This is from 2016 election cycle but still relevant. Money quote: "Trump_vs_deep_state will outlive Trump and the people's
faith in economists will only be restored after the next financial collapse if all of the financial sector is liquidated, all
the universities and think tanks go bankrupt and the know-nothing free traders disappear from our public discourse. "
Despicable neoliberal MSM do not like to discuss real issue that facing people in 220 elections. They like to discuss personalities.
Propagandists of Vichy left like Madcow spend hours discussing Ukrainegate instead of real issues facing the nation.
Notable quotes:
"... Donald Trump has promised to make deregulation one of the focal points of his presidency. If Trump is elected, the trend toward rising market concentration and all of the problems that come with it are likely to continue. ..."
"... If Clinton is elected, it's unlikely that her administration would be active enough in antitrust enforcement for my taste. But at least she acknowledges that something needs to be done about this growing problem, and any movement toward more aggressive enforcement of antitrust regulation would be more than welcome. ..."
"... Once again we have a stark 'choice' in this election...one party who won't enforce existing laws and another who will just get rid of them. Like flipping a coin: heads, the predator class wins; tails, we lose. ..."
"... "Vote third party to register your disgust..." and waste the opportunity, at least in a few states, to affect the national outcome (in many states the outcome is not in doubt, so, thanks to our stupid electoral college system, millions of voters could equally well stay home, vote third party, or write in their dog). ..."
"... But then it dawned on me: antitrust enforcement is largely up to the president and his picked advisers. If Democrats really think it is so damned important, why has Clinton's old boss Barack Obama done so very, very little with it? ..."
"... Josh Mason thinks a Clinton administration may push on corporate short-termism if not on anti-trust. We'll see, but seeing as the Obama administration didn't do much I wouldn't be surprised if Hillary doesn't either. ..."
"... They ignored the housing bubble, don't seem to understand the connection between manufacturing and wealth (close your eyes and imagine your life with no manufactured goods, because they are all imported and your economy only produces a few low value-added raw materials such as timber or exotic animals) then you will see that allowing the US to deindustrialize was a really, world-historic mistake. ..."
"... Trump_vs_deep_state will outlive Trump and the people's faith in economists will only be restored after the next financial collapse if all of the financial sector is liquidated, all the universities and think tanks go bankrupt and the know-nothing free traders disappear from our public discourse. ..."
Donald Trump has promised to make deregulation one of the focal points of his presidency. If Trump is elected, the trend
toward rising market concentration and all of the problems that come with it are likely to continue.
We'll hear the usual arguments about ineffective government and the magic of markets to justify ignoring the problem.
If Clinton is elected, it's unlikely that her administration would be active enough in antitrust enforcement for my taste.
But at least she acknowledges that something needs to be done about this growing problem, and any movement toward more aggressive
enforcement of antitrust regulation would be more than welcome.
"We'll hear the usual arguments about ineffective government" which has been amply demonstrated during the last 7 years by negligible
enforcement of anti-trust laws.
Once again we have a stark 'choice' in this election...one party who won't enforce existing laws and another who will just
get rid of them. Like flipping a coin: heads, the predator class wins; tails, we lose.
Vote third party to register your disgust and to open the process to people who don't just represent the predator class.
"Vote third party to register your disgust..." and waste the opportunity, at least in a few states, to affect the national
outcome (in many states the outcome is not in doubt, so, thanks to our stupid electoral college system, millions of voters could
equally well stay home, vote third party, or write in their dog).
Thomas Frank: "I was pleased to learn, for example, that this year's Democratic platform includes strong language on antitrust
enforcement, and that Hillary Clinton has hinted she intends to take the matter up as president. Hooray! Taking on too-powerful
corporations would be healthy, I thought when I first learned that, and also enormously popular. But then it dawned on me:
antitrust enforcement is largely up to the president and his picked advisers. If Democrats really think it is so damned important,
why has Clinton's old boss Barack Obama done so very, very little with it?"
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/10/07/some-clintons-pledges-sound-great-until-you-remember-whos-president
One party who won't enforce existing laws and another who will just get rid of them...a distinction without a difference.
Who do you prefer to have guarding the chicken house...a fox or a coyote? Sane people would say, 'neither.'
Yes and Clinton supporters attacked Sanders over this during the primaries.
Josh Mason thinks a Clinton administration may push on corporate short-termism if not on anti-trust. We'll see, but seeing
as the Obama administration didn't do much I wouldn't be surprised if Hillary doesn't either.
"At Vox,* Rachelle Sampson has a piece on corporate short-termism. Supports my sense that this is an area where there may be
space to move left in a Clinton administration."
Economists have said for thirty years that free trade will benefit the US. Increasingly the country looks like a poor non-industrialized
third world country. Why should anyone trust US economists?
They ignored the housing bubble, don't seem to understand the connection between manufacturing and wealth (close your eyes
and imagine your life with no manufactured goods, because they are all imported and your economy only produces a few low value-added
raw materials such as timber or exotic animals) then you will see that allowing the US to deindustrialize was a really, world-historic
mistake.
Trust in experts is what has transformed the US from a world leader in 1969 with the moon landing to a country with no high
speed rail, no modern infrastructure, incapable of producing a computer or ipad or ship.
Trump_vs_deep_state will outlive Trump and the people's faith in economists will only be restored after the next financial
collapse if all of the financial sector is liquidated, all the universities and think tanks go bankrupt and the know-nothing free
traders disappear from our public discourse.
There were no prosecution in three years since publication of this article
Notable quotes:
"... New York Police Department detectives and prosecutors working an alleged underage sexting case against former Congressman Anthony
Weiner have turned over a newly-found laptop he shared with wife Huma Abedin to the FBI with enough evidence "to put Hillary (Clinton)
and her crew away for life," NYPD sources told True Pundit. ..."
"... NYPD detectives and a NYPD Chief, the department's highest rank under Commissioner, said openly that if the FBI and Justice
Department fail to garner timely indictments against Clinton and co- conspirators, NYPD will go public with the damaging emails now
in the hands of FBI Director James Comey and many FBI field offices. ..."
"... Meanwhile, FBI sources said Abedin and Weiner were cooperating with federal agents, who have taken over the non-sexting portions
the case from NYPD. The husband-and-wife Clinton insiders are both shopping for separate immunity deals, sources said. ..."
"... Prosecutors in the office of US Attorney Preet Bharara have issued a subpoena for Weiner's cell phones and travel records,
law enforcement sources confirmed. NYPD said it planned to order the same phone and travel records on Clinton and Abedin, however, the
FBI said it was in the process of requesting the identical records. Law enforcement sources are particularly interested in cell phone
activity and travel to the Bahamas, U.S. Virgin Islands and other locations that sources would not divulge. ..."
"... Both NYPD and FBI sources confirm based on the new emails they now believe Hillary Clinton traveled as Epstein's guest on at
least six occasions, probably more when all the evidence is combed, sources said. Bill Clinton, it has been confirmed in media reports
spanning recent years, that he too traveled with Epstein over 20 times to the island. ..."
"... Because Weiner's campaign website is managed by the third-party consultant and political email guru, FBI agents are burdened
with the task of trying to decipher just how many people had access to Weiner's server and emails and who were these people. Or if the
server was ever compromised by hackers, or other actors. ..."
"... Abedin told FBI agents in an April interview that she didn't know how to consistently print documents or emails from her secure
Dept. of State system. Instead, she would forward the sensitive emails to her yahoo, Clintonemail.com and her email linked to Weiner.
..."
"... Abedin said, according to FBI documents, she would then access those email accounts via webmail from an unclassified computer
system at the State Dept. and print the documents, many of which were classified and top secret, from the largely unprotected webmail
portals. ..."
New York Police Department detectives and prosecutors working an alleged underage sexting case against former Congressman
Anthony Weiner have turned over a newly-found laptop he shared with wife Huma Abedin to the FBI with enough evidence "to put Hillary
(Clinton) and her crew away for life," NYPD sources told True Pundit.
NYPD sources said Clinton's "crew" also included several unnamed yet implicated members of Congress in addition to her aides and
insiders.
The NYPD seized the computer from Weiner during a search warrant and detectives discovered a trove of over 500,000 emails to and
from Hillary Clinton, Abedin and other insiders during her tenure as secretary of state. The content of those emails sparked the
FBI to reopen its defunct email investigation into Clinton on Friday.
But new revelations on the contents of that laptop, according to law enforcement sources, implicate the Democratic presidential
candidate, her subordinates, and even select elected officials in far more alleged serious crimes than mishandling classified and
top secret emails, sources said. NYPD sources said these new emails include evidence linking Clinton herself and associates to:
Money laundering
Child exploitation
Sex crimes with minors (children)
Perjury
Pay to play through Clinton Foundation
Obstruction of justice
Other felony crimes
NYPD detectives and a NYPD Chief, the department's highest rank under Commissioner, said openly that if the FBI and Justice
Department fail to garner timely indictments against Clinton and co- conspirators, NYPD will go public with the damaging emails now
in the hands of FBI Director James Comey and many FBI field offices.
"What's in the emails is staggering and as a father, it turned my stomach," the NYPD Chief said. "There is not going to be
any Houdini-like escape from what we found. We have copies of everything. We will ship them to Wikileaks or I will personally hold
my own press conference if it comes to that."
The NYPD Chief said once Comey saw the alarming contents of the emails he was forced to reopen a criminal probe against Clinton.
"People are going to prison," he said.
Meanwhile, FBI sources said Abedin and Weiner were cooperating with federal agents, who have taken over the non-sexting portions
the case from NYPD. The husband-and-wife Clinton insiders are both shopping for separate immunity deals, sources said.
"If they don't cooperate they are going to see long sentences," a federal law enforcement source said.
NYPD sources said Weiner or Abedin stored all the emails in a massive Microsoft Outlook program on the laptop. The emails
implicate other current and former members of Congress and one high-ranking Democratic Senator as having possibly engaged in criminal
activity too, sources said.
Prosecutors in the office of US Attorney Preet Bharara have issued a subpoena for Weiner's cell phones and travel records,
law enforcement sources confirmed. NYPD said it planned to order the same phone and travel records on Clinton and Abedin, however,
the FBI said it was in the process of requesting the identical records. Law enforcement sources are particularly interested in cell
phone activity and travel to the Bahamas, U.S. Virgin Islands and other locations that sources would not divulge.
The new emails contain travel documents and itineraries indicating Hillary Clinton, President Bill Clinton, Weiner and multiple
members of Congress and other government officials accompanied convicted pedophile billionaire Jeffrey Epstein on his Boeing 727
on multiple occasions to his private island in the US Virgin Islands, sources said. Epstein's island has also been dubbed
Orgy Island or
Sex Slave Island where Epstein allegedly pimps out underage girls and boys to international dignitaries.
Both NYPD and FBI sources confirm based on the new emails they now believe Hillary Clinton traveled as Epstein's guest on
at least six occasions, probably more when all the evidence is combed, sources said. Bill Clinton, it has been confirmed in media
reports spanning recent years, that he too traveled with Epstein over 20 times to the island.
Laptop Also Unveiled More Classified, Top Secret Breaches
According to other uncovered emails, Abedin and Clinton both sent and received thousands of classified and top secret documents
to personal email accounts including Weiner's unsecured campaign web site which is managed by Democratic political consultants in
Washington D.C.
Weiner maintained little known email accounts that the couple shared on the website anthonyweiner.com. Weiner, a former seven-term
Democratic Congressman from New York, primarily used that domain to campaign for Congress and for his failed mayoral bid of New York
City.
At one point, FBI sources said, Abedin and Clinton's classified and top secret State Department documents and emails were stored
in Weiner's email on a server shared with a dog grooming service and a western Canadian bicycle shop.
However, Weiner and Abedin, who is Hillary Clinton's closest personal aide, weren't the only people with access to the Weiner's
email account. Potentially dozens of unknown individuals had access to Abedin's sensitive State Department emails that were stored
in Weiner's email account, FBI sources confirmed.
FEC records show Weiner paid more than $92,000 of congressional campaign funds to Anne Lewis Strategies LLC to manage his email
and web site. According to FBI sources, the D.C.-based political consulting firm has served as the official administrator of the
anthonyweiner.com domain since 2010, the same time Abedin was working at the State Department. This means technically Weiner and
Abedin's emails, including top secret State Department emails, could have been accessed, printed, discussed, leaked, or distributed
by untold numbers of personnel at the Anne Lewis consulting firm because they can control where the website and it emails are pointed,
FBI sources said.
According to FBI sources, the bureau's newly-minted probe into Clinton's use and handling of emails while she served as secretary
of state, has also been broadened to include investigating new email-related revelations, including:
Abedin forwarded classified and top secret State Department emails to Weiner's email
Abedin stored emails, containing government secrets, in a special folder shared with Weiner warehousing over 500,000 archived
State Department emails.
Weiner had access to these classified and top secret documents without proper security clearance to view the records
Abedin also used a personal yahoo address and her Clintonemail.com address to send/receive/store classified and top secret
documents
A private consultant managed Weiner's site for the last six years, including three years when Clinton was secretary of state,
and therefore, had full access to all emails as the domain's listed registrant and administrator via Whois email contacts.
Because Weiner's campaign website is managed by the third-party consultant and political email guru, FBI agents are burdened
with the task of trying to decipher just how many people had access to Weiner's server and emails and who were these people. Or if
the server was ever compromised by hackers, or other actors.
Abedin told FBI agents in an April interview that she didn't know how to consistently print documents or emails from her secure
Dept. of State system. Instead, she would forward the sensitive emails to her yahoo, Clintonemail.com and her email linked to Weiner.
Abedin said, according to FBI documents, she would then access those email accounts via webmail from an unclassified computer
system at the State Dept. and print the documents, many of which were classified and top secret, from the largely unprotected webmail
portals.
Clinton did not have a computer in her office on Mahogany Row at the State Dept. so she was not able to read timely intelligence
unless it was printed out for her, Abedin said. Abedin also said Clinton could not operate the secure State Dept. fax machine installed
in her Chappaqua, NY home without assistance.
Perhaps more alarming, according to the FBI's 302 Report detailing its interview with Abedin, none of the multiple FBI agents
and Justice Department officials who conducted the interview pressed Abedin to further detail the email address linked to Weiner.
There was never a follow up, according to the 302 report.
But now, all that has changed, with the FBI's decision to reopen the Clinton email investigation and the husband and wife seeking
immunity deals to testify against Clinton and other associates about the contents of the laptop's emails.
Steve Pieczenik additional video on "Lolita express" HRottenC enabled/participated in pedophilia as well, more intel leaks to
come from US gov. insiders:
During 2016 election campaign: "On foreign policy Hillary is trigger happy" says Trump and he is right 100%... And he continued Hillary
policies.
And the he behaves as 100% pure militarist.
Notable quotes:
"... I've always thought that Hillary's support for the broader mission in Libya put the president on the 51 side of the line for a more aggressive approach ..."
"... Had the secretaries of state and defense both opposed the war, he and others said, the president's decision might have been politically impossible. ..."
"... Except for that last minute of Trump_vs_deep_states, I almost thought that was a Bernie speech. An interesting general election plan is to take Bernie's ideas with a healthy dash of Trump spice in an attempt to coalesce the angry populist vote. ..."
"... Sanders is the last hope to avoid total disaster. Maybe he can help mitigate HRC's hawk stance in the ME. I think Israel is a lost cause though as the problem child with nukes. ..."
"... A political strategy based on xenophobia and divisiveness supports those who benefit from xenophobia and divisiveness – those who exploit labor (including Trump who outsources jobs, hires H2-B workers, and exploits workers domestically and overseas), and those who benefit from the military-industrial-security-serveillance complex; and harms the rest of us. ..."
"... Obama and the Democrats did everything they could to undermine and stamp out progressive organization. ..."
"... Except it's recent US actions which have undermined the Middle East in general. From Saddam to Libya to ISIS etc etc. ..."
"... if you pay them enough. ..."
"... "We have been killing, maiming and displacing millions of Muslims and destroying their countries for the last 15 years with less outcry than transgender bathrooms have generated." ..."
"... Good point. I keep wondering why Hillary the Hawk's actual illegal war and murdering of Muslims is worse than Trump's ban. ..."
"... Imagine Trump running to the left of Hillary on defense / interventionism, trade, and universal healthcare. That would sure make things interesting. He could win. ..."
"... James Carville, astute handicapper that he is, has already sniffed out that Hillary now needs Bernie more than Bernie needs Hillary. ..."
"... even in comparison with Hillary Clinton ..."
"... "core voters come from communities where a lot of people have fought in the post-9/11 Middle Eastern conflicts. Our armed forces are stretched to the breaking point. Trump has strong support among veterans and active duty soldiers" ..."
"... "As a small business owner, not only are you trying to provide benefits to your employees, you're trying to provide benefits to yourself. I have seen our health insurance for my own family, go up $500 dollars a month in the last two years. We went from four hundred something, to nine hundred something. We're just fighting to keep benefits for ourselves. The thought of being able to provide benefits to your employees is almost secondary, yet to keep your employees happy, that's a question that comes across my desk all the time. I have to keep my employees as independent contractors for the most part really to avoid that situation, and so I have turnover" ..."
"... "We do not qualify for a subsidy on the current health insurance plan. My question to you is not only are you looking out for people that can't afford healthcare, but I'm someone that can afford it, but it's taking a big chunk of the money I bring home." ..."
"... "What you're saying is one of the real worries that we're facing with the cost of health insurance because the costs are going up in a lot of markets, not all, but many markets and what you're describing is one of the real challenges." ..."
"... "There's a lot of things I'm looking at to try to figure out how to deal with exactly the problem you're talking about. There are some good ideas out there but we have to subject them to the real world test, will this really help a small business owner or a family be able to afford it. What could have possibly raised your costs four hundred dollars, and that's what I don't understand." ..."
"... You echo my feelings. My loathing of Clinton knows no bounds, and I cannot vote for her, no matter what. But I simply don't trust Trump. He's a gold-digger extrodinaire, and quite the accomplished showman. He knows how to play to the crowd, and he's clearly quite quick to shape shift. The wrecked tatters of what's called the USA "media" gives Trump a YOOOGE pass on simply everything and anything the man says or does. ..."
"... if Donald wins, he could just end up the loneliest man in DC, be ignored, get nothing done ..."
"... Trump doesn't need to see the Zapruder film. He was alive then and knows the story, just like everyone else of a certain age. Nay, verily, he just means to cash in on it. ..."
"... Being Left of Hillary is a really really really low bar. He probably is, but thats probably because Hillary is right wing. You know, like almost all American politicians from both parties. Trumps not left of Bernie (at least not yet or not right now: I expect hes going to swing left in the general to scoop up Bernie voters), and Bernies just an Eisenhower Republican, which is admittedly to the left of basically all the other politicians today. ..."
There are good reasons to harbor serious reservations about The Donald, given that he changes
his position as frequently as most people change their clothes. But so far, he has been consistent
in making an argument that is sorely underrepresented in the media and in policy circles: that our
war-making in the Middle East has been a costly disaster with no upside to the US. Trump even cites,
without naming him, Joe Stiglitz's estimate that
our wars have cost at least $4 trillion.
As Lambert put it, "I hate it when Trump is right."
If you think Trump is overstating his case on Hillary's trigger-happiness, read this New York
Times story,
How Hillary Clinton Became a Hawk .
Mrs. Clinton's account of a unified European-Arab front powerfully influenced Mr. Obama. "Because
the president would never have done this thing on our own," said Benjamin J. Rhodes, the deputy
national security adviser.
Mr. Gates, among others, thought Mrs. Clinton's backing decisive. Mr. Obama later told him
privately in the Oval Office, he said, that the Libya decision was "51-49."
"I've always thought that Hillary's support for the broader mission in Libya put the president
on the 51 side of the line for a more aggressive approach," Mr. Gates said. Had the secretaries
of state and defense both opposed the war, he and others said, the president's decision might
have been politically impossible.
Best assessment yet. This is a great speech bite from Donald but I have no idea if he means it.
(Though I don't agree with it just look at his Muslim Ban stance) Half the time he makes coherent
reasonable arguments, the other half the time I think he definitely is a Clinton Mole. I don't know
which Trump I'm getting hour to hour much less day to day.
Except for that last minute of Trump_vs_deep_states, I almost thought that was a Bernie speech. An interesting
general election plan is to take Bernie's ideas with a healthy dash of Trump spice in an attempt to
coalesce the angry populist vote. It'll be interesting to watch Hillary circle the wagons of the content,
elite center in an attempt to hold off the marginalized hordes of angry "savage plebs", especially if
the convention seems stolen. Still hoping for some miracle to pull Sanders through.
Miracle indeed, Sanders is the last hope to avoid total disaster. Maybe he can help mitigate HRC's
hawk stance in the ME. I think Israel is a lost cause though as the problem child with nukes.
In all seriousness, why is his Muslim ban idea bad? Or for that matter why would it, in principle,
be a bad idea to ban nearly all foreigners from entering the US? After all, it's not as if the US has
some actual need for foreigners to enter considering the large and growing desperately poor domestic
population. Especially considering that heretofore (let's be real here) both legal and illegal immigration
has been mainly exploited to destroy domestic labor conditions in the US.
This is a fact a lot of ostensibly good-hearted progressive and wealthy liberals conveniently ignore
(they'd probably cry themselves to sleep if they could no longer help to improve the lot of that below
minimum wage illegal immigrant maid they hired). Well, the working poor aren't ignoring it, and the
lid is going to blow soon if this keeps up. Donald Trump and the popularity of his Muslim ban is only
an early sign of the brewing discontent.
He didn't propose banning Muslims as a way to address our jobs and economic problems (which it isn't),
he proposed it as a way to address domestic terror (which it isn't). It's a political tactic to stir
up and implicitly sanction hate, prejudice, divisiveness, and violence.
Not arguing your point, however how are Trump supporters reading this? These people are already against
any immigrant coming into the US for economic reasons, and in all honesty they are looking for any excuse
whatsoever to view immigrants in a bad light.
Just to add to that a bit, it's also why immigrant crime is always being hyped up and exaggerated
by Trump supporters. The real issue deep down is that immigrants are threatening them economically,
and they'll use any justification whatsoever to get rid of them.
Is it right? I don't really know how to objectively answer that. But for the people doing it, this
could work out in economic terms for them. So at least from their perspective it's a good idea.
I think people are just so angry with how the squillionaries use "politically correct" proper thinking
about immigration to hide their illegal suppression of wages that even outrageous and outlandish statements
by The Donald will not dissuade his supporters – – after all, the supporters could ask why is this issue
of wage suppression, "by any means necessary", that affects FAR, FAR more people who ARE US citizens
so scrupulously IGNORED by the media (media owned by rich??? – of course). As disturbing as what The
Donald says, what is NOT SAID by the ENTIRE (except Sanders) US political establishment, is far more
disturbing, as I think it shows an utterly captured political caste. As well as the rank hypocrisy that
if any of these immigrants don't have health care after they arrive, the squillionaires couldn't care
less if they died in the streets – no matter how rich they are, they want to make more people poorer.
They are such an evil enemy that people will put up with The Donald.
It is a fact that these tech billionaires engaged in an illegal activity. It is a fact the US government
simply ignored enforcing laws and refuses to punish them.
Trump in my view will not be able to do even a quarter of some of this crap like banning Muslims
– laws do have to be passed. But the fact remains that Trump will probably be the only presidential
nominee (not presidential candidate, i.e., Sanders), and the last one in 40 years, to even merely talk
about these issues.
The fact that Trump succeeds just shows how famished people are to some challenge to the war mongering,
coddling of the rich that is passed off as something that the majority supports.
A political strategy based on xenophobia and divisiveness supports those who benefit from xenophobia
and divisiveness – those who exploit labor (including Trump who outsources jobs, hires H2-B workers,
and exploits workers domestically and overseas), and those who benefit from the military-industrial-security-serveillance
complex; and harms the rest of us.
It seems no more likely that Trump as president will actually promote policies that will "work out
in economic terms" for ordinary people as it was to think Obama would put on this "comfortable shoes"
and join a picket line (though I bought that one at the time).
Hillary basically won relatively well to do minorities who voted for her in 2008 just in smaller
numbers. Poorer minorities stayed home in Southern states where Internet access is less available and
progressive organizations are just churches. On the surface, Sanders sounds very much like the media
perception of President Hope and Change who isn't as popular as much as no one wants to admit the first
non white President was terrible or they actively applauded terrible policy.
Free college probably didn't appeal to people with junk degrees from for profit diploma mills. The
damage is done. People need jobs not school at this point or incomes. A green jobs guarantee act would
have been a better push front and center, but again, this is with hindsight. Many minority voters simply
didn't vote, and Hillary pushed that "you don't know Bernie" line to scare voters that Sanders was another
Obama.
Obama and the Democrats did everything they could to undermine and stamp out progressive organization.
Agree that jobs should be the focus (or income and meeting basic needs). Education as the focus appeals
to the under 25 years old college bound crowd, but not so much to anyone older having to survive out
there in the work world everyday.
I am a Trump supporter and I am not against immigrants or immigration. I am opposed to doing nothing
in the face of a broken immigration system. I do not think it is wise for any country to have millions
and millions of undocumented workers in its midst. I believe we should legalize those that are here.
Those that have committed crimes not related to immigrating or over staying visas should absolutely
be deported and lose the privilege of living in the US. I live in Spain, but am an American. If I broke
minor laws, such as drunk driving, assault or drug possession I would be deported too, seems fair to
me. I believe we have to revamp border security, though I don´t think a wall spanning the entire border
would be wise or effective I personally think Trump is speaking hyperbolically and symbolically about
the wall. Nonetheless, our elites sure do love living behind big walls and gated communities, with armed
security, maybe we should ask them why, walls are just racist anyways, no?
Immigrant crime is not some myth, its real and sometimes it is a very tragic consequence of a broken
immigration system. The fact that the cartels also exploit our broken border and immigration system
is not a myth either, it is reality.
And as for a temporary ban on Muslims coming from Syria, Libya and other locations that have been
devastated by the covert and overt wars of the US I support it totally, for no other reason than public
safety, which is the first reason we institute government. Remember this happened just after Paris,
public safety is a very legitimate concern. Also, why are Islamic countries such as Saudi Arabia or
the Gulf States taking in a single refugee? The Saudis have the money and the capacity to to do this.
They have tents used only during the hajj that house thousands upon thousands. Where is that wonderful,
charitable side of Islam?
I wish the world were different. I don´t harbor prejudice against anyone. Those that want to come
and live, grow and contribute to American civilization, Come, please!! But our world is very dangerous,
and we have created enemies that seek to do harm to our society and civilization in anyway that they
can. We have to protect ourselves and our nation. I wish beyond wishing, that it was someone besides
the Donald saying these things, but, it is what it is. I am not gonna shoot the messanger cuase I dont
like his personality, or because I would not be friends with someone like him.
Illegal immigration could likely be enforced in some industries (on the lower paid scale in garment
making sweatshops and so on). And this could probably best be done by prosecuting the employers doing
the hiring. But I'm not at all convinced the country could run without immigrants entirely. Who would
pick the crops? Ok maybe lots of people at a $15 an hour minimum wage. But at current compensation?
Though I don't know if this really needs to be done via illegal immigration, it could be done by much
more formalized guest worker programs I suppose.
Or, we could just let the market work. You WILL get American workers to perform just about any job
if you pay them enough. Obviously, the reasonable price point for labor is currently well below
what a US citizen will accept. But if I offered a million dollars to get my lawn mowed, I would have
a line out the door of American workers begging to have the job.
Guest workers are just another way to depress US citizens' wages. And immigration reform is best
tackled at the employer level, like you said - anybody who doesn't make this part of his or her "reform"
plan is not to be taken seriously. (I regularly mention this to conservatives, and they always look
for a way to justify going after the powerless immigrants anyway.)
High wages can encourage more automation or substitution of crops that require less manual labor
or even cause people to exit farming as uneconomic.. But the number of workers employed in farming is relatively small.
The World Bank has the USA workforce at 161 million in 2014 and if about 2% of this workforce is
employed in farming, this is about 3.2 million people throughout the USA. And the 3.2 million count is probably not all illegal immigrant workers. This report suggests government price supports have encouraged more people to work in agriculture,
implying that the government is indirectly creating low wage jobs by price supports.
From the above pdf. "For example, the institutionalization of what began as emergency income support
in the 1930s has likely slowed the movement of labor out of the farm sector."
I am of the opinion that the law of one price will apply if there is relatively free movement of
workers, legally or illegally, across borders.
Note, Trump never suggests e-verify and employer enforcement, which would be a low cost way of enforcing
citizen employment and would avoid a costly "great wall".
Trump and HRC's investments are probably more profitable due to a lower labor cost influenced by
low wage workers.
And people don't OPPOSE his restrictions on Muslim immigration because they feel so charitable towards
and accepting of Muslims.
We have been killing, maiming and displacing millions of Muslims and destroying their countries for
the last 15 years with less outcry than transgender bathrooms have generated. And we've allowed our
own civil liberties to be radically infringed. All because " THEY hate us for our 'freedoms.'
" Who the hell do you think THEY are?
But it's Trump who is hateful, prejudiced, divisive and bigoted? As if "welcoming" some immigrants
from countries that we callously destroyed perfectly absolves those who were busy waiting in line for
the newest i-gadget and couldn't be bothered to demand an end to the slaughter.
Get a clue. Trump's not talking about murdering anybody. And no amount of puffed up "outrage" and
name-calling is going to get the stain out. Not to mention it's the most sane and humane way to protect
the "homeland" from the "terrorism" that we, ourselves, created.
"We have been killing, maiming and displacing millions of Muslims and destroying their countries
for the last 15 years with less outcry than transgender bathrooms have generated."
Good point. I keep wondering why Hillary the Hawk's actual illegal war and murdering of Muslims is
worse than Trump's ban.
"I'm against all immigration, as it's merely a lever to lower wages." "I'm against the immigration
of muslims, because they're bad terrorists." There is a difference in these two statements.
You are correct that there is too much immigration to the U.S., and it causes economic and environmental
problems. However, Trump's Muslim ban would cover more than immigration. He would also ban temporary
visits by Muslims (except for the mayor of London, I suppose).
I object very strongly to Muslim extremism, and a lot of Muslims have extremist views. But not all
of them do. And many Christians, Hindus, and whatever also have extremist views which should be opposed.
Trump's not proposing a bad on travel by extremist Christians; he's singling out Muslims because they
scare millions of Americans. It's demagoguery.
You are not quite right there. Trump supporters do indeed want to ban Christian immigrants as well
(the vast, overwhelming majority of immigrants from Mexico, central, and South America are Christians
of some sort) although in the case of Christians the excuse is "violent crime" since obviously Trump
supporters can not disparage Christians specifically for their Christianity. Seriously, watch any Trump
speech and you'll see that he spends more time talking about why all American (Christian) immigrants
need to be banned (crime) than why Muslim immigrants need to be banned (terror). Economic insecurity
is at the root of all of it.
Has Trump demanded that Christians from Europe or Canada be prevented from entering the U.S.? I'm
pretty sure he hasn't. If he's really motivated by economic reasons, there's no need to specify a particular
religion, such as Islam, or a particular nationality, such as Mexicans.
People from Europe and Canada already have high salaries. Or they are perceived to have high salaries
in their home countries. IE they are not percieved as an economic threat. I guarantee you, show me a
poor, third world country that is sending a lot of people to US right now and and I'll show you an ethnic
groups that faces some prejudice. Come on, it's not well paid people with stable jobs and incomes who
are going around being prejudiced against immigrants. It's the poor and the desperate who are doing
it.
There is a reason for that. Ignoring that reason and pretending that it's some bizarre and unfathomable
psychological illness just coincidentally affecting people who are also offing themselves from despair
left and right isn't going to make it go away. Rather, you are inviting something terrible to happen.
The Germans didn't decide to follow Hitler because times were good, and a friendly PR campaign encouraging
openness and acceptance among the poor misguided racists and immigrant haters out there will do exactly
nothing to help matters.
I don't think anyone (most anyone anyway) would disagree that there are plenty of Muslims who are
not extremists. The problem for us is, how do you tell the difference? The San Bernadino shooter was
a health inspector, had a wife, kids, a middle class job, ties to the community and still decided to
shoot up his co-workers with his wife in tow. Plenty of the European ISIS recruits come from middle
class families that are seemingly well-adjusted. If these people (keep in mind Farook was a US citizen)
can become terrorists, how can we possibly screen new entrants with any sort of efficacy?
I'd say it's probably worth the miniscule risk of possible immigrants turning out to be terrorists
if there was some other benefit to having them come in, but if we agree there's too much immigration
to the US already and it is hurting actual US citizens, what exactly is the upside to keep allowing
Muslims in?
By the way, I've been lurking on this site for a few weeks now, first time commenter. It's nice to
find some quality discussion on the internet. Nice to meet everyone.
Where are these "extremist Christians" burning and burying people alive, beheading hostages, blasting
away at crowds in night clubs? "Christian extremism" is a figment of your imagination. The attempt to
equate Moslem violence with conservative Christians is utterly absurd. Do you seriously believe that
soime Amish dude is going to run amuck in a New York night club and slaughter hundreds of people?
Obama does not get is morning SITREP delivered with biblical headers
"The religious theme for briefings prepared for the president and his war cabinet was the brainchild
of Major General Glen Shaffer, a committed Christian and director for intelligence serving Mr Rumsfeld
and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
In the days before the six-week invasion, Major General Shaffer's staff had created humorous covers
for the briefings to alleviate the stress of preparing for battle.
But as the body count rose, he decided to introduce biblical quotes.
However, many of his Pentagon colleagues were reportedly opposed to the idea, with at least one Muslim
analyst said to be greatly offended.
A defence official warned that if the briefing covers were leaked, the damage to America's standing
in the Arab world 'would be as bad as Abu Ghraib' – the Baghdad prison where U.S. troops abused Iraqis.
But Major General Shaffer, 61, who retired in August 2003, six months after the invasion, claimed
he had the backing of the president and defence secretary. When officials complained, he told them the
practice would continue because it was 'appreciated by my seniors' – Mr Rumsfeld and Mr Bush.
The briefing covers were revealed for the first time by GQ after they were leaked to the U.S. magazine
by a source at the Pentagon."
Disheveled Marsupial . whilst I understand the acts committed transcend time and political party's .
never the less in – The Name Of – can not be white washed away
Did you manage to miss Trump's point in the video that the US has killed millions in the Middle East,
and that if US presidents had gone to the beach for the last 15 years. everyone would have been better
off? And that we murder people by drone in addition to all our undeclared wars? You are seriously pretending
Christians not only have blood on their hands, but started these wars and have killed people in vastly
bigger numbers than we have? I'm not defending terrorists, but your position is a remarkable airbrushing.
The worst domestic terrorist the U.S. ever produced, Timothy McVeigh, wasn't Amish, yet neither was
he Muslim. Denying people the opportunity to immigrate here– based solely on religion– contradicts the
principles of tolerance on which this country was founded.
Yah, this is a Great Country, isn't it, where everyone has the right to own assault weapons, and
the opportunity to assemble and detonate giant bombs hidden in rental trucks, and you can do pretty
much whatever you can get away with, depending on one's degree of immunity and impunity and invisibility
Eric Rudolph and Robert Lewis Dear, Jr., are more examples of Christian terrorists. Outside the country,
there's Anders Breivik (well, he's only partially Christian, but he's definitely not Muslim).
I get your point from a labor standpoint but who gets to decide to shut the door and say 'no more
room at the inn'? Unless it's First Peoples I think it would be pretty hypocritical coming from the
descendants of all the other immigrants who crossed over themselves at some point.
PS: I haven't heard this talked about much but does anyone really believe Trump is serious with all
this immigrant-bashing rhetoric? If he is anywhere near as rich as he claims to be, he got there at
least in part, and likely in large part by exploiting cheap labor. While I've never stayed in a Trump
property to see for myself I'm guessing that all the hotel employees aren't direct descendants of the
Daughters of the American Revolution.
Unless it's First Peoples I think it would be pretty hypocritical coming from the descendants
of all the other immigrants who crossed over themselves at some point.
Everybody outside of Africa, including "First Peoples" (if I understand that phrase correctly), is
a descendant of immigrants. The ancestors of the Amer-Indians (probably) came from Siberia over the
Bering land bridge during the late ice age.
It might be hypocritical for an actual immigrant to advocate restrictions on immigration, but that's
not the case for descendants of immigrants. But if there are restrictions, they shouldn't be based on
religion or race.
I don't really think shutting down immigration is the answer. It's not practical and isn't likely
to solve the problems blamed on immigration even if you could keep people out.
People don't leave their countries en masse unless there's some kind of disaster. A little less imperialism
turning nations to rubble would be a much better solution.
So you believe that no people, anywhere, ever, have a right to determine who can join their community,
contribute to their community, or undercut their community's wages and values. Except if some "First
Peoples" show up and endorse the idea? Do they have divine right of kings or something? What if we got
one Indian to agree? A plurality of them?
If it was right for the natives to resist the destruction of their way of life in 1492-1900, and
it was, it is right for the natives to resist of the destruction of their way of life now. Even if those
natives' skin now comes in multiple colors.
Well, I have trouble believing that Trump is serious about his TPP-bashing and Iraq-war-bashing,
I have trouble believing Trump's words are credible on just about any issue.
It's going to be a rough four years, whether Trump wins or loses.
Well, Sanders still has a chance, although he's a long shot. Democratic voters in Kentucky, Oregon,
the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, California, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota,
and the District of Columbia have a chance to save the nomination for him.
In Puerto Rico, Montana, and North Dakota, the election events are open, so anyone who's registered
can vote for Sanders. In California, registered independents can also vote for Sanders.
If its hypocritical, perhaps we should live with that if it is also reality-based and pragmatic.
As in " we've got a good thing going here and we don't need nobody else muscling in on our sweet racket".
Separately, many advocates of ILLEGAL immigration carefully pull a sleight-of-mouth bait-and-switch
between ILLEGAL immigration and legal immigration. Accepters of carefully controlled legal immigration
can still reject ILLEGAL immigration for pragmatic social-survival reasons.
Quite simply, the idea of banning Muslims entry to the U.S. is an affront to the very nature of the
American experiment, of plurality, equality, and religious freedom. However, recent events in Europe,
specifically the sexual assaults in Cologne and elsewhere show that some young Muslim men are a problem.
So are some young American men. An issue we need to wrestle with is how to reduce this problem. Such
problems are not about religion, they are cultural, they are about interpersonal respect and behavior.
But, the West, broadly speaking, has shown horrendous disrespect to Moslems. The U.S. has attacked wedding
parties and funerals, destroyed cities and countries, behaving like Crusaders. Perhaps were the West
to display less barbarism toward Moslems, they would express more respect toward us. Seems worth a try.
He doesn't have to mean anything. Trump needs to drive potential Democratic turnout down. On one
hand, reminding people how awful Hillary is effectively destroys volunteer efforts which is how voters
get registered and identified for gotv. The other side is what is the perception of the average Democratic
voter of Hillary's record. Hillary supporters have pushed the "tested," "likely to win, " and "inevitable"
arguments for a long time now. How many people in the potential electorate understood Hillary was a
hawk when they voted or didn't bother to show up? Bernie used words such as "poor judgement" for fear
of being labeled sexist. Trump won't hold back.
Perhaps, Trump was a mole, but what can Bill offer that the GOP can't? Air Force One might not be
the most luxurious plane, but its the Air Force plane wherever the President is. Thats respect no one
can buy. Reagan was carted through the White House, so why not Trump?
Imagine Trump running to the left of Hillary on defense / interventionism, trade, and universal healthcare.
That would sure make things interesting. He could win.
It ain't over. She's got one countermove left which is to somehow get Bernie on the ticket and grab
the enthusiastic and politically correct (if not fully-informed) millenial vote. Otherwise the dilution
of the blue vote in the swing states will loom large. James Carville, astute handicapper that he is,
has already sniffed out that Hillary now needs Bernie more than Bernie needs Hillary.
Sanders on the ticket would only undermine Sanders. This Is about the DLC or the status quo. The
length of Sanders career has made him credible, but Hillary has already lost this same race to an empty
suit. The Democrats have bled support since Obama went full Reagan, but in many ways, this is a conflict
between Democratic elites and their loyalist followers and everyone else. Accepting assimilation will
only hurt Sanders. Forcing a Vice President onto Hillary such as Gabbard would be a far better aim.
Sanders supporters aren't interested in a status quo candidate, supported by the usual list of villains.
Hillary can get a begrudging vote, but she will never endive enthusiasm. Bernie and Hillary uniting
will only annoy people.
Yes, and then, as his long history with customers, contractors, vendors and creditors has shown,
he'll fuck us.
Please don't take this as advocacy for the Other One, but Donnie's entire career is based on screwing
people over; this is just another, albeit far bigger, hustle.
Don't think for a second that you could rely on him to follow through honestly about anything; it's
always and forever about Donnie.
Hey, there's at least a 1% chance that Trump won't go out if his way to screw the American people
considering the blackbox nature of his candidacy, whereas there is at least a 100% chance that HRC will
screw the American people hard. And add in the fact that she is a known psychopath with an itchy trigger
finger who will have the Red Button on her desk if she gets into the oval office Yeah. Trump isn't
looking too bad now, is he?
I gotta admit that Trump has always been a wild card for me, and while he is likely to screw us,
Hillary definitely will. Still the only candidate worth supporting in any conceivable sense is Bernie.
Given his gleeful endorsement of torture, advocacy for war crimes, nods to totalitarianism and fascism,
his own clear psychopathy, along with his racism, xenophobia, and apparent ignorance on everything from
medicine to the environment, and nuclear weapons, yes he looks bad, even in comparison with Hillary
Clinton , which says a great deal about just how awful he truly is.
I'm personally more frightened by Trump than Clinton. I've lived through almost 8 years of Obama,
plus Bush and Clinton how much worse than those could another 4-8 years of the same be? Trump is a
terrifying like my house on fire. But at the same time, I can certainly understand the desire to vote
for the Green with a clear conscience.
Perhaps we'll get lucky, and Hillary's campaign will collapse before the convention. Bernie would
be the first candidate I could really vote for (and who'd have a real chance at winning).
Why not put your vote where your words are? We're Senator Bernie Sanders to be the candidate, my
vote would be his. If he's not, and he endorses Secretary Clinton, then my vote goes to Doctor Jill
Stein, my favorite candidate anyway. Given the momentum Sanders has generated, were he, instead of supplicating
himself to Clinton following her coronation, to stand behind Ms. Stein Only in my dreams. Sigh
The DLC Third-Way Clintonite Obamacrats will not let Bernie become nominee no matter what. If the
party can't coronate Clinton, the party will try to bolt the severed head of Joe Biden onto Clinton's
headless body . . and run THAT.
That right there is what convinced me that the woman is a psychopath. She should have been carried
out out of the interview in a straight jacket, and yet there are some people who trying to make her
president. Trump may be a narcissist, but I would not say that he's psychotic.
If nothing else you need to support Trump for the survival of humanity.
Thinking about a Trump/hillary_clinton. contest reminds me of the movie 'The Sting'; where a couple of honest
con men take down a dishonest con man who killed their friend. I see Hillary as the dishonest con man.
In reality Trump is NOT to the left of Hillary on universal healthcare. Read his website.
Look since the guy is a major presidential candidate whether one likes that or not, I have no problem
directing people to his website. See how he puts his actual policy positions, such as they are, in his
own words.
Interventionism and trade remain to be seen as personally I think his positions on them are likely
to still uh evolve as they say during the campaign season. So I'm leaving the verdict out there.
I brought up this idea right when he became the presumptive nominee but this isn't really a pivot
left. He's always been less of a hawk than Hillary. One of the few positions he has been relatively
consistent on. I see him biding his time for a full pivot until Bernie is out of the picture. Here's
to hoping that doesn't happen.
My apologies, my friend. Didn't mean to step on you. Meant it as a concurrence. Sipping coffee slowly
today. You're one of my favorite people here for your regularly spot on, insightful comments.
Yes, my big effort to tell myself that Life Under Trump may not be as horrible as I fear is that
the record of outsider presidents (Carter) and celebrity governors (Schwarznegger and Jesse Ventura)
is they get very little done.
Modern governors are bound by devolution and mandates. They are just glorified city managers with
the staff to do the city manager's job. Even popular, insider governors can do very little. The President
can set the terms by which the governors operate.
I'm concerned that HRC will get more done than the Donald, but little of HRC's actions will be positive.
California handled Schwarznegger without too many problems as he tried unsuccessfully to "break down
boxes".
He replaced, via recall, the forgettable democratic Governor Gray Davis who simply disappeared from
politics.
As I recall, Davis papered over the CA energy crisis until after the election, figuring that when
the s**t hit the fan, he'd have been safely reinstalled in office.
I see HRC as possibly getting more wars started, TPP/TTIP approved, a grand bargain done on SS, and
providing more coddling to the financial, medical and insurance industries.
If many or all of HRC's possible negative accomplishments will not be done by Trump, then that could
justify electing a president who accomplishes little..
Yea Schwarznegger was ok. He made a few very devoted enemies in a few unions. But he was probably
far better on pushing environmental issues than Jerry fracking Brown ever was or will be. If it was
him versus Jerry at this point, I might very well prefer Arnold.
I think Trump at least understands that you can't take money from people who don't have any. His
casino enterprise in Atlantic City may have taught him that.
Like Anne Amnisia's link yesterday, I feel like I know where I stand with a Mussolini and can envision
taking a bullet honorably in resistance where the DNC method has been slowly killing me my whole adult
life and, short of Bernie, I can't see how to resist!
If he's ineffectual and doesn't start more wars, at least its more time to organize and Trump's the
kind of "leader" that might give focus to resistance.
Yves, I wish I thought you were right. But The Duck is so bizarre, so definitively unhinged, that
no one can predict what he'll do. He changes positions as the wind blows. And when he follows any philosophy
at all, it's the "Conservative" philosophy. He doesn't believe in global warming. He once said that
there should be NO minimum wage. I'm a Bernie fan, not a Hillary fan, but I would never, ever take the
risk of letting the Hare-Brained Jabberwocky into any position of power, which means, probably, that
I have to vote for Hillary, and even start sending her money after the primaries. Probably.
His healthcare plan on his campaign website is the usual Republican gibberish – repeal Obamacare,
sell insurance across state lines, block grant Medicaid.
He suggested 20-30,000 troops to Syria in response to a debate question, then said he would never
do that, but send " air power and military support" instead. (
LINK )
edit: Position on the website is also to give veterans the ability to "choose" healthcare outside
the VA system. (I'm not knowledgeable to say if this would actually help current pressing VA issues,
but it is a move from a national public health service model to a private care model, so not leftward).
Thanks for that. I think the general idea holds, though: it's a populist remake of politics, and
I think if Trump stakes out some 'unconventional' positions that are to the 'left' of HRC, he could
beat her.
Well, if by left you meant 'left' then we agree :) His appeal is much broader, though IMO a combination
of rightward demagoguery and leftward populist-i-ness.
That VA notion is a dagger pointed at the heart of all those people who for whatever reason, "took
the King's shilling" or drew the short straws in the draft lotteries or, before that, were nailed and
"inducted" just by living in heavy-draft-quota areas. And of course the Greatest Generation, so many
of whom got drug into earlier US imperial wars (Narrative notwithstanding.)
Sending GIs to docs outside the VA system (itself under siege for generations now by the same shits
who bring on the Forever War that generates ever more damaged people needing those "services"), to docs
who in my experience pretty uniformly have zero knowledge of vet-specific problems and diseases and
injuries, who will be paid how much to treat what quota of veterans, again? Crucifying GIs on the HMO
cross, so people can pretend there's "care" for them, via docs who are even more likely than VA docs
(who at least have some protections against arbitrary rules and policies and firings, in a "system"
run by many who institutionalize actual CARE as the main idea) to "go along with the minimization-hurry-up-and-die
program"?
The whole notion is straight Rule #2: "GO DIE, FOKKER! And do it quietly, out of sight, and with
minimum fuss, in a structure that so diffuses the abuses over space and time that it's extremely difficult
for the affected population to even gather the numbers to show how bad it is." Straight "more continuing
more opaque fog of war" bullshit. The same kind of sales BS as used to sell the rest of neoliberalist
misery ("Don't whine now, fools - you voted for it, I have the validated results of the elections right
here, so now it's All Nice And Legal, seeee?) from NAFTA and preceding frauds and vast FIREs, on up
to the present scams.
In the meantime, the Military-Industrial Juggernaut continues to gain mass and momentum. Trump can
natter about "war in the Mideast is a bad deal for the US" (Mideast seemingly not including AfPak, China,
Africa, South America, etc.) as a "bad deal." But will he have any interest in spooling down the turbines
on the enormous Milo Minderbinder Enterprises machine that is daily being "upgraded" and "up-armored"
and "re-weaponed" and "re-doctrined" and "mission-creeped," with the happy participation of every business,
large and small, that can wangle or "extend" a procurement or "study" contract to expand and lethality
and simple bureaucratic-growth size and incompetence (as a military force, in the old sense of what
armies are supposed to do for the Emperoro) of the monster, even as we blog participants do our mostly
ineffectual (if intellectually pleasing) nattering?
Civilian Control of the Military is a dishonest myth - true only in the sense that the Captains of
MICIndustry and drivers of "policy" are not currently Active Duty, though they all, along with the generals
(who live like kings, of course) belong to the same clubs and dip deeply into the same MMT Cornucopia.
And the MIC, from what I read, is quite open and pleased about the state of affairs
I would argue that the MIC is simply part of the 20 percent that derive their middle class existence
by serving at the beck and call of the 1 percent. You are describing the symptoms and not the disease.
We are in the grip of "credentialled" doctors and lawyers. Just as most litigation and most of what
lawyers do is destructive to the average person, it is estimated that half of all surgeries done in
the US are unnecessary. the HIC (health industrial complex) has brainwashed the public to believe that
we need $20,000 per month medications and artificial discs. As you have doubtless seen the third leading
cause of death in the US is medical mistakes. They happen in the VA and in the private sector. Maybe
the notion of more medical care is better is simply not valid. At some point we will have to realize
that rationing in a rational way is going to have to happen. I would rather have someone who went to
medical school decide on what is going to be rationed than some lawyer or business administrator.
There sure is a lot packed into that comment. But my experience with VA doctors and other caregivers
(speaking as a retired "private sector" nurse, VA care recipient and former attorney) is that except
for the psychiatrists and some of the docs that perform disability examinations, the VA caregivers actually
provide care, and they seem to do it pretty well, given the constant attrition of resources and burgeoning
case load the neolibs are imposing. Personal tale: the Medicare 'provider" at the full-spectrum clinic
I used to use was all hot to perform a "common surgical procedure that most older men need." A fee-generating
TURP, which pretty rarely improves the victim's life. The VA doc, looking at the same condition and
presentation, noted the down-sides pretty carefully and said that until I was a lot more "restricted,"
there was no way I "needed" any such invasive procedure. But then his income is not influenced by the
number of cuts he makes
Most of what lawyers do any more, and this has been true for a long time, is combat over wealth transfers,
economic warfare. Ever since partnership was killed off as the mandatory form of lawyer business operations,
with attendant personal liability for partner actions, the rule is "eat what you kill, and kill all
you can." Most doctors I know have caregiving as their primary motivation in going into medicine. (Most
nurses, the same to a much greater extent, and since they start with smaller debt and fewer chances
to bleed the patient and the system that bleeds the nurse pretty badly, they can carry that decency
forward.)
Interesting, of course, that more and more doctors have joint MD and MBA credentials. And working
with other operatives, are gradually and maybe inexorably forcing more of their fellows into "medical
cooperatives" like HCA and JSA, where they become salaried wage slaves with productivity targets and
metrics, and thus "rationers" de facto, by having to respond to "metrics" that are all driven by the
basic business model: "More and more work, from fewer and fewer people, for less and less money, for
higher and higher costs, with ever more crapified outcomes for the mope-ery." Although, I might offer,
there are some of my fellow mopes who actually do benefit from those back surgeries (yes, maybe most
of them are unwarranted, but not all) and meds that only cost "$20,000 per month" because of MARKETS.
Imagine Trump winning as a GOP canidate by running to the left of the DNC canidate. The vision of
the GOP having a collective ulcer/Rovian Meltdown is making me giggle like a schoolgirl all day.
Frankly, I'm *much* more worried about HRC in the Whitehouse than I am about Trump. Reason why is
that he's a relative outsider, not an Establishment guy - and there is always Congress to deal with.
Its not like he would have a total dictatorship, whereas HRC would be able to do far more and deeper
damage to the nation.
My position is Sanders or bust, and I say that as a 20-year member of the GOP (now independent).
Like you said, he changes his positions all the time, and Clinton is no doubt a serious warmonger/war
criminal, but he did also say that he would "bomb the s- out of ISIS," which one might also be inclined
to characterize as trigger happy.
I am equally terrified at the prospect of having Clinton or Trump at the nuclear controls, which
is why we should all send Bernie a few bucks today. The MSM have already gone into full Clinton v Trump
general election mode, though that is certain to change once Bernie wins California.
If you read what Trump has said about our foreign policy, he has been consistent in his view that
the US can't and shouldn't be acting as an imperalist. He does not use those words, but he's said this
often enough that I've even linked to articles describing how Trump is willing to depict America as
being in decline, and this as one manifestation. In addition, his foreign policy speech was slammed
basically because it broke with neocon orthodoxy. I have not read it but people I respect and who are
not temperamentally inclined to favor Trump have, and they said it was sensible and among other things
argued that we could not be fighting with China and Russia at the same time, and pumped for de-escalating
tensions with Russia as the country whose culture and interests were more similar to ours than China's.
Having said that, calling out our belligerence and TPP as bad ideas seem to be the only issues on
which he's not been all over the map (well, actually, he has not backed down on his wall either .)
The other reason to think he might stick with this position more consistently than with others is
that his core voters come from communities where a lot of people have fought in the post-9/11 Middle
Eastern conflicts. Our armed forces are stretched to the breaking point. Trump has strong support among
veterans and active duty soldiers, and it's due to his speaking out against these wars.
Trump can probably get away with continuing to shape shift till Labor Day, since most voters don't
make up their minds till close to the election. It's not pretty to watch him make a bold statement and
then significantly walk it back in the next 24 hours, particularly if it's an issue you care about and
he's said something that is so nuts that it sounds like he cares more about his Nielsen rating than
what makes sense for the country. If he can't put enough policy anchors down by the fall and stick to
them, he will lose a lot of people who might give him a shot out of antipathy to Clinton.
That may well be the case and he was right to call out the Iraq war as a "mistake" during that debate
(given his otherwise unconventional rhetoric, however, I was actually a bit disappointed that he didn't
use the more correct term war crime), but he has also said that he wants to bring back torture and then
some.
As far as I'm concerned though, the race right now is between Clinton and Bernie and I'm fairly confident
that Bernie still has a good chance since he is sure to take California (which, luckily for Bernie,
will seem like a huge surprise).
In a match up between Trump and Clinton my own personal thoughts (that a democratic – i.e. neoliberal
– white house will at least continue to move people to the left, whereas a republican white house will
only galvanize people around bringing another neoliberal to the white house) are irrelevant because
I have virtually no doubt that Trump will win.
Yes, his enthusiasm for torture is pretty creepy and you get a taste of it here indirectly: "That
Saddam, he was a really bad guy but he sure could take care of those terrorists!" While Trump does seem
to genuinely disapprove of all the people our wars have killed for no upside (a commonsense position
in absence among our foreign policy elites), he seems overly confident that we can identify baddies
well and having identified them, we should have no compunction about being brutal with them.
"That Saddam, he was a really bad guy but he sure could take care of those terrorists!"
His meaning here is we should have stayed out of it and let the "really bad guy" (Saddam) handle
Al Quaeda. Of course, the Bush neocons dishonestly morphed Saddam into Al Quaeda. You know the rest
of the story.
I'm willing to bet that he's saying a lot of this stuff for his audience–people who are generally
a pretty angry and bloodthirsty lot. I'm not saying that he's not going to come out for peace, love
and contrition when he's elected president, but I think it is safe to say that his rhetoric now is completely
unrelated to how he'd go about actually governing.
OK, so normally that'd be a horrible admission–if the Democrats hadn't had the brilliant idea of
foisting Hillary onto the American people. What a brain-dead move! I myself could have been persuaded
to support Bernie, but Hillary is the Devil incarnate as far as I'm concerned.
One fact that we have to remember is all the people who designed, advocated for, implemented, and
defended "enhanced interrogation" and than who use "Clintonisms" to say we no longer use torture (because
we never did – "enhanced interrogation") AND because we are "rendering" them someplace else and our
friends are doing the enhanced interrogation – well, such lying devious people in my view are far, far
worse than The Donald.
In my view, there appears to be considerable evidence that the US still defacto tortures – and that
is far, far worse than the appalling, but at least truthful statement of how Trump feels. And of course,
pink misting people may not be torture, but it can't be separated.
Again, which is worse:
A. The Donald up front advocates a policy (of torture), people can be mobilized to oppose it. No legalisms,
dissembling, and every other term that can be used to obfuscate what the US is REALLY doing.
B. The US government asserts it no longer tortures. How many readers here have confidence that that
is a factually true statement, that can be said without word games?
Is saying we should torture WORSE than saying we don't torture, but WE ARE???
I feel the same way. It's preferable to have someone take the morally reprehensible pro-torture stance
than to pretend to be against it while secretly renditioning prisoners and so forth.
except for the fake wmds that started it. and abu ghraib. and the reasons the contractors were hung
in fallujah. and the fake alliance between saddam and al quaida. and outing valerie plame when joe wilson
blew the whistle on the fake purpose of the aluminum tubes.
Enough electoral fraud has been evidenced that I think that the numbers are going to be gamed to
be closer to the non-representative polling that flood the MSM. He may win, but they aren't going to
allow him to win by a lot in such a delegate heavy state.
Unfortunately, I think you are quite right that the California numbers will be rigged/gamed. I had
become quite cynical about American politics, thanks to Obama the More Effective Evil's reign and the
Bush and the Supremes Florida gambit back in 2000. But this primary vote rigging has really moved my
marker so far that I am not even sure what word to use what's more cynical than super duper cynical?
So here's an idea I've been pondering how can the people try to prevent or find this? Could we exit
poll outside the voting places? Yes it would be a limited sample of just one local place but it's something
and in aggregate if lots of people were doing this
I too think they might try to game California. And this is quite alarming considering California
is usually too unimportant to even game. I figure the elections are usually honest here, probably because
they just don't matter one whit. But this time it might matter and they might steal the vote.
"core voters come from communities where a lot of people have fought in the post-9/11 Middle
Eastern conflicts. Our armed forces are stretched to the breaking point. Trump has strong support
among veterans and active duty soldiers"
This.
People tend to also forget that there's a lot of us Gen-X'ers that were deployed over there over
25 years ago, when it was popular, for the same damned thing. Nothing has changed. Sure, some leadership
folks have been taken out, but the body count of Americans soldiers has only risen,and the Region is
now worse off.
The "first time" we had more folks die from non-combat related accidents than from actual combat.
Some of us are sick of our political and corporate establishment selling out our fellow soldiers and
Veterans, even worse is the way they have been treated when they come home. I'm not a Trump supporter,
but this part of his message not only resonates with me, but angers me further. Why? Because I know
that if Hillary Clinton walks into The Oval Office, even more Americans are going to die for lust of
more power and influence.
HRC is simply the evilest human being I have ever seen in politics in my lifetime. Trump may be an
idiot, crass, authoritarian, and any number of negative things, but he is not "evil" – she is.
If the mash up continues as Clinton v. Trump and barring any character sinking actions of Trump,
this man will win in November. To paraphrase Shivani, Clinton is speaking entirely in high minded self-interest,
while Trump has latched onto and is pressing a actual truths of reality (regardless of his personal
convictions or what he wlll actually do if elected).
Trump is more liberal than Clinton here. What exactly are her redeeming qualities again?
I can't really think of any HRC redeeming qualities. "Retail politicking" doesn't seem to be one
of them. Lambert, you no doubt saw this video of her confronted with rising health insurance costs post-ACA?
Her word salad response doesn't begin to address the real issues
During a recent town hall event, a small business owner explained to the Democratic front-runner
that her health insurance has gone up so significantly for her family that the thought of providing
benefits to her employees is secondary at this point.
"As a small business owner, not only are you trying to provide benefits to your employees,
you're trying to provide benefits to yourself. I have seen our health insurance for my own family,
go up $500 dollars a month in the last two years. We went from four hundred something, to nine hundred
something. We're just fighting to keep benefits for ourselves. The thought of being able to provide
benefits to your employees is almost secondary, yet to keep your employees happy, that's a question
that comes across my desk all the time. I have to keep my employees as independent contractors for
the most part really to avoid that situation, and so I have turnover"
"We do not qualify for a subsidy on the current health insurance plan. My question to you
is not only are you looking out for people that can't afford healthcare, but I'm someone that can
afford it, but it's taking a big chunk of the money I bring home."
To which Hillary responded, to make a long story short, that she knows healthcare costs are going
up, and doesn't understand why that would ever be the case.
"What you're saying is one of the real worries that we're facing with the cost of health insurance
because the costs are going up in a lot of markets, not all, but many markets and what you're describing
is one of the real challenges."
"There's a lot of things I'm looking at to try to figure out how to deal with exactly the
problem you're talking about. There are some good ideas out there but we have to subject them to
the real world test, will this really help a small business owner or a family be able to afford it.
What could have possibly raised your costs four hundred dollars, and that's what I don't understand."
"What could have possibly raised your costs four hundred dollars, and that's what I don't
understand." - this from a woman who ostensibly is an expert on health care delivery?
The link is from Zero Hedge but in any case watch the video. Or wait for it to appear in a Trump
campaign ad:
"Or wait for it to appear in a Trump campaign ad" Haha!
I am surprised she didn't pull out the "90% coverage" false-positve. We haven't seen that pony enough.
The notion of imploring "scientific" method here is interesting in light of the party's blood oath to
meritocracy. "There are some good ideas out there but we have to subject them to the real world
test ". It also implies that the process is natural and no accountability is necessary.
Another great DNC experiment. Throwing the blacks in jail for 20 years over nothing "oh well, we
need to try more!" I cannot imagine being in prison right now for some minor drug offense and hearing
the Clintons spew this nonsense.
Jeff Gundlach, one of the few iconoclasts and reigning king of bonds on Wall Street:
"People are going to start putting greater focus on Hillary (Clinton). Voters are going to say, 'No.
I don't want this,'" he told Reuters. "Hillary is going to evolve into an unacceptable choice. If she
is such a great candidate, how come (Bernie Sanders) is beating her?"
Even more. He's based in LA so there's a 400 mile air gap between him in the goldbugging, glibertarian,
wannabe John Galt culture of the Valley exemplified by Peter Theil.
How about a picture of Gundlach for tomorrow's antidote ?
It is warm heartening to see this site who consistently leaning left warming for the Donald. Clinton
is a horrible candidate, flawed human being and her presidency is guaranteed to be marred by scandal
after scandal and deep polarization.
Bern would be a great choice but he has no chance, the corrupt Democratic establishment will stick with
Clinton.
I inuited months ago that the warming to Donald thing would happen. I have a growing conviction that
most of the people here, maybe even you, are going to vote for Donald in November. Even Jason will vote
for Donald (unless he is being employed by that pro-Hillary super pac which I don't think is the case
but just throwing it out there since there are empirically speaking people being paid to produce pro
Hillary comments on the internet). Barring something truly interesting and novel happening between now
and then that is.
The way things are going now this plane seems set for an effortless autopilot victory for Trump.
I have no doubt that everyone will regret too. They'll even regret before they cast the vote, and do
it anyway. Oh man, that's some truly black humor. OK I'll make an even grander prediction: Trump will
inaugurate the post postmodern era (whatever historians eventually decide to call it) where our entire
conception and perception of reality as a society undergoes a radical and unpleasant change. It's a
unique time to be alive. Aren't we lucky?
Wait. I just had an incredible insight. We're already out of the postmodern era, and I can date it
from Sept. 11, 2001as the exit. Historian are going to say that this was a short era, a transitional
era of illusions, delusions and fear, where complete non-reality Trumped the real for an ever so short
period of time. But now we're going to be shocked awake, and what's coming next is going to be incredible
and horrific. Damn, it's such an awesome and strange feeling to see things so clearly all of a sudden!
It's really happening. So this why I've been obsessing over this stuff much recently.
I tried to find a short clip of Brunhilde riding her horse into the flames in Gotterdammerung right
before Valhalla collapses, which is what voting for Trump would be like for me, but I couldn't find
out.
There was an antiwar left on the msm during the Bush years? Kerry's campaign message was "Ill be
W 2.0." Kerry himself was that awful, but there was no antiwar left in the msm. I thought the absence
was the direct cause for the rise of blogs. The real crisis is the shift of websites such as TalkingPointMemo
and CrooksandLiars to Team Blue loyalist sites or when Digby brought on Spoonfed.
Yep. 2006 was when the Dems decapitated the left blogosphere, and as a result we have no independent
media, except for lonely outposts like this one, and whatever those whacky kidz are doing with new media.
I keep donating to Bernie because even if he somehow doesn't win the nomination, he can force Hillary
to be much more like him – if HRC wants Bernie voters to clinch the deal for her. Bernie staying in
and fighting to the end (and my money says he wins) is great and if Hillary doesn't become Bernie, then
the only one that can beat Trump is Bernie, and the super-delegates have got to see that.
Bottom line, Hillary has to become Bernie to beat Trump. Is that going to happen? We'll see.
Bernie staying in until the very end serves two purposes (he CAN still win, especially when he carries
California). The first is, again, he CAN win. The second purpose is to prevent Hillary from shifting
right the way she REALLY wants to for the general. She will have to keep tacking left to fend off a
major slide towards Bernie. The "center" (actually right wing) is out of reach for her as long as Bernie
is there.
Sorry to rain on your thesis, but absent the nomination, all Bernie can do is to force Hillary to
*message* more like him. With her, the operative phrase is "words are wind". There is nothing whatever
to keep her from immediately ditching every progressive-sounding campaign stance once she is in office,
just as Obama did. And I guarantee you that if she does become president, that is precisely what she
will do.
Trump knows the counterweight better than anyone. He's the guy you keep on the job because he's entertaining,
knowing he will sell you out if you let him, and you let him, when it serves a purpose, to adjust the
counterweight.
POLITICS, RE feudalism, is a game, and he loves it, despite the heartburn. All that debt inertia.preventing
the economic motor from gaining traction is psychological. That much he knows, which is a lot more than
the rest of the politicians, making him a better dress maker. But like the others, he has no idea what
to do about it.
He vascillates to maintain options, including a path to the future, while others rule themselves
out. Of course hiring good people is the answer, but most Americans are politicians, like anywhere else,
wanting to know little more than their cubicle, because the net result of majority behavior is punishing
work, in favor of consumers, competing for advantage.
If you spent this time developing skills and finding a spouse that won't cut your throat, you will
do quite well. The casino isn't life; it just keeps a lot of people busy, with busy work. Government
is hapless.
It's hard to know if Trump sees militarization and imperialism as bad because they're bad or bad
because it's not Donald Trump in charge, with a great big straw sucking Benjamins between those rectally
pursed lips. It may take an agent provocateur bullshitter to call bullshit, but that says nothing about
what Trump will do as president. What's likeliest, given his record, is an opportunistic seizure of
the Treasury to rival the occupation of Iraq. When I gaze into my crystal ball at a Trump administration
I see cronyism, graft, corruption, nepotism, and deceit of monumental dimensions, just like the gold
letters spelling Trump plastered over everything he lays his stubby little hands on. Because the Clintons
are appalling doesn't make Trump appealing. It's a farcical contest, and every way, we lose.
You echo my feelings. My loathing of Clinton knows no bounds, and I cannot vote for her, no matter
what. But I simply don't trust Trump. He's a gold-digger extrodinaire, and quite the accomplished showman.
He knows how to play to the crowd, and he's clearly quite quick to shape shift. The wrecked tatters
of what's called the USA "media" gives Trump a YOOOGE pass on simply everything and anything the man
says or does.
I don't trust Trump, and although, yes, he has says a few things that I agree with – and usually
stuff that no one else at his level will ever say – it's essentially meaningless to me. I think Trump
would be a disaster as President, and my "take" – which is based on my own opinion – is that he'll be
Grifter El Supremo and make sure that he walks off with stacks and gobs and buckets of CA$H. For him.
And if the country really tanks and goes bankrupt? So What?
Plus all this about Trump not being a War Hawk? I don't trust it. With the other breath, he's constantly
spewing about "building up" the damn military, which, allegedly Obama has "weakened." Like, we really
need to be spending another gazillion of our tax dollars "building up" the Military??? WHY? If The Donald
is so against all these foreign wars, then why do we need to spend even more money on the Military???
All that signals to me is that Donald expects to go large on MIC investments for HIMSELF.
Story time: so, when I married the Mrs, I offered to fix the mother in laws old bug. She turned me
down and has since demand that I fix what is now a rust bucket, not worth one manhour of my time, going
around to the neighbors, all critters on govt checks rapidly falling behind RE inflation, to build consensus
to the end, among women using men and men using women, all of them having thrown their marriages under
the bus, as if majority vote is going to get me to do something I have no intention of doing.
When hospital gave Grace that shot and sent her to the ICU, per Obamacare expert protocol, all the
critters went into CYA mode, and ultimately called the family, to confirm that the wife and I must be
on drugs, which they did. I don't blame the morons running the court system, and she's the mother in
law.
That debt is nothing more than psychology, but it is more effective than a physical prison. Silicon
Valley is the as is abutment, simply reinforcing stupid with ever greater efficiency, but it is the
endpoint on a collapsing bridge with no retreat, because automation has systematically destroyed the
skill pool and work ethic required to advance further, replacing them with make work and make work skills.
Competing with China and the Middle East to build carp infrastructure to keep As many economic slaves
as busy as possible is not the path forward. As you have seen, govt data is far closer to being 180
degrees wrong than being correct, as designed, which you should expect, from those holding out ignorance
as a virtue.
There are far more elevators that need fixing than I could ever get to, and I am quite capable of
fixing them in a manner that generates power. Who becomes president is irrelevant.
My family in Ohio is massive, they made a killing on RE and currency arbitrage, after selling all
the family farms, and have nothing real to show for it, but rapidly depreciating sunk costs, waiting
to do it again. Rocket scientists.
If the GWOT has cost us $4 Trillion, somebody made $4 Trillion.
That/those somebodies are not about to give up the kind of behavior that makes that
kind of money.
If there is any real, actual third-rail in American politics, it's the MIC budget.
This fact has never been openly acknowledged, even though the American people are pretty sure that
threatening the will of the MIC cost the life of at least one well known politician.
Trump may talk about that enormous waste now, but after his private screening of the Zapruder film
he's going to STFU and get with the program like all the rest.
OTOH, like Yves has pointed out, if Donald wins, he could just end up the loneliest man in DC, be
ignored, get nothing done, and I'm not sure I see a down-side to that.
if Donald wins, he could just end up the loneliest man in DC, be ignored, get nothing done
Exactly my feeling. He will be hated and fought constantly, whereas Clinton (if nominated) is guaranteed
to screw things up. Like her husband (who by the way will be there whispering in ears and making passes
at maids) she will triangulate on issues and pass destructive GOP legislation and likely drag this country
into another foreign policy blunder, where I am betting more young, under-educated, poor citizens with
no prospects or options will be sent to slaughter (themselves and others).
EH? I think The Donald will just go Large on MIC investments for himself. He talks a good game, but
he keeps saying that he's going "build up" the Military, even as he's stating that we shouldn't be fighting
in all of these wars. Why, then, do we need to "build up" the Military?
No one ever said Trump was stupid. I'm sure he's rubbing his grubby tiny vulgarian mitts with glee
thinking about how he, too, can get in on that sweet sweet SWEET MIC payola grift scam. Count on it.
Trump doesn't need to see the Zapruder film. He was alive then and knows the story, just like everyone
else of a certain age. Nay, verily, he just means to cash in on it.
Watt4Bob
May 13, 2016 at 12:30 pm
"OTOH, like Yves has pointed out, if Donald wins, he could just end up the loneliest man in DC, be ignored,
get nothing done, and I'm not sure I see a down-side to that."
I too view that as a feature and not a bug. Seriously, in the last 10, 20, 30 years, I would ask,
what law is viewed as making things better? Was Sarbanes Oxley suppose to do something??? Maybe the
law is OK, they just won't enforce it
I know Obamacare is relentlessly disparaged here, others think it is better than nothing.
Many of you youngsters don't realize this, but there was a time, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, that
there were no deductibles, co-pays, narrow networks, and that you had confidence that your doctor may
have over treated and tested you, but you weren't afraid that you would die because it was too expensive
to treat you.
Just like I don't care if GDP goes up because i won't see any of it, I don't care about all the cancer
research because I am certain I won't be able to afford it, even though I have health "insurance" .
"Employer-sponsored retiree health coverage once played a key role in supplementing Medicare," observe
Tricia Neuman and Anthony Damico of the foundation. "Any way you slice it, this coverage is eroding."
Since 1988, the foundation says, among large firms that offer active workers health coverage, the
percentage that also offer retiree health plans has shrunk to 23% in 2015 from 66% in 1988. The decline,
which has been steady and almost unbroken, almost certainly reflects the rising cost of healthcare and
employers' diminishing sense of responsibility for long-term workers in retirement.
.
Financial protection against unexpected healthcare costs is crucial for many Medicare enrollees, especially
middle- and low-income members, because the gaps in Medicare can be onerous. The deductible for Medicare
Part A, which covers inpatient services, is $1,288 this year, plus a co-pay of $322 per hospital day
after 60 days. Part B, which covers outpatient care, has a modest annual deductible of $166 but pays
only 80% of approved rates for most services.
====================================================
80% of 100,000$ means 20K is left over – with cancer treatments*, kidney treatments, cardiovascular
treatments, such a scenario is more likely than a lot of people will imagine.
*treatments don't include those foam slippers that they charge you 25$ for .
But the consequences of the shift away from employer-sponsored retiree benefits go beyond the rise
in costs for the retirees themselves. Many are choosing to purchase Medigap policies, which fill in
the gaps caused by Medicare's deductibles, cost-sharing rates and benefit limitations. That has the
potential to drive up healthcare costs for the federal government too. That's because Medigap policies
tend to encourage more medical consumption by covering the cost-sharing designed to make consumers more
discerning about trips to the doctor or clinic. Already, nearly 1 in 4 Medicare enrollees had a Medigap
policy - almost as many as had employer-sponsored supplemental coverage.
..
The trend is sure to fuel interest on Capitol Hill in legislating limits to Medigap plans. Such limits
have supporters across the political spectrum: Over the past few years, proposals to prohibit Medigap
plans from covering deductibles have come from the left-leaning Center for American Progress, the centrist
Brookings Institution and conservatives such as Sens. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Bob Corker (R-Tenn.).
================================
please stop going to the doctor, its expensive .just expire
First time poster, long time lurker. You don't think that Sanders success in the race pushed HRC
to embrace debt free 4 year public college?
We'll see what specific policy commitments come out of the convention, but I don't think the current
campaign would have the same issues if Bernie wasn't there.
Please don't mistake me either, ideologically I'm with Sanders and was supporting him until the NYDN
article and the delegate math became pretty much impossible. If I had my druthers, he'd be the candidate,
but it looks quite quite unlikely now.
I'm concerned that HRC will pivot after the election and give support to the TPP but even then I'm
still anti-Trump more.
Actually, a poster with your email commented in 2014 under another handle. There seems to be a rash
lately of infrequent or new commenters who "support Sanders but" or "supported Sanders until" lately.
For some reason.
That said, you could be right on college (
see here for a comparison of the plans ). It's just that Clinton's talking point about not wanting
to pay for Trump's children is so unserious I can't believe the plan is serious.
I dunno. I see a lot of people decry Trump's immigration ban on Muslims, but Hillary's record as
SecState was incredibly violent toward Muslims internationally and also includes presiding
over a defacto immigration ban from specific "problem" states- banning people for security reasons being
much more tactful than banning Muslims per se.
The nativist appeal Trump is making doesn't go much farther than naming the intent of policy Hillary
has been actually pursuing. Trump wants to use the demonisation of Muslims since 9/11 as a political
lever to gain power and will use anti-Muslim or anti-immigrant (weird to see the two conflated so frequently)
sentiment to achieve specific political goals, preferably sublating it into keynesian infrastructure
programs (wall building or whatever). Hillary intends to keep bombing societies that are increasingly
visibily disintegrating from the cumulative effects of climate change, colonial oppression and marginalisation,
foreign intervention, etc. It's not obvious who gets the benefit of the doubt in a lesser evil contest.
Trump is breaking the "lesser of two evils" argument.
Let's be clear about something here. The "lesser of two evils" is not an argument to find which candidate
is "the less evil." It's an argument used to justify the assumption that your candidate is the less
evil of the other. While else is it that Democrats say Clinton is the less evil while Republicans argue
that Trump is the less evil.
It's obvious watching leftist pundits (many of whom I respect) come out and flatly assert "Clinton
is the better of the two." And there heads usually explode right off their shoulders when they run into
someone who disagrees or is simply skeptical of the claim.
The real problem is when Trump dose speak on trade and war policy, he exposes the fallacy of the
argument. We can't take Trump's word for it – even though we already know Hillary is likely lying, so
it's still a tie. The notion that Trump might actually be honest here isn't even permitted to be considered
because that would make Trump the less evil of the two.
The problem I keep running into is just how do you measure "evil?" This gets even harder to do when
you can't take either at their word. There is always some deeper calculous we are expected to project
on the candidates in order to arrive at our pre-supposed conclusion that our candidate is always the
less evil.
It's the main reason I will not be voting for either.
Forgive me for piling on today Btw,.anyone know who this Carmen Yarrusso is? Excerpt from Counterpunch
(today)
"Trump may be a (loose-cannon) unpredictable evil. But then, based on her long track record, Clinton
is a very predictable evil. In fact, Trump is left of Clinton on such things as legal marijuana, NATO
aggression, and trade policy. His crazy proposals (e.g. Mexican wall, banning Muslims) are just bluster
with zero chance of becoming reality. If Congress can stop Obama, it can stop Trump. But Clinton has
a predictable pro-war track record (Iraq, Libya, Syria) and a predictable track record of changing positions
for political expediency (e.g. Iraq war, NAFTA, Bankruptcy Reform Act of 2000, immigration, gun control,
the Keystone XL pipeline, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, same-sex marriage). How can you be sure she
won't conveniently change her current progressive positions as president? A Trump presidency just might
force Democratic Party elites to start seriously addressing the populist concerns they now arrogantly
ignore.
If you vote for Clinton as the lesser of two evils, you're compromising your moral values, you're
condoning the Democratic Party's shoddy treatment of millions of progressives, and you're sabotaging
future real change. You're virtually guaranteeing the Democratic Party elites will put you in this position
again and again. If you refuse to vote for the lesser of two evils, maybe you'll help elect Trump (or
maybe your write-in or third party choice will win). But you'll certainly send a very clear message
to Democratic Party elites that you'll no longer tolerate being ignored, marginalized, or shamed with
false lesser of two evil choices."
lol watching people attack Trump well, not sure if it's Clinton's army out to scare us about the
horrors Trump will cause. now it's like the Devil we know vs the Devil we don't know. Kind of hard to
compare Trump to Hillary. Hillary's effective brand of evil is well established and is quite thorough,
shown by the primary votes in NY and AZ, for example. watching the Elites attack, belittle and completely
ignore the existence of Bernie gives us a little clue of what is in store if Hillary gets her way. Trump
is the "known unknown" to use Rumsfeld terminology.
Evil is as evil does. aka Hillary
this is perhaps the one and only time I ever will vote Republican. and I abhor Republicans. Hillary
has earned her reputation, Trump.. well Trump or no Trump, it won't be Hillary getting my vote. Keeping
Bernie out, we all lose.
No, I don't support the current administration's drone war, nor did I support the horrible Iraq war
of 2003, but that doesn't answer my question. I don't understand "Hillary is lying" as a tautology and
the conclusion being that Trump is a better bet than HRC because of that.
But in regards to your question, do you think that the drone war stance will change in the next administration
whether's it's HRC or Trump? Trump said he wants to get more aggressive on terrorists than we currently
are, explicitly endorsing torture.
Well even Sanders has come out in favor of drones, so probably, unless one is die hard Jill Stein
all the way. Then one's hands are entirely clean if also entirely ineffective.
Yeah, because voting for drone strikes, imperialism and corruption is more effective at getting rid
of those things than not voting for drone strikes, imperialism and drone strikes
Theyre both liars. If youre trusting Donald to not drone strike or trusting Hillary to not torture,
youre being duped.
As for your comment further down about Trump saying he wants to torture people more Its not as if
Obama has stopped Bush's torture regime or closed Guantanamo. Hillary too would continue more things.
Honestly I still dont understand why Trump is so much scarier than Hillary. Their differences are
mostly kayfabe. All that xenophobic racist demagogy Trump is doing? More kayfabe. Im still voting Stein,
because I dont vote for corrupt imperialists.
Stein is likewise kayfabe. If the party had gone with Anderson he might well have pulled a Bernie
in the last general election. That just wouldn't do, so the party was rather brazenly railroaded into
nominating Stein.
Just as the best lies are 99% truth the best con-jobs are the ones containing the maximum amount
of truthiness. Some days I like the things I hear Trump saying, the next he gives me a sick feeling
with chills down my spine. Sure, he's not sticking to the approved neo-con, neo-lib, Washington consensus
script but just how stupid do you have to be to not know that Saddam Hussein was a secular Bathist dictator
who executed anyone who he saw as a threat to his power, especially muslim extremists. Just because
Trump can spout off a truthy factoid that is only news to the brain-dead Fox News masses doesn't mean
he is any more of an honest dealer than Bush Jr. Does anyone think Bush, Cheney or Rumsfield were operating
under any illusions that Saddam Hussein had anything to do with 9/11? Of course not, they either saw
an opportunity or they engineered an opportunity to do what they wanted to do. Trump has shown himself
to be a bully comfortable with marshaling mob violence or the threat of mob violence. He is an authoritarian
and no defender of civil liberties, habeous corpus or the Geneva convention. He's exactly the type of
megalomanic that would try and seize power in an ailing democracy like our own, and I have no doubts
that if elected he will create some sort of Constitutional crisis that could end in a military coup
or Trump installed as a dictator. He already has a silent pissed-off army of violent brown shirts on
his side. I don't like the way this situation looks and people on the left with intelligence and a grasp
of history are deluding themselves if they think Trump isn't a very dangerous person.
In a possibly unrelated note, I'm 99% sure someone deeply keyed the full length of my car (truck
actually) yesterday while I was surfing for no other reason than my Bernie Sanders bumper sticker right
here in sunny, liberal southern California. Could it have been a Clinton supporter or a joy vandal who
likes keying random people's cars – sure. But if Trump wins I wonder how long it is before halal restaurants
and muslim dry cleaners start getting their windows smashed, then burned. How long before Hindus and
brown people start getting attacked (as a common occurrence, not outlier events that are punished as
they are now) because they are confused as being Muslim or Mexican or deliberately because they just
aren't white and should go home. There's a very nasty underbelly to this Trump thing and I don't like
it.
I agree on the nasty underbelly. On the other hand, I find it refreshing that Trump mentions the
millions of people slaughtered by our foreign policy. I don't hear that from Clinton, at all.
" I find it refreshing that Trump mentions the millions of people slaughtered by our foreign policy.
I don't hear that from Clinton, at all."
Ditto, me too, but I'm not about to cherry-pick Trump's schizophrenic and ever shifting talking points
then soft-peddle candidate Trump while telling people not to worry. I like silver-linings, staying optimistic
and being contrarian (I wouldn't hang out here otherwise) but why ignore the very troubling subtext
in the rest of Trump's speech? The anti-democratic, sneering remarks about suspected terrorists being
executed immediately in Saddam's Iraq instead of "on trial for fifteen years" in pansy-cakes weak, habeas
corpus America. Trump offhandedly mentions; 'Oh by the way, don't buy the lowball collateral damage
numbers you hear from the Pentagon, we're unnecessarily killing a lot of brown people abroad.' But then
he fans the flames of racism with stump speeches about building a wall and banning all muslims from
entering the USA. I can tell you which message his supporters are comprehending if you're unsure. Despite
being a politically heterodox chameleon Trump is showing his true colors. Just because Trump is willing
to break with the orthodoxy while he is campaigning doesn't mean he isn't an aspiring tyrant. Don't
be fooled. Trump isn't enlightened or altruistic, he's a talented demagogue pulling a Con on America-
that's it.
By the way, I wanted to add I am not in any way considering a vote for Hillary if she does in fact
become the Democratic nominee. I am very troubled by the prospect of a President Trump but I will not
allow my vote to be held hostage by the DNC and the very tired "lesser of evils arguments" I realized
my last comment might be construed as a "Trump must be stopped at all costs" Clinton rationalization.
It was not. Trump will be on the conscience of those who vote for him and those who have enabled him.
Maybe we should look at what Trump recently said at AIPAC – y'know, that itsy bitsy little lobby
that seems to strike fear into the hearts of all US politicians Trump included – to get a sense of his
ME policy,
shall we
?
snip
'In Spring 2004, at the height of violence in the Gaza Strip, I was the Grand Marshal of the 40th
Salute to Israel Parade, the largest single gathering in support of the Jewish state."
"My number one priority is to dismantle the disastrous deal with Iran. I have been in business
a long time. I know deal-making and let me tell you, this deal is catastrophic – for America, for
Israel, and for the whole Middle East."
"First, we will stand up to Iran's aggressive push to destabilize and dominate the region. Iran
is a very big problem and will continue to be, but if I'm elected President, I know how to deal with
trouble. Iran is a problem in Iraq, a problem in Syria, a problem in Lebanon, a problem in Yemen,
and will be a very major problem for Saudi Arabia. Literally every day, Iran provides more and better
weapons to their puppet states.
Hezbollah in Lebanon has received sophisticated anti-ship weapons, anti-aircraft weapons, and
GPS systems on rockets. Now they're in Syria trying to establish another front against Israel from
the Syrian side of the Golan Heights."
Just last week, American Taylor Allen Force, a West Point grad who served in Iraq and Afghanistan,
was murdered in the street by a knife-wielding Palestinian. You don't reward that behavior, you confront
it!
It's not up the United Nations to impose a solution. The parties must negotiate a resolution themselves.
The United States can be useful as a facilitator of negotiations, but no one should be telling Israel
it must abide by some agreement made by others thousands of miles away that don't even really know
what's happening.
When I'm president, believe me, I will veto any attempt by the UN to impose its will on the Jewish
state.
Already, half the population of Palestine has been taken over by the Palestinian ISIS in Hamas,
and the other half refuses to confront the first half, so it's a very difficult situation but when
the United States stands with Israel, the chances of peace actually rise. That's what will happen
when I'm president.
We will move the American embassy to the eternal capital of the Jewish people, Jerusalem – and
we will send a clear signal that there is no daylight between America and our most reliable ally,
the state of Israel."
Yup, it's like he and Hillary are just night and day, huh?
I mean other than the fact that Hillary actually BACKS the Iran Deal but don't let that get in the
way of a good "but Hillary" meeting.
The two candidates will be identical where it's most important – e.g. w/ Israel and the ME – just
like all of the presidential candidates.
You would think the Obama administration may have taught us something about perceiving reality oh
wait that's right, it really was Hillary and not poor Obama who's been doing all that killing over the
last 8 years and the Donald's really a renegade "outsider" billionaire who's just scaring the pants
off of the Establishment, right?
Wow. Just wow.
Obama Hope Junkies so desperate that they're shooting Trumpodil straight into their minds.
I'm confused. What does this have to do with the topic of the post? The YouTube has nothing to do
with the deplorable Beltway consensus on Israel, of which Trump is a part.
As US-driven wars plummet the Muslim world ever deeper into jihadi-ridden failed state chaos,
events seem to be careening toward a tipping point. Eventually, the region will become so profuse
a font of terrorists and refugees, that Western popular resistance to "boots on the ground" will
be overwhelmed by terror and rage. Then, the US-led empire will finally have the public mandate it
needs to thoroughly and permanently colonize the Greater Middle East.
It is easy to see how the Military Industrial Complex and crony energy industry would profit from
such an outcome. But what about America's "best friend" in the region? How does Israel stand to benefit
from being surrounded by such chaos?
Tel Aviv has long pursued a strategy of "divide and conquer": both directly, and indirectly through
the tremendous influence of the Israel lobby and neocons over US foreign policy.
A famous article from the early 1980s by Israeli diplomat and journalist Oded Yinon is most explicit
in this regard. The "Yinon Plan" calls for the "dissolution" of "the entire Arab world including
Egypt, Syria, Iraq and the Arabian peninsula." Each country was to be made to "fall apart along sectarian
and ethnic lines," after which each resulting fragment would be "hostile" to its neighbors." Yinon
incredibly claimed that:
"This state of affairs will be the guarantee for peace and security in the area in the long run"
According to Yinon, this Balkanization should be realized by fomenting discord and war among the
Arabs:
"Every kind of inter-Arab confrontation will assist us in the short run and will shorten the way
to the more important aim of breaking up Iraq into denominations as in Syria and in Lebanon."
So, you can see that Trump has said the right things into the right ears – read: AIPAC – as far as
anyone of import is concerned – read: not any of us – and so now he's free to say whatever else he thinks
he needs to.
I mean, Sheldon Adelson endorsed him so he can't be THAT scary to Israel-first billionaires and their
bed-buddies, right?
Ooops, I forgot he's an outsider that everyone's scared of. My bad. Hillary will be so much worse.
Robert Parry at ConsortiumNews has written an insightful article about the damage that has been caused
by both the neocon ideologues' control of US foreign policy and the neoliberals' control of economic
policy, their powerful political and propaganda apparatus, and what we can expect from the legacy political
party candidates for the presidency, focusing on Clinton and her past positions regarding the Middle
East.
It is noteworthy that the dominance of failed neocon and neoliberal policies over the past few decades
has coincided with consolidation and concentration of ownership of corporate media in very few hands.
As with restoring the Glass-Steagall Act and breaking up the TBTFs, reinstating limits on media ownership
and control is an important and necessary measure to breaking the influence these few individuals have
had over national policy.
Being Left of Hillary is a really really really low bar. He probably is, but thats probably because
Hillary is right wing. You know, like almost all American politicians from both parties. Trumps not
left of Bernie (at least not yet or not right now: I expect hes going to swing left in the general to
scoop up Bernie voters), and Bernies just an Eisenhower Republican, which is admittedly to the left
of basically all the other politicians today.
Quoting from memory, context foreign policy: "If our Presidents had gone to the beach every day of
the year fifteen years ago, we would have been in much better shape." (Note this includes Bush.)
Ron Paul was right in 2016 to express reservations about Trump forign policy.
Notable quotes:
"... Paul started off the interview saying that he is keeping his "fingers crossed" regarding Trump's potential foreign policy actions. ..."
"... Trump has presented "vague" foreign policy positions overall. Paul also comments that a good indication of how Trump will act on foreign policy issues will be provided by looking at who Trump appoints to positions in the executive branch and from whom Trump receives advice. ..."
"... Regarding Trump's foreign policy advisors and potential appointees, Paul expresses in the interview reason for concern. Paul states: "Unfortunately, there have been several neoconservatives that are getting closer to Trump, and, if he gets his advice from them, then I don't think that is a good sign." ..."
"... Even if Trump wants to pursue a significantly more noninterventionist course than his recent predecessors in the presidency, Paul warns that the entrenched "deep state" that favors foreign intervention and war, special interests that have "sinister motivation for these wars," and media propaganda that "builds up the war fever" can ..."
Ron Paul, known for his promotion of the United States following a noninterventionist foreign policy,
presented Thursday his take on the prospects of Donald Trump's foreign policy as president. Paul
set out his analysis in an extensive interview with host Peter Lavelle at RT.
Paul started off
the interview saying that he is keeping his "fingers crossed" regarding Trump's potential foreign
policy actions. Paul says he views favorably Trump's comments in the presidential election about
"being less confrontational with Russia" and criticizing some of the US wars in the Middle East.
Paul, though, notes that Trump has presented "vague" foreign policy positions overall. Paul also
comments that a good indication of how Trump will act on foreign policy issues will be provided by
looking at who Trump appoints to positions in the executive branch and from whom Trump receives advice.
Regarding Trump's foreign policy advisors and potential appointees, Paul expresses in the interview
reason for concern. Paul states: "Unfortunately, there have been several neoconservatives that are
getting closer to Trump, and, if he gets his advice from them, then I don't think that is a good
sign."
Even if Trump wants to pursue a significantly more noninterventionist course than his recent predecessors
in the presidency, Paul warns that the entrenched "deep state" that favors foreign intervention and
war, special interests that have "sinister motivation for these wars," and media propaganda that
"builds up the war fever" can
"... The "Obama Doctrine" a continuation of the previous false government doctrines in my lifetime, is less doctrine than the disease,
as David Swanson points out . But in the article he critiques, the neoconservative warmongering global planning freak perspective (truly,
we must recognize this view as freakish, sociopathic, death-cultish, control-obsessed, narcissist, take your pick or get a combo, it's
all good). Disease, as a way of understanding the deep state action on the body politic, is abnormal. It can and should be cured. ..."
"... The deep state seems to have grown, strengthened and tightened its grip. Can a lack of real money restrain or starve it? I
once thought so, and maybe I still do. But it doesn't use real money, but rather debt and creative financing to get that next new car,
er, war and intervention and domestic spending program. Ultimately it's not sustainable, and just as unaffordable cars are junked, stripped,
repossessed, and crunched up, so will go the way of the physical assets of the warfare–welfare state. ..."
"... Because inflated salaries , inflated stock prices and inflated ruling-class personalities are month to month, these should
evaporate more quickly, over a debris field once known as some of richest counties in the United States. Can I imagine the shabbiest
of trailer parks in the dismal swamp, where high rises and government basilicas and abbeys once stood? I'd certainly like to. But I'll
settle for well-kept, privately owned house trailers, filled with people actually producing some small value for society, and minding
their own business. ..."
"... Finally, what of those pinpricks of light, the honest assessments of the real death trail and consumption pit that the deep
state has delivered? Well, it is growing and broadening. Wikileaks and Snowden are considered assets now to any and all competitors
to the US deep state, from within and from abroad – the Pandora's box, assisted by technology, can't be closed now. The independent
media has matured to the point of criticizing and debating itself/each other, as well as focusing harsh light on the establishment media.
Instead of left and right mainstream media, we increasingly recognize state media, and delightedly observe its own struggle to survive
in the face of a growing nervousness of the deep state it assists on command. ..."
"... Watch an old program like"Yes, Minister" to understand how it works. Politicians come and go, but the permanent state apparatchiks
doesn't. ..."
"... The "deep state" programs, whether conceived and directed by Soros' handlers, or others, risks unintended consequences. The
social division intended by BLM, for example could easily morph beyond the goals. The lack of law due to corruption is equally susceptible
to a spontaneous reaction of "the mob," not under the control of the Tavistock handlers. There's an old saying on Wall St; pigs get
fat, hogs get slaughtered. ..."
So, after getting up late, groggy, and feeling overworked even before I started, I read
this article . Just
after, I had to feed a dozen cats and dogs, each dog in a separate room out of respect for their territorialism and aggressive desire
to consume more than they should (hmm, where have I seen this before), and in the process, forgot where I put my coffee cup. Retracing
steps, I finally find it and sit back down to my 19-inch window on the ugly (and perhaps remote) world of the state, and the endless
pinpricks of the independent media on its vast overwhelmingly evil existence. I suspect I share this distractibility and daily estrangement
from the actions of our government with most Americans .
We are newly bombing Libya and still messing with the Middle East? I thought that the wars the deep state wanted and started were
now limited and constrained! What happened to lack of funds, lack of popular support, public transparency that revealed the stupidity
and abject failure of these wars?
Deep state. Something systemic, difficult to detect, hard to remove, hidden. It is a spirit as much as nerves and organ.
How do your starve it, excise it, or just make it go away? We want to know. I think this explains the popularity of infotainment
about haunted houses, ghosts and alien beings among us. They live and we are curious
and scared.
The "Obama Doctrine" a continuation of the previous false government doctrines in my lifetime, is less doctrine than the
disease, as David Swanson points out . But in the article he critiques, the neoconservative warmongering global planning freak
perspective (truly, we must recognize this view as freakish, sociopathic, death-cultish, control-obsessed, narcissist, take your
pick or get a combo, it's all good). Disease, as a way of understanding the deep state action on the body politic, is abnormal. It
can and should be cured.
My summary of the long Jeffrey Goldberg piece is basically that Obama has become more fatalistic (did he mean to say fatal?) since
he won that Nobel
Peace Prize back in 2009 . By the way, the "Nobel prize" article contains this gem, sure to get a chuckle:
"Obama's drone program is regularly criticized for a lack of transparency and accountability, especially considering incomplete
intelligence means officials are often unsure about who will die. "
[M]ost individuals killed are not on a kill list, and the government does not know their names," Micah Zenko, a scholar at
the Council on Foreign Relations told the New York Times."
This is about all the fun I can handle in one day. But back to what I was trying to say.
The deep state seems to have grown, strengthened and tightened its grip. Can a lack of real money restrain or starve it? I
once thought so, and maybe I still do. But it doesn't use real money, but rather debt and creative financing to get that next new
car, er, war and intervention and domestic spending program. Ultimately it's not sustainable, and just as unaffordable cars are junked,
stripped, repossessed, and crunched up, so will go the way of the physical assets of the warfare–welfare state.
Because
inflated salaries ,
inflated
stock prices and inflated ruling-class personalities
are month to month, these should evaporate more quickly, over a debris field
once known as some of richest
counties in the United States. Can I imagine the shabbiest of trailer parks in the dismal swamp, where high rises and government
basilicas and abbeys once stood? I'd certainly like to. But I'll settle for well-kept, privately owned house trailers, filled with
people actually producing some small value for society, and minding their own business.
Can a lack of public support reduce the deep state, or impact it? Well, it would seem that this is a non-factor, except for the
strange history we have had and are witnessing again today, with the odd successful popular and populist-leaning politician and their
related movements. In my lifetime, only popular figures and their movements get assassinated mysteriously, with odd polka dot dresses,
MKULTRA suggestions, threats against their family by their competitors (I'm thinking Perot, but one mustn't be limited to that case),
and always with concordant pressures on the sociopolitical seams in the country, i.e riots and police/military activations. The
bad dealings toward, and genuine fear
of, Bernie Sanders within the Democratic Party's wing of the deep state is matched or exceeded only by the genuine terror of
Trump among the Republican deep state wing. This reaction to something or some person that so many in the country find engaging and
appealing - an outsider who speaks to the growing political and economic dissatisfaction of a poorer, more indebted, and
more regulated population – is
heart-warming, to be sure. It is a sign that whether or not we do, the deep state thinks things might change. Thank you, Bernie and
especially Donald, for revealing this much! And the "republicanization" of the Libertarian Party is also a bright indicator blinking
out the potential of deep state movement and compromise in the pursuit of "stability."
Finally, what of those pinpricks of light, the honest assessments of the real death trail and consumption pit that the deep
state has delivered? Well, it is growing and broadening. Wikileaks and Snowden are considered assets now to any and all competitors
to the US deep state, from within and from abroad – the Pandora's box, assisted by technology, can't be closed now. The independent
media has matured to the point of criticizing and debating itself/each other, as well as focusing harsh light on the establishment
media. Instead of left and right mainstream media, we increasingly recognize state media, and delightedly observe its own struggle
to survive in the face of a growing nervousness of the deep state it assists on command.
Maybe we will one day soon be able to debate how deep the deep state really is, or whether it was all just a dressed up, meth'ed
up, and eff'ed up a sector of society that deserves a bit of jail time, some counseling, and a new start . Maybe some job training
that goes beyond the printing of license plates. But given the destruction and mass murder committed daily in the name of this state,
and the environmental disasters it has created around the world for the future generations, perhaps we will be no more merciful to
these proprietors of the American empire as they have been to their victims. The ruling class deeply fears our judgment, and in this
dynamic lies the cure.
LIST OF DEMANDS TO PROTECT THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA FROM FINANCIAL CATASTROPHE
I.CURB CORRUPTION AND EXCESSIVE POWER IN THE FINANCIAL ARMS OF THE US GOVERNMENT
A. FEDERAL RESERVE
1. Benjaman Bernanke to be removed as Chairman immediately
2. New York Federal Reserve Bank and all New York City offices of the Federal Reserve system will be closed for at least 3
years
3. Salaries will be reduced and capped at $150,000/year, adjusted for official inflation
4. Staffing count to be reduced to 1980 levels
5. Interest rate manipulation to be prohibited for at least five years
6. Balance sheet manipulation to be prohibited for at least five years
7. Financial asset purchases prohibited for at least five years
B. TREASURY DEPARTMENT
1. Timothy Geithner to be removed as Secretary immediately
2. All New York City offices of the Department will be closed for at least 3 years
3. Salaries will be reduced and capped at $150,000/year, adjusted for official inflation
4. Staffing count to be reduced to 1980 levels
5. Market manipulation/intervention to be prohibited for at least five years
7. Financial asset purchases prohibited for at least five years
II. END THE CORRUPTING INFLUENCE OF GIANT BANKS AND PROTECT AMERICANS FROM FURTHER EXPOSURE TO THEIR COLLAPSE
A. END CORRUPT INFLUENCE
1. Lifetime ban on government employment for TARP recipient employees and corporate officers, specifically including Goldman
Sachs and JP Morgan Chase
2. Ten year ban on government work for consulting firms, law firms, and individual consultants and lawyers who have accepted
cash from these entities
3. All contacts by any method with federal agencies and employees prohibited for at least five years, with civil and criminal
penalties for violation
B. PROTECT THE AMERICAN PEOPLE FROM FURTHER HARM AT THE HANDS OF GIANT BANKS
1. No financial institution with assets of more than $10billion will receive federal assistance or any 'arm's-length' bailouts
2. TARP recipients are prohibited from purchasing other TARP recipient corporate units, or merging with other TARP recipients
3. No foreign interest shall be allowed to acquire any portion of TARP recipients in the US or abroad
III. PREVENT CORPORATE ACCOUNTING AND PENSION FUND ABUSES RELATED TO THE GLOBAL FINANCIAL CRISIS
A. CORPORATE ACCOUNTING
1. Immediately implement mark-to-market accounting rules which were improperly suspended, allowing six months for implementation.
2. Companies must reserve against impaired assets under mark-to-market rules
3. Any health or life insurance company with more than$100 million in assets must report on their holdings and risk factors,
specifically including exposure to real estate, mortgage-backed securities, derivatives, and other exotic financial instruments.
These reports will be to state insurance commissions and the federal government, and will also be made available to the public
on the Internet.
B. PENSION FUNDS
1. All private and public pension funds must disclose their funding status and establish a plan to fully fund accounts under
the assumption that net real returns across all asset classes remain at zero for at least ten years.
Sir Humphrey Appleby: You know what happens when politicians get into Number 10; they want to take their place on the
world stage.
Sir Richard Wharton: People on stages are called actors. All they are required to do is look plausible, stay sober,
and say the lines they're given in the right order.
Sir Humphrey Appleby: Some of them try to make up their own lines.
The "deep state" programs, whether conceived and directed by Soros' handlers, or others, risks unintended consequences.
The social division intended by BLM, for example could easily morph beyond the goals. The lack of law due to corruption is equally
susceptible to a spontaneous reaction of "the mob," not under the control of the Tavistock handlers. There's an old saying on
Wall St; pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered.
The failed coup in Turkey is a significant indication of institutional weakness and also vulnerability. The inability to exercise
force of will in Syria is another. The list of failures is getting too long.
An interesting article on John McCain. I disagree with the contention that McCain hid knowledge that many American POWs were left
behind (undoubtedly some voluntarily choose to remain behind but not hundreds ). However, the article touched on some ideas that
rang true:
Today when we consider the major countries of the world we see that in many cases the official leaders are also the leaders
in actuality: Vladimir Putin calls the shots in Russia, Xi Jinping and his top Politburo colleagues do the same in China, and
so forth. However, in America and in some other Western countries, this seems to be less and less the case, with top national
figures merely being attractive front-men selected for their popular appeal and their political malleability, a development that
may eventually have dire consequences for the nations they lead. As an extreme example, a drunken Boris Yeltsin freely allowed
the looting of Russia's entire national wealth by the handful of oligarchs who pulled his strings, and the result was the total
impoverishment of the Russian people and a demographic collapse almost unprecedented in modern peacetime history.
An obvious problem with installing puppet rulers is the risk that they will attempt to cut their strings, much like Putin
soon outmaneuvered and exiled his oligarch patron Boris Berezovsky.
One means of minimizing such risk is to select puppets who
are so deeply compromised that they can never break free, knowing that the political self-destruct charges buried deep within
their pasts could easily be triggered if they sought independence. I have sometimes joked with my friends that perhaps the best
career move for an ambitious young politician would be to secretly commit some monstrous crime and then make sure that the hard
evidence of his guilt ended up in the hands of certain powerful people, thereby assuring his rapid political rise.
The gist is that elite need a kill switch on their front men (and women).
Seems to be a series of pieces dealing with Vietnam POWs: the following linked item was interesting and provided a plausible explanation:
that the US failed to pay up agreed on reparations…
Remarkable and shocking. Wheels within wheels – this is the first time I have ever seen McCain's father connected with the infamous
Board of Inquiry which cleared Israel in that state's attack on USS LIBERTY during Israel's seizure of the Golan Heights.
Another stunning article in which the author makes reference to his recent acquisition of what he considers to be a reliably authentic
audio file of POW McCain's broadcasts from captivity. Dynamite stuff. The conclusion regarding aspiring untenured historians is
quite downbeat:
Also remarkable; fantastic. It's hard to believe, and a testament to the boldness of Washington dog-and-pony shows, because this
must have been well-known in insider circles in Washington – anything so damning which was not ruthlessly and professionally suppressed
and simply never allowed to become part of a national discussion would surely have been stumbled upon before now. Land of the
Cover-Up.
This was written in 2011 but it summarizes Obama presidency pretty nicely, even today. Betrayer
in chief, the master of bait and switch. That is the essence of Obama legacy. On "Great Democratic betrayal"...
Obama always was a closet neoliberal and neocon. A stooge of neoliberal financial oligarchy, a puppet,
if you want politically incorrect term. He just masked it well during hist first election campaigning
as a progressive democrat... And he faced Romney in his second campaign, who was even worse, so after
betraying American people once, he was reelected and did it twice. Much like Bush II. He like
another former cocaine addict -- George W Bush has never any intention of helping American people, only
oligarchy.
Notable quotes:
"... IN contrast, when faced with the greatest economic crisis, the greatest levels of economic inequality, and the greatest levels of corporate influence on politics since the Depression, Barack Obama stared into the eyes of history and chose to avert his gaze. ..."
"... We (yes, we) recognise that capitalism is the most efficient way to maximise overall prosperity and quality of life. But we also recognise that unfettered, it will ravage the environment, abuse labor, and expand income disparity until violence or tragedy (or both) ensues. ..."
"... These are the lessons we've learned since the industrial revolution, and they're the ones that we should be drawing from the past decade. We recognise that we need a strong federal government to check these tendencies, and to strike a stable, sustainable balance between prosperity, community, opportunity, wealth, justice, freedom. We need a voice to fill the moral vacuum that has allowed the Koch/Tea/Fox Party to emerge and grab power. ..."
"... Americans know this---including, of course, President Obama (see his April 13 speech at GW University). But as this article by Dr. Westen so effectively shows, Obama is incompetent to lead us back ..."
"... he is not competent to lead us back to a state of American morality, where government is the protector of those who work hard, and the provider of opportunity to all Americans. ..."
"... I've heard him called a mediator, a conciliator, a compromiser, etc. Those terms indicate someone who is bringing divergent views together and moving us along. That's part of what a leader does, though not all. Yet I don't think he's even lived up to his reputation as a mediator. ..."
"... Almost three years after I voted for Obama, I still don't know what he's doing other than trying to help the financial industry: the wealthy who benefit most from it and the technocrats who run it for them. But average working people, people like myself and my daughter and my grandson, have not been helped. We are worse off than before. And millions of unemployed and underemployed are even worse off than my family is. ..."
"... So whatever else he is (and that still remains a mystery to me), President Obama is not the leader I thought I was voting for. ..."
"... I knew that Obama was a charade early on when giving a speech about the banking failures to the nation, instead of giving the narrative Mr. Westen accurately recommended on the origins of the orgy of greed that just crippled our economy and caused suffering for millions of Americans ..."
"... He should have been condemning the craven, wanton, greed of nihilistic financial gangsters who hijacked our economy. Instead he seemed to be calling for all Americans not to hate rich people. That was not the point. Americans don't hate rich people, but they should hate rich people who acquire their wealth at the expense of the well being of an entire nation through irresponsible, avaricious, and in some instances illegal practices, and legally bribe politicians to enact laws which allow them to run amok over our economy without supervision or regulation. ..."
"... I knew then that Obama was either a political lemon, in over his head, an extremely conflict averse neurotic individual with a compulsive need for some delusional ideal of neutrality in political and social relations, or a political phony beholden to the same forces that almost destroyed the country as Republicans are. ..."
When Barack Obama rose to the lectern on Inauguration Day, the nation was in tatters. Americans
were scared and angry. The economy was spinning in reverse. Three-quarters of a million people lost
their jobs that month. Many had lost their homes, and with them the only nest eggs they had. Even
the usually impervious upper middle class had seen a decade of stagnant or declining investment,
with the stock market dropping in value with no end in sight. Hope was as scarce as credit.
In that context, Americans needed their president to tell them a story that made sense of what
they had just been through, what caused it, and how it was going to end. They needed to hear that
he understood what they were feeling, that he would track down those responsible for their pain and
suffering, and that he would restore order and safety. What they were waiting for, in broad strokes,
was a story something like this:
"I know you're scared and angry. Many of you have lost your jobs, your homes, your hope. This
was a disaster, but it was not a natural disaster. It was made by Wall Street gamblers who speculated
with your lives and futures. It was made by conservative extremists who told us that if we just eliminated
regulations and rewarded greed and recklessness, it would all work out. But it didn't work out. And
it didn't work out 80 years ago, when the same people sold our grandparents the same bill of goods,
with the same results. But we learned something from our grandparents about how to fix it, and we
will draw on their wisdom. We will restore business confidence the old-fashioned way: by putting
money back in the pockets of working Americans by putting them back to work, and by restoring integrity
to our financial markets and demanding it of those who want to run them. I can't promise that we
won't make mistakes along the way. But I can promise you that they will be honest mistakes, and that
your government has your back again." A story isn't a policy. But that simple narrative - and the
policies that would naturally have flowed from it - would have inoculated against much of what was
to come in the intervening two and a half years of failed government, idled factories and idled hands.
That story would have made clear that the president understood that the American people had given
Democrats the presidency and majorities in both houses of Congress to fix the mess the Republicans
and Wall Street had made of the country, and that this would not be a power-sharing arrangement.
It would have made clear that the problem wasn't tax-and-spend liberalism or the deficit - a deficit
that didn't exist until George W. Bush gave nearly $2 trillion in tax breaks largely to the wealthiest
Americans and squandered $1 trillion in two wars.
And perhaps most important, it would have offered a clear, compelling alternative to the dominant
narrative of the right, that our problem is not due to spending on things like the pensions of firefighters,
but to the fact that those who can afford to buy influence are rewriting the rules so they can cut
themselves progressively larger slices of the American pie while paying less of their fair share
for it.
But there was no story - and there has been none since.
In similar circumstances, Franklin D. Roosevelt offered Americans a promise to use the power of
his office to make their lives better and to keep trying until he got it right. Beginning in his
first inaugural address, and in the fireside chats that followed, he explained how the crash had
happened, and he minced no words about those who had caused it. He promised to do something no president
had done before: to use the resources of the United States to put Americans directly to work, building
the infrastructure we still rely on today. He swore to keep the people who had caused the crisis
out of the halls of power, and he made good on that promise. In a 1936 speech at Madison Square Garden,
he thundered, "Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate
as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me - and I welcome their hatred."
When Barack Obama stepped into the Oval Office, he stepped into a cycle of American history, best
exemplified by F.D.R. and his distant cousin, Teddy. After a great technological revolution or a
major economic transition, as when America changed from a nation of farmers to an urban industrial
one, there is often a period of great concentration of wealth, and with it, a concentration of power
in the wealthy. That's what we saw in 1928, and that's what we see today. At some point that power
is exercised so injudiciously, and the lives of so many become so unbearable, that a period of reform
ensues - and a charismatic reformer emerges to lead that renewal. In that sense, Teddy Roosevelt
started the cycle of reform his cousin picked up 30 years later, as he began efforts to bust the
trusts and regulate the railroads, exercise federal power over the banks and the nation's food supply,
and protect America's land and wildlife, creating the modern environmental movement.
Those were the shoes - that was the historic role - that Americans elected Barack Obama to fill.
The president is fond of referring to "the arc of history," paraphrasing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther
King Jr.'s famous statement that "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."
But with his deep-seated aversion to conflict and his profound failure to understand bully dynamics
- in which conciliation is always the wrong course of action, because bullies perceive it as weakness
and just punch harder the next time - he has broken that arc and has likely bent it backward for
at least a generation.
When Dr. King spoke of the great arc bending toward justice, he did not mean that we should wait
for it to bend. He exhorted others to put their full weight behind it, and he gave his life speaking
with a voice that cut through the blistering force of water cannons and the gnashing teeth of police
dogs. He preached the gospel of nonviolence, but he knew that whether a bully hid behind a club or
a poll tax, the only effective response was to face the bully down, and to make the bully show his
true and repugnant face in public.
IN contrast, when faced with the greatest economic crisis, the greatest levels of economic
inequality, and the greatest levels of corporate influence on politics since the Depression, Barack
Obama stared into the eyes of history and chose to avert his gaze. Instead of indicting the
people whose recklessness wrecked the economy, he put them in charge of it. He never explained that
decision to the public - a failure in storytelling as extraordinary as the failure in judgment behind
it. Had the president chosen to bend the arc of history, he would have told the public the story
of the destruction wrought by the dismantling of the New Deal regulations that had protected them
for more than half a century. He would have offered them a counternarrative of how to fix the problem
other than the politics of appeasement, one that emphasized creating economic demand and consumer
confidence by putting consumers back to work. He would have had to stare down those who had wrecked
the economy, and he would have had to tolerate their hatred if not welcome it. But the arc of his
temperament just didn't bend that far.
Michael August 7, 2011
Eloquently expressed and horrifically accurate, this excellent analysis articulates the frustration
that so many of us have felt watching Mr...
Bill Levine August 7, 2011
Very well put. I know that I have been going through Kübler-Ross's stages of grief ever since
the foxes (a.k.a. Geithner and Summers) were...
AnAverageAmerican August 7, 2011
"In that context, Americans needed their president to tell them a story that made sense of
what they had just been through, what caused it,...
Unfortunately, the Democratic Congress of 2008-2010, did not have the will to make the economic
and social program decisions that would have improved the economic situation for the middle-class;
and it is becoming more obvious that President Obama does not have the temperament to publicly
push for programs and policies that he wants the congress to enact.
The American people have a problem: we reelect Obama and hope for the best; or we elect a Republican
and expect the worst. There is no question that the Health Care law that was just passed would
be reversed; Medicare and Medicare would be gutted; and who knows what would happen to Social
Security. You can be sure, though, that business taxes and regulation reforms would not be in
the cards and those regulations that have been enacted would be reversed. We have traveled this
road before and we should be wise enough not to travel it again!
Brilliant analysis - and I suspect that a very large number of those who voted for President
Obama will recognize in this the thoughts that they have been trying to ignore, or have been trying
not to say out loud. Later historians can complete this analysis and attempt to explain exactly
why Mr. Obama has turned out the way he has - but right now, it may be time to ask a more relevant
and urgent question.
If it is not too late, will a challenger emerge in time before the 2012 elections, or will
we be doomed to hold our noses and endure another four years of this?
Very eloquent and exactly to the point. Like many others, I was enthralled by the rhetoric
of his story, making the leap of faith (or hope) that because he could tell his story so well,
he could tell, as you put it, "the story the American people were waiting to hear."
Disappointment has darkened into disillusion, disillusion into a species of despair. Will I
vote for Barack Obama again? What are the options?
This is the most brilliant and tragic story I have read in a long time---in fact, precisely
since I read when Ill Fares the Land by Tony Judt. When will a leader emerge with a true moral
vision for the federal government and for our country? Someone who sees government as a balance
to capitalism, and a means to achieve the social and economic justice that we (yes, we) believe
in? Will that leadership arrive before parts of America come to look like the dystopia of Johannesburg?
We (yes, we) recognise that capitalism is the most efficient way to maximise overall prosperity
and quality of life. But we also recognise that unfettered, it will ravage the environment, abuse
labor, and expand income disparity until violence or tragedy (or both) ensues.
These are the lessons we've learned since the industrial revolution, and they're the ones
that we should be drawing from the past decade. We recognise that we need a strong federal government
to check these tendencies, and to strike a stable, sustainable balance between prosperity, community,
opportunity, wealth, justice, freedom. We need a voice to fill the moral vacuum that has allowed
the Koch/Tea/Fox Party to emerge and grab power.
Americans know this---including, of course, President Obama (see his April 13 speech at
GW University). But as this article by Dr. Westen so effectively shows, Obama is incompetent to
lead us back to America's traditional position on the global economic/political spectrum.
He's brilliant and eloquent. He's achieved personal success that is inspirational. He's done some
good things as president. But he is not competent to lead us back to a state of American morality,
where government is the protector of those who work hard, and the provider of opportunity to all
Americans.
Taxes, subsidies, entitlements, laws... these are the tools we have available to achieve our
national moral vision. But the vision has been muddled (hijacked?) and that is our biggest problem.
-->
I voted for Obama. I thought then, and still think, he's a decent person, a smart person, a
person who wants to do the best he can for others. When I voted for him, I was thinking he's a
centrist who will find a way to unite our increasingly polarized and ugly politics in the USA.
Or if not unite us, at least forge a way to get some important things done despite the ugly polarization.
And I must confess, I have been disappointed. Deeply so. He has not united us. He has not forged
a way to accomplish what needs to be done. He has not been a leader.
I've heard him called a mediator, a conciliator, a compromiser, etc. Those terms indicate
someone who is bringing divergent views together and moving us along. That's part of what a leader
does, though not all. Yet I don't think he's even lived up to his reputation as a mediator.
Almost three years after I voted for Obama, I still don't know what he's doing other than
trying to help the financial industry: the wealthy who benefit most from it and the technocrats
who run it for them. But average working people, people like myself and my daughter and my grandson,
have not been helped. We are worse off than before. And millions of unemployed and underemployed
are even worse off than my family is.
So whatever else he is (and that still remains a mystery to me), President Obama is not
the leader I thought I was voting for. Which leaves me feeling confused and close to apathetic
about what to do as a voter in 2012. More of the same isn't worth voting for. Yet I don't see
anyone out there who offers the possibility of doing better.
This was an extraordinarily well written, eloquent and comprehensive indictment of the failure
of the Obama presidency.
If a credible primary challenger to Obama ever could arise, the positions and analysis in this
column would be all he or she would need to justify the Democratic party's need to seek new leadership.
I knew that Obama was a charade early on when giving a speech about the banking failures
to the nation, instead of giving the narrative Mr. Westen accurately recommended on the origins
of the orgy of greed that just crippled our economy and caused suffering for millions of Americans,
he said "we don't disparage wealth in America." I was dumbfounded.
He should have been condemning the craven, wanton, greed of nihilistic financial gangsters
who hijacked our economy. Instead he seemed to be calling for all Americans not to hate rich people.
That was not the point. Americans don't hate rich people, but they should hate rich people who
acquire their wealth at the expense of the well being of an entire nation through irresponsible,
avaricious, and in some instances illegal practices, and legally bribe politicians to enact laws
which allow them to run amok over our economy without supervision or regulation.
I knew then that Obama was either a political lemon, in over his head, an extremely conflict
averse neurotic individual with a compulsive need for some delusional ideal of neutrality in political
and social relations, or a political phony beholden to the same forces that almost destroyed the
country as Republicans are.
This was written in 2011 but it summarizes Obama presidency pretty nicely, even today. Betrayer
in chief, the master of bait and switch. That is the essence of Obama legacy. On "Great Democratic betrayal"...
Obama always was a closet neoliberal and neocon. A stooge of neoliberal financial oligarchy, a puppet,
if you want politically incorrect term. He just masked it well during hist first election campaigning
as a progressive democrat... And he faced Romney in his second campaign, who was even worse, so after
betraying American people once, he was reelected and did it twice. Much like Bush II. He like
another former cocaine addict -- George W Bush has never any intention of helping American people, only
oligarchy.
Notable quotes:
"... IN contrast, when faced with the greatest economic crisis, the greatest levels of economic inequality, and the greatest levels of corporate influence on politics since the Depression, Barack Obama stared into the eyes of history and chose to avert his gaze. ..."
"... We (yes, we) recognise that capitalism is the most efficient way to maximise overall prosperity and quality of life. But we also recognise that unfettered, it will ravage the environment, abuse labor, and expand income disparity until violence or tragedy (or both) ensues. ..."
"... These are the lessons we've learned since the industrial revolution, and they're the ones that we should be drawing from the past decade. We recognise that we need a strong federal government to check these tendencies, and to strike a stable, sustainable balance between prosperity, community, opportunity, wealth, justice, freedom. We need a voice to fill the moral vacuum that has allowed the Koch/Tea/Fox Party to emerge and grab power. ..."
"... Americans know this---including, of course, President Obama (see his April 13 speech at GW University). But as this article by Dr. Westen so effectively shows, Obama is incompetent to lead us back ..."
"... he is not competent to lead us back to a state of American morality, where government is the protector of those who work hard, and the provider of opportunity to all Americans. ..."
"... I've heard him called a mediator, a conciliator, a compromiser, etc. Those terms indicate someone who is bringing divergent views together and moving us along. That's part of what a leader does, though not all. Yet I don't think he's even lived up to his reputation as a mediator. ..."
"... Almost three years after I voted for Obama, I still don't know what he's doing other than trying to help the financial industry: the wealthy who benefit most from it and the technocrats who run it for them. But average working people, people like myself and my daughter and my grandson, have not been helped. We are worse off than before. And millions of unemployed and underemployed are even worse off than my family is. ..."
"... So whatever else he is (and that still remains a mystery to me), President Obama is not the leader I thought I was voting for. ..."
"... I knew that Obama was a charade early on when giving a speech about the banking failures to the nation, instead of giving the narrative Mr. Westen accurately recommended on the origins of the orgy of greed that just crippled our economy and caused suffering for millions of Americans ..."
"... He should have been condemning the craven, wanton, greed of nihilistic financial gangsters who hijacked our economy. Instead he seemed to be calling for all Americans not to hate rich people. That was not the point. Americans don't hate rich people, but they should hate rich people who acquire their wealth at the expense of the well being of an entire nation through irresponsible, avaricious, and in some instances illegal practices, and legally bribe politicians to enact laws which allow them to run amok over our economy without supervision or regulation. ..."
"... I knew then that Obama was either a political lemon, in over his head, an extremely conflict averse neurotic individual with a compulsive need for some delusional ideal of neutrality in political and social relations, or a political phony beholden to the same forces that almost destroyed the country as Republicans are. ..."
When Barack Obama rose to the lectern on Inauguration Day, the nation was in tatters. Americans
were scared and angry. The economy was spinning in reverse. Three-quarters of a million people lost
their jobs that month. Many had lost their homes, and with them the only nest eggs they had. Even
the usually impervious upper middle class had seen a decade of stagnant or declining investment,
with the stock market dropping in value with no end in sight. Hope was as scarce as credit.
In that context, Americans needed their president to tell them a story that made sense of what
they had just been through, what caused it, and how it was going to end. They needed to hear that
he understood what they were feeling, that he would track down those responsible for their pain and
suffering, and that he would restore order and safety. What they were waiting for, in broad strokes,
was a story something like this:
"I know you're scared and angry. Many of you have lost your jobs, your homes, your hope. This
was a disaster, but it was not a natural disaster. It was made by Wall Street gamblers who speculated
with your lives and futures. It was made by conservative extremists who told us that if we just eliminated
regulations and rewarded greed and recklessness, it would all work out. But it didn't work out. And
it didn't work out 80 years ago, when the same people sold our grandparents the same bill of goods,
with the same results. But we learned something from our grandparents about how to fix it, and we
will draw on their wisdom. We will restore business confidence the old-fashioned way: by putting
money back in the pockets of working Americans by putting them back to work, and by restoring integrity
to our financial markets and demanding it of those who want to run them. I can't promise that we
won't make mistakes along the way. But I can promise you that they will be honest mistakes, and that
your government has your back again." A story isn't a policy. But that simple narrative - and the
policies that would naturally have flowed from it - would have inoculated against much of what was
to come in the intervening two and a half years of failed government, idled factories and idled hands.
That story would have made clear that the president understood that the American people had given
Democrats the presidency and majorities in both houses of Congress to fix the mess the Republicans
and Wall Street had made of the country, and that this would not be a power-sharing arrangement.
It would have made clear that the problem wasn't tax-and-spend liberalism or the deficit - a deficit
that didn't exist until George W. Bush gave nearly $2 trillion in tax breaks largely to the wealthiest
Americans and squandered $1 trillion in two wars.
And perhaps most important, it would have offered a clear, compelling alternative to the dominant
narrative of the right, that our problem is not due to spending on things like the pensions of firefighters,
but to the fact that those who can afford to buy influence are rewriting the rules so they can cut
themselves progressively larger slices of the American pie while paying less of their fair share
for it.
But there was no story - and there has been none since.
In similar circumstances, Franklin D. Roosevelt offered Americans a promise to use the power of
his office to make their lives better and to keep trying until he got it right. Beginning in his
first inaugural address, and in the fireside chats that followed, he explained how the crash had
happened, and he minced no words about those who had caused it. He promised to do something no president
had done before: to use the resources of the United States to put Americans directly to work, building
the infrastructure we still rely on today. He swore to keep the people who had caused the crisis
out of the halls of power, and he made good on that promise. In a 1936 speech at Madison Square Garden,
he thundered, "Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate
as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me - and I welcome their hatred."
When Barack Obama stepped into the Oval Office, he stepped into a cycle of American history, best
exemplified by F.D.R. and his distant cousin, Teddy. After a great technological revolution or a
major economic transition, as when America changed from a nation of farmers to an urban industrial
one, there is often a period of great concentration of wealth, and with it, a concentration of power
in the wealthy. That's what we saw in 1928, and that's what we see today. At some point that power
is exercised so injudiciously, and the lives of so many become so unbearable, that a period of reform
ensues - and a charismatic reformer emerges to lead that renewal. In that sense, Teddy Roosevelt
started the cycle of reform his cousin picked up 30 years later, as he began efforts to bust the
trusts and regulate the railroads, exercise federal power over the banks and the nation's food supply,
and protect America's land and wildlife, creating the modern environmental movement.
Those were the shoes - that was the historic role - that Americans elected Barack Obama to fill.
The president is fond of referring to "the arc of history," paraphrasing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther
King Jr.'s famous statement that "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."
But with his deep-seated aversion to conflict and his profound failure to understand bully dynamics
- in which conciliation is always the wrong course of action, because bullies perceive it as weakness
and just punch harder the next time - he has broken that arc and has likely bent it backward for
at least a generation.
When Dr. King spoke of the great arc bending toward justice, he did not mean that we should wait
for it to bend. He exhorted others to put their full weight behind it, and he gave his life speaking
with a voice that cut through the blistering force of water cannons and the gnashing teeth of police
dogs. He preached the gospel of nonviolence, but he knew that whether a bully hid behind a club or
a poll tax, the only effective response was to face the bully down, and to make the bully show his
true and repugnant face in public.
IN contrast, when faced with the greatest economic crisis, the greatest levels of economic
inequality, and the greatest levels of corporate influence on politics since the Depression, Barack
Obama stared into the eyes of history and chose to avert his gaze. Instead of indicting the
people whose recklessness wrecked the economy, he put them in charge of it. He never explained that
decision to the public - a failure in storytelling as extraordinary as the failure in judgment behind
it. Had the president chosen to bend the arc of history, he would have told the public the story
of the destruction wrought by the dismantling of the New Deal regulations that had protected them
for more than half a century. He would have offered them a counternarrative of how to fix the problem
other than the politics of appeasement, one that emphasized creating economic demand and consumer
confidence by putting consumers back to work. He would have had to stare down those who had wrecked
the economy, and he would have had to tolerate their hatred if not welcome it. But the arc of his
temperament just didn't bend that far.
Michael August 7, 2011
Eloquently expressed and horrifically accurate, this excellent analysis articulates the frustration
that so many of us have felt watching Mr...
Bill Levine August 7, 2011
Very well put. I know that I have been going through Kübler-Ross's stages of grief ever since
the foxes (a.k.a. Geithner and Summers) were...
AnAverageAmerican August 7, 2011
"In that context, Americans needed their president to tell them a story that made sense of
what they had just been through, what caused it,...
Unfortunately, the Democratic Congress of 2008-2010, did not have the will to make the economic
and social program decisions that would have improved the economic situation for the middle-class;
and it is becoming more obvious that President Obama does not have the temperament to publicly
push for programs and policies that he wants the congress to enact.
The American people have a problem: we reelect Obama and hope for the best; or we elect a Republican
and expect the worst. There is no question that the Health Care law that was just passed would
be reversed; Medicare and Medicare would be gutted; and who knows what would happen to Social
Security. You can be sure, though, that business taxes and regulation reforms would not be in
the cards and those regulations that have been enacted would be reversed. We have traveled this
road before and we should be wise enough not to travel it again!
Brilliant analysis - and I suspect that a very large number of those who voted for President
Obama will recognize in this the thoughts that they have been trying to ignore, or have been trying
not to say out loud. Later historians can complete this analysis and attempt to explain exactly
why Mr. Obama has turned out the way he has - but right now, it may be time to ask a more relevant
and urgent question.
If it is not too late, will a challenger emerge in time before the 2012 elections, or will
we be doomed to hold our noses and endure another four years of this?
Very eloquent and exactly to the point. Like many others, I was enthralled by the rhetoric
of his story, making the leap of faith (or hope) that because he could tell his story so well,
he could tell, as you put it, "the story the American people were waiting to hear."
Disappointment has darkened into disillusion, disillusion into a species of despair. Will I
vote for Barack Obama again? What are the options?
This is the most brilliant and tragic story I have read in a long time---in fact, precisely
since I read when Ill Fares the Land by Tony Judt. When will a leader emerge with a true moral
vision for the federal government and for our country? Someone who sees government as a balance
to capitalism, and a means to achieve the social and economic justice that we (yes, we) believe
in? Will that leadership arrive before parts of America come to look like the dystopia of Johannesburg?
We (yes, we) recognise that capitalism is the most efficient way to maximise overall prosperity
and quality of life. But we also recognise that unfettered, it will ravage the environment, abuse
labor, and expand income disparity until violence or tragedy (or both) ensues.
These are the lessons we've learned since the industrial revolution, and they're the ones
that we should be drawing from the past decade. We recognise that we need a strong federal government
to check these tendencies, and to strike a stable, sustainable balance between prosperity, community,
opportunity, wealth, justice, freedom. We need a voice to fill the moral vacuum that has allowed
the Koch/Tea/Fox Party to emerge and grab power.
Americans know this---including, of course, President Obama (see his April 13 speech at
GW University). But as this article by Dr. Westen so effectively shows, Obama is incompetent to
lead us back to America's traditional position on the global economic/political spectrum.
He's brilliant and eloquent. He's achieved personal success that is inspirational. He's done some
good things as president. But he is not competent to lead us back to a state of American morality,
where government is the protector of those who work hard, and the provider of opportunity to all
Americans.
Taxes, subsidies, entitlements, laws... these are the tools we have available to achieve our
national moral vision. But the vision has been muddled (hijacked?) and that is our biggest problem.
-->
I voted for Obama. I thought then, and still think, he's a decent person, a smart person, a
person who wants to do the best he can for others. When I voted for him, I was thinking he's a
centrist who will find a way to unite our increasingly polarized and ugly politics in the USA.
Or if not unite us, at least forge a way to get some important things done despite the ugly polarization.
And I must confess, I have been disappointed. Deeply so. He has not united us. He has not forged
a way to accomplish what needs to be done. He has not been a leader.
I've heard him called a mediator, a conciliator, a compromiser, etc. Those terms indicate
someone who is bringing divergent views together and moving us along. That's part of what a leader
does, though not all. Yet I don't think he's even lived up to his reputation as a mediator.
Almost three years after I voted for Obama, I still don't know what he's doing other than
trying to help the financial industry: the wealthy who benefit most from it and the technocrats
who run it for them. But average working people, people like myself and my daughter and my grandson,
have not been helped. We are worse off than before. And millions of unemployed and underemployed
are even worse off than my family is.
So whatever else he is (and that still remains a mystery to me), President Obama is not
the leader I thought I was voting for. Which leaves me feeling confused and close to apathetic
about what to do as a voter in 2012. More of the same isn't worth voting for. Yet I don't see
anyone out there who offers the possibility of doing better.
This was an extraordinarily well written, eloquent and comprehensive indictment of the failure
of the Obama presidency.
If a credible primary challenger to Obama ever could arise, the positions and analysis in this
column would be all he or she would need to justify the Democratic party's need to seek new leadership.
I knew that Obama was a charade early on when giving a speech about the banking failures
to the nation, instead of giving the narrative Mr. Westen accurately recommended on the origins
of the orgy of greed that just crippled our economy and caused suffering for millions of Americans,
he said "we don't disparage wealth in America." I was dumbfounded.
He should have been condemning the craven, wanton, greed of nihilistic financial gangsters
who hijacked our economy. Instead he seemed to be calling for all Americans not to hate rich people.
That was not the point. Americans don't hate rich people, but they should hate rich people who
acquire their wealth at the expense of the well being of an entire nation through irresponsible,
avaricious, and in some instances illegal practices, and legally bribe politicians to enact laws
which allow them to run amok over our economy without supervision or regulation.
I knew then that Obama was either a political lemon, in over his head, an extremely conflict
averse neurotic individual with a compulsive need for some delusional ideal of neutrality in political
and social relations, or a political phony beholden to the same forces that almost destroyed the
country as Republicans are.
If such attempts were really registered, the question is were those attempts to hack US sites from
Russian IP space a false flag operation, probably with participation of Ukrainian secret services?
'
As one commenter noted: "The Ukrainian government have been trying to drive a wedge between the West
and Russia for years for their own political advantage."
If so what is the agenda outside obvious attempt to poison Us-Russian relations just before
Trump assumes presidency. Neocon in Washington are really afraid losing this plush positions.
And there is the whole colony of such "national security professionals" in Washington DC. For
example Robert Kagan can't do anything useful outside his favorite Russophobic agenda and would be an
unemployed along with his wife, who brought us Ukrainian disaster.
Notable quotes:
"... President Obama issued a terse statement seeming to blame Russia for the hack of the Democratic National Committee emails. "These data theft and disclosure activities could only have been directed by the highest levels of the Russian government," he wrote. ..."
"... The problem with this story is that, like the Iraq-WMD mess, it takes place in the middle of a highly politicized environment during which the motives of all the relevant actors are suspect. Nothing quite adds up. ..."
"... Now we have this sanctions story, which presents a new conundrum. It appears that a large segment of the press is biting hard on the core allegations of electoral interference emanating from the Obama administration. ..."
"... Did the Russians do it? Very possibly, in which case it should be reported to the max. But the press right now is flying blind. ..."
"... Maybe the Russians did hack the DNC, but the WikiLeaks material actually came from someone else? There is even a published report to that effect, with a former British ambassador as a source, not that it's any more believable than anything else here. ..."
"... We ought to have learned from the Judith Miller episode. Not only do governments lie, they won't hesitate to burn news agencies. In a desperate moment, they'll use any sucker they can find to get a point across. ..."
"... The Joint Analysis Report from the FBI contains an appendix that lists hundreds of IP addresses that were supposedly "used by Russian civilian and military intelligence services." While some of those IP addresses are from Russia, the majority are from all over the world, which means that the hackers constantly faked their location. ..."
"... "If I was the Chinese and I wanted to make it look like the Russians did it, I would use Russian language within the code, I would use Russian techniques of breaking into the organization," McAfee said, adding that, in the end, "there simply is no way to assign a source for any attack." ..."
"... I have a problem understanding why the powers that be can't understand the widening gap between their on podium statements and the average persons view. Are they hoping to brainwash, or really believe it, or just leaving a video record for posterity that might sway historical interpretation of the current time? ..."
"... A little OT, but how many people realize that Israel (less than half the population of the former Palestine) has taken complete control of ALL water and has decreed that 3% of that water may be directed to the Palestinians! ..."
"... It's been said that on average Americans are like mushrooms – "Keep 'em in the dark and feed 'em shit!" ..."
"... And THAT, from what I've read in OPEN literature (obviously) about what is known by our cyber threat intel community, read on tech sites, and seen on the outstanding documentary program CyberWar about the Eastern European hacking community, is a OUTRIGHT BLATANT LIE. ..."
"... NOTE that he may actually believe that because that is what he may have been TOLD, just as Bush was told there were WMDs in Iraq, but as I've pointed out, the clumsy errors allowing the malware to be so very EASILY traced back to "supposedly" Russia are beyond belief for any state-sponsored outfit, especially a Russian effort. ..."
"... Note that the user info for TWO BILLION Yahoo email accounts was stolen and they left no traces which then led the FBI to conclude that it must have been "state sponsored." ..."
"... We are left with two basic options. Either they are simply stupid or their is a larger agenda at hand. I don't believe they are stupid. They have been setting fires all around this election for months, none of them effective by themselves, but ALL reinforcing the general notion that Trump is unfit and illegitimate. ..."
"... I do not believe this is just random panic and hyperbole. They are "building" something. ..."
"... This is what is must have been like being a Soviet Citizen in 1989 or so. The official media was openly laughed at because its lies were so preposterous. ..."
"... Sadly, the JAR, as the Joint Analysis Report is called, does little to end the debate. Instead of providing smoking guns that the Russian government was behind specific hacks, it largely restates previous private-sector claims without providing any support for their validity. Even worse, it provides an effective bait and switch by promising newly declassified intelligence into Russian hackers' "tradecraft and techniques" and instead delivering generic methods carried out by just about all state-sponsored hacking groups." ..."
"... WORSE than "delivering generic methods carried out by just about all state-sponsored hacking groups." It should have said "by just about anyone using 'in the wild' malware tools." ..."
"... The Russians probably have a lot of information about USG employees, contractors, etc, via hacking, recording, etc than Wikileaks. But, as a general rule, intelligence agencies do not dump it into the public domain because you don't want a potential adversary know what you know about him lest he investigate and close off the means of obtaining that information. The leaks came from elsewhere. ..."
"... Smells like a "false flag" operation, like the USA/NATO Operation Gladio in Europe. ..."
"... McCain and the War Hawks have had it out for Russia for a long time, and the Neo-cons have been closing in on the borders of Russia for some time. What will be interesting is when Trump meets with the CIA/NSA et al. for intel briefings on the alleged hacking. Hopefully, Trump will bring along VP Pence, Mad Dog and the other Marine generals (appointees) for advice. I suspect that the "false flag" nature of the hacking excuse will be evident and revealed as the pretext for the Neo-con anti-Russia agenda moving forward. ..."
"... McCain is the real thug, and an interferer in foreign elections (Kiev) and seems to have no real scruples. ..."
"... After Victoria Nuland brags about the USA spending $5 billion to overthrow the elected Ukraine government, how these Russia-phobes have any credibility is beyond me. Just shows that the consolidation of the media into a few main propaganda outlets under Bill Clinton (who also brought the Neo-cons into foreign policy dominance) has reached its logical apex. The Swamp is indeed a stinking, Corrupt miasma. ..."
"... Russia a country of 170 million surrounded by NATO military bases and 800 million people in the EU and USA is the threat? The US alone spends 12 times as much on its military annually than Russia. It's not Russia invading and overthrowing secular governments in the Muslim world. ..."
"... If I remember correctly the CIA claimed their intelligence sources came from unspecified 'allies'. It seems rather crucial to establish who these allies actually are. If it were Germany that would be one thing, however it is more than likely to be the Ukraine. ..."
"... So if Obama had actually produced evidence that the Russians had hacked Hilary's illegal, unprotected email setup in her Chapaqua basement/closet how would that change the ***content*** of the emails? It wouldn't. ..."
"... Obama is failing to convince the world that Russia is a bunch of whistle blowers on his corrupt regime. All of the emails detailing corruption and fraud are true (unchallenged), however Obama wants to suggest they were obtained illegally from an illegal email server? That is Obama's bullshit defense for the corrupt behavior? ..."
Is there any evidence those expelled are "intelligence operatives"? Any hard evidence Russia was
behind the Hillary hacks? Any credible evidence that Putin himself is to blame?
The answers are No, No, and No. Yet, once again the American press is again asked to co-sign a
dubious intelligence assessment.
In an extraordinary development Thursday, the Obama administration announced a series of sanctions
against Russia. Thirty-five Russian nationals will be expelled from the country. President
Obama issued a terse statement seeming to blame Russia for the hack of the Democratic National
Committee emails. "These data theft and disclosure activities could only have been directed by
the highest levels of the Russian government," he wrote.
The problem with this story is that, like the Iraq-WMD mess, it takes place in the middle
of a highly politicized environment during which the motives of all the relevant actors are suspect.
Nothing quite adds up.
If the American security agencies had smoking-gun evidence that the Russians had an organized
campaign to derail the U.S. presidential election and deliver the White House to Trump, then expelling
a few dozen diplomats after the election seems like an oddly weak and ill-timed response. Voices
in both parties are saying this now.
Republican Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham
noted the "small price" Russia paid for its "brazen attack." The Democratic National Committee,
meanwhile, said Thursday that taken alone, the Obama response is "
insufficient " as a response to "attacks on the United States by a foreign power."
The "small price" is an eyebrow-raiser.
Adding to the problem is that in the last months of the campaign, and also in the time since
the election, we've seen an epidemic of factually loose, clearly politically motivated reporting
about Russia. Democrat-leaning pundits have been unnervingly quick to use phrases like "Russia
hacked the election."
This has led to widespread confusion among news audiences over whether the Russians hacked
the DNC emails (a story that has at least been backed by some evidence, even if it
hasn't always been great evidence ), or whether Russians hacked vote tallies in critical states
(a far more outlandish tale backed by
no credible evidence ).
As noted in The Intercept and other outlets, an Economist/YouGov poll conducted this month
shows that 50 percent of all Clinton voters believe the Russians hacked vote tallies.
And reports by some Democrat-friendly reporters – like Kurt Eichenwald, who has birthed some
real head-scratchers this year, including what he admitted was a
baseless claim that Trump spent time in an institution in 1990 – have attempted to argue that
Trump surrogates may have been liaising with the Russians because they either visited Russia
or appeared on the RT network. Similar reporting about Russian scheming has been based entirely
on unnamed security sources.
Now we have this sanctions story, which presents a new conundrum. It appears that a large
segment of the press is biting hard on the core allegations of electoral interference emanating
from the Obama administration.
Did the Russians do it? Very possibly, in which case it should be reported to the max.
But the press right now is flying blind.
Maybe the Russians did hack the DNC, but the WikiLeaks material actually came from someone
else? There is even a
published report to that effect, with a former British ambassador as a source, not that it's
any more believable than anything else here.
We just don't know, which is the problem.
We ought to have learned from the Judith Miller episode. Not only do governments lie, they
won't hesitate to burn news agencies. In a desperate moment, they'll use any sucker they can find
to get a point across.
The Joint Analysis Report from the FBI contains an appendix that lists hundreds of IP addresses
that were supposedly "used by Russian civilian and military intelligence services." While some
of those IP addresses are from Russia, the majority are from all over the world, which means that
the hackers constantly faked their location.
McAfee argues that the report is a "fallacy," explaining that hackers can fake their location,
their language, and any markers that could lead back to them. Any hacker who had the skills to
hack into the DNC would also be able to hide their tracks, he said
"If I was the Chinese and I wanted to make it look like the Russians did it, I would use
Russian language within the code, I would use Russian techniques of breaking into the organization,"
McAfee said, adding that, in the end, "there simply is no way to assign a source for any attack."
Question of Patriotism
It's not patriotic to accept accusations as facts, given US history of lies, deceit, meddling,
and wars.
The gullibility and ignorance of the typical media lapdog is appalling, and whores like McCain
and Graham will use them shamelessly to promote their twisted, warmongering agenda. The same old
story, over and over again.
I have a problem understanding why the powers that be can't understand the widening gap between
their on podium statements and the average persons view. Are they hoping to brainwash, or really
believe it, or just leaving a video record for posterity that might sway historical interpretation
of the current time?
Net control very likely in Europe soon with public administration of the web/content. Might at
least help reduce the unemployment rate. Looked over the 2016 Bilderberg attendees too. MSM attendees
interesting vs political bias they exhibit.
Whoever thinks there aren't people behind the scenes with a plan is naive and woe betide anyone
upsetting that plan.
Unemployment rate read last refuge from the official economy. Not the alt. web that takes away
motivation, it is a pressure valve for people who find the official direction nothing short of
insulting. The majority of social media users won't be distracted.
Noticed zh on Italy for you if you had not picked it up
A little OT, but how many people realize that Israel (less than half the population of the
former Palestine) has taken complete control of ALL water and has decreed that 3% of that water
may be directed to the Palestinians!
Over ten million get running water for 12 hrs a week, while in Israel (borders move
every day as the world says nothing) there are no water restrictions zero!
So, while Palestinians
struggle to live in hot barren desert conditions (food and medicine is also denied children die
of treatable cancer often as medication is blocked), a 5 min drive away millions of gallons are
used to create a green, lush paradise for the Jewish Masters!
Did you know US laws were changed in 1968 to allow "Dual Citizens" to be elected and appointed
to government positions and today many of the top posts are citizens of Israel and America WTF?
Trump needs to make a daily dose of Red Pills the law
Oops the 10M fig is a bit high but it's at least double the Jewish population, yet they get 97%
this is slow moving genocide yet it's never even acknowledged
Syria is about gas pipelines. Corporations want to profit from the gas pipeline through the region
and wr the people are supposed to send our children to war over it and pay taxes tpbsupport the
effort. Rissia wants pipelines from their country under the Black sea and Irans pipelines to the
north. The US is supporting Qatar pipeline and LNG from our own shores to the EU.
"These data theft and disclosure activities could only have been directed by the highest levels
of the Russian government," (Obama) wrote.
And THAT, from what I've read in OPEN literature (obviously) about what is known by our
cyber threat intel community, read on tech sites, and seen on the outstanding documentary program
CyberWar about the Eastern European hacking community, is a OUTRIGHT BLATANT LIE.
NOTE that he may actually believe that because that is what he may have been TOLD, just as
Bush was told there were WMDs in Iraq, but as I've pointed out, the clumsy errors allowing the
malware to be so very EASILY traced back to "supposedly" Russia are beyond belief for any state-sponsored
outfit, especially a Russian effort.
Note that the user info for TWO BILLION Yahoo email accounts was stolen and they left no
traces which then led the FBI to conclude that it must have been "state sponsored."
We are left with two basic options. Either they are simply stupid or their is a larger agenda
at hand. I don't believe they are stupid. They have been setting fires all around this election
for months, none of them effective by themselves, but ALL reinforcing the general notion that
Trump is unfit and illegitimate.
I do not believe this is just random panic and hyperbole. They are "building" something.
Well, it is an established and accepted fact that Richard Nixon was a very intelligent guy. None
of Nixon's detractors ever claimed he was stupid, and Nixon won reelection easily.
Tricky Dick was just a tad "honesty challenged", and so is Obama. They were/are both neo-keynesians,
both took their sweet time ending stupid wars started by their predecessors even after it was
clear the wars were pointless.
Then again, I doubt Obozo is as smart as Nixon. Soros is clearly the puppeteer controlling
what Obama does. Soros is now freaking out that his fascist agenda has been exposed.
This is what is must have been like being a Soviet Citizen in 1989 or so. The official media
was openly laughed at because its lies were so preposterous.
"While security companies in the private sector have said for months the hacking campaign was
the work of people working for the Russian government, anonymous people tied to the leaks have
claimed they are lone wolves. Many independent security experts said there was little way to know
the true origins of the attacks.
Sadly, the JAR, as the Joint Analysis Report is called, does little to end the debate.
Instead of providing smoking guns that the Russian government was behind specific hacks, it largely
restates previous private-sector claims without providing any support for their validity. Even
worse, it provides an effective bait and switch by promising newly declassified intelligence into
Russian hackers' "tradecraft and techniques" and instead delivering generic methods carried out
by just about all state-sponsored hacking groups."
WORSE than "delivering generic methods carried out by just about all state-sponsored hacking
groups." It should have said "by just about anyone using 'in the wild' malware tools."
2015 Bilderberg. Looking down the attendees and subjects covered. Interesting some of the main
anti-Brexit groups had representatives there, suggests HC picked for 2016 US election, Cyber-security
and etc. Look at the key topics. How they all helped define 2016. So many current intertwined
themes.
The Russians probably have a lot of information about USG employees, contractors, etc,
via hacking, recording, etc than Wikileaks. But, as a general rule, intelligence agencies do not
dump it into the public domain because you don't want a potential adversary know what you know
about him lest he investigate and close off the means of obtaining that information. The leaks
came from elsewhere.
Smells like a "false flag" operation, like the USA/NATO Operation Gladio in Europe.
McCain and the War Hawks have had it out for Russia for a long time, and the Neo-cons have
been closing in on the borders of Russia for some time. What will be interesting is when Trump
meets with the CIA/NSA et al. for intel briefings on the alleged hacking. Hopefully, Trump will
bring along VP Pence, Mad Dog and the other Marine generals (appointees) for advice. I suspect
that the "false flag" nature of the hacking excuse will be evident and revealed as the pretext
for the Neo-con anti-Russia agenda moving forward.
The CIA it is now widely believed was part of the Deep State behind the JFK assassination when
JFK took an independent view, so Trump will need the USA Marines on his side. McCain is the
real thug, and an interferer in foreign elections (Kiev) and seems to have no real scruples.
After Victoria Nuland brags about the USA spending $5 billion to overthrow the elected
Ukraine government, how these Russia-phobes have any credibility is beyond me. Just shows that
the consolidation of the media into a few main propaganda outlets under Bill Clinton (who also
brought the Neo-cons into foreign policy dominance) has reached its logical apex. The Swamp is
indeed a stinking, Corrupt miasma.
Perhaps the Clinton Foundation and nascent Obama foundation feel it in their financial
interests to nurture the misma.
Cha-ching, cha-ching. Money to be made in demonizing Russia.
"The CIA it is now widely believed was part of the Deep State behind the JFK assassination when
JFK took an independent view "
All the circumstantial evidence pointed to Oswald. No one has ever proven otherwise, in over
50 years.
After 50 years of being propagandized by conspiracy book writers, it isn't surprising that
anything is widely believed at this point. The former curator of the 6th Floor Museum, Gary Mack,
believed there was a conspiracy, but over time came to realize that it was Oswald, alone.
When liberal Rolling Stone questions the Obama/DNC propaganda, you know for certain that they
have lost even their base supporters (the ones that can still think). The BS has just gotten too
stupid.
Why is the WSJ strongly supporting Obama here but also saying he waited way to long to make this
move? I don't always agree with them nor do I with you.
Ok I haven't read the comments but would only say that when Vladimir Putin the once leader
of the KGB becomes a preacher and starts criticizing the West for abandoning its Christian roots,
it's moral dignity, that for me doesn't just stink, it raises red flags all over the place. I
think Trump and some of the rest of u r being set up here-like lambs to the slaughter. Mish your
naďveté here surprises me!
Russia a country of 170 million surrounded by NATO military bases and 800 million people
in the EU and USA is the threat? The US alone spends 12 times as much on its military annually
than Russia. It's not Russia invading and overthrowing secular governments in the Muslim world.
If I remember correctly the CIA claimed their intelligence sources came from unspecified 'allies'.
It seems rather crucial to establish who these allies actually are. If it were Germany that would
be one thing, however it is more than likely to be the Ukraine.
The Ukranian government have been trying to drive a wedge between the West and Russia for years
for their own political advantage. If I was Trump then when I took office I would want an extremely
thorough investigation into the activities of the CIA by a third reliable party.
Excerpt: But was it really Russian meddling? After all, how does one prove not only intent
but source in a world of cyberespionage, where planting false flag clues and other Indicators
of Compromise (IOCs) meant to frame a specific entity, is as important as the actual hack.
Robert M. Lee, CEO and founder of cybersecurity company Dragos, which specializes in threats
facing critical infrastructure, also noted that the IOCs included "commodity malware," or hacking
tools that are widely available for purchase.
He said:
1. No they did not penetrate the grid.
2. The IOCs contained *commodity malware* – can't attribute based off that alone.
So if Obama had actually produced evidence that the Russians had hacked Hilary's illegal,
unprotected email setup in her Chapaqua basement/closet how would that change the ***content***
of the emails? It wouldn't.
Obama is failing to convince the world that Russia is a bunch of whistle blowers on his
corrupt regime. All of the emails detailing corruption and fraud are true (unchallenged), however
Obama wants to suggest they were obtained illegally from an illegal email server? That is Obama's
bullshit defense for the corrupt behavior?
And as "proportional retaliation" for this Russian whistle blowing, Obozo is evicting 35 entertainment
staff from the Russian embassy summer camp?
I doubt Hollywood or San Francisco has the integrity to admit they backed the wrong loser when
they supported Obozo but they should think about their own credibility after January 20th. Anyone
who is still backing Obozo is just too stupid to tie their own shoes much less vote
"... White House/StateDep press release on sanctions is ORWELLIAN: corruption within the DNC/Clinton's
manager Podesta undermines the democracy, not its exposure as claimed (let alone the fact that there
is still no evidence that the Russian government has anything to do with the hacks). ..."
"... The press release also talks about how the security of the USA and its interests were compromised,
so Obama in effects says that national security interest of the country is to have corrupt political
system, which is insane. ..."
"... You may be sure that the Americans will commit all the stupidities they can think of, plus
some that are beyond imagination." ~Charles de Gaulle. ..."
"... United States are not united I guess. Guess, that Merkel is the next on the list... ..."
"... Obama will be making to many paid speeches to be doing anything of the sort. And frankly I
suspect he be silent, because Trump is soon going to know where all the bodies were buried under Obama,
just like Obama knows where all the bodies are buried from the Bush area. ..."
On Friday, the Kremlin responded to the moves, including the expulsion of 35 suspected intelligence
operatives and the closing of two Russian facilities in the US, with a shrug. Putin, it seems,
is willing simply to wait until Trump moves into the Oval Office. Trump's tweet suggested he is
too.
But such provocative words could not distract the media and public from another domestic concern
for Trump – the growing perception that his predecessor has acted to
his disadvantage .
"The sanctions were clearly an attempt by the Obama administration to throw a wrench into –
or [to] box in – the next administration's relationship with Russia," said Boris Zilberman, a
Russia expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
"Putin, in part, saw through that and sidestepped it by playing good cop to [Russian foreign
minister Sergey] Lavrov and the [state] Duma, who were calling for a reciprocal response."
vgnych 8h ago
All Obama does with his clumsy movements is just attempting to blame Russians for Democrat's
loss of elections. Also he is obscuring peaceful power transition while at it.
All what Trump needs to do is to just call the looser a loser a move on.
White House/StateDep press release on sanctions is ORWELLIAN: corruption within the DNC/Clinton's
manager Podesta undermines the democracy, not its exposure as claimed (let alone the fact that
there is still no evidence that the Russian government has anything to do with the hacks).
The press release also talks about how the security of the USA and its interests were
compromised, so Obama in effects says that national security interest of the country is to
have corrupt political system, which is insane.
This argumentation means that even if Russian government has done the hacking, it was a
good deed, there is nothing to sanction Russia for even in such case.
'Fraid both Putin and Trump are a lot smarter than Barry. Putin's move in not retaliating and
inviting US kids to the Kremlin New Year party was an astute judo throw. And Barry is sitting
on his backside wondering how it happened.
Reply
.. Probably Obama's "exceptionalism" made him so clumsy on international affairs stage..
.. just recently.. snubbed by Fidel.. he refused to meet him..
.. humiliated by Raul Castro, he declined to hug president of USA..
.. Duterte described.. hmm.. his provenance..
.. Bibi told him off in most vulgar way.. several times..
.. and now this..
..pathetic..
P.S. You may be sure that the Americans will commit all the stupidities they can think of, plus
some that are beyond imagination." ~Charles de Gaulle.
Obama knew about Russian involvement in July. Look it up. He ignored it because it was seen
as having no effect, and they didn't want the appearance of the government favoring Hillary,
because they thought she was in line for a landslide victory.
After the election, "RUSSIA" has become a fund raising buzz word for Democrats.
The election should have taught our "betters" that people do think for themselves, albeit occasionally.
I've been frustrated enough with Obama since he pardoned Bush and Cheney... now he wants
to sacrifice whatever shreds of reputation the Democratic party has... to be a white knight
for miserable candidate, warmonger, and incompetent Hillary Clinton.
He figured the republicans would love him when he took Bush et al. off the hook and (clumsily)
implemented Romney's health plan. They didn't.
Now he thinks leftists will love him because he's going "all in" on Hillary didn't lose
this all on her own. They won't.
The guy doesn't have a fraction of the insight he credits himself with.
Simple solution, publish the commenter geolocation and ban proxy, clean the comment section
from putinbots. Putin like ASBO's must stop to do more harm against democracy.
Reply Share
Yes, the so-called liberals are losing all over. They blame everyone but themselves. The problem
is that they have been found out. They were not real liberals at all. They had little bits
of liberal policies like "Gay rights" and "bathrooms for Transgenders" and, of course, "Anti-Anti-Semitism
Laws" and a few other bits and pieces with which they constructed a sort of camoflage coat,
but the core of their policies was Corpratism. Prize exhibits: Tony Blair and Barak Obama.
The extreme Left and extreme Right ("Populists") are benefiting by being able to say what
they mean, loud and apparently clear. People are not, on the whole, politically sophisticated
but they do realise that they have been lied to for a very long time and they are fed up. That
is why "Populists are making such a showing in the polls. People don't believe in the centre's
"Liberalism" any more.
You just know these people, like Johnny boy, who are pointing fingers at Russia are doing so
based upon long laid plans to bind up Trump from building a healthy relationship with Russia
which would put an end to terrorism and likely all of these petty little wars that are tearing
the world to pieces. These people want war because division keeps them in power and war makes
them lots of money. I hope that Trump and Putin can work together and build a trust and foundation
as allies in that together we can stamp out terrorism and stabilize the worlds conflicts. Everything
these people do in the next 20 days has a single agenda and that is to cause instability and
roadblocks for Trump and his team. Hope is just around the corner people so let's help usher
it in.
First... let's see some actual evidence/proof. Oh, that's right, none has been offered up.
Second... everyone is upset that the DNC turd was exposed, but no one upset about the existence
of the turd. ?
Obama acting like a petulant child that has to leave the game and go home now, so he's kicking
the game board and forcing everyone else to clean up his mess. Irresponsible.
Hundred times repeated lie will become the truth... that's the US officials policy for decades
now. In 8 years, they did nothing, so they are trying to do "something" in the last minute.
For someone, who's using his own brain is all of this just laughable.
United States are not united I guess. Guess, that Merkel is the next on the list...
Hopefully now this will enable senate and congress republicans to prevent these crazy ideas
of russian appeasement take hold and prusue a hardline against Russia, Hamas, Iran and Cuba.
They'll probably do that. Business as usual. To pursue a hard line against Isis enablers like
Saudi and Qatar, now that would be a surprise.
Reply Share
Obama will be making to many paid speeches to be doing anything of the sort. And frankly
I suspect he be silent, because Trump is soon going to know where all the bodies were buried
under Obama, just like Obama knows where all the bodies are buried from the Bush area.
You are a wishful thinker, if you think Obama is going anything after he leaves office.
The foreign power did the American people a favor when it exposed the corruption within the
Democratic Party; something the establishment media was apparently unable or unwilling to do.
Rather than sanctioning Putin, Americans should be thanking him!
Seems a no brainer, reverse Obama's ridiculous posturing gesture. As if the US doesn't have
a long track record of interfering in the affairs of other countries.
Personally I think the US should do as it wishes but it's extremely hypocritical to act shocked
when the same meddling is returned by others. Obama is acting foolishly as if the final weeks
of his presidency have any genuine traction on future events.
One thing lost in all the hullabaloo about Russian hacks is that the Obama
administration's record on cyber security has been terrible. Off the top of my
head I can think of several compromising cases:
* Anything having to do with HRC's bathroom server, of course
* The Sony hack that Obama said was North Korea, but other experts say was
probably just Trump's 400 lb fat guy on a bed.
* The alleged Chinese hacking of OPM
* And undoubtedly the "CYBER 911!!" of the alleged Russian interference in the
election.
I don't see anyone talking about the fact that cyber infrastructure looks
like it's been hit by birdshot. All the while, Obama's intelligence teams are
mining information on Americans as extralegally as possible.
"Russia tampered with vote tallies to help Donald Trump"
Yeah, that seems like a clear statement, but when you consider that the vast majority of people
do not habitually read closely and interpret things literally, I can see how this would easily
be misinterpreted.
Russia tampered with the election to help Donald Trump. That's a fairly well established fact.
It's not the same as "tampered with vote tallies" but an inattentive poll respondent might assume
the question was about the former. And most people are inattentive.
"Russia tampered with the election to help Donald Trump. That's a fairly well established fact."
You are funny. Especially with your "well established fact" nonsense.
In such cases the only source of well established facts is a court of law or International
observers of the elections. All other agencies have their own interest in distorting the truth.
For example, to get additional funding.
And that list includes President Obama himself, as a player, because he clearly was a Hillary
supporter and as such can not be considered an impartial player and can politically benefit from
shifting the blame for fiasco to Russia.
Also historically, he never was very truthful with American people, was he? As in case of his
"Change we can believe in!" bait and switch trick.
There were several other important foreign players in the US elections: for example KAS and
Israel. Were their actions investigated? Especially in the area of financial support of candidates.
And then FYI there is a documented history of US tampering in Russian Presidential election
of 2011-2012 such as meetings of the US ambassador with the opposition leaders, financing of opposition
via NGO, putting pressure by publishing election pools produced by US financed non-profits, and
so on and so forth. All in the name of democracy, of course. Which cost Ambassador McFaul his
position; NED was kicked out of the country.
As far as I remember nobody went to jail in the USA for those activities. There was no investigation.
So it looks like the USA authorities considered this to be a pretty legal activity. Then why they
complain now?
And then there is the whole rich history of CIA subverting elections in Latin America.
So is not this a case of "the pot calling the kettle black"?
I don't know. But I would avoid your simplistic position. The case is too complex for this.
At least more complex that the narrative the neoliberal MSMs try to present us with. It might
be Russian influence was a factor, but it might be that it was negligible and other factors were
in play. There is also a pre-history and there are other suspects.
You probably need to see a wider context of the event.
Some perspective: For most of human history, power was rooted in
possession
of land. After the
Industrial Revolution , power lay in controlling in the means of production. But today, the main
source of power is control of information.
Having the power to control information (what Steve Sailer calls
The Megaphone ) gives you the ability to determine what issues will be discussed, what
viewpoints are considered legitimate, and who is allowed to participate in polite society. It
ultimately allows you to push an entire code of morality on others. And morality is, ultimately,
a weapon more terrible than can be found in any arsenal [
Weaponized Morality , by Gregory Hood, Radix, October 12, 2016].
The 2016 election was ultimately a battle between the
commanding heights of media (newspapers, networks, and web portals) and what we could call the
guerillas of media (/pol, forums, hackers,
right wing trolls , and independent media outlets like us). The latter lacked power on their
own, but they united behind Donald Trump, a man whose brand was so well-established that the Establishment
couldn't ignore him. It was
Fourth Generation Warfare –this time over information.
And just as guerillas have been frustrating established armies all around the world on real-world
battlefields, so did the online commandos frustrate and eventually overcome the seemingly invincible
Fourth Estate.
But this victory wasn't inevitable. From day one,
the MSM tried to destroy Donald Trump , including his business empire, because of his stated
views on immigration.
Since that failed, they have started turning on his supporters with three tactics.
First , a blatant attempt to pathologize dissent–especially the Alt Right.
Soon after the election, the Leftist Think Progress blog announced that the Alt Right should
only be called "white nationalist" or "white supremacist". [
Think Progress will no longer describe racists as "alt-right" , November 22, 2016]
The AP dutifully echoed this pronouncement days later, warning journalists not to use the term and
instead to stick to pejoratives. [
AP issues guidelines for using the term 'alt-right,' by Brent Griffiths, Politico,
November 28, 2016]
This is a literally
Orwellian attempt to eliminate Crimethink through
linguistic control
. Of course, no such guidelines will apply to non-white Identitarian groups such as the National
Council of La Raza, which will continue to be called an "advocacy" or "progressive grass-roots immigration-reform
organization" [
NCLR head: Obama 'deporter-in-chief, ' by Reid Epstein, Politico, March 4,
2016].
Secondly , a meme has been invented about so-called
"Fake News," which will be used to shut down
dissident media outlets.
Needless to say, most the rationale for this is not just fake, but comically, obviously, wrong.
Thus the Washington Post
reported that VDARE.com (and many other sites) was a "Russian propaganda effort" based on no
evidence at all. We ask: where is our vodka?
Rolling Stone, which
pushed one of the most disgusting hoaxes in
modern journalism at the University
of Virginia, is having
meetings with President
Obama to discuss "fake news." The Guardian
fell for what appears to be a hoax decrying "online hate" precisely because it is impossible
to tell the difference today between the latest virtue signaling craze and satire.
Actual attacks on Trump supporters are not covered, while unsourced, unverified claims of a wave
of "hate crimes," which mostly consists of handwritten notes most likely written by the supposed
"victims" or
incidents so trivial normal people wouldn't even notice , dominate the headlines.
This is a far more insidious form of "fake news" than anything "the Russians" are promoting. And
what about the lie of "
hands up, don't shoot ?"
Another example: supposedly mainstream outlets are comfortable leveling wild charges Steve Bannon
is somehow a "white nationalist." Bannon on the evidence is actually a
civic nationalist who has specifically denounced racism and, if anything, is showing troubling
signs of moving towards the
"DemsRRealRacist"- style talking points which led Conservatism Inc. to disaster. There are absolutely
no statements by Bannon actually calling for, say, a white ethnostate.
Thirdly , the Trump victory is clearly leading to increased attempts at outright
repression.
Or, as VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow
told the NPI conference: "What we are going to see in the next few years is an intensified Reign
Of Terror."
For example, Buzzfeed's latest masterpiece of journalism: the shocking revelation that
reality stars Chip and Joanna Gaines attend a church that disagrees with homosexual marriage [
Chip and Joanna Gaines' Church Is Firmly Against Same-Sex Marriage , by Kate Aurthur,
Buzzfeed, November 29, 2016]. You know–like every Christian church for about 2000 years. The
obvious agenda: to get the show canceled or the Gaines to disavow their own pastor.
This is the goal of most "journalism" today–to get someone fired or to get someone to disavow
someone. The
Southern Poverty Law Center (
$PLC to VDARE.com) makes a
lucrative income from
policing speech . ( Right, a graph of their endowment fund.)And journalists today are no different
than the $PLC. They do not report, they do not provide information, and rather than ensuring freedom
they are the willing tools of repression.
And this repression only goes one way.
If you wouldn't invite
some communist demonstrator into your meeting, why would you invite an MSM journalist? They have
the same beliefs, the same motivations, and increasingly, they rely on the same tactics. Aside from
the occasional throwing of feces (as Richard Spencer learned at NPI), the preferred tactic of "Antifa"
consists of pearl-clutching blog posts.
Since the election, journalists have been paying tribute to their own courage, promising to hold
Trump accountable. But there is no greater enemy to free speech than reporters. Shutting down the
networks and shuttering the newspapers would be a boon to independence of thought, not an obstacle.
For his own sake, to defend his own Administration, Trump has to delegitimize the MSM, just as
he did during the campaign. He should continue to use his Twitter account and speak straight to the
people. He should not
hold press conferences with national MSM and speak only to local reporters before holding rallies.
If Twitter bans him, as Leftists are urging, he should nationalize it as a utility and make it a
free speech zone.[
Twitter has become a utility , by Alan Kohler, The Australian, October 17,
2016]
And Trump's supporters need to act the same way. Stop giving reporters access. Stop pretending
you can play the MSM for your own benefit. Stop acting like these people are anything other than
hostile political activists whose only interest in life is to make yours worse.
Stop giving them what they want.
Your career, family, and entire life may depend on it. And so does the life of the nation.
James Kirkpatrick [
Email him]
is a Beltway veteran and a refugee from Conservatism Inc.
"... "The lockstep zombies for the sleaze and global mayhem of the Clinton Machine and Dem Party gangsters are on the march. These liberals for US Empire are showing their reverence and fanboy love for the CIA and FBI and McCarthyism. ..."
"... They either cheered or shrugged when the Clinton thugs stole the primary from Bernie (with his obsequious assent) or snored when Obama/Clinton staged coups and installed fascists in Honduras and Ukraine but oh how they bellow and shake their fists at the *alleged* hacking by Russia that amounts to providing info on just how sleazy the Democratic Party is. ..."
"... THAT form of fake news is not only acceptable it is to be embraced and taught to our fucking children. If the NYT or WaPo tells us all bad things come from Putin these shock troops for the Democratic Party click their heels and salute. ..."
"... The risk of WWIII is not enough to deter these fucking maniacs from doing all they can to keep their team in power. Meanwhile their leaders want to "work with" Trump and "give him a chance." Who are the fascists in this shit show?? Such a clusterfuck of incoherence. ..."
"... If it's true the "Russians" (who be that by the way?) did what the professional liars in the intelligence agencies say they did it doesn't even amount to a parking violation compared to the billions and billions of dollars spent by the US over the last 70 years rigging and crushing democracy (literally with murder) across the globe. ..."
This post by Leftie on facebook offers glimpse into chasm on the other side.
It's Progs vs Globs. ProGlob is coming apart.
"The lockstep zombies for the sleaze and global mayhem of the Clinton Machine and Dem Party gangsters
are on the march. These liberals for US Empire are showing their reverence and fanboy love for the CIA
and FBI and McCarthyism.
They either cheered or shrugged when the Clinton thugs stole the primary from Bernie (with his obsequious
assent) or snored when Obama/Clinton staged coups and installed fascists in Honduras and Ukraine but
oh how they bellow and shake their fists at the
*alleged*
hacking by Russia that amounts
to providing info on just how sleazy the Democratic Party is.
The "fake news" (it's called free speech you fucking assholes) that the Rooskies pumped into our
helpless and confused brains is a threat to the Republic but "capitalism means freedom and democracy",
WMD's, yellow cake, mobile weapons labs, babies torn from incubators, the international monolithic communist
conspiracy, Gaddafi supplying viagra to his troops, the headchoppers Obama gives arms and sends into
Syria to destroy yet another nation are "moderates", KONY 2012, the filthy Hun is coming to kill us
all in 1917, "Duck and cover!!" Gulf of Tonkin, Ho Chi Min's soldiers are going to spring from their
canoes on the beaches of Malibu to rape your wife and make you wear pajamas, "superpredators" and on
and on etc etc etc
THAT form of fake news is not only acceptable it is to be embraced and taught to our fucking children.
If the NYT or WaPo tells us all bad things come from Putin these shock troops for the Democratic Party
click their heels and salute.
The risk of WWIII is not enough to deter these fucking maniacs from doing all they can to keep their
team in power. Meanwhile their leaders want to "work with" Trump and "give him a chance." Who are the
fascists in this shit show?? Such a clusterfuck of incoherence.
If it's true the "Russians" (who be
that by the way?) did what the professional liars in the intelligence agencies say they did it doesn't
even amount to a parking violation compared to the billions and billions of dollars spent by the US
over the last 70 years rigging and crushing democracy (literally with murder) across the globe.
And
the whole obscene carnival engulfing the nation is of course to be blamed on the racist knuckle-dragging
"basket of deplorables.""
A Wikileaks envoy today claims he personally received Clinton campaign emails in Washington
D.C. after they were leaked by 'disgusted' whisteblowers - and not hacked by Russia.
Craig Murray, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan and a close associate of Wikileaks founder
Julian Assange, told Dailymail.com that he flew to Washington, D.C. for a clandestine hand-off
with one of the email sources in September.
'Neither of [the leaks] came from the Russians,' said Murray in an interview with Dailymail.com
on Tuesday. ' The source had legal access to the information. The documents came from inside leaks,
not hacks.'
His account contradicts directly the version of how thousands of Democratic emails were published
before the election being advanced by U.S. intelligence.
Americans steeped in a culture of 'politics' are again being fooled, this election wasn't about
party or state lines, "Republicans" didn't win over "Democrats" - this election was about a wild
card, a non-politician, non-Establishment candidate winning by a landslide if going by the polls
(Trump was given 5% chance of winning up until the night of election).
When Peńa Nieto won, Sepúlveda began destroying evidence. He drilled holes in flash drives,
hard drives, and cell phones, fried their circuits in a microwave, then broke them to shards with
a hammer. He shredded documents and flushed them down the toilet and erased servers in Russia
and Ukraine rented anonymously with Bitcoins. He was dismantling what he says was a secret history
of one of the dirtiest Latin American campaigns in recent memory.
For eight years, Sepúlveda, now 31, says he traveled the continent rigging major political
campaigns. With a budget of $600,000, the Peńa Nieto job was by far his most complex. He led a
team of hackers that stole campaign strategies, manipulated social media to create false waves
of enthusiasm and derision, and installed spyware in opposition offices, all to help Peńa Nieto,
a right-of-center candidate, eke out a victory. On that July night, he cracked bottle after bottle
of Colón Negra beer in celebration. As usual on election night, he was alone.
Sepúlveda's career began in 2005, and his first jobs were small-mostly defacing campaign websites
and breaking into opponents' donor databases. Within a few years he was assembling teams that
spied, stole, and smeared on behalf of presidential campaigns across Latin America. He wasn't
cheap, but his services were extensive. For $12,000 a month, a customer hired a crew that could
hack smartphones, spoof and clone Web pages, and send mass e-mails and texts. The premium package,
at $20,000 a month, also included a full range of digital interception, attack, decryption, and
defense. The jobs were carefully laundered through layers of middlemen and consultants. Sepúlveda
says many of the candidates he helped might not even have known about his role; he says he met
only a few.
His teams worked on presidential elections in Nicaragua, Panama, Honduras, El Salvador, Colombia,
Mexico, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Venezuela. Campaigns mentioned in this story were contacted
through former and current spokespeople; none but Mexico's PRI and the campaign of Guatemala's
National Advancement Party would comment.
The point here, well there are several points. One, Sepulveda is not the only guy in the world
doing this. The CIA even has a team of social media trolls and the NSA has a department that only
develops robots to do the same thing Sepulveda was doing and better. The age of 'spies' has transformed
into an electronic, digital, online version - much like the internet has transformed life and business
it has also changed the way the intelligence establishment deals with controlling the population.
Oh how the FBI has evolved since the days of Hoffman and Cointelpro!
Many of Sepúlveda's efforts were unsuccessful, but he has enough wins that he might be able
to claim as much influence over the political direction of modern Latin America as anyone in the
21st century. "My job was to do actions of dirty war and psychological operations, black propaganda,
rumors-the whole dark side of politics that nobody knows exists but everyone can see," he says
in Spanish, while sitting at a small plastic table in an outdoor courtyard deep within the heavily
fortified offices of Colombia's attorney general's office. He's serving 10 years in prison for
charges including use of malicious software, conspiracy to commit crime, violation of personal
data, and espionage, related to hacking during Colombia's 2014 presidential election. He has agreed
to tell his full story for the first time, hoping to convince the public that he's rehabilitated-and
gather support for a reduced sentence.
Usually, he says, he was on the payroll of Juan José Rendón, a Miami-based political consultant
who's been called the Karl Rove of Latin America. Rendón denies using Sepúlveda for anything illegal,
and categorically disputes the account Sepúlveda gave Bloomberg Businessweek of their relationship,
but admits knowing him and using him to do website design. "If I talked to him maybe once or twice,
it was in a group session about that, about the Web," he says. "I don't do illegal stuff at all.
There is negative campaigning. They don't like it-OK. But if it's legal, I'm gonna do it. I'm
not a saint, but I'm not a criminal." While Sepúlveda's policy was to destroy all data at the
completion of a job, he left some documents with members of his hacking teams and other trusted
third parties as a secret "insurance policy."
We don't need a degree in cybersecurity to see how this was going on against Trump all throughout
the campaign. Not only did they hire thugs to start riots at Trump rallies and protest, a massive
online campaign was staged against Trump.
Rendón, says Sepúlveda, saw that hackers could be completely integrated into a modern political
operation, running attack ads, researching the opposition, and finding ways to suppress a foe's
turnout. As for Sepúlveda, his insight was to understand that voters trusted what they thought
were spontaneous expressions of real people on social media more than they did experts on television
and in newspapers. He knew that accounts could be faked and social media trends fabricated, all
relatively cheaply. He wrote a software program, now called Social Media Predator, to manage and
direct a virtual army of fake Twitter accounts. The software let him quickly change names, profile
pictures, and biographies to fit any need. Eventually, he discovered, he could manipulate the
public debate as easily as moving pieces on a chessboard-or, as he puts it, "When I realized that
people believe what the Internet says more than reality, I discovered that I had the power to
make people believe almost anything."
Sepúlveda managed thousands of such fake profiles and used the accounts to shape discussion
around topics such as Peńa Nieto's plan to end drug violence, priming the social media pump with
views that real users would mimic. For less nuanced work, he had a larger army of 30,000 Twitter
bots, automatic posters that could create trends. One conversation he started stoked fear that
the more López Obrador rose in the polls, the lower the peso would sink. Sepúlveda knew the currency
issue was a major vulnerability; he'd read it in the candidate's own internal staff memos.
While there's no evidence that Rendon or Sepulveda were involved in the 2016 election, there is
also no evidence that Russian hackers were involved in the 2016 election. There's not even false
evidence. There isn't a hint of it. There isn't a witness, there isn't a document, there's nothing
- it's a conspiracy theory! And a very poor one.
Russian hackers would have had the same or better (probably much better) tools, strategies, and
resources than Sepulveda. But none of this shows up anywhere. If anything, this is an example of
how NOT to hack an election.
Thanks. Right. Hillary's official electronic communications is more correct than Hillary's emails.
(And the "wipe them, you mean like with a rag?" from Hillary, after having been in government
all her adult life and after having presented herself as a modern Secretary of State who knew
all about how government and modern technology worked would have been a funny joke if it hadn't
obviously been intended to cover up enormous crimes.)
Whoever is running the world with all of this fake stuff and all of the monitoring of people and
petty false propganda, they pretty much suck at it. it is as if they are claiming to be running
the world using "training wheels". As a substitute for God they stink! Grade D-!
The tale doesn't have to be a good one for the TV addicted masses to believe it, it only has to
be presented by the only sources these imbeciles are willing to use: their fucking TV sets. Most
people are so deluded by their main source of entertainment and information that they wouldn't
give a shit if incontrovertible evidence that their TV information source was lying was presented
to them.
Most people I know don't want to know anything that can't be spoonfed to them on a TV screen.
"The tale doesn't have to be a good one for the TV addicted masses to believe it..."
Like the tale that the only steel highrise buildings to ever collapse due to fires (turning
into dust at near freefall speed) ocurred on a single day 15 years ago, orchestrated, along with
everything else on that fateful day, by a man in a cave half a world away.
and that after every airport was closed and every single commercial plane was grounded, that man's
entire extended family resident in the u.s., some two dozen individuals, was given fbi protection,
rented cars and chartered planes, and flown out of the country without ever being interviewed,
at all, by any law enforcement branch of the government of the united states which, needless to
say, had absolutely no involvement with the deadliest foreign attack on u.s. soil since the war
of 1812, killing nearly 600 more than died at pearl harbor.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/bin-laden-family-evacuated/
this was known at the time it happened. what took longer to discover was that the source of
the foreign attack was not a cave in afghanistan or even saudi arabia or the muslim world generally.
all along it was our trusted ally, brave little israel.
Anti-semitism enables one to ignore the elephant in the room, namely the Saudis who have been
spending billions promoting Wahhabism and terrorism, to blame a tiny little country for everything,
without ever having to bother about evidence. Seek help.
"... "Fake news was a term specifically about people who purposely fabricated stories for clicks and revenue," said David Mikkelson, the founder of Snopes, the myth-busting website. "Now it includes bad reporting, slanted journalism and outright propaganda. And I think we're doing a disservice to lump all those things together." ..."
"... "What I think is so unsettling about the fake news cries now is that their audience has already sort of bought into this idea that journalism has no credibility or legitimacy," ..."
"... The market in these divided times is undeniably ripe. "We now live in this fragmented media world where you can block people you disagree with. You can only be exposed to stories that make you feel good about what you want to believe," Mr. Ziegler, the radio host, said. "Unfortunately, the truth is unpopular a lot. And a good fairy tale beats a harsh truth every time." ..."
.... As reporters were walking out of a Trump rally this month in Orlando, Fla., a man heckled them with shouts of "Fake news!"
Until now, that term had been widely understood to refer to fabricated news accounts that are meant to spread virally online.
But conservative cable and radio personalities, top Republicans and even Mr. Trump himself, incredulous about suggestions that fake
stories may have helped swing the election, have appropriated the term and turned it against any news they see as hostile to their
agenda.
In defining "fake news" so broadly and seeking to dilute its meaning, they are capitalizing on the declining credibility of all
purveyors of information, one product of the country's increasing political polarization. And conservatives, seeing an opening to
undermine the mainstream media, a longtime foe, are more than happy to dig the hole deeper.
"Over the years, we've effectively brainwashed the core of our audience to distrust anything that they disagree with. And now
it's gone too far," said John Ziegler, a conservative radio host, who has been critical of what he sees as excessive partisanship
by pundits. "Because the gatekeepers have lost all credibility in the minds of consumers, I don't see how you reverse it."
Journalists who work to separate fact from fiction see a dangerous conflation of stories that turn out to be wrong because of
a legitimate misunderstanding with those whose clear intention is to deceive. A report, shared more than a million times on social
media, that the pope had endorsed Mr. Trump was undeniably false. But was it "fake news" to report on data models that showed Hillary
Clinton with overwhelming odds of winning the presidency? Are opinion articles fake if they cherry-pick facts to draw disputable
conclusions?
"Fake news was a term specifically about people who purposely fabricated stories for clicks and revenue," said David Mikkelson,
the founder of Snopes, the myth-busting website. "Now it includes bad reporting, slanted journalism and outright propaganda. And
I think we're doing a disservice to lump all those things together."
The right's labeling of "fake news" evokes one of the most successful efforts by conservatives to reorient how Americans think
about news media objectivity: the move by Fox News to brand its conservative-slanted coverage as "fair and balanced." Traditionally,
mainstream media outlets had thought of their own approach in those terms, viewing their coverage as strictly down the middle. Republicans
often found that laughable. As with Fox's ubiquitous promotion of its slogan, conservatives' appropriation of the "fake news" label
is an effort to further erode the mainstream media's claim to be a reliable and accurate source.
"What I think is so unsettling about the fake news cries now is that their audience has already sort of bought into this idea
that journalism has no credibility or legitimacy," said Angelo Carusone, the president of Media Matters, a liberal group that
polices the news media for bias. "Therefore, by applying that term to credible outlets, it becomes much more believable."
.... ... ...
Mr. Trump has used the term to deny news reports, as he did on Twitter recently after various outlets said he would stay on as
the executive producer of "The New Celebrity Apprentice" after taking office in January. "Ridiculous & untrue - FAKE NEWS!" he wrote.
(He will be credited as executive producer, a spokesman for the show's creator, Mark Burnett, has said. But it is unclear what work,
if any, he will do on the show.)
Many conservatives are pushing back at the outrage over fake news because they believe that liberals, unwilling to accept Mr.
Trump's victory, are attributing his triumph to nefarious external factors.
"The left refuses to admit that the fundamental problem isn't the Russians or Jim Comey or 'fake news' or the Electoral College,"
said Laura Ingraham, the author and radio host. "'Fake news' is just another fake excuse for their failed agenda."
Others see a larger effort to slander the basic journalistic function of fact-checking. Nonpartisan websites like Snopes and Factcheck.org
have found themselves maligned when they have disproved stories that had been flattering to conservatives.
When Snopes wrote about a State Farm insurance agent in Louisiana who had posted a sign outside his office that likened taxpayers
who voted for President Obama to chickens supporting Colonel Sanders, Mr. Mikkelson, the site's founder, was smeared as a partisan
Democrat who had never bothered to reach out to the agent for comment. Neither is true.
"They're trying to float anything they can find out there to discredit fact-checking," he said.
There are already efforts by highly partisan conservatives to claim that their fact-checking efforts are the same as those of
independent outlets like Snopes, which employ research teams to dig into seemingly dubious claims.
Sean Hannity, the Fox News host, has aired "fact-checking" segments on his program. Michelle Malkin, the conservative columnist,
has a web program, "Michelle Malkin Investigates," in which she conducts her own investigative reporting.
The market in these divided times is undeniably ripe. "We now live in this fragmented media world where you can block people
you disagree with. You can only be exposed to stories that make you feel good about what you want to believe," Mr. Ziegler, the radio
host, said. "Unfortunately, the truth is unpopular a lot. And a good fairy tale beats a harsh truth every time."
"... "It's common for people to put the blame on the non-voters here. They shirked their duty: to vote for the status quo, even if it's slowly killing them. This complaint is usually unpleasantly whiny. ..."
"... The demand political systems make of us – 'of constituting ourselves as subjects, of liberating ourselves, expressing ourselves at whatever cost, of voting, producing, deciding' – are in their own way an exercise of power. In these conditions, resistance takes the form of the refusal to do so: 'the renunciation of the subject position and of meaning – precisely the practices of the masses.' ..."
"... Mr. Trump won nearly one in four voters who wanted the next president to follow more ..."
I'll leave any metaphors as exercises for readers, but note the
careful advance work: The crowd is fenced off (and there's what looks
like additional cordage, in orange, to make the fence even more
effective, Clinton has a box to stand on, the edge of the box is marked
with colored tape so she doesn't trip and fall, the campaign logos are
placed behind her head, and her security is present but not in the shot.
That's a rp
"The Clinton team was so confident in its analytical models
that it opted not to conduct tracking polls in a number of states
during the last month of the campaign. As a consequence,
deteriorating support in states such as Michigan and Wisconsin
fell below the radar screen, slippage that that traditional
tracking polls would have certainly caught" [
National
Journal
]. "According to Kantar Media/CMAG data, the Clinton
campaign did not go on the air with television ads in Wisconsin
until the weeks of Oct. 25 and Nov. 1, spending in the end just $2.6
million. Super PACs backing Clinton didn't air ads in Wisconsin
until the last week of the campaign. In Michigan, aside from a tiny
$16,000 buy by the campaign and a party committee the week of Oct. 25,
the Clinton campaign and its allied groups didn't conduct a
concerted advertising effort until a week before the election. In
fact, the Clinton campaign spent more money on television
advertising in Arizona, Georgia, and the Omaha, Nebraska markets
than in Michigan and Wisconsin combined. It was Michigan and
Wisconsin, along with Pennsylvania (the Clinton campaign and allied
groups did spend $42 million on television in the Keystone State),
that effectively cost Democrats the presidency." Apparently, a Putin
agent was in charge of Clinton's analytical models. It's the only
explanation!
"Why Clinton Lost: An exercise in victimology" [
Global
Guerillas
]. "here's a list of 'popular' reasons for why Clinton
unexpectedly lost the election to Trump according to the establishment.
Notice how all of them blame the 'other.' This is the language of
betrayal. The type of language that feeds civil war." I agree, and will
have more to say about that.
"It's common for people to put the blame on the non-voters here.
They shirked their duty: to vote for the status quo, even if it's slowly
killing them. This complaint is usually unpleasantly whiny.
The fact that these people feel entitled to make it points to exactly
why they keep on losing" [Sam Kriss,
Guardian
].
"In The Implosion of Meaning in the Media, the philosopher Jean
Baudrillard describes this kind of voter alienation as a tactic.
The
demand political systems make of us – 'of constituting ourselves as
subjects, of liberating ourselves, expressing ourselves at whatever cost,
of voting, producing, deciding' – are in their own way an exercise of
power. In these conditions,
resistance
takes the form of the
refusal to do so: 'the renunciation of the subject position and of
meaning – precisely the practices of the masses.'
In the US, mainstream liberals are announcing their "Resistance" to a
2017 that's smashing into the end of December with all the dumb force of
a Trump presidency – but their ideas mostly consist of giving money to
the Democrats. Whatever form resistance does take, it won't be that." So,
one might say that the
interesting
act of resistance has already
taken place. Of course, if the Democrats cared about alienated voters,
expanding the franchise would be a core party function. Imagine what the
billion dollars Clinton set on fire and threw in the air while losing to
Trump could have done, if put to use serving that purpose!
Realignment and Legitimacy
... ... ...
"Donald J. Trump won the white working-class vote over Hillary Clinton
by a larger margin than any major-party nominee since World War II.
Instead of this considerable achievement inspiring introspection, figures
from the heights of journalism, entertainment, literature and the Clinton
campaign continue to suggest that Mr. Trump won the presidency by
appealing to the bigotry of his supporters.
As Bill Clinton recently said, the one thing Mr. Trump knows 'is how
to get angry white men to vote for him.'
This stereotyping of Trump voters is not only illiberal, it falsely
presumes Mr. Trump won
because
of his worst comments about women
and minorities rather than despite them" [David Paul Kuhn,
New York Times
].
"But traits are not motives and don't necessarily decide votes.
Consider that four in 10 liberal Democrats, the largest share of any
group, said in 2011 that they would hold a Mormon candidate's faith
against him or her. It would be silly to argue that, therefore, liberals
voted for Mr. Obama because Mitt Romney was Mormon. Yet the Trump
coalition continues to be branded as white backlash. The stereotyping
forgets that many Trump supporters held a progressive outlook.
Mr. Trump won nearly one in four voters who wanted the next
president to follow
more
liberal policies."
I wonder what facts you have to label Trump's team "globalist shills".
Robert W. Merry in his National Interest article disagrees with you
http://nationalinterest.org/feature/trump-vs-hillary-nationalism-vs-globalism-2016-16041
=== start of the quote ===
Globalists captured much of American society long ago by capturing the bulk of the nation's elite
institutions -- the media, academia, big corporations, big finance, Hollywood, think tanks, NGOs,
charitable foundations. So powerful are these institutions -- in themselves and, even more so,
collectively -- that the elites running them thought that their political victories were complete
and final. That's why we have witnessed in recent years a quantum expansion of social and political
arrogance on the part of these high-flyers.
Then along comes Donald Trump and upends the whole thing. Just about every major issue that this
super-rich political neophyte has thrown at the elites turns out to be anti-globalist and pro-nationalist.
And that is the single most significant factor in his unprecedented and totally unanticipated
rise. Consider some examples:
Immigration: Nationalists believe that any true nation must have clearly delineated and protected
borders, otherwise it isn't really a nation. They also believe that their nation's cultural heritage
is sacred and needs to be protected, whereas mass immigration from far-flung lands could undermine
the national commitment to that heritage.
Globalists don't care about borders. They believe the nation-state is obsolete, a relic of
the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which codified the recognition of co-existing nation states.
Globalists reject Westphalia in favor of an integrated world with information, money, goods
and people traversing the globe at accelerating speeds without much regard to traditional concepts
of nationhood or borders.
=== end of the quote ===
I wonder how "globalist shills" mantra correlates with the following Trump's statements:
=== start of quote ===
"Globalization has made the financial elite who donate to politicians very, very wealthy ... but
it has left millions of our workers with nothing but poverty and heartache," Trump told supporters
during a prepared speech targeting free trade in a nearly-shuttered former steel town in Pennsylvania.
In a speech devoted to what he called "How To Make America Wealthy Again," Trump offered a
series of familiar plans designed to deal with what he called [Obama] "failed trade policies"
- including rejection of the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) with Pacific Rim nations
and re-negotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with Canada and Mexico,
withdrawing from it if necessary.
The presumptive Republican presidential nominee also said he would pursue bilateral trade agreements
rather than multi-national deals like TPP and NAFTA.
In addition to appointing better trade negotiators and stepping up punishment of countries
that violate trade rules, Trump's plans would also target one specific economic competitor: China.
He vowed to label China a currency manipulator, bring it before the World Trade Organization and
consider slapping tariffs on Chinese imports coming into the U.S.
"... We have a dollar democracy that protects the economic interest of the elite class while more than willing to let working class families lose their homes and jobs on the back end of wide scale mortgage fraud. Then the fraud was perpetuated in the mortgage default process just to add insult to injury. ..."
"... One thing that Trump certainly got wrong that no one ever points out is that there is a lot more murder than rape crossing the Mexican-American border in the drug cartel operations ..."
"... The technocrats lied about how globalization would be great for everyone. People's actual experience in their lives has been different. ..."
"... Centrist Democrat partisans with their increasinly ineffectual defenses of the establishment say it's only about racism and xenophobia, but it's more than that. ..."
Assaults on democracy are working because our current political elites have no idea how to
defend it.
[There are certainly good points to this article, but the basic assumption that our electorally
representative form of republican government is the ideal incarnation of the democratic value
set is obviously incorrect. We have a dollar democracy that protects the economic interest of
the elite class while more than willing to let working class families lose their homes and jobs
on the back end of wide scale mortgage fraud. Then the fraud was perpetuated in the mortgage default
process just to add insult to injury.
One thing that Trump certainly got wrong that no one ever points out is that there is a lot
more murder than rape crossing the Mexican-American border in the drug cartel operations:<) ]
The author fails to mention the Sanders campaign. An elderly socialist Jew from Brooklyn was able
to win 23 primaries and caucuses and approximately 43% of pledged delegates to Clinton's 55%.
This despite a nasty, hostile campaign against him and his supporters by the Clinton campaign
and corporate media.
There's also Jeremy Corbyn in the UK. Podemos, Syriza, etc.
Italy's 5 Star movement demonstrates a hostility to technocrats as well.
The author doesn't really focus on how the technocrats have failed.
The technocrats lied about how globalization would be great for everyone. People's actual experience
in their lives has been different.
Trump scapegoated immigrants and trade, as did Brexit, but what he really did was channel hostility
and hatred at the elites and technocrats running the country.
Centrist Democrat partisans with their increasinly ineffectual defenses of the establishment
say it's only about racism and xenophobia, but it's more than that.
RC AKA Darryl, Ron said in reply to Peter K.... , -1
"Globalization has made the financial elite who donate to politicians very, very wealthy ... but
it has left millions of our workers with nothing but poverty and heartache," Trump told supporters
during a prepared speech targeting free trade in a nearly-shuttered former steel town in Pennsylvania.
In a speech devoted to what he called "How To Make America Wealthy Again," Trump offered a series
of familiar plans designed to deal with what he called "failed trade policies" - including rejection
of the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) with Pacific Rim nations and re-negotiation of the
North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with Canada and Mexico, withdrawing from it if necessary.
The presumptive Republican presidential nominee also said he would pursue bilateral trade agreements
rather than multi-national deals like TPP and NAFTA.
In addition to appointing better trade negotiators and stepping up punishment of countries that violate
trade rules, Trump's plans would also target one specific economic competitor: China. He vowed to
label China a currency manipulator, bring it before the World Trade Organization and consider slapping
tariffs on Chinese imports coming into the U.S.
This Russian hacking thing is being discussed entirely out of realistic context.
Cyber security
is a serious risk management operation that firms and governments spend outrageous sums of money
on because hacking attempts, especially from sources in China and Russia, occur in vast numbers
against every remotely desirable target corporate or government each and every day. At my former
employer, the State of Virginia, the data center repelled over two million hacking attempts from
sources in China each day. Northrop Grumman, the infrastructure management outsourcer for the
State of Virginia's IT infrastructure, has had no known intrusions into any Commonwealth of Virginia
servers that had been migrated to their standard security infrastructure thus far since the inception
of their contract in July 2006. That is almost the one good thing that I have to say about NG.
Some state servers, notably the Virginia Department of Health Professions, not under protection
of the NG standard network security were hacked and had private information such as client SSNs
stolen. Retail store servers are hacked almost routinely, but large banks and similarly well protected
corporations are not. Security costs and it costs a lot.
Even working in a data center with an excellent intrusion protection program as part of that
program I had to take an annual "securing the human" computer based training class. Despite all
of the technical precautions we were retrained each year to among other things NEVER put anything
in an E-Mail that we did not want to be available for everyone to read; i.e., to never assume
privacy is protected in an E-Mail. Embarrassing E-Mails need a source. We should assume that there
will always be a hacker to take advantage of our mistakes.
The reality is that all the major world powers (and some minor ones), including us, do this routinely
and always have. While it is entirely appropriate to be outraged that it may have materially determined
the election (which I think is impossible to know, though it did have some impact), we should
not be shocked or surprised by this.
"...I would suggest attacks on Putin's personal business holdings all over the world..."
[My guess is that has been being done a long time ago considering the direction of US/Russian
foreign relations over NATO expansion, the Ukraine, and Syria.
Long before TCP/IP the best way to prevent dirty secrets from getting out was not to have dirty
secrets. It still works.
The jabbering heads will not have much effect on the political opinions of ordinary citizens
because 40 million or more US adults had their credit information compromised by the Target hackers
three years ago. Target had been saving credit card numbers instead of deleting them as soon as
they obtained authorizations for transfers, so that the 40 million were certainly exposed while
more than twice that were probably exposed. Establishment politicians having their embarrassing
E-mails hacked is more like good fun family entertainment than something to get all riled up about.]
Voting machines are public and for Federal elections then tampering with them is elevated to a
Federal crime. Political parties are private. The Federal government did not protect Target or
Northrop Grumman's managed infrastructure for the Commonwealth of Virginia although either one
can take forensic information to the FBI that will obtain warrants for prosecution. Foreign criminal
operations go beyond the immediate domestic reach of the FBI. Not even Interpol interdicts foreign
leaders unless they are guilty of genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes.
The Federal government can do what it will as there are not hard guidelines for such clandestine
operations and responses. Moreover, there are none to realistically enforce against them, which
inevitably leads to war given sufficient cycles of escalation. Certainly our own government has
done worse (political assassinations and supporting coups with money and guns) with impunity merely
because of its size, reach, and power.
BTW, "the burglar that just ransacked your house" can be arrested and prosecuted by a established
regulated legal system with absolutely zero concerns of escalating into a nuclear war, trade war,
or any other global hostility. So, not the same thing at all. Odds are good though that the burglar
will get away without any of that because when he does finally get caught it will be an accident
and probably only after dozen if not hundreds of B&E's.
There is a line. The US has crossed that line, but always in less developed countries that
had no recourse against us. Putin knows where the line is with the US. He will dance around it
and lean over it, but not cross it. We have him outgunned and he knows it. Putin did not tamper
with an election, a government function. Putin tampered with private data exposing incriminating
information against a political party, which is a private entity rather than government entity.
Whatever we do should probably stay within the rule of law as it gets messy fast once outside
those boundaries.
As far as burglars go I live in a particular working class zip code that has very few burglaries.
It is a bad risk/reward deal unless you are just out to steal guns and then you better make sure
that no one is home. Most people with children still living at home also have a gun safe. Most
people have dogs.
There are plenty burglaries in a lower income zip code nearby and lots more in higher income
zip codes further away, the former being targets of opportunity with less security and possible
drug stashes, which has a faster turnover than fencing big screen TV's. High income neighborhoods
are natural targets with jewelry, cash, credit cards, and high end electronics, but far better
security systems. I don't know much about their actual crime stats because they are on the opposite
side of the City of Richmond VA from me, but I used to know a couple of burglars when I lived
in the inner city. They liked the upscale homes near the University of Richmond on River Road.
"They kept telling us the e-mail didn't reveal anything and now they say the e-mail determined
the election"
And those two statement are not in conflict unless you are a brain dead Fox bot. Big nothing-burgers
like Bhengazi or trivial emails can easily be blown up and affect a few hundred thousand voters.
When the heck are you going to grow up and get past your 5 stages of Sanders grief?
I know - and there used to be some signs of a functional brain. Now it is all "they are all the
same" ism and Hillary derangement syndrome on steroids. Someone who cares need to do an intervention
before it becomes he get gobbled up by "ilsm" ism.
ABC video interview by Martha Raddatz of Donna Brazile 2:43
Adding the following FACTS, not opinion, to the Russian Hacking debate at the DNC
Russian hacks of the DNC began at least as early as April, the FBI informed the DNC in May
of the hacks, NO ONE in the FedGovt offered to HELP the DNC at anytime (allowed it to continue),
and Russia's Putin DID NOT stop after President Obama told Putin in September to "Cut it Out",
despite Obama's belief otherwise
"DNC Chair Says Russian Hackers Attacked The Committee Through Election Day"
'That goes against Obama's statement that the attacks ended after he spoke to Putin in September'
by Dave Jamieson Labor Reporter...The Huffington Post...12/18/2016...10:59 am ET
"The chair of the Democratic National Committee said Sunday that the DNC was under constant
cyber attack by Russian hackers right through the election in November. Her claim contradicts
President Barack Obama's statement Friday that the attacks ended in September after he issued
a personal warning to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
"No, they did not stop," Donna Brazile told Martha Raddatz on ABC's "This Week." "They came
after us absolutely every day until the end of the election. They tried to hack into our system
repeatedly. We put up the very best cyber security but they constantly [attacked]."
Brazile said the DNC was outgunned in its efforts to fend off the hacks, and suggested the
committee received insufficient protection from U.S. intelligence agencies. The CIA and FBI have
reportedly concluded that Russians carried out the attacks in an effort to help Donald Trump defeat
Hillary Clinton.
"I think the Obama administration ― the FBI, the various other federal agencies ― they informed
us, they told us what was happening. We knew as of May," Brazile said. "But in terms of helping
us to fight, we were fighting a foreign adversary in the cyberspace. The Democratic National Committee,
we were not a match. And yet we fought constantly."
In a surprising analogy, Brazile compared the FBI's help to the DNC to that of the Geek Squad,
the tech service provided at retailer Best Buy ― which is to say well-meaning, but limited.
"They reached out ― it's like going to Best Buy," Brazile said. "You get the Geek Squad, and
they're great people, by the way. They reached out to our IT vendors. But they reached us, meaning
senior Democratic officials, by then it was, you know, the Russians had been involved for a long
time."..."
This new perspective and set of facts is more than distressing it details a clear pattern of Executive
Branch incompetence, malfeasance, and ineptitude (perhaps worse if you are conspiratorially inclined)
im1dc -> im1dc... , -1
The information above puts in bold relief President Obama's denial of an Electoral College briefing
on the Russian Hacks
There is now no reason not to brief the Electors to the extent and degree of Putin's help for
demagogue Donald
Fred C. Dobbs -> Peter K....
December 26, 2016 at 07:15 AM neopopulism: A cultural and political movement, mainly in Latin
American countries, distinct from twentieth-century populism in radically combining classically opposed
left-wing and right-wing attitudes and using electronic media as a means of dissemination. (Wiktionary)
(wired.co.uk)
270 Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday November 27, 2016 @03:34AM from the help-me-hive-mind
dept. Upworthy co-founder Eli Pariser is leading a group of online volunteers hunting for ways to
respond to the spread of fake news. An anonymous reader quotes Wired UK: Inside a Google Doc,
volunteers
are gathering ideas and approaches to get a grip on the untruthful news stories. It is part analysis,
part brainstorming, with those involved being encouraged to read widely around the topic before contributing.
"This is a massive endeavour but well worth it," they say...
At present, the group is coming up with
a list of potential solutions and approaches . Possible methods the group is looking at include:
more human editors, fingerprinting viral stories then training algorithms on confirmed fakes, domain
checking, the blockchain, a reliability algorithm, sentiment analysis, a Wikipedia for news sources,
and more.
The article also suggests this effort may one day spawn fake news-fighting tech startups.
"... The Democratic Party as a Party (Sanders was an outlier) has nothing to do with "fair and equal
play for all". This is a party of soft neoliberals and it adheres to Washington consensus no less then
Republicans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Consensus ..."
"... If you read the key postulates it is clear that that they essentially behaved like an occupier
in this country. In this sense "Occupy Wall street" movement should actually be called "Liberation from
Wall Street occupation" movement. ..."
"... Bill Clinton realized that he can betray working class with impunity as "they have nowhere
to go" and will vote for Democrat anyway. In this sense Bill Clinton is a godfather of the right wing
nationalism in the USA. He sowed the "Teeth's of Dragon" and now we have, what we have. ..."
You guys should wake up and smell what country you live in. Here is a good place to start.
"Campaigning for president in 1980, Ronald Reagan told stories of Cadillac-driving "welfare
queens" and "strapping young bucks" buying T-bone steaks with food stamps. In trumpeting these
tales of welfare run amok, Reagan never needed to mention race, because he was blowing a dog
whistle: sending a message about racial minorities inaudible on one level, but clearly heard
on another. In doing so, he tapped into a long political tradition that started with George
Wallace and Richard Nixon, and is more relevant than ever in the age of the Tea Party and the
first black president.
In Dog Whistle Politics, Ian Haney L?pez offers a sweeping account of how politicians and
plutocrats deploy veiled racial appeals to persuade white voters to support policies that favor
the extremely rich yet threaten their own interests. Dog whistle appeals generate middle-class
enthusiasm for political candidates who promise to crack down on crime, curb undocumented immigration,
and protect the heartland against Islamic infiltration, but ultimately vote to slash taxes
for the rich, give corporations regulatory control over industry and financial markets, and
aggressively curtail social services. White voters, convinced by powerful interests that minorities
are their true enemies, fail to see the connection between the political agendas they support
and the surging wealth inequality that takes an increasing toll on their lives. The tactic
continues at full force, with the Republican Party using racial provocations to drum up enthusiasm
for weakening unions and public pensions, defunding public schools, and opposing health care
reform.
Rejecting any simple story of malevolent and obvious racism, Haney L?pez links as never
before the two central themes that dominate American politics today: the decline of the middle
class and the Republican Party's increasing reliance on white voters. Dog Whistle Politics
will generate a lively and much-needed debate about how racial politics has destabilized the
American middle class -- white and nonwhite members alike."
Reading the above posts I am reminded that in November there was ONE Election with TWO Results:
Electoral Vote for Donald Trump by the margin of 3 formerly Democratic Voting states Michigan,
Ohio, and Pennsylvania
Popular Vote for Hillary Clinton by over 2.8 Million
The Democratic Party and its Candidates OBVIOUSLY need to get more votes in the Electoral States
that they lost in 2016, not change what they stand for, the principles of fair and equal play
for all.
And, in the 3 States that turned the Electoral Vote in Trump's favor and against Hillary, all
that is needed are 125,000 or more votes, probably fewer, and the DEMS win the Electoral vote
big too.
It is not any more complex than that.
So how does the Democratic Party get more votes in those States?
PANDER to their voters by delivering on KISS, not talking about it.
That is create living wage jobs and not taking them away as the Republican Party of 'Free Trade'
and the Clinton Democratic Party 'Free Trade' Elites did.
Understand this: It is not the responsibility of the USA, or in its best interests, to create
jobs in other nations (Mexico, Japan, China, Canada, Israel, etc.) that do not create jobs in
the USA equivalently, especially if the gain is offset by costly overseas confrontations and involvements
that would not otherwise exist.
"The Democratic Party and its Candidates OBVIOUSLY need to get more votes in the Electoral
States that they lost in 2016, not change what they stand for, the principles of fair and equal
play for all. "
The Democratic Party as a Party (Sanders was an outlier) has nothing to do with "fair and
equal play for all". This is a party of soft neoliberals and it adheres to Washington consensus
no less then Republicans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Consensus
If you read the key postulates it is clear that that they essentially behaved like an occupier
in this country. In this sense "Occupy Wall street" movement should actually be called "Liberation
from Wall Street occupation" movement.
Bill Clinton realized that he can betray working class with impunity as "they have nowhere
to go" and will vote for Democrat anyway. In this sense Bill Clinton is a godfather of the right
wing nationalism in the USA. He sowed the "Teeth's of Dragon" and now we have, what we have.
"... "Donald Trump tapped into the anger of a declining middle class that is sick and tired of establishment economics, establishment politics and the establishment media. People are tired of working longer hours for lower wages, of seeing decent paying jobs go to China and other low-wage countries, of billionaires not paying any federal income taxes and of not being able to afford a college education for their kids – all while the very rich become much richer. ..."
"... "To the degree that Mr. Trump is serious about pursuing policies that improve the lives of working families in this country, I and other progressives are prepared to work with him. To the degree that he pursues racist, sexist, xenophobic and anti-environment policies, we will vigorously oppose him." ..."
This is inspiring, but I hope they realise that opposing Trump is just
one side of a two-front battle. Trump needs to be opposed when (as seems
very likely) he will start to drive a very right wing pro-billionaire set of
policies. But its increasingly obvious that there is an equally difficult
battle to be fought against the 'centrists' in the Dems and elsewhere. If
all the focus is on Trump, then there is the danger they just become the
useful idiots of the Dem mainstream.
I would go so far to say that their greatest opponent and biggest
danger is not Trump and the Republicans at all. It is the Democratic
Party and pretty much every significant office holding Democrat and their
staffs.
Revolution starts at home. Fighting with Republicans will not
accomplish much when the fifth columnists from the Democratic Party are
going to sabotage every effort they make which shows promise of having an
effect. They need to show their power by hamstringing targeted Democrats
and thus herding the rest into line through fear. You do what we say and
how we say it or we replace you. They have to own the left. No more
liberal's in name only. You are against us or you are with us.
I agree - they must be opposed in the primaries. That's tough to
do, and will take real dedication and money. The deplorable Debbie
Wasserman Schultz won against Tim Canova in the 2016 primary, and the
equally deplorable Chuck Schumer won reelection in 2016, so he won't
be facing a primary opponent until the 2022 election season. Pelosi,
of course is vulnerable every two years.
Please need to be willing to do more than just post comments on
blogs. And lets not have any more of those comments bewailing the
impossibility of overthrowing the status quo - it's difficult, but
it's not impossible. (This paragraph isn't directed specifically to
you, JohnnyGL or PlutoniumKun. I'm just concerned that some other
commenters seem to try to prevent people from taking an active role in
politics, and that is just plain wrong.)
uh why fight against a party with NO federal power? (state power in a
few states so maybe relevant there)
Even if you get unanimous Dem opposition how much does it matter? Ok
the Rs don't quite have a super-majority yet I guess but it is Rs who
will be passing legislation. Fighting Dems is about like fighting WWII
after it's all over. They have mouthpieces and foundations it is true,
but no power.
Better message is to be pro a set of policies:
1. Medicare for all
2. SS are a real retirement system
3. Job Guarantee
4. College for all – student debt
5. Taxes as social and business policy
6. No permanent standing military
Irritated by the identity politics of the main article. That and
would they have opened an office if Hillary had won? If not, I fear
they don't understand and are doomed to repeat the same mistakes of
their elders.
Sanders is always on point moving toward the goal with minimal time
spent talking about moving away from what Is opposed. Here's a sometime
humorous case in point–
A candid conversation: Bernie Sanders and Sara Silverman
Waaaaay too many bullet points already, and I see that others are
adding more. Not that I'm saying any of those are unimportant, but when
you have a dozen goals you actually have none at all. My ideal
progressive movement would hammer relentlessly on 3 major initiatives:
– Medicare for all
– $15 minimum wage
– Post office banking
All 3 provide tangible benefits to the majority of Americans, with the
added bonus of poking a sharp stick in the eye of the oligarchs.
I definitely agree about keeping the list of priorities short, but
I feel that these two areas are foundational and systemically
corrupting, and little else is likely to be accomplished without major
reforms of both
– MIC/"Defense" spending (mostly spent on offense, not defending
the borders of the USA from invasion)
– Campaign Finance – big money in politics
9. Lifelong job education and skills-building for all unemployed and
under-employed, paid for directly from corporate taxes.
10. Universal two-year commitment to the military or a full-time volunteer
public service program.
11. Rewilding and reforesting polluted and abandoned land.
12. Anti-trust! More trust-busting needed!
13. Agricultural reform to ban feedlots, fertilizers and pesticides and
reorganize farms to restore and rebuild soil. And yes, this will create
jobs.
"9. Lifelong job education and skills-building for all unemployed and
under-employed, paid for directly from corporate taxes."
people don't know what a nightmare such scenarios are, ok it sucks if
you are underemployed and have no way to retrain because finances, but it
also sucks big league if you have to spend your entire life working full
time AND pursuing more and more formal education, forever until you die.
Is any of our utopias going to care about human beings being able to BE
human beings? We are so so much more than just useful labor machines
forever aquiring labor market useful skills.
Ok course a basic income guarantee or a labor market tilted for labor
not capital (including government job creation sure – and sure there's
other things that can tilt it for labor – lower Social Security age,
unionization etc.) would nullify this objection as the competition for
jobs would lessen enough perhaps.
"10. Universal two-year commitment to the military or a full-time
volunteer public service program."
well this is even more self-evidently nightmarish but it hardly needs
unpacking. 2 years of becoming hired killers for the imperialist murder
machine. Yea I know you didn't specify military as mandatory, I'm just
saying what is being encouraged.
jrs: Agreed. Points 9 and 10 are non-starters. They will not lessen
class warfare. Only a jobs policy and a commitment to full employment
will. And this idea that U.S. citizens have to be drafted into some
regimented public-service program isn't helpful.
But let's talk about reopening the Civilian Conservation Corps, as
in point 11. Now that is a genuinely good idea. And people would
gladly join–without feeling regimented.
There was an interesting debate around the water cooler links on
Festivus. I would like to recap and extend it here because I want to know
more. First about how you, Lambert, see the take over of a single state
Democratic party office breaking open a path to reform the party from
within. I would like to hear what scenarios you feel are possible.
Walden pond wrote
"The elite control the D party (which is nothing but a criminal organization
at this point). They will allow outsiders to have dog-catcher, but get
uppity and run for a state position and that person will be out in an
instant. The Ds are factually/legally a private club and they can select
their membership and candidates in any way they choose or get a court to
back them on every petty legal change they make to block outsiders. They
change rules (legal contract) retroactively, they violate their own rules
repeatedly and someone thinks they are going to get any farther than a few
school board positions or city council is going to fail.
Taking over the D party is similar to proposing infiltrating gangs (fully
backed by the legal system) with 13 year olds to 'save the neighborhood'."
I whole heartedly agree. I think it's important that people understand
that the party is not just a "machine" waiting for someone new to guide it.
It is not a set of empty offices and poster printing machines with helpful
local people waiting for guidance. At the top, it is much more like an
exclusive country club whose membership passes down through wealthy families
who think they know what's best for the nation.
Anyhow, if you have a strategy on how to break it, I would like to
support that discussion. I would like to hear more.
I'm glad you carried this discussion over to today. People hear have
heard my sad tales of woe when I decided in 2004 to stop being
inattentive and to actually try "to change the party from within" that
talk show hosts like Thom Hartmann and "The Nation" gang call for every 4
years. Yes, I discovered what Walden Pond wrote; that there is an "elite"
control of the state parties. They are almost hereditary positions. Yes,
they will get excited by a newbie like me who was articulate, worked in
Hollywood, married to a rancher for conservative creeds. But then I
started to challenge their positions by advocating for single payer;
stronger labor stances that they all paId lip service to but didn't
really seem to care about. So no longer was I allowed to talk to the
press at the DNC Convention. As I recall in 2006 or 2007 they changed a
rule to make it harder to challenge Jon Tester in a primary.
Affairs like "Campaign for America's Future" conventions were always in
D.C. And during the 2nd one I went to, I confirmed by observations that
they were just big job fairs for people wanting jobs in the next
administration or becoming lobbyists. That was actually what the
convention in 2004 was too that I attended as a delegate. "Agriculture
Salutes Tom Harking"; brought to you not by The Grange but by Monsanto
and Carroll. Lavish party with handsome young men shucking tons of
oysters. Ick.
I went in naive as I suspect many well meaning millennials will do now to
this "house". But boy did I start to wake up and finally by 2009 after
the failed single payer health care movement, I quit this dead donkey.
There's a lot of contentious debate on whether to fight in the
Democrat Party or build a 3rd one. The answer is both, always and
constantly.
1) Start the fight within the Party, as seen in MI. What happened
there is important to expose and embarrass the local party officials. I
consider the incident an encouraging sign and hope there are more like it
around the country (not happy with the guy getting assaulted, of course,
but if it shows 'they are who we thought they were', then that's progress
of a sort).
2) If you can fight within the party and the party leadership at the
state level understands the need to change and gets on board (getting on
board as defined by fighting for specific policies, organizing and party
building, and going against the wishes of big donors), then work with
them.
3) if the big donors and dinosaur party leaders don't get on board,
then then need to be A) removed, if possible. Or, if not possible, B)
they should be isolated. If Schumer and Pelosi can't be primary-ed out of
existence (a-la Eric Cantor) then they should be stripped of leadership
positions and isolated. Primary all of their allies in congress. Pelosi
still got around 2/3 of the vote. Let's get it below 1/2. We're not
starting from scratch, there's a base of opposition to work with.
4) Part of the contention between points 2) and 3) is protests like
those seen recently protesting at Schumer's office by BLM and Occupy
folks. Again, make them come to us on policy. Life should get
increasingly uncomfortable for Party leaders and members that don't play
ball. It should be clear that their current attitudes and policies are
untenable and they need to get with the new program. Hassle them in their
offices, at their public events. Anti-fracking protestors who harassed
Cuomo over several years showed what to do. I think one of his kids joked
that when they got lost on the way to an event, they could always find
where they were going because the anti-fracking protestors were there
waiting for them.
People like Pelosi and Schumer will cave to public pressure, they've
done it in the past. Pelosi said no to medicare changes when Obama wanted
to put entitlement reform on the table. These people are different than
ideologues who will push their agenda regardless of public opinion.
They're snakes, but they'll play ball under pressure.
5) Now in the case where we can't with the fight within the party, go
outside. Socialist Alternative, Working Families and other 3rd parties
that are built up at the local level can threaten and do real damage.
Does anyone think Seattle gets a $15/hr min. wage without Sawant and
Socialist Alternative? Working Families Party demonstrated exactly what
NOT to do during NY Governor election. If Cuomo won't come to us and meet
our demands, bring him down. Suck it up, deal with a Republican for a few
years, if necessary. While the Republican is in charge, pressure them,
too. Don't think about the election right now .that's short termism.
Let's think 2, 3, 4 elections out. If you're not winning now, clear out
the deadwood to win later.
6) Now, to face up to the 'lesser evil' arguments regarding 5). It's
over, there's no more 'lesser evilism'. It's dead. Hillary Clinton and
the elite Dems killed it. They put it all on display for all to see. They
were willing to crush the left (again), squash voting rights through a
variety of means, and risk Trump or another whacky 'Pied Piper' candidate
in order to get their anointed candidate put in charge. THAT should tell
you EXACTLY who we're dealing with here. They were perfectly willing to
risk Trump to win, so that means if a 3rd party can get 3%-5% in a close
election and play a spoiler role, then that 3rd party should DO it. Every
time. Again, keep doing it until the Democrats adopt the platform of a
3rd party (which, presumably includes fight for $15, medicare for all, no
wars, etc). Again, until the Dems come to us on policy, they will be
opposed.
But, but Nader brought us Bush who brought us Iraq War! You cannot
take risks like that! Must vote lesser evil!!! Oh really? Dems voted for
Patriot Act, Dems voted for AUMF over and over again. Dems voted to keep
funding the war, too. When Dems don't win the Presidency they want to sit
back and wait for Repubs to do awful stuff so that Dems will be back in
charge as seen in 2006-8. Pelosi and Reid did NOTHING to deserve a win,
they just waited it out until people voted for change again. They want to
do this again. We can't let them. Make them do their job. Make them act
in opposition. Make them earn their next win, otherwise we'll get the
same group and the same policies that have just been discredited.
7) From the article, I like Ahmed's strategy/tactics, but the concept
of attacking Trump the person, seems flawed. Remember, policy is what
matters!
Nixon passed an amendment that created the EPA. That doesn't happen if
you oppose Nixon for who he is. Also, wikipedia reveals that the Clean
Water Act got passed in spite of Nixon's veto! If Trump wants to move in
the right direction, he should be praised for doing so. If he doesn't, go
around him!
Trump is a guy that just slapped the Repub establishment silly and
clearly is running at least partially out of vanity more than he wants to
collect fat checks when he leaves office (like the Clintons, and probably
Obama soon enough). There's value in this, by itself, and there's value
on policy grounds, too.
Okay, I'm done. I hope anyone who bothers to read found this
enjoyable. Happy for comments. Also, to be clear, I've got no experience
in organizing or any kind of playbook to carry this plan out. :) So, feel
free to mock my credentials, because they don't exist!
Sigh. We millennials might be smart about policy and pragmatic, but if
this is our moonshot, we don't know jack about how to organize a successful
social movement. Protesting "Trump" is stupid. Trump is not a policy. He is
a person. Is our goal to make him feel bad about himself? And he did win the
election. So his administration is, in fact, "legitimate" in any meaningful
sense of the word.
I'd have slightly different lists, but I entirely agree that a pro-policy
platform is an essential starting point. That said, protests basically
always fail, and more often then not IMO, strengthen the opposition. When
they succeed, or even make headway like NODAPL, they always share a common
set of features.
1) One very specific policy. Today, if I were in charge, I'd choose
Federally funded Medicare for all. Never mind details for protesting
purposes.
2) A simple, clear message that appeals to values that most people in a
body politic can agree on "Health Care is a Civil Right!"
3) A symbol that presents a clear, binary, moral choice. Sorry people, it
makes me feel icky too, but this is where we go hunting for a dying grandma
or kid with cancer who can't get medical care and make him/her our mascot
(ideally, in a purely strategic realm, such person would refuse any care
until it was guaranteed to all, then die at a decisive moment, thus becoming
a martyr).
4) The ability to bring different folks together to agree on ONE thing.
Organized bitch sessions about Obamacare in Trump country might work here,
but we'd have to throw shit at the wall and see what stuck. I know for a
fact that most Trump supporters, if pressed, will say that a family should
not have to choose between impoverishment and treating mom's cancer. But
protesting "Trump" is protesting them too, with the main goal of feeling
like you are a better person because you know that gender is socially
constructed or whatever (as if there is something magical in who you are
that is the reason you got to go to a private liberal arts college, and you
totally never would have been racist no matter what life circumstances you
were born into).
It's not that I'm a single issue person, it's just protesting lots of
things at once just makes a lot of noise, and a bunch of people trying to
work together with competing agendas (lack of shared vision, in corporate
speak), makes all human organizations dysfunctional. Basically, I support
many issues, but think mixing them all together is not a good recipe for
success.
Didn't read the article. Seems like a misdirected effort to me. You don't
win voters by being against something. You win them by being for something.
I am getting tired of the "Ain't It Awful" game. Give me a vision to be for.
There is something called target fixation. When you concentrate on what
you want to avoid, you end up going right toward it. Concentrate on where
you want to go rather than spend all your time thinking about where you
don't want to go.
This can be demonstrated by asking someone to follow your instructions
and then issuing a number of imperative sentences:
Don't think of blue
Don't think about your left earlobe
Don't think about what Crazyman will do with this
Don't think of Trump
Etc
One has to think of those things in order to make sense of the words.
Moving away from can be a powerful motivator but only toward will get you
there. Sorry, clarifying the obvious again.
This effort is not about winning voters but about blocking really bad
policy changes that will hurt millions of people. Organizing for an
election campaign and organizing for issue-based activism are not the
same. If Barb Mikulski forty-odd years ago had just gone around the city
talking about her vision of good communities and good transportation
policy, a lot of Baltimore neighborhoods would have been wiped out as the
city was cut apart by an ill-placed interstate. She stopped it by
organizing a fight against it. More recently, Destiny Watford, still in
high school at the time, was the prime mover in the successful fight
against an incinerator in her Curtis Bay neighborhood in south Baltimore.
There is a time and a place for everything. There are at least two
other organizations focusing on electoral politics. This one has a
different purpose.
Yes to be opposed to Trump is because they think a bunch of bad
policies will come from his administration and they are likely not
wrong. It doesn't need to be about Trump the person at all, though for
some deluded people it may be. Now they could broaden it to opposing
Paul Ryans congress etc. since they are hardly better but if any
legistlaton is actually going to be passed a Republican congress and
Trump will be working together.
A single issue focus, say it was Medicare for all, even if it was
sucessful, would have let all the other issues a Trump administration
will represent slide. Ok so if Trump passes tax cuts say that further
enrich the plutocrats, an ever more unequal society might even destroy
Medicare for all (the rich will just buy their way out). If Trump
passes even more obviously anti-environmental legistlation, the fact
Medicare for all was achieved would be a goal of it's own but would
not change this. Maybe there are people enough for all movements, I
don't know.
It'll never work & for good reason. It's a form of ideation contrary to
gnostic principles and therefore to the highest spiritual values on this
plane of existence.
Sad to see hopeful inspired people get lost in that maze of misery. Trust
your perceptions in the silence of your mind without looking to anybody else
for affirmation. People are people. That's what everybody who can figure
things out figures out when they grow up.
Grow up & Merry Christmas. LOL
I'm wishing Trump well & am somewhat hopeful that - through the odd
feedback loops in complex systems - the provocations of his originality will
shape things in a direction even progressives will find appealing. Maybe
I'll be wrong, I admit. But I'm usually not wrong. LOL. (Although I am
sometimes, no lie.)
Firecracker puppies professional trainer who isists she knows about how
people of color feel..hmmm a bunch of photos of ms nadine and her fellow
associates something about dc that tells me the demographics are not the
same as iowa does not look as she thinks there are any people of color who
can train on what "she" calls "non violence" and her "famous" black female
puppet to represent and protest against the military because the military is
so black and female seems a bit tone deaf
Same old same old chameleons bending to the new hot button funding to
keep the lights on
"As the international director of the committee to make noise and get
nothing done, we strive to "
And ms bangladeshi her nov 27 tweet that anyone right of the democrats is
a fascist does this child have an idea what that word means, or is it
something she picked up at one of the "people" conventions she attended or
spoke at
Not looking to be hyper cynical on this of all days but seems moumita has
spent her entire adult life posing with her megaphone and for someone who is
so "out there" mekantz find much about her except her self proclaimed
relevance and for a person who claims this large network somewhat smallish
set of followers on her chyrping account
The Washington police will now have to use a search warrant or a
battering ram unlike Zuccotti park where night sticks and pepper spray were
used. I don't see a problem getting those. Especially after agents have
infiltrated. Well at least it is a start which I hope snowballs!
enter the sans coullottes! I am thrilled and will try to get in contact
with them. depend upon it, the American people will turn to those who
demonstrate the best ability to push back against Trump. Which is why Bernie
has been doing that since the election.
No, I disagree. Bernie does not push back against Trump. No identity
politics, no focus on personalities. Bernie pushes back against
wrong-headed policies. Bernie wants policies that benefit the majority.
Let's pray our new president does some good that most of us do not
expect. I hope he is more unpredictable than that. I may be wrong but I
can hope.
Sounds like the Alternet crowd is up to its sheepdogging tactics again.
Let's corral young energy and co-opt it for the Democrats. Co-opting is what
I call "Skunking" because it sure stinks up the joint.
I'm with the majority here in finding this sad that these "organizers"
have decided to go all negative. They are "going to hold him [Trump]
accountable and delegitimize literally everything he is doing and not let
him succeed." Well, how has that worked out so far.
New thinking and new solutions ae called for, not the same old feel good
"protests" and voter drives that professional organizers love to do. If they
had done any real introspection they would have come up with ways of forming
new coalitions; and also realize the need to keep Schumer and Pelosi as
accountable as Trump. But these are still party operatives in younger
sheep's clothing. Many are poli sci majors who want to be in politics in
Washington as a vocation. See, they are the wise "behind the scenes" people
that will guide the "activists" . Ugh. Same old; Same old story.
And this smells of the same DLC Clinton gang since they are calling Trump's
victory and presidency illegitimate. Again, they don't want to delve into
why she lost. They wants jobs in D.C. And spend their energy "resisting"
rather than coming up with anything remotely interesting. This is not
Occupy. And I doubt they will embrace young Anarchists.
Wonderful shakeout by Cohn: Trump won by
trading places with
Obama
. O appealed to less educated whites as their protector
against the Wall Street candidate (47% time) Romney. (Crackpot) Trump
appealed to them with same promise versus Wall Street candidate (true
enough) Hill.
Upshot: Dems only have to get busy rebuilding labor union density at the
state by progressive state level (or not so progressive; but be seen trying
hard). Repubs will have no where to hide: once and for all political
checkmate.
We are only asking state legislatures to make possible joining a union if
you want to - without running an impassable gauntlet - no complicated policy
issues at all.
Totally unpromising that they start with the calamitous premise of the
whole Sanders campaign: "a campaign where Bernie specifically said, 'Do not
attack the other person." Sanders knew he could run a campaign that would
destroy the Clinton, a proven loser on the merits, and thereby make it
possible to defeat any of the GOP's dumpster of deplorables, especially the
Trumpe-l'oeil. But that would involve a political break with the whole
record of the Obama administration in both domestic and foreign policy. So
instead Sanders wound up saying the falsest single thing anyone said in the
whole campaign–"nobody cares about those damn e-mails."
Youth may wish to have their bragging rights for their old age, but Trump
has proven that power lies with the voters, who will be driven away to the
likes of Reagan by this posturing.
Ahmed has not learned all the lessons of the 1960s.
We-The-Ppl rejected Gold Sacks's "shitty deal" Hillary, foisted on us by
the Dems whose elites "assassinated" the best candidate since JFK; Repubs
rejected "fool me again" Jeb in the Primary. Nasty Trump was put there to
shoo-in Hill, but it backfired. Democracy? all gone. The Wild West is back.
We need both "away from" and "toward" bullet points. The "away
from" will naturally target Trump's onerous policies and will generate
lots of energy. The "toward" bullet points will also "target" the
"fake news" neoliberals because their support will prove to be tepid
faint praise and lots of how it can't be done. Energy wise it will be
more of a slog. They will also covertly seek to undermine progressive
change. They will be called out on their crap.
Why didn't they set up this "permanent base" when Sanders voted for the
700 billion dollar F35 or when Obama claimed the legal right to indefinitely
detain or kill anyone without judicial oversight?
"You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image,
when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do."
I assume all of those who have so arrogantly dismissed the efforts of
these young people are all, therefore, engaged in alternative activities
that support their respective opinions of how to effect the change that is
our only salvation from neo-feudalism. Otherwise, I say put up or shut up.
Because I'm getting really sick of all the armchair quarterbacking, which
to me is no different from the way the DNC elites treat anyone who isn't a
member of their club. If people who object to the goals and/or methods of
the District 13 House group have useful suggestions to make, why haven't
they engaged in working to bring those suggestions to fruition. It's also
precisely the kind of ivory-tower critique that has brought us to this pass,
so do keep in mind that when pointing out the sins of others, one has three
other fingers pointing in the opposite direction.
Natural skeptic/cynic at this point I go back to to Bernie's first
statement after the election:
"Donald Trump tapped into the anger of a declining middle class that
is sick and tired of establishment economics, establishment politics and the
establishment media. People are tired of working longer hours for lower
wages, of seeing decent paying jobs go to China and other low-wage
countries, of billionaires not paying any federal income taxes and of not
being able to afford a college education for their kids – all while the very
rich become much richer.
"To the degree that Mr. Trump is serious about pursuing policies that
improve the lives of working families in this country, I and other
progressives are prepared to work with him. To the degree that he pursues
racist, sexist, xenophobic and anti-environment policies, we will vigorously
oppose him."
Now taken in that light, do we need a generic "anti-Trump" resistance
house to "stick out like a sore thumb"?
Or do we need something that speaks to the deeper issues around which
non-squillionaire people can unite?
I concur with those who posted above on sticking to the issues. If you
stick to the issues, the face of the opposition (from within and without)
doesn't matter. It's about getting people to realize that agents of the
establishment on BOTH sides (Dem & Repub) of all various
identarian
flavors have betrayed us all.
Now granted, there's plenty of swamp left undrained to warrant being all
up the new administration's grill like freckles. But please, let's get the
focus where it should be – on what's being done and undone. Focusing on
"Trump" is a non-starter.
Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah and FestivusForTheRestOfUs to everyone!
(rollingstone.com)
335
Posted by EditorDavid
on Sunday December 04, 2016 @12:39PM
from the
ghosts-of-Joseph-McCarthy
dept.
MyFirstNameIsPaul
was one
of several readers who spotted this disturbing instance of fake news about fake
news. An anonymous reader writes:
Last week the Washington Post described
"independent researchers" who'd identified "more than 200 websites as
routine peddlers of Russian propaganda
" that they estimated were viewed
more than 200 million times on Facebook. But the researchers insisted on
remaining anonymous "to avoid being targeted by Russia's legions of skilled
hackers," and when criticized on Twitter,
responded
"Awww, wook at all the angwy Putinists, trying to change the
subject -- they're so vewwy angwy!!"
The group "seems to have been in existence for just a few months,"
writes Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi
, calling the Post's article an
"astonishingly lazy report". (Chris Hedges, who once worked on a Pulitzer
Prize-winning team at the New York Times, even found his site
Truthdig
on the group's dubious list of over 200 "
sites
that reliably echo Russian propaganda
," along with other long-standing
sites like
Zero
Hedge
,
Naked
Capitalism
, and the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.) "By
overplaying the influence of Russia's disinformation campaign, the report also
plays directly into the hands of the Russian propagandists
that it hopes to
combat," complains Adrian Chen, who in 2015 documented real Russian propaganda
efforts which he traced to "a building in St. Petersburg where
hundreds
of young Russians worked to churn out propaganda
."
The Post's article was picked up by other major news outlets (
including
USA Today
), and included an ominous warning that "The
sophistication of the Russian tactics may complicate efforts by Facebook and
Google to crack down on 'fake news'."
"... Another thing: it will be clear how serious they take the allegations of Russian hacking, by how they address the problem of auditing electronic voting machines. ..."
"... If the 2018 elections aren't all with voter verified paper ballots, accompanied by random auditing and auditing all close elections, we know the accusations of Russian hacking were blatant lies. ..."
Another thing: it will be clear how serious they take the allegations of Russian hacking,
by how they address the problem of auditing electronic voting machines.
If the 2018 elections aren't all with voter verified paper ballots, accompanied by random auditing
and auditing all close elections, we know the accusations of Russian hacking were blatant lies.
"... The use of the term, however, rather naďvely implies that it is possible for a government agency to not be politicized. A non -political government agency, it is assumed, acts without regard to how its actions and claims affect its political standing among powerful interests in Washington. Such an agency has never existed. ..."
"... Indeed, when a government agency relies on taxpayer funding, Congressional lawmaking, and White House politics to sustain itself, it is absurd to expect that agency to somehow remain not "politicized." That is, it's a logical impossibility to think it possible to set up a government agency that relies on government policymakers to sustain it, and then think the agency in question will not attempt to influence or curry favor with those policymakers. ..."
"... Does the organization depend on taxpayer funding for a substantial amount of its budget? ..."
"... Does the organization engage in what would be illegal activities were it not for protective government legislation? ..."
Anonymous leakers at the CIA continue to make claims about Russia and the 2016 election. In response to demands to provide evidence,
the CIA has declined to offer any, refusing to meet with Congressional intelligence committees, and refusing to issue any documents
offering evidence. Instead, the CIA, communicating via leaks, simply says the equivalent of "trust us."
Not troubled by the lack of evidence, many in the media and in the Democratic party have been repeating unsubstantiated CIA claims
as fact.
Of course, as
I've noted before , the history of CIA intelligence is largely a history of missing the forest for the trees. Sometimes, the
failures have been spectacular.
One of the questions that immediately arises in the media in situations like these, however, is "
has the CIA been politicized ?"
When used in this way, the term "politicized" means that the CIA is involved in helping or hurting specific political factions
(e,g., specific ideological groups, pressure groups, or presidential administrations) in order to strengthen the CIA's financial
or political standing.
All Government Agencies Are Politicized
The use of the term, however, rather
naďvely implies that it is possible for a government agency to not be politicized. A non -political government agency, it is
assumed, acts without regard to how its actions and claims affect its political standing among powerful interests in Washington.
Such an agency has never existed.
Indeed, when a government agency relies on taxpayer funding, Congressional lawmaking, and White House politics to sustain
itself, it is absurd to expect that agency to somehow remain not "politicized." That is, it's a logical impossibility to think it
possible to set up a government agency that relies on government policymakers to sustain it, and then think the agency in question
will not attempt to influence or curry favor with those policymakers.
This idea might seem plausible to school children in junior-high-school civics classes, but not to anyone who lives in the real
world.
In fact, if we wish to ascertain whether or not an institution or organization is "politicized" we can simply ask ourselves a
few questions:
Does the organization depend on a legal monopoly to accomplish its mission? That is, does the organization benefit from a
government prohibition on other organizations - especially private-sector ones - doing the same thing?
Does the organization depend on taxpayer funding for a substantial amount of its budget?
Was the organization created by government legislation?
Are senior officials appointed by government policymakers (i.e., the President)?
Does the organization engage in what would be illegal activities were it not for protective government legislation?
If the answer to any of these questions is "yes" then you are probably dealing with a politicized organization. If the answer
to all of these questions is "yes" - as is the case with the CIA - then you're definitely dealing with a very politicized organization.
(Other "non-political" organizations that fall well within this criteria as well include so-called "private" organizations such as
the Federal Reserve System and Fannie Mae.)
So, it has always been foolish to ask ourselves if the CIA is "politicized" since the answer is obviously "yes" for anyone who
is paying attention.
Nevertheless, the myth that the CIA and agencies like it can be non-political continues to endure, although in many cases, the
charge has produced numerous helpful historical analysis of just how politicized the CIA has been in practice.
Recent Narratives on CIA Politicization
Stories of CIA politicization take at least two forms: One type consists of anti-CIA writers attempting to illustrate how the
CIA acts to manipulate political actors to achieve its own political ends. The other type consists of pro-CIA writers attempting
to cast the CIA as an innocent victim of manipulation by senior Washington officials.
Of course, it doesn't matter whether the provenance of CIA politicking comes from within the agency or outside it. In both cases,
the fact remains that the Agency is a tool for political actors to deceive, manipulate, and attack political enemies.
With CIA leaks apparently attempting to call the integrity of the 2016 election into question, the CIA is once again being accused
of politicization. Consequently, articles in the
Washington
Times , the
Daily Caller , and
The Intercept all question the CIA's motivation and present numerous examples of the Agency's history of deception.
The current controversy is hardly the first time the Agency has been accused of being political, and during the build up to the
Iraq invasion in 2003, for example, the CIA worked with the Bush Administration to essentially manufacture "intelligence."
In his book Failure of Intelligence , Melvin Allan Goodman writes:
Three years after the invasion of Iraq, a senior CIA analyst, Paul Pillar, documented the efforts of the Bush administration
to politicize the intelligence of the CIA on Iraqi WMD and so-called links between Iraq and al Qaeda. Pillar accused the Bush
administration of using policy to drive intelligence production, which was the same argument offered by the chief of British intelligence
in the Downing Street memorandum prior to the war, and aggressively using intelligence to win public support for the decision
to go to war....Pillar does not explain why no senior CIA official protested, let alone resigned in the wake of the president's
misuse of intelligence on Iraq's so-called efforts to obtain uranium ore in Africa. Pillar falsely claimed "for the most part,
the intelligence community's own substantive judgments do not appear to have been compromised," when it was clear that the CIA
wa wrong on every conclusion and had to politicize the intelligence to be so egregiously wrong."
Since then, CIA officials have attempted to rehabilitate the agency by claiming the agency was the hapless victim of the Administration.
But, as Goodman notes, we heard no protests from the Agency when such protests would have actually mattered, and the fact is the
Agency was easily used for political ends. Whether or not some agents wanted to participate in assisting the Bush administration
with trumping up evidence against Iraq remains irrelevant. The fact remains the CIA did it.
Moreover, according to documents compiled by John Prados
at the George Washington University , "The U.S. intelligence community buckled sooner in 2002 than previously reported" and that
"Under the circumstances, it is difficult to avoid the impression that the CIA and other intelligence agencies defended themselves
against the dangers of attack from the Bush administration through a process of self-censorship. That is the very essence of politicization
in intelligence."
In other words, to protect its own budgets and privileges, the CIA reacted quickly to shape its intelligence to meet the political
goals of others.
Journalist Robert Parry has also
attempted to go the CIA-as-victim
route in his own writings. In an article written before the Iraq War debacle, Parry looks at how the Agency was used by both
Reagan and Clinton, and claims that what is arguably of the CIA's biggest analytical errors - repeatedly overstating the economic
strength of the Soviet Union - was the result of pressure applied to the Agency by the Reagan administration. (Parry may be mistaken
here, as the CIA
was
wrong about the Soviet economy long before the Reagan Administration .)
While attempting to defend the CIA, however, Parry is merely providing a list of the many ways in which the CIA serves to manufacture
false information that are useful for political officials.
In this essay for the Center for
International Policy, Goodman further lists many examples of politicization and concludes "Throughout the CIA's 60-year history,
there have been many efforts to slant analytical conclusions, skew estimates, and repress evidence that challenged a particular policy
or point of view. As a result, the agency must recognize the impact of politicization and introduce barriers to protect analysts
from political pressures. Unfortunately, the CIA has largely ignored the problem."
It is difficult to ascertain whether past intelligence failures were due to pressure form the administration or whether they originated
from within the Agency itself. Nevertheless, the intelligence failures are numerous, including:
The CIA was wrong about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
The fact that politicization occurs might help explain some of these failures, but simply claiming "politicization" doesn't erase
the legacy of failure, and it hardly serves as an argument in favor of allowing the CIA to continue to
command huge budgets and essentially
function unsupervised. Regardless of fanciful claims of non-political professionalism, it is undeniable that, as an agency of the
US government, the CIA is a political institution.
The only type of organization that is not politicized is a private-sector organization under a relatively laissez-faire regime.
Heavily regulated private industries and all government agencies are politicized by nature because they depend heavily on active
assistance from political actors to sustain themselves.
It should be assumed that politicized organizations seek to influence policymakers, and thus all the actions and claims of these
organization should be treated with skepticism and a recognition that these organizations benefit from further taxation and expanded
government powers inflicted on ordinary taxpayers and other productive members of society outside the privileged circles of Washington,
DC.
Perimetr -> Chupacabra-322 •Dec 23, 2016 11:34 AM
Is the CIA politicized?
...Is the pope catholic?
How many more presidents does the CIA have to kill to answer your question?
Oldwood -> DownWithYogaPants •Dec 23, 2016 11:26 AM
How could the CIA NOT be politicized? They collect "intelligence" and use it to influence policy makers without ANY accountability
and no real proof. The CIA operates on CONJECTURE that is completely subjective to bias and agenda. Is that ANYTHING BUT political?
TeaClipper's picture -> TeaClipper •Dec 23, 2016 11:24 AM
The CIA was not wrong about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, it lied about them. That is a very big distinction.
Old Poor Richard •Dec 23, 2016 12:13 PM
The question is whether the CIA is puppeteer and not the puppet.
The Snowden report, jam packed with provably false scurrilous accusations, demonstrates that not only is the US intelligence
community entirely lacking in credibility, but that they believe themselves so powerful that they can indefinitely get away with
baldfaced lies.
The thing is, the deep state can only keep up the charade when they completely control the narrative, the way China does. Hence
the attacks on the first amendment that are accelerating as fast as the attacks on the second amendment. Majority of Americans
don't believe the Russian hacking hoax and it make the CIA increasingly hysterical.
DarthVaderMentor •Dec 23, 2016 12:33 PM
The CIA has been politicized. In fact, all the way down to the COS level, and in concert with the State Department. Brennan and
Moran are nothing but Clinton surrogates.
In one embassy in a country where IEDs keep blowing up, there were millions of taxpayer dollars spent and continue to be spent
in "safe spaces" and "comfort food and liquor" inside an embassy (taking away space from the US Marine Giuards for it) to let
"Democrat snowflakes" in senior embassy and CIA positions recover from the Trump elections.
The real reaon for the loss of the Phillipines as an ally may eventually come out that a gay senior embassy official made a
pass at the President of the country. Just like it happened with the gay ambassador in the Dominican Republic.
That Libral You Hate •Dec 23, 2016 12:41 PM
I would say the simple answer to the question asked in the headline of this article is "yes" but it is important to actually understand
the nuance of the langer answer.
The critical nuance is that: politics didn't conquor the CIA, but rather the CIA injected itself into politics. I.e. the CIA
aren't political stooges, but act political because they have injected political stooges into politics and they have to act political
to protect them to protect their interests. Thus while the answer is "yes" the question is phrased wrong as: "Has the CIA Been
Politicized," the appropriate question is "Has politics been co-opted by the CIA"
insanelysane •Dec 23, 2016 12:50 PM
The first post is spot on except the CIA was in Southeast Asia stirring stuff up to get us into a war. War is big business.
The entire reason for Vietnam was "If Vietnam falls the commies will be marching down Main Street USA afterwards."
Well we fucking lost Vietnam and the commies still aren't marching down Main Street and yet the assessment is still being peddled
by the Corporation.
Kennedy was killed because, even though he was fucking totally drugged up, he still saw Vietnam for what it was.
The Corporation gave Johnson and offer he couldn't refuse, take the keys to the kingdom, just keep "fighting" in Vietnam. I
say fighting because we were just fucking around there. No one in charge wanted to risk winning the war.
And here we are today, 23rd, December, 2016, "fighting" in the Middle East and the Corporation not willing to risk winning
the war. Just need to keep it hot enough for the weapons and ammunition to be used in a nice steady pace to keep business going.
Fox Business News discusses a potential investigation involving CIA Director John Brennan over whether
he leaked information about the Russian hacking investigation to the media
John Brennan takes his cues directly from Barack Obama, which means the entire CIA, Russian hack
investigation, was initiated and conducted under Obama's direct order.
The Russian hack, media spin, has been and remains a political play. National security has very
little to do with it.
"... Democratic party under Bill Clinton became yet another neoliberal party (soft neoliberals) and betrayed both organized labour and middle class in favour of financial oligarchy. ..."
"... The cynical calculation was that "they have nowhere to go" and will vote for Democrats anyway. And that was true up to and including election of "change we can believe in" guy. After this attempt of yet another Clinton-style "bait and switch" trick failed. ..."
"... Now it is clear that far right picked up large part of those votes. So in a way Bill Clinton is the godfather of the US far right renaissances. The same is true for Hillary: her "kick the can down the road" stance made victory of Trump possible (although it surprised me; I expected that neoliberals were still strong enough to push their candidate down the US people throat) ..."
"... Under "democrat" Obama the USA pursued imperial policy of creating global neoliberal empire. The foreign policy remained essentially unchanged. Neocons were partially replaced with "liberal interventionists" which is the same staff in a different bottle. This policy costs the US tremendous amount of money and it is probable that the US is going the way British empire went -- overextending itself. ..."
"... Regional currency blocks are now a reality and arrangements bypass the usage of US dollar if international trade are common. They are now in place between several large countries such as Russia and China and absolutely nothing can reverse this trend. So dollar became virtualized -- a kind of "conversion gauge" but without profits for real conversion national currency to dollars for major TBTF banks. ..."
This Washington Post article on Poland - where a right-wing, anti-intellectual, nativist party
now rules, and has garnered a lot of public support - is chilling for those of us who worry that
Trump_vs_deep_state may really be the end of the road for US democracy. The supporters of Law and Justice
clearly looked a lot like Trump's white working class enthusiasts; so are we headed down the same
path?
(In Poland, a window on what happens when
populists come to power http://wpo.st/aHJO2
Washington Post - Anthony Faiola - December 18)
Well, there's an important difference - a bit of American exceptionalism, if you like. Europe's
populist parties are actually populist; they pursue policies that really do help workers, as long
as those workers are the right color and ethnicity. As someone put it, they're selling a herrenvolk
welfare state. Law and Justice has raised minimum wages and reduced the retirement age; France's
National Front advocates the same things.
Trump, however, is different. He said lots of things on the campaign trail, but his personnel
choices indicate that in practice he's going to be a standard hard-line economic-right Republican.
His Congressional allies are revving up to dismantle Obamacare, privatize Medicare, and raise
the retirement age. His pick for Labor Secretary is a fast-food tycoon
who loathes minimum wage hikes. And his pick for top economic advisor is the king of trickle-down.
So in what sense is Trump a populist? Basically, he plays one on TV - he claims to stand for
the common man, disparages elites, trashes political correctness; but it's all for show. When
it comes to substance, he's pro-elite all the way.
It's infuriating and dismaying that he managed to get away with this in the election. But that
was all big talk. What happens when reality begins to hit? Repealing Obamacare will inflict huge
harm on precisely the people who were most enthusiastic Trump supporters - people who somehow
believed that their benefits would be left intact. What happens when they realize their mistake?
I wish I were confident in a coming moment of truth. I'm not. Given history, what we can count
on is a massive effort to spin the coming working-class devastation as somehow being the fault
of liberals, and for all I know it might work. (Think of how Britain's Tories managed to shift
blame for austerity onto Labour's mythical fiscal irresponsibility.) But there is certainly an
opportunity for Democrats coming.
And the indicated political strategy is clear: make Trump and company own all the hardship
they're about to inflict. No cooperation in devising an Obamacare replacement; no votes for Medicare
privatization and increasing the retirement age. No bipartisan cover for the end of the TV illusion
and the coming of plain old, ugly reality.
Democratic party under Bill Clinton became yet another neoliberal party (soft neoliberals)
and betrayed both organized labour and middle class in favour of financial oligarchy.
The cynical calculation was that "they have nowhere to go" and will vote for Democrats
anyway. And that was true up to and including election of "change we can believe in" guy. After
this attempt of yet another Clinton-style "bait and switch" trick failed.
Now it is clear that far right picked up large part of those votes. So in a way Bill Clinton
is the godfather of the US far right renaissances. The same is true for Hillary: her "kick the
can down the road" stance made victory of Trump possible (although it surprised me; I expected
that neoliberals were still strong enough to push their candidate down the US people throat)
Point 2:
Under "democrat" Obama the USA pursued imperial policy of creating global neoliberal empire.
The foreign policy remained essentially unchanged. Neocons were partially replaced with "liberal
interventionists" which is the same staff in a different bottle. This policy costs the US tremendous
amount of money and it is probable that the US is going the way British empire went -- overextending
itself.
Regional currency blocks are now a reality and arrangements bypass the usage of US dollar
if international trade are common. They are now in place between several large countries such
as Russia and China and absolutely nothing can reverse this trend. So dollar became virtualized
-- a kind of "conversion gauge" but without profits for real conversion national currency to dollars
for major TBTF banks.
So if we think about Iraq war as the way to prevent to use euro as alternative to dollar in
oil sales that goal was not achieved and all blood and treasure were wasted.
In this sense it would be difficult to Trump to continue with "bastard neoliberalism" both
in foreign policy and domestically and betray his election promises because they reflected real
problems facing the USA and are the cornerstone of his political support.
Also in this case neocons establishment will simply get rid of him one way or the other. I
hope that he understand this danger and will avoid trimming Social Security.
Returning to Democratic Party betrayal of interests of labour, Krugman hissy fit signifies
that he does not understand the current political situation. Neoliberal wing of Democratic Party
is now bankrupt both morally and politically. Trump election was the last nail into Bill Clinton
political legacy coffin.
Now we returned to essentially the same political process that took place after the Great Depression,
with much weaker political leaders, this time. So this is the time for stronger, more interventionist
in internal policy state and the suppression of financial oligarchy. If Trump does not understand
this he is probably doomed and will not last long.
That's why I think Trump inspired far right renaissance will continue and the political role
of military might dramatically increase. And politically Trump is the hostage of this renaissance.
Flint appointment in this sense is just the first swallow of increased role of military leaders
in government.
There certainly are experts in the field who should know
about the alleged hacking, but they are not allowed to disrupt mainstream media's Russophobe
frenzy. Bet you never saw William Binney on mainstream media. Who is Binney? He is the guy who
put together the NSA's elaborate worldwide surveillance system. He has publicly stated on
alternative news sites, that if something was "hacked", the NSA would instantly know who, when,
and whether the info was passed on to another party. He designed the system. He argues, there was
no hacking for that very reason. Binney insists the e-mails had to have been leaked by an
"insider" who had access to the data. Never heard him on mainstream media huh? Next comes Craig
Murray a former US Ambassador who claims he knows who leaked the e-mails, because he met with the
individual in Washington D.C. Never heard him on mainstream media either huh? Finally, Julian
Assange, the man who released the e-mails. He insisted all along he never got the e-mails from
Russia. Another no show on mainstream media. Whatever happened to the journalistic adage of going
to the source? Assange is the source, but no mainstream media journalist, and I use the term very
loosely, has ventured to speak with him. The accusation has been repeated countless times,
without any evidence, or consulting with any of the above three experts.
Because the big lie has been repeated so many times by
corporate media, about half of the US public, according to a recent poll, believes Russia
interfered, even though there is not a bit of evidence to support it. Once again they take the
bait; hook, line, and sinker.
For believers of Russian hacking, I offer the following analogy. It might, but I doubt it will
help, because you cannot undo the effect of propaganda. You are put on trial for murder that you
did not commit. The prosecutor and judge simply say they have reached a "consensus view", the
phrase offered by intelligence agencies, that you committed the murder and are guilty. You ask
for proof. They offer none. They just keep repeating that you did it. You challenge and ask how
do you know I did it? Answer: we have anonymous sources, but we cannot tell you who they are, nor
can we show you proof.
Just as in the fake run-up to the Iraq war, the expert voices of the opposition are not tolerated
on mainstream media. Do these folks really want a war with Russia? Are they so upset with Trump's
pronouncement that he wanted better relations with Russia? What sane person would not? Hmmm.
It appears there is a war already raging between the Russophobes, who do not want better
relations with Russia, and are doing their best to smear and demonize Putin, and those who do.
This is the same tactic used with Manuel Noriega of Panama, Muarmar Gaddafi, and Saddam Hussein,
before they made war on all three. Demonize, then make war.
Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. Shame on those who buy into propaganda
without any proof.
The oddity of the above author's first paragraph is that the
CIA was not lying in 2001-03. The CIA said Iraq/Saddam had no
wmds.
In fact, if you lived through it then perhaps you recall the
words cherry-picking and stove-piped intel. Now, I understand
he's CIA so there's no reason to believe them, but ask Larry
Johnson (I know, great name for CIA).
Actually he didn't mention the CIA in the first paragraph.
However in late 2002 CIA director George Tenet and United
States Secretary of State Colin Powell both cited attempts
by Hussein to obtain uranium from Niger in their September
testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
using intelligence Italy, Britain, and France.
Days before the Iraq invasion, the International Atomic
Energy Agency (IAEA) voiced serious doubt on the
authenticity of the documents to the UN Security Council,
judging them counterfeit but the CIA while having
suspicions, largely kept them to themselves.
The author of the above article, Joe Clifford is referring
to what CIA Chief George Tenet who represented US
intelligence, said: it was "Slam Dunk" Iraq had WMD. Tenet
was quoted over and over again by Bush-Dick regime to
justify US war against Iraq. After Tenet said those words,
CIA neither contradicted him nor corrected him which meant
that they went along with the "Slam Dunk" Iraq had WMD.
Tenet, representing US intelligence, even sat quietly
behind Powell at the UNSC when Powell was spewing his lies
about Iraq's nonexistent WMD.
Not only to officials repeat false assertions over and over,
but those who hear the falsities, themselves start repeating
them. The more outrageous, the more they are repeated.
You forgot former Yugoslavia.There they "sharpened "their
tools.They "demonized" that country,demonized their
President,trained and financed those local soldiers and then
destroyed that country while "peace making".Filthy
BASTARDS.And you people call USA a decent country?They lied
when they created that country and still their mouths and
deeds are full of lies,murder and plunder.And their Churches
are cheer leaders in that endeavour yet they will proclaim
even this Christmas "Peace to the world" while they will plot
more of the same.They preach one thing but their actions are
totally opposite.They leave wrecked countries behind them and
those people end up feeding from containers.I hope that they
choke on that stolen turkey.
The counter tactic for the "big lie" is the "big truth."
Ordinary people have access to e-mail, social media and
website comments. No secret organization is needed. Just make
counter-bullturdism part of your personal routine.
This takes time. Most people invest little thought into
the news they digest. Quite often, news (or "news") is not
even digested at all, just internalised. They know this.
The CIA, th eDNC, all of them. They rely on public apathy
to survive.
This the the lie the liberals love just like Iraq's wmd was
the lie so dear to the conservatives. It's sickening the way
these partisan idiots are so easily manipulated.
It doesn't matter who hacked the emails one bit! That right
there is the point the powers that be want us to argue about
endlessly, because it draws attention away from what actually
matters: What matters is that the emails revealed the truth
about the democratic party, and that they rigged their
primaries. What matters is that the press did not reveal this
and since the reveal, they have been trying to distract
people from the truth. It is the press and the Democratic
party that were influencing the 2016 election by lying and
cheating, not the Russians or whoever hacked the email.
The e-mails were not hacked: they were leaked. Every time
anyone refers to the "hacked" e-mails, it raises the
question "Who dunnit ?" This is a wild goose chase. The
e-mails were leaked by a disgusted insider.
The contents of the leaks/hacks were almost never claimed to
be false. Even the very faint cries of "the e-mails were
doctored" eventually died out. Nobody has stepped in to claim
that the information was false since. This means that all
Wikileaks revealed was true. Whoever was responsible for
providing this information has done a very valuable public
service. Yes, even if it (somehow) was the Russians. To deny
that the leak/hack was beneficial to the public is insane.
Not that we didn't know beforehand that the CIA are quite
crazy, but still. I would at least have expected them to
welcome this 4th detente. I mean, they have thus far shown
that their intelligence gathering efforts in Russia are
laughably bad. Do they not want some respite form the
humiliation? It would at least be good PR.
During the third and last presidential debate between Republican Donald Trump and
Democrat Hillary Clinton, debate moderator Chris Wallace
pulled a quote from a speech
Clinton had given to Brazilian bankers, noting the
information had been made available to the public via WikiLeaks.
Instead of
answering the question, Clinton blamed the Russian government for the leaks
,
alleging "
[t]he Russian government has engaged in espionage against Americans
,"
hacking "
American websites, American accounts of private people, of institutions
in an effort, as 17 of our intelligence agencies have confirmed, to influence our
election
."
Following the claim,
Clinton criticized Trump for
saying
"
[Clinton] has no idea whether it's Russia, China, or anybody else
,"
repeating her assertion that 17 U.S. intelligence agencies had determined the Russian
government had been behind the Democratic National Committee (DNC) hack.
Despite her claim, reality couldn't be more different.
Instead of 17 agencies, only the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI)
and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have
offered the public
any input on this matter, claiming the DNC attacks "
are
consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts
."
Without offering any evidence, these two - not 17 - agencies hinted that the
Kremlin
could
be behind the cyber attack.
But saying they
believe
the hacks come from the Russians is far short of saying they
know
the Russians
were behind them.
During an
interview on Aaron Klein's Sunday radio program
, former high-ranking NSA
intelligence official-turned-whistleblower,
William Binney
, discussed the alleged Russian involvement in our elections,
suggesting the cyber attack against the DNC may not have originated from the Russian
government. Instead, Binney says, a
"
disgruntled U.S. intelligence worker
"
is likely behind the breach.
According to Binney, what Mueller meant is that
the FBI has access to the NSA
database and that it's accessed without any oversight, meaning the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA), as well as the FBI, have open access to anything the NSA has access to. "
So
if the FBI really wanted [Clinton's and the DNC emails] they can go into that database
and get them right now
," Binney
told
Klein.
Asked
if he believed the NSA had copies of all Clinton's emails,
"
including
the deleted correspondence
,"
Binney said:
"
Yes. That would be my point. They have them all and the FBI can get
them right there
."
While Binney seems to be the only intelligence insider who has come forward with this
type of analysis, a young man from Russia whose servers were implicated in the recent
hacking of the DNC sites says he has information that will lead to the hacker - yet the
FBI won't knock on his door.
In a conversation with the
New York Times
, Vladimir M. Fomenko said his server rental company, King
Servers, is oftentimes used by hackers. Fomenko added that the hackers behind the attack
against computerized election systems in Arizona and Illinois - which, like the DNC
hack, were
also linked to the Russian government by the FBI
- had used his servers.
According to the 26-year-old entrepreneur,
"[w]e have the information.
If the F.B.I. asks, we are ready to supply the I.P. addresses, the logs, but nobody
contacted us."
"
It's like nobody wants to sort this out,
"
he
added
.
After learning that two renters using the nicknames Robin Good and Dick Robin had
used his servers to hack the Arizona and Illinois voting systems, Fomenko
released a statement
saying he learned about the problem through the news and shut
down the two users down shortly after.
While he
told the
New York Times
he doesn't know who the hackers are, he used his
statement to report that the hackers are not Russian security agents.
"
The analysis of the internal data allows King Servers to confidently
refute any conclusions about the involvement of the Russian special services in this
attack
,"
he
said
on September 15, the
New York Times
reported.
According to Fomenko, he found a trail left by the hackers through their contact with
King Servers' billing page, which leads to the next step in the chain
"
to
bring investigators in the United States closer to the hackers
."
The clients used about 60 I.P. addresses to contact Fomenko, including addresses
belonging to server companies in Finland, France, Italy, Norway, Britain, and Sweden.
With these addresses in hand, authorities could track the hackers down.
But while this information is somewhat recent, few news organizations found it
necessary to report on the King Servers link. In the past, however, at least one major
news network mentioned Binney.
In August 2016, Judge Andrew Napolitano
commented
on
the DNC hack.
On "Judge Napolitano Chambers," the Judge said that while the DNC, government
officials, and the Clinton campaign all accuse the Russians of hacking into the DNC
servers,
"
the Russians had nothing to do with it.
"
"A group of retired senior intelligence officials, including the NSA whistleblower
William Binney (former Technical Director, World Geopolitical & Military Analysis,
NSA), have posted an open letter on consortiumnews.com that destroys the Obama
administration's "Russian hacking" narrative.
Within the letter, Binney argues that, thanks to the NSA's "extensive domestic
data-collection network," any data removed remotely from Hillary Clinton or DNC
servers would have passed over fiber networks and therefore would have been captured
by the NSA who could have then analyzed packet data to determine the origination
point and destination address of those packets. As Binney further notes, the only way
the leaks could have avoided NSA detection is if they were never passed over fiber
networks but rather downloaded to a thumb drive by someone with internal access to
servers."
"... Democracy is inevitably going to clash with the demands of Globalization as they are opposite. Globalization requires entrepreneurs to search cheaper means of production worldwide. ..."
"... In practice, this means moving capital out of the USA. ..."
"... To put it in Marxist terms the interests of American society to survive and prosper came into contradiction with the interests of capitalism as a system of production and with the capitalists as a class who has no homeland, and for whom homeland is where it is easier to make money. ..."
"... American capitalism from its very beginning was based on the assumption that what was good for business was good for America. Until 1929 it more or less worked. The robber barons were robbing other entrepreneurs and workers but at least they reinvested their ill gained profits in America. The crash of 1929 showed that the interests of Big Banks clashed with the interest of American society with devastating results. ..."
"... The decades after WWII have seen a slow and steady erosion of American superiority in technology and productivity and slow and steady flight of capital from the USA. Globalization has been undermining America. From the point of view of Global prosperity if it is cheaper to produce in China, production should relocate to China. From the point of view of American worker, this is treason, a policy destroying the United States as an industrial power, as a nation, and as a community of citizens. Donald Trump is the first top ranking politician who has realized this simple fact. The vote for Donald Trump has been a protest against Globalization, immigration, open borders, capital flight, multiculturalism, liberalism and all the values American Liberal establishment has been preaching for 60 years that are killing the USA. ..."
"... Donald Trump wants to arrest the assault of Globalization on America. He promised to reduce taxes, and to attract business back to the USA. However, reduced taxes are only one ingredient in incentives. For businesses to stay or come back to the US, companies must have educated labor force, steady supply of talented, well-educated young people, excellent schools, and safe neighborhoods, among other things. As of now most of these preconditions are missing. ..."
"... Dr. Brovkin is a historian, formerly a Harvard Professor of History. He has published several books and numerous articles on Russian History and Politics. Currently, Dr. Brovkin works and lives in Marrakech, Morocco. ..."
"... This is an interesting question: is it possible to contain neoliberal globalization by building walls, rejecting 'trade' agreement, and so on. I get the feeling that a direct attack may not work. Water will find a way, as they say. With a direct attack against globalization, what you're likely to face is major capital flight. ..."
In his election campaign Donald Trump has identified several key themes that defined American malaise.
He pointed to capital flight, bad trade deals, illegal immigration, and corruption of the government
and of the press. What is missing in Trump's diagnosis though is an explanation of this crisis. What
are the causes of American decline or as Ross Pero used to say: Let's look under the hood.
Most of the challenges America faces today have to do with two processes we call Globalization
and Sovietization. By Globalization we mean a process of externalizing American business thanks to
the doctrine of Free trade which has been up to now the Gospel of the establishment. By Sovietization
we mean a process of slow expansion of the role of the government in economy, education, business,
military, press, virtually any and every aspect of politics and society.
Let us start with Globalization.
Dani Rodrick (
The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy) has argued that
it is impossible to have democracy and globalization at the same time. Democracy is inevitably
going to clash with the demands of Globalization as they are opposite. Globalization requires entrepreneurs
to search cheaper means of production worldwide.
In practice, this means moving capital out of the USA. For fifty years economists have
been preaching Free trade, meaning that free unimpeded, no tariffs trade is good for America. And
it was in the 1950s, 60s and 1970s that American products were cheaper or better than those overseas.
Beginning with the 1970s, the process reversed. Globalization enriched the capitalists and impoverished
the rest of Americans. To put it in Marxist terms the interests of American society to survive
and prosper came into contradiction with the interests of capitalism as a system of production and
with the capitalists as a class who has no homeland, and for whom homeland is where it is easier
to make money.
American capitalism from its very beginning was based on the assumption that what was good
for business was good for America. Until 1929 it more or less worked. The robber barons were robbing
other entrepreneurs and workers but at least they reinvested their ill gained profits in America.
The crash of 1929 showed that the interests of Big Banks clashed with the interest of American society
with devastating results.
The decades after WWII have seen a slow and steady erosion of American superiority in technology
and productivity and slow and steady flight of capital from the USA. Globalization has been undermining
America. From the point of view of Global prosperity if it is cheaper to produce in China, production
should relocate to China. From the point of view of American worker, this is treason, a policy destroying
the United States as an industrial power, as a nation, and as a community of citizens. Donald Trump
is the first top ranking politician who has realized this simple fact. The vote for Donald Trump
has been a protest against Globalization, immigration, open borders, capital flight, multiculturalism,
liberalism and all the values American Liberal establishment has been preaching for 60 years that
are killing the USA.
Donald Trump wants to arrest the assault of Globalization on America. He promised to reduce
taxes, and to attract business back to the USA. However, reduced taxes are only one ingredient in
incentives. For businesses to stay or come back to the US, companies must have educated labor force,
steady supply of talented, well-educated young people, excellent schools, and safe neighborhoods,
among other things. As of now most of these preconditions are missing.
To fight Globalization Donald Trump announced in his agenda to drop or renegotiate NAFTA and TPP.
That is a step in the right direction. However, this will not be easy. There are powerful vested
interests in making money overseas that will put up great resistance to America first policy. They
have powerful lobbies and votes in the Congress and it is by far not certain if Trump will succeed
in overcoming their opposition.
Another step along these lines of fighting Globalization is the proposed building of the Wall
on Mexican border. That too may or may not work. Powerful agricultural interests in California have
a vested interest in easy and cheap labor force made up of illegal migrants. If their supply is cut
off they are going to hike up the prices on agricultural goods that may lead to inflation or higher
consumer prices for the American workers.
... ... ...
The Military: Americans are told they have a best military in the world. In fact, it is not the
best but the most expensive one in the world. According to the National priorities Project, in fiscal
2015 the military spending amounted to 54% of the discretionary spending in the
amount of 598.5 billion dollars . Of those almost 200 billion dollars goes for operations and
maintenance, 135 billion for military personnel and 90 billion for procurement (see
Here is How the US Military Spends its Billions )
American military industrial complex spends more that the next seven runners up combined. It is
a Sovietized, bureaucratic structure that exists and thrives on internal deals behind closed doors,
procurement process closed to public scrutiny, wasted funds on consultants, kickbacks, and outrageous
prices for military hardware. Specific investigations of fraud do not surface too often. Yet for
example, DoD Inspector General reported:
Why is it that an F35 fighter jet should cost 135 million apiece and the Russian SU 35 that can
do similar things is sold for 35 million dollars and produced for 15 million? The answer is that
the Congress operates on a principle that any price the military asks is good enough. The entire
system of military procurement has to be scrapped. It is a source of billions of stolen and wasted
dollars. The Pentagon budget of half a trillion a year is a drain on the economy that is unsustainable,
and what you get is not worth the money. The military industrial complex in America does not deliver
the best equipment or security it is supposed to.(on this see:
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-skeptics/cutting-waste-isnt-enough-curb-pentagon-spending-18640
)
Donald Trump was the first to his credit who raised the issue: Do we need all these bases overseas?
Do they really enhance American security? Or are they a waste of money for the benefit of other countries
who take America for a free ride. Why indeed should the US pay for the defense of Japan? Is Japan
a poor country that cannot afford to defend itself? Defense commitments like those expose America
to unnecessary confrontations and risk of war over issues that have nothing to do with America's
interests. Is it worth it to fight China over some uninhabitable islands that Japan claims? (See
discussion:
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-skeptics/should-the-us-continue-guarantee-the-security-wealthy-states-17720
)
Similarly, Trump is the first one to raise the question: What is the purpose of NATO? ( see discussion
of NATO utility:
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/will-president-trump-renegotiate-the-nato-treaty-18647
) Yes the Liberal pro-Clinton media answer is: to defend Europe from Russian aggression. But
really what aggression? If the Russians wanted to they could have taken Kiev in a day two years ago.
Instead, they put up with the most virulently hostile regime in Kiev. Let us ask ourselves would
we have put up with a virulently anti-American regime in Mexico, a regime that would have announced
its intention to conclude a military alliance with China or Russia? Were we not ready to go to nuclear
war over Soviet missiles in Cuba? If we would not have accepted such a regime in Mexico, why do we
complain that the Russians took action against the new regime in Ukraine. Oh yes, they took Crimea.
But the population there is Russian, and until 1954 it was Russian territory and after Ukrainian
independence the Russians did not raise the issue of Crimea as Ukrainian territory and paid rent
for their naval base there The Russians took it over only when a hostile regime clamoring for NATO
membership settled in Kiev. Does that constitute Russian aggression or actually Russian limited response
to a hostile act? (see on this Steven Cohen:
http://eastwestaccord.com/podcast-stephen-f-cohen-talks-russia-israel-middle-east-diplomacy-steele-unger/
) As I have argued elsewhere Putin has been under tremendous pressure to act more decisively
against the neo-Nazis in Kiev. (see Vlad Brovkin: On Russian Assertiveness in Foreign Policy. (
http://eastwestaccord.com/?s=brovkin&submit=Search
)
With a little bit of patience and good will a compromise is possible on Ukraine through Minsk
accords. Moreover, Ukraine is not in NATO and as long as it is not admitted to NATO, a deal with
the Russians on Ukraine is feasible. Just like so many other pro-American governments, Ukraine wants
to milk Uncle Sam for what it is worth. They expect to be paid for being anti/Russian. (See discussion
on need of enemy:
http://nationalinterest.org/feature/does-america-need-enemy-18106
) Would it not be a better policy to let Ukraine know that they are on their own: no more subsidies,
no more payments? Mend your relations with Russia yourselves. Then peace would immediately prevail.
If we admit that there is no Russian aggression and that this myth was propagated by the Neo/Cons
with the specific purpose to return to the paradigm of the cold war, i.e. more money for the military
industrial complex, if we start thinking boldly as Trump has begun, we should say to the Europeans:
go ahead, build your own European army to allay your fears of the Russians. Europe is strong enough,
rich enough and united enough to take care of its defense without American assistance. (See discussion
of Trumps agenda:
http://nationalinterest.org/feature/course-correction-18062
)
So, if Trump restructures procurement mess, reduces the number of military bases overseas, and
invests in high tech research and development for the military on the basis of real competition,
hundreds of billions of dollars could be saved and the defense capability of the country would increase.
... ... ...
Dr. Brovkin is a historian, formerly a Harvard Professor of History. He has published several
books and numerous articles on Russian History and Politics. Currently, Dr. Brovkin works and lives
in Marrakech, Morocco.
This is a bit too much, Volodya. Maybe you should've taken one subject – globalization, for
example – and stop there.
This is an interesting question: is it possible to contain neoliberal globalization by
building walls, rejecting 'trade' agreement, and so on. I get the feeling that a direct attack
may not work. Water will find a way, as they say. With a direct attack against globalization,
what you're likely to face is major capital flight.
You might be able to make neoliberal globalization work for you (for your population, that
is), like Germany and the Scandinavians do, but that's a struggle, constant struggle. And it's
a competition; it will have to be done at the expense of other nations (see Greece, Portugal,
Central (eastern) Europe). And having an anti-neoliberal president is not enough; this would require
a major change, almost a U turn, in the whole governing philosophy. Forget the sanctity of 'free
market', start worshiping the new god: national interest
What an INTERESTING article -- So much that is right, so much that is wrong. An article you
can get your teeth into.
On globalisation: pretty spot-on (although I believe he exaggerates the US weakness in what he
calls "preconditions": there are still many well educated Americans, still good neighborhoods
(yes, sure it could be a lot better). He's against NAFTA & other neoliberal Trade self indulgences.
But then we come to his concept of "Sovietization" of the US. Perhaps it's mere semantics, but
I find the concept incoherent & suspiciously adapted to deliberately agitate US conservatives.
Example: "huge sectors of American economy are not private at all, that in fact they have been
slowly taken over by an ever growing state ownership and control"
This is nonsense on its face: the government spews out trillions to private actors to provide
goods & services. It does so, in part, because it has systematically privatized every government
function capable of returning a profit. The author can't see the actor behind the mask: how much
legislation is now written by & for the benefit of private interests ? (Obama care, Bush pharmaceutical
laws ?)
Of course, the author is correct on the US military-industrial complex: it is a sump of crime
& corruption. Yet he seems not to grasp that the problem is regulative capture. How is the Fiasco
of the F35 & MacDonald Douglas merely an issue for the Legislature alone & how does this circus
resemble the Soviet Union, beyond the fact that BOTH systems (like most systems) are capable of
gross negligence & corruption ?
I like what the author says about NATO, Japan, bases etc. Although he's a little naive if he
thinks NATO for instance is about "protecting" Europe. Yes, that's a part of it: but primarily
NATO etc exist as a tool/mask behind which the US can exert it's imperial ambitions against friend
& for alike.
The author does go off against welfare well that's to be expected: sadly I don't think he quite
gets the connection between globalisation & welfare .He also legitimately goes after tertiary
education, but seems to be (again) confused as to cause & effect.
The author is completely spot on with his sovietization analogy when he comes to the US security
state. Only difference between the Soviets & the US on security totalitarianism ? The US is much
better at it (of course the US has technological advantages unimaginable to the Soviets)
• Replies:
@Randal I agree with you that it's a fascinating piece, and I also agree with many of the points
you agree with.
But then we come to his concept of "Sovietization" of the US. Perhaps it's mere semantics, but
I find the concept incoherent & suspiciously adapted to deliberately agitate US conservatives.
Example: "huge sectors of American economy are not private at all, that in fact they
have been slowly taken over by an ever growing state ownership and control"
This is nonsense on its face: the government spews out trillions to private actors to provide
goods & services. It does so, in part, because it has systematically privatized every government
function capable of returning a profit. The author can't see the actor behind the mask: how much
legislation is now written by & for the benefit of private interests ? (Obama care, Bush pharmaceutical
laws ?)
I think part of the problem here might be a mistaken focus on "the government" as an independent
actor, when in reality it is just a mechanism whereby the rulers (whether they are a dictator,
a political party or an oligarchy or whatever), and those with sufficient clout to influence them,
get things done the way they want to see them done.
As such there is really not much difference between the government directly employing the people
who do things (state socialism), and the government paying money to companies to get the same
things done. Either way, those who use the government to get things done, get to say what gets
done and how. There are differences of nuance, in terms of organizational strengths and weaknesses,
degrees of corruption and of efficiency, but fundamentally it's all big government.
A more interesting question might be - how really different are these big government variants
from the small government systems, in which the rulers pay people directly to get things done
the way they want them to be done?
An excellent article. The points that resonated the most were:
For businesses to stay or come back to the US, companies must have educated labor force,
steady supply of talented, well-educated young people, excellent schools, and safe neighborhoods,
among other things. As of now most of these preconditions are missing.
This is an enormously difficult problem that will take years to resolve, and it will need a
rethink of education from the ground up + the political will to fight the heart of Cultural Bolshevism
and the inevitable 24/7 Media assault.
Drain the swamp in Washington: ban the lobbyists, make it a crime to lobby for private interest
in a public place, restructure procurement, introduce real competition, restore capitalism,
phase out any government subsidies to Universities, force them to compete for students, force
hospitals to compete for patients. Cut cut cut expenditure everywhere possible, including welfare.
Banning lobbyists should be possible but draining the rest of the swamp looks really complicated.
Each area would need to be examined from the ground up from a value for money – efficiency viewpoint.
It doesn't matter which philosophy each one is run on – good value healthcare is desirable whichever
system produces it.
Could we have ever imagined in our worst dreams that a system of mass surveillance would
be created and perfected in the USA. (see discussion on this in: Surveillance State, in
http://www.americamagazine.org/issue/surveillance-state
This one should be easy. The Constitution guarantees a right to privacy so just shut down the
NSA. Also shut down the vast CIA mafia (it didn't exist prior to 1947) and the expensive and useless
FED (controlling the money supply isn't the business of a group of private banks – an office in
the Treasury could easily match the money supply to economic activity).
This one should be easy. The Constitution guarantees a right to privacy so just shut down the
NSA. Also shut down the vast CIA mafia (it didn't exist prior to 1947) and the expensive and useless
FED (controlling the money supply isn't the business of a group of private banks – an office in
the Treasury could easily match the money supply to economic activity).
From Unz, I have learned that the US actually has a four-part government: the "Deep State"
part which has no clear oversight from any of the other three branches.
To put it in Marxist terms the interests of American society to survive and prosper came
into contradiction with the interests of capitalism as a system of production and with the
capitalists as a class who has no homeland, and for whom homeland is where it is easier to
make money.
Another add-on contradiction, comrade, is that the selfsame capitalist class expect their host
nation to defend their interests whenever threatened abroad. This entails using the resources
derived from the masses to enforce this protection including using the little people as cannon
fodder when deemed useful.
Donald Trump is the first top ranking politician who has realized this simple fact.
Come now, do you really believe that all these politicians who have gone to these world-class
schools don't know this? They simply don't care. They're working on behalf of the .1% who are
their benefactors and who will make them rich. They did not go into politics to take vows of poverty.
They just realize the need to placate the masses with speeches written by professional speechwriters,
that's all.
Insofar as Social Security/Medicare/Medicaid goes, those are the most democratic institutions
of all. It's money spent on ourselves, internally, with money being cycled in and out at the grassroots
level. Doctors, nurses, home-care providers, etc etc, all local people get a piece of the action
unlike military spending which siphons money upwards to the upper classes.
I'd rather be employed in a government job than unemployed in the private sector. That's not
the kind of "freedom" I'm searching for comrade.
@animalogic What an INTERESTING article -- So much that is right, so much that is wrong. An
article you can get your teeth into.
On globalisation: pretty spot-on (although I believe he exaggerates the US weakness in what
he calls "preconditions": there are still many well educated Americans, still good neighborhoods
(yes, sure it could be a lot better). He's against NAFTA & other neoliberal Trade self indulgences.
But then we come to his concept of "Sovietization" of the US. Perhaps it's mere semantics, but
I find the concept... incoherent...& suspiciously adapted to deliberately agitate US conservatives.
Example: "huge sectors of American economy are not private at all, that in fact they
have been slowly taken over by an ever growing state ownership and control"
This is nonsense on its face: the government spews out trillions to private actors to provide
goods & services. It does so, in part, because it has systematically privatized every government
function capable of returning a profit. The author can't see the actor behind the mask: how much
legislation is now written by & for the benefit of private interests ? (Obama care, Bush pharmaceutical
laws ?)
Of course, the author is correct on the US military-industrial complex: it is a sump of crime
& corruption. Yet he seems not to grasp that the problem is regulative capture. How is the Fiasco
of the F35 & MacDonald Douglas merely an issue for the Legislature alone...& how does this circus
resemble the Soviet Union, beyond the fact that BOTH systems (like most systems) are capable of
gross negligence & corruption ?
I like what the author says about NATO, Japan, bases etc. Although he's a little naive if he
thinks NATO for instance is about "protecting" Europe. Yes, that's a part of it: but primarily
NATO etc exist as a tool/mask behind which the US can exert it's imperial ambitions ...against
friend & for alike.
The author does go off against welfare...well that's to be expected: sadly I don't think he quite
gets the connection between globalisation & welfare....He also legitimately goes after tertiary
education, but seems to be (again) confused as to cause & effect.
The author is completely spot on with his sovietization analogy when he comes to the US security
state. Only difference between the Soviets & the US on security totalitarianism ? The US is much
better at it (of course the US has technological advantages unimaginable to the Soviets)
I agree with you that it's a fascinating piece, and I also agree with many of the points you
agree with.
But then we come to his concept of "Sovietization" of the US. Perhaps it's mere semantics,
but I find the concept incoherent & suspiciously adapted to deliberately agitate US conservatives.
Example: "huge sectors of American economy are not private at all, that in fact they have been
slowly taken over by an ever growing state ownership and control"
This is nonsense on its face: the government spews out trillions to private actors to provide
goods & services. It does so, in part, because it has systematically privatized every government
function capable of returning a profit. The author can't see the actor behind the mask: how
much legislation is now written by & for the benefit of private interests ? (Obama care, Bush
pharmaceutical laws ?)
I think part of the problem here might be a mistaken focus on "the government" as an independent
actor, when in reality it is just a mechanism whereby the rulers (whether they are a dictator,
a political party or an oligarchy or whatever), and those with sufficient clout to influence them,
get things done the way they want to see them done.
As such there is really not much difference between the government directly employing the people
who do things (state socialism), and the government paying money to companies to get the same
things done. Either way, those who use the government to get things done, get to say what gets
done and how. There are differences of nuance, in terms of organisational strengths and weaknesses,
degrees of corruption and of efficiency, but fundamentally it's all big government.
A more interesting question might be – how really different are these big government variants
from the small government systems, in which the rulers pay people directly to get things done
the way they want them to be done?
"... The essence of voting the lesser of two evils: "To comfortable centrists like pgl, the Democrats should be graded on a curve. As long as they're better than the awful Republicans, then they're good enough and beyond criticism." ..."
"... These Wall Street Democrats can rest assured that Democrats will surely get their turn in power in 4-8 years...after Trump thoroughly screws things up. And then Democrats will proceed to screw things up themselves...as we learned from Obama and Hillary's love of austerity and total disinterest in the economic welfare of the vast majority. ..."
"... In case you didn't notice, Democrats did nothing about the minimum wage 2009-2010. ..."
"... Many Democratic candidates won't even endorse minimum wage increase in states where increases win via initiative. They preferred to lose elections to standing up for minimum wage increases. ..."
Peter K.... The essence of voting the lesser of two evils: "To comfortable centrists like pgl,
the Democrats should be graded on a curve. As long as they're better than the awful Republicans,
then they're good enough and beyond criticism."
These Wall Street Democrats can rest assured that Democrats will surely get their turn in power
in 4-8 years...after Trump thoroughly screws things up. And then Democrats will proceed to screw
things up themselves...as we learned from Obama and Hillary's love of austerity and total disinterest
in the economic welfare of the vast majority.
To pgl and his ilk, Obama was great as long as he said the right things...regardless of what
he actually did. Hillary didn't even have to say the right things...she only had to be a Wall
Street Democrat for pgl to be enthusiastic about her.
In case you didn't notice, Democrats did nothing about the minimum wage 2009-2010.
At a minimum,
they could have taken their dominance then to enact increases for 2010-2016 or to index increases
to inflation. Instead, Pelosi, Reid and Obama preferred to do nothing.
Many Democratic candidates won't even endorse minimum wage increase in states where increases
win via initiative. They preferred to lose elections to standing up for minimum wage increases.
the article contain at least one blatant lie which discredits its connect: the assertion the Sony
attack was from North Korea. No mentioning of Flame and Stixnet. Another proof that NYT is a part
of Clinton campaign and became a neocons mouthpiece...
Notable quotes:
"... How many of us have signed petitions to exonerate Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning for letting us know what our govt was doing? Didn't they do us all, and democracy, a great service? ..."
"... I'm happy to know how the DNC operated, the astounding and unprecedented conflation of a national party committee with one candidate's campaign organization. ..."
"... What they were doing to Bernie Sanders, and the use they were making of national media was just wrong. ..."
"... Clinton herself was involved (via her neocon undersecretary, formerly Cheney's chief foreign policy aide) in overthrowing the elected president of Ukraine, a friend of Russia, and installing a US-capitalist friendly fellow in his stead. ..."
"... What goes around comes around. If we wanted to stop all this cyber warfare, the time to do it was by treaty BEFORE we risked Iranian lives with the Stuxnet virus. ..."
"... The release of e-mails was embarrassing for Secretary Clinton and the Democratic Party, but I don't think it tipped the election. How many longtime Democratic voters stayed home on November 9th because of the release of these e-mails? How many working class voters switched their vote because of the release of these e-mails? ..."
"... If the hacking had tampered with voting, I would be extremely concerned, but since it only involved email systems, I am not concerned. ..."
"... The hacked and subsequently published emails revealed the dishonest, deceitful, and unethical practices of the Democrats, especially in the treatment of Sanders, who should have ditched the Democrats run for president as an Independent. ..."
"... The emails also revealed that Obama was a participant in HRC's use of a nongovernmental email system when he stated emphatically that the first time he had ever heard of it was when the media first reported it. ..."
"... That's not the first and probably not the last time he will lie to the public. And the emails revealed the satanic practices of Podesta. The published emails made the election interesting and entertaining. But it is over and mow its time to put this issue to rest, accept the fact that Donald Trump is our next President, the leader of the freest county in the free world, and get on with governing this blessed great nation. Thank you. ..."
"... I suppose Hillary's email server could have been hacked like this too. Could this be the reason for Comey's stern reprimand of her? It is a little ironic, isn't it, that the DNC, while down playing Hillary's issues with her private server and criticizing Comey for his handling of the investigation, should itself suffer a damaging security breach of its own servers at the hands of a foreign power, which was exactly Comey's concern. Not to mention the fact that the NYT, which told us enough was enough with Hillary's email, is now up in arms about exactly that issue with the shoe on the other foot ..."
"... I am struggling with how to react to this, just as i do with the Edward Snowden disclosures. On the one hand Russian meddling in a US election is certainly a concern, and should be investigated. On the other hand the disclosures laid bare things many people had suspected, let the sunlight in, so to speak. ..."
"... Would Hillary even have had the nomination were it not for the favoritism shown by the DNC to her campaign at the expense of the Sanders campaign? What was more meddlesome, the Russian hack and release or the DNC's unfair treatment of Bernie? There is no suggestion that the leaked documents were altered. The effect of the hack was to reveal the truth. Is that the Russian goal, to delegitimize the election process by revealing the truth? ..."
"... I suppose we finally got a taste of our own medicine -- countless governments overthrown and elections influenced at the hand of the United States. Not fun is it? Perhaps we can learn a lesson from this. ..."
An aspect that truly surprises me is the hopeless ineptitude of the DNC response (which could
easily have parallels in the RNC).
Irrespective of who the cyber-attacker is, it's astounding in this day and age that sensitive
organizations do not pre-arm themselves with the highest security, and treat every sign of interference
(eg, an actual FBI WARNING PHONE CALL) as a major alarm.
Sadly, that this response is probably replicated all over the place underscores a theory I've
held for some time: Technology will kill democracy. Maybe it already has.
I'm surprised at what's missing here. How many of us have signed petitions to exonerate Edward
Snowden and Chelsea Manning for letting us know what our govt was doing? Didn't they do us all,
and democracy, a great service?
I'm happy to know how the DNC operated, the astounding and unprecedented
conflation of a national party committee with one candidate's campaign organization.
What they
were doing to Bernie Sanders, and the use they were making of national media was just wrong.
Assange
and Putin (if he was involved) revealed the truth. And since Clinton took no care to guard her
private emails, mixed with public communications, how much sympathy is she owed?
Clinton herself
was involved (via her neocon undersecretary, formerly Cheney's chief foreign policy aide) in overthrowing
the elected president of Ukraine, a friend of Russia, and installing a US-capitalist friendly
fellow in his stead. We do this sort of thing all the time, so if the Russians "interfere" in
our electoral process by revealing true stuff (far short of fomenting a coup like we did in Ukraine),
isn't that just tit for tat? We even hacked into the communications of European leaders and international
organizations. We were the first to use cyber warfare (Stuxnet, v. Iran), so how can we play holier
than thou? What goes around comes around. If we wanted to stop all this cyber warfare, the time
to do it was by treaty BEFORE we risked Iranian lives with the Stuxnet virus.
The release of e-mails was embarrassing for Secretary Clinton and the Democratic Party, but
I don't think it tipped the election. How many longtime Democratic voters stayed home on November
9th because of the release of these e-mails? How many working class voters switched their vote
because of the release of these e-mails?
The bigger issue for me is that because we are now politicizing this hacking (i.e. making the
argument that the hacking helped Republicans), many Republicans are opposed to investigating it.
If the hacking had tampered with voting, I would be extremely concerned, but since it only
involved email systems, I am not concerned.
The hacked and subsequently published emails revealed
the dishonest, deceitful, and unethical practices of the Democrats, especially in the treatment
of Sanders, who should have ditched the Democrats run for president as an Independent.
The emails
also revealed that Obama was a participant in HRC's use of a nongovernmental email system when
he stated emphatically that the first time he had ever heard of it was when the media first reported
it.
That's not the first and probably not the last time he will lie to the public. And the emails
revealed the satanic practices of Podesta. The published emails made the election interesting
and entertaining. But it is over and mow its time to put this issue to rest, accept the fact that
Donald Trump is our next President, the leader of the freest county in the free world, and get
on with governing this blessed great nation. Thank you.
I suppose Hillary's email server could have been hacked like this too. Could this be the reason
for Comey's stern reprimand of her? It is a little ironic, isn't it, that the DNC, while down
playing Hillary's issues with her private server and criticizing Comey for his handling of the
investigation, should itself suffer a damaging security breach of its own servers at the hands
of a foreign power, which was exactly Comey's concern. Not to mention the fact that the NYT, which
told us enough was enough with Hillary's email, is now up in arms about exactly that issue with
the shoe on the other foot
I am struggling with how to react to this, just as i do with the Edward Snowden disclosures. On
the one hand Russian meddling in a US election is certainly a concern, and should be investigated.
On the other hand the disclosures laid bare things many people had suspected, let the sunlight
in, so to speak.
Would Hillary even have had the nomination were it not for the favoritism shown
by the DNC to her campaign at the expense of the Sanders campaign? What was more meddlesome, the
Russian hack and release or the DNC's unfair treatment of Bernie? There is no suggestion that
the leaked documents were altered. The effect of the hack was to reveal the truth. Is that the
Russian goal, to delegitimize the election process by revealing the truth?
I suppose we finally got a taste of our own medicine -- countless governments overthrown and
elections influenced at the hand of the United States. Not fun is it? Perhaps we can learn a lesson
from this.
The agent could have walked over to the DNC headquarters and shown the DNC IT consultant his
badge. Or he could have invited the DNC IT consultant to his office--confirming his true identity.
Instead, the two communicated for several months just by phone, and as a result, the DNC IT consultant
did not fully believe he was speaking to an FBI agent, and so he did not act as aggressively to
search for the possible cyber intrusion.
She lost, get over it. Yes the Electoral College is obsolete. Yes some voting machines can
be hacked, but no-one is claiming that in states with tight results. Let's see what the official
investigation says, and who says it.
For better or worse Mr. Trump will be our next President because he won the election. Personally
I'm delighted that he may damp down the over-the-top Russophobia that is swirling around DC, "defense"
contractor Congressional shills, & the offices of the NYT but nowhere else in the country.
It's time for progressives to emerge from Obama-daze and convince the rest of the country that
they have a better vision for this country's future than that offered by conservatives/reactionaries.
One that doesn't involve bombing hapless foreigners. Articulate your policies as best you can,
learn from your defeats and from your victories. Onward!
If the hacking had tampered with voting, I would be extremely concerned, but since it only
involved email systems, I am not concerned. The hacked and subsequently published emails revealed
the dishonest, deceitful, and unethical practices of the Democrats, especially in the treatment
of Sanders, who should have ditched the Democrats run for president as an Independent. The emails
also revealed that Obama was a participant in HRC's use of a nongovernmental email system when
he stated emphatically that the first time he had ever heard of it was when the media first reported
it. That's not the first and probably not the last time he will lie to the public. And the emails
revealed the satanic practices of Podesta. The published emails made the election interesting
and entertaining. But it is over and mow its time to put this issue to rest, accept the fact that
Donald Trump is our next President, the leader of the freest county in the free world, and get
on with governing this blessed great nation. Thank you.
"... Can you please explain to me why you are thinking that this was a hack, not a leak by an insider? ..."
"... Yes, of course, Russians are everywhere, much like Jews in traditional anti-Semitic propaganda. ..."
"... Or in good McCarthyism tradition, they are under each bed. This evil autocrat Putin (who actually looks like yet another corrupt neoliberal ruler, who got Russia into WTO mousetrap and invests state money in the USA debt) manages to get everywhere, control everything and at the same time (German elections, Ukraine, Syria, world oil prices, Chechnya Islamic insurgence, US Presidential election, US stock market, you name it.) Amazing fit for a man over 60. ..."
"... And citing NYT article as for Russian hacks is probably not so much different from citing The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to support anti-Semitic propaganda. NYT was and still is one of the most enthusiastic supporters of Hillary campaign. Hardly a neutral observer. ..."
"... This level of anti-Russian hysteria that several people here are demonstrating is absolutely disgusting. Do you really want a military confrontation with Russia in Syria as most neocons badly want (but would prefer that other fought for them in the trenches) ? ..."
Former British Ambassador and current Wikileaks operative Craig Murray recently said he has
met the person who leaked DNC and Clinton campaign emails, and they aren't Russian.
While he is highly critical of Wikileaks, he suggests that without NSA coming forward with
hard data obtained via special program that uncover multiple levels of indirection, those charges
are just propaganda and insinuations.
And BTW after the fact it is usually impossible to discover who obtained the information, as
they use multiple levels of indirection and Russia might be just one of those indirection levels.
Use of Russian IP-space or Russian IPS might be just an attempt to create a false trail and to
implicate a wrong party.
As in any complex case you should not jump to conclusions so easily.
Or you can explain why you believe strange Faux news conspiracy stories with absolutely no evidence
that this person was in a position to hack the computers? Or why do you believe the obvious hugely
conflicted statements from Wikileaks operatives, who would never want to admit that they were
played by the Russians? Or a guy like Snowden who's life depend on Putins charity? Why would those
sources make anybody question the clear evidence already presented?
The fact that NSA is not going to publish all its evidence, is not a surprise. No need to tell
the Russians and other hackers how they can avoid detection. But it is not just the government
that conclude Russian involvement. Private company experts have reached the same conclusion. The
case for a Russian government hack is about as good as it can get.
Yes, of course, Russians are everywhere, much like Jews in traditional anti-Semitic propaganda.
Or in good McCarthyism tradition, they are under each bed. This evil autocrat Putin (who actually
looks like yet another corrupt neoliberal ruler, who got Russia into WTO mousetrap and invests
state money in the USA debt) manages to get everywhere, control everything and at the same time
(German elections, Ukraine, Syria, world oil prices, Chechnya Islamic insurgence, US Presidential
election, US stock market, you name it.) Amazing fit for a man over 60.
And citing NYT article as for Russian hacks is probably not so much different from citing
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to support anti-Semitic propaganda. NYT was and still
is one of the most enthusiastic supporters of Hillary campaign. Hardly a neutral observer.
This level of anti-Russian hysteria that several people here are demonstrating is absolutely
disgusting. Do you really want a military confrontation with Russia in Syria as most neocons badly
want (but would prefer that other fought for them in the trenches) ?
That's what this hysteria is now about, I think.
RC AKA Darryl, Ron -> likbez... , -1
The NSA is very good at finding the source of intrusion attempts because they happen all the time
every day from China, Russia, North Korea and just little island backwaters in the Pacific.
Doing
something to stop or punish the perpetrators is what is hard. Individual US installation instances
must each be protected by their own firewalls and then still monitored for unusual variations
in traffic patterns through firewalls to detect IP spoofing.
"... To whom do US intelligence agencies owe protection against hackers? The DNC was informed that the Russians or someone pretending to be the Russians was on them. To put your political dirty tricks or your apprehensions about the possible discovery of apparent pay-to-play games in your client's foundation in your emails after being warned was just plain foolish. ..."
"... The Clintons' venality has been an open secret for 30 years, though Dem-leaning pundits prefer to ignore it or attribute it to the evil right wing conspiracy. From the Arkansas arrangements permitting the purchase of influence by engaging as attorney the wife of the AG or the Governor, the miraculous commodity investment, the Marc Rich and other pardons all stunk. ..."
"... That the Clinton Foundation and its generous support for Clinton political operators might be a pay-to-play operation was not a surprise to longtime observers. I thought it was admirably bold and clever myself. Nobody else has been able to organize a tax-exempt political slush fund under personal control except even in Illinois where we have a lot of smart lawyers in politics. I suspect we will see a lot more political slush funds disguised as foundations in the future. ..."
"... We also need to think about what political parties actually are. Then are not government agencies or acting on behalf of government agencies or the people at large. Political parties are large private lobbying firms for a set of loosely affiliated private interests that promote an agenda and communications expressly triangulated to satisfy both their donor class and voting majority constituencies. They are more like corporations with owners, employees, and clients than any public entity. ..."
"... Former British Ambassador and current Wikileaks operative Craig Murray recently said he has met the person who leaked DNC and Clinton campaign emails, and they aren't Russian. ..."
"... And BTW after the fact it is usually impossible to discover who obtained the information, as they use multiple levels of indirection and Russia might be just one of those indirection levels. Use of Russian IP-space or Russian IPS might be just an attempt to create a false trail and to implicate a wrong party. ..."
It was only after listening to the Donna Brazile interview that I decided to comment on the hacking
because of how wrong that Donna Brazile was in so many ways. What responsibility do you think
that the Federal government should have for protecting the data of a private political operation?
What legal or regulatory responsibility do you think that the Federal government has towards the
protection of data for private civilian entities? The second question is rhetorical only to put
the first question in perspective since they are materially exactly the same thing according to
law. How difficult do you think it is to avoid exposure of incriminating or covert E-mails simply
by not having such things?
To whom do US intelligence agencies owe protection against hackers? The DNC was informed that
the Russians or someone pretending to be the Russians was on them. To put your political dirty
tricks or your apprehensions about the possible discovery of apparent pay-to-play games in your
client's foundation in your emails after being warned was just plain foolish.
The Clintons' venality
has been an open secret for 30 years, though Dem-leaning pundits prefer to ignore it or attribute
it to the evil right wing conspiracy. From the Arkansas arrangements permitting the purchase of
influence by engaging as attorney the wife of the AG or the Governor, the miraculous commodity
investment, the Marc Rich and other pardons all stunk.
HRC was elected senator from NY despite
that. That the Clinton Foundation and its generous support for Clinton political operators might
be a pay-to-play operation was not a surprise to longtime observers. I thought it was admirably
bold and clever myself. Nobody else has been able to organize a tax-exempt political slush fund
under personal control except even in Illinois where we have a lot of smart lawyers in politics.
I suspect we will see a lot more political slush funds disguised as foundations in the future.
THANKS! We better get used to Republicans, at least until they "d'oh" their way out of political
power just like the Democrats did. Democrats will never get it back on their own.
I think there was a serious lack of IT competence in the DNC playing a big role. One being with
the obvious incompetence of their cyber-security contractor and another the lack of supervision
or procedures set for this person:
I agree that the procedures and rules at the FBI could have been much better. Why the FBI agent
didn't (or maybe (s)he did) send the information up higher in the chain (all the way to the President)
is a bit of a mystery. Hacking of one of our two major parties should have been Presidential level
info, or at least cabinet level.
How about the possibility of not even having any E-mails incriminating Democrats of political
corruption? Would that have been to hard? I am not saying that they should not be corrupt, just
don't put it in an E-mail for Christ's sake.
[Interesting that Putin is the bad guy here for exposing the behavior of the DNC. Why so much
talk of Russians and so little talk of what was in those Emails?]
The 2016 Democratic National Committee email leak is a collection of Democratic National Committee
(DNC) emails leaked to and subsequently published by WikiLeaks on July 22, 2016. This collection
included 19,252 emails and 8,034 attachments from the DNC, the governing body of the United States'
Democratic Party.[1] The leak includes emails from seven key DNC staff members, and date from
January 2015 to May 2016.[2] The leak prompted the resignation of DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz
before the Democratic National Convention.[3] After the convention, DNC CEO Amy Dacey, CFO Brad
Marshall, and Communications Director Luis Miranda also resigned in the wake of the controversy.[4]
WikiLeaks did not reveal its source; a self-styled hacker going by the moniker Guccifer 2.0
claimed responsibility for the attack. On July 25, 2016, the FBI announced that it would investigate
the hack[5][6][7][8][9][10][11] The same day, the DNC issued a formal apology to Bernie Sanders
and his supporters, stating, "On behalf of everyone at the DNC, we want to offer a deep and sincere
apology to Senator Sanders, his supporters, and the entire Democratic Party for the inexcusable
remarks made over email," and that the emails did not reflect the DNC's "steadfast commitment
to neutrality during the nominating process."[12] On November 6, 2016, WikiLeaks released a second
batch of DNC emails, adding 8,263 emails to its collection.[13]
On December 9, 2016, the CIA told U.S. legislators that the U.S. Intelligence Community concluded
Russia conducted operations during the 2016 U.S. election to assist Donald Trump in winning the
presidency.[14] Multiple U.S intelligence agencies concluded people with direct ties to the Kremlin
gave WikiLeaks hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee...
...Bernie Sanders' campaign
In the emails, DNC staffers derided the Sanders campaign.[45] The Washington Post reported:
"Many of the most damaging emails suggest the committee was actively trying to undermine Bernie
Sanders's presidential campaign. Basically, all of these examples came late in the primary-after
Hillary Clinton was clearly headed for victory-but they belie the national party committee's stated
neutrality in the race even at that late stage."[46]
In a May 2016 email chain, the DNC chief financial officer (CFO) Brad Marshall told the DNC
chief executive officer, Amy Dacy, that they should have someone from the media ask Sanders if
he is an atheist prior to the West Virginia primary.[46][47] In another email, Wasserman Schultz
said of Bernie Sanders, "He isn't going to be president."[45]
On May 21, 2016, DNC National Press Secretary Mark Paustenbach sent an email to DNC Spokesman
Luis Miranda mentioning a controversy that ensued in December 2015 when the National Data Director
of the Sanders campaign and three subordinate staffers accessed the Clinton campaign's voter information
on the NGP VAN database.[48] (The party accused Sanders' campaign of impropriety and briefly limited
their access to the database. The Sanders campaign filed suit for breach of contract against the
DNC; they dropped the suit on April 29, 2016.)[47][49][50] Paustenbach suggested that the incident
could be used to promote a "narrative for a story, which is that Bernie never had his act together,
that his campaign was a mess." (The suggestion was rejected by the DNC.) [46][47] The Washington
Post wrote: "Paustenbach's suggestion, in that way, could be read as a defense of the committee
rather than pushing negative information about Sanders. But this is still the committee pushing
negative information about one of its candidates."...
...Financial and donor information
The New York Times wrote that the cache included "thousands of emails exchanged by Democratic
officials and party fund-raisers, revealing in rarely seen detail the elaborate, ingratiating
and often bluntly transactional exchanges necessary to harvest hundreds of millions of dollars
from the party's wealthy donor class. The emails capture a world where seating charts are arranged
with dollar totals in mind, where a White House celebration of gay pride is a thinly disguised
occasion for rewarding wealthy donors and where physical proximity to the president is the most
precious of currencies."[60] As is common in national politics, large party donors "were the subject
of entire dossiers, as fund-raisers tried to gauge their interests, annoyances and passions."[60]
In a series of email exchanges in April and May 2016, DNC fundraising staff discussed and compiled
a list of people (mainly donors) who might be appointed to federal boards and commissions.[61]
Center for Responsive Politics senior fellow Bob Biersack noted that this is a longstanding practice
in the United States: "Big donors have always risen to the top of lists for appointment to plum
ambassadorships and other boards and commissions around the federal landscape."[61] The White
House denied that financial support for the party was connected to board appointments, saying:
"Being a donor does not get you a role in this administration, nor does it preclude you from getting
one. We've said this for many years now and there's nothing in the emails that have been released
that contradicts that."...
That does not make Putin a good guy. I was not a fan of Snowden's either. But it is easier for
me to avoid incriminating myself in Emails than it is to get a foreign leader half way around
the world to not expose my self-incrimination if it is in his self-interest to do so and he has
the resources to do so.
We also need to think about what political parties actually are. Then are not government agencies
or acting on behalf of government agencies or the people at large. Political parties are large
private lobbying firms for a set of loosely affiliated private interests that promote an agenda
and communications expressly triangulated to satisfy both their donor class and voting majority
constituencies. They are more like corporations with owners, employees, and clients than any public
entity.
So a bunch of nothing burgers about how the sausage is made. You don't say that there is actually
people in the DNC that have their own personal favorite among the primary candidates - shocking???
And campaign donations in exchange for the ability to gain influence -- almost half a chocking
as the K-Street project - and a quarter as shocking as the revelation that donating to the Clinton
foundation could NOT give the donors what they wanted from the State Department (what an absurdly
incompetent scheme of corruption - how could we let her run the gobinment).
I am sure that the Russian governments hack of the GOP didn't find anything like that - and
that's the reason they didn't make those emails public.
The general advice that you should not send anything by email that you don't want the public
to know should have been headed by all involved. Maybe the DNC could learn from Hillary - who
had > 30K emails examined and not a single one where she had said anything not good for public
consumption.
"...Maybe the DNC could learn from Hillary - who had > 30K emails examined and not a single one
where she had said anything not good for public consumption."
[Now you are starting to come around.
NO, I did not find anything in the Emails shocking. None of it was a surprise at all to me.
However, it was enough for a lot of other people to be influenced in their voting (likely to stay
home and maybe it helped the Green Party get a few more votes), otherwise no one would care that
they were hacked.
Observer's comment just down thread shows that he got it. Now he was not a Hillary supporter
and more likely than not a Libertarian of sorts, but the principle here is universal, simple risk
management where there was nothing to be gained and everything to lose.
Also, going to war over the hacked Emails of any political party is probably off the table:<)
Where Hillary made a mistake was making an enemy that had one of the worlds most aggressive state
sponsored internet hacking programs (China and the US being the only ones that are more capable,
but still less aggressive and more covert).]
You have exhaustively proven that there was no crime or wrong doing committed by the DNC or Hillary.
Thanks.
You have provided evidence that politics is politics and like sausage making you don't want
to actually see it up close and personal.
Nothing here, nothing at all.
Except for Marshall McLuhan's observation that the media is the message. In this case the Russian
leaked emails to Assange lead Wikileaks calculated to dribble out over the months and weeks before
the November election to suggest there were illegalities and criminal behavior being covered up
by Hillary and the DNC at EXACTLY the same time Donald Trump is jetting around the country telling
everybody who listened that the election was rigged, Hillary is a crook, and the MSM was out to
get him.
Wow, how did you miss that and the implications derived from it?
Former British Ambassador and current Wikileaks operative Craig Murray recently said he has
met the person who leaked DNC and Clinton campaign emails, and they aren't Russian.
While he is highly critical of Wikileaks, he suggests that without NSA coming forward with
hard data obtained via special program that uncover multiple levels of indirection, those charges
are just propaganda and insinuations.
And BTW after the fact it is usually impossible to discover who obtained the information, as
they use multiple levels of indirection and Russia might be just one of those indirection levels.
Use of Russian IP-space or Russian IPS might be just an attempt to create a false trail and to
implicate a wrong party.
As in any complex case you should not jump to conclusions so easily.
ilsm -> im1dc... , -1
Nothing Ron says is clearing.
The e-mail thing is about safeguarding and preserving public records. The content of mishandled records is not an issue.
The public demanded to know what government does. Congress passed the federal records act. The crime has nothing to do with content.
That is one felony Comey could complain about justice whitewashing. The elements of friendly information released must never be discussed, that would make the
breeches worse. Except in closed, secure rooms with no electronic bugging devices.
"... These allegations were followed Wednesday by a press briefing in which White House spokesman Josh Earnest declared that media outfits in the US, in reporting on the Democratic Party emails released by WikiLeaks, "essentially became the arms of Russian intelligence." ..."
"... Later that day, President Obama threatened to retaliate against Russia, telling National Public Radio, "I think there is no doubt that when any foreign government tries to impact the integrity of our elections, that we need to take action and we will." ..."
"... The Times followed up its inflammatory article with an editorial Thursday all but accusing the president-elect of acting as a Russian agent. ..."
"... There are bitter and raging conflicts within the state, and a faction of the military-intelligence apparatus is determined that there be no retreat from an aggressive confrontation with Russia. This is connected to anger over the debacle of the CIA-led regime-change operation in Syria. ..."
"... Bound up with this internecine conflict within the ruling class, there is a concerted effort to politically bludgeon the American people into supporting further military escalation, both in the Middle East and against Russia itself. ..."
The American population is being subjected to a furious barrage of propaganda by the media and
political establishment aimed at paving the way to war.
The campaign was sharply escalated this week, beginning with Wednesday's publication of a lead
article in the New York Times . Based entirely on unnamed sources and flimsy and concocted
evidence, it was presented as definitive proof of Russia's hacking of Democratic Party emails and
waging of "cyberwar" against the United States.
These allegations were followed Wednesday by a press briefing in which White House spokesman
Josh Earnest declared that media outfits in the US, in reporting on the Democratic Party emails released
by WikiLeaks, "essentially became the arms of Russian intelligence."
On Thursday, Earnest declared that president-elect Trump had encouraged "Russia to hack his opponent
because he believed it would help his campaign." Later that day, President Obama threatened to
retaliate against Russia, telling National Public Radio, "I think there is no doubt that when any
foreign government tries to impact the integrity of our elections, that we need to take action and
we will."
These warmongering comments by the Obama administration were accompanied by editorials in leading
US and international newspapers denouncing Trump's accommodative stance toward Russia and clamoring
for a more aggressive response to the alleged hacking. News reports, based on unnamed intelligence
officials, breathlessly proclaim that Russian President Vladimir Putin directly ordered and oversaw
the hacking.
The Times followed up its inflammatory article with an editorial Thursday all but accusing
the president-elect of acting as a Russian agent. "There could be no more 'useful idiot,' to
use Lenin's term of art, than an American president who doesn't know he's being played by a wily
foreign power," the Times declared. The editorial further defined Russia as "one of our oldest, most
determined foreign adversaries," adding, "Kremlin meddling in the 2016 election" justifies "retaliatory
measures."
The declarations by the Times and other media outlets combine all of the noxious elements
of 1950s McCarthyism, with capitalist Russia replacing the Soviet Union: hysterical denunciation
of "wily" Russia, shameless lying and attacks on domestic opponents as spies, traitors and agents
of foreign governments.
There are bitter and raging conflicts within the state, and a faction of the military-intelligence
apparatus is determined that there be no retreat from an aggressive confrontation with Russia. This
is connected to anger over the debacle of the CIA-led regime-change operation in Syria. Trump
has packed his cabinet with generals and is planning a massive escalation of war, but he has also
indicated a preference for greater accommodation with Russia.
Bound up with this internecine conflict within the ruling class, there is a concerted effort
to politically bludgeon the American people into supporting further military escalation, both in
the Middle East and against Russia itself.
The propaganda campaign alleging Russian interference in the US election parallels a related media
blitzkrieg claiming that Syrian government troops, backed by Russia, are carrying out massacres as
they retake the Syrian city of Aleppo.
The Times ' lead editorial on Thursday, titled "Aleppo's Destroyers: Assad, Putin, Iran,"
declares: "After calling on Mr. Assad to 'step aside' in 2011, Mr. Obama was never able to make it
happen, and it may never have been in his power to make it happen, at least at a cost acceptable
to the American people." The front-page lead of Thursday's Times bemoans the fact that efforts
to whip up public support for US military intervention in Syria have "not resonated" as much as previous
propaganda campaigns.
The international press has joined in the hysteria. An op-ed in Germany's Der Spiegel bitterly
complains that "Obama sought a diplomatic, not a military solution" to the crisis in Syria. It "made
him popular, both in the United States and here [in Germany]," the piece states, but adds that such
"self-righteousness is wrong."
Such media propaganda campaigns are not new. Without exception, they have preceded every bloody
military adventure: the attempts to blame Afghanistan for the September 11 terrorist attacks in the
run-up to that country's invasion in 2001; the lying claims about "weapons of mass destruction" before
the 2003 invasion of Iraq; and the reports of an imminent massacre of civilians in Benghazi that
preceded the US bombing and destruction of Libya in 2011.
The difference now, however, is that this campaign is directed not at a virtually defenseless
and impoverished former colony, but at Russia, the world's second-ranked nuclear power. None of the
figures carrying out this campaign care to explain how a war against Russia should be fought, how
many people will die, and how such a war could avoid a nuclear exchange leading to the destruction
of human civilization.
Behind the banner headlines and vituperative editorials, real steps are being taken to prepare
for warfare on a scale not seen for 60 years. Earlier this year, US Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark
A. Milley told the Association of the United States Army that the military must prepare for wars
against great powers, which will be "very highly lethal, unlike anything our Army has experienced
since World War II."
The campaign that has developed over the past two weeks makes clear what the policy of a Clinton
administration would have been. The Democratic Party and its allied media outlets have rooted their
opposition to Trump not on the basis of his losing the popular vote by nearly three million ballots,
or that he is appointing a cabinet dominated by right-wing, reactionary billionaires, bankers, business
executives and generals, but on the charge that he is "soft" on Russia. That is, the Democratic Party
has managed to attack Trump from the right.
Whatever the outcome of the conflict within the state, the American ruling class is preparing
for war. The dissolution of the USSR 25 years ago was greeted with enraptured declarations of an
era of perpetual peace, in which a world under the unrivaled hegemony of the United States would
be free of the wars that plagued mankind in the 20th century. Now, after a quarter century of bloody
regional conflicts, the blood-curdling declarations of the press make it clear that a new world war
is in the making.
Among broad sections of workers and young people, there is deep skepticism toward government
lies and hostility to war. However, this opposition can find no reflection within any faction of
the political establishment. The building of a new anti-war movement, based on the international
unity of the working class in opposition to capitalism and all the political parties of the ruling
class, is the urgent task.
Last week we reported that the State of Georgia had traced an attempted break-in to its voter
registration database to none other than the famous Russian government agency, the Department of
Homeland Security.
Now it has been revealed that Kentucky and West Virginia "have confirmed suspected cyberattacks
linked to the same U.S. Department of Homeland Security IP address as last month's massive attack
in Georgia". There must be some way to blame Moscow:
While there could be an "innocent" explanation for such attacks (testing network security, for
example), the Department of Homeland Security did not inform any of these states - before or
after the attacks - that they had been conducted, for security-checking purposes or otherwise. In
other words: These states still don't know why DHS targeted, and they're still waiting for an
answer:
In the past week, the Georgia Secretary of State's Office has confirmed 10 separate
cyberattacks on its network over the past 10 months that were traced back to DHS addresses.
"We're being told something that they think they have it figured out, yet nobody's really
showed us how this happened," Kemp said. "We need to know."
He says the new information from the two other states presents even more reason to be
concerned.
"So now this just raises more questions that haven't been answered about this and continues to
raise the alarms and concern that I have," Kemp said.
Georgia's Secretary of State says he has already sent an appeal to the incoming Trump
administration, asking for assistance in resolving this bizarre string of cyber attacks.
"... Danielle Ryan is an Irish freelance writer, journalist and media analyst. She has lived and traveled extensively in the US, Germany, Russia and Hungary. Her byline has appeared at RT, The Nation, Rethinking Russia, The BRICS Post, New Eastern Outlook, Global Independent Analytics and many others. She also works on copywriting and editing projects. Follow her on Twitter or Facebook or at her website www.danielleryan.net. ..."
According to the anonymous sources inside the anonymous US intelligence agency,
Putin's objectives were multifaceted, but the whole thing began as a "vendetta"
against Hillary Clinton because she said some mean things about him a few
times. Putin is also an "immature 12 year-old child," a former US official with
links to the defense industry, who spoke on condition of anonymity, confirmed
(with high confidence).
The high level, anonymous and completely trustworthy sources also told a major
US news agency that Putin himself had piloted a specially-designed Russian spy
plane across the Atlantic to personally direct the still-ongoing hacking
operations from the air.
via GIPHY
Satellite images seen by a separate anonymous NASA whistleblower are believed
to show Putin in the cockpit of the spy plane alongside his co-pilot Boris, a
lifelike robotic bear which has been under secret development in the depths of
Siberia and has been programmed to attack Putin's enemies on command using a
variety of lethal methods.
The NASA whistleblower did not provide journalists with photographic evidence,
but the editors had a chat about it in their morning meeting and concluded that
it's probably still true.
In fact, the American news agency could not verify any of the claims from the
officials who commented for the story, but given that their sources used the
term "high confidence" they took this to mean the evidence must be "nearly
incontrovertible" and relayed the information to the public with this
implication. An understandable decision, since, as we all know, only 100
percent factual information is ever released by anonymous intelligence
officials.
Okay, let's rewind.
Obviously that bit about the bear and the plane was
fake news. And maybe a few other bits, too. But it all demonstrates a point.
I've provided you with about the same amount of evidence as NBC has in its
story this week
claiming Putin personally rigged
the US election:
I made some allegations, I cited anonymous sources and then I conveyed it to
you readers as "nearly incontrovertible" and suggested no further digging or
investigation, or even a bit of healthy skepticism, was necessary.
Journalism is dying
There was a time when journalists needed more than 'maybes' and 'probablys'
before deciding what their sources told them was "incontrovertible" and
delivering half-baked conspiracy theories to the public. That time has
apparently long gone.
Imagine for a moment that RT published a story about, oh, let's say Barack
Obama personally hacking into Putin's computer. Now imagine the only evidence
RT provided was "anonymous FSB officials" and told its readers the story was
therefore practically indisputable because these anonymous sources were
"confident" in the legitimacy of their secret evidence. Imagine the laughs that
would get from sneering Western journalists. Well, that's pretty much exactly
what NBC did. And they're not alone. The
Washington Post
has been at
it too,
reporting on a "secret" CIA assessment that Russia worked to get Donald
Trump elected, quoting anonymous "top officials" and like NBC, providing no
evidence.
Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but for something to be presented to the
public as indisputable fact, there must be evidence made available to back it
up. Neither the CIA or the FBI have provided any such evidence to the public.
Perhaps the saddest thing though is having to acknowledge that all our debates
over fake news and real news really don't matter because the very people we are
told to trust are the people who will most adeptly use the public's concerns
over fake news to manipulate them. The CIA, for example, is hardly known for
its long history of telling the truth. Its employees are literally trained in
the art of deception and disinformation. They are hardly averse to creating a
bit of fake news or making up 'evidence' where needed. Anything they say or do
can be forgiven once someone utters the words "national security".
NBC's story claimed Putin not only wanted to embarrass Clinton with the DNC
leaks, but to highlight corruption in the American political system; the emails
showing, for example, how the DNC colluded with the Clinton campaign to ensure
Clinton, not Bernie Sanders, would be the Democratic nominee.
Now, what better way to encourage people to ignore the corruption in
the system than to focus their attention on the idea that Putin is the one who
told them about it? Are people really reading these stories and convincing
themselves that the CIA is the most credible source of public information on
what the Russians are doing?
Clinton's long-shot
We've been hearing about Russian hacking for months, long before the election
results in November, so why the sudden confidence in all this new and secret
evidence? Why the new assertions that Putin himself directed the hacking? Look
at your calendar. The Electoral College votes on Monday and it may be Clinton's
last hope. It's a long shot, but in true Clinton character, she won't go down
without a fight to the last gasp. Her best hope is to convince the Electoral
College that Trump's win was influenced by a foreign power, is therefore
illegitimate and that national security will be at stake if he takes office.
Amazingly, in the midst of all this, while Clinton's camp is still trying to
get her elected through back-door tactics, Obama has pretty much called the
election results
legitimate .
Members of the Electoral College are expected to vote the way their states
voted, but they are not required to. If Clinton can get enough members to flip
their votes, Trump is deprived of the 270 votes he needs to become president.
That's what this is really all about - and the media is serving as Clinton's
willing accomplice.
Danielle Ryan is an Irish freelance writer, journalist and media analyst.
She has lived and traveled extensively in the US, Germany, Russia and Hungary.
Her byline has appeared at RT, The Nation, Rethinking Russia, The BRICS Post,
New Eastern Outlook, Global Independent Analytics and many others. She also
works on copywriting and editing projects. Follow her on Twitter or Facebook or
at her website www.danielleryan.net.
Donald Trump won the electoral college at least in part by promising to bring coal jobs
back to Appalachia and manufacturing jobs back to the Rust Belt. Neither promise can be honored
– for the most part we're talking about jobs lost, not to unfair foreign competition, but to
technological change. But a funny thing happens when people like me try to point that out:
we get enraged responses from economists who feel an affinity for the working people of the
afflicted regions – responses that assume that trying to do the numbers must reflect contempt
for regional cultures, or something.
Is this the right narrative? I am no longer comfortable with this line:
for the most part we're talking about jobs lost, not to unfair foreign competition, but
to technological change.
Try to place that line in context with this from
Noah Smith:
Then, in the 1990s and 2000s, the U.S opened its markets to Chinese goods, first with Most
Favored Nation trading status, and then by supporting China's accession to the WTO. The resulting
competition from cheap Chinese goods contributed to vast inequality in the United States, reversing
many of the employment gains of the 1990s and holding down U.S. wages. But this sacrifice on
the part of 90% of the American populace enabled China to lift its enormous population out
of abject poverty and become a middle-income country.
Was this "fair" trade? I think not. Let me suggest this narrative: Sometime during the
Clinton Administration, it was decided that an economically strong China was good for both the
globe and the U.S. Fair enough. To enable that outcome, U.S. policy deliberately sacrificed manufacturing
workers on the theory that a.) the marginal global benefit from the job gain to a Chinese worker
exceeded the marginal global cost from a lost US manufacturing job, b.) the U.S. was shifting
toward a service sector economy anyway and needed to reposition its workforce accordingly and
c.) the transition costs of shifting workers across sectors in the U.S. were minimal.
As a consequence – and through a succession of administrations – the US tolerated implicit
subsidies of Chinese industries, including national industrial policy designed to strip production
from the US.
And then there was the currency manipulation. I am always shocked when international economists
claim "fair trade," pretending that the financial side of the international accounts is irrelevant.
As if that wasn't a big, fat thumb on the scale. Sure, "currency manipulation" is running the
other way these days. After, of course, a portion of manufacturing was absorbed overseas. After
the damage is done.
Yes, technological change is happening. But the impact, and the costs, were certainly accelerated
by U.S. policy.
It was a great plan. On paper, at least. And I would argue that in fact points a and b above
were correct.
But point c. Point c was a bad call. Point c was a disastrous call. Point c helped deliver
Donald Trump to the Oval Office. To be sure, the FBI played its role, as did the Russians. But
even allowing for the poor choice of Hilary Clinton as the Democratic nominee (the lack of contact
with rural and semi-rural voters blinded the Democrats to the deep animosity toward their candidate),
it should never have come to this.
As the opioid epidemic sweeps through rural America, an ever-greater number of drug-dependent
newborns are straining hospital neonatal units and draining precious medical resources.
The problem has grown more quickly than realized and shows no signs of abating, researchers
reported on Monday. Their study, published in JAMA Pediatrics, concludes for the first time
that the increase in drug-dependent newborns has been disproportionately larger in rural areas.
The latest causalities in the opioid epidemic are newborns.
The transition costs were not minimal.
My take is that "fair trade" as practiced since the late 1990s created another disenfranchised
class of citizens. As if we hadn't done enough of that already. Then we weaponized those newly
disenfranchised citizens with the rhetoric of identity politics. That's coming back to bite us.
We didn't really need a white nationalist movement, did we?
Now comes the big challenge: What can we do to make amends? Can we change the narrative? And
here is where I agree with Paul Krugman:
Now, if we want to have a discussion of regional policies – an argument to the effect that
my pessimism is unwarranted – fine. As someone who is generally a supporter of government activism,
I'd actually like to be convinced that a judicious program of subsidies, relocating government
departments, whatever, really can sustain communities whose traditional industry has eroded.
The damage done is largely irreversible. In medium-size regions, lower relative housing
costs may help attract overflow from the east and west coast urban areas. And maybe a program
of guaranteed jobs for small- to medium-size regions combined with relocation subsidies for very
small-size regions could help. But it won't happen overnight, if ever. And even if you could reverse
the patterns of trade – which wouldn't be easy given the intertwining of global supply chains
– the winners wouldn't be the same current losers. Tough nut to crack.
Bottom Line: I don't know how to fix this either. But I don't absolve the policy community
from their role in this disaster. I think you can easily tell a story that this was one big policy
experiment gone terribly wrong.
"... this will probably be in tomorrow's washington post. "how putin sabotaged the election by hacking yahoo mail". and "proton" and "putin" are 2 syllable words beginning with "p", which is dispositive according to experts who don't want to be indentified. ..."
"... [Neo]Liberals have gone truly insane, I made the mistake of trying to slog through the comments the main "putin did it" piece on huffpo out of curiosity. Big mistake, liberals come across as right wing nutters in the comments, I never knew they were so very patriotic, they never really expressed it before. ..."
"... Be sure and delete everything from your Yahoo account BEFORE you push the big red button. They intentionally wait 90 days to delete the account in order that ECPA protections expire and content can just be handed over to the fuzz. ..."
"... It's a good thing for Obama that torturing logic and evasive droning are not criminal acts. ..."
"... "Relations with Russia have declined over the past several years" I reflexively did a Google search. Yep, Victoria Nuland is still employed. ..."
"... With all the concern expressed about Russian meddling in our election process why are we forgetting the direct quid pro quo foreign meddling evidenced in the Hillary emails related to the seldom mentioned Clinton Foundation or the more likely meddling by local election officials? Why have the claims of Russian hacking received such widespread coverage in the Press? ..."
"... I watched it too and agree with your take on it. For all the build up about this press conference and how I thought we were going to engage in direct combat with Russia for these hacks (or so they say it is Russia, I still wonder about that), he did not add any fuel to this fire. ..."
"... The whole thing was silly – the buildup to this press conference and then how Obama handled the hacking. A waste of time really. I don't sense something is going on behind the scenes but it is weird that the news has been all about this Russian hacking. He did not get into the questions about the Electoral College either and he made it seem like Trump indeed is the next President. I mean it seems like the MSM was making too much about this issue but then nothing happened. ..."
this will probably be in tomorrow's washington post. "how putin sabotaged the election
by hacking yahoo mail". and "proton" and "putin" are 2 syllable words beginning with "p",
which is dispositive according to experts who don't want to be indentified.
[Neo]Liberals have gone truly insane, I made the mistake of trying to slog through the
comments the main "putin did it" piece on huffpo out of curiosity. Big mistake, liberals come
across as right wing nutters in the comments, I never knew they were so very patriotic, they never
really expressed it before.
Be sure and delete everything from your Yahoo account BEFORE you push the big red button. They
intentionally wait 90 days to delete the account in order that ECPA protections expire and content
can just be handed over to the fuzz.
I don't think I've looked at my yahoo account in 8-10 years and I didn't use their email; just
had an address. I don't remember my user name or password. I did get an email from them (to my
not-yahoo address) advising of the breach.
I was amazed as I watched a local am news show in Pittsburgh recommend adding your cell phone
number in addition to changing your password. Yeah, that's a great idea, maybe my ss# would provide
even more security.
I use yahoo email. Why should I move? As I understood the breach it was primarily a breach
of the personal information used to establish the account. I've already changed my password -
did it a couple of days after the breach was reported. I had a security clearance with DoD which
requires disclosure of a lot more personal information than yahoo had. The DoD data has been breached
twice from two separate servers.
As far as reading my emails - they may prove useful for phishing but that's about all. I'm
not sure what might be needed for phishing beyond a name and email address - easily obtained from
many sources I have no control over.
So - what am I vulnerable to by remaining at yahoo that I'm not already exposed to on a more
secure server?
Yeah, it isn't like Mr. 'We go high' is going to admit our relationship has declined because
we have underhandedly tried to isolate and knee cap them for pretty much his entire administration.
Are you referring to Obama's press conference? If so, I am glad he didn't make a big deal out
of the Russian hacking allegations - as in it didn't sound like he planned a retaliation for the
fictional event and its fictional consequences. He rose slightly in stature in my eyes - he's
almost as tall as a short flea.
With all the concern expressed about Russian meddling in our election process why are we forgetting
the direct quid pro quo foreign meddling evidenced in the Hillary emails related to the seldom
mentioned Clinton Foundation or the more likely meddling by local election officials? Why have
the claims of Russian hacking received such widespread coverage in the Press?
Why is a lameduck
messing with the Chinese in the South China sea? What is the point of all the "fake" news hogwash?
Is it related to Obama's expression of concern about the safety of the Internet? I can't shake
the feeling that something is going on below the surface of these murky waters.
I watched it too and agree with your take on it. For all the build up about this press conference
and how I thought we were going to engage in direct combat with Russia for these hacks (or so
they say it is Russia, I still wonder about that), he did not add any fuel to this fire.
He did
respond at one point to a reporter that the hacks from Russia were to the DNC and Podesta but
funny how he didn't say HRC emails. Be it as it may, I think what was behind it was HRC really
trying to impress all her contributors that Russia really did do her in, see Obama said so, since
she must be in hot water over all the money she has collected from foreign governments for pay
to play and her donors.
The whole thing was silly – the buildup to this press conference and then
how Obama handled the hacking. A waste of time really. I don't sense something is going on behind
the scenes but it is weird that the news has been all about this Russian hacking. He did not get
into the questions about the Electoral College either and he made it seem like Trump indeed is
the next President. I mean it seems like the MSM was making too much about this issue but then
nothing happened.
Unfortunately the nightly news is focusing on Obama says Russia hacked the DNC and had it in
for Clinton!!! He warned them to stay out of the vote! There will be consequences! Russia demands
the evidence and then a story about the evidence. (This one might have a few smarter people going
"huh, that's it?!?!")
I do like the some private some public on that consequences and retaliation thing. You either
have to laugh or throw up about the faux I've got this and the real self-righteousness. Especially
since it is supposedly to remind people we can do it to you. Is there anyone left outside of America
who doesn't think they already do do it to anyone Uncle Sam doesn't want in office and even some
they do? Mind you I'm not sure how many harried people watching the news are actually going to
laugh at that one because they don't know how how much we meddle.
"... Shorter Paul Krugman: nobody acted more irresponsibly in the last election than the New York Times. ..."
"... Looks like Putin recruited the NYT, the FBI and the DNC. ..."
"... Dr. Krugman is feeding this "shoot first, ask questions later" mentality. He comes across as increasingly shrill and even unhinged - it's a slide he's been taking for years IMO, which is a big shame. ..."
"... It is downright irresponsible and dangerous for a major public intellectual with so little information to cast the shadow of legitimacy on a president ("And it means not acting as if this was a normal election whose result gives the winner any kind of a mandate, or indeed any legitimacy beyond the bare legal requirements.") This kind of behavior is EXACTLY what TRUMP and other authoritarians exhibit - using pieces of information to discredit institutions and individuals. Since foreign governments have and will continue to try to influence U.S. policy through increasingly sophisticated means, this opens the door for anyone to declare our elections and policies as illegitimate in the future. ..."
"... Any influence Russian hacking had was entirely a consequence of U.S. media obsession with celebrity, gotcha and horse race trivia and two-party red state/blue state tribalism. ..."
"... Without the preceding, neither Trump nor Clinton would have been contenders in the first place. Putin didn't invent super delegates, Citizens United, Fox News, talk radio, Goldman-Sachs, etc. etc. etc. If Putin exploited vulnerabilities, it is because preserving those vulnerabilities was more important to the elites than fostering a democratic political culture. ..."
"... It's not a "coup". It's an election result that didn't go the way a lot of people want. That's it. It's probably not optimal, but I'm pretty sure that democracy isn't supposed to produce optimal results. ..."
"... All this talk about "coups" and "illegitimacy" is nuts, and -- true to Dem practice -- incredibly short-sighted. For many, voting for Trump was an available way to say to those people, "We don't believe you any more. At all." Seen in that light, it is a profoundly democratic (small 'd') response to elites that have most consistently served only themselves. ..."
"... Post Truth is Pre-Fascism. The party that thinks your loyalty is suspect unless you wear a flag pin fuels itself on Post Truth. Isnt't this absurdity the gist of Obama's Russia comments today!?! ..."
"... Unless the Russians or someone else hacked the ballot box machines, it is our own damn fault. ..."
"... The ship of neo-liberal trade sailed in the mid-2000's. That you don't get that is sad. You can only milk that so far the cow had been milked. ..."
"... The people of the United States did not have much to choose between: Either a servant of the Plutocrats or a member of the Plutocratic class. The Dems brought this on us when they refused to play fair with Bernie. (Hillary would almost certainly have won the nomination anyway.) ..."
"... The Repubs brought this on, by refusing to govern. The media brought this on: I seem to remember Hillary's misfeasances, once nominated, festering in the media, while Trump's were mentioned, and then disappeared. (Correct me if I'm wrong in this.) Also, the media downplayed Bernie until he had no real chance. ..."
"... The government brought this on, by failing to pursue justice against the bankers, and failing to represent the people, especially the majority who have been screwed by trade and the plutocratic elite and their apologists. ..."
"... The educational system brought this on, by failing to educate the people to critical thought. For instance: 1) The wealthy run the country. 2) The wealthy have been doing very well. 3) Everybody else has not. It seems most people cannot draw the obvious conclusion. ..."
"... Krugman is himself one of those most useful idiots. I do not recall his clarion call to Democrats last spring that "FBI investigation" and "party Presidential nominee" was bound to be an ugly combination. Some did; right here as I recall. Or his part in the official "don't vote for third party" week in the Clinton media machine....thanks, hundreds of thousands of Trump votes got the message. ..."
"... It's too rich to complain about Russia and Wikileaks as if those elements in anyway justified Clinton becoming President. Leaks mess with our democracy? Then for darn sure do not vote for a former Sec. of State willing to use a home server for her official business. Russia is menacing? Just who has been managing US-Russia relations the past 8 years? I voted for her anyway, but the heck if I think some tragic fate has befell the nation here. Republicans picked a better candidate to win this thing than we Democrats did. ..."
"... The truth of the matter is that Clinton was a very weak candidate with nothing to offer but narcissism ("I'm with her"). It's notable that Clinton has still not accepted responsibility for her campaign, preferring to throw the blame for the loss anywhere but herself. Sociopathy much? ..."
[ I find it terrifying, simply terrifying, to refer to people as "useful idiots" after all
the personal destruction that has followed when the expression was specifically used in the past.
To me, using such an expression is an honored economist intent on becoming Joseph McCarthy.
]
To demean a person as though the person were a communist or a fool of communists or the like,
with all the personal harm that has historically brought in this country, is cruel beyond my understanding
or imagining.
Well, not really. For example he referred to "the close relationship between Wikileaks and Russian
intelligence." But Wikileaks is a channel. They don't seek out material. They rely on people to
bring material to them. They supposedly make an effort to verify that the material is not a forgery,
but aside from that what they release is what people bring to them. Incidentally, like so many
people you seem to not care whether the material is accurate or not -- Podesta and the DNC have
not claimed that any of the emails are different from what they sent.
ZURICH - If Putin the Thug gets away with crushing Ukraine's new democratic experiment and
unilaterally redrawing the borders of Europe, every pro-Western country around Russia will be
in danger....
Yup, like the other elections, the bases stayed solvent and current events factored into the turnout
and voting patterns which spurred the independent vote.
When people were claiming Clinton was going to win big, I thought no Republican and Democratic
voters are going to pull the lever like a trained monkey as usual. Only difference in this election
was Hillary's huge negatives due entirely by her and Bill Clinton's support for moving manufacturing
jobs to Mexico and China in the 90s.
To Understand Trump, Learn Russian http://nyti.ms/2hLcrB1
NYT - Andrew Rosenthal - December 15
The Russian language has two words for truth - a linguistic quirk that seems relevant to our
current political climate, especially because of all the disturbing ties between the newly elected
president and the Kremlin.
The word for truth in Russian that most Americans know is "pravda" - the truth that seems evident
on the surface. It's subjective and infinitely malleable, which is why the Soviet Communists called
their party newspaper "Pravda." Despots, autocrats and other cynical politicians are adept at
manipulating pravda to their own ends.
But the real truth, the underlying, cosmic, unshakable truth of things is called "istina" in
Russian. You can fiddle with the pravda all you want, but you can't change the istina.
For the Trump team, the pravda of the 2016 election is that not all Trump voters are explicitly
racist. But the istina of the 2016 campaign is that Trump's base was heavily dependent on racists
and xenophobes, Trump basked in and stoked their anger and hatred, and all those who voted for
him cast a ballot for a man they knew to be a racist, sexist xenophobe. That was an act of racism.
Trump's team took to Twitter with lightning speed recently to sneer at the conclusion by all
17 intelligence agencies that the Kremlin hacked Democratic Party emails for the specific purpose
of helping Trump and hurting Hillary Clinton. Trump said the intelligence agencies got it wrong
about Iraq, and that someone else could have been responsible for the hack and that the Democrats
were just finding another excuse for losing.
The istina of this mess is that powerful evidence suggests that the Russians set out to interfere
in American politics, and that Trump, with his rejection of Western European alliances and embrace
of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, was their chosen candidate.
The pravda of Trump's selection of Rex Tillerson, head of Exxon Mobil, as secretary of state
is that by choosing an oil baron who has made billions for his company by collaborating with Russia,
Trump will make American foreign policy beholden to American corporate interests.
That's bad enough, but the istina is far worse. For one thing, American foreign policy has
been in thrall to American corporate interests since, well, since there were American corporations.
Just look at the mess this country created in Latin America, the Caribbean, Southeast Asia and
the Middle East to serve American companies.
Yes, Tillerson has ignored American interests repeatedly, including in Russia and Iraq, and
has been trying to remove sanctions imposed after Russia's seizure of Crimea because they interfered
with one of his many business deals. But take him out of the equation in the Trump cabinet and
nothing changes. Trump has made it plain, with every action he takes, that he is going to put
every facet of policy, domestic and foreign, at the service of corporate America. The istina here
is that Tillerson is just a symptom of a much bigger problem.
The pravda is that Trump was right in saying that the intelligence agencies got it wrong about
Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction.
But the istina is that Trump's contempt for the intelligence services is profound and dangerous.
He's not getting daily intelligence briefings anymore, apparently because they are just too dull
to hold his attention.
And now we know that Condoleezza Rice was instrumental in bringing Tillerson to Trump's attention.
As national security adviser and then secretary of state for president George W. Bush, Rice was
not just wrong about Iraq, she helped fabricate the story that Hussein had nuclear weapons.
Trump and Tillerson clearly think they are a match for the wily and infinitely dangerous Putin,
but as they move foward with their plan to collaborate with Russia instead of opposing its imperialist
tendencies, they might keep in mind another Russian saying, this one from Lenin.
"There are no morals in politics; there is only expedience," he wrote. "A scoundrel may be
of use to us just because he is a scoundrel."
Putin has that philosophy hard-wired into his political soul. When it comes to using scoundrels
to get what he wants, he is a professional, and Trump is only an amateur. That is the istina of
the matter.
If nothing else, Russia - with a notably un-free press - has shrewdly used our own 'free press'
against US.
RUSSIA'S UNFREE PRESS
The Boston Globe - Marshall Goldman - January 29, 2001
AS THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION DEBATES ITS POLICY TOWARD RUSSIA, FREEDOM OF THE PRESS SHOULD BE
ONE OF ITS MAJOR CONCERNS. UNDER PRESIDENT VLADIMIR PUTIN THE PRESS IS FREE ONLY AS LONG AS IT
DOES NOT CRITICIZE PUTIN OR HIS POLICIES. WHEN NTV, THE TELEVISION NETWORK OF THE MEDIA GIANT
MEDIA MOST, REFUSED TO PULL ITS PUNCHES, MEDIA MOST'S OWNER, VLADIMIR GUSINSKY, FOUND HIMSELF
IN JAIL, AND GAZPROM, A COMPANY DOMINATED BY THE STATE, BEGAN TO CALL IN LOANS TO MEDIA MOST.
Unfortunately, Putin's actions are applauded by more than 70 percent of the Russian people. They
crave a strong and forceful leader; his KGB past and conditioned KGB responses are just what they
seem to want after what many regard as the social, political, and economic chaos of the last decade.
But what to the Russians is law and order (the "dictatorship of the law," as Putin has so accurately
put it) looks more and more like an old Soviet clampdown to many Western observers.
There is no complaint about Putin's promises. He tells everyone he wants freedom of the press.
But in the context of his KGB heritage, his notion of freedom of the press is something very different.
In an interview with the Toronto Globe and Mail, he said that that press freedom excludes the
"hooliganism" or "uncivilized" reporting he has to deal with in Moscow. By that he means criticism,
especially of his conduct of the war in Chechnya, his belated response to the sinking of the Kursk,
and the heavy-handed way in which he has pushed aside candidates for governor in regional elections
if they are not to Putin's liking.
He does not take well to criticism. When asked by the relatives of those lost in the Kursk
why he seemed so unresponsive, Putin tried to shift the blame for the disaster onto the media
barons, or at least those who had criticized him. They were the ones, he insisted, who had pressed
for reduced funding for the Navy while they were building villas in Spain and France. As for their
criticism of his behavior, They lie! They lie! They lie!
Our Western press has provided good coverage of the dogged way Putin and his aides have tried
to muscle Gusinsky out of the Media Most press conglomerate he created. But those on the Putin
enemies list now include even Boris Berezovsky, originally one of Putin's most enthusiastic promoters
who after the sinking of the Kursk also became a critic and thus an opponent.
Gusinsky would have a hard time winning a merit badge for trustworthiness (Berezovsky shouldn't
even apply), but in the late Yeltsin and Putin years, Gusinsky has earned enormous credit for
his consistently objective news coverage, including a spotlight on malfeasance at the very top.
More than that, he has supported his programmers when they have subjected Yeltsin and now Putin
to bitter satire on Kukly, his Sunday evening prime-time puppet show.
What we hear less of, though, is what is happening to individual reporters, especially those
engaged in investigative work. Almost monthly now there are cases of violence and intimidation.
Among those brutalized since Putin assumed power are a reporter for Radio Liberty who dared to
write negative reports about the Russian Army's role in Chechnia and four reporters for Novaya
Gazeta. Two of them were investigating misdeeds by the FSB (today's equivalent of the KGB), including
the possibility that it rather than Chechins had blown up a series of apartment buildings. Another
was pursuing reports of money-laundering by Yeltsin family members and senior staff in Switzerland.
Although these journalists were very much in the public eye, they were all physically assaulted.
Those working for provincial papers labor under even more pressure with less visibility. There
are numerous instances where regional bosses such as the governor of Vladivostok operate as little
dictators, and as a growing number of journalists have discovered, challenges are met with threats,
physical intimidation, and, if need be, murder.
True, freedom of the press in Russia is still less than 15 years old, and not all the country's
journalists or their bosses have always used that freedom responsibly. During the 1996 election
campaign, for example, the media owners, including Gusinsky conspired to denigrate or ignore every
viable candidate other than Yeltsin. But attempts to muffle if not silence criticism have multiplied
since Putin and his fellow KGB veterans have come to power. Criticism from any source, be it an
individual journalist or a corporate entity, invites retaliation.
When Media Most persisted in its criticism, Putin sat by approvingly as his subordinates sent
in masked and armed tax police and prosecutors. When that didn't work, they jailed Gusinsky on
charges that were later dropped, although they are seeking to extradite and jail him again. along
with his treasurer, on a new set of charges. Yesterday the prosecutor general summoned Tatyana
Mitkova, the anchor of NTV's evening news program, for questioning. Putin's aides are also doing
all they can to prevent Gusinsky from refinancing his debt-ridden operation with Ted Turner or
anyone else in or outside of the country.
According to one report, Putin told one official, You deal with the shares, debts, and management
and I will deal with the journalists. His goal simply is to end to independent TV coverage in
Russia. ...
"Unfortunately, Putin's actions are applauded by more than 70 percent of the Russian people"
Exactly; the majority of people are so stupid and/or lazy that they cannot be bothered understanding
what is going on; and how their hard won democracy is being subjugated. But thank God that is
in Russia not here in the US - right?
"Pravda" is etymologically derived from "prav-" which means "right" (as opposed to "left", other
connotations are "proper", "correct", "rightful", also legal right). It designates the social-construct
aspect of "righteousness/truthfulness/correctness" as opposed to "objective reality" (conceptually
independent of social standards, in reality anything but). In formal logic, "istina" is used to
designate truth. Logical falsity is designated a "lie".
It is a feature common to most European languages that rightfulness, righteousness, correctness,
and legal rights are identified with the designation for the right side. "Sinister" is Latin for
"left".
If you believe 911 was a Zionist conspiracy, so where the Paris attacks of November 2015, when
Trump was failing in the polls as the race was moving toward as you would expect, toward other
candidates. After the Paris attacks, his numbers reaccelerated.
If "ZOG" created the "false flag" of the Paris attacks to start a anti-Muslim fervor, they
succeeded, much like 911. Bastille day attacks were likewise, a false flag. This is not new, this
goes back to when the aristocracy merged with the merchant caste, creating the "bourgeois". They
have been running a parallel government in the shadows to effect what is seen.
There used to be something called Usenet News, where at the protocol level reader software could
fetch meta data (headers containing author, (stated) origin, title, etc.) independently from comment
bodies. This was largely owed to limited download bandwidth. Basically all readers had "kill files"
i.e. filters where one could configure that comments with certain header parameters should not
be downloaded, or even hidden.
The main application was that the reader would download comments in the background when headers
were already shown, or on demand when you open a comment.
Now you get the whole thing (or in units of 100) by the megabyte.
A major problem is signal extraction out of the massive amounts of noise generated by the media,
social media, parties, and pundits.
It's easy enough to highlight this thread of information here, but in real time people are
being bombarded by so many other stories.
In particular, the Clinton Foundation was also regularly being highlighted for its questionable
ties to foreign influence. And HRC's extravagant ties to Wall St. And so much more.
The media's job was to sell Trump and denounce Clinton. The mistake a lot of people make is thinking
the global elite are the "status quo". They are not. They are generally the ones that break the
status quo more often than not.
The bulk of them wanted Trump/Republican President and made damn sure it was President. Buffering
the campaign against criticism while overly focusing on Clinton's "crap". It took away from the
issues which of course would have low key'd the election.
Not much bullying has to be applied when there are "economic incentives". The media attention
economy and ratings system thrive on controversy and emotional engagement. This was known a century
ago as "only bad news is good news". As long as I have lived, the non-commercial media not subject
(or not as much) to these dynamics have always been perceived as dry and boring.
I heard from a number of people that they followed the campaign "coverage" (in particular Trump)
as gossip/entertainment, and those were people who had no sympathies for him. And even media coverage
by outlets generally critical of Trump's unbelievable scandals and outrageous performances catered
to this sentiment.
First, let me disclose that I detest TRUMP and that the Russian meddling has me deeply concerned.
Yet...
We only have assertions that the Russian hacking had some influence. We do not know whether
it likely had *material* influence that could have reasonably led to a swing state(s) going to
TRUMP that otherwise would have gone to HRC.
Dr. Krugman is feeding this "shoot first, ask questions later" mentality. He comes across
as increasingly shrill and even unhinged - it's a slide he's been taking for years IMO, which
is a big shame.
It is downright irresponsible and dangerous for a major public intellectual with so little
information to cast the shadow of legitimacy on a president ("And it means not acting as if this
was a normal election whose result gives the winner any kind of a mandate, or indeed any legitimacy
beyond the bare legal requirements.") This kind of behavior is EXACTLY what TRUMP and other authoritarians
exhibit - using pieces of information to discredit institutions and individuals. Since foreign
governments have and will continue to try to influence U.S. policy through increasingly sophisticated
means, this opens the door for anyone to declare our elections and policies as illegitimate in
the future.
It is quite clear that the Russians intervened on Trump's behalf and that this intervention had
an impact. The problem is that we cannot actually quantify that impact.
"We only have assertions that the Russian hacking had some influence."
Any influence Russian hacking had was entirely a consequence of U.S. media obsession with
celebrity, gotcha and horse race trivia and two-party red state/blue state tribalism.
Without the preceding, neither Trump nor Clinton would have been contenders in the first
place. Putin didn't invent super delegates, Citizens United, Fox News, talk radio, Goldman-Sachs,
etc. etc. etc. If Putin exploited vulnerabilities, it is because preserving those vulnerabilities
was more important to the elites than fostering a democratic political culture.
But this is how influence is exerted - by using the dynamics of the adversary's/targets organization
as an amplifier. Hierarchical organizations are approached through their management or oversight
bodies, social networks through key influencers, etc.
I see this so much and it's so right wing cheap: I hate Trump, but assertions that Russia intervened
are unproven.
First, Trump openly invited Russia to hack DNC emails. That is on its face treason and sedition.
It's freaking on video. If HRC did that there would be calls of the right for her execution.
Second, a NYT story showed that the FBI knew about the hacking but did not alert the DNC properly
- they didn't even show up, they sent a note to a help desk.
This was a serious national security breach that was not addressed properly. This is criminal
negligence.
This was a hacked election by collusion of the FBI and the Russian hackers and it totally discredits
the FBI as it throwed out chum and then denied at the last minute. Now the CIA comes in and says
PUTIN, Trump's bff, was directly involved in manipulating the timetable that the hacked emails
were released in drip drip form to cater to the media - creating story after story about emails.
It was a perfect storm for a coup. Putin played us. And he will play Trump. And God knows how
it ends. But it doesn't matter b/c we're all screwed with climate change anyway.
"It was a perfect storm for a coup. Putin played us. And he will play Trump. And God knows how
it ends. But it doesn't matter b/c we're all screwed with climate change anyway."
It's not a "coup". It's an election result that didn't go the way a lot of people want.
That's it. It's probably not optimal, but I'm pretty sure that democracy isn't supposed to produce
optimal results.
All this talk about "coups" and "illegitimacy" is nuts, and -- true to Dem practice --
incredibly short-sighted. For many, voting for Trump was an available way to say to those people,
"We don't believe you any more. At all." Seen in that light, it is a profoundly democratic (small
'd') response to elites that have most consistently served only themselves.
Trump and his gang will be deeply grateful if the left follows Krugman's "wisdom", and clings
to his ever-changing excuses. (I thought it was the evil Greens who deprived Clinton of her due?)
Post Truth is Pre-Fascism. The party that thinks your loyalty is suspect unless you wear a
flag pin fuels itself on Post Truth. Isnt't this absurdity the gist of Obama's Russia comments
today!?!
"On Wednesday an editorial in The Times described Donald Trump as a "useful idiot" serving Russian
interests." I think that is beyond the pale. Yes, I realize that Adolph Hitler was democratically
elected. I agree that Trump seems like a scary monster under the bed. That doesn't mean we have
too pee our pants, Paul. He's a bully, tough guy, maybe, the kind of kid that tortured you before
you kicked the shit out of them with your brilliance. That's not what is needed now.
What really is needed, is a watchdog, like Dean Baker, that alerts we dolts of pending bills and
their ramifications. The ship of neo-liberal trade bullshit has sailed. Hell, you don't believe
it yourself, you've said as much. Be gracious, and tell the truth. We can handle it.
The experience of voting for the Hill was painful, vs Donald Trump.
The Hill seemed like the least likely aristocrat, given two choices, to finish off all government
focus on the folks that actually built this society. Two Titans of Hubris, Hillary vs Donald,
each ridiculous in the concept of representing the interests of the common man.
At the end of the day. the American people decided that the struggle with the unknown monster
Donald was worth deposing the great deplorable, Clinton.
The real argument is whether the correct plan of action is the way of FDR, or the way of the industrialists,
the Waltons, the Kochs, the Trumps, the Bushes and the outright cowards like the Cheneys and the
Clintons, people that never spent a day defending this country in combat. What do they call it,
the Commander in Chief.
My father was awarded a silver and a bronze star for his efforts in battle during WW2. He was
shot in the face while driving a tank destroyer by a German sniper in a place called Schmitten
Germany.
He told me once, that he looked over at the guy next to him on the plane to the hospital in
England, and his intestines were splayed on his chest. It was awful.
What was he fighting for ? Freedom, America. Then the Republicans, Ronald Reagan, who spent the
war stateside began the real war, garnering the wealth of the nation to the entitled like him.
Ronald Reagan was a life guard.
Anthony Weiner
Podesta
Biden (for not running)
Tim Kaine (for accepting the nomination instead of deferring to a latino)
CNN and other TV news media (for giving trump so much coverage- even an empty podium)
Donna Brazile
etc.
The people of the United States did not have much to choose between: Either a servant of the
Plutocrats or a member of the Plutocratic class. The Dems brought this on us when they refused
to play fair with Bernie. (Hillary would almost certainly have won the nomination anyway.)
The Repubs brought this on, by refusing to govern. The media brought this on: I seem to
remember Hillary's misfeasances, once nominated, festering in the media, while Trump's were mentioned,
and then disappeared. (Correct me if I'm wrong in this.) Also, the media downplayed Bernie until
he had no real chance.
The government brought this on, by failing to pursue justice against the bankers, and failing
to represent the people, especially the majority who have been screwed by trade and the plutocratic
elite and their apologists.
The educational system brought this on, by failing to educate the people to critical thought.
For instance: 1) The wealthy run the country. 2) The wealthy have been doing very well. 3) Everybody
else has not. It seems most people cannot draw the obvious conclusion.
The wealthy brought this on. For 230 years they have, essentially run this country. They are
too stupid to be satisfied with enough, but always want more.
The economics profession brought this on, by excusing treasonous behavior as efficient, and
failing to understand the underlying principles of their profession, and the limits of their understanding.
(They don't even know what money is, or how a trade deficit destroys productive capacity, and
thus the very ability of a nation to pay back the debts it incurs.)
The people brought this on, by neglecting their duty to be informed, to be educated, and to
be thoughtful.
Anybody else care for their share of blame? I myself deserve some, but for reasons I cannot
say.
What amazes me now is, the bird having shown its feathers, there is no howl of outrage from
the people who voted for him. Do they imagine that the Plutocrats who will soon monopolize the
White House will take their interests to heart?
As far as I can tell, not one person of 'the people' has been appointed to his cabinet. Not
one. But the oppressed masses who turned to Mr Trump seem to be OK with this.
I can only wonder, how much crap will have to be rubbed in their faces, before they awaken to
the taste of what it is?
Eric377 : , -1
Krugman is himself one of those most useful idiots. I do not recall his clarion call to Democrats
last spring that "FBI investigation" and "party Presidential nominee" was bound to be an ugly
combination. Some did; right here as I recall. Or his part in the official "don't vote for third
party" week in the Clinton media machine....thanks, hundreds of thousands of Trump votes got the
message.
It's too rich to complain about Russia and Wikileaks as if those elements in anyway justified
Clinton becoming President. Leaks mess with our democracy? Then for darn sure do not vote for
a former Sec. of State willing to use a home server for her official business. Russia is menacing?
Just who has been managing US-Russia relations the past 8 years? I voted for her anyway, but the
heck if I think some tragic fate has befell the nation here. Republicans picked a better candidate
to win this thing than we Democrats did.
The truth of the matter is that Clinton was a very weak candidate with nothing to offer
but narcissism ("I'm with her"). It's notable that Clinton has still not accepted responsibility
for her campaign, preferring to throw the blame for the loss anywhere but herself. Sociopathy
much?
This has made me cynical. I used to think that at least *some* members of the US political
elite had the best interests of ordinary households in mind, but now I see that it's just ego
vs. ego, whatever the party.
As for democracy being on the edge: I believe Adam Smith over Krugman: "there is a lot of ruin
in a nation". It takes more than this to overturn an entrenched institution.
I think American democracy will survive a decade of authoritarianism, and if it does not, then
H. L. Mencken said it best: "The American people know what they want, and they deserve to get
it -- good and hard."
The agitprop out of the White House isn't working these days, thanks to the advent of fake
news of course. Following weeks of hysteria, following Donald J. Trump's triumphant victory of
Hillary Clinton and Obama's legacy, Obama took to the podium for one last time to divide
Americans -- this time invoking the revered late President Ronald Reagan -- saying he'd be
'rolling over in his grave' now had he known that over a third of republicans approve of Putin in
some random poll.
If Obama truly wants to know why Americans are willing to accept the words of Putin,
undoubtedly a strong man leader, over his -- he should take a look in the mirror and then gander
over to his computer to re-read all of the Wikileaks from John Podesta's email that Putin so
graciously made available to us all. They speak volumes about the corruptness and the rot
permeating in our capitol. Even without the emails, we see the neocon strategy of persistent war
and deceit hollowing out this nation -- devouring its resources, emptying its treasury, and there
is nothing redeeming about it.
During the press conference, Obama provided his media with incontrovertible evidence that
Russia was behind the WikiLeaks, saying 'not much happens in Russia without Putin's approval.'
Russia has a land mass of 6,592,800 sq miles and Putin controls every single inch of it. This is
retard level thinking.
Moreover, Obama says he told Putin to 'cut it out' when he last saw him in China, warning him
of serious consequences. Luckily for us, Putin got scared and ceased all further hackings.
However, the damage had already been done and the Wikileaks released.
I suppose this type of lazy thinking appeals to a certain subset of America, else why would he
make such infantile statements?
The Divider in Chief, one last time reminding himself and the press that XENOPHOBIA against
Russians is good. The Russians are a useless sort, who produce nothing of interest, a very small
and weak country, only capable of wiping out the entirety of America 10x over via very large
nuclear detonations. Oh, and you pesky republicans love Putin because you're sooo political.
This is what some might call 'idiotic diplomacy', mocking and deriding a rival nation to the
point of war, a war that could exterminate life on planet earth for at least a millennia. Genius.
Assuming these "rogue-Electors" from the Electoral College
get a briefing on the "Russian election-hack" from the CIA
, and assuming the
Electors have a few working brain cells, and assuming they care, here are the top 11
questions they should ask the CIA presenter.
Questions One through Three (repeated with enthusiasm and fervor):
Are you just
going to feed us generalities and tell us you can't detail specifics because that would
compromise your methods and personnel? We can read the generalities in the Washington
Post, whose owner, Jeff Bezos, chief honcho at Amazon, has a $600 million contract with
the CIA to provide cloud computing services, so he and the Post and the CIA are in bed
together.
Question Four:
We need a precise
distinction here. How did "Russia hacked the DNC, Hillary, Podesta, and Weiner emails
and fed the emails to WikiLeaks who released them" suddenly morph into "Russia hacked
the election vote"?
Question Five:
The security systems
that protected the DNC, Hillary, Podesta, and Weiner emails were so feeble a child could
have gotten past them in a few minutes. Why should we assume high-level Russian agents
were involved?
Question Six:
Not only does the CIA
have a history of lying to the American people, lying is part of your job description.
Why should we believe you? Take your time. We can have food brought in.
Question Seven:
We're getting the
feeling you're talking down to us as if we're the peasants and you're the feudal barons.
Why is that? Do you work for us, or do we work for you? Once upon a time, before you
went to work for the Agency, were you like us, or were you always arrogant and
dismissive?
Question Eight:
Let's put aside for a
moment the question of who leaked all those emails. What about the substance and content
of the emails? Was all that forged or was it real? If you claim there was forgery, prove
it. Put a dozen emails up on that big screen and take us through them, piece by piece,
and show us where and how the forgery occurred. By the way, why didn't you allow us to
bring several former NSA analysts into this briefing? Are we living in the US or the
USSR?
Question Nine:
Are you personally a
computer expert, sir? Or are you merely relaying what someone else at the CIA told you?
Would you spell your name for us again? What is your job description at the Agency? Do
you work in public information? Are you tasked with "being convincing"?
Question Ten:
Do you think we're
completely stupid?
Question Eleven:
Let's all let our
hair down, okay? Forget facts and specifics. Of course we want to overthrow the election
and install Hillary Clinton in the Oval Office. So do you. We're on the same team. But
we need you to give us something, anything. So far, this briefing is embarrassing. Once
we get out of here, we want to tell a few persuasive lies. Give us a Russian name, any
name. Or a location in Russia we can use. The brand name of a Russian vodka. Caviar.
Something that sounds Russian. Make up a code with letters and numbers. Help us out. How
about the name of an American who who's actually a Russian spy? You could shoot him
later today in a "gun battle at a shopping mall." That would work.
Good luck.
(To read about Jon's mega-collection,
Power
Outside The Matrix
,
click here
.)
We encourage you to share and republish our reports, analyses,
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Contributed by Jon Rappoport of
No More Fake News .
The author of an explosive collection,
THE
MATRIX REVEALED , Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the
29th District of California. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an
investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health
for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines
in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics,
health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world.
Podesta essentially gave up his email due to committed by him blunder: sending his password to the
attacker. As such it was far from high-end hacking, which can be attributed to intelligence
agencies. It is more like a regular, primitive phishing expedition
which became successful due to Podesta blunder. So this is not hacking but phishing
expedition... That makes big difference.
Notable quotes:
"... The DNC hackers inserted the name of the founder of Russian intelligence, in Russian, in the metadata of the hacked documents. Why would the G.R.U., Russian military intelligence do that? ..."
"... If the hackers were indeed part of Russian intelligence, why did they use a free Russian email account, or, in the hack of the state election systems, a Russian-owned server? Does Russian intelligence normally display such poor tradecraft? ..."
"... Why would Russian intelligence, for the purposes of hacking the election systems of Arizona and Illinois, book space on a Russian-owned server and then use only English, as documents furnished by Vladimir Fomenko, proprietor of Kings Servers, the company that owned the server in question, clearly indicate? ..."
"... Numerous reports ascribe the hacks to hacking groups known as APT 28 or "Fancy Bear" and APT 29 or "Cozy Bear." But these groups had already been accused of nefarious actions on behalf of Russian intelligence prior to the hacks under discussion. Why would the Kremlin and its intelligence agencies select well-known groups to conduct a regime-change operation on the most powerful country on earth? ..."
"... The joint statement issued by the DNI and DHS on October 7 2016 confirmed that US intelligence had no evidence of official Russian involvement in the leak of hacked documents to Wikileaks, etc, saying only that the leaks were " consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts." Has the US acquired any evidence whatsoever since that time regarding Russian involvement in the leaks? ..."
It is being reported that John Podesta, Chairman of the defeated $1.2 billion Clinton presidential
campaign, is supporting the call by various officials, including at least forty Electors, that the
members of the Electoral College be given a classified intelligence briefing on the alleged Russian
hacking before the College votes on December 19.
In the event such a briefing comes to pass, it might be helpful if the Electors had some informed
questions to ask the CIA
The DNC hackers inserted the name of the founder of Russian intelligence, in Russian,
in the metadata of the hacked documents. Why would the G.R.U., Russian military intelligence
do that?
If the hackers were indeed part of Russian intelligence, why did they use a free Russian
email account, or, in the hack of the state election systems, a Russian-owned server?
Does Russian intelligence normally display such poor tradecraft?
Why would Russian intelligence, for the purposes of hacking the election systems of Arizona
and Illinois, book space on a Russian-owned server and then use only English, as documents furnished
by Vladimir Fomenko, proprietor of Kings Servers, the company that owned the server in question,
clearly indicate?
Numerous reports ascribe the hacks to hacking groups known as APT 28 or "Fancy Bear" and
APT 29 or "Cozy Bear." But these groups had already been accused of nefarious actions on
behalf of Russian intelligence prior to the hacks under discussion. Why would the Kremlin
and its intelligence agencies select well-known groups to conduct a regime-change operation on
the most powerful country on earth?
It has been reported in the New York Times , without attribution, that U.S. intelligence
has identified specific G.R.U. officials who directed the hacking. Is this true, and if so, please
provide details (Witness should be sworn)
The joint statement issued by the DNI and DHS on October 7 2016 confirmed that US intelligence
had no evidence of official Russian involvement in the leak of hacked documents to Wikileaks,
etc, saying only that the leaks were " consistent with the methods and motivations
of Russian-directed efforts." Has the US acquired any evidence whatsoever since that time
regarding Russian involvement in the leaks?
Since the most effective initiative in tipping the election to Donald Trump was the intervention
of FBI Director Comey, are you investigating any possible connections he might have to Russian
intelligence and Vladimir Putin?
by
Gary Leupp
Mainstream TV news anchors including MSNBC's Chris Hayes are reporting as fact---with
fuming indignation---that Russia (and specifically Vladimir Putin) not only sought to
influence the U.S. election (and---gosh!---promote "doubt" about the whole legitimacy
of the U.S. electoral system) but to throw the vote to Donald Trump.
The main
accusation is that the DNC and Podesta emails leaked through Wikileaks were provided
by state-backed Russian hackers (while they did not leak material hacked from the
Republicans). I have my doubts on this. Former U.S. ambassador to Uzbekistan and
torture whistle-blower Craig Murray, a friend of Julian Assange, has stated that the
DNC emails were leaked by a DNC insider whose identity he knows. The person, Murray
contends, handed the material over to him, in a D.C. park. I have met Murray, admire
and am inclined to believe him. (I just heard now that John Bolton, of all people,
has also opined this was an inside job.)
Putin Lashes Out At Obama: "Show Some Proof Or Shut Up"
Tyler Durden
Dec 16, 2016 9:09 AM
0
SHARES
Putin has had enough of the relentless barrage of US accusations that he, personally,
"hacked the US presidential election."
The Russian president's spokesman, Dmitry
Peskov, said on Friday that the US must either stop accusing Russia of meddling in its
elections or prove it. Peskov said it was "indecent" of the United States to
"groundlessly" accuse Russia of intervention in its elections.
"You need to either stop talking about it, or finally show some kind of
proof. Otherwise it just looks very indecent
", Peskov told Reporters in Tokyo
where Putin is meeting with Japan PM Abe, responding to the latest accusations that
Russia was responsible for hacker attacks.
Peskov also warned that Obama's threat to "retaliate" to the alleged Russian hack is
"against both American and international law", hinting at open-ended escalation should
Obama take the podium today at 2:15pm to officially launch cyberwar against Russia.
Previously, on Thursday, Peskov told the AP the report was "
laughable
nonsense
", while Russian foreign ministry spox Maria Zakharova accused "Western
media" of being a "shill" and a "mouthpiece of various power groups", and added that
"it's not the general public who's being manipulated," Zakharova said. "the general
public nowadays can distinguish the truth. It's the mass media that is manipulating
themselves."
Meanwhile, on Friday Sergei Lavrov, Russia's foreign minister told state television
network, Russia 24, he was "dumbstruck" by the NBC report which alleges that Russian
President Vladimir Putin was personally involved in an election hack.
The report cited U.S. intelligence officials that now believe with a "high level of
confidence" that Putin became personally involved in a secret campaign to influence the
outcome of the U.S. presidential election.
"I think this is just silly, and the
futility of the attempt to convince somebody of this is absolutely obvious,"
Lavrov added, according to the news outlet.
As a reminder,
last night Obama vowed retaliatory
action against Russia for its meddling in the US
presidential election last month. "I think there is no doubt that when any foreign
government tries to impact the integrity of our elections that we need to take action
and we will at a time and place of our own choosing," Obama told National Public Radio.
US intelligence agencies in October pinned blame on Russia for election-related
hacking. At the time, the White House vowed a "proportional response" to the
cyberactivity, though declined to preview what that response might entail. Meanwhile,
both President-elect Donald Trump, the FBI,
and the ODNI
have dismissed the CIA's intelligence community's assessment, for the
the same reason Putin finally lashed out at Obama: there is no proof.
That, however, has never stopped the US from escalating a geopolitical conflict to
the point of war, or beyond, so pay close attention to what Obama says this afternoon.
According to an
NBC report
, a team of analysts at Eurasia Group said in a note on Friday that they
believe the outgoing administration
is likely to take action which could result
in a significant barrier for Trump's team once he takes office in January
.
"It is unlikely that U.S. intelligence reports will change Trump's intention to
initiate a rapprochement with Moscow,
but the congressional response following
its own investigations could obstruct the new administration's effort
," Eurasia
Group analysts added.
At the same time, Wikileaks offered its "validation" services, tweeting that "
Obama
should submit any Putin documents to WikiLeaks to be authenticated to our standards if
he wants them to be seen as credible.
"
Obama should submit any Putin documents to WikiLeaks to be
authenticated to our standards if he wants them to be seen as credible.
And orchestrated by Mossad/CIA Millions upon millions of
ordinary folks just got up and voted to take out the trash, and
by God their will be done. If we don't remove the cancerous
tumors now, they will regrow and regroup and in our weakened
state it will be GAME OVER.
The sad part is they are spinning this as election tampering when
in fact there was none, some decent human beings found out the
truth of how corrupt, evil, and treasonous these people are and
wanted the American public to know.
You can tell they are
desperate now, I just hope the law enforcement community is ready
to uphold their oath.
False testimony to Congress on NSA surveillance programs
[
edit
]
Excerpt of James Clapper's testimony before the Senate Select Committee
on Intelligence
On March 12, 2013, during a
United
States Senate
Select
Committee on Intelligence
hearing, Senator
Ron
Wyden
quoted the keynote speech at the 2012
DEF
CON
by the director of the NSA,
Keith
B. Alexander
. Alexander had stated that "Our job is foreign
intelligence" and that "Those who would want to weave the story that we have
millions or hundreds of millions of dossiers on people, is absolutely
false From my perspective, this is absolute nonsense." Senator Wyden then
asked Clapper, "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or
hundreds of millions of Americans?" He responded "No, sir." Wyden asked "It
does not?" and Clapper said "Not wittingly. There are cases where they could
inadvertently, perhaps, collect, but not wittingly."
[30]
When
Edward
Snowden
was asked during his January 26, 2014 TV interview in Moscow
what the decisive moment was or why he blew the whistle, he replied: "Sort
of the breaking point was seeing the Director of National Intelligence,
James Clapper, directly lie under oath to Congress. Seeing that really
meant for me there was no going back."
[31]
This is the man reponsible for the newest lie to the American people. Are
you serious?
This asshole jack off obozo wants to start WW3 with Russia for Soros and all
his globalist neocon pals BEFORE he leaves office. His pals shoveled out way
too much money to get that dirty corrupt, crooked pig Hillary elected. The
anti-Trump street protests, riots, burning, pillaging and looting didn't work.
The recount directed by the Hillary stooge Jill Stein actually got Trump more
votes so this didn't work. So now we go with "fake news" accusations against
Russia and Putin. The assholes in our goverment pushing this theme are the
dirty fucking crooks we voted against by voting for Donald Trump. They won't go
down without a fight. So today at 2:15PM ET Obozo will do his best to get the
actual war with Russia on deck!!!
The war mongering neocons won't stop until we have
literally minutes to live. Russia has underground facilitities for 70% of the
citizens in the Russian Federation. In the US only the so-called elites have
some underground place to hide. Like that would save them anyway as it would be
delayed death from Cobalt bombs. We peons and serfs will simply be vaporized
immediately into non-existance. Obozo and his minions and handlers know this
and don't give a fuck.
Obozo and those around him are insane and believe that a
nuclear war with Russia is winnable. The truth is that the world will not even
be fit for human life after a full scale nuclear, chemical and biological
exchange. Who thinks it stops at nuclear? Russia inherited the WMD arsenal of
the Soviet Union. There are enough chemical and biological weapons in the
Russian Federation to kill everyone on earth twenty times.
This is real simple. Obama and Hillary got their asses kicked by Putin in the
Ukraine, Crimea, and Syria because Putin was honest and acted out of integrity
and real concern for his people, and Obama and Hillary were evil and
pathological liars and up to no good, and acted out of a lust for power,
control over others, and stealing their resources. And now the two pathetic
losers want revenge. And this is their vile attempt at trying to get it.
We're laughing at you Hillary and Obama. You are a disgrace to your country and
the human race.
You must remember something here - we laid it on for Vlad / Serg. Our
governments made it so easy for them to play the white knights, they didn't
even need to try. Russian administration is just like any other - the
machine - but we fucked up so tragically bad in our foreign policy conduct
that just going against the unilateral actions of US / NATO / UN has won
Russians major support in Western societies, sick to the back teeth of the
media game BS.
Our elites came to believe that the world is theirs. That
they can take what they want. Citizenry hasn't been best pleased due to
cognitive dissonance ("shining house on the hill" =/= 500k dead Iraqis
"worth it"). Enter the Russians: central admin personnel = expert level 120,
conservative social values, non-interventionist foreign policy, always
stressing legality / due process. They showed us up. Simple as. They were
the first to dare point at our naked emperors.
They also have guns. Lots of guns, and big ones too. We will never really
fight them head on - we wouldn't stand a chance. Not with their society
coalescing around the govt, and ours hating the guts out of our elites. We'd
get stomped.
To quote Joseph Goebbels "If you tell a lie big enough and keep
repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it." There are several
things going on. MSM and deep state were counting on a Hillary Clinton victory
and continued US bellicose posturing against Russia. The deep state is also
apoplectic about the military debacle in Syria. The ministry of propaganda-
corporate media (owned by 6 large corporations; Link:
www.wakingtimes.com/2015/08/28/the-illusion-of-choice-90-of-american-media-controlled-by-6-corporations
)
has been saturating the airwaves and social media with ongoing stories about
Russian "hacking" which are probably nonsense. A far more likely scenario is
this "hacking" was carried out by people with intimate knowledge of Hillary
Clinton's background, her email correspondence and location of servers where
this information was stored/archived, such as people in the FBI, CIA, DHS or
State Dept. These hacked messages were then forwarded to Judicial Watch,
WikiLeaks or contacts in Russia or China to cover their tracks.
This might be of interest-
Former NSA Officer – CIA Lying About Russians Hacking DNC By Jim W. Dean Dec
14, 2016; Link:
www.veteranstoday.com/2016/12/14/former-nsa-officer-cia-lying-about-russians-hacking-dnc
Bottom line is that fierce battles are going on between completing
economic factions who run the US. Both groups are pursuing increasingly
reckless and bellicose foreign policies which are likely to lead to direct
military confrontations with Russia and China.
I'm a cyber security professional with over 30 years experience and several
certifications. Hackers with apparent Russian ties (not necessarily the
Russian government) have been involved in global hacking efforts for many
years. So have the Chinese. So has everyone else, including the US.
None of
this may be true at all, because hackers that know what they're doing never
leave a trail behind. EVER. And if they do leave a trail, it's almost always
a false flag -- which means that what you think you see is not actually where
it came from. It's highly unlikely that sophisticated hackers connected with
the Russian government would be stupid enough to leave anything behind that
identified who they were or where they operated from.
I'm calling BS on this whole thing, for two reasons. One -- the
"election" wasn't hacked, the DNC was -- and their extremely dirty laundry
aired. We now know for certain that the Democrats are a bunch of liars,
thieves, and hooligans that could care less about the country. And two -- the
politicization of this by Obama is nauseating. The likelihood that anyone knows
for certain that the Russian government was behind it is about zero or less.
Yesterday, Julian Assange emphatically stated on Sean Hannity's radio show that
the Russians had absolutely no involvement in the Wikileaks hacks. I'll
believe Assange before the Obama administration or US media shills. Assange
has never been proven wrong.
The Associated Press and the New York Times are repeating, word for word,
whatever CIA and CIA-in-Chief says, and then all Vatican-controlled
newspapers are printing the AP and NYT articles. Big dose of CIA in my
local newspaper today, and yesterday, and every day since, at least,
Merrimack College pointed the way toward The One True Propaganda, with its
junior-professor-of-how-Hollywood-and-TV-portray-overweight-people's
omniscient and omnipotent list of "Fake News Sites". Still waiting for the
Pope to endorse this list: maybe when Rome Freezes Over.
The article nails an important point. The purpose of this exercise is to
sabotage any Trump attempts for a rapprochement with Russia. Peace with major
powers is bad for business and Obama's Zionist masters need war to advance
their one world government plans.
Obama knows no moral compass and will
do anything, say anything, to get the treats from his masters that a faithful
lap dog believes it deserves.
Some of the racist quotes here I can't uptick, that said it was classic Obama
from the trump speech telling EVERYONE in advance what he was going to do
military wise. That is disapointing. Lets assume that China, Russia, and many
other capable state actors did hack Hillary's server? Lets go the route of
occums razor and assume that as a truth. That does not excuse the behavior and
sheer stupidity of:
Setting up an illegal server anyway, AFTER hillary
requested and was denied a phone like the POTUS.
Emails show NSA rejected Hillary Clinton's request for secure smartphone
So let us start here! Keep in mind she lost numerous devices, the stupid
cunt kept loosing her phones and misplacing them.
Then Hillary hell bent on having her own private communication system
circumvents the DOS and sets up her own! At the point where that decision was
made there was no longer any attack against the United States of America but
instead an attack against a politician leaking state level data on a non-secure
media. If anyone should be held accountable it should be Hillary despite
INTENT, yes Hillary.
But it gets better folks!
Then we have the DNC and Weiner hacks, and the DNC and the RNC are not
actual offices of government, There is no fucking .gov address behind the DNC
or GOP. The nice lady who runs the local GOP isn't a vetted government
employee and used some poor habits in her handling of data, she was ignorant of
a BCC and the security of doing so. (to her credit she learned quickly) ***
side note
And then finally there was Weiners emails. These emails were on a
non-government device/computer and seemed to have been traversed by yahoo. So
you have these stupid fucking people doing the following: Using Yahoo, DNC,
and Gov systems utilizing the same passwords. BUT IT GETS BETTER
So now a phishing attack at one account podesta becomes a swiss cheese
attack as numerous vectors are exploited, did the Russians hack weiner and put
the emails on his device? It is with password complexity, password expiration,
and non-passowrd reuse that government can ensure that you don't use the same
password on Yahoo that you use at .gov sites. It is by using multi-factor
authentication and geo location that a .gov account can be authenticated and
authorized.
But what we have is a bunch of assholes who mishandled the peoples data or
governmnet data and it was never their personal data! It was either the data
of the united states in which case Hillary should be fucking charged or it was
not and she is a stupid fucking victim like the other billion or so yahoo
hacks.
So now we got Obama just like Trump said, telling the world what we are
going to do before we do it for optimal results.. lets tell russia in
advance.. we will attack at noon...for what has been characterized as yoga
emails on non-government systems by the attorney general.
This is why I hate the elites, this is why I never needed Russia to do
anything to votes against these incompetent and ridiculous assholes.
As Obama leaves offce remember that this observation is concise and made
from an educated and unbiased persepctive of handling government data.
The echo cjhamber that Obama lives in has become as insular as that of
Hillary. And damn these people for their confusion of conviction with fact.
And finally.. we beat the democrats in PA the good old fashioned way.. we were
grassroots and not astro-turf.
***** The local GOP website was being cyber-squated when I volunteered, an
email of so from me on blacklisting it and there ads would not have shut them
down, but it would have hit them in the pocket and caused monetary disruption,
they released the expired domain and stopped squatting, the local head of the
GOP, defintly not .gov but "GOP" was being blocked by email systems because she
would send out GOP emails to an email list with 100 or so recipients and the
spam filters thought it was spam or a virus. So I explained to her how to use
BCC tools, and our communication improved. I didn't want my email shared with
everyone anyway! But the DNC and GOP ain't fucking government.. at best these
people are like televangelists which is like hollywood for ugly people.
I can say this, I have an ENORMOUS respect for the local GOP, I have come to
like many of them. I don't agree with them on everything but never has so few,
worked so hard, to empower so many more to volunteer and win an election. And
to their credit shown the right way changed, they didn't piss and moan.
Good observations, sir. People like you are the reason ZH is so useful for
enlightenment.
I should add that if Hillary was claiming to lose her
phone, then Hillary probably wasn't losing her phone all the time. She was
probably periodically destroying it to destroy evidence. Burn phones or
burners are a common technique among criminals to minimize the evidence
available if/when they get caught.
Looks to me like Obola and his cabal are trying to cause as much friction as
possible with Russia before he leaves office.
This garbage allegation about
Putin being personally involved in hacking the US election, the recent
announcement of supplying more weapons to terrorists in Syria, recent wild
allegations of Russian genocide in Syria (whilst ignoring Syrian people waving
and cheering when the SAA arrived in Allepo) and threats to begin a cyberwar
are all designed to do this.
Obama has acted like a CIA employee for 8 years. He lied to get into office
and he's lied ever since, just like the CIA teaches its employees to do. The
CIA is not bound by US or international law and they could give a shit about
our Constitution, our laws, or our elections, as long as their preferred
candidate gets in of course. Are we currently any better than the Nazis?
Conquering other countries is the same regardless if you do it covertly or
not, regardless of how many lies you say or not. These people must be stopped.
Unfortunately it might take mass civil unrest to bring the changes we need.
Stealing the election from Trump and handing it to a criminal like Clinton may
be the spark. Let's hope there are enough people left with integrity and
intelligence in DC to do the right thing.
There is no concept of a open courtroom to decide contentious technical issues
like. This . Cozy bear, whatever bear
'more than i can' bear. A jury of fair minded people can decide when a good
adversarial courtroom encounter occurs.
I would like to see Trey Gowdy defending Putin against whatever CIA stooge they
send up. Obama has a lot of gall to complain about hacking when Hillary,
Podesta, and the run DNC gang was so careless that a very amateur
hacking/phishing effort would be sufficient to do this break in. Then there is
the assertion that some disgruntled democratic people leaked the whole works-
from the inside- being mad at Hillary over Bernie I guess.
If the US wants as gentlemen agreement not to read each others mail, maybe
we could pursue that but hacking Putin and sending NGO's to undermine him, the
numerous color revolutions from George Soros in Ukraine, Georgia, ... make it
seem to me that Putin is the aggrieved party here, now being threatened by
Obama personally. Everybody snoops on everybody. Israel, Russia, US and the
five eyes, China, ... but when it gets personal like this Putin Obama threat
thing, we could cross a line, like an obscure assassination of the Austrian
Archduke by some Serbian did. Putin is a serious fellow and not somebody to
threaten without consequences. We may think he sees it as just posturing, and
we better hope it stops right there. If the Clinton mob can't win, they may
decide to bring the house down on everybody.
Obama: "I am, of course, not speaking about the real, live Vladimir Putin. I
am speaking about our CIA cardboard-cutout caricature of Vladimir Putin. We
ALWAYS have a number of cardboard-cutouts in stock, of various people, to blame
for whatever goes wrong next.
"....while Russian foreign ministry spox Maria Zakharova accused "Western
media" of being a "shill" and a "mouthpiece of
various power groups
",
and added that "it's not the general public who's being manipulated," Zakharova
said. "
the general public nowadays can distinguish the truth
. It's the
mass
media that is manipulating themselves
.""
Can you effin believe
such a statement made by the Russian gubmint - and that it is
true
?
This whole affair screams one thing and one thing only: politics. And dirty,
childish, Democrat politics at that. COULD the Russian government have hacked
the DNC? Sure, anything is possible. Is it likely? NO. Government-sponsored
hackers don't leave telltale signs as to who they are, they leave false flags
and a trail of breadcrumbs that lead nowhere or to places they want you to
think the hack came from. Anyone smart enough to hack the DNC isn't going to
do anything to reveal who they are. Not even accidentally.
The overseers of the U.S. intelligence community have not embraced a CIA assessment that Russian
cyber attacks were aimed at helping Republican President-elect Donald Trump win the 2016 election,
three American officials said on Monday.
While the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) does not dispute the CIA's analysis
of Russian hacking operations, it has not endorsed their assessment because of a lack of conclusive
evidence that Moscow intended to boost Trump over Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton, said the officials,
who declined to be named .
An ODNI spokesman declined to comment on the issue.
"ODNI is not arguing that the agency (CIA) is wrong, only that they can't prove intent," said
one of the three U.S. officials. "Of course they can't, absent agents in on the decision-making in
Moscow."
The Federal Bureau of Investigation, whose evidentiary standards require it to make cases that
can stand up in court, declined to accept the CIA's analysis – a deductive assessment of the available
intelligence – for the same reason, the three officials said
But all of them, without exception, accept that the Democrats' server was hacked by Russia, and
that it was Russia who leaked the information through Wikileaks, and that Russia also hacked the
Republicans but declined to release incriminating or influential material it had in its possession.
There is, to my knowledge, no evidence of this, either.
Vladimir Putin's Valdai Speech at the XIII Meeting (Final Plenary Session) of the Valdai International
Discussion Club (Sochi, 27 October 2016)
As is his usual custom, Russian President Vladimir Putin delivered a speech at the final session
of the annual Valdai International Discussion Club's 13th meeting, held this year in Sochi, before
an audience that included the President of Finland Tarja Halonen and former President of South Africa
Thabo Mbeki. The theme for the 2016 meeting and its discussion forums was "The Future in Progress:
Shaping the World of Tomorrow" which as Putin noted was very topical and relevant to current developments
and trends in global politics, economic and social affairs.
Putin noted that the previous year's Valdai Club discussions centred on global problems and crises,
in particular the ongoing wars in the Middle East; this fact gave him the opportunity to summarise
global political developments over the past half-century, beginning with the United States' presumption
of having won the Cold War and subsequently reshaping the international political, economic and social
order to conform to its expectations based on neoliberal capitalist assumptions. To that end, the
US and its allies across western Europe, North America and the western Pacific have co-operated in
pressing economic and political restructuring including regime change in many parts of the world:
in eastern Europe and the Balkans, in western Asia (particularly Afghanistan and Iraq) and in northern
Africa (Libya). In achieving these goals, the West has either ignored at best or at worst exploited
international political, military and economic structures, agencies and alliances to the detriment
of these institutions' reputations and credibility around the world. The West also has not hesitated
to dredge and drum up imaginary threats to the security of the world, most notably the threat of
Russian aggression and desire to recreate the Soviet Union on former Soviet territories and beyond,
the supposed Russian meddling in the US Presidential elections, and apparent Russian hacking and
leaking of emails related to failed US Presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton's conduct as
US Secretary of State from 2008 to 2012.
After his observation of current world trends as they have developed since 1991, Putin queries
what kind of future we face if political elites in Washington and elsewhere focus on non-existent
problems and threats, or on problems of their own making, and ignore the very real issues and problems
affecting ordinary people everywhere: issues of stability, security and sustainable economic development.
The US alone has problems of police violence against minority groups, high levels of public and private
debt measured in trillions of dollars, failing transport infrastructure across most states, massive
unemployment that either goes undocumented or is deliberately under-reported, high prison incarceration
rates and other problems and issues indicative of a highly dysfunctional society. In societies that
are ostensibly liberal democracies where the public enjoys political freedoms, there is an ever-growing
and vast gap between what people perceive as major problems needing solutions and the political establishment's
perceptions of what the problems are, and all too often the public view and the elite view are at
polar opposites. The result is that when referenda and elections are held, predictions and assurances
of victory one way or another are smashed by actual results showing public preference for the other
way, and polling organisations, corporate media with their self-styled "pundits" and "analysts" and
governments are caught scrambling to make sense of what just happened.
Putin points out that the only way forward is for all countries to acknowledge and work together
on the problems that challenge all humans today, the resolution of which should make the world more
stable, more secure and more sustaining of human existence. Globalisation should not just benefit
a small plutocratic elite but should be demonstrated in concrete ways to benefit all. Only by adhering
to international law and legal arrangements, through the charter of the United Nations and its agencies,
can all countries hope to achieve security and stability and achieve a better future for their peoples.
To this end, the sovereignty of Middle Eastern countries like Iraq, Syria and Yemen should be
respected and the wars in those countries should be brought to an end, replaced by long-term plans
and programs of economic and social reconstruction and development. Global economic development and
progress that will reduce disparities between First World and Third World countries, eliminate notions
of "winning" and "losing", and end grinding poverty and the problems that go with it should be a
major priority. Economic co-operation should be mutually beneficial for all parties that engage in
it.
Putin also briefly mentioned in passing the development of human potential and creativity, environmental
protection and climate change, and global healthcare as important goals that all countries should
strive for.
While there's not much in Putin's speech that he hasn't said before, what he says is typical of
his worldview, the breadth and depth of his understanding of current world events (which very, very
few Western politicians can match), and his preferred approach of nations working together on common
problems and coming to solutions that benefit all and which don't advantage one party's interests
to the detriment of others and their needs. Putin's approach is a typically pragmatic and cautious
one, neutral with regards to political or economic ideology, but one focused on goals and results,
and the best way and methods to achieve those goals.
One interesting aspect of Putin's speech comes near the end where he says that only a world with
opportunities for everyone, with access to knowledge to all and many ways to realise creative potential,
can be considered truly free. Putin's understanding of freedom would appear to be very different
from what the West (and Americans in particular) understand to be "freedom", that is, being free
of restraints on one's behaviour. Putin's understanding of freedom would be closer to what 20th-century
Russian-born British philosopher Isaiah Berlin would consider to be "positive freedom", the freedom
that comes with self-mastery, being able to think and behave freely and being able to choose the
government of the society in which one lives.
The most outstanding point in Putin's speech, which unfortunately he does not elaborate on further,
given the context of the venue, is the disconnect between the political establishment and the public
in most developed countries, the role of the mass media industry in reducing or widening it, and
the dangers that this disconnect poses to societies if it continues. If elites continue to pursue
their own fantasies and lies, and neglect the needs of the public on whom they rely for support (yet
abuse by diminishing their security through offshoring jobs, weakening and eliminating worker protection,
privatising education, health and energy, and encouraging housing and other debt bubbles), the invisible
bonds of society – what might collectively be called "the social contract" between the ruler and
the ruled – will disintegrate and people may turn to violence or other extreme activities to get
what they want.
An English-language transcript of the speech can be found at
this link .
On watching the "Keiser Report " on the imperial blowback against independent media, it strikes me
that the MSM are as to the Papacy as the new media are to Martin Luther:
"... That those scheming Russians were clever enough to hack into voting machines, but not clever enough to cover their tracks? ..."
"... It's strangely reminiscent of the days of the Red scare, minus the Reds. ..."
"... The displaced machinists in the industrial midwest, whose votes helped put Trump in the White House, believe that free trade deals are responsible for their economic woes and they never trusted Clinton's turn against the TPP. ..."
"... was Clinton's campaign for you, bereft of principle and pathologically concerned with "optics" at the expense of substance. ..."
"... They were so confident of their inevitable victory that they wrote off the old industrial states in favor of luring upscale suburbanites who normally vote Republican. They hoped they would be so revolted by Trump that they would vote for her, but they didn't. ..."
"... It's panic over loss of control. They aren't pondering ways to make things better for the American people. Not in the Beltaway. Not the duoploy. The handwringing is strictly about control and pasification of the population. ..."
"... The long, long list of dodgy-donors to The Clinton Foundation told large numbers of Democrat voters everything they needed to know about a potential Hillary Clinton presidency. This, and the 'knifing' of Bernie, sealed her fate. ..."
"... America will never, and should never, forgive Debbie Wasserman-Schultz. ..."
"... At last! Someone on this newspaper talking common sense. ..."
"... Absurd! She was a rich white hawkish neolib who has no one but herself and the Democratic Pary to blame for the terrible loss which will seal the supreme court for years. Face facts!! She couldn't even beat Trump and was widely viewed as a fraud. ..."
"... The person who lost the Presidential Election in USA is Hillary Clinton. She, like Blair is a war monger. I, if I had a vote, would not have voted for her. ..."
"... If she had been elected we would have had bigger and better wars in the Middle East. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan never ended despite Obama calling the Iraq war a "strategic mistake". One that continued for another eight years. To those two we have added Syria and Lybia. ..."
"... " ...reflecting on how baseless our self-image as the world's greatest democracy is. " The rest of the world has known that for decades. ..."
"... I don't understand how accurate reporting by Wikileaks of politicians' emails is considered 'interference' with the US elections. To me, it seems helpful. If a US newspaper made the report, they would probably get a prize. If a foreign organization made the report, so what? People abroad are free (I hope) to comment on US matters, and people in the US are free to read it or not. ..."
"... Perhaps they mean the Guardian's politics. Identity politics has been thoroughly rejected and instead of learning from the experience, Guardian has been electing to throw more of the same tactics, except louder ..."
"... Americans across the political spectrum are happy to use Putin to distract them from reflecting on how baseless our self-image as the world's greatest democracy is. ..."
"... You're absolutely right. Putin is the boogeyman for every ill, real or purported, of his own society, and when the American political system and its institutions prove to be broken, Putin gets to be the boogeyman for that, too. What a powerful man! He must be pleased. ..."
"... This is an ultimate truth because it explains why Merkel will not be elected. These days Putin is in full control of the world and is responsible for everything. ..."
"... Let's thank Hillary for that. There is a very good news: on the 20th January we'll cut all Saudi supply channels to the IS and kill all the bastards within 2 months. ..."
"... In the modern world it is enough to do nothing to be a good man, eg if Bush, Blair, Obama and Clinton didn't create ISIS, the world would be a much better place. You do not even need to be smart to understand this. ..."
"... It's crazy. Even if the Russian hacking claims are legitimate, the leaks still revealed things about the Democrats that were true. It's like telling your friend that their spouse is cheating on them, and then the spouse blaming you for ruining the marriage. ..."
"... The Clinton campaign spent like drunken sailors, on media. This is a new role for the media giants that took care of Clinton's every need, including providing motivational research and other consultants. ..."
"... The ongoing scenario that now spins around Putin as a central figure is a product of "after shock media". ..."
"... To weave fictional reality in real time for a mass audience is a magnum leap from internet fake news. This drama is concocted to keep DNC from going into seclusion until the inauguration. ..."
"... Doug Henwood is absolutely correct. This obsession with the supposed foreign interference is baseless. All the real culprits operate within our own system. ..."
"... Trump's embrace of Russia and decision to end the neocon-neoliberal agenda of regime change skewer two of the corporate establishment's cash cows - arms sales to the numerous conflicts in the Middle East initiated by the corporate cabal, and arms sales to NATO and all the new post Cold War NATO members to continue the buildup of armaments on Russia's borders." ..."
"... I'd love to be pleasantly surprised, and I note that already Trump's campaign has put down TWO odious political dynasties, AND the TPP -- all very healthy developments. ..."
"... The only thing that kept the contest somehow close was the unprecedented all-media fear campaign against Trump. ..."
"... It was always Hillary's election to lose and she lost it simply because she was not to be trusted. Her very public endorsement by gangster capitalist Jay-Z told you all you needed to know about who she represented. ..."
"... I was dubious before, but I'm now actively concerned. This crop of Democrats and their deep state cohorts are unhinged and dangerous. They see me and my families' lives as an externality in their eventual war with Russia. As Phyrric a victory as there could possibly be. They are psychotic; not only waging countless coups and intelligence operations abroad, but now in plain sight on American soil. The mainstream media seems to invoke the spirit of Goebbels more vividly with each passing day. Their disdain and manipulation of the general populace is chilling. They see us not as people to be won-over, but as things to be manipulated, tricked and coerced. Nothing new for politicians (particularity the opposition) - but the levels here are staggering. ..."
"... January couldn't come soon enough - and I say that as strong critic of Trump. ..."
"... A good article to counterbalance the reams of rubbish we are hearing in the US election post-mortem. Anyone who had neural activity should have known that when you steal the candidacy, you certainly won't get the votes. Clinton effectively handed the election to Trump by not having the humility, humanity and honesty to admit defeat by Benie Sanders. ..."
"... There's always the possibility of course, that the US establishment realised Clinton's blatant warmongering wasn't 'good for business'. ..."
"... So maybe, they thought, we can get the Russkies 'on side', deal with China (ie. reduce it to a 'client state'/ turn it into an ashtray) - and then move on Russia and grab all those lovely resources freed up by global warming.... ..."
"... Only her campaign volunteers knew, her message to the public was "dont vote for Trump" which translates to, I could lose to him, vote for me! ..."
"... The Podesta emails confirmed what many people already suspected and knew of Hillary and her campaign. Those who were interested in reading them had to actually look for them, since MSM was not reporting on them. It's not as if an avid MSNBC or CNN watcher was going to be exposed. ..."
"... It's hilarious how the major Left outlets (Washington Post) are now telling it's readers how Russia is to blame for people voting against Hillary due to the Podesta emails, when they didn't even report on the emails in the first place. ..."
"... EVERYTHING about the system all halfway decent people detest, is summed up in the figure of Hillary Clinton. ..."
"... Like Donald said, she had 'experience', but it was all BAD 'experience'. ..."
"... she is a frail, withered old woman who needs to retire - def the wrong democrat choice, crazy -- Berni.S would have won if for them - he is far more sincere ..."
"... "The displaced machinists... believe that free trade deals are responsible for their economic woes and they never trusted Clinton's turn against the TPP. But that was Clinton's campaign for you, bereft of principle and pathologically concerned with "optics" at the expense of substance." ..."
"... This argument is as asinine as the one the author opposes. It was a collusion of events that led to this result, including the failure of both parties to adapt to an evolving economic and social climate over decades. The right wing hailing the collapse of liberalism as a result of decades of liberal mismanagement conveniently forget their own parties have held the reins for half that time, and failed just as miserably as the left.... ..."
"... It's quite bizarre to see "progressives" openly side with the military industrial complex, which is threatened by a president elect weary of more warfare. ..."
"... It's to be expected from career politicians like McCain who is kicking and screaming, but it's shameful to see supposed liberally-minded people help spread the Red Scare storyline. ..."
"... Obama has behaved dreadfully, first he or his office gets one of its poodles namely MI6 to point the finger at Putin re cyberwar, which was swiftly followed by the International Olympic Committee looking at Russia for 2012 Olympic games, the elections in the US and the Democrats CIA coming out with unsubstantiated nonsense (funny how they never like, providing collaborative evidence - on this or anything that supposedly Russia has done) then there is Syria, and Obama and the Democrats were the cheerleader for regime change, because they have been out manoeuvred in that sphere. All of it in less than a week. ..."
"... If Obama, the administration, and the CIA were smart they would have realised that a concerted effort to blame Putin / Russia would be seen for what it is - a liar and one of trying to discredit both the outcome of the US elections, the dislike of HRC, and her association with Wall St. - she raised more money for her campaign than Trump and Sanders put together (if the Democrats had chosen Sanders, then they would have stood a chance) and that their hawk would not be in a position to create WW111 - thank goodness. The Democrats deserved what they got. ..."
"... This organ of the liberal media (no scare quotes required - it is socially liberal and economically neoliberal), along with many others, dogmatically supported Clinton against Sanders to the point of printing daily and ridiculous dishonesty, even going so far as to make out as if anyone who supports any form of wealth redistribution is a racist, sexist, whitesplaining dude-bro. ..."
"... The Wikileaks emails proved the votes were rigged against Sanders, it why Debbie W Shulz had to resign ..."
"... The election was close, and if one less thing had gone wrong for Hillary she would have won. However I think an important thing that lost her the election was identity politics. She patronized Afro-Americans and Hispanics, by tell them that because they are Trump-threatened minorities, they should vote for her. In the same vein, gays and women were supposed to vote for her. But what she was really telling these groups was that they should revel in their supposed victimhood, which was not a great message. ..."
"... Completely agreed! The onus for defeat belongs to the Democrat party leadership as well. Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders both understood where the momentum of the election was headed before anyone else did. The election was won and lost in the white blue collar Midwest. A place that decided that diet corporatism is decidedly worse than a populist right wing extremist. ..."
"... No one here believed the ridiculous about-face Hillary pulled on the question of the TPP. I guarantee you Bernie would have cleaned Trump's clock in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and perhaps Ohio and Iowa. ..."
"... "Our self-image as the world's greatest democracy...." Well, speaking for myself and plenty of other Americans, I never said anything like that about us. In fact, like a lot of people I wish we would stick to our own business, quit trying to be the world's cop, and cease meddling in other countries' affairs. ..."
"... Assuming that it really was the Russians who done it, I guess they had a better game plan than the Saudis. ..."
"... Her 'deplorables' comment was every bit as telling as Mitt Romney's '47%'. We really needed to know about her 'public versus private positions', even if it only confirmed what everybody already knew. I am not 100% sure the system made the worst choice in raising up Donald Trump. ..."
"... The American voters heard a steady stream of these arguments. Some may have simply ignored them. Others took them into consideration, but concluded that they wanted drastic change enough to put them aside. White women decided that Trump's comments, while distasteful, were things they'd heard before. ..."
"... Reliance on the sanctity of racial and gender pieties was a mistake. Not everyone treats these subjects as the holiest of holies. The people who would be most swayed by those arguments never would have voted for Trump anyways. ..."
"... Colin Powell said Clinton destroys everything she touches with hubris. Seeing as how she destroyed the democrat "blue wall" and also had low turnout which hurt democrats down the ticket I agree. ..."
"... All this hysteria about the USA and Russia finally working together than apart doesn't help either for it appears that the [neoliberal] lefties want a perpetual war rather than peace. ..."
"... The CIA being outraged about a foreign state intervening in an election is quite funny. They have intervened so many times, especially in Latin America, to install puppet regimes. ..."
"... As for hacking... does anybody believe the CIA has never hacked anybody? ..."
Hillary Clinton was the symbol of neoliberal globalization and contept of neoliberal for common
poeple (aka deplorable). That's why she lost. this is more of the first defeat of neoliberal
candidate in the USA then personal defeat of Hillary. She was just a symbol, or puppet, if you wish.
... ... ...
And what exactly are the claims made by these Putin-did-it stories? That were it not for Russian
chicanery, Hillary Clinton would have won the popular vote by five million and not almost three million?
That displaced machinists on the banks of Lake Erie were so incensed by the Podesta emails that they
voted for Trump instead of Clinton? That Putin was pulling FBI director James Comey's strings in
his investigation of the Clinton emails? That those scheming Russians were clever enough to hack
into voting machines, but not clever enough to cover their tracks?
It's strangely reminiscent of the days of the Red scare, minus the Reds.
... ... ...
The displaced machinists in the industrial midwest, whose votes helped put Trump in the White
House, believe that free trade deals are responsible for their economic woes and they never trusted
Clinton's turn against the TPP. But that was Clinton's campaign for you, bereft of principle
and pathologically concerned with "optics" at the expense of substance.
They were so confident of their inevitable victory that they wrote off the old industrial
states in favor of luring upscale suburbanites who normally vote Republican. They hoped they would
be so revolted by Trump that they would vote for her, but they didn't.
... ... ...
Of course there are questions about our voting machines. The American balloting system is a chaotic
mess, with an array of state and local authorities conducting elections under a vast variety of rules
using technologies ranging from old-fashioned paper ballots to sleek touch-screen devices.
The former take forever to count, and the latter are unauditable – we can have no idea whether
the counts are accurate. The whole system is a perfect example of a quote attributed (probably falsely)
to Joseph Stalin: "The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide
everything." It's not a system that inspires trust, but we barely discuss that.
It's panic over loss of control. They aren't pondering ways to make things better for the
American people. Not in the Beltaway. Not the duoploy. The handwringing is strictly about control
and pasification of the population.
And you're shocked? I'm shocked you expected more.
The really amazing story about the presidential elections 2016 was actually not Clinton or Trump.
It was how close the US actually got to get its first socialist, or factually rather social-democratic
president. Americans are craving for more justice and equality.
And no, Clinton does not stand for any "left values". Therefore the media favored her.
The long, long list of dodgy-donors to The Clinton Foundation told large numbers of Democrat
voters everything they needed to know about a potential Hillary Clinton presidency. This, and
the 'knifing' of Bernie, sealed her fate. A reincarnated Tricky Dicky would have trounced
her, too.
Weird in your mind only. A letter just before the election suggesting that Clinton might be indicted?
And was she? Of course not. Match the letter's release with the polls at the time to see it's
influence.
Clinton's problems such as her email server were nothing compared to all the baggage that Trump
carries, yet Trump's problems were blithely ignored by many because they thought Trump would make
a difference.
At last! Someone on this newspaper talking common sense.
For the last twenty years, (way before we even knew Putin's name) the Republican Party have
promoted, fomented and instigated the most ludicrous lies and calumnies about the Democratic Party
and particularly Hilary Clinton, who they quite rightly recognised as a future Democratic Presidential
candidate.
They have politicised: education, defense, Federal Parks, water, race, religion and even the
air we breath in their efforts to ensure victory and to this end, they bought and paid for populist
uprisings against Democratic politicians, like the now abandoned Tea Party.
The problem was that even when Republicans were elected, they obviously couldn't keep their
own nonsensical promises to their now rabid audience who no longer trusted their own elected Government.
When Trump, a disestablishment, anti-Government candidate came along, the electorate (naively)
saw a possibility of the change they have been promised.
Of course the Russians prefer Trump over Clinton, since they can see the destruction he can
cause their geopolitical adversary and Putin would say as much as he can to support Trump...errr....even
though it would be counter-productive with conservative voters...but it is unlikely that he bears
anywhere near the blame that the Republican Party does, who foolishly allowed their own 'attack
dog' to bite them on the arse.
I'm sorry to say that the Republican Party (and the US) has to suck this one up and admit...(to
mix my hackneyed metaphors) that they've blown themselves up with their own petard!
I think with hindsight Bernie Sanders is going to be blamed for dividing the Democratic Party
and bolstering the Republican propaganda against the Clintons. If only we had stuck together with
Clinton we wouldn't be facing the Trump disaster now. Hillary Clinton is not evil and she was
very highly qualified--to paraphrase Brando, we could have had progress instead of a disaster,
which is what we have now.
Absurd! She was a rich white hawkish neolib who has no one but herself and the Democratic
Pary to blame for the terrible loss which will seal the supreme court for years. Face facts!!
She couldn't even beat Trump and was widely viewed as a fraud.
You fool, the Libertarian party is the largest third party in the US and they mostly take votes
from the Republicans. Stop blaming third parties when their existence demonstrably helps the Democrats.
Or perhaps you dream of a world where conservatives still support their third party just as much
as they ever did but lefties all move in perfect lockstep? If so, it's time for a reality check.
Up jumped Hilary Benn with the theory that Jeremy Corbyn had caused the Brexit vote. His resignation
and the denunciation of 172 Labour MP's based on an "indisputable fact" that nobody believes to
be true today. The person who lost the Presidential Election in USA is Hillary Clinton. She,
like Blair is a war monger. I, if I had a vote, would not have voted for her.
If she had been elected we would have had bigger and better wars in the Middle East. The
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan never ended despite Obama calling the Iraq war a "strategic mistake".
One that continued for another eight years. To those two we have added Syria and Lybia. The
west, like Russia, is dabbling in other people's wars. They have been made one hundred times worse.
What Hillary would not have dabbled in is the industrial decline in the "Rust Belt" states.
She is proposing to do nothing. So they had the prospect of no rectification at home with yet
more wars abroad. No wonder they stayed at home. Hillary and Nu Labour are the same: belligerancy
in the Middle East coupled with tame pussy cat against failing capitalism at home. The middle
east has got total destruction from the west and total nothingness but austerity (ie more failure)
as the action plan for capitalism. They are on the "same page" then!
I don't understand how accurate reporting by Wikileaks of politicians' emails is considered
'interference' with the US elections. To me, it seems helpful. If a US newspaper made the report,
they would probably get a prize. If a foreign organization made the report, so what? People abroad
are free (I hope) to comment on US matters, and people in the US are free to read it or not.
It could be argued that only reporting democratic emails is distorting the truth: I'd say its
a step towards the whole truth. I welcome all disclosures that are pertinent to a good decision
by US voters.
Perhaps they mean the Guardian's politics. Identity politics has been thoroughly rejected
and instead of learning from the experience, Guardian has been electing to throw more of the same
tactics, except louder
Citizens of the UK are by far the most heavily surveilled in the western world. This has been
the case since long before the ubiquitous introduction of CCTV cameras.
Americans across the political spectrum are happy to use Putin to distract them from
reflecting on how baseless our self-image as the world's greatest democracy is.
You're absolutely right. Putin is the boogeyman for every ill, real or purported, of his
own society, and when the American political system and its institutions prove to be broken, Putin
gets to be the boogeyman for that, too. What a powerful man! He must be pleased.
Only, the thing is, the American political system and its institutions - American democracy
- weren't undermined overnight. It took several decades and it was done by Americans who weren't
so keen on democracy. Can't fob that off on Putin, try as they might.
If American power takes a big fat fall like Humpty Dumpty, don't look to Vladimir Putin, look
in a fucking mirror. That's where you'll find the culprit.
This is an ultimate truth because it explains why Merkel will not be elected. These days Putin
is in full control of the world and is responsible for everything.
Let's thank Hillary for that. There is a very good news: on the 20th January we'll cut all
Saudi supply channels to the IS and kill all the bastards within 2 months.
In the modern world it is enough to do nothing to be a good man, eg if Bush, Blair, Obama
and Clinton didn't create ISIS, the world would be a much better place. You do not even need to
be smart to understand this.
Your Donald.
From where you'd rather be.
With love.
It's crazy. Even if the Russian hacking claims are legitimate, the leaks still revealed things
about the Democrats that were true. It's like telling your friend that their spouse is cheating
on them, and then the spouse blaming you for ruining the marriage.
The Clinton campaign spent like drunken sailors, on media. This is a new role for the media
giants that took care of Clinton's every need, including providing motivational research and other
consultants.
The ongoing scenario that now spins around Putin as a central figure is a product of "after
shock media". Broadcast media bounced America back and forth from sit-com to gun violence
for decades, giving fiction paramount value. To weave fictional reality in real time for a
mass audience is a magnum leap from internet fake news. This drama is concocted to keep DNC from
going into seclusion until the inauguration.
Doug Henwood is absolutely correct. This obsession with the supposed foreign interference
is baseless. All the real culprits operate within our own system.
Maybe, in four years, Trump's administration can oversee a secure election. Unlike the Obama folks,
who seem to make a calamity out of any project bigger than making a sandwich.
This hullabaloo really highlights the disdain the establishment has for the American voter. They
thought they had it tied up. They thought they had pulled one over on the American people. They
are not interested in what the voter actually wants.
And this raises questions about why our servicemen and women are making sacrifices. The establishment
story-line talks about our brave soldiers dying so we can have free elections. Or something like
that. The establishment does not care about free and fair elections. In fact, this hullabaloo
should have demonstrated to everybody that the establishment does not respect or accepts the results
of elections that don't go their way.
Look at WikiLeaks. They died so Hillary could present her ever-so-clever "tick-tock on Libya"
and make fools think she's a constructive foreign policy force.
H. Clinton would have started a war against Russia in Syria come January; and war against Russia
in The Ukraine shortly after. Trump could yet end civilization as we know it: thereagain the CIA
might 'JFK' him early doors before he's able to.
Fully agree with you. Trump's victory is certain to have incalculable consequences for life on
earth. I believe he will give Netenyahu the green light to use tactical nuclear weapons against
Iranian nuclear and military facilities. I am no fan of Trump.
American 'exceptionalism;' The World's Policeman; The greatest country on earth. Descriptions
believed and espoused by the USA. So Exceptional is America that it claims a God-given right to
interfere with or sabotage political parties, foriegn governments (democratically-elected or not)
and sovereign states anywhere it chooses. Now we have the hilarious spectacle of a historically
blood-drenched CIA (Fake News Central) squawking and squealing completely fabricated nonsense
about Kremlin interference in Trump's election victory. Tell that to the tens of millions slaughtered
in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq and the many other nations and people's around the globe who have
had first hand experience of American Exceptionalism. You could not make it up..
Arguably, Clinton and the DNC themselves showed very little respect for democracy, as we know
from leaks. And now they are whining because of a democratic outcome they don't like.
We should discuss two things:
- the content of the mails
- and the ethical question: did the hacker, whoever it is, did democracy rather a service than
a disservice? From when on is a piece of information so valuable that its origins don't matter
anymore?
Media, at least in times when msm still had some moral clout, often relied in their investigative
journalism on source which by themselves were not necessarily ethically bona fide - but the public
interest, the common good benefited by the information.
Had Clinton won the election and we only found out now about the trickery that aided in her
success we would have a major dilemma. We would have to have endless discussions now about her
legitimacy.
I am one who firmly believes that Clinton lost this election because of Clinton's and the DNC's
ineptitude and hubris.
But that doesn't mean the Russians weren't running a psy-ops campaign of fake news stories
and misinformation about Clinton and this election on Facebook.
Which was more responsible for Clinton's loss? Most probably Clinton's ineptitude but the fake
news campaigns on Facebook had some effect. It needs to be addressed...
But hadn't Hillary made it personal by saying Trump was Putin's puppet etc?
She even refused to state whether she'd seek to impose a no-fly zone over Syria; this despite
leading Generals telling her it would mean going to war with Russia and Syria.
Given all that, it's hardly surprising the Russian Duma broke into spontaneous applause upon
the confirmation of her defeat. She'd very much cast herself as the enemy of Russia in the campaign.
With the naming of Rex Tillerson, a close business, and personal, friend of Putin, to be Secy.
of State I am not sure the argument can be made that she was wrong in her assessment.
This article is absolutely right. Trump was not a good candidate and for him to beat Clinton should
be setting alarm bells ringing in Democrat HQ. The left though does have an entrenched culture
of deluding itself and convincing itself that its a victim of things beyond its control. That
lack of self awareness and inability to be brutally honest with itself is a major reason why the
left wins many fewer elections than the left. It is also why there are never shock wins for the
Democrats or Labour because they always assume too much. The Tories and Republicans are very good
at understanding their weaknesses and mitigating them to win elections.
It's absurd to consider Clinton and the mainstream Democrats as part of "the Left". Even the best
of the Democrats are generally more on the Right than on the Left, in that they are pro-capitalist
and defend the national interests of U.S. imperialism. Add to that their almost unanimous support
for the settler colony called "Israel" and there's very little leftism to be found among them.
Cunning of Putin to go back in time and persuade the framers of the US constitution to institute
an electoral college, so that he could put his own candidate in place all those hundreds of years
later.
No. Both candidates fought an election under the same rules. In the run up to the vote, Hillary's
spokesmen often argued that even if the vote was close, they had the electoral college sewn up.
She has nobody to blame but herself.
There are plenty of villains who contributed to the electoral downfall of HRC, mostly, though,
it's HRC who is primarily responsible, with a big assist from an arrogant & politically inept
DNC. Hillary won a bare majority of women, plus the average income of Trump voters exceeded that
of Hillies' supporters. Then all the groundwork for the deplorables was laid by Bill, who got
rid of Glass-Steagell. Too much is being made of the machinist from Erie & the deplorables generally
& if the Dems don't take a serious look at themselves we'll have Agent Orange for 8 rather than
4 deplorable years.
For goodness sake, it is not foreign governments , it is information. With advance of social media
and internet it became so much harder to control the information that gets out.
That is where we are in a post-propaganda world. You are not only receiving your government approved
daily portion of brainwashing but propaganda and brainwashing and information from various sources,
all with their various interests. It is your job a s an individual to decide what to believe.
You can't put the jinni back in the box.
It is all about a narrative to suit the agenda. Had Trump outspent Clinton 2:1 he would now be
reviled as the candidate of arms industry, pharmaceuticals and big banks. Had Clinton defeated
him it would be celebrated as a successful setback for the aforementioned industries; the intelligence
of the voters would have been praised. But then supposedly, Clinton was more supported by disadvantaged
groups, albeit they then also would be disadvantaged with regards to their education.
It will always end up in absurdity. However, the notion that "Putin" (never with first name,
or Mr, preferably pronounced "Poot'n") decided the US presidency is, interesting.
Usually the issue simply is, crap candidate, crap result.
Had Sanders been the candidate and had he lost to Trump, I doubt very much he'd have started all
this blaming the Russians nonsense.
Ultimately, Hilary had terrible trustworthiness ratings from nearly 25 years in frontline politics;
every shortcoming ruthlessly exploited along the way by her and her husband's political opponents.
Ignoring all that historic baggage(dating back to the early '90s) as irrelevant and blaming defeat
on the Russians makes everyone supporting that theory look equally absurd.
In the 2016 Presidential election, in the 49 States other than California, Trump won the popular
vote and enough electoral votes to win the election.
In California, the most populous State in America, the popular vote was so overwhelmingly in favor
of Hillary Clinton that she ended up winning the overall popular vote.
The electoral college is working exactly as the Founding Fathers intended.
In Shakespeare's book "Julius Caesar" the dictator was told not to go to the Capitol where he
will be murdered. His wife warned him, the soothsayer warned him but he ignored it. Caesar's wisdom
was consumed in confidence...confidence that he will be crowned king, confidence that all Romans
(most stupid people then) loved him, and confidence that those who surround him are his 'friends.'
He adamantly went to the Capitol and was murdered.
Clinton ignored most rural areas and I totally agree with the writer along this line "They
were so confident of their inevitable victory that they wrote off the old industrial states in
favor of luring upscale suburbanites who normally vote Republican." Clinton and her team paid
dearly for it just like Caesar did. Blaming Russian for the loss is like "You made me do it."
In the UK, Rupert Murdoch accesses a Prime Minister as readily as any government minister and
wields at least as much influence. At least he is open and honest about this. Similar oligarchs
exert their power more discretely. Murdoch's an Australian born US citizen (for business reasons)
with a truly global empire.
A country's big rich have always ruled it's politics. Imperial powers have intervened
in their spheres of influence . But now the big rich are international and, it seems,
1st world electorates are getting a taste of what 3rd world people have become used to.
What strikes me is the reluctance of the US political elite (including Obama) to intervene,
even when there's a suspicion of vote rigging. The right of the rich and powerful to control the
electoral process (as they have long done) trumps the national-interest (US v. rival powers)
side of politics.
Hilary Clinton won the popular vote. More people voted for her. What is the deal with the electoral
college? How is it possible to have such a huge discrepancy between the two. What is the point
of blaming the candidate when they can lose while winning?
And what is the point of blaming the candidate for their campaign when large numbers of Americans
are prepared to believe the most random bullshit? What did you want her to do, lie more often?
Because apparently, that's what it takes.
From my comment above... "In the 2016 Presidential election, in the 49 States other than California,
Trump won the popular vote and enough electoral votes to win the election.
In California, the most populous State in America, the popular vote was so overwhelmingly in favor
of Hillary Clinton that she ended up winning the overall popular vote.
The electoral college is working exactly as the Founding Fathers intended."
The election is decided by Electoral Votes. Everyone including Hillary knew that. Complaining
that she won the popular vote while losing in the Electoral College would be similar to the loser
of a soccer match complaining they lost 1-nil even though they outshot the victor by a 6-1 margin.
Whine all you want about the popular vote, it is irrelevant.
Hillary Clinton visited Arizona in the last week of the election, while visiting Wisconsin
ZERO times in the general election campaign. The trip to Arizona was a waste of time.
She lost because she was a horrible candidate with terrible strategy. All these people bleating
about "Putin" and or the "popular vote" make me laugh.
With respect, you're going to have to back up some of those claims in the second paragraph and
how they could apply to Russia.
As for the first paragraph, a few things come to mind.
Firstly, it's a huge simplification - there are things like public interest laws to be borne
in mind when talking about the press having to obey the law. I don't think there is much doubt
that this was in the public interest. I mean what Clinton did with the email server was actually
illegal. If someone hacked into a mob boss' computer, got evidence of his/her crimes, and leaked
them to the press, would you criticise the hacker or the mob boss?
Secondly, how on earth was this selectively released to favour one side? How do you favour
one side over the other when you only have information on one side. You are literally saying that
you shouldn't report on one side's wrongdoings if you can't find anything wrong about the other's!
If these are genuine - which absolutely no-one to do with Clinton has denied - then that is all
there is to it. Reality isn't partisan.
Or are you talking about how it was released? You mean dumped en masse onto Wikileaks? How
was that showing bias in any way? I just don't understand what you are trying to claim here.
Finally this comment makes me suspect you don't appreciate the American political climate:
But, given the result, the section of the press that would investigate hasn't got the money
or power to do so. You can be assured the Fox network would have devoted billions to the investigation
had HRC won though.
Fox News aren't the only people with money - indeed, Clinton vastly outspent Trump in the election...
by roughly half a billion(!) dollars.
O -- The Director of the CIA says it, then it must be true? Forgive me, but isn't this an organisation
created to spread disinformation around the world, overthrow foreign governments, and subvert
democracy? Which elections in the world has the CIA not tried to influence? Time Magazine openly
boasts that the US government and agencies had a direct role in securing the election of President
Yeltsin (who sold off a significant share of the country's assets under US advice, and plunged
Russia into the worst recession since the 1930s). Hillary Clinton openly supported the management
of the elections for the Palestine National Authority in 2006. Bill Clinton openly agitated for
the overthrow of President Aristide.
Now that the CIA's most assiduous supporters have lost office, up pops the CIA, blaming the Russians,
like we were in some bad 1950s Cold War pastiche. Get real. Take responsibility for your own failures,
Democrats. Time to cleanse the stables.
Where is even the proof of Russian propaganda? It all seems to come from an "Anonymous source",
without verfication I don't see how this is any more legitimate than the rest of the post truth
fake news out there that people believe just because it confirms their biases.
The CIA claim to know that Russian hackers leaked the Clinton campaign emails to Assange. You
can, of course, disbelieve them, but they're not a random anonymous source exactly.
Putin extremely powerful man. Make regime change in Amerika without needing invasion or rebels.
Soon regime change also in many Europan countries by sending copies of emails to small room in
embassy of little country in London.
You know how powerful Putin? Last week even show finger to Chuck Norris! Chuck Norris now call
Putin "sir".
Thank you, Doug Henwood for pointing out what the wholly-owned corporate "pundits" choose not
to divulge to coincide with their own agendas.
Hillary was a disastrous choice for the "Democratic" party, but the vast majority of Democratic
politicians were just too feckless to support Bernie Sanders, so now we have an equally terrible
choice in Donald Trump.
That Clinton and Trump even competed for the presidency is in itself an indication of just
how disconnected and undemocratic U.S. politics has become.
Moreover, as Henwood (a frequent and unsparing critic of Clinton, Inc. over the years) has
pointed out both Democrats and Republicans are supporting the Russia conspiracy theory in a cowardly
attempt to distract the U.S. public from the real and far more dire crisis, which is Washington's
enormous political dysfunction not Russia's complicity. (Read Henwood's essay: Stop Hillary! Vote
no to a Clinton Dynasty in Harper's Magazine, November 2014 - one article a month is free for
reading).
Yes, the electoral college is a ridiculous throwback to slavery which should be abolished,
but its dissolution is just one of many things I'd like to see eradicated from a governing body
that has long stopped representing the interests of working class Americans; unless, of course
you have the influence and money for such access.
The non-violent and powerful Black Lives Matter, Moral Mondays in North Carolina and Standing
Rock protesters (reinforced by U.S. veterans and other supporters) have demonstrated that change
is possible if we're carefully focused on uprooting and replacing government corruption.
The West support for regimes like Israel and Saudi Arabia makes it hard to present a credible
case against Putin on any issues but, rigging the election is just absurd. These days people are
more clued up and know Hillary lost because she was not trusted, carried baggage and was funded
by big banks. It is rather worrying that we've gone backward and Nazi propaganda tactics are the
norm again.
There was a 50/50 chance the Democrats would take the fall from grace; both parties are out of
touch with mainstream, middle-class America, it's just coincidence Trump manifested himself when
he did. Neither party had a good message or a good messenger; the dark phenomenon of Trump could
have come from either party, the nation was so desperate for change. Yet the GOP really maneuvered
for Jeb Bush to begin with; the Democrats, with a significantly smaller field, laid their bet
on Clinton. The public's rejection of both Bush and Clinton left the door open for a GOP interloper,
Trump; and Clinton was pushed on the Democrats rather than Sanders.
Even the GOP will have buyers remorse if/when they cannot temper Trump.
As someone who wanted Hilary to win, it is difficult to disagree with any of this.
If she couldn't beat Trump - who about three times a day said something idiotic or repugnant,
then she really was the wrong candidate
Since he won Trump has actually sounded miles more sensible. I can't help feel that if he had
adopted his current tone before the election that he would have won by a landslide
"This was the strategy not because Clinton was was incompetent; it was the strategy because all
available data pointed to the fact that it was working."
What a joke.
She had a billion dollars in her campaign fund. The money she spent on "data" was just money
flushed down the sewer. (No doubt various Clinton hangers-on got very nice "consulting" fees.)
She was a Democrat who publicly bragged about her devotion to **Henry Kissinger**.
She lost to **Donald Trump**. I think even Martin O'Malley could've beaten Trump; I'm certain
Sanders could. Only Hillary Clinton had the "magic" necessary to lose to a casino and real estate
huckster.
She was always a lousy candidate, and she's an incompetent politician as well. Dems can face
that, face reality, or keep going as they are, in which case there won't **be** a Democratic Party
before long.
Agreed. HRC, DNC and the Clintonistas are the only ones responsible for her loss. But there's
more to their post-election pushback than just shifting the blame, a lot more.
Demonizing Russia isn't just about seeking a scapegoat. Trump's embrace of Russia and decision
to end the neocon-neoliberal agenda of regime change skewer two of the corporate establishment's
cash cows - arms sales to the numerous conflicts in the Middle East initiated by the corporate
cabal, and arms sales to NATO and all the new post Cold War NATO members to continue the buildup
of armaments on Russia's borders.
That's a lot of anticipated arms sales and a lot of every bit as anticipated political "donations"
from the corporate establishment.
" Trump's embrace of Russia and decision to end the neocon-neoliberal agenda of regime change
skewer two of the corporate establishment's cash cows - arms sales to the numerous conflicts in
the Middle East initiated by the corporate cabal, and arms sales to NATO and all the new post
Cold War NATO members to continue the buildup of armaments on Russia's borders."
That's a mighty optimistic forecast, but it's not impossible. I think Trump is likely to be
a disaster, and even if he isn't, an unleashed Republican gang is a horrible thing to imagine.
Still, I'd love to be pleasantly surprised, and I note that already Trump's campaign has put
down TWO odious political dynasties, AND the TPP -- all very healthy developments.
Hillary Clinton lost because the majority of the voters were nauseated by her by her fake perma-
smile which might as well have been installed by cosmetic surgery. The well rehearsed, worn-out,
hollow on-message crap she spouted had zilch credibility and as much resonance. She had nothing
to say to the electorate.
That the Clinton spent about twice as much as the Trump camp in this case did not work to her
favour: every appearance on tv made her lose voters.
The only thing that kept the contest somehow close was the unprecedented all-media fear
campaign against Trump.
I have never had any doubt that that Trump would get the job. What surprised me though, is
that only one in 200 eligible voters bothered with the Green's Jill Stein: they are supposedly
relatively highly committed to their causes.
Another mistake of the Clinton campaign, btw. was to focus on scandal. My experience of 45
years of campaigning tells me "scandal" does not win any campaigns.
99% of the weapons in the Trump arsenal were Trumped up Hillary "scandals"
They did not decide it. Neither did the new "sexual victim" paraded every couple of days by
the Clinton camp. Scandal and counter-scandal are part of every campaign and ignored by non-committed
voters.
What did it for Trump was, that he spoke unscripted, thus came across a somewhat more genuine,
and at least acknowledged the victims of de-industrialisation, for which he could not be blamed,
but Clinton could. Clinton did not have anything she could present apart from "better equipped
because of experience" - with an undistinguished actual record. The name Clinton can be blamed
for the plight of the "rust-belt".
Americans have paid a heavy price because of free trade deals and they want a different direction.
In the last 15 years there is a noticeable difference in opportunity and wages and most of our
politicians don't care. Hillary lost this because she supported most free trade and outsourcing
jobs to India and China. They DNC has a chance to reform but they choose not to. I hope Bernie
starts a new party and leaves the neo liberals behind. Who knows where Trump will take us but
if he adds to the swamp he will be a one term president. Right now it looks like he is repaying
his Wall Street fundraisers and big oil super pacs. Our politicians deserve the embarrassment
for ignoring our citizens struggles.
Steven Mnuchin with ties to Wall Street stepped in when no one else would and fund raised for
Trump. Mnuchin is picked as secretary of treasury. Big oil supported Cruz and moved to Trump with
a few superpacs that Kellyanne Conway managed. Both Wall Street and energy will be deregulated.
Also tax reform for corporations. He will have to follow through on new trade deals, tax on imports
and immigration or he will only help the 1%. We will see if he follows through...
I bet in Moscow they're quite enjoying this notion Putin can simply dismiss any govt on earth
by simply letting loose a few hackers and propagandists. And probably thinking if only.
The west looks like its collectively losing its marbles. Political systems, like tastes and
fashion change naturally over time. Our two party systems struggle to cope with any change, thus
the bewildered politicians within these parties lash out.
On November 25, 2016, the Obama administration said the results from November 8, "accurately reflect
the will of the American people." The following day, the White House released another statement
saying, "the federal government did not observe any increased level of malicious cyberactivity
aimed at disrupting our electoral process on Election Day."
And? Does anybody claim that any foreign power hacked the voting machines themselves?
The claim is that Russian directed operatives hacked the DNC, etc. in an attempt to find embarrassing
material that would damage Clinton's candidacy. They succeeded.
Doug Henwood trying to beat the Bernie Sanders drum. What I heard from Bernie Sanders Townhall
in Wisconsin is that people blamed illegal immigrants for their situation. Deep down inside they
have been Trump supporters for a while. That is why Trump won Wisconsin.
A Labour MP is claiming that Putin also fixed the Brexit vote - which also shows how people will
blame anyone but themselves for losing a vote. There is not one Clinton supporter who would have
complained about the result had she won the Electoral College and lost the popular vote.
That is not to say that the system should not be changed but Democrats and/or Clintonites should
not try to change it retrospectively. That would mean chaos.
Totally agree with this article by Mr. Henwood. If Democrats, and Republicans for that matter,
want to go on a wild goose chase to blame Russians for the election outcome, with basically no
hard evidence to back their claim, rather than look at the real reasons why they lost (disaffected
angry citizens and not being able to compete with Trump because they chose lousy candidates) then
they deserve to continue losing their future elections. So be it.
If she had not spent so much time calling Trump a Misogynist while taking money from Saudi Arabia
then maybe , just maybe she would have not come across as the most deceitful and toxic candidate
the US has ever seen.
Hillary Clinton lost Pennsylvania, Michigan & Wisconsin solely because of NAFTA & TPP. Bill &
Hillary Clinton supported NAFTA. Hillary Clinton had a history of supporting TPP & Obama was actively
pushing it. When Hillary Clinton changed her position on TPP people in the old industrial heartland
were not convinced that was sincere. The Russians were not responsible for Hillary, Bill & Obama's
history of support for trade deals that facilitate moving jobs to low wage countries that suppress
unions, allow unsafe working conditions & don't have meaningful environmental regulations.
Julian Assange denies that the Russian government was the source of the hacked emails
to and from Clinton campaign chair John Podesta that WikiLeaks published. Of course, there's
no way of knowing if he's telling the truth – but regardless of their source, how much influence
did they have on the election outcome?
oh, right
so when the Wikileaks reveals evilness of the conservatives, it's good, but when the liberals
get revealed, he's not telling the truth?
give me a break.
Wikileaks is a neutral source, not a conservative or a liberal one.
I agree with you. However may I add that the point is not whether Assange is of good character
or whether Wikileaks is left or right. The point is has any Wikileaks releases been proven false
in the last 10 years or so?
Wikileaks is a neutral source, not a conservative or a liberal one.
Bull. Assange dripped, dripped, dripped the leaks so that it would do maximum damage to Clinton.
Whether he has conservative or liberal leanings is irrelevant. What in incontrovertible, however,
is that he has an anti-Clinton bias.
What the leaks revealed is exactly the kind of internal policy debates, calibration of message,
and gossipy venting that occurs in any political campaign. Only out of context did they appear
damaging.
The other big elephant in the room is that nearly half of those eligible to vote did not. Instead,
the hysterical US media engage the gullible populace in yet another game of mass distraction,
and soon Putin will be forgotten and all will salivate over the Oscar nominations. Thus the United
States of Amnesia will settle into its usual addictive habit of running after any "news" that
holds the promise of distractive entertainment. Never mind the nation's democracy... "We amuse
ourselves to death" (Neil Postman).
Otto Bismarck once said: "laws are like sausages. It's better not to see them being made"
To paraphrase, I guess you could also say the same about elections. Leaks revealing behind
the curtains shenanigans of any election would turn most stomachs. After seeing this election
I may become a vegetarian.
Too right. It was always Hillary's election to lose and she lost it simply because she was
not to be trusted. Her very public endorsement by gangster capitalist Jay-Z told you all you needed
to know about who she represented.
I used to work for an American oil company. Clinton was the one thing that united Democrats and
Republicans over lunch time chats. She was unsuitable, and unfit for office. People voted not
necessarily for Trump, but against Clinton. Don't blame Trump for this result. Blame the democrats
and their poor candidates. So far I like his choice of cabinet members. Except for the banker
they are men that create wealth by providing work for talented people. Not something the Guardian
understands.
So your prime character witness for Hillary Clinton is.....Bill Clinton.
Good luck with that.
FYI mishandling protectively marked documents is wrongdoing, which James Comey testified that
she had. Had it been ANYBODY other than a presidential candidate their feet wouldn't have touched
the floor.
What the author fails to emphasize is the degree to which Dem. party 'insiders' like DWSchulz
and DBrazile and so on sabotaged their own nomination process by biasing the pre-primary and primary
contests in favor of Clinton in subtle and stupidly obvious ways.
Had this been a contest between Trump and B. Sanders, M. O'Malley, J. Biden, E. Warren, etc.
there would have been no Podesta emails to care hack, no home server to investigate, etc. By tipping
the scales in favor of Clinton early, parts of the Dem. party caused the current outcome.
I was dubious before, but I'm now actively concerned. This crop of Democrats and their deep
state cohorts are unhinged and dangerous. They see me and my families' lives as an externality
in their eventual war with Russia. As Phyrric a victory as there could possibly be. They are psychotic;
not only waging countless coups and intelligence operations abroad, but now in plain sight on
American soil. The mainstream media seems to invoke the spirit of Goebbels more vividly with each
passing day. Their disdain and manipulation of the general populace is chilling. They see us not
as people to be won-over, but as things to be manipulated, tricked and coerced. Nothing new for
politicians (particularity the opposition) - but the levels here are staggering.
January couldn't come soon enough - and I say that as strong critic of Trump.
There is an update to yesterday's Guardian article. Update: David Swanson interviewed Murray today,
and obtained additional information. Specifically, Murray told Swanson that: (1) there were two
American leakers ... one for the emails of the Democratic National Committee and one for the emails
of top Clinton aide John Podesta; (2) Murray met one of those leakers; and (3) both leakers are
American insiders with the NSA and/or the DNC, with no known connections to Russia.
"Putin didn't win this election for Trump. Hillary Clinton did"
Nailed it. If the Democrats had fielded someone who actually represented the people (and who
spoke the truth) instead of a corporate shill, the outcome would have been very different.
They had the ideal candidate in Sanders and they fucked him out of it. But have they learned
anything? I seriously doubt it.
Mrs Clinton is not blaming others. She never did. It's the CIA - backed by the 17 US intelligence
agencies - that's saying Russia interfered with the election process in the USA.
In UK as well, the MI6 said something similar a few weeks ago. Germany is also concerned about
the next elections in France and Germany. If any of this was true then it would be a serious threat
against democracy in Western countries.
So who's blaming who? Deep cheaters or bad loosers? The CIA could be wrong but is probably
correct this time. Trying to bury this unanimous call from western secret services under contempt
is significant by itself.
" It's the CIA - backed by the 17 US intelligence agencies - that's saying Russia interfered with
the election process in the USA. "
Way to parrot FAKE NEWS.
That is a COMPLETE LIE. Unless you honestly believe that agencies like the DEA and NASA's "intelligence"
conclusively found "proof" that does not exist. That TALKING POINT was a lie when CLINTON'S CAMPAIGN
originated it, and it is STILL a lie.
But hey, it's only wrong when the "bad guys" on the "other team" spread fake news and engage
in intellectual dishonesty, right? When it's the "good guys" it's just a case of the "ends justify
the means" and perfectly acceptable, right?
"Mrs Clinton is not blaming others. She never did."
Bullshit. Just last week she resurfaced (can't she grasp the idea of the graceful exit?) to
yammer on about the menace of "fake news". Because of course we all know that before 2016, all
American elections have been exercises in fair-mindedness and scrupulous devotion to truth.
It's funny how media simply refuses to admit that Trump did it.
Russians, Hilary, polar bears - none of them had anything to do with it - HE WON.
Live with it.
The clickbait headline is frustrating. No serious person is accusing Russia of having caused Clinton's
loss. Instead, serious people (including, thankfully, leading Republicans) are demanding that
we take a thoughtful and comprehensive look at the evidence that Russia intended to influence
the election. That's a necessary step for protecting our democracy and it's irresponsible to ascribe
political motives to that task.
There was a good article in The Intercept the other regarding the CIA's unsubstantiated (and subserviently
published by the media) claims of Russian interference - how it has essentially become a willy-waving
contest between the CIA and the FBI in the wake of the elections; how the CIA is an inherently
untrustworthy organisation and the media allowing "senior officials" to dictate the news with
empty leaks and no evidence (while shouting the loudest about fake news) is folly.
Very true. It takes an abysmal candidate to lose against (quoting Jimmy Dore here:) Donny Tinyhands.
It takes a special brand of dense to run
- for Wall Street (against reinstatement of Glass Steagall)
- for a direct military confrontation with nuclear power Russia (wich Clinton's pet-project of
no-fly zones in Syria would have signified)
- for trade deals (nobody bought Clinton was suddenly against that)
and expect the DEMOCRATIC base to turn out.
Jesus Christ, Donny ran to the left of Hillary on all three issues. Not that anyone trusts him
to keep any promise, but at least he didn't outright spit in the face of the people who want less
war, less neoliberalism and less Wall Street cronyism while running for election.
No Democratic candidate worth his/her name would have lost against Trump, not even if the Axis
of Evil (whoever that currently is) had hacked all their emails, photobooks and private porn-flicks,
in which they starred, and had them all run nonstop 24/7 on every screen on Earth.
I'm shocked!!! Aren't the Russians to blame for everything???
My t.v breaking, the rain outside, brexit, Donald trump, the Iraq war, the death of Jesus, those
damn Russians, nothing is safe around those monsters.
Hilarious
I am so sick and tired of hearing those whining elite democrats gone incessantly about white
males , the FBI , Putin , Russia , stupid red state citizens , etc., etc ..
I want say ' Shut the fuck up -- ..... and look in the bloody mirror ' .
I am a classic liberal .... always have been ..... always will be ...... and I don't know what
you would like to call these corrupt , elitist , contemporary democrats but you certainly can
not call them real liberals .
I call them designer democrats . They care only for their particular pet issues and they ongoing
pursuit of notions of their own superiority . They routinely generalize in highly sexist and racist
fashions and through the use of political correctness seek to silence all of their critics .
I , simply , loath them .
They sabotaged Bernie Sanders campaign . Bernie Sanders ..... the nicest , most caring man
to come along in American politics in the past 50 years . Not since , FDR , John and Robert Kennedy
have we seen such hope for average people .
But oh , no ..... Bernie was an outsider ..... not part of their corrupt , elite club . He
was a threat to their ongoing party . He had to go .
They didn't give a shit about what was good for the people . They only cared about themselves
and their exploitation of the Democratic Party and it's traditional status ..... and their vulgar
corruption of genuine liberalism for their own purposes .
The Democratic Party establishment will now undergo a long , long overdue cleansing . The Clintons
are the first to go as they should be . Two total career political scoundrels , if ever there
were any . Lies and secrecy were all that you ever got from them aside form the horrific repeal
of the 'Glass-Steggall Act ' and the Stock Trade Modernization Bill which lead to the licensing
of the financial elite to plunder the economy , ruin the lives of countless average Americans
and turn the economy into a complete casino .
Elitist to the core , they were .
Imagine an elite , spoon fed , self-interested urbanite like Hillary Clinton telling some poor
white male schmuck living in some small town , who for economic reasons has never had a good full
time time and works 3 temporary part-time jobs to pay the bills that he is privileged .
Bloody ridiculous --
Talk about overt sexism . Talk about overt racism .
It's these kinds of behaviours that doomed Hillary Clinton .
She only has herself to blame .
If she really had cared about average people she would have not sabotaged Bernie Sanders and
she would have stepped aside back in June when every poll indicated the she could not beat Trump
and that Bernie could beat him by 10 to 15 points .
Now , we the people are stuck with a Trump presidency ..... something which you can pretty
much be assured is going to be un mitigated disaster in ways that we can't even begin to imagine
yet .
Lord help us .
Good-bye Democratic Party elites ..... don't let the fucking door hit on the way out .
I wish I could say that it was nice knowing you but it wasn't .
Go off to your designer lives and pontificate about what is good for people ..... a subject
that you know little about and really don't give a damn .
Go back to Davos and party with the financial global elite for they are really your people
.... your kind . Certainly , average hardworking , genuinely liberal people are not .
Liberalism exists for all people not just the self-anointed few .
Have you noticed how recently the 'we are not racist and you are' left have started to use the
Chinese and Russians as convenient foreign bogeymen to scare the people with?
Awkward economic figures, blame the Chinese.
Awkward diplomatic issues or you lost a vote, blame the Russians.
The problem with this is that our media then amplifies these attacks on China and Russia, they
hear them, and they start to resent it and respond. And our future relations with two major world
powers are made worse than they needed to be.
A good article to counterbalance the reams of rubbish we are hearing in the US election post-mortem.
Anyone who had neural activity should have known that when you steal the candidacy, you certainly
won't get the votes. Clinton effectively handed the election to Trump by not having the humility,
humanity and honesty to admit defeat by Benie Sanders.
He was not a perfect choice, but he could have been a candidate who was everything that Trump
wasn't - uncorrupted, honest, and with a clearly thought out and principled agenda.
All Trump was facing was someone as entitled and establishment as he was,. but with less of
what passes for 'the human touch' across the pond.
There's always the possibility of course, that the US establishment realised Clinton's
blatant warmongering wasn't 'good for business'.
The Russians are no doubt aware that the US has to try and cut the Gordian knot - Washington
cannot face down China and Russia at the same time; and the two countries are mutually supportive
in the UN and are developing many economic projects together.
So maybe, they thought, we can get the Russkies 'on side', deal with China (ie. reduce
it to a 'client state'/ turn it into an ashtray) - and then move on Russia and grab all those
lovely resources freed up by global warming....
Seems to me like the Clinton agenda of big oil, big banks and alot of lies won the WH. Hillary's
big corporate donors are on Trumps transition team. Surely they didnt want her to win, since she
adopted Sanders regulatory, tax the wealthy platform, hence Clinton was duped with marketing strategy
which turned voters off, she was reduced to name calling over promotong policy...what did she
represent? Only her campaign volunteers knew, her message to the public was "dont vote for
Trump" which translates to, I could lose to him, vote for me!
The Podesta emails confirmed what many people already suspected and knew of Hillary and her
campaign. Those who were interested in reading them had to actually look for them, since MSM was
not reporting on them. It's not as if an avid MSNBC or CNN watcher was going to be exposed.
So, if you were seeking them out, A: you probably already suspected those things and B: you
weren't going to vote for Hillary to begin with.
It's hilarious how the major Left outlets (Washington Post) are now telling it's readers
how Russia is to blame for people voting against Hillary due to the Podesta emails, when they
didn't even report on the emails in the first place.
FINALLY sanity intrudes. For one article and one day. But hey , progress is progress. Trump will
NOT be what you think him to be. He will be far better. He will still do things you don't like,
but not REALLY bad things. :-)
There was no reason to vote for Clinton as the article says. She offered nothing except the
entitlement of HER. It wasn't enough. Thank The Gods. EVERYTHING about the system all
halfway decent people detest, is summed up in the figure of Hillary Clinton. And evidently
(and I stand to be corrected) she didn't even have the stones not to melt down on election night
and Podesta had to go out there and be a complete buffoon.
Trump might be an unknown but Clinton and her used up party were a complete known. Like
Donald said, she had 'experience', but it was all BAD 'experience'. Trump might not fix the
problems but at least he's going to try. Clinton didn't even see the problems.
she is a frail, withered old woman who needs to retire - def the wrong democrat choice, crazy -- Berni.S would have won if for them - he is far more sincere
Here is the key paragraph: "The displaced machinists... believe that free trade deals are
responsible for their economic woes and they never trusted Clinton's turn against the TPP. But
that was Clinton's campaign for you, bereft of principle and pathologically concerned with "optics"
at the expense of substance." Funny the author fails to notice that that describes to a T
Trump's campaign, and actually his whole life. That description applies to Trump several orders
of magnitude moreso than it applies to Hillary Clinton's life. If you think Trump is really interested
in bringing jobs, especially good paying jobs back, you are willfully blind.
"Putin didn't win this election for Trump. Hillary Clinton did"
Trump won, he played the game brilliantly to the rules (including the electoral college system),
Clinton lost (you can't win it for the opposition, you can just lose, and the Democrats didn't
put out their best hope) and Putin was irrelevant in terms of any interference (although maybe
Trump voters would rather the US develop a better relationship with Russia, but that's down to
Trump in playing that card).
This argument is as asinine as the one the author opposes. It was a collusion of events that
led to this result, including the failure of both parties to adapt to an evolving economic
and social climate over decades. The right wing hailing the collapse of liberalism as a result
of decades of liberal mismanagement conveniently forget their own parties have held the reins
for half that time, and failed just as miserably as the left....
It's quite bizarre to see "progressives" openly side with the military industrial complex,
which is threatened by a president elect weary of more warfare.
It's to be expected from career politicians like McCain who is kicking and screaming, but
it's shameful to see supposed liberally-minded people help spread the Red Scare storyline.
The Democrats are in full blown tantrum mode, throwing teddies out of their pram and spitting
dummies across the room, because their warmonger and deceitful candidate HRC, didn't win, that's
why there has been all this bad news nonsense about Putin and/or Russia since last week.
Obama has behaved dreadfully, first he or his office gets one of its poodles namely MI6 to
point the finger at Putin re cyberwar, which was swiftly followed by the International Olympic
Committee looking at Russia for 2012 Olympic games, the elections in the US and the Democrats
CIA coming out with unsubstantiated nonsense (funny how they never like, providing collaborative
evidence - on this or anything that supposedly Russia has done) then there is Syria, and Obama
and the Democrats were the cheerleader for regime change, because they have been out manoeuvred
in that sphere. All of it in less than a week.
If Obama, the administration, and the CIA were smart they would have realised that a concerted
effort to blame Putin / Russia would be seen for what it is - a liar and one of trying to discredit
both the outcome of the US elections, the dislike of HRC, and her association with Wall St. -
she raised more money for her campaign than Trump and Sanders put together (if the Democrats had
chosen Sanders, then they would have stood a chance) and that their hawk would not be in a position
to create WW111 - thank goodness. The Democrats deserved what they got.
This organ of the liberal media (no scare quotes required - it is socially liberal and economically
neoliberal), along with many others, dogmatically supported Clinton against Sanders to the point
of printing daily and ridiculous dishonesty, even going so far as to make out as if anyone who
supports any form of wealth redistribution is a racist, sexist, whitesplaining dude-bro.
Or more precisely the Superdelegates and the Democratic National Committee did. Her Goldman/Morgan
Stanley speechs were in 2013 ffs, they all knew she had form and was 'viewed as an insider' as
Obama put it in The New Yorker interview.
The election was close, and if one less thing had gone wrong for Hillary she would have won.
However I think an important thing that lost her the election was identity politics. She patronized
Afro-Americans and Hispanics, by tell them that because they are Trump-threatened minorities,
they should vote for her. In the same vein, gays and women were supposed to vote for her. But
what she was really telling these groups was that they should revel in their supposed victimhood,
which was not a great message.
Completely agreed! The onus for defeat belongs to the Democrat party leadership as well. Donald
Trump and Bernie Sanders both understood where the momentum of the election was headed before
anyone else did. The election was won and lost in the white blue collar Midwest. A place that
decided that diet corporatism is decidedly worse than a populist right wing extremist.
No one here believed the ridiculous about-face Hillary pulled on the question of the TPP.
I guarantee you Bernie would have cleaned Trump's clock in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan,
and perhaps Ohio and Iowa.
"Our self-image as the world's greatest democracy...." Well, speaking for myself and plenty
of other Americans, I never said anything like that about us. In fact, like a lot of people I
wish we would stick to our own business, quit trying to be the world's cop, and cease meddling
in other countries' affairs.
If we do that, then I could care less about our image or what the rest of the world thinks.
Let some other country be the "leader of the Free World." Who died and left the US in charge,
anyway? Not one war we have fought since WWII has been worth the price of one drop of American
blood.
Assuming that it really was the Russians who done it, I guess they had a better game plan
than the Saudis. I consider the Russians to have done us a favor of sorts by exposing Hillary's
secret Wall Street speeches and the machinations of the DNC. Her 'deplorables' comment was
every bit as telling as Mitt Romney's '47%'. We really needed to know about her 'public versus
private positions', even if it only confirmed what everybody already knew. I am not 100% sure
the system made the worst choice in raising up Donald Trump.
And even so, if it takes four years of Trump to remove the people who thought Hillary was a
good candidate from power in the Democratic Party, it may work out for the best in the long run.
And if it takes four years of Trump to show the people who voted for Trump that Republican ideologues
can only make their problems worse, so be it. It's mostly the hubris that amuses me at this point.
They thought they were the pros. They had the money. They had the ground game. All they did wrong
was to preselect and preordain a candidate nobody wanted.
abuses women, advances the cause of racism, attacks women's rights, is xenophobic
The American voters heard a steady stream of these arguments. Some may have simply ignored
them. Others took them into consideration, but concluded that they wanted drastic change enough
to put them aside. White women decided that Trump's comments, while distasteful, were things they'd
heard before.
Reliance on the sanctity of racial and gender pieties was a mistake. Not everyone treats
these subjects as the holiest of holies. The people who would be most swayed by those arguments
never would have voted for Trump anyways.
Colin Powell did not advise Clinton to do that, and even if he did she was a fool to take his
advice when her boss Obama explicitly told her not to keep a private server. Colin Powell
said Clinton destroys everything she touches with hubris. Seeing as how she destroyed the democrat
"blue wall" and also had low turnout which hurt democrats down the ticket I agree.
Zero evidence other than "he said, she said" regarding any involvement of Russian espionage agencies
in the U.S. elections but the left, incredulous once the result didn't go their way, are now clinging
to anything to divert attention from the issues that HRC ignored and Trump embraced.
All this hysteria about the USA and Russia finally working together than apart doesn't
help either for it appears that the [neoliberal] lefties want a perpetual war rather than peace.
The CIA being outraged about a foreign state intervening in an election is quite funny. They
have intervened so many times, especially in Latin America, to install puppet regimes.
As for hacking... does anybody believe the CIA has never hacked anybody?
Anyway, had the emails not existed, there would have been nothing with which to help Trump.
The Democrats have only themselves to blame. Bernie Sanders or ANY other candidate without the
Clintons baggage could have done a better job f beating Trump. They wanted Hillary at all cost;
they lost!
A major threat to liberty is the assault on the right to discuss political issues, seek out alternative
information sources, and promote dissenting ideas and causes such as non-interventionism in foreign
and domestic affairs. If this ongoing assault on free speech succeeds, then all of our liberties
are endangered.
One of the most common assaults on the First Amendment is the attempt to force public policy organizations
to disclose their donors. Regardless of the intent of these laws, the effect is to subject supporters
of controversial causes to harassment, or worse. This harassment makes other potential donors afraid
to support organizations opposing a popular war or defending the rights of an unpopular group.
Many free speech opponents support laws and regulations forbidding activist or educational organizations
from distributing factual information regarding a candidate's positions for several months before
an election. The ban would apply to communications that do not endorse or oppose any candidate. These
laws would result in the only sources of information on the candidate's views being the campaigns
and the media.
Recently the Federal Election Commission (FEC) rejected a proposal to add language exempting books,
movies, and streaming videos from its regulations. The majority of FEC commissioners apparently believe
they should have the power, for example, to ban Oliver Stone's biography of Edward Snowden, since
it was released two months before the election and features clips of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump
discussing Snowden.
The latest, and potentially most dangerous, threat to the First Amendment is the war on "fake
news." Those leading the war are using a few "viral" Internet hoaxes to justify increased government
regulation - and even outright censorship - of Internet news sites. Some popular websites, such as
Facebook, are not waiting for the government to force them to crack down on fake news.
Those calling for bans on "fake news" are not just trying to censor easily-disproved Internet
hoaxes. They are working to create a government-sanctioned "gatekeeper" (to use Hillary Clinton's
infamous phrase) with the power to censor any news or opinion displeasing to the political establishment.
None of those wringing their hands over fake news have expressed any concern over the fake news stories
that helped lead to the Iraq War. Those fake news stories led to the destabilizing of the Middle
East, the rise of ISIS, and the deaths of millions.
The war on "fake news" has taken a chilling turn with efforts to label news and opinion sites
of alternative news sources as peddlers of Russian propaganda. The main targets are critics of US
interventionist foreign policy, proponents of a gold standard, critics of the US government's skyrocketing
debt, and even those working to end police militarization. All have been smeared as anti-American
agents of Russia.
Just last week, Congress passed legislation creating a special committee, composed of key federal
agencies, to counter foreign interference in US elections. There have also been calls for congressional
investigations into Russian influence on the elections. Can anyone doubt that the goal of this is
to discredit and silence those who question the mainstream media's pro-welfare/warfare state propaganda?
The attempts to ban "fake news;" smear antiwar, anti-Federal Reserve, and other pro-liberty movements
as Russian agents; and stop independent organizations from discussing a politician's record before
an election are all parts of an ongoing war on the First Amendment. All Americans, no matter their
political persuasion, have a stake in defeating these efforts to limit free speech.
dirtscratcher
Snípéir_Ag_Obair ,
Dec 13, 2016 11:45 AM
For the MSM to declare war on 'fake news' they would have to shoot themselves in the head (instead
of the foot). A delightful idea, now that I think about it.
Traditional left is equal protection under the law, against imperial war and, most importantly,
pro-justice for the working and middle classes (i.e., against off-shoring mfg, etc.).
All this nonsense PC and identity politics is designed to divide the left (the working class)
on the core issues.
from my Easter European point of view (after a decade spent in the USSA) - Democrats seem much
more Stalininst and totalitarian than Republicans. $hitlery really reminds me of former prez Milosevic's
ugly wife (she was also politically involved and as totalitarian as $hitlery)
They are not "pro-immigration", they are against an intrusive police state that use illegal immigration
as an excuse to adopt artificial measures. Do you find logic that in many states you have in parallel
1) Welfare for refugees & illegal immigrants
2) Other government services as well
3) Money use to crack down on business with spot checks to see if they hire illegal immigrants
4) Money use to increase the patrols along the border or even build a wall
5) Naturalization of illegal immigrants after a few years of residence
Usually when the media organize a debate it's always rigged
On one side you will have the guy/woman who say that Westerners are selfish because they need
to offer more to those who arrive and adapt themselves to the new migrants
On the other side the guy/woman who will say that we are at war with Islam, that they have
wage a war on us with this invasion and that some asses need to be kick out overthere, Assad,
Ghadafi, Iran, you can name them, martial law is necessary to defend ourself by bombing them.
The fake news accusation is possible to counter. ... Let them call you a 'Fake News' website all
they want. ..
Post and publish well researched and truthful news and then let MSM do your advertising for
you. ... Call yourself "Fake News - 'Something'" and let the MSM lying fuckers send you traffic.
When they say fake news said this, that or something else and people search you out to hear all
your 'fake news' and discover your reports are more on the mark than all the fictional gibberish
MSM is trying to feed them, MSM loses it's audience even more.
Truth has a way of bubbling to the top. ..... Just look at the story of ZeroHedge.
Send in the lawyers if you have to.
Live Hard, Sue The Deep Pockets Of MSM When They Lie, Die Free
Enough with "the Russians" already. This "Russian Disinformation" and "Russian Hacking" stuff
is getting more ridiculous by the day.
First, don't let the irony escape you that most, if not all, of the pundits breathlessly blaming
the Russians for "fake news" and "election interference" are the very ones who were saying that Hillary
Clinton was a shoe-in for president. They're the ones who were providing her campaign with questions
in advance, and allowing her people to approve/disapprove of articles.
Secondly, many of the entities blamed for spreading "Russian propaganda" were the ones with the
audacity to tell the truth about the Clinton crime family and spread knowledge of the information
released by Wikileaks. Obviously, I'm not including
those Macedonian college kids in this, but keep in mind that they weren't doing it for the Russians
– they were doing it to make money.
This isn't about the Russians at all, which anyone with half a brain realizes is absolutely ridiculous.
Here's what this really is.
This is a war on the Trump presidency. It's an attempted coup.
Maybe it's even another effort to outright steal the presidency from Trump. Maybe there's someone
with a lot of money to throw into this "OMG THE RUSSIANS" rhetoric who really hates Russia and who
really wanted Hillary Clinton to be the President. Maybe his name rhymes with "Doros." I don't know
this for sure, but it's at least a more likely story than "The Russians" hacking our election and
deliberately spreading propaganda.
It's important to note that the MSM lost every single bit of their remaining credibility during
the last election and they're desperate to get it back. It reminds me of a high school kid who gets
caught doing something she shouldn't, who then makes up stories about another group of kids to get
people talking about them instead of her. The MSM can't accept the fact that Hillary Clinton lost,
despite their dishonest but enthusiastic efforts to steal the election for her. They'll
collude with whoever they have to in order to become relevant again.
Do you really have any doubt that they'll collude with whoever they have to in order to become
relevant again?
About "The Russians"
The whole plotline about "the Russians" really took off when the
Washington Post published an article listing a couple hundred websites as Russian "fake news"
sites. (I know the owners of quite a few of these sites personally -as in, we've shared meals and
wine together – and I can tell you, they're as American as apple pie." The Washington Post later
backtracked on the accusations but did not retract the article.
Except that when you consider that evidence by definition is definitive and the NYT admits everything
they have is circumstantial, then, doesn't that completely negates the headline? The article is sheer
speculation, just like the WaPo article that named the "fake news" sites.
What's more, the FBI completely disagrees with the CIA, and they've been very public about it.
They don't believe that there is well, evidence . I'll quote
from WaPo here .
The competing messages, according to officials in attendance, also reflect cultural differences
between the FBI and the CIA The bureau, true to its law enforcement roots, wants facts and tangible
evidence to prove something beyond all reasonable doubt. The CIA is more comfortable drawing inferences
from behavior.
"The FBI briefers think in terms of criminal standards - can we prove this in court," one of
the officials said. "The CIA briefers weigh the preponderance of intelligence and then make judgment
calls to help policymakers make informed decisions. High confidence for them means 'we're pretty
damn sure.' It doesn't mean they can prove it in court."
Give me a break. That, ladies and gentlemen, is why you should never, ever believe anything the
Washington Post refers to as investigative journalism. They have no idea what proof or evidence even
means.
There's a psy-op, all right, but it isn't "the Russians" perpetrating it.
It's the CIA (keep in mind that psyops is part of their job) working hand in hand with the MSM.
You just have to laugh at some of these headlines and quotes.
For your entertainment, enjoy the following round-up of headlines promoting the "Blame Russia"
sentiment.
Secret CIA assessment says Russia was trying to help Trump win White House (
source )
House passes intelligence bill enhancing efforts against Russia (
source )
Where's the outrage over Russia's hack of the US election?" (
CNN )
Fake News, Russians, and Election Reversal (
Town Hall )
A Powerful Russian Weapon: The Spread of False Stories (
NY Times )
DID RUSSIAN AGENTS INFLUENCE THE U.S. ELECTION WITH FAKE NEWS? (
Vanity
Fair)
Experts Say Russian Propaganda Helped Spread Fake News During Election (
NPR )
Media Wakes Up To Russia's 'Fake News' Only After It Is Applied Against Hillary (
Forbes )
And then, have an eyeroll at some very silly quotes
From an interview on NPR:
"But let's remember, this was a very close vote where just, you know, a few tens of thousands
of votes in a few states ended up making the difference. So I don't know, if you believe that
the kind of information that crashes through all of our social media accounts affects how we think
and potentially how we vote, I think you would conclude that this kind of stuff does matter."
(
source )
From the NY Times:
"RT [Russia Today] often seems obsessed with the United States, portraying life there as hellish.
On the day President Obama spoke at the
Democratic National Convention , for example, it emphasized scattered demonstrations rather
than the speeches. It defends the Republican presidential nominee, Donald J. Trump, as an underdog
maligned by the established news media." (
source )
From a secret mystery source on CNN:
"There was no way that any one could have walked out of there with that the evidence and conclude
that the Russian government was not behind this." (
source )
From CBS:
Responding to intelligence officials' report that Russia
tried to influence the U.S. presidential election in favor of President-elect Donald Trump,
Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain (R-Arizona) on Sunday said he doesn't know
what to make of Mr. Trump's dismissal of the issue.
"I don't know what to make of it because it's clear the Russians interfered," he told CBS'
"Face the Nation." "Whether they intended to interfere to the degree that they were trying to
elect a certain candidate, I think that's a subject of investigation. But facts are stubborn things.
They did hack into this campaign." (
source )
Politico reported:
"Donald Trump's insult-laced dismissal of reports that the CIA believes Russia hacked the 2016
election to help him is rattling a spy community already puzzled over how to gain the ear and
trust of the incoming president." (
source )
While some of the efforts are laughable, the end result could be incredibly serious.
And by serious, I mean devastating. It could result in civil war. It could result in World War
III.
Despite the inadvertent hilarity, this is a blatant effort to keep President-Elect Trump out of
the White House and to silence the opposition.
We learned that some people will do anything to remain in power.
We're watching them do anything right now.
Never has an election been so vehemently contested. Never has our country been so divided. If
the election results are cast aside, what do you really think will happen? Do you think Trump supporters
will just sigh and accept it?
And what about Russia?
Just a few months ago, we were
on the verge of war with them . By scapegoating "The Russians," if this psy-op is successful,
and Trump is kept out of office, what do you think is going to happen with tensions between the two
countries?
Enough with "the Russians" already. The real conspiracy is happening right here in America.
Glenn Greenwald
notes that – in the face of Trump and Brexit (which were
primarily caused by
economic
policies which have created
massive inequality ) – the Democratic National committee is trying to blame everybody and everything
but their own status quo policies and candidates which rig the system for the fatcats and hurt the
little guy:
The indisputable fact is that prevailing institutions of authority in the West, for decades,
have relentlessly and with complete indifference stomped on the economic welfare and social security
of hundreds of millions of people. While elite circles gorged themselves on globalism, free trade,
Wall Street casino gambling, and endless wars (wars that enriched the perpetrators and sent the
poorest and most marginalized to bear all their burdens), they completely ignored the victims
of their gluttony, except when those victims piped up a bit too much - when they caused a ruckus
- and were then scornfully condemned as troglodytes who were the deserved losers in the glorious,
global game of meritocracy.
***
A
short, incredibly insightful, and now more relevant than ever post-Brexit Facebook note by
the Los Angeles Times's Vincent Bevins wrote that "both Brexit and Trump_vs_deep_state are the very, very
wrong answers to legitimate questions that urban elites have refused to ask for 30 years." Bevins
went on: "Since the 1980s the elites in rich countries have overplayed their hand, taking all
the gains for themselves and just covering their ears when anyone else talks, and now they are
watching in horror as voters revolt."
For those who tried to remove themselves from the self-affirming, vehemently pro-Clinton elite
echo chamber of 2016, the warning signs that Brexit screechingly announced were not hard to see.
Two short
passages
from
a Slate interview I gave in July summarized those grave dangers: that opinion-making elites
were so clustered, so incestuous, so far removed from the people who would decide this election
- so contemptuous of them - that they were not only incapable of seeing the trends toward Trump
but were unwittingly accelerating those trends with their own condescending, self-glorifying behavior.
***
The warning lights were flashing in neon for a long time, but they were in seedy places that
elites studiously avoid. The few people who purposely went to those places and listened,
such as Chris Arnade , saw and heard them loud and clear. The ongoing failure to take heed
of this intense but invisible resentment and suffering guarantees that it will fester and strengthen.
This was the last paragraph of my July article on the Brexit fallout:
Instead of acknowledging and addressing the fundamental flaws within themselves, [elites]
are devoting their energies to demonizing the victims of their corruption, all in order to
delegitimize those grievances and thus relieve themselves of responsibility to meaningfully
address them. That reaction only serves to bolster, if not vindicate, the animating perceptions
that these elite institutions are hopelessly self-interested, toxic, and destructive and thus
cannot be reformed but rather must be destroyed. That, in turn, only ensures there will be
many more Brexits, and Trumps, in our collective future.
***
Democrats have already begun flailing around trying to blame anyone and everyone they can
find - everyone except themselves - for last night's crushing defeat of their party.
You know the drearily predictable list of their scapegoats: Russia, WikiLeaks, James Comey,
Jill Stein, Bernie Bros, The Media, news outlets (including, perhaps especially, The Intercept)
that sinned by reporting negatively on Hillary Clinton. Anyone who thinks that what happened
last night in places like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Iowa, and Michigan can be blamed on any of that
is drowning in self-protective ignorance so deep that it's impossible to express in words.
***
Put simply, Democrats knowingly chose to nominate a deeply unpopular, extremely vulnerable,
scandal-plagued candidate, who - for very good reason - was widely perceived to be a protector
and beneficiary of all the worst components of status quo elite corruption. It's astonishing
that
those of us who tried frantically to warn Democrats that nominating Hillary Clinton was a huge
and scary gamble - that all empirical evidence showed that she could lose to anyone
and Bernie Sanders would be a much stronger candidate, especially in this climate - are now
the ones being blamed: by the very same people who insisted on ignoring all that data and nominating
her anyway.
But that's just basic blame shifting and self-preservation. Far more significant is what
this shows about the mentality of the Democratic Party. Just think about who they nominated:
someone who - when she wasn't dining with Saudi monarchs and being feted in Davos by tyrants
who gave million-dollar checks - spent the last several years piggishly running around to Wall
Street banks and major corporations cashing in with $250,000 fees for 45-minute secret speeches
even though she had already become unimaginably rich with book advances while her husband already
made tens of millions playing these same games. She did all that without the slightest apparent
concern for how that would feed into all the perceptions and resentments of her and the Democratic
Party as corrupt, status quo-protecting, aristocratic tools of the rich and powerful: exactly
the worst possible behavior for this post-2008-economic-crisis era of globalism and destroyed
industries.
***
Trump vowed to destroy the system that elites love (for good reason) and the masses hate
(for equally good reason), while Clinton vowed to manage it more efficiently. That, as Matt
Stoller's
indispensable article in The Atlantic three weeks ago documented, is the conniving choice
the Democratic Party made decades ago: to abandon populism and become the party of technocratically
proficient, mildly benevolent managers of elite power. Those are the cynical, self-interested
seeds they planted, and now the crop has sprouted.
Indeed, the Dems re-elected Mrs. Status Quo – Nancy Pelosi – as minority leader. And Pelosi
claims :
I don't think people want a new direction.
Similarly, outgoing Senate minority leader Harry Reid
says
:
I don't think the Democratic Party is in that big of trouble.
I mean, if Comey kept his mouth shut, we would have picked up a couple more Senate seats and
we probably would have elected Hillary.
Of course, the whole claim that Russia hacked the U.S. election
is baseless as
is the whole
hysterical
claim that Russian propaganda swung the election.
But it's not just America
After Brexit and Italexit – with a potential
Frexit looming on the horizon – the status quo in Europe is also trying to shift attention (look,
squirrel!) from their failed policies to boogeymen.
For example, European leaders
are
also
claiming that Russian propaganda is interfering with European values.
And Germany's incredibly unpopular Social Democratic party is
claiming
that Russia might hack its election.
A former British cabinet member
alleges that Russian hackers "probably" swayed the Brexit vote.
And Washington Post national security reporter at Adam Entous told BBC this week that a CIA official
claims that Russia hacked
the Brexit vote, and the vote in Ukraine (starting around 1:09:58).
What's next the status quo starts blaming their electoral losses on little green men?
"... By Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One and an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Jointly published with New Economic Perspectives ..."
"... This Russia stuff isn't about Trump but about the Democrats pleading with people not to look at the man behind the curtain. ..."
"... Propaganda only works when people are aware there is no curtain. At this point, the Wizard of Oz has been revealed, and unlike Baum's creation, he has no redeeming qualities. Telling everyone to look at the big giant head again fails. ..."
"... Putin is not the one responsible for manipulating Democrats into an intensely pro-Wall Street, anti-working class political posture that loses elections. ..."
"... The working class wants jobs and job security – not simply income. ..."
"... The baggage you speak of actually began with Reagan when from a government position of high privilege he actually sneered at government as the employer of last resort with his statement belittling "I'm from the government and I'm here to help you." Which a subservient press took and ran with to make sure it settled into everyone's subconscious. It's helpful to revisit the rise of Ronald Reagan, and to remember that Obama took him as his role model, not FDR. ..."
"... The New Democrats will likely go the way of the blue dog Democrats. Their Republican voters will ask themselves why should they vote for a powerless Republican-lite, and they will simply die politically. ..."
"... New Democrats are really moderate republicans. For the democrat party to survive and get back their base, they have to adopt progressive democrat ideas. Electing Schumer as their senate leader is a mistake. He represents all that is bad about the democrat party. ..."
December 12, 2016 by
Yves Smith By
Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One and an associate professor of
economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Jointly published with
New Economic Perspectives
On December 10, 2016, a New York Times
article entitled "Democrats Have a New Message: It's the Economy First" that unintentionally
revealed that the Party's "centrist" leadership and the paper remain clueless about how to improve
the economy and why the "centrist" leadership needs to end its long war against the working class.
This is how the paper explained the five "centrist" leaders' framing of the problem.
It was a blunt, plain-spoken set of senators who gathered last Monday at the Washington home
of Senator Heidi Heitkamp, Democrat of North Dakota, dining on Chinese food as they vented frustration
about the missteps of the
Democratic Party .
To this decidedly centrist group, the 2016 election was nothing short of a fiasco: final proof
that its national party had grown indifferent to the rural, more conservative areas represented
by Democrats like Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Joe Donnelly of
Indiana and Jon Tester of Montana, who attended the dinner. All face difficult re-election races
in 2018.
This non-centrist group was a gathering of five New Democrats. President Obama self-identified
himself as a New Democrat. The Clintons and Al Gore are leaders of the New Democrats. The leadership
of the Democratic National Committee was, and remains, New Democrats. On economic issues such as
austerity, jobs, and full employment, the New Democrats are far more extreme than the (stated) views
of Donald Trump. The New Democrats are infamous for their close ties with Wall Street. This means
that the paper's description of the Chinese nosh is as clueless as the five New Democrats kvetching
about policy "missteps" that they championed for decades. Of course, neither the paper nor the non-centrists
mentioned that critical fact. The blindness of the non-centrists to the fact that it is their policies
that launched the long war by the New Democrats against the working class is matched by the blindness
of the paper.
The kvetching may have been "blunt," but it was also dishonest. The five New Democrats know that
they will likely be replaced in the 2018 elections by Republicans who share the New Democrats' anti-working
class dogmas. What was really going on was an extended cry of pain about the five senators' fear
of losing their jobs.
Note that the paper never tells you what the five New Democrats so bluntly identified as the New
Democrats' "missteps" or what new policies they believed needed to be adopted by the Party.
This failure is particularly bizarre because the paper says that its reportage is based on sources
that the paper agreed to keep anonymous so that they could speak frankly about this meeting over
Chinese food. That combination of supposed frankness from the sources gained by the grant of anonymity
so them could describe in detail the purported bluntness by the gang of five should have produced
some epic, specific condemnations of the Democratic Party's leadership by the New Democrats. Instead,
it produced mush. Focusing on the "economy" is the right general idea for any political party, but
it is so general a word that it is close to meaningless without identifying the specific policy changes
that the five New Democrats now support and oppose. The mushy reportage provides a thin gruel to
the reader.
Most of all, they lamented, Democrats had simply failed to offer a clarion message about the
economy with appeal to all 50 states.
"Why did the working people, who have always been our base, turn away?" Mr. Manchin said in
an interview, recounting the tenor of the dinner conversation.
And the "clarion message about the economy" that they proposed that the Democratic Party make
was? You would have thought that little detail would (a) be critical to the article and (b) would
be something that the five New Democrats would have been eager to publicize without any need for
anonymity. Conversely, if even after the disastrous election, from their perspective, the five New
Democrats could not compose that "clarion" call, then the real problem is that the New Democrats'
economic dogmas prevent them from supporting such a "clarion" pro-worker policy.
The second sentence of the quotation is equally embarrassing to the New Democrats. It purportedly
recounts "the tenor of the dinner conversation." The first obvious question is – how did each of
these five New Democrats answer that that question? That is what the readers would want to know.
Even with the grants of anonymity to multiple sources the paper inexplicably presents only the vaguest
hints as to the five Senators' explanation for why the New Democrats waged their long war on the
working class.
Notice also the unintentional humor of the five New Democrats finally asking themselves this existential
question in 2016 – after the election. The New Democrats began their long war on the working class
over 30 years ago. Tom Frank published his famous (initial) book warning that the New Democrats'
war on the working class would prove disastrous in 2004. The five New Democrats are shocked, shocked
that the working class, after 30 years of being abused by the New Democrats' anti-worker policies
and after being vilified for decades by the New Democrats, overwhelmingly voted against the Nation's
most prominent New Democrat, Hillary Clinton. None of the five New Democrats appears to have a clue,
even after the 2016 election, why this happened.
The article and the five New Democrats fail to discuss the anti-working class policies that they
have championed for decades. Job security is the paramount issue that drives voting by many members
of the working class. The New Democrats and the Old Republicans share a devotion to the two greatest
threats to working class job security – austerity and the faux free trade deals. This makes
it ironic that the paper sought out the Party faction leaders who have been so wrong for so long
as supposedly being the unique source of providing the right answers now. If the five New Democrats
had engaged in introspection and were prepared to discuss their disastrous, repeated policy failures
that would have been valuable, but the New Democrats admit to making zero errors in the article.
The paper's understanding of economics and jobs is so poor that it wrote this clunker.
But even liberals believe Democrats must work harder to compete for voters who lean to the
right, if only to shave a few points off the Republican Party's margin of victory in rural America.
In some cases, they said, that may mean embracing candidates who hold wildly different views from
the national party on certain core priorities.
First, the phrase and the implicit logic in the use of the phrase "even liberals" reverses reality.
It is progressives who have consistently called for the Democratic Party to return to its role as
a party that champions working people.
Second, the issue is generally not who "leans to the right." Indeed, the 2016 election should
have made clear to the paper the severe limits on the usefulness of the terms "right" and "left"
in explaining U.S. elections. Jobs are not a right v. left issue.
Third, the paramount policy priority – jobs – is the same regardless of whether one focuses on
economic or political desirability. So, how long does it take for the article, and the five New Democrats
to discuss "jobs?" Given the fact that they vented at length about the fear that they would begin
to lose their jobs within two years, the subject of job security should have been paramount to the
five New Democrats. The article, however, never even mentioned jobs or any of the related critical
concepts – austerity, the faux trade deals, or the refusal to provide full employment. Further,
the article did not comment on the failure of the New Democrats to even mention these any of these
four concepts.
"A Clarion Message about the Economy with Appeal to all 50 States"
Here is UMKC's economics department's long-standing proposal to every American political party:
Our party stands for full employment at all times. We will make the federal government the
guaranteed employer of last resort for every American able and wanting to work. We recognize that
the United States has a sovereign currency and can always afford to ensure full employment. We
recognize that austerity typically constitutes economic malpractice and is never a valid excuse
for rejecting full employment. The myth that we help our grandchildren by consigning their grandparents
and parents to unemployment is obscene. The opposite is true.
The working class wants jobs and job security – not simply income. Working class people overwhelmingly
want to work. Working class males who are unable to find secure, full time work often become depressed
and unmarriageable. If you want to encourage marriage and improve the quality of marriages, full
employment and job security are vital policies. There are collateral advantages to providing full
employment. Full employment can reduce greatly the "zero sum" fears about employment that can tear
a society apart. Each of these outcomes is overwhelmingly supported by Americans.
Good economics is not a "right" v. "left" issue. Austerity is terrible economics. The fact that
we have a sovereign currency is indisputable and there is broad agreement among finance professionals
that such a currency means that the federal government budget is nothing like a household. The major
party that first adopts the federal full employment guarantee will secure a critical political advantage
over its rivals. Sometimes, good economics is good politics.
It is critical that existing Democrat leadership goes into retirement. Finagling the Clintons
back into the WH, delays this by 4, 8 or more years. Besides generating immense animosity. This
could be easily accomplished if all Democrat leadership retires at 65 immediately, to live on
their Social Security and Medicare (if they think those are still important).
ah, but there was a "clarion message". It was "we care not even about the 1%, but the 0.01%.
The rest of you can piss off".
Which is why Dems got dumped.
I suspect this meeting was functionally similar to the ecclesiastic kvetching when folks began
to believe the world was a sphere some 600 years ago. I can imagine them thinking: unemployment
(as they measure it) is low, housing prices are jumping, and boy, look at that stock market –
how did our base constituency lose its way?
As long as the Democratic Party leadership thinks
this way, the party is useless and should be abandoned. I might suggest that Bill, Yves, Randy
Wray, and others get to work educating them, but like flat-earthers, these folks not only live
in willful ignorance, they would very much like to cast that crowd on the pyre of false-news purveyors
lest they lead even more of the faithful astray.
I have to fully agree with Prof. Black's assessment; thought this when they reelected Nancy
"my son works at Countrywide" Pelosi and doubled down on their identity politics. (David Harvey
disposes of identity politics in a single sentence in his latest book.)
But in this Lewis Carroll universe, "Work harder to compete for Republican votes" doesn't mean
steal Trump's jobs-related thunder but give in on things like fracking a la Madame Heitkamp, or
discover an enthusiasm for guns like Manchin, or run anti-abortion stalwarts like Donnelly. That's
why the reporter couldn't depart from the vague mush–the "centrists'" solution to the Democrats'
debacle is to become Republicans.
My folks are bible thumping, Fox News watching, prolife, and anti-gay marriage voters.
They were all set to vote for Bernie, not because they agreed with him on everything, but because
he was fighting for people like them and he was honest. They would have burned in H-E-double-hockey-sticks
before voting for Clinton though. Judging by the polls during the primaries and the eventual outcome,
they were far from alone in their assessment. Too bad the dimwit DC Dems can't be bothered to
actually talk to people like them.
They sort of do talk to people like your relatives, but partisanship is strong. Plenty of local
Democrats can diagnose and propose solutions caused by the GOP but will worship Trump if he had
a "D" next to his name. Claire McCaskill probably receives enough praise from partisan plebes
for no payment she assumes all the plebes should love her. For conservative types, Sanders not
being in the other tribe was a huge selling point.
The fundamental power diagram of politics is that groups of donors select groups of politicians
to fight for the interests of the donors. The complication in democracy is that the voters select
which politicians will rule. So the donors are like a client, the politicians like a lawyer and
the voters are like a jury. A talented politician is one who can cunningly convince voters to
set her guilty donors free.
So all these New Democrats are doing is suggesting ways to better plead to the jury. But they
are in no way questioning the donors or whether they should continue to push policies that only
serve the donors' best interests
One revolutionary feature of Donald Trump's campaign was that he was his own donor and so was
very free to directly appeal to what is in the best interests of the working class voters he targeted:
economic nationalism.
Conversely the most problematic feature of the Trump campaign was that he was running as the
head of a party that did have plenty of donors and he was openly contradicting plenty of these
donors' interests. But Trump correctly calculated that the only way to power in America was to
hijack one of the two legacy parties.
In some ways Bernie Sanders attempted a similar feat, although I remain skeptical about whether
he really was trying to win. If Sanders had become President, he would be facing the same problems
that Trump now faces; how to rule a party whose policies fundamentally diverge in many areas from
what you have promised to deliver.
And so until the Democrat change donors – specifically by announcing that as a party they will
only accept small donations and adopt some of the Trump tactics to reduce campaign spending –
nothing will change except the sound bites. Many working class people realized exactly how flawed
Trump was but they rolled the dice for one reason only – no one owned Trump. Or as
Henry Kissinger put it:
"This president-elect, it's the most unique that I have experienced in one respect. He has
absolutely no baggage," Kissinger told CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS." "He has no obligation to
any particular group because he has become president on the basis of his own strategy."
Kissinger is smart so he makes these words sound blasé but I can assure you they strike fear
into the hearts of America's elite. But only when we hear these same elites expressing fear of
the entire Democratic party (like they did about Bernie Sanders) will we know something fundamental
has changed for the better.
Some very good insights. I would be curious to know your thoughts on when the repub/Trump split
comes, which way will FOX tilt? Right now FOX is all Trump, but after a year or two of insinuations
that Trump is a Pro Putin commie, I suspect the masterful propagandists that make so much of our
beliefs will either cause the actual downfall of Trump, or will more than neuter him.
Trump was selected by Republican voters despite Fox not being his BFF. Trump is the GOP, and
Republican voters support their own. 41 called Reagan a practitoner of Voodoo economics. Yes,
this was an appeal to the Southern strategy. Attacks on Trump that say he's not a "true conservative"
will never work. Trump is a known clown. He can't embarrass himself, and I think it's important
to remember Iraq happened. What did the average Republican voter take from that? Putin Fear Fest
is very similar to the events of 2002.
Periodically, new tribal arrangements need to be made. Romney was given a chance. He failed,
so the GOP voters selected someone new. Republicans hate Democrats. Attacks levied by Democrats
will always be brushed off.
Videos could emerge of Trump swearing allegiance to Putin at an orgy, and Republican voters
wouldn't care.
This Russia stuff isn't about Trump but about the Democrats pleading with people not to look
at the man behind the curtain.
Yes Republicans stick together plus they think Trump is most likely to accomplish their "small
government" goals and so they support Trump (this is probably true, the establishment supported
Hillary, but many a Republican votes party line for one of their own).
Hillary did well with defense contract related Republicans, but they are clustered. The ones
in hideously over priced McMansions in Virginia and Maryland are terrified of spending being redirected.
They have mortgages to pay, and if Trump thinkers with defense spending whether through cutting
cutting or moving, Northern Virginia will become a land of white elephants. Northern Virginia
might have incomes, but outside of old town Alexandria, it's a dump of out of control suburban
sprawl.
No one sane would live there by choice. The costs are too high to relocate a corporate operation
or even grow one. Republicans in Wisconsin don't care.
Oh, I agree with your overall points. I was just wondering specifically about Murdoch and if
his contrariness will make FOX pro Russian ((in the face of overwhelming repub foreign policy
establishment against Trump)), or will FOX be the "repub" anti Russain brand. It will be interesting
when being "conservative" means you like Putin .
And I remember how many rabidly anti communists where having conniptions when Reagan met with
Gorbachev in Iceland. But Reagan was well ensconced in the establishment. Can Trump alone end
the red menace?
? – "Trump was selected by Republican voters despite Fox not being his BFF. " Hannity and O'Reilly
segments this past cycle were one hour propaganda news feeds for Trump.
As far as Fox goes from what I understand they are currently split - with Kelly Megyn (I know),
Brit Hume, and Chris Wallace being anti-Trump while Sean Hannity and Lou Dobbs are pro-Trump bigly.
This is a smart balancing of Fox's short term need for viewers versus their longer-term policy
requirements. But there can be no doubt that Rupert Murdoch is rabidly anti-Trump - he even gave
that raving NeverTrump lunatic Louise Mensch a website called HeatStreet.
From glancing at the National Review it seems the GOPe think they are being generous by admitting
defeat and magnanimously getting behind Trump's cultural agenda while insisting conservatives
stay in charge of economic and foreign policy. But this is no change at all since the Republicans
have always been offering the working classes empty cultural issues.
I imagine the Republicans see this as a Tour de France with them being the huge peloton while
Trump is a lone breakaway attacker who they will soon swallow back up and totally co-opt.
I don't think the MSM are that good at propaganda; if they were Trump wouldn't be President!.
For example now they have launched this Trump + Putin campaign but Trump responds by picking a
fight with China. But the MSM is aghast and totally support the Chinese position! So they accuse
Trump of carrying water for Russia put there's the entire MSM all lined up with buckets of Chinese
water on their heads!
I suppose at some point several top GOP Senators (McCain, Flake) and a bottom (Lindsey Graham)
will leave the party and caucus with the Democrats to ensure legislative gridlock. I believe if
Trump really tried he could get a House of Representatives that supports him. I don't see how
he herds the Senate though.
Propaganda only works when people are aware there is no curtain. At this point, the Wizard
of Oz has been revealed, and unlike Baum's creation, he has no redeeming qualities. Telling everyone
to look at the big giant head again fails.
The msm and the Democrats don't know how to function moving forward because building trust
will take years of effort, and many of the specific personalities are done. They can never be
attached to a competitive effort without undermining the effort. If they hope to retake their
spot, when FB seemed trendy and not a mom hangout, they need people to forget about the curtain,
but it's impossible. Instead they will whine about wicked witches of the North.
Even Trump won because the GOP misfits were sheepdogs for Jeb. Whatever else Trump was, he
wasn't part of Jeb's curtain. Shouting Trump is a fraud doesn't work as long as you then scream
"pay no mind to the strings on my back." I think Rufio could have made more noise if he wasn't
such an obvious beta as he attacked Jeb, but one could argue he betrayed Jeb. People don't like
that kind of thing.
Bernie proved that there is plenty of money for candidates with the right intent and policies.
What you say, that dems can't win without its moneyed donor class, is a notion that has been
used to bludgeon democrats into conservatism and passivity.
Bernie blasted your assertion about campaign finance to bits.
As to the dems "figuring something out," the dem leadership doesn't need to figure anything
out. They are perfectly happy serving the 1%. It's the rest of the democrats who need to figure
that out about their leadership and take action, whether it is tossing the leadership or starting
a new party.
According to an NYT article about his campaign, Sanders was not running to win until after
his popularity started to skyrocket. Initially he was still attending the Senate and was not campaigning
fulltime.
It was just an attempt to spread his liberal policy message nationwide. But how to control
the party as President when it's opposed to him on policy? That's what "political revolution"
meant. If Congress opposed Trump, he will have a rally of thousands in the district of any difficult
legislator blaming him or her for not letting Trump make America great again.
Similarly Sanders
can campaign to either get a Dem majority, it he hadn't got one in 2016, by 2018. Or to increase
it or make it more liberal. This is what he did when the city council opposed him in Burlington,
Vermont. Within a year he got one which was much more pliable. The progressives never got a majority
but he went from Obama-style gridlock to a working government.
One correction: Bernie Sanders is not a liberal. He is a democratic socialist. It's not a minor
point, particularly because liberals deliberately obfuscate the difference to con voters.
Liberals believe in hierarchy. I'm pretty confident Bernie Sanders is an egalitarian. That
matters, when it comes to policy and governance, as well as core values.
Putin is not the one responsible for manipulating Democrats into an intensely pro-Wall Street,
anti-working class political posture that loses elections.
I agree - if the "old" parties act like the old neoliberal parties, they can't solve our current
predicament. While our predicament isn't a new one, just a new version of an old problem, retreading
the past 20 or 30 years isn't going to do the trick.
Gov't as employer as last resort is a huge leap from the goals of full employment and job security.
This is promoted here and elsewhere without any rationale. Someone will have to explain why this
is the only possible solution.
Plus the quality of the jobs in the private sector is often horrible (of course not all but
many). There is a reason everyone wants a government job. And unless the government sector forces
the private sector to improve the quality of their jobs (ie living wages and ACTUALLY enforce
overtime and safety and etc. not to mention all the contract work going on that isn't EVEN jobs)
it will remain so. Quality of jobs matters.
Not really, but try explaining the opposite. How can we have full employment without gov't
employment as last resort? Granted you can have "goals" all you want if you ignore them, but we'll
put that aside and assume you are not disingenuous.
Everything else has been tried and failed, miserably. Companies sit on piles of cash without significant
hiring. Tax incentives get gamed easily.
Offering employment is the simplest, most targeted solution that effectively cuts the rest of
the employers out of the hostage taking business.
The working class wants jobs and job security – not simply income.
I rather like the term used here instead of jobs , people want a livelihood. In the
USA, that get's shortened into jobs, and then later short changed again into things like minimum
wage. One could have fully employment and terrible livelihood. Only the Japanese could put up
with 50+ years of being economic animals. Anyone who thinks full employment is going to solve
issues like income inequality has been eating mushrooms picked from the cow pasture.
I just don't even like the idea of "good jobs" - so limited and so American.
For example, Jobs won't save us from Climate Change, it's not just a money issue. Hence Livelihood,
as in lets make sure the bastards who made this mess die before we do, then we;ll have some justice
to make our miserable end more bearable.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/12/links-121216.html#comment-2725938
Full employment is the growth argument. Both would be beneficial but I would prefer the switch
to income/leisure. Shorter work week, more leisure activities, less consumption, less growth.
Ditto. Government doesn't need to provide jobs where people go to the office and get paid to
sit on their rear end all day – we already have enough of those in the public and private sectors.
I'd like to see a basic income guarantee with some sort of mandatory work required to get it.
Something like the draft where people are called up to work for a certain period of time on a
rotating basis but also giving them some say in what sort of job they get to do. One year you
work at job x for a period of time, train your replacement and then get a bunch of time off. The
next year you can try something different at job y.
Mandatory work everything is work. Yes, you can have call up for people who want to do a stint/internship
learning large scale community construction, infrastructure, plumbing, electrical, etc.
Still, there needs to be jobs where people sit on their back sides part of a day some prefer
working in offices and some are only able to work in offices.
But stretch the imagination: Community service runs the gamut: people to clean up streets,
keep gutters open, scrape up weeds, maintain plantings, paint, repair; assisting children, seniors
and animals; art etc. I am not a musician nor actor but would appreciate having free/low cost
local enrichment programs. Public schools (the ones left) could be used in the evening for free
classes: electronics, woodworking, engine/household repair, cooking, nutrition, etc.
And yes, there will be a need for people who sit on their rear ends to help organize and track
activities. :)
And don't get me wrong about the rear end sitting – I don't mean those types of jobs shouldn't
exist, I just mean that when you show up at the office you ought to have some actual work to do.
And going to meetings deciding what work others should be doing doesn't count. I've worked at
a few where I was required to be there for eight hours a day but only had four hours of work to
do, and not for lack of asking.
One can only read the whole internet so many times a day ;)
What nonsense it is to generalize what the working class as a whole wants (and really this
probably should include everyone who works for a living). Some want jobs, some income. If everyone
only wanted jobs no mothers would ever stay home to raise children etc..
Everything is work, everything is a job. If you take care of an elderly relative, it's duty
(unpaid labor), if you take care of an elderly stranger it's a job. If you raise your own children,
it's duty (unpaid labor), if raise others children, it's a job.
Elites are claiming more and more work is duty and of course it should be unpaid not to mention
volunteerism.
If there was an income guarantee, most would labor their days away as work contributes to social
connection and provides personal satisfaction.
If there was an income, I imagine social life would be richer as more people could be artists
(festivals!), performers (community theater!), work in schools (art, music, construction classes)
etc.
And, of course, it is the government that is the issuer of this sovereign currency that they
cannot run out of. Or are you suggesting that the government give the $$ to the private sector,
which will, of course, trickle it on down? We could call it, I don't know, how about 'quantitative
easing'?
Another reason to prefer the government (which, after all, is "us") to administer jobs-for-all
is providing jobs that do useful things for society which could not be provided on a for-profit
basis. Um, like daycare, medical care, public utilities, eldercare, voter registration, education,
making things that are repairable, and then repairing them when they need it, organic agriculture,
humane animal husbandry, saving the monarch butterflies, *manual* residential snow shoveling -
all those things that 'cost too much' for a for-profit business to do.
Exactly, HotFlash. And, notice that so many of these livelihoods, child and eldercare, teaching,
repair persons, garbage collectors, snow plow operators, have been relegated to the level of 'minimum
wage jobs,' and the people that perform these necessary services consigned to the ranks of 'too
dumb to be innovators or investment bankers.'
We have been conned into mumbling to our military, 'thank you for your service,' as they get
to board flights before us. Why not honor trash collectors and the women who clean the toilets
in our workplaces and the workers who are out on the county roads and interstates at 2am in a
blizzard, keeping the roads clear so we don't have to be inconveniences? Where would our society
be without them?
Douglas Adams was only being partially facetious when he had the an advanced civilization wiped
out because
they shipped out their phone cleaners on rocket-ships (ala the Marching Morons). It was his
subtle rebuke to both Kornbluth and the Ayn Randian/neo-conservative of that time, as well as
the general vapid consumerist society.
As to the military, I always favored the Coast Guard, they risk their lives to save other humans,
not help the MIC and Empire.
I think explaining govt-as-employer-of last-resort becomes easy once a few misconceptions are
corrected and a few realities sink in. But it's no small thing for the realities to sink in -
everything we've been taught, or encouraged to assume, is working against us. Conventional, responsible
wisdom is that the wealth one has that didn't come from the government is "earned" and any activity
that "earns" money is inherently productive and being productive is good - it makes one worthy.
People think of "money" as the stuff passed around in big green wads in the movies, that comes
into being through work an ingenuity (unless the govt commits the sin of "just printing it").
Distribution may not be "fair" but it at least follows certain intuitive laws or forces, that
have a vague sense of morality associated with them (e.g., money is earned through productivity
which means whoever has it by definition earned it, e.g. MH point on FIRE sector). It is a tautology
- but a powerful one. People don't think of money as the product of accounting, a two
sided coin created literally from a balance sheet - debits and credits, assets and liabilities
- and that commercial banks can conjure "money" - pump it into circulation - simply by marking
an asset in their ledger. People don't know that banks issue loans (create assets) out of nothing
all the time (i.e., loans without corresponding deposits or reserves, loaning what they don't
"have"). The asset becomes revenue-generating through interests and fees, which, if non-liquidating,
are the precise opposite of "productive."
It is so difficult for this to sink in because our society organizes itself as if this weren't
true. Speaking personally, it takes a persistent, systematic re-organization of how we process
facts and arguments. We hear something like a "sovereign currency can never run out" as a justification
for universal income or govt-as-employer-of-last-resort, and it triggers a deeply embedded sense
that somehow this would send the economy spinning of the rails. But once it sinks in that "money"
is just an asset/liability, and its entry into private circulation is purely a matter of public
policy (not private "productivity"), at least then you're asking the right question: how should
a sovereign inject currency into private circulation? Maybe no one answer is universally right
at all times and in all circumstances .. but at this point debt is outpacing actual productivity,
which means it must be written down (MH argument) and/or there needs to be an injection on the
debtor side to try to catch up (e.g., jobs program or universal income). Which is why it is so
nonsensical for the govt to "print money" in the form of transferring assets in the form of increasing
bank reserves, as if bank lending depends on reserves at all it's like trying to fill a pool
but flooding your sink). At least that's how I make sense of it still may botch the details,
but at least once you strip away the cultural/social/moral baggage, it becomes more of a matter
of simple economic logic that doesn't need a larger explanation. If you want to fill the pool,
fill the pool, not the sink. But the baggage is real - which is why it really does seem to be
a matter of letting the realities sink in.
The baggage you speak of actually began with Reagan when from a government position of high
privilege he actually sneered at government as the employer of last resort with his statement
belittling "I'm from the government and I'm here to help you." Which a subservient press took
and ran with to make sure it settled into everyone's subconscious. It's helpful to revisit the
rise of Ronald Reagan, and to remember that Obama took him as his role model, not FDR.
This battle has been ongoing in American politics probably since way back before the Great
Depression, but that's as far back as some of us remember our parents telling us about. I love
Bill Black because he's the kind of Democrat I thought I was. This new crowd makes me sick. It's
appropriate that Obama's murder weapons are called drones. That's what the New Democrats are:
drones.
The New Democrats will likely go the way of the blue dog Democrats. Their Republican voters
will ask themselves why should they vote for a powerless Republican-lite, and they will simply
die politically.
They care about staying a Senator. They care about themselves first and only, and will suck
up to and serve whoever provides the money that allows them to hold onto their seats.
Voters in these red states voted for change, above all else. They voted for a nut job because
they finally heard a candidate speaking to their issues and concerns, something their Senators,
apparently, have not done.
There will soon be so few democrats remaining that we should give some serious consideration
to a sequestration solution of giving them their own land, with no fossil fuel degradation, clean
water from the glaciers, a tiny house, a pouch of seeds, and a sustainable truck garden, no cars
trucks or bicycles, a fig tree in the middle of town. They could either pay taxes or not, as they
felt motivated, and provide their own services regardless as not to be a burden. We could gather
them up and have a long march to their new home; it would be hravenly! The rest of us could peacefully
proceed to hell.
This is mind blowing. Granted I didn't follow the link to the full story - but how on earth
is this even news , even under the pathetic standards of election post mortems? New dems
concoct self-admiring story, posture as the ones who "get it." Feed it to reporter, who agrees
to attribute anonymously of course (so it has the feel of insiders and not high schoolers). I'm
guessing what these courageous centrists really mean with the confused prescription to court voters
who "lean right" is to appeal on social/cultural issues. Scold "elitist identity politics" of
the national party as a distraction from the "economic message" (which of course will be the same
assault on decency it always has been). So "economy first" would mean attack/exploit social liberalism
and call it a "fight" for the economic plight of the every-man/woman. The beauty is you get to
sound angry on behalf of voters without an iota of accountability or reflection, without ever
having to answer for shallow, self-serving policies and abject failure.
Note that the paper never tells you what the five New Democrats so bluntly identified as
the New Democrats' "missteps" or what new policies they believed needed to be adopted by the Party.
This failure is particularly bizarre because the paper says that its reportage is based on sources
that the paper agreed to keep anonymous so that they could speak frankly about this meeting over
Chinese food. . .
The five New Democrats were: Democrats like Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Claire McCaskill
of Missouri, Joe Donnelly of Indiana and Jon Tester of Montana, at a dinner held at the Washington
home of Senator Heidi Heitkamp, Democrat of North Dakota.
So, not anonymous at all.
Here is the key part to understanding the plight of the politician / narcissist that feels
the wrath of voters.
. . . All face difficult re-election races in 2018.
There is nothing worse than being ignored, but fail to understand that what they themselves
fear, being ignored with no jawb, the peasants have been living with for decades. Hypocrite is
the word and these are vacuous human beings that care only about themselves no matter what emotional
fakery they use.
Um . what the five New Democrats so bluntly identified as the New Democrats' "missteps" or what
new policies they believed needed to be adopted by the Party
Um, noun (subject)-verb-object. what (noun) was identified as (verb) "missteps" and "'policies"
(objects) eg. the 5 did not identify the missteps or policies.
Comical. The first line in Bill's post gets the NYT headline wrong.
On December 10, 2016, a New York Times article entitled "Democrats Have a New Message: It's
the Economy First"
The actual headline is "Democrats Hone a New Message: It's the Economy Everyone ". A small
detail for sure, which implies from The NYT it's a purveyor of fake news, because honing implies
a refinement of a message already being said, and is contradicted within two words, by the word
"new". It is possible that the headlines keep changing and that Bill's was up when he quoted them,
which would solidify their reputation of fake news purveyors.
Getting back to the meat of Bill's post.
This failure is particularly bizarre because the paper says that its reportage is based
on sources that the paper agreed to keep anonymous so that they could speak frankly about this
meeting over Chinese food. That combination of supposed frankness from the sources gained by the
grant of anonymity so them could describe in detail the purported bluntness by the gang of five
should have produced some epic, specific condemnations of the Democratic Party's leadership by
the New Democrats. Instead, it produced mush . . .
Going to the NYT article here is the reference to anonymous sources, so I freely admit to being
wrong about Bill's anonymous Chinese food eating party (or wake) attendees being the fatuous five.
The party, these senators said, had grown overly fixated on cultural issues with limited
appeal to the heartland. They criticized Hillary Clinton's campaign slogan, "Stronger Together,"
as flat and opaque, according to multiple people present at the dinner, some of whom spoke on
the condition of anonymity .
This is the NYT's only reference to anonymity and furthers it's reputation of a fake news purveyor
as the word "some" implies that some would go on record but either couldn't be found or weren't
asked.
The rest of the article segues into a pity party, from those that weren't there.
Moderate Democrats are not alone in their sense of urgency about honing a new economic message.
After a stinging loss to Donald J. Trump, liberals in the party are also trying to figure out
how to tap into the populist unrest that convulsed both parties in 2016. Only by making pocketbook
issues the central focus, they say, can Democrats recover in the 2018 midterm elections and unseat
Mr. Trump in 2020.
"We need to double down and double down again on the importance of building an economy not
just for those at the top, but for everyone ," said Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts,
a high-profile progressive who is seen as a leading potential opponent for Mr. Trump.
Elizabeth Warren doesn't realize that those at the top stole it from everyone else, and quadrupling
down on building an economy that works for those at the top won't work for those at the bottom
or anyone else except for those at the top.
Beyond that, they expect wide variance in how officeholders handle Mr. Trump and his agenda,
from moderates who seek out accommodation to blue-state leaders who pursue total war . Their emerging
message is likely to focus on protecting Medicare and Social Security, attacking income inequality
and political corruption , and blocking legislation that might restrict access to health care.
"Likely" and "might" are weasel words. How likely are those that live and breath corruption
to cut off their own supply?
The whole article is a mix of real and fake news and some days I like my comedy, black.
"So, how long does it take for the article, and the five New Democrats to discuss "jobs?" Given
the fact that they vented at length about the fear that they would begin to lose their jobs within
two years, the subject of job security should have been paramount to the five New Democrats."
I'm still chuckling. It's sort of like five roosters in a chicken coop that only has room for
one, all vying to become Chanticleer.
We in the UK had thirteen years of ' New Labour ' which was Tony Blair's repositioning of the
old Labour Party to turn it into a right of centre Thatcherite, neoliberal, let's privatise everything
party, thus abandoning the working class in the process . Exactly as Bill Black describes re the
Democrats . The problem as I see it is hydra headed , but here are the headings as it were :
1. A political shift to the right is also a psychological one, separating the ' doing okays
' from the ' left behinds ' and in the process reducing ( if not eliminating ) empathy from the
' doing okays ' for the ' left behinds ' . So intentional or otherwise this is a ' divide and
rule ' policy, by government that has given rise to Global Trump_vs_deep_state. In the process the electability
of a left-wing candidate as a leader – Saunders, Corybyn – has been made impossible under the
present set up.
2. Automation. The power of labour hasn't just been weakened by this rightward shift . It has
been severely weakened by the onward march of capital embracing new technologies of every type
and as we all know none of the productivity gains from this have benefitted labour, nor will they
in the future.
3. Bill Black is right a government is not like a household, but the daily message that we
' tax in order to spend ' is a deeply rooted belief system and just trying ( as I do ) to explain
why this is not the case is, I imagine , like Copernicus trying to explain the actual motion of
the earth around the sun. They just don't get it. It goes against common sense .
The election of Trump is not the beginning of the end it is end of the beginning. This is not
a polite, dinner party conversation, it's going to turn ugly rather quickly and, just like the
Crash of 2008 no-one will have seen it coming.
Re automation: I know the CEOs are pushing replacing people with robots. But none of them can
give you an answer to this question: Which robots are going to buy your products? And the fact
that none of them can even think this far ahead means they are just as clueless as the New Dems.
Maybe they can't see it coming but plenty of us can. I keep telling my friends they better start
preparing for any and all emergencies because the future ain't gonna be pretty.
The Times writes: "Why did the working people, who have always been our base, turn away?" Mr.
Manchin said in an interview, recounting the tenor of the dinner conversation.
This is the same Joe Manchin whose daughter, Heather Bresch, heads up Mylan of recent EpiPen
monopoly pricing fame.
Maybe Democratic voters are realizing that the elected Democrats are concerned about taking
care of their own well-connected class, but working people are a group ignored most of the time
and catered to, verbally, only 2/4/6 years.
Can we get a re-post on a previous BB primer on MMT? I studied (bachelors) econ, I have read
L. Randal Wray's MMT book but I find the concepts of a sovereign currency hard to explain to
outsiders who are mostly inundated with globalism, "free trade" etc.
Wray, whatever his importance to the MMT world as a theorist, is a terrible explainer. Cullen
Roche (who disagrees with the UMKC economists on the prescriptive points of the theory, such as
the job guarantee) does a far better job explaining it to the beginner on his site Pragmatic Capitalism.
Sometimes it does not matter how well you explain that a sovereign country need not raise taxes
before spending can take place because some people will never change their beliefs no matter how
well those beliefs are challenged. It is almost as difficult as trying to change someone's religious
beliefs.
U.S. level sovereign countries. Russia could do it. Brazil and Indonesia could, but most "sovereign"
countries would have problems with international trade if they tried this. Iran maybe could do
it.
I fear many people believe the U.S. is a higher character version of the UK or France, so when
you try to explain this, they don't quite grasp the U.S. is a continent spanning power and don't
grasp why the dollar has value. The U.S. isn't the indispensable nation. It's the nation that
can check out. Other nation states don't have this luxury. Despite the decline of industrial production,
the U.S. makes that or could easily. American exceptionalism isn't the moral garbage Obama pushes.
It's sovereignty in the modern world.
For people without a background in Econ I highly recommend theses youtube playlists. They are
filtered into different categories and are very good explainers.
The Dems are hoping that they'll be back in office as soon as the Repubs screw up. And it's
quite possible since people don't have a choice other that the duopoly. We have to start building
other parties to give ourselves a choice. But will we do it? How?
They didn't lose because more people voted rep.
They lost because 10mm that voted for big o in 2008 stayed home, didn't vote for anybody for pres,
or went 3rd party in other words, ABC, or anybody but Clinton.
A few will some day emulate Bernie, but this leap of faith means no banker money. Not many of
these senior dems
new blood, please!
I find the spectacle of these despicable excuses for Senators being deeply concerned for their
own job security quite heart-warming. Thanks, Prof Black, goes great with coffee.
But why, oh why, if they are that scared about their jobs, can't they get a clue? Are they
still afraid of Hillary? Afraid that they would have to do honest work? Or do they still truly
believe that the working class is just muttons?
There aren't corporate board jobs waiting for losers without years of direct labor on behalf
of corporate backers. Backbenchers who simply enjoy the celebrity of DC and follow corporate directives
aren't relevant once they lose.
Certain ones retire to avoid the stench of losing (Evan Bayh, now officially a loser) and can
manage decent jobs, but what does a loser bring to corporate pr especially when they are replaceable
faces? A retired astronaut will come cheaper and present far less chance of scandal.
And the Democrats already keep trying that same old trick of hating their base. Heidi Heitkamp
is about as far right as one can go. What's next? Resurrecting Pinochet to run in Florida?
I did click on the link, and the Krugman's first sentence was "The CIA, according to The
Washington Post, has now determined that hackers working for the Russian government worked to
tilt the 2016 election to Donald Trump."
At least Krugman didn't write, "According to reliable sources" as many people would not view
the CIA and WaPo as reliable sources.
The thrust of the Krugman op-ed is that Clinton lost by such a small margin in some states,
it could have been the alleged Russian influence that made the difference.
And it could have been because she was a lousy candidate with many concerns about her judgment
and ethics (Libya, Iraq, Clinton Foundation, 150K Wall Street speeches, possible selling of favors
during SOS, email evidence destruction, cheating on a debate with prior knowledge of debate questions
from Donna Brazile, for TPP then against it.).
Krugman should be taking the Democratic leadership to task for foisting their marginal candidate
on the electorate and the failure of the existing Democratic President to do much for the voters
in his eight years in office.
I remember going to a lecture/book signing by Paul Krugman about 12 years ago and he seemed
to be a decent and thoughtful academic.
Perhaps winning the Nobel branded economics prize was not good for him?
Or maybe there is something in the drinking water at the Times, that like the Shadow, has the
ability to "cloud men's minds"?
I view Krugman the same way I view the inquisitors of the Holy Roman Empire – they are the
"true" believers, and as such have a duty to defend the sacredness of the church (i.e., the democratic
party – it is INCAPABLE OF ERROR).
Krugman's indoctrination into the religion of economics would
put the indoctrination of Jesuits to shame. Krugman is simply incapable of examining his indoctrination
and in that respect can't even match Greenspan, who at least owned up to the flaw in his (Greenspan's)
ideology.
Democrats are perfect, ergo any critique of Obama, ACA, employment, droning, et al is racism and
any critique of Hillary is sexism – Krugman: ANY disagreement means your stupid.
"Working class people overwhelmingly want to work. Working class males who are unable to find
secure, full time work often become depressed and unmarriageable"
As always, Bill Black is spot-on, but the above sentence can be extended by eliminating the
words "working class." The reason Trump won is not only because of blue collar workers. White
collar workers in jeopardy of losing their job due to H-1B visas heard Trump's promise that he
would stop visa abuse.
And Democratic leaders still have not realized that a non-criminal candidate, e.g. Jim Webb,
would have trounced Trump due to his sheer normality. They were in too much of a hurry to crown
their queen. Joe "more of the same" Biden is not the answer.
The Democratic Party might disappear for the most part unless it dumps identity politics and
re-embraces workers and unions.
The problem can be stated quite simply: New Democrats pay close attention to the ministrations
of George Soros, AIPAC, and Wall Street. The policies flow from the dollars these entities provide.
It's the rationale solution. I believe even indirect elections would produce a better class
of Senators. The pomp of the Senate is corrupting. Each Senator fancies himself or herself President.
If Hillary could almost make it and an empty suit such as Obama could make it, the Senator from
the great state of (insert state) definitely could, so they need to keep the money spigots open
and not offend voters in other states.
Indirectly elected Senators would likely be former state house Speaker types or people who
have had more than back benching jobs and never felt the thrill of winning statewide. They wouldn't
entertain delusions of becoming President.
An added benefit is people would pay more attention to state house races. Fixing potholes would
not be sufficient for reelection.
Senate corruption is not about pomp as it is really about Citizens United. That senators have
weak malleable egos that money easily corrupts is disguised by the pomp of the Senate.
Anyone who has ever run for local or state public office knows that local races are treated
like the bush leagues and minor leagues of baseball where the campaign manager acts like a scout
for the party apparatus. Each party has their loyalists and, to borrow a great metaphor, Inquisition-era
Klugmans, who guard the gates and dole out monies to influence the local media and voters.
Thrown to the wayside are the actual beliefs of democracy; as the religion of money is the
only thing recognized. The rationale decision is to reconnect with the ideas of principal. It's
not going to be easy. As this article demonstrates, everyone involved in it is completely void
of any principal thought.
And yet I wonder. Bill Black's critique and commentators on this post provide evidence that
general principals are thought about. How then, could indirect elections tap into this vein and
eschew our vacuous and archaic Senator class?
The House Democrats re-elected Pelosi and company virtually unchallenged. I think they are
so used to losing that they view keeping majorities in the east and west coast states as victory.
HEY! THAT MEANS THAT ANY CATEGORY OF WORKERS DEFINED OUTSIDE THE FED SETUP IS ELIGIBLE FOR
SEPARATE STATE LABOR ORGANIZING SETUP!!!!!!!!!!!!
State labor setup could add something oh, so every day practicable. State NLRB substitute could
MANDATE certification elections upon a finding of union busting. States should also take union
busting as seriously in criminal law as fed takes taking a movie in the movies - that FBI warning
on your DVD comes alive and you are gone for couple of years if caught.
But mandating certification elections has so much more an everyday, natural businesslike feel
that it could sail relatively smoothly through state legislatures. Nota bene: Wisconsin mandates
re-certification of public employees unions annually (51% of membership required; not just voters)
- nothing too alien about mandating union elections.
State set up might ACTUALLY go the last practical mile and actually force employers to actually
bargain with certified unions - which refusal to bargain remains the last impassable barrier associated
with the fed no-enforcement mechanism. See Donald Trump in Vegas.
So I think one of the main issues out there is even understanding what middle-class means.
A key example of this can be found in this piece where the difficulties that Swiss watch makers
are facing is because of the struggling middle-class. Completely baffling I have never known anybody
in the "middle class" to even be thinking of buying a Rolex Oyster watch. There are many other
things that they would do with $5k before buying a watch.
I think the media and policy makers are mistaking the struggles of people who are making over
$250k a year (or local equivalent) as the struggles of the middle class.
I think this is an interesting column discussing whether or not economists should be focused
as much on income distribution as total income growth. I think what the Democratic party has completely
missed is that the period fo time that the Trump voters view as "When America Was Great" was a
period when GDP growth was high (3%-4%) but more importantly, a record percentage of it was being
allocated to the middle-class.
Trump's big challenge will be routing the current 3% GDP growth to his voters as he has promised
to. I have not seen or heard any concrete policy proposals that will accomplish this, so there
should be a yawning wide door for the Democrats to march through 2 and 4 years from now if they
can figure out how to turn on the light to discover where that door is. Right now the Democrats
are just fighting with the Republicans on how the money should be distributed among the top 10%
instead of looking at revisiting their policies form scratch.
Sanders was on the right track, but went to far on key things such as free university. I think
most Americans would agree that college should have some value that is paid for, but it should
be much less than $60k/year tuition. The rest of the developed world doesn't have massive student
debt issues because their colleges and universities are typically in the $3k to $20k/year tuition
and many professional programs (lawyers, doctors etc.) are structured as long undergraduate programs
instead of 4-year undergraduate program just being a weeding out process before you even get into
the professional program.
Free college is popular. Most people went to free public schools. Your argument against college
is the same argument against elementary school. If you want more STEM graduates as a society,
pay for it.
One small quibble: IMHO it is an issue of left vs. right. Unfortunately the US has no `left'
and the only options ever presented are right vs. even-further-right.
"Second, the issue is generally not who "leans to the right." Indeed, the 2016 election should
have made clear to the paper the severe limits on the usefulness of the terms "right" and "left"
in explaining U.S. elections. Jobs are not a right v. left issue."
Until Democrat Party leadership disavows their neoliberal, financial strip-mining, progressive
voters are challenged by identity politics. How can one remain a Democratic loyalist under those
circumstances?
The video begins with the March of Dimes funded development of the polio vaccine. Edward Murrow
asks Jonas Salk, "Who owns the patent on this vaccine?" Salk famously answered, "The people, I'd
say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?"
The video ends with his Salk's son repeating what his father said to him: "What is more important?
The human value of the dollar or the dollar value of the human?"
These questions are not valid when corporate oligarchs control the puppet strings of both political
parties.
Presumably, that's because neoliberals have bought into the Chicago School theory of human
capital, "the stock of knowledge, habits, social and personality attributes, including creativity,
embodied in the ability to perform labor so as to produce economic value."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_capital
Since economic value is intended for the shareholder, neoclassical and neoliberal policies
are intended to achieve the same outcome: to decrease the dollar value of the human.
Prof Black says that Al Gore is "the [co]leader of the New Democrats." That was true in 1988-1992.
But some people sometimes learn a thing or two over a quarter-century. In Gore's case, he learned
something yuuuge: that global warming is the central issue of our time for *everyone*. Yet Prof.
Black, the Democrats new, old, and middleaged, every single commenter on this posting, not to
mention the Five coal-state Senators whining about "the economy," not a one of all of them had
a single word about the most important (perhaps the *only* important issue) of our times. Does
anyone doubt that, had the Democrats been forced to nominate him in the contested convention that
I had so hoped for, the campaign, its outcome, and our present discussion would be quite different?
I believe Gore was a less talented version of his father under the spell of Tipper who was
usually on a crusade against naughty language. Left to his own devices, Gore is alright, but it
takes him a while. He was garbage in 2000.
Wow! I respect Bill Black,so much so that if I was a billionaire respite with household name
recognition to promote my ascension to the big house, my cabinet would have hopefully been blessed
with his inclusion. I get the monetary sovereignty reality and am equally frustrated over the
disconnect most people have digesting the difference between public and private debt. Unfortunately
long standing cultural beliefs continually propogandized are hard to change, so without a very
established credentialed leader, like maybe some of those new democats, and a host of other well
respected influential cohorts supporting this counter intuitive reversal of perception, the reality
that our governments finances are nothing akin to a households will only be reckognized by a very
small group of open minded heterodox academics and truth seeking objective journalists, like the
folks here at Naked Capitalism. I assume some unsavory corporate benefactors of energy , banking,
and the sometimes comically nefarious cast of charachters running the various military industrial
enterprises, obviously dependent upon government accomodations, contracts, and unlimited revolving
door exposures, must have some inherent comprehension of the governments monetary sovereignty.
Though i am sure, just like justice and law, to them its two tier. Whether we want to admit it
or not, class is a big divider, and those benefitting from our current insanity stand on some
shaky shoulders. They need institutions that are self affirming and equally prescribed to regardless
of class. Religion helps the downtrodden with hope and morality; equally comforting to the plutocrats
that be are the multiple arenas upholding assumptions espousing limited federal government coffers,
conforming the masses to be humble and aquiescent, but more importantly incentivizes a hard working
competitive ethic that the powers that be easily exploit for ever more profits.
Now the divergence between me and Professor Black comes where he implores that people just want
to work, anotherwords have a secure job. What that job is and what it pays isnt the priority,
the idea they have a structured format to adhere to and anchor their societal existence is whats
paramount. I dont buy it! . I get it, here at Naked Capitalism isnt the place for anecdotal exploits,
so i dont want to bore anybody with my angry history. But experiences do correspond to attitudes
and policy persuasions. Briefly, I own a small business, I hate it, I simply have to continue
with it because otherwise I am in the street. The Great Recession gutted my savings, opportunities,
and networks, while age, personal obligations, and finances precludes any restructuring. Surely
many middle aged middle class americans share my frustrations, and the future isnt looking any
brighter. That being said, work for the sake of doing something integrated for a minimal pay check
to stay relevant and in the "system" isnt what's needed. Productive opportunities that engage
those that are idle and prone to self destructive behaviors might be socially responsible, and
obviously our federal government can provide funding for that, even though this cooperative idea
might sound too much like socialism. Young people surely need educational opportunities and structured
paths to engage in that will lead to either being productive or aid searching for better sustainable
ventures that balance our proclivity to turn nature into profits for the few. Point is, obviously
society is a growth in progress and each new generation needs guidance finding ways to spend time
assuring they and their societal members are continuing to build upon and improve the quality
of everybodies lives. Sometimes profit can be a great motivator for this, and other times not.
I am not sure if Prof. Black is expanding his definition of work. Maybe instead of getting into
debt for an education, vocational or academic, people should be paid a living wage to receive
an education at the beginning of their occupational lives, or like me, they need help restructuring
due to public policy that destroyed their economic and occupational existences.. Bernie tried
to introduce these concepts, but fear of deficits and lacking funds took center stage. Bernie,
who obviously knows the truth because of Stephanie Kelton, got cold feet with regards to attempting
an honest discusion, reverting instead to increased taxing to find funding. Sorry , until the
definition of "work" is broadened, i'm not in favor of collectively indoctrinating unfortunate
able bodied persons into a government work program that serves as a wage floor for some make for
work job. Something like the Orange Oompa Loompa's proposed border wall? The entire concept sounds
way too Orwelian for me.
New Democrats are really moderate republicans. For the democrat party to survive and get back
their base, they have to adopt progressive democrat ideas. Electing Schumer as their senate leader
is a mistake. He represents all that is bad about the democrat party. People are tired of being
screwed by Neoliberal policies. We need a new deal for the 99%. Those voters that were conned
by Trump are in for a rude awaking, and it won't take too long. American voters are very fickle.
Not long ago the republican party was portrayed as on life support. It didn't take long for that
to change. If democrats are smart they will quit living in the past and become more progressive.
They only need to support their base to make big changes happen.
"... What is ALREADY going on with Trump, Dems, Russia is fascinating – and he is NOT EVEN SWORN in yet!!! WOW! The war mongers are REALLY panicking . Anti commie – its the new politically correct viewpoint . ..."
"... adding: "a party of buck-passing juveniles that have no vision for the future " ..."
"... Republicans have an agenda. It's terrible but they have one. Democrats represent rule by the professional class, including bankers. That's it. Publicly, they're for rainbows, good things and bringing people together. ..."
"... Several of my Democratic friends are simultaneously convinced that Trump is a Russian stooge and outraged that he won't listen to his daily national security briefings. ..."
"... No. First, access was granted by .. Hillary and Podesta and their own idiocy ( her with the server, him with the pas*word) . IMO we are entitled to know what was in the emails. It certainly did not change my vote nor did it change the vote of anyone I know. ..."
"... I think both Clinton and Trump would be terrible presidents but it has been obvious since she lost that Hillary is unable to accept this to the point of mental illness. First she tried to have her proxies do some damage and when that did not work, she counters with this. ..."
"... The anti-Trump tapes . And the one with former Miss Universe – is she an American now? Do you call that 'foreign' intervention? "Former Miss Universe tries to steal election for HIllary!!!" ..."
Hillary: " Where is Steiner?!?!?!? " I don't envy whoever's gonna have to take her aside
and tell her it's really over. Poor Bill
If you boil down what Clinton and the Clintonites are saying, Putin stole the election from her,
and Trump is a Russian agent of influence. The first is a casus belli , and the second is
treason. The first demands a response at the very least of recalling our Ambassador from Moscow.
That hasn't happened, which tells you that the people responsible for such things (Obama) don't take
Clinton's casus belli seriously. The second calls for a solution "by any means necessary"
(exactly as Clinton's previous claim, that Trump is a fascist, does).
"By any means necessary" would include anything from a
von Stauffenberg solution
(no doubt the CIA has a wet team) all the way up to a coup. (This last is hard to imagine, since
a coup demands occupying physical space with armed force. Who could Clinton call on?)
So what the Clintonites have settled on is trying get the Electoral College to reverse the election.
I can't imagine this coming to anything, since the majority of the electors - since Trump won the
election - are Republicans
If I were a Trump voter, and a bunch of electors, on data that is this uncertain, and which
even if it is true amounts to "telling the truth about Hillary and Democrats" were to give the
election to Clinton I would be furious.
I would consider it a violation of democratic norms: an overturning of a valid election result
because elites didn't like the result.
And while I'm not saying they should, or I would (nor that I wouldn't), many will feel that
if the ballot box is not respected, then violence is the only solution.
If faithless electors give the election to Clinton, there will be a LOT of violence as a result,
and there might even be a civil war.
Ian is Canadian; then again, installing Clinton in office by retroactively changing the
election rules is a "cross the Rubicon" moment. At least in Maine, I wouldn't picture a Civil War,
but I would picture shattered windows in every Democrat headquarters in the state, and then we'd
go on from there. Welsh concludes:
This is where Nazi/Fascist/Hitler/Camps rhetoric leaves you. Nothing is off the table.
Either decide you mean it, or calm down and take shit off the table that is going to get a
lot of people dead if you pull it off.
Exactly.
"CIA admits it broke into Senate computers; senators call for spy chief's ouster" [
McClatchy (Re Silc)]. Fooled ya! From 2013. I'm so old I remember when anonymous CIA soruces
weren't always revered as truth-tellers.
What is ALREADY going on with Trump, Dems, Russia is fascinating – and he is NOT EVEN SWORN
in yet!!! WOW! The war mongers are REALLY panicking . Anti commie – its the new politically correct
viewpoint .
Yes, there is something weird going on with these stories that the CIA appears to be spreading.
MOA is saying the MSN is falsely reporting China is flying nukes it doesn't have in planes all
over the place. Just a guess but bet this too comes from CIA
China threatening us with nukes and Russia stealing our elections. The fake news B.S. quotient
is off the richter scale. Makes you yearn for the good old days when all we had to worry about
was WMD in Iraq.
except Putin & his dominant party in the Russian gov are not Commie, Putin is a right-wing
authoritarian. I suppose Putin, Trump, & HClinton could each be labeled within the right-wing
authoritarian category.
politicalcompass certaintly categorized HClinton & Trump as right-wing authoritarian, & HClinton
was closer to Trump on the graph, than she was to Sanders (left-wing libertarian)
I'd expect this 'reds under the bed' fear mongering from Fox News, not from WaPo. Guess the
Wapo is to the Dems what Fox News is to the GOP. Clarifying election, indeed.
Really? Check out where Saints Jack and Bobby were during the red scare craze of the 50's.
Freedom of speech wasn't their pet project. I know but "Dallas 1963", but there whereabouts in
the 1950's aren't the product of conspiracy theory. For the fetishists, their red hunter status
has to be ignored. Bobby was a full fledged inquisitor for McCarthy.
The Dems are throwing on the golden oldies in an attempt to relive the glory of the past.
what drives me crazy about the Russian hacking conspiracy theory is that there actually WAS
a conspiracy to steal the 2016 election, as carefully documented by Greg Palast and Brad Friedman.
It consisted of the crosscheck purge of the voting rolls, voter suppression and vapour voting
machines. That no Democrat is talking about this tells me that the party is done for.
Good points, and yes, that ticks me off as well. The D Party continues to sit on their thumbs
and do bupkiss about real voting issues while issuing Red Scare Menace 3.0.
Why bother voting Democratic? They're not going to do one blasted thing for the proles. They
haven't for years and years.
Republicans have an agenda. It's terrible but they have one. Democrats represent rule by
the professional class, including bankers. That's it. Publicly, they're for rainbows, good things
and bringing people together.
Yes, the tin foil hat theory is that this all stems from the situation in Syria The CIA's aka
HRC"s Syria regime change is a failure. The CIA had high hopes, now dashed. The only chance for
war with Russia is to get HRC installed. The recount failed. So, Plan B.
There is a politico article from the wake of the 2014 disaster where elite Dems promised Hillary
would save them. An incredible amount of money, time, and reputations was put behind a loser,
not just a loser but a person who lost to Donald Trump. Anyone who donated any thing to the Clinton
effort should be crazy about Clinton Inc's conduct, so Clinton Inc needs to blame everyone but
themselves.
Let's just say for the sake of argument that the CIA and the Democrats have massively overplayed
their hand in these accusations against Russia. I suspect it wouldn't take all that much to bring
it all down like a house of cards, with a major scandal ensuing in its wake. Let's say that the
anonymous CIA source, assuming it was legit, has badly misrepresented what evidence, circumstantial
or otherwise, is there. They're "all-in" on this now. People will have to resign or get fired
within these organizations after Trump takes over because of this, wouldn't they? If their careers
are on the line, who knows what they'll resort to in order to save their own skins? Maybe this
play at flipping the Electoral College was the game all along.
The Clintons were abysmal candidates before emails were uttered. Hillary significantly under
performed Gore in 2000 in New York by a significant margin despite a candidate too extreme for
Peter King.
Every doubt about Hillary's electability was based in fact and OBVIOUS to anyone who spent
more than half a second taking the election seriously. Every Hillary primary voter who isn't a
already spectacular crook failed as citizens by putting forth a clown such a Hillary. There are
no ways around this.
Hillary just lost to Donald Trump because "liberals" are too childish to take politics seriously,
even her centrist supporters should have seen she is a clod. Of course, most centrists would stop
being centrists if they possessed critical thinking skills.
This is no less than trying to latch onto something that excuses their failures as citizens
and human beings.
Several of my Democratic friends are simultaneously convinced that Trump is a Russian stooge
and outraged that he won't listen to his daily national security briefings.
In light of the risible 'fake news' meme and NC's invocation of media related laws, here's
a reminder of another law you may find useful –
Sturgeon's Law .
Sci fi writer Theodore Sturgeon was told by a critic that 90% of scifi was crap and he retorted
that 90% of everything was crap. You just need to know how to find the good stuff.
Seems like this fake 'fake news' news (c) 2016 is primed to blow up right in the face
of entities like The Times, as more and more people see that half of what they purvey
as news is as likely to be B.S. as anything coming from an alternative, or even fringe website.
What's more is that they are driving the point home that their news stories can't
be trusted, with the very same 'fake news' story they are trying to use to emphasize how comparatively
real their news is. The irony levels are off the scale. It's uncharted territory.
In order to accept this is any kind of deal ( I do not support Trump nor did I vote for him)
there are so many hidden premises you have to accept it is laughable
First let's assume that Putin himself donned a Mr Robot Hoodie and hacked the server and printed
the emails and gave them to Assange who was sitting next to him.
SO WHAT?
Is the American public so gullible? Was that somehow unfair?
No. First, access was granted by .. Hillary and Podesta and their own idiocy ( her with the
server, him with the pas*word) . IMO we are entitled to know what was in the emails. It certainly
did not change my vote nor did it change the vote of anyone I know.
It's not like all the anti-Trump tapes etc were not strategically timed to influence the election.
IS it OK if Americans do it?
Second, all they could do with Trump was run past business stuff. He did not have a public
policy record to reveal the man was not in government service.. she was. My view is that if the
public was so influenced by the emails, which had some absolutely appalling details, none of which
were forged, then they were entitled to be ,even if Hitler himself had done the hacking.
It is disheartening that , less than a month after the NYT said maybe we were biased and we
promise to be more careful they are again acting as propagandists and not pointing out all the
absurd hidden premises that must be accepted to manufacture an issue. I am still waiting for the
Times report on her "fake news" that she was under fire- obviously a story designed to influence
primary voters.
I think both Clinton and Trump would be terrible presidents but it has been obvious since she
lost that Hillary is unable to accept this to the point of mental illness. First she tried to
have her proxies do some damage and when that did not work, she counters with this.
I never recall anyone saying that the Democratic party has an absolute right to control the
flow of information in the world. AS much as i despise Trump and his stone age cabinet, I am starting
to think he is less pathological about this than her. Perhaps if this latest gambit fails she
will go the way of Lady Macbeth,
The anti-Trump tapes . And the one with former Miss Universe – is she an American now? Do you call that 'foreign'
intervention? "Former Miss Universe tries to steal election for HIllary!!!"
Beverly,
=== quote ===
Just the fact that Trump has now said he thinks the CIA's cyber forensics team is the same group that tries to determine the
nuclear capacity of other countries is itself scary–and revealing. He doesn't recognize and obvious distinctions even about
incredibly important things, doesn't understand the concept of expertise, and can't distinguish between important and unimportant
things.
=== end of quote ===
Two points:
1. After Iraq WMD false claim CIA as agency had lost a large part of its credibility, because it is clear that it had succumbed
to political pressure and became just a pocket tool in the dirty neocon political games. At this time the pressure was from
neocons in Bush administration. Don't you think that it is possible that this is the case now too ?
2. It's not the job of CIA to determine who and how hacked DNC computers or any other computers in the USA. CIA mandate
is limited to foreign intelligence and intelligence aggregation and analysis. It is job of FBI and NSA, especially the latter,
as only NSA has technical means to trace from where really the attack had come, if it was an attack.
So any CIA involvement here is slightly suspect and might point to some internal conflicts within Obama administration.
It is unclear why Obama had chosen CIA Also as CIA and State Department are closely linked as CIA operatives usually use diplomatic
cover that request looks a little bit disingenuous as Hillary used to work for State Department. In this case one of the explanation
might be that it can be attributed to the desire to create a smoke screen and shield Clintons from pressure by rank-and-file
Hillary supporter (and donors) to explain the devastating defeat in electoral college votes against rather weak, really amateur
opponent.
"... Multiple CIA sources are now denouncing the Washington Post for knowingly reporting misleading national security intelligence. Intelligence insiders said no one in the Agency or in the FBI, who is running at least one parallel inquiry, has ruled out a possible internal leak within the Democratic National Committee from actor(s) inside the United States who funneled private DNC emails to WikiLeaks. ..."
Apparently CIA has finally figured out that their asses are toast. CIA has fed a constant stream
of half truths and outright rabrications to US MSM and are now turning on WaPo. CIA also has killer
drones and military powers they have no right to exercise. Apparently the rats are turning on each
other. Let the trials and subsequent executions begin.
LONG LIVE THE REPUBLIC
However, the FBI reported they did not find evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that the Russian
Government did such a thing. The POST reported that a secret CIA report had been presented to lawmakers
on Capitol Hill allegedly saying there was information linking Russia to the election hackings in
favor of President-elect Trump.
Now, the CIA is saying the POST got it wrong in fact, they allegedly lied. At this point I think
the whole thing is a mess, and I don't see how the American people can decipher the "real" news from
the "fake" news.
Multiple CIA sources are now denouncing the Washington Post for knowingly reporting misleading
national security intelligence. Intelligence insiders said no one in the Agency or in the FBI, who
is running at least one parallel inquiry, has ruled out a possible internal leak within the Democratic
National Committee from actor(s) inside the United States who funneled private DNC emails to WikiLeaks.
Worth noting that Ukrainian associations have been deeply embedded in most large US cities
since the early 1950s. Not unlike the AIPAC propaganda wing that pulls the strings in the
US government.
And having a KNOWN perjurer (James Clapper) presiding over this farce
of an "investigation" is just the icing on the cake.
"Senator Wyden
then asked Clapper, "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on
millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?" He responded "No,
sir." Wyden asked "It does not?" and Clapper said "Not wittingly.
There are cases where they could inadvertently, perhaps, collect, but
not wittingly."
Then it was revealed by Edward Snowden that, why yes, in fact the
NSA does collect data on HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF PEOPLE HERE IN
AMERICA (probably all) and not "unwittlingly"...on fucking
purpose...snaring both Obama and Clapper in their fabricated stories
otherwise known as lies.
Clapper perjured himself before Congress,
a felony.
The next month, a Senate subcommittee launched an investigation
and found no proof of any subversive activity. Moreover, many of
McCarthy's Democratic and Republican colleagues, including
President Dwight Eisenhower, disapproved of his tactics ("I will
not get into the gutter with this guy," the president told his
aides). Still, the senator continued his so-called Red-baiting
campaign. In 1953, at the beginning of his second term as
senator, McCarthy was put in charge of the Committee on
Government Operations, which allowed him to launch even more
expansive investigations of the alleged communist infiltration
of the federal government. In hearing after hearing, he
aggressively interrogated witnesses in what many came to
perceive as a blatant violation of their civil rights. Despite a
lack of any proof of subversion, more than 2,000 government
employees lost their jobs as a result of McCarthy's
investigations.
"Have you no sense of decency, sir?"
In April 1954, Senator McCarthy turned his attention to
"exposing" the supposed communist infiltration of the armed
services. Many people had been willing to overlook their
discomfort with McCarthyism during the senator's campaign
against government employees and others they saw as "elites";
now, however, their support began to wane. Almost at once, the
aura of invulnerability that had surrounded McCarthy for nearly
five years began to disappear. First, the Army undermined the
senator's credibility by showing evidence that he had tried to
win preferential treatment for his aides when they were drafted.
Then came the fatal blow: the decision to broadcast the
"Army-McCarthy" hearings on national television. The American
people watched as McCarthy intimidated witnesses and offered
evasive responses when questioned. When he attacked a young Army
lawyer, the Army's chief counsel thundered, "Have you no sense
of decency, sir?" The Army-McCarthy hearings struck many
observers as a shameful moment in American politics.
The Fall of Joseph McCarthy
By the time the hearings were over, McCarthy had lost most of
his allies. The Senate voted to condemn him for his
"inexcusable," "reprehensible," "vulgar and insulting" conduct
"unbecoming a senator." He kept his job but lost his power, and
died in 1957 at the age of 48.
"... The authenticity of the content of the hacked/leaked emails were never in doubt. Several DNC lackeys, including the chair of the democratic national committee, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, were fired on the grounds of bias, fraud and even conspiracy to commit criminal acts. ..."
"... Their desperation makes them very dangerous, especially while still ostensibly in charge of many elements of gov't and, of course, the entrenched MSM. ..."
"... So can we now accept that the Russians hacked Hillarys server? Seems before the election, the Demorats kept trying to deny it happened. ..."
"... What about the DHS trying to Hack the Georgia Election Computer System? ..."
"... Not just gossip, an un-named official (not an official statement by the department head) stating with "confidence" (not evidence), off the record but reported in every major fish-wrap, that Russian hackers were interfered in our elections, AND inferring that they knew the motives/intentions behind this conjured crime. ..."
"... If there were ANY evidence, the Dems would have paraded it out in front of us loudly and proudly the second they found it. Instead, they prefer making jacka$$es out of themselves (and our country) with innuendo-based trial balloons, as everyone in the world capable of critical thinking laughs at them (us). ..."
"... So we are still "shooting the messenger"? Nobody wants to discuss the content of the Podesta emails, even though they have not been discredited in any way. ..."
Russians did not affect my votes against HRC. HRC did: Whitewater. Mena. Foster. Waco. OKC.
Ruby Ridge. Her continuing career and liberty is proof of a Conspiracy.
Gucifer said, that it was open. The sysadmin said, that it was unmodified Windows business
suite server.
Who needs more to get in, as a standard MS product? I am convinced every intelligence
agency on this earth (yes, Zimbabwian agency as well), has a copy of all emails there.
The authenticity of the content of the hacked/leaked emails were never in doubt. Several
DNC lackeys, including the chair of the democratic national committee, Debbie Wasserman Schultz,
were fired on the grounds of bias, fraud and even conspiracy to commit criminal acts.
Hillary Clinton herself can be indicted on lying under oath to Congress, conspiracy to commit
criminal acts (Paying agitators to assault the supporters of her opponents), election fraud (See
Veritas), contravening the Federal Records Act, Improper handling of classified documents, and
I won't even go into Pizzagate, Saudi funding and the Clinton Foundation, or I'll be here typing
all night.
Where it gets interesting (actually vomit-inducing disgusting), just as Julian Assange alluded,
is inside the Podesta emails that colludes with Huma Abedin's dirty laundry on her/Weiner's laptop.
The missing (deleted) emails, the references to paedophile activities and snippets of pay-for-play
inside the Clinton Foundation. These are not just embarrassing or technicalities that can be woven
into excuses, but information that could bring hanging back as the ultimate form of justice for
the perpetrators.
So, these cretins are doing what they glanced at in The Art of War: That the best defense is
offence. They are going all out full retard to save their lives using every asset they have in
the msm, intelligence, politics and oligarchy.
Look how fast they moved with H.R.6393 to criminalize alternative news. To discredit the leaked
information, to discredit the source, to attack anyone who publishes or mentions them. They will
not stop because they cannot stop. This isn't a subsidy for the failing msm, that's a bonus, this
is a fight for their existence because they have committed crimes that not a single decent person
in the world can abide. It is so horrific, I still have trouble with believing it, but the circumstantial
evidence is overwhelming.
Where this will lead is obvious -- a distraction first from the content of the leaks, false
accusations and attacks on Russia and anyone who talks about it, leading to the biggest false
accusation of all: Trump as a (willing or unwilling) foreign agent which amounts to treason and
therefore unfit to be president. Bring the hammer down on the stock market at the same time and
we have a conflagration erupting from the already boiling cauldron of American society. Too much
conjecture? Maybe.
No, you articulated what I was alluding to a few posts above (I posted before reading yours).
Their desperation makes them very dangerous, especially while still ostensibly in charge of
many elements of gov't and, of course, the entrenched MSM.
They'll create the crisis they vow to not let go to waste. Any excuse to seize ultimate
power.
No, I can't accept that the Russian's hacked Hillary's server. Not until I see some evidence.
Just repeating the same gossip a million times is not providing evidence.
Not just gossip, an un-named official (not an official statement by the department head) stating
with "confidence" (not evidence), off the record but reported in every major fish-wrap, that Russian
hackers were interfered in our elections, AND inferring that they knew the motives/intentions
behind this conjured crime.
If there were ANY evidence, the Dems would have paraded it out in front of us loudly and
proudly the second they found it. Instead, they prefer making jacka$$es out of themselves
(and our country) with innuendo-based trial balloons, as everyone in the world capable of critical
thinking laughs at them (us).
This tactic is so brutally transparent that I really fear what they are really up to......or
maybe they are this stupid?
So we are still "shooting the messenger"? Nobody wants to discuss the content of the Podesta
emails, even though they have not been discredited in any way. Classic divert and deflect
tactics which a Libtard MSM enjoys being a part of.
They probably forgot about Snowden revelation way too soon...
Either Russian intelligence officials have suddenly become extremely efficient at disrupting national
elections in the world's largest democracies or the establishment leaders of those democracies have
intentionally launched a coordinated, baseless witch hunt as a way to distract voters from their
failed policies. We have our suspicions on which is more likely closer to the truth...
Either way, per Reuters
, Germany's domestic intelligence agency is reporting a "striking increase" in Russian propaganda
and disinformation campaigns aimed at destabilizing German society, and targeted cyber attacks against
political parties.
"We see aggressive and increased cyber spying and cyber operations that could potentially endanger
German government officials, members of parliament and employees of democratic parties," Hans-Georg
Maassen, head of the BfV spy agency, said in statement.
Maassen, who raised similar concerns about Russian efforts to interfere in German elections
last month, cited what he called increasing evidence about such efforts and said further cyber
attacks were expected.
The agency said it had seen a wide variety of Russian propaganda tools and "enormous use of
financial resources" to carry out "disinformation" campaigns aimed at the Russian-speaking community
in Germany, political movements, parties and other decision makers.
The goal was to spread uncertainty, strengthen extremist groups and parties, complicate the
work of the federal government and "weaken or destabilise the Federal Republic of Germany".
Like accusations made by Hillary and Obama in the U.S., German politicians, including Chancellor
Angela Merkel, have asserted that Russian intelligence agents and media outlets have attempted to
spread "fake news" in an effort to "fan popular angst over issues like the migrant crisis." Of course,
it can't simply be that voters disagree with Merkel's "open border" policies which have resulted
in a massive influx of migrants that have been linked to increasing crime, terrorist attacks and
sexual assaults on German citizens...that would just be silly and racist and xenophobic.
German officials have accused Moscow of trying to manipulate German media to fan popular angst
over issues like the migrant crisis , weaken voter trust and breed dissent within the European
Union so that it drops sanctions against Moscow.
But intelligence officials have stepped up their warnings in recent weeks, alarmed about the
number of attacks.
Last month, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she could not rule out Russia interfering
in Germany's 2017 election through Internet attacks and misinformation campaigns.
Estonian Foreign Minister Sven Mikser on Thursday said he expected Russia to continue a campaign
of "psychological warfare" and spreading false information after the cyber attacks launched during
the U.S. election.
"It's a pretty safe bet that they will try to do it again," he told Reuters in Hamburg at a
meeting of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe. "They will try to surprise
us. That's something that we should be very careful to look at and try to protect ourselves from."
While we have absolutely no doubt in Merkel and Obama's assertions that Russia has been able to
successfully sabotage national elections, it is curious that, in the U.S., Russian efforts were only
successful in certain states where voters had been disproportionately hurt by past Clinton policies
(e.g. WI, MI, PA, OH) but not in other swing states like Nevada, New Mexico and Colorado.
Exactly. The whole Putin did it narrative in the MSM is government propaganda. Nato bullshit Deep
State military industrial complex trying very hard to get the Sheeple to believe in their leaders.....
The biggest defeat for globalists would be that Europe will start looking east, towards Russia,
instead of West. Follow the money for these German politicians: bet the "Open Society Foundation"
from George Soros will be mentioned regularly.
The world would be a better place if Russia actualy did all the things they have been accused
of instead of the CIA and Germany making all this shit up.
One thing is for certain the NWO was working on Russia at the time of the election, which Clinton
was meant to be a guaranteed winner - expcept the Soros-Neocon-Clinton-DNC cabal totally fucked
up their rigging, not realising how popular Trump actually was.
NOW they are in total fucking panic trying to think of ways to get Trump out.
These neocon fucktard New World Order proponents were trying to corner Russia, remove Putin
and make Russia kow tow to the NWO and accept their new overlords. EXCEPT it was and is a total
fucking stupid idea because the result would have been nuclear war - Russia would never ever bend
to the USA and the NWO - they were totally dreaming if they believed that. And the result would
have been a military alliance between China and Russia - with Europe and the USA and Russia in
ashes.
The world dodge a nuclear bullet when Trump won. So now, having failed to overturn the
election through Stein recounts and rigging (the judges wouldn't play along) they have to go the
whole demonise Russia thing, as was their original plan. And they want to push it fast before
the EU breaks up, as the sheeple wake the fuck up to these neocon Oligarch overlords.
My bet is a major False Flag attack somewhere outrageous blamed on Russia.
These fucking neocons like Soros, Israel, Germany, Clintons and all their backers and cabal
either are totally stupid or just don't give a fuck, knowing that nuclear war is a real possibility
- AND that the USA CANNOT defend itself against nuclear attack , despite all the wankery about
their defense systems.
So these people know there is a chance of laying waste to the USA - and they don't care, it
is worth it for their NWO.
Considering that the Russians are Hollywood's favorite general purpose villains (as opposed to
the practitioners of the religion of peace, or Mexican criminals), this is hardly unexpected,
dontcha think?
last week I read that the german government was aware of the NSA spying at least since 2001. No
outrage here. Outrage only occurs if you don't have any evidence, and it's the russians. Do you
know how most of german elections are held? Paper ballots, ID-cards and lists of citizens who
are elligible to vote. There's definitely some hacking possible... Hate your politicians,
often!
Not only did they know that the NSA spied on the German government -including Merkel's mobile-
the German BND along with the NSA spied on the rest of Europe: policitians, EU officials and European
businesses.
While I will agree that if you knew where to look, in a basic fashion, everything he brought
to light was already known or knowable, at least.
The thing Snowden did was brought all the pieces together, stole the graphics (great visualizing
tools), program names and working details and evidence that these things are all possible and
on-line. ..... He brought the story together and made it very public. .........
Not something that Boos Hamilton, the CIA or the NSA would have wanted. ..
well, whatever you might think about Russian influence in the US...
... Russian influence on and in Germany (and all other european countries) is a quite different
affair. one little factoid: the so called "Russlands-Deutsche"( * ), i.e. "Russian-Germans" number
somewhere between two and three million , in Germany. we are talking here about at least one million
that speaks Russian better then German, and reads/watches Russian News
here, on this continent, we are btw somewhat used to external influences, be them Russian or
US ones
I forecasted to "Haus" some years ago that eventually the German political "status-quo" would
start to point out the Russian influence on "Alternative für Deutschland". That moment is nearly
there
again: US Americans might be somewhat confused about foreign influences on their political
matters
here , it has been a reality during the whole of the Cold War and after, from both the US and
Russia
just some examples:
the reports over the last years about the German parliament being spied upon and hacked by
both the CIA and the Russian intelligence services are completely plausible. Merkel was holding
up her phone... and alleged that the CIA was spying on her. again, very plausible
the EU org in Brussels was hacked/spied upon by the British intelligence services, too. again,
very plausible. indeed, now that the Brexit talks begin in a confrontational manner... there are
even more reasons for the British GCHQ to spy on Brussels
They are caled "Spaetaussiedler" Ghordius. There are about the same number of Turks in Germany.
It is true the prison population of Germany is largely Serbs, Turks, Spaetaussiedler and New Arrivals.
I hear Russian but after having millions of Russian soldiers in Germany since 1945 and huge
Russian influence back into the 18th Century that is not unusual. You can get Tax Forms in Russian
but not English.
Berlin always was the capital of the East never of the West which Adenauer cleverly placed
on the Rhine rather than the Spree. Berlin has always had to consider Russia because ONLY in the
years 1919-1939 and 1990-2016 has Germany NOT shared a border with Russia in the past 250 years.
It is German Aggression that twice brought Russian troops to Berlin
Sandmann, as often, you try to "soften the blow" of my message with some tidbits that are often
completely irrelevant
they don't call themselves "Spätaussiedler". They call themselves Russlands-Deutsche, i.e.
Russian-Germans
their prison population is irrelevant, here. their right to vote in the German election is
they read Russian News, they watch RT in Russian, they hold up signs like "Putin save us",
and they are quite confused, to boot, and pawns in this "game"
some Germans, when they arrived, made jokes that some of those Russian-Germans hardly qualified
to "Germanness", up to saying things like "all families that in the 19th Century had once a German
Shephard as pet". but this is too, irrelevant
fact is that their numbers are substantial. fact is that they are influenced by their media
consumption from Russia. fact is that they were used to see Putin and Merkel as good friends...
until they weren't anymore, and since then they are bombarded with news how Merkel is the source
of all evils, in Europe
fact is also that the political establishments in Germany were, up to now, not that fond to
tell them anything that would make them too confused because... they are voters, too. and in a
political setup like Germany's, you don't tell hard truths to voters, and you don't insult them
as dupes
nevertheless, fact is that Russian (and US, note) influence on Germany's politics is substantial,
including that on the Russlands-Deutsche in Germany
I don't think anyone is denying the fact that Germany has become a playball of foreign powers
ever since it lost WW1, yes the first, not the second one was already desicive in that.
Now, no matter how many German-Russians there are in Germany they are still citizens of your
country, else they would not have been allowed to come back. The question for Germany needs to
be looking ahead into the future, become aware that it is dependent or even controlled by other
greater powers, a status it lost, one century ago. Its citizens should start to raise the question
which side is better for us, should we work more closely with continental Russia, with all its
ressources and land? Or should we work closer with martim ZATO? What has that relationship really
done for us, what have we truly benefitted from it?
Once there is a serious discussion going on about it, Germans will surely never support an
atlantcist such as Merkel. For the time being, I'm glad there are German-Russians at least one
branch of German society that is keenly aware of the dire situation your country is in.
" no matter how many German-Russians there are in Germany they are still citizens of your country,
else they would not have been allowed to come back "
do you live in some alternate reality planet? check yourself on this your assumption
we are talking about Russian citizens that were granted German citizenship when arriving in
Germany because of their German ancestry
the "Return of the Russian-Germans" to Germany has gone on since before and after WWI, and
the only thing that stopped it for a while was the Iron Curtain
nevertheless, it was a German policy to grant them citizenship on arrival
and no, your "Merkel the Atlanticist" is a tad... extreme. it's not about Russia or "ZATO",
here
Right, else they would not have been granted citizenship, I don't see why we should disagree on
that subject.
Regarding Merkel is not an Atlanticist, I would like a bit more of an argument just calling
it extreme but not providing information as to why is not making your argument very strong. I
have plenty of reasons to believe she is: "Allowing nuclear weaopns to be stationed in Germany
against the will of the Bundestag, not being the slightest bit affected by the NSA spying scandal,
supporting sanctions to Russia that hurt German business much more than British or American...the
list goes on and on."
samjam7, do you ever check on what you believe ? let's take only this: " (Merkel) allowing nuclear
weapons to be stationed in Germany against the will of the Bundestag "
just googled it. already in the second hit I get this:
" The Bundestag decided in March 2010 by a large majority, that the federal government should
'press for the withdrawal of US nuclear weapons from Germany.' Even the coalition agreement between
the CDU and FDP, the German government in 2009 had promised the withdrawal of nuclear weapons
from Büchel. "
that's the German Bundestag pressing/instructing the German executive to "do something" in
that direction, yes
that's not the German Bundestag doing a law , which is the very thing it could do, being a
lawgiver
saying "the will of the Bundestag" in this is just that: propaganda. and you fell for it
the true will of the Bundestag is expressed in law. the rest is "please, try to...", so that
your "Merkel is going against the will of..." is just... stretching the truth
in the same way, there is a substantial difference between welcoming citizens of other countries
because of their ancestry and granting them citizenship versus: "they already had that German
citizenship"
Where in the above statement did I talk of law? You Germans always need everything 'schwarz auf
weiss' or its wrong....
I spoke of will and to be honest even your quote that you thankfully looked up, proofs without
any doubt that the parliament had a will, namely not to station more nuclear weapons in Büchel.
Now that the Bundestag doesn't fight with Merkel over it 'i.e. pass a law' is related to the political
system of Germany and that its major parties are co-opted and prefer to nod off Merkel's politics
than resist it. Also it is highly questionable whether the German Parliament has the authority
to decide on these matters, as it delves into the grey area of who actually decides what kind
of troops are stationed in Germany, Merkel or the US/UK?
To call that Propaganda though is unwarranted and rather weak, or how more clearly can a Parliament
demonstrate its will?
"... William Casey (CIA Director), "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false."? ..."
"... if an organization has lost trust of national security affairs it should be DISBANDED ..."
"... ...so why did Debbie Wassername-Schultz resign if the hacks were untrue about her non-neutrality toward Bernie Marx in favor of Hillary Crony? Is this not a usurpation of the peoples will and an affront to "democracy" everywhere? ..."
"... How is it that a "charity" is only a "charity" as long as the people running this "charity" remain in power? Everyone suddenly becomes "less charitable" because she lost? Why is that? Can't they say cronyism and be done with it? ..."
"... The entire story is based on a leak from Senate Staff on SSCI alleging what they were told in a briefing by CIMC. What SSCI was told is that there is no evidence of who was the hacker. Because Russia is one of many possibilities, somebody on SSCI who leaked to WaPo concluded for himself that the hacker was Russia. That is not what they were told. The vitriol should be directed toward WaPo and their Senate SSCI source. ..."
"... As the Obama Administration falls apart, expect the various players to begin to look out for themselves. ..."
"... Obama is hanging everyone out to dry in the futile attempt to save his own 'legacy'. ..."
"... Truman signed its charter. The original intent was to assemble and study Information, period. Truman later remarked he would never have done so had he known it would go amok. Instead, it became a weapon of the Deep State. It is now a direct threat to the American Republic. ..."
"... Ah, yes. The CIA The folks who claimed that Sony was hacked by North Korea, when a private security firm was able to directly finger the disgruntled ex-employees responsible. ..."
"... The CIA is run by neocons, who are upset that their stooge Hillary lost the election and Trump, the elected President-to-be, is making a direct pivot towards accomodation with their arch-enemy Vladimir Putin. ..."
"... Meanwhile, the receivers of the DNC leaks know who they got the information from, and swear publicly that that also was an inside leak. But if it were an inside leak, then it couldn't call the results of the election into question. Only interference by a Foreign Power can do that. ..."
"... Same for the Nameless One. Does she want to admit that her own bureaucracy prefers that she not sit on the throne, or does she like the idea of blaming a sinister foreign entity for her loss? ..."
"... If the Russians did it, is Obama twisting the knife in the Clinton's back? The email leaks were a false flag attack against the Clintons perpetrated by Obama to remove them from the power matrix, and install himself as head of the Democrat party, free from their influence, and free to move that party in the direction he wants as it's defacto leader. ..."
"... John Swinton, Chief editorial writer of the New York Times from 1860 to 1870: "There is no such thing as a free press. You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who would dare to write his honest opinions. The business of the journalist is to destroy truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell himself, his country, and his race, for his daily bread. We are tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are jumping jacks; they pull the strings, we dance; our talents, our possibilities, and our lives are the property of these men. We are intellectual prostitutes." ..."
"... Clinton's is a common defense of the CIA: namely, the American people should stop criticizing the CIA because they don't know what it really does. This, of course, is the heart of the problem in the first place. An agency that is above criticism is also above moral behavior and reform. Its secrecy and lack of accountability allows its corruption to grow unchecked. ..."
"... The CIA's response to this growing knowledge and criticism follows a typical historical pattern.(Indeed, there are remarkable parallels to the Medieval Church's fight against the Scientific Revolution.) The first journalists and writers to reveal the CIA's criminal behavior were harassed and censored if they were American writers, and tortured and murdered if they were foreigners. ..."
"... Another common apologetic is that "the world is filled with unsavory characters, and we must deal with them if we are to protect American interests at all." There are two things wrong with this. First, it ignores the fact that the CIA has regularly spurned alliances with defenders of democracy, free speech and human rights, preferring the company of military dictators and tyrants. ..."
"... Second, this argument begs several questions. The first is: " Which American interests?" The CIA has courted right-wing dictators because they allow wealthy Americans to exploit the country's cheap labor and resources. But poor and middle-class Americans pay the price whenever they fight the wars that stem from CIA actions, from Vietnam to the Gulf War to Panama. ..."
"... The other begged question is: "Why should American interests come at the expense of other peoples' human rights?" The CIA should be abolished, its leadership dismissed and its relevant members tried for crimes against humanity. ..."
"... Craig Murray: "[...] the mad CIA allegations against Russia and now claiming – incredibly – that the CIA believe the FBI is deliberately blocking the information on Russian collusion. " I wasn't aware of this CIA allegation against the FBI, it's quite astonishing. ..."
"... Craig Murray: "[...] this rubbish has been the lead today in the Washington Post in the US and the Guardian here, and was the lead item on the BBC main news. " No one should be surprised that The Guardian is up to its neck in publishing ... garbage ..."
A little simple logic demolishes the CIA's claims. The CIA claim they "know the individuals"
involved. Yet under Obama the USA has been absolutely ruthless in its persecution of whistleblowers,
and its pursuit of foreign hackers through extradition. We are supposed to believe that in the
most vital instance imaginable, an attempt by a foreign power to destabilise a US election, even
though the CIA knows who the individuals are, nobody is going to be arrested or extradited, or
(if in Russia) made subject to yet more banking and other restrictions against Russian individuals?
Plainly it stinks.
The anonymous source claims of "We know who it was, it was the Russians" are beneath contempt.
The CIA has lots of evidence (both collected and manufactured) which is then misconstrued through
politiczed analysis and dissemination to serve their own and their primary customer's personal
interests.
Back during the Reagan administration, someone casually told me "We spend more on disinformaion
than we do on information" - I doubt things have changed that much since then.
Correct me if Im wrong; but i thought the law prohibits the CIA from operations and investigations
on home soil. That is the job for the FBI. Why is the CIA commenting on computer systems that
were hacked in the US of A? There are at least a dozen other agencies (just as worthless) that
this would fall under their jurisdiction.
If the Russians had anything to do with the hacked emails, which are only accusations, they
did the American people a great service by exposing the evil of the DNC, HRottenC and their
MSM minions, none of whom could care less about their ethics violations. They are only upset
because they were caught. Their supporters have been had by their own kind and their leaders
are now redirecting their exposure onto the Russians and Trump to keep their sheep misdirected
from the real problems, HRC and Obama.
we all know what happened to the boy who cried "wolf" when none were there... by the time there
actually _were_ wolves, no one believed him...
the CIA has lost the plot and cried "wolf" too many times for anyone to believe them anymore...
if an organization has lost trust of national security affairs it should be DISBANDED
Well it is a wide open "bear trap"...lol...(to use a metaphor) sitting there out in the open
un-camouflaged for everyone with two brain cells left in their heads to see...and at some point
someone is going to ask...
...so why did Debbie Wassername-Schultz resign if the hacks were untrue about her non-neutrality
toward Bernie Marx in favor of Hillary Crony? Is this not a usurpation of the peoples will
and an affront to "democracy" everywhere?
How is it that a "charity" is only a "charity" as long as the people running this "charity"
remain in power? Everyone suddenly becomes "less charitable" because she lost? Why is that?
Can't they say cronyism and be done with it?
Yezzz, let the progressive tears flow, they taste wonderful ;-)
The Brit Ambassador has the wrong target, because he was caught by Fake News.
The entire story is based on a leak from Senate Staff on SSCI alleging what they were
told in a briefing by CIMC. What SSCI was told is that there is no evidence of who was the
hacker. Because Russia is one of many possibilities, somebody on SSCI who leaked to WaPo concluded
for himself that the hacker was Russia. That is not what they were told. The vitriol should
be directed toward WaPo and their Senate SSCI source.
As the Obama Administration falls apart, expect the various players to begin to look
out for themselves. Do not be surprised if in the next few days, Brennan or someone else
at the agency sets the record straight and throws some 'shade' on WaPo and Obama.
Obama is hanging everyone out to dry in the futile attempt to save his own 'legacy'.
Whoever might have been a loyal soldier and who fell on his sword if requested to do so
is not going to do it anymore. Obama is a child who cannot accept that he has been an abject
failure, so he is getting desperate to create some false historical record.
I remember Zerohedge reporting on a meeting last year with US Senator McCain and Arab terrorists
that included photos . These terrorists were on the US most wanted list. Too bad
that Canadian reporter did not mention that.
I'd say this entire campaign is far too clunky and clumsy to be executed by the CIA
The CIA has done some incredibly evil shit in the past so I wouldn't put something like this
past them, however they are far more professional generally than this from my limited exposure
and what I've researched about activities of the agency.
The "CIA" has outlived its usefulness. It needs to be broken up and disbanded.
Truman signed its charter. The original intent was to assemble and study Information,
period. Truman later remarked he would never have done so had he known it would go amok. Instead,
it became a weapon of the Deep State. It is now a direct threat to the American Republic.
Our spy and security apparatus didn't defeat the Soviet Union's "evil empire" so much as it
emulated it, using Orwell and Huxley as roadmaps, rather than warnings.
Maybe it wasn't the Russians. Who else could it possibly be? Not the CIA! Not in good ol USA.
Maybe it was Aliens! After all the UK Mail thought as much with Kennedy. Or maybe Bush and
his clan are the Aliens. All I can say is Trump better never let the CIA instead of Secret
Service guard him and his motorcade!
The CIA Kennedy assassination theory is a prominent John F. Kennedy assassination conspiracy
theory. The CIA's potential involvement was frequently mentioned during the 1960s and 1970s
when the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was involved in plots to assassinate foreign
leaders, particularly Fidel Castro.[1][2] According to author James Douglass, Kennedy was
assassinated because he was turning away from the Cold War and seeking a negotiated peace
with the Soviet Union.[3][4] Accusations and confessions of and by alleged conspirators,
as well as official government reports citing the CIA as uncooperative in investigations,
have at times renewed interest in these conspiracy theories.
Ah, yes. The CIA The folks who claimed that Sony was hacked by North Korea,
when a private security firm was able to directly finger the disgruntled ex-employees responsible.
Let's break this down some more. The CIA is run by neocons, who are upset that
their stooge Hillary lost the election and Trump, the elected President-to-be, is making a
direct pivot towards accomodation with their arch-enemy Vladimir Putin.
Meanwhile, the FBI is stacked with political employees and their career hirees installed
under GW Bush, and leans strongly against the Democrats, to the point of deliberately leaking
damaging evidence against the Democratic candidate the week before the election . . . granted
that there wouldn't have been any information to leak, if Hillary had followed the laws and
policies of her federal position.
Meanwhile, the receivers of the DNC leaks know who they got the information from, and
swear publicly that that also was an inside leak. But if it were an inside leak, then
it couldn't call the results of the election into question. Only interference by a Foreign
Power can do that.
But to the extent that the Russians DID lobby against Hillary, they did so completely openly.
If you read an article in Russia Today in favor of Trump or against Hillary, you can hardly
claim to be deceived.
The Russians are allowed to have an opinion; we can't stop that. What they aren't
allowed to do is to vote, or to contribute money to the candidates' campaigns (here we will
lightly skip over the millions donated to Hillary's campaign by Israeli dual citizens, the
Saudis, the Australians, Nigeria, VietNam, India, Haiti . . .).
What did you expect them to say? "Uh, yes, Mr. President, it was us, actually." Of course
they are going to point the finger elsewhere. Especially to someplace that cannot be pressured.
You would too, if placed in the same position. Same for the Nameless One. Does she
want to admit that her own bureaucracy prefers that she not sit on the throne, or does she
like the idea of blaming a sinister foreign entity for her loss?
And even if Russia did it, it's not like they made anything up. Come on, people. Realpolitik.
The CIA (Central Insanity Agency) IS the United States government. It controls all of the other
so-called independent intelligence agencies. Would the CIA lie to overturn the 2016 Presidential
elections? Well, the CIA are the very same people who: <
for decades have had hundreds of nationally and internationally prominent so-called
journalists on the CIA payroll and controlled the stories reported by Western Mainstream
Conporate News Media;
assassinated President John F. Kennedy because they were furious about the failure of
their insane Bay of Pigs fiasco, the peaceful resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis, etc.,
etc., etc.;
faked the Gulf of Tonkin intelligence to get the United States Congress to pass the
Gulf of Tonkin Resolution giving the bloodthirsty Generals and Admirals and President Lyndon
B. Johnson the false flag incident to drastically escalate the Vietnam War–closely located
to the Golden Triangle's highly coveted rich heroin supplies–and all of the attendant decades
of lying about that war;
destabilized Afghanistan to encourage invasion by the Soviet Union;
created, supported and armed the Sunni Mujahideen, which morphed into Al Qaeda following
the Gulf War, to fight against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan;
encouraged President Jimmy Carter to admit the Shah of Iran to create the pretext for
decades of enmity between Iran and the United States and destroy Jimmy Carter's Presidency;
encouraged Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait to give President George H. W. Bush the pretext
to declare war on Iraq;
were behind the 9/11/2001 false flag attacks on the World Trade Center towers, and their
destruction with controlled explosives demolitions charges, and the Pentagon and then lied
that it was all an Al Qaeda plot;
lied about Al Qaeda's role in 9/11/2001 to justify the invasion of Afghanistan with
its highly coveted, rich poppy fields for heroin production;
lied about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction to justify President George W. Bush's war
of aggression against Iraq;
created, finances, arms and supports ISIS;
plans and carries out false flag operations to influence public opinion;
lie about whatever whenever it suits their agenda;
controls the 'narratives' in the Feral gangster government's organs of state propaganda
(mainstream & social media and entertainment oligopoly);
And far, far more. But, I got tired of typing and I don't want to bore the readers. The
point being that they are ALL professional liars and the love of truth and the American Republic
is not in them.
Yes, of course the CIA would lie to overturn the 2016 Presidential elections.
If the Russians did it, is Obama twisting the knife in the Clinton's back?
The email leaks were a false flag attack against the Clintons perpetrated by Obama to remove
them from the power matrix, and install himself as head of the Democrat party, free from their
influence, and free to move that party in the direction he wants as it's defacto leader.
Blaming the leaks on the Russians gains obfuscation of Obama's chief foreign policy failure
as President.... drawing a red line, then failing to act when it was crossed, which signaled
to the world that he was an impudent little bitch that could be ignored in a world that understands
only one thiing..... strength.
John Swinton, Chief editorial writer of the New York Times from 1860 to 1870: "There
is no such thing as a free press. You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who would
dare to write his honest opinions. The business of the journalist is to destroy truth, to lie
outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell himself, his country,
and his race, for his daily bread. We are tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes.
We are jumping jacks; they pull the strings, we dance; our talents, our possibilities, and
our lives are the property of these men. We are intellectual prostitutes."
Clinton's is a common defense of the CIA: namely, the American people should stop criticizing
the CIA because they don't know what it really does. This, of course, is the heart of the problem
in the first place. An agency that is above criticism is also above moral behavior and reform.
Its secrecy and lack of accountability allows its corruption to grow unchecked.
Furthermore, Clinton's statement is simply untrue. The history of the agency is growing
painfully clear, especially with the declassification of historical CIA documents. We may not
know the details of specific operations, but we do know, quite well, the general behavior of
the CIA These facts began emerging nearly two decades ago at an ever-quickening pace. Today
we have a remarkably accurate and consistent picture, repeated in country after country, and
verified from countless different directions.
The CIA's response to this growing knowledge and criticism follows a typical historical
pattern.(Indeed, there are remarkable parallels to the Medieval Church's fight against the
Scientific Revolution.) The first journalists and writers to reveal the CIA's criminal behavior
were harassed and censored if they were American writers, and tortured and murdered if they
were foreigners.
However, over the last two decades the tide of evidence has become overwhelming, and the
CIA has found that it does not have enough fingers to plug every hole in the dike. This is
especially true in the age of the Internet, where information flows freely among millions of
people. Since censorship is impossible, the Agency must now defend itself with apologetics.
Clinton's "Americans will never know" defense is a prime example.
Another common apologetic is that "the world is filled with unsavory characters, and we must
deal with them if we are to protect American interests at all."
There are two things wrong with this. First, it ignores the fact that the CIA has regularly
spurned alliances with defenders of democracy, free speech and human rights, preferring the
company of military dictators and tyrants.
The CIA had moral options available to them, but did not take them.
Second, this argument begs several questions. The first is: " Which American interests?" The CIA has courted right-wing dictators because they allow wealthy Americans to exploit
the country's cheap labor and resources. But poor and middle-class Americans pay the price whenever they fight the wars that stem
from CIA actions, from Vietnam to the Gulf War to Panama.
The other begged question is: "Why should American interests come at the expense of other
peoples' human rights?" The CIA should be abolished, its leadership dismissed and its relevant members tried for
crimes against humanity.
Our intelligence community should be rebuilt from the ground up, with the goal of collecting
and analyzing information. As for covert action, there are two moral options.
The first one is to eliminate covert action completely. But this gives jitters to people worried about the Adolf Hitlers of the world. So a second
option is that we can place covert action under extensive and true democratic oversight. For example, a bipartisan Congressional Committee of 40 members could review and veto all
aspects of CIA operations upon a majority or super-majority vote.
Which of these two options is best may be the subject of debate, but one thing is clear:
like dictatorship, like monarchy, unaccountable covert operations should die like the dinosaurs
they are.
Craig Murray: "[...] the mad CIA allegations against Russia and now claiming – incredibly –
that the CIA believe the FBI is deliberately blocking the information on Russian collusion.
"
I wasn't aware of this CIA allegation against the FBI, it's quite astonishing.
The FBI and CIA are both utterly corrupt, as is every other faction of the Obola Administration
including the Marxist slimeball himself at the very top, but what we see here are factions
throwing allegations against each other.
Craig Murray: "[...] this rubbish has been the lead today in the Washington Post in the US
and the Guardian here, and was the lead item on the BBC main news. "
No one should be surprised that The Guardian is up to its neck in publishing ... garbage
written by Jonathen Freedland. After all it's been "the progressive Left's" house newspaper
for years and is known as " The Grauniad " by dissenters.
What is truly bad is that the BBC are coming out of the closet and once again revealing
their own Left-wing Establishment bias by running fake news stories on its TV news channel.
"... President-elect Donald Trump, in an exclusive interview with " Fox News Sunday ," decried as "ridiculous" the CIA's reported assessment that Russia intervened in the election to boost his candidacy – describing the claim as another "excuse" pushed by Democrats to explain his upset victory. ..."
President-elect Donald Trump, in an exclusive interview with "
Fox News
Sunday ," decried as "ridiculous" the CIA's reported assessment that Russia intervened in
the election to boost his candidacy – describing the claim as another "excuse" pushed by Democrats
to explain his upset victory.
"It's just another excuse. I don't believe it," Trump said. " Every week it's another excuse.
We had a massive landslide victory, as you know, in the Electoral College."
Trump spoke with Fox News' Chris Wallace in the president-elect's first Sunday show interview
since winning the election.
"... If the CIA is actually stupid enough to believe this, the US is without a competent intelligence agency. Of course, the CIA didn't say and doesn't believe any such thing. The fake news stories in the presstitute media are all sourced to unnamed officials. Former British ambassador Craig Murray described the reports accurately: "bullshit." ..."
"... Fake news is the presstitute's product. Throughout the presidential primaries and presidential campaign it was completely clear that the mainstream print and TV media were producing endless fake news designed to damage Trump and to boost Hillary. We all saw it. We all lived through it. What is this pretense that Russia is the source of fake news? ..."
"... We have had nothing but fake news from the presstitutes since the Klingon regime. Fake news was used against Yugoslavia and Serbia in order to cloak the Clinton's war crimes. ..."
"... Ironic, isn't it, that it is those who purport to be liberal and progressive who are responsible for the revival of McCarthyism in America. Moreover, the liberal progressives are institutionalizing McCarthyism in the US government. There is clearly a concerted effort being made to define truth as fake news and to define lies as truth. ..."
Speaking of fake news, the latest issue of the National Enquirer at the supermarket checkout is
giving the mainstream presstitute media a run for the money: "Castro's Deathbed Confession: I Killed
JFK. How I framed Oswald."
That's almost as good as the fake news going around the presstitute media, such as the TV stations,
the Washington Post, New York Times, and Guardian-yes, even the former leftwing British newspaper
has joined the ranks of the press prostitutes-that the CIA has concluded that "Russian operatives
covertly interfered in the election campaign in an attempt to ensure the Republican candidate's victory."
If the CIA is actually stupid enough to believe this, the US is without a competent intelligence
agency. Of course, the CIA didn't say and doesn't believe any such thing. The fake news stories in
the presstitute media are all sourced to unnamed officials. Former British ambassador Craig Murray
described the reports accurately: "bullshit."
So who is making the stories up, another anonymous group tied to Hillary such as PropOrNot, the
secret, hidden organization that released a list of 200 websites that are Russian agents?
Fake news is the presstitute's product. Throughout the presidential primaries and presidential
campaign it was completely clear that the mainstream print and TV media were producing endless fake
news designed to damage Trump and to boost Hillary. We all saw it. We all lived through it. What
is this pretense that Russia is the source of fake news?
We have had nothing but fake news from the presstitutes since the Klingon regime. Fake news was
used against Yugoslavia and Serbia in order to cloak the Clinton's war crimes.
Fake news was used against Osama bin Laden, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia in
order to cloak the Bush regime's war crimes.
Fake news was used against Libya and Syria in order to cloak the Obama regime's war crimes.
Without fake news these three blood-drenched presidencies would have been hauled before the War
Crimes Commission, tried, and convicted.
Can anyone produce any truthful statement from the presstitute media about anything of importance?
MH-17? Crimea? Ukraine?
Ironic, isn't it, that it is those who purport to be liberal and progressive who are responsible
for the revival of McCarthyism in America. Moreover, the liberal progressives are institutionalizing
McCarthyism in the US government. There is clearly a concerted effort being made to define truth
as fake news and to define lies as truth.
"... As Pam Martens reports, another imbecile has now composed a list of 200 suspect professors who also dissent from the official bullshit fed to the American people. ..."
"... In an effort to regain control over Americans' minds, they are attempting to define dissenters and truth-tellers as "Russian agents." Why "Russian agents"? Because they hope that their fake news portrait of Russia as America's deadly enemy has taken hold and will result in the public turning away from those of us labeled "Russian agents." ..."
As Pam Martens reports, another imbecile has now composed a list of 200 suspect professors who also
dissent from the official bullshit fed to the American people.
The official government purveyors of fake news in the US and their presstitute agents are concerned
that they are losing control over the explanations given to the American people.
In an effort to regain control over Americans' minds, they are attempting to define dissenters and
truth-tellers as "Russian agents." Why "Russian agents"? Because they hope that their
fake news portrait of Russia as America's deadly enemy has taken hold and will result in the public
turning away from those of us labeled "Russian agents."
"... At the present moment, it is practically obligatory to slam Russia and Putin at every opportunity even though Moscow is too militarily weak and poor to fancy itself a global adversary of the U.S. ..."
"... Candidate Donald Trump appeared to recognize that fact before he began listening to Michael Flynn, who has a rather different view. Hopefully the old Trump will prevail. ..."
"... Blaming Russia, which has good reasons to be suspicious of Washington's intentions, is particularly convenient for those many diverse inside the Beltway interests that require a significant enemy to keep the cash flowing out of the pockets of taxpayers and into the bank accounts of the useless grifters who inhabit K-Street and Capitol Hill. ..."
...Does the name Judith Miller ring any bells? And the squeaks of rage coming from
the U.S. Congress over being lied to is also something to behold as the federal
government has been acting in collusion with the media to dish up falsehoods
designed to start wars since the time of the Spanish-American conflict in 1898,
if not before.
The fake news saga is intended to discredit Donald Trump, whom
the media hates mostly because they failed to understand either him or the
Americans who voted for him in the recent election. You have to blame somebody
when you are wrong so you invent "fake news" as the game changer that explains
your failure to comprehend simple truths. To accomplish that, the clearly
observable evidence that the media was piling on Donald Trump at every
opportunity has somehow been deliberately morphed into a narrative that it is
Trump who was
attacking the media, suggesting that it was all self-defense on the part of
the Rachel Maddows of this world, but anyone who viewed even a small portion of
the farrago surely will have noted that it was the Republican candidate who was
continuously coming under attack from both the right and left of the
political-media spectrum.
There are also some secondary narratives being promoted, including a
pervasive argument that Hillary Clinton was somehow the victim of the news
reporting due specifically to fake stories emanating largely from Moscow in an
attempt to not only influence the election but also to subvert
America's democratic institutions. I
have observed that if such a truly ridiculous objective were President
Vladimir Putin's desired goal he might as well relax. Our own Democratic and
Republican duopoly has already been doing a fine job at subverting democracy by
assiduously separating the American people from the elite Establishment that
theoretically represents and serves them.
Another side of the mainstream media lament that has been relatively
unexplored is what the media chooses not to report. At the present moment, it
is practically obligatory to slam Russia and Putin at every opportunity even
though Moscow is too militarily weak and poor to fancy itself a global
adversary of the U.S.
Instead of seeking a new Cold War, Washington should
instead focus on working with Russia to make sure that disagreements over
policies in relatively unimportant parts of the world do not escalate into
nuclear exchanges. Russian actions on its own doorstep in Eastern Europe do not
in fact threaten the United States or any actual vital interest. Nor does
Moscow threaten the U.S. through its intervention on behalf of the Syrian
government in the Middle East. That Russia is described incessantly as a threat
in those areas is largely a contrivance arranged by the media, the Democratic
and Republican National Committees and by the White House.
Candidate Donald
Trump appeared to recognize that fact before he began listening to Michael
Flynn, who has a rather different view. Hopefully the old Trump will prevail.
Blaming Russia, which has good reasons to be suspicious of Washington's
intentions, is particularly convenient for those many diverse inside the
Beltway interests that require a significant enemy to keep the cash flowing out
of the pockets of taxpayers and into the bank accounts of the useless grifters
who inhabit K-Street and Capitol Hill.
Neoconservatives are frequently
described as ideologues, but the truth is that they are more interested in
gaining increased access to money and power than they are in promulgating their
own brand of global regime change.
Russophobia/Putinophobia is as big as it is because it is a rare issue where the
mainstream right, the left and the political class all agree, albeit for different reasons. The
mainstream right is anti Russia because of the Cold War and Russia's support for Iran, Venezuela
and Cuba. The left hates Russia because of Pussy Riot, humiliating Obama and Merkel in the
Ukraine, Snowden, supporting anti immigrant politicians like Le Pen and Wilders, jailing/killing
pro Western Russian politicians, the gay stuff and especially for Trump. The political class
hates Russia simply because it is a rival to US power in Europe and the Middle East. Put all
three together, and you get a political consensus for Russophobia.
At the end of the day, however, Russophobia or even Putinophobia is a minority position in the
US; or else Trump wouldn't have been elected. And a huge chunk of the people who voted for
Hillary are blacks and hispanics, who don't give a rat's ass about Russia and probably couldn't
even find it on a map.
Before Pussy Riot/Ukraine/Snowden/Gays/Trump there was even a lot of sympathy in the US media for
victims of Chechen terrorism, especially after the Beslan school thing. As late as the 2012
election, Obama was mocking Mitt Romney's Russophobia.
" BARACK OBAMA, WITH THE COOPERATION OF SOME IN THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY, ARE TRYING TO DISCREDIT TRUMP BEFORE THE ELECTION"
Notable quotes:
"... The whole "blame Russia" movement to account for Hillary's unexpected failure to win the Presidency got a new shot in the arm with today's announcement that Obama ordered: ..."
"... The stupidity of this is profound. If this review leads to the "discovery" that Russia is carrying out espionage activities in the United States then we have passed the threshold of learning that there is gambling in a casino. ..."
"... The real irony in all of this is that Wikileaks, thanks to the hack of the DNC and John Podesta emails, exposed the reality of Democrats working surreptitiously to tamper with and manipulate the election. Here are the highlights from that leak: ..."
"... Best approach is to slaughter Donald for his bromance with Putin, but not go too far betting on Putin re Syria. ..."
"... Blaming Russia for Hillary's flame out is absurd. The Russians did not create and lie about Hillary's server. They did not force her to back the multilateral trade agreements, such as NAFTA and TPP. They didn't set up the Clinton Foundation as a cash cow for the Clinton family. They did not force her to advocate imposing a No Fly Zone in Syria and having been a cheerleader for past wars, including Iraq and Libya. Vladimir Putin did not slip her a mickey and cause her to pass out at the 9-11 memorial, which fueled concerns about her health. And they did not infect her lungs and cause her to have extended coughing jags. They did not cause her to call Americans deplorables. They did not make her say that the coal industry should be shutdown. With that kind of record, coupled with her shrieking, screechy voice, why are folks surprised that she did not win? ..."
"... So now Democrats and several Republicans are in a lather over the Russians stealing the election for Trump. The list of conspiracy theorists pushing this nonsense include John McCain, Lindsay Graham, Angus King of Maine, Brent Budowsky and Adam Schiff. I defy anyone, to explain to me how Russian meddling gave Trump the win. ..."
"... The realities are this. First, as noted in the Budowsky email, the Clinton campaign came up with the idea of accusing Trump of being a stooge of Russia. They thought they'd get political bang out of that. They didn't. ..."
"... Second, the hack of the DNC emails confirmed that the suspicions of many that the DNC and Hillary were collaborating to screw over Bernie and rig the election. That was not fake news. Cold, unwelcomed truth. That's when this drum beat about the big, bad Russians started meddling in our election started. Why? To distract attention away from the ugly reality that the DNC and Hillary were cheating. ..."
"... The subsequent Wikileaks avalanche of Podesta emails reinforced as fact the existing suspicion that the media was in the bag for Hillary. ..."
"... I would recommend you assemble a short reading list of everything surrounding President Kennedy's full acceptance of responsibility after the Bay of Pigs, beginning with the substance and tone of his unequivocal taking of responsibility and ending with his huge rise in the polls, to nearly 90% favorable ratings, after he did this. ..."
"... And then I would suggest she plan the equivalent and take full, absolute and unequivocal responsibility for making a mistake with the private emails and give an honest, direct, explanation of the reasons I believe she used those private emails. . . . ..."
"... Give Budowsky credit for one thing, if Hillary had followed his advice she might have won the election. But she was too busy exploiting the rules of a rigged game and trying to smear Trump as a Russian agent while failing to exercise genuine, sincere personal responsibility. ..."
"... Barack Obama appears to be actively working to discredit the Trump election and has enlisted the intelligence community in the effort. How else to explain this disconnect? Yesterday, as noted above, Obama directed the intelligence community to: ..."
"... I heard from a knowledgeable friend in September that Hillary's campaign was pressing the Obama White House to lean on the intel community and put something out blaming her woes on the Russians. That led to the October statement. And now we have the CIA via a SECRET report (that is leaked to the public) insisting that Trump's victory came because of the Russians. ..."
"... This is a damn lie. The CIA is now allowing itself to be used once again for blatant political purposes. The politicization became a real problem under Bush. Let's not forget that these are the same cats who insisted it was a slam dunk that were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The same group who missed the rise of ISIS. ..."
"... Also worth reminding ourselves that the head of the ironically titled "Intelligence Community" is a proven liar. Jim Clapper lied to the Senate about the NSA spying on Americans three years ago (December 2013) : ..."
"... "Congressional oversight depends on truthful testimony – witnesses cannot be allowed to lie to Congress," wrote representatives James Sensenbrenner, Darrell Issa, Trent Franks, Raul Labrador, Ted Poe, Trey Gowdy and Blake Farenthold, citing "Director Clapper's willful lie under oath." ..."
"... There is a consistent pattern in the Obama Administration of lying to the American people, especially when it comes to National Security matters. The NSA is not an isolated case. We also have Benghazi, Syria and Libya as other examples of not telling the truth and misrepresenting facts. ..."
"... In my lifetime, going on 60 years, I have never seen such a display of incompetence as is being manifested by Barack Obama and mental midgets that surround him. ..."
"... What they can say for sure is that the DNC and Podesta emails were hacked. Those hacked emails were passed to WIKILEAKS. Those emails were then released to the public. What the intel community will be hard pressed to prove is that the Russian Government conceived of and directed such a campaign. This is the true information operation to meddle in the U.S. election, but that isn't Russia. That's Obama. ..."
UPDATE–PLEASE SEE BELOW. BOTTOMLINE, BARACK OBAMA, WITH THE COOPERATION OF SOME IN THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY, ARE TRYING
TO DISCREDIT TRUMP BEFORE THE ELECTION.
Let me stipulate up front that both the United States and Russia engage in
covert and clandestine information
operations. It is called espionage. It is but one aspect of the broader intelligence activity also known as spying. Time for all
you snowflakes in America to grow up and get a grip and deal with with reality. If the respective intelligence organizations in either
country are not doing this they are guilty of malpractice and should be dismantled.
There are two basic types of espionage activity–Covert refers to an operation that is undetected while in progress, but the outcome
may be easily observed. Killing Bin Laden is a prime example of a "covert" operation. A Clandestine Operation is something that is
supposed to be undetected while in progress and after completion. For example, if the U.S. or Russia had a mole at the top of the
National Security bureaucracy of their respective adversary, communicating with that mole and the mole's very existence would be
clandestine.
So, the alleged Russian meddling in our election–was it covert or clandestine?
The whole "blame Russia" movement to account for Hillary's unexpected failure to win the Presidency got a new shot in the
arm with today's announcement that
Obama ordered:
a full review into hacking by the Russians designed to influence the 2016 election, White House Homeland Security and Counterterrorism
Adviser Lisa Monaco said Friday.
The stupidity of this is profound. If this review leads to the "discovery" that Russia is carrying out espionage activities
in the United States then we have passed the threshold of learning that there is gambling in a casino.
The real irony in all of this is that Wikileaks, thanks to the hack of the DNC and John Podesta emails, exposed the reality
of Democrats working surreptitiously to tamper with and manipulate the election. Here are the highlights from that leak:
DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz Calls Sanders Campaign Manager Jeff Weaver an "A–" and a "Liar"
In May the Nevada Democratic State Convention became rowdy and got out of hand in a fight over delegate allocation. When Weaver
went on CNN and denied any claims violence had happened, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, once she was notified of the exchange, wrote
"Damn liar. Particularly scummy that he never acknowledges the violent and threatening behavior that occurred."
Highlighting Sanders' Faith
One email shows that a DNC official contemplated highlighting Sanders' alleged atheism - even though he has said he is not an
atheist - during the primaries as a possibility to undermine support among voters.
"It may make no difference but for KY and WA can we get someone to ask his belief," Brad Marshall, CFO of the DNC, wrote
in an email on May 5, 2016. "He had skated on having a Jewish heritage. I read he is an atheist. This could make several points
difference with my peeps. My Southern Baptist peeps would draw a big difference between a Jew and an atheist."
Building a Narrative Against Sanders
"Wondering if there's a good Bernie narrative for a story which is that Bernie never ever had his act together, that his campaign
was a mess," DNC National Secretary Mark Paustenbach wrote in an email to National Communications Director Luis Miranda on May 21.
After detailing ways in which the Sanders camp was disorganized, Paustenbach concludes, "It's not a DNC conspiracy it's because they
never had their act together."
The release provides further evidence the DNC broke its own charter violations by favoring Clinton as the Democratic presidential
nominee, long before any votes were cast.
It was the Clinton spokesman, Robbie Mook, who launched the claim on July 24, 2016 that these leaks were done by the Russians
in order to help Trump:
The source of the leak has not been revealed, though Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, Robby Mook, said on ABC News' "This Week
With George Stephanopoulos" on Sunday that he believes the Russians were instrumental in it.
"Experts are telling us that Russian state actors broke into the DNC, took all these emails and now are leaking them out through
these websites," Mook said Sunday. "It's troubling that some experts are now telling us that this was done by the Russians for the
purpose of helping Donald Trump."
The Clinton campaign started planning to smear Trump as a Putin stooge as early as December 2015. The Podesta emails showed clearly
that the Clinton campaign decided early on to clobber Trump for his "bromance" with Putin. It was Brent Buwdosky almost one year
ago (December 21, 2015) who proposed going after
Trump with the Russian card in an email to Podesta:
Putin did not agree to anything about removing Assad and continues to bomb the people we support. We pushed the same position
in 2012 (Geneva 1, which HRC knows all about) and Geneva 2 in 2014. Odds that Putin agrees to remove Assad are only slightly better
than the odds the College of Cardinals chooses me to someday succeed Pope Francis. Best approach is to slaughter Donald for his
bromance with Putin, but not go too far betting on Putin re Syria.
Going after Trump as a Russian stooge was in the Clinton playbook long before Trump won a primary. One the wedge issues for Clinton
with respect to Trump was Syria. Trump took a strong stand (which many thought would hurt him with Republicans) in declaring we should
not be trying to get rid of Assad and that America should cooperate with the Russians in fighting the Islamists. Clinton, by contrast,
called for imposing a No Fly Zone that would have risked a direct confrontation with Russia.
Blaming Russia for Hillary's flame out is absurd. The Russians did not create and lie about Hillary's server. They did not
force her to back the multilateral trade agreements, such as NAFTA and TPP. They didn't set up the Clinton Foundation as a cash cow
for the Clinton family. They did not force her to advocate imposing a No Fly Zone in Syria and having been a cheerleader for past
wars, including Iraq and Libya. Vladimir Putin did not slip her a mickey and cause her to pass out at the 9-11 memorial, which fueled
concerns about her health. And they did not infect her lungs and cause her to have extended coughing jags. They did not cause her
to call Americans deplorables. They did not make her say that the coal industry should be shutdown. With that kind of record, coupled
with her shrieking, screechy voice, why are folks surprised that she did not win?
So now Democrats and several Republicans are in a lather over the Russians stealing the election for Trump. The list of conspiracy
theorists pushing this nonsense include John McCain, Lindsay Graham, Angus King of Maine, Brent Budowsky and Adam Schiff. I defy
anyone, to explain to me how Russian meddling gave Trump the win.
The realities are this. First, as noted in the Budowsky email, the Clinton campaign came up with the idea of accusing Trump
of being a stooge of Russia. They thought they'd get political bang out of that. They didn't.
Second, the hack of the DNC emails confirmed that the suspicions of many that the DNC and Hillary were collaborating to screw
over Bernie and rig the election. That was not fake news. Cold, unwelcomed truth. That's when this drum beat about the big, bad Russians
started meddling in our election started. Why? To distract attention away from the ugly reality that the DNC and Hillary were cheating.
The subsequent Wikileaks avalanche of Podesta emails reinforced as fact the existing suspicion that the media was in the bag
for Hillary. But no amount of media help and foreign money could transform Hillary into a likeable candidate. She was dreadful
on the campaign trail and terrible at talking to the average American. Even her boy, Brent Budowsky, reluctantly acknowledged this
in an email to John Podesta on Wednesday, August 26,
2015 :
While I have been warning for some time about the dangers facing the Clinton campaign, aggressively in privately, tactfully in
columns, during this latest stage I have been publicly defending her with no-holds barred, and here is my advice based on the reaction
I have been receiving and the dangers I see coming to fruition.
I would recommend you assemble a short reading list of everything surrounding President Kennedy's full acceptance of responsibility
after the Bay of Pigs, beginning with the substance and tone of his unequivocal taking of responsibility and ending with his huge
rise in the polls, to nearly 90% favorable ratings, after he did this.
And then I would suggest she plan the equivalent and take full, absolute and unequivocal responsibility for making a mistake
with the private emails and give an honest, direct, explanation of the reasons I believe she used those private emails. . . .
She could say she was right anticipating this, but wrong in overreacting by trying to shield her private emails, and she takes
full responsibility for this, and apologizes to her supporters and everyone else, and now she has turned over all information, it
will ultimately be seen that there no egregious wrongs committed.
She needs to stop talking like a lawyer parsing legalistic words and a potential defendant expecting a future indictment, which
is how she often looks and sounds to many voters today. Instead, she should take full responsibility for a mistake with no equivocation,
and segue into the role of a populist prosecutor against a corrupted politics that Americans already detest ..and make a direct attack
against the Donald Trump politics of daily insults and defamations and intolerance against whichever individuals and groups he tries
to bully on a given day, and while defending some Republican candidates against his attacks, she should deplore their being intimidated
by his insults and offering pastel versions of the intolerance he peddles.
In other words, she should stop acting like a front-runner who cautiously tries to exploit the rules of a rigged game to her advantage,
and start acting like a fighting underdog who will fight on behalf of Americans who want a higher standard of living for themselves,
a higher standard of politics for the nation, and a higher level of economic opportunity and social justice for everyone.
Like JFK after the Bay of Pigs, the more responsibility she takes now the more she will succeed going forward.
Give Budowsky credit for one thing, if Hillary had followed his advice she might have won the election. But she was too busy
exploiting the rules of a rigged game and trying to smear Trump as a Russian agent while failing to exercise genuine, sincere personal
responsibility.
UPDATE –This is an extremely dangerous time now. Barack Obama appears to be actively working to discredit the Trump
election and has enlisted the intelligence community in the effort. How else to explain this disconnect? Yesterday, as noted above,
Obama directed the intelligence community to:
"conduct a full review of what happened during the 2016 election process. It is to capture lessons learned from that and
to report to a range of stakeholders," she said at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast with reporters. "This is consistent with
the work that we did over the summer to engage Congress on the threats that we were seeing."
The CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency,
rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system, according to officials briefed on the matter.
Why do you order a review if the CIA has already made a factual determination? In fact, we were told in October that the whole
damn intelligence community determined the Russians did it.
USA Today reported this in October :
The
fact-checking website Politifact says Hillary Clinton is correct when she says 17 federal intelligence agencies have concluded
that Russia is behind the hacking.
"We have 17, 17 intelligence agencies, civilian and military who have all concluded that these espionage attacks, these cyber
attacks, come from the highest levels of the Kremlin. And they are designed to influence our election. I find that deeply disturbing,"
Clinton said during
Wednesday's presidential debate in Las Vegas .
Trump pushed back, saying that Clinton and the United States had "no idea whether it is Russia, China or anybody else."
But Clinton is correct. On Oct. 7, the Department of Homeland Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence
issued
a joint statement on behalf of the U.S. Intelligence Community. The USIC is
made up of 16 agencies , in
addition to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
I heard from a knowledgeable friend in September that Hillary's campaign was pressing the Obama White House to lean on the
intel community and put something out blaming her woes on the Russians. That led to the October statement. And now we have the CIA
via a SECRET report (that is leaked to the public) insisting that Trump's victory came because of the Russians.
This is a damn lie. The CIA is now allowing itself to be used once again for blatant political purposes. The politicization
became a real problem under Bush. Let's not forget that these are the same cats who insisted it was a slam dunk that were weapons
of mass destruction in Iraq. The same group who missed the rise of ISIS.
"The ability of ISIL to not just mass inside of Syria, but then to initiate major land offensives that took Mosul, for example,
that was not on my intelligence radar screen," Obama told Zakaria, using the administration's term for the Islamic State terror group.
In a letter issued the day after a White House surveillance review placed new political pressure on the National Security Agency,
the seven members of the House judiciary committee said that James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, ought to face
consequences for untruthfully telling the Senate that the NSA was "not wittingly" collecting data on Americans.
"Congressional oversight depends on truthful testimony – witnesses cannot be allowed to lie to Congress," wrote representatives
James Sensenbrenner, Darrell Issa, Trent Franks, Raul Labrador, Ted Poe, Trey Gowdy and Blake Farenthold, citing "Director Clapper's
willful lie under oath."
There is a consistent pattern in the Obama Administration of lying to the American people, especially when it comes to National
Security matters. The NSA is not an isolated case. We also have Benghazi, Syria and Libya as other examples of not telling the truth
and misrepresenting facts.
In my lifetime, going on 60 years, I have never seen such a display of incompetence as is being manifested by Barack Obama
and mental midgets that surround him.
What they can say for sure is that the DNC and Podesta emails were hacked. Those hacked emails were passed to WIKILEAKS. Those
emails were then released to the public. What the intel community will be hard pressed to prove is that the Russian Government conceived
of and directed such a campaign. This is the true information operation to meddle in the U.S. election, but that isn't Russia. That's
Obama.
Larry C. Johnson is a former analyst at the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, who moved subsequently in 1989 to the U.S.
Department of State, where he served four years as the deputy director for transportation security, antiterrorism assistance training,
and special operations in the State Department's Office of Counterterrorism. He left government service in October 1993 and set up
a consulting business. He currently is the co-owner and CEO of BERG Associates, LLC (Business Exposure Reduction Group) and is an
expert in the fields of terrorism, aviation security, and crisis and risk management, and money laundering investigations. Johnson
is the founder and main author of No Quarter, a weblog that addresses issues of terrorism and intelligence and politics. NoQuarterUSA
was nominated as Best Political Blog of 2008.
"... There is no Russian involvement in the leaks of emails showing Clinton's corruption. Yet this rubbish has been the lead today in the Washington Post in the US and the Guardian here, and was the lead item on the BBC main news. I suspect it is leading the American broadcasts also. ..."
I have watched incredulous as the CIA's blatant lie has grown and grown as a media story – blatant
because the CIA has made no attempt whatsoever to substantiate it.
There is no Russian involvement
in the leaks of emails showing Clinton's corruption. Yet this rubbish has been the lead today in
the Washington Post in the US and the Guardian here, and was the lead item on the BBC main news.
I suspect it is leading the American broadcasts also.
Thanks for this– a much-needed Onion-esque satirical dig at the Globe/Post/NYT trifecta of
garbage. To base a headline on information gleaned from anonymous sources and unnamed officials
in secret meetings with unpublished agendas seems the most dangerous type of fake news there is.
The death of irony was greatly exaggerated, if you ask me.
Are we seeing a pattern here? Tillerson - a Putin counterpart and
recipient of Russia's Order of Friendship - to Moscow; Gov Branstad - farmin'
buddy of Premier Xi since the 1980s - to Beijing. And so forth.
Inside-the-Beltway folk are upset at the overturning of the established
order, in which diplomatic posts go to the biggest bundlers, regardless of
country knowledge. Lacking titles of nobility here in the Homeland, we need
an outlet for the well-connected to purchase a prestigious sinecure and a
black diplomatic passport. Otherwise a frightening Revolt of the Affluent
could roil our streets.
Still angling for the Court of St James myself - got any witticisms I
could share with the Queen?
Like it or not, Tillerson as secretary of "state" makes a fair amount of
sense.
His appointment would acknowledge, pretty overtly, that american foreign
"policy" is, always and everywhere, about energy.
We ignore human rights abuses in saudi arabia and overthrow Gadhafi when
he proposes demanding payment for oil in a gold-backed currency. Iraq. Assad
must "go" because of a pipeline. A biden boy gets a seat on the board of a
Ukranian energy company after a u. s. backed coup. The clinton foundation in
Nigeria.
And that's just the last decade or so of wars and "threats to american
interests." Maybe it's time we just got honest about it.
"... "Jake Sullivan, Clinton's policy director, was the only one in Clinton's inner circle who kept saying she would likely lose, despite the sanguine polling," Glenn Thrush says, citing Sullivan's friends. ..."
"... "He was also the only one of the dozen aides who dialed in for Clinton's daily scheduling call who kept on asking if it wasn't a good idea for her to spend more time in the Midwestern swing states in the closing days of the campaign." ..."
"... Clinton herself had a spat with other top party officials who wanted to run against Trump as emblematic of where crazy repubs were headed. Clinton said, 'no, be nice to republicans, only Trump matters and we want their voters.' ..."
"... The Clintons happily sacrificed the whole party to save themselves and in the end, they couldn't even accomplish THAT. What amazes me is that the chokehold that the Clintons had(still have?) was so tight that the party let it happen! ..."
Decent read from a democrat candidate in NC who ran for congress and got no help from DCCC. Makes
larger point about how they need to built out the organization with training, infrastructure for
campaigns. One remarkable bit is how there was a seat in TX district that hillary clinton won and
the party didn't even field a candidate!
A similar story about the final days of the SS Clintanic :
"Jake Sullivan, Clinton's policy director, was the only one in Clinton's inner circle who kept
saying she would likely lose, despite the sanguine polling," Glenn Thrush says, citing Sullivan's
friends.
"He was also the only one of the dozen aides who dialed in for Clinton's daily scheduling call
who kept on asking if it wasn't a good idea for her to spend more time in the Midwestern swing
states in the closing days of the campaign."
"They spent far more time debating whether or not Clinton should visit Texas and Arizona, two
states they knew she had little chance of winning, in order to get good press," Thrush says. Just
a week before Election Day, Clinton made a campaign stop in Tempe, Arizona.
Who knows whether the NYT's ten months of daily fake news about "inevitable Hillary" misled the
campaign, or the campaign misled the NYT?
One is reminded of the old nautical story about an imperious captain sailing on into a wall of
clouds, as the worried navigator watches the barometer dropping to 28 inches of mercury.
The NYT's job is to inject more mercury - problem solved! (we thought)
Building on lambert's favorite quote from atrios "they had ONE job!". Anecdotes like this from
politico really emphasize how they literally stopped trying to elect other democrats. It was ALL
about clinton and little else mattered. There was NO plan B!
Clinton herself had a spat with other top party officials who wanted to run against Trump as emblematic
of where crazy repubs were headed. Clinton said, 'no, be nice to republicans, only Trump matters
and we want their voters.'
The Clintons happily sacrificed the whole party to save themselves and in the end, they couldn't
even accomplish THAT. What amazes me is that the chokehold that the Clintons had(still have?) was
so tight that the party let it happen!
Personally I would like to see the Democratic Party go the way of the Whigs. They don't deserve
my time and effort when the elite go out of their way to stack the deck.
"... My perspective from across the ocean has always been that the McCarthy philosophy was the least admirable episode in recent US history. ..."
"... It's almost as if the West, or at least Western Elite circles who have strived to saturate the airways with Russia-the-bogey-man material since the year dot, can they, on the back of this one-sided propaganda machine, wheel-out blame directed towards Russia for .... well almost anything they desire. ..."
"... If only Barack Hussain Obama had not taken it upon his self to interfere in our referendum with his clear 'Back of the queue' threat, it may have been possible to not think he is a hypocrite. ..."
"... I suspect this is one last roll of the dice by the 'democrats' to keep Trump out of office. ..."
"... Obama is foolishly upping the ante, not on Putin, but on Trump. Trump's instinct will be to put a 10x hurt on Obama for this. Don't punk Trump. ..."
"... They are desperate to discredit the winner. It is as ineffective as any of his failed policies ..."
"... In other words, Obama admits he hasn't kept America secure versus 21st-century threats. ..."
"... Obama has said the intelligence agencies had the proof that Russia interfered with the election. With all their proof why order a review? Can't wait until Obama leaves office. ..."
"... what, is the USA the new Latin America, and Russia the new CIA ? forever meddling surreptitiously to undermine and overthrow other sovereign nation states democratic processes ? that's just so unfair ..."
"... It is a funny joke, but on the essence I would advise to read investigative report "The New Red Scare" in Harpers. The evidence of Russian government having anything to do with any hacks is literally non-existing. ..."
"... The US, heckler of the world for decades, stirring trouble wherever the dart falls, and yet Russian hackers and North Korean hookers are to blame for 99.9% of the worlds problems. Reality is, if the US didn't move past its own borders for 10 years the world would be already a much, much better place. ..."
"... The Guardian probably shouldn't go along in helping build the new McCarthyist, Cold War narrative, especially when it's just a bunch of US politicians and media figures repeating politically expedient, but factually unsupported claims. The Western media is trying to be Hearst Newspapers in the Spanish-American war. ..."
"... This is explicitly bad because it allows the suppression of dissent, of creating blacklists, the military industrial complex to further consolidate power, and to blame all sorts of domestic failures on shadowing foreign influence. ..."
"... But when Judith Miller, the NYT, George Bush and Hillary Clinton used fake news to kill hundreds of thousands, Obama told us to get over it, to "look forward and not backward." ..."
"... The United States has attempted to push its democratic ideologies on countries all over the world, using means much more direct than hacking. Yet they cannot take a fraction of what they dish out. If Russia is indeed intervening to aid nationalists around the world, then Russia is a friend and should be welcomed with open arms. Trump should do the same, and used the powers of the United States to undermine [neoliberal] leftists around the globe. ..."
Interesting - Obama never ordered an independent probe into 9/11 or invasion of Iraq or on the
Wall Street Collapse. Somehow Russian hacking seems to be more draconian than all the above.
And Russians somehow got into the brains of the disgruntled white population, and controlled
Trump's brain so that he would be voted to power. Then they still control Trump's brain so much
that he is wanting to let NATO countries pay for their security, make Japan, South Korea and everyone
else where US maintains its bases to pay for themselves.
And then suddenly there is a news of a thousand Russian athletes doing well in 2012 London
Olympics due to enhanced drugs. Until now, no one knew about this or heard about it.
It is not that I am supporting Russia all of a sudden. It is just that I am not supporting
the attempt to create enemies out of thin air and make them monstrous as needed, while covering
even more sinister schemes that need public attention.
Obama is part of the same system too that runs everything from behind the curtains. He still
is a good man. But he has only some much room to function within and survive.
A good man is not capable of bombing 7 countries in 8 years' time. People are too naive to believe
that someone could look as nice and sound as nice as Obama and push to advance the agenda of some
of the most evil and power-hungry megalomaniacs on the planet.
I don't know if the Russians provided Wikileaks with the actual emails or not but Wikileaks
like so many news organisations before them released info obtained illegally that they thought
the public had a right to know.
Now Assange has effectively been imprisoned in an Embassy in London for around 5 years on bogus
charges and his reputation was damaged by the same charges - Obviously Obama does not want to
give any credit to Assange and he knows he has played a part in this outrageous persecution.
This would also a could time to remind fellow commentators here about the Nuland - Pyatt conversation
that was recorded by Russia and released. This conversation showed the the involvement of two
high ranking US Politicians in the armed coup in Ukraine where an elected albeit corrupt leader
was forced to flee the country.
The period in the United States known as the Second Red Scare, lasting roughly from
1950 to 1956 and characterized by heightened political repression against supposed communists,
as well as a campaign spreading fear of their influence on American institutions and of espionage
by Soviet agents.
The third Red Scare? *clutches teddy bear*
Only one slight problem ...there aren't any reds in charge in Russia anymore.
My point being, there is no great ideological clash anymore. Assange volunteered the fact the
email data didn't come from the Russians. And whether Trump is better than Hillary is open to
debate.
My perspective from across the ocean has always been that the McCarthy philosophy was the
least admirable episode in recent US history. I doubt many people want to return to that
but surely, demonstrable evidence in either direction is the only antidote to accusations and
conspiracy theories, and is needed now more than ever in this supposed 'post truth' era.
Reply Share
I assume that Obama is being told to do this, and probably by the same people who backed the Clinton
individual for POTUS. The American people must be exceedingly dumb if they fall for this rubbish.
It's almost as if the West, or at least Western Elite circles who have strived to saturate
the airways with Russia-the-bogey-man material since the year dot, can they, on the back of this
one-sided propaganda machine, wheel-out blame directed towards Russia for .... well almost anything
they desire.
Problem is, are the public still eating out of their hands!?
Brext and the Trump victory is suggesting - not all of us by a long way.
If only Barack Hussain Obama had not taken it upon his self to interfere in our referendum
with his clear 'Back of the queue' threat, it may have been possible to not think he is a hypocrite.
what a joke, america has been 'interfering' (i.e. bombing and destroying) how many countries since
1945?? incredible hypocrisy and sickening double-standards.
War propoganda. Will the White Helmets be saving Russian civilians too? I suspect this is
one last roll of the dice by the 'democrats' to keep Trump out of office.
Obama has said the intelligence agencies had the proof that Russia interfered with the election.
With all their proof why order a review? Can't wait until Obama leaves office.
what, is the USA the new Latin America, and Russia the new CIA ? forever meddling surreptitiously
to undermine and overthrow other sovereign nation states democratic processes ? that's just so
unfair
It is a funny joke, but on the essence I would advise to read investigative report "The New
Red Scare" in Harpers. The evidence of Russian government having anything to do with any
hacks is literally non-existing.
The US, heckler of the world for decades, stirring trouble wherever the dart falls, and yet
Russian hackers and North Korean hookers are to blame for 99.9% of the worlds problems. Reality
is, if the US didn't move past its own borders for 10 years the world would be already a much,
much better place.
The Guardian probably shouldn't go along in helping build the new McCarthyist, Cold War narrative,
especially when it's just a bunch of US politicians and media figures repeating politically expedient,
but factually unsupported claims. The Western media is trying to be Hearst Newspapers in the Spanish-American
war.
This is explicitly bad because it allows the suppression of dissent, of creating blacklists,
the military industrial complex to further consolidate power, and to blame all sorts of domestic
failures on shadowing foreign influence. This is exactly what countries like Iran and North
Korea do. Bravo guys, for keep this story going for almost half a year with no substantial proof
whatsoever.
But when Judith Miller, the NYT, George Bush and Hillary Clinton used fake news to kill hundreds
of thousands, Obama told us to get over it, to "look forward and not backward." What a waste
of 8 years.
he suddenly discovered, 2-3 wks ago, that he was enthusiastic about space technology and exploration.
He (that is his ghost writers) published a 1 p. article about his love of space. Fact is, first
thing great-mind Obama did 8yrs ago is gut NASA's budget. He never mentioned space once in 8 yrs.
Suddenly, he is a fan. Creepy ... how does he deal with his hypocritical self every morning?
Political theatre. He will be out of office before anyone will even be asked to take office.
Its hilarious that The Guardian tries to frame US Intelligence as a single cohesive unit. Its
a splintered multi-headed hydra that will never act on this. Once again Obama brings righteous
powerful leadership to the act of being ineffective.
Starring:
Shirtless Putin
Legacy Obama
Hillary "I'm Not Trump" Clinton
Donald "OG Troll" Trump
Super Elite Genius Ninja Russian Hackers
The Poor Defenseless Victim DNC
John "Let's All Just Laugh at The Risotto Recipe and Not Pay Attention to any of my Other Emails"
Podesta
80's synth "rock" and really bright neon clothing
And featuring: Lou Diamond Phillips as.....Guccifer 2.0
The United States has attempted to push its democratic ideologies on countries all over the
world, using means much more direct than hacking. Yet they cannot take a fraction of what they
dish out. If Russia is indeed intervening to aid nationalists around the world, then Russia is
a friend and should be welcomed with open arms. Trump should do the same, and used the powers
of the United States to undermine [neoliberal] leftists around the globe.
No its by the letter actually. Libya, Yemen backed by US, Pakistan, Tunisia had some financial
and military backing. Obama is the drone king. And Ukraine well have you heard of Victoria nuland
before? Regime change in Ukraine cost the taxpayer 5 billion dollars
"... Outrageous how the Russians interfered with the Koch brothers and Soros's electoral process... ..."
"... No one, not the government agencies, not those ominous private security firms, no one presented even a shred of evidence for any involvement of the Russian government. Not even some lackluster ambiguous data, it was all anecdotal stuff, 'confidence' and fluffy rhetoric. ..."
"... The McCarthy-esque paranoia spread by the Clinton campaign to deflect from the content of those emails took foothold it seems. ..."
"... If the evidence were to hand, actually existed, it would have been all over the front pages of the WaPo, NYT and other major news outlets, not just in the US but everywhere else too. Investigating this 'evidence' is, to borrow William Gibson's simile, "Like planning to assassinate a figure out of myth and legend". The usual 'national security considerations' which have been and will continue to be adduced, as reasons for not publishing the evidence is pure triple-distilled BS and pretty much everyone knows that it's BS. ..."
Russia has always been the convenient whipping boy for the United States. We manufactured the
cold war because we needed an enemy to prop up our war economy. We built the Soviet Union into
this monolithic bogey man, spoiling to crush the west, enemies of "freedom," in order to keep
the west scared and pliant and in our pocket. After so-called communism collapsed, we found new
enemies in the middle east but they lacked the staying power. So now it's back to Russia. Maybe
the Russians did hack into the DNC. If so, they merely exposed the damning material. They didn't
write it.
Oh boy the knives are out against Russia, first I read about the 2012 Olympics which even if it
is true I would hold the British Olympic Committee responsible for the failure to find out about
the doping at the time of the Games and not 4 years later. I have just read US, Obama is now pointing
the finger at Russia for the outcome of the US Elections oh dear they are really scraping the
barrell to look for someone to blame instead of finding out why their own people decided to vote
for Trump. This is all typical American hyperbole and nonsense and a concerted effort on America's
efforts to orchestrate the next War.
America is so way behind with any modern services, they apparently do not have their bank cards
with pin or contactless as yet.
Unlucky failed mainstream media lost all confidence of its readership and are now broke. What
will they do next? ask for money saying that they're helping others whilst keeping most of it?
No one, not the government agencies, not those ominous private security firms, no one presented
even a shred of evidence for any involvement of the Russian government. Not even some lackluster
ambiguous data, it was all anecdotal stuff, 'confidence' and fluffy rhetoric.
But if it makes them happy....
The McCarthy-esque paranoia spread by the Clinton campaign to deflect from the content
of those emails took foothold it seems.
If the evidence were to hand, actually existed, it would have been all over the front pages
of the WaPo, NYT and other major news outlets, not just in the US but everywhere else too. Investigating
this 'evidence' is, to borrow William Gibson's simile, "Like planning to assassinate a figure
out of myth and legend". The usual 'national security considerations' which have been and will
continue to be adduced, as reasons for not publishing the evidence is pure triple-distilled BS
and pretty much everyone knows that it's BS.
Yeah sure, just like how it was 'all over the front pages' about what really happened on 9/11,
who was really involved etc.
And don't give me any of that conspiracy theory, tin-foil hat bs either...unless you are able
to be honest about this conspiracy: 19 or 20 strip-club lovin, don't-need-no-takeoff/landing-lessons
jihadists used box-cutters to overpower jet air planes and with the-luck-of-the-century HIT NOT
ONE....BUT TWO skyscrapers at the EXACT SPOT where the 47 concrete -steel inner columns were weak
enough to cause 'pancaking' of the undamaged 60-90 UNDAMAGED FLOORS. Collapsing (and pulverizing
concrete into dust) the building into itself.
And then weirdly enough a small cabal of PNAC signees who in writing had expressed that pax-americana
was going to be 'difficult unless a pearl harbor like event happens' had almost as much Luck-of-the-century
as the jihadists when......WA LA....into their lap.....a new pearl harbor.
Trying to blame one of the most flawed and undemocratic election process's in the Western hemisphere
on the Russians is laughable to the point of hysteria.
The dumb-ed down bigoted electorate is a direct result of decades of a two party political
system, backed up by a compliant media, that fosters mindless patriotism and ignorance rather
than enlightenment and intelligent discussion on the problems facing the country.
Never have I seen a better example of your own dog biting you on the arse!
But Clinton lost the election because the Republicans realised she was certain to be the Democratic
Presidential candidate fifteen years ago and they began their smear campaign against her right
there and then, and a lot of it stuck.
When you add to that tens of thousands on the left like me who voted for her...but would not
campaign for her because we didn't agree with her disastrous blunder in helping to overthrow Qaddafi
in Libya ( a country that is now a feudal backwater) and her stated goals of regime change in
Syria and all the while she had a domestic policy was cosying up to the bankers and Wall Street
elites, whilst ignoring blue collar Americans without jobs and prospects for their future...the
almost inevitable result is Trump as President of the United States.
'Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud, hatch out!'
The US will get what it deserves...and it deserves Trump I'm afraid.
"... Greenwald's take down is another hammer meets nail piece. The CIA are systemic liars. In fact, that's their job to move around in the shadows and deceive. They literally lie about everything. They lied about Iran/Contra, torture programs, their propensity for drug smuggling and dealing, infesting the media with agents, imaginary WMDs that launch war and massacre, mass surveillance of citizens, just to name a few. ..."
"... This is the agency who are in secret and anonymity, with no verifiable evidence, whispering rumors in the WaPoo and NYTimes' ears that the Russians made Hillary lose. What moron would take the CIA at its word anymore? Much less a major newspaper? Did I miss something, is it 1950 again? Methinks I've picked up the scent of fake news ..."
"... Apparently, all the morons who are still screaming about Trump, as if he alone will be in charge of the government and not his GOP handlers. Please keep in mind that the ardent Clinton supporters quite clearly reveal cult behavior, and anything that allows them to continue embracing their belief in their righteousness will be embraced without question or qualm. ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... The upside of these overtly political battles among intelligence agencies is that we are eroding away the idea that these are non-partisan institutions without overt political agendas. ..."
"... What Stengel and various mainstream media outlets appear to be arguing for is the creation of a "Ministry of Truth" managed by mainstream U.S. media outlets and enforced by Google, Facebook and other technology platforms. ..."
"... In other words, once these supposedly responsible outlets decide what the "truth" is, then questioning that narrative will earn you "virtual" expulsion from the marketplace of ideas, possibly eliminated via algorithms of major search engines or marked with a special app to warn readers not to believe what you say, a sort of yellow Star of David for the Internet age. ..."
"... The NC lawsuit against WaPo, like the lawsuit of Hedges et al. against provisions of the NDAA, marks a watershed moment for defending free speech in our country! I hope that my oft-expressed belief -- that we will soon need to revive samizdat ..."
"... According to a recent posting on Wolf Street, according to records, the Treasury has borrowed 4 trillion more between 2004-15, than can actually be accounted for in spending. This is because it is the borrowing and thus public obligations, which really matter to the powers that be. The generals just get their toys and wars as icing on the cake. It doesn't matter if they win, because there would be less war to spend it on. Eventually they will use "public/private partnerships" to take their piles of public obligations and trade for the rest of the Commons. ..."
"... Money needs to be understand as a public utility, like roads. We no more own it than we own the section of road we are using. It is like blood, not fat. ..."
"... The CIA whinging about a right wing president being installed by a foreign power might just be the greatest self-awareness fail ever! ..."
"... LOL at that! You'd think they were afraid trump might turn out to be the next Hugo Chavez! They must really, really love their program to help al Qaeda in Syria. ..."
"... The CIA lies as a matter of course, and now they're being propped up as the paragons of honesty, simply out of political expediency. Crazy days. ..."
"... Modern Democrats simply aren't a political party but fanatics of a professional sports club. If it wasn't the Russians, it would be referees or Bill Belichick at fault. I'm surprised they aren't mentioning "Comrade Nader" at all times. ..."
"... In fact, Trump's coalition looks remarkably similar to the one that Scott Walker put together in 2014. ..."
"... Obama in Spartanburg, SC in 2007: And understand this: If American workers are being denied their right to organize and collectively bargain when I'm in the White House, I'll put on a comfortable pair of shoes myself, I will walk on that picket line with you as President of the United States of America. Because workers deserve to know that somebody is standing in their corner. ..."
"... And the Dems wonder why the working class feel betrayed. ..."
Meet the Democrats' proto-Trumps Politico. "In three major states with a governor's
mansion up for grabs in 2018, a big-name, politically active billionaire or multimillionaire
is taking steps toward a run - [Democrat] donors looking to take matters into their own
hands after 2016's gutting losses."
The Evidence to Prove the Russian Hack emptywheel. The headline is a bit off, since the
post's subject is really the evidence required to prove the Russian hack. Some of
which does exist. That said, this is an excellent summary of the state of play. I take issue
with one point:
Crowdstrike reported that GRU also hacked the DNC. As it explains, GRU does this by sending
someone something that looks like an email password update, but which instead is a fake
site designed to get someone to hand over their password. The reason this claim is strong
is because people at the DNC say this happened to them.
First, CrowdStrike is a private security firm, so there's a high likelihood they're talking
their book, Beltway IT being what it is. Second, a result (DNC got phished) isn't "strong"
proof of a claim (GRU did the phishing). We live in a world where 12-year-olds know how to
do email phishing, and a world where professional phishing operations can camouflage themselves
as whoever they like. So color me skeptical absent some unpacking on this point. A second post
from emptywheel,
Unpacking the New CIA Leak: Don't Ignore the Aluminum Tube Footnote , is also well worth
a read.
Greenwald's take down is another hammer meets nail piece. The CIA are systemic liars.
In fact, that's their job to move around in the shadows and deceive. They literally lie about
everything. They lied about Iran/Contra, torture programs, their propensity for drug smuggling
and dealing, infesting the media with agents, imaginary WMDs that launch war and massacre,
mass surveillance of citizens, just to name a few.
They murder, torture, train hired mercenary proxies (who they are often pretending to oppose),
stage coups of democratically elected govt.'s, interfere with elections, topple regimes, install
ruthless puppet dictators, and generally enslave other nations to western corporate pirates.
They are a rogue band of pirates themselves.
This is the agency who are in secret and anonymity, with no verifiable evidence, whispering
rumors in the WaPoo and NYTimes' ears that the Russians made Hillary lose. What moron would
take the CIA at its word anymore? Much less a major newspaper? Did I miss something, is it
1950 again? Methinks I've picked up the scent of fake news
Conclusion: It isn't the Russians that are interfering with U.S. kangaroo elections, it's
the professionals over at the CIA
Apparently, all the morons who are still screaming about Trump, as if he alone will
be in charge of the government and not his GOP handlers. Please keep in mind that the ardent
Clinton supporters quite clearly reveal cult behavior, and anything that allows them to continue
embracing their belief in their righteousness will be embraced without question or qualm.
I've tried to point out on other blogs just how shaky that story in the Washington Post
is, and the response I get is something along the lines of, well, other outlets are also
reporting it, so it must be true. It does me no good to point out that this is the same tactic
used by the Bush administration in the run-up to the Iraq war. People will believe what they
want to believe.
It may help to point to the history of CIA influence at WaPoo. Counterpunch had a short
piece reminding everyone of Operation Mockingbird (going from memory on that name) where CIA
had reporters on staff at the paper directly taking orders and simultaneously on CIA payroll.
If questioned about CIA's motivation for hating trump, my best guess is that it is because
trump is undermining their project to overthrow assad in syria using nusra rebels. And also
because trump wants to be nice to russia.
I think there's some people in the cia that think they played a major role in winning the
cold war through their support for mujahadeen rebels in afghanistan. I suspect they think they
can beat putin in syria the same way. This is absolutely nutty.
The upside of these overtly political battles among intelligence agencies is that we
are eroding away the idea that these are non-partisan institutions without overt political
agendas.
There's a large number of people that will see through the facade. Right now, Trump supporters
are getting a lesson in how much resistance there can be within the establishment. I'm no Trump
supporter, but I think seeing what these institutions are capable of is a useful exercise for
all involved.
Apologies if this analysis by Robert Parry has already been shared here:
"What Stengel and various mainstream media outlets appear to be arguing for is the
creation of a "Ministry of Truth" managed by mainstream U.S. media outlets and enforced
by Google, Facebook and other technology platforms.
In other words, once these supposedly responsible outlets decide what the "truth"
is, then questioning that narrative will earn you "virtual" expulsion from the marketplace
of ideas, possibly eliminated via algorithms of major search engines or marked with a special
app to warn readers not to believe what you say, a sort of yellow Star of David for the
Internet age.
And then there's the possibility of more direct (and old-fashioned) government enforcement
by launching FBI investigations into media outlets that won't toe the official line. (All
of these "solutions" have been advocated in recent weeks.)
On the other hand, if you do toe the official line that comes from Stengel's public diplomacy
shop, you stand to get rewarded with government financial support. Stengel disclosed in
his interview with Ignatius that his office funds "investigative" journalism projects.
"How should citizens who want a fact-based world combat this assault on truth?" Ignatius
asks, adding: "Stengel has approved State Department programs that teach investigative reporting
and empower truth-tellers."
The NC lawsuit against WaPo, like the lawsuit of Hedges et al. against provisions of
the NDAA, marks a watershed moment for defending free speech in our country! I hope that my
oft-expressed belief -- that we will soon need to revive samizdat techniques to preserve
truth– may turn ou to be overly pessimistic.
Keep in mind the basis of this capitalist economy is Federal debt. They have to spend it
on something. The government doesn't even budget, which is to list priorities and spend according
to need/ability. They put together these enormous bills, add enough to get the votes, which
don't come cheap and then the prez can only pass or veto.
If they wanted to actually budget, taking the old line item veto as a template, they could
break these bills into all their various items, have each legislator assign a percentage value
to each one, put them back together in order of preference and the prez would draw the line.
"The buck stops here."
That would keep powers separate, with congress prioritizing and the prez individually responsible
for deficit spending. It would also totally crash our current "Capitalist" system.
According to a recent posting on Wolf Street, according to records, the Treasury has
borrowed 4 trillion more between 2004-15, than can actually be accounted for in spending. This
is because it is the borrowing and thus public obligations, which really matter to the powers
that be. The generals just get their toys and wars as icing on the cake. It doesn't matter
if they win, because there would be less war to spend it on. Eventually they will use "public/private
partnerships" to take their piles of public obligations and trade for the rest of the Commons.
Money needs to be understand as a public utility, like roads. We no more own it than
we own the section of road we are using. It is like blood, not fat.
LOL at that! You'd think they were afraid trump might turn out to be the next Hugo Chavez!
They must really, really love their program to help al Qaeda in Syria.
There are so many eye-rolling ironies in all this I think my eyeballs might just pop out
of their sockets. And the liberals going out of their way to tout the virtues of the CIA the
very same organization that never shied from assassinating or overthrowing a leftwing president/prime
minister it galls. The CIA lies as a matter of course, and now they're being propped up
as the paragons of honesty, simply out of political expediency. Crazy days.
Modern Democrats simply aren't a political party but fanatics of a professional sports
club. If it wasn't the Russians, it would be referees or Bill Belichick at fault. I'm surprised
they aren't mentioning "Comrade Nader" at all times.
My guess is donors are annoyed after the 2014 debacle and are having a hard time rationalizing
a loss to a reality TV show host with a cameo in Home Alone 2.
And understand this: If American workers are being denied their right to organize and
collectively bargain when I'm in the White House, I'll put on a comfortable pair of shoes
myself, I will walk on that picket line with you as President of the United States of America.
Because workers deserve to know that somebody is standing in their corner.
And the Dems wonder why the working class feel betrayed.
That ProPublica piece (
Suspected of Corruption at Home, Powerful Foreigners Find Refuge in the U.S. Pro Publica)
is brutal. Not only do we have to be the shittest corrupt country in the world but we have
to be a safe haven for ever other corrupt politician in the world as long as they have $$.
Can someone just make it all end? Please. There needs to be a maximum wealth where anything
you earn past it just gets automatically redistributed to the poor.
Thanks for the link – really important and scary things are going in congress concerning
'fake news' and Russian propaganda and HR 6393 is particularly bad. The EU is also taking steps
to counter 'fake news' as well. Obama claimed that some form of curation is required – and
it is happening quickly. People are suggesting that propornot has been debunked. That does
not matter anymore. The Obama regime and the MSM don't care – that have gotten the message
out.
And the people behind this are really deranged – check out Adam Schiff calling Tucker Carlson
a Kremlin stooge for even suggesting that there is no certainty that Russia leaked the emails
to Wikileaks.
After all, the media went all in for Hillary and spent huge amounts of time explaining why
Trump is unfit. But they lost.
And now our efforts on behalf of al Queada are failing in Syria and more hysteria ensues.
See for example:
The email saga lost a provable set of sources a long time ago. Before the files were given
to Wikileaks it was already too late to determine which people did it. So-called forensic evidence
of these computers only tell us that investigators either found evidence of a past compromise
or that people want us to believe they did. Since the compromise was determined after the fact,
the people with access could have done anything to the computers, including leave a false trail.
The core problem is that since security for all of these machines, including the DNC's email
server and most likely many of those from Team R, was nearly non-existent nearly nothing useful
can be determined. The time to learn something about a remote attacker, when it's possible
at all, is while the machine is being attacked – assuming it has never been compromised before.
If the attacker's machine has also been compromised then you know pretty much nothing unless
you can get access to it.
As far as physical access protection goes. If the machine has been left on and unattended
or is not completely encrypted then the only thing that might help is a 24 hour surveillance
camera pointed at the machine.
Forensic evidence in compromised computers is significantly less reliable than DNA and hair
samples. It's much too easy for investigators to frame another party by twiddling some bits.
Anyone that thinks that even well intentioned physical crime investigators have never gotten
convictions with bad or manipulated evidence has been watching and believing way too many crime
oriented mysteries. "Blindspot" is not a documentary.
As for projecting behaviors on a country by calling it a "state action", Russia or otherwise,
implying that there is no difference between independent and government sponsored actions,
that is just silly.
Apt observation from Gareth: "I believe the CIA is attempting to delegitimize Trump's election
so as to force him into a defensive position in which he will temper his dual goals of normalizing
relations with Russia and destroying the CIA's proxy armies of jihadists. We will see if Trump has
the guts to make some heads roll in the CIA He will remember that the last President who even
threatened to take on the CIA received a massive dose of flying lead poisoning. "
Essentially after WaPo scandal it is prudent to view all US MSM as yellow press.
Notable quotes:
"... The Post and the like are terrified over their loss of credibility just as the internet has destroyed their advertising. Interesting that their response to competition isn't to outdo the competition but to smother the competition with a lie. Their own fake news. ..."
"... As a moral American and supporter of free speech, I am going to make a list of online or print WaPo advertisers. Then I will communicate to them that I will never buy another thing from them as long as they advertise in the Washington Post. ..."
"... Open their ads in Firefox ad blocker. Then add them to the script and spam blacklist. ..."
"... The story serves many purposes. One is firing a shot across TrumpCo's bow: 'Submit to us or we'll delegitimate your election.' ..."
"... Another is excusing the Democratic Party establishment for losing the election, and thus diverting the wrath of the rank and file. ..."
"... About all we can do at the moment is remember to remember the names of the people who purveyed and supported the story, just as we should remember to remember the names of those who purveyed WMD stories. ..."
"... Job #1 always is suppressing the Sanders faction. Not beating Trump or the Republicans. They want control of their little pond. ..."
"... Personally, after what we did in Ukraine (essentially funding a revolution) I refuse to get the vapors because Russia apparently "helped" elect Trump by exposing (not forcing her to be a liar or cheat) Hillary. ..."
"... All of this crap about Russia, or the electoral college system is a distraction from the real issues at hand about our political system, which is a two party one oligarchy (ALEC) anti-democratic system. The rot runs from national presidential elections to the comptroller of the smaller city governments. ..."
"... If any candidate was capable of speaking to the working and middle class, then either Russia nor the the 0.01% who compose the oligarchy could control who wins in popular elections. What is really needed is to eliminate either the two party system, or democratize their methods of selecting candidates. ..."
"... Think Hillary played an unfair hand to Sanders? That was nothing compared to the shenanigans that get played at local level, state level, and Congress level to filter out populist candidates and replace them with machine / oligarchy pets. ..."
"... the idea that Saudi (or other Middle Eastern states) also intervened (with money), is not more credible? ..."
"... Yes, the NYT piece on Russian hacking is complete evidence free tripe. Not once do they say what evidence they base these accusations on, beyond the Cyrillic keyboard. The code for Cyrillic keyboard is, "fuzzy bear" et al. as the original reporting on the DNC hack and the company that ran security made clear that this was the one and only piece of concrete evidence the attacks by "fuzzy bear" et al. were perpetrated by the Russians. ..."
"... So based on a Cyrillic keyboard and the below quote, unnamed "American intelligence agencies know it was the Russians, really? ..."
"... Based on this it appears the NYTs definition of fake reporting is anything that isn't fed directly to it by unnamed experts or the USG and uncritically reported. ..."
"... I think these unnamed agencies are not going to have a very good working relationship with the orange overlord if they keep this up. They might not even be getting that new war they wanted for Christmas. ..."
"... It's as though the NYT and WaPo had these vast pools of accumulated credibility and they could go out on a limb here Oh wait - their credibility has been destroyed countless times over the past decade or so. One would think they'd realise: If you're in a ditch, the first thing to do is stop digging. ..."
"... The world is flat . Note: This is not me awarding a Thomas L. Friedman prize. In this case, I am simply sharing the article because I think it is hilarious. ..."
"... Nowhere, in any of this, is it mentioned that Clinton's illegal private email server (that got hacked) played any factor whatsoever. It just stinks so bad, I wonder how they can not smell what they are sitting in.. ..."
"... Summarizing a very plausible theory, NeoCon Coup Attempt: As Syria's Assad (with Russian help) is close to crushing HRC's jihadi Queda & Nusra rebels in Aleppo, the NeoCons are freaking out on both sides of the Atlantic. ..."
"... What to do? Jill's recount is floundering. So, last resort: Concoct Russia hacking myth to either delay Dec 19 EC vote or create more faithless electors. Result: A NeoCon like HRC or a NeoCon sympathizer is installed. ..."
"... Two biggest war hawks, McCain and Graham, are leading the Senate charges against Russia. All of this within days of Obama sending 200 MORE US troops to Syria and lifting the ban on more arms to the Syrian rebels, including anti-aircraft MANPADS. ..."
"... The recount farce makes me angry, and has made me resolve to never give Stein my vote again. ..."
"... That implies the NeoCon establishment views DJT and cabinet as a threat in any way, which is an extremely dubious premise. Occam's razor: Clinton and the media establishment that gifted the country DJT will do anything they can to cast the blame elsewhere. ..."
"... I'm not sure if that is a simpler explanation. I offer this: It's simpler to see that they are engaging in a struggle for now and the future – that means the neocons vs Trump. ..."
"... "The story reveals that a CIA assessment detailing this conclusion had been presented to President Obama and top congressional leaders last week." You read that? It's "detailed". None of us peasants will ever know what those "details" are, but its the f#ckin CIA, dude. ..."
"... The problem is we are expected to just trust the NYT and CIA without evidence??? Anybody remember WMD in Iraq?? The complete loss of credibility by the NYT and CIA over the last decade means I have to see credible evidence before I believe anything they say. ..."
"... Seems coordinated to me -- Globe/Times/WaPo. Double down for WaPoo who are now reporting from area 51 where they found Bigfoot sitting on a stockpile of Sadam's WMDs. Reading this article is surreal. The CIA, a terrorist outfit which our own former reporter (Bernstein) showed to be infesting our own newsroom, whispered in our ear that the Cold War 2.0 is going to escalate with or without the establishment coronation queen. ..."
"... "Secret CIA assessment says Russia was trying to help Trump win White House" The link on WaPoo's site actually says a different headline so I am just sharing the headline itself. Not another secret assessment . no more passing notes in class, students. ..."
"... Robert Reich has posted the news that the Russians helped to secure the election for Trump on his FB page, to it seems much acclaim – perhaps I was foolish for having expected better from him. ..."
"... WaPo seems allied with the CIA-FIRE sector Clintonian group, while T may be more inclusive of the classic MICC-Pentagon sector which was asserting itself in Syria. ..."
"... Craig Murray, the former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, who is a close associate of Assange, called the CIA claims "bullshit", adding: "They are absolutely making it up." "I know who leaked them," Murray said. "I've met the person who leaked them, and they are certainly not Russian and it's an insider. It's a leak, not a hack; the two are different things. ..."
"... Although I'm convinced that the Republicans are, on average, noticeably worse than the Democrats, I agree with you. It is useful that there is no doubt about where Trump and the Congressional Republicans stand, which is on the side of the billionaires and the giant corporations. We've had 8 years of Obama's obeisance to the oligarchs, and millions of Americans still don't understand that this was happening. ..."
"... rhetoric that is beginning conspicuously to resemble the celebration by capitalist elites during the interwar years of German and Italian fascism (and even Stalinist communism) for their apparently superior economic governance. [12] ..."
"... I always knew Trump would be a disaster. However, Trump is a survivable disaster–with Hillary that would have been the end. ..."
"... If Trump has many Goldman guys, is it a case of 'keeping your enemies close?' ..."
"... First of all, the Democrats would use Clinton to suppress the left and to insist that Clinton was more electable. That would lead to a validation of the idea that the left has nowhere to go and set a precedent for decades with a 3 point formula: ..."
"... Suppress the left ..."
"... Accept money from Wall Street and move to the right with each election ..."
"... Use identity politics as a distraction. ..."
"... There were other dangers. Clinton wanted war with Russia. That could easily escalate into a nuclear conflict. With Trump, the risk is reduced, although given his ego, I will concede that anything is possible. We would also be seeing some very damaging neoliberal policies. ..."
"... The reality is that the US was screwed the moment Sanders was out of the picture. With Trump, at least it is more naked and more obvious. The real challenge is that the left has a 2 front war, first with the corporate Democrats, then the GOP. On the GOP side, Trump's supporters are going to wake up at some point to an Obama like betrayal, which is exactly what I expect will happen. ..."
"... There are elements of the Trump fan base already calling him out for the people he has appointed, which is a very encouraging sign. Trump's economic performance is what will make or break him. He has sold himself on his business acumen. Needless to say, I expect it will break him because he won't even try to do anything for his base. ..."
"... I like a lot of your analysis. "We would also be seeing some very damaging neoliberal policies." We could still yet under Trump, given the cabinet nominees. ..."
"... By dangerous and delegitimizing I assume you mean the results of the election will be reversed sometime in the next six weeks while the current establishment still has martial authority. ..."
"... Both sides now fear the other side will lock them up or, at the very least, remove them from power permanently. Why do I think this is not over? ..."
"... I am certainly not ready to rule out Moore's gut feeling. Capitalist Party + MSM + Clinton + Nuland + CIA has shown to be an equation that ends in color revolution ..or at least an attempted color revolution ..."
"... At the same time that the media hysteria over "fake news" has reached a fever pitch, yesterday the Senate passed the "Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act" , colloquially known as the Portman-Murphy Counter-Propaganda Bill, as part of the FY 2017 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) Conference Report. ..."
"... " establishing an interagency center housed at the State Department to coordinate and synchronize counter-propaganda efforts throughout the U.S. government." Our very own Ministry of Truth! ..."
"... Under Ukrainian law journalists that disagree with Kiev's policies are collaborators. They are subject to any mechanism Kiev can devise to stop them. In the case of RT Ruptly or the Guardian this means developing a strategy to ruin their reputations. The Interpreter was developed to that end. Kiev has gone so far as to petition the UK government to censure the Guardian for its coverage of events in Ukraine hoping to bully the publication into line. US broadcasters (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty) have put RT on the same list as ISIS. ..."
"... This plan to censor opposing viewpoints in the US was intended to be executed during a Clinton presidency, and would've been almost impossible to stop under those circumstances. There is now a window of opportunity to fight back and ruin these clowns once and for all. ..."
"... These rallies are Trump's means of maintaining contact with his base, and making sure that he knows what they want. And a means of showing that he is trying to get it for them. If Hillary had bothered to do anything of the sort she would have been elected. Sanders did it and it was much appreciated. Trump's ego is huge but the rallies are much more than an ego-trip. ..."
"... Re: WP's response to Truthdig's retraction request. It seems as if they are doubling down on the "not our responsibility to verify the validity theme". My first reaction is that the WP is now the equivalent of the National Enquirer. What's next, a headline " I gave birth to Trump's Love Child". ..."
I believe the CIA is attempting to delegitimize Trump's election so as to force him into a
defensive position in which he will temper his dual goals of normalizing relations with Russia
and destroying the CIA's proxy armies of jihadists. We will see if Trump has the guts to make
some heads roll in the CIA He will remember that the last President who even threatened to
take on the CIA received a massive dose of flying lead poisoning.
This hysteria over Russia is getting downright dangerous. The people pushing that story will
seemingly stop at nothing to delegitimize the election results.
The Post's Marc Fisher was on the PBS Newshour last night. He talked about Alex Jones. They
probably didn't expect the pushback from Yves, Truthdig, etc. The Establishment often underestimates
dissenters.
Real fake news, like Jones, benefits from the fake news charge. Their readers hate the MSM.
I wonder if the same ethic can develop on the left.
The Post and the like are terrified over their loss of credibility just as the internet
has destroyed their advertising. Interesting that their response to competition isn't to outdo
the competition but to smother the competition with a lie. Their own fake news.
I heard Stephen Colbert lump Alex Jones together w/Wikileaks as if they were the same "fake
news". I have also repeatedly heard Samantha Bee refer to Julian Assange as a rapist. Sigh. Both
of those comments are "fake news". The allegations against JA are tissue thin and Wikileaks has
NEVER been challenged about the truth of their releases. Please correct me if I am wrong.
"just as the internet has destroyed their advertising." Shouldn't that be "destroyed their ability to sell advertising?"
As a moral American and supporter of free speech, I am going to make a list of online or print
WaPo advertisers.
Then I will communicate to them that I will never buy another thing from them as long as they
advertise in the Washington Post.
Open their ads in Firefox ad blocker. Then add them to the script and spam blacklist.
The Wapo's trying to steal Craigslist business with online job listings. Looks like an opportunity
to have some fun for creatives.
Boss WaPo OwnerMan Bezos is very rich. He bought WaPo as a propaganda outlet. He is prepared
to lose a lot of money keeping it "open for propaganda." Naming and shaming and boycotting every advertiser WaPo has could certainly embarass WaPo and
perhaps diminish its credibility-patina for Bezoganda purposes. It is certainly worth trying.
The WaPo brand also owns a lot of other moneymaking entities like Kaplan testing and test-prepping
I believe. It would be a lot harder to boycott those because millions of people find them to be
important. But perhaps a boycott against them until WaPo sells them off to non Bezos ownership
would be worth trying.
Perhaps a savage boycott against Amazon until Bezos fires everyone at WaPo involved in this
McCarthy-list and related articles . . . and humiliates them into unhireability anywhere else
ever again?
The Dem Liberals (Joan Walsh etc). on the twitter are going full throttle with this, it's a
twofer as Joan is using this to attack Sanders supporters for not being on the front lines of
Russia Fear.
The story serves many purposes. One is firing a shot across TrumpCo's bow: 'Submit to us or
we'll delegitimate your election.' (Apparently TrumpCo has not delivered a convincing submission
yet.)
Another is excusing the Democratic Party establishment for losing the election, and thus
diverting the wrath of the rank and file. Evidently it's also going to be used against the Sanders
faction of the Democrats. About all we can do at the moment is remember to remember the names
of the people who purveyed and supported the story, just as we should remember to remember the
names of those who purveyed WMD stories.
Personally, after what we did in Ukraine (essentially funding a revolution) I refuse to get
the vapors because Russia apparently "helped" elect Trump by exposing (not forcing her to be a
liar or cheat) Hillary.
Perhaps they should consider that it could be worse, a foreign nation could be arming people
and encouraging them to topple the government we have like what we're doing in Syria. It isn't
like the very sharp divisions elsewhere haven't resulted in civil war.
All of this crap about Russia, or the electoral college system is a distraction from the real
issues at hand about our political system, which is a
two party one oligarchy (ALEC) anti-democratic system. The rot runs from national presidential
elections to the comptroller of the smaller city governments.
If any candidate was capable of speaking to the working and middle class, then either Russia
nor the the 0.01% who compose the oligarchy could control who wins in popular elections. What
is really needed is to eliminate either the two party system, or democratize their methods
of selecting candidates.
Think Hillary played an unfair hand to Sanders? That was nothing
compared to the shenanigans that get played at local level, state level, and Congress level to
filter out populist candidates and replace them with machine / oligarchy pets.
The popular vs. electoral vote – look up the rules next time you play.
Recount – to investigate without much evidence is something senator McCarthy would do.
Russia – and the idea that Saudi (or other Middle Eastern states) also intervened (with money),
is not more credible?
Coincidentally, all these urgent initiatives will lead to replacing Trump with Hillary as president.
"I will tear down the very building just to achieve my Pyrrhic victory."
Thank you, sorry Dems, Boris Badunov did not swing the election. If you want *hard* evidence
(not fake news) of a foreign government influencing the election you might have a look at the
beheading, gay-killing, women-supressing tyrannical monarchy known as The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
and ask whether it made sense for them to be the *#1* contributor to your candidate.
Yes, the NYT piece on Russian hacking is complete evidence free tripe. Not once do they say
what evidence they base these accusations on, beyond the Cyrillic keyboard. The code for Cyrillic
keyboard is, "fuzzy bear" et al. as the original reporting on the DNC hack and the company that
ran security made clear that this was the one and only piece of concrete evidence the attacks
by "fuzzy bear" et al. were perpetrated by the Russians.
So based on a Cyrillic keyboard and the below quote, unnamed "American intelligence agencies
know it was the Russians, really?
"They based that conclusion, in part, on another finding - which they say was also reached
with high confidence - that the Russians hacked the Republican National Committee's computer systems
in addition to their attacks on Democratic organizations, but did not release whatever information
they gleaned from the Republican networks."
Based on this it appears the NYTs definition of fake reporting is anything that isn't fed directly
to it by unnamed experts or the USG and uncritically reported.
I think these unnamed agencies are not going to have a very good working relationship with
the orange overlord if they keep this up. They might not even be getting that new war they wanted
for Christmas.
It's as though the NYT and WaPo had these vast pools of accumulated credibility and they could
go out on a limb here Oh wait - their credibility has been destroyed countless times over the
past decade or so. One would think they'd realise: If you're in a ditch, the first thing to do is stop digging.
Especially when dealing with a President Trump. He's already made his distaste for the WaPo
clear. We are entering a new, crazy, dangerous era of press-presidential relations. All the more
reason for the newspapers to behave responsibly - is that too much to ask?
The world is flat .
Note: This is not me awarding a Thomas L. Friedman prize. In this case, I am simply sharing
the article because I think it is hilarious.
Also, Bradford deLong should be included with Krugman and Friedman, though the length and width
of deLong's connections don't seem to have the same acceleration, energy, or viscosity, as the
other two. There are also olfactory and temporal differences.
Come to think of it, I also don't think Krugman Turdman or Friedman
Flathead would have to grovel to Neera "I'm a loyal soldier" Tanden and John "Done, so
think about something else" Podesta to get a family member a "meritocratic" job.
If Russia is so dangerous, then anyone who mishandles classified information (say, by storing
it on a personal server) should be prosecuted, shouldn't they?
Nowhere, in any of this, is it mentioned that Clinton's illegal private email server (that
got hacked) played any factor whatsoever. It just stinks so bad, I wonder how they can not smell
what they are sitting in.. I also wonder just where the line is between those who actually buy
into this hysteria, and those who simply feel justified in using whatever means they can to discredit
Trump and overturn the election. I think there's a lot of overlap and grey area there in many
people's minds.
Summarizing a very plausible theory, NeoCon Coup Attempt: As Syria's Assad (with Russian help) is close to crushing HRC's jihadi Queda & Nusra rebels
in Aleppo, the NeoCons are freaking out on both sides of the Atlantic.
What to do? Jill's recount is floundering. So, last resort: Concoct Russia hacking myth to
either delay Dec 19 EC vote or create more faithless electors. Result: A NeoCon like HRC or a
NeoCon sympathizer is installed.
Two biggest war hawks, McCain and Graham, are leading the Senate charges against Russia.
All of this within days of Obama sending 200 MORE US troops to Syria and lifting the ban on
more arms to the Syrian rebels, including anti-aircraft MANPADS.
The recount farce makes me angry, and has made me resolve to never give Stein my vote again.
Apparently she's in opposition to much of her party leadership on this, so if they ditch her in
the future and get someone better I may consider voting for them again. The reality of Trump as
president is going to be bad enough, attempting to sabotage the transition isn't doing anyone
any favors. I don't like Obama at all, but he wants a clean, peaceful transfer of power, and on
that issue at least he's correct.
That implies the NeoCon establishment views DJT and cabinet as a threat in any way, which is
an extremely dubious premise. Occam's razor: Clinton and the media establishment that gifted the country DJT will do anything
they can to cast the blame elsewhere.
I'm not sure if that is a simpler explanation. I offer this: It's simpler to see that they are engaging in a struggle for now and the future – that means
the neocons vs Trump.
Hillary vs Trump, invoking Russia now, is about fighting the last war. That one was over more
than a month ago. It's more convoluted to say one team still desires to continue the fight.
"The story reveals that a CIA assessment detailing this conclusion had been presented to President
Obama and top congressional leaders last week." You read that? It's "detailed". None of us peasants will ever know what those "details" are,
but its the f#ckin CIA, dude.
The problem is we are expected to just trust the NYT and CIA without evidence??? Anybody remember
WMD in Iraq?? The complete loss of credibility by the NYT and CIA over the last decade means I
have to see credible evidence before I believe anything they say. But that is just me. From reading
the NYT comments on the OBama Russia election hack article, the NYT commenters have en mass swallowed
the story hook, line and sinker. They apparently don't need evidence and have completely loss
any sort of functioning long term memory.
Based on the fact that she was hidden more than actually performing on the campaign trail,
that is a possibility. She may have very well been our own puppet government member that some were ready to install
here just like we tend to do over in other nations. No real marbles needed since she wouldn't
actually be running things. It's come to my attention that we seem to be inching closer and closer
to third world here and those places rarely have vibrant democracies.
Seems coordinated to me -- Globe/Times/WaPo. Double down for WaPoo who are now reporting from
area 51 where they found Bigfoot sitting on a stockpile of Sadam's WMDs. Reading this article
is surreal. The CIA, a terrorist outfit which our own former reporter (Bernstein) showed to be
infesting our own newsroom, whispered in our ear that the Cold War 2.0 is going to escalate with
or without the establishment coronation queen.
"Secret CIA assessment says Russia was trying to help Trump win White House" The link on WaPoo's site actually says a different headline so I am just sharing the headline
itself. Not another secret assessment . no more passing notes in class, students.
Robert Reich has posted the news that the Russians helped to secure the election for Trump
on his FB page, to it seems much acclaim – perhaps I was foolish for having expected better from
him.
Sifting the election through a Peter Turchin filter, Sanders' run was a response to 'popular
immiseration' while the choice-of-billionaires was 'intra-elite competition'. WaPo seems allied
with the CIA-FIRE sector Clintonian group, while T may be more inclusive of the classic MICC-Pentagon
sector which was asserting itself in Syria.
I needed
Jalen & Jacoby to sooth me to sleep last night, after seeing the last chart (Fig. 14.4) from
Turchin's latest book. You can see it by hitting Ctrl-End from this
pdf . If he's correct,
this election was just the warm-up for 2020. Crikey.
Craig Murray, the former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, who is a close associate of Assange,
called the CIA claims "bullshit", adding: "They are absolutely making it up." "I know who leaked them," Murray said. "I've met the person who leaked them, and they are certainly
not Russian and it's an insider. It's a leak, not a hack; the two are different things.
Although I'm convinced that the Republicans are, on average, noticeably worse than the Democrats,
I agree with you. It is useful that there is no doubt about where Trump and the Congressional
Republicans stand, which is on the side of the billionaires and the giant corporations. We've
had 8 years of Obama's obeisance to the oligarchs, and millions of Americans still don't understand
that this was happening.
I hope people will vigorously lobby their Representatives and Senators, and pay attention to
who the genuine progressives are in the 2018 primaries.
Like ordinary citizens, although for the opposite reasons, elites are losing faith in democratic
government and its suitability for reshaping societies in line with market imperatives. Public
Choice's disparaging view of democratic politics as a corruption of market justice, in the
service of opportunistic politicians and their clientele, has become common sense among elite
publics-as has the belief that market capitalism cleansed of democratic politics will not only
be more efficient but also virtuous and responsible. [11]
Countries like China are complimented
for their authoritarian political systems being so much better equipped than majoritarian democracy,
with its egalitarian bent, to deal with what are claimed to be the challenges of 'globalization'
-- a
rhetoric that is beginning conspicuously to resemble the celebration by capitalist elites during
the interwar years of German and Italian fascism (and even Stalinist communism) for their apparently
superior economic governance. [12]
Right, the euphemisms have been done away with. I always knew Trump would be a disaster. However,
Trump is a survivable disaster–with Hillary that would have been the end.
In the long run, a Clinton presidency would be far more damaging.
First of all, the Democrats would use Clinton to suppress the left and to insist that Clinton
was more electable. That would lead to a validation of the idea that the left has nowhere to go
and set a precedent for decades with a 3 point formula:
Suppress the left
Accept money from Wall Street and move to the right with each election
Use identity politics as a distraction.
A Trump victory forces questions on the conventional wisdom (not really wisdom), and forces
changes. At best, they can hope to shove another Obama that is attractive on the outside, but
will betray people, but even that will be harder because people now are more watchful. Not to
mention, the mainstream media has lost its power.
There were other dangers. Clinton wanted war with Russia. That could easily escalate into a
nuclear conflict. With Trump, the risk is reduced, although given his ego, I will concede that
anything is possible. We would also be seeing some very damaging neoliberal policies.
The reality is that the US was screwed the moment Sanders was out of the picture. With Trump,
at least it is more naked and more obvious. The real challenge is that the left has a 2 front
war, first with the corporate Democrats, then the GOP. On the GOP side, Trump's supporters are
going to wake up at some point to an Obama like betrayal, which is exactly what I expect will
happen.
There are elements of the Trump fan base already calling him out for the people he has appointed,
which is a very encouraging sign. Trump's economic performance is what will make or break him.
He has sold himself on his business acumen. Needless to say, I expect it will break him because
he won't even try to do anything for his base.
I like a lot of your analysis. "We would also be seeing some very damaging neoliberal policies."
We could still yet under Trump, given the cabinet nominees.
The left must be vigilant and smart. There is opportunity here, but sidetracking on fake news,
pop vote, etc. doesn't gain much in terms of opposition.
I think you're possibly right, and I just couldn't pull the lever to vote for Trump. Sometimes
we just have to be true to ourselves and hope it works out.
By dangerous and delegitimizing I assume you mean the results of the election will be reversed
sometime in the next six weeks while the current establishment still has martial authority.
All
the intelligent agencies are now in lock step over Russian intervention. How do they let this
result stand? Trump obviously realizes his win is now in play and has gone after those same agencies
pointing out their gross incompetence.
Both sides now fear the other side will lock them up or, at the very least, remove them from power
permanently. Why do I think this is not over?
Michael Moore agrees with you – something is, or might be (more accurate description of what
he is said to have said, I think), brewing, according to him, or rather, his intuition .
I am certainly not ready to rule out Moore's gut feeling.
Capitalist Party + MSM + Clinton + Nuland + CIA has shown to be an equation that ends in color
revolution ..or at least an attempted color revolution
What the State Department and MSM have pleasantly referred to in the past as a bloodless coup.
See Ukraine, Brazil, Argentina et al
At the same time that the media hysteria over "fake news" has reached a fever pitch, yesterday
the Senate passed the
"Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act" , colloquially known as the Portman-Murphy
Counter-Propaganda Bill, as part of the FY 2017 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) Conference
Report.
According to Senator Portman's press release, the Bill "will improve the ability of the United
States to counter foreign propaganda and disinformation by establishing an interagency center
housed at the State Department to coordinate and synchronize counter-propaganda efforts throughout
the U.S. government." The bill also creates a "grant program for NGOs, think tanks, civil society
and other experts outside government who are engaged in counter-propaganda related work."
While the passage of this bill seems very coincidentally timed given recent events, it was
actually introduced in March. Not sure whether it simply followed a normal legislative track,
or was brought back from the dead recently, etc.
" establishing an interagency center housed at the State Department to coordinate and synchronize
counter-propaganda efforts throughout the U.S. government." Our very own Ministry of Truth!
It is important to find work for our newly minted graduates of marketing, psychology and sociology
as well as those graduates of the communication school and the arts. The need of our post-industrial
information age is to make things up as opposed to just making things.
Our liberal nation has promised our children that after they have enslaved themselves through
student debt they will find work. The work they find is likely to be meaningful only to the creditors
who wish to be repaid.
The graduates will find idealistic rationales like patriotism or making
"'Merica Grate Again" to soothe their corrupted souls while keeping the fake news as fresh as
a steamy load.
Under Ukrainian law journalists that disagree with Kiev's policies are collaborators. They
are subject to any mechanism Kiev can devise to stop them. In the case of RT Ruptly or the
Guardian this means developing a strategy to ruin their reputations. The Interpreter was developed
to that end. Kiev has gone so far as to petition the UK government to censure the Guardian
for its coverage of events in Ukraine hoping to bully the publication into line. US broadcasters
(Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty) have put RT on the same list as ISIS.
From yesterday's links but seems appropriate. This plan to censor opposing viewpoints in the
US was intended to be executed during a Clinton presidency, and would've been almost impossible
to stop under those circumstances. There is now a window of opportunity to fight back and ruin
these clowns once and for all.
That may be but what we are seeing now is just an echo of the Clinton/Soros plan, and not even
close to the disaster that would result from having Soros et al at the helm. My guess is that
the CIA are now simply using gullible Republicans (yes, there is certainly some redundancy there)
as useful idiots, but this dynamic significantly weakens the original plan.
Amy Davidson ends her article with this paragraph.
And that is why the rallies are likely to endure: to serve as calibrators of or infomercials
for what Trump believes that "the public" wants. One can waste a lot of time delving into the
question of Trump's psychological need for affirmation . What is politically more important is
how he might use the set piece of a cheering crowd to brush aside other considerations, particularly
those involving the checks on the Presidency, and the willingness of those in other areas of the
government, or in the White House itself, to exercise them. Should courts worry about "a lot of
angry people"? One important point not to let go of is that a crowd that the President assembles
and the broader public are two very different things, no matter how big the arena, or how filled
it is with love . A better opportunity to hear that public voice will come in two years, at the
midterm elections. Maybe those will surprise Trump.
News flash for Amy. When a narcissist uses the word "love" it doesn't mean what you think it
does. Those rallies are about training people to react emotionally in a way that is fulfilling
to Donald. Nothing more, nothing less.
A better opportunity to hear that public voice will come in two years, at the midterm elections.
Maybe those will surprise Trump.
We remind ourselves that no one can help us but us. We empower ourselves.
So, it goes for today, as it did in 2008. Such moderation!!! A better opportunity will come
in two years!!!! I said that to myself 8 years ago, but I didn't hear much of it from the media
then. And we (not just I) say that now.
As for crowds reacting and it being fulfilling for the one being looked up on – again, it's
the same human psychology, whether the guy on stage is a rock star, Lenin, Roosevelt, Pol Pot,
the next savior or Idi Amin. How much love is there for anyone in any long term relationship,
except to affirm and be affirmed by 'love' everyday, in small acts or otherwise, much less some
politicians you interact through abstractions, like, through the media or stories told to us.
"Those rallies are about training people to react emotionally in a way that is fulfilling to
Donald. Nothing more, nothing less."
These rallies are Trump's means of maintaining contact with his base, and making sure that
he knows what they want. And a means of showing that he is trying to get it for them. If Hillary
had bothered to do anything of the sort she would have been elected. Sanders did it and it was
much appreciated. Trump's ego is huge but the rallies are much more than an ego-trip.
Re: WP's response to Truthdig's retraction request. It seems as if they are doubling down on
the "not our responsibility to verify the validity theme". My first reaction is that the WP is
now the equivalent of the National Enquirer. What's next, a headline " I gave birth to Trump's
Love Child".
Patriotic Correctness is a useful term and concept. Otherwise, the article was extremely long-winded
and boring. Editor to writer: "I need you to fill 3,000 words worth of space with this 50-word
idea "
I don't consider Trump a compromise candidate and that's largely because I don't see him actually
moving the country forward in the right direction. Sanders, for me, would have been a compromise
from the point of view of he probably wouldn't have moved us far enough fast enough for me but
he would have set us leftward instead of ever rightward and that IS an improvement.
The mainstream media is doubling down on imagined pro-Russian heresies in a fashion not seen
since the Reformation. Back then the Catholic Church held a monopoly on ideology. They lost it
to an unruly bunch of rebellious Protestants who were assisted by the new technology of the printing
press.
Nowadays various non-conformist internet sites, with the help of the new technology of the
internet, are challenging the MSM's monopoly on the means of persuasion. To show how much things
have changed, back in the 60's, dissidents such as the John Birch Society were limited to issuing
pamphlets to expound on their theories of Russians taking over America. In a very ironic role-reversal,
today it is the increasingly desperate Washington Post that more closely matches the paranoia
of the John Birch Society as it accuses non-conformist media heretics – who are threatening the
MSM's monopoly on the means of persuasion - of allowing Russians to take over America.
But let's spare a thought for poor Jeff Bezos. He basically thought he was purchasing the medieval
equivalent of a Bishopry when he bought the WaPo. But now after running six anti-Trump editorials
each and every day for the past 18 months, in which his establishment clergy engaged in an ever
increasing hysteria-spiral trying to outdo each other in turning Trump into Hitler, it ends up
Bezos' side lost the election anyway. It's like he bought a Blockbuster store in 2008 and never
even thought about Netflix!
And so now the MSM is literally launching an Establishment Inquisition by issuing "indexes"
of prohibited heretical websites.
Where will this lead? The grossly paranoiac reading is the Establishment's Counter Reformation
is laying the ideological groundwork for a sort of coup d'etat to be followed by the rule of a
goodthink junta. In this case we have to start calculating how many divisions are loyal to Trump's
gang of generals versus how many are loyal to Obama's generals. A more moderate reading is that
with these anti-Russian headlines, the Establishment is attempting to pressure Trump to stay the
Establishment course on foreign policy and to appoint a SecState who is hostile to Russia. And
in the best case these crazy MSM ramblings are just the last gasps of soon to be extinct media
mammoths.
One thing you can say about Trump is that he is most certainly not a wuss. In the face of this
firestorm about Russian influence sources say Trump is going to nominate Rex Tillerson, who is
very pro-Putin, as Secretary of State!
I wonder what happens when they don't confirm any of his nominees? Is this a case of 'I will nominee so many you don't like, you will be forced to confirm at
least a few?'
Yes I do because Trump is reportedly naming NeoCon John Bolton as undersecretary. That's going
to be a package deal; if they reject Tillerson then Bolton is gone as well. The NeoCons are desperate
to get Bolton into the Administration.
Bolton's job will be to go on talk shows and defend Trump's policies. If he doesn't do it then
he gets fired.
And so from the rest of the world's point of view, Tillerson is the carrot but Bolton remains
in the background as the stick in case anyone starts thinking Trump is too soft and decides to
test him.
Praetorian Guard Redux. Any nation that embraces secret police will find itself ruled by them in short order.
Notable quotes:
"... Yes, the CIA's sterling reputation around the world for truth-telling and integrity might be sullied if someone doubts their claims... https://t.co/2uyQXvFdOK - Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) December 10, 2016 ..."
"... When is it hardest to get people not to blindly accept anonymous, evidence-free CIA claims? When it's very pleasing to believe them. - Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) December 10, 2016 ..."
"... "...there is no clear evidence - even now," said Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and a member of the Trump transition team. "There's a lot of innuendo, lots of circumstantial evidence, that's it." ..."
"... "...Obama wants the report before he leaves office Jan. 20, Monaco said. The review will be led by [PROVEN LIAR] James Clapper, the outgoing director of national intelligence, officials said." ..."
"... Aside from its instigation of coups and alliances with right-wing juntas, Washington sought to more subtly influence elections in all corners of the world. And so did Moscow. Political scientist Dov Levin calculates that the "two powers intervened in 117 elections around the world from 1946 to 2000 - an average of once in every nine competitive elections. ..."
"... In the late 1940s, the newly established CIA cut its teeth in Western Europe, pushing back against some of the continent's most influential leftist parties and labor unions. In 1948, the United States propped up Italy's centrist Christian Democrats and helped ensure their electoral victory against a leftist coalition, anchored by one of the most powerful communist parties in Europe. CIA operatives gave millions of dollars to their Italian allies and helped orchestrate what was then an unprecedented, clandestine propaganda campaign : This included forging documents to besmirch communist leaders via fabricated sex scandals, starting a mass letter-writing campaign from Italian Americans to their compatriots, and spreading hysteria about a Russian takeover and the undermining of the Catholic Church. ..."
"... "We had bags of money that we delivered to selected politicians, to defray their political expenses, their campaign expenses, for posters, for pamphlets," recounted F. Mark Wyatt , the CIA officer who handled the mission and later participated in more than 2˝ decades of direct support to the Christian Democrats. ..."
"... This template spread everywhere : CIA operative Edward G. Lansdale, notorious for his efforts to bring down the North Vietnamese government, is said to have run the successful 1953 campaign of Philippines President Ramon Magsaysay. Japan's center-right Liberal Democratic Party was backed with secret American funds through the 1950s and the 1960s. The U.S. government and American oil corporations helped Christian parties in Lebanon win crucial elections in 1957 with briefcases full of cash. ..."
"... In Chile, the United States prevented Allende from winning an election in 1964. "A total of nearly four million dollars was spent on some fifteen covert action projects, ranging from organizing slum dwellers to passing funds to political parties," detailed a Senate inquiry in the mid-1970s that started to expose the role of the CIA in overseas elections. When it couldn't defeat Allende at the ballot box in 1970, Washington decided to remove him anyway. ..."
"... Obama & The Presstitutes: Legalized DOMESTIC Propaganda to American Citizens The National Defense Authorization Act of July 2013 (NDAA) included an amendment that legalized the use of propaganda on the American public. The amendment - originally proposed by Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) and Adam Smith (D-Wash.) and passed – nullified the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948, which explicitly forbids information and psychological operations aimed at influencing U.S. public opinion. The Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012 allowed U.S. propaganda intended to influence foreign audiences to be used on the domestic population. ..."
"... This Russia CIA Program aimed at US Citizens is part of the OBAMA FRAUD to cover the crimes of Clinton et al. The MSM and especially the NYT is the epi-center of "Fake News" ..."
"... Hillary was a big threat to Russia security. Trump was willing to work with Russia. Does anyone really believe Russia has absolutely no part to play in Trump's win? Think again. ..."
"... Thinking is one thing. Proving it is another. And what do you "think" about the CIA and Victoria Nuland's role in toppling the elected government in the Ukraine? ..."
"... After a year of MSM propaganda and lies, you are now obsessed with "fake news" ironically the kind that totally obliterated your propaganda for the lies that they were. ..."
"... Go back to the 1960s. Phillp Graham and his wife rans Wa Post. Phillip got a young girl friend and started going off the reservation saying WaPo was becoming a mouthpiece for the See Eye Ah. He was going to divorce his wife. He then was commited to an insane asylum, released and then killed himself with a shotgun. ..."
"... There have to be good, patriotic Americans within CIA These intelligence reports are obvious fictions: The agitprop of a neocon/zionist Deep State that fully intends to expand the wars, target Iran and Russia, while sending American blood and treasure to pay their bill. ..."
"... Kennedy knew that the CIA was nothing but a group of Useless, Meddling, Lying Assholes, and made it known Publicly. Unfortunately for him, things didn't turn out all that well. "Wetwork" is never in shortage with that crew. ..."
"... Praetorian Guard Redux. Any nation that embraces secret police will find itself ruled by them in short order. ..."
"... Most CIA directors are/were members of the Rockefeller/CFR including: Morell, Petraeus, Hayden, Tenet, Deutch, Woolsey, Gates, Webster, Casey, Turner, Bush, Colby, Schlesinger, Helms, McCone and Allen Dulles. Also every Fed chairman since WW2. See member lists at cfr dot org. ..."
"... The domestic policies of both CFR wings are the same: the maintenance of the American Empire... There is no possibility of [outsiders] capturing power at the top of either party... ..."
Overnight the media propaganda wars escalated after the late Friday release
of an article by the Washington Post (which last week
admitted to using unverified, or fake, news in an attempt to smear other so-called "fake news" sites) according to which a secret
CIA assessment found that Russia sought to tip last month's U.S. presidential election in Donald Trump's favor, a conclusion presented
without any actual evidence, and which drew an extraordinary, and angry rebuke from the president-elect's camp.
"These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction," Trump's transition team said, launching
a broadside against the spy agency. "The election ended a long time ago in one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history.
It's now time to move on and 'Make America Great Again.' "
The Washington Post report comes after outgoing President Barack Obama
ordered a review of all cyberattacks that took place during the 2016 election cycle , amid growing calls from Congress for more
information on the extent of Russian interference in the campaign. The newspaper cited officials briefed on the matter as saying
that individuals with connections to Moscow provided WikiLeaks with email hacked from the Democratic National Committee, Democratic
nominee Hillary Clinton's campaign chief and others.
Without a shred of evidence provided, and despite Wikileaks' own on the record denial that the source of the emails was Russian,
the WaPo attack piece claims the email messages were steadily leaked out via WikiLeaks in the months before the election, damaging
Clinton's White House run. Essentially, according to the WaPo, the Russians' aim was to help Donald Trump win and not just undermine
the U.S. electoral process, hinting at a counter-Hillary intent on the side of Putin.
"It is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia's goal here was to favor one candidate over the other, to
help Trump get elected," the newspaper quoted a senior U.S. official briefed on an intelligence presentation last week to key
senators as saying. " That's the consensus view."
CIA agents told the lawmakers it was "quite clear" - although it was not reported exactly what made it "clear" - that electing
Trump was Russia's goal, according to officials who spoke to the Post, citing growing evidence from multiple sources.
And yet, key questions remain unanswered, and the CIA's report fell short of being a formal U.S. assessment produced by all 17
intelligence agencies the newspaper said, for two reasons. As we reported in November "
The "Fact" That 17 Intelligence Agencies Confirmed Russia is Behind the Email Hacks Isn't Actually A "Fact ", and then also because
aside from so-called "consensus", there is - once again - no evidence, otherwise the appropriate agencies would have long since released
it, and this is nothing more than another propaganda attempt to build tension with Russia. In fact, the WaPo admits as much in the
following text, which effectively destroys the article's entire argument :
The CIA presentation to senators about Russia's intentions fell short of a formal U.S. assessment produced by all 17 intelligence
agencies. A senior U.S. official said there were minor disagreements among intelligence officials about the agency's assessment,
in part because some questions remain unanswered.
For example, intelligence agencies do not have specific intelligence showing officials in the Kremlin "directing" the identified
individuals to pass the Democratic emails to WikiLeaks, a second senior U.S. official said. Those actors, according to the official,
were "one step" removed from the Russian government, rather than government employees. Moscow has in the past used middlemen to
participate in sensitive intelligence operations so it has plausible deniability.
* * *
"I'll be the first one to come out and point at Russia if there's clear evidence, but there is no clear evidence - even now,"
said Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and a member of the Trump transition team.
"There's a lot of innuendo, lots of circumstantial evidence, that's it."
And since even the WaPo is forced to admit that intelligence agents don't have the proof that Russian officials directed the identified
individuals to supply WikiLeaks with the hacked Democratic emails, the best it can do is speculate based on circumstantial inferences,
especially since, as noted above, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has
denied links with Russia's government
, putting the burden of proof on the side of those who challenge the Wikileaks narrative. So far that proof has not been provided.
Nonetheless, at the White House, Deputy Press Secretary Eric Schultz said Obama called for the cyberattacks review earlier this
week to ensure "the integrity of our elections."
"This report will dig into this pattern of malicious cyberactivity timed to our elections, take stock of our defensive capabilities
and capture lessons learned to make sure that we brief members of Congress and stakeholders as appropriate," Schultz said.
Taking the absurdity to a whole new level, Obama wants the report completed before his term ends on January 20, by none other
than a proven and confirmed liar : " The review will be led by James Clapper, the outgoing director of national intelligence, officials
said. " In other words, the report that the Kremlin stole the election should be prepared by the time Trump is expected to be sworn
in.
"We are going to make public as much as we can," the spokesman added. "This is a major priority for the president."
The move comes after Democrats in Congress pressed the White House to reveal details, to Congress or to the public, of Russian
hacking and disinformation in the election.
On Oct. 7, one month before the election, the Department of Homeland Security and the Director of National Intelligence announced
that "the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of emails from U.S. persons and institutions, including from U.S. political
organizations." "These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the U.S. election process," they said.
Trump dismissed those findings in an interview published Wednesday by Time magazine for its "Person of the Year" award. Asked
if the intelligence was politicized, Trump answered: "I think so."
"I don't believe they interfered," he said. "It could be Russia. And it could be China. And it could be some guy in his home in
New Jersey."
Worried that Trump will sweep the issue under the rug after his inauguration, seven Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee
called on Nov. 29 for the White House to declassify what it knows about Russian interference. The seven have already been briefed
on the classified details, suggesting they believe there is more information the public should know. On Tuesday this week, leading
House Democrats called on Obama to give members of the entire Congress a classified briefing on Russian interference, from hacking
to the spreading of fake news stories to mislead U.S. voters.
Republicans in Congress have also promised hearings into Russian activities once the new administration comes in.
Obama's homeland security adviser Lisa Monaco said the cyberinterference goes back to the 2008 presidential race, when both the
Obama and John McCain campaigns were hit by malicious computer intrusions.
* * *
An interesting aside to emerge from last night's hit piece and the Trump team response is that there is now a full blown turf
war between Trump and the CIA, as NBC's Chuck Todd observed in a series of late Friday tweets:
The implication in the Trump transition statement is that he doesn't believe a single thing from the CIA
To which Glenn Greenwald provided the best counterargument:
Yes, the CIA's sterling reputation around the world for truth-telling and integrity might be sullied if someone doubts
their claims...https://t.co/2uyQXvFdOK - Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald)
December 10, 2016
When is it hardest to get people not to blindly accept anonymous, evidence-free CIA claims? When it's very pleasing to
believe them. - Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald)
December 10, 2016
However, of the mini Tweetstorm, this was the most important aspect: the veiled suggestion that in addition to Russia, both the
FBI and the Obama presidency prevented Hillary from becoming the next US president...
While Obama's FBI director smeared Hillary, Obama sat on evidence of Russian efforts to elect Trump that had basis in evidence.
... which in light of these stunning new unproven and baseless allegations, she may very well have renewed aspirations toward.
* * *
So while there is no "there" there following the WaPo's latest attempt to fan the rarging fires of evidence-free propaganda, or
as the WaPo itself would say "fake news", here is why the story has dramatic implications. First, the only two quotes which matter:
"...there is no clear evidence - even now," said Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee
and a member of the Trump transition team. "There's a lot of innuendo, lots of circumstantial evidence, that's it."
* * *
"...Obama wants the report before he leaves office Jan. 20, Monaco said. The review will be led by [PROVEN LIAR] James
Clapper, the outgoing director of national intelligence, officials said."
And then the summary:
Announce "consensus" (not unanimous) "conclusion" based in circumstantial evidence now, before the Electoral College vote,
then write a report with actual details due by Jan 20.
Put a proven liar in charge of writing the report on Russian hacking.
Fail to mention that not one of the leaked DNC or Podesta emails has been shown to be inauthentic. So the supposed Russian
hacking simply revealed truth about Hillary, DNC, and MSM collusion and corruption.
Fail to mention that if hacking was done by or for US government to stop Hillary, blaming the Russians would be the most likely
disinformation used by US agencies.
Expect every pro-Hillary lapdog journalist - which is virtually all of them - in America will hyperventilate (Twitter is currently
on fire) about this latest fact-free, anti-Trump political stunt for the next nine days.
Or, as a reader put it, this is a soft coup attempt by leaders of Intel community and Obama Admin to influence the Electoral College
vote, similar to the 1960s novel " Seven Days in May
."
Once again it's a case of "watch the shiny object"... The "secret CIA report" seems to focus on who leaked the documents to Wikileaks
and not the content of those documents... The left have not refuted that the emails are real, just who leaked them to Assange...
Fuck 'em, if they keep Trump from the white house there will be revolution...
"Aside from its instigation of coups and alliances with right-wing juntas, Washington sought to more subtly influence elections
in all corners of the world. And so did Moscow. Political scientist
Dov Levin calculates that the "two powers intervened in 117 elections around the world from 1946 to 2000 - an average of once
in every nine competitive elections."
In the late 1940s, the newly established CIA cut its teeth in Western Europe, pushing back against some of the continent's
most influential leftist parties and labor unions. In 1948, the United States propped up Italy's centrist Christian Democrats
and helped ensure their electoral victory against a leftist coalition, anchored by one of the most powerful communist parties
in Europe. CIA operatives gave millions of dollars
to their Italian allies and helped orchestrate what was then
an unprecedented, clandestine propaganda campaign
: This included forging documents to besmirch communist leaders via fabricated sex scandals, starting a mass letter-writing
campaign from Italian Americans to their compatriots, and spreading hysteria about a Russian takeover and the undermining of the
Catholic Church.
"We had bags of money that we delivered to selected politicians, to defray their political expenses, their campaign expenses,
for posters, for pamphlets," recounted F. Mark Wyatt
, the CIA officer who handled the mission and later participated in more than 2˝ decades of direct support to the Christian
Democrats.
This
template spread everywhere : CIA operative Edward G. Lansdale, notorious for his efforts to bring down the North Vietnamese
government, is said to have run the successful 1953 campaign of Philippines President Ramon Magsaysay. Japan's center-right Liberal
Democratic Party was backed with secret American funds through the 1950s and the 1960s. The U.S. government and American oil corporations
helped Christian parties in Lebanon win crucial elections in 1957 with briefcases full of cash.
In Chile, the United States prevented Allende from winning an election in 1964. "A total of nearly four million dollars
was spent on some fifteen covert action projects, ranging from organizing slum dwellers to passing funds to political parties,"
detailed a Senate
inquiry in the mid-1970s that started to expose the role of the CIA in overseas elections. When it couldn't defeat Allende at
the ballot box in 1970, Washington decided to remove him anyway."
A US Official has claimed the Russians are out to get Merkel in a cyber campaign.
A CIA probe confirms Moscow helped Trump win the election.
"In both cases, said the official, Mr. Putin's campaigns in both Europe and the US are intended to disrupt and discredit the
Western concept of democracy by promoting extremist candidates, parties, and political figures."
Both WAPO , & C.TODD would NOT be missed. Per Todd: "How helpful is it for the CIA's reputation around the world if the next US
questions their findings so publicly?"
Todd is concerned about The CIA's "Reputation" ?????? AS IF its current rep is wonderful??? - TODD: There is no "reputation"
to damage!!! Lame brain !!
17 intelligence agencies? Is this some dystopian record?
"There's a lot of innuendo, lots of circumstantial evidence, that's it."
So these 'intelligence' agencies are in the same boat as the pizzgate crowd. The main difference is after failing to produce
any actionable evidence the pizzagate crowd will loose interest and move on. We still have to give the bureaucrats at these intelligence
agencies a paycheck next month.
Russians are training the illegals in secret camps in the Sierra Madre mountains before they are released into the US. I was there
and saw it. Bigfoot was guarding the entrance.
Obama & The Presstitutes: Legalized DOMESTIC Propaganda to American Citizens The National Defense Authorization Act of July
2013 (NDAA) included an amendment that legalized the use of propaganda on the American public. The amendment - originally proposed
by Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) and Adam Smith (D-Wash.) and passed – nullified the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948, which explicitly forbids
information and psychological operations aimed at influencing U.S. public opinion. The Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012 allowed
U.S. propaganda intended to influence foreign audiences to be used on the domestic population.
Signed by .. Obama. This Act formalized systems in place covertly or ad hoc for some time.
Hillary was a big threat to Russia security. Trump was willing to work with Russia. Does anyone really believe Russia has
absolutely no part to play in Trump's win? Think again. They should and I think they did! Whether it was an illegal intervention
would be another question.
Thinking is one thing. Proving it is another. And what do you "think" about the CIA and Victoria Nuland's role in toppling
the elected government in the Ukraine? How about NATO expansion for decades under Clinton, Bush and Obama? Aren't these DIRECT
THREATS against Putin and Russia? Yes, they most certainly are. Fuck the CIA They do far more harm than good for the people in
the USA.
Hillary was a threat to life on Earth. She made it clear her intent was to wage war against Russia (and probably China). Obviously
the US has been conducting cyberwarfare, psyops and propaganda against Russia, as this has been documented in the past. Russia's
response may merely have been presenting authentic information via RT/Sputnik/etc. and putting clips of Putin online where he
sounds like a rational human being. In other words, they may be guilty of nothing more than providing Americans with the truth,
much as America did with the Soviets.
That was exactly what this brought to mind for me - a John F Kennedy moment, but not his assassination. I was thinking of an earlier
time well before this., ie, Nikita Krushev banging the table at the UN with his shoe. The state of the nation - people were in
a panic because Russia let it be known it was about to bring nuclear missiles into Cuba. It was a ploy by the Russians and Krushev
to de-escalate the tensions between the two countries over our attempt to take out Castro and the Bay of Pigs Invasion.
Fade to today. Why would the Russians care who won the presidency? Hillary the war monger or the Donald, the negotiator? Ahh,
maybe because we just brought into Turkey then consequently moved fifty nuclear missiles into position along Russia's border?
Who authorized and ordered that? Would that be any cause for worry by Russia or its citizenry? Is that or is it not total insanity?
Total fuckery? Obama and Hillary have put us four minutes away from a worldwide nuclear holocaust and now they are trying to make
Trump look like he was in bed with Putin. I don't know what Trump is but I do know he and Putin are the only two people on the
same wavelength right now, thank the electoral college.
You are delusional, dishonest, ignrorant, and proud of it. Fortunately, YOU LOST.
After a year of MSM propaganda and lies, you are now obsessed with "fake news" ironically the kind that totally obliterated
your propaganda for the lies that they were.
After a year of cackling laughter when every two bit dictator and NWO globalist bad mouthed Trump, like a child, you are OUTRAGED
that Russia might have not wanted Hillary to take power and make war against it. At least Russia didn't PUBLICALLY attempt to
influence an American election LIKE HILLARY'S NWO GOONS DID FROM THEIR EXECUTIVE OFFICES.
The popular vote: Ignoring fraud, which was proven in the Michigan recount, Hillary supporters are trying to make hay out of
her garnering 2.6 million more votes than Trump. Besides the fact that this is irrelevant in a campaign for the electoral college,
2.6 million votes is only somewhere @0.7% of the US population. That's hardly a mandate, especially when we consider she only
had that dubious edge over Trump, not the entire playing field. There were other candidate you know.
I'm sorry, I forgot, YOU LOST, and you think you can spoil our good time with the assertion that the better candidate was Hillary.
LOL, losers.
Trump is a wildcard, we all knew that when we voted for him.
Hillary is a witchcard and we all knew what she would do.
Bernie wasn't even a choice, Hillary had him as a straw man opponent.
Rand Paul to me was the best choice but establishment didn't want him, Gay media wanted Trump because they thought Hillary
could beat him and many of the Ron Paulers still butthurt over him endorsing Romney. Never mind Ron Paul didn't even put up a
fight when they robbed him of the nomination he won.
Go back to the 1960s. Phillp Graham and his wife rans Wa Post. Phillip got a young girl friend and started going off the reservation
saying WaPo was becoming a mouthpiece for the See Eye Ah. He was going to divorce his wife. He then was commited to an insane
asylum, released and then killed himself with a shotgun.
Phil's wife was the daughter of Eugene Meyer who ran The Fed.
Watergate was not what you were told. Nixon wanted tariffs and the Rockefellers (who myguess started the CIA - David was an
OSS officer in WW2) got mad at their boy Nixon. Nixon hated George Bush and did not trust him. All the info the Wa Post got on
Nixon was C**IIA info to Ben Bradley, editor of Wa Post, probably from George Bush. All of Nixons,relatively minor, dirt was passed
from See EYE Ah to Wa Post. Woodward and Bernstein just typed it up.
Bradley was brther in law to Cord Meyer (operation mockingbird). Cord's wife (Mary Pinchot-Meyer) had an ongoing affair with
JFK. After he was killed, she was gonna spill the beans like Marilyn Monroe. She was killed taking a walk. Ben BRadley and the
See EYE Ah rush to her apartment to get her diary.
the CIA has been arming Al Qaeda and (likely) 'ISIS'.
It is very probable US forces will be killed by these weapons.
Add to that the small issue of the hundreds of thousands of people, Christian and non-Salafist/non-Wahhabi Muslims murdered
by the Islamopsycho and Acadami etc. private western mercs.
There have to be good, patriotic Americans within CIA These intelligence reports are obvious fictions: The agitprop of
a neocon/zionist Deep State that fully intends to expand the wars, target Iran and Russia, while sending American blood and treasure
to pay their bill.
And now they are going to try to overturn an election in which Clinton not only lost by the rules of our system, but in which
Clinton's 'popular vote' win was the product of illegal immigrant and other fraudulent voting.
all of which means they are also willing to risk civil war.
Kennedy knew that the CIA was nothing but a group of Useless, Meddling, Lying Assholes, and made it known Publicly. Unfortunately
for him, things didn't turn out all that well. "Wetwork" is never in shortage with that crew.
Most CIA directors are/were members of the Rockefeller/CFR including: Morell, Petraeus, Hayden, Tenet, Deutch, Woolsey, Gates,
Webster, Casey, Turner, Bush, Colby, Schlesinger, Helms, McCone and Allen Dulles. Also every Fed chairman since WW2. See member
lists at cfr dot org.
"I have discussed Council on Foreign Relations Team A vs. Team B for 35 years. I have seen two anti-CFR people get through
the [presidential] screening... The domestic policies of both CFR wings are the same: the maintenance of the American Empire...
There is no possibility of [outsiders] capturing power at the top of either party..."
"... In principle, every router between the DNC server and Russia has the potential to be hacked, with a tunnel added to send the traffic somewhere else in the world with new source and destination addresses. This is known as router table poisoning. It is preventable but the mechanisms are rarely ever used because the security services want to be able to do this themselves. There are some nice logs of the NSA using this. ..."
"... In principle, someone at an ISP or backbone service could have had a laptop plugged into a switch or router to do the same thing, or lit up a strand of dark fibre to let some uber-wealthy business do this. And there's no shortage of uber-wealthy businesses who aren't keen on Democrats. This technique is used for local and remote network diagnostics, no reason it can't be used nefarious, it's not like the hardware cares why a wire is plugged in. ..."
"... Russia has an independent foreign policy and acts in what it perceives as it's own best interests. It has refused to become a vassal state of the West and is a threat to the Empire's full-spectrum dominance. Worst of all it has begun trading outside the $US in energy and other resources with China and Iran. ..."
"... Mainstream media are now busy repressing any news and any questioning about facts ..."
"... Western media are in full panic as Aleppo falls with all sorts of gruesome tales about the mistreatment of their favorite terrorists in Aleppo and a strange silence on the whereabouts of their '250K civilians' under siege ..."
"... I cant believe the Fake News outlets are still making a big deal about this issue. Obomber is leaving in a cloud of failure as he deserves ..."
"... "Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state." ― Noam Chomsky, Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda. ..."
"... New Canadian documentary - All Governments Lie. "It lucidly argues that powerful interests have been creating supercharged fake stories for decades to advance their own nefarious interests. And the institutional media have too often blithely played along." The Globe and Mail. ..."
"... No comments about Seth Rich the DNC staffer Assange hinted had leaked the Podesta emails to Wikileaks and was subsequently shot multiple times and died at 04:20 on a Washington DC street in a 'motiveless' crime in which none of his possessions were taken. ..."
"... The rise of the right wing in Europe is due to the fact that Social Democratic parties have completely sold out to neo-liberal agenda. ..."
"... So Putin's plan to undermine U.S. voter confidence was to simply show what actually happens behind the scenes at the DNC, how diabolical! ..."
"... Peter Schweizer, the author of Clinton Cash, has published a report that claims that that Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta was on the executive board of a foreign company that received $35 million from the Kremlin. "The company was a transparent Russian front, and how much Podesta was compensated - and for what - is unclear. In addition, Podesta failed to disclose his position on that board to the Federal government, as required by law," John Schindler of the Observer wrote. ..."
"... So it's true because the CIA said so. That's the gold standard for me. ..."
"... "Truth is Treason in the Empire of Lies" - Ron Paul ..."
"... At least Tucker Carlson is able to see through the BS and asks searching question. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRkeGkCjdHg ..."
"... President-elect Donald Trump's transition team said in a statement Friday afternoon that the same people who claim Russia interfered in the presidential election had previously claimed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. ..."
"... The neoliberal corporate machine is wounded but not dead. They will use every trick, ploy and opportunity to try to regain power. The fight goes on. ..."
"... Good occasion to substantiate the accusation which ,substantiated or not,will remind the "useful idiots" of the "change of regime " US policy and who started the Ukrainian crisis. ..."
"... Just another chapter in the sad saga of the Democrats unwillingness to admit they ran the worst candidate & the worst campaign in recent memory. It's not our fault! Them dirty Russkies did it! ..."
Well, if Rupert Mudroach, an American citizen, can influence the Australian elections, who gives a stuff about anyone else's
involvement in US politics?
The US loves demonising Russia, even supporting ISIS to fight against them.
The United States of Amnesia just can't understand that they are run by the military machine.
As Frank Zappa once correctly stated: The US government is just the entertainment unit of the Military.
Altogether the only thing people are accusing the Russians of is the WikiLeaks scandal. And in hindsight of the enormous media
bias toward Trump it really comes of as little more than leveling the playing field. Hardly the sort of democratic subversion
that is being suggested.
And of course there is another problem and that is in principle, the DNC server could have had malware in an e-mail that set
up a NAT entry that made the connecting computer appear somewhere else, with the entry deleted afterwards. Typically, IP table
modifications aren't logged, so this would not be detectable.
In principle, the DNC server could have had malware in an e-mail that ran a SED script at a specific time that changed any
occurrence of one IP address with another. Not sure anyone would bother with this, but it's why good system admins place so much
emphasis on securing logs. However, it's obvious we're not talking about good admins.
In principle, every router between the DNC server and Russia has the potential to be hacked, with a tunnel added to send the
traffic somewhere else in the world with new source and destination addresses. This is known as router table poisoning. It is
preventable but the mechanisms are rarely ever used because the security services want to be able to do this themselves. There
are some nice logs of the NSA using this.
In principle, someone along the way could tap into the fibre, spoofing IP addresses and injecting/sniffing packets. The US
even has a submarine designed for this, but optics aren't complex and any number of neo-phone phreaks could have the hardware.
In principle, someone at an ISP or backbone service could have had a laptop plugged into a switch or router to do the same
thing, or lit up a strand of dark fibre to let some uber-wealthy business do this. And there's no shortage of uber-wealthy businesses
who aren't keen on Democrats. This technique is used for local and remote network diagnostics, no reason it can't be used nefarious,
it's not like the hardware cares why a wire is plugged in.
In principle, the supposed destination machine could have been hacked to relay the packets in encrypted form to the South Pole
or a college campus in Texas. There are many examples of client machines being hacked to do this. It's basically what zombie machines
are in botnets.
In practice, it is flat-out guaranteed that none of the security agencies could distinguish this from a Russian attack. Nothing
in the area monitored could tell the difference. We know, for a fact, that college kids spoofing a scan from China have fooled
the DoD and NSA on previous occasions, it has caused international incidents.
So we have known forms of attack that are known to exist, aren't complex and in some cases are already used for attacks. They
are 100% untraceable.
Don't know about Russians, but in the early 2000's the Ukrainian hackers had some nasty viruses embedded in email attachments
that could fuckup ARM based computers.
Russia has an independent foreign policy and acts in what it perceives as it's own best interests. It has refused to become
a vassal state of the West and is a threat to the Empire's full-spectrum dominance. Worst of all it has begun trading outside
the $US in energy and other resources with China and Iran.
Mainstream media are now busy repressing any news and any questioning about facts, as the last battle in their support to jidaists
fighting the Syrian Army. This is the dark pit where our so called free press has fallen into.
Yep had a chat with an army mate yesterday asked him what the fcuk the supposed head of MI6 was on about regarding Russian support
for Syrian govt suggesting Russian actions made terrorism more likely here in UK. He shrugged his shoulders and said he hoped
Putin wiped the terrorists out...
Western media are in full panic as Aleppo falls with all sorts of gruesome tales about the mistreatment of their favorite terrorists
in Aleppo and a strange silence on the whereabouts of their '250K civilians' under siege
Of course no news on the danger to the civilians of W,Aleppo, who have been bombarded indiscriminately for months by the 'moderates'
in the east of the city or the danger to the civilians of Palmyra, Mosul or al Bab.
I cant believe the Fake News outlets are still making a big deal about this issue. Obomber is leaving in a cloud of failure as
he deserves.
I´ll still look for the Guardian articles on football which are excellent.
Cheers!
The Sanders movement inside the Democratic party did offer some hope but this was snuffed out by the DNC and the Clinton campaign
in collusion with the media. This is what likely caused her defeat in November and not some Kremlin intrigue.
"Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state."
― Noam Chomsky, Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda.
New Canadian documentary - All Governments Lie. "It lucidly argues that powerful interests have been creating supercharged fake
stories for decades to advance their own nefarious interests. And the institutional media have too often blithely played along."
The Globe and Mail.
No comments about Seth Rich the DNC staffer Assange hinted had leaked the Podesta emails to Wikileaks and was subsequently shot
multiple times and died at 04:20 on a Washington DC street in a 'motiveless' crime in which none of his possessions were taken.
Distract the masses with bullsh*t , nothing new...
Trump needs to double up on his personal security, he has doubled down on the CIA tonight bringing upmtheir bullsh*t on WMD. Thing
are getting interesting...
"If we can revert to the truth, then a great deal of one's suffering can be erased, because a great deal of one's suffering is
based on sheer lies. "
R. D. Laing
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
US politicians and the MSM depend on sheer lies.....
They are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they
will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game.
R. D. Laing
+++++++++++++++++++++++++
I'm sick of jumping through their hoops - how about you?
"Tin Foil Hat" Hillary--
"This is not about politics or partisanship," she went on. "Lives are at risk, lives of ordinary people just trying to go about
their days to do their jobs, contribute to their communities. It is a danger that must be addressed and addressed quickly."
We fail to see how Russian propaganda has put people's lives directly at risk. Unless, of course, Hillary is suggesting that
the increasingly-bizarre #Pizzagate swarm journalism campaign (which apparently caused a man to shoot up a floor tile in a D.C.
pizza shop) was conjured up by a bunch of Russian trolls.
And this is about as absurd as saying Russian trolls were why Trump got elected.
"It needs to be said," former counterintelligence agent John R. Schindler (who, by the way, believes Assange and Snowden are
both Russian plants), writes in the Observer, "that nearly all of the liberals eagerly pontificating about how Putin put Trump
in office know nothing about 21st century espionage, much less Russia's unique spy model and how it works. Indeed, some of the
most ardent advocates of this Kremlin-did-it conspiracy theory were big fans of Snowden and Wikileaks -- right until clandestine
Russian shenanigans started to hurt Democrats. Now, they're panicking."
(Nonetheless, #Pizzagate and Trump, IMHO, are manifestations of a population which deeply deeply distrusts the handlers and
gatekeepers of the status quo. Justified or not. And with or without Putin's shadowy fingers strumming its magic hypno-harp across
the Land of the Free. This runs deeper than just Putin.)
Fake news has always been around, from the fake news which led Americans to believe the Pearl Harbor attack was a surprise
and completely unprovoked .
To the fake news campaigns put out by Edward Bernays tricking women into believing cigarettes were empowering little phallics
of feminism. (AKA "Torches of Freedom.")
This War on Fake News has more to do with the elites finally realizing how little control they have over the minds of the unwashed
masses. Rather, this is a war on the freaks, geeks and weirdos who've formed a decentralized and massively-influential media right
under their noses.
and there may be some truth to that. An article says has delved into financial matters in Russia.
Kremlin Connection? The TRUTH About Hillary's Shady Ties To Russia REVEALED
Find out why insiders say Clinton has some explaining to do.
Americans have no idea just how closely Hillary Clinton is tied to the Kremlin! That's the shocking claim of a new report that
alleges the Democratic nominee is secretly pals with Vladimir Putin and his countrymen.
Peter Schweizer, the author of Clinton Cash, has published a report that claims that that Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta
was on the executive board of a foreign company that received $35 million from the Kremlin. "The company was a transparent Russian
front, and how much Podesta was compensated - and for what - is unclear. In addition, Podesta failed to disclose his position
on that board to the Federal government, as required by law," John Schindler of the Observer wrote.
As Radar previously reported, when Clinton was secretary of state, she profited from the "Russian Reset," a failed attempt
to improve relations between the U.S. and Russia.
chweizer wrote, "Many of the key figures in the Skolkovo process - on both the Russian and U.S. sides - had major financial ties
to the Clintons. During the Russian reset, these figures and entities provided the Clintons with tens of millions of dollars,
including contributions to the Clinton Foundation, paid for speeches by Bill Clinton, or investments in small start-up companies
with deep Clinton ties." Schweizer also details "Skolkovo," a Silicon Valley-like campus that both the U.S. and Russia worked
on for developing biomed, space, nuclear and IT technologies. He told the New York Post that there was a "pattern that shows a
high percentage of participants in Skolkovo who happen to be Clinton Foundation donors."
So it's true because the CIA said so.
That's the gold standard for me.
So let me be the first to thank Russia for providing us with their research.
Instead of assassination, coup or invasion, they simply showed us our leaders' own words when written behind the public's backs.
I'm no fan of Putin, but this was a useful bit of intelligence you've shared with us.
Happy Christmas, Vlad.
Next time why not provide us with the email of all our banks and fossil fuel companies; you can help us clean up both political
parties with one fell swoop that way.
The U.S. is getting what it deserves, IF Russia was even dumb enough to meddle. The government in this country has been meddling
in other countries' affairs sixty years, in the Middle East, in South America and other places we don't even know about. The result
is mayhem, all in the 'interests' of the U.S., as it is described.
Where's the gap in this logic:
A) The American public has been offered ZERO proof of hacking by the Russian government to alter our election.
B) Even if true, no one has disputed the authenticity of the emails hacked.
C) Therefore, the WORST Russia could have done is show us who are own leader are when they don't think we're listening.
D) Taken together, this article is pretty close to fake news, and gives us nothing that should outrage us much at this time --
unless we are trying to foment war with Russia or call for a military coup against the baboon about to take the oath of office.
Hacking by unnamed individuals. No direct involvement of the Russian government, only implied, alleged, etc. Seems to me that
if Hillary had obeyed the law and not schemed behind the scenes to sabotage Bernie S. there would have been nothing to leak! Really
this is all about being caught with fer fingers in the cookie jar. Does it matter who leaked it? Did the US public not have a
right to know what the people they were voting for had been up to? It's a bit like the governor of a province being filmed burgling
someone's house and then complaining that someone had leaked the film to the media, just when he was trying to get re-elected!
It is called passing the buck, and because of the underhanded undermining of Bernie Sanders, who was winning, we have Trump. Thank
you Democratic party.
I am disappointed that the Guardian gives so much prominence to such speculation which is almost totally irrelevant. Why would
we necessarily (a) believe what the superspies tell us and (b) even if it is true why should we care?
I am also very disappointed at the Guardians attitude to Putin, the elected leader of Russia, who was so badly treated by the
US from the moment he took over from Yeltsin. I was in Russia as a visitor around that time and it was obvious that Putin restored
some dignity to the Russian people after the disastrous Yeltsin term of office. If the US had been willing to deal with him with
respect the world could be a much better place today. Instead the US insisted in trying to subvert his rule with the support of
its supine NATO allies in order to satisfy its corporate rulers.
If this is true, the US can hardly complain. After all, the US has a long record of interfering in other countries' elections--including
CIA overthrow of elected governments and their replacement with murderous, oppressive, right-wing dictatorships.
If the worst that Russia did was reveal the truth about what Democratic Party figures were saying behind closed doors, I'd
say it helped correct the unbalanced media focus on preventing Trump from becoming President. Call it the globalization of elections.
First, the government has yet to present any persuasive evidence that Russia hacked the DNC or anyone else. All we have is that
there is Russian code (meaningless according to cyber-security experts) and seemingly baseless "conclusions" by "intelligence"
officials. In other words, fake news at this point.
Second, even if true, the allegation amounts to an argument that Russia presented us with facts that we shouldn't have seen.
Think about that for a while. We are seeing demands that we self-censor ourselves from facts that seem unfair. What utter idiocy.
This is particularly outrageous given that the U.S. directly intervenes in the governance of any number of nations all the
time. We can support coups, arm insurgencies, or directly invade, but god forbid that someone present us with unsettling facts
about our ruling class.
This nation has jumped the shark. The fact that Trump is our president is merely confirmation of this long evident fact. That
fighting REAL NEWS of emails whose content has not been disputed is part of our war on "fake news," and the top priority for some
so-called liberals, promises only worse to come.
>> Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee, said Russia had "succeeded" in "sow[ing] discord" in the
election, and urged as much public disclosure as is possible.
What utter bullshit. The DNC's own dirty tricks did that. Donna Brasille stealing debate questions and handing them to Hillary
so that she could cheat did that. The FBIs investigation into Hillary did that. Podesta's emails did that. The totally one-sided
press coverage (apart from Fox) of the election did that. But it seems the american people were smart enough to see through the
BS and voted for trump. Good for them.
And we're gonna need a lot more than the word of a few politicised so-called intelligence agencies to believe this russo-hacking
story. These are the same people who lied about Iraqi WMDs so they are proven fakers/liars. These are also the same people who
hack EVERYONE else so I, quite frankly, have no sympathy even of the story turns out to be true.
Announce "consensus" (not unanimous) "conclusion" based in circumstantial evidence now, before the Electoral College vote,
then write a report with actual details due by Jan 20.
Put a proven liar in charge of writing the report on Russian hacking.
Fail to mention that not one of the leaked DNC or Podesta emails has been shown to be inauthentic. So the supposed Russian hacking
simply revealed truth about Hillary, DNC, and MSM collusion and corruption.
Fail to mention that if hacking was done by or for US government to stop Hillary, blaming the Russians would be the most likely
disinformation used by US agencies.
Expect every pro-Hillary lapdog journalist - which is virtually all of them - in America will hyperventilate (Twitter is currently
on fire) about this latest fact-free, anti-Trump political stunt for the next nine days.
Or, as a reader put it, this is a soft coup attempt by leaders of Intel community and Obama Admin to influence the Electoral College
vote, similar to the 1960s novel "Seven Days in May."
When the Department Of Homeland Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Election Security release a joint
statement it is not without very careful consideration to the wording.
Therefore, to understand what is known by the US intelligence services one must analyse the language used.
This is very telling:
"The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona
are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts."
Alleged:
adjective [attributive]
said, without proof, to have taken place or to have a specified illegal or undesirable quality
Consistent:
adjective
acting or done in the same way over time
Method:
noun
a particular procedure for accomplishing or approaching something
Motivation:
noun
a reason or reasons for acting or behaving in a particular way
So, what exactly is known by the US intelligence services?
Well what we can tell is:
the alleged (without proof) hacks were consistent (done in the same way) with the methods (using a particular procedure) and motivations
(and having reason for doing so) with Russian State actions.
There is absolutely no certainty about this whatsoever.
Thank God Obama will be out of office soon. He is the biggest disappointment ever. He has ordered the death of THOUSANDS via drone
strikes in other people's countries and most of the deaths were innocent bystanders. If President Xi of China or Putin were to
do that we would all be calling them tyrannical dictators and accusing them of a back door invasions. But somehow people are brainwashed
into thinking its ok of the US president to do such things. Truly sickening.
Says the CIA the organisation set up to destabilise governments all over the world. Lol.....
Congratulations for keeping a straight face I hope Trump makes urgently needed personnel changes in the alphabet soup agencies
working against humanity for very many years.
This is an extremely dangerous game that Obama and the political elites are playing.
The American political elites - including senetors, bankers, investors, multinationals et al, can feel power and control slipping
away from them.
This makes them very dangerous people indeed - as self-preservation and holding onto power is their number one priority.
What they're aiming to do ( a child can see what's coming ), is to call into question the validity of Trump's victory and blame
the Russians for it.
The elites are looking to create chaos and insurrection, to have the result nullified and to vilify Putin and Russia.
American and Russian troops are already lined up and facing each other along the Eastern European borders and all it takes
is one small incident from either side.
And all because those that have ruled the roost for so many decades ( in the White house, the 2 houses of Congress and Wall
St ), simply cannot face losing their positions of power, wealth and political influence.
They're out to get Trump, the populists and President Putin.
This is starting to feel like an attempt to make the Trump presidency appear illegitimate. The problem is that it could actually
make the democrats look like sore losers instead. We've had the recount, now it's foreign interference. This might harm them in
2020.
I don't like that Trump won, but he did. The electoral college system is clearly in the constitution and all sides understood
and agreed to it at the campaign commencement. Also some, by no means all, of commenters saying that the popular vote should win
have also been on referendum BTL saying the result isn't a legitimate leave vote, make your minds up!
I don't want Trump and I wanted to remain but, by the rules, my sides lost.
Yet in August, Snowden warned that the recent hack of NSA tied cyber spies was not designed to expose Hillary Clinton, but rather
a display of strength by the hackers, showing they could eventually unmask the NSA's own international cyber espionage and prove
the U.S. meddles in elections around the world.
Will the CIA be providing evidence to support these allegations or is it a case of "just trust us guys"? In any event, hypocrisy
is a national sport for the Yanks. According to a Reuters article 9 August 2016 "NSA operations have, for example, recently delved
into elections in Mexico, targeting its last presidential campaign. According to a top-secret PowerPoint presentation leaked by
former NSA contract employee Edward Snowden, the operation involved a "surge effort against one of Mexico's leading presidential
candidates, Enrique Peńa Nieto, and nine of his close associates." Peńa won that election and is now Mexico's president.
The NSA identified Peńa's cellphone and those of his associates using advanced software that can filter out specific phones
from the swarm around the candidate. These lines were then targeted. The technology, one NSA analyst noted, "might find a needle
in a haystack." The analyst described it as "a repeatable and efficient" process.
The eavesdroppers also succeeded in intercepting 85,489 text messages, a Der Spiegel article noted.
Another NSA operation, begun in May 2010 and codenamed FLATLIQUID, targeted Pena's predecessor, President Felipe Calderon.
The NSA, the documents revealed, was able "to gain first-ever access to President Felipe Calderon's public email account."
At the same time, members of a highly secret joint NSA/CIA organization, called the Special Collection Service, are based in
the U.S. embassy in Mexico City and other U.S. embassies around the world. It targets local government communications, as well
as foreign embassies nearby. For Mexico, additional eavesdropping, and much of the analysis, is conducted by NSA Texas, a large
listening post in San Antonio that focuses on the Caribbean, Central America and South America."
Breaking news! CIA admits people in USA aren't smart enough to vote for the person right person. Why blame Russians now?
Come on. Let's move on and enjoy the mess Trump will start. This is going to be worse than GWB.
We should all just enjoy the political comedy programs.
The CIA accusing a foreign power of interfering in the election of a showman for president - it would take me all day top cite
the times that this evil criminal organisation has interfered in the affairs of other countries, ordered assassinations, coups
etc. etc. etc
Yes like the "help" the CIA gave to the Taliban, Bin Laden and Co. when the Russians were in Afghanistan.
Then these dimwits from the CIA who taught Bin Laden and Co guerrilla warfare totally "missed" 9/11 and Twin Towers with all their
billions of funding.
So basically this is a total load of crap and if you think we are going to believe any reports vs. Russia these fools at the CIA
are going to publish then think again.
During the election our media was exposed as in essence a propaganda tool for the Democrat campaign and they continue the unholy
alliance after the election
Pathetic move from an organisation that created ISIS and is single handling every single conflict in the world. Here we have a
muppet president that for once wants to look after USA affairs internally and here we have a so alleged independent organisation
that wants to keep bombing and destabilising the world. Didn't Trump said he wanted to shake the FBI and CIA ? Who is going to
stop this machine of treachery ? : south America, middle east ...Asia ... they put their fingers on to create a problem- solution
caveat wereas is to create weapons contracts /farma or construction and sovereign debt . But it never tricles down to the layperson
..
"We are Not calling into question the election results"
next White House sentence - "Just the integrity.. " WTF
What more do you need to know - Bullshit Fake News.. propaganda, spoken by the youngest possible puppet boy White House Rep.
who almost managed to have his tie done up..
I am bookmarking this guy, for a laugh! White House Fake Newscaster ..:)
Worth watching the sides of his mouth onto his attempt to engage you with the eyes, but blinking way too much before, during
and after the word "Integrity".. FAKE!
His hand signals.. lmfao, so measured, how sweet.. now sack the sycophants --
People should know that these Breaking News stories we see in Western media on BBC, Guardian etc, about Russian interference are
in fact from Wash Post and NY Times quoting mysterious sources within the CIA
Of course we know that Wash Post and NY Times were completely objective during the election and didn't favor any party
Russia made Hillary run the most expensive campaign ever, spending 1.2 billion dollars.
Russia stole Hillary's message to the working people and gave her lousy slogans
My real comment is below, but work with me, for a moment.
So, since 2008, eh? Barack has thought carefully, with a legal mind.
Can't we somehow blame the Russians for the whole Economic collapse.. coming soon, Wall Street Cyber Crash, screwed up sKewed
up systems of Ponzi virus spiraling out of control..
blame the Russians , logic, the KGB held the FED at gunpoint and said "create $16.2 Trillion in 5 working days"
jeez, blame anything and anybody except peace prize guy Obama, the Pope, Bankers & Israel..
Now can we discuss the Security of the Pound against Cyber Attack.. what was it 6% in 2 minutes, early on Sunday morning, just
over month ago.. whoosh!
It seems more important than discussing an election where the result was always OBVIOUS!
And we called it, just like Kellyanne Conway..
Who is Huma Abedin? I wish to know and hear her talking to Kellyanne Conway, graciously in defeat.. is that so unreasonable?
********
Obama wishes to distract from exceedingly poor judgement, at the very minimum....
after his Greek Affair with Goldman Sachs.. surely.
As for his other Foreign Policy: Eternal Shame, founded on Fake News!
Obama the Fake News Founder to flounder over the Russians, who can prove that he, Obama supports & supported Terrorism!
Thus this article exists, to create doubt over the veracity of evidence to be presented over NATO's involvement in SYRIA! Obama
continues to resist, or loose face completely..
Just ask Can Dundar.... what he knows now and ask Obama to secure the release of Can Dundar's wife's passport, held for no
legitimate reason in Turkey! This outrageous stand off, from Erdogan & Obama to address their failures and arrogant disrespect
of Woman and her Legal Human Rights is Criminal.. & a Sickness of Mind that promotes Dictatorship!
Mainstream Media - Fake News.. for quite some time!
& Obama is guilty!
The one certainty of the US/EU led drive to remove an elected leader just in their 2nd year after an election that saw them
gain 47% of the popular vote was the Russki response, its borders were immediately at open 'threat' from any alliance. NATO or
otherwise, the deep sea ports of eastern Ukraine which had always been accessed by the Russki fleets would lose guaranteed access
etc....to believe the West was surprised by this action, would be to assume the US Generals were as stupid as the US administration,
they knew exactly the response of the Russkis & would have made no difference if their leader had been named Putin or Uncle Tom
Cobbly.
In some ways the Russkis partitioning of the East of Ukraine could well minimise the possibility of a world conflict as the
perceived threat is neutralised by the buffer.
The Russkis cyber doodah is no different to our own the US etc, they're all 'at it' & all attempt to inveigle the others in
terms of making life difficult.....not too sure Putin will be quite as comfortable with the Pres Elects 3 Trumpeteers though as
the new Pressie looks likely to open channels of communications but those negotiations might well see a far tougher stance......still,
in truth, all is never fair in love or war
.....that the CIA is not only suddenly involved, but suddenly at the forefront, may well reflect President-elect Trump's stated
policy intentions being far removed from those that the CIA has endorsed, and might be done with an eye toward undermining Trump's
position in those upcoming policy battles.
At the center of those Trump vs. CIA battles is Syria, as the CIA has for years pushed to move away from the ISIS war and toward
imposing regime change in Syria. Trump, by contrast, has said he intends to end the CIA-Saudi program arming the Syrian rebels,
and focus on fighting ISIS. Trump was even said to be seeking to coordinate anti-ISIS operations with Russia.
The CIA allegations could easily imperil that plan, as so long as the allegations remain part of the public discourse, evidence
or not, anything Trump does with respect to Russia is going to have a black cloud hanging over it. http://news.antiwar.com/2016/12/09/cia-claims-russia-intervened-to-get-trump-elected
/
Oh dear Obama trolls? Food for your starved thoughts:
Your degree of understanding IT is disturbing, especially given how dependent we are on it.
This is all very simple. The process by which you find out if and how a machine was hacked was clearly documented in the Russian
"Internet Audit", run by a group of Grey Hats.
Grey Hats: People concerned about security who perform unauthorized hacks for relatively benign purposes, often just notifying
people of how their system is flawed. IT staff have mixed reactions(!), the illegality is not disputed but the benefit of not
being hit by a Black Hat first can be considerable at times. Differentiation is rare, especially as some hacktivist groups belong
here, causing no damage beyond reputational by flagging activity that is not acceptable to the hacktivists.
Black Hats: These are the guys to worry about. These include actually destructive hacktivists. These are the ones who steal
data for malicious purposes, disrupt for malicious purposes and just generally act maliciously.
Nothing in reports indicates if the DNC hack was Grey Hat or Black Hat, but it should be obvious that there is a difference.
IP addresses and hangouts - worthless as evidence. Anyone can spoof the former, happens all the time (NMap used to provide
the option, probably still does), Grey Hats and Black Hats alike have the latter and may break into other people's. It's all about
knowing vulnerabilities.
That voting machines were even on the Internet is disturbing. That they and the DNC server were improperly configured for such
an environment is frightening - and possibly illegal.
The standard sequence of events is thus:
Network intrusion detector system identifies crafted packet attacking known vulnerability.
In a good system, the firewall is set to block the attack at that instant.
If the attacker scans the network, the only machine responding to such knocks should be a virtual machine running a honeypot
on attractive-looking port numbers. The other machines in the zone should technically violate the RFCs by not responding to ICMP
or generating recognized error codes on unused/blocked ports.
The system logger picks up an event that creates a process that shouldn't be happening.
In a good system, this either can't happen because the combination of permissions needed doesn't exist, or it doesn't matter because
the process is root jailed and hasn't the privileges to actually do any harm.
The file alteration logger (possibly Tripwire, though the Linux kernel can do this itself) detects that a process with escalated
privileges is trying to create, delete or alter a file that it isn't supposed to be able to change.
In a good system with mandatory access controls, this really is impossible. In a good system with logging file systems, it doesn't
matter as you can instruct the filesystem to revert those specific alterations. Even in adequate but feeble systems, checkpoints
will exist. No use in a voting system, but perfectly adequate for a campaign server. In all cases, the system logs will document
what got damaged.
The correct IT manager response is thus:
Find out why the firewall wasn't defaulting to deny for all unknown sources and for unnecessary ports.
Find out why the public-facing system wasn't isolated in the firewall's DMZ.
Find out why NIDS didn't stop the attack.
Non-public user mobility should be via IPSec using certificates. That deals with connecting from unknown IP addresses without
exposing the innards of the system.
Lock down misconfigured network systems.
Backup files identified by file alteration detection as corrupt for forensic purposes.
Revert files identified by file alteration detection as corrupt to last good version.
Close permission loopholes. Everything should run with the fewest privileges necessary, OS included. On Linux, kernel permissions
are controlled via capabilities.
Establish from the logs if the intruder came through a public-facing application, an essential LAN service or a non-essential
service.
If it's a LAN service, block access to that service outside the LAN on the host firewall.
Run network and host vulnerability scanners to detect potential attack vectors.
Update any essential software that is detected as flawed, then rerun the scanners. Repeat until fixed.
Now the system is locked down against general attacks, you examine the logs to find out exactly what failed and how. If that line
of attack got fixed, good. If it didn't, then fix it.
Password policy should prevent rainbow attacks, not users. Edit as necessary, lock accounts that aren't secure and set the password
control system to ban bad passwords.
It is impossible from system logs to track where an intruder came from, unsecured routers are common and that means a skilled
attacker can divert packets to anywhere. You can't trust brags, in security nobody is honest. The sensible thing is to not allow
such events in the first place, but when (not if) they happen, learn from them.
If the USA is to investigate the effect of foreign governments 'corrupting' the free decisions of the American people in elections,
perhaps they could look into the fact that for the past three decades every Republican candidate for president, after they have
won the nomination of their party, has gone to just one foreign country to pledge their firm commitment/allegiance to that foreign
power, for the purpose of shoring up large blocks of donors prior to the actual presidential election. The effect is probably
more 'corrupting' than any leak of emails!
Obama should confess to creating ISIS, sustaining ISIS & utilising ISIS as a proxy army to have them do things that he knew US
soldiers could never be caught doing!!!
They then spoon fed you bullshit propaganda about who the bad guys were, without ever being to properly explain why the US
armed forces were prevented from taking any hostile action against ISIS, until they were FORCED TO, that is, when Putin let the
the cat out of the bag!!!
Hilarious. One would've thought Obama of all presidents would be reluctant to delve too deeply into this particular midden. As
the author of the weakest and most incompetent American foreign policy agenda since Carter's, it's much the likeliest that if
China or Russia have been hacking US elections, then by far the biggest beneficiary will have been himself.
cdm Begin forwarded message: > From: Lynn Forester de Rothschild <[email protected]> > Date: May 28, 2015 at 9:44:12 AM
EDT > To: Nick Merrill <[email protected]>, "Cheryl Mills ([email protected])" <[email protected]> > Subject: FW:
POLITICO Playbook > > Morning, > I am sure you are working on this, but clearly, the opposition is trying to undercut Hillary's
reputation for honesty (the number one characteristic people look for in a President according to most polls) ..and also to benefit
from an attack on wealth that Dems did the most to start I am sure we need to fight back against both of these attacks. > Xoxo
> Lynn > > By Mike Allen (@mikeallen; [email protected]), and Daniel Lippman (@dlippman; [email protected]) > > > > QUINNIPIAC
POLL, out at 6 a.m., "Rubio, Paul are only Republicans even close to Clinton": "In a general election, ... Clinton gets 46 percent
of American voters to 42 percent for Paul and 45 percent of voters to 41 percent for Rubio." Clinton leads Christie 46-37 ...
Huckabee 47-40 ... Jeb 47-37 ... Walker 46-38 ... Cruz 48-37 ... Trump 50-32. > > --"[V]oters say 53-39 percent that Clinton is
NOT honest and trustworthy, but say 60-37 ... that she has strong leadership qualities. Voters are divided 48-47 ... over whether
Clinton cares about their needs and problems." > > --RNC's new chart - "'Dead Broke' Clintons vs. Everyday Americans": "Check
out the chart below to see how many households in each state it would take to equal the 'Dead Broke' Clintons."
http://bit.ly/1Avg8iE
Blind leading the Blind.. & Obama knows that very well after it was clear that Clinton was NEVER trusted by the Voters, which
makes Debbie and the DNC look like a complete bunch of..
Idiots?!?! STILL BLAMING The RUSSIANS.... instead of themselves!
She was and always will be unelectable due to exceedingly poor judgement, across the board.
Who is in charge of Internet security in the US government? Because it seems full of holes. Last time it was the Chinese and this
time it's the Russians, yet not one piece of evidence to say where hacks have come from. How much are these world class Internet
security people paid? And why do they still have a job? People sitting in their bedrooms on a pc from stores like staples have
hacked their security regularly.
In 2016, he said, the government did not detect any increased cyber activity on election day itself but the FBI made public
specific acts in the summer and fall, tied to the highest levels of the Russian government. "This is going to put that activity
in a greater context ... dating all the way back to 2008."
Extremely vague. Seems like there is no evidence at all to suggest any Russian involvement, but they need to pretend otherwise.
Blah, blah, blah, Weapons of mass destruction... Apollo mission, etc
Ole, Russians exposed the DNC emails, we knew about that. I though this should investigate Russians vote rigging, but I guess
not. I for once welcome anyone who hacks my government and exposes their skeletons, so I can see what kind of dirty garbage I
had leading or potentially leading my country.
Maybe the DNC should play fair and not dirty next time and put a candidate forward without skeletons that still reek of rotting
flesh.
Don't believe any of this at all.
American has been thee most corrupt and disgusting western nation for decades, run by people who are now being shown for who they
really are and they're shitting themselves big time. The stakes don't get higher than this.
What a total load of double talk. There is zero integrity in anything CIA says or does since the weapons of mass destruction deal
or before that it was the Iran Contra deal and before that it was the Bay of Pigs. Now we have this rigging os the election results
based on zero evidence. The whole thing is just idiocy. What is Obama trying to achieve?The end game will be for Obama to go down
in history as ... let's just say he is not the smartest tool in the shed when it comes to being a so called world leader. Well
done Obama you have now completely trashed what is left of your legacy.
"CIA concludes Russia interfered to help Trump win election – report "
You might as well ask accountants to do a study on wether it's worthwhile to use an accountant. Part of the CIAs job is to
influence elections around the world to get US-Corporation friendly gov'ts in to power. So yes of course they are going to say
that a gov't can influence elections, if they said otherwise then they'd be admitting they're wasting money.
So, it was the Russians! I knew it must've been them, they're so sneaky. All HFC had was the total backing of the entire establishment,
including prominent Republican figures, the total fawning support of the entire main-stream media machine which carefully controlled
the "she's got a comfortable 3 point lead maybe even double-digit lead" narrative and the "boo and hiss" pantomime slagging of
her opponent. Plus the endless funds from the crooked foundation and murderous fanatics from the compliant Gulf states, and lost.
But hey, do keep this going please, it'll help the Trumpster get a second term! Trump/Nugent 2020.
Good point. Add that the whole election was dogged is the most glaring media bias and suddenly Russia comes off as simply leveling
the playing field a bit
The 'secret' enquiry reported to Congress that the CIA concludes etc, etc, etc. Then yet more revelations from 'anonymous sources'
are quoted in the Washington Post and The New York Times reaching the same conclusions.....talk about paranoia, or are the Democrats
guilty of news fakery of the highest order to deny the US voters....
Ooh Obama...there's a little snag about this investigation.
In principle, the DNC server could have had malware in an e-mail that set up a NAT entry that made the connecting computer
appear somewhere else, with the entry deleted afterwards. Typically, IP table modifications aren't logged, so this would not be
detectable.
In principle, the DNC server could have had malware in an e-mail that ran a SED script at a specific time that changed any
occurrence of one IP address with another. Not sure anyone would bother with this, but it's why good system admins place so much
emphasis on securing logs. However, it's obvious we're not talking about good admins.
In principle, every router between the DNC server and Russia has the potential to be hacked, with a tunnel added to send the
traffic somewhere else in the world with new source and destination addresses. This is known as router table poisoning. It is
preventable but the mechanisms are rarely ever used because the security services want to be able to do this themselves. There
are some nice logs of the NSA using this.
In principle, someone along the way could tap into the fibre, spoofing IP addresses and injecting/sniffing packets. The U.S.
even has a submarine designed for this, but optics aren't complex and any number of neo-phone phreaks could have the hardware.
In principle, someone at an ISP or backbone service could have had a laptop plugged into a switch or router to do the same
thing, or lit up a strand of dark fibre to let some uber-wealthy business do this. And there's no shortage of uber-wealthy businesses
who aren't keen on Democrats. This technique is used for local and remote network diagnostics, no reason it can't be used nefarious,
it's not like the hardware cares why a wire is plugged in.
In principle, the supposed destination machine could have been hacked to relay the packets in encrypted form to the South Pole
or a college campus in Texas. There are many examples of client machines being hacked to do this. It's basically what zombie machines
are in botnets.
In practice, it is flat-out guaranteed that none of the security agencies could distinguish this from a Russian attack. Nothing
in the area monitored could tell the difference. We know, for a fact, that college kids spoofing a scan from China have fooled
the DoD and NSA on previous occasions, it has caused international incidents.
So we have known forms of attack that are known to exist, aren't complex and in some cases are already used for attacks. They
are 100% untraceable.
Of course the Americans would never interfere in other people's elections would they?...........I imagine the Russians wanted
to avoid a nuclear war with war monger Hilary & who can blame them?
Y'know really all they seem to be looking possibly guilty of is the wikileaks scandal. Compare that to the enormous media bias
regarding Trump and suddenly the Russians at worst come off as evening the playing field so as to help an election be less biased...
Paranoia about Russia has arrived at the laughable, almost like the fable of the boy who cried wolf! Even the way the CIA statement
is worded makes you smile. "silk purse sows ear"? Everyone is clutching at straws rather than looking down the barrel at the truth......that
folks is what is missing from Western Politics......"The Truth" --
Obama expected the review to be completed before he leaves office...
Really?? Obama wants a "deep review" of internet activities surrounding the elections of 2008, 2012, and 2016; and he wants
this done in less than 40 days? And it encompasses voting stations throughout the 50 states? That's the definition of political
shenanigans.
Seeing as how the CIA interfered with Ukraine before and during the overthrow of Yanukovich, and with Moscow protests a few years
ago...... seems like everyone is always trying to interfere with each-other. Hypocrisy abounds
This is not really a fight against Trump. That is lost. This is an intramural fight among Democrats.
This is desperate efforts by the corporate Democrats to hang on to power after Hillary (again) lost.
Excuses. Allegations without sources given, anonymous.
Remember that the same people used the same media contacts to spread fake news that the Podesta leaks were faked, and tried
to shift attention from what was revealed to who revealed it.
if the Ruskies did it, there's something funny: they did it on Obama's watch and her protege, Hillary, lost it. The system is
a real mess in this case.
Interesting link. It raises a particularly salient question: assuming the Russians did indeed do it - and after the whole CIA
yellow cake thing in Iraq, no one could possibly doubt national intelligence agencies any more - does it particularly matter?
Did the Russians write the emails? The betrayal of Sanders, the poor protection on classified materials, the cynical,
vicious nonsense spewed out by the HRC campaign, the media collusion with the DNC and HRC: did the Russians do these things too?
Or was that Clinton and the DNC? Silly question, I'm sure.
Well, chief, the Wisconsin recount is in and the results are staggering: after the recount, Clinton has gained on Trump by 3 votes...
and Trump gained on Clinton by a heady six votes. One begins to wonder at the 'Manchurian candidate' claim.
It is precisely charades like this that millions in the US and around the world have given up on the establishment. Business as
usual or rather lying as usual will only alienate more not-so-stupid citizens. It speaks volumes about their desperation that
they're are actually employing such obviously infantile tactics on the Russia even as they continue to paper over Hillary's tattered
past. The result of the investigation is totally predictable..................Yes, the Russians were involved in hacking the elections,
but..........for reasons of national security, details of the investigative process and evidence cannot be revealed.
If the Russians really wanted Trump to win that means they helped Hillary win the Democratic primaries because Bernie would have
beat Trump.. There was a mess of hanky-panky going on to defeat Bernie, and deflecting the blame to a foreign actor should keep
the demonstrators off the streets.
If someone is gullible enough to believe the Russians did it they'd also believe that Elvis made Bigfoot hack the DNC. That's
even more plausible since bigfoot is just a guy who spends so much time sitting at his computer he lost all interest in personal
hygiene.
The Democrats are really desperate to find anything they can use to challenge the results of the election.
Either way they look foolish - openly investigating the possibility of Russian hacking which acknowledges that their electoral
systems aren't well secured, OR look really foolish if they find anything (whether real or faked).
The big question now is if, and how much, they will fake the findings of the investigation so that they can declare the
election results wrong, and put Clinton into the White House.
Clearly, it is a case of desperate times calling for desperate measures. It is incredible that one man can make the largest Western
nation look so ridiculous in the eyes of the world.
Pot calling the kettle black. Reveal fully what the CIA get up to all over the planet. The phoney intel America has used to go
to war causing countries to implode. The selective way they release information to project the picture they want. I am not convinced
that Russia is any better or any worse than the USA.
I can understand the Russians wanting Obama in 2008 and 2012 because he is a weak leader and totally incompetent.
I can also understand Putin preferring DJT to HRC.
It's about time the planet settled down a little bit, Trump and Putin will do more for world peace in the next year than Obama
achieved in his 8 wasted years in charge.
The Democrats have yet to realise the reason for their demise was not the racists, the homophobes, the KKK, the Deplorables,
the misogynists, the xenophobes etc etc etc.
It was Hillary Clinton.
Get over it, move on, stop whining, get out of your safe room, put the puppy down, throw the play dough away, stop protesting,
behave like an adult.
As much as I am enjoying the monumental meltdown of the left, it is getting sad now and I am starting to feel very sorry for
you.
What a sad bunch of clowns. But the time is ripe. You and your sort are done Obama, Hillary Clinton, Juncker, Merkel, Hollande,
Mogherini, Kerry, Tusk, Nuland, Albright, Breedlove, SaManThe Power and the rest of the reptiles. With all respect - mwuahahaha!
- you will soon sink into the darkness of the darkest places of history, but you won't be forgotten, no you won't!
As for the Podesta email. John Podesta was so stupid that he gave out his password in a simple email scam that any 8 year old
kid could have conducted. I wouldn't be surprised if Assange did it himself. Assange will be celebrating at the demise of Hillary.
Guys! Your side lost the election. Get over it & stop looking for excuses.
I don't think it was the Russians, it was just a lot of people got sick of being told what to think & how to behave by your
side of politics.
It is because people who disagree with you are either ignored, shut-down or called names with weaponised words such as "racist,
bigot, xenophobe, homophobe, islamophobe, you name it. You go out onto the streets chanting mindless slogans aimed at shutting
down debate. You have infiltrated academia and no journalism graduate comes out of a western univerity without a 60 degree lean
to the left. People of alternative views to what is now the dominant social paradigm are not permitted to speak at universities.
Once they were the vanguard of dangerous ideas. Now they are just sheep pens.
You have infiltrated the mainstream media so of course people need to go to Info Wars, Breitbart & Project Veritas to get the
other side to your one-sided argument.
Your side of politics has regulated the very words we speak so that we can't even express a thought anymore without being chanted
down, or shut down, prosecuted or sued.
There was once a time when it was the left who spoke up for freedom of speech. It was the left who demanded that a man be judged
by the content of his character & not the color of his skin & it was once the right who used to be worried about the Russians
taking over our institutions.
Have a look at yourselves. Look at what you've become. You've stopped being the guardians of freedom & now you have become
the very anti-freedom totalitarians you thought you were campaigning against.
Bleating about the "popular vote" doesn't cut it either. That's like saying, the other side scored more goals than us but we
had possession of the ball more times. It is sad for you but it is irrelevant.
Trump won the election! Get over it!
Let's see what sort of job he does before deciding what to do next.
In principle, the DNC server could have had malware in an e-mail that set up a NAT entry that made the connecting computer
appear somewhere else, with the entry deleted afterwards. Typically, IP table modifications aren't logged, so this would not be
detectable.
In principle, the DNC server could have had malware in an e-mail that ran a SED script at a specific time that changed any
occurrence of one IP address with another. Not sure anyone would bother with this, but it's why good system admins place so much
emphasis on securing logs. However, it's obvious we're not talking about good admins.
In principle, every router between the DNC server and Russia has the potential to be hacked, with a tunnel added to send the
traffic somewhere else in the world with new source and destination addresses. This is known as router table poisoning. It is
preventable but the mechanisms are rarely ever used because the security services want to be able to do this themselves. There
are some nice logs of the NSA using this.
In principle, someone along the way could tap into the fibre, spoofing IP addresses and injecting/sniffing packets. The U.S.
even has a submarine designed for this, but optics aren't complex and any number of neo-phone phreaks could have the hardware.
In principle, someone at an ISP or backbone service could have had a laptop plugged into a switch or router to do the same
thing, or lit up a strand of dark fibre to let some uber-wealthy business do this. And there's no shortage of uber-wealthy businesses
who aren't keen on Democrats. This technique is used for local and remote network diagnostics, no reason it can't be used nefarious,
it's not like the hardware cares why a wire is plugged in.
In principle, the supposed destination machine could have been hacked to relay the packets in encrypted form to the South Pole
or a college campus in Texas. There are many examples of client machines being hacked to do this. It's basically what zombie machines
are in botnets.
In practice, it is flat-out guaranteed that none of the security agencies could distinguish this from a Russian attack. Nothing
in the area monitored could tell the difference. We know, for a fact, that college kids spoofing a scan from China have fooled
the DoD and NSA on previous occasions, it has caused international incidents.
So we have known forms of attack that are known to exist, aren't complex and in some cases are already used for attacks. They
are 100% untraceable.
Joe Biden unwittingly gave the game up when he spoke to the press with indignation of the Russian hacks. The US would respond
in kind with a covert cyber operation run by the CIA First of all it would be the NSA, not the CIA Secondly, it's not covert when
you tell the press! Oh Joe, you really let the Obama administration down with that gaffe! Who would believe them now? A lot of
people it would seem. Mainly those still reeling from an election they were so vested in
Unfortunately our media has lost all credibility.
For years we were told it was necessary to remove the dictator Assad in Syria. The result, a country destroyed, migrant crisis
that fuelled Brexit and brought EU to its knees.
Now they are going to sell the 'foreign entities decided the US election'.
It's just a sad situation
Syria has been destroyed because Western client states in the Middle East wanted this to happen. Assad had a reasonably successful
secular government and our medieval gulf state allies felt. threatened by his regime. there was the little business of a pipeline,
but of course that would be called a "conspiracy theory".
If Obama has resources to spend on investigations, he should be investigating why the US is providing guided missiles to the terrorist
in Syria. We had such great hopes for him, and he has proved to be totally useless as a president. Rather than giving us leadership
and guidance he is looking under his bed for spooks. Just another example of his incompetence at a time when we needed leadership.
Looking for proof of espionage will be like trying to prove a negative and only result in a possible or at best a likely type
of result for no purpose. It would just be another case of an unsupported accusation being thrown about.
Facing up to the question of who is supplying weapons to terrorist would require the courage to take on the Military Industrial
Complex and he hasn't got it. Trump will be different.
If the russians did interfere in the USA elections perhaps is a bit of poetic justice.
The USA has interfere in Latin America for over hundred years and they have given us Batista, Somoza, Trujillo, Noriega, Pinochet,
Duvaliers , military juntas in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Streener in Paraguay to name a few. They all were narcissists, racists
and insecure. The american people love this type of leader now they got him in the white house may be from Russia with love. Empires
get destroyed from within, look at Little Britain now, maybe the same will happen soon in the USA.
Viva China , is far from Latin America
So if the US managed to somehow get rid of Russia and China, what would they do then? How would it justify hundreds of billions
in defense spending? Just remember, the US military industry desperately needs an external enemy to exist. Without it, there is
no industry.
No I disagree. I don't think it was a conpriscy. It was just decades of misinformation, lies, usually perpertrated by our esteemed
foreign minister. The man is a buffoon , liar and incompetent. It is quite amusing to see how inept, Incompotent and totally unsuited
this man child is to public office.
Another red herring that smacks of desperation. The final death throes of a failed administration. These carefully chosen words
reveal a lot. The email leaks were "consistent with the methods and motivations" of Russian hackers. In layman's terms its the
equivalent of saying "we haven't got a clue who it was but it's the kind of thing they would probably do". Don't expect a smoking
gun because it doesn't exist, otherwise we would have known about it by now.
It's not just the US who has accused Putin of meddling in their domestic affairs. Germany and the UK have made the same allegations.
Are they wrong too?
I think anyone with reasonable intelligence would take each accusation on a case by case basis. There is no doubt that Russia
conducts cyber operations, as the US and UK and Germany does. There is also little doubt that significant Russophobia exists,
particularly since the failed foreign attempt of regime change in Syria that was thwarted by Russia. On that last point many citizens
of the West are coming to the realisation that a secular government in Syria is preferable to one run by jihadists installing
crude sharia law (Libya was certainly a lesson). Furthermore, if Hillary Clinton had succeeded one dreads to think of the consequences
of her no-fly-zone plans. Thankfully she didn't succeed, no doubt in part to wikileaks revelations, who for the record stated
that did not result from Russian hacks
Hows the election recount going? You know the one this paper kept going on about a few weeks ago in Wisconsin that was supposed
to be motivated by "Russian Hacking" in the election? Not very well but you have gone quiet. Also I see the Washington Post has
been forced to backtrack for implying news outlets like Breitbart are Russian controlled on the advice of their own lawyers....after
all calling someone a Russian agent without a shred of evidence is seriously libellous and they know it. Russian agents to blame
yeah ok Obama no doubt the Easter Bunny will be next in your sights you fraud.
Look no further than Hillarys private server. Classified information sent and received and Obam was part of it. Obama is a liar
and a fraud who is now blaming the Russians for crooked Hillarys loss.
Feed the flames of the war mongers that want Russia and Putin to be our bogeyman.Feed the military industrial complex more billions.The
U.S. Defense budget is already 10 times that of Russia ,feed NATO already on Russia's boarder with tanks ,troops and heavy weapons.i
did expect more from this pres,... The lies ,mis information and propaganda has worked so well since the end of WW2,upon a public
who has been fed those lies {and is to busy with sports ,gadgets,games, alcohol and other drugs }for 70 yrs by a compliant,for
profit lap dog media more interested in producing infotainment and profits than supplying information..If you don't think the
"public" isn't very poorly informed and will believe anything ,..just look at who the next prez will be..
I don't think it's true that Trump voters were less informed than Clinton voters. The public knows that they all lie, they simply
choose the one who's lies most appeal to them.
Unfortunately Obama is not leaving office with dignity.
This action is another attempt to delegitimize the election of Trump. We already have the recount farce going on.
If Republicans had tried to delegitimize the election of Obama we know what the reaction from media would have been. An outcry
against antidemocratic and racist behaviour
The corporate media is so predictable at this point. The news cranks up the anti-Russia hysteria while the guys over in entertainment
roll out a slick fantasy about anti-Nazi resistance. It all adds up to a big steaming pile of crap but you hope it will push enough
buttons to keep the citizens chained to their their desks for another quarter. Don't bet on it. As a great American said at another
time of upheaval, you can't fool everyone forever...
Kremlin Connection? The TRUTH About Hillary's Shady Ties To Russia REVEALED
Find out why insiders say Clinton has some explaining to do.
Americans have no idea just how closely Hillary Clinton is tied to the Kremlin! That's the shocking claim of a new report that
alleges the Democratic nominee is secretly pals with Vladimir Putin and his countrymen.
Peter Schweizer, the author of Clinton Cash, has published a report that claims that that Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta
was on the executive board of a foreign company that received $35 million from the Kremlin. "The company was a transparent Russian
front, and how much Podesta was compensated - and for what - is unclear. In addition, Podesta failed to disclose his position
on that board to the Federal government, as required by law," John Schindler of the Observer wrote.
As Radar previously reported, when Clinton was secretary of state, she profited from the "Russian Reset," a failed attempt
to improve relations between the U.S. and Russia.
chweizer wrote, "Many of the key figures in the Skolkovo process - on both the Russian and U.S. sides - had major financial ties
to the Clintons. During the Russian reset, these figures and entities provided the Clintons with tens of millions of dollars,
including contributions to the Clinton Foundation, paid for speeches by Bill Clinton, or investments in small start-up companies
with deep Clinton ties." Schweizer also details "Skolkovo," a Silicon Valley-like campus that both the U.S. and Russia worked
on for developing biomed, space, nuclear and IT technologies. He told the New York Post that there was a "pattern that shows a
high percentage of participants in Skolkovo who happen to be Clinton Foundation donors."
Sour grapes at the liberation of Aleppo and their loss of face.
I'm surprised they haven't started asking about the missing 250K civilians,who must even now be languishing in Assad's dungeons.
Keeping that one for tomorrow probably.
When Cheney used the terror alert levels to keep the US population in the constant state of fear, the Democrats denounced it as
fear mongering. Now they're embracing the same tactics in the constant demonization of Russia. Look, it's raining today! Russia
must be trying to control the weather in the US! Get them! Utterly ridiculous.
The US has been the most bloodthirsty, aggressive nation in my lifetime. Where the US goes we obediently follow. Yet as Obama
(7 countries he's bombed in his presidency, not bad for a Nobel Prize Winner) continues to circle Russia with NATO on their borders.
We're continually spun headline news that Russia is the aggressor and is continually meddling in foreign affairs. We are the aggressors,
we are the danger to ourselves and it's we who are run by megalomaniac elites who pump us full of fear and propaganda.
Malicious cyberactivity... has no place in international community... No? When West does it, then it's for democratic purposes?
But invading countries on a humanitarian pretense does? So Democrats are still looking to blame Russia for everything not going
their way I see. This rhetoric didn't work for Clinton in the election and it won't now. Stop with this nonsense
The Egyptian Empire lasted millenum,
The Greek and Roman Empires a thousand years, give or take.
The Holy Roman Empire centuries.
The British and French circa 200 years.
The USSR about 70, the USA 70 and counting
This is just the cyclical death throes of empires played out at ever increasing speed before our very eyes.
This is exactly why we should never move to electronic voting. Can you imagine the lengths the IPA would go to ensure their men
security the power they need to roll out their neoliberal agenda? As a tax-free right wing think tank composed of rich like Rinehart,
Murdoch, Forrest, et al. the sky's the limit.
The five stages of dealing with psychological trauma: Anger, Denial, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. Hillary and the Democrats
are still at stage one and two. Obama is only beginning stage one as events dawn on him.
I really do feel the established media and its elite hierarchy are vexed by both the Trump victory and Brexit here in the UK.
Now the media attention turns to a report on another of its perpetual campaigns, namely Russia, and corruption in sport.
I'm not going to doubt the 'findings', but I know humans are corrupt ALL over the world, but it does strike me that no Western
outlet, ever prints anything positive about Russia. I mean - nothing, zero!
If, indeed, the Russian government gathered the DNC and Podesta info released by Wikileaks, the Russians did the American people
a favor by pulling back the curtain on behind the scenes scheming by Clinton campaign potentates.
Of course, I don't believe the Democratic claim that Clinton lost the election because of the Russians and the FBI.
US backed a coup, or set up a coup, to overthrow the democratically elected government in Ukraine which led to war. Putin's payback
seems fully justified.
Oh my, a foreign country may have had a tiny influence on a US Election.
How about investigating the overthrow of the Democratically elected Govt in Ukraine, or the influence the US has had on the
Syrian Govt, or even in Australia, where the Chinese Govt donates massive amounts of money to Political Parties (note, there's
no link of course between Chinese Govt donations and Chinese Companies being able to buy most of Australia and employ Chinese
Nationals in Australia on Chinese conditions and 500,000 Chinese Nationals being able to buy Real Estate in Sydney alone... none
whatsoever).
I'm not a policy or think tank wonk, but isn't Russia just a euphemism for China. Aren't their geopolitical interests linked.
You just say Russia because China has us by the financial balls (I'm sure the Guardian would prefer to NOT be censored on the
mainland) right? Package it that way and I'm on board. My love of Dostoevsky goes out the window. Albeit I still think Demons
one of the best novels ever written. Woke me up.
I'm all in favor of delegitimizing the incoming semi-fascist Trump/Pence regime, and find Obama's talk of a smooth transition
disgusting. However, I reject the appeal to Russophobia or other Xenophobia.
BTW, Obama and his collaborators like Diane Feinstein have done a lot to prepare the legal basis for fascistic repression under
the new POtuS.
I already know what the comission will find. They will find evidences that Iraq holds vast ammonúnt of weapons of mass destruction!
Oh wait, that was already used.
Obama has been as useless as his predecessor young Bush. His policies generally are in tatters and the US neo cons evil fantasy
of full spectrum dominance has met its death in Syria. Bravo.
After an election cycle with proven collusion between the DNC/Hillary Clinton campaign and our media, our media has the nerve
to come up with the term 'fake news'.
Hypocrisy at its finest
Nobody does paranoia like the yanks. To the rest of the world, the unedifying spectacle of the world's biggest bullies, snoops,
warmongers, liars and hypocrites complaining about how unfair life is, is pretty nauseating. Most of America's problems are home-grown.
And the final report will conclude with something along the lines of:
'After a thorough, exhaustive investigation of all relevant evidence concerning the potential of foreign interference in the United
States electoral process, the results of the investigation have shown that, although there remain troubling questions about the
integrity of U.S. cyber-security which should prompt immediate Congressional review, there has been uncovered no conclusive evidence
to support the conjecture that cyber attacks originating with any foreign actor, state or individual had any significant effect
on the outcome of the 2016 Presidential election, and that there is no cause or justification for the American People to question
the fairness of or lose faith in the electoral process and laid out by and carried out according to the Constitution.'
I do Holiday cards too.
Georgia's Secretary of State is accusing someone at the Department of Homeland Security of illegally trying to hack its computer
network, including the voter registration database.
In a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, copied to the full Georgia congressional delegation, Georgia Secretary
of State Brian Kemp alleges that a computer with a DHS internet address attempted to breach its systems.
http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/309530-state-of-georgia-allegedly-accusing-homeland-security-of-attempted-hack
Wake up and smell the BS, the hacking is being done by people a lot nearer home.....
Oh dear, the GOP seem to have forgotten what they were saying about Putin and the Kremlin a short while back:
The continuing erosion of personal liberty and fundamental rights under the current officials in the Kremlin. Repressive
at home and reckless abroad, their policies imperil the nations which regained their self-determination upon the collapse of
the Soviet Union. We will meet the return of Russian belligerence with the same resolve that led to the collapse of the Soviet
Union. We will not accept any territorial change in Eastern Europe imposed by force, in Ukraine, Georgia, or elsewhere, and
will use all appropriate constitutional measures to bring to justice the practitioners of aggression and assassination.
..... prohibiting "fake" or "false" news would be a cure worse than the disease, i.e., censorship by other means. The government
cannot be trusted with distinguishing fake from genuine news because it has ulterior motives. News the government dislikes would
be conflated with fakery, and news the government approved would be conflated with truthfulness. Private businesses like Facebook
cannot be trusted with distinguishing fake from genuine news because its overriding mission is to make money and to win popularity,
not to spread truth. It would suppress news that risked injury to its reputation or profits but leave news that did the opposite
undisturbed. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/dec/5/reflections-fake-news
/
Uh excuse me but that sort of introspection doesn't fly. She was flawless and the blame rests solely on Russia/alt-right/Sanders/Third
Parties/Racism/Misogyny/Alignment of the stars/etc/etc
I thnk the idea that russia has world domination is quite laughable, what else they gonna be blamed for next, reduction of giraffe
population!Lol
I think a teeny wee paranoia is setting in, or outright deliberate propaganda, too obvious
Is this worse than when the two CIA operatives were caught searching through files in the Offices of the British Labour Party
about thirty years ago. What goes around comes around.
The CIA hacks have been destabalisuping Government for a at least seventy years.
One thing is pretty obvious paper ballots and a different ballot for each is much harder to rig.
It is ironic it takes a despot life key Trump to bring the issue to a head AFTER unexpectedly won.
"Is this worse than when the two CIA operatives were caught searching through files in the Offices of the British Labour Party
about thirty years ago. What goes around comes around."
The CIA were caught hacking into the US Congressional computers just 6 or so months ago. Nothing came out of it.
Based on the fact that the US 2000 (and possibly 2004) election was outright stolen by George Bush Jr., perhaps the propagandists
in the White House and media ought to be looking for a "Russian connection" in regards to our illustrious former president.
I'm shocked--shocked--to hear that our close Russian allies have done anything to influence and undermine the stability of other
countries. Preposterous accusation! And to try to become huge winners in the Western Hemisphere, by cheating? Vitriolic nonsense!
Many posters here actually believe that Good Old Russia should just stick with what they do best. That's poison!
Rather like the Litvenenko inquiry...full of maybe's and possibilities, with not a shred of hard, factual proof shown - demonstrating
that the order came from the Kremlin.
It's just a total accident that Putin's most vocal opponents keep getting shot in the head, gunned down on bridges, suffering
'accidents' or strange miscarriages of (sometimes post-mortem) 'justice' and fall victim to radiological state-enacted terrorism
in foreign countries. No pattern there, whatsoever.
I am at a loss. On the one hand, I hear about Russian economy in tatters, gas station posing as a country, deep crisis, economy
the size of Italy, rusty old military toys, aircraft carrier smoking out the whole Northern hemisphere, etc. On the other hand,
I hear about Russian threat all the time, which must be countered by massive build up of the US and EU military, Russia successfully
interfering in the elections in the beacon of democracy, the US, with 20 times greater economy, with powerful allies, the best
armed forces in the world, etc. Are we talking about two different Russias, or is this schizophrenia, pure and simple?
It's always easy to find reasons to fear something, added to that the psychology of the unknown, and we have the makings of very
powerful propaganda. Whatever Russia's level of corruption, and general society, I feel I cannot trust the Western media anymore
100%. There seems to be a equally sinister hidden agenda deep within Western Elites - accessing Russia's land, political and potential
wealthly resources must surely be one of them!? The longterm Western agenda/mission?
The Democratic Party's problem is Russia, which the President is rightly putting front and center. All Russians are the summit
of eviality, and must be endlessly scapegoated in order for Democrats to regain power for the nation's greater good.
Democrats' problems have nothing to do with corruption, glaring conflicts of interest, favoritism, ass-licking editors, crappy
data, lacking enthusiasm, and horribly poor judgement.
None of these issues need to be publicly addressed, being of no consequence to independent voters, and the President, Guardian,
et al. must continue their silent -- and "independent" -- vigil on such silly topics, if Democrats are to have any hope of cultivating
enough mindless, enraged, and abandoned sheep to bring them future victories.
I admire Trump, Putin & Farage. Don't agree with them but I have admiration for them. They show all the cunning, calculating,
resourcefulness that put the European race on top. Liberals don't like that and want to see the own people fall to the bottom.
Thankfuly the neoliberal elite are finishedm
Absurd nonsense - the third anti-Russian story of the day. Very little of this has much traction because of the sheer volume of
misinformation coming out about Russia. there are very good cogent reasons why the Democrats lost the US election - none of them
have anything to do with Russia.
I can't see a thing wrong with reviewing the last three election cycles, if there is any doubt at all and to put speculation to
bed, it should be done.
So the US intelligence servies aren't doing similar operations?
If they werent, heads would roll as they have a considerable budget. Did we learn nothing from Edward Snowden? Are Russia just
better at this? I doubt it.
I think both sides conduct themselves in a despicable manner so please dont call me a Putin apologist. Well, feel free actually,
I could'nt care less.
Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election
US interference:
COUNTRY OR STATE Dates of intervention Comments
VIETNAM l960-75 Fought South Vietnam revolt & North Vietnam; one million killed in longest U.S. war; atomic bomb threats in
l968 and l969.
CUBA l961 CIA-directed exile invasion fails.
GERMANY l961 Alert during Berlin Wall crisis.
LAOS 1962 Military buildup during guerrilla war.
142 more rows
the vietnam fiasco alone is enough to disqualify america from any criticism about interference in internal affairs
they practically destroyed the country
The pathetic way the media are pushing this big-bad-Russians meme is a little depressing.
This "hack" is totally fictional, the wikileaks e-mails were almost certainly that...leaks. As most o their output has been
over the years. For 95% of the Wikileaks existence there have been absolutely zero connections with "the Kremlin", in fact they
have leaked stuff damaging to Russia before now.
The Russian's did not hack the DNC, or rig the election, this is yet another example of the political establishment hysterically
pointing fingers and making up lies when their chosen side loses an election.
I remember how North Korea was blamed for Sony hack. I think they were even cut from the internet for a day and there was all
this talk of punishing them. And then later it came out that very likely wasn't North Korea. Only the news cycle already moved
on and nobody cared.
Traditionally, the best Cold Warriors have been right-wing liberals. In the absence of policies that concretely benefit the people
they engage in threat inflation and demagoguery.
In 90s US set all figures in Russia - from president to news program anchor. Elections of 96 were ripped by American "advisors"
so that Eltsyn with 3% rating "won" them. It's payback time.
And yet the so-called "Russian trolls" (which is apparently anyone who exercise a modicum of skepticism) seem to be winning here
at CiF based on the number of likes per comment, which is likely why the NSA sponsored propagandists and clueless dopes are getting
so increasingly shrill.
If you take a wider view, this is all really about keeping the Dems in the game, trying to undo the Trump validity and give them
another go in 4 or so years. Really, seems quite desperate that a man that allowed 270000 wild horses to be sold for horsemeat
this year across the border to Mexico, brought HC in to his own cabinet having said 'she will say anything and do nothing', knowing
what a nightmare that would make, and is going to watch his healthcare get ripped to shreds, needs more accomplishments in his
last year, aka Obama, ergo, let's investigate the evil russians and their female athletes with male DNA ( you would think I am
making this stuff up, but I am not ) ... Come on Grandma, where are you when we need you most
we must somehow, subvert the despicable populace that elected trump. we must erase from history the conceding of president elect
clinton - newpeak from the ministry of truth. we'll get her into the white house if it takes more cash, lies, and corruption.
after all, who needs democracy in the democratic party when we have big brother. democracy just confuses the members. we'll send
the despicables through the ministry of love to re-educate them, of course, this IS 1984 after all....we will vote for you, the
intelligentsia of the left knows what is best for you.
"Malicious cyber activity, specifically malicious cyber activity tied to our elections , has no place in the international
community. Unfortunately this activity is not new to Moscow. We've seen them do this for years ... The president has made it clear
to President Putin that this is unacceptable."
Note how carefully it specifies that it is cyber activity tied to the american elections that is inappropriate. I presume that
is simply to avoid openly saying that mass-surveillance by the US government of everyone's private email, and social network accounts
doesn't come under that "no place in the international community" phrase. You know, one does wonder how these people's faces don't
come off in shame when whinning about potential interference by foreign governemnts after a full 8 years or so of constant revelations
of permanent spying and mass-surveillance by the US government of international leaders and ordinary citizens worldwide.
So the DNC was hacked - so what. Hacking is so common these days as to be expected. A quick perusal of the internet provides some
SIGNIFICANT hacks that deserved some consternation:
9/4/07 The Chinese government hacked a noncritical Defense Department computer system in June, a Pentagon source told FOX News
on Tuesday.
Spring 2011 Foreign hackers broke into the Pentagon computer system this spring and stole 24,000 files - one of the biggest
cyber-attacks ever on the U.S. military,
On the 12th of July 2011, Booz Allen Hamilton the largest U.S. military defence contractor admitted that they had just suffered
a very serious security breach, at the hands of hacktivist group AntiSec.
5/28/13 The confidential version of a Defense Science Board report compiled earlier this year reportedly says Chinese hackers
accessed designs for more than two dozen of the U.S. military's most important and expensive weapon systems.
June 2014 The UK's National Crime Agency has arrested an unnamed young man over allegations that he breached the Department
of Defense's network last June.
1/12/15 The Twitter account for U.S. Central Command was suspended Monday after it was hacked by ISIS sympathizers (OK twitter
accounts shouldn't be a big deal. Why does US CentCom even HAVE a twitter account???)
5/6/15 OPM hack: China blamed for massive breach of US government data
And so the neocon propaganda machine trundles on, churning out this interesting material day after day. The elephant in the room
is that if you get hacked you have no knowledge of this until your private stuff is all over the internet, and the chances of
finding out who did it are zilch. Everyone in IT security knows this.
Another "fake news" story. Does anybody with a pulse really believe that Russia hacked the DNC? The US Security Services admitted
that it was NOT Russia; the likelihood is that the leaks were provided to Wikileaks by insiders within the US Administration -
they wanted to ensure that Hillary did not win. None of the actual revelations were covered by the MSM, and "the Russians did
it" was a convenient distraction.
All people that on earth do dwell have no clue who hacked the DNC to the amusing end that Podesta's e-mails ended up on the internet,
but it suits a dangerous political narrative to demonise Russia until it becomes plain logical to attack them.
YES YES let attack Russia, YES YES YES, Russia Russia we should carry on attacking Russia. We the journalists are well paid by
the man from Australia. YES YES we must to carry on attacking Russia and forget the shit happening in other countries. YES YES
it is our duty.
Election hacking: Obama orders 'full review' of Russia interference
And I guess Obama has also ordered the Guardian to do a full court press of anti-Russian propaganda, just judging by the articles
pumped out on today's rag alone.
The US government is seemingly attempting the "Big Lie" tactic of Joseph Goebbels and instigating support in the public for
war against Russia. By repeating the completely unsubstantiated allegations that Russia has somehow "interfered with the election"
they hope, without any genuine basis, to strong arm the public into accepting a further ramping of tensions and starting yet another
illegal war for profit.
There's nothing wrong with conducting the investigation, but shouldn't it have been done before accusing Russia?
And aren't all the people cited in the article political appointees, Democrats or avowed Trump enemies, and then there's closing,
" A spokesman for the director of national intelligence declined to comment."
Surely of all the Orders Obama might issue during his last weeks in office, why does he choose to give a stupid Order that effectively
makes US some sort of Banana Republic? This man was/is more hype than real! At a stroke of a pen he seriously undermines the integrity
of the US Electoral System. Whatever credibility was left has now been eroded by these constant and silly claims that somehow
Russians installed Trump as President. Doesn't that make Trump some sort of Russian Agent?
Meanwhile MSM keeps on streaming some fake news and theories and then Obama Orders US intelligence to dig deeper. This is lunacy!
Obama certainly understands that Russia is not the reason why Trump was elected. However, he wants to create new obstacles on
the way of normalization of relations between the US and Russia and make it more difficult for Trump.
However, Trump is not a weak man, not a skinny worm; and he can hit these opponents back so hard that international court for
them (for invasions into sovereign countries) will lead to their life sentences.
Only two weeks ago the Obama Administration publicly stated there was no evidence of cybersecurity breaches affecting the electoral
process,
as reported in the NYT :
The administration, in its statement, confirmed reports from the Department of Homeland Security and intelligence officials
that they did not see "any increased level of malicious cyberactivity aimed at disrupting our electoral process on Election
Day."
The administration said it remained "confident in the overall integrity of electoral infrastructure, a confidence that was
borne out." It added: "As a result, we believe our elections were free and fair from a cybersecurity perspective."
Is there any limit to the ridicolous, Mr. Obama? what is this? a tragicomic play of the inept?
Here we are with the most childish fabrication that it must be the Russians' fault if Trump won the election. I'll be laughing
for an entire cosmic era! And all this after US publically announced that they were going to launch a devastating acher attack
against the badies: the Russians, which of course didn't work out. Come on, this is more comedy that a serious play.
What probably is going on, the readers can gather by having a look at the numberless articles that are being published by maistream
media against the Russians.
Why this histeric insurgence of Russofobia? Couldn't it be that it is intolerable for the US and their allies to see the Russians
winning in Aleppo, and most of all restoring peace and tollerance among the population returning to their abbandoned homes.
I think Hillary, in part, lost the election due to all the fake news being pumped out by the mainstream corporate media, doing
her bidding. People are tired of it, along with all the corruption and lies that came to the surface through the likes of Wikileaks.
Trump is a terrible alternative, but the only alternative people were given, so many went with it.
Now we see fake news making out the Russians to be the bad guys again, pumping out story after story, trying to propagandize the
population into sucking up these new memes. Russia has its problems, and will always act in its own self-interest, but it's nothing
compared to the tactics the US uses, bullying countries around the world to pander to its own will, desperately trying to maintain
its Empire.
The scripture tells us those who live by the sword will perish by it.
America was in the interference of other countries' elections before its ugly 2016 presidential election. Remember Ukraine
and Secretary Hillary Clinton's employee Victoria F****the EU Nuland in Ukraine. Now we have the makings of some kind of conflict
with Russia over its alleged meddling in America's elections. More global tension= More cash flowing into the US equity market,
money printing by another means.
I'd be surprised if the Russians weren't trying to affect the outcome of the election. The Brits had a debate in Parliament on
Trump, Obama made threats to the UK on the Brexit vote, so who knows what we're all doing in each others elections behind closed
doors while we are clear to do so publically.
The MSM's absolute refusal to address the leaks in a meaningful way (other than the stuff about recipes) suggests to be no
one felt it a big deal at the time.
Obama could realise that Hillary's viewes on Putin and Russia did not help her at all. People are not that stupid, they see well,
use own brains and not so easily impressed by whatever CNN says to them.
John McAfee said that any organization sophisticated enough to do these hacks is also sophisticated enough to make it look as
though any country they want did it. So it could have been anyone.
It's reported today on Ars Technica : ThyssenKrupp suffered a "professional attack"
The steelmaker, which makes military subs, says it was targeted from south-east Asia.
..the design of its plants were penetrated by a "massive," coordinated attack which made off with an unknown amount of "technological
know-how and research."
Neoliberals are just desperately losing ideological competition at home and abroad. They cannot convince people that they are
right because it's not what's going on.
It does not matter what some others say, it's what really goes on matters.
But there is innate, basic self-interest in all people (that does not depend on education, ethnicity, race) and people know it
instinctively well. They will not go against it even if all around will tell otherwise.
I love how this has now become solid fact. No confirmation, nothing official but it is no common fact that the Russians interfered.
How many reports do we hear about US interference with foreign countries infastructure through covert means.
Meh. Seems like tampering happens all the time. How many elections in South America did the USA fix? How many in the middle
east and Africa? I think this "russian's did it" rhetoric is counterproductive as it is stopping Democrats from doing the introspective
needed to really understand why HRC lost the election.
Imagine if the shoe were on the other foot and there was credible evidence that the Russians had rigged the election in favor
of the Democrat. The right-wing echo chamber would be having seizures! These people are UTTER HYPOCRITES. And they would obviously
rather win with the help of a hostile foreign power than try to preserve the integrity of our elections.
Russia may or may not have hacked the DNC. I'd like to find out. I hope the DNC aren't enough of doofusses to assume this wouldn't
be in the realm of possibility.
I presume that the U.S. has its own group of hackers doing the same Worldwide. This is not a criticism; I would expect the U.S.
intelligence community to learn what our rivals, and even some of our friends, are up to.
This is getting to be pretty lame. I have doubts that "Russia" could interfere to any great extent with our elections any more
than we could with theirs. Sure, individuals or organizations, and more than likely in THIS country, could do so. And they have,
as we saw with the DNC and Sanders campaign (and vice versa). Let's not go into an almost inevitable nuclear war over what is
quite possibly "fake news".
Russia did this, Russia did that
its getting very boring now, you have lost all credibility
you have cried wolf to many times
stop trying to manipulate us
When will the Democrats get it? It wasn't the Russians, who are blamed for everything, including the weather, by desperate Western
failed leaders, but an unsuitable candidate in Clinton, which lost them the Election. Bernie Sanders would have walked it.
Regarding the notorious "fuck the EU " on the part of the US "diplomat" Victoria Nuland "the State Department and the White House
suggested that an assistant to the deputy prime minister of Russia Dmitry Rogozin was the source of the leak, which he denied
" Wiki
Good occasion to substantiate the accusation which ,substantiated or not,will remind the "useful idiots" of the "change of regime
" US policy and who started the Ukrainian crisis.
Boy, oh boy, fake news is everywhere just read this headline!
Election hacking: Obama orders 'full review' of Russia interference
Which states as fact there was interference by Russia and that the investigation is to determine how bad it was. NO EVIDENCE WHAT SO EVER has been offered by anyone that Russia interfered in any way. FAKE NEWS!!
Voting machine hacking is a very serious problem but you generally need physical access to a voting machine to hack it.
Anyone notice thousands of Russians hanging around in Detriot, Los Angeles, etc election HQs? How about Clinton drones?
If the DNC hadn't rigged the primary we'd be celebrating president-elect Bernie. If they hadn't rigged the general Hillary
would have lost by a landslide.
1000 Russian athletes were doping in the 2012 Olympics - but it's taken until now to realise it?!
Russia influenced the 2016 US election?!
Russia is presently "influencing" the German elections?!
Russia is killing civilians and destroying hospitals with impunity in Syria?!
etc
Wow! Russia is taking over the world, it must be stopped, can anyone save us? Obama? Trump? NATO?
Look out! Russian armies are massing on the border ready to sweep into Europe.......arrhhh!
"..ex-prime minister Anthony Charles Lynton Blair of the United Kingdom, and Hillary Rodham Clinton of the United States
of America, have formally announced a new transatlantic political party to be named: The Neoliberal Elite Party for bitter
anti-Brexiters and sore anti-Trumpettes.
Rather rich coming from my country which has interfered in elections around the world for decades. I suppose it's only cheating
if the other team does it.
Not that they'll find any evidence. Just another chapter in the sad saga of the Democrats unwillingness to admit they ran the
worst candidate & the worst campaign in recent memory. It's not our fault! Them dirty Russkies did it!
"... Joe McCarthy rose to corrosive prominence at the midpoint of the 20th century by riding hysteria and spurring it on. The demagoguery was fueled not only by opportunistic politicians but also by media outlets all too eager to damage the First Amendment and other civil liberties in the name of Americanism and anti-communism. ..."
"... Most Democratic leaders, for their part, seem determined to implicitly - or even explicitly - scapegoat the Russian government for the presidential election results. Rather than clearly assess the impacts of Hillary Clinton 's coziness with Wall Street, or even the role of the FBI director just before the election, the Democratic line seems bent on playing an anti-Russia card. ..."
This country went through protracted witch hunts during the McCarthy era. A lot of citizens -
including many government workers - had their lives damaged or even destroyed. The chill on the First
Amendment became frosty, then icy. Democracy was on the ropes.
Joe McCarthy rose to corrosive prominence at the midpoint of the 20th century by riding hysteria
and spurring it on. The demagoguery was fueled not only by opportunistic politicians but also by
media outlets all too eager to damage the First Amendment and other civil liberties in the name of
Americanism and anti-communism.
Today, congressional leaders of both parties seem glad to pretend that Section 501 of the Intelligence
Authorization Act is just fine, rather than an odious and dangerous threat to precious constitutional
freedoms. On automatic pilot, many senators will vote aye without a second thought.
Yet by rights, with growing grassroots
opposition , this terrible provision should be blocked by legislators in both parties, whether
calling themselves progressives, liberals, libertarians, Tea Partyers or whatever, who don't want
to chip away at cornerstones of the Bill of Rights.
Most Democratic leaders, for their part, seem determined to implicitly - or even explicitly
- scapegoat the Russian government for the presidential election results. Rather than clearly assess
the impacts of Hillary Clinton
's coziness with Wall Street, or even the role of the FBI director just before the election,
the Democratic line seems bent on playing an anti-Russia card.
Perhaps in the mistaken belief that they can gain some kind of competitive advantage over the
GOP by charging Russian intervention for
Donald Trump 's victory, the
Democrats are playing with fire. The likely burn victims are the First Amendment and other precious
freedoms.
From Wikipedia article
Communist propaganda.
"....the term "propaganda" broadly refers to any publication or campaign aimed at promoting a cause
and is/was used for official purposes by most communist-oriented governments. Rooted in Marxist thought,
the propaganda of communism is viewed by its proponents as the vehicle for spreading the enlightenment
of working class people and pulling them away from the propaganda of their oppressors that reinforces
their exploitation, such as religion or consumerism. A Bolshevik theoretician, Nikolai Bukharin, in
his The ABC of Communism wrote:[1] The State propaganda of communism becomes in the long run a means
for the eradication of the last traces of bourgeois propaganda dating from the old régime; and it is
a powerful instrument for the creation of a new ideology, of new modes of thought, of a new outlook
on the world.
Similarly neoliberal propaganda is the vehicle of spreading neoliberal ideas and "neoliberal rationality"
inside the country and all over the world the reinforces key postulated of neoliberalism -- unlimited
"free market" for transnational corporations, deregulation, suppression of wages via "free movement
of labor" and outsourcing and offshoring, decimation of labor unions and organized labor in general
(atomization of working force"), "greed is good" memo, etc.
Like Communist propaganda during Brezhnev rule, neoliberal propaganda after 2008 is in crisis, and
it is natural to expect that neoliberal propagandists will resort to heavy handed tactic of McCarthyism
in a vain attempt to restore its influence.
Wall Street On Parade closely examined the report issued by PropOrNot, its related Twitter page,
and its registration as a business in New Mexico, looking for "tells" as to the individual(s) behind
it. We learned quite a number of interesting facts.
As part of its McCarthyite tactics, PropOrNot
has developed a plugin to help readers censor material from the websites it has blacklisted. It calls
that its YYYCampaignYYY. In that effort,
it lists an official address of 530-B Harkle Road, Suite 100, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87505. That's
one of those agent addresses that serve as a virtual address for the creation of limited liability
corporations that want to keep their actual principals secret. The address has dozens of businesses
associated with it. There should also be a corresponding business listed in the online archives of
the business registry at the Secretary of State of New Mexico. However, no business with the words
Propaganda or PropOrNot or YYY exist in
the
New Mexico business registry, suggesting PropOrNot is using a double cloaking device to shield
its identity by registering under a completely different name.
PropOrNot's Twitter page provides a "tell" that its report may simply be a hodgepodge compilation
of other people's research that was used to arrive at its dangerous assertion that critical thinkers
across America are a clandestine network of Russian propaganda experts. Its
Tweet on
November 7 indicates that the research of Peter Pomerantsev, a Senior Fellow at the Legatum Institute
in London, who has also been cooperating
on research with the Information Warfare Project of the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA)
in Washington, D.C, inspired its efforts.
According to SourceWatch, the Legatum Institute "is a right-wing think tank promoting 'free markets,
free minds, and free peoples.' " SourceWatch adds that the Legatum Institute "is a project founded
and funded by the Legatum Group, a private investment group based in Dubai." According to the Internet
Archive known as the Wayback Machine, the Center for European Policy Analysis
previously
indicated it was an affiliate of the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA). We can see why
they might want to remove that affiliation now that the Koch brothers have been exposed as funders
of a very real network of interrelated websites and nonprofits.
According to
Desmog, NCPA has received millions of dollars in funding from right wing billionaires like the
Koch brothers and their related trusts along with the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the
Sarah Scaife Foundation
(heir to the Mellon fortune) along with corporations like ExxonMobil.
CEPA's InfoWar Project is currently listed as a "Related Project" at PropOrNot's website. Indeed,
there are numerous references within the report issued by PropOrNot that sound a familiar refrain
to Pomerantsev and/or CEPA. Both think the U.S. Congress is in denial on the rising dangers of Russian
propaganda and want it to take more direct counter measures. Pages 31 and 32 of the PropOrNot report
urge the American people to demand answers from the U.S. government about how much it knows about
Russian propaganda. The report provides a detailed list of specific questions that should be asked.
In the August 2016 report
released by CEPA (the same month the PropOrNot Twitter account was established) Pomerantsev and his
co-author, Edward Lucas, recommend the establishment of "An international commission under the auspices
of the Council of Europe on the lines of the Venice Commission" to "act as a broadcasting badge of
quality. If an official body cannot be created, then an NGO could play a similar advisory role."
On its website, PropOrNot recommends
a much stronger censorship of independent media websites, writing:
"We call on the American public to Obtain news from actual reporters,
who report to an editor and are professionally accountable for mistakes. We suggest NPR, the BBC,
the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Buzzfeed News, VICE, etc, and especially
your local papers and local TV news channels. Support them by subscribing, if you can!"
CounterPunch
was quick to point out that the Washington Post's former publisher, Philip Graham, supervised
a disinformation network for the CIA during the Cold War, known as Mockingbird. Graham was reported
to have died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at his farm in 1963.
CEPA's website
indicates that on May 10 it hosted Senators Chris Murphy and Rob Portman to discuss "Russia's
sophisticated disinformation campaign." CEPA's President, A. Wess Mitchell is quoted as saying: "What's
missing is a significant effort on the part of the U.S. government. Not nearly enough has been done."
Six days after Washington Post reporter Craig Timberg ran his first PropOrNot story, he
published another article indicating that "Congressional negotiators on Wednesday approved an
initiative to track and combat foreign propaganda amid growing concerns that Russian efforts to spread
'fake news' and disinformation threaten U.S. national security." Quoted in the story was none other
than the very Senator who had met with CEPA in May on that very topic, Senator Rob Portman.
Portman is quoted as follows: "This propaganda and disinformation threat is real, it's growing,
and right now the U.S. government is asleep at the wheel." Among Portman's
top three donors to his 2016 Senate race were Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, two Wall Street behemoths
that would very much like to pivot the national debate to anything other than Wall Street power and
corruption.
"... Sorry, Brian, but you and your ilk sold your credibility for a full investment position in Hillary and Globalism. Your only recourse now is to attack and try to delegitamize those who call you out. ..."
Now this is rich. Brian Williams, the disgraced ex-NBC journalist who was literally fired for
falsely reporting that he was in a helicopter during the Iraq war that took on combatant fire, is
now going on a crusade against "fake news." On his MSNBC show last night, Williams decided to attack
retired General Flynn and Donald Trump for spreading "fake news" via their twitter accounts.
... ... ...
nuubee •Dec 9, 2016 11:42 AM
I'm going to start reading The Onion and taking it seriously now.
nope-1004 -> Pladizow •Dec 9, 2016 11:48 AM
At least he wasn't in real harms way, like Hillary, when she landed under sniper fire.
It's like [neo]Liberals are genetically compelled or something to accuse others of what they
themselves are actually doing. I've never seen anything this universally true for an entire group
of people suffering the same mental illness ([neo]liberalism).
- "A terrible moment a dozen years back during the invasion of Iraq when the helicopter
we were traveling in was forced down after being hit by an RPG." - NBC Nightly News, January
30, 2015
- "It was no more than 120 seconds later that the helicopter in front of us was hit." -
Brian Williams to Tim Russert on CNBC,
March 2005
- "I was instead following the aircraft" [that was struck by the RPG]. - NBC Nightly News,
Wednesday February 5, 2015
- Williams' original [March 26, 2003, NBC News] report indicated that a helicopter in front
of his was hit. -
PolitiFact
- NBC publishes a book [in 2003], "Operation Iraqi Freedom," in which they describe Williams'
experience, implying that his helicopter sustained fire. -
PolitiFact
- May 2008: Williams writes another [NBC News] blog, responding to a note from a soldier
who he met in Iraq. In this post, Williams indicates that he was in a helicopter that took
fire. -
PolitiFact
- "I've done some ridiculously stupid things under that banner, like being in a helicopter
I had no business being in Iraq with rounds coming into the airframe," he said [to Alec Baldwin
in March 2014] -
PolitiFact
- "We were in some helicopters. What we didn't know was, we were north of the invasion.
We were the northernmost Americans in Iraq. We were going to drop some bridge portions across
the Euphrates so the Third Infantry could cross on them. Two of the four helicopters were hit,
by ground fire, including the one I was in, RPG and AK-47. - Williams to Letterman on March
26, 2013 -
PolitiFact.
- In the initial NBC broadcast where he described his 2003 Iraq reporting mission, embattled
NBC anchor Brian Williams falsely claimed that "we saw the guy . . . [who] put a round through
the back of a chopper," which he further and incorrectly claimed was "the Chinook [helicopter]
in front of us." -
Breitbart
- "We flew over a bridge. He waved to the lead pilot very kindly. With that someone else
removed the tarp, stood up, and put a round through the back of a chopper missing the rear
rotor by four or five feet." - To Tom Brokaw on March 26, 2003 -
Breitbart
- "[Y]ou go back to Iraq, and I looked down the tube of an RPG that had been fired at us
and it hit the chopper in front of ours." - Williams to Fairfield University in 2007 -
Ace of Spades
SEAL Team 6 Tale
- "We have some idea which of our special operations teams carried this out," Williams said
on "The Late Show With David Letterman" the day after the raid [May 2, 2011]. "It happens to
be a team I flew into Baghdad with, on the condition that I would never speak of what I saw
on the aircraft, what aircraft we were on, what we were carrying, or who we were after." -
Huffington Post
- "Now, people might be hearing about SEAL Team 6," Williams said the next night, May 3,
2011, on "Nightly News." "I happen to have the great honor of flying into Baghdad with them
at the start of the war." -
Huffington Post
- "I flew into Baghdad, invasion plus three days, on a blackout mission at night with elements
of SEAL Team 6, and I was told not to make any eye contact with them or initiate any conversation,"
Williams said. (Three days after the U.S. invasion would have been March 22, 2003, not April
9, 2003, which was the day Williams broadcasted from the Baghdad airport.) - To David Letterman
in May of 2012 -
Huffinton Post
- In the 2012 "Late Show" appearance, Williams also recalled carrying a box of Wheat Thins,
which he said a hungry special operator dug into with a "hand the size of a canned ham." They
got to talking, and Williams told the commando how much he admired his knife. "Darned if that
knife didn't show up at my office a couple weeks later," Williams told Letterman. -
Huffington Post
- "About six weeks after the Bin Laden raid, I got a white envelope and in it was a thank-you
note, unsigned," Williams said on "Letterman" in January 2013. "And in it was a piece of the
fuselage of the blown-up Black Hawk in that courtyard. Sent to me by one of my friends." -
Huffington Post
- In February 2014, Williams elaborated on the helicopter gift in another media appearance,
this time on the sports talk show hosted by Dan Patrick. "It's one of the toughest things to
get," he said, "and the president has a piece of it as well It's made of a material most people
haven't seen or held in their hands." -
Huffington Post
Fall of the Berlin Wall
- "I've been so fortunate," he said during a 2008 forum at the Ronald Reagan Presidential
Library. "I was at the Brandenburg Gate the night the wall came down." -
CNN
- "Here's a fact: 25 years ago tonight, Tom Brokaw and I were at the Berlin Wall," Williams
said at a gala held on November 8, 2014. -
CNN
The Pope
- "I was there during the visit of the pope," Williams said [in 2002]. -
CNN
- While delivering the commencement address at Catholic University that year [2004], Williams
said the "highlight" of his time at the school "was in this very doorway, shaking hands with
the Holy Father during his visit to this campus." -
CNN
Katyusha Rocket Fire
- "There were Katyusha rockets passing just beneath the helicopter I was riding in," he
told a student interviewer from Fairfield (Conn.) University that year [2007]. -
Washington Post
- "When you look out of your hotel window in the French Quarter and watch a man float by
face down, when you see bodies that you last saw in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, and swore to yourself
that you would never see in your country," Williams told Eisner [in 2006], who suggested in
the interview that Williams emerged from former NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw's shadow with his
Katrina coverage. -
USA Today
- In Williams's telling, the pathos of the scene extended to his crew's access to food.
"We were desperate for food and drink. But not like the people we were seeing in the streets,"
he said in the documentary "In His Own Words: Brian Williams on Hurricane Katrina." -
Washington Post
Puppy Rescue
- "I remember one such house fire - the structure was fully involved with flames and smoke.
I was wearing a breathing apparatus, conducting a search on my hands and knees, when I felt
something warm, squishy and furry on the floor of a closet. I instinctively tucked it in my
coat." -
October 2011, USA Today
- "All I ever did as a volunteer fireman was once save two puppies." -
January 2007, Esquire
Christmas Tree Robbery
In a 2005 interview with Esquire magazine, Williams said a thief drew on him in the 1970s
- leaving him "looking up at a thug's snub-nosed .38 while selling Christmas trees out of the
back of a truck." –
NY Post
Quitting College
- "One day, I'm at the copy machine in the White House and Walter Mondale comes up behind
me and clears his throat. A classic throat-clearing. I thought people only did that in movies,
but it turns out vice-presidents do it, too. Anyway, it makes for an exceptionally good morning,
and I run from the White House to the GW campus for class. I'm still wearing my West Wing hard
pass on a chain, and when my professor sees it, he admits that he's only been to the White
House on the public tour. And I thought to myself, This is costing me money that I don't have,
and I'm a young man in too much of a hurry. So I left school." - Brian Williams to
Esquire , 2005
- But then a friend invited him to drive to Washington, D.C., for a weekend, and everything
changed. Smitten with the city and its youthful energy, Williams decided to move there. He
transferred what credits he could from Brookdale to Catholic University and took a job in the
public relations department to help pay his expenses. He landed an internship at the White
House, and when that ended, he answered an ad for a clerking job at a broadcasting association.
- 2009,
New Jersey-Star Ledger
It's just amazing what a shameless loser this guy has always been. I was surprised that they even
fired him for contriving this story, that is after all, what they do. The whole idea behind embedding
journalists was to make them part of the team, which prevents subjective journalism (not that
there was a risk of that happening with him) and turning the war into a fictionalized patriotic
orgy of bullshit reality TV. This was a huge shame to the profession of journalism before you
factor in the lies and perpetual fabrication.
The only reason he was fired was due to the fact that we were in the throws of a giant national
masturbation frenzy over military aggression and the military and it's endeavors became untouchable
overnight. When they got pissed off during that time frame it definitely mattered, not so much
now. Now they are just screwing them and everybody else. These news anchors are absolutely disgusting,
just about every one of them. They all look like pumpkins and hookers. They need to lay off the
hairspray and man-makeup before throwing themselves into 170 degree acidic geyser (you don't want
it too hot).
These ratfuck pressitutes haven't noticed Clinton lost the election because we stopped buying
the MSM lies nothing there that's worthwhile to read based on his stupidity here.
Brian Willians has been discredited and should either retire or find another job. But also, and
I'm serious about this, Pizzagate is a ridiculous made-up bullshit story that is distracting everyone
from the real issues and the way that the Dems have fucked our whole civilization for real, not
just a few kids that likely never even happened.
Even if pizzagate is real it is far less important than the many real ways in which the elites
have fucked us all.
Brian Williams is a member of the Rockefeller/CFR along with Mika Brzezinski and Charles "Joe"
Scarborough. See member lists at cfr dot org.
"The fact that we will not reestablish [another] Walter Cronkite, because of technology...
does not mean we can't have people who are trusted. Brian Williams is sitting here , Charlie Gibson
and Katie Couric..."
With over a century of government schooling to dumb down the population, I'd say their lack of
tact is fairly well warranted, given the average length of attention span can likely be measured
in hours.
All we can do is tell the unawake to turn off the idiot box, stop ingesting Kellogg's etc etc.
Every day we win a few more battles, and one day come to realize the enemy are all lying on the
ground, motionless.
Obama orders review of cyber attacks on 2016 election – adviser
President Barack Obama directed US intelligence agencies to conduct a full review of cyber
attacks and foreign intervention into the 2016 election and deliver a report before he leaves
office, homeland security adviser Lisa Monaco said on Friday. Monaco told reporters the results
of the report would be shared with lawmakers and others. Obama leaves office on January 20. (Reuters)
remember, this has nothing to do with fake news. This has everything to do with competition. THe
MSM is getting too much competition from independent bloggers and opinions that don't follow their
narrative. Their goal now......figure out some way to shut them down.
And that's the entirety of the issue: if McCain had won in 2008, we'd have been hearing about
fake news then. It really is just that we had the audacity to disagree with the legacy media--who
for the first time in my memory broke every rule they had for themselves in appearing to cover
all sides--to try to corral the US public into voting for their candidate of choice. Even Fox
News was anti-Trump, for fuck's sake: did they not realize that gave away the game?!
Ironically, I feel if the media hadn't been so in-the-bag for Clinton from the start, I wouldn't
be surprised if she had won. The media lost her A LOT of votes by making it look like, whether
true or not, they had been bought off. (Yeah, I know they were. But they aren't supposed to APPEAR
it; Clinton should ask for a refund, in my opinion.)
So yeah; look forward to media licensing being floated, and somehow requiring credentials for
journalists (which will end with needing to be 'certified,' which will inevitably require an expensive
several year trip to your university daycare of choice.)
Will it work? Actually, for once, I have hope: I don't think it will. In fact, I suspect fairly
soon, someone is going to notice that Thomas Payne was probably the first purveyor of "fake news"
in this country, and that's a fucked up thing to be against as an American.
BS. If McCain won in 2008 we'd already be in an actual fucking hot war with Russia. 2008 was a
wet-dream for Soros and his boys. They got to win big or win FUCKING BIG.
The FBI found State Dept emails showing that Hillary Clinton went to "Orgy Island" at least
6 times - and at least once in the company of convicted pedo Jeffrey Epstein. (Bill Clinton went
there "at least 20 times" - those pesky progressives!)
You are the epitome of and exactly exactly the type of vile, disgusting, reprehensible Scum
at the bottom of the Swap. A bottom feeder at best.
The Presstitute Centrailized Media has been exposed for the farce that it is. The obvious denial
of it simply exposes the Sociopathic / Psychopathic Nature of you vile Scum Fucks.
Accept it. The Public has lost all respect for the Centrailzed Industrial Complex Presstitiute
Media.
The Libtards are desperate to attack Russia and start WW III, bailout Wall Street again and keep
the Swamp parasites in power in DC to keep the gravy train flowing.
MSM and Dem lies get Yuuuger every day...it's almost laughable but they are actually very dangerous
people and thus, we need to protect the 2nd to protect us from them if they get to desperate.
There has never been an actual media in America to begin with --- just go back and check out
the trash that the Pulitzer fellow wrote, and then realize why that prize is awarded to the riff-raff
who usually receive it.
Sorry, Brian, but you and your ilk sold your credibility for a full investment position
in Hillary and Globalism. Your only recourse now is to attack and try to delegitamize those who
call you out.
The gig is up for these MSM pantywaists and they know it. The only way they maintain viewership
is if the gov't shuts down the internet, which it may. These little fucktards like williams are
some of the biggest purveyors of bullshit in the history of mankind and they know we are on to
their game. No one is going back to believing anything these assholes say except for the most
partisan, retarded, misinformed of the US population.
the news organizations are all propped up to keep the global culture industry operational. If
they were to be displaced by conscious consumers of worth while real news, like the kind that's
now starting to make it's way through the alternative media, they would only exist for viewers
who were being groomed for social unrest. Oh wait, that's what their doing now isn't it?
This is the opportunity to wake people up that you care about. If nothing else you can show that
the news is all coordinated. There is no possibility that in a free competitive market every org
would repeat the same message from the same perspective.
I have taken advantage of the oligarchs sloppiness. People who thought I was crazy two years
ago are now acknowledging I was right. I have delivered news to people and two weeks later it
was a breaking story. Take the opportunity and bring a few more people over.
The only truly fake news is the US MSM. This bullshit that is called "news" is filled with omissions,
distortions, half truths, bald faced lies and fabrications. This is the "official narrative" the
Kool Aid that we are all supposed to drink. Remember how the MSM colluded with the Bush Administration's
neocons to sell the bullshit Iraq WMD story that was presented to the UN by Colin Powell? Total
bullshit. How can anyone believe anything that is fed to us from the MSM.
Ironic but the guy I'm going to tell you about was featured on 60 minutes. You know what I
love is when the US State Department or the MSM quotes the UK Britain-based Syrian Observatory
for Human Rights. This is a little old man in a dingy apartment in a slum Arab neighborhood in
London. This old fucking guy claims to know whats going on in Syria. Actually this is a neocon
propaganda mill for the CIA It's comments, suggestions and conclusions are solely based upon
an official narrative created by the CIA and sold to us through the MSM.
Look at the pre-election coverage and non-stop polling data talked about by all the MSM boneheads
including this Brian Williams jack off. Donald Trump was continously slammed, over and over again
by *all of them.*The exception was Sean Hannity. Now look at the partial list of donors to crooked
Hillary's campaign.
The list of donors to the Clinton campaign included many of the most powerful media institutions
in the country - among the donors: Comcast (which owns NBC, and its cable sister channels, such
as MSNBC); James Murdoch of News Corporation (owner of Fox News and its sister stations, among
many other media holdings); Time Warner (CNN, HBO, scores of other channels); Bloomberg; Reuters;
Viacom; Howard Stringer (of CBS News); AOL (owner of Huffington Post); Google; Twitter; The Washington
Post Company; George Stephanopoulos (host of ABC News' flagship Sunday show); PBS; PRI; the Hearst
Corporation and others (
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/37451-the-clinton-foundation-and-the-... ).
Trump is correct when he says the US media is crooked. It's all fucking fake news!!
Post election- I now watch local news for traffic and weather in the morning. But fuck them
I will not listen to the MSM talking heads or anything else on the crooked MSM. To know whats
going on in the world I now watch RT which presents an objective and honest perspective of what's
really going on in the world. Of course they call RT fake news, or Russian propaganda. All I can
say is they can go fuck themselves! I am sick and tired of the lies and bullshit which is the
official US narrative as presented by our 100% crooked MSM!
The real fake news is presented by the liars in our MSM!
Lol makes no difference now ... I left the MSM, never read it anymore.
I am no longer misinformed by them - that's a bonus.
I now prefer news from other nations because domestically it is all the fucking same from the
libtards and progressives of more people murdered because of some shit they created. Still get
drug addicts committing crime just like all them illegal immigrants because with no money you
have to commit a crime to exist. We all know that domestically your bankers are robbing you and
that the politicians are lying pieces of shit.
So why would I want to read what I already know? Nope don't need it.
Bye, bye NBC and the rest of you I can predict what the stories you will run with tomorrow
because they are the same fucking lies like the past 30 years.
Attack the MSM by attacking their ability to sell advertising.
"That newspaper you are advertising in has been wrong on everything, from going into Iraq to
recommending that loser Hillary Clinton to the final election results. If you are advertising
in that dishonest discredited rag, your product or service is being tarnished by association.
"
"Just watch President Elect Trump's Thank You Tour speech. Tens of thousands of people loudly
booed the press and the media that were there. You really want to spend your money buying ads
from those discredited losers?"
The neocons and fascist Democrat factions are joining forces looks like and as desperate as can
be. They've lied since day one, bombed RNC offices, beat innocent people up at Trump rallys, published
non-stop fake news, and now pull the "Russian agent" theory out of their closet.
Most Americans laugh at these nuts but I think they are very scary and serious since they have
alot of money invested in Queeb Hillary and war with Russia.
The Washington Post ( fake news organization) is reporting that the CIA secretly informed the
senate last week that there was Russian interference in our election and that it was Russia's
goal to ensure the election of Donald Trump. Apparently the house was informed in September and
was questioned if this should be made public and the Republicams said no, according to the Washington
Post - the source identified himself as " DNC in deep shit" . /Sarc.
Rachel Maddow was gleefully reporting on this tonight, as if it somehow vindicated her and
her morally bankrupt colleagues from the fact that they should have been reporting on this rather
than the Russians, since it is an American election and it is their job to investigate and report
the news.
Of course Obama has decided to keep this information secret, although, 7 "Democratic " senators
were requesting that the Obama administration released PARTS of the findings of the investigation
which can only lead one to question which PARTS they would prefer to keep from the American public
and why. It also is a concern of national security that national secrets are ending up on the
Washington Post- maybe they received this information from Russia.
Mitch McConell was reported to have been dismissive of the allegations as a result of the lack
of agreement over the evidence among the 17 security agencies involved, the lack of any source
directly linking the Russian government to releasing DNC hacked emails to the Wikileaks
This also begs to question Rachel Maddow on her lack of outrage of the behavior of the DNC in
colluding with the press and rigging the primary. As if to say, since Russia revealed the information
and the wrong doing of the DNC, it is not a question of if the behavior of the DNC was just or
unjust.
Nor does it vindicate any Hillary supporter, it does not legitimize what the DNC, the press,
or Hillary Clinton did.
Leave it to the incompetent Washington Post and MSNBC and Rachel Maddow to completely miss
the ball again.
Is it surprising to anyone that Russia did not wish for world war 3?
We don't have to be too concerned about fake news pumped out by Russia and other evil doers. That
job is being well handled already by NBC, CNN, the New York Times, and others.
In this post-truth world, these openly left-biased media organizations can rival Pravada of
the old Soviet Union in their laughable news reports, lack of integrity, and willingness to suppress
news they don't want known while publishing outright propaganda.
In a democracy where citizens must make informed decisions about governments, politicians and
issues, it seems to me that the people behind these corrupt media outlets are just debasing their
country; I imagine they at least get well paid for their treachery.
Curious how, having destroyed their own credibility and lost so many viewers and readers, these
organizations are now attacking their new, smaller divergent rivals on the internet.
The Liberal Leftist and the MSM created the terms Alt-Right and Fake News to distort real news
and make them fit into their political agenda! They use this to discredit Conservatives in an
effort to shut down Alternative and Conservatist News Media, especially on the Internet and Talk
Radio to end competition! They want Free Speech for the Left and Censorship for the Right! The
truth is that people discovered their plot and it backfired!!!
Mainstream media lost all credibility with We the People!!!
"... All of the "The Russians are Coming" nonsense is coming from Democrat party organs and mouthpieces. Not Trump and his media allies. ..."
"... An excellent article from Mark. This Alexandra Chalupa sounds like a real piece of work. These Cold Warriors seem to have red-colored glasses and see commies everywhere they look. ..."
"... Of course, there was that old experiment ( Kohler et al ) where they had people wearing different colored goggles for some time, then asked participants to take them off. And what happened? The participants continued to see in those hues. ..."
"... Wait a second, so there was ..."
"... CIA has been whipping ethnic Ukies into a patriotic frenzy for decades with social clubs that seep revanchist propaganda. ..."
"... HR 6393: "(Sec. 501) This title establishes an executive branch interagency committee to counter active measures by the Russian Federation to exert covert influence over peoples and governments (with the role of the Russian Federation hidden or not acknowledged publicly) through front groups, covert broadcasting, media manipulation, disinformation or forgeries, funding agents of influence, incitement, offensive counterintelligence, assassinations, or terrorist acts. The committee shall expose falsehoods, agents of influence, corruption, human rights abuses, terrorism, and assassinations carried out by the security services or political elites of the Russian Federation or their proxies." ..."
"... Plus, that will add $160 million, IIRC, to The Deficit. ..."
"... Two things this article curiously doesn't seem to mention. The first is Victoria Nuland, who must be a close Hillary confidante, and architect of the coup in Ukraine ..."
"... So your food for thought is that the Russian state behaves rationally in the face of an aggressive military power? Of course, they are hacking everything. If they weren't before the NSA revelations (where the U.S. vacuums up everything and then has no safeguards on what they grab; Congress has had testimony about NSA employees using their power to stalk people), they were afterwards. ..."
"... Here's some food for thought. John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Hillary Clinton all tried to make a country of 145 million or so people with numerous internal problems a major campaign platform. Not one of them is President. Could there be a connection? ..."
"... As one of the people who consistently calls bull hockey about the claims that the wikileaks releases of the DNC and Podesta emails are the results of Russian government hackers, I will hereby agree with the idea that Russia is hacking everything they can get their hands on. Mind you I believe that every major government from the US to China to Germany to India are hacking everything they can get their hands on. And that every government knows that about all the rest. As far as I am concerned anyone who doesn't believe that is beyond naive. ..."
"... But thinking that every major government had access to Clinton's emails, Boeing's files, and knows what internet videos Obama/May/Merkel/Putin/Castro have accessed more than once is not the same thing as thinking they are stupid enough or have decent strategic reasons to make that public knowledge by releasing damaging but not destroying emails concerning the massive stupidity and arrogance of one candidate for President and her core people. ..."
"... There is only one reason that the meme about Fake News is being pushed now – the people who have been pushing fake news for awhile to promote their agendas have lost the control they thought they had over the public and now worry about them rebelling. If fake news were important Judith Miller wouldn't have a job or a book deal and the opportunity to promote that book. Hell Murdoch wouldn't have a media empire. ..."
"... I don't know why so many so-called movers and shakers want war with Russia, but it is clear that anyone getting in the way of that goal is now in the cross hairs. ProporNOT may be more about Ukrainian support, but the people who promoted them are about the reasons it was being used in the first place. ..."
"... Eastern European fascists running propaganda web sites for the Whappo, indeed. ..."
"... If you read Matt Stoller's excellent piece from The Atlantic ..."
"... I don't see "Banana Republican" Trump as a fascist - he is in many ways an exemplar of Caudillismo , a charismatic, populist, but authoritarian oligarch. ..."
"... Nance used fake news about Clinton speeches to propagate the fake news that the Podesta emails were fake. ..."
"... Was amused to see that naturalnews (one of the sites listed in propornot – it looks like I guess a right wing alternative medicine type site) is offering a $10k reward for unmasking propornot but I don't think anyone's ever going to be able to collect. ..."
"... Why? Because they take the site seriously on its claim of being composed of 30 members and will only pay out for the identities of at least ten. I think it's just one, maybe two guys. ..."
"... There are dots to connect – the WP article, Congressional Section 501 activity, Senators McCain/Graham "leadership"; and most recently, Hillary's comments. Suspect coordination. Connect the dots. And then search for a motive. ..."
"... The national security state is concerned that Trump will seek mutually beneficial agreements with Russia. For evidence of the power of the national "security" state a tour of the Pentagon is not necessary. Tour Tyson Corner, Virginia, instead, for starters. ..."
"... And once Trump has established these agreements there will then be no stopping several Eastern European countries + Germany (of course) realizing where their economic interests really lie. Does anyone really believe that Germany is going to let itself be turned into an irradiated wasteland just to please a bunch of neocon paranoids ? ..."
"... That's what the neocons, the MIC, and all their shills, and enablers truly fear. Paradoxically this ludicrous attempt to revive McCarthyism may well end up actually ending the Cold War for good & all 25 years after it should have ended. ..."
"... From the article: "It's now been a few days, and the shock and disgust is turning to questions about how to fight back-and who we should be fighting against." ..."
"... How many people, world-wide, are involved and invested in the whole "taking over everything" machinery of "state security" and espionage and corporate hegemony? And who is this "we" who should be fighting? ..."
"... This book provides a detailed account of the ways in which the CIA penetrated and influenced a vast array of cultural organizations, through its front groups and via friendly philanthropic organizations like the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations. The author, Frances Stonor Saunders, details how and why the CIA ran cultural congresses, mounted exhibits, and organized concerts. The CIA also published and translated well-known authors who toed the Washington line, sponsored abstract art to counteract art with any social content and, throughout the world, subsidized journals that criticized Marxism, communism, and revolutionary politics and apologized for, or ignored, violent and destructive imperialist U.S. policies. ..."
"... The CIA was able to harness some of the most vocal exponents of intellectual freedom in the West in service of these policies, to the extent that some intellectuals were directly on the CIA payroll. Many were knowingly involved with CIA "projects," and others drifted in and out of its orbit, claiming ignorance of the CIA connection after their CIA sponsors were publicly exposed during the late 1960s and the Vietnam war, after the turn of the political tide to the left. ..."
"... U.S. and European anticommunist publications receiving direct or indirect funding included Partisan Review, Kenyon Review, New Leader, Encounter and many others. Among the intellectuals who were funded and promoted by the CIA were Irving Kristol, Melvin Lasky, Isaiah Berlin, Stephen Spender, Sidney Hook, Daniel Bell, Dwight MacDonald, Robert Lowell, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, and numerous others in the United States and Europe. In Europe, the CIA was particularly interested in and promoted the "Democratic Left" and ex-leftists, including Ignacio Silone, Stephen Spender, Arthur Koestler, Raymond Aron, Anthony Crosland, Michael Josselson, and George Orwell. The CIA, under the prodding of Sidney Hook and Melvin Lasky, was instrumental in funding the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a kind of cultural NATO that grouped together all sorts of "anti-Stalinist" leftists and rightists. They were completely free to defend Western cultural and political values, attack "Stalinist totalitarianism" and to tiptoe gently around U.S. racism and imperialism. Occasionally, a piece marginally critical of U.S. mass society was printed in the CIA-subsidized journals. What was particularly bizarre about this collection of CIA-funded intellectuals was not only their political partisanship, but their pretense that they were disinterested seekers of truth, iconoclastic humanists, freespirited intellectuals, or artists for art's sake, who counterposed themselves to the corrupted "committed" house "hacks" of the Stalinist apparatus. ..."
"... It is impossible to believe their claims of ignorance of CIA ties. How could they ignore the absence in the journals of any basic criticism of the numerous lynchings throughout the southern United States during the whole period? How could they ignore the absence, during their cultural congresses, of criticism of U.S. imperialist intervention in Guatemala, Iran, Greece, and Korea that led to millions of deaths? How could they ignore the gross apologies of every imperialist crime of their day in the journals in which they wrote? They were all soldiers: some glib, vitriolic, crude, and polemical, like Hook and Lasky; others elegant essayists like Stephen Spender or self-righteous informers like George Orwell. Saunders portrays the WASP Ivy League elite at the CIA holding the strings, and the vitriolic Jewish ex-leftists snarling at leftist dissidents. When the truth came out in the late 1960s and New York, Paris, and London "intellectuals" feigned indignation at having been used, the CIA retaliated. Tom Braden, who directed the International Organizations Branch of the CIA, blew their cover by detailing how they all had to have known who paid their salaries and stipends (397-404). ..."
"... I have no answers for "what is to be done." ..."
"... It seems inevitable that perversion and corruption and greed will always eventually "trump" decency and comity, once a certain size and composition of a human population has been reached. ..."
"... One may hope that the general principle of eventual incompetence that seems to apply to even the Deep State activities might become more immanent. ..."
"... Dems didn't lose this elections because of "fake news". Dems lost because they did not prosecute the bankers who caused the 2008 financial crash, who fraudulently foreclosed on homes and are still engaged in fraud (see: Wells Fargo). imo. ..."
Great article but I'm unsure about the conclusion. ""This is the world the Washington Post
is bringing back to its front pages. And the timing is incredible-as if Bezos' rag has taken upon
itself to soften up the American media before Trump moves in for the kill. And it's all being
done in the name of fighting "fake news" and fascism.""
I was much more worried about this happening with Hillary at the helm. She seems more in line
with Soros and the Ukrainian extremists. Trump still seems to be interested in working with Putin
on things of mutual interest although he will probably find resistance in both US parties.
Yup. I'm still thinking "Make Ukraine Great Again" is not on Trump's agenda. But I'm just taking
things day by day. Still digesting Soros found some Nazis he likes. [Facebook "Like" gots it covered.
No new tweaking of social media required.]
However, I think it would be interesting if Trump investigated whether treason against Ukraine
is punishable by firing squad under US Treason Law. Since they've made it kinda personal.
Yeah, the piece is a bit uneven and the last bit a bit revealing of the author's own biases.
All of the "The Russians are Coming" nonsense is coming from Democrat party organs and mouthpieces.
Not Trump and his media allies.
The most effective neo-fascism that we see emerging everywhere is pretty consistently on the
erstwhile voices of the "left" affiliated with the Democrat Party which is double speak for the
New American Right. Indeed, by going back to the height of the cold war to make connections to
these shady organizations rather than modern day plutocrats (Amazonia and Googlie are low hanging
fruit), the author is employing misdirection. So, I will take this with a few grains of salt.
An excellent article from Mark. This Alexandra Chalupa sounds like a real piece of work.
These Cold Warriors seem to have red-colored glasses and see commies everywhere they look.
Of course, there was that old experiment (
Kohler et al ) where they had people wearing different colored goggles for some time, then
asked participants to take them off. And what happened? The participants continued to see in those
hues.
Wait a second, so there was foreign intervention in this election and there
were nefarious racists and eugenicists involved, but they weren't behind Trump,
but Clinton!?
/heavy sarcasm
Thank you very much for sharing this JLS! What a fasc inating read! The historical
context Ames provides is very intriguing and convincing.
"Convincing" is too strong. I would say rather suggestive, possibly persuasive. There is not
enough evidence to convince. More investigation is needed, and this might be a productive line
of inquiry, but it is too soon to talk about conclusions.
I am a huge fan of your website and donate as regularly as i can. I am appalled at what the
Washington Post did and its implications for free speech in the US going forward.
That said, I find this article defamatory in purpose, rather than informative. I do not believe
it meets the usual standards of Naked Capitalism: it is not fairly reasoned, nor based only on
relevant fact to the issue at hand. In my opinion, it is designed to smear and thus undermines
the considerable, unusual credibility of your website. I find it disturbing that it has been amplified
by its inclusion as a link. It does damage to the cause, rather than further it.
How so? First off, we know very little and Ames acknowledges that, but he uses historical context
to expand on that and build a case behind the PropOrNot / FPRI claims and their potential motives.
He fully admits he is working with that we've got. Maybe all these illustrations do just happen
to line up well and new information will change perception, but Ames discussion hits a lot of
typical looking benchmarks.
How is Mr Ames experience and the very place in which Chalupa works, what she says, as well
as the history of our countries actions upon others around the world and within not reasonable
to consider?
I'm sorry if incorrect but you seem like a troll without explaining yourself in specificity
further.
Disturbed voter, batshit Springtime-for-Hitler Ukies long predate Biden's involvement.
CIA has been whipping ethnic Ukies into a patriotic frenzy for decades with social clubs that
seep revanchist propaganda. The hapless Ukies were meant to be cannon fodder for hot war
on the USSR. When Russia molted and shed the USSR, Ukraine continued its Soviet degeneration but
the associations had a life of their own. That's how CIA clowns wound up proud owners of the Exclusion
Zone.
HR 6393: "(Sec. 501) This title establishes an executive branch interagency committee to
counter active measures by the Russian Federation to exert covert influence over peoples and governments
(with the role of the Russian Federation hidden or not acknowledged publicly) through front groups,
covert broadcasting, media manipulation, disinformation or forgeries, funding agents of influence,
incitement, offensive counterintelligence, assassinations, or terrorist acts. The committee shall
expose falsehoods, agents of influence, corruption, human rights abuses, terrorism, and assassinations
carried out by the security services or political elites of the Russian Federation or their proxies."
Two things this article curiously doesn't seem to mention. The first is Victoria Nuland,
who must be a close Hillary confidante, and architect of the coup in Ukraine .
The second thing is not so curious per se, but a common feature of articles about Russian hacking
accusations–they gloss over the fact that there is good evidence that the Russians are hacking
everything they can get their hands on. To assume otherwise is naive. Much of this evidence is
available in a recently-published book, The Plot to Hack America by Malcolm Nance.
He doesn't identify American news sources of being Russian stooges, but does describe how the
hacks on the DNC have FSB (the new KGB) fingerprints all over them. He also describes Trump's
ties to the Kremlin, as well as his advisors' business interests there. Food for thought.
So your food for thought is that the Russian state behaves rationally in the face of an
aggressive military power? Of course, they are hacking everything. If they weren't before the
NSA revelations (where the U.S. vacuums up everything and then has no safeguards on what they
grab; Congress has had testimony about NSA employees using their power to stalk people), they
were afterwards.
Here's some food for thought. John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Hillary Clinton all tried to
make a country of 145 million or so people with numerous internal problems a major campaign platform.
Not one of them is President. Could there be a connection?
As one of the people who consistently calls bull hockey about the claims that the wikileaks
releases of the DNC and Podesta emails are the results of Russian government hackers, I will hereby
agree with the idea that Russia is hacking everything they can get their hands on. Mind you I
believe that every major government from the US to China to Germany to India are hacking everything
they can get their hands on. And that every government knows that about all the rest. As far as
I am concerned anyone who doesn't believe that is beyond naive.
But thinking that every major government had access to Clinton's emails, Boeing's files,
and knows what internet videos Obama/May/Merkel/Putin/Castro have accessed more than once is not
the same thing as thinking they are stupid enough or have decent strategic reasons to make that
public knowledge by releasing damaging but not destroying emails concerning the massive stupidity
and arrogance of one candidate for President and her core people.
There is only one reason that the meme about Fake News is being pushed now – the people
who have been pushing fake news for awhile to promote their agendas have lost the control they
thought they had over the public and now worry about them rebelling. If fake news were important
Judith Miller wouldn't have a job or a book deal and the opportunity to promote that book. Hell
Murdoch wouldn't have a media empire.
I don't know why so many so-called movers and shakers want war with Russia, but it is clear
that anyone getting in the way of that goal is now in the cross hairs. ProporNOT may be more about
Ukrainian support, but the people who promoted them are about the reasons it was being used in
the first place.
Because big picture. Eurasia is inevitably coming together and it is the end of an era. Why
we thought we could prevent this from happening must be based on pure hubris. Everything has changed
so much in one century that even language makes no sense. Eastern European fascists running
propaganda web sites for the Whappo, indeed.
Hillary Clinton taking up the cause against fake news. Jesus. As Liz Warren said, personnel
is policy. You hire fascist nut cases, you create fascism. Hillary, you're so very patriotic.
If you read Matt Stoller's excellent piece from The Atlantic , "How the Democrats
Killed their Populist Soul" you'll see that Clintonism matches the corporatist model of fascism
as derided by Franklin Roosevelt in the late '30's, before mass-murder became associated with
the brand and when people like Charles Lindbergh were touting it as the "modern" way forward.
If you understand Clintonism as corporatist fascism, the DNC's affinity for Ukraine becomes more
and more logical.
I don't see "Banana Republican" Trump as a fascist - he is in many ways an exemplar of
Caudillismo , a charismatic, populist, but authoritarian oligarch.
I read that. I don't believe Nance said the Podesta emails were fake, just that there was a
possibility that those supplying the documents to Wikileaks could adulterate the documents or
introduce fabricated documents into the pipeline. Quite easy to do when leaking, what was it,
fifty thousand emails? And I still haven't heard a single persuasive argument to disprove that
the Russians hacked the DNC. Quite the contrary. The hacks originated from IP addresses known
to originate in the FSA (Fancy Bear) who have led a prodigious list of pro-Russian exploits against
targets throughout eastern Europe, including the Baltic states, Ukraine, and the German Bundestag.
Real-time adjustments from those IPs also occurred from the Moscow time zone, and some used cyrillic
keyboards.
Don't get me wrong: I disagree with the WaPo piece, and have read, commented, and financially
supported Naked Capitalism for quite a while now. And there's no faker news than that Iraq had
WMDs, a fact that the press has never quite overcome in the eyes of the public. But just because
spooky Intelligence Community people say that Russia hacked the DNC, doesn't make it not so. There
are way too many people on the left going off half-cocked. Have you noticed how since the "fake
news" imbroglio flamed up, MSM criticism of Trump's swampland cabinet picks have been quite muted?
The Intercept post has a
link
to the Nance tweet, which is still out there, saying
Malcolm Nance Retweeted KA Semenova
Official Warning: #PodestaEmails are already proving to be riddled with obvious forgeries
& #blackpropaganda not even professionally done.
He, Podesta, and the correspondents in the leaked emails never provided a single example and/or
proof that any email was forged. Also, I don't understand the technicality, but there is some
type of hash value associated with an email such that WL was able provide confirmation of those
emails where the hash value was intact. Instructions on how to replicate that confirmation process
were published at the time.
Was amused to see that naturalnews (one of the sites listed in propornot – it looks like
I guess a right wing alternative medicine type site) is offering a $10k reward for unmasking propornot
but I don't think anyone's ever going to be able to collect.
Why? Because they take the site seriously on its claim of being composed of 30 members
and will only pay out for the identities of at least ten. I think it's just one, maybe two guys.
There are dots to connect – the WP article, Congressional Section 501 activity, Senators
McCain/Graham "leadership"; and most recently, Hillary's comments. Suspect coordination. Connect
the dots. And then search for a motive.
The national security state is concerned that Trump will seek mutually beneficial agreements
with Russia. For evidence of the power of the national "security" state a tour of the Pentagon
is not necessary. Tour Tyson Corner, Virginia, instead, for starters.
And once Trump has established these agreements there will then be no stopping several
Eastern European countries + Germany (of course) realizing where their economic interests really
lie. Does anyone really believe that Germany is going to let itself be turned into an irradiated
wasteland just to please a bunch of neocon paranoids ?
Goodbye sanctions and then, shortly after, its bye, bye NATO bye bye.
That's what the neocons, the MIC, and all their shills, and enablers truly fear. Paradoxically
this ludicrous attempt to revive McCarthyism may well end up actually ending the Cold War for
good & all 25 years after it should have ended.
From the article: "It's now been a few days, and the shock and disgust is turning to questions
about how to fight back-and who we should be fighting against."
How many people, world-wide, are involved and invested in the whole "taking over everything"
machinery of "state security" and espionage and corporate hegemony? And who is this "we" who should
be fighting?
Fundamentals: The human siege of the planet is (it seems sort of clear) driving the biosphere
toward collapse as a sustainer of most human life. Ever more of the extractable entities of the
planet (mineral and living resources, "money" whatever that is, the day labor of most of us, on
and on) are being used, and used up, in service to what? a relatively few masters of manipulation
who are playing a game that most of the rest of us, were we able to focus and figure it out, would
recognize as murder and attempted murder as part of a war "we" did not enlist (most of us) to
participate in. The manipulators, both the ones sitting on extreme piles of wealth and the power
it provides, and the senior effectives in the various "agencies" that play out the game, what
the heck do they "want?" Other than "MORE"?
What motivates a Coors or Koch or Bezos or Brock or the various political figures and their
handlers and minions and "advisors?" This one little episode shows how completely it appears that
the whole species is screwed: "Who do we fight, and how?" Are "we" is the readers of NC? Some
few of whom are stooges and operatives for the Ministries of Truth who are tracking and recording
what transpires here and no doubt subtly injecting "influencers" into the discourse. Some are
just ordinary people, of varying degrees of insight and ability to influence the collective net
vector of human activity (for good or ill). Some are hoping to just find some awareness of and
comprehension of what-all is shaking on the Big Game Board of Life. In this moment, "we" depend,
in this one tiny instance among the great flood of chaos-induction and interest-seeking, on the
responses and pressures "our" hosts can bring to bear - threatening letters to the propagators
like WaPo and Craig Timberg, just one tumor in the vast cancer that afflicts the species, attempts
to link up with other parts of the too-small "good will, comity and deceny" population that is
fractioned and atomized and constantly seduced or frightened into going along with the larger
trend line, grabbing URLs and stuff I'm not smart enough to understand, all that. But the Big
People, the Deep State that "we" are subtly taught NOT to believe exists by various bits of sophistry,
is a lot better armed and equipped and always active - its operatives are paid, usually pretty
well, to be on the job all the time, operating their various and manifold, multifarious, often
ingenious, always disingenous operations, and always thinking up new ways to screw over and loot
and debase and oppress and enserf the rest of us.
Here's just one explication of how the Deep State operates:
This book provides a detailed account of the ways in which the CIA penetrated and influenced
a vast array of cultural organizations, through its front groups and via friendly philanthropic
organizations like the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations. The author, Frances Stonor Saunders,
details how and why the CIA ran cultural congresses, mounted exhibits, and organized concerts.
The CIA also published and translated well-known authors who toed the Washington line, sponsored
abstract art to counteract art with any social content and, throughout the world, subsidized
journals that criticized Marxism, communism, and revolutionary politics and apologized for,
or ignored, violent and destructive imperialist U.S. policies.
The CIA was able to harness some of the most vocal exponents of intellectual freedom
in the West in service of these policies, to the extent that some intellectuals were directly
on the CIA payroll. Many were knowingly involved with CIA "projects," and others drifted in
and out of its orbit, claiming ignorance of the CIA connection after their CIA sponsors were
publicly exposed during the late 1960s and the Vietnam war, after the turn of the political
tide to the left.
U.S. and European anticommunist publications receiving direct or indirect funding included
Partisan Review, Kenyon Review, New Leader, Encounter and many others. Among the intellectuals
who were funded and promoted by the CIA were Irving Kristol, Melvin Lasky, Isaiah Berlin, Stephen
Spender, Sidney Hook, Daniel Bell, Dwight MacDonald, Robert Lowell, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy,
and numerous others in the United States and Europe. In Europe, the CIA was particularly interested
in and promoted the "Democratic Left" and ex-leftists, including Ignacio Silone, Stephen Spender,
Arthur Koestler, Raymond Aron, Anthony Crosland, Michael Josselson, and George Orwell.
The CIA, under the prodding of Sidney Hook and Melvin Lasky, was instrumental in funding
the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a kind of cultural NATO that grouped together all sorts
of "anti-Stalinist" leftists and rightists. They were completely free to defend Western cultural
and political values, attack "Stalinist totalitarianism" and to tiptoe gently around U.S. racism
and imperialism. Occasionally, a piece marginally critical of U.S. mass society was printed
in the CIA-subsidized journals.
What was particularly bizarre about this collection of CIA-funded intellectuals was not
only their political partisanship, but their pretense that they were disinterested seekers
of truth, iconoclastic humanists, freespirited intellectuals, or artists for art's sake, who
counterposed themselves to the corrupted "committed" house "hacks" of the Stalinist apparatus.
It is impossible to believe their claims of ignorance of CIA ties. How could they ignore
the absence in the journals of any basic criticism of the numerous lynchings throughout the
southern United States during the whole period? How could they ignore the absence, during their
cultural congresses, of criticism of U.S. imperialist intervention in Guatemala, Iran, Greece,
and Korea that led to millions of deaths? How could they ignore the gross apologies of every
imperialist crime of their day in the journals in which they wrote? They were all soldiers:
some glib, vitriolic, crude, and polemical, like Hook and Lasky; others elegant essayists like
Stephen Spender or self-righteous informers like George Orwell. Saunders portrays the WASP
Ivy League elite at the CIA holding the strings, and the vitriolic Jewish ex-leftists snarling
at leftist dissidents. When the truth came out in the late 1960s and New York, Paris, and London
"intellectuals" feigned indignation at having been used, the CIA retaliated. Tom Braden, who
directed the International Organizations Branch of the CIA, blew their cover by detailing how
they all had to have known who paid their salaries and stipends (397-404).
http://monthlyreview.org/1999/11/01/the-cia-and-the-cultural-cold-war-revisited/
And that is just one part of the "operations" put in motion by just "our" national rulers by
ONE of the "seventeen national security agencies" that apparently appear in the organization chart
of the US empire.
These mostly faceless people, from "wet workers" to "economic hit men" to analysts and office
workers and Station Chiefs and functionaries at DIA and NIA and NSA and the rest of the acronymists
of "state security," are "just doing their jobs," with more or less personal malevolence (William
Casey, Dick Cheney, the Dulleses, Kermit Roosevelt, on and on), seem to be working from a central
organizing principle: Control of minds and resources, in service to imperial and corporate and
personal dominion. What tools and actions and thought processes do ordinary people have, to fight
back or even resist against this kind of onslaught? "We" are told we are becoming responsible
to do our daily best, in among fulfilling our and our families' basic needs, and to minimize our
environmental impacts to at least slow the destruction, and also somehow to become aware, in a
world of dis- and dysinformation, of what is being done to us and our children and communities,
and "resist." And "fight back." Against who, and against what, and by what means, when you have
the "Googolverment," and all those millions of employees and managers and executives thereof,
on call and on task 24/7 looking for ever more subtle ways to data mine and monetize and manipulate
"us"? And in a feedback loop that has been ongoing since no doubt the earliest of "civilization"
cities and tribes and nations, the "arms race" both in straight military terms and in the sneaky-pete
realm of espionage and state security and "statecraft," "the Russians" and the Pakistanis and
Chinese and Israelites, and probably Brazilians and Zoroastrians, are all growing their own machinery
of consumption and dominance and destruction.
What's the model "we" are supposed to be working from? Some people here are looking for "investment
opportunities" to take advantage of the chaos and destruction, and there are many for those who
can see the patterns and buy in. But what would a "just and decent world" (at least the human
population) even look like, and is there anything in our DNA that moves enough of us toward that
inchoate model to even have a prayer of suppressing those darker and deadlier impulses and motivations
and goals?
I have no answers for "what is to be done." It seems inevitable that perversion and corruption
and greed will always eventually "trump" decency and comity, once a certain size and composition
of a human population has been reached. One may hope that the general principle of eventual incompetence
that seems to apply to even the Deep State activities might become more immanent. And try to build
little communities that don't depend on killable cyber connections for their interconnectedness.
And work on an "organizing principle" of their/our own, that has a chance of surviving the crushing
mass of energetic but negative energy that infects the species.
And thanks to our hosts, for doing their bit to face down the fokkers that would take us all
down if they could. It's a constant struggle, and no doubt they are more aware than even a Futilitarian
like myself of all the parasites and malignancies that are so increasingly active and invested
in looting what's left of "antidotes."
Yes you do, the part about little communities and ad-hoc organizing principles is spot-on;
that stuff works, it just grows slowly at first. It is also self-limiting, a valuable feature,
given the manifest evidence of how badly things can go wrong when communities are pushed to grow
beyond their capacities.
It seems inevitable that perversion and corruption and greed will always eventually "trump"
decency and comity, once a certain size and composition of a human population has been reached.
Decency and comity have their little flaws, too; both can obscure incidents of gross folly.
But yeah, population factors are just ferocious.
One may hope that the general principle of eventual incompetence that seems to apply to
even the Deep State activities might become more immanent.
Not to worry. Incompetence is on it! Any second now wait for it wait for it excuse me, my timepiece
seems to have frozen hmm. Well, it appears that "peak incompetence" has already arrived and done
the bulk of its work, we just haven't noticed all of the results yet. We are now in that phase
between the giant's stumble and their final impact on the ground.
All this is normal, predictable, and as it should be (even the unfortunate parts); it's entropy.
It would be wiser to abandon bivalent moralities and just evaluate each circumstance on its merits,
and do our best.
That Ukrainian nationalists are behind propornot seems clear; that they're from the Nazified
wing seems implausible. Would the Bandera crowd be likely to think of putting a USS Liberty veterans'
website on a list of Russian propaganda outlets?
Ukrainian nationalists = Nazified Ukrainians. Israel is also involved so yes it makes a lot
of sense that the USS Liberty veterans' website on "the list". Might be time for Israel (and Genie
energy) to kiss the Golan Heights goodbye.
Yats and Porky are Jewish, so are some oligarchs who sponsor various neo-Nazi military formations.
Ihor Kolomoyskyi, for example, sponsors the Aidar Battalion. The bottom line is, the neo-Nazis
need to please their US government and Ukie oligarch sponsors in order to keep the dough flowing,
so Russians are the new Jews in Ukraine. Geopolitics makes for strange bedfellows.
Wikipedia has Yats being a member of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic and Porky belonging to the
Ukrainian Orthodox church. Not vouching for Wikipedia and knowing that history can produce some
interesting heritage, I thought I would point that out. Kolomoyskyi has dual citizenship with
Israel and of course infamous Clinton Foundation donor and Maidan supporter Victor Pinchuk was
raised by Jewish parents before sacking his own country.
The Forward certainly counts Porky as a Jew, and many Jewish organizations have attacked Yats
for concealing his Jewish roots. Given the rampant anti-antisemitism in Ukraine, can't really
blame them for concealing their identity. It was shortly before the Maidan that Mila Kunis went
back to her native Ukraine to promote her flick, and got called very unsavory names by some rabid
anti-Semites in Kiev.
" Dimitri - who asked NBC News not to use his real name - is one of dozens of teenagers in
the Macedonian town of Veles who got rich during the U.S. presidential election producing fake
news for millions on social media. "
heh. Dems didn't lose this elections because of "fake news". Dems lost because they did
not prosecute the bankers who caused the 2008 financial crash, who fraudulently foreclosed on
homes and are still engaged in fraud (see: Wells Fargo). imo.
Well that and passed a regressive health insurance bailout that required people to purchase
expensive and largely useless insurance; and showed their complete and utter contempt for working
Americans by ignoring the real state of the under and unemployment, and continued that contempt
by passing several job killing trade bills and attempting three other mega steroid versions of
same.
There are many reasons why the Democrats lost, but mostly it is because they stopped doing
little more than barely pretending to represent the interests of anyone outside of the wealthy
and corporate 'persons' who fund their campaigns and retirements. Protecting the banks and bankers
being only the clearest example.
I still don't see any of my favorite bloggers going after Bezos. I didn't even see him mentioned
until today. We are looking pretty timid so far in the face of Trump and Bezos (Trump from another
direction). No possibility of winning without fighting the war where it's taking place.
For Hire: Established corporation seeking experienced individuals in need of a challenge. Applicants
should have –
*at least 3 Yrs. experience of having their head head firmly up their backsides.
* a certificate from a licensed physician confirming applicants
mental impairment
* an ability to to obfuscate combined with no understanding of the terms 'cognitive dissonance'
'false moral equivalence' and 'logical fallacy'
Applicant must be at least 13 years old and show the capacity to convince 45% of America that
he or she is 30.
Earlier in this thread there was a comment from Claudia Riche claiming the Ames article is,
essentially, a smear job. I feel compelled to respond as I have direct personal knowledge of one
of his two main points, specifically re: the extreme right-wing tenor of the Foreign Policy Research
Institute, or FPRI in Philadelphia.
I worked at FPRI (yes, me the Marxist) in the mid-to-late 1970's, and was in contact with people
there through the early 1980's. I can testify that Ames's description of Strausz-Hupe and his
ideas are entirely accurate. I didn't know much about S-H when I first started working there,
but I figured out his age and original location probably made him a 3-way spook, at the least.
I could cite chapter and verse of the various associates and leading personalities that went through
there (including Alexander Haig) but I don't have the energy today.
Ames mentions that FPRI was driven off the Penn campus – well, only in the technical sense.
If you spit out the window you'd hit a university building, and many principals there were professors
at Penn, including Strausz-Hupe. Also, many Penn grad students passed through there, and undergrads
(like me).
For laughs, here is an interesting, if airbrushed, synopsis of the influence of FPRI by my
old friend Alan Luxenberg:
Here it is – sorry it didn't post immediately. BTW stuff not posting immediately doesn't necessarily
mean either (1) there is anything wrong with your comment, or (2) it got permanently eaten by
Skynet. Sometimes the algorithm for finding spam gets false positives for reasons that are not
entirely clear.
that was alot of investigative digging jerri-lynn -- so nice To see u surprise me twice in a
week. tremendous effort -thank you a post worth cross posting if it hasn't been already
This is indeed a great post, but I'm not the author. Mark Ames is the author. I just cross-posted
his fine work, which was originally published by AlterNet.
The CIA's apparent involvement reveals the immense danger and probable failure of expecting
a few managers to keep the sty clean.
Its not just in spookery that standards have collapsed. The world of professionals – doctors,
lawyers, accountants – has followed the same downward trajectory and it started in 1970 with demonetization
and the subsequent expansion of honorable greed.
It was in early 1970s that creative accounting and its penchant for creating wealth out of
nothing appeared.Then we saw these dodgy scorers appearing in court and swearing to the truth
of their new view. That infected the legal profession. The prosecutors were still willing to present
all their evidence for and against conviction to the Judge but the defense increasingly cheated,
led by the lawyer who tells his customers 'we never plead guilty,' and starts the creation of
a case beyond a reasonable doubt in place of the defendant's actual evidence.
It may be that doctors have so far escaped the moral collapse although on a recent visit to
hospital I saw the elevator lobbies infested with the army of capitalism in the shape of suited
drug salesmen trying to create obligations on the part of doctors.
We seem to have lost our way and for the time being its the man who cares only for the bottom
line who is winning the war of the world. He's the man who owns the newspaper that tells you every
bad thing is because of foreigners.
Typically Diaspora is more nationalistic the "mainland" population. This is very true about
Ukrainian Diaspora, which partially is represented by those who fought on the side of Germany in the WWII.
They are adamantly anti-Russian.
Notable quotes:
"... Here it also bears mentioning that it has been established that Yanukovych's Party of Regions transferred $200,000 to the far right Svoboda party and about $30,000 to the nationalist UNA-UNSO. This is serious money in Ukraine. ..."
"... Firstly, most Ukrainians don't give a shit about Bandera and the OUN. So if they're not speaking out against people using those symbols or slogans it's not because they support them, but because they're more concerned with issues of pure survival. ..."
"... And then these same fascists were whitewashed as noble freedom fighters by Western MSM simply because their interests happen to allign with the interests of the US, for the moment. ..."
"... Uh, no. I haven't noticed anyone here thinking that Russia is some sort of fighter for social and economic justice. Rather, we as a group are sick of noxious propaganda driven by American Exceptionalism. ..."
"... And speaking for myself, I find the rise of Russia to be potentially a very good thing for the US itself, if it manages to curtail the MIC-driven hegemonic drive, weakens its relative power, and forces it to focus its money and energies on pressing domestic issues. ..."
"... The idea of considering Putin to be anticapitalist is risible. Putin represents a limit on a US hegemonized economic order and the greater likelihood that some portion ..."
"... This is some insidious strawman and dishonest argumentation, speaking of "BS." Nowhere does this article state that the entire Maidan revolution was a "fascist coup"-that's you putting words in the author's mouth to make his article appear to be Russian propaganda. The author specifies names of top figures in power today with seriously disturbing neo-Nazi backgrounds-the speaker of Ukraine's parliament, its Interior Minister, and head of National Police. He never once calls it a "fascist coup". Using strawman to avoid having to answer these specific allegations is bad faith commenting. ..."
"... The false analogy to Occupy shows how dishonest your comment is. No one disputes that neo-Nazi leader Parubiy was in charge of Maidan's "self-defense"; and that neo-Nazi Right Sektor played a lead role in the confrontations with the Yanukovych authorities. ..."
"... I suspect that Mr. Kovpak is a member of the Ukrainian diaspora that first infested this country starting around 1945, and has since been trying to justify the belief that the wrong side won WWII. ..."
"... "The appalling corruption of Yanukovich was replaced by the appalling corruption of Yats and Poroschenko " ..."
"... Paruiby (Neo Fascist) was in charge before and after the Maidan for security – the trajectory of the bullets came from his peoples positions that shot the cops – analyzed over and over ..."
"... The Nazi Asov Battalion among other organizations supporting the Regime in Kiev has Nazi symbols, objectives and is one of the main forces armed and trained by American Military. ..."
"... The entire corrupt Kiev administration is Nazi and now it appears the Clinton Campaign has direct ties well beyond the $13 million she received in her Slush Fund from the Oligarchs in 2013. The driving force behind this entire Fake News Initiative and support for Hillary is becoming more visible each day. ..."
"... Not to mention the Ukrainian Nazis penchant for shelling civilians. Or will Kovpak (Ukrainian school perhaps? Did his grandfather emigrate with the other Ukrainian SS?) will repeat the canard that unbeknownst to the locals, the rebels are shelling themselves, using artillery shells that can 180 mid-flight? ..."
"... What is the liberals' talking point these days? "Not all Trump supporters are racist, but all of them decided that racism isn't a deal-breaker. End of story." Hillary's SoS-designate Nuland and Barry 0 decided that Ukie nazism wasn't a deal breaker. End of story. ..."
"... Ukrainian neo-fascists were an integral part of the Maidan (trained in Poland, US, and Canada). ..."
"... Yes, ordinary Ukrainians protested against corruption – but every U. government since 1991 has been corrupt. Yanukovich was no exception – but he was also not the worst one (do some research on J. Timoshenko). ..."
"... There is enough actual footage from Maidan that shows the presence of neo-nazi members on the square from the beginning. They were also the one who completed the violent overthrow of the government that happened on 2/21-22/14 – after a deal had been signed calling for early elections. The burning of 48 people in Odessa was probably done by angels, according to your likely analysis. ..."
"... So perhaps in the future instead of repeating a bunch of Russian talking points ..."
"... I was going to say something about how the CIA made Ukraine's Social Nationalist party change its name to Svoboda (freedom), to obscure the obvious Nazi connection, but instead I will just laugh at you. ..."
"... What a shocker that Jim Kovpak, the commenter who tries smearing this article as "repeating a bunch of Russian talking points" -- works for CIA-founded Voice of America and is a regular with Ukraine's "StopFake.org" which is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy , the CIA's color revolution "soft" arm - in other words, PropOrNot's folks. Can't make this stuff up. ..."
"... Wait, so in Kovpak's case our tax dollars are used to fund and disseminate propaganda to America's public, too? I am not shocked or anything, but rather amused that the vaunted American democracy and famously free media is beginning to resemble communist Bulgaria. ..."
"... Okay, but isn't it the case that many far-right leaders have migrated to parties closer to the center, such as People's Front? Svoboda's leaders have done this. Andriy Parubiy, Tetiana Chornovol, and Oleksandr Turchynov, for example, hold high positions in People's Front, but started out as members or Svoboda. If I'm not mistaken, People's Front also has strong connections to the far-right Volunteer Battalions. I believe People's Front has its own paramilitary branch too. ..."
"... What this tells me is that much of Ukraine's far-right may be masquerading as right-center. That's kind of like a political Trojan Horse operation. This way the fascists avoid standing out as far-right, but at the same time, move closer to the mechanisms of power within Ukraine's government. ..."
"... Here's an article by Lev Golinkin commenting on the far-right's strong and dangerous influence on Ukraine today. A fascist presence like this could easily be a powerful element in Ukrainian elections, very suddenly and unpredictably too. https://www.thenation.com/article/the-ukrainian-far-right-and-the-danger-it-poses/ ..."
"... This is getting darker and darker. As much as I dislike Trump I feel happier that Clinton didn't make it. The TINA party is the most reactionary thing by far! ..."
"... Sanders might have had a hard time driving as far left on FP as he did on domestic issues. I'm his constituent, and I have a letter from him from mid-'15 reiterating all the mainstream lies about Russia and Ukraine. ..."
Hello, I'm the blogger of Russia Without BS, a site you cited once in the stories about PropOrNot.
As I have recently written
on my blog
, I believe PropOrNot is most likely one person who is not linked to any real organization
group or intelligence agency. The individual is most likely what I call a cheerleader, which is
basically a person with no reasonable connection to some conflict, yet who takes a side and sort
of lives vicariously through their imagined "struggle."
That being said, you're probably not going to do yourself any favors claiming that Maidan was
a fascist coup and that fascists are in charge in Ukraine. Euromaidan was not started by right-wingers
(quite the opposite, actually), and they were not the majority of people there. Basically you
condemning Maidan is like someone condemning Occupy just because of the presence of neo-Nazis
and racists who were sometimes involved in certain Occupy chapters (this is well documented).
Without actually bothering to look at the issues involved, you are basically telling millions
of Ukrainians that they should have tolerated a corrupt, increasingly authoritarian government
that was literally stealing their future all because some right-wingers happened to latch on to
that cause too. Here it also bears mentioning that it has been established that Yanukovych's
Party of Regions transferred $200,000 to the far right Svoboda party and about $30,000 to the
nationalist UNA-UNSO. This is serious money in Ukraine.
As for the slogan, yes, Slava Ukraini, Heroiam Slava! has its origins in the OUN, but there
are some important things to consider when discussing Ukrainian history.
Firstly, most Ukrainians don't give a shit about Bandera and the OUN. So if they're not
speaking out against people using those symbols or slogans it's not because they support them,
but because they're more concerned with issues of pure survival. Look at the average salary
in Ukraine and look into some of the instances of corruption (some of which continue to this day),
and you'll understand why a lot of people aren't going to get up in arms about someone waving
the red and black flag. Most people have become very cynical and see the nationalists as provocateurs
or clowns, and thus they don't take them seriously enough.
Before you call this good points, please familiarize yourself with the (accurate) history of
the Maidan, Ukraine, neo-nazi presence in that country, and Russian history. Please Kovpak seems
to be an embodiment of what Ames tries to convey.
The more experienced observer listens to all sides; and all sides lie at least a little, if
only for their own comfort. Beyond that, subjectivity is inescapable, and any pair of subjectives
will inevitably diverge. This is not a malign intent, it's existential circumstance, the burden
of identity, of individual life.
My own (admittedly cursory) analysis happens to coincide with Jim Kovpak's first para (PropOrNot
being primarily a lone "cheerleader"). And I can see merit, and the call for dispassionate assessment,
in some of his other points. This does not mean I endorse Kovpak over Ames, or Ames over Kovpak;
both contribute to the searching discussion with cogent observation (and the inevitable measure
of subjective evaluation).
I thank both for their remarks, and also thank our gracious hosts ;).
No, but it was hijacked by fascists. It is sad that more democratic/progressive forces lost
out, but that's what happened. You seem to be trying to avoid recognizing this fact by affirming
the rightfulness of those who began the revolt. Their agency was removed not by Naked Capitalism
or Mark Ames, but by fascists who out maneuvered, spent, and gunned them. It's time to mourn,
not to defend a parasitic Frankenstein that is trying to develop a European fascist movement.
Goons from that movement assaulted and injured May Day demonstrators in Sweden this year and then
fled back to the Ukraine. They are dangerous and should not be protected with illusions.
Their agency was removed not by Naked Capitalism or Mark Ames, but by fascists who out maneuvered,
spent, and gunned them
And then these same fascists were whitewashed as noble freedom fighters by Western MSM
simply because their interests happen to allign with the interests of the US, for the moment.
Thus we have the ridiculous situation where supposedly reputable media like NYT and WaPoo
cheer on the Azov battalion and its brethren, and deny the very symbolism of the various Nazi
insignia and regalia featured on their uniforms. Jim makes some very good points, but he fell
way short in ignoring the role of the US MSM in this travesty.
And just in case someone tries to claim that we all make mistakes at times and that the MSM
made an honest mistake in regards to these neo-Nazi formations, the same thing has been happening
in Syria, where the US and its Gulf allies have armed extremists and have whitewashed their extremism
by claiming even Al Qaeda and its offshoots are noble freedom fighters.
Good on the parallel with Syria. The evolution, or distortion, of revolutionary movements as
they struggle to gain support and offensive power and then either are modified or jacked by "supporting"
external powers is not a cheering subject. The tendency to ignore that this has happened takes
two forms. One is what we are here discussing. The other is its opposite, as seen in, for example,
the way some writers try to maintain that there never was a significant democratic/progressive/humane
etc. element to the Syrian opposition.
Ukraine, as I understand it, is not monolith but has roughly 2 interest areas – western and
eastern – divided by the River Dnieper. The Western half is more pro-European and EU, the Eastern
half is more pro-Russia. The word "fascist" in Ukraine means something slightly different than
in means in the US and the EU. So I take your comment with a grain of salt, even though it is
interesting.
Ukraine's geographical location as the land "highway" between Europe and Asia has created a
long and embattled history there.
So perhaps in the future instead of repeating a bunch of Russian talking points because
you mistakenly think Russia is somehow opposed to US capitalism,
Uh, no. I haven't noticed anyone here thinking that Russia is some sort of fighter for
social and economic justice. Rather, we as a group are sick of noxious propaganda driven by American
Exceptionalism.
And speaking for myself, I find the rise of Russia to be potentially a very good thing
for the US itself, if it manages to curtail the MIC-driven hegemonic drive, weakens its relative
power, and forces it to focus its money and energies on pressing domestic issues.
Thirded. The idea of considering Putin to be anticapitalist is risible. Putin represents
a limit on a US hegemonized economic order and the greater likelihood that some portion
of the fruits of the Russian oligarchic capitalist effort will benefit Russians, not elites
tied to the US, because of his self-interested nationalism. Not much to cheer about but better
than where things were headed when Yeltsin was in power.
This is some insidious strawman and dishonest argumentation, speaking of "BS." Nowhere
does this article state that the entire Maidan revolution was a "fascist coup"-that's you putting
words in the author's mouth to make his article appear to be Russian propaganda. The author specifies
names of top figures in power today with seriously disturbing neo-Nazi backgrounds-the speaker
of Ukraine's parliament, its Interior Minister, and head of National Police. He never once calls
it a "fascist coup". Using strawman to avoid having to answer these specific allegations is bad
faith commenting.
The false analogy to Occupy shows how dishonest your comment is. No one disputes that neo-Nazi
leader Parubiy was in charge of Maidan's "self-defense"; and that neo-Nazi Right Sektor played
a lead role in the confrontations with the Yanukovych authorities. There is absolutely no
equivalent to this with Occupy at all. Where does this false analogy even come from? No where
does the author state that Maidan was ONLY fascists, that is again your strawman response. Maidan
had a lot of support from pro-western, pro-european, pro-liberal forces. But to deny the key and
often lead roles played by neo-fascists in the actual organization, "self defense" and violent
confrontations with the Yanukovych goons is gross whitewashing.
Much worse is the way you rationalize the fascist OUN salute by arguing that it means something
else now, or it's become normalized, etc. These are all the same bullshit arguments made by defenders
of the Confederate flag. "It means something different now." "it's about heritage/being a rebel!/individualism!"
There is no "but" to this, and anyone who claims so is an asshole of the first order. The salute
descends directly from collaborators in the Holocaust and mass-murder of Jews and Poles and collaboration
with Nazis. If people claim they don't understand its origins, then educate them on why it's so
fucked up, don't make excuses for them. Really disgusting that you'd try to rationalize this away.
There is no "but" and no excuse, period.
"Russia Without BS" is one hell of an ironic name for someone bs-ing like this. Your failure
to actually engage the article, setting up and knocking down strawmen instead, and evading, using
false analogies-reveal your own intellectual pathologies. Try responding to the actual text here,
and maybe you'll be taken seriously.
My thought was that this post was an example of the strawman fallacy. Yet certainly Mr. Kovpak
wasn't just shooting from the hip. That is, he thought about this thing, wrote it, looked it over,
and said "well enough" and posted it. Poor logic, or bad faith?
I think the tell was his characterization of the article as "repeating a bunch of Russian talking
points." What the hell is a "Russian talking point"? How do Ames' contentions follow said talking
points? Are he saying, perhaps, that Ames is another one of those Kremlin agents we've been hearing
about, or perhaps another "useful idiot"? Perhaps Ames – of all people – is a dupe for Putin,
right?
Hasbara, Ukrainian style. Bringing this junk onto NS, either this guy is alot of dumber than
he gives himself credit for, or he actually has no familiarity with NS, outside of the now- and
rightly-notorious WP/ProporNot blacklist. Probably the latter, since it looks like his comment
was a pre-masticated one-and-done.
I suspect that Mr. Kovpak is a member of the Ukrainian diaspora that first infested this
country starting around 1945, and has since been trying to justify the belief that the wrong side
won WWII.
I'm glad Jim Kovpak provided this background. I was very troubled to see Ames breezily smear
the Ukrainian uprising as "fascist," essentially writing off the protesters as U.S. proxies and
dismissing their grievances as either non-existent or irrelevant. Something similar has happened
in Syria, of course. Yes, the U.S. ruling blocs try to advance their interests in such places,
but if you ignore the people on the ground or dismiss them as irrelevant, you're just playing
into the hands of other tyrannical interests (in Syria: Assad, Putin, Hezbollah, etc.).
$5 billion spent over the past 25 years by the US in Ukraine (per Nuland). Yeah, they ain't
US proxies. Gla that you straightened that out for us.
The grievances in Ukraine are many and are legitimate. But that the people's anger was hijacked
by US-financed proxies is a fact. Nuland was caught dictating that Yats would be the new PM, and
darned if he didn't become just that. The appalling corruption of Yanukovich was replaced by the
appalling corruption of Yats and Poroschenko, and the country was plunged into a civil war. But
Yats and Porky are freedom-loving democrats! The old saying remains true: "They may be corrupt
SOBs, but they are our corrupt SOBs!"
Heck, for all the crocodile tears shed by the West about corruption and democracy, it has nurtured
corruption in Eastern Europe and looked the other way as democracy has been trampled. Including
in my native Bulgaria, where millions of dollars spent by the US and allied NGOs on promoting
and financing "free press" have seen Bulgaria's freedom of media ranking slip to third world levels.
But Bulgaria is a "democracy" because it is a member of the EU and NATO, and as such its elites
have done the bidding of its Western masters at the expense of Bulgaria's national interests and
the interests of its people. Ukraine is headed down that road, and all I can say to regular Ukrainians
is that they are in for an even bigger screwing down the road, cheer-led by the Western "democracies"
and "free" media.
Meddling by US hyperpower in the internal affairs and the replacement of one set of bastahds
with another set of bastahds that is beholden to the US is not progress, which is why we call
it out. After all the spilled blood and destruction sponsored by the US, can you honestly say
that Ukraine and Syria and Libya and Iraq are now better off, and that their futures are bright?
I can't, and I can't say that for my native country either. That's because this new version of
neocolonialism is the most destructive and virulent yet. And it is particularly insidious because
it fools well-meaning people, like yourself, into believing that it actually helps improve the
lives of the natives. It does not.
"The appalling corruption of Yanukovich was replaced by the appalling corruption of
Yats and Poroschenko "
That pretty much sums it up. Jim Kovpak does make some excellent points which help to understand
what the Ukranians are thinking. The discussion regarding the poor education system and potential
lack of knowledge of what certain symbolism refers to was really good. Sort of reminds me of the
Southerners in the US who still claim that the Stars and Bars is just about Southern heritage
and pride without bothering to consider the other ramifications and what the symbol means for
those who were persecuted at one time (and continuing to today). But yeah, I'm sure there are
those who think that that flag was just something the Duke boys used on the General Lee when trying
to outrun Roscoe.
All that being said, I don't believe anybody here thinks that Yanukovich was some paragon of
virtue ruling a modern utopia. The problem is that the new boss looks surprisingly familiar to
the old boss with the main difference being that the fruits of corruption are being funneled to
different parties with the people likely still getting the shaft.
If your a(just as many in the US are), it's quite possible they are also unaware of the current
US influence in their country, just as most US citizens are unaware of what the US has done in
other countries.
I'd be very interested in Jim Kovpak's thoughts on this.
$5 billion spent over the past 25 years by the US in Ukraine (per Nuland). Yeah, they
ain't US proxies. Gla[d] that you straightened that out for us.
Yes, it doesn't get any more blatant than that, and if anyone believes otherwise they are obviously
hooked on the officially sanctioned fake news, aka the MSM.
"Euromaidan was not started by right-wingers / Ukraine certainly does not have more right-wingers
than other Eastern European nations" silly at best!
Paruiby (Neo Fascist) was in charge before and after the Maidan for security – the trajectory
of the bullets came from his peoples positions that shot the cops – analyzed over and over
The Nazi Asov Battalion among other organizations supporting the Regime in Kiev has Nazi
symbols, objectives and is one of the main forces armed and trained by American Military.
The entire corrupt Kiev administration is Nazi and now it appears the Clinton Campaign
has direct ties well beyond the $13 million she received in her Slush Fund from the Oligarchs
in 2013. The driving force behind this entire Fake News Initiative and support for Hillary is
becoming more visible each day.
Your statements are pure propaganda and I would assume you work indirectly for Alexandra Chalupa!
Not to mention the Ukrainian Nazis penchant for shelling civilians. Or will Kovpak (Ukrainian
school perhaps? Did his grandfather emigrate with the other Ukrainian SS?) will repeat the canard
that unbeknownst to the locals, the rebels are shelling themselves, using artillery shells that
can 180 mid-flight?
"Basically you condemning Maidan is like someone condemning Occupy just because of the presence
of neo-Nazis and racists who were sometimes involved in certain Occupy chapters (this is well
documented)."
You must be kidding. Where to begin? Can we start with the simple fact that the Russian Foreign
Ministry wasn't handing out baked goods to Occupy protesters in NYC, egging them on as they tossed
molotov cocktails at police, who, strangely enough, refrained from shooting protesters until right
after a peaceful political settlement was reached? Coincidence or fate? Or maybe there is strong
evidence that right wing fanatics were the ones who started the shooting on that fateful day?
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-31359021
And sorry, no matter how much Kovpak denies it, the muscle behind the "glorious revolution"
was a bunch of far-right thugs that make our American alt-right look like girl scouts. Andrei
Biletsky, leader of Azov Battalion and head of Ukraine's creatively named Social-National Assembly,
says he's committed to "punishing severely sexual perversions and any interracial contacts that
lead to the extinction of the white man."
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-28329329
- Just like those hippies at Zuccotti Park, right?! Oh,and this guy received a medal from
Poroshenko.
I can keep going, but your "Maidan was just like Occupy!" argument pretty much speaks for itself.
Glory to the heroes indeed.
As someone who lived many years in Ukraine, speaks Ukrainian and Russian and knows personally
many of the people involved, yes, Ukrainians know full well the origin of the Nazi slogans that
the local Nazis spout.
That doesn't mean that the average frustrated euromaidan supporter is a Nazi, but Nazis bussed
in from Galicia did eventually provide the muscle, as it were, and the rest of the country were
willing to get in bed with them, appoint them to run ministries, and let them have independent
military units.
Those Nazis are perfectly happy to call themselves Nazis.
What is the liberals' talking point these days? "Not all Trump supporters are racist, but
all of them decided that racism isn't a deal-breaker. End of story." Hillary's SoS-designate Nuland
and Barry 0 decided that Ukie nazism wasn't a deal breaker. End of story.
To be fair, there is a fairly wide gap between 'racist' and 'violent racist of the KKK/Nazi
variety'.
Also (yes, partly preaching to the choir, but with a purpose), liberals are perfectly happy
to stay quiet about enormous income/prosecution/incarceration/kill rate differences, so long as
those targeted/affected can (bureau-/meritocratically) be described as 'druggies/criminals/"extremists"/uneducated-thus-
undeserving '. And to ignore drone bombing of brown people. Etc. So all the pearl-clutching/virtue-signaling
concerning racism is pretty easy to shrug off as concerning little more than a plea to express
one's support for racist policy in a PC fashion.
(Highly recommend The New Jim Crow , which I've only recently started reading, for no
good reason. Bizarre to realize that all of the stuff that's being reported on a little bit now
has been going on for 30 years now (30y of silence / wir-haben-es-nicht-gewusst wrt the structural
nature; note that any/all reporting that im/explicitly describes these issues as "scandals"/"excesses"
is part of the problem.)
WOW I guess we have democracy, so your comment got through. In a way, your post confirms the
existence of rabidly anti-Russian entities – the very point that Mark Ames makes. But you know,
there are people who know a thing or two about Russia and Ukraine, and can easily refute much
of your diatribe. (1) Ukrainian neo-fascists were an integral part of the Maidan (trained
in Poland, US, and Canada).
Yes, ordinary Ukrainians protested against corruption – but every U. government since 1991
has been corrupt. Yanukovich was no exception – but he was also not the worst one (do some research
on J. Timoshenko).
Corruption persists in U. today – and based on the now-required property disclosures by U.
politicians – may be even worse. It is likely correct that most U. don't give a damn about Bandera
– but most U. also do not have any power to do anything about the neo-nazis, as they are (at least
in the western part of the country) numerous, vocal, and prone to violence.
There is enough actual footage from Maidan that shows the presence of neo-nazi members
on the square from the beginning. They were also the one who completed the violent overthrow of
the government that happened on 2/21-22/14 – after a deal had been signed calling for early elections.
The burning of 48 people in Odessa was probably done by angels, according to your likely analysis.
(2) But it is your comments about the U. neo-nazi participation in the war that seem to clarify
who you really represent. This participation was not much discussed during the soviet times –
I only found out that they continued to fight against the soviet state long after the war ended
recently – from family members who witnessed it (in Belorussia, west. Ukr., and eastern Czechoslovakia).
Some of them witnessed the unspeakable cruelty of these Ukr. "troops" against villagers and any
partisans they could find. White-washing this period (or smearing soviet educational system) will
not help – there is plenty of historical evidence for those who are interested in the subject.
(3) What you say about the Russian state promoting this or that is just a scurrilous attack,
with no proof. Not even worth exploring. On the other hand, there are plenty of documented murders
of Ukr. journalists (google Buzina – a highly intelligent and eloquent Ukr. journalist, who was
gunned down in front of his home; there are quite a few others).
Ukr. in 2014 may have been protesting inept government, but what they ended up with is far
worse – by any measure, Ukr. standard of living has gone way down. But now, the industrial base
of the country has been destroyed, and the neo-nazi genie will not go back into the bottle any
time soon. Ukr. as a unified place did not exist until after WWI, and the great divisions – brought
starkly into contrast by the 2014 destruction of the state – cannot be papered over anytime soon.
Appreciate the points you bring up but if the Ukranians truly want an end to an exploitative
system, they probably are not going to get it by allying themselves with Uncle Sugar. The US provided
billions of dollars to foment the coup and our oligarchs expect a return on that investment –
they aren't going to suddenly start trust funds for all Ukranians out of the goodness of their
hearts. You are aware of that aren't you?
So perhaps in the future instead of repeating a bunch of Russian talking points
I was going to say something about how the CIA made Ukraine's Social Nationalist party
change its name to Svoboda (freedom), to obscure the obvious Nazi connection, but instead I will
just laugh at you.
Hahahahahaha!
What a shocker that Jim Kovpak, the commenter who tries smearing this article as "repeating
a bunch of Russian talking points" -- works for CIA-founded
Voice of America and is
a regular with Ukraine's
"StopFake.org"
which is
funded
by the National Endowment for Democracy , the CIA's color revolution "soft" arm - in other
words, PropOrNot's folks. Can't make this stuff up.
Wait, so in Kovpak's case our tax dollars are used to fund and disseminate propaganda to
America's public, too? I am not shocked or anything, but rather amused that the vaunted American
democracy and famously free media is beginning to resemble communist Bulgaria. The good news
is that by the 80's nobody believed the state and its propagandists, even on the rare occasion
they were telling the truth, and America's people seem to be a bit ahead of the curve already,
which may explain the "fake news" hysteria from the creators and disseminators of fake news.
Ukraine certainly does not have more right-wingers than other Eastern European nations,
but if you look at their polls and elections you see that the far-right in Ukraine does far
worse than it does in other Eastern and even Western European countries
Okay, but isn't it the case that many far-right leaders have migrated to parties closer
to the center, such as People's Front? Svoboda's leaders have done this. Andriy Parubiy, Tetiana
Chornovol, and Oleksandr Turchynov, for example, hold high positions in People's Front, but started
out as members or Svoboda. If I'm not mistaken, People's Front also has strong connections to
the far-right Volunteer Battalions. I believe People's Front has its own paramilitary branch too.
What this tells me is that much of Ukraine's far-right may be masquerading as right-center.
That's kind of like a political Trojan Horse operation. This way the fascists avoid standing out
as far-right, but at the same time, move closer to the mechanisms of power within Ukraine's government.
Here in America we saw something like that in the early 1990s, when KKK leader David Duke migrated
to the political mainstream by running for office as a Republican in Louisiana. Of course Duke
never changed his views, he just learned to dissemble himself in the way he sold his politics
to the public.
This is getting darker and darker. As much as I dislike Trump I feel happier that Clinton
didn't make it. The TINA party is the most reactionary thing by far!
Yes, these are dangerous people, as are most "true believers". I'm also becoming even more
disappointed at Ms, Clinton. For a while, she seemed to be keeping a little distance from her
dead-enders, but now that her and Bill are out back on the money trail (How much is enough?),
it doesn't look good.
Selling fear? Really? Isn't there a shelf life on that?
I'm not certain about the contents of that crock, good sir. We now live in a "culture" where
s–t IS gold. Otherwise, why are we now enduring a "popular press" full of "wardrobe malfunctions,"
new amazing bikini bodies, salacious gossip, and equally salacious "news?" (The Page Three was
shut down really because there was too much competition.)
Oh tempura, oh s'mores! (Latinate for "We're crisped!")
Indeed. The above article is great, great stuff and shows why some of us found Hillary more
disturbing than Trump. Therefore Ames' final assumption
And the timing is incredible-as if Bezos' rag has taken upon itself to soften up the
American media before Trump moves in for the kill.
seems a bit off. It's certainly true that Trump said news organizations should face greater
exposure to libel laws but one suspects this has more to do with his personal peevishness and
inability to take criticism than the Deep State-y motives described above. Clearly the "public
versus private" Hillary–Nixon in a pant suit–would have been just the person to embrace this sort
of censorship by smear and her connection with various shadowy exiles and in her own campaign
no less shows why Sanders' failure to make FP the center of his opposition was, if not a political
mistake, at least evidence of his limited point of view.
It's unlikely that anyone running this time would be able to change our domestic trajectory
but this fascism from abroad is a real danger IMO. In Reagan times some of us thought that Reagan
supported reactionary governments abroad because that's what he and his rogue's gallery including
Casey and North wished they could do here. The people getting hysterical over Trump while pining
for Hillary don't seem to know fascism when it's right in front of them. Or perhaps it's just
a matter of whose ox is going to be gored.
Sanders might have had a hard time driving as far left on FP as he did on domestic issues.
I'm his constituent, and I have a letter from him from mid-'15 reiterating all the mainstream
lies about Russia and Ukraine.
No surprise, ever since the US, and Biden, got involved in Ukraine. And it is even probable,
that people like that were behind the Kennedy assassination, that the US has admitted was a conspiracy,
that is still protected from "journalistic sunshine" under lock and key by the US government.
Thanks for giving this article its own post, and thanks to dcblogger for providing the
link in yesterday's Water Cooler.
Seems to me that this little bout of D-party/CIA incompetence, and/or incontinence, will finally
sound the death knell for the Operation Paperclip gang's plan. Good riddance.
"... The MSM has lost control of the narrative. The big dailies continue to hemorrhage ad revenue, month in and month out, year in and year out. Their existence going forward will be even more dependent on government assistance. Fake News is the pathetic death rattle of the neoliberal order. ..."
More importantly, the editor's note vaults into verbal gymnastics in an attempt to simultaneously
rationalize and distance itself from an obviously flawed primary source. Any data analysis is
only as good as the sum of its parts, and it's clear that PropOrNot's methodology was lacking.
The Post, of course, was merely reporting what PropOrNot said . Yet it used declarative
language throughout, sans caveat, lending credence to a largely unknown organization that lumps
together independent left-wing publications and legitimately Russian-backed news services. The
Post diminished its credibility at a time when media credibility is in short supply, and the non-apologetic
editor's note doesn't help.
Almost two weeks after its article ran, the Post ran a
sort of correction in the form of an editorial comment in italics pasted on top of the online
edition of Timberg's November 24 piece (where only those looking for the by then old original
story would find it). In that note, the editors say that the paper
did not name any of the sites [on PropOrNot's blacklist], does not itself vouch for the
validity of PropOrNot's findings regarding any individual media outlet, nor did the article
purport to do so. Since publication of the Post 's story, PropOrNot has removed some
of those sites from its list.
Of course, the damage was already done, as the original article achieved widespread circulation
via the Post 's wire service; it would be up to all those news organizations that bought
and ran the story, or reported their own versions of it, to make any correction.
Meanwhile, the facile dodge of "we didn't name the sites" ignores the reality that the Post
had prominently showcased PropOrNot and let its name vouch for the heretofore unknown group's
credibility. The paper didn't have to run the list; anyone with a smartphone could do a Google
search, find PropOrNot's website as the first listing, go to the homepage and find a link
button headed "The List."
And apparently plenty of readers did that. While thanks to the Post 's grant of anonymity,
PropOrNot's hidden principals remained safe from inquiring reporters and Russian hackers alike,
editors of sites named on its McCarthyite hit list quickly found themselves deluged with venomous
calls and emails. As Jeffrey St. Clair, a co-founder and editor of CounterPunch.org , another
site listed prominently as a propaganda tool, recalls, "The morning after the Post published
its article, I found 1,000 emails in my inbox, mostly hate mail and death threats."
Expert media commentators criticized the Post's handwave in the form of an editor's note
that it placed at the top of a story that is now history, as opposed to news. The mild concession
is likely to be read only by fans of the 199 sites that were defamed by the Post, and journalists
who've taken interest in the row and not the vast public that read the story through the post
and other major outlets, like USA Today, that re-reported or syndicated Timberg's piece.
It all depends upon who you follow on Twitter, but from my check-in's today, the WaPo is not
coming off well.
This whole 'fake news' mess is downright weird.
I have trouble understanding how anyone can govern, given the growing legitimacy problems.
It seems as if there are (very well greased) wheels within (extravagantly funded) wheels moving
behind the scenes.
Meanwhile, apparently Obama has formally requested that the Intel Community develop a 'consensus
report' about the role of the Russians in this most recent election (per Emptywheel). "Senior
officials' in Congress have already been briefed, and some are apparently leaking: this much smoke
signals a battle royale behind the scenes.
The worst possible outcome, IMVHO, is failing to investigate and come clean.
Every time our government is too gutless to deal with reality - whether WMD, or the Financial
Crisis - the legitimacy of government is further eroded. It would be helpful if Hillary renounced
the Presidency, and agreed that even if the election should be overturned, that she would defer
to some other person. The investigation should not be used as a recount, nor as a re-do. It should
function only to restore credibility to the US federal government, and for no other reason.
Unfortunately for Trump, if he blocks this kind of investigation, it will only diminish his
credibility, and weaken the very power he seeks to hold.
Life is full of paradoxes and mysteries; this one takes the cake.
I agree with your comment re Twitter, but Twitter is heavy with journalists who love the story
of a media fight. This is catnip to them.
The Washington Post story was tweeted far more heavily when it first ran than the follow-on
criticism was. The story proper got 14,800 comments. It was picked up by USA Today, CNN, and I
haven't even begun to track how many different other publishers. The original reach was at least
an order of magnitude, and probably two orders of magnitude, bigger than the discussion of the
itty bitty walkback.
Please see our Tip Jar in the right column. It tells you how to donate using a debit or credit
card, or send a check.
We had a recent emergency fundraiser, and some of that has already been allocated to extra
site coverage (to have others do more site-minding and content generation so as to free me up
to spend time on this stuff) and the other part (a bit more than half the total) is to fund expenses
for litigation.
Is this episode really Bezos carrying water for a faction of the deep state? They had to have
known that if you malign the entirety of the alt media-left and right that they'd show their teeny
little teeth.
I bet they feed this chump Timberg to the crocodiles ultimately. Meanwhile Mark Ames will ferret
out the weird nexus of Ukrainian Nazi types. But since the WaPo will take the heat and the public
will lose interest, nobody will care. But in the end the 4 or 5 folks who came up with this scheme
will have achieved their goals:
*Throw mud on non corporate news reportage.
*Fire a warning shot over Trumps bow
*Plant seeds with the population for the future when some ginned up provocation will again put
Russia in the crosshairs of a black propaganda campaign.
These archonic m_fers are relentless. Russia represents an independent power which absolutely
cannot be permitted by Empire. This is part of a long term strategy to box Russia in. They are
seen as the weaker of the Sino Russian partnership and are being targeted first.
Not having witnessed anything like this before I'm having trouble understanding the strategy
here. What potential end game is there in dealing directly with PropOrNot? Jim Moody's time is
valuable, Yves' time is valuable, but they seem likely to be a few nobodies who no one would have
paid any attention to if the Washington Post hadn't amplified the reach of their amateurish operation
by factor of a million.
I think you said it all there without maybe realizing it - PropOrNot may seem like
harmless nobodies and, left to their own devices and not given the oxygen of publicity that is
what they'd have remained.
But there are no accidents in life. The Washington Post (and do keep in mind its owner)
picked up on their output and played their tune on the Mighty Media Wurlitzer thereby amplifying
it. That alone is suggestive that PropOrNot may not be the two guys working out of their Mom's
basement which it is easy to think they might be.
Add in the fact that - worldwide now, I can tell you that even outside the U.S. this whole
"fake news" meme is still getting lots of airtime, the BBC in England is running 'Russia Hacked
the U.S. Election' stories right now as I watch and the Japanese language media has similar too
- what the Washington Post is seeking to do looks very well orchestrated and coordinated it means
that you must not take anything at face value here.
The MSM is all in. Last night the PBS Newshour ran the first in a series of stories
on FakeNews™, with favorably framed clips of Clinton and Sheryl Sandberg, and an extended
interview with Marc Fisher of the WaPo. Oddly, no mention of the PropOrNot fiasco.
It doesn't take a tin foil hat to believe the globalist-neocon-neolib-blob_thing feels it necessary
to delegitimize Trump and Trump's election in order to reassure its merry band of practitioners
that it's still biz as usual in the One World.
And tho it may seem a challenge to re-paint "Lying Hillary" as the beacon of truth, challenges
are what keep one motivated and ever stronger. No pain no gain.
P.S. Irony Of The Year Award goes to Russia for hacking and releasing real news. If we are
giving them the credit for DNC hacks and Hillary's secret private server discovery.
I went to a fundraiser last night where the very politically involved crowd was largely liberal
and one of the award presenters brought up 'fake news' during her speech. If I'm not mistaken
a member of this woman's family was one of Clinton's superdelegates. This 'fake news' meme is
definitely being spread far and wide.
We need to pursue the source of the defamation. See the BuzzFeed story yesterday, which is
generally very sympathetic to our position. Yet even that reporter says, Why have you gone after
the Post and not ProOrNot too?
I think this is at the very most six guys and probably more like two or three, for reasons
not worth taking the time to explain. And do not forget that the New Yorker said not only they
but other major pubs were shown the story and passed on it.
So the question is more: why did the Post pick up on obvious rubbish and treat it as newsworthy?
This may have less to do with grand conspiracy as much as a bad intersection of events, such as:
the Post under Bezos explicitly placing much more pressure on reporters to churn out stories quickly,
which means less fact checking; hysteria over Russia and fake news; and individual reporters and
editors seeing it as to their advantage to be in front of a hot area, no matter at what risk.
Recall the Post has run such nutty stories as one saying that Hillary's 9/11 collapse was due
to Putin poisoning her.
I think WAPO picked it up because they were obviously all in for Clinton during the election.
Whether Bezos was the hand behind this or not, WAPO has certainly focused on Trump. They even
admitted they were doing it as Bob Woodward disclosed in a Zero Hedge article. And of course,
WAPO assisted Clinton against Sanders with their coverage which has been documented many times.
Now Clinton is on the bandwagon of the fake news fiasco. She just gave a speech about it Thursday.
Thanks Yves (and Clive) for the responses. My concern is that if a shoddy three-man operation,
paired with a useful idiot MSM amplifier, can provoke a response that puts sites like NC on the
defensive and takes time from original reporting, it could be a template for quick-and-dirty future
attacks against independent media outlets. It seems like the amplifier is the only part of the
chain that can't just change domain names and set up shop somewhere else.
But I can see how ignoring them entirely isn't an optimal solution either. I'll keep throwing
my change in the tip jar and seeing how it all unfolds.
The PorN site is a dark site. We don't know who the principals are or where its funding comes
from. YYYYvesYYY also said NC needs to know what jurisdiction to file in in order to pursue PorN,
but that is not even known at this point. But in the Wapo response to TruthDig, Wapo stated they
did have "numerous" discussions with some persons at PorN before running the story.
So you got to shake the tree by the branches you can grab. The ball is now in Wapo's court
to state, "Journalistic integrity demands we do not reveal our sources in order to protect their
safety."
Meanwhile PorN is calling upon the entire USG security apparatus to investigate 200 websites
for Treason, but we are unsure about which country[government] Treason is being committed against
in One World. This doesn't sound like a very safe situation for simple minded provincial US citizen
homebodies.
I have been browsing your links for many years now – I find them well balanced, genuine, thought
provoking, and usually quite deep. And it is not just me – your quality is well recognized among
financial online community and punditry.
It is important you treat this thing with the right kind of attention. This is not mccarthian.
If it would be, you would be locked down in some hole in a secret location. This is somebody claiming
you have silicone tits and an extramarital affair with Michael Moore. Nobody gives a shit about
this, or their software, or WaPo and thir article – even if it gets 10 million retweets. Twitter
attention span is 1 minute.
Sure, sue everybody. But never give them an aureola of some dark sinister power. Ridicule them
every way of the step. Ridicule "newspapers of record". Ridicule retweets. Have fun with it. Find
new cases of such crap, where you personally are not affected. Help Melania Trump in her great
fight against online violence :-)
Just never concede to this as a "media fight" or "two versions of reality". This has nothing
to do with news or reality. Do not give them that ground. This is some insignificant ass claiming
you have fake tits, and it was picked up by an obsolete marketing tool called WaPo. A claim of
an extramarital affair with Michael Moore would probably get even more coverage and more retweets
and I bet some cable news discussions about public health consequences of missionary position
with such a voluptuous man.
We are fighting a legal battle and a political battle. The need to do both somewhat restricts
our degrees of freedom. The political battle is ultimately the far more important one, since the
"fake news" scare is part of a major push to restrict content on the web, by de facto rather than
de jure means.
you're kidding yourself, every time lately that I look at mainstream headlines the fake news
story is there near the top, can no longer stomach the news hour but another commenter says they're
doing a series think about all those proper folks demanding their kids not read alternative views?
The only consolation I can think of is that hillary lost because clearly this story was put out
in advance of her losing and would still be amplified had she won, .the outcome looks bleak either
way from here might as well fight it
I can tell you these fake news websites articles were heavily promoted here in Europe, so the
consequences are wide spread world wide.
I tried to explain the reasons and people behind ProporNot, but my comments were censored on
3 of the biggest digital newspapers in The Netherlands, some of them are in close contact with
Soros.
We have national elections in March 2017 and I can tell you the majority of the people are
mad as hell and they know the news presented to them in the MSM are/were heavily biased
towards Clinton. The MSM are sh*t scared what will happen in March 2017, an earthquake in the
political landscape. All the liberal political leaders are now suddenly promoting political stuff
that was unimaginable 2 years ago.
I have followed your website on and off the last 5 years and the idea that you are guided by
the Ruskies is absolutely preposterous even insane.
I just wonder, was Wapo so blinded by the total unexpected loss of Clinton that they keep on
publicing this nonsense or is it the trench war by Trump through his tweets. Wapo must have been
aware of the amateurish drivel from Propornot and took a big risk of being exposed as havily biased
and unprofessional with a heavy backlash.
Anyways, I would like to donate to you in this battle, do you accept Paypal as well.
I wish you and your team lots of success, Yves in this battle for truth.
However, if PropOrNot doesn't respond you might be able to get their Whois privacy provider
to get you the real owner's details – click on "File a Claim" at
https://www.domainsbyproxy.com/default.aspx
to see their process.
I realize that there were a number of right wing news outlets included in this de facto
censorship effort. But, they seem to be in a much stronger position than the left wing ones.
Wider distribution, less choosy about what they'll run, favored by the incoming power elite, etc.
Except, perhaps for a few paleocons-turned-libertarian-contrarians like Paul Craig Roberts. The
Drudge Report types seem less vulnerable.
I haven't been paying as much attention as I should to post a comment. But, first order, it
looks like this imbalance may pertain to targeting. No one could expect to dull the impact of
the Drudge Report by including it in an app of this kind. It is simply too prominent. Therefore,
dampening the influence of the Drudge Report (and similar sites) was not the point of this little
exercise.
Slurring the actual targets by including Drudge & company in the app seems . more the point.
Last night the PBS Newshour did a segment on "fake news." They are also participating in the
current PBS pledge drive. Perhaps they are hoping that George Soros will send them a big check.
One had hoped that the show would improve now that the election is over. One was wrong.
The MSM has lost control of the narrative. The big dailies continue to hemorrhage ad revenue,
month in and month out, year in and year out. Their existence going forward will be even more
dependent on government assistance. Fake News is the pathetic death rattle of the neoliberal order.
Short-termism is a real problem for the US politicians. It is only now the "teeth of dragon"
sowed during domination of neoliberalism since 80th start to show up in unexpected places. And reaction
is pretty predictable. As one commenter said: "Looks like the CIA's latest candidate for regime change
is the USA."
Notable quotes:
"... Divide and Control is being brilliantly employed once again against 'us'. The same tactics used against foreign countries are being used here at home on 'us'. ..."
"... Divide and Conquer, yes indeed, watch McCain and Graham push this Russian hacking angle hard. ..."
"... i regard this 'secret' CIA report, following on from the 'fake news' meme, to be another of what will become a never-ending series of attempts to deligitemize Trump, so that later on this year the coming economic collapse (and shootings, street violence, markets etc) can be more successfully blamed not only on Trump and his policies, but by extension, on the Russians. (a two-fer for the globalist statists) ..."
"... Nevermind that many states voting machines are on private networks and are not even connected to the internet. ..."
"... The Russians 'might' have influenced the election..... The American Government DID subvert and remove a democratically elected leader (Ukraine).Anyone see the difference there? ..."
"... Voted for Trump, but the Oligarcy picked him too. Check the connection between Ross and Trump and Wilburs former employer. TPTB laughs at all of us ..."
"... The sad facts are the CIA itself and it's massive propaganda arm has its gummy fingers all over this election and elections all over the planet. ..."
"... The Russians, my ass. ................. The CIA are famous for doing nefarious crap and blaming their handy work on someone else. Crap that usually causes thousands of deaths. ... Even in the KGB days the CIA was the king of causing chaos. ..... the KGB would kill a dissident or spy or two and the CIA in the same time frame would start a couple of wars killing thousands or millions. ..."
"... What makes people think the Post is believable? The truth has been hijacked by their self annihilating ideology. Honestly one would have to be dumb as a fence 'Post' (pun intended) to believe ANYTHING coming from this rag and the rest of these 'Fake News' MSM propaganda machines, good lord! ..."
"... As for the CIA, it was reported at the time to be largely purged under the Dubya administration, of consitutionalists and other dissidents to the 9-11 -->> total-war program. Stacked to the brim with with neocon cadres. ..."
"... Out of the 3,153 counties in this country, Hillary Clinton won only 480. A dismal and pathetic 15% of this country. The worst showing EVER for a presidential candidate. ..."
"... The much vaunted 2 million vote lead in the popular vote can be attributed to exactly 4 boroughs in NYC; Bronx, Queens, Manhattan, & Brooklyn ..."
"... 96 MILLION Americans were either too disgusted, too lazy, or too apathetic to even bother to go out and cast a vote for ANYONE in this election. ..."
"... Looks like the CIA's latest candidate for regime change is the USA. ..."
"... Clapper sat in front of congress and perjured himself. When confronted with his perjury he defended himself saying he told them the "least untruthful thing" he could - admitting he had not problem whatsoever about lying to Congress. ..."
"... There certainly is foreign meddling in US government policy but it is not coming from Russia. The countries that have much greater influence than Russia on 'our' government are the Sunni-dominated Persian Gulf oil states including the UAE, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, Kuwait and, of course, that bastion of human rights, Saudi Arabia. ..."
"... Oil money from these states has found its way into influentual think tanks including the Brookings Institution, the Atlantic Council, the Middle East Institute and the Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies and others. ..."
"... And also, there are arms sales. Arm sales to Saudi/Gulf States come with training. With training comes military ties, foreign policy ties and even intelligence ties. Saudi Arabia, with other Gulf oil states as partners, practically owns the CIA now. ..."
"... Reverse Blockade: emphatically insisting upon something which is the opposite of the truth blocks the average person's mind from perceiving the truth. In accordance with the dictates of healthy common sense, he starts searching for meaning in the "golden mean" between truth and its opposite, winding up with some satisfactory counterfeit. People who think like this do not realize that this effect is precisely the intent of the person who subjects them to this method. ..."
"... I recall lots of "consensus views" that were outright lies, bullshit and/or stupidity: "The Sun circles the Earth. The Earth is flat. Global cooling / next ice age (1970s). Global warming (no polar ice) 1990s-00's. Weapons of mass destruction." You can keep your doctor. ..."
"... The CIA, Pentagon and "intelligence" agencies need both a cleaning and culling ..."
"... Blacklist Promoted by the Washington Post Has Apparent Ties to Ukrainian Fascism and CIA Spying. ..."
"... This whopper of a story from the CIA makes the one fabricated about WMD's in Iraq that fooled Bush Jr. and convinced him to almost take this country down by violating the sage advice on war strategy from Sun-Tzu and Clausewitz and opening up a second front in Iraq almost child's play. ..."
"... At least with the WMD story they had false witnesses and some made up evidence! With this story, there is no "HUMINT (human intelligence) sources" and no physical evidence, just some alleged traces that could have been actually produced from the ether or if they knew ahead of time of Trump's possible win sent someone to Russia and had them actually run the IP routes for show. ..."
"... Bush was misled because the CIA management was scared of some of his budgetary saber rattles and his chasing after some CIA management. In this case, someone is really scared of what the people will find when the swam gets drained, if ever it gets done. This includes so-called "false flag conservatives" like Lindsey Graham and top Democrats "Cambridge 5 Admirers" salted in over the years into the CIA ..."
"... Trump has already signaled he is going hand them nearly unlimited power by appointing Pompeo in the first place. I would think they would be very happy to welcome the incoming administration with open arms. ..."
"... I could see it if they were really that pissed about Trumps proposed Russian re-set and maybe they are but even that has to be in doubt because of the rate at which Trump is militarizing his cabinet. ..."
"... In all reality Trump is a MIC, intelligence cabal dream come true, so why would they even consider biting the hand that feeds so well? Perhaps their is more going on here under the surface, maybe all the various agencies and bureaucracies are not playing nice, or together for that matter. ..."
"... after all the CIA and the Pentagon's proxy armies are already killing each other in Syria so one has to wonder in what other arenas are they clashing? ..."
"... The neocons are desperate. Their war monger Hitlery lost by a landslide now they fabricate all sorts of irrational BS. ..."
"... 'CIA Team B' ..."
"... 'Committee on the Present Danger' ..."
"... 'Office of Special Plans' ..."
"... Trump is a curious fellow. I've thought about this quite a bit and tried to put myself in his shoes. He has no friends in .gov, no real close "mates" he can depend on, especially in his own party, so he had to start from scratch to put his cabinet together. ..."
"... It could very well be that this was Trump & the establishment plan to con the American public from the start of course. I kind of doubt it, since the efforts of the establishment to destroy Trump was genuinely full retard from the outset and still continues. ..."
"... He would have done better to ignore the political divide to choose those who have spent their lives challenging the Deep State. My ignorance of US politics does not supply me with a complete picture, but Ron Paul, David Kucinich, Trey Gowdy, Tulsi Gabard and even turncoat Bernie Sanders would have been better to drain the swamp than the neocon zionists he has installed in power. ..."
It is worse than "shiny object." Human brains have a latency issue - the first time they hear
something, it sticks. To unstick something, takes a lot of counter evidence.
So, a Goebbels-like big lie, or shiny object can be told, and then it can take on a life of
its own. False flags operate under this premise. There is an action (false flag), and then false
narrative is issued into press mouthpieces immediately. This then plants a shiny object in sheeple
brains. It then takes too much mental effort for average sheeple to undo this narrative, so "crowds"
can be herded.
Six million dead is a good example of this technique.
Fortunately, with the internet, "supposed fake news sites like ZH" are spreading truth so fast
- that shiny stories issued by our Oligarch overlords are being shot down quickly.
Bezo's, who owns Washington Post, is taking rents by avoiding sales taxes; not that I'm a fan
of sales taxes. But, ultimately, Bezos is taking rental thefts, and he is afraid of Trump - who
may change the law, hence collapse the profit scheme of Amazon.
Cognitive Dissonance -> Oldwood •Dec 10, 2016 10:49 AM
Oldwood. I have a great deal of respect for you and your intelligent opinions.
My only concern is our constant and directed attention towards the 'liberals' and 'progressives'.
When we do so we are thinking it is 'them' that are the problem.
In fact it is the force behind 'them' that is the problem. If we oppose 'them', we are wasting
our energy upon ghosts and boogeymen.
Divide and Control is being brilliantly employed once again against 'us'. The same tactics
used against foreign countries are being used here at home on 'us'.
chunga -> Cognitive Dissonance •Dec 10, 2016 11:33 AM
I've been reading what the blue-teamers are saying over on the "Democratic Underground" site
and for a while they've been expressing it's their "duty" to disrupt this thing. They are now
calling Trump a "Puppet Regime".
Divide and Conquer, yes indeed, watch McCain and Graham push this Russian hacking angle
hard. Also watch for moar of the Suprun elector frauds pop out of the woodwork. The Russian
people must be absolutely galvanized by what's happening, USSA...torn into many opposing directions.
dark pools of soros -> chunga •Dec 10, 2016 1:38 PM
First tell them to change their name to the Progressive Party of Globalists. Then remind them
that many democrats left them and voted for Trump.. Remind them again and again that if they really
want to see blue states again, they have to actually act like democrats again
I assure you that you'll be banned within an hour from any of their sites
American Gorbachev -> Oldwood •Dec 10, 2016 10:12 AM
not an argument to the contrary, but one of elongating the timing
i regard this 'secret' CIA report, following on from the 'fake news' meme, to be another
of what will become a never-ending series of attempts to deligitemize Trump, so that later on
this year the coming economic collapse (and shootings, street violence, markets etc) can be more
successfully blamed not only on Trump and his policies, but by extension, on the Russians. (a
two-fer for the globalist statists)
with a political timetable operative as well, whereby some (pardon the pun :) trumped up excuse
for impeachment investigations/proceedings can consume the daily news during the run-up to the
mid-term elections (with the intent of flipping the Senate and possibly House)
these are very powerful, patient, and deliberate bastards (globalist statists) who may very
well have engineered Trump's election for the very purpose of marginalizing, near the point of
eliminating, the rural, christian, middle-class, nationalist voices from subsequent public debate
Oldwood -> American Gorbachev •Dec 10, 2016 10:21 AM
The problem is that once Trump becomes president, he will have much more power to direct the
message as well as the many factions of government agencies that would otherwise be used to substantiate
so called Trump failures. This is a calculated risk scenario for them, but to deny Trump the presidency
by far produces more positives for them than any other.
They will have control of the message and will likely shut down much of alternate media news.
It is imperative that Trump be stopped BEFORE taking the presidency.
sleigher -> overbet •Dec 10, 2016 10:00 AM
"I read one morons comment that the IP address was traced back to a Russian IP. Are people
really that dumb? I can post this comment from dozens of country IPs right now."
Nevermind that many states voting machines are on private networks and are not even connected
to the internet. IP addresses from Russia mean nothing.
kellys_eye -> Nemontel •Dec 10, 2016 9:40 AM
The Russians 'might' have influenced the election..... The American Government DID subvert
and remove a democratically elected leader (Ukraine).Anyone see the difference there?
Paul Kersey -> Nemontel •Dec 10, 2016 9:40 AM
"Most of our politicians are chosen by the Oligarchy."
And most of our politicians choose the Oligarchy. Trump's choices:
Anthony Scaramucci, Goldman Sachs
Gary Cohn, Goldman Sachs
Steven Mnuchin. Goldman Sachs
Steve Bannon, Goldman Sachs
Jared Kushner, Goldman Sachs
Wilbur Ross, Rothschild, Inc
The working man's choices.....very limited.
Paul Kersey -> Paul Kersey •Dec 10, 2016 10:27 AM
"Barack Obama received more money from Goldman Sachs employees than any other corporation.
Tim Geithner, Obama's first treasury secretary, was the protege of one-time Goldman CEO Robert
Rubin. "
"The more things change, the more they stay the same."
Nameshavebeench... -> Nemontel •Dec 10, 2016 11:53 AM
If Trump gets hit, the 'official story' of who did it will be a lie.
There needs to be a lot of online discussion about this ahead of time in preparation. If/when
the incident happens, there needs to be a successful counter-offensive that puts an end to the
Deep State. (take from that what you will)
We've seen the MO many times now;
Pearl Harbor
Iran in the 50's
Congo
Vietnam
Most of Latin America many times over
JFK
911
Sandy Hook
Boston Marathon 'Bombings'
Numerous 'mass shootings'
The patterns are well established & if Trump gets hit it should be no surprise, now the 'jackals'
need to be exterminated.
Also, keep in mind that everything we're hearing in all media just might be psyops/counter-intel/planted
'news' etc.
sgt_doom -> Nemontel •Dec 10, 2016 1:25 PM
Although I have little hope for this happening, ideally Trump should initiate full forensic
audits of the CIA, NSA, DIA and FBI. The last time a sitting president undertook an actual audit
of the CIA, he had his brains blown out (President John F. Kennedy) and the Fake News (CBS, NBC,
ABC, etc.) reported that a fellow who couldn't even qualify as marksman, the lowest category (he
was pencilled in) was the sniper.
Then, on the 50th anniversary of that horrible coup d'etat, another Fake News show (NPR) claimed
that a woman in the military who worked at the rifle range at Atsuga saw Oswald practicing weekly
- - absurd on the fact of it, since women weren't allowed at military rifle ranges until the late
1970s or 1980s (and I doublechecked and there was never a woman assigned there in the late 1950s).
Just be sure he has trustworthy bodyguards, unlike the last batch of phony Secret Service agents
(and never employ anyone named Elmer Moore).
2rigged2fail -> Nemontel •Dec 10, 2016 4:04 PM
Voted for Trump, but the Oligarcy picked him too. Check the connection between Ross and
Trump and Wilburs former employer. TPTB laughs at all of us
All these Russian interference claims require one to believe that the MSM and democrat machine
got out played and out cheated by a bunch of ruskies. This is the level of desperation the democrats
have fallen too. To pretend to be so incompetent that the Russians outplayed and overpowered their
machine. But I guess they have to fall on that narrative vs the fact that a "crazy" real estate
billionaire with a twitter account whipped their asses.
Democrats, you are morally and credulously bankrupt. all your schemes, agenda's and machinations
cannot put humpty dumpty back together again. So now it is another period of scorched earth. The
Federal Bureaucracy will fight Trump tooth and nail, joined by the democrats in the judiciary,
and probably not a few rino's too.
It is going to get ugly, like a machete fight. W. got a taste of it with his Plame affair,
the brouhaha over the AGA firings, the regime of Porter Goss as DCI
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porter_Goss
DuneCreature -> cherry picker •Dec 10, 2016 10:30 AM
The sad facts are the CIA itself and it's massive propaganda arm has its gummy fingers
all over this election and elections all over the planet.
The Russians, my ass. ................. The CIA are famous for doing nefarious crap and
blaming their handy work on someone else. Crap that usually causes thousands of deaths. ... Even
in the KGB days the CIA was the king of causing chaos. ..... the KGB would kill a dissident or
spy or two and the CIA in the same time frame would start a couple of wars killing thousands or
millions.
You said a mouth full, cherry picker. ..... Until the US Intel community goes 'bye bye' the
world will HATE the US. ... People aren't stupid. They know who is behind the evil shit.
... ... ..
G-R-U-N-T •Dec 10, 2016 9:39 AM
What makes people think the Post is believable? The truth has been hijacked by their self
annihilating ideology. Honestly one would have to be dumb as a fence 'Post' (pun intended) to
believe ANYTHING coming from this rag and the rest of these 'Fake News' MSM propaganda machines,
good lord!
Colborne •Dec 10, 2016 9:37 AM
As for the CIA, it was reported at the time to be largely purged under the Dubya administration,
of consitutionalists and other dissidents to the 9-11 -->> total-war program. Stacked to the brim
with with neocon cadres. So, that's the lay of the terrain there now, that's who's running
the place. And they aren't going without a fight apparently.
Interesting times , more and more so.
66Mustanggirl •Dec 10, 2016 9:40 AM
For those of us who still have a grip on reality, here are the facts of this election:
Out of the 3,153 counties in this country, Hillary Clinton won only 480. A dismal and
pathetic 15% of this country. The worst showing EVER for a presidential candidate. Are
they really trying to blame the Russians and "fake" news for THAT?? Really??
The much vaunted 2 million vote lead in the popular vote can be attributed to exactly
4 boroughs in NYC; Bronx, Queens, Manhattan, & Brooklyn, where Hillary racked up 2 million
more votes than Trump. Should we give credit to the Russians and "fake" news for that, too?
96 MILLION Americans were either too disgusted, too lazy, or too apathetic to even
bother to go out and cast a vote for ANYONE in this election. On average 100 Million Americans
don't bother to vote.The Russians and "fake" news surely aren't responsible for THAT!
But given this is a story from WaPo, I think will just give a few days until it is thoroughly
discredited.
max2205 -> 66Mustanggirl •Dec 10, 2016 11:04 AM
And she won CA by 4 million. She hates she only gets a limited amount of electoral votes..
tough shit rules are rules bitch. Suck it
HalEPeno •Dec 10, 2016 9:43 AM
Looks like the CIA's latest candidate for regime change is the USA.
Clara Tardis •Dec 10, 2016 9:45 AM
This is a vid from the 1950's, "How to spot a Communist" all you have to do is swap out commie
for: liberal, neocon, SJW and democrat and figure out they've about won....
This is the same CIA that let Pakistan build up the Taliban in Afganistan during the 1990s
and gave Pakistan ISI (Pakistan spy agency) hundreds of millions of USD which the ISI channeled
to the Taliban and Arab freedom fighters including a very charming chap named Usama Bin Laden.
The CIA is as worthless as HRC.
Fuck them and their failed intelligence. I hope Trump guts the CIA like a fish. They need a
reboot.
Yes We Can. But... -> venturen •Dec 10, 2016 10:08 AM
Why might the Russians want Trump? If there is anything to the stuff I've been reading about
the Clintons, they are like cornered animals. Putin just may think the world is a safer, more
stable place w/o the Clintons in power.
TRM -> atthelake •Dec 10, 2016 10:44 AM
If it is "on" then those doing the "collections" should be aware that a lot of people they
will be "collecting" have read Solzhenitsyn.
"And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every
Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he
would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family?"
Those doing the "collections" will have to choose and choose wisely the side they are on. How
much easier would it be for them to report back "Sorry, couldn't find them" than to face the wrath
of a well armed population?
Abaco •Dec 10, 2016 9:53 AM
The clowns running the intelligence agencies for the US have ZERO credibility. Clapper
sat in front of congress and perjured himself. When confronted with his perjury he defended himself
saying he told them the "least untruthful thing" he could - admitting he had not problem whatsoever
about lying to Congress. He was not fired or reprimanded in any way. He retired with a generous
pension. He is a treasonous basrtard who should be swinging from a lamppost. These people serve
their political masters - not the people - and deserve nothing but mockery and and a noose.
mendigo •Dec 10, 2016 9:56 AM
As reported on infowars:
On Dec 9 0bomber issued executive order providing exemption to Arms Export Control Act to permit
supplying weapons (ie sams etc) to rebel groups in Syria as a matter "essential to national security
"interests"".
Be careful in viewing this report as is posted from RT - perhaps best to wait for corraboaration
on front page of rededicated nyt to be sure and avoid fratrenizing with Vlad.
Separately Gabard has introduced bill : Stop Arming Terrorists Act.
David Wooten •Dec 10, 2016 9:56 AM
There certainly is foreign meddling in US government policy but it is not coming from Russia.
The countries that have much greater influence than Russia on 'our' government are the Sunni-dominated
Persian Gulf oil states including the UAE, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, Kuwait and, of course, that bastion
of human rights, Saudi Arabia.
Oil money from these states has found its way into influentual think tanks including the
Brookings Institution, the Atlantic Council, the Middle East Institute and the Georgetown Center
for Strategic and International Studies and others. All of these institutions should be registered
as foriegn agents and any cleared US citizen should have his or her clearance revoked if they
do any work for these organizations, either as a contractor or employee. And these Gulf states
have all been donating oil money to UK and US universities so lets include the foreign studies
branches of universities in the registry of foreign agents, too.
And also, there are arms sales. Arm sales to Saudi/Gulf States come with training. With
training comes military ties, foreign policy ties and even intelligence ties. Saudi Arabia, with
other Gulf oil states as partners, practically owns the CIA now. Arms companies who sell
deadly weapons to the Gulf States, in turn, donate money to Congressmen and now own politicians
such as Senators Graham and McCain. It's no wonder Graham wants to help his pals - er owners.
So what we have here ('our' government) is institutionalized influence, if not outright control,
of US foreign policy by some of the most vicious states on the planet,
especially Saudi Arabia - whose religious police have been known to beat school girls fleeing
from burning buildings because they didn't have their headscarves on.
As Hillary's 2014 emails have revealed, Qatar and Saudi Arabia support ISIS and were doing
so about the same time as ISIS was sweeping through Syria and Iraq, cutting off the heads of Christians,
non-Sunnis and just about anyone else they thought was in the way. The Saudi/Gulf States are the
driving force to get rid of Assad and that is dangerous as nuclear-armed Russia protects him.
If something isn't done about this, the Gulf oil states may get US into a nuclear war with Russia
- and won't care in the least.
Richard Whitney •Dec 10, 2016 10:10 AM
So...somehow, Putin was able to affect the election one way, and the endorsements for HRC and
the slander of Trump by and from Washington Post, New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, practically
every big-city newspaper, practically every newspaper in Europe, every EU mandarin, B Streisand,
Keith Olberman, Comedy Central, MSNBC, CNN, Lady Gaga, Lena Dunham and a wad of other media outlets
and PR-driven-celebs couldn't affect that election the other way.
Sounds unlikely on the face of it, but hats off to Vlad. U.S. print and broadcast media, Hollywood,
Europe...you lost.
seataka •Dec 10, 2016 10:11 AM
The Reverse Blockade
"Reverse Blockade: emphatically insisting upon something which is the opposite of the truth
blocks the average person's mind from perceiving the truth. In accordance with the dictates of
healthy common sense, he starts searching for meaning in the "golden mean" between truth and its
opposite, winding up with some satisfactory counterfeit. People who think like this do not realize
that this effect is precisely the intent of the person who subjects them to this method.
" page 104, Political Ponerology by Andrew M. Lobaczewski
more
just the tip -> northern vigor •Dec 10, 2016 11:51 AM
that car ride for the WH to the capital is going to be fun.
Arnold -> just the tip •Dec 10, 2016 12:12 PM
Your comment ticked one of my remaining Brain Cells.
I recall lots of "consensus views" that were outright lies, bullshit and/or stupidity:
"The Sun circles the Earth. The Earth is flat. Global cooling / next ice age (1970s). Global warming
(no polar ice) 1990s-00's. Weapons of mass destruction." You can keep your doctor.
The CIA, Pentagon and "intelligence" agencies need both a cleaning and culling. 50%
of the Federal govt needs to go.....now.
What is BEYOND my comprehension is how anyone would think that in Putin's mind, Trump would
be preferable to Hillary. She and her cronies are so corrupt, he would either be able to blackmail
or destroy her (through espionage and REAL leaks) any time he wanted to during her presidency.
Do TPTB think we are this fucking stupid?
madashellron •Dec 10, 2016 10:31 AM
Blacklist Promoted by the Washington Post Has Apparent Ties to Ukrainian Fascism and CIA
Spying.
I love this. Trump is not eager to "drain the swamp" and to collide with the establishment,
anyway he has no viable economic plan and promised way too much. However if they want to lead
a coup for Hilary with the full backing of most republican and democrat politicians just to get
their war against Russia, something tells me that the swamp will be drained for real when the
country falls apart in chaos.
northern vigor •Dec 10, 2016 10:36 AM
Fuckin' Obama interfered in the Canadian election last year by sending advisers up north to
corrupt our laws. He has a lot of nerve pointing fingers at the Russians.
I notice liberals love to point fingers at others, when they are the guilty ones. It must be
in the Alinsky handbook.
Pigeon -> northern vigor •Dec 10, 2016 10:38 AM
Called "projection". Everything they accuse others of doing badly, illegally, immorally, etc.
- means that is EXACTLY what they are up to.
just the tip -> northern vigor •Dec 10, 2016 11:35 AM
Trump should not only 'defund' them but should end all other 'programs' that are providing
funds to them. Drug trade, bribery, embezzelment, etc. End the CIA terror organization.
Skiprrrdog •Dec 10, 2016 10:49 AM
Putin for Secretary of State... :-)
brianshell •Dec 10, 2016 10:50 AM
Section 8, The congress shall have the power to...declare war...raise armies...navies...militia.
The National Security Act charged the CIA with coordinating the nation's intelligence activities
and correlating, evaluating and disseminating intelligence affecting national security.
Rogue members of the executive branch have overstepped their authority by ordering the CIA
to make war without congressional approval or oversight.
A good deal of the problems created by the United States, including repercussions such as terrorism
have been initiated by the CIA
Under "make America great", include demanding congress assume their responsibility regarding
war.
Rein in the executive and the CIA
DarthVaderMentor •Dec 10, 2016 10:59 AM
This whopper of a story from the CIA makes the one fabricated about WMD's in Iraq that
fooled Bush Jr. and convinced him to almost take this country down by violating the sage advice
on war strategy from Sun-Tzu and Clausewitz and opening up a second front in Iraq almost child's
play.
At least with the WMD story they had false witnesses and some made up evidence! With this
story, there is no "HUMINT (human intelligence) sources" and no physical evidence, just some alleged
traces that could have been actually produced from the ether or if they knew ahead of time of
Trump's possible win sent someone to Russia and had them actually run the IP routes for show.
Bush was misled because the CIA management was scared of some of his budgetary saber rattles
and his chasing after some CIA management. In this case, someone is really scared of what the
people will find when the swam gets drained, if ever it gets done. This includes so-called "false
flag conservatives" like Lindsey Graham and top Democrats "Cambridge 5 Admirers" salted in over
the years into the CIA
The fact that's forgotten about this is that if the story was even slightly true, it shows
how incompetent the Democrats are in running a country, how Barak Obama was an intentional incompetent
trying to drive the country into the ground and hurting its people, how even with top technologies,
coerced corrupted vendors and trillions in funding the NSA, CIA and FBI they were outflanked by
the FSB and others and why Hillary's server was more incompetent and dangerous a decision than
we think.
Maybe Hillary and Bill had their server not to hide information from the people, but maybe
to actually promote the Russian hacking?
Why should Trump believe the CIA? What kind of record and leadership do they have that anyone
other than a fool should listen to them?
small axe •Dec 10, 2016 10:55 AM
At some point Americans will need to wake up to the fact that the CIA has and does interfere
in domestic affairs, just as it has long sought to counter "subversion" overseas. The agency is
very likely completely outside the control of any administration at this point and is probably
best seen as the enforcement arm of the Deep State.
As the US loses its empire and gains Third World status, it is (sadly) fitting that the CIA
war to maintain docile populations becomes more apparent domestically.
Welcome to Zimbabwe USA.
marcusfenix •Dec 10, 2016 11:10 AM
what I don't understand is why the CIA is even getting tangled up in this three ring circus
freak show.
Trump has already signaled he is going hand them nearly unlimited power by appointing Pompeo
in the first place. I would think they would be very happy to welcome the incoming administration
with open arms.
I could see it if they were really that pissed about Trumps proposed Russian re-set and
maybe they are but even that has to be in doubt because of the rate at which Trump is militarizing
his cabinet. All these stars are not exactly going to support their president going belly
up to the bar with Putin. and since Trump has no military or civilian leadership experience (which
is why I believe he has loaded up on so much brass in the first place, to compensate) I have no
doubt they will have tremendous influence on policy.
In all reality Trump is a MIC, intelligence cabal dream come true, so why would they even
consider biting the hand that feeds so well? Perhaps their is more going on here under the surface,
maybe all the various agencies and bureaucracies are not playing nice, or together for that matter.
perhaps some have grown so large and so powerful that they have their own agendas? it's not as
if our federal government has ever really been one big happy family there have been many times
when the right hand did not know what the left hand was doing. and congress is week so oversight
of this monolithic military and intelligence entities may not be as extensive as we would like
to think.
after all the CIA and the Pentagon's proxy armies are already killing each other in Syria
so one has to wonder in what other arenas are they clashing?
and is this really all just a small glimpse of some secret war within, which every once in
a while bubbles up to the surface?
CheapBastard •Dec 10, 2016 11:34 AM
The neocons are desperate. Their war monger Hitlery lost by a landslide now they fabricate
all sorts of irrational BS.
However, there is no doubt the Russians stole my TV remote last week.
The Intel agencies have been politicized since the late 1970's; look up 'CIA Team B'
and the 'Committee on the Present Danger' and their BS 'minority report' used by the
original NeoCons to sway public opinion in favor of Ronald Reagan and the arms buildup of the
1980's, which led to the first sky-high deficits. It also led to a confrontational stance against
the Soviet Union which almost led to nuclear war in 1983: The 1983 War Scare Declassified
and For Real
http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb533-The-Able-Archer-War-Scare-Decl...
The honest spook analysts were forced out, then as now, in favor of NeoCons with political
agendas that were dangerously myopic to say the least. The 'Office of Special Plans'
in the Pentagon cherry-picked or outright fabricated intel in order to justify the NeoCon/Israeli
wet-dream of total control of oil and the 'Securing the (Israeli) Realm' courtesy of invading
parts of the Middle East and destabilizing the rest, with the present mess as the wholly predictable
outcome. The honest analysts told them it would happen, and now they're gone.
This kind of organizational warping caused by agency politicization is producing the piss-poor
intel leading to asinine decisions creating untold tragedy; that the WaPo is depending upon this
intel from historically-proven tainted sources is just one more example of the incestuous nature
of the relations between Traditional Media and its handlers in the intel community.
YHC-FTSE •Dec 10, 2016 11:54 AM
This isn't a "Soft Coup". It's the groundwork necessary for a rock hard, go-for-broke, above
the barricade, tanks in the street coup d'etat. You do not get such a blatant accusation from
the CIA and establishment echo vendor, unless they are ready to back it up to the hilt with action.
The accusations are serious - treason and election fraud.
Trump is a curious fellow. I've thought about this quite a bit and tried to put myself
in his shoes. He has no friends in .gov, no real close "mates" he can depend on, especially in
his own party, so he had to start from scratch to put his cabinet together. His natural "Mistake"
is seeking people at his level of business acumen - his version of real, ordinary people - when
billionaires/multimillionaires are actually Type A personalities, usually predatory and addicted
to money. In his world, and in America in general, money equates to good social standing more
than any other facet of personal achievements. It is natural for an American to equate "Good"
with money. I'm a Brit and foreigners like me (I have American cousins I've visited since I was
a kid) who visit the States are often surprised by the shallow materialism that equates to culture.
So we have a bunch of dubious Alpha types addicted to money in transition to take charge of
government who know little or nothing about the principle of public service. Put them in a room
together and without projects they can focus on, they are going to turn on each other for supremacy.
I would not be surprised if Trump's own cabinet destroys him or uses leverage from their own power
bases to manipulate him.
Mike Pompeo, for example, is the most fucked up pick as CIA director I could have envisaged.
He is establishment to his core, a neocon torture advocate who will defend the worst excesses
of the intelligence arm of the MIC no matter what. One word from his mouth could have stopped
this bullshit about Russia helping Trump win the election. Nobody in the CIA was going to argue
with the new boss. Yet here we are, on the cusp of another attack on mulitple fronts. This is
how you manipulate an incumbent president to dial up his paranoia to the max and failing that,
launch a coup d'etat.
It could very well be that this was Trump & the establishment plan to con the American
public from the start of course. I kind of doubt it, since the efforts of the establishment to
destroy Trump was genuinely full retard from the outset and still continues. I think he was
his own man until paranoia and the enormity of his position got the better of him and he chose
his cabinet from the establishment swamp dwellers to best protect him from his enemies. Wrong
choices, granted, but understandable.
He would have done better to ignore the political divide to choose those who have spent
their lives challenging the Deep State. My ignorance of US politics does not supply me with a
complete picture, but Ron Paul, David Kucinich, Trey Gowdy, Tulsi Gabard and even turncoat Bernie
Sanders would have been better to drain the swamp than the neocon zionists he has installed in
power.
flaminratzazz ->YHC-FTSE •Dec 10, 2016 12:03 PM
I think he was his own man until paranoia and the enormity of his position got the better of
him,,
+1 I think he was just dickin around with throwin his hat in the ring, was going to go have fun
calling everyone names with outlandish attacks and lo and behold he won.. NOW he is shitting himself
on the enormity of his GREATEST fvkup in his life.
jomama ->YHC-FTSE •Dec 10, 2016 12:16 PM
Unless you can show how Trump's close ties to Wall St. (owes banks there around 350M currently
YHC-FTSE ->jomama •Dec 10, 2016 12:59 PM
My post is conjecture, obviously. The basis of my musings, as stated above, is the fact that the
establishment has tried to destroy Trump from the outset using all of their assets in his own
party, the msm, Hollyweird, intelligence and politics. A full retard attack is being perpetrated
against him as I type.
There is some merit to dividing the establishment, the Deep State, into two opposing sides.
One that lost power, priestige and funds backing Hillary and one that did not, which would make
Trump an alternative establishment candidate. But there is no proof that any establishment (MIC+Banking)
entity even likes Trump, let alone supports him. As for Israel, Hillary was their candidate of
choice, but their MO is they will always infiltrate and back both sides to ensure compliance.
blindfaith ->YHC-FTSE •Dec 10, 2016 12:36 PM
Do not underestimate Trump. I will grant that some of these picks are concerning. However, think
in terms of business, AND government is a business from top to bottom. It has been run as a dog
and pony show for years and look where we are. To me, I think his picks are strating to look like
a very efficient team to get the government efficient again. That alone must make D.C. shake in
thier boots.
YHC-FTSE ->blindfaith •Dec 10, 2016 1:08 PM
Underestimating Trump is the last thing I would do. I'm just trying to understand his motives
in my own clumsy way. Besides, he promised to "Drain the swamp", not run the swamp more efficiently.
ducksinarow •Dec 10, 2016 12:04 PM
From a non political angle, this is a divorce in the making. Then democrats have been rejected
in totallity but instead of blaming themselves for not being good enough, they are blaming a third
party which is the Russians. They are now engaging the Republican Party in a custody battle for
the "children". There are lies flying around and the older children know exactly what is going
on and sadly the younger children are confused, bewildered, angry and getting angrier by the minute.
Soon Papa(Obama) will be leaving which is symbolic of the male father figure in the African American
community. The new Papa is a white guy who is going to change the narrative, the rules of engagement
and the financial picture. The ones who were the heroes in the Obama narrative are not going to
be heroes anymore. New heroes will be formed and revered and during this process some will die
for their beliefs.
Back to reality, Trump needs to cleanse the CIA of the ones who would sell our nation to the
highest bidder. If the CIA is not on the side of America the CIA should be abolished. In a world
where mercenaries are employed all over the world, bringing together a culturally mixed agency
does not make for a very honest agency. It makes for a bunch of self involved countries trying
to influence the power of individuals. The reason Castro was never taken down is because it was
not in the interest of the CIA to do so. That is why there were some pretty hilarious non-attempts
on Castro's life over the years. It is not in the best interest of the CIA that Trump be president.
It is in the best interest of America that Trump is our President.
brane pilot •Dec 10, 2016 12:22 PM
Even the idea that people would rely on foreign governments for critical information during
an election indicates the bankruptcy of the corrupt US media establishment. So now they resort
to open sedition and defamation in the absence of factual information. The mainstream media in
the USA has become a Fifth Column against America, no different than the so-called 'social science'
departments on college campuses. Trump was America's last chance and we took it and no one is
going to take it away.
"... It appears that the globalists are scared of anything that resembles the truth that counters their incessant propaganda If there was ever a discovery process in a lawsuit against WAPO, I would imagine that all roads would lead to a Contelpro section of the CIA It's interesting that Wall Street on Parade has noted that Propornot has a double blind registration in New Mexico. ..."
"... Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts. ..."
"... More and more it seems like USA, like the roman empire, needs barbarians at the gates to distract the plebs from internal structural problems. ..."
"... As long as Yeltsin allowed Wall Street to loot Russia of former soviet holdings, Russia was not "barbaric". Now that Putin has put a solid halt on said looting, Russia is again "barbarians" ..."
"... And by refusing to address the emails, other than to scream "Russian hackers," the corporate media were able to convince the Clinton cultists and other Third-Way believers that the information they contained was just another right-wing attack on The Anointed because (other than leftist, Russian-loving "fake news" sites), the right-wing media were the only ones paying it any attention. ..."
"... I am old enough to remember seeing in the news reel at my local theater in 1950 Joseph McCarthy holding up a piece of paper to the cameras and intoning in his inimitable droning voice, "I have here in my hand a list of 205 known members of the Communist Party who are working and shaping policy in the State Department." ..."
"... People's livelihoods and reputations were thereby smeared for life. Never did McCarthy back his claims with evidence, nor did he retract his scurrilous accusation. Now, tell me how what Jeff Bezos and co. are doing in this instance is in any significant way different from what McCarthy did to these people back in 1956. What finally put it squarely before the American public and finally earned McCarthy Congressional censure was when Boston attorney Joseph Welch asked McCarthy, "Have you no sense of decency, sir?" ..."
"... Here's the thing. Yes, RT is funded by the Russian government, and thus anything posted thereon needs to be considered with that in mind. Nevertheless, it is also where stories the corporates prefer to ignore are given attention. In other words, there is an irony that the Russians may, indeed, be trying to influence us, but if so, they appear to be doing it by subtly undermining the reliability of the corporate media. ..."
"... To put it another way, dismissing RT solely because of its funding source is no better than dismissing NC et al. as propaganda sites, and doing so is actually feeding the propaganda machine. After all, we don't know what percentage of the US media currently receives "grants" from US intelligence agencies, now, do we. ..."
"... In studying communications, there's a distinction between 'white' and 'black' propaganda. White propaganda is publishing truth that supports your cause. Black propaganda is, of course, slanderous lies. RT is white propaganda, so use it for the value it brings. ..."
"... Exactly. I'm a grown-up. I have a lot of practice reading critically and I'm quite capable of questioning sources and filtering bias. I don't need Jeff Bezos to protect me from Russkie BadThink. ..."
"... "does not itself vouch " You have to bear in mind this is not the Post talking, this is CIA CIA has blatantly used the Post as a their sockpuppet since they put Woodward in there to oust Nixon, and now they've got Bezos by the contractual balls. CIA has impunity in municipal statute and secret red tape so any answer you get from them means No fuck You. ..."
"... The NDAA legalized domestic propaganda in 2013 so when the public repudiated their chosen president Hillary Clinton, CIA immediately got to work work attacking Article 19. ..."
"... [M]aybe we should just lump them [WaPo] in with Breitbart and company. ..."
This is tantamount to an admission that not only did the Washington Post do no fact-checking,
but also that it does not consider fact-checking to be part of its job.
Another way to put it is to say that WaPoo is not in the business of investigation but instead
is in the business of regurgitation . WaPoo seems to think that reporting equals repeating.
We don't need people who repeat other people's words. We need reporters who are digging.
"This minimalist walk-back does not remedy the considerable damage [already] done to NC and
other sites." No, it certainly does not. Once the "defamatory cat" is out of the bag, you can't
exactly stuff the cat back in.
Proceed, young lady with your case. But as you move forward, do take measures to keep these
vampires from stealing your adaptive energies and health.
p.s. You know, this diminiishes WaPo to a mere "blog aggregator" when allows its "reporters"
such as Craig Timberg to merely "scrape and publish" posts from anonymous blogsites (not even
scraping from the laughable "gold standard" of truth on the internet: Wiki). These reporters aren't
writing, they are scraping. What a bunch of lazy fucks at WaPo!
And you know what I'd really like to do: kick this Craig Timberg character a new ass in a dark
alley. Yves, when you are done shredding WaPo and Timberg, I sincerely hope they won't be able
to sit down for a whole year.
p.s.s. that post (yd) about Wiki becoming the "gold standard" of 'fact-finding" and "truth"
on the internet was particularly disturbing. Even citations from academic journals (such as JAMA)
posted in Wiki are laden with flawed research suffering from poor design and methodology, draw
the wrong conclusions, reveal biases and conflicts of interest, show a lack of references etc.
Decades ago, there was a shift in much of the medical literature – a shift from "evidence-based"
to "consensus-based." The internet appears to be moving in the same direction, using various tools
and methodologies that allow "consensus-based" opinions (valued by the certain parties that be)
to be shaped as "facts" and "truth." When in fact, those opinions are anything but a truth.
. a shift from "evidence-based" to "consensus-based."
Yes. That's what I see as behind the browser flagging extensions, as if facts are subject to
majority vote, which would make them opinions, not facts. If wapoo prints an editorial opinion
on the editorial page, that's one thing. If wapoo prints editorial opinion masquerading as fact
on the front page, that is a different matter.
Wapoo's arrogant reply, in the form of an editor's note, to NC's letter isn't a surprising
first move for them. I trust NC's atty has already thought many, many steps ahead.
"The Post, which did not name any of the sites, does not itself vouch for the validity of PropOrNot's
findings regarding any individual media outlet, nor did the article purport to do so."
You couldn't get a more weassely response. They admit they didn't fact check their sources,
they cowadly now hide behind the defence of not actully naming any of the sites, and then finally
try to play the "nothing to see here" defence of pretending the article didn't mean what it quite
clearly did mean when it was published.
Increasingly, challenging western govt output is seen as a form of rebellion. As Orwell said
. telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.
One day I was listening to Bloomberg News on the car radio, when they aired a critical story
on a company where I had worked. The criticism was from a third party group. And then the next
news story began.
Stunned, I phoned the reporter and asked, "Where was the company's rebuttal, or refusal to
comment?"
He replied, "It was there, you just didn't hear it."
But I had listened with full attention, and it wasn't there. Maybe an editor had removed it
to shorten the clip.
This has been my experience with the MSM. They are always right. They make no mistakes. You
should believe them, not your lying eyes and ears.
"This has been my experience with the MSM. They are always right. They make no mistakes.
You should believe them, not your lying eyes and ears."
We have always been at war with Eurasia.
The Ministry of Truth hasn't, yet, been given the power to completely silence those of us who
don't stay within the confines of The Narrative. So their tactic is to portray us all as dangerous
disinformators like Emmanuel Goldstein.
In 1975, I went to the Soviet Union with a group of American tourists. At the time, I was working
as a volunteer for Ralph Nader. A few times, some of the people in our group had a chance to talk
to Soviet people in our hotels. The other Americans would give civics book explanations about
how the US government worked. Some of the Soviet people would question these explanations, saying
that they had heard from their government that the American government worked in a way that sounded
to me much more accurate and in line with the way Nader portrayed the US. Undemocratic regimes
are often fairly accurate in describing the faults of other governments, especially those of their
perceived enemies, while ignoring their own failings. I do not know exactly what Russian propaganda
the Washington Post is referring to, but I would not be surprised if various Russian sources simply
repeat the common criticisms of the toxic activities of the neoliberal establishment – an establishment
of which the Washington Post has been a long-time supporter. Why go through all of the trouble
of fabricating stories when the reality is as damning as anything you could make up? So rather
than the US sources in question spouting Russian propaganda, the Russians might simply be repeating
the criticisms they are hearing from the US.
This is tantamount to an admission that not only did the Washington Post do no fact-checking,
but that it does not consider fact-checking to be part of its job.
Ah, the Ratings Agencies "opinions" defense. Blithely ignorant of their own legally and historically
protected positions. I suspect this is exactly the defense the WP will run with. Effectively they
will assert their constitutional right as propagandists, to broadcast whatever they please in
the national interest.
is a new, private sector-led initiative
I would say not entirely. True, large private corporations are behind a lot of this, but what
is at stake is their authority to speak for, and their connections to, the state and Deep State.
On a more emotional level, what is at stake is status. Because really that is all the big newspapers
have anymore. Social status. Do not underestimate this currency. It is probably the most precious
form of capital there is and the Post, et al, will fight with their fingernails to avoid losing
it. Things could get pretty nasty. Good luck and give the bastards hell.
Long, long time, b/c of their policies. I figure my opinion doesn't count, my vote doesn't
count, but by golly, I will make every dollar I spend count. I buy locally when possible (ideally
both locally made/grown and locally-owned retail, although there is at least one local company
I will not patronize, for policy reasons) and have found alternate sources for things I can't
get around here, eg. Powell's for books and
Lehman's for tools and kitchen stuff. As a last resort I will comparison shop on Amazon and
then ask my local supplier to order the thing in for me (as I did with my water heater). Not one
nickel of mine will go to WaPo or Amazon. And I have told rellies, pls no Amazon gifts for our
household.
Long before the current series of events happened, there were excellent reasons to avoid buying
from Amazon.com. The horrific working conditions in Amazon.com warehouses should be enough to
prevent any person from buying from the company. I suppose many people still aren't aware of how
bad it is, so here's an example article:
As much as I would love to "boycott Amazon," it's not possible for several reasons. First,
being old and crippled, I can't run out to the nearest Target to buy stuff, and I definitely don't
have time or physical capacity to hop all over town trying to find some specialty item that doesn't
sell enough for most bricks-and-mortar retailers to carry. I do buy direct when it's possible,
but the fact of life is there's stuff you can only find on Amazon.
Second, I own and operate a small digitally-based book publishing company, and Amazon is our
major source of revenue. For me, boycotting Amazon would mean pulling my authors' work from distribution
there, which isn't an option. Likewise, consider Kindle owners with extensive libraries.
Frankly, I consider these calls to boycott some huge corporation the kind of symbolic action
that allows people to feel good about themselves while avoiding doing anything actually effective.
Like writing/emailing/phoning the editorial board of the local news media should they be broadcasting/publishing
this rubbish-preferably all three and multiple times. Given that many are connected to the same
major corporations as the Big Media, that strikes me as what really needs to be done.
After all, WaPo isn't doing this in an echo chamber. Their fiction was picked up by all the
major players and more than a few of the minor. The only way to counter public discourse is publicly.
On another subject-Yves and Lambert, if you'd like someone to run over your articles pre-publication
for a quick copyedit, you know where to find me. It's one of the non-monetary things I can donate.
Agree on symbolic action. I do buy from Amazon and either go to antiwar.com first (a mixed
site, but one I want to see endure) and click so they get a commission or go to smile.amazon.com
so my favorite small charity gets it.
Buying is NOT voting. I'm a citizen and not mainly just a consumer. Not buying from amazon
would hurt me more than them (especially as I like buying obscure second-hand books). There are
much better things I can do to be politically effective, including letters to the editor and contributions.
I do buy by preference from a third-party that doesn't distribute from Amazon warehouses if
the price is close. And there are many things I do choose to get locally or from others. But I
buy a heck of a lot from them especially books.
There should be a union of sorts, among those defamed. Join forces with some other reputable
smallish websites and create a consortium that pools resources to fight this sort of thing going
forward.
I think you should take the strongest, most aggressive stance possible given the huge number
of very important issues at stake. I will continue to support naked capitalism any way that I
can.
Yves, have you contacted Bill Moyers? He initially referred to the Post article without adequate
critical comment. He could and should remedy this. His voice would carry weight with the book
bag-toting NPR folks, who will be among the last to "doubt" the Post.
Excellent suggestion. I found NC when Bill Moyers recommended it on his old tv show when he
interviewed Yves and it has continued to open my eyes big time and I haven't been the same since.
Whenever I encounter a NYTimesbot or a BostonGlobebot or a Wapoobot or NPRbot (Blindly quoting
believers) I tell them I don't have time for MSM anymore after Bill Moyers recommended this incredibly
informative site and I tell them all about NC. I am so grateful for NC and Yves and Lambert and
all the other contributors for what you all do. I would be devastated if this horror damages you
(us) all. And Net Neutrality in general – Trump will go after it. WaPoo (love that) should be
taken way out to the woodshed, shamed, and publicized for how awful they (and so many others in
the MSM) have become. I will help in any way I can. And please stay well Yves and Lambert.
I found NC through Bill Moyers as well. Since he retired, i rarely look at the website and
never the FC page anymore since the content significantly decreased in quality and originality
imo after he retired. i know his name is still attached to the website and he still occasionally
submits articles, but i wonder how much oversight and content involvement he has with the operation
these days.
That should read, "since he retired from the tv show Moyers & Co and it went off the air".
The website still lists Bill Moyers as the managing editor. But the quality of the website noticeably
changed after the show left PBS in i think 2015.
It appears that the globalists are scared of anything that resembles the truth that counters
their incessant propaganda If there was ever a discovery process in a lawsuit against WAPO, I
would imagine that all roads would lead to a Contelpro section of the CIA It's interesting that
Wall Street on Parade has noted that Propornot has a double blind registration in New Mexico.
A propaganda holding company! This is allowed by the Whappo? It's a felony masquerading as
a farce and they can't get out of this like little Judy Miller pretending to be dumb. Judy Miller
is very sophisticated and so is the Whappo. Journalism isn't journalism if it does this sleazy
stuff. Since when does a newspaper "disclaim" its own news? It's totally outrageous. And the nerve
to say that PropOrNot insists on being anonymous. PropOrNot might as well be the Whappo itself.
Only sleazy purveyors of crap disclaim it. This is just asking for satire. Whappo deserves to
be ridiculed into oblivion.
just a quick check on the net produced a a site: dab-oracl.com and an atty named Donald Burleson
– stating that New Mexico is one of 17 states that enforce criminal libel and that you can file
to lift the veil on anonymity for defamation and have the perp arrested cool
It's in Santa Fe and the U of Magonia has a channeling portal there. The channeling portal
connects to alternate universes and higher order dimensions and all sorts of weird and unusual
stuff passes thru the portal. It's where craazyman finds out about lots of stuff and he may have
bumped(if that's right word) into these other channelers?
I'm 56, I was a 9 buck an hour cook in Boston in 1988 when Dukakis came out of Labor Day with
a 17 point lead.
The campaign wizards of Bush Senior came up some kind of 'Dukakis hates America ' baloney,
because of some other baloney about The Flag!! or The Pledge!!! For days, GWB Sr. came out in
front of a bunch of flags & said the Pledge, and the craven, sycophantic, grovelling media of
the day dutifully reported –
"In order to show '__Dukakis hates America___' Vice President Bush said the pledge of allegiance."
Anyone from that era remember all the liberal cloak rending and finger waving and furrowed
brows? Anyone remember that Fairness Doctrine thing??? Seriously – having some contract mouth
piece of the WAPO question NC is a badge of honor.
rmm.
But then I sigh; and, with a piece of scripture,
Tell them that God bids us do good for evil:
And thus I clothe my naked villany
With old odd ends stolen out of holy writ;
And seem a saint, when most I play the devil.
Dukakis' loss was due to his weak response to a racist smear campaign that assigned him personal
responsibility for every poor decision made by the Massachusetts penal system.
His sin was failing to fight back with sufficient vigor. It's a good choice of anecdote for
this comments thread however. An object lesson if you will.
The Washington Post has responded, from the perspective of their own interests, in literally
the worst way possible.
They have essentially gone on record as admitting that publish articles that are defamatory
per se in a reckless manner, using a reckless (or non-existent) fact-checking and vetting process.
It's really unbelievable, and many of us in the legal community are scratching our heads, now,
wondering from whom The Washington Post is soliciting legal advice.
They wouldn't have deigned to respond at all if they weren't nervous about our attorney. But
I agree, this response is incredibly lame and not helpful to them from a legal or reputational
standpoint. They seem to think if they make a minimal gesture, NC and the other wronged sites
won't proceed. Bad assumption.
My grandfather was a political refugee. He escaped Bulgaria after being jailed one too many
times for having the audacity to disagree with the communist elites and its media organs, and
to do so in public. What I see happening here in the US, with dissent on the verge of being suppressed
or even criminalized, deeply concerns me because it reminds me of those bad old times. I respect
you guys and your willingness to stand up to power, in ways I can not adequately express. Thank
you.
Craig Timberg may be another example of the "son of more successful father" phenomenon who
in attempting to exceed their fathers, do great damage to others (other examples: G.W. Bush, Bill
Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, John McCain ).
" He was nearly 30 years old, borderline ancient for a beginning daily newspaper reporter.
Unlike other Capital staffers, he was a Naval Academy graduate with a master's degree in journalism,
and he was a Vietnam war combat veteran. And he could not type."
"I first noticed Bob's reporting talents from his incisive articles on a legal challenge to
compulsory chapel attendance at the U.S. service academies, filed by six Annapolis midshipmen
and a West Point cadet."
"The highlight of Bob's reporting was an interview with celebrated evangelist Billy Graham,
who shockingly characterized the students' lawsuit as a being "part of a planned attack against
all chaplains, to force them completely out of all services," and further suggested that the young
men were Communist dupes. Though Bob knew now that he had a good story, he still pressed on, asking
Graham if an atheist can become a good naval officer. "I can't comment on that," the preacher
answered."
So Timberg's father questioned a prominent person who was alleging "Communist dupes" against
military chaplains.
But his son does little vetting of the shadowy group PropOrNot as he goes for HIS story alleging
"Russian propagandists".
It may be too late for the son to learn from the father's example.
Good story. The son as a pale shadow of the father is, as you say, not an uncommon thing. Craig,
in this current example, doesn't seem to understand even the most basic, fundamental principles
of journalistic ethics or professional conduct. It's strange someone in the profession that long
could survive lacking that. Or maybe once you get on with a big name paper with a billionaire
owner, sucking up to the establishment is a get out of jail free card when it comes to ethics
and professional accountability.
I stopped ordering from Amazon two years ago after reading the stories about labor conditions
for warehouse employees. It is nothing more than brutal slave labor.
I used to at least read the headlines in the NYT and WaPo. Now I can not even stomach them.
So, the WaPo now admits that "journalism" is dead and stenography is the only purpose
their "platform" exists for.
The quaint institution of "journalism" existed to sort "fact" from "opinion" and made the important
distinction between the two. Opinions are like belly-buttons and assholes, everybody has one.
Facts are more difficult to discern, but are immutable and objective. As attributed to the late
Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, " Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.
"
This is the death of the First Amendment - The ScAmazon model of purporting to be a "marketplace"
but refusing to vouch for the quality, safety, or authenticity of anything that they loudly and
slickly shill to profit from the work of others. It is disgusting, hollow, and amoral. It must
be brought to heel.
I suspect the MSM have always seen their ability to shape elections as their true "ring of
power." As you say this has been going on for a long time–certainly pre-internet. The fact that
Trump won despite their best efforts has likely shaken big media to the core. Which doesn't mean
Trump's election was a good thing or a bad thing but simply that they didn't get to pick.
Television will always be the most important medium when it comes to politics but the print
media now see their role as "influencers" under threat from the web. And given their financial
problems this may be the final existential threat. It's likely the Post editors knew perfectly
well what they were doing and how shoddy that story was. It was a shot across the bow.
Yves: What is going on here is deeply ingrained. We live in a country in which everyone's opinions
are now canonical, as we see with wonder about the candidate for the head of the EPA. Pruitt's
opinion counteracts years of research, because lawyers know all about science.
I was reminded of how ingrained these "narratives" are when I read the lead in the Talk of
the Town in the most recent New Yorker: Jeffrey Toobin on voting. He did a drive-by diagnosis
of Jill Stein as a narcissist. (But, but, but the New Yorker already declared Trump a narcissist.)
Then, in a couple of very curious sentences, he tries to accuse the Russians of tampering with
the U.S. election campaign while admitting it unlikely that foreigners hacked the vote count.
So you have two or three or four fake-news pieces strung together so as to assert power. That's
the long and the short of it. Just as Pruitt is an ignoramus about science, so Toobin as an ignoramus
about psychology. As Lambert often writes: Agnotology. I'd add: Agnotology to maintain the structures
of power.
We have been in this intellectual winter for a while: Liberals in denial, peddling psychobabble.
Rightwingers in denial, peddling resentment.
At the end of the 70s, we came to the US, believing western media to be the epitome of honesty
and truth (the belief itself based on plentiful pro-western propaganda, which we consumed unquestioningly).
The highly misleading anti-Soviet propaganda in the US at that time was a bit of a shock. Not
so much its existence, but its vicious nature. And the lies about "Russians are coming." Nothing
much has changed – the west still dislikes Russia, and will do all it can to discredit the country
(just watch out for the starting effort to ruin the 2018 futbal (soccer) games in Russia – anti-Sochi
hysteria was just a preview). The wapoo stunt may be crude, but it is not a demonstration of incompetence.
It does seem to be a part of concerted efforts to limit the free flow of information on the Internet.
As the "narrative" has gotten away from powers that be, a new way to censor information is needed.
Even Merkel said she'd want to address "fake news." Has everybodu forgotten operation Mockingbird
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird
)? Nothing new under the sun – but the stakes are much higher now, as the west runs out of
options to maintain supremacy.
More and more it seems like USA, like the roman empire, needs barbarians at the gates to
distract the plebs from internal structural problems.
As long as Yeltsin allowed Wall Street to loot Russia of former soviet holdings, Russia
was not "barbaric". Now that Putin has put a solid halt on said looting, Russia is again "barbarians"
Want to have some fun? Next time someone starts ranting about "the Russians hacked our election,"
try tossing out "Well, we messed with theirs, so it seems only fair."
Post editorial/management probably doesn't have strong opinions - or any opinions - of the
sites impugned by PropOrNot, including Naked Capitalism, since it's unlikely these corporate drones
possess enough intellectual curiosity to actually look at them.
The problem is confirmation bias (in this case, offering an acceptable explanation for why
WaPo's Chosen Liberal lost the election, without having to look in the mirror) and shoddy careerist
journalism generally, which works so well for so many, and which can't be litigated away.
Banish Timberg, and you might as well put WaPO out of business.
I recall seeing somewhere in the initial flurry of tweets and comments on the subject that
someone had contacted Wapo and received a response from the editor or some such stating that "multiple
contacts" were made to PorNot for some sort of purpose, perhaps verification, fact checking, or
what ever it is newspapers do before breathlessly getting out the bold typeface and running a
"story". Wish I could find it again. But now it seems that was fake news.
The timing and placement of the "clarification" is rich. 14 days later slip in an "editor's
comment" buried in the old news pile. Your pet parrot wouldn't even notice.
Timburg is obviously another tool – like Judith Miller. His "editors" knew full well the story
was bullshit – "can't vouch for the validity" (because we can't be bothered to check our sources)
– and ran it anyway. So there was/is an agenda. And the media wonder why they are in such low
regard.
Yves, in your apology post with your attorney's letter, you stated this
I also hope, particularly for those of you who don't regularly visit Naked Capitalism,
that you'll check out our related pieces that give more color to how the fact the Washington
Post was taken for a ride by inept propagandists
My first reaction to this was "presumes facts not in evidence"
I don't believe the Post was taken in by anyone. They wanted to have a particular piece written
and they did. Why in the world would they back down now?
You're going to need more fundraisers because I'm guessing they'll be dragging this out. If
they can't beat you with fake news then they will drain your resources with a long-drawn out legal
process. Yes, I'm very cynical. Watched one of the bloggers I follow spend around $150,000 defending
themselves from a defamation case that never went to trail. The blogger was also a lawyer so could
help with her defense, had discounted legal assistance from an first amendment expert and an additional
attorney. They had a year of depositions with constant delays. $150,000 is not petty cash.
I know the circumstances are not the same but the Post has deep pockets. If they want to drain
NC and other independent news sources, they have the resources to go the distance.
Also please stop giving the newspapers excuses. The entire industry is pretty much consolidated.
I don't think they very much care about whether or not a newspaper makes money after they've leveraged
it with so much debt in order to purchase it in the first place. Or used their billions to simply
buy it. Either way that would seem to indicate that's about the write-off and controlling the
"narrative."
As an added bonus get rid of your workers due to "costs." Further narrowing the acceptable
narrative within the newsroom. Pretty soon, the entire industry is gutted just like other industries
in this country. (I'd argue that's most of the way done except for independent media.) That's
quite purposeful and just like other industries, it never had to be that way, even with the rise
of the Internet and "things" like Google ads and Facebook.
Stop giving them so much of the benefit of the doubt. They are engaged in a class war.
Even if somewhere down the line they were to apologize and give you a prominent byline, the
damage is already done with a good portion of their readership. Which was entirely the point.
" I don't believe the Post was taken in by anyone. "
I may wholeheartedly agree with you but there are good reasons for NC to be circumspect and
initially offer Wapoo the option of backing away and retracting gracefully; or as gracefully as
possible in this situation.
Yes, I'm in for the long haul wrt donations. Bernie's campaign showed the power of small donations.
You've put your finger on the "stupid, crazy, or evil" question.
Our esteemed hostess has chosen stupid, for reasons that seem good and sufficient. Crazy would
be apparent from past behavior, and we of the tinfoil hat legions can make a good case for evil
from the interests of the actors. But if nothing else, stupid is easily proved.
I think the main reason many here are giving the benefit of the doubt to WaPo is that it was
done so ineptly. The article reeks of carelessness and non-existent fact-checking and poor (or
non-existent) editorial overview. If it was part of a deliberate plot to smear it should have
been better written and they would have done a better job in covering themselves legally. Most
recent high profile libel claims – such as the Rolling Stones college rape hoax story – originated
from a mix of confirmation bias and incompetence, not (so far as we know) from a deliberate malign
plot.
Having said that, their refusal to come straight out and apologise when presented with the
facts is just digging themselves a deeper hole. I've no doubt the NC crew will go all the way
with this, I hope it proves deeply embarrassing for the WaPo, they are destroying their own reputation
and its entirely their fault.
I guess, on one level, it's intersting that the PTB saw the websites on the list as having
that much power and influence to sway the election to Trump due to telling the truth, frankly.
The truth clearly has no place in the US conversation anymore.
At any rate, most of here saw our main, favored websites on that McCarthyite witch hunt list
and thought: WOW. So we told the truth about Clinton and various other issues with this election,
and now we must be silenced.
Of course, it's pretty odd given the DNC hacked emails were really very revealing of many shady
(to say the least) things, and I've seen those emails quoted quite a bit by many rightwing sources.
And that info was, in fact, disseminated broadly to conservative voters. And I feel that those
emails, possibly along with Comey's last minute "reveal," probably swayed some still-on-the-fence
voters to either not vote for POTUS at all or to vote for Trump.
Frankly, it's risable in the extreme that this country has been drowning in rightwingnut propaganda
for the past 40+ years (or longer), and that's really what the rise of Trump is all about. As
opposed to others here, I frankly despise Trump and all he stands for, but I give him props where
due. He's kind of stupid but has this certain rat cunning about reading the moment and grabbing
it for his purposes. He saw that those who had lost the most in this country were ripe for the
plucking, and he went about using them for his own greedy means accordingly.
Railing against a handful of truth-telling lefty-ish blogs is amazing on one level. I doubt
that, even in the aggragate, many voters were swayed by the information provided. I think most
who read these blogs are already determined what we'll do, but we come to these sites for a breath
of fresh air, as it were.
That, for me, is what makes this attack so chilling. The last few small voices of reason and
sanity? And they have to be silenced? Brrrrrr . that's bitterly cold.
Keep up the good fight, Yves and friends. This is gonna be tough row to hoe, but I'm in it
to win it.
And by refusing to address the emails, other than to scream "Russian hackers," the corporate
media were able to convince the Clinton cultists and other Third-Way believers that the information
they contained was just another right-wing attack on The Anointed because (other than leftist,
Russian-loving "fake news" sites), the right-wing media were the only ones paying it any attention.
You have to give credit where it's due-they have had decades to perfect their method, and it
is very hard to counter it.
silicon valley does not know the meaning of trust. they have extracted it from every situation
they can, destroying everything they touch, without realizing what they have unleashed. this will
eventually be learned by all, the hard way.
I am old enough to remember seeing in the news reel at my local theater in 1950 Joseph
McCarthy holding up a piece of paper to the cameras and intoning in his inimitable droning voice,
"I have here in my hand a list of 205 known members of the Communist Party who are working and
shaping policy in the State Department."
People's livelihoods and reputations were thereby smeared for life. Never did McCarthy
back his claims with evidence, nor did he retract his scurrilous accusation. Now, tell me how
what Jeff Bezos and co. are doing in this instance is in any significant way different from what
McCarthy did to these people back in 1956. What finally put it squarely before the American public
and finally earned McCarthy Congressional censure was when Boston attorney Joseph Welch asked
McCarthy, "Have you no sense of decency, sir?"
Yikes,Yves! What a lame response from them. We all need to keep up the pressure, by any means.
This is one of those MSM errors that they hope will just go away, as evidenced by their hand waving
dismissal. We can't let it! I think letters to the editor-an avalanche- might do a world of good.
Murtaza HussainVerified account Dec 5
@MazMHussain
2003: Rifle-toting Americans barge into Iraq after reading viral Fake News story about weapons
of mass destruction.
------------------------------
This fake news story ranks up there with the rifle toting Americans that barge into Viet Nam after
the Fake News story about a US Navy warship that was attacked by the North Viet Namese Naval forces
in the Gulf of Tonkin.
PolitiFact is running a poll for "Lie of the Year"
here . There's a line for write in votes. I wrote in the Post's "Russian Propaganda " story.
I suggest you can do the same.
A true fake news refusal to retract. Extraordinary that WaPo's editors also claim "not to vouch"
for the veracity of whether or not RT.com is a "conduit for Russian propaganda". Really? RT is
sponsored by the Russian state, how could it not be such a "conduit"? WaPo has all but admitted
that it will print all the fake news it chooses to print. This reply is actually worse than the
original offense. Pure confection of arrogance and cowardice as only libertarians can produce.
But of course it doesn't matter if every last one of the news sources mentioned in the WaPo
article were in fact such conduits. The issue is the neo-Cold war, neo-McCarthyite campaign launched
over the last 2 years whose center of gravity lies clearly in the Clinton liberal Democrat camp.
We can only imagine how the campaign would conduct itself if Clinton had won the Presidency.
It was predictable they would come after the Left, only now they come on with less swag, but with
a pathetic sore loser grudge. A perusal of the Liberal sphere on HuffnPuff, Alternet, Salon and
such shows these still lost in a self-induced hysterical psychosis.
Right NOW is the time to for leftists and progressives to draw a clear line, and distance,
from American Liberalism and its blame the victim rhetoric.
Here's the thing. Yes, RT is funded by the Russian government, and thus anything posted
thereon needs to be considered with that in mind. Nevertheless, it is also where stories the corporates
prefer to ignore are given attention. In other words, there is an irony that the Russians may,
indeed, be trying to influence us, but if so, they appear to be doing it by subtly undermining
the reliability of the corporate media.
To put it another way, dismissing RT solely because of its funding source is no better
than dismissing NC et al. as propaganda sites, and doing so is actually feeding the propaganda
machine. After all, we don't know what percentage of the US media currently receives "grants"
from US intelligence agencies, now, do we.
In studying communications, there's a distinction between 'white' and 'black' propaganda.
White propaganda is publishing truth that supports your cause. Black propaganda is, of course,
slanderous lies. RT is white propaganda, so use it for the value it brings.
Exactly. I'm a grown-up. I have a lot of practice reading critically and I'm quite capable
of questioning sources and filtering bias. I don't need Jeff Bezos to protect me from Russkie
BadThink.
There's a sense in which that's true, of course. But it is a useful characterization? Is there
even any point to such a broad statement about a media outlet, other than to discredit work that
can't be discredited on more direct grounds?
State sponsorship of media organizations is not all that unusual. The BBC is primarily funded
by a tax levied on any British household that uses a television to receive a broadcast signal,
for example. Is the WaPo in the habit of describing the BBC as a "conduit for British propaganda"?
Am I acting as a useful idiot for the UK government every time I rehash an old Monty Python joke?
"does not itself vouch " You have to bear in mind this is not the Post talking, this is
CIA CIA has blatantly used the Post as a
their sockpuppet
since they put Woodward in there to oust Nixon, and now they've got Bezos by the contractual
balls. CIA has impunity in municipal statute and secret red tape so any answer you get from them
means No fuck You.
The NDAA legalized domestic propaganda in 2013 so when the public repudiated their chosen
president Hillary Clinton, CIA immediately got to work work attacking Article 19. CIA is
panicking because Hillary was going to get them the war they need to preserve CIA impunity for
the crime against humanity of systematic and widespread torture and murder in their global gulag
of secret death camps.
The ICC's investigation of US crimes against humanity has reached the critical point of referral
to the pre-trial chamber . The
ICC is under intense pressure from Russia and the global south to prove it's not afraid of US
criminals. Italian courts have got torturer Sabrina de Souza, and they're going to use her to
roll up the command chain. One way or another it's going to be open season on CIA torture cowards,
in universal jurisdiction with no statute of limitations. This is a far graver threat to CIA than
the family jewels. The international community is investigating CIA crimes, not avuncular Jim
Schlesinger or some gelded congressional committee. Like Francis Boyle says, the US government
is a criminal enterprise. And since COG was imposed it's got one branch, CIA
That's the background here. You're the Op in Red Harvest. Poisonville's the USA.
May I suggest that this site no longer link to The Wapoo for stories that are available elsewhere.
I personally would prefer to not go to their site at all, but they seem to make up a lot of the
links here.
I understand that sometimes this will be unavoidable, as the Wapoo is the only one doing a particular
story, but in cases where the story is carried at other sites, can you please link to those other
sites instead?
I live in New Zealand and start every day with NC because WaPo and it's like runs an agenda.
We all know that. I feel for you Yves but the site's strength is bringing together all those speaking
truth to power. The courts won't care about that and that route can drain you personally and financially.
Stay strong and play to your strengths. You have lots of support – perhaps more than you know.
The Second Phase of the Propaganda Fake News War: Economic Strangulation. What Comes Next?
by BAR editor and columnist Dr. Marsha Adebayo
"The public has determined that the corporate media is actually the purveyor of "fake news"
and turned to media organizations, such as BAR, Truthout and other outlets for information."
So, since the W.P. won't bear responsibility for what they publish, maybe we should just lump
them in with Breitbart and company. Just out of curiosity, did W.P. contact N.C. for comment before
they tried to smear your (and, by extension, our) reputation?
It's libel per se and an avalanche of lawsuits directed at PropOrNot and WaPo should be pretty
effective. Because WaPo did not retract there is no defense.
From a legal point of view, I wonder how the Executive Editor's (Marty Baron) tweeting of the
article plays against the assertion that "The Post does not itself vouch for the validity of PropOrNot's
findings". Is that a case where he was speaking (tweeting) his own opinion, and not necessarily
that of his employer?
So if the WaPo doesn't consider validity checking of sources to be part of its job, then that
raises the obvious question in this case: WHY the (insert expletive of your choice) did they take
this site with anonymous authors, sweeping allegations and no evidence of any kind, and choose
to make a featured story out of it? There are hundreds or thousands of other sites just like it
out there. Why PropOrNot, and not any of the others?
In other words, if (as they claim) the story boils down to "some anonymous people on the Internet
made some unsubstantiated claims which may or may not be accurate", why did they decide it was
newsworthy at all, let alone worthy of the kind of prominence they gave it?
They might actually get off the hook for libel on the grounds that the lack of fairness and
impartiality wasn't malicious intent but part of their core values.
Am I the only one who remembered an "Andrew Watts" commenting on NC? And wasn't Aug 21 the
date ProporCrap started? And isn't the exchange between 'Andrew Watts' and 'timbers' of interest
given the WaPo reporter's name is Timberg?
How hard would it be, really, for two or three people with some know-how to engage in discussion,
get replies from comments, trace/track those people. Even one person hacked (and I'm virtually
certain I was this summer) could provide a large number of sites visited or 'linked'.
And it seems to me as well I sent a story to Lambert (and I wrote to Lambert something like
"You mean this isn't real?") that I took to be a real WaPo story re a major wrinkle in the Clinton
scandals that was part of a story link I got from Global Research, a story which also had a paragraph
referenced from Breibart which I didn't notice until my comment wasn't posted, so I went back
and looked. I assumed the comment was rejected due to the Breibart (sp?) reference. But what if
WaPo/Watts were fishing at NC and saw my follow-up comment to Lambert with only the WaPo link
and my question (assuming it was posted, which I do not remember)?
I wonder if Snopes has asked to be removed from PropOrNot's list of "related projects."
I contacted them to find out if they were going to ask themselves to be removed from that list,
but I have not heard back from them. I guess we'll find out something about their reputability.
I have spent the better
part of the last 10 years working diligently to investigate and relate information on
economics and geopolitical discourse for the liberty movement. However, long before I
delved into these subjects my primary interests of study were the human mind and the
human "soul" (yes, I'm using a spiritual term).
My fascination with economics and sociopolitical events has always been rooted in the
human element.
That is to say, while economics is often treated as a
mathematical and statistical field, it is also driven by psychology.
To know
the behavior of man is to know the future of all his endeavors, good or evil.
Evil is what we are specifically here to discuss.
I have touched on
the issue in various articles in the past including
Are Globalists Evil Or Just Misunderstood
, but with extreme tensions taking shape
this year in light of the U.S. election as well as the exploding online community
investigation of "Pizzagate," I am compelled to examine it once again.
I will not be grappling with this issue from a particularly religious perspective.
Evil applies to everyone regardless of their belief system, or even their lack of
belief. Evil is secular in its influence.
The first and most important thing to understand is this - evil is NOT simply
a social or religious construct, it is an inherent element of the human psyche.
Carl Gustav Jung was one of the few psychologists in history to dare write extensively
on the issue of evil from a scientific perspective as well as a metaphysical
perspective. I highly recommend a book of his collected works on this subject titled
'Jung On Evil', edited by Murray Stein, for those who are interested in a deeper view.
To summarize, Jung found that much of the foundations of human behavior are rooted in
inborn psychological contents or "archetypes." Contrary to the position of Sigmund
Freud, Jung argued that while our environment may affect our behavior to a certain
extent, it does not make us who we are. Rather, we are born with our own individual
personality and grow into our inherent characteristics over time. Jung also found that
there are universally present elements of human psychology. That is to say, almost every
human being on the planet shares certain truths and certain natural predilections.
The concepts of good and evil, moral and immoral, are present in us from birth and
are mostly the same regardless of where we are born, what time in history we are born
and to what culture we are born. Good and evil are shared subjective experiences. It is
this observable psychological fact (among others) that leads me to believe in the idea
of a creative design - a god. Again, though, elaborating on god is beyond the scope of
this article.
To me, this should be rather comforting to people, even atheists. For if there is
observable evidence of creative design, then it would follow that there may every well
be a reason for all the trials and horrors that we experience as a species. Our lives,
our failures and our accomplishments are not random and meaningless. We are striving
toward something, whether we recognize it or not. It may be beyond our comprehension at
this time, but it is there.
Evil does not exist in a vacuum; with evil there is always good, if one looks
for it in the right places.
Most people are readily equipped to recognize evil when they see it
directly. What they are not equipped for and must learn from environment is how to
recognize evil disguised as righteousness.
The most heinous acts in
history are almost always presented as a moral obligation - a path towards some "greater
good." Inherent conscience, though, IS the greater good, and any ideology that steps
away from the boundaries of conscience will inevitably lead to disaster.
The concept of globalism is one of these ideologies that crosses the line of
conscience and pontificates to us about a "superior method" of living.
It
relies on taboo, rather than moral compass, and there is a big difference between the
two.
When we pursue a "greater good" as individuals or as a society, the means are just as
vital as the ends. The ends NEVER
justify the means. Never. For if we
abandon our core principles and commit atrocities in the name of "peace," safety or
survival, then we have forsaken the very things which make us worthy of peace and safety
and survival. A monster that devours in the name of peace is still a monster.
Globalism tells us that the collective is more important than the individual,
that the individual owes society a debt and that fealty to society in every respect is
the payment for that debt.
But inherent archetypes and conscience tell us
differently. They tell us that society is only ever as healthy as the individuals
within it, that society is only as free and vibrant as the participants. As the
individual is demeaned and enslaved, the collective crumbles into mediocrity.
Globalism also tells us that humanity's greatest potential cannot be reached without
collectivism and centralization. The assertion is that the more single-minded a society
is in its pursuits the more likely it is to effectively achieve its goals. To this end,
globalism seeks to erase all sovereignty. For now its proponents claim they only wish to
remove nations and borders from the social equation, but such collectivism never stops
there. Eventually, they will tell us that individualism represents another nefarious
"border" that prevents the group from becoming fully realized.
At the heart of collectivism is the idea that human beings are "blank
slates;" that we are born empty and are completely dependent on our environment in order
to learn what is right and wrong and how to be good people or good citizens. The
environment becomes the arbiter of decency, rather than conscience, and whoever controls
the environment, by extension, becomes god.
If the masses are convinced of this narrative then moral relativity is only a short
step away. It is the abandonment of inborn conscience that ultimately results in evil.
In my view, this is exactly why the so called "elites" are pressing for globalism in the
first place. Their end game is not just centralization of all power into a one world
edifice, but the suppression and eradication of conscience, and thus, all that is good.
To see where this leads we must look at the behaviors of the elites
themselves, which brings us to "Pizzagate."
The exposure by Wikileaks during the election cycle of what appear to be coded emails
sent between John Podesta and friends has created a burning undercurrent in the
alternative media. The emails consistently use odd and out of context "pizza"
references, and independent investigations have discovered a wide array connections
between political elites like Hillary Clinton and John Podesta to James Alefantis, the
owner of a pizza parlor in Washington D.C. called Comet Ping Pong. Alefantis, for
reasons that make little sense to me, is listed as number 49 on GQ's
Most Powerful People In Washington list
.
The assertion according to circumstantial evidence including the disturbing child and
cannibalism artwork collections of the Podestas has been that Comet Ping Pong is somehow
at the center of a child pedophilia network serving the politically connected. Both
Comet Ping Pong and a pizza establishment two doors down called Besta Pizza use symbols
in their logos and menus that are listed on the
FBI's
unclassified documentation on pedophilia symbolism
, which does not help matters.
Some of the best documentation of the Pizzagate scandal that I have seen so far has
been done by David Seaman, a former mainstream journalist gone rogue.
Here is his
YouTube page
.
I do recommend everyone at least look at the evidence he and others present. I went
into the issue rather skeptical, but was surprised by the sheer amount of weirdness and
evidence regarding Comet Pizza. There is a problem with Pizzagate that is difficult to
overcome, however; namely the fact that to my knowledge no victims have come forward.
This is not to say there has been no crime, but anyone hoping to convince the general
public of wrong-doing in this kind of scenario is going to have a very hard time without
a victim to reference.
The problem is doubly difficult now that an armed man was arrested on the premises of
Comet Ping Pong while "researching" the claims of child trafficking. Undoubtedly, the
mainstream media will declare the very investigation "dangerous conspiracy theory."
Whether this will persuade the public to ignore it, or compel them to look into it,
remains to be seen.
I fully realize the amount of confusion surrounding Pizzagate and the assertions by
some that it is a "pysop" designed to undermine the alternative media. This is a
foolish notion, in my view. The mainstream media is dying, this is unavoidable. The
alternative media is a network of sources based on the power of choice and cemented in
the concept of investigative research. The reader participates in the alternative media
by learning all available information and positions and deciding for himself what is the
most valid conclusion, if there is any conclusion to be had. The mainstream media
simply tells its readers what to think and feel based on cherry picked data.
The elites will never be able to deconstruct that kind of movement with something
like a faked "pizzagate"; rather, they would be more inclined to try to co-opt and
direct the alternative media as they do most institutions. And, if elitists are using
Pizzagate as fodder to trick the alternative media into looking ridiculous, then why
allow elitist run social media outlets like Facebook and Reddit to shut down discussion
on the issue?
The reason I am more convinced than skeptical at this stage is because this has
happened before; and in past scandals of pedophilia in Washington and other political
hotbeds, some victims DID come forward.
I would first reference the events of the Franklin Scandal between 1988 and 1991. The
Discovery Channel even produced a documentary on it complete with interviews of alleged
child victims peddled to Washington elites for the purpose of favors and blackmail.
Meant to air in 1994, the documentary was quashed before it was ever shown to the
public. The only reason it can now be found is because an original copy was released
without permission by parties unknown.
I would also reference the highly evidenced
Westminster Pedophile Ring in the U.K.
, in which the U.K. government lost or
destroyed at least 114 related files related to the investigation.
Finally, it is disconcerting to me that the criminal enterprises of former Bear
Sterns financier and convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein and his "Lolita Express" are
mainstream knowledge, yet the public remains largely oblivious. Bill Clinton is
shown on flight logs
to have flown on Epstein's private jet at least a 26 times; the
same jet that he used to procure child victims as young as 12 to entertain celebrities
and billionaires on his 72 acre island called "Little Saint James". The fact that
Donald Trump was also close friends with Epstein should raise some eyebrows - funny how
the mainstream media attacked Trump on every cosmetic issue under the sun but for some
reason backed away from pursuing the Epstein angle.
Where is the vast federal investigation into the people who frequented Epstein's
wretched parties? There is none, and Epstein, though convicted of molesting a 14 year
old girl and selling her into prostitution, was only slapped on the wrist with a 13
month sentence.
Accusations of pedophilia seem to follow the globalists and elitist politicians
wherever they go. This does not surprise me. They often exhibit characteristics of
narcissism and psychopathy, but their ideology of moral relativity is what would lead to
such horrible crimes.
Evil often stems from people who are empty.
When one abandons
conscience, one also in many respects abandons empathy and love. Without these elements
of our psyche there is no happiness. Without them, there is nothing left but desire and
gluttony.
Narcissists in particular are prone to use other people as forms of
entertainment and fulfillment without concern for their humanity. They can be vicious
in nature, and when taken to the level of psychopathy, they are prone to target and
abuse the most helpless of victims in order to generate a feeling of personal power.
Add in sexual addiction and aggression and narcissists become predatory in the
extreme. Nothing ever truly satisfies them. When they grow tired of the normal, they
quickly turn to the abnormal and eventually the criminal. I would say that pedophilia
is a natural progression of the elitist mindset; for children are the easiest and most
innocent victim source, not to mention the most aberrant and forbidden, and thus the
most desirable for a psychopathic deviant embracing evil impulses.
Beyond this is the even more disturbing prospect of cultism.
It is
not that the globalists are simply evil as individuals; if that were the case then they
would present far less of a threat. The greater terror is that they are also organized.
When one confronts the problem of evil head on, one quickly realizes that evil is within
us all. There will always be an internal battle in every individual. Organized evil,
though, is in fact the ultimate danger, and it is organized evil that must be
eradicated.
For organized evil to be defeated, there must be organized good.
I believe the liberty movement in particular is that good; existing in early stages,
not yet complete, but good none the less. Our championing of the non-aggression
principle and individual liberty is conducive to respect for privacy, property and
life. Conscience is a core tenet of the liberty ideal, and the exact counter to
organized elitism based on moral relativity.
Recognize and take solace that though we live in dark times, and evil men
roam free, we are also here. We are the proper response to evil, and we have been placed
here at this time for a reason. Call it fate, call it destiny, call it coincidence, call
it god, call it whatever you want, but the answer to evil is us.
"Out of the temporary evil we are now compelled to commit will emerge the
good of an unshakable rule, which will restore the regular course of the
machinery of the national life, brought to naught by liberalism. The result
justifies the means. Let us, however, in our plans, direct our attention not
so much to what is good and moral as to what is necessary and useful."
I should also point out those alledgedly behind The Protocols
are not the people the article is referring ie: those people are
typically found in any liberal establishment.
A good article, but it fails to deliver on these key aspects of
the matter:
Everyone knows from the Godfather and its genre
that there is a connection between loyalty, criminality and
power: Once you witness someone engaging in a criminal act, you
have leverage over them and that ensures their loyalty. But what
follows from that - which healthy sane minds have trouble
contemplating - is that the greater the criminality the greater
the leverage, and that because murderous paedophilia places a
person utterly beyond any prospect of redemption in decent
society, there in NO GREATER LOYALTY than those desperate to
avoid being outed. These must be the three corners of the
triangle - Power:Loyalty:Depravity through which the evil eys
views the world.
I always beleived in an Illuminati of sorts, however they
care to self identify. Until Pizzagate, I never understood that
murderous paedophilia, luciferian in style to accentuate their
own depravity, is THE KEY TO RULING THE EARTH
And another thing. If pizzagate is 'fake news' then it it
inconceivably elaborate - they'd have had to fake Epstein 2008,
Silsby 2010, Breitbart 2011, the 2013 portugese release of
podestaesque mccann suspects, as well as the current run of
wikileaks and Alefantis' instagram account - which had an avatar
photo of the 13 yr old lover of a roman emperor.
Is that much fake news a possibility? Or has this smoke been
blowing for years and we've all been too distracted to stop and
look for fire?
What floors me about the whole pizzagate thing is the evil staring us
right in the face. And then to realize that the libtards don't even
believe in evil at all, only "mental illness"!
Lesson #1: Do not waste your time figuring some things out. Things like evil
people are probably beyond a decent persons ability to understand and let's be
honest I don't want to feel any sympathy for them anyway.
Read a book years ago by Dr. Karl Menninger, a psychiatrist, titled
'Whatever happened to Sin?'
In it he talks of murder and that it is not a natural thing for man to
do,. However, when the burden of guilt is spread over many shoulders and
government condones the action, it becomes easier to bear.
When observing the results, such as soldiers returning from war, unstable
mentally, it is evident that evil has occured. It has been decades since I
read the book, so the words I wrote may not be verbatim.
Lurked ZH for years, just started reading the comments. This is worse than
Reddit's echo chamber. Bible quotes? 3 guys 1 hammer on liveleak has more
productive comments. Why not mention methods you've used to help people reach
their own conclusion about Pizzagate?
I had two slices of pizza for dinner. I had to try not to think of the poor
children walking innocently about the store who may at any moment fall victim
to a pedo. My gf said pizza places all over now need to keep a keen eye out for
the Posdesta Brothers and their Gang after all the stuff that has come out from
WikiLeaks and other sources about them.
The bible says God created evil and loosed it on us. The correct reading of
Genesis 4;1 is from the dead sea scrolls stating :
"And Adam knew his
wife Eve,
who was pregnant by Sammael [Satan]
, and she conceived and
bare Cain,
and he was like the heavenly beings, and not like earthly
beings,
and
she
said, I have gotten a man from
the angel of
the Lord."
So in Isaiah 45:7 we have this:
I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the
LORD do all these
things
.
So my research shows evil was "grafted" into humans through
the unholy alliance and 2 seedline of people resulted.
Good article but an exception: evil doesn't reside in all of us, sin does.
Evil is the expression of wanton and intentional deception, injury,
degradation, and destruction and rarely self-recognizes or admits to God as
supreme. It may be DNA encoded. Sociopathy certainly is.
But you're so
right about the organized nature of it all, and for thousands of years. The
newly formed EU didn't advertise itself as the New Babylonia for nothing on
publicty posters, heralding the coming age of one tongue out of many and
fashioning its parliament building after the Tower of Bablyon:
Secret societies are cannibalizing us, and themselves, but members won't
know till it's too late that they'll also be eaten fairly early on. Of all
"people", they should know those in the pyramid capstone won't have enough
elbow room if they let in every Tom, Dick and Harry Mason.
I am sympatico with Brandon. I have always had similar interests, about the
soul, about ethics, about human behavior.
The reality is that evil is extant
in other human beings. The thought that your property manager is going to piss
in your OJ or fuck their BFF in your bed is abhorrent to most people, but not
all. There was an article this week about a married couple that had concerns
about their rental unit manager. And what did they find? He was fucking his BFF
(yes, of course it was another dude) in their bed. The good news is they got it
on video and moved. The bad news? This kind of attitude is rampant. People
don't give a shit about other people. They think the rules don't apply to them.
That they are special. The result is renting from some asshat that fucks in
your bed or pisses in your OJ. Or parents that wonder why little Johnny or
little Janie never move out of the house and are stoned and play video games
all day.
Evil exists, in varying forms. Sadly too many people continue to make
excuses for not only bad behavior but evil behavior. I don't think that way and
I don't live my life that way but I am fully aware of all the morons stumbling
through the world that do.
I think people are misunderstanding the setup theory. Nobody believes, at
least I hope not, that all of this art and bizarre behavior on the part of
these freaks was staged for the purposes of taking down the last of our free
media, but rather, they just took advantage of a situation where they knew
people were making accusations that couldn't be sufficiently backed up or even
prosecuted, and yet caused proven or contrived damages to people. If this is
the case, their intention,
with the help of intelligence agencies
, is
to frame alt-media for starting vigilante violence and the destruction of
innocent people's lives through promoting defamation against others.
I have
no doubt that our entire system is riddled with pedophilia and likely much
worse. They have also been getting away with this forever, so when we go for
the takedown we better have our ducks in a row. To do otherwise will just give
these sickos complete immunity and more decades will pass with them continuing
to prey on our children. Not only is this at stake but the fate of all the
children of this nation is at stake if we lose our media. We are in very
dangerous and treacherous times. When you go toe to toe with the professional
trade crafters you have to play smart or they will have you every time.
Once people have had enough exposure to NPDs or psychopaths you will vibe
them after a while. I imagine this is likely the case for anyone who has
worked as a trader, finance, politics, big commodity booms are bad, etc. We
have all encountered them somewhere. People should pay attention to how they
feel (yeah I know, people hate that word) when they are around people. I have
to pretend that I don't notice them because it is so apparent to me and
immediately.
The last time I picked one out at work, a few months later the creepy
bastard walked past me at night during a -20 blizzard, with next to no
visibility, knowing that I had an hour drive, and told me in super spooky
whisper.. "Don't hit a deer on your way home now." I found out later that a
bunch of horses had mysteriously died in his care and a bunch of other things
that confirmed my suspicions. I had a long battle with him so I eventually got
to understand him pretty well. I didn't have to hear the guy state a single
sentence or watch any body language, I just knew immediately because I could
feel his malevolence and threat in my stomach where we have a large nerve
cluster. Pay attention and you will know. Also their eye contact is all wrong
and too intense.
Globalism, is designed to make you poorer slowly over decades by allowing wages
and conditions to be for ever slowly reduced under the guise of free market
competition to funnel wealth ever upwards to the 1%.
"... One of the sites PropOrNot cited as Russian-influenced was the Drudge Report. ..."
"... The piece's description of some sharers of bogus news as "useful idiots" could " theoretically include anyone on any social-media platform who shares news based on a click-bait headline ," Mathew Ingram wrote for Fortune. ..."
"... But the biggest issue was PropOrNot itself. As Adrian Chen wrote for the New Yorker , its methods were themselves suspect, hinting at counter-Russian propaganda - ostensibly with Ukrainian origins - and verification of its work was nearly impossible. Chen wrote "the prospect of legitimate dissenting voices being labeled fake news or Russian propaganda by mysterious groups of ex-government employees, with the help of a national newspaper, is even scarier." ..."
"... Now, at least, the "national newspaper" has taken some responsibility, however the key question remains: by admitting it never vetted its primary source, whose biased and conflicted "work" smeared hundreds of websites, this one included, just how is the Washington Post any different from the "fake news" it has been deriding on a daily basis ever since its endorsed presidential candidate lost the elections? ..."
In the latest example why the "mainstream media" is facing a historic crisis of confidence among
its readership, facing unprecedented blowback following Craig Timberg November 24 Washington Post
story "
Russian propaganda effort helped spread 'fake news' during election, experts say ", on Wednesday
a lengthy editor's note appeared on top of the original article in which the editor not only distances
the WaPo from the "experts" quoted in the original article whose "work" served as the basis for the
entire article (and which became the most read WaPo story the day it was published) but also admits
the Post could not " vouch for the validity of PropOrNot's finding regarding any individual media
outlet", in effect admitting the entire story may have been, drumroll "fake news" and conceding the
Bezos-owned publication may have engaged in defamation by smearing numerous websites - Zero Hedge
included - with patently false and unsubstantiated allegations.
It was the closest the Washington Post would come to formally retracting the story, which has
now been thoroughly discredited not only by outside commentators, but by its own editor.
Editor's Note: The Washington Post on Nov. 24 published a story on the work of four
sets of researchers who have examined what they say are Russian propaganda efforts to undermine
American democracy and interests. One of them was PropOrNot, a group that insists on public anonymity,
which issued a report identifying more than 200 websites that, in its view, wittingly or unwittingly
published or echoed Russian propaganda. A number of those sites have objected to being included
on PropOrNot's list, and some of the sites, as well as others not on the list, have publicly challenged
the group's methodology and conclusions. The Post, which did not name any of the sites, does not
itself vouch for the validity of PropOrNot's findings regarding any individual media outlet, nor
did the article purport to do so. Since publication of The Post's story, PropOrNot has removed
some sites from its list.
As The
Washingtonian notes , the implicit concession follows intense and rising criticism of the article
over the past two weeks. It was "
rife with obviously reckless and unproven allegations, " Intercept reporters Glenn Greenwald
and Ben Norton wrote, noting that PropOrNot, one of the groups whose research was cited in Timberg's
piece, "anonymous cowards." One of the sites PropOrNot cited as Russian-influenced was the Drudge
Report.
But the biggest issue was PropOrNot itself. As Adrian Chen
wrote for the New Yorker , its methods were themselves suspect, hinting at counter-Russian propaganda
- ostensibly with Ukrainian origins - and verification of its work was nearly impossible. Chen wrote
"the prospect of legitimate dissenting voices being labeled fake news or Russian propaganda by mysterious
groups of ex-government employees, with the help of a national newspaper, is even scarier."
Now, at least, the "national newspaper" has taken some responsibility, however the key question
remains: by admitting it never vetted its primary source, whose biased and conflicted "work" smeared
hundreds of websites, this one included, just how is the Washington Post any different from the "fake
news" it has been deriding on a daily basis ever since its endorsed presidential candidate lost the
elections?
The authors seems to miss the key observation: this is a sign of the crisis of neoliberal propaganda
model, which gave rise to Internet rumor mill. Rumor s (aka improvised news) became a prominent news
source if and only if official channels of information are not viewed as trustworthy. And blacklisting
alternative news sites does not help to return the trust. When it is gone it is gone. The same situation
in the past happened in Brezhnev's USSR. People just stopped to trust official newspapers and turned
to propaganda sites of Western =government such as BBC and voice of America for news. Soviet authorities
tried to jam them, but this did not stop Soviet people from trying to listen to then at nights, trying
to find frequencies that were not jammed.
Notable quotes:
"... Basically, everyone who isn't comfortably within the centrist Hillary Clinton/Jeb Bush spectrum is guilty. On its Twitter account, the group announced a new "plugin" that automatically alerts the user that a visited website has been designated by the group to be a Russian propaganda outlet. ..."
"... The group commits outright defamation by slandering obviously legitimate news sites as propaganda tools of the Kremlin. ..."
"... a big part of the group's definition for "Russian propaganda outlet" is criticizing U.S. foreign policy ..."
"... In sum: They're not McCarthyite; perish the thought. They just want multiple U.S. media outlets investigated by the FBI for espionage on behalf of Russia. ..."
"... PropOrNot is by no means a neutral observer. It actively calls on Congress and the White House to work "with our European allies to disconnect Russia from the SWIFT financial transaction system, effective immediately and lasting for at least one year, as an appropriate response to Russian manipulation of the election." ..."
"... In other words, this blacklisting group of anonymous cowards - putative experts in the pages of the Washington Post - is actively pushing for Western governments to take punitive measures against the Russian government and is speaking and smearing from an extreme ideological framework that the Post concealed from its readers. ..."
"... The Post itself - now posing as a warrior against "fake news" - published an article in September that treated with great seriousness the claim that Hillary Clinton collapsed on 9/11 Day because she was poisoned by Putin. ..."
"... Indeed, what happened here is the essence of fake news. The Post story served the agendas of many factions: those who want to believe Putin stole the election from Hillary Clinton; those who want to believe that the internet and social media are a grave menace that needs to be controlled, in contrast to the objective truth that reliable old media outlets once issued; those who want a resurrection of the Cold War. ..."
"... So those who saw tweets and Facebook posts promoting this Post story instantly clicked and shared and promoted the story without an iota of critical thought or examination of whether the claims were true, because they wanted the claims to be true. That behavior included countless journalists. ..."
One of the core functions of PropOrNot appears to be its compilation of a lengthy blacklist of
news and political websites that it smears as peddlers of "Russian propaganda." Included on this
blacklist of supposed propaganda outlets are prominent independent left-wing news sites such as Truthout,
Naked Capitalism, Black Agenda Report, Consortium News, and Truthdig.
Also included are popular libertarian hubs such as Zero Hedge, Antiwar.com, and the Ron Paul Institute,
along with the hugely influential right-wing website the Drudge Report and the publishing site WikiLeaks.
Far-right, virulently anti-Muslim blogs such as Bare Naked Islam are likewise dubbed Kremlin mouthpieces.
Basically, everyone who isn't comfortably within the centrist Hillary Clinton/Jeb Bush spectrum
is guilty. On its Twitter account, the group announced a new "plugin" that automatically alerts the
user that a visited website has been designated by the group to be a Russian propaganda outlet.
... ... ...
The group commits outright defamation by slandering obviously legitimate news sites as propaganda
tools of the Kremlin.
The group eschews alternative media outlets like these and instead recommends that readers rely
solely on establishment-friendly publications like NPR, the BBC, the New York Times, the Wall Street
Journal, the Washington Post, BuzzFeed, and VICE. That is becausea big part of
the group's definition for "Russian propaganda outlet" is criticizing U.S. foreign policy.
... ... ...
While blacklisting left-wing and libertarian journalists, PropOrNot also denies being McCarthyite.
Yet it simultaneously calls for the U.S. government to use the FBI and DOJ to carry out "formal investigations"
of these accused websites, "because the kind of folks who make propaganda for brutal authoritarian
oligarchies are often involved in a wide range of bad business." The shadowy group even goes so far
as to claim that people involved in the blacklisted websites may "have violated the Espionage Act,
the Foreign Agent Registration Act, and other related laws."
In sum: They're not McCarthyite; perish the thought. They just want multiple U.S. media outlets
investigated by the FBI for espionage on behalf of Russia.
... ... ...
PropOrNot is by no means a neutral observer. It actively calls on Congress and the White House
to work "with our European allies to disconnect Russia from the SWIFT financial transaction system,
effective immediately and lasting for at least one year, as an appropriate response to Russian manipulation
of the election."
In other words, this blacklisting group of anonymous cowards - putative experts in the pages
of the Washington Post - is actively pushing for Western governments to take punitive measures against
the Russian government and is speaking and smearing from an extreme ideological framework that the
Post concealed from its readers.
... ... ...
The Post itself - now posing as a warrior against "fake news" - published an article in September
that treated with great seriousness the claim that Hillary Clinton collapsed on 9/11 Day because
she was poisoned by Putin. And that's to say nothing of the paper's disgraceful history of convincing
Americans that Saddam was building non-existent nuclear weapons and had cultivated a vibrant alliance
with al Qaeda. As is so often the case, those who mostly loudly warn of "fake news" from others are
themselves the most aggressive disseminators of it.
Indeed, what happened here is the essence of fake news. The Post story served the agendas
of many factions: those who want to believe Putin stole the election from Hillary Clinton; those
who want to believe that the internet and social media are a grave menace that needs to be controlled,
in contrast to the objective truth that reliable old media outlets once issued; those who want a
resurrection of the Cold War.
So those who saw tweets and Facebook posts promoting this Post story instantly clicked and
shared and promoted the story without an iota of critical thought or examination of whether the claims
were true, because they wanted the claims to be true. That behavior included countless journalists.
"... When the narratives will become completely obsolete and incapable to persuade, except only a slightest minority, the fake democracy will become an open, brutal dictatorship. ..."
"... Many still wonder if the planet indeed slips towards a new Cold War. Despite that there is plenty of evidence that this is, unfortunately, already a fact, another incident came to verify this situation. ..."
"... The Western neoliberal establishment is exposed, revealing its real agenda: to challenge the alternative bloc driven by the Sino-Russian alliance. The 'democratic' Europe proceeded in a similar, unprecedented move recently. As reported by RT: "In a completely bonkers move this week, the EU Parliament approved a resolution to counter "Russian propaganda" and the "intrusion of Russian media" into the EU. The resolution was adopted with 304 MEPs voting in favor, 179 MEPs voting against it and 208 abstaining. The most bizarre part, however, is that the resolution lumped Russian media in with Islamist propaganda of the kind spread by terror groups like the so-called Islamic State. Thus Russian media is put on the same level with videos of ISIS beheadings and incitements to mass murder." ..."
"... In Cold War 2.0, the Western neoliberal establishment is forced to create the respective McCarthyism. Therefore, the new dogma has changed accordingly. It doesn't matter if an alternative medium provides a different view, away from the mainstream media propaganda. It doesn't matter if the Whistleblowers are telling the truth about the US dirty wars and mass surveillance of ordinary citizens. As long as the US empire and its allies are exposed by all these elements outside their Matrix control, these elements help Russia, therefore, they are doing 'Russian propaganda'. It's as simple as that. ..."
"... When the narratives will become completely obsolete and incapable to persuade, except only a slightest minority, the fake democracy will become an open, brutal dictatorship. ..."
Key insight:
When the narratives will become
completely obsolete and incapable to persuade, except only a slightest minority, the fake democracy
will become an open, brutal dictatorship.
When the narratives will become completely obsolete and incapable to persuade, except only a slightest
minority, the fake democracy will become an open, brutal dictatorship.
Many still wonder if the planet indeed slips towards a new Cold War. Despite that there is plenty
of evidence that this is, unfortunately, already a fact, another incident came to verify this situation.
The blacklist created by PropOrNot and provided to Washington Post, containing more than 200 websites
that are supposedly doing 'Russian propaganda', marks the start of a new McCarthyism era and verifies
beyond doubt the fact that we have indeed entered the Cold War 2.0.
Seeing that it's losing the battle of information, the establishment simply proceeded in one more
clumsy move that will only accelerate developments against it.
It really sounds like a joke to accuse anyone who opposes the US dirty wars and interventions
that brought so much chaos and distraction, for doing 'Russian propaganda', when you are the one
who supported and justified these wars through the most offensive propaganda, for decades.
Someone has to tell the mainstream media parrots that their dirty tricks don't work anymore. According
to a Gallup latest report, "Americans' trust and confidence in the mass media "to report the news
fully, accurately and fairly" has dropped to its lowest level in Gallup polling history, with 32%
saying they have a great deal or fair amount of trust in the media. This is down eight percentage
points from last year."
The mainstream mouthpieces are extremely predictable. They will rush to blame internet and alternative
media that flourished over the last fifteen years, for this unprecedented situation. Of course they
will. They don't want any alternative to their propaganda monopoly which was extremely effective
in guiding the sheeple during the past decades.
The Western neoliberal establishment is exposed, revealing its real agenda: to challenge the alternative
bloc driven by the Sino-Russian alliance. The 'democratic' Europe proceeded in a similar, unprecedented
move recently. As reported by RT: "In a completely bonkers move this week, the EU Parliament approved
a resolution to counter "Russian propaganda" and the "intrusion of Russian media" into the EU. The
resolution was adopted with 304 MEPs voting in favor, 179 MEPs voting against it and 208 abstaining.
The most bizarre part, however, is that the resolution lumped Russian media in with Islamist propaganda
of the kind spread by terror groups like the so-called Islamic State. Thus Russian media is put on
the same level with videos of ISIS beheadings and incitements to mass murder."
It has been mentioned in previous article that "While the EU and US were occupied with the war
against terrorism as well as with the dead-end wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and other areas of the planet,
Putin had all the time to build his own mechanism against Western propaganda. Being himself a man
who had come to power with the help of media, he built his own media network which includes, for
example, the TV network Russia Today, according to the Western standards, and "invaded" in millions
of homes in the Western countries using the English language, promoting however the Russian positions
as counterweight to the Western propaganda monopoly."
In Cold War 2.0, the Western neoliberal establishment is forced to create the respective McCarthyism.
Therefore, the new dogma has changed accordingly. It doesn't matter if an alternative medium provides
a different view, away from the mainstream media propaganda. It doesn't matter if the Whistleblowers
are telling the truth about the US dirty wars and mass surveillance of ordinary citizens. As long
as the US empire and its allies are exposed by all these elements outside their Matrix control, these
elements help Russia, therefore, they are doing 'Russian propaganda'. It's as simple as that.
This latest desperate move of the establishment should alarm us all. Because it shows that the
establishment is in panic and therefore, more dangerous than ever.
When the narratives will become
completely obsolete and incapable to persuade, except only a slightest minority, the fake democracy
will become an open, brutal dictatorship.
"... What people see in Clinton is a candidate willing to travel any distance at any time if the fee for showing up is $225 k for an hour of work, or so; but who couldn't find the time or reason to visit Wisconsin before an election and actually ask people to vote for her. ..."
"... This does present possibilities, and was in fact the Clinton/DLC plan, although a plan dating back to the 1960s. The idea is to add to the identity groups that are currently the base of the Democratic Party college-educated urban professional socially progressive but economically moderate Republicans. This preserves the neoliberal system, but should create great economic opportunities for elite blacks, women, Latinos etc who really would rather get rich before socialism. ..."
"... I am willing to now designate non-college rural whites as a valid minority, without real privilege except very locally, economically moderate but socially conservative. They have been up for grabs to a degree for a long time, and way too much a major topic of discussion, as nobody knows what to do with them, nobody really wants them, but they are very dangerous, as we can see. ..."
"... The way he put it is that the neoliberal center-left's long-term political project since the '90s, as embodied in figures like the Clintons in the US and Blair in the UK, can be summed up as an effort to redefine the two-party system so that the nominally "left" party becomes a de facto ruling party representing the center-left and center-right, leaving the far right with a dangerously long leash to move the nominally "right" party ever closer toward an outright National Front-style fascist party, and ideally leaving a shattered and demoralized far left as what amounts to an ideological hostage of the center. ..."
"... Both Clinton's failure to defeat Trump and the Blairites' failure to take Labour back from Corbyn have been setbacks for this project, and in both countries the center-right has largely decided to remain for now in its old electoral bloc with the proto-fascists instead of jumping ship to a "left" party that hasn't yet been fully transformed into a well-oiled machine for neoliberal centrism. ..."
"... He'll do many things more or less exactly the way a Clinton administration would have done them, perhaps in some cases with enough of a superficial far-right veneer to create the perception of contrast (for instance future Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who supports vouchers for religious private schools but otherwise might as well be a member of Democrats for Education Reform) and in some cases with red meat to the far right on issues the neoliberal center doesn't particularly care about (i.e. who the hell knows what if anything he'll do on issues like abortion rights, about which he's been all over the map in the past depending what's in his immediate opportunistic interest). ..."
"... appointing figures from places like Goldman Sachs to positions of authority at institutions like the Treasury and the Fed is a thoroughly bipartisan commitment that doesn't make either major US party look any more left-wing or right-wing than the other. ..."
Dec 07, 2016 | http://crookedtimber.org/2016/11/28/the-day-after-brexit/#comment-699954
The Democratic left does not exist. Sanders is an independent who would never have been nominated
except to help rubber-stamp the inauguration of the donor-class candidate.
The Democrats do not have a left-candidate, or a slate of 'left candidates' around whom a left
might coalesce. That's the consequence of national Democratic priorities and the take-over of
the party by the Clinton crime family. There are no 'up and coming' Democrats. Those who are talented
are spotted and co-opted into the Clinton-controlled machine. The quid pro quo manner of doing
business is transparent. Very large sums change hands and almost always according to the laws,
in so far as the actual pay-offs are 'incidental' rather than clearly causal.
How many doctoral candidates in their thirties get paid $600 k per year for part-time work
and another $300 k per year plus stock options?
All of them, if the doctoral candidate happens to be named Chelsea Clinton. As I noted earlier,
Democrats regard outsourcing their interactions with young people and rural voters to Bernie Sanders
as a 'solution.'
What people see in Clinton is a candidate willing to travel any distance at any time if
the fee for showing up is $225 k for an hour of work, or so; but who couldn't find the time or
reason to visit Wisconsin before an election and actually ask people to vote for her.
Yes, it was close. But let's not forget who won and why and how. The president-elect has already
stolen parts of the Dem base and now he's after the rest. The traditional Dem coalition is already
fractured and if the new president does half as well as he did destroying two political dynasties
then Democrats may find themselves in an even deeper whole in 2018.
Like Labour, Democrats need to figure out whether they are the party of the working class,
or not.
There was no (or not much) 'working class surge' for Trump.
Well, there was, in that the internal composition of the Republican vote changed to be more white
non-college rural working class and a little less urban college-educated Republicans. I don't know
what the numbers are.
This does present possibilities, and was in fact the Clinton/DLC plan, although a plan dating
back to the 1960s. The idea is to add to the identity groups that are currently the base of the Democratic
Party college-educated urban professional socially progressive but economically moderate Republicans.
This preserves the neoliberal system, but should create great economic opportunities for elite blacks,
women, Latinos etc who really would rather get rich before socialism.
I am willing to now designate non-college rural whites as a valid minority, without real privilege
except very locally, economically moderate but socially conservative. They have been up for grabs
to a degree for a long time, and way too much a major topic of discussion, as nobody knows what to
do with them, nobody really wants them, but they are very dangerous, as we can see.
Hidari @ 108, Matt Christman of the podcast Chapo Trap House made almost this exact point in
a recent interview with NYU historian David Parsons
on Parsons' podcast The Nostalgia Trap. (Both
excellent podcasts, by the way.)
The way he put it is that the neoliberal center-left's long-term political project since the
'90s, as embodied in figures like the Clintons in the US and Blair in the UK, can be summed up as
an effort to redefine the two-party system so that the nominally "left" party becomes a de facto
ruling party representing the center-left and center-right, leaving the far right with a dangerously
long leash to move the nominally "right" party ever closer toward an outright National Front-style
fascist party, and ideally leaving a shattered and demoralized far left as what amounts to an ideological
hostage of the center.
Both Clinton's failure to defeat Trump and the Blairites' failure to take Labour back
from Corbyn have been setbacks for this project, and in both countries the center-right has largely
decided to remain for now in its old electoral bloc with the proto-fascists instead of jumping ship
to a "left" party that hasn't yet been fully transformed into a well-oiled machine for neoliberal
centrism. (Of course this is also pretty close to Quiggin's three-party system critique, depending
on the extent to which one treats the distinction between center-left and center-right as ever having
been particularly meaningful in the first place.)
Faustusnotes, bob mcmanus brings up more or less the same litany of actual tangible policy decisions
that I and others have brought up in the past, a kind of litany to which a typical center-leftist
response is obstinately ignoring it.
Another point US leftists have been making for many months now is that Trump himself isn't
actually a fascist, he's only pretending to be one , which you treated as a novel discovery at
#79 and to which your response was that Trump's neoliberal administration in practice will make neoliberal
Democrats somehow leftist by comparison, which is absolutely incorrect.
He'll do many things more or less exactly the way a Clinton administration would have done
them, perhaps in some cases with enough of a superficial far-right veneer to create the perception
of contrast (for instance future Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who supports vouchers for religious
private schools but otherwise might as well be a member of Democrats for Education Reform) and in
some cases with red meat to the far right on issues the neoliberal center doesn't particularly care
about (i.e. who the hell knows what if anything he'll do on issues like abortion rights, about which
he's been all over the map in the past depending what's in his immediate opportunistic interest).
But appointing figures from places like Goldman Sachs to positions of authority at institutions
like the Treasury and the Fed is a thoroughly bipartisan commitment that doesn't make either major
US party look any more left-wing or right-wing than the other.
I want to see a political decision to abandon the working class
NAFTA & TPP etc, big bank bailout no prosecutions, no mortgage relief, grossly inadequate structured
and targeted stimulus, low inflation low gov't spending with many gov't jobs cut, insurance and
provider friendly whirlpool of an expensive health care plan
The Democratic left does not exist. Sanders is an independent who would never have been nominated
except to help rubber-stamp the inauguration of the donor-class candidate.
The Democrats do not have a left-candidate, or a slate of 'left candidates' around whom a left
might coalesce. That's the consequence of national Democratic priorities and the take-over of
the party by the Clinton crime family. There are no 'up and coming' Democrats. Those who are talented
are spotted and co-opted into the Clinton-controlled machine. The quid pro quo manner of doing
business is transparent. Very large sums change hands and almost always according to the laws,
in so far as the actual pay-offs are 'incidental' rather than clearly causal.
How many doctoral candidates in their thirties get paid $600 k per year for part-time work
and another $300 k per year plus stock options?
All of them, if the doctoral candidate happens to be named Chelsea Clinton. As I noted earlier,
Democrats regard outsourcing their interactions with young people and rural voters to Bernie Sanders
as a 'solution.'
What people see in Clinton is a candidate willing to travel any distance at any time if the
fee for showing up is $225 k for an hour of work, or so; but who couldn't find the time or reason
to visit Wisconsin before an election and actually ask people to vote for her.
Yes, it was close. But let's not forget who won and why and how. The president-elect has already
stolen parts of the Dem base and now he's after the rest. The traditional Dem coalition is already
fractured and if the new president does half as well as he did destroying two political dynasties
then Democrats may find themselves in an even deeper whole in 2018.
Like Labour, Democrats need to figure out whether they are the party of the working class,
or not.
bob mcmanus 12.03.16 at 4:00 pm There was no (or not much) 'working class surge' for Trump.
Well, there was, in that the internal composition of the Republican vote changed to be more
white non-college rural working class and a little less urban college-educated Republicans. I
don't know what the numbers are.
This does present possibilities, and was in fact the Clinton/DLC plan, although a plan dating
back to the 1960s. The idea is to add to the identity groups that are currently the base of the
Democratic Party college-educated urban professional socially progressive but economically moderate
Republicans. This preserves the neoliberal system, but should create great economic opportunities
for elite blacks, women, Latinos etc who really would rather get rich before socialism.
I am willing to now designate non-college rural whites as a valid minority, without real privilege
except very locally, economically moderate but socially conservative. They have been up for grabs
to a degree for a long time, and way too much a major topic of discussion, as nobody knows what
to do with them, nobody really wants them, but they are very dangerous, as we can see.
Hidari @ 108, Matt Christman of the podcast Chapo Trap House made almost this exact point in
a recent interview with NYU historian David Parsons on Parsons' podcast The Nostalgia Trap.
(Both excellent podcasts, by the way.) The way he put it is that the neoliberal center-left's
long-term political project since the '90s, as embodied in figures like the Clintons in the US
and Blair in the UK, can be summed up as an effort to redefine the two-party system so that the
nominally "left" party becomes a de facto ruling party representing the center-left and
center-right, leaving the far right with a dangerously long leash to move the nominally "right"
party ever closer toward an outright National Front-style fascist party, and ideally leaving a
shattered and demoralized far left as what amounts to an ideological hostage of the center. Both
Clinton's failure to defeat Trump and the Blairites' failure to take Labour back from Corbyn have
been setbacks for this project, and in both countries the center-right has largely decided to
remain for now in its old electoral bloc with the proto-fascists instead of jumping ship to a
"left" party that hasn't yet been fully transformed into a well-oiled machine for neoliberal centrism.
(Of course this is also pretty close to Quiggin's three-party system critique, depending on the
extent to which one treats the distinction between center-left and center-right as ever having
been particularly meaningful in the first place.)
Faustusnotes, bob mcmanus brings up more or less the same litany of actual tangible policy
decisions that I and others have brought up in the past, a kind of litany to which a typical center-leftist
response is obstinately ignoring it. Another point US leftists have been making for many months
now is that Trump himself isn't actually a fascist, he's only pretending to be one , which
you treated as a novel discovery at #79 and to which your response was that Trump's neoliberal
administration in practice will make neoliberal Democrats somehow leftist by comparison, which
is absolutely incorrect. He'll do many things more or less exactly the way a Clinton administration
would have done them, perhaps in some cases with enough of a superficial far-right veneer to create
the perception of contrast (for instance future Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who supports
vouchers for religious private schools but otherwise might as well be a member of Democrats for
Education Reform) and in some cases with red meat to the far right on issues the neoliberal center
doesn't particularly care about (i.e. who the hell knows what if anything he'll do on issues like
abortion rights, about which he's been all over the map in the past depending what's in his immediate
opportunistic interest). But appointing figures from places like Goldman Sachs to positions of
authority at institutions like the Treasury and the Fed is a thoroughly bipartisan commitment
that doesn't make either major US party look any more left-wing or right-wing than the other.
"... "Smearing is not reporting," the RootsAction petition says. "The Washington Post 's recent descent into McCarthyism - promoting anonymous and shoddy claims that a vast range of some 200 websites are all accomplices or tools of the Russian government - violates basic journalistic standards and does real harm to democratic discourse in our country. We urge the Washington Post to prominently retract the article and apologize for publishing it." ..."
"... For one thing, PropOrNot wasn't just another source for the Post 's story. As The New Yorker noted in a devastating article on Dec. 1, the story "prominently cited the PropOrNot research." The Post 's account "had the force of revelation, thanks in large part to the apparent scientific authority of PropOrNot's work: the group released a 32-page report detailing its methodology, and named names with its list of 200 suspect news outlets . But a close look at the report showed that it was a mess." ..."
"... As The New Yorker pointed out, PropOrNot's criteria for incriminating content were broad enough to include "nearly every news outlet in the world, including the Post itself." Yet "The List" is not a random list by any means - it's a targeted mish-mash, naming websites that are not within shouting distance of the U.S. corporate and foreign policy establishment. ..."
"... As The New Yorker 's writer Adrian Chen put it: "To PropOrNot, simply exhibiting a pattern of beliefs outside the political mainstream is enough to risk being labeled a Russian propagandist." And he concluded: "Despite the impressive-looking diagrams and figures in its report, PropOrNot's findings rest largely on innuendo and conspiracy thinking." ..."
"... As much as the Post news management might want to weasel out of the comparison, the parallels to the advent of the McCarthy Era are chilling. For instance, the Red Channels list, with 151 names on it, was successful as a weapon against dissent and free speech in large part because, early on, so many media outlets of the day actively aided and abetted blacklisting, as the Post has done for "The List." ..."
"... Sen. Joseph McCarthy, R-Wisconsin, who led the "Red Scare" hearings of the 1950s. ..."
"... So far The New Yorker has been the largest media outlet to directly confront the Post 's egregious story. Cogent assessments can also be found at The Intercept , Consortium News , Common Dreams , AlterNet , Rolling Stone , Fortune , CounterPunch , The Nation and numerous other sites. ..."
"... But many mainline journalists and outlets jumped at the chance to amplify the Post 's piece of work. A sampling of the cheers from prominent journalists and liberal partisans was published by FAIR.org under the apt headline " Why Are Media Outlets Still Citing Discredited 'Fake News' Blacklist? " ..."
"... When liberals have green-lighted a witch-hunt, right wingers have been pleased to run with it. President Harry Truman issued an executive order in March 1947 to establish "loyalty" investigations in every agency of the federal government. Joe McCarthy and the era named after him were soon to follow. ..."
After publishing a McCarthyistic "black list" that smears some 200 Web sites as "Russian propagandists,"
The Washington Post refuses to apologize - and other mainstream media outlets pile on, writes
Norman Solomon.
We still don't have any sort of apology or retraction from the Washington Post for
promoting "The List" - the highly dangerous blacklist that got a huge boost from the newspaper's
fawning coverage on Nov. 24. The project of smearing 200 websites with one broad brush wouldn't
have gotten far without the avid complicity of high-profile media outlets, starting with the
Post .
On Thursday - a week after the Post published its front-page news
article hyping the blacklist that was put out by a group of unidentified people called PropOrNot
- I sent a petition statement to the newspaper's executive editor Martin Baron.
The Washington Post building in downtown Washington, D.C. (Photo credit: Washington Post)
"Smearing is not reporting," the RootsAction
petition says. "The Washington Post 's recent descent into McCarthyism - promoting
anonymous and shoddy claims that a vast range of some 200 websites are all accomplices or tools
of the Russian government - violates basic journalistic standards and does real harm to democratic
discourse in our country. We urge the Washington Post to prominently retract the article
and apologize for publishing it."
After mentioning that 6,000 people had signed the petition (the number has doubled since then),
my email to Baron added: "If you skim through the comments that many of the signers added to the
petition online, I think you might find them to be of interest. I wonder if you see a basis for
dialogue on the issues raised by critics of the Post piece in question."
The reply came from the newspaper's vice president for public relations, Kristine Coratti Kelly,
who thanked me "for reaching out to us" before presenting the Post 's response, quoted
here in full:
"The Post reported on the work of four separate sets of researchers, as well as independent
experts, who have examined Russian attempts to influence American democracy. PropOrNot was one.
The Post did not name any of the sites on PropOrNot's list of organizations that it said
had - wittingly or unwittingly - published or echoed Russian propaganda. The Post reviewed
PropOrNot's findings and our questions about them were answered satisfactorily during the course
of multiple interviews."
Full of Holes
But that damage-control response was as full of holes as the news story it tried to defend.
For one thing, PropOrNot wasn't just another source for the Post 's story. As
The New Yorker noted in a
devastating article on Dec. 1, the story "prominently cited the PropOrNot research." The
Post 's account "had the force of revelation, thanks in large part to the apparent scientific
authority of PropOrNot's work: the group released a 32-page report detailing its methodology,
and named names with its list of 200 suspect news outlets . But a close look at the report showed
that it was a mess."
Contrary to the PR message from the Post vice president, PropOrNot did not merely
say that the sites on its list had "published or echoed Russian propaganda." Without a word of
the slightest doubt or skepticism in the entire story, the Post summarized PropOrNot's
characterization of all the websites on its list as falling into two categories: "Some players
in this online echo chamber were knowingly part of the propaganda campaign, the researchers concluded,
while others were 'useful idiots' - a term born of the Cold War to describe people or institutions
that unknowingly assisted Soviet Union propaganda efforts."
As The New Yorker pointed out, PropOrNot's criteria for incriminating content were
broad enough to include "nearly every news outlet in the world, including the Post
itself."
Yet "The List" is not a random list by any means - it's a targeted mish-mash, naming websites
that are not within shouting distance of the U.S. corporate and foreign policy establishment.
And so the list includes a few overtly Russian-funded outlets; some other sites generally aligned
with Kremlin outlooks; many pro-Trump sites, often unacquainted with what it means to be factual
and sometimes overtly racist; and other websites that are quite different - solid, factual, reasonable
- but too progressive or too anti-capitalist or too libertarian or too right-wing or just plain
too independent-minded for the evident tastes of whoever is behind PropOrNot.
As The New Yorker 's writer Adrian Chen put it: "To PropOrNot, simply exhibiting a
pattern of beliefs outside the political mainstream is enough to risk being labeled a Russian
propagandist." And he concluded: "Despite the impressive-looking diagrams and figures in its report,
PropOrNot's findings rest largely on innuendo and conspiracy thinking."
As for the Post vice president's defensive phrasing that "the Post did not
name any of the sites on PropOrNot's list," the fact is that the Post unequivocally promoted
PropOrNot, driving web traffic to its site and adding a hotlink to the anonymous group's 32-page
report soon after the newspaper's story first appeared. As I mentioned in my reply to her: "Unfortunately,
it's kind of like a newspaper saying that it didn't name any of the people on the Red Channels
blacklist in 1950 while promoting it in news coverage, so no problem."
Pushing McCarthyism
As much as the Post news management might want to weasel out of the comparison, the
parallels to the advent of the McCarthy Era are chilling. For instance, the Red Channels
list, with 151 names on it, was successful as a weapon against dissent and free speech in
large part because, early on, so many media outlets of the day actively aided and abetted blacklisting,
as the Post has done for "The List."
Sen. Joseph McCarthy, R-Wisconsin, who led the "Red Scare" hearings of the 1950s.
Consider how the Post story described the personnel of PropOrNot in favorable terms
even while hiding all of their identities and thus shielding them from any scrutiny - calling
them "a nonpartisan collection of researchers with foreign policy, military and technology backgrounds."
But many mainline journalists and outlets jumped at the chance to amplify the Post
's piece of work. A sampling of the cheers from prominent journalists and liberal partisans was
published by FAIR.org under the apt headline "
Why Are Media Outlets Still Citing Discredited 'Fake News' Blacklist? "
FAIR's media analyst Adam Johnson cited enthusiastic responses to the bogus story from journalists
like Bloomberg's
Sahil Kupar
and MSNBC's
Joy Reid
- and such outlets as
USA Today ,
Gizmodo , the
PBS NewsHour ,
The Daily Beast ,
Slate ,
AP ,
The Verge and
NPR , which "all uncritically wrote up the Post 's most incendiary claims with little
or minimal pushback." On the MSNBC site, the Rachel Maddow Show's
blog "added another breathless write-up hours later, repeating the catchy talking point that
'it was like Russia was running a super PAC for Trump's campaign.'"
With so many people understandably upset about Trump's victory, there's an evident attraction
to blaming the Kremlin, a convenient scapegoat for Hillary Clinton's loss. But the Post
's blacklisting story and the media's amplification of it - and the overall political environment
that it helps to create - are all building blocks for a reactionary order, threatening the First
Amendment and a range of civil liberties.
When liberals have green-lighted a witch-hunt, right wingers have been pleased to run with
it. President Harry Truman issued an executive order in March 1947 to establish "loyalty" investigations
in every agency of the federal government. Joe McCarthy and the era named after him were soon
to follow.
In media and government, the journalists and officials who enable blacklisting are cravenly
siding with conformity instead of democracy.
Norman Solomon is co-founder of the online activist group RootsAction.org. His books include War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. He is the executive
director of the Institute for Public Accuracy.
This idea of casting dissidents as Russian Agent is directly from McCarthy play book.
And paradoxically resembles the practive of the USSR in which dissdents were demonized as "Agent
of the Western powers." The trick is a immanent part of any war propaganda efforts. So it is clear
the Cold War II had started...
Notable quotes:
"... As George Orwell predicted, telling the truth is now regarded by Western "democratic" governments as a hostile act. A brand new website, propornot.com, has just made its appearance condemning a list of 200 Internet websites that provide news and views at variance with the presstitute media that serves the governments' agendas . Does propornot.com's funding come from the CIA, the National Endowment for Democracy, or George Soros? ..."
"... In the West those who disagree with the murderous and reckless policies of public officials are demonized as "Russian agents." ..."
"... The presstitute Washington Post played its assigned role in the claim promoted by Washington that the alternative media consists of Russian agents. Craig Timberg, who appears devoid of integrity or intelligence, and perhaps both, is the WaPo stooge who reported the fake news that "two teams of independent researchers" - none of whom are identified - found that the Russians exploited my gullibility, that of CounterPunch, Professor Michel Chossudosky of Global Researh, Ron Paul, Lew Rockwell, Justin Raimondo and that of 194 other websites to help "an insurgent candidate" (Trump) "claim the White House." ..."
"... Note the term applied to Trump - "insurgent candidate." That tells you all you need to know. ..."
"... Western governments are running out of excuses. Since the Clinton regime, the accumulation of war crimes committed by Western governments exceed those of Nazi Germany. Millions of Muslims have been slaughtered, dislocated, and dispossessed in seven countries. Not a single Western war criminal has been held accountable. ..."
"... The despicable Washington Post is a prime apologist for these war criminals. The entire Western print and TV media is so heavily implicated in the worst war crimes in human history that, if justice ever happens, the presstitutes will stand in the dock with the Clintons, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, Obama and their neocon operatives or handlers as the case may be. ..."
The "war on terror" has simultaneously been a war on truth. For fifteen years-from 9/11 to Saddam
Hussein's "weapons of mass destruction" and "al Qaeda connections," "Iranian nukes," "Assad's use
of chemical weapons," endless lies about Gadaffi, "Russian invasion of Ukraine"-the governments of
the so-called Western democracies have found it essential to align themselves firmly with lies in
order to pursue their agendas. Now these Western governments are attempting to discredit the truthtellers
who challenge their lies.
Russian news services are under attack from the EU and Western presstitutes as purveyors of
"fake news" . Abiding by its Washington master's orders, the EU actually passed a resolution
against Russian media for not following Washington's line. Russian President Putin said that the
resolution is a "visible sign of degradation of Western society's idea of democracy."
As George Orwell predicted, telling the truth is now regarded by Western "democratic" governments
as a hostile act. A brand new website, propornot.com, has just made its appearance condemning a list
of 200 Internet websites that provide news and views at variance with the presstitute media that
serves the governments' agendas
. Does propornot.com's funding come from the CIA, the National Endowment for Democracy, or George
Soros?
I am proud to say that paulcraigroberts.org is on the list.
What we see here is the West adopting Zionist Israel's way of dealing with critics. Anyone who
objects to Israel's cruel and inhuman treatment of Palestinians is demonized as "anti-semitic."
In the West those who disagree with the murderous and reckless policies of public officials are demonized
as "Russian agents." The president-elect of the United States himself has been designated a
"Russian agent."
This scheme to redefine truthtellers as propagandists has backfired. The effort to discredit truthtellers
has instead produced a catalogue of websites where reliable information can be found, and readers
are flocking to the sites on the list. Moreover, the effort to discredit truthtellers shows that
Western governments and their presstitutes are intolerant of truth and diverse opinion and are committed
to forcing people to accept self-serving government lies as truth.
Clearly, Western governments and Western media have no respect for truth, so how can the West
possibly be democratic?
The presstitute Washington Post played its assigned role in the claim promoted by Washington
that the alternative media consists of Russian agents. Craig Timberg, who appears devoid of integrity
or intelligence, and perhaps both, is the WaPo stooge who reported the fake news that "two teams
of independent researchers" - none of whom are identified - found that the Russians exploited my
gullibility, that of CounterPunch, Professor Michel Chossudosky of Global Researh, Ron Paul, Lew
Rockwell, Justin Raimondo and that of 194 other websites to help "an insurgent candidate" (Trump)
"claim the White House."
Note the term applied to Trump - "insurgent candidate." That tells you all you need to know.
You can read here what passes as "reliable reporting" in the presstitute
Washington Post .
Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept, which somehow escaped inclusion in The 200, unloads on Timberg
and the Washington Post
here .
Western governments are running out of excuses. Since the Clinton regime, the accumulation
of war crimes committed by Western governments exceed those of Nazi Germany. Millions of Muslims
have been slaughtered, dislocated, and dispossessed in seven countries. Not a single Western war
criminal has been held accountable.
The despicable Washington Post is a prime apologist for these war criminals. The entire Western
print and TV media is so heavily implicated in the worst war crimes in human history that, if justice
ever happens, the presstitutes will stand in the dock with the Clintons, George W. Bush and Dick
Cheney, Obama and their neocon operatives or handlers as the case may be.
Which purveys more "fake news" - RT.com on the one hand, or Fox News, MSNBC and CNN on the other?
I asked that question on reddit and my post was deleted.
"... By Jayati Ghosh, Professor of Economics and Chairperson at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Originally published at The Frontline ..."
"... President Obama has been a fervent supporter of both these deals, with the explicit aim of enhancing and securing US power. "We have to make sure America writes the rules of the global economy. We should do it today while our economy is in the position of global strength. We've got to harness it on our terms. If we don't write the rules for trade around the world – guess what? China will!", he famously said in a speech to workers in a Nike factory in Oregon, USA in May 2015. But even though he has made the case for the TPP plainly enough, his only chance of pushing even the TPP through is in the "lame duck" session of Congress just before the November Presidential election in the US. ..."
"... The official US version, expressed on the website of the US Trade Representative, is that the TPP "writes the rules for global trade-rules that will help increase Made-in-America exports, grow the American economy, support well-paying American jobs, and strengthen the American middle class." This is mainly supposed to occur because of the tariff cuts over 18,000 items that have been written into the agreement, which in turn are supposed to lead to significant expansion of trade volumes and values. ..."
"... But this is accepted by fewer and fewer people in the US. Across the country, workers view such trade deals with great suspicion as causing shifts in employment to lower paid workers, mostly in the Global South. ..."
"... But in fact the TPP and the TTIP are not really about trade liberalisation so much as other regulatory changes, so in any case it is hardly surprising that the positive effects on trade are likely to be so limited. What is more surprising is how the entire discussion around these agreements is still framed around the issues relating to trade liberalisation, when these are in fact the less important parts of these agreements, and it is the other elements that are likely to have more negative and even devastating effects on people living in the countries that sign up to them. ..."
"... Three aspects of these agreements are particularly worrying: the intellectual property provisions, the restrictions on regulatory practices and the investor-state dispute settlement provisions ..."
"... All of these would result in significant strengthening of the bargaining power of corporations vis-ŕ-vis workers and citizens, would reduce the power of governments to bring in policies and regulations that affect the profits or curb the power of such corporations ..."
"... So if such features of US-led globalisation are indeed under threat, that is probably a good thing for the people of the US and for people in their trading partners who had signed up for such deals. ..."
"... The question arises: is Trump evil? Or merely awful? If Trump is merely awful, then we are not faced with voting for the Lesser Evil or otherwise voting Third Party in protest. If we are faced with a choice between Evil and Awful, perhaps a vote for Awful is a vote against Evil just by itself. ..."
"... Trump has backpedaled and frontpedaled on virtually everything, but on trade, he's got Sanders-level consistency. He's been preaching the same sanity since the 90s. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZpMJeynBeg ..."
"... While I do not disagree with your comments, they must be placed in proper context: there is no substantive difference between Mike Pence and Tim Kaine, and the people who staff the campaigns of Trump and Clinton are essentially the same. (Fundamentally a replay of the 2000 election: Cheney/Bush vs. Lieberman/Gore.) ..."
"... Great Comment. Important to knock down the meme that "this is the most significant or important election of our time" - this is a carbon copy of what we have seen half a dozen times since WW2 alone and that's exactly how our elite handlers want it. Limit the choices, stoke fear, win by dividing the plebes. ..."
"... Let's face it, trade without the iron fist of capitalism will benefit us schlobs greatly and not the 1%. I'm all for being against it (TPP etc) and will vote that way. ..."
"... We'd also have put in enough puppet dictators in resource rich countries that we'd be able to get raw materials cheaply. The low labor/raw material cost will provide a significant advantage for exports but alas, our 99% won't be able to afford our own products. ..."
"... the TPP will completely outlaw any possibility of a "Buy America" clause in the future! ..."
"... The cynic in me wonders if under say NAFTA it would be possible for a multinational to sue for lost profits via isds if TPP fails to pass. That the failure to enact trade "liberalizing" legislation could be construed as an active step against trade. the way these things are so ambiguously worded, I wonder. ..."
"... Here's Obama's actual speech at the Nike headquarters (not factory). http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/barackobama/barackobamatradenike.htm ..."
"... It should be noted that the Oregon Democrats who were free traitors and supported fast track authority were called out that day: Bonamici, Blumenauer, Schrader and Wyden. The only Oregon Ds that opposed: Sen. Merkley and Congressman DeFazio. ..."
"... The Market Realist is far more realistic about Oregon's free traitors' votes. http://marketrealist.com/2015/05/trans-pacific-partnership-affects-footwear-firms/ "US tariffs on footwear imported from Vietnam can range from 5% to 40%, according to OTEXA (Office of Textiles and Apparel). Ratification of the TPP will likely result in lower tariffs and higher profitability for Nike." ..."
"... So what's the incentive for Oregon's free traitors to support the TPP now? ..."
"... Perhaps they still need to show loyalty to their corporate owners and to the principle of "free trade". ..."
"... Obama: "We have to make sure America writes the rules of the global economy." ..."
"... Thank you, Mr. President, for resolving any doubts that the American project is an imperialist project! ..."
"... Yes, and I would add a jingoistic one as well. Manifest destiny, the Monroe doctrine, etc. are not just history lessons but are alive and well in the neoliberal mindset. The empire must keep expanding into every nook and cranny of the world, turning them into good consumerist slaves. ..."
"... Funny how little things change over the centuries. ..."
"... The West Is The Best, Subhuman Are All The Rest. The perpetual mantra of the Uebermensch since Columbus first made landfall. Hitler merely sought to apply the same to some Europeans. ..."
"... "How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism", 2015, Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nisancioglu. ..."
"... The Dem candidate's husband made it appallingly clear what the purpose of the TPP is: "It's to make sure the future of the Asia-Pacific region is not dominated by China". ..."
"... Bill Clinton doesn't even care about "the rise of China". That's just a red herring he sets up to accuse opponents of TPP of soft-on-China treasonism. It's just fabricating a stick to beat the TPP-opponents with. Clinton's support for MFN for China shows what he really thinks about the "rise of China". ..."
"... Clinton's real motivation is the same as the TPP's real reason, to reduce America to colonial possession status of the anti-national corporations and the Global OverClass natural persons who shelter behind and within them. ..."
"... Obama. Liar or stupid? When Elizabeth Warren spoke out about the secrecy of the TPP, Obama, uncharacteristically, ran to the cameras to state that the TPP was not secret and that the charge being leveled by Warren was false. Obama's statement was that Warren had access to a copy so how dare she say it was secret. ..."
"... Obama (and Holder) effectively immunized every financial criminal involved in the great fraud and recession without bothering to run for a camera, and to this day has refused and avoided any elaboration on the subject, but he wasted no time trying to bury Warren publicly. The TPP is a continuation of Obama's give-away to corporations, or more specifically, the very important men who run them who Obama works for. And he is going to pull out all stops to deliver to the men he respects. ..."
"... It's a virtual "black market" of "money laundering" (sterilization). In foreign trade, IMPORTS decrease (-) the money stock of the importing country (and are a subtraction to domestic gDp figures), while EXPORTS increase (+) the money stock and domestic gDp (earnings repatriated to the U.S), and the potential money supply, of the exporting country. ..."
"... I don't WANT the US writing the rules of trade any longer. We know what US-written rules do: plunge worker wages into slave labor territory, guts all advanced country's manufacturing capability, sends all high tech manufacturing to 3rd world nations ..."
"... Time to toss the rules and re-write them for the greatest benefit of the greatest number of NON-wealthy and for the benefit of the planet/ecosystems, NOT for benefit of Wall St. ..."
By Jayati Ghosh, Professor of Economics and Chairperson at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru
University, New Delhi. Originally published at
The Frontline
There is much angst in the Northern financial media about how the era of globalisation led actively by the United States may well
be coming to an end. This is said to be exemplified in the changed political attitudes to mega regional trade deals like the Trans
Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) that was signed (but has not yet been ratified) by the US and 11 other countries in Latin America,
Asia and Oceania; and the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership Agreement (TTIP) still being negotiated by the US and the
European Union.
President Obama has been a fervent supporter of both these deals, with the explicit aim of enhancing and securing US power.
"We have to make sure America writes the rules of the global economy. We should do it today while our economy is in the position
of global strength. We've got to harness it on our terms. If we don't write the rules for trade around the world – guess what? China
will!", he famously said in a speech to workers in a Nike factory in Oregon, USA in May 2015. But even though he has made the case
for the TPP plainly enough, his only chance of pushing even the TPP through is in the "lame duck" session of Congress just before
the November Presidential election in the US.
However, the changing political currents in the US are making that ever more unlikely. Hardly anyone who is a candidate in the
coming elections, whether for the Presidency, the Senate or the House of Representatives, is willing to stick their necks out to
back the deal.
Both Presidential candidates in the US (Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton) have openly come out against the TPP. In Clinton's case
this is a complete reversal of her earlier position when she had referred to the TPP as "the gold standard of trade deals" – and
it has clearly been forced upon her by the insurgent movement in the Democratic Party led by Bernie Sanders. She is already being
pushed by her rival candidate for not coming out more clearly in terms of a complete rejection of this deal. Given the significant
trust deficit that she still has to deal with across a large swathe of US voters, it will be hard if not impossible for her to backtrack
on this once again (as her husband did earlier with NAFTA) even if she does achieve the Presidency.
The official US version, expressed on the website of the US Trade Representative, is that the TPP "writes the rules for global
trade-rules that will help increase Made-in-America exports, grow the American economy, support well-paying American jobs, and strengthen
the American middle class." This is mainly supposed to occur because of the tariff cuts over 18,000 items that have been written
into the agreement, which in turn are supposed to lead to significant expansion of trade volumes and values.
But this is accepted by fewer and fewer people in the US. Across the country, workers view such trade deals with great suspicion
as causing shifts in employment to lower paid workers, mostly in the Global South. Even the only US government study of the
TPP's likely impacts, by the International Trade Commission, could project at best only 1 per cent increase in exports due to the
agreement up to 2032. A study by Jeronim Capaldo and Alex Izurieta with Jomo Kwame Sundaram ("Trading down: Unemployment, inequality
and other risks of the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement", Working Paper 16-01, Global Development and Environment Institute, January
2016) was even less optimistic, even for the US. It found that the benefits to exports and economic growth were likely to be relatively
small for all member countries, and would be negative in the US and Japan because of losses to employment and increases in inequality.
Wage shares of national income would decline in all the member countries.
But in fact the TPP and the TTIP are not really about trade liberalisation so much as other regulatory changes, so in any
case it is hardly surprising that the positive effects on trade are likely to be so limited. What is more surprising is how the entire
discussion around these agreements is still framed around the issues relating to trade liberalisation, when these are in fact the
less important parts of these agreements, and it is the other elements that are likely to have more negative and even devastating
effects on people living in the countries that sign up to them.
Three aspects of these agreements are particularly worrying:
the intellectual property provisions,
the restrictions on regulatory practices
the investor-state dispute settlement provisions.
Three aspects of these agreements are particularly worrying: the intellectual property provisions, the restrictions
on regulatory practices and the investor-state dispute settlement provisions.
All of these would result in significant strengthening of the bargaining power of corporations vis-ŕ-vis workers and citizens,
would reduce the power of governments to bring in policies and regulations that affect the profits or curb the power of such corporations
For example, the TPP (and the TTIP) require more stringent enforcement requirements of intellectual property rights: reducing
exemptions (e.g. allowing compulsory licensing only for emergencies); preventing parallel imports; extending IPRs to areas like life
forms, counterfeiting and piracy; extending exclusive rights to test data (e.g. in pharmaceuticals); making IPR provisions more detailed
and prescriptive. The scope of drug patents is extended to include minor changes to existing medications (a practice commonly employed
by drug companies, known as "evergreening"). Patent linkages would make it more difficult for many generic drugs to enter markets.
This would strengthen, lengthen and broaden pharmaceutical monopolies on cancer, heart disease and HIV/AIDS drugs, and in general
make even life-saving drugs more expensive and inaccessible in all the member countries. It would require further transformation
of countries' laws on patents and medical test data. It would reduce the scope of exemption in use of medical formulations through
public procurement for public purposes. All this is likely to lead to reductions in access to drugs and medical procedures because
of rising prices, and also impede innovation rather than encouraging it, across member countries.
There are also very restrictive copyright protection rules, that would also affect internet usage as Internet Service Providers
are to be forced to adhere to them. There are further restrictions on branding that would reinforce the market power of established
players.
The TPP and TTIP also contain restrictions on regulatory practices that greatly increase the power of corporations relative to
states and can even prevent states from engaging in countercyclical measures designed to boost domestic demand. It has been pointed
out by consumer groups in the USA that the powers of the Food and Drug Administration to regulate products that affect health of
citizens could be constrained and curtailed by this agreement. Similarly, macroeconomic stimulus packages that focus on boosting
domestic demand for local production would be explicitly prohibited by such agreements.
All these are matters for concern because these agreements enable corporations to litigate against governments that are perceived
to be flouting these provisions because of their own policy goals or to protect the rights of their citizens. The Investor-State
Dispute Settlement mechanism enabled by these agreements is seen to be one of their most deadly features. Such litigation is then
subject to supranational tribunals to which sovereign national courts are expected to defer, but which have no human rights safeguards
and which do not see the rights of citizen as in any way superior to the "rights" of corporations to their profits. These courts
can conduct closed and secret hearings with secret evidence. They do not just interpret the rules but contribute to them through
case law because of the relatively vague wording of the text, which can then be subject to different interpretations, and therefore
are settled by case law. The experience thus far with such tribunals has been problematic. Since they are legally based on "equal"
treatment of legal persons with no primacy for human rights, they have become known for their pro-investor bias, partly due to the
incentive structure for arbitrators, and partly because the system is designed to provide supplementary guarantees to investors,
rather than making them respect host countries laws and regulations.
If all these features of the TPP and the TTIP were more widely known, it is likely that there would be even greater public resistance
to them in the US and in other countries. Even as it is, there is growing antagonism to the trade liberalisation that is seen to
bring benefits to corporations rather than to workers, at a period in history when secure employment is seen to be the biggest prize
of all.
So if such features of US-led globalisation are indeed under threat, that is probably a good thing for the people of the US
and for people in their trading partners who had signed up for such deals.
I was watching a speech Premier Li gave at the Economic Club of NY last night, and it was interesting to see how all his (vetted,
pre-selected) questions revolved around anxieties having to do with resistance to global trade deals. Li made a few pandering
comments about how much the Chinese love American beef (stop it! you're killing me! har har) meant to diffuse those anxieties,
but it became clear that the fear among TPTB of people's dissatisfaction with the current economic is palpable. Let's keep it
up!
A federal appeals court on Tuesday threw out a $147 million civil price fixing judgment against Chinese manufacturers of
vitamin C, ruling the companies weren't liable in U.S. courts because they were acting under the direction of Chinese authorities.
The case raised thorny questions of how courts should treat foreign companies accused of violating U.S. antitrust law when
they are following mandates of a foreign government.
"I was only following orders" might not have worked in Nuremberg, but it's a-ok in international trade.
The question arises: is Trump evil? Or merely awful? If Trump is merely awful, then we are not faced with voting for the
Lesser Evil or otherwise voting Third Party in protest. If we are faced with a choice between Evil and Awful, perhaps a vote for
Awful is a vote against Evil just by itself.
Trump has already back peddaled on his TPP stance. He now says he wants to renegotiate the TTP and other trade deals. Whatever
that means. Besides, Trump is a distraction, its Mike Pence you should be keeping your eye on. He's American Taliban pure and
simple.
This is simply false. Trump has backpedaled and frontpedaled on virtually everything, but on trade, he's got Sanders-level
consistency. He's been preaching the same sanity since the 90s.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZpMJeynBeg
Hillary wants to start a war with Russia and pass the trade trifecta of TPP/TTIP/TiSA.
While I do not disagree with your comments, they must be placed in proper context: there is no substantive difference between
Mike Pence and Tim Kaine, and the people who staff the campaigns of Trump and Clinton are essentially the same. (Fundamentally
a replay of the 2000 election: Cheney/Bush vs. Lieberman/Gore.)
Trump was run to make Hillary look good, but that has turned out to be Mission Real Impossible!
We are seeing the absolute specious political theater at its worst, attempting to differentiate between Hillary Rodham Clinton
and the Trumpster – – – the only major difference is that Clinton has far more real blood on her and Bill's hands.
Nope, there is no lesser of evils this time around . . .
Great Comment. Important to knock down the meme that "this is the most significant or important election of our time" -
this is a carbon copy of what we have seen half a dozen times since WW2 alone and that's exactly how our elite handlers want it.
Limit the choices, stoke fear, win by dividing the plebes.
Let's face it, trade without the iron fist of capitalism will benefit us schlobs greatly and not the 1%. I'm all for being
against it (TPP etc) and will vote that way.
>only 1 per cent increase in exports due to the agreement up to 2032.
At that point American's wages will have dropped near enough to Chinese levels that we can compete in selling to First World
countries . assuming there are any left.
We'd also have put in enough puppet dictators in resource rich countries that we'd be able to get raw materials cheaply.
The low labor/raw material cost will provide a significant advantage for exports but alas, our 99% won't be able to afford our
own products.
Naaah, never been about competition, since nobody is actually vetted when they offshore those jobs or replace American workers
with foreign visa workers.
But to sum it up as succinctly as possible: the TPP is about the destruction of workers' rights; the destruction of local and
small businesses; and the loss of sovereignty. Few Americans are cognizant of just how many businesses are foreign owned today
in America; their local energy utility or state energy utility, their traffic enforcement company which was privatized, their
insurance company (GEICO, etc.).
I remember when a political action group back in the '00s thought they had stumbled on a big deal when someone had hacked into
the system of the Bretton Woods Committee (the lobbyist group for the international super-rich which ONLY communicates with the
Speaker of the House and the Senate Majority Leader, and who shares the same lobbyist and D.C. office space as the Group of Thirty,
the lobbyist group for the central bankers [Larry Summers, Timothy Geithner, Mario Draghi, Ernesto Zedillo, Bill Dudley, etc.,
etc.]) and placed online their demand of the senate and the congress to kill the "Buy America" clause in the federal stimulus
program of a few years back (it was watered down greatly, and many exemptions were signed by then Commerce Secretary Gary Locke),
but such information went completely unnoticed or ignored, and of course, the TPP will completely outlaw any possibility of
a "Buy America" clause in the future!
The cynic in me wonders if under say NAFTA it would be possible for a multinational to sue for lost profits via isds if
TPP fails to pass. That the failure to enact trade "liberalizing" legislation could be construed as an active step against trade.
the way these things are so ambiguously worded, I wonder.
In June 2016, "[TransCanada] filed an arbitration claim under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) over President
Obama's rejection of the pipeline, making good on its January threat to take legal action against the US decision.
According to the official request for arbitration, the $15 billion tab is supposed to help the company recover costs and damages
that it suffered "as a result of the US administration's breach of its NAFTA obligations." NAFTA is a comprehensive trade agreement
between the United States, Canada, and Mexico that went into effect in January 1, 1994. Under the agreement, businesses can challenge
governments over investment disputes.
In addition, the company filed a suit in US Federal Court in Houston, Texas in January asserting that the Obama Administration
exceeded the power granted by the US Constitution in denying the project."
It should be noted that the Oregon Democrats who were free traitors and supported fast track authority were called out
that day: Bonamici, Blumenauer, Schrader and Wyden. The only Oregon Ds that opposed: Sen. Merkley and Congressman DeFazio.
Obama's rhetoric May 5, 2015 at the Nike campus was all about how small businesses would prosper. Congresswoman Bonamici clings
to this rationale in her refusal to tell angry constituents at town halls whether she supports the TPP.
The Market Realist is far more realistic about Oregon's free traitors' votes.
http://marketrealist.com/2015/05/trans-pacific-partnership-affects-footwear-firms/
"US tariffs on footwear imported from Vietnam can range from 5% to 40%, according to OTEXA (Office of Textiles and Apparel). Ratification
of the TPP will likely result in lower tariffs and higher profitability for Nike."
That appeals to the other big athletic corporations that cluster in the Portland metro: Columbia Sportswear and Under Armour.
Yes, and I would add a jingoistic one as well. Manifest destiny, the Monroe doctrine, etc. are not just history lessons
but are alive and well in the neoliberal mindset. The empire must keep expanding into every nook and cranny of the world, turning
them into good consumerist slaves.
Funny how little things change over the centuries.
The West Is The Best, Subhuman Are All The Rest. The perpetual mantra of the Uebermensch since Columbus first made landfall.
Hitler merely sought to apply the same to some Europeans.
"How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism", 2015, Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nisancioglu.
The Dem candidate's husband made it appallingly clear what the purpose of the TPP is: "It's to make sure the future of
the Asia-Pacific region is not dominated by China".
Would be nice if they had even a passing thought for those people in a certain North American region located in between Canada
and Mexico.
Bill Clinton doesn't even care about "the rise of China". That's just a red herring he sets up to accuse opponents of TPP
of soft-on-China treasonism. It's just fabricating a stick to beat the TPP-opponents with. Clinton's support for MFN for China
shows what he really thinks about the "rise of China".
Clinton's real motivation is the same as the TPP's real reason, to reduce America to colonial possession status of the
anti-national corporations and the Global OverClass natural persons who shelter behind and within them.
If calling the International Free Trade Conspiracy "American" is enough to get it killed and destroyed, then I don't mind having
a bunch of foreigners calling the Free Trade Conspiracy "American". Just as long as they are really against it, and can really
get Free Trade killed and destroyed.
Excellent post. Thank you. Should these so called "trade agreements" be approved, perhaps Investor-State Dispute Settlement
(ISDS arbitration) futures can be created by Wall Street and made the next speculative "Play-of-the-day" so that everyone has
a chance to participate in the looting. Btw, can you loot your own house?
Obama. Liar or stupid? When Elizabeth Warren spoke out about the secrecy of the TPP, Obama, uncharacteristically, ran to
the cameras to state that the TPP was not secret and that the charge being leveled by Warren was false. Obama's statement was
that Warren had access to a copy so how dare she say it was secret.
At the time he made that statement Warren could go to an offsite location to read the TPP in the presence of a member of the
Trade Commission, could not have staff with her, could not take notes, and could not discuss anything she read with anyone else
after she left. Or face criminal charges.
Yeah. Nothing secret about that.
Obama (and Holder) effectively immunized every financial criminal involved in the great fraud and recession without bothering
to run for a camera, and to this day has refused and avoided any elaboration on the subject, but he wasted no time trying to bury
Warren publicly. The TPP is a continuation of Obama's give-away to corporations, or more specifically, the very important men
who run them who Obama works for. And he is going to pull out all stops to deliver to the men he respects.
And add to that everything from David Dayen's book (" Chain of Title ") on Covington & Burling and Eric Holder and President
Obama, and Thomas Frank's book ("Listen, Liberals") and people will have the full picture!
It's a virtual "black market" of "money laundering" (sterilization). In foreign trade, IMPORTS decrease (-) the money stock
of the importing country (and are a subtraction to domestic gDp figures), while EXPORTS increase (+) the money stock and domestic
gDp (earnings repatriated to the U.S), and the potential money supply, of the exporting country.
So, there's a financial incentive (to maximize profits), not to repatriate foreign income (pushes up our exchange rate, currency
conversion costs, if domestic re-investment alternatives are considered more circumscribed, plus taxes, etc.).
In spite of the surfeit of $s, and E-$ credits, and unlike the days in which world-trade required a Marshall Plan jump start,
trade surpluses increasingly depend on the Asian Tiger's convertibility issues.
I don't WANT the US writing the rules of trade any longer. We know what US-written rules do: plunge worker wages into slave
labor territory, guts all advanced country's manufacturing capability, sends all high tech manufacturing to 3rd world nations
or even (potential) unfriendlies like China (who can easily put trojan spyware hard code or other vulnerabilities into critical
microchips the way WE were told the US could/would when it was leading on this tech when I was serving in the 90s). We already
know that US-written rules is simply a way for mega corporations to extend patents into the ever-more-distant future, a set of
rules that hands more control of arts over to the MPAA, rules that gut environmental laws, etc. Who needs the US-written agreements
when this is the result?
Time to toss the rules and re-write them for the greatest benefit of the greatest number of NON-wealthy and for the benefit
of the planet/ecosystems, NOT for benefit of Wall St.
"... The motive is there (discredit competition), the evidence is there per the above, the legal standing is explicit, the only thing that is technically unquantifiable is the damage done. ..."
"... Both Firefox and Chrome have added the option to open in a "private" or "incognito" window or tab, which also gets you around the monthly limit. ..."
"... What NYT/WaPo lose in people not paying to read, they apparently can make up from people willing to pay to have things published. ..."
"... 'The man' who shot one round into the floor* at Comet Pizza may be an actor, Edgar Maddison Welch, who has done various jobs in media, including playing a "raver/victim". ..."
"... Yves, I would very much question your description of The Washington Post being " taken for a ride." over this story. ..."
"... It's worth pointing out that the newspapers owner Jeff Bezos was hired by the Secretary of Defense to a rather sinister sounding organisation called the " Defense Innovation Advisory Board " in July. The Boards mission statement is to .."focus on new technologies and organizational behavior and culture." Also, in addition "identify innovative private-sector practices, and technological solutions that the DoD could employ in the future." ..."
"... In short, Bezos, and his companies are now part of the MIC. I believe Googles CEO is also on the same board. ..."
"... Am I supposed to accept then that the Washington Post really thinks that the work of PropOrNot is honestly and objectively carried out? I can't. ..."
"... Dan Rather was put in an impossible position by supporters of GW Bush, despite the accuracy of the accusation. In this case, instead, the Post intentionally credits accusations for which it can offer no support (or at least declines to do so). I'll conclude that the Post acted maliciously and spitefully, as in slander, until it gives me reason to think otherwise. No person or media outlet can disseminate such shocking and potentially damaging accusations without our demanding accountability. ..."
"... If you read section 501 of this year's intelligence authorization bill, it directs the President to set up an interagency committee to 'counter active measures by Russia to exert covert influence over peoples and governments.' So that shows you that senators from both parties are clearly concerned about Russian covert influence efforts. ..."
"... "Never assume malice when incompetence will explain the behavior." unless a lengthy history of errors having the same bias suggests otherwise. ..."
"... I've been a lifelong journalist, 10 years on a daily newspaper, 20 years freelancing for magazines. The Wapo story so blatantly violated fundamental journalistic standards I cannot believe any experienced editor would not have realized that. My only possible conclusion is that irresistible pressure was placed on editors to publish the story. ..."
"... You fake a document that contains the truth. When you discredit the document, you discredit the truth. Maneuvers like that show why Karl Rove really was (in his own special way) a genius. ..."
"... I followed the Bush Texas Air National Guard story in detail at the time, and the Rather story in particular, and posted on it a good deal. So far as I know, nobody ever claimed the $10,000 reward that Gary Trudeau offered for anybody who would come forward as an eye witness to Bush performing his TANG duties. ..."
"... Your comment is heavy on speculation including the notion that Bezos is directly controlling what goes into the Post. I'd say the tight little club that is mainstream journalism doesn't require government subversion in order to represent a MIC point of view. As Gore Vidal said re the deep state: they don't need to conspire since they all think alike anyway. ..."
"... With all due respect it isn't speculation that Bezos has been hired by the secretary of defence to the Defence innovation advisory board. I think you have to be very naive if you think he has little input into the editorial running of the paper. Why else buy a newspaper these days? They hardly make much money. ..."
"... The British Guardian for example has been running articles and pushing a campaign of "The Internet we want." Which seems to consist of all critiscms of what it believes being censored. ..."
"... As to Yves point about the amateur nature of this list, and the attack on sites like NC in the article, Yves shouldn't assume that all these people are geniuses. It won't be the first or the last time that powerful people who run businesses make complete fools of themselves. ..."
"... And Bezos is too busy to have much/any input into editorial decisions. Newscycles are far too rapid. Bezos might make clear what the general priorities and tone are, but he's not going to be involved in individual stories save on a very exceptional basis, and news of that would get out to reporters and make the journalism rumor mill in a bad way. Marty Peretz, who unlike Bezos was the publisher and editor in chief of the magazine he bought (the vastly smaller The New Republic) had pet priorities (Israel) and preferences (falling in love with smart young male senior editors and then becoming disenchanted with them in a couple of years and driving them out) that were widely known. ..."
"... These guys are so ludicrous that folks like Bellingcat are denouncing them. ..."
"... Carl Bernstein has done some pretty deep reporting on decades of links bw CIA and media: http://www.carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php ..."
"... Even he says there are not really any links bw CIA and WaPo as propaganda channel. As much as it'd be fun to fantasize about Bezos being an evil operator for the MIC, I am inclined toward Yves' narrative of incompetence, and an (unhealthy) dose of confirmation bias-seeking. ..."
"... Much as I would believe anything about Bezos/WP, the article is so amateurish its very hard to believe it is part of an active top-down conspiracy. I'd be more inclined to think that it 'became known' among WP staff that certain Very Important People believe in the Russian propaganda conspiracy and that any articles highlighting this are more likely to be published than others. ..."
"... Off the top of my head, some of the worst examples of journalistic libel recently have primarily been driven not by malice or conspiracies, but because of active confirmation bias. The journalist and editor strongly believes X to be true, therefore when a source comes up to provide a potentially juicy story confirming the reality and evil of X, then they leap on the source without any professional scepticism. The Rolling Stone college rape hoax comes to mind, as does a notorious case in Ireland which nearly destroyed investigative journalism in the main TV company. ..."
"... In this exclusive report, distinguished research psychologist Robert Epstein explains the new study and reviews evidence that Google's search suggestions are biased in favor of Hillary Clinton. He estimates that biased search suggestions might be able to shift as many as 3 million votes in the upcoming presidential election in the US. ..."
"... Zerohedge was listed as a "fake news" site but, as I'm sure many here know, they do great, hard hitting economic analysis and have had their projections and theories confirmed many times with a far better track record than the mainstream sites covering the same subject. ..."
"... I'm not sure the guys behind all this mind losing the discussion in the end. As often, even if the smeared news sites, including NC, win the debate, they'll still lose the communication war. ..."
"... The background to all this, the attempt by the Clintonites to draw on Cold War stink reserves (a National Ideological Reserve, sorta like the National Petroleum Reserve) and, if not its complete failure, than its failure to be decisively effective, makes me think we are witnessing signs of a decisive weakening in elite communication control. PropOrNot advances the process. ..."
"... We fully endorse Yves Smith's efforts. ..."
"... Additionally, we note that the only reason we haven't followed up with a similar action is because i) the allegations were beyond laughable – we have rejected all of them on the record, and ii) there are simply too much other events taking place in what should otherwise be a quiet end to the year taking place to focus on what may be a lenghty, if gratifying, legal process. ..."
The thing with raising money is you have to ask, ask, ask a lot, lot, lot.
So when you need more money to continue this fight, just publish an updated case-statement
with an ask, and the lot of us will turn over our digits to support the fight. Many hands make
light work, as my mother always says.
It's refreshing to have something to support that is worthwhile in both principle and actuality.
Plus, the Post is a nasty piece of work. Same for the Times . Disgraceful and
distasteful. They are only fun to peruse for the self-parody.
Class Action libel suit against WaPo and the propornot website seems reasonable. The motive
is there (discredit competition), the evidence is there per the above, the legal standing is explicit,
the only thing that is technically unquantifiable is the damage done.
If the damages can be determined by some reasonable methodology then perhaps there is enough
to make it worth bringing a suit.
Regarding paying for the news in general, I'm assuming there aren't too many readers who who
actually want to pay WaPo or the NYT for anything at this point.
Those sites and others in recent years have imposed a monthly free article limit and I find
that sometimes after clicking on stories linked to from here I run up against the limit.
I'm sure most people here are already aware of this, but just so you are never tempted to subscribe
to their crappy organizations, all you need to do to get around the limit is use a different browser
to open the link.
My name is Choung, I'm Korean(south Korea).
Korean have experienced this kind of things many many times under the military dictatorship,
and now we were suffering from new blacklist.
Our president is daughter of the past infamous dictator.
I have visited your site and linked many good pieces. Sometimes translated them.
Korean mainstream media don't handle this story,
So, l wrote some pieces about it in public site.
I strongly express solidarity with you on behalf of many progressive Koreans.
Of tangential interest is the "news" report, if Yahoo can be so described, of the man charged
with various and sundry for threatening the pizzaria "implicated" in the pedophilia allegations
swirling around in the overheated miasma that passes for "common wisdom" today.
Of importance is the framing of the "story." The man is alleged to have gone off on his "adventure"
as the result of "fake news site" reporting. The assault on journalism is now switching from a
pure smear to a flanking maneuver. Whether real or manufactured, this act will probably be spun
to support further crackdowns on dissenting points of view. Guilt by (manufactured) association
can hurt just as badly as real guilt. All this plays out in the court of public opinion, a notoriously
rickety edifice in the best of times. \
'The man' who shot one round into the floor* at Comet Pizza may be an actor, Edgar Maddison
Welch, who has done various jobs in media, including playing a "raver/victim". Look him up on IMDB. http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2625901/bio
Yves, I would very much question your description of The Washington Post being " taken
for a ride." over this story.
It's worth pointing out that the newspapers owner Jeff Bezos was hired by the Secretary
of Defense to a rather sinister sounding organisation called the " Defense Innovation Advisory
Board " in July. The Boards mission statement is to .."focus on new technologies and organizational
behavior and culture." Also, in addition "identify innovative private-sector practices, and
technological solutions that the DoD could employ in the future."
In short, Bezos, and his companies are now part of the MIC. I believe Googles CEO is also
on the same board. These so called private corporations are now part of the US govt that
works in the field of black ops. Remember also that Amazon has major contracts with the govt to
provide cloud computing storage. This is fascism in all but name. It remains to be seen how long
the new President Mr Trump will want to trust these people as they did so much to try to defeat
him.
I beg to differ. No one would want to damage their credibility above all in undermining a narrative
(in Beltway-speak) that they are tying to promote.
Remember the Dan Rather scandal? Unlike this
case, the underlying fact set about George Bush was accurate, but Dan Rather falling for bogus
evidence not only forced Rather to resign, but
diverted attention from what should have been a scandal if properly reported and
confused any attempts to discuss it (as in the Rather evidence being bad made casual observers
think the dirt on Bush was untrue).
I was also struck by the statement that the Post was 'taken for a ride'. Am I supposed
to accept then that the Washington Post really thinks that the work of PropOrNot is honestly and
objectively carried out? I can't.
Dan Rather was put in an impossible position by supporters of GW Bush, despite the accuracy
of the accusation. In this case, instead, the Post intentionally credits accusations for which
it can offer no support (or at least declines to do so). I'll conclude that the Post acted maliciously
and spitefully, as in slander, until it gives me reason to think otherwise. No person or media
outlet can disseminate such shocking and potentially damaging accusations without our demanding
accountability.
And if you look at the what the Post
said to Consortium News (hat tip UserFriendly), it apparently considers just chatting with
a source for a bit an adequate basis for validating a smear against 200 publications. They effectively
admit they did no independent verification:
The reply came from the newspaper's vice president for public relations, Kristine Coratti
Kelly, who thanked me "for reaching out to us" before presenting the Post's response, quoted
here in full:
"The Post reported on the work of four separate sets of researchers, as well as independent
experts, who have examined Russian attempts to influence American democracy. PropOrNot was
one. The Post did not name any of the sites on PropOrNot's list of organizations that it said
had - wittingly or unwittingly - published or echoed Russian propaganda. The Post reviewed
PropOrNot's findings and our questions about them were answered satisfactorily during the course
of multiple interviews."
Speaking of, do you think your inclusion on the initial "PropOrNot" list is an example of malice
or incompetence? Could it be some half-assed algorithm scanned the web for sites linking to RT
(which I can remember at least one instance popping up in Water Cooler/Links), and called it a
day? That seems the most plausible to me, but it also seems plausible that there are many organizations
which would want to discredit NC.
I haven't seen "The List", but am confident that sites like Moon of Alabama and The Saker are
on it. Saker is explicitly pro-Russia (this is not a criticism per se; I found his pieces on the
Ukraine/Donbas crisis in 2014-15 to be more illuminating than most of the very little that one
could find in the US MSM, for example) and MoA is typically skeptical of US international military
adventures.
Pieces from both of these sites have been, from time to time, linked at the NC daily
news links page. Not sure, but there may be a few links over the past couple of years to items
at Russia Insider as well. It may be that 2nd order associations were enough to "merit" NC's inclusion
on "The List."
But last week Timberg was still touting his "independent experts" in an article on a proposed
new committee mandated in the 2017 intelligence authorization bill. He quoted Wyden:
If you read section 501 of this year's intelligence authorization bill, it directs the President
to set up an interagency committee to 'counter active measures by Russia to exert covert influence
over peoples and governments.' So that shows you that senators from both parties are clearly
concerned about Russian covert influence efforts.
Linking his earlier story with this information may be self-important stupidity on Timberg's
part, but stupidity does not actually preclude malice.
In any case, if senators are treating Russian influence as fact when we have yet to be shown
any proof of its existence that is a sign this article, be it folly or malice, needs further discrediting,
so thanks and more power to you!
That's an awful aphorism. Never discount one just because the other is a potential explanation,
especially if the pattern indicates they'll abdicate their core responsibilities for access and
relish going after those they resent for calling them out on it.
Having said that, one can see how you personally wouldn't want to risk libel, but I will make
no such assumptions about the likes of the beltway press.
I've been a lifelong journalist, 10 years on a daily newspaper, 20 years freelancing for magazines.
The Wapo story so blatantly violated fundamental journalistic standards I cannot believe any experienced
editor would not have realized that. My only possible conclusion is that irresistible pressure
was placed on editors to publish the story.
"Dan Rather was put in an impossible position by supporters of GW Bush, despite the accuracy
of the accusation."
Excuse me.
Rather (and CBS) had to admit that the documents used to make those accusations were fake.
How do you have "accurate accusations" when those accusations are based on faked documents?
Rather was not put in a bad positions by supporters of GW Bush.
He was put in a bad position by Dan Rather.
BTW, the Rather incident is a perfect illustration on how fake news gets reported. The underlying
accusation so matched Rather's world view that he decided to run with them without doing any sort
of fact checking. Or checking the reliability of the one source for the story.
Doing so would have prevented Rather from reporting that story and having to resign in disgrace.
This is why fact checking and verifying stories via multiple sources is so important when reporting
news.
It prevents reporting fake news.
The reason we have so much "fake news" is that too many reporters have abandoned basic journalistic
practices.
> How do you have "accurate accusations" when those accusations are based on faked documents?
You fake a document that contains the truth. When you discredit the document, you discredit
the truth. Maneuvers like that show why Karl Rove really was (in his own special way) a genius.
I followed the Bush Texas Air National Guard story in detail at the time, and the Rather story
in particular, and posted on it a good deal. So far as I know, nobody ever claimed the $10,000
reward that Gary Trudeau offered for anybody who would come forward as an eye witness to Bush
performing his TANG duties.
Your comment is heavy on speculation including the notion that Bezos is directly controlling
what goes into the Post. I'd say the tight little club that is mainstream journalism doesn't require
government subversion in order to represent a MIC point of view. As Gore Vidal said re the deep
state: they don't need to conspire since they all think alike anyway.
More likely the Post article is an example of journo dinosaurs striking out at websites they
now regard as their rivals. Print journalism has been brought low, financially, by the internet
and television.
The people who work at the Post don't dare attack television because they all
want to be on it. However the web is likely regarded as an easy target and I've long been under
the impression that mainstream journalists know practically nothing about the internet other than
Twitter and a few favored sites like Politico.
While it's potentially the greatest communication
medium ever devised, of course people visiting the internet have to bring their own truth filter.
Which is why some of us have landed here. NC seems serious about getting to the truth, and if
you don't like what's written you get to say so. What the MSM really resents is people thinking
for themselves.
With all due respect it isn't speculation that Bezos has been hired by the secretary of defence
to the Defence innovation advisory board. I think you have to be very naive if you think he has
little input into the editorial running of the paper. Why else buy a newspaper these days? They
hardly make much money.
I suspect that this outfit PropOrNot was set up before the election of Trump. They assumed
Clinton was going to win and this was the The begining of an onslaught against the so called alternative
media that was going to be waged once Hilary was safely inside the White House. Full regulation
of the Internet is their aim. This agenda has been pushed in other so called liberal newspapers.
The British Guardian for example has been running articles and pushing a campaign of "The Internet
we want." Which seems to consist of all critiscms of what it believes being censored.
As to Yves point about the amateur nature of this list, and the attack on sites like NC in
the article, Yves shouldn't assume that all these people are geniuses. It won't be the first or
the last time that powerful people who run businesses make complete fools of themselves.
I doubt
they thought they were going to be called out on it, and if Clinton won the election it didn't
really matter because they would have the power to come after the alternative media. Trumps election
has put a spanner in the works .for now. It remains to be seen if he will try to censor the Internet
under pressure from elites.
No it wasn't. They bought the URL only in late August. The first tweet was November 5. The
site appears to have been published at the earliest as of November 9, but from what I can tell,
it was November 18.
And Bezos is too busy to have much/any input into editorial decisions. Newscycles are far too
rapid. Bezos might make clear what the general priorities and tone are, but he's not going to
be involved in individual stories save on a very exceptional basis, and news of that would get
out to reporters and make the journalism rumor mill in a bad way. Marty Peretz, who unlike Bezos
was the publisher and editor in chief of the magazine he bought (the vastly smaller The New Republic)
had pet priorities (Israel) and preferences (falling in love with smart young male senior editors
and then becoming disenchanted with them in a couple of years and driving them out) that were
widely known.
Agree that Bezos is an unlikely instigator of this farce. More likely, from what we know about
the CIA/Mockingbird history, the person responsible is most likely a CIA plant at the senior editor
level.
I have to beg to differ re CIA plant. These guys are so ludicrous that folks like Bellingcat
are denouncing them. I won't link even here to the original site since that helps them in Google,
but just go look at the FAQ on the baddie's site or their Twitter feed. No one who was a pro in
any field would see them as serious. I have no idea what the reporter was smoking. But the article
reads as if they never did the most basic verification, like a web search. They didn't recognize
that the "report" which was The List, was already up and they either double down on or try to
cover for their mistake by "updating" the article saying the "report" went up Saturday November
26, when it had been up since at least November 18.
Even he says there are not really any links bw CIA and WaPo as propaganda channel. As much
as it'd be fun to fantasize about Bezos being an evil operator for the MIC, I am inclined toward
Yves' narrative of incompetence, and an (unhealthy) dose of confirmation bias-seeking.
Much as I would believe anything about Bezos/WP, the article is so amateurish its very hard
to believe it is part of an active top-down conspiracy. I'd be more inclined to think that it
'became known' among WP staff that certain Very Important People believe in the Russian propaganda
conspiracy and that any articles highlighting this are more likely to be published than others.
Off the top of my head, some of the worst examples of journalistic libel recently have primarily
been driven not by malice or conspiracies, but because of active confirmation bias. The journalist
and editor strongly believes X to be true, therefore when a source comes up to provide a potentially
juicy story confirming the reality and evil of X, then they leap on the source without any professional
scepticism. The Rolling
Stone college rape hoax comes to mind, as does a
notorious case in Ireland
which nearly destroyed investigative journalism in the main TV company.
Having said that, I think it is strongly likely that certain elements in the establishment
(probably the Clinton part of it) was actively pushing the Putin is Goebbels line for several
months – but I doubt there is any structured conspiracy – these things tend to just become part
of received wisdom, and there are plenty of bottom feeding journalists ready to join the parade.
Well, there's negligence, and then there's wanton, feckless, scurrilous, criminal negligence.
Recompense accordingly.
They certainly know or ought to know that, with the entire left field virtually empty, the
Bill of Rights in the round hole, and because they've foreclosed global working class solidarity
with walls, laws and red tape, (if that's too much of a stretch you don't belong), all they have
to do is squirm at us and we crash.
Well, there's negligence, and then there's wanton, feckless, scurrilous, criminal negligence.
Recompense accordingly.
They certainly know or ought to know that, with the entire left field virtually empty, the
Bill of Rights in the round hole, and because they've foreclosed global working class solidarity
with walls, laws and red tape, (if that's too much of a stretch you don't belong), all they have
to do is squirm at us and we crash.
"What the MSM really resents is people thinking for themselves."
Here are other examples of undoubtedly top-down suppression of anything other than the "kingmaker"
and corrupt status quo maintainer narratives owned by the six mega-corporations that control 90%
of what we see and hear.
The stealthy, Eric Schmidt-backed startup that's working to put Hillary Clinton in the White
House – October 09, 2015
An under-the-radar startup funded by billionaire Eric Schmidt has become a major technology
vendor for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, underscoring the bonds between Silicon Valley
and Democratic politics.
The Groundwork, according to Democratic campaign operatives and technologists, is part of efforts
by Schmidt -- the executive chairman of Google parent-company Alphabet -- to ensure that Clinton has
the engineering talent needed to win the election. And it is one of a series of quiet investments
by Schmidt that recognize how modern political campaigns are run, with data analytics and digital
outreach as vital ingredients that allow candidates to find, court, and turn out critical voter
blocs.
Research Proves Google Manipulates Autocomplete Suggestions to Favor Clinton – 12 Sep 2016
In this exclusive report, distinguished research psychologist Robert Epstein explains the new
study and reviews evidence that Google's search suggestions are biased in favor of Hillary Clinton.
He estimates that biased search suggestions might be able to shift as many as 3 million votes
in the upcoming presidential election in the US.
Ironically, Sputnick News IS, I believe, a Russian supported site, but just on a hunch and
noticing search autocompletion suggestion disparities myself, I had INDEPENDENTLY confirmed what
Epstein proved a month before the topic hit the on-line news.
I even emailed a few web sites about
it, but they didn't run with it AS THEY SHOULD HAVE as they would have scooped Sputnick News.
It was easy to prove, BTW. Google Trends data which is what is normally used to create autocomplete
suggestions on Google did not match the suggestions made, but the search autocomplete suggestions
on every other search engine DID.
YouTube and Facebook censorship against political conservative video bloggers (Google owns
YouTube)
Zerohedge was listed as a "fake news" site but, as I'm sure many here know, they do great,
hard hitting economic analysis and have had their projections and theories confirmed many times
with a far better track record than the mainstream sites covering the same subject.
My heartfelt support (and contribution) will be with you as you take on one of the most egregiously
insulting to its' readers and rot-riddled collection of hacks and mouthpieces. Now a propaganda
outlet but once at least a flaky effort at journalism, today,s Washington Post has earned an encounter
of the costly kind with a good lawyer or two, many times over.
.Illegitemi non carborundum! (Don't let the bastards wear you down!).
As I noted here this weekend, I have cancelled my subscription to the WaPo and will be sending
a check to NC in the amount of what I would have paid for it.
I am embarrassed that it took me so long to do so, but having been a subscriber since 1979
[except for when I lived elsewhere], the Post was rather a habit.
I specifically mentioned the Timberg story as the reason for my cancellation, and hope this
information will work its way up the Post food chain.
Also, Amazon is as dead to me as Walmart. I refuse to buy from either of them.
The "Fake News" story was vetted by editors at the WaPo before it was published. That they
published an article that no reputable High School paper would have touched with a 10 foot pole
speaks volumes. Hubris?.
Did they think that because it was published by the WaPo that no one would question it?
It was certainly a bold thing to do ( And stupid) unless the person or persons who decided to
publish this trash thought they had the kind of powerful backing that would protect them from
the consequences.
I expect the WaPo to try to weasel their way out of this embarassment and urge you not to back
down or compromise on your demands, if they don't get their noses rubbed in it they will crap
on you again.
When the National Enquirer has become more respectable than the WaPo ( And it is!) we are living
in strange times indeed.
If this effort begins to build a stronger alliance between truth telling internet sites -- thus
promoting change from the ground up -- perhaps it will lead to quicker consequences for Wapo and
others who pull this kind of stunt. If it becomes obvious that,
not only will your bogus story increase the traffic to these sites at the very time they are pointing
out what an idiot you are, but you also reliably get sued,
maybe it won't be as much fun anymore.
I'm not sure the guys behind all this mind losing the discussion in the end.
As often, even if the smeared news sites, including NC, win the debate, they'll still lose the
communication war.
The original revelation is buzzing around, and everybody loves it. If there is a rebuttal,
it will be a boring article nobody will comment. What people will remember is : "the russians
helped Trump win, and some fake news site like NC were their mouthpieces. I distinctly remember
the articles, even if the MSM now tries to hide the truth"
Not sure how to fight that, except with an even better message like : "There is a conspiracy
by the WP to smear independent reporting."
Sadly, I'm not sure it is possible to do that in all honestly. My opinion is that stupidity and
ignorance are at work here (and everywhere), not some well organised effort. And the thoughtful
voice is just boring.
I'm not so sure. This scandal might be something of a test of your argument, which predicts
that, similar to the horrible fate of Gary Webb, the named sites will forever have a residue of
doubt to deal with. Webb's story went the way it did because it was semiforgotten, drifting off
into the collective preconscious, vaguely malodorous. Surely that can be avoided here. Opportunities
for reminding readers of the farce and the revealed intentions of its promoters are abundant.
One thing to consider might be to put the WaPo under steady critical scrutiny. For example, as
above, the WaPo Whopper of the week.
The background to all this, the attempt by the Clintonites to draw on Cold War stink reserves
(a National Ideological Reserve, sorta like the National Petroleum Reserve) and, if not its complete
failure, than its failure to be decisively effective, makes me think we are witnessing signs of
a decisive weakening in elite communication control. PropOrNot advances the process.
Keep needling outlets that picked up the Post story and demanding a prominent apology for irresponsible
reporting. Send them the FAIR link, send them this one. Ask why they haven't reaffirmed their
commitment (sic) to basic journalistic principles . Be a damn nuisance. (I've often thought what
a pity it is that "public nuisance" has a prior signification.)
I'm relieved to know that James Moody will be representing Naked Capitalism in its authentic
quest to right an egregious (and either reckless or intentional, in my opinion) wrong committed
by a major newspaper of record that purports to represent the Fourth Estate.
Mr. Moody is technically competent, deeply experienced and highly ethical.
It's critical that the establishment-driven & coordinated assault on many credible alternative
media outlets be halted if free speech and free criticism (which mainstream media sources have
not only failed in protecting, but have willingly attempted to suppress views contrary to establishment-approved
concepts) is to survive in the United States and elsewhere.
There is a coordinated attempt by long-standing establishment media sources and government
to discredit and de-legitimize very authentic, well-intentioned and thought-provoking non-mainstream
media sources, which, if successful, would amount to nothing less than basic censorship and a
wholesale de-democratization of news reporting and editorializing.
That the Washington Post allowed for and even assisted a highly questionable and anonymous
source to cast a wide net of aspersions over so many clearly legitimate alternative media sources
(such as Naked Capitalism) is nothing short of shameful McCarthy-era attempts to stifle free political
expression of substance, and must be challengers if there's any hope in preserving the very system
of a free exchange of ideas and speech.
I can't believe the unfairness of this allegation made by this propaganda watchdog website.
I mean, if I were a Hillary supporter, I would be in tears over this. But as a Bernie supporter,
I have learned to get over my butthurt.
"You identified and thus denigrated Naked Capitalism, one of the sites targeted in the "study"
as one of the "right-wing sites across the Internet as they portrayed Clinton as a criminal hiding
potentially fatal health problems and preparing to hand control of the nation to a shadowy cabal
of global financiers. The effort also sought to heighten the appearance of international tensions
and promote fear of looming hostilities with nuclear-armed Russia."
"shadowy cabal of global financiers" ???? We always use the stock symbols GS and JPM here.
WTF is shadowy about that?????????????? You can look the symbols up in Bloomberg!
Well, I guess maybe some fake news got posted here in the comments section, but I distinctly
recall discussing real news, like when Hillary compared Putin to Hitler, or the Cookie Monster
thing in Kiev. Or NATO scattering nukes around Eastern Europe. Or Soros and the CIA funding a
long term propaganda war in Eastern Europe. Even Fox News would call that fair and balanced fake
news. But at any rate, Russia shouldn't view any of this as hostile. That would just be childish.
Confirming the impression that the Z site monitors NC closely for useful content, Tyler Durden
now has a post up titled "Fake News" Site Threatens Washington Post With Defamation Suit, Demands
Retraction .
The post includes the Scribd document of Moody's letter.
Since the Z site reportedly generates a six-figure annual profit, you'd think this deep-pocketed
site would join the suit (should litigation regrettably become necessary). Whaddya say, Tyler(s)?
He's actually quite technically expert (as in he can take apart and analyze software) which
is why I don't get the aol.com either. Although he may have been an early aol.com user, and I
am told it is a nuisance to extract your contacts from aol.com, and he may have decided it was
not worth the fuss.
Now the post is "gray boxed" (pinned) on the Z site, making it one of two lead articles that
apparently are expected to generate a high level of interest and comments.
It's not monetary support, however, the story now ends thus,
We fully endorse Yves Smith's efforts.
Additionally, we note that the only reason we haven't followed up with a similar action
is because i) the allegations were beyond laughable – we have rejected all of them on the record,
and ii) there are simply too much other events taking place in what should otherwise be a quiet
end to the year taking place to focus on what may be a lenghty, if gratifying, legal process.
Pass the popcorn! Mr. Moody is a terrific lawyer. I just hope that if Aurora Advisors winds
up owning ScAmazon, the workers and suppliers start getting treated decently!
You're too nice to WaPo Yves, maybe this was incompetence but Bezos and WaPo are terrible and
they did too many hit pieces on Trump which included false information, so this is not a coincidence.
They are the fake news, and that's terrifying. Good luck and may you destroy them.
Good luck. I agree with your demands and hope that they are satisfied.
I gave up a long time ago on either the tv or mainstream print media as a source of credible
or factual news. There are some print publications out there that do a rather decent job at reporting
the news more accurately, but the ones I know of are mostly smaller local newspapers with very
limited budgets.
All the Bigs are propaganda pure and simple. I gave up reading the NYT and the WaPoo a long
long time ago. It would embarress a parrot to have either on the bottom of their cage to catch
their sh*t.
Where's Bezos? I'm still speculating this is Bezos' answer to Trump's birthing. Annoy the press
like hell. Let them whine and sue. Then save the country.
Addressing the Whappo's "incompetence" is genius bec. it cannot shake the label. It will stick
with them now, whereas if you had gone for the throat with an accusation of malice the Whappo
could have escaped all that disgust and resentment because to prove malice you have to prove intent.
Like fraud. It's hard to do.
It has been a difficult to watch these past 8 years under the continued conversion of whatever
was left of MSM being turned to merely a propaganda arm for the Executive branch. It is absolutely
hilarious that they had the audacity to write the article in the first place since MSM is the
only "real" fake news outlet. I do believe it will be a difficult road to achieve a full retraction
or even an acknowledgement because they will hide behind the concepts of editorial content. Nothing
they write is vetted or researched because they merely conjure articles to fit their preconceptions.
If nothing else, pushing back is still the right thing to do . just remember to not let it consume
you to the detriment of your continued good work on this site.
Does the threat of civil litigation even matter to an organization with Bezos' endless resources
to draw on? They would probably love the idea of a war of monetary attrition–they can't lose that
game. It seems to me the weak link might be the creators of the website itself. Unlike a hardened
target like the WaPo, they are unlikely to have such bottomless resources. The first step may
be to use investigation or litigation to strip away the anonymity of the publishers of the site,
probably by going after the hosting company, then to attack them directly. And if it turns out
that filing website whois papers via a proxy privacy service is 100% surefire, ironclad protection
from any legal accountability, then there really is no longer anything like accountability for
web publishing. If that is the case then there is nothing stopping you from retaliating in kind,
creating an anonymous website accusing Bezos of being a child pornographer or whatever and imploring
that he and his lawyers negotiate with you to have the accusations retracted at your pleasure.
Either filing whois papers for a domain using a privacy proxy is an unbreakable defense against
litigation, or it isn't.
My experience with journalists (as an organiser of non-profit activities) has convinced me
that nowadays they do little to no fact-checking. In one particular case I know of, mainstream
UK media including the Independent and the BBC publicized a man that, if they had simply bothered
doing a Google search on his name, they'd immediately realize he had zero credibility on the field
he was claiming expertise on.
This should hardly be a surprise to anyone who has followed the story of climate change, with
dozens of so-called "climate change" experts being allowed to write opinion pieces on mainstream
media, in spite of having no credentials, and sometimes having long credentials of having lobbied
for every dubious cause known to mankind, from the health safety of tobacco to the lack of issues
with pesticides.
The real issue is that it's getting damned near impossible for anyone to find out the truth
about any controversial issue without spending a long time researching the subject. And most people
don't have the time for this, and don't even know that they should regard the news on any controversial
issue, from any source, with great suspicion.
If one is serious about pursuit of a retraction and apology from Wapo, support for NC's cautious
approach is in order. It will not help the case being advanced to overstate with inferences about
WaPo's motives. Sticking to the already known objective facts will be enough to produce the desired
result, public discredit of WaPo by its own hand.
That's said with full sympathy for the feelings on WaPo, a publication that now ranks with
W. R. Hearst's in sheer depths of vileness. And that in general is rightfully laid at the door
of its libertardian owner Jeff Bezos, a man whose enterprises mark all that is most evil about
US capitalism today. But none of this belongs in the retraction / apology effort. As I see it,
the effort is designed to produce a specific effect from specific cause. That effort is best supported
by not second-guessing it at this point and over-loading it with meanings that can't be demonstrated
within the context of the effort. Let's give it a chance to run and review / critique the result
afterward.
Finally and for the record, this is said as someone with no sympathy for the Putin regime,
one that no leftist should have any truck with, "conscious or unconscious", especially from an
"anti-imperialist" POV. The Putin regime is right wing, capitalist, neo-nationalist, revanchist,
and neo-imperialist (and not at all "wannabe"). It supports with armed force a regime in Damascus
that has destroyed "its own country" to save itself. It IS a regime ideologically congruent with
Donald Trump's tendencies. IOW Putin's Russia is a lot like the United States in political coloration
right now.
Nevertheless, residents of the USA must first and foremost act against repression conducted
by their own government and its political agents such as WaPo. We can agree to disagree on Putin
while showing solidarity against domestic repression, especially of this poisonous neo-McCarthyite
type. That is only common sense. Our main opponent is always at home.
After more than a few decades of educational decline and loss of expertise, we have arrived
at the Age of Incompetence. That the WaPo would hire such nitwits is all the proof one needs.
The most reasonable hypothesis I can see is that the PropOrNot effort is a response by the
MSM to reassert information control, having lost it so spectacularly during the election. The
alternative media's counterstory has proven to be more faithful to reality than the picture presented
by elite journalists. Elite journalists themselves have been compromised by the Wikileaks revelations.
The MSM's reputation is in tatters and SOMETHING MUST BE DONE, at least until enough time has
gone by for the public to forget how truly dismally deceptive was their coverage.
A consistently suspicious pattern of MSM behavior is their incuriousness, and in the present
situation, one of the many of the herd of interrogatory elephants in the room is, why isn't the
MSM investigating the people who make up PropOrNot? (Or asking any of the questions NS has posed).
Would that not be newsworthy?
I agree with this assessment wholeheartedly. I am afraid that the strategy of the dem establishment
and their elite media allies over the next 4 years will be to regain narrative control via censorship,
rather than make any attempts at governing like small-d democrats.
The red baiting is popping out from all sides. Last week Amy Goodman interviewed Bernie – the
first (she basically ignored him through the primary). She started off with "you were considered
a fringe candidate " and he politely reminded her he has been in congress for 25 years. Then she
said that he had been red-baited during the primary by Clinton over Castro and the Sandinistas
and "could he speak some about Castro and Latin America?" And at every opportunity she reminded
the audience he was an independent, not a Democrat, "a socialist."
I have been told that Sarah Palin blew her chance to be Sec. of Interior, or VA, or whatever
it was because she criticized Trump for "crony capitalism" over the Carrier deal.
I'm totally confused about who our friends are these days.
How has "Beall's List" of so-called "predatory" open-access academic research publishers escaped
a similar lawsuit? Some of these publishers were shut down as a direct result of being named so
the list has undeniably done damage since being published in 2013. There seem to be strong parallels
between "Fake News" and "Fake Science" censorship efforts.
It's not unreasonable the Washington Post would confuse Naked Capitalism with a Porn site.
But not a Russian porn site, that's just not credible since Naked Capitalism is English.
They should just admit it they made up fake news. They probably never read anything on the
site - or even looked at the pictures of naked animals. Naked pussys. Lots of those. With garish
flash photography. It's enough to embarrass anybody with refined aesthetic sensibilities.
But it isn't Porn and it's not Russian. I've never seen a Russian pussy here. Usually they're
American or maybe from England. Sometimes they're even guys. That's kind of confusing, but a cat
is a cat to most people. I'm not a veterinarian anyway.
Fake news is the scourge of the internet. Fake news has been around a long time, as long as
there were newspapers in fact. It started in the 1700s and it kept going. Before that it was fake
but it was only passed by word of mouth.
Now there's fake pictures. Fake news with fake pictures can sometimes be art - but only if
you see it in the movies, where some drug addled lunatic pretends they're somebody else, then
they go into rehab after the movie is made and sometimes before. News should be real, in theory,
but in reality it isn't. Somebody makes it up but you don't always know who. That's why jourmalism
is so important, because you want the person making it up to be accurate! You don't want them
making up Porn and publishing that. Why pay for that? People make that up themselves evidently
and don't even need a newspaper.
So if they fell for the fake Porn angle here - thinking that Naked meant Porn, and from Russia
of all places! - that must mean they're either making it up or they don't know what real news
is from anywhere. Since it could be from other places besides Russia. If they went to a museum
they'd see naked things but not Porn. There's a museum of things but it's not news or porn, it's
just whatever. I'm just being honest. It doesn't have to be confusing, even for somebody who writes
and takes pictures.
The tendency towards consensus has been apparent in the mainstream media for forty plus years
, long before the internet came along and upset things. What has caused mass hysteria in those
circles is the sound of these other uncontrolled and uncontrollable voices . Years ago the only
comment section of a national newspaper was ' Letters to the Editor ' which the editor had the
veto over, never mind editorial responsibility for, and he / she took their job seriously ( in
my first hand experience ) . Those days are long gone . Imagine you are a young, or even a seasoned
journalist on one of these papers and you think you have the ear of the editor , the temptation
to bring forth a story ( ' scoop ' in old – fashioned newspaper speak ) that gives umpteen internet
sites a good kicking must be hard to resist. Trouble is the story was trashed before it hit the
ground . And so another nail goes in the coffin of the mainstream press .
Blast from the past. Bill Clinton position on illegal immegtation.
Notable quotes:
"... Today's Democratic Party also believes we must remain a nation of laws. We cannot tolerate illegal immigration and we must stop it. For years before Bill Clinton became President, Washington talked tough but failed to act. In 1992, our borders might as well not have existed. The border was under-patrolled, and what patrols there were, were under-equipped. Drugs flowed freely. Illegal immigration was rampant. Criminal immigrants, deported after committing crimes in America, returned the very next day to commit crimes again. ..."
"... President Clinton is making our border a place where the law is respected and drugs and illegal immigrants are turned away. We have increased the Border Patrol by over 40 percent; in El Paso, our Border Patrol agents are so close together they can see each other. Last year alone, the Clinton Administration removed thousands of illegal workers from jobs across the country. Just since January of 1995, we have arrested more than 1,700 criminal aliens and prosecuted them on federal felony charges because they returned to America after having been deported. ..."
"... However, as we work to stop illegal immigration, we call on all Americans to avoid the temptation to use this issue to divide people from each other. We deplore those who use the need to stop illegal immigration as a pretext for discrimination . And we applaud the wisdom of Republicans like Mayor Giuliani and Senator Domenici who oppose the mean-spirited and short-sighted effort of Republicans in Congress to bar the children of illegal immigrants from schools - it is wrong, and forcing children onto the streets is an invitation for them to join gangs and turn to crime. ..."
Democrats remember that we are a nation of immigrants. We recognize the extraordinary contribution
of immigrants to America throughout our history. We welcome legal immigrants to America. We support
a legal immigration policy that is pro-family, pro-work, pro-responsibility, and pro-citizenship
, and we deplore those who blame immigrants for economic and social problems.
We know that citizenship is the cornerstone of full participation in American life. We are
proud that the President launched Citizenship USA to help eligible immigrants become United States
citizens. The Immigration and Naturalization Service is streamlining procedures, cutting red tape,
and using new technology to make it easier for legal immigrants to accept the responsibilities
of citizenship and truly call America their home.
Today's Democratic Party also believes we must remain a nation of laws. We cannot tolerate
illegal immigration and we must stop it. For years before Bill Clinton became President, Washington
talked tough but failed to act. In 1992, our borders might as well not have existed. The border
was under-patrolled, and what patrols there were, were under-equipped. Drugs flowed freely. Illegal
immigration was rampant. Criminal immigrants, deported after committing crimes in America, returned
the very next day to commit crimes again.
President Clinton is making our border a place where the law is respected and drugs and
illegal immigrants are turned away. We have increased the Border Patrol by over 40 percent; in
El Paso, our Border Patrol agents are so close together they can see each other. Last year alone,
the Clinton Administration removed thousands of illegal workers from jobs across the country.
Just since January of 1995, we have arrested more than 1,700 criminal aliens and prosecuted them
on federal felony charges because they returned to America after having been deported.
However, as we work to stop illegal immigration, we call on all Americans to avoid the
temptation to use this issue to divide people from each other. We deplore those who use the need
to stop illegal immigration as a pretext for discrimination . And we applaud the wisdom of Republicans
like Mayor Giuliani and Senator Domenici who oppose the mean-spirited and short-sighted effort
of Republicans in Congress to bar the children of illegal immigrants from schools - it is wrong,
and forcing children onto the streets is an invitation for them to join gangs and turn to crime.
Democrats want to protect American jobs by increasing criminal and civil sanctions against
employers who hire illegal workers , but Republicans continue to favor inflammatory rhetoric over
real action. We will continue to enforce labor standards to protect workers in vulnerable industries.
We continue to firmly oppose welfare benefits for illegal immigrants. We believe family members
who sponsor immigrants into this country should take financial responsibility for them, and be
held legally responsible for supporting them.
"... Expressing his overall objections to the TPP, Stiglitz said "corporate interests... were at the table" when it was being crafted. He also condemned "the provisions on intellectual property that will drive up drug prices" and "the 'investment provisions' which will make it more difficult to regulate and actually harm trade." ..."
"... The Democratic candidate, for her part, supported the deal before coming out against it , but for TPP foes, uncertainty about her position remains, especially since she recently named former Colorado Senator and Interior Secretary-and " vehement advocate for the TPP "-Ken Salazar to be chair of her presidential transition team. ..."
"... Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) said , "We have to make sure that bill never sees the light of day after this election," while Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) said at the American Postal Workers Union convention in Walt Disney World, "If this goes through, it's curtains for the middle class in this country." ..."
Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has reiterated his opposition
to the Trans Pacific
Partnership (TPP), saying on Tuesday that President Barack Obama's push
to get the trade deal passed during the upcoming lame-duck session of Congress
is "outrageous" and "absolutely wrong."
Stiglitz, an economics professor at
Columbia University and chief economist of the Roosevelt Institute,
made the comments on CNN's "Quest Means Business."
His criticism comes as Obama aggressively
campaigns to get lawmakers to pass the TPP in the Nov. 9 to Jan. 3 window-even
as
resistance mounts against the 12-nation deal.
Echoing an
argument made by Center for Economic
and Policy Research co-director Mark Weisbrot, Stiglitz said, "At the lame-duck
session you have congressmen voting who know that they're not accountable anymore."
Lawmakers "who are not politically accountable because they're leaving may,
in response to promises of jobs or just subtle understandings, do things that
are not in the national interest," he said.
Expressing his overall objections to the TPP, Stiglitz said "corporate
interests... were at the table" when it was being crafted. He also condemned
"the provisions on intellectual property that will drive up drug prices" and
"the 'investment provisions' which will make it more difficult to regulate and
actually harm trade."
"The advocates of trade said it was going to benefit everyone,"
he added. "The evidence is it's benefited a few and left a lot behind."
Stiglitz has also been advising the
Hillary
Clinton presidential campaign. The Democratic candidate, for her part,
supported the deal before coming out
against it, but for TPP foes, uncertainty about her position remains, especially
since she recently
named former Colorado Senator and Interior Secretary-and "vehement
advocate for the TPP"-Ken Salazar to be chair of her presidential transition
team.
Opposition to the TPP also appeared Tuesday in Michigan and Florida, where
union members and lawmakers criticized what they foresee as the deal's impacts
on working families.
Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.)
said, "We have to make sure that bill never sees the light of day after
this election," while Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.)
said at the American Postal Workers Union convention in Walt Disney World,
"If this goes through, it's curtains for the middle class in this country."
We cannot allow this agreement to forsake the American middle class, while foreign governments
are allowed to devalue their currency and artificially prop-up their industries.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal is a bad deal for the American people. This historically
massive trade deal -- accounting for 40 percent of global trade -- would reduce restrictions on foreign
corporations operating within the U.S., limit our ability to protect our environment, and create
more incentives for U.S. businesses to outsource investments and jobs overseas to countries with
lower labor costs and standards.
Over and over we hear from TPP proponents how the TPP will boost our economy, help American workers,
and set the standards for global trade. The International Trade Commission report released last May
(https://www.usitc.gov/publications/332/pub4607.pdf)
confirms that the opposite is true. In exchange for just 0.15 percent boost in GDP by 2032, the TPP
would decimate American manufacturing capacity, increase our trade deficit, ship American jobs overseas,
and result in losses to 16 of the 25 U.S. economic sectors. These estimates don't even account for
the damaging effects of currency manipulation, environmental impacts, and the agreement's deeply
flawed Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) process.
There's no reason to believe the provisions of this deal relating to labor standards, preserving
American jobs, or protecting our environment, will be enforceable. Every trade agreement negotiated
in the past claimed to have strong enforceable provisions to protect American jobs -- yet no such
enforcement has occurred, and agreements like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) have
resulted in the loss of hundreds of thousands of American jobs. Former Secretary of Labor Robert
Reich has called TPP "NAFTA on steroids." The loss of U.S. jobs under the TPP would likely be unprecedented.
"... "No TPP - a certainty in case Donald Trump is elected in November - means the end of US economic hegemony over Asia. Hillary Clinton knows it; and it's no accident President Obama is desperate to have TPP approved during a short window of opportunity, the lame-duck session of Congress from November 9 to January 3." ..."
"... To me, the key to our economic hegemony lies in our reserve currency hegemony. They will have to continue to supply us to get the currency. Unless we have injected too much already (no scholars have come forth to say how much trade deficits are necessary for the reserve currency to function as the reserve currency, and so, we have just kept buying – and I am wondering if we have bought too much and there is a need to starting running trade surpluses to soak up the excess money – just asking, I don't know the answer). ..."
A response to Hillary Clinton's America Exceptionalist Speech:
1. America Exceptionalist vs. the World..
2. Brezinski is extremely dejected.
3. Russia-China on the march.
4. "There will be blood. Hillary Clinton smells it already ."
"No TPP - a certainty in case Donald Trump is elected in November
- means the end of US economic hegemony over Asia. Hillary Clinton knows
it; and it's no accident President Obama is desperate to have TPP approved
during a short window of opportunity, the lame-duck session of Congress
from November 9 to January 3."
To me, the key to our economic hegemony lies in our reserve currency
hegemony. They will have to continue to supply us to get the currency. Unless
we have injected too much already (no scholars have come forth to say how
much trade deficits are necessary for the reserve currency to function as
the reserve currency, and so, we have just kept buying – and I am wondering
if we have bought too much and there is a need to starting running trade
surpluses to soak up the excess money – just asking, I don't know the answer).
Regarding the push to pass the TPP and TISA I've been needing to get
this off my chest and this seems to be as good a time as any:
In the face of public opposition to the TPP and TISA proponents have
trotted out a new argument: "we have come too far", "our national credibility
would be damaged if we stop now." The premise of which is that negotiations
have been going on so long, and have involved such effort that if the
U.S. were to back away now we would look bad and would lose significant
political capital.
On one level this argument is true. The negotiations have been long,
and many promises were made by the negotiators to secure to to this
point. Stepping back now would expose those promises as false and would
make that decade of effort a loss. It would also expose the politicians
who pushed for it in the face of public oppoosition to further loss
of status and to further opposition.
However, all of that is voided by one simple fact. The negotiations
were secret. All of that effort, all of the horse trading and the promise
making was done by a self-selected body of elites, for that same body,
and was hidden behind a wall of secrecy stronger than that afforded
to new weapons. The deals were hidden not just from the general public,
not from trade unions or environmental groups, but from the U.S. Congress
itself.
Therefore it has no public legitimacy. The promises made are not
"our" promises but Michael Froman's promises. They are not backed by
the full faith and credit of the U.S. government but only by the words
of a small body of appointees and the multinational corporations that
they serve. The corporations were invited to the table, Congress was
not.
What "elites" really mean when they say "America's credibility is
on the line" is that their credibility is on the line. If these deals
fail what will be lost is not America's stature but the premise that
a handful of appointees can cut deals in private and that the rest of
us will make good.
When that minor loss is laid against the far greater fact that the
terms of these deals are bad, that prior deals of this type have harmed
our real economies, and that the rules will further erode our national
sovreignity, there is no contest.
Michael Froman's reputation has no value. Our sovreignity, our economy,
our nation, does.
"What "elites" really mean when they say "America's credibility is on
the line" is that their credibility is on the line. If these deals fail
what will be lost is not America's stature but the premise that a handful
of appointees can cut deals in private and that the rest of us will make
good."
Yes! And the victory will taste so sweet when we bury this filthy, rotten,
piece of garbage. Obama's years of effort down the drain, his legacy tarnished
and unfinished.
I want TPP's defeat to send a clear message that the elites can't count
on their politicians to deliver for them. Let's make this thing their Stalingrad!
Leave deep scars so that they give up on TISA and stop trying to concoct
these absurd schemes like ISDS.
sorry but i don't see it that way at all. 'they' got a propaganda machine
to beat all 'they' make n break reps all the time. i do see a desperation
on a monetary/profit scale. widening the 'playing field' offers more profits
with less risk. for instance, our Pharams won't have to slash their prices
at the risk of sunshine laws, wish-washy politicians, competition, nor a
pissed off public. jmo tho')
LOL "America's credibility" LOL, these people need to get out more. In
the 60's you could hike high up into the Andes and the sheep herder had
two pics on the wall of his hut: Jesus and JFK. America retains its cachet
as a place to make money and be entertained, but as some kind of beacon
of morality and fair play in the world? Dead, buried, and long gone, the
hype-fest of slogans and taglines can only cover up so many massive, atrocious
and hypocritical actions and serial offenses.
Clinton Inc was mostly Bill helping Epstein get laid until after Kerry
lost. If this was the reelection of John Edwards, Kerry's running mate,
and a referendum on 12 years of Kerronomics, Bill and Hill would be opening
night speakers at the DNC and answers to trivia questions.
My guess is Obama is dropped swiftly and unceremoniously especially since
he doesn't have much of a presence in Washington.
"It looks as if we'll be firing Tomahawk cruise missiles at Syria in
the coming days, and critics are raising legitimate concerns:"
"Yet there is value in bolstering international norms against egregious
behavior like genocide or the use of chemical weapons. Since President Obama
established a "red line" about chemical weapons use, his credibility has
been at stake: he can't just whimper and back down."
Obama did back down.
NIcholas Kristof, vigilant protector of American credibility through
bombing Syria.
Ah yes the credibility of our élites. With their sterling record on Nafta's
benefits, Iraq's liberation, Greece's rebound, the IMF's rehabilitation
of countries
We must pass TPP or Tom Friedman will lose credibility, what?
"... pro-TPPers "consciously seek to weaken the national defense," that's exactly what's going on. Neoliberalism, through offshoring, weakens the national defense, because it puts our weaponry at the mercy of fragile and corruptible supply chains. ..."
"... Now, when we think about how corrupt the political class has become, it's not hard to see why Obama is confident that he will win. ..."
"... I think raising the ante rhetorically by framing a pro-TPP vote as treason could help sway a close vote; and if readers try that frame out, I'd like to hear the results ..."
There are two reasons: First, they consciously seek to weaken the national
defense. And second, the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) system is
a
surrender of national sovereignty .
National Defense
This might be labeled the "Ghost Fleet" argument, since we're informed that
Paul Singer and Augustus Cole's techno-thriller has really caught the attention
of the national security class below the political appointee level, and that
this is a death blow for neoliberalism. Why? "The multi-billion dollar, next
generation F-35 aircraft, for instance, is rendered powerless after it is revealed
that Chinese microprocessor manufacturers had implanted malicious code into
products intended for the jet" (
Foreign Policy ). Clearly, we need, well, industrial policy, and we need
to bring a lot of manufacturing home.
From Brigadier General (Retired) John Adams :
In 2013, the Pentagon's Defense Science Board put forward a remarkable
report describing one of the most significant but little-recognized threats
to US security: deindustrialization. The report argued that the loss of
domestic U.S. manufacturing facilities has not only reduced U.S. living
standards but also compromised U.S. technology leadership "by enabling new
players to learn a technology and then gain the capability to improve on
it." The report explained that the offshoring of U.S. manufacturing presents
a particularly dangerous threat to U.S. military readiness through the "compromise
of the supply chain for key weapons systems components."
Our military is now shockingly vulnerable to major disruptions in the
supply chain, including from substandard manufacturing practices, natural
disasters, and price gouging by foreign nations. Poor manufacturing practices
in offshore factories lead to problem-plagued products, and foreign producers-acting
on the basis of their own military or economic interests-can sharply raise
prices or reduce or stop sales to the United States.
The link between TPP and this kind of offshoring has been well-established.
And, one might say, the link between neo-liberal economic policy "and this
kind of offshoring has been well-established" as well.
So, when I framed the issue as one where pro-TPPers "consciously seek
to weaken the national defense," that's exactly what's going on. Neoliberalism,
through offshoring, weakens the national defense, because it puts our weaponry
at the mercy of fragile and corruptible supply chains. Note that re-industrializing
America has positive appeal, too: For the right, on national security grounds;
and for the left, on labor's behalf (and maybe helping out the Rust Belt that
neoliberal policies of the last forty years did so much to destroy. Of course,
this framing would make Clinton a traitor, but you can't make an omelette without
breaking eggs. (Probably best to to let the right, in its refreshingly direct
fashion, use the actual "traitor" word, and the left, shocked, call for the
restoration of civility, using verbiage like "No, I wouldn't say she's a traitor.
She's certainly 'extremely careless' with our nation's security.")
ISDS
The Investor-State Dispute Settlement system is a hot mess (unless you represent
a corporation, or are one of tiny fraternity of international corporate lawyers
who can plead and/or judge ISDS cases).
Yves wrote :
What may have torched the latest Administration salvo is a well-timed
joint publication by Wikileaks and the New York Times of a recent version
of the so-called investment chapter. That section sets forth one of the
worst features of the agreement, the investor-state dispute settlement process
(ISDS). As we've described at length in earlier posts, the ISDS mechanism
strengthens the existing ISDS process. It allows for secret arbitration
panels to effectively overrule national regulations by allowing foreign
investors to sue governments over lost potential future profits in secret
arbitration panels. Those panels have been proved to be conflict-ridden
and arbitrary. And the grounds for appeal are limited and technical.
Here again we have a frame that appeals to both right and left. The very
thought of surrendering national sovereignty to an international organization
makes any good conservative's back teeth itch. And the left sees the "lost profits"
doctrine as a club to prevent future government programs they would like to
put in place (single payer, for example). And in both cases, the neoliberal
doctrine of putting markets before anything else makes pro-TPP-ers traitors.
To the right, because nationalism trumps internationalism; to the left, because
TPP prevents the State from looiking after the welfare of its people.
The Political State of Play
All I know is what I read in the papers, so what follows can only be speculation.
That said, there are two ways TPP could be passed: In the lame duck session,
by Obama, or after a new President is inaugurated, by Clinton (or possibly by
Trump[1]).
[OBAMA:] And hopefully, after the election is over and the dust settles,
there will be more attention to the actual facts behind the deal and it
won't just be a political symbol or a political football. And I will actually
sit down with people on both sides, on the right and on the left. I'll sit
down publicly with them and we'll go through the whole provisions. I would
enjoy that, because there's a lot of misinformation.
I'm really confident I can make the case this is good for American workers
and the American people. And people said we weren't going to be able to
get the trade authority to even present this before Congress, and somehow
we muddled through and got it done. And I intend to do the same with respect
to the actual agreement.
So it is looking like a very close vote. (For procedural and political
reasons, Obama will not bring it to a vote unless he is sure he has the
necessary votes). Now let's look at one special group of Representatives
who can swing this vote: the actual lame-ducks, i.e., those who will be
in office only until Jan. 3. It depends partly on how many lose their election
on Nov. 8, but the average number of representatives who left after the
last three elections was about 80.
Most of these people will be looking for a job, preferably one that can
pay them more than $1 million a year. From the data provided by OpenSecrets.org,
we can estimate that about a quarter of these people will become lobbyists.
(An additional number will work for firms that are clients of lobbyists).
So there you have it: It is all about corruption, and this is about as
unadulterated as corruption gets in our hallowed democracy, other than literal
cash under a literal table. These are the people whom Obama needs to pass
this agreement, and the window between Nov. 9 and Jan. 3 is the only time
that they are available to sell their votes to future employers without
any personal political consequences whatsoever. The only time that the electorate
can be rendered so completely irrelevant, if Obama can pull this off.
(The article doesn't talk about the Senate, but Fast Track passed the Senate
with a filibuster-proof super-majority, so the battle is in the House anyhow.
And although the text of TPP cannot be amended - that's what fast track means!
- there are still ways to affect the interpretation and enforcement of the text,
so Obama and his corporate allies have bargaining chips beyond Beltway sinecures.[2])
Now, when we think about how corrupt the political class has become,
it's not hard to see why Obama is confident that he will win. (
Remember , "[T]he preferences of economic elites have far more independent
impact upon policy change than the preferences of average citizens do.") However,
if the anti-TPP-ers raise the rhetorical stakes from policy disagreement to
treason, maybe a few of those 80 representatives will do the right thing (or,
if you prefer, decide that the reputational damage to their future career makes
a pro-TPP vote not worth it. Who wants to play golf with a traitor?)
Passing TPP after the Inaugural
After the coronation inaugural, Clinton will have to use more
complicated tactics than dangling goodies before the snouts of representatives
leaving for K Street. (We've seen that Clinton's putative opposition to TPP
is based on lawyerly parsing; and her base supports it. So I assume a Clinton
administration would go full speed ahead with it.) My own thought has been that
she'd set up a "conversation" on trade, and then buy off the national unions
with "jobs for the boys," so that they sell their locals down the river. Conservative
Jennifer Rubin has a better proposal , which meets Clinton's supposed criterion
of not hurting workers even better:
Depending on the election results and how many pro-free-trade Republicans
lose, it still might not be sufficient. Here's a further suggestion: Couple
it with a substantial infrastructure project that Clinton wants, but with
substantial safeguards to make sure that the money is wisely spent. Clinton
gets a big jobs bill - popular with both sides - and a revised TPP gets
through.
What Clinton needs is a significant revision to TPP that she can tout
as a real reform to trade agreements, one that satisfies some of the TPP's
critics on the left. A minor tweak is unlikely to assuage anyone; this change
needs to be a major one. Fortunately, there is a TPP provision that fits
the bill perfectly: investor state dispute settlement (ISDS), the procedure
that allows foreign investors to sue governments in an international tribunal.
Removing ISDS could triangulate the TPP debate, allowing for enough support
to get it through Congress.
Obama can't have a conversation on trade, or propose a jobs program, let
alone jettison ISDS; all he's got going for him is corruption.[3] So, interestingly,
although Clinton can't take the simple road of bribing the 80 represenatives,
she does have more to bargain with on policy. Rubin's jobs bill could at least
be framed as a riposte to the "Ghost Fleet" argument, since both are about "jawbs,"
even if infrastructure programs and reindustrialization aren't identical in
intent. And while I don't think Clinton would allow ISDS to be removed (
her corporate donors love it ), at least somebody's thinking about how to
pander to the left. Nevertheless, what does a jobs program matter if the new
jobs leave the country anyhow? And suppose ISDS is removed, but the removal
of the precautionary principle remains? We'd still get corporate-friendly decisions,
bilaterally. And people would end up balancing the inevitable Clinton complexity
and mush against the simplicity of the message that a vote for TPP is a vote
against the United States.
Conclusion
I hope I've persuaded you that TPP is still very much alive, and that both
Obama in the lame duck, and Clinton (or even Trump) when inaugurated have reasonable
hopes of passing it. However, I think raising the ante rhetorically by framing
a pro-TPP vote as treason could help sway a close vote; and if readers try that
frame out, I'd like to hear the results (especially when the result comes
from a letter to your Congress critter). Interestingly, Buzzfeed just published
tonight the first in a four-part series, devoted to the idea that ISDS is what
we have said it is all along: A surrender of national sovereignty.
Here's
a great slab of it :
Imagine a private, global super court that empowers corporations to bend
countries to their will.
Say a nation tries to prosecute a corrupt CEO or ban dangerous pollution.
Imagine that a company could turn to this super court and sue the whole
country for daring to interfere with its profits, demanding hundreds of
millions or even billions of dollars as retribution.
Imagine that this court is so powerful that nations often must heed its
rulings as if they came from their own supreme courts, with no meaningful
way to appeal. That it operates unconstrained by precedent or any significant
public oversight, often keeping its proceedings and sometimes even its decisions
secret. That the people who decide its cases are largely elite Western corporate
attorneys who have a vested interest in expanding the court's authority
because they profit from it directly, arguing cases one day and then sitting
in judgment another. That some of them half-jokingly refer to themselves
as "The Club" or "The Mafia."
And imagine that the penalties this court has imposed have been so crushing
- and its decisions so unpredictable - that some nations dare not risk a
trial, responding to the mere threat of a lawsuit by offering vast concessions,
such as rolling back their own laws or even wiping away the punishments
of convicted criminals.
This system is already in place, operating behind closed doors in office
buildings and conference rooms in cities around the world. Known as investor-state
dispute settlement, or ISDS, it is written into a vast network of treaties
that govern international trade and investment, including NAFTA and the
Trans-Pacific Partnership, which Congress must soon decide whether to ratify.
That's the stuff to give the troops!
NOTE
[1] Trump:
"I pledge to never sign any trade agreement that hurts our workers." Lotta
wiggle room there, and the lawyerly parsing is just like Clinton's. I don't
think it's useful to discuss what Trump might do on TPP, because until there
are other parties to the deal, there's no deal to be had. Right now, we're just
looking at
Trump doing A-B testing - not that there's anything wrong with that - which
the press confuses with policy proposals. So I'm not considering Trump because
I don't think we have any data to go on.
To pacify [those to whom he will corrupt appeal], Obama will
have to convince them that what they want will anyway be achieved, even
if these are not legally part of the TPP because the TPP text cannot be
amended.
He can try to achieve this through bilateral side agreements on specific
issues. Or he can insist that some countries take on extra obligations beyond
what is required by the TPP as a condition for obtaining a U.S. certification
that they have fulfilled their TPP obligations.
This certification is required for the U.S. to provide the TPP's benefits
to its partners, and the U.S. has previously made use of this process to
get countries to take on additional obligations, which can then be shown
to Congress members that their objectives have been met.
In other words, side deals.
[3] This should not be taken to imply that Clinton does not have corruption
going for her, too. She can also make all the side deals Obama can.
"... One of the main concerns with TTIP is that it could allow multinational corporations to effectively "sue" governments for taking actions that might damage their businesses. Critics claim American companies might be able to avoid having to meet various EU health, safety and environment regulations by challenging them in a quasi-court set up to resolve disputes between investors and states. ..."
"... These developments take place against the background of another major free trade agreement - the Trans Pacific Partnership ( TPP ) - hitting snags on the way to being pushed through Congress. ..."
"... "US Faces Major Setback" Well, actually, US corporations face a major setback. Average US citizens face a reprieve. ..."
TTIP negotiations have been ongoing since 2013 in an effort to establish a massive
free trade zone that would eliminate many tariffs. After 14 rounds of talks
that have lasted three years not a single common item out of
the 27 chapters being discussed has been agreed on. The United States has
refused to agree on an equal playing field between European and American companies
in the sphere of public procurement sticking to the principle of "buy American".
The opponents of the deal believe that in its current guise the TTIP is too
friendly to US businesses. One of the main concerns with TTIP is that it
could allow multinational corporations to effectively "sue" governments for
taking actions that might damage their businesses. Critics claim American companies
might be able to avoid having to meet various EU health, safety and environment
regulations by challenging them in a quasi-court set up to resolve disputes
between investors and states.
In Europe thousands of people supported by society groups, trade unions and
activists take to the streets expressing protest against the deal. Three million
people have signed a petition calling for it to be scrapped. For instance, various
trade unions and other groups have called for protests against the TTIP across
Germany to take place on September 17. A trade agreement with Canada has also
come under attack.
These developments take place against the background of another major
free trade agreement - the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP)
- hitting snags on the way to being pushed through Congress. The chances
are really slim.
silverer •Sep 5, 2016 9:51 AM
"US Faces Major Setback" Well, actually, US corporations face a major
setback. Average US citizens face a reprieve.
"... Speaking to a local radio station before the joint rally, Farage urged Americans to "go out and fight" against Hillary Clinton. ..."
"... "I am going to say to people in this country that the circumstances, the similarities, the parallels between the people who voted Brexit and the people who could beat Clinton in a few weeks time here in America are uncanny," Farage told Super Talk Mississippi. "If they want things to change they have get up out of their chairs and go out and fight for it. It can happen. We've just proved it." ..."
"... It's not for me as a foreign politician to say who you should vote for ... All I will say is that if you vote for Hillary Clinton, then nothing will change. She represents the very politics that we've just broken through the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom. ..."
...the British politician, who was invited by Mississippi governor Phil Bryant, will draw parallels
between what he sees as the inspirational story of Brexit and Trump's campaign. Farage will describe
the Republican's campaign as a similar crusade by grassroots activists against "big banks and global
political insiders" and how those who feel disaffected and disenfranchised can become involved in
populist, rightwing politics. With Trump lagging in the polls, just as Brexit did prior to the vote
on the referendum, Farage will also hearten supporters by insisting that they can prove pundits and
oddsmakers wrong as well.
This message resonates with the Trump campaign's efforts to reach out to blue collar voters who
have become disillusioned with American politics, while also adding a unique flair to Trump's never
staid campaign rallies.
The event will mark the first meeting between Farage and Trump.
Arron Banks, the businessman who backed Leave.EU, the Brexit campaign group associated with the
UK Independence party (Ukip), tweeted that he would be meeting Trump over dinner and was looking
forward to Farage's speech.
The appointment last week of Stephen Bannon, former chairman of the Breitbart website, as
"CEO" of Trump's campaign has seen the example of the Brexit vote, which Breitbart enthusiastically
advocated, rise to the fore in Trump's campaign narrative.
Speaking to a local radio station before the joint rally, Farage urged Americans to "go out
and fight" against Hillary Clinton.
"I am going to say to people in this country that the circumstances, the similarities, the
parallels between the people who voted Brexit and the people who could beat Clinton in a few weeks
time here in America are uncanny," Farage told Super Talk Mississippi. "If they want things to change
they have get up out of their chairs and go out and fight for it. It can happen. We've just proved
it."
"I am being careful," he added when asked if he supported the controversial Republican nominee.
"It's not for me as a foreign politician to say who you should vote for ... All I will say is
that if you vote for Hillary Clinton, then nothing will change. She represents the very politics
that we've just broken through the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom."
"... As Mr. Buffet so keenly said it, There is a war going on, and we are winning. ..."
"... Just type `TPP editorial' into news.google.com and watch a toxic sludge of straw men, misdirection, and historical revisionism flow across your screen. And the `objective' straight news reporting is no better. ..."
"... "Why is it afraid of us?" Because we the people are perceived to be the enemy of America the Corporation. Whistleblowers have already stated that the NSA info is used to blackmail politicians and military leaders, provide corporate espionage to the highest payers and more devious machinations than the mind can grasp from behind a single computer. 9/11 was a coup – I say that because looking around the results tell me that. ..."
"... The fourth estate (the media) has been purchased outright by the second estate (the nobility). I guess you could call this an 'estate sale'. All power to the markets! ..."
Free Trade," the banner of Globalization, has not only wrecked the world's economy, it has left Western
Democracy in shambles. Europe edges ever closer to deflation. The Fed dare not increase interest
rates, now poised at barely above zero. As China's stock market threatened collapse, China poured
billions to prop it up. It's export machine is collapsing. Not once, but twice, it recently manipulated
its currency to makes its goods cheaper on the world market. What is happening?
The following two
graphs tell most of the story. First, an overview of Free Trade.
Capital fled from developed countries to undeveloped countries with slave-cheap labor, countries
with no environmental standards, countries with no support for collective bargaining. Corporations,
like Apple, set up shop in China and other undeveloped countries. Some, like China, manipulated its
currency to make exported goods to the West even cheaper. Some, like China, gave preferential tax
treatment to Western firm over indigenous firms. Economists cheered as corporate efficiency unsurprisingly
rose. U.S. citizens became mere consumers.
Thanks to Bill Clinton and the Financial Modernization Act, banks, now unconstrained, could peddle
rigged financial services, offer insurance on its own investment products–in short, banks were free
to play with everyone's money–and simply too big to fail. Credit was easy and breezy. If nasty Arabs
bombed the Trade Center, why the solution was simple: Go to the shopping mall–and buy. That remarkable
piece of advice is just what freedom has been all about.
Next: China's export machine sputters.
China's problem is that there are not enough orders to keep the export machine going. There comes
a time when industrialized nations simply run out of cash–I mean the little people run out of cash.
CEOs and those just below them–along with slick Wall Street gauchos–made bundles on Free Trade, corporate
capital that could set up shop in any impoverished nation in the world.. No worries about labor–dirt
cheap–or environmental regulations–just bring your gas masks. At some point the Western consumer
well was bound to run dry. Credit was exhausted; the little guy could not buy anymore. Free trade
was on its last legs.
So what did China do then? As its markets crashed, it tried to revive its export model, a model
based on foreign firms exporting cheap goods to the West. China lowered its exchange rates, not once
but twice. Then China tried to rescue the markets with cash infusion of billions. Still its market
continued to crash. Manufacturing plants had closed–thousands of them. Free Trade and Globalization
had run its course.
And what has the Fed been doing? Why quantitative easy–increase the money supply and lower short
term interest rates. Like China's latest currency manipulation, both were merely stop-gap measures.
No one, least of all Obama and his corporate advisors, was ready to address corporate outsourcing
that has cost millions of jobs. Prime the pump a little, but never address the real problem.
The WTO sets the groundwork for trade among its member states. That groundwork is deeply flawed.
Trade between impoverished third world countries and sophisticated first world economies is not merely
a matter of regulating "dumping"-not allowing one country to flood the market with cheap goods-nor
is it a matter of insuring that the each country does not favor its indigenous firms over foreign
firms. Comparable labor and environmental standards are necessary. Does anyone think that a first
world worker can compete with virtual slave labor? Does anyone think that a first world nation with
excellent environmental regulations can compete with a third world nation that refuses to protect
its environment?
Only lately has Apple even mentioned that it might clean up its mess in China. The Apple miracle
has been on the backs of the Chinese poor and abysmal environmental wreckage that is China.
The WTO allows three forms of inequities-all of which encourage outsourcing: labor arbitrage,
tax arbitrage, and environmental arbitrage. For a fuller explanation of these inequities and the
"race to the bottom," see
here.
Of course now we have the mother of all Free Trade deals –the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)–
carefully wrapped in a black box so that none of us can see what finally is in store for us. Nothing
is ever "Free"–even trade. I suspect that China is becoming a bit too noxious and poisonous. It simply
has to deal with its massive environmental problems. Time to move the game to less despoiled and
maybe more impoverished countries. Meanwhile, newscasters are always careful to tout TPP.
Fast Tracking is a con man's game. Do it so fast that the marks never have a chance to watch their
wallets. In hiding negotiations from prying, public eyes, Obama, has given the con men a bigger edge:
A screen to hide the corporations making deals. Their interest is in profits, not in public good.
Consider the media. Our only defense is a strong independent media. At one time,
newsrooms were not required to be profitable. Reporting the news was considered a community service.
Corporate ownership provided the necessary funding for its newsrooms–and did not interfere.
But the 70′s and 80′s corporate ownership required its newsrooms to be profitable. Slowly but
surely, newsrooms focused on personality, entertainment, and wedge issues–always careful not to rock
the corporate boat, always careful not to tread on governmental policy. Whoever thought that one
major news service–Fox–would become a breeding ground for one particular party.
But consider CNN: It organizes endless GOP debates; then spends hours dissecting them. Create
the news; then sell it–and be sure to spin it in the direction you want.
Are matters of substance ever discussed? When has a serious foreign policy debate ever been allowed
occurred–without editorial interference from the media itself. When has trade and outsourcing been
seriously discussed–other than by peripheral news media?
Meanwhile, news media becomes more and more centralized. Murdoch now owns National Geographic!
Now, thanks to Bush and Obama, we have the chilling effect of the NSA. Just whom does the NSA
serve when it collects all of our digital information? Is it being used to ferret out the plans of
those exercising their right of dissent? Is it being used to increase the profits of favored corporations?
Why does it need all of your and my personal information–from bank accounts, to credit cards, to
travel plans, to friends with whom we chat .Why is it afraid of us?
jefemt, October 23, 2015 at 9:43 am
As Mr. Buffet so keenly said it, There is a war going on, and we are winning.
If 'they' are failing, I'd hate to see success!
Isn't it the un-collective WE who are failing?
failing to organize,
failing to come up with plausible, 90 degrees off present Lemming-to-Brink path alternative plans
and policies,
failing to agree on any of many plausible alternatives that might work
Divided- for now- hopefully not conquered ..
I gotta scoot and get back to Dancing with the Master Chefs
allan, October 23, 2015 at 10:03 am
Just type `TPP editorial' into news.google.com and watch a toxic sludge of straw men, misdirection,
and historical revisionism flow across your screen. And the `objective' straight news reporting
is no better.
Vatch, October 23, 2015 at 10:36 am
Don't just watch the toxic sludge; respond to it with a letter to the editor (LTE) of the offending
publication! For some of those toxic editorials, and contact information for LTEs, see:
A few of the editorials may now be obscured by paywalls or registration requirements, but most
should still be visible. Let them know that we see through their nonsense!
TedWa, October 23, 2015 at 10:38 am
"Why is it afraid of us?" Because we the people are perceived to be the enemy of America
the Corporation. Whistleblowers have already stated that the NSA info is used to blackmail politicians
and military leaders, provide corporate espionage to the highest payers and more devious machinations
than the mind can grasp from behind a single computer. 9/11 was a coup – I say that because looking
around the results tell me that.
TG, October 23, 2015 at 3:27 pm
The fourth estate (the media) has been purchased outright by the second estate (the nobility).
I guess you could call this an 'estate sale'. All power to the markets!
Pelham, October 23, 2015 at 8:32 pm
Even when newsrooms were more independent they probably would not, in general, have reported
on free trade with any degree of skepticism. The recent disappearance of the old firewall between
the news and corporate sides has made things worse, but at least since the "professionalization"
of newsrooms that began to really take hold in the '60s, journalists have tended to identify far
more with their sources in power than with their readers.
There have, of course, been notable exceptions. But even these sometimes serve more to obscure
the real day-to-day nature of journalism's fealty to the corporate world than to bring about any
significant change.
CHRIS HEDGES: We're going to be discussing a great Ponzi scheme that not only defines not only
the U.S. but the global economy, how we got there and where we're going. And with me to discuss this
issue is the economist Michael Hudson, author of
Killing
the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Destroy the Global Economy. A professor of economics
who worked for many years on Wall Street, where you don't succeed if you don't grasp Marx's dictum
that capitalism is about exploitation. And he is also, I should mention, the godson of Leon Trotsky.
I want to open this discussion by reading a passage from your book, which I admire very much,
which I think gets to the core of what you discuss. You write,
"Adam Smith long ago remarked that profits often are highest in nations going fastest to
ruin. There are many ways to create economic suicide on a national level. The major way through
history has been through indebting the economy. Debt always expands to reach a point where it
cannot be paid by a large swathe of the economy. This is the point where austerity is imposed
and ownership of wealth polarizes between the One Percent and the 99 Percent. Today is not the
first time this has occurred in history. But it is the first time that running into debt has occurred
deliberately." Applauded. "As if most debtors can get rich by borrowing, not reduced to a condition
of debt peonage."
So let's start with the classical economists, who certainly understood this. They were reacting
of course to feudalism. And what happened to the study of economics so that it became gamed by ideologues?
HUDSON: The essence of classical economics was to reform industrial capitalism, to streamline
it, and to free the European economies from the legacy of feudalism. The legacy of feudalism was
landlords extracting land-rent, and living as a class that took income without producing anything.
Also, banks that were not funding industry. The leading industrialists from James Watt, with his
steam engine, to the railroads
HEDGES: From your book you make the point that banks almost never funded industry.
HUDSON: That's the point: They never have. By the time you got to Marx later in the 19th century,
you had a discussion, largely in Germany, over how to make banks do something they did not do under
feudalism. Right now we're having the economic surplus being drained not by the landlords
but also by banks and bondholders.
Adam Smith was very much against colonialism because that lead to wars, and wars led to public
debt. He said the solution to prevent this financial class of bondholders burdening the economy by
imposing more and more taxes on consumer goods every time they went to war was to finance wars on
a pay-as-you-go basis. Instead of borrowing, you'd tax the people. Then, he thought, if everybody
felt the burden of war in the form of paying taxes, they'd be against it. Well, it took all of the
19th century to fight for democracy and to extend the vote so that instead of landlords controlling
Parliament and its law-making and tax system through the House of Lords, you'd extend the vote to
labor, to women and everybody. The theory was that society as a whole would vote in its self-interest.
It would vote for the 99 Percent, not for the One Percent.
By the time Marx wrote in the 1870s, he could see what was happening in Germany. German banks
were trying to make money in conjunction with the government, by lending to heavy industry, largely
to the military-industrial complex.
HEDGES: This was Bismarck's kind of social – I don't know what we'd call it. It was a form
of capitalist socialism
HUDSON: They called it State Capitalism. There was a long discussion by Engels, saying, wait a
minute. We're for Socialism. State Capitalism isn't what we mean by socialism. There are two kinds
of state-oriented–.
HEDGES: I'm going to interject that there was a kind of brilliance behind Bismarck's policy
because he created state pensions, he provided health benefits, and he directed banking toward industry,
toward the industrialization of Germany which, as you point out, was very different in Britain and
the United States.
HUDSON: German banking was so successful that by the time World War I broke out, there were discussions
in English economic journals worrying that Germany and the Axis powers were going to win because
their banks were more suited to fund industry. Without industry you can't have really a military.
But British banks only lent for foreign trade and for speculation. Their stock market was a hit-and-run
operation. They wanted quick in-and-out profits, while German banks didn't insist that their clients
pay as much in dividends. German banks owned stocks as well as bonds, and there was much more of
a mutual partnership.
That's what most of the 19th century imagined was going to happen – that the world
was on the way to socializing banking. And toward moving capitalism beyond the feudal level, getting
rid of the landlord class, getting rid of the rent, getting rid of interest. It was going to be labor
and capital, profits and wages, with profits being reinvested in more capital. You'd have an expansion
of technology. By the early twentieth century most futurists imagined that we'd be living in a leisure
economy by now.
HEDGES: Including Karl Marx.
HUDSON: That's right. A ten-hour workweek. To Marx, socialism was to be an outgrowth of the reformed
state of capitalism, as seemed likely at the time – if labor organized in its self-interest.
HEDGES: Isn't what happened in large part because of the defeat of Germany in World War I?
But also, because we took the understanding of economists like Adam Smith and maybe Keynes. I don't
know who you would blame for this, whether Ricardo or others, but we created a fictitious economic
theory to praise a rentier or rent-derived, interest-derived capitalism that countered productive
forces within the economy. Perhaps you can address that.
HUDSON: Here's what happened. Marx traumatized classical economics by taking the concepts of Adam
Smith and John Stuart Mill and others, and pushing them to their logical conclusion.
Progressive
capitalist advocates – Ricardian socialists such as John Stuart Mill – wanted to tax away the land
or nationalize it. Marx wanted governments to take over heavy industry and build infrastructure to
provide low-cost and ultimately free basic services. This was traumatizing the landlord class and
the One Percent. And they fought back. They wanted to make everything part of "the market," which
functioned on credit supplied by them and paid rent to them.
None of the classical economists imagined how the feudal interests – these great vested interests
that had all the land and money – actually would fight back and succeed. They thought that the future
was going to belong to capital and labor. But by the late 19th century, certainly in America,
people like John Bates Clark came out with a completely different theory, rejecting the classical
economics of Adam Smith, the Physiocrats and John Stuart Mill.
HEDGES: Physiocrats are, you've tried to explain, the enlightened French economists.
HUDSON: The common denominator among all these classical economists was the distinction between
earned income and unearned income. Unearned income was rent and interest. Earned incomes were wages
and profits. But John Bates Clark came and said that there's no such thing as unearned income. He
said that the landlord actually earns his rent by taking the effort to provide a house and
land to renters, while banks provide credit to earn their interest. Every kind of income is thus
"earned," and everybody earns their income. So everybody who accumulates wealth, by definition, according
to his formulas, get rich by adding to what is now called Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
HEDGES: One of the points you make in
Killing
the Host which I liked was that in almost all cases, those who had the capacity to make money
parasitically off interest and rent had either – if you go back to the origins – looted and seized
the land by force, or inherited it.
HUDSON: That's correct. In other words, their income is unearned. The result of this anti-classical
revolution you had just before World War I was that today, almost all the economic growth in the
last decade has gone to the One Percent. It's gone to Wall Street, to real estate
HEDGES: But you blame this on what you call Junk Economics.
HUDSON: Junk Economics is the anti-classical reaction.
HEDGES: Explain a little bit how, in essence, it's a fictitious form of measuring the economy.
HUDSON: Well, some time ago I went to a bank, a block away from here – a Chase Manhattan bank
– and I took out money from the teller. As I turned around and took a few steps, there were two pickpockets.
One pushed me over and the other grabbed the money and ran out. The guard stood there and saw it.
So I asked for the money back. I said, look, I was robbed in your bank, right inside. And they said,
"Well, we don't arm our guards because if they shot someone, the thief could sue us and we don't
want that." They gave me an equivalent amount of money back.
Well, imagine if you count all this crime, all the money that's taken, as an addition to GDP.
Because now the crook has provided the service of not stabbing me. Or suppose somebody's held up
at an ATM machine and the robber says, "Your money or your life." You say, "Okay, here's my money."
The crook has given you the choice of your life. In a way that's how the Gross National Product accounts
are put up. It's not so different from how Wall Street extracts money from the economy. Then also
you have landlords extracting
HEDGES: Let's go back. They're extracting money from the economy by debt peonage. By raising
HUDSON: By not playing a productive role, basically.
HEDGES: Right. So it's credit card interest, mortgage interest, car loans, student loans. That's
how they make their funds.
HUDSON: That's right. Money is not a factor of production. But in order to have access to credit,
in order to get money, in order to get an education, you have to pay the banks. At New York University
here, for instance, they have Citibank. I think Citibank people were on the board of directors at
NYU. You get the students, when they come here, to start at the local bank. And once you are in a
bank and have monthly funds taken out of your account for electric utilities, or whatever, it's very
cumbersome to change.
So basically you have what the classical economists called the rentier class. The class
that lives on economic rents. Landlords, monopolists charging more, and the banks. If you have a
pharmaceutical company that raises the price of a drug from $12 a shot to $200 all of a sudden, their
profits go up. Their increased price for the drug is counted in the national income accounts as if
the economy is producing more. So all this presumed economic growth that has all been taken by the
One Percent in the last ten years, and people say the economy is growing. But the economy isn't growing
HEDGES: Because it's not reinvested.
HUDSON: That's right. It's not production, it's not consumption. The wealth of the One Percent
is obtained essentially by lending money to the 99 Percent and then charging interest on it, and
recycling this interest at an exponentially growing rate.
HEDGES: And why is it important, as I think you point out in your book, that economic theory
counts this rentier income as productive income? Explain why that's important.
HUDSON: If you're a rentier, you want to say that you earned your income by
HEDGES: We're talking about Goldman Sachs, by the way.
HUDSON: Yes, Goldman Sachs. The head of Goldman Sachs came out and said that Goldman Sachs workers
are the most productive in the world. That's why they're paid what they are. The concept of productivity
in America is income divided by labor. So if you're Goldman Sachs and you pay yourself $20 million
a year in salary and bonuses, you're considered to have added $20 million to GDP, and that's enormously
productive. So we're talking in a tautology. We're talking with circular reasoning here.
So the issue is whether Goldman Sachs, Wall Street and predatory pharmaceutical firms, actually
add "product" or whether they're just exploiting other people. That's why I used the word parasitism
in my book's title. People think of a parasite as simply taking money, taking blood out of a host
or taking money out of the economy. But in nature it's much more complicated. The parasite can't
simply come in and take something. First of all, it needs to numb the host. It has an enzyme so that
the host doesn't realize the parasite's there. And then the parasites have another enzyme that takes
over the host's brain. It makes the host imagine that the parasite is part of its own body, actually
part of itself and hence to be protected.
That's basically what Wall Street has done. It depicts itself as part of the economy. Not as a
wrapping around it, not as external to it, but actually the part that's helping the body grow, and
that actually is responsible for most of the growth. But in fact it's the parasite that is taking
over the growth.
The result is an inversion of classical economics. It turns Adam Smith upside down. It says what
the classical economists said was unproductive – parasitism – actually is the real economy. And that
the parasites are labor and industry that get in the way of what the parasite wants – which is to
reproduce itself, not help the host, that is, labor and capital.
HEDGES: And then the classical economists like Adam Smith were quite clear that unless that
rentier income, you know, the money made by things like hedge funds, was heavily taxed and put back
into the economy, the economy would ultimately go into a kind of tailspin. And I think the example
of that, which you point out in your book, is what's happened in terms of large corporations with
stock dividends and buybacks. And maybe you can explain that.
HUDSON: There's an idea in superficial textbooks and the public media that if companies make a
large profit, they make it by being productive. And with
HEDGES: Which is still in textbooks, isn't it?
HUDSON: Yes. And also that if a stock price goes up, you're just capitalizing the profits – and
the stock price reflects the productive role of the company. But that's not what's been happening
in the last ten years. Just in the last two years, 92 percent of corporate profits in America have
been spent either on buying back their own stock, or paid out as dividends to raise the price of
the stock.
HEDGES: Explain why they do this.
HUDSON: About 15 years ago at Harvard, Professor Jensen said that the way to ensure that corporations
are run most efficiently is to make the managers increase the price of the stock. So if you give
the managers stock options, and you pay them not according to how much they're producing or making
the company bigger, or expanding production, but the price of the stock, then you'll have the corporation
run efficiently, financial style.
So the corporate managers find there are two ways that they can increase the price of the stock.
The first thing is to cut back long-term investment, and use the money instead to buy back their
own stock. But when you buy your own stock, that means you're not putting the money into capital
formation. You're not building new factories. You're not hiring more labor. You can actually increase
the stock price by firing labor.
HEDGES: That strategy only works temporarily.
HUDSON: Temporarily. By using the income from past investments just to buy back stock, fire the
labor force if you can, and work it more intensively. Pay it out as dividends. That basically is
the corporate raider's model. You use the money to pay off the junk bond holders at high interest.
And of course, this gets the company in trouble after a while, because there is no new investment.
So markets shrink. You then go to the labor unions and say, gee, this company's near bankruptcy,
and we don't want to have to fire you. The way that you can keep your job is if we downgrade your
pensions. Instead of giving you what we promised, the defined benefit pension, we'll turn it into
a defined contribution plan. You know what you pay every month, but you don't know what's going to
come out. Or, you wipe out the pension fund, push it on to the government's Pension Benefit Guarantee
Corporation, and use the money that you were going to pay for pensions to pay stock dividends. By
then the whole economy is turning down. It's hollowed out. It shrinks and collapses. But by that
time the managers will have left the company. They will have taken their bonuses and salaries and
run.
HEDGES: I want to read this quote from your book, written by David Harvey, in
A Brief
History of Neoliberalism, and have you comment on it.
"The main substantive achievement of neoliberalism has been to redistribute rather than
to generate wealth and income. [By] 'accumulation by dispossession' I mean the commodification
and privatization of land, and the forceful expulsion of peasant populations; conversion of various
forms of property rights (common collective state, etc.) into exclusive private property rights;
suppression of rights to the commons; colonial, neocolonial, and the imperial processes of appropriation
of assets (including natural resources); and usury, the national debt and, most devastating
at all, the use of the credit system as a radical means of accumulation by dispossession. To
this list of mechanisms, we may now add a raft of techniques such as the extraction of rents from
patents, and intellectual property rights (such as the diminution or erasure of various forms
of common property rights, such as state pensions, paid vacations, and access to education, health
care) one through a generation or more of class struggle. The proposal to privatize all state
pension rights, pioneered in Chile under the dictatorship is, for example, one of the cherished
objectives of the Republicans in the US."
This explains the denouement. The final end result you speak about in your book is, in essence,
allowing what you call the rentier or the speculative class to cannibalize the entire society until
it collapses.
HUDSON: A property right is not a factor of production. Look at what happened in Chicago, the
city where I grew up. Chicago didn't want to raise taxes on real estate, especially on its expensive
commercial real estate. So its budget ran a deficit. They needed money to pay the bondholders, so
they sold off the parking rights to have meters – you know, along the curbs. The result is that they
sold to Goldman Sachs 75 years of the right to put up parking meters. So now the cost of living and
doing business in Chicago is raised by having to pay the parking meters. If Chicago is going to have
a parade and block off traffic, it has to pay Goldman Sachs what the firm would have made
if the streets wouldn't have been closed off for a parade. All of a sudden it's much more expensive
to live in Chicago because of this.
But this added expense of having to pay parking rights to Goldman Sachs – to pay out interest
to its bondholders – is counted as an increase in GDP, because you've created more product simply
by charging more. If you sell off a road, a government or local road, and you put up a toll booth
and make it into a toll road, all of a sudden GDP goes up.
If you go to war abroad, and you spend more money on the military-industrial complex, all this
is counted as increased production. None of this is really part of the production system of the capital
and labor building more factories and producing more things that people need to live and do business.
All of this is overhead. But there's no distinction between wealth and overhead.
Failing to draw that distinction means that the host doesn't realize that there is a parasite
there. The host economy, the industrial economy, doesn't realize what the industrialists realized
in the 19th century: If you want to be an efficient economy and be low-priced and under-sell
competitors, you have to cut your prices by having the public sector provide roads freely. Medical
care freely. Education freely.
If you charge for all of these, you get to the point that the U.S. economy is in today. What if
American factory workers were to get all of their consumer goods for nothing. All their food,
transportation, clothing, furniture, everything for nothing. They still couldn't compete with
Asians or other producers, because they have to pay up to 43% of their income for rent or mortgage
interest, 10% or more of their income for student loans, credit card debt. 15% of their paycheck
is automatic withholding to pay Social Security, to cut taxes on the rich or to pay for medical care.
So Americans built into the economy all this overhead. There's no distinction between growth and
overhead. It's all made America so high-priced that we're priced out of the market, regardless of
what trade policy we have.
HEDGES: We should add that under this predatory form of economics, you game the system. So
you privatize pension funds, you force them into the stock market, an overinflated stock market.
But because of the way companies go public, it's the hedge fund managers who profit. And it's those
citizens whose retirement savings are tied to the stock market who lose. Maybe we can just conclude
by talking about how the system is fixed, not only in terms of burdening the citizen with debt peonage,
but by forcing them into the market to fleece them again.
HUDSON: Well, we talk about an innovation economy as if that makes money. Suppose you have an
innovation and a company goes public. They go to Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street investment banks
to underwrite the stock to issue it at $40 a share. What's considered a successful float is when,
immediately, Goldman and the others will go to their insiders and tell them to buy this stock and
make a quick killing. A "successful" flotation doubles the price in one day, so that at the end of
the day the stock's selling for $80.
HEDGES: They have the option to buy it before anyone else, knowing that by the end of the day
it'll be inflated, and then they sell it off.
HUDSON: That's exactly right.
HEDGES: So the pension funds come in and buy it at an inflated price, and then it goes back
down.
HUDSON: It may go back down, or it may be that the company just was shortchanged from the very
beginning. The important thing is that the Wall Street underwriting firm, and the speculators it
rounds up, get more in a single day than all the years it took to put the company together. The company
gets $40. And the banks and their crony speculators also get $40.
So basically you have the financial sector ending up with much more of the gains. The name of
the game if you're on Wall Street isn't profits. It's capital gains. And that's something that wasn't
even part of classical economics. They didn't anticipate that the price of assets would go up for
any other reason than earning more money and capitalizing on income. But what you have had in the
last 50 years – really since World War II – has been asset-price inflation. Most middle-class families
have gotten the wealth that they've got since 1945 not really by saving what they've earned by working,
but by the price of their house going up. They've benefited by the price of the house. And they think
that that's made them rich and the whole economy rich.
The reason the price of housing has gone up is that a house is worth whatever a bank is going
to lend against it. If banks made easier and easier credit, lower down payments, then you're going
to have a financial bubble. And now, you have real estate having gone up as high as it can. I don't
think it can take more than 43% of somebody's income to buy it. But now, imagine if you're joining
the labor force. You're not going to be able to buy a house at today's prices, putting down a little
bit of your money, and then somehow end up getting rich just on the house investment. All of this
money you pay the bank is now going to be subtracted from the amount of money that you have available
to spend on goods and services.
So we've turned the post-war economy that made America prosperous and rich inside out. Somehow
most people believed they could get rich by going into debt to borrow assets that were going to rise
in price. But you can't get rich, ultimately, by going into debt. In the end the creditors always
win. That's why every society since Sumer and Babylonia have had to either cancel the debts, or you
come to a society like Rome that didn't cancel the debts, and then you have a dark age. Everything
collapses.
"... Furthermore, as Mark Kleiman sagely observes , the conventional case for trade liberalization relies on the assertion that the government could redistribute income to ensure that everyone wins - but we now have an ideology utterly opposed to such redistribution in full control of one party, and with blocking power against anything but a minor move in that direction by the other. ..."
A Protectionist Moment? : ... if Sanders were to make it to the White House, he would find
it very hard to do anything much about globalization - not because it's technically or economically
impossible, but because the moment he looked into actually tearing up existing trade agreements
the diplomatic, foreign-policy costs would be overwhelmingly obvious. ...
But it's also true
that much of the elite defense of globalization is basically dishonest: false claims of inevitability,
scare tactics (
protectionism causes depressions !), vastly exaggerated claims for the benefits of trade liberalization
and the costs of protection, hand-waving away the large distributional effects that are what standard
models actually predict. I hope, by the way, that I haven't done any of that...
Furthermore, as Mark Kleiman
sagely observes , the conventional case for trade liberalization relies on the assertion that
the government could redistribute income to ensure that everyone wins - but we now have an ideology
utterly opposed to such redistribution in full control of one party, and with blocking power against
anything but a minor move in that direction by the other.
So the elite case for ever-freer trade is largely a scam, which voters probably sense even
if they don't know exactly what form it's taking.
Ripping up the trade agreements we already have would, again, be a mess, and I would say that
Sanders is engaged in a bit of a scam himself in even hinting that he could do such a thing. Trump
might actually do it, but only as part of a reign of destruction on many fronts.
But it is fair to say that the case for more trade agreements - including TPP, which hasn't
happened yet - is very, very weak. And if a progressive makes it to the White House, she should
devote no political capital whatsoever to such things.
Again, just because automation has been a major factor in job loss doesn't mean "off shoring"
(using the term broadly and perhaps somewhat inaccurately) is not a factor.
The "free" trade deals suck. They are correctly diagnosed as part of the problem.
What would you propose to fix the problems caused by automation?
Automation frees labor to do more productive and less onerous tasks. We should expand our solar
production and our mass transit. We need to start re-engineering our urban areas. This will not
bring back the number of jobs it would take to make cities like Flint thrive once again.
Flint and Detroit have severe economic problems because they were mismanaged by road building
and suburbanization in the 1950s and 1960s. Money that should have been spent on maintaining and
improving urban infrastructure was instead plowed into suburban development that is not dense
enough to sustain the infrastructure required to support it. People moved to the suburbs, abandoned
the built infrastructure of the cities and kissed them goodbye.
Big roads polluted the cities with lead, noise, diesel particles and ozone and smog. Stroads
created pedestrian kill zones making urban areas, unwalkable, unpleasant- an urban blights to
drive through rather than destinations to drive to.
Government subsidized the white flight to the suburbs that has left both the suburbs and the
urban cores with too low revenue to infrastructure ratio. The inner suburbs have aged into net
losers, their infrastructure must be subsidized. Big Roads were built on the Big Idea that people
would drive to the city to work and play and then drive home. That Big idea has a big problem.
Urban areas are only sustainable when they have a high resident density. The future of cities
like Flint and Detroit will be tearing out the roads and replacing them with streets and houses
and renewing the housing stock that has been abandoned. It needs to be done by infill, revitalizing
inner neighborhoods and working outward. Cities like Portland have managed to protect much of
their core, but even they are challenged by demands for suburban sprawl.
Slash and burn development, creating new suburbs and abandoning the old is not a sustainable
model. Not only should we put people to work replacing the Flint lead pipes, but much of the city
should be rebuilt from the inside out. Flint is the leading edge of this problem that requires
fundamental changes in our built environment to fix. I recommend studying Flint as an object lesson
of what bad development policy could do to all of our cities.
An Interview with Frank Popper about Shrinking Cities, Buffalo Commons, and the Future of Flint
How does America's approach shrinking cities compare to the rest of the world?
I think the American way is to do nothing until it's too late, then throw everything at it
and improvise and hope everything works. And somehow, insofar as the country's still here, it
has worked. But the European or the Japanese way would involve much more thought, much more foresight,
much more central planning, and much less improvising. They would implement a more, shall we say,
sustained effort. The American way is different. Europeans have wondered for years and years why
cities like Detroit or Cleveland are left to rot on the vine. There's a lot of this French hauteur
when they ask "How'd you let this happen?"
Do shrinking cities have any advantages over agricultural regions as they face declining populations?
The urban areas have this huge advantage over all these larger American regions that are going
through this. They have actual governments with real jurisdiction. Corrupt as Detroit or Philadelphia
or Camden may be, they have actual governments that are supposed to be in charge of them. Who's
in charge of western Kansas? Who's in charge of the Great Plains? Who is in charge of the lower
Mississippi Delta or central Appalachia? All they've got are these distant federal agencies whose
past performance is not exactly encouraging.
Why wasn't there a greater outcry as the agricultural economy and the industrial economy collapsed?
One reason for the rest of the country not to care is that there's no shortage of the consumer
goods that these places once produced. All this decline of agriculture doesn't mean we're running
out of food. We've got food coming out of our ears. Likewise, Flint has suffered through all this,
but it's not like it's hard to buy a car in this country. It's not as if Flint can behave like
a child and say "I'm going to hold my nose and stop you from getting cars until you do the right
thing." Flint died and you can get zero A.P.R. financing. Western Kansas is on its last legs and,
gee, cereal is cheaper than ever.
In some sense that's the genius of capitalism - it's heartless. But if you look at the local
results and the cultural results and the environmental results you shake your head. But I don't
see America getting away from what I would call a little sarcastically the "wisdom" of the market.
I don't think it's going to change.
So is there any large-scale economic fallout from these monumental changes?
Probably not, and it hurts to say so. And the only way I can feel good about saying that is
to immediately point to the non-economic losses, the cultural losses. The losses of ways of life.
The notion of the factory worker working for his or her children. The notion of the farmer working
to build up the country and supply the rest of the world with food. We're losing distinctive ways
of life. When we lose that we lose something important, but it's not like The Wall Street Journal
cares. And I feel uncomfortable saying that. From a purely economic point of view, it's just the
price of getting more efficient. It's a classic example of Schumpeter's theory of creative destruction,
which is no fun if you're on the destruction end.
Does the decline of cities like Flint mirror the death of the middle class in the United States?
I think it's more the decline of the lower-middle class in the United States. Even when those
jobs in the auto factories paid very high wages they were still for socially lower-middle-class
people. I think there was always the notion in immigrant families and working-class families who
worked in those situations that the current generation would work hard so that the children could
go off and not have to do those kind of jobs. And when those jobs paid well that was a perfectly
reasonable ambition. It's the cutting off of that ambition that really hurts now. The same thing
has been true on farms and ranches in rural parts of the united states.
It is a much different thing to be small minded about trade than it is to be large minded about
everything else. The short story that it is all about automation and not trade will always get
a bad reception because it is small minded. When you add in the large minded story about everything
else then it becomes something entirely different from the short story. We all agree with you
about everything else. You are wrong about globalization though. Both financialization and globalization
suck and even if we paper over them with tax and transfer then they will still suck. One must
forget what it is to be a created equal human to miss that. Have you never felt the job of accomplishment?
Does not pride and self-confidence matter in your life?
While automation is part of the story, offshoring is just as important. Even when there is not
net loss in the numbers of jobs in aggregate, there is significant loss in better paying jobs
in manufacturing. It is important to look at the distributional effects within countries, as well
as between them
It would probably be cheaper and easier to just fix them. We don't need to withdraw from trade.
We just need to fix the terms of trade that cause large trade deficits and cross border capital
flows and also fix the FOREX system rigging.
What would it take to ignore trade agreements? They shouldn't be any more difficult to ignore
than the Geneva Conventions, which the US routinely flaunts.
In order to import we must export and in order to export we must import. The two are tied together.
Suppressing imports means we export less.
What free trade does is lower the price level relative to wages. It doesn't uniformly lower
the price level but rather lowers the cost of goods that are capable of being traded internationally.
It lowers the price on those goods that are disproportionately purchased by those with low incomes.
Free trade causes a progressive decline in the price level while protectionism causes a regressive
increase in the price level.
Funny rebuttal! Bhagwati probably has a model that says the opposite! But then he grew up in India
and should one day get a Nobel Prize for his contributions to international economics.
Our media needs to copy France 24, ... and have real debates about real issues. What we get is
along the lines of ignoring the problem then attacking any effort to correct. for example, the
media stayed away from the healthcare crisis, too complicated, but damn they are good at criticizing.
A seriously shameful article. Krugman has been a booster of trade & globalization for 30 years:
marginally more nuanced than the establishment, but still a booster.
Now, the establishment has what it wanted and the effects have been disastrous for those not
in the top 20 percent of the income distribution.
At this stage, comes insult to injury. Establishment economists (like Mr. Krugman) can reinvent
themselves with "brilliant new studies" showing the costs and damage of globalization. They pay
no professional costs for the grievous injuries inflicted; there is no mention of the fact that
critical outsider economists have been predicting and writing about these injuries and were right;
and they blithely say we must stay the course because we are locked-in and have few options.
Krugman is not Greg Mankiw. Most people who actually get international economics (Mankiw does
not) are not of the free trade benefits all types. Paul Samuelson certainly does not buy into
Mankiw's spin. Funny thing - Mankiw recently cited an excellent piece from Samuelson only to dishonestly
suggest Samuelson did not believe in what he wrote.
Why are you mischaracterizing what Krugman has written? That's my point. Oh wait - you misrepresent
what people write so you can "win" a "debate". Never mind. Please proceed with the serial dishonesty.
"The truth is that if Sanders were to make it to the White House, he would find it very hard to
do anything much about globalization - not because it's technically or economically impossible,
but because the moment he looked into actually tearing up existing trade agreements the diplomatic,
foreign-policy costs would be overwhelmingly obvious. In this, as in many other things, Sanders
currently benefits from the luxury of irresponsibility: he's never been anywhere close to the
levers of power, so he could take principled-sounding but arguably feckless stances in a way that
Clinton couldn't and can't."
As Dean Baker says, we need to confront Walmart and Goldman Sachs at home, who like these policies,
more than the Chinese.
The Chinese want access to our consumer market. They'd also like if we did't invade countries
like Iraq.
"so he could take principled-sounding but arguably feckless stances in a way that Clinton couldn't"
And what is that? Tear up trade deals? It is Krugman who is engaging in straw man arguments.
Krugman does indeed misrepresent Sanders' positions on trade. Sander is not against trade, he
merely insists on *Fair Trade*, which incorporates human rights and environmental protections.
His opposition is to the kinds of deals, like NAFTA and TPP, which effectively gut those (a central
element in Kruman's own critique of the latter).
Krugman has definitely backed off his (much) earlier boosterism and publicly said so. This is
an excellent piece by him, though it does rather downplay his earlier stances a bit. This is one
of the things I especially like about him.
I can get the idea that some people win, some people lose from liberalized trade. But what really
bugs me about the neoliberal trade agenda is that it has been part of a larger set of economically
conservative, laissez faire policies that have exacerbated the damages from trade rather than
offsetting them.
At the same time they were exposing US workers to greater competition from abroad and destroying
and offshoring working class jobs via both trade and liberalized capital flows, the neoliberals
were also doing things like "reinventing government" - that is, shrinking structural government
spending and public investment - and ending welfare. They have done nothing serious about steering
capital and job development efforts toward the communities devastated by the liberalization.
The neoliberal position has seem to come down to "We can't make bourgeois progress without
breaking a few working class eggs."
Agreed! "Krugman has been a booster of trade & globalization for 30 years: marginally more nuanced
than the establishment, but still a booster.'
Now he claims that he saw the light all along! "much of the elite defense of globalization
is basically dishonest: false claims of inevitability, scare tactics (protectionism causes depressions!),
vastly exaggerated claims for the benefits of trade liberalization and the costs of protection,
hand-waving away the large distributional effects that are what standard models actually predict.
I hope, by the way, that I haven't done any of that..."
You would be hard pressed to find any Krugman clips that cited any of those problems in the
past. Far from being an impartial economist, he was always an avid booster of free trade, overlooking
those very downsides that he suddenly decides to confess.
As far as I know, Sanders has not proposed ripping up the existing trade deals. His information
page on trade emphasizes (i) his opposition to these deals when they were first negotiated and
enacted, and (ii) the principles he will apply to the consideration of future trade deals. Much
of his argumentation concerning past deals is put forward to motivate his present opposition to
TPP.
Note also that Sanders connects his discussion of the harms of past trade policy to the Rebuild
America Act. That is, his approach is forward facing. We can't undo most of the past damage by
recreating the old working class economy we wrecked, but we can be aggressive about using government-directed
national investment programs to create new, high-paying jobs in the US.
You could have said the same about the 1920s
We can't undo most of the past damage by recreating the old agrarian class economy we wrecked,
but we can be aggressive about using government-directed national investment programs to create
new, high-paying jobs in the US.
The march of progress:
Mechanization of agriculture with displacement of large numbers of Ag workers.
The rise of factory work and large numbers employed in manufacturing.
Automation of Manufacturing with large displacement of workers engaged in manufacturing.
What do we want our workers to do? This question must be answered at the highest level of society
and requires much government facilitation. The absence of government facilitation is THE problem.
Memo to Paul Krugman - lead with the economics and stay with the economics. His need to get into
the dirty business of politics dilutes what he ends up sensibly writes later on.
""The truth is that if Sanders were to make it to the White House, he would find it very hard
to do anything much about globalization - not because it's technically or economically impossible,
but because the moment he looked into actually tearing up existing trade agreements the diplomatic,
foreign-policy costs would be overwhelmingly obvious. In this, as in many other things, Sanders
currently benefits from the luxury of irresponsibility: he's never been anywhere close to the
levers of power, so he could take principled-sounding but arguably feckless stances in a way that
Clinton couldn't and can't."
Yeah, it's pretty dishonest for Krugman to pretend that Sanders' position is "ripping up the trade
agreements we already have" and then say Sanders is "engaged in a bit of a scam" because he can't
do that. Sanders actual position (trying to stop new trade deals like the TPP) is something the
president has a lot of influence over (they can veto the deal). Hard to tell what Krugman is doing
here other than deliberately spreading misinformation.
Also worth noting that he decides to compare Sanders' opposition to trade deals with Trump,
and ignore the fact that Clinton has come out against the TPP as well .
Busy with real life, but yes, I know what happened in the primaries yesterday. Triumph for
Trump, and big upset for Sanders - although it's still very hard to see how he can catch Clinton.
Anyway, a few thoughts, not about the horserace but about some deeper currents.
The Sanders win defied all the polls, and nobody really knows why. But a widespread guess is
that his attacks on trade agreements resonated with a broader audience than his attacks on Wall
Street; and this message was especially powerful in Michigan, the former auto superpower. And
while I hate attempts to claim symmetry between the parties - Trump is trying to become America's
Mussolini, Sanders at worst America's Michael Foot * - Trump has been tilling some of the same
ground. So here's the question: is the backlash against globalization finally getting real political
traction?
You do want to be careful about announcing a political moment, given how many such proclamations
turn out to be ludicrous. Remember the libertarian moment? The reformocon moment? Still, a protectionist
backlash, like an immigration backlash, is one of those things where the puzzle has been how long
it was in coming. And maybe the time is now.
The truth is that if Sanders were to make it to the White House, he would find it very hard
to do anything much about globalization - not because it's technically or economically impossible,
but because the moment he looked into actually tearing up existing trade agreements the diplomatic,
foreign-policy costs would be overwhelmingly obvious. In this, as in many other things, Sanders
currently benefits from the luxury of irresponsibility: he's never been anywhere close to the
levers of power, so he could take principled-sounding but arguably feckless stances in a way that
Clinton couldn't and can't.
But it's also true that much of the elite defense of globalization is basically dishonest:
false claims of inevitability, scare tactics (protectionism causes depressions! ** ), vastly exaggerated
claims for the benefits of trade liberalization and the costs of protection, hand-waving away
the large distributional effects that are what standard models actually predict. I hope, by the
way, that I haven't done any of that; I think I've always been clear that the gains from globalization
aren't all that (here's a back-of-the-envelope on the gains from hyperglobalization *** - only
part of which can be attributed to policy - that is less than 5 percent of world GDP over a generation);
and I think I've never assumed away the income distribution effects.
Furthermore, as Mark Kleiman sagely observes, **** the conventional case for trade liberalization
relies on the assertion that the government could redistribute income to ensure that everyone
wins - but we now have an ideology utterly opposed to such redistribution in full control of one
party, and with blocking power against anything but a minor move in that direction by the other.
So the elite case for ever-freer trade is largely a scam, which voters probably sense even
if they don't know exactly what form it's taking.
Ripping up the trade agreements we already have would, again, be a mess, and I would say that
Sanders is engaged in a bit of a scam himself in even hinting that he could do such a thing. Trump
might actually do it, but only as part of a reign of destruction on many fronts.
But it is fair to say that the case for more trade agreements - including Trans-Pacific Partnership,
which hasn't happened yet - is very, very weak. And if a progressive makes it to the White House,
she should devote no political capital whatsoever to such things.
Michael Mackintosh Foot (1913 – 2010) was a British Labour Party politician and man of letters
who was a Member of Parliament (MP) from 1945 to 1955 and from 1960 until 1992. He was Deputy
Leader of the Labour Party from 1976 to 1980, and later the Leader of the Labour Party and Leader
of the Opposition from 1980 to 1983.
Associated with the left of the Labour Party for most of his career, Foot was an ardent supporter
of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and British withdrawal from the European Economic Community.
He was appointed to the Cabinet as Secretary of State for Employment under Harold Wilson in 1974,
and he later served as Leader of the House of Commons under James Callaghan. A passionate orator,
he led Labour through the 1983 general election, when the party obtained its lowest share of the
vote at a general election since 1918 and the fewest parliamentary seats it had had at any time
since before 1945.
There was so much wrong with Mitt Romney's Trump-is-a-disaster-whom-I-will-support-in-the-general
* speech that it may seem odd to call him out for bad international macroeconomics. But this is
a pet peeve of mine, in an area where I really, truly know what I'm talking about. So here goes.
In warning about Trumponomics, Romney declared:
"If Donald Trump's plans were ever implemented, the country would sink into prolonged recession.
A few examples. His proposed 35 percent tariff-like penalties would instigate a trade war and
that would raise prices for consumers, kill our export jobs and lead entrepreneurs and businesses
of all stripes to flee America."
After all, doesn't everyone know that protectionism causes recessions? Actually, no. There
are reasons to be against protectionism, but that's not one of them.
Think about the arithmetic (which has a well-known liberal bias). Total final spending on domestically
produced goods and services is
Total domestic spending + Exports – Imports = GDP
Now suppose we have a trade war. This will cut exports, which other things equal depresses
the economy. But it will also cut imports, which other things equal is expansionary. For the world
as a whole, the cuts in exports and imports will by definition be equal, so as far as world demand
is concerned, trade wars are a wash.
OK, I'm sure some people will start shouting "Krugman says protectionism does no harm." But
no: protectionism in general should reduce efficiency, and hence the economy's potential output.
But that's not at all the same as saying that it causes recessions.
But didn't the Smoot-Hawley tariff cause the Great Depression? No. There's no evidence at all
that it did. Yes, trade fell a lot between 1929 and 1933, but that was almost entirely a consequence
of the Depression, not a cause. (Trade actually fell faster ** during the early stages of the
2008 Great Recession than it did after 1929.) And while trade barriers were higher in the 1930s
than before, this was partly a response to the Depression, partly a consequence of deflation,
which made specific tariffs (i.e. tariffs that are stated in dollars per unit, not as a percentage
of value) loom larger.
Again, not the thing most people will remember about Romney's speech. But, you know, protectionism
was the only reason he gave for believing that Trump would cause a recession, which I think is
kind of telling: the GOP's supposedly well-informed, responsible adult, trying to save the party,
can't get basic economics right at the one place where economics is central to his argument.
The Gains From Hyperglobalization (Wonkish)
By Paul Krugman
Still taking kind of an emotional vacation from current political madness. Following up on
my skeptical post on worries about slowing trade growth, * I wondered what a state-of-the-art
model would say.
The natural model to use, at least for me, is Eaton-Kortum, ** which is a very ingenious approach
to thinking about multilateral trade flows. The basic model is Ricardian - wine and cloth and
labor productivity and all that - except that there are many goods and many countries, transportation
costs, and countries are assumed to gain productivity in any particular industry through a random
process. They make some funny assumptions about distributions - hey, that's kind of the price
of entry for this kind of work - and in return get a tractable model that yields gravity-type
equations for international trade flows. This is a good thing, because gravity models *** of trade
- purely empirical exercises, with no real theory behind them - are known to work pretty well.
Their model also yields a simple expression for the welfare gains from trade:
Real income = A*(1-import share)^(-1/theta)
where A is national productivity and theta is a parameter of their assumed random process (don't
ask); they suggest that theta=4 provides the best match to available data.
Now, what I wanted to do was apply this to the rapid growth of trade that has taken place since
around 1990, what Subramanian **** calls "hyperglobalization". According to Subramanian's estimates,
overall trade in goods and services has risen from about 19 percent of world GDP in the early
1990s to 33 percent now, bringing us to a level of integration that really is historically unprecedented.
There are some conceptual difficulties with using this rise directly in the Eaton-Kortum framework,
because much of it has taken the form of trade in intermediate goods, and the framework isn't
designed to handle that. Still, let me ignore that, and plug Subramanian's numbers into the equation
above; I get a 4.9 percent rise in real incomes due to increased globalization.
That's by no means small change, but it's only a fairly small fraction of global growth. The
Maddison database ***** gives us a 45 percent rise in global GDP per capita over the same period,
so this calculation suggests that rising trade was responsible for around 10 percent of overall
global growth. My guess is that most people who imagine themselves well-informed would give a
bigger number.
By the way, for those critical of globalization, let me hasten to concede that by its nature
the Eaton-Kortum model doesn't let us talk about income distribution, and it also makes no room
for the possible role of globalization in causing secular stagnation. ******
Still, I thought this was an interesting calculation to make - which may show more about my
warped sense of what's interesting than it does about anything else.
General Equilibrium Analysis of the Eaton-Kortum Model of International Trade
By Fernando Alvarez and Robert E. Lucas
We study a variation of the Eaton-Kortum model, a competitive, constant-returns-to-scale multicountry
Ricardian model of trade. We establish existence and uniqueness of an equilibrium with balanced
trade where each country imposes an import tariff. We analyze the determinants of the cross-country
distribution of trade volumes, such as size, tariffs and distance, and compare a calibrated version
of the model with data for the largest 60 economies. We use the calibrated model to estimate the
gains of a world-wide trade elimination of tariffs, using the theory to explain the magnitude
of the gains as well as the differential effect arising from cross-country differences in pre-liberalization
of tariffs levels and country size.
The gravity model of international trade in international economics, similar to other gravity
models in social science, predicts bilateral trade flows based on the economic sizes (often using
GDP measurements) and distance between two units. The model was first used by Jan Tinbergen in
1962.
The Hyperglobalization of Trade and Its Future
By Arvind Subramanian and Martin Kessler
Abstract
The open, rules-based trading system has delivered immense benefits-for the world, for individual
countries, and for average citizens in these countries. It can continue to do so, helping today's
low-income countries make the transition to middle-income status. Three challenges must be met
to preserve this system. Rich countries must sustain the social consensus in favor of open markets
and globalization at a time of considerable economic uncertainty and weakness; China and other
middle-income countries must remain open; and mega-regionalism must be prevented from leading
to discrimination and trade conflicts. Collective action should help strengthen the institutional
underpinnings of globalization. The world should move beyond the Doha Round dead to more meaningful
multilateral negotiations to address emerging challenges, including possible threats from new
mega-regional agreements. The rising powers, especially China, will have a key role to play in
resuscitating multilateralism.
"Furthermore, as Mark Kleiman sagely observes, the conventional case for trade liberalization
relies on the assertion that the government could redistribute income to ensure that everyone
wins"
That was never the conventional case for trade. Plus it's kind of odd that you have to add
"plus have the government redistribute" to the case your making.
Tom Pally above is correct. Krugman has been on the wrong side of this issue. He's gotten better,
but the timing is he's gotten better as the Democratic Party has moved to the left and pushed
back against corporate trade deals. Even Hillary came out late against Obama's TPP.
Sanders has nothing about ripping up trade deals. He has said he won't do any more.
As cawley predicted, once Sanders won Michigan, Krugman started hitting him again at his blog.
With cheap shots I might add. He's ruining his brand.
Tell Morning Edition: It's Not "Free Trade" Folks
by Dean Baker
Published: 10 March 2016
Hey, can an experienced doctor from Germany show up and start practicing in New York next week?
Since the answer is no, we can say that we don't have free trade. It's not an immigration issue,
if the doctor wants to work in a restaurant kitchen, she would probably get away with it. We have
protectionist measures that limit the number of foreign doctors in order to keep their pay high.
These protectionist measures have actually been strengthened in the last two decades.
We also have strengthened patent and copyright protections, making drugs and other affected
items far more expensive. These protections are also forms of protectionism.
This is why Morning Edition seriously misled its listeners in an interview with ice cream barons
Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield over their support of Senator Bernie Sanders. The interviewer repeatedly
referred to "free trade" agreements and Sanders' opposition to them. While these deals are all
called "free trade" deals to make them sound more palatable ("selective protectionism to redistribute
income upward" doesn't sound very appealing), that doesn't mean they are actually about free trade.
Morning Edition should not have used the term employed by promoters to push their trade agenda.
This has been Dean Baker's excellent theme for a very long time. And if you actually paid attention
to what Krugman said about TPP - he agreed with Dean's excellent points. But do continue to set
up straw man arguments so you can dishonestly attack Krugman.
No. That is not a sign of a faulty memory, quite the contrary.
Krugman writes column after column praising trade pacts and criticizing (rightly, I might add)
the yahoos who object for the wrong reasons.
But he omits a few salient facts like
- the gains are small,
- the government MUST intervene with redistribution for this to work socially,
- there are no (or minimal) provisions for that requirement in the pacts.
I would say his omissions speak volumes and are worth remembering.
Krugman initially wrote a confused column about the TPP, treating it as a simple free trade deal
which he said would have little impact because tariffs were already so low. But he did eventually
look into the matter further and wound up agreeing with Baker's take.
"That was never the conventional case for trade". Actually it was. Of course Greg Mankiw never
got the memo so his free trade benefits all BS confuses a lot of people. Mankiw sucks at international
trade.
David Glasner attacks Krugman from the right, but he doesn't whitewash the past as you do.
He remembers Gore versus Perot:
"Indeed, Romney didn't even mention the Smoot-Hawley tariff, but Krugman evidently forgot the
classic exchange between Al Gore and the previous incarnation of protectionist populist outrage
in an anti-establishment billionaire candidate for President:
GORE I've heard Mr. Perot say in the past that, as the carpenters says, measure twice and cut
once. We've measured twice on this. We have had a test of our theory and we've had a test of his
theory. Over the last five years, Mexico's tariffs have begun to come down because they've made
a unilateral decision to bring them down some, and as a result there has been a surge of exports
from the United States into Mexico, creating an additional 400,000 jobs, and we can create hundreds
of thousands of more if we continue this trend. We know this works. If it doesn't work, you know,
we give six months notice and we're out of it. But we've also had a test of his theory.
PEROT When?
GORE In 1930, when the proposal by Mr. Smoot and Mr. Hawley was to raise tariffs across the
board to protect our workers. And I brought some pictures, too.
[Larry] KING You're saying Ross is a protectionist?
GORE This is, this is a picture of Mr. Smoot and Mr. Hawley. They look like pretty good fellows.
They sounded reasonable at the time; a lot of people believed them. The Congress passed the Smoot-Hawley
Protection Bill. He wants to raise tariffs on Mexico. They raised tariffs, and it was one of the
principal causes, many economists say the principal cause, of the Great Depression in this country
and around the world. Now, I framed this so you can put it on your wall if you want to.
You obviously have not read Krugman. Here is from his 1997 Slate piece:
But putting Greenspan (or his successor) into the picture restores much of the classical vision
of the macroeconomy. Instead of an invisible hand pushing the economy toward full employment in
some unspecified long run, we have the visible hand of the Fed pushing us toward its estimate
of the noninflationary unemployment rate over the course of two or three years. To accomplish
this, the board must raise or lower interest rates to bring savings and investment at that target
unemployment rate in line with each other.
And so all the paradoxes of thrift, widow's cruses, and so on become irrelevant. In particular,
an increase in the savings rate will translate into higher investment after all, because the Fed
will make sure that it does.
To me, at least, the idea that changes in demand will normally be offset by Fed policy--so
that they will, on average, have no effect on employment--seems both simple and entirely reasonable.
Yet it is clear that very few people outside the world of academic economics think about things
that way. For example, the debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement was conducted almost
entirely in terms of supposed job creation or destruction. The obvious (to me) point that the
average unemployment rate over the next 10 years will be what the Fed wants it to be, regardless
of the U.S.-Mexico trade balance, never made it into the public consciousness. (In fact, when
I made that argument at one panel discussion in 1993, a fellow panelist--a NAFTA advocate, as
it happens--exploded in rage: "It's remarks like that that make people hate economists!")
Yes. But please do not interrupt PeterK with reality. He has important work do with his bash all
things Krugman agenda. BTW - it is a riot that he cites Ross Perot on NAFTA. Perot has a self
centered agenda there which Gore exposed. Never trust a corrupt business person whether it is
Perot or Trump.
Yes the model PeterK is using is unclear. He doesn't seem to have a grasp on the economics of
the issues. He seems to think that Sanders is a font of economic wisdom who is not to be questioned.
I would hate to see the left try to make a flawed candidate into the larger than life icon that
the GOP has made out of Reagan.
"Yes the model PeterK is using is unclear. He doesn't seem to have a grasp on the economics of
the issues."
Dean Baker and Jared Bernstein. Like you I want full employment and rising wages. And like
Krugman I am very much an internationalist. I want us to deal fairly with the rest of the world.
We need to cooperate especially in the face of global warming.
1. My first, best solution would be fiscal action. Like everyone else. I prefer Sanders's unicorn
plan of $1 trillion over five years rather than Hillary's plan which is one quarter of the size.
Her plan puts more pressure on the Fed and monetary policy.
a. My preference would be to pay for it with Pigouvian taxes on the rich, corporations, and
the financial sector.
b. if not a, then deficit spending like Trudeau in Canada
C. if the deficit hawks block that, then monetary-financing would be the way around them.
2. close the trade deficit. Dean Baker and Bernstein have written about this a lot. Write currency
agreements into trade deals. If we close the trade deficit and are at full employment, then we
can import more from the rest of the world.
3. If powerful interests block 1. and 2. then lean on monetary policy. Reduce the price of
credit to boost demand. It works as a last resort.
"I would hate to see the left try to make a flawed candidate into the larger than life icon
that the GOP has made out of Reagan.'
I haven't seen any evidence of this. It would be funny if the left made an old Jewish codger
from Brooklyn into an icon. Feel the Bern!!!
Sanders regularly points out it's not about him as President fixing everything, it's about
creating a movement. It's about getting people involved. He can't do it by himself. Obama would
say this too. Elizabeth Warren become popular by saying the same things Sanders is saying.
However to say that the conventional case for trade liberalization relies on the Compensation
Principle isn't quite accurate. The conventional case has traditionally relied on the assertion
that "we" are better off with trade since we could *theoretically* distribute the gains. However,
free trade boosters never seem to get around to worrying about distributing the gains *in practice*.
In practice, free trade is typically justified simply by the net aggregate gain, regardless of
how these gains are distributed or who is hurt in the process.
To my mind, before considering some trade liberalization deal we should FIRST agree to and
implement the redistribution mechanisms and only then reduce barriers. Implementing trade deals
in a backward, half-assed way as has typically been the case often makes "us" worse off than autarky.
"Krugman has at times advocated free markets in contexts where they are often viewed as controversial.
He has ... likened the opposition against free trade and globalization to the opposition against
evolution via natural selection (1996),[167]
(In fact, when I made that argument at one panel discussion in 1993, a fellow panelist--a NAFTA
advocate, as it happens--exploded in rage: "It's remarks like that that make people hate economists!")
[Thanks to electoral politics, we're all fellow panelists now.]
"To me, at least, the idea that changes in demand will normally be offset by Fed policy--so that
they will, on average, have no effect on employment--seems both simple and entirely reasonable.
Yet it is clear that very few people outside the world of academic economics think about things
that way."
As we've seen the Fed is overly fearful of inflation, so the Fed doesn't offset the trade deficit
as quickly as it should. Instead we suffer hysteresis and reduction of potential output.
"The truth is that if Sanders were to make it to the White House, he would find it very hard to
do anything much about globalization - not because it's technically or economically impossible,
but because the moment he looked into actually tearing up existing trade agreements the diplomatic,
foreign-policy costs would be overwhelmingly obvious."
Here Krugman is more honest. We're basically buying off the Chinese, etc. The cost for stopping
this would be less cooperation from the Chinese, etc.
This is new. He never used to say this kind of thing. Instead he'd go after "protectionists"
as luddites.
"This is new. He never used to say this kind of thing. Instead he'd go after "protectionists"
as luddites."
You have Krugman confused with Greg Mankiw. Most real international economics (Mankiw is not
one) recognize the distributional consequences of free trade v. protectionism. Then again - putting
forth the Mankiw uninformed spin is a prerequisite for being on Team Republican. Of course Republicans
will go protectionist whenever it is politically expedient as in that temporary set of steel tariffs.
Helped Bush-Cheney in 2004 and right after that - no tariffs. Funny how that worked.
Where is the "redistribution from government" in the TPP. There isn't any.
Even the NAFTA side agreements on labor and the environment are toothless. The point of these
corporate trade deals is to profit from the lower labor and environmental standards of poorer
countries.
The fact that you resort to calling me a professional Krugman hater means you're not interested
in an actual debate about actual ideas. You've lost the debate and I'm not participating.
One is not allowed to criticize Krugman lest one be labeled a professional Krugman hater?
Your resort to name calling just weakens the case you're making.
You of late have wasted so much space misrepresenting what Krugman has said. Maybe you don't hate
him - maybe you just want to get his attention. For a date maybe. Lord - the troll in you is truly
out of control.
Sandwichman may think Krugman changed his views but if one actually read what he has written over
the years (as opposed to your cherry picking quotes), you might have noticed otherwise. But of
course you want Krugman to look bad. It is what you do.
Sizeable numbers of Americans have seen wages decline in real terms for nearly 20 years. Many/most
parents in many communities do not see a better future before them, or for their children.
Notable quotes:
"... Democracy demands that ballot access rules be selected by referendum, not by the very legacy parties that maintain legislative control by effectively denying ballot access to parties that will pose a challenge to their continued rule. ..."
"... I think the U.S. Party system, in the political science sense, shifted to a new state during George W Bush's administration as, in Kevin Phillip's terms the Republican Party was taken over by Theocrats and Bad Money. ..."
"... My understanding is trumps support disproportionately comes from the small business owning classes, Ie a demographic similar to the petite bourgeoisie who have often been heavily involved in reactionary movements. This gets oversold as "working class" when class is defined by education level rather than income. ..."
"... Racism serves as an organizing principle. Politically, in an oppressive and stultifying hierarchy like the plantation South, racism not incidentally buys the loyalty of subalterns with ersatz status. ..."
"... For a time, the balkanization of American political communities by race, religion and ethnicity was an effective means to the dominance of an tiny elite with ties to an hegemonic community, but it backfired. Dismantling that balkanization has left the country with a very low level of social affiliation and thus a low capacity to organize resistance to elite depredations. ..."
"... Watching Clinton scoop up bankster money, welcome Republicans neocons to the ranks of her supporters does not fill me with hope. ..."
Legislators affiliated with the duopoly parties should not write the rules governing the ballot
access of third parties. This exclusionary rule making amounts to preserving a self-dealing duopoly.
Elections are the interest of the people who vote and those elected should not be able to subvert
the democratic process by acting as a cartel.
Democracy demands that ballot access rules be selected by referendum, not by the very legacy
parties that maintain legislative control by effectively denying ballot access to parties that
will pose a challenge to their continued rule.
Of course any meaningful change would require a voluntary diminishment of power of the duopoly
that now has dictatorial control over ballot access, and who will prevent any Constitutional Amendment
that would enhance the democratic nature of the process.
bruce wilder 08.02.16 at 8:02 pm
I think the U.S. Party system, in the political science sense, shifted to a new state during
George W Bush's administration as, in Kevin Phillip's terms the Republican Party was taken over
by Theocrats and Bad Money.
Ronan(rf) 08.04.16 at 10:35 pm
"I generally don't give a shit about polls so I have no "data" to evidence this claim,
but my guess is the majority of Trump's support comes from this broad middle"
My understanding is trumps support disproportionately comes from the small business owning
classes, Ie a demographic similar to the petite bourgeoisie who have often been heavily involved
in reactionary movements. This gets oversold as "working class" when class is defined by education
level rather than income.
This would make some sense as they are generally in economically unstable jobs, they tend to
be hostile to both big govt (regulations, freeloaders) and big business (unfair competition),
and while they (rhetorically at least) tend to value personal autonomy and self sufficiency ,
they generally sell into smaller, local markets, and so are particularly affected by local demographic
and cultural change , and decline. That's my speculation anyway.
bruce wilder 08.06.16 at 4:28 pm
I am somewhat suspicious of leaving dominating elites out of these stories of racism as an
organizing principle for political economy or (cultural) community.
Racism served the purposes of a slaveholding elite that organized political communities to
serve their own interests. (Or, vis a vis the Indians a land-grab or genocide.)
Racism serves as an organizing principle. Politically, in an oppressive and stultifying
hierarchy like the plantation South, racism not incidentally buys the loyalty of subalterns with
ersatz status. The ugly prejudices and resentful arrogance of working class whites is thus
a component of how racism works to organize a political community to serve a hegemonic master
class. The business end of racism, though, is the autarkic poverty imposed on the working communities:
slaves, sharecroppers, poor blacks, poor whites - bad schools, bad roads, politically disabled
communities, predatory institutions and authoritarian governments.
For a time, the balkanization of American political communities by race, religion and ethnicity
was an effective means to the dominance of an tiny elite with ties to an hegemonic community,
but it backfired. Dismantling that balkanization has left the country with a very low level of
social affiliation and thus a low capacity to organize resistance to elite depredations.
bruce wilder 08.06.16 at 4:31 pm
Watching Clinton scoop up bankster money, welcome Republicans neocons to the ranks of her
supporters does not fill me with hope.
Trump and the other illiberal populists have been benefiting from three overlapping backlashes.
The first is cultural. Movements for civil liberties have been remarkably successful over the
last 40 years. Women, ethnic and religious minorities, and the LGBTQ community have secured important
gains at a legal and cultural level. It is remarkable, for instance, how quickly same-sex marriage
has become legal in more than 20 countries when no country recognized it before 2001.
Resistance has always existed to these movements to expand the realm of civil liberties. But this
backlash increasingly has a political face. Thus the rise of parties that challenge multiculturalism
and immigration in Europe, the movements throughout Africa and Asia that support the majority over
the minorities, and the Trump/Tea Party takeover of the Republican Party with their appeals to primarily
white men.
The second backlash is economic. The globalization of the economy has created a class of enormously
wealthy individuals (in the financial, technology, and communications sectors). But globalization
has left behind huge numbers of low-wage workers and those who have watched their jobs relocate to
other countries.
Illiberal populists have directed all that anger on the part of people left behind by the world
economy at a series of targets: bankers who make billions, corporations that are constantly looking
for even lower-wage workers, immigrants who "take away our jobs," and sometimes ethnic minorities
who function as convenient scapegoats. The targets, in other words, include both the very powerful
and the very weak.
The third backlash, and perhaps the most consequential, is political. It's not just that people
living in democracies are disgusted with their leaders and the parties they represent. Rather, as
political scientists Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk
write in the Journal of Democracy , "they have also become more cynical about the value
of democracy as a political system, less hopeful that anything they do might influence public policy,
and more willing to express support for authoritarian alternatives."
Foa and Mounk are using 20 years of data collected from surveys of citizens in Western Europe
and North America – the democracies with the greatest longevity. And they have found that support
for illiberal alternatives is greater among the younger generation than the older one. In other countries
outside Europe and North America, the disillusionment with democratic institutions often takes the
form of a preference for a powerful leader who can break the rules if necessary to preserve order
and stability – like Putin in Russia or Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in Egypt or Prayuth Chan-ocha in Thailand.
These three backlashes – cultural, economic, political – are also anti-internationalist because
international institutions have become associated with the promotion of civil liberties and human
rights, the greater globalization of the economy, and the constraint of the sovereignty of nations
(for instance, through the European Union or the UN's "responsibility to protect" doctrine).
... ... ....
The current political order is coming apart. If we don't come up with a fair, Green, and internationalist
alternative, the illiberal populists will keep winning. John Feffer is the director of Foreign
Policy In Focus.
"... if neo-liberalism is partly defined by the free flow of goods, labor and capital - and that has been the Republican agenda since at least Reagan - how is Trump a continuation of the same tradition?" ..."
"... Trump is a conservative (or right populist, or whatever), and draws on that tradition. He's not a neoliberal. ..."
"... Trump is too incoherent to really represent the populist view. He's consistent w/the trade and immigration views but (assuming you can actually figure him out) wrong on banks, taxes, etc. ..."
"... But the next populists we see might be more full bore. When that happens, you'll see much more overlap w/Sanders economic plans for the middle class. ..."
"... There's always tension along the lead running between the politician and his constituents. The thing that seems most salient to me at the present moment is the sense of betrayal pervading our politics. At least since the GFC of 2008, it has been hard to deny that the two Parties worked together to set up an economic betrayal. And, the long-running saga of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan also speak to elite failure, as well as betrayal. ..."
"... Trump is a novelty act. He represents a chance for people who feel resentful without knowing much of anything about anything to cast a middle-finger vote. They wouldn't be willing to do that, if times were really bad, instead of just disappointing and distressing. ..."
"... There's also the fact Reagan tapped a fair number of Nixon people, as did W years later. Reagan went after Nixon in the sense of running against him, and taking the party in a much more hard-right direction, sure. But he was repudiated largely because he got caught doing dirty tricks with his pants down. ..."
"... From what I can tell - the 1972 election gave the centrists in the democratic party power to discredit and marginalize the anti-war left, and with it, the left in general. ..."
"... Ready even now to whine that she's a victim and that the whole community is at fault and that people are picking on her because she's a woman, rather than because she has a habit of making accusations like this every time she comments. ..."
"... That is a perfect example of predatory "solidarity". Val is looking for dupes to support her ..."
"Once again, if neo-liberalism is partly defined by the free flow of goods, labor and capital
- and that has been the Republican agenda since at least Reagan - how is Trump a continuation
of the same tradition?"
You have to be willing to see neoliberalism as something different
from conservatism to have the answer make any sense. John Quiggin has written a good deal here
about a model of U.S. politics as being divided into left, neoliberal, and conservative. Trump
is a conservative (or right populist, or whatever), and draws on that tradition. He's not a neoliberal.
... ... ...
T 08.12.16 at 5:52 pm
RP @683
That's a bit of my point. I think Corey has defined the Republican tradition solely
in response to the Southern Strategy that sees a line from Nixon (or Goldwater) to Trump. But
that gets the economics wrong and the foreign policy too - the repub foreign policy view has not
been consistent across administrations and Trump's economic pans (to the extent he has a plan)
are antithetical to the Nixon – W tradition. I have viewed post-80 Dem administrations as neoliberals
w/transfers and Repub as neoliberals w/o transfers.
Trump is too incoherent to really represent the populist view. He's consistent w/the trade
and immigration views but (assuming you can actually figure him out) wrong on banks, taxes, etc.
But the next populists we see might be more full bore. When that happens, you'll see much
more overlap w/Sanders economic plans for the middle class. Populists have nothing against
gov't programs like SS and Medicare and were always for things like the TVA and infrastructure
spending. Policies aimed at the poor and minorities not so much.
T @ 685: Trump is too incoherent to really represent the populist view.
There's always tension along the lead running between the politician and his constituents.
The thing that seems most salient to me at the present moment is the sense of betrayal pervading
our politics. At least since the GFC of 2008, it has been hard to deny that the two Parties worked
together to set up an economic betrayal. And, the long-running saga of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
also speak to elite failure, as well as betrayal.
These are the two most unpopular candidates in living memory. That is different.
I am not a believer in "the fire next time". Trump is a novelty act. He represents a chance
for people who feel resentful without knowing much of anything about anything to cast a middle-finger
vote. They wouldn't be willing to do that, if times were really bad, instead of just disappointing
and distressing.
Nor will Sanders be back. His was a last New Deal coda. There may be second acts in American
life, but there aren't 7th acts.
If there's a populist politics in our future, it will have to have a much sharper edge. It
can talk about growth, but it has to mean smashing the rich and taking their stuff. There's very
rapidly going to come a point where there's no other option, other than just accepting cramdown
by the authoritarian surveillance state built by the neoliberals. that's a much taller order than
Sanders or Trump have been offering.<
Corey, you write: "It's not just that the Dems went after Nixon, it's also that Nixon had so few
allies. People on the right were furious with him because they felt after this huge ratification
that the country had moved to the right, Nixon was still governing as if the New Deal were the
consensus. So when the time came, he had very few defenders, except for loyalists like Leonard
Garment and G. Gordon Liddy. And Al Haig, God bless him."
You've studied this more than I have,
but this is at least somewhat at odds with my memory. I recall some prominent attackers of Nixon
from the Republican party that were moderates, at least one of whom was essentially kicked out
of the party for being too liberal in later years. There's also the fact Reagan tapped a fair
number of Nixon people, as did W years later. Reagan went after Nixon in the sense of running
against him, and taking the party in a much more hard-right direction, sure. But he was repudiated
largely because he got caught doing dirty tricks with his pants down.
To think that something similar would happen to Clinton (watergate like scandal) that would
actually have a large portion of the left in support of impeachment, she would have to be as dirty
as Nixon was, *and* the evidence to really put the screws to her would have to be out, as it was
against Nixon during watergate.
OTOH, my actual *hope* would be that a similar left-liberal sea change comparable to 1980 from
the right would be plausible. I don't think a 1976-like interlude is plausible though, that would
require the existence of a moderate republican with enough support within their own party to win
the nomination. I suppose its possible that such a beast could come to exist if Trump loses a
landslide, but most of the plausible candidates have already left or been kicked out of the party.
From what I can tell - the 1972 election gave the centrists in the democratic party power
to discredit and marginalize the anti-war left, and with it, the left in general. A comparable
election from the other side would give republican centrists/moderates the ability to discredit
and marginalize the right wing base. But unlike Democrats in 1972, there aren't any moderates
left in the Republican party by my lights. I'm much more concerned that this will simply re-empower
the hard-core conservatives with plausbly-deniable dog-whistle racism who are now the "moderates",
and enable them to whitewash their history.
Unfortunately, unlike you, I'm not convinced that a landslide is possible without an appeal
to Reagan/Bush republicans. I don't think we're going to see a meaningful turn toward a real left
until Democrats can win a majority of statehouses and clean up the ridiculous gerrymandering.
Val: "Similarly with your comments on "identity politics" where you could almost be seen
by MRAs and white supremacists as an ally, from the tone of your rhetoric."
That is 100% perfect Val. Insinuates that BW is a sort-of-ally of white supremacists - an infuriating
insinuation. Does this insinuation based on a misreading of what he wrote. Completely resistant
to any sort of suggestion that what she dishes out so expansively to others had better be something
she should be willing to accept herself, or that she shouldn't do it. Ready even now to whine
that she's a victim and that the whole community is at fault and that people are picking on her
because she's a woman, rather than because she has a habit of making accusations like this every
time she comments.
That is a perfect example of predatory "solidarity". Val is looking for dupes to support
her - for people to jump in saying "Why are you being hostile to women?" in response to people's
response to her comment.
"... More than a dozen Republican rivals, described as the strongest GOP field since 1980, were sent packing. This was the year Americans rose up to pull down the establishment in a peaceful storming of the American Bastille. ..."
"... If 2016 taught us anything, it is that if the establishment's hegemony is imperiled, it will come together in ferocious solidarity - for the preservation of their perks, privileges and power. All the elements of that establishment - corporate, cultural, political, media - are today issuing an ultimatum to Middle America: Trump is unacceptable. Instructions are going out to Republican leaders that either they dump Trump, or they will cease to be seen as morally fit partners in power. ..."
"... Our CIA, NGOs and National Endowment for Democracy all beaver away for "regime change" in faraway lands whose rulers displease us. How do we effect "regime change" here at home? ..."
"... Donald Trump's success, despite the near-universal hostility of the media, even much of the conservative media, was due in large part to the public's response to the issues he raised. ..."
"I'm afraid the election is going to be rigged," Donald Trump told voters
in Ohio and Sean Hannity on Fox News. And that hit a nerve.
"Dangerous," "toxic," came the recoil from the media.
Trump is threatening to "delegitimize" the election results of 2016.
Well, if that is what Trump is trying to do, he has no small point. For consider
what 2016 promised and what it appears about to deliver.
This longest of election cycles has rightly been called the Year of the Outsider.
It was a year that saw a mighty surge of economic populism and patriotism, a
year when a 74-year-old Socialist senator set primaries ablaze with mammoth
crowds that dwarfed those of Hillary Clinton.
It was the year that a non-politician, Donald Trump, swept Republican primaries
in an historic turnout, with his nearest rival an ostracized maverick in his
own Republican caucus, Senator Ted Cruz.
More than a dozen Republican rivals, described as the strongest GOP field
since 1980, were sent packing. This was the year Americans rose up to pull down
the establishment in a peaceful storming of the American Bastille.
But if it ends with a Clintonite restoration and a ratification of the same
old Beltway policies, would that not suggest there is something fraudulent about
American democracy, something rotten in the state?
If 2016 taught us anything, it is that if the establishment's hegemony
is imperiled, it will come together in ferocious solidarity - for the preservation
of their perks, privileges and power. All the elements of that establishment
- corporate, cultural, political, media - are today issuing an ultimatum to
Middle America: Trump is unacceptable. Instructions are going out to Republican
leaders that either they dump Trump, or they will cease to be seen as morally
fit partners in power.
It testifies to the character of Republican elites that some are seeking
ways to carry out these instructions, though this would mean invalidating and
aborting the democratic process that produced Trump.
But what is a repudiated establishment doing issuing orders to anyone?
Why is it not Middle America issuing the demands, rather than the other way
around?
Specifically, the Republican electorate should tell its discredited and rejected
ruling class: If we cannot get rid of you at the ballot box, then tell us how,
peacefully and democratically, we can be rid of you?
You want Trump out? How do we get you out? The Czechs had their Prague Spring.
The Tunisians and Egyptians their Arab Spring. When do we have our American
Spring? The Brits had their "Brexit," and declared independence of an arrogant
superstate in Brussels. How do we liberate ourselves from a Beltway superstate
that is more powerful and resistant to democratic change?
Our CIA, NGOs and National Endowment for Democracy all beaver away for
"regime change" in faraway lands whose rulers displease us. How do we effect
"regime change" here at home?
Donald Trump's success, despite the near-universal hostility of the media,
even much of the conservative media, was due in large part to the public's response
to the issues he raised.
He called for sending illegal immigrants back home, for securing America's
borders, for no amnesty. He called for an America First foreign policy to
keep us out of wars that have done little but bleed and bankrupt us.
He called for an economic policy where the Americanism of the people
replaces the globalism of the transnational elites and their K Street lobbyists
and congressional water carriers.
He denounced NAFTA, and the trade deals and trade deficits with China,
and called for rejection of the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
By campaign's end, he had won the argument on trade, as Hillary Clinton was
agreeing on TPP and confessing to second thoughts on NAFTA.
But if TPP is revived at the insistence of the oligarchs of Wall Street,
the Business Roundtable, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce - backed by conscript
editorial writers for newspapers that rely on ad dollars - what do elections
really mean anymore?
And if, as the polls show we might, we get Clinton - and TPP, and amnesty,
and endless migrations of Third World peoples who consume more tax dollars than
they generate, and who will soon swamp the Republicans' coalition - what was
2016 all about?
Would this really be what a majority of Americans voted for in this most
exciting of presidential races?
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution
inevitable," said John F. Kennedy.
The 1960s and early 1970s were a time of social revolution in America, and
President Nixon, by ending the draft and ending the Vietnam war, presided over
what one columnist called the "cooling of America."
But if Hillary Clinton takes power, and continues America on her present
course, which a majority of Americans rejected in the primaries, there is going
to be a bad moon rising.
And the new protesters in the streets will not be overprivileged children
from Ivy League campuses.
"... the capitalist economy is more and more an asset driven one. This article does not even begin to address the issue of asset valuations, the explicit CB support for asset inflation and the effect on inequality, and especially generational plunder. ..."
"... the problem of living standards is obviously a Malthusian one. despite all the progress of social media tricks, we cannot fool nature. the rate of ecological degradation is alarming, and now irreversible. "the market" is now moving rapidly to real assets. This will eventually lead to war as all war is eventually for resources. ..."
No matter what central banks do, their actions will not be able to create the same level of
economic growth that we have become used to over the past seven decades.
Economic growth does not come from the central banks; if government sought to provide the basics
for all its citizens, including health care, education, a home, and proper food and all the infrastructure
needed to give people the basics, then you could have something akin to "growth" while at the
same time making life more pleasant for the less fortunate. There seems to be no definition of
economic growth that includes everyone.
This seems a very elaborate way of stating a simple problem, that can be summarised in three
points.
The living standards of most people have fallen over the last thirty years or so because of
the impact of neoliberal economic policies. Conventional politicians are promising only more
of the same. Therefore people are increasingly voting for non-conventional politicians.
Neoliberalism has only exacerbated falling living standards. Living standards would be falling
even without it, albeit more gradually.
Neoliberalism itself may even be nothing more than a standard type response of species that
have expanded beyond the capacity of their environment to support them. What we see as an evil
ideology is only the expression of a mechanism that apportions declining resources to the elites,
like shutting shutting down the periphery so the core can survive as in hypothermia.
I really don't have problem with this. Let the financial sector run the world into the ground
and get it over with.
In defference to a great many knowledgable commentors here that work in the FIRE sector, I
don't want to create a damning screed on the cost of servicing money, but at some point even the
most considered opinions have to acknowledge that that finance is flooded with *talent* which
creates a number of problems; one being a waste of intellect and education in a field that doesn't
offer much of a return when viewed in an egalitarian sense, secondly; as the field grows due to,
the technical advances, the rise in globilization, and the security a financial occuptaion offers
in an advanced first world country nowadays, it requires substantially more income to be devoted
to it's function.
This income has to be derived somewhere, and the required sacrifices on every facet of a global
economy to bolster positions and maintain asset prices has precipitated this decline in the well
being of peoples not plugged-in to the consumer capitalist regime and dogma.
Something has to give here, and I honestly couldn't care about your 401k or home resale value,
you did this to yourself as much as those day-traders who got clobbered in the dot-com crash.
the capitalist economy is more and more an asset driven one. This article does not even
begin to address the issue of asset valuations, the explicit CB support for asset inflation and
the effect on inequality, and especially generational plunder.
the problem of living standards is obviously a Malthusian one. despite all the progress
of social media tricks, we cannot fool nature. the rate of ecological degradation is alarming,
and now irreversible. "the market" is now moving rapidly to real assets. This will eventually
lead to war as all war is eventually for resources.
This is from Daily Mail. The later is a British daily conservative, middle-market tabloid. You
are warned !
I wonder whether when the Dems --or I should say if the Dems --select an "establishment" nominee
they might consider Elizabeth Warren. She's very popular & not as far out there as Bernie. I could live
with that. B ut is considered to be a menace to the Wall Street. In realty not much, but due to this
perception chances for this happening are slim. Dems are corrupt to the core and are now the party of
Wall Street ("republicans light") , thanks to this neoliberal stooge Bill Clinton who sold the party
for 20 silver coins (sorry, millions in annual speeches). And as the neoliberals the last thing they
need is have Warren as their (temporary) leader. Warren is probably acceptable to neocons as she is
war hawk "light" do I would say that her chances are single digits.
An interesting combination would be to have her as VP to boost Hillary changes and then force Hillary
to resign. But this is a conspiracy theory.
Funny, Republicans start digging the dirt on Bill Clinton again and it looks like he enjoyed himself
not only with Monica during his time at White House. There were also unnamed receptionist, his female
jogger companions, and even Eleanor Mondale, the daughter of former US Vice President Walter Mondale.
Of course those are rumors but they are 'well substantiated rumors" (http://www.dailymail.co.uk
)
Now it is quite clear that both Clintons have a really sociopathic sense of entitlement. A lack
of concern for feelings, needs, or suffering of others; lack of remorse after hurting or mistreating
another; use of seduction, charm, glibness.' That's why "Anyone by Clinton" movement is so strong. Reportedly
around a half of Bernie supporters decided never vote for Hillary.
Notable quotes:
"... 'There is a vengeful, spiteful ugliness that some women have for other women. Hillary is just one of those women.' For the latest on Hillary and Bill Clinton visit www.dailymail.co.uk/hillary ..."
"... Their clandestine meetings typically included Bill goofing around and playing his sax while Miller, a trained singer and musician, accompanied him on her piano. He would sometimes unwind by smoking a marijuana cigarette. Miller claims that she saw Clinton produce a pouch of white powder on several occasions and snort lines off her coffee table. 'I don't do drugs and I don't smoke. But if you come into my house and say "gosh I've had a bad day" I wouldn't know how to stop you,' said Miller. ..."
"... Their affair would remain a secret for nearly a decade until she went public on the Sally Jesse Raphael show in July 1992, a day after Clinton had been formally named by the Democratic Party as its Presidential candidate. ..."
'There is a vengeful, spiteful ugliness that some women have for other women. Hillary is just
one of those women.' For the latest on Hillary and Bill Clinton visit
www.dailymail.co.uk/hillary
====
...The book promises to recall a series of unguarded conversations in which she claims Bill revealed
his wife's preference for female lovers. As far-fetched as her accusations may appear, she remains
convinced that Hillary Clinton is behind a plot to silence her ahead of the November election. But
it will also lay bare what Miller, describes as a decades-long Democrat campaign to discredit and
harass her that began when she first revealed the affair in 1992, a campaign she claims has now reached
such perverse depths that she actually fears for her life.
The twice-divorced 77-year-old took to social media in recent weeks to post an extraordinary warning
that if she dies by 'suicide' no-one should believe it. When Daily Mail Online visited Miller at
her Arkansas home she insisted she had been stalked, spied upon and plagued by anonymous phone calls
since word of her memoir leaked out.
... ... ...
It was a very different scenario in August 1983, when a 44-year-old Miller left her back door
ajar so her seven-years' younger paramour Bill could be chauffeured to the rear of the property before
slipping inside unnoticed.
The pair had met a decade earlier at parties and political functions when Miller was a senate
aide at the Arkansas State Capitol and Clinton was preparing for his unsuccessful 1974 run for the
House of Representatives.
So when she needed help getting a vintage steam train project off the ground, she sought out her
former friend, by now in his second stint as Governor. 'I left my number with his secretary,' recalled
Miller. 'He was playing golf but within three hours he'd called me. 'He said "I'm going to be leaving
here in a little while, why don't I just drop by and let's see each other for old times' sake."
'We decided because of the positioning of the condo it might be better if he didn't come by the
front door, there are some prominent people that live across by me. 'He never drove himself, it was
a state trooper or someone on his staff. He parked in the park behind my house. I had a gate on the
patio but he just had to lift the latch. 'The first night I just played the piano while he sang.
He's not noted as someone who has a trained voice but we laughed, it was just kind of fun. 'Finally
he said ''we didn't talk about what I came to talk about, so we're going to have to do this again
sometime''. I had all my notes and pictures, all my ideas, all he had to do was call his parks and
tourism gal and get her on this. Bill is not the most handsome man. But he makes you feel like you
have an incredible body and on top of all that you're beautiful. There are not many men that can
make a woman feel that way. 'But we dragged it out for about three months. And yes, we did go upstairs
where the bedrooms were.'
Their clandestine meetings typically included Bill goofing around and playing his sax while
Miller, a trained singer and musician, accompanied him on her piano. He would sometimes unwind by
smoking a marijuana cigarette. Miller claims that she saw Clinton produce a pouch of white powder
on several occasions and snort lines off her coffee table. 'I don't do drugs and I don't smoke. But
if you come into my house and say "gosh I've had a bad day" I wouldn't know how to stop you,' said
Miller.
'Bill is not the most handsome man. But he makes you feel like your breasts are the right size,
your legs are the perfect length, you have an incredible body and on top of all that you're beautiful.
There are not many men that can make a woman feel that way. 'Do I make it a point to have affairs
with married men, no. But most everyone in Arkansas assumed that their marriage was a business arrangement.
'Bill never sounded like he was in love or locked into a loyal arrangement.'
Their affair would remain a secret for nearly a decade until she went public on the Sally
Jesse Raphael show in July 1992, a day after Clinton had been formally named by the Democratic Party
as its Presidential candidate. But while the future president was a born entertainer and charismatic
companion, the sex itself failed to inspire. 'It wasn't that memorable. It was no big deal - think
about that,' chuckled Miller. 'That's probably why he didn't have any confidence as a lover. 'He
reminded me of a what a little boy would say to his momma. 'Is it OK if I put my hand there? Can
I touch you here?' I've always preferred younger men but I've never had one who asked permission.'
She claims the affair ended abruptly in late 1983 when Miller revealed her intention to stand for
mayor of her hometown, Pine Bluffs, as a Republican.
It would remain a secret for nearly a decade until she went public on the Sally Jesse Raphael
show in July 1992, a day after Clinton had been formally named by the Democratic Party as its Presidential
candidate.
.... ...
BILL'S WOMEN WHO HAUNT HILLARY
Kathleen Willey, a former White House volunteer who says Bill Clinton groped her in
an Oval Office hallway in 1993 when she came to him seeking a paid job, says she has agreed to
become a paid national spokeswoman for an anti-Clinton group being created by operative Roger
Stone
Paula Jones, the former state employee whose allegations of sexual harassment dogged
President Bill Clinton throughout his administration, was photographed appearing at a rally for
presidential candidate Donald Trump in Little Rock.
Linda Tripp, Monica Lewinsky's confidante and who worked as a White House staffer says
that Hillary Clinton not only knew about her husband's exploits, 'She made it her personal mission
to disseminate information and destroy the women with whom he dallied.'
Juanita Broaddrick, who claims that she was raped by Bill Clinton in an Arkansas hotel
38 years ago, says that she was cornered by Hillary as she was helping at a Clinton fundraiser
and was given a thinly-veiled warning to keep her mouth shut.
Maria Crider, who worked on Bill Clinton's first political campaign, said power-hungry
Hillary torpedoed the torrid affair that threatened to destroy her master plan to become president
with anonymous phone calls, fears of stalking and veiled threats.
SF94123, San Francisco, United States, 3 months ago
She probably fears her because it's all a bunch of lies.
Not_Surprised, Walton County, United Kingdom, 3 months ago
Don't believe this mess!
Barney Fife, St Paul, United States, 4 months ago
And this is news? It has been rumored for many years Hillary swings both ways. As for Billy,
that has been known, too.
mememememe, Glasgow, 4 months ago
So what? Sad old woman reliving her youth
du Vallon, Midwest, United States, 4 months ago
So this woman admits that she freely threw her cat at a married man, and now she is bragging
about it, and all the bible pounding, family values, right wing Christian fundamentalists want
us to believe that she is the caliber of woman who we should all believe. Making it worse, she
has so little regret at the hurt she caused that she is now passing around some completely unsupported
and foul whispers about the wife of the man that she dragged into bed. Then has the gall to whine
that Hillary isn't very nice to her. I should think not. She is a sodden dox of a woman with no
morals whatsoever. I have no use for her and don't believe a word she says.
peanutmom, SFBay, United States, 4 months ago
Meh. Who the Clintons get busy with, and how, is of no consequence. Hillary could do the entire
USC football team, and I wouldn't care, just so long as the job she does is done right. It was
ridiculous that Bill got impeached over a dalliance with an intern. It's not like Lewinsky interfered
with how the country was being run.
"... " It is clear a significant number of former Baathist officers have formed the professional core of Daesh [IS] in Syria and Iraq and have given that organization the military capability it has shown in conducting its operations. " ..."
"... A March 2007 JIC report warned Al-Qaeda in Iraq, which it terms AQ-I, had " no shortage of suicide bombers. AQ-I is seeking high-profile attacks. We judge AQ-I will try to expand its sectarian campaign wherever it can: suicide bombings in Kirkuk have risen sharply since October when AQ-I declared the establishment of the notional 'Islamic State of Iraq' (including Kirkuk). " ..."
"... " They claimed that the label 'jihadist' is becoming increasingly difficult to define: in many cases distinctions between nationalists and jihadists are blurred. They increasingly share common cause being drawn together in the face of Shia sectarian violence. " ..."
Intelligence reports examined and now released by the Chilcot inquiry appear to confirm Islamic State
(IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) was created by the Iraq war, a view now apparently backed by Britain's Tory
Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond. The reports from the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), which
were previously classified, tell the story of the security services' increasing concern that the
war and occupation was fuelling ever more extremism in Iraq.
The evidence also appears to debunk repeated claims by former PM Tony Blair that IS began in the
Syrian civil war and not Iraq, positioning the brutal group's rise clearly within Iraq's borders.
The Chilcot findings were backed up Thursday by serving Foreign Secretary Phillip Hammond. He
told The Foreign Affairs Committee " many of the problems we see in Iraq today stem from that
disastrous decision to dismantle the Iraqi army and embark on a program of de-Baathification
."
" That was the big mistake of post-conflict planning. If we had gone a different way afterwards
we might have been able to see a different outcome, " he said.
Hammond conceded that many members of Saddam's armed forces today filled top roles in IS.
" It is clear a significant number of former Baathist officers have formed the professional
core of Daesh [IS] in Syria and Iraq and have given that organization the military capability it
has shown in conducting its operations. "
The documents show that by 2006 – three years into the occupation – UK intelligence chiefs were
increasingly concerned about the rise of Sunni jihadist resistance to the Western-backed regime of
Shia President Nouri Al-Maliki.
A March 2007 JIC report warned Al-Qaeda in Iraq, which it terms AQ-I, had " no shortage of
suicide bombers. AQ-I is seeking high-profile attacks. We judge AQ-I will try to expand its sectarian
campaign wherever it can: suicide bombings in Kirkuk have risen sharply since October when AQ-I declared
the establishment of the notional 'Islamic State of Iraq' (including Kirkuk). "
Many leading Al-Qaeda figures had been pro-regime Baathists and members of the former Iraqi Army
disbanded by the occupation. They are broadly accepted to have later formed the basis for IS.
The report describes AQ-I as being " in the vanguard. "
" Its strategic main effort is the prosecution of a sectarian campaign designed to drag Iraq
into civil war " at the head of a number of other Sunni militia groups.
" We judge its campaign has been the most effective of any insurgent group, having significant
impact in the past year, and poses the greatest immediate threat to stability in Iraq. The tempo
of mass-casualty attacks on predominantly Shia targets has been relentless, " the spies argue.
Chillingly, an earlier report from 2006 appears to echo some of the realizations made late in
the Vietnam War that there were also strong elements of nationalism driving the insurgency.
" They claimed that the label 'jihadist' is becoming increasingly difficult to define: in
many cases distinctions between nationalists and jihadists are blurred. They increasingly share common
cause being drawn together in the face of Shia sectarian violence. "
The reports appear to suggest that the conditions also somewhat echo the Afghanistan war, which
by that time was already underway, in that the anti-coalition forces displayed a mix of ideological
and economic drivers to resist the occupation.
" Their motivation is mixed: some are Islamist extremists inspired by the AQ agenda, others
are simply hired hands attracted by the money, " the spies warn.
The religious sectarianism involved, however, was distinctly Iraqi and reflected the power battle
between the deposed Sunni forces and the US-installed Shia regime which replaced it.
They also appeared to believe that AQ-I was composed of local and not, as was claimed at the time,
foreign fighters.
" We judge Al-Qaida in Iraq is the largest single insurgent network and although its leadership
retains a strong foreign element, a large majority of its fighters are Iraqi.
" Some are drawn in by the opportunity to take on Shia militias: the jihadists' media effort
stresses their role as defenders of the Sunni ," the report concludes.
Prophetically, even before IS began to germinate in Iraq, one now-declassified Foreign Office
memo from January 2003 warned "all the evidence from the region suggests that coalition forces
will not be seen as liberators for long, if at all. Our motives are regarded with huge suspicion.
"
AHHA -> Blue Car 7 Jul
No there was a documentary on the rise of IS months ago on Dutch television coming to the same
conclusion. Kicking all Baath party members (all Sunni people) out of the army, leaving only Shiite
in created IS. Baath militairy specialists did it out of revenge. One former high Baath militairy
officer even went up to the room of the American leadership on Irak to tell him that if they would
kick Baath people out he would have no other option than to start fighting America. Because what
would all those people have to live of. And they did not just kick them out of the army but out
of all government posts. But the Americans and making one group less equal to another by treating
them different, does that ring any bells. ?
AHHA -> Blue Car 8 Jul
It was not Fox, I loath them. It was a well built Dutch documentary not praising the Americans
for a change but being real True, together with Bush and the rest of their accomplices, of the
most horrific mass killings based on lies (more than a million innocent people have perished because
of their deceitful actions)! We should all demand Justice for the sake of humanity, and also because
it is the only way to deter feature self-righteous leaders like them from leading our world to
more blood sheds and catastrophic destructions! No one should be above the law!
Blue Scissors -> Red Snow 7 Jul
No, Bush and Cheney are the biggest terrorist. Blair just followed behind them, like a sheep.
Linx 7 Jul
Its clear that the U.S. government was the instigator of the war in Iraq based on 911and WMD.
Blair in his ambition to reached the top lied to his parliament because there is noway they did
not have the intelligence there not WMDs. In a stunning but little-known speech from 2007, Gen.
Wesley Clark claims America underwent a "policy coup" at the time of the 9/11 attacks. In this
video, he reveals that, right after 9/11, he was privy to information contained in a classified
memo: US plans to attack and remove governments in seven countries over five years: Iraq, Syria,
Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran. He was told: "We learned that we can use our military
without being challenged . We've got about five years to clean up the Soviet client regimes before
another superpower comes along and challenges us." "This was a policy coup these people took control
of policy in the United States. The interview is still available in the internet.
Orange Tag 7 Jul
What I want to be informed about is the ICC court date set for Bush, Blair, Cheney, Rumsfeld and
the generals ordering the killings of innocent people in Iraq. It's time for the west to wake
up and provide all and every help that Syrian legitimate government needs, and for west to stop
the support of Saudis, Qatari and others alike regimes whom are the providers and are state sponsors
of terrorism as Isis and others a like called " "moderates terrorist". Look you fly the Emirates
you pay for the costs of their terrorism in Middle East.
keghamminas 7 Jul Edited
Very true about the blind destructive policy of the US-Nato that should have attacked Saudi Arabia
instead of Iraq .The same faults are committed now against Syria and it's legal government ; the
total destruction of this country will lead to more anarchy and new terrorist movements as what's
happenning in Iraq. All the puppets ,like the UK are guilty by their criminal participation.
Malcolm stark 7 Jul
Yet another problem caused by Washington and Co and yet their are still people even here who say
Russia, Russia, Russia. And will make excuses for the problems caused without blaming their own
government.
CyanDog 7 Jul
Sexton: What a surprise. An investigation designed to whitewash the criminal activities of our
beloved Western leaders turned out to be eminently successful. A playful slap on the wrist for
Mr Blair, but basically the Western criminals made to look like good guys although a few unintentional
mistakes were made. From now on the West can continue business as usual. I wonder which countries
the West has currently set its future sights on? I would suggest that Iran, Russia and China should
keep their powder dry. The Westerners are playing for keeps, and they do not care who gets hurt
on either side.
"... ISIS is al-Qaeda re-branded and is supported by Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States and the Western military alliance. Obama didn't technically 'create' them. Nor did he do anything to stop them. When ISIS first emerged, the US State Department said they were caught completely "flat -footed". ISIS emerged like a mirage in the Iraq desert, fully equipped, fully armed and driving a convoy of matching Toyota trucks! ..."
"... I would like to say that Obama and Hillary Clinton were too weak or complacent to stop the Neoconservatives/Zionists/Establishment from creating ISIS. It was their way of toppling the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and helping Israel to tighten the grip over stolen land. ..."
"... I would like to say watch the "Yuri Bezmenov" interviews, and realize there is no difference between the democrats and establishment GOP, they are the same thing. ..."
"... I was able to see through GW Bush, other establishment RINOs, and was honest enough to see the fraud. ..."
We have been saying that for years that Isis was created and funded by the US ( Obama) he should
have been impeached years ago and to this day he needs to impeached and locked up for life for
all the lives he has killed and for all the crooked deals he has done behind our backs! He is
not even a citizen of the US! Please God help us all!
ISIS is al-Qaeda re-branded and is supported by Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf
States and the Western military alliance. Obama didn't technically 'create' them. Nor did he do
anything to stop them. When ISIS first emerged, the US State Department said they were caught
completely "flat -footed". ISIS emerged like a mirage in the Iraq desert, fully equipped, fully
armed and driving a convoy of matching Toyota trucks!
We all know why Hillary and Obama get away with literally murder and treason. The reason is that
it is leverage over them by their puppet masters to ensure they stay on course with the New World
Order agenda. When it is feared that they are getting a bit off script leaks occur of their heinous
crimes and they get back on script. Both of these pathetic scum bags know what awaits them if
they turn away from their puppet master's wishes. At the least prison for life and the worse is
death in so many possible ways that it would be a replay of Kennedy with different patsies. This
is why Hillary has a Cheshire cat grin and Obama plays more golf than any other president. They
know they have a get out of jail free pass.
I would like to say that Obama and Hillary Clinton were too weak or complacent to stop the
Neoconservatives/Zionists/Establishment from creating ISIS. It was their way of toppling the regime
of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and helping Israel to tighten the grip over stolen land.
I would like to say watch the "Yuri Bezmenov" interviews, and realize there is no difference
between the democrats and establishment GOP, they are the same thing. The cancer of the democrat
party bled into the GOP, hence the establishment, and organ of the democrat party. I was able
to see through GW Bush, other establishment RINOs, and was honest enough to see the fraud.
I used my intellect, my brains, to see what was going on, and left the republican party many
years ago. YOU are still defending the democrat party, Obama, and Hillary. Pathetic.
But those politicians lucky enough to win discover -- if they did not know already -- that their
capacity to affect even their own domestic environment is constrained by forces beyond their control.
Notable quotes:
"... But those politicians lucky enough to win discover -- if they did not know already -- that their capacity to affect even their own domestic environment is constrained by forces beyond their control. ..."
"... In the case of Britain, the once-powerful centralized governments of that country are now multiply constrained. As the power of Britain in international affairs has declined, so has the British government's power within its own domain. Membership of the European Union constrains British governments' ability to determine everything from the quantities of fish British fishermen can legally catch to the amount in fees that British universities can charge students from other EU countries. ..."
"... Not least, the EU's insistence on the free movement of labor caused the Conservative-dominated coalition that came to power in 2010 to renege on the Tories' spectacularly ill-judged pledge to reduce to "tens of thousands a year" the number of migrants coming to Britain. The number admitted in 2014 alone was nearer 300,000. ..."
"... On top of all that, British governments -- even more than those of some other predominantly capitalist economies -- are open to being buffeted by market forces, whose winds can acquire gale force. In a world of substantially free trade, imports and exports of goods and services are largely beyond any government's control, and the Bank of England's influence over the external value of sterling is negligible. During the present election campaign, HSBC, one of the world's largest banks, indicated that it was contemplating shifting its headquarters from the City of London to Hong Kong. For good or ill, Britain's government was, and is, effectively helpless to intervene. ..."
"... That's why we need a federal Europe. Local governments for local issues and elected by the local people and a European government for European issues elected by all Europeans. ..."
Once upon a time, national elections were -- or seemed to be -- overwhelmingly domestic affairs,
affecting only the peoples of the countries taking part in them. If that was ever true, it is so
no longer. Angela Merkel negotiates with Greece's government with Germany's voters looming in the
background. David Cameron currently fights an election campaign in the UK holding fast to the belief
that a false move on his part regarding Britain's relationship with the EU could cost his Conservative
Party seats, votes and possibly the entire election.
Britain provides a good illustration of a general proposition. It used to be claimed, plausibly,
that "all politics is local." In 2015, electoral politics may still be mostly local, but the post-electoral
business of government is anything but local. There is a misfit between the two. Voters are mainly
swayed by domestic issues. Vote-seeking politicians campaign accordingly. But those politicians
lucky enough to win discover -- if they did not know already -- that their capacity to affect even
their own domestic environment is constrained by forces beyond their control.
Anyone viewing the UK election campaign from afar could be forgiven for thinking that British
voters and politicians alike imagined they were living on some kind of self-sufficient sea-girt island.
The opinion polls indicate that a large majority of voters are preoccupied -- politically as well
as in other ways -- with their own financial situation, tax rates, welfare spending and the future
of the National Health Service. Immigration is an issue for many voters, but mostly in domestic terms
(and often as a surrogate for generalized discontent with Britain's political class). The fact that
migrants from Eastern Europe and elsewhere make a positive net contribution to both the UK's economy
and its social services scarcely features in the campaign.
... ... ...
After polling day, all that will change -- probably to millions of voters' dismay. One American
presidential candidate famously said that politicians campaign in poetry, but govern in prose. Politicians
in democracies, not just in Britain, campaign as though they can move mountains, then find that most
mountains are hard or impossible to move.
In the case of Britain, the once-powerful centralized governments of that country are now
multiply constrained. As the power of Britain in international affairs has declined, so has the British
government's power within its own domain. Membership of the European Union constrains British governments'
ability to determine everything from the quantities of fish British fishermen can legally catch to
the amount in fees that British universities can charge students from other EU countries.
Not least, the EU's insistence on the free movement of labor caused the Conservative-dominated
coalition that came to power in 2010 to renege on the Tories' spectacularly ill-judged pledge to
reduce to "tens of thousands a year" the number of migrants coming to Britain. The number admitted
in 2014 alone was nearer 300,000.
The UK's courts are also far more active than they were. The British parliament in 1998 incorporated
the European Convention on Human Rights into British domestic law, and British judges have determinedly
enforced those rights. During the 1970s, they had already been handed responsibility for enforcing
the full range of EU law within the UK.
Also, Britain's judges have, on their own initiative, exercised increasingly frequently their
long-standing power of "judicial review," invalidating ministerial decisions that violated due process
or seemed to them to be wholly unreasonable. Devolution of substantial powers to semi-independent
governments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland has also meant that the jurisdiction of many
so-called UK government ministers is effectively confined to the purely English component part.
On top of all that, British governments -- even more than those of some other predominantly
capitalist economies -- are open to being buffeted by market forces, whose winds can acquire gale
force. In a world of substantially free trade, imports and exports of goods and services are largely
beyond any government's control, and the Bank of England's influence over the external value of sterling
is negligible. During the present election campaign, HSBC, one of the world's largest banks, indicated
that it was contemplating shifting its headquarters from the City of London to Hong Kong. For good
or ill, Britain's government was, and is, effectively helpless to intervene.
The heirs of Gladstone, Disraeli, Lloyd George and Winston Churchill, Britain's political leaders
are understandably still tempted to talk big. But their effective real-world influence is small.
No wonder a lot of voters in Britain feel they are being conned.
ItsJustTim
That's globalization. And it won't go away, even if you vote nationalist. The issues are increasingly
international, while the voters still have a mostly local perspective. That's why we need
a federal Europe. Local governments for local issues and elected by the local people and a European
government for European issues elected by all Europeans.
"... it seems fair to say: Globalism isn't quite the Wave of the Future that most observers thought it was, even just a year ago. And so before we attempt to divide the true intentions of Clinton and Trump, we might first step back and consider how we got to this point. ..."
"... An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations . ..."
"... Clinton will say anything then she'll sell you out. I hope we never get a chance to see how she will sell us out on TPP ..."
"... What we would be headed for under Hillary Clinton is fascism--Mussolini's shorthand definition of fascism was the marriage of industry and commerce with the power of the State. That is what the plutocrats who run the big banks (to whom she owes her soul) aim to do. President, Thomas Jefferson knew the dangers of large European-style central banks. ..."
On the surface, it appears that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, for all their mutual antipathy,
are united on one big issue: opposition to new trade deals. Here's a recent headline in
The Guardian: "Trump and Clinton's free trade retreat: a pivotal moment for the world's
economic future."
And the subhead continues in that vein:
Never before have both main presidential candidates broken so completely with Washington orthodoxy
on globalization, even as the White House refuses to give up. The problem, however, goes much
deeper than trade deals.
In the above quote, we can note the deliberate use of the loaded word, "problem." As in, it's
a problem that free trade is unpopular-a problem, perhaps, that the MSM can fix. Yet in the
meantime, the newspaper sighed, the two biggest trade deals on the horizon, the well-known
Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), and the lesser-known
Trans Atlantic Trade Investment
Partnership (TTIP), aimed at further linking the U.S. and European Union (EU), are both in jeopardy.
So now we must ask broader questions: What does this mean for trade treaties overall? And what
are the implications for globalism?
More specifically, we can ask: Are we sure that the two main White House hopefuls, Clinton and
Trump, are truly sincere in their opposition to those deals? After all, as has been
widely reported, President Obama still has plans to push TPP through to enactment in the "lame
duck" session of Congress after the November elections. Of course, Obama wouldn't seek to do that
if the president-elect opposed it-or would he?
Yet on August 30, Politico reminded its Beltway readership, "How
Trump or Clinton could kill Pacific trade deal." In other words, even if Obama were to move TPP
forward in his last two months in office, the 45th president could still block its implementation
in 2017 and beyond. If, that is, she or he really wanted to.
Indeed, as we think about Clinton and Trump, we realize that there's "opposition" that's for show
and there's opposition that's for real.
Still, given what's been said on the presidential campaign trail this year, it seems fair
to say: Globalism isn't quite the Wave of the Future that most observers thought it was, even just
a year ago. And so before we attempt to divide the true intentions of Clinton and Trump, we might
first step back and consider how we got to this point.
2. The Free Trade Orthodoxy
It's poignant that the headline, "Trump and Clinton's free trade retreat", lamenting the decay
of free trade, appeared in The Guardian. Until recently, the newspaper was known as The
Manchester Guardian, as in Manchester, England. And Manchester is not only a big city, population
2.5 million, it is also a city with a fabled past: You see, Manchester was the cradle of the Industrial
Revolution, which transformed England and the world. It was that city that helped create the free
trade orthodoxy that is now crumbling.
Yes, in the 18th and 19th centuries, Manchester was the leading manufacturing city in the world,
especially for textiles. It was known as "Cottonopolis."
Indeed, back then, Manchester was so much more efficient and effective at mass production that
it led the world in exports. That is, it could produce its goods at such low cost that it could send
them across vast oceans and still undercut local producers on price and quality.
Over time, this economic reality congealed into a school of thought: As Manchester grew rich from
exports, its business leaders easily found economists, journalists, and propagandists who would help
advance their cause in the press and among the intelligentsia.
The resulting school of thought became known, in the 19th century, as "Manchester
Liberalism." And so, to this day, long after Manchester has lost its economic preeminence to
rivals elsewhere in the world, the phrase "Manchester Liberalism" is a well-known in the history
of economics, bespeaking ardent support for free markets and free trade.
More recently, the hub for free-trade enthusiasm has been the United States. In particular, the
University of Chicago, home to the Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, became free trade's
academic citadel; hence the "Chicago
School" has displaced Manchesterism.
And just as it made sense for Manchester Liberalism to exalt free trade and exports when Manchester
and England were on top, so, too, did the Chicago School exalt free trade when the U.S. was unquestionably
the top dog.
So back in the 40s and 50s, when the rest of the world was either bombed flat or still under the
yoke of colonialism, it made perfect sense that the U.S., as the only intact industrial power, would
celebrate industrial exports: We were Number One, and it was perfectly rational to make the most
of that first-place status. And if scribblers and scholars could help make the case for this new
status quo, well, bring 'em aboard. Thus the Chicago School gained ascendancy in the late 20th century.
And of course, the Chicagoans drew inspiration from a period even earlier than Manchesterism,
3. On the Origins of the Orthodoxy: Adam Smith and David Ricardo
One passage in that volume considers how individuals might optimize their own production and consumption:
It is the maxim of every prudent master of a family never to attempt to make at home what it
will cost him more to make than to buy.
Smith is right, of course; everyone should always be calculating, however informally, whether
or not it's cheaper to make it at home or buy it from someone else.
We can quickly see: If each family must make its own clothes and grow its own food, it's likely
to be worse off than if it can buy its necessities from a large-scale producer. Why? Because, to
be blunt about it, most of us don't really know how to make clothes and grow food, and it's expensive
and difficult-if not downright impossible-to learn how. So we can conclude that self-sufficiency,
however rustic and charming, is almost always a recipe for poverty.
Smith had a better idea: specialization. That is, people would specialize in one line of
work, gain skills, earn more money, and then use that money in the marketplace, buying what they
needed from other kinds of specialists.
Moreover, the even better news, in Smith's mind, was that this kind of specialization came naturally
to people-that is, if they were free to scheme out their own advancement. As Smith argued, the ideal
system would allow "every man to pursue his own interest his own way, upon the liberal plan of equality,
liberty and justice."
That is, men (and women) would do that which they did best, and then they would all come together
in the free marketplace-each person being inspired to do better, thanks to, as Smith so memorably
put it, the "invisible hand." Thus Smith articulated a key insight that undergirds the whole of modern
economics-and, of course, modern-day prosperity.
A few decades later, in the early 19th century, Smith's pioneering work was expanded upon by another
remarkable British economist, David Ricardo.
Ricardo's big idea built on Smithian specialization; Ricardo called it "comparative advantage."
That is, just as each individual should do what he or she does best, so should each country.
In Ricardo's well-known illustration, he explained that the warm and sunny climate of Portugal
made that country ideal for growing the grapes needed for wine, while the factories of England made
that country ideal for spinning the fibers needed for apparel and other finished fabrics.
Thus, in Ricardo's view, we could see the makings of a beautiful economic friendship: The Portuguese
would utilize their comparative advantage (climate) and export their surplus wine to England, while
the English would utilize their comparative advantage (manufacturing) and export apparel to Portugal.
Thus each would benefit from the exchange of efficiently-produced products, as each export paid for
the other.
Furthermore, in Ricardo's telling, if tariffs and other barriers were eliminated, then both countries,
Portugal and England, would enjoy the maximum free-trading win-win.
Actually, in point of fact-and Ricardo knew this-the relationship was much more of a win for England,
because manufacture is more lucrative than agriculture. That is, a factory in Manchester could crank
out garments a lot faster than a vineyard in Portugal could ferment wine.
And as we all know, the richer, stronger countries are industrial, not agricultural. Food is essential-and
alcohol is pleasurable-but the real money is made in making things. After all, crops can be grown
easily enough in many places, and so prices stay low. By contrast, manufacturing requires a lot of
know-how and a huge upfront investment. Yet with enough powerful manufacturing, a nation is always
guaranteed to be able to afford to import food. And also, it can make military weapons, and so, if
necessary, take foreign food and croplands by force.
We can also observe that Ricardo, smart fellow that he was, nevertheless was describing the economy
at a certain point in time-the era of horse-drawn carriages and sailing ships. Ricardo realized that
transportation was, in fact, a key business variable. He wrote that it was possible for a company
to seek economic advantage by moving a factory from one part of England to another. And yet in his
view, writing from the perspective of the year 1817, it was impossible to imagine
moving a factory from England to another country:
It would not follow that capital and population would necessarily move from England to Holland,
or Spain, or Russia.
Why this presumed immobility of capital and people? Because, from Ricardo's early 19th-century
perspective, transportation was inevitably slow and creaky; he didn't foresee steamships and airplanes.
In his day, relying on the technology of the time, it wasn't realistic to think that factories, and
their workers, could relocate from one country to another.
Moreover, in Ricardo's era, many countries were actively hostile to industrialization, because
change would upset the aristocratic rhythms of the old order. That is, industrialization could turn
docile or fatalistic peasants, spread out thinly across the countryside, into angry and self-aware
proletarians, concentrated in the big cities-and that was a formula for unrest, even revolution.
Indeed, it was not until the 20th century that every country-including China, a great civilization,
long asleep under decadent imperial misrule-figured out that it had no choice other than to industrialize.
So we can see that the ideas of Smith and Ricardo, enduringly powerful as they have been, were
nonetheless products of their time-that is, a time when England mostly had the advantages of industrialism
to itself. In particular, Ricardo's celebration of comparative advantage can be seen as an artifact
of his own era, when England enjoyed a massive first-mover advantage in the industrial-export game.
Smith died in 1790, and Ricardo died in 1823; a lot has changed since then. And yet the two economists
were so lucid in their writings that their work is studied and admired to this day.
Unfortunately, we can also observe that their ideas have been frozen in a kind of intellectual
amber; even in the 21st century, free trade and old-fashioned comparative advantage are unquestioningly
regarded as the keys to the wealth of nations-at least in the U.S.-even if they are so no longer.
4. Nationalist Alternatives to Free Trade Orthodoxy
As we have seen, Smith and Ricardo were pushing an idea, free trade, that was advantageous to
Britain.
So perhaps not surprisingly, rival countries-notably the United States and Germany-soon developed
different ideas. Leaders in Washington, D.C., and Berlin didn't want their respective nations to
be mere dependent receptacles for English goods; they wanted real independence. And so they wanted
factories of their own.
In the late 18th century, Alexander Hamilton, the visionary American patriot, could see that both
economic wealth and military power flowed from domestic industry. As the nation's first Treasury
Secretary, he persuaded President George Washington and the Congress to support a system of protective
tariffs and "internal improvements" (what today we would call infrastructure) to foster US manufacturing
and exporting.
And in the 19th century, Germany, under the much heavier-handed leadership of Otto von Bismarck,
had the same idea: Make a concerted effort to make the nation stronger.
In both countries, this industrial policymaking succeeded. So whereas at the beginning of the
19th century, England had led the world in steel production, by the beginning of the 20th century
century, the U.S. and Germany had moved well ahead. Yes, the "invisible hand" of individual self-interest
is always a powerful economic force, but sometimes, the "visible hand" of national purpose, animated
by patriotism, is even more powerful.
Thus by 1914, at the onset of World War One, we could see the results of the Smith/Ricardo model,
on the one hand, and the Hamilton/Bismarck model, on the other. All three countries-Britain, the
US, and Germany, were rich-but only the latter two had genuine industrial mojo. Indeed, during World
War One, English weakness became glaringly apparent in the 1915
shell crisis-as
in, artillery shells. It was only the massive importing of made-in-USA ammunition that saved Britain
from looming defeat.
Yet as always, times change, as do economic circumstances, as do prevailing ideas.
As we have seen, at the end of World War II, the U.S. was the only industrial power left standing.
And so it made sense for America to shift from a policy of Hamiltonian protection to a policy of
Smith-Ricardian export-minded free trade. Indeed, beginning in around 1945, both major political
parties, Democrats and Republicans, solidly embraced the new line: The U.S. would be the factory
for the world.
Yet if times, circumstances, and ideas change, they can always change again.
5. The Contemporary Crack-Up
As we have seen, in the 19th century, not every country wanted to be on the passive receiving
end of England's exports. And this was true, too, in the 20th century; Japan, notably, had its own
ideas.
If Japan had followed the Ricardian doctrine of comparative advantage, it would have focused on
exporting rice and tuna. Instead, by dint of hard work, ingenuity, and more than a little national
strategizing, Japan grew itself into a great and prosperous industrial power. Its exports, we might
note, were such high-value-adds as automobiles and electronics, not mere crops and fish.
Moreover, according to the same theory of comparative advantage, South Korea should have been
exporting parasols and kimchi, and China should have settled for exporting fortune cookies and pandas.
Yet as the South Korean economist
Ha-Joon Chang has chronicled,
these Asian nations resolved, in their no-nonsense neo-Confucian way, to launch state-guided private
industries-and the theory of comparative advantage be damned.
Yes, their efforts violated Western economic orthodoxy, but as the philosopher Kant once observed,
the actual proves the possible. Indeed, today, as we all know, the Asian tigers are among the richest
and fastest-growing economies in the world.
China is not only the world's largest economy in terms of purchasing power parity (PPP), but
also the world's largest manufacturing nation-producing 52 percent of color televisions, 75 percent
of mobile phones and 87 percent of the world's personal computers. The Chinese automobile industry
is the world's largest, twice the size of America's. China leads the world in foreign exchange
reserves. The United States is the main trading partner for seventy-six countries. China is the
main trading partner for 124.
In particular, we might pause over one item in that impressive litany: China makes 87 percent
of the world's personal computers.
Indeed, if it's true, as ZDNet reports, that
the Chinese have built "backdoors" into almost all the electronic equipment that they sell-that
is to say, the equipment that we buy-then we can assume that we face a serious military challenge,
as well as a serious economic challenge.
Yes, it's a safe bet that the People's Liberation Army has a good handle on our defense establishment,
especially now that the Pentagon has fully equipped itself with
Chinese-made iPhones and iPads.
Of course, we can safely predict that Defense Department bureaucrats will always say that there's
nothing to worry about, that they have the potential hacking/sabotage matter under control (although
just to be sure, the Pentagon might say, give us more money).
Yet we might note that this is the same defense establishment that couldn't keep track of lone
internal rogues such as Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden. Therefore, should we really believe that
this same DOD knows how to stop the determined efforts of a nation of 1.3 billion people, seeking
to hack machines-machines that they made in the first place?
Yes, the single strongest argument against the blind application of free- trade dogma is the doctrine
of self defense. That is, all the wealth in the world doesn't matter if you're conquered. Even Adam
Smith understood that; as he wrote, "Defense
. . . is of much more importance than opulence."
Yet today we can readily see: If we are grossly dependent on China for vital wares, then we can't
be truly independent of China. In fact, we should be downright fearful.
Still, despite these deep strategic threats, directly the result of careless importing, the Smith-Ricardo
orthodoxy remains powerful, even hegemonistic-at least in the English-speaking world.
Why is this so? Yes, economists are typically seen as cold and nerdy, even bloodless, and yet,
in fact, they are actual human beings. And as such, they are susceptible to the giddy-happy feeling
that comes from the hope of building a new utopia, the dream of ushering in an era of world harmony,
based on untrammeled international trade. Indeed, this woozy idealism among economists goes way back;
it was the British free trader Richard Cobden who declared in 1857,
Free trade is God's diplomacy. There is no other certain way of uniting people in the bonds
of peace.
And lo, so many wars later, many economists still believe that.
Indeed, economists today are still monolithically pro-fee trade; a
recent survey of economists found that 83 percent supported eliminating all tariffs and other
barriers; just 10 percent disagreed.
We might further note that others, too, in the financial and intellectual elite are fully on board
the free-trade train, including most corporate officers and their lobbyists, journalists, academics,
and, of course, the mostly for-hire think-tankers.
To be sure, there are always exceptions: As that Guardian article, the one lamenting the
sharp decrease in support for free trade as a "problem," noted, not all of corporate America is on
board, particularly those companies in the manufacturing sector:
Ford openly opposes TPP because it fears the deal does nothing to stop Japan manipulating its
currency at the expense of US rivals.
Indeed, we might note that the same Guardian story included an even more cautionary note,
asserting that support for free trade, overall, is remarkably rickety:
Some suggest a "bicycle theory" of trade deals: that the international bandwagon has to keep
rolling forward or else it all wobbles and falls down.
So what has happened? How could virtually the entire elite be united in enthusiasm for free trade,
and yet, even so, the free trade juggernaut is no steadier than a mere two-wheeled bike? Moreover,
free traders will ask: Why aren't the leaders leading? More to the point, why aren't the followers
following?
To answer those questions, we might start by noting the four-decade phenomenon of
wage stagnation-that's
taken a toll on support for free trade. But of course, it's in the heartland that wages have been
stagnating; by contrast,
incomes for
the bicoastal elites have been soaring.
We might also note that some expert predictions have been way off, thus undermining confidence
in their expertise. Remember, this spring, when all the experts were saying that the United Kingdom
would fall into recession, or worse, if it voted to leave the EU? Well, just the other day came this
New York Post headline: "Brexit
actually boosting the UK economy."
Thus from the Wall Street-ish perspective of the urban chattering classes, things are going well-so
what's the problem?
Yet the folks on Main Street have known a different story. They have seen, with their own eyes,
what has happened to them, and no fusillade of op-eds or think-tank monographs will persuade them
to change their mind.
However, because the two parties have been so united on the issues of trade and globalization-the
"Uniparty," it's sometimes called-the folks in the boonies have had no political alternative. And
as they say, the only power you have in this world is the power of an alternative. And so, lacking
an alternative, the working/middle class has just had to accept its fate.
Indeed, it has been a bitter fate, particularly bitter in the former industrial heartland. In
a 2013 paper, the
Economic Policy Institute (EPI) came to some startling conclusions:
Growing trade with less-developed countries lowered wages in 2011 by 5.5 percent-or by roughly
$1,800-for a full-time, full-year worker earning the average wage for workers without a four-year
college degree.
The paper added, "One-third of this total effect is due to growing trade with just China."
Continuing, EPI found that even as trade with low-wage countries caused a decrease in the incomes
for lower-end workers, it had caused an increase in the incomes of high-end workers-so no
wonder the high-end thinks globalism in great.
To be sure, some in the elite are bothered by what's been happening.
Peggy Noonan, writing earlier this year in The Wall Street Journal-a piece that must have
raised the hackles of her doctrinaire colleagues-put the matter succinctly: There's a wide, and widening,
gap between the "protected" and the "unprotected":
The protected make public policy. The unprotected live in it. The unprotected are starting
to push back, powerfully.
Of course, Noonan was alluding to the Trump candidacy-and also to the candidacy of Sen. Bernie
Sanders. Those two insurgents, in different parties, have been propelled by the pushing from all
the unprotected folks across America.
We might pause to note that free traders have arguments which undoubtedly deserve a fuller airing.
Okay. However, we can still see the limits. For example, the familiar gambit of outsourcing jobs
to China, or Mexico-or 50 other countries-and calling that "free trade" is now socially unacceptable,
and politically unsustainable.
Still, the broader vision of planetary freedom, including the free flow of peoples and their ideas,
is always enormously appealing. The United States, as well as the world, undoubtedly benefits from
competition, from social and economic mobility-and yes, from new blood.
As
Stuart Anderson, executive director of the National Foundation for American Policy, notes, "77
percent of the full-time graduate students in electrical engineering and 71 percent in computer science
at U.S. universities are international students." That's a statistic that should give every American
pause to ask: Why aren't we producing more engineers here at home?
We can say, with admiration, that Silicon Valley is the latest Manchester; as such, it's a powerful
magnet for the best and the brightest from overseas, and from a purely dollars-and-cents point of
view, there's a lot to be said for welcoming them.
So yes, it would be nice if we could retain this international mobility that benefits the U.S.-but
only if the economic benefits can be broadly shared, and patriotic assimilation of immigrants can
be truly achieved, such that all Americans can feel good about welcoming newcomers.
The further enrichment of Silicon Valley won't do much good for the country unless those riches
are somehow widely shared. In fact, amidst the ongoing outsourcing of mass-production jobs,
total employment in such boomtowns as San Francisco and San Jose has barely budged. That is,
new software billionaires are being minted every day, but their workforces tend to be tiny-or located
overseas. If that past pattern is the future pattern, well, something will have to give.
We can say: If America is to be
one nation-something Mitt "47 percent" Romney never worried about, although it cost him in the
end-then we will have to figure out a way to turn the genius of the few into good jobs for the many.
The goal isn't socialism, or anything like that; instead, the goal is the widespread distribution
of private property, facilitated, by conscious national economic development, as
I argued at the tail end of this piece.
If we can't, or won't, find a way to expand private ownership nationwide, then the populist upsurges
of the Trump and Sanders campaigns will be remembered as mere overtures to a starkly divergent future.
6. Clinton and Trump Say They Are Trade Hawks: But Are They Sincere?
So now we come to a mega-question for 2016: How should we judge the sincerity of the two major-party
candidates, Clinton or Trump, when they affirm their opposition to TPP? And how do we assess their
attitude toward globalization, including immigration, overall?
The future is, of course, unknown, but we can make a couple of points.
First, it is true that
many have questioned the sincerity of Hillary's new anti-TPP stance, especially given the presence
of such prominent free-traders as vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine and presidential transition-planning
chief Ken Salazar. Moreover, there's also Hillary's own decades-long association with open-borders
immigration policies, as well as past support for such trade bills as NAFTA, PNTR, and, of course,
TPP. And oh yes, there's the Clinton Foundation, that global laundromat for every overseas fortune;
most of those billionaires are globalists par excellence-would a President Hillary really
cross them?
Second, since there's still no way to see inside another person's mind, the best we can
do is look for external clues-by which we mean, external pressures. And so we might ask a basic question:
Would the 45th president, whoever she or he is, feel compelled by those external pressures to keep
their stated commitment to the voters? Or would they feel that they owe more to their elite friends,
allies, and benefactors?
As we have seen, Clinton has long chosen to surround herself with free traders and globalists.
Moreover, she has raised money from virtually every bicoastal billionaire in America.
So we must wonder: Will a new President Clinton really betray her own class-all those
Davos Men and Davos Women-for the sake of middle-class folks she has never met, except maybe
on a rope line? Would Clinton 45, who has spent her life courting the powerful, really stick her
neck out for unnamed strangers-who never gave a dime to the Clinton Foundation?
Okay, so what to make of Trump? He, too, is a fat-cat-even more of fat-cat, in fact, than Clinton.
And yet for more than a year now, he has based his campaign on opposition to globalism in all its
forms; it's been the basis of his campaign-indeed, the basis of his base. And his campaign policy
advisers are emphatic. According to Politico, as recently as August 30, Trump trade adviser
Peter Navarro reiterated Trump's opposition to TPP, declaring,
Any deal must increase the GDP growth rate, reduce the trade deficit, and strengthen the manufacturing
base.
So, were Trump to win the White House, he would come in with a much more solid anti-globalist
mandate.
Thus we can ask: Would a President Trump really cross his own populist-nationalist base by going
over to the other side-to the globalists who voted, and donated, against him? If he did-if he repudiated
his central platform plank-he would implode his presidency, the way that Bush 41 imploded his presidency
in 1990 when he went back on his "read my lips, no new taxes" pledge.
Surely Trump remembers that moment of political calamity well, and so surely, whatever mistakes
he might make, he won't make that one.
To be sure, the future is unknowable. However, as we have seen, the past, both recent and historical,
is rich with valuable clues.
Clinton will say anything then she'll sell you out. I hope we never get a chance to see
how she will sell us out on TPP
Ellen Bell -> HoosierMilitia
You really do not understand the primitive form of capitalism that the moneyed elites are trying
to impose on us. That system is mercantilism and two of its major tenets are to only give the
workers subsistence level wages (what they are doing to poor people abroad and attempting to do
here) and monopolistic control of everything that is possible to monopolize. The large multi-nationals
have already done that. What we would be headed for under Hillary Clinton is fascism--Mussolini's
shorthand definition of fascism was the marriage of industry and commerce with the power of the
State. That is what the plutocrats who run the big banks (to whom she owes her soul) aim to do.
President, Thomas Jefferson knew the dangers of large European-style central banks. He said:
"...The central bank is an institution of the most deadly hostility existing against the
Principles and form of our Constitution. I am an Enemy to all banks discounting bills or notes
for anything but Coin. If the American People allow private banks to control the issuance of
their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will
grow up around them will deprive the People of all their Property until their Children will
wake up homeless on the continent their Fathers conquered..."
The power to create money was given to the private banking system of the Federal Reserve in
1913. Nearly every bit of our enormous debt has been incurred since then. The American people
have become debt-slaves. In the Constitution, only Congress has the right to issue currency. That's
why the plutocrats want to do away with it--among other reasons.
"... Donald Trump is challenging the very fabric of the institutional elites in this country on both sides that have, quite frankly, just straight up screwed this country up and made the world a mess. ..."
Tom Coyne, a lifelong Democrat and the mayor of Brook Park, Ohio, spoke
about his endorsement of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump with Breitbart
News Daily SiriusXM host Matt Boyle.
Coyne said:
The parties are blurred. What's the difference? They say the same things
in different tones. At the end of the day, they accomplish nothing.
Donald Trump is challenging the very fabric of the institutional elites
in this country on both sides that have, quite frankly, just straight up
screwed this country up and made the world a mess.
Regarding the GOP establishment's so-called Never Trumpers, Coyne stated,
"If it's their expertise that people are relying upon as to advice to vote,
people should go the opposite."
In an interview last week, Coyne said that Democrats and Republicans
have failed the city through inaction and bad trade policies, key themes
Trump often trumpets.
"He understands us," Coyne said of Trump. "He is saying what we feel,
and therefore, let him shake the bedevils out of everyone in the canyons
of Washington D.C. The American people are responding to him."
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00
a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
"... Donald Trump isn't a politician -- he's a one-man wrecking ball against our dysfunctional and corrupt establishment. We're about to see the deluxe version of the left's favorite theme: Vote for us or we'll call you stupid. It's the working class against the smirking class. ..."
"... He understands that if we're ever going to get our economy back on its feet the wage-earning middle class will have to prosper along with investors ..."
"... Trump that really "gets" the idea that the economy is suffering because the middle class can't find employment at livable wages ..."
"... Ms. Coulter says it more eloquently: "The Republican establishment has no idea how much ordinary voters hate both parties." Like me, she's especially annoyed with Republicans, because we think of the Republican Party as being our political "family" that has turned against us: ..."
"... The RNC has been forcing Republican candidates to take suicidal positions forever They were happy to get 100 percent of the Business Roundtable vote and 20 percent of the regular vote. ..."
"... American companies used free trade with low-wage countries as an opportunity to close their American factories and relocate the jobs to lower-paying foreign workers. Instead of creating product and exporting it to other countries, our American companies EXPORTED American JOBS to other countries and IMPORTED foreign-made PRODUCTS into America! Our exports have actually DECLINED during the last five years with most of the 20 countries we signed free trade with. Even our exports to Canada, our oldest free trade partner, are less than what they were five years ago. ..."
"... Trade with Japan, China, and South Korea is even more imbalanced, because those countries actively restrict imports of American-made products. We run a 4x trade imbalance with China, which cost us $367 billion last year. We lost $69 billion to Japan and $28 billion to South Korea. Our exports to these countries are actually DECLINING, even while our imports soar! ..."
"... Why do Establishment Republicans join with Democrats in wanting to diminish the future with the WRONG kind of "free trade" that removes jobs and wealth from the USA? As Ms. Coulter reminds us, it is because Republican Establishment, like the Democrat establishment, is PAID by the money and jobs they receive from big corporations to believe it. ..."
"... The donor class doesn't care. The rich are like locusts: once they've picked America dry, they'll move on to the next country. A hedge fund executive quoted in The Atlantic a few years ago said, "If the transformation of the world economy lifts four people in China and India out of poverty and into the middle class, and meanwhile [that] means one American drops out of the middle class, that's not such a bad trade." ..."
"... The corporate 1% who believe that the global labor market should be tapped in order to beat American workers out of their jobs; and that corporations and the 1% who own them should be come tax-exempt organizations that profit by using cheap overseas labor to product product that is sold in the USA, and without paying taxes on the profit. Ms. Coulter calls this group of Republican Estblishmentarians "locusts: once they've picked America dry, they'll move on to the next country." ..."
"... Pretending to care about the interests of minorities. Of course, the Republican Establishment has even less appeal to minorities than to the White Middle Class (WMC) they abandoned. Minorities are no more interested in losing their jobs to foreigners or to suffer economic stagnation while the rich have their increasing wealth (most of which is earned at the expense of the middle class) tax-sheltered, than do the WMC. ..."
"... Trump has given Republicans a new lease on life. The Establishment doesn't like having to take a back seat to him, but perhaps they should understand that having a back seat in a popular production is so much better than standing outside alone in the cold. ..."
Donald Trump isn't a politician -- he's a one-man wrecking ball against our dysfunctional
and corrupt establishment. We're about to see the deluxe version of the left's favorite theme: Vote
for us or we'll call you stupid. It's the working class against the smirking class.
No pandering! The essence of Trump in personality and issues , August 23, 2016
Ms. Coulter explains the journey of myself and so many other voters into Trump's camp. It captures
the essence of Trump as a personality and Trump on the issues. If I had to sum Ms. Coulter's view
of the reason for Trump's success in two words, I'd say "No Pandering!" I've heard many people,
including a Liberal tell me, "Trump says what needs to be said."
I've voted Republican in every election going back to Reagan in 1980, except for 2012 when
I supported President Obama's re-election. I've either voted for, or financially supported many
"Establishment Republicans" like Mitt Romney and John McCain in 2008. I've also supported some
Conservative ones like Newt Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani. In this election I'd been planning to
vote for Jeb Bush, a superb governor when I lived in Florida.
Then Trump announced his candidacy. I had seen hints of that happening as far back as 2012.
In my Amazon reviews in 2012 I said that many voters weren't pleased with Obama or the Republican
Establishment. So the question became: "Who do you vote for if you don't favor the agendas of
either party's legacy candidates?" In November 2013 I commented on the book DOUBLE DOWN: GAME
CHANGE 2012 by Mark Halperin and John Heileman:
=====
Mr. Trump occupies an important place in the political spectrum --- that of being a Republican
Populist.
He understands that if we're ever going to get our economy back on its feet the wage-earning
middle class will have to prosper along with investors, who are recovering our fortunes in
the stock market.
IMO whichever party nominates a candidate like Trump that really "gets" the idea that the
economy is suffering because the middle class can't find employment at livable wages, will
be the party that rises to dominance.
Mr. Trump, despite his flakiness, at least understood that essential fact of American economic
life.
November 7, 2013
=====
Ms. Coulter says it more eloquently: "The Republican establishment has no idea how much
ordinary voters hate both parties." Like me, she's especially annoyed with Republicans, because
we think of the Republican Party as being our political "family" that has turned against us:
===== The RNC has been forcing Republican candidates to take suicidal positions forever They were
happy to get 100 percent of the Business Roundtable vote and 20 percent of the regular vote.
when the GOP wins an election, there is no corresponding "win" for the unemployed blue-collar
voter in North Carolina. He still loses his job to a foreign worker or a closed manufacturing
plant, his kids are still boxed out of college by affirmative action for immigrants, his community
is still plagued with high taxes and high crime brought in with all that cheap foreign labor.
There's no question but that the country is heading toward being Brazil. One doesn't have to
agree with the reason to see that the very rich have gotten much richer, placing them well beyond
the concerns of ordinary people, and the middle class is disappearing. America doesn't make anything
anymore, except Hollywood movies and Facebook. At the same time, we're importing a huge peasant
class, which is impoverishing what remains of the middle class, whose taxes support cheap labor
for the rich.
With Trump, Americans finally have the opportunity to vote for something that's popular.
=====
That explains how Trump won my vote --- and held on to it through a myriad of early blunders
and controversies that almost made me switch my support to other candidates.
I'm no "xenophobe isolationist" stereotype. My first employer was an immigrant from Eastern
Europe. What I learned working for him launched me on my successful career. I've developed and
sold computer systems to subsidiaries of American companies in Europe and Asia. My business partners
have been English and Canadian immigrants. My family are all foreign-born Hispanics. Three of
my college roommates were from Ecuador, Germany, and Syria.
BECAUSE of this international experience I agree with the issues of trade and immigration that
Ms. Coulter talks about that have prompted Trump's rising popularity.
First, there is the false promise that free trade with low-wage countries would "create millions
of high-paying jobs for American workers, who will be busy making high-value products for export."
NAFTA was signed in 1994. GATT with China was signed in 2001. Since then we've signed free trade
with 20 countries. It was said that besides creating jobs for Americans, that free trade would
prosper the global economy. In truth the opposite happened:
American companies used free trade with low-wage countries as an opportunity to close their
American factories and relocate the jobs to lower-paying foreign workers. Instead of creating
product and exporting it to other countries, our American companies EXPORTED American JOBS to
other countries and IMPORTED foreign-made PRODUCTS into America! Our exports have actually DECLINED
during the last five years with most of the 20 countries we signed free trade with. Even our exports
to Canada, our oldest free trade partner, are less than what they were five years ago.
We ran trade SURPLUSES with Mexico until 1994, when NAFTA was signed. The very next year the
surplus turned to deficit, now $60 billion a year. Given that each American worker produces an
average of $64,000 in value per year, that is a loss of 937,000 American jobs to Mexico alone.
The problem is A) that Mexicans are not wealthy enough to be able to afford much in the way of
American-made product and B) there isn't much in the way of American-made product left to buy,
since so much of former American-made product is now made in Mexico or China.
Trade with Japan, China, and South Korea is even more imbalanced, because those countries
actively restrict imports of American-made products. We run a 4x trade imbalance with China, which
cost us $367 billion last year. We lost $69 billion to Japan and $28 billion to South Korea. Our
exports to these countries are actually DECLINING, even while our imports soar!
Thus, free trade, except with a few fair-trading countries like Canada, Australia, and possibly
Britain, has been a losing proposition. Is it coincidence that our economy has weakened with each
trade deal we have signed? Our peak year of labor force participation was 1999. Then we had the
Y2K collapse and the Great Recession, followed by the weakest "recovery" since WWII? As Trump
would say, free trade has been a "disaster."
Why do Establishment Republicans join with Democrats in wanting to diminish the future
with the WRONG kind of "free trade" that removes jobs and wealth from the USA? As Ms. Coulter
reminds us, it is because Republican Establishment, like the Democrat establishment, is PAID by
the money and jobs they receive from big corporations to believe it. Ms. Coulter says:
===== The donor class doesn't care. The rich are like locusts: once they've picked America dry,
they'll move on to the next country. A hedge fund executive quoted in The Atlantic a few years
ago said, "If the transformation of the world economy lifts four people in China and India
out of poverty and into the middle class, and meanwhile [that] means one American drops out
of the middle class, that's not such a bad trade."
=====
Then there is immigration. My wife, son, and extended family legally immigrated to the USA
from Latin America. The first family members were recruited by our government during the labor
shortage of the Korean War. Some fought for the United States in Korea. Some of their children
fought for us in Vietnam, and some grandchildren are fighting in the Middle East. Most have
become successful professionals and business owners. They came here LEGALLY, some waiting in
queue for up to 12 years. They were supported by the family already in America until they were
on their feet.
Illegal immigration has been less happy. Illegals are here because the Democrats want new voters
and the Republicans want cheap labor. Contrary to business propaganda, illegals cost Americans
their jobs. A colleague just old me, "My son returned home from California after five years, because
he couldn't get construction work any longer. All those jobs are now done off the books by illegals."
It's the same in technology. Even while our high-tech companies are laying off 260,000 American
employees in 2016 alone, they are banging the drums to expand the importation of FOREIGN tech
workers from 85,000 to 195,000 to replace the Americans they let go. Although the H1-B program
is billed as bringing in only the most exceptional, high-value foreign engineers, in truth most
visas are issued to replace American workers with young foreigners of mediocre ability who'll
work for much less money than the American family bread-winners they replaced.
Both parties express their "reverse racism" against the White Middle Class. Democrats don't
like them because they tend to vote Republican. The Republican Establishment doesn't like them
because they cost more to employ than overseas workers and illegal aliens. According to them the
WMC is too technologically out of date and overpaid to allow our benighted business leaders to
"compete internationally."
Ms. Coulter says "Americans are homesick" for our country that is being lost to illegal immigration
and the removal of our livelihoods overseas. We are sick of Republican and Democrat Party hidden
agendas, reverse-racism, and economic genocide against the American people. That's why the Establishment
candidates who started out so theoretically strong, like Jeb Bush, collapsed like waterlogged
houses of cards when they met Donald Trump. As Ms. Coulter explains, Trump knows their hidden
agendas, and knows they are working against the best interests of the American Middle Class.
Coulter keeps coming back to Mr. Trump's "Alpha Male" personality that speaks to Americans
as nation without pandering to specific voter identity groups. She contrasts his style to the
self-serving "Republican (Establishment) Brain Trust that is mostly composed of comfortable, well-paid
mediocrities who, by getting a gig in politics, earn salaries higher than a capitalist system
would ever value their talents." She explains what she sees as the idiocy of those Republican
Establishment political consultants who wrecked the campaigns of Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz by micromanaging
with pandering.
She says the Republican Establishment lost because it served itself --- becoming wealthy by
serving the moneyed interests of Wall Street. Trump won because he is speaking to the disfranchised
American Middle Class who loves our country, is proud of our traditions, and believes that Americans
have as much right to feed our families through gainful employment as do overseas workers and
illegal aliens.
"I am YOUR voice," says Trump to the Middle Class that until now has been ignored and even
sneered at by both parties' establishments.
I've given an overview of the book here. The real delight is in the details, told as only Anne
Coulter can tell them. I've quoted a few snippets of her words, that relate most specifically
to my views on Trump and the issues. I wish there were space to quote many more. Alas, you'll
need to read the book to glean them all!
Bruce, I would also add that the Republican Establishment chose not to represent the interests
of the White Middle Class on trade, immigration, and other issues that matter to us. They chose
to represent the narrow interests of:
1. The corporate 1% who believe that the global labor market should be tapped in order
to beat American workers out of their jobs; and that corporations and the 1% who own them should
be come tax-exempt organizations that profit by using cheap overseas labor to product product
that is sold in the USA, and without paying taxes on the profit. Ms. Coulter calls this group
of Republican Estblishmentarians "locusts: once they've picked America dry, they'll move on to
the next country."
2. Pretending to care about the interests of minorities. Of course, the Republican Establishment
has even less appeal to minorities than to the White Middle Class (WMC) they abandoned. Minorities
are no more interested in losing their jobs to foreigners or to suffer economic stagnation while
the rich have their increasing wealth (most of which is earned at the expense of the middle class)
tax-sheltered, than do the WMC.
The Republican Establishment is in a snit because Trump beat them by picking up the WMC votes
that the Establishment abandoned. What would have happened if Trump had not come on the scene?
The probable result is that the Establishment would have nominated a ticket of Jeb Bush and John
Kasich. These candidates had much to recommend them as popular governors of key swing states.
But they would have gone into the election fighting the campaign with Republican Establishment
issues that only matter to the 1%. They would have lost much of the WMC vote that ultimately rallied
around Trump, while gaining no more than the usual 6% of minorities who vote Republican. It would
have resulted in a severe loss for the Republican Party, perhaps making it the minority party
for the rest of the century.
Trump has given Republicans a new lease on life. The Establishment doesn't like having
to take a back seat to him, but perhaps they should understand that having a back seat in a popular
production is so much better than standing outside alone in the cold.
It's funny how White Men are supposed to be angry. But I've never seen any White men:
1. Running amok, looting and burning down their neighborhood, shooting police and other "angry
White men." There were 50 people shot in Chicago last weekend alone. How many of those do you
think were "angry white men?" Hint: they were every color EXCEPT white.
2. Running around complaining that they aren't allowed into the other gender's bathroom, then
when they barge their way in there complain about being sexually assaulted. No, it's only "angry
females" (of any ethnicity) who barge their way into the men's room and then complain that somebody
in there offended them.
Those "angry white men" are as legendary as "Bigfoot." They are alleged to exist everywhere,
but are never seen. Maybe that's because they mostly hang out in the quiet neighborhoods of cookie-cutter
homes in suburbia, go to the lake or bar-be-que on weekends, and take their allotment of Viagra
in hopes of occassionally "getting lucky" with their wives. If they're "angry" then at least they
don't take their angry frustrations out on others, as so many other militant, "in-your-face" activist
groups do!
"... I've tuned out Warren-she has become the "red meat" surrogate for Clinton. Just because Taibbi was excellent on exposing Wall St. doesn't mean he really knows s**t about politics. I find the depiction of Trump as some kind of monster-buffoon to be simply boring and not very helpful. ..."
"... (might be the Trump Chaos bc Hillary will strategically turn our war machine on us can't believe this is as good as it gets, sighed out) ..."
"... Having the establishment, the military-industrial complex and Wall Street against him helps Trump a lot. ..."
"... You can fool part of the people all the time, and all people part of the time, but Brexit won, so will Trump, politician extraordinaire ..."
"... Given his family, a Trump presidency may look more like JFK's, where Bobby had more power than LBJ. Also, given Trump's negotiating expertise, I would certainly not believe any assertion of support he proclaims for the VP. I expect he had little choice in the matter, and that he also plans to send the VP to the hinterlands at the first opportunity. I'm unclear why so many appear to believe the VP has any influence whatsoever; I believe GWB was the only post-WW2 president who let the VP have any power. ..."
"... What is a populist? Somebody that tries to do what the majority want. Current examples: Less wars and military spending. More infrastructure spending. Less support for banks and corps (imagine how many votes trump would gain if he said 'as pres I will jail bankers that break the law' And how that repudiates Obama and both parties.) Gun control (but not possible from within the rep party) ..."
"... What is a fascist? Somebody that supports corporations, military, and military adventures. ..."
"... Actually, it sounds a whole lot like a different candidate from a different party, doesn't it? ..."
"... Neoliberal "Goodthink" flag. What this means when neoliberals say it is not let's build a better global society for all it means Corporations and our military should be able to run roughshod over the world and the people's of other countries. Exploit their citizens for cheap Labor, destroy their environment and move on. These are the exact policies of Hillary Clinton (see TPP, increase foreign wars etc.). Hillary globalism is not about global Brotherhood it's about global economic and military exploitation. Trump is nationalist non – interventionist, which leads to less global military destruction than hillary and less global exploitation. So who is a better for those outside the US, hillary the interventionist OR trump the non-interventionist? ..."
"... Look, the Clintons are criminals, and their affiliate entities, including the DNC, could be considered criminal enterprises or co-conspirators at this point. ..."
"... The very fact that Establishment, Wall St and Koch bros are behind HRC is evidence that the current 'status quo' will be continued! I cannot stand another 4 years of Hilabama. ..."
"... The striving for American empire has so totally confused the political order of the country that up is down and down is up. The idea of government for and by the people is a distant memory. Covering for lies and contradictions of beliefs has blurred any notion of principles informing public action. ..."
"... If there is any principle that matters today, it is the pursuit of money and profit reigns supreme. Trump is populist in the sense he is talking about bringing money and wealth back to the working classes. Not by giving it directly, but by forcing businesses to turn their sights back to the US proper and return to making their profits at home. In the end, it is all nostalgia and probably impossible, but working class people remember those days so it rings true. That is hope and change in action. People also could care less if he cheats on his taxes or is found out lying about how much he is worth. Once again, fudging your net worth is something working people care little about. Having their share of the pie is all that matters and Trump is tapping into that. ..."
"... The only crime Trump has committed so far is his language. Liberals like Clinton, Blair and Obama drip blood. ..."
"... The 2016 election cannot be looked at in isolation. The wars for profit are spreading from Nigeria through Syria to Ukraine. Turkey was just lost to the Islamists and is on the road to being a failed state. The EU is in an existential crisis due to Brexit, the refugee crisis and austerity. Western leadership is utterly incompetent and failing to protect its citizens. Globalization is failing. Its Losers are tipping over the apple cart. Humans are returning to their tribal roots for safety. The drums for war with Russia are beating. Clinton / Kaine are 100% Status Quo Globalists. Trump / Pence are candidates of change to who knows what. Currently I am planning on voting for the Green Party in the hope it becomes viable and praying that the chaos avoids Maryland. ..."
I've tuned out Warren-she has become the "red meat" surrogate for Clinton. Just because
Taibbi was excellent on exposing Wall St. doesn't mean he really knows s**t about politics. I
find the depiction of Trump as some kind of monster-buffoon to be simply boring and not very helpful.
for all the run around Hillary, Trump's chosen circle of allies are Wall Street and Austerity
enablers. actually, Trump chaos could boost the enablers as easily as Hillary's direct mongering.
War is Money low hanging fruit in this cash strapped era and either directly or indirectly neither
candidate will disappoint.
So I Ask Myself which candidate will the majority manage sustainability while assembling to create
different outcomes? (might be the Trump Chaos bc Hillary will strategically turn our war machine
on us can't believe this is as good as it gets, sighed out)
War is only good for the profiteers when it can be undertaken in another territory. Bringing
the chaos home cannot be good for business. Endless calls for confidence and stability in markets
must reflect the fact that disorder effects more business that the few corporations that benefit
directly from spreading chaos. A split in the business community seems to be underway or at least
a possible leverage point to bring about positive change.
Even the splits in the political class reflect this. Those that benefit from spreading chaos are
loosing strength because they have lost control of where that chaos takes place and who is directly
effected from its implementation. Blowback and collateral damage are finally registering.
Trump may be a disaster. Clinton will be a disaster. One of these two will win. I won't vote
for either, but if you put a gun to my head and forced me to choose, I'd take Trump. He's certainly
not a fascist (I think it was either Vice or Vox that had an article where they asked a bunch
of historians of fascism if he was, the answer was a resounding no), he's a populist in the Andrew
Jackson style. If nothing else Trump will (probably) not start WW3 with Russia.
And war with Russia doesn't depend just on Hillary, it depends on us in Western Europe agreeing
with it.
A laughable proposition. The official US policy, as you may recall, is
fuck the EU .
Where was Europe when we toppled the Ukrainian govt? Get back to me when you can actually spend
2% GDP on your military. At the moment you can't even control your illegal immigrants.
The political parties that survive display adaptability, and ideological consistency isn't
a requirement for that. Look at the party of Lincoln. Or look at the party of FDR.
If the Democrats decapitate the Republican party by bringing in the Kagans of this world and
Republican suburbanites in swing states, then the Republicans will go where the votes are; the
Iron Law of Institutions will drive them to do it, and the purge of the party after Trump will
open the positions in the party for people with that goal.
In a way, what we're seeing now is what should have happened to the Republicans in
2008. The Democrats had the Republicans down on the ground with Obama's boot on their neck. The
Republicans had organized and lost a disastrous war, they had lost the legislative and executive
branches, they were completely discredited ideologically, and they were thoroughly discredited
in the political class and in the press.
Instead, Obama, with his strategy of bipartisanship - good faith or not - gave them a hand
up, dusted them off, and let them right back in the game, by treating them as a legitimate opposition
party. So the Republican day of reckoning was postponed. We got various bids for power by factions
- the Tea Party, now the Liberty Caucus - but none of them came anywhere near taking real power,
despite (click-driven money-raising) Democrat hysteria.
And now the day of reckoning has arrived. Trump went through the hollow institutional shell
of the Republican Party like the German panzers through the French in 1939. And here we are!
(Needless to say, anybody - ***cough*** Ted Cruz ***cough*** - yammering about "conservative
principles" is part of the problem, dead weight, part of the dead past.) I don't know if the Republicans
can remake themselves after Trump; what he's doing is necessary for that, but may not be sufficient.
Republicans won Congress and the states because the Democrats handed them to them on a silver
platter. To Obama and his fan club meaningful power is a hot potato, to be discarded as soon as
plausible.
Having the establishment, the military-industrial complex and Wall Street against him helps
Trump a lot.
Pro-Sanders folks, blacks, and hispanics will mostly vote for Trump.
Having Gov. Pence on the ticket, core Republicans and the silent majority will vote for Trump.
Women deep inside know Trump will help their true interests better than the Clinton-Obama rinse
repeat
Young people, sick and tired of the current obviously rigged system, will vote for change.
You can fool part of the people all the time, and all people part of the time, but Brexit
won, so will Trump, politician extraordinaire
Even Michael Moore gets it
Trump has intimated that he is not going to deal with the nuts and bolts of government,
that will be Pence's job.
Given his family, a Trump presidency may look more like JFK's, where Bobby had more power
than LBJ.
Also, given Trump's negotiating expertise, I would certainly not believe any assertion of support
he proclaims for the VP. I expect he had little choice in the matter, and that he also plans to
send the VP to the hinterlands at the first opportunity. I'm unclear why so many appear to believe
the VP has any influence whatsoever; I believe GWB was the only post-WW2 president who let the
VP have any power.
Minorities will benefit at least as much as whites with infrastructure spending, which trump
says he wants to do It would make him popular, which he likes, why not believe him? And if pres
he would be able to get enough rep votes to get it passed. No chance with Hillary, who anyway
would rather spend on wars, which are mostly fought by minorities.
What is a populist? Somebody that tries to do what the majority want. Current examples:
Less wars and military spending. More infrastructure spending. Less support for banks and corps
(imagine how many votes trump would gain if he said 'as pres I will jail bankers that break the
law' And how that repudiates Obama and both parties.) Gun control (but not possible from within
the rep party)
What is a fascist? Somebody that supports corporations, military, and military adventures.
I'm saying you have a much better chance to pressure Clinton
Sorry, but this argues from facts not in evidence and closely resembles the Correct the Record
troll line (now substantiated through the Wikileaks dump) that Clinton "has to be elected" because
she is at least responsive to progressive concerns.
Except she isn't, and the degree to which the DNC clearly has been trying to pander to disillusioned
Republicans and the amount of bile they spew every time they lament how HRC has had to "veer left"
shows quite conclusively to my mind that, in fact, the opposite of what you say is true.
Also, when NAFTA was being debated in the '90s, the Clintons showed themselves to be remarkably
unresponsive both to the concerns of organized labor (who opposed it) as well as the majority
of the members of their own party, who voted against it. NAFTA was passed only with a majority
of Republican votes.
I have no way of knowing whether you're a troll or sincerely believe this, but either way,
it needs to be pointed out that the historical record actually contradicts your premise. If you
do really believe this, try not to be so easily taken in by crafty rhetoric.
BTW, I'll take Trump's record as a husband over HRC's record as a wife. He loves a woman, then
they break up, and he finds another one. This is not unusual in the US. Hillary, OTOH, "stood
by her man" through multiple publicly humiliating infidelities, including having to settle out
of court for more than $800,000, and rape charges. No problem with her if her husband was flying
many times on the "Lolita Express" with a child molester. Could be she had no idea where her "loved
one" was at the time. Do they in fact sleep in the same bed, or even live in the same house? I
don't know.
RE: calling Donald Trump a "sociopath"-this is another one of those words that is thrown around
carelessly, like "nazi" and "fascist". In the Psychology Today article "How to Spot a Sociopath",
they list 16 key behavioral characteristics. I can't see them in Trump-you could make a case for
a few of them, but not all. For example: "failure to follow any life plan", "sex life impersonal,
trivial, and poorly integrated", "poor judgment and failure to learn by experience", "incapacity
for love"-–you can't reasonably attach these characteristics to The Donald, who, indeed, has a
more impressive and loving progeny than any other prez candidate I can think of.
"I have a sense of international identity as well: we are all brothers and sisters."
Neoliberal "Goodthink" flag. What this means when neoliberals say it is not let's build
a better global society for all it means Corporations and our military should be able to run roughshod
over the world and the people's of other countries. Exploit their citizens for cheap Labor, destroy
their environment and move on. These are the exact policies of Hillary Clinton (see TPP, increase
foreign wars etc.). Hillary globalism is not about global Brotherhood it's about global economic
and military exploitation. Trump is nationalist non – interventionist, which leads to less global
military destruction than hillary and less global exploitation. So who is a better for those outside
the US, hillary the interventionist OR trump the non-interventionist?
"And not everyone feels the same way, but for most voters there is either a strong tribal loyalty
(Dem or Repub) or a weaker sense of "us" guiding the voter on that day.
Mad as I am about the Blue Dogs, I strongly identify with the Dems."
So you recognize you are a tribalist, and assume all the baggage and irrationality that tribalism
often fosters, but instead of addressing your tribalism you embrace it. What you seem to be saying
(to me)is that we should leave critical thinking at the door and become dem tribalists like you.
"But the Repubs and Dems see Wall Street issues through different cultural prisms. Republican
are more reflexively pro-business. It matters."
Hillary Clinton's biggest donors are Wallstreet and her dem. Husband destroyed glass-steagall.
Trump wants to reinstate glass-steagall, so who is more business friendly again?
"He is racist, and so he knows how to push ugly buttons."
This identity politics trope is getting so old. Both are racist just in different ways, Trump
says in your face racist things, which ensure the injustice cannot be ignored, where hillary has
and does support racist policies, that use stealth racism to incrementaly increase the misery
of minorities, while allowing the majority to pretend it's not happening.
"First, he will govern with the Republicans. Republican judges, TPP, military spending, environmental
rollbacks, etc. Trump will not overrule Repubs in Congress."
These are literally hillarys policies not trumps.
Trump: anti TPP, stop foreign interventions, close bases use money for infrastructure.
Hillary :Pro TPP, more interventions and military spending
"And no, no great Left populist party will ride to the rescue. The populist tradition (identity)
is mostly rightwing and racist in our society.
People do not change political identity like their clothes. The left tradition in the US, such
as it is, is in the Dem party."
So what you are saying is quit being stupid, populism is bad and you should vote for hillarys
neoliberalism. The democrats were once left so even if they are no longer left, we must continue
to support them if another party or candidate that is to the left isn't a democrat? Your logic
hurts my head.
Look, the Clintons are criminals, and their affiliate entities, including the DNC, could
be considered criminal enterprises or co-conspirators at this point. Those who haven't realized
that, or worse, who shill for them are willfully ignorant, amoral, or unethical. The fact that
that includes a large chunk of the population doesn't change that. I don't vote for criminals.
The very fact that Establishment, Wall St and Koch bros are behind HRC is evidence that
the current 'status quo' will be continued! I cannot stand another 4 years of Hilabama.
I hate Hillary more than Trump. I want to protest at the Establishment, which at this represented
by Hillary.
Populism (support for popular issues) is, well, popular.
Fascism (support for corps and military adventures) is, at least after our ME adventures, unpopular.
Commenters are expressing support for the person expressing popular views, such as infrastructure
spending, and expressing little support for the candidate they believe is most fascist.
Btw, Most on this site are liberals, few are reps, so to support him they have had to buck
some of their long held antipathy regarding reps.
Right, what is changing with Trump is the Republicans are going back to, say, the Eisenhower
era, when Ike started the interstate highway system, a socialist program if there ever was one.
It's a good article; this is a general observation. Sorry!
"Hate" seems to be a continuing Democrat meme, and heck, who can be for hate? So it makes sense
rhetorically, but in policy terms it's about as sensible as being against @ssh0les (since as the
good book says, ye have the @ssh0les always with you). So we're really looking at virtue signaling
as a mode of reinforcing tribalism, and to be taken seriously only for that reason. If you look
at the political class writing about the working class - modulo writers like Chris Arnade - the
hate is plain as day, though it's covered up with the rhetoric of meritocracy, taking care of
losers, etc.
Strategic hate management is a great concept. It's like hate can never be created or destroyed,
and is there as a resource to be mined or extracted. The Clinton campaign is doing a great job
of strategic hate management right now, by linking Putin and Trump, capitalizing on all the good
work done in the press over the last year or so.
For years we have been told that government should be run like a business. In truth that statement
was used as a cudgel to avoid having the government provide any kind of a safety net to its citizenry
because there was little or no profit in it for the people who think that government largess should
only be for them.
Here's the thing, if government had been run like a business, we the people would own huge
portions of Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and Chase today. We wouldn't have bailed them out without
an equity stake in them. Most cities would have a share of the gate for every stadium that was
built. And rather than paying nothing to the community Walmart would have been paying a share
of their profits (much as those have dropped over the years).
I do not like Trump's business, but he truly does approach his brand and his relationships
as a business. When he says he doesn't like the trade deals because they are bad business and
bad deals he is correct. IF the well being of the United states and his populace are what you
are interested in regarding trade deals, ours are failures. Now most of us here know that was
not the point of the trade deals. They have been a spectacular success for many of our largest
businesses and richest people, but for America as a whole they have increased our trade deficit
and devastated our job base. When he says he won't go there, this is one I believe him on.
I also believe him on NATO and on the whole Russian thing. Why, because of the same reasons
I believe him on Trade. They are not winners for America as a whole. They are bad deals. Europe
is NOT living up to their contractual agreement regarding NATO. For someone who is a believer
in getting the better of the deal that is downright disgusting. And he sees no benefit in getting
into a war with Russia. The whole reserve currency thing vs. nukes is not going to work for him
as a cost benefit analysis of doing it. He is not going to front this because it is a business
loser.
We truly have the worst choices from the main parties in my lifetime. There are many reasons
Trump is a bad candidate. But on these two, he is far more credible and on the better side of
things than the Democratic nominee. And on the few where she might reasonably considered to have
a better position, unfortunately I do not for a moment believe her to be doing more than giving
lip service based on both her record and her character.
Is it your opinion that to have globalisation we must marginalize russia to the extent that
they realize they can't have utopia and make the practical choice of allowing finance capitalism
to guide them to realistic incrementally achieved debt bondage?
The Democratic Party has been inching further and further to the right. Bernie tried to arrest
this drift, but his internal populist rebellion was successfully thwarted by party elite corruption.
The Democratic position is now so far to the right that the Republicans will marginalize themselves
if they try to keep to the right of the Democrats.
But, despite party loyalty or PC slogans, the Democrat's rightward position is now so obvious
that it can be longer disguised by spin. The Trump campaign has demonstrated, the best electoral
strategy for the Republican Party is to leapfrog leftward and campaign from a less corporate position.
This has given space for the re-evaluation of party positions that Trump is enunciating, and the
result is that the Trump is running to the
left of Hillary. How weird is this?
I meant to use right and left to refer generally to elite vs popular. The issue is too big
to discuss without some simplification, and I'm sorry it has distracted from the main issue. On
the face of it, judging from the primaries, the Republican candidates who represented continued
rightward drift were rejected. (Indications are that the same thing happened in the Democratic
Party, but party control was stronger there, and democratic primary numbers will never be known).
The main point I was trying to make is that the Democratic party has been stretching credulity
to the breaking point in claiming to be democratic in any sense, and finally the contradiction
between their statements and actions has outpaced the capabilities of their propaganda. Their
Orwellian program overextended itself. Popular recognition of the disparity has caused a kind
of political "snap" that's initiated a radical reorganization of what used to be the party of
the right (or corporations, or elites, or finance, or "your description here".)
Besides confusion between which issues are right or left for Republicans or Democrats on the
national level, internationally, the breakdown of popular trust in the elites, and the failure
of their propaganda on that scale, is leading to a related worldwide distrust and rejection of
elite policies. This distrust has been percolating in pockets for some time, but it seems it's
now become so widespread that it's practically become a movement.
I suspect, however, there's a Plan B for this situation to restore the proper order. Will be
interesting to see how this plays out.
The striving for American empire has so totally confused the political order of the country
that up is down and down is up. The idea of government for and by the people is a distant memory.
Covering for lies and contradictions of beliefs has blurred any notion of principles informing
public action.
If there is any principle that matters today, it is the pursuit of money and profit reigns
supreme. Trump is populist in the sense he is talking about bringing money and wealth back to
the working classes. Not by giving it directly, but by forcing businesses to turn their sights
back to the US proper and return to making their profits at home. In the end, it is all nostalgia
and probably impossible, but working class people remember those days so it rings true. That is
hope and change in action. People also could care less if he cheats on his taxes or is found out
lying about how much he is worth. Once again, fudging your net worth is something working people
care little about. Having their share of the pie is all that matters and Trump is tapping into
that.
Clintons arrogance is worse because the transcripts probably clearly show her secretly conspiring
with bankers to screw the working people of this country. Trumps misdeeds effect his relationship
to other elites while Clintons directly effect working people.
Such a sorry state of affairs. When all that matters is the pursuit of money and profit, moving
forward will be difficult and full of moral contradictions. Populism needs a new goal. The political
machinery that gives us two pro-business hacks and an ineffectual third party has fundamentally
failed.
The business of America must be redefined, not somehow brought back to a mythical past greatness.
Talk about insanity.
"Bill Clinton has been a disaster for the Democratic Party. Send him packing."
"There's not much the Democrats can do about Mrs. Clinton. She's got a Senate seat for six
years. But there is no need for the party to look to her for leadership. The Democrats need to
regroup, re-establish their strong links to middle-class and working-class Americans, and move
on."
"You can't lead a nation if you are ashamed of the leadership of your party. The Clintons are
a terminally unethical and vulgar couple, and they've betrayed everyone who has ever believed
in them."
"As neither Clinton has the grace to retire from the scene, the Democrats have no choice but
to turn their backs on them. It won't be easy, but the Democrats need to try. If they succeed
they'll deserve the compliment Bill Clinton offered Gennifer Flowers after she lied under oath:
"Good for you." "
Amazing how the New York Times has "evolved" from Herbert's editorial stance of 15 years ago
to their unified editorial/news support for HRC's candacy,
In my view, it is not as if HRC has done anything to redeem herself in the intervening years.
It takes liberals to create a refugee crisis.
What country are we going to bomb back into the stone age this week?
We are very squeamish about offensive language.
We don't mind dropping bombs and ripping people apart with red hot shrapnel.
We are liberals.
Liberal sensibilities were on display in the film "Apocalypse Now".
No writing four letter words on the side of aircraft.
Napalm, white phosphorous and agent orange – no problem.
Liberals are like the English upper class – outward sophistication hiding the psychopath underneath.
They were renowned for their brutality towards slaves, the colonies and the English working class
(men, women and children) but terribly sophisticated when with their own.
Are you a bad language sort of person – Trump
Or a liberal, psychopath, empire builder – Clinton
The only crime Trump has committed so far is his language. Liberals like Clinton, Blair
and Obama drip blood.
Lambert strether said: my view is that the democrat party cannot be saved, but it can be seized.
Absolutely correct.
That is why Trump must be elected. Only then through the broken remains of both Parties can the
frangible Democrat Party be seized and restored.
The 2016 election cannot be looked at in isolation. The wars for profit are spreading from
Nigeria through Syria to Ukraine. Turkey was just lost to the Islamists and is on the road to
being a failed state. The EU is in an existential crisis due to Brexit, the refugee crisis and
austerity. Western leadership is utterly incompetent and failing to protect its citizens. Globalization
is failing. Its Losers are tipping over the apple cart. Humans are returning to their tribal roots
for safety. The drums for war with Russia are beating. Clinton / Kaine are 100% Status Quo Globalists.
Trump / Pence are candidates of change to who knows what. Currently I am planning on voting for
the Green Party in the hope it becomes viable and praying that the chaos avoids Maryland.
"... Because we interpreted the end of the Cold War as the ultimate vindication of America's economic system, we intensified our push toward the next level of capitalism, called globalization. It was presented as a project that would benefit everyone. Instead it has turned out to be a nightmare for many working people. Thanks to "disruption" and the "global supply chain," many American workers who could once support families with secure, decent-paying jobs must now hope they can be hired as greeters at Walmart. Meanwhile, a handful of super-rich financiers manipulate our political system to cement their hold on the nation's wealth. ..."
"... Rather than shifting to a less assertive and more cooperative foreign policy, we continued to insist that America must reign supreme. When we declared that we would not tolerate the emergence of another "peer power," we expected that other countries would blithely obey. Instead they ignore us. We interpret this as defiance and seek to punish the offenders. That has greatly intensified tensions between the United States and the countries we are told to consider our chief adversaries, Russia and China. ..."
Because we interpreted the end of the Cold War as the ultimate vindication
of America's economic system, we intensified our push toward the next level
of capitalism, called globalization. It was presented as a project that
would benefit everyone. Instead it has turned out to be a nightmare for
many working people. Thanks to "disruption" and the "global supply chain,"
many American workers who could once support families with secure, decent-paying
jobs must now hope they can be hired as greeters at Walmart. Meanwhile,
a handful of super-rich financiers manipulate our political system to cement
their hold on the nation's wealth.
Enrique Ferro's insight:
Moments of change require adaptation, but the United States is not good
at adapting. We are used to being in charge. This blinded us to the reality
that as other countries began rising, our relative power would inevitably
decline. Rather than shifting to a less assertive and more cooperative
foreign policy, we continued to insist that America must reign supreme.
When we declared that we would not tolerate the emergence of another "peer
power," we expected that other countries would blithely obey. Instead they
ignore us. We interpret this as defiance and seek to punish the offenders.
That has greatly intensified tensions between the United States and the
countries we are told to consider our chief adversaries, Russia and China.
This is downright sickening and the people who are voting for Hillary will not even care what will
happen with the USA iif she is elected.
By attacking Trump using "Khan gambit" she risks a violent backlash (And not only via Wikileaks,
which already promised to release information about her before the elections)
People also start to understand that she is like Trump. He destroyed several hundred American lifes
by robbing them, exploiting their vanity (standard practice in the USA those days) via Trump University
scam. She destroyed the whole country -- Libya and is complicit in killing Khaddafi (who, while not
a nice guy, was keeping the country together and providing be highest standard of living in Africa for
his people).
In other words she is a monster and sociopath. He probably is a narcissist too. So there is no much
phychological difference between them. And we need tight proportions to judge this situation if we are
talking about Hillary vs Trump.
As for people voting for Trump -- yes they will. I think if Hillary goes aganst Trump, the female
neoliberal monster will be trumped. She has little chances even taking into account the level of brainwashing
in the USA (which actually is close to those that existed in the USSR).
Notable quotes:
"... The reason Trump and Sanders are doing well in the US while fascists are doing well in Europe is the same reason: neoliberalism has gutted, or is in the process of gutting, societies. Workers and other formerly "safe" white collar workers are seeing their job security, income security, retirement security all go up in smoke. Neoliberals are trying to snip and cut labor protections, healthcare, environmental regulations all for corporate profit. In Europe this is all in addition to a massive refugee crisis itself brought on by neoliberalism (neocon foreign policy is required for neoliberal social policy, they go hand-in-hand). The US and NATO destabilize countries with the intent of stealing their resources and protecting their markets, cause massive refugee flows which strain social structures in Europe (which falls right into the hands of the gutters and cutters of neoliberalism). Of course the people will lean fascist. ..."
"... U.S. Government Tried to Tackle Gun Violence in 1960s ..."
"... Another key feature of fascism is territorial expansionism. As far as I am aware, none of the nationalist parties advocate invading other countries or retaking former colonies. Once again, contemporary neoliberalism is far closer to fascism. But you are correct about both Israel and Turkey – our allies. They are much closer to the genuine article. But you won't hear those complaining about the rise of fascism in Europe complaining too much about them. ..."
"... The only way they have avoided complete revolt has been endless borrowing to fund entitlements, once that one-time fix plays out the consequences will be apparent. The funding mechanism itself (The Fed) has even morphed into a neo-liberal tool designed to enrich Capital while enslaving Labor with the consequences. ..."
"... "Every society chooses how resources are allocated between capital and labor." More specifically, isn't it a struggle between various political/economic/cultural movements within a society which chooses how resources are allocated between capital and labor. ..."
"... My objection to imprecise language here isn't merely pedantic. The leftist dismissal of right wing populists like Trump (or increasingly influential European movements like Ukip, AfD, and the Front national) as "fascist" is a reductionist rhetorical device intended to marginalize them by implying their politics are so far outside of the mainstream that they do not need to be taken seriously. ..."
"... " the gutters and cutters of neoliberalism" ..."
"... The neoliberals are all too aware that the clock is ticking. In this morning's NYT, yet more talk of ramming TPP through in the lame duck. ..."
"... The roads here are deteriorating FAST. In Price County, the road commissioner said last night that their budget allows for resurfacing all the roads on a 200 year basis. ..."
"... This Trump support seems like a form of political vandalism with Trump as the spray paint. People generally feel frustrated with government, utterly powerless and totally left out as the ranks of the precariat continue to grow. Trump appeals to the nihilistic tendencies of some people who, like frustrated teens, have decided to just smashed things up for the hell of it. They think a presidency mix of Caligula with Earl Scheib would be a funny hoot. ..."
"... Someone at American Conservative, when trying to get at why it's pointless to tell people Trump will wreck the place, described him as a "hand grenade" lobbed into the heart of government. You can't scare people with his crass-ness and destructive tendencies, because that's precisely what his voters are counting on when/if he gets into government. ..."
"... In other words, the MSM's fear is the clearest sign to these voters that their ..."
"... Your phrase "Trump is political vandalism" is great. I don't think I've seen a better description. NPR this morning was discussing Trump and his relationship with the press and the issues some GOP leaders have with him. When his followers were discussed, the speakers closely circled your vandalism point. Basically they said that his voters are angry with the power brokers and leaders in DC and regardless of whether they think Trump's statements are heartfelt or just rhetoric, they DO know he will stick it to those power brokers so that's good. Vandalism by a longer phrase. ..."
"... Meritocracy was ALWAYS a delusional fraud. What you invariably get, after a couple of generations, is a clique of elitists who define merit as themselves and reproduce it ad nauseam. Who still believes in such laughable kiddie stories? ..."
"... Campaign Finance Reform: If you can't walk into a voting booth you cannot contribute, or make all elections financed solely by government funds and make private contributions of any kind to any politician illegal. ..."
"... Re-institute Glass-Steagall but even more so. Limit the number of states a bank can operate in. Make the Fed publicly owned, not privately owned by banks. Completely revise corporate law, doing away with the legal person hood of corporations and limit of liability for corporate officers and shareholders. ..."
"... Single payer health care for everyone. Allow private health plans but do away with health insurance as a deductible for business. Remove the AMA's hold on licensing of medical schools which restricts the number of doctors. ..."
"... Do away with the cap on Social Security wages and make all income, wages, capital gains, interest, and dividends subject to taxation. Impose tariffs to compensate for lower labor costs overseas and revise industry. ..."
"... Cut the Defense budget by 50% and use that money for intensive infrastructure development. ..."
"... Raise the national minimum wage to $15 and hour. ..."
"... Severely curtail the revolving door from government to private industry with a 10 year restriction on working for an industry you dealt with in any way as a government official. ..."
"... Free public education including college (4 year degree). ..."
"... Obama and Holder, allowing the banks to be above the law have them demi-gods, many of whom are psychopaths and kleptocrats, and with their newly granted status, they are now re-shaping the world in their own image. Prosecute these demi-gods and restore sanity. Don't and their greed for our things will never end until nothings left. ..."
"... This is why Hillary is so much more dangerous than trump, because she and the demi gods are all on the same page. The TPP is their holy grail so I expect heaven and earth to be moved, especially if it looks like some trade traitors are going to get knocked off in the election, scoundrels like patty murray (dino, WA) will push to get it through then line up at the feed trough to gorge on k street dough. I plan to vote stein if it's not Bernie, but am reserving commitment until I see what kind of betrayals the dems have for me, if it's bad enough I'll go with the trump hand grenade. ..."
"... Totally agree tegnost, no more democratic neoliberals -- ..."
"... "they are now re-shaping the world in their own image" Isn't this intrinsic to bourgeois liberalism? ..."
"... Two things are driving our troubles: over-population and globalization. The plutocrats and kleptocrats have all the leverage over the rest of us laborers when the population of human beings has increased seven-fold in the last 70 years, from a little over a billion to seven billions (and growing) today. They are happy to let us freeze to death behind gas stations in order for them to compete with other oligarchs in excess consumption. ..."
"... Thank you for mentioning the third rail of overpopulation. Too often, this giant category of problems is ignored, because it makes people uncomfortable. The planet is finite, resources on the planet are finite, yet the number of people keeps growing. We need to strive for a higher quality of life, not a higher quantity of people. ..."
"... The issue goes beyond "current neoliberals up for election", it is most of our political establishment that has been corrupted by a system that provides for the best politicians money can buy. ..."
"... America has always been a country where a majority of the population has been poor. With the exception of a fifty five year(1950-2005) year period where access to large quantities of consumer debt by households was deployed to first to provide a wealth illusion to keep socialism at bay, followed by a mortgage debt boom to both keep the system afloat and strip the accumulated capital of the working class, i.e. home equity, the history of the US has been one of poverty for the masses. ..."
"... Further debt was foisted on the working class in the form of military Keynesianism, generating massive fiscal deficits which are to be paid for via austerity in a neo-feudal economy. ..."
The first comment gives a window into the hidden desperation in America that is showing up in statistics
like increasing opioid addiction and suicides, rather than in accounts of how and why so many people
are suffering. I hope readers will add their own observations in comments.
We recently took three months to travel the southern US from coast to coast. As an expat for
the past twenty years, beyond the eye opening experience it left us in a state of shock. From
a homeless man convulsing in the last throes of hypothermia (been there) behind a fuel station
in Houston (the couldn't care less attendant's only preoccupation getting our RV off his premises),
to the general squalor of near-homelessness such as the emergence of "American favelas" a block
away from gated communities or affluent ran areas, to transformation of RV parks into permanent
residencies for the foreclosed who have but their trailer or RV left, to social study one can
engage while queuing at the cash registers of a Walmart before beneficiaries of SNAP.
Stopping to take the time to talk and attempt to understand their predicament and their beliefs
as to the cause of their plight is a dizzying experience in and of itself. For a moment I felt
transposed to the times of the Cold War, when the Iron Curtain dialectics fuzzed the perception
of that other world to the west with a structured set of beliefs designed to blacken that horizon
as well as establish a righteous belief in their own existential paradigm.
What does that have to do with education? Everything if one considers the elitist trend that
is slowly setting the framework of tomorrow's society. For years I have felt there is a silent
"un-avowed conspiracy", why the seeming redundancy, because it is empirically driven as a by-product
of capitalism's surge and like a self-redeeming discount on a store shelf crystalizes a group
identity of think-alike know-little or nothing frustrated citizens easily corralled by a Fox or
Trump piper. We have re-rcreated the conditions or rather the reality of "Poverty In America"
barely half a century after its first diagnostic with one major difference : we are now feeding
the growth of the "underclass" by lifting ever higher and out of reach the upward mobility ladder,
once the banner of opportunity now fallen behind the supposedly sclerotic welfare states of Europe.
So Richard Cohen now fears American voters because of Trump. Well, on Diane Reem today (NPR)
was a discussion on why fascist parties are growing in Europe. Both Cohen and the clowns on NPR
missed the forest for the trees. The reason Trump and Sanders are doing well in the US while
fascists are doing well in Europe is the same reason: neoliberalism has gutted, or is in the process
of gutting, societies. Workers and other formerly "safe" white collar workers are seeing their
job security, income security, retirement security all go up in smoke. Neoliberals are trying
to snip and cut labor protections, healthcare, environmental regulations all for corporate profit.
In Europe this is all in addition to a massive refugee crisis itself brought on by neoliberalism
(neocon foreign policy is required for neoliberal social policy, they go hand-in-hand). The US
and NATO destabilize countries with the intent of stealing their resources and protecting their
markets, cause massive refugee flows which strain social structures in Europe (which falls right
into the hands of the gutters and cutters of neoliberalism). Of course the people will lean fascist.
In the US we don't have the refugees, but the neoliberalism is further along and more damaging.
There's no mystery here or in Europe, just the natural effects of governments failing to represent
real people in favor of useless eater rich.
Make the people into commodities, endanger their washes and job security, impose austerity,
and tale in floods of refugees. Of COURSE Europeans stay leaning fascist.
According to NPR's experts, many or most of those parties are "fascist". The fascist label
is getting tossed around a LOT right now. It is slung at Trump, at UKIP, or any others. Fascist
is what you call the opposition party to the right that you oppose. Now I don't call Trump a fascist.
A buffoon, yes, even a charlatan (I still rather doubt he really originally thought he would become
the GOP nominee. Perhaps I'm wrong but, like me, many seemed to think that he was pushing his
"brand" – a term usage of which I HATE because it IS like we are all commodities or businesses
rather than PEOPLE – and that he would drop by the wayside and profit from his publicity).
Be that as it may, NPR and Co were discussing the rise of fascist/neofascist parties and wondering
why there were doing so well. Easy answer: neoliberalism + refugee hoards = what you see in Europe.
I've also blamed a large part of today's gun violence in the USA on the fruits of neoliberalism.
Why? Same reason that ugly right-wing groups (fascist or not) are gaining ground around the Western
world. Neoliberalism destroys societies. It destroys the connections within societies (the USA
in this case). Because we have guns handy, the result is mass shootings and flashes of murder-suicides.
This didn't happen BEFORE neoliberalism got its hooks into American society. The guns were there,
always have been (when I was a teen I recall seeing gun mags advertising various "assault weapons"
for sale this was BEFORE Reagan and this was BEFORE mass shootings, etc). Machine guns were much
easier to come by BEFORE the 1980s yet we didn't have mass killings with machine guns, handguns,
or shotguns. ALL that stuff is a NEW disease. A disease rooted in neoliberalism. Neoliberalism
steals your job security, your healthcare security, your home, your retirement security, your
ability to provide for your family, your ability to send your kids to college, your ability to
BUY FOOD. Neoliberalism means you don't get to work for a company for 20 years and then see the
company pay you back for that long, good service with a pension. You'll be lucky to hold a job
at any company from month-to-month now and FORGET about benefits! Healthcare? Going by the wayside
too. Workers in the past felt a bond with each other, especially within a company. Neoliberalism
has turned all workers against each other because they have to fight to gain any of the scraps
being tossed out by the rich overlords. You can't work TOGETHER to gain mutual benefit, you need
to fight each other in a zero sum game. For ME to win you have to lose. You are a commodity. A
disposable and irrelevant widget. THAT combines with guns (that have always been available!) and
you get desperate acting out: mass shootings, murder suicides, etc.
There are actual fascist parties in Europe. To name a few in one country I've followed, Ukraine,
there's Right Sector, Svoboda, and others, and that's just one country. I don't think anyone calls
UKIP fascist.
@Praedor – Your comment that Yves posted and this one are excellent. One of the most succinct
statements of neoliberalism and its worst effects that I have seen.
As to the cause of recent mass gun violence, I think you have truly nailed it. If one thinks
at all about the ways in which the middle class and lower have been squeezed and abused, it's
no wonder that a few of them would turn to violence. It's the same despair and frustration that
leads to higher suicide rates, higher rates of opiate addiction and even decreased life expectancy.
"Machine guns were much easier to come by BEFORE the 1980s yet we didn't have mass killings
with machine guns, handguns, or shotguns. ALL that stuff is a NEW disease. A disease rooted in
neoliberalism."
Easy availability of guns was seen as a serious problem long before the advent of neoliberalism.
For one example of articles about this, see U.S. Government Tried to Tackle Gun Violence in
1960s . Other examples include 1920s and 1930s gangster and mob violence that were a consequence
of Prohibition (of alcohol). While gun violence per-capita might be increasing, the population
is far larger today, and the news media select incidents of violence to make them seem like they're
happening everywhere and that everyone needs to be afraid. That, of course, instills a sense of
insecurity and fear into the public mind; thus, a fearful public want a strong leader and are
willing to accept the inconvenience and dangers of a police state for protection.
America has plenty of refugees, from Latin America
Neo-liberal goes back to the Monroe Doctrine. We used to tame our native workers with immigrants,
and we still do, but we also tame them by globalism in trade. So many rationalizations for this,
based on political and economic propaganda. All problems caused by the same cause American predatory
behavior. And our great political choice iron fist with our without velvet glove.
Germany, Belgium, France, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Turkey, Israel, Australia come to mind
(if one is allowed to participate in a European song contest, one is supposed to be part of Europe
:) They all have more or less fascist governments.
Once you realize that the ECB creates something like 60 billion euros a month, and gives nothing
to its citizens nor its nation-states, that means the money goes to corporations, which means
that the ECB, and by extension the whole EU, is a fascist construct (fascism being defined as
a government running on behalf of the corporations).
That's a fallacy. Corporatism is a feature of fascism, not the other way around.
None of the governments you mention, with the possible exception of Israel and Turkey, can
be called fascist in any meaningful sense.
Even the anti-immigration parties in the Western European countries you mention – AfD, Front
National, Vlaams Belang – only share their nationalism with fascist movements. And they are decidedly
anti-corporatist.
The problem here is one of semantics, really. You're using "fascist" interchangeably with "authoritarian",
which is a misnomer for these groups. The EU is absolutely anti-democratic, authoritarian, and
technocratic in a lot of respects, but it's not fascist. Both have corporatist tendencies, but
fascist corporatism was much more radical, much more anti-capitalist (in the sense that the capitalist
class was expected to subordinate itself to the State as the embodiment of the will of the Nation
or People, as were the other classes/corporate units). EU technocratic corporatism has none of
the militarism, the active fiscal policy, the drive for government supported social cohesion,
the ethno-nationalism, or millenarianism of Fascism.
The emergent Right parties like UKIP, FNP, etc. share far more with the Fascists, thought I'd
say they generally aren't yet what Fascists would have recognized as other Fascists in the way
that the NSDAP and Italian Fascists recognized each other -perhaps they're more like fellow travelers.
True, I posted a few minutes ago saying roughly the same thing – but it seems to have gone
to moderation.
Another key feature of fascism is territorial expansionism. As far as I am aware, none
of the nationalist parties advocate invading other countries or retaking former colonies. Once
again, contemporary neoliberalism is far closer to fascism. But you are correct about both Israel
and Turkey – our allies. They are much closer to the genuine article. But you won't hear those
complaining about the rise of fascism in Europe complaining too much about them.
When I was young, there were 4 divisions:
* who owned the means of production (public or private entities)
* who decided what those means were used for.
If it is a 'public entity' (aka government or regime) that decides what is built, we have a totalitarian
state, which can be 'communist' (if the means also belong the public entities like the government
or regional fractions of it) or 'fascist' (if the factories are still in private hands).
If it is the private owner of the production capacity who decides what is built, you get capitalism.
I don't recall any examples of private entities deciding what to do with public means of production
(mafia perhaps).
Sheldon Wolin
introduced
us to inverted totalitarism. While it is no longer the government that decides what must be
done, the private 'owners' just buy the government, the judiciary, the press, or whatever is needed
to achieve their means.
When I cite Germany, it is not so much AfD, but the 2€/hour jobs I am worried about. When I cite
Belgium, it is not the fools of Vlaams Belang, but rather the un-taxing of corporations and the
tear-down of social justice that worries me.
But Jeff, is Wolin accurate in using the term "inverted totalitarianism" to try to capture
the nature of our modern extractive bureaucratic monolith that apparently functions in an environment
where "it is no longer the government that decides what must be done..simply.."private owners
just buy the government, the judiciary, the press, or whatever is needed to achieve their means."
Mirowski argues quite persuasively that the neoliberal ascendency does not represent the retreat
of the State but its remaking to strongly support a particular conception of a market society
that is imposed with the help of the State on our society.
For Mirowski, neoliberalism is definitely not politically libertarian or opposed to strong
state intervention in the economy and society.
Inverted totalitarianism is the mirror image of fascism, which is why so many are confused.
Fascism is just a easier term to use and more understandable by all. There is not a strict adherence
to fascism going on, but it's still totalitarian just the same.
Hi
I live in Europe as well, and what to think of Germany's AfD, Greece's Golden Dawn, the Wilder's
party in the Netherlands etc. Most of them subscribe to the freeloading, sorry free trading economic
policies of neoliberalism.
There's LePen in France and the far-right, fascist leaning party nearly won in Austria. The
far right in Greece as well. There's clearly a move to the far right in Europe. And then there's
the totalitarian mess that is Turkey. How much further this turn to a fascist leaning right goes
and how widespread remains to be seen, but it's clearly underway.
Searched 'current fascist movements europe' and got these active groups from wiki.
National Bolshevik Party-Belarus
Parti Communautaire National-Européen Belgium
Bulgarian National Alliance Bulgaria
Nova Hrvatska Desnica Croatia
Ustaše Croatia
National Socialist Movement of Denmark
La Cagoule France
National Democratic Party of Germany
Fascism and Freedom Movement – Italy
Fiamma Tricolore Italy
Forza Nuova Italy
Fronte Sociale Nazionale Italy
Movimento Fascismo e Libertŕ Italy
Pērkonkrusts Latvia
Norges Nasjonalsosialistiske Bevegelse Norway
National Radical Camp (ONR) Poland
National Revival of Poland (NOP)
Polish National Community-Polish National Party (PWN-PSN)
Noua Dreaptă Romania
Russian National Socialist Party(formerly Russian National Union)
Barkashov's Guards Russia
National Socialist Society Russia
Nacionalni stroj Serbia
Otačastveni pokret Obraz Serbia
Slovenska Pospolitost Slovakia
Espańa 2000 Spain
Falange Espańola Spain
Nordic Realm Party Sweden
National Alliance Sweden
Swedish Resistance Movement Sweden
National Youth Sweden
Legion Wasa Sweden
SPAS Ukraine
Blood and Honour UK
British National Front UK
Combat 18 UK
League of St. George UK
National Socialist Movement UK
Nationalist Alliance UK
November 9th Society UK
Racial Volunteer Force UK
"Fascism" has become the prefered term of abuse applied indiscriminately by the right thinking
to any person or movement which they want to tar as inherently objectionable, and which can therefore
be dismissed without the tedium of actually engaging with them at the level of ideas.
Most of the people who like to throw this word around couldn't give you a coherant definition
of what exactly they understand it to signify, beyond "yuck!!"
In fairness even students of political ideology have trouble teasing out a cosistent system
of beliefs, to the point where some doubt fascism is even a coherent ideology. That hardly excuses
the intellectual vacuity of those who use it as a term of abuse, however.
Precisely 3,248 angels can fit on the head of a pin. Parsing the true definition of "fascism"
is a waste of time, broadly, fascism is an alliance of the state, the corporation, and the military,
anyone who doesn't see that today needs to go back to their textbooks.
As far as the definition "neo-liberalism" goes, yes it's a useful label. But let's keep it
simple: every society chooses how resources are allocated between Capital and Labor. The needle
has been pegged over on the Capital side for quite some time, my "start date" is when Reagan busted
the air traffic union. The hideous Republicans managed to sell their base that policies that were
designed to let companies be "competitive" were somehow good for them, not just for the owners
of the means of production.
The only way they have avoided complete revolt has been endless borrowing to fund entitlements,
once that one-time fix plays out the consequences will be apparent. The funding mechanism itself
(The Fed) has even morphed into a neo-liberal tool designed to enrich Capital while enslaving
Labor with the consequences.
"Every society chooses how resources are allocated between capital and labor." More specifically,
isn't it a struggle between various political/economic/cultural movements within a society which
chooses how resources are allocated between capital and labor.
Take, for example, the late 1880s-1890s in the U.S. During that time-frame there were powerful
agrarian populists movements and the beginnings of some labor/socialist movements from below,
while from above the property-production system was modified by a powerful political movement
advocating for more corporate administered markets over the competitive small-firm capitalism
of an earlier age.
It was this movement for corporate administered markets which won the battle and defeated/absorbed
the agrarian populists.
What are the array of such forces in 2016? What type of movement doe Trump represent? Sanders?
Clinton?
fascism is an alliance of the state, the corporation, and the military, anyone who doesn't
see that today needs to go back to their textbooks
Which textbooks specifically?
The article I cited above in Vox canvasses the opinion of five serious students of fascism,
and none of them believe Trump is a fascist. I'd be most interested in knowing what you
have been reading.
As for your definition of "fascism", it's obviously so vague and broad that it really doesn't
explain anything. To the extent it contains any insight it is that public institutions (the state),
private businesses (the corporation) and the armed forces all exert significant influence on public
policy. That and a buck and and a half will get you a cup of coffee. If anything it is merely
a very crude descriptive model of the political process. It doesn't define fascism as a particular
set of beliefs that make it a distinct political ideology that can be differentiated from other
ideologies (again, see the Vox article for a discussion of some of the beliefs that are arguably
characteristic of fascist movements). Indeed by your standard virtually every state that has ever
existed has to a greater or lesser extent been "fascist".
My objection to imprecise language here isn't merely pedantic. The leftist dismissal of
right wing populists like Trump (or increasingly influential European movements like Ukip, AfD,
and the Front national) as "fascist" is a reductionist rhetorical device intended to marginalize
them by implying their politics are so far outside of the mainstream that they do not need to
be taken seriously. Given that these movements are only growing in strength as faith in traditional
political movements and elites evaporate this is likely to produce exactly the opposite result.
Right wing populism isn't going to disappear just because the left keeps trying to wish it away.
Refusing to accept this basic political fact risks condemning the left rather than "the fascists"
to political irrelevance.
I moved to a small city/town in Iowa almost 20 years ago. Then, it still had something of a
Norman Rockwell quality to it, particularly in a sense of egalitarianism, and also some small
factory jobs which still paid something beyond a bare existence.
Since 2000, many of those jobs have left, and the population of the county has declined by
about 10%. Kmart, Penney's, and Sears have left as payday/title loan outfits, pawnshops, smoke
shops, and used car dealers have all proliferated.
Parts of the town now resemble a combination of Appalachia and Detroit. Sanders easily won
the caucuses here and, no, his supporters were hardly the latte sippers of someone's imagination,
but blue collar folks of all ages.
My tale is similar to yours. About 2 years ago, I accepted a transfer from Chicagoland to north
central Wisconsin. JC Penney left a year and a half ago, and Sears is leaving in about 3-4 months.
Kmart is long gone.
I was back at the old homestead over Memorial Day, and it's as if time has stood still. Home
prices still going up; people out for dinner like crazy; new & expensive automobiles everywhere.
But driving out of Chicagoland, and back through rural Wisconsin it is unmistakeable.
2 things that are new: The roads here are deteriorating FAST. In Price County, the road
commissioner said last night that their budget allows for resurfacing all the roads on a 200 year
basis. (Yes, that means there is only enough money to resurface all the county roads if spread
out over 200 years.) 2nd, there are dead deer everywhere on the side of the road. In years past,
they were promptly cleaned up by the highway department. Not any more. Gross, but somebody has
to do the dead animal clean up. (Or not. Don't tell Snotty Walker though.)
Anyway, not everything is gloom and doom. People seem outwardly happy. But if you're paying
attention, signs of stress and deterioration are certainly out there.
This Trump support seems like a form of political vandalism with Trump as the spray paint.
People generally feel frustrated with government, utterly powerless and totally left out as the
ranks of the precariat continue to grow. Trump appeals to the nihilistic tendencies of some people
who, like frustrated teens, have decided to just smashed things up for the hell of it. They think
a presidency mix of Caligula with Earl Scheib would be a funny hoot.
You also have the more gullible fundis who have actually deluded themselves into thinking the
man who is ultimate symbol of hedonism will deliver them from secularism because he says he will.
Authoritarians who seek solutions through strong leaders are usually the easiest to con because
they desperately want to believe in their eminent deliverance by a human deus ex machina. Plus
he is ostentatiously rich in a comfortably tacky way and a TV celebrity beats a Harvard law degree.
And why not the thinking goes the highly vaunted elite college Acela crowd has pretty much made
a pig's breakfast out of things. So much for meritocracy. Professor Harold Hill is going to give
River City a boys band.
Someone at American Conservative, when trying to get at why it's pointless to tell people
Trump will wreck the place, described him as a "hand grenade" lobbed into the heart of government.
You can't scare people with his crass-ness and destructive tendencies, because that's precisely
what his voters are counting on when/if he gets into government.
In other words, the MSM's fear is the clearest sign to these voters that their
political revolution is working. Since TPTB decided peaceful change (i.e. Sanders) was a non-starter,
then they get to reap the whirlwind.
Your phrase "Trump is political vandalism" is great. I don't think I've seen a better description.
NPR this morning was discussing Trump and his relationship with the press and the issues some
GOP leaders have with him. When his followers were discussed, the speakers closely circled your
vandalism point. Basically they said that his voters are angry with the power brokers and leaders
in DC and regardless of whether they think Trump's statements are heartfelt or just rhetoric,
they DO know he will stick it to those power brokers so that's good. Vandalism by a longer phrase.
Meritocracy was ALWAYS a delusional fraud. What you invariably get, after a couple of generations,
is a clique of elitists who define merit as themselves and reproduce it ad nauseam. Who still
believes in such laughable kiddie stories?
Besides, consumers need to learn to play the long game and suck up the "scurrilous attacks"
on their personal consumption habits for the next four years. The end of abortion for four years
is not important - lern2hand and lern2agency, and lern2cutyourrapist if it comes to that. What
is important is that the Democratic Party's bourgeois yuppie constituents are forced to defend
against GOP attacks on their personal and cultural interests with wherewithal that would have
been ordinarily spent to attend to their sister act with their captive constituencies.
If bourgeois Democrats hadn't herded us into a situation where individuals mean nothing outside
of their assigned identity groups and their corporate coalition duopoly, they wouldn't be reaping
the whirlwind today. Why, exactly, should I be sympathetic to exploitative parasites such as the
middle class?
There are all good ideas. However, population growth undermines almost all of them. Population
growth in America is immigrant based. Reverse immigration influxes and you are at least doing
something to reduce population growth.
How to "reverse immigration influxes"?
Stop accepting refugees. It's outrageous that refugees from for example, Somalia,
get small business loans, housing assistance, food stamps and lifetime SSI benefits while some
of our veterans are living on the street.
No more immigration amnesties of any kind.
Deport all illegal alien criminals.
Practice "immigrant family unification" in the country of origin. Even if you have
to pay them to leave. It's less expensive in the end.
Eliminate tax subsidies to American corn growers who then undercut Mexican farmers'
incomes through NAFTA, driving them into poverty and immigration north. Throw Hillary Clinton
out on her ass and practice political and economic justice to Central America.
I too am a lifetime registered Democrat and I will vote for Trump if Clinton gets the crown.
If the Democrats want my vote, my continuing party registration and my until recently sizeable
donations in local, state and national races, they will nominate Bernie. If not, then I'm an Independent
forevermore. They will just become the Demowhig Party.
Campaign Finance Reform: If you can't walk into a voting booth you cannot contribute,
or make all elections financed solely by government funds and make private contributions of
any kind to any politician illegal.
Re-institute Glass-Steagall but even more so. Limit the number of states a bank can
operate in. Make the Fed publicly owned, not privately owned by banks.
Completely revise corporate law, doing away with the legal person hood of corporations
and limit of liability for corporate officers and shareholders.
Single payer health care for everyone. Allow private health plans but do away with
health insurance as a deductible for business. Remove the AMA's hold on licensing of medical
schools which restricts the number of doctors.
Do away with the cap on Social Security wages and make all income, wages, capital gains,
interest, and dividends subject to taxation.
Impose tariffs to compensate for lower labor costs overseas and revise industry.
Cut the Defense budget by 50% and use that money for intensive infrastructure development.
Raise the national minimum wage to $15 and hour.
Severely curtail the revolving door from government to private industry with a 10 year
restriction on working for an industry you dealt with in any way as a government official.
Free public education including college (4 year degree).
Obama and Holder, allowing the banks to be above the law have them demi-gods, many of whom
are psychopaths and kleptocrats, and with their newly granted status, they are now re-shaping
the world in their own image. Prosecute these demi-gods and restore sanity. Don't and their greed
for our things will never end until nothings left.
This is why Hillary is so much more dangerous than trump, because she and the demi gods
are all on the same page. The TPP is their holy grail so I expect heaven and earth to be moved,
especially if it looks like some trade traitors are going to get knocked off in the election,
scoundrels like patty murray (dino, WA) will push to get it through then line up at the feed trough
to gorge on k street dough. I plan to vote stein if it's not Bernie, but am reserving commitment
until I see what kind of betrayals the dems have for me, if it's bad enough I'll go with the trump
hand grenade.
Totally agree tegnost, no more democratic neoliberals -- Patty Murray (up for re-election)
and Cantwell are both trade traitors and got fast track passed.
Two things are driving our troubles: over-population and globalization. The plutocrats
and kleptocrats have all the leverage over the rest of us laborers when the population of human
beings has increased seven-fold in the last 70 years, from a little over a billion to seven billions
(and growing) today. They are happy to let us freeze to death behind gas stations in order for
them to compete with other oligarchs in excess consumption.
This deserves a longer and more thoughtful comment, but I don't have the time this morning.
I have to fight commute traffic, because the population of my home state of California has doubled
from 19M in 1970 to an estimated 43M today (if you count the Latin American refugees and H1B's).
Thank you for mentioning the third rail of overpopulation. Too often, this giant category
of problems is ignored, because it makes people uncomfortable. The planet is finite, resources
on the planet are finite, yet the number of people keeps growing. We need to strive for a higher
quality of life, not a higher quantity of people.
The issue goes beyond "current neoliberals up for election", it is most of our political
establishment that has been corrupted by a system that provides for the best politicians money
can buy.
In the 1980's I worked inside the beltway witnessing the new cadre of apparatchiks that drove
into town on the Reagan coattails full of moral a righteousness that became deviant, parochial,
absolutist and for whom bi-partisan approaches to policy were scorned prodded on by new power
brokers promoting their gospels in early morning downtown power breakfasts. Sadly our politicians
no longer serve but seek a career path in our growing meritocratic plutocracy.
America has always been a country where a majority of the population has been poor. With
the exception of a fifty five year(1950-2005) year period where access to large quantities of
consumer debt by households was deployed to first to provide a wealth illusion to keep socialism
at bay, followed by a mortgage debt boom to both keep the system afloat and strip the accumulated
capital of the working class, i.e. home equity, the history of the US has been one of poverty
for the masses.
Further debt was foisted on the working class in the form of military Keynesianism, generating
massive fiscal deficits which are to be paid for via austerity in a neo-feudal economy.
"... Money, it seems to him, has somehow changed its role. It has "increased" (is that possible, he asks?) while at the same time it has become concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. It appears to seek to become an autonomous and dominating sector of economic life, functionally separated from production of real things, almost all of which seem to come from faraway places. "Real" actually begins to change its meaning, another topic more interesting still. This devotion to the world of money-making-money seems to have obsessed the lives of many of the most "important" Americans. Entire TV networks are devoted to it. They talk about esoteric financial instruments that to the ordinary citizen look more like exotically placed bets-on-credit in the casino than genuine ways to grow real-world business, jobs, wages, and family income. The few who are in position to master the game live material lives that were beyond what almost any formerly "wealthy" man or woman in Rip's prior life could even imagine ..."
"... children gone away and lost to either the relentless rootlessness of the trans-national economy or the virtual hell-world of meth and opioids and heroin and unending underemployed hopelessness. ..."
"... "If public life can suffer a metaphysical blow, the death of the labor question was that blow. For millions of working people, it amputated the will to resist." ..."
"... It's a Wonderful Life ..."
"... as educators ..."
"... OK, so I hear some of you saying, corporate America will never let this Civic Media get off the ground. My short answer to this is that corporations do what makes money for them, and in today's despairing political climate there's money to be made in sponsoring something truly positive, patriotic and constructive. ..."
"... I am paying an exorbitant subscription for the UK Financial Times at the moment. Anyway, the good news is that very regular articles are appearing where you can almost feel the panic at the populist uprisings. ..."
"... The kernel of Neoliberal Ideology: "There is no such a thing as society." (Margaret Thatcher). ..."
"... "In this postindustrial world not only is the labor question no longer asked, not only is proletarian revolution passé, but the proletariat itself seems passé. And the invisibles who nonetheless do indeed live there have internalized their nonexistence, grown demoralized, resentful, and hopeless; if they are noticed at all, it is as objects of public disdain. What were once called "blue-collar aristocrats"-skilled workers in the construction trades, for example-have long felt the contempt of the whole white-collar world. ..."
"... Or, we could replace Western liberal culture, with its tradition to consume and expand by force an unbroken chain from the Garden of Eden to Friedrich von Hayek, with the notion of maintenance and "enough". Bourgeois make-work holds no interest to me. ..."
"... My understanding of the data is that living standards increased around the world during the so-called golden age, not just in the U.S. (and Western Europe and Japan and Australia ). It could be that it was still imperialism at work, but the link between imperialism and the creation of the middle class is not straightforward. ..."
"... I thought neoliberalism was just the pogrom to make everyone – rational agents – as subscribed by our genetic / heraldic betters .. putting this orbs humans and resources in the correct "natural" order . ..."
"... Disheveled Marsupial for those thinking neoliberalism is not associated with libertarianism one only has to observe the decades of think tanks and their mouth organs roaming the planet . especially in the late 80s and 90s . bringing the might and wonders of the – market – to the great unwashed globally here libertarian priests rang in the good news to the great unwashed ..."
"... I would argue that neoliberalism is a program to define markets as primarily engaged in information processing and to make everyone into non-agents ( as not important at all to the proper functioning of markets). ..."
"... It also appears that neoliberals want to restrict democracy to the greatest extent possible and to view markets as the only foundation for truth without any need for input from the average individual. ..."
I am almost 70 years old, born and raised in New York City, still living in a near suburb.
Somehow, somewhere along the road to my 70th year I feel as if I have been gradually transported
to an almost entirely different country than the land of my younger years. I live painfully now
in an alien land, a place whose habits and sensibilities I sometimes hardly recognize, while unable
to escape from memories of a place that no longer exists. There are days I feel as I imagine a
Russian pensioner must feel, lost in an unrecognizable alien land of unimagined wealth, power,
privilege, and hyper-glitz in the middle of a country slipping further and further into hopelessness,
alienation, and despair.
I am not particularly nostalgic. Nor am I confusing recollection with sentimental yearnings
for a youth that is no more. But if I were a contemporary Rip Van Winkle, having just awakened
after, say, 30-40 years, I would not recognize my beloved New York City. It would be not just
the disappearance of the old buildings, Penn Station, of course, Madison Square Garden and its
incandescent bulb marquee on 50th and 8th announcing NYU vs. St. John's, and the WTC, although
I always thought of the latter as "new" until it went down. Nor would it be the disappearance
of all the factories, foundries, and manufacturing plants, the iconic Domino Sugar on the East
River, the Wonder Bread factory with its huge neon sign, the Swingline Staples building in Long
Island City that marked passage to and from the East River tunnel on the railroad, and my beloved
Schaeffer Beer plant in Williamsburg, that along with Rheingold, Knickerbocker, and a score of
others, made beer from New York taste a little bit different.
It wouldn't be the ubiquitous new buildings either, the Third Avenue ghostly glass erected
in the 70's and 80's replacing what once was the most concentrated collection of Irish gin mills
anywhere. Or the fortress-like castles built more recently, with elaborate high-ceilinged lobbies
decorated like a kind of gross, filthy-wealthy Versailles, an aesthetically repulsive style that
shrieks "power" in a way the neo-classical edifices of our Roman-loving founders never did. Nor
would it even be the 100-story residential sticks, those narrow ground-to-clouds skyscraper condominiums
proclaiming the triumph of globalized capitalism with prices as high as their penthouses, driven
ever upward by the foreign billionaires and their obsession with burying their wealth in Manhattan
real estate.
It is not just the presence of new buildings and the absence of the old ones that have this
contemporary Van Winkle feeling dyslexic and light-headed. The old neighborhoods have disintegrated
along with the factories, replaced by income segregated swatches of homogenous "real estate" that
have consumed space, air, and sunlight while sucking the distinctiveness out of the City. What
once was the multi-generational home turf for Jewish, Afro-American, Puerto Rican, Italian, Polak
and Bohunk families is now treated as simply another kind of investment, stocks and bonds in steel
and concrete. Mom's Sunday dinners, clothes lines hanging with newly bleached sheets after Monday
morning wash, stickball games played among parked cars, and evenings of sitting on the stoop with
friends and a transistor radio listening to Mel Allen call Mantle's home runs or Alan Freed and
Murray the K on WINS 1010 playing Elvis, Buddy Holly, and The Drifters, all gone like last night's
dreams.
Do you desire to see the new New York? Look no further than gentrifying Harlem for an almost
perfect microcosm of the city's metamorphosis, full of multi-million condos, luxury apartment
renovations, and Maclaren strollers pushed by white yuppie wife stay-at-homes in Marcus Garvey
Park. Or consider the "new" Lower East Side, once the refuge of those with little material means,
artists, musicians, bums, drug addicts, losers and the physically and spiritually broken - my
kind of people. Now its tenements are "retrofitted" and remodeled into $4000 a month apartments
and the new residents are Sunday brunching where we used to score some Mary Jane.
There is the "Brooklyn brand", synonymous with "hip", and old Brooklyn neighborhoods like Red
Hook and South Brooklyn (now absorbed into so desirable Park Slope), and Bushwick, another former
outpost of the poor and the last place I ever imagined would be gentrified, full of artists and
hipsters driving up the price of everything. Even large sections of my own Queens and the Bronx
are affected (infected?). Check out Astoria, for example, neighborhood of my father's family,
with more of the old ways than most but with rents beginning to skyrocket and starting to drive
out the remaining working class to who knows where.
Gone is almost every mom and pop store, candy stores with their egg creams and bubble gum cards
and the Woolworth's and McCrory's with their wooden floors and aisles containing ordinary blue
collar urgencies like thread and yarn, ironing boards and liquid bleach, stainless steel utensils
of every size and shape. Where are the locally owned toy and hobby stores like Jason's in Woodhaven
under the el, with Santa's surprises available for lay-away beginning in October? No more luncheonettes,
cheap eats like Nedicks with hot dogs and paper cones of orange drink, real Kosher delis with
vats of warm pastrami and corned beef cut by hand, and the sacred neighborhood "bar and grill",
that alas has been replaced by what the kids who don't know better call "dive bars", the detestable
simulacra of the real thing, slick rooms of long slick polished mahogany, a half-dozen wide screen
TV's blaring mindless sports contests from all over the world, over-priced micro-brews, and not
a single old rummy in sight?
Old Rip searches for these and many more remembered haunts, what Ray Oldenburg called the "great
good places" of his sleepy past, only to find store windows full of branded, high-priced, got-to-have
luxury-necessities (necessary if he/she is to be certified cool, hip, and successful), ridiculously
overpriced "food emporia", high and higher-end restaurants, and apparel boutiques featuring hardened
smiles and obsequious service reserved for those recognized by celebrity or status.
Rip notices too that the visible demographic has shifted, and walking the streets of Manhattan
and large parts of Brooklyn, he feels like what walking in Boston Back Bay always felt like, a
journey among an undifferentiated mass of privilege, preppy or 'metro-sexed' 20 and 30-somethings
jogging or riding bicycles like lean, buff gods and goddesses on expense accounts supplemented
by investments enriched by yearly holiday bonuses worth more than Rip earned in a lifetime.
Sitting alone on a park bench by the river, Rip reflects that more than all of these individual
things, however, he despairs of a city that seems to have been reimagined as a disneyfied playground
of the privileged, offering endless ways to self-gratify and philistinize in a clean, safe (safest
big city in U.S., he heard someone say), slick, smiley, center-of-the-world urban paradise, protected
by the new centurions (is it just his paranoia or do battle-ready police seem to be everywhere?).
Old ethnic neighborhoods are filled with apartment buildings that seem more like post-college
"dorms", tiny studios and junior twos packed with three or four "singles" roommates pooling their
entry level resources in order to pay for the right to live in "The City". Meanwhile the newer
immigrants find what place they can in Kingsbridge, Corona, Jamaica, and Cambria Heights, far
from the city center, even there paying far too much to the landlord for what they receive.
New York has become an unrecognizable place to Rip, who can't understand why the accent-less
youngsters keep asking him to repeat something in order to hear his quaint "Brooklyn" accent,
something like the King's English still spoken on remote Smith Island in the Chesapeake, he guesses
.
Rip suspects that this "great transformation" (apologies to Polanyi) has coincided, and is somehow
causally related, to the transformation of New York from a real living city into, as the former
Mayor proclaimed, the "World Capital" of financialized commerce and all that goes with it.
"Financialization", he thinks, is not the expression of an old man's disapproval but a way
of naming a transformed economic and social world. Rip is not an economist. He reads voraciously
but, as an erstwhile philosopher trained to think about the meaning of things, he often can't
get his head around the mathematical model-making explanations of the economists that seem to
dominate the more erudite political and social analyses these days. He has learned, however, that
the phenomenon of "capitalism" has changed along with his city and his life.
Money, it seems to him, has somehow changed its role. It has "increased" (is that possible,
he asks?) while at the same time it has become concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. It appears
to seek to become an autonomous and dominating sector of economic life, functionally separated
from production of real things, almost all of which seem to come from faraway places. "Real" actually
begins to change its meaning, another topic more interesting still. This devotion to the world
of money-making-money seems to have obsessed the lives of many of the most "important" Americans.
Entire TV networks are devoted to it. They talk about esoteric financial instruments that to the
ordinary citizen look more like exotically placed bets-on-credit in the casino than genuine ways
to grow real-world business, jobs, wages, and family income. The few who are in position to master
the game live material lives that were beyond what almost any formerly "wealthy" man or woman
in Rip's prior life could even imagine
.
Above all else is the astronomical rise in wealth and income inequality. Rip recalls that growing
up in the 1950's, the kids on his block included, along with firemen, cops, and insurance men
dads (these were virtually all one-parent income households), someone had a dad who worked as
a stock broker. Yea, living on the same block was a "Wall Streeter". Amazingly democratic, no?
Imagine, people of today, a finance guy drinking at the same corner bar with the sanitation guy.
Rip recalls that Aristotle had some wise and cautionary words in his Politics concerning the stability
of oligarchic regimes.
Last year I drove across America on blue highways mostly. I stayed in small towns and cities,
Zanesville, St. Charles, Wichita, Pratt, Dalhart, Clayton, El Paso, Abilene, Clarksdale, and many
more. I dined for the most part in local taverns, sitting at the bar so as to talk with the local
bartender and patrons who are almost always friendly and talkative in these spaces. Always and
everywhere I heard similar stories as my story of my home town. Not so much the specifics (there
are no "disneyfied" Lubbocks or Galaxes out there, although Oxford, MS comes close) but in the
sadness of men and women roughly my age as they recounted a place and time – a way of life – taken
out from under them, so that now their years are filled with decayed and dead downtowns, children
gone away and lost to either the relentless rootlessness of the trans-national economy or the
virtual hell-world of meth and opioids and heroin and unending underemployed hopelessness.
I am not a trained economist. My graduate degrees were in philosophy. My old friends call me
an "Eric Hoffer", who back in the day was known as the "longshoreman philosopher". I have been
trying for a long time now to understand the silent revolution that has been pulled off right
under my nose, the replacement of a world that certainly had its flaws (how could I forget the
civil rights struggle and the crime of Viet Nam; I was a part of these things) but was, let us
say, different. Among you or your informed readers, is there anyone who can suggest a book or
books or author(s) who can help me understand how all of this came about, with no public debate,
no argument, no protest, no nothing? I would be very much appreciative.
I'll just highlight this line for emphasis
"there are no "disneyfied" Lubbocks or Galaxes out there, although Oxford, MS comes close) but
in the sadness of men and women roughly my age as they recounted a place and time – a way of life
– taken out from under them, so that now their years are filled with decayed and dead downtowns,
children gone away and lost to either the relentless rootlessness of the trans-national economy
or the virtual hell-world of meth and opioids and heroin and unending underemployed hopelessness."
my best friend pretty much weeps every day.
I don't have a book to recommend. I do think you identify a really underemphasized central
fact of recent times: the joint processes by which real places have been converted into "real
estate" and real, messy lives replaced by safe, manufactured "experiences." This affects wealthy
and poor neighborhoods alike, in different ways but in neither case for the better.
I live in a very desirable neighborhood in one of those places that makes a lot of "Best of"
lists. I met a new neighbor last night who told me how he and his wife had plotted for years to
get out of the Chicago burbs, not only to our city but to this specific neighborhood, which they
had decided is "the one." (This sentiment is not atypical.) Unsurprisingly, property values in
the neighborhood have gone through the roof. Which, as far as I can tell, most everyone here sees
as an unmitigated good thing.
At the same time, several families I got to know because they moved into the neighborhood about
the same time we did 15-20 years ago, are cashing out and moving away, kids off to or out of college,
parents ready (and financed) to get on to the next phase and the next place. Of course, even though
our children are all Lake Woebegoners, there are no next generations staying in the neighborhood,
except of course the ones still living, or back, at "home." (Those families won't be going anywhere
for awhile!)
I can't argue that new money in the hood hasn't improved some things. Our formerly struggling
food co-op just finished a major expansion and upgrade. Good coffee is 5 minutes closer than it
used to be. But to my wife and me, the overwhelming feeling is that we are now outsiders here
in this neighborhood where we know all the houses and the old trees but not what motivates our
new neighbors. So I made up a word for it: unsettling (adj., verb, noun).
"If public life can suffer a metaphysical blow, the death of the labor question was that
blow. For millions of working people, it amputated the will to resist."
Christopher Lash in "Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy" mentions Ray Oldenburg's
"The Great Good Places: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores,
Bars, Hangouts and How they Got You through the Day."
He argued that the decline of democracy is directly related to the disappearance of what he
called third places:,
"As neighborhood hangouts give way to suburban shopping malls, or, on the other hand private
cocktail parties, the essentially political art of conversation is replaced by shoptalk or personal
gossip.
Increasingly, conversation literally has no place in American society. In its absence how–or
better, where–can political habits be acquired and polished?
Lasch finished he essay by noting that Oldenburg's book helps to identify what is missing from
our then newly emerging world (which you have concisely updated):
"urban amenities, conviviality, conversation, politics–almost everything in part that makes
life worth living."
The best explainer of our modern situation that I have read is Wendell Berry. I suggest that
you start with "The Unsettling of America," quoted below.
"Let me outline briefly as I can what seem to me the characteristics of these opposite kinds
of mind. I conceive a strip-miner to be a model exploiter, and as a model nurturer I take the
old-fashioned idea or ideal of a farmer. The exploiter is a specialist, an expert; the nurturer
is not. The standard of the exploiter is efficiency; the standard of the nurturer is care. The
exploiter's goal is money, profit; the nurturer's goal is health - his land's health, his own,
his family's, his community's, his country's. Whereas the exploiter asks of a piece of land only
how much and how quickly it can be made to produce, the nurturer asks a question that is much
more complex and difficult: What is its carrying capacity? (That is: How much can be taken from
it without diminishing it? What can it produce dependably for an indefinite time?) The exploiter
wishes to earn as much as possible by as little work as possible; the nurturer expects, certainly,
to have a decent living from his work, but his characteristic wish is to work as well as possible.
The competence of the exploiter is in organization; that of the nurturer is in order - a human
order, that is, that accommodates itself both to other order and to mystery. The exploiter typically
serves an institution or organization; the nurturer serves land, household, community, place.
The exploiter thinks in terms of numbers, quantities, "hard facts"; the nurturer in terms of character,
condition, quality, kind."
I also think Prof. Patrick Deneen works to explain the roots (and progression) of decline.
I'll quote him at length here describing the modern college student.
"[T]he one overarching lesson that students receive is the true end of education: the only
essential knowledge is that know ourselves to be radically autonomous selves within a comprehensive
global system with a common commitment to mutual indifference. Our commitment to mutual indifference
is what binds us together as a global people. Any remnant of a common culture would interfere
with this prime directive: a common culture would imply that we share something thicker, an inheritance
that we did not create, and a set of commitments that imply limits and particular devotions.
Ancient philosophy and practice praised as an excellent form of government a res publica –
a devotion to public things, things we share together. We have instead created the world's first
Res Idiotica – from the Greek word idiotes, meaning "private individual." Our education system
produces solipsistic, self-contained selves whose only public commitment is an absence of commitment
to a public, a common culture, a shared history. They are perfectly hollowed vessels, receptive
and obedient, without any real obligations or devotions.
They won't fight against anyone, because that's not seemly, but they won't fight for anyone
or anything either. They are living in a perpetual Truman Show, a world constructed yesterday
that is nothing more than a set for their solipsism, without any history or trajectory."
Wow. Did this hit a nerve. You have eloquently described what was the city of hope for several
generations of outsiders, for young gay men and women, and for real artists, not just from other
places in America, but from all over the world. In New York, once upon a time, bumping up against
the more than 50% of the population who were immigrants from other countries, you could learn
a thing or two about the world. You could, for a while, make a living there at a job that was
all about helping other people. You could find other folks, lots of them, who were honest, well-meaning,
curious about the world. Then something changed. As you said, you started to see it in those hideous
80's buildings. But New York always seemed somehow as close or closer to Europe than to the U.S.,
and thus out of the reach of mediocrity and dumbing down. New York would mold you into somebody
tough and smart, if you weren't already – if it didn't, you wouldn't make it there.
Now, it seems, this dream is dreamt. Poseurs are not artists, and the greedy and smug drive
out creativity, kindness, real humor, hope.
It ain't fair. I don't know where in this world an aspiring creative person should go now,
but it probably is not there.
Americans cannot begin to reasonably demand a living wage, benefits and job security when there
is an unending human ant-line of illegals and legal immigrants willing to under bid them.
Only when there is a parity or shortage of workers can wage demands succeed, along with other
factors.
From 1925 to 1965 this country accepted hardly any immigrants, legal or illegal. We had the
bracero program where Mexican males were brought in to pick crops and were then sent home to collect
paychecks in Mexico. American blacks were hired from the deep south to work defense plants in
the north and west.
Is it any coincidence that the 1965 Great Society program, initiated by Ted Kennedy to primarily
benefit the Irish immigrants, then co-opted by LBJ to include practically everyone, started this
process of Middle Class destruction?
1973 was the peak year of American Society as measured by energy use per capita, expansion
of jobs and unionization and other factors, such as an environment not yet destroyed, nicely measured
by the The Real Progress Indicator.
Solution? Stop importing uneducated people. That's real "immigration reform".
Now explain to me why voters shouldn't favor Trump's radical immigration stands?
Maybe, but OTOH, who is it, exactly, who is recruiting, importing, hiring and training undocumented
workers to downgrade pay scales??
Do some homework, please. If businesses didn't actively go to Central and South America to
recruit, pay to bring here, hire and employ undocumented workers, then the things you discuss
would be great.
When ICE comes a-knocking at some meat processing plant or mega-chicken farm, what happens?
The undocumented workers get shipped back to wherever, but the big business owner doesn't even
get a tap on the wrist. The undocumented worker – hired to work in unregulated unsafe unhealthy
conditions – often goes without their last paycheck.
It's the business owners who manage and support this system of undocumented workers because
it's CHEAP, and they don't get busted for it.
Come back when the USA actually enforces the laws that are on the books today and goes after
big and small business owners who knowingly recruit, import, hire, train and employee undocumented
workers you know, like Donald Trump has all across his career.
This is the mechanism by which the gov't has assisted biz in destroying the worker, competition
for thee, but none for me. For instance I can't go work in canada or mexico, they don't allow
it. Policy made it, policy can change it, go bernie. While I favor immigration, in it's current
form it is primarily conducted on these lines of destroying workers (H1b etc and illegals combined)
Lucky for the mexicans they can see the american dream is bs and can go home. I wonder who the
latinos that have gained citizenship will vote for. Unlikely it'll be trump, but they can be pretty
conservative, and the people they work for are pretty conservative so no guarantee there, hillary
is in san diego at the tony balboa park where her supporters will feel comfortable, not a huge
venue I think they must be hoping for a crowd, and if she can't get one in san diego while giving
a "if we don't rule the world someone else will" speech, she can't get one anywhere. Defense contractors
and military advisors and globalist biotech (who needs free money more than biotech? they are
desperate for hillary) are thick in san diego.
I live part-time in San Diego. It is very conservative. The military, who are constantly screwed
by the GOP, always vote Republican. They make up a big cohort of San Diego county.
Hillary may not get a big crowd at the speech, but that, in itself, doesn't mean that much
to me. There is a segment of San Diego that is somewhat more progressive-ish, but it's a pretty
conservative county with parts of eastern SD county having had active John Birch Society members
until recently or maybe even ongoing.
There's a big push in the Latino community to GOTV, and it's mostly not for Trump. It's possible
this cohort, esp the younger Latino/as, will vote for Sanders in the primary, but if Clinton gets
the nomination, they'll likely vote for her (v. Trump).
I was unlucky enough to be stuck for an hour in a commuter train last Friday after Trump's
rally there. Hate to sound rude, but Trump's fans were everything we've seen. Loud, rude, discourteous
and an incessant litany of rightwing talking points (same old, same old). All pretty ignorant.
Saying how Trump will "make us great again." I don't bother asking how. A lot of ugly comments
about Obama and how Obama has been "so racially divisive and polarizing." Well, No. No, Obama
has not been or done that, but the rightwing noise machine has sure ginned up your hatreds, angers
and fears. It was most unpleasant. The only instructive thing about it was confirming my worst
fears about this group. Sorry to say but pretty loutish and very uninformed. Sigh.
part timer in sd as well, family for hillary except for nephew and niece .I keep telling my
mom she should vote bernie for their sake but it never goes over very well
Re Methland, we live in rural US and we got a not-very-well hidden population of homeless children.
I don't mean homeless families with children, I mean homeless children. Sleeping in parks in good
weather, couch-surfing with friends, etc. I think related.
Fascism is a system of political and social order intended to reinforce the unity, energy and
purity of communities in which liberal democracy stand(s) accused of producing division and decline.
. . . George Orwell reminded us, clad in the mainstream patriotic dress of their own place and
time, . . . an authentically popular fascism in the United States would be pious and anti-Black;
in Western Europe, secular and antisemitic, or more probably, these days anti-Islamic; in Russia
and Eastern Europe, religious, antisemitic, and slavophile.
Robert O. Paxton
In The Five Stages of Faschism
" that eternal enemy: the conservative manipulators of privilege who damn as 'dangerous agitators'
any man who menaces their fortunes" (maybe 'power and celebrity' should be added to fortunes)
Sinclair Lewis
It Can't Happen Here page 141
On the Boots To Ribs Front: Anyone hereabouts notice that Captain America has just been revealed
to be a Nazi? Maybe this is what R. Cohen was alluding to but I doubt it.
The four horse men are, political , social, economic and environmental collapse . Any one remember
the original Mad Max movie. A book I recommend is the Crash Of 2016 By Thom Hartmann.
From the comment, I agree with the problems, not the cause. We've increased the size and scope
of the safety net over the last decade. We've increased government spending versus GDP. I'm not
blaming government but its not neoliberal/capitalist policy either.
1. Globalization clearly helps the poor in other countries at the expense of workers in the
U.S. But at the same time it brings down the cost of goods domestically. So jobs are not great
but Walmart/Amazon can sell cheap needs.
2. Inequality started rising the day after Bretton Woods – the rich got richer everyday after
"Nixon Shock"
Hi rfam : To point 1 : Why is there a need to bring down the cost of goods? Is it because of
past outsourcing and trade agreements and FR policies? I think there's a chicken and egg thing
going on, ie.. which came first. Globalization is a way to bring down wages while supplying Americans
with less and less quality goods supplied at the hand of global corporations like Walmart that
need welfare in the form of food stamps and the ACA for their workers for them to stay viable
(?). Viable in this case means ridiculously wealthy CEO's and the conglomerate growing bigger
constantly. Now they have to get rid of COOL's because the WTO says it violates trade agreements
so we can't trace where our food comes from in case of an epidemic. It's all downhill. Wages should
have risen with costs so we could afford high quality American goods, but haven't for a long,
long time.
Globalization helps the rich here way more than the poor there. The elites get more money for
nothing (see QE before you respond, if you do, that's where the money for globalization came from)
the workers get the husk. Also the elite gets to say "you made your choices" and other moralistic
crap. The funny(?) thing is they generally claim to be atheists, which I translate into "I am
God, there doesn't need to be any other" Amazon sells cheap stuff by cheating on taxes, and barely
makes money, mostly just driving people out of business. WalMart has cheap stuff because they
subsidise their workers with food stamps and medicaid. Bringing up bretton woods means you don't
know much about money creation, so google "randy wray/bananas/naked capitalism" and you'll find
a quick primer.
The Walmart loathsome spawn and Jeff Bezos are the biggest welfare drains in our nation – or
among the biggest. They woefully underpay their workers, all while training them on how to apply
for various welfare benefits. Just so that their slaves, uh, workers can manage to eat enough
to enable them to work.
It slays me when US citizens – and it happens across the voting spectrum these days; I hear
just as often from Democratic voters as I do from GOP voters – bitch, vetch, whine & cry about
welfare abuse. And if I start to point out the insane ABUSE of welfare by the Waltons and Jeff
Bezos, I'm immediately greeted with random TRUE stories about someone who knew someone who somehow
made out like a bandit on welfare.
Hey, I'm totally sure and in agreement that there are likely a small percentage of real welfare
cheats who manage to do well enough somehow. But seriously? That's like a drop in the bucket.
Get the eff over it!!!
Those cheats are not worth discussing. It's the big fraud cheats like Bezos & the Waltons and
their ilk, who don't need to underpay their workers, but they DO because the CAN and they get
away with it because those of us the rapidly dwindling middle/working classes are footing the
bill for it.
Citizens who INSIST on focusing on a teeny tiny minority of real welfare cheats, whilst studiously
ignoring the Waltons and the Bezos' of the corporate world, are enabling this behavior. It's one
of my bugabears bc it's so damn frustrating when citizens refuse to see how they are really being
ripped off by the 1%. Get a clue.
That doesn't even touch on all the other tax breaks, tax loopholes, tax incentives and just
general all-around tax cheating and off-shore money hiding that the Waltons and Bezos get/do.
Sheesh.
"I'm immediately greeted with random TRUE stories about someone who knew someone who somehow
made out like a bandit on welfare."
is the key and a v. long term result of the application of Bernays' to political life. Its
local and hits at the gut interpersonal level 'cos the "someones" form a kind of chain of trust
esp. if the the first one on the list is a friend or a credentialed media pundit. Utterly spurious
I know but countering this with a *merely* rational analysis of how Walmart, Amazon abuse the
welfare system to gouge profits from the rest of us just won't ever, for the large majority, get
through this kind emotional wall.
I don't know what any kind of solution might look like but, somehow, we need to find a way
of seriously demonising the corporate parasites that resonates at the same emotional level as
the "welfare cheat" meme that Bill Clinton and the rest of the DLC sanctified back in the '90s.
Something like "Walmart's stealing your taxes" might work but how to get it out there in a
viral way ??
What a comment from seanseamour. And the "hoisting" of it to high visibility at the site is
a testament to the worth of Naked Capitalism.
seanseamour asks "What does that have to do with education?" and answers "Everything if one
considers the elitist trend " This question & answer all but brings tears to my eyes. It is so
utterly on point. My own experience of it, if I may say so, comes from inside the belly of the
beast. As a child and a product of America's elite universities (I have degrees from Harvard and
Yale, and my dad, Richard B. Sewall, was a beloved English prof at Yale for 42 years), I could
spend all morning detailing the shameful roles played by America's torchbearing universities –
Harvard, Yale, Stanford etc – in utterly abandoning their historic responsibility as educators
to maintaining the health of the nation's public school system.*
And as I suspect seanseymour would agree, when a nation loses public education, it loses everything.
But I don't want to spend all morning doing that because I'm convinced that it's not too late
for America to rescue itself from maelstrom in which it finds itself today. (Poe's "Maelstrom"
story, cherished by Marshall McLuhan, is supremely relevant today.)
To turn America around, I don't look to education – that system is too far gone to save itself,
let alone the rest of the country – but rather to the nation's media: to the all-powerful public
communication system that certainly has the interactive technical capabilities to put citizens
and governments in touch with each other on the government decisions that shape the futures of
communities large and small.
For this to happen, however, people like the us – readers of Naked Capitalism – need to stop
moaning and groaning about the damage done by the neoliberals and start building an issue-centered,
citizen-participatory, non-partisan, prime-time Civic Media strong enough to give all Americans
an informed voice in the government decisions that affect their lives. This Civic media would
exist to make citizens and governments responsive and accountable to each other in shaping futures
of all three communities – local, state and national – of which every one of us is a member.
Pie in the sky? Not when you think hard about it. A huge majority of Americans would welcome
this Civic Media. Many yearn for it. This means that a market exists for it: a Market of the Whole
of all members of any community, local, state and national. This audience is large enough to rival
those generated by media coverage of pro sports teams, and believe it or not much of the growth
of this Civic media could be productively modeled on the growth of media coverage of pro sports
teams. This Civic Media would attract the interest of major advertisers, especially those who
see value in non-partisan programming dedicated to getting America moving forward again. Dynamic,
issue-centered, problem-solving public forums, some modeled on voter-driven reality TV contests
like The Voice or Dancing with the Stars, could be underwritten by a "rainbow" spectrum of funders,
commericial, public, personal and even government sources.
So people take hope! Be positive! Love is all we need, etc. The need for for a saving alternative
to the money-driven personality contests into which our politics has descended this election year
is literally staring us all in the face from our TV, cellphone and computer screens. This is no
time to sit back and complain, it's a time to start working to build a new way of connecting ourselves
so we can reverse America's rapid decline.
OK, so I hear some of you saying, corporate America will never let this Civic Media get
off the ground. My short answer to this is that corporations do what makes money for them, and
in today's despairing political climate there's money to be made in sponsoring something truly
positive, patriotic and constructive. And I hear a few others saying that Americans are too
dumbed down, too busy, too polarized or too just plain stupid to make intelligent, constructive
use of a non-partisan, problem-solving Civic Media. But I would not underestimate the intelligence
of Americans when they can give their considered input – by vote, by comment or by active participation
– in public forums that are as exciting and well managed as an NFL game or a Word Series final.
I am paying an exorbitant subscription for the UK Financial Times at the moment. Anyway,
the good news is that very regular articles are appearing where you can almost feel the panic
at the populist uprisings.
Whatever system is put in place the human race will find a way to undermine it. I believe in
capitalism because fair competition means the best and most efficient succeed.
I send my children to private schools and universities because I want my own children at the
top and not the best. Crony capitalism is inevitable, self-interest undermines any larger system
that we try and impose.
Can we design a system that can beat human self-interest? It's going to be tricky.
"If that's the system, how can I take advantage of it?" human nature at work. "If that's the
system, is it working for me or not?" those at the top.
If not, it's time to change the system.
If so, how can I tweak it to get more out of it?
Neo-Liberalism
Academics, who are not known for being street-wise, probably thought they had come up with
the ultimate system using markets and numeric performance measures to create a system free from
human self-interest.
They had already missed that markets don't just work for price discovery, but are frequently
used for capital gains by riding bubbles and hoping there is a "bigger fool" out there than you,
so you can cash out with a handsome profit.
(I am not sure if the Chinese realise markets are supposed to be for price discovery at all).
Hence, numerous bubbles during this time, with housing bubbles being the global favourite for
those looking for capital gains.
If we are being governed by the markets, how do we rig the markets?
A question successfully solved by the bankers.
Inflation figures, that were supposed to ensure the cost of living didn't rise too quickly,
were somehow manipulated to produce low inflation figures with roaring house price inflation raising
the cost of living.
What unemployment measure will best suit the story I am trying to tell?
U3 – everything great
U6 – it's not so good
Labour participation rate – it hasn't been this bad since the 1970s
Anything missing from the theory has been ruthlessly exploited, e.g. market bubbles ridden
for capital gains, money creation by private banks, the difference between "earned" and "unearned"
income and the fact that Capitalism trickles up through the following mechanism:
1) Those with excess capital collect rent and interest.
2) Those with insufficient capital pay rent and interest.
I just went on a rant last week. (Not only because the judge actually LIED in court)
I left the courthouse in downtown Seattle, to cross the street to find the vultures selling
more foreclosures on the steps of the King County Administration Building, while above them, there
were tents pitched on the building's perimeter. And people were walking by just like this scene
was normal.
Because the people at the entrance of the courthouse could view this, I went over there and
began to rant. I asked (loudly) "Do you guys see that over there? Vultures selling homes rendering
more people homeless and then the homeless encampment with tents pitched on the perimeter above
them? In what world is this normal?" One guy replied, "Ironic, isn't it?" After that comment,
the Marshall protecting the judicial crooks in the building came over and tried to calm me down.
He insisted that the scene across the street was "normal" and that none of his friends or neighbors
have been foreclosed on. I soon found out that that lying Marshall was from Pierce County, the
epicenter of Washington foreclosures.
"In this postindustrial world not only is the labor question no longer asked, not only
is proletarian revolution passé, but the proletariat itself seems passé. And the invisibles who
nonetheless do indeed live there have internalized their nonexistence, grown demoralized, resentful,
and hopeless; if they are noticed at all, it is as objects of public disdain. What were once called
"blue-collar aristocrats"-skilled workers in the construction trades, for example-have long felt
the contempt of the whole white-collar world.
For these people, already skeptical about who runs things and to what end, and who are now
undergoing their own eviction from the middle class, skepticism sours into a passive cynicism.
Or it rears up in a kind of vengeful chauvinism directed at alien others at home and abroad, emotional
compensation for the wounds that come with social decline If public life can suffer a metaphysical
blow, the death of the labor question was that blow. For millions of working people, it amputated
the will to resist."
One thing I don't think I have seen addressed on this site (apologies if I have missed it!)
in all the commentary about the destruction of the middle class is the role of US imperialism
in creating that middle class in the first place and what it is that we want to save from destruction
by neo-liberalism. The US is rich because we rob the rest of the world's resources and have been
doing so in a huge way since 1945, same as Britain before us. I don't think it's a coincidence
that the US post-war domination of the world economy and the middle class golden age happened
at the same time. Obviously there was enormous value created by US manufacturers, inventors, government
scientists, etc but imperialism is the basic starting point for all of this. The US sets the world
terms of trade to its own advantage. How do we save the middle class without this level of control?
Within the US elites are robbing everyone else but they are taking what we use our military power
to appropriate from the rest of the world.
Second, if Bernie or whoever saves the middle class, is that so that everyone can have a tract
house and two cars and continue with a massively wasteful and unsustainable lifestyle based on
consumption? Or are we talking about basic security like shelter, real health care, quality education
for all, etc? Most of the stories I see seem to be nostalgic for a time when lots of people could
afford to buy lots of stuff and don't 1) reflect on origin of that stuff (imperialism) and 2)
consider whether that lifestyle should be the goal in the first place.
I went to the electronics recycling facility in Seattle yesterday. The guy at customer service
told me that they receive 20 million pounds per month. PER MONTH. Just from Seattle. I went home
and threw up.
It doesn't have to be that way. You can replace military conquest (overt and covert) with space
exploration and science expansion. Also, instead of pushing consumerism, push contentment. Don't
setup and goose a system of "gotta keep up with the Joneses!"
In the 50s(!!!) there was a plan, proven in tests and studies, that would have had humans on
the mars by 1965, out to Saturn by 72. Project Orion. Later, the British Project Daedalus was
envisioned which WOULD have put space probes at the next star system within 20 years of launch.
It was born of the atomic age and, as originally envisioned, would have been an ecological disaster
BUT it was reworked to avoid this and would have worked. Spacecraft capable of comfortably holding
100 personnel, no need to build with paper-thin aluminum skin or skimp on amenities. A huge ship
built like a large sea vessel (heavy iron/steel) accelerated at 1g (or more or slightly less as
desired) so no prolonged weightlessness and concomitant loss of bone and muscle mass. It was all
in out hands but the Cold War got in the way, as did the many agreements and treaties of the Cold
War to avoid annihilation. It didn't need to be that way. Check it out:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)
All that with 1950s and 60s era technology. It could be done better today and for less than
your wars in the Middle East. Encourage science, math, exploration instead of consumption, getting
mine before you can get yours, etc.
Or, we could replace Western liberal culture, with its tradition to consume and expand
by force an unbroken chain from the Garden of Eden to Friedrich von Hayek, with the notion of
maintenance and "enough". Bourgeois make-work holds no interest to me.
My understanding of the data is that living standards increased around the world during
the so-called golden age, not just in the U.S. (and Western Europe and Japan and Australia ).
It could be that it was still imperialism at work, but the link between imperialism and the creation
of the middle class is not straightforward.
Likewise, US elites are clearly NOT robbing the manufacturing firms that have set up in China
and other low-wage locations, so it is an oversimplification to say they are "robbing everyone
else."
Nostalgia is overrated but I don't sense the current malaise as a desire for more stuff. (I
grew up in the 60s and 70s and I don't remember it as a time where people had, or craved, a lot
of stuff. That period would be now, and I find it infects Sanders' supporters less than most.)
If anything, it is nostalgia for more (free) time and more community, for a time when (many but
not all) people had time to socialize and enjoy civic life.
those things would be nice as would just a tiny bit of hope for the future, our own and the
planet's and not an expectation of things getting more and more difficult and sometimes for entirely
unnecessary reasons like imposed austerity. But being we can't have "nice things" like free time,
community and hope for the future, we just "buy stuff".
I live on the south side, in the formerly affluent south shore neighborhood. A teenager was
killed, shot in the head in a drive by shooting, at 5 pm yesterday right around the corner from
my residence. A white coworker of mine who lives in a rich northwest side neighborhood once commented
to me how black people always say goodbye by saying "be safe". More easily said than done.
I thought neoliberalism was just the pogrom to make everyone – rational agents – as subscribed
by our genetic / heraldic betters .. putting this orbs humans and resources in the correct "natural"
order .
Disheveled Marsupial for those thinking neoliberalism is not associated with libertarianism
one only has to observe the decades of think tanks and their mouth organs roaming the planet .
especially in the late 80s and 90s . bringing the might and wonders of the – market – to the great
unwashed globally here libertarian priests rang in the good news to the great unwashed
I would argue that neoliberalism is a program to define markets as primarily engaged in
information processing and to make everyone into non-agents ( as not important at all to the proper
functioning of markets).
It also appears that neoliberals want to restrict democracy to the greatest extent possible
and to view markets as the only foundation for truth without any need for input from the average
individual.
But as Mirowski argues–carrying their analysis this far begins to undermine their own neoliberal
assumptions about markets always promoting social welfare.
When I mean – agents – I'm not referring to agency, like you say the market gawd/computer does
that. I was referencing the – rational agent – that 'ascribes' the markets the right at defining
facts or truth as neoliberalism defines rational thought/behavior.
Disheveled Marsupial yes democracy is a direct threat to Hayekian et al [MPS and Friends]
paranoia due to claims of irrationality vs rationally
I have trouble understanding the focus on an emergence of fascism in Europe, focus that seems
to dominate this entire thread when, put in perspective such splinter groups bear little weight
on the European political spectrum.
As an expat living in France, in my perception the Front National is a threat to the political
establishments that occupy the center left and right and whose historically broad constituencies
have been brutalized by the financial crisis borne of unbridled anglo-saxon runaway capitalism,
coined neoliberalism. The resulting disaffection has allowed the growth of the FN but it is also
fueled by a transfer of reactionary constituencies that have historically found identity in far
left parties (communist, anti-capitalist, anarchist ), political expressions the institutions
of the Republic allow and enable in the name of plurality, a healthy exultury in a democratic
society.
To consider that the FN in France, UKIP in the UK and others are a threat to democratic values
any more that the far left is non-sensical, and I dare say insignificant compared to the "anchluss"
our conservative right seeks to impose upon the executive, legislative and judicial branches of
government.
The reality in Europe as in America is economic. The post WWII era of reconstruction, investment
and growth is behind us, the French call these years the "Trente Glorieuses" (30 glorious years)
when prosperity was felt through all societal strats, consumerism for all became the panacea for
a just society, where injustice prevailed welfare formulas provided a new panacea.
As the perspective of an unravelling of this golden era began to emerge elites sought and conspired
to consolidate power and wealth, under the aegis of greed is good culture by further corrupting
government to serve the few, ensuring impunity for the ruling class, attempting societal cohesiveness
with brash hubristic dialectics (America, the greatest this or that) and adventurism (Irak, mission
accomplished), conspiring to co-opt and control institutions and the media (to understand the
depth of this deception a must read is Jane Mayer in The Dark Side and in Dark Money).
The difference between America and Europe is that latter bears of brunt of our excess.
The 2008 Wall St / City meltdown eviscerated much of America' middle class and de-facto stalled,
perhaps definitively, the vehicle of upward mobility in an increasingly wealth-ranked class structured
society – the Trump phenomena feeds off the fatalistic resilience and "good book" mythologies
remnant of the "go west" culture.
In Europe where to varying degrees managed capitalism prevails the welfare state(s) provided the
shock absorbers to offset the brunt of the crisis, but those who locked-in on neoliberal fiscal
conservatism have cut off their nose in spite leaving scant resources to spur growth. If social
mobility survives, more vibrantly than the US, unemployment and the cost thereof remains steadfast
and crippling.
The second crisis borne of American hubris is the human tidal wave resulting from the Irak adventure;
it has unleashed mayhem upon the Middle East, Sub Saharan Africa and beyond. The current migrational
wave Europe can not absorb is but the beginning of much deeper problem – as ISIS, Boko Haram and
so many others terrorist groups destabilize the nation-states of a continent whose population
is on the path to explode in the next half century.
The icing on the cake provided by a Trump election will be a world wave of climate change refugees
as the neoliberal establishment seeks to optimize wealth and power through continued climate change
denial.
Fascism is not the issue, nationalism resulting from a self serving bully culture will decimate
the multilateral infrastructure responsible nation-states need to address today's problems.
Broadly, Trump Presidency capping the neoliberal experience will likely signal the end of the
US' dominant role on the world scene (and of course the immense benefits derived for the US).
As he has articulated his intent to discard the art of diplomacy, from soft to institutional,
in favor of an agressive approach in which the President seeks to "rattle" allies (NATO, Japan
and S. Korea for example) as well as his opponents (in other words anyone who does not profess
blind allegiance), expect that such modus operandi will create a deep schism accompanied by a
loss of trust, already felt vis-a-vis our legislature' behavior over the last seven years.
The US's newfound respect among friends and foes generated by President Obama' presidency, has
already been undermined by the GOP primaries, if Trump is elected it will dissipate for good as
other nations and groups thereof focus upon new, no-longer necessarily aligned strategic relationships,
some will form as part as a means of taking distance, or protection from the US, others more opportunist
with the risk of opponents such as Putin filling the void – in Europe for example.
Neoliberalism isn't helping, but it's a population/resource ratio thing. Impacts on social
orders occur well before raw supply factors kick in (and there is more than food supply to basic
rations). The world population has more than doubled in the last 50 years, one doesn't get that
kind of accelerated growth without profound impacts to every aspect of societies. Some of the
most significant impacts are consequent to the acceleration of technological changes (skill expirations,
automations) that are driven in no small part by the needs of a vast + growing population.
I don't suggest population as a pat simplistic answer. And neoliberalism accelerates the declining
performance of institutions (as in the CUNY article and that's been going on for decades already,
neoliberalism just picked up where neoconservatism petered out), but we would be facing issues
like homelessness, service degradation, population displacements, etc regardless of poor policies.
One could argue (I do) that neoliberalism has undertaken to accelerate existing entropies for
profit.
Thanks for soliciting reader comments on socioeconomic desperation. It's encouraging to know
that I'm not the only failure to launch in this country.
I'm a seasonal farm worker with a liberal arts degree in geology and history. I barely held
on for six months as a junior environmental consultant at a dysfunctional firm that tacitly encouraged
unethical and incompetent behavior at all levels. From what I could gather, it was one of the
better-run firms in the industry. Even so, I was watching mid-level and senior staff wander into
extended mid-life crises while our entire service line was terrorized by a badly out-of-shape,
morbidly obese, erratic, vicious PG who had alienated almost the entire office but was untouchable
no matter how many firing offenses she committed. Meanwhile I was watching peers in other industries
(especially marketing and FIRE) sell their souls in real time. I'm still watching them do so a
decade later.
It's hard to exaggerate how atrociously I've been treated by bougie conformists for having
failed/dropped out of the rat race. A family friend who got into trouble with the state of Hawaii
for misclassifying direct employees of his timeshare boiler room as 1099's gave me a panic attack
after getting stoned and berating me for hours about how I'd wake up someday and wonder what the
fuck I'd done with my life. At the time, I had successfully completed a summer job as the de facto
lead on a vineyard maintenance crew and was about to get called back for the harvest, again as
the de facto lead picker.
Much of my social life is basically my humiliation at the hands of amoral sleazeballs who presume
themselves my superiors. No matter how strong an objective case I have for these people being
morally bankrupt, it's impossible to really dismiss their insults. Another big component is concern-trolling
from bourgeois supremacists who will do awfully little for me when I ask them for specific help.
I don't know what they're trying to accomplish, and they probably don't, either. A lot of it is
cognitive dissonance and incoherence.
Some of the worst aggression has come from a Type A social climber friend who sells life insurance.
He's a top producer in a company that's about a third normal, a third Willy Loman, and a third
Glengarry Glen Ross. This dude is clearly troubled, but in ways that neither of us can really
figure out, and a number of those around him are, too. He once admitted, unbidden, to having hazed
me for years.
The bigger problem is that he's surrounded by an entire social infrastructure that enables
and rewards noxious, predatory behavior. When college men feel like treating the struggling like
garbage, they have backup and social proof from their peers. It's disgusting. Many of these people
have no idea of how to relate appropriately to the poor or the unemployed and no interest in learning.
They want to lecture and humiliate us, not listen to us.
Dude recently told me that our alma mater, Dickinson College, is a "grad school preparatory
institution." I was floored that anyone would ever think to talk like that. In point of fact,
we're constantly lectured about how versatile our degrees are, with or without additional education.
I've apparently annoyed a number of Dickinsonians by bitterly complaining that Dickinson's nonacademic
operations are a sleazy racket and that President Emeritus Bill Durden is a shyster who brainwashed
my classmates with crude propaganda. If anything, I'm probably measured in my criticism, because
I don't think I know the full extent of the fraud and sleaze. What I have seen and heard is damning.
I believe that Dickinson is run by people with totalitarian impulses that are restrained only
by a handful of nonconformists who came for the academics and are fed up with the propaganda.
Meanwhile, I've been warm homeless for most of the past four years. It's absurd to get pledge
drive pitches from a well-endowed school on the premise that my degree is golden when I'm regularly
sleeping in my car and financially dependent on my parents. It's absurd to hear stories about
how Dickinson's alumni job placement network is top-notch when I've never gotten a viable lead
from anyone I know from school. It's absurd to explain my circumstances in detail to people who,
afterwards, still can't understand why I'm cynical.
While my classmates preen about their degrees, I'm dealing with stuff that would make them
vomit. A relative whose farm I've been tending has dozens of rats infesting his winery building,
causing such a stench that I'm just about the only person willing to set foot inside it. This
relative is a deadbeat presiding over a feudal slumlord manor, circumstances that he usually justifies
by saying that he's broke and just trying to make ends meet. He has rent-paying tenants living
on the property with nothing but a pit outhouse and a filthy, disused shower room for facilities.
He doesn't care that it's illegal. One of his tenants left behind a twenty-gallon trash can full
to the brim with his own feces. Another was seen throwing newspaper-wrapped turds out of her trailer
into the weeds. They probably found more dignity in this than in using the outhouse.
When I was staying in Rancho Cordova, a rough suburb of Sacramento, I saw my next-door neighbor
nearly come to blows with a man at the light rail station before apologizing profusely to me,
calling me "sir," "man," "boss," and "dog." He told me that he was angry at the other guy for
selling meth to his kid sister. Eureka is even worse: its west side is swarming with tweakers,
its low-end apartment stock is terrible, no one brings the slumlords to heel, and it has a string
of truly filthy residential motels along Broadway that should have been demolished years ago.
A colleague who lives in Sweet Home, Oregon, told me that his hometown is swarming with druggies
who try to extract opiates from local poppies and live for the next arriving shipment of garbage
drugs. The berry farm where we worked had ten- and twelve-year-olds working under the table to
supplement their families' incomes. A Canadian friend told me that he worked for a crackhead in
Lillooet who made his own supply at home using freebase that he bought from a meathead dealer
with ties to the Boston mob. Apparently all the failing mill towns in rural BC have a crack problem
because there's not much to do other than go on welfare and cocaine. An RCMP sergeant in Kamloops
was recently indicted for selling coke on the side.
Uahsenaa's comment about the invisible homeless is spot on. I think I blend in pretty well.
I've often stunned people by mentioning that I'm homeless. Some of them have been assholes about
it, but not all. There are several cars that I recognize as regular overnighters at my usual rest
area. Thank God we don't get hassled much. Oregon is about as safe a place as there is to be homeless.
Some of the rest areas in California, including the ones at Kingsburg and the Sacramento Airport,
end up at or beyond capacity overnight due to the homeless. CalTrans has signs reminding drivers
that it's rude to hog a space that someone else will need. This austerity does not, of course,
apply to stadium construction for the Kings.
Another thing that almost slipped my mind (and is relevant to Trump's popularity): I've encountered
entrenched, systemic discrimination against Americans when I've tried to find and hold menial
jobs, and I've talked to other Americans who have also encountered it. There is an extreme bias
in favor of Mexican peasants and against Americans in the fields and increasingly in off-farm
jobs. The top quintile will be lucky not to reap the whirlwind on account of this prejudice.
"... The number one issue fueling the leave vote was immigration – a lot like Trump's wall against Mexico. The number two issue was lack of accountability of government: Leavers believe that the EU government in Brussels is unaccountable to voters. For Trump supporters, resentment towards a distant and unaccountable Washington government ranks high as well. The Brexit constituency and the Trump constituency are both motivated by the same sense of loss and vulnerability. ..."
"... In both the U.S. and the U.K., a large and growing segment of voters has not prospered in today's complex, technology-driven global economy. Their wages have stagnated and in many cases fallen. Too few good-paying jobs exist for people lacking a college degree, or even people with a college degree, if the degree is not in the right field. These people are angry, frustrated, and afraid -- and with very good reason. Both countries' governments have done little to help them adapt, and little to soothe the sting of globalization. The voter's concerns in both places are mostly the same even though these concerns have coalesced around a policy issue ("leave") in the U.K. whereas here in the U.S. they have coalesced around a candidate (Trump). ..."
"... Similarly, the elite insiders of the Republican Party and their business allies badly underestimated Trump. Establishment candidates like former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush failed terribly. Now the Republican political insiders are trying to make sense of a presumptive nominee who trashes free trade, one of the fundamental principles of the party, and openly taunts one of most important emerging voting blocks. ..."
"... Perhaps the biggest reason for the impotence of today's political elites is that elites have trashed the very idea of competent and effective government for 35 years now, and the public has taken the message to heart. Ever since Reagan identified government as the problem, conservative elites have attacked the idea of government itself – rather than respecting the idea of government itself while criticizing the particular policies of a particular government. This is a crucial (and dangerous) distinction. In 1986, Reagan went on to say "the nine most terrifying words in the English language are 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'" ..."
In addition, the issues are similar between the two campaigns: The number
one issue fueling the leave vote was immigration – a lot like Trump's wall against
Mexico. The number two issue was lack of accountability of government: Leavers
believe that the EU government in Brussels is unaccountable to voters. For Trump
supporters, resentment towards a distant and unaccountable Washington government
ranks high as well. The Brexit constituency and the Trump constituency are both
motivated by the same sense of loss and vulnerability.
In both the U.S. and the U.K., a large and growing segment of voters
has not prospered in today's complex, technology-driven global economy. Their
wages have stagnated and in many cases fallen. Too few good-paying jobs exist
for people lacking a college degree, or even people with a college degree, if
the degree is not in the right field. These people are angry, frustrated, and
afraid -- and with very good reason. Both countries' governments have done little
to help them adapt, and little to soothe the sting of globalization. The voter's
concerns in both places are mostly the same even though these concerns have
coalesced around a policy issue ("leave") in the U.K. whereas here in the U.S.
they have coalesced around a candidate (Trump).
In both countries, political elites were caught flat-footed. Elites lost
control over the narrative and lost credibility and persuasiveness with angry,
frustrated and fearful voters. The British elites badly underestimated the intensity
of public frustration with immigration and with the EU. Most expected the vote
would end on the side of "remain," up to the very last moment. Now they are
trying to plot their way out of something they never expected would actually
happen, and never prepared for.
Similarly, the elite insiders of the Republican Party and their business
allies badly underestimated Trump. Establishment candidates like former Florida
Gov. Jeb Bush failed terribly. Now the Republican political insiders are trying
to make sense of a presumptive nominee who trashes free trade, one of the fundamental
principles of the party, and openly taunts one of most important emerging voting
blocks.
How did the elites lose control? There are many reasons: With social media
so pervasive, advertising dollars no longer controls what the public sees and
hears. With unrestricted campaign spending, the party can no longer "pinch the
air hose" of a candidate who strays from party orthodoxy.
Perhaps the biggest reason for the impotence of today's political elites
is that elites have trashed the very idea of competent and effective government
for 35 years now, and the public has taken the message to heart. Ever since
Reagan identified government as the problem, conservative elites have attacked
the idea of government itself – rather than respecting the idea
of government itself while criticizing the particular policies of a particular
government. This is a crucial (and dangerous) distinction. In 1986, Reagan went
on to say "the nine most terrifying words in the English language are 'I'm from
the government and I'm here to help.'"
Reagan booster Grover Norquist is known for saying, "I don't want to abolish
government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into
the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub." Countless candidates and elected
officials slam "Washington bureaucrats" even though these "bureaucrats" were
none other than themselves. It's not a great way to build respect. Then the
attack escalated, with the aim of destroying parts of government that were actually
mostly working. This was done to advance the narrative that government itself
is the problem, and pave the way for privatization. Take the Transportation
Security Administration for example. TSA has actually done its job. No terrorist
attacks have succeeded on U.S. airplanes since it was established. But by
systematically underfunding it , Congress has made the lines painfully long,
so people hate it. Take the Post Office. Here Congress manufactured a crisis
to force service cuts, making the public believe the institution is incompetent.
But the so-called "problem" is
due almost entirely to a requirement, imposed by Congress, forcing the Postal
Service to prepay retiree's health care to an absurd level, far beyond what
a similar private sector business would have to do. A similar dynamic now threatens
Social Security. Thirty-five years have passed since Reagan first mocked the
potential for competent and effective government. Years of unrelenting attack
have sunk in. Many Americans now distrust government leaders and think it's
pointless to demand or expect wisdom and statesmanship. Today's American voters
(and their British counterparts), well-schooled in skepticism, disdain and dismiss
leaders of all parties and they are ready to burn things down out of sheer frustration.
The moment of blowback has arrived.
PK has nearly lost all of his ability to see things objectively. Ambition got him, I suppose,
or maybe he has always longed to be popular. He was probably teased and ridiculed too much in
his youth. He is something of a whinny sniveler after-all.
Then too, I doubt if PK has ever used a public restroom in the Southwest, or taken his kids
to a public park in one of the thousands of small towns where non-English speaking throngs take
over all of the facilities and parking.Or had his children bullied at school by a gang of dark-skinned
kids whose parents believe that whites took their land, or abused or enslaved their distant ansestors.
It might be germane here too... to point out that some of this anti-white sentiment gets support
and validation from the very rhetoric that Democrats have made integral to their campaigns.
As for not knowing why crime rates have been falling, the incarceration rates rose in step,
so duh, if you lock up those with propensities for crime, well, how could crime rates not fall?
And while I'm on the subject of crime, the statistical analysis that is commonly used focuses
too much on violent crime and convictions. Thus, crimes of a less serious nature, that being the
type of crimes committed by poor folks, is routinely ignored. Then too, those who are here illegally
are often transient and using assumed names, and so they are, presumably, more difficult to catch.
So, statistics are all too often not as telling as claimed.
And, though I'm not a Trump supporter, I fully understand his appeal. As would PK if he were
more travelled and in touch with those who have seen their schools, parks, towns, and everything
else turn tawdry and dysfunctional. But of course the nation that most of us live in is much different
than the one that PK knows.
> And, though I'm not a Trump supporter, I fully understand his appeal
I wonder why everybody is thinking about this problem only in terms of identity politics.
This is a wrong, self-defeating framework to approach the problem. which is pushed by neoliberal
MSM and which we should resist in this forum as this translates the problems that the nation faces
into term of pure war-style propaganda ("us vs. them" mentality). To which many posters here already
succumbed
IMHO the November elections will be more of the referendum on neoliberal globalization (with
two key issues on the ballot -- jobs and immigration) than anything else.
If so, then the key question is whether the anger of population at neoliberal elite that stole
their jobs and well-being reached the boiling point or not. The level of this anger might decide
the result of elections, not all those petty slurs that neoliberal MSM so diligently use as a
smoke screen.
All those valiant efforts in outsourcing and replacing permanent jobs with temporary to increase
profit margin at the end have the propensity to produce some externalities. And not only in the
form "over 50 and unemployed" but also by a much more dangerous "globalization of indifference"
to human beings in general.
JK Galbraith once gave the following definition of neoliberal economics: "trickle down economics
is the idea that if you feed the horse enough oats eventually some will pass through to the road
for the sparrows." This is what neoliberalism is about. Lower 80% even in so-called rich countries
are forced to live in "fear and desperation", forced to work "with precious little dignity".
Human beings are now considered consumer goods in "job market" to be used and then discarded.
As a consequence, a lot of people find themselves excluded and marginalized: "without work, without
possibilities, without any means of escape" (pope Francis).
And that inevitably produces a reaction. Which in extreme forms we saw during French and Bolsheviks
revolutions. And in less extremist forms (not involving lampposts as the placeholders for the
"Masters of the Universe" (aka financial oligarchy) and the most obnoxious part of the "creative
class" aka intelligentsia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligentsia
) in Brexit vote.
Hillary and Trump are just symbols here. The issue matters, not personalities.
An interesting warning about possible return of neocons in Hillary administration. Looks like not
much changed in Washington from 2005 and Obama more and more looks like Bush III. Both Hillary and Trump
are jingoistic toward Iran. Paradoxically Trump is even more jingoistic then Hillary.
Notable quotes:
"... That no one yet claims actually exists, has begun. Once again we seem to be heading down a highway marked "counterproliferation war." What makes this bizarre is that the Middle East today, for all its catastrophic problems, is actually a nuclear-free zone except for one country, Israel, which has a staggeringly outsized, semi-secret nuclear arsenal. ..."
"... And not much has changed since. I recommend as well a piece written even earlier by Ira Chernus on a graphic about the Israeli nuclear arsenal tucked away at the MSNBC website (and still viewable ). ..."
"... Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst and one of the founders of the group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, considers the Iranian and Israeli bombs, and Bush administration policy in relation to both below in a piece that, he writes, emerged from "an informal colloquium which has sprung up in the Washington, DC area involving people with experience at senior policy levels of government, others who examine foreign policy and defense issues primarily out of a faith perspective, and still others with a foot in each camp. We are trying to deal directly with the moral -- as well as the practical -- implications of various policy alternatives. One of our group recently was invited to talk with senior staffers in the House of Representatives about Iran, its nuclear plans, its support for terrorists, and U.S. military options. Toward the end of that conversation, a House staffer was emboldened to ask, 'What would be a moral solution?' This question gave new energy to our colloquium, generating a number of informal papers, including this one. I am grateful to my colloquium colleagues for their insights and suggestions." ..."
"... What about post-attack "Day Two?" Not to worry. Well-briefed pundits are telling us about a wellspring of Western-oriented I find myself thinking: Right; just like all those Iraqis who welcomed invading American and British troops with open arms and cut flowers. ..."
"... In 2001, the new President Bush brought the neocons back and put them in top policymaking positions. Even former Assistant Secretary of State Elliot Abrams, convicted in October 1991 of lying to Congress and then pardoned by George H. W. Bush, was called back and put in charge of Middle East policy in the White House. In January, he was promoted to the influential post (once occupied by Robert Gates) of deputy assistant to the president for national security affairs. From that senior position Abrams will once again be dealing closely with John Negroponte, an old colleague from rogue-elephant Contra War days, who has now been picked to be the first director of national intelligence. ..."
"... Those of us who -- like Colin Powell -- had front-row seats during the 1980s are far too concerned to dismiss the re-emergence of the neocons as a simple case of déjŕ vu . They are much more dangerous now. Unlike in the eighties, they are the ones crafting the adventurous policies our sons and daughters are being called on to implement. ..."
"... So why would Iran think it has to acquire nuclear weapons? Sen. Richard Lugar, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was asked this on a Sunday talk show a few months ago. Apparently having a senior moment, he failed to give the normal answer. Instead, he replied, "Well, you know, Israel has..." At that point, he caught himself and abruptly stopped. ..."
That no one yet claims actually exists, has begun. Once again we seem to be heading down a highway
marked "counterproliferation war." What makes this bizarre is that the Middle East today, for all
its catastrophic problems, is actually a nuclear-free zone except for one country, Israel, which
has a staggeringly outsized, semi-secret nuclear arsenal.
As Los Angeles Times reporter Douglas Frantz wrote at one point, "Though Israel is a democracy,
debating the nuclear program is taboo A military censor guards Israel's nuclear secrets." And this
"taboo" has largely extended to American reporting on the subject. Imagine, to offer a very partial
analogy, if we all had had to consider the Cold War nuclear issue with the Soviet, but almost never
the American nuclear arsenal, in the news. Of course, that would have been absurd and yet it's the
case in the Middle East today, making most strategic discussions of the region exercises in absurdity.
I wrote about this subject under the title,
Nuclear Israel
, back in October 2003, because of a brief break, thanks to Frantz, in the media blackout on the
subject. I began then, "Nuclear North Korea, nuclear Iraq, nuclear Iran - of these our media has
been full for the last year or more, though they either don't exist or hardly yet exist. North Korea
now probably has a couple of crude nuclear weapons, which it may still be incapable of delivering.
But nuclear Israel, little endangered Israel? It's hard even to get your head around the concept,
though that country has either the fifth or sixth largest nuclear arsenal in the world." And
not much has changed since. I recommend as well a piece written even earlier
by Ira Chernus on a
graphic about the Israeli nuclear arsenal tucked away at the MSNBC website (and
still viewable
).
Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst and one of the founders of the group, Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity, considers the Iranian and Israeli bombs, and Bush administration policy
in relation to both below in a piece that, he writes, emerged from "an informal colloquium which
has sprung up in the Washington, DC area involving people with experience at senior policy levels
of government, others who examine foreign policy and defense issues primarily out of a faith perspective,
and still others with a foot in each camp. We are trying to deal directly with the moral -- as well
as the practical -- implications of various policy alternatives. One of our group recently was invited
to talk with senior staffers in the House of Representatives about Iran, its nuclear plans, its support
for terrorists, and U.S. military options. Toward the end of that conversation, a House staffer was
emboldened to ask, 'What would be a moral solution?' This question gave new energy to our colloquium,
generating a number of informal papers, including this one. I am grateful to my colloquium colleagues
for their insights and suggestions." Now, read on. ~ Tom
Attacking Iran: I Know It Sounds Crazy, But...
By Ray McGovern
"'This notion that the United States is getting ready to attack Iran is simply ridiculous.'
"(Short pause)
"'And having said that, all options are on the table.'
"Even the White House stenographers felt obliged to note the result: '(Laughter).'"
For a host of good reasons -- the huge and draining commitment of U.S. forces to Iraq and Iran's
ability to stir the Iraqi pot to boiling, for starters -- the notion that the Bush administration
would mount a "preemptive" air attack on Iran seems insane. And still more insane if the objective
includes overthrowing Iran's government again, as in 1953 -- this time under the rubric of "regime
change."
But Bush administration policy toward the Middle East is being run by men -- yes, only men
-- who were routinely referred to in high circles in Washington during the 1980s as "the crazies."
I can attest to that personally, but one need not take my word for it.
According to James Naughtie, author of The Accidental American: Tony Blair and the Presidency
, former Secretary of State Colin Powell added an old soldier's adjective to the "crazies"
sobriquet in referring to the same officials. Powell, who was military aide to Defense Secretary
Casper Weinberger in the early eighties, was overheard calling them "the f---ing crazies" during
a phone call with British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw before the war in Iraq. At the time, Powell
was reportedly deeply concerned over their determination to attack -- with or without UN approval.
Small wonder that they got rid of Powell after the election, as soon as they had no more use for
him.
If further proof of insanity were needed, one could simply look at the unnecessary carnage
in Iraq since the invasion in March 2003. That unprovoked attack was, in my view, the most fateful
foreign policy blunder in our nation's history...so far.
It Can Get Worse
"The crazies" are not finished. And we do well not to let their ultimate folly obscure
their current ambition, and the further trouble that ambition is bound to bring in the four years
ahead. In an immediate sense, with U.S. military power unrivaled, they can be seen as "crazy like
a fox," with a value system in which "might makes right." Operating out of that value system,
and now sporting the more respectable misnomer/moniker "neoconservative," they are convinced that
they know exactly what they are doing. They have a clear ideology and a geopolitical strategy,
which leap from papers they put out at the
Project for the New American Century
over recent years.
The very same men who, acting out of that paradigm, brought us the war in Iraq are now focusing
on Iran, which they view as the only remaining obstacle to American domination of the entire oil-rich
Middle East. They calculate that, with a docile, corporate-owned press, a co-opted mainstream
church, and a still-trusting populace, the United States and/or the Israelis can launch a successful
air offensive to disrupt any Iranian nuclear weapons programs -- with the added bonus of possibly
causing the regime in power in Iran to crumble.
But why now? After all, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency has just told Congress
that Iran is not likely to have a nuclear weapon until "early in the next decade?" The answer,
according to some defense experts, is that several of the Iranian facilities are still under construction
and there is only a narrow "window of opportunity" to destroy them without causing huge environmental
problems. That window, they say, will begin to close this year.
Other analysts attribute the sense of urgency to worry in Washington that the Iranians may
have secretly gained access to technology that would facilitate a leap forward into the nuclear
club much sooner than now anticipated. And it is, of course, neoconservative doctrine that it
is best to nip -- the word in current fashion is "preempt" -- any conceivable threats in the bud.
One reason the Israelis are pressing hard for early action may simply be out of a desire to ensure
that George W. Bush will have a few more years as president after an attack on Iran, so that they
will have him to stand with Israel when bedlam breaks out in the Middle East.
What about post-attack "Day Two?" Not to worry. Well-briefed pundits are telling us about
a wellspring of Western-oriented I find myself thinking: Right; just like all those Iraqis who
welcomed invading American and British troops with open arms and cut flowers. For me, this
evokes a painful flashback to the early eighties when "intelligence," pointing to "moderates"
within the Iranian leadership, was conjured up to help justify the imaginative but illegal arms-for-hostages-and-proceeds-to-Nicaraguan-Contras
caper. The fact that the conjurer-in-chief of that spurious "evidence" on Iranian "moderates,"
former chief CIA analyst, later director Robert Gates, was recently offered the newly created
position of director of national intelligence makes the flashback more eerie -- and alarming.
George H. W. Bush Saw Through "The Crazies"
During his term in office, George H. W. Bush, with the practical advice of his national security
adviser Gen. Brent Scowcroft and Secretary of State James Baker, was able to keep "the crazies"
at arms length, preventing them from getting the country into serious trouble. They were kept
well below the level of "principal" -- that is, below the level of secretary of state or defense.
Even so, heady in the afterglow of victory in the Gulf War of 1990, "the crazies" stirred up
considerable controversy when they articulated their radical views. Their vision, for instance,
became the centerpiece of the draft "Defense Planning Guidance" that Paul Wolfowitz, de facto
dean of the neoconservatives, prepared in 1992 for then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney. It dismissed
deterrence as an outdated relic of the Cold War and argued that the United States must maintain
military strength beyond conceivable challenge -- and use it in preemptive ways in dealing with
those who might acquire "weapons of mass destruction." Sound familiar?
Aghast at this radical imperial strategy for the post-Cold War world, someone with access to
the draft leaked it to the New York Times , forcing President George H. W. Bush either
to endorse or disavow it. Disavow it he did -- and quickly, on the cooler-head recommendations
of Scowcroft and Baker, who proved themselves a bulwark against the hubris and megalomania of
"the crazies." Unfortunately, their vision did not die. No less unfortunately, there is method
to their madness -- even if it threatens to spell eventual disaster for our country. Empires always
overreach and fall.
The Return of the Neocons
In 2001, the new President Bush brought the neocons back and put them in top policymaking
positions. Even former Assistant Secretary of State Elliot Abrams, convicted in October 1991 of
lying to Congress and then pardoned by George H. W. Bush, was called back and put in charge of
Middle East policy in the White House. In January, he was promoted to the influential post (once
occupied by Robert Gates) of deputy assistant to the president for national security affairs.
From that senior position Abrams will once again be dealing closely with John Negroponte, an old
colleague from rogue-elephant Contra War days, who has now been picked to be the first director
of national intelligence.
Those of us who -- like Colin Powell -- had front-row seats during the 1980s are far too
concerned to dismiss the re-emergence of the neocons as a simple case of déjŕ vu . They
are much more dangerous now. Unlike in the eighties, they are the ones crafting the adventurous
policies our sons and daughters are being called on to implement.
Why dwell on this? Because it is second in importance only to the portentous reality that the
earth is running out of readily accessible oil – something of which they are all too aware. Not
surprisingly then, disguised beneath the weapons-of-mass-destruction smokescreen they laid down
as they prepared to invade Iraq lay an unspoken but bedrock reason for the war -- oil. In any
case, the neocons seem to believe that, in the wake of the November election, they now have a
carte-blanche "mandate." And with the president's new "capital to spend," they appear determined
to spend it, sooner rather than later.
Next Stop, Iran
When a Special Forces platoon leader just back from Iraq matter-of-factly tells a close friend
of mine, as happened last week, that he and his unit are now training their sights (literally)
on Iran, we need to take that seriously. It provides us with a glimpse of reality as seen at ground
level. For me, it brought to mind an unsolicited email I received from the father of a young soldier
training at Fort Benning in the spring of 2002, soon after I wrote an op-ed discussing the timing
of George W. Bush's decision to make war on Iraq. The father informed me that, during the spring
of 2002, his son kept writing home saying his unit was training to go into Iraq. No, said the
father; you mean Afghanistan... that's where the war is, not Iraq. In his next email, the son
said, "No, Dad, they keep saying Iraq. I asked them and that's what they mean."
Now, apparently, they keep saying Iran ; and that appears to be what they mean.
Anecdotal evidence like this is hardly conclusive. Put it together with administration rhetoric
and a preponderance of other "dots," though, and everything points in the direction of an air
attack on Iran, possibly also involving some ground forces. Indeed, from the
New Yorker reports
of Seymour Hersh to
Washington Post articles , accounts of small-scale American intrusions on the ground as well
as into Iranian airspace are appearing with increasing frequency. In a speech given on February
18, former UN arms inspector and Marine officer Scott Ritter (who was totally on target before
the Iraq War on that country's lack of weapons of mass destruction) claimed that the president
has already "signed off" on plans to bomb Iran in June in order to destroy its alleged nuclear
weapons program and eventually bring about "regime change." This does not necessarily mean an
automatic green light for a large attack in June, but it may signal the president's seriousness
about this option.
So, again, against the background of what we have witnessed over the past four years, and the
troubling fact that the circle of second-term presidential advisers has become even tighter, we
do well to inject a strong note of urgency into any discussion of the "Iranian option."
Why Would Iran Want Nukes?
So why would Iran think it has to acquire nuclear weapons? Sen. Richard Lugar, chair of
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was asked this on a Sunday talk show a few months ago.
Apparently having a senior moment, he failed to give the normal answer. Instead, he replied, "Well,
you know, Israel has..." At that point, he caught himself and abruptly stopped.
Recovering quickly and realizing that he could not just leave the word "Israel" hanging there,
Lugar began again: "Well, Israel is alleged to have a nuclear capability."
Is alleged to
have ? Lugar is chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and yet he doesn't know that
Israel has, by most estimates, a major nuclear arsenal, consisting of several hundred nuclear
weapons? (Mainstream newspapers are allergic to dwelling on this topic, but it is mentioned every
now and then, usually buried in obscurity on an inside page.)
Just imagine how the Iranians and Syrians would react to Lugar's disingenuousness. Small wonder
our highest officials and lawmakers -- and Lugar, remember, is one of the most decent among them
-- are widely seen abroad as hypocritical. Our media, of course, ignore the hypocrisy. This is
standard operating procedure when the word "Israel" is spoken in this or other unflattering contexts.
And the objections of those appealing for a more balanced approach are quashed.
If the truth be told, Iran fears Israel at least as much as Israel fears the internal security
threat posed by the thugs supported by Tehran. Iran's apprehension is partly fear that Israel
(with at least tacit support from the Bush administration) will send its aircraft to bomb Iranian
nuclear facilities, just as American-built Israeli bombers destroyed the Iraqi nuclear reactor
at Osirak in 1981. As part of the current war of nerves, recent statements by the president and
vice president can be
read as giving a green light to Israel to do just that; while Israeli Air Force commander Major
General Eliezer Shakedi told reporters on February 21 that Israel must be prepared for an air
strike on Iran "in light of its nuclear activity."
US-Israel Nexus
The Iranians also remember how Israel was able to acquire and keep its nuclear technology.
Much of it was stolen from the United States by spies for Israel. As early as the late-1950s,
Washington knew Israel was building the bomb and could have aborted the project. Instead, American
officials decided to turn a blind eye and let the Israelis go ahead. Now Israel's nuclear capability
is truly formidable. Still, it is a fact of strategic life that a formidable nuclear arsenal can
be deterred by a far more modest one, if an adversary has the means to deliver it. (Look at North
Korea's success with, at best, a few nuclear weapons and questionable means of delivery in deterring
the "sole remaining superpower in the world.") And Iran already has missiles with the range to
hit Israel.
Israeli Prime Minister Sharon has for some time appeared eager to enlist Washington's support
for an early "pre-emptive" strike on Iran. Indeed,
American
defense officials have told reporters that visiting Israeli officials have been pressing the
issue for the past year and a half. And the Israelis are now claiming publicly that Iran could
have a nuclear weapon within six months -- years earlier than the Defense Intelligence Agency
estimate mentioned above.
In the past, President Bush has chosen to dismiss unwelcome intelligence estimates as "guesses"
-- especially when they threatened to complicate decisions to implement the neoconservative agenda.
It is worth noting that several of the leading neocons – Richard Perle, chair of the Defense Policy
Board (2001-03); Douglas Feith, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy; and David Wurmser, Middle
East adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney -- actually wrote policy papers for the Israeli government
during the 1990s. They have consistently had great difficulty distinguishing between the strategic
interests of Israel and those of the US -- at least as they imagine them.
As for President Bush, over the past four years he has amply demonstrated his preference for
the counsel of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon who,
as Gen. Scowcroft said publicly , has the president "wrapped around his little finger." (As
Chairman of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board until he was unceremoniously removed
at the turn of the year, Scowcroft was in a position to know.) If Scowcroft is correct in also
saying that the president has been "mesmerized" by Sharon, it seems possible that the Israelis
already have successfully argued for an attack on Iran.
When "Regime Change" Meant Overthrow For Oil
To remember why the United States is no favorite in Tehran, one needs to go back at least to
1953 when the U.S. and Great Britain overthrew Iran's democratically elected Premier Mohammad
Mossadeq as part of a plan to insure access to Iranian oil. They then emplaced the young Shah
in power who, with his notorious secret police, proved second to none in cruelty. The Shah ruled
from 1953 to 1979. Much resentment can build up over a whole generation. His regime fell like
a house of cards, when supporters of Ayatollah Khomeini rose up to do some regime change of their
own.
Iranians also remember Washington's strong support for Saddam Hussein's Iraq after it decided
to make war on Iran in 1980. U.S. support for Iraq (which included crucial intelligence support
for the war and an implicit condoning of Saddam's use of chemical weapons) was perhaps the crucial
factor in staving off an Iranian victory. Imagine then, the threat Iranians see, should the Bush
administration succeed in establishing up to 14 permanent military bases in neighboring Iraq.
Any Iranian can look at a map of the Middle East (including occupied Iraq) and conclude that this
administration might indeed be willing to pay the necessary price in blood and treasure to influence
what happens to the black gold under Iranian as well as Iraqi sands. And with four more years
to play with, a lot can be done along those lines. The obvious question is: How to deter it? Well,
once again, Iran can hardly be blind to the fact that a small nation like North Korea has so far
deterred U.S. action by producing, or at least claiming to have produced, nuclear weapons.
Nuclear Is the Nub
The nuclear issue is indeed paramount, and we would do well to imagine and craft fresh approaches
to the nub of the problem. As a start, I'll bet if you made a survey, only 20% of Americans would
answer "yes" to the question, "Does Israel have nuclear weapons?" That is key, it seems to me,
because at their core Americans are still fair-minded people.
On the other hand, I'll bet that 95% of the Iranian population would answer, "Of course Israel
has nuclear weapons; that's why we Iranians need them" -- which was, of course, the unmentionable
calculation that Senator Lugar almost conceded. "And we also need them," many Iranians would probably
say, "in order to deter 'the crazies' in Washington. It seems to be working for the North Koreans,
who, after all, are the other remaining point on President Bush's 'axis of evil.'"
The ideal approach would, of course, be to destroy all nuclear weapons in the world
and ban them for the future, with a very intrusive global inspection regime to verify compliance.
A total ban is worth holding up as an ideal, and I think we must. But this approach seems unlikely
to bear fruit over the next four years. So what then?
A Nuclear-Free Middle East
How about a nuclear-free Middle East? Could the US make that happen? We could if we had moral
clarity -- the underpinning necessary to bring it about. Each time this proposal is raised, the
Syrians, for example, clap their hands in feigned joyful anticipation, saying, "Of course such
a pact would include Israel, right?" The issue is then dropped from all discussion by U.S. policymakers.
Required: not only moral clarity but also what Thomas Aquinas labeled the precondition for all
virtue, courage. In this context, courage would include a refusal to be intimidated by inevitable
charges of anti-Semitism.
The reality is that, except for Israel, the Middle East is nuclear free. But the discussion
cannot stop there. It is not difficult to understand why the first leaders of Israel, with the
Holocaust experience written indelibly on their hearts and minds, and feeling surrounded by perceived
threats to the fledgling state's existence, wanted the bomb. And so, before the Syrians or Iranians,
for example, get carried away with self-serving applause for the nuclear-free Middle East proposal,
they will have to understand that for any such negotiation to succeed it must have as a concomitant
aim the guarantee of an Israel able to live in peace and protect itself behind secure borders.
That guarantee has got to be part of the deal.
That the obstacles to any such agreement are formidable is no excuse not trying. But the approach
would have to be new and everything would have to be on the table. Persisting in a state of denial
about Israel's nuclear weapons is dangerously shortsighted; it does nothing but aggravate fears
among the Arabs and create further incentive for them to acquire nuclear weapons of their own.
A sensible approach would also have to include a willingness to engage the Iranians directly,
attempt to understand their perspective, and discern what the United States and Israel could do
to alleviate their concerns.
Preaching to Iran and others about not acquiring nuclear weapons is, indeed, like the village
drunk preaching sobriety -- the more so as our government keeps developing new genres of nuclear
weapons and keeps looking the other way as Israel enhances its own nuclear arsenal. Not a pretty
moral picture, that. Indeed, it reminds me of the Scripture passage about taking the plank out
of your own eye before insisting that the speck be removed from another's.
Lessons from the Past...Like Mutual Deterrence
Has everyone forgotten that deterrence worked for some 40 years, while for most of those years
the U.S. and the USSR had not by any means lost their lust for ever-enhanced nuclear weapons?
The point is simply that, while engaging the Iranians bilaterally and searching for more imaginative
nuclear-free proposals, the U.S. might adopt a more patient interim attitude regarding the striving
of other nation states to acquire nuclear weapons -- bearing in mind that the Bush administration's
policies of "preemption" and "regime change" themselves create powerful incentives for exactly
such striving. As was the case with Iraq two years ago, there is no imminent Iranian strategic
threat to Americans -- or, in reality, to anyone. Even if Iran acquired a nuclear capability,
there is no reason to believe that it would risk a suicidal first strike on Israel. That, after
all, is what mutual deterrence is all about; it works both ways.
It is nonetheless clear that the Israelis' sense of insecurity -- however exaggerated it may
seem to those of us thousands of miles away -- is not synthetic but real. The Sharon government
appears to regard its nuclear monopoly in the region as the only effective "deterrence insurance"
it can buy. It is determined to prevent its neighbors from acquiring the kind of capability that
could infringe on the freedom it now enjoys to carry out military and other actions in the area.
Government officials have said that Israel will not let Iran acquire a nuclear weapon; it would
be folly to dismiss this as bravado. The Israelis have laid down a marker and mean to follow through
-- unless the Bush administration assumes the attitude that "preemption" is an acceptable course
for the United States but not for Israel. It seems unlikely that the neoconservatives would take
that line. Rather
"Israel Is Our Ally."
Or so
said
our president before the cameras on February 17, 2005. But I didn't think we had a treaty
of alliance with Israel; I don't remember the Senate approving one. Did I miss something?
Clearly, the longstanding U.S.-Israeli friendship and the ideals we share dictate continuing
support for Israel's defense and security. It is quite another thing, though, to suggest the existence
of formal treaty obligations that our country does not have. To all intents and purposes, our
policymakers -- from the president on down -- seem to speak and behave on the assumption that
we do have such obligations toward Israel. A former colleague CIA analyst, Michael Scheuer, author
of Imperial Hubris , has put it this way: "The Israelis have succeeded in lacing tight
the ropes binding the American Gulliver to Israel and its policies."
An earlier American warned:
"A passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for
the favorite nation facilitates the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where
no real common interest exists, infuses into one the enmities of the other, and betrays the
former into participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement
or justification.... It also gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens, who devote
themselves to the favorite nation, facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own
country." ( George Washington, Farewell Address, 1796 )
In my view, our first president's words apply only too aptly to this administration's lash-up
with the Sharon government. As responsible citizens we need to overcome our timidity about addressing
this issue, lest our fellow Americans continue to be denied important information neglected or
distorted in our domesticated media.
Ray McGovern served as a CIA analyst for 27 years -- from the administration of John
F. Kennedy to that of George H. W. Bush. During the early 1980s, he was one of the writers/editors
of the President's Daily Brief and briefed it one-on-one to the president's most senior advisers.
He also chaired National Intelligence Estimates. In January 2003, he and four former colleagues
founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
"... If I was in charge of the DNC and wanted to commission a very cleverly written piece to exonerate the DLC and the New Democrats from the 30 odd years of corruption and self-aggrandizement they indulged in and laughed all the way to the Bank then I would definitely give this chap a call. ..."
"... I would ask the Author to start with the Powell memo and then make an investigation as to why the Democrats then and the DLC later decided to merely sit on their hands when all the forces the Powell memo unleashed proceeded to wreak their havoc in every established institution of the Left, principally the Universities which had always been the bastion of the Progressives. That might be a good starting point. ..."
If I was in charge of the DNC and wanted to commission a very cleverly written piece to exonerate
the DLC and the New Democrats from the 30 odd years of corruption and self-aggrandizement they
indulged in and laughed all the way to the Bank then I would definitely give this chap a call.
I mean, where do we start? No attempt at learning the history of neoliberalism, no attempt
at any serious research about how and why it fastened itself into the brains of people like Tony
Coelho and Al From, nothing, zilch.
If someone who did not know the history of the DLC read this piece, they would walk away thinking,
'wow, it was all happenstance, it all just happened, no one deliberately set off this run away
train'. Sometime in the 90s the 'Left' decided to just pursue identity politics. Amazing.
I would ask the Author to start with the Powell memo and then make an investigation as to why
the Democrats then and the DLC later decided to merely sit on their hands when all the forces
the Powell memo unleashed proceeded to wreak their havoc in every established institution of the
Left, principally the Universities which had always been the bastion of the Progressives. That
might be a good starting point.
The reasons for the election of Donald Trump as President of the U.S. will be analyzed and argued
about for many years to come. Undoubtedly there are U.S.-specific factors that are relevant, such
as racial divisions in voting patterns. But the election took place after the British vote to withdraw
from the European Union and the rise to power of conservative politicians in continental Europe,
so it is reasonable to ask whether globalization bears any responsibility.
Have foreign workers taken the jobs of U.S. workers? Increased trade does lead to a reallocation
of resources, as a country increases its output in those sectors where it has an advantage while
cutting back production in other sectors. Resources should flow from the latter to the former, but
in reality it can be difficult to switch employment across sectors.
Daron Acemoglu and David Autor of MIT,
David Dorn of the University of Zurich, Gordon Hanson of UC-San Diego and Brendan Price of MIT
have found that import competition from China after 2000 contributed to reductions in U.S. manufacturing
employment and weak U.S. job growth. They estimated manufacturing job losses due to Chinese competition
of 2.0 – 2.4 million.
Other studies
find similar results for workers who do not have high school degrees.
Moreover, multinational firms do shift production across borders in response to lower wages, among
other factors.
Ann E. Harrison of UC-Berkeley and Margaret S. McMillan of Tufts University looked at the hiring
practices of the foreign affiliates of U.S. firms during the period of 1977 to 1999. They found that
lower wages in affiliate countries where the employees were substitutes for U.S. workers led to more
employment in those countries but reductions in employment in the U.S. However, when employment across
geographical locations is complementary for firms that do significantly different work at home and
abroad, domestic and foreign employment rise and fall together.
Imports and foreign production, therefore, have had an impact on manufacturing employment in the
U.S. But several caveats should be raised. First, as
Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of MIT and others have pointed out, technology has had a
much larger effect on jobs. The U.S. is the second largest global producer of manufactured goods,
but these products are being made in plants that employ fewer workers than they did in the past.
Many of the lost jobs simply do not exist any more. Second, the U.S. exports goods and services as
well as purchases them. Among the manufactured goods that account for significant shares of U.S.
exports are
machines
and engines, electronic equipment and aircraft . Third, there is inward FDI as well as outward,
and the foreign-based firms hire U.S. workers. A 2013
Congressional Research Service
study by James V. Jackson reported that by year-end 2011 foreign firms employed 6.1 million Americans,
and 37% of this employment-2.3 million jobs-was in the manufacturing sector.
More recent data
shows that employment by the U.S. affiliates of multinational companies rose to 6.4 million in
2014. Mr. Trump will find himself in a difficult position if he threatens to shut down trade and
investment with countries that both import from the U.S. and invest here.
The other form of globalization that drew Trump's derision was immigration. Most of his ire focused
on those who had entered the U.S. illegally. However, in a speech in Arizona he said that he would
set up a commission that would
roll back the number of legal migrants to "historic norms."
The
current number of immigrants (42 million) represents around 13% of the U.S. population, and 16%
of the labor force. An increase in the number of foreign-born workers depresses the wages of some
native-born workers, principally high-school dropouts, as well as other migrants who arrived earlier.
But there are other, more significant reasons for the
stagnation in
working-class wages . In addition, a reduction in the number of migrant laborers would raise
the ratio of young and retired people to workers-the dependency ratio-and endanger the financing
of Social Security and Medicare. And by increasing the size of the U.S. economy,
these workers induce expansions in investment expenditures and hiring in areas that are complementary.
The one form of globalization that Trump has not criticized, with the exception of outward FDI,
is financial. This is a curious omission, as the crisis of 2008-09 arose from the financial implosion
that followed the collapse of the housing bubble in the U.S. International financial flows exacerbated
the magnitude of the crisis. But
Trump has pledged
to dismantle the Dodd-Frank legislation, which was enacted to implement financial regulatory
reform and lower the probability of another crisis. While
Trump has criticized China for undervaluing its currency in order to increase its exports to
the U.S., most economists believe that the
Chinese currency is no longer undervalued vis-ŕ-vis the U.S. dollar.
Did globalization produce Trump, or lead to the circumstances that resulted in
46.7% of the electorate voting
for him? A score sheet of the impact of globalization within the U.S. would record pluses and minuses.
Among those who have benefitted are consumers who purchase items made abroad at cheaper prices, workers
who produce export goods, and firms that hire migrants. Those who have been adversely affected include
workers who no longer have manufacturing jobs and domestic workers who compete with migrants for
low-paying jobs. Overall, most studies find evidence of
positive net benefits from trade . Similarly,
studies of the cost and benefits of immigration indicate that overall foreign workers make a
positive contribution to the U.S. economy.
Other trends have exerted equal or greater consequences for our economic welfare. First, as pointed
out above, advances in automation have had an enormous impact on the number and nature of jobs, and
advances in artificial intelligence wii further change the nature of work. The launch of driverless
cars and trucks, for example, will affect the economy in unforeseen ways, and more workers will lose
their livelihoods. Second, income inequality has been on the increase in the U.S. and elsewhere for
several decades. While those in the upper-income classes have benefitted most from increased trade
and finance, inequality reflects many factors besides globalization.
Why, then, is globalization the focus of so much discontent? Trump had the insight that demonizing
foreigners and U.S.-based multinationals would allow him to offer simple solutions-ripping up trade
deals, strong-arming CEOs to relocate facilities-to complex problems. Moreover, it allows him to
draw a line between his supporters and everyone else, with Trump as the one who will protect workers
against the crafty foreigners and corrupt elite who conspire to steal American jobs. Blaming the
foreign "other" is a well-trod route for those who aspire to power in times of economic and social
upheaval.
Globalization, therefore, should not be held responsible for the election of Donald Trump and
those in other countries who offer similar simplistic solutions to challenging trends. But globalization's
advocates did indirectly lead to his rise when they oversold the benefits of globalization and neglected
the downside. Lower prices at Wal-Mart are scarce consolation to those who have lost their jobs.
Moreover, the proponents of globalization failed to strengthen the safety networks and redistributive
mechanisms that allow those who had to compete with foreign goods and workers to share in the broader
benefits.
Dani Rodrik of Harvard's Kennedy School has described how the policy priorities were changed:
"The new model of globalization stood priorities on their head, effectively putting democracy to
work for the global economy, instead of the other way around. The elimination of barriers to trade
and finance became an end in itself, rather than a means toward more fundamental economic and social
goals."
The battle over globalization is not finished, and there will be future opportunities to adapt
it to benefit a wider section of society. The goal should be to place it within in a framework that
allows a more egalitarian distribution of the benefits and payment of the costs. This is not a new
task. After World War II, the Allied planners sought to revive international trade while allowing
national governments to use their policy tools to foster full employment. Political scientist
John
Ruggie of the Kennedy School called the hybrid system based on fixed exchange rates, regulated
capital accounts and government programs "
embedded liberalism
," and it prevailed until it was swept aside by the wave of neoliberal policies in the 1980s
and 1990s.
What would today's version of "embedded liberalism" look like? In the financial sector, the pendulum
has already swung back from unregulated capital flows and towards the use of capital control measures
as part of macroprudential policies designed to address systemic risk in the financial sector. In
addition,
Thomas Piketty of the École des hautes etudes en sciences (EHESS) and associate chair at the Paris
School of Economics , and author of Capital in the Twenty-first Century, has called
for a new focus in discussions over the next stage of globalization: " trade is a good thing, but
fair and sustainable development also demands public services, infrastructure, health and education
systems. In turn, these themselves demand fair taxation systems."
The current political environment is not conducive toward the expansion of public goods. But it
is unlikely that our new President's policies will deliver on their promise to return to a past when
U.S. workers could operate without concern for foreign competition or automation. We will certainly
revisit these issues, and we need to redefine what a successful globalization looks like. And if
we don't? Thomas Piketty warns of the consequences of not enacting the necessary domestic policies
and institutions: "If we fail to deliver these, Trump_vs_deep_state will prevail."
Since 1980, US manufacturing output has approximately doubled while manufacturing employment
fell by about a third.
Yes, globalization impacts the composition of output and it is a contributing factor in the
weaker growth of manufacturing output. but overall it has accounted for a very minor share of
the weakness in manufacturing employment since 1980. Productivity has been the dominant factor
driving manufacturing employment down.
JimH November 29, 2016 11:11 am
"Overall, most studies find evidence of positive net benefits from trade."
Of course they do! And in your world, studies always Trump real world experience.
Studies on trade can ignore the unemployed workers with a high school education or less. How
were they supposed to get an equivalent paying job? EDUCATION they say! A local public university
has a five year freshman graduation rate of 25%. Are those older students to eat dirt while attempting
to accumulate that education!
Studies on trade can ignore that illegal immigration increases competition for the those under
educated employees. Since 1990 there has been a rising demand that education must be improved!
That potential high school drop outs should be discouraged by draconian means if necessary. YET
we allow immigrants to enter this country and STAY with less than the equivalent of an American
high school education! Why are we spending so much on secondary education if it is not necessary!
"In Mexico, 34% of adults aged 25-64 have completed upper secondary education, much lower than
the OECD average of 76% the lowest rate amongst OECD countries."
See: http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/mexico/
Trade studies can ignore the fate of a small town when its major employer shuts down and leaves.
Trade studies can assume that we are one contiguous job market. They can assume that an unemployed
worker in Pennsylvania will learn of a good paying job in Washington state, submit an application,
and move within 2 weeks. Or assume that the Washington state employer will hold a factory job
open for a month! And they can assume that moving expenses are trivial for an unemployed person.
Our trade partners have not attempted anything remotely resembling balanced trade with us.
Here are the trade deficits since 1992.
Year__________US Trade Balance with the world
1992__________-39,212
1993__________-70,311
1994__________-98,493
1995__________-96,384
1996__________-104,065
1997__________-108,273
1998__________-166,140
1999__________-258,617
2000__________-372,517
2001__________-361,511
2002__________-418,955
2003__________-493,890
2004__________-609,883
2005__________-714,245
2006__________-761,716
2007__________-705,375
2008__________-708,726
2009__________-383,774
2010__________-494,658
2011__________-548,625
2012__________-536,773
2013__________-461,876
2014__________-490,176
2015__________-500,361
From:
https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/statistics/historical/gands.pdf
AND there is the loss of the income from tariffs which had been going to the federal government!
How has that effected our national debt?
"However, when employment across geographical locations is complementary for firms that do
significantly different work at home and abroad, domestic and foreign employment rise and fall
together."
And exactly how do you think that the US government could guarantee that complementary work
at home and abroad. Corporations are profit seeking, amoral entities, which will seek profit any
way they can. (Legal or illegal)
The logical conclusion of your argument is that we could produce nothing and still have a thriving
economy. How would American consumers earn an income?
Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin are RUST BELT states. Were the voters
there merely ignorant or demented? You should never ever run for elected office.
Beverly Mann November 29, 2016 12:30 pm
Meanwhile, Trump today chose non-swampy Elaine Chao, Mitch McConnell's current wife and GWBush's
former Labor Secretary, as Transportation Secretary, to privatize roads, bridges, etc.
JimH November 29, 2016 12:36 pm
The trade balances are in millions of dollars in the table in my last comment.
Global trade had a chance of success beginning in 1992. But that required a mechanism which
was very difficult to game. A mechanism like the one that the Obama administration advocated in
October 2010.
"At the meeting in South Korea's southern city of Gyeongju, U.S. officials sought to set a
cap for each country's deficit or surplus at 4% of its economic output by 2015.
The idea drew support from Britain, Australia, Canada and France, all of which are running trade
deficits, as well as South Korea, which is hosting the G-20 meetings and hoping for a compromise
among the parties.
But the proposal got a cool reception from export powerhouses such as China, which has a current
account surplus of 4.7% of its gross domestic product; Germany, with a surplus of 6.1%; and Russia,
with a surplus of 4.7%, according to IMF statistics."
See:
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/oct/24/business/la-fi-g20-summit-20101024
That cap was probably too high. But at least the Obama administration showed some realization
that global trade was exhibiting serious unpredicted problems. Too bad that Hillary Clinton could
not have internalized that realization enough to campaign on revamping problematic trade treaties.
(And persuaded a few more of the voters in the RUST BELT to vote for her.) Elections have consequences
and voters understand that, but what choice did they have?
In your world, while American corporations act out in ways that would be diagnosed as antisocial
personality disorder in a human being, American human beings are expected to wait patiently for
decades while global trade is slowly adjusted into some practical system. (As one shortcoming
after another is addressed.)
The article states almost exactly what you 'add' in your comment:
"Imports and foreign production, therefore, have had an impact on manufacturing employment
in the U.S. But several caveats should be raised. First, as Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee
of MIT and others have pointed out, technology has had a much larger effect on jobs".
So, what gives? Is there an award today for who ever gets the biggest DUH??? If there is anything
worth adding, it would be a mention of the Ball St study that supports the author's claim but
is somehow overlooked. But your comment, well, DUH!!
=================================================
JimH,
Some good stuff there, your assessment of Economics and its penchant for ignoring variables,
and your insight which states that "studies can assume that we are one contiguous job market",
is all very true, and especially when it comes to immigration issues. I've lived most of my life
near the Southern border and when economists claim that undocumented workers are good for our
economy I can only chuckle and shake my head. I suppose I could also list all of the variables
which those economists ignore, and there are many to choose from, but, there is that quote by
Upton Sinclair: "You can't get a man to understand what his salary depends on his not understanding".
In all fairness though, The Dept. of Labor does of course have its JOLTS data, and so not all
such studies are based on broad assumptions, but Economics does have its blind spots, generally
speaking. And of course economists apply far too much effort and energy serving their political
and financial masters.
As for your comment in regards to the the trade deficit, you might want to read up a little
on the Triffin Dilemma. The essence of globalization has a lot to do with the US leadership choosing
to maintain the reserve-currency status and Triffin showed that an increasing amount of dollars
must supply the world's demand for dollars, or, global growth would falter. So, the trade deficit
since 1975 has been intentional, for that reason, and others. Of course the cost of labor in the
US was a factor too, and shipping and standards and so on. But, it is wise also, to remember that
these choices were made at time, during and just after the Viet Nam war, when military recruitment
was a very troubling issue for the leadership. And the option of good paying jobs for the working-class
was very probably seen as in conflict with military recruitment. Accordingly, the working-class
has been left with fewer options. This being accomplished in part with the historical anomaly
of high immigration quotas, (and by the tolerance for illegal immigration), during periods with
high unemployment, a falling participation-rate, inadequate infrastructure, and etc.
Ray LaPan-Love November 29, 2016 2:18 pm
JimH,
After posting my earlier comment it occurred to me that I should have recommended an article
by Tim Taylor that has some good info on the Triffin dilemma.
Also, it might be worth mentioning that you are making the common mistake of assigning blame
to an international undertaking that would be more accurately assigned to national shortcomings.
I'm referring here to what you quoted and said:
""Overall, most studies find evidence of positive net benefits from trade.""
"Of course they do! And in your world, studies always Trump real world experience".
My point being that "positive net benefits from trade" are based on just another half-baked
measurement as you suggest, but the problems which result from trade-related displacements are
not necessarily the fault of trade itself. There are in fact political options, for example, immigration
could have been curtailed about 40 years ago and we would now have about 40 million fewer citizens,
and thus there would almost certainly be more jobs available. Or, the laws pertaining to illegal
immigration could have been enforced, or the 'Employee Free Choice Act could have been passed,
or whatever, and then trade issues may have had much different impact.
Ray LaPan-Love November 29, 2016 3:12 pm
It seems worth mentioning here, that there are other more important goals that make globalization
valuable than just matters of money or employment or who is getting what. Let us not forget the
famous words of Immanuel Kant:
"the spirit of commerce . . . sooner or later takes hold of every nation, and is incompatible
with war."
coberly November 29, 2016 6:33 pm
Ray
the spirit of commerce did not prevent WW1 or WW2.
otherwise, thank you, and Jim H and Joseph Joyce for the first Post and Comments for grownups
we've had around here in some time.
Ray LaPan-Love November 29, 2016 7:03 pm
Hey Coberly, long time no see.
And yes, you are right, 'the spirit of commerce' theory has had some ups and downs. But, one
could easily and accurately argue that the effort which began with the League of Nations, and
loosely connects back to Kant's claim, has gained some ground since WW2. There has not, after-all,
been a major war since.
So, when discussing the pros and cons of globalization, that factor, as I said, is worthy of
mention. And it was a key consideration in the formation of the Bretton Woods institutions, and
in the globalization effort in general. This suggesting then that there are larger concerns than
the unemployment-rate, or the wage levels, of the working-class folks who may, or may not, have
been at the losing end of 'free-trade'.
I've been a 'labor-lefty' since the 1970s, but I am still capable of understanding that things
could have been much worse for the American working-class. Plus, if anyone must give up a job,
who better than those with a fairly well-constructed safety-net. History always has its winners
and losers, and progress rarely, if ever, comes in an even flow.
Meanwhile, those living in extreme poverty, worldwide, have dropped from 40% in 1981, to about
10% in 2015 (World Bank), so, progress is occurring. But of course much of that is now being ignored
by the din which has drowned out so many considerations that really do matter, and a great deal.
coberly November 29, 2016 8:25 pm
Ray
I am inclined to agree with you, but sometimes it's hard to see the forest for the trees. Especially
if one of those trees has fallen on you.
In general I am more interested in stopping predatory business models that really hurt people
than in creating cosmic justice.
as for the relative lack of big wars since WW2, I always thought that was because of mutual
assured destruction. I am sure Vietnam looked like a big enough war to the Vietnamese.
This idea of McCarthy style attack turned in promotion with some sites having large flow of
donations from outrages readers.
Notable quotes:
"... By Max Blumenthal, a senior editor of the Grayzone Project at AlterNet, and the award-winning author of Goliath and Republican Gomorrah. His most recent book is The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza. Follow him on Twitter at @MaxBlumenthal. Originally published at Alternet ..."
"... it was created about three months ago when the Red baiting was already in full swing in the media. ..."
"... it now has a wikipedia page as of 15 Nov. ..."
"... Congratulations! That site is like a who's who of influential critical reporting. I suspect, as with so many of the bubble-dwellers attempts, that this slapdash but probably overpriced effort will drive traffic to those sites while reducing the credibility of its promoters. An instant classic own-goal. I look forward to the inevitable and embarassing revelations about their founders and funding. ..."
"... Under general tenets of defamation law (statutory and in common law), it is not just the original entity or person defaming (including defamation "per se") another that is liable for such torts, but others who carelessly or recklessly repeat the original defamatory statements/claims (in this case, both The Washington Post & New York Times bear similar potential liability as PropOrNot). ..."
"... Requires actual malice since it's the media you're suing – but that can be proven by reckless indifference to the truth which this might actually meet the standard of, especially since the site isn't making this claim based on anything other than the content of the views espoused by the sites. ..."
"... i vaguely thought the actual malice requirement was tied to the target being a public figure; maybe running a blog qualifies. ..."
"... Propornot is directly accusing NC and the rest of a crime (espionage), which constitutes defamation per se, so I think the only issue before the court would be whether it was done with reckless indifference. ..."
"... The MSM did such a fine job reporting the news during the campaign. (16 anti-Sanders stories in 16 hours from the WaPo. A new record.) Are small news/opinion sites cutting into their online advertising revenue. ;) ..."
"... Second, had you bothered to read the actual PropOrNot site, it accuses all of the sites listed as being "propaganda outlets" under the influence of "coordinators abroad" (#11 in its FAQ). ..."
"... And under #7, PropOrNot asserts that "some" of the sites are guilty of violating the Espionage Act and the Foreign Agent Registration Act, as in accusing them of being spies and calling for investigation (by implication of all, since how do you know which is or isn't) by the FBI and DoJ. ..."
"... Their MSM propaganda isn't working and they see it. They already heavily censor comments on their MSM sites. Other MSM sights such as Bloomberg closed down comments altogether. Expect more of that. ..."
"... what weakens people's confidence in their leaders is their not addressing people's issues and lying about their inability to do so. Despite protestations from the likes of much of our 'intelligentsia', mainstream media, and most of our political class, the majority of people are not stupid. There is a reason why terms like 'lame stream media' resonate with a large number of people. ..."
"... For instance when Obama is out there talking about a recovery and people know that there is no such thing in their lives, their communities then HE has lost their confidence – not someone giving an interview on RT. ..."
"... Or to put it another way the problem isn't someone going on RT and saying the emperor isn't wearing clothes, the problem is that the emperor isn't wearing clothes. ..."
"... Steve Keen is great, and I love his work, but it's also obvious that RT invites him on the network because he lambasts the American political establishment and weakens the public's confidence in its leaders. This is clearly a goal of Moscow, and they use people like Steve Keen to do it. I'm sure Steven Keen doesn't think of his role that way, but RT and Russian intelligence certainly do. ..."
"... How do you know any of this? how would you know would Russian intelligence's goals are, or how they think of Steve Keen? this is all just McCarthyism 2016, accusing the left of being dupes or willing agents of Russia. McCarthy had his 200 communists in the state department, this website and the Washington Post have their 200 Russian propaganda websites. Why are you catapulting this bullshit? ..."
"... James do you happen to remember when those intelligence agencies reported Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction.? How about when North Korea hacked Sony? Both of which were inaccurate and dare I say it propaganda intended to mislead the American public. ..."
"... Why does Naval Intelligence have anything to do with this investigation? ..."
"... Why were 17 agencies watching the DNC? ..."
"... The immediate claims that Russia hacked the DNC were never credible to any one with even a bit of knowledge about high level hacking. The 17 agency thing was outright laughable once you asked the simple question of what most of them had to do with this investigation. And USA Today was and is the print equivalent of the Yahoo front page. ..."
"... oh so now you're an intelligence expert, but somehow you still don't have any evidence, because the "17 intelligence agencies" don't have any evidence either. they didn't have evidence of wmd's but i bet you fell for that, too. i think the most dishonest line in your post is this: You should wander out of the alt-left echo chamber once in a while and stop thinking that any criticism of Russia is 'red-baiting' and propaganda ..."
"... If Russia is actively trying to influence American politics, then they have been far more effective than the US and get a much bigger bang for their buck. For one thing, they didn't have to drop a single bomb to effect a regime change. So assuming you are correct, the noise is just a hysterical regime change envy. ..."
"... So are RT and Sputnik propaganda outlets? Sometimes they are, but sometimes they report the truth that our MSM, having given up the last shreds of their journalistic integtity in return for access, won't report. ..."
"... Given the widespread funding of media (including government-owned media) by Western governments, I would say that US and Euro hysteria about Russian propaganda, real and imagined, is yet another off-putting display of noxious American exceptionalism. ..."
"... I grew up listening to broadcasts of RFE and VOA behind the Iron Curtain, and mixed in with honest reporting was a heavy dose of propaganda aimed at weakening Eastern European governments. Now, it is the America For Bulgaria Foundation that funds several media outlets in the country. What they all have in common is rabid Russophobia-driven editorial stances, and one can easily conclude that it is driven by the almighty dollar rather than by honest, deeply held convictions. So, America can do it but whines like a toddler when it is allegedly done to it?! What a crock. ..."
"... The worst thing is that regardless of whatever propaganda wars are going on, this list constitutes a full frontal attack on free speech in the alleged "Land of the Free." Besides NC, there are number of sites distinguished by thorough, quality reporting of the kind that WaPo and NYT no longer engage in. Having grown up behind the Iron Curtain, this is chilling to me. Dissident voices speaking against the endless wars for profit and neoliberalism are in effect being intimidated and smeared by anonymous thugs. This, while the militarized local police and federal agencies, closely coordinated by "fusion centers", have ruthlessly put down a number of citizen protests, have engaged in spying on all of us, and have gone after whistleblowers for exposing the reach and scope of the surveillance state. These are the hallmarks of dictatorships, not of the alleged "world's greatest democracy and beacon of freedom." What the eff happened to America, and why are you equating challenging the oppressive and exploitative status quo with being "unwitting Russian dupes?" Seems to me that the useful idi0t here is you, with all due respect. ..."
"... American intelligence uses exactly the same tactics, and has since at least WW1. Selling the American public on the Iraq war is a classic example. Remember that all news is biased, some much more so than others (we report, you decide.) ..."
"... The advent of the internet and the subsequent broadening of readily available news of all slants has made it much harder for any intelligence agency of any specific country to control the news( but it has made it extremely easy for them to monitor what we are reading). ..."
"... . The normal tell for this is being state sponsored, or having a big sugar daddy providing the funding, and Yves doesn't have any of that. ..."
"... Some of us happen to believe that 'lambast[ing] the American political establishment and weaken[ing] the public's confidence in its leaders' is in the best interests of everyone on the planet, including the American public. If that constitutes propaganda, I'm not about to look that gift horse in the mouth. RT isn't perfect – I personally find their relentless cheerleading for economic growth rather wearying – but it knocks spots off the competition and consistently sends me scurrying to the internet to chase up on new faces and leads. I'm grateful for that. ..."
"... Steve Keen is great, and I love his work, but it's also obvious ..."
"... It is obvious that Russia has been trying to influence American politics. The very existence of RT makes that obvious. What is not obvious is why modestly left-of-center Americans' political concerns should be subject to McCarthyite attacks in our most influential news outlets. We've been subject to internally generated far-right propaganda for decades now and have seen minimal, feeble 'mainstream' efforts to counter it. The far right has done tremendous damage to our nation and is poised to do much more now that its doyens control all branches of the federal government. ..."
"... What I interpret this as is a strike by 'think tank' grifters against those who are most likely to damage their incomes, their prestige and their exceedingly comfortable berths on the Acela corridor. It's a slightly panicky, febrile effort by a bunch of heels who are looking at losing their mid-6-figure incomes . and becoming like so many of the rest of us: over-credentialed, under-paid and unable to afford life in the charming white parts of our coastal metropolises. ..."
"... You've just libeled me. You have no evidence whatsoever to substantiate your claim. Nor do you have any evidence that Russia has been "aggressively" trying to influence US politics. This is one of many hysterical lines offered by Team Dem over the course of this election, up there with depicting all Trump voters as racist yahoos. ..."
"... "Russia is aggressively trying to influence American politics" Apparently with the help of Hillz. Was her decision to use a private email server made with the help of Putin? ..."
"... If you'd like, take a trip in the Wayback Machine to 1959. Then you'll find many criticisms of US society by the Civil Rights movement sharing the same sinister tone as criticisms made by Soviet new outlets. Then you'll also find a gaggle of US pols and their minions claiming on that basis that the Civil Rights movement is communist inspired, funded, and run. Then you'll also find many people who don't bother to distinguish source from story and end up enjoying the official Kool Aid. ..."
"... It reminds me of a story from Northern Ireland in the 1960's when the leader of a civil rights march was asked by a BBC reporter 'is it true that your organisation has been infiltrated by radicals and communists?' His reply was to sigh and say 'I f**king wish it was true'. ..."
"... @hemeantwell – This same claim of communist inspiration and connection was also thrown at the anti-war movement. I remember arguing with a friend of my parents in the summer of 1969, after my freshman year at college where I was active in the anti-war and anti-draft movements. After countering all of the arguments made by this gentleman, he was left with nothing to say but "Well, that's the Commie's line " as a final dismissal. ..."
"... Right up to his death on 4 Apr 1968, Martin Luther King was accused by J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI of "knowingly, willingly and regularly cooperating with and taking guidance from communists." Now there's a US national holiday in King's honor. ..."
"... It's all propaganda of one sort or another. I exhort you to read Plato and understand that the Sophists for which Socrates held so much ire are much the same as anon and administration sources for so much of what drives journalism. ..."
"... NC separates the wheat from the chaff. ..."
"... Verdict on PropOrNot: Looks like Prop to me. Getting really sloppy, Oligarchy ..."
"... This has all the earmarks of an effort by the Nuland Neocons that joined Camp Hillary, and now in defeat constitute a portion Hillary's professional dead enders. ..."
"... Camp Hillary, as you call it, has decamped and is on the march. It has powerful allies in the intelligence community, the media and actors on the world stage who deem Trump to be an existential threat to America and world. The story of Russian inspired fake news is paving the way for regime change, an HRC specialty. The recount is the tip of the spear. If they can pull this coup off, sites like this will move from the useful idiot category to the enemy of the state category overnight. ..."
"... Manfred Keeting November 26, 2016 at 4:01 am If you weren't on the Nixon's enemies list, there was something wrong with you ..."
"... First as tragedy, then as farce. People literally killed themselves because of McCarthyism. No one is going to kill themselves over this farce. ..."
"... Aha, I have solved the mystery. It is elementary my dear Watson! The PropOrNot site is itself a Russian propaganda ploy on the part of the KGB! What? errr, ok, the FSB then. ..."
"... But Max himself is an interesting character. I've been scratching my head wondering how a guy one step removed (Sidney Blumenthal) from the Clintons' inner circles is ambitious about exposing the ludicrous claims made by those same people regarding Palestine and Syria. ..."
"... I like the idea some commenter had (too lazy to find it right now) that all these strategems were long-prepared, and in place for a Clinton victory. Now the Clinton faction in the political class is deploying them anyhow. They'd better hurry, because influence peddling at the Clinton Foundation isn't as lucrative as it once was . ..."
"... For long time readers this russian(chinese) propaganda should be obvious. And it is ok, get used to it. Great opportunity to learn "how to read between the lines", and when you understand, solidifying into a basic skill. ..."
"... Be careful NC. MSM are in panic. They see that their propaganda is less and less effective and start targeting those who offer an alternative against their obsolete narratives. Be prepared: when they will realize that these don't work at all, their fake democracy will become an open dictatorship. ..."
"... The US MSM is all propaganda all the time-every bit as bad as Pravda ever was. RT now is the "anti-propaganda." They were even carrying Jesse Ventura and other Americans who are blacklisted by the MSM. ..."
"... This is a "hail mary pass." ..."
"... A hail mary pass that was intercepted by the opposing team and run back for a touchdown. ..."
"... What exactly is the origin of the Russia bashing that's been going on as of late? I feel like I missed some important public dis somewhere that would explain it all. Condoleeza Rice's general dated anti-Soviet attitude I could understand, but that doesn't explain the escalating bigotry pouring out of Obama and Clinton (and their various surrogates). Is it a case of a bomb in search of a war? ..."
"... Looks to me like it came out of the HRC campaign. ..."
"... What exactly is the origin of the Russia bashing that's been going on as of late? I think it can be traced back to this . ..."
"... I don't think there is an easy answer to your question, but I think it goes around to the failed Ukrainian coup (well, partially failed) and the realisation within a certain element of the neocon establishment that Putin had been inadvertently strengthened by their policy failures in the Ukraine and Syria. I think there was a concerted element within the Blob to refocus on 'the Russian threat' to cover up their failures in the Middle East and the refusal of the Chinese to take the bait in the Pacific. ..."
"... This rolled naturally into concerns about cyberwar and it was a short step from there to using Russian cyberespionage to cover up the establishments embarrassment over wikileaks and multiple other failures exposed by outsiders. As always, when a narrative suits (for different reasons) the two halves of the establishment, the mainstream media is always happy to run it unquestioningly. ..."
"... So in short, I think its a mixture of genuine conspiracy, mixed in with political opportunism. ..."
"... Listen to Gore Vidal (in 1994!) and find out why: https://www.c-span.org/video/?61333-1/state-united-states ..."
"... That is very good question and it does not have a simple answer. I have been pondering this for 8 years now. The latest bout of Russia-hatred began as Putin began to re-assert their sovereignty after the disastrous Yeltsin years. This intensified after Georgia, Ukraine and Syria. In adddition the US was preprogrammed to hate Russia for historical reasons. Mostly because of the Soviet era but also when the US inherited the global empire from the Brits we also got some of their dislike of the Russian empire dating back to the 19th century. ..."
"... It all started when Putin arrested the Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, when Putin put a stop to the shock therapy looting of Russia by the Harvard mafia and Jeffrey Sachs. Didn't he know that oligarch's are above the law? They are in the US. Didn't he know that money can buy you immunity from prosecution like it does in Europe and the US? Can't have that, hence the Ukraine, deprive him of his warm water naval base. Then there was the Crimean referendum. Out smarted again! Can't have that! ..."
"... And so the Democratic Party ends, not with a bang, but with a McCarthyite lynch mob. ..."
"... Didn't we used to call "fake news" rumors? And when did newspapers stop printing rumors? ..."
"... Based on the evidence of above mentioned link, this "PropOrNot" can be part of a project of U.S. government to manipulate media to create an anti-Russia climate or more likely another method of attack on what they consider "Left" so status quo in economic policies of U.S. can be maintained. ..."
"... it scares the pants off me ..."
"... I'm with you Tom Stone. There is nothing funny about this. The MSM at this point is the greatest purveyor of fake news on the planet, I am talking about not just CNN and Fox, but the BBC, France24 and so on. ..."
"... Pretty much everything they have said and every video they has shown on east Aleppo is either a lie or a fake. As someone noted the other day (I can't remember who) if the stories about east Aleppo were actually true, then the Russians and Syrians have destroyed approximately 900 hospitals – including the 'last pediatric hospital in east Aleppo' which has been completely demolished on at least three separate occasions in the last few months. The main stream outlets don't even try to be consistent. ..."
"... It's 90 hospitals not 900, but 90 is just as ridiculous given the whole country of Syria only has 88 hospitals/clinics. ..."
"... Weapons of Mass Distraction. Another nail in the coffin of credibility of the NYT and WaPo. Recall after the Stupid War and how there were zero weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq that the NYT and Wapo declined to mention or explore their own culpability in beating the drums of war. This will be more of the same. ..."
"... I suspect that PropOrNot's outburst was developed during the campaign by well heeled and connected Hilary supporters to be unveiled after the election to muzzle increasingly influential web sites including NC. As it stands PropOrNot shot a blank. If Hilary had won the campaign against "fake news" would probably have taken on a more ominous tone. ..."
"... PropOrNot is asserting that the sites on the 'List", both right and left, were responsible for the Clinton loss by spreading false Russian propaganda. This would make more sense, as a political project, if Clinton had won. Asking the Trump DOJ and Trump's/Comey's FBI to investigate the asserted causes of Trump's win is bizarre. ..."
"... Excellent observation, preparation for a post Killery election purge of the alternate media. ..."
"... Lots of panic for the Washington regime. The clownish asshole loser that they carefully groomed proved less repulsive than their chosen Fuehrer Clinton. Now they are distraught to see that their enemy Russia sucks much less than the USA. ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... Jill Stein has embarrassed herself with this effort. I gave money to her until she made her final vp choice – Baraka called Bernie a white supremacist! I did vote for her and now feel it really was a wasted vote. 1% in the national totals. Ok. Being a useful idiot for the Clintons – no way. ..."
"... When the rot is complete and the edifice tumbles? Or when TINA wins, and the voices go silent? My bet is on the later. Collectively, the money got all 4 aces (and a few more hidden up their sleaves and a few more hidden in their boots, etc – no end of aces.) ..."
"... Charles Hugh-Smith's response to the "list": "The Washington Post: Useful-Idiot Shills for a Failed, Frantic Status Quo That Has Lost Control of the Narrative" ..."
Yves here. As indicated in Links, we'll have more to say about this in due course. Note, however,
that as Blumenthal points out, some of the sites that are listed as PropOrNot allies receive US government
funding. As Mark Ames pointed out via e-mail, "The law is still clear that US State Dept money and
probably BBG money cannot be used
to propagandize American audiences." So if these sites really are "allies" in terms of providing
hard dollars or other forms of support (shared staff, research), this site and its allies may be
in violation of US statutes.
By Max Blumenthal, a senior editor of the Grayzone Project at AlterNet, and the award-winning
author of Goliath and Republican Gomorrah. His most recent book is The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance
in Gaza. Follow him on Twitter at @MaxBlumenthal. Originally published at
Alternet
A shady website that claims
"Russia is Manipulating US Opinion Through Online Propaganda" has compiled a blacklist of websites
its anonymous authors accuse of pushing fake news and Russian propaganda. The blacklist includes
over 200 outlets, from the right-wing Drudge Report and Russian government-funded Russia Today, to
Wikileaks and an array of marginal conspiracy and far-right sites. The blacklist also includes some
of the flagship publications of the progressive left, including Truthdig, Counterpunch, Truthout,
Naked Capitalism, and the Black Agenda Report, a leftist African-American opinion hub that is critical
of the liberal black political establishment.
Called PropOrNot, the blacklisting organization was described by the Washington Post's Craig Timberg
as "a nonpartisan collection of researchers with foreign policy, military and technology backgrounds."
The Washington Post agreed to preserve the anonymity of the group's director on the grounds that
exposure could result in their being targeted by "Russia's legions of skilled hackers." The Post
failed to explain what methods PropOrNot relied on to conclude that "stories planted or promoted
by the Russian disinformation campaign were viewed more than 213 million times." (Timberg also cited
a report co-authored by Aaron Weisburg, founder of the one-man anti-Palestinian "Internet Haganah"
operation, who has been
accused of interfering
in federal investigations, stealing the personal information of anarchists, online harassment, and
fabricating information to smear his targets.)
Despite the Washington Post's charitable description of PropOrNot as a group of independent-minded
researchers dedicated to protecting the integrity of American democracy, the shadowy group bears
many of the qualities of the red enemies it claims to be battling. In addition to its blacklist of
Russian dupes, it lists a collection of outlets funded by the U.S. State Department, NATO and assorted
tech and weapons companies as "allies." PropOrNot's methodology is so shabby it is able to peg widely
read outlets like Naked Capitalism, a leading left-wing financial news blog, as Russian propaganda
operations.
Though the supposed experts behind PropOrNot remain unknown, the site has been granted a veneer
of credibility thanks to the Washington Post, and journalists from the New York Times, including
deputy Washington editor
Jonathan
Weissman to former Obama senior advisor
Dan Pfeiffer
, are hailing Timberg's story as Pulitzer-level journalism. "Russia appears to have successfully
hacked American democracy,"
declared Sahil
Kapur, the senior political reporter for Bloomberg. The dead-enders of Hillary Clinton's campaign
for president have also seized on PropOrNot's claims as proof that the election was rigged, with
Clinton confidant and Center For American Progress president Neera Tanden
declaring
, "Wake up people," as she blasted out the Washington Post article on Russian black ops.
PropOrNot's malicious agenda is clearly spelled out on its website. While denying McCarthyite
intentions, the group is openly
attempting
to compel "formal investigations by the U.S. government, because the kind of folks who make propaganda
for brutal authoritarian oligarchies are often involved in a wide range of bad business." The group
also seeks to brand major progressive politics sites (and a number of prominent right-wing opinion
outlets) as "'gray' fake-media propaganda outlets" influenced or directly operated by Russia's Federal
Security Service (FSB). It can then compel Facebook and Google to
ban them , denying them the ad revenue they rely on to survive.
Though PropOrNot's hidden authors claim, "we do not reach our conclusions lightly," the group's
methodology leaves more than enough room to smear an outlet on political grounds. Among the criteria
PropOrNot identifies as clear signs of Russian propaganda are, "Support for policies like Brexit,
and the breakup of the EU and Eurozone" and, "Opposition to Ukrainian resistance to Russia and Syrian
resistance to Assad."
By these standards, any outlet that raises the alarm about the considerable presence of extreme
right-wing elements among the post-Maidan Ukrainian government or that questions the Western- and
Saudi-funded campaign for regime change in Syria can be designated a Russia dupe or a paid agent
of the FSB. Indeed, while admitting that they have no idea whether any of the outlets they blacklisted
are being paid by Russian intelligence or are even aware they are spreading Russian propaganda, PropOrNot's
authors concluded that any outlets that have met their highly politicized criteria "have effectively
become tools of the Russian intelligence services, and are worthy of further investigation."
Among the most ironic characteristics of PropOrNot is its claim to be defending journalistic integrity,
a rigorous adherence to the facts, and most of all, a sense of political levity. In fact, the group's
own literature reflects a deeply paranoid view of Russia and the outside world. According to PropOrNot's
website , Russia is staging a hostile takeover of America's alternative online media environment
"in order to Make Russia Great Again (as a new 'Eurasian' empire stretching from Dublin to Vladisvostok),
on the other. That means preserving Russian allies like Bashar al-Assad in Syria, breaking up the
'globalist' EU, NATO, and US-aligned trade and defense organizations, and getting countries to join
'Eurasianist' Russian equivalents Or else."
The message is clear: Stamp out the websites blacklisted by PropOrNot,or submit to the malevolent
influence of Putin's "new global empire."
Among the websites listed by PropOrNot as "allies" are a number of groups funded by the U.S. government
or NATO. They include InterpreterMag, an anti-Russian media monitoring blog
funded through
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, an arm of the U.S. government, which is edited by the hardline neoconservative
Michael Weiss. Polygraph Fact Check,
another project of Radio Free
Europe/Radio Liberty aimed at Russian misinformation, is listed as an "ally." So is Bellingcat, the
crowdsourced military analysis blog run by Elliot Higgins through the Atlantic Council, which receives
funding from the
U.S. State Department, various Gulf monarchies and the weapons industry. (Bellingcat is
directly funded
by Google, according to Higgins.)
Unfortunately for PropOrNot's mysterious authors, an alliance requires the consent of all parties
involved. Alerted to his designation on the website, Bellingcat's Higgins immediately disavowed it:
"Just want to note I hadn't heard of Propornot before the WP piece and never gave permission to them
to call Bellingcat 'allies,'" he
wrote .
As scrutiny of PropOrNot increases, its credibility is rapidly unraveling. But that has not stopped
Beltway media wiseguys and Democratic political operatives from hyping its claims. Fake news and
Russian propaganda have become the great post-election moral panic, a creeping Sharia-style conspiracy
theory for shell-shocked liberals. Hoping to punish the dark foreign forces they blame for rigging
the election, many of these insiders have latched onto a McCarthyite campaign that calls for government
investigations of a wide array of alternative media outlets. In this case, the medicine might be
worse than the disease.
What I meant by my sarcastic remark is that there seems to be absolutely no reason to trust
anything it says, from its content, to the fact that it was created about three months ago
when the Red baiting was already in full swing in the media.
Congratulations! That site is like a who's who of influential critical reporting. I suspect,
as with so many of the bubble-dwellers attempts, that this slapdash but probably overpriced effort
will drive traffic to those sites while reducing the credibility of its promoters. An instant
classic own-goal. I look forward to the inevitable and embarassing revelations about their founders
and funding.
The full list was a mix of really good sites and the unknown personal blogs of some whack-a
-doodles producing "content" of little value. I see the list linked to is smaller.
"Collectively, this propaganda is undermining our public discourse by providing a warped view
of the world, where Russia can do no wrong, and America is a corrupt dystopia that is tearing
itself apart."
Meanwhile publicans even they would deem credible like the L.A. times report there are 63,000
homeless youths in los angeles. Corrupt dystopia? No it can not be.
"It is vital that this effort be exposed for what it is: A coordinated attempt to deceive U.S.
citizens into acting in Russia's interests."
look idiots, the truth as I understand it is neither Russian interest NOR US government interests
are necessarily in my interest
I am an attorney. I am not soliciting or advising any entity or person, but those identified
by PropOrNot, including Naked Capitalism, should consult competent legal counsel, having appropriate
and specific experience regarding defamation law (maybe even in a "pooled," co-ordinated effort
with others' among the over 200 entities named by PropOrNot) to seek a legal opinion as to whether
there exists a viable defamation claim against The Washington Post, and also, via Weisburg, The
New York Times, as both publications repeated potentially defamatory claims made by PropOrNot.
Under general tenets of defamation law (statutory and in common law), it is not just the
original entity or person defaming (including defamation "per se") another that is liable for
such torts, but others who carelessly or recklessly repeat the original defamatory statements/claims
(in this case, both The Washington Post & New York Times bear similar potential liability as PropOrNot).
Understanding the distinction between an attorney, and *my* attorney, and as a matter of general
interest, I am curious: What about individual posters in their capacities as employees, contractors,
or just rabble?
Requires actual malice since it's the media you're suing – but that can be proven by reckless
indifference to the truth which this might actually meet the standard of, especially since the
site isn't making this claim based on anything other than the content of the views espoused by
the sites. /also an attorney but the wrong specialty. I'd be pleased to help if I can though
– all of the sites I read regularly are on the list and whoever's propaganda op the site is the
whole concept of what it represents scares the pants off me.
All private individual gets you is compensatory damages – and everyone's readership and donations
have increased.
"We hold that, so long as they do not impose liability without fault, the States may define
for themselves the appropriate standard of liability for a publisher or broadcaster of defamatory
falsehood injurious to a private individual. But this countervailing state interest extends
no further than compensation for actual injury. For the reasons stated below, we hold that
the States may not permit recovery of presumed or punitive damages, at least when liability
is not based on a showing of knowledge of falsity or reckless disregard for the truth."
Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc., 418 U.S. 323, 347-349 (1974).
Propornot is directly accusing NC and the rest of a crime (espionage), which constitutes
defamation per se, so I think the only issue before the court would be whether it was done with
reckless indifference.
Seriously, Yves, please feel free to contact me offlist – I would be delighted to pro bono
the heck out of this including at the direction of whoever you hire.
The MSM did such a fine job reporting the news during the campaign. (16 anti-Sanders stories
in 16 hours from the WaPo. A new record.) Are small news/opinion sites cutting into their online
advertising revenue. ;)
I like you and your blog, but I'm almost positive your site has been guilty of accidently publishing
Russian propaganda at some point. You've probably linked to stories that sound legit but can be
traced all the way back to some Russian operation like RT, even though the third party source
you got the story from seemed ok.
The creator of the app never said all the sites on the list knowingly did it.
First the fact that a story appeared on RT does not make it propaganda. We featured videos
from Ed Harrison on the RT program Boom/Bust, which is about the US economy and has featured respected
US and foreign academics, like Steve Keen.
What Steve Keen has to say is not suddenly propaganda by virtue of appearing on RT.
If you read Eddy Bernay's book Propaganda, he defines it as an entity or cause promoting its
case. Thus when a news organization that is government-affiliated, like Voice of America or RT,
presents a news story that is straight up reporting, that does not qualify as propaganda either
(like "Marine Le Pen Gains in French Polls"). In fact, for a government site to be seen as credible
when it does present propaganda, it has to do a fair bit of reasonably unbiased reporting.
Second, had you bothered to read the actual PropOrNot site, it accuses all of the sites
listed as being "propaganda outlets" under the influence of "coordinators abroad" (#11 in its
FAQ).
Several individuals on Twitter called this out as libel with respect to NC. And under #7,
PropOrNot asserts that "some" of the sites are guilty of violating the Espionage Act and the Foreign
Agent Registration Act, as in accusing them of being spies and calling for investigation (by implication
of all, since how do you know which is or isn't) by the FBI and DoJ.
And you defend this witch hunt? Seriously? Do you have any idea of what propaganda consists
of? Hint: it is not reporting accurately and skeptically.
Their MSM propaganda isn't working and they see it. They already heavily censor comments
on their MSM sites. Other MSM sights such as Bloomberg closed down comments altogether. Expect
more of that.
And they will take every measure to close down any other independent sites people have turned
to get some truth which millions of us know we aren't getting from the MSM.
Those of us who have a grasp on what is going on in this country will find #7 is very disturbing.
As it tells us what they have in mind to discredit and close down independent sites.
As you know, propaganda doesn't have to [be] false. It can be more about selectively reporting
certain facts or emphasizing certain facts over others to smear your target and mislead people.
Steve Keen is great, and I love his work, but it's also obvious that RT invites him on the network
because he lambasts the American political establishment and weakens the public's confidence in
its leaders. This is clearly a goal of Moscow, and they use people like Steve Keen to do it. I'm
sure Steven Keen doesn't think of his role that way, but RT and Russian intelligence certainly
do.
And the site clearly states that some sites are knowingly coordinating with Russian agents
(like RT) and some are likely unaware that they are being influenced. They likely think NC falls
into the unaware category.
I think they should be more specific as to what sites they believe fall into the 'knowingly'
and 'unknowingly' categories, but I also don't believe the app is an entirely crazy idea. Russia
is aggressively trying to influence American politics as we saw in the most recent US election
and coming up with a response is a good idea even if this particular one should be improved.
Um, James what weakens people's confidence in their leaders is their not addressing people's
issues and lying about their inability to do so. Despite protestations from the likes of much
of our 'intelligentsia', mainstream media, and most of our political class, the majority of people
are not stupid. There is a reason why terms like 'lame stream media' resonate with a large number
of people.
For instance when Obama is out there talking about a recovery and people know that there
is no such thing in their lives, their communities then HE has lost their confidence – not someone
giving an interview on RT.
Or to put it another way the problem isn't someone going on RT and saying the emperor isn't
wearing clothes, the problem is that the emperor isn't wearing clothes.
Pretending not to notice doesn't mean that no one has noticed. Considering the Washington/NY/California
bubble, most people probably have and have been screaming at their television that he needs to
get dressed.
what did we see in "the most recent election"? what is your evidence that Russia is "aggressively
trying to influence American politics?"
Steve Keen is great, and I love his work, but it's also obvious that RT invites him
on the network because he lambasts the American political establishment and weakens the public's
confidence in its leaders. This is clearly a goal of Moscow, and they use people like Steve
Keen to do it. I'm sure Steven Keen doesn't think of his role that way, but RT and Russian
intelligence certainly do.
How do you know any of this? how would you know would Russian intelligence's goals are,
or how they think of Steve Keen? this is all just McCarthyism 2016, accusing the left of being
dupes or willing agents of Russia. McCarthy had his 200 communists in the state department, this
website and the Washington Post have their 200 Russian propaganda websites. Why are you catapulting
this bullshit?
Well put. I could equally well argue that it's in Russia's interests that American leadership
not be questioned, if it's following policies that are clearly stupid and likely to weaken America's
position in the world. So the PropOrNot site might actually be a double blind backed by Russia,
using fear of Russian influence to manipulate people into uncritical acceptance of their leaders
and prevent questioning of poor decisions, thereby weakening America. (ALERT: If it's not obvious
to readers, this is sarcasm).
If your methodology is gazing into the tea leaves to figure out what Russia's position is,
then smearing anybody that advocates a similar position, then that's such a ridiculously flimsy
veneer of logic that it can be used to reach pretty much any conclusion you like (as my example
above demonstrates). Tell me again who is guilty of propaganda in this scenario?
I suppose all 17 intelligence agencies could be wrong.
And RT has a pattern of inviting dissidents that have extremely negative views of American
leadership. You can say this negative view justified but that doesn't negate the fact that Russia
wants to amplify that discontent as much as possible.
i suppose they still haven't provided any evidence whatsoever. just like you. What 17 agencies?
what evidence are they relying on? Why does Obama say the election was not fixed by Russia, that
there was no ramping up of cyber attacks?
You could be working for David Brock at correct the record. the way you blindly accept the
talking points of the Clinton campaign indicates that. you just keep repeating them, and don't
respond to the criticisms of propornot as a source, or the reporter who uncritically accepted
their little mccarthyite hit list. linking to a usa today article that blindly repeats the same
talking points, again sans evidence, does not support your argument.
I was not claiming Russia fixed the election results. I was referring to the email hacking
directed at the Clinton camp during the election campaign.
And my claim that Russia was likely involved in the email hacking is backed up by 17 intelligence
agencies and reporting from various independent news outlets. If you had bothered to read the
article, which you apparently didn't, you would know that the 17 agencies are the 'Office of the
Director of National Intelligence' plus the 16 agencies listed in the link available in the article
I provided.
If USA Today reporting is not credible to you but Russia Today's reporting is, then I'm afraid
your trust of Kremlin created propaganda outlets over independent news outlets only underscores
my point that Russian information warfare has been very successful at influencing and shaping
parts of American public opinion.
I also don't think US intelligence agencies would make this accusation publicly if they were
not confident. They could have just as easily made this accusation against China but have not
because it doesn't fit China's MO. Russia has engaged in similar types of email hacking operations
in former Eastern European countries it has been seeking to control and influence.
And comparing an app to McCarthyism is absurd. McCarthysim was the state targeting individuals
and organizations. This is private citizens compiling a list by their own accord, which they are
free to do. When a left wing blog makes a list of the top ten most right-wing and GOP influenced
websites, are they also engaging in 'McCarthism'? Is the left engaging in 'McCarthyism' when it
accuses Fox News of being GOP influenced propaganda? C'mon.
Regardless, I am done with this conversation for now. You can think what you want.
James do you happen to remember when those intelligence agencies reported Iraq had Weapons
of Mass Destruction.? How about when North Korea hacked Sony? Both of which were inaccurate and
dare I say it propaganda intended to mislead the American public.
Short of watching the hacking in real time there is no way those agencies would have been able
to trace any competent hacker.So here are some very serious questions for you. Do you think the
Russians hire script kiddies? Why does Naval Intelligence have anything to do with this investigation?
Same with at least half of those agencies?
Why were 17 agencies watching the DNC? Don't they have anything better to do, like
figuring out who hacked the State Department, the IRS and Social Security?
The immediate claims that Russia hacked the DNC were never credible to any one with even
a bit of knowledge about high level hacking. The 17 agency thing was outright laughable once you
asked the simple question of what most of them had to do with this investigation. And USA Today
was and is the print equivalent of the Yahoo front page.
You say you are done, but I sincerely hope so e of what was said here percolates in your thoughts.
Most of us here understand propaganda, misinformation, and yes confirmation bias. You seem to
need to learn to look critically at your usual sources as well as those you have warned about.
Being wrong about something in the past doesn't mean you are always wrong. In fact, the CIA
and FBI have been on the money about countless things in the past, but I'm sure you know this
and are just trying to deflect. And it's not true that NK being involved in the Sony hack has
been debunked. Opinion is mixed among independent security analysts. Look it up.
And I think you should take your own advice as far as confirmation bias and understanding propaganda
are concerned. Nobody who relies on FSB cut outs like RT for information and analysis has room
to talk about their intelligence and critical thinking. NC and other alternative 'anti-establishment'
news sources you consume are full of their own bias. You should wander out of the alt-left echo
chamber once in a while and stop thinking that any criticism of Russia is 'red-baiting' and propaganda.
Mr. Putin isn't a damsel in distress that needs your defending.
oh so now you're an intelligence expert, but somehow you still don't have any evidence,
because the "17 intelligence agencies" don't have any evidence either. they didn't have evidence
of wmd's but i bet you fell for that, too. i think the most dishonest line in your post is this:
You should wander out of the alt-left echo chamber once in a while and stop thinking that any
criticism of Russia is 'red-baiting' and propaganda
while you're searching for evidence to back up the rancid propaganda exposed by glenn greenwald's
article in the intercept, you can look for one single post expressing this conviction. just one.
after all the lies by our intelligence agencies, using the same methods as this smear, to uncritically
accept anonymous quotes betrays either a great naďveté or intellectual dishonesty.
Gee, if only there were some North American country that would try to influence foreign elections,
for example say Russian or Ukrainian ones.
But let me extend James's thought above by advocating for our leaders to obtain public encryption
keys so that we may send our grievances privately without enabling any foreign interference. Won't
that just invigorate our democracy?
If Russia is actively trying to influence American politics, then they have been far more
effective than the US and get a much bigger bang for their buck. For one thing, they didn't have
to drop a single bomb to effect a regime change. So assuming you are correct, the noise is just
a hysterical regime change envy.
So are RT and Sputnik propaganda outlets? Sometimes they are, but sometimes they report
the truth that our MSM, having given up the last shreds of their journalistic integtity in return
for access, won't report.
Given the widespread funding of media (including government-owned media) by Western governments,
I would say that US and Euro hysteria about Russian propaganda, real and imagined, is yet another
off-putting display of noxious American exceptionalism.
I grew up listening to broadcasts of RFE and VOA behind the Iron Curtain, and mixed in
with honest reporting was a heavy dose of propaganda aimed at weakening Eastern European governments.
Now, it is the America For Bulgaria Foundation that funds several media outlets in the country.
What they all have in common is rabid Russophobia-driven editorial stances, and one can easily
conclude that it is driven by the almighty dollar rather than by honest, deeply held convictions.
So, America can do it but whines like a toddler when it is allegedly done to it?! What a crock.
The worst thing is that regardless of whatever propaganda wars are going on, this list
constitutes a full frontal attack on free speech in the alleged "Land of the Free." Besides NC,
there are number of sites distinguished by thorough, quality reporting of the kind that WaPo and
NYT no longer engage in. Having grown up behind the Iron Curtain, this is chilling to me. Dissident
voices speaking against the endless wars for profit and neoliberalism are in effect being intimidated
and smeared by anonymous thugs. This, while the militarized local police and federal agencies,
closely coordinated by "fusion centers", have ruthlessly put down a number of citizen protests,
have engaged in spying on all of us, and have gone after whistleblowers for exposing the reach
and scope of the surveillance state. These are the hallmarks of dictatorships, not of the alleged
"world's greatest democracy and beacon of freedom." What the eff happened to America, and why
are you equating challenging the oppressive and exploitative status quo with being "unwitting
Russian dupes?" Seems to me that the useful idi0t here is you, with all due respect.
American intelligence uses exactly the same tactics, and has since at least WW1. Selling
the American public on the Iraq war is a classic example. Remember that all news is biased, some
much more so than others (we report, you decide.)
The advent of the internet and the subsequent broadening of readily available news of all
slants has made it much harder for any intelligence agency of any specific country to control
the news( but it has made it extremely easy for them to monitor what we are reading).
Naked capitalism uses a wide variety of sources, and obviously has no coordination with any
intelligence agency. The normal tell for this is being state sponsored, or having a big sugar
daddy providing the funding, and Yves doesn't have any of that.
As always, it's up to the reader to use their critical thinking skills and form their own opinions.
Some of us happen to believe that 'lambast[ing] the American political establishment and
weaken[ing] the public's confidence in its leaders' is in the best interests of everyone on the
planet, including the American public. If that constitutes propaganda, I'm not about to look that
gift horse in the mouth. RT isn't perfect – I personally find their relentless cheerleading for
economic growth rather wearying – but it knocks spots off the competition and consistently sends
me scurrying to the internet to chase up on new faces and leads. I'm grateful for that.
" Steve Keen is great, and I love his work, but it's also obvious "
Damning with faint praise. A dainty smear tactic noted as such since the days of .. Shakespeare.
It is obvious that Russia has been trying to influence American politics. The very existence
of RT makes that obvious. What is not obvious is why modestly left-of-center Americans' political
concerns should be subject to McCarthyite attacks in our most influential news outlets. We've
been subject to internally generated far-right propaganda for decades now and have seen minimal,
feeble 'mainstream' efforts to counter it. The far right has done tremendous damage to our nation
and is poised to do much more now that its doyens control all branches of the federal government.
And yet this libelous attack is more focused on left-leaning opinion sites than on the ultra-right.
The latter were thrown into this list almost as window dressing. Conceivably because the far right
is very adept at self-defense. But more because the prestige and financial well-being of the center-"left"
is endangered by the rise of an adversarial, econo-centric left. The insiders from this branch
of our duopoly never have been harmed by their historic "opposition" (Tea Party kooks + corrupt
Beltway Republicans).
What I interpret this as is a strike by 'think tank' grifters against those who are most
likely to damage their incomes, their prestige and their exceedingly comfortable berths on the
Acela corridor. It's a slightly panicky, febrile effort by a bunch of heels who are looking at
losing their mid-6-figure incomes . and becoming like so many of the rest of us: over-credentialed,
under-paid and unable to afford life in the charming white parts of our coastal metropolises.
I was wondering what Brock has been up to since the dissolution of "Correct the Record."
Has it been dissolved or has it morphed into something else? This looks like too seamless a
transition from the Clinton campaign strategy we have all grown to love to the revenge strategy
we have come to expect from such people. I look forward to the discovery portions of the libel
suits to come. Hopefully Yves and Lambert will be taking up a collection for so worthy an enterprise
soon.
You've just libeled me. You have no evidence whatsoever to substantiate your claim. Nor
do you have any evidence that Russia has been "aggressively" trying to influence US politics.
This is one of many hysterical lines offered by Team Dem over the course of this election, up
there with depicting all Trump voters as racist yahoos.
Ed Harrison, who is the producer of the show and replied later in this thread, is the
one who booked Keen and interviewed and other economists and firmly disputes your assertion that
his show has anything to do with promoting an anti-US line. And as a former diplomat, Harrison
would be far more sensitive than most to that sort of issue. I'm repeating his comment below:
Hi Naked Capitalism. I haven't been on this site for some time. But I felt it necessary
to comment due to an ad hominem attack from a commenter "James" regarding the show I produce
at RT called Boom Bust.
From my vantage point as producer at RT, I have been able to see the whole anti-Russia campaign
unfold in all its fury. I have a lot of thoughts on this but I want to restrict my comments
to the specific argument James makes. here:
"it's also obvious that RT invites him on the network because he lambasts the American political
establishment and weakens the public's confidence in its leaders. This is clearly a goal of
Moscow, and they use people like Steve Keen to do it. I'm sure Steven Keen doesn't think of
his role that way, but RT and Russian intelligence certainly do."
Since I produce the show that Steve Keen appears on, I am well-placed to give you a view
on this. James' comment is flat out false. What James writes is something he has fabricated
in his imagination – connecting dots he believes should be connected based on no first hand
evidence whatsoever.
What actually happens on Boom Bust is this:
Since no one I work with at RT has a sophisticated background in economics, finance or financial
reporting, they give us a wide berth in putting together content for our show with nearly no
top down dictates at all. That means we as American journalists have a pretty much free hand
to report economic news intelligently and without bias. We invite libertarian, mainstream,
non-mainstream, leftist, Democratic commentators, Republican commentators – you name it. As
for guests, they are not anti-American in any way shape or form. They are disproportionately
non-mainstream.
We have no pro-Russian agenda. And that is in part because Russia is a bit player on the
economic stage, frankly. Except for sanctions, it has mostly been irrelevant on our show since
inception.
Let me share a strange anecdote on that. We had a guest on our show about three years ago,
early in my tenure. We invited him on because he had smart things to say about the UK economy.
But he had also written some very negative things about Putin and Russia. Rather than whitewash
this we addressed it specifically in the interview and asked him an open-ended question about
Russia, so he could say his piece. I was ASTONISHED when he soft-pedaled his response and made
no forceful case as he had done literally days ago in print. This guy clearly self-censored
– for what reason I don't know. But it is something that has stayed with me ever since.
The most important goal from a managerial perspective has been that our reporting is different
i.e. covers missing and important angles of the same storyline that are missing in the mainstream
media or that it covers storylines that are missing altogether.
Neither Steve Keen nor any other guest on our show appears "because he lambasts the American
political establishment". This is false. He appears on our show because he is a credible economist
who provides a differentiated view on economics and insight that we believe will help our viewers
understand the global economy. If Paul Krugman had something to say of that nature and would
appear on our show, we would welcome him. In fact, I and other producers have reached out to
him many times to no avail, especially after we had Gerald Friedman give his take on the dust-up
surrounding Bernie Sanders' economic plan.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yna275KzuDQ
Look, I understand the scepticism about RT and its motives. It IS a state-funded news outlet
with news story angles that sometimes contrast sharply with western media. And it has not been
critical of the Russian government as far as I can tell. But you can't ascribe nefarious motives
to individual economists or reporters based on inaccurate or false third hand accounts. You
are just making things up, creating a false narrative based on circumstantial evidence. This
is just adding to the building peer pressure associated with what almost seems like an orchestrated
campaign to discredit non-mainstream sources of news.
"Russia is aggressively trying to influence American politics" Apparently with the help
of Hillz. Was her decision to use a private email server made with the help of Putin?
James, we get it. We US citizens are not to be permitted to criticize our own government or
corporations as that might "weaken public confidence" in our Dear Leaders.
We cannot be trusted to think for ourselves in discerning what is and is not propaganda, for
after all we would be able to discern the same coming from the US side.
The overt stifling of dissent that was such an outrageous feature of the Clinton campaign "is
clearly a goal" of your side.
Who needs Putin when we have mindless ClintonBots to do all the dirty work here?
This is a secular trend, a great wave. If Steve Keen were going on Tass 24 hours a day, seven
days a week, Live!!! With ***Nude*** WOMBATS!!!!, undermining confidence in neoliberal economists
- let me pause to gasp in horror - it would be the merest bit of froth on that wave. Taking Jame's
view as a proxy for the views of the intelligence community, if they really believe this - and
it's not just a ploy for budget time - then the country truly is doomed.
NOTE * Note the authoritarian followership of "leaders." So my response with institutions is
not precisely on point.
The idea that banks were trusted more than organized labor was troublesome to me till I remembered
the labor leaders like Trumka and the continued betrayals of membership by the likes of the AFL
CIO. At that point I got it really was a toss up.
My revenue is suffering because my rag is bullshit, but all these alternatives are unfair competition
- please Mr Government shut them done, because I, the one and only Great Bezos (or Great Bozo),
is loosing money.
If you'd like, take a trip in the Wayback Machine to 1959. Then you'll find many criticisms
of US society by the Civil Rights movement sharing the same sinister tone as criticisms made by
Soviet new outlets. Then you'll also find a gaggle of US pols and their minions claiming on that
basis that the Civil Rights movement is communist inspired, funded, and run. Then you'll also
find many people who don't bother to distinguish source from story and end up enjoying the official
Kool Aid.
It reminds me of a story from Northern Ireland in the 1960's when the leader of a civil
rights march was asked by a BBC reporter 'is it true that your organisation has been infiltrated
by radicals and communists?' His reply was to sigh and say 'I f**king wish it was true'.
@hemeantwell – This same claim of communist inspiration and connection was also thrown
at the anti-war movement. I remember arguing with a friend of my parents in the summer of 1969,
after my freshman year at college where I was active in the anti-war and anti-draft movements.
After countering all of the arguments made by this gentleman, he was left with nothing to say
but "Well, that's the Commie's line " as a final dismissal.
'US pols and their minions claiming that the Civil Rights movement is communist inspired,
funded, and run.'
Right up to his death on 4 Apr 1968, Martin Luther King was accused by J. Edgar Hoover
and the FBI of "knowingly, willingly and regularly cooperating with and taking guidance from communists."
Now there's a US national holiday in King's honor.
That same year, my dad visited Moscow and Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring. After he
returned, we started receiving crudely mimeographed newsletters from Moscow - actual Soviet
propaganda , delivered right to our mailbox in Texas.
So laden were they with hoary old Marxist rhetoric that we started satirizing it in our underground
student newspaper, mocking the public school administration as "capitalist running dogs" and "colonialist
oppressors." (This did not go over well.)
To his regret, my dad sent one of the Soviet flyers to the FBI, but never got a reply. He suspected
that they put him on a watch list, rather than investigating how the Soviets were distributing
their crude invective through the US mail.
So laden were they with hoary old Marxist rhetoric that we started satirizing it in our underground
student newspaper, mocking the public school administration as "capitalist running dogs" and "colonialist
oppressors." (This did not go over well.)
They link American propaganda all the time. If you take off your blinders, you'll find that
most news is just propaganda, because the basis for most news stories is what person X says. What's
sad is that people like you believe there is some kind of "objective" news source in the "free
world" that is telling it like it is. There isn't and there never has been.
It's all propaganda of one sort or another. I exhort you to read Plato and understand that
the Sophists for which Socrates held so much ire are much the same as anon and administration
sources for so much of what drives journalism.
I have identified a motif that pretty much always gives away a Hillary bot- it was used about
several dozen thousand times as part of 'Correct the Record' during the runup to November 8. And
here we have it again. It goes like this: I was always in favor of – – – – – – – (fill in the
blank with the supposed offenders name) until I found out this 'truth'.
Also, why not just admit you are a Clinton Supporter who finds it convenient that a lot of
the sites could be trashed for being critical of HRC
Let me just make a list of the weasel words (setting aside the famous "I like you, but ____"
trope, which I have never yet seen used in good faith in all my many years of blogging, partly
because of the assumption that whether a random commenter "likes" the blog is important.
almost positive
guilty of accidentally
at some point
probably linked (but with no evidence)
can be traced (but not by James!)
some . operation like
The ginormous pile of steaming innuendo and faux reasonableness aside, James seems to think
that the NC readership has no critical thinking skills at all. Apparently, NC readers are little
children who need expert guidance from James and his ilk - bless their hearts! - to distinguish
crap from not crap.
If there is any take away from this foul
Bernays-inspired campaign season, it is
that fear can and will overrule reason completely.
Half of the voters (whichever lost) were set up
for a cognitive dissonance cork blowing episode.
No one should expect reason to be an effective defense against cognitive attempts to rectify that
dissonance .neither side can be unplugged
from their self-selected news matrix, without
blowing their cork. It will not matter that this list
is comical, because it is a dog whistle to the
audience preloaded with fear (and the other side would've done a variation of the thene if they
had lost).
(pretty funny of them to list your site though..I guess
the Russians must've also been quite upset by all
the American mortage fraud in housing bubble #1
and felt a need to •head explodes•)
I suppose this comment will add me to some list maintained by some very frightened but misguided
people? What's the line "lighten up, Francis"?
This has all the earmarks of an effort by the Nuland Neocons that joined Camp Hillary,
and now in defeat constitute a portion Hillary's professional dead enders.
Camp Hillary, as you call it, has decamped and is on the march. It has powerful allies
in the intelligence community, the media and actors on the world stage who deem Trump to be an
existential threat to America and world. The story of Russian inspired fake news is paving the
way for regime change, an HRC specialty. The recount is the tip of the spear. If they can pull
this coup off, sites like this will move from the useful idiot category to the enemy of the state
category overnight.
The brilliance of this move will eliminate all possibly of civil unrest since America democracy
will be saved from a Russia threat that requires a declaration of war and severe restrictions
on media freedom.
I can guarantee you Trump is looking over his shoulder and sees it coming and is working furiously
to build a case for his own legitimacy. He is doing his best to sound normal.
Obama has relegated himself to the sidelines. He hates conflict, but will back Hillary if she
can pull it off.
"Camp Hillary, as you call it, has decamped and is on the march." True that. Even a lost election
can't stop them. Heard over the holiday- Andrew Cuomo for prez. So the same people who didn't
show up to vote for Hillz can now not show up to vote for her waterboy/bagman.
For sure. The "history doesn't repeat but it rhymes" is suddenly sickeningly applicable here.
I hope they've bitten off more than they can chew in this case. There is that argument that
we are "siloing" in our little corners of the web, however – everybody read the newspapers and
listed to the radio back then. Which means a very, very small subset of the population set the
agenda. Nowadays, the "far-left" and "far-right" are only a click away from each other (and they
always did seem to have more in common with each other than the center which has gone from mushy
to absolutely rotten). A unified pushback on this is not impossible and who knows where it might
lead?
Aha, I have solved the mystery. It is elementary my dear Watson! The PropOrNot site is
itself a Russian propaganda ploy on the part of the KGB! What? errr, ok, the FSB then. By
adding sites such as the Naked Capitalism site to the list, it will be discredited in its entirety
thus letting the nefarious Russian propaganda websites be given a free pass. Mystery solved! And
sorry Max but "Naked Capitalism" a leading left-wing financial news blog"? I'd rather label it
a practical and empirical financial news blog myself.
Seriously, I am wondering if something else is going on here ("tin-foil hat" mode on) with
this piece of trash. No doubt people here have heard all the cries of "fake news" since the election.
This was on top of months of claims of Russian hacking of the election which is still ongoing
(cough cough, Jill Stein). Now Merkel is screaming blue murder of probable Russian hacking of
the German elections next year and just this week the EU Parliament has passed a resolution which
in part states that Russian media exists to "undermine the very notion of objective information
or ethical journalism," and one of its methods is to cast all other information "as biased or
as an instrument of political power."
I am given to understand that the military use the term "preparing the battlefield" and that
is what I think that we are seeing here. There have already been calls for FaceBook and Google
to implement censorship of "fake news" which will amount to censorship of social and news feeds
– the same media Trump used to bf the entire news establishment in this years election. Could
we be seeing the beginnings of calls to censor the internet? All to fight terrorism and black
propaganda of course. The Left would have absolutely no problem with this and if was used to get
rid of sites that contrasted the mainstream media's narrative, more people would be forced to
use the mainstream media for their news which would make them happy. Something to think about.
And sorry Max but "Naked Capitalism" a leading left-wing financial news blog"? I'd rather
label it a practical and empirical financial news blog myself.
While the level of discussion here is generally at a much deeper level than most sites and
commenters don't fit into neat little ideological boxes, I don't think it's a particularly egregious
generalization to call a site with readers that overwhelmingly support things like financial regulation,
single-payer health care and post-office banking "left-wing".
But Max himself is an interesting character. I've been scratching my head wondering how
a guy one step removed (Sidney Blumenthal) from the Clintons' inner circles is ambitious about
exposing the ludicrous claims made by those same people regarding Palestine and Syria.
The list of news sites on the said fact-free, unsourced, anonymous webpage are all, so far
as I can tell, news sites that have disagreed with neocon foreign policy preferences on several
occasions.
I am so tired of the use of "left" and " right" and "progressive" and "libertarian" that when
I see these words I go off into a daze. These words are bandied about in so many different ways
for so many different reasons, that they have almost become meaningless. I would rather that people
or organizations be described in detail who supposedly have these "left" "right" etc. characteristics,
then I would know what was being claimed.
yes, and one good way to that sort of detailed description is to read here regularly for a
while: there's hardly any political self-tagging or confessional drama going on, but any one person's
comments over a few months do add up to a picture of how her/his life experience, unlabelled political
principles, intellectual ( not the same as academic!) background and style of spontaneous
reaction (yes Mr Mencken, 'humor!) all fit together. And this gradually reveals a lot more than
Left-Right status updates or biographical oversharing ever could: not so much about the person
- who has a right to all the unknownness s/he wants - but about the experiences and reasoning
that might connect a statement that delights you and another that leaves you aghast when both
come from the same person and within about a dozen lines. And all this with no fuzzy-fake "consensus"
in sight: mutual respect across abyssal differences is hard-won and correspondingly cared for.
"The internet" still gets blamed for "ruining face-to-face interaction" by people who probably
flatter themselves about the richness of their past social lives. But I can't imagine when I'll
ever have a spare few years and some mysterious money (not to mention some "social skills" and
a valid passport ) with which to visit Maine, Oregon, Arizona, Buenos Aires (etc etc etc) for
extended casual conversations there. In the absence of that option, whatever you all have the
patience to write here counts as THE escape route out of political parochialism and geographical
niche.
I like the idea some commenter had (too lazy to find it right now) that all these strategems
were long-prepared, and in place for a Clinton victory. Now the Clinton faction in the political
class is deploying them anyhow. They'd better hurry, because influence peddling at the Clinton
Foundation
isn't as lucrative as
it once was .
Surely any site that accepts donations could be funded by a foreign power without knowing?
ps A couple of my students make 50p a post for challenging negative posts on travel websites by
making up how great was their experience.
And, um, so what? They can waste money anywhere they want. How much has the US spent over my
lifetime propagandizing the Middle East and how did that work out?
The Neera Tandeen tweet is revealing in that it shows how hypocritical all the pearl-clutching
was over Trump's complete lack of discretion in pushing bogus and fabricated stories. A cursory
glance through the rest of her feed shows a bunch of equally thoroughly scrutinized claims that
the Putin/Comey/Deplorables triumvirate conspired to steal the election from the forces of Good.
For long time readers this russian(chinese) propaganda should be obvious. And it is ok,
get used to it. Great opportunity to learn "how to read between the lines", and when you understand,
solidifying into a basic skill.
"The only way to get smarter is by playing a smarter opponent." and now you have a good ones,
not a cheap wapo columnist but organised, educated, trained information warfare hacks.
we are on the early days, more to come, much worse to come.
Be careful NC. MSM are in panic. They see that their propaganda is less and less effective
and start targeting those who offer an alternative against their obsolete narratives. Be prepared:
when they will realize that these don't work at all, their fake democracy will become an open
dictatorship.
I loved naked capitalism's election coverage, but here is an anecdote of how it angered conventional
liberals.
I read a particle physics blog by Columbia mathematician Peter Woit, who wrote an election
post-mortem (he occasionally writes about politics). Not Even Wrong is one of the most popular
blogs in theoretical physics, I've several excellent physicists post in the comments to previous
entries. I was very surprised to see Woit blame naked capitalism (and others) for the electoral
defeat of Hillary Clinton, he's a very conventional thinker normally so I would have expected
him to not even know about naked capitalism. I'm still surprised he knew about it.
My guess? There is a lot of communication in the country between people who do read some of
these 200 news media organizations, with the vast majority who stick to conventional sources such
as the NYT, the WSJ, and who think that Vox and The Atlantic are intellectual sources. When people
get exposed to alternative media for the first time, even educated people, their most likely response
is some combination of anger, laughter, and asking if the writer also believes that 9/11 is an
inside job.
I hate to get tin foily, but that blog is typical of a few I've seen – expressing real anger
at the amorphous 'left' for not getting on board the Hilary train. There is an element of vengefulness
in some of the writing and combined with the evidence of the article above, it seems there is
an element within the establishment (the losing half) who are in full on McCarthy mode – and of
course the first stage of a purge is to accuse the targets of being traitors and in the pay of
foreign interests. Trump and the people around him are dangerous of course, but I think a defeated
neolib/neocon establishment is equally dangerous. We are in worrying times, and its not just the
far right we have to be worried about.
Woit also includes the NYT in his list of culprits so I don't know what planet he resides.
Also interesting to note his jetting off to Paris as tonic. Oh the humanity!!
It's incredible how many otherwise smart people can't think for themselves.
Once a newspaper touches a story the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonist. -Norman
Mailer
I am unable to understand how a man of honor can take a newspaper in his hand without a
shudder of disgust. -Charles Baudelaire
The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but
newspapers. -Thomas Jeffereson
Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper. -Thomas Jefferson
If you're not careful, the newspaper will have you hating people being oppressed and loving
the people doing the oppressing -Malcolm X
Journalism is organized gossip. -Edward Egglestone
If you don't read the newspaper you are uninformed, if you do read it, you are misinformed.
-Mark Twain (allegedly, but it could be misinformation)
It's hard to know what to believe! You can believe your own eyes, but even your mind connects
the dots without you knowing it.
This is not the Washington Post's finest hour - although they probably haven't had one of those
for years at this point. I'm down to the Redskins coverage in the WaPo, which is still quite good
actually.
I used to be a Washington Post paper boy, so I'l put one last quote from Charles Osgood
It was while making newspaper deliveries, trying to miss the bushes and hit the porch, that
I first learned about accuracy in journalism
-Charles Osgood
I notice that Woit has disabled comments on this particular post (all other posts have comments
enabled). Probably he justifies it by telling himself that he is running a physics related blog
and isn't interested in promoting discussion on non-physics related matters like politics (but
he still wants to promote his own political opinions on his physics blog!). It's typical of the
fingers-in-the-ears reaction that ivory tower liberals to Trump's win.
Calling Susan out by name, misrepresenting her viewpoints, and then turning of comments is
completely indefensible.
I always felt he has needlessly politicized string theory research l by making his case against
it primarily in popular science books and on his blog rather than in peer-reviewed journals and
academic papers. Since when is it a good idea to let public perception influence our scientific
whims? Whether or not his arguments are valid is beside the point, it wasn't the right way to
go about attempting to influence the field.
I am re-posting the following from an insightful comment on the Liberty Blitzkrieg report on
this scam site:
"The anonymous "executive director" of the Propornot website, quoted by the Washington Post,
was mostly a likely a "senior military intelligence" impostor cum serial teen pornographer named
Joel Harding. He is facing a lawsuit over the copyright infringement of Internet-distributed (teen)
pornography (Case No. 1:16-cv-00384-AJT-TCB) in the US District Court for the eastern district
of Virginia, Alexandria division. This is in the public domain.
BTW, Harding's fellow trolls have been known to ascribe the rank of Brig Gen to their pathetic
troll leader in private messages to the unsuspecting.
No wonder Joel Harding wished to remain the anonymous "executive director" whose laughably
scientific work was quoted by Washington Post. But why didn't Washington Post's Craig Timberg
check this up? Basic journalistic checks thrown out of the mixed gender bathroom window? Details
of Harding's trolling activities are available on the very Internet that is trolled by Joel Harding
through his 3,000-odd troll sites.
And to think that I used to be an avid reader of Washington Post's science and Technology reports
now galls me.
There is a growing assumption that the patriotic paranoid activities of Joel Harding and associates
are a cover for their Ukrainian teen pornography distribution business."
The US MSM is all propaganda all the time-every bit as bad as Pravda ever was. RT now is
the "anti-propaganda." They were even carrying Jesse Ventura and other Americans who are blacklisted
by the MSM.
A hail mary pass that was intercepted by the opposing team and run back for a touchdown.
Methinks the WaPo, "PropOrNot", and the rest of the MSM involved with this stunt are going
to have a lesson in The Streisand Effect. Michael Krieger of Liberty Blitzkrieg (whom I greatly
admire BTW) has said he already has many new followers and donors.
What exactly is the origin of the Russia bashing that's been going on as of late? I feel
like I missed some important public dis somewhere that would explain it all. Condoleeza Rice's
general dated anti-Soviet attitude I could understand, but that doesn't explain the escalating
bigotry pouring out of Obama and Clinton (and their various surrogates). Is it a case of a bomb
in search of a war?
Looks to me like it came out of the HRC campaign. LOL James Carville was talking about
the KGB tampering with the vote tally .not knowing they've been out of business since 1991. The
whole thing makes absolutely no sense, and it won't fly with the American public, many of whom
watch RT, or may be married to or dating Russians. Even Randy Newman likes Putin enough to write
a song about him.
The funny thing is it's been an open secret that the Democratic party has known about electronic
voting fraud (always swinging to the Right) for years but refuses to go near the subject publicly
supposedly because they didn't want people to lose faith in election results and stop voting.
The Obama administration said on Friday that despite Russian attempts to undermine the
presidential election , it has concluded that the results "accurately reflect the will of the
American people."
From the NYT article you mention. It is now axiomatic that the Putin government was actively
attempting to subvert our election. This despite the fact that absolutely no compelling evidence
has ever been given.
After the nineties opening foreign influence was accepted and russia started integrating into
the western world. Some years later the resurged nationalist kicked out western companies, broke
cultural-social contacts.
West is made on free trade-free business-free ideas flow. if russia not trading on common terms,
west gonna take it by force. and russia holds one-fourth of fresh water, one-fifth of world forests,
one sixth of arable but never before used land, and never before properly explored mineral wealth.
All these can help to secure a prosperous 21.century for the west.
Same like before the american conquest, only difference now local indigenous people wield nuclear
weapons and have unlimited chinese support, so no rush let them make mistakes. (and they do, ukraine-syria-azerbaijan
just the latest)
I don't think there is an easy answer to your question, but I think it goes around to the
failed Ukrainian coup (well, partially failed) and the realisation within a certain element of
the neocon establishment that Putin had been inadvertently strengthened by their policy failures
in the Ukraine and Syria. I think there was a concerted element within the Blob to refocus on
'the Russian threat' to cover up their failures in the Middle East and the refusal of the Chinese
to take the bait in the Pacific.
This rolled naturally into concerns about cyberwar and it was a short step from there to
using Russian cyberespionage to cover up the establishments embarrassment over wikileaks and multiple
other failures exposed by outsiders. As always, when a narrative suits (for different reasons)
the two halves of the establishment, the mainstream media is always happy to run it unquestioningly.
So in short, I think its a mixture of genuine conspiracy, mixed in with political opportunism.
Don't forget Snowden and Assange. The intelligence community is, I'm sure, furious about those
two. With Snowden still in Russia, it's basically a weeping sore on the intelligence community's
face. Those people do not like exposure at all.
I remember that, shortly after Snowden's revelations, the war drums really started to beat
for Syria.
In all success* is the seeds of failure. Once upon a time, the "beating of war drums" was a
great distraction from whatever ill's were currently affecting a nation. But the US now has such
an overwhelming military that not only is there absolutely no threat to the US land mass, but
for a given person there are at least two degrees of freedom between them and anybody actually
involved in these wars themselves. We lost a soldier – ONE soldier – on Thanksgiving day and sure
it was all over the news but how many USians actually know even a member of his family, let alone
him? About zero to a first approximation.
So it just isn't working as a distraction. TPTB I don't think really get that yet.
*the word success here is used in a morally neutral sense
Likewise don't forget Chelsea/Bradley Manning! He was the one who put WikiLeaks on the map
and is now paying a horrible price for his courage and love of humanity. His name is constantly
dropped from the list of whistle blower heroes. Why? Because of his gender ambiguity? Whatever
his gender Manning is an American hero worth remembering.
I think that's about right PlutoniumKun but I would add your moniker – the US is gonna spend
a FORTUNE (I TRILLION dollars using Austin Powers voice) updating our nuclear arsenal. Can't really
justify using ISIS, so the Soviet boogyman has to be resurrected .
A friend of mine is convinced that Obama and the Beltway crowd have never gotten over Russia
giving asylum to Edward Snowden. If you look at the timing between Snowden's revelations and the
U.S. ginning up its anti-Russia talk and activities, there is some correlation.
What exactly is the origin of the Russia bashing that's been going on as of late?
That is very good question and it does not have a simple answer. I have been pondering
this for 8 years now. The latest bout of Russia-hatred began as Putin began to re-assert their
sovereignty after the disastrous Yeltsin years. This intensified after Georgia, Ukraine and Syria.
In adddition the US was preprogrammed to hate Russia for historical reasons. Mostly because of
the Soviet era but also when the US inherited the global empire from the Brits we also got some
of their dislike of the Russian empire dating back to the 19th century.
It all started when Putin arrested the Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, when Putin
put a stop to the shock therapy looting of Russia by the Harvard mafia and Jeffrey Sachs. Didn't
he know that oligarch's are above the law? They are in the US. Didn't he know that money can buy
you immunity from prosecution like it does in Europe and the US? Can't have that, hence the Ukraine,
deprive him of his warm water naval base. Then there was the Crimean referendum. Out smarted again!
Can't have that!
Yes. There was a Michael Hudson piece posted here in 2014 that lays it all out. Apparently
those wanting to bring "democratic institutions" to Russia haven't given up yet.
This Propornot outfit has all the makings of a National Endowment for Democracy scam, including
its sudden appearance in the Post, which has been publishing crazy regime-change-esque editorials
on Russia for more than two years now.
It's all my fault. I studied Russian in high school (4 years) and college (1 year), and even
subscribed to Pravda briefly in college (as did all of my classmates) to improve reading skills.
I also spent a month in Russia in 1971. This is how I became a dirty commie. By commenting on
NC a half dozen times in the past, I have forever tainted it. Sorry!
BTW, what is the W3C approved sarcasm tag? /sarc or /s?
I also took 4 years of Russian in HS. When in the Cold War, it is best to understand your opponents
(not enemies), rather than be ignorant. That is how one can play chess and win and yes, it is
as much a matter of intimidation and annoyance, as it is cold calculation. Bobby Fischer vs Boris
Spassky. States have no enemies. Former allies become opponents and vice versa pragmatism rules.
Well Joe McCarthy was a Republican so this is yet another example of Democrats taking on that
mantle of paranoid fear and war-mongering. Flipping Clintons, the best Republican President and
candidate the Dems could come up with.
The MSM can no longer fool the people that there has been an economic recovery, that is why
nobody believes the media anymore and that is why Donald Trump won the election. Watching news
today is like watching a bad puppet show. The masses are finally waking up to the fact that their
government has sold them down the river to big corporations and predatory bankers. Took the sheeple
long enough.
It's an idiotic new red scare, and I can tell you the well credentialed, supposedly smart liberals
in my circles will eat it right up. Their critical thinking is completely out the window at this
point, and they'll accept apparently anything to avoid coming to terms with Clinton having lost
to Trump. It's terrifying.
9. Investigate. Figure things out for yourself. Spend more time with long articles. Subsidize
investigative journalism by subscribing to print media. Realize that some of what is on your
screen is there to harm you. Bookmark PropOrNot and other sites that investigate foreign propaganda
pushes.
It was so jarring I kept reading that last sentence, thinking I'd missed the snark. Fully expected
it to end with "as an example," not to lend it cred.
The article you mention in In These Times is by Timothy Snyder :), who despite being a well-known
historian is no mean propagandist himself, having suggested that the Ukrainians not the Soviets
liberated Auschwitz.
http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2014/03/07/crimea-putin-vs-reality/
Timothy Snyder is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. That he would recommend PoN
is at least a small indication of who stands behind it. Snyder is has given bad odor to the term
"historian" over the past three years. He is to objective history what Bernays was to objective
journalism.
Snyder: "The army group that liberated Auschwitz was called the First Ukrainian Front." The
NYR of Books has suppressed the comment section on its blog, probably to spare Snyder the embarrassment
of having his howlers pointed out by readers.
Ah so, thanks to you both. Two tells made me suspicious: lots of apparently good advice, then
the little drop of poison just nonchalantly dropped in the mix; and Yale historian ;) .
My comment there hasn't made it out of moderation yet. But someone else tore into him for the
same reason I did, recommending PoN:
Because you have no idea who the hell they are, anymore than anyone else does, they've just
released a list of non-MSM news sites that they disagree with. They smear long running and
well trusted sites as "propaganda" outlets without offering any evidence or stating any sort
of methodology. You have litereally abandoned the professional ethic which ought to go along
with being a published.historian and University professor purely because it makes you FEEL
BETTER.
I just asked him, as a Yale historian, to please tell us how the list was compiled, or at least
give some reason for his unqualified recommendation. I went on to say that I read several of the
sites listed, esp. Counterpunch and of course, NC. Even helpfully provided a link to this article,
saying the idea that NC pushes foreign propaganda is ludicrous, and the WaPo article was being
thoroughly debunked here.
Ended with "I call upon the author to explain! (h/t Nick Cave)"
More likely, what "truth" 'they' are trying to manufacture. (When did the new 'owners' take
up the reins at WaPo? There might be a correlation, and a causation involved)
This is why I'm looking forward to any legal cases that may arise out of this - I plan to follow
such *very* closely. Would love to see discovery documents upon the editorial and ownership staff
. the legal equivalent of a public enema, "you shall have no more secrets "
After all, didn't Fox News win a case essentially stating that it was OK to flat out lie and
fabricate from whole cloth? Then why can't Democrat media organs do likewise?
Why didn't I think of that earlier? "Political Infotainment." If my reading serves me right,
I was under the impression that newspapers of a hundred years ago and earlier displayed their
political allegiances openly. A reader could easily work out the underlying story from separating
"story" from "interpretation." Now, news outlets are supposedly impartial and pure of heart. Yet
another cherished myth bites the dust. Perhaps it is better this way.
Based on the evidence of above mentioned link, this "PropOrNot" can be part of a project
of U.S. government to manipulate media to create an anti-Russia climate or more likely another
method of attack on what they consider "Left" so status quo in economic policies of U.S. can be
maintained.
What is going on with the press/MSM lately? It is like one big game of mind control. Is that
what journalism is for – to persuade people to do what the system wants them to do and I hope
I am not stretching here but a la Bernays? I mean when I think about this it is really sort of
terrifying as the MSM has done little else but constantly broadcast to people that life in America
is just fine and everyone is happy when in fact the opposite is true – there is a lot of hardship
out there since the financial crisis, a lot of people never recovered, millions or tens of millions.
So how can people not be drawn to alternative news sites which thankfully are quite abundant now
and want political change? It just seems like the WaPo, NYT are living in this one little sliver
of opulence and prosperity while the rest of us just shake our heads and wonder what has happened
to this country, especially as we see their darling was not voted in as President. So now they
are striking out and attempting to smear the reputations of good sites, And what is this fake
news thing – I am not on social media and have no idea what the fake news is – is it about the
pizza places? And why are the social media sites being censored – I had read on zh that when the
Comey story hit before the election that that news was not trending at all which was very strange
according to those who would know better.
I don't know where all this fear is coming from in the MSM but I imagine they have lost their
grasp of the American mind. I worry every time I tune in that I am being lied to and misled for
a reason. A political reason. I grew up in the 50's and remember real journalism and I want it
back. I want to know what is really going on. Everywhere.
It has worked for a hundred years, since WWI and the Creel Commission, the destruction of a
vibrant American Left. Imagine the panic in the boardroom suites, the millennials no longer think
that socialism is a bad word, and supported an aging leftist for president. OMFG! It's all Russia's
fault providing an alternate plausible narrative. Can't have that. Outsourcing jobs to Asia, burdening
college students with immense debts, incredible corruption personified by the Queen of Wall Street
couldn't have anything to do with it. All power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
It's finally happened, they have over reached and are about to fall off the edge. Relish the panic.
When everything hits the fan, I'll be glad to have you other filthy propagandists in the FEMA
camp alongside me, breaking rocks, eating gruel, and discussing the path to insanity.
I really wish that reporters like those at the Post and the Times had done us all a favor and
walked into the ocean after their abysmal election coverage. Why anyone listens to these outlets
anymore is a question that I ponder at night, staring at the ceiling, wondering what the hell
happened to my country.
On PropOrNot's list is usslibertyveterans.org, which might be an indication its neocon origins.
The site has few articles, no comments and its visit counter shows under 3,800 hits. It looks
like it was created 4 months ago. It is propaganda because?
Their
stats page shows that ProOrNot's strategy might backfire. Yesterday was a record day for hits.
Or maybe usslibertyveterans.org is a fishing lure.
Who could possibly have a problem with a site on the USS Liberty? Certainly narrows down the
list of suspects considerably, assuming it wasn't a deliberate false track. For those not familiar
with the USS Liberty, it was the USN ship attacked, nearly sunk with heavy casualties, by Israel
in 1967. A lot of military still have bitterness towards Israel and the American leadership due
to the lack of justice and cover-up over that incident.
The surrounding of "Russian propaganda" with the letter 'y' reminds me a bit of
this :
(((Echo))) is a symbol used by anti-Semitic members of the alt-right to identify certain
individuals as Jewish by surrounding their names with three parentheses on each side. The symbol
became a subject of online discussions and media scrutiny in June 2016 after Google removed
a browser extension that automatically highlights Jewish surnames in the style.
Note that Israel has a lot to lose if Trump pulls the US out of the Middle East. Here's some
Russian propaganda on the issue:
Tila Tequila's Descent Into Nazism Is A Long Time Coming
The self-proclaimed "alt-reich queen" has a long history of anti-Semitism, and an even longer
one of internet trolling.
Again unless this is a false lead, these guys are looking more and more Israeli or Israeli
sympathizers. Other tweets per Greenwald at same link also suggest a pretty low maturity level.
Possibly kids or college level??
This is a lot worse than "Yellow Cake" and it scares the pants off me. This is the "Official
line", signed off on by the editors of WaPo. Think about that for a minute. And then think about
the campaign to get the EC to enthrone HRC.
Trump dissed the MSM and they are pissed off, so are their masters who wanted Obama to slide
through TPP in the period between Hillary's win and the inauguration. They blew more than $1Billion
on a loser and they may have decided that losing is not acceptable and that it will be HRC on
the throne, whatever it takes. The recklessness displayed by the MSM here is breathtaking at a
moment when the USA is more divided than it has been since the election of 1860.
I'm with you Tom Stone. There is nothing funny about this. The MSM at this point is the
greatest purveyor of fake news on the planet, I am talking about not just CNN and Fox, but the
BBC, France24 and so on.
Pretty much everything they have said and every video they has shown on east Aleppo is
either a lie or a fake. As someone noted the other day (I can't remember who) if the stories about
east Aleppo were actually true, then the Russians and Syrians have destroyed approximately 900
hospitals – including the 'last pediatric hospital in east Aleppo' which has been completely demolished
on at least three separate occasions in the last few months. The main stream outlets don't even
try to be consistent.
The people who run things here and in Europe are apparently desperate – and this latest
move is an indication of how desperate they actually are. It is indeed scary.
I am publicly apologizing to Sarah Palin who I used to think was a dingbat for all of her criticism
of the MSM aka Lame stream media. She was far, far more correct than I ever thought possible.
But look at the silver lining – how many people like me who thought that the large media got
the essential facts correct can now see how much we're being fed pure propaganda .how much of
what you see depends on what your looking for .
Weapons of Mass Distraction. Another nail in the coffin of credibility of the NYT and WaPo.
Recall after the Stupid War and how there were zero weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq
that the NYT and Wapo declined to mention or explore their own culpability in beating the drums
of war. This will be more of the same.
"Some critics of our coverage during that time have focused blame on individual reporters.
Our examination, however, indicates that the problem was more complicated. Editors at several
levels who should have been challenging reporters and pressing for more skepticism were perhaps
too intent on rushing scoops into the paper. Accounts of Iraqi defectors were not always weighed
against their strong desire to have Saddam Hussein ousted. Articles based on dire claims about
Iraq tended to get prominent display, while follow-up articles that called the original ones into
question were sometimes buried. In some cases, there was no follow-up at all."
So the Times DID admit some culpability, but it wasn't as if the Times volunteered to donate
a portion of their profits(deepen their losses?) to help Iraqi victims or US soldiers and their
families.
And given the Times Syria coverage, where even the sanctimonious Nick Kristof (August 28, 2013)
called on for Obama to bomb Syria for credibility reasons, nothing has changed at the Times.
"Yet there is value in bolstering international norms against egregious behavior like genocide
or the use
of chemical weapons. Since President Obama established a "red line" about chemical weapons use,
his
credibility has been at stake: he can't just whimper and back down."
The Times playbook is to parrot what TPTB wants to do and then if the readers subsequently
revolt in disgust, apologize later.
After I quit my digital subscription to the Times, it seems I'm limited to 10 articles/month.
This might be more than the safely recommended monthly dose of the NYTimes.
The dissimulation, the feigned ignorance (the irony). During the 1930s, the New York Times
actually acted as propaganda agents for Stalin. They collaborated with the Soviet Security Services
to prevent the rescue of millions of Ukrainian peasants (deplorables).
"In 1932 Duranty received a Pulitzer Prize for a series of reports about the Soviet Union,
11 of them published in June 1931. He was criticized then and later for his denial of widespread
famine (1932–33) in the USSR, most particularly the mass starvation in Ukraine. Years later, there
were calls to revoke his Pulitzer; The New York Times, which submitted his work for the prize
in 1932, wrote that his articles constituted "some of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper."
Editors were perhaps too intent on rushing scoops into the paper.
And there you have it, boys and girls, the one driving force behind journalism as practiced
in the corporate media. If I had been paid for every time I was told to fudge a story lest the
local broadcast stations break it first, I would have been able to pay my mortgage.
This whole Russian propaganda campaign is nothing more then elites attempting to slam shut
the Overton Window that the Trump campaign has pried open a bit this year. This article explains
why they will most likely fail:
I suspect that PropOrNot's outburst was developed during the campaign by well heeled and
connected Hilary supporters to be unveiled after the election to muzzle increasingly influential
web sites including NC. As it stands PropOrNot shot a blank. If Hilary had won the campaign against
"fake news" would probably have taken on a more ominous tone.
Wolf mentioned that the list will function as a dog-whistle for money - that is, advertisers
- telling them about the dangerous places. Maybe not shooting a blank in the short run. In the
long run, of course, advertisers will follow the eyeballs anywhere.
The MSM became so biased during the Presidential election, it drove many Americans toward social
media where you could at least view campaign speaches unfiltered. The same process is now being
applied in the support of manmade climate change alarmism with hopefully the same result
i think you meant the same process is applied in the support of oil company propaganda. the
msm slavishly supported the pro fracking clinton, slavishly acted for years as if there were an
actual scientific debate, instead of fossil fuel shills vs scientists.
I really hope this doesn't get buried in the comments, because it's important to note that
Ames is actually incorrect. He would have been right as recently as 3 years ago but no longer
is.
The provisions of the Smith-Mundt act that prevented materials produced by the BGG from being
used for domestic purposes were repealed by the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012 (actually
passed in 2013, when incorporated into the NDAA), which states:
The Secretary and the Broadcasting Board of Governors are authorized to use funds appropriated
or otherwise made available for public diplomacy information programs to provide for the preparation,
dissemination, and use of information intended for foreign audiences abroad about the United
States, its people, and its policies, through press, publications, radio, motion pictures,
the Internet, and other information media, including social media, and through information
centers, instructors, and other direct or indirect means of communication.
It also contains a provision that supposedly prevents the BBG from influencing domestic public
opinion, yet also says the following.
Nothing in this section shall be construed to prohibit the Department of State or the Broadcasting
Board of Governors from engaging in any medium or form of communication, either directly or
indirectly, because a United States domestic audience is or may be thereby exposed to program
material, or based on a presumption of such exposure.
Worth noting: passed under Obama and discounted at the time but venues such as Mother Jones,
who did the heavy lifting of telling progressives they were paranoid.
I am guessing the proviso you quote may have been intended to cover the possibility of people
in places like Florida hearing broadcasts aimed at Cuba or other targets, but it certainly raises
questions.
What I find most despicable in all this is the cowardice of these people making up their accusations
and refusing to say who they are. Beneath contempt.
As a loophole it's not perfect (the intent of the primary provision it qualifies seems rather
clear on its face), but we're talking about people who wrote elaborate memos justifying torture
and extra judicial murder, and who went before Congress (i.e. Holder) to claim that "due process"
does not necessarily mean "judicial process." A loophole like that is more than enough to judge
such activities legal enough. I certainly can't imagine anyone in the current administration prosecuting
it.
In regards to all this 'fake news' and 'Russian propaganda' hysteria, one potential problem
I keep seeing mentioned is that certain sites could be banned from FleeceBook thereby destroying
these sites' page hits and ad revenue.
I don't use the FleeceBook so I guess I don't understand how this works. I can come to this
or any other website any time I want so why would I care that it's been banned by FleeceBook?
I don't remember exactly how I first heard of NC but I'm guessing I followed a link from one of
the other left-leaning sites I read regularly (which coincidentally also are authored by Boris
Badinov according to the WaPo). Is FB sort of like AOL back in the day where AOL users thought
they were surfing the intertubes but in reality were in some sort of AOL-approved pen? And if
that's the case I have to wonder how long it will be before FB becomes just like AOL is today,
ie mainly used by the less internet savvy. I already hear rumors that the youngsters consider
FB something only old people use.
I am genuinely interested if anyone can explain this – would it really hurt websites that much
to be banned by FB? Wouldn't there be a backlash against FB for doing so?
PS: The thing that made me start using NC as my go-to source for news besides the excellent
original financial reporting was the fact that you guys started including regular links to sites
like BAR, Counetrpunch, etc that I was already reading anyway. I feel like I can read here without
missing out on what was going on elsewhere – there's only so much one can read in a day. Keep
up the great work!
I would assume that's how they intend to hurt these sites, but we get virtually no traffic
from Facebook. However, being banned from FB would seriously dent out policy influence.
Unfortunately, Faceborg is the best way for me to stay in touch with certain people. For example,
it has a closed group called FDL-LLN which is limited to former commenters on FireDogLake. (LLN
stands for Late Late Night, which was a subforum for people to post music and discuss musical
artists; the LLN heading was used for the FB group out of, I believe, both nostalgia and the friendships
that many formed as FDL "pups".)
In addition, if you post an NC link on FB, it gets seen by many people who might not otherwise
become aware of the site.
Ah Jess I miss LLN and Suz an Tut and all the rest. But not enough to go Faceborg. Somethings
are lost some remain. I still have a phone which i use every so often.
Bob.
After a few years of FB econ sites, hashing things out with the usual suspects, things began
to increasingly change as the primaries got to the wire. Once solid commenters replete with knowlage
and experience began to mimic the very people and camps they once railed against.
It was on then when I took on these people for such actions that I started to get the FB treatment,
ending in privacy washing.
Disheveled Marsupial . especially when noting Hillary's history and bad side, sad to think
it might have been one of the old gang that put in a complaint to FB.
There is something bizarre about this whole scenario.
PropOrNot is asserting that the sites on the 'List", both right and left, were responsible
for the Clinton loss by spreading false Russian propaganda. This would make more sense, as a political
project, if Clinton had won. Asking the Trump DOJ and Trump's/Comey's FBI to investigate the asserted
causes of Trump's win is bizarre.
It only makes sense, IMHO, if this project was already in the works pre-election anticipating
a Clinton win, where it would have had the benefit of targeting both the right and the left and
continuing the drum beat for war. If that is the case, the losers appear to be too shell-shocked
or committed, financially or ideologically, to think through the implications of letting this
go forward.
I do like the idea of NC, and other left-wing sites, forming a coalition with right-wing sites
to take legal action. Ralph Nader's "Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle
the Corporate State" comes to mind.
Wasn't the reality of Russia intervention in Syria well underway by that time as well? Wasn't
the whole US Syrian ploy dependent on everybody selling the people a clear distinction between
evil Assad, evil ISIS, and good moderates (ahem al-quaeda)?
That narrative was clearly no longer believed even by the journalists writing it. Why? Sites
like this one and others. Why does it matter? Because aim was to get rid of Assad to cut Russia
out of Mideast, having failed to achieve that goal two years earlier in Ukraine. Cui bono?
Good points. Also, IIRC, internet governance is due to be turned over to a non-governmental
organization in the not too distant future. Might this not be a way of achieving the elimination
of net neutrality during a Democratic Administration that would not want to be seen as sticking
the knife in themselves?
In that scenario, it would look a lot like the present Administration is secretly working the
refs in the same way that they tried to push the TPP and its' associated ISDS provisions before
the whistle was blown on them.
This whole bizarre "fake news" meme along with the and the Russians are coming is getting widespread
media traction including Vanity Fair. It's getting repeated in Canadian media too.
Now PropOrNot not is not credited as the source but the more plausible sounding Foreign Policy
Research Institute and lots of references to the Washington Post's "reporting".
I think this is a deliberate campaign to discredit progressive and independent news sources.
God forbid that citizens should read a variety of sources and make up their own minds.
I have wondered for about a year now if someone is handing out anti-Russian story quotas –
or maybe anti-Russian story cash, with a bonus for anything that goes viral. I'm not sure how
else you explain
stuff like this from a Gawker site that was mainly focused on minimum wage law and whether
the Tilted Kilt could legally fire you for being too fat.
This current listicle feels very much the same, except with less professionalism and more credulity.
Either someone is getting paid enough not to care how asinine this looks, or the inmates really
are running the media asylum.
Naked Capitalism is in great company: BAR, Counterpunch, Antiwar, Consortium News. I didn't
need to read these sites to come to my views though, all they did is to confirm what I had come
to believe all on my own: that Hillary is a corrupt warmonger, that the American government has
been captured by the moneyed elites, that the Democrat Party is a rat nest of neoliberal infestation.
And while I was naturally predisposed toward Russia by virtue of where I was born and by Bulgarian
history, my college career was marked by my support for all of the bad policies that brought us
the new Cold War with Russia: NATO expansion, the bombing of Serbia, the economic ruin of Russia,
the unipolar world order. I was young, stupid, and ambitious. Later on I simply settled into profound
indifference toward Russia and a general anti-war attitude brought about by my own service. It
wasn't until the hysterical MSM crapstorm of breathless smears about Sochi that I began to notice
the US policies against Russia. So for me, the most effective pro-Russia propaganda outlets proved
to be US MSM, WaPo and NYT being the most effective of all. Just one of life's little ironies.
So WaPo wants to sling mud and go on a witch hunt? I suggest that they indict themselves first
and foremost, for being a mindless disseminators of US government propaganda.
"a new 'Eurasian' empire stretching from Dublin to Vladisvostok"
Why Dublin? With a flick of the finger, they could have had the flyover terrain between there
and Shannon.
And why Vladivostock? You can go a lot farther East than that and still be in Russia.
For Pete's sake, why have they not included Sapporo and the rest of Japan. Aren't they vulnerable
too?
And the Aleutians; for that matter, why not the rest of Alaska too? After all, we only bought
it from them at a knock-down price. Anyone knows they got
a raw deal. Shouldn't they want that back too?
Shannon Airport would have been appropriate as during the Cold War it was Aeroflots main base
for flying on to Cuba. Its now only a short drive from Trumps Irish golf course.
Conflicted. On the one hand, as a long time reader of a diversity of listed websites (on the
lefty side mostly), this comes across as ham fisted and, frankly, bizarre. Not only the laughable
story itself, but that it has been picked up and reposted by a host of other rather mainstream
and 'liberal' surrogates.
It is *bizarre* because Russia today is nothing of what the boogeyman USSR was in times past:
an alternative political-economic arrangement to then industrial capitalism. Russia Today (wink,
wink) is as capitalist and as democratic as any of the other players on this particular stage
(plenty of the former, not so much of the latter). An economic competitor, sure, but no USSR.
So the anti-Russia/Putin propaganda just consistently reads hollow to anyone who spends any time
just reading run of the mill reporting of goings on in the world (reporting aside from propaganda
stories). In other words, if you are a relatively informed reader of diverse sources and traveler,
the anti-Russia stuff just comes across as contrived from the get go.
But then again, I got a chance to visit with some 1000s of academic colleagues at a national
convention recently. This is where the 'conflicted' point comes from. As Good Liberals, academics
dine daily on a strict NYT, WAPO, NPR diet, with the more 'edgy' types hanging at VOX and HuffPo.
And they BELIEVE everything their beloved media tells them through these sources, without reservation
(and with the requisite snark and smirk). The academy is nearly completely captured and now so
deeply immersed in its echo chamber that any information that might challenge its perception of
the world is immediately dismissed as nefarious propaganda (either paid for by the Koch bros,
or Putin). Of course, since the elite academy is overwhelmingly Ivy educated, their worldview
loops back to their Ivy educated friends at said media outlets. Creating a bubble that is increasingly
impenetrable to reason and critical analysis.
Lots of panic for the Washington regime. The clownish asshole loser that they carefully
groomed proved less repulsive than their chosen Fuehrer Clinton. Now they are distraught to see
that their enemy Russia sucks much less than the USA.
Russians get a much better deal than the US subject population. The Russian head of state has
approval ratings that US politicians scarcely dream of. Russia complies with the Paris Principles,
the gold standard for institutionalized human rights protection under international review. The
USA does not. Russia's incorruptible President keeps kleptocrats in check, while the US banana
republic installs them in high office. Russia complies with the rule of law: they refrain from
use or threat of force and rely on pacific dispute resolution, using proportional and necessary
force in compliance with UN Charter Chapter VII. The US shits on rule of law, interpreting human
rights instruments in bad faith and flouting jus cogens to maintain impunity for the gravest crimes.
In the precise terms of Responsibility to Protect, the US government does not even meet the minimal
test for state sovereignty: compliance with the International Bill of Human Rights, the Rome Statute,
and the UN Charter. Naturally the US is bleeding legitimacy and international standing, and Russia
is going from strength to strength. If Russia invaded, we would strew flowers and sweets.
The collapse of the USSR did Russia a world of good. Now it's time for the USA to collapse
and free America.
it boils down to Soros vs Putin. Anyone who is not with Soros is with Putin, according to Soros.
Soros cannot digest the death threat he was given by Putin, to stay away from Russia or else.
Since Soros was born in old communist europe, he seems to believe he has the right to regime change
there. And he has been very successful – primarily because he is in bed with the CIA and the Russians
are just now waking up again.
So sorry! I am a foreign "propagandist" reader, commenter and contributer from Spain, and I
am just shoked to see this! How sad is this, it pretty much looks like McCarthysm again!!!!
Hi Naked Capitalism. I haven't been on this site for some time. But I felt it necessary to
comment due to an ad hominem attack from a commenter "James" regarding the show I produce at RT
called Boom Bust.
From my vantage point as producer at RT, I have been able to see the whole anti-Russia campaign
unfold in all its fury. I have a lot of thoughts on this but I want to restrict my comments to
the specific argument James makes. here:
"it's also obvious that RT invites him on the network because he lambasts the American political
establishment and weakens the public's confidence in its leaders. This is clearly a goal of Moscow,
and they use people like Steve Keen to do it. I'm sure Steven Keen doesn't think of his role that
way, but RT and Russian intelligence certainly do."
Since I produce the show that Steve Keen appears on, I am well-placed to give you a view on
this. James' comment is flat out false. What James writes is something he has fabricated in his
imagination – connecting dots he believes should be connected based on no first hand evidence
whatsoever.
What actually happens on Boom Bust is this:
Since no one I work with at RT has a sophisticated background in economics, finance or financial
reporting, they give us a wide berth in putting together content for our show with nearly no top
down dictates at all. That means we as American journalists have a pretty much free hand to report
economic news intelligently and without bias. We invite libertarian, mainstream, non-mainstream,
leftist, Democratic commentators, Republican commentators – you name it. As for guests, they are
not anti-American in any way shape or form. They are disproportionately non-mainstream.
We have no pro-Russian agenda. And that is in part because Russia is a bit player on the economic
stage, frankly. Except for sanctions, it has mostly been irrelevant on our show since inception.
Let me share a strange anecdote on that. We had a guest on our show about three years ago,
early in my tenure. We invited him on because he had smart things to say about the UK economy.
But he had also written some very negative things about Putin and Russia. Rather than whitewash
this we addressed it specifically in the interview and asked him an open-ended question about
Russia, so he could say his piece. I was ASTONISHED when he soft-pedaled his response and made
no forceful case as he had done literally days ago in print. This guy clearly self-censored –
for what reason I don't know. But it is something that has stayed with me ever since.
The most important goal from a managerial perspective has been that our reporting is different
i.e. covers missing and important angles of the same storyline that are missing in the mainstream
media or that it covers storylines that are missing altogether.
Neither Steve Keen nor any other guest on our show appears "because he lambasts the American
political establishment". This is false. He appears on our show because he is a credible economist
who provides a differentiated view on economics and insight that we believe will help our viewers
understand the global economy. If Paul Krugman had something to say of that nature and would appear
on our show, we would welcome him. In fact, I and other producers have reached out to him many
times to no avail, especially after we had Gerald Friedman give his take on the dust-up surrounding
Bernie Sanders' economic plan.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yna275KzuDQ
Look, I understand the scepticism about RT and its motives. It IS a state-funded news outlet
with news story angles that sometimes contrast sharply with western media. And it has not been
critical of the Russian government as far as I can tell. But you can't ascribe nefarious motives
to individual economists or reporters based on inaccurate or false third hand accounts. You are
just making things up, creating a false narrative based on circumstantial evidence. This is just
adding to the building peer pressure associated with what almost seems like an orchestrated campaign
to discredit non-mainstream sources of news.
You are in good company with that suspicion of a campaign to "sanitize" the public's sources
of information. If one were to consider the Corporate sector as the equivalent of a state, then
almost all news sources are liable to extra strong scrutiny. Going back to Bernays, the "shepherding"
of the news sources used by the majority of the population is crucial to maintaining control of
public perceptions. In that sense, the present struggle for control of the news narrative is understandable.
Keep up the good work.
Isn't that a compliment? I mean it does say "leading" (and I have to agree).
As for "left-wing", well NC does frequently feature articles by Bill Black & others associated
with the University of Mo. Kansas City; and UMKC has long been known for its lefty, socialist/commie
leanings – I know because my 81 y.o. mother told me so (and I had a prof. there teaching "History
of Economic Thought" who came right out & claimed to be a Socialist – horrors!)
Lambert foresaw that there would be a witch hunt after the election. He indicated that it would
come from the Democratic Party and the conserva-Dem establishment. And, ecco!, a witch hunt. So
what could possibly be the source?
I am noticing on my Facebook feeds that the ooshy liberals are in a feeding frenzy: They believe
that they are victims of some breakdown in information. The shocker was that the news being passed
around in DemPartyLandia was that the Democrats were on the verge of retaking both houses of Congress
and the presidency. Meanwhile, Water Cooler showed that the neither house of Congress was truly
in play and the presidential race was a dead heat. After the election, various lists began to
circulate. The one cited by Yves isn't the first. I saw one list that included The Onion, The
Daily Currant, and Duffel Blog. You mean Duffel Blog's story on U.S. soldiers trying en masse
to join the Canadian army isn't true?
Further, much of liberaldom is now deep into trying to flip the Electoral College or amend
the Constitution immediately, as well as the Trump as Fascist meme.
Yes, America, land of self-proclaimed bad-asses, turns out to be the realm of panic. And many
policies and stances are going to have to be suddenly revised: Ooshy liberals, who supported charter
schools for years, are suddenly shocked that DeVos of Amway is a charter-school addict. The disastrous
foreign-policy adventures of the last few years have to be offloaded very soon on Trump, so that
Obama can be thanked for being scandal-free.
And, evidently, the conspiracy is now so big that it can't be blamed solely on Al-Jazeera.
This means we need more outlets besides Google and Facebook; outlets impervious to witch hunts
– maybe offshore enterprises, after all that's the trend. The more the merrier for manufacturing
dissent – in a good sense. What Russia does cannot harm us but it is always good to hear their
take; and China is interesting as well. We get such gobbledegook from MSM we would never understand
a single issue without alternative news. It's a little late for them to be all hysterical about
losing their grip – they've been annoying us and boring us to death for 5 decades; and selling
us down the river. I'm amazed they have a following at all.
The military industrial complex and all the elites are behind all this massive propaganda stuff
and fake news. They want war and nothing is going to stand in their way – not the democrats, not
the republicans, no one. HRC knew this – hence her "paranoia" about Russia. It's crazy. I hope
Trump has the balls to stand up against them. Thanks NC for being here --
With the Washington Post at least, there is a pretty handy avenue of response. Namely that
its CEO Jeff Bezos, who clearly approves of the editorial policy, is also owner of Amazon.com
If you don't approve of Mr. Bezos using his media platform to revive McCarthyism and Yellow Journalism,
keep that in mind when doing your holiday shopping, and when you see that item you were thinking
of buying on amazon, take a moment to see about buying it elsewhere, even if it costs a bit more
to do so. If Mr. Bezos want to use the Washington Post to promote censorship of media control,
make him pay for it in a drop in Amazon's stock price.
"Information globalism is a free flow of information across the world irrespective of race,
source geography. Its up to a competent reader being selective- choosing what sort of information
they want consuming. Its the bases of choice, a basic human right."
The Clinton campaign announced today they'll be joining the recount effort. Greens start a
recount effort, Friday WaPo prints vile rumors, Saturday Clinton campaign announces it is joining
the Wisc recount effort. This is banana republic stuff.
One of the most egregious examples is the group's inclusion of Naked Capitalism, the widely
respected left-wing site run by Wall Street critic Yves Smith. That site was named by Time
Magazine as one of the best 25 Best Financial Blogs in 2011 and by Wired Magazine as a crucial
site to follow for finance, and Smith has been featured as a guest on programs such as PBS'
Bill Moyers Show. Yet this cowardly group of anonymous smear artists, promoted by the Washington
Post, has now placed them on a blacklist of Russian disinformation.
From the propornot website (deliberately not linking it) the YYY thing is really creepy.
The YYYcampaignYYY is an effort to crowdsource identifying Russian propaganda outlets and
sympathizers. To participate, when you see a social-media account, commenter, or outlet echoing
Russian propaganda themes, highlight it with YYYs accordingly!
Reminds me of the (((name of jewish person))) thing that popped up very briefly in the right
wing fever swamp only to be instantly proudly self-added by a ton of jewish liberals.
I have come to the conclusion, based on personal observation, that anyone who includes the
words "our leaders" in their narrative is not to be trusted. Granted, it's a personal thing, as
I have been advocating whenever possible that we should under no circumstances apply that label
to our elected officials but should instead always use their proper designation: "public servants."
Anyone want to wager a thorough check of the MSM for the last fifty years or more would eventually
uncover the first one of their ilk to refer to elected officials as "our leaders"? To then be
followed by all of the others?
Because how better to persuade the voting public that they should just fill in the bubble or
push the button without asking a lot of silly questions about issues than by subtly brainwashing
them with the implication the people they're voting for are better equipped to deal with the important
stuff? Because "our leaders" are clearly better qualified to make the decisions than we are.
Interesting. Google's n-gram viewer shows that "our leaders" is much more prevalent
in books during and after wartime, peaking in 1942-44, with a somewhat steady rise between
just before WW1 and the end of WW2 (upon which each war is superimposed), and an odd reversal
upward around 1996 whose incline isn't much deflected by 9/11, and which levels off around 2005.
It's almost like looking at the Third Way made flesh.
My ex husband told me that back in the 70s when he was applying for a government job, he had
to undergo an extensive FBI check. The fibbies found out he had a subscription to "Soviet Life"
(a magazine about cultural, economic stuff in the USSR). As a result, his neighbors, family, past
co-workers were all interviewed to see if he was a "subversive." The Russophobia has a long history.
I agree with many commenters that Pravda's ProPorNet's listing is heading somewhere scary.
The MSM got the message that they have no credibility anymore, and they're in a panic, as are
the neocons/neolibs. I think after the US backed Ukrainian coup failed to nudge Russia into a
war, this "Russian aggression" meme started in earnest. Now that the election is over and the
"favored one" lost, it is quite telling to me that the panicked establishment isn't going to go
quietly. They were planning on having WWIII, and are furious now.
I'm too young to remember McCarthyism, but this stuff is frightening.
[..]Also included are popular libertarian hubs such as Zero Hedge, Antiwar.com and the Ron
Paul Institute, along with the hugely influential right-wing website the Drudge Report and the
publishing site WikiLeaks.
[..]One of the most egregious examples is the group's inclusion of Naked Capitalism, the widely
respected left-wing site run by Wall Street critic Yves Smith. That site was named by Time Magazine
as one of the best 25 Best Financial Blogs in 2011 and by Wired Magazine as a crucial site to
follow for finance, and Smith has been featured as a guest on programs such as PBS' Bill Moyers
Show. Yet this cowardly group of anonymous smear artists, promoted by the Washington Post, has
now placed them on a blacklist of Russian disinformation.[..]
Key line from Greenwald IMO: "The Post story served the agendas of many factions: those who
want to believe Putin stole the election from Hillary Clinton; those who want to believe that
the internet and social media are a grave menace that needs to be controlled, in contrast to the
objective truth which reliable old media outlets once issued; those who want a resurrection of
the Cold War."
me: The only way the mainstream media can get its power back is by killing or at least crippling
the internet.
A bunch of people in the U.S. got fed up, and now it means that a lot of people who were used
to only having contact with other people like themselves and hanging out at fancy parties are
being told they need to start interacting with the general public or get a different job, and
they're not happy about it.
Just last week I made my first ever reader contribution to NC–now I wish I had waited a few
days so my donation could be interpreted as an "FU" to ProporNot. :)
This Washington Post piece is so insidious as to make my blood run cold. We've seen
in "education reform" how the Gates Foundation and Walton Foundation would place un-sourced propaganda
in articles by friendly reporters in the WaPost and the NYTimes and then reference
the news outlets as proving their propaganda to be "fact."
As some know, I am a professional conspiracy theorist, having served as a local-level
criminal prosecutor for over 32 years. I see a grave threat to the First Amendment when
an anonymous source suspected to have ties to the military-industrial complex calls for the government
to investigate news sources for espionage.
I also find it interesting that The Intercept didn't make the list, despite the presence
of Glenn Greenwald. Given Pierre Omidyar's closeness to the current administration (was FirstLook
created to take Greenwald and Taibbi out of circulation during the 2012 election?), is there some
sort of "tell" here about where this attack on Free Speech is coming from?
Those on this blacklist should pool resources to pursue retraction, repudiation, and an admission
by the Post editorial board that Timberg's outrageously un-sourced "reporting" is libelous
and was published with an at best reckless and at worst intentional disregard for the truth.
Probably true, though also worth noting that (as has been observed frequently here), the Intercept's
regular reporting on Ukraine and Syria was often little better than mainstream outlets.
What is even more alarming, this seems to be coordinated with Jane Harmon's recent advocacy
of a FISA drone court which also targets "enemy" web sites. Is this a prelude to shutting down
dissenting web sites based on their status as foreign agents of our arch enemy "Russia" which
the European Parliament has equated with Daesh. There is a sense of impending revolution world
wide, is this the first step to preempt such? Is martial law the next step? There seemed to be
a lot of projection involved when the neo-libs accused Trump of fascism and not accepting election
results. Who is now not accepting election results and who are the real fascists calling for the
shutting down of news outlets?
Yet another reason why political establishment got what it deserved this election cycle. They
still think that a bit of propaganda denied them a victory and there is nothing wrong with their
policies
WaPo is now too vile to read.
McClatchy is still a fairly good news source. And, oh, look at this: Clinton campaign will join
recount effort in Wisconsin. Not surprising.
Jill Stein has embarrassed herself with this effort. I gave money to her until she made
her final vp choice – Baraka called Bernie a white supremacist! I did vote for her and now feel
it really was a wasted vote. 1% in the national totals. Ok. Being a useful idiot for the Clintons
– no way.
Ah yes, one more chance to steal the election. Syria must fall and be partitioned. Russia must
be driven from the Ukraine, the internet must be cleansed of dissent. Patent and Copyright monopolies
must be imposed on the world. This election took TPTB by surprise, they are surprised no longer.
Trump does not want to be President, he's scared to death. The consensus is that the results will
not change. Don't be so sure. There may yet be a coronation and then the shit will hit the proverbial
fan. Apparently it was not enough for TPTB to control both parties, they also control the minor
parties. Et tu Jill Stein!
Hillary and her handlers had the choice to lose to Bernie or to Trump. They chose Trump.
(OK, maybe not consciously.)
Now, they are are NOT happy with the result but please notice that Bernie is looking better,
has more news coverage, even appearing on The View, for crying out loud! Yes veal pen, "outreach",
whatever. Doesn't matter what they Think They are crafting.
If they keep up the Rooskie angle they will be amazed how good Bernie starts to look.
A little FB censorship. Ditto! Shut down some international protests. (In North Dakota) Bingo!
Drive people into the street! Whoooee!
They, DNC, Bezos et al, will pine for him before this is all over. Because he is the symbol
for what could have happened if they had followed the law and had gone peacefully.
They can't see it yet.
BTW, RT has a 30 minute segment with Chris Hedges at Standing Rock circulating now.
Seems legit to me. Decide for yourself.
Yves stand up and take a bow. You have been noticed by the filth. One of the many reassuring
signs to come from the corridors of power lately. Is it possible change really is coming?
I have just learned of a group in the European Parliament led by a Polish MEP and member of
the Alliance of Conservatives and Reformers in Europe that is likewise attempting to create a
fear of "fake news" from those sites that don't follow the MSM Editors' example of restraint in
publication.
It has this week received a huge injection of public money to extend its work. It seems that
North America and Europe are in lockstep on the need to keep the people ignorant.
If this site is seriously trying to help snowflakes create information-safe-places, then it
needs to protect them from my blog, too.
Fair is fair. I deserve recognition.
I also think Ilargi @ The Automatic Earth is being snubbed through their non-inclusion of that
site.
Everybody should email them and demand that all worthy blogs get included in their precious list.
When the rot is complete and the edifice tumbles? Or when TINA wins, and the voices go silent?
My bet is on the later. Collectively, the money got all 4 aces (and a few more hidden up their
sleaves and a few more hidden in their boots, etc – no end of aces.)
Then the silence reigns and TINA is happy. Despair is walled offed into its own echo chamber
and silence is taken for acquiescence and indifference.
Until it doesn't.
Human history just keeps playing the same music. Mind you, big nature might be adding a new
wrinkle to march-of-death tune. Interesting times, very interesting.
Charles Hugh-Smith's response to the "list": "The Washington Post: Useful-Idiot Shills for
a Failed, Frantic Status Quo That Has Lost Control of the Narrative"
"... Judging by the people who Trump has appointed, it is looking like an ugly situation for the US. If he actually hires people like John Bolton, we will know that a betrayal was certain. While I think that it is probable that he is the lesser evil, he was supposed to avoid neoconservatives and Wall Street types (that Clinton associates herself with). ..."
"... I think it would be a mistake to attribute too much "genius" to Trump and Kushner. It sounds like Kushner exhibited competence, and that's great. But Trump won in great measure because Democratic Party governance eviscerated those communities. ..."
"... This is akin to how Obama got WAY too much credit for being a brilliant orator. People wanted change in '08 and voted for it. That change agent betrayed them, so they voted for change again this time. Or, more accurately, a lot of Obama voters stayed home, the Republican base held together, and Trump's team found necessary little pockets of ignored voters to energize. But that strategy would never have worked if not for Obama's and Clinton's malfeasance and incompetence. Honestly, Hillary got closer to a win that she had a right to. That ought to be the real story. ..."
Does anyone else get the overwhelming impression that the US is heading for an impending collapse
or serious decline at least, unless it puts a fight it against the status quo?
Judging by the people who Trump has appointed, it is looking like an ugly situation for
the US. If he actually hires people like John Bolton, we will know that a betrayal was certain.
While I think that it is probable that he is the lesser evil, he was supposed to avoid neoconservatives
and Wall Street types (that Clinton associates herself with).
I find it amazing how tone deaf the Clinton campaign and Democratic Establishment are. Trump
and apparently his son in law, no matter what else, are political campaigning geniuses given their
accomplishments. For months people were criticizing their lack of experience in politics like
a fatal mistake..
I think that no real change is going to happen until someone authentically left wing takes
power or if the US collapses.
I think it would be a mistake to attribute too much "genius" to Trump and Kushner. It sounds
like Kushner exhibited competence, and that's great. But Trump won in great measure because Democratic
Party governance eviscerated those communities.
This is akin to how Obama got WAY too much credit for being a brilliant orator. People
wanted change in '08 and voted for it. That change agent betrayed them, so they voted for change
again this time. Or, more accurately, a lot of Obama voters stayed home, the Republican base held
together, and Trump's team found necessary little pockets of ignored voters to energize. But that
strategy would never have worked if not for Obama's and Clinton's malfeasance and incompetence.
Honestly, Hillary got closer to a win that she had a right to. That ought to be the real story.
It is not clear to me what exactly a collapse entails. The US doesn't have obvious lines to
fracture across, like say the USSR did. (I suppose an argument could be made for "cultural regions"
like the South, Cascadia etc separating out, but it seems far less likely to happen, even in the
case of continuing extreme economic duress and breakdown of democracy/civil rights).
The US is and has been in a serious decline, and will probably continue.
A crisis of legitimacy . People are fed up with politics. Do not blame globalisation for
that. Sep 27th 2001 | From the print edition. Timekeeper. Add this article to ...
Legitimacy: Legitimation Crises and Its Causes - Political Science Notes www.politicalsciencenotes.com/
legitimacy / legitimacy -legitimation- crises -and-its.../797
Causes of Legitimation Crisis : There are several causes or aspects of legitimation crisis
. Habermas and several other neo-Marxists, after studying all the aspects of capitalist
societies, have concluded that a number of factors are responsible for the legitimation crisis
The Global Crisis of Legitimacy . Geopolitical Weekly. May 4, 2010 | 08:56 GMT. Print. Text
Size. By George Friedman. Financial panics are an integral part of ...
by GE Reyes - 2010 -
Cited by 1 -
Related articles Theoretical basis of crisis of legitimacy and implications for less
developed countries: Guatemala as a case of study. TENDENCIAS. Revista de la Facultad de ...
by A Mattelaer - 2014 -
Related articles Mar 21, 2014 - generalised crisis in legitimacy , our democracies
face a crisis of legitimation: political choices are in dire need of an explanatory narrative
that.
The Legitimacy Crisis | RealClearPolitics www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2015/05/08/the_
legitimacy _ crisis _126530.html
May 8, 2015 - American government - at all levels - is losing the legitimacy it needs to
function. Or, perhaps, some segments of the government have ...
The third dimension of the crisis that I identify is the crisis of legitimacy of US hegemony.
This, I think, is as serious as the other two crises, since, as an admirer of ...
The Crisis of Legitimacy in Africa. Abiola Irele ▫ Summer 1992. A bleak picture emerges
from today's Africa. One glaring aspect is the material deprivation ...
This unadmitted ignorance was previously displayed for those with eyes to see it in the Libya debacle,
perhaps not coincidentally Clinton's pet war. Cast by the Obama White House as a surgical display
of "smart power" that would defend human rights and foster democracy in the Muslim world, the 2011
Libyan intervention did precisely the opposite. There is
credible evidence that the U.S.-led NATO campaign prolonged and exacerbated the humanitarian
crisis, and far from creating a flourishing democracy, the ouster of strongman Muammar Qaddafi led
to a power vacuum into which ISIS and other rival unsavories surged.
The 2011 intervention and the follow-up escalation in which we are presently entangled were both
fundamentally informed by "the underlying belief that military force will produce stability and that
the U.S. can reasonably predict the result of such a campaign," as Christopher Preble has argued
in a must-read Libya analysis
at Politico . Both have proven resoundingly wrong.
Before Libya, Washington espoused the same false certainty in advance of intervention and nation-building
Iraq and Afghanistan. The rhetoric around the former was particularly telling: we would find nuclear
weapons and "be greeted as liberators,"
said Vice President
Dick Cheney. The whole thing would take five months or less,
said Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld. It would be a
"cakewalk." As months dragged into years of nation-building stagnation, the ignored truth became
increasingly evident: the United States cannot reshape entire countries without obscene risk and
investment, and even when those costly commitments are made, success cannot be predicted with certainty.
Nearly 14 years later, with Iraq demonstrably more violent and less stable than it was before
U.S. intervention, wisdom demands we reject Washington's recycled snake oil.
Recent polls (let alone the anti-elite backlash Trump's
win represents ) suggest Americans are ready to do precisely that. But a lack of public enthusiasm
has never stopped Washington from hawking its fraudulent wares-this time in the form of yet-again
unfounded certainty that escalating American intervention in Syria is a sure-fire solution to that
beleaguered nation's woes.
We must not let ourselves be fooled. Rather, we "should understand that we don't need to overthrow
distant governments and roll the dice on what comes after in order to keep America safe," as Preble,
reflecting on Libya,
contends . "On the contrary, our track record over the last quarter-century shows that such interventions
often have the opposite effect."
And as for the political establishment, let Trump's triumph be a constant reminder of the necessity
of expecting the unexpected and proceeding with due (indeed, much overdue) prudence and restraint
abroad. If Washington so grossly misunderstood the direction of its own heartland-without the muddling,
as in foreign policy, of massive geographic and cultural differences-how naďve it is to believe that
our government can successfully play armed puppet-master over an entire region of the world?
Bonnie Kristian is a fellow at Defense Priorities. She is a weekend editor at The Week
and a columnist at Rare , and her writing has also appeared at Time , Politico
, Relevant , The Hill , and other outlets.
"... Did the United States not know that intervening in "the lands of Islam" would act as a catalyst for Jihad? Was it
by chance that the United States intervened only in secular states, turning them into manholes of religious extremism? Is
it a coincidence that these interventions were and are often supported by regimes that sponsor political Islam? Conspiracy
theory, you say? No, these are historical facts. ..."
"... The South has understood where the North has not: the selective nature of humanitarian interventions reflects their
punitive nature; sanctions go to non-client regimes; interventions seem to be a new excuse for the hegemonic ambitions of
the United States and its allies; they are a new rationale for NATO after the collapse of the Soviet Union; they are a way
to suppress Russia and deprive it of its zones of influence. (3) ..."
"... What a far-sighted motion was that of the coalition of the countries of the Third World (G77) at the Havana Summit
in 2000! It declared its rejection of any intervention, including humanitarian, which did not respect the sovereignty of
the states concerned. (4) This was nothing other than a rejection of the Clinton Doctrine, announced in 1999, in the wake
of the war of Kosovo, which made "humanitarian intervention" the new bedrock, or perhaps the new facade, of the foreign policy
of the United States. It was the same policy followed and developed by Hillary Clinton during her tenure as secretary of
state. (5) ..."
"... At the moment of this writing, any speculation as to the policy choices of Trump's foreign policy is premature.
..."
"... Like Donald Trump, George W. Bush was a conservative Republican non-interventionist. He advocated "America First,"
called for a more subdued foreign policy and adopted Colin Powell's realism "to attend without stress" (7) with regard to
the Near and Middle East. But his policy shifted to become the most aggressive and most brutal in the history of the United
States. Many international observers argue that this shift came as a response to the September 11 attacks, but they fail
to note that the aggressive germs already existed within Bush's cabinet and advisers: the neo-conservatives occupied key
functions in his administration. ..."
"... Up until now, Trump's links with the neo-cons remain unclear. The best-known neo-cons, Paul Wolfowitz, William Kristol,
and Robert Kagan, appear to have lost their bet by supporting Hillary Clinton's candidacy. But others, less prominent or
influential, seem to have won it by supporting Trump: Dick Cheney, Norman Podhoretz, and James Woolsey, his adviser and one
of the architects of the wars in the Middle East. ..."
"... it is more realistic to suppose that as long as the United States has interests in the countries of the South and
the Near and Middle East, so long it will not hesitate to intervene. ..."
"... In this context, Trump's defeat and Clinton's accession are not sufficient reasons to declare the decline of interventionism
-- the end of an era and the beginning of another. ..."
"... (Translated from the French by Luciana Bohne) ..."
If the discourse of humanitarianism seduced the North, it has not been so in the South, even less in the Near and Middle
East, which no longer believe in it. The patent humanitarian disasters in Kosovo, Iraq, Libya, and Syria have disillusioned
them.
It is in this sense that Trump's victory is felt as a release, a hope for change, and a rupture from the policy of Clinton,
Bush, and Obama. This policy, in the name of edifying nations ("nation building"), has destroyed some of the oldest nations
and civilizations on earth; in the name of delivering well-being, it has delivered misery; in the name of liberal values,
it has galvanized religious zeal; in the name of democracy and human rights, it has installed autocracies and Sharia law.
Who is to blame?
Did the United States not know that intervening in "the lands of Islam" would act as a catalyst for Jihad? Was it
by chance that the United States intervened only in secular states, turning them into manholes of religious extremism?
Is it a coincidence that these interventions were and are often supported by regimes that sponsor political Islam? Conspiracy
theory, you say? No, these are historical facts.
Can the United States not learn from history, or does it just doom itself to repeat it? Does it not pose itself the
question of how al-Qaeda and Daesh originated? How did they organize themselves? Who trained them? What is their mobilizing
discourse? (1) Why is the US their target? None of this seems to matter to the US: all it cares about is
projecting its own idealism. (2)
The death of thousands of people in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya or Syria, has it contributed to the well being of these
peoples? Or does the United States perhaps respond to this question in the manner of Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton's
Secretary of State, who regretted the death of five-hundred-thousand Iraqi children, deprived of medications by the American
embargo, to conclude with the infamous sentence, "[But] it was worth it "?
Was it worth it that people came to perceive humanitarian intervention as the new crusades? Was it worth it that they
now perceive democracy as a pagan, pre-Islamic model, abjured by their belief? Was it worth it that they now perceive modernity
as deviating believers from the "true" path? Was it worth that they now perceive human rights as human standards as contrary
to the divine will? Was it worth it that people now perceive secularism as atheism whose defenders are punishable by beheading?
Have universal values become a problem rather than a solution? What then to think of making war in their name? Has humanitarian
intervention become punishment rather than help?
The South has understood where the North has not: the selective nature of humanitarian interventions reflects their
punitive nature; sanctions go to non-client regimes; interventions seem to be a new excuse for the hegemonic ambitions
of the United States and its allies; they are a new rationale for NATO after the collapse of the Soviet Union; they are
a way to suppress Russia and deprive it of its zones of influence. (3)
What a far-sighted motion was that of the coalition of the countries of the Third World (G77) at the Havana Summit
in 2000! It declared its rejection of any intervention, including humanitarian, which did not respect the sovereignty of
the states concerned. (4) This was nothing other than a rejection of the Clinton Doctrine, announced in 1999, in the wake
of the war of Kosovo, which made "humanitarian intervention" the new bedrock, or perhaps the new facade, of the foreign
policy of the United States. It was the same policy followed and developed by Hillary Clinton during her tenure as secretary
of state. (5)
The end of interventionism?
But are Clinton's defeat and Trump's accession to power sufficient reasons to declare the decline of interventionism?
Donald Trump is a nationalist, whose rise has been the result of a coalition of anti-interventionists within the Republican
Party. They professe a foreign policy that Trump has summarized in these words: "We will use military force only in cases
of vital necessity to the national security of the United States. We will put an end to attempts of imposing democracy
and overthrowing regimes abroad, as well as involving ourselves in situations in which we have no right to intervene."
(6)
But drawing conclusions about the foreign policy of the United States from unofficial statements seems simplistic.
At the moment of this writing, any speculation as to the policy choices of Trump's foreign policy is premature.
One can't predict his policy with regard to the Near and Middle East, since he has not yet even formed his cabinet.
Moreover, presidents in office can change their tune in the course of their tenure. The case of George W. Bush provides
an excellent example.
Like Donald Trump, George W. Bush was a conservative Republican non-interventionist. He advocated "America First,"
called for a more subdued foreign policy and adopted Colin Powell's realism "to attend without stress" (7) with regard
to the Near and Middle East. But his policy shifted to become the most aggressive and most brutal in the history of the
United States. Many international observers argue that this shift came as a response to the September 11 attacks, but they
fail to note that the aggressive germs already existed within Bush's cabinet and advisers: the neo-conservatives occupied
key functions in his administration. (8)
Up until now, Trump's links with the neo-cons remain unclear. The best-known neo-cons, Paul Wolfowitz, William Kristol,
and Robert Kagan, appear to have lost their bet by supporting Hillary Clinton's candidacy. But others, less prominent or
influential, seem to have won it by supporting Trump: Dick Cheney, Norman Podhoretz, and James Woolsey, his adviser and
one of the architects of the wars in the Middle East.
These indices show that nothing seems to have been gained by the South, still less by the Near and Middle East. There
appears to be no guarantee that the situation will improve.
The non-interventionism promised by Trump may not necessarily equate to a policy of isolationism. A non-interventionist
policy does not automatically mean that the United States will stop protecting their interests abroad, strategic or otherwise.
Rather, it could mean that the United States will not intervene abroad except to defend their own interests,
unilaterally -- and perhaps even more aggressively. Such a potential is implied in Trump's promise to increase
the budget for the army and the military-industrial complex. Thus, it is more realistic to suppose that as long as
the United States has interests in the countries of the South and the Near and Middle East, so long it will not hesitate
to intervene.
In this context, Trump's defeat and Clinton's accession are not sufficient reasons to declare the decline of interventionism
-- the end of an era and the beginning of another. The political reality is too complex to be reduced to statements
by a presidential candidate campaigning for election, by an elected president, or even by a president in the course of
performing his office.
No one knows what the future will bring.
Marwen Bouassida is a researcher in international law at North African-European relations, University of Carthage,
Tunisia. He regularly contributes to the online magazine Kapitalis.
"... Flynn: "I don't know if they turned a blind eye. I think it was a decision, a willful decision." ..."
"... Hasan (Interviewer): "A willful decision to support an insurgency that had Salafists, Al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood?" ..."
"... Flynn: "A willful decision to do what they're doing, You have to really ask the President what is it that he actually is doing with the policy that is in place, because it is very, very confusing." ..."
Hasan (Interviewer) (From 11.15 onwards into the interview): "In 2012, your agency was
saying, quote: "The Salafists, the Muslim Brotherhood and Al-Qaeda in Iraq [(which ISIS arose
out of)], are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria." In 2012, the US was helping coordinate
arms transfers to those same groups. Why did you not stop that if you're worried about the rise
of Islamic extremism?"
Flynn: "Well I hate to say it's not my job, but my job was to ensure that the accuracy
of our intelligence that was being presented was as good as it could be, and I will tell you,
it goes before 2012. When we were in Iraq, and we still had decisions to be made before there
was a decision to pull out of Iraq in 2011, it was very clear what we were going to face."
Hasan (Interviewer): You are basically saying that even in government at the time, you
knew those groups were around, you saw this analysis, and you were arguing against it, but who
wasn't listening?"
Flynn: "I think the administration."
Hasan (Interviewer): "So the administration turned a blind eye to your analysis?"
Flynn: "I don't know if they turned a blind eye. I think it was a decision, a willful
decision."
Hasan (Interviewer): "A willful decision to support an insurgency that had Salafists, Al-Qaeda
and the Muslim Brotherhood?"
Flynn: "A willful decision to do what they're doing, You have to really ask the President
what is it that he actually is doing with the policy that is in place, because it is very, very
confusing."
Former US Intelligence Chief Admits Obama Took "Willful Decision" to Support ISIS Rise
Strong, credible allegations of high-level criminal activity can bring down a government. When the
government lacks an effective, fact-based defense, other techniques must be employed. The success
of these techniques depends heavily upon a cooperative, controlled press and a mere token opposition
party.
1. Dummy up . If it's not reported, if it's not news, it didn't happen.
2. Wax indignant . This is also known as the "how dare you" gambit.
3. Characterize the charges as "rumors" or, better yet, "wild rumors." If, in spite of the news
blackout, the public is still able to learn about the suspicious facts, it can only be through "rumors."
4. Knock down straw men . Deal only with the weakest aspect of the weakest charges. Even better,
create your own straw men. Make up wild rumors and give them lead play when you appear to debunk
all the charges, real and fanciful alike.
5. Call the skeptics names like "conspiracy theorist," "nut," "ranter," "kook," "crackpot" and,
of course, "rumor monger." You must then carefully avoid fair and open debate with any of the people
you have thus maligned.
6. Impugn motives . Attempt to marginalize the critics by suggesting strongly that they are not
really interested in the truth but are simply pursuing a partisan political agenda or are out to
make money.
7. Invoke authority . Here the controlled press and the sham opposition can be very useful.
8. Dismiss the charges as "old news."
9. Come half-clean . This is also known as "confession and avoidance" or "taking the limited hang-out
route." This way, you create the impression of candor and honesty while you admit only to relatively
harmless, less-than-criminal "mistakes." This stratagem often requires the embrace of a fall-back
position quite different from the one originally taken.
10. Characterize the crimes as impossibly complex and the truth as ultimately unknowable.
11. Reason backward , using the deductive method with a vengeance. With thoroughly rigorous deduction,
troublesome evidence is irrelevant. For example: We have a completely free press. If they know of
evidence that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF) had prior knowledge of the Oklahoma
City bombing they would have reported it. They haven't reported it, so there was no prior knowledge
by the BATF. Another variation on this theme involves the likelihood of a conspiracy leaker and a
press that would report it.
12. Require the skeptics to solve the crime completely.
13. Change the subject . This technique includes creating and/or reporting a distraction.
"... But he has simultaneously opposed the agreement with Iran on its nuclear programme and criticised Barack Obama for pulling the last US troops out of Iraq in 2011 (though in fact this was under an agreement signed by George W Bush). ..."
"... The US army and air force is today heavily engaged in Iraq and Syria and that is not going to end with Obama's departure. In contradiction to Trump's non-interventionism, leading members of his foreign policy team such as John Bolton, the belligerent former US ambassador to the UN, has been advocating a war with Iran since 2003. Bolton proposes carving out a Sunni state in northern Iraq and eastern Syria, a plan in which every sentence betrays ignorance and misjudgements about the forces in play on the ground. As a recipe for deepening the conflict in the region, it could scarcely be bettered. ..."
"... There have always been crackpots in Washington, sometimes in high office, but the number of dangerous people who have attached themselves to the incoming administration may be higher today than at any time in American history. ..."
"... Optimists have been saying this week that Trump is less ideological than he sounds and, in any case, the US ship of state is more like an ocean liner than a speedboat making it difficult to turn round. They add privately that not all the crooks and crazies will get the jobs they want. ..."
In theory, Trump is a non-interventionist; opposed to US military involvement in the Middle East
and North Africa, he wants to bring the war in
Syria to an end. But he has simultaneously opposed the agreement with Iran on its nuclear programme
and criticised Barack Obama for pulling the last US troops out of Iraq in 2011 (though in fact this
was under an agreement signed by George W Bush).
But Bush and
Obama were both non-interventionists when first elected – until the course of events, and the
enthusiasm of the Washington foreign policy establishment for foreign military ventures, changed
all that.
The US army and air force is today heavily engaged in Iraq and Syria and that is not going to
end with Obama's departure. In contradiction to Trump's non-interventionism, leading members of his
foreign policy team such as John Bolton, the belligerent former US ambassador to the UN, has been
advocating a war with Iran since 2003. Bolton proposes carving out a Sunni state in northern Iraq
and eastern Syria, a plan in which every sentence betrays ignorance and misjudgements about the forces
in play on the ground. As a recipe for deepening the conflict in the region, it could scarcely be
bettered.
There have always been crackpots in Washington, sometimes in high office, but the number of dangerous
people who have attached themselves to the incoming administration may be higher today than at any
time in American history.
Optimists have been saying this week that Trump is less ideological than he sounds and, in any
case, the US ship of state is more like an ocean liner than a speedboat making it difficult to turn
round. They add privately that not all the crooks and crazies will get the jobs they want.
Unfortunately, much the same could have been said of George W Bush when he came into office before
9/11. It is precisely such arrogant but ill-informed opportunists who can most easily be provoked
by terrorism into a self-destructive overreaction. Isis is having a good week.
The heads of the Pentagon and the nation's intelligence community have recommended to President Obama that the director of
the National Security Agency, Adm. Michael S. Rogers, be removed.
The recommendation, delivered to the White House last month, was made by Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter and Director
of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr., according to several U.S. officials familiar with the matter.
...
The news comes as Rogers is being considered by President-Elect Donald Trump to be his nominee for DNI, replacing Clapper as
the official who oversees all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies. In a move apparently unprecedented for a military officer, Rogers,
without notifying superiors, traveled to New York to meet with Trump on Thursday at Trump Tower.
Adm. Michael S. Rogers recently claimed in
reference to the hack of the Democratic National Council emails that Wikileaks spreading them is "a conscious effort by a nation-state
to attempt to achieve a specific effect." He obviously meant Russia.
Compare that with his boss James Clapper who very recently
said
(again) that the "intelligence agencies don't have good insight on when or how Wikileaks obtained the hacked emails."
Emails of the DNC and of Clinton's consigliere John Podesta were hacked and leaked. Additionally emails from Clinton's private
email server were released. All these influenced the election in favor of Trump.
Wikileaks boss Assange
says he does not know where the emails come from but he does not think they came from Russia.
Clapper and Carter wanted Rogers fired because he was generally disliked at the NSA, because two big breaches in the most secret
Tailored Access Organization occurred on
his watch even after the Snowden case and because he blocked, with the help of Senator McCain, plans to split the NSA into a spying
and a cyber war unit.
Now let me spin this a bit.
Rogers obviously knew he was on the to-be-fired list and he had good relations with the Republicans.
Now follows some plausible speculation:
Some Rogers trusted dudes at the NSA (or in the Navy cyber arm which Rogers earlier led) hack into the DNC, Podesta emails
and the Clinton private email server. An easy job with the tools the NSA provides for its spies. Whoever hacked the emails then
pushes what they got to Wikileaks (and DCleaks , another "leak" outlet). Wikileaks
publishes what it gets because that is what it usually does. Assange also has various reasons to hate Clinton. She was always
very hostile to Wikileaks. She allegedly even
mused of killing Assange by a drone strike.
Rogers then accuses Russia of the breach even while the rest of the spying community finds no evidence for such a claim. That
is natural to do for a military man who grew up during the cold war and may wish that war (and its budgets) back. It is also a
red herring that will never be proven wrong or right unless the original culprit is somehow found.
Next we know - Trump offers Rogers the Clapper job. He would replace the boss that wanted him fired.
Rogers support for the new cold war will also gain him favor with the various weapon industries which will eventually beef
up his pension.
Some of the above is speculation. But it would make sense and explain the quite one-sided wave of leaks we saw during this
election cycle.
Even if it isn't true it would at least be a good script for a Hollywood movie on the nastiness of the inside fighting in Washington
DC.
Let me know how plausible you find the tale.
Posted by b on November 19, 2016 at 02:14 PM |
Permalink
Not sure about the speculation. There's justification for military spending beyond the cold war. Actually, the cold war
could be sacrificed in order to re-prioritize military spending.
In any case, Trump's proposed picks are interesting. I especially like the idea of Dana Rohrabacher as Secretary of State
if it comes to pass.
One thing for sure .... there's been so much 'fail' with the Obama years that there's an abundance of low-hanging fruit
for Trump to feather his cap with success early on, which will give him a template for future successes. That depends largely
on who his picks for key posts are, but there has seldom been so much opportunity for a new President as the one that greets
Trump.
It's there to be had. Let's hope that Trump doesn't blow it.
Sounds about right and this just means a new criminal class has taken over the beltway. That doesn't do anything for us citizens,
just more of the same.
Everything is on schedule and please there's nothing to see here.
I wonder if Rogers' statement appearing to implicate Russian government hackers in leaking DNC information to Wikileaks at
that link to Twitter was made after the Democratic National Convention itself accused Russia of hacking into its database.
In this instance, knowing when Rogers made his statement and when the DNC made its accusation makes all the difference.
If someone at the NSA had been leaking information to Wikileaks and Rogers knew of this, then the DNC blaming Russia for
the leaked information would have been a godsend. All Rogers had to do then would be to keep stumm and if questioned, just
say a "nation state" was responsible. People can interpret that however they want.
Any of the scenarios you mention could be right. The one thing that is certain - Russia was not the culprit. Not because Russians
would not be inclined to hack - I think it is plausible that everyone hacks everyone (as someone said) - but Russians would
not likely go to Wikileaks to publicize their prize. They'd keep it to themselves... in that way, they are probably like LBJ,
who knew that Nixon had sabotaged the end-of-war negotiations in Paris in 1968, but said nothing for fear of shocking the "system"
and the people's trust in it... (didn't work out too well in the end, though). Putin was right when he said (referring to the
2016 US election) that it all should somehow be ... more dignified.
Makes me wonder who populates the Anonymous group of loosely affiliated hackers and if they were used. The tale has probability;
it would be even more interesting if the motive could be framed within the hacker's fulfilling its oath of obligation to the
Constitution. Le Carre might be capable of weaving such a tale plausibly. But what about the Russia angle? IMO, Russia had
the biggest motive to insure HRC wouldn't become POTUS despite all its denials and impartiality statements. Quien Sabe? Maybe
it was Chavez's ghost who did all the hacking; it surely had an outstanding motive.
I'll add some color on Rogers in another post, but I just want to preface any remarks with one overriding aspect of the leaks.
From the details of most of these leaks, speculation on tech blogs (and as far as anyone knows for certain):
There are many parties that had great incentive to acquire and leak the emails, but I have to insist with the utmost conviction
(without a string of expletives) that a junior high school kid could have performed the same feat using hacking tools
easily found on the internet . There was absolutely nothing technically sophisticated or NSA-like in someone's ability
to get into the DNC server or grab Podesta's emails. It was a matter of opportunity and poor security. If anyone has a link
to any other reasoning, I would love to see it. The DNC and Hillary leaks (among other hacks) were due to damn amateurish security
practices. The reason you don't outsource or try to get by on the cheap for systems/network security is to reduce the risk
of this happening to an acceptable cost/benefit level.
So the presumption of Wikileaks source being (or needing to be) a state actor with incredibly sophisticated hacking tools
is utter nonsense. Yes, it could have been the Russian FSB or any one of the five-eyes intelligence agencies or the U.S. Defense
Intelligence Agency. But it could have just as plausibly been Bart Simpson
pwning the DNC from Springfield Elementary School and sending
everything to Wikileaks, "Cool, I just REKT the Clintons!"
WikiLeaks doesn't care if the leak comes from the head of a western intel agency or a bored teenager in New Jersey. It cares
that the material is authentic and carefully vets the content, not the source. At least until they kidnapped Assange and took
over WikiLeaks servers a couple of weeks ago, but that's for a different tin-foil hat thread.
Carol Davidek-Waller | Nov 19, 2016 3:18:02 PM |
7
Is Trump that much of a deep thinker? Rebellious teenager who chooses anyone that the last administration didn't like seems
more plausible to me. It doesn't matter who they are or what their record is. I don't think Trump plans to surrender any of
his undeserved power to anyone. He'll be running the whole show. They'll do what he wants or be shown the door.
rufus (aka "rufie") the MoA Hillbot uses a new persona - "Ron Showalter" - to attack Trump post-election. rufie/Ron conducts
a false flag attack on MoA (making comments that are pages long) so that his new persona can claim that his anti-Trump
views are being attacked by someone using his former persona.
I generally dislike "theories" that go too much into speculation, -- however this one sounds actually quite plausible!
As for "Russia did it", this was obvious bullshit right from the start, not least because of what GoraDiva #4 says: I think it is plausible that everyone hacks everyone (as someone said) - but Russians would not likely go to Wikileaks to
publicize their prize. They'd keep it to themselves
Allegations against Russia worked on confusing different levels: hacking -- leaking -- "rigging".
This picture encapsulates IMO the full absurdity this election campaign had come down to:
MSM constantly bashing Trump for "lies", "post-factual", "populist rage", "hate speech", -- while themselves engaging in the
same on an even larger level, in a completely irresponsible way that goes way beyond "bias", "preference" or even "propaganda".
I understand (and like) the vote for Trump mainly as a call to "stop this insanity!"
~~~
Some more on the issue:
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2016/10/really-really-upset-foreign-office-security-services/ I left Julian [Assange] after midnight. He is fit, well, sharp and in good spirits. WikiLeaks never reveals or comments
upon its sources, but as I published before a fortnight ago, I can tell you with 100% certainty that it is not any Russian
state actor or proxy that gave the Democratic National Committee and Podesta material to WikiLeaks.
The following week, two cybersecurity firms, Fidelis Cybersecurity and Mandiant, independently corroborated Crowdstrike's
assessment that Russian hackers infiltrated DNC networks, having found that the two groups that hacked into the DNC used malware
and methods identical to those used in other attacks attributed to the same Russian hacking groups.
But some of the most compelling evidence linking the DNC breach to Russia was found at the beginning of July by Thomas
Rid, a professor at King's College in London, who discovered an identical command-and-control address hardcoded into the DNC
malware that was also found on malware used to hack the German Parliament in 2015. According to German security officials,
the malware originated from Russian military intelligence. An identical SSL certificate was also found in both breaches.
Sooooo .... these "traces" all show known Russian methods (whether true or not). If they are known they can be faked and
used by someone else.
Now who is the no. 1 organisation, worldwide, in having and being capable to use such information?
@b, your speculation gets better and better the more one thinks about it.
I'm out of my depth on cyber forensics, but would the NSA, and thus Clapper, know who hacked and leaked these documents? Or
would the NSA be in the dark, as they suggest?
Just watched Oliver Stone's "Snowden". Awesome. Can't believe after seeing it that Clapper has survived all these years. Just
another Hoover.
thanks b.. i like the idea of it being an inside job.. makes a lot of sense too.
i like @3 jens question about the timing as a possible aid to understanding this better.
@4 gordiva comment - everyone hacks everyone comment..ditto. it's another form of warfare and a given in these times..
i agree with @6 paveway, and while it sounds trite, folks who don't look after their own health can blame all the doctors..
the responsibility for the e mail negligence rests with hillary and her coterie of bozos..
@7 carol. i agree.
@8 jr.. did you happen to notice a few posts missing from the thread from yesterday and who it was that's been removed?
hint : poster who made the comment "more popcorn" is no longer around. they have a new handle today..
@20 manne.. you can say whatever you want and be speculative too, but i don't share your view on assange knowing who leaked
it..
Except that you have to consider the targeting. I've suspected an insider all along, given the pre-packaged spin points coordinated
with the release vectors. Not that the Russies, Pakistanis, or Chinese wouldn't know more about the US than the US knows about
itself, but the overall nuance really hits the anti-elitist spurned sidekick chord. This clashes a bit with b's interagency
pissing match scenario, but, then again, you step on the wrong tail... Someone didn't get their piece of pie, or equally valid,
someone really really disapproves of the pie's magnitude and relative position on the table.
Curious how Weenergate led to the perfectly timed 650K emails on that remarkably overlooked personal device.
@20 Manne
Yes I think on this case Assange does know, if I remember correctly, he spoke to RT and said something to the effect of 'it's
not Russia, we don't reveal our sources but if the DNC found out who it was they would have "egg on their faces"' ...and easy
access, copy, paste, send job, my hunch it was the DNC staffer who was suicided.
Its what Assange himself says, do your homework, as someone else said here, Wikileaks wont reveal the source, that doesnt
mean they dont know who leaked it.
Is Trump that much of a deep thinker? Rebellious teenager who chooses anyone that the last administration didn't like seems
more plausible to me. It doesn't matter who they are or what their record is. I don't think Trump plans to surrender any of
his undeserved power to anyone. He'll be running the whole show. They'll do what he wants or be shown the door.
Posted by: Carol Davidek-Waller | Nov 19, 2016 3:18:02 PM | 7
I agree.
Trump's got charm and a good memory and doesn't need to be a deep thinker in order to network efficiently and listen carefully.
Nor does he need to be a mathematician to figure out that 1 + 1 = 2.
Has anyone else got the feeling that much of the panic inside Washington is due to the possibility that the crimes of the Obama
administration might be exposed?
One of the most uncanny moments I've experienced watching the Syria crisis unfold is seeing the "Assad gasses his people"
operation launched, fail miserably, then - mostly - interest is lost. I know: the lie, once asserted, has done most of its
work already, debunked or not. I also understand that the western press is so in the tank for the establishment, so "captured"
that it shouldn't surprise anyone that no follow up is offered. My point is, rather, that if you think back over just the Ukrainian
and Syrian debacle the amount of dirt that could be exposed by a truly anti-establishment figure in the White House is mind
boggling.
Just off the top of my head:
- the sabotage of the deal to save the Ukrainian constitutional order brokered by Putin, Merkel and Hollande c/o of the
excuisitely timed and staged sniper shootings (otherwise known as the "most obvious coup in history")
- the farce that is the MH17 inquiry (and the implication: another false flag operation with a cut-out that killed, what was
it, 279 innocents?)
- the Kherson pogrom and the Odessa massacre
- the targeting of both Libya and Syria with outright lies and with all the propaganda perfectly reflecting the adage that,
in dis- info operations, the key is to accuse your enemies of all the crimes you are committing or planning to
- highlights of the above might include: Robert Ford's emails scheming to create "paranoia" in Damascus while completely justifying
same; the "rat-lines" and Ghoutta gas operation; the farcically transparent White Helmets Psy-op *
And on and on...
If you or the institution that pays you had a closet full to bursting with skeletons like this and you were facing an incoming
administration that seems to relish and flaunt it's outsider status wouldn't you be freaking out?
To ice the cake the latest Freudian slip is the crusade against "fake news." Seriously, if I were in their shoes that's
the last phrase I would want people ruminating over. I think it was R. D. Laing who said "we always speak the truth." One way
or another.
* This comes with the delicious irony that the operation's own success offers proof of the adage that sometimes you can succeed
too well. The fact that the Omran photo was plastered across every paper in the west is good evidence of how completely "fake"
our news has become. My favourite is this farcical interview between Amanpour and Lavrov:
https://youtu.be/Tx8kiQyEkHc
@27 Oddlots
Most of those are pretty easy picking under a firm rule of law - plenty of underling rats willing to squeal with even gentle
pressure, I'm sure.
His legacy is horrific.
Obama taught constitutional law for 12 years... It would be sweet, sweet poetry to see him nailed... his 'white papers',
formed in secret courts that no one can see, no oversight in the light of day... phony legal documents that allowed him to
incinerate fellow humans via drone without charge, without trial...
95% or more of the individuals Trump is considering for his administration, including those already picked have a deep-seated
obsession with Iran. This is very troubling. It's going to lead to war and not a regular war where 300,000 people die. This
is a catastrophic error in judgment I don't give a sh...t who makes such an error, Trump or the representative from Kalamazoo!
This is so bad that it disqualifies whatever else appears positive at this time.
And one more deeply disturbing thing; Pompeo, chosen to head the CIA has threatened Ed Snowden with the death penalty, if
Snowden is caught, and now as CIA Director he can send operatives to chase him down wherever he is and render him somewhere,
torture him to find out who he shared intelligence with and kill him on the spot and pretend it was a foreign agent who did
the job. He already stated before he was assigned this powerful post that Snowden should be brought back from Russia and get
the death penalty for treason.
Pompeo also sided with the Obama Administration on using U. S. military force in Syria against Assad and wrote this in the
Washington Post: "Russia continues to side with rogue states and terrorist organizations, following Vladimir Putin's pattern
of gratuitous and unpunished affronts to U.S. interests,".
That's not all, Pompeo wants to enhance the surveillance state, and he too wants to tear up the Iran deal.
Many of you here are extremely naďve regarding Trump.
James @21 I noticed the different handle but b hasn't commented on the attack. I assumed that this meant that b didn't know
for sure who did the attack.
As I wrote, rufus/Ron made himself the prime suspect when he described the attack as an attempt to shut down his anti-Trump
message. Some of us thought that it might be a lame attempt to discredit rufus but only "Ron" thought that the attack was related
to him.
If one doesn't believe - as I do - that Ron = rufus then you might be less convinced that rufus did the deed.
Yes, it is important to remember that Assange, though he did not state that he knew who provided the DNC emails, implied
that he did, and further implied--but did not state--that it was Seth Rich. Assange's statement came shortly after Rich's death
by shooting. Assange stated he specifically knew people had people had risked their lives uploading material, implying that
they had in fact lost them.
b's speculation has the ring of truth. I've often wondered if Trump was encouraged to run by a deep-state faction that found
the neocons to be abhorrent and dangerous.
Aside: I find those who talk about "factions" in foreign policy making to be un-credible. Among these were those that spoke
of 'Obama's legacy'. A bullshit concept for a puppet.The neocons control FP. And they could only be unseated if a neocon
-unfriendly President was elected.
Trump is turning animosity away from Russia and toward Iran. But I doubt that it will result in a shooting war with Iran. The
'deep-state' (arms industry and security agencies) just wants a foreign enemy as a means of ensuring that US govt continues
to fund security agencies and buy arms.
And really, Obama's "peace deal" with Iran was bogus anyway. It was really just a placeholder until Assad could be toppled.
Only a small amount of funds were released to Iran, and US-Iranian relations have been just as bad as they were before the
"peace deal". So all the hand-wringing about Trump vs. Iran is silly.
What is important is that with Iran as the nominal enemy du jour plus Trump's campaign pledge to have the "strongest" military
(note: every candidate was for a strong military) , the neocons have no case to make that Trump is weak on defense.
And so it is interesting that those that want to undermine Trump have resorted to the claim that he is close to Jews/Zionists/Israel
or even Jewish himself. Funny that Trump wasn't attacked like that before the election, huh?
The profound changes and profound butt-hurt lead to the following poignant questions:
>> Have we just witnessed a counter-coup?
>> Isn't it sad that, in 2016(!), the only check on elites are other elite factions? An enormous cultural failure that
has produced a brittle social fabric.
>> If control of NSA snooping power is so crucial, why would ANY ruling block ever allow the another to gain power?
Indeed, the answer to this question informs one's view on whether the anti-Trump protests are just Democratic Party ass-covering/distraction
or a real attempt at a 'color revolution'.
b said also.."Rogers support for the new cold war will also gain him favor with the various weapon industries which will
eventually beef up his pension."
That's the long game for most of the "Hawks" in DC. Perpetual war is most profitable.
What is important is that with Iran as the nominal enemy du jour plus Trump's campaign pledge to have the "strongest"
military (note: every candidate was for a strong military), the neocons have no case to make that Trump is weak on defense.
Oh please! Trump is stacking his cabinet with Iran-obsessed Islam haters! Nominal enemy , my ass! And was every candidate
for spending a Trillion more on defense??? Did you even read Trump's plan to build up the military?
You do Netanyahu proud with your deflection. What? Nothing regarding Pompeo's blistering comments on Russia or Ed Snowden?
Why are you trying to diminish the threat to Iran with the hawks, Islam-haters, and Iran-obsessed team that Trump cobbled
together so far?
Trump's Israel adviser David Friedman is known to be more extreme than even Netanyahu.
No doubt Netanyahu has unleashed an army of IDF hasbara to crush criticism of Trump and his Iran-obsessed cabinet because
he must be elated with his choices and wants to make them palatable to the American sheeple.
Netanyahu is the first leader Trump spoke with on the phone. Trump praised Netanyahu from day one. PNAC and Clean Break
were war manifestos for rearranging the Middle East with the ultimate goal of toppling Iran.
Trump and his cabinet are all about tearing up the deal and assuming a much more hostile position with Iran. Tearing up
the deal is a precursor to a casus belli. What more proof is there that Trump is doing the bidding of Zionist Neocons??? Oh,
but you don't want more, do you?
As chipnik noted in a comment, Iran is one of the only countries that is yet to be under the control of private finance
(see my latest Open Thread comments, please)
I personally see all this as obfuscation covering for throwing Americans under the bus by the global plutocrats. The elite
can see, just like us, that the US empire's usefulness is beyond its "sold by" date and are acting accordingly. America and
its Reserve Currency status are about to crash and the elites are working to preserve their supra-national private finance
base of power/control while they let America devolve to who knows what level.
Too much heat and not enough light here...or if you prefer, the noise to signal ratio is highly skewed to noise.
Crimes involving moral turpitude have an inherent quality of baseness, vileness, or depravity with respect to a person's
duty to another or to society in general.
Given the above Trump would not be allowed to immigrate to the US.....just saying...
the shadowbrokers say they have NSA malware/tools and to prove it after their auction was met with crickets riding tumbleweeds
they released some teaser info on NSA servers used for proxy attacks and recon. of course a few just happened to be "owned"
boxes in russia (and china and some other places for that matter). add their russian IP addresses to some (mostly useless)
sigantures associated with supposedly russian-designed malware and you've got some good circumstantial evidence.
also: an email address associated with one or more attacks is from a russian site/domain but whoever registered was directed
to the .com domain instead of the .ru one. this probably means someone got sloppy and didn't remember to check their DNS for
fail.
in general these hacks look less like russians and more like someone who wants to look like russians. the overpaid consultants
used by the DNC/clinton folks can put "bear" in the names and claim that a few bits of cyrillic are a "slam dunk" but all the
"evidence" is easily faked. not that anyone in the "deep state" would ever fake anything.
Trump is turning animosity away from Russia and toward Iran.
I worry about it as well. Trump said he'll tear up nuclear agreement, and the people he is choosing also have rabid anti-Iranian
agenda.
Nice start for Trump:
Thursday US House voted to stop civilian aircraft sales to Iran by both Boeing and Airbus.
Few days before - US extending economic sanctions against Iran through 2026.
Of course Trump can block it, but will he? Even if he does, he might blackmail Iran for something in return, etc. Iran is
by no means off the hook for neocons and Israel, and I wouldnt be surprised if Trump follows the suit.
Trump will (or might) have better relations with Russia, but this cordiality doesnt extend to Iran. Or as Jackrabbit says,
US neocons will simply switch the targeted state and Iran may soon become "worse threat to humanity than ISIS", again.
I doubt separating the animosity towards Russia and Iran is even possible. Truth be told his comments towards Russia during
the election seemed more like he was woefully unaware of the reality of the Russo-American situation in the Mideast than about
being ready to negotiate major US power positions and accept Russia as anything more than enemy. Sounded very off the cuff
to me. Maybe he thought he'd 'get along great with Putin' at the time but after realizing later that means making nice with
Iran and giving up a large measure of US influence in the MENA he has reconsidered and taken the party line. It'd certainly
be understandable for a noncareer politician. I'd imagine he'd be more interested now in currying favour with the MIC and the
typical Republican party hawks than with Russia/Putin given his statements on military spending. Back when I saw him bow down
at the altar of AIPAC earlier in the season I had trouble reconciling that with how he hoped to improve relationships with
Russia at the same time given their radical differences wrt their allies. He's made a lot of those type of statements too,
it was hard to read where he stood on most any issue during election season.
I imagine as he's brought into the fold and really shown the reality of how US imperialist power projection he'll change
his mind considerably. I think we, as readers and amateur analysts of this type of material, take for granted how hard some
of this knowledge is to come by without looking for it directly. When we hear someone is going to make nice with Russia we
want to think "well he says that as he must surely recognize the insanity and destructive forces at work." Maybe it's more
of a case where the person speaking actually thinks we're in Syria to fight ISIS - that they have very little grasp of how
things really work over there.
In my eyes the names he's been considering are reason for much worry for those hoping Trump would be the one to usher in
a multipolar world and end the cold war. I never had much hope in that regard (but I'm still praying for the best).
Putin has been supporting right-wing movements across the West in order to weaken NATO
Care to back this statement with arguments, examples ar a link to an excellent article?
Looking at most of "New Europe", it's the other way around ... fascist states allied with Nazi Germany against communism,
participating in massacres of Jewish fellow citizens and functioning as a spearhead for US intelligence against communism after
the defeat of Nazi Germany – see Gladio. Now used by the CIA in the
coup d'état in Ukraine in Februari 2014.
Ahhh ... searched for it myself, a paper written earlier in 2016 ... how convenient!
Policy set by the Atlantic Council years ago:
make Russia a pariah state . Written
about it many times. BS and more western propaganda. The West has aligned itself with jihadists across the globe, Chechnya
included. Same as in Afghanistan, these terrorists were called "freedom fighters". See John McCain in northern Syria with same
cutthroats.
Absolutely outrageous! See her twitter account with followers/participants
Anne Applebaum and former and now discredited Poland's FM
Radoslaw Sikorski .
"Emails of the DNC and of Clinton's consigliere John Podesta were hacked and leaked. Additionally emails from Clinton's private
email server were released. All these influenced the election in favor of Trump."
Not necessarily so. An informal poll of people in blue collar flyover country about their voting intentions prior to the
election expressed 4 common concerns
i) The risk of war.
ii) The Obamacare disaster especially recent triple digit percent increase in fees.
iii) Bringing back jobs.
iv) Punishing the Democrat Party for being indistinguishable from the Republicans.
We shouldn't take Trump's bluster at face value. For example, Trump said that he'd eliminate Obamacare. Now he has backed
off that saying that some elements of Obamacare are worthwhile.
That the Israeli head of state is one of the first foreign leaders that any President-elect speaks to is no surprise. That
you harp on what is essentially nonsense is telling.
In my view Trump is not anti-Jewish. He is anti-neocon/anti-Zionist. As Bannon said, America has been getting f*cked.
To ice the cake the latest Freudian slip is the crusade against "fake news."
i see it more as another mindfucking meme than a Freudian slip. another paean to Discordia, the goddess of chaos. we've
lived with 'fake news,' heretofore advertised by reliable sources , since forever. baptizing this bastardized melange
only sinks us deeper into dissonant muck.
One would hope if that is true - Trump recognises this and fires him as well rather than promoting him.
However, if he were instrumental in getting Trump elected it is understandable if Trump decided to promote him.
It's well-known and clear Trump rewards those who have done him favours.
Let us hope it is not true.
The first thing Trump must do when elected is declassify all material related to MH17. This can be done in late January/
February as one of his first orders of business.
It's important to do this quickly - at least before the Dutch Elections in March 2017.
#MH17truth
If Trump does this he will do a number of things.
1 - Likely reveal that it was the Ukrainians who were involved in shooting down MH17. I say likely because it's possible
this goes deeper than just Ukraine - if that's the case - more the better.
2. He will destroy the liar Porky Poroshenko and his corrupt regime with him. He will destroy Ukraine's corrupt Government's
relationship with Europe.
3. He will destroy the sell-out traitor to his own people Mark Rutte of Netherlands. This will ensure an election win for
a key Trump ally - Geert Wilders.
If Rutte is discredited for using the deaths of 200 Dutch citizens for his own political gain - he is finished and might
end up in jail.
4. He will destroy Merkel utterly. Her chances of re-election (which she just announced she will stand!) will be utterly
destroyed.
5. He will restory Russia-USA relations in an instant.
Trump must also do this ASAP because this is the kind of thing that could get him killed if he doesn't do it ASAP when he's
inaugurated.
Of course - until then - he should keep his mouth shut about it - but the rest of us should be shouting it all around the
Internet.
And very well documented, too. Sort of like the theory that 9/11 was carried out by the Boy Scouts of America. After all,
the boost in jingoism and faux-patriotism gave the BSA a boost in revenue and membership, so that pretty well proves it, eh?
And if you dig deep enough I'm sure you'll find that on 9/10 the BSA shorted their stocks in United.
Totally agree Oddlots and that is why Trump must be on the front foot immediately.
Exposing MH17 and destroying Poroshenko, Rutte & Merkel - and Biden & Obama by the way and a bunch of others is absolutely
key.
Blow MH17 skyhigh and watch Russia-USA relations be restored in a nanosecond.
It will be especially sweet to watch the Dutch traitor to his own people Rutte destroyed in the midst of an election campaign
such that he might end up in jail charged with treason and replaced by Geert Wilders - the Dutch Donald Trump if ever there
was one - within a matter of weeks.
However, a word of caution, it is precisely because of these possibilities that there has to be a high chance Trump will
be assassinated.
Pence would not walk that line. Not at all.
There is no doubt Trump's life is in danger. I hope he has enough good people around him who will point the finger in the
right direction if and when it happens.
I think it's a bit of a stretch. First of all, there are other, deeper areas of investigative matters concerning previous governments
of the US, impeachable offenses and international crimes - remember when Nancy Pelosi took impeachment off the table? Not to
mention, what did happen in Benghazi and why? It wouldn't matter who did that hacking of those emails- it's a bit like the
exposure of the White House tapes in Nixon's presidency. We didn't worry about who revealed that - we went to the issues themselves.
I think that is what Trump is doing as he brings people to his home for conversations. It is the opposite of Obama's 'moving
forward, not looking back'. Trump is going to look back. It's not about reinstating the cold war; it's about gathering information.
I think Saudi Arabia are the ones who should be scared. Trump has implied before he knows who is responsible for September
11.
My guess is he wants to expose Saudi Arabia and the Bush Family.
Ever wondered why the Bushes hate and appear frightened of Trump? Because they understand he will expose their complicity
in September 11 and potentially have them locked up.
Or perhaps he'll let Dubya off claiming he didn't know in return for a favour and lock up Dick Cheney instead. Quite possible.
The Saudis will get thrown down the river and lose any assets they hold in US Dollars - a significant amount I believe!
Sucks to be a Saudi Royal right about now - they better liquidate their US assets ASAP if they have any brains.
Retired UK ambassador Craig Murray said on his Web site, after meeting with Assange and then traveling to Washington where
he met with former NSA officials, that he was 100 percent sure that Wikileaks's source was not the Russians and also suggested
that the leaks came from inside the U.S. government.
@24 jr.. i found the rs guy to be quite repugnant..rufus never came across quite the same way to me, but as always - i could
be wrong! i see pac is gone today and been replaced with another name, lol.. and the beat goes on.. b has deleted posts and
must be getting tired of them too.
@31 manne.. thanks.. does that rule out an insider with the nsa/cia as well?
@34 fecklessleft.. i agree with your last paragraph..
@36 yonatan.. i agree with that alternative take myself..
@40 jules.. would be nice to see happen, but most likely an exercise in wishful thinking.. sort of the same with your @44
too.. the saudis need to be taken down quite a few notches.. the usa/israel being in bed with the headchopper cult has all
the wrong optics for suggesting anything positive coming from usa/israel..
b says 'Next we [can speculate] - Trump offers Rogers the Clapper job. He would replace the boss that wanted him fired.' There,
fixed it.
There appears to be a growing canyon in the intelligence world with some wanting to rid the Office of the National Intelligence
agency altogether, while others are lobbying for it to remain.
Remember when Obama referred to the rise of the Islamic State as the 'JV team'? That nonchalant attitude by Obama towards
the growing threat of the head choppers in Iraq and Syria was squarely placed on senior management within the intelligence
community -
"Two senior analysts at CENTCOM signed a written complaint sent to the Defense Department inspector general in July alleging
that the reports, some of which were briefed to President Obama, portrayed the terror groups as weaker than the analysts
believe they are. The reports were changed by CENTCOM higher-ups to adhere to the administration's public line that the
U.S. is winning the battle against ISIS and al Nusra, al Qaeda's branch in Syria, the analysts claim."
Who knows, Rogers may very well have been one in senior management who encouraged these 50 analysts to come forward. Maybe
the IG investigation is wrapping up and at least internally, the senior management who made intel reports to Obama full of
'happy talk' have been identified and are now leaving on their own.
We shouldn't take Trump's bluster at face value. For example, Trump said that he'd eliminate Obamacare. Now he has backed
off that saying that some elements of Obamacare are worthwhile.
For crying out loud! I don't give a rat's ass about Obamacare when he outlined a plan to boost the military by a trillion
dollars and stacks his cabinet with crazy Iran-obsessed hawks who want to start a world war over effing Iran! And you're deflecting
this with freakin' Obamacare -- It's speaks volumes about your credibility!
Trump is anti-Zionist??? Ha! His adviser to Israel David Friedman is an extreme right-wing Zionist! Or do you just prefer
to completely ignore fact and reality???
And Mike Pence and Mike Pompeo can't stand Putin and their comments and record are there - FACT!
And Trump didn't only tell Hillary he was going to build up the military; he outlined it later in his plan with facts and
figures and it's going to cost about a Trillion dollars, so quit comparing it to a gradual phasing out of Obamacare!
Okay, you know what? I see right through your little game. Unless you have something cogent with factual backup; I don't
wanna read your responses based on pure fantasy and deflection. I look at the cold, hard facts and reality. I look at who Trump
is surrounding himself with rabid Islam-haters obsessed with going after Iran and extremist Zionist loons and hawks like Pompeo
and Pence making disturbing comments on Russia and Snowden and Trump's plan. So quit pretending you're not trying to obscure
fact with fiction meant to deceive!
"...and not a regular war where 300,000 people die..."
- Regular? So, you're calling an aggression on Syria just a 'Regular' war, on par with the course? The very least the Americans
have to do, including those given the 'Nobel Peace Prize' (a bloody joke if there ever was one)? And those regular wars are
needed to, what, regularly feed and the US MIC Beast? So... Obama and Hillary were just getting on with the inevitable?
Your other observations regarding Pompeo are more meaningful, but I think you underestimate the power of groupthink under
the Clinton-Bush-Obama continuous administration complex. Anyway, if Pompeo doesn't wish to get "reassigned", he might be better
off unmounting the neocon horse mindset and getting on better with the Tea Party dogma, where the enemies of thy enemies are
more likely to be seen as friends then frenemies.
#34 Feckless Left
In a sense you are right, he is not a career politician and he might be underestimating the depth of the abyss. Yet, he
has far more street cred than you seem to be giving him credit for. An honest, naive idealist, he is certainly not...
Circe, I have addressed your panic about Iran in another thread and you failed to reply so again:
"Even if true that the future administration would shift its focus against Iran, what can they accomplish militarily against
it? Nought. SAA & ISA would send militias to support Iran, nothing would prevent Russia from using Hamedan airbase just as
it uses Hmeimim and deploy S-400 et al systems to bolster Iran's already existing ones. Plus on what grounds politically could
they intervene? Nobody is buying Bibi's "Bomb" bs seriously anymore. Forget it, with Syria prevailing Iran is safe.."
Oddlots #21. insightful. you ignored the entire list on the financial side, but they are linked through the profound mutual
support between Israel and Wall Street.
I have been really surprised at the lack of discussion of BHO's impromptu post-election tour of Germany and Greece. It seems
to me Egypt flipped and it was met with silence, because WashDC must be secured before the neocons can respond. But the two
countries that are game-set-match are Germany and Greece. The Greek navy with German support is a great power in the Mediterranean.
How convenient to keep them at each other's throats for a decade. I think BHO was trying desperately to keep them onside. But
he would either have to promise them something that he can no longer deliver after Jan 20th...or he has to clue them in to
a different timeline than the one we think is playing out. Anyone have a idea why the Prez had to go and talk to Merkel and
Tsipras *without intermediaries?*
Having now founded a central bank in every nation of the world, the Khazars have defeated the Pope and the Caliphate. Only
Iran and North Korea don't have a Khazar central bank. And only Iran has the last stash of crown jewels and gold bullion that
the Khazars don't already control.
They want Iran as part of Greater Israel, and they hate Russia for driving them out after the fall of the Soviet Union.
The Khazars control the American Union under a Red/Blue Star. Just talking ethnics, not race, religion or creed, since Hebrew
is a religion of pure commercial convenience for the Khazars.
US and IL are therefore aligned against IR and RU. Now we can get rid of all the race, religion or creed crap, and talk
New Math set theory: {US,IL} ≠ {IR,RU}
Who are {US,IL} sanctions against? {IR,RU}. In this new Trump' Administration: {TA} ⊆ {US,IL}, and {TA} ⊄ {IR,RU}. From
a chess perspective, Putin just got Kieningered, because the Khazars would have everyone believe that {TA} ❤ {RU}, when in
reality, {TA} ∩ {RU} = {Ř}.
I'm fully expecting a radical change in rhetoric coming from Mr. Trump and his new team, but little else. The REAL movers and
shakers who run the U$A have everything moving their direction right now, so why change? I expect "the Donald" to do as he's
told, like every other POTUS in modern history. They'll let him screw the workers, but, not the REAL owners of the U$A( 1%).
You don't know? Before he died, my father told me a trick. Once the bloom was off their marriage, his wife would deliberately
provoke his heavy-handed management of the family, by doing whatever he didn't want. So he learned to always 'go crazy' over
things, knowing that's exactly what she would do to spite him, ...and in that way, using 'reverse psychology', the Khazars
would have you believe that they hate Trump, and Trump loves Russia. They're just putting the Maidan gears into motion.
If Trump is considering Mitt Romney for SoS then you can bet his policy towards Russia will be hostile because the only reason
Trump would put someone between himself and Putin, who repeatedly called Russia, America's No. 1 enemy, is because he wants
a bad cop on Russia in the State Department, in spite of his supposed good cop remarks regarding Putin. In other words, he
wants someone who can put it straight to Putin so he himself can pretend to be the good cop. If Trump were being honest regarding
a softening in policy with Russia do you really believe he would ever consider someone like Romney for SoS??? Again, Mitt Romney
has made the most scathing comments of anyone against Putin, and then calling Russia the number one geopolitical enemy of
the U.S. . Many on the Democratic and even Republican side felt he went overboard and many have since called his comment
prophetic and today Romney feels vindicated.
Many analysts on the Democratic side and Republican side are calling Romney prophetic since he made that statement on Russia
before Russia messed with U.S. plans for Syria.
So, my point is this; it's possible, it's very possible that, Mike Pompeo, Trump's choice for CIA Director, who also has
a hostile position towards Russia asked Trump to consider Romney because he know doubt also believes that Romney proved good
foresight with that comment regarding Russia and urged Trump to give Romney a meeting.
My 2nd point is this: quit trying to make Trump into what he's not when he's spelling it all out for you in black and white!
It doesn't look good. This picture that's starting to develop is looking worse by the day. Look at who he's surrounding
himself with; look at his actions and forget about his words. This man has sold ice to the eskimos in his business dealings.
Look at the facts. Trump is not who you think he is and just because he made some comments favorable in Putin's regard doesn't
mean he's not going to turn around and stick it to Putin a year or maybe a few years down the line. Kissinger told Fareed Zakaria
today on GPS: One should not insist in nailing Trump to positions he took during the campaign.
I already wrote that I believe Trump is using this fake softer strategy to get Russia to look sideways on a coming Resolution
to invade Iran and then he's going to deal with Putin and Russia.
If Trump picks someone like Romney for State; he'll have 3 individuals in the most important cabinet positions dealing with
foreign policy and foreign enemies who will be hostile to Russia: VP, CIA Director and SoS. Therefore he would be sending his
bad cop to deal with Russia and sending a message to Putin like: Don't put your money on whatever I said during the campaign,
my positions are changing for the empire's benefit and strategic interests. And even if he doesn't choose Mitt, because on
Breitbart where his base convenes they're up in arms about this meeting, I would still be wary of his direction because of
the picks he's made already; the majority of his cabinet so far want war with Iran and his VP and CIA Director can't stand
Putin and then looking at who's advising him, rabid Neocon Zionists like James Woolsey and David Friedman.
Look at what Trump does, who he's meeting with, who he's choosing to surround himself with and quit hanging on what he said,
because talk is cheap, especially coming from someone who's now in the inner circle of American power.
@55
Please don't give me one measly Cohen tweet as fact! The entire Zionist Organization of America came to Bannon's defense
and he will be attending their gala! It's been made public everywhere; so quit obscuring the truth.
@54
Yes, Russia could come to Iran's defense considering Iran allowed for Russia's use of that air base for Syria and rescued
one of the two Russian pilots shot down by Turkey, and is fighting al-Nusra shoulder to shoulder with Russia, but the empire
has something up its sleeve to stop Russia from coming to the defense of Iran, should the U.S. and Israel decide to circumvent
the Security Council. Something stinks; Trump is top loading his cabinet with crazy, Iran-obsessed hawks and his VP and CIA
Direct also have no love for Putin. They're planning something against Iran and I know they're going to do something to tie
Putin's hands. Something's up and it's going to lead to war beyond Syria. Look the Russians are already depleting resources
in Syria; already that puts Russia in a weakened position. I don't know what they're planning but it's not good. The picture
unfolding with Trump's cabinet is very disturbing.
There's another aspect and maybe it's significant and maybe not that could influence a change in Trump's position on Russia
that would have also made him take the extreme step of meeting with Romney while considering the SoS position. Trump is getting
the highest level of security briefings now that he's President-elect. You wanna bet that Russia and Putin are mentioned in
over 50% of those briefings and ISIS, Iran and others get the other 50% collectively???
Hasbara hysteria to undermine Trump. Unrelenting bullshit and innuendo.
What was Bannon talking about when he said that America is getting f*cked? Globalism vs. Nationalism. Who equates nationalism
with nazism? Zionists. Who is butt-hurt over Trump Presidency? Zionists and neocons.
Yep, describes your weak deception to a T! ...like I'm going to hang on Bannon's word as gospel when he's going to be wining
and dining with Zionists at the ZOA gala.
Oh, and one more thing: Zionists, FYI, relate very well with nationalists and supremacists since they got their own nationalist,
supremacist operation in ISRAEL! So I'm only too sure they'll be commiserating and exchanging ideas on how best to secure their
nationalist, supremacist vision for the empire. There's a whole lot of common ground for them to cover during the gala, and
YOU CAN'T AND DIDN'T DENY THAT BANNON IS ATTENDING THE ZIONIST GALA! Did you???
So again, quit dogging me, quit presuming I'm some undercover hasbara, that maybe you are, and spare me the bullshit.
As if we didn't need anymore proof of where Trump is taking the U.S.: Trump tweeted a comment highly praising General James
Mattis after their meeting considering him for Secretary of Defense. This is a major, major red flag signalling a very troubling
direction in Trump's foreign policy.
Mattis served for two years as Supreme Allied Commander of NATO. Although, he served under Obama, he was against the Iran
deal and considers Iran more dangerous that ISIS!
Mattis is nicknamed "mad-dog mattis" for a reason: he is an extreme hawk and he is MIC incorporated.
But here's the kicker, Mattis like Pompeo, Pence and Romney has also made blistering comments against Russia, stating that
Putin wants to break up NATO, sent "dogs and thugs" into Georgia and has been very critical of Putin's actions in Ukraine and
Syria.
At the beginning of the primaries, Neocons wanted Mattis as a candidate for the Presidency on the Republican side. I like
how the following article describes just how much Neocon war hawks salivated over the thought of Mattis in the White House:
Well folks, Mattis, the darling of Neocons, will be in the White House next to Trump advising him on war strategy! And worst
of all this mad-dog Neocon war hawk is going to run the Pentagon, oversee a trillion-dollar military expansion and command
the next world war!
So are you convinced yet that Trump is perpetuating the Neocon PNAC/Clean Break plan or are you still totally blind???
@34 fl, 'In my eyes the names he's been considering are reason for much worry for those hoping Trump would be the one to usher
in a multipolar world and end the cold war. I never had much hope in that regard (but I'm still praying for the best).'
Trump is in it for Trump. He's a solipsist. We and our 'real world' doesn't exist for Trump. He lives in Trump Tower. The
only things he cares about are his personal interests. He'll put in people to 'run the government' who will insulate him and
his interests from the consequences of their actions and that'll keep him happy and them in their jobs, no matter the consequences
for our 'imaginary' real world. We're back to the mad Caesars. Our government has been steadily walking away from us since
Bush XLI. It's on the run now, we're up to Nero. We 'barbarians' need to take care of our real world in its absence, prepare
ourselves to pick up the pieces when it's become so unrecognizable that it's finally disappeared.
"... To do so would be madness. President-Elect Donald Trump appears to recognize that Syria is not America's responsibility. Unfortunately, Vice President-Elect Mike Pence, as well as some of those mentioned for top administration positions, take a more militaristic perspective. Trump should announce that his administration will not get involved in Syria's civil war in any way. ..."
"... President Barack Obama spent five years resisting pressure for direct military intervention. But he appointed war supporters John Kerry, Samantha Power, Susan Rice and Hillary Clinton to manage his foreign policy. Kerry acknowledged to a group of Syrian refugees in Beirut that he and other officials had advocated use of force but "lost the argument." ..."
"... However, rather than clearly set a policy of non-involvement, President Obama attempted intervention-lite. The administration failed in both its major objectives: oust Bashar al-Assad as president and empower "moderate" opponents. ..."
"... Republican warrior wannabes claim that Washington could have provided just the right form of aid to just the right groups at just the right time and thereby created a liberal, democratic, united Syria allied with America. ..."
"... In Syria the Obama administration has pursued incompatible objectives and combatants. Washington remains committed to ousting the Assad regime, which remains the most important barrier to a triumph by the Islamic State. NATO ally Turkey spent the civil war's early years accommodating so-called Daesh, and now is battling Kurdish fighters, who have been America's staunchest allies against ISIS. ..."
"... America's Gulf allies led by Saudi Arabia largely abandoned the campaign against the Islamic State in favor of a brutal attack on Yemen, dragging the U.S. into a dangerous proxy war with Iran. ..."
"... Washington must set priorities. Washington Post columnist Jackson Diehl argued that Russia "has proved that a limited use of force could change the political outcome, without large costs." However, that's because Moscow has one objective: keep Assad in power. Washington has a half dozen or more conflicting goals, none of are important enough to warrant the use of force. ..."
"... Nor could the conflict be settled without using extraordinary force. Merely fudging the balance of military power won't end the killing. If jihadist groups took control after Assad's collapse and his allies' withdrawal, Washington would face pressure to "do something" to protect Alawites, Christians and perhaps even "moderate" insurgents and their supporters. The U.S. has neither the responsibility nor the resources to police the globe. ..."
"... Finally, the administration has unfinished business involving anti-American radicals, the Islamic State and al-Qaeda-affiliated al-Nusra/al-Sham. But Assad's ouster would empower both groups. They remain primarily insurgents which can be dealt with on the ground by the surrounding nations which they most threaten. ..."
"... Donald Trump had only just been declared president-elect when those controlled U.S. foreign policy began urging him to conform to their disastrous designs in the Middle East. However, Trump appears to have learned from the past. He told the Wall Street Journal: "I've had an opposite view of many people regarding Syria." ..."
"... I agree, Trump should stay out of the Middle East and start building the infrastructure for this third world country called the United States. As for John Kerry, Samantha Power, Susan Rice, and Hillary Clinton, they are so over and yesterday's news in the fast pace of social media. ..."
"... But their war mongering attitudes will carry a heavy burden when it comes to political history; this foursome was responsible for many civilian deaths are they responsible for the use of drones and every other killing machine that make the USA, as Eisenhower said the Military Industrial Complex. ..."
"... now it is time for the USA to cut all IRS tax benefits for the religion business and use that for new airports and railroads. If someone wants to worship a God in an untaxed temple, make them pay an admission tax like when you go to the movies. ..."
The U.S. presidential election mercifully has ended. But global conflict continues. And American
politicians are still attempting to drag America into another tragic, bloody Middle Eastern conflict.
To do so would be madness. President-Elect Donald Trump appears to recognize that Syria is
not America's responsibility. Unfortunately, Vice President-Elect Mike Pence, as well as some of
those mentioned for top administration positions, take a more militaristic perspective. Trump should
announce that his administration will not get involved in Syria's civil war in any way.
President Barack Obama spent five years resisting pressure for direct military intervention.
But he appointed war supporters John Kerry, Samantha Power, Susan Rice and Hillary Clinton to manage
his foreign policy. Kerry acknowledged to a group of Syrian refugees in Beirut that he and other
officials had advocated use of force but "lost the argument."
However, rather than clearly set a policy of non-involvement, President Obama attempted intervention-lite.
The administration failed in both its major objectives: oust Bashar al-Assad as president and empower
"moderate" opponents. However, administration officials still have not given up. Even as the
American people were voting on Obama's successor his appointees were pushing "kinetic actions against
the regime," reported anonymous sources. The president remains at odds with his own appointees.
Republican warrior wannabes claim that Washington could have provided just the right form
of aid to just the right groups at just the right time and thereby created a liberal, democratic,
united Syria allied with America. Even today Thanassis Cambanis of the Century Foundation argues
the U.S. should "use its resources to manage conflicts like Syria's." That sounds good, but when
was the last time Washington "managed" anything well in the Middle East?
Even with a quick military victory Washington got Iraq disastrously wrong, empowering Iran while
triggering the very sectarian conflict which spawned the Islamic State. U.S. intervention in Libya
left chaos and conflict in its wake. American policymakers demonstrate no facility for global social
engineering.
In Syria the Obama administration has pursued incompatible objectives and combatants. Washington
remains committed to ousting the Assad regime, which remains the most important barrier to a triumph
by the Islamic State. NATO ally Turkey spent the civil war's early years accommodating so-called
Daesh, and now is battling Kurdish fighters, who have been America's staunchest allies against ISIS.
The U.S. has trained and armed so-called moderate insurgents, who have had only limited combat
success, often surrendering, along with their U.S.-supplied equipment, to radical forces. One half
billion dollar training program generated barely three score insurgents, most of whom were promptly
killed or captured.
Former Obama official Derek Chollet said the administration hoped its aid to insurgents would
give Washington "leverage" in dealing with its Sunni "allies." Yet the latter have manipulated America
to serve their interests, pressing Washington to oust the Assad regime while supporting radical insurgent
groups opposed by the U.S. After providing symbolic aid in the early days, America's Gulf allies
led by Saudi Arabia largely abandoned the campaign against the Islamic State in favor of a brutal
attack on Yemen, dragging the U.S. into a dangerous proxy war with Iran.
Extremist forces have threatened U.S. military personnel embedded with Syrian fighters. Arab and
Kurdish insurgents trained and armed by Washington recently battled each other. Shia militias fighting
with the Baghdad government against ISIS in Iraq are opposing U.S.-backed Sunni insurgents in Syria.
Baghdad and Ankara neared war over Turkey's intervention in northern Iraq. Any attacks on Assad's
forces threaten Russian military personnel and hardware.
... ... ...
Washington must set priorities. Washington Post columnist Jackson Diehl argued that Russia
"has proved that a limited use of force could change the political outcome, without large costs."
However, that's because Moscow has one objective: keep Assad in power. Washington has a half dozen
or more conflicting goals, none of are important enough to warrant the use of force.
Syria's civil war does not implicate any of Washington's traditional Middle Eastern interests,
most importantly Israel and oil. America's chief concern should be the Islamic State, not Assad regime.
Candidate Trump correctly opined: "our far greater problem is not Assad, it's ISIS."
Advocates of regime change claim that only through Assad's ouster can Daesh be defeated. However,
the existing government remains the biggest military barrier to the radicals. Moreover, the group
grew out of Iraq's sectarian war and would continue to promote its "caliphate" in a post-Assad Syria.
Alas, history is full of examples-Soviet Union, Nicaragua and Iran, among others-in which brutal
radicals defeat decent liberals after they together depose a hated dictator. Unless the U.S. is willing
to occupy the country, impose a new government, and remain until the state is rebuilt, the worst
Syrians are likely to control a post-Assad future. And the results could be ugly even if Washington
stuck around, as in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Retired Gen. John Allen and author Charles R. Lister argued that "the credibility of the United
States as the leader and defender of the free world must be salvaged." But the Syrian tragedy has
little to do with "the free world": brutal civil wars have occurred since the dawn of mankind. And
Washington's chief duty is to defend America, not referee other nations' conflicts.
Yet ivory tower warriors continue to urge greater U.S. military involvement. Some propose targeting
Russia with additional sanctions, which would not likely dissuade Moscow from acting on behalf of
what it perceives as its important interests. However, further penalties would discourage cooperation
even where the two nations' interests coincided.
Another option is more training and better weapons for so-called moderates. Yet even President
Obama admitted that there were few past cases when support for insurgents "actually worked out well."
In a recent interview President-Elect Trump contended that "we have no idea who these people are"
and as a candidate complained that "they end up being worse" than the regime.
The reality is nuanced-Syria's insurgents span the spectrum-but the administration's experience
has been a cruel disappointment. An anonymous American official admitted to the Washington Post:
U.S.-backed forces are "not doing any better on the battlefield, they're up against a more formidable
adversary, and they're increasingly dominated by extremists." There's no reason to expect better
under the new administration.
Indeed, noted the BBC, "many of the more moderate rebel groups that the U.S. backs have formed
a strategic alliance with Jabhat Fatah al-Sham [formerly al-Qaeda-affiliated al-Nusra] and now fight
alongside it." Weapons previously provided to the moderates often ended up in the hands of more radical
forces. Greater aid might prolong the fighting but would be unlikely to give the "good guys" victory.
Providing anti-aircraft missiles would threaten Russian as well as Syrian aircraft, risking a significant
escalation if Moscow responded with greater force. And any leakage to radical jihadists could result
in attacks on Western airliners.
Establishing a "no-fly" and/or "safe" zone has become a panacea for many U.S. policymakers, including
former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. It is an obvious way to appear to do something. However,
protecting civilians in this way would simultaneously immunize combatants-attracting insurgents who
would use such areas as a sanctuary, encouraging further regime and Russian attacks.
Moreover, Washington would have to do more than simply declare such a zone to exist. Enforcing
it would be an act of war requiring continuous military action. U.S. officials have estimated that
the effort would take hundreds of aircraft, thousands of personnel and hundreds of millions of dollars
or more a month. Washington would have to destroy the Syrian anti-air defense system, no simple task.
Indeed, in one of her conversations revealed by Wikileaks, Hillary Clinton acknowledged that imposing
a no fly zone would "kill a lot of Syrians" and "a lot of civilians."
A true "no-fly" zone also would require preventing Russian air operations as well. Trump complained
to the Wall Street Journal that by attacking Assad "we end up fighting Russia, fighting Syria." Moscow
officials have warned against strikes that would threaten Russian military personnel; Moscow already
has introduced its advanced S-300 and S-400 anti-aircraft missile systems. Nevertheless, several
GOP presidential candidates advocated downing Russian aircraft, if necessary. Yet it would be mad
to commit an unprovoked act of war against a nuclear-armed power over a third nation's conflict in
which the U.S. has no substantial interest. Moscow would not likely yield peacefully.
Why let this declining power "push around the United States, which has the world's biggest economy"
and "greatest military," asked Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen? Because Moscow has far more
at stake and as a result is willing to accept greater costs and take greater risks than is America.
Worse, Moscow would feel pressure to maintain its credibility and preserve its international status
against an overbearing United States.
The result could be the very conflict America and the Soviet Union avoided during the entire Cold
War. One anonymous U.S. official told the Washington Post: "You can't pretend you can go to war against
Assad and not go to war against Russia." During the campaign Trump warned: "you're going to end up
in World War Three over Syria if we listen to Hillary Clinton," since fighting Syria would mean "fighting
Syria, Russia and Iran."
Direct military intervention also would be possible, but would raise the stakes dramatically.
Special operations forces, drones, airstrikes, and even an Iraq-style invasion all are possible.
But none would enjoy sustained public or allied support or end the ongoing murder and mayhem. Victory,
whatever that meant, would simply trigger a new round of fighting for dominance in a post-Assad Syria,
as occurred in Iraq. And conflict with Moscow could not easily be avoided.
How would any of this serve U.S. interests? The American people have no meaningful stake in the
outcome. The Assad regime's fate is largely irrelevant to Washington. For nearly a half century under
both Bashar al-Assad and his father, Hafez, who ruled previously, Damascus was hostile to the U.S.
But Syria lost more than it won and never posed a threat to America or impeded Washington's dominance
in the Middle East. Once the country dissolved into civil war the Assad regime's ability to harm
others essentially disappeared. Even if the government survives, its influence will be much diminished
for years.
Washington worries about instability, but the U.S. has created greater chaos through its foolish
war-making in the Mideast. Obviously, ending the Syrian civil war would be best for everyone, but
a jihadist victory, likely if Assad is defeated, would threaten American interests more than continuing
instability. Sen. John McCain, among others, claims that Assad's survival guarantees continuation
of the war, but Washington cannot halt the conflict and is best served by staying out of the bloody
imbroglio.
"Moderate" insurgents would be angered by Washington's withdrawal, but they are unlikely ever
to gain power. America might lose its "leverage" over such nominal allies as Riyadh and Ankara, but
there is little evidence that Washington has gained anything from its supposed influence. Indeed,
Saudi Arabia has essentially abandoned the fight against the Islamic State and Turkey is more often
attacking Kurds than Daesh.
Even if Assad fell, Washington would have no control over what followed. Without ongoing American
support, the so-called "moderates" would do no better against the radical forces than they have done
against the Syrian army. The hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who died after the Bush administration
blew up the country demonstrate that good intentions are an insufficient basis for U.S. policy.
Clinton criticized "the ambitions and the aggressiveness of Russia" in Syria. But Moscow's objectives
there do not threaten America. Russia's alliance with Syria goes back decades. Washington should
do what is in America's interest, not what is against Russia's interest.
Of course, Syria is a humanitarian horror. But the civil war is not as bad as other conflicts
largely ignored by the U.S., such as the mass slaughter in the Democratic Republic of the Congo during
the late 1990s and early 2000s. Moreover, Syria is not genocide, a la Rwanda or Cambodia, but a civil
war, in which a most of the dead are combatants, and from all sides. The bombing of civilian areas
is horrific, but hardly a new military tactic, and one which Washington has only recently come to
reject.
Nor could the conflict be settled without using extraordinary force. Merely fudging the balance
of military power won't end the killing. If jihadist groups took control after Assad's collapse and
his allies' withdrawal, Washington would face pressure to "do something" to protect Alawites, Christians
and perhaps even "moderate" insurgents and their supporters. The U.S. has neither the responsibility
nor the resources to police the globe.
Finally, the administration has unfinished business involving anti-American radicals, the
Islamic State and al-Qaeda-affiliated al-Nusra/al-Sham. But Assad's ouster would empower both groups.
They remain primarily insurgents which can be dealt with on the ground by the surrounding nations
which they most threaten.
Donald Trump had only just been declared president-elect when those controlled U.S. foreign
policy began urging him to conform to their disastrous designs in the Middle East. However, Trump
appears to have learned from the past. He told the Wall Street Journal: "I've had an opposite view
of many people regarding Syria."
The incoming administration should announce that the U.S. is staying out. Syria is a tragedy beyond
America's control. Only the battling local factions and regional parties can reach a stable settlement.
Washington should seek to make the best of a bad situation and encourage negotiations to end the
killing and limit the activities of Islamic radicals.
Michael Grace 2 days ago
I agree, Trump should stay out of the Middle East and start building the infrastructure
for this third world country called the United States. As for John Kerry, Samantha Power, Susan
Rice, and Hillary Clinton, they are so over and yesterday's news in the fast pace of social media.
But their war mongering attitudes will carry a heavy burden when it comes to political
history; this foursome was responsible for many civilian deaths are they responsible for the use
of drones and every other killing machine that make the USA, as Eisenhower said the Military Industrial
Complex.
Syria was a beautiful country, safe to visit, and it is the victim of greed and religion. The
latter probably being the worst thing man has ever created. The Christian, Judaic, and Muslim
malarky about a judgemental "God in the sky." has brought 2000 years of wrath, now it is time
for the USA to cut all IRS tax benefits for the religion business and use that for new airports
and railroads. If someone wants to worship a God in an untaxed temple, make them pay an admission
tax like when you go to the movies.
waky wake 2 days ago
@ Doug Bandow [:-{) I agree with your suggestion to the President-Elect Donald Trump and will
put additional emphasizes on it !!!STAY OUT OF SYRIA AT ALL COST!!! I think Pence was probably
the best choice Trump could have made for his VP, but maybe he needs to put him and one or two
of his other "have to have" team members in a box and keep them there.
I voted for "The Donald"
to do three things he said he was going to do. 1} Regain control of our southern borders {BUILD
THE WALL}, to include repatriating recent illegal intruders. 2} Renegotiate, resend, or cancel
NAFTA, TPP and TTIP. 3} To totally transform our Foreign Policy objectives and focus, including
but not limited to removing our military forces from the ME and non-NATO eastern European theaters
and requiring our NATO and Asian-pacific partners to more consistently cover their portion of
the tab, for providing their protection.
After that, I'm willing to cut him some slack. That being
said, adding the infrastructure rebuild efforts he mentioned being initiated, would guarantee
my vote for a second Trump term.
Darren Bruin 2 days ago
BRAVO, the author has it 1,000% correct. It is asinine for the USA to get involved in Syria
while wasting taxpayer's dollars as well as risking war with Russia. All for absolutely nothing
to do with America's interests. While I did not vote for him I have high hope that Trump will
keep to his promise and keep the USA out of Syria.
Trung Jen 2 days ago
Agree. Cant destroy something then leave what chaos that was created in our wake. If in the
name of humanitarian goals, there are countless other missions to intervene. Politics/power shouldn't
be hiding behind any veil
Parham Noori-Esfandiari a day ago
The problem is that U.S think-tanks that advise concessive U.S administration for long turn
planning for U.S dominance do not have good intentions for the world. If some country claims leadership
for the world it has to look what is good for the world but not what is good for bunch of criminal
special interest. How many Islamic countries have been destroyed? Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria,
and Yemen and .. How could the rulers in U.S and Western countries be Angels toward their own
people when they are demons toward other nations? It seems like Trump wants to build up his nation
and avoiding damage to the others. We have to wait how successful he will be against special interest
groups to achieve his goals.
wootendw 2 hours ago
Bashar Assad is a secular Alawite married to a British born/raised Sunni. Both the husband
and wife are highly intelligent. Bashar is an ophthalmologist; his wife, Asmi, has a degree in
computer science and French literature and has worked as an investment banker. Bashar Assad is
not his father (who sent troops to fight against Saddam during Iraq I). He accepted the Syrian
Presidency because his older brother, groomed to replace Hafez, was killed. Compared to other
ME leaders like Qatar's and Saudi Arabia's (whom the USG arms) the Assads are a decent couple.
Yet, for 10 years, our deceitful, murderous foreign policy establishment has been vilifying them
and trained terrorists to overthrow them. Yes, ISIS is a creation of the USG through its proxies,
Turkey and the Gulf States. Please, Mr Trump, leave Syria alone and let its people choose their
own leader even if it's Assad. This is the Russian position and the morally correct one.
"... For one thing, many vested interests don't want the Democratic party to change. Most of the money it raises ends up in the pockets of political consultants, pollsters, strategists, lawyers, advertising consultants and advertisers themselves, many of whom have become rich off the current arrangement. They naturally want to keep it. ..."
"... For another, the Democratic party apparatus is ingrown and entrenched. Like any old bureaucracy, it only knows how to do what it has done for years. Its state and quadrennial national conventions are opportunities for insiders to meet old friends and for aspiring politicians to make contacts among the rich and powerful. Insiders and the rich aren't going to happily relinquish their power and perquisites, and hand them to outsiders and the non-rich. ..."
"... I have been a Democrat for 50 years – I have even served in two Democratic administrations in Washington, including a stint in the cabinet and have run for the Democratic nomination for governor in one state – yet I have never voted for the chair or vice-chair of my state Democratic party. That means I, too, have had absolutely no say over who the chair of the Democratic National Committee will be. To tell you the truth, I haven't cared. And that's part of the problem. ..."
"... Finally, the party chairmanship has become a part-time sinecure for politicians on their way up or down, not a full-time position for a professional organizer. In 2011, Tim Kaine (who subsequently became Hillary Clinton's running mate in the 2016 election) left the chairmanship to run, successfully, for the Senate from Virginia. ..."
"... The chair then went to Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, a Florida congresswoman who had co-chaired Clinton's bid for the Democratic nomination for president in 2008. This generated allegations in the 2016 race that the Democratic National Committee was siding with Clinton against Bernie Sanders – allegations substantiated by leaks of emails from the DNC. ..."
"... So what we now have is a Democratic party that has been repudiated at the polls, headed by a Democratic National Committee that has become irrelevant at best, run part-time by a series of insider politicians. It has no deep or broad-based grass-roots, no capacity for mobilizing vast numbers of people to take any action other than donate money, no visibility between elections, no ongoing activism. ..."
For one thing, many vested interests don't want the Democratic party to change. Most of the
money it raises ends up in the pockets of political consultants, pollsters, strategists, lawyers,
advertising consultants and advertisers themselves, many of whom have become rich off the current
arrangement. They naturally want to keep it.
For another, the Democratic party apparatus is ingrown and entrenched. Like any old bureaucracy,
it only knows how to do what it has done for years. Its state and quadrennial national conventions
are opportunities for insiders to meet old friends and for aspiring politicians to make contacts
among the rich and powerful. Insiders and the rich aren't going to happily relinquish their power
and perquisites, and hand them to outsiders and the non-rich.
Most Americans who call themselves Democrats never hear from the Democratic party except when
it asks for money, typically through mass mailings and recorded telephone calls in the months leading
up to an election. The vast majority of Democrats don't know the name of the chair of the Democratic
National Committee or of their state committee. Almost no registered
Democrats have any idea
how to go about electing their state Democratic chair or vice-chair, and, hence, almost none have
any influence over whom the next chair of the Democratic National Committee may be.
I have been a Democrat for 50 years – I have even served in two Democratic administrations
in Washington, including a stint in the cabinet and have run for the Democratic nomination for governor
in one state – yet I have never voted for the chair or vice-chair of my state Democratic party. That
means I, too, have had absolutely no say over who the chair of the Democratic National Committee
will be. To tell you the truth, I haven't cared. And that's part of the problem.
Nor, for that matter, has Barack Obama cared. He basically ignored the Democratic National Committee
during his presidency, starting his own organization called Organizing for America. It was originally
intended to marshal grass-roots support for the major initiatives he sought to achieve during his
presidency, but morphed into a fund-raising machine of its own.
Finally, the party chairmanship has become a part-time sinecure for politicians on their way
up or down, not a full-time position for a professional organizer. In 2011, Tim Kaine (who subsequently
became Hillary Clinton's running mate in the 2016 election) left the chairmanship to run, successfully,
for the Senate from Virginia.
The chair then went to Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, a Florida congresswoman who had co-chaired
Clinton's bid for the Democratic nomination for president in 2008. This generated allegations in
the 2016 race that the Democratic National Committee was siding with Clinton against Bernie Sanders
– allegations substantiated by leaks of emails from the DNC.
So what we now have is a Democratic party that has been repudiated at the polls, headed by
a Democratic National Committee that has become irrelevant at best, run part-time by a series of
insider politicians. It has no deep or broad-based grass-roots, no capacity for mobilizing vast numbers
of people to take any action other than donate money, no visibility between elections, no ongoing
activism.
It is the end of neoliberalism and the start of the era of authoritarian nationalism, and we all
need to come together to stamp out the authoritarian part.
Notable quotes:
"... Neoliberalism has been disastrous for the Rust Belt, and I think we need to envision a new future for what was once the country's industrial heartland, now little more than its wasteland ..."
"... The question of what the many millions of often-unionized factory workers, SMEs which supplied them, family farmers (now fully industrialized and owned by corporations), and all those in secondary production and services who once supported them are to actually do in future to earn a decent living is what I believe should really be the subject of debate. ..."
"... two factors (or three, I guess) have contributed to this state of despair: offshoring and outsourcing, and technology. ..."
"... Medicaid, the CHIP program, the SNAP program and others (including NGOs and private charitable giving) may alleviate some of the suffering, but there is currently no substitute for jobs that would enable men and women to live lives of dignity – a decent place to live, good educations for their children, and a reasonable, secure pension in old age. Near-, at-, and below-minimum wage jobs devoid of any benefits don't allow any of these – at most, they make possible a subsistence life, one which requires continued reliance on public assistance throughout one's lifetime. ..."
"... In the U.S. (a neoliberal pioneer), poverty is closely linked with inequality and thus, a high GINI coefficient (near that of Turkey); where there is both poverty and a very unequal distribution of resources, this inevitably affects women (and children) and racial (and ethnic) minorities disproportionately. The economic system, racism, sexism, and xenophobia are not separate, stand-alone issues; they are profoundly intertwined. ..."
"... But really, if you think about it, slavery was defined as ownership, ownership of human capital (which was convertible into cash), and women in many societies throughout history were acquired as part of a financial transaction (either through purchase or through sale), and control of their capital (land, property [farmland, herds], valuables and later, money) often entrusted to a spouse or male guardian. All of these practices were economically-driven, even if the driver wasn't 21st-century capitalism. ..."
"... Let it be said at once: Trump's victory is primarily due to the explosion in economic and geographic inequality in the United States over several decades and the inability of successive governments to deal with this. ..."
"... Both the Clinton and the Obama administrations frequently went along with the market liberalization launched under Reagan and both Bush presidencies. At times they even outdid them: the financial and commercial deregulation carried out under Clinton is an example. What sealed the deal, though, was the suspicion that the Democrats were too close to Wall Street – and the inability of the Democratic media elite to learn the lessons from the Sanders vote. ..."
"... Regional inequality and globalization are the principal drivers in Japanese politics, too, along with a number of social drivers. ..."
"... The tsunami/nuclear meltdown combined with the Japanese government's uneven response is an apt metaphor for the impact of neo-liberalism/globalization on Japan; and on the US. I then explained that the income inequality in the US was far more severe than that of Japan and that many Americans did not support the export of jobs to China/Mexico. ..."
"... I contend that in some hypothetical universe the DNC and corrupt Clinton machine could have been torn out, root and branch, within months. As I noted, however, the decision to run HRC effectively unopposed was made several years, at least, before the stark evidence of the consequences of such a decision appeared in sharp relief with Brexit. ..."
"... Just as the decline of Virginia coal is due to global forces and corporate stupidity, so the decline of the rust belt is due to long (30 year plus) global forces and corporate decisions that predate the emergence of identity politics. ..."
"... It's interesting that the clear headed thinkers of the Marxist left, who pride themselves on not being distracted by identity, don't want to talk about these factors when discussing the plight of their cherished white working class. ..."
"... The construction 'white working class' is a useful governing tool that splits poor people and possible coalitions against the violence of capital. Now, discussion focuses on how some of the least powerful, most vulnerable people in the United States are the perpetrators of a great injustice against racialised and minoritised groups. Such commentary colludes in the pathologisation of the working class, of poor people. Victims are inculpated as the vectors of noxious, atavistic vices while the perpetrators get off with impunity, showing off their multihued, cosmopolitan C-suites and even proposing that their free trade agreements are a form of anti-racist solidarity. Most crucially, such analysis ignores the continuities between a Trumpian dystopia and our satisfactory present. ..."
"... Race-thinking forecloses the possibility of the coalitions that you imagine, and reproduces ideas of difference in ways that always, always privilege 'whiteness'. ..."
"... Historical examples of ethnic groups becoming 'white', how it was legal and political decision-making that defined the present racial taxonomy, suggest that groups can also lose or have their 'whiteness' threatened. CB has written here about how, in the UK at least, Eastern and Southern Europeans are racialised, and so refused 'whiteness'. JQ has written about southern white minoritisation. Many commentators have pointed that the 'white working class' vote this year looked a lot like a minority vote. ..."
"... Given the subordination of groups presently defined as 'white working class', I wonder if we could think beyond ethnic and epidermal definition to consider that the impossibility of the American Dream refuses these groups whiteness; i.e the hoped for privileges of racial superiority, much in the same way that African Americans, Latin Americans and other racialised minorities are denied whiteness. Can a poor West Virginian living in a toxified drugged out impoverished landscape really be defined as a carrier of 'white privilege'? ..."
"... I was first pointed at this by the juxtapositions of racialised working class and immigrants in Imogen Tyler's Revolting Subjects – Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain but this below is a useful short article that takes a historical perspective. ..."
"... In a 1990 essay, the late Yale political scientist Juan Linz observed that "aside from the United States, only Chile has managed a century and a half of relatively undisturbed constitutional continuity under presidential government - but Chilean democracy broke down in the 1970s." ..."
"... Linz offered several reasons why presidential systems are so prone to crisis. One particularly important one is the nature of the checks and balances system. Since both the president and the Congress are directly elected by the people, they can both claim to speak for the people. When they have a serious disagreement, according to Linz, "there is no democratic principle on the basis of which it can be resolved." The constitution offers no help in these cases, he wrote: "the mechanisms the constitution might provide are likely to prove too complicated and aridly legalistic to be of much force in the eyes of the electorate." ..."
"... In a parliamentary system, deadlocks get resolved. A prime minister who lacks the backing of a parliamentary majority is replaced by a new one who has it. If no such majority can be found, a new election is held and the new parliament picks a leader. It can get a little messy for a period of weeks, but there's simply no possibility of a years-long spell in which the legislative and executive branches glare at each other unproductively.' ..."
"... In any case, as I pointed out before, given that the US is increasingly an urbanised country, and the Electoral College was created to protect rural (slave) states, the grotesque electoral result we have just seen is likely to recur, which means more and more Presidents with dubious democratic legitimacy. Thanks to Bush (and Obama) these Presidents will have, at the same time, more and more power. ..."
"... To return to my original question and answer it myself: I'm forced to conclude that the Democrats did not specifically address the revitalization – rebirth of the Rust Belt in their 2016 platform. Its failure to do so carried a heavy cost that (nearly) all of us will be forced to pay. ..."
"... This sub seems to have largely fallen into the psychologically comfortable trap of declaring that everyone who voted against their preferred candidate is racist. It's a view pushed by the neoliberals, who want to maintain he stranglehold of identity politics over the DNC, and it makes upper-class 'intellectuals' feel better about themselves and their betrayal of the filthy, subhuman white underclass (or so they see it). ..."
"... You can scream 'those jobs are never coming back!' all you want, but people are never going to accept it. So either you come up with a genuine solution (instead of simply complaining that your opponents solutions won't work; you're partisan and biased, most voters won't believe you), you may as well resign yourself to fascism. Because whining that you don't know what to do won't stop people from lining up behind someone who says that they do have one, whether it'll work or not. Nobody trusts the elite enough to believe them when they say that jobs are never coming back. Nobody trusts the elite at all. ..."
"... You sound just like the Wiemar elite. No will to solve the problem, but filled with terror at the inevitable result of failing to solve the problem. ..."
"... One brutal fact tells us everything we need to know about the Democratic party in 2016: the American Nazi party is running on a platform of free health care to working class people. This means that the American Nazi Party is now running to the left of the Democratic party. ..."
"... Back in the 1930s, when the economy collapsed, fascists appeared and took power. Racists also came out of the woodwork, ditto misogynists. Fast forward 80 years, and the same thing has happened all over again. The global economy melted down in 2008 and fascists appeared promising to fix the problems that the pols in power wouldn't because they were too closely tied to the existing (failed) system. Along with the fascists, racists gained power because they were able to scapegoat minorities as the alleged cause of everyone's misery. ..."
"... None of this is surprising. We have seen it before. Whenever you get a depression in a modern industrial economy, you get scapegoating, racism, and fascists. We know what to do. The problem is that the current Democratic party isn't doing it. ..."
"... . It is the end of neoliberalism and the start of the era of authoritarian nationalism, and we all need to come together to stamp out the authoritarian part. ..."
"... This hammered people on the bottom, disproportionately African Americans and especially single AA mothers in America. It crushed the blue collar workers. It is wiping out the savings and careers of college-educated white collar workers now, at least, the ones who didn't go to the Ivy League, which is 90% of them. ..."
"... Calling Hillary an "imperfect candidate" is like calling what happened to the Titanic a "boating accident." Trump was an imperfect candidate. Why did he win? ..."
"... "The neoliberal era in the United States ended with a neofascist bang. The political triumph of Donald Trump shattered the establishments in the Democratic and Republican parties – both wedded to the rule of Big Money and to the reign of meretricious politicians." ..."
"... "It is not an exaggeration to say that the Democratic Party is in shambles as a political force. Not only did it just lose the White House to a wildly unpopular farce of a candidate despite a virtually unified establishment behind it, and not only is it the minority party in both the Senate and the House, but it is getting crushed at historical record rates on the state and local levels as well. Surveying this wreckage last week, party stalwart Matthew Yglesias of Vox minced no words: `the Obama years have created a Democratic Party that's essentially a smoking pile of rubble.' ..."
"... "One would assume that the operatives and loyalists of such a weak, defeated and wrecked political party would be eager to engage in some introspection and self-critique, and to produce a frank accounting of what they did wrong so as to alter their plight. In the case of 2016 Democrats, one would be quite mistaken." ..."
"... Foreign Affairs ..."
"... "At the end of World War II, the United States and its allies decided that sustained mass unemployment was an existential threat to capitalism and had to be avoided at all costs. In response, governments everywhere targeted full employment as the master policy variable-trying to get to, and sustain, an unemployment rate of roughly four percent. The problem with doing so, over time, is that targeting any variable long enough undermines the value of the variable itself-a phenomenon known as Goodhart's law. (..) ..."
"... " what we see [today] is a reversal of power between creditors and debtors as the anti-inflationary regime of the past 30 years undermines itself-what we might call "Goodhart's revenge." In this world, yields compress and creditors fret about their earnings, demanding repayment of debt at all costs. Macro-economically, this makes the situation worse: the debtors can't pay-but politically, and this is crucial-it empowers debtors since they can't pay, won't pay, and still have the right to vote. ..."
"... "The traditional parties of the center-left and center-right, the builders of this anti-inflationary order, get clobbered in such a world, since they are correctly identified by these debtors as the political backers of those demanding repayment in an already unequal system, and all from those with the least assets. This produces anti-creditor, pro-debtor coalitions-in-waiting that are ripe for the picking by insurgents of the left and the right, which is exactly what has happened. ..."
"... "The global revolt against elites is not just driven by revulsion and loss and racism. It's also driven by the global economy itself. This is a global phenomenon that marks one thing above all. The era of neoliberalism is over. The era of neonationalism has just begun." ..."
"... They want what their families have had which is secure, paid, benefits rich, blue collar work. ..."
"... trump's campaign empathized with that feeling just by focusing on the factory jobs as jobs and not as anachronisms that are slowly fading away for whatever reason. Clinton might have been "correct", but these voters didn't want to hear "the truth". And as much as you can complain about how stupid they are for wanting to be lied to, that is the unfortunate reality you, and the Democratic party, have to accept. ..."
"... trump was offering a "bailout" writ large. Clinton had no (good) counteroffer. It was like the tables were turned. Romney was the one talking about "change" and "restructuring" while Obama was defending keeping what was already there. ..."
"... "Without that bailout, Detroit will need to drastically restructure itself. With it, the automakers will stay the course - the suicidal course of declining market shares, insurmountable labor and retiree burdens, technology atrophy, product inferiority and never-ending job losses. Detroit needs a turnaround, not a check." http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/19/opinion/19romney.html ..."
"... Clinton toward the end offered tariffs. But the trump campaign hit back with what turned out to be a pretty strong counter attack – ""How's she going to get tough on China?" said Trump economic advisor Peter Navarro on CNN's Quest Means Business. He notes that some of Clinton's economic advisors have supported TPP or even worked on it. "" ..."
The question is no longer her neoliberalism, but yours. Keep it or throw it away?
I wish this issue was being seriously discussed. Neoliberalism has been disastrous for
the Rust Belt, and I think we need to envision a new future for what was once the country's industrial
heartland, now little more than its wasteland (cf. "flyover zone" – a pejorative term which
inhabitants of the zone are not too stupid to understand perfectly, btw).
The question of what the many millions of often-unionized factory workers, SMEs which supplied
them, family farmers (now fully industrialized and owned by corporations), and all those in secondary
production and services who once supported them are to actually do in future to earn a decent
living is what I believe should really be the subject of debate.
As noted upthread, two factors (or three, I guess) have contributed to this state of despair:
offshoring and outsourcing, and technology. The jobs that have been lost will not return,
and indeed will be lost in ever greater numbers – just consider what will happen to the trucking
sector when self-driving trucks hit the roads sometime in the next 10-20 years (3.5 million truckers;
8.7 in allied jobs).
Medicaid, the CHIP program, the SNAP program and others (including NGOs and private charitable
giving) may alleviate some of the suffering, but there is currently no substitute for jobs that
would enable men and women to live lives of dignity – a decent place to live, good educations
for their children, and a reasonable, secure pension in old age. Near-, at-, and below-minimum
wage jobs devoid of any benefits don't allow any of these – at most, they make possible a subsistence
life, one which requires continued reliance on public assistance throughout one's lifetime.
In the U.S. (a neoliberal pioneer), poverty is closely linked with inequality and thus,
a high GINI coefficient (near that of Turkey); where there is both poverty and a very unequal
distribution of resources, this inevitably affects women (and children) and racial (and ethnic)
minorities disproportionately. The economic system, racism, sexism, and xenophobia are not separate,
stand-alone issues; they are profoundly intertwined.
I appreciate and espouse the goals of identity politics in all their multiplicity, and also
understand that the institutions of slavery and sexism predated modern capitalist economies.
But really, if you think about it, slavery was defined as ownership, ownership of human capital
(which was convertible into cash), and women in many societies throughout history were acquired
as part of a financial transaction (either through purchase or through sale), and control of their
capital (land, property [farmland, herds], valuables and later, money) often entrusted to a spouse
or male guardian. All of these practices were economically-driven, even if the driver wasn't 21st-century
capitalism.
Also: Faustusnotes@100
For example Indiana took the ACA Medicaid expansion but did so with additional conditions that
make it worse than in neighboring states run by democratic governors.
And what states would those be? IL, IA, MI, OH, WI, KY, and TN have Republican governors. Were
you thinking pre-2014? pre-2012?
To conclude and return to my original point: what's to become of the Rust Belt in future? Did
the Democratic platform include a New New Deal for PA, OH, MI, WI, and IA (to name only the five
Rust Belt states Trump flipped)?
" Let it be said at once: Trump's victory is primarily due to the explosion in economic
and geographic inequality in the United States over several decades and the inability of successive
governments to deal with this.
Both the Clinton and the Obama administrations frequently went along with the market liberalization
launched under Reagan and both Bush presidencies. At times they even outdid them: the financial
and commercial deregulation carried out under Clinton is an example. What sealed the deal, though,
was the suspicion that the Democrats were too close to Wall Street – and the inability of the
Democratic media elite to learn the lessons from the Sanders vote. "
What should have been one comment came out as 4, so apologies on that front.
I spent the last week explaining the US election to my students in Japan in pretty much the
terms outlined by Lilla and PIketty, so I was delighted to discover these two articles.
Regional inequality and globalization are the principal drivers in Japanese politics, too,
along with a number of social drivers. It was therefore very easy to call for a show of hands
to identify students studying here in Tokyo who are trying to decide whether or not to return
to areas such as Tohoku to build their lives; or remain in Kanto/Tokyo – the NY/Washington/LA
of Japan put crudely.
I asked students from regions close to Tohoku how they might feel if the Japanese prime minister
decided not to visit the region following Fukushima after the disaster, or preceding an election.
The tsunami/nuclear meltdown combined with the Japanese government's uneven response is an
apt metaphor for the impact of neo-liberalism/globalization on Japan; and on the US. I then explained
that the income inequality in the US was far more severe than that of Japan and that many Americans
did not support the export of jobs to China/Mexico.
I then asked the students, particularly those from outlying regions whether they believe Japan
needed a leader who would 'bring back Japanese jobs' from Viet Nam and China, etc. Many/most agreed
wholeheartedly. I then asked whether they believed Tokyo people treated those outside Kanto as
'inferiors.' Many do.
Piketty may be right regarding Trump's long-term effects on income inequality. He is wrong,
I suggest, to argue that Democrats failed to respond to Sanders' support. I contend that in
some hypothetical universe the DNC and corrupt Clinton machine could have been torn out, root
and branch, within months. As I noted, however, the decision to run HRC effectively unopposed
was made several years, at least, before the stark evidence of the consequences of such a decision
appeared in sharp relief with Brexit.
Also worth noting is that the rust belts problems are as old as Reagan – even the term dates
from the 80s, the issue is so uncool that there is a dire straits song about it. Some portion
of the decline of manufacturing there is due to manufacturers shifting to the south, where the
anti Union states have an advantage. Also there has been new investment – there were no Japanese
car companies in the us in the 1980s, so they are new job creators, yet insufficient to make up
the losses. Just as the decline of Virginia coal is due to global forces and corporate stupidity,
so the decline of the rust belt is due to long (30 year plus) global forces and corporate decisions
that predate the emergence of identity politics.
It's interesting that the clear headed thinkers of the Marxist left, who pride themselves
on not being distracted by identity, don't want to talk about these factors when discussing the
plight of their cherished white working class. Suddenly it's not the forces of capital and
the objective facts of history, but a bunch of whiny black trannies demanding safe spaces and
protesting police violence, that drove those towns to ruin.
And what solutions do they think the dems should have proposed? It can't be welfare, since
we got the ACA (watered down by representatives of the rust belt states). Is it, seriously, tariffs?
Short of going to an election promising w revolution, what should the dems have done? Give us
a clear answer so we can see what the alternative to identity politics is.
basil 11.19.16 at 5:11 am
Did this go through?
Thinking with WLGR @15, Yan @81, engels variously above,
The construction 'white working class' is a useful governing tool that splits poor people
and possible coalitions against the violence of capital. Now, discussion focuses on how some of
the least powerful, most vulnerable people in the United States are the perpetrators of a great
injustice against racialised and minoritised groups. Such commentary colludes in the pathologisation
of the working class, of poor people. Victims are inculpated as the vectors of noxious, atavistic
vices while the perpetrators get off with impunity, showing off their multihued, cosmopolitan
C-suites and even proposing that their free trade agreements are a form of anti-racist solidarity.
Most crucially, such analysis ignores the continuities between a Trumpian dystopia and our satisfactory
present.
I get that the tropes around race are easy, and super-available. Privilege confessing is very
in vogue as a prophylactic against charges of racism. But does it threaten the structures that
produce this abjection – either as embittered, immiserated 'white working class' or as threatened
minority group? It is always *those* 'white' people, the South, the Working Class, and never the
accusers some of whom are themselves happy to vote for a party that drowns out anti-war protesters
with chants of USA! USA!
Race-thinking forecloses the possibility of the coalitions that you imagine, and reproduces
ideas of difference in ways that always, always privilege 'whiteness'.
--
Historical examples of ethnic groups becoming 'white', how it was legal and political decision-making
that defined the present racial taxonomy, suggest that groups can also lose or have their 'whiteness'
threatened. CB has written here about how, in the UK at least, Eastern and Southern Europeans
are racialised, and so refused 'whiteness'. JQ has written about southern white minoritisation.
Many commentators have pointed that the 'white working class' vote this year looked a lot like
a minority vote.
Given the subordination of groups presently defined as 'white working class', I wonder
if we could think beyond ethnic and epidermal definition to consider that the impossibility of
the American Dream refuses these groups whiteness; i.e the hoped for privileges of racial superiority,
much in the same way that African Americans, Latin Americans and other racialised minorities are
denied whiteness. Can a poor West Virginian living in a toxified drugged out impoverished landscape
really be defined as a carrier of 'white privilege'?
I was first pointed at this by the juxtapositions of racialised working class and immigrants
in Imogen Tyler's Revolting Subjects – Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain but
this below is a useful short article that takes a historical perspective.
The 'racialisation' of class in Britain has been a consequence of the weakening of 'class'
as a political idea since the 1970s – it is a new construction, not an historic one.
.
This is not to deny the existence of working-class racism, or to suggest that racism is
somehow acceptable if rooted in perceived socio-economic grievances. But it is to suggest that
the concept of a 'white working class' needs problematizing, as does the claim that the British
working-class was strongly committed to a post-war vision of 'White Britain' analogous to the
politics which sustained the idea of a 'White Australia' until the 1960s.
Yes, old, settled neighbourhoods could be profoundly distrustful of outsiders – all outsiders,
including the researchers seeking to study them – but, when it came to race, they were internally
divided. We certainly hear working-class racist voices – often echoing stock racist complaints
about over-crowding, welfare dependency or exploitative landlords and small businessmen, but
we don't hear the deep pathological racial fears laid bare in the letters sent to Enoch Powell
after his so-called 'Rivers of Blood' speech in 1968 (Whipple, 2009).
But more importantly, we also hear strong anti-racist voices loudly and clearly. At Wallsend
on Tyneside, where the researchers were gathering their data just as Powell shot to notoriety,
we find workers expressing casual racism, but we also find eloquent expressions of an internationalist,
solidaristic perspective in which, crucially, black and white are seen as sharing the same
working-class interests.
Racism is denounced as a deliberate capitalist strategy to divide workers against themselves,
weakening their ability to challenge those with power over their lives (shipbuilding had long
been a very fractious industry and its workers had plenty of experience of the dangers of internal
sectarian battles).
To be able to mobilize across across racialised divisions, to have race wither away entirely
would, for me, be the beginning of a politics that allowed humanity to deal with the inescapable
violence of climate change and corporate power.
*To add to the bibliography – David R. Roediger, Elizabeth D. Esch – The Production of Difference
– Race and the Management of Labour, and Denise Ferreira da Silva – Toward a Global Idea of Race.
And I have just been pointed at Ian Haney-López, White By Law – The Legal Construction of Race.
FWIW 'merica's constitutional democracy is going to collapse.
Some day - not tomorrow, not next year, but probably sometime before runaway climate change
forces us to seek a new life in outer-space colonies - there is going to be a collapse of the
legal and political order and its replacement by something else. If we're lucky, it won't be violent.
If we're very lucky, it will lead us to tackle the underlying problems and result in a better,
more robust, political system. If we're less lucky, well, then, something worse will happen .
In a 1990 essay, the late Yale political scientist Juan Linz observed that "aside from
the United States, only Chile has managed a century and a half of relatively undisturbed constitutional
continuity under presidential government - but Chilean democracy broke down in the 1970s."
Linz offered several reasons why presidential systems are so prone to crisis. One particularly
important one is the nature of the checks and balances system. Since both the president and the
Congress are directly elected by the people, they can both claim to speak for the people. When
they have a serious disagreement, according to Linz, "there is no democratic principle on the
basis of which it can be resolved." The constitution offers no help in these cases, he wrote:
"the mechanisms the constitution might provide are likely to prove too complicated and aridly
legalistic to be of much force in the eyes of the electorate."
In a parliamentary system, deadlocks get resolved. A prime minister who lacks the backing
of a parliamentary majority is replaced by a new one who has it. If no such majority can be found,
a new election is held and the new parliament picks a leader. It can get a little messy for a
period of weeks, but there's simply no possibility of a years-long spell in which the legislative
and executive branches glare at each other unproductively.'
Given that the basic point is polarisation (i.e. that both the President and Congress have
equally strong arguments to be the the 'voice of the people') and that under the US appalling
constitutional set up, there is no way to decide between them, one can easily imagine the so to
speak 'hyperpolarisation' of a Trump Presidency as being the straw (or anvil) that breaks the
camel's back.
In any case, as I pointed out before, given that the US is increasingly an urbanised country,
and the Electoral College was created to protect rural (slave) states, the grotesque electoral
result we have just seen is likely to recur, which means more and more Presidents with dubious
democratic legitimacy. Thanks to Bush (and Obama) these Presidents will have, at the same time,
more and more power.
nastywoman @ 150
Just study the program of the 'Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschland' or the Program of 'Die
Grünen' in Germany (take it through google translate) and you get all the answers you are looking
for.
No need to run it through google translate, it's available in English on their site. [Or one
could refer to the Green Party of the U.S. site/platform, which is very similar in scope and overall
philosophy. (www.gp.org).]
I looked at several of their topic areas (Agricultural, Global, Health, Rural) and yes, these
are general theses I would support. But they're hardly policy/project proposals for specific regions
or communities – the Greens espouse "think global, act local", so programs and projects must be
tailored to individual communities and regions.
To return to my original question and answer it myself: I'm forced to conclude that the
Democrats did not specifically address the revitalization – rebirth of the Rust Belt in their
2016 platform. Its failure to do so carried a heavy cost that (nearly) all of us will be forced
to pay.
This sub seems to have largely fallen into the psychologically comfortable trap of declaring
that everyone who voted against their preferred candidate is racist. It's a view pushed by the
neoliberals, who want to maintain he stranglehold of identity politics over the DNC, and it makes
upper-class 'intellectuals' feel better about themselves and their betrayal of the filthy, subhuman
white underclass (or so they see it).
I expect at this point that Trump will be reelected comfortably. If not only the party itself,
but also most of its activists, refuse to actually change, it's more or less inevitable.
You can scream 'those jobs are never coming back!' all you want, but people are never going
to accept it. So either you come up with a genuine solution (instead of simply complaining that
your opponents solutions won't work; you're partisan and biased, most voters won't believe you),
you may as well resign yourself to fascism. Because whining that you don't know what to do won't
stop people from lining up behind someone who says that they do have one, whether it'll work or
not. Nobody trusts the elite enough to believe them when they say that jobs are never coming back.
Nobody trusts the elite at all.
You sound just like the Wiemar elite. No will to solve the problem, but filled with terror
at the inevitable result of failing to solve the problem.
One brutal fact tells us everything we need to know about the Democratic party in 2016:
the American Nazi party is running on a platform of free health care to working class people.
This means that the American Nazi Party is now running to the left of the Democratic party.
Folks, we have seen this before. Let's not descend in backbiting and recriminations, okay?
We've got some commenters charging that other commenters are "mansplaining," meanwhile we've got
other commenters claiming that it's economics and not racism/misogyny. It's all of the above.
Back in the 1930s, when the economy collapsed, fascists appeared and took power. Racists
also came out of the woodwork, ditto misogynists. Fast forward 80 years, and the same thing has
happened all over again. The global economy melted down in 2008 and fascists appeared promising
to fix the problems that the pols in power wouldn't because they were too closely tied to the
existing (failed) system. Along with the fascists, racists gained power because they were able
to scapegoat minorities as the alleged cause of everyone's misery.
None of this is surprising. We have seen it before. Whenever you get a depression in a
modern industrial economy, you get scapegoating, racism, and fascists. We know what to do. The
problem is that the current Democratic party isn't doing it.
Instead, what we're seeing is a whirlwind of finger-pointing from the Democratic leadership
that lost this election and probably let the entire New Deal get rolled back and wiped out. Putin
is to blame! Julian Assange is to blame! The biased media are to blame! Voter suppression is to
blame! Bernie Sanders is to blame! Jill Stein is to blame! Everyone and anyone except the current
out-of-touch influence-peddling elites who currently have run the Democratic party into the ground.
We need the feminists and the black lives matter groups and we also need the green party people
and the Bernie Sanders activists. But everyone has to understand that this is not an isolated
event. Trump did not just happen by accident. First there was Greece, then there was Brexit, then
there was Trump, next it'll be Renzi losing the referendum in Italy and a constitutional crisis
there, and after that, Marine Le Pen in France is going to win the first round of elections. (Probably
not the presidency, since all the other French parties will band together to stop her, but the
National Front is currently polling at 40% of all registered French voters.) And Marine LePen
is the real deal, a genuine full-on out-and-out fascist. Not a closet fascist like Steve Bannon,
LePen is the full monty with everything but a Hugo Boss suit and the death's heads on the cap.
Does anyone notice a pattern here?
This is an international movement. It is sweeping the world . It is the end of neoliberalism
and the start of the era of authoritarian nationalism, and we all need to come together to stamp
out the authoritarian part.
Feminists, BLM, black bloc anarchiest anti-globalists, Sandernistas, and, yes, the former Hillary
supporters. Because it not just a coincidence that all these things are happening in all these
countries at the same time. The bottom 90% of the population in the developed world has been ripped
off by a managerial and financial and political class for the last 30 years and they have all
noticed that while the world GDP was skyrocketing and international trade agreements were getting
signed with zero input from the average citizen, a few people were getting very very rich but
nobody else was getting anything.
This hammered people on the bottom, disproportionately African Americans and especially
single AA mothers in America. It crushed the blue collar workers. It is wiping out the savings
and careers of college-educated white collar workers now, at least, the ones who didn't go to
the Ivy League, which is 90% of them.
And the Democratic party is so helpless and so hopeless that it is letting the American Nazi
Party run to the left of them on health care, fer cripes sake! We are now in a situation
where the American Nazi Party is advocating single-payer nationalized health care, while the former
Democratic presidential nominee who just got defeated assured everyone that single-payer "will
never, ever happen."
C'mon! Is anyone surprised that Hillary lost? Let's cut the crap with the "Hillary
was a flawed candidate" arguments. The plain fact of the matter is that Hillary was running mainly
on getting rid of the problems she and her husband created 25 years ago. Hillary promised criminal
justice reform and Black Lives Matter-friendly policing policies - and guess who started the mass
incarceration trend and gave speeches calling black kids "superpredators" 20 years ago? Hillary
promised to fix the problems with the wretched mandate law forcing everyone to buy unaffordable
for-profit private insurance with no cost controls - and guess who originally ran for president
in 2008 on a policy of health care mandates with no cost controls? Yes, Hillary (ironically, Obama's
big surge in popularity as a candidate came when he ran against Hillary from the left, ridiculing
helath care mandates). Hillary promises to reform an out-of-control deregulated financial system
run amok - and guess who signed all those laws revoking Glass-Steagal and setting up the Securities
Trading Modernization Act? Yes, Bill Clinton, and Hillary was right there with him cheering the
whole process on.
So pardon me and lots of other folks for being less than impressed by Hillary's trustworthiness
and honesty. Run for president by promising to undo the damage you did to the country 25 years
ago is (let say) a suboptimal campaign strategy, and a distinctly suboptimal choice of presidential
candidate for a party in the same sense that the Hiroshima air defense was suboptimal in 1945.
Calling Hillary an "imperfect candidate" is like calling what happened to the Titanic a
"boating accident." Trump was an imperfect candidate. Why did he win?
Because we're back in the 1930s again, the economy has crashed hard and still hasn't recovered
(maybe because we still haven't convened a Pecora Commission and jailed a bunch of the thieves,
and we also haven't set up any alphabet government job programs like the CCC) so fascists and
racists and all kinds of other bottom-feeders are crawling out of the political woodwork to promise
to fix the problems that the Democratic party establishment won't.
Rule of thumb: any social or political or economic writer virulently hated by the current Democratic
party establishment is someone we should listen to closely right now.
Cornel West is at the top of the current Democratic establishment's hate list, and he has got
a great article in The Guardian that I think is spot-on:
"The neoliberal era in the United States ended with a neofascist bang. The political triumph
of Donald Trump shattered the establishments in the Democratic and Republican parties – both wedded
to the rule of Big Money and to the reign of meretricious politicians."
Glenn Greenwald is another writer who has been showered with more hate by the Democratic establishment
recently than even Trump or Steve Bannon, so you know Greenwald is saying something important.
He has a great piece in The Intercept on the head-in-the-ground attitude of Democratic
elites toward their recent loss:
"It is not an exaggeration to say that the Democratic Party is in shambles as a political
force. Not only did it just lose the White House to a wildly unpopular farce of a candidate despite
a virtually unified establishment behind it, and not only is it the minority party in both the
Senate and the House, but it is getting crushed at historical record rates on the state and local
levels as well. Surveying this wreckage last week, party stalwart Matthew Yglesias of Vox minced
no words: `the Obama years have created a Democratic Party that's essentially a smoking pile of
rubble.'
"One would assume that the operatives and loyalists of such a weak, defeated and wrecked
political party would be eager to engage in some introspection and self-critique, and to produce
a frank accounting of what they did wrong so as to alter their plight. In the case of 2016 Democrats,
one would be quite mistaken."
Last but far from least, Scottish economist Mark Blyth has what looks to me like the single
best analysis of the entire global Trump_vs_deep_state tidal wave in Foreign Affairs magazine:
"At the end of World War II, the United States and its allies decided that sustained mass
unemployment was an existential threat to capitalism and had to be avoided at all costs. In response,
governments everywhere targeted full employment as the master policy variable-trying to get to,
and sustain, an unemployment rate of roughly four percent. The problem with doing so, over time,
is that targeting any variable long enough undermines the value of the variable itself-a phenomenon
known as Goodhart's law. (..)
" what we see [today] is a reversal of power between creditors and debtors as the anti-inflationary
regime of the past 30 years undermines itself-what we might call "Goodhart's revenge." In this
world, yields compress and creditors fret about their earnings, demanding repayment of debt at
all costs. Macro-economically, this makes the situation worse: the debtors can't pay-but politically,
and this is crucial-it empowers debtors since they can't pay, won't pay, and still have the right
to vote.
"The traditional parties of the center-left and center-right, the builders of this anti-inflationary
order, get clobbered in such a world, since they are correctly identified by these debtors as
the political backers of those demanding repayment in an already unequal system, and all from
those with the least assets. This produces anti-creditor, pro-debtor coalitions-in-waiting that
are ripe for the picking by insurgents of the left and the right, which is exactly what has happened.
"In short, to understand the election of Donald Trump we need to listen to the trumpets blowing
everywhere in the highly indebted developed countries and the people who vote for them.
"The global revolt against elites is not just driven by revulsion and loss and racism.
It's also driven by the global economy itself. This is a global phenomenon that marks one thing
above all. The era of neoliberalism is over. The era of neonationalism has just begun."
You don't live here, do you? I'm really asking a genuine question because the way you are framing
the question ("SPECIFICS!!!!!!) suggests you don't. (Just to show my background, born and raised
in Australia (In the electoral division of Kooyong, home of Menzies) but I've lived in the US
since 2000 in the midwest (MO, OH) and currently in the south (GA))
If this election has taught us anything it's no one cared about "specifics". It was a mood,
a feeling which brought trump over the top (and I'm not talking about the "average" trump voter
because that is meaningless. The average trunp voter was a republican voter in the south who the
Dems will never get so examining their motivations is immaterial to future strategy. I'm talking
about the voters in the Upper Midwest from places which voted for Obama twice then switched to
trump this year to give him his margin of victory).
trump voters have been pretty clear they don't actually care about the way trump does (or even
doesn't) do what he said he would do during the campaign. It was important to them he showed he
was "with" people like them. They way he did that was partially racialized (law and order, islamophobia)
but also a particular emphasis on blue collar work that focused on the work. Unfortunately these
voters, however much you tell them they should suck it up and accept their generations of familial
experience as relatively highly paid industrial workers (even if it is something only their fathers
and grandfathers experienced because the factories were closing when the voters came of age in
the 80s and 90s) is never coming back and they should be happy to retrain as something else, don't
want it. They want what their families have had which is secure, paid, benefits rich, blue
collar work.
trump's campaign empathized with that feeling just by focusing on the factory jobs as jobs
and not as anachronisms that are slowly fading away for whatever reason. Clinton might have been
"correct", but these voters didn't want to hear "the truth". And as much as you can complain about
how stupid they are for wanting to be lied to, that is the unfortunate reality you, and the Democratic
party, have to accept.
The idea they don't want "government help" is ridiculous. They love the government. They just
want the government to do things for them and not for other people (which unfortunately includes
blah people but also "the coasts", "sillicon valley", etc.). Obama won in 2008 and 2012 in part
due to the auto bailout.
trump was offering a "bailout" writ large. Clinton had no (good) counteroffer. It was like
the tables were turned. Romney was the one talking about "change" and "restructuring" while Obama
was defending keeping what was already there.
"Without that bailout, Detroit will need to drastically restructure itself. With it, the
automakers will stay the course - the suicidal course of declining market shares, insurmountable
labor and retiree burdens, technology atrophy, product inferiority and never-ending job losses.
Detroit needs a turnaround, not a check." http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/19/opinion/19romney.html
So yes. Clinton needed vague promises. She needed something more than retraining and "jobs
of the future" and "restructuring". She needed to show she was committed to their way of life,
however those voters saw it, and would do something, anything, to keep it alive. trump did that
even though his plan won't work. And maybe he'll be punished for it. In 4 years. But in the interim
the gop will destroy so many things we need and rely on as well as entrench their power for generations
through the Supreme Court.
But really, it was hard for Clinton to be trusted to act like she cared about these peoples'
way of life because she (through her husband fairly or unfairly) was associated with some of the
larger actions and choices which helped usher in the decline.
Clinton toward the end offered tariffs. But the trump campaign hit back with what turned
out to be a pretty strong counter attack – ""How's she going to get tough on China?" said Trump
economic advisor Peter Navarro on CNN's Quest Means Business. He notes that some of Clinton's
economic advisors have supported TPP or even worked on it. ""
Both Republican Party and Democratic party degenerated into the racket. Neoliberal racket. It really goes back to
what Eric Hoffer
said: "Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into
a
racket ." It's a racket.
Notable quotes:
"... That's because I assumed that everybody realized that America standing up to the Soviet Union was, in some sense, a nationalist resistance. Americans just didn't want to be conquered by Russians. ..."
"... In contrast to all that, Donald Trump said: ..."
"... I view the word conservative as a derivative of the word conserve. We want to converse our money. We want to conserve our wealth We want to conserve our country. We want to save our country. ..."
"... it turned out that American Conservatism was just a transitional phase. And now it's over. ..."
"... terrified of the neoconservatives who didn't like the emphasis on immigration because of their own ethnic agenda, and he was very inclined to listen to the Congressional Republicans, who didn't want to talk about immigration because they are terrified too-because they are cowards, basically-and also because they have big corporate donors . And, I think that is part of the explanation. ..."
"... I think that goes to what happened to the American Conservative Movement. It wasn't tortured; it was bought . It was simply bought . I think the dominance of the Donorist class and the Donorist Party is one of the things that has emerged analytically within the past 10 years. ..."
"... So I think that is the reason for the end of the American Conservative Movement. It really goes back to what Eric Hoffer said: "Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket ." It's a racket. ..."
"... But the good news is, as John Derbyshire said a few minutes ago, that ultimately Conservatism -- or Rightism -- is a personality type. It underlies politics and it will crop up again-just as, to our astonishment, Donald Trump has cropped up. ..."
The core of conservatism, it seems to me, is this recognition and acceptance of the elemental emotions.
Conservatism understands that it is futile to debate the feelings of the
mother for her child-or such human instincts as the bonds of
tribe
,
nation , even
race . Of course, all are painfully vulnerable to deconstruction by rationalistic intellectuals-but
not, ultimately, to destruction. These commitments are Jungian rather than Freudian, not irrational
but a-rational-beyond the reach of reason.
This is one of the problems, by the way, with the American Conservative Movement. I was completely
astonished when it fell apart at the end of the Cold War -- I never thought it would. That's
because I assumed that everybody realized that America standing up to the Soviet Union was, in some
sense, a nationalist resistance. Americans just didn't want to be
conquered by Russians.
But, it turned out that there were people who had joined the anti-Communist coalition who
harbored messianic fantasies about
"global democracy" and and America as the first
"universal nation" (i.e. polity. Nation-states must have a specific ethnic core.) They also had
uses for the American military which hadn't occurred to me. But they didn't care about America-about
America as a nation-state, the political expression of a particular people, the Historic American
Nation. In fact, in some cases, it made them feel uneasy.
I thought about this this spring when Trump was debating in New Hampshire. ABC's John Muir asked
three candidates: "What does it mean to be Conservative?"
I'm going to quote from John Kasich:
blah, blah, blah, blah. Balanced budgets-tax cuts-jobs-"but once we have economic growth I believe
we have to reach out to people who live in the shadows." By this he meant, not illegal aliens, although
he did
favor Amnesty , but "the mentally ill, the drug addicted, the working poor [and] our friends
in the minority community."
That's because the Republican Party has lots of friends in the minority community.
Marco Rubio said:
it's about three things. The first is conservatism is about limited government, especially
at the federal level It's about free enterprise And it's about a strong national defense. It's
about believing, unlike Barack Obama, that the world is a safer and a better place when America
is the strongest military and the strongest nation on this planet. That's conservatism.
Kasich and Rubio's answers, of course, are not remotely "conservative" but utilitarian, economistic,
classical liberal. Note that Rubio even felt obliged to justify "strong national defense" in universalistic,
Wilsonian terms: it will make the world "a safer and a better place."
In contrast to all that, Donald Trump said:
I view the word conservative as a derivative of the word conserve. We want to converse
our money. We want to conserve our wealth We want to conserve our country. We want to save our
country.
Now, this caused a considerable amount of harrumphing among Conservative Inc. intellectuals and
various Republican politicians. Somebody called
John Hart , who writes a
thing called Opportunity Lives -has anybody heard of it? It's a very well-funded
Libertarianism Inc. website in Washington. Nobody has heard of it? Good. Hart said:
Trump's answer may have been how conservatives described themselves once: in 1957. But today's
modern conservative movement isn't a hoarding or protectionist philosophy. Conservatism isn't
about conserving; it's about growth.
"Growth"? Well, I don't think so. And not just because I remember
1957 . As I said,I think it turned out that American Conservatism was just a transitional
phase. And now it's over.
Why did it end? After
Buckley purged John O'Sullivan and all of us
immigration patriots from
National
Review in 1997, we spent a lot of time thinking about why he had done this. And there were
a lot of complicated psychological explanations: Bill was getting old, he was
jealous of his successor, the new Editor, John O'Sullivan, he was terrified of the
neoconservatives who didn't like the emphasis on immigration because of their
own ethnic
agenda, and he was very inclined to listen to the Congressional Republicans, who didn't want
to talk about immigration because they are terrified too-because they are cowards, basically-and
also because they have
big corporate donors . And, I think that is part of the explanation.
But
there was a similar discussion in the 1950s and 1960s, which I'm old enough to remember, about why
the Old Bolsheviks all
testified against themselves in the treason trials during
Stalin's Great
Purge . They all admitted to the most fantastic things-that they had been spies for the Americans
and the British and the capitalist imperialists all along, that they'd plotted to assassinate Comrade
Stalin. And there were all kinds of discussions as to why this was, and in fact a wonderful novel,
Darkness At Noon [
PDF
] by
Arthur Koestler , one of the
most remarkable novels in the last century, describing the exquisite psychological process by
which an old Bolshevik in prison came to the conclusion that he was going to have to say all these
things in the long-term interest of the Revolution.
Do you agree about Darkness At Noon , Paul? [ Paul Gottfried indicates assent
]
In other words, there is no complex
psychological explanation : they were just tortured. I think that goes to what happened to the
American Conservative Movement. It wasn't tortured; it was
bought . It was simply
bought . I think the dominance of the
Donorist class and the
Donorist Party is one of the things that has
emerged analytically within the past 10 years.
When I was first writing about American politics and got involved in American politics–and
I started by working for John Ashbrook (not
Ashcroft , Ash brook
) against
Nixon in 1972 –nobody thought about donors. We have only gradually become conscious of them.
And their absolute dominant role, and their ability to prohibit policy discussions, has really only
become clear in the last five to ten years.
I think, in retrospect, with
Buckley
, who
subsidized his lifestyle out of the National Review to a scandalous extent, that there
was some financial transaction. I think that now.
It's an open secret that
Rich Lowry did not want to come out and with
this anti-Trump issue that they published earlier this year, but he was
compelled to do it. That's not the type of thing that Lowry would normally do. He wouldn't take
that kind of risk, he's a courtier, he would never take the risk of not being invited to ride in
Trump's limousine in the case that Trump won. But, apparently, someone forced him to do it. And I
think that someone was a
donor and I think I know who it was.
So I think that is the reason for the end of the American Conservative Movement. It really
goes back to what
Eric Hoffer
said: "Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates
into a
racket ." It's a racket.
But the good news is, as
John Derbyshire said a few
minutes ago, that ultimately Conservatism -- or Rightism -- is a personality type. It underlies politics
and it will crop up again-just as, to our astonishment, Donald Trump has cropped up.
"... " Like [Andrew] Jackson's populism, we're going to build an entirely new political movement ," he says. "It's everything related to jobs. The conservatives are going to go crazy. I'm the guy pushing a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan. With negative interest rates throughout the world, it's the greatest opportunity to rebuild everything. Ship yards, iron works, get them all jacked up. We're just going to throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks . It will be as exciting as the 1930s, greater than the Reagan revolution - conservatives, plus populists, in an economic nationalist movement." ..."
"... Nobody in the Democratic party listened to his speeches, so they had no idea he was delivering such a compelling and powerful economic message. He shows up 3.5 hours late in Michigan at 1 in the morning and has 35,000 people waiting in the cold. When they got [Clinton] off the donor circuit she went to Temple University and they drew 300 or 400 kids." ..."
"... Bannon on Murdoch: "Rupert is a globalist and never understood Trump" ..."
"... " The globalists gutted the American working class and created a middle class in Asia. The issue now is about Americans looking to not get f-ed over . If we deliver-" by "we" he means the Trump White House "-we'll get 60 percent of the white vote, and 40 percent of the black and Hispanic vote and we'll govern for 50 years. That's what the Democrats missed, they were talking to these people with companies with a $9 billion market cap employing nine people. It's not reality. They lost sight of what the world is about ." ..."
"... ... I'd say, IMO, Steve Bannon is more than an excellent choice for President Trump's team ... Bannon's education, business, work and military experience speaks highly of his abilities ... I wish the MSM would stop labelling him a white nationalist and concentrate on his successful accomplishments and what he could contribute to Trump's cabinet. ..."
Bannon next discusses the "battle line" inside America's great divide.
He absolutely - mockingly - rejects the idea that this is a racial line. "I'm not a white nationalist,
I'm a nationalist. I'm an economic nationalist, " he tells me. " The globalists gutted the American
working class and created a middle class in Asia. The issue now is about Americans looking to
not get f-ed over . If we deliver-" by "we" he means the Trump White House "-we'll get 60 percent
of the white vote, and 40 percent of the black and Hispanic vote and we'll govern for 50 years.
That's what the Democrats missed, they were talking to these people with companies with a $9 billion
market cap employing nine people. It's not reality. They lost sight of what the world is about
."
Bannon's vision: an "entirely new political movement", one which drives the conservatives crazy.
As to how monetary policy will coexist with fiscal stimulus, Bannon has a simple explanation: he
plans to "rebuild everything" courtesy of negative interest rates and cheap debt throughout the world.
Those rates may not be negative for too long.
" Like [Andrew] Jackson's populism, we're going to build an entirely new political movement
," he says. "It's everything related to jobs. The conservatives are going to go crazy. I'm the
guy pushing a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan. With negative interest rates throughout the
world, it's the greatest opportunity to rebuild everything. Ship yards, iron works, get them all
jacked up. We're just going to throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks . It will be
as exciting as the 1930s, greater than the Reagan revolution - conservatives, plus populists,
in an economic nationalist movement."
How Bannon describes Trump: " an ideal vessel"
It is less than obvious how Bannon, now the official strategic brains of the Trump operation,
syncs with his boss, famously not too strategic. When Bannon took over the campaign from Paul
Manafort, there were many in the Trump circle who had resigned themselves to the inevitability
of the candidate listening to no one . But here too was a Bannon insight: When the campaign seemed
most in free fall or disarray, it was perhaps most on target. While Clinton was largely absent
from the campaign trail and concentrating on courting her donors, Trump - even after the leak
of the grab-them-by-the-pussy audio - was speaking to ever-growing crowds of thirty-five or forty
thousand. "He gets it, he gets it intuitively," says Bannon, perhaps still surprised he has found
such an ideal vessel. "You have probably the greatest orator since William Jennings Bryan, coupled
with an economic populist message and two political parties that are so owned by the donors that
they don't speak to their audience. But he speaks in a non-political vernacular, he communicates
with these people in a very visceral way. Nobody in the Democratic party listened to his speeches,
so they had no idea he was delivering such a compelling and powerful economic message. He shows
up 3.5 hours late in Michigan at 1 in the morning and has 35,000 people waiting in the cold. When
they got [Clinton] off the donor circuit she went to Temple University and they drew 300 or 400
kids."
Bannon on Murdoch: "Rupert is a globalist and never understood Trump"
At that moment, as we talk, there's a knock on the door of Bannon's office, a temporary, impersonal,
middle-level executive space with a hodgepodge of chairs for constant impromptu meetings. Sen.
Ted Cruz, once the Republican firebrand, now quite a small and unassuming figure, has been waiting
patiently for a chat and Bannon excuses himself for a short while. It is clear when we return
to our conversation that it is not just the liberal establishment that Bannon feels he has triumphed
over, but the conservative one too - not least of all Fox News and its owners, the Murdochs. "They
got it more wrong than anybody," he says. " Rupert is a globalist and never understood Trump.
To him, Trump is a radical. Now they'll go centrist and build the network around Megyn Kelly."
Bannon recounts, with no small irony, that when Breitbart attacked Kelly after her challenges
to Trump in the initial Republican debate, Fox News chief Roger Ailes - whom Bannon describes
as an important mentor, and who Kelly's accusations of sexual harassment would help topple in
July - called to defend her. Bannon says he warned Ailes that Kelly would be out to get him too
.
Finally, Bannon on how he sees himself in the administration:
Bannon now becomes part of a two-headed White House political structure, with Reince Priebus
- in and out of Bannon's office as we talk - as chief of staff, in charge of making the trains
run on time, reporting to the president, and Bannon as chief strategist, in charge of vision,
goals, narrative and plan of attack, reporting to the president too. Add to this the ambitions
and whims of the president himself, and the novel circumstance of one who has never held elective
office, the agenda of his highly influential family and the end runs of a party significant parts
of which were opposed to him, and you have quite a complex court that Bannon will have to finesse
to realize his reign of the working man and a trillion dollars in new spending.
"I am," he says, with relish, "Thomas Cromwell in the court of the Tudors."
" The globalists gutted the American working class and created a middle class in Asia.
The issue now is about Americans looking to not get f-ed over . If we deliver-" by "we" he
means the Trump White House "-we'll get 60 percent of the white vote, and 40 percent of the
black and Hispanic vote and we'll govern for 50 years. That's what the Democrats missed, they
were talking to these people with companies with a $9 billion market cap employing nine people.
It's not reality. They lost sight of what the world is about ."
... I'd say, IMO, Steve Bannon is more than an excellent choice for President Trump's team
... Bannon's education, business, work and military experience speaks highly of his abilities
... I wish the MSM would stop labelling him a white nationalist and concentrate on his successful
accomplishments and what he could contribute to Trump's cabinet.
........ from wiki ...
Stephen Kevin Bannon was born on November 27, 1953, in Norfolk, Virginia into a working-class,
Irish Catholic, pro-Kennedy, pro-union family of Democrats. He graduated from Virginia Tech in
1976 and holds a master's degree in National Security Studies from Georgetown University. In 1983,
Bannon received an M.B.A. degree with honors from Harvard Business School.
Bannon was an officer in the United States Navy, serving on the destroyer USS Paul F. Foster
as a Surface Warfare Officer in the Pacific Fleet and stateside as a special assistant to the
Chief of Naval Operations at the Pentagon.
After his military service, Bannon worked at Goldman Sachs as an investment banker in the Mergers
& Acquisitions Department. In 1990, Bannon and several colleagues from Goldman Sachs launched
Bannon & Co., a boutique investment bank specializing in media. Through Bannon & Co., Bannon negotiated
the sale of Castle Rock Entertainment to Ted Turner. As payment, Bannon & Co. accepted a financial
stake in five television shows, including Seinfeld. Société Générale purchased Bannon & Co. in
1998.
In 1993, while still managing Bannon & Co., Bannon was made acting director of Earth-science
research project Biosphere 2 in Oracle, Arizona. Under Bannon, the project shifted emphasis from
researching space exploration and colonization towards pollution and global warming. He left the
project in 1995.
After the sale of Bannon & Co., Bannon became an executive producer in the film and media industry
in Hollywood, California. He was executive producer for Julie Taymor's 1999 film Titus. Bannon
became a partner with entertainment industry executive Jeff Kwatinetz at The Firm, Inc., a film
and television management company. In 2004, Bannon made a documentary about Ronald Reagan titled
In the Face of Evil. Through the making and screening of this film, Bannon was introduced to Peter
Schweizer and publisher Andrew Breitbart. He was involved in the financing and production of a
number of films, including Fire from the Heartland: The Awakening of the Conservative Woman, The
Undefeated (on Sarah Palin), and Occupy Unmasked. Bannon also hosts a radio show (Breitbart News
Daily) on a Sirius XM satellite radio channel.
Bannon is also executive chairman and co-founder of the Government Accountability Institute,
where he helped orchestrate the publication of the book Clinton Cash. In 2015, Bannon was ranked
No. 19 on Mediaite's list of the "25 Most Influential in Political News Media 2015".
Bannon convinced Goldman Sachs to invest in a company known as Internet Gaming Entertainment.
Following a lawsuit, the company rebranded as Affinity Media and Bannon took over as CEO. From
2007 through 2011, Bannon was chairman and CEO of Affinity Media.
Bannon became a member of the board of Breitbart News. In March 2012, after founder Andrew
Breitbart's death, Bannon became executive chairman of Breitbart News LLC, the parent company
of Breitbart News. Under his leadership, Breitbart took a more alt-right and nationalistic approach
towards its agenda. Bannon declared the website "the platform for the alt-right" in 2016. Bannon
identifies as a conservative. Speaking about his role at Breitbart, Bannon said: "We think of
ourselves as virulently anti-establishment, particularly 'anti-' the permanent political class."
The New York Times described Breitbart News under Bannon's leadership as a "curiosity of the
fringe right wing", with "ideologically driven journalists", that is a source of controversy "over
material that has been called misogynist, xenophobic and racist." The newspaper also noted how
Breitbart was now a "potent voice" for Donald Trump's presidential campaign.
Bannon: " The globalists gutted the American working class ..the Democrats were talking
to these people with companies with a $9 billion market cap employing nine people. It's not reality.
They lost sight of what the world is about ."
Well said. Couldn't agree more.
Bannon: " Like [Andrew] Jackson's populism, we're going to build an entirely new political
movement I'm the guy pushing a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan.
Dear Mr. Bannon, it has to be way more than $1trillion in 10 years. Obama's $831 billion American
Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) didn't make up the difference for all the job lost
in 2007/08. Manufacturing alone lost about 9 million jobs since 1979, when it peaked.
Trump needs to go Ronald Reagan 180% deficit spending. If Trump runs 100% like Obama, Trump
will fail as well.
Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make
the Rich Richer
By Dean Baker
Introduction: Trading in Myths
In winter 2016, near the peak of Bernie Sanders' bid for the Democratic presidential
nomination, a new line became popular among the nation's policy elite: Bernie Sanders is
the enemy of the world's poor. Their argument was that Sanders, by pushing trade policies
to help U.S. workers, specifically manufacturing workers, risked undermining the well-being
of the world's poor because exporting manufactured goods to the United States and other
wealthy countries is their path out of poverty. The role model was China, which by
exporting has largely eliminated extreme poverty and drastically reduced poverty among its
population. Sanders and his supporters would block the rest of the developing world from
following the same course.
This line, in its Sanders-bashing permutation, appeared early on in Vox, the
millennial-oriented media upstart, and was quickly picked up elsewhere (Beauchamp 2016).
After all, it was pretty irresistible. The ally of the downtrodden and enemy of the rich
was pushing policies that would condemn much of the world to poverty.
The story made a nice contribution to preserving the status quo, but it was less
valuable if you respect honesty in public debate.
The problem in the logic of this argument should be apparent to anyone who has taken an
introductory economics course. It assumes that the basic problem of manufacturing workers
in the developing world is the need for someone who will buy their stuff. If people in the
United States don't buy it, then the workers will be out on the street and growth in the
developing world will grind to a halt. In this story, the problem is that we don't have
enough people in the world to buy stuff. In other words, there is a shortage of demand. But
is it really true that no one else in the world would buy the stuff produced by
manufacturing workers in the developing world if they couldn't sell it to consumers in the
United States? Suppose people in the developing world bought the stuff they produced
raising their living standards by raising their own consumption.
That is how the economics is supposed to work. In the standard theory, general shortages
of demand are not a problem. Economists have traditionally assumed that economies tended
toward full employment. The basic economic constraint was a lack of supply. The problem was
that we couldn't produce enough goods and services, not that we were producing too much and
couldn't find anyone to buy them. In fact, this is why all the standard models used to
analyze trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership assume trade doesn't affect
total employment. Economies adjust so that shortages of demand are not a problem.
In this standard story (and the Sanders critics are people who care about textbook
economics), capital flows from slow-growing rich countries, where it is relatively
plentiful and so gets a low rate of return, to fast-growing poor countries, where it is
scarce and gets a high rate of return.
[Figure 1-1] Theoretical and actual capital flows.
So the United States, Japan, and the European Union should be running large trade
surpluses, which is what an outflow of capital means. Rich countries like ours should be
lending money to developing countries, providing them with the means to build up their
capital stock and infrastructure while they use their own resources to meet their people's
basic needs.
This wasn't just theory. That story accurately described much of the developing world,
especially Asia, through the 1990s. Countries like Indonesia and Malaysia were experiencing
rapid annual growth of 7.8 percent and 9.6 percent, respectively, even as they ran large
trade deficits, just over 2 percent of GDP each year in Indonesia and almost 5 percent in
Malaysia.
These trade deficits probably were excessive, and a crisis of confidence hit East Asia
and much of the developing world in the summer of 1997. The inflow of capital from rich
countries slowed or reversed, making it impossible for the developing countries to sustain
the fixed exchange rates most had at the time. One after another, they were forced to
abandon their fixed exchange rates and turn to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for
help.
Rather than promulgating policies that would allow developing countries to continue the
textbook development path of growth driven by importing capital and running trade deficits,
the IMF made debt repayment a top priority. The bailout, under the direction of the Clinton
administration Treasury Department, required developing countries to switch to large trade
surpluses (Radelet and Sachs 2000, O'Neil 1999).
The countries of East Asia would be far richer today had they been allowed to continue
on the growth path of the early and mid-1990s, when they had large trade deficits. Four of
the five would be more than twice as rich, and the fifth, Vietnam, would be almost 50
percent richer. South Korea and Malaysia would have higher per capita incomes today than
the United States.
[Figure 1-2] Per capita income of East Asian countries, actual vs. continuing on 1990s
growth path.
In the wake of the East Asia bailout, countries throughout the developing world decided
they had to build up reserves of foreign exchange, primarily dollars, in order to avoid
ever facing the same harsh bailout terms as the countries of East Asia. Building up
reserves meant running large trade surpluses, and it is no coincidence that the U.S. trade
deficit has exploded, rising from just over 1 percent of GDP in 1996 to almost 6 percent in
2005. The rise has coincided with the loss of more than 3 million manufacturing jobs,
roughly 20 percent of employment in the sector.
There was no reason the textbook growth pattern of the 1990s could not have continued.
It wasn't the laws of economics that forced developing countries to take a different path,
it was the failed bailout and the international financial system. It would seem that the
enemy of the world's poor is not Bernie Sanders but rather the engineers of our current
globalization policies.
There is a further point in this story that is generally missed: it is not only the
volume of trade flows that is determined by policy, but also the content. A major push in
recent trade deals has been to require stronger and longer patent and copyright protection.
Paying the fees imposed by these terms, especially for prescription drugs, is a huge burden
on the developing world. Bill Clinton would have much less need to fly around the world for
the Clinton Foundation had he not inserted the TRIPS (Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual
Property Rights) provisions in the World Trade Organization (WTO) that require developing
countries to adopt U.S.-style patent protections. Generic drugs are almost always cheap -
patent protection makes drugs expensive. The cancer and hepatitis drugs that sell for tens
or hundreds of thousands of dollars a year would sell for a few hundred dollars in a free
market. Cheap drugs would be more widely available had the developed world not forced TRIPS
on the developing world.
Of course, we have to pay for the research to develop new drugs or any innovation. We
also have to compensate creative workers who produce music, movies, and books. But there
are efficient alternatives to patents and copyrights, and the efforts by the elites in the
United States and other wealthy countries to impose these relics on the developing world is
just a mechanism for redistributing income from the world's poor to Pfizer, Microsoft, and
Disney. Stronger and longer patent and copyright protection is not a necessary feature of a
21st century economy.
In textbook trade theory, if a country has a larger trade surplus on payments for
royalties and patent licensing fees, it will have a larger trade deficit in manufactured
goods and other areas. The reason is that, in theory, the trade balance is fixed by
national savings and investment, not by the ability of a country to export in a particular
area. If the trade deficit is effectively fixed by these macroeconomic factors, then more
exports in one area mean fewer exports in other areas. Put another way, income gains for
Pfizer and Disney translate into lost jobs for workers in the steel and auto industries....
It includes this interesting piece on international trade:
"I'll start with my favorite, the complaint that the trade policy advocating by Warren
and Sanders would hurt the poor in the developing world, or to use their words:
"And their ostensible protection of American workers leaves no room to consider the welfare
of poor people elsewhere in the world."
I like this one because it turns standard economic theory on its head to advance the
interests of the rich and powerful. In the economic textbooks, rich countries like the
United States are supposed to be exporting capital to the developing world. This provides
them the means to build up their capital stock and infrastructure, while maintaining the
living standards of their populations. This is the standard economic story where the
problem is scarcity.
But to justify trade policies that have harmed tens of millions of U.S. workers, either
by costing them jobs or depressing their wages, the Post discards standard economics and
tells us the problem facing people in the developing world is that there is too much stuff.
If we didn't buy the goods produced in the developing world then there would just be a
massive glut of unsold products.
In the standard theory the people in the developing world buy their own stuff, with rich
countries like the U.S. providing the financing. It actually did work this way in the
1990s, up until the East Asian financial crisis in 1997. In that period, countries like
Malaysia, Vietnam, and Indonesia were growing very rapidly while running large trade
deficits. This pattern of growth was ended by the terms of the bailout imposed on these
countries by the U.S. Treasury Department through the International Monetary Fund.
The harsh terms of the bailout forced these and other developing countries to reverse
the standard textbook path and start running large trade surpluses. This post-bailout
period was associated with slower growth for these countries. In other words, the poor of
the developing world suffered from the pattern of trade the Post advocates. If they had
continued on the pre-bailout path they would be much richer today. In fact, South Korea and
Malaysia would be richer than the United States if they had maintained their pre-bailout
growth rate over the last two decades. (This is the topic of the introduction to my new
book, Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make
the Rich Richer, it's free.)"
Not sure that I fully agree with him, but I do agree that trade imbalances and
mercantilism is a large part of the problem.
The Washington Post editorial page decided to lecture readers * on the meaning of
progressivism. Okay, that is nowhere near as bad as a Trump presidency, but really, did we
need this?
The editorial gives us a potpourri of neo-liberal (yes, the term is appropriate here)
platitudes, all of which we have heard many times before and are best half true. For
framing, the villains are Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren who it tells us "are
embracing principles that are not genuinely progressive."
I'll start with my favorite, the complaint that the trade policy advocating by Warren
and Sanders would hurt the poor in the developing world, or to use their words:
"And their ostensible protection of American workers leaves no room to consider the
welfare of poor people elsewhere in the world."
I like this one because it turns standard economic theory on its head to advance the
interests of the rich and powerful. In the economic textbooks, rich countries like the
United States are supposed to be exporting capital to the developing world. This provides
them the means to build up their capital stock and infrastructure, while maintaining the
living standards of their populations. This is the standard economic story where the
problem is scarcity.
But to justify trade policies that have harmed tens of millions of U.S. workers, either
by costing them jobs or depressing their wages, the Post discards standard economics and
tells us the problem facing people in the developing world is that there is too much stuff.
If we didn't buy the goods produced in the developing world then there would just be a
massive glut of unsold products.
In the standard theory the people in the developing world buy their own stuff, with rich
countries like the U.S. providing the financing. It actually did work this way in the
1990s, up until the East Asian financial crisis in 1997. In that period, countries like
Malaysia, Vietnam, and Indonesia were growing very rapidly while running large trade
deficits. This pattern of growth was ended by the terms of the bailout imposed on these
countries by the U.S. Treasury Department through the International Monetary Fund.
The harsh terms of the bailout forced these and other developing countries to reverse
the standard textbook path and start running large trade surpluses. This post-bailout
period was associated with slower growth for these countries. In other words, the poor of
the developing world suffered from the pattern of trade the Post advocates. If they had
continued on the pre-bailout path they would be much richer today. In fact, South Korea and
Malaysia would be richer than the United States if they had maintained their pre-bailout
growth rate over the last two decades. (This is the topic of the introduction to my new
book, "Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to
Make the Rich Richer," ** it's free.)
It is also important to note that the Post is only bothered by forms of protection that
might help working class people. The United States prohibits foreign doctors from
practicing in the United States unless they complete a U.S. residency program. (The total
number of slots are tightly restricted with only a small fraction open to foreign trained
doctors.) This is a classic protectionist measure. No serious person can believe that the
only way for a person to be a competent doctor is to complete a U.S. residency program. It
costs the United States around $100 billion a year ($700 per family) in higher medical
expenses. Yet, we never hear a word about this or other barriers that protect the most
highly paid professionals from the same sort of international competition faced by
steelworkers and textile workers.
Moving on, we get yet another Post tirade on Social Security.
"You can expand benefits for everyone, as Ms. Warren favors. Prosperous retirees who
live mostly off their well-padded 401(k)s will appreciate what to them will feel like a
small bonus, if they notice it. But spreading wealth that way will make it harder to find
the resources for the vulnerable elderly who truly depend on Social Security.
"But demographics - the aging of the population - cannot be wished away. In the 1960s,
about five taxpayers were helping to support each Social Security recipient, and the
economy was growing about 6 percent annually. Today there are fewer than three workers for
each pensioner, and the growth rate even following the 2008 recession has averaged about 2
percent . On current trends, 10 years from now the federal government will be spending
almost all its money on Medicare, Social Security and other entitlements and on interest
payments on the debt, leaving less and less for schools, housing and job training. There is
nothing progressive about that."
There are all sorts of misleading or wrong claims here. First, the economy did not grow
"about 6 percent annually" in the 1960s. There were three years in which growth did exceed
6.0 percent, and it was a very prosperous decade, but growth only averaged 4.6 percent from
1960 to 1970.
I suppose we should be happy that the Post is at least getting closer to the mark. A
2007 editorial *** praising The North American Free Trade Agreement told readers that
Mexico's GDP "has more than quadrupled since 1987." The International Monetary Fund data
**** put the gain at 83 percent. So by comparison, they are doing pretty good with the 6
percent growth number for the sixties.
But getting to the demographics, we did go from more than five workers for every retiree
to less than three today, and this number is projected to fall further to around 2.0
workers per retiree in the next fifteen years. This raises the obvious question, so what?
The economy did not collapse even as we saw the fall from 5 workers per retiree to less
than 3, so something really really bad happens when it falls further? We did raise taxes to
cover the additional cost and we will probably have to raise taxes in the future.
We get that the Post doesn't like tax increases (no one does), but this hardly seems
like the end of the world. The Social Security Trustees project ***** that real wages will
rise on average by more than 34 percent over the next two decades. Suppose we took back
5–10 percent of these projected wage gains through tax increases (still leaving workers
with wages that are more than 30 percent higher than they are today), what is the big
problem?
Of course most workers have not seen their wages rise in step with the economy's growth
over the last four decades. This is a huge issue which is the sort of thing that
progressives should be and are focusing on. But the Post would rather distract us with the
possibility that at some point in the future we may be paying a somewhat higher Social
Security tax.
The Post's route for savings is also classic misdirection. It tells how about
high-living seniors who get so much money from their 401(k)s they don't even notice their
Social Security checks. Only a bit more than 4.0 percent of the over 65 population has
non-Social Security income of more than $80,000 a year. If the point is to have substantial
savings from means-testing it would be necessary to hit people with incomes around $40,000
a year or even lower. That is not what most people consider wealthy.
We could have substantial savings on Medicare by pushing down the pay of doctors and
reducing the prices of drugs and medical equipment. The latter could be done by
substituting public financing for research and development for government granted patent
monopolies (also discussed in Rigged). These items would almost invariably be cheap in a
free market. But the Post seems uninterested in ways to save money that could affect the
incomes of the rich.
One can quibble with whether the current benefits for middle income people are right or
should be somewhat higher or lower, but it is ridiculous to argue that raising them $50 a
month, as proposed by Senator Warren, will break the bank.
Then we have the issue of free college. The Post raises the issue, pushed by Senator
Sanders in his presidential campaign, and then tells readers:
"Our answer - we would argue, the progressive answer - is that there are people in
society with far greater needs than that upper-middle-class family in Fairfax County that
would be relieved of its tuition burden at the College of William & Mary if Mr. Sanders got
his wish."
There are two points to be made here. First there is extensive research ****** showing
that many children from low- and moderate-income families hugely over-estimate the cost of
college, failing to realize that they would be eligible for financial aid that would make
it free or nearly free. This means that the current structure is preventing many relatively
disadvantaged children from attending college. Arguably better education on the
opportunities to get aid would solve this problem, but the problem has existed for a long
time and better education has not done much to change the picture thus far.
The second point is that the process of determining eligibility for aid is itself
costly. Many children have divorced parents, with a non-custodial parent often not anxious
to pay for their children's college. Perhaps it is appropriate that they should pay, but
forcing payment is not an easy task and it doesn't make sense to make the children in such
situations suffer.
In many ways, the free college solution is likely to be the easiest, with the tax coming
out of the income of higher earners, the vast majority of whom will be the beneficiaries of
this policy. There are ways to save on paying for college. My favorite is limiting the pay
of anyone at a public school to the salary of the president of the United States ($400,000
a year). We can also deny the privilege of tax exempt status to private universities or
other non-profits that don't accept a similar salary cap. These folks can pay their top
executives whatever they want, but they shouldn't ask the taxpayers to subsidize their
exorbitant pay packages.
There is one final issue in the column worth noting. At one point it makes a pitch for
the virtues of economic growth then tells readers:
"It's not in conflict with the goal of redistribution."
At least some of us progressive types are not particularly focused on "redistribution."
The focus of my book and much of my other writing is on the way that the market has been
structured to redistribute income upward, compared with the structures in place in the
quarter century after World War II. Is understandable that people who are basically very
satisfied with this upward redistribution of market income would not want this rigging of
the market even to be discussed, but serious progressives do.
Although I like much of what
Dean Baker, I don't like his term "loser liberalism", nor do I think his de-emphasis on
redistribution useful. Au contraire, I think talking about redistribution is absolutely
essential if we are to move to sustainable world. We can no longer be certain that per
person GDP growth will be sufficient to be able to ignore distribution or to rely on
"predistribution".
The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive
By Dean Baker
Upward Redistribution of Income: It Didn't Just Happen
Money does not fall up. Yet the United States has experienced a massive upward
redistribution of income over the last three decades, leaving the bulk of the workforce
with little to show from the economic growth since 1980. This upward redistribution was not
the result of the natural workings of the market. Rather, it was the result of deliberate
policy, most of which had the support of the leadership of both the Republican and
Democratic parties.
Unfortunately, the public and even experienced progressive political figures are not
well informed about the key policies responsible for this upward redistribution, even
though they are not exactly secrets. The policies are so well established as conventional
economic policy that we tend to think of them as incontrovertibly virtuous things, but each
has a dark side. An anti-inflation policy by the Federal Reserve Board, which relies on
high interest rates, slows growth and throws people out of work. Major trade deals hurt
manufacturing workers by putting them in direct competition with low-paid workers in the
developing world. A high dollar makes U.S. goods uncompetitive in world markets.
Almost any economist would acknowledge these facts, but few economists have explored
their implications and explained them to the general public. As a result, most of us have
little understanding of the economic policies that have the largest impact on our jobs, our
homes, and our lives. Instead, public debate and the most hotly contested legislation in
Congress tend to be about issues that will have relatively little impact.
This lack of focus on crucial economic issues is a serious problem from the standpoint
of advancing a progressive agenda....
What is the Democratic Party's former constituency of labor and progressive reformers to do?
Are they to stand by and let the party be captured in Hillary's wake by Robert Rubin's Goldman
Sachs-Citigroup gang that backed her and Obama?
The 2016 election sounded the death knell for the identity politics. Its aim was to persuade
voters not to think of their identity in economic terms, but to think of themselves as women or
as racial and ethnic groups first and foremost, not as having common economic interests. This
strategy to distract voters from economic policies has obviously failed...
This election showed that voters have a sense of when they're being lied to. After eight years of
Obama's demagogy, pretending to support the people but delivering his constituency to his
financial backers on Wall Street. 'Identity politics' has given way to the stronger force of
economic distress. Mobilizing identity politics behind a Wall Street program will no longer
work."
By Michael Hudson
Tuesday, November 15, 2016
..................
The danger of not taking this opportunity to clean out the party now
The Democratic Party can save itself only by focusing on economic issues – in a way that reverses
its neoliberal stance under Obama, and indeed going back to Bill Clinton's pro-Wall Street administration.
The Democrats need to do what Britain's Labour Party did by cleaning out Tony Blair's Thatcherites.
As Paul Craig Roberts wrote over the weekend: "Change cannot occur if the displaced ruling class
is left intact after a revolution against them. We have proof of this throughout South America. Every
revolution by the indigenous people has left unmolested the Spanish ruling class, and every revolution
has been overthrown by collusion between the ruling class and Washington." Otherwise the Democrats
will be left as an empty shell.
Now is the time for Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and the few other progressives who have not
been kept out of office by the DNC to make their move by appointing their own nominees to the DNC.
If they fail, the Democratic Party is dead.
An indication of how hard the present Democratic Party leadership will fight against this change
of allegiance is reflected in their long fight against Bernie Sanders and other progressives going
back to Dennis Kucinich. The past five days of MoveOn demonstrations sponsored by Hillary's backer
George Soros may be an attempt to preempt the expected push by Bernie's supporters, by backing Howard
Dean for head of the DNC while organizing groups to be called on for what may be an American "Maidan
Spring."
Perhaps some leading Democrats preferred to lose with their Wall Street candidate Hillary than
win with a reformer who would have edged them out of their right-wing positions. But the main problem
was hubris. Hillary's coterie thought they could make their own reality. They believed that hundreds
of millions of dollars of TV and other advertising could sway voters. But eight years of Obama's
rescue of Wall Street instead of the economy was enough for most voters to see how deceptive his
promises had been. And they distrusted Hillary's feigned embrace of Bernie's opposition to the TPP.
The Rust Belt swing states that shifted away from backing Obama for the last two terms are not
racist states. They voted for Obama twice, after all. But seeing his support Wall Street, they had
lost faith in her credibility – and were won by Bernie in his primaries against Hillary.
Donald Trump is thus Obama's legacy. Last week's vote was a backlash. Hillary thought that getting
Barack and Michelle Obama to campaign as her surrogates would help, but it turned out to be the kiss
of death. Obama egged her on by urging voters to "save his legacy" by supporting her as his Third
Term. But voters did not want his legacy of giveaways to the banks, the pharmaceutical and health-insurance
monopolies.
Most of all, it was Hillary's asking voters to ignore her economic loyalty to Wall Street simply
to elect a woman, and her McCarthy-like accusations that Trump was "Putin's candidate" (duly echoed
by Paul Krugman). On Wednesday, Obama's former Ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul tweeted that
"Putin intervened in our elections and succeeded." It was as if the Republicans and even the FBI
were a kind of fifth column for the KGB. Her receptiveness to cutting back Social Security and steering
wage withholding into the stock market did not help – especially her hedge fund campaign contributors.
Compulsory health-insurance fees continue to rise for healthy young people. This was the profit center
Obamacare offered the health-insurance monopoly.
The anti-Trump rallies mobilized by George Soros and MoveOn look like a preemptive attempt to
capture the potential socialist left for the old Clinton divide-and-conquer strategy. The group was
defeated five years ago when it tried to enlist Occupy Wall Street as part of the Democratic Party.
It's attempt to make a comeback right now should be heard as an urgent call to Bernie's supporters
and other "real" Democrats that they need to create an alternative pretty quickly so as not to let
"socialism" be captured by Soros and his apparatchiks carried over from the Clinton campaign.
"Reconstructed" might be a better term. But barging full steam ahead with the Wall Street-friendly
Chuck Schumer, as though nothing has happened, seems particularly obtuse on the part of the Democrats
to me.
There is now a growing movement among the Berniecrats to join the Democratic Socialists of America
and build it up into a much larger and more influential organization capable of exerting real political
pressure on the political process.
"without shutting out the wealthy, business interests, or US Corporations"
I should have been less opaque and simply added that America is a Capitalist based nation and
shutting out its Capitalists, who risk their capital for profit, is exactly like biting the hand
that feeds.
Obviously there are evil wealthy people such as that rich women who was caught asking Mitt Romney
about 'eliminating, reducing or cutting off benefits to the 47% who refuse to work and earn a living'
so her taxes would be cut. Obviously there are evil businesses that are predators and take and do
not give back. Obviously there are evil MNC corporations, Apple is in my sites, that refuse to pay
their fair share of taxes to run this nation.
But, as obviously there are super kind and nice wealthy people, businesses, and corporations that
go out of their way to give back to their communities and the vote for Democrats.
The wealthy, American businesses, and MNC corporations will always be lead, in most places on
earth, by those who want lower taxes and less regulation, that's built into the nature of having
more and the desire to control it rather than give it to a government. IT IS NOT EVIL.
Accept that concept and you know why I believe the Democrat Party must be a welcoming home for
the Capitalist Risk Takers, without any acrimony or embarrassment, but with open arms and respect
for what they've accomplished with their lives.
Why Liberals Should Support a Trump Republican Nomination
By Jonathan Chait
February 5, 2016
8:54 a.m.
The initial stupefaction and dismay with which liberals greeted Donald Trump's candidacy have
slowly given way to feelings of Schadenfreude- reveling in the suffering of others, in this case
the apoplectic members of the Republican Establishment. Are such feelings morally wrong? Or can liberals
enjoy the spectacle unleavened by guilt? As Republican voters start actually voting, is it okay to
be sad - alarmed, even - by the prospect that the Trump hostile takeover of the GOP may fail?
There are three reasons, in descending order of obviousness, for a liberal to earnestly and patriotically
support a Trump Republican nomination. The first, of course, is that he would almost certainly lose.
Trump's ability to stay atop the polls for months, even as critics predicted his demise, has given
him an aura of voodoo magic that frightens some Democrats. But whatever wizardry Trump has used to
defy the laws of political gravity has worked only within his party. Among the electorate as a whole,
he is massively - indeed, historically - unpopular, with unfavorable ratings now hovering around
60 percent and a public persona almost perfectly designed to repel the Obama coalition: racial minorities,
single women, and college-educated whites. It would take a landscape-altering event like a recession
for him to win; even that might not be enough.
Second, a Trump nomination might upend his party. The GOP is a machine that harnesses ethno-nationalistic
fear - of communists, criminals, matrimonial gays, terrorists, snooty cultural elites - to win elections
and then, once in office, caters to its wealthy donor base. (This is why even a social firebrand
like Ted Cruz would privately assure the billionaire investor Paul Singer that he wasn't particularly
concerned about gay-marriage laws.) As its voting base has lost college-educated voters and gained
blue-collar whites, the fissure between the means by which Republicans attain power and the ends
they pursue once they have it has widened.
What has most horrified conservative activists about Trump's rise is how little he or his supporters
seem to care about their anti-government ideology. When presented with the candidate's previous support
for higher taxes on the rich or single-payer insurance, heresies of the highest order, Trump fans
merely shrug. During this campaign, Trump has mostly conformed to party doctrine, but without much
conviction. Trump does not mouth the rote conservative formulation that government is failing because
it can't work and that the solution is to cut it down to size. Instead, he says it is failing because
it is run by idiots and that the solution is for it to instead be run by Trump. About half of Republicans
favor higher taxes on the rich, a position that has zero representation among their party's leaders.
And those Republicans are the most likely to support Trump.
Trump's candidacy represents, among other things, a revolt by the Republican proletariat against
its master class. That is why National Review devoted a cover editorial and 22 columns to denouncing
Trump as a heretic to the conservative movement. A Trump nomination might not actually cleave the
GOP in two, but it could wreak havoc. If, like me, you think the Republican Party in its current
incarnation needs to be burned to the ground and rebuilt anew, Trump is the only one holding a match.
The third reason to prefer a Trump nomination: If he does win, a Trump presidency would probably
wind up doing less harm to the country than a Marco Rubio or a Cruz presidency. It might even, possibly,
do some good.
The Trump campaign may feel like an off-the-grid surrealistic nightmare, The Man in the High Castle
meets Idiocracy. But something like it has happened before. Specifically, it happened in California,
a place where things often happen before they happen to the rest of us, in 2003, when Arnold Schwarzenegger
won the governorship. At the time, the prospect of Schwarzenegger governing America's largest state
struck many of us as just as ghastly as the idea of a Trump presidency seems now. Like Trump, Schwarzenegger
came directly to politics from the celebrity world without bothering to inform himself about public
policy. He campaigned as a vacuous Man of Action in opposition to the Politicians, breezing by all
the specifics as the petty obsessions of his inferiors.
I think the takeaway is that Republican politicians lie and lie and lie and lie even about recent
history. The exasperating thing to me is the complete inability of a Democratic politician to effectively
counter these lies with facts. I wasn't that impressed with Sanders ability to argue effectively
to be honest.
My mind goes back to the abortion question in the last debate. Trump's accusation that Clinton
wanted to rip babies out of mother's wombs at 9 months has no basis in medical science or actual
practice. However, despite being someone who should be an "expert" on women's issues could not articulate
accurately how medically preposterous this notion was or even the facts behind late term abortions
and why women need them at all. Surely a politician of Clinton's "skill" would at least have an anecdote
ready about a woman who had a late-term abortion.
" The exasperating thing to me is the complete inability of a Democratic politician to effectively
counter these lies with facts. "
Yes but the election isn't just about that. Hillary was the establishment candidate and the establishment
isn't delivering. Trump was the outsider - he took over the Republican party - and it didn't matter
that he lies or is obnoxious to a certain type of voter.
Obama is the establishment candidate. However, Obama has charisma and I think we need more politicians
like this. I'm past caring whether or not they are great at policy (apparently Hillary was and she
still couldn't argue effectively against Trump!) I want someone who can effectively argue the case
for progressive policies. We know progressive policies are the right ones we just need someone who
can fight for those policies. They need an encyclopedic knowledge of the shit Republicans have done,
why it is wrong and how progressive policies have worked for the betterment of the 99 percent.
The unheard winning and bold economic agenda
Findings from Roosevelt Institute's Election night survey
....................
Economic change election and the working class vote
Throughout this election cycle, polling conducted on behalf of the Roosevelt Institute and others
revealed the potential of a "rewrite the rules" narrative, message and bold policy agenda to win
broad and deep public support. It fit the times where voters wanted change and were tired of corporate
interests dominating politics at the expense of the middle class.
It was also appealing to swing groups including white college graduates and white working class
women. True, Trump always enjoyed big margins among the white working class men who identified with
him, and they turned out for him early and in growing numbers. But there were points where Clinton
was outperforming Obama with white working class women.
The data does not support that idea that the white working class was inevitably lost, as polls
showed fairly resilient support with white working class women, until the Clinton campaign stopped
talking about economic change and asked people to vote for unity, temperament and experience and
to continue on President Obama's progress. As we shall see, both the Democratic base and white working
class voters are struggling economically and would demand change in their own ways.
Three Myths About Clinton's Defeat in Election 2016 Debunked
Posted on November 14, 2016
By Lambert Strether
This post is not an explainer about why and how Clinton lost (and Trump won). I think we're going
to be sorting that out for awhile. Rather, it's a simple debunking of common talking points by Clinton
loyalists and Democrat Establishment operatives; the sort of talking point you might hear on Twitter,
entirely shorn of caveats and context. For each of the three talking points, I'll present an especially
egregious version of the myth, followed by a rebuttal.
Clinton's responses to the charges about NAFTA were incredibly weak. This is strange considering
she must have known that topic was going to be raised - why was she so unprepared?
llary Clinton was an extraordinarily terrible candidate for the Democrats to run in 2016.
Donald Trump's approval rating is 38 percent. President Obama's just bumped up to 57 percent.
No amount of furious dissembling from humiliated Clinton partisans will convince me that Obama -
and very probably Bernie Sanders* - wouldn't have beaten Trump handily.
So what gives?
Let me start by noting that the overall polls were off, but not by that much. They predicted a
Clinton victory by about about 3 points. And in the popular vote, that prediction was reasonably
close. Clinton is ahead by a bit less than 1 percent nationally, with many votes still to count.
What tipped the election was about 100,000 votes spread across just three states: Wisconsin, Michigan,
and Pennsylvania. Here's where the polls did seriously botch things. Trump won these states by 1,
0.3, and 1.2 points respectively (assuming the close result in Michigan holds). The poll averages
showed Clinton winning these states by roughly 6 points, 3 to 7 points, and 2 to 5 points respectively,
depending on who you ask.
Some people did correctly point to this outcome being a possibility. Remarkably, most of them
relied heavily on gut-check analysis. Zach Carter and Ryan Grim wrote way back in February that Trump
could win by peeling off Rust Belt states, based on little more than intuitions about trade and general
voting patterns. Michael Moore hypothesized something similar. Nathan J. Robinson wrote around the
same time that Clinton would lose because she is a wooden, uninspiring campaigner who was almost
uniquely vulnerable to Trump-style attacks on character and integrity.
Van Jones was perhaps most prescient of all. In June, he argued that Trump would not gaffe himself
out of the election, because outrageous statements help him get attention on social media; that tut-tutting
about his lack of realistic policy would not work, because voters neither know nor care about that;
and that he could potentially win over Rust Belt whites attracted to Trump's anti-trade messaging,
because "we're not paying attention to a big chunk of America that is hurting - that would accept
any change, the bigger the better."
With the benefit of hindsight, I think we can add a couple more factors to the pile. First is
the self-deception of the Clinton campaign and its media sycophants. She did not visit Wisconsin
at all between April and the election, and largely abandoned Obama's working-class message from 2012
in favor of portraying Trump as a dangerous, woman-hating maniac.
They were enabled in this by pro-Clinton publications, which churned out endless slavish portrayals
of Clinton as some kind of wizard of politics and policy, whose grasp of fine detail would surely
deliver the electoral goods. In fact, it turned out that her vaunted algorithm-driven turnout machine
was contacting tons of Trump voters. Paul Romer points to the problem of "mathiness" in economics,
where complicated and intimidating theoretical symbolism is built up without establishing clear linkages
to the real world. Lots of computers, theories, and datasets might be the most sophisticated way
to attack voter turnout, or it might be a way to simply appear sophisticated while dismissing people
whose ideas don't come packaged with a science-y veneer. (Something similar seems to have happened
to the wonky election-simulator people.)
Then there is the Clintons' omnipresent aura of scandal and corruption, which is about 50 percent
unfair double standard and 50 percent totally their fault. The political media has been obsessed
with the Clintons for 20 years to a frankly psychotic degree, particularly given how much worse the
stories about Trump were. On the other hand, the Clintons enable that coverage with a paranoid and
secretive attitude, and an obvious hatred of the press. The Clinton Foundation coverage was unfair
compared to the much worse Trump Foundation, but then again, there was some genuinely skeezy stuff
in there. There's a good chance that FBI Director James Comey's vague letter about emails to congressional
Republicans, which led to an extremely ill-timed media firestorm, tipped the election to Trump. But
then again, she might have avoided the whole story by following the dang rules in the first place.
I always assumed that if Clinton were nominated for president, the race would be dominated by
some weird quasi-scandal that dragged on for month after month. It's not fair, but it is simply the
reality of the Clintons. At some point, one simply has to take that into account.
That brings me to a final point: Clinton's general political affect. She is not a great campaigner
(by her own admission), a rather robotic speaker, and most of all, a dynasty politician who very
obviously got the nomination because the party elite cleared the decks for her. Given how the party
has evolved, her political history was filled with devastating indictments of her judgment and priorities.
Even after getting a reasonably good party platform (after just barely beating back about the most
unlikely primary challenger imaginable), she was a non-credible vehicle for it. Without Obama's mesmerizing
charisma and political energy, her image was defined by things like taking millions of dollars for
secret speeches to Wall Street banks and refusing to release the transcripts. She simply was not
a good fit for the party, and a terrible avatar of the party in a country furious at self-dealing
elite institutions of all kinds.
Hillary Clinton was a heavily compromised candidate and bad campaigner who grossly misjudged the
political terrain, and thus bled just enough of the Obama coalition to let Trump sneak past. If we
ever get to vote again, let's hope the party learns from this epic disaster.
And that, now, is the key question: Where do the Democrats go from here?
This 1000 word article traces the impact of Keynesian theories on the 20th century.
The Global Financial Crisis (GFC) has created awareness of the great gap between academic models
and reality. IMF Chief Economist Olivier Blanchard said that modern DSGE macroeconomic models currently
used for policy decisions are based on assumptions which are profoundly at odds with what we know
about consumers and firms. More than seven different schools of macroeconomic thought contend with
each other, without coming to agreement on any fundamental issue. This bears a striking resemblance
to the post-Depression era when Keynes set out to resolve the "deep divergences of opinion between
fellow economists which have for the time being almost destroyed the practical influence of economic
theory."
Likewise, today, the inability of mainstream economists to predict, understand, explain, or find
remedies for the Global Financial Crisis, has deeply damaged the reputation of economists and economic
theories. Recently, World Bank Chief Economist Paul Romer stated that for more than three decades,
macroeconomics has gone backwards. Since modern macroeconomics bears a strong resemblance to pre-Keynesian
theories, Keynesian theories have fresh relevance, as described below.
In the aftermath of the Great Depression, economic misery was a major factor which led to the
Russian Revolution and the rise of Hitler in Germany. Conventional economic theory held that market
forces would automatically and quickly correct the temporary disequilibrium of high unemployment
and low production in Europe and USA. Keynes argued that high unemployment could persist, and government
interventions in the form of active monetary and fiscal policy were required to correct the economic
problems. Many have suggested that Keynes rescued Capitalism by providing governments with rationale
to intervene on behalf of the workers, thereby preventing socialist or communist revolutions. There
is no doubt that strong and powerful labor movements in Europe and USA derived strength from the
economic misery of the masses, and also took inspiration from the pro-labor and anti-capitalist theories
of Marx. While it is hard to be sure whether Keynes saved capitalism, we can be very sure that Keynes
and Keynesian theories were extremely influential in shaping the economic landscapes of the 20th
Century.
Keynes actually met Roosevelt (FDR) to try to persuade him of the necessity of an aggressive fiscal
policy and of running budget deficits, in order to lift the US economy out of recession. He was only
partially successful. FDR, like nearly all political leaders as well as economists of the time, was
convinced of the necessity of balancing budgets: this is the same 'austerity' being touted today
as the cure for economic problems. Leading economists like Lionel Robinson and Friedrich Hayek argued
in favor of austerity, and said that Keynesian remedies were dangerously wrong. They held the view
that the Great Depression had been caused by excessively easy monetary policies in the pre-Depression
period, and Keynesian interventions in the form of further easy monetary and fiscal policies would
only prolong the agony.
FDR was not quite convinced by Keynes, but was politically savvy enough to announce that he would
not balance the budget on the backs of the American people. Accordingly, he did go against his personal
convictions, as well as his campaign promises of balancing the budget, which he believed to be a
sound and necessary economic policy. Keynes felt that the economic policies of FDR were timid and
hesitant, and prolonged the recession un-necessarily. In light of contemporary experience of the
tremendously aggressive expansionary monetary policy in the post-GFC era, we can see that bolder
steps by FDR would not have caused the harms that he was afraid of. In fact, after the economy recovered
somewhat, FDR went back to conventional wisdom and started reducing budget deficits in 1936. This
created a mini-recession which has been labelled the "Roosevelt Recession of 1937". Duly chastened,
FDR embraced Keynesian policies with greater conviction, and increased deficit spending right up
to the second World War. It was the effectiveness of Keynesian policies that led even arch-enemy
Friedman to state that "We are all Keynesians now," though he later recanted. Indeed, he master-minded
the Monetarist counter-revolution in the 1970's which eventually led to a rejection of Keynesian
insights, and a return to the pre-Keynesian ideas of austerity as a cure for recessions. Forgetting
the hard-learned lessons of Keynes led to a recurrence of problems very similar to those faced by
Keynes in the form of GFC 2007.
Following the GFC, there has been a resurgence of interest in Keynes and Keynesian Theories. In
the "Return of Depression Economics", Krugman argued for the continuing relevance of Keynes, and
stated that we could end the Great Recession immediately by implementing Keynesian policies. China
implemented Keynesian policies, and used a fiscal stimulus of $586 billion spread over two years,
to successfully combat the global recession created by the GFC. Unlike countries forced to implement
austerity, which further wrecked their economies, the Chinese economy was able to perform well in
the aftermath of the GFC. The Shanghai index had been falling sharply since the September 2008 bankruptcy
of Lehman Brothers, but the decline was halted when news of the planned stimulus leaked in late October.
The day after the stimulus was officially announced, the Shanghai index immediately rose by 7.3%,
followed by sustained growth. Speaking at the 2010 Summer Davos, Premier Wen Jiabao also credited
the Keynesian fiscal stimulus for good performance of the Chinese economy over the two years following
the GFC.
Meanwhile, even IMF acknowledged the failure of austerity, the anti-thesis of the Keynesian policy.
Massive damage was caused to Greece, Ireland, Portugal and other economies which were forced to tighten
budgets in response to the recession. In the see-saw battle between Keynesians and Monetarists, after
three decades of darkness, the Keynesian star seems to be rising. Strange as it may seem, many fundamental
insights of Keynes were never actually absorbed by conventional economists. Keynes himself said that
he had the greatest difficulty in escaping the habits of thought created by an economics education.
Mainstream economists never made this escape. As a result, Keynesian theories remain an undiscovered
treasure offering deep insights into current economic conditions.
The Glaring Contradiction at the Heart of Donald Trump's
Economic Policy
http://nyti.ms/2eJFsw4
via @UpshotNYT
NYT - Neil Irwin - November 17
Campaign promises are easy. Governing is hard.
It is a truism that Donald J. Trump and his team will soon learn. And a fascinating example has
emerged since the election, courtesy of global currency markets. It is a study in the kind of complex
trade-offs that Mr. Trump rarely grappled with during his campaign but will face many times a day
in the Oval Office.
A centerpiece of Mr. Trump's campaign was the United States' trade deficits. He pledged to eliminate
them and create a resurgence in American manufacturing.
He has also pledged tax cuts, infrastructure spending and deregulation. That set of policies has
led markets to expect speedier economic growth and thus higher interest rates in coming years. That,
in turn, is driving the value of the dollar higher on currency markets. Since Election Day, the dollar
is up 2.6 percent against an index of six other major currencies. The value of the Mexican peso has
fallen 10 percent against the dollar, a remarkable swing for the United States' third-largest trading
partner.
You don't need to be an economist to see what that means: A pricier dollar makes it harder for
American manufacturers to compete overseas; it gives an advantage to companies that locate operations
elsewhere; and it will, all else being equal, tend to make the trade deficit higher rather than lower.
This is not to suggest that the shift in the currency so far is a major disaster for American
manufacturers and other exporters (though those that ship their goods to Mexico will feel the brunt
of it). There was a bigger rise in the dollar in 2014 and 2015 that damaged export sectors even more.
Photo
A board displaying the exchange rate for the Mexican peso and the dollar in a bank in Mexico City
this week. Credit Henry Romero/Reuters
But let's imagine that Mr. Trump follows through on the policy mix he's hinted at so far: a combination
of loose fiscal policy (think more spending on defense and infrastructure, and tax cuts) and tighter
monetary policy (the Federal Reserve raising interest rates faster than
had seemed likely before the election). At that point, the dollar could move more decisively higher,
creating a tension that the president and his advisers would have to resolve one way or the other.
As a rule of thumb, said Joseph Gagnon, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International
Economics, a 10 percent rise in the dollar would be expected to increase the current account deficit
(a broader concept than trade deficit, but closely related) by 1 to 1.5 percent of G.D.P. in the
ensuing two to three years.
In that scenario, Mr. Trump's pledge to eliminate the $500 billion United States trade deficit
would have just become $180 billion to $270 billion harder.
This is the kind of dilemma presidents face all the time. The Oval Office debate might go something
like this: The Commerce Secretary complains, "Mr. President, this strong dollar is just killing our
manufacturers; they can't compete with this kind of appreciation." The Treasury Secretary, who is
in charge of the currency, responds, "It's a necessary evil, Mr. President; our economy is booming
so much that global investors just can't get enough of United States assets."
When there are these kinds of disputes, the president has to decide. And when a president tries
to find a solution that answers both concerns, there are always complex ripples. For example, "let's
appoint Fed officials who will cut interest rates" might temporarily let you have both a booming
domestic economy and a competitive export sector, but would mean an increase in inflation - which
will make both the bond market and many retired Americans living on fixed incomes unhappy.
The tension between currency policy and trade policy is just one example. Mr. Trump's promises
to repeal Obamacare while keeping some of its most popular features would be hard to carry out in
practice. Virtually every issue in tax policy, diplomacy and regulatory policy features similar complex
trade-offs.
None of this is to say that these tensions are unsolvable, or that Mr. Trump won't overcome his
lack of a policy background to arrive at good solutions. But he will almost certainly find out soon
that "Make America Great Again" is a slogan, not an answer.
So the post-mortem begins. Much electronic ink has already been spilled and predictable fault
lines have emerged. Debate rages in particular on the question of whether Trump's victory was driven
by economic factors. Like Duncan Weldon, I think Torsten Bell gets it about right – economics is
an essential part of the story even if the complete picture is more complex.
Neoliberalism is a word I usually try to avoid. It's often used by people on the left as an easy
catch-all to avoid engaging with difficult issues. Broadly speaking, however, it provides a short-hand
for the policy status quo over the last thirty years or so: free movement of goods, labour and capital,
fiscal conservatism, rules-based monetary policy, deregulated finance and a preference for supply-side
measures in the labour market.
Some will argue this consensus has nothing to with the rise of far-right populism. I disagree. Both
economics and economic policy have brought us here.
But to what extent has academic economics provided the basis for neoliberal policy? The question
had been in my mind even before the Trump and Brexit votes. A few months back, Duncan Weldon posed
the question, 'whatever happened to deficit bias?' In my view, the responses at the time missed the
mark. More recently, Ann Pettifor and Simon Wren Lewis have been discussing the relationship between
ideology, economics and fiscal austerity.
I have great respect for Simon – especially his efforts to combat the false media narratives around
austerity. But I don't think he gets it right on economics and ideology. His argument is that in
a standard model – a sticky-price DSGE system – fiscal policy should be used when nominal rates are
at the zero lower bound. Post-2008 austerity policies are therefore at odds with the academic consensus.
This is correct in simple terms, but I think misses the bigger picture of what academic economics
has been saying for the last 30 years. To explain, I need to recap some history.
Fiscal policy as a macroeconomic management tool is associated with the ideas of Keynes. Against
the academic consensus of his day, he argued that the economy could get stuck in periods of demand
deficiency characterised by persistent involuntary unemployment. The monetarist counter-attack was
led by Milton Friedman – who denied this possibility. In the long run, he argued, the economy has
a 'natural' rate of unemployment to which it will gravitate automatically (the mechanism still remains
to be explained). Any attempt to use activist fiscal or monetary policy to reduce unemployment below
this natural rate will only lead to higher inflation. This led to the bitter disputes of the 1960s
and 70s between Keynesians and Monetarists. The Monetarists emerged as victors – at least in the
eyes of the orthodoxy – with the inflationary crises of the 1970s. This marks the beginning of the
end for fiscal policy in the history of macroeconomics.
In Friedman's world, short-term macro policy could be justified in a deflationary situation as
a way to help the economy back to its 'natural' state. But, for Friedman, macro policy means monetary
policy. In line with the doctrine that the consumer always knows best, government spending was proscribed
as distortionary and inefficient. For Friedman, the correct policy response to deflation is a temporary
increase in the rate of growth of the money supply.
It's hard to view Milton Friedman's campaign against Keynes as disconnected from ideological influence.
Friedman's role in the Mont Pelerin society is well documented. This group of economic liberals,
led by Friedrich von Hayek, formed after World War II with the purpose of opposing the move towards
collectivism of which Keynes was a leading figure. For a time at least, the group adopted the term
'neoliberal' to describe their political philosophy. This was an international group of economists
whose express purpose was to influence politics and politicians – and they were successful.
Hayek's thesis – which acquires a certain irony in light of Trump's ascent – was that collectivism
inevitably leads to authoritarianism and fascism. Friedman's Chicago economics department formed
one point in a triangular alliance with Lionel Robbins' LSE in London, and Hayek's fellow Austrians
in Vienna. While in the 1930s, Friedman had expressed support for the New Deal, by the 1950s he had
swung sharply in the direction of economic liberalism. As Brad Delong puts it:
by the early 1950s, his respect for even the possibility of government action was gone. His grudging
approval of the New Deal was gone, too: Those elements that weren't positively destructive were ineffective,
diverting attention from what Friedman now believed would have cured the Great Depression, a substantial
expansion of the money supply. The New Deal, Friedman concluded, had been 'the wrong cure for the
wrong disease.'
While Friedman never produced a complete formal model to describe his macroeconomic vision, his
successor at Chicago, Robert Lucas did – the New Classical model. (He also successfully destroyed
the Keynesian structural econometric modelling tradition with his 'Lucas critique'.) Lucas' New Classical
colleagues followed in his footsteps, constructing an even more extreme version of the model: the
so-called Real Business Cycle model. This simply assumes a world in which all markets work perfectly
all of the time, and the single infinitely lived representative agent, on average, correctly predicts
the future.
This is the origin of the 'policy ineffectiveness hypothesis' – in such a world, government becomes
completely impotent. Any attempt at deficit spending will be exactly matched by a corresponding reduction
in private spending – the so-called Ricardian Equivalence hypothesis. Fiscal policy has no effect
on output and employment. Even monetary policy becomes totally ineffective: if the central bank chooses
to loosen monetary policy, the representative agent instantly and correctly predicts higher inflation
and adjusts her behaviour accordingly.
This vision, emerging from a leading centre of conservative thought, is still regarded by the
academic economics community as a major scientific step forward. Simon describes it as `a progressive
research programme'.
What does all this have to with the current status quo? The answer is that this model – with one
single modification – is the 'standard model' which Simon and others point to when they argue that
economics has no ideological bias. The modification is that prices in the goods market are slow to
adjust to changes in demand. As a result, Milton Friedman's result that policy is effective in the
short run is restored. The only substantial difference to Friedman's model is that the policy tool
is the rate of interest, not the money supply. In a deflationary situation, the central bank should
cut the nominal interest rate to raise demand and assist the automatic but sluggish transition back
to the `natural' rate of unemployment.
So what of Duncan's question: what happened to deficit bias? – this refers to the assertion in
economics textbooks that there will always be a tendency for governments to allow deficits to increase.
The answer is that it was written out of the textbooks decades ago – because it is simply taken as
given that fiscal policy is not the correct tool.
To check this, I went to our university library and looked through a selection of macroeconomics
textbooks. Mankiw's 'Macroeconomics' is probably the mostly widely used. I examined the 2007 edition
– published just before the financial crisis. The chapter on 'Stabilisation Policy' dispenses with
fiscal policy in half a page – a case study of Romer's critique of Keynes is presented under the
heading 'Is the Stabilization of the Economy a Figment of the Data?' The rest of the chapter focuses
on monetary policy: time inconsistency, interest rate rules and central bank independence. The only
appearance of the liquidity trap and the zero lower bound is in another half-page box, but fiscal
policy doesn't get a mention.
The post-crisis twelfth edition of Robert Gordon's textbook does include a chapter on fiscal policy
– entitled `The Government Budget, the Government Debt and the Limitations of Fiscal Policy'. While
Gordon acknowledges that fiscal policy is an option during strongly deflationary periods when interest
rates are at the zero lower bound, most of the chapter is concerned with the crowding out of private
investment, the dangers of government debt and the conditions under which governments become insolvent.
Of the textbooks I examined, only Blanchard's contained anything resembling a balanced discussion
of fiscal policy.
So, in Duncan's words, governments are 'flying a two engined plane but choosing to use only one
motor' not just because of media bias, an ill-informed public and misguided politicians – Simon's
explanation – but because they are doing what the macro textbooks tell them to do.
The reason is that the standard New Keynesian model is not a Keynesian model at all – it is a
monetarist model. Aside from the mathematical sophistication, it is all but indistinguishable from
Milton Friedman's ideologically-driven description of the macroeconomy. In particular, Milton Friedman's
prohibition of fiscal policy is retained with – in more recent years – a caveat about the zero-lower
bound (Simon makes essentially the same point about fiscal policy here).
It's therefore odd that when Simon discusses the relationship between ideology and economics he
chooses to draw a dividing line between those who use a sticky-price New Keynesian DSGE model and
those who use a flexible-price New Classical version. The beliefs of the latter group are, Simon
suggests, ideological, while those of the former group are based on ideology-free science. This strikes
me as arbitrary. Simon's justification is that, despite the evidence, the RBC model denies the possibility
of involuntary unemployment. But the sticky-price version – which denies any role for inequality,
finance, money, banking, liquidity, default, long-run unemployment, the use of fiscal policy away
from the ZLB, supply-side hysteresis effects and plenty else besides – is acceptable. He even goes
so far as to say 'I have no problem seeing the RBC model as a flex-price NK model' – even the RBC
model is non-ideological so long as the hierarchical framing is right.
Even Simon's key distinction – the New Keynesian model allows for involuntary unemployment – is open
to question. Keynes' definition of involuntary unemployment is that there exist people willing and
able to work at the going wage who are unable to find employment. On this definition the New Keynesian
model falls short – in the face of a short-run demand shortage caused by sticky prices the representative
agent simply selects a new optimal labour supply. Workers are never off their labour supply curve.
In the Smets Wouters model – a very widely used New Keynesian DSGE model – the labour market is described
as follows: 'household j chooses hours worked Lt(j)'. It is hard to reconcile involuntary unemployment
with households choosing how much labour they supply.
What of the position taken by the profession in the wake of 2008? Reinhart and Rogoff's contribution
is by now infamous. Ann also draws attention to the 2010 letter signed by 20 top-ranking economists
– including Rogoff – demanding austerity in the UK. Simon argues that Ann overlooks the fact that
'58 equally notable economists signed a response arguing the 20 were wrong'.
It is difficult to agree that the signatories to the response letter, organised by Lord Skidelsky,
are 'equally notable'. Many are heterodox economists – critics of standard macroeconomics. Those
mainstream economists on the list hold positions at lower-ranking institutions than the 20. I know
many of the 58 personally – I know none of the 20. Simon notes:
Of course those that signed the first letter, and in particular Ken Rogoff, turned out to be a more
prominent voice in the subsequent debate, but that is because he supported what policymakers were
doing. He was mostly useful rather than influential.
For Simon, causality is unidirectional: policy-makers cherry-pick academic economics to fit their
purpose but economists have no influence on policy. This seems implausible. It is undoubtedly true
that pro-austerity economists provided useful cover for small-state ideologues like George Osborne.
But the parallels between policy and academia are too strong for the causality to be unidirectional.
Osborne's small state ideology is a descendent of Thatcherism – the point when neoliberalism first
replaced Keynesianism. Is it purely coincidence that the 1980s was also the high-point for extreme
free market Chicago economics such as Real Business Cycle models?
The parallel between policy and academia continues with the emergence of the sticky-price New Keynesian
version as the 'standard' model in the 90s alongside the shift to the third way of Blair and Clinton.
Blairism represents a modified, less extreme, version of Thatcherism. The all-out assault on workers
and the social safety net was replaced with 'workfare' and 'flexicurity'.
A similar story can be told for international trade, as laid out in this excellent piece by Martin
Sandbu. In the 1990s, just as the 'heyday of global trade integration was getting underway', economists
were busy making the case that globalisation had no negative implications for employment or inequality
in rich nations. To do this, they came up with the 'skill-biased technological change' (SBTC) hypothesis.
This states that as technology advances and the potential for automation grows, the demand for high-skilled
labour increases. This introduces the hitch that higher educational standards are required before
the gains from automation can be felt by those outside the top income percentiles. This leads to
a `race between education and technology' – a race which technology was winning, leading to weaker
demand for middle and low-skill workers and rising 'skill premiums' for high skilled workers as a
result.
Writing in the Financial Times shortly before the financial crisis, Jagdish Bagwati argued that those
who looked to globalisation as an explanation for increasing inequality were misguided:
The culprit is not globalization but labour-saving technical change that puts pressure on the wages
of the unskilled. Technical change prompts continual economies in the use of unskilled labour. Much
empirical argumentation and evidence exists on this. (FT, January 4, 2007, p. 11)
As Krugman put it:
The hypothesis that technological change, by raising the demand for skill, has led to growing inequality
is so widespread that at conferences economists often use the abbreviation SBTC – skill-biased technical
change – without explanation, assuming that their listeners know what they are talking about (p.
132)
Over the course of his 2007 book, Krugman sets out on a voyage of discovery – 'That, more or less,
is the story I believed when I began working on this book' (p. 6). He arrives at the astonishing
conclusion – '[i]t sounds like economic heresy' (p. 7) – that politics can influence inequality:
[I]nstitutions, norms and the political environment matter a lot more for the distribution of income
– and impersonal market forces matter less – than Economics 101 might lead you to believe (p. 8)
The idea that rising pay at the top of the scale mainly reflect social and political change,
strikes some people as too much at odds with Economics 101.
If a left-leaning Nobel prize-winning economist has trouble escaping from the confines of Economics
101, what hope for the less sophisticated mind?
As deindustrialisation rolled through the advanced economies, wiping out jobs and communities, economists
continued to deny any role for globalisation. As Martin Sandbu argues,
The blithe unconcern displayed by the economics profession and the political elites about whether
trade was causing deindustrialisation, social exclusion and rising inequality has begun to seem Pollyannish
at best, malicious at worst. Kevin O'Rourke, the Irish economist, and before him Lawrence Summers,
former US Treasury Secretary, have called this "the Davos lie."
For mainstream macroeconomists, inequality was not a subject of any real interest. While the explanation
for inequality lay in the microeconomics – the technical forms of production functions – and would
be solved by increasing educational attainment, in macroeconomic terms, the use of a representative
agent and an aggregate production function simply assumed the problem away. As Stiglitz puts it:
[I]f the distribution of income (say between labor and capital) matters, for example, for aggregate
demand and therefore for employment and output, then using an aggregate Cobb-Douglas production function
which, with competition, implies that the share of labor is fixed, is not going to be helpful. (p.596)
Robert Lucas summed up his position as follows: 'Of the tendencies that are harmful to sound economics,
the most seductive, and in my opinion the most poisonous, is to focus on questions of distribution.'
It is hard to view this statement as more strongly informed by science than ideology.
But while economists were busy assuming away inequality in their models, incomes continued to diverge
in most advanced economies. It was only with the publication of Piketty's book that the economics
profession belatedly began to turn its back on Lucas.
The extent to which economic insecurity in the US and the UK is driven by globalisation versus
policy is still under discussion – my answer would be that it is a combination of both – but the
skill-biased technical change hypothesis looks to be a dead end – and a costly one at that.
Similar stories can be told about the role of household debt, finance, monetary theory and labour
bargaining power and monopoly – why so much academic focus on 'structural reform' in the labour market
but none on anti-trust policy? Heterodox economists were warning about the connections between finance,
globalisation, current account imbalances, inequality, household debt and economic insecurity in
the decades before the crisis. These warnings were dismissed as unscientific – in favour of a model
which excluded all of these things by design.
Are economic factors – and economic policy – partly to blame for the Brexit and Trump votes? And
are academic economists, at least in part, to blame for these polices? The answer to both questions
is yes. To argue otherwise is to deny Keynes' dictum that 'the ideas of economists and political
philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong are more powerful than is commonly
understood.'
This quote, 'mounted and framed, takes pride of place in the entrance hall of the Institute for Economic
Affairs' – the think-tank founded, with Hayek's encouragement, by Anthony Fisher, as a way to promote
and promulgate the ideas of the Mont Pelerin Society. The Institute was a success. Fisher was, in
the words of Milton Friedman, 'the single most important person in the development of Thatcherism'.
The rest, it seems, is history.
Obomber's new conference with Ms. Merkel. The peace prize winner who ordered 25000 bombing sorties
in 2015 against places US is not warring against.
Per Obomber Assad caused all that suffering in Syria, despite US arming al Qaeda since 2010 to
replace him with the kind of guys who rammed a bayonet through Qaddafi's rectum, and sending assassinated
Qaddafi's weaponry through Benghazi at the time Clinton got her envoy killed there.
The greater threat to American democracy is the bizarre world of the US fighting for the Sunnis
in the middle east. Also known as Obomber's Stalinist definitions of atrocities versus fictions about
fascists.
Why would one of Qadaffi's own
citizens do such a nasty deed on the
sadly misunderstood guy who brought down
Pan Am flight #103 over Lockerbie Scotland
killing 259 passenger & crew, previously
killing three people & injuring around
230 in La Belle discothčque in Berlin,
& why do you keep bringing this up?)
"President-Elect Donald Trump Gets to Work Betraying His Backers"
'Millions of voters who thought they'd elected a populist hero will soon find out that men who
live in golden penthouses are rarely heroes'
by Joy-Ann Reid...11.17.16...1:00 AM ET
"I should probably get out of the predictions business, having so misjudged the country before
the recent election. But I will hazard two more. The first: Donald Trump will turn on his supporters.
The second: The Democrats will turn on theirs, too.
Trump got a head start this week, floating the names of Iraq war supporters and promoters of a
grand, global war with Islam like John Bolton and Rudy Giuliani for the job of secretary of state.
Trump voters who claimed that Hillary Clinton would bring on World War III might be surprised by
some of the views of Clinton and John Kerry's likely successor (and Giuliani is a vigorous neocon,
too.)
Trump is now part of a global ring of ethno-nationalist leaders of far-right parties in thrall
to Vladimir Putin's Russia. National security experts are shuddering at the demeanor of the people
surrounding the next president who are busy mounting what Republican leakers are calling a "Stalinesque
purge" of the insufficiently loyal. With the transition team in chaos, and experienced hands reluctant
to join such an administration, who knows what kind of bizarre cabinet he'll wind up assembling.
Meanwhile, to the extent that he is doing something other than trying to figure out what a president
does Trump-or rather the people around him who know how to take advantage of an opportunity-are preparing
to stack his team with Wall Street and big-business friendly insiders and establishment cronies poised
to raid the treasury on behalf of the one percent.
Working-class voters who thought they'd elected a populist hero will soon find out that men who
live in golden penthouses are rarely populists, and even more rarely heroic. Trump, who in his own
history as a developer preferred mob concrete and Chinese steel to the variety produced in the Rust
Belt, cannot bring back the steel and manufacturing jobs lost in Lorain, Ohio or western Pennsylvania.
No president can force shuttered mills to reopen, or companies who've left in search of cheaper labor
to relocate to the United States (or those who have come back to choose expensive humans over cheaper
robots.) Even if he manages to slap massive tariffs on Chinese-made goods, the only outcome will
be much higher prices at Wal-Mart.
Meanwhile, anyone still wondering why Paul Ryan quietly slipped on his MAGA cap during the election
will soon understand. On the off chance Trump pulled off an improbable win, Ryan knew he would be
on track to enact his life's dream: turning Medicare into a voucher program and forcing future of
the most popular government program since Social Security into private insurance HMOs. According
to Josh Marshall, who cites Ryan's own website, the "phasing out" of Medicare begins in March.
Trump's tax plan will sock it to single mothers, by ending the ability to file as head of household
and thus raising taxes on unmarried filers. The tax hikes will be higher the more children you have.
Anyone who doesn't itemize deductions will likely get a onetime check for a few hundred dollars,
the way George W. Bush did his "middle class tax cut." Count that as bill money.
Trump's trade and immigration policies will deliver an economic shock to states like Texas where
trade produces a substantial share of the jobs, and which depend on high oil prices. Trump's North
Dakota pipeline (in which he is personally financially invested) will flood more oil onto an already
glutted world market, further forcing down prices and putting both the Lone Star state in an unpleasant
economic position.
But not to worry, Republicans have a fix, to ensure there is no voter backlash against them.
They are already preparing to reverse their opposition to earmarks, with three red state Senators
(from Florida, Alabama and of course, Texas) pushing to revive the kind of spending that helps members
go back to their districts with something to show for their time in Washington, and which long greased
the skids of congress. You see, most in the GOP never really objected to government spending. They
just objected to government spending that might make their constituents look more favorably on Barack
Obama's tenure.
Also watch as the objections to raising the debt ceiling and to infrastructure spending-so vehement
during the Obama years-vanish into thin air. This will be a big spending administration, with the
full backing of congress. The small number of conservatives preparing to fight back are likely to
cave, eventually, in the interests of party unity and maintaining total Republican control.
All the while, Trump fans can maintain their euphoria over taking America back from the multiculturalists,
the politically correct, leftie Hollywood and Beyoncé, by purchasing clothing and jewelry from Ivanka
Trump's retail line, which she'll dutifully model during television appearances, after which her
staff will inform the media on where faithful followers can "shop the look." The Trump children,
armed with security clearances and still in charge of the family business and the ephemeral "foundation"
will be in a position to stuff the family coffers for four years, African dictator style, with the
possible aid of information marked "secret" and thus unavailable to their competitors. And if you
expect the fearsome House Republicans who hounded Hillary Clinton over her emails to lift a finger
to investigate what already look to be spiraling conflicts of interest, you don't understand the
Republican Party.
But it isn't just Trump who is poised to betray those who voted for him. Some Democrats and their
allies are already rushing to get their Trump tattoos, knowing that the coming spending boom helps
them too. Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia excoriated Harry Reid, the out-going minority leader,
who alone came out forthrightly to defend the black and brown women, men, children, businesses and
even churches being brutalized by gleeful Trump supporters from the GOP's white supremacist wing,
in cities around the country. Reid, whose Nevada Democratic Party operation was actually successful
in the 2016 elections, including getting a Latina elected to his seat, has bravely called out the
white nationalists and anti-Semites of the alt-right and stood against the normalization of people
like soon-to-be Trump senior counselor Stephen Bannon. But Reid is a lonely voice standing athwart
anti-history yelling, "stop," while his party and the mainstream media fall into a swoon of presidential
succession pageantry.
Even Bernie Sanders couldn't rush fast enough to get on the Trump side of the line, declaring
himself a member of the white working class (his and his wife's three homes and high six-figure income
aside) and cautioning Democrats-who belong to a party of which he is still not a member-to start
focusing on these voters too. Sanders ran a campaign that echoed Trump's in many ways; appealing
to a majority white, populist audience that hated Hillary Clinton more than it disdained Republicans.
A majority of Black Americans were unimpressed, which is why he didn't become the nominee, and they
should be unsurprised that he is dropping them faster than he and his supporters wrote off "the South"
as insignificant during the primary campaign.
Bernie is not alone. Think pieces are already being written admonishing Dems to throw black and
brown, LGBT, Muslim and Hispanic voters and progressive women under the bus in favor of the never-ending
chase for the Pabst Blue Ribbon vote. Democrats continue to practice "identity politics" at their
peril, they say; demanding that issues around rape culture, Black Lives Matter and merciful immigration
policy be scotched in favor of bucking up men, dialing back blunt talk on race, policing and DREAMers,
and emphasizing things like border security. In other words, Democrats must learn to talk more like
Republicans and marginalized groups must learn to be quiet. The party has been here before, and ironically,
that kind of thinking is what produced Bill Clinton, whose surname, and wife, the very people hawking
this prescription loathe.
The message to African-Americans, Hispanics, Muslims, LGBT people (well, mostly Trans folks, since
Trump has declared his movement can live with "the gays") and women, who stand in the crosshairs
of the coming "retail authoritarian" presidency, is that you're on your own. Your party will not
come to your aid. They'll be too busy trying to ride the Trump train, or to least avoid being tied
to the tracks and run over by it in the next election.
There are small green shoots of hope. The coming battle for DNC chair, which could come down to
two black candidates: Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison and South Carolina Democratic Party chair
Jamie Harrison, is a proxy for whether the party will push a message of Sandersian working class
populism or press forward on the ongoing fight for racial justice, voting rights and the rights of
the poor. Perhaps one of these men can help the party find a way to do both.
And despite her immediate statement of conciliation to Trump, one can only hope Elizabeth Warren
will hold strong on issues concerning Wall Street, once Republicans begin the process of dismantling
restrictions on bankers' worst practices, restoring the robber baron era in lower Manhattan and on
the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, where the "tea party movement" was born amid furious presumptions
that Obama would dare to help struggling homeowners instead of their mortgage note holders. We'll
just have to wait and see.
In the end, the lessons of American history, from Reconstruction to the Fusion movement of the
late 19th century; that an openness to the aspirations of racial, ethnic and religious minorities
will always produce a fierce backlash among the country's majority population and cost the party
dearly, have proven thrice true in the modern era-in the bloody political aftermath of Lyndon Johnson,
Bill Clinton and now Barack Obama. All three marched the country forward on race, culture and economics,
only to cede federal and state governmental power for years to the Republican right, which quickly
proceeded, each time, to reward the rich and the powerful on the backs of their working class supporters
who just wanted to feel like winners again.
In a sense, who can blame the Democrats for running away? But run they will. Count on it."
McDonald's gets fancy, says table
service coming to US locations
NEW YORK - McDonald's says it plans to offer table service across its U.S. stores to make the
ordering process less stressful, but did not say when the overhaul will be complete.
The world's biggest burger chain says about 500 of its more than 14,000 domestic stores have been
testing table service and ordering kiosks for people who do not want to wait for the cashier. People
in those stores order at the counter or kiosks, then sit and wait for an employee to bring them their
food.
Early next year, McDonald's says it will expand the offering in Boston, Chicago, San Francisco,
Seattle and Washington, D.C. ...
McDonald's gets fancy, says table
service coming to US locations
NEW YORK - McDonald's says it plans to offer table service across its U.S. stores to make the
ordering process less stressful, but did not say when the overhaul will be complete.
The world's biggest burger chain says about 500 of its more than 14,000 domestic stores have been
testing table service and ordering kiosks for people who do not want to wait for the cashier. People
in those stores order at the counter or kiosks, then sit and wait for an employee to bring them their
food.
Early next year, McDonald's says it will expand the offering in Boston, Chicago, San Francisco,
Seattle and Washington, D.C. ...
'Democrats on the Hill began soul searching this week-but the process appears to be longer for
some than others'
by Matt Laslo...11.17.16...1:00 AM ET
"The Democratic Party is at a crossroads, but everyone on Capitol Hill seems to have a different
roadmap.
Democrats, still in shock over Hillary Clinton's surprise loss to president-elect Donald Trump,
are faced with a stark new reality: they are not only the minority party in all corners of Capitol
Hill and across the nation-but there are cracks in places where their foundation was thought to be
very strong.
The party is debating how it got here and whether it's time to tack left, in the Bernie Sanders'
vein of populism, or to go back to the middle, which is how they won in the nineties and regained
control of the House in 2006.
The change didn't come overnight. The party has been devastated in the past three election cycles,
losing more than 900 state legislative seats and 11 governorships since President Barack Obama took
office.
But it was Clinton's string of losses in the Rust Belt-Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Ohio-that
caused the soul searching in the party.
"So you can't conclude anything else but that our message is wrong. Our values aren't wrong, but
our message is wrong," Rep. John Delaney (D-Md.) told The Daily Beast. "The one thing we must commit
to is that whatever our message is going forward must be different than what we had in the past because
that one has failed."...
"Rep. Tom Price Reveals Republicans Eyeing Medicare Overhaul In 2017"
By Lauren Fox...November 17, 2016...12:13 PM EDT
"Rep. Tom Price (R-GA), the chairman of the budget committee, told reporters on Thursday that
Republicans are eyeing major changes to Medicare in 2017.
Price, who is being floated as a possible Health and Human Services Secretary in the next administration,
said that he expects Republican in the House to move on Medicare reforms "six to eight months" into
the Trump administration.
Privatization of Medicare has been a central feature of Speaker of the House Paul Ryan's budget
proposal for years, and the House GOP has voted in favor of it multiple times. Ryan himself said
last week that Medicare would be on the table in the new Congress, signaling it could be taken up
early in the new year. Price's comments suggest privatization won't be part of the first round of
legislative initiatives rolled out by the Trump administration and GOP-controlled Congress.
Price also noted that Republicans are eyeing using a tactic known as budget reconciliation to
make the change. That process allows Republicans to pass bills with a simple majority in the U.S.
Senate.
When asked by TPM about timing for changes to Medicare, Price said "I think that is probably in
the second phase of reconciliation, which would have to be in the FY 18 budget resolution in the
first 6-8 months."
Republicans plan to tackle the Affordable Care Act in the first budget reconciliation process,
which could take place as early as January. Tackling Medicare reform and Obamacare repeal at the
same time could prove too high a risk for Republicans who have yet to reveal a clear plan to replace
Obamacare with.
During his weekly press conference House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) remained vague about the timing
for such reforms, saying only that those discussions are still underway."
Privatizing Medicare will be a disaster it can only end in the service being worse. I'm sure they
have plans to go after Social Security too. Getting rid of Obamacare won't hurt the white middle
class too bad but even there too most people will know someone with a preexisting condition who can't
get medical insurance. Good luck with all that Republicans!!
The 3 month Treasury interest rate is at 0.43%, the 2 year Treasury rate is 1.03%, the 5 year
rate is 1.72%, while the 10 year is 2.29%.
The Vanguard Aa rated short-term investment grade bond fund, with a maturity of 3.2 years and
a duration of 2.6 years, has a yield of 1.63%. The Vanguard Aa rated intermediate-term investment
grade bond fund, with a maturity of 6.4 years and a duration of 5.5 years, is yielding 2.37%. The
Vanguard Aa rated long-term investment grade bond fund, with a maturity of 23.0 years and a duration
of 13.6 years, is yielding 3.75%. *
The Vanguard Ba rated high yield corporate bond fund, with a maturity of 5.6 years and a duration
of 4.4 years, is yielding 5.40%.
The Vanguard unrated convertible corporate bond fund, with an indefinite maturity and a duration
of 4.1 years, is yielding 2.04%.
The Vanguard A rated high yield tax exempt bond fund, with a maturity of 6.8 years and a duration
of 6.4 years, is yielding 2.66%.
The Vanguard Aa rated intermediate-term tax exempt bond fund, with a maturity of 5.4 years and
a duration of 4.8 years, is yielding 1.59%.
The Vanguard Government National Mortgage Association bond fund, with a maturity of 5.7 years
and a duration of 3.4 years, is yielding 2.05%.
The Vanguard inflation protected Treasury bond fund, with a maturity of 8.8 years and a duration
of 8.3 years, is yielding - 0.21%.
* Vanguard yields are after cost. Federal Funds rates are no more than 0.50%.
"Consumer prices show big increase on rising gasoline costs and rents"
Reuters...November 17, 2016...5:27 PM
'Consumer prices show big increase'
"Consumer prices recorded their biggest increase in six months in October on rising gasoline costs
and rents, suggesting a pickup in inflation that potentially clears the way for the Federal Reserve
to raise interest rates in December.
Prospects for a rate hike next month also got a boost from other data on Thursday showing first-time
applications for unemployment benefits tumbling to a 43-year low last week and housing starts surging
to a nine-year high in October.
The reports painted an upbeat picture of the economy early in the fourth quarter and came as Fed
Chair Janet L. Yellen told lawmakers that the U.S. central bank could lift borrowing costs "relatively
soon."
The Labor Department said its consumer price index increased 0.4 percent last month after rising
0.3 percent in September. In the 12 months through October, the CPI advanced 1.6 percent, the biggest
year-on-year increase since October 2014. The CPI increased 1.5 percent in the year to September.
Underlying inflation continued to slow last month as health-care costs moderated after recent
hefty gains. But with rents pushing higher, that trend is unlikely to be sustained.
The so-called core CPI, which strips out food and energy costs, climbed 0.1 percent last month
after a similar gain in September. That slowed the year-on-year increase in the core CPI to 2.1 percent
from a 2.2 percent rise in September.
The Fed has a 2 percent inflation target and tracks an inflation measure that is now at 1.7 percent.
In another report, the Labor Department said initial claims for state unemployment benefits dropped
19,000 to a seasonally adjusted 235,000 for the week ended Nov. 12, the lowest level since November
1973.
Claims have now been below 300,000, a threshold associated with a healthy labor market, for 89
straight weeks. That is the longest run since 1970, when the labor market was much smaller.
With the labor market firming and rents rising, housing is getting a lift. In a third report,
the Commerce Department said housing starts jumped 25.5 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual pace
of 1.32 million units last month, the highest level since August 2007."
"Federal Reserve Chair Throws Cold Water On Trump's Economic Plan"
by Chris Arnold...November 17, 2016...5:25 PM ET
"President-elect Donald Trump has pledged a $1 trillion infrastructure spending program to help
jump-start an economy that he said during the campaign was in terrible shape.
Speaking on Capitol Hill Thursday, Federal Reserve Board Chair Janet Yellen warned lawmakers that
as they consider such spending, they should keep an eye on the national debt. Yellen also said that
while the economy needed a big boost with fiscal stimulus after the financial crisis, that's not
the case now.
"The economy is operating relatively close to full employment at this point," she said, "so in
contrast to where the economy was after the financial crisis when a large demand boost was needed
to lower unemployment, we're no longer in that state."
Yellen cautioned lawmakers that if they spend a lot on infrastructure and run up the debt, and
then down the road the economy gets into trouble, "there is not a lot of fiscal space should a shock
to the economy occur, an adverse shock, that should require fiscal stimulus."
In other words, lawmakers should consider keeping their powder dry so they have more options whenever
the next economic downturn comes along.
Trump was harshly critical of Yellen during his campaign. But testifying before the Joint Economic
Committee, Yellen said she is not going to quit just because Trump won the election. Rep. Carolyn
Maloney, D-N.Y., asked Yellen, "Can you envision any circumstances where you would not serve out
your term as chair of the Federal Reserve?" "No, I cannot," answered Yellen, "It is fully my intention
to serve out that term." Yellen's appointment goes through January 2018.
Another target of Trump's during the campaign came up at the hearing: the Dodd-Frank Wall Street
Reform and Consumer Protection Act. Rep. Pat Tiberi, R-Ohio, cited Trump's criticism that the Dodd-Frank
banking rules were stifling lending and stunting the economy. But Yellen gave her support to Dodd-Frank,
saying:
"We lived through a devastating financial crisis, and a high priority for all Americans should
be that we want to see put in place safeguards through supervision and regulation that result in
a safer and sounder financial system, and I think we have been doing that and our financial system
as a consequence is safer and sounder and many of the appropriate reforms are embodied in Dodd-Frank."
Yellen added, "We wouldn't want to go back to the mortgage lending standards that led to the financial
crisis."
She also said she thought banks were actually willing to lend to small businesses, but that sales
haven't been growing sufficiently fast to justify borrowing, suggesting the demand for loans was
the real problem.
As far as the ever-present question about when the Fed will raise interest rates, Yellen signaled
that she didn't see any reason to alter the Fed's prior guidance now that Trump has been elected
as the next president."
"Facebook fake-news writer: 'I think Donald Trump is in the White House because of me'"
by Caitlin Dewey...The Washington Post
"What do the Amish lobby, gay wedding vans and the ban of the national anthem have in common?
For starters, they're all make-believe - and invented by the same man.
Paul Horner, the 38-year-old impresario of a Facebook fake-news empire, has made his living off
viral news hoaxes for several years. He has twice convinced the Internet that he's British graffiti
artist Banksy; he also published the very viral, very fake news of a Yelp vs. "South Park" lawsuit
last year.
But in recent months, Horner has found the fake-news ecosystem growing more crowded, more political
and vastly more influential: In March, Donald Trump's son Eric and his then-campaign manager, Corey
Lewandowski, even tweeted links to one of Horner's faux-articles. His stories have also appeared
as news on Google.
In light of concerns that stories like Horner's may have affected the presidential election, and
in the wake of announcements that both Google and Facebook would take action against deceptive outlets,
The Washington Post called Horner to discuss his perspective on fake news.
Q: You've been writing fake news for a while now - you're kind of like the OG Facebook news hoaxer.
Well, I'd call it hoaxing or fake news. You'd call it parody or satire. How is that scene different
now than it was three or five years ago? Why did something like your story about Obama invalidating
the election results (almost 250,000 Facebook shares, as of this writing) go so viral?
A: Honestly, people are definitely dumber. They just keep passing stuff around. Nobody fact-checks
anything anymore - I mean, that's how Trump got elected. He just said whatever he wanted, and people
believed everything, and when the things he said turned out not to be true, people didn't care because
they'd already accepted it. It's real scary. I've never seen anything like it.
Q: You mentioned Trump, and you've probably heard the argument, or the concern, that fake news
somehow helped him get elected. What do you make of that?
A: My sites were picked up by Trump supporters all the time. I think Trump is in the White House
because of me. His followers don't fact-check anything - they'll post everything, believe anything.
His campaign manager posted my story about a protester getting paid $3,500 as fact. Like, I made
that up. I posted a fake ad on Craigslist.
Q: Why? I mean - why would you even write that?
A: Just 'cause his supporters were under the belief that people were getting paid to protest at
their rallies, and that's just insane. I've gone to Trump protests - trust me, no one needs to get
paid to protest Trump. I just wanted to make fun of that insane belief, but it took off. They actually
believed it.
I thought they'd fact-check it, and it'd make them look worse. I mean that's how this always works:
Someone posts something I write, then they find out it's false, then they look like idiots. But Trump
supporters - they just keep running with it! They never fact-check anything! Now he's in the White
House. Looking back, instead of hurting the campaign, I think I helped it. And that feels (bad).
Q: You think you personally helped elect Trump?
A: I don't know. I don't know if I did or not. I don't know. I don't know.
Q: I guess I'm curious, if you believed you might be having an unfair impact on the election -
especially if that impact went against your own political beliefs - why didn't you stop? Why keep
writing?
A: I didn't think it was possible for him to get elected president. I thought I was messing with
the campaign, maybe I wasn't messing them up as much as I wanted - but I never thought he'd actually
get elected. I didn't even think about it. In hindsight, everyone should've seen this coming - everyone
assumed Hillary (Clinton) would just get in. But she didn't, and Trump is president.
Q: Speaking of Clinton - did you target fake news at her supporters? Or Gary Johnson's, for that
matter? (Horner's Facebook picture shows him at a rally for Johnson.)
A: No. I hate Trump.
Q: Is that it? You posted on Facebook a couple weeks ago that you had a lot of ideas for satirizing
Clinton and other figures, but that "no joke in doing this for six years, the people who clicked
ads the most, like it's the cure for cancer, is right-wing Republicans." That makes it sound like
you've found targeting conservatives is more profitable.
A: Yeah, it is. They don't fact-check.
Q: But a Trump presidency is good for you from a business perspective, right?
A: It's great for anybody who does anything with satire - there's nothing you can't write about
now that people won't believe. I can write the craziest thing about Trump, and people will believe
it. I wrote a lot of crazy anti-Muslim stuff - like about Trump wanting to put badges on Muslims,
or not allowing them in the airport, or making them stand in their own line - and people went along
with it!
Q: Facebook and Google recently announced that they'd no longer let fake-news sites use their
advertising platforms. I know you basically make your living from those services. How worried are
you about this?
A: This whole Google AdSense thing is pretty scary. And all this Facebook stuff. I make most of
my money from AdSense - like, you wouldn't believe how much money I make from it. Right now I make
like $10,000 a month from AdSense.
I know ways of getting hooked up under different names and sites. So probably if they cracked
down, I would try different things. I have at least 10 sites right now. If they crack down on a couple,
I'll just use others. They could shut down advertising on all my sites, and I think I'd be OK. Plus,
Facebook and AdSense make a lot of money from (advertising on fake news sites) for them to just get
rid of it. They'd lose a lot of money.
But if it did really go away, that would suck. I don't know what I would do.
Q: Thinking about this less selfishly, though - it might be good if Facebook and Google took action,
right? Because the effects you're describing are pretty scary.
A: Yeah, I mean - a lot of the sites people are talking about, they're just total BS sites. There's
no creativity or purpose behind them. I'm glad they're getting rid of them. I don't like getting
lumped in with Huzlers. I like getting lumped in with the Onion. The stuff I do - I spend more time
on it. There's purpose and meaning behind it. I don't just write fake news just to write it.
So, yeah, I see a lot of the sites they're listing, and I'm like - good. There are so many horrible
sites out there. I'm glad they're getting rid of those sites.
President Barack Obama said Wednesday that America's election of Donald Trump and the U.K.'s
vote to leave the European Union reflect a political uprising in the West over economic
inequities spawned by leaders' mishandling of globalization.
"... Already, motor-vehicle manufacturers ship an automotive transmission back and forth across the US-Mexican border several times in the course of production. At some point, unpacking that production process still further will reach the point of diminishing returns. ..."
"... The story for cross-border flows of financial capital is even more dramatic. Gross capital flows – the sum of inflows and outflows – are not just growing more slowly; they are down significantly in absolute terms from 2009 levels. ..."
"... ... cross-border bank lending and borrowing that have fallen. Foreign direct investment – financial flows to build foreign factories and acquire foreign companies – remains at pre-crisis levels. ..."
"... This difference reflects regulation. Having concluded, rightly, that cross-border bank lending is especially risky, regulators clamped down on banks' international operations. ..."
Does Donald Trump's election as United States president mean that globalization is dead, or are
reports of the process' demise greatly exaggerated? If globalization is only partly incapacitated,
not terminally ill, should we worry? How much will slower trade growth, now in the offing, matter
for the global economy?
World trade growth would be slowing down, even without Trump in office. Its growth was already
flat in the first quarter of 2016, and it fell
by nearly 1% in the second quarter. This continues a prior trend: since 2010, global trade has
grown at an annual rate of barely 2%. Together with the fact that worldwide production of goods and
services has been rising by more than 3%, this means that the trade-to-GDP ratio has been falling,
in contrast to its steady upward march in earlier years.
... the resurgent protectionism manifest in popular opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership
(TPP) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP),
Causality in economics may be elusive, but in this case it is clear. So far, slower trade growth
has been the result of slower GDP growth, not the other way around.
This is particularly evident in the case of investment spending, which has
fallen sharply since
the global financial crisis. Investment spending is trade-intensive, because countries rely disproportionately
on a relatively small handful of producers, like Germany, for technologically sophisticated capital
goods.
In addition, slower trade growth reflects China's economic deceleration. Until 2011 China was
growing at double-digit rates, and Chinese exports and imports were growing even faster. China's
growth has now slowed by a third, leading to slower growth of Chinese trade.
China's growth miracle, benefiting a fifth of the earth's population, is the most important economic
event of the last quarter-century. But it can happen only once. And now that the phase of catch-up
growth is over for China, this engine of global trade will slow.
The other engine of world trade has been global supply chains. Trade in parts and components has
benefited from falling transport costs, reflecting containerization and related advances in logistics.
But efficiency in shipping is unlikely to continue to improve faster than efficiency in the production
of what is being shipped. Already, motor-vehicle manufacturers ship an automotive transmission
back and forth across the US-Mexican border several times in the course of production. At some point,
unpacking that production process still further will reach the point of diminishing returns.
The story for cross-border flows of financial capital is even more dramatic. Gross capital
flows – the sum of inflows and outflows – are not just growing more slowly; they are down significantly
in absolute terms from 2009 levels.
... cross-border bank lending and borrowing that have fallen. Foreign direct investment –
financial flows to build foreign factories and acquire foreign companies – remains at pre-crisis
levels.
This difference reflects regulation. Having concluded, rightly, that cross-border bank lending
is especially risky, regulators clamped down on banks' international operations.
In response, many banks curtailed their cross-border business. But, rather than alarming anyone,
this should be seen as reassuring, because the riskiest forms of international finance have been
curtailed without disrupting more stable and productive forms of foreign investment.
We now face the prospect of the US government revoking the Dodd-Frank Act and rolling back the
financial reforms of recent years. Less stringent financial regulation may make for the recovery
of international capital flows. But we should be careful what we wish for.
Ellison is a dud, Bernie tweets support for Schumer "there's nobody I know better prepared
and more capable of leading our caucus than Chuck Schumer"!
Well there's a good chunder maker in that statement eh? Hope dashed!
There are no doubt many who are better informed, more progressive and principled, more remote
from Wall Street and oligarchic capture than Chuck Schumer and Ellison. So there you have it –
this is reform in the Democrats after a crushing defeat.
Vale democrats, and now the journey becomes arduous with these voices to smother hope. A new
party is urgently needed (I know how difficult that is) and these voices of the old machine need
to be ignored for the sake of sanity.
"... The New Deal did not seek to overthrow the plutocracy, but it did seek to side-step and disable
their dominance. ..."
"... It seems to me that while neoliberalism on the right was much the same old same old, the neoliberal
turn on the left was marked by a measured abandonment of this struggle over the distribution of income
between the classes. In the U.S., the Democrats gradually abandoned their populist commitments. In Europe,
the labour and socialist parties gradually abandoned class struggle. ..."
"... When Obama came in, in 2008 amid the unfolding GFC, one of the most remarkable features of
his economic team was the extent to which it conceded control of policy entirely to the leading money
center banks. Geithner and Bernanke continued in power with Geithner moving from the New York Federal
Reserve (where he served as I recall under a Chair from Goldman Sachs) to Treasury in the Obama Administration,
but Geithner's Treasury was staffed from Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase and Citibank. The crisis served
to concentrate banking assets in the hands of the top five banks, but it seemed also to transfer political
power entirely into their hands as well. Simon Johnson called it a coup. ..."
"... Here's the thing: the globalization and financialization of the economy from roughly 1980 drove
both increasingly extreme distribution of income and de-industrialization. ..."
"... It was characteristic of neoliberalism that the policy, policy intention and policy consequences
were hidden behind a rhetoric of markets and technological inevitability. Matt Stoller has identified
this as the statecraft of neoliberalism: the elimination of political agency and responsibility for
economic performance and outcomes. Globalization and financialization were just "forces" that just happened,
in a meteorological economics. ..."
"... This was not your grandfather's Democratic Party and it was a Democratic Party that could aid
the working class and the Rust Belt only within fairly severe and sometimes sharply conflicting constraints.
..."
"... No one in the Democratic Party had much institutional incentive to connect the dots, and draw
attention to the acute conflicts over the distribution of income and wealth involved in financialization
of the economy (including financialization as a driver of health care costs). And, that makes the political
problem that much harder, because there are no resources for rhetorical and informational clarity or
coherence. ..."
"... If Obama could not get a very big stimulus indeed thru a Democratic Congress long out of power,
Obama wasn't really trying. And, well-chosen spending on pork barrel projects is popular and gets Congressional
critters re-elected. So, again, if the stimulus is small and the Democratic Congress doesn't get re-elected,
Obama isn't really trying. ..."
"... Again, it comes down to: by 2008, the Democratic Party is not a fit vehicle for populism, because
it has become a neoliberal vehicle for giant banks. Turns out that makes a policy difference. ..."
At the center of Great Depression politics was a political struggle over the distribution of
income, a struggle that was only decisively resolved during the War, by the Great Compression.
It was at center of farm policy where policymakers struggled to find ways to support farm incomes.
It was at the center of industrial relations politics, where rapidly expanding unions were seeking
higher industrial wages. It was at the center of banking policy, where predatory financial practices
were under attack. It was at the center of efforts to regulate electric utility rates and establish
public power projects. And, everywhere, the clear subtext was a struggle between rich and poor,
the economic royalists as FDR once called them and everyone else.
FDR, an unmistakeable patrician in manner and pedigree, was leading a not-quite-revolutionary
politics, which was nevertheless hostile to and suspicious of business elites, as a source of
economic pathology. The New Deal did not seek to overthrow the plutocracy, but it did seek
to side-step and disable their dominance.
It seems to me that while neoliberalism on the right was much the same old same old, the
neoliberal turn on the left was marked by a measured abandonment of this struggle over the distribution
of income between the classes. In the U.S., the Democrats gradually abandoned their populist commitments.
In Europe, the labour and socialist parties gradually abandoned class struggle.
In retrospect, though the New Deal did use direct employment as a means of relief to good effect
economically and politically, it never undertook anything like a Keynesian stimulus on a Keynesian
scale - at least until the War.
Where the New Deal witnessed the institution of an elaborate system of financial repression,
accomplished in large part by imposing on the financial sector an explicitly mandated structure,
with types of firms and effective limits on firm size and scope, a series of regulatory reforms
and financial crises beginning with Carter and Reagan served to wipe this structure away.
When Obama came in, in 2008 amid the unfolding GFC, one of the most remarkable features
of his economic team was the extent to which it conceded control of policy entirely to the leading
money center banks. Geithner and Bernanke continued in power with Geithner moving from the New
York Federal Reserve (where he served as I recall under a Chair from Goldman Sachs) to Treasury
in the Obama Administration, but Geithner's Treasury was staffed from Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan
Chase and Citibank. The crisis served to concentrate banking assets in the hands of the top five
banks, but it seemed also to transfer political power entirely into their hands as well. Simon
Johnson called it a coup.
I don't know what considerations guided Obama in choosing the size of the stimulus or its composition
(as spending and tax cuts). Larry Summers was identified at the time as a voice of caution, not
"gambling", but not much is known about his detailed reasoning in severely trimming Christina
Romer's entirely conventional calculations. (One consideration might well have been worldwide
resource shortages, which had made themselves felt in 2007-8 as an inflationary spike in commodity
prices.) I do not see a case for connecting stimulus size policy to the health care reform. At
the time the stimulus was proposed, the Administration had also been considering whether various
big banks and other financial institutions should be nationalized, forced to insolvency or otherwise
restructured as part of a regulatory reform.
Here's the thing: the globalization and financialization of the economy from roughly 1980
drove both increasingly extreme distribution of income and de-industrialization. Accelerating
the financialization of the economy from 1999 on made New York and Washington rich, but the same
economic policies and process were devastating the Rust Belt as de-industrialization. They were
two aspects of the same complex of economic trends and policies. The rise of China as a manufacturing
center was, in critical respects, a financial operation within the context of globalized trade
that made investment in new manufacturing plant in China, as part of globalized supply chains
and global brand management, (arguably artificially) low-risk and high-profit, while reinvestment
in manufacturing in the American mid-west became unattractive, except as a game of extracting
tax subsidies or ripping off workers.
It was characteristic of neoliberalism that the policy, policy intention and policy consequences
were hidden behind a rhetoric of markets and technological inevitability. Matt Stoller has identified
this as the statecraft of neoliberalism: the elimination of political agency and responsibility
for economic performance and outcomes. Globalization and financialization were just "forces" that
just happened, in a meteorological economics.
It is conceding too many good intentions to the Obama Administration to tie an inadequate stimulus
to a Rube Goldberg health care reform as the origin story for the final debacle of Democratic
neoliberal politics. There was a delicate balancing act going on, but they were not balancing
the recovery of the economy in general so much as they were balancing the recovery from insolvency
of a highly inefficient and arguably predatory financial sector, which was also not incidentally
financing the institutional core of the Democratic Party and staffing many key positions in the
Administration and in the regulatory apparatus.
This was not your grandfather's Democratic Party and it was a Democratic Party that could
aid the working class and the Rust Belt only within fairly severe and sometimes sharply conflicting
constraints.
No one in the Democratic Party had much institutional incentive to connect the dots, and
draw attention to the acute conflicts over the distribution of income and wealth involved in financialization
of the economy (including financialization as a driver of health care costs). And, that makes
the political problem that much harder, because there are no resources for rhetorical and informational
clarity or coherence.
The short version of my thinking on the Obama stimulus is this: Keynesian stimulus spending is
a free lunch; it doesn't really matter what you spend money on up to a very generous point, so
it seems ready-made for legislative log-rolling. If Obama could not get a very big stimulus
indeed thru a Democratic Congress long out of power, Obama wasn't really trying. And, well-chosen
spending on pork barrel projects is popular and gets Congressional critters re-elected. So, again,
if the stimulus is small and the Democratic Congress doesn't get re-elected, Obama isn't really
trying.
Again, it comes down to: by 2008, the Democratic Party is not a fit vehicle for populism,
because it has become a neoliberal vehicle for giant banks. Turns out that makes a policy difference.
Great comment. Simply great. Hat tip to the author !
Notable quotes:
"… The New Deal did not seek to overthrow the plutocracy, but it did seek to side-step and
disable their dominance. …"
"… It seems to me that while neoliberalism on the right was much the same old same old, the
neoliberal turn on the left was marked by a measured abandonment of this struggle over the distribution
of income between the classes. In the U.S., the Democrats gradually abandoned their populist
commitments. In Europe, the labour and socialist parties gradually abandoned class struggle. …"
"… When Obama came in, in 2008 amid the unfolding GFC, one of the most remarkable features
of his economic team was the extent to which it conceded control of policy entirely to the leading
money center banks. Geithner and Bernanke continued in power with Geithner moving from the
New York Federal Reserve (where he served as I recall under a Chair from Goldman Sachs) to Treasury
in the Obama Administration, but Geithner's Treasury was staffed from Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan
Chase and Citibank. The crisis served to concentrate banking assets in the hands of the top
five banks, but it seemed also to transfer political power entirely into their hands as well.
Simon Johnson called it a coup. … "
"… Here's the thing: the globalization and financialization of the economy from roughly 1980
drove both increasingly extreme distribution of income and de-industrialization. …"
"… It was characteristic of neoliberalism that the policy, policy intention and policy consequences
were hidden behind a rhetoric of markets and technological inevitability. Matt Stoller has identified
this as the statecraft of neoliberalism: the elimination of political agency and responsibility
for economic performance and outcomes. Globalization and financialization were just "forces"
that just happened, in a meteorological economics. …"
"… This was not your grandfather's Democratic Party and it was a Democratic Party that could
aid the working class and the Rust Belt only within fairly severe and sometimes sharply conflicting
constraints. …"
"… No one in the Democratic Party had much institutional incentive to connect the dots, and
draw attention to the acute conflicts over the distribution of income and wealth involved in financialization
of the economy (including financialization as a driver of health care costs). And, that makes
the political problem that much harder, because there are no resources for rhetorical and informational
clarity or coherence. …"
"… If Obama could not get a very big stimulus indeed thru a Democratic Congress long out of
power, Obama wasn't really trying. And, well-chosen spending on pork barrel projects is popular
and gets Congressional critters re-elected. So, again, if the stimulus is small and the Democratic
Congress doesn't get re-elected, Obama isn't really trying. …"
"… Again, it comes down to: by 2008, the Democratic Party is not a fit vehicle for populism,
because it has become a neoliberal vehicle for giant banks. Turns out that makes a policy difference.
…"
The United States should threaten Russia with military force in order to contain the Kremlin's growing
power on the international stage, a top candidate to become Donald Trump's Secretary of State has
said.
Rudy Giuliani, the former New York Mayor
who is believed to be the front runner to head Mr Trump's
State Department, made the comments at a Washington event sponsored by the
Wall Street Journal
.
In
quotes | The Trump - Putin relationship
Putin on Trump:
"He is a very flamboyant man, very talented, no doubt about
that He is an absolute leader of the presidential race, as we see it today. He says that
he wants to move to another level of relations, to a deeper level of relations with Russia.
How can we not welcome that? Of course we welcome it." -
December 2015
Trump on Putin:
"It is always a great honour to be so nicely complimented by a
man so highly respected within his own country and beyond." -
December 2015
"I think I would just get along very well with Putin. I just
think so. People say what do you mean? I just think we would." -
July 2015
"I have no relationship with [Putin] other than he called me a
genius. He said Donald Trump is a genius and he is going to be the leader of the party and
he's going to be the leader of the world or something. He said some good stuff about me I
think I'd have a good relationship with Putin, who knows." -
February 2016
"I have nothing to do with Putin, I have never spoken to him, I
don't know anything about him, other than he will respect me." -
July 2016
"I would treat Vladimir Putin firmly, but there's nothing I can
think of that I'd rather do than have Russia friendly as opposed to how they are right now
so that we can go and knock out Isis together with other people. Wouldn't it be nice if we
actually got along?" -
July 2016
"The man has very strong control over a country. It's a very
different system and I don't happen to like the system, but certainly, in that system, he's
been a leader." -
September 2016
"Well I think when [Putin] called me brilliant, I'll take the
compliment, okay?" -
September 2016
"... News that Trump might work 4 days a week as President, or at least work the same work week as Congress does, would suggest he plans on running a lean government. ..."
"... A counter-argument that could be put forward is that the Presidency doesn't (and shouldn't) define the office-holder's life and the Clintons themselves are an example of what can happen if the Presidency consumes their lives ..."
"... If it's Trump's intention to reform the political culture in Washington and make it more accountable to the public, and bring the Presidency closer to the public, then defining the maximum limits of the position on his time and sticking to them, perhaps through delegating roles and functions to his cabinet secretaries, is one path to reform. ..."
My impression is that Donald Trump is planning or at least thinking of running the government
as a business, choosing people as cabinet secretaries on the basis of past experience and on what
they would bring to the position, as opposed to choosing cabinet secretaries because they have
been loyal yes-people (as Hillary Clinton would have done)
News that Trump might work 4 days a week as President, or at least work the same work week
as Congress does, would suggest he plans on running a lean government. At present the prevailing
attitude among Washington insiders and the corporate media is that Trump is not really that interested
in being President and isn't committed to the job 24/7.
A counter-argument that could be put forward is that the Presidency doesn't (and shouldn't)
define the office-holder's life and the Clintons themselves are an example of what can happen
if the Presidency consumes their lives: it can damage the individuals and in Hillary Clinton's
case, cut her off so much from ordinary people that it disqualifies her from becoming President
herself.
If it's Trump's intention to reform the political culture in Washington and make it more accountable
to the public, and bring the Presidency closer to the public, then defining the maximum limits
of the position on his time and sticking to them, perhaps through delegating roles and functions
to his cabinet secretaries, is one path to reform.
"... a normal person might look at the slight thaw in Cold War 2.0 as an early positive indicator of the end of the Obama Era. ..."
"... Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) begs to differ. In a blistering statement he released today responding to the Trump/Putin telephone call, Sen. McCain condemned any efforts by President-elect Trump to find common ground with Putin. ..."
"... Interesting that Republican McCain has taken to using the Hillary Clinton campaign line (the one that lost her the election) that somehow the Russians were manipulating the US electoral process. The claim was never backed up by facts and Hillary's claim that some 17 US intelligence agencies agreed with her was shown to be a dangerous and foolish lie. ..."
"... What McCain doesn't say is that unlike US troops in Syria, the Russians are invited by the Syrian government and operate according to international law. Oh yes, and they are also fighting al-Qaeda and ISIS, which has sought to overthrow Assad for the past five years. ..."
"... Maybe McCain is just really sensitive after meeting with al-Qaeda and ISIS in Syria? ..."
"... As rumors swirl from Washington about neocons sniffing out top jobs in the incoming administration, it would serve president-elect Trump well to reflect on he true nature of the neocon beast... ..."
Sit down. This is going to shock you. (Not). We
reported yesterday on the telephone call between US president-elect Trump and Russian president
Putin, where the current and future presidents discussed the need to set aside differences and look
to more constructive future relations.
With serious observers of this past year's increasing tensions between US and Russia openly
worrying about a nuclear war breaking out, with some 300,000 NATO troops placed on Russia's border,
with sanctions hurting average businesspersons on both sides, a normal person might look at the
slight thaw in Cold War 2.0 as an early positive indicator of the end of the Obama Era.
Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) begs to differ. In a blistering
statement he released today responding to the Trump/Putin telephone call, Sen. McCain condemned
any efforts by President-elect Trump to find common ground with Putin.
Any claim by Putin that he wants to improve relations with the US must be vigorously opposed,
writes McCain. He explains:
We should place as much faith in such statements as any other made by a former KGB agent who has
plunged his country into tyranny, murdered his political opponents, invaded his neighbors, threatened
America's allies, and attempted to undermine America's elections.
Interesting that Republican McCain has taken to using the Hillary Clinton campaign line (the
one that lost her the election) that somehow the Russians were manipulating the US electoral process.
The claim was never backed up by facts and Hillary's claim that some 17 US intelligence agencies
agreed with her was
shown to be a dangerous and foolish lie.
Why is Putin not to be trusted, according to McCain?
Vladimir Putin has rejoined Bashar Assad in his barbaric war against the Syrian people with the
resumption of large-scale Russian air and missile strikes in Idlib and Homs. Another brutal assault
on the city of Aleppo could soon follow.
What McCain doesn't say is that unlike US troops in Syria, the Russians are invited by the Syrian
government and operate according to international law. Oh yes, and they are also fighting al-Qaeda
and ISIS, which has sought to overthrow Assad for the past five years.
As rumors swirl from Washington about neocons sniffing out top jobs in the incoming administration,
it would serve president-elect Trump well to reflect on he true nature of the neocon beast...
"... "Welcome to the world of strategic analysis," Ivan Selin used to tell his team during the Sixties, "where we program weapons that don't work to meet threats that don't exist." Selin, who would spend the following decades as a powerful behind-the-scenes player in the Washington mandarinate, was then the director of the Strategic Forces Division in the Pentagon's Office of Systems Analysis. "I was a twenty-eight-year-old wiseass when I started saying that," he told me, reminiscing about those days. "I thought the issues we were dealing with were so serious, they could use a little levity." ..."
"Welcome to the world of strategic analysis," Ivan Selin used to tell his team during the
Sixties, "where we program weapons that don't work to meet threats that don't exist." Selin, who
would spend the following decades as a powerful behind-the-scenes player in the Washington mandarinate,
was then the director of the Strategic Forces Division in the Pentagon's Office of Systems Analysis.
"I was a twenty-eight-year-old wiseass when I started saying that," he told me, reminiscing about
those days. "I thought the issues we were dealing with were so serious, they could use a little
levity."
####
While I do have some quibbles with the piece (RuAF pilots are getting much more than 90 hours
a year flight time & equipment is overrated and unaffordable in any decent numbers), it is pretty
solid.
"... I know what it is like to have to juggle creditors to make it through a week. I know what it is like to have to swallow my pride and constantly dun people to pay me so that I can pay others. ..."
"... I know what it is like to dread going to the mailbox, because there will always be new bills to pay but seldom a check with which to pay them. I know what it is like to have to tell my daughter that I didn't know if I would be able to pay for her wedding; it all depended on whether something good happened. And I know what it is like to have to borrow money from my adult daughters because my wife and I ran out of heating oil ..."
"... Two-thirds of Americans would have difficulty coming up with the money to cover a $1,000 emergency, according to an exclusive poll released Thursday, a signal that despite years after the Great Recession, Americans' finances remain precarious as ever. ..."
"... These difficulties span all incomes, according to the poll conducted by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Three-quarters of people in households making less than $50,000 a year and two-thirds of those making between $50,000 and $100,000 would have difficulty coming up with $1,000 to cover an unexpected bill. ..."
"... Even for the country's wealthiest 20 percent - households making more than $100,000 a year - 38 percent say they would have at least some difficulty coming up with $1,000 ..."
"... Chronicle for Higher Education: ..."
"... Meanwhile, 91% of all the profits generated by the U.S. economy from 2009 through 2012 went to the top 1%. As just one example, the annual bonuses (not salaries, just the bonuses) of all Wall Street financial traders last year amounted to 28 billion dollars while the total income of all minimum wage workers in America came to 14 billion dollars. ..."
"... "Between 2009 and 2012, according to updated data from Emmanuel Saez, overall income per family grew 6.9 percent. The gains weren't shared evenly, however. The top 1 percent saw their real income grow by 34.7 percent while the bottom 99 percent only saw a 0.8 percent gain, meaning that the 1 percent captured 91 percent of all real income. ..."
"... Adjusting for inflation and excluding anything made from capital gains investments like stocks, however, shows that even that small gains for all but the richest disappears. According to Justin Wolfers, adjusted average income for the 1 percent without capital gains rose from $871,100 to $968,000 in that time period. For everyone else, average income actually fell from $44,000 to $43,900. Calculated this way, the 1 percent has captured all of the income gains." ..."
"... There actually is a logic at work in the Rust Belt voters for voted for Trump. I don't think it's good logic, but it makes sense in its own warped way. The calculation the Trump voters seem to be making in the Rust Belt is that it's better to have a job and no health insurance and no medicare and no social security, than no job but the ACA (with $7,000 deductibles you can't afford to pay for anyway) plus medicare (since most of these voters are healthy, they figure they'll never get sick) plus social security (most of these voters are not 65 or older, and probably think they'll never age - or perhaps don't believe that social security will be solvent when they do need it). ..."
"... It's the same twisted logic that goes on with protectionism. Rust Belt workers figure that it's better to have a job and not be able to afford a Chinese-made laptop than not to have a job but plenty of cheap foreign-made widgets you could buy if you had any money (which you don't). That logic doesn't parse if you run through the economics (because protectionism will destroy the very jobs they think they're saving), but it can be sold as a tweet in a political campaign. ..."
"... The claim "Trump's coalition is composed of overt racists and people who are indifferent to overt racism" is incomplete. Trump's coalition actually consists of 3 parts and it's highly unstable: [1] racists, [2] plutocrats, [3] working class people slammed hard by globalization for whom Democrats have done little or nothing. ..."
"... The good news is that Trump's coalition is unstable. The plutocrats and Rust Belters are natural enemies. ..."
"... Listen to Steve Bannon, a classic stormfront type - he says he wants to blow up both the Democratic and the Republican party. He calls himself a "Leninist" in a recent interview and vows to wreck all elite U.S. institutions (universities, giant multinationals), not just the Democratic party. ..."
"... Again, it comes down to: by 2008, the Democratic Party is not a fit vehicle for populism, because it has become a neoliberal vehicle for giant banks. Turns out that makes a policy difference. ..."
Eric places the blame for this loss squarely on economics, which, it seems to me, gets the analysis
exactly right. And the statistics back up his analysis, I believe.
It's disturbing and saddening to watch other left-wing websites ignore those statistics and
charge off the cliff into the abyss, screaming that this election was all about racism/misogyny/homophobia/[fill
in the blank with identity politics demonology of your choice]. First, the "it's all racism" analysis
conveniently lets the current Democratic leadership off the hook. They didn't do anything wrong,
it was those "deplorables" (half the country!) who are to blame. Second, the identity politics
blame-shifting completely overlooks and short-circuits any real action to fix the economy by Democratic
policymakers or Democratic politicians or the Democratic party leadership. That's particularly
convenient for the Democratic leadership because these top-four-percenter professionals "promise
anything and change nothing" while jetting between Davos and Martha's Vineyard, ignoring the peons
who don't make $100,000 or more a year because the peons all live in flyover country.
"Trump supporters were on average affluent, but they are always Republican and aren't numerous
enough to deliver the presidency (538 has changed their view in the wake of the election result).
Some point out that looking at support by income doesn't show much distinctive support for Trump
among the "poor", but that's beside the point too, as it submerges a regional phenomenon in a
national average, just as exit polls do. (..)
"When commentators like Michael Moore and Thomas Frank pointed out that there was possibility
for Trump in the Rust Belt they were mostly ignored or, even more improbably, accused of being
apologists for racism and misogyny. But that is what Trump did, and he won. Moreover, he won with
an amateurish campaign against a well-funded and politically sophisticated opponent simply because
he planted his flag where others wouldn't.
"Because of the obsession with exit polls, post-election analysis has not come to grips with
the regional nature of the Trump phenomenon. Exit polls divide the general electorate based on
individual attributes: race, gender, income, education, and so on, making regional distinctions
invisible. Moreover, America doesn't decide the presidential election that way. It decides it
based on the electoral college, which potentially makes the characteristics of individual states
decisive. We should be looking at maps, not exit polls for the explanation. Low black turnout
in California or high Latino turnout in Texas do not matter in the slightest in determining the
election, but exit polls don't help us see that. Exit polls deliver a bunch of non-explanatory
facts, in this election more than other recent ones." http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2016/11/11/23174/
"Donald Trump performed best on Tuesday in places where the economy is in worse shape, and
especially in places where jobs are most at risk in the future.
"Trump, who in his campaign pledged to be a voice for `forgotten Americans,' beat Hillary Clinton
in counties with slower job growth and lower wages. And he far outperformed her in counties where
more jobs are threatened by automation or offshoring, a sign that he found support not just among
workers who are struggling now but among those concerned for their economic future."
Meanwhile, the neoliberal Democrats made claims about the economy that at best wildly oversold
the non-recovery from the 2009 global financial meltdown, and at worst flat-out misrepresented
the state of the U.S. economy. For example, president Obama in his June 1 2016 speech in Elkhart
Indiana, said:
"Now, one of the reasons we're told this has been an unusual election year is because people
are anxious and uncertain about the economy. And our politics are a natural place to channel
that frustration. So I wanted to come to the heartland, to the Midwest, back to close to my
hometown to talk about that anxiety, that economic anxiety, and what I think it means. (..)
America's economy is not just better than it was eight years ago - it is the strongest, most
durable economy in the world. (..) Unemployment in Elkhart has fallen to around 4 percent.
(Applause.) At the peak of the crisis, nearly one in 10 homeowners in the state of Indiana
were either behind on their mortgages or in foreclosure; today, it's one in 30. Back then,
only 75 percent of your kids graduated from high school; tomorrow, 90 percent of them will.
(Applause.) The auto industry just had its best year ever. (..) So that's progress.(..) We
decided to invest in job training so that folks who lost their jobs could retool. We decided
to invest in things like high-tech manufacturing and clean energy and infrastructure, so that
entrepreneurs wouldn't just bring back the jobs that we had lost, but create new and better
jobs By almost every economic measure, America is better off than when I came here at the
beginning of my presidency. That's the truth. That's true. (Applause.) It's true. (Applause.)
Over the past six years, our businesses have created more than 14 million new jobs - that's
the longest stretch of consecutive private sector job growth in our history. We've seen the
first sustained manufacturing growth since the 1990s."
None of this is true. Not is a substantive sense, not in the sense of being accurate, not in
the sense of reflecting the facts on the ground for real working people who don't fly their private
jets to Davos.
The claim that "America's economy is the strongest and most durable economy in the world" is
just plain false. China has a much higher growth rate, at 6.9% nearly triple the U.S.'s - and
America's GDP growth is trending to historic long-term lows, and still falling. Take a look at
this chart of the Federal Reserve board's projections of U.S. GDP growth since 2009 compared with
the real GDP growth rate:
"[In the survey] [t]he Fed asked respondents how they would pay for a $400 emergency. The answer:
47 percent of respondents said that either they would cover the expense by borrowing or selling
something, or they would not be able to come up with the $400 at all. Four hundred dollars! Who
knew?
"Well, I knew. I knew because I am in that 47 percent.
" I know what it is like to have to juggle creditors to make it through a week. I know
what it is like to have to swallow my pride and constantly dun people to pay me so that I can
pay others. I know what it is like to have liens slapped on me and to have my bank account
levied by creditors. I know what it is like to be down to my last $5-literally-while I wait for
a paycheck to arrive, and I know what it is like to subsist for days on a diet of eggs.
I know what it is like to dread going to the mailbox, because there will always be new
bills to pay but seldom a check with which to pay them. I know what it is like to have to tell
my daughter that I didn't know if I would be able to pay for her wedding; it all depended on whether
something good happened. And I know what it is like to have to borrow money from my adult daughters
because my wife and I ran out of heating oil ."
" Two-thirds of Americans would have difficulty coming up with the money to cover a $1,000
emergency, according to an exclusive poll released Thursday, a signal that despite years after
the Great Recession, Americans' finances remain precarious as ever.
" These difficulties span all incomes, according to the poll conducted by The Associated
Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Three-quarters of people in households making less
than $50,000 a year and two-thirds of those making between $50,000 and $100,000 would have difficulty
coming up with $1,000 to cover an unexpected bill.
" Even for the country's wealthiest 20 percent - households making more than $100,000 a
year - 38 percent say they would have at least some difficulty coming up with $1,000 .
"`The more we learn about the balance sheets of Americans, it becomes quite alarming,' said
Caroline Ratcliffe, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute focusing on poverty and emergency savings
issues."
The rest of Obama's statistics are deceptive to the point of being dissimulations - unemployment
has dropped to 4 percent because so many people have stopped looking for work and moved into their
parents' basements that the Bureau of Labor Statistics no longer counts them as unemployed. Meanwhile,
the fraction of working-age adults who are not in the workforce has skyrocketed to an all-time
high. Few homeowners are now being foreclosed in 2016 compared to 2009 because the people in 2009
who were in financial trouble all lost their homes. Only rich people and well-off professionals
were able to keep their homes through the 2009 financial collapse. Since 2009, businesses did
indeed create 14 million new jobs - mostly low-wage junk jobs, part-time minimum-wage jobs that
don't pay a living wage.
"The deep recession wiped out primarily high-wage and middle-wage jobs. Yet the strongest employment
growth during the sluggish recovery has been in low-wage work, at places like strip malls and
fast-food restaurants.
"In essence, the poor economy has replaced good jobs with bad ones."
And the jobs market isn't much better for highly-educated workers:
New research released Monday says nearly half of the nation's recent college graduates work
jobs that don't require a degree.
The report, from the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, concludes that while
college-educated Americans are less likely to collect unemployment, many of the jobs they do have
aren't worth the price of their diplomas.
The data calls into question a national education platform that says higher education is better
in an economy that favors college graduates.
Don't believe it? Then try this article, from the Chronicle for Higher Education:
Approximately 60 percent of the increase in the number of college graduates from 1992 to
2008 worked in jobs that the BLS considers relatively low skilled-occupations where many participants
have only high school diplomas and often even less. Only a minority of the increment in our
nation's stock of college graduates is filling jobs historically considered as requiring a
bachelor's degree or more.
As for manufacturing, U.S. manufacturing lost 35,000 jobs in 2016, and manufacturing employment
remains 2.2% below what it was when Obama took office.
Meanwhile, 91% of all the profits generated by the U.S. economy from 2009 through 2012
went to the top 1%. As just one example, the annual bonuses (not salaries, just the bonuses) of
all Wall Street financial traders last year amounted to 28 billion dollars while the total income
of all minimum wage workers in America came to 14 billion dollars.
"Between 2009 and 2012, according to updated data from Emmanuel Saez, overall income per
family grew 6.9 percent. The gains weren't shared evenly, however. The top 1 percent saw their
real income grow by 34.7 percent while the bottom 99 percent only saw a 0.8 percent gain, meaning
that the 1 percent captured 91 percent of all real income.
Adjusting for inflation and excluding anything made from capital gains investments like
stocks, however, shows that even that small gains for all but the richest disappears. According
to Justin Wolfers, adjusted average income for the 1 percent without capital gains rose from $871,100
to $968,000 in that time period. For everyone else, average income actually fell from $44,000
to $43,900. Calculated this way, the 1 percent has captured all of the income gains."
Does any of this sound like "the strongest, most durable economy in the world"? Does any of
this square with the claims by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama that "By almost every economic
measure, America is better off "? The U.S. economy is only better off in 2016 by disingenuous
comparison with the stygian depths of the 2009 economic collapse.
Hillary Clinton tied herself to Barack Obama's economic legacy, and the brutal reality for
working class people remains that the economy today has barely improved for most workers to what
it was in 2009, and is in many ways worse. Since 2009, automation + outsourcing/offshoring has
destroyed whole classes of jobs, from taxi drivers (wiped out by Uber and Lyft) to warehoues stock
clerks (getting wiped out by robots) to paralegals and associates at law firms (replaced by databases
and legal search algorithms) to high-end programmers (wiped out by an ever-increasing flood of
H1B via workers from India and China).
Yet vox.com continues to run article after article proclaiming "the 2016 election was all about
racism." And we have a non-stop stream of this stuff from people like Anne Laurie over at balloon-juice.com:
"While the more-Leftist-than-thou "progressives" - including their latest high-profile figurehead
- are high-fiving each other in happy anticipation of potential public-outrage gigs over the next
four years, at least some people are beginning to push back on the BUT WHITE WORKING CLASS HAS
ALL THE SADS!!! meme so beloved of Very Serious Pundits."
That's the ticket, Democrats double down on the identity politics, keep telling the pulverized
middle class how great the economy is. Because that worked so well for you this election.
= = = mclaren@9:52 am: The rest of Obama's statistics are deceptive to the point of being
dissimulations -[ ] Only rich people and well-off professionals were able to keep their homes
through the 2009 financial collapse. = = =
Some food for thought in your post, but you don't help your argument with statements such as
this one. Rich people and well-off professionals make up at most 10% of the population. US homeownership
rate in 2005 was 68.8%, in 2015 is 63.7. That's a big drop and unquestionably represents a lot
of people losing their houses involuntarily. Still, even assuming no "well-off professionals"
lost their houses in the recession that still leaves the vast majority of the houses owned by
the middle class. Which is consistent with foreclosure and sales stats in middle class areas from
2008-2014. Remember that even with 20% unemployment 80% of the population still has a job.
Similarly, I agree that the recession and job situation was qualitatively worse than the quantitative
stats depicted. Once you start adding in hidden factors not captured by the official stats, though,
where do you stop? How do you know the underground economy isn't doing far better than it was
in the boom years of the oughts, thus reducing actual unemployment? Etc.
Finally, you need to address the fundamental question: assuming all you say is true (arguendo),
how does destroying the Affordable Care Act, Social Security, and Medicare help those in the economically
depressed areas? I got hit bad by the recession myself. Know what helped from 2010 forward? Knowing
that I could change jobs, keep my college-age children on my spouse's heath plan, not get hit
with pre-existing condition fraud, and that if worse came to worse in a couple years I would have
the plan exchange to fall back on. Kansas has tried the Ryan/Walker approach, seen it fail, doubled
down, and seen that fail 4x as badly. Now we're going to make it up on unit sales by trying the
Ryan plan nationally? How do you expect that to "work out for you"?
WLGR 11.16.16 at 4:11 pm
mclaren @ 7: "high-end programmers (wiped out by an ever-increasing flood of H1B via workers
from India and China)"
I'm on board with the general thrust of what you're saying, but this is way, way over
the line separating socialism from barbarism. The fact that
it's not even true is beside the point, as is the (quite frankly) fascist metaphor of "flood"
to describe human fucking beings traveling in search of economic security, at least as long as
you show some self-awareness and contrition about your language. Some awareness about the insidious
administrative structure of the H1-B program would also be nice - the way it works is, an individual's
visa status more or less completely depends on remaining in the good graces of their employer,
meaning that by design these employees have no conceivable leverage in any negotiation
over pay or working conditions, and a program of unconditional residency without USCIS as a de
facto strikebreaker would have much less downward pressure on wages - but anti-immigration rhetoric
remaining oblivious to actual immigration law is par for the course.
No, the real point of departure here from what deserves to be called "socialism" is in the
very act of blithely combining effects of automation (i.e. traditional capitalist competition
for productive efficiency at the expense of workers' economic security) and effects of offshoring/outsourcing/immigration
(i.e. racialized fragmentation of the global working class by accident of birth into those who
"deserve" greater economic security and those who don't) into one and the same depiction of developed-world
economic crisis. In so many words, you're walking right down neoliberal capitalism's ideological
garden path: the idea that it's not possible to be anticapitalist without being an economic nationalist,
and that every conceivable alternative to some form of Hillary Clinton is ultimately reducible
to some form of Donald Trump. On the contrary, those of us on the socialism side of "socialism
or barbarism" don't object to capitalism because it's exploiting American workers , we
object because it's exploiting workers , and insisting on this crucial point against all
chauvinist pressure ("workers of all lands , unite!") is what fundamentally separates our
anticapitalism from the pseudo-anticapitalism of fascists.
Maclaren: I'm with you. I well remember Obama and his "pivot to deficit reduction" and "green
shoots" while I was screaming at the TV 'No!! Not Now!"
And then he tried for a "grand bargain" with the Reps over chained CPI adjustment for SS, and
he became my active enemy. I was a Democrat. Where did my party go?
Just chiming in here: The implicit deal between the elites and the hoi polloi was that the economy
would be run with minimal competence. Throughout the west, those elites have broken faith with
the masses on that issue, and are being punished for it.
I'm less inclined to attach responsibility to Obama, Clinton or the Democratic Party than some.
If Democrats had their way, the economy would have been managed considerably more competently.
Always remember that the rejection of the elites wasn't just a rejection of Democrats. The
Republican elite also took it in the neck.
I'll also dissent from the view that race wasn't decisive in this election. Under different
circumstances, we might have had Bernie's revolution rather than Trump's, but Trump's coalition
is composed of overt racists and people who are indifferent to overt racism.
I find the discussions over identity politics so intensely frustrating. A lot of people
on the left have gone all-in on self-righteous anger
Identity politics (and to some extent probably the rhetorical style that goes with it) isn't
a 'left' thing, it's a liberal thing. It's a bęte noire for many on the left-see eg. Nancy Fraser's
work.
The Anglo/online genus what you get when you subtract class, socialism and real-world organisation
from politics and add in a lot of bored students and professionals with internet connections in
the context of a political culture (America's) that already valorises individual aggression to
a unique degree.
As polticalfoorball @15 says. The Democrats just didn't have the political muscle to deliver on
those things. There really is a dynamic thats been playing out: Democrats don't get enough governing
capacity because they did poorly in the election, which means their projects to improve the economy
are neutered or allowed through only in a very weakened form. Then the next election cycle the
neuterers use that failure as a weapon to take even more governing capacity away. Its not a failure
of will, its a failure to get on top of the political feedback loop.
@15 politicalfootball 11.16.16 at 5:27 pm
"Throughout the west, those elites have broken faith with the masses on that issue, and are being
punished for it."
Could you specify some "elite" that has been punished?
'the economic theories and programs ascribed to John M. Keynes and his followers; specifically
: the advocacy of monetary and fiscal programs by government to increase employment and spending'
– and if it is done wisely – like in most European countries before 2000 it is one of the least
'braindead' things.
But with the introduction of the Euro – some governmental programs – lead (especially in Spain)
to horrendous self-destructive housing and building bubbles – which lead to the conclusion that
such programs – which allow 'gambling with houses' are pretty much 'braindead'.
Or shorter: The quality of Keynesianism depends on NOT doing it 'braindead'.
Cranky Observer in #11 makes some excellent points. Crucially, he asks: "Finally, you need to
address the fundamental question: assuming all you say is true (arguendo), how does destroying
the Affordable Care Act, Social Security, and Medicare help those in the economically depressed
areas?"
There actually is a logic at work in the Rust Belt voters for voted for Trump. I don't
think it's good logic, but it makes sense in its own warped way. The calculation the Trump voters
seem to be making in the Rust Belt is that it's better to have a job and no health insurance and
no medicare and no social security, than no job but the ACA (with $7,000 deductibles you can't
afford to pay for anyway) plus medicare (since most of these voters are healthy, they figure they'll
never get sick) plus social security (most of these voters are not 65 or older, and probably think
they'll never age - or perhaps don't believe that social security will be solvent when they do
need it).
It's the same twisted logic that goes on with protectionism. Rust Belt workers figure that
it's better to have a job and not be able to afford a Chinese-made laptop than not to have a job
but plenty of cheap foreign-made widgets you could buy if you had any money (which you don't).
That logic doesn't parse if you run through the economics (because protectionism will destroy
the very jobs they think they're saving), but it can be sold as a tweet in a political campaign.
As for 63.7% home ownership stats in 2016, vast numbers of those "owned" homes were snapped
up by giant banks and other financial entities like hedge funds which then rented those homes
out. So the home ownership stats in 2016 are extremely deceptive. Much of the home-buying since
the 2009 crash has been investment purchases. Foreclosure home purchases for rent is now a huge
thriving business, and it's fueling a second housing bubble. Particularly because in many ways
it repeats the financially frothy aspects of the early 2000s housing bubble - banks and investment
firms are issuing junks bonds based on rosy estimates of ever-escalating rents and housing prices,
they use those junk financial instruments (and others like CDOs) to buy houses which then get
rented out at inflated prices, the rental income gets used to fund more tranches of investment
which fuels more buy-to-rent home buying. Rents have already skyrocketed far beyond incomes on
the East and West Coast, so this can't continue. But home prices and rents keep rising. There
is no city in the United States today where a worker making minimum wage can afford to rent a
one-bedroom apartment and have money left over to eat and pay for a car, health insurance, etc.
If home ownership were really so robust, this couldn't possibly be the case. The fact that rents
keep skyrocketing even as undocumented hispanics return to Mexico in record numbers while post-9/11
ICE restrictions have hammered legal immigration numbers way, way down suggests that home ownership
is not nearly as robust as the deceptive numbers indicate.
Political football in #15 remarks: "I'll also dissent from the view that race wasn't decisive
in this election. Under different circumstances, we might have had Bernie's revolution rather
than Trump's, but Trump's coalition is composed of overt racists and people who are indifferent
to overt racism."
Race was important, but not the root cause of the Trump victory. How do we know this? Tump
himself is telling us. Look at Trump's first announced actions - deport 3 million undocumented
immigrants who have committed crimes, ram through vast tax cuts for the rich, and end the inheritance
tax.
If Trump's motivation (and his base's motivation) was pure racism, Trump's first announced
action would be something like passing laws that made it illegal to marry undocumented workers.
His first act would be to roll back the legalization of black/white marriage and re-instate segregation.
Trump isn't promising any of that.
Instead Trump's (bad) policies are based around enriching billionaires and shutting down immigration.
Bear in mind that 43% of all new jobs created since 2009 went to immigrants and you start to realize
that Trump's base is reacting to economic pressure by scapegoating immigrants, not racism by itself.
If it were pure racism we'd have Trump and Ryan proposing a bunch of new Nuremberg laws. Make
it illegal to have sex with muslims, federally fund segregated black schools and pass laws to
force black kids to get bussed to them, create apartheid-style zones where only blacks can live,
that sort of thing. Trump's first announced actions involve enriching the fantastically wealthy
and enacting dumb self-destructive protectionism via punitive immigration control. That's protectionism
+ class war of the rich against everyone else, not racism. The protectionist immigration-control
+ deportation part of Trump's program is sweet sweet music to the working class people in the
Rust Belt. They think the 43% of jobs taken by immigrants will come back. They don't realize that
those are mostly jobs no one wants to do anyway, and that most of those jobs are already in the
process of getting automated out of existence.
The claim "Trump's coalition is composed of overt racists and people who are indifferent
to overt racism" is incomplete. Trump's coalition actually consists of 3 parts and it's highly
unstable: [1] racists, [2] plutocrats, [3] working class people slammed hard by globalization
for whom Democrats have done little or nothing.
Here's an argument that may resonate: the first two groups in Trump's coalition are unreachable.
Liberal Democrats can't sweet-talk racists out of being racist and we certainly have nothing to
offer the plutocrats. So the only part of Trump's coalition that is really reachable by liberal
Democrats is the third group. Shouldn't we be concentrating on that third group, then?
The good news is that Trump's coalition is unstable. The plutocrats and Rust Belters are
natural enemies. Since the plutocrats are perceived as running giant corporations that import
large numbers of non-white immigrants to lower wages, the racists are not big fans of that group
either.
Listen to Steve Bannon, a classic stormfront type - he says he wants to blow up both the
Democratic and the Republican party. He calls himself a "Leninist" in a recent interview and vows
to wreck all elite U.S. institutions (universities, giant multinationals), not just the Democratic
party.
Why? Because the stormfront types consider elite U.S. institutions like CitiBank as equally
culpable with Democrats in supposedly destroying white people in the U.S. According to Bannon's
twisted skinhead logic, Democrats are allegedly race traitors for cultural reasons, but big U.S.
corporations and elite institutions are supposedly equally guilty of economic race treason by
importing vast numbers of non-white immigrants via H1B visas, by offshoring jobs from mostly caucasian-populated
red states to non-white countries like India, Africa, China, and by using elite U.S. universities
to trawl the world for the best (often non-white) students, etc. Bannon's "great day of the rope"
includes the plutocrats as well as people of color.
These natural fractures in the Trump coalition are real, and Democrats can exploit them to
weaken and destroy Republicans. But we have to get away from condemning all Republicans as racists
because if we go down that route, we won't realize how fractured and unstable the Trump coalition
really is.
The short version of my thinking on the Obama stimulus is this: Keynesian stimulus spending is
a free lunch; it doesn't really matter what you spend money on up to a very generous point, so
it seems ready-made for legislative log-rolling. If Obama could not get a very big stimulus indeed
thru a Democratic Congress long out of power, Obama wasn't really trying. And, well-chosen spending
on pork barrel projects is popular and gets Congressional critters re-elected. So, again, if the
stimulus is small and the Democratic Congress doesn't get re-elected, Obama isn't really trying.
Again, it comes down to: by 2008, the Democratic Party is not a fit vehicle for populism,
because it has become a neoliberal vehicle for giant banks. Turns out that makes a policy difference.
Ps. Should prob add that identity politics isn't the same thing as feminism, anti-racism, LGBT
politics, etc. They're all needed now more than ever.
What we don't need more of imo is a particular liberal/middle-class form of those things with
particular assumptions (meritocratic and individualist), epistemology (strongly subjectivist)
and rhetorical style (which often aims humiliating opponents from a position of relative knowledge/status
rather than verbal engagement).
I don't know why I'm even having to say this, as it's so obvious. The "leftists" (for want of
a better word) and feminists who I know are also against neoliberalism. They are against the selloff
of public assets to enterprises for private profit. They want to see a solution to the rapidly
shrinking job market as technology replaces jobs (no, it's not enough for the Heroic Workers to
Seize the Means of Production – the means of production are different now and the solution is
going to have to be more complex than just "bring back manufacturing" or "introduce tariffs".)
They want to roll back the tax cuts for the rich which have whittled down our revenue base this
century. They want corporations and the top 10% to pay their fair share, and concomitantly they
want pensioners, the unemployed and people caring for children to have a proper living wage.
They support a universal "single payer" health care system, which we social democratic squishy
types managed to actually introduce in the 1970s, but now we have to fight against right wing
governments trying to roll it back They support a better system of public education. They support
a science-based approach to climate change where it is taken seriously for the threat it is and
given priority in Government policy. They support spending less on the Military and getting out
of international disputes which we (Western nations) only seem to exacerbate.
This is not an exhaustive list.
Yet just because the same people say that the dominant Western countries (and my own) still
suffer from institutionalised racism and sexism, which is not some kind of cake icing but actually
ruin lives and kill people, we are "all about identity politics" and cannot possibly have enough
brain cells to think about the issues I described in para 1.
The slow recovery was only one factor. Wages have been stagnant since Reagan. And honestly,
if a white Republican president had stabilized the economy, killed Osama Bin Laden and got rid
of pre-existing condition issue with healthcare, the GOP would be BRAGGING all over it. Let's
remember that we have ONE party that has been devoted to racist appeals, lying and putting party
over country for decades.
Obama entered office as the economy crashed over a cliff. Instead of reforming the banks and
punishing the bankers who engaged in fraudulent activities, he waded into healthcare reform. Banks
are bigger today than they were in 2008. And tell me again, which bankers were punished for the
fraud? Not a one All that Repo 105 maneuvering, stuffing the retirement funds with toxic assets
– etc. and so on – all of that was perfectly legal? And if legal, all of that was totally bonusable?
Yes! In America, such failure is gifted with huge bonuses, thanks to the American taxpayer.
Meanwhile, homeowners saw huge drops the value of their homes. Some are still underwater with
the mortgage. It's a shame that politicians and reporters in DC don't get out much.
Concurrently, right before the election, ACA premiums skyrocketed. If you are self-insured,
ACA is NOT affordable. It doesn't matter that prior to ACA, premiums increased astronomically.
Obama promised AFFORDABLE healthcare. In my state, we have essentially a monopoly on health insurance,
and the costs are absurd. But that's in part because the state Republicans refused to expand Medicaid.
Don't underestimate HRC's serious issues. HRC had one speech for the bankers and another for
everyone else. Why didn't she release the GS transcripts? When did the Democrats become the party
of Wall Street?
She also made the same idiotic mistake that Romney did – disparage a large swathe of American
voters (basket of deplorables is this year's 47%.)
And then we had a nation of voters intent on the outsider. Bernie Sanders had an improbable
run at it – the Wikileaks emails showed that the DNC did what they could to get rid of him as
a threat.
Well America has done and gone elected themselves an outsider. Lucky us.
"... 'A big part of Bill's anger toward Hillary was that he was sidelined during the entire campaign by her advisers,' said the source. 'He can't be effective if he sees himself as just another hired hand. He wasn't listened to and that infuriated him. After all, he knows something about campaigns, and he told me in early October that Hillary and her advisers were blowing it. ..."
"... 'Hillary wouldn't listen. She told Bill that his ideas were old and that he was out of touch. In the end, there was nothing he could do about it because Hillary and her people weren't listening to anything he said.' ..."
'Bill always campaigned as a guy who felt your pain, but Hillary came across as someone who was
pissed off at her enemy [Trump], not someone who was reaching out and trying to make life better
for the white working class.'
'Bill also said that many African Americans were deeply disappointed with the results of eight
years of Obama,' the source continued.
'Despite more and more government assistance, black weren't economically any better off, and black-on-black
crime was destroying their communities. He said Hillary should have gone into the South Side of Chicago
and condemned the out-of-control violence.'
'A big part of Bill's anger toward Hillary was that he was sidelined during the entire campaign
by her advisers,' said the source. 'He can't be effective if he sees himself as just another hired
hand. He wasn't listened to and that infuriated him. After all, he knows something about campaigns,
and he told me in early October that Hillary and her advisers were blowing it.
'Hillary wouldn't listen. She told Bill that his ideas were old and that he was out of touch.
In the end, there was nothing he could do about it because Hillary and her people weren't listening
to anything he said.'
"... Of course, the DNC was too busy trying to blow the Sanders campaign to smithereens and Hillary decided that comforting the Democrat Party's donor base was more important than attracting working class voters in the Rust Belt. ..."
I read all of these points and conclude that Bernie Sanders would have defeated Trump in the
general election. Sanders would have held all of the Democratic strongholds, and he would have
beaten Trump in the Midwest.
Of course, the DNC was too busy trying to blow the Sanders campaign to smithereens and
Hillary decided that comforting the Democrat Party's donor base was more important than attracting
working class voters in the Rust Belt.
This is evidence that the elites in the Democrat Party would rather lose with a ' made ' candidate
than win with an outsider.
"... Clinton's defeat is more than anything else a rejection of Obama. Obama descended into the fray to bolster her campaign and witnessed the rejection of his own presidency. Conquered, in the 2008 electoral campaign, with a pledge of support not only for Wall Street but also "Main Street", that is, the ordinary citizen. Since then, the middle class has witnessed its conditions deteriorate, the rate of poverty has increased while the rich have become even richer. Now, marketing himself as the champion of the middle class, the billionaire outsider, Donald Trump, has won the presidency. ..."
"... As her e-mails make clear, when she was Secretary of State, she convinced President Obama to engage in war to demolish Libya and to roll out the same operation against Syria. She was the one to promote the internal destabilization of Venezuela and Brazil and the US "Pivot to Asia" – an anti-Chinese manoeuvre. And yet again, she also used the Clinton Foundation as a vehicle to prepare the terrain in Ukraine for the Maidan Square putsch which paved the way for Usa/Nato escalation against Russia. ..."
"... Given that all this has not prevented the relative decline of US power, it is up to the Trump Administration to correct its shot, while keeping its gaze fixed on the same target. There is no air of reality to the hypothesis that Trump intends to abandon the system of alliances centered around US-led Nato. ..."
"... Trump could seek an agreement with Russia, an additional objective of which would be to pull it away from China. China: against which Trump announces economic measures, accompanied by an additional strengthening of US military presence in the Asia-Pacific region. ..."
"... Here you have the colossal financial groups that dominate the economy (the share value alone of the companies listed on Wall Street is higher than the entire US national income). ..."
"... Then you have the multinationals whose economic dimensions exceed those of entire states and which delocalize production to countries offering cheap labour. The knock-on effect? Domestically, factories will close and unemployment will increase, which will in turn lead to the conditions of the US middle class becoming even worse. ..."
"... It is 21st century capitalism, which the USA expresses in its most extreme form, that increasingly polarizes the rich and poor. 1% of the global population has more than the other 99%. The President[-elect], Trump, belongs to the class of the superrich. ..."
Clinton's defeat is more than anything else a rejection of Obama. Obama descended into the
fray to bolster her campaign and witnessed the rejection of his own presidency. Conquered, in the
2008 electoral campaign, with a pledge of support not only for Wall Street but also "Main Street",
that is, the ordinary citizen. Since then, the middle class has witnessed its conditions deteriorate,
the rate of poverty has increased while the rich have become even richer. Now, marketing himself
as the champion of the middle class, the billionaire outsider, Donald Trump, has won the presidency.
How will this change of guard at the White House change US foreign policy? Certainly, the core
objective of remaining the dominant global power will remain untouched. [Yet] this position is increasing
fragile. The USA is losing ground both within the economic and the political domains, [ceding] it
to China, Russia and other "emerging countries". This is why it is throwing the sword onto the scale.
This is followed by a series of wars where Hillary Clinton played the [lead] protagonist.
As her authorized biography reveals, she was the one as First Lady, to convince the President,
her consort, to engage in war to destroy Yugoslavia, initiating a series of "humanitarian interventions"
against "dictators" charged with "genocide".
As her e-mails make clear, when she was Secretary of State, she convinced President Obama
to engage in war to demolish Libya and to roll out the same operation against Syria. She was the
one to promote the internal destabilization of Venezuela and Brazil and the US "Pivot to Asia" –
an anti-Chinese manoeuvre. And yet again, she also used the Clinton Foundation as a vehicle to prepare
the terrain in Ukraine for the Maidan Square putsch which paved the way for Usa/Nato escalation against
Russia.
Given that all this has not prevented the relative decline of US power, it is up to the Trump
Administration to correct its shot, while keeping its gaze fixed on the same target. There is no
air of reality to the hypothesis that Trump intends to abandon the system of alliances centered around
US-led Nato. But he will of course thump his fists on the table to secure a deeper commitment,
particularly on military expenditure from the allies.
Trump could seek an agreement with Russia, an additional objective of which would be to pull
it away from China. China: against which Trump announces economic measures, accompanied by an additional
strengthening of US military presence in the Asia-Pacific region.
Such decisions, that will surely open the door for further wars, do not depend on Trump's warrior-like
temperament, but on centres of power wherein lies the matrix of command on which the White House
itself depends.
Here you have the colossal financial groups that dominate the economy (the share value alone
of the companies listed on Wall Street is higher than the entire US national income).
Then you have the multinationals whose economic dimensions exceed those of entire states and
which delocalize production to countries offering cheap labour. The knock-on effect? Domestically,
factories will close and unemployment will increase, which will in turn lead to the conditions of
the US middle class becoming even worse.
Then you have the giants of the war industry that extract profit from war.
It is 21st century capitalism, which the USA expresses in its most extreme form, that increasingly
polarizes the rich and poor. 1% of the global population has more than the other 99%. The President[-elect],
Trump, belongs to the class of the superrich.
Talking Point: The Clinton Campaign Was Well-Managed
Here are two examples of the talking point. From the Washington Post (November 10, 2016):
At Brooklyn headquarters on Wednesday, Podesta expressed his gratitude and support for the
team, and for Mook. "We have the No. 1 campaign manager," he said, in a staffwide gathering
in the afternoon. "I've been doing this since 1968, and I've never seen a culture and a spirit
like we created in this campaign." On the conference call with thousands of staff across the
country, Clinton also called in [how kind] and thanked her team for their dedication.
Mook tried to end the campaign on a high note.
"What you've created is going to live on," he told his troops. "Leaders all over this country,
local networks around the nation, future candidates who are going to step forward. Someone
in this room is going to manage a presidential campaign one day."
Talking Point: The Clinton Defeat Had Nothing To Do With Economics
Here's an example of the talking point. From, naturally,
Amanda Marcotte (November 11, 2016):
(The subtext here is usually that if you don't retweet approvingly, you're a racist yourself,
and possibly a racist Trump supporter.) There are four reasons why this talking point is false.
... .... ...
To be fair, Clinton is correct that "there are lots of reasons," in an election this close. However,
to me, blaming Comey is like blaming the last pebble in an avalanche of #FAIL. Sanders asks the
right question.
Talking about the Comey letters
, Sanders said:
"It's not a question of what happens in the last week. The question is that she should have
won this election by 10 percentage points.
"... Alexei Ulyukayev is a well-known economic liberal, with a career dating back to the turbulent market reforms of the 1990s ..."
"... "The arrest was big news on Russia's state-run TV channels." ..."
"... Yesterday RBK economic channel (pro-liberast independent one) could not shut up – they were talking only about this. Ekho Moscvy was hysterical, as if it was not the crook arrested, but Lucavichev rabbi robbed and killed in his synagogue. ..."
"... "News of the minister's arrest sparked a mixture of shock and bewilderment." ..."
"... "Alexei Ulyukayev is a well-known economic liberal, with a career dating back to the turbulent market reforms of the 1990s." ..."
"... So… to become a "liberal victim of the Regime" instead of "Regime's lackey" you must steal lots of money and get caught? A-okey! ..."
"... It's also charming when the article uses the tired cliché "some think" or "some people consider this" as a way of legitimizing their own speculations. ..."
The arrest was big news on Russia's state-run TV channels.
However, sources told the Novaya Gazeta website that Mr Ulyukayev himself did not take any
money, contradicting earlier reports, and there was no video footage of his arrest. [Novaya Gazeta
said that? Well what a surprise! - ME]
The economy ministry described the arrest as "strange and surprising".
Show of state strength or payback? By Sarah Rainsford, BBC News, Moscow
News of the minister's arrest sparked a mixture of shock and bewilderment.
A stream of commentators on state TV have been telling viewers that this means that
no-one is untouchable, or above the law. Even ministers.
So on one level, the FSB operation is a clear show of state strength. A message to senior officials
and far beyond.
But elsewhere there are doubts, and questions about the possible politics behind this.
Alexei Ulyukayev is a well-known economic liberal, with a career dating back to the turbulent
market reforms of the 1990s.
He's against increasing state-control of the economy and opposed the Bashneft privatisation
deal which was led by a close and powerful ally of President Putin.
So some suggest this could be a dramatic form of payback. More effective, than simply sacking
him.
Others see a symbolic blow to the liberal camp in government.
[my stress]
State TV! State TV! State TV!
D'ya hear me? - State TV!!!!!!!
Unlike the British Broadcasting Corporation, of course.
"The arrest was big news on Russia's state-run TV channels."
Yesterday RBK economic channel (pro-liberast independent one) could not shut up – they were
talking only about this. Ekho Moscvy was hysterical, as if it was not the crook arrested, but
Lucavichev rabbi robbed and killed in his synagogue.
"News of the minister's arrest sparked a mixture of shock and bewilderment."
Mainly a good cheer and hope that other liberal ministers will soon follow in his steps.
"Alexei Ulyukayev is a well-known economic liberal, with a career dating back to the turbulent
market reforms of the 1990s."
So… to become a "liberal victim of the Regime" instead of "Regime's lackey" you must steal
lots of money and get caught? A-okey!
It's also charming when the article uses the tired cliché "some think" or "some people consider
this" as a way of legitimizing their own speculations.
"... The "my way" or the highway rhetoric from Clinton supporters on the campaign was sickening. When Bush was called a warmonger for Iraq, that was fine. When Clinton was called a warmonger for Iraq and Libya, the Clintonites went on the offensive, often throwing around crap like "if she was a man, she wouldn't be a warmonger!" ..."
"... On racism: "what I can say, from personal experience, is that the racism of my youth was always one step removed. I never saw a family member, friend, or classmate be mean to the actual black people we had in town. We worked with them, played video games with them, waved to them when they passed. What I did hear was several million comments about how if you ever ventured into the city, winding up in the "wrong neighborhood" meant you'd get dragged from your car, raped, and burned alive. Looking back, I think the idea was that the local minorities were fine as long as they acted exactly like us." ..."
"... I'm telling you, the hopelessness eats you alive. And if you dare complain, some liberal elite will pull out their iPad and type up a rant about your racist white privilege. Already, someone has replied to this with a comment saying, "You should try living in a ghetto as a minority!" Exactly. To them, it seems like the plight of poor minorities is only used as a club to bat away white cries for help. Meanwhile, the rate of rural white suicides and overdoses skyrockets. Shit, at least politicians act like they care about the inner cities." ..."
"... And the rural folk are called a "basket of deplorables" and other names. If you want to fight racism, a battle that is Noble and Honorable, you have to understand the nuances between racism and hopelessness. The wizard-wannabe idiots are a tiny fringe. The "deplorables" are a huge part of rural America. If you alienate them, you're helping the idiots mentioned above. ..."
Erm, atheist groups are known to target smaller Christian groups with lawsuits. A baker was sued
for refusing to bake a cake for a Gay Wedding. She was perfectly willing to serve the couple,
just not at the wedding. In California we had a lawsuit over a cross in a park. Atheists threatened
a lawsuit over a seal. Look, I get that there are people with no life out there, but why are they
bringing the rest of us into their insanity, with constant lawsuits. There's actually a concept
known as "Freedom from Religion" – what the heck? Can you imagine someone arguing about "Freedom
from Speech" in America? But it's ok to do it to religious folk! And yes, that includes Muslims,
who had to fight to build a Mosque in New York. They should've just said it was a Scientology
Center
The "my way" or the highway rhetoric from Clinton supporters on the campaign was sickening.
When Bush was called a warmonger for Iraq, that was fine. When Clinton was called a warmonger
for Iraq and Libya, the Clintonites went on the offensive, often throwing around crap like "if
she was a man, she wouldn't be a warmonger!"
The problem with healthcare in the US deserves its own thread, but Obamacare did not fix it;
Obamacare made it worse, especially in the rural communities. The laws in schools are fundamentally
retarded. A kid was suspended for giving a friend Advil. Another kid suspended for bringing in
a paper gun. I could go on and on. A girl was expelled from college for trying to look gangsta
in a L'Oreal mask. How many examples do you need? Look at all of the new "child safety laws" which
force kids to leave in a bubble. And when they enter the Real World, they're fucked, so they pick
up the drugs. In cities it's crack, in farmvilles it's meth.
Hillary didn't win jack shit. She got a plurality of the popular vote. She didn't win it, since
winning implies getting the majority. How many Johnson votes would've gone to Trump if it was
based on popular vote, in a safe state? Of course the biggest issue is the attack on the way of
life, which is all too real. I encourage you to read this, in order to understand where they're
coming from:
http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-one-talks-about/
"Nothing that happens outside the city matters!" they say at their cocktail parties, blissfully
unaware of where their food is grown. Hey, remember when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans? Kind
of weird that a big hurricane hundreds of miles across managed to snipe one specific city and
avoid everything else. To watch the news (or the multiple movies and TV shows about it), you'd
barely hear about how the storm utterly steamrolled rural Mississippi, killing 238 people and
doing an astounding $125 billion in damage. But who cares about those people, right? What's newsworthy
about a bunch of toothless hillbillies crying over a flattened trailer? New Orleans is culturally
important. It matters. To those ignored, suffering people, Donald Trump is a brick chucked through
the window of the elites. "Are you assholes listening now?"
On racism: "what I can say, from personal experience, is that the racism of my youth was always
one step removed. I never saw a family member, friend, or classmate be mean to the actual black
people we had in town. We worked with them, played video games with them, waved to them when they
passed. What I did hear was several million comments about how if you ever ventured into the city,
winding up in the "wrong neighborhood" meant you'd get dragged from your car, raped, and burned
alive. Looking back, I think the idea was that the local minorities were fine as long as they
acted exactly like us."
"They're getting the shit kicked out of them. I know, I was there. Step outside of the city,
and the suicide rate among young people fucking doubles. The recession pounded rural communities,
but all the recovery went to the cities. The rate of new businesses opening in rural areas has
utterly collapsed."
^ That, I'd say, is known as destroying their lives. Also this:
"In a city, you can plausibly aspire to start a band, or become an actor, or get a medical
degree. You can actually have dreams. In a small town, there may be no venues for performing arts
aside from country music bars and churches. There may only be two doctors in town - aspiring to
that job means waiting for one of them to retire or die. You open the classifieds and all of the
job listings will be for fast food or convenience stores. The "downtown" is just the corpses of
mom and pop stores left shattered in Walmart's blast crater, the "suburbs" are trailer parks.
There are parts of these towns that look post-apocalyptic.
I'm telling you, the hopelessness eats you alive. And if you dare complain, some liberal elite
will pull out their iPad and type up a rant about your racist white privilege. Already, someone
has replied to this with a comment saying, "You should try living in a ghetto as a minority!"
Exactly. To them, it seems like the plight of poor minorities is only used as a club to bat away
white cries for help. Meanwhile, the rate of rural white suicides and overdoses skyrockets. Shit,
at least politicians act like they care about the inner cities."
And the rural folk are called a "basket of deplorables" and other names. If you want to fight
racism, a battle that is Noble and Honorable, you have to understand the nuances between racism
and hopelessness. The wizard-wannabe idiots are a tiny fringe. The "deplorables" are a huge part
of rural America. If you alienate them, you're helping the idiots mentioned above.
...In fact, the entire Democratic Party has mainly ceased to campaign on issues-choosing instead
to invest heavily in identity politics. The message to black voters is: vote for us because you are
black, not because of anything we are going to do. Ditto for Hispanics. And women. And the LGBT community.
And others. Hillary does have an agenda. More on that in a future post. But she didn't campaign on
it.
As for the mainstream media, I have never seen an election in which the media was so biased. And
not just biased. The media's entire view of the election was Hillary Clinton's view. Even on Fox
News, the entire focus on election night and in the days that followed was on identity politics.
How many blacks were voting? How many Hispanics? How many women?
As if demography were destiny.
Now, as it turns out, a greater percentage of blacks voted for Trump than voted for Romney. The
same thing is true of Hispanics. In fact, Trump did better among minorities than any Republican since
Ronald Reagan. He even got a majority of white female votes.
Why were all these people doing something they weren't supposed to do? On network television and
even on cable television, no one had an answer.
Putting the media aside for the moment, do you know what Hillary's position is on trade deals
with other countries? Of course, you don't. And neither does anyone else. When she spoke about the
issue at all, she said one thing behind closed doors and another in public. The reason this doesn't
matter on Wall Street (or to the editors of the New York Times ) is that they assume she
has no real convictions and that money and special interest influence will always win out.
What about Hillary's solution to the problem of illegal immigration? Do you know what that is?
How about her position on corporate tax reform? Or school choice? Or Obamacare? Or opportunities
for blacks in inner cities?
I bet you don't know her positions on any of these topics. But I bet you do know Donald Trump's.
Not in detail, of course. But I bet you know the general way in which he differs from Obama administration
policies.
"... "Class first" amongst men of the left has always signaled "ME first." What else could it mean? ..."
"... So "Black Lives Matter" actually means "Black Lives Matter First". Got it. So damn tired of identity politics. ..."
"... Meanwhile, in the usual way of such things, #BlackLivesMatter hashtag activism became fashionable, as the usual suspects were elevated to celebrity status by elites. Nothing, of course, was changed in policy, and so in a year or so, matters began to bubble on the ground again. ..."
"... I'm not tired of identity politics. I'm just tired of some identity-groups accusing other identity-groups of "identity-politics". I speak in particular of the Identity Left. ..."
"... Identity politics, any identity, is going to automatically split voters into camps and force people to 'pick' a side. ..."
"... The Faux Feminism of Hillary Rodham Clinton, I and many other writers argued that the bourgeois feminism Clinton represents works against the interests of the vast majority of women. This has turned out to be even more true than we anticipated. That branding of feminism has delivered to us the most sexist and racist president in recent history: Donald Trump. ..."
"... Hillary spoke to the million-dollar feminists-of-privilege who identified with her multi-million dollar self and her efforts to break her own Tiffany Glass ceiling. And she worked to get many other women with nothing to gain to identify with Hillary's own breaking of Hillary's own Tiffany Glass ceiling. ..."
"... For me (at least) the essence of the "Left" is justice. When we speak of Class we are putting focus on issues of economic justice. Class is the material expression of economic (and therefore political) stratification. Class is the template for analysing the power dynamics at play in such stratification. ..."
"... in the absence of economic justice, it's very difficult to obtain ANY kind of justice - whether such justice be of race, gender, legal, religious or sexual orientation. ..."
"... I find it indicative that the 1% (now) simply don't care one way or another about race or gender etc, PROVIDED it benefits or, has no negative effects on their economic/political interests. ..."
"... "There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning." ..."
"... In ship sinking incidents, where a lot of people are dumped in the water, many adopt the strategy of trying to use others as flotation devices, pushing them under while the "rich class" tootle off in the lifeboats. Sounds like a winner, all right. ..."
"... The rich class has enlisted the white indentured servants as their Praetorian Guard. The same play as after Bacon's Rebellion. ..."
"... Is what is actually occurring another Kristallnacht, or the irreducible susurrus of meanness and idiocy that is part of every collection of humans? It would be nice not to get suckered into elevating the painful minima over the importance of getting ordinary people to agree on a real common enemy, and organizing to claim and protect. ..."
"... If even one single banker had gone to jail for the mess (fed by Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II) that blew up in 2008, we would be having a different conversation. We are in a huge legitimacy crisis, in part because justice was never served on those who made tens of millions via fraud. ..."
"... The Malignant Overlords - the King or Queen, the Financial Masters of the Universe,, the tribal witch doctor- live by grazing on the wealth of the natural world and the productivity of their underlings. There are only a few thousand of them but they control finance and the Money system, propaganda organizations (in the USA called the Media) land and agriculture, "educational" institutions and entire armies of Homeland Insecurity police. ..."
"... Under them there are the sycophants– generals and officers, war profiteers and corporate CEO's, the intelligentsia, journalists, fake economists, and entertainment and sports heroes who grow fat feasting on the morsels left over after the .0001% have fed. And far below the Overlords are the millions of professional Bureaucrats whose job security requires unquestioning servitude. ..."
"... Race, gender identity, religion, etc. are the false dichotomies by which the oligarchs divide us. Saudi princes, African American millionaires, gay millionaires etc. are generally treated the same by the oligarchs as wasp millionaires. The true dichotomy is class, that is the dichotomy which dare not speak its name. ..."
"... For Trump it was so easy. He just says something that could be thought of as racist and then his supporters watch as the media morphs his words, removes context, or just ignores any possible non-racist motivations for his words. ..."
"... Just read the actual Mexican- rapists quote. Completely different then reported by the media. Fifteen years ago my native born Mexican friend said almost exactlly the same thing. ..."
"... whilst his GOP colleagues publicly recoiled in horror, there is no question that Trump was merely making explicit what Republicans had been doing for decades – since the days of Nixon in 1968. The dog whistle was merely replaced by a bull horn. ..."
"... Yes, class identity can be a bond that unites. However, in the US the sense of class identity remains underdeveloped. In fact, it is only with the Sanders campaign that large swaths of the American public have had practical and sustained exposure to the concept of class as a political force. For most of the electorate, the language of class is still rather alien, particularly since the "equality of opportunity" narrative even now is not completely overthrown. ..."
"... It seems inevitable that populist sentiment, which both Sanders and Trump have used to electoral advantage, will spill over into a variety of economic nationalism. ..."
"... Obama was a perfect identity candidate, i.e., not only capable of getting the dem nomination, but the presidency and than not jailing banksters NO MATTER WHAT THEY DID, OR WILL DO… ..."
"... One truism about immigration, to pick a topical item, is that uncontrolled immigration leads to overwhelming an area whether city, state or country. Regardless of how one feels about the other aspects of immigration, there are some real, unacknowledged limits to the viability of the various systems that must accommodate arrivals, particularly in the short term. Too much of a perceived ..."
"... There is an entrenched royal court, not unlike Versailles in some respects, where the sinecures, access to the White House tennis court (remember Jimmy Carter and his forest for the trees issues) or to paid "lunches in Georgetown" or similar trappings. Inflow of populist or other foreign ideas behind the veil of media and class secrecy represents a threat to overwhelm, downgrade (Sayeth Yogi Berra: It is so popular that nobody goes there anymore) or remove those perks, and to cause some financial, psychic or other pain to the hangers-on. ..."
"... Pretty soon, word filters out through WikiLeaks, or just on the front page of a newspaper in the case of the real and present corruption (What do you mean nobody went to jail for the frauds?). In those instances, the tendency of a populace to remain aloof with their bread and circuses and reality shows and such gets strained. ..."
"... Some people began noticing and the cognitive dissonance became to great to ignore no matter how many times the messages were delivered from on high. That led to many apparent outbursts of rational behavior ..."
if poor whites were being shot by cops at the rate urban blacks are, they would be screaming
too. blm is not a corporate front to divide us, any more than acorn was a scam to help election
fraud.
It's lazy analysis to suggest Race was a contributing factor. On the fringes, Trump supporters
may have racial overtones, but this election was all about class. I applaud sites like NC in continually
educating me. What you do is a valuable service.
"We won't need a majority of the dying "white working class" in our present and future feminine,
multiracial American working class. Just a minority."
Indeed, this site has featured links to articles elaborating the demographic composition of
today's "working class". And yet we still have people insisting that appeals to the working class,
and policies directed thereof, must "transcend" race and gender.
And, of course this "class first" orientation became a bone of contention between some loud
mouthed "men of the left" during the D-Party primary and "everyone else" and that's why the "Bernie
Bro" label stuck. It didn't help the Sanders campaign either.
"Class first" amongst men of the left has always signaled "ME first." What else could it
mean?
This is, actually, complicated. It's a reasonable position that black lives don't
matter because they keep getting whacked by cops and the cops are never held accountable. Nobody
else did anything, so people on the ground stood up, asserted themselves, and as part
of that created #BlackLivesMatter as an online gathering point; all entirely reasonable. #AllLivesMatter
was created, mostly as deflection/distraction, by people who either didn't like the movement,
or supported cops, and of course if all lives did matter to this crowd, they would have
done something about all the police killings in the first place.
Meanwhile, in the usual way of such things, #BlackLivesMatter hashtag activism became fashionable,
as the usual suspects were elevated to celebrity status by elites. Nothing, of course, was changed
in policy, and so in a year or so, matters began to bubble on the ground again.
Activist time (we might say) is often slower than electoral time. But sometimes it's faster;
see today's Water Cooler on the #AllOfUs people who occupied Schumer's office (and high time,
too). To me, that's a very hopefully sign. Hopefully, not a bundle of groups still siloed by identity
(and if that's to happen, I bet that will happen by working together. Nothing abstract).
I'm not tired of identity politics. I'm just tired of some identity-groups accusing other
identity-groups of "identity-politics". I speak in particular of the Identity Left.
"We won't need a majority of the dying "white working class" in our present and future
feminine, multiracial American working class. Just a minority."
That statement is as myopic a vision as the current political class is today. The statement
offends another minority, or even a possible majority. Identity politics, any identity, is
going to automatically split voters into camps and force people to 'pick' a side.
In False Choices: The Faux Feminism of Hillary Rodham Clinton, I and many other writers
argued that the bourgeois feminism Clinton represents works against the interests of the vast
majority of women. This has turned out to be even more true than we anticipated. That branding
of feminism has delivered to us the most sexist and racist president in recent history: Donald
Trump.
I wonder if there is an even simpler more colorful way to say that. Hillary spoke to the
million-dollar feminists-of-privilege who identified with her multi-million dollar self and her
efforts to break her own Tiffany Glass ceiling. And she worked to get many other women with nothing
to gain to identify with Hillary's own breaking of Hillary's own Tiffany Glass ceiling.
If the phrase "Tiffany Glass ceiling" seems good enough to re-use, feel free to re-use it one
and all.
For me (at least) the essence of the "Left" is justice. When we speak of Class we are putting
focus on issues of economic justice. Class is the material expression of economic (and therefore
political) stratification. Class is the template for analysing the power dynamics at play in such
stratification.
Class is the primary political issue because it not only affects everyone, but in the absence
of economic justice, it's very difficult to obtain ANY kind of justice - whether such justice
be of race, gender, legal, religious or sexual orientation.
I find it indicative that the 1% (now) simply don't care one way or another about race or gender
etc, PROVIDED it benefits or, has no negative effects on their economic/political interests.
"Just how large a spike in hate crime there has been remains uncertain, however. Several reports
have been proven false, and Potok cautioned that most incidents reported to the Southern Poverty
Law Center did not amount to hate crime.
All us ordinary people are insecure. Planet is becoming less habitable, war everywhere, ISDS
whether we want it or not, group sentiments driving mass behaviors with extra weapons from our
masters, soil depletion, water becoming a Nestle subsidiary, all that. But let us focus on maintaining
our favored position as more insecure than others, with a "Yes, but" response to what seems to
me the fundamental strategic scene:
"There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war,
and we're winning."
Those mostly white guys, but a lot of women too, the "rich classs," are ORGANIZED, they have
a pretty simple organizing principle ("Everything belong us") that leads to straightforward strategies
and tactics to control all the levers and fulcrums of power. The senators in Oregon are "on the
right side" of a couple of social issues, but they both are all in for "trade deals" and other
big pieces of the "rich class's" ground game. In ship sinking incidents, where a lot of people
are dumped in the water, many adopt the strategy of trying to use others as flotation devices,
pushing them under while the "rich class" tootle off in the lifeboats. Sounds like a winner, all
right.
The comparison with 9/11 is instructive. That is not minimizing hate crimes. Within days after
9/11, my Sikh neighbor was assaulted and called a "terrorist". He finally decided to stop wearing
a turban, cut his hair, and dress "American". My neighborhood was not ethnically tense, but it is ethnically diverse, and my neighbor had
never seen his assailant before.
Yes, the rich classes are organized…organized to fleece us with unending wars. But don't minimize
other people's experience of what constitutes a hate crime.
In 1875, the first step toward the assassination of a black, "scalawag", or "carpetbagger"
public official in the South was a friendly visit from prominent people asking him to resign,
the second was night riders with torches, the third was night riders who killed the public official.
Jury nullification (surprise, surprise) made sure that no one was punished at the time. In 1876,
the restoration of "home rule' in Southern states elected in a bargain Rutherford B. Hayes, who
ended Reconstruction and the South entered a period that cleansed "Negroes, carpetbaggers, and
scalawags" from their state governments and put the Confederate generals and former plantation
owners back in charge. That was then called The Restoration. Coincidence that that is the name
of David Horowitz's conference where Donna Brazile was hobnobbing with James O'Keefe?
The rich class has enlisted the white indentured servants as their Praetorian Guard. The
same play as after Bacon's Rebellion.
Not minimizing - my very peaches-and-cream Scots-English daughter is married to a gentleman
from Ghana whose skin tones are about as dark as possible.
the have three beautiful children, and are fortunate to live in an area that is a hotbed of
"tolerance." I have many anecdotes too.
Do anecdotes = reality in all its complexity? Do anecdotes = policy? Is what is
actually occurring another Kristallnacht, or the irreducible susurrus of meanness and idiocy
that is part of every collection of humans? It would be nice not to get suckered into
elevating the painful minima over the importance of getting ordinary people to agree on a real
common enemy, and organizing to claim and protect.
If even one single banker had gone to jail for the mess (fed by Bush I, Clinton, and Bush
II) that blew up in 2008, we would be having a different conversation. We are in a huge legitimacy
crisis, in part because justice was never served on those who made tens of millions via fraud.
When there's no justice, its as if the society's immune system is not functioning.
Expect more strange things to appear, almost all of them aimed at sucking the remaining resources
out of the system with the knowledge that they'll never face consequences for looting. The fact
that they're killing the host does not bother them.
Corruption is both cause & effect of gross wealth inequities. Of course to the 1% it's not
corruption so much as merely what is owed as of a right to the privileged. (Thus, the most fundamental
basis of liberal democracy turns malignant: that ALL, even rulers & law makers are EQUALLY bound
by the Law).
The Malignant Overlords - the King or Queen, the Financial Masters of the Universe,, the
tribal witch doctor- live by grazing on the wealth of the natural world and the productivity of
their underlings. There are only a few thousand of them but they control finance and the Money
system, propaganda organizations (in the USA called the Media) land and agriculture, "educational"
institutions and entire armies of Homeland Insecurity police.
Under them there are the sycophants– generals and officers, war profiteers and corporate
CEO's, the intelligentsia, journalists, fake economists, and entertainment and sports heroes who
grow fat feasting on the morsels left over after the .0001% have fed. And far below the Overlords
are the millions of professional Bureaucrats whose job security requires unquestioning servitude.
Once upon a time there was what was known as the Middle Class who taught school or built things
in factories, made mortgage payments on a home, and bought a new Ford every other year. But they
now are renters, moving from one insecure job in one state to an insecure one across the country.
How else are they to maintain their sense of self-worth except by identifying a tribe that is
under them? If the members of the inferior tribe look just like you they might actually be more
successful and not a proper object of scorn. But if they have a black or brown skin and speak
differently they are the perfect target to make you feel that your life is not a total failure.
It's either that or go home and kick the dog or beat the wife. Or join the Army where you can
go kill a few foreigners and will always know your place in the hierarchy.
Class "trumps" race, but racial prejudice has its roots far back in human social history as
a tribal species where the "other" was always a threat to the tribe's existence.
Anyone who thinks it is only class and not also race is wearing some very strange blinders
No one with any sense is saying that, Katharine, and constantly bringing it up as some kind
of necessary argument (which, you may recall, was done as a way of trying to persuade people of
color Sanders wasn't working for them in the face of his entire history) perpetuates the falsehood
dichotomy that it has to be one or the other.
I can understand the desire to reduce the problems to a single issue that can then be subjected
to our total focus, but that's what's been done for the last fifty years; it doesn't work. Life
is too complex and messy to be fixed using magic pills, and Trump's success because those who've
given up hope of a cure are still enormously vulnerable to snake oil.
Race, gender identity, religion, etc. are the false dichotomies by which the oligarchs divide
us. Saudi princes, African American millionaires, gay millionaires etc. are generally treated
the same by the oligarchs as wasp millionaires. The true dichotomy is class, that is the dichotomy
which dare not speak its name.
yes, racism still exist, but the Democrats want to make it the primary issue of every election
because it is costs them nothing. I've never liked the idea of race based reparations because
they seem like another form of racism.
However, if the neolibs really believe racial disparity
and gender issues are the primary problems, why don't they ever support reparations or a large
tax on rich white people to pay the victims of racism and sexism and all the other isms?
Perhaps
its because that would actually cost them something. I think what bothers most of the Trumpets
out here in rural America is not race but the elevation of race to the top of the political todo
list.
For Trump it was so easy. He just says something that could be thought of as racist and
then his supporters watch as the media morphs his words, removes context, or just ignores any
possible non-racist motivations for his words.
Just read the actual Mexican- rapists quote. Completely
different then reported by the media. Fifteen years ago my native born Mexican friend said almost exactlly the same thing. Its a trap the media walks right into. I think most poor people of whiteness
do see racism as a sin, just not the only or most awful sin. As for Trump being a racist, I think
he would have to be human first.
… whilst his GOP colleagues publicly recoiled in horror, there is no question that Trump
was merely making explicit what Republicans had been doing for decades – since the days of Nixon
in 1968. The dog whistle was merely replaced by a bull horn.
Spot-on statement. Was watching Fareed Zakaria (yeah, I know, but he makes legit points from
time to time) and was pleasantly surprised that he called Bret Stephens, who was strongly opposed
to Trump, out on this. To see Stephens squirm like a worm on a hook was priceless.
"…what divides people rather than what unites people…"
Yes, class identity can be a bond that unites. However, in the US the sense of class identity
remains underdeveloped. In fact, it is only with the Sanders campaign that large swaths of the
American public have had practical and sustained exposure to the concept of class as a political
force. For most of the electorate, the language of class is still rather alien, particularly since
the "equality of opportunity" narrative even now is not completely overthrown.
Sanders and others on an ascendant left in the Democratic Party - and outside the Party - will
continue to do the important work of building a sense of class consciousness. But more is needed,
if the left wants to transform education into political power. Of course, organizing and electing
candidates at the local and state level is enormously important both to leverage control of local
institutions and - even more important - train and create leaders who can effectively use the
tools of political power. But besides this practical requirement, the left also needs to address
- or co-opt, if you will - the language of economic populism, which sounds a lot like economic
nationalism.
It seems inevitable that populist sentiment, which both Sanders and Trump have used to
electoral advantage, will spill over into a variety of economic nationalism. Nationalist
sentiment is the single most powerful unifying principle available, certainly more so than the
concept of class, at least in America. I don't see that changing anytime soon, and I do see the
Alt-Right using nationalism as a lever to try to coax the white working class into their brand
of identity politics. But America's assimilationist, "melting pot" narrative continues to be attractive
to most people, even if it is under assault in some quarters. So I think moving from nationalism
to white identity politics will not so easy for the Alt-Right. On the other hand, picking up the
thread of economic nationalism can provide the left with a powerful tool for bringing together
women, minorities and all who are struggling in this economy. This becomes particularly important
if it is the case that technology already makes the ideal of full (or nearly full) employment
nothing more than a chimera, thus forcing the question of a guaranteed annual income. Establishing
that kind of permanent safety net will only be possible in a polity where there are firm bonds
between citizens and a marked sense of responsibility for the welfare of all.
And if the Democratic Party is honest, it will have to concede that even the popular incumbent
President has played a huge role in contributing to the overall sense of despair that drove people
to seek a radical outlet such as Trump. The Obama Administration rapidly broke with its Hope and
"Change you can believe in" the minute he appointed some of the architects of the 2008 crisis
as his main economic advisors, who in turn and gave us a Wall Street friendly bank bailout that
effectively restored the status quo ante (and refused to jail one single banker, even though many
were engaged in explicitly criminal activity).
====================================================================
For those who think its just Hillary, its not. There is no way there will ever be any acknowledgement
of Obama;s real failures – he will no more be viewed honestly by dems than he could be viewed
honestly by repubs. Obama was a perfect identity candidate, i.e., not only capable of getting
the dem nomination, but the presidency and than not jailing banksters NO MATTER WHAT THEY DID,
OR WILL DO…
I imagine Trump will be one term, and I imagine we return in short order to our nominally different
parties squabbling but in lock step with regard to their wall street masters…
Democrats seem to be the more visible or clumsy in their attempts to govern themselves and
the populace, let alone understand their world. By way of illustration, consider the following.
One truism about immigration, to pick a topical item, is that uncontrolled immigration leads to
overwhelming an area whether city, state or country. Regardless of how one feels about the other
aspects of immigration, there are some real, unacknowledged limits to the viability of the various
systems that must accommodate arrivals, particularly in the short term. Too much of a perceived
good thing may be hazardous to one's health. Too much free stuff exhausts the producers,
infrastructure and support networks.
To extend and torture that concept further, just because, consider the immigration of populist
ideas to Washington. There is an entrenched royal court, not unlike Versailles in some respects,
where the sinecures, access to the White House tennis court (remember Jimmy Carter and his forest
for the trees issues) or to paid "lunches in Georgetown" or similar trappings. Inflow of populist
or other foreign ideas behind the veil of media and class secrecy represents a threat to overwhelm,
downgrade (Sayeth Yogi Berra: It is so popular that nobody goes there anymore) or remove those
perks, and to cause some financial, psychic or other pain to the hangers-on.
Pretty soon, word filters out through WikiLeaks, or just on the front page of a newspaper in
the case of the real and present corruption (What do you mean nobody went to jail for the frauds?).
In those instances, the tendency of a populace to remain aloof with their bread and circuses and
reality shows and such gets strained.
Some people began noticing and the cognitive dissonance
became to great to ignore no matter how many times the messages were delivered from on high. That
led to many apparent outbursts of rational behavior (What, you sold my family and me out and reduced
our prospects, so why should we vote for a party that takes us for granted, at best), which would
be counter-intuitive by some in our media.
"... Judging by the volume of complaints from Clinton sycophants insisting that people did not get behind Clinton or that it was purely her gender, they won't. Why would anyone get behind Clinton save the 1%? Her policies were pro-war, pro-Wall Street, and at odds with what the American people needed. Also, we should judge based on policy, not gender and Clinton comes way short of Sanders in that regard – in many regards, she is the antithesis of Sanders. ..."
"... "Establishment Democrats have nobody but themselves to blame for this one. The only question is whether or not they are willing to take responsibility" I disagree. In my view, it is not a question at all. They have never taken responsibility for anything, and they never will. ..."
"... What would make Democrats focus on the working class? Nothing. They have lost and brought about destruction of the the Unions, which was the Democratic Base, and have become beholden to the money. The have noting in common with the working class, and no sympathy for their situation, either. ..."
"... What does Bill Clinton, who drive much of the policy in the '90s, and spent his early years running away form the rural poor in Arkansas (Law School, Rhodes Scholarship), have in common with working class people anywhere? ..."
"... Iron law of institutions applies. Position in the D apparatus is more important than political power – because with power come blame. ..."
"... I notice Obama worked hard to lose majorities in the house and Senate so he could point to the Republicans and say "it was their fault" except when he actually wanted something, and made it happen (such as TPP). ..."
"... Agreed with the first but not the second. It's typical liberal identity politics guilt tripping. That won't get you too far on the "white side" of Youngstown Ohio. ..."
"... Also suspect that the working-class, Rust-Belt Trump supporters will soon be thrown under the bus by their Standard Bearer, if the Transition Team appointments are any indicator: e.g. Privateers at SSA. ..."
"... My wife teaches primary grades in an inner city school. She has made it clear to me over the years that the challenges her children are facing are related to poverty, not race. She sees a big correlation between the financial status of a family and its family structure (one or more parents not present or on drugs) and the kids' success in school. Race is a minor factor. ..."
"... The problem with running on a class based platform in America is, well, it's America; and in good ol' America, we are taught that anyone can become a successful squillionare – ya know, hard work, nose-to-the-grindstone, blah, blah, blah. ..."
"... The rags to riches American success fable is so ingrained that ideas like taxing the rich a bit more fall flat because everyone thinks "that could be me someday. Just a few house flips, a clever new app, that ten-bagger (or winning lottery ticket) and I'm there" ("there" being part of the 1%). ..."
"... The idea that anyone can be successful (i.e. rich) is constantly promoted. ..."
"... I think this fantasy is beginning to fade a bit but the "wealth = success" idea is so deeply rooted in the American psyche I don't think it will ever fade completely away. ..."
"... If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy - which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog - you will come to an awful realization. It wasn't Beijing. It wasn't even Washington, as bad as Washington can be. It wasn't immigrants from Mexico, excessive and problematic as our current immigration levels are. It wasn't any of that. ..."
"... Nothing happened to them. There wasn't some awful disaster. There wasn't a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence - and the incomprehensible malice - of poor white America. So the gypsum business in Garbutt ain't what it used to be. There is more to life in the 21st century than wallboard and cheap sentimentality about how the Man closed the factories down. ..."
"... The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump's speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. ..."
"... White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America ..."
"... Poor or Poorer whites have been demonised since the founding of the original Colonies, and were continuously pushed west to the frontiers by the ruling elites of New England and the South as a way of ridding themselves of "undesirables", who were then left to their own resources, and clung together for mutual assistance. ..."
"... White trash is a central, if disturbing, thread in our national narrative. The very existence of such people – both in their visibility and invisibility – is proof that American society obsesses over the mutable labels we give to the neighbors we wish not to notice. "They are not who we are". But they are who we are and have been a fundamental part of our history, whether we like it or not". ..."
"... "To be sure, Donald Trump did make a strong appeal to racists, homophobes, and misogynists " ..."
"... working class white women ..."
"... Obama is personally likeable ..."
"... History tells us the party establishment will move further right after election losses. And among the activist class there are identity purity battles going on. ..."
"... Watch as this happens yet again: "In most elections, U.S. politicians of both parties pretend to be concerned about their issues, then conveniently ignore them when they reach power and implement policies from the same Washington Consensus that has dominated the past 40 years." That is why we need a strong third party, a reformed election system with public support of campaigns and no private money, and free and fair media coverage. But it ain't gonna happen. ..."
"... Obviously, if the Democrats nominate yet another Clintonite Obamacrat all over again, I may have to vote for Trump all over again . . . to stop the next Clintonite before it kills again. ..."
Ultimately the Establishment Democrats have nobody but themselves to blame for this one. The
only question is whether or not they are willing to take responsibility for what happened.
Judging by the volume of complaints from Clinton sycophants insisting that people did not
get behind Clinton or that it was purely her gender, they won't. Why would anyone get behind Clinton
save the 1%? Her policies were pro-war, pro-Wall Street, and at odds with what the American people
needed. Also, we should judge based on policy, not gender and Clinton comes way short of Sanders
in that regard – in many regards, she is the antithesis of Sanders.
Class trumps race, to make a pun. If the left doesn't take the Democratic Party back and clean
house, I expect that there is a high probability that 2020's election will look at lot like the
2004 elections.
I'd recommend someone like Sanders to run. Amongst the current crop, maybe Tulsi Gabbard or
Nina Turner seem like the best candidates.
"Establishment Democrats have nobody but themselves to blame for this one. The only question
is whether or not they are willing to take responsibility" I disagree. In my view, it is not a
question at all. They have never taken responsibility for anything, and they never will.
What would make Democrats focus on the working class? Nothing. They have lost and brought
about destruction of the the Unions, which was the Democratic Base, and have become beholden to
the money. The have noting in common with the working class, and no sympathy for their situation,
either.
What does Bill Clinton, who drive much of the policy in the '90s, and spent his early years
running away form the rural poor in Arkansas (Law School, Rhodes Scholarship), have in common
with working class people anywhere?
The same question applies to Hillary, to Trump and the remainder of our "representatives" in
Congress.
Without Unions, how are US Representatives from the working class elected?
What we are seeing is a shift in the US for the Republicans to become the populist party. They
already have the churches, and with Trump they can gain the working class – although I do not
underestimate the contempt help by our elected leaders for the Working Class and poor.
The have forgotten, if they ever believed: "There, but for the grace of God, go I".
Iron law of institutions applies. Position in the D apparatus is more important than political
power – because with power come blame.
I notice Obama worked hard to lose majorities in the house and Senate so he could point
to the Republicans and say "it was their fault" except when he actually wanted something, and
made it happen (such as TPP).
We know that class and economic insecurity drove many white people to vote for Trump. That's
understandable. And now we are seeing a rise in hate incidents inspired by his victory. So obviously
there is a race component in his support as well. So, if you, white person, didn't vote for Trump
out of white supremacy, would you consider making a statement that disavows the acts of extremist
whites? Do you vow to stand up and help if you see people being victimized? Do you vow not to
stay silent when you encounter Trump supporters who ARE obviously in thrall to the white supremacist
siren call?
Agreed with the first but not the second. It's typical liberal identity politics guilt
tripping. That won't get you too far on the "white side" of Youngstown Ohio.
And I wouldn't worry about it. When I worked at the at the USX Fairless works in Levittown
PA in 1988, I was befriended by one steelworker who was a clear raving white supremacist racist.
(Actually rather nonchalant about about it). However he was the only one I encountered who was
like this, and eventually I figured out that he befriended a "newbie" like me because he had no
friends among the other workers, including the whites. He was not popular at all.
I've always thought that Class, not Race, was the Third Rail of American Politics, and that
the US was fast-tracking to a more shiny, happy feudalism.
Also suspect that the working-class, Rust-Belt Trump supporters will soon be thrown under
the bus by their Standard Bearer, if the Transition Team appointments are any indicator: e.g.
Privateers at SSA.
My wife teaches primary grades in an inner city school. She has made it clear to me over
the years that the challenges her children are facing are related to poverty, not race. She sees
a big correlation between the financial status of a family and its family structure (one or more
parents not present or on drugs) and the kids' success in school. Race is a minor factor.
She also makes it clear to me that the Somali/Syrian/Iraqi etc. immigrant kids are going to
do very well even though they come in without a word of English because they are working their
butts off and they have the full support of their parents and community. These people left bad
places and came to their future and they are determined to grab it with both hands. 40% of her
class this year is ENL (English as a non-native language). Since it is an inner city school, they
don't have teacher's aides in the class, so it is just one teacher in a class of 26-28 kids, of
which a dozen struggle to understand English. Surprisingly, the class typically falls short of
the "standards" that the state sets for the standardized exams. Yet many of the immigrant kids
end up going to university after high school through sheer effort.
Bullying and extreme misbehavior (teachers are actually getting injured by violent elementary
kids) is largely done by kids born in the US. The immigrant kids tend to be fairly well-behaved.
On a side note, the CSA at our local farmer's market said they couldn't find people to pick
the last of their fall crops (it is in a rural community so a car is needed to get there). So
the food bank was going out this week to pick produce like squash, onions etc. and we were told
we could come out and pick what we wanted. Full employment?
The problem with running on a class based platform in America is, well, it's America; and
in good ol' America, we are taught that anyone can become a successful squillionare – ya know,
hard work, nose-to-the-grindstone, blah, blah, blah.
The rags to riches American success fable is so ingrained that ideas like taxing the rich
a bit more fall flat because everyone thinks "that could be me someday. Just a few house flips,
a clever new app, that ten-bagger (or winning lottery ticket) and I'm there" ("there" being part
of the 1%).
The idea that anyone can be successful (i.e. rich) is constantly promoted.
I think this fantasy is beginning to fade a bit but the "wealth = success" idea is so deeply
rooted in the American psyche I don't think it will ever fade completely away.
I'm recalling (too lazy to find the link) a poll a couple years ago that showed the number
of American's identifying as "working class" increased, and the number as "middle class" decreased.
It is both. And it is a deliberate mechanism of class division to preserve power. Bill Cecil-Fronsman,
Common Whites: Class and Culture in Antebellum North Carolina identifies nine classes
in the class structure of a state that mixed modern capitalist practice (plantations), agrarian
YOYO independence (the non-slaveowning subsistence farms), town economies, and subsistence (farm
labor). Those classes were typed racially and had certain economic, power, and social relations
associated with them. For both credit and wages, few escaped the plantation economy and being
subservient to the planter capitalists locally.
Moreover, ethnic identity was embedded in the law as a class marker. This system was developed
independently or exported through imitation in various ways to the states outside North Carolina
and the slave-owning states. The abolition of slavery meant free labor in multiple senses and
the capitalist use of ethnic minorities and immigrants as scabs integrated them into an ethnic-class
system, where it was broad ethnicity and not just skin-color that defined classes. Other ethnic
groups, except Latinos and Muslim adherents, now have earned their "whiteness".
One suspects that every settler colonial society develops this combined ethnic-class structure
in which the indigenous ("Indians" in colonial law) occupy one group of classes and imported laborers
or slaves or intermixtures ("Indian", "Cape Colored" in South Africa) occupy another group of
classes available for employment in production. Once employed, the relationship is exactly that
of the slaveowner to the slave no matter how nicely the harsh labor management techniques of 17th
century Barbados and Jamaica have been made kinder and gentler. But outside the workplace (and
often still inside) the broader class structure applies even contrary to the laws trying to restrict
the relationship to boss and worker.
Blacks are not singling themselves out to police; police are shooting unarmed black people
without punishment. The race of the cop does not matter, but the institution of impunity makes
it open season on a certain class of victims.
It is complicated because every legal and often managerial attempt has been made to reduce
the class structure of previous economies to the pure capitalism demanded by current politics.
So when in a post Joe McCarthy, post-Cold War propaganda society, someone wants to protest
the domination of capitalism, attacking who they perceive as de facto scabs to their higher incomes
(true or not) is the chosen mode of political attack. Not standing up for the political rights
of the victims of ethnically-marked violence and discrimination allows the future depression of
wages and salaries by their selective use as a threat in firms. And at the individual firm and
interpersonal level even this gets complicated because in spite of the pressure to just be businesslike,
people do still care for each other.
This is a perennial mistake. In the 1930s Southern Textile Strike, some organizing was of both
black and white workers; the unions outside the South rarely stood in solidarity with those efforts
because they were excluding ethnic minorities from their unions; indeed, some locals were organized
by ethnicity. That attitude also carried over to solidarity with white workers in the textile
mills. And those white workers who went out on a limb to organize a union never forgot that failure
in their labor struggle. It is the former textile areas of the South that are most into Trump's
politics and not so much the now minority-majority plantation areas.
It still is race in the inner ring suburbs of ethnically diverse cities like St. Louis that
hold the political lock on a lot of states. Because Ferguson to them seems like an invasion of
the lower class. Class politics, of cultural status, based on ethnicity. Still called by that
19h century scientific racism terminology that now has been debunked - race - Caucasoid, Mongoloid,
Negroid. Indigenous, at least in the Americas, got stuck under Mongoloid.
You go organize the black, Latino, and white working class to form unions and gain power, and
it will happen. It is why Smithfield Foods in North Carolina had to negotiate a contract. Race
can be transcended in action.
Pretending the ethnic discrimination and even segregation does not exist and have its own problems
is political suicide in the emerging demographics. Might not be a majority, but it is an important
segment of the vote. Which is why the GOP suppressed minority voters through a variety of legal
and shady electoral techniques. Why Trump wants to deport up to 12 million potential US citizens
and some millions of already birthright minor citizens. And why we are likely to see the National
Labor Review Board gutted of what little power it retains from 70 years of attack. Interesting
what the now celebrated white working class was not offered in this election, likely because they
would vote it down quicker because, you know, socialism.
Your comment reminded me of an episode in Seattle's history.
Link . The
unions realized they were getting beat in their strikes, by scabs, who were black. The trick was
for the unions to bring the blacks into the union. This was a breakthrough, and it worked in Seattle,
in 1934. There is a cool mural the union commissioned by,
Pablo O'Higgins , to
celebrate the accomplishment.
Speaking of class, and class contempt , one must recall the infamous screed published
by National Review columnist Kevin Williamson early this year, writing about marginalised white
people here is a choice excerpt:
If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my
own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and
alcohol addiction, the family anarchy - which is to say, the whelping of human children with
all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog - you will come to an awful realization. It wasn't
Beijing. It wasn't even Washington, as bad as Washington can be. It wasn't immigrants from
Mexico, excessive and problematic as our current immigration levels are. It wasn't any of that.
Nothing happened to them. There wasn't some awful disaster. There wasn't a war or a famine
or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very
little to explain the dysfunction and negligence - and the incomprehensible malice - of poor
white America. So the gypsum business in Garbutt ain't what it used to be. There is more to
life in the 21st century than wallboard and cheap sentimentality about how the Man closed the
factories down.
The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die.
Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap
theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory
towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your
goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American
underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used
heroin needles. Donald Trump's speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin.
Now it's not too much of a stretch of the imagination to state that Williamson's animus can
be replicated amongst many of the moneyed elite currently pushing and shoving their way into a
position within the incoming Trump Administration. The Trump campaign has openly and cynically
courted and won the votes of white people similar to those mentioned in Williamson's article,
and who – doubtlessly – will be stiffed by policies vigourously opposed to their welfare that
will be enacted during the Trump years. The truly intriguing aspect of the Trump election is:
what will be the consequences of further degradation of the "lower orders' " quality of life by
such actions? Wholesale retreat from electoral politics? Further embitterment and anger NOT toward
those in Washington responsible for their lot but directed against ethnic and racial minorities
"stealing their jawbs" and "getting welfare while we scrounge for a living"? I sincerely doubt
whether the current or a reconstructed Democratic Party can at all rally this large chunk of white
America by posing as their "champions" the class divide in the US is as profound as the racial
chasm, and neither major party – because of internal contradictions – can offer a credible answer.
[In addition to the growing inequality and concomitant wage stagnation for the middle and working
classes, 9/11 and its aftermath has certainly has contributed to it as well, as, making PEOPLE
LONG FOR the the Golden Age of Managerial Capitalism of the post-WWII era,]
Oh yeah, I noticed a big ol' hankerin' for that from the electorate. What definition could
the author be using for Managerial Capitalism that could make it the opposite of inequality? The
fight for power between administration and shareholders does not lead to equality for workers.
[So this gave force to the idea that the government was nothing but a viper's nest full of
crony capitalist enablers,]
I don't think it's an 'idea' that the govt is crony capitalists and enablers. Ds need to get
away from emotive descriptions. Being under/unemployed, houseless, homeless, unable to pay for
rent, utilities, food . aren't feelings/ideas. When that type of language is used, it comes across
as hand waving. There needs to be a shift of talking to rather than talking about.
If crony capitalism is an idea, it's simply a matter for Ds to identify a group (workers),
create a hierarchy (elite!) and come up with a propaganda campaign (celebrities and musicians
spending time in flyover country-think hanging out in coffee shops in a flannel shirt) to get
votes. Promise to toss them a couple of crumbs with transfer payments (retraining!) or a couple
of regulations (mandatory 3 week severance!) and bring out the obligatory D fall back- it would
be better than the Rs would give them. On the other hand, if it's factual, the cronies need to
be stripped of power and kicked out or the nature of the capitalist structure needs to be changed.
It's laughable to imagine liberals or progressives would be open to changing the power and nature
of the corporate charter (it makes me smile to think of the gasps).
The author admits that politicians lie and continue the march to the right yet uses the ACA,
a march to the right, as a connection to Obama's (bombing, spying, shrinking middle class) likability.
[[But emphasizing class-based policies, rather than gender or race-based solutions, will achieve
more for the broad swathe of voters, who comprehensively rejected the "neo-liberal lite" identity
politics]
Oops. I got a little lost with the neo-liberal lite identity politics. Financialized identity
politics? Privatized identity politics?
I believe women and poc have lost ground (economic and rights) so I would like examples of
successful gender and race-based (liberal identity politics) solutions that would demonstrate
that identity politics targeting is going to work on the working class.
If workers have lost power, to balance that structure, you give workers more power (I predict
that will fail as unions fall under the generic definition of corporatist and the power does not
rest with the members but with the CEOs of the unions – an example is a union that block the members
from voting to endorse a candidate, go against the member preference and endorse the corporatist
candidate), or you remove power from the corporation. Libs/progs can't merely propose something
like vesting more power with shareholders to remove executives as an ameliorating maneuver which
fails to address the power imbalance.
[This is likely only to accelerate the disintegration of the political system and economic
system until the elephant in the room – class – is honestly and comprehensively addressed.]
For a thorough exposition of lower-class white America from the inception of the Republic to
today, a must-read is Nancy Isenberg's White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in
America . Poor or Poorer whites have been demonised since the founding of the original
Colonies, and were continuously pushed west to the frontiers by the ruling elites of New England
and the South as a way of ridding themselves of "undesirables", who were then left to their own
resources, and clung together for mutual assistance.
Thus became the economic and cultural subset of "crackers", "hillbillies", "rednecks", and
later, "Okies", a source of contempt and scorn by more economically and culturally endowed whites.
The anti-bellum white Southern aristocracy cynically used poor whites as cheap tenant farming,
all the while laying down race-based distinctions between them and black slaves – there is always
someone lower on the totem pole, and that distinction remains in place today. Post-Reconstruction,
the South maintained the cult of white superiority, all the while preserving the status of upper-class
whites, and, by race-based public policies, assured lower-class whites that such "superiority"
would be maintained by denying the black populations access to education, commerce, the vote,
etc. And today, "white trash", or "trailer trash", or poorer whites in general are ubiquitous
and as American as apple pie, in the North, the Midwest, and the West, not just the South. Let
me quote Isenberg's final paragraph of her book:
White trash is a central, if disturbing, thread in our national narrative. The very
existence of such people – both in their visibility and invisibility – is proof that American
society obsesses over the mutable labels we give to the neighbors we wish not to notice. "They
are not who we are". But they are who we are and have been a fundamental part of our history,
whether we like it or not".
Presenting a plan for the future, which has a chance to be supported by the electorate, must
start with scrupulous, unwavering honesty and a willingness to acknowledge inconvenient facts.
The missing topic from the 2016 campaigns was declining energy surpluses and their pervasive,
negative impact on the prosperity to which we feel entitled. Because of the energy cost of producing
oil, a barrel today represents a declining fraction of a barrel in terms of net energy. This is
the major factor in sluggish economic performance. Failing to make this case and, at the same
time, offering glib and vacuous promises of growth and economic revival, are just cynical exercises
in pandering.
Our only option is to mange the coming decline in a way that does not descend into chaos and
anarchy. This can only be done with a clear vision of causes and effects and the wisdom and courage
to accept facts. The alternative is yet more delusions and wishful thinking, whose shelf life
is getting shorter.
To be fair to the article, Marshall did in fact say:
"To be sure, Donald Trump did make a strong appeal to racists, homophobes, and misogynists
"
IMO the point Marshall is making that race was not the primary reason #DJT
won. And I concur.
This is borne out by the vote tallies which show that the number of R voters from 2012 to 2016
was pretty much on the level (final counts pending):
2016 R Vote: 60,925,616
2012 R Vote: 60,934,407
(Source:
US Election Atlas )
Stop and think about this for a minute. Every hard core racist had their guy this
time around; and yet, the R's could barely muster the same amount of votes as Mittens
in 2012. This is huge, and supports the case that other things contributed far more than just
race.
Class played in several ways:
Indifference/apathy/fatigue: Lambert posted some data from Carl Beijer on this yesterday in his
Clinton Myths piece yesterday.
Anger: #HRC could not convince many people who voted for Bernie that she was interested in his
outreach to the working class. More importantly, #HRC could not convince working class white
women that she had anything other than her gender and Trump's boorishness as a counterpoint
to offer.
Outsider v Insider: Working class people skeptical of political insiders rejected #HRC.
If black workers were losing ground and white workers were gaining, one could indeed claim
that racism is a problem. However, both black and white workers are losing ground – racism simply
cannot be the major issue here. It's not racism, it's class war.
The fixation on race, the corporate funding of screaming 'black lives matter' agitators, the
crude attempts to tie Donald Trump to the KKK (really? really?) are just divide and conquer, all
over again.
Whatever his other faults, Donald Trump has been vigorous in trying to reach out to working
class blacks, even though he knew he wouldn't get much of their vote and he knew that the media
mostly would not cover it. Last I heard, he was continuing to try and reach out, despite the black
'leadership' class demanding that he is a racist. Because as was so well pointed out here, the
one thing the super-rich fear is a united working class.
Divide and conquer. It's an old trick, but a powerful one.
Suggestion: if (and it's a big if) Trump really does enact policies that help working class
blacks, and the Republicans peel away a significant fraction of the black vote, that would set
the elites' hair on fire. Because it would mean that the black vote would be in play, and the
Neoliberal Democrats couldn't just take their votes for granted. And wouldn't that be a thing.
that was good for 2016. I will look to see if he has stats for other years. i certainly agree
that poor whites are more likely to be shot; executions of homeless people by police are one example.
the kind of system that was imposed on the people of ferguson has often been imposed on poor whites,
too. i do object to the characterization of black lives matter protestors as "screaming agitators";
that's all too reminiscent of the meme of "outside agitators" riling up the local peaceful black
people to stand up for their rights that was characteristically used to smear the civil rights
movement in the 60's.
I might not have much in common at all with certain minorities, but it's highly likely that
we share class status.
That's why the status quo allows identity politics and suppresses class politics.
Having been around for sometime, I often wonder what The Guardian is going on about in the
UK as it is supposed to be our left wing broadsheet.
It isn't a left I even recognised, what was it?
I do read it to try and find out what nonsense it is these people think.
Having been confused for many a year, I think I have just understood this identity based politics
as it is about to disappear.
I now think it was a cunning ploy to split the electorate in a different way, to leave the
UK working class with no political outlet.
Being more traditional left I often commented on our privately educated elite and private schools
but the Guardian readership were firmly in favour of them.
How is this left?
Thank god this is now failing, get back to the old left, the working class and those lower
down the scale.
It was clever while it lasted in enabling neoliberalism and a neglect of the working class,
but clever in a cunning, nasty and underhand way.
Thinking about it, so many of these recent elections have been nearly 50% / 50% splits, has
there been a careful analysis of who neoliberalism disadvantages and what minorities need to be
bought into the fold to make it work in a democracy.
Women are not a minority, but obviously that is a big chunk if you can get them under your
wing. The black vote is another big group when split away and so on.
Brexit nearly 50/50; Austria nearly 50/50; US election nearly 50/50.
So, 85% of Blacks vote Hillary against Sanders (left) and 92% vote Hillary against Trump (right),
but is no race. It's the class issue that sends them to the Clintons. Kindly explain how.
Funny think about likeability, likeable people can be real sh*ts. So I started looking into
hanging out with less likeable people. I found that they can be considerably more appreciative
of friendship and loyalty, maybe because they don't have such easy access to it.
Entertainment media has cautiously explored some aspect so fthis, but in politics, "nice" is
still disproportionately values, and not appreciated as a possible flag.
Watch out buddy. They are onto you. I have seen some comments on democratic party sites claiming
the use of class to explain Hillary's loss is racist. The democratic party is a goner. History
tells us the party establishment will move further right after election losses. And among the
activist class there are identity purity battles going on.
Watch as this happens yet again: "In most elections, U.S. politicians of both parties pretend
to be concerned about their issues, then conveniently ignore them when they reach power and implement
policies from the same Washington Consensus that has dominated the past 40 years." That is why
we need a strong third party, a reformed election system with public support of campaigns and
no private money, and free and fair media coverage. But it ain't gonna happen.
Well it certainly won't happen by itself. People are going to have to make it happen. Here
in Michigan we have a tiny new party called Working Class Party running 3 people here and there.
I voted for two of them. If the Democrats run somebody no worse than Trump next time, I will be
free to vote Working Class Party to see what happens.
Obviously, if the Democrats nominate yet another Clintonite Obamacrat all over again, I
may have to vote for Trump all over again . . . to stop the next Clintonite before it kills again.
While focusing on preserving ObamaCare and other achievements of the Obama administration that are
threatened by a Donald Trump presidency, the DA's agenda includes panels on rethinking polling and
the left's approach to winning the working-class vote. The group will also stress funneling cash
into state legislative policy initiatives and races where Republicans took over last week.
President-elect Donald Trump has said his first 100 days will be dedicated to restoring "honesty,
accountability and change to Washington" through the following seven steps:
A Constitutional Amendment to impose term limits on all members of Congress
A hiring freeze on all federal employees to reduce federal workforce through attrition (exempting
military, public safety, and public health)
A requirement that for every new federal regulation, two existing regulations must be eliminated
A five year ban on White House and Congressional officials becoming lobbyists after they leave
government service
A lifetime ban on the White House officials lobbying on behalf of a foreign government
A complete ban on foreign lobbyists raising money for American elections
Cancel billions in payments to U.N. climate change programs and use the money to fix America's
water and environmental infrastructure
Billionaire George Soros immediately had fingers of blame pointing at him for the anti-Trump riots
and protests that swept the nation since Nov. 9, as
his group MoveOn.org has organized most of them .
The billionaire committed
$25 million to boosting the Clinton campaign and other Democratic candidates and causes in 2016.
"... We so easily forget. Once the cry of so-called prosperity is heard in the land, we all become so stampeded by the spirit of the god Mammon, that we cannot serve the dictates of social conscience. . . . We are here to serve notice that the economic order is the invention of man; and that it cannot dominate certain eternal principles of justice and of God... ..."
"... The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little." ..."
"... You can fool all of the people, some of the time. You can fool some of the people all of the time- but you can't fool all of the people all of the time. ..."
"There are two theories of prosperity and of well-being: The first theory is that if we make
the rich richer, somehow they will let a part of their prosperity trickle down to the rest
of us. The second theory - and I suppose this goes back to the days of Noah - I won't say Adam
and Eve, because they had a less complicated situation - but, at least, back in the days of
the flood, there was the theory that if we make the average of mankind comfortable and secure,
their prosperity will rise upward, just as yeast rises up, through the ranks...
We so easily forget. Once the cry of so-called prosperity is heard in the land, we all
become so stampeded by the spirit of the god Mammon, that we cannot serve the dictates of social
conscience. . . . We are here to serve notice that the economic order is the invention of man;
and that it cannot dominate certain eternal principles of justice and of God...
The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have
much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little."
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
You can fool all of the people, some of the time. You can fool some of the people all of the
time- but you can't fool all of the people all of the time.
"... Democrats still seem amazed that voters are more concerned about economic conditions and resentment against Wall Street (no bankers jailed, few junk mortgages written down). It is a sign of their wrong path that party strategists are holding onto the same identity politics they have used since the 1960s to divide Americans into hyphenated special-interest groups. ..."
"... Obviously, the bottom 95 Percent realize that their incomes and net worth have declined, not recovered. ..."
"... On the bright side, these "trade" agreements to enable corporations to block public laws protecting the environment, consumers and society at large are now presumably dead. ..."
"... Instead of a love fest within the Democratic Party's ranks, the blame game is burning. The Democrats raised a reported $182 million dollars running up to the election. But when democratic candidates from Russ Feingold in Wisconsin and other candidates in Michigan, Minnesota and Pennsylvania asked for help. Hillary monopolized it all for TV ads, leaving these candidates in the lurch. The election seemed to be all about her, about personality and identity politics, not about the economic issues paramount in most voters' minds. ..."
"... Six months ago the polls showed her $1 billion spent on data polling, TV ads and immense staff of sycophants to have been a vast exercise in GIGO. ..."
"... If the party is to be recaptured, now is the moment to move. The 2016 election sounded the death knell for the identity politics. Its aim was to persuade voters not to think of their identity in economic terms, but to think of themselves as women or as racial and ethnic groups first and foremost, not as having common economic interests. This strategy to distract voters from economic policies has obviously failed. ..."
"... It did not work with women. In Florida, only 51 percent of white women are estimated to have voted for Hillary. It didn't even work very well in ethnic Hispanic precincts. They too were more concerned about their own job opportunities. ..."
"... The ethnic card did work with many black voters (although not so strongly; fewer blacks voted for Hillary than had showed up for Obama). Under the Obama administration for the past eight years, blacks have done worse in terms of income and net worth than any other grouping, according to the Federal Reserve Board's statistics. But black voters were distracted from their economic interests by the Democrats' ethnic-identity politics. ..."
"... This election showed that voters have a sense of when they're being lied to. After eight years of Obama's demagogy, pretending to support the people but delivering his constituency to his financial backers on Wall Street. "Identity politics" has given way to the stronger force of economic distress. Mobilizing identity politics behind a Wall Street program will no longer work. ..."
"... The Rust Belt swing states that shifted away from backing Obama for the last two terms are not racist states. They voted for Obama twice, after all. But seeing his support Wall Street, they had lost faith in her credibility – and were won by Bernie in his primaries against Hillary. ..."
"... Most of all, it was Hillary's asking voters to ignore her economic loyalty to Wall Street simply to elect a woman, and her McCarthy-like accusations that Trump was "Putin's candidate" (duly echoed by Paul Krugman). ..."
"... The anti-Trump rallies mobilized by George Soros and MoveOn look like a preemptive attempt to capture the potential socialist left for the old Clinton divide-and-conquer strategy. ..."
In the week leading up to last Tuesday's election the press was busy writing obituaries for the Republican
Party. This continued even after Donald Trump's "surprising" victory – which, like the 2008 bank-fraud
crash, "nobody could have expected." The pretense is that Trump saw what no other politician saw:
that the economy has not recovered since 2008.
Democrats still seem amazed that voters are more concerned about economic conditions and resentment
against Wall Street (no bankers jailed, few junk mortgages written down). It is a sign of their wrong
path that party strategists are holding onto the same identity politics they have used since the
1960s to divide Americans into hyphenated special-interest groups.
Obviously, the bottom 95 Percent realize that their incomes and net worth have declined, not recovered.
National Income and Federal Reserve statistics show that all growth has accrued to just 5 percent
of the population. Hillary is said to have spent $1 billion on polling, TV advertising and high-salaried
staff members, but managed not to foresee the political reaction to this polarization. She and her
coterie ignored economic policy as soon as Bernie was shoved out of the way and his followers all
but told to join a third party. Her campaign speech tried to convince voters that they were better
off than they were eight years ago. They knew better!
So the question now is whether Donald Trump will really a maverick and shake up the Republican
Party. There seems to be a fight going on for Donald's soul – or at least the personnel he appoints
to his cabinet. Thursday and Friday saw corporate lobbyists in the Republican leadership love-bombing
him like the Moonies or Hari Krishna cults welcoming a new potential recruit. Will he simply surrender
now and pass on the real work of government to the Republican apparatchiks?
The stock market thinks so! On Wednesday it soared almost by 300 points, and repeated this gain
on Thursday, setting a DJIA record! Pharmaceuticals are way up, as higher drug prices loom for Medicaid
and Medicare. Stocks of the pipelines and major environmental polluters are soaring, from oil and
gas to coal, mining and forestry, expecting U.S. environmental leadership to be as dead under Trump
as it was under Obama and his push for the TPP and TTIP (with its fines for any government daring
to impose standards that cost these companies money). On the bright side, these "trade" agreements
to enable corporations to block public laws protecting the environment, consumers and society at
large are now presumably dead.
For now, personalities are policy. A problem with this is that anyone who runs for president is
in it partly for applause. That was Carter's weak point, leading him to cave into Democratic apparatchiks
in 1974. It looks like Trump may be a similar susceptibility. He wants to be loved, and the Republican
lobbyists are offering plenty of applause if only he will turn to them and break his campaign promises
in the way that Obama did in 2008. It would undo his hope to be a great president and champion of
the working class that was his image leading up to November 8.
The fight for the Democratic Party's future (dare I say "soul"?)
In her Wednesday morning post mortem speech, Hillary made a bizarre request for young people (especially
young women) to become politically active as Democrats after her own model. What made this so strange
is that the Democratic National Committee has done everything it can to discourage millennials from
running. There are few young candidates – except for corporate and Wall Street Republicans running
as Blue Dog Democrats. The left has not been welcome in the party for a decade – unless it confines
itself only to rhetoric and demagogy, not actual content. For Hillary's DNC coterie the problem with
millennials is that they are not shills for Wall Street. The treatment of Bernie Sanders is exemplary.
The DNC threw down the gauntlet.
Instead of a love fest within the Democratic Party's ranks, the blame game is burning. The Democrats
raised a reported $182 million dollars running up to the election. But when democratic
candidates from Russ Feingold in Wisconsin and other candidates in Michigan, Minnesota and Pennsylvania
asked for help. Hillary monopolized it all for TV ads, leaving these candidates in the lurch. The
election seemed to be all about her, about personality and identity politics, not about the economic
issues paramount in most voters' minds.
Six months ago the polls showed her $1 billion spent on data polling, TV ads and immense staff
of sycophants to have been a vast exercise in GIGO. From May to June the Democratic National Committee
(DNC) saw polls showing Bernie Sanders beating Trump, but Hillary losing. Did the Democratic leadership
really prefer to lose with Hillary than win behind him and his social democratic reformers.
Hillary doesn't learn. Over the weekend she claimed that her analysis showed that FBI director
Comey's reports "rais[ing] doubts that were groundless, baseless," stopped her momentum. This was
on a par with the New York Times analysis that had showed her with an 84 percent probability
of winning last Tuesday. She still hasn't admitted that here analysis was inaccurate.
What is the Democratic Party's former constituency of labor and progressive reformers to do? Are
they to stand by and let the party be captured in Hillary's wake by Robert Rubin's Goldman Sachs-Citigroup
gang that backed her and Obama?
If the party is to be recaptured, now is the moment to move. The 2016 election sounded the death
knell for the identity politics. Its aim was to persuade voters not to think of their identity
in economic terms, but to think of themselves as women or as racial and ethnic groups first and foremost,
not as having common economic interests. This strategy to distract voters from economic policies
has obviously failed.
It did not work with women. In Florida, only 51 percent of white women are estimated to have voted
for Hillary. It didn't even work very well in ethnic Hispanic precincts. They too were more concerned
about their own job opportunities.
The ethnic card did work with many black voters (although not so strongly; fewer blacks voted
for Hillary than had showed up for Obama). Under the Obama administration for the past eight years,
blacks have done worse in terms of income and net worth than any other grouping, according to the
Federal Reserve Board's statistics. But black voters were distracted from their economic interests
by the Democrats' ethnic-identity politics.
This election showed that voters have a sense of when they're being lied to. After eight years
of Obama's demagogy, pretending to support the people but delivering his constituency to his financial
backers on Wall Street. "Identity politics" has given way to the stronger force of economic distress.
Mobilizing identity politics behind a Wall Street program will no longer work.
If we are indeed experiencing a revival of economic class consciousness, who should lead the fight
to clean up the Democratic Party Wall Street leadership? Will it be the Wall Street wing, or can
Bernie and perhaps Elizabeth Warren make their move?
There is only one way to rescue the Democrats from the Clintons and Rubin's gang. That is to save
the Democratic Party from being tarred irreversibly as the party of Wall Street and neocon brinkmanship.
It is necessary to tell the Clintons and the Rubin gang from Wall Street to leave now . And
take Evan Bayh with them.
The danger of not taking this opportunity to clean out the party now
The Democratic Party can save itself only by focusing on economic issues – in a way that reverses
its neoliberal stance under Obama, and indeed going back to Bill Clinton's pro-Wall Street administration.
The Democrats need to do what Britain's Labour Party did by cleaning out Tony Blair's Thatcherites.
As Paul Craig Roberts wrote over the weekend: "Change cannot occur if the displaced ruling class
is left intact after a revolution against them. We have proof of this throughout South America. Every
revolution by the indigenous people has left unmolested the Spanish ruling class, and every revolution
has been overthrown by collusion between the ruling class and Washington."
[1] Otherwise the Democrats will be left as an empty shell.
Now is the time for Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and the few other progressives who have not
been kept out of office by the DNC to make their move and appointing their own nominees to the DNC.
If they fail, the Democratic Party is dead.
An indication of how hard the present Democratic Party leadership will fight against this change
of allegiance is reflected in their long fight against Bernie Sanders and other progressives going
back to Dennis Kucinich. The past five days of MoveOn demonstrations sponsored by Hillary's backer
George Soros may be an attempt to preempt the expected push by Bernie's supporters, by backing Howard
Dean for head of the DNC while organizing groups to be called on for what may be an American "Maidan
Spring."
Perhaps some leading Democrats preferred to lose with their Wall Street candidate Hillary than
win with a reformer who would have edged them out of their right-wing positions. But the main problem
was hubris. Hillary's coterie thought they could make their own reality. They believed that hundreds
of millions of dollars of TV and other advertising could sway voters. But eight years of Obama's
rescue of Wall Street instead of the economy was enough for most voters to see how deceptive his
promises had been. And they distrusted Hillary's pretended embrace of Bernie's opposition to TPP.
The Rust Belt swing states that shifted away from backing Obama for the last two terms are not
racist states. They voted for Obama twice, after all. But seeing his support Wall Street, they had
lost faith in her credibility – and were won by Bernie in his primaries against Hillary.
Donald Trump is thus Obama's legacy. Last week's vote was a backlash. Hillary thought that getting
Barack and Michelle Obama to campaign as her surrogates would help, but it turned out to be the kiss
of death. Obama egged her on by urging voters to "save his legacy" by supporting her as his Third
Term. But voters did not want his legacy of giveaways to the banks, the pharmaceutical and health-insurance
monopolies.
Most of all, it was Hillary's asking voters to ignore her economic loyalty to Wall Street simply
to elect a woman, and her McCarthy-like accusations that Trump was "Putin's candidate" (duly echoed
by Paul Krugman). On Wednesday, Obama's former Ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul tweeted that
"Putin intervened in our elections and succeeded." It was as if the Republicans and even the FBI
were a kind of fifth column for the KGB. Her receptiveness to cutting back Social Security and steering
wage withholding into the stock market did not help – especially her hedge fund campaign contributors.
Compulsory health-insurance fees continue to rise for healthy young people rise as the main profit
center that Obamacare has offered the health-insurance monopoly.
The anti-Trump rallies mobilized by George Soros and MoveOn look like a preemptive attempt to
capture the potential socialist left for the old Clinton divide-and-conquer strategy. The group was
defeated five years ago when it tried to capture Occupy Wall Street to make it part of the Democratic
Party. It's attempt to make a comeback right now should be heard as an urgent call to Bernie's supporters
and other "real" Democrats that they need to create an alternative pretty quickly so as not to let
"socialism" be captured by the Soros and his apparatchiks carried over from the Clinton campaign.
Notes.
[1] Paul Craig Roberts, "The Anti-Trump Protesters Are Tools of the Oligarchy," November 11,
2016.
Michael Hudson's new book,
Killing
the Host is published in e-format by CounterPunch Books and in print by
Islet
. He can be reached via his website, [email protected]
Liberal democracy has always depended on its relationships with an illiberal Other of one
sort or another, and all too often "liberal progressivism" merely means responding to such
relationships in one's own society, the capitalist exploitation of a domestic proletariat,
by "outsourcing" our illiberal tendencies to consist largely of the imperial domination
and subjugation of foreigners.
(Which can even happen inside one's own borders, as long as it remains suitably "illegal";
notice how much less ideologically problematic it is to document the presence and labor of
the most brutally exploited migrant workers in e.g. China or the Gulf Arab states than in more
liberal societies like the US or EU.)
It's the height of either hypocrisy or obliviousness for those who consider themselves
liberal progressives to then act surprised when the people charged with carrying out this domination
and subjugation on our behalf - our Colonel Jessups, if you will - demand that we stop hiding
our society's illiberal underbelly and acknowledge/celebrate it for what it is , a demand
that may be the single most authentic marker of the transition from liberalism to fascism.
In Pareto "elite rotation" terms, the election of Trump definitely means rotation of the US
neoliberal elite. "Status quo" faction of the elite was defeated due to backlash over globalization
and disappearance of meaningful well-paid jobs, with mass replacement of them by McJobs and temps/contractors.
Whether openness about domination and subjugation is an "authentic marker of the transition
from [neo]liberalism to fascism" remains to be seen, unless we assume that this transition (to
the National Security State) already happened long ego.
In a way illegal immigrants in the USA already represented stable and growing "new slaves"
class for decades. Their existence and contribution to the US economy was never denied or suppressed.
And even Greenspan acknowledged that Iraq war was about oil. So Trump put nothing new on the table
other then being slightly more blunt.
Neoliberalism and neo-imperialism show pretty much the contradictions of the older globalist
orders (late 19th c), they are just now distributed so as re-intensify the differences, the combined
etc, and concentrate the accumulation.
And elites are fighting over the spoils.
Yes, neoliberalism and neo-imperialism are much better and more precise terms, then fuzzy notions
like "liberal progressivism" . May be we should use Occam razor and discard the term "[neo]liberal
progressivism". The term "soft neoliberals" is IMHO good enough description of the same.
As for contradictions of the "older globalist orders (late 19th c)" the key difference is that
under neoliberalism armies play the role of "can opener" and after then the direct occupation were
by-and-large replaced with financial institutions and with indirect
"debt slavery". In many cases neoliberal subjugation is achieved via color revolution mechanism,
without direct military force involved.
Neo-colonialism creates higher level of concentration of risks due to the greed of financial
elite which was demonstrated in full glory in 2008. As such it looks less stable then old colonialism.
And it generates stronger backlash, which typically has elements of anti-Americanism, as we see in
Philippines now. Merkel days might also be numbered.
Also TBTF banks are now above the law as imposing judgments on them after the crisis can have
disastrous economic externalities. At the same time the corruption of regulators via revolving door
mechanisms blocks implementing meaningful preventive regulatory reforms.
In other words, like with Soviet nomenklatura, with the neoliberal elite we see the impossibility
of basic change, either toward taming the TBTF or toward modification of an aggressive
neocolonial foreign policy
with its rampant militarism.
"... Well, I will say this about President-Elect Trump, so far so good. Media justifiably discredited, neocons sucking air, Democratic Party doubling down on the stupid and self-destructing by selling out to Soros, what's not to like? ..."
"... I was happy to hear that the old liberal Trump still exists. ..."
"... I still have not heard any rumors about Lt. Gen. Flynn. I am very interested to know where he is assigned. I thought he would have 2nd pick after Sessions so either DoD, CIA or Head of the NSC. ..."
"... As a lifelong liberal who voted for Trump primarily to keep to the warmongering wackjob Clinton out of power the early moves by Trump are promising. ..."
... co-founded the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which was a center for prominent
neoconservatives. He has been a member of the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, a committee
of civilians and retired military officers that the U.S. Secretary of Defense may call upon for
advice, that was instituted during the administration of President George W. Bush. He was put
on the board after acquaintance Richard Perle put forward his name. Cohen has referred to the
War on Terrorism as "World War IV". In the run-up to the 2003 Invasion of Iraq, he was a member
of Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, a group of prominent persons who pressed for an invasion.
It's over. Donald Trump, a man utterly unfit for the position by temperament, values and policy
preferences, will be the Republican nominee for president. He will run against Hillary Clinton,
who is easily the lesser evil ...
Mr. Trump's temperament, his proclivity for insult and deceit and his advocacy of unpredictability
would make him a presidential disaster - especially in the conduct of foreign policy, where clarity
and consistency matter.
...
Hillary Clinton is far better: She believes in the old consensus and will take tough lines on
China and, increasingly, Russia.
Cohen
in
The American Interest on November 10 2016 (immediately after Trump won):
Trump may be better than we think. He does not have strong principles about much, which means
he can shift. He is clearly willing to delegate legislation to Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell.
And even abroad, his instincts incline him to increase U.S. strength-and to push back even against
Russia if, as will surely happen, Putin double-crosses him. My guess is that sequester gets rolled
back, as do lots of stupid regulations, and experiments in nudging and nagging Americans to behave
the way progressives think they should.
Cohen on Twitter November 15 2016
Eliot A Cohen @EliotACohen
After exchange w Trump transition team, changed my recommendation: stay away. They're angry,
arrogant, screaming "you LOST!" Will be ugly.
Retweets 3,719 Likes 3,204
5:07 AM - 15 Nov 2016
I find the above very funny. How could that turncoat think he would be greeted by the Trump organization
with anything but derision? Cohen believed he and his ilk would be welcome with candies and roses
after insulting Trump in all major media? Who is the arrogant one in the above?
While the papers are full of (badly) informed rumors about who will get this or that position
in a Trump administration let's keep in mind that 90% of such rumors are just self promotions by
people like Cohen who shill for the rumored job. That is why I will not write about John Bolton or
Rudy Giuliani as coming Secretary of State. Both are possible (unqualified) candidates. But others
are just as likely to get that position. We will only know who it is after the official release.
Meanwhile Trump yesterday had a
phonecall with the Russian President Putin. They discussed bilateral relations, Syria and fighting
terrorism. Today the Russian and Syrian military started the long expected big campaign against the
"moderate" al-Qaeda in east-Aleppo city and Idleb governate. Air strikes on east-Aleppo had been
held back for 28 days. Today missiles and cruise missiles were launched against fixed targets and
dozens of carrier and land launched airplanes
attacked Nusra position on the various front and in its rear. Long range bombers flown from Russia
joined the campaign. Trump seems to have voiced no objections to this offensive.
The Russian military has upped its air defense in Syria. Additional to the S-400 system around
its airport in Latakia seven S-300 systems were deployed as a screen against U.S. cruise missile
attacks. These are joined by rehabilitated Syrian S-200 system and Pantsyr S-1 short range systems
for point defense. This should be enough to deter any stupid idea the Pentagon hawks, or dumb neocons
like Eliot Cohen, might have.
Posted by b on November 15, 2016 at 12:13 PM |
Permalink
Well, I will say this about President-Elect Trump, so far so good. Media justifiably discredited,
neocons sucking air, Democratic Party doubling down on the stupid and self-destructing by selling
out to Soros, what's not to like?
A lot sure to come, no doubt. But for now, go Donald!
I've never known a president-elect to have such an effect right after an election. It's like a
house of cards falling.
Hell, at this rate, Trump may be able to declare 'mission accomplished' before even taking
office!!! j/k :)
Thank you for this summary. Trump will be a mixed bag especially in domestic politics. I was happy
to hear that the old liberal Trump still exists. He may appoint an openly gay man to a Cabinet
position (I do not know if this is tokenism or not). If his appointments follow policy then I
think a lot of Clinton crybabies in the streets will have a harder time gaining traction with
the social justice warriors.
I sometimes used Cohen's WWIV statement to see how strongly a person held their neo-conservative
positions. Only a few knew what I was talking about during the 2nd Iraq War. I'm glad that is
he gone. I hope Trump can pull in some realists but I do not know where these people exist anymore.
People like that are typically weeded out at lower levels.
I still have not heard any rumors about Lt. Gen. Flynn. I am very interested to know where
he is assigned. I thought he would have 2nd pick after Sessions so either DoD, CIA or Head of
the NSC.
Ironic, shifting the balance of power over Syria means denial of both a successful coalition air
campaign as well as opportunity for stupid bait operation to create pretext for retaliation. Queen
against wall of pawns.
1
Timelines are the most valuable tool of all in outing ponderous idiots. Thanks, b.
Here's one for idiot Paul Krugman.
Nov09 (day after election) – PK: The markets are in free-fall, the recession has begun, it
will "never" end.
Reality: the markets were going thought the roof. Dow Jones went straight up and past it's
previous high.
Nov11 – PK: I have rethought what I said on Nov09 and there's a chance the markets will take
the elections results well.
Nov14 – PK: After giving my Nov09 prediction some thought, I "quickly" retracted it.
Yeah, you moran. You retracted it after seeing it was 180 degrees wrong and everyone can now
see that your fear-mongering about markets was just more of your bullshit.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
2
b: "That is why I will not write about John Bolton or Rudy Giuliani as coming Secretary of State.
Both are possible (unqualified) candidates. "
You just did.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
3.
b: "Today the Russian and Syrian military started the long expected big campaign against the "moderate"
al-Qaeda in east-Aleppo city and Idleb governate."
I don't know about Aleppo. Here's RT earlier today:
" The Russian military has launched a large-scale operation against terrorists stationed in
Homs and Idlib provinces of Syria, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu said on Tuesday."
/snip
"Journalists asked presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov about the possibility of the operation
which started on Tuesday to be expanded to include Aleppo. 'Aleppo has not been mentioned in
the report of the defense minister; it concerned other areas – Homs and Idlib [provinces],'
Peskov told the press.
/snip
"Russian jets have not been in the vicinity of Aleppo for the last 28 days"
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-aleppo-idUSKBN13A16O
Intense air strikes resumed in rebel-held districts of eastern Aleppo after a weeks-long pause
on Tuesday, killing at least three people, residents and a war monitor said.
Syrian state television said the Damascus government's air force took part in strikes against
"terrorist strongholds" in Aleppo's Old City while Russia said it had struck Islamic State and
former Nusra Front sites elsewhere in Syria, without mentioning Aleppo.
The bombardment appeared to mark the end of a pause in strikes on targets inside the city declared
by Syria's government and Russia on Oct 18.
~~~
On Monday and early Tuesday, air strikes hit hospitals in three towns and villages in rebel-held
areas to the west of Aleppo, putting them all out of action. Damascus and Moscow both deny targeting
hospitals.
Other strikes, including some by suspected Russian cruise missiles, hit Saraqeb in Idlib, a province
near Aleppo where many of the rebel factions have a large presence.
Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said on Tuesday Russia had launched attacks in Idlib and
Homs provinces using missiles and jets from the country's only aircraft carrier, which recently
arrived in the eastern Mediterranean.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-israel-russia-mideast-idUSKBN13A2CN?il=0 Russia has long-term ambitions in the Middle East: Israeli official
By Luke Baker | JERUSALEM
Israel should be concerned about the deepening disconnect between Russia's aims in the Middle
East and its own goals, according to a senior Israeli official who held high-level meetings in
Moscow last week.
Avi Dichter, chairman of Israel's foreign affairs and defense committee and the former head of
the Shin Bet intelligence agency, said Russia's views on Iran, Syria's Bashar al-Assad and the
Lebanese militia Hezbollah were in sharp contrast to Israel's and a growing source of potential
conflict.
While he said Moscow appreciates the good ties it has with Israel and takes the diplomatic relationship
seriously, it won't hesitate to impose actions that serve its interests on any countries in the
Middle East, including Israel.
"The gap between us and them is large and disturbing," Dichter said in summing up discussions
with senior members of Russia's upper and lower houses of parliament, the deputy defense minister
and the deputy head of national security.
"Russia thinks and acts as a superpower and as such it often ignores Israeli interest when
it doesn't coincide with the Russian interest," he said.
Wow, more insightful analysis about the US!!!! FAIL.
Um, James Woolsey of PNAC was Trump's advisor. He was also financially backed by Adelson who
is one of the people who FUNDS the neocons or are we not going to talk about the neocon's Zionist
roots?
Gee, b, could the neocons have everyone in their pocket or do thoughts like that get in the
way of your devotion to this fascist girl-raping piece of garbage, Trump?
I can't remember, did Berlusconi send a shiver down your spine as well, b?
Here is another example of folks trying get in front of the Trump train and turn it into a parade.
"Trump has pledged to change things in Washington -- about draining the swamp. He is going
to need some people to help guide him through the swamp -- how do you get in and how do you get
out? We are prepared to help do that."
-former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, speaking on behalf of Squire Patton Boggs, the lobbying
firm he works for
Nuland has managed to "burrow" herself - convert their political slot to permanent one at Foggy
Bottom since Strobe Talbot after Bill Clinton's terms.
There are quite a few Israel firsters like her: Jeffrey Feltman is another one.
What have the poor people of Outer Mongolia ever done to deserve this: "Does this mean that Victoria
Nuland will be fired? Actually, can she be fired? or at at least transferred to the embassy in
Outer Mongolia?" I think all of the neo-cons should replace current prisoners at Gitmo, along
with BOTH Clintons, Obama, G W Bush, Cheney, et al. Then subjected to all sorts of 'information
gathering techniques' ...
Ha ha.
Obama has called a press conference to deliver a lecture about the consequences of a descent into
'tribalism'.
One hopes that Bibi and the pro-"Israel" crowd are paying attention...
Let's hope that all the radical rabbinical right-wing fascists like Cohen and Nuland and Bolton
can be pressed to death with stones at Foggy Bottom Swamp.
Very tiny stones, lol. Like Death of 3,035,795,900,000 Cuts they impose on US.
I did some math on Mil.Gov.Fed. There are 6,800 banks in the US, and an average bank robbery
in the US nets ~$10,000. If every bank in the US was robbed every 10 minutes, of every day, throughout
every month, for the entire year, that would equal the yearly depredation of our last life savings
by OneParty of Mil.Gov.Fed.
That's 6,800 211A police bank robbery calls, every 10 minutes, forever, and that doesn't include
$T a year interest-only forever payments on their odious 'debt'.
Maybe pressed to death with damp pig dung would be more appropriate for them.
"Thank you for this summary. Trump will be a mixed bag especially in domestic politics. I was
happy to hear that the old liberal Trump still exists. He may appoint an openly gay man to a Cabinet
position (I do not know if this is tokenism or not). If his appointments follow policy then I
think a lot of Clinton crybabies in the streets will have a harder time gaining traction with
the social justice warriors."
Yes.
As a lifelong liberal who voted for Trump primarily to keep to the warmongering wackjob
Clinton out of power the early moves by Trump are promising.
As someone who lived lived through the 1980s I remember how telling people how concerned and
fearful you were of nuclear war was most something you did in an attempt to make yourself look
'deep'.
This past six month have been the first time in my life where I was found myself really being
afraid. Sitting in my safe home that has never been touched by war it has been a sobering shock
of just how close the frantic push for all out war with Russia by Clinton and her army of neocon
cronies infesting the US government came to killing tens or hundreds of millions of people.
It is going to be a painful four years for a large number of liberal issues but the avoidance
of the horror of an actual all out war between two nuclear powers is worth the pain on many social
and environmental issues.
...
I hope Trump can pull in some realists but I do not know where these people exist anymore. People
like that are typically weeded out at lower levels.
...
Posted by: AnEducatedFool | Nov 15, 2016 12:39:17 PM | 4
Don't fret. Trump is a gifted personnel picker with a flair for innovation.
In 1980 he (very unfashionably) appointed a woman as the construction project manager for Trump
Tower, a task she performed with remarkable expertise.
Bacevich for Secretary of State!
Or at least Secretary of Defense.
Would be great to see Chas Freeman nominated for Sec/State but
GOP/Neocons/Zionists blocked him from lesser post under Obama.
Here we have Woolsey quoting and adopting Cohen's WWIV theory (I wonder who they think the
parties will be for WWIII) and Woolsey has even referred to Cohen as my friend just this
month!
I have adopted Eliot Cohen's formulation, distinguished professor at Johns Hopkins School
for Advanced International Studies, that we are in World War IV, World War III having been the
Cold War. And I think Eliot's formulation fits the circumstances really better than describing
this as a war on terrorism.
Yes, I do think you get your news from the MSM and what is worse is that you actually believe
it just like b.
Gee, do you think that having all of the neocons tell the MSM - and thus you - that they really
support HRC had anything to do with how much you, b and the other bedwetters p!ssed themselves
about OMG!1!! WWIII!!1!!1 especially as those announcements came out in March - now listen closely
- when HRC WAS RUNNING AGAINST BS?
Why, that sure was fuel to the fire for Bernie-bros, huh?
By deception thou shall wage war, huh?
Gee, I can't think of a worse poison pill for a fake-left Democratic candidate than to have
the endorsements of the neocons, can you? Why, that might even sway some easily fooled MSM-imbibers
as to whose string the neocons might end up pulling in the end, huh?
Why, maybe do ya think they might sway even more people by PUBLICLY tweeting about just HOW
MUCH they still hate that dastardly Trump, y'know, the same guy who was backed by the world's
richest Zionist Jew and who was advised by James Woosley throughout his campaign?
No one - but especially Israeli-backing neocons - would never think to use subterfuge to get
their way, huh?
But you and b and all the rest here don't pay attention to the MSM, huh? You all just happened
to have been parroting the "neocons love HRC" line that was first found in the MSM, huh?
Names have been floated for this and that positions in the Trump Administration but I haven't
seen Pat Buchanan been named for anything; or have I skipped too much comments? I rather think
much of Buchanan's world views are in line with Trump's, and he should make a sensible Secretary
of State.
Norm MacDonald the Canadian humorist was fired from Saturday Night Live in 1998 for allegedly
telling to many O.J. Simpson jokes. This 25 minute compilation video illustrates that the real
reason was most likely that Norm made fun of the Clinton's life of crime by actually stating their
crime spree facts disguised as humor?
Maybe Putin told Trump "the sooner we (Russia, Syria, etc. clear out Al Qaeda, the sooner we deal
with ISIS". An offer Trump would be an idiot to refuse, not that I think he's an idiot. Hopefully,
the moronic BS we had to put up with from Obama, Cameron, Hollande, The Grauniad, New York Times,
etc. about how Russia, Syria, weren't attacking ISIS but were attacking "moderate" Al Qaeda will
soon go away.
"Vice President-elect Mike Pence is the best person to shape the transition effort, with the president-elect's
input, Trump spokesman Jason Miller said."
"... On Sunday's "60 Minutes," Trump said: "You know, we've been fighting this war for 15 years. … We've spent $6 trillion in the Middle East, $6 trillion - we could have rebuilt our country twice. And you look at our roads and our bridges and our tunnels … and our airports are … obsolete." ..."
"... They want to confront Vladimir Putin, somewhere, anywhere. They want to send U.S. troops to the eastern Baltic. They want to send weapons to Kiev to fight Russia in Donetsk, Luhansk and Crimea. ..."
"... At the end of the Cold War, however, with the Soviet Empire history and the Soviet Union having disintegrated, George H.W. Bush launched his New World Order. His son, George W., invaded Iraq and preached a global crusade for democracy "to end tyranny in our world." ..."
"... Result: the Mideast disaster Trump described to Lesley Stahl, and constant confrontations with Russia caused by pushing our NATO alliance right up to and inside what had been Putin's country. ..."
"... The opportunity is at hand for Trump to reconfigure U.S. foreign policy to the world we now inhabit, and to the vital interests of the United States. ..."
However Donald Trump came upon the foreign policy views he espoused, they were as crucial to his
election as his views on trade and the border.
Yet those views are hemlock to the GOP foreign policy elite and the liberal Democratic interventionists
of the Acela Corridor. Trump promised an "America First" foreign policy rooted in the national interest, not in nostalgia.
The neocons insist that every Cold War and post-Cold War commitment be maintained, in perpetuity.
On Sunday's "60 Minutes," Trump said: "You know, we've been fighting this war for 15 years. …
We've spent $6 trillion in the Middle East, $6 trillion - we could have rebuilt our country twice.
And you look at our roads and our bridges and our tunnels … and our airports are … obsolete."
Yet the War Party has not had enough of war, not nearly.
They want to confront Vladimir Putin, somewhere, anywhere. They want to send U.S. troops to the
eastern Baltic. They want to send weapons to Kiev to fight Russia in Donetsk, Luhansk and Crimea.
They want to establish a no-fly zone and shoot down Syrian and Russian planes that violate it,
acts of war Congress never authorized.
They want to trash the Iran nuclear deal, though all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies told us, with
high confidence, in 2007 and 2011, Iran did not even have a nuclear weapons program.
Other hardliners want to face down Beijing over its claims to the reefs and rocks of the South
China Sea, though our Manila ally is talking of tightening ties to China and kicking us out of Subic
Bay.
In none of these places is there a U.S. vital interest so imperiled as to justify the kind of
war the War Party would risk.
Trump has the opportunity to be the president who, like Harry Truman, redirected U.S. foreign
policy for a generation.
After World War II, we awoke to find our wartime ally, Stalin, had emerged as a greater enemy
than Germany or Japan. Stalin's empire stretched from the Elbe to the Pacific.
In 1949, suddenly, he had the atom bomb, and China, the most populous nation on earth, had fallen
to the armies of Mao Zedong.
As our situation was new, Truman acted anew. He adopted a George Kennan policy of containment
of the world Communist empire, the Truman Doctrine, and sent an army to prevent South Korea from
being overrun.
At the end of the Cold War, however, with the Soviet Empire history and the Soviet Union having
disintegrated, George H.W. Bush launched his New World Order. His son, George W., invaded Iraq and
preached a global crusade for democracy "to end tyranny in our world."
A policy born of hubris.
Result: the Mideast disaster Trump described to Lesley Stahl, and constant confrontations with
Russia caused by pushing our NATO alliance right up to and inside what had been Putin's country.
How did we expect Russian patriots to react?
The opportunity is at hand for Trump to reconfigure U.S. foreign policy to the world we now inhabit,
and to the vital interests of the United States.
What should Trump say?
As our Cold War presidents from Truman to Reagan avoided World War III, I intend to avert Cold
War II. We do not regard Russia or the Russian people as enemies of the United States, and we
will work with President Putin to ease the tensions that have arisen between us.
For our part, NATO expansion is over, and U.S. forces will not be deployed in any former republic
of the Soviet Union.
While Article 5 of NATO imposes an obligation to regard an attack upon any one of 28 nations
as an attack on us all, in our Constitution, Congress, not some treaty dating back to before most
Americans were even born, decides whether we go to war.
The compulsive interventionism of recent decades is history. How nations govern themselves
is their own business. While, as JFK said, we prefer democracies and republics to autocrats and
dictators, we will base our attitude toward other nations upon their attitude toward us.
No other nation's internal affairs are a vital interest of ours.
Europeans have to be awakened to reality. We are not going to be forever committed to fighting
their wars. They are going to have to defend themselves, and that transition begins now.
In Syria and Iraq, our enemies are al-Qaida and ISIS. We have no intention of bringing down
the Assad regime, as that would open the door to Islamic terrorists. We have learned from Iraq
and Libya.
Then Trump should move expeditiously to lay out and fix the broad outlines of his foreign policy,
which entails rebuilding our military while beginning the cancellation of war guarantees that have
no connection to U.S. vital interests. We cannot continue to bankrupt ourselves to fight other countries'
wars or pay other countries' bills.
The ideal time for such a declaration, a Trump Doctrine, is when the president-elect presents
his secretaries of state and defense.
"... The affluent and rich voted for Clinton by a much broader margin than they had voted for the Democratic candidate in 2012. Among those with incomes between $100,000 and $200,000, Clinton benefited from a 9-point Democratic swing. Voters with family incomes above $250,000 swung toward Clinton by 11 percentage points. The number of Democratic voters amongst the wealthiest voting block increased from 2.16 million in 2012 to 3.46 million in 2016-a jump of 60 percent. ..."
"... Clinton's electoral defeat is bound up with the nature of the Democratic Party, an alliance of Wall Street and the military-intelligence apparatus with privileged sections of the upper-middle class based on the politics of race, gender and sexual orientation ..."
"... Over the course of the last forty years, the Democratic Party has abandoned all pretenses of social reform, a process escalated under Obama. Working with the Republican Party and the trade unions, it is responsible for enacting social policies that have impoverished vast sections of the working class, regardless of race or gender. ..."
The elections saw a massive shift in party support among the poorest and wealthiest voters. The share
of votes for the Republicans amongst the most impoverished section of workers, those with family
incomes under $30,000, increased by 10 percentage points from 2012. In several key Midwestern states,
the swing of the poorest voters toward Trump was even larger: Wisconsin (17-point swing), Iowa (20
points), Indiana (19 points) and Pennsylvania (18 points).
The swing to Republicans among the $30,000 to $50,000 family income range was 6 percentage points.
Those with incomes between $50,000 and $100,000 swung away from the Republicans compared to 2012
by 2 points.
The affluent and rich voted for Clinton by a much broader margin than they had voted for the
Democratic candidate in 2012. Among those with incomes between $100,000 and $200,000, Clinton benefited
from a 9-point Democratic swing. Voters with family incomes above $250,000 swung toward Clinton by
11 percentage points. The number of Democratic voters amongst the wealthiest voting block increased
from 2.16 million in 2012 to 3.46 million in 2016-a jump of 60 percent.
Clinton was unable to make up for the vote decline among women (2.1 million), African Americans
(3.2 million), and youth (1.2 million), who came overwhelmingly from the poor and working class,
with the increase among the rich (1.3 million).
Clinton's electoral defeat is bound up with the nature of the Democratic Party, an alliance
of Wall Street and the military-intelligence apparatus with privileged sections of the upper-middle
class based on the politics of race, gender and sexual orientation.
Over the course of the last forty years, the Democratic Party has abandoned all pretenses
of social reform, a process escalated under Obama. Working with the Republican Party and the trade
unions, it is responsible for enacting social policies that have impoverished vast sections of the
working class, regardless of race or gender.
British diplomat John Glubb wrote a book called "The Fate of Empires and Search For Survival."
Glubb noted that the average age of empires since the time of ancient Assyria (859-612 B.C.)
is 250 years. Only the Mameluke Empire in Egypt and the Levant (1250-1517) made it as far as
267 years. America is 238 years old and is exhibiting signs of decline. All empires begin,
writes Glubb, with the age of pioneers, followed by ages of conquest, commerce, affluence,
intellect and decadence. America appears to have reached the age of decadence, which Glubb
defines as marked by "defensiveness, pessimism, materialism, frivolity, an influx of foreigners,
the welfare state, [and] a weakening of religion."
The most important is probably the fact that the ideology of the current US empire -- neoliberalism
(called here "liberal progressivism") -- became discredited after 2008. What happened after the
collapse of the Marxist ideology with the USSR is well known. It took 46 years (if we assume that
the collapse started in 1945 as the result of victory in WWII, when the Soviet army has a chance
to see the standard of living in Western countries). Why the USA should be different ? Decline
of empires is very slow and can well take a half a century. Let's say it might take 50 years from
9/11 or October 2008.
One telling sign is the end of "American hegemony" in the global political sphere. One telling
sign is the end of "American hegemony" in the global political sphere. As Lupita hypothesized
here Trump might be the last desperate attempt to reverse this process.
Another, the deterioration of the standard of living of the USA population and declining infrastructure,
both typically are connected with the overextension of empire. In Fortune (
http://fortune.com/2015/07/20/united-states-decline-statistics-economic/
) Jill Coplan lists 12 signs of the decline.
Trump election is another sign of turmoil. The key message of his election is "The institutions
we once trusted deceived us" That includes the Democratic Party and all neoliberal MSM. Like was
the case with the USSR, the loss of influence of neoliberal propaganda machine is a definite sign
of the decline of empire.
Degeneration of the neoliberal political elite that is also clearly visible in the current set
of presidential candidates might be another sign. Hillary Clinton dragged to the car on 9/11 commemorative
event vividly reminds the state of health of a couple of members of Soviet Politburo .
"... The second argument is the Bayesian vs frequentist debate on the foundations of probability theory, which has roots that go back centuries. Not that it matters, but I am in the Bayes-Laplace-Jeffreys-Jaynes camp. Evidently the author is a frequentist. But it is a vastly bigger intellectual issue than how some pollsters blew it and can't be settled in a blog post by someone proclaiming The Truth. ..."
"... It's no secret that U.S. election results can't be audited - the integrity of the data is unknowable - and is subject to pre-election manipulation, in the form of widespread voter suppression. Post-election manipulation of vote totals also can't be discounted, because in many election districts it wouldn't be difficult and motive exists. ..."
"... The general nature of humans is to "freak out" about big things and demand stuff like Brexit, then "calm down" and leave things roughly like they are maybe with a few touch-ups around the edges.* (This is the simplified basis of my "Brexit not gonna happen" stance. ..."
"... But this is saying that people at the last moment decided the status quo was so bad they realized they just had to make a very scary leap into something new. That, if true, says quite a lot about the status quo. ..."
"... "The Bradley effect" is the idea people are lying to pollsters. The problem is modeling, and unlike a few years ago, Gallup and others no longer do their daily tracking polls which give a better picture of the electorate. In the absence of a clear view of the electorate, the pollsters make up who will vote based on preconceived notions. ..."
"... I think this is a good point. My understanding of the polling methodology is that they sample the electorate then break their sampled voters into demographic bins, then they weight the bins based on expected participation by demographic to get a final expected vote. ..."
"... Putting blame for voter 'apathy' on Clinton's treatment of the Democratic base that supported Sanders, probably the most activist part of the party, or on Clinton's pivot to 'suburban republicans', or on the FBI, or Clinton's disastrous foreign policy record, or Clinton's unprecedentedly low favorability and trustworthiness numbers is difficult, but all of those problems were foreseen by Sanders supporters as well as by the DNC, but were ignored by the latter. That those problems were likely to depress turnout, which Democrats need to win elections was also fairly obvious, which is why I never believed the polls and believed Trump was indeed likely to win. ..."
"... Polling organizations are really political organizations that get paid to influence public opinion rather than measure it. Their models are garbage. It's a complete joke of an industry. ..."
I have a very different explanation of why the pollsters got it so wrong. My argument is based on
two statements which I hope to convince you of: That the pollsters were not actually using anything
resembling scientific methodology when investigating the polls. Rather they were simply tracking
the trends and calibrating their commentary in line with them. Not only did this not give us a correct
understanding of what was going on but it also gave us no real new information other than what the
polls themselves were telling us. I call this the redundancy argument . That the pollsters
were committing a massive logical fallacy in extracting probability estimates from the polls (and
whatever else they threw into their witches' brew models). In fact they were dealing with a singular
event (the election) and singular events cannot be assigned probability estimates in any non-arbitrary
sense. I call this the logical fallacy argument .
Let us turn to the redundancy argument first. In order to explore the redundancy argument I will
lay out briefly the type of analysis that I did on the polls during the election. I can then contrast
this with the type of analysis done by pollsters. As we will see, the type of analysis that I was
advocating produced new information while the type of approach followed by the pollsters did not.
While I do not claim that my analysis actually predicted the election, in retrospect it certainly
helps explain the result – while, on the other hand, the pollsters failed miserably.
... ... ...
Probability theory requires that in order for a probability to be assigned an event must be repeated
over and over again – ideally as many times as possible. Let's say that I hand you a coin. You have
no idea whether the coin is balanced or not and so you do not know the probability that it will turn
up heads. In order to discover whether the coin is balanced or skewed you have to toss it a bunch
of times. Let's say that you toss it 1000 times and find that 900 times it turns up heads. Well,
now you can be fairly confident that the coin is skewed towards heads. So if I now ask you what the
probability of the coin turning up heads on the next flip you can tell me with some confidence that
it is 9 out of 10 (900/1000) or 90%.
Elections are not like this because they only happen once. Yes, there are multiple elections every
year and there are many years but these are all unique events. Every election is completely unique
and cannot be compared to another – at least, not in the mathematical space of probabilities. If
we wanted to assign a real mathematical probability to the 2016 election we would have to run the
election over and over again – maybe 1000 times – in different parallel universes. We could then
assign a probability that Trump would win based on these other universes. This is silly stuff, of
course, and so it is best left alone.
So where do the pollsters get their probability estimates? Do they have access to an interdimensional
gateway? Of course they do not. Rather what they are doing is taking the polls, plugging them into
models and generating numbers. But these numbers are not probabilities. They cannot be. They are
simply model outputs representing a certain interpretation of the polls. Boil it right down and they
are just the poll numbers themselves recast as a fake probability estimate. Think of it this way:
do the odds on a horse at a horse race tell you the probability that this horse will win? Of course
not! They simply tell you what people think will happen in the upcoming race. No one knows the actual
odds that the horse will win. That is what makes gambling fun. Polls are not quite the same – they
try to give you a snap shot of what people are thinking about how they will vote in the election
at any given point in time – but the two are more similar than not. I personally think that this
tendency for pollsters to give fake probability estimates is enormously misleading and the practice
should be stopped immediately. It is pretty much equivalent to someone standing outside a betting
shop and, having converted all the odds on the board into fake probabilities, telling you that he
can tell you the likelihood of each horse winning the race.
There are other probability tricks that I noticed these pollsters doing too.
... ... ...
The Catechism of the Catholic Church in discussing the first commandment repeats the condemnation
of divination: "All forms of divination are to be rejected: recourse to Satan or demons, conjuring
up the dead or other practices falsely supposed to 'unveil' the future. Consulting horoscopes, astrology,
palm reading, interpretation of omens and lots, the phenomena of clairvoyance, and recourse to mediums
all conceal a desire for power over time, history, and, in the last analysis, other human beings,
as well as a wish to conciliate hidden powers. These practices are generally considered mortal sins.
Of course I am not here to convert the reader to the Catholic Church. I am just making the point
that many institutions in the past have seen the folly in trying to predict the future and have warned
people against it. Today all we need say is that it is rather silly. Although we would also not go
far wrong by saying, with the Church, that "recourse to mediums all conceal a desire for power over
time, history, and, in the last analysis, other human beings". That is a perfectly good secular
lesson.
I would go further still. The cult of prediction plays into another cult: the cult of supposedly
detached technocratic elitism. I refer here, for example, to the cult of mainstream economics with
their ever mysterious 'models'. This sort of enterprise is part and parcel of the cult of divination
that we have fallen prey to but I will not digress too much on it here as it is the subject of a
book that I will be publishing in mid-December 2016 – an overview of which can be found
here . What knowledge-seeking people should be pursuing are tools of analysis that can help them
better understand the world around us – and maybe even improve it – not goat entrails in which we
can read future events. We live in tumultuous times; now is not the time
The second argument is the Bayesian vs frequentist debate on the foundations of probability
theory, which has roots that go back centuries. Not that it matters, but I am in the Bayes-Laplace-Jeffreys-Jaynes
camp. Evidently the author is a frequentist. But it is a vastly bigger intellectual issue than
how some pollsters blew it and can't be settled in a blog post by someone proclaiming The Truth.
Bayesian analysis is frequently cited as an alternative to frequentist schools, although
only with prior awareness of the ontological challenges. Bwaaaaaaak!
The Philster is back! Dude, you've been gone a while.
If your title says we shouldn't listen to you, that might discourage readers before they read.
That's a Bayesian prior. LOL. Sort of anyway.
The probability of us reading, given the admonition not to read = the probability of the admonition
given the probability of us reading, divided by the probability of us reading. Or something like
that. ;-)
When i do the math I get lost. I'll read it later. Right now i can't
It's no secret that U.S. election results can't be audited - the integrity of the data
is unknowable - and is subject to pre-election manipulation, in the form of widespread voter suppression.
Post-election manipulation of vote totals also can't be discounted, because in many election districts
it wouldn't be difficult and motive exists.
The arguments above are convincing in principle, but when the outcomes against which we measure
polling predictions can't even be verified….
Letting others debate Bayesian models… this stood out:
> This suggested to me that all of those that were going to vote Remain had decided early on
and the voters that decided later and closer to the election date were going to vote Leave
Wow. Just wow. The general nature of humans is to "freak out" about big things and demand
stuff like Brexit, then "calm down" and leave things roughly like they are maybe with a few touch-ups
around the edges.* (This is the simplified basis of my "Brexit not gonna happen" stance.)
But this is saying that people at the last moment decided the status quo was so bad they
realized they just had to make a very scary leap into something new. That, if true, says quite
a lot about the status quo.
*Yes I've been married for quite a long time now. Why do you ask? :)
After some discussions about 'the inverse Bradley effect' some months ago, the press had been
strangely silent about the effect and whether it applied to Trump. Theoretically, Trump, more
than any other candidate I can name, should have enjoyed better support in the election than he
was polling, as people were uncomfortable admitting that he was their preference for fear of condescension
from pollsters. Ross Perot–to whom Trump is often compared– enjoyed a five point advantage 'inverse
Bradley effect' in 1992 over his last and best poll numbers. Bill Clinton experienced a straight
up 'Bradley effect' in both of his Presidential victories (off three points from his polling,
as I recall), though he still did well enough to win.
Nate Silver had an article that pretty much outlined what happened in the election back on
Sept 15th. I'm not sure why he isn't referring to this as a fig leaf today, perhaps because so
much of the rest of his reporting predicted Clinton's victory.
"The Bradley effect" is the idea people are lying to pollsters. The problem is modeling,
and unlike a few years ago, Gallup and others no longer do their daily tracking polls which give
a better picture of the electorate. In the absence of a clear view of the electorate, the pollsters
make up who will vote based on preconceived notions.
The LaT poll was very close this cycle and last cycle for the right reasons. Why didn't people
lie to them? Are they special? They used a cross section of the country as a sample based on the
census. They continued to talk to non voters or people who claimed to be non voters. They recognized
people turning their backs on Team Blue. In 2012, they predicted the decline of the white vote
for Team Blue and the rally of support from minorities because they talked to people.
In the case of the famed "Bradley effect," the pollsters in that race didn't account for high
republican turnout in connection to a statewide referendum expecting the usual city council turnout.
The Republicans simply weren't counted. The "lying" of secret racists excuse was cooked up by
pollsters and Bradley's campaign to avoid accountability for not working hard enough.
I don't know if this fits in, but this what I've been pondering.
For most of my life so far, lack of turnout has been assumed to be the result of 'voter apathy'.
It looks to me as if the democratic party's behavior this year, especially in suppressing the
Sanders campaign, had the ultimate effect of creating negative motivation on the part of many
otherwise democratic voters, who were excoriated with the warning that any vote not-for-HRC was
a vote for Trump.
It would seem that many of those voters accepted that reality, and by refusing to show up at
the polls, did indeed vote for Trump.
From my perspective, this is both a complete repudiation of the Third-Way politics of the Clintons,
and the beginning of a sea change.
What I'm saying is that we no longer have voter apathy to blame, but real evidence of deepening
engagement, which hopefully bodes well for Bernie's new project OR.
This wasn't a mysterious failure to excite voters, it was an obvious and monumental case of
ignoring the wishes of the electorate, and reaping a just reward.
In the end, faced with the prospect of the SOS, voters elected to take a chance on Change,
and this included many who could not bring themselves to vote for someone who obviously did not
respect them, and for whom they held no respect.
I don't know how much of the poor turnout over the past 2 decades was ever "your usual poor
turnout". Third Way servitors to the powerful were never beloved of the people, except perhaps
for the charismatic Bill Clinton. And there were many of us who never understood the love for
him.
Not voting has long been a conscious decision for many Americans, and when it's a conscious
decision, it's essential a vote.
I think this is a good point. My understanding of the polling methodology is that they
sample the electorate then break their sampled voters into demographic bins, then they weight
the bins based on expected participation by demographic to get a final expected vote. The
expected participation by demographic can really only be based on turnout from previous elections,
though presumably pollsters tweak things to account for expected differences, like assuming women
or latinos will be more motivated to vote in this election. If the actual turnout doesn't match
the pollsters expectation, as happened in this election, where many traditional democratic demographics
appeared to be demotivated, then the polls will all be systematically inaccurate.
Putting blame for voter 'apathy' on Clinton's treatment of the Democratic base that supported
Sanders, probably the most activist part of the party, or on Clinton's pivot to 'suburban republicans',
or on the FBI, or Clinton's disastrous foreign policy record, or Clinton's unprecedentedly low
favorability and trustworthiness numbers is difficult, but all of those problems were foreseen
by Sanders supporters as well as by the DNC, but were ignored by the latter. That those problems
were likely to depress turnout, which Democrats need to win elections was also fairly obvious,
which is why I never believed the polls and believed Trump was indeed likely to win.
And of course another major factor is that the polls were seemingly sponsored by media
organizations which have pretty openly declared their opposition to Trump. The obvious suspicion
was, then, that the polls were intended as campaign propaganda rather than objective information,
and were tweaked (via turnout models?) to make Hillary seem inevitable. I also believed this was
likely to lead to complacency among democrats, since Republicans are very reliable voters, and
Trump-inspired indies would not believe anything coming from the MSM anyway.
Most people I dared to explain this too were incredulous, and tended to write it off as more
of my characteristic weird logic… and now they are shocked, the idiots.
Polling organizations are really political organizations that get paid to influence public
opinion rather than measure it. Their models are garbage. It's a complete joke of an industry.
Actually that just under 2 percent win in the national polls is going to be correct. Also many
polls were vert close in PA were close as was FL and NC . Very few were done in Michigan which
AP may never call because it is close enough for a recount. In the national number it looks like
a 1 or 2 win
I thought the media and the both campaigns got it so wrong because they think everyone everywhere
is on Facebook and Twitter. The people that helped elect the Trumpeter aren't on social media
and didn't exist to those in power.
"... Because the following talking points prevent a (vulgar) identity politics -dominated Democrat Party from owning its loss, debunking them is then important beyond winning your Twitter wars. I'm trying to spike the Blame Cannons! ..."
"... Remember, Trump won Wisconsin by a whisker. So for this talking point to be true, we have to believe that black voters stayed home because they were racist, costing Clinton Wisconsin. ..."
"... These former Obama strongholds sealed the election for Trump. Of the nearly 700 counties that twice sent Obama to the White House, a stunning one-third flipped to support Trump . ..."
"... The Obama-Trump counties were critical in delivering electoral victories for Trump. Many of them fall in states that supported Obama in 2012, but Trump in 2016. In all, these flipped states accounted for 83 electoral votes. (Michigan and New Hampshire could add to this total, but their results were not finalized as of 4 p.m. Wednesday.) ..."
"... And so, for this talking point to be true, we have to believe that counties who voted for the black man in 2012 were racist because they didn't vote for the white women in 2016. Bringing me, I suppose, to sexism. ..."
"... These are resilient women, often working two or three jobs, for whom boorish men are an occasional occupational hazard, not an existential threat. They rolled their eyes over Trump's unmitigated coarseness, but still bought into his spiel that he'd be the greatest job producer who ever lived. Oh, and they wondered why his behaviour was any worse than Bill's. ..."
"... pink slips have hit entire neighbourhoods, and towns. The angry white working class men who voted in such strength for Trump do not live in an emotional vacuum. They are loved by white working class women – their wives, daughters, sisters and mothers, who participate in their remaindered pain. I t is everywhere in the interviews. "My dad lost his business", "My husband hasn't been the same since his job at the factory went away" . ..."
"... So, for this talking point to be true, you have to believe that sexism simultaneously increased the male vote for Trump, yet did not increase the female vote for Clinton. Shouldn't they move in opposite directions? ..."
"... First, even assuming that the author's happy but unconscious conflation of credentials with education is correct, it wasn't the "dunces" who lost two wars, butchered the health care system, caused the financial system to collapse through accounting control fraud, or invented the neoliberal ideology that was kept real wages flat for forty years and turned the industrial heartland into a wasteland. That is solely, solely down to - only some , to be fair - college-educated voters. It is totally and 100% not down to the "dunces"; they didn't have the political or financial power to achieve debacles on the grand scale. ..."
"... Second, the "dunces" were an important part of Obama's victories ..."
"... Not only has polling repeatedly underplayed the importance of white voters without college degrees, it's underplayed their importance to the Obama coalition: They were one-third of Obama votes in 2012. They filled the gap between upper-class whites and working-class nonwhites. Trump gained roughly 15 percentage points with them compared to Romney in 2012. ..."
"... "No, you are ignorant! You threw away the vote and put Trump in charge." Please, it will be important to know what derogatory camp you belong in when the blame game swings into full gear. *snark ..."
"... 'Stupid' was the word I got very tired of in my social net. Two variant targets: ..."
"... 1) Blacks for not voting their interests. The responses included 'we know who our enemies are' and 'don't tell me what to think.' ..."
"... Mostly it was vs rural, non-college educated. iirc, it was the Secretary of Agriculture, pleading for funds, who said the rural areas were where military recruits came from. A young fella I know, elite football player on elite non-urban HS team, said most of his teammates had enlisted. So they are the ones getting shot at, having relatives and friends come back missing pieces of body and self. ..."
"... My guy in the Reserves said the consensus was that if HRC got elected, they were going to war with Russia. Not enthused. Infantry IQ is supposedly average-80, but they know who Yossarian says the enemy is, e'en if they hant read the book. ..."
This post is not an explainer about why and how Clinton lost (and Trump won). I think we're going
to be sorting that out for awhile. Rather, it's a simple debunking of common talking points by Clinton
loyalists and Democrat Establishment operatives; the sort of talking point you might hear on Twitter,
entirely shorn of caveats and context. For each of the three talking points, I'll present an especially
egregious version of the myth, followed by a rebuttals.
How Trump won the presidency with razor-thin margins in swing states
Of the more than 120 million votes cast in the 2016 election, 107,000 votes in three states
[Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania] effectively decided the election.
Of course, America's first-past-the-post system and the electoral college amplify small margins
into decisive results. And it was the job of the Clinton campaign to find those 107,000 votes and
win them;
the Clinton operation turned out to be weaker than anyone would have imagined when
it counted . However, because Trump has what might be called an institutional mandate - both
the executive and legislative branches and soon, perhaps, the judicial - the narrowness of his margin
means he doesn't have a popular mandate. Trump has captured the state, but by no means civil society;
therefore, the opposition that seeks to delegitimize him is in a stronger position than it may realize.
Hence the necessity for reflection; seeking truth from facts, as the saying goes. Because
the following talking points prevent a
(vulgar) identity politics -dominated Democrat Party from owning its loss, debunking them is
then important beyond winning your Twitter wars. I'm trying to spike the Blame Cannons!
Trump's win is a reminder of the incredible, unbeatable power of racism
The subtext here is usually that if you don't chime in with vehement agreement, you're a racist
yourself, and possibly a racist Trump supporter. There are two reasons this talking point is false.
First, voter caring levels dropped from 2012 to 2016, especially among black Democrats
.
Carl
Beijer :
From 2012 to 2016, both men and women went from caring about the outcome to not caring.
Among Democratic men and women, as well as Republican women, care levels dropped about 3-4
points; Republican men cared a little less too, but only by one point. Across the board, in
any case, the plurality of voters simply didn't care.
Beijer includes the following chart (based on Edison exit polling cross-referenced with total
population numbers from the US Census):
Beijer interprets:
White voters cared even less in 2016 then in 2012, when they also didn't care; most of that
apathy came from white Republicans compared to white Democrats, who dropped off a little less.
Voters of color, in contrast, continued to care – but their care levels dropped even more,
by 8 points (compared to the 6 point drop-off among white voters). Incredibly, that drop was
driven entirely by a 9 point drop among Democratic voters of color which left Democrats
with only slim majority 51% support; Republicans, meanwhile, actually gained support
among people of color.
Urban areas, where black and Hispanic voters are concentrated along with college-educated
voters, already leaned toward the Democrats, but Clinton did not get the turnout from these
groups that she needed. For instance, black voters did not show up in the same numbers they
did for Barack Obama, the first black president, in 2008 and 2012.
Remember, Trump won Wisconsin by a whisker. So for this talking point to be true, we have to
believe that black voters stayed home because they were racist, costing Clinton Wisconsin.
Second, counties that voted for Obama in 2012 voted for Trump in 2016 .
The Washington Post :
These former Obama strongholds sealed the election for Trump. Of the nearly 700 counties that twice sent Obama to the White House,
a stunning one-third flipped to support Trump
.
The Obama-Trump counties were critical in delivering electoral victories for Trump. Many
of them fall in states that supported Obama in 2012, but Trump in 2016. In all, these flipped
states accounted for 83 electoral votes. (Michigan and New Hampshire could add to this total,
but their results were not finalized as of 4 p.m. Wednesday.)
Here's the chart:
And so, for this talking point to be true, we have to believe that counties who voted for the
black man in 2012 were racist because they didn't vote for the white women in 2016. Bringing me,
I suppose, to sexism.
Talking Point: Clinton was Defeated by Sexism
Here's an article showing the talking point from
Newsweek :
This often vitriolic campaign was a national referendum on women and power.
(The subtext here is usually that if you don't join the consensus cluster, you're a sexist
yourself, and possibly a sexist Trump supporter). And if you only look at the averages this claim
might seem true :
On Election Day, women responded accordingly, as Clinton beat Trump among women 54 percent
to 42 percent. They were voting not so much for her as against him and what he brought to the
surface during his campaign: quotidian misogyny.
There are two reasons this talking point is not true. First, averages conceal, and what
they conceal is class . As you read further into the article, you can see it fall apart:
In fact, Trump beat Clinton among white women 53 percent to 43 percent, with
white women without college degrees going for [Trump]
two to one .
So, taking lack of a college degree as a proxy for being working class, for Newsweek's claim
to be true, you have to believe that working class women don't get a vote in their referendum,
and for the talking point to be true, you have to believe that working class women are sexist.
Which leads me to ask: Who died and left the bourgeois feminists in Clinton's base in charge of
the definition of sexism, or feminism? Class traitor
Tina Brown is worth repeating:
Here's my own beef. Liberal feminists, young and old, need to question the role they played
in Hillary's demise. The two weeks of media hyperventilation over grab-her-by-the-pussygate,
when the airwaves were saturated with aghast liberal women equating Trump's gross comments
with sexual assault, had the opposite effect on multiple women voters in the Heartland.
These are resilient women, often working two or three jobs, for whom boorish men are an
occasional occupational hazard, not an existential threat. They rolled their eyes over Trump's
unmitigated coarseness, but still bought into his spiel that he'd be the greatest job producer
who ever lived. Oh, and they wondered why his behaviour was any worse than Bill's.
Missing this pragmatic response by so many women was another mistake of Robbie Mook's campaign
data nerds. They computed that America's women would all be as outraged as the ones they came
home to at night. But pink slips have hit entire neighbourhoods, and towns. The angry white
working class men who voted in such strength for Trump do not live in an emotional vacuum.
They are loved by white working class women – their wives, daughters, sisters and mothers,
who participate in their remaindered pain. I t is
everywhere in the interviews. "My dad lost his business", "My husband hasn't been the same
since his job at the factory went away" .
Second, Clinton in 2016 did no better than Obama in 2008 with women (although she did
better than Obama in 2012). From
the New York Times analysis of the exit polls, this chart...
So, for this talking point to be true, you have to believe that sexism simultaneously increased
the male vote for Trump, yet did not increase the female vote for Clinton. Shouldn't they move
in opposite directions?
Talking Point: Clinton was Defeated by Stupidity
Here's an example of this talking point from
Foreign Policy , the heart of The Blob. The headline:
Trump Won Because Voters Are Ignorant, Literally
And the lead:
OK, so that just happened. Donald Trump always enjoyed massive support from uneducated,
low-information white people. As Bloomberg Politics reported back in August, Hillary Clinton
was enjoying a giant 25 percentage-point lead among college-educated voters going into the
election. (Whether that trend held up remains to be seen.) In contrast, in the 2012 election,
college-educated voters just barely favored Barack Obama over Mitt Romney. Last night we saw
something historic: the dance of the dunces. Never have educated voters so uniformly rejected
a candidate. But never before have the lesser-educated so uniformly supported a candidate.
The subtext here is usually that if you don't accept nod your head vigorously, you're stupid,
and possibly a stupid Trump supporter. There are two reasons this talking point is not true.
First, even assuming that the author's happy but unconscious conflation of credentials with
education is correct, it wasn't the "dunces" who lost two wars, butchered the health care
system, caused the financial system to collapse through accounting control fraud, or invented
the neoliberal ideology that was kept real wages flat for forty years and turned the industrial
heartland into a wasteland. That is solely, solely down to - only some , to be fair
- college-educated voters. It is totally and 100% not down to the "dunces"; they didn't have the
political or financial power to achieve debacles on the grand scale.
Second, the "dunces" were an important part of Obama's victories. From
The Week :
Not only has polling repeatedly underplayed the importance of white voters without college
degrees, it's underplayed their importance to the Obama coalition: They were one-third of Obama
votes in 2012. They filled the gap between upper-class whites and working-class nonwhites.
Trump gained roughly 15 percentage points with them compared to Romney in 2012.
So, to believe this talking point, you have to believe that voters who were smart when they
voted for Obama suddenly became stupid when it came time to vote for Clinton. You also have to
believe that credentialed policy makers have an unblemished record of success, and that only they
are worth paying attention to.
By just about every metric imaginable, Hillary Clinton led one of the worst presidential campaigns
in modern history. It was a profoundly reactionary campaign, built entirely on rolling back the
horizons of the politically possible, fracturing left solidarity, undermining longstanding left
priorities like universal healthcare, pandering to Wall Street oligarchs, fomenting nationalism
against Denmark and Russia, and rehabilitating some of history's greatest monsters – from Bush
I to Kissinger. It was a grossly unprincipled campaign that belligerently violated FEC Super PAC
coordination rules and conspired with party officials on everything from political attacks to
debate questions. It was an obscenely stupid campaign that all but ignored Wisconsin during the
general election, that pitched Clinton to Latino voters as their abuela, that centered an entire
high-profile speech over the national menace of a few thousand anime nazis on Twitter, and that
repeatedly deployed Lena Dunham as a media surrogate.
Which is rather like running a David Letterman ad in a Pennsylvania steel town. It must have seemed
like a good idea in Brooklyn. After all, they had so many celebrities to choose from.
* * *
All three talking points oversimplify. I'm not saying racism is not powerful; of course it is.
I'm not saying that sexism is not powerful; of course it is. But monocausal explanations in an election
this close - and in a country this vast - are foolish. And narratives that ignore economics and erase
class are worse than foolish; buying into them will cause us to make the same mistakes over and over
and over again.[1] The trick will be to integrate multiple causes, and that's down to the left; identity
politics liberals don't merely not want to do this; they actively oppose it. Ditto their opposite
numbers in America's neoliberal fun house mirror, the conservatives.
NOTES
[1] For some, that's not a bug. It's a feature.
NOTE
You will have noticed that I haven't covered economics (class), or election fraud at all. More
myths are coming.
Lambert Strether has been blogging, managing online communities, and doing system administration
24/7 since 2003, in Drupal and WordPress. Besides political economy and the political scene, he blogs
about rhetoric, software engineering, permaculture, history, literature, local politics, international
travel, food, and fixing stuff around the house. The nom de plume "Lambert Strether" comes from Henry
James's The Ambassadors: "Live all you can. It's a mistake not to." You can follow him on Twitter
at @lambertstrether. http://www.correntewire.com
"No, you are ignorant! You threw away the vote and put Trump in charge." Please, it will be
important to know what derogatory camp you belong in when the blame game swings into full gear.
*snark
'Stupid' was the word I got very tired of in my social net. Two variant targets:
1) Blacks
for not voting their interests. The responses included 'we know who our enemies are' and 'don't
tell me what to think.'
2) Mostly it was vs rural, non-college educated. iirc, it was the Secretary of Agriculture,
pleading for funds, who said the rural areas were where military recruits came from. A young fella
I know, elite football player on elite non-urban HS team, said most of his teammates had enlisted.
So they are the ones getting shot at, having relatives and friends come back missing pieces of
body and self.
My guy in the Reserves said the consensus was that if HRC got elected, they were going
to war with Russia. Not enthused. Infantry IQ is supposedly average-80, but they know who Yossarian
says the enemy is, e'en if they hant read the book.
"... There are some who believe the elites are actually splintered into numerous groups and that domestic US elites have positioned themselves against the banking elites in London's City. ..."
"... US elites are basically in the employ of a handful of families, individuals and institutions in our view. It is confusing because it is hard to tell if Hillary, for instance, is operating on her own accord or at the behest of higher and more powerful authorities. ..."
"... It is probably a combination of both but at root those who control central banks are managing the world's move towards globalism. ..."
"... The vote to propel Trump to the US presidency reflects a profound backlash against open markets and borders, and the simmering anger of millions of blue-collar white and working-class people who blame their economic woes on globalisation and multiculturalism. ..."
"... If indeed Trump's election has damped the progress of TPP, and TTIP, this is a huge event. As we've pointed out, both agreements effectively substituted technocratic corporatism for the current sociopolitical model of "democracy." ..."
"... one of the elite's most powerful, operative memes today is "populism vs. globalism" ..."
"... No matter what, the reality of these two events, the victories of both Trump and Brexit, stand as signal proof that elite stratagems have been defeated, at least temporarily. Though whether these defeats have been self-inflicted as part of a change in tactics remains to be seen. ..."
Was Trump's victory actually created by the very globalist elites that Trump is supposed to have
overcome? There are some who believe the elites are actually splintered into numerous groups and
that domestic US elites have positioned themselves against the banking elites in London's City.
We
see no fundamental evidence of this.
The world's real elites in our view may have substantive histories in the hundreds and
thousands of years. US elites are basically in the employ of a handful of families,
individuals and institutions in our view. It is confusing because it is hard to tell if Hillary,
for instance, is operating on her own accord or at the behest of higher and more powerful
authorities.
It is probably a combination
of both but at root those who control central banks are managing the world's move towards globalism.
History easily shows us who these groups are – and they are not located in America.
This is a cynical perspective to be sure, and certainly doesn't remove the impact of Trump's victory
or his courage in waging his election campaign despite what must surely be death threats to himself
and his family..
But if true, this perspective corresponds to predictions that we've been making for nearly a decade
now, suggesting that sooner or later elites – especially those in London's City – would have to "take
a step back."
More:
The vote to propel Trump to the US presidency reflects a profound backlash against open markets
and borders, and the simmering anger of millions of blue-collar white and working-class people
who blame their economic woes on globalisation and multiculturalism.
"There are a few parallels to Switzerland – that the losers of globalisation find somebody
who is listening to them," said Swiss professor and lawyer Wolf Linder, a former director of the
University of Bern's political science institute.
"Trump is doing his business with the losers of globalisation in the US, like the Swiss People's
Party is doing in Switzerland," he said. "It is a phenomenon which touches all European nations."
... ... ...
If indeed Trump's election has damped the progress of TPP, and TTIP, this is a huge event. As
we've pointed out, both agreements effectively substituted technocratic corporatism for the current
sociopolitical model of "democracy." The elites were trying to move toward a new
model of world control with these two agreements. ...
Additionally, one of the elite's most powerful, operative memes today is "populism vs. globalism"
that seeks to contrast the potentially freedom-oriented events of Trump and Brexit to the discarded
wisdom of globalism. See
here and
here.
No matter what, the reality of these two events, the victories of both Trump and Brexit, stand
as signal proof that elite stratagems have been defeated, at least temporarily. Though whether these
defeats have been self-inflicted as part of a change in tactics remains to be seen.
Conclusion: But the change has come. One way or another the Internet and tens of millions or people
talking, writing and acting has forced new trends. This can be hardly be emphasized enough. Globalism
has been at least temporarily redirected.
Editor's Note: The Daily Bell is giving away a silver coin and a silver "white paper" to subscribers.
If you enjoy DB's articles and want to stay up-to-date for free, please subscribe
here .
The analysis is flawed in that it fails to understand the context for power and influence in the
western alliance. The Crowns in contest are seeking coordinated domination through political proxy,
i.e. the force behind the EU and the UN. The problem is the most influential crown was not in
a mind to destroy the fabric of their civilization and more importantly to continue to bail-out
the "socialist" paradises in the continent and beyond. Britannia has its own socialism to support
much less that of the world.
Trump represents keeping the Colony in line with a growing interest in keeping traditions intact
and in more direct control of Anglo values. Europe has this insane multi-culturalism that is fundamentally
incompatible with a "free" and robust civilization. The whole goal of detente with China was to
convert them to our values via proxy institutions and that is working in the long-run. In the
short-run, the Empire must reunite and solidify its value bulwark against the coming storm from
China and to a lesser extend from the expanded EU states. Russia is playing out on its own.
In his first post-election
interview , Bernie Sanders
has declared to
should-be-disgraced Wolf Blitzer that Trump seeking to indict Hillary Clinton for her crimes
would be "an outrage beyond belief".
When asked if President Obama should pardon Hillary Clinton, Sanders seems almost confused as
to why a pardon would even be needed.
Blitzer notes that Ford pardoned Nixon before he could be charged, to which Bernie seemed again
incredulous as to the comparison was even being made.
He goes on to state:
That a winning candidate would try to imprison the losing candidate – that's what dictatorships
are about, that's what authoritarian countries are about. You do not imprison somebody you ran
against because you have differences of opinion. The vast majority of the American people would
find it unacceptable to even think about those things.
Either Senator Sanders is a drooling idiot, or he is being willfully obtuse.
No one wants to imprison Hillary Clinton because of her opinion. They want to imprison Hillary Clinton because she has committed criminal actions that any other
person lacking millions of dollars and hundreds of upper-echelon contacts would be imprisoned for.
Apparently, according to progressive hero Bernie Sanders, holding the elites to the same level
of justice as the peons is undemocratic, authoritarian, and perhaps even dictatorial!
Enough with the damn emails?
Enough with any hope that the Democrats have retained a minute shred of credibility.
"There are two theories of prosperity and of well-being: The first theory is that if we make the
rich richer, somehow they will let a part of their prosperity trickle down to the rest of us.
The second theory - and I suppose this goes back to the days of Noah - I won't say Adam and Eve,
because they had a less complicated situation - but, at least, back in the days of the flood,
there was the theory that if we make the average of mankind comfortable and secure, their prosperity
will rise upward, just as yeast rises up, through the ranks...
We so easily forget. Once the cry of so-called prosperity is heard in the land, we all become
so stampeded by the spirit of the god Mammon, that we cannot serve the dictates of social conscience.
. . . We are here to serve notice that the economic order is the invention of man; and that it
cannot dominate certain eternal principles of justice and of God...
The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it
is whether we provide enough for those who have too little."
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
You can fool all of the people, some of the time. You can fool some of the people all of the time-
but you can't fool all of the people all of the time.
"... "Democrats have focused too much with a liberal elite" while ignoring the working class. ..."
"... How does it happen that they win elections and Democrats lose? I think what the conclusion is, is that that is raising incredible sums of money from wealthy people … but has ignored to a very significant degree, working class, middle class, and low income people in this country. ..."
Sunday on CBS's "Face The Nation," Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) said President-elect Donald Trump
won because "Democrats have focused too much with a liberal elite" while ignoring the working
class.
Sanders said, " How does it happen that they win elections and Democrats lose? I think
what the conclusion is, is that that is raising incredible sums of money from wealthy people …
but has ignored to a very significant degree, working class, middle class, and low income people
in this country. "
Lost control of the Senate
Lost control of the House of Representatives
Lost control of dozens of state legislatures and Governorships.
The Republicans control 36 States of America - One more and they could in theory amend the Constitution.
In Wisconsin (notionally Democrat) the Legislature and Governor are both Republican controlled.
And Clinton didn't even campaign there when it was pretty obvious the State was not trending towards
her.
Most commenters do not realise that it is neoliberalism that caused the current suffering of
working people in the USA and elsewhere...
Notable quotes:
"... Working class wages destroyed. The wages of the low paid lowered. Ordinary people robbed of holiday and sickness pay. Working people priced out of ever owning their own home. Our city centers socially cleansed of the working class. Poor people forced to fight like rats in sacks with even poorer foreigners for jobs, housing, school places and social and health services. ..."
"... Keep going mate. Continue to pump out that snobbish attitude because every time you do you've bagged Mr Trump, Mr Farage and Ms LePen another few votes. ..."
"... I recall a time when any suggestion that immigration may be too high was silenced by cries of racism, eventually that label was misused so often that it lost its potency, one gets the sense that this trend for dubbing those who hold certain opinions as somehow unintelligent will go the same way. People are beginning to see through this most hateful tactic of the Modern Left. ..."
"... Which is why I think Mr D'Ancona and many others are wrong to say that Farage and Trump will face the whirlwind when voters realise that their promises were all unachievable. The promises were much less important than the chance to slap the political world in the face. Given another chance, a lot of voters will do the same again. ..."
"... I think the author completely misses the most salient point from the two events he cites: simply that the *vast* majority of people have become completely disenfranchised with the utter corruption that is mainstream politics today. ..."
"... It doesn't matter who is voted in, the status quo [big business and the super-rich get wealthier whilst the middle is squeezed and the poorest are destroyed] remains. ..."
"... The votes for Brexit and Trump are as much a rejection of "establishment" as anything else. Politicians in both countries heed these warnings at their peril... ..."
"... The majority of the people are sick and tired of PC ism and the zero hour, minimum wage economy that both Britain and America have suffered under "globalisation". And of the misguided "[neo]liberal" agenda of much of the media which simply does not speak to or for society. ..."
"... People in western democracies are rising up through the ballot box to defeat PC [neo]liberalism and globalisation that has done so much to impoverish Europe and America morally and economically. To the benefit of the tax haven corporates. ..."
"... Globalisation disembowelled American manufacturing so the likes of Blair and the Clintons could print money. The illimitable lives they destroyed never entered their calculus. ..."
"... I have stood in the blue lane in Atlanta waiting for my passport to be processed; in the adjoining lane was a young British female student (so she said to the official). The computer revealed she had overstayed her visa by 48 hours the last time she visited. She was marched out by two armed tunics to the next plane home. That's how Europeans get treated if they try to enter America illegally. Why the demented furor over returning illegal Hispanics or anyone else? ..."
Surely the people who voted for Trump and Farage are too stupid to realise the sheer,
criminal folly of their decision...
thoughtcatcher -> IanPitch 12h ago
Working class wages destroyed. The wages of the low paid lowered. Ordinary people
robbed of holiday and sickness pay. Working people priced out of ever owning their own home.
Our city centers socially cleansed of the working class. Poor people forced to fight like rats
in sacks with even poorer foreigners for jobs, housing, school places and social and health
services.
But yeah, they voted against the elite because they are "stupid".
attila9000 -> IanPitch 11h ago
I think at some point a lot of them will realize they have been had, but then they will
probably just blame immigrants, or the EU. Anything that means they don't have to take
responsibility for their own actions. It would appear there is a huge pool of people who can
be conned into acting against their own self interest.
jonnyoyster -> IanPitch 11h ago
Keep going mate. Continue to pump out that snobbish attitude because every time you do
you've bagged Mr Trump, Mr Farage and Ms LePen another few votes. Most people don't
appreciate being talked down to and this arrogant habit of calling those who hold views
contrary to your own 'stupid' is encouraging more and more voters to ditch the established
parties in favour of the new.
I recall a time when any suggestion that immigration may be too high was silenced by
cries of racism, eventually that label was misused so often that it lost its potency, one gets
the sense that this trend for dubbing those who hold certain opinions as somehow unintelligent
will go the same way. People are beginning to see through this most hateful tactic of the
Modern Left.
DilemmataDocta -> IanPitch 11h ago
A lot of the people who put their cross against Brexit or Trump weren't actually voting for
anything. They were just voting against this, that or the other thing about the world that
they disliked. It was voting as a gesture.
Which is why I think Mr D'Ancona and many others are wrong to say that Farage and Trump
will face the whirlwind when voters realise that their promises were all unachievable. The
promises were much less important than the chance to slap the political world in the face.
Given another chance, a lot of voters will do the same again.
Sproggit 12h ago
I think the author completely misses the most salient point from the two events he
cites: simply that the *vast* majority of people have become completely disenfranchised with
the utter corruption that is mainstream politics today.
It doesn't matter who is voted in, the status quo [big business and the super-rich get
wealthier whilst the middle is squeezed and the poorest are destroyed] remains.
The votes for Brexit and Trump are as much a rejection of "establishment" as anything
else. Politicians in both countries heed these warnings at their peril...
NotoBlair 11h ago
OMG, the lib left don't Geddit do they?
The majority of the people are sick and tired of PC ism and the zero hour, minimum wage
economy that both Britain and America have suffered under "globalisation". And of the
misguided "[neo]liberal" agenda of much of the media which simply does not speak to or for
society.
People in western democracies are rising up through the ballot box to defeat PC [neo]liberalism
and globalisation that has done so much to impoverish Europe and America morally and
economically. To the benefit of the tax haven corporates.
The sour grapes bleating of the lib left who refuse to accept the democratic will of the
people is a movement doomed failure.
Frankincensedabit 11h ago
Malign to whom? Wall Street and people who want us all dead?
Globalisation disembowelled American manufacturing so the likes of Blair and the Clintons
could print money. The illimitable lives they destroyed never entered their calculus.
I have stood in the blue lane in Atlanta waiting for my passport to be processed; in the
adjoining lane was a young British female student (so she said to the official). The computer
revealed she had overstayed her visa by 48 hours the last time she visited. She was marched
out by two armed tunics to the next plane home. That's how Europeans get treated if they try
to enter America illegally. Why the demented furor over returning illegal Hispanics or anyone
else?
I likely wouldn't have voted at all. But all my life the occupants of the White House
represented the interests of those nobody could ever identify. The owners of the media and the
numbered accounts who took away the life-chances of U.S. citizens by the million and called
any of them who objected a thick white-trash bigot. Whatever Trump is, he will be different.
"... So-called [neo]liberals and leftists in the US and around the world, are now wailing and gnashing their teeth in reaction to Hillary Clinton's crushing defeat. They are, however, the first to blame for the outcome of the US presidential elections. Their candidate, Hillary Clinton, was the embodiment of a totally corrupt political system. She is a hypocrite par excellence, talking to the bankiers of Wall Street behind closed doors differently than to the American people. Her rhetoric for the rights of women and blacks and other minorities sounded disingenuous. ..."
"... The Clinton Foundation received large donations from Saudi-Arabia and Qatar, countries rewarded in return by huge arms transfers overseen by her as Secretary of State. Her involvement in this corruption was no theme for the media. ..."
"... According to emails published by WikiLeaks, her campaign manager John Podesta was or is on the payroll of the Saudis. ..."
"... the Clinton team stole the primary elections to prevent the candidacy of Bernie Sanders, the media demonized Donald Trump. ..."
"... An American President is not a free and politically independent person. From day one, a President-elect can't anymore go around the corner and grab a hot dog or a hamburger. He is reigned in by a military and security establishment that holds the President fit for public consumption. Trump, as any other president, can be expected to follow their rule and political suggestions. ..."
"... I doubt very much that Trump will keep the promises of his election campaign, such as building a wall along the American-Mexican border, deport all illegal immigrants or ban Muslims from immigrating into the US. I even doubt that he will go after Hillary Clinton and her husband's dubious foundation. There exists a code of honor among thieves. ..."
"... Trump won precisely because of the shrill one-sided media propaganda and because of his rhetoric against the Washington establishment , including his own Republican Party. Now, this Republican establishment dominates both houses of Congress. Trump belongs also, however, to the US establishment but of another sort. Nobody should believe that the Washington establishment will follow Trump's lead. ..."
"... Whether Trump will stop American adventurism in the Middle East remains to be seen. His close ties with Netanyahu do not bode well for the Palestinians ..."
"... And while he has promised to move the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, I doubt that he will carry out this provocation against international law and the entire Muslim world. ..."
"... Chancellor Angela Merke l sent the President-Elect Trump a warning in the guise of a congratulation. Her political impudence was garbed within obsequious blabber about the allegedly honorable nature of German-American ties ..."
"... Germany's Foreign Minister Steinmeier called Trump a "preacher of hate" ..."
"... During the election campaign, Trump called Merkel's mass-immigration policy "insane" and "what Merkel did to Germany" a "sad shame". ..."
"... The media and the political class should at this point stop pontificating. Their double morals and unprofessional coverage of the US elections should prompt them to more humility. They should rather blame themselves for their biased reporting, which led directly to Clinton's defeat. ..."
So-called [neo]liberals and leftists in the US and around the world, are now wailing and gnashing
their teeth in reaction to Hillary Clinton's crushing defeat. They are, however, the first to blame
for the outcome of the US presidential elections. Their candidate, Hillary Clinton, was the embodiment
of a totally corrupt political system. She is a hypocrite par excellence, talking to the bankiers
of Wall Street behind closed doors differently than to the American people. Her rhetoric for the
rights of women and blacks and other minorities sounded disingenuous.
The Clinton Foundation received large donations from Saudi-Arabia and Qatar, countries rewarded
in return by huge arms transfers overseen by her as Secretary of State. Her involvement in this corruption
was no theme for the media.
According to emails published by WikiLeaks, her campaign manager John
Podesta was or is on the payroll of the Saudis. All of this was not considered worth reporting by
the media. Virtually all national media in the United States supported Clinton's candidacy. Instead
of reporting how the machinery of the Democratic Party and the Clinton team stole the primary elections
to prevent the candidacy of Bernie Sanders, the media demonized Donald Trump.
I do not wish here to defend Donald Trump. He made numerous stupid, racist, sexist, and anti-Islamic
statements that were rightly criticized. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, was treated with kid
gloves while her huge criminal political record was glossed over. Instead of coming to grips with
their abject failures, the liberals and their media continue in slandering Donald Trump. Trump's
first declarations show already that he has conquered new frontiers.
An American President is not a free and politically independent person. From day one, a President-elect
can't anymore go around the corner and grab a hot dog or a hamburger. He is reigned in by a military
and security establishment that holds the President fit for public consumption. Trump, as any other
president, can be expected to follow their rule and political suggestions.
I doubt very much that Trump will keep the promises of his election campaign, such as building
a wall along the American-Mexican border, deport all illegal immigrants or ban Muslims from immigrating
into the US. I even doubt that he will go after Hillary Clinton and her husband's dubious foundation.
There exists a code of honor among thieves.
Trump won precisely because of the shrill one-sided media propaganda and because of his rhetoric
against the Washington establishment , including his own Republican Party. Now, this Republican establishment
dominates both houses of Congress. Trump belongs also, however, to the US establishment but of another
sort. Nobody should believe that the Washington establishment will follow Trump's lead. Even his
positive statements about Vladimir Putin or his suggestion to discard NATO, will probably vanish.
But what I do hope is that he stands to his rejection of TPP and TTIP and his pragmatic view of Vladimir
Putin.
Whether Trump will stop American adventurism in the Middle East remains to be seen. His close
ties with Netanyahu do not bode well for the Palestinians. He sees Zionist colonization of the rest
of Palestine as no hindrance to peace. And while he has promised to move the US Embassy from Tel
Aviv to Jerusalem, I doubt that he will carry out this provocation against international law and
the entire Muslim world.
The German political and media class was not only surprised by the results of the US elections,
but did not even try to hide its revulsion against the choice of the American people. The entire
political class in Germany perceived and presented the Trump campaign in the same one-sided manner
as American media did. Chancellor Angela Merke l sent the President-Elect Trump a warning in the
guise of a congratulation. Her political impudence was garbed within obsequious blabber about the
allegedly honorable nature of German-American ties:
"Germany and America are bound by common values - democracy, freedom, as well as respect for
the rule of law and the dignity of each and every person, regardless of their origin, skin color,
creed, gender, sexual orientation, or political views. It is based on these values that I wish
to offer close cooperation, both with me personally and between our countries' governments."
Other German politicians did not even attempt to hide their disdain for American voters by diplomatic
language. Germany's Foreign Minister Steinmeier called Trump a "preacher of hate", and Deputy Chancellor
Gabriel cartooned Trump as a
"trailblazer of a new authoritarian and chauvinist international movement… [who wants] a rollback
to the bad old times in which women belonged by the stove or in bed, gays in jail and unions at
best at the side table."
During the election campaign, Trump called Merkel's mass-immigration policy "insane" and "what
Merkel did to Germany" a "sad shame".
The media and the political class should at this point stop pontificating. Their double morals
and unprofessional coverage of the US elections should prompt them to more humility. They should
rather blame themselves for their biased reporting, which led directly to Clinton's defeat. Ordinary
Americans are not as stupid as the Establishment wants us to believe. Established parties and media
would be well advised to give the new US President a chance to prove his worth. There will be, without
doubt, many occasions in the future for fact-based criticism.
That is why watching President-elect Trump's choices for his foreign policy team is so important.
If he chooses primarily alumni of the Bush administration, we can be fairly certain that there
will be few, if any, beneficial changes in Washington's security strategy. Indeed, it could conceivably
be even more interventionist than that pursued by the Clinton, Bush or Obama administrations.
The main difference might be that it would be conducted unilaterally rather than multilaterally,
especially if someone like John Bolton gets a key position.
If on the other hand, Trump begins to pick advisers who have little or no previous government
service, it would be an encouraging step. Watch for appointments from realist enclaves like Defense
Priorities, the Independent Institute and others. Also watch for the appointment of individual unorthodox
or "rogue" scholars from such places as Notre Dame University, George Mason University, the Lyndon
B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, and (ironically) the Bush School
at Texas A&M University. Such moves would indicate that Trump was choosing new blood and really intending
to make a meaningful change in the direction of U.S. foreign policy.
"... It's not just corporate lobbyists who are playing early, visible roles in the new power structure. Some of Trump's biggest political donors are shaping the incoming administration, including Rebekah Mercer, a daughter of billionaire Robert Mercer, who is figuring prominently in behind-the-scenes discussions, according to people familiar with the transition. ..."
"... Mercer is among four major donors appointed by Trump Friday to a 16-person executive committee overseeing his transition. The others are campaign finance chairman Steven Mnuchin, New York financier Anthony Scaramucci and Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel. ..."
The chant echoed through Donald Trump's boisterous rallies leading up to Election Day: "Drain the swamp! Drain the swamp! Drain
the swamp!"
"We are fighting for every citizen that believes that government should serve the people, not the donors and not the special interests,"
the billionaire real estate developer promised exuberant supporters at his last campaign rally in Manchester, N.H.
But just days later, there is little evidence that the president-elect is seeking to restrain wealthy interests from having access
and influence in his administration.
It's not just corporate lobbyists who are playing early, visible roles in the new power structure. Some of Trump's biggest political
donors are shaping the incoming administration, including Rebekah Mercer, a daughter of billionaire Robert Mercer, who is figuring
prominently in behind-the-scenes discussions, according to people familiar with the transition.
Mercer is among four major donors appointed by Trump Friday to a 16-person executive committee overseeing his transition. The
others are campaign finance chairman Steven Mnuchin, New York financier Anthony Scaramucci and Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel.
Meanwhile, top campaign fundraisers and a raft of lobbyists tied to some of the country's wealthiest industries have been put
in charge of hiring and planning for specific federal agencies. They include J. Steven Hart, chairman of the law and lobbying shop
Williams & Jensen; Michael McKenna, an energy company lobbyist who is overseeing planning for the Energy Department; and Dallas fundraiser
Ray Washburne, was has been tapped to oversee the Commerce Department.
Billionaires who served as Trump's policy advisers, such as Oklahoma oil executive Harold Hamm, are under consideration for Cabinet
positions.
LOL .
LOL
. So how about a new chant for protesters: DRAIN THE SWAP!?
... ... ...
UPDATE:
Asked about the tensions, and about Kushner's role in the leadership change at the transition team, Trump spokesman Jason Miller
said, "Anybody seeing today's news about the appointment of Vice President-elect Mike Pence to run the Presidential Transition
Team realizes that President-elect Donald J. Trump is serious about changing Washington whether the town likes it or not. This
might ruffle the delicate sensitivities of the well-heeled two-martini lunch set, but President-elect Trump isn't fighting for
them, he's fighting for the hard-working men and women outside the Beltway who don't care for insider bickering."
It's not uncommon for rivalries to emerge inside campaigns and administrations as advisers jockey to place allies in key roles
and advance their policy priorities. But the level of internecine conflict during Trump's drive toward the GOP nomination was
so extreme that it sometimes resulted in conflicting directives for even simple hiring and spending decisions.
Eight years ago, President Obama had a chance to change the warmongering direction that outgoing
President Bush and the U.S. national-security establishment had led America for the previous eight
years. Obama could have said, "Enough is enough. America has done enough killing and dying. I'm going
to lead our country in a different direction - toward peace, prosperity, and harmony with the people
of the world." He could have ordered all U.S. troops in the Middle East and Afghanistan to return
home. He could have ended U.S. involvement in the endless wars that Bush, the Pentagon, and the CIA
spawned in that part of the world. He could have led America in a new direction.
Instead, Obama decided to stay Bush's course, no doubt believing that he, unlike Bush, could win
the endless wars that Bush had started. It was not to be. He chose to keep the national-security
establishment embroiled in Afghanistan and Iraq. Death and destruction are Obama's legacy, just as
they were Bush's.
Obama hoped that Hillary Clinton would protect and continue his (and Bush's) legacy of foreign
death and destruction. Yesterday, a majority of American voters dashed that hope.
Will Trump change directions and bring U.S. troops home? Possibly not, especially given he is
an interventionist, just as Clinton, Bush, and Obama are. But there is always that possibility, especially
since Trump, unlike Clinton, owes no allegiance to the U.S. military-industrial complex, whose survival
and prosperity depends on endless wars and perpetual crises.
If Clinton had been elected, there was never any doubt about continued U.S. interventionism in
Afghanistan and the Middle East. Not only is she a died-in-the-wool interventionist, she would have
been owned by the national-security establishment. She would have done whatever the Pentagon, CIA,
and NSA wanted, which would have automatically meant endless warfare - and permanent destruction
of the liberty and prosperity of the American people.
It's obvious that Americans want a new direction when it comes to foreign policy. That's partly
what Trump's election is all about. Americans are sick and tired of the never-ending wars in Afghanistan,
Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere. That includes military families, especially the many who
supported Trump, Gary Johnson, or Jill Stein. Americans are also tired of the out of control spending
and debt that come with these wars. By electing Trump, it is obvious that Americans are demanding
a change on foreign policy.
Imagine the benefits to American society if Trump were to change directions on foreign policy.
No more anti-American terrorist blowback, which would mean no more war on terrorism. That means the
restoration of a sense of normality to American lives. No more TSA checkpoints at airports. No more
mass surveillance schemes to "keep us safe." No more color coded warnings. No more totalitarian power
to round up Americans, put them into concentration camps or military dungeons, and torture them.
No more power to assassinate people, including Americans. In other words, the restoration of American
civil liberties and privacy.
The Middle East is embroiled in civil wars - wars that have been engendered or magnified by U.S.
interventionism. Continued interventionism in an attempt to fix the problems only pours gasoline
on the fires. The U.S. government has done enough damage to Afghanistan and the Middle East. It has
already killed enough people, including those in wedding parties, hospitals, and neighborhoods. Enough
is enough.
Will Trump be bad on immigration and trade? Undoubtedly, but Clinton would have been bad in
those areas too. Don't forget, after all, that Obama has become America's greatest deporter-in-chief,
deporting more illegal immigrants than any U.S. president in history. Clinton would have followed
in his footsteps, especially in the hope of protecting his legacy. Moreover, while Trump will undoubtedly
begin trade wars, Clinton would have been imposing sanctions on people all over the world whose government
failed to obey the commands of the U.S. government. A distinction without a difference.
Another area for hope under a Trump presidency is with respect to the drug war, one of the most
failed, destructive, and expensive government programs in history. Clinton would have followed in
Bush's and Obama's footsteps by keeping it in existence, if for no other reason than to cater to
the army of DEA agents, federal and state judges, federal and state prosecutors, court clerks, and
police departments whose existence depends on the drug war.
While Trump is a drug warrior himself, he doesn't have the same allegiance to the vast drug-war
bureaucracy that Clinton has. If we get close to pushing this government program off the cliff -
and I am convinced that it is on the precipice - there is a good chance that Trump will not put much
effort into fighting its demise. Clinton would have fought for the drug war with every fiber of her
being.
There is another possible upside to Trump's election: The likelihood that Cold War II will
come to a sudden end. With Clinton, the continuation of the new Cold War against Russia was a certainty.
In fact, Clinton's Cold War might well have gotten hot very quickly, given her intent to establish
a no-fly zone over Syria where she could show how tough she is by ordering U.S. warplanes to shoot
down Russian warplanes. There is no telling where that would have led, but it very well might have
led to all-out nuclear war, something that the U.S. national-security establishment wanted with the
Soviet Union back in the 1960s under President Kennedy.
The danger of war with Russia obviously diminishes under a President Trump, who has said that
he favors friendly relations with Russia, just as Kennedy favored friendly relations with the Soviet
Union and Cuba in the months before he was assassinated.
Indeed, given Trump's negative comments about NATO, there is even the possibility of a dismantling
of that old Cold War dinosaur that gave us the crisis in Ukraine with Russia.
How about it, President-Elect Trump? While you're mulling over your new Berlin Wall on the Southern
(and maybe Northern) border and your coming trade wars with China, how about refusing to follow
the 16 years of Bush-Obama when it comes to U.S. foreign interventionism? Bring the troops home.
Lead America in a different direction, at least insofar as foreign policy is concerned - away from
death, destruction, spending, debt, loss of liberty and privacy, and economic impoverishment and
toward freedom, peace, prosperity, and harmony.
"
TRYING" ???...That's a JOKE, Right? Gingrich, Giuliani, etc, etc, These Neocons
already have a lot of the wild cards and 'Trump Cards'...Closet Globalists, even though they
probably wouldn't admit it.
Reference Carroll Quigley and Craig Hulet if you really want to get the REAL skinny!
The chant echoed through Donald Trump's boisterous rallies leading up to Election Day: "Drain
the swamp! Drain the swamp! Drain the swamp!"
"We are fighting for every citizen that believes that government should serve the people, not
the donors and not the special interests," the billionaire real estate developer promised exuberant
supporters at his last campaign rally in Manchester, N.H.
But just days later, there is little evidence that the president-elect is seeking to restrain
wealthy interests from having access and influence in his administration.
It's not just corporate lobbyists who are playing early, visible roles in the new power structure.
Some of Trump's biggest political donors are shaping the incoming administration, including Rebekah
Mercer, a daughter of billionaire Robert Mercer, who is figuring prominently in behind-the-scenes
discussions, according to people familiar with the transition.
Mercer is among four major donors appointed by Trump Friday to a 16-person executive committee
overseeing his transition. The others are campaign finance chairman Steven Mnuchin, New York financier
Anthony Scaramucci and Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel.
Meanwhile, top campaign fundraisers and a raft of lobbyists tied to some of the country's wealthiest
industries have been put in charge of hiring and planning for specific federal agencies. They
include J. Steven Hart, chairman of the law and lobbying shop Williams & Jensen; Michael McKenna,
an energy company lobbyist who is overseeing planning for the Energy Department; and Dallas fundraiser
Ray Washburne, was has been tapped to oversee the Commerce Department.
Billionaires who served as Trump's policy advisers, such as Oklahoma oil executive Harold Hamm,
are under consideration for Cabinet positions.
LOL .
LOL . So how about a new chant for protesters: DRAIN THE SWAP!?
... ... ...
UPDATE:
Asked about the tensions, and about Kushner's role in the leadership change at the transition
team, Trump spokesman Jason Miller said, "Anybody seeing today's news about the appointment of
Vice President-elect Mike Pence to run the Presidential Transition Team realizes that President-elect
Donald J. Trump is serious about changing Washington whether the town likes it or not. This might
ruffle the delicate sensitivities of the well-heeled two-martini lunch set, but President-elect
Trump isn't fighting for them, he's fighting for the hard-working men and women outside the Beltway
who don't care for insider bickering."
It's not uncommon for rivalries to emerge inside campaigns and administrations as advisers
jockey to place allies in key roles and advance their policy priorities. But the level of internecine
conflict during Trump's drive toward the GOP nomination was so extreme that it sometimes resulted
in conflicting directives for even simple hiring and spending decisions.
That is why watching President-elect Trump's choices for his foreign policy team is so important.
If he chooses primarily alumni of the Bush administration, we can be fairly certain that there
will be few, if any, beneficial changes in Washington's security strategy. Indeed, it could conceivably
be even more interventionist than that pursued by the Clinton, Bush or Obama administrations.
The main difference might be that it would be conducted unilaterally rather than multilaterally,
especially if someone like John Bolton gets a key position.
If on the other hand, Trump begins to pick advisers who have little or no previous government
service, it would be an encouraging step. Watch for appointments from realist enclaves like Defense
Priorities, the Independent Institute and others. Also watch for the appointment of individual unorthodox
or "rogue" scholars from such places as Notre Dame University, George Mason University, the Lyndon
B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, and (ironically) the Bush School
at Texas A&M University. Such moves would indicate that Trump was choosing new blood and really intending
to make a meaningful change in the direction of U.S. foreign policy.
Looks like Secretary of State shortlist is dominated by neocons. A couple of candidates would make
Hillary Clinton proud... the head of CIA is an informal head of shadow government and as such
is also very important. Allen Dulles example should still be remembered by all presidents, if
they do not want to repeat the face of JFK ....
(There are 5 women on the list, including Sarah Palin & NH's Kelly Ayotte, demonstrating that
ilsm has some influence.
For Sec/Defense - seriously. Alternatively for UN Ambassador. Right.)
Thomas Barrack Jr. Founder, chairman and executive chairman of Colony Capital; private equity
and real estate investor
Jeb Hensarling Representative from Texas and chairman of the House Financial Services Committee
Steven Mnuchin Former Goldman Sachs executive and Mr. Trump's campaign finance chairman
Tim Pawlenty Former Minnesota governor
Defense Secretary
Kelly Ayotte Departing senator from New Hampshire and member of the Senate Armed Services
Committee
Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn Former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (he would need
a waiver from Congress because of a seven-year rule for retired officers)
Stephen J. Hadley National security adviser under George W. Bush
Jon Kyl Former senator from Arizona
Jeff Sessions Senator from Alabama who is a prominent immigration opponent
Attorney General
Chris Christie New Jersey governor
Rudolph W. Giuliani Former New York mayor
Jeff Sessions Senator from Alabama
Interior Secretary
Jan Brewer Former Arizona governor
Robert E. Grady Gryphon Investors partner
Harold G. Hamm Chief executive of Continental Resources, an oil and gas company
Forrest Lucas President of Lucas Oil Products, which manufactures automotive lubricants, additives
and greases
Sarah Palin Former Alaska governor
Agriculture Secretary
Sam Brownback Kansas governor
Chuck Conner Chief executive officer of the National Council of Farmer Cooperatives
Sid Miller Texas agricultural commissioner
Sonny Perdue Former Georgia governor
Commerce Secretary
Chris Christie New Jersey governor
Dan DiMicco Former chief executive of Nucor Corporation, a steel production company
Lewis M. Eisenberg Private equity chief for Granite Capital International Group
Labor Secretary
Victoria A. Lipnic Equal Employment Opportunity commissioner and work force policy counsel
to the House Committee on Education and the Workforce
Health and Human Services Secretary
Dr. Ben Carson Former neurosurgeon and 2016 presidential candidate
Mike Huckabee Former Arkansas governor and 2016 presidential candidate
Bobby Jindal Former Louisiana governor who served as secretary of the Louisiana Department
of Health and Hospitals
Rick Scott Florida governor and former chief executive of a large hospital chain
Energy Secretary
James L. Connaughton Chief executive of Nautilus Data Technologies and former environmental
adviser to President George W. Bush
Robert E. Grady Gryphon Investors partner
Harold G. Hamm Chief executive of Continental Resources, an oil and gas company
Education Secretary
Dr. Ben Carson Former neurosurgeon and 2016 presidential candidate
Williamson M. Evers Education expert at the Hoover Institution, a think tank
Secretary of Veterans Affairs
Jeff Miller Retired chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee
Homeland Security Secretary
Joe Arpaio Departing sheriff of Maricopa County, Ariz.
David A. Clarke Jr. Milwaukee County sheriff
Michael McCaul Representative from Texas and chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee
Jeff Sessions Senator from Alabama
White House Chief of Staff
Stephen K. Bannon Editor of Breitbart News and chairman of Mr. Trump's campaign
Reince Priebus Chairman of the Republican National Committee
E.P.A. Administrator
Myron Ebell A director at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and a prominent climate change
skeptic
Robert E. Grady Gryphon Investors partner who was involved in drafting the Clean Air Act Amendments
of 1990
Jeffrey R. Holmstead Lawyer with Bracewell L.L.P. and former deputy E.P.A. administrator in
the George W. Bush administration
U.S. Trade Representative
Dan DiMicco Former chief executive of Nucor Corporation, a steel production company, and
a critic of Chinese trade practices
U.N. Ambassador
Kelly Ayotte Departing senator from New Hampshire and member of the Senate Armed Services
Committee
Richard Grenell Former spokesman for the United States ambassador to the United Nations during
the George W. Bush administration
CIA Director / Director of National Intelligence
Michael T. Flynn Former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency
Peter Hoekstra Former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee
Mike Rogers Former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee
Frances Townsend Former homeland security adviser under George W. Bush
National Security Adviser
Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn Former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency
Trump's Hires Will Set Course of His Presidency
http://nyti.ms/2eNUfRg
NYT - MARK LANDLER =- Nov 12
WASHINGTON - "Busy day planned in New York," President-elect Donald J. Trump said on Twitter
on Friday morning, two days after his astonishing victory. "Will soon be making some very important
decisions on the people who will be running our government!"
If anything, that understates the gravity of the personnel choices Mr. Trump and his transition
team are weighing.
Rarely in the history of the American presidency has the exercise of choosing people to fill
jobs had such a far-reaching impact on the nature and priorities of an incoming administration.
Unlike most new presidents, Mr. Trump comes into office with no elective-office experience, no
coherent political agenda and no bulging binder of policy proposals. And he has left a trail of
inflammatory, often contradictory, statements on issues from immigration and race to terrorism
and geopolitics.
In such a chaotic environment, serving a president who is in many ways a tabula rasa, the appointees
to key White House jobs like chief of staff and cabinet posts like secretary of state, defense
secretary and Treasury secretary could wield outsize influence. Their selection will help determine
whether the Trump administration governs like the firebrand Mr. Trump was on the campaign trail
or the pragmatist he often appears to be behind closed doors. ...
"... Washington insiders attempt to capture Trump and influence his positions, policies and decisions. ..."
"... Trump will likely form a very small team of offshoots of himself, people whom he trusts implicitly, in order to extend his capacity to choose people who will adhere to and execute his agenda. ..."
"... The presidency is an establishment and Washington is another. By being elected, Trump struck a blow at the members of the establishment who will be packing their bags while weeping over their losses (see here and here .) ..."
"... The Obama establishment is dead. The Democratic establishment is dead, at least for 4 years. There was a time, a very brief time under the Articles of Confederation, when Americans recognized the evils of the establishment and avoided instituting one. ..."
What happens next in Washington? Trump fills out his administration.
At the same time, Washington insiders attempt to capture Trump and influence his positions,
policies and decisions. The presidency is an institution, not a man, not a president. The presidency
is a network of enormous power with Trump now at its center.
Washington insiders who live and breathe politics are now in a race for positions of power and
influence. They hanker and vie for appointments. Trump must make appointments. He cannot operate
alone. He must delegate power to make decisions. He cannot monitor all information pertinent to every
issue in which the government has a hand.
The presidency is not 100 percent centralized. Decision-making power is allocated to levels below
the president himself and to levels surrounding him. It also lies outside the presidency in Congress.
Trump has his ideas and desires for actions, but their realization depends on the people he appoints.
He loses control and locks himself in with every appointment that he makes. People around him want
his power and want to influence him. They have a heavy influence on what he hears, whom he sees,
the options presented to him, and the evaluations of competing personnel. Trump will likely form
a very small team of offshoots of himself, people whom he trusts implicitly, in order to extend his
capacity to choose people who will adhere to and execute his agenda.
Power in Washington is not simply the apparatus of administering the presidency that will take
up headlines for the next few months. After the U.S. Treasury robs the tax-paying Americans, new
robbers (the Lobby) appear to rob the Treasury using every device they can get away with. There is
a second contingent, the power-seekers. Those who covet the exercise of power unceasingly work toward
their own narrow aims. As long as Washington remains the place that concentrates unbelievably large
amounts of money and powers, it will remain the swamp that Trump has promised to drain but won't.
He cannot drain it, not without destroying Washington's power and he cannot accomplish that, nor
does he even hint that he wants to accomplish that. His stated aims are the redirection of money
and powers, not their elimination for the sake of a greater justice, a greater right, and a truly
greater people and country.
The presidency is an establishment and Washington is another. By being elected, Trump struck
a blow at the members of the establishment who will be packing their bags while weeping over their
losses (see
here and
here .)
But elections do not strike the roots of the presidency, the establishment or Washington. Neither
will demonstrations against Trump.
The Obama establishment is dead. The Democratic establishment is dead, at least for 4 years.
There was a time, a very brief time under the Articles of Confederation, when Americans recognized
the evils of the establishment and avoided instituting one.
This gave way almost immediately (in 1787) to the constitutional seed that planted the enormous
tree that now cuts out the sun of justice from American lives. A domestic war failed to uproot that
tree. Long live the establishment, the Union, the American state, and may they be possessed of immense
powers over our lives - these became the social and political reality. Trump isn't going to change
it. He's a president administering a presidency. He's at the top of the heap. His credo is still
"Long Live the Establishment!"
"... Understand something, the caricature of Trump and his supporters is all fiction! It was the wallpaper inside the bubble of the elites that kept them from having to face the fact they are being rejected by the people of this country. ..."
"... It is not racist to want to control our borders and stem the influx – for a period – of people from other lands. It is not racist to note that Islam has a violent element willing to kill innocents at any time and any place. Just like one bad cop can give all cops a bad rap, so can a handful of bloody insane Muslims. It is not racist or nativist to deport immigrants who have committed serious felonies. ..."
The Democratic Party establishment has beclowned itself and is finished.
… The party establishment made a grievous mistake rallying around Hillary Clinton. It wasn't
just a lack of recent political seasoning. She was a bad candidate, with no message beyond heckling
the opposite sideline. She was a total misfit for both the politics of 2016 and the energy of
the Democratic Party as currently constituted. She could not escape her baggage, and she must
own that failure herself.
Theoretically smart people in the Democratic Party should have known that. And yet they worked
giddily to clear the field for her. Every power-hungry young Democrat fresh out of law school,
every rising lawmaker, every old friend of the Clintons wanted a piece of the action. This was
their ride up the power chain. The whole edifice was hollow, built atop the same unearned sense
of inevitability that surrounded Clinton in 2008, and it collapsed, just as it collapsed in 2008,
only a little later in the calendar. The voters of the party got taken for a ride by the people
who controlled it, the ones who promised they had everything figured out and sneeringly dismissed
anyone who suggested otherwise. They promised that Hillary Clinton had a lock on the Electoral
College. These people didn't know what they were talking about, and too many of us in the media
thought they did.
This is a grueling but necessarily treatise on how the Political Elite played God and got burned.
The essence here is wake up and fix the Democrat Party.
The mood in the Washington press corps is bleak, and deservedly so.
It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that, with a few exceptions, we were all tacitly
or explicitly #WithHer, which has led to a certain anguish in the face of Donald Trump's victory.
More than that and more importantly,
we also missed the story , after having spent months mocking the people who had a better sense
of what was going on.
This is all symptomatic of modern journalism's great moral and intellectual failing:
its
unbearable smugness . Had Hillary Clinton won, there's be a winking "we did it" feeling in
the press, a sense that we were brave and called Trump a liar and saved the republic.
So much for that. The audience for our glib analysis and contempt for much of the electorate,
it turned out, was rather limited. This was particularly true when it came to voters, the ones
who turned out by the millions to deliver not only a rebuke to the political system but also the
people who cover it.
Trump
knew what he was doing when he invited his crowds to jeer and hiss the reporters covering
him. They hate us, and have for some time.
And can you blame them? Journalists love mocking Trump supporters. We insult their appearances.
We dismiss them as racists and sexists. We emote on Twitter about how this or that comment or
policy makes us feel one way or the other, and yet we reject their feelings as invalid.
Understand something, the caricature of Trump and his supporters is all fiction! It was the wallpaper
inside the bubble of the elites that kept them from having to face the fact they are being rejected
by the people of this country.
It is not racist to want to control our borders and stem the influx – for a period – of people
from other lands. It is not racist to note that Islam has a violent element willing to kill innocents
at any time and any place. Just like one bad cop can give all cops a bad rap, so can a handful of
bloody insane Muslims. It is not racist or nativist to deport immigrants who have committed serious
felonies.
The media over stated the drivers behind these views to propel their candidate to victory. They
were not reporting facts.
The last good perspective was from the Morning Joe show:
"... Trump can renegotiate that Iranian treaty but he should never change the result: Iran loses its sanctions and joins the rest of the trading world. ditto with Russia. I have a feeling after trump has a long talk with Putin the Iranian deal will look somewhat different. ..."
Trump can renegotiate that Iranian treaty but he should never change the result: Iran loses its
sanctions and joins the rest of the trading world. ditto with Russia. I have a feeling after trump
has a long talk with Putin the Iranian deal will look somewhat different.
the last thing, the very fucking last thing, trump needs to do is start adopting the neocon,
Zionist, Israeli first agenda after the total opposite of those fucks elected him.
"... Washington insiders attempt to capture Trump and influence his positions, policies and decisions. ..."
"... Trump will likely form a very small team of offshoots of himself, people whom he trusts implicitly, in order to extend his capacity to choose people who will adhere to and execute his agenda. ..."
"... The presidency is an establishment and Washington is another. By being elected, Trump struck a blow at the members of the establishment who will be packing their bags while weeping over their losses (see here and here .) ..."
"... The Obama establishment is dead. The Democratic establishment is dead, at least for 4 years. There was a time, a very brief time under the Articles of Confederation, when Americans recognized the evils of the establishment and avoided instituting one. ..."
What happens next in Washington? Trump fills out his administration.
At the same time, Washington insiders attempt to capture Trump and influence his positions,
policies and decisions. The presidency is an institution, not a man, not a president. The presidency
is a network of enormous power with Trump now at its center.
Washington insiders who live and breathe politics are now in a race for positions of power and
influence. They hanker and vie for appointments. Trump must make appointments. He cannot operate
alone. He must delegate power to make decisions. He cannot monitor all information pertinent to every
issue in which the government has a hand.
The presidency is not 100 percent centralized. Decision-making power is allocated to levels below
the president himself and to levels surrounding him. It also lies outside the presidency in Congress.
Trump has his ideas and desires for actions, but their realization depends on the people he appoints.
He loses control and locks himself in with every appointment that he makes. People around him want
his power and want to influence him. They have a heavy influence on what he hears, whom he sees,
the options presented to him, and the evaluations of competing personnel. Trump will likely form
a very small team of offshoots of himself, people whom he trusts implicitly, in order to extend his
capacity to choose people who will adhere to and execute his agenda.
Power in Washington is not simply the apparatus of administering the presidency that will take
up headlines for the next few months. After the U.S. Treasury robs the tax-paying Americans, new
robbers (the Lobby) appear to rob the Treasury using every device they can get away with. There is
a second contingent, the power-seekers. Those who covet the exercise of power unceasingly work toward
their own narrow aims. As long as Washington remains the place that concentrates unbelievably large
amounts of money and powers, it will remain the swamp that Trump has promised to drain but won't.
He cannot drain it, not without destroying Washington's power and he cannot accomplish that, nor
does he even hint that he wants to accomplish that. His stated aims are the redirection of money
and powers, not their elimination for the sake of a greater justice, a greater right, and a truly
greater people and country.
The presidency is an establishment and Washington is another. By being elected, Trump struck
a blow at the members of the establishment who will be packing their bags while weeping over their
losses (see
here and
here .)
But elections do not strike the roots of the presidency, the establishment or Washington. Neither
will demonstrations against Trump.
The Obama establishment is dead. The Democratic establishment is dead, at least for 4 years.
There was a time, a very brief time under the Articles of Confederation, when Americans recognized
the evils of the establishment and avoided instituting one.
This gave way almost immediately (in 1787) to the constitutional seed that planted the enormous
tree that now cuts out the sun of justice from American lives. A domestic war failed to uproot that
tree. Long live the establishment, the Union, the American state, and may they be possessed of immense
powers over our lives - these became the social and political reality. Trump isn't going to change
it. He's a president administering a presidency. He's at the top of the heap. His credo is still
"Long Live the Establishment!"
"... Real foreign policy positions will only emerge with the formation of a Trump cabinet when it becomes clear who will be in charge. ..."
"... But, if future policies remain unknowable, super-charged American nationalism combined with economic populism and isolationism are likely to set the general tone. ..."
"... This sort of aggressive nationalism is not unique to Trump. All over the world nationalism is having a spectacular rebirth in countries from Turkey to the Philippines. It has become a successful vehicle for protest in Britain, France, Germany, Austria and Eastern Europe. ..."
"... The most serious wars in which the US is already militarily involved are in Iraq and Syria and here Trump's comments during the campaign suggest that he will focus on destroying Isis, recognise the danger of becoming militarily over-involved and look for some sort of cooperation with Russia as the next biggest player in the conflict. This is similar to what is already happening. ..."
"... Trump's instincts generally seem less well-informed but often shrewd, and his priories have nothing to do with the Middle East. ..."
"... The region has been the political graveyard for three of the last five US presidents: Jimmy Carter was destroyed by the consequences of the Iranian revolution; Ronald Reagan was gravely weakened by the Iran-Contra scandal; and George W Bush's years in office will be remembered chiefly for the calamities brought on by his invasion of Iraq. Barack Obama was luckier and more sensible, but he wholly underestimated the rise of Isis until it captured Mosul in 2014. ..."
...the election campaign was focused almost exclusively on American domestic politics with voters
showing little interest in events abroad. This is unlikely to change.
Governments around the world can see this for themselves, though this will not stop them badgering
their diplomats in Washington and New York for an inkling as to how far Trump's off-the-cuff remarks
were more than outrageous attempts to dominate the news agenda for a few hours. Fortunately, his
pronouncements were so woolly that they can be easily jettisoned between now and his inauguration. Real foreign policy positions will only emerge with the formation of a Trump cabinet when it becomes
clear who will be in charge.
But, if future policies remain unknowable, super-charged American nationalism combined with
economic populism and isolationism are likely to set the general tone.Trump has invariably portrayed
Americans as the victims of the foul machinations of foreign countries who previously faced no real
resistance from an incompetent self-serving American elite.
This sort of aggressive nationalism is not unique to Trump. All over the world nationalism
is having a spectacular rebirth in countries from Turkey to the Philippines. It has become a successful
vehicle for protest in Britain, France, Germany, Austria and Eastern Europe.Though Trump is
frequently portrayed as a peculiarly American phenomenon, his populist nationalism has a striking
amount in common with that of the Brexit campaigners in Britain or even the chauvinism of President
Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey. Much of this can be discounted as patriotic bombast, but in all cases
there is a menacing undercurrent of racism and demonisation, whether it is directed against illegal
immigrants in the US, asylum seekers in the Britain or Kurds in south east Turkey.
In reality, Trump made very few proposals for radical change in US foreign policy during the election
campaign, aside from saying that he would throw out the agreement with Iran on its nuclear programme
– though his staff is now being much less categorical about this, saying only that the deal must
be properly enforced. Nobody really knows if Trump will deal any differently from Obama with the
swathe of countries between Pakistan and Nigeria where there are at least seven wars raging – Afghanistan,
Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Somalia and South Sudan – as well as four serious insurgencies.
The most serious wars in which the US is already militarily involved are in Iraq and Syria and
here Trump's comments during the campaign suggest that he will focus on destroying Isis, recognise
the danger of becoming militarily over-involved and look for some sort of cooperation with Russia
as the next biggest player in the conflict. This is similar to what is already happening.
Hillary Clinton's intentions in Syria, though never fully formulated, always sounded more interventionist
than Trump's. One of her senior advisers openly proposed giving less priority to the assault on Isis
and more to getting rid of President Bashar al-Assad. To this end, a third force of pro-US militant
moderates was to be raised that would fight and ultimately defeat both Isis and Assad. Probably this
fantasy would never have come to pass, but the fact that it was ever given currency underlines the
extent to which Clinton was at one with the most dead-in-the-water conventional wisdom of the foreign
policy establishment in Washington.
President Obama developed a much more acute sense of what the US could and could not do in the
Middle East and beyond, without provoking crises exceeding its political and military strength. Its
power may be less than before the failed US interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan following 9/11,
but it is still far greater than any other country's. Currently, it is the US which is successfully
coordinating the offensive against Isis's last strongholds in Mosul and Raqqa by a multitude of fractious
parties in Iraq and Syria. It was never clear how seriously one should have taken Clinton's proposals
for "safe zones" and trying to fight Isis and Assad at the same time, but her judgements on events
in the Middle East since the Iraq invasion of 2003 all suggested a flawed idea of what was feasible.
Trump's instincts generally seem less well-informed but often shrewd, and his priories have
nothing to do with the Middle East.Past US leaders have felt the same way, but they usually
end up by being dragged into its crises one way or other, and how they perform then becomes the test
of their real quality as a leader. The region has been the political graveyard for three of
the last five US presidents: Jimmy Carter was destroyed by the consequences of the Iranian
revolution; Ronald Reagan was gravely weakened by the Iran-Contra scandal; and George W Bush's
years in office will be remembered chiefly for the calamities brought on by his invasion of Iraq.
Barack Obama was luckier and more sensible, but he wholly underestimated the rise of Isis until
it captured Mosul in 2014.
(Reprinted from
The Independent by permission of author or representative)
"... if the rumors are true and Trump nominates John Bolton as secretary of state, it's almost unfathomable to believe that Washington would continue to certify that Tehran is meeting its nuclear commitments. ..."
"... This is the same guy who, during the tail-end of the P5+1 negotiating process for an interim, placeholder accord, wrote in the New York Times that the United States needed to bomb Iran's facilities or at least support the Israelis so they could do it themselves. ..."
"... John Bolton for SoS? Criminality! ..."
"... If the hardest core neocons are brought directly into the highest echelons of American government and institute the kinds of policies mentioned in this article there will be much destruction, and when the dust settles there will be a popularly mandated realignment of EU countries away from fast allegiance with the US, and finally, a functioning alternative monetary and financial system revolving around the BRICS countries. ..."
Trump's ambivalence and wishy-washiness isn't much comfort for people who worked on the negotiation
tirelessly over a matter of years. Richard Nephew, the former sanctions official who helped put in
place and implement nuclear-related economic restrictions on the Iranians,
strongly believes that the JCPOA is a dead deal walking and will be slowly strangled to death
as soon as Trump is sworn in. In many ways, he could be right;
if the rumors are true and Trump nominates
John Bolton as secretary of state, it's almost unfathomable to believe that Washington would continue
to certify that Tehran is meeting its nuclear commitments.
This is the same guy who, during the tail-end
of the P5+1 negotiating process for an interim, placeholder accord,
wrote in the New York Times that the United States needed to bomb Iran's facilities or
at least support the Israelis so they could do it themselves.
If the hardest core neocons are brought directly into the highest echelons of American
government and institute the kinds of policies mentioned in this article there will be much destruction,
and when the dust settles there will be a popularly mandated realignment of EU countries away
from fast allegiance with the US, and finally, a functioning alternative monetary and financial
system revolving around the BRICS countries.
It doesn't have to happen, but if Trump brings in fire breathing nut jobs like Bolton, it WILL
happen. Non-the-less, I do predict that Trump will be greatly coopted by "the establishment" he
vilified and that the public largely hates. It's an irresistible force that will only be brought
down with general social collapse.
"... he Clinton camp, the media and the pollsters missed what we had anticipated as "not Clinton". A basic setting in a part of the "left" electorate that remember who she is and what she has done and would under no circumstances vote for her. Clinton herself pushed the "bernie bros" and "deplorables" into that camp. This was a structural change that was solely based in the personality of the candidate. ..."
"... Even then polls and their interpretation will always only capture a part of the story. Often a sound grasp of human and cultural behavior will allow for better prediction as all polls. As my friend the statistician say: "The best prognostic instrument I have even today is my gut." ..."
"... NeverHillary turned out to be bigger than NeverTrump. Hillary got less than 6 million votes compared to Obama. Trump got nearly as much as Romney. ..."
"... A good indicator was the size of the crowds each candidate drew to their rallies. Clinton tended to show more "bought" TV-ready extras. Bernie blew the walls out at his rallies, as did Trump. You can't look at that and say the polls are even close to accurate. ..."
"... When the Democrats unleashed thugs on Trump supporters while the media studiously looked away, it was not sensible to openly identify with Trump. ..."
"... On Wednesday after the election, I heard an interview with a woman reporter who worked with the 538 polling group. She said that it was impossible for most reporters to really investigate how voters in certain areas of the country were feeling about the election bcz newspapers and other news organizations, including the Big Broadcasters, did not have the ability to pay for enough reporters to actually talk to people. ..."
"... the Los Angeles Times polls were correct (although the paper was pro-Clinton); can't get the link now, but they explained how they weighted their polls on the basis of the enthusiasm displayed for the preferred candidate, and Trump supporters were more "charged" ..."
"... I read many stories about how the polls were fixed for Clinton for months before the election. ..."
"... The pollsters took the % of voters from the Obama election but they also added more Democrats than were representative in the 2012 election, thereby skewing the polls for Clinton. Many believed that the reason they did this was to try to manipulate the voting machines in Clinton's favour and have the polls match the result. ..."
"... i go back to what my sociology of the media instructor said.. polls are for massaging people's brains.. unless one knows who pays for them and what goes into them, they are just another propaganda tool for use.. ..."
"... It has been known for a long time in the polling world that polling numbers are getting more and more unreliable because fewer and fewer people are willing to complete polls. ..."
"... theory would also explain the newspaper polls largely rigged to correspond to the planned vote theft, as well as the idiotic magnitude of overconfidence seen in the Pol-Est/MS Media/Wall Street complex. ..."
"... 1. IBD/TIPP (A collaboration of Investors Business Daily and TechnoMetrica Market Intelligence). TechnoMetrica was consistent throughout – final poll for election day had Trump leading by 2%. Also predicted the last presidential elections back to 2004. ..."
"... This election candidates' crowd draw was a good indicator. It was very difficult to pre-program the Diebold machines. MSM polls were in the bag for Hillary, had her ahead. It backfired. ..."
"... A bit about polling methodology explains the bias we've seen this election cycle. Typically, the polling samples are not big enough to be representative, so the results are corrected (weighted) based on the participant responses. The polls assume certain turnout percentages for different groups (Democrats, Republicans, Independents, rural, urban, ethnicity, gender etc.). A lot of the polls were weighting the polls with turnouts similar to 2012, corrected for the expected demographic changes over the last 4 years. ..."
"... Poll weighing is a tricky business. This is why most polling has a 4% error margin, so it does not produce as accurate picture as is typically presented by the media. The error is not randomly distributed, it is closely related to the poll weighting. The weighting error was favouring Clinton in the polls as it assumed higher Democratic turnout, which ended up not being the case, she underperformed 2012 significantly and lost the election. ..."
"... Are the polls done to discover "what's up", or are they done to project the view that one side is winning? ..."
"... I go with the second view. That's what the 'corrections' are all about. The 'corrections' need to be dropped completely ..."
"... This. There was a Wikiliks Podesta email in whdich Clinton operatives discussed oversampling certain groups to inflate the poll in her favor. ..."
"... Hmm ... what can I say that no-one else has already said except to observe that the polling and the corporate media reporting the polling statistics were in another parallel universe and the people supposedly being polled (and not some over-sampled group in Peoria, Iowa, who could predict exactly what questions would be asked and knew what answers to give) live on planet Earth? ..."
"... I most certainly did not predict Trump would win. But I did question the polls. What I questioned a few weeks ago was the margin of victory for Hillary. ..."
"... This is because most of the polls were weighting more Democratic (based on the 2012 election), which overestimated Clinton's support. ..."
"... So the difference between the poll and the actual result is 1.2% in favour of Trump (1.7% lead to Clinton in poll vs. 0.5% in the election). All are well within the error of the poll, so 1.2% difference between the election and the poll is well within the stated 3% error margin of the poll. ..."
"... You assume public polls are conducted by impartial actors who wish to inform and illuminate..... your assumption is incorrect. ..."
"... The New York Times recent admission that it writes the narrative first, then builds the story to suit says about everything for me regarding polls. ..."
"... According to reports, the first leader Trump spoke to on the phone after his election victory was the Egyptian president, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi. Sisi congratulated him on the election victory, a spokesman for the Egyptian leader said. ..."
"... It may be unfortunate, but I can see Trump & Erdogan getting along very well. Although, if they bring Putin into that triumvirate that could actually be very beneficial for the Middle East. ..."
Today I discussed the U.S. election with a friend who studied and practices statistics. I asked
about the failure of the polls in this years presidential election. Her explanation: The polls are
looking at future events but are biased by the past. The various companies and institutions adjust
the polls they do by looking at their past prognoses and the real results of the past event. They
then develop correcting factors, measured from the past, and apply it to new polls. If that correcting
factor is wrong, possibly because of structural changes in the electorate, then the new polls will
be corrected with a wrong factor and thus miss the real results.
Polls predicting the last presidential election were probably off by 3 or 5 points towards the
Republican side. The pollsters then corrected the new polls for the Clinton-Trump race in favor of
the Democratic side by giving that side an additional 3-5 points. They thereby corrected the new
polls by the bias that was poll inherent during the last race.
But structural changes, which we seem to have had during this election, messed up the result.
Many people who usually vote for the Democratic ticket did not vote for Clinton. The "not Clinton"
progressives, the "bernie bros" and "deplorables" who voted Obama in the last election stayed home,
voted for a third party candidate or even for Trump. The pollsters did not anticipate such a deep
change. Thus their correction factor was wrong. Thus the Clinton side turned out to be favored in
polls but not in the relevant votes.
Real polling, which requires in depth-in person interviews with the participants, does not really
happen anymore. It is simply to expensive. Polling today is largely done by telephone with participants
selected by some database algorithm. It is skewed by many factors which require many corrections.
All these corrections have some biases that do miss structural changes in the underlying population.
The Clinton camp, the media and the pollsters missed what we had anticipated as "not Clinton".
A basic setting in a part of the "left" electorate that remember who she is and what she has done
and would under no circumstances vote for her. Clinton herself pushed the "bernie bros" and "deplorables"
into that camp. This was a structural change that was solely based in the personality of the candidate.
If Sanders would have been the candidate the now wrong poll correction factor in favor of Democrats
would likely have been a correct one. The deep antipathy against Hillary Clinton in a decisive part
of the electorate was a factor that the pseudo-science of cheap telephone polls could not catch.
More expensive in depth interviews of the base population used by a pollster would probably have
caught this factor and adjusted appropriately.
There were some twenty to thirty different entities doing polls during this election cycle. Five
to ten polling entities, with better budgets and preparations, would probably have led to better
prognoses. Some media companies could probably join their poll budgets, split over multiple companies
today, to have a common one with a better analysis of its base population.One that would have anticipated
"not Hillary".
Unless that happens all polls will have to be read with a lot of doubt. What past bias is captured
in these predictions of the future? What are their structural assumptions and are these still correct?
What structural change might have happened?
Even then polls and their interpretation will always only capture a part of the story. Often
a sound grasp of human and cultural behavior will allow for better prediction as all polls. As my
friend the statistician say: "The best prognostic instrument I have even today is my gut."
An equally interesting question about polls: what about the exit polls? If Greg Palast and others
are right, exit polls indicate that the voting was rigged. What does your statistics friend think
about that?
After the 1948 election, statisticians started to get rid of the quota sampling for electoral
polls. After this election, it's time to reassess Statistics.
A good indicator was the size of the crowds each candidate drew to their rallies. Clinton
tended to show more "bought" TV-ready extras. Bernie blew the walls out at his rallies, as did
Trump. You can't look at that and say the polls are even close to accurate.
I suspect that the future of polling isn't as dire as you're painting it, b. There was huge anti-Trump
bias in the Jew-controlled Christian-West Media from the beginning of the campaign. You drew attention
to negative MSM bias yourself in the post which pointed out how consistently wrong the Punditocracy
had been in predicting the imminent failure of the Trump campaign - thereby rubbing their noses
in their own ineptitude and tomfoolery.
One factor which seemed important to me was occasionally hilighted at regular intervals by
commenters here at MoA... The (apparent) fact that Trump addressed more, and bigger, crowds than
Mrs Clinton. I accepted those claims as fact, and didn't bother to check their veracity. But nevertheless
crowd size and frequency seems to have played a pivotal role in the outcome (as one would expect
in a political campaign).
Exit polls have provided checks on the accuracy of the vote count -- but are liable to the same
problem as the opinion pols, people who don't admit to their real position.
I'm not surprised that the polls fail badly in this presidential election. When the Democrats
unleashed thugs on Trump supporters while the media studiously looked away, it was not sensible
to openly identify with Trump. Even Trump was saying so through out the campaign.The Democrats
together with their media partners truly believed that Donald Trump's alleged character flaws
would be enough to win the election. Despite the fact that it was obvious to anyone without a
blinker on that the momentum was on the side of Trump all along. Obama's phenomenon of 08 was
nothing compared to Trump's phenomenon of this year, but because neither the MSM nor the Pollsters
liked him they transferred their biases to their jobs. In any case I'm sure happy that the result
of the election turned out different from the skewed prognosis.
On Wednesday after the election, I heard an interview with a woman reporter who worked with
the 538 polling group. She said that it was impossible for most reporters to really investigate
how voters in certain areas of the country were feeling about the election bcz newspapers and
other news organizations, including the Big Broadcasters, did not have the ability to pay for
enough reporters to actually talk to people.
Since statistics had worked so well, and were cheaper to deal with, they won the day. And lost
the battle.
Now, most people at this site seemed to base their decisions of whom to vote for based on stands
on issues and known actions of the various candidates. But, even so, we probably paid attention
to the polling results. I know I took into consideration that Hillary would win big in NJ, leaving
me free to vote for Jill Stein. Based on known actions of Trump I could not vote for him, even
tho' I hoped he would kill TPP and have better relations with Russia. I feared and still do fear
his nominations to the Supreme Court. (I am not religious, but if I were I would pray daily, perhaps
hourly, for the continued good health of the Justices Kennedy, GInsburg, and Breyer. I would hope
the other Dem appointed justices would take care to avoid, oh, small airplanes....
Would Hillary have adjusted her campaign if she could have seen the rising disappointment of
the working class Dems (even middle class to higher income Dems)? I don't know. I do know that
her husband ran his first campaign on the famous "It's the economy, stupid" reminder.
Somehow, I don't think it would have registered enough.
And Obama ran on Hope and Change, but was always the Corporatist Dem Wall Street wanted. What
a waste. And now we have four more years of doing essentially nothing aboug climate change. It
was have been a strategy to put off even regulatory actions to lessen CO2 emissions until near
the end of his second term, but, dang, it makes it easier for Trump to negate those efforts.
Again, what a waste. But I didn't vote for Obama for either term bcz I saw that his actions
as IL state senator and as US senator were always looking out for the Big Money, Big Corporations,
and seldom worked for anyone below the middle class, more the top of the middle class.
A long explanatory report which signifies nothing critical. "The polls were wrong??" No. The polls
reported by MSM were wrong.
Big time, including from those from Clinton loving CBC here in Canada, which for an extended
time was reporting Hillary with an 11% lead. That number was far beyond any minor adjustments,
for sure.
There were polls, such as Rasmussen, itself suspected of fiddling, which were reporting ups
and downs of 2%, and ended up tied election day.
So, please schemers, please do not try to cover up the MSM's deliberate attempt to influence
results by using garbage numbers. Figures can lie, and liars can sure figure.
the Los Angeles Times polls were correct (although the paper was pro-Clinton); can't get the
link now, but they explained how they weighted their polls on the basis of the enthusiasm displayed
for the preferred candidate, and Trump supporters were more "charged"
I disagree with your friend, b. I read many stories about how the polls were fixed for Clinton
for months before the election.
The pollsters took the % of voters from the Obama election but they also added more Democrats
than were representative in the 2012 election, thereby skewing the polls for Clinton. Many believed
that the reason they did this was to try to manipulate the voting machines in Clinton's favour
and have the polls match the result. I think that Trump crying foul so early got them worried
that they might be caught. Remember, voting machines in 14 states are run by companies affiliated
with Soros.
i go back to what my sociology of the media instructor said.. polls are for massaging people's
brains.. unless one knows who pays for them and what goes into them, they are just another propaganda
tool for use..
It has been known for a long time in the polling world that polling numbers are getting more
and more unreliable because fewer and fewer people are willing to complete polls.
I have a weird conspiracy hypothesis that I mainly made up on my own;
The last FBI "reopening" and the quick subsequent "close-down" felt all too counter-intuitive
and silly, when examined solely based on their face value.
However, what if there was more to this? What if this was a final threat from FBI to the Soros-Clinton
mafia to "quickly unrig the voting machines" OR we will arrest the lot of you? Which, once the
promises were made by "allow fair play", required FBI to pull back as their part of the deal?
This - admittedly conspiracy - theory would also explain the newspaper polls largely rigged
to correspond to the planned vote theft, as well as the idiotic magnitude of overconfidence seen
in the Pol-Est/MS Media/Wall Street complex.
I find it interesting b that you and your friend didn't seem to talk at all about the polling
questions....at least that you shared with us. It is my experience and education that even with
a "beauty contest" that we just had, that the structure of the polling questions make all the
difference in how people being polled respond.
Polls are funded by parties with agendas and the questions, assumptions and biases are baked
in to the result......IMO, they are all worthless or worse than that because folks see them, like
the media as being something of an authority figure and therefore believable which we know is
total BS.
Polls are just another propaganda tool of those rich enough to use them in their quiver of
control.
Timid Trumpists is the major factor, I would think. A factor already well known in UK. People
who are going to vote for a non-PC solution hesitate to admit it to poll questions.
All of the above is true, but - in addition - polls are used to manipulate campaigns.
People sympathize with someone who is considered a winner and when someone is considered likely
to lose people lose interest.
To get the vote out polls have to be tight. In addition to that polls are used to motivate
donors. In the end there has to be a reason pollsters get paid.
But even if polls would be done for purely scientific reasons, this election was impossible
to poll. The correct question would have been "Do you hate/fear candidate x enough to motivate
you to queue for voting for canditate y, or are you too disgusted to bother at all"
In the end, it was not the wrong polls that sank Clinton but the strategy to leave the anti-elitist
populist stuff to Trump and - unsuccessfully concentrate on winning the elitist Republican anti
Trump vote. That way she lost more of the Democrat Sanders vote than she could gain right wing.
The other factor was her reliance on television ads and media ties (they all backed her), a
reluctance to talk to large audiences and an inability to communicate via social media.
It is possible though she never had a chance against a well established reality show brand.
The good news is that after this election campaigns will be done mainly low cost social media.
The bad news is that these campaigns will be more fact free than ever and that the age of independent
quality newspapers is over.
So, you're saying that the age of independent quality newspapers has just ended, like about
now. Interesting pov...
Somehow, the last few years of the MSM coverage of the NATO-Salafist War on Syria have had
me convinced that the "independent quality newspapers" have become a*rse-wipe material a long
time ago. Instead, we get the Sorosoid ZioTakfirism.
But, yeah, maybe it's all Trump's fault. Hey I also blame Hezbollah for kicking Yisrael's arse
north of Litani in 2006. If they didn't piss of the Yivrim this much, maybe they wouldn't have
punitively collapsed the faith in the Western Society from the inside.
Ultimately, it's all Putin's fault. He started it all by beating the pro-Saudi Chechens into
a pulp back in 1999, and started the NATOQAEDA self-destruction.
1. IBD/TIPP (A collaboration of Investors Business Daily and TechnoMetrica Market Intelligence).
TechnoMetrica was consistent throughout – final poll for election day had Trump leading by 2%.
Also predicted the last presidential elections back to 2004.
Methodology
"Traditional Telephone method" includes cell –live interviews by Region; Age; Gender; Race;
Income; Education; Party; Ideology; Investor; Area Type; Parental Status; White – men, women;
Black/Hispanic; Women-single, married; Household description –Upper/Middle-Middle, Working, Lower;
Religion; Union Household; Intensity of Support.
This election candidates' crowd draw was a good indicator. It was very difficult to pre-program
the Diebold machines. MSM polls were in the bag for Hillary, had her ahead. It backfired.
Is Newsweek embarrassed yet? They forgot some history. Truman-Dewey. Madam President! How appropriate.
Some of b's posts regarding US politics seems naive but I chalk that up to his not being American.
But this technocratic excuse for the polling is just wrong. b, what happened to your skeptical
view of Western media????
virgile @ 9: An excerpt: " It was about the union men who refused to sell out their futures and
vote for a Democrat who is an agent of the One Percent."
And now, I fear, they still have no future.
James @ 15 said.." polls are for massaging people's brains.. unless one knows who pays for
them and what goes into them, they are just another propaganda tool for use..
How true..
Trumps choices for his cabinet don't leave much room for positive change, for the millions
of disaffected voters who put him in office. We'll see!
A bit about polling methodology explains the bias we've seen this election cycle. Typically,
the polling samples are not big enough to be representative, so the results are corrected (weighted)
based on the participant responses. The polls assume certain turnout percentages for different
groups (Democrats, Republicans, Independents, rural, urban, ethnicity, gender etc.). A lot of
the polls were weighting the polls with turnouts similar to 2012, corrected for the expected demographic
changes over the last 4 years.
Poll weighing is a tricky business. This is why most polling has a 4% error margin, so
it does not produce as accurate picture as is typically presented by the media. The error is not
randomly distributed, it is closely related to the poll weighting. The weighting error was favouring
Clinton in the polls as it assumed higher Democratic turnout, which ended up not being the case,
she underperformed 2012 significantly and lost the election.
It is important to stress that the election results ended up within the margin of error
(+-4%). The polls were not wrong, it is the media and the analyst who over-interpreted the data
and gave Clinton the win where she did not have a statistically significant (<4%) lead. This is
why if Nate Silver at 538 was consistently writing that the polls in many of the swing states
were within the error margin, although favouring Clinton, and their election prediction still
gave Trump a ~30% chance of victory. Other analysts were more careless (hello Huffington Post)
and even made fun of 538 for giving Trump any chance of victory.
There is no way to make more accurate polling for the future elections as the accuracy of the
poll is tied in to poll weighing, which is guesswork (although somewhat educated by the historical
data). Short of forcing everyone to vote, election-to-election turnout will change and affect
the accuracy of the polls.
Instead of interpreting every single of those Polls as plausibly biased on one side, why don't
you take the entire population of Western MSM Polls, and see if their median predicted outcome
vs actual final outcome difference is statistically significant?
I'd say you'd find their entire population to be likely biased at least to six-sigma level.
(I have no time to show this myself, just proposing someone's hypothesis, as a research idea
for someone's M Sci thesis for example)
I have lived in the D.C. area for the past 22 years with a land line phone and am listed in the
White Pages. I have never been called by a pollster, although I am often called by political campaigns.
I do not know anyone who has been called by a pollster.
More expensive in depth interviews of the base population used by a pollster would probably
have caught this factor and adjusted appropriately.
No more 'adjustments' allowed. A desire to actually discover the lay of the land and to publish
it is what's required. Good luck on getting that from the political class and/or their captive
msm. Everything they do is a lie, calculated to keep themselves in power.
The polls were obviously blatantly skewed towards urban Blue zones, and did not include working
adults in Red zones, then were 'massaged' by reporting media in clearly a Rodham-paid PAC marketing
campaign to brand the sheeples 'Wear Rodham!'
Only Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight even came close, but he had to rely on those same skewed
polls. After all, since 1990, you can buy a CD set of American voting records by street address,
it's not rocket science to be able to 'algo' that into a 'poll' that skews whichever way the highest
bidder's (Rodham) quants tell you to. https://www.facebook.com/viralthread/videos/598130190359668/
As if on cue, or something. All of a sudden, S.U.R.P.R.I.S.E,… a litany of polls released today
show Donald Trump ahead in key battleground states (Ohio and Florida), and tied –or closer
than the margin of error– in new national polls…. […]
Remember what we stated on October 20th: […]
The real battle is the battle for your mind. The peak U.S. media false polling cycle is
thankfully in the rear-view mirror.
It was because I followed that right-wing blog that I ignored all polls other than the LA Times
tracking poll. (I didn't know about the IBD/TIPP poll until after the election.)
Hmm ... what can I say that no-one else has already said except to observe that the polling
and the corporate media reporting the polling statistics were in another parallel universe and
the people supposedly being polled (and not some over-sampled group in Peoria, Iowa, who could
predict exactly what questions would be asked and knew what answers to give) live on planet Earth?
I most certainly did not predict Trump would win. But I did question the polls. What I questioned
a few weeks ago was the margin of victory for Hillary.
There were two big variables that the pollsters had to guess at. One was the voter turnout
numbers for those precincts that had many working class people with a high school or less education
level. As it turns out those people came out in higher numbers than they have in elections over
the past two decades. The other was voter turnout for many precincts that supported Obama in 2008
and 2012. What happened here was many of those voters who did turn out voted for Trump, instead
of the Democrat. There was a third uncertainty here that no on has yet figured out. That was those
people who would never admit to a stranger that they were going to vote for Trump and simply lied
to the pollster.
In any case those three uncertainties worked in directions that none of the pollsters really
picked up on.
This is because most of the polls were weighting more Democratic (based on the 2012 election),
which overestimated Clinton's support. For example, the Rasmussen poll, which traditionally
weights more Republican, gave Clinton 1.7% lead, 44.8% to 43.1% (3% margin of error), so fairly
close to the election results (47.3% to 47.8%).
So the difference between the poll and the actual result is 1.2% in favour of Trump (1.7%
lead to Clinton in poll vs. 0.5% in the election). All are well within the error of the poll,
so 1.2% difference between the election and the poll is well within the stated 3% error margin
of the poll.
When you mention 6 sigma, you really don't really know what you are talking about. Typical
polling error is 3 - 4% and the election result was within this error for most polls in all of
the states. Standard deviation (sigma) that you mention is a random uncertainty associated with
a measurement and it does not apply here. As I tried to convey, the errors in polling tend to
be systematic, not random, because they are tied to weighting of the polls, not to the sample
of the population as this is mostly corrected by the weighting. So because most of the MSM polls
use similar weighting methodology based on the same historical data, they will all be off, there
will be no random distribution of some for Trump, some for Clinton. Weighing based on different
historical data skews the whole picture one way, it's not a random error. This is why pollster
slap a relatively large 3 - 4% error on their polls, it is meant to cover any systematic bias
of the weighting as well as random errors.
those three uncertainties worked in directions that none of the pollsters really picked
up on.
Have a loook at the
LA Times
tracking poll . It had Trump ahead by 3.2% on election day, which is close to the margin of
error. The graph there is interesting, because dates of various events, such as the debates are
marked. The poll figures moved in response to those events as one would expect.
Before the election, the people who do that poll said that they did best at predicting the
2012 election. Oh, in a
post about the
election's outcome, Alexander Dugin singled out that poll for praise.
I have a better idea--how about we stop the stupid polling altogether since there is only one
poll that really matters? Then the media would have to focus on the issues rather than the horserace.
Oh, the humanity!
Hypothesis A - that it's all explainable by random distribution of their samples.
If you use Hypotethesis A, and then disprove it in it's own game (be it 3, or 6 sigma), then
you have to suggest an alternative.
I don't know what the alternative is. I don't even claim I do. But you can more easily disprove
the veracity that the polls could have mostly been non-biased by showing that hypothesis is unlikely
to be RIGHT. That's where sigmas make absolute sense.
Furthermore, what you are proving here is that the POPULATION of ALL COMBINED polls has a mean
that must be different from the POPULATION of all actual voters, not of disproving the polls one
by one.
I think you've totally ignored my point, you keep looking at individual polls as trees, I am
looking at the poll forest and saying the entire forest is buggered if almost all polls erred
on one side, regardless of their individual margins of error.
The New York Times recent admission that it writes the narrative first, then builds the story
to suit says about everything for me regarding polls. 'Hey, my editor needs someone to come
out and say something, can you say this...?' <-- Now, if that is standard practice in journalism
at 'the paper of record', then skewing polls to suit a common agenda is a given, again in my opinion.
This of course is great news for sites like MofA.
Also impossible to capture The Don's campaign playing the electoral college system like an
old mandolin, as it turns out. 306 Trump bts 232 Hillary it looks like in the wash up. That's
old school work rate doing the job. Fair play. Great to see all the student debt laden brainwashed
libtards out there doing there nut. They don't even know what a bullet they dodged + shite like
the TPP is now dead. Some gratitude.
Hopefully in 2020 there are some more scientific polls like the USC Dornslife/LA Times poll,
each having their own differing methodologies preferably. This should give the punters a better
'feel' for the electorate.
In other news...
Assange is being interviewed tomorrow by Swedush police (for the 2nd time I should add). There
are and were no charges laid. I suspect their will be no charges brought tomorrow.
...so what happened...? Did The Rule of Law just...magically appear...?
The most extraordinary thing I learned about polls is that exit polls are altered as soon as the
official election or primary vote is in-- to match it.
According to reports, the first leader Trump spoke to on the phone after his election victory
was the Egyptian president, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi. Sisi congratulated him on the election victory,
a spokesman for the Egyptian leader said.
Ireland's government said the taoiseach, Enda Kenny, had a 10-minute call with Trump, and
was invited to visit the White House on St Patrick's Day.
Mexico's president, Enrique Peńa Nieto, has said he and Trump agreed in their call to meet
before Trump takes office, while Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was invited to
the White House.
Other leaders to have a chat with Trump so far include the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip
Erdoğan, India's prime minister, Narendra Modi, the Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe – they
reportedly talked for 20 minutes and agreed to meet soon in New York – and South Korea's president,
Park Geun-hye.
Australia's prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, was reported to have chatted with Trump about
security and trade in their call.
No surprises there.
It may be unfortunate, but I can see Trump & Erdogan getting along very well. Although,
if they bring Putin into that triumvirate that could actually be very beneficial for the Middle
East.
Concur with all your points. And yes, the timing of the Swedes finally deciding to interview
Assange is funny.
I never thought that Hillary would become president, btw., from the moment she declared
for 2016. Which is not to say that I was not concerned that the demonization of Trump might throw
the election. We'll never know, but it is possible that Trump wouldn't have won without Wikileaks.
And the two sets of leaks were very well timed.
To return to polls. It's not just most media polls that were off. The Clinton campaign's internal
polls were off, too. They didn't have much doubt that they would win. (The same thing happened
with Romney of course, but in their case, their internal polls differed from the media polls.)
Apparently, they really did believe they have a firewall, with redundancies no less.
We face the greatest challenges to our security in a generation. This is no time to question
the value of the partnership between Europe and the United States.
Britain is facing a diplomatic crisis with the US over Donald Trump's plans to forge an
alliance with Vladimir Putin and bolster the Syrian regime.
In a significant foreign policy split, officials admitted that Britain will have some "very
difficult" conversations with the President-elect in coming months over his approach to Russia.
I don't think it will be difficult for the US president-elect to tell the UK government where
to go.
Donald Trump's plans to forge an alliance with Vladimir Putin and bolster the Syrian regime. When
did he ever say he had any such plans? But now they are a fact in being, thanks to the Torygraph.
Britain has evolved into an expert panicker.
"... Trump, to a degree previously matched only by such outlier presidential candidates as Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich, is challenging Washington's conventional wisdom that America must dominate the globe. ..."
"... He also criticized nation-building. "We have a country that's in bad shape," he reasonably allowed: "I just think we have to rebuild our country." ..."
"... Fifth, foreign policy is ultimately about domestic policy. "War is the health of the state," Randolph Bourne presciently declared a century ago. There is no bigger big government program war, no graver threat to civil liberties than perpetual conflict with the homeland the battlefield, no greater danger to daily life than blowback from military overreach. ..."
Still, Trump, to a degree previously matched only by such outlier presidential candidates as Ron
Paul and Dennis Kucinich, is challenging Washington's conventional wisdom that America must dominate
the globe. The "usual suspects" who manage foreign policy in every administration, Republican and
Democrat, believe that the U.S. must cow every adversary, fight every war, defend every ally, enforce
every peace, settle every conflict, pay every bill, and otherwise ensure that the lion lies down
with the lamb at the end of time, if not before.
Not Donald Trump. He recently shocked polite war-making society in the nation's capital when he
criticized NATO, essentially a welfare agency for Europeans determined to safeguard their generous
social benefits. Before the Washington Post editorial board he made the obvious point that "NATO
was set up at a different time." Moreover, Ukraine "affects us far less than it affects other countries
in NATO, and yet we're doing all of the lifting." Why, he wondered? It's a good question.
His view that foreign policy should change along with the world scandalized Washington policymakers,
who embody Public Choice economics, which teaches that government officials and agencies are self-interested
and dedicated to self-preservation. In foreign policy that means what has ever been must ever be
and everything is more important today than in the past, no matter how much circumstances have changed.
Trump expressed skepticism about American defense subsidies for other wealthy allies, such as
South Korea and Saudi Arabia as well as military deployments in Asia. "We spent billions of dollars
on Saudi Arabia and they have nothing but money," he observed. Similarly, he contended, "South Korea
is very rich, great industrial country, and yet we're not reimbursed fairly for what we do."
He also criticized nation-building. "We have a country that's in bad shape," he reasonably allowed:
"I just think we have to rebuild our country."
Unlike presidents dating back at least to George H.W. Bush, Trump appears reluctant to go to war.
He opposed sending tens of thousands of troops to fight the Islamic State: "I would put tremendous
pressure on other countries that are over there to use their troops." Equally sensibly, he warned
against starting World War III over Crimea or useless rocks in East Asian seas. He made a point that
should be obvious at a time of budget crisis: "We certainly can't afford to do this anymore."
... ... ...
Fifth, foreign policy is ultimately about domestic policy. "War is the health of the state,"
Randolph Bourne presciently declared a century ago. There is no bigger big government program war,
no graver threat to civil liberties than perpetual conflict with the homeland the battlefield, no
greater danger to daily life than blowback from military overreach.
"
TRYING" ???...That's a JOKE, Right? Gingrich, Giuliani, etc, etc, These Neocons
already have a lot of the wild cards and 'Trump Cards'...Closet Globalists, even though they
probably wouldn't admit it.
Reference Carroll Quigley and Craig Hulet if you really want to get the REAL skinny!
But Democrats had a simpler answer for why Clinton lost. As one Democratic strategist close to
Clinton told The Post, it all came down to "one word: Comey." Too bad for Democrats there are
zero electoral votes in the State of Denial. FBI Director James Comey didn't use a private e-mail
server to conduct official State Department business and put 110 classified e-mails on that unsecured
server. Comey didn't fail to turn over some 14,900 e-mails to the FBI after assuring Americans
that "I turned over everything I was obligated to turn over."
Comey didn't lie to the American people about Benghazi, publicly blaming the attacks on "inflammatory
material posted on the Internet." Comey didn't tell Democratic voters he was against free-trade
deals, but then tell Brazilian bankers that his dream was for "hemispheric . . . open trade and
open borders."
Comey didn't have a foundation that accepted millions of dollars in donations from foreign
governments during his tenure as secretary of state. He didn't give, as I wrote last month, "special
treatment to Clinton Foundation donors after the Haiti quake, asking for them to be identified
as 'FOBs' (friends of Bill Clinton) or 'WJC VIPs' (William Jefferson Clinton VIPs)."
Why did Hillary Clinton lose? Not because of Comey. She lost because exit polls showed that
54 percent of voters believe she is "corrupt."
To the elites in Washington, her corruption was apparently no big deal, at least not compared
with their horror at the prospect of a Trump presidency. But Americans correctly saw her corruption
as corrosive to our democracy.
This election was a popular repudiation of Clinton's corruption and deceit - and she owns that.
But there is one person besides herself whom she can blame: President Obama. Because while Clinton
may have lost to Donald Trump, it was Obama who created him.
Looks like Secretary of State shortlist is dominated by neocons. A couple of candidates would make
Hillary Clinton proud... the head of CIA is an informal head of shadow government and as such
is also very important. Allen Dulles example should still be remembered by all presidents, if
they do not want to repeat the face of JFK ....
(There are 5 women on the list, including Sarah Palin & NH's Kelly Ayotte, demonstrating that
ilsm has some influence.
For Sec/Defense - seriously. Alternatively for UN Ambassador. Right.)
Thomas Barrack Jr. Founder, chairman and executive chairman of Colony Capital; private equity
and real estate investor
Jeb Hensarling Representative from Texas and chairman of the House Financial Services Committee
Steven Mnuchin Former Goldman Sachs executive and Mr. Trump's campaign finance chairman
Tim Pawlenty Former Minnesota governor
Defense Secretary
Kelly Ayotte Departing senator from New Hampshire and member of the Senate Armed Services
Committee
Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn Former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (he would need
a waiver from Congress because of a seven-year rule for retired officers)
Stephen J. Hadley National security adviser under George W. Bush
Jon Kyl Former senator from Arizona
Jeff Sessions Senator from Alabama who is a prominent immigration opponent
Attorney General
Chris Christie New Jersey governor
Rudolph W. Giuliani Former New York mayor
Jeff Sessions Senator from Alabama
Interior Secretary
Jan Brewer Former Arizona governor
Robert E. Grady Gryphon Investors partner
Harold G. Hamm Chief executive of Continental Resources, an oil and gas company
Forrest Lucas President of Lucas Oil Products, which manufactures automotive lubricants, additives
and greases
Sarah Palin Former Alaska governor
Agriculture Secretary
Sam Brownback Kansas governor
Chuck Conner Chief executive officer of the National Council of Farmer Cooperatives
Sid Miller Texas agricultural commissioner
Sonny Perdue Former Georgia governor
Commerce Secretary
Chris Christie New Jersey governor
Dan DiMicco Former chief executive of Nucor Corporation, a steel production company
Lewis M. Eisenberg Private equity chief for Granite Capital International Group
Labor Secretary
Victoria A. Lipnic Equal Employment Opportunity commissioner and work force policy counsel
to the House Committee on Education and the Workforce
Health and Human Services Secretary
Dr. Ben Carson Former neurosurgeon and 2016 presidential candidate
Mike Huckabee Former Arkansas governor and 2016 presidential candidate
Bobby Jindal Former Louisiana governor who served as secretary of the Louisiana Department
of Health and Hospitals
Rick Scott Florida governor and former chief executive of a large hospital chain
Energy Secretary
James L. Connaughton Chief executive of Nautilus Data Technologies and former environmental
adviser to President George W. Bush
Robert E. Grady Gryphon Investors partner
Harold G. Hamm Chief executive of Continental Resources, an oil and gas company
Education Secretary
Dr. Ben Carson Former neurosurgeon and 2016 presidential candidate
Williamson M. Evers Education expert at the Hoover Institution, a think tank
Secretary of Veterans Affairs
Jeff Miller Retired chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee
Homeland Security Secretary
Joe Arpaio Departing sheriff of Maricopa County, Ariz.
David A. Clarke Jr. Milwaukee County sheriff
Michael McCaul Representative from Texas and chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee
Jeff Sessions Senator from Alabama
White House Chief of Staff
Stephen K. Bannon Editor of Breitbart News and chairman of Mr. Trump's campaign
Reince Priebus Chairman of the Republican National Committee
E.P.A. Administrator
Myron Ebell A director at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and a prominent climate change
skeptic
Robert E. Grady Gryphon Investors partner who was involved in drafting the Clean Air Act Amendments
of 1990
Jeffrey R. Holmstead Lawyer with Bracewell L.L.P. and former deputy E.P.A. administrator in
the George W. Bush administration
U.S. Trade Representative
Dan DiMicco Former chief executive of Nucor Corporation, a steel production company, and
a critic of Chinese trade practices
U.N. Ambassador
Kelly Ayotte Departing senator from New Hampshire and member of the Senate Armed Services
Committee
Richard Grenell Former spokesman for the United States ambassador to the United Nations during
the George W. Bush administration
CIA Director / Director of National Intelligence
Michael T. Flynn Former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency
Peter Hoekstra Former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee
Mike Rogers Former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee
Frances Townsend Former homeland security adviser under George W. Bush
National Security Adviser
Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn Former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency
Trump's Hires Will Set Course of His Presidency
http://nyti.ms/2eNUfRg
NYT - MARK LANDLER =- Nov 12
WASHINGTON - "Busy day planned in New York," President-elect Donald J. Trump said on Twitter
on Friday morning, two days after his astonishing victory. "Will soon be making some very important
decisions on the people who will be running our government!"
If anything, that understates the gravity of the personnel choices Mr. Trump and his transition
team are weighing.
Rarely in the history of the American presidency has the exercise of choosing people to fill
jobs had such a far-reaching impact on the nature and priorities of an incoming administration.
Unlike most new presidents, Mr. Trump comes into office with no elective-office experience, no
coherent political agenda and no bulging binder of policy proposals. And he has left a trail of
inflammatory, often contradictory, statements on issues from immigration and race to terrorism
and geopolitics.
In such a chaotic environment, serving a president who is in many ways a tabula rasa, the appointees
to key White House jobs like chief of staff and cabinet posts like secretary of state, defense
secretary and Treasury secretary could wield outsize influence. Their selection will help determine
whether the Trump administration governs like the firebrand Mr. Trump was on the campaign trail
or the pragmatist he often appears to be behind closed doors. ...
"... Hillary lost not merely because she misread the "real" people, she decided to run a very divisive
and nasty negative campaign, which has fueled the violence ever since. According to WikiLeaks emails
from campaign John Podesta, Clinton colluded with the DNC and the media to raise what they thought would
be the extreme right among Republicans to then make her the middle of the road to hide her agenda. ..."
"... Clinton called this her "pied piper" strategy, that intentionally cultivated extreme right-wing
presidential candidates and that would turn the Republicans away from their more moderate candidates.
..."
"... The Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee along with mainstream media all called
for using far-right candidates "as a cudgel to move the more established candidates further to the right."
Clinton's camp insisted that Trump should be "elevated" to "leaders of the pack" and media outlets should
be told to "take them seriously." ..."
"... The Clinton strategy was all about manipulating the Republicans to nominate the worst candidate
Clinton called for forcing "all Republican candidates to lock themselves into extreme conservative positions
that will hurt them in a general election." ..."
"... It was not Putin trying to rig the elections, it was Hillary. Clinton saw the Republican field
as crowded and she viewed as "positive" for her. "Many of the lesser known can serve as a cudgel to
move the more established candidates further to the right." Clinton then took the strategic position
saying "we don't want to marginalize the more extreme candidates, but make them more 'Pied Piper' candidates
who actually represent the mainstream of the Republican Party." ..."
"... "We need to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are leaders of the pack and
tell the press to them seriously." ..."
"... This is by far the WORST campaign in history and it was all orchestrated by Hillary to be intentionally
divisive for the nation all to win the presidency at all costs. She has torched the constitution and
the country. ..."
"... Any Democrat who is not angry at this is clearly just a biased fool. Wake up and smell the
roses. You just got what you deserve. ..."
"... It's one thing to be ruthless & evil. It's another to be ruthless, evil and stupid. Brexit
should have been a huge eye-opener for the elites that they should seek to field two establishment candidates
as usual at any cost rather than risk elevating an outsider. ..."
"... It's incredibly fortunate they were too dumb to realise that the former middle class and independents
cognisant of NWO would create huge momentum for exactly those type of candidates & that this was absolutely
the worst time in history to attempt that strategy. Lack of competition at the top of the food chain
has made her ilk slow and out of touch. Evolution is a bitch. ..."
"... Personally, I find this hilarious. She schemes and connives to push forward the most "unelectable"
republican, and that republican wins mostly because she vastly underestimates the dislike of Americans
for her. ..."
"... Excellent article. Truly, the definition of "hubris" was Hillary during this election. ..."
"... What she underestimated was the ability for most to see thru her true contempt of people. That's
the bottom line of Hillary- she just sees herself as royalty, and we just got tired of seeing it again
and again. ..."
"... from the tone of the leaked emails it is clear they realized she was the worst candidate ever.
..."
"... This mirrors her naive approach to foreign policy of "create a controlled burn (Arab spring)
and get rid of your enemy". Without realizing someone would move in to the void left afterwards. (I
need to drink more - In whiskey, veritas). Or as in this case, the wind changes direction. ..."
"... It is interesting that there is no mention of any strategy to promote her ideas or positive
qualities. In fact the "muddy the waters" statement shows they knew scandals would come up and they'd
have to play defense. ..."
"... Remember how Hitlery called US working white men just a deplorable POS. Furthermore, her allies
could easily falsify the voter counting process but again they were so arrogant and self confident that
they fucked up themselves. ..."
"... People, stop be so naive and stupid. The life is not fair to losers since only winners always
write the history! ..."
"... Finally, if Trump will follow an advice to be good to everybody being a unifier then he will
be destroyed. This is why he must continue the strategy that brought his the victory. One never can
win follow a defensive strategy! ..."
"... unfortunately, the MSM is continuing without a break in cadence their lock-step call for bipartisan!
compromise! and let's be "REASONABLE" . DAMMIT. The time for reasonable is past. ..."
"... If Trump puts in a lot of NEOCON insiders in his cabinet I say we need to hammer it again home
that this is our last chance. If trump doesn't deliver the JOBS and Economic turnaround then the conservatives
are GONE. We won't get another chance. ..."
Meanwhile, Hillary lost not merely because she misread the "real" people, she decided to run
a very divisive and nasty negative campaign, which has fueled the violence ever since. According
to WikiLeaks emails from campaign John Podesta, Clinton colluded with the DNC and the media to raise
what they thought would be the extreme right among Republicans to then make her the middle of the
road to hide her agenda.
... ... ...
Clinton called this her "pied piper" strategy, that intentionally cultivated extreme right-wing
presidential candidates and that would turn the Republicans away from their more moderate candidates.
This enlisted mainstream media who then focused to Trump and raise him above all others assuming
that would help Hillary for who would vote for Trump. This was a deliberate strategy all designed
to propel Hillary to the White House.
The Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee along with mainstream media all called
for using far-right candidates "as a cudgel to move the more established candidates further to the
right." Clinton's camp insisted that Trump should be "elevated" to "leaders of the pack" and media
outlets should be told to "take them seriously."
If we look back on April 23, 2015, just two
weeks after Hillary Clinton officially declared her presidential campaign, her staff sent out a message
on straregy to manipulate the Republicans into selecting the worse candidate. They included this
attachment a "memo for the DNC discussion."
The memo was addressed to the Democratic National Committee and stated bluntly, "the strategy
and goals a potential Hillary Clinton presidential campaign would have regarding the 2016 Republican
presidential field." Here we find that the real conspiracy was Clinton manipulating the Republicans.
"Clearly most of what is contained in this memo is work the DNC is already doing. This exercise is
intended to put those ideas to paper."
"Our hope is that the goal of a potential HRC campaign and the DNC would be one-in-the-same:
to make whomever the Republicans nominate unpalatable to a majority of the electorate."
The Clinton strategy was all about manipulating the Republicans to nominate the worst candidate
Clinton called for forcing "all Republican candidates to lock themselves into extreme conservative
positions that will hurt them in a general election."
It was not Putin trying to rig the elections,
it was Hillary. Clinton saw the Republican field as crowded and she viewed as "positive" for her.
"Many of the lesser known can serve as a cudgel to move the more established candidates further to
the right." Clinton then took the strategic position saying "we don't want to marginalize the more
extreme candidates, but make them more 'Pied Piper' candidates who actually represent the mainstream
of the Republican Party."
Her manipulative strategy was to have the press build up Donald Trump, Sen. Ted Cruz and Ben Carson.
"We need to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are leaders of the pack and tell
the press to them seriously."
This conspiracy has emerged from the Podesta emails. It was Clinton conspiring with mainstream
media to elevate Trump and then tear him down. We have to now look at all the media who endorsed
Hillary as simply corrupt. Simultaneously, Hillary said that Bernie had to be ground down to the
pulp. Further leaked emails showed how the Democratic National Committee sabotaged Sanders' presidential
campaign. It was Hillary manipulating the entire media for her personal gain. She obviously did not
want a fair election because she was too corrupt.
What is very clear putting all the emails together, the rise of Donald Trump was orchestrated
by Hillary herself conspiring with mainstream media, and they they sought to burn him to the ground.
Their strategy backfired and now this is why she has not come out to to speak against the violence
she has manipulated and inspired.
This is by far the WORST campaign in history and it was all orchestrated by Hillary to be
intentionally divisive for the nation all to win the presidency at all costs. She has torched the
constitution and the country. No wonder Hillary could not go to the stage to thank her supporters.
She never counted on them and saw the people as fools. The entire strategy was to take the White
House with a manipulation of the entire election process. Just unbelievable. Any Democrat who
is not angry at this is clearly just a biased fool. Wake up and smell the roses. You just got what
you deserve.
Notveryamused -> Charles Wilson •Nov 12, 2016 9:12 PM
It's one thing to be ruthless & evil. It's another to be ruthless, evil and stupid. Brexit
should have been a huge eye-opener for the elites that they should seek to field two establishment
candidates as usual at any cost rather than risk elevating an outsider.
It's incredibly fortunate they were too dumb to realise that the former middle class and
independents cognisant of NWO would create huge momentum for exactly those type of candidates
& that this was absolutely the worst time in history to attempt that strategy. Lack of competition
at the top of the food chain has made her ilk slow and out of touch. Evolution is a bitch.
Personally, I find this hilarious. She schemes and connives to push forward the most "unelectable"
republican, and that republican wins mostly because she vastly underestimates the dislike of Americans
for her.
Could there be a more fitting slap in the face to someone of such enormous hubris and arrogance?
jcaz -> Automatic Choke •Nov 12, 2016 9:47 PM
Excellent article. Truly, the definition of "hubris" was Hillary during this election.
What she underestimated was the ability for most to see thru her true contempt of people.
That's the bottom line of Hillary- she just sees herself as royalty, and we just got tired of
seeing it again and again.
MalteseFalcon -> espirit •Nov 12, 2016 10:47 PM
Hillary Rodent fashions herself as some kind of leader who is a Christian (Methodist) and loves
America ("Need to unify!!"). So let the Rodent get on TV and tell these bought and paid for rioters
to stop. "Not in my name" should be the Rodent's plea.
<crickets>
She's a fraud.
Joe Davola -> MalteseFalcon •Nov 12, 2016 11:44 PM
It truly was the worst campaign in history (topping Mondale 84). If only they'd put half the
effort into their campaign that they put into dirty tricks. Then again, from the tone of the
leaked emails it is clear they realized she was the worst candidate ever.
They were so busy playing it like a parlor game, they forgot to actually provide real reasons
to vote for her - beyond it was her turn.
This mirrors her naive approach to foreign policy of "create a controlled burn (Arab spring)
and get rid of your enemy". Without realizing someone would move in to the void left afterwards.
(I need to drink more - In whiskey, veritas). Or as in this case, the wind changes direction.
FreedomGuy -> Joe Davola •Nov 13, 2016 12:44 AM
It is interesting that there is no mention of any strategy to promote her ideas or positive
qualities. In fact the "muddy the waters" statement shows they knew scandals would come up and
they'd have to play defense.
It is never about how good they are. It is about how bad you/the other side is.
caconhma -> jcaz •Nov 12, 2016 10:31 PM
War is war. The goal is to win by destroying an opponent. Therefore, any actions and any strategy
leading to a victory are totally justified!
Consequently, one cannot blame Hitlery for her actions. Hitlery has done the right things but
Jewish arrogance that guided and executed her election campaign negated and destroyed all advantages
she had. Remember how Hitlery called US working white men just a deplorable POS. Furthermore,
her allies could easily falsify the voter counting process but again they were so arrogant and
self confident that they fucked up themselves.
People, stop be so naive and stupid. The life is not fair to losers since only winners always
write the history!
Finally, if Trump will follow an advice to be good to everybody being a unifier then he
will be destroyed. This is why he must continue the strategy that brought his the victory. One
never can win follow a defensive strategy!
hardmedicine -> caconhma •Nov 13, 2016 3:46 AM
unfortunately, the MSM is continuing without a break in cadence their lock-step call for
bipartisan! compromise! and let's be "REASONABLE" . DAMMIT. The time for reasonable is past.
If Trump puts in a lot of NEOCON insiders in his cabinet I say we need to
hammer it again home that this is our last chance. If trump doesn't deliver the JOBS and Economic
turnaround then the conservatives are GONE. We won't get another chance.
Grosvenor Pkwy -> Chris Dakota •Nov 13, 2016 6:29 AM
Long-term drug and alcohol abuse slowly destroys the brain. She was definitely smarter 20 years
ago. "first we have to bring them to heel..."
"... Take over the Democratic Party and return it to the people. They have failed us miserably. ..."
"... Fire all pundits, predictors, pollsters and anyone else in the media who had a narrative they wouldn't let go of and refused to listen to or acknowledge what was really going on. Those same bloviators will now tell us we must "heal the divide" and "come together." ..."
"... let those of us who know the score lead the way in stopping the meanness and the madness that's about to begin. ..."
"... Everyone must stop saying they are "stunned" and "shocked". What you mean to say is that you were in a bubble and weren't paying attention to your fellow Americans and their despair. ..."
"... You live in a country where a majority of its citizens have said they believe there's climate change, they believe women should be paid the same as men, they want a debt-free college education, they don't want us invading countries, they want a raise in the minimum wage and they want a single-payer true universal health care system. None of that has changed. ..."
"... Finally, speaking of Saturday Night Live sketches, we can't wait to see how the liberal "comedy" show - which just like the NYT existed in a world of its own throughout the presidential campaign - spins the election results tonight. ..."
Then there was ultraliberal Michael Moore, who in a
facebook post
urged to "Fire all pundits, predictors, pollsters and anyone else in the media who had a narrative
they wouldn't let go of and refused to listen to or acknowledge what was really going on. Those same
bloviators will now tell us we must "heal the divide" and "come together." They will pull more hooey
like that out of their ass in the days to come. Turn them off."
Morning After To-Do List:
1. Take over the Democratic Party and return it to the people. They have failed us miserably.
2. Fire all pundits, predictors, pollsters and anyone else in the media who had a narrative
they wouldn't let go of and refused to listen to or acknowledge what was really going on. Those
same bloviators will now tell us we must "heal the divide" and "come together." They will pull
more hooey like that out of their ass in the days to come. Turn them off.
3. Any Democratic member of Congress who didn't wake up this morning ready to fight, resist
and obstruct in the way Republicans did against President Obama every day for eight full years
must step out of the way and let those of us who know the score lead the way in stopping the meanness
and the madness that's about to begin.
4. Everyone must stop saying they are "stunned" and "shocked". What you mean to say is that
you were in a bubble and weren't paying attention to your fellow Americans and their despair.
YEARS of being neglected by both parties, the anger and the need for revenge against the system
only grew. Along came a TV star they liked whose plan was to destroy both parties and tell them
all "You're fired!" Trump's victory is no surprise. He was never a joke. Treating him as one only
strengthened him. He is both a creature and a creation of the media and the media will never own
that.
5. You must say this sentence to everyone you meet today: "HILLARY CLINTON WON THE POPULAR
VOTE!" The MAJORITY of our fellow Americans preferred Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump. Period.
Fact. If you woke up this morning thinking you live in an effed-up country, you don't. The majority
of your fellow Americans wanted Hillary, not Trump. The only reason he's president is because
of an arcane, insane 18th-century idea called the Electoral College. Until we change that, we'll
continue to have presidents we didn't elect and didn't want. You live in a country where a majority
of its citizens have said they believe there's climate change, they believe women should be paid
the same as men, they want a debt-free college education, they don't want us invading countries,
they want a raise in the minimum wage and they want a single-payer true universal health care
system. None of that has changed. We live in a country where the majority agree with the "liberal"
position. We just lack the liberal leadership to make that happen (see: #1 above).
* * *
There were countless more such examples of prominent liberals accusing the press of bias and propaganda
long after the fact, even as the press itself refuses to admit any guilt, while itself blaming others,
and so the circle continues to turn, and nothing changes in a world in which nobody knows what happens
next now that the status quo has been crushed by the people.
Finally, speaking of Saturday Night Live sketches, we can't wait to see how the liberal "comedy"
show - which just like the NYT existed in a world of its own throughout the presidential campaign
- spins the election results tonight.
Sometimes who lost is more important than who won. Let's review who lost the
election:
1. Let's start with the Corporatocracy, which expected to once again wield
unlimited influence by funding political campaigns with millions of dollars in
contributions and speaking fees.
2. A biased mainstream media. My mom-in-law was watching CBS all night, so that's what
we watched. All the pundits/anchors spoke in the hushed tones of a funeral. For two hours,
the only images of campaign workers shown were the sad faces of Clinton supporters; not one
image of jubilant Trump supporters was broadcast until Trump gave his acceptance speech.
When one of the talking heads noted that Hillary never generated the enthusiasm of the
Sanders or Trump campaigns, his comment was followed by a stony silence. That he had given
voice to a self-evident truth was not welcome.
3. Mainstream punditry: they got it wrong from the start and remained close-minded and
arrogant in their postured superiority.
The punditry applied a double standard to Trump and Hillary. Trump's speeches and
ethically questionable history were judged by moral standards, and he was declared unfit.
Hillary's actions, on the other hand, were judged by strictly legalistic standards:
well, you can't indict her, so she's fit for office.
Dear punditry: you can't use double standards to promote your biases and retain any
shred of credibility.
4. Pollsters. Having rigged the polls via over-sampling and under-sampling, they were
laughably wrong. Here is a typical headline from election night, from the New York Times:
Trump Takes Florida, Closing In on a Stunning Upset.
Only the pollsters and the MSM were stunned.
5. Political parties. As my friend G.F.B. observed, both parties ran 20th century
campaigns in the 21st century. Both parties lost for this reason; both are hopelessly out
of touch with a rapidly changing America.
Democrats upset with losing should look at their party's system of Super-Delegates that
squelched Bernie Sander's bid.
6. Warmongers. Many Americans are sick and tired of interventionist, globalist
warmongering. The only possible way they could register their opposition to warmongering
was to vote for Trump.
7. Pay-to-Play Grifters. Let the investigations, indictments, prosecutions and
convictions begin as soon as Trump is sworn in.
8. Neoliberals. Globalization boils down to freeing mobile capital to rove the globe for
opportunities to strip-mine cheap resources, assets and labor and then move on, leaving
ruined communities behind.
9. Bonus loser: Fake Progressives. Fake Progressives are perfectly fine with
soaring inequality and corrupt governance, as long as everyone's public utterances are
politically correct. So the oppressor class is acceptable as long as they speak
respectfully while stepping on your neck.
Real Progressives see jobs and community as solutions, not welfare and central planning.
Real Progressives see the eradication of warmongering Imperial pretensions and corrupt
pay-to-play grifting as the essential projects of liberty and democracy.
By John Cassidy conviniently forget that Hillary was/is a neocon warmonger, perfectly
cable of unleashing WWIII. Instead he pushes "Comey did it" bogeyman"...
EMichael and im1dc would rather have their head in the sand. We were told confidently by Clinton
surrogates like Krugman and DeLong that Brexit wouldn't happen again.
Since Tuesday night, there has been a lot of handwringing about how the media, with all its fancy
analytics, failed to foresee Donald Trump's victory. The Times alone has published three articles
on this theme, one of which ran under the headline "How Data Failed Us in Calling an Election." On
social media, Trump supporters have been mercilessly haranguing the press for getting it wrong.
Clearly, this was a real issue. It's safe to say that most journalists, myself included, were
surprised by Tuesday's outcome. That fact should be acknowledged. But journalists weren't the only
ones who were shocked. As late as Tuesday evening, even a senior adviser to Trump was telling the
press that "it will take a miracle for us to win."
It also shouldn't be forgotten that, in terms of the popular vote, Clinton didn't lose on Tuesday.
As of 6:30 p.m. Eastern Time on Friday, a tally by CNN showed that Hillary Clinton had received 60,617,062
votes, while Trump got 60,118,567. The margin in her favor-now at 498,495-is likely to grow as the
remaining votes are counted in California. At the end of the day, Clinton may end up ahead by two
per cent of the total votes cast. If the United States had a direct system of voting, Clinton would
have been the one at the White House on Thursday meeting with President Obama. But, of course, Trump
won the Electoral College. If the final count in Michigan remains in his favor, Trump will end up
with three hundred and six Electoral College votes, to Clinton's two hundred and twenty-six.
Still, as journalists and commentators, we all knew the rules of the game: if Trump got to two
hundred and seventy votes in the Electoral College, he'd be President. Why did so few observers predict
he'd do it? Many Trump supporters insist it was East Coast insularity and ideological bias, and many
in the media are now ready to believe that. To be sure, it's easy to get sucked into the media bubble.
But there are also strong professional incentives for journalists to get things right. Why did that
prove so difficult this year?
It wasn't because journalists weren't legging it to Michigan or Wisconsin or West Virginia. In
this magazine alone, a number of writers-including Larissa MacFarquhar, Evan Osnos, George Packer,
and George Saunders-published long, reported pieces about the Trump phenomenon in different parts
of the country. Many other journalists spent a lot of time talking with Trump supporters. I'd point
you to the work of ProPublica's Alec MacGillis and the photojournalist Chris Arnade, but they were
just two among many. So many, in fact, that some Clinton supporters, such as Eric Boehlert, of Media
Matters, regularly complained about it on social media.
To the extent that there was a failure, it was a failure of analysis, rather than of observation
and reporting. And when you talk about how the media analyzed this election, you can't avoid the
polls, the forecasting models, and the organizing frames-particularly demographics-that people used
to interpret the incoming data.
It was clear from early in the race that Trump's electoral strategy was based on appealing
to working-class whites, particularly in the Midwest. The question all along was whether, in the
increasingly diverse America of 2016, there were enough alienated working-class whites to propel
Trump to victory.
Some analysts did suggest that there might be. Immediately after the 2012 election, Sean Trende,
of Real Clear Politics, pointed out that one of the main reasons for Mitt Romney's defeat was that
millions of white voters stayed home. Earlier this year, during the Republican primaries, Trende
returned to the same theme, writing, "The candidate who actually fits the profile of a 'missing white
voter' candidate is Donald Trump."
The Times' Nate Cohn was another who took Trump's strategy seriously. In June, pointing to
a new analysis of Census Bureau data and voter-registration files, Cohn wrote, "a growing body of
evidence suggests that there is still a path, albeit a narrow one, for Mr. Trump to win without gains
among nonwhite voters." As recently as Sunday, Cohn repeated this point, noting that Trump's "strength
among the white working class gives him a real chance at victory, a possibility that many discounted
as recently as the summer."
Among analysts and political demographers, however, the near-consensus of opinion was that Trump
wouldn't be able to turn back history. Back in March, I interviewed Ruy Teixeira, the co-author of
an influential 2004 book, "The Emerging Democratic Majority," which highlighted the growing number
of minority voters across the country, particularly Hispanics. Drawing on his latest data, Teixeira,
who is a senior fellow at the Century Foundation and the Center for American Progress, offered some
estimates of how many more white working-class voters Trump would need to turn out to flip states
like Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin. "It's not crazy," he said. "But I think it would be very hard
to pull off."
Trump managed it, though. He enjoyed a thirty-nine-point advantage among whites without college
degrees, according to the network exit poll, compared to the twenty-six-point advantage Romney saw
in 2012. "What totally tanked the Democrats was the massive shift in the white non-college vote against
them, particularly in some of the swing states," Teixeira told me by telephone on Thursday. "And
that by itself is really enough to explain the outcome."
In the lead-up to the election, the possibility of Clinton winning the popular vote while losing
the Electoral College was well understood but, in hindsight, not taken seriously enough. In mid-September,
David Wasserman, an analyst at the Cook Political Report, laid out a scenario in which turnout among
white non-college voters surged and turnout among some parts of the Democratic coalition, particularly
African-Americans, fell. "Clinton would carry the popular vote by 1.5 percentage points," Wasserman
wrote. "However, Trump would win the Electoral College with 280 votes by holding all 24 Romney states
and flipping Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Iowa and Maine's 2nd Congressional District."
In the days and weeks leading up to the election, FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver also considered
the possibility of Clinton winning the popular vote and losing the election. But he, Wasserman, and
others who looked at the matter believed this was an unlikely outcome. On Tuesday, the FiveThirtyEight
forecasting model estimated that the probability of such a scenario happening was about one in ten.
There was a straightforward reason for all the skepticism about Trump's chances: when you looked
at the state-level polling, it looked like Clinton's "blue wall" was holding. Take Wisconsin, which
turned out to be a state that Trump won. The Huffington Post's polling database lists the results
of more than thirty polls that were taken in the Badger State since June: Trump didn't lead in any
of them. Three of the final four surveys showed Clinton ahead by six points or more, and the Huffpollster
poll average put her lead at 6.3 percentage points. Trump carried the state by one point. In other
key states, the pattern was similar. The final Huffington Post poll averages showed Trump losing
by nearly six points in Michigan, and by four points in Pennsylvania.
In a public statement issued on Wednesday, the American Association for Public Opinion Research
said bluntly, "The polls clearly got it wrong this time." The organization announced that it had
already put together a panel of "survey research and election polling experts" tasked with finding
some answers. Several possible explanations have already been floated.
First, it's possible there was a late swing to Trump among undecided voters, which the state polls,
in particular, failed to pick up. Another possibility is that some Trump voters didn't tell the pollsters
about their preferences-the "shy Trump supporter" hypothesis.
A third theory, which I suspect may be the right one, is that a lot of Trump voters refused
to answer the pollsters' calls in the first place, because they regarded them as part of the same
media-political establishment that Trump was out railing against on the campaign trail. Something
like this appears to have happened in Britain earlier this year, during the run-up to the Brexit
referendum. Turnout wound up being considerably higher than expected among lower-income voters in
the north of England, particularly elderly ones, and that swung the result.
Whatever went wrong with the polls in this country, they inevitably colored perceptions. "The
reason it surprised me was because, like everyone else, I was taken in by those pesky polls," Teixeira
told me. "It didn't look like, by and large, that he was running up as big a margin as he needed
among non-college whites."
The prediction models didn't help things. On Tuesday morning, FiveThirtyEight's "polls-only"
prediction model put the probability of Clinton winning the presidency at 71.4 per cent. And that
figure was perhaps the most conservative one. The Times' Upshot model said Clinton had an eighty-five
per cent chance of winning, the Huffington Post's figure was ninety-eight per cent, and the Princeton
Election Consortium's estimate was ninety-nine per cent.
These numbers had a big influence on how many people, including journalists and political professionals,
looked at the election. Plowing through all the new polls, or even keeping up with all the state
and national poll averages, can be a time-consuming process. It's much easier to click on the latest
update from the model of your choice. When you see it registering the chances of the election going
a certain way at ninety per cent, or ninety-five per cent, it's easy to dismiss the other outcome
as a live possibility-particularly if you haven't been schooled in how to think in probabilistic
terms, which many people haven't.
The problem with models is that they rely so much on the polls. Essentially, they aggregate
poll numbers and use some simulation software to covert them into unidimensional probabilistic forecasts.
The details are complicated, and each model is different, but the bottom line is straightforward:
when the polls are fairly accurate-as they were in 2008 and 2012-the models look good. When the polls
are off, so are the models.
Silver, to his credit, pointed this out numerous times before the election. His model also allowed
for the possibility that errors in the state polls were likely to be correlated-i.e., if the polls
in Wisconsin got it wrong, then most likely the Michigan polls would get it wrong, too. This was
a big reason why FiveThirtyEight's model consistently gave Trump a better chance of winning than
other models did. But the fact remains that FiveThirtyEight, like almost everyone else, got the result
wrong.
I got it wrong, too. Unlike in 2012, I didn't make any explicit predictions this year. But based
on the polls and poll averages-I didn't look at the models much-I largely accepted the conventional
wisdom that Clinton was running ahead of Trump and had an enduring advantage in the Electoral College.
In mid-October, after the "Access Hollywood" tape emerged, I suggested that Trump was done.
Clearly, he wasn't. In retrospect, the F.B.I. Director James Comey's intervention ten days before
the election-telling Congress that his agency was taking another look at e-mails related to Clinton's
private server-may have proved decisive. The news seems to have shifted the national polls against
Clinton by at least a couple of points, and some of the state polls-in Ohio, Florida, North Carolina,
and other places-also moved sharply in Trump's direction. Without any doubt, it energized Republicans
and demoralized Democrats.
One thing we know for sure, however, is that in mid-October, even some of the indicators that
the Trump campaign relied on were sending out alarm signals. "Flash back three weeks, to October
18," Bloomberg News's Joshua Green and Sasha Issenberg reported on Thursday. "The Trump campaign's
internal election simulator, the 'Battleground Optimizer Path to Victory,' showed Trump with a 7.8
percent chance of winning. That's because his own model had him trailing in most of the states that
would decide the election, including the pivotal state of Florida."
Of course, neither the Battleground Optimizer Path to Victory software nor I knew that fate, in
the form of Comey, was about to take a hand.
"... What happened? Why is this clique's triumphant return to power erupting in massive scandal this time around? Probably because we are living in an era during which much that was mysterious is suddenly becoming clear. Probably because Trump's "silent majority" suddenly saw before them someone they had been waiting for for a long time – a man ready to defend their interests. ..."
"... Perhaps also it is because the middle class is choking on its growing exasperation with the "elite caste" occupying its native country. And it finally became clear to the sober-minded American patriots in law enforcement that the return to power of the people responsible for the current global chaos could be a big threat to the US and rest of the world. Because, in the end, everyone has children and no one wants a new world war. ..."
Today Trump represents an entirely new party made up of half of the American electorate, and they
are ready for action. And whatever the eventual political structure of this new model, this is what
is shaping America's present reality. Moreover, this does not seem like such a unique situation.
It rather appears to be the final chapter of some ancient story, in which the convoluted plotlines
finally take shape and find resolution.
The circumstances are increasingly reminiscent of 1860, when Lincoln's election so enraged the
South that those states began agitating for secession. Trump is today symbolic of a very real American
tradition that during
the Civil War (1860-1865) ran headlong into American revolutionary liberalism for the first time.
Right up until World War I traditional American conservatism wore the guise of "isolationism."
Prior to WWII it was known as "non-interventionism." Afterward, that movement attempted to use
Sen. Joseph
McCarthy to battle the left-liberal stranglehold. And in the 1960s it became the primary target
of the "counter-cultural revolution."
Its last bastion was
Richard
Nixon , whose fall was the result of an unprecedented attack from the left-liberal press in 1974.
And this is perhaps the example against which we should compare the present-day Trump and his current
fight.
And by the way, the crimes of Hillary Clinton, who has failed to protect state secrets and has
repeatedly been caught lying under oath, clearly outweigh the notorious Watergate scandal that led
to Nixon's forced resignation under threat of impeachment. But the liberal American media remains
silent, as if nothing has happened.
By all indications it is clear that we are standing before a truly epochal moment. But before
turning to the future that might await us, let's take a quick glance at the history of conflict between
revolutionary liberalism and traditional white conservatism in the US.
***
Immediately after WWII, an attack on two fronts was launched by the party of "expansionism" (we'll
call it that). The Soviet Union and Communism were designated the number one enemy. Enemy number
two (with less hype) was traditional American conservatism. The war against traditional "Americanism"
was waged by several intellectual fringe groups simultaneously.
The country's cultural and intellectual life was under the absolute control of a group known as
the " New York
Intellectuals ." Literary criticism as well as all other aspects of the nation's literary life
was in the hands of this small group of literary curators who had emerged from the milieu of a Trotskyist-communist
magazine known as the
Partisan Review (PR). No one could become a professional writer in the America of the 1950s and
1960s without being carefully screened by this sect.
The foundational tenets of American political philosophy and sociology were composed by militants
from the Frankfurt School
, which had been established during the interwar period in Weimar Germany and which moved to
the US after the National Socialists took power. Here, retraining their sights from communist to
liberal, they set out to design a "theory of totalitarianism" in addition to their concept of an
"authoritarian personality" – both hostile to "democracy."
The "New York Intellectuals" and representatives of the Frankfurt School became friends, and
Hannah Arendt , for example, was an
authoritative representative of both sects. This is where future neocons (Norman Podhoretz, Eliot
A. Cohen, and Irving Kristol) gained their experience. The former leader of the Trotskyist Fourth
International and godfather of the neocons,
Max Shachtman , held a place
of honor in the "family of intellectuals."
The anthropological school of Franz Boas and Freudianism reigned over the worlds of psychology
and sociology at that time. The Boasian approach in psychology argued that genetic, national, and
racial differences between individuals were of no importance (thus the concepts of "national culture"
and "national community" were meaningless).
Psychoanalysis also became fashionable, which primarily aimed to supplant traditional church institutions
and become a type of quasi-religion for the middle class.
The common denominator linking all these movements was anti-fascism. Did something look fishy
in this? But the problem was that the traditional values of the nation, state, and family were all
labeled "fascist." From this standpoint, any white Christian man aware of his cultural and national
identity was potentially a "fascist."
Kevin MacDonald, a professor of psychology at California State University, analyzed in detail
the seizure of America's cultural, political, and mental landscape by these "liberal sects" in his
brilliant book The Culture
of Critique , writing:
"The New York Intellectuals, for example, developed ties with elite universities, particularly
Harvard, Columbia, the University of Chicago, and the University of California-Berkeley, while
psychoanalysis and anthropology became well entrenched throughout academia.
"The moral and intellectual elite established by these movements dominated intellectual
discourse during a critical period after World War II and leading into the countercultural revolution
of the 1960s."
It was precisely this intellectual milieu that spawned the countercultural revolution of the 1960s.
Riding the wave of these sentiments, the new
Immigration and Nationality Act was passed in 1965, encouraging this phenomenon and facilitating
the integration of immigrants into US society. The architects of the law wanted to use the celebrated
melting pot to "dilute" the "potentially fascist" descendants of European immigrants by making use
of new ethno-cultural elements.
The 60s revolution opened the door to the American political establishment to representatives
from both wings of the expansionist "party" – the neo-liberals and the neo-conservatives.
Besieged by the left-liberal press in 1974, Richard Nixon resigned under threat of impeachment.
In the same year the US Congress passed the
Jackson-Vanik
Amendment (drafted by Richard
Perle ), which emerged as a symbol of the country's "new political agenda" – economic war against
the Soviet Union using sanctions and boycotts.
At that same time the "hippie generation" was joining the Democratic Party on the coattails of
Senator George McGovern's campaign . And that was when Bill Clinton's smiling countenance first
emerged on the US political horizon.
And the future neo-conservatives (at that time still disciples of the Democratic hawk Henry "Scoop"
Jackson) began to slowly edge in the direction of the Republicans.
In 1976, Mr. Rumsfeld and his fellow neo-conservatives resurrected the
Committee
on the Present Danger , an inter-party club for political hawks whose goal became the launch
of an all-out propaganda war against the USSR.
Former Trotskyists and followers of Max Shachtman (Kristol, Podhoretz, and Jeane Kirkpatrick)
and advisers to Sen. Henry Jackson (Paul Wolfowitz, Perle, Elliott Abrams, Charles Horner, and Douglas
Feith) joined Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and other "Christian" politicians with the intention
of launching a "campaign to transform the world."
This is where the neocons' "nonpartisan ideology" originated. And eventually today's "inalterable
US government" hatched from this egg.
American politics began to acquire its current shape during the Reagan era. In economics this
was seen in the policy of neoliberalism (politics waged in the interests of big financial capital)
and in foreign policy – in a strategy consisting of "holy war against the forces of evil." The Nixon-Kissinger
tradition of foreign policy (which viewed the Soviet Union and China as a normal countries with which
is essential to find common ground) was entirely abandoned.
The collapse of the USSR was a sign of the onset of the final phase of the "neocon revolution."
At that point their protégé, Francis Fukuyama, announced the "end of history."
***
As the years passed, the influence of the neo-conservatives (in politics) and neoliberals (in
economics) only expanded. Through all manner of committees, foundations, "think tanks," etc., the
students of Milton Friedman and Leo Strauss (from the departments of economics and political science
at the University of Chicago) penetrated ever more deeply into the inner workings of the Washington
power machine. The apotheosis of this expansion was the presidency of George W. Bush, during which
the neocons, having seized the primary instruments of power in the White House, were able to plunge
the country into the folly of a war in the Middle East.
By the end of the Bush presidency this clique was the object of universal hatred throughout the
US. That's why the middle-ground, innocuous figure of Barack Obama, a Democrat, was able to move
into the White House for the next eight years. The neocons stepped down from their central rostrums
of power and returned to their "influential committees." It is likely that this election was intended
to facilitate the triumphant return of the neoconservative-neoliberal paradigm all wrapped up in
"new packaging." For various reasons, the decision was made to assign this role to Hillary Clinton.
But it seems that at the most critical moment the flimsy packaging ripped open
What happened? Why is this clique's triumphant return to power erupting in massive scandal this
time around? Probably because we are living in an era during which much that was mysterious is suddenly
becoming clear. Probably because Trump's "silent majority" suddenly saw before them someone they
had been waiting for for a long time – a man ready to defend their interests.
Perhaps also it is because the middle class is choking on its growing exasperation with the "elite
caste" occupying its native country. And it finally became clear to the sober-minded American patriots
in law enforcement that the return to power of the people responsible for the current global chaos
could be a big threat to the US and rest of the world. Because, in the end, everyone has children
and no one wants a new world war.
How will this new conservative revolt against the elite end? Will Trump manage to "drain the swamp
of Washington, DC" as he has promised, or he will end up as the system's next victim? Very soon we
can finally get an answer to these questions.
Donald Trump's success or failure as the next US president will
largely depend on his ability to keep his independence from the "shadow government" and elite
structures that shaped the policies of previous administrations, former presidential candidate
Ron Paul told RT.
[...]
"
Unfortunately, there has been several neoconservatives that
are getting closer to Trump. And if gets his advice from them then I do not think that is a good
sign,
" Paul told the host of RT's Crosstalk show Peter Lavelle.
The retired Congressman said that people voted for Trump because
he stood against the deep corruption in the establishment, that was further exposed during the
campaign by WikiLeaks, and because of his disapproval of meddling in the wider Middle East.
"
During the campaign, he did talk a little bit about backing
off and being less confrontational to Russia and I like that. He criticized some the wars in the
Middle East at the same time. He believes we should accelerate the war against ISIS and terrorism,
"
Paul noted.
[...]
"
But quite frankly there is an outside source which we refer
to as the 'deep state' or the 'shadow government'. There is a lot of influence by people which
are actually more powerful than our government itself, our president,
" the congressman said.
"
Yes, Trump is his own guy, more so than most of those who
have ever been in before. We hope he can maintain an independence and go in the right direction.
But I fear the fact that there is so much that can be done secretly, out of control of our apparent
government and out of the view of so many citizens,
" he added.
More:
https://www.rt.com/usa/366404-trump-ron-paul-crosstalk/
WikiLeaks series on deals involving
Hillary Clinton campaign Chairman John Podesta. Mr Podesta is a long-term associate of the Clintons
and was President Bill Clinton's Chief of Staff from 1998 until 2001. Mr Podesta also owns the
Podesta Group with his brother Tony, a major lobbying firm and is the Chair of the Center for
American Progress (CAP), a Washington DC-based think tank.
globinfo freexchange
A letter under the title "Stay out of Syria" from
Jon Soltz
, an Iraq War Veteran and founder
of VoteVets.org, to John Podesta in May, 2013, confirms the multiple, serious warnings that the
Clinton/Podesta complex
had received about
the implications of the US involvement on Syrian mess.
Soltz's warnings couldn't be more clear. He points that "
arming
and training the Syrian rebels is a misguided and dangerous idea
" and that he helped to train
the Iraqi Army, and "
their concern is that many of the anti-Assad forces are the same terrorists
they've fought before and who continue to target them
". He also writes that "
there is no
winning scenario when we get involved in other nations' civil wars and proxy wars
".
Most important parts of the short letter:
Earlier this week, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
voted 15-3 in favor of arming and training the Syrian rebels. This is a misguided and dangerous
idea. I helped to train the Iraqi Army during my second tour, and their concern is that
many
of the anti-Assad forces are the same terrorists they've fought before and who continue to target
them
. Plus, as Senator Tom Udall noted,
once we introduce weapons, we have zero control
over them
. The United States "could turn over the weapons we're talking about and next day
they end up in the hands of al-Qaida." Three Senators voted against the bill in committee, but
we need you to send a strong message to the other 97 that you oppose intervention in Syria's civil
war.
Moreover,
there is no winning scenario when we get involved
in other nations' civil wars and proxy wars
. On this point, Senator Chris Murphy said it best:
"We have failed over and over again in our attempts to pull the strings of Middle Eastern politics."
Let's not make the same mistake again.
Full letter:
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/59165
Recall that, another letter from Clinton email
series, released also by WikiLeaks, proves that
Hillary had been seriously warned about the
oncoming Syrian chaos
,
already since 2011.
Apparently, the Clinton/Podesta complex completely ignored those
serious warnings. Hillary and her team are totally responsible for doing nothing to prevent, or
at least restrict, the Middle East chaos.
"... The party elites--the superdelegates--committed to Clinton from the beginning. They decided it was her turn. And despite all the evidence showing they were supporting a weak, vulnerable, and heavily disliked candidate, they stuck with it anyway. This Trump presidency, and the Republican sweep in the House and Senate, is entirely on the shoulders of 300 insider Democrats. ..."
"... Clinton's supporters among the media didn't help much, either. It always struck me as strange that such an unpopular candidate enjoyed such robust and unanimous endorsements from the editorial and opinion pages of the nation's papers, but it was the quality of the media's enthusiasm that really harmed her. With the same arguments repeated over and over, two or three times a day, with nuance and contrary views all deleted, the act of opening the newspaper started to feel like tuning in to a Cold War propaganda station. ..."
"... But she was exactly the wrong candidate for this angry, populist moment. An insider when the country was screaming for an outsider. A technocrat who offered fine-tuning when the country wanted to take a sledgehammer to the machine. ..."
No shit, Sherlock. Sanders would have beaten Trump. We are living in extreme times, and in
extreme times centrism and political 'triangulation' doesn't work.
This result will be repeated next year in France with the National Front. Mark my words. And when
it does, France will vote to leave the EU and the house of cards will come crashing down.
You can thank the Democrats, a party that used to represent working people, for at least part
of that. Their billionaire backers picked Clinton because she'd ensure their wealth would remain
untouched. I wonder what they're feeling now?
Aaron Jackson -> NathAldridge 4d ago
How do you figure? Clinton won the Democratic primary by less than the margin of superdelegates.
She had a MASSIVE lead in funding, institutional support, and (at the least) insider bias--though
it was likely more than that, given that nearly every single election anomaly in that primary
bounced her way.
The DNC intentionally limited the debates and scheduled those they did have for off times to try
to limit the damage Sanders could do to Clinton, and big media refused to cover Bernie Sanders
except in the context of Clinton.
And even with all of that, Sanders pulled within 300 delegates of winning the Democratic Nomination
by working through a grassroots, positive campaign. The momentum was entirely on his side, too!
And national polls showed him performing MUCH better against Trump than Clinton. And, of course,
he had no scandals (real or imagined) to leverage.
The party elites--the superdelegates--committed to Clinton from the beginning. They decided
it was her turn. And despite all the evidence showing they were supporting a weak, vulnerable,
and heavily disliked candidate, they stuck with it anyway. This Trump presidency, and the Republican
sweep in the House and Senate, is entirely on the shoulders of 300 insider Democrats.
NathAldridge 4d ago
The Guardian in a nutshell!
Clinton's supporters among the media didn't help much, either. It always struck me as
strange that such an unpopular candidate enjoyed such robust and unanimous endorsements from
the editorial and opinion pages of the nation's papers, but it was the quality of the media's
enthusiasm that really harmed her. With the same arguments repeated over and over, two or three
times a day, with nuance and contrary views all deleted, the act of opening the newspaper started
to feel like tuning in to a Cold War propaganda station. Here's what it consisted of:
Hillary was virtually without flaws. She was a peerless leader clad in saintly white,
a super-lawyer, a caring benefactor of women and children, a warrior for social justice.
Her scandals weren't real.
The economy was doing well / America was already great.
Working-class people weren't supporting Trump. And if they were, it was only because
they were botched humans. Racism was the only conceivable reason for lining up with the
Republican candidate.
dynamic22 4d ago
"But she was exactly the wrong candidate for this angry, populist moment. An insider when
the country was screaming for an outsider. A technocrat who offered fine-tuning when the country
wanted to take a sledgehammer to the machine."
You said everything really.
Watchman80 -> dynamic22 4d ago
Yup.
Also, see this. Note the date (and the imagined Trump speech)
Maybe it's time to consider whether there's something about shrill self-righteousness,
shouted from a position of high social status, that turns people away.
I couldn't have put it better. I could have put it with more swear words in though.
BigBlue80 4d ago
Maybe there is a bright side to a Trump victory. After all, there was a reason that tens
of millions of good people voted for him yesterday, and maybe he will live up to their high
regard for him.
If you assume that election victory (not even a majority as apparently Clinton will win the
popular vote) legitmises everything, you are right. But if you believe that there are western
values that should not be sacrificed than you are wrong. Eventually, this will be the end of democracy
- it will kill itself by electing a fascist. I happened before and it looks ever more likely.
The you US with ist overbearing nationalism, its leader-orientation and glorification of the military
was always close to fascism, but now it might have taken the final leap into the abyss.
atuocool 4d ago
"[Neo]Liberals" are a type of conservative who never convince me of the sincerity of their
"progressive" values. What was progressive about Hillary? What would she have actually done for
the poor? How would she have moved America away from being a corporate plutocracy? We all know
the answer is nothing. Trump is a nightmare, but he represents a bizarre, retrograde change while
Clinton represented a vacuous status quo.
with nuance and contrary views all deleted, the act of opening the newspaper started to
feel like tuning in to a Cold War propaganda station
Correct, it is censorship and suppression of contrary opinion and enormously biased towards "The
Chosen One"
Once again it proves that the Guardian is against the tide of History.
It is not bad to be contrarian or representing an alternative opinion or "voice" however provided
you still maintain some sense of integrity and journalistic professionalism, providing content,
news and information that is fair, balanced without indulging in gratuitous character assassination,
presenting controversial issues of public importance in a manner that is honest, equitable, and
balanced.
The Guardian during the American election as with Brexit and many other controversial issues
has consistently aligned itself with policies and opinion that many would consider left-wing or
liberal yet is neither as the viewpoints they support betrays the liberty and freedom of the ordinary
citizen.
As I said before the election regardless who win or lose the media has already lost by showing
its hand and exposed itself as not a true independent source of news and information, but pursuing
definite agendas and siding with corporate news media's opinions and politics.
According to the Guardian's own view liberalism will have to be remade in a post-liberal age.
It is their own peculiar set of values they believe that is important and not the very principles
the left originally defended. Pursuing a certain "metropolitan liberal creed".
An metropolitan liberal elite who believe they are more educated, more intelligent and talented,
more enlightened, more able to comprehend what society needs than the slow, slobs, the wasters
and good for nothings with their prejudices, that do not know what is good for them.
Their brand of Liberalism has been the complete antithesis of allowing people to take control
of their lives. It has been a dictatorial imposition of the beliefs of the least liberal nature.
Equating the tendencies of so-called "social justice warriors" and so-called "identity politics"
and equating them somehow with liberalism you're a long way from the truth have little to do with
liberalism and no, that's not "left" either.
The establishment in the mainstream media believe they are economically liberals - though privately
they look more kindly on monopolies than old school liberals would have. Yet these "liberals"
want to happily embrace Brussels' legalistic regime of rules that range from the petty and impractical
to a punitive and autocratic dictatorship.
Classical liberalism is a political ideology and a branch of liberalism which advocates civil
liberties and political freedom with representative democracy under the rule of law and emphasizes
economic freedom.
It is no secret what the problem is, lack of jobs, lack of opportunities, people who feel they
have no future or rights in their own country anymore.
Ask yourself is what you identify with or support contributing towards a more peaceful, harmonious
society where all have a sense of having a place and a future in their own country where they
feel they fit in and contribute towards a more safe, secure and prosperous society?
An metropolitan liberal elite who believe they are more educated, more intelligent and talented,
more enlightened, more able to comprehend what society needs than the slow, slobs, the wasters
and good for nothings with their prejudices, that do not know what is good for them.
This is not a new problem. The social elites (self-appointed) of all political persuasions are
always bemoaning the stupidity of the plebs in not bowing to their superior understanding of all
things. That this unfounded hubris is an amazing exemplar of denial of reality (who just won this
election, for example) doesn't seem able to take root in the bubble of acceptable thought in their
minds. How could they possibly be talking out of their bottom when it comes to damn near everything?
(All evidence aside.)
We need the voice of the 'common people' to be heard, without being filtered by the elites. Fake
democracy is not going to work -- we'll end up with a bigger fiasco, such as Jamie Dimon vs Kim Kardashian
in the next US Presidential contest. Way past time for those in power to wake up to the fact that
they're not in control, and real change that involves the great unwashed in the process is necessary.
Trump is one dumb guy, but he has managed to figure out how to use this frustration to get his misogynist,
racist, backside into the chair in the Oval Office.
- Election of Trump is not just another routine changing of the guards in the US two-party
system (although it is that too). This is a significant deviation in the business-as-usual model
of politics, and there will be substantial repercussions that will explicitly manifest themselves
somewhere down the line.
- The Founding Dudes and the Framers of the US Constitution had set up the system so as to
preclude the possibility of ascendance of someone like Trump.
- The Founding Dudes and the Framers of the US Constitution had set up the system so as to
eventually make possible the ascendance of someone like Trump.
- Sanders was right. That having had had been said, he would have still lost to Drumpf if he
were the D's nominee instead of HRC.
- That is because RealAmerica_a spoke more vocally this time around, overwhelming the voice
of RealAmerica_b.
- Judging by geographical size alone, RealAmerica_a is Real America.
- It is simply unimaginable that the enlightened citizenry will elect someone as destructive
and unqualified as Reagan in 1980. Such a possibility is not conceivable in any logical space,
and even fiction writers are wary to contemplate such an impossibility.
- Election of Reagan is not just another routine changing of the guards in the US two-party
system (although it is that too). This is a significant deviation in the business-as-usual model
of politics, and there will be substantial repercussions that will explicitly manifest themselves
somewhere down the line.
- Trump's victory is a repeat of the interplay of the socioeconomic forces that made Dubya's
presidency possible in 2000. Eight more years of this worldview and we will have another Obama-type
candidacy afterwards to clean up the mess and make the world safe again for the staggering-but-still-dominant
neoliberal order.
- People will be just too exhausted after eight years of Trump's presidency, and they will
be so relieved after the election of the next Obama-type president as to retreat to their homes
and let the new savior continue cuddling the big economic players and attempting to reach a Grand
Bargain with the Republicans to further erode the threadbare social safety net holding up the
people, of course for the good of the people themselves and in the name of Serious Politics.
-The dominant position in our society will continue to be the generalization of Alan Grayson's
observation: Don't fall down, if you do disappear quickly.
- Setting aside the status quo status of Clinton's policy prescriptions (she a competent steward
of the Washington Consensus), Trump's victory also signals the provisional victory of the manly
men of RealAmerica_a (and the women who love them) over women (and minorities, and the LGBT, and
immigrants, and etc).
- The same way that most people don't know or care about the wavelengths associated with colors,
they don't know or care about the underlying forces affecting their lives as long as the politicians
put on a good Reality TV show and pull effectively at their heartstrings.
- In other words, F science, F reality.
- In other words, long live Realty TV, the rule of Kardashians, the Apprentice,
WWE/WWF , etc. Constant exposure
to these things matter.
- Constant exposure to these things don't matter.
- Tomorrow the Sun will come up as before, and the Earth will go around it at a steady pace
as before, and the already enfeebled welfare state will continue to fray as before, and millions
of US citizens will continue their steady fall into precariousness as before (especially Trump
supporters in RealAmerica_a), and millions will continue to lose steady jobs and be pushed into
the the gig economy, and the 1% will continue raking in the loot as before under the benevolent
gaze of their new leader.
- If HRC had won, all above would still occur, but probably at a lower rate (except for the
Sun and Earth thing).
I feel lots of parallels can be drawn with brexit, particularly the points made at the end. amazingly
people dont like being insulted and talked down to by party elites, the gop base has been totally
transformed by trumps campaign.
that said has anyone else noticed that trump supporters only ever say 'hes going to do so much
for us' and trump says we are going to reopen the mines/factories/get a better deal but never
said how. he has promised unicorns and rainbows to people dealt a shit hand by the economic changes
of the last 30 years.
The political class amongst US liberals are neo-liberals
Neoliberalism from Reagan to [Bill] Clinton .
written in 1998 the review of this book ends with
" Michael Meeropol's damning indictment of the economic direction of the Clinton presidency demonstrates
that nowhere is the need for a new movement more pressing than in the United States".
Well Bush & Obama & Hillary, had she been elected, were continuations of that economic direction.
If America has needed a new movement to win since 1999 then I guess they got really desperate
which is why they voted for something as bad as Trump. Yes , the liberals or more specifically
neo-liberals an be held responsible
Frank has been making exactly this point since 1997. Others worth reading on this issue include
Walter Benn Michaels and Adolph L. Reed, Jr.
Unfortunately, in a lot of fora where this message sorely needs to be heard right now, this
article would be summarily dismissed on the basis that Frank used the word "shrill," which is
out of bounds in liberal discourse. Which of course just illustrates Frank's point.
The DNC put President Trump into the White House. The DNC, fixated on the anointed, untouchable
HRC, lost its moral compass and the good work of Bernie and Warren, now amounts to a big fat ZERO.
Laughable, how out of touch - meaningless motherhood cliches cannot pay the bills.
It is a case in point that the MSM have completely lost touch with a population that often relies
on the internet for its news. In the old days, the newspaper that was closest to your political
viewpoint was delivered to your door as your primary source of information, now every news outlet,
blog and forum in the world is delivered directly to your tablet.
The media, like the Government has considerably less influence than a decade or two ago.
Good article and, as one poster put it, encapsulates the Guardian's editorial line in a nutshell.
The FT seems to be to the left of this paper these days, forced to be more hard nosed about
the world. This from its columnist Wolfgang Munchenau some days ago:
"What led the centre-left on to such a self-destructive path? The answer is a combination
of the following: a false belief that elections are won from the centre; the lure of ministerial
limousines; an inferiority complex about not being able to run "responsible fiscal policies";
and a belief that voters of the left have nowhere else to go. .. The main issue is not
whether a Keynesian policy response would be economically correct. The more important point
is that if the centre-left does not offer it, the populists will. Unless the centre-left returns
to its Keynesian roots, I think there is a good chance that the politics of insurrection will
succeed."
You live here in Ohio, you know what I'm talking about. Whether Trump means it or not, is
kind of irrelevant because he's saying the things to people who are hurting, and that's why
every beaten-down, nameless, forgotten working stiff who used to be part of what was called
the middle class loves Trump. He is the human molotov cocktail that they've been waiting for.
The human hand grande that they can legally throw into the system that stole their lives from
them.
the act of opening the newspaper started to feel like tuning in to a Cold War propaganda
station.
That's a very accurate summary. The first step to winning next time is to understand why you
lost this time. The establishment view was that people were going to get Hillary Clinton whether
they liked it or not. Next time try listening to people who are angry that their pay has fallen
in real terms for 10 years. Try listening to people whose views you disagree with rather than
'no platform' them lest your delicate sensibilities be offended.
The list of celebrities and pundits and surrogates taking his side on the campaign trail was extremely
short.
I often wonder is having a celebrity endourse you counter productive. I saw many celebs appear
on TV and social media telling people they shouldn't vote for Trump. Some went as far as to call
people who might vote for Trump idiots. How many people got fed up with rich, famous people telling
them how they should vote? If you're someone sitting in America's rust belt, no job or low paid
crap job, being told by someone you think probably owns a Hollywood mansion and does very little
work, would you not feel a little resentful being told by them how to vote? Wouldn't you take
a dislike to a candidate who appears on stage with these celebs and yet you feel ignores you?
Just a thought.
If you have the right to vote, the responsibility is to think through the implications of using
that vote for X or Y candidate, to work out for yourself what will happen to you, your family,
your community and your country if you vote for X or Y.
If you vote for Y because you feel "resentful" that someone is using their freedom of speech
to urge voting for X rather than Y - perhaps you shouldn't really be voting at all. Just a thought.
More than just an odd thought my friend. The sight of a procession of wealthy, smug and self entitled
celebs, often utter hypocrites, expecting to deliver their Facebook followers to a politician
is nauseating and angers more than a few. Few of these celebs are famous for their brains so being
called an idiot by a halfwit with money hardly endears them. But still society is in thrall to
the concept of celebrity following. It begs the question of what all these followers are actually
following. Perhaps Lady Gaga et al have confused the pathological need for an entertainment fix
with an adoration of their thoughts and outlook.
Killing off the neo-liberal virus in the Democratic Party would be a start, but won't be enough,
if the Democrats simply put the American equivalents of Jeremy Corbyn in its place. What's desperately
needed here are fresh ideas--something analogous to the Keynesian ideas that gave intellectual
underpinning to the New Deal.
The American white-collar class just spent the year rallying around a super-competent
professional (who really wasn't all that competent) and either insulting or silencing everyone
who didn't accept their assessment. And then they lost. Maybe it's time to consider whether
there's something about shrill self-righteousness, shouted from a position of high social status,
that turns people away.
I think this is a very succinct assessment and goes most of the way to explaining this result,
and the Brexit result too. People don't want to be lectured, they want to be listened to (yes,
even if you think they're wrong).
You see, their sneering attitude to the British working class, their name-calling, their bogus
judgements about the working class for not wanting any more of their rights and opportunities
taken away from them.
The 'liberals' are hated as much as the toffs. Brexit was a great example of the bile and hatred
the 'liberals' spew out at the disadvantaged working class.
It wasn't the 'liberals' housing and schools, communities and healthcare, employment rights
and opportunities that was being eroded though was it? No. But that didn't stop the 'liberals'
branding the working class as 'racists' and 'stupid' and 'blind' did it.
Maybe you now can see yourself, on this poxy 'liberal' website and see how YOU have created
a situation where the working class want ANYTHING other than more of your poison.
Look at the people bleating about Brexit: the 'liberals', the politicians, the bankers, big
business, the judges...my goodness, doesn't that tell a story of the haves and have nots. All
the bleaters are the scum that have never had the working class' best interests in mind and yet
you think we, the working class, should take heed of their fatuous, aquisitive, vile, whimpers?
Really?
Multi-Billionaire Media Barons controlling the news on both sides of the Atlantic (the same
Baron in the case of Murdoch) and they in turn backed by the Trillionaire old and true establishment
who are the exact same families as a hundred years ago and hundreds of years before that in many
cases.
Very well written and I agree to a large extent - the problem is.. are people like Trump and blood
Boris Johnson going to be any more cognisant of the lives and problems of the working class than
the liberals? And are they likely to do anything about those problems unless they simultaneously
line their own pockets? If, and it's a very big if, the interests of the working class and the
interests of Trump et al align somehow then there is a silver lining. If not, then the best we
can hope for is that liberals start to reconnect with the people they purport to represent.
the problem is.. are people like Trump and blood Boris Johnson going to be any more cognisant
of the lives and problems of the working class than the liberals?
No. But maybe, just maybe, the 'left-wing' parties will wake and remember what they are supposed
to be for.
Here's the other thing. Clinton and her mates at the New York Times and the Guardian are always
lecturing us on the need to be compassionate and welcoming towards refugees from faraway places
who would like to come and live among us, but there's never a moment of compassion for the people
who are already here and suffering miserably on the margins of our already unequal societies -
the unemployed and badly employed, the badly housed and homeless, those working sixty hours a
week on the minimum wage for some crappy agency. So, guess what. That's why people are voting
for stuff like Brexit and Trump.
If you lot in the metropolitan elite can't see this then you are doomed to keep repeating the
same mistakes.
Just like Silvio Berlusconi, Trumps opponents were incapable to escape the trap of trying to sling
shit at a candidate made out of teflon.
The Clinton camp tried to fight a war in the trenches...but Trump feeds of negativity, they
should have learnt early that nothing was too outrageous or controversial to tarnish him.
The closest they got was the misogyny accusations and even they didn't stick. Just like Berlusconi,
Trump the lover of pageantry and beautiful women was being portrayed as a woman hater but he cleverly
made it sound like he was hater of feminists instead of women.
The problem with Clinton is that she tried to play the integrity card but that was easily debunked
by Trump with email gate.
The voice of sanity. Thank you, Mr. Frank.
The Democratic Establishment didn't give a hoot about what Bernie had to say, because his presidency
would not have served their ambitions. They're more interested in getting nice jobs at Goldman
Sachs than controlling the finance industry. And their sons and daughters will not fight in all
the wars Clinton&Co see as great business opportunity.
The Dem establishment has failed the people, and now we all reep the whirlwind.
I agree with Frank's analysis though not his use of the word 'liberal' which has confusingly different
meanings. I think the same analysis could be used to explain Brexit.
The problem is a political class which wishes to maintain the status quo of a neo-liberal,
globalised economy. For 35 years this economy has redistributed wealth from the poor to the rich
and massively damaged the environment. It has thus disadvantaged the great majority of the people
in the USA, the UK and indeed people across the world. People are quite reasonably fed up with
the lies behind this 'trickle-down' economics. They are angry and want something different. The
vacuum created by the failure of the left to recognise this, and come up with a new solution,
has resulted in Trump, UKIP, Marine LePen etc.
No. I really think liberals have been their own worst enemies during this election.
They have treated ordinary white Americans as if they are shit, spoken about them in ways that
should make them hang their heads in shame and behaved as if they are living in a oligarchy where
they can call the shots instead of a democracy and now they are paying the price.
You can only kick a dog so many times before it turns around and bites you.
I would also question the term"liberals" to describe people who are happy seeing jobs moved
offshore, causing unemployment at home and slave labour conditions abroad; encouraging mass immigration
to bring wages down and create a powerless and easily exploitable servant class and globalisation
that provides them with a luxury lifestyle on the cheap while making it harder for just about
everyone else.
The only "liberal" thing about these people is their attitudes towards trivial personal issues
like sexuality and lifestyle choices.
Wise words from Frank - I hope the Guardian opinionators are made to read it
Clinton's supporters among the media didn't help much, either. It always struck me as strange
that such an unpopular candidate enjoyed such robust and unanimous endorsements from the editorial
and opinion pages of the nation's papers, but it was the quality of the media's enthusiasm
that really harmed her. With the same arguments repeated over and over, two or three times
a day, with nuance and contrary views all deleted, the act of opening the newspaper started
to feel like tuning in to a Cold War propaganda station. Here's what it consisted of:
Hillary was virtually without flaws. She was a peerless leader clad in saintly white, a
super-lawyer, a caring benefactor of women and children, a warrior for social justice.
Her scandals weren't real.
The economy was doing well / America was already great.
Working-class people weren't supporting Trump.
And if they were, it was only because they were botched humans. Racism was the only conceivable
reason for lining up with the Republican candidate.
Absolutely right. And I'm willing to wager the liberal response to this will be to double
down on the identity politics, double down on the victimhood narratives, double down on the march
toward globalism, and double down on the cries for open borders and ever-increasing levels of
immigration. They simply never learn.
It's very clear what happened this morning. Trump won because he picked up the white working
class vote in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Ohio, all of which had previously voted for Obama in
both 2008 and 2012. The people in these states didn't magically become racist over the past four
years. They saw a candidate (Clinton) who represented "business as usual", and they rejected her.
Excellent article. Summarises both Brexit as well as Trump's victory.
The stats are showing that Trump polled higher amongst African and Hispanic Americans. I am
not surprised. The Democrats, like the UK Labour party, like to think they OWN ethnic voters and
they are merely another 'special interest' group alongside women, gays, etc. They don't and us
ethnic voters have the same concerns as any other working or middle class voters. And NO ONE appreciates
being told they are wrong, racist and unintelligent.
This shows Social liberialism is dead and rotten. Well past its used by date, time to chuck
it out. It went off when supposed social justice warriors got into business with big business
and fickle finance.
The elites may be well educated but that they couldn't even bare to bring themselves to understand
the perspectives of another reveals how broadminded they really are - the journalists, academics
etc. They believed in democracy where only one way of thinking and the status quo could be permitted
to flourish. This is the most intelligent article to capture the social change that far too many
liberals are denying. How are they going deal with reality, ie. Are the majority of Americans
and British really racists? The greatest irony is this article is published within the vanguard
of what ordinary people are democratically retaliating against.
When you reach rock bottom the only way is to look up. The problem for the Liberalism of the Democratic
Party of the last three decades is that it has become a social scientific morality of the well
connected and completely unable to deal with the naked populism of Trump let alone the half baked
morass of crony capitalism of George Bush.
Lets be opportunistic. This gives it a chance to wipe the slate clean and at the very least rid
themselves of the influence of the Clintons who from the removal of Glass-Steagal Act demonstrated
their only concerns were with the needs of the Super Rich rather than the majority of the population.
Unfortunately you have that feeling that they are not even capable of doing that.
"Trump... a folly so bewildering, an incompetence so profound ..."
Har, har, har, the foolish and incompetent Trump is now president elect and you are a wise
and competent journalist who foresaw the future clearly.
Maybe you're the foolish incompetent, not Trump. Maybe you should examine the foolish certainty
which made you write your Guardian article headlined "With Trump certain to lose, you can forget
about a progressive Clinton" and many others based on foolish and incompetent assumptions, reasoning
and conclusions
Maybe you and all the rest of the useful idiots on the left should examine all of your convictions
about the world. You might discover how often you have been hoodwinked by your own folly into
believing trash like Trump will lose to Hillary, AGW is a real problem which can be corrected
by funneling trillions to crony capitalist alternative energy companies, fracking is dangerous
and the unlimited immigration of millions of young, able bodied, violent, low IQ men is a good
thing.
Trump will achieve nothing of what he's said he wants to do. Reversing the 'reverse colonisation'
of the white western world will fail, especially in the USA where, after all, the Afro-black population
didn't ask to move to in the first place (though I'll bet tend dollars dollars not a single Afro-black
American would opt for emigrating back to Africa, however much they complain about racial prejudice
in the USA - the financial advantages of living in the developed world are FAR too valuable for
that!).
As for the Hispanics, I doubt even a wall would stop them. The mass population of Central and
South America is far, far greater than that of 'white western America' and their third world economics
keep the USA and the developed world a desperate magnet for them (and I can't blame them - I'd
fight tooth and nail to get in to the rich west as well!)
Nope, the Trump victory is a sad, hopeless rearguard action against the triumph of twenty-first
century 'reverse colonisation' and that is that. The white western world is finished - the only
question is, can it 'westernise' the immigrant population in time to save the developed world,
or are we doomed to another Dark Ages of Global Third Worldism? (Maybe China will take over as
Islam did post Roman Empire, while Europe went savage...)
When you separate identity politics - race and gender - from inequality and class, which is what
Obama and Clinton both did, you end up with Donald Trump moving into the White House ......
The liberal argument has always been about the equality to exploit not an end to exploitation.
It was at the heart of New Labour as well as Obama/Clinton Democrats ...
For the last 30 odd years the liberal left have claimed class no longer mattered. Now the "white"
working class have twice given them a kicking in 2016. When you're at the bottom class really
matters!
And so Democratic leaders made Hillary their candidate even though they knew about her closeness
to the banks, her fondness for war, and her unique vulnerability on the trade issue – each
of which Trump exploited to the fullest.
I really like Thomas Frank, but I wish in this diatribe that he wouldn't cheapen the countless
(because the Americans don't count them) who have paid the price for Hillary's 'fondness for war'
by referring to it like that, in passing, as if it was a fondness for muffins.
I wish that he had a bit more righteous fury about how the crazed neocon warmongers who effectively
rule America and for whom Hillary was the latest acceptable face, with her almost total sense
of entitlement, based on the fact that she was a woman, acted like she was heading for a coronation.
Yes it would be great if a woman had been elected president, I can think of at least two others
one running, and one not, but doesn't even the most basic tenet of critical thinking require us
to ask searching questions, about the specific woman ?
He has run one of the lousiest presidential campaigns ever. In saying so I am not referring
to his much-criticized business practices or his vulgar remarks about women. I mean this in a
purely technical sense: this man fractured his own party.
But did he really 'fracture' his own party? From the superficial point of view, one might have
thought so. Many Democrats hope so.
But I'll suggest this. Anybody who is holding out the faint hope that he will work badly with
the GOP in Congress is going to be very disappointed. He's going to put his signature to virtually
everything they want. They're going to have a lot of fun together.
Even stuff which directly contradicts what he ran on and which upset many in the Republican establishment.
I'm thinking foreign policy and trade agreements.
And those in movement conservatism who didn't like him, like Glenn Beck and Erick Erickson?
Watch them do a 180 over the next six months.
Excellent article, about six months late, but hopefully not too late for liberals everywhere to
wake up to the idea that if you claim to want to help improve the lives of the working class you
better listen to them first, and connect with them second. I always thought laughing and sneering
at Trump and particularly his supporters was never going to work. And sure enough it didn't. Nobody
likes being patronised.
Sometimes you've got to have the courage to move beyond a rotting status quo and into a brave
new world. If you don't you leave the door open for something potentially much much worse to take
that opportunity.
How about doing a piece on how the press keep getting it wrong all the time, how you keep misjudging
the mood of the people, the zeitgeist, how afraid you are of change and how as a result you keep
siding with the establishment when the vast majority of people are fed up with its incessant inaction
and bullshit?
Youre letting the fascists in through the open door because youre too afraid to give up your priviledges
and go towards healthy change. You deserve what youre going to get because you spent too much
time on here waffling bullshit and not enough time on the streets listening to what people want.
Total cognitive dissonance. Social media is no good for assessing the mood of the people, its
for pussy cat photos and selfies.
The republicans feared change, but winning was more important to them. As incongruous as it may
seem, a billionaire businessman reached out to voters disenfranchised by some 30 years of partisan
parlour games. Maybe it'll dawn on the Democrats who they should be reaching out to and maybe
it'll dawn on the Republicans that there's more to being a politician than banging on about God
and being against abortion.
I don't like the guy and find some of his views abhorrent and would even have preferred HC,
but... but... this may be a wake up call for politics in America. Not sure it will be because
after Brexit, the finger was pointed at the London middle classes and older voters whereas the
strength of the vote came from the post-industrial heartland destroyed by Thatcher and virtually
ignored by both parties ever since. Still, we'll see.
"With the same arguments repeated over and over, two or three times a day, with nuance and contrary
views all deleted, the act of opening the newspaper started to feel like tuning in to a Cold War
propaganda station. "
Spot on analysis.
Let the soul-searching amongst the mainstream journalistic elites begin.
People have rspecially started to notice the "with nuance and all contrary views deleted" part.
That is part of the problem and part of the reason Trump got elected as a sort of collective middle
finger to the establishment by ordinary people who are sick of being told what to think and how
to think by unelected elites whose job it is supposed to be to report the FACTS, and not to dictate
what people are allowed to say or think. Because as a great person once said "Facts are sacred."
And as JS Mill said in his famous essay 'On Liberty' - we should not censor unpopular views because
even though the unpopular view may be incorrect we may come to a better understanding of why our
own view is correct by seeing its collision with error. (Quite apart from the fact that the unpopular
view is not always correct and by suppressing it we may never know the truth.)
I hope the mainstream media learn from this disaster and start living up to the ideals of the
intellectual founders of our liberal democracies such as JS Mill who would no doubt be appalled
at the lerhaps well intentioned but counterproductive censorsgip of views which run counter to
that of the prevailing orthodoxy.
It's because they believe we are stupid. The intellectual snobbery of the oxbridge set, think
they are better than us. Little suspecting that most of us can't be arsed with that shite.
The thing that keeps coming back to me with this election, as with Brexit, was the established
candidates ignoring what people were saying. In Brexit, the remain side utterly ignored immigration,
whilst the leave side focused on it. I don't think the remain side realised that immigration wasn't
just conjured up by Daily Mail headlines but was a genuine issue for many people.
In the US, Trump spoke openly about jobs; bringing them back and preventing outsourcing. Looking
again at trade deals to make sure American jobs were protected. Clinton's team ignored this.
Take heed for the future, politicians. Listen to what people actually say, not just the bits
they say that you agree with.
Indeed, that's the problem, a narrow political elite expecting the population to vote as they
think, rather than as the population think. The disconnect between the consensus and the politicians
is wide, the left in particular withdraws to the safety of it's narrow agenda when threatened
leaving the centre wide open.
"Cold War propaganda station. Here's what it consisted of:
- Hillary was virtually without flaws.
- She was a peerless leader clad in saintly white, a super-lawyer, a caring benefactor of women
and children, a warrior for social justice.
- Her scandals weren't real.
- The economy was doing well / America was already great.
- Working-class people weren't supporting Trump.
- If they were, it was only because they were botched humans. Racism was the only
conceivable reason for lining up with the Republican candidate."
Funny how all of these points were constantly touted in the Guardian... oh the ironny
The neoliberals weren't listening and probably still aren't listening. They will be blaming the
white working class rednecks but there isn't enough of white working class rednecks to cause this
upset. Professional neoliberal policians have neither the insight nor the intelligence to figure
out they are the problem, they alienated the people they ignored while looking after the rich.
We see the same problem in the Labour Party here. The neoliberal Blairites spent 13 years using
identity politics as a way to pretend to be radical while showing utter contempt for the white
(and black) working class. When they lost two elections and Scotland, they blamed the left, as
though no one could reject neoliberalism. Sorry professional neoliberal politicians, your days
of your front trotters in the trough are almost up, you are being rejected and anyone but you
seems to be the preference.
You, Sir or Madam, are a genius. Your analysis - like the analysis of the article - is spot on
and your prose is punchy, concise and grammatically correct. You should be pick of the day.
The neoliberals weren't listening and probably still aren't listening. They will be blaming the
white working class rednecks but there isn't enough of white working class rednecks to cause this
upset. Professional neoliberal policians have neither the insight nor the intelligence to figure
out they are the problem, they alienated the people they ignored while looking after the rich.
We see the same problem in the Labour Party here. The neoliberal Blairites spent 13 years using
identity politics as a way to pretend to be radical while showing utter contempt for the white
(and black) working class. When they lost two elections and Scotland, they blamed the left, as
though no one could reject neoliberalism. Sorry professional neoliberal politicians, your days
of your front trotters in the trough are almost up, you are being rejected and anyone but you
seems to be the preference.
You, Sir or Madam, are a genius. Your analysis - like the analysis of the article - is spot on
and your prose is punchy, concise and grammatically correct. You should be pick of the day.
Very interesting, and striking, parallels with Brexit. A disaffected majority, who don't believe
they are listened to, rally round people who speak their language, engage with their fears and
concerns and give them easy solutions to difficult problems.
Both decisions are tragically wrong, in my view, but its clear there is a huge disconnect between
those on the left (notional or otherwise) and their usual target voters.
Absolutely spot on. And broadly applicable right across the western world. It wasn't Hillary the
personality, or Hillary the crook, or Hillary the incompetent who lost the election.
It was the Hillary the archetypal representative of the smug 'n' shabby liberal stitch-up that's
done us all over, basking in its meritocratic delusions, and raising all the ladders (and greasing
the sides) to the lifeboats in which those delusions were acted out to delusional acclaim...
...even as it was busy handing the world over first (greedily) to transnational capitalism
and now (stupidly) to the marauding squads of pinhead fascists that'll be everywhere in the US
within weeks, maybe days. A couple of million George fucking pinhead Zimmermans.
"Socialism or Barbarism" (rings truer and truer!) is a choice that excludes liberalism only
because liberalism is too morally and aesthetically insubstantial to make the cut. Imagine the
choice in the form of a movie, and liberalism would be the twitching little grass who betrays
the hero for the price of a bottle of White Lighting.
(In real life it's not a bottle of cider, of course: it's more likely a nice old house in a
gentrified area that still holds on to the charming character of the people it displaced,
some of whom spend 5 hours a day on the bus to come back and work in the charming shops
and eateries, or as nannies and cleaners....).
This is a very good piece (as you'd expect from a cultural critic as smart as Frank is), but it
really needs to be read alongside Adolph L. Reed's
excoriating
article in Harper's from 2014, "Nothing Left: The Slow Surrender of American Liberals":
The left has no particular place it wants to go. And, to rehash an old quip, if you have
no destination, any direction can seem as good as any other. The left careens from this oppressed
group or crisis moment to that one, from one magical or morally pristine constituency or source
of political agency (youth/students; undocumented immigrants; the Iraqi labor movement; the
Zapatistas; the urban "precariat"; green whatever; the black/Latino/LGBT "community"; the grassroots,
the netroots, and the blogosphere; this season's worthless Democrat; Occupy; a "Trotskyist"
software engineer elected to the Seattle City Council) to another. It lacks focus and stability;
its métier is bearing witness, demonstrating solidarity, and the event or the gesture. Its
reflex is to "send messages" to those in power, to make statements, and to stand with or for
the oppressed.
We are in a very bad place right now, in terms of ideas and arguments. The opposition, in pretty
much every western hemisphere country, has been colonised by the same people: professional politicians,
upper-middle-class in social background, educated at the same small group of elite universities,
reflexively committed to meritocratic ideology. They're very good at expressing sympathy for the
marginalised, at saying the right words, at, as Reed says, "sending messages" and engaging in
representational politics. But all those gestures do nothing for the constituencies they supposedly
represent. They're ultimately selfish -- focussed on their own career advancement and the narrow
class interests of the meritocratic-professional elite itself. The opposition, as Frank himself
once said, "has ceased to oppose" in any economically meaningful sense. (Although they're very
good at symbolic forms of opposition on cultural and historical issues.)
And now their constituencies have noticed and have withdrawn their votes.
according to exit polls every section of white America, old, young, affluent, low-income, educated/not
voted Trump, all bar 'young college educated white females', older college educated white females
also voted Trump.
Same here with Brexit, voting patterns show the all white groups voted out, nothing to do with
education levels, income or age.
The pundits write about 'the crisis of liberalism',, hhmmm, I think it should more be 'the rejection
of illiberal openess'. When we say 'immigration needs to be reduced' the 'elites' reach for the
favourite fall back 'you're a white that's racist/fascist/backward/uneducated' etc etc etc response.
Well, turns out, the white part is right, the rest is just class based ignorance. Clinton was
the absolute embodiment of this type of ignorance and arrogance. That basket of deplorables thing
was disgusting, I felt personally insulted by it myself (i'm in the UK). Absolute standard 'elite'
arrogance and hatred of those that don't agree with you. She's just paid for that hate by alienating
absolutely EVERY SINGLE section of white America.
Trump's politics is a rejection of a globalism that has damaged the interests of so many, we're
all far far too open to the forces of the world coming in at us from all directions, Catholics
in Eastern Europe are not allowed their Christian values, are smeared as backward and ordered
by foreign 'elites' in Brussels to drop all that they hold dear or face fines. We've all watched
as the Remoaners showed to the world just exactly how 'tolerant' and 'accepting' they are of those
they don't agree with, erupting into a torrent of class based ignorance and venomous hatred.
Well, they've all been at all this for far too long, and we're all pushing back against it. Spew
race based hate at those that don't agree with you, BBC journalists shouting 'Nazi, fascist, racist'
at any slight tightening up of immigration, Hilary Clinton labelling most white working-class
a basket of fascist deployarables and hey presto, you lose to a repulsive cartoon like Trump.
They need to start thinking on about just exactly who it is in reality that's the race haters.
Most are on the Left.
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Given that Republicans have been opposed to intervention by Big Government at least since the
Great Depression if Trump gets the go ahead for some of his ideas it will be a case of 4 legs
good 2 legs better.
With the same arguments repeated over and over, two or three times a day, with nuance and
contrary views all deleted, the act of opening the newspaper started to feel like tuning in
to a Cold War propaganda station.
Quite so. And now the elitist corporate media which got everything wrong, including their highly
confident predictions about the result, will now tell you in a highly confident manner all the
things that are going to happen as a result of the thing they said wouldn't happen. First to dash
off a thousand words of hyperventilating predictions?
Jonathan Freedland , so top marks to him for speed, if nothing else.
Interesting article, and in a way I sensed it coming unfortunately, at least in the meaning that
I have always felt that certain liberal and "progressive" thoughts are just too alien from basic
human nature, and are being forced to enter the mainstream a bit too fast, and that this is a
huge risk in the sense that when people decide they are not ready for these and it's time to reject
them properly, then all the valuable, truly liberating and forward-thinking ideas will be drained
along with them and that means dark times ahead indeed.
I am from Eastern-Europe, and, while I don't have a lot of personal memories of the communist
times myself, most of the liberal bits of my cultural heritage comes from the counter-culture,
a lot of the things we value today in my country were, albeit not necessarily all illegal as such,
certainly more of the taboo sort, than they would have been in the West. Now it looks like that
with all this Brexit and America, the West will have to learn to use the liberal thinking to serve
as meaningful criticism of the system that will be built in the future by these new people. It's
the Westerner's turn now, to learn to read between the lines and produce culture with purpose
other than entertainment (if there is any positive side to this, then it should be the rise of
new, creative movies and the end of the high-budget superhero era, and the birth of music with
lyrics worth listening to lol, that's what I keep telling myself as my silver lining for now at
least.)
It's obviously difficult to compare, nothing, in the entire world at the time was this commercialised
and business and technology and life and everything was obviously very different. And, crucially,
whilst the commies declared themselves to be ruling in the name of the common working people,
they had their own breed of intellectuals, at least in my country, there was an approved bunch
of scientists, artists etc, who could stretch it and provide some sense. So, worryingly enough,
from this point of view I wouldn't say they were comparable to the type of anti-intellectualist
mob rule seemingly putting these people into power, and that is my real fear, that these new rulers
will not even have their own bunch of approved scientists who might not approve the views of atheists
or feminists or whatever, but would at least be ready to provide these new governments with sound
advice on the environment, education, health, etc.
I'm not sure how avoidable this could have been in reality, but it should have been, because
we have no time for such ideological bullsh*t games (excuse my words), the damage we are doing
to our own, living planet is becoming irreparable, and we really, absolutely, from all backgrounds
and cultures must work together to basically stay alive.
The arrogance and snotty mindedness of the progressive liberal establishment has be dealt a righteous
slap in the face which they have been asking for, for decades. The Revolt of the Deplorables.
This was the winter of our discontent. Now it is our turn.
Time will tell whether this upset is the beginning of a much better era in the U.S.
I voted for Trump not because I like him (personally I find him repulsive) but because he was
a wrecking ball and a sledge hammer to be used against the liberal progressives that have been
running the U.S. into the ground for decades.
This the Moment of the Ticked Off Deplorables.
This is also a surprise. This is the most exciting time since Truman defeated Dewey.
Except it was the Republicans (not the "white collar liberals") who deregulated the Wall Street
banks. It was the Republicans who gave tax breaks to the wealthy 1% and it was the Republicans
who got rid of welfare. The biggest con of all? That the majority of uneducated Americans who
just voted Republican, think that the GOP represent thier interests and it's all the fault of
the "liberals". We are without doubt witnessing the beginning of the end of the American empire...
We are without doubt witnessing the beginning of the end of the American empire...
And about time, too! That said, you are right about the GOP being the party of deregulation,
tax-breaks for the rich etc. but since in the 35 years since Reagan, when bank deregulation began
in earnest (I know, Nixon repealed the Gold Standard), we have had 16 years of Democratic rule,
and NOTHING has been done to reverse it; in fact, quite the opposite. Most of the damage was done
between Clinton (who repealed Glass-Steigel) and his chairman of the Fed, Alan Greenspan.
We are without doubt witnessing the beginning of the end of the American empire...
And about time, too! That said, you are right about the GOP being the party of deregulation,
tax-breaks for the rich etc. but since in the 35 years since Reagan, when bank deregulation began
in earnest (I know, Nixon repealed the Gold Standard), we have had 16 years of Democratic rule,
and NOTHING has been done to reverse it; in fact, quite the opposite. Most of the damage was done
between Clinton (who repealed Glass-Steigel) and his chairman of the Fed, Alan Greenspan.
Thomas Frank is right on the money. People voted for Trump precisely because both parties represent
business as usual and people are sick of it. Same with Brexit.
ank is right on the money. People voted for Trump precisely because both parties represent
business as usual and people are sick of it. Same with Brexit.
The silent majority,the ones who go to work pay their taxes and quietly get on with life have
spoken. Don't underestimate us. We're intelligent, humble and caring. We're entitled to a view.
We've had enough, we don't have to bully scream and shout to get our way, we go down to the polling
station and we put a cross in the box we feel passionately about and we go home back to our quiet
lives-job done.Well done the people of America,you have had the equivalent to our Brexit and now
let's get the world back to how it should be. One of the most satisfying parts is listening to
the Lefties,Luvvies and BBC crying their eyes out. The times they are a changing.
It is a liberalism of the rich, it has failed the middle class, and now it has failed on its
own terms of electability. Enough with these comfortable Democrats and their cozy Washington system.
Enough with Clintonism and its prideful air of professional-class virtue. Enough!
Amen to that. Thank you, Thomas Frank, for articles such as this one. A lone voice of progressive
reason at the Guardian (neo)liberal circus.
We need to overhaul the DNC, as well as the Guardian and NYT editorial boards.
She was the Democratic candidate because it was her turn and because a Clinton victory would
have moved every Democrat in Washington up a notch.
Spot on. And this is exactly the misery that infects both wings of the Labour Party.
People in politics jostling for power and status, like it's a hobby for them, a kind of shoot-em
up where the consequences of policy affect only other people.
Cameron and Johnson and all the slime of the Tory party suffer from the same disease.
Why do you want to be prime minister, you spam faced Tefal foreheaded dilettante?
"Well, I think I'd be rather good at it."
Well, you weren't. You were awful at it, because you had no basic guiding principles, just
like all the other dilettantes from Eton and all the other posh boy Petri dishes where hubris
is cultivated.
The story of Melania
Trump's nude photos shows an unexpected maturity in American life, and the
predictably depressing hypocrisy within it, too.
Credit
Photograph by Eric Thayer / The New
York Times / Redux
The story of Melania
Trump's old nude photos, and their odd blossoming into a fable of the
trials of immigration, will probably remain as a footnote to this
bizarre Presidential campaign, though footnotes to this campaign are
rather like footnotes to "Finnegans Wake": the text itself is so
confounding that there isn't a sentence that might not call for one.
Still, it is worth ruminating over for a moment, before it passes away,
for two reasons. It shows an unexpected maturity in American life, and
then something predictably depressing about the hypocrisy within it,
too.
The nudes, alone and ŕ deux, of
Melania Knauss (to use her name when the photos were taken, back in the
nineties), appeared in the New York
Post
the weekend before
last. Melania's most notable previous appearance had occurred when she
said a few words at the Republican Convention, which were quickly
discovered to be, in part, actually Michelle Obama's words. This was a
hard début in the role of the nominee's wife, though, in fact, she was
treated extraordinarily gently, the assumption being that, despite her
having declared that she had written the speech herself with as "little
help as possible," she was not really responsible for it. (And another
assumption being that her declaring that she'd written it was the kind
of white lie that all political spouses are expected to tell, like
saying that they love getting up early on winter mornings and
campaigning in Iowa.)
The appearance of the photos in the
Post
would, one might have thought in an earlier time, suggest
that they were intended to shock or offend the Trump campaign. But to
think this is to misunderstand the role of the
Post
as it
exists today, which is as a sort of Potemkin tabloid. It looks like and
poses as a populist paper, but it actually loses money (the sum, in
recent years,
has been estimated
as being in the tens of millions) and exists
principally to give its owner, Rupert Murdoch, a paper platform in New
York City. (It does have a terrific sports section.) Since Murdoch's
Post
is the only paper in New York to be resolutely pro-Trump,
there seems to be a decent chance that the pictures were published with
Trump's acquiescence, if not his aid. This may seem odd, but in truth
Trump has a long history of actively feeding information to the press
that more normally constituted citizens might find embarrassing. And it
did serve as a distraction from all the other, still more embarrassing
things that were going on around the candidate. (There are always such
things going on around Trump.) The publication of the photographs was
obviously expected to outrage some and enrage others and distract
everyone. In some other, earlier epochs in American life-specifically,
in the eighties, to which Trump still spiritually belongs-they would
indeed have served as a distraction from almost every other controversy
going. (As Trump surely recognized, the pictures would have distracted
him
.)
What was so strange and oddly cheering
was that, on the whole, nobody took the bait. Did Trump expect his wife
to be subjected to a storm of mockery, so that he could spring to her
defense? Apart from some scattershot sneering, it didn't happen. Was he
expecting his political rivals to publicly question him so that he could
defend her, while simultaneously pointing out how much hotter she was
than every other candidate's wife? Didn't happen. Did the
Post
and Trump both expect hooting from feminist Hillary supporters, or even
from one Clinton or the other, thus revealing their hypocritical
readiness to turn on a woman with the wrong politics? That didn't happen
either. Nothing happened. The photographs were received almost entirely
without scandal, because, well, because education
does
happen,
and change does take place, and even the most benighted among us, Trump
quite possibly aside, now understand that a woman's body is hers to pose
and have photographed more or less as she chooses, and that it is for
the rest of us to respect her choices and to look or not at the
photographs as we choose. The wrongness of "slut shaming" women, as we
call it now, for appearing in pictures, either artful or erotic, is
apparent to all. We already knew that
Melania
had worked as a model
, and that models take these kinds of pictures.
(That objectifying yourself for money might still be an imprudent way to
spend your youth, perhaps because it leaves you vulnerable when you're
older, is another question worth pursuing, but one for the colleges more
than for the tabloids.)
Nobody blamed Melania. Most people
understood that she had nothing to be ashamed of, though one might
wonder how all those Christian evangelicals who support Trump could
reconcile the pictures with their hard faith. Even given the desperate
nature of people's anxiety about Trump, it was almost universally
accepted that his wife's posing for nude pictures in the past was not a
proper subject for political scrutiny. It must have been an enormous
disappointment to him.
This marks a genuine change, perhaps
even a revolution, in America's ability not to be shocked by the not
particularly shocking. Back in those same eighties during which Trump
first crawled from the primal tabloid swamp, as some may recall, the
gifted Vanessa Williams, having become the first black Miss America, was
discovered to have posed for similar pictures, which, once passed to
Penthouse
, caused her to be stripped of her crown and cast out into
the darkness. Williams proved resilient and made a fine career for
herself as a singer and actress. The pageant has since apologized to
her.
And then, suddenly, something
did
happen.
Looking past the pictures to the presumed date and circumstances of
their creation, it appeared that the problem was not with Melania posing
but with the visa she must have held while she was doing it. The
question, after an inquiry by Politico, became not whether she was right
or wrong to pose for such pictures but whether she had the proper
working papers for posing at all, clothed or nude, in New York in 1995.
Sexual shame cannot move the meter of our culture; questions of equal
treatment before the law, it seems, always can.
The subsequent story, about what
working papers she would have had, and which she would have needed, to
make the session kosher-and the subsequent curlicues about whether the
shoot was paid or merely pro bono-is a complex one. (In brief, she might
well have had the right kind of visa, a special one for people, like
models, with special talents, though this may or may not square with her
own account of travelling back and forth to Slovenia regularly to get
her visa renewed and her papers stamped.) Whatever the truth that will
eventually out, it is also here that the story stops being funny. For
Melania Knauss's struggles to get the right papers to permit her to pose
nude in a wholly legal manner are a more privileged version of what is,
for millions of would-be immigrants, a desperate daily struggle. Donald
Trump has made a central plank of his platform a plan to arrest, detain,
and deport millions of people who have come here, like his wife, to
work, and have found themselves in situations that are, at best, as
ambiguous as hers. We can't be certain how close she danced to, or over,
the edge of a confounding set of laws-but surely we should extend the
same circumspect compassion to all those millions that one might ask for
her. Immigrating to the United States is
hard
-anyone who has
gone through, sponsored, assisted in, or simply attended to an
immigration case knows how brutal and indifferent immigration procedures
can be. Every immigrant has a story much like Melania's, and we should
hear those stories, too, and make some allowances as well. Empathy for
Melania is a good principle, but extending that circle of compassion to
all caught in similar circumstances is a better one. The story of the
old photos of the ambitious-to-be-American Mrs. Trump ends by
underlining the cruelty of the Trump campaign toward those other, more
helpless, ambitious-to-be-Americans. And that's not a pretty picture.
"... Mark Leibovich of the Times magazine gave the Clinton campaign significant input and review into a fawning profile of the candidate. "Pleasure doing business!" campaign spokeswoman Jennifer Palmieri wrote him at the conclusion of the process. ..."
"... Ezra Klein, the boy wonder editor-in-chief of Vox, is considered to be the campaign's most reliable mouthpiece, as seen in a March 23, 2015 email in which Clintonistas were wondering which journalist it could call upon to push out a campaign storyline they were then concocting. "I think that person…is Ezra Klein," wrote Palmieri. "And we can do it with him today." ..."
"... In a July email, Neera Tanden, Hillary's longtime friend, aide, and attack puppet, strategized with Podesta about "recruiting brown and women pundits" and pushing pro-Hillary media figures such as MSNBC's Joan Walsh and Klein's colleague at Vox, Matthew Yglesias, to be even more faithful stenographers. "They can be emboldened," she wrote, as if these two loyalist PR assets needed any further encouragement. ..."
"... Trump's threats to expand libel laws and to sue journalists are genuinely scary, but Hillary displays similar contempt for journalists. In September, she gave her first formal press conference in more than nine months - virtually this entire presidential campaign. And as the Podesta emails show, the Clintonistas happily work hand in glove with pliant surrogates but operate in quite a different, and dishonest, way with critics. ..."
"... The Clinton-Giustra partnership had been written about but no U.S. journalists had traveled to Colombia to see what the Foundation has done there. In fact, with few exceptions, the Clinton Foundation's claims about the good it has done overseas have been unexamined. ..."
"... Furthermore, I had "misled" the Foundation in the past so "we have every reason to be suspicious of his intentions and doubt he would give our facts a fair hearing," he wrote. "Other news organizations have handled this material differently, always checking with us prior to publication, giving us an opportunity to respond." (Giving us the opportunity to edit and approve, is what he should have written.) In the end, Fusion updated the story and posted an editorial note saying that it had not met its standards. ..."
"... Second, of course I'm biased against the Clinton Foundation and the Clintons, on the basis of evidence and reporting. I've never bothered to hide my feelings, in public, on social media, or in my articles, because I believe that all reporters are biased and readers are smart enough to know that, and that the pretense of objectivity is itself dishonest. What makes a journalist honest is holding all sides to the same standard of criticism, no matter what your own views. ..."
"... Third, and most important, I repeatedly sought comment from the Clinton Foundation. This may seem like a minor matter but the fact that the foundation lied about that shows that it not only seeks out well-trained pet reporters as surrogates, but keeps tabs on and actively seeks to undermine its "enemies." ..."
The destruction of the industrial heartland due to Democratic-driven trade policies, shrinking salaries that force many Americans to work two and three jobs to support their families, the staggering rise in health care costs under Obamacare, widespread economic insecurity that has fueled a national opioid epidemic, and Hillary's trigger-happy views are highly rational reasons for any voter to consider casting a ballot for Trump. So, too, are fears that Clinton's election would lead to an entrenchment of institutionalized corruption and corporate political power. (If Hillary wins and Chuck Schumer takes over as Senate Majority Leader, Wall Street will get its every dream through Congress.)
There's nothing secret about the media's anti-Trump stance. A formal declaration of war was launched on August 7, when Jim Rutenberg, the New York Times media columnist, wrote a story under the headline, "Trump Is Testing the Norms of Objectivity in Journalism." Rutenberg wrote that journalists were in a terrible bind trying to stay objective because Trump, among other things, "cozies up to anti-American dictators," has "put financial conditions on the United States defense of NATO allies," and that his foreign policy views "break with decades-old …consensus."
And worst of all is Rutenberg's statement about the role of journalists. "All governments are
run by liars and nothing they say should be believed," I.F. Stone once wrote. "Journalism is printing
what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations," said George Orwell.
For those two self-evident reasons, being "oppositional" is the only place political journalists
should ever be, no matter who is in power or who is campaigning.
But for Rutenberg and the New York Times being oppositional is only "uncomfortable" when it comes
to covering Hillary Clinton. It didn't seem uncomfortable at all when it came to running a story
about Trump's taxes based on three pages of a decades-old tax return that was sent anonymously or
when it ran another story with the headline, "The 282 People, Places and Things Donald Trump Has
Insulted on Twitter: A Complete List."
All during the campaign we have watched Hillary Clinton rehearse campaign themes and, almost as
if by magic, the media amplifying those themes in seeming lockstep. The hacked emails from Clinton
campaign chairman John Podesta have demonstrated that this was not mere happenstance, but, at least
in part, resulted from direct coordination between the Clintonistas and the press.
Mark Leibovich of the Times magazine gave the Clinton campaign significant input and review into
a fawning profile of the candidate. "Pleasure doing business!" campaign spokeswoman Jennifer Palmieri
wrote him at the conclusion of the process.
The Clintonistas had an equally pleasurable relationship with the Times's Maggie Haberman, who,
it was said in one email, "We have had… tee up stories for us before and have never been disappointed."
Haberman even apparently read Palmieri an entire story prior to publication "to further assure me,"
Palmieri wrote.
Ezra Klein, the boy wonder editor-in-chief of Vox, is considered to be the campaign's most reliable
mouthpiece, as seen in a March 23, 2015 email in which Clintonistas were wondering which journalist
it could call upon to push out a campaign storyline they were then concocting. "I think that person…is
Ezra Klein," wrote Palmieri. "And we can do it with him today."
In a July email, Neera Tanden, Hillary's longtime friend, aide, and attack puppet, strategized
with Podesta about "recruiting brown and women pundits" and pushing pro-Hillary media figures such
as MSNBC's Joan Walsh and Klein's colleague at Vox, Matthew Yglesias, to be even more faithful stenographers.
"They can be emboldened," she wrote, as if these two loyalist PR assets needed any further encouragement.
In the same email, Tanden wrote that when New York mayor Michael Bloomberg was "having problems"
with the Times he called publisher Arthur Schulzburger [sic] to arrange a coffee to complain about
the newspaper's reporting and that their chat "changed the coverage moderately but also aired the
issues in the newsroom so people were more conscious of it."
Unfortunately, she added, "Arthur is
a pretty big wuss" so he wouldn't do more to help out Bloomberg without additional prodding.
To get real results to change the Times's coverage of the 2016 campaign, "Hillary would have to
be the one to call" Sulzberger - a rather astonishing remark that begs a million questions about
the Times' election reporting.
Politico reporter Glenn Thrush apologized to Podesta for writing a story draft that he feared
was too critical. "I have become a hack I will send u the whole section that pertains to u," he wrote.
"Please don't share or tell anyone I did this Tell me if I fucked up anything." On bended knee would
have been more dignified.
Trump's threats to expand libel laws and to sue journalists are genuinely scary, but Hillary displays
similar contempt for journalists. In September, she gave her first formal press conference in more
than nine months - virtually this entire presidential campaign. And as the Podesta emails show, the
Clintonistas happily work hand in glove with pliant surrogates but operate in quite a different,
and dishonest, way with critics.
Which leads me to my own recent experience writing about the Clinton Foundation's abysmal programs
in Colombia, where it has worked closely with Frank Giustra, reportedly the foundation's largest
donor. Giustra, a Canadian stock market manipulator who was known as the "Poison Dwarf" because of
his tiny stature - he's a little north of 5 feet- and tendency to make tons of money at the expense
of small investors, invested heavily in Colombia in oil, gold, and
timber. He made a fortune while companies he was affiliated with ruthlessly exploited workers
and
reportedly raped and pillaged the environment.
The Clinton-Giustra partnership had been written about but no U.S. journalists had traveled to
Colombia to see what the Foundation has done there. In fact, with few exceptions, the Clinton Foundation's
claims about the good it has done overseas have been unexamined.
I spent 10 days in Colombia last May and spoke to unionists, workers, environmentalists, Afro-Colombians
and entrepreneurs - exactly the people who the foundation brags about helping on its website- as
well as three left-leaning senators who champion the poor. They were overwhelmingly negative, and
in many cases disparaging, about the Clinton Foundation and Giustra, who was deeply involved with
an oil company, Pacific Rubiales, that recently went spectacularly bankrupt and which worked with
the Army to smash a strike after workers revolted over miserable pay and working conditions.
Bill Clinton had a friendly relationship with Pacific Rubiales too, and in 2012 the two men golfed
together at a charitable event for the foundation sponsored by the oil company. Colombia's president,
whose niece got a plush job as "Sustainability
Manager" for Pacific Rubiales, golfed with Bill.
I had wanted to write the Colombia story for months but, as is often the case in journalism today,
couldn't find a media outlet to pay for the trip. A friend steered me to the American Media Institute
(AMI), a conservative non-profit, which funded the trip.
AMI arranged for the story to run in Politico, but it killed an early version. I then pitched
it to Fusion,
which ran it on October 13. It immediately generated a furious reaction from the Clinton camp,
starting off with a series of tweets by Angel Urena, Bill Clinton's spokesman. Then the Foundation
tried to get Fusion to take the story off its website.
On October 14, Craig Minassian, a Clinton Foundation spokesman, sent a 14-page letter to Fusion,
CC-ing foundation officials, Urena and Mark Gunton of the Clinton-Giustra Enterprise Partnership.
The first few pages attacked me, citing past articles about the Clinton Foundation and a series of
"vulgar" tweets I'd posted about Hillary Clinton and her supporters, including Clinton's long-time
surrogate Joe Conason, author of
Man of the World, a rapturous book about Bill Clinton's post-presidency. (Conason is also former
executive editor of the Observer.)
It also complained about factual errors and cited the funding from AMI as being evidence that
the story was a right wing plot. In fact, I set up the trip with the help of fixer in Colombia, picked
people to interview, and there was no political intrusion into the story. Ironically, a conservative
non-profit paid for a piece that defended unions, the poor, women, and Afro-Colombians.
Mostly the dossier contained unverifiable Clinton Foundation propaganda and references to positive
press stories about the foundation, like one in pro-Hillary Vox titled "The key question on the Clinton
Foundation is whether it saved lives. The answer is clearly yes." A central component of the foundation's
attack - which Urena played heavily on his Twitter feed -was that I had never attempted to reach
the Clinton Foundation or campaign for comment.
Furthermore, I had "misled" the Foundation in the past so "we have every reason to
be suspicious of his intentions and doubt he would give our facts a fair hearing," he wrote. "Other
news organizations have handled this material differently, always checking with us prior to publication,
giving us an opportunity to respond." (Giving us the opportunity to edit and approve, is what he
should have written.) In the end, Fusion updated the story and posted an editorial note saying that
it had not met its standards.
OK, let me acknowledge my mistakes and provide a little further information. First off, the Fusion
story did contain a number of errors. My name is on the story so I have to take responsibility.
Fine. None of the mistakes was intentional and I spent endless hours prior to publication trying
to ensure everything was accurate. There is nothing more embarrassing as a journalist than having
to make corrections. I screwed up. But I stand by the story's on-the-ground reporting from Colombia
and the conclusions about the Clinton Foundation's meager results there.
Second, of course I'm biased against the Clinton Foundation and the Clintons, on the basis of
evidence and reporting. I've never bothered to hide my feelings, in public, on social media, or in
my articles, because I believe that all reporters are biased and readers are smart enough to know
that, and that the pretense of objectivity is itself dishonest. What makes a journalist honest is
holding all sides to the same standard of criticism, no matter what your own views.
I'm equally biased against Donald Trump and have written a number of critical articles about him
and described him in equally vulgar and unflattering terms. The only reasons I haven't written about
Trump more is that I had pitches about him turned down - including one about his revolting comments
about women, which I shopped around unsuccessfully last spring during the GOP primaries - and because
I believed (and still do) that Hillary Clinton is likely to be elected president, which makes her
a bigger target.
Third, and most important, I repeatedly sought comment from the Clinton Foundation. This may seem
like a minor matter but the fact that the foundation lied about that shows that it not only seeks
out well-trained pet reporters as surrogates, but keeps tabs on and actively seeks to undermine its
"enemies."
In August, when the piece was at Politico, I sent a detailed email to the foundation, to Hillary's
campaign and to the CGEP seeking comment. There was nothing coy about it. I wrote, in part:
I'm currently writing a piece about the foundations' activities in Colombia, where I recently
spent 10 days, and interviewed dozens of people…I truly want to hear your side of this story,
which thus far appears to be utterly appalling. While the Foundation and presidential candidate
Hilary Clinton have effusively and repeatedly expressed their concerns for the poor and organized
labor - and in Colombia specifically mention a deep concern for Afro-Colombians - I found no evidence
of that on the ground.
Unionists, Afro-Colombians, elected officials and impoverished people in the slums of Bogota
and Cartagena are unanimous: the Clinton Foundation…has played no role at all in helping Colombia's
poor or even worse, it has played a negative role.
I've tried unsuccessfully to get comment from you in the past about other stories but wanted
to reach out once again in the hopes that you might be able to reply to some simple straightforward
questions.
In fact, this was the fifth time in the past year that I wrote about the foundation and it only
replied once, prior to publication of the first story. Furthermore, I sought comment at the Clinton
Foundation in Colombia and at several of its projects in Bogota and Cartagena, and no one could talk
to me or provide even minimal information. (For example, why does the Clinton Foundation run a private
equity fund out of its Bogota office? What does that have to do with its charitable efforts?)
Should I have reached out to the foundation again after the story moved to Fusion? Perhaps, but
another reporter who had been working on the Colombia story had attempted to get comment from the
foundation and received no reply. The foundation (and the Clinton campaign) was given ample opportunity
to reply and chose not to. I have a strong suspicion that if Thrush or Klein or Haberman or one of
its other pet journalists had asked for comment they would have had no problem.
The 2016 election has exposed like nothing in modern times the desperate need for political reform
in this country.
Donald Trump's success or failure as the next US president will
largely depend on his ability to keep his independence from the "shadow government" and elite
structures that shaped the policies of previous administrations, former presidential candidate
Ron Paul told RT.
[...]
"
Unfortunately, there has been several neoconservatives that
are getting closer to Trump. And if gets his advice from them then I do not think that is a good
sign,
" Paul told the host of RT's Crosstalk show Peter Lavelle.
The retired Congressman said that people voted for Trump because
he stood against the deep corruption in the establishment, that was further exposed during the
campaign by WikiLeaks, and because of his disapproval of meddling in the wider Middle East.
"
During the campaign, he did talk a little bit about backing
off and being less confrontational to Russia and I like that. He criticized some the wars in the
Middle East at the same time. He believes we should accelerate the war against ISIS and terrorism,
"
Paul noted.
[...]
"
But quite frankly there is an outside source which we refer
to as the 'deep state' or the 'shadow government'. There is a lot of influence by people which
are actually more powerful than our government itself, our president,
" the congressman said.
"
Yes, Trump is his own guy, more so than most of those who
have ever been in before. We hope he can maintain an independence and go in the right direction.
But I fear the fact that there is so much that can be done secretly, out of control of our apparent
government and out of the view of so many citizens,
" he added.
More:
https://www.rt.com/usa/366404-trump-ron-paul-crosstalk/
Donald Trump's proposal for $1 trillion worth of new infrastructure construction relies entirely
on private financing, which industry experts say is likely to fall far short of adequately funding
improvements to roads, bridges and airports.
The president-elect's infrastructure plan largely boils down to a tax break in the hopes of
luring capital to projects. He wants investors to put money into projects in exchange for tax
credits totaling 82% of the equity amount. His plan anticipates that lost tax revenue would be
recouped through new income-tax revenue from construction workers and business-tax revenue from
contractors, making the proposal essentially cost-free to the government.
Mr. Trump has made a $1 trillion infrastructure investment over 10 years one of his first priorities
as president, promising in his victory speech early Wednesday morning to "rebuild our highways,
bridges, tunnels, airports, schools, hospitals."
The Trump team's $1 trillion infrastructure investment plan over 10 years is laid out in a
description of the proposal on the website (#) of Peter Navarro, an adviser to Mr. Trump and a
public-policy professor at the University of California, Irvine. A presidential transition website
that went up this week (*) said Mr. Trump planned to invest $550 billion in infrastructure, without
offering details on where that funding would come from. Top Trump aides couldn't be reached to
comment on the proposal.
Experts and industry officials, though, say there are limits to how much can be done with private
financing. Because privately funded projects need to turn a profit, they are better suited for
major projects such as toll roads, airports or water systems and less appropriate for routine
maintenance, such as repaving a public street, they say.
Officials also doubt that the nation's aging infrastructure can be updated without a significant
infusion of public dollars. ...
Trump took what should have been democrats' issues. Clinton should simply have tried
to take all of Sanders positions, working with Sanders, and then position Trump as the faker who
was taking the dems positions. Alas, she did not.
Clinton made her usual lame, transparent attempts to co-opt Sanders' positions, but being
Clinton, few people **believe** her.
Sanders backers always said that Clinton was almost uniquely capable of losing to a fraud like
Trump, and here, apparently -- tragically -- we are.
And believing Dems will learn not one goddam thing. Expect the special pleading and blame-shifting
to amp up to jet engine levels. Already Saint Krugman has smeared the Greens for Clinton's loss
in Florida, which seems to mathematically impossible by an order of magnitude.
Clinton lost **Pennsylvania**, for Christ's sake! She seems to have lost Philly!! How does
an even semi-competent candidate pull that off?!?!?
...And Clintonians spent decades claiming neoliberalism was necessary to get moderate voters
who went for Reagan, and that liberalism is too unpopular to win an election. They stuck to that
script in post-Great Recession America, which is not post-Reagan America.
And they stuck with a candidate who has zero ability to get independent voters. Her leftward
moves in response to Sanders on college tuition and more funding for health clinics (which Sanders
said would achieve free primary care in the US) would have got out the vote, but she preferred
to talk in infuriating platitudes and smear Trump as a Russian puppet to get the patriotic vote.
"... but she preferred to talk in infuriating platitudes and smear Trump as a Russian
puppet to get the patriotic vote."
This, I think, is a valid criticism. Hillary and the older Dems were truly out of touch
on this issue and failed to understand how poorly it played with the electorate (which is sad,
because there are some real serious issues with Russia right now). Likewise, they failed to grasp
how desperate Millennials / Rural whites have gotten and thus how important fixing the economy
was for them.
Fix that on "we came, we saw, he died......" with a post up his you know where! Or the no fly
zone thing to give another country to the foundation donors' terrorists. You all missed the point!
All the people don't see what you want us to! You could fool enough of the people when you
needed to!
The Russia nonsense was always overblown, typical Dem tactical ineptitude. I wouldn't be
surprised if it backfired to Trump's advantage.
Dems never stopped to consider that
Any mention of foreign data leakage had to remind people of Clinton's FOIA-avoiding server
escapades, and
You can find lots of Dem "consultants" and "strategists" who themselves have lucrative
histories with sleazy overseas characters (Podesta, Biden's son, etc.).
"The Russia nonsense was always overblown, typical Dem tactical ineptitude. I wouldn't
be surprised if it backfired to Trump's advantage."
From a campaign prospective, right conclusion. Wrong reason. Pushing the Russia connection
damaged Hillary because it played up her "War Hawk" and "Military Industrial complex" ties for
the public, which in turn strengthened the corporocrat accusation.
Worse, to the informed it smelled like W's push for war, and thus reminded everyone of Hillary's
vote on Iraq. And those things hurt.
Clinton is with Bill unmitigated war mongering neoliberalNeocon/ The Clinton Iraq vote
was purely animus! Stepping away is prevarication. What went into Qaddafi was pure evil sent by
Obama and his SecState.
Clinton was more into Sunni/GCC money and influence peddling. The Russian/Putin thing was
fantasy! The main stream media [Stalinist] propaganda did not sell in the 5 key states that went
red from blue.
No, the point is the dems are crooked, Clinton was selected by the DNC (calling it crooked
is repeating myself). I am convinced the US dodged a very severe mistake by electing Trump!
I thought Obama blew it in his first hundred days, when he refused to take on Wall Street,
and instead played idiotic bipartisanship games with totally (and obviously) intransigent Republicans.
But more recently I figured that at least he got the Iran deal going, and that looked like a significant
gain for sanity. Now, if I understand Trump's ramblings on every other Tuesday, the deal is vulnerable.
You mean declare martial law and send the Marines into capture Wall Street, and ship them to
Gitmo? Or didn't you notice the Republicans legalizing financial fraud over the past 40 years?
If you like I can detail the dozen major steps beginning circa 1970 like the camel nose unto
the tent. Step one: retail money market funds as an alternative to bank savings accounts. They
were a big fraud: "safer than FDIC bank savings accounts".
Yes, totally agree with the point that Obama did not understand the strategic moment and
instead aligned himself in a way that legitimized the opposition's points.
Simpson Bowles was benighted. TPP was senseless. How could a party that stood for working
people give away social security and then try to give away jobs some more. Strategists should
have been screaming that this was positioning the party in a way that was opposite to what the
party had stood for in opposition to the republican elite.
Of course, Clinton was the wrong candidate as she is a archetype, tied to Trade deals, Glass
Steagel and even the Iraq war.
I would like to see the democratic party stand fir work in the US.
"Simpson Bowles was benighted. TPP was senseless. How could a party that stood for working people
give away social security and then try to give away jobs some more...."
Just wanted to say, good tactical analysis there.
srbarbour -> sglover... , -1
"I thought Obama blew it in his first hundred days, when he refused to take on Wall Street, and
instead played idiotic bipartisanship games with totally (and obviously) intransigent Republicans."
Hard to say, 2009 had a very different atmosphere and there was a very real desire in the electorate
to return to bipartisanship. Plus, bipartisanship was kind of a major Obama campaign promise.
That said, the only gain Dems got from that was a general fuzzy, awareness the Republican partisanship
is one-sided. A boon that is now tactically useless because the Republicans will control every
branch of the government. So in hindsight, pure fail. However, forgiveable in context.
Anybody but the brain dead could see HRC ran a lazy campaign focused on a non-issue. It's clear
she expected certain quarters of the population's loyalty in voting but offered them nothing.
One hopes these libs begin to wake up.
DemoRats lost working class votes. may be forever (or as long as they stay neoliberal DemoRats).
This is an important defeats of Bill Clinton, who sold the party to wall Street.
Notable quotes:
"... On Thursday night, People for Bernie, a tech-savvy progressive group with ties to Sanders, told CNN it was backing Ellison as a first step in displacing Clinton loyalists with "a leadership untainted by cozy relationships to Wall St. moneymen, corporate behemoths, dictators, or monarchs." ..."
"... In a jab at Dean, People for Bernie co-founder Charles Lenchner added, "Any 50-state strategy must begin with a 50-state accountability project; we reject any effort to unite the party behind the agents of a failed leadership." ..."
As Democrats reel in the wake of Donald Trump's stunning victory, a new storm is brewing inside
the party as competing factions begin to grapple for its leadership.
Howard Dean, who ran the Democratic National Committee from 2005 to 2009, announced on Thursday he
would again seek its top role. Soon after he announced, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and his top allies
began pushing Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison for the role.
But other politicos expressed interest in the job Friday. Former presidential candidate Martin
O'Malley announced that he is throwing his hat in the ring.
"Since the election, I have been approached by many Democrats who believe our party needs new leadership,"
said the former Maryland Governor. "I'm taking a hard look at DNC Chair because I know how badly
we need to reform our nominating process, articulate a bold progressive vision, recommit ourselves
to higher wages and a stronger middle class, and return to our roots as a nationwide, grassroots
party."
New Hampshire Democratic Party Chairman and DNC Vice Chair Ray Buckley is exploring a run, according
to the Boston Globe.
... ... ...
Sanders -- a registered independent who caucuses with Democrats and fought a lengthy primary battle
for the party's nomination this year -- and top allies are touting Ellison for the job. The Muslim-American
congressman currently co-chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
... ... ...
On Thursday night, People for Bernie, a tech-savvy progressive group with ties to Sanders,
told CNN it was backing Ellison as a first step in displacing Clinton loyalists with "a leadership
untainted by cozy relationships to Wall St. moneymen, corporate behemoths, dictators, or monarchs."
In a jab at Dean, People for Bernie co-founder Charles Lenchner added, "Any 50-state strategy
must begin with a 50-state accountability project; we reject any effort to unite the party behind
the agents of a failed leadership."
The current head of the DNC is Donna Brazile, a longtime Democratic operative and former CNN contributor,
who is leading in an interim capacity after Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned on the eve of the convention.
Hacked emails appeared to show Wasserman Schultz and other since-departed DNC officials discussing
ways to undermine Sanders' effort to oust Clinton in the primary.
DemoRats lost working class votes. may be forever (or as long as they stay neoliberal DemoRats).
This is an important defeats of Bill Clinton, who sold the party to wall Street.
Notable quotes:
"... But aides said the Clinton campaign's top strategists largely ignored the former president, instead focusing on consolidating the base of voters that helped elect President Barack Obama to the White House. In the closing days of the campaign, Clinton targeted young people, Hispanics and African-Americans with laser like focus, casting Trump as a racist who only sought the presidency to benefit himself. ..."
The campaign communications director, Jennifer Palmieri, said in a statement Friday that "no one
anticipated" losing. She said many factors were at work, but she listed Comey as chief among them.
"We didn't blame everyone but ourselves," Palmieri said. "We acknowledged a lot of challenges we
faced, plenty of mistakes made along the way, some challenges we weren't able to overcome."
She added: "What changed in the last week that made his turn out go up and our's go down? The only
thing apparent was Comey. It was one thing too many. Could not overcome it."
Democrats close to Bill Clinton said Thursday that one mistake Clinton's top aides made was not listening
to the former president more when he urged the campaign to spend more time focusing on disaffected
white, working class voters.
Many in Clinton's campaign viewed these voters as Trump's base, people so committed to the Republican
nominee that no amount of visits or messaging could sway them. Clinton made no visits to Wisconsin
as the Democratic nominee, and only pushed a late charge in Michigan once internal polling showed
the race tightening.
Bill Clinton, advisers said, pushed the campaign early on to focus on these voters, many of whom
helped elected him twice to the White House. The former president, a Clinton aide said, would regularly
call Robby Mook to talk about strategy and offer advice.
But aides said the Clinton campaign's top strategists largely ignored the former president,
instead focusing on consolidating the base of voters that helped elect President Barack Obama to
the White House. In the closing days of the campaign, Clinton targeted young people, Hispanics and
African-Americans with laser like focus, casting Trump as a racist who only sought the presidency
to benefit himself.
"... Some of those applications are coming from the #NeverTrump crowd, the source said, and include former national security officials who signed one or more of the letters opposing Trump. ..."
"... Fifty GOP national security experts signed an August letter saying Trump "would put at risk our country's national security and well-being" because he "lacks the character, values and experience" to occupy the Oval Office, making him "the most reckless president in American history." ..."
"... Another bipartisan letter cited concern about potential foreign conflicts of interest Trump might encounter as president, and called on him to disclose them by releasing his tax returns. Trump has refused to do so, saying he is under audit and will make the returns public only once that is done. ..."
The extraordinary repudiation -- partly based on Trump's rejection of basic US foreign policy
tenets, including support for close allies -- helped spark the hashtag #NeverTrump. Now, a source
familiar with transition planning says that hard wall of resistance is crumbling fast.
There are "boxes" of applications, the source said. "There are many more than people realize."
Some of those applications are coming from the #NeverTrump crowd, the source said, and include
former national security officials who signed one or more of the letters opposing Trump. "Mea
culpas" are being considered -- and in some cases being granted, the source said -- for people who
did not go a step further in attacking Trump personally.
... ... ...
Fifty GOP national security experts signed an August letter saying Trump "would put at risk
our country's national security and well-being" because he "lacks the character, values and experience"
to occupy the Oval Office, making him "the most reckless president in American history."
Another bipartisan letter cited concern about potential foreign conflicts of interest Trump might
encounter as president, and called on him to disclose them by releasing his tax returns. Trump has
refused to do so, saying he is under audit and will make the returns public only once that is done.
It remains to be seen what kind of team Trump will pull together, how many "NeverTrumpers" will apply
for positions and to what degree the President-elect will be willing to accept them.
There's a fight underway within the Trump transition team about whether to consider "never Trumpers"
for jobs, one official tells CNN. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who is leading the transition
team, has been working to persuade Trump and other top officials to consider Republicans who openly
opposed his campaign. That has caused some friction with those who see no place for people who didn't
support their candidate.
"... What's bought [sic] us to this stage is a policy – whether it's been intentional or unintentional or a mixture of both – of divide and rule, where society is broken down into neat little boxes and were told how to behave towards the contents of each one rather than, say, just behaving well towards all of them. ..."
"... And this right here is why neoliberalism = identity politics and why both ought to be crushed ruthlessly. ..."
Well, that makes a lot of sense for a very good reason: racism was essentially created in the
British colonies first in the Americas (read: Virginia) in the 17th and 18th centuries. Slavery
became synomous with race, i.e., only Africans and their colonial descendants could be legally
enslaved. Before, pretty much anyone could be a slave, including the destitute, or religious "others"
(Irish, especially), or war captives (Native peoples, Muslims, etc.). In the colonies, this new
racialized legal definition of slavery created a very real divide in the lower orders and working
classes – specifically, race was a way to divide enslaved people away from indentured servants
and landless peasants. (you could say it also created what is now called "white privilege," putting
white people one notch above black slaves, in legal terms). Look into the Virginia slave codes,
Bacon's Rebellion, etc. They literally invented race-thinking to divide the lower classes and
protect the colonial social hierarchy and its economy. It's where "racism" began, arguably.
This was the British empire we're talking about here. And you mentioned India…under British
colonial rule. If interested, the classic text on this is Edward Morgan's "American Slavery, American
Freedom." It's a must-read for all Americans and those interested in US/imperial history, or the
history of slavery writ large. Must read, as in top ten histories of all time. Not coincidentally,
the British became more interested in Asia after their American colonists got all uppity, demanded
their political autonomy, and created their own empire in the Americas. British historians of
empire call this the empire's "swing to the east." This happened in the latter part of the 18th
century.
The old divide and conquer. A cynic might suggest this is exactly the strategy of the corporate
Dems. Assimilation–what used to be called "the melting pot"–is their enemy.
What's bought [sic] us to this stage is a policy – whether it's been intentional
or unintentional or a mixture of both – of divide and rule, where society is broken down into
neat little boxes and were told how to behave towards the contents of each one rather than,
say, just behaving well towards all of them.
And this right here is why neoliberalism = identity politics and why both ought to be crushed
ruthlessly.
"... America's globalists and interventionists are already pushing the meme that because so many establishment and entrenched national
security and military "experts" opposed Trump's candidacy, Trump is "required" to call on them to join his administration because there
are not enough such "experts" among Trump's inner circle of advisers. ..."
"... Discredited neo-conservatives from George W. Bush's White House, such as Iraq war co-conspirator Stephen Hadley, are being
mentioned as someone Trump should have join his National Security Council and other senior positions. George H. W. Bush's Secretary
of State James Baker, a die-hard Bush loyalist, is also being proffered as a member of Trump's White House team. ..."
"... There is absolutely no reason for Trump to seek the advice from old Republican fossils like Baker, Hadley, former Secretaries
of State Rice and Powell, the lunatic former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, and others. There are plenty of Trump
supporters who have a wealth of experience in foreign and national security matters, including those of African, Haitian, Hispanic,
and Arab descent and who are not neocons, who can fill Trump's senior- and middle-level positions. ..."
"... Trump must distance himself from sudden well-wishing neocons, adventurists, militarists, and interventionists and not permit
them to infest his administration. ..."
"... PNAC: Project for New American Century. The main neocon lobby, it focused first on invading Iraq. Founded 1997, by William
Kristol & Robert Kagan. First action: open letter to Clinton advocating Iraq war. Members in the Iraq-War clique: Cheney, Rumsfeld,
Wolfowitz, Feith, BOLTON, Libby, Abrams, Wurmser, Perle. ..."
"... HE PROMISED he would appoint a special prosecutor, PROMISED... ..."
"... Trump should reverse the McCain Feingold bill. That would take some wind out of Soros' sails, at least temporarily because
that was Soros' bill. He wanted campaign finance reform which actually meant that he wanted to control campaign finance through 501C3
groups, or foundations such as Open Society, Moveon.org, Ella Baker society, Center for American progress, etc. He has a massive web
of these organizations and they fund smaller ones and all kinds of evil. ..."
"... Tyler, please rerun this! How George Sorros destroys countries, profits from currency trading, convinces the countries to privatize
its assets, buys them and then sells them for yet another profit: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-07-08/how-george-soros-singlehandedly...
..."
"... We know so little about Trump ... he's neoCon friendly to start with (remember he hired neoCon Grandee James Woolsey as an
advisor)... and remember too Trump is promising his own war against Iran ... ..."
"... JFK was gunned down in front of the whole world. ..."
"... If Trump really is a nationalist patriot he'll need to innoculate the Population about the Deep State... they in turn will
unleash financial disintegration and chaos, a Purple Revolution and then assassinate Trump (or have his own party impeach him) ..."
"... Organizing a means to receive the protestors' complaints may co-opt any organized effort to disrupt good political interaction
and it will also separate out the bad elements cited by Madsen. ..."
Defeated Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton is not about to "go quietly into that good night". On the morning
after her surprising and unanticipated defeat at the hands of Republican Party upstart Donald Trump, Mrs. Clinton and her husband,
former President Bill Clinton, entered the ball room of the art-deco New Yorker hotel in midtown Manhattan and were both adorned
in purple attire. The press immediately noticed the color and asked what it represented. Clinton spokespeople claimed it was to represent
the coming together of Democratic "Blue America" and Republican "Red America" into a united purple blend. This statement was a complete
ruse as is known by citizens of countries targeted in the past by the vile political operations of international hedge fund tycoon
George Soros.
The Clintons, who both have received millions of dollars in campaign contributions and Clinton Foundation donations from Soros,
were, in fact, helping to launch Soros's "Purple Revolution" in America. The Purple Revolution will resist all efforts by the Trump
administration to push back against the globalist policies of the Clintons and soon-to-be ex-President Barack Obama. The Purple Revolution
will also seek to make the Trump administration a short one through Soros-style street protests and political disruption.
It is doubtful that President Trump's aides will advise the new president to carry out a diversionary criminal investigation of
Mrs. Clinton's private email servers and other issues related to the activities of the Clinton Foundation, especially when the nation
faces so many other pressing issues, including jobs, immigration, and health care. However, House Oversight and Government Reform
Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz said he will continue hearings in the Republican-controlled Congress on Hillary Clinton, the
Clinton Foundation, and Mrs. Clinton's aide
Huma Abedin
. President Trump should not allow himself to be distracted by these efforts. Chaffetz was not one of Trump's most loyal supporters.
America's globalists and interventionists are already pushing the meme that because so many establishment and entrenched national
security and military "experts" opposed Trump's candidacy, Trump is "required" to call on them to join his administration because
there are not enough such "experts" among Trump's inner circle of advisers.
Discredited neo-conservatives from George W. Bush's White House, such as Iraq war co-conspirator Stephen Hadley, are being
mentioned as someone Trump should have join his National Security Council and other senior positions. George H. W. Bush's Secretary
of State James Baker, a die-hard Bush loyalist, is also being proffered as a member of Trump's White House team.
There is absolutely no reason for Trump to seek the advice from old Republican fossils like Baker, Hadley, former Secretaries
of State Rice and Powell, the lunatic former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, and others. There are plenty of Trump
supporters who have a wealth of experience in foreign and national security matters, including those of African, Haitian, Hispanic,
and Arab descent and who are not neocons, who can fill Trump's senior- and middle-level positions.
Trump must distance himself from sudden well-wishing neocons, adventurists, militarists, and interventionists and not permit
them to infest his administration. If Mrs. Clinton had won the presidency, an article on the incoming administration would have
read as follows:
"Based on the militarism and foreign adventurism of her term as Secretary of State and her husband Bill Clinton's two terms
as president, the world is in store for major American military aggression on multiple fronts around the world. President-elect
Hillary Clinton has made no secret of her desire to confront Russia militarily, diplomatically, and economically in the Middle
East, on Russia's very doorstep in eastern Europe, and even within the borders of the Russian Federation. Mrs. Clinton has dusted
off the long-discredited 'containment' policy ushered into effect by Professor George F. Kennan in the aftermath of World War.
Mrs. Clinton's administration will likely promote the most strident neo-Cold Warriors of the Barack Obama administration, including
Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland, a personal favorite of Clinton".
President-elect Trump cannot afford to permit those who are in the same web as Nuland, Hadley, Bolton, and others to join his
administration where they would metastasize like an aggressive form of cancer. These individuals would not carry out Trump's policies
but seek to continue to damage America's relations with Russia, China, Iran, Cuba, and other nations.
Not only must Trump have to deal with Republican neocons trying to worm their way into his administration, but he must deal with
the attempt by Soros to disrupt his presidency and the United States with a Purple Revolution
No sooner had Trump been declared the 45th president of the United States, Soros-funded political operations launched their activities
to disrupt Trump during Obama's lame-duck period and thereafter. The swiftness of the Purple Revolution is reminiscent of the speed
at which protesters hit the streets of Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, in two Orange Revolutions sponsored by Soros, one in 2004 and
the other, ten years later, in 2014.
As the Clintons were embracing purple in New York, street demonstrations, some violent, all coordinated by the Soros-funded Moveon.org
and "Black Lives Matter", broke out in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Oakland, Nashville, Cleveland, Washington, Austin, Seattle,
Philadelphia, Richmond, St. Paul, Kansas City, Omaha, San Francisco, and some 200 other cities across the United States.
The Soros-financed Russian singing group "Pussy Riot" released on YouTube an anti-Trump music video titled "Make America Great
Again". The video went "viral" on the Internet. The video, which is profane and filled with violent acts, portrays a dystopian Trump
presidency. Following the George Soros/Gene Sharp script to a tee, Pussy Riot member Nadya Tolokonnikova called for anti-Trump Americans
to turn their anger into art, particularly music and visual art. The use of political graffiti is a popular Sharp tactic. The street
protests and anti-Trump music and art were the first phase of Soros's Purple Revolution in America.
President-elect Trump is facing a two-pronged attack by his opponents. One, led by entrenched neo-con bureaucrats, including former
Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency director Michael Hayden, former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff,
and Bush family loyalists are seeking to call the shots on who Trump appoints to senior national security, intelligence, foreign
policy, and defense positions in his administration. These neo-Cold Warriors are trying to convince Trump that he must maintain the
Obama aggressiveness and militancy toward Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, and other countries. The second front arrayed against
Trump is from Soros-funded political groups and media. This second line of attack is a propaganda war, utilizing hundreds of anti-Trump
newspapers, web sites, and broadcasters, that will seek to undermine public confidence in the Trump administration from its outset.
One of Trump's political advertisements, released just prior to Election Day, stated that George Soros, Federal Reserve chair
Janet Yellen, and Goldman Sachs chief executive officer Lloyd Blankfein, are all part of "a global power structure that is responsible
for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth and put that money into the pockets
of a handful of large corporations and political entities". Soros and his minions immediately and ridiculously attacked the ad as
"anti-Semitic". President Trump should be on guard against those who his campaign called out in the ad and their colleagues. Soros's
son, Alexander Soros, called on Trump's daughter, Ivanka, and her husband Jared Kushner, to publicly disavow Trump. Soros's tactics
not only seek to split apart nations but also families. Trump must be on guard against the current and future machinations of George
Soros, including his Purple Revolution.
"It is doubtful that President Trump's aides will advise the new president to carry out a diversionary criminal investigation
of Mrs. Clinton's private email servers and other issues related to the activities of the Clinton Foundation, especially when
the nation faces so many other pressing issues, including jobs, immigration, and health care."
None of those "pressing issues" involve the DOJ or the FBI.
Investigate, prosecute and jail Hillary Clinton and her crew.
Trump is going to need a hostage or two to deal with these fucks.
News for the Clintons, The R's and D's already united to vote against Hillary.
I do not understand why they think street protests will bring down a POTUS? And that would be acceptable in a major nation.
Why isn't the government cracking down the separatists in Oregon, California, and elsewhere? They are not accepting the legal
outcome of an election. They are calling for illegal secession. (Funny in 1861 this was a cause for the federal government to
attack the joint and seveal states of the union.) If a group of whites had protested Obama's election in 2008?
The people living in Kalispell are reviled and ridiculed for their separatist views. Randy Weaver and family for not accepting
politically correct views. And so on.
This is getting out of hand. There will be no walking this back.
Purple is the color of royalty! Are these fuckers proclaiming themselves as King and Queen of America? If so, get the executioner
and give them a "French Haircut"!
"Yes. And who are the neocons really? Progressives. Neocon is a label successfully used by criminal progressives to shield
their brand."
Well let's go a little bit deeper in examing the 'who' thing:
"The neoconservative movement, which is generally perceived as a radical (rather than "conservative") Republican right,
is, in reality, an intellectual movement born in the late 1960s in the pages of the monthly magazine Commentary , a media arm
of the American Jewish Committee , which had replaced the Contemporary Jewish Record in 1945. The Forward , the oldest American
Jewish weekly, wrote in a January 6th, 2006 article signed Gal Beckerman: " If there is an intellectual movement in America
to whose invention Jews can lay sole claim, neoconservatism is it.... "
The idea of arresting the Clinton Crime, Fraud and Crime Family would be welcomed. BUT, who is going to arrest them? Loretta Lynch,
James Comey, WHO? The problem here is that our so called "authorities" are all in the same bed. The tentacles of the Eastern Elite
Establishment are everywhere in high office, academia, the media, Big Business, etc. The swamp is thoroughly infested with this
elite scum of those in the Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg Group, Chatham House, Club of Rome,
Committee of 300, Jason Society and numerous other private clubs of the rich, powerful and influential. The Illuminati has been
exposed, however they aren't going down lightly. They still have massive amounts of money, they own the media and the banking
houses. Some have described it as MIMAC, the Military Industrial Media Academic Complex. A few months ago here at Zero Hedge,
there was an article which showed a massive flow chart of the elites and their organization
They could IF and WHEN Trump gets to Washington after 20 Jan 2017, simply implode the economy and blame t it on Trump. Sort
of what happened to Herbert Hoover in the late 1920's. Unfortunately the situation in the US will continue to deteriorate. George
Soros, a major financial backer of Hillary will see to that. Soros is a Globalist and advocate of one world government. People
comment that Soros should be arrested. I agree, BUT who is going to do that?
Agree. I think Trump will yank all the "aid" to Israel as well as "aid" to the Islamic murderers of the Palitrashian human garbage
infesting the area. This "aid" money is simply a bribe to keep both from killing each other. F**k all of them. None of our business
what they do.
We got progressives ( lots and lots of Jews in that group) who are the enemy of mankind and then we got Islam who are also
the enemy of mankind. Why help either of them? Makes no sense.
Soros is hated in Israel and has never set foot there but his foundations have done such harm that a bill was recently passed
to ban foreign funding of non profit political organizations
The fact that we all have to worry about the CIA killing a President Elect simply because the man puts America first, really says
it all.
The Agency is Cancer. Why are we even waiting for them to kill another one of our people to act? There should be no question
about the CIA's future in the US.
Dissolved & dishonored. Its members locked away or punished for Treason. Their reputation is so bad and has been for so long,
that the fact that you joined them should be enough to justify arrest and Execution for Treason, Crimes Against Humanity & Crimes
Against The American People.
There are entirely way too many Intelligence Agencies. Plus the Contractors, some of who shouldn't have high level clearance to
begin with which the US sub contracts the Intel / work out to.
For Fucks sake, Government is so incompetent it can't even handle it own Intel.
Something along the lines of Eurpoe's Five Eyes would be highly effective.
Fuck those Pure Evil Psychopaths at the CIA They're nothing more than a bunch of Scum Fuck murdering, drug running, money laundering
Global Crime Syndicate.
The FBI is still investigating the Clinton Foundation, Trump needs to encourage that through backdoor channels. Soro's needs to
be investigated, he has been tied to a conspiracy to incite violence, this needs to be documented and dealt with. Trump can not
ignore this guy. If any of these investigations come back with a recommendation to indict then that process needs to be started.
Take the fight to them, they are vulnerable!
Make a National APB Warrent for the apprehension & arrest of George Sooros for inciting violence, endsrgerimg the public & calling
for the murder of our Nations Police through funding of the BLM Group.
Have every Law Informent Agency in the Nation on alert. Also, issue a Bounty in the Sum of $5,000,000 for his immediate apprehension.
Trump needs to replace FBI chickenshits & sellouts with loyal people then get the FBI counter-terrorism to investigate and shut
down Soros & the various agencies instigating the riots. It's really simple when you quit over-thinking a problem. It's domestic
terrorism. It's the FBI's job to stop it.
I read what Paul said this morning and thought, despite Paul's hostility to Trump during the primaries most likely due to his
son, Rand's loss, that Paul gave good advice to Trump.
Let's face it Donald Trump is a STOP GAP measure. And demographic change over the next 4 years makes his re-election very, very
UNLIKELY. If he keeps his campaign promises he will be a GREAT president. However as ZH reported earlier he appears to be balking
from repealing Obamacare, I stress the word APPEARS.
Let us give him a chance. This is all speculation. His enemies are DEADLY as they were once they got total control in Russia,
they killed according to Solzhenitsyn SIXTY-SIX MILLION Russian Christians. The descendants of those Bolsheviks are VERY powerful
in the USSA. They control the Fed, Hollyweird, Wall Street, the universities...
Much of the media and advertising exist by pushing buttons that trigger appropriate financially lucrative reflexes in their
audiences, from pornography to romantic movies to team sports. Media profits are driven by competition over how best to push
those buttons. But the effort to produce politically and racially cuckolded Whites adds a layer of complexity: What buttons
do you push to make Whites complicit in their own racial and cultural demise?
Actually, there are a whole lot of them, which shouldn't be surprising. This is a very sophisticated onslaught, enabled
by control over all the moral, intellectual, and political high ground by the left. With all that high ground, there are a
lot of buttons you can push.
Our enemies see this as a pathetic last gasp of a moribund civilization and it is quite true for our civilization is dying.
Identity Christians describe this phase as Jacob's Troubles and what the secular Guillaume Faye would, I think, describe as the
catastrophe required to get people motivated. The future has yet to be written, however I cannot help but think that God's people,
the White people, are stirring from their slumber.
"PNAC: Project for New American Century. The main neocon lobby, it focused first on invading Iraq. Founded 1997, by William
Kristol & Robert Kagan. First action: open letter to Clinton advocating Iraq war. Members in the Iraq-War clique: Cheney, Rumsfeld,
Wolfowitz, Feith, BOLTON, Libby, Abrams, Wurmser, Perle.
JINSA, The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. "explaining the link between U.S. national security and Israel's
security" Served on JINSA's Advisory Board: Cheney, Wolfowitz, Feith, BOLTON, Perle."
If Trump has probable cause on the Soros crimes, have his DoJ request a warrant for all of Soros's communications via the NSA,
empanel a grand jury, indict the bastard, and throw his raggedy ass in prison. It would be hard for him to run his retarded purple
revolution when he's getting ass-raped by his cell mate.
I agree. Thing is, I think as president he can simply order the NSA to cough up whatever they have, just like Obama could have
done at any point. The NSA is part of the Defense Department, right? What am I missing here?
But in respect to Soro's money and the Dalas shooting or other incited events, there should be a grand jury empanelled and
then charges brought against him. I think nothing short of him hiding in an embassy with all his money blocked by Swift is justice
for the violence that he funded.
It is doubtful that President Trump's aides will advise the new president to carry out a diversionary criminal investigation
of Mrs. Clinton's private email servers and other issues related to the activities of the Clinton Foundation, especially when
the nation faces so many other pressing issues, including jobs, immigration, and health care. However, House Oversight and
Government Reform Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz said he will continue hearings in the Republican-controlled Congress on
Hillary Clinton, the Clinton Foundation, and Mrs. Clinton's aide Huma Abedin. President Trump should not allow himself to be
distracted by these efforts. Chaffetz was not one of Trump's most loyal supporters.
And so it begins; I really hope that this is just some misinformation/disinformation, because HE PROMISED he would appoint
a special prosecutor, PROMISED...
The likes of Bill Kristol, Ben Shapiro and Jonah Goldberg get to catch up on their Torah for the forseeable future but the likes
of Lloyd Blankfein will probably get to entertain the court since they have probably crossed paths doing business in NYC. The
"real conservative" deeply introspective, examine-my-conscience crowd screwed themselves to the wall, god love them.
Trump should reverse the McCain Feingold bill. That would take some wind out of Soros' sails, at least temporarily because
that was Soros' bill. He wanted campaign finance reform which actually meant that he wanted to control campaign finance through
501C3 groups, or foundations such as Open Society, Moveon.org, Ella Baker society, Center for American progress, etc. He has a
massive web of these organizations and they fund smaller ones and all kinds of evil.
We know so little about Trump ... he's neoCon friendly to start with (remember he hired neoCon Grandee James Woolsey as an
advisor)... and remember too Trump is promising his own war against Iran ... (just in case you confused him with Mother Theresa)..
But then again JFK took office with a set of initiatives that were far more bellicose and provocative (like putting huge Jupiter
missile launchers on the USSR border in Turkey)... once he saw he light and fired the pro Nazi Dulles Gang , JFK was gunned
down in front of the whole world.
If Trump really is a nationalist patriot he'll need to innoculate the Population about the Deep State... they in turn will
unleash financial disintegration and chaos, a Purple Revolution and then assassinate Trump (or have his own party impeach him)
I'm guessing though that deep down Trump is quite comfortable with a neoCon cabinet... hell he already offered Jamie Diamon
the office of Treasry Secretary... no doubt a calculated gesture to signal compliance with the Deep State.
The Clintons do not do things by accident. Coordination of colors at the concession speech was meant for something. Perhaps the
purple revolution or maybe they want to be seen as royals. It doesn't really matter why they did it; the fact is they are up to
something. They will not agree to go away and even if they offered to just disappear with their wealth we know they are dishonest.
They will come back... that is what they do.
They must be stripped of power and wealth. This act must be performed publicly.
In order to succeed Mr. Trump I suggest you task a group to accomplish this result. Your efforts to make America great again
may disintegrate just like Obamacare if you allow the Clintons and Co. to languish in the background.
The protestors are groups of individuals who may seek association for any number of reasons. One major reason might be the loss
of hope for a meaningful and prosperous life. We should seek out and listen to the individuals within these groups. If they are
truly desirous of being heard they will communicate what they want without use of violence. Perhaps individuals join these protest
groups because they do not have a voice.
Organizing a means to receive the protestors' complaints may co-opt any organized effort to disrupt good political interaction
and it will also separate out the bad elements cited by Madsen.
The articles reporting that Mr. Trump has changed his response to the protestors is a good effort to discover the protestors'
complaints and channel their energy into beneficial political activity. Something must be done quickly though, before the protests
get out of hand, for if that happens the protestors will be criminals and no one will want to work with them.
In order to make America great again we need input from all of America. Mr. Trump you can harness the energy of these protestors
and let them know they are a part of your movement.
Classical economists are experts on today's capitalism, it is 18th and 19th Century capitalism, it's how it all started.
Adam Smith would think we are on the road to ruin.
"But the rate of profit does not, like rent and wages, rise with the prosperity and fall with the declension of the society.
On the contrary, it is naturally low in rich and high in poor countries, and it is always highest in the countries which are going
fastest to ruin."
Exactly the opposite of today's thinking, what does he mean?
When rates of profit are high, capitalism is cannibalizing itself by:
1) Not engaging in long term investment for the future
2) Paying insufficient wages to maintain demand for its products and services.
Got that wrong as well.
Adam Smith wouldn't like today's lobbyists.
"The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order ought always to be listened to with great
precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous,
but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men whose interest is never exactly the same with that of
the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions,
both deceived and oppressed it."
AMERICAN SPRING: She practiced overseas in Tunisia, Algeria, Oman, Jordan, Libya, Egypt... Now it's time to apply the knowledge
in her own country!
lakecity55 -> CoCosAB •Nov 12, 2016 7:53 AM
Really good chance these subversive operations will continue. Soros has plenty of money. Trump will have to do some rough stuff,
but he needs to, it's what we hired him for.
NATO strategists are reportedly planning for a scenario in which Trump orders US troops out of Europe,
as the shock result of the US presidential election sinks in, spreading an atmosphere of uncertainty.
According to Spiegel magazine,
strategists from NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg's staff have drafted a secret report
which includes a worst-case scenario in which Trump orders US troops to withdraw from Europe and
fulfills his threat to make Washington less involved in European security. Read more
German
defense minister says Trump should be firm with Russia as NATO stood by US after 9/11
"For the first time, the US exit from NATO has become a threat" which would mean the end
of the bloc, a German NATO officer told the magazine.
During his campaign, Trump repeatedly slammed NATO, calling the alliance "obsolete." He
also suggested that under his administration, the US may refuse to come to the aid of NATO allies
unless they "pay their bills" and "fulfill their obligations to us."
"We are experiencing a moment of the highest and yet unprecedented uncertainty in the transatlantic
relationship," said Wolfgang Ischinger, former German ambassador in Washington and head of the
prominent Munich Security Conference. By criticizing the collective defense, Trump has questioned
the basic pillar of NATO as a whole, Ischinger added.
The president-elect therefore has to reassure the European allies that he remains firm on the
US commitment under Article 5 of the NATO charter prior to his inauguration, the top diplomat stressed.
Earlier this week, Stoltenberg lambasted Trump's agenda, saying: "All allies have made a solemn
commitment to defend each other. This is something absolutely unconditioned."
Fearing that Trump would not appear in Brussels even after his inauguration, NATO has re-scheduled
its summit – expected to take place in early 2017 – to next summer, Spiegel said.
The report might reflect current moods within the EU establishment as well, as Jean-Claude Juncker,
President of the European Commission, has called on the member states to establish Europe's own military.
Washington "will not ensure the security of the Europeans in the long term... we have to do this
ourselves," he argued on Thursday.
If Trump is serious about reducing the number of US troops stationed in Europe, large NATO countries
like Germany have little to offer, Spiegel said. Even major member states' militaries lack units
able to replace the Americans, which in turn may trigger debate on strengthening NATO's nuclear arm,
a sensitive issue in most European countries for domestic reasons.
Still, an increase in defense spending has already been approved by the Europeans following pressure
from the outgoing US administration. Over the past few days in Brussels, representatives of NATO
states have been working on the so-called "Blue Book," a secret strategy paper which stipulates
each member's contribution in the form of troops, aircraft, warships, and heavy armor until 2032,
Spiegel reported.
The document stipulates an increase in each NATO members' military spending by one percent of
each nation's GDP, in addition to the current two percent.
Uncertainty over Trump's NATO policy seems to be taking its toll; Germany, one of the largest
military powers in Europe, plans to allocate 130 billion euros ($140bn) to military expenditures
by 2030, but the remarkable figure may be a drop in the ocean.
"No one knows yet if the one percent more would be enough," the German NATO officer told Spiegel.
Nevertheless, the US is continuing to deploy troops to eastern Europe, justifying the move with
the need to protect the region from "assertive Russia." Earlier this week, the largest arms
shipment yet, 600 containers, arrived in Germany to supply the US armored and combat aviation brigades,
expected to
deploy
in Europe by January 2017.
"... Better relations with Russia will encourage them to venture into Europe? How does that work? The more friendly they are with us, I'd think the less they'd want to upset us and destroy those gains. The alternative might end up in a war with Russia. Yeah, that's great! Good grief, CNN. ..."
"... " ultranationalistic rhetoric". This sensationalist hyperbole is wrecking our language. Being against intervening in other countries affairs is not being "ultranationalistic" ..."
"... When you [neo]liberals living in your bubble fly over middle America, over all the small towns, farms, factories and coal miners that you often forget about. Just remember that there is a big middle finger pointing up at you. ..."
"... Well now a substancial portion of Americans know that free trade isn't so good. When it started to hit home for non working class folks, eyes opened up. ..."
Flynn, like Trump, sees Russian president Vladimir Putin as someone the US can do business
with. In December, Flynn attended a banquet in Moscow where he sat next to Putin. He also has
appeared on the Kremlin TV mouthpiece, Russia Today (which Flynn has compared to CNN).
If Flynn is Trump's national security advisor or secretary of defense we can expect him to push
for a closer relationship with the Russians; a punitive policy on Iran -- and a more aggressive
war on Islamist militants around the world. These views mesh well with what we have heard from
Donald Trump on the campaign trail.
Daniel, 35 minutes ago
Mr. Bergen : "American Islamists, Flynn claims, are trying to create "an Islamic state
right here at home" by pushing to "gain legal standing for Sharia." Flynn cited no evidence
for this claim." !!!?? Really ?? "German court lets off 'Sharia police' patrol in Wuppertal"
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-35059488
SimpleStupid
Not a bad article up until the last paragraph. Better relations with Russia will
encourage them to venture into Europe? How does that work? The more friendly they are with us,
I'd think the less they'd want to upset us and destroy those gains. The alternative might end
up in a war with Russia. Yeah, that's great! Good grief, CNN.
And "derail the deal that prevents Iran from developing nuclear weapons"? What is this,
backwards day?
Ron Lane
" ultranationalistic rhetoric". This sensationalist hyperbole is wrecking our language.
Being against intervening in other countries affairs is not being "ultranationalistic"
hanklmarcus
Iraq was a failure , But attacking IRAN will not be ??????????? FOOLS
CNN User
When you [neo]liberals living in your bubble fly over middle America, over all the
small towns, farms, factories and coal miners that you often forget about. Just remember that
there is a big middle finger pointing up at you.
We don't accept your values and are tired of having ours oppressed.
LizardKing
@Lenny Good - Ukraine should clearly be dominated by Russia and who gives a s t about
Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. Call me when Russia is threatening Poland
Dwright :
Well now a substancial portion of Americans know that free trade isn't so good. When it
started to hit home for non working class folks, eyes opened up.
"... Prioritizing foreign over domestic policy, Jackson's former aides Richard Perle , Douglas Feith , and Elliott Abrams - along with some fellow travelers like Paul Wolfowitz - eventually shifted their allegiance to the right-wing Republican Ronald Reagan. They formed an important pro-Israel, "peace through strength" nucleus within the new president's foreign policy team. ..."
John Feffer Director, Foreign Policy
In Focus and Editor, LobeLog Much has been made of the swing in political allegiances of neoconservatives
in favor of Hillary Clinton.
As a group, Washington's neocons are generally terrified of Trump's unpredictability and his flirtation
with the alt-right. They also support Clinton's more assertive foreign policy (not to mention her
closer relationship to Israel). Perhaps, too, after eight long years in the wilderness, they're daydreaming
of an appointment or two in a Clinton administration.
This group of previously staunch Republicans, who believe in using American military power to
promote democracy, build nations, and secure U.S. interests abroad, have defected in surprising numbers.
Washington Post columnist
Robert Kagan , the Wall Street Journal 's
Bret Stephens , and the
Foreign
Policy Initiative 's
James Kirchick have all endorsed Clinton. Other prominent neocons like The National Review
's William Kristol
, the Wall Street Journal 's
Max Boot , and SAIS's
Eliot Cohen have rejected
Trump but not quite taken the leap to supporting Clinton.
A not particularly large or well-defined group, neoconservatives have attracted a disproportionate
amount of attention in this election. For the Trump camp, these Republican defectors merely prove
that the elite is out to get their candidate, thus reinforcing his outsider credentials (never mind
that Trump initially
wooed neocons like Kristol).
For the left , the neocons are flocking to support a bird of their feather, at least when it
comes to foreign policy, which reflects badly on Clinton. The mainstream media, meanwhile, is attracted
to the man-bites-dog aspect of the story (news flash: members of the vast right-wing conspiracy support
Clinton!).
As we come to the end of the election campaign, which has been more a clash of personalities than
of ideologies, the neocon defections offer a much more interesting storyline. As the Republican Party
potentially coalesces around a more populist center, the neocons are the canary in the coal mine.
Their squawking suggests that the American political scene is about to suffer a cataclysm. What will
that mean for U.S. foreign policy?
A History of Defection
The neoconservative movement began within the Democratic Party. Henry "Scoop" Jackson, a Democrat
from Washington State, carved out a new position in the party with his liberal domestic policies
and hardline Cold War stance. He was a strong booster of civil rights and environmental legislation.
At the same time, he favored military build-up and a stronger relationship with Israel. He was also
dismayed with the Nixon administration's détente with the Soviet Union.
Prioritizing foreign over domestic policy, Jackson's former aides
Richard Perle
, Douglas Feith
, and Elliott
Abrams - along with some fellow travelers like
Paul Wolfowitz
- eventually shifted their allegiance to the right-wing Republican Ronald Reagan. They formed
an important pro-Israel, "peace through strength" nucleus within the new president's foreign policy
team.
At the end of the Reagan era, their commitment to such policies as regime change in the Middle
East, confrontation with Russia, and opposition to multilateral institutions like the United Nations
brought them into conflict with realists in the George H.W. Bush administration. So many of them
defected once again to support Bill Clinton.
Writes
Jim Lobe:
A small but not insignificant number of them, repelled by George H.W. Bush's realpolitik, and
more specifically his Middle East policy and pressure on then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir to
join the Madrid peace conference after the first Gulf War, deserted the party in 1992 and publicly
endorsed Bill Clinton. Richard Schifter, Morris Amitay of the Jewish Institute for National Security
Affairs, Angier Biddle Duke, Rita Freedman of the Social Democrats USA, neocon union leaders John
Joyce and Al Shanker, Penn Kemble of the Institute for Religion and Democracy, James Woolsey,
Marty Peretz of The New Republic, and Joshua Muravchik of the American Enterprise Institute all
signed a much-noted ad in The New York Times in August 1992 endorsing Clinton's candidacy. Their
hopes of thus being rewarded with top positions in a Clinton administration were crushed.
The flirtation with Clinton's Democratic Party was short-lived. Woolsey, Schifter, and Kemble
received appointments in the Clinton administration, but the neocons in general were unhappy with
their limited influence, Clinton's (albeit inconsistent) multilateralism, and the administration's
reluctance to intervene militarily in Rwanda, Somalia, and Bosnia. Disenchantment turned to anger
and then to organizing. In 1997, many of the same people who worked for Scoop Jackson and embraced
Ronald Reagan put together
the Project for the New American Century in an effort to preserve and expand America's post-Cold
War unilateral power.
A handful of votes in Florida in 2000 and the attacks on September 11 the following year combined
to give the neocons a second chance at transforming U.S. foreign policy. Dick Cheney became perhaps
the most powerful vice president in modern American history, with Scooter Libby as his national security
adviser. Donald Rumsfeld became secretary of defense, with Paul Wolfowitz as his deputy and Feith
as head of the policy office. Elliott Abrams joined the National Security Council, and so on. Under
their guidance, George W. Bush abandoned all pretense of charting a more modest foreign policy and
went on a militarist bender.
The foreign policy disasters of the Bush era should have killed the careers of everyone involved.
Unfortunately, there are plenty of think tanks and universities that value access over intelligence
(or ethics) - and even the most incompetent and craven administration officials after leaving office
retain their contacts (and their arrogance).
Those who worry that the neocons will be rewarded for their third major defection - to Reagan,
to Bill Clinton, and now to Hillary Clinton - should probably focus elsewhere. After all, the Democratic
nominee this year doesn't have to go all the way over to the far right for advice on how to construct
a more muscular foreign policy. Plenty of mainstream think tanks - from
the Center for a New American Security on the center-right to the leftish
Center for American Progress - are offering their advice on how to "restore balance" in how the
United States relates to the world. Many of these positions - how to push back against Russia, take
a harder line against Iran, and ratchet up pressure on Assad in Syria - are not very different from
neocon talking points.
But the defections do herald a possible sea change in party alignment. And that will influence
the trajectory of U.S. foreign policy.
The Walking Dead
The Republican Party has been hemorrhaging for nearly a decade. The Tea Party dispatched many
party centrists - Jim Leach, Richard Lugar - who once could achieve a measure of bipartisanship in
Congress. The overwhelming whiteness of the party, even before the ascendance of Trump, made it very
difficult to recruit African Americans and Latinos in large numbers. And now Trump has driven away
many of the professionals who have served in past Republican administrations, including the small
clique of neoconservatives.
What remains is enough to win state and local elections in certain areas of the country. But it's
not enough to win nationally. Going forward, with the further demographic shift away from white voters,
this Republican base will get older and smaller. Moreover, on foreign policy, the Trumpistas are
leading the party in a
nationalist,
apocalyptic direction that challenges the party leadership (in emphasis if not in content).
It's enough to throw dedicated Republicans into despair. Avik Roy, who was an advisor to the presidential
campaigns of Marco Rubio, Mitt Romney, and Rick Perry,
told
This American Life :
I think the Republican Party is a lost cause. I don't think the Republican Party is capable
of fixing itself, because the people who are most passionate about voting Republican today are
the Trump voters. And what politician is going to want to throw those voters away to attract some
unknown coalition of the future?
One of his Republican compatriots, Rob Long, had this to say on the podcast about how anti-Trump
survivors who stick with the party will navigate the post-election landscape:
It'll be like The Walking Dead, right? We're going to try to come up with bands of people and
walk across the country. And let's not get ourselves killed or eaten and hook up with people we
think are not insane or horrible or in some way murderous.
Coming out of this week's elections, here's my guess of what will happen. The Republican Party
will continue to be torn apart by three factions: a dwindling number of moderates like Susan Collins
(R-ME), right-wing fiscal conservatives like Paul Ryan (R-WI), and burn-the-house-down Trumpsters
like Jeff Sessions (R-AL). Foreign policy won't be much of an issue for the party because it will
be shut out of the White House for 12 years running and will focus instead on primarily domestic
questions. Perhaps the latter two categories will find a way to repair their breach; perhaps the
party will split in two; perhaps Trump supporters will engineer a hostile takeover.
The Democratic Party, meanwhile, may suffer as a result of its success. After all, how can a single
party play host to both Bernie Sanders and
Robert Kagan ?
How can the party promote both guns and butter? How can Hillary Clinton preserve Obama's diplomatic
successes - the Iran deal, the Cuba détente, the efforts to contain climate change - and be more
assertive militarily? Whatever unity the party managed during the elections will quickly fall apart
when it comes to governing.
In one sense, Clinton may well resurrect the neocon legacy by embracing a more or less progressive
domestic policy (which would satisfy the Sanderistas) and a more hawkish foreign policy (which would
satisfy all the foreign policy mandarins from both parties who supported her candidacy).
At the same time, a new political axis is emerging: internationalists vs. insularists, with the
former gathering together in the Democratic Party and the latter seeking shelter in a leaky Republican
Party. But this categorization conceals the tensions within each project. Internationalists include
both fans of the UN and proponents of unilateral U.S. military engagement overseas. Insularists,
who have not turned their back on the world quite as thoroughly as isolationists, include both xenophobic
nationalists and those who want to spend war dollars at home.
The trick of it for progressives is to somehow steal back the Democratic Party from the aggressive
globalists and recapture those Trump voters who are tired of supporting war and wealthy transnational
corporations. Or, perhaps in the wake of the Republican Party's collapse, progressives could create
a new party that challenges Clinton and the neocons.
One thing is for certain, however. With a highly unpopular president about to take office and
one of the major political parties on life support, the current political moment is highly unstable.
Something truly remarkable could emerge. Or voters in 2020 might face something even more monstrous
than what has haunted this election cycle.
Trump betrayed all his election promises. He should not be relelcted.
Notable quotes:
"... HiIlary Clinton is a perfect enemy of Trump. She has become rich in office, and as Harry Truman said "anyone who gets rich in politics is a crook". She has dedicated her life to political power at the top while growing ever wealthier from its use. And she loves foreign wars. She has supported a long line of eco-genocidal attacks and bombings of Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine, all of them still in motion and waiting for her to be escalated further. ..."
"... Know a man by his enemies. Trump has countless enemies, but most of them march to the drums of endless wars of aggression and care less about the casualties of tens of millions of lost good jobs in America. Most are neo-liberals in fact, the bipartisan doctrine of dispossession of citizens and foreign wars to grow the system further. The worst have been Washington servants of the world corporate machine looting the world. They above all condemn his peace overtures to Russia and his promise to repeal NAFTA – both unspeakable heresies on the US public stage until Trump's movement against them. ..."
"... Where Trump agrees with the US money-and-war party is on Israel and Iran. He started with a policy of more neutrality towards the Israel-Palestine conflict, but soon backed out when the attack-dogs went into action with a $50 million gift for his campaign from a wealthy Zionist at the same time. Then he declared " Israel is America". So Trump can proclaim opposite positions without a blink, including on the continuous war crimes of Israel supported by the US. ..."
"... When you join the dots to Trump preaching a policy revolt against the insatiable corporate jaws feeding on trillions of dollars of public budgets in Washington, the underlying meaning emerges. He wants to stop the non-productive transnational corporations from feasting on the public purse. At the beginning after 2008, he even dared to recognize that Wall Street should be nationalized, as it once was by the American Revolution, Abraham Lincoln and FDR's Federal Reserve. This would be as big a turn of US government in the people's interests as stopping ruinous foreign wars. ..."
"... Trump also once said that the US "must be neutral, an honest broker" on the Israel-Palestine conflict – as unspeakable as it gets in US politics. Big Pharma was also called out with "$400 billion to be saved by government negotiation of prices". He even confronted the more powerful HMO's with the possibility of a "one-payer system" far better than the Obamacare pork-barrel for ever higher insurance premiums. ..."
HiIlary Clinton is a perfect enemy of Trump. She has become rich in office, and as Harry Truman
said "anyone who gets rich in politics is a crook". She has dedicated her life to political power
at the top while growing ever wealthier from its use. And she loves foreign wars. She has supported
a long line of eco-genocidal attacks and bombings of Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine,
all of them still in motion and waiting for her to be escalated further.
Know a man by his enemies. Trump has countless enemies, but most of them march to the drums of
endless wars of aggression and care less about the casualties of tens of millions of lost good jobs
in America. Most are neo-liberals in fact, the bipartisan doctrine of dispossession of citizens and
foreign wars to grow the system further. The worst have been Washington servants of the world corporate
machine looting the world. They above all condemn his peace overtures to Russia and his promise to
repeal NAFTA – both unspeakable heresies on the US public stage until Trump's movement against them.
HiIlary Clinton is a perfect enemy of Trump. She has become rich in office, and as Harry Truman
said "anyone who gets rich in politics is a crook". She has dedicated her life to political power
at the top while growing ever wealthier from its use. And she loves foreign wars. She has supported
a long line of eco-genocidal attacks and bombings of Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine,
all of them still in motion and waiting for her to be escalated further.
She wants a return to this bombing in Syria as a "free-fly zone" – free for US and NATO bombers
– just as she led Libya's destruction from 2011 on. She abuses Russia and slanders Putin at every
opportunity and she supported the neo-Nazi coup overthrowing the elected government of Ukraine and
the civil war since. She has done nothing but advocate or agree to endless US-led war crimes without
any life gain but only mass murder, social ruin and terror which she ignores. Like her mentor Madeleine
Allbright , even the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children in Iraq by Clinton-led bombing are
"worth the price".
Where Trump agrees with the US money-and-war party is on Israel and Iran. He started with
a policy of more neutrality towards the Israel-Palestine conflict, but soon backed out when the attack-dogs
went into action with a $50 million gift for his campaign from a wealthy Zionist at the same time.
Then he declared " Israel is America". So Trump can proclaim opposite positions without a blink,
including on the continuous war crimes of Israel supported by the US.
Trump also bellows against on the giveaway of many billions of US money to Iran and prefers to
bomb their nuclear facilities as Israel wants, and has already done in Syria. He does not tell his
audience that all of this US money is Iran's money being returned to it from its US seizure
in exchange for its nuclear disarmament never suggested for Israel which has enough nuclear weaponry
to blow up the whole Middle East and beyond. Trump too is not to be trusted when it suits his run
to be US President. Yet even here Trump still holds to his position that use of nuclear weapons means
"game over". Clinton and the bipartisan money-and-war party express no such constraint.
Why the Establishment Hates Trump, But Will Accept Him
All of them have reason to hate Trump for a more basic reason. He is seemingly alone in the money-media-military
establishment to publicly deplore the rigged electoral system in which big money and media rule –
formerly unspeakable in the press and political discussion on stage. Trump has even voiced suspicion
of the 9-11 killing spectacle and the "six-trillion- dollar" haemorrhage of US money on Middle East
and Afghanistan wars propelled and justified by 9-11 from 2001 on.
Yet here again the problem is that Trump backs off as soon as he thinks he will not be able to
sell it. This is the art of political lying at which Trump, like Reagan, is a master. But the hard-line
difference between Trump and Reagan and neo-con-lib rulers over the last 30 years is deep – Trump's
denunciation of NAFTA and willingness to have peace with other nations not bowing to Uncle Sam.
Before Trump, job-destroying edicts of transnational global corporations and captive states called
'free trade' have been anathema to oppose in official society. But Trump sticks to his heretical
position. Right up to the election he has promised a "35% tariff" on products of US factories that
disemploy workers to get cheaper labor elsewhere. No-one in the US political establishment has risked
such a position, or blamed these corporate-rights treaties for hollowing out American society itself.
It is apostasy in the corporate 'free press'.
Trump is still hated for such deviations from the official corporate-state line. But the haters
cannot say this. They stick to the politically correct repudiations, and call him "racist", "sexist",
"bigot" and so on even if the conclusion does follow from what he says or does. Selected instances
are the ruling fallacy here.
Trump and the Media-Lie System
Trump is unique in calling out the major mass media as continuous purveyors of lies and propaganda
– although he centers it on himself and not global corporate rule across borders which they worship.
Anyone not doing so is excommunicated from the press. This profound disorder is never allowed into
the mass media as an issue, and Trump never raises it. He too is a believer, but one who sees the
life costs of the sacrifice-workers rule inside the US. He also advocates job-creating public spending
on physical infrastructure which is as crucial to his movement as it was to FDR. It is no longer
taboo inside the dumkopfen party
Trump is a first. Never before has anyone been able to denounce the mass media framing, half-truths
and fabrications and still come out stronger The onslaught of ideological assassination by
a hireling intelligentsia and media of record like the New York Times has always succeeded
before. Trump reacts only as it affects his own position, but his raw defiance right into the cameras
has been eye-popping and unique in America.
This may be Trump's most remarkable achievement. He has been slandered and demonized more than
Russia's Putin, and Russia-baiting him with McCarthy-like accusations of collaboration with Putin
has been part of the attack by Hillary and the press. Yet passionate voter support of Trump has still
grown in the face of all this denunciation by the political establishment.
An underlying revolution in thinking has occurred. Trump has tapped the deep chords of worker
rage at dispossession by forced corporate globalization, criminally disastrous Middle East wars,
and trillions of dollars of bailouts to Wall Street. He never connects the dots on stage. But by
Clinton's advocacy of all of them, she has made them her own and will go down because of it.
Trump's unflinching vast ego and media savvy have been what she and the political establishment
are too corrupted to defeat, The underlying contradiction that now raises its head pits the mass
media against the President of the United States himself – against the long sacred office of the
commander-in-chief of US power across the world, precisely what he is proposing to pacify with friendly
relations instead of ruinous war invasions as in Iraq. Many observers think that Wall Street and
big money won't let it happen. Or that Trump will like others before him will be determined by the
office. Or that Clinton's billion dollars of PAC money will succeed work in the end. But the meaning
is out and cannot be reversed out of sight.
Whatever happens next in this saga it will be ground-shaking. The worst that can happen to Trump's
enemies is that he wins despite the all-fronts attack. They define his underlying meaning, just as
the Enemy they construct abroad defines them. If he loses, there will be a carnival of the money-war-media
party pretending a healing of the great division that has come to view. But this is not a Republican-Democrat
division. It is as deep as all the lost jobs and lives since 2001, and it is ultimately grounded
in the tens of millions of dispossessed people which the life-blind global market system and its
wars have imposed on America too.
The Great Division Will Not Go Away
Trump is the closest to an egomaniac that has ever run for the presidential office. If he were
not, he could not have withstood the public shaming heaped upon him by the political establishment
and dominant media everywhere.
But the tens of millions of Americans for whom Trump speaks tend to have one thing in common more
than anything else. They have been dispossessed and smeared by the neo-con/ neo-liberal alliance
that has taken or traded away their life security and belittled them with political correctness –
the establishment's patronizing diversion from their fallen state.
All the while, the ruling money party behind the media and the wars is system-driven to seek limitlessly
more money under masks of 'free trade' and "America's interests abroad'. The majority is left behind
as the sacrificial living dead. Multiplying transnational money sequences of the very rich have bled
the world into a comatose state, and perpetual wars against the next Enemy of the cancerous system
have sown chaos across the world.
Trump at least starts remission by seeing a criminally blind rule and chaos inside America itself.
Before his campaign, there was helplessness against the invading wars and money sequences always
profiting from the global ruin. The reality has been taboo to see in public. Only entertainments
have appeared in ever new guises as the corporate money-and-war machine has rolled and careened on
across all borders, now marching East through Ukraine into Russia, Brazil to Venezuela to the Caribbean,
from the Congo to the South China Sea.
The Trump entertainment, the most watched in the world, may be the long bridge to taking down
the neo-liberal pillars of majority dispossession and war-criminal state.
Trump is the Opposite to Reagan in Policy Directions
On the face of it, Trump is an ideal leader for US empire. He is like Ronald Reagan on steroids.
His long practiced camera image, his nativist US supremacism, his down-home talk, and his reality-show
confidence all go one better. He is America come to meet itself decades down the road as its pride
slips away in third-world conditions.
But unlike Reagan and Bush who spoke to the rich becoming richer, Trump speaks to the losing white
working class and those who have come to hate the money-corrupted Washington forging the policies
of dispossession Reagan started.
Washington has since ignored and patronized their plight over 30 years. Trump's constituency has
been the disposable rejects from the corporate global system that it is rigged from top to bottom
with rights only for the profits of transnational abroad and bought politicians at home.
The Trump constituency may have no clear idea of this inner logic of the system. But they directly
experience the unemployment, underemployment, ever lower pay, deprived pensions, degraded living
conditions, public squalor, contempt from official society, and no future for their children.
At the surface level, what drives them mad is the 'political correctness' that diverts all attention
from their plight to pant-suit 'feminists' getting a leg up, racial rights with no life substance,
sexual queers they had been conditioned to abhor, and other symbols of oppression changed as the actually ruling system of dispossession becomes inexorably worse all the
way down to their grand children.
Here too Hillary Clinton has been an embodiment of the smug ideology of the system that bleeds
the unseen job-deprived into powerless humiliation: an existential crisi where the secure jobs and
goods of US life have been stripped from them in continuous eviction from the American way with no
notice.
While Trump's narrative is that the American Dream seeks recovery again, the dominant media and
political elite relentlessly denounce him for his message. He gives lots of ammunition to them. His
most popular line is "build the wall", "build the great wall" between Mexico and the US. No political
correctness cares that the biggest source of near-slave labor for the big businesses of the US South
is Mexican 'illegals', and Trump himself never mentions this. He prefers to blame the Mexican illegals
themselves for drugs, rape and violence, the standard lie of blame-the-poorer for your problems.
Trump also wants to tax their slim earnings to pay for the wall. This is the still running sore of
America beneath the lost jobs.
Trump has thus attracted lots of votes. But many non-ignorant people too recognise that the tens
of millions of illegal migrants seeking work in the richer USA cannot continue in any country with
borders, or any nation that seeks to keep worker wages up not down by lower priced labor flooding
in. The legal way must be the only way if the law of nations is to exist and working people are to
be secure from dispossession by starvation wages illegal migrants can be hired for. Borders are,
few notice, the very target of the carcinogenic neo-liberal program.
Of course the political discourse never gets to this real and complex economic base of the problem.
Nor does Trump. His choral promise is "'l'll fix it. Believe me". But something deeper than demagoguery
and blaming the weak is afoot here. An untapped historic resentment is boiling up from underneath
which has long been unspeakable on the political stage. Trump has mined it and proposed a concrete
solution – one grand gate through which immigrants must pass.
Is this really racist? It is rather that Trump is very good at bait and switch. From his now deserted
promise to halve the Pentagon's budget to getting the Congress off corporate-donation payrolls, now
by fixed congressional terms, the public wealth that the politicians and corporate lobbies stand
to lose from a Trump presidency is very disturbing to them. The Mexican wall does not fit the borderless
neo-liberal program either. But all of it is welcome to citizens' ears. That is why the establishment
hates Trump for exposing all these issues long kept in the closet and covered over by politically
correct identity politics.
On the other hand, Trump leaves the halving of the Pentagon's budget behind as soon as he sees
the massive private money forces against it. It is Reagan in reverse. He now promises hundreds of
billions more to the military – but he still opposes foreign wars. That might even do it. But this
most major issue of the election has been completely ignored by the media and opposing politicians
alike. It is the historic core of his bid for the presidency.
Yet the US political establishment across parties cannot yet even conceive it so used are they
to the Reagan-led war state, the military corporate lobbies paying them off in every Senate seat,
anti-union policies at macro as well as micro levels, and always designated foreign enemies to bomb
for resistance. "Say Uncle" said Reagan to the Sandinistas when they asked what could stop the mercenary
killers paid by US covert drug running from bombing their harbours, schools and clinics.
Trump is going the opposite direction in foreign affairs, but the establishment commentators call
it "isolationist" to discredit it. Clinton talks of overcoming the divisions in America, but has
never mentioned holding back on foreign wars. On the contrary, she approves more war power against
Russia and in Syria and in the Ukraine. This is the biggest danger that no media covers – ever more
ruinous US wars on other continents. The formula is old and Reagan exemplified it. Russia is portrayed
as the evil threat to justify pouring up to two billion dollars-a-day of public money into the US
war-for-profit machine occupying across the world, now prepping for China.
But the bipartisan war party backed by Wall Street is going down if Trump's policy can prevail.
This may be the salvation of America and the world, but it is silenced up to election day.
Trump Against the Special Interests
At the beginning g of his public campaign, Trump's policy claims threatened almost every big lobby
now in control of US government purse strings. And these policies grounded in no more foreign wars
which have already cost over 'six trillion dollars' of US public money. At the same time, the country's
physical infrastructures degrade on all levels, and its people's lives are increasingly impoverished
and insecure for the majority. Trump promises to rebuild them all.
Yet the cut-off of hundreds of billions of public giveaways to the Big Corps that Trump advocated
did not end here. It hit almost every wide-mouthed transnational corporate siphon into the US Treasury,
taxpayers' pockets and the working majority of America. Masses of American citizens increasingly
without living wages and benefits and in growing insecurity listened to what the political establishment
and corporate media had long silenced.
Trump raised the great dispossession into the establishment's face, and this is why he will win.
"In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for
the vintage"."The grapes of wrath have risen from the long painful stripping of the people's livelihoods,
their social substance and their cities by corporate globalization selecting for the limitless enrichment
of the few living off an ever-growing takes from public coffers and the impoverishment of America's
working citizens. A primal rage has united them across party lines in the public person of Donald
Trump.
Can he deliver? Well he certainly has shown the guts necessary to do so, most uniquely in facing
down the corporate media and Washington politicians.
Looking Past the Victory
The issue still remains that Trump does not promise any fixing of the greatest transfer of wealth
to the very rich in history that Reagan started. This great transfer of wealth includes his own.
We may recall that his model Ronald Reagan started this Great Dispossession to "make America great
again" too.
Now Trump has promised a massive tax cut to the rich and private capital gains as Reagan did.
In the meantime nothing has been less talked about in election commentary than the globally powerful
interests Trump promised to rein back from the public troughs bleeding the country's capacities to
build for and to employ its people. On this topic, there has been only silence from the media and
politicians, and retreating vague generalizations from Trump.
At the beginning, he not only went after the foreign wars, but the sweetheart deals of the government
with Big Pharma, the health insurance racket, lobby-run foreign policy, off-shore tax evasion, and
global trade taking jobs in the tens of millions from home workers. This is why the establishment
so universally hated him. Most of their private interests in looting public wealth were named. He
reversed the tables on the parasite rich in Washington lobbying and gobbling up public money faster
than it could be bribed, printed and allocated to their schemes – except on real estate, his own
big money 'special interest' not centered in Washington. Indeed Trump loves 'eminent domain', state
seizure of people's private property for big developers like him.
This is where Trump joins hands with those depending on the deep system corruptions he has promised
to reverse. He even asked, in his loud way, how these huge private interests go on getting away with
a corporate-lobby state transferring ever more public wealth and control to them at the expense of
the American working majority and their common interest as Americans. But it had all pretty well
slid away by election day except the hatred of self-enriching Washington fixers like Hillary, Mexican
illegals, the Obamacare new charges (with no mention of the HMO's doing it), and the disrespect for
people bearing arms by the second-amendment right.
Do we have here the familiar positional determinism where political and economic class
leaders desert what they promised as they enter into elected office or have sold the goods?
Yet the victory Trump is about to reap is far from empty for America and the world if he keeps
to the promises he made. The money-and media-rigged elections have stayed front and center where
no-one in official politics dared say it before. The black-hole of US foreign wars has above all
has remained his historic target.
His entire strategy has been based on getting public attention, and he is a master at it. He is
unbuyably rich, has energy beyond a rock star, and is the most watched person in America across the
country and the world for months on end. He can't be shut up. Media stigmatization and slander without
let-up do not work as always before.
Trump is also capable of meeting perhaps the world's most important challenges, holding back the
global US war machine from perpetual eco-genocidal aggression and investing back into public infrastructure
and workers' productive jobs.
Most importantly, Trump challenges "the Enemy" cornerstone of US ideology when he says "wouldn't
it be nice to get along with Russia and China for a change?" And as he said to Canada whose branch-plant
corporate state still plays minion to its US corporate masters, "congratulations. You have become
independent".
As for Trump's much publicized 'denial of climate change, it is not really accurate. He has said
little on the topic, but has expressed his opposition to "bullshit government spending" on preventing
climate. So does James Lovelock, the famous global ecologist behind 'the Gaia hypothesis '. Certainly
the green-wash hoaxes of the private corporations (and Al Gore) becoming much richer than before
on solutions that do not work to prevent the global market-led climate destabilization do need more
astute appraisal.
When you join the dots to Trump preaching a policy revolt against the insatiable corporate
jaws feeding on trillions of dollars of public budgets in Washington, the underlying meaning emerges.
He wants to stop the non-productive transnational corporations from feasting on the public purse.
At the beginning after 2008, he even dared to recognize that Wall Street should be nationalized,
as it once was by the American Revolution, Abraham Lincoln and FDR's Federal Reserve. This would
be as big a turn of US government in the people's interests as stopping ruinous foreign wars.
Trump also once said that the US "must be neutral, an honest broker" on the Israel-Palestine
conflict – as unspeakable as it gets in US politics. Big Pharma was also called out with "$400 billion
to be saved by government negotiation of prices". He even confronted the more powerful HMO's with
the possibility of a "one-payer system" far better than the Obamacare pork-barrel for ever higher
insurance premiums.
Trump is no working-class hero. He has long been a predatory capitalist with all the furies of
greed, egoism and self-promotion that the ruling system selects for. But he is not rich from foreign
wars of aggression, or from exporting the costs of labor to foreign jurisdictions with subhuman standards.
He has not been getting richer or more smug by seeking high office in a context of saturating slander
and denunciation from official society. He has initiated a long overdue recognition of parasite capitalism
eating out and wasting the life capacities of the US itself as well as the larger world.
Trump has now won the first major step that his enemies declared inconceivable, and he can now
do what he has promised 'in the place where the buck stops'.
Prof. John McMurtry is author of The Cancer Stage of Capitalism: From Crisis to Cure (available
from University of Chicago Press) and an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
It also remains to be seen how the Oligarchy will respond to Trump's victory. Wall Street and
the Federal Reserve can cause an economic crisis in order to put Trump on the defensive, and they
can use the crisis to force Trump to appoint one of their own as Secretary of the Treasury. Rogue
agents in the CIA and Pentagon can cause a false flag attack that would disrupt friendly relations
with Russia. Trump could make a mistake and retain neoconservatives in his government.
With Trump there is at least hope. Unless Trump is obstructed by bad judgment in his appointments
and by obstacles put in his way, we should expect an end to Washington's orchestrated conflict
with Russia, the removal of the US missiles on Russia's border with Poland and Romania, the end
of the conflict in Ukraine, and the end of Washington's effort to overthrow the Syrian government.
However, achievements such as these imply the defeat of the US Oligarchy. Although Trump defeated
Hillary, the Oligarchy still exists and is still powerful.
Trump said that he no longer sees the point of NATO 25 years after the Soviet collapse. If he sticks
to his view, it means a big political change in Washington's EU vassals. The hostility toward Russia
of the current EU and NATO officials would have to cease. German Chancellor Merkel would have to
change her spots or be replaced. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg would have to be dismissed.
We do not know who Trump will select to serve in his government. It is likely that Trump is unfamiliar
with the various possibilities and their positions on issues. It really depends on who is advising
Trump and what advice they give him. Once we see his government, we will know whether we can be hopeful
for the changes that now have a chance.
If the oligarchy is unable to control Trump and he is actually successful in curbing the power
and budget of the military/security complex and in holding the financial sector politically accountable,
Trump could be assassinated.
"... Oh, what does anyone know about Pence? Folks have been saying he's going to be Trump's Cheney (and apparently Cheney is a Pence's avowed role model and personal hero). Cheney had a lifetime of insider experience and I'm guessing is both ambitious and intelligent (if evil). ..."
"... Did anyone catch Peter Thiel's speech to the National Press Club? Listen to this and tell me it is not spot on. His is actually on Rumps transition team. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfYLEPRiIyE ..."
"... "The deep state ushered in Trump because he's clearly their most useful decoy. As the country hopes in vain, the crooked men behind the curtain will go on with business as usual. Trump is simply an Obama for a different demographic. Nothing will change for the better." ..."
"... So is Trump Hope and Change for the Angry White Male demographic? ..."
"... I doubt very much that the Obama is providing "continuity". IMO this is a naive reading. Obama has just created a smokescreen that allows for preparing to 'facts on the ground' that will force Trump to respond accordingly. ..."
"... To claim the trump is more powerful and has more influence over the US deep state on day one is just ludicrous. ..."
"...the paradox problem is they'll have to charge Clinton before da boy can pardon her..."
That's one of those facts that sounds right but isn't true. If the law was logical that might
be correct, but then mathematicians would get the highest scores on the Law School Admission Test
(which supposedly tests aptitude to "think like a lawyer.")
The President of the U.S. can't pardon someone in advance for possible later crimes, but can give
a pardon for any and all past crimes without specifying those crimes. That's how Ford was able to
pardon Nixon, who had not been indicted, for any crimes "he might have committed."
If Obama wants he can pardon the Clintons for everything and anything they MIGHT have done up
to the final minutes of swearing in Trump. In that case they would never need to concede they had
ever broken any laws at all.
Remember, the U.S. Constitution was written by aristocrats who were still in many ways monarchists
who didn't want to give up all their power. That mindset also put the electoral college process into
the constitution.
Are you saying that Obama could pardon Bill Clinton and his entire foundation for financial crimes
(apparently) being investigated in New York wrt New York's laws regarding charitable foundation
practices? That seems like it would be "bigger than Marc Rich" demonstration of Democratic misuse
/ abuse of power, cronyism, etc.
If he can do it, he might do it ... if the punishment/threat for not doing it was sufficient.
I've not been impressed by Obama's "brilliance" or "vision" ... I have been impressed rather by
his self-promotion and self-interest -- Neither Bush or Bill Clinton had the sort of job opportunities
that GHWB enjoyed.
Oh, what does anyone know about Pence? Folks have been saying he's going to be Trump's
Cheney (and apparently Cheney is a Pence's avowed role model and personal hero). Cheney had a
lifetime of insider experience and I'm guessing is both ambitious and intelligent (if evil).
Does Pence have genuine potential as Cheney II ... and where does the awkward relationship
between the GOP establishment and Trump put "Pence as a new Cheney" ... The GOP might love it.
Is Trump ideologically consistent enough (don't laugh) to recognize the contradictions?
Did anyone catch Peter Thiel's speech to the National Press Club? Listen to this and tell
me it is not spot on. His is actually on Rumps transition team. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfYLEPRiIyE
Early days indeed. An alternative view of the recent events, by someone who said more or less
the same about Obama when he was selected.
"The deep state ushered in Trump because he's clearly their most useful decoy. As the country
hopes in vain, the crooked men behind the curtain will go on with business as usual. Trump is
simply an Obama for a different demographic. Nothing will change for the better."
I agree with Hoarsewhisperer @11: ... it's a crock and a trick.
I doubt very much that the Obama is providing "continuity". IMO this is a naive reading.
Obama has just created a smokescreen that allows for preparing to 'facts on the ground' that will
force Trump to respond accordingly.
We are at a very very dangerous point in time.
<> <> <> <> <> <> <> <>
Also, giving ANY credence to 'Obama legacy' BS is misguided in the extreme. His 'legacy'
is dissembling and treachery. Anything thing beyond that is just BS meant to keep adversary's
off-balance.
@22 Where do you get the idea that those countries are somehow bad for USA? If we ramp up industries
in USA it will cost substantially more than in those countries. They've benefitted USA immensely.
If the industries come back to USA it won't go over too well, unless slave wages are truly instituted
I don't know if Trump can take credit ... but rather that the Clinton wing of the Pentagon
and CIA, etc. has been defanged and the threat of a coup (if Obama acted in ways contrary to Clinton
and the General's plans) is now neutralized ... Clinton's loss, I hope, will mean future books
will be more candid than might have been possible if she were in office... yes, I wanna know how
bad it's been these last 8 years.
Obama's personal stock wrt his future as a consultant, motivational speaker and all around
leader fell dramatically both with Clinton's campaign (and anticipated sharp turn from Obama's
foreign policy) but also with her defeat (now his legacy). He was spared the ongoing shaming by
a Clinton administration. Likely too little, too late ... when does Kerry get back from the Antarctica?
He's got a chance at some legacy mending as well.
I believe reports that the Clintons and the Obamas loathe each other ... particularly since
the Clintons hate everyone/anyone who does not grovel perfectly. Did Obama sell-out to the DLC
Democrats to secure his future $$$ with all their and the foundation's friends... it will be fun
to watch and look for breadcrumbs, particularly if the foundation implodes under scrutiny.
I think your worst case senario is now off the table. I believe Turkey has been told to keep
its planes out of Syria, and the US only conducts missions within reach of the Russian air defences
with Russian approval.
Turkey using only ground forces to achieve its aims? I suspect this is part of the reason the
Russian naval force is loitering off the Syrian coast (apart from securing the area prior to constructing
the naval base at Tartus).
Cruise missiles would decimate any conventional ground forces, and I believe the Granit anti
ship missiles have a land strike capability, also the S-300 S-400 may also have a ground strike
capability.
That would be as part of the carveup that we are not supposed to talk about because it is a
wicked "conspiracy theory"...
Posted by: paul | Nov 11, 2016 12:12:44 PM | 17
That's a mini-conspiracy compared with the one that the Fake War Of Terror has distracted people's
attention from. The Privatisation of almost every Publicly-owned asset and piece of infrastructure
in the West. The Neolib takeover was well-advanced in 1999 but slipped into overdrive in 2001.
Banks, Insurance Cos, Telcos, Airlines, Childcare, Hospitals, Health Clinics (preventative), Roads,
Rail, Electrical Generation and distribution.
In Oz the Govt/people used to own all of the above, or a competitive participant in the 'market'
in the case of banking, insurance, health clinics, airlines etc. In 2016 the govt owns only unprofitable
burdens. Public Education is currently under extreme pressure to be Privatised for Profit.
(The Yanks call it Anti-Communism but consumers call it an Effing Expensive way to get much
crappier service than in the Good Old Days).
I think you give Barrack Obongo way too much credit. He is a "selfishly concerned" narcissist
alright but that's about it. All his years at the bathhouses and public lavatories with his wookie-in-drag
in Chicago, has not made him particularly smarter you know, rather the opposite...
Dropping AQ means dropping KSA, i.e. the 9/11 enquiry will probably go ahead. As for the MB/Qatar
who run a bunch of other groups, this is left to the EU to decide what it want to do with Turkey.
You bet the Eurocrats are having a headache. And Hollande shows his muscles (sic) and claims he
will talk with Trump on the phone and gets some "clarifications" about his programme.
MSM are reporting on a daily basis of the huge problems with the "Syrian refugees" crossing
the Mediterranean Sea although there is just a handful of Syrians compared to Eritreans, Sudanese,
Gambians etc.
According to the report, the last time Turkish jets participated in airstrikes against terrorists
in Syria was on October 23, three days after around 200 PKK/PYD terrorists were killed.
Ash Carter is, together with John Brennan, the major anti-Russian force in the Obama administration.
He is a U.S. weapon industry promoter and the anti-Russia campaign, which helps to sell U.S. weapons
to NATO allies in Europe, is largely of his doing.
BTW, I do believe he re-won his senate seat, against the true patriot Arpaio there.
Hence his absence from the public scene these months.
So things have not changed much if at all, since still 70 days to Jan20, except for appearances
as they've rearranged some furniture & color-matched the curtains to the upholstery in the act/play
is all.
@11 Hoarsewhisperer - I think it's unrealistic to expect the US simply to leave..
...
Posted by: Grieved | Nov 11, 2016 12:33:02 PM | 27
Today, your guess is as good as mine (at least).
But I regard FrUKUS as Ter'rism Central and if Russia & China et al think they can put a stop
to TerCent without dislodging some teeth and kneecapping them, they're pissing into the wind/dreaming.
It's a bit ambiguous but China, according to CCTV Nov 12, during a chat about Sun Yat Sen and
China/Taiwan unity, seems to be issuing a Global reminder to Loyal Chinese Citizens overseas similar
to the one that Russia issued a month ago.
Saudi Arabia's government has set aside 100 billion riyals ($26.7 billion) to pay debts that
it owes to private sector companies after payment delays that have lasted months, an official
document seen by Reuters shows.
To help curb a huge budget deficit caused by low oil prices, the government of the world's
largest oil exporter has slashed spending and reduced or suspended payments that it owes to
construction firms, medical establishments and even some of the foreign consultants who helped
to design its economic reforms.
But the payment delays have seriously damaged some companies, slowing the economy,
and earlier this week the government said it would make all delayed payments by the end
of this year.
This seems to suggest that Saudi mismanagement is or is about to cost citizens their paychecks
even jobs ... KSA is such a black box police state, it's dangerous to speculate what public opinion
"might be."
I figured the "rebels" in Syria would keep fighting until the paychecks stopped coming,
but I've wondered how many "rebels" were dislodged from relatively personally safe "rebel strongholds"
recently and decided they'd rather quit than die.
Contra Obama's attempt to cleanse his legacy by using the US military to actually attack ISIS,
Russian media report that Ass Carter has warned the president not to cooperate with Russia in
Syria until they are sure Moscow will 'do the right thing'. The report is based on data avaialable
at the af.mil website
Disgusting as it is, yes, my understanding is Obama can do exactly that. My guess is, want
to or not, he probably will come under so much pressure he will have to pass out plenty of pardons.
Or maybe Lynch will give everyone involved in the Clinton Foundation immunity to testify and then
seal the testimony -- or never bother to get any testimony. So many games.
For Obama, it might not even take all that much pressure. From about his second day in office,
from his body language, he's always looked like he was scared.
Instead of keeping his mouth shut, which he would do, being the lawyer he is, Giuliani has
been screaming for the Clintons' scalps. That's exactly what a sharp lawyer would do if he was
trying to force Obama to pardon them. If he really meant to get them he would be agreeing with
the FBI, saying there doesn't seem to be any evidence of wrong doing, and then change his mind
once (if) he's AG and it's too late for deals.
With so many lawyers, Obama, the Clintons, Lynch, Giuliani, Comey, no justice is likely to
come out of this.
@ Posted by: Ken Nari | Nov 11, 2016 2:51:53 PM | 55
I heard a podcast on Batchelor with Charles Ortel which explained some things -- even if
there are no obvious likely criminal smoking guns -- given that foundations get away with a lot
of "leniency" because they are charities, incomplete financial statements and chartering documents,
as I recall. I was most interested in his description of the number of jurisdictions the Foundation
was operating under, some of whom, like New York were already investigating; and others, foreign
who might or might be, who also have very serious regulations, opening the possibility that if
the Feds drop their investigation, New York (with very very strict law) might proceed, and that
they might well be investigated (prosecuted/banned??) in Europe.
The most recent leak wrt internal practices was just damning ... it sounded like a playground
of favors and sinecures ... no human resources department, no written policies on many practices
...
This was an internal audit and OLD (2008, called "the Gibson Review") so corrective action
may have been taken, but I thought was damning enough to deter many donors (even before Hillary's
loss removed that incentive) particularly on top of the Band (2011) memo. Unprofessional to the
extreme.
It's part of my vast relief that Clinton lost and will not be in our lives 24/7/365 for the
next 4 years. (I think Trump is an unprincipled horror, but that's as may be, I'm not looking
for a fight). After the mess Clinton made of Haiti (and the accusations/recriminations) I somehow
thought they'd have been more careful with their "legacy" -- given that it was founded in 1997,
2008 is a very long time to be operating without written procedures wrt donations, employment
"... HiIlary Clinton is a perfect enemy of Trump. She has become rich in office, and as Harry Truman said "anyone who gets rich in politics is a crook". She has dedicated her life to political power at the top while growing ever wealthier from its use. And she loves foreign wars. She has supported a long line of eco-genocidal attacks and bombings of Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine, all of them still in motion and waiting for her to be escalated further. ..."
"... Know a man by his enemies. Trump has countless enemies, but most of them march to the drums of endless wars of aggression and care less about the casualties of tens of millions of lost good jobs in America. Most are neo-liberals in fact, the bipartisan doctrine of dispossession of citizens and foreign wars to grow the system further. The worst have been Washington servants of the world corporate machine looting the world. They above all condemn his peace overtures to Russia and his promise to repeal NAFTA – both unspeakable heresies on the US public stage until Trump's movement against them. ..."
"... Where Trump agrees with the US money-and-war party is on Israel and Iran. He started with a policy of more neutrality towards the Israel-Palestine conflict, but soon backed out when the attack-dogs went into action with a $50 million gift for his campaign from a wealthy Zionist at the same time. Then he declared " Israel is America". So Trump can proclaim opposite positions without a blink, including on the continuous war crimes of Israel supported by the US. ..."
"... When you join the dots to Trump preaching a policy revolt against the insatiable corporate jaws feeding on trillions of dollars of public budgets in Washington, the underlying meaning emerges. He wants to stop the non-productive transnational corporations from feasting on the public purse. At the beginning after 2008, he even dared to recognize that Wall Street should be nationalized, as it once was by the American Revolution, Abraham Lincoln and FDR's Federal Reserve. This would be as big a turn of US government in the people's interests as stopping ruinous foreign wars. ..."
"... Trump also once said that the US "must be neutral, an honest broker" on the Israel-Palestine conflict – as unspeakable as it gets in US politics. Big Pharma was also called out with "$400 billion to be saved by government negotiation of prices". He even confronted the more powerful HMO's with the possibility of a "one-payer system" far better than the Obamacare pork-barrel for ever higher insurance premiums. ..."
HiIlary Clinton is a perfect enemy of Trump. She has become rich in office, and as Harry Truman
said "anyone who gets rich in politics is a crook". She has dedicated her life to political power
at the top while growing ever wealthier from its use. And she loves foreign wars. She has supported
a long line of eco-genocidal attacks and bombings of Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine,
all of them still in motion and waiting for her to be escalated further.
Know a man by his enemies. Trump has countless enemies, but most of them march to the drums of
endless wars of aggression and care less about the casualties of tens of millions of lost good jobs
in America. Most are neo-liberals in fact, the bipartisan doctrine of dispossession of citizens and
foreign wars to grow the system further. The worst have been Washington servants of the world corporate
machine looting the world. They above all condemn his peace overtures to Russia and his promise to
repeal NAFTA – both unspeakable heresies on the US public stage until Trump's movement against them.
HiIlary Clinton is a perfect enemy of Trump. She has become rich in office, and as Harry Truman
said "anyone who gets rich in politics is a crook". She has dedicated her life to political power
at the top while growing ever wealthier from its use. And she loves foreign wars. She has supported
a long line of eco-genocidal attacks and bombings of Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine,
all of them still in motion and waiting for her to be escalated further.
She wants a return to this bombing in Syria as a "free-fly zone" – free for US and NATO bombers
– just as she led Libya's destruction from 2011 on. She abuses Russia and slanders Putin at every
opportunity and she supported the neo-Nazi coup overthrowing the elected government of Ukraine and
the civil war since. She has done nothing but advocate or agree to endless US-led war crimes without
any life gain but only mass murder, social ruin and terror which she ignores. Like her mentor Madeleine
Allbright , even the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children in Iraq by Clinton-led bombing are
"worth the price".
Where Trump agrees with the US money-and-war party is on Israel and Iran. He started with
a policy of more neutrality towards the Israel-Palestine conflict, but soon backed out when the attack-dogs
went into action with a $50 million gift for his campaign from a wealthy Zionist at the same time.
Then he declared " Israel is America". So Trump can proclaim opposite positions without a blink,
including on the continuous war crimes of Israel supported by the US.
Trump also bellows against on the giveaway of many billions of US money to Iran and prefers to
bomb their nuclear facilities as Israel wants, and has already done in Syria. He does not tell his
audience that all of this US money is Iran's money being returned to it from its US seizure
in exchange for its nuclear disarmament never suggested for Israel which has enough nuclear weaponry
to blow up the whole Middle East and beyond. Trump too is not to be trusted when it suits his run
to be US President. Yet even here Trump still holds to his position that use of nuclear weapons means
"game over". Clinton and the bipartisan money-and-war party express no such constraint.
Why the Establishment Hates Trump, But Will Accept Him
All of them have reason to hate Trump for a more basic reason. He is seemingly alone in the money-media-military
establishment to publicly deplore the rigged electoral system in which big money and media rule –
formerly unspeakable in the press and political discussion on stage. Trump has even voiced suspicion
of the 9-11 killing spectacle and the "six-trillion- dollar" haemorrhage of US money on Middle East
and Afghanistan wars propelled and justified by 9-11 from 2001 on.
Yet here again the problem is that Trump backs off as soon as he thinks he will not be able to
sell it. This is the art of political lying at which Trump, like Reagan, is a master. But the hard-line
difference between Trump and Reagan and neo-con-lib rulers over the last 30 years is deep – Trump's
denunciation of NAFTA and willingness to have peace with other nations not bowing to Uncle Sam.
Before Trump, job-destroying edicts of transnational global corporations and captive states called
'free trade' have been anathema to oppose in official society. But Trump sticks to his heretical
position. Right up to the election he has promised a "35% tariff" on products of US factories that
disemploy workers to get cheaper labor elsewhere. No-one in the US political establishment has risked
such a position, or blamed these corporate-rights treaties for hollowing out American society itself.
It is apostasy in the corporate 'free press'.
Trump is still hated for such deviations from the official corporate-state line. But the haters
cannot say this. They stick to the politically correct repudiations, and call him "racist", "sexist",
"bigot" and so on even if the conclusion does follow from what he says or does. Selected instances
are the ruling fallacy here.
Trump and the Media-Lie System
Trump is unique in calling out the major mass media as continuous purveyors of lies and propaganda
– although he centers it on himself and not global corporate rule across borders which they worship.
Anyone not doing so is excommunicated from the press. This profound disorder is never allowed into
the mass media as an issue, and Trump never raises it. He too is a believer, but one who sees the
life costs of the sacrifice-workers rule inside the US. He also advocates job-creating public spending
on physical infrastructure which is as crucial to his movement as it was to FDR. It is no longer
taboo inside the dumkopfen party
Trump is a first. Never before has anyone been able to denounce the mass media framing, half-truths
and fabrications and still come out stronger The onslaught of ideological assassination by
a hireling intelligentsia and media of record like the New York Times has always succeeded
before. Trump reacts only as it affects his own position, but his raw defiance right into the cameras
has been eye-popping and unique in America.
This may be Trump's most remarkable achievement. He has been slandered and demonized more than
Russia's Putin, and Russia-baiting him with McCarthy-like accusations of collaboration with Putin
has been part of the attack by Hillary and the press. Yet passionate voter support of Trump has still
grown in the face of all this denunciation by the political establishment.
An underlying revolution in thinking has occurred. Trump has tapped the deep chords of worker
rage at dispossession by forced corporate globalization, criminally disastrous Middle East wars,
and trillions of dollars of bailouts to Wall Street. He never connects the dots on stage. But by
Clinton's advocacy of all of them, she has made them her own and will go down because of it.
Trump's unflinching vast ego and media savvy have been what she and the political establishment
are too corrupted to defeat, The underlying contradiction that now raises its head pits the mass
media against the President of the United States himself – against the long sacred office of the
commander-in-chief of US power across the world, precisely what he is proposing to pacify with friendly
relations instead of ruinous war invasions as in Iraq. Many observers think that Wall Street and
big money won't let it happen. Or that Trump will like others before him will be determined by the
office. Or that Clinton's billion dollars of PAC money will succeed work in the end. But the meaning
is out and cannot be reversed out of sight.
Whatever happens next in this saga it will be ground-shaking. The worst that can happen to Trump's
enemies is that he wins despite the all-fronts attack. They define his underlying meaning, just as
the Enemy they construct abroad defines them. If he loses, there will be a carnival of the money-war-media
party pretending a healing of the great division that has come to view. But this is not a Republican-Democrat
division. It is as deep as all the lost jobs and lives since 2001, and it is ultimately grounded
in the tens of millions of dispossessed people which the life-blind global market system and its
wars have imposed on America too.
The Great Division Will Not Go Away
Trump is the closest to an egomaniac that has ever run for the presidential office. If he were
not, he could not have withstood the public shaming heaped upon him by the political establishment
and dominant media everywhere.
But the tens of millions of Americans for whom Trump speaks tend to have one thing in common more
than anything else. They have been dispossessed and smeared by the neo-con/ neo-liberal alliance
that has taken or traded away their life security and belittled them with political correctness –
the establishment's patronizing diversion from their fallen state.
All the while, the ruling money party behind the media and the wars is system-driven to seek limitlessly
more money under masks of 'free trade' and "America's interests abroad'. The majority is left behind
as the sacrificial living dead. Multiplying transnational money sequences of the very rich have bled
the world into a comatose state, and perpetual wars against the next Enemy of the cancerous system
have sown chaos across the world.
Trump at least starts remission by seeing a criminally blind rule and chaos inside America itself.
Before his campaign, there was helplessness against the invading wars and money sequences always
profiting from the global ruin. The reality has been taboo to see in public. Only entertainments
have appeared in ever new guises as the corporate money-and-war machine has rolled and careened on
across all borders, now marching East through Ukraine into Russia, Brazil to Venezuela to the Caribbean,
from the Congo to the South China Sea.
The Trump entertainment, the most watched in the world, may be the long bridge to taking down
the neo-liberal pillars of majority dispossession and war-criminal state.
Trump is the Opposite to Reagan in Policy Directions
On the face of it, Trump is an ideal leader for US empire. He is like Ronald Reagan on steroids.
His long practiced camera image, his nativist US supremacism, his down-home talk, and his reality-show
confidence all go one better. He is America come to meet itself decades down the road as its pride
slips away in third-world conditions.
But unlike Reagan and Bush who spoke to the rich becoming richer, Trump speaks to the losing white
working class and those who have come to hate the money-corrupted Washington forging the policies
of dispossession Reagan started.
Washington has since ignored and patronized their plight over 30 years. Trump's constituency has
been the disposable rejects from the corporate global system that it is rigged from top to bottom
with rights only for the profits of transnational abroad and bought politicians at home.
The Trump constituency may have no clear idea of this inner logic of the system. But they directly
experience the unemployment, underemployment, ever lower pay, deprived pensions, degraded living
conditions, public squalor, contempt from official society, and no future for their children.
At the surface level, what drives them mad is the 'political correctness' that diverts all attention
from their plight to pant-suit 'feminists' getting a leg up, racial rights with no life substance,
sexual queers they had been conditioned to abhor, and other symbols of oppression changed as the actually ruling system of dispossession becomes inexorably worse all the
way down to their grand children.
Here too Hillary Clinton has been an embodiment of the smug ideology of the system that bleeds
the unseen job-deprived into powerless humiliation: an existential crisi where the secure jobs and
goods of US life have been stripped from them in continuous eviction from the American way with no
notice.
While Trump's narrative is that the American Dream seeks recovery again, the dominant media and
political elite relentlessly denounce him for his message. He gives lots of ammunition to them. His
most popular line is "build the wall", "build the great wall" between Mexico and the US. No political
correctness cares that the biggest source of near-slave labor for the big businesses of the US South
is Mexican 'illegals', and Trump himself never mentions this. He prefers to blame the Mexican illegals
themselves for drugs, rape and violence, the standard lie of blame-the-poorer for your problems.
Trump also wants to tax their slim earnings to pay for the wall. This is the still running sore of
America beneath the lost jobs.
Trump has thus attracted lots of votes. But many non-ignorant people too recognise that the tens
of millions of illegal migrants seeking work in the richer USA cannot continue in any country with
borders, or any nation that seeks to keep worker wages up not down by lower priced labor flooding
in. The legal way must be the only way if the law of nations is to exist and working people are to
be secure from dispossession by starvation wages illegal migrants can be hired for. Borders are,
few notice, the very target of the carcinogenic neo-liberal program.
Of course the political discourse never gets to this real and complex economic base of the problem.
Nor does Trump. His choral promise is "'l'll fix it. Believe me". But something deeper than demagoguery
and blaming the weak is afoot here. An untapped historic resentment is boiling up from underneath
which has long been unspeakable on the political stage. Trump has mined it and proposed a concrete
solution – one grand gate through which immigrants must pass.
Is this really racist? It is rather that Trump is very good at bait and switch. From his now deserted
promise to halve the Pentagon's budget to getting the Congress off corporate-donation payrolls, now
by fixed congressional terms, the public wealth that the politicians and corporate lobbies stand
to lose from a Trump presidency is very disturbing to them. The Mexican wall does not fit the borderless
neo-liberal program either. But all of it is welcome to citizens' ears. That is why the establishment
hates Trump for exposing all these issues long kept in the closet and covered over by politically
correct identity politics.
On the other hand, Trump leaves the halving of the Pentagon's budget behind as soon as he sees
the massive private money forces against it. It is Reagan in reverse. He now promises hundreds of
billions more to the military – but he still opposes foreign wars. That might even do it. But this
most major issue of the election has been completely ignored by the media and opposing politicians
alike. It is the historic core of his bid for the presidency.
Yet the US political establishment across parties cannot yet even conceive it so used are they
to the Reagan-led war state, the military corporate lobbies paying them off in every Senate seat,
anti-union policies at macro as well as micro levels, and always designated foreign enemies to bomb
for resistance. "Say Uncle" said Reagan to the Sandinistas when they asked what could stop the mercenary
killers paid by US covert drug running from bombing their harbours, schools and clinics.
Trump is going the opposite direction in foreign affairs, but the establishment commentators call
it "isolationist" to discredit it. Clinton talks of overcoming the divisions in America, but has
never mentioned holding back on foreign wars. On the contrary, she approves more war power against
Russia and in Syria and in the Ukraine. This is the biggest danger that no media covers – ever more
ruinous US wars on other continents. The formula is old and Reagan exemplified it. Russia is portrayed
as the evil threat to justify pouring up to two billion dollars-a-day of public money into the US
war-for-profit machine occupying across the world, now prepping for China.
But the bipartisan war party backed by Wall Street is going down if Trump's policy can prevail.
This may be the salvation of America and the world, but it is silenced up to election day.
Trump Against the Special Interests
At the beginning g of his public campaign, Trump's policy claims threatened almost every big lobby
now in control of US government purse strings. And these policies grounded in no more foreign wars
which have already cost over 'six trillion dollars' of US public money. At the same time, the country's
physical infrastructures degrade on all levels, and its people's lives are increasingly impoverished
and insecure for the majority. Trump promises to rebuild them all.
Yet the cut-off of hundreds of billions of public giveaways to the Big Corps that Trump advocated
did not end here. It hit almost every wide-mouthed transnational corporate siphon into the US Treasury,
taxpayers' pockets and the working majority of America. Masses of American citizens increasingly
without living wages and benefits and in growing insecurity listened to what the political establishment
and corporate media had long silenced.
Trump raised the great dispossession into the establishment's face, and this is why he will win.
"In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for
the vintage"."The grapes of wrath have risen from the long painful stripping of the people's livelihoods,
their social substance and their cities by corporate globalization selecting for the limitless enrichment
of the few living off an ever-growing takes from public coffers and the impoverishment of America's
working citizens. A primal rage has united them across party lines in the public person of Donald
Trump.
Can he deliver? Well he certainly has shown the guts necessary to do so, most uniquely in facing
down the corporate media and Washington politicians.
Looking Past the Victory
The issue still remains that Trump does not promise any fixing of the greatest transfer of wealth
to the very rich in history that Reagan started. This great transfer of wealth includes his own.
We may recall that his model Ronald Reagan started this Great Dispossession to "make America great
again" too.
Now Trump has promised a massive tax cut to the rich and private capital gains as Reagan did.
In the meantime nothing has been less talked about in election commentary than the globally powerful
interests Trump promised to rein back from the public troughs bleeding the country's capacities to
build for and to employ its people. On this topic, there has been only silence from the media and
politicians, and retreating vague generalizations from Trump.
At the beginning, he not only went after the foreign wars, but the sweetheart deals of the government
with Big Pharma, the health insurance racket, lobby-run foreign policy, off-shore tax evasion, and
global trade taking jobs in the tens of millions from home workers. This is why the establishment
so universally hated him. Most of their private interests in looting public wealth were named. He
reversed the tables on the parasite rich in Washington lobbying and gobbling up public money faster
than it could be bribed, printed and allocated to their schemes – except on real estate, his own
big money 'special interest' not centered in Washington. Indeed Trump loves 'eminent domain', state
seizure of people's private property for big developers like him.
This is where Trump joins hands with those depending on the deep system corruptions he has promised
to reverse. He even asked, in his loud way, how these huge private interests go on getting away with
a corporate-lobby state transferring ever more public wealth and control to them at the expense of
the American working majority and their common interest as Americans. But it had all pretty well
slid away by election day except the hatred of self-enriching Washington fixers like Hillary, Mexican
illegals, the Obamacare new charges (with no mention of the HMO's doing it), and the disrespect for
people bearing arms by the second-amendment right.
Do we have here the familiar positional determinism where political and economic class
leaders desert what they promised as they enter into elected office or have sold the goods?
Yet the victory Trump is about to reap is far from empty for America and the world if he keeps
to the promises he made. The money-and media-rigged elections have stayed front and center where
no-one in official politics dared say it before. The black-hole of US foreign wars has above all
has remained his historic target.
His entire strategy has been based on getting public attention, and he is a master at it. He is
unbuyably rich, has energy beyond a rock star, and is the most watched person in America across the
country and the world for months on end. He can't be shut up. Media stigmatization and slander without
let-up do not work as always before.
Trump is also capable of meeting perhaps the world's most important challenges, holding back the
global US war machine from perpetual eco-genocidal aggression and investing back into public infrastructure
and workers' productive jobs.
Most importantly, Trump challenges "the Enemy" cornerstone of US ideology when he says "wouldn't
it be nice to get along with Russia and China for a change?" And as he said to Canada whose branch-plant
corporate state still plays minion to its US corporate masters, "congratulations. You have become
independent".
As for Trump's much publicized 'denial of climate change, it is not really accurate. He has said
little on the topic, but has expressed his opposition to "bullshit government spending" on preventing
climate. So does James Lovelock, the famous global ecologist behind 'the Gaia hypothesis '. Certainly
the green-wash hoaxes of the private corporations (and Al Gore) becoming much richer than before
on solutions that do not work to prevent the global market-led climate destabilization do need more
astute appraisal.
When you join the dots to Trump preaching a policy revolt against the insatiable corporate
jaws feeding on trillions of dollars of public budgets in Washington, the underlying meaning emerges.
He wants to stop the non-productive transnational corporations from feasting on the public purse.
At the beginning after 2008, he even dared to recognize that Wall Street should be nationalized,
as it once was by the American Revolution, Abraham Lincoln and FDR's Federal Reserve. This would
be as big a turn of US government in the people's interests as stopping ruinous foreign wars.
Trump also once said that the US "must be neutral, an honest broker" on the Israel-Palestine
conflict – as unspeakable as it gets in US politics. Big Pharma was also called out with "$400 billion
to be saved by government negotiation of prices". He even confronted the more powerful HMO's with
the possibility of a "one-payer system" far better than the Obamacare pork-barrel for ever higher
insurance premiums.
Trump is no working-class hero. He has long been a predatory capitalist with all the furies of
greed, egoism and self-promotion that the ruling system selects for. But he is not rich from foreign
wars of aggression, or from exporting the costs of labor to foreign jurisdictions with subhuman standards.
He has not been getting richer or more smug by seeking high office in a context of saturating slander
and denunciation from official society. He has initiated a long overdue recognition of parasite capitalism
eating out and wasting the life capacities of the US itself as well as the larger world.
Trump has now won the first major step that his enemies declared inconceivable, and he can now
do what he has promised 'in the place where the buck stops'.
Prof. John McMurtry is author of The Cancer Stage of Capitalism: From Crisis to Cure (available
from University of Chicago Press) and an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
"... At the start of the 2016 election cycle, this power structure proclaimed Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush shoo-ins for the nominations of the Democratic and Republican parties. After all, both of these individuals had deep bases of funders, well-established networks of political insiders, experienced political advisers and all the political name recognition any candidate could possibly want. ..."
"... Recent economic indicators may be up, but those indicators don't reflect the insecurity most Americans continue to feel, nor the seeming arbitrariness and unfairness they experience. Nor do the major indicators show the linkages many Americans see between wealth and power, stagnant or declining real wages, soaring CEO pay, and the undermining of democracy by big money. ..."
"... Median family income is lower now than it was 16 years ago, adjusted for inflation. ..."
"... Wealth, power and crony capitalism fit together. Americans know a takeover has occurred, and they blame the establishment for it. ..."
"... Bill Clinton and Obama also allowed antitrust enforcement to ossify – with the result that large corporations have grown far larger, and major industries more concentrated. The unsurprising result of this combination – more trade, declining unionization and more industry concentration – has been to shift political and economic power to big corporations and the wealthy, and to shaft the working class. This created an opening for Donald Trump's authoritarian demagoguery, and his presidency. ..."
"... The power structure is shocked by the outcome of the 2016 election because it has cut itself off from the lives of most Americans. Perhaps it also doesn't wish to understand, because that would mean acknowledging its role in enabling the presidency of Donald Trump. ..."
What has happened in America should not be seen as a victory for hatefulness over decency. It
is more accurately understood as a repudiation of the American power structure.
At the core of that structure are the political leaders of both parties, their political operatives,
and fundraisers; the major media, centered in New York and Washington DC; the country's biggest corporations,
their top executives, and Washington lobbyists and trade associations; the biggest Wall Street banks,
their top officers, traders, hedge-fund and private-equity managers, and their lackeys in Washington;
and the wealthy individuals who invest directly in politics.
At the start of the 2016 election cycle, this power structure proclaimed Hillary Clinton and
Jeb Bush shoo-ins for the nominations of the Democratic and Republican parties. After all, both of
these individuals had deep bases of funders, well-established networks of political insiders, experienced
political advisers and all the political name recognition any candidate could possibly want.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the White House. The presidency was won by Donald Trump,
who made his fortune marketing office towers and casinos, and, more recently, starring in a popular
reality-television program, and who has never held elective office or had anything to do with the
Republican party. Hillary Clinton narrowly won the popular vote, but not enough of the states and
their electors secure a victory.
Hillary Clinton's defeat is all the more remarkable in that her campaign vastly outspent the Trump
campaign on television and radio advertisements, and get-out-the-vote efforts. Moreover, her campaign
had the support in the general election not of only the kingpins of the Democratic party but also
many leading Republicans, including most of the politically active denizens of Wall Street and the
top executives of America's largest corporations, and even former Republican president George HW
Bush. Her campaign team was run by seasoned professionals who knew the ropes. She had the visible
and forceful backing of Barack Obama, whose popularity has soared in recent months, and his popular
wife. And, of course, she had her husband.
Trump, by contrast, was shunned by the power structure. Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential
candidate in 2012, actively worked against Trump's nomination. Many senior Republicans refused to
endorse him, or even give him their support. The Republican National Committee did not raise money
for Trump to the extent it had for other Republican candidates for president.
What happened?
There had been hints of the political earthquake to come. Trump had won the Republican primaries,
after all. More tellingly, Clinton had been challenged in the Democratic primaries by the unlikeliest
of candidates – a 74-year-old Jewish senator from Vermont who described himself as a democratic socialist
and who was not even a Democrat. Bernie Sanders went on to win 22 states and 47% of the vote in those
primaries. Sanders' major theme was that the country's political and economic system was rigged in
favor of big corporations, Wall Street and the very wealthy.
... ... ...
The power structure of America wrote off Sanders as an aberration, and, until recently, didn't
take Trump seriously. A respected political insider recently told me most Americans were largely
content with the status quo. "The economy is in good shape," he said. "Most Americans are better
off than they've been in years."
Recent economic indicators may be up, but those indicators don't reflect the insecurity most
Americans continue to feel, nor the seeming arbitrariness and unfairness they experience. Nor do
the major indicators show the linkages many Americans see between wealth and power, stagnant or declining
real wages, soaring CEO pay, and the undermining of democracy by big money.
Median family income is lower now than it was 16 years ago, adjusted for inflation. Workers
without college degrees – the old working class – have fallen furthest. Most economic gains, meanwhile,
have gone to top. These gains have translated into political power to elicit bank bailouts, corporate
subsidies, special tax loopholes, favorable trade deals and increasing market power without interference
by anti-monopoly enforcement – all of which have further reduced wages and pulled up profits.
Wealth, power and crony capitalism fit together. Americans know a takeover has occurred, and
they blame the establishment for it.
The Democratic party once represented the working class. But over the last three decades the party
has been taken over by Washington-based fundraisers, bundlers, analysts, and pollsters who have focused
instead on raising campaign money from corporate and Wall Street executives and getting votes from
upper middle-class households in "swing" suburbs.
Democrats have occupied the White House for 16 of the last 24 years, and for four of those years
had control of both houses of Congress. But in that time they failed to reverse the decline in working-class
wages and economic security. Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama ardently pushed for free trade agreements
without providing millions of blue-collar workers who thereby lost their jobs means of getting new
ones that paid at least as well.
They stood by as corporations hammered trade unions, the backbone of the white working class –
failing to reform labor laws to impose meaningful penalties on companies that violate them, or help
workers form unions with simple up-or-down votes. Partly as a result, union membership sank from
22% of all workers when Bill Clinton was elected president to less than 12% today, and the working
class lost bargaining leverage to get a share of the economy's gains.
Bill Clinton and Obama also allowed antitrust enforcement to ossify – with the result that
large corporations have grown far larger, and major industries more concentrated. The unsurprising
result of this combination – more trade, declining unionization and more industry concentration –
has been to shift political and economic power to big corporations and the wealthy, and to shaft
the working class. This created an opening for Donald Trump's authoritarian demagoguery, and his
presidency.
Now Americans have rebelled by supporting someone who wants to fortify America against foreigners
as well as foreign-made goods. The power structure understandably fears that Trump's isolationism
will stymie economic growth. But most Americans couldn't care less about growth because for years
they have received few of its benefits, while suffering most of its burdens in the forms of lost
jobs and lower wages.
The power structure is shocked by the outcome of the 2016 election because it has cut itself
off from the lives of most Americans. Perhaps it also doesn't wish to understand, because that would
mean acknowledging its role in enabling the presidency of Donald Trump.
I'm in agreement with RR, as far as he goes. He could have gone further, but it's probably not
the time or place for that, anyway, that road is depressing.
Trump's an opportunist, certainly, but a very, very, successful one indeed. He has, after all,
made an awful lot of money that way, so he's not that lacking in intelligence and ruthlessness.
If only Sanders had been more ruthless and willing to stick the knife into the Democratic Party
when he had the chance.
Trump, essentially ran as an independent. First he needed to defeat the Republican Party's
establishment, which he did, take over the party and only then was he ready to challenge the Democrats
and beat them down. He succeeded in his strategy, beating both of them, which is an astonishing
feat, historic in character.
It actually gets worse for liberals. Trump also took on the liberal media and despite their
best efforts to destroy him, brazenly supporting Clinton and ridiculing Trump and his supporters...
Trump didn't just survive the onslaught, but crushed the media as well. Vast swathes of the population
hate and despise the media as much as they loathe the political elite. People simply don't believe
the media anymore, so most of their attacks on Trump were useless and ineffective when they came.
And it really isn't Trump that's important here. It's the character of the wave he surfed
on and lifted him into the White House. But the media ignored the wave and have done for years
and years. Now, the fascist chickens have really come home to roost and much of the responsibility
lies with the incredible ignorance, arrogance and mind-numbing stupidity that characterizes so
much of the media.
"Democrats once represented the working class. Not any more."
And they haven't since Bill Clinton had his way with the party in the 90s.
As much as the right enjoys calling the Clintons liberals, they're not.
They're neo-liberals, which is a whole different philosophy.
The Dems abandoned those who supported them for generations and we are all living in the ever-worsening
result of that betrayal.
So Robert Reich spent the past year enthusiastically encouraging us to vote for a candidate who
embodied every last bit of the formula that he now tells us was a sure loser. Should he perhaps
have warned his long-time good friend Hillary that she was on the wrong road? That being the servant
of Wall Street and promising the status quo with incremental progress was a recipe for failure?
As you say, sir:
"The power structure is shocked by the outcome of the 2016 election because it has cut itself
off from the lives of most Americans. Perhaps it also doesn't wish to understand, because that
would mean acknowledging its role in enabling the presidency of Donald Trump."
This includes Obama's role as enabler.
Ironic, that Obama was a charismatic campaigner who failed entirely to become a charismatic president.
And he lost to a candidate who had another sort of charisma: That of a lying, sneering, insulting,
self-important clown.
Shows how bad things have become for a once hard-working & productive middle class now set adrift.
The same power structure that has for decades ignored the plight of millions in favour of it's
own elitist wealth building, little wonder this election result. The neo liberals by their arrogance
and lack of empathy have brought us to this setting us back decades. Clinton was definately does
not hold any sympathy for the downtrodden, she cannot, she's in another class, the billionaire
type. That is why we must never trust them or ever look again to people with this background to
help us. They are responsible for the descent towards fascism and the people are responsible for
their utter gullability in believing them in the first place.
Obama is the worst president and most divisive. he is the master race baiter as well.
Nov 11, 2016 | Pinterest
How the 2016 US election night unfolded
The power structure of America wrote off Sanders as an aberration, and, until recently, didn't
take Trump seriously. A respected political insider recently told me most Americans were largely
content with the status quo. "The economy is in good shape," he said. "Most Americans are better
off than they've been in years."
Recent economic indicators may be up, but those indicators don't reflect the insecurity most
Americans continue to feel, nor the seeming arbitrariness and unfairness they experience. Nor
do the major indicators show the linkages many Americans see between wealth and power, stagnant
or declining real wages, soaring CEO pay, and the undermining of democracy by big money.
Median family income is lower now than it was 16 years ago, adjusted for inflation. Workers
without college degrees – the old working class – have fallen furthest. Most economic gains, meanwhile,
have gone to top. These gains have translated into political power to elicit bank bailouts, corporate
subsidies, special tax loopholes, favorable trade deals and increasing market power without interference
by anti-monopoly enforcement – all of which have further reduced wages and pulled up profits.
Wealth, power and crony capitalism fit together. Americans know a takeover has occurred, and
they blame the establishment for it.
The Democratic party once represented the working class. But over the last three decades the
party has been taken over by Washington-based fundraisers, bundlers, analysts, and pollsters who
have focused instead on raising campaign money from corporate and Wall Street executives and getting
votes from upper middle-class households in "swing" suburbs.
Democrats have occupied the White House for 16 of the last 24 years, and for four of those
years had control of both houses of Congress. But in that time they failed to reverse the decline
in working-class wages and economic security. Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama ardently pushed
for free trade agreements without providing millions of blue-collar workers who thereby lost their
jobs means of getting new ones that paid at least as well.
They stood by as corporations hammered trade unions, the backbone of the white working class
– failing to reform labor laws to impose meaningful penalties on companies that violate them,
or help workers form unions with simple up-or-down votes. Partly as a result, union membership
sank from 22% of all workers when Bill Clinton was elected president to less than 12% today, and
the working class lost bargaining leverage to get a share of the economy's gains.
Bill Clinton and Obama also allowed antitrust enforcement to ossify – with the result that
large corporations have grown far larger, and major industries more concentrated. The unsurprising
result of this combination – more trade, declining unionization and more industry concentration
– has been to shift political and economic power to big corporations and the wealthy, and to shaft
the working class. This created an opening for Donald Trump's authoritarian demagoguery, and his
presidency.
Now Americans have rebelled by supporting someone who wants to fortify America against foreigners
as well as foreign-made goods. The power structure understandably fears that Trump's isolationism
will stymie economic growth. But most Americans couldn't care less about growth because for years
they have received few of its benefits, while suffering most of its burdens in the forms of lost
jobs and lower wages.
The power structure is shocked by the outcome of the 2016 election because it has cut itself
off from the lives of most Americans. Perhaps it also doesn't wish to understand, because that
would mean acknowledging its role in enabling the presidency of Donald Trump.
I've known Hillary Clinton since she was 19 years old, and have nothing but respect for
her. In my view, she's the most qualified candidate for president of the political system we now
have.
But Bernie Sanders is the most qualified candidate to create the political system we should
have, because he's leading a political movement for change.
The upcoming election isn't about detailed policy proposals. It's about power – whether
those who have it will keep it, or whether average Americans will get some as well. [...]
Which explains a paradox I found a few months ago when I was on book tour in the nation's
heartland: I kept bumping into people who told me they were trying to make up their minds in
the upcoming election between Sanders and Trump.
At first I was dumbfounded. The two are at opposite ends of the political divide. But as
I talked with these people, I kept hearing the same refrains. They wanted to end "crony capitalism."
They detested "corporate welfare," such as the Wall Street bailout.
They wanted to prevent the big banks from extorting us ever again. Close tax loopholes for
hedge-fund partners. Stop the drug companies and health insurers from ripping off American consumers.
End trade treaties that sell out American workers. Get big money out of politics. [...]
You don't care about the details of proposed policies and programs.
You just want a system that works for you.
If you click his name at the byline you'll see how many articles published in 2016. Now think
about the number of pieces published that pushed the pro-Clinton argument of more of the same.
"Third-Way" Democrats made an art form of triangulating a position between the old-line liberal
Democrats the positions made by the mainstream corporate Republican party. By tacking as far right
as possible, these corporate Democrats could scrape off enough of the business friendly, socially
progressive Independents and Republicans to stymie any sort of Republican Presidential bid. Corporate
America gave to both parties, but loves first and foremost to be on the side of the winner, where
its influence can manifest itself in business friendly legislation, politically friendly appointments,
no prosecutions for criminal behavior. no enforcement of labor or business legislation and no
break-ups of monopolies using the still existent anti-trust legislation.
One of the things that made Republicans furious during Bill Clinton's term was that he was skilled
in the extreme at taking issues the Republicans were pushing and getting out in front of them
and making the issue his own, making the result at least somewhat palpable to the old liberals
of the world.
The Democrats became the other war party, the other big business party, the other big banking
party, the other big agriculture party, the other big oil party, the other big communications
party, the other international exploitation party, the other anti-union party the other big medical
party, the other big pharmaceutical party, the other international trade deal party.
Bill Clinton sat down with Alan Greenspan and agreed to be the other austerity party. He supported
low tax rates on the billionaires and corporations and low tariffs. That led to lower services
for the public and small businesses and the tax burden being borne by the long suffering middle
class and working poor. The non-working poor suffered as well with no welfare, more stringent
unemployment benefits, and a stagnant job market for meaningful jobs. At the same time, law enforcement
was focusing on them, putting them in prison for extreme amounts of time for often trivial matters.
But Bill had an overall good economy because of the Computer Generation, so the economy grew and
he was able to deliver to George W. Bush a budget surplus, which, if maintained, would have entirely
paid off the national debt by now.
Unfortunately all those economic gains were being funneled to the top. Overall wages of working
people actually declined since Ronald Reagan came in to begin the austerity measures while the
wealth of the top 1% quadrupled. Working people were losing good paying jobs and having to have
both wage earners in a family work lesser jobs to make up for hemorrhaging income. These lesser
jobs not only had less wages, they had less benefits. Against an out of control health care industry,
banking industry, communications industry and investment industry they were being sucked dry well
before retirement. No amount of savings could stand up to catastrophic illness. People's 401K
plans were repeatedly slaughtered while the big guys who precipitated the mess ended up owning
more and more of the means of generating wealth in our country. Remember the absolutely sinful
Republican law that made student debt unforgivable at the same time that school costs were skyrocketing?
It was so unpopular, Republicans needed help from Joe Biden and other corporate Democrats to get
it passed.
Never mind the corporate media and Republican lies about Barack Obama being a "Liberal", he was,
in fact, another version of corporate Democrat. Since he was black, the racist Republicans could
do the unprecedented in America politics: they decided to block everything. For no good reason.
Other than he was black and no one would hold them accountable. He went along with the austerity
plan because he had no other option. Able enough manager, he was able to drastically reduce the
national deficit virtually on his own. But he kept up the wars. Hell, he and Hillary Clinton started
wars for oil and natural gas. Just like the Republicans. Along with the very expensive war and
secret intelligence budget and police state budget. He has restarted the nuclear weapons program,
never mind that we already have enough nukes to destroy the world 100 times over. He also longed
for hanging his hat on another record-breaking Trans Pacific Partnership international trade deal
encompassing 40% of the world's Gross Domestic Product. Like Bill Clinton/George HW Bush's NAFTA
on steroids. Jobs would be flowing out to low wage countries and waves of filthy international
profits would come flowing back in to: the top 1%, where presumably the fraud of trickle down
economics would waged on the American worker once again.
Yup the elites got hammered Tuesday. Even though they say they are for democracy, they aren't.
The elites want open borders and the people at the bottom of the wage scale are having to compete
against these low wage border jumpers.
How can the elites say they are for open borders and for raising wages. It isn't possible.
It is the law of supply and demand. Sure the government could pass minimum wage increases but
that will drive businesses to automate as much as possible. That ain't going to help these people
either!
Wikileaks proved that the Democrat party is the party of the ruling class elites, no question.
Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders? Give me a break, These two phonies are owned lock stock and
barrel by Wall Street and the Big Banks. Warren's Consumer Protection racket is like Dodd-Frank
- a Potemkin village of fake reforms designed to kill off any competition to the ruling class
oligarchs.
A better analysis than the hysterical white/kkk/racist/woman hater etc pieces that have been flooding
the pages lately.
Its "dont piss on my back and tell me its raining" stuff, Obamacare has stung those in work,
in some cases badly, and those out of work see no hope or change either.
No-one went to jail for screwing the world economy.
Even the government agencies who had oversight, and failed to see one single indicator of trouble
saw no-one demoted, just a call for more power.
And lastly importing more people to compete for low skilled jobs from overseas does keep downward
pressure on wages, and make jobs harder to find for the native born. Pretending otherwise in some
misguided sense of international "solidarity" is punishing your own people for outsiders advantage.
The roles of the two parties have been interchanged over the years, but they both ended up the
same way -- serving the Davos community.
Some have suggested the formation of a third party as a possible remedy. I don't think that
is the solution. As long as campaigns are financed through private contributions, the politicians
elected would be beholden to the rich, regardless of the number of parties involved. The voice
of the less privileged voters will not be heard. To have a truly representative body of elected
officials, private (including corporate) campaign contributions should be eliminated from politics.
Candidates should disseminate their message and platform in publicly funded campaigns. So I would
say don't worry about the number of parties. Just get rid of Citizens United and limit spending
for political campaigns to public funding.
The present Republican-controlled government will not do that. HRC had promised to get rid
of Citizens United. The only remedy now is to organize and try to give the House in 2 years to
whoever will do so.
If was the duffus you worked for Mr. Reich who repealed the Glass-Steagall Act ushering in the
tech bubble, the housing bubble and now the 'everything' bubble. A financialization of our economy
that has benefited only the top 10 to 15 percent of the population.
I don't usually agree w Sex Reich but he mostly right here. The Democratic Party has been corrupted
& a tool of Goldman Sachs, Wall Street, Big Banks, & Corrupt Democrat billionaires ...
Wall Street does care if the kill growth & jobs as long as they keep interest rates at Zero
& Print trillions to fuel the market & fill their pockets. Same w the banks.
The Democrats have Total comtempt for working Americans out here in what they call flyover land.
You know... IW WI MI OH. So Reich is right there but more Gov, more socialism is not the answers.
Economic growth & free Enterprise w sound monetary policy to crest jobs & raise incomes is what
we need & what Trump will provide.
There's definitely a failure of government to do its job: to ensure that the market economy works
to improve the lives of all people (they instead ensure that they get a job at a Goldman Sachs
or a Morgan Stanley once they leave government). Robert Reich points out in the article that the
government never steps in to prevent anti-monopoly practices. To his point, one has only to look
at the over-valued market capitalizations of the financial and pharmaceutical sectors to see that
these guys are getting a free ride. Since not everyone can be a Paul Volcker, one may have to
raise the pay grade of civil servants to attract the best talents.
Whether he's a Democrat or a Republican, the white voter is a bit lost, unable to find his
way in a world where the white man no longer dominates. This doesn't apply to the working or middle
class.
This said, it's not because we want change that we're going to cast our vote for a monster
like Trump. We know what happened in 1933 in Germany, in 1917 in Russia. Whether it's gas chambers
or the Goulag, these psychopaths (Hitler, Stalin) can go very far. The worst ones are the toned-down
versions: a Hitler Light. I sure won't vote for Marine Le Pen.
It's truly a worrying time for the intelligent citizen. Democrats fail the middle class, yet for
all my life there's only been one party who would throw their own mother on hot coals and walk
over her body to give a rich man a tax cut: the Republican Party. I hope it's true that Trump
represents their defeat just as much as the Democrats. They've sold out their base for decades
now, peddling condescending lies and culture war excuses for their greed and cronyism. Not a single
Republican used to be an expert scientist until reducing pollution was going to cost their donors
a few dollars, then all of sudden they all knew better than a PhD how the climate worked. Their
last President started a war and gave no-bid government contracts to his friends, and even tried
to privatize Social Security so business associates could skim off the top of that too, consequences
be damned. When neither side is either willing or able to save you, what can you do?
Mr. Reich, you can't see the forest for the trees. Hillary promised that AFTER you lost your job
to bad trade deals, she'd help you to retrain to become a 7-11 night clerk. In essence, she was
offering to bury your job in a fine casket. Donald offered to fight for your job and shake up
America's trade deals if he had to in order to level the playing field and keep our manufacturing
here. And oh yea, bring some jobs back home too. He also said he would protect them from cheap
labor pouring across the border legally and illegally. Illegal Latinos don't all work picking
lettuce - some drive trucks, do construction, are plumbers, carpenters, electricians, shipyard
workers, you know - jobs our own citizens want. It's not about whether you can strangle another
company with union demands, it's about the lack of jobs period. So in essence, Hillary wanted
open borders and all of our jobs going to Latinos. Donald wants the opposite.
Wonder what makes you Einsteins think the republicans are now suddenly for the working man? Republicans
have always been on the side of big money interests, and nothing has changed. Trump is just there
to placate the mid western rubes. 'Mericuns are so naive. (no tolerance for propaganda like the
Euros or Russians seem to have.) Trump is just a head fake. Its business as usual. He's just gonna
pick up where Obama and Shrub left off. Seen this trick before.
The Guardian needs to publish an editorial apologizing for being part of this problem. During
the Sanders-Clinton race, the Guardian was nothing but derisive towards Sanders, and elevated
Clinton as the responsible and adult choice to stop Donald Trump. They even compared Sanders to
Nader as a spoiler from 2000, not realizing that all the warning signs were there that Clinton
would play the role of John Kerry in 2004.
There were comments in the comment section with people saying "I still don't fully understand
the difference between Clinton and Sanders, can someone please explain it to me?" That was the
Guardian's job. For the record, here is the correct explanation.
For decades the Democratic Party has abandoned working people and embraced globalization at
their expense. Clinton was the candidate of continuity with that policy, Sanders was the candidate
of "Hey, that was actually a bad idea, our mistake, we'll start caring about your issues as well."
It was obvious that Clinton would be vulnerable in a general election against anyone who ran a
populist platform, which Trump was doing.
This train wreck was obvious from a mile away. The DNC and the media need to own this blunder.
You are correct. I would add that electing trump has ended the dlc Democratic party. Of course
my conjecture remains to be proved by events going forward. Still this rightwing shift has a real
chance now to remain in power like the collapsed dlc Clinton Obama clique for a considerable period
ahead. And besides that a restive U.S. working class is in motion with little obvious direction
to the left right now. I would expect though a left opposition is coming rather soon.
The US is a country with a lot of very angry and unhappy people. The nation is in decline and
the people are fearful; they know something is terribly wrong but they do not have the political
acumen to deal with the situation. The two political parties, co-opted if not largely owned by
the plutocracy-, offer no respite from the oppression of which, in fact, they are the instruments
being vassals of their plutocratic masters.
Unfortunately, the plutocracy and their subservient mass media have convinced about half of
the population to vote, to their own destruction, for continual transfer of wealth and power to
the corporations and plutocrats-. The Trumpers, arguably less educated, politically ignorant and
naive, easily manipulated, and riddled with fear fueled with bigotry, are the leading edge of
the discontent and fright. However, their blindness to reality is a severe obstacle to any possibility
of getting that nation back on the track. The plutocrats-, like all parasites, will drain the
nation of its lifeblood and then move on to another country to exploit.
As long as the Trumpeters and those of their ilk can be so easily duped and manipulated, it
is unlikely that there will be any common ground. In fact, common ground is not what is needed.
Rather, what is needed is an aggressively progressive agenda to restore democracy, economic recovery
and re-establishment of a rapidly disappearing middle class.
Politicians like Clinton and Obama give paid speeches behind closed doors on Wall St, whom they
bailed out at the expense of the people. They throw $10k-a-plate fundraisers with celebrities,
and cozy up to the profit-over-people industries like big pharmaceutical and big oil. They are
for hedge fund managers, payday lenders, defense contractors, and credit card companies. Then
they have the gall to send out "tweets" saying we must overturn Citizens United.
I realize the Republicans are no better, in fact, they're even worse, but everyone knows who
and what they are. They make no bones about it, they don't dress up in wolf's clothing and pretend
they are for the working man.
Democrats do. Democrats are like the Republicans from 30 years ago. Over the last 3 decades,
the left has moved to the right and the right has moved into an insane asylum. So now it's the
Democrats who do the red-baiting (see their treatment of Sanders) and the RNC are accusing neoliberal
centre-right politicians like Obama of being a socialist. Socialist? He's not even a liberal.
You are forgetting to add in the "for profit' colleges. How much did Debbie Dearest get from *that*
lobby? How many millions did Bill get to sit on their boards? These political grifters got paid
big money by the very entities which were foreclosing on homes, suffocating kids with student
loan debt, and tanking the economy via Wall Street schemes. The Dems thought we weren't paying
attention?
Trump is offering a solution, that's all. Can he implement it, probably not, but no one else is
even talking about re negotiating NAFTA, penalizing China or anything else to bring back millions
of good paying factory jobs.
Our politicians are out of touch, and corrupted by the oceans of money thrown at them. The 58
million people who voted for Trump want anyone to talk to them about what has happened to their
lives and opportunities and address their problems.
Hillary may in fact be the most competent politician, but that is the problem. She never came
across as a leader who would lead us out of our problems. So we elected a lying misogynist who
is, at least, not a politician!
Reich debated Chris Hedges on democracynow before the election, Hedges pointed out
to him that under Ronald Ray-Gun the levers of power were given over to all the
corp's of the world, there isn't a DNC or a RNC, it's a less than one percent secure hold
on all power, Trump is just another puppet --
The last two paragraphs are absolutely dead on with what happened. You can't cater to minorities
and expect the majority to stick with you forever as they suffer. The Democrats are so blind they
didn't understand why Bernie surged or why Trump won but this writer has real clarity and speaks
the truth absolutely on it. If you ignore the majority, which is mostly working class or rural
citizens, you lose election after election with never ever holding total power for long. Trump
truly needs to be a Teddy Roosevelt up there and set the barn on fire to chase all of the rats
out and rebuild it.
That's what we need and at least there is the tiniest sliver of hope he will, whereas with
Hillary we would have received more establishment politics which always include purposeful half-truths
and omissions at the working class's expense. Seriously, Schumer and Pelosi need to be investigated
with Hillary Clinton because the way they act up there is exactly what made America a stagnant
decaying landscape.
I think it's time we get to the real issues the majority and minority citizens face together
and stop beating to death your four issues that are inconsequential to the other 90 % of us in
one way or another. That goes for both parties too. It makes me wonder if they ever talk to anyone
but the people who have money. It would seem so and it needs to change now because them people
live in a bubble and bubbles always burst. Drag the swamp Donald on both sides of the isle and
you will be my hero forever. Fail and you will be my most hated president yet.
And on a final note, thank god the Guardian has pulled back from the left some now and is being
a good news source again. Thank you for this article and a big thank you to this writer for telling
it like it
Once the Democratic Party was the party of the working man. The union member. Blue collar.
Trying to get higher wages for the working man.
The Republican Party was the party of capital. Bankers. Corporate types. Millionaires.
The Democrats abandoned the working man for the underclass.
Now it seems to becoming that the Republicans are the party of people who work for a living
at a private job, along with the business owners.
The Democrats represent those who either don't work, or those who work for the State: welfare
recipients, students, public union members, most every staffer in DC. Hollywood types. Millionaires,
especially dot com ones.
Despite calling it racist over and over, unfettered immigration holds wages down. Free trade
with China and Mexico guts unions and makes the proposed $15/hr minimum wage a joke when factories
have all moved to Mexico or China. It's a fine thing with Britain, Germany or Canada, but a big
loser with low wage countries. Especially with China who puts barriers in place for OUR exports.
It also didn't help when Katy Perry, Madonna and J.Lo endorsed Hillary. It sent more people
towards the Republicans looking for people who looked like them. Who got up in the morning to
go to work.
If U.S. Democrats have any sense, they'll kick the DNC leadership losers out and let Bernie and
Elizabeth Warren lead the Party. Then we'll have at least one party that represents the interests
of Workers.
Trump has two years to make the lives of his supporters substantially better. Looking
at the people around him, that's not likely to happen. I can't wait to see him make the case that
more tax cuts for Huuge corporations will somehow help Working People! If they try more of the
same, then the market crash will happen on their watch.
Good luck in 2018 then. Dems re-take House & Senate, with Bernie & Elizabeth Warren leading
the way...
We are living through the death of "growth", the death of capitalism. The 1% are using the 99%
as human shields to buffer themselves from the collapse of their religion and their Gawd, horded
wealth. Trump will sellout his Chumps worse than Obama... And the idea that the TwoParty will
ever move to meet the social needs of humanity is a pipe dream. The only way we will get this
is by Direct Democracy. The 99% votes policy. The government are employees who implement those
policies... or they are fired.
Nearly every single elected politician currently in office on both sides is bought and paid for
and works in the best interest of large corporations, not in the best interest of we the people.
A complete purge, a system flush is required if we are to take our country back.
It seams like a monumental task, it looks like an impossible mission when you look at the sheer
amount of money and power in play but it is actually simple and it's all on us, all we need to
do is stop voting for Repocrats and start voting for people of integrity outside of these two
establishment parties.
That is the only way to quickly affect real change and if everyone did that we'd have our country
back in no time. So stop bashing the people who are voting third party and independent, stop telling
them that their vote is wasted or a vote for the "other side", realize that there are no two sides
really and join them in voting the Repocrats out of everything and voting in the people who will
overturn Citizens United, outlaw lobbying and pass a new campaign finance law that will take the
money complete out of politics and allow us to elect the congress and the president that will
work for us, not the Wall Street or MIC.
Is Trump's election really a rejection of the "power structure"? How could that be since that
power structure, whether Democrat or Republican, remains intact decade after decade? I don't think
Trump's victory is a rejection of the power structure. The rejection of the power structure was
embodied, if anywhere, by the Sanders campaign, but it was defied by the Clinton's and by actors
like Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and by the fraud employed by those actors during the primaries.
In a system of only two parties voting for one or the other can simply be a vote based in anger
about an excluded middle, or a non-existent "left". These frustrating complaints tell you more
about the result than does "the power structure" who could care less which party wins, so long
as their interests are served.
Some sanity at last amidst the demented ragings of the identity politics crowd that STILL does
not understand that it was them who put Trump in the White House. Not white male rage. Not the
shy white female vote. Not any other race/gender/sexuaity category that you wish to dream up.
What put Trump in the White House was a deeply dysfunctional political system. The fact that
the symbol of this deeply dysfunctional political system happened to be female is neither here
nor there. Understand this. Understand this and learn.
Ditch the identity politics. Become a real progressive, not a fake progressive deriving fatally
deluded ideas from exclusio
Reich has some points, but is ignoring several key circumstances, such as the 72K$ median income
among Trump supporters, but mainly hostile legislators blocking anything more than incremental
changes as to wealth redistribution such as the ACA. Neither Obama nor Clinton have supernatural
powers to get progressive measures passed through republican congress.
The Guardian once represented the working class. Not any more.
The next president had been decided. The elites, the lobbyists, the corporate bosses, and the
media all decided the next president. Only one thing missing. The voters. They weren't playing
ball! Those pesky working class voters! Now the media get to pretend they were with us all along!
"In an article out today at The Washington Post, Freddie DeBoer makes this case. He points
out that Sanders during the Democratic primary won in key states, like Michigan and Wisconsin,
that Clinton lost in the general, and that Sanders was able to attract independent voters. He
also notes Sanders's higher favorability and popularity ratings. Of course, such arguments are
entirely speculative. We don't know how Sanders would have fared under Republican attacks. And
we can't forget that Sanders lost the primary, by a not insignificant amount.
"But one of the biggest arguments made by Clinton and her supporters was that she was pragmatic
and electable-the safe candidate. Sanders's campaign, with its proposals for a $15 minimum wage
and universal health care, was derided as pie-in-the-sky, and the candidate himself painted his
platform as an electoral disaster. I suspect that more than a few Democrats went with their heads
instead of their hearts when casting their votes for Clinton. But we found out that playing a
safe and moderate campaign (i.e., picking Tim Kaine, the most forgettable man in existence) doesn't
necessarily translate into a winning one. Clinton failed to pick up moderate Republicans and white
women. And many of her supporters skated over her extreme unfavorability ratings and her inability
to generate excitement.
"There is no concrete evidence that Sanders would have won. But we were sold a candidate who
we were told was electable, when most of the signs pointed to the fact that she wasn't."
Democratic party turned into a party of identity politics painting by the numbers. Here is how
they assemble their base by pandering to each group specifically:
*women - check
*blacks - check
*latino - check
*lgbt -check
*millenials - check
*educated white collar progressives - check
But then it turns out these groups are not one-dimensional and their voting is not based on
just a single identity. They are complex people. And this is how the Democratic voting base splintered.
There was no message unifying them.
First Brexit, now Trump ... world politics are not going the way that Guardianistas envisaged!
So where has it all gone wrong for the left?
What Rubin says about the democrats abandoning the working class in the US could equally apply
to Labour in the UK.
Serves the Washington and London elites f***ing well right, you might say.
But whereas the Washington/New York democrats will just have to lump it, the London elites don't
want to accept Brexit because they didn't get the result they wanted, and they will try to do
anything to stop it.
If they do, and they might because they will stop at nothing, it will destroy any fleeting idea
of democracy in Britain.
And for what?
To remain a member of a corrupt and bankrupt euro project that is running off the rails?
The euro elite is as bent as they come. What they did and are doing to the greeks is unforgivable.
Yanis Varoufakis was against Brexit not because he supports the Brussels autocrats, but because
he thinks that the best way to combat the world's biggest threats - i.e., climate change - is
through combined efforts (not much point in one country trying to combat climate change on its
own if no one else bothers).
The euro project is doomed. The 28 or 30 countries can agree on nothing (response to refugee crisis?),
except to punish those that dissent
Trump & the GOP don't represent the working class [either]. All the misguided "uneducated, poor
white folk" will find that out soon enough when the new regime is allowed to ride roughshod over
all the gov't support programs they've relied on.
Think he served one year and resigned. He was too much of an idealist as came from educational
system and could not enough accomplished to justify himself being in that position as per what
I saw him say many years ago.
Yes Reich was a Clinton appointee. He wrote a book about his four years as Secretary of Labor.
It is an interesting read. My take from that book was how Bill gutted labor influence inside his
admin.
The Clintos and Obama watched as their fellow blue-class and middle class workers were gobbled
up by larger and larger corporations, and now they are surprised that they refuse to vote for
them? Trumps message to African Americans was simple and so painfully true: "Vote for me, what
do you have to lose?". In the end, most voters decided "what do I have to lose?"
Because four million people voted for someone even more right wing then trump. If you think Gary
Johnson is a supporter of expanded government services, then you're entirely unfamiliar with his
career as new mexico's governor.
Thomas Ferguson granted an interview this morning. In it he said,
(in a paper from 2014 he predicted that) "Hillary Clinton would have a lot of trouble putting
together the old coalition of effectively Wall Street and if you'll allow me to speak quickly
and directly for the sake of communication, identity politics. They're really interesting to study.
You can see for example in the white college age women that Hillary only got 6% more of those
than Trump did which is sort of unbelievable. But let me come to what I think is probably the
heart of the matter. I think we really are at the end of the classical democratic formula of the
Clinton period which was Wall Street plus identity politics. I think this is it. You're never
going to be able to put that humpty dumpty back together again. If the democrats want to win they're
going to actually have to make a strong appeal to working class Americans. Now you know the problem
this is going to create. There's a ton of money in the democratic party. It is not going to sit
there and tolerate candidates like Sanders. They just really despised and hated Sanders. So we're
now going to have a very interesting situation where you've got a top heavy party with cash at
the top and no mass at the base at all, or very little."
The interesting thing about Ferguson is he doesn't speak or write that often as he dislikes
arguing, but when he does come to a conclusion he is willing to share he is seldom wrong.
I think you, Reich and Ferguson are spot on. It is very hard to argue against "identity" politics
since it is basically arguing that minorities (racial, sexual, religious, whatever) have rights.
Unfortunately these "identity" groupings somehow left out the working class. So the Democratic
Party ended up representing a coalition that involved Wall Street (at its center) and many other
small minority groups. What was left out of this coalition was any voice for the working class.
Now that is a classical example of divide and conquer. And yes this is a case of the big money
of capitalism dividing America's workers.
Fifty years ago organized labor unions had a seat at the table who could speak for American
workers (whatever small group the individual worker may have belonged to). Today that is gone.
Hopefully in the coming years the Democratic Party can restore its roots and begin to represent
that class of Americans who actually work for a living. These workers can be divided into hundreds
of different groups -- white, black, male, female, straight,gay, wonks, blue collar, hispanic,
many others. But together they can have a voice in the national dialogue. If electing Trump is
the way to educate the Democratic Party honchos on what is required then perhaps Trump's win will
serve a useful purpose.
Bill Clinton moved the Democratic Party to the right. Although rejected by the GOP (racism) Obama
continued that move. Hillary could have easily won the election by reaching out to the millions
disenfranchised for more than 30 years, but failed to do so. What and who made her stick to a
campaign of 'Not Trump' and elitism is puzzling but not an enigma.
My guess is Bill and Wall Street created the plan, and it went down in a blaze.
"Democrats once represented the working class. Not any more".
A good article which explains the route the Democrats have taken over the years. Faced with
the Republican victories of Ronald Reagan from 1981-1989 the democrats chose to move to the right,
the party having a previous lineage with ordinary workers back to FDR and further. Bill Clinton
in 1992 took onboard the third way calling itself the New Democrats. In the UK Tony Blair copied
this following on after the tories Margaret Thatcher and John Major with his New Labour transformation
of the party into a virtual copy of the tories.
Just like the 2010 election in the UK with Labour, many people who would have voted Democrat
simply did not turn out for Hilary Clinton and did not vote at all. With complete establishment
backing including Wall Street and the MSM she lost to Donald Trump. Many would have voted for
him anyway but a sizeable percentage must have used him as an anti Clinton vote. Jill Stein called
Hilary Clinton corrupt. Clinton is a war hawk she supported the Iraq war and doesn't appear to
have learnt from the disaster as she was mainly responsible for the catastrophy in Libya. She
loves to boast, we came, we saw, he died, meaning Col. Gaddafi she is more reserved about the
later deaths of the ambassador Christopher Stevens and some of his colleagues in the Libyan embassy
as a direct result of supporting the jihadis. While still secretary of state she said that she
would arm anyone fighting against President Assad thats turned out well. She supported the coup
in Honduras and was instrumental in laying the ground out for the coup in Ukraine. The recent
wikileaks indicated she knew the Saudis were financing ISIS but she said nothing as they were
contributing to the Clinton Foundation.
Hillary Clinton Lies About Attending Bilderberg While In Denver
An excellent analysis. Clinton was an awful candidate. She represents the establishment in every
possible way; the same establishment that has stood shamelessly by while the US working and middle
classes have been abandoned.
She offered precisely nothing other than not being Donald Trump. Her campaign resembled a coronation.
This sheer hubris and arrogance cost the Democrats the presidency. Forget the tiresome shrieks
of racism and fascism for a minute: Trump won because Clinton failed to get support among the
masses of underemployed and unemployed industrial working class in the Rust Belt; because she
offered nothing new, no answers other than more of the same.
They failed to address the very real concerns and fears of everyday Americans. They have no
one to blame but themselves for this disaster.
Nonsense.The article nails it. A failure to address the Economic Vampirism that Clinton champions.Sure,
there are plenty of racists and misogynists in the GOP, but willfull ignorance couched in identity
rhetoric is how the party lost so much.until establishment dems realize that, things will continue
to get bleaker for them.
This is a very good article, but it doesn't pay enough attention to the human, emotional aspect
of political leadership. The really sad thing is that the Democrats had somebody in Bernie Sanders
who could have beaten Trump, as all polls earlier this year indicated, but the determination of
Hillary to be President combined with the vast web of Clinton connections led to the result we
have. Everybody knew about her problems going into the primary campaign, but the attraction of
electing a female President combined with unease with Sanders' roots and radicalism (actually,
not such big difficulties) led to her rock-solid "super-delegate" support and sufficient voter
support in the primaries. I doubt the DNC "dirty tricks" were quite enough to cause Sanders' defeat,
but the Party establishment support no doubt swayed some voters, too. Unfortunately, Sanders will
be too old to carry the torch, as is Elizabeth Warren; they should now lead the battle in the
Senate and write the books so needed to shape American progressive thought in the coming years.
The Democrats need to completely rebuild, so that in eight years they can be ready again for executive
power, with the essential support of Democratic majorities in both Houses of Congress. It's not
worth their while winning the Presidency without control of Congress. It means building a real
party, a social movement and organization, not just a label, with leaders who can connect emotionally
with citizens.
"Bill Clinton and Barack Obama helped shift power away from the people towards corporations..."?
What about the landslide shift of power to corporations, lobbyists, and the rich under the
Bush and Reagan regimes?
I always agree with you, Mr Reich, and gain insight from your writings/columns, but I think
you're really missed the boat here. A demagogue told the big lie to people, and many bought it!
For all the Democrats' (many shortcomings), the BLAME for the sad state of the middle-class,
working class, and non-1% is on the Republicans' heads!
And the war on unions is one of the right-wing's key rallying points
Clinton is at least partly responsible for Brexit.
1) She led the US into invading Libya. Persuaded Obama, who was initially against it, and now
calls it his biggest mistake as president.
2) As Gaddafi predicted, his regime was the "cork in the bottle of Africa" (Assange's words)
since Libya was patrolling the region. Removing him opened the first front of the European migrant
crisis.
3) Destabilizing Libya provided a base for ISIS and other factions, which helped destabilize
Syria, opening the second front of the European migrant crisis.
4) The European migrant crisis was one of the primary drivers of Brexit.
Well regular Joe Blow has been mocked and ignored for years. Joe Blow might not live in a trailer
park, he might have some nice house but he and Jane Blow are working double shifts to pay for
it. Joe and Jane have long given up on politics because 'it does not change a thing anyways',
they have never seen a politician outside the election phase to descend to their rather unremarkable
town in the middle of nowhere. Unions are nowhere to be seen, no one actually gives a damn about
them and no one listens to their concerns.
But they understand. They do not have a college degree so those people from NY or Detroit might
be right that they do not understand the big picture, watching the news they see that their elected
officials have much more important things to take care of. Gender neutral bathrooms, organizing
community hours to paint the safe space at the nearby college, giving debt and tax reliefs to
the same banks threatening the two of them to foreclose their house, apparently they are really
busy.
But now, after years, someone is coming around and listens. He might not really care and only
pretend to but he DOES listen. For the first time ever.
And we really wonder about the outcome of this election?!
Reich's article pretty much nails it. The Democratic bigwigs preferred the company of corporate
fat cats, facilitated their greed and lost touch with their base....
This is one of the few articles that provides any insight into the 2016 presidential election.
The reality is that Americans don't like either political party and don't trust politicians. American
voters identify with political parties far less than voters in other countries, and most Americans
assume that politicians are crooks. That's just the way it is.
Presidential candidates hire consultants to provide marketing expertise to their political
campaigns. Trump, by contrast, is himself a marketing expert. As a young man in his twenties,
he had the insight that he could increasing the value of real estate by branding it, just as luxury
automobiles are branded.
The people who have been mocking Donald Trump for being a real estate magnate and reality show
TV impresario fail to realize that those are pursuits where it is impossible to succeed without
understanding what the consuming public wants. Many people find Trump to be outrageously offensive,
but that is part of a persona he has developed over decades in his property development and TV
enterprises in order to attract large numbers of people to his golf courses and hotels, and to
attract viewers to The Apprentice.
In politics, Trump's persona translated into a vicious political style that led his opponents
to focus on his persona rather than his message. The message was that the increasing deemphasis
on national borders (in the form of globalized trade, illegal immigration, and arguably even international
terrorism) should be dialed back because it is changing America for the worse. That message resonated
with a large number of people and resulted in his election.
Throughout the 2016 election cycle, Trump's opponents failed to address his message and focused
instead on his persona. Every opponent who tried to take out Trump by attacking his outrageous
and offensive persona was destroyed in the process. During the Republican primary, candidates
were talking about Donald Trump so much that they were defining themselves in terms of Donald
Trump. Hillary Clinton made the same mistake the 16 unsuccessful Republican primary candidates
made. Her campaign was a social message that used Donald Trump as a bogeyman.
The appeal to social interest groups did not address the objective and important issues that
Trump was (arguably inarticulately) articulating, which are the issues that really attracted voters
to him attracted voters to him. Like Britain, America has a lot of towns where the local economy
has been destroyed by the closing of, for example, a steel mill. Trump knew how to address the
voters in those towns, and that's how he got elected.
The missing piece from your comment is Trumps use of media that was relatively new compared to
prior presidential elections. In Trump's case this was Twitter and Twitter bot accounts re-tweeting
messages to smartphones. Obama did well harnessing social media, just as Reagan used taped video
feeds appearing to be live (have to remember how primitive color transmissions were not that long
ago), Kennedy used television, and earlier presidents won harnessing radio.
That is true, as well. Trump's campaign was arguably the American equivalent of the Twitter revolutions
that swept North Africa and the Ukraine a few years ago. One question is whether that use of social
media is why Trump won or whether it is more narrowly why his win was not predicted by pollsters.
This may also be relevant to the unexpectedness of the results of the Brexit referendum.
It's also a reminder to those who shout "power to the people" in the expectation that empowered
people will return a particular result. With Trump, and with Brexit, the people appear to have
repudiated those who see themselves as empowerers of the people. It's worth some reflection.
This is an excellent article. In a perverse way it was those zealously anti Trump wailers who
unwittingly made him the 45th president of the USA.
Words of wisdom for those disappointed by the result: Understand why those who voted for Trump
did. Don't just write them all of as racist/xenophobic. The majority are not. They are angry because
politicians, including and especially those Democrats who were supposed to be on their side, sold
their souls to the devil - globalisation, big corporations etc.
In fact one may argue that Bill Clinton signing the NAFTA free trade agreement back in 1994
sowed the seeds for this current situation. Think about it
Exactly! These people are suffering, and instead of getting help from the Democratic Party they
were just all labeled as a bunch of racists, xenophobes. homophobes, etc. Most people who voted
for Trump didn't vote for the man. They voted for the hope that they could take their country
back from a bunch of elitist, corporatists, and rich bankers who have stolen it from them. You
aren't going to win them back by denigrating them further.
Yet the mainstream media will persist in explaining the Trump disaster in terms of race or gender
issues, never in terms of economic class.
This is how they keep us divided.
Yes. I live in rural Missouri, and I absolutely agree with this analysis. The bit that worries
me is that none of the embryonic "plans" suggested by Trump -- the wall, the deportations, the
repeal of the Affordable Care Act -- will do anything but make the less well-off less well-off
in every way. Does anyone really believe, for example, that lowering the tax on business will
induce any businessman with any sense to rebuild an old factory in a small, crumbling midwestern
town with an uneducated workforce? Let alone allow a union to form, provide decent salaries, pensions
and healthcare like their grandfathers had from companies like Ford, General Motors, Caterpillar,
John Deere etc? Of course, there's always a war as a last resort: that used to get the economy
going, using up lots of materials and lots of surplus young men, didn't it? But I'm afraid the
Chinese don't want to fight us, they want to buy us. There's still so much useable, badly-tended
space in the middle of America ...
"The bit that worries me is that none of the embryonic "plans" suggested by Trump -- the wall,
the deportations, the repeal of the Affordable Care Act -- will do anything but make the less
well-off less well-off in every way."
Actually, GETTING ELECTED was the best thing he could have done. At least it's a CHANCE for
the Democratic Party to wake the **** up and see the working class (not the WHITE working class,
the WHOLE working class) has been slipping away from them and at an accelerating rate. And they
are FURIOUS at getting the shaft while their union "leaders" ORDER them to "vote blue no matter
who" and are bullied and browbeaten if they so much as DARE to ask what happened to all those
empty promises from last campaign season that have been DOWNGRADED yet again into something even
smaller and less ambitious, only to be silenced with "the other guys will be the apocalypse so
don't you dare ask any questions you dirty racists!"
My husband and two friends and I traveled from SF to Philly to protest the DNC convention.
The protestors - most of whom were under 35 - were corralled in FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT PARK.
The delegates lounged in WELLS FARGO CENTER. They even shut down the subway station used by both
groups so that only delegates could use it. They did this even though at the end of the day a
torrential electrical storm was drenching the protesters. Nope, folks. That PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION
IS FOR THE DNC ONLY.
Did Hillary really think we didn't NOTICE?? Did she think that making FIVE TIMES the average
annual income of Americans for a 45 minutes speech to Gold In Sacks would be ignored? That we
didn't care that she and Bill RENEGED on the deal with Russia that Bush One made re NATO is pushing
Europe to the brink of war? That she loves loves loves the TPP?
Just how fucking stupid did Hillary think we were NOT to notice her Wall Street/MIC worshiping
history and positions?
Trump is a domestic disaster. We'll have to deal with that. But I am at least slightly comforted
that he wants to stop this war machine (bon chance) and does not support the treasonous, sovereignty-killing
TPP - which Hillary SUPPORTED.
The only one who got Trump elected was HILLARY CLINTON and her arrogant followers.
i hope mr reich can help to clear out the faux liberal power elites from the democratic
party ... the wall street apparatchiks and senior officials that preside over the various electoral
'plantations' for the clintons: millenials, blacks, lgbt/trans and hispanics
this type of politics is regressive because it provides cover for vested interests (that
derive their wealth through ownership of capital) to colonise democracy against the vast majority
of people that depend upon wages for a living
the power structure at the top of the democratic party is corrupt and corrupting ... the way
this organisation has sought and cultivated minority votes (not in the pursuit of some higher
class goal) but to enhance the career prospects of an 'out of touch' political class on capitol
hill is the ultimate form of betrayal
in particular, the way impoverished black communities across america have been used by a 'praetorian
guard' of senior black democratic leaders to support the dynastic ambitions of the clinton family
must come to an end
it is down to enlightened thinkers like mr reich to ensure that the democratic party transitions
from being the 'last plantation owner in america' (and trader in chief of minority votes) towards
a champion of working people and their class interests
this would be a good start: i would fire most senior black leaders in the democratic party
... (you know, the likes of donna brazile!) for activities incompatible with representing the
class interests of working americans - period
One problem the left has to overcome is the sheer seductiveness of the argument that the Farages
and Trumps of this world put forward - they tell those who have not fared well under capitalism
that the fault is not their own, that the real problem is immigrants - it is a cynical but effective
lie that those who feel left behind find hard to resist.
In truth the problem is that the system they - Trump and Farage - actually favour is utterly
dependent on workers who will work for very little whether they are immigrants or not. The tragic
irony is that the right has absolutely no intention of improving the lot of the poor fools who
vote for them.
In a multi party parliamentary system the US labor unions and the US' left-leaning social justice
voters would not be represented by the same party.
Too many people make the mistake of thinking labor in the US is a left-wing movement. It hasn't
been for decades. US labor unions don't fight for workers rights, they fight for their workers
pocketbooks and nothing else.
In 1972 labor abandoned the Democrats when they chose a too-progressive candidate for president.
Since that time the relationship between progressives and the working class has been a nothing
but a marriage of convenience. That marriage seems to have broken up.
17% of American indusrtry is union. There wasn't much of a marriage to break up. Factory mechanization
was accompanied by moving out of the rust belt into anti-union Southern states. Later, they left
for China.
The value of unions to Democrats has little to do with the voters in their ranks. Unions have
long been the Democrat's counterbalance against Republican wealth - they can't buy as many ads
but they can provide nearly unlimited free labor to the Democrats canvassing and telephone campaigns.
WIthout unions the Democrats would have even fewer seats in the House and Senate and Woodrow Wilson
would probably have been their last president.
No, the democrats no longer represent the working classes in the US . As the Labour party here
no longer does. I listened to Ed Miliband this morning on the radio and when asked whether he
supported Brexit he said he was worried about coloured people, Muslims, transgender and almost
everyone else, but he didn't mention the working class at all.
This is why the Tories can get away with doing whatever they want, because Labour is finished
in most working class areas. They became a party for minorities and encouraged mass immigration.
Now they mean less than nothing to most ordinary, indigenous people in this country!
We don't need a Trump, we've got the Tories and UKIP instead!
That would be because the classical working class is an 1860s-1970s phenomenon. It's not describing
any meaningful "class" of people anymore. Some people may "feel" working class, but the truth
of the matter is that for everyone who feels that way, there's someone with similar living conditions
who doesn't.
While I find much to agree with in analyses like Reich's and Frank's, I find that they tend to
romanticize the white working class and ignore the elephants in the room, those being racism,
xenophobia, homophobia, and the rest. I feel I can say this because I come from a white working-class
background in small-town Arkansas (Bill Clinton's hometown and mine were thirty-five miles apart).
Believe me, Robert, there is a virulent strain of racism among many of those folks, and It's something
that needs to be better addressed by analyses such as yours and Tom Frank's. It's not just something
that GOP fear mongering conjured out of thin air. It has deep historical roots and cannot be brushed
easily aside by discussions based solely on economic arguments. (See, for example, Stacy Patton's
article:
http://www.damemagazine.com/2016/11/01/why-i-have-no-sympathy-angry-white-men .)
My GF comes from a similar background. I posted this earlier on this thread.
I know the "working classes" in the USA, especially the midwestern variety. Dumb, ill informed,
incurious. Obsessed with macho posturing, weapons, military exploits.
Rampant racism, misogyny, extreme religiosity. Birtherism, creationism, paranoia, you name
it. You have to read the anti-Obama and Clinton vitriol from people lke that to believe it.
From people who do not have a pot to piss in.
My GF hails from some dot in the middle of nowhere in IA. She describes being raised there
as living in a cult. She had to come to Long Island to realise that there actually were still
jews alive today. She more or less thought they were like the Hittites and the Sumerians, something
you read about in the bible. To this day she loves to watch documentaries on TV because the
education she received in school was so poor and narrow minded.
A lot of that rascism, xenophobia, homophobia etc is born out of the frustration that the working
class find themselves in. Many believe, rightly or wrongly, that foreigners, the LGBTQ community,
Arfrican Americans, Latino's, Asians and so on, are given special treatment. These groups have
jumped to the front of the cue to reach the American Dream, while the working class have been
stuck in line at the back for years and they have become frustrated and angry. It doesn't excuse
those views, but if you look at it from their perspective you can see why they hit out.
Additionally, these views are held right across the demographic makeup of the US, not just
the Working Class.
hopefully once the dust has died down this is the sort of considered writing that we will see
in the Guardian - not the ludicrous outpourings of bile we have seen in the past few days.
I listened to the live radio account from the BBC and noted the evident discomfiture as the
result differed from the script. At the end of a presidential election the assembled studio experts
should have more to say about a candidate than bewailing perceived racism, perceived misogyny
(I doubt that Trump is a true misogynist!) and Mexican walls yet listening to the BBC since then
it's as if the programme presenters are working to a script. Likewise. I'm afraid, The Guardian.
What I find truly remarkable is the analogous positions of Trump and Corbyn: both outsider
candidates who relied on votes from outside their respective Establishments to win through. Trump
had little to do with the Republicans in the past. Corbyn was best known for voting against his
party. Both have been reviled by their own party elites (and by the Guardian). Corbyn has faced
a coup rumoured to have been organised from outside the PLP. Leading Republicans wore the fact
that they had not voted for their own candidate as a badge of honour. Of course this was solely
intended to save their political necks, but in the event did no harm whatsoever to Trump or Corbyn
- indeed it may have positively assisted them. Had Corbyn been positively endorsed by say, Harriet
Harman, he would possibly never have survived.
The US and UK political elites set great store by their acceptance of other faiths and ethnicities
yet seem curiously intolerant to the outsiders in their own milieu.
Clinton, Blair and Schroeder came up with the third way. Snake oil salesmen that all profited
from sucking up to the corporations and selling their influence. Schroeder signed a deal with
the Russians supply gas to Germany before joining Nordstream the company set up to do so. As for
Clinton and Blair the list is long a sto how they have lined their pockets. The third way has
never been about the ordinary working man. Wages have not risen in Germany in real terms for years
as they havent in the US. In the UK easy credit has masked the real situation and now peple are
suffering.
What Robert Reich has written has hit the nail on the head.
Schroeder signed a deal with the Russians supply gas to Germany before joining Nordstream
the company set up to do so.
Except he merely served on the supervisory board.
The third way has never been about the ordinary working man. Wages have not risen in Germany
in real terms for years as they havent in the US.
"The working man" is waffling. Contrary to propaganda, Schroeder's reforms have contributed
massively to Germany not being hit as hard by the financial crisis as others - and contrary to
legends, it has improved the situation of the poor. It's the people peddling those legends, devoid
of any understanding how the situation was before, who contribute to the unemployed feeling outcast.
It's the 21st century. Wake up. Waffling about the "Working Man" is the same as waffling about
Cowboys and believing cattle farming is still being done like in 1850.
Guardian columnists such as Hadley Freeman, Lucia Graves, Wolff, Abramson, Freedland and company
should be forced to read this article. These columnists very rarely if ever talk about the Gilded
Age style inequality levels in the West, and the USA in particular. Instead it is all about identity
politics for them. Can these individuals start writing about the disastrous chasm between the
very rich and the rest please?
Definitely. Identity politics has been coopted by the neoliberal technocracy to divert attention
from wealth inequalities, the operation of big corporations in politics and the general lack of
democratic accountability in governance.
Thank you Mr Reich. Best article I have read for months.
The vote for Trump was a protest vote. It was a non violent revolution. A significant part
of the US electorate were angry. They saw their quality of life eroded. They saw little change
of their children having a chance of a better life. Trump was the perfect outsider. He was not
part of the "corrupt system". If you are living on your knees why not vote for someone who might
bring the whole corrupt rotting edifice crashing down?
THe usual media suspects have been trying to explain what happen in their normal closeted,
university educated, urban, smug, condesending manner. But when people are angry, when they are
protesting they want action, they want change , they don't want the status quo. During the French
revolution the mobs didn't ask "whats your policy on gender based minorities?"...they just shouted
"off with their heads"
Until the media, the politicians, the policy makers, the wealthy elite start properly listening
to the people left behind, then we will continue to see more Trumps and Brexits.
Excellent analysis . Mr Reich was Labour secretary under Clinton and so she shares the responsibility
of his policies. Of note is media complicity including so called liberal progressive media no
heavy weights. It seems that 'generating ' money / growth/ markets etc etc seem to be the all
important factors . Citizens' solidarity and the needs of the most vulnerable are at the bottom
of the checklist if it is ther at all. These progressives have fallen or perhaps fallen into the
trap of believing that talking about 'progressive' topics e.g. misogyny and gender etc is enough
to earn the badge of 'progressives and liberals '.
It is very strange indeed in the midst of all this ther is no mention of JC and McDonnel and
co and their ' old 'foolish' 'defunct' types of policies that no one wants to vote for because
.......
Finally it is curious to note that many US citizens voted for Trump because of the disillusionment
with political establishment. The odd thing is that ' those in the know ' did not know about their
anger -- To complicate matters further and using this an example does US and the West really know
what ordinary citizens in Afghanistan, Iraq and the rest of ME Asia and Africa really think about
the ruinous roles of the West in making their lives and their children's lives and their countries
and their future a waste . Just because ther are strategic and national security and economic
interests of West and their local reps. Do we have to believe the stories and features of the
natives and their 'backgrward ' oppressors or just believe ( as US election showed ) what we want
to believe that the natives, want , deserve and should get --
And yes we are in 21 st century and using all the powers of Internet and modern society to
be acquainted with the outside world -- Doh --
This article and simon Jenkins article on trump are the best two articles I've read in the guardian
for a long time! Spot on .keep reminding people that gw bush supported h. Clinton ,bush whose
personal vendetta against Saddam cost thousands of lives ,Iraqi ,us ,UK ,etc! And how million
american workers were put on the dole by bill clinton !ill
The Clintons also helped corrupt the Democratic party to deny Bernie Sanders the opportunity
to put many of these popular views to the test on Tuesday.
That also meant denying the voters the chance of having someone like Tulsi Gabbard as vice-president:
Exactly. Messrs Thatcher/Major/Blair/Cameron followed the same path here and that is why we have
decided that we , the people , want to take back control and showed it by voting to recover our
sovereignty by leaving the EU .
Remember, Trump used to be a Democrat. The fact that he has led the Republicans to peers suggests
very little difference between establishment parties, as in the U.K. Trump is a savvy enough schemer
to play to the fears and feelings of the dispossed. Let's see what he can deliver. I doubt much.
All I can hope is that he recruits right wing Us Supreme Court justices in the vein of Scalia.
Mr Justice Scalia, by his verdict in the Citizens United case, sold US politics to the highest
bidder. He and his devout followers have done more harm to their country than any other supreme
Court Justice. A man who supposedly believed in the 10 commandments, but who lacked the integrity
to hear any death penalty cases. A hypocrite.
Glass-Steagall, which was used to protect ordinary savers from high risk investment banking, was
removed by Clinton, not GWB. Sure, Congress and House were dominated by Republicans, but the Democrats
had Bill Clinton and could have filibustered (see how effective the Republicans have been since).
Instead, Gramm-Leach-Biley passed with bipartisan support. And let's not even talk about
NAFTA.
The Socialist bread van resprayed in a liberalism, neoliberalism, multiculturalism, political
correctness, globalism and liberal interventionism pretty colour by the Blairites, the Clintonites
and EU political elites, was still the same old failed product under the bonnet.
Guaranteed whenever it is taken out on the roads to breakdown and take a Nation or Federal
Superstate to the brink of bankruptcy before the passengers(electorate) see it for what it really
is - they had been sold a clapped out old banger with a new coat of paint!
UK Socialists, memorably described by Margaret Thatcher as people who when in power always
run out of other peoples money, are mostly a well meaning lot, but their bread van which crashed
spectacularly in the 1970's and got taken to the scrap yard as beyond repair, was years later
deviously bought(hijacked) as a 'damaged repairable', by a small group of liberal metropolitan
elite scam artists who had quietly infiltrated the Labour Party.
After a little tinkering under the bonnet(parachuting their own candidates into Labour heartland
seats) and a new touchy feely PR paint job, they relaunched it onto the streets as a New Model
'Green' Socialist vehicle, when in reality it just a bunch of second hand car dealers in sharp
suits operating an industrial scale 'cut and shut' job scam of Madoff proportions on hoodwinked
buyers(the electorate).
Working hand in glove with Goldman Sachs and big business, they made themselves extremely rich
but now have a lot to answer for, as they're responsible for the rise of the left and right wing
populist genie out of the bottle. Once out, like the inflation genie it is a devilishly difficult
task to put back in.
As evidenced by the latest utterances of a beaming Nigel Farage, aka Mr Brexit, following the
Trump Presidential winning campaign:
"Brexit, and now Trump, and now the wagons roll on to the rest of Europe for all the elections
next year," Farage said, smiling like a cheshire cat. "This is a really exciting time. As someone
who has now become a demolitions expert I'm thoroughly enjoying what's going on."
With bold, brash, crass, in your face characters like Trump and Farage at the forefront of
the political stage, the next few years, like a fairground ride could be rather wild and bumpy,
but never dull.
What so you're saying Trump and Farage lied? ....They're not going to protect our lifestyles and
western living standards using left wing socialist protectionism? ....who woulda thunk it?
It may be a repudiation of the American power structure, or the result of building certain perceptions
in the American public over the years by the mainstream media that Trump pounced upon and crudely
exploited to the hilt. The US media couldn't steer the beast it had created when it wanted to.
Think it's wishful thinking that we're not in for a period of great upheaval, possibly tragedy.
We saw what happened during the Bush presidency, an ugly war with a tally of tens of thousands
of lives and global financial meltdown. This time it could be much, much worse.
The Democratic party once represented the working class. But over the last three decades
the party has been taken over by Washington-based fundraisers, bundlers, analysts, and pollsters
who have focused instead on raising campaign money from corporate and Wall Street executives
and getting votes from upper middle-class households in "swing" suburbs.
Change "Democratic" for "Labour", "Washington" for "Westminster", "Wall Street" for "the City",
and it still rings true. Corbyn and the swing to the left isn't the cause of the crisis, it's
a response. What happens with Sanders and his base next will be pivotal.
Compulsory reading for all who formed & remain part of what is described with forensic precision,
including many contributing journalist to this paper. To be taken seriously, not immediately denounced,
Robert Reich could only put pen to paper with confidence after Trump won so decisively, & why
we are still reeling from reality about to unfold from success of the Brexit campaign. Fundamental
change in reactionary maverick hands.
Both Trump & UKIP/Farage/ Tory right engaged willingly, without shame, in a campaign of authoritarian
demagoguery, with elevation of racist, xenophobic sentiments to being new national virtue of saying
it as it is.
Existing power structures with their intricate connections, web of back rubbing fundraising, &
legislation to enable profit accumulation to continue unhindered by challenges from 'shopfloor'
labour groups, failed to see what was under their noses. Insulated, blinkered privileged they
dismissed as unelectable what was coming down on them like a ton of bricks.
Great piece, well worth reading more than once.
It is more an indictment of the mainstream political parties than the electorates that politicians
like Trump, Farage, Le Pen and all the other hate preachers are attracting so much support. It
is equally an indictment of the leftist media that they cling to the discredited leaders of the
so called centre left parties. But then they have personally done very nicely out of the cozy
relationships they have with leaders who are held in as much contempt by the ordinary voters as
the misnamed liberal media holds them.
The Democratic party once represented the working class. But over the last three decades
the party has been taken over by Washington-based fundraisers, bundlers, analysts, and pollsters
who have focused instead on raising campaign money from corporate and Wall Street executives
and getting votes from upper middle-class households in "swing" suburbs.
That is the most relevant paragraph I've seen here in recent months. exactly the same for the
UK Labour party, Nobody with any real prospect of power represents the working class. The only
shadows left are the unrealistic promises of Trump, or Brexit that we know will be ignored once
the vote is cast. But what else is there?
The "lumpenproletariat" that brought the social democratic parties in europe to power and made
the european communist political parties a force to reckon with no longer exist. The old working
classes have been superseded by an underclass who do the truly unskilled work, and a middle class,
the successful children of the former workingclass who now are nurses, administrators, middle
managers, etc.
Steel, mining, ship building, car manufacturing, etc, used to employ thousands or even tens of
thousands of people in a single plant. Those days are over. Everywhere. To exclusively focus on
the 20% of the population that are truly left behind is political suicide. And why a guy like
Corbyn will never see an electoral win.
And then one needs to keep in mind that the American working class are much more right leaning
than their european counterparts.
First past the post does have benefits e.g., stable governments that last 4-5 years, manifesto's
printed up-front rather than debated behind closed doors, prevention of extremist parties achieving
influence via balance of power.
UK, USA main two parties are actually 'large tents/broad churches' where multiple views exist
rather than narrow dogma.
Democracy is not perfect - but the peaceful transfer of power - in the UK, US is to be commended
and not taken for granted.
(ps I agree with gerrymandering in US but that's a result of the States vs Federal system. Also
one more thing - FPTP is the only way to choose a President whether by Electoral College or popular
vote).
Stable governments that don't represent voter's views or needs. Manifestos that are manifestly
ignored at the earliest convenience, policies that were never announced or publicised, pursued
in the interests of political lobbyists, donors or corporations. Politicians whose default position
is to lie if it serves them better than the truth and the electorate offered the only opportunity
to dismiss them at the next election, when they can reliably expect to be rewarded with a seat
in the Lords or any number of sinecures in the form of directorships and consultancies.
The system is not fit for purpose and that's just the way our political class likes it.
Thank you! Thank you! Thank you, Secy. Reich. I cannot say enough!
Yes, Sir no one can fool all the people all the time. The Clintons were masters at this game
and believed they could get the people to believe that 2+2=5 assisted with their unlimited corporate
money, Wall St. influence, and the dissemination of misinformation aided by the media.
There would not have been any need for organizations like Wikileaks, if journalists had a modicum
of integrity.
As for the Guardian, it had to have their favorite, and the most corrupt, candidate defeated
at the elections resoundingly in order to have voices, the like that of Secy. Reich express his
views in this otherwise skewed newspaper. With the increase in corruption in public office, journalistic
integrity followed that same path.
The frustration of the people with establishment politics rose to such a level where they did
not care even if the opposing non-establishment candidate was Donald Trump or Donald Duck who
groped other ducklings.
The Guardian was one of Clinton's loudest barking dogs, following the Goldman Sachs playlist to
the letter. Adverse comments BTL about her or the Guardian's election coverage were deleted.
"Democrats once represented the working class. Not anymore "
Republicans never represented the working class but the working classes continued to vote them
into office.
The destruction of the trade union movement has always been one of the highest priorities for
Conservatives – the success they have had in large part due to the concerted efforts of Ronnie
and Maggie (who are now engaged in a torrid posthumous affair).
In the UK there is a sinister parallel between zero hour contracts and workers during the depression
standing in the streets hoping to pick up a day's work.
Apparently "job security" is a threat to the prosperity of the nation and so it goes on.
Now that the unions have been dealt with the Tories in the UK have set their sights on dismantling
the NHS (by incrementally starving it to death) and there is presently nothing to stop them.
Trump clearly tailored his message to reach the disenfranchised but unfortunately there
doesn't appear to be any evidence that (a) he really cares about them and (b) anything substantial
is about to improve their lot.
Its quite ironic that right-wing, neo-lib ideology, created what we have now, and at the same
time its the right and far right that are getting all the gains. The popularity of Trump. Farage
and this movement tells you how utterly and totally the left and liberals in general have failed
in connecting with the working classes and offer something different.
Bill Clinton and Barack Obama helped shift power away from the people towards corporations.
It was this that created an opening for Donald Trump
Sums things up succintly. If you're concentrating on stealing their clothes, they can steal
yours, especially when you only wave them about listlessly yet refuse to wear them.
That's been happening since Reagan. I get the blame on Clinton & Obama in the context of "Dems
played the same game as GOP", but not in a more open context. This has been happening for 35 years
with trickle down economy. It also happens to "coincide" with the widening of wealth gap...
It was a repudiation of President Barack Obama and his leftist [neoliberal] policies that decimated
middle class jobs, health insurance and the respect for the rule of law.
Obama just nailed the whole working class with a massive Obamacare rate hike. What did they expect
was going to happen? You cannot provide free healthcare to the poor on the backs of the working
class while the upper mids and wealthy pay nothing. The upper mids already have employer insurance,
people, and they do not get an opinion. OCare is hitting me for $400 a month for insurance with
a $13,000 deductible! That is fraud! I am a working class liberal- Obama broke every campaign
promise he ever made to us, and Clinton has done nothing to shed her 'corrupt DNC insider' image
or distance herself from Obama's treacherous policies. ALL of the reasons the Trump people are
giving for voting for Trump are VALID and we can blame this one on THE DNC. BERNIE WOULD HAVE
WON.
I find it poetic that the Guardian, which seemed this past year to be competing with the other
US majors in the grotesque sidelining and marginalizing of Bernie Sanders, is now On their hands
and knees with their contribution drive. I will never give a dime to these hacks. What's funny
is that had they stuck to their principles of fearless reporting I have no doubt a huuuge number
of readers would have jumped at the opportunity to make a worthwhile contribution. Like the DNC,
they had a clear thoroughbred in the stable and they drowned it in the backyard. i have no sympathy
for this rag. I have contempt for it.
Just as after Brexit, this paper is flooded with articles claiming how 'minority' groups, BMEs,
LGBTQ...s, and even women, are now being attacked in numbers and how vulnerable they feel.
I follow the MSM and have seen nothing of substance that backs this up.
Nor do I feel that Trump is going to mount major campaigns against such groups.
Interestingly I believe it true that 29% of the 'Hispanic' minority actually voted for Trump.
Similarly was the figure for white women not c.50% ?
Many fewer blacks did, but should Trump's economics actually bring back jobs for the 'working
class' why would blacks in this group of both (all ?) sexes not benefit also and if that is the
case watch how their voting patterns change next time.
Thankfully there are articles like this.
Media other than Guardian who don't care to give this thought the time of the day, slip into irrelevance.
I mean the MSMs here who all embody Trotzkism.
Trotzkism dictates that the livelihoods of people ought to be taken away to make them pliable.
China bought US-TBs (for US government aggrandizement) upon US shipping jobs over there. Feeding
the hungry? With the Fed going into overdrive. Banks together with govt concocted the financial
crisis to profit off bear strategies that mortals can't do. In following years, the elite coined
high-flying ideals such as globalization, which is good for them because they sit in govt, teach
in universities or are detached ueber-owners of businesses. Joe Blow was screamed at when he would
ask: How am I gonna pay for stuff that the big wigs have now manufactured overseas, when we now
make, or get as welfare, $10 instead of $25 an hour?
Hard to reverse the destruction, but worth a try.
I never thought I would be in agreement with Robert Reich but I am today. Every election cycle
the Democratic Party spouts happy talk about being the people's party and the worker's party (in
contrast to the supposedly blue blooded, monied Republican Party.) While that may once have been
a somewhat accurate portrayal, it has long since become a sham of an image.
Today's Democratic Party is the party of the corporate billionaires, the tech titans, and the
globalist elitists who don't want a simplistic notion like that of national borders to get in
the way of their profit seeking. Naturally, the entertainment and media stars gravitate toward
their corporate masters and shill for the Democrats. Throw in a fixation on divisive identity
politics and the Democratic establishment and its less loud and proud Republican counterpart thought
that the authentic voice of the American people could forever be drowned out. The success of Bernie
Sanders (done in by the rigged Democratic Party rules) and Donald Trump demonstrates that the
people will no longer be silenced.
Hey GUARDIAN, where is that 99% chance of Hillary winning???
I personally know three people that didnt vote because they thought she had a win in the bank.
Shame on the Guardian.
Those pollsters along with GUARDIAN should be summarily FIRED.
And don't let the door hit them in the a$$.
Thank you for your voice of intelligence & grounded wisdom. As I read elsewhere, the treaties
that Mr. Clinton & Obama have backed have unravelled the middle class. And let's not forget Mr.
Reagan who reversed high tax rates on the wealthy and broke the back of unions. Neither party
represents working people anymore. Certainly Mr. Trump does not. And playing to that disenfranchisement
won him the election---but I fear that he has no interest in redeeming the middle class. He was
interested in getting elected and telling people anything they want to hear.
The western first world dominance is coming to an end. People in the west like to think they are
the top of the food chain but reality is the second world of Asia and the far east is rapidly
stepping into their shoes. Capitalism dictates that maximum profits are returned for minimum outlay
so if you can make a product for minimal cost i.e. wages, and sell for the maximum price then
you have a successful business model. Protectionism has been tried before and Trump's version
trying to roll back globalisation will be no more successful. ..same applies to brexit. It'll
get even worse as robotics take over more and more, the only solution will be social control mechanisms
to ensure that suppliers have consumers to sell their products to. It's going to take a while
for this realism to sink in...but it's unavoidable.
Sense at last in a Guardian article.
But still not enough sense to say clearly what a weak campaigner and what a poor choice of candidate
Hillary Clinton was.
Oh well... maybe the Guardian will use the period between now and January 20 to reflect on
how they cheer-led for a candidate who didn't have what it takes to win an election.
Or maybe not. Maybe they will continue to print and post stories that are tinged with hurt surprise
that democracy means one -and only one- vote for every citizen who cares to cast it. How can
democracy function if all those white unemployed and immiserated vote against the candidates
that the rich have prepared for them?
As is usual Mr. Reich hits the nail squarely on the head.
The working class had long been the backbone of the Democratic Party electorate. They no longer
are because the Democratic Party is no longer the party of the working class. The banks, the upscale
suburban liberals, minorities and specific issue oriented groups are the people that matter most
to the Democratic Party. The working class support has been taken for granted for far too long
by the Dems. I can't remember how many times I have heard said, or seen written, by Democratic
insiders "where else do they have to go (for candidates to support)?"
The working class has to be a part, and an important part, of the left's coalition going forward
or risk seeing more shock election results like this. Their lots have not improved in this brand
new global economy championed by both parties. And while their numbers aren't as large as when
Reagan was elected (and before) there are more than enough of them to be an election decider.
It also will be helpful to choose candidates who will not to insult them like who, for example,
call them all a "basketful of deplorables".
the biggest factor in the Trump victory,and in the Brexit mayhem,is quite simply Globalization.
it is Globalization that has exported jobs,and skills out of the western world. it is responsible
for ghost towns in the industrial and manufacturing heartlands. western governments have had no
strategy for regeneration on anything like a great enough scale. unless the consequences of globalization
are addressed and reversed, the West faces ever falling living standards and huge unrest.
Yes, what we call "globalization" is quite simply the universalizing of a certain set of relations
between capital and labor -- it's clear that if the process is allowed to proceed without proper
safeguards, capital will be greatly favored, while labor will be reduced to the lowest possible
level. Marx pointed out a long time ago that the tendency of capitalism is to squeeze the greatest
amount of "surplus value" out of the workforce while granting them only as much money as necessary
for them to scrape by from day to day. Essentially, under capitalism, he wrote, people exist to
produce things and are less important than the things they produce. Marx may have been wrong about
the viability of "scientific socialism," but he was often spot-on as an analyst of the way capitalism
works and who it really benefits.
Trade is wonderful, but only when it doesn't proceed by reducing us all to wage slaves. Maybe
Dems who keep supporting bullshit neoliberal trade deals need to go read some of old Uncle Karl's
delightfully sarcastic works. Capital, Vol. 1 would be a fine start: see in particular
the chapter, "The Fetishism of the Commodity and the Secret Thereof." It's a masterpiece.
Can anyone turn back the tide of globalisation and power of the corporations? What is the role
of MSM? Are they all part of the problem? Interesting times. Maybe Trump will be force for good.
We certainly need stronger leadership from our politicians, on both sides of the pond.
Yes, I think of lot of that sort of stuff is misplaced. True, there are some despicable people
supporting Trump -- the Klan, neo-Nazi types, and so forth. But most people who voted for him
aren't like that. It's probably more the case that they put aside considerable disdain for Trump's
wretched behavior and voted for him based on his promise to "unforget" the working class. Personally,
I think he's a brazen demagogue who doesn't give any more of a rat's bottom about the poor and
the working class than Hitler did in Germany, what with all his "national socialist" promises
of "two chickens in every pot." But it isn't hard to understand the appeal of such populist rhetoric
when people are suffering and insecure. The American Left needs to rediscover its proper role
as a moderator of the harsher side of capitalism -- it has forgotten that role, and the bill for
that forgetfulness just came due. I don't blame Hillary personally -- Secretary Reich is right
to frame the problem in much broader terms, i.e. as having to do with the Democratic leadership
as a whole.
The business of government has morphed into the government for businesses.
Take a hint from what President Xi of China is doing, in managing the PRC. A good yardstick of
good governance comes from the analects of Confucius.
For instance, once upon a time in Germany, social democrats represented the working class.
Not anymore. People couldn't care less about Germany's wonderful economic growth either, as most
of the surplus goes to the top.*
The "social democrat" Schröder demolished the welfare state and introduced a new low wage sector,
much beloved by his corporate buddies. Thanks to his and Angela Merkel's efforts, numbers of working
poor and food banks are increasing. So is the wealth gap.* Thanks to an ongoing media hate campaign
against the meritocratic losers, most people suffered in silence. And now everyone acts shocked
and confused that a right-winged populist party is on the rise.
Well, thank you Angela Merkel, these are the fruits of your beloved austerity. The next vote
in Germany is going to be interesting. And just for the record: austerity was employed by Brüning
to boot. And that turned out so well, didn't it?
Capitalism is the best economic system we have but it becomes increasingly self destructive and
unstable if it is not managed properly. The moderate left and right would both agree on this normally
but the left would prioritise the interests of workers and the right the interests of capitalists.
However both, self interestedly, would support policies and institutions that kept the system
stable and growing.
Unfortunately hubris and market fundamentalism has turned the right's head and allowed the
rich and greedy to destructively run rampant. This is in no-one's longer term interest as the
impoverishment of the middle class and destruction of a prosperous mas market will eventually
undermine even most of the wealthy. The economic elite need to be dragged back under control.
Theodore Roosevelt broke up the trusts in the 20s and Franklin brought in the New Deal in the
Great Depression. It has been done before. It needs to be done again.
Now Americans have rebelled by supporting someone who wants to fortify America against foreigners
as well as foreign-made goods. The power structure understandably fears that Trump's isolationism
will stymie economic growth. But most Americans couldn't care less about growth because for years
they have received few of its benefits, while suffering most of its burdens in the forms of lost
jobs and lower wages.
Exactly, and the parallels with the Brexit vote and against an EU corporate bureaucracy set
up to benefit the wealthy are stark. You could apply the same phrasing here in the UK:
Now British voters have rebelled by supporting a campaign that wants to fortify the UK against
foreigners as well as foreign-made goods. The power structure understandably fears that Brexit's
isolationism will stymie economic growth. But most British workers couldn't care less about growth
because for years they have received few of its benefits, while suffering most of its burdens
in the forms of lost jobs and lower wages.
The Democrats have more or less sold out the working class to the rich and powerful. They are,
in large part, the rich and powerful as this article points out. If the left wants to counter
right wing populists such as Trump it will need to address the growing anger of the white working
class towards policies that have put them in a position where they will be a minority in their
own country where they have historically been a large majority. It will also have to look after
the unemployed, working and middle classes at the expense of Wall Street, big tech and big business
generally. Ironically the right needs to do exactly the same thing. And both need to do these
things while protecting the well-being of minorities. Will these mainstream politicians be able
to escape the orbit of the rich? It is difficult to be optimistic.
Maybe so, but the only solution offered here is more Unions... if you think that's a solution
to the stagnating earnings of the bottom half of the population then I'm afraid you are way off
the mark.
The problem, and it's one that Trump will utterly fail to address and strikes at the heart
of our beliefs, is that a modern economy has little use (and places little economic value) on
low and unskilled labour. There is not a thing that can't be done cheaper by foreign factories
and machines (computers/robots/automation). This is deeply unpalatable and I do not like it, but
without a solution to how we ensure fair treatment of people who are, day by day, becoming less
economically valuable to the modern economy, this issue will not go away. Trump is a reaction,
but he is not the solution but he will set out to blame every minority, foreign government, trade
agreement he can because he can't or won't address this issue, and that will be very bad for everyone.
Its much worse than that. The modern economy places no real value on labour at all. Over the coming
years about 1/3 of all jobs are considered at risk of automation, including doctors, lawyers (already
happening), journalists (already happening) etc. The liberal elite in some of these jobs are like
lobsters in a slowly heating pot - they are too busy congratulating themselves on how toasty warm
their situation is to realise what is going on, and so all too happy to applaud the status quo.
Certainly it's a rising tide that threatens to wash away at everyone, though the higher skilled
the safer you are likely to be, at least for now.
I think the challenges are ultimately going to affect everyone, the question is going to be
who benefits politically. The left (which is where my political sympathies lie) is currently in
a real funk and lacks meaningful answers, the right is reducing it's message to 'blame the others,
they take your job, benefit at your expense etc'. No real answers.
P.S. I think your reference to the 'liberal elite' is misplaced, I'm not sure if the local
GP or bloke who writes wills in the local high street really count as an elite, just ordinary
people doing relatively well for themselves. The risk in this kind of language is that the tendency
is to think they are some kind of other who are to blame for all this, when what's happening is
actually far more wide ranging and fundamental.
And the liberal elite are by definition to blame for this because they are the ones whose privilege
got them the managerial and leadership positions they hold yet whose ideology and political views
have meant they have carried out these roles so badly.
I agree that neither side has the answers because both sides are in effect faces of the same
coin, cut from the same metal, imbued with the same flaws. Corbyn no more has answers than Trump.
What Trump has done is prove that no politician can go forward ignoring the questions. Hillary
firmly expected to.
Mirrored exactly with the new labour. Billionaires and celebrities rubbing shoulders with the
political elite, little wonder why we became disillusioned with them. For years now, the government
neglected the working class. Industries and jobs vanished ever since replaced with ZHC jobs and
low pay, keeping the broken system going on the back of a 'trickle-down effect' lie.
The Democrats had their party, Perry turned up, endorsed by lines of celebrities, we are looking
back with perplexed bemused expressions. If we elect her, it would be more of the same. The free
market shite started off a few decades ago, heavily entrenched by corporations and billionaires,
the scandal of offshore trust funds, we are dumped and forgotten.
What struck me as a tourist to San Francisco in 2014 were the sheer numbers of very visible homeless
on the streets, begging or just looking beaten . Yet all around them there were mass preparations
for the annual Gay Pride celebration. Obviously I am not decrying Gay Pride but the sense of priorities
seemed strange and I was forced to think that America is a pretty insane place. It is going the
same way here, a lot easier to celebrate identity than to tackle systemic injustice. That used
to be Governments` job but they have largely abandoned their historic responsibilities. Time for
Labour to bring those fundamental responsibilities back --
All told, San Francisco spends close to three quarters of a Billion dollars every year on "homeless"
of which close to $200 million is a specific department and budget item. As such, many flock to
San Francisco, which is also well known for lack of enforcement of many laws. Many of the beggars
are already housed at taxpayer expense and prefer to generate additional income outdoors on a
schedule of their choice, which is where they also purchase and consume items never sold in stores.
The working classes have been stripped of their dignity, whole communities have become wastelands
and virtual ghettos. The working class don't trust the left to sort things out for them and that
is why and how a figure like Trump can come along and say 'I will save you all' and become President.
Meanwhile, the socialist left sit around scratching their heads, unable to work out what has happened
and squabble about the spirit of socialism and ideology that in all honesty, most working class
people don't give a toss about. They just want jobs that pay a decent wage, a nice house to own,
nice food on the table, two cars and nice holidays. They want to be middle class in other words.
But democrats are not left. They right wing too. If Americans think that Democrats are left, they
don´t know what left is at all. And what socialist goverment has USA had. I see Americans saying
tthat Democrats are socialists, really?.Hillary left and socialist?. Trump and Hillary are both
right wing, only that Trump is more extreme.
A respected political insider recently told me most Americans were largely content with
the status quo. "The economy is in good shape," he said. "Most Americans are better off than
they've been in years."
The political elite of *both* parties are completely out of touch with the citizenry. The economy
has been restructured over the last 20-30 years to completely de-value labor and prioritize the
rich and corporations.
Having said that, I believe people just want to be heard. Voting for Trump was seen as voting
against the status quo, and voting for Hillary was voting for the big establishment. Much like
Brexit, I don't think voters were thinking through the long-term consequences of their decision.
Monday morning quarterbacking of the worst kind. That the Democrats have lost the white working
class is obvious. But to blame the Democrats, such as Hillary, is misplaced. It is the Dems who
have attempted to help the working poor and propose improvements in health care and child care
and tax redistribution. It is not a lack of concern that is the issue. What Reich ignores is that
voters are voting an ideology and not self-interest. They have bought into the notion that getting
rid of immigrants and taking care of the rich will solve all problems.
The voters had a clear choice and they chose the demagogue peddling a non-solution. They wanted
to believe that they are wonderful people and problems can be solved by a wealthy idiot who promises
to turn the clock back. In Democracy sometimes it is the voters who get it wrong.
The analysis is correct more of less , the issue here is class , the Republicans and Democrats
are the two wings of the same party. The party of property and money and the powerful , the vote
for Trump is one of those events that happens much like Obama being elected twice after the Republicans
stole the two previous elections via the supreme court and election fraud. It can happen but the
system remains the same , there is no serious challenge to the supremacy of the ruling class.
The one analysis you will not hear in the media is a class one and if it is then it will be
howled down lest it gain currency and the wage slaves realise they have been conned yet again
, Trump is not unusual in his attitudes or views , it's just that the campaign gave them wide
publicity.
In the UK the same kind of thing has happened to Labour , they lost Scotland and the 2010 election
and the remain vote because ordinary working people are tired just as they are in the US of seeing
the rich get every richer and their own living standards fall and nothing in the future but more
pain and misery. They vote UKIP/SNP here as a cry in the wilderness and they voted for Trump for
the same reason because they aren't what they've had before , the real problem will come when
the right wing populists have been in power for a while and nothing has really improved.
For the last thirty years, there has been no left or right wing governments - not economically
or fiscally. Third way centrism (liberal progressiveness) embraced the primacy of unfettered market
capitalism and corporate globalism, and focused exclusively on using political power as a tool
to win the culture war instead. That's fine if you've done materially very well out of unfettered
market capitalism and corporate globalism, and all that therefore matters to you is social justice
issues. But if you were once in a secure job with a decent income and decent prospects for your
children, and all of that has been ripped away from you by unfettered market capitalism and corporate
globalism, and the people responsible for preventing that - or at least fixing it when it happens
- are more concerned with policing the language you use to express your fears and pain, and demonstrating
their compassion by trying to improve the life chances of people on other continents, then social
justice issues become a source of burning resentment, not enlightenment. There has been a crushing
rejection of globalism and corporate plutocracy by Western electorates. The Western progressive
left will only survive if it has the courage to recognise that, and prioritises the fight for
economic and fiscal policies that promote the interests and prospects of its own poor and middle
class, over and above the cultural issues that have defined it for a quarter of a century. We
should always remain vigilant, but the truth is that the culture war is won. It would be tragic
beyond words if that victory was reversed by an explosion of resentment caused by the left's determination
to guard old battle fields, while ignoring the reality that its thinkers and activists are needed
to right new injustices. Trump's success doesn't represent the victory of hate over hope, it just
represents the loss of hope. The left has to see that or its finished.
It's not quite as simple as that. Some things like clothes are certainly still made by people
(in horrific conditions for terrible pay) but more and more factories are automated with a bare
skeleton staff running the show. The BBC series 'Inside the Factory' was an eye opener for me.
The UK food manufacturing industry for example is heading toward almost full automation - I'd
imagine the US industry is even further down the automated road. This is why the UK and US have
moved to services and these areas are the vast bulk of unskilled jobs now.
The Democratic party once represented the working class
Now it sneers at them as a "basket of deplorables". The same has happened in the UK; only this
morning Owen Jones was asking the left to reach out to the working class, and in the very same
article labelled them as racist, misogynist homophobes.
The consequences of this disdain are entirely predictable
Re: "basket of deplorables" -- if you care about accuracy, she didn't sneer at them as a basket
of deplorables; she sneered at *half* of them as a basket of deplorables. In the same paragraph,
she described the other half as having legitimate concerns that weren't being addressed.
As far as her criticisms of half of Trump's voting base -- politically, stupid as hell. But
valid? Well, what do carefully-taken public opinion polls from the 15 months before the election
tell us? 2/3 of Trump supporters believe Obama is a Muslim who was born in another country. 63%
want to amend the Constitution to eliminate citizenship for people born in the U.S. 40% consider
African-Americans lazier than white people. A third of Trump supporters believe that the internment
of Japanese-Americans during WW2 was a good thing. 31% believe in banning homosexuals from entering
the United States. A quarter of them believe that Antonin Scalia was murdered in a conspiracy.
A quarter believe that vaccines cause autism. 16% believe that whites are a superior race, and
another 14% just aren't sure.
I don't see a very strong case that she was wrong.
It's the same problem the UK had with brexit. People feel squeezed, invariably because of neoliberalist
policies that benefit the wealthy, and the rising wage and wealth gap drives resentment because
of it.
Suddenly, you get populists who spring up with "solutions" to such problems, but rather than
being actual solutions seem to scapegoat totally unrelated factors, such as immigration, free
trade, power blocs, specific groups of people who may be out of favour at the moment, rather than
the actual correct causes in the first place.
Your post actually chimes with what I've been saying. There was a big moment for the left, that
came in 2008 in the USA. A mixed race opponent of the Iraq War, sounding plausibly leftish leaning,
praised public healthcare, accused relentlessly by the right of being a communist/socialist, of
being a muslim, of not born in the USA. And he won. So only 8 years ago, there was a moment where
American electorate shifted left, it'd seem. But instead Obama brought back Rubin, Summers, Geithner,
same old 1990's wall street cabal. FDR he was not.
There'll be a moment within a decade for things to move left, who will head 'the left' (Clinton
and Blair types?) will tell whether things actually do move in that direction.
"... Specifically, she adduced the Clinton Foundation, with its $600,000 salary to Chelsea Clinton, and Hillary's receipt of cash from Saudi Arabia and Morocco, as well as complaining about Benghazi and something that I took to be death panels. ..."
I talked to an elated Trump voter today. She had little to say about Trump, other than "Give
him a chance." No, her elation was at the defeat of Hillary, and the attendant possibility that
opened up to get rid of the corruption in Washington. Specifically, she adduced the Clinton
Foundation, with its $600,000 salary to Chelsea Clinton, and Hillary's receipt of cash from Saudi
Arabia and Morocco, as well as complaining about Benghazi and something that I took to be death
panels.
@138 The woman is wrong. Chelsea Clinton was not paid $600 k from the Clinton Foundation.
Chelsea Clinton was paid $600 k per year from 2011 by NBC for 'work' as a special correspondent,
whilst also pocketing $300 k per year plus stock options as a 'board member' of IAC. Chelsea's
speaking fees were a mere $65 k per.
The NYT offers a more severe critique of the IAC board deal readable by clicking through
the links. There will be those who see nothing improper about a fifth-estate firm paying a 31
year-old graduate student $600 k, or awarding her a board seat and stock options at $300k. Others
may disagree, and perhaps with some good reason.
The defeat of the democratic candidate by a rodeo clown is a slap in the face. Contra Manta
@71 I do not believe that anything less than a slap in the face of this order would be enough
to jar the successful and well-fed out of their state of complacency and indifference to the plight
of both the blacks and whites left behind by 8 years of Democratic rule, and far longer when we're
talking about urban African-Americans.
As noted, I believe the Republican candidate to be far and away the more sober, safer choice
both on domestic and foreign policy. Now we'll find out.
Thanks for the kind words to Rich, Bruce, T, bob mc, and others.
The headline is "Did third-party candidates Jill Stein and Gary Johnson lose Clinton the election?"
and the short answer is no, but Chalabi takes the time to point out the reasoning behind the answer.
Thanks for the link. Don't get me wrong, there are 1 or 2 writers still worth reading and some
articles that actually provide content.
It's just that, overall, the jist the of paper seems to have established a deliberate policy
of contradictory messaging to cloud important issues, or momentarily providing balance to only
later use the apparent balance a to push a one-sided agenda.
The Blairite faction's attack on Corbyn and the guardian's coverage comes to mind. It was pure
hack journalism. The political careerists were so obviously in league with the hack journalist
careerists.
Apart from the Science & Tech stuff I've really only been reading the Graun recently (esp since
its utterly scandalous treatment of Corbyn (*)) for the Thomas Frank pieces. Is he publishing
these anywhere else on-line ?
(*) They're probably kicking themselves for not labeling them as `deplorables' & letting the
Clinton team get to this phrase first.
HClinton outspent (campaign + SuperPACs) Trump by 45% ($534M to $367M per the election Wiki
page, given preliminary FEC reports currently available) in the election, yet lost. Perhaps the
most clear sign as to what a horrible candidate HClinton was, both in policies & campaign tactics.
When was the last Pres election the top fundraiser did NOT win? How many times has this happen,
say since the 1980 Reagan election or since the 1948 post-WW2 election? IIRC, Thomas Ferguson
with his Investment Theory of Politics shows that in the vast majority (90%+ ?) of US elections
(Fed/State/Local), the biggest fundraiser wins.
"... "Sanders and Trump inflamed their audiences with searing critiques of Capitalism's unfairness.
Then what? Then Trump's response to what he has genuinely seen is, analytically speaking, word salad.
Trump is sound and fury and garble. Yet - and this is key - the noise in his message increases the apparent
value of what's clear about it. The ways he's right seem more powerful, somehow, in relief against the
ways he's blabbing." ..."
"... "But Trump's people don't use suffering as a metric of virtue. They want fairness of a sort,
but mainly they seek freedom from shame. Civil rights and feminism aren't just about the law after all,
they are about manners, and emotions too: those "interest groups" get right in there and reject what
feels like people's spontaneous, ingrained responses. People get shamed, or lose their jobs, for example,
when they're just having a little fun making fun. Anti-PC means "I feel unfree." ..."
bob mcmanus 11.10.16 at 1:45 pm I thought someone above talked about Trump's rhetoric
1) Tom Ferguson at Real News Network post at Naked Capitalism says (and said in 2014) that the
Democratic coalition of Wall Street (Silicon Valley) + Identity Politics is imploding, because it
can't deliver populist goodies without losing part of it's core base.
Noted no for that, but for my equation of Neoliberalism (or Post-Capitalism) = Wall Street + Identity
Politics generated by the dematerialization of Capital. CDO's are nothing but words on paper or bytes
in the stream; and identity politics has much less to do with the Body than the culture and language.
Trumpists were interpellated as White by the Democrats and became ideological. Capital is Language.
2) Consider the above an intro to
Lauren
Berlant at the New Inquiry "Trump or Political Emotions" which I think is smart. Just a phrase
cloud that stood out for me. All following from Berlant, except parenthetical
It is a scene where structural antagonisms - genuinely conflicting interests - are described in
rhetoric that intensifies fantasy.
People would like to feel free. They would like the world to have a generous cushion for all their
aggression and inclination. They would like there to be a general plane of okayness governing social
relations
( Safe Space defined as the site where being nasty to those not inside is admired and approved.
We all have them, we all want them, we create our communities and identities for this purpose.)
"Sanders and Trump inflamed their audiences with searing critiques of Capitalism's unfairness.
Then what? Then Trump's response to what he has genuinely seen is, analytically speaking, word salad.
Trump is sound and fury and garble. Yet - and this is key - the noise in his message increases the
apparent value of what's clear about it. The ways he's right seem more powerful, somehow, in relief
against the ways he's blabbing."
(Wonderful, and a comprehension of New Media I rarely see. Cybernetics? Does noise increase the
value of signal? The grammatically correct tight argument crowd will not get this. A problem I have
with CT's new policy)
"You watch him calculating, yet not seeming to care about the consequences of what he says, and
you listen to his supporters enjoying the feel of his freedom. "
(If "civil speech" is socially approved signal, then noise = freedom and feeling. Every two year
old and teenage guitarist understands)
"But Trump's people don't use suffering as a metric of virtue. They want fairness of a sort,
but mainly they seek freedom from shame. Civil rights and feminism aren't just about the law after
all, they are about manners, and emotions too: those "interest groups" get right in there and reject
what feels like people's spontaneous, ingrained responses. People get shamed, or lose their jobs,
for example, when they're just having a little fun making fun. Anti-PC means "I feel unfree."
The Trump Emotion Machine is delivering feeling ok, acting free. Being ok with one's internal
noise, and saying it, and demanding that it matter. Internal Noise Matters. " …my emp
Noise again. Berlant worth reading, and thinking about.
I watched one of Trump's last speeches before the election. In it, he said, "Tomorrow, the
working class takes back this country." I was struck. No contemporary Democratic politician would
(or could, credibly) say those words. Afraid of scaring off their donors or being red-baited,
most Democrats won't even utter the phrase "working class"-preferring the capacious and increasingly
meaningless "middle class" or, at best, "working families."
But Trump said it. His rural and exurban white supporters have a class consciousness of
sorts. They despise elites. They feel that the system is rigged. But that antipathy is entirely
entangled with their fear of a black president, of eroding racial and gender hierarchies, and
their perception that multi-cultural elites are helping minorities at their expense. Trump can
say "working class" because everyone in his audience hears the unsaid word "white" preceding it.
It is, as it has ever been, the left's task to build a mass political movement where there are
no words silently preceding the term "working class." It's not hyperbole to say that everything
depends on it.
I'm going to be as diplomatic as I can about the lack of gravitas clearly displayed in the comments
here as I can, whilst at the same timing reviewing some of the data that many clearly missed.
One of the key reasons I remained confident that Hillary would lose irrespective of what the
FBI did, or did not do, if you're interested, is that I was keenly interested in the attitudes
of African-American voters from the outset of this election. As I've said throughout, I do not
regard Trump as a 'Republican' in anything like the conventional sense of the word, but rather
see him as a New York celebrity vulgarian with liberal inclinations. Trump from the outset had
a clear plan to appeal to African-American voters, even it was far from fleshed-out. And given
the 'of course, African-American voters will support the Democrat' attitude of practically every
white supporter of Hillary, I was confident Trump wouldn't need much of a plan beyond saying:
'vote for me, what have you got to lose?' to do fairly well no matter how badly he was smeared.
Turns out I was right. Low black turn-out numbers in key states, such as Michigan, NC, and
Florida came as no surprise to me because I watched Leslie Wimes one week before the election
explain that it was 'already over' for Hillary in Florida.
Not one to mince words, Ms. Wimes, who voted early for Clinton, reports that she warned the
Clinton campaign and the DNC as early as September that black voters in Florida were not, repeat
not, going to be turning out in sufficient numbers to permit Hillary to carry this critical state.
But nobody wanted to hear. Funny, that.
Layman 11.11.16 at 11:13 am
266
mclaren: "No, what I was pointing out is that the two candidates who set the electorate on fire
were the two populist candidates, Trump and Sanders."
You're abusing the term 'the electorate'. 'The electorate' in a primary (or a caucus!) is a different
thing than 'the electorate' in a general election, and results in one don't translate into results
in another. The point of the Obama Idaho 2008 example is this: Obama beat Clinton by 60 points in
that caucus, but this did not mean he was going to win Idaho in a general election, and in fact he
got trounced there in the general election. This is because, again, 'the electorate' is a different
thing in those two contests. No one knows if Sanders would have done better in this general election,
and primary results don't provide an answer to that question.
Sorry, but I do not see in this thread any attempt to discuss Hillary extreme militarism and jingoism
as well as attempt to make Russophobia a part of the platform of the Democratic Party, effectively
positioning it as yet another War Party.
In some areas of foreign policy Hillary looks like John McCain in the pantsuit. There is no military
intervention that she did not like, and she was always prone to the most hawkish positions on any
war related issues, trying to outdid her male counterparts in jingoism, as if overcompensating her
hidden sense of inferiority.
That might be another negative factor affecting the elections results. Few people outside military
industrial complex lobbyists are exited about the possibility of unleashing WWIII (for example via
enforcing "no fly zone" in Syria) even with conventional weapons. And a lot of people, especially
among more educated part of electorate, still remember her role in the destruction of Iraq, Libya
and Syria. Especially the latter (
moonofalabama.org)
The people loyal to the Syrian government are happy with Donald Trump winning the U.S. election:
At the passport counter, a Syrian officer's face lit up when he saw an American traveler.
"Congratulations on your new president!" he exclaimed, giving an energetic thumbs up. Mr. Trump,
he said, would be "good for Syria."
The first significant step of the new administration comes while Trump is not even in offices.
Obama, selfishly concerned with his historic legacy, suddenly makes a 180 degree turn and starts
to implement Trump polices. Lets consider the initial position:
Asked about Aleppo in an October debate with Clinton, Trump said it was a humanitarian disaster
but the city had "basically" fallen. Clinton, he said, was talking in favor of rebels without
knowing who they were.
The rebels fighting Assad in western Syria include nationalists fighting under the Free Syrian
Army banner, some of them trained in a CIA-backed program, and jihadists such as the group formerly
known as the al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front.
The Obama administration, through the CIA led by Saudi asset John Brennan, fed weapons, training
and billions of dollars to "moderate rebels". These then turned around (vid) and either gave the
CIA gifts to al-Qaeda in Syria (aka Jabhat al Nusra) or joined it themselves.
The scheme was no secret at all and Russia as well as Syria pointed this out several times.
The Russian foreign Minister Lavrov negotiated with the U.S. secretary of State Kerry who promised
to separate the "moderate rebels" from al-Qaeda. But Kerry never delivered. Instead he falsely
accuse Russia of committing atrocities that never happened. The CIA kept the upper hand within
the Obama administration and continued its nefarious plans.
continued its nefarious plans.
likbez 11.12.16 at 3:20 am
289
Another interesting question that needs to be discussed is the "cleansing" of DNC from Clinton
loyalists (the word "super delegate" smells of corruption) and thus weakening the dominant neoliberal
wing of the party:
"You can't tell working people you're on their side while at the same time you're raising money
from Wall Street and the billionaire class," Sanders said. "The Democratic Party has to be focused
on grass-roots America and not wealthy people attending cocktail parties."
Sanders acknowledged the need for the party to continue its function as a fundraising vehicle
but suggested a model akin to his presidential campaign, which raised much of its money from small-dollar
donors.
… … …
Leaders of several progressive groups, who had been courting Clinton as a potential ally on many
of their causes, have expressed anger in the aftermath of the election, arguing that the result
was a repudiation of a campaign driven by the Democratic establishment.
"The Democratic establishment had their chance with this election," said Stephanie Taylor,
co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. "It's time for new leadership of the
Democratic Party - younger, more diverse and more ideological - that is hungry to do things differently,
like leading a movement instead of dragging people to the polls."
… … …
Neil Sroka, a spokesman for the liberal group Democracy for America, said Ellison would be "a
potentially phenomenal choice" as DNC chairman, but said the organization was open to other choices,
provided they weren't part of the party establishment.
"I think Tuesday night was a tremendous loss that must sit at the feet of the political establishment
of a Democratic Party that preordained the primary process from the very beginning," said Sroka,
whose group backed Sanders in the primaries. "The folks that enabled the loss need to step back
and let the grass roots lead it."
In a sign of tension at the DNC, a staff meeting there was interrupted Thursday by a staff
member who stood up and blamed Trump's win on Brazile, the Huffington Post reported.
One telling comment:
PackersFanWisconsin
The Democrats abandoned Midwestern working voters and now they want us back??? Dream on! My
town voted Dem for years, they used to care about us, then they want all bonkers social justice
white people are all bad and sent all our jobs overseas. We will never vote Democrat again, Democrats
betrayed us and they had the nerve to think we wouldn't notice!
Suzanne 11.11.16 at 4:24 pm
284
Agreeing with everything said by LFC in#280. Certainly many people are still not in a good place
after eight years of slow recovery; in this respect Clinton's defeat can also be seen as a partial
rejection of her boss, since traditionally putting the heir in power has been a marker for a popular
presidency.
Also, @246, don't forget that some of us where also whingeing about sexism.
@239: Clinton is a decent Democrat who ran to the left of Obama. She is not and never has been
the superstar he was. The Democratic Party has a perennial issue with getting portions of their base
out when it's an off-year election and also when the presidential candidate is okay but doesn't send
a thrill up their leg.
What we need to focus on now is the obvious question: what the hell went wrong? What species
of cluelessness guided our Democratic leaders as they went about losing what they told us was
the most important election of our lifetimes?
There are several excerpts from the news media since Tuesday night that help drive home the point
I make in that title about Trump and the Democrats in the immediate future. But the excerpts are
about Clinton, not Trump:
There are several excerpts from the news media since Tuesday night that help drive home the
point I make in that title about Trump and the Democrats in the immediate future. But the excerpts
are about Clinton, not Trump:
There are vast rural, small-town or post-industrial areas of the country where Barack Hussein
Obama will have greatly outperformed Clinton
– twitter.com/AlecMacGillis of Pro Publica, Nov. 8, late evening
The left-behind places are making themselves heard, bigly
– twitter.com/AlecMacGillis of Pro Publica, Nov. 8, late evening
From Pennsylvania to Wisconsin, industrial towns once full of union voters who for decades
offered their votes to Democratic presidential candidates, even in the party's lean years, shifted
to Mr. Trump's Republican Party. One county in the Mahoning Valley of Ohio, Trumbull, went to
Mr. Trump by a six-point margin. Four years ago, Mr. Obama won there by 22 points.
– Donald Trump Is Elected President in Stunning Repudiation of the Establishment , Matt
Flegenheimer and Michael Barbaro, New York Times, yesterday
Clinton and her operatives went into the race predicting her biggest problems would be inevitability
and her age, trying to succeed a two-term president of her own party. But the mood of the country
surprised them. They recognized that Sanders and Trump had correctly defined the problem-addressing
anger about a rigged economy and government-and that Clinton already never authentically could.
Worse still, her continuing email saga and extended revelations about the Clinton Foundation connections
made any anti-establishment strategy completely impossible.
So instead of answering the question of how Clinton represented change, they tried to change
the question to temperament, what kind of change people wanted, what kind of America they wanted
to live in. It wasn't enough.
Using Trump as a foil and a focus, she hit on a voice and an argument for why she should actually
be president that perhaps only she could have, and that she'd struggled for so long to find on
her own. That wasn't enough either.
Meanwhile, her staff harnessed all the money and support they could to out organize, first
in the primaries and then in the general, grinding out victories while her opponents had movements.
None of it was enough, though all of it should have been, and likely would have been for another
candidate. She couldn't escape being the wrong candidate for the political moment.
Interviews over the closing weeks of the 2016 campaign with members of Clinton's innermost
circle, close advisers and other aides reveal a deep frustration with their failure to make a
dent, a consuming sense that their candidate's persecution paranoia might actually be right, and
a devastating belief that they might never persuade Americans to vote for her.
"There was no way to generate momentum," one top adviser said.
Any positive storyline from Clinton "was always fragile," admitted that adviser, and issues
related to the emails inevitably stripped away any uptick in Clinton's favorable ratings.
– Inside the Loss Clinton Saw Coming: Publicly they seemed confident, but in private her
team admitted her chances were 'always fragile.' , Edward-Isaac Dovere, Politico, yesterday
To several top aides, the best day of this whole campaign was a year ago, before the Sanders
headache or the Trump threat really materialized, when the House of Representatives hauled Clinton
and her emails in with the single aim of destroying her candidacy over Benghazi. …
She delivered tirelessly [that day], knocking back the Republicans one by one, complete with
facial expressions that have launched GIFs that have been all over Democrats' Facebook and Twitter
feeds ever since. She renewed her shaken team's faith that she was the leader they wanted to follow
into what was already shaping up to be a dejecting primary battle.
"It reminded people of everything they like about her," said one of her senior advisers. "It's
toughness, but also a calm, adult presence of someone you can actually see being president of
the United States."
– Inside the Loss Clinton Saw Coming: Publicly they seemed confident, but in private her
team admitted her chances were 'always fragile.'
Bill Clinton had his own problems, but never that one [his gender], and neither did Trump,
who openly disparaged women throughout his campaign and still prevailed. The result was at once
unfathomably difficult for the Clintons and yet not entirely surprising to Bill. He saw the signs
all along the way of this campaign. He knew the people who were voting for Trump, and also the
people who during the primaries were voting not for his wife but for Bernie Sanders. He saw the
anger and the feelings of disconnection, but he did not know how he, or his wife's campaign, could
connect to it effectively without resorting to demagoguery or false populism, something Hillary
was not good at even if she was disposed to try.
– The Clintons were undone by the middle-American voters they once knew so well , David
Maraniss, Washington Post, today
Last year, a prominent group of supporters asked Hillary Clinton to address a prestigious St.
Patrick's Day gathering at the University of Notre Dame, an invitation that previous presidential
candidates had jumped on. Barack Obama and Joseph R. Biden Jr. had each addressed the group, and
former President Bill Clinton was eager for his wife to attend. But Mrs. Clinton's campaign refused,
explaining to the organizers that white Catholics were not the audience she needed to spend time
reaching out to.
As it became clear on Tuesday night that Mrs. Clinton would lose to Donald J. Trump, supporters
cast blame on everything from the news media to the F.B.I. director's dogged pursuit of Mrs. Clinton
over her personal emails, and to a deep discomfort with electing a woman as president.
But as the dust settled, Democrats recognized two central problems of Mrs. Clinton's flawed
candidacy: Her decades in Washington and the paid speeches she delivered to financial institutions
left her unable to tap into the antiestablishment and anti-Wall Street rage. And she ceded the
white working-class voters who backed Mr. Clinton in 1992.
Though she would never have won this demographic, her husband insisted that her campaign aides
do more to try to cut into Mr. Trump's support with these voters. They declined, reasoning that
she was better off targeting college-educated suburban voters by hitting Mr. Trump on his temperament.
Instead, they targeted the emerging electorate of young, Latino and African-American voters
who catapulted Mr. Obama to victory twice, expecting, mistakenly, that this coalition would support
her in nearly the same numbers. They did not.
– Hillary Clinton's Expectations, and Her Ultimate Campaign Missteps , Amy Chozick,
New York Times, yesterday
And then there is this:
Clinton picked Mook, instead of promoting a campaign manager out of loyalty from her own inner
circle. She persuaded Podesta, who had kept his distance in 2008 because he didn't get along with
polarizing top strategist Mark Penn, to join as the guiding hand and the buffer for all the "friends
of" who streamed in with advice and second-guessing.
But that didn't mean there weren't serious problems. Bill Clinton complained throughout that
Mook was too focused on the ground game and not enough on driving a message-based campaign. Without
a chief strategist in the mold of Penn or David Axelrod, the campaign was run by a committee of
strong-willed aides struggling to assert themselves in the same space. Longtime consultant Mandy
Grunwald and Palmieri grappled at points over message control as Palmieri worked her way into
the inner circle. Mook and strategist Joel Benenson barely spoke to each other for the month of
April, battling over their roles.
– Inside the Loss Clinton Saw Coming: Publicly they seemed confident, but in private her
team admitted her chances were 'always fragile.'
And here it is, in summation of all of the above:
Whoever takes over what's left of the Democratic Party is going to have to find a way to appeal
to a broader cross section of the country. It may still be true that in the long term, Republicans
can't win with their demographics, but we found out Tuesday that the long term is still pretty
far away. Democrats have to win more white voters. They have to do so in a way that doesn't erode
the anti-racist or anti-sexist planks of the modern party, which are non-negotiable. If
only there were a model for this. [Link in original. Do click it.]
The few Democratic leaders who remain are going to say that it was just a bad note struck here
or there, or the lazy Bernie voters who didn't show up, or Jim Comey, or unfair media coverage
of Clinton's emails, to blame for this loss. I am already seeing Democrats blaming the Electoral
College, which until a few hours ago was hailed as the great protector of Democratic virtue for
decades to come, and Republicans were silly for not understanding how to crack the blue "wall."
They will say, just wait for Republicans to overreach. Then we'll be fine.
Don't listen to any of this. Everything is not OK. This is not OK.
– The Democratic Party Establishment Is Finished , Jim Newell, Slate, yesterday
Among all the email exchanges leaked from Podesta's hacked email account-the ones I read; I read
a couple of articles quoting from each group of releases-the most revealing, in my opinion, were
two sets of exchanges released about a week before the Comey outrage. Both were from early 2015,
a few weeks before Clinton was scheduled, finally, to announce her candidacy in mid-April.
One shows newly hired campaign manager Robby Mook asking for John Podesta's and Huma Abedin's
help in persuading Clinton to ask her husband to cancel a $225,000 speech to Morgan Stanley scheduled
for a few days after her announcement and while she was scheduled to be in Iowa on her inaugural
campaign trip.
The difficulty wasn't resistance from Bill; it was resistance from Hillary, at whose instance
the speech had been arranged. The email exchanges indicate that Hillary could not be persuaded to
all the cancellation, because it had been arranged personally by her and Tom Nides, a top aide to
Clinton at the State Dept. and by then a top executive at Morgan Stanley.
Finally it was decided that Abedin would get Bill to agree to cancel the speech, and she would
tell Hillary that Bill (who apparently did have qualms about the speech) was the one who decided
to cancel it. Abedin reported back to Podesta and Mook that Clinton was angry about it for a couple
of days but then moved on.
The other one is from about the same time and is somewhat similar. This series of exchanges was
among Mook, Abedin, Podesta and Neera Tanden, and concerned Hillary's appearance in early May, shortly
after her campaign announcement, at a massive Clinton Global Initiative gala in Morocco paid for
by the king of Morocco, a friend of Clinton's, who all told would donate $12 million to the foundation.
This, too, had been arranged by Hillary, and was not strongly supported by Bill or anyone else at
the foundation.
Abedin's emails suggest (without saying outright) that she and perhaps others had tried to dissuade
Clinton from arranging this, and then, once Clinton had set the date of mid-April for her campaign
announcement, tried to persuade Clinton to cancel it. But by the time of this email exchange with
Mook and Podesta, Abedin said it was so late and Clinton had had earlier opportunities to cancel
but instead had assured her presence there, that it will break a lot of glass" (or some such phrase)
for Clinton to cancel. Mook did manage to get Clinton's agreement to have Bill attend instead of
her.
These instances illustrate what was a constant throughout: Mook and two or three others, including
Podesta, having to put on a full court press to stop Clinton from acting as though she weren't a
candidate for president. Or a candidate for anything. Both Podesta and Tanden complained about Clinton's
"instincts," a euphemism for "I'm completely unaware of the overarching mood of the public in this
election cycle. Or, I don't give a damn about the overarching mood of the public in this election
cycle. And I certainly don't give a damn about down-ballot Dems. Or about Dems. Or about anything
other than what I want to do."
Clinton arranged to clear the Democratic field of anyone thought in early 2015 to have chance
against her in the primaries. She just wasn't willing to swear off anything else she wanted, besides
the presidency, in order to reduce the chance that she would lose the general election.
This wasn't Lent, after all. And anyway, Clinton isn't Catholic.
Had Mook not killed that $225,000 speech to Morgan Stanley by Bill Clinton in April 2015, Bernie
Sanders-whom Clinton could not clear the field of until June 6, 2016-would have won the nomination
and would be president-elect now, accompanied by a newly elected Senate, and maybe House, Democratic
majority. That fee would have been identified in the Clintons' tax returns, filed presumably in last
April and (presumably) released shortly afterward.
In early 2015, when Hillary was arranging for Bill to give that speech-undoubtedly arrangements
made shortly after Elizabeth Warren removed any doubt that she would run-Clinton looked to be free
of any challenge from the left. So it didn't bother her one whit that this would be revealed during
the primary season.
Nor, since she expected her general election opponent to be Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio, did it concern
her that this would be known during the general election campaign. It wasn't as if Bush wasn't a
wholly owned subsidiary of Wall Street. Or Rubio owned by other highly unpretty financial interests.
And even if it did, well, it was worth the risk. After all, after the general election, the gravy
train for both her and her husband would stop. And it wasn't blue collar workers in the Rust Belt
who were her target votes, so it wasn't all that big a risk anyway.
So we were saddled with a Democratic presidential nominee whose decades in Washington and the
paid speeches she delivered to financial institutions left her unable to tap into the antiestablishment
and anti-Wall Street rage. Someone who had to cede the white working-class voters who backed Barack
Obama in 2008 and again in 2012, because the only way someone who'd taken so very much money from
Wall Street as personal income for doing so very little-someone who was selling her anticipated presidency
to Wall Street-had no avenue with which to connect effectively with working class Rust Belters without
resorting to demagoguery or false populism, something she was not good at even if she was disposed
to try.
The answer then was to highlight her high status and the importance she placed on connections
with celebrities and the pillars of the establishment in various venues, by campaigning hardly at
all, by spending August secluded in the Hamptons, by parading with entertainment celebrities at the
few rallies she had.
And by incessantly rolling out ever more names of the most elite establishment people to endorse
her or at least make clear that they, too, recognized that her opponent is unfit to hold the office
of the presidency. Because even though the targeted audience has access to the same information on
that the elite establishment did, and were reminded by Clinton and her ad campaign of these lowlights
so often that they lost their resonance, there might be a few people whose decision would turn on
the opinion of these elites.
They just weren't the people the blue collar Rust Belters who, it seemed clear all along would
play an outsize role in the outcome of the election. As they had in 2008 and 2012.
Nor, apparently, did she have any avenue to point out whom Trump's financial campaign backers
actually were, who was writing his budget and regulatory proposals, who was selecting his court and
agency-head nominees, his SEC, FTC and NLRB member nominees, and why. They're not people with labor
union backing, nor do they have the interests of blue collar folks at heart. Their interests are
diametrically opposite those of blue collar workers. And Trump wasted not so much as a day in handing
over to them the entire panoply of powers of the federal government.
But having sold her avenue for informing people of this, to Wall Street and any other huge-money
interest waiving a mega-check around in exchange for a 45-minute-long speech by or question-and-answer
session with, the likely president she was limited to reminding voters of what they themselves saw,
and assuring them that elites viewed him just as they did. Which may be why her campaign manager,
Mook, wasn't as focused on messaging as Bill Clinton wished. Normally, a candidate has one.
This candidate had foreclosed to herself the message she needed to have, and had nothing much filling
in for it. That wasn't Mook's fault.
Trump wasn't going to co-opt Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell. Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell were
going to co-opt Trump. All the indications were that that is what would happen. And that, Trump has
made unabashedly clear now, is what will happen. Our nominee couldn't-or at least wouldn't campaign
on this anything resembling consistency.
The way to contain this is for high-profile Democrats to make clear to the public what is happening.
And to threaten massive campaigns on this in none other than the Rust Belt, in the 2018 election
cycle. And to start very, very soon. People who supported Obama in 2008 and 2012 aren't Donald Trump's
base. Most of them would have flocked to Sanders or to Elizabeth Warren in this election.
The latter should be shoved in anyone's face who starts blathering about sexism hurting Clinton
among the hoi polloi . The former should answer the question about whether racism was
part of the appeal to the voters who put Trump over the top, by one per cent, in Michigan, Wisconsin
and Pennsylvania, and came within barely more than a point of doing son in New Hampshire and, of
all states, Minnesota. All states went comfortably for Obama, and all except Pennsylvania went for
Sanders in the primary, as did Indiana. And had Warren instead of Sanders been Clinton's primary
challenger, she like Sanders would have voted for her.
People who claim otherwise on either point don't know the region. It is not the South and it is
not the Southwest. Trump's racism and xenophobia did not win those states for Trump. Nor did Clinton's
gender.
The first step is to appoint a strong Sanders backer in charge of the DNC. Jeff Weaver, maybe.
Or Jim Dean. No war for the soul of the party. That ship sailed on Tuesday.
Recognize that.
And join me in wishing Hillary and Bill Clinton a happy jaunt in their retirement as they luxuriate
in the massive wealth that, while possibly still not quite enough to sate them, we are about to pay
very dearly for.
People have lost their sense of security, status and even identity. This result is the scream
of an America desperate for radical change
They will blame James Comey and the FBI. They will blame voter suppression and racism. They will
blame Bernie or bust and misogyny. They will blame third parties and independent candidates. They
will blame the corporate media for giving him the platform, social media for being a bullhorn, and
WikiLeaks for airing the laundry.
But this leaves out the force most responsible for creating the nightmare in which we now find
ourselves wide awake: neoliberalism. That worldview – fully embodied by Hillary Clinton and her machine
– is no match for Trump-style extremism. The decision to run one against the other is what sealed
our fate. If we learn nothing else, can we please learn from that mistake?
Here is what we need to understand: a hell of a lot of people are in pain. Under neoliberal policies
of deregulation, privatisation, austerity and corporate trade, their living standards have declined
precipitously. They have lost jobs. They have lost pensions. They have lost much of the safety net
that used to make these losses less frightening. They see a future for their kids even worse than
their precarious present.
At the same time, they have witnessed the rise of the Davos class, a hyper-connected network of
banking and tech billionaires, elected leaders who are awfully cosy with those interests, and Hollywood
celebrities who make the whole thing seem unbearably glamorous. Success is a party to which they
were not invited, and they know in their hearts that this rising wealth and power is somehow directly
connected to their growing debts and powerlessness.
For the people who saw security and status as their birthright – and that means white men most
of all – these losses are unbearable.
Donald Trump speaks directly to that pain. The Brexit campaign spoke to that pain. So do all of
the rising far-right parties in Europe. They answer it with nostalgic nationalism and anger at remote
economic bureaucracies – whether Washington, the North American free trade agreement the World Trade
Organisation or the EU. And of course, they answer it by bashing immigrants and people of colour,
vilifying Muslims, and degrading women. Elite neoliberalism has nothing to offer that pain, because
neoliberalism unleashed the Davos class. People such as Hillary and Bill Clinton are the toast of
the Davos party. In truth, they threw the party.
Trump's message was: "All is hell." Clinton answered: "All is well." But it's not well – far from
it.
Neo-fascist responses to rampant insecurity and inequality are not going to go away. But what
we know from the 1930s is that what it takes to do battle with fascism is a real left. A good chunk
of Trump's support could be peeled away if there were a genuine redistributive agenda on the table.
An agenda to take on the billionaire class with more than rhetoric, and use the money for a green
new deal. Such a plan could create a tidal wave of well-paying unionised jobs, bring badly needed
resources and opportunities to communities of colour, and insist that polluters should pay for workers
to be retrained and fully included in this future.
It could fashion policies that fight institutionalised racism, economic inequality and climate
change at the same time. It could take on bad trade deals and police violence, and honour indigenous
people as the original protectors of the land, water and air.
People have a right to be angry, and a powerful, intersectional left agenda can direct that anger
where it belongs, while fighting for holistic solutions that will bring a frayed society together.
Such a coalition is possible. In Canada, we have begun to cobble it together under the banner
of a people's agenda called The Leap Manifesto, endorsed by more than 220 organisations from Greenpeace
Canada to Black Lives Matter Toronto, and some of our largest trade unions.
Bernie Sanders' amazing campaign went a long way towards building this sort of coalition, and
demonstrated that the appetite for democratic socialism is out there. But early on, there was a failure
in the campaign to connect with older black and Latino voters who are the demographic most abused
by our current economic model. That failure prevented the campaign from reaching its full potential.
Those mistakes can be corrected and a bold, transformative coalition is there to be built on.
That is the task ahead. The Democratic party needs to be either decisively wrested from pro-corporate
neoliberals, or it needs to be abandoned. From Elizabeth Warren to Nina Turner, to the Occupy alumni
who took the Bernie campaign supernova, there is a stronger field of coalition-inspiring progressive
leaders out there than at any point in my lifetime. We are "leaderful", as many in the Movement for
Black Lives say.
So let's get out of shock as fast as we can and build the kind of radical movement that has a
genuine answer to the hate and fear represented by the Trumps of this world. Let's set aside whatever
is keeping us apart and start right now.
Here is what we need to understand: a hell of a lot of people are in pain. Under neoliberal
policies of deregulation, privatisation, austerity and corporate trade, their living standards
have declined precipitously.
You forgot to mention identity politics. Neoliberalism and identity politics go hand in
hand. I don't think it's a surprise that after the 50's and the Second Red Scare, HUAC, McCarthyism
and the John Birch Society the socialist, communist and other left-wingers were gone from the
US and identity politics became ascendant.
We don't see SJW being dragged in front of Congress and them losing their jobs, nor
do we see the National Guard coming in to break up Slut Walks. Instead, we see them in the highest
positions of power and with governments and corporations embracing their ideas. The reason is
simple; identity politics and SJWs are no threat to people in power.
Keep people divided into ever smaller identities and they can't fight back. Keep demonizing
people for objecting, calling them sexist and racist for speaking up, and you muzzle the opposition.
If someone wants to take on neoliberalism then they need to abandon identity politics.
Glass-Steagal was repealed, Wall St. stole itself rich, people wanted change (Yes we can!). But
not a single bankster megathief was even investigated and in the rust belt and elsewhere millions
suffered. They were told that they needed to shut up because they were evil privileged white males
who needed to be HRC's blue wall because she owned them. Refusal to comply meant they were racist
misogynists.
So now they are racist misogynists and proud of it.
And why all this? Because Hillary's ego is so large that it bumps into the edges of the universe.
She calls that her class ceiling.
Thanks Hillary. You brought us Trump. You and that bunch of privileged DNC-ers that are in
bed with Wall Street.
The left's reflections are getting closer, but we're still not quite there it seems.
... ... ...
The visible, real-life consequences of globalisation and modern capitalism are those targets
picked out (hardly by coincidence) by Trump and Farage. The most obvious sign of globalisation
is not a billionaire's yacht, but that when you call to sort out being overcharged or crappy service,
you finally get through to an outsourced offshored call centre. And when the right attacks them
and the left inevitably and correctly defends them - that immigrants do contribute to the economy,
but are still disadvantaged economically, that women are paid less for the same work, that muslims
face discrimination every day - we're infact subliminally reinforcing Trump/Farage's blunter message:
that the left's priority constituents are immigrants, people of colour, muslims and women.
And then we criticise a 50 year old white unemployed or zero-hour-contract man for being "selfish"
and "stupid" when he votes for the only candidate who *appears* to put him first, when we seem
to ask him to put everyone else first.
The left is losing the argument because our answers to modern problems are removed from everyday
experience. Correct, but complex. Trump and Farage understand KISS. If we think the solution is
to just keep saying the same thing louder, like an English tourist abroad, we'll carry on losing.
"It was the Democrats' embrace of neoliberalism that won it for Trump"
Yes indeed, I have seen this coming since the mid nineties, when the -fairly high tech- Company,
where I worked for at the time, became a victim of globalization, 120 people got fired, a.o. me.
Gladly I was able to still find a job at 50, a hell of a lot of others did not.
Besides, I have been active in International business since the early 1960's until recently,
so I know what I am talking about.
We are spoiling 200 years of social economic improvement to the short term interests of capital
at supersonic speed. (modern communication and transport, the free movement of capital)
Both the republicans and the democrats made that happen (as their followers did in Europe)
The Globalizing, Outsourcing, Monetary, Laissez-Faire, Supply side economy.
That is the one thing that I was in agreement with, with Trump, for the rest, by the way he
is talking now, it looks very much as if we will be having to deal with a liar. (and a cheat?)
After all he did say a lot of different things while selling himself in the campaign from the
image that he seems to depict now..
The worst things are in my opinion his wish to destroy the livelyhood of lots of people world
wide by not accepting the human influences on the climate, this besides lots of others things
is in my opinion extremely selfish, especially seen the fact that a green economy can be -at least-
as profitable (in work and money) as the fossil one was.
And of course the repeal of Obamacare, one of the few successes that Obama could materialize
in his mainly obstructed time in office.
What is 'Neoliberalism'
Neoliberalism is a policy model of social studies and economics that transfers control of economic
factors to the private sector from the public sector. It takes from the basic principles of
neoclassical economics, suggesting that governments must limit subsidies, make reforms to tax
law in order to expand the tax base, reduce deficit spending, limit protectionism, and open
markets up to trade. It also seeks to abolish fixed exchange rates, back deregulation, permit
private property, and privatize businesses run by the state.
Liberalism, in economics, refers to a freeing of the economy by eliminating regulations
and barriers that restrict what actors can do. Neoliberal policies aim for a laissez-faire
approach to economic development.
"It's a belief that the human social system works best if there's almost no government, and
almost everything is done through markets... and also it says there should be no trade unions,
no tariffs, remove all the controls and the economy will work better.
Now that's only true of a system if it is inherently stabilizing, it's like saying 'this ship
will go a lot faster if you take off all the stuff that's there to stabilize it.' Yeah it will
but it'll go upside down at some point and sink."
From the British perspective this is true here as well. After a number of high powered meetings
over a fifteen year period, the Labour Party embraced NeoLiberalism and paid when it failed. Those
meetings where pretty big and millions turned up. Those meetings took place in 19779, 983, 1987
and the final one was in 1992. The general public announced that no one would elect anyone who
did not support wholesale privatisation, free markets at every turn with a special emphasis on
labour market laws. Any devience, under any circumstances from Tory ideology was punished at the
ballot box. Labour was forced to drop clause four as a sop to get elected.
And when this neo liberal wet dream started to crumble in the form of crippling PFI schemes,
light touch banking, zero hour agency work and possibly bigger than the light touch banking collapse,
the free movement of Labour for the biggest companies in the UK. Who did the public blame for
these Tory driven Liberalism? The Tories? Themselves for forcing the Labour Party to adopt these
flawed policies? The Newspapers who condemned anything other than free market ideology? Nope,
the blamed the very people who had been campaigning against Tory policies all along. The people
who got blamed for the banking collapse was not the people who DEMANDEDbanks be deregulated, not
the Party who carried out the deregulation, but the poor saps in power when it blew up.
Who gets blamed for the importing of labour? The political ideology that people had supported
for thirty years? Nope, again the Party that bent over backwards to accommodate the Tesco, ASDA
and sports direct et al.
And guess what? After punishing anything to the Left of Reagan or questioning free trade at
the ballot box, and dismissing it as 'Socailism' it turns out they voted for a protectionist who
is opposed to free trade and multi Nationals. The Party who are opposed to free trade, multinationals
and 'What is good for GM is good for America'? The protector of jobs and regulated labour markets?
Why the GOP of course. The Party whose DNA has all this time been at the heart of protecting jobs
who shun free trade agreements and are at the very heart of the socialist movement are the Republican
movement. And nobody even said anything. We all just moved into a parallel universe where the
Republican movement have been campaigning against free trade for two hundred years.
"The indisputable fact is that prevailing institutions of authority in the West, for decades,
have relentlessly and with complete indifference stomped on the economic welfare and social security
of hundreds of millions of people. While elite circles gorged themselves on globalism, free trade,
Wall Street casino gambling, and endless wars (wars that enriched the perpetrators and sent the
poorest and most marginalized to bear all their burdens), they completely ignored the victims
of their gluttony, except when those victims piped up a bit too much - when they caused a ruckus
- and were then scornfully condemned as troglodytes who were the deserved losers in the glorious,
global game of meritocracy."
"Neoliberal policies of deregulation, privatisation, austerity and corporate trade..." Are you
sure those are neoliberal policies? They sound exactly like conservative Republican mainstays
to me. Didn't Trump run on these very things?
Exactly, they are virtually the same, with the difference being that the GOP adds "nostalgic nationalism
and anger at remote economic bureaucracies – whether Washington, the North American free trade
agreement the World Trade Organisation or the EU. And of course, they answer it by bashing immigrants
and people of colour, vilifying Muslims, and degrading women".
In difficult times, people want relief as fast as possible and they want to blame *anyone*
for their plight. This is what a demagogue offers; it's why Trump is in the White House. Prepare
yourselves, and never give in to Trump's cynicism.
Warren sold Sanders out. Sanders sold his supporters out for Debbie Wasserman Shultz, who incidentally
was reelected. Hillary was forced on the ticket by the oligarchy. Change will not come from Trudeau,
or Obama, or Trump, or Sanders or Warren. These people have betrayed what they said. Where do
we go from here? Which is the way that's clear? Dunno, but all of the above have shown to be frauds.
Whose next?
In this election, Donald Trump was the lesser evil, so I am glad that he won. There won't be nu
clear war on Iran or wherever, and better relations with Russia, China, and hopefully, the rest
of the world.
As for domestic politics, we'll take care of those issues ourselves, forcefully protesting
against, if necessary. It'll be few and far between, I project.
In this election, Donald Trump was the lesser evil, so I am glad that he won. There won't be nu
clear war on Iran or wherever, and better relations with Russia, China, and hopefully, the rest
of the world.
As for domestic politics, we'll take care of those issues ourselves, forcefully protesting
against, if necessary. It'll be few and far between, I project.
"...a green new deal. Such a plan could create a tidal wave of well-paying unionised jobs, bring
badly needed resources and opportunities to communities ... and insist that polluters should pay
for workers to be retrained and fully included in this future."
That is, at least, the only positive suggestion that's been made. I think it's a good one the
needs to be developed. I'm far from an economist but perhaps we need also to start thinking about
blended economic systems rather than just one type as well.
What I don't agree with is the continuation of identity politics. It's suffering badly from
overuse and also from its juxtaposition with the application of economic pain to those who are
also consistently abused with every vile epithet known to man. In brief, people have been operant
conditioned to either worship at its feet or loathe it with most or all of their being. It's past
its use-by date and needs to grow into the real expression of its stated aims.
As an example, Merkel is quoted as saying, ""Germany and America are connected by values of
democracy, freedom, and respect for the law and the dignity of man, independent of origin, skin
colour, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or political views."
The words are just positive framing. We all know now that 'democracy' (defined by the UN as
extreme terrorism to be fought and eliminated when iit involves public voting) refers to voting
by an elite group. For the rest of it, Junckers right hand man was quoted this week as saying
it's to be achieved by 'elimination of all national, cultural, ethnic, and faith identity'.
There is a unbridgable gulf between those two concepts, and the first one is simply dishonest.
But journalists never explain that.
The way forward is to treat all people with dignity and respect, as long as they're not harassing
or killing each other, and stop trying to brainwash them. If someone is a racist and content to
keep that to themselves, leave them alone. Likewise with all the other -isms and -obias. The law
and institutions need to treat people equally indeed. No negative and no positive discrimination.
'Indigenous peoples' could have a special role- but not to dispossess, sponge off, or lord it
over others. Religious holidays need to be observed for all religions, not for none. I can hear
the business howls now but the reality is we need to be decreasing industrial pollution and having
less 'stuff', not increasing it.
I wanted Trump to win but if I saw someone(including him) harassing someone else racially,
homophobically, or any other -ism or -obia, I would defend the victim to the death as long as
they were in my presence. That includes male victims of domestic violence. Everything has its
day and identity politics is in that category.
We need a new way and it needs to honour the reality described in the fraudelent rhetoric of
the recent past globalist, multiculturalsit, and liberalist concepts. We need a completely new
economic system or blend of the old which serves the needs of all the people, al the time. And
we need democratic systems which empower constant feedback from those people on how far its succeeding.
Here is what we need to understand: a hell of a lot of people are in pain. Under neoliberal
policies of deregulation, privatisation, austerity and corporate trade, their living standards
have declined precipitously. They have lost jobs. They have lost pensions. They have lost much
of the safety net that used to make these losses less frightening. They see a future for their
kids even worse than their precarious present.
Agree 100% with this, but am at an utter loss to grasp why this is chalked up to the hip new lingo
of "neoliberalism." Bullshit. It's as pure a distillation of conservatism as has ever been penned.
This obsession with renaming things for the sake of confusion serves no one well. This is prime
Trickle Down and the Conservative Manifesto through and through.
I am afraid the author is correct in describing the problem as Neo Liberalism - It is not Conservatism
or Capitalism.
This is Neo Liberalism - You are the CEO of a plant employs 5,000 people that makes widgets.
You don't know how to make a better widget but you want to increase profits so you decide to close
down your plant and outsource 4,000 of the jobs to a low wage economy where workers don't have
the same rights (remember China doesn't have democracy or freedom of speech).
Now your making widgets cheaper but you still aren't making enough money so you offshore the
tax liability to a tax haven - There goes schools, roads, hospitals.
Now your making so much more money for the company what do you do? You give yourself a pay
rise. Not any old pay rise. You pay yourself five or ten times as much.
And then you buy shares because the share price goes way up.
And then you donate to politicians and they tell the great unwashed (that's you and me) this
wheeze is FREE TRADE, or conservatism or capitalism or trickle down.
It isn't its Neo Liberalism and both left and right in most of Europe and the USA has embraced
it to the detriment of its citizens.
Naomi Klein: The Democratic party needs to be either decisively wrested from pro-corporate
neoliberals, or it needs to be abandoned.
It starts by having the DNC follow its own rules. The superdelegates were dutifully counted
as Hillary supporters from Day One of the primaries. Something like 507 to begin with! When Sanders
won successive states, more and more superdelegates mysteriously appeared supporting Hillary.
People understand what a rigged game means. This was Thumb-On-The-Scale tactics and people saw
through it. The Party chose Hillary and that was that. That's not democracy. The Democratic Party
needs a complete transformation from root to branch.
But yes, the bigger picture must be a focus on institutional reform. Not just for America but
everywhere.
I agree with Klein's take on neoliberalism, its Panglossian economic model, as a cause of much
angst in the world, but the remedy is simple in the US -- regulation. Break up the big banks,
end monopolies based on third-party payments, licensing and credentialing (health care, the universities,
etc.), and levy higher taxes on the wealthy. I truly believe that race relations among Americans
have never been better, and that most "problems" have largely been manufactured. What America
is crying out for is good, pragmatic government.
Naomi is spot on. She is speaking a truth that too many have no wish to hear because it tampers
with their idealize status quo. They have theirs and to hell with everyone else. That time has
past and the groaning of the privileged- people who do not CARE (which does not include many people
with means- that is stupid to relegate the carers to hell with the criminals) is so LOUD right
now. They are spinning bank reports and market doom and gloom.
It has been said that HALF of the USA is a 'basket of deplorables' - WOW that is reductionist
logic and it explains nothing.
I am not American and yet, what I know is that PEOPLE ARE PEOPLE- human beings- so please-
what a bullshit argument- that you have tried all too often with Brexit (its not working for you
so who is the insane one? Wasn't it Einstein who said that the definition of insanity is doing
the same thing over and over while expecting a different result?
RESEARCH says that people are usually very informed about the issues of their own lives. All
they have left is their lives and the lives of their children. A LITTLE respect would be nice.
Many creatures can only see things that are moving. Maybe some people are like that once they
trust. WE ALL trusted government, police, agencies because we wanted to believe in a common good.
That trust was ABUSED. The last grasping woke people up. They saw that grab very clearly.
And this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCWNqMV4Bgs
(I was married to a cop at that time and the interviewee is one of the most staid journalists
in Canada with a program on public television.
Someone has to OWN those facts before casting aspersions on mankind. The voters are not stupid
ESPECIALLY when it comes to SURVIVAL and it is brink time.
You expect them to DIE QUIETLY? Dream on in your precious nightmare.
And people have been saying that for decades but no one has been listening, least of all the
trendy neoliberals who thought they had found the final economic solution.
You cannot strip away a person's identity, life and loves, without them losing their dignity
-totally. You must prepare and assist every one of them for change over realistic time scales
dealing with every consequence as it happened. None of that was done because all of what has happened
is the product of opportunism - cash today think about it tomorrow.
These trendy neoliberals have cheated us all, not once, not twice, but all the time, and they
show no guild, no guilt at all. They will continue to pay the price until they listen to us and
change.
Naomi is spot on. She is speaking a truth that too many have no wish to hear because it tampers
with their idealize status quo. They have theirs and to hell with everyone else. That time has
past and the groaning of the privileged- people who do not CARE (which does not include many people
with means- that is stupid to relegate the carers to hell with the criminals) is so LOUD right
now. They are spinning bank reports and market doom and gloom.
It has been said that HALF of the USA is a 'basket of deplorables' - WOW that is reductionist
logic and it explains nothing.
I am not American and yet, what I know is that PEOPLE ARE PEOPLE- human beings- so please-
what a bullshit argument- that you have tried all too often with Brexit (its not working for you
so who is the insane one? Wasn't it Einstein who said that the definition of insanity is doing
the same thing over and over while expecting a different result?
RESEARCH says that people are usually very informed about the issues of their own lives. All
they have left is their lives and the lives of their children. A LITTLE respect would be nice.
Many creatures can only see things that are moving. Maybe some people are like that once they
trust. WE ALL trusted government, police, agencies because we wanted to believe in a common good.
That trust was ABUSED. The last grasping woke people up. They saw that grab very clearly.
And this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCWNqMV4Bgs
(I was married to a cop at that time and the interviewee is one of the most staid journalists
in Canada with a program on public television.
Someone has to OWN those facts before casting aspersions on mankind. The voters are not stupid
ESPECIALLY when it comes to SURVIVAL and it is brink time.
You expect them to DIE QUIETLY? Dream on in your precious nightmare.
Perfect. Thank you, Naomi, for the best column on the 2016 election. Democrats are proving to
be sore losers but they can come around if they all or most read your take on the outcome of our
presidential election. Neoliberal has been our downfall but still most Americans are not aware
of even the word. Times to get explanation of the ideology and the negative effect on the world.
It has been so cruel and so horrible since Jimmy Carter who started this whole thing but the Clintons
were the cruelest of all. I am so glad Hillary did not win. I could not vote for Trump so voted
for Jill Stein.
It was also their (and the left in general's) embrace of identity politics. Welcoming the whiny
'social justice warrior' attitude that puts everyone into little groups and puts those groups
into little lanes, and no one can ever leave their group or lane. Calling people racist or bigoted,
not for actual racism or bigotry, but for merely expressing a different opinion. White privilege-
trying to shut down the opinions of white people. Cultural appropriation- witch-hunting people
for wearing a certain hairstyle or costume. Safe spaces- creating echo chambers and segregating
people from even hearing opposing opinions or ideas. Microagressions- claiming offense over perceived
slights and insults in harmless remarks. not to mention trying to police, ban, and control speech.
I'm a liberal, I lean left, my ideals and values and principles and what I stand for are more
in line with left-wing ideology, but if they want to be taken seriously and have a chance at winning
again, the left needs to let identity politics die.
An ideology that believes that if you give rich people absolutely unfettered ability to make
even more money, they'll magically look after everyone else.
The center left's shameful, braindead acceptance of Thatcher-Reaga, Dumbonomics has been a
worldwide plague.
The EU, supposedly a bulwark of common sense, is still officially austerian and neoliberal,
even though some hard thinking is going on.
Anger-fuelled adoption of far right policies and economics is a further lurch in the same direction:
deregulation, unchecked corporate power, quashing of workers' rights.
A bad time for the disenfranchised all over the world, now being used as electoral cannon fodder
by their owners.
As an English woman who lived in America for some years, it was perfectly clear to me that voters
there have a choice between cuddly-right and hard-right.
There is no "left" in America, and there is none in the UK either in any meaningful, workable
sense. All we have is the soft-right and an unreconstructed 70s Trot. Brilliant.
Nice as it might seem, " The Leap Manifesto, endorsed by more than 220 organisations from Greenpeace
Canada to Black Lives Matter Toronto, and some of our largest trade unions" sounds like yet another
loose coalition of pressure groups with no cohesive platform or plan. Same old, same old.
Absolutely spot on. I remember, as a rare liberal working at a GOP-run Enron, how disheartened
I was watching Bill Clinton pander to the GOP elites and shove NAFTA through a GOP-run Congress
while the majority of Democrats voted against it. He also sought, for political expediency, many
neoliberal solutions that doomed the working class to subsistence. The GOP crowed that Reagan
won the Cold War when actually it was the shift of wealth from the West to the 3rd world as a
bribe that ultimately brought us to the globalized mess we find ourselves in. This was during
Clinton's presidency. Unfortunately Obama did a u-turn and continued GW's disastrous tenure in
what really matters: wars, globalization, abandonment of the working class. Why didn't the Democratic
elite not remind voters that the GOP was behind globalization and the shift of wealth from the
middle class to overseas?
A Message from the Rust Belt: It's the NAFTA, Stupid
The road to President Trump began with the enactment of NAFTA, a heinous betrayal by the Democratic
Party of its blue collar base and of it's most basic principles, taking it from the party of the
New Deal to the party of the Brave New Global World Order Deal, screwing it's most loyal constituents
in favor of Wall Street.
The next step on the road to the Trump House was the Clinton's reckless deregulation, culminating
in the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, yet again in the name of a bigger, more profitable, more
powerful Wall Street at the peril of Main Street.
But perhaps the most decisive factor in sending blue collar rust belt America into the arms
of an orange-haired demon is what happened when they put their faith, heart and souls into electing
Barack Obama, a man who ran as a progressive, promising hope and change, but who then immediately
governed as a neo-lib.
I know what some of you are saying right now, that given the fierce opposition he was up against,
he accomplished what he could; but that's a bunch of bull, as we say in the Midwest.
No one forced him to appoint, immediately upon taking office, Wall Street insiders to his cabinet
and make Larry Summers (the architect of deregulation, neo-lib style) his chief economic adviser.
No one forced him to appoint corporate toady, Common Core loving, privatization loving (through
charter schools) Arne "teach to the test" Duncan to Secretary of Education.
No one forced him to immediately abandon, in the fight for Obamacare, the public option.
No one forced him to ultimately come up with a health care plan, that at its base, is of by
and big Pharma and the insurance industry, one that lowers costs not by controlling them but by
rationing care (that's what those huge deductibles and co-pays are for and they're working--working
Americans, even while insured, don't dare visit the doctor, except when at death's door, for fear
the doctor will order tests they can't afford to pay.)
Most now use their insurance as catastrophic policies to be used only in emergencies. This
is why Obamacare is so hated in America--not because it's socialist, but because it isn't. (Remember,
they voted for hope and change)
No Republican cabal forced Obama to embrace TPP, NAFTA on steroids and so univerally hated
here in the heartland.
Ah, but you say, Hillary has come out against it. But only after praising it and only in cagey
language, about not approving it in its present form (and she has yet to comment on the viscerally
hated NAFTA forever linked to the Clintons and the Democrats).
Much is made (and rightly so) of Trump's threats to constitutionality and the rule of law.
Yet Democrats seem blissfully unaware of their own full-frontal assaults on the Constitution.
For elected officials who have taken an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United
States, supporting NAFTA and TPP, which sign over US sovereignty to unelected, unaccountable (corporate
controlled) international tribunals, giving them the power to, in essence, overturn any US, state
or federal, is nothing less than an act of treason. You might as well just take the Constitution,
rip it to shreds, and throw it up in the air like confetti.
(It's so easy to see Trump's threats to the Constitution, so difficult for Democratic elites
to see their own obliteration of it.)
Why is the hatred of NAFTA, of TPP (and of the Clintons) so visceral in rust-belt America?
I know people who watched the plants they worked in dismantled piece by piece and shipped off
to Mexico. I've spoken to people who've had the humiliating experience of going to Mexico to train
their replacements. I've talked to union members who've reported that employers, at the bargaining
table, have demanded huge cuts in pay and benefits, saying that unless they concede, they're moving
to Mexico.
It's personal.
It's not like blue collar, rust-belt America hasn't given the Democrats chance after chance.
They've been voting Democratic since 1992.
They gave Obama two chances, believing his promises of hope and change, only to witness his
championing of TPP.
Time and again, the Clintonian Democrats have deceived and betrayed their blue collar, rust-belt
base. Time and again rust-belt blue collar America has supported them, nonetheless, hoping, like
Charlie Brown, that this time they wouldn't have the football pulled away.
But the accumulating decay, the devastation of the great recession (and the feeble, corporate
oriented Democratic response) have left them with no hope left. The vote for Donald is a howl
of rage and desperation. He was the only way left for them to vent their rage (after the Democratic
elites dispensed with Bernie Sanders).
The next four years are going to be hell. But for heartland rust-belt America, the last thirty-five
years have been hell (and they have nothing left to lose).
On the one hand you don't want immigrants in your mist because they undercut local workers.
And in the other hand you don't want those same people to get good jobs in their own country,
because they undercut your own workers.
You think you have a God given right to jobs for which you aren't productive enough.
In other words you don't want to compete.
You want to sell us your stuff allright ( NAFTA slaughtered the Mexican farming sector, specially
subsistence farming) but you would rather don't buy Mexican stuff, unless it is raw materials
so you can add value and sell it back to us.
NAFTA has made countless articles cheaper to all of you, and has slowed down illegal immigration
which has been in the decline for a while.
But you want it all, no matter how unrealistic.
Having you cake and eat it. While riding an unicorn please.
Why Klein doesn't mention Jews in her list of targets of this right wing hate and reaction is
surprising. In defining the reason neo-liberalism failed so many people, she states "At the same
time, they have witnessed the rise of the Davos class, a hyper-connected network of banking and
tech billionaires, elected leaders who are awfully cosy with those interests, and Hollywood celebrities
who make the whole thing seem unbearably glamorous. Success is a party to which they were not
invited, and they know in their hearts that this rising wealth and power is somehow directly connected
to their growing debts and powerlessness." And this paragraph directly applies to how the Trumpettes,
the KKK, who endorsed him, the Alt-right who he played a major role of normalizing, sees JEWS.
Central to the ideology of the extreme right is their hatred of Jews. How Klein missed that is
really baffling.
Naive comment. The "lefts" criticism of Israel is largely unrelated to the growing right's hostility
to Jews. It's the latter you need to be concerned about.
What right's hostility in the US? Where are they. There isn't a single Republican member of Congress
who is hostile to Israel. David Duke ran for senate in Lousiana and got 3% of the vote.
Naomi: "But this leaves out the force most responsible for creating the nightmare in which we
now find ourselves wide awake: neoliberalism."
Is this completely correct, leaving out as it does something that has grown since at least
the last days of WWII and throughout the Cold War, something that some call the "Deep State?"
Here's one view of it, written by a former Republican congressional staffer but in an essay
found on the Bill Moyers and Company's website (Bill Moyers is definitely neither a Republican
nor a conservative):
"Yes, there is another government concealed behind the one that is visible at either end of
Pennsylvania Avenue, a hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country according
to consistent patterns in season and out, connected to, but only intermittently controlled by,
the visible state whose leaders we choose. My analysis of this phenomenon is not an exposé of
a secret, conspiratorial cabal; the state within a state is hiding mostly in plain sight, and
its operators mainly act in the light of day."
Lofgren's description is not exhaustive, not really focusing on the darkest heart within the
"military industrial complex" that is intimately associated with the deep state, namely the covert,
classified areas of the intelligence and security components. (I find the fact that the present
president recently renewed the illegal and unconstitutional 9/11 State of Emergency Act for the
eighth year in a row, just as his predecessor did every year he was in office after
the Act was first signed in September, 2001, telling.)
Still, it's good starting point.
It looks to me that this huge beast is more about empire than Neoliberalism (or even NeoConservatism
-- it encompasses both; it's not necessarily "left" or "right" as most use the terms, not truly
Democrat or Republican).
Hillary has promised to be a president for everyone…that is, everyone who contributes to 'The
Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation'.
According to the Foundation's website, it is a 'non-profit 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization.'
The easiest way to make an organisation non-profit is to pay out all earnings - seven-figure director
fees, first class travel, Fifth Avenue offices…oh how you can spend your way to a luxurious non-profit
outcome! And whatever is left over after your personal indulgences have been satisfied, you can
spend on a few pet projects.
The Clintons are seen as money grubbers who'd sell their own family members for the right price.
Hillary is a despised person.
Trump is no better. The only difference between him and Hillary is that he is openly corrupt.
Whereas Hillary hides her corruption behind a cloak of establishment respectability.
The dumbest thing about the response to this is is how everyone is just shoehorning their own
narrative into this. If this was just about neoliberalism, nobody would have voted for the Republican
party. Trump won for a variety of factors. It wasn't that he was against globalisation, it's that
he lied that he could change it. These people believed his "we'll bring back all the jobs" over
concrete plans.
Such a coalition is possible. In Canada, we have begun to cobble it together under the banner
of a people's agenda called The Leap Manifesto, endorsed by more than 220 organisations from
Greenpeace Canada to Black Lives Matter Toronto, and some of our largest trade unions.
I hang around in liberal circles in Toronto and even there, Black Lives Matter is hardly popular.
I know socialists see the result and think that they can be next, but they won't be.
The political class assiduously serves the needs of the wealthy, while the working people fend
for themselves. The banks get a bailout, the bankers get a bonus, and the consumer gets his house
foreclosed on. The oil companies and hedge funds get loopholes built into the tax code, and the
middle class hears that they might not be able to draw their Social Security until they're seventy.
It's not hard to see why people are unhappy, and Trump was unafraid to call the system rigged
and the players corrupt. You can analyze the results of this election until you're blue in the
face, but I think what it ultimately comes down to is that the working people have been thrown
under the bus in favor of corporate profit for far too long.
True enough, but Trump's "solutions" will just make it worse for the same group of people and
continue to support corporations and the wealthy. Sadly yet again the voters have been duped.
Probably. The only hope I have is that Trump is a vanity candidate, so I expect he really will
try to do the best job he can for as many people as he can. He genuinely has no love for the political
class and our campaign finance or lobbying systems. It's not beyond the realm of possibility that
something half decent might yet come of his election. Probably not any of the big issues, and
it's a shame about the environment and the Supreme Court, but you never know... Or so I'll keep
telling myself.
1] Since the Eighties the powerless left have been saying that the solutions are on the left
... while the voters kept moving right. Repeating the same thing but louder doesn't make it work
any better.
2] Since the Eighties every faction of the left has been calling unto the other flavours of left
to 'unite' ... whereas as what they usually meant was 'join us'. Even now I see no evidence that
the left is capable of running a 'united-self' ... let alone capable of uniting and healing the
deep rift in the society of Trumpian-US or Brexit-UK.
This ship has sailed! The Modern Left has failed to prevent this fascist take-over every bit
as much as 'Old Left' failed to stand-up in the Europe of the 1930's and 'Older Left' failed to
withstand the nationalist fervor of '14-'18. No, I am afraid that, as in all previous episode,
this fascism must be fought. We better start preparing while we still can.
But the problem with your story is that the left were defeated some time back. What we've had
since are liberals (i.e. the neo-liberal right) tacking ever-rightward, constantly insisting that's
the only way to avert the hard populist right. The result has been complete failure, as all that
right-ward movement by liberals has achieved is to further create the conditions that lead to
the rise of the right.
Its pretty much the same thing that happened in Russia post-communism. Neo-liberalism/liberalism
(they are, in fact, the same thing) led to the rise of watered-down kind of fascism.
The modern pro-capitalist/non-populist right has failed to prevent this fascist take-over every
bit as much as 'Old Right' failed to stand-up in the Europe of the 1930's...
This article is spot on. Neoliberalism creates its own hierarchy which has no place for the peole
who voted for Trump. Two quotes from US voters (with acknowledgements to Sky News).
1. A black man who voted for Trump...'most blacks have more in common with white woeking class
families trying to make ends meet than they do with the democrats'
2. A well heeled white democrat man in shock....'trying to come to terms with an election which
has shown me a side of America I was unaware of...'
Shock horror....Trump was elected by ordinary people.
It was interesting to see that nearly each and every newspaper in the US and the UK and everywhere
else and nearly all the TV channels started a barrage of anti-Trump rhetoric always repeating
his sexual escapades and his racist and sexist comments. Only a few alternative blogs or news
channels dared to criticise Hillary or question her integrity.
Now that Trump has won has shocked all these news channels and everybody is asking who voted for
him ? All those "deplorable" people as mentioned by Hillary or all those sexist, racist or uneducated
whites ? Were they angry ? If so, why ? Was it a protest vote ? Why ?
It is interesting to read Charles Hugh Smith's writing "The source of our rage" below and wonder
why all these "expert" commentators got it wrong -- https://goo.gl/VuEGZy
Turn on your television or pick up a paper. Listen to a radio or read the online news. There's
always someone telling us how we should think, and what we should do.
The belief that they know better - that they are superior to the rest of us - permeates every
corner of our lives. Those that disagree with and challenge the 'consensus' are considered ignorant
or uneducated.
This is the argument that's been trotted out since Brexit. The poor old folks didn't know what
they were doing. That somehow, those who grew up under the black cloud shadowing post-Second World
War Britain couldn't comprehend the implications of seeking to regain control of their economy
and borders.
That's the way society has gone - the megaphone minority blasting away in our ear. The elites
who believe their values and opinions are the only ones that matter. Pity the poor taxpayer who
picks up the tab.
The international 'specialist' who flies in for a couple of days to lecture us on what they
think we're doing wrong. From how farmers should manage their land, the type of energy we should
use, through to how to control our borders. How these self-appointed experts love to enlighten
the great unwashed. It happens at the local level as well. It could be the council dictating something
as simple as the colour a homeowner is allowed to paint their fence.
There's the local action group. After moving into an area and setting themselves up as they
see fit, they seek to restrict who can join them, and what their fellow residents can do.
A paddock that once held a herd of sheep has been subdivided, and then subdivided again. Yet the
new owner places a placard on their new fence protesting against any future developments.
The events of yesterday in the US have turned the world on its head. World leaders are struggling
to know how to respond, to Trump's victory.
While so much of the commentary and analysis by the experts has been about the two personalities
involved, the US election results reflect something much more basic than that.
It's that the ones who do the lifting - that is, those who set their alarms early and go off
to work - are tired of subsidising those that are the recipients of the public purse. They've
had enough of paying for the lifestyles of those who look down on them. This includes the political
class who lecture them, and everyone else.
The commentariat are putting their spin on the US election result. Much like Brexit, they're
arguing that the poor uneducated folks didn't know what they were doing. The result is a two-fingered
salute to the political elite who sign off on trade agreements with little regard for those that
will lose their jobs. It's a protest against those elected to represent the voters' interests
but rarely, if ever, visit the factory floor.
But it's not only the political class who left the majority behind. The result also reflects
the great chasm that continues to grow between the wealthy elite - Wall Street - and those on
the other side where wages have gone nowhere for years.
The post-GFC world has only pumped more money into the top few percent, while everybody else
has been left a long way behind. While the Dow Jones Industrial Index has increased more than
two-and-a-half times since the lows of 2009, real wages have barely increased a dime.
Nobody knows how the Trump presidency will play out. I doubt he even knows himself. And as
the elites predict, it might turn out to be one of the US' great follies.
Some are calling the result a swing back to conservatism. But the result illustrates ever so strongly
how the so-called 'silent majority' are deciding to reclaim the way their lives are governed.
It's a major blow to elitism, and is a trend that will only grow.
Perhaps if The Guardian and every other major left media site would have been understanding this
the past few years instead of ignoring Bernie, plugging for Clinton, and pushing the SJW stuff
there wouldn't have been a Trump presidency. Everyone shares a bit of blame for his win. Hopefully
we can not get so obsessed with blind Dem support and identity politics going forward.
Ya think? Finally someone says something sensible. Neo-liberal economic policy and neo-con foreign
policy I might add. There is a German blogger who is a polyglot. He speaks German, French, Italian,
English and Russian. He reads the romance languages at least I don't know about Russian. He monitors
how different news events are spun to the various populations. Which facts are presented, which
omitted, obfuscations, lies and who's controlling the narrative. Because of the time difference
he went to bed before the election results were known and woke up after. The opening sentence
on his piece that morning was, "So I just woke up and found that the world has changed. World
War III was called off."
Which in my estimation is accurate. Perhaps not WWIII but certainly another major war. And
what's the result over here in America? It's the Hillary supporters who are behaving violently.
Rioting, destroying property, assaults, interfering with transportation etc. Not covered in your
press of course because it is the republicans who were supposed to be the violent monsters and
it doesn't fit the narrative.
First, neo-con warring, an essential subcomponent of neoliberalism, for when CIA manipulation
of political strife isn't possible. Indonesia versus Iraq, for example.
Second, Hillary supporters rebelling is in the news this morning, though they aren't a) airing
it as an alarming event, nor b) having the same paramilitary police response to it.
Third, R has been pushing for warring and I've no idea where you'd (they'd?) come up with an all
R Washington isn't going to jump right in. Particularly, post election, when congress refuels
the "campaign donation" money laundering machine, defense contractors (Northrop, etc.) and infrastructure
(Parsons Brinckerhoff, etc.), with the gifting of federal contracts, which will no doubt run way
over budget as cost plus contracts.
There's a whole lot of less than Whole Truth used to manipulate. Some intentional, some due to
ignorance.
Long ago I asked, what is the difference between ignorance and arrogance, and about the only thing
I can come up with is ignorance is unintentional while arrogance is confident ignorance.
And people like Trump never went to Davos? Republicans don't do that? Yes, a lot of people are
in economic pain, and the Democrats and Clinton share that blame. I agree that the Democratic
party needs to be either decisively wrested from pro-corporate neoliberals, or it needs to be
abandoned, but Trump's victory is not just about economic pain. It's also about fear of the diverse
country we are becoming. You want to know who is to blame for the election of Donald Trump? The
people who voted for him. They are the ones who fell for the con that he was their solution.
What you say is correct, but the point is that it is expected that the GOP will protect business
interests and profit at the expense of people. That is why they exist. The Democrats have historically
been the party that protects the working class. As the author points out, they have abandoned
that role during the last 40 years, leaving the working class without protection from the concentration
of corporate wealth, power and influence. Working class whites, Latinos and blacks should be allies,
not competitors for the scraps left after the Davos party. The conservative right in America is
successful because they have successfully pitted these natural allies against each other, but
they have been aided the the embrace of corporate neoliberalism by the Democratic party leadership.
Bill Clinton gave us Bush the Younger thanks to having the self control of an adolescent chimpanzee.
Now the Democrat establishment aided by another Clinton gave us Trump. When are we going to stop
buying into the neo-liberal bullshit. They have played us like suckers since the revolution the
French won for us. Speaking of the French, their revolution scared the shit out of the "founding
fathers" especially the parts about equality and fraternity. I saw Trump coming a long time ago,
but I thought someone would stand up. It wasn't as if we weren't warned. Instead all the talking
fucking heads are telling us it's time to heal to work together. Right, like the way the Republicans
worked with Obama. Are we going to work together, are we going to fight? Nah. We"ll find someone
new to bomb in the name of liberty and some new shinny thing will come along and we'll just stay
bent over. But never forget, we are the greatest and the most exceptional.
Good post. But it was also Obama who recently led us here. He didn't do anything. Sure he was
stymied by the Republican congress. But he didn't even use the bully pulpit.
He seemed to me to want to work for the rest of the world more than he did the U.S. He couldn't
even see that the trade agreements are a problem for our citizens. And I supported him more than
any previous presidential candidate, because I thought he cared.
Generally speaking, American and British media supports neoconservative foreign policy (regime
change in Libya and Syria, military confrontation with Russia and China, expanded funding for
NATO, the Iraq War WMD lies, etc.). At the same time, it tends to support neoliberal trade policies
(free flow of capital, offshoring manufacturing to sweatshop zones) that enrich billionaires while
impoverishing the middle class.
The only real difference between "conservative" and "liberal" media outlets is in their take
on identity politics; this is why people view media as propaganda that tries to point people away
from the more important issues of global war and wealth inequality. It's a distraction tactic.
Naomi Klein is right about the neoliberalism that played such a huge role in the creation of massive
wealth inequality in the United States, but the other issue is that Hillary Clinton embraced the
Bush-era neoconservative program (just look at her record as Secretary of State with Honduras,
Haiti, Libya and Syria, as well as all the arms deals and support for Saudi Arabia and Israel).
In addition, she was completely loyal to the Wall Street interests who crashed the economy in
2008 and yet were never criminally charged by the Obama Administration.
Obama shares much of the blame - despite coming in with Congress in Democratic hands, he quickly
abandoned his populist base in favor of pro-Wall Street agendas; he expanded the domestic mass
surveillance program and persecuted whistleblowers like nobody before him; and he was seduced
by the CIA's regime change/drone assassination program. His peace prize is now the punchline of
a joke. He didn't help out homeowners who'd been targeted by Wall Street; he instead pushed for
a massive taxpayer bailout of Wall Street - and minority homeowners in particular were hit hard
by the banks. As far as all the young people who supported him? He did nothing to alleviate student
loan debt; that's not what Wall Street wanted. As far as renewable energy? He did little if anything
on that front; instead he quietly OK'd offshore oil drilling, oil exports, and pipelines like
Dakota Access. He betrayed his base and served Wall Street, and of course that's what Hillary
Clinton would have done as well.
Bernie Sanders, in contrast, had good policies on all these issues and would have won the primary
if it hadn't been rigged by the DNC, the Clinton campaign, and the corporate media.
The Democratic Party reforms needed are obvious:
(1) A fixed number of debates in the primary (Sanders vs. Clinton? 9 debates. Obama vs. Clinton?
26 debates).
(2) Elimination of the superdelegate system. (In Feb 2008, Clinton had 241 to Obama's 181; in
Feb 2016, Clinton had 451 to Sander's 19)
(3) Opening the primaries to independent voters in places like New York, at the very least allowing
last-minute party registration for independent voters.
That all takes power away from Wall Street-tied party elites, who will otherwise continue to
pick losers that will serve Wall Street interests in exchange for big donations - but who are
unpopular with the general public. That rigged process is why Bernie Sanders, who would obviously
have beaten Trump with enthusiastic millenial support, was prevented from winning the Democratic
Primary.
The other party in this debacle, the corporate media - they deserve to be broken up by anti-trust
legislation. TimeWarner, Disney, etc. should all be forced to break up into a hundred independently
owned news outlets, otherwise it'll be an endless stream of Wall Street propaganda from them.
" Hillary Clinton embraced the Bush-era neoconservative program (just look at her record as Secretary
of State with Honduras, Haiti, Libya and Syria, as well as all the arms deals and support for
Saudi Arabia and Israel). In addition, she was completely loyal to the Wall Street interests who
crashed the economy in 2008 and yet were never criminally charged by the Obama Administration."
Very much so. Hillary Clinton to me was pretty indistinguishable from George Bush. I never
voted for Bush and I wasn't going to vote for a female version of him.
"They will blame James Comey and the FBI. They will blame voter suppression and racism. They will
blame Bernie or bust and misogyny. They will blame third parties and independent candidates. They
will blame the corporate media for giving him the platform, social media for being a bullhorn,
and WikiLeaks for airing the laundry."
And in the Guardian, of course, they'll work out some way to blame Jeremy Corbyn...
We need to ask why the polling was wrong. People who normally vote did not, and people who
normally don't vote did. Clinton really did rig the election as proven by Wikileaks, and lots
of Bernie supporters could not bring ourselves to vote for her ; and Clinton called Trump's
redneck base "a basket of deplorables", and many of those folks who would have watched the election
from a bar stool got up to kick her ass. Naturally the same persons who pretended that Clinton
did not rig the election want to continue to pretend. But Naomi, she really did.
I too believe Clinton and the DNC sealed their own fate. But the "bucket of losers" accusation has
proved to be false, the product of a spoof Podesta email.
So in other words Naomi Klein admits that "rampant insecurity and inequality exist" and that something
is required to be done to correct this - which I think many of us realise is a balancing of the needs
of national autonomy and globalisation, but then Naomi has the audacity to attribute these "responses
" to "neo fascists" So suffer on you poor under privileged unwashed. but should you rise up then
we ( the enlightened) know that you are being prodded by neo fascists !! A totally ridiculous idea
which can only be explained as the last desperate gasp of the politically correct whose credibility
is not only on the line but is now clearly beyond the pale
Beautifully said. Eight years of neo-liberal acting/progressive talking Barack Obama and the prospect
of more of the same from the deeply flawed Hillary Clinton was enough to hand the presidency to the
grotesque Donald Trump. The Democratic party is smoldering and needs to be rebuilt as Naomi says
by and for the 99%.
Naomi Klein is right about the neoliberalism that played such a huge role in the creation of massive
wealth inequality in the United States, but the other issue is that Hillary Clinton embraced the
Bush-era neoconservative program (just look at her record as Secretary of State with Honduras, Haiti,
Libya and Syria, as well as all the arms deals and support for Saudi Arabia and Israel). In addition,
she was completely loyal to the Wall Street interests who crashed the economy in 2008 and yet were
never criminally charged by the Obama Administration.
Obama shares much of the blame - despite coming in with Congress in Democratic hands, he quickly
abandoned his populist base in favor of pro-Wall Street agendas; he expanded the domestic mass
surveillance program and persecuted whistleblowers like nobody before him; and he was seduced by
the CIA's regime change/drone assassination program. His peace prize is now the punchline of a joke.
He didn't help out homeowners who'd been targeted by Wall Street; he instead pushed for a massive
taxpayer bailout of Wall Street - and minority homeowners in particular were hit hard by the banks.
As far as all the young people who supported him? He did nothing to alleviate student loan debt;
that's not what Wall Street wanted. As far as renewable energy? He did little if anything on that
front; instead he quietly OK'd offshore oil drilling, oil exports, and pipelines like Dakota Access.
He betrayed his base and served Wall Street, and of course that's what Hillary Clinton would have
done as well.
Bernie Sanders, in contrast, had good policies on all these issues and would have won the primary
if it hadn't been rigged by the DNC, the Clinton campaign, and the corporate media.
The Democratic Party reforms needed are obvious:
(1) A fixed number of debates in the primary (Sanders vs. Clinton? 9 debates. Obama vs. Clinton?
26 debates).
(2) Elimination of the superdelegate system. (In Feb 2008, Clinton had 241 to Obama's 181; in Feb
2016, Clinton had 451 to Sander's 19)
(3) Opening the primaries to independent voters in places like New York, at the very least allowing
last-minute party registration for independent voters.
That all takes power away from Wall Street-tied party elites, who will otherwise continue to pick
losers that will serve Wall Street interests in exchange for big donations - but who are unpopular
with the general public. That rigged process is why Bernie Sanders, who would obviously have beaten
Trump with enthusiastic millenial support, was prevented from winning the Democratic Primary.
The other party in this debacle, the corporate media - they deserve to be broken up by anti-trust
legislation. TimeWarner, Disney, etc. should all be forced to break up into a hundred independently
owned news outlets, otherwise it'll be an endless stream of Wall Street propaganda from them.
" Hillary Clinton embraced the Bush-era neoconservative program (just look at her record as Secretary
of State with Honduras, Haiti, Libya and Syria, as well as all the arms deals and support for Saudi
Arabia and Israel). In addition, she was completely loyal to the Wall Street interests who crashed
the economy in 2008 and yet were never criminally charged by the Obama Administration."
Very much so. Hillary Clinton to me was pretty indistinguishable from George Bush. I never voted
for Bush and I wasn't going to vote for a female version of him.
While I'm troubled by many of the implications of this electoral result, I think the main story is
that the Democrats have bled so many votes that an extremely unpopular Republican candidate was able
to win simply by holding on to most of the votes that Romney managed to get 4 years ago and flipping
a few swing voters. When the final tally comes in, Hillary Clinton will likely have received over
8 million fewer votes than Obama in 2008 and nearly 5 million less than he got in 2012. Trump got
fewer still, and he'll now be president because he managed to sway just enough voters in the rust
belt to win several of those states.
It could not be clearer that Sanders' approach would have been the better one for this election
by far. He spoke to the anger at the economic hollowing out of so much of this country while offering
prescriptions that were in the best interests of the vast majority of people and framed the discussion
in a way that made it clear race was not at the center, that the unchecked pursuit of the class interests
of the wealthy & well-connected was responsible for so much of the human devastation that can easily
be observed in so many parts of the country.
Anyone who zealously advocated for this view was derided as a "Bernie bro" or mocked with sneering
suggestions that Bernie was only a viable candidate in white states. (Nevermind that being
absolute bunkum) Clinton supporters and other DNC hacks falsely equated working class white people
in states like Wisconsin and Ohio supporting a more left-leaning economic program that placed a lesser
emphasis on racial & identity issues to engaging in some sort of insidious white male identity politics-
and they did so deliberately, to muddy the waters.
They forced a widely reviled, ethically challenged, evasive servant of the establishment who deemed
TPP "the gold standard" of trade agreements, supported the Iraq war, was content to let the financial
sector completely off the hook for the last financial meltdown and engineered the disastrous Libya
intervention down everyone's throat on the premise that Americans didn't have a choice. Anyone who
expressed their fear that this would result in a loss to Trump, much less voiced a slight preference
for Trump over Clinton (even if absolutely de minimis), was vilified to such a degree that I am confident
that it stifled some of the public discussion about how to electorally confront Trump. The only acceptable
answer was voting for Hillary Clinton without reservation, even accepting that many criticisms of
her were valid was tantamount to enabling fascism.
Look where we are now. There's a lesson in this: you cannot rely on progressive issues on a few
social positions as a fig leaf to cover up a massive failure to challenge the systemic rot of our
economy, our governmental institutions and our legal system. Standing up for a person's right to
peace, security and opportunity irrespective of race, ethnicity or creed is absolutely the right
thing to do. Same goes for women's right to make family planning decisions or the rights of gay people
to marry and live free of discrimination. None of these can begin to mask massive system-wide failures,
that we are seemingly hopelessly chained to an economic paradigm that is grossly indifferent- even
actively hostile- to the welfare of the majority of our citizens.
I think Sanders' response to Trump's election is entirely appropriate. If Trump does follow through
on some of his challenges to globalization, lobbyists or modernizing and improving our infrastructure,
we should offer our qualified support. If he attempts to push through massive deregulation, lopsided
tax cuts for the wealthy, stripping of environmental protections, or anything to stoke the flames
of bigotry and division we should unite in principled, civil opposition.
Excellent and intelligent post. I especially agree with your last sentence. Trump may have saved
us from an insane war with Russia. But mass resistance is called for if he and the blood-red Congress
try to turn us into Christo-fascist serfs.
Absolutely on target, thanks Naomi! The DLC (Democratic Leadership?? Council) won this for Trump.
They may have taken a couple of presidencies--mostly on false promises--but their wishywashy presidents
did nothing for real people and worked solely for the rich oligarchs and imperialists. The "Leadership"
was only toward the Right. This election was the Revolt of the Rustbelt and the Dead Small Towns.
But Drumpf will do nothing for them except postpone, then forget, and finally turn against any who
dare complain.
And just think--if not for the DLC stuffed shirts and Wall Street bootlickers who held power in
the Dem establishment, we might be happy that Bernie & Jane Sanders--AUTHENTIC feminists and genuine
reformers--were going to the White House. I'm 80 years old, may not be around to see the young people's
victory, so I get sick thinking of how much we almost gained, but was lost by the DLC Beltway minds
and the GOP (Greedy Oil Party) solipsists. We lost more than Trump can guess, until his Miami properties
are all swallowed by the sea. It takes a heavy knock on his orange noggin to get that egomaniac's
attention.
I firmly believe that we must bring down BOTH of our over-age, limping, idiot-led political parties,
or reform them from the grassroots up! (If they can be saved, which I doubt.) It's time to revive
the LaFollette Progressive Republicans and the New Deal Democrats, but under different names--and
this time NOT just for privileged, "entitled" white males. Yes, I know Bob LaFollette tried to be
inclusive, but the time is way past when our children and grandchildren must support and empathize
with the entire HUMAN race, not just the paleface branch who've grabbed all the goodies.
As for the macho white males, offer the cowboys a chance to put their he-man cravings to work
at the top of wind-powered electric generators 200 feet tall out in the deep ocean, or avoiding glass
slashes from large solar trombe wall collectors or even small glass solar cells, or staying alive
around unexpected flares of methane, or getting caught in the ebb of a massive tidal bore and swept
out to sea. All of these are renewable energy generating systems, safe for the planet but requiring
daredevils who would marvel at how comparably un-scary mining and lumberjacking were back in the
Olden Days.
Trump was born into the 1% and has stayed there; inherited wealth don't ya know. His policies and
those of the Republican hierarchy include : union busting, lower taxes at the top, austerity at the
bottom, financial deregulation below 2008 levels, and privatization of government services. Democratic
policies are the complete opposite in each of these cases.
Trump doesn't stand for less neoliberalism but more.
"People have lost their sense of security, status and even identity."
That's about the only part that's correct. Globalisation and the threat of open borders is what
does that. Everyone wants to feel secure in their home, individually or collectively, without the
threat that anyone who likes your home better than theirs can invite themselves over and redecorate.
Canada's elite smugly refuse to recognize that its seeming imperviousness to "ethnophobic nationalism"
is precisely because it has secure borders and an immigration policy that selects immigrants.
Obama was elected twice in very recent history. If the country consisted mostly
of bigots, that would have never happened. To chalk this up to bigotry is
exactly the wrong thing to do - it makes one feel all smug and superior without
bothering to engage with the real issues, like the ones that Klein is discussing.
The Democrats have failed as a party of the middle and working classes. They
are the party of Wall Street bankers and the MIC and the Hollywood elite, who
are more concerned with eating organic arugula and with the bathroom rights of
transgender people than they are with the economic plight of the majority of
people in this country. And they nominated the one person who almost perfectly
embodies this establishment: Clinton - a war mongering, corrupt establishment neoconservative who
revels in Hollywood fund raisers with $50,000/person
tickets, gets paid a quarter of million dollars by Goldman Sachs for an 1-hour
speech, and salivates at the prospect of starting more wars in the middle east
and poking Putin in the eye. That's why the lost, not because of bigotry.
This piece is exactly right. The infiltration of the neoliberals has poisoned mainstream politics
and hijacked the left. It is given form by the Washington Consensus:
1. Fiscal policy discipline, with avoidance of large fiscal deficits relative to GDP;
2. Redirection of public spending from subsidies ("especially indiscriminate subsidies") toward
broad-based provision of key pro-growth, pro-poor services like primary education, primary health
care and infrastructure investment;
3. Tax reform, broadening the tax base and adopting moderate marginal tax rates;
4. Interest rates that are market determined and positive (but moderate) in real terms;
5. Competitive exchange rates;
6. Trade liberalization: liberalization of imports, with particular emphasis on elimination of
quantitative restrictions (licensing, etc.); any trade protection to be provided by low and relatively
uniform tariffs;
7. Liberalization of inward foreign direct investment;
8. Privatization of state enterprises;
9. Deregulation: abolition of regulations that impede market entry or restrict competition, except
for those justified on safety, environmental and consumer protection grounds, and prudential oversight
of financial institutions;
10. Legal security for property rights.
Trump is planning to tear up a lot of this, and he is quite right to do it, even if for the wrong
reasons. Globalisation has screwed working people in the developed world and enabled multinationals
to form an unholy alliance with the chinese communists to exploit the chinese people to make bigger
profits, whilst the old manufacturing base in the developed economies has been hollowed out and sent
to China.
The Democratic Party changed fundamentally under Carter/Clinton in the 1980s/1990s. Very much like
Labour in the UK changed during the same period under Blair. During that period, both parties morphed
from domestic worker's parties into global capitalist parties with (somewhat) progressive social
agendas. In both instances, the move away from core left economic values was justified by electability.
The sweeping elections of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair in the early 1990s won the argument and relegated
the original base of the parties (workers) to the periphery.
Now that neoliberals are no longer electable, what's the justification for their continued existence?
No one on the left is happy with their core policies (deregulation, privatization, free trade, unfettered
immigration, coziness with corporations/banks, etc.). If they aren't advancing progressive social
issues y winning elections, why should we continue putting up with the neolibs co-opting our economic
policies?
Ideally, Democrats would use this opportunity to revert back into being a domestic worker's party
with genuine progressive/leftist values (much like Labour did in the UK by electing Corbyn). It almost
happened with Sanders. Given the enthusiasm/turnout he generated, that's clearly the way forward.
Sadly, if I were betting, I'd imagine the Democratic establishment will do exactly what the Labour
establishment did in the UK post Brexit...circle the wagons and double down. And with the anger being
directed at Trump rather than the Democratic establishment's malpractice in this botched election,
they may get away with it (unlike the Blairites in the UK).
The New Democrats (neoliberals) have been circuling the wagons for awhile now. They have tried to
shoot down progressive candidates running in primaries for office and support the neoliberal ones.
The guy who lost to Rubio was a former republican who became a New Democrat while the party shut
down any progressives.
It will take alot of battles to change the party back to their New Deal roots. The party saw the
reaction to the true son of the New Deal, Bernie Sanders. Instead of taking lessons from that and
what the democratic voters craved, they did everything to undermine him and shut him down.
It will take very heavy equipment to remove the entrenched neoliberals from the party and put true
democrats in their rightful place
It's strange to watch...the UK seems to be about half an election cycle ahead of us in its rejection
of neoliberalism. Everything happening in UK politics is echoed over here about 6 month's later.
Down to the fact that, in both countries, wealthy orange haired baboons somehow managed to speak
to the disaffected working class. If Gove hadn't snaked Boris Johnson at the death, both countries
would currently be led by said orange haired baboons. I mean, what are the odds?
Granted, it is the Year of the Monkey per the Chinese calendar...so there might be something in
that after all.
Relatedly, I cannot wait until the UK's new Secretary of State has a photo op with our President
elect. Which one is the doppelganger?
This is a very decent article, indeed the mainstream left made a deal with the devil and now he's
getting his due. But on the other hand I think it's terribly optimistic to assume everything boils
down to kick starting a new democratic-socialist movement, raking in all those votes that have just
been waiting for it to happen(and only voted for a right wing populist because it didn't yet, sure)
and fixing everybody's problems forever.
For one, the neoliberals managed to singlehandedly to make the left look like even more of a villain
in the eyes of those who already eschewed it, alienate those who believed in a left solution but
were not diehard about it, and fracture the remaining group into niches who refuse to engage in dialogue
or even in recognize each other as fellow lefties. Managing to form a stable coalition is a beginning
but it only deals with the latter problem, the left still has a huge public image problem to solve
before it can make a return.
And for another, the very idea of safety nets and benefits seems to have fallen out of fashion with
the electorate: the "I had to climb the hill both ways to get here, so nobody dare cut a tunnel through
it" mentality has been on the rise lately. It seems the neoliberals' failures somehow managed to
make us all even more individualist, if only a bit more tribal too. Thus, for a new left to rise
it wouldn't be enough to restore trust among all the isolated left groups, but also among society
as a whole.
But, when you have people homeless, starving, falling through society's cracks you have a rise in
crime.
Many who are suffering are not shiftless. Many are working but, don't make enough to pay bills and
put food on the table.
Many do not have access to healthcare.
Children go to bed without food.
When society is uncaring, mean and causes undue suffering, society falls apart and into haves and
have nots.
All the money that went to help people is the same money that now lines the pockets of the uber wealthy.
Our schools cannot teach with rats and cockroaches, ceillings falling in and no heat. When children
cannot get a lunch anymore, how do they learn?
When we cannot pay teachers or even support them, you end up with the bottom of the barrel teaching
the upcoming generation inadequately.
You can tell the strength of a society from how it cares for its poor and in need.
Ours is a 'i got mine' selfish shallow society now.
And it is violent and people are filled with hate.
Maybe because we have stopped caring and making sure people have opportunities and jobs and education
and help when they fall on hard times.
Agreed, except for the major actors who started this globalization's depression ofN. American and
European workers-- the Reagan and the Bush corporate supporters and puppet masters. Clintons and
other neolibs have followed suit because they wrongly believed that they could beat them by joining
them yet still do a bit of good for their voters. Wrong. But yes, the Revolution continues. Whether
it can save the planet -- the environment, however, is doubtful, and nothing matters nearly as much.
For years on is far to late.
Yes it was the Democrats promotion of neo-liberalsim aided by such claptrap as this opinion from
another Guardian scribbler.
"Centrism has failed these and many other voters. Clinton was not handpicked by the Democratic
party's elite: she defeated an unexpectedly successful challenge by self-described socialist Bernie
Sanders, partly because of his failure to inspire African Americans. "
That a closet Clinton supporter should have the temerity to write something like this to explain
Clintons defeat is beyond belief, when we know from Wikileaks e-mails that the DNC actively opposed
Sanders.
The reality is that all politics is dominated by the golden rule: he who has the gold rules.
Well meaning scribblers like Naomi can scribble all they want it will never change the situation.
Even revolution will not change the situation for the simple facts are "the oppressed are potential
oppressors".
The achievement of dominance and superiority seems to be built into human genes, and why not it is
so in the rest of the animal world.
Forget Richard Dawkins, dominance is certainly not universal among living creatures. If a species
exists with a plentiful supply of food, domination and competition are unnecessary. Think of the
cooperative bonobo and the symbiosis of insects and field flowers. On the other hand, where resources
are scare, competition begins and we have social structures like the baboons and leafy trees that
kill competitive seedlings by their own shade.
However, throughout evolution cooperation outweighs competition. If it didn't we'd still be solitary
single-celled amoebae. As things are, our own bodies are well-furnished with microscopic critters
from RNA through viruses and bacteria, many of whom run the shop in the background. Cooperation,
whether vestigial, symbiotic or by choice, is the way that leads to life. Competition is the way
of violence and death. That's not Marxism. It's nature.
"Forget Richard Dawkins, dominance is certainly not universal among living creatures. If a species
exists with a plentiful supply of food, domination and competition are unnecessary."
There is a plentiful supply of food for the human species.
So how can you explain the general situation that exists on the planet whereby governing elites control
and enjoy the major part of all that human labour creates to the detriment of over 50% of the human
population ?
"Neo-fascist responses"? Get over yourself Klein. Trump won because the Clinton's "own" the Democrat
Party and they and Goldman Sachs were confident she would be the nominee and millions of gullible
Americans would vote for Hillary.
By far the best candidate was Bernie Sanders but the Clintons had him run off the road by "Super
Delegates". Oh and by the way is it not odd that the Democrats did not change the electoral system
when they were in power?
House of Cards comes close to showing us just how ruthless the Clintons really are.
Well, that it is worthwhile reading. At the beginning I thought: good that someone pointed that out.
People haven't forgotten NAFTA and Hillary's speeches in closed wall street circles and so on. I
just wanted to remark that it was probably a multitude of reasons that explain the Democratic loss.
Comey's interference and other stuff that is outright dismissed by the author also played a role.
However, as I read on I couldn't help but realize that there seems to be another person who wasn't
even aware that Bernie and Elizabeth supported Hillary and wasn't aware of their arguments or the
Democratic platform Bernie Sanders fought so hard for. The last two paragraphs speak volumes of Ms.
Klein's realism or rather the lack thereof.
And how clear does it have to be that "the Network" is and has been purely supra and post-national?
How many trillions in dark loot in shadow banks and other asset dumps which the Panama Papers only
show a fraction of?
These Fokkers and Fuggers, what drives them? How much is enough? There's always been this cadre
of people who figure out how to scam and manipulate and "transcend boundaries," but to the extent
that exists today? With the habitability of the planet in question?
But then I have to remember that these people are into self-pleasing on a gargantuan scale, are
what we call sociopaths, who have been with the species since "we" figured out how to grow grains
and build granaries and walls to protect the granaries and warriors to man the walls and attack the
neighbors and take their stuff, and artisans to make the weapons and "improvements," and kings to
issue the orders, and priests to justify it all as the Hand and Will of God -- what we call "civilization."
And the people at the top have known since forever that if they insulate themselves adequately from
the rabble, they face no consequences for their predations, and can live out their lives of looting
and indulgence and die comfortably, cared for by loving nurses and doctors who will ease their passing
(unlike what the rest of us now face). Because as they have known since forever, "Apres ils le deluge,"
"IBG-YBG,"
http://tradicionclasica.blogspot.com/2006/01/expression-aprs-moi-le-dluge-and-its.html ,
And what are the rest of us going to do when they have passed on, or fled like the Nazis with
the gold from the teeth of millions and the art treasures and other portable wealth of demolished
and decimated nations, to live out their lives as CIA "assets" or in comfortable temperate South
American and African places? Dig up their corpses and desecrate them, or try to find their "cremains"
and burn them again? They do not care what happens to their children, even.
I wish us ordinary people all the luck in the world trying to create and maintain a different
order that will let everyone eat only to their honest hunger and drink only to their reasonable thirst...
Couldn't agree more. The neo-liberalism orthodoxy instead of suddenly knocking at the door has come
silently home to roost. The Democrats in America and Labor in UK were hand in glove with elites in
the greatest robbery the history has ever seen. The concentration of wealth in one percent which
was rationalized as panacea of all economic ills has turned out to be an opening of mythical Pandora's
box unleashing evils of racism, xenophobia, misogyny etc. The abhorrent echo of "too big to fail"
is still heard by the those who were let down by the same oligarchs. I have yet to find an answer
to the vexing question as to why enormous benefits of human knowledge and scientific advances be
exclusively extracted by one percenters.
Guardian commentators use identity politics and cries of "racism, sexism and xenophobia" to try and
distract the working class from noticing how internationalism, globalization and immigration has
stagnated their wages, moved meaningful jobs oversees and stoked up asset prices allowing a homeowner
in London to earn more by twiddling their thumbs than their Polish cleaner gets paid in a year.
No matter how shrill the likes of Owen, Jonathan, Paul, Polly and Hadley try and distract us with
their daily dribble of identity politics, we increasingly see them as just another faded facet of
the corporatist, internationalist status quo.
The union excesses (which have largely been killed off and the union and former and would-be union
workers looted and impoverished along with the rest of the "lower orders) are just part of the disease
-- which is corruption, and self-pleasing at the expense of everyone else. Union "leaders," absent
disinterested "regulation" by government (which has been mostly corrupted too) and thanks to cooptation
by "capitalists," definitely screwed the ordinary people (who one must acknowledge included quite
a few rank-and-file that aspired to leadership so they could join the looting).
There probably is stuff that needs to be built and manufactured (not the 7,000 pound SUVs and
big Dodge and GMC and Ford F-series and "TUNDRA" trucks) to try to keep the species and culture alive.
But killing the ability of ordinary people to organize, essentially making unions illegal except
in tiny niches, just makes the end-game even worse. And continuing to punch down on working people
on account of some 1962 wages (NOT "salaries," these were hourly payrolls, with "benefits" that in
may cases like pension funds were subsequently looted by "private equity" vampire-squids and captured-government
actions) just makes it harder for ordinary people to come together AS A CLASS and fight the 0.01%
for a decent future.
my post on Facebook that mirrors Naomi:
My thoughts about last night:
Bill Clinton's New Democrats were incinerated last night...arrogant, ivy league, sleeping with Wall
Street, multinational corporations, insurance companies... and thinking that if they wrap themselves
in the social issues from abortion to gay marriage that wage starved workers with enormous bills
and debts, evaporating opportunities, disappearing pensions, shit schools and deteriorating infrastructure
wouldn't notice they were overlooked and forgotten. This election underscores that Economic injustice
is color blind
What I want to know though is that, given the reality of what you are saying, did none of this
occur to the Democratic party prior t the election?
If they knew all this why did they not respond to it instead of continuing to plough the same
old furrow regardless of the likely consequences for ordinary voters?
Why? Because the Dem Elites knew that with Hillary their perks, access, power, etc. was secure. They
wanted status quo and, just as they have behaved the past years, failed to listen to their constituencies,
ignored them. They should have known just by seeing Bernie's exceptional campaign and the enthusiasm
that fueled it, giving him more money than what Hillary often raised from her wealthy donors each
month, that no one was excited about more of the same. Arrogantly, they chose to ignore and minimize
what was before their eyes.
The most cogent analysis I have read so far. Bravo Ms. Klein. In a year where the country was screaming
for populist change, the Democratic party establishment who had their own highly effective populist
candidate, CHOSE to offer up possibly the most "establishment" candidate in history. Fly-over America
responded with a sharply erect, if ignorantly self-destructive middle finger.
Spot on diagnosis. People are angry that neolibralism has failed them and does not given a damn about
them. Clinton offered nothing but the same to too many people. Trump was a molotov cocktail, warts
and all, that they got to throw into Washington.
I don't buy the racist argument. People that elected Obama in 2008 and 2012, but Trump in 2016
are not racist. At the same time I acknowledge that all the KKK people did vote Trump.
Question is, does the left have an answer that is palatable to the people? It would be good if
it did, but I'm not holding my breath. Corbyn isn't it, that you can be certain of.
Clinton was a comically bad choice that made no sense whatsoever. The left often gets told that it
has to endlessly suffer centrist/neo-liberal "lesser evil" candidates in order to defeat the right
as they're more electable, which is an argument that at least makes some logical sense under some
circumstances, even if I disagree with it. But in the case of this election, everyone has known
for years that Clinton is wildly unpopular, and there was a radical alternative to her available
who consistently out-polled her against Trump in the form of Sanders.
Now her backers, such as Hadley Freedman on here today, rather than admitting their massive and
obvious mistake in supporting her against Sanders and generally backing the "centrist" policies that
brought us to this point, are suggesting nonsense such as the idea that those who voted for Trump
should be "held responsible." What does that even mean? What are you going to do, elect a new people?
You could have had a radical candidate who unlike Clinton could have brought about real change, and
unlike Clinton would have attracted many of Trump's blue collar supporters and, you know, won
.
All that lesser evil neoliberal politics gives us is a lack of change that allows the right to
make even more radical changes during the periods they're in power and eventually leads to the rise
of people like Trump, and it's particularly stupid when it throws up deeply unpopular and unelectable
people like Clinton, Miliband or the various empty suits lined up against Corbyn. It's time this
paper decisively turned its back on the concept.
I don't have a lot of confidence in the prospect of political ideologies forged in the Industrial
Age - "left", "right", "conservative", liberal" - being able to meet the challenges of this post-Industrial
age and the future beyond.
Western societies are fracturing into ever-smaller social groups defined by different, complex
combinations of social/economic/national/ethnic/topographical/sexual/religious factors which mushrooming
sub-groups all create their own realities based on the unregulated information they they select from
divisive, self-reflexive social media sources rather than inclusive "mainstream" news media which
have become increasingly corrupted and not trusted.
Fragmentation, disintegration of societies - these lead to paranoia and aggression aimed at the
"other" - and we can see this on both the "left" and the "right" in the blame-games that have followed
Brexit and Trump's victory. The 19th century liberals and conservative who provided the foundations
for the institutions of Western Democracy didn't foresee the emergence of global corporations and
banks with interests that could defy "the national good" or disrupt the moderately equitable distribution
of wealth and replace it with a massive diversion of wealth to a tiny global elite (So long affluent
workers! Goodbye aspiring middle-class!) - while placating most of the population with a consumerist,
material lifestyle mostly funded by debt. The old system is broken.
In both the Brexit referendum and the US election the most striking split was between the old
- the over-50s, clinging to the past - and young people, disconnected in their social media silos,
wanting a different future but, as a generation, not able to organize and politically express their
unhappiness and their hopes for the future because inadequate conventional Left/Right political thinking
doesn't chime with the reality of their lives.
Not everyone who voted for Donald Trump is a racist or a misogynist. Not everyone who voted for
Hillary Clinton has no sympathy with an unemployed factory worker in a mid-west town whose future
has been written off. However, everywhere you look - people are anxious and fearful that "the others"
are trying to stop them getting what they solipsistically feel they deserve.
Donald Trump won't be able to get Apple of Walmart to switch their product sourcing from China
to the US, nor will he be able to halt the long-term economic decline of the US any more than Theresa
May will be able to prevent post-Brexit economic decline in the UK: the challenges our dysfunctional
political institutions face are too complex for politicians who are strong on rhetoric and promises
but intellectually feeble and cowardly when it comes to decision-making and execution.
We need education, public-service-based information, new political ideas and new political parties
that can cut through the destructive white noise of Twitter and Facebook and focus on values that
bring people together and counter the greed of the supra-national elites - something more powerful
than divisive, out-dated concepts like Left and Right.
What a lot of words to say bugger all.
Why do people with no answers always say we need more education ?
We have to get rid of this notion that we US and UK are post industrial.
We have made a huge mistake offshoring our industry and must relocate the more essential parts. We
cannot be a service economy without making things.
Bashing metal turning wood molding plastics must be part of our future.
We cannot be a nation of management consultants and hairdressers.
The boom in population during the Boom didn't help. We are overpopulated, and our current economic
structure cannot support the material lifestyles and the narratives of freedom that we grew up living
with or dreaming about. That's the education that's needed.
Until we accept our current situation, we cannot understand or construct new political ideas,
parties, or narratives.
Neoliberal globalization is the worst kind of socialism, whether or not it is actually socialism.
It's what we're going to get if young people don't become collectively more informed and quickly.
There is an attitude of entitlement among young people that drives towards a socialist mentality
and the left has picked up the scent. They're going to chase that vote and those disaffected voters
are going to chase that lie right down the rabbit hole eventually. If Hillary and Obama have their
way, the riots that are being orchestrated right now will start the process immediately.
A very confused article. Neo liberalism is unfettered Global Capitalism given a nice sounding name.
It is an invention of the right. To think that the most extreme Republican President ever, will improve
the lot of the common man is quite simply bizzare.
A good chunk of Trump's support could be peeled away if there were a genuine redistributive
agenda on the table. An agenda to take on the billionaire class with more than rhetoric, and use
the money for a green new deal
Particularly as Trump himself is a member of that billionaire class and clearly has no interest
in redistributing wealth away from himself, or in doing anything to overhaul the economic system
that has made him very rich.
Trump was elected US President by riding the same wave of anger & disaffection that fuelled Brexit.
Many of those who were disappointed by the result were quick to console themselves with the (wishful)
thought that he will not attempt to implement his more radical proposals, or that, if he tries, he
will be thwarted by the Republicans (who now hold majorities in both the House and the Senate). It
is important to bear in mind however, that any who dare oppose him will know that they do so at the
risk of their seats.
The "Inconvenient Truth" is that the politics of Donald Trump has much in common with movements like
Attack and Occupy Wall Street, and hence with Naomi Klein. They both want to stop, or put a break
on, international trade. Donald Trump wants to revive local production through protectionism. Klein
sees international trade as a source of both environmental and social degradation.
Naomi, thus, carries some responsibility for Donald's success.
The combined Trump/Klein policies would see the old rust belt workers boarding self driven electrical
buses to go to work in the new windmill factories. These windmills, normally, would be both more
expensive and less effective than if the business was subject to international competition, hence
the electricity they produced would be more expensive, giving domestic business a disadvantage.
The new environmental businesses would require support from the public purse (if not, we would
already have had them). The taxpayers seem in no mood for such grand scale subsidies.
History does not repeat itself, but in the 1930s the industrial nations raised barriers to trade
in order to protect their work forces. As a result, everybody got poorer and reacted by electing
extremist politicians.
Michael Moore outlines his post-election strategy. Point 1 is Take over the Democratic Party and
return it to the people. They have failed us miserably.
Exactly the same as what is happening in the Labour Party. But in that case The Guardian supports
neoliberalism and seeks to undermine the ones who are trying to change things.
Sadly I think the electorate in some western societies are in danger of becoming just as ineffective
as 'the proles' in 1984, while the vice like grip of the military/industrial complex is just as tenacious
as that exerted by Big Brother and the party.
Since the entire political class, or least those with any clout all sing from the same hymn sheet
while moderate, or leftist figures, like Corbyn, or Sanders, are bound to be shredded by their own
party and by the media, then what hope, eh, unless that hope is something new and outside of party
politics?
Thank you, thank you, thank you Naomi. Even after an unbelievable defeat, the neoliberals still don't
get it. Blame game articles are starting already but no self reflection.
The role of the media (The Guardian included big time) have a responsibility and offended people's
intelligence and sensitivity about democracy, elites etc. Now they are running for cover. Today,
Hadley Freeman writes "Misogyny won the US election – let's stop indulging angry white men". Disgrace,
offensive and arrogant. Also, Hadley Freeman with "The US has elected its most dangerous leader"...No
remorse, no responsibility, blaming American people for being angry, for swallowing the same medicine
again...
Compare the Guardian and AP (recall who called California early and rigged the pre-selection against
Sanders?) and Waleed Aly here: (
http://www.theage.com.au/comment/us-election-2016-its-not-about-racism-or-sexism-its-about-class-warfare-20161109-gslxzs.html)...What
options did the "forgotten", vast majority, the "insignificant other", the disadvantaged, the
powerless have? When one is drowning, the relatively privileged onlooker has a duty to help rather
than blame the one drowning for "pulling our hair". Of course the future looks terribly bleak for
democracy, gender/racial relations etc...
Seriously, could Clinton be an answer for the family that struggles to pay rent, the homeless,
the unemployed, those scared of terrorism or a WWIII, the working poor, those in debt due to college
fees, those who lost their house and jobs for the sake of "free trade"...These are many, many people
folks...real people with flesh, dreams and humanity...
Understanding their pain and their lack of options (thanks to NDC & the Media) does not mean one
identifies with Trump and the ugly fascist monsters creeping behind him...It's not about us or one's
dream about equality, freedom...It's about survival & human dignity for millions of US people...
Did the demonizing of many working people send them straight to Trump land? Waleed Aly: "progressives
have treated the working class largely as a source of xenophobia ... ignore it at our peril" --
Excellent article much of which could have been written during the past thirty years.
We all know hindsight is a wonderful thing, but I was puzzled as to why Mrs Clinton seemed to
cold shoulder Bernie Sanders. He had already connected with many of the 'left behind' by putting
a Social Democratic view opposite to Mr Trump's views. Both had identified the problems that the
Chicago economists and neoliberalism had caused, but not having Mr Sanders involved or even accepting
that his views would be part of her next administration, Mrs Clinton left the field open to her opponent.
If only she had remembered her husband's slogan 'Its the economy, stupid', it may have turned fire
on Trump's campaign.
There is an irony that although it was right wing politicians who bought in the neo liberal policies
which have impoverished working people, it is the social democratic parties on both sides of the
Atlantic who have suffered by trying to make neoliberalism work. They could not demonstrate however
how 'trickledown' benefitted the poorest and the image left was of rich people sucking up more wealth
and more influence over politicians as Ms Klein points out.
On our side of the Atlantic Mrs Thatcher ensured that the right have a strong supportive press
due to her ownership reforms and the right is gradually weakening our BBC so that any opposition
views will be stifled. Mr Corbyn has already been character assassinated. It remains to be seen if
Mr Trump carries out his threats to the American press supporters of Mrs Clinton to reinforce only
right wing views.
The smell of authoritarian regimes is now appearing in many places.
There was an almost dynastic arrogance in the Clinton's assumption that they would carry the day.
I have often been impressed with Bill's eloquence and Hillary's tough fight for a rational health
and insurance system, but have never heard a word of self-criticism about the dire effects of deregulation
and the financial crisis. The democrats missed their chance for radical measures when they had control
of Congress just after Lehman Bros.
Still, for international affairs, climate change, any sane kind of approach Trump is an unmitigated
disaster. Hillary has much experience in international affairs, but her opportunism in the wake of
9/11 had led her to support the intervention in Iraq. Of course we were all opposed to Saddam's régime,
but not with those means and in that kind of way, made much worse of course by Bush jr. Islamic State
is a direct consequence of the chaos and unemployment in Iraq created under the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld
administration.
"Neo-fascist responses"
"Trump-style extremism"
"they answer it by bashing immigrants and people of colour, vilifying Muslims, and degrading women"
You call my right to vote the way I choose "stupid".
You just don't get it. Millions of Americans voted exactly this way. A big middle finger to the establishment,
media, Wall Street, "experts", and yes moral posturing know-it-alls is a great way to use your vote.
You completely misunderstand Trump. He is far more for the working man than Clinton. The poor
voted for him in droves. And for good reason.
I am an angry white male, and I am not a misogynist, as this paper would have it.
I am fully aware of the appalling nature of Donald Trump.
On the other hand, I fully understand the bureaucratic nature of the Democrat Party, the embedded
interests of Wall Street and the military-industrial complex in that bureaucracy, the dirty tricks
that that bureaucratic machinery got up to in order to extinguish Bernie Sander's campaign.
I am aware of how that machinery has been ramping up a situation of global conflict, shamelessly
recreating an aggressive Cold war Mk II situation with Russia and China, which is simply cover for
the US racist colonial assumption that the world and its resources belongs to it in its sense of
itself as an exceptional entity fulfilling its manifest destiny upon a global stage that belongs
to its exceptional, wealthy and powerful elites.
And I am aware of how Hillary was so keen to service this reality and American image of itself.
And to go beyond that, and bomb Libya for 6 months, killing thousands of civilians (Middle eastern
unpeople) and, may I suggest, doing nothing whatsoever for the women of Libya. Quite the opposite!
Michael Moore, in a talk in which he predicted the victory of Trump before the election, notes
how Trump went into an American car factory and told the executives of that company that if they
relocated to Mexico, he would put a huge tax on their cars coming into America. Not all was misogyny
in the vote for Trump. Whether he delivers on his threat or not, unlike the democrat bureaucratic
machinery, he showed he was actually listening to working class Americans and that he was ;prepared
to face up to company executives.
What has this paper got to say about Hillary and the Democrat Party's class bigotry – its demonstrable
contempt for 10s of millions of Americans whose lives are worse now than in 1973, while productivity
and wealth overall has skyrocketed over those 43 years.
What has this paper got to say about the lives of African American women, which have been devastated
by Republican/Democrat bipartisan policy over the last 43 years?
What has Hadley Freeman got to say about Hillary's comment that President Mubarek of Egypt was "one
of the family? A president whose security forces used physical and sexualised abuse of female demonstrators
in the Arab Spring?
A feminist would need more than a peg on their nose to vote for Hillary – a feminist would need
all the scented oils of Arabia. Perhaps Wahhabi funded Hillary can buy them up.
Great article, but Hilary was hardly responsible for privatization and austerity in the USA. She
only had 2 terms in the senate (and was only one of 450+ in congress). She was in fact mildly center-left
and at least nominally and aginst the TPPA. She could have led a progressive congress (as in the
Johnson year) if her coattails were long enough.
I have never in my long life ever seen a politician so demonized... not by the mainstream media,
but by the new media run mostly by the alt-right and funded by the likes of the Koch brothers. It
worked.
The climate accord is now finished ..any movement towards single payer or paid parental leave,
minimum wage increase ...gone. - military spending is now going up, and Trump is proposing tolls
on all roads -all to be privatized to pay for tax cuts for the top earners. and this is tip of the
iceberg...and not including the racist upswing.
That said, the DNC has a lot to answer for with its undemocratic superdelegates and documented
undemining of Sanders...as did the media who either ignored him or unfairly lambasted him. The RealClearPolitics
average from May 6-June 5 had Sanders at 49.7% to Trump's 39.3%, a 10.4-point cushion...polling that
included independents. In that same time frame, Trump was polling close to Clinton and was even ahead
in multiple polls. Most people were well aware of Sander's so-called "socialist" label since October
the previous year, so I'm unclear if that would have been a factor in the general election.
An analysis of the media is long over due : It was remarkable to see the media, including American
media, go into shock mode and scramble to reorganise the script and the thinking to run a perspective
on what was happening on the night the votes were counted. The media had conditioned themselves to
a Clinton win. Clearly the editors and the reporters were not out on the streets and in the hustings
getting all the messages. The Guardian is in shock mode after the British Referendum and the American
Presidential Election. The most politically dangerous person is a discontented voter with a ballot
paper. How could the media have not spotted in advance what was happening ? I do not buy the lazy
perspective that the voters deceived the media into their voting intentions. Personally, I think
the media have got fat and lazy and need to come out from behind their editorial desks.
Naomi, has omitted one very important detail: automation, i.e. the use of AI to replace
jobs.
This absolutely requires us to restructure society to provide security and purpose to each every
one of us who is not part of the super rich owners.
For example we will see driving jobs rapidly disappearing within the next five to ten years.
I also notice that where the worst effects of rampant capitalism are ameliorated there appear
to be fewer issues. I'm thinking of many Western European nations where the issues do not yet seem
to have the over fifty percent traction that they have in the US and the UK. If Australia were suffering
a similar economic slow down it may well join the US and UK. But what's happening in Canada and New
Zealand?
The problem with centre left parties throughout the western world is that they sold out to corporate
capitalism, which forced people who rejected neoliberalism to go to the extremes to protest. The
question is, once someone's loyalty has been broken, it is that much more difficult to win loyalty
back, if it is possible at all.
And you're right - the neoliberal capture of centre-left legacy parties from the Democrats to
the German SPD and French Socialist Party has created an exceptionally unpromising landscape and
public mood. Trust has been broken. Responsibilities betrayed. Intellectual traditions traduced,
distorted, or simply cast aside.
In moments of humiliation or defeat - and make no mistake, this was both - there needs to be reflection
and a willingness to return to first principles as well as evolving new strategies and insights appropriate
to the present.
Economic realities shape cultural and social relations. The left should always listen to the experiences
of people and build a consensus based on solidarity between groups and not the alienated support
of different self-interested demographics. Exploitation is the corner-stone of capitalism when it
is left to run unchecked. Without regulation, capitalism tends towards monopolies that end up subverting
democracy itself.
These are the issues Bernie Sanders raised and the enthusiasm with which it was greeted is testimony
to the fact that there are white working class voters hungry for a politics of positive, radical
social change. Intoning with robotic piety that the people have never had it so good despite overwhelming
evidence to the contrary is a form of deceit; when it comes from the mouths of corporate Democrats,
it is political obscenity.
In moments of humiliation or defeat - and make no mistake, this was both - there needs to be
reflection and a willingness to return to first principles
I think what I've realised from the Brexit and Trump results is how desperate people are for something
to believe in. What used to be called 'the vision thing'.
For decades we've had to choose between different forms of managerialism and variations on a theme
of 'there is no alternative to rule by the market'. We just had to put up and shut up, there was
nothing to get excited about. Nobody's ever jumped up and down shouting "What do want? Trickle-down
economics! When do we want it? Now!"
The thing about demagogues is they offer that emotional release. What we need is principled political
movements that also enable it.
Absolutely right. One of the by-products of There Is No Alternative, though, is that managerialism
and wonkiness have been fetishised. Hillary Clinton's devastatingly uninspiring offer to the American
people was hailed by some as a mark of her "maturity", "experience", and "competence". Bernie Sanders,
by contrast, was attacked for firing people up, for inspiring them to believe change was possible
- by implication, of course, such attacks rest on the belief that change is in fact not possible
at all. It is a bleak nihilism that states the best that can be hoped or organised for is a slightly
better management of existing structures.
There is a hypocrisy, too, when someone like Clinton derides Trump's economic plans as "Trumped-up
trickle-down". In reality, they were arguing simply over who would offer the *bigger* tax cuts. The
notion that there were alternative visions on the economy, on climate change, on racial equality
or healthcare and education, not to mention foreign policies, was almost completely absent.
This is why I wrote that in some ways Hillary Clinton was the greater evil in this election. It
is one thing to hark backwards to a mythical past, as Donald Trump did. It is quite another to put
such tight constraints on the entire notion of what is possible in the future. Trump offered nostalgia.
Clinton offered the tyranny of low expectations - forever.
But that is all in the past now - for the future, I agree with you that there needs to be a willingness
to offer radical, inspirational and visionary alternatives to a system that has simply not worked
for the majority of people who through no fault of their own find their quality of life, possibilities
and security in decline while wealth flows ceaselessly upwards and into the pockets of those already
insulated from the harm their favoured politicians unleash.
Bernie showed what can be done - he also showed that people are willing to finance such campaigns
and thus liberate the political process from the death-grip of corporate donations. Personally, I
am sceptical of whether the Democratic Party is an appropriate vehicle for such politics (I know
that Bernie doesn't agree with me!) Regardless, his campaign should provide somewhat of a model for
what can be done - and likewise his statement from today. Amidst the headlong rush - in this paper
as well - to denigrate and smear voters for failing to advance bourgeois liberal interests, it is
imperative that deprived, working class voters of all races are listened to properly and not labelled
racists and bigots. A few no doubt are. But these are, in many instances, the same people that helped
elect Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. They are crying out for something to organise around. Hillary
Clinton failed because she was not and never has been a person capable of, even interested in, offering
that.
This is a great article. Alas, I fear it is all too late.
Everyone knew what was wrong with Clinton and the whole rotten DNC operation, but they supported
her anyway. When her flaws were pointed out, people kept saying 'but she's a woman.' As if that even
mattered.
Fundamentally the left has to abandon its obsession with identity politics, embrace national identity
and individual liberty. Then it will be able to get over its economic message and win the day.
The Donald's victory is on the Dem estab who rigged the primaries. It's on the MSM who acted as Hillary's surrogate and cheerleader
and who slandered Sanders' voters at every opportunity. And they're STILL slandering Sanders' voters. More important for the Dem
estab to keep control of the party than to win against the GOP. Bernie would'a beat Trump, imo.
But not "respectable" coat tails. Remember, the Democratic Party is the "respectable" left, not those hooligan socialists that
want to make bosses and workmen peers (ew).
Ironically, "respectability" is an intrinsically far-right notion in the first place.
"... Abedin had top secret information on a laptop in her home that she never disclosed to FBI interviwers. She and her husband had money, or a source of income, above & beyond what their salaries would indicate. The latter could be the former. ..."
"... If military intelligence folk gave Trump his insider knowledge about Weiner's laptop, maybe they suspected the source of leaking intelligence. Dig? ..."
Willing to go out on a speculative limb. Some people want answers like Giuliani, and not because
they're interested, as Holder shrilly claimed, in 'jail[ing] political opponents.'
Abedin had top secret information on a laptop in her home that she never disclosed to FBI
interviwers. She and her husband had money, or a source of income, above & beyond what their salaries
would indicate. The latter could be the former.
Ah, yes, The Nation! I have had a subscription for decades (it was much better in Cockburn's
day) and have long marveled that they raise money by having cruises where wealthy donors can schmooze
with columnists or special contributors, and apparently see no conflict between this and their
professed political values. (Come cruise the Caribbean and see the dear natives and talk about
social justice? Ugh!) They do still sometimes produce good articles, but their lack of connection
with the world outside their bubble seems to be growing.
As for the amazingly stupid "whiteness" article (and I did not vote for Trump), Vanden Heuvel
should hang her head in shame. Her own husband has styled the neocon (and therefore HIllary) policy
toward Russia as something close to lunacy. Which is to say there were plenty of reasons to vote
against Hillary other than "whiteness." In fact a more accurate statement about most white people
and race is that they probably don't think about it much at all. Call this insensitive if you
like, but ignoring a problem and contributing to it are not the same things. After all the author
of the Nation article clearly hasn't spent a lot of time thinking about Russia, Syria, Libya,
or Hillary's victims. Nevertheless I'll refrain from calling him a bigot.
Nor did I, but given his thesis, that doesn't matter. I'm still complicit. Another interesting
consequence of his thesis is that Hillary Clinton is also complicit. But 'complicity' implies
agency – one cannot be unconsciously complicit since 'being complicit' means 'knowingly helping
helping others to commit a crime or other wrong doing'.
Speaking of extending the sense of a term, the 'white supremacy' trope is suffering from overuse.
First of all, there really are white supremacists. You can Google it. But like 'antisemitic' once
it is applied generally as a term of abuse it loses its force – it suffers semantic inflation.
Jill Stein's running mate, Ajamu Baraka suggested in a blog post that Bernie Sanders had a commitment
to Eurocentrism and normalized white supremacy . Calling Bernie Sanders a white supremacist
is really rendering the term meaningless.
"... As open-minded and tolerant [neo]liberals purport to be, they are more moralistic than they realize. They can't for the life of them understand why enlightened California should not count more than degenerate Texas; their contempt towards the heartland and jokes about withdrawing the franchise from the rednecks is revealing of their vacuous elitism. Their willingness to flee the country and protest now that their chosen political instrument was rejected is a testament to their complete political flaccidity. As much as a broad coalition must be built to push the world to the Left, these people deserved to lose and hurt. The problem is they won't learn, and the world will be a disaster by the time they are forced to realize their errors. ..."
I was talking to my parents (not very well-versed in political theory) about how liberals really
have no true convictions other than their fragile faith in the universality of moral values. My
friends are literally convulsing from having to resolve the following contradictions in their
minds:
a) their hatred and misunderstanding of Trump's victory,
b) straight up animosity towards anyone perceived to have supported Trump or not supported Hillary
(the latter being the same as the former for them), and
c) reiterating their faith in democracy and "respecting" everyone's right to democratic expression.
As open-minded and tolerant [neo]liberals purport to be, they are more moralistic than
they realize. They can't for the life of them understand why enlightened California should not
count more than degenerate Texas; their contempt towards the heartland and jokes about withdrawing
the franchise from the rednecks is revealing of their vacuous elitism. Their willingness to flee
the country and protest now that their chosen political instrument was rejected is a testament
to their complete political flaccidity. As much as a broad coalition must be built to push the
world to the Left, these people deserved to lose and hurt. The problem is they won't learn, and
the world will be a disaster by the time they are forced to realize their errors.
As a non-American in America, this election has been supremely clarifying to me about the true
nature of the educated, enlightened West[en elite]. But I am also thankful for having come closer
to my true convictions mostly because of the coverage and comments at NC. You guys rock!
"... Prioritizing foreign over domestic policy, Jackson's former aides Richard Perle , Douglas Feith , and Elliott Abrams - along with some fellow travelers like Paul Wolfowitz - eventually shifted their allegiance to the right-wing Republican Ronald Reagan. They formed an important pro-Israel, "peace through strength" nucleus within the new president's foreign policy team. ..."
John Feffer Director, Foreign Policy
In Focus and Editor, LobeLog Much has been made of the swing in political allegiances of neoconservatives
in favor of Hillary Clinton.
As a group, Washington's neocons are generally terrified of Trump's unpredictability and his flirtation
with the alt-right. They also support Clinton's more assertive foreign policy (not to mention her
closer relationship to Israel). Perhaps, too, after eight long years in the wilderness, they're daydreaming
of an appointment or two in a Clinton administration.
This group of previously staunch Republicans, who believe in using American military power to
promote democracy, build nations, and secure U.S. interests abroad, have defected in surprising numbers.
Washington Post columnist
Robert Kagan , the Wall Street Journal 's
Bret Stephens , and the
Foreign
Policy Initiative 's
James Kirchick have all endorsed Clinton. Other prominent neocons like The National Review
's William Kristol
, the Wall Street Journal 's
Max Boot , and SAIS's
Eliot Cohen have rejected
Trump but not quite taken the leap to supporting Clinton.
A not particularly large or well-defined group, neoconservatives have attracted a disproportionate
amount of attention in this election. For the Trump camp, these Republican defectors merely prove
that the elite is out to get their candidate, thus reinforcing his outsider credentials (never mind
that Trump initially
wooed neocons like Kristol).
For the left , the neocons are flocking to support a bird of their feather, at least when it
comes to foreign policy, which reflects badly on Clinton. The mainstream media, meanwhile, is attracted
to the man-bites-dog aspect of the story (news flash: members of the vast right-wing conspiracy support
Clinton!).
As we come to the end of the election campaign, which has been more a clash of personalities than
of ideologies, the neocon defections offer a much more interesting storyline. As the Republican Party
potentially coalesces around a more populist center, the neocons are the canary in the coal mine.
Their squawking suggests that the American political scene is about to suffer a cataclysm. What will
that mean for U.S. foreign policy?
A History of Defection
The neoconservative movement began within the Democratic Party. Henry "Scoop" Jackson, a Democrat
from Washington State, carved out a new position in the party with his liberal domestic policies
and hardline Cold War stance. He was a strong booster of civil rights and environmental legislation.
At the same time, he favored military build-up and a stronger relationship with Israel. He was also
dismayed with the Nixon administration's détente with the Soviet Union.
Prioritizing foreign over domestic policy, Jackson's former aides
Richard Perle
, Douglas Feith
, and Elliott
Abrams - along with some fellow travelers like
Paul Wolfowitz
- eventually shifted their allegiance to the right-wing Republican Ronald Reagan. They formed
an important pro-Israel, "peace through strength" nucleus within the new president's foreign policy
team.
At the end of the Reagan era, their commitment to such policies as regime change in the Middle
East, confrontation with Russia, and opposition to multilateral institutions like the United Nations
brought them into conflict with realists in the George H.W. Bush administration. So many of them
defected once again to support Bill Clinton.
Writes
Jim Lobe:
A small but not insignificant number of them, repelled by George H.W. Bush's realpolitik, and
more specifically his Middle East policy and pressure on then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir to
join the Madrid peace conference after the first Gulf War, deserted the party in 1992 and publicly
endorsed Bill Clinton. Richard Schifter, Morris Amitay of the Jewish Institute for National Security
Affairs, Angier Biddle Duke, Rita Freedman of the Social Democrats USA, neocon union leaders John
Joyce and Al Shanker, Penn Kemble of the Institute for Religion and Democracy, James Woolsey,
Marty Peretz of The New Republic, and Joshua Muravchik of the American Enterprise Institute all
signed a much-noted ad in The New York Times in August 1992 endorsing Clinton's candidacy. Their
hopes of thus being rewarded with top positions in a Clinton administration were crushed.
The flirtation with Clinton's Democratic Party was short-lived. Woolsey, Schifter, and Kemble
received appointments in the Clinton administration, but the neocons in general were unhappy with
their limited influence, Clinton's (albeit inconsistent) multilateralism, and the administration's
reluctance to intervene militarily in Rwanda, Somalia, and Bosnia. Disenchantment turned to anger
and then to organizing. In 1997, many of the same people who worked for Scoop Jackson and embraced
Ronald Reagan put together
the Project for the New American Century in an effort to preserve and expand America's post-Cold
War unilateral power.
A handful of votes in Florida in 2000 and the attacks on September 11 the following year combined
to give the neocons a second chance at transforming U.S. foreign policy. Dick Cheney became perhaps
the most powerful vice president in modern American history, with Scooter Libby as his national security
adviser. Donald Rumsfeld became secretary of defense, with Paul Wolfowitz as his deputy and Feith
as head of the policy office. Elliott Abrams joined the National Security Council, and so on. Under
their guidance, George W. Bush abandoned all pretense of charting a more modest foreign policy and
went on a militarist bender.
The foreign policy disasters of the Bush era should have killed the careers of everyone involved.
Unfortunately, there are plenty of think tanks and universities that value access over intelligence
(or ethics) - and even the most incompetent and craven administration officials after leaving office
retain their contacts (and their arrogance).
Those who worry that the neocons will be rewarded for their third major defection - to Reagan,
to Bill Clinton, and now to Hillary Clinton - should probably focus elsewhere. After all, the Democratic
nominee this year doesn't have to go all the way over to the far right for advice on how to construct
a more muscular foreign policy. Plenty of mainstream think tanks - from
the Center for a New American Security on the center-right to the leftish
Center for American Progress - are offering their advice on how to "restore balance" in how the
United States relates to the world. Many of these positions - how to push back against Russia, take
a harder line against Iran, and ratchet up pressure on Assad in Syria - are not very different from
neocon talking points.
But the defections do herald a possible sea change in party alignment. And that will influence
the trajectory of U.S. foreign policy.
The Walking Dead
The Republican Party has been hemorrhaging for nearly a decade. The Tea Party dispatched many
party centrists - Jim Leach, Richard Lugar - who once could achieve a measure of bipartisanship in
Congress. The overwhelming whiteness of the party, even before the ascendance of Trump, made it very
difficult to recruit African Americans and Latinos in large numbers. And now Trump has driven away
many of the professionals who have served in past Republican administrations, including the small
clique of neoconservatives.
What remains is enough to win state and local elections in certain areas of the country. But it's
not enough to win nationally. Going forward, with the further demographic shift away from white voters,
this Republican base will get older and smaller. Moreover, on foreign policy, the Trumpistas are
leading the party in a
nationalist,
apocalyptic direction that challenges the party leadership (in emphasis if not in content).
It's enough to throw dedicated Republicans into despair. Avik Roy, who was an advisor to the presidential
campaigns of Marco Rubio, Mitt Romney, and Rick Perry,
told
This American Life :
I think the Republican Party is a lost cause. I don't think the Republican Party is capable
of fixing itself, because the people who are most passionate about voting Republican today are
the Trump voters. And what politician is going to want to throw those voters away to attract some
unknown coalition of the future?
One of his Republican compatriots, Rob Long, had this to say on the podcast about how anti-Trump
survivors who stick with the party will navigate the post-election landscape:
It'll be like The Walking Dead, right? We're going to try to come up with bands of people and
walk across the country. And let's not get ourselves killed or eaten and hook up with people we
think are not insane or horrible or in some way murderous.
Coming out of this week's elections, here's my guess of what will happen. The Republican Party
will continue to be torn apart by three factions: a dwindling number of moderates like Susan Collins
(R-ME), right-wing fiscal conservatives like Paul Ryan (R-WI), and burn-the-house-down Trumpsters
like Jeff Sessions (R-AL). Foreign policy won't be much of an issue for the party because it will
be shut out of the White House for 12 years running and will focus instead on primarily domestic
questions. Perhaps the latter two categories will find a way to repair their breach; perhaps the
party will split in two; perhaps Trump supporters will engineer a hostile takeover.
The Democratic Party, meanwhile, may suffer as a result of its success. After all, how can a single
party play host to both Bernie Sanders and
Robert Kagan ?
How can the party promote both guns and butter? How can Hillary Clinton preserve Obama's diplomatic
successes - the Iran deal, the Cuba détente, the efforts to contain climate change - and be more
assertive militarily? Whatever unity the party managed during the elections will quickly fall apart
when it comes to governing.
In one sense, Clinton may well resurrect the neocon legacy by embracing a more or less progressive
domestic policy (which would satisfy the Sanderistas) and a more hawkish foreign policy (which would
satisfy all the foreign policy mandarins from both parties who supported her candidacy).
At the same time, a new political axis is emerging: internationalists vs. insularists, with the
former gathering together in the Democratic Party and the latter seeking shelter in a leaky Republican
Party. But this categorization conceals the tensions within each project. Internationalists include
both fans of the UN and proponents of unilateral U.S. military engagement overseas. Insularists,
who have not turned their back on the world quite as thoroughly as isolationists, include both xenophobic
nationalists and those who want to spend war dollars at home.
The trick of it for progressives is to somehow steal back the Democratic Party from the aggressive
globalists and recapture those Trump voters who are tired of supporting war and wealthy transnational
corporations. Or, perhaps in the wake of the Republican Party's collapse, progressives could create
a new party that challenges Clinton and the neocons.
One thing is for certain, however. With a highly unpopular president about to take office and
one of the major political parties on life support, the current political moment is highly unstable.
Something truly remarkable could emerge. Or voters in 2020 might face something even more monstrous
than what has haunted this election cycle.
Apparently, the Donald's victory on Tuesday is 'on' white people whether they voted for him
or not! In voting for DT, white people did not vote against their interests; rather they voted
for the one thing they value above all else – their whiteness. At the Nation:
And please note that I am not including any qualifiers. For working-class whites. Or whites
from Rust Belt cities. Or white men. Or white people who didn't graduate from college-or rural
whites, or Midwestern whites, or Southern whites. Or whites disillusioned with Washington.
Or whites who hate Clinton. Or whites who felt ignored by politicians. This is on all white
people-who are complicit even if they didn't vote for Trump.
Does this mean I would not be a white supremacist if Hillary had won? Seems to me that if we
had elected Hillary a whole rainbow coalition of people would have been complicit in bringing
to power a white, neo-liberal war hawk who have shortly launched attacks both economic and military
both here and abroad.
Naw, "white supremacist" is a thing, an indelible genetic Magic Marker evidenced by having
skin tones that are actually cream, tan, peach and an assortment of pastels, shading to gray-green
as death approaches or fiery red if overexposed to the cleansing power of natural (or tanning-bed)
light, and any such creature who voted Democrat did so purely out of fear of retribution… /s
Exactly. Except I'd expand that to say the complicity extends far beyond Trump voters, to those
whites who voted against Sanders in the primary, and indeed to *everyone* who did. Yes, those
black church ladies voting lockstep in the early primaries for the only candidate who could lose
to Trump did their part for the white supremacist cause as well, albeit as unwittingly as many
of the others.
Thus, the author of that piece, Damon Young, who I'll assume from reading it was a Clinton
supporter, was it turns out equally complicit as well but obviously lacking in sufficient self-awareness
to see it.
"Yes, there exists a difference between allies and racial antagonists. They are not the
same. But those allies obviously haven't done enough collectively to repudiate the mindsets
existing in their families and among their friends…
"Millions of white voters have shown us that nothing existing on earth or in heaven or hell
matters more to them than being white , and whichever privileges-real or fabricated, concrete
or spiritual-existing as White in America provides."
First, such exit polling as I have seen indicates it is not that white people turned out in
droves to vote for Trump; it is rather the case that people of color DIDN'T turn out in droves
to vote for Clinton. Second. it is rather a tall order for us "allies" to convince other
folks' friends and family of anything – not always but mostly within one's own circle values
are largely shared. Although I certainly have had my share of exchanges affirming the legitimacy
of Black Lives Matter with commenters here who would deny it.
But heavens, all the snark on this site about Van Jones yesterday? Folks, this stuff is heartfelt.
See Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me. The seemingly hysterical outcry of fear
above has to be understood within the context of the history of this country. Can anyone seriously
doubt that as the demographics change the fight to preserve power/status for those who traditionally
held it will intensify? Who gives up power voluntarily?
We are going through a seismic change and it could well get ugly, and those who have been on
the receiving end of ugly for generations are terrified, truly terrified. I got quite the dressing
down from an African American friend who is furious I didn't vote for Clinton. I stood my ground,
but with compassion. In the end, the browns inevitably will prevail, and let us hope they are
kinder to whites than whites have been to them over the centuries.
Just wondering, is there anywhere a source of reliable media writers that we can rely on?
A small list to start with:
– Glenn Greenwald
– Naomi Klein
– Thomas Frank
– Chris Hedges
Need a full list of people that we can trust to give us an honest breakdown.
What is the quality of coverage at the Al Jaazera English network and RT? Any alt media sites
you guys trust?
This election has a been a serious eye opener. A lot of supposedly left leaning sites proved
to be little more than Clinton bots – the Daily Kos being the most visible example but there have
been others.
Everybody on your list is usually pretty good, but no one is on all the time. It's totally
possible to be right about a lot things and woefully blind to others. See Matt Taibbi, Christopher
Hitchens, etc. It's always important to not assume someone knows what they're talking about just
because that's been the case in the past. No matter the source, you always gotta think it through
yourself.
That said, this site (obviously) and anything by Bill Black, Michael Hudson, The Real News
Network, or Laura Flanders is a good bet for real news. And that's just for starters….
Chris Arnade, Michael Tracey, Carl Beijer, Stephanie Kelton, Francis McKenna, Adolph Reed,
Corey Robin, Jimmy Dore, Benjamin Dixon, Erica Garner, Dan Froomkin.
Mmm…. these days it's a rare type of journalist who won't fall on earth void of sense, nor
drop to earth dead of mind! Agree with those listed by NC commenters but would also include the
following below. Why?
None of them (rarely?) prostrate themselves upon the ground………they instead bravely choose to behold
the earth in all its' darkest extremities. For they are a crazy bunch of hellacious mortals piercing
our gloom with much added sparkle and stars….
International Business Times – David Sirota and his colleagues
The Young Turks – Cenk Uygur, Ana Kasparian (a formidable young lady!) et al
The Empire Files with Abby Martin (another formidable young lady!)
Watching the Hawks – Tabetha Wallace (as with Ana and Abby!), Tyrel Ventura etc.
The Intercept – Lee 'BIG' Fang, Jeremy Scahill, and the rest of the team
There are also a few typically labeled right-wingers IMHO who are good too, not least because
they remain sane and surprisingly impartial for the most part compared to their batty brethren!
Otherwise I'd suggest the non-English language media for a decent lay of the USA…
While Cenk can be hard on the ears when in all caps rants, TYT is really quite informative
and entertaining. Dore on a tear complete with parenthetical remarks manages to compress a lot
of detail in a short time. He makes comedy central look sick/dead.
I don't know, just watched a few of their recent videos. Michael Shure is the epitome of the
clueless identity politics liberal, sneering about all the 'people in overalls with pitchforks'
who voted for Trump, and John Iadarola seems convinced the only possible reason non-college educated
white men under 45 could have voted for Trump is because they hate women. Pathetic.
Both the WSJ and the National Review appear to thankfully give some out-of-the-box latitude
to their teams at times to present some impartial, well-researched and well-written journalism.
Don't read everything in either journal but I haven't seen any "sneering of people in overalls
with pitchforks" from either journal.
Is there really an answer to this? I mean, everyone we "ostensibly" seem to trust seems to
have a blind spot somewhere.
Glenn Greenwald is great, but has some issues with releasing Snowden documents (which I think
Cryptome has discussed), plus there's always the issue of what angle Pierre Omydar is pushing.
Chris Hedges seems to have a an overly soft heart for religion in general and was overly apologetic
in my mind to Islam after 9/11, which I think Sam Harris did a good job of pointing out the flaws
in his, not logic, but rather "faith."
But then Sam Harris has some serious issues with wanting to use nuclear weapons against religious
fundamentalists too… (There's a good podcast interview between Dan Carlin and Sam on you tube
where Dan I think exposes some of Sam's blind spots.)
Chomsky, of course, has the problem of LOTE-ism by telling everyone to hold their noses and
vote for Hillary.
I say something along the lines of trust, but verify…or trust no one (at the heart of it all)
when it comes to journalistic sources, experts or other thinkers.
I don't think it could ever be a matter of just following "trusted" sources as you might not
always be able to know when they've been compromised or change their viewpoints and subtly/slowly
alter their reporting to fit their new perspective or paradigm.
Sometimes it's not even subtle, like when Christopher Hitchens went all in with Shrub on invading
Iraq & Middle East adventurism.
It's mostly about critical thinking skills and putting pieces together using varied sources,
even those that might disgust you simply because they force your to look at issues from other
perspectives.
I wonder if it isn't a bit risky to create such lists, though I admit my daily reading implicitly
relies on one. Nobody, even well-intentioned, can be guaranteed always reliable, nor is someone
who really annoys you sometimes always going to be wrong. Facts matter, with sources if they are
not in the category of general knowledge, and clear reasoning, and a willingness to consider other
points of view when they are offered with some substantiation–all the sorts of things that characterize
our hosts and some of the most knowledgeable and thoughtful commenters here.
When I was in seventh or eighth grade we had "current events" in which you had to bring in
a news article from one of the newspapers, present its information, and give your preliminary
critique, which opened up discussion from the floor, with questions about whether the article
was giving all the information or seemed to give inappropriate weight to one point of view without
factual support, etc. Judging by letters in my local paper, I suspect this practice died long
ago, as many people don't understand that opinion and bias on the editorial page are both permissible
and to be expected, but yet others fail to see them in articles.
Sometimes for kicks or because of recent developments, I look for news sources in another area
or country, for which I have sometimes found this site useful:
Either use advanced browsing or scroll down to the map and pick your area. You can quickly
find out which papers you're capable of reading and then apply your critical thinking skills to
try to assess the target audience, possible backing, bias, etc. It's an interesting exercise,
and sometimes preferable to getting the "expert" opinion of someone in this country who really
doesn't know the subject as well as he claims to.
holy cow, i wrote the longest reply i've written in years and it went poof!
anywho…Thank You Kathrine for the reminder that skills that seem to come naturally, can always
use a bit of dusting off. Thanks for the link, luv aby.
Chris Savage, Ellen Nakashima, Carol Rosenberg, Mark Ames, John Dolan aka Gary Brecher aka
The War Nerd, James Risen, Ray MacGovern, Robert Parry, Michael Winship, Bill Moyers, Charles
P. Piece.
Various good suggestions have certainly been made by other posters, but I should like to commend
the value of visiting other sites where you may encounter views that are not homogeneous with
yours. If I may, I would submit that this very narrowness of field of vision was part and parcel
of the collapse of the Democrat party's fortunes; when one lives in an echo chamber, where all
that is on offer is confirmation bias, and all other viewpoints are believed to
"... EXCELLENT article on the "unbearable smugness" of the media from a CBS political correspondent/managing director: ..."
"... great piece, and the comments are scathing. what I don't get is why they don't mention that beyond being insular and smug, the journos are also corporate-owned agents of the 1%. ..."
"... Yesterday I watched Rachel Maddow patronizingly begin a lesson on what things make America America – how we know we're here and nowhere else in the world. I had to turn it off toot sweet when she with a completely straight face enumerated a "free" press as one of those things. ..."
"... Not state owned, eh? But you are corporate owned, same difference. Why did MSNBC not report at all on opposition to the TPP – wouldn't have anything to do with being owned by ComCast now, would it? ..."
"... Years ago I liked her, now she is the poster child for smug. ..."
Personally, this tin-foil hatter believes the rating is -19%.
To get that number, one has to rig the poll though (by including people not longer living or
not born yet)…e.g. 1,000 people live in this town, and of them, 1,190 disapprove.
great piece, and the comments are scathing. what I don't get is why they don't mention that
beyond being insular and smug, the journos are also corporate-owned agents of the 1%.
I broke my ban on MSM the night of the election and have been "slipping" a bit.
Yesterday I
watched Rachel Maddow patronizingly begin a lesson on what things make America America – how we
know we're here and nowhere else in the world. I had to turn it off toot sweet when she with a
completely straight face enumerated a "free" press as one of those things.
Not state owned, eh? But you are corporate owned, same difference. Why did MSNBC not report
at all on opposition to the TPP – wouldn't have anything to do with being owned by ComCast now,
would it?
Years ago I liked her, now she is the poster child for smug.
"... I watched the election coverage over at R/T. I haven't watched a lamestream media broadcast of any kind for about 15 years, other than being a captive audience member at the airport, but toward the end of the night I tuned in to MSNBC and CNN. The funereal mood at these two "networks" was pretty over-the-top. The smug look on Rachel Maddow's face was priceless. ..."
I watched the election coverage over at R/T. I haven't watched a lamestream media broadcast
of any kind for about 15 years, other than being a captive audience member at the airport, but
toward the end of the night I tuned in to MSNBC and CNN. The funereal mood at these two "networks"
was pretty over-the-top. The smug look on Rachel Maddow's face was priceless.
I really thought
all of the talking heads were going to break out into tears. It was quite a disturbing scene.
They all looked like special little snowflakes who had just had something stolen from them. The
hubris was unbelievable. The coverage over at R/T was a breath of fresh air, in comparison. The
anchors were professional, they understand clearly and with articulation described how and why
the election went the way it did. R/T clearly "gets it" and did a bang-up job on election night
2016. Good job,, R/T.
sou812
3h ago
0
1
The Democrats abandoned the only people that are paying
the bills in this country - period! And the working class
sent a message loud and clear. The arrogance and ignorance
of he left is astounding: focused on the novelty of
getting a woman elected to the presidency even though she
was the worst of choices. An arrogant, dishonest, bought
and paid for Wall Street elitist like her husband, they
thought that her experience was enough to seal her
success. Ta!
The Dem's have lost it all and it will take two decades to
recover, if ever.
After 8 years of "no change" Obama, a president totally owned by the corporations, banks, big
money etc. and the man who failed to do anything about that huge and ever widening wealth gap
the Democrats were obviously out of favour with the poor working class. But the voters seem to
have forgotten than Trump still stands for the Republicans and thats where he will enrol his
cabinet from, he can not act alone. Those same weak, ineffective ultra right loonies that
stood against Trump and made him look special will now stand with him in government. Its still
money politics.
Mutinous DNC Staffers Rage At Donna Brazile: "You Are Part Of The Problem... You Let This Happen"
Tyler Durden Nov 11, 2016 2:55 PM 0 SHARES Liar, cheat, and fired CNN contributor Donna Brazile faced
an angry crowd on Thursday night ... as Democratic Party officials held their first staff meeting since Hillary Clinton was crushed
by the "least qualified candidate for President ever."
As The Huffington Post reports, Donna Brazile, the interim leader of the Democratic National Committee, was giving what one
attendee described as "a rip-roaring speech" to about 150 employees, about the need to have hope for wins going forward, when
a staffer identified only as Zach stood up with a question.
"Why should we trust you as chair to lead us through this?" he asked, according to two people in the room. "You backed a
flawed candidate, and your friend [former DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz] plotted through this to support your own gain
and yourself."
Some DNC staffers started to boo and some told him to sit down. Brazile began to answer, but Zach had more to say.
"You are part of the problem," he continued, blaming Brazile for clearing the path for Trump's victory by siding with Clinton
early on . "You and your friends will die of old age and I'm going to die from climate change. You and your friends let this
happen, which is going to cut 40 years off my life expectancy."
Zach gathered his things and began to walk out. When Brazile called after him, asking where he was going, he told her to
go outside and "tell people there" why she should be leading the party.
Two DNC staffers confirmed the exchange, and Brazile appeared to confirm the exchange also...
"As you can imagine, the individual involved is a member of the staff and I personally do not wish to discuss our internal
meetings."
Brazile could move to stay on as chair after March, but Thursday's meeting shows at least some party officials want fresh blood
at the top.
"The party is at a crossroads. They have been using the same playbook for decades, and now, they won't let anyone else come
in and change it up," said one former longtime DNC staffer, who requested anonymity to speak freely.
"The fact that Democrats just sat through a devastating defeat and now have to trust the leadership that not only contributed
to Clinton's loss, but the crushing 2014 midterm losses, well, what do they expect?"
Mutiny at the DNC? And where does Brazile go now? No TV network will hire a proven liar and cheat. There's no Democratic campaign
for her to jump to like Wasserman-Schultz... So Brazile will probably find herself worling at The Clinton Foundation.
Disgusting as it is, yes, my understanding is Obama can do
exactly that. My guess is, want to or not, he probably will come under so much pressure
he will have to pass out plenty of pardons. Or maybe Lynch will give everyone involved
in the Clinton Foundation immunity to testify and then seal the testimony -- or never
bother to get any testimony. So many games.
For Obama, it might not even take all that much pressure. From about his second day
in office, from his body language, he's always looked like he was scared.
Instead of keeping his mouth shut, which he would do, being the lawyer he is,
Giuliani has been screaming for the Clintons' scalps. That's exactly what a sharp lawyer
would do if he was trying to force Obama to pardon them. If he really meant to get them
he would be agreeing with the FBI, saying there doesn't seem to be any evidence of wrong
doing, and then change his mind once (if) he's AG and it's too late for deals.
With so many lawyers, Obama, the Clintons, Lynch, Giuliani, Comey, no justice is
likely to come out of this.
@ Posted by: Ken Nari | Nov 11, 2016 2:51:53 PM | 55
I heard a podcast on Batchelor
with Charles Ortel which explained some things -- even if there are no obvious likely
criminal smoking guns -- given that foundations get away with a lot of "leniency"
because they are charities, incomplete financial statements and chartering documents, as
I recall. I was most interested in his description of the number of jurisdictions the
Foundation was operating under, some of whom, like New York were already investigating;
and others, foreign who might or might be, who also have very serious regulations,
opening the possibility that if the Feds drop their investigation, New York (with very
very strict law) might proceed, and that they might well be investigated
(prosecuted/banned??) in Europe.
The most recent leak wrt internal practices was just damning ... it sounded like a
playground of favors and sinecures ... no human resources department, no written
policies on many practices ...
This was an internal audit and OLD (2008, called "the Gibson Review") so corrective
action may have been taken, but I thought was damning enough to deter many donors (even
before Hillary's loss removed that incentive) particularly on top of the Band (2011)
memo. Unprofessional to the extreme.
It's part of my vast relief that Clinton lost and will not be in our lives 24/7/365
for the next 4 years. (I think Trump is an unprincipled horror, but that's as may be,
I'm not looking for a fight). After the mess Clinton made of Haiti (and the
accusations/recriminations) I somehow thought they'd have been more careful with their
"legacy" -- given that it was founded in 1997, 2008 is a very long time to be operating
without written procedures wrt donations, employment
Yet the mainstream media will persist in explaining the Trump disaster in terms of race or
gender issues, never in terms of economic class.
This is how they keep us divided.
The Democrats did a fine job of stomping out any enthusiasm by sabotaging
Bernie Sanders.
The DNC became a wholly owned subsidiary of Clinton Family Inc. starting
in about 2008. Control the rulemakers/money flow, and you can control who
the nominee is. At least that is the conventional thinking, and Clinton Inc.
is nothing if not conventional.
To buy the DNC, she chose to go to the Wall Street banksters, and others.
Essentially an "up front" bribe. No smoking gun needed to be created. They
knew what they were paying for, without it being said.
(I'm curious to see how many "donations" the Clinton Foundation receives,
now that she's been pushed out on an ice floe.)
They never anticipated a challenger who didn't need the DNC, or it's
cash.
They ignored the stats showing how many people wouldn't vote for Hillary
Clinton under any circumstance. Just call them racist/sexist/dumbazz hicks,
and call them "deplorables". Ask Mitt Romney how that worked out for him.
She lost an election to DONALD TRUMP. Even without the airwaves filled
with Republican attack ads. (Lack of RNC enthusiasm for Trump? Or a
recognition that Hillary's negatives couldn't be covered in a 30 second
commercial?).
If it wasn't for the Clinton's collective ego, and lust for power/money
(after all, we all now that in the current state of affairs, the moneyed
class drives policy), we'd all (well, all of us who don't live in the
rarefied air of the 1%ers/Banksters) be celebrating the upcoming
inauguration of President Sanders.
". Clinton raised $154 million in September for her campaign and the party.
And people "getting the resources they needed"? Seems odd."
smells like the allegations thrown at the Clinton Foundation--insiders
directing very generous contracts to other insiders. with competence or
efficacy secondary.
How Podesta may have caused Clinton to weaken her position on Wall Street.
New Wikileak shows he pushed her to show "love" for Obama rather than criticism
of BHO's handling of reform
The next day, an OpEd under the byline of Hillary Clinton appeared at
Bloomberg News. Obama's name was mentioned four separate times in a highly
favorable light. Clinton said Obama had signed into law "important new
rules" after the 2008 financial crash; she was going to "build on the
progress we've made under President Obama"; "thanks to President Obama's
leadership" the economy is now on "sounder footing"; and the Dodd-Frank
financial reform legislation that Obama signed into law had "made important
reforms, but there's more to do."
Since Bloomberg News is heavily read by people on Wall Street, this was a
signal to them that Hillary Clinton would leave the bulk of her husband's
cash cow deregulation in place by following in the footsteps of Obama. What
Obama's administration had done in 2010 was to create the illusion of
regulating Wall Street by proposing hundreds of vaguely worded rules in the
Dodd-Frank legislation, then putting crony Wall Street regulators in charge
at the SEC and U.S. Treasury to be sure the rules were never actually
implemented in any meaningful way. (Under Dodd-Frank, the U.S. Treasury
Secretary now sits atop a new financial stability body known as the
Financial Stability Oversight Council. The crony Federal Reserve, which
failed to see the crisis coming, was given enhanced supervisory powers over
the largest Wall Street bank holding companies.) Obama even ignored one of
his own rules in Dodd-Frank. It called for Obama to appoint a Vice Chairman
for Supervision at the Federal Reserve to police Wall Street.[…]
There is another telling fact in the email. Hillary Clinton seems to have
had very little to do with actually fashioning her policies. Another Clinton
adviser, Dan Schwerin, indicates that WJC (William Jefferson Clinton, i.e.
Bill Clinton) had edited the OpEd with "further refinements from policy
team," but there is no mention that Hillary Clinton was involved in her own
OpEd that would bear her byline.
So not just by Podesta but victimized by her philandering husband one last
time? Awhile back Pat Lang suggested it was really Bill who pushed her into
running. The impeach-ee needed his legacy redeemed.
Hillary Clinton seems to have had very little to do with actually
fashioning her policies.
This is a point that has irked me ever since I waded into the Podesta
emails - how even the smallest public statement or even just a Tweet
required numerous rounds of revisions, feedback, vetting and tweaking from
the Clinton insiders.
It seemed that Clinton rarely had a fire in the belly on any particular
position. It was whatever her team determined was the most politcally
advantageous at the moment.
Maybe this is how most presidential candidates function, but it made me
see Clinton as Presidential Robot Version 2016, programmed by her team to
simulate the appearance of a person with convictions.
I'm sure she has some real convictions and I'm sure she has done real
good in the world. But maybe Assange is right - she has been consumed by
power and greed and was seduced by the possibility of more.
In the wreckage of Hillary Clinton's unexpected loss, liberal lawmakers and advocacy groups have started plotting a major overhaul
of the Democratic National Committee, with the aim of using the staid organization to reconnect the party with working-class voters
it lost to President-elect Donald Trump.
Much of the talk since Tuesday's election has focused on selecting a new chairman, with the most frequently mentioned successor
being Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), a leader of the Congressional Progressive Caucus who backed the primary bid of Sen. Bernie
Sanders (I-Vt.).
On Thursday afternoon, former Vermont governor Howard Dean (D) offered his service for a second tenure as DNC chairman, saying
on Twitter: "The dems need organization and focus on the the young. Need a fifty State strategy and tech rehab. I am in for chairman
again."
Evil Incarnate1956
I think the Republicans should get down on their knees and give thanks to God for Barack Obama. I'm serious.
He did great at getting himself elected, and he had some coattails when he was on the ballot. When he wasn't on the ballot,
the Dems' election performance has been one unmitigated disaster after another- midterm epic-fails in 2010 and 2014, and Tuesday's
election the frosting on the cake.
Where is the Democrats' bench strength? Where is their future? Besides Barack Obama, the face of their party today is Hillary
Clinton, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Steny Hoyer.
Obama, by cramming Obamacare down people's throats against their will, and his executive order overreach, has taken a wrecking
ball to the Democrat Party.
I hope the Democrats will adopt a strategy to continue the trend.
NewbieWaDoobie
Neat trick.....if you were to take the overtones of the media at large and the messaging coming from the HRC camp you can easily
see why she lost the rust belt. I worked as a carpenter in South Bend, IN from about 2002-2008 and she was never going to win
those people without a MESSAGE....when did she ELEVATE AND STUMP HARD for income equality and the platform....NEVER!!!! It
was against her principles and the interests of the people who surrounded her and the DNC.....FOOLS!!!!!
Neoliberalism is DEAD....even the IMF, published a report on this back in June 2016....take a look at Glen Greenwald's piece
while you're at it.
The GOP has the White House, the Senate and the House, the 33 state Governerships and, for the next 30 years, the US Supreme Court
(once Trump picks the next 3 Justices).
What we do know is that people like me, and probably like most readers of The New York Times,
truly didn't understand the country we live in. We thought that our fellow citizens would not, in
the end, vote for a candidate so manifestly unqualified for high office, so temperamentally unsound,
so scary yet ludicrous.
We thought that the nation, while far from having transcended racial prejudice and misogyny, had
become vastly more open and tolerant over time.
We thought that the great majority of Americans valued democratic norms and the rule of law.
It turns out that we were wrong. There turn out to be a huge number of people - white people,
living mainly in rural areas - who don't share at all our idea of what America is about. For them,
it is about blood and soil, about traditional patriarchy and racial hierarchy. And there were many
other people who might not share those anti-democratic values, but who nonetheless were willing to
vote for anyone bearing the Republican label.
I don't know how we go forward from here. Is America a failed state and society? It looks truly
possible.
Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton – as senator, secretary of
state, and active partner in the Clinton Foundation – has had the privilege of
influencing major players in governments across the globe.
The result of her efforts has largely been the unfettered consolidation of
autocratic power, instability (when not total collapse) in vulnerable states, and
a global jihadist movement with its own Caliphate infiltrating some of the world's
most strategic locations.
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The above map shows the nations of the world Clinton's policies have
destabilized and, below, an explanation of why each is labeled the way it is. This
is meant to be a comprehensive list, though by no means complete: there are few
nations in which an American secretary of state has no influence whatsoever.
Emboldened Autocrats
China
As secretary of state, Clinton presided over a policy known as the "
pivot
to Asia
," meant to increase American visibility in the continent and, in
particular, bring China and the United States closer together. Clinton publicly
supported the "
one-China
policy
" – China's way of imposing itself on the Republic of China (Taiwan),
Tibet, Hong Kong, and the western Xinjiang region – and encouraged China to
buy up U.S. debt
.
Following her tenure as secretary of state, Clinton expressed support for
incoming president Xi Jinping in private. In a 2013 private speech now public,
thanks to the organization WikiLeaks, Clinton
said
it was "good news" that Xi was "doing much more to try to assert his
authority" than his predecessor, Hu Jintao.
Since then, Xi has declared himself the "
core
"
leader,
comparable to Mao Zedong
;
colonized
the maritime territory of six nations in the South China Sea; used
state violence
to crack down on the nation's skyrocketing Christian
population; and engaged in multiple Communist Party purges, citing unspecified "
corruption
."
Cuba
Hillary Clinton has loudly supported President Obama's policy to "normalize"
relations with Cuba, and her associates
maintain close ties
to the Washington, D.C., community that benefits from
relations with the Castro regime. President Obama's "normalization" has
triggered a boom
in violent arbitrary arrests of political dissidents and a
new wave of refugees seeking to leave the communist dictatorship before the United
States changes its mind about treating them as political refugees.
Iran
Hillary Clinton's work to embolden the Iranian Islamic dictatorship began early
in her term as secretary of state. During Clinton's tenure, the Obama
administration all but ignored the Iranian Green Revolution, a series of protests
against then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei.
Clinton's State Department
rejected requests for funding
from groups doing the work on the grounds of
documenting Khamenei's rampant human rights abuses against unarmed protesters.
The Obama administration's crowning achievement in securing the Shiite
Caliphate's rule came years later, of course, in the form of the Joint
Comprehensive Plan of Action, or the Iran nuclear deal. While the parties signed
the deal long after her departure from State, Clinton was responsible for "naming
the negotiators for the nuclear talks and approving two major U.S. concessions to
Iran in 2011 – guaranteeing Iran the right to enrich uranium and agreeing to close
the IAEA's investigation of Iran's past nuclear weapons work,"
according to Fred Fleitz of the Center for Security Policy
.
Malaysia
Under Prime Minister Najib Razak, Malaysia has become a hotbed of
corruption
and,
increasingly,
radical
Islamic sentiment
. The Obama administration has, nonetheless, cozied up to
Kuala Lumpur, including
improving
its human rights ratings
to make it an eligible partner in the Trans-Pacific
Partnership. Among the allies Clinton world
feared
would
challenge Clinton, the presidential candidate, on Malaysia were labor leader
Richard Trumka and George Soros.
Secretary of State Clinton approached North Korea with a policy known as "
strategic
patience
," which one expert described as "sitting back and watching while
North Korea continued to build up its nuclear weapons program." North Korea has
detonated two nuclear weapons since Clinton has been out of office, in part
emboldened by "strategic patience" and in part, many argued after the fourth of
five tests,
emboldened by the Iranian nuclear deal
.
Russia
Clinton has attempted to convince the American people that her arch-rival in
the presidential election is Russian President Vladimir Putin, but long before it
was politically expedient for her to do so, Clinton was the face of President
Obama's "Russian reset" – the one that preceded the collapse of Ukraine – and
bragged privately to big-money donors of her close ties to Putin. The strongman
trusted her so much, she once boasted, that he invited her to his "
inner
sanctum
."
Turkey
In her memoir,
Hard Choices
, Clinton reserved praise from President
(then-Prime Minister) Recep Tayyip Erdogan that sounded not unlike her optimistic
profiling of Xi Jinping. Erdogan,
she said
, was "an ambitious, forceful, devout and effective politician." Of
his government, she said Erdogan was correct to seek "zero problems with
neighbors." WikiLeaks-released emails
have since revealed
that Erdogan sought to buy influence through campaign
donations to the Clintons.
During his tenure as president, Erdogan has advanced the cause of Islamism in
Turkey to unprecedented levels since the rule of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, going so
far as to allow Islamic prayers in the Hagia Sophia, an iconic Christian landmark.
He has also conducted
mass arrests of political enemies
and shut down numerous media outlets who
dare challenge his government
. Last Friday, Erdogan's government
arrested the leaders
of the People's Democratic Party (HDP) – a pro-Kurdish,
pro-Christian center-left party – in a midnight raid on dubious "terrorism"
charges.
Venezuela
Clinton served as secretary of state during the tail end of the tenure of
socialist dictator Hugo Chávez, who died shortly after she departed. Chávez
presided over a bleak time in Venezuelan history: nationalizing private
industries, cozying up to enabling autocrats in Cuba, Iran, and China, and using
violence to suppress anti-socialist opposition.
In 2009, Clinton defended negotiating with Chávez and fostering diplomacy with
him, telling a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing that the U.S.
should dismiss
Chávez's ties to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and communist China
because "we've isolated him, so he's gone elsewhere. I mean, he's a very sociable
guy."
Venezuela's economy is now in free fall as dozens of prisoners of conscience
languish in prison under Chávez's hand-picked successor, Nicolás Maduro. Maduro's
management of his own government has been so abysmal that, with Clinton gone,
President Obama has declared Venezuela
a national security threat
.
Emboldened Corruption
Algeria
The government of Algeria is involved in one of the most egregious corruption
schemes of the Clinton Foundation: offering the Clintons a $500,000 check. "The
donation reportedly coincided with an intense effort by Algeria to lobby Mrs
Clinton's State Department over US criticism of its human rights record,"
The
Telegraph
notes
.
Brazil
Earlier this year, Brazil
impeached and ousted
its socialist President Dilma Rousseff for a variety of
fiscal improprieties, including the misrepresentation of government funds to lure
investors. Triggering protests that numbered in the millions, however, was
Rousseff's deep involvement in something known as "Operation Car Wash," a
sprawling corruption scheme in which dozens of government officials took millions
in kickbacks from projects commissioned by the state-run oil company Petrobras.
As secretary of state, Clinton had longtime ties to Rousseff and
praised
"her commitment to openness, transparency," stating that "her fight
against corruption is setting a global standard" in 2012.
Haiti
The Clinton Foundation's
exploitation
of Haiti's poverty and the damage caused by a 2010 earthquake has
left many of those nation's leaders disgusted enough to speak up about the
corruption. An operation to aid earthquake victims run by the Clintons was also
found to have "
played
a role
" in an unprecedented cholera outbreak in that country.
Kazakhstan
Among the more alarming deals Clinton cut at the State Department was the
nuclear deal that handed one-fifth of America's uranium production capacity to
Russia. While Russia usurped control of the Uranium One corporation, the Clinton
Foundations coffers filled with Russian money.
In addition to Uranium One control, the
New York Times
reports
that Russia gained control of "mines in Kazakhstan that are among the
most lucrative in the world."
Morocco
A more recent WikiLeaks reveal shows that the Clinton Foundation received a $12
million donation from the King of Morocco in exchange for Hillary Clinton's
presence at a Foundation summit. At the last minute, she
did not attend
.
Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia has enjoyed longstanding ties to the Clinton family and
donated
at least $50 million to the Clinton Foundation. These ties persisted
even as Clinton
privately admitted
she had evidence that Saudi Arabia provided "clandestine
financial and logistic support to ISIL and other radical Sunni groups in the
region."
United States
While the Clinton Foundation often served as a
laundry service for foreign donations
, Clinton fostered questionable ties with
plenty of domestic entities, as well. Clinton
has raked in millions
in donations from big business in America, donors to
which she privately promised "
open
borders
." Clinton's ties to Department of Justice officials in the wake of an
investigation into her use of an illicit private server for state business has
also raised many questions regarding cronyism and corruption within our own
country.
Jihadist Boom
Afghanistan
President Obama famously declared that the war in Afghanistan
was over
for American soldiers in 2014. The policies that led to that point
only exacerbated the damage a vacuum of American power in the nation wrought
following the announcement.
Under Clinton, the State Department
largely ignored
a sprawling corruption problem that left Afghanistan with few
resources to combat the Taliban or al-Qaeda. Clinton policies elsewhere in the
world also led to the development of an Islamic State presence in the nation.
Currently, U.S. officials
warn
that the Taliban is stronger than it has been since September 11, 2001.
Indonesia
One of Clinton's first stops as secretary of state was Indonesia, where she
proclaimed, "If you want to know whether Islam, democracy, modernity and women's
rights can co-exist, go to Indonesia."
At the time
(2009), her visit was met with chants of "Allahu akbar" and an
inauspicious shoe-throwing protest against her.
Since then, Clinton's foreign policy greatly contributed to the creation of the
Islamic State, a jihadist group
actively courting Indonesian recruits
. "Between 300 and 700 Indonesians are
believed to have joined the group in Syria and Iraq over the past two years," the
BBC reported in July, adding that 30 Indonesian groups had pledged allegiance to
Islamic State "Caliph" Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Iraq
Unlike Syria, the collapse of which followed violent acts of oppression by a
ruthless tyrant, Iraq's collapse is more closely tied to American foreign policy
due to the nation's longtime occupation there. An American presence on the ground
in Iraq did more to subdue jihadist elements there than any action to routinely
fleeing Iraqi military and its corrupt leadership took.
While Clinton was in office, President Obama
withdrew
most of America's troops from Iraq, leaving a power vacuum rapidly
filled by the Islamic State, al-Qaeda, and Iran-backed Shiite militias. Military
experts
have agreed
that a prolonged American presence in the country would have
contributed to stability and withdrawing left the nation vulnerable to Islamist
colonization.
Nigeria, Niger, Chad, Cameroon
The nations surrounding Lake Chad continue to struggle with the rise of Boko
Haram, a jihadist group
founded in 2002
but active throughout the 2010s in northeast Borno state,
Nigeria. Boko Haram is currently the deadliest wing of the Islamic State and
responsible for killing
an
estimated 15,000
and displacing millions. The group rose to international
prominence following the abduction of more than 200 schoolgirls from a secondary
school in the Borno region in 2014. Most of these girls remain in captivity,
"married" off to Boko Haram jihadists for use as sex slaves.
As secretary of state, Clinton
refused to designate
Boko Haram, at the time affiliated with al-Qaeda, a
Foreign Terrorist Organization. The move
severely hindered
the Nigerian government's ability to target and neutralize
the group, as they could not seek U.S. aid for the mission.
Somalia, Kenya
Clinton
traveled to Somalia
personally in 2009 t0 offer support against al-Shabaab, an
al-Qaeda affiliated terrorist group. Following that visit, al-Shabaab made its
ties to al-Qaeda public and went on two high-profile rampages against civilians in
Kenya: the
Westgate Mall massacre
in 2013 and the
Garissa University attack
of 2015. It has since then become a popular enough
jihadist group to have found itself the object of courtship of both its al-Qaeda
overlords and the Islamic State.
The United States did little in those in-between years to subdue al-Shabaab,
including a "
Yemen-like
"
drone policy to target leadership and an embarrassing
failed raid
on an al-Shabaab camp in 2013. Clinton herself merely
implored the terrorists
to allow humanitarian aid.
Collapse of State
Libya
Clinton's role
in the death of Americans, including a U.S. Ambassador, in the
September 11, 2012, siege of Benghazi is now well-known. She had a major role in
pushing for the decision to support Libya's uprising against dictator Muammar
Gadhafi, as well, however – a move President Obama followed up with little
strategy to ensure that a stable, secular government would replace Gadhafi. The
collapse of the Gadhafi dictatorship has left Libya a failed state, at first
governed by
two rival parties
, but now partially governed by the
Islamic State
,
al-Qaeda
, and a variety of Islamist tribal militias.
The Syrian Civil War began in 2011, during Clinton's stewardship of the State
Department. The Secretary reportedly
pushed President Obama
to arm Sunni Arab Syrian rebels, armed militias that
included a high number of jihadist elements, many of whom would move on to fight
for the Islamic State. The President
reportedly did not heed Clinton's advice
, though he failed to do much of
anything else, either.
In 2011, however, Clinton referred to dictator Bashar al-Assad as "
a
reformer
" by reputation, whose nascent rule was cause for optimism, casting
some doubt on how adamantly she pushed President Obama to arm the Syrian rebels.
Today, Syria remains a land mass governed piecemeal by the Islamic State,
Kurdish militias, al-Qaeda linked armed Sunni groups, and the
Iranian-Russian-Assad alliance. Assad
claimed in an interview
earlier this month that Syria is now "much better off"
than before the civil war.
Sudan/South Sudan
The creation of South Sudan, the world's youngest nation, was a direct product
of Clinton's foreign policy. Years of civil war in Sudan between the northern
Muslim population and the Christian south gave way to secession and a war between
two nations, not one. By the time Clinton visited in 2012,
the
Washington Post
referred to the refugee crisis there as one of
the worst in the world (soon to be eclipsed by the Syrian crisis).
The State Department persisted in aiding the South Sudanese government, even
continuing to provide funding after evidence surfaced that the government
employed
child soldiers
. Subsequent reports unveiled that Clinton-related firms
received money
from the South Sudanese government, as well.
Clinton's State Department support appears to have done little to
stabilize South Sudan. Report of
mass rape
at UN camps are common, and the country is
now facing a famine
.
Ukraine/Georgia
The Obama administration's tepid responses to Russian colonization of former
Soviet states have left Ukraine without its Crimea region and its eastern
provinces in collapse. In Georgia, the breakaway regions of
Abkhazia and South Ossetia
, invaded in 2008, remain under pseudo-Russian
control.
Hillary Clinton presided over a "Russian reset" policy meant to dissuade
Vladimir Putin from pillaging his neighbors. Clinton even gave her Russian
counterpart Sergei Lavrov a literal "reset button" as a gift,
leaving him baffled
. The reset succeeded in keeping Russia from obstructing
the negotiation of the Iran nuclear deal and the invasion of Libya
, but did
little to convince Putin to change his foreign policy.
Subsequent revelations showed the Clintons
taking money from both sides
of the Ukraine conflict and being careful of
making too tough a stand against Putin's aggression.
Yemen
As secretary of state, Clinton made the first visit as America's top diplomat
to Yemen since 1990. There, she told Ali Abdullah Saleh that
she
would support
a program to return al-Qaeda terrorists imprisoned at Guantánamo
Bay, Cuba, to Yemen, while also acknowledging that Yemen was a hotbed of
al-Qaeda activity. Saleh is now an ally of the Iran-backed Houthi rebels, which
have launched a civil war against current President Abd Rabbo Mansur Hadi.
Al-Qaeda is possibly the most stable entity in a nation where
80 percent
of
civilians live off of humanitarian aid,
quadrupling its presence in the nation in a year
. Yemen is a failed state torn
apart by an emboldened Iran and Saudi Arabia, both major beneficiaries of the
Clinton State Department's policies.
The Migrant Crisis
Austria, Belgium, the Balkan nations, Cyprus, Denmark, France, Germany,
Greece, Italy, Jordan, Lebanon, the Netherlands, Turkey, Sweden, the UK
The Obama administration's Syria and Libya policies (See above.), executed
while Clinton was secretary of state, have triggered a flood of
nearly five million
displaced Syrians
and
more
than one million Libyans
seeking refuge in Europe and the Middle East.
Refugees from Afghanistan, Pakistan, sub-Saharan Africa, and other volatile
regions have added to the masses seeking a new home, rejected in countries like
Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia who have criticized the West for being
unwelcoming.
"... The origins of Daesh, known commonly as the Islamic State or ISIS, tie back directly to Obama and Clinton policy delusions and half measures of the Iraq and Syria conflicts. ..."
"... The FSA exerted zero control over the dozens of rival militias fighting each other and the Assad regime in Damascus. The Syrian Rebel groups were like dozens of hungry baby vultures in a nest all competing for resources, and the worst and meanest destroyed their counterparts using the aid given them by their misguided American benefactors. ..."
"... The Sunni Arab Gulf states piled on behind the U.S. government to help their Sunni brethren with more arms and cash. The result was a true race to the bottom of Syrian Rebel groups. ..."
"... The chaos sewn globally by ISIS today grew directly from the bad seeds planted by the Clinton/Obama failures in the basics of statecraft. ..."
"... Obama/Clinton continued to approach the Middle East with the same naivety that led the Bush Administration into Iraq in the first place. For all of the criticism that Obama levied on Bush, he continued to apply a deeply delusional Washington perspective to Middle Eastern politics and culture - ignoring all we should have learned in 13 years of Iraq conflict and warfare. ..."
The origins of Daesh, known commonly as the Islamic State or ISIS, tie back directly to Obama
and Clinton policy delusions and half measures of the Iraq and Syria conflicts.
With the recent release of an August 2012
classified intelligence memo to then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton detailing the presence
of the organization that became ISIS among the Syrian oppositional forces supported by the West,
it's important to remember the history of exactly how the Islamic State arose from the ashes of a
failed Obama/Clinton foreign policy.
The Syrian "Arab Spring" agitations that began in March 2011, where majority Sunnis rebelled against
an Assad run Alawite Shia Ba'th Party, quickly dissolved into a multi sided proxy war. Clinton State
Department policy grew into helping these Sunni rebels under the banner of the "Free Syrian Army
(FSA)" with weapons, money and diplomatic support.
However, the reality is that the FSA existed only in the minds of the State Department leadership.
The FSA exerted zero control over the dozens of rival militias fighting each other and the Assad
regime in Damascus. The Syrian Rebel groups were like dozens of hungry baby vultures in a nest all
competing for resources, and the worst and meanest destroyed their counterparts using the aid given
them by their misguided American benefactors.
The Sunni Arab Gulf states piled on behind the U.S. government to help their Sunni brethren
with more arms and cash. The result was a true race to the bottom of Syrian Rebel groups. All
the while the Assad regime's traditional allies of Russia and Iran provided weapons, training, and
even thousands of fighters themselves to combat the U.S. supported Sunni rebels. The Obama/Clinton
team couldn't even do a proxy war correctly.
The chaos sewn globally by ISIS today grew directly from the bad seeds planted by the Clinton/Obama
failures in the basics of statecraft.
... ... ...
Obama/Clinton continued to approach the Middle East with the same naivety that led the Bush
Administration into Iraq in the first place. For all of the criticism that Obama levied on Bush,
he continued to apply a deeply delusional Washington perspective to Middle Eastern politics and culture
- ignoring all we should have learned in 13 years of Iraq conflict and warfare.
Erik Prince is a former Navy SEAL, founder of Blackwater, and currently a frontier market
investor and concerned parent.
"... If one "fact" is known to be false then one is inclined to think those "facts" one is unfamiliar with are also false. I'll always think of Clinton's behavior on hearing of Gadaffi's death. That's the thing you want running the most powerful corporation on earth. ..."
"... I don't remember Krugman saying that Bush Sr. spent his days at the CIA so he trained as a professional assassin. ..."
If one "fact" is known to be false then one is inclined to think those "facts" one is unfamiliar
with are also false. I'll always think of Clinton's behavior on hearing of Gadaffi's death. That's
the thing you want running the most powerful corporation on earth.
The election was rigged by Russian intelligence, which was almost surely behind the hacking of
Democratic emails, which WikiLeaks then released with great fanfare. Nothing truly scandalous
emerged, but the Russians judged, correctly, that the news media would hype the revelation that
major party figures are human beings, and that politicians engage in politics, as somehow damning....
-- Paul Krugman
[ A wildly speculative, purposely inflaming even dangerous passage. And in keeping with previously
expressed, inflaming Krugman stereotypes.
I know, I know, the Russians are going to eat our children for breakfast but I am in no mood
for another era of Cold War McCarthyism. Children for what? OMG. ]
OMG, the Russians not being satisfied with eating the children of Cleveland are also going to
eat the Baltics and we all know that Baltics are already endangered (climate change and all).
Who knew?
"Save the Baltics from hungry Russians," must be the cry through the land. Save the Baltics,
I am ready.
I'm hearing is simply a recognition that Putin is a problem and that his agents are trying to
influence the election, which they sure appear to be doing and have done in many other cases in
many countries. It's SOP for this guy....
[ I know, I have no idea how to portray this as absurd as it actually is. Remember though,
I am always ready to go to the Baltics when called to battle. ]
What is important and saddening is the wild Cold War prejudice, a prejudice that extends to China
and would readily descend to name-naming. I get this, fortunately I get the prejudice.
No matter, when called as I have made clear I will be naming-names from A to Z, but I get this.
That's why a British court has effectively overturned the results of the Brexit vote – in
a lawsuit brought by a hedge fund manager and former model – and thrown the fate of the country
into the hands of pro-EU Tories, and their Labor and Liberal Democrat collaborators.
This stunning reversal was baked in to the legislation that enabled the referendum to begin
with, and is par for the course as far as EU referenda are concerned: in 1992,
Danish voters rejected the EU, only to have the Euro-crats demand a rematch with a "modified"
EU treaty which won narrowly. There have been repeated attempts to modify the modifications,
which have all failed. Ireland voted against both the Lisbon Treaty and the Nice Treaty, only
to have the issue brought up again until the "right" result was achieved.
"... We know those in Washington with a vested interest in maintaining a US empire overseas will fight to the end to keep the financial gravy train flowing. The neocons and the liberal interventionists will continue to preach that we must run the world or everything will fall to ruin. But this election and many recent polls demonstrate that their time has passed. They may not know it yet, but their failures are too obvious and Americans are sick of paying for them. ..."
Regardless of How America Votes, Americans Want a Different Foreign Policy
,
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I have said throughout this presidential campaign that it doesn't matter much which candidate
wins. Both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are authoritarians and neither can be expected to roll
back the leviathan state that destroys our civil liberties at home while destroying our economy and
security with endless wars overseas. Candidates do not matter all that much, despite what the media
would have us believe. Ideas do matter, however. And regardless of which of these candidates is elected,
the battle of ideas now becomes critical.
The day after the election is our time to really focus our efforts on making the case for a peaceful
foreign policy and the prosperity it will bring. While we may not have much to cheer in Tuesday's
successful candidate, we have learned a good deal about the state of the nation from the campaigns.
From the surprising success of the insurgent Bernie Sanders to a Donald Trump campaign that broke
all the mainstream Republican Party rules – and may have broken the Republican Party itself – what
we now understand more clearly than ever is that the American people are fed up with politics as
usual. And more importantly they are fed up with the same tired old policies.
Last month a fascinating poll was conducted by the Center for the National Interest and the Charles
Koch Institute. A broad ranging 1,000 Americans were asked a series of questions about US foreign
policy and the 15 year "war on terror." You might think that after a decade and a half, trillions
of dollars, and thousands of lives lost, Americans might take a more positive view of this massive
effort to "rid the world of evildoers," as then-president George W. Bush promised. But the poll found
that only 14 percent of Americans believe US foreign policy has made them more safe! More than 50
percent of those polled said the next US president should use less force overseas, and 80 percent
said the president must get authorization from Congress before taking the country to war.
These results should make us very optimistic about our movement, as it shows that we are rapidly
approaching the "critical mass" where new ideas will triumph over the armies of the status quo.
We know those in Washington with a vested interest in maintaining a US empire overseas will fight
to the end to keep the financial gravy train flowing. The neocons and the liberal interventionists
will continue to preach that we must run the world or everything will fall to ruin. But this election
and many recent polls demonstrate that their time has passed. They may not know it yet, but their
failures are too obvious and Americans are sick of paying for them.
What is to be done? We must continue to educate ourselves and others. We must resist those who
are preaching "interventionism-lite" and calling it a real alternative. Claiming we must protect
our "interests" overseas really means using the US military to benefit special interests. That is
not what the military is for. We must stick to our noninterventionist guns. No more regime change.
No more covert destabilization programs overseas. A solid defense budget, not an imperial military
budget. US troops home now. End US military action in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and so on.
Just come home.
Americans want change, no matter who wins. We need to be ready to provide that alternative.
By Daniel
Larison James Traub gamely
tries to convince us (and himself) that Clinton's foreign policy won't be as aggressive and meddlesome
as she says it will be, but he undermines his argument when he says this:
As a senator and later secretary of state, she rarely departed from the counsel of senior military
officials. She was far more persuaded of the merits of Gen. David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal's
counterinsurgency plan for Afghanistan, which would have sent an additional 40,000 troops there,
than Obama was and maybe even more than then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates was. She rarely departed
from Gates on any significant issue. Of course, the one time she did so was on Libya, where she
advocated intervention and he did not [bold mine-DL]. On Syria, Clinton may have to choose between
her own expressed commitments and a Pentagon that is far more cautious and more inclined to see
mishap than are civilian interventionists. I wonder how Kagan-esque she will be in the White House.
Less so, perhaps, than she was as secretary of state.
In other words, when military officers recommended a larger escalation, she agreed with them,
and when Gates didn't support intervention she didn't agree. Clinton was fine with advice from the
military when it meant supporting deeper involvement, but she broke with Gates when he didn't want
to take sides in a foreign war. That isn't a picture of someone who consistently heeds military advice,
but rather someone who always opts for the more aggressive option available at the time. It doesn't
make much sense that Clinton as president would be less "Kagan-esque" than she was as a member of
Obama's Cabinet. As president, she will have considerable leeway to do as she sees fit, Congress
will be pathetically quiescent as usual, and most of the foreign policy establishment will be encouraging
her to do more in Syria and elsewhere. Clinton will be predisposed to agree with what they urge her
to do, and in the last twenty years she has never seen a military intervention that she thought was
unnecessary or too risky. Why is that suddenly going to change when she has the power of the presidency?
In virtually every modern case, a new president ends up behaving more hawkishly than expected based
on campaign rhetoric. All of the pressures and incentives in Washington push a president towards
do-somethingism, and Clinton has typically been among the least resistant to the demand to "do something"
in response to crises and conflicts, so why would we think she would become more cautious once she
is in office? I can understand why many of her supporters wish that to be the case, but it flies
in the face of all the available evidence, including most of what we know about how Washington works.
Traub makes a number of predictions at the end of his article:
She will not make dumb mistakes. She will reassure every ally who needs reassurance. She will
try to mute China's adventurism in the South China Sea without provoking a storm of nationalism.
She'll probably disappoint the neocons. She won't go out on any limbs. She won't shake the policymaking
consensus.
I don't know where this confidence in Clinton's good judgment comes from, but it seems misplaced.
I suppose it depends on what you think smart foreign policy looks like, but there is a fair amount
of evidence from Clinton's own record that she is quite capable of making dumb mistakes.
That doesn't just apply to her vote to authorize the invasion of Iraq and her backing for intervention
in Libya, but could also refer to her support for sending weapons to Ukraine, her endorsement of
"no-fly" and safe zones in Syria, her preference for more sanctions on Iran while negotiations were
still taking place, and her belief that the U.S. has to bomb another country to retain its "credibility."
All of these are mistakes, and some are quite dumb.
It isn't at all reassuring to know that Clinton will "reassure every ally who needs reassurance,"
because in practice that means indulging bad behavior from reckless clients and rewarding them with
more aid and weapons. Earlier in the article, Traub seems to understand that enabling the Saudis
is a bad idea:
This last policy, which for Clinton will come under the heading of "alliance management," would
only deepen the violence and sectarian strife rending the region. She would be better advised
to tell the Saudis that the United States will reduce its support of their war effort unless they
make serious efforts toward a lasting cease-fire.
That would certainly be wiser than offering uncritical backing of their intervention, but what
is the evidence that Clinton thinks U.S. support for the war on Yemen needs to be curtailed? Yemen
has been devastated in no small part because of Obama's willingness to "reassure" the Saudis and
their allies. What other countries will be made to suffer so Clinton can keep them happy? Clinton
may disappoint neocons, but then they are disappointed by anything short of preventive war. Even
if Clinton's foreign policy isn't aggressive enough to satisfy them, it is likely to be far more
aggressive than necessary.
"... It is shockingly disappointing that MOA, this otherwise intelligent incisive, a deeply intellectual and factual blog's readership exhibit a trait common to overall American anti-intellectual sheeple constituency as Gore Vidal posited decades ago, having no shame expressing their utter confusion and ignorance about one fundamental fact of reality they are facing. ..."
"... Those political puppets, stooges of oligarchy are no alternatives to the calcified imperial system itself, they never have been and they never will. They are new/old faces of the same old 240 y.o. Anglo-American imperial regime based on ancient and modern slavery and they already declared it by submitting to it via pledging to run in this farcical rigged electoral fallacy. ..."
It is shockingly disappointing that MOA, this otherwise intelligent incisive, a deeply intellectual
and factual blog's readership exhibit a trait common to overall American anti-intellectual sheeple
constituency as Gore Vidal posited decades ago, having no shame expressing their utter confusion
and ignorance about one fundamental fact of reality they are facing.
THE FACT: The US elections are a staged political farce with NO MATERIAL IMPACT on the US imperial
policies, domestic or international WHATSOEVER. And that's the fact based on rock solid empirical
evidences also MOA proliferates that only a mental patient can deny.
SO WHAT THE F.U.CK ALL OF YOU PEOPLE ARE TALKING ABOUT? "Voting" for this or that? NONSENSE;
Those political puppets, stooges of oligarchy are no alternatives to the calcified imperial
system itself, they never have been and they never will. They are new/old faces of the same old
240 y.o. Anglo-American imperial regime based on ancient and modern slavery and they already declared
it by submitting to it via pledging to run in this farcical rigged electoral fallacy.
All at the end will openly pledge unwavering support for the regime and their rotten deeply
corrupted parties while abandoning their gullible voters.
Supporters of any of these plastic puppets of oligarchy not unlike a cargo cult, are impatient,
nervous, excited and scared sitting and waiting before an impregnable curtain of political deceit,
lies and manipulation by the ruling elite in front of their wide shut eyes , turning to magic,
superstition, appeasement, making up stories, poems out of their incoherent utterances filed with
tautologies, innuendos and absurd, begging for mercy or praying for a caprice of good will to
save them ultimately in a form of fake, meaningless political turds passing as empty "political"
platform promises while blatantly abandoning their unalienable rights to independence, self-determination
and democratic system of people's rule, based on equality in the law, and one voter one vote principle,
for a role of a meddlesome spectators to their own execution.
THE FACT: The democratic electoral system worth participating does not exist in the US but
none of the candidates would utter this truth as long as they can benefit from the fraud and that
includes third parties. If this was a true change or revolution, that we desperately need, honest
leaders would not run their campaign within the corrupted system set up by and for two oligarchic
parties but they would decry and utterly reject it.
Think people, all the so-called candidates even third party candidates are just nibbling on
the behemoth of abhorrent and brutal US imperial power mostly with utterances that they never
intended to follow if they wanted to survive terror of the US security apparatus, while peddling
the lies about small incremental changes and stealing ours and our children future by asking us
to wait, be patient, and begging ruling elite for mercy and may be for some crumbs from an oligarchs'
table after they are not able to gorge themselves anymore with our blood sweat and tears.
Unfortunately, this time as well, millions of irrational, desperate and helpless in their daily
lives electoral zombies such as those, under a spell of exciting political masquerade, regrettably
also on this blog, will be aligning themselves with one or the other anointed by establishment
winner [whoever it will be] of a meaningless popularity/beauty contest, in a delusional feat of
transference of a fraction of elite's power to themselves just for a second of a thrill of illusion
of power, illusion of feelings that something depends on me, that I can make a difference, a delusion
of holding skies from falling and by that saving the world common among paranoid mental patients.
And they will continue to authorize their own suicide mission, since even baseless, continually
disproved hope of Sisyphus, of any chance of influencing of the political realm via means of begging
is the last thing that dies.
THE LOUD POLITICAL BOYCOTT OF THIS FARCE, UTTER REJECTION OF THIS FACADE OF DEMOCRATIC CHOICE,
REJECTION OF ANY POLITICAL LEGITIMACY OF THIS SORRY SPECTACLE IS THE ONLY ALTERNATIVE AVAILABLE
TO ANY DECENT PERSON, INDEPENDENT, SOVEREIGN CITIZEN WHO TAKES A MORAL STAND REJECTING ENSLAVEMENT
RIGHT HERE AND RIGHT NOW.
THE REST WILL JUST PLEDGE ALLEGIANCE TO THEIR OWN CHAINS.
"... I think Mormons are ticked over Romney losing in 2012 and blame Evangelicals ask when there was fear Evangelicals wouldn't vote for a Mormon. Romney did as well as a non Mormon robber baron would have done in 2012. Trump trashing Romney annoyed Mormons who probably aren't going to get another shot at the Oval Office any time soon. ..."
"... the Romney, Will, Kristol, McCain, Graham, Paulson, Blankfein NEVER TRUMP brigades are up to their sleazy behinds in the Clinton Foundation FRAUD. ..."
"... The Foundation is under very very strict rules but has ignored all of them, putting all their contributors at risk. If Trump wins – a grand jury will have all the necessary ammunition to bring down a whole lot of people, here and abroad. ..."
Shouldn't Utah be considered a swing state in 2016? Some Mormons are unhappy with aspects of
Trump's behavior, and wild card McMullin is a member of the LDS church.
Nate Silver's site gives Trump an overwhelming advantage in Utah, but I still think that surprises
are possible. See this article (which admittedly also shows a significant polling advantage for
Trump):
An Emerson College poll released on November 3 shows him at 28 percent to Trump's 40 percent
and Clinton's 20 percent.
Jason Perry, the director of Utah's bipartisan Hinckley Institute, says there is a large
percentage of voters who do not even know who McMullin is, "but they know who he is not. He's
not Trump, and he's not Hillary".
With 67 percent of Utah voters viewing Trump unfavourably according to a Monmouth University
poll, voting for the Republican candidate does not appear to sit well with Utah's value-minded
voters.
…
Becky Rasmussen, 37, of Highland City, is one such voter who could not see herself voting for
Trump, in part because of her Mormon faith.
While she also sees Clinton as unfit for the presidency, Trump, she says, is "completely
morally bankrupt …You see framed in his office him on the cover of Playboy Magazine".
…
But Porter Goodman, 28, from Provo – who believes that voting for McMullin "is the only way
to not throw away your vote" – says it is not his Mormon beliefs that cause him to view Trump
as having a "lack of morality".
"I say he lacks morality because he lies and because he abuses other people with his words
and actions," Goodman says. "Savour the magnificent irony of Trump supporters who say, 'Yeah,
Trump may be a pathological liar, but set that aside and focus on the great things he says
he'll do as president."
I think Mormons are ticked over Romney losing in 2012 and blame Evangelicals ask when there
was fear Evangelicals wouldn't vote for a Mormon. Romney did as well as a non Mormon robber baron
would have done in 2012. Trump trashing Romney annoyed Mormons who probably aren't going to get
another shot at the Oval Office any time soon.
Nate doesn't do a why or how of trends and just focuses on raw numbers based on previous polls.
It's why he never landed a baseball job when other Stat geeks did. If there was an usual trend
in Utah, Nate would miss it.
The key issue is are Mormons "Republicans" or "conservative" when they describe themselves.
If their identity is "conservative," I could see them not voting for Trump. If being a "Republican"
matters, they will vote. They voted for McCain, and the fundies hated that guy.
the Romney, Will, Kristol, McCain, Graham, Paulson, Blankfein NEVER TRUMP brigades are up to
their sleazy behinds in the Clinton Foundation FRAUD.
The Foundation is under very very strict rules but has ignored all of them, putting all their
contributors at risk. If Trump wins – a grand jury will have all the necessary ammunition to bring
down a whole lot of people, here and abroad.
It's the great untold story of this election. IT's also the spit and glue that holds the Clinton
coalition of media, government, Wall St, Dems and Goper royalty together in this fight to the
death to keep a "friendly" administration in DC. This is kill or be killed time.
"... "Yet commentators who have been ready and willing to attribute Donald Trump's success to anger, authoritarianism, or racism rather than policy issues have taken little note of the extent to which Mr. Sanders's support is concentrated not among liberal ideologues but among disaffected white men." ... ..."
"... poor pk a leader of the Stalinist press ..."
"... the surprising success of Bernie Sanders -- a Brooklyn-born, Jewish socialist -- in the primaries is solid proof that the electorate was open to a coherent argument for genuine progressive change, and that a substantial portion of that electorate is not acting on purely racist and sexist impulses, as so many progressive commentators say. ..."
"... "I will live my life calmly and my children will be just fine. I will live my life calmly and my children will be just fine." That assumes you're about 85 years old...and don't have long to live! ..."
"... Laid out by whom? By the commercial "media" hype machine that has 12-16 hours of airtime to fill every day with the as sensationalized as possible gossip (to justify the price for the paid advertisements filling the remaining hours). ..."
"... Killary Clinton got no closer than Ann Arbor this weekend, a message! ..."
"... Mr. Krugman forgot to list the collusion of the DNC and the Clinton campaign to work against Sanders. ..."
"... putting crooked in the same sentence as Clinton or DNC is duplicative wording. This mortification is brought to US by the crooked and the stalinist press that calls crooked virtue. ..."
"... Krugman did so much to help create the mass of white working class discontent that is electing Trump. Krugman and co cheering on NAFTA/PNTR/WTO etc, US deindustrialization, collapse of middle class... ..."
"... Hopefully the working class masses will convince our rulers to abandon free trade before every last factory is sold off or dismantled and the US falls to the depths of a Chad or an Armenia. ..."
The Truth About the Sanders Movement
By Paul Krugman
In short, it's complicated – not all bad, by any means, but not the pure uprising of idealists
the more enthusiastic supporters imagine.
The political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels have an illuminating discussion
of Sanders support. The key graf that will probably have Berniebros boiling is this:
"Yet commentators who have been ready and willing to attribute Donald Trump's success to
anger, authoritarianism, or racism rather than policy issues have taken little note of the extent
to which Mr. Sanders's support is concentrated not among liberal ideologues but among disaffected
white men." ...
[ Yes, I do find defaming people by speculation or stereotype to be beyond saddening. ]
The fact that Obama either won, or did so much better than Hillary appears to be doing with, the
white working-class vote in so many key battleground states, as well as the surprising success
of Bernie Sanders -- a Brooklyn-born, Jewish socialist -- in the primaries is solid proof that
the electorate was open to a coherent argument for genuine progressive change, and that a substantial
portion of that electorate is not acting on purely racist and sexist impulses, as so many progressive
commentators say.
And her opponent was/is incapable of debating on substance, as there was/is neither coherence
nor consistency in any part of his platform -- nor that of his party....
Question is, will Krugman be able to move on after the election...and talk about something useful?
Like how to get Hillary to recognize and deal with inequality...
Barbara Ehrenreich: "Forget fear and loathing. The US election inspires projectile vomiting. The
most sordid side of our democracy has been laid out for all to see. But that's only the beginning:
whoever wins, the mutual revulsion will only intensify... With either Clinton or Trump, we will
be left to choke on our mutual revulsion."
"I will live my life calmly and my children will be just fine. I will live my life calmly
and my children will be just fine." That assumes you're about 85 years old...and don't have long
to live!
Laid out by whom? By the commercial "media" hype machine that has 12-16 hours of airtime to
fill every day with the as sensationalized as possible gossip (to justify the price for the paid
advertisements filling the remaining hours).
Something interesting today.... President Obama came to Michigan. I fully expected him to speak
in Detroit with a get out the vote message. Instead he is in Ann Arbor, speaking to an overwhelmingly
white and white-collar audience. On a related note, the Dems have apparently written off
the white blue collar vote in Michigan, even much of the union vote. the union leaders are pro
Clinton, but the workers not so much. Strange year.
The real danger of serious election-rigging: electronic voting machines. How do we know the machine
*really* recorded everyone's votes correctly? (Did any Florida county ever give Al Gore negative
something votes?)
That's a big subject but you are right, that is the biggest risk of significant fraud. Not just
the voting machines, but the automatic counting systems. Other forms of possible election fraud
are tiny by comparison.
Here is the transcript from 60 Minutes about the Luntz focus group rancor. Instructive to read
about the depth of feeling in case you didn't see the angry, disgusted faces of citizens.
putting crooked in the same sentence as Clinton or DNC is duplicative wording. This mortification
is brought to US by the crooked and the stalinist press that calls crooked virtue.
Before the 1970s the US was both rich and protectionist - no look at our horrible roads and hopeless
people - the miracle of free trade! : ,
November 07, 2016 at 07:13 PM
Krugman did so much to help create the mass of white working class discontent that is electing
Trump. Krugman and co cheering on NAFTA/PNTR/WTO etc, US deindustrialization, collapse of
middle class...
Hopefully the working class masses will convince our rulers to abandon free trade before
every last factory is sold off or dismantled and the US falls to the depths of a Chad or an Armenia.
"... We don't want World War 3 with Russia. We want our factories and jobs back, we would like to spend $1 trillion a year on infrastructure instead of blowing up yet another Middle Eastern nation. ..."
"... Fuck Hillary, Fuck the neolibcons, Fuck al-CIAda, Fuck the fascist banksters who eat our children for breakfast. ..."
"... Vote Trump in swing states. Vote Jill everywhere else. ..."
The heartland of the US is RED, solid RED.
The neolibcons are printing up their Newsweek mags with Madam President on the cover.
They don't have a clue about how pissed off the people in the "flyover states" are.
Fuck their rigged polls and lying news.
Sure Trump is behind or neck-and-neck . . . Just like we have 5% unemployment.
As long as you don't count the 1/3 of working age people who DON"T HAVE A JOB.
The deplorables can think of 650,000 reasons why Hillary should be in PRISON, even if the FBI
can't.
We don't want World War 3 with Russia. We want our factories and jobs back, we would like
to spend $1 trillion a year on infrastructure instead of blowing up yet another Middle Eastern
nation.
Fuck Hillary, Fuck the neolibcons, Fuck al-CIAda, Fuck the fascist banksters who eat our
children for breakfast.
Do not blow shit up, like the political system, without a clear idea where the pieces will
land and how you will put them back together. Crisis would benefit the right, not the left, given
the current correlation of class and political forces.
The best result. sadly, would be a resounding win for Mrs. Clinton. As the comment at 11 shows,
anything less than a crushing defeat will enable the alt-right and embolden the most reactionary
and nativist elements in society.
The notion that worsening conditions will automatically produce progressive revolution is a
pipe-dream. Beaten-down folks struggling to survive don't have the time or energy to organize.
Vote your conscience, your hopes. Takingg the long view, I am again voting, as I have for years,
for the Socialist Workers Party.
"... I also read other written and printed media because I think it is important to expose yourself to points of view you find uncomfortable – and how can you tell other people their newspapers etc are lying to them and misleading them if you do not dip into them from time to time to confirm that is indeed the case? ..."
"... The Economist has thrown any semblance of impartiality out the window the last couple years. Sign of the times, I guess. ..."
"... One angle is how feckless Democrats sought to give up regulatory power because they wanted to duck responsibility for mistaken decisions. ..."
In this context, abuse is a positive thing. Both Jebbie and the mainstream press needed abusing!
Now look at them! They're earning it more than ever! In other news….RealClear give some space to a pro-ColoradoCare writer. Very nice to see!
I still read both the FT and Economist. The FT still has some good pieces in it, even if it
is diminished from pre-Crash days when Gillian Tett was the person to read. And the book reviews
in the Economist can be worth reading, though it is a pale shadow of the journal it used to be.
I also read other written and printed media because I think it is important to expose yourself
to points of view you find uncomfortable – and how can you tell other people their newspapers
etc are lying to them and misleading them if you do not dip into them from time to time to confirm
that is indeed the case?
Are the Economist's reviews of the 'an important work' type that get featured on the cover,
even though the publication continues to ignore every insight and alternative idea presented in
the book reviewed?
Stoller is paraphrasing his review of Greta Krippner's Capitalizing on Crisis, which
sounds well worth a read.
It is. One angle is how feckless Democrats sought to give up regulatory power because they
wanted to duck responsibility for mistaken decisions. Why run risks ironing out business cycles
when you can collect campaign contributions for venerating Alan Greenspan?
"... What America objects to in Russia is that Americans couldn't buy control of their oil, couldn't buy control of their natural resources, couldn't buy control of their public utilities and charge economic rents and continue to make Russia the largest stock market boom in the world as it was from 1994 through 1998 when there was the crisis. ..."
"... So the conflict is not one of economic systems. It's simply that America wants to control other countries and keep other countries within the dollar orbit. And what that means is that if the whole world saves in the form of dollars, that means saving by buying Treasury bonds. ..."
"... And other countries are trying to withdraw from this and America says, "Well, we can smash you." ..."
"... There really is no alternative, and that's the objective of control: to create a society in which there is no choice. That's what a free market [myth] is really all about: preventing any choice by the people except what the government gives them. ..."
"... has the illusion of choice in choosing either between which is the lesser evil. They get to vote for the lesser evil when it's all really the same process. ..."
> Ashcroft: What sort of president then will Hillary Clinton be?
> Hudson: A dictator. She… a vindictive dictator, punishing her enemies, appointing neocons in the secretary
of state, in the defense department, appointing Wall Street people in the Treasury and the Federal Reserve,
and the class war will really break out very explicitly. And she'll-as Warren Buffet said, there is
a class war and we're winning it.
> Ashcroft: As in the one percent are winning it.
> Hudson: The one percent are winning it. And she will try to use the rhetoric to tell people: "Nothing
to see here folks. Keep on moving," while the economy goes down and down and she cashes in as she's
been doing all along, richer and richer, and if she's president, there will not be an investigator of
the criminal conflict of interest of the Bill Clinton Foundation, of pay-to-play. You'll have a presidency
in which corporations who pay the Clintons will be able to set policy. Whoever has the money to buy
the politicians will buy control of policy because elections have been privatized and made part of the
market economy in the United States. That's what the Citizens United Supreme Court case was all about.
> Hudson: Well, after 1991 when the Soviet Union broke up, it really went neoliberal. And Putin is basically
a neoliberal. So there's not a clash of economic systems as there was between capitalism and communism.
What America objects to in Russia is that Americans couldn't buy control of their oil, couldn't buy
control of their natural resources, couldn't buy control of their public utilities and charge economic
rents and continue to make Russia the largest stock market boom in the world as it was from 1994 through
1998 when there was the crisis.
So the conflict is not one of economic systems. It's simply that America
wants to control other countries and keep other countries within the dollar orbit. And what that means
is that if the whole world saves in the form of dollars, that means saving by buying Treasury bonds.
And that means lending all of the balance-of-payments surplus that Russia or China or other countries
look at, by lending it to the U.S. Treasury, which will use that money to militarily encircle these
countries and threaten to do to any country that seeks to withdraw from the dollar system exactly what
they did to Iraq or Libya or Afghanistan, or now Syria.
And other countries are trying to withdraw from
this and America says, "Well, we can smash you." No country's going to invade any other country. There's
not going to be a military draft in any country 'cause the students; the population would rise up. Nobody's
going to invade, and you can't control or occupy a country if you don't have an army. So the only thing
that America can do-or any country can do militarily-is drop bombs.
And that's sort of the equivalent
of, just like the European Central Bank told Greece, "We'll close down your banks and the ATM machines
will be empty," America will say, "Well, we'll bomb you, make you look like Syria and Libya if you don't
turn over your oil, your pipelines, your utilities to American buyers so we can charge rents; we can
be the absentee landlords. We can conquer the world financially instead of militarily. We don't need
an army; we can use finance. And the threat of military warfare and bombing you to achieve things."
Other countries are trying to stay free of the mad bomber, and it's all about who's going to control
the world's natural resources: water, real estate, utilities-not a question of economic systems so much
anymore.
> Well, President Obama, even though he's a tool of Wall Street, at least he says, "It's not worth blowing
up the world to fight in the near east." Hillary says, "It is worth pushing the world back to the Stone
Age if they don't let us and me, Hillary, tell the world how to behave." That's a danger of the world
and that's why the Europeans should be terrified of a Hillary presidency and terrified of the direction
that America is doing, saying, "We want to control the world." It's not control the world through a
different economic philosophy. It's to control the world through ownership of their land, natural resources
and essentially, governments and monetary systems. That's really what it's all about. And the popular
press is not doing a good job of explaining that context, but I can assure you, that's what they're
talking about in Russia, China and South America.
> There really is no alternative, and that's the objective of control: to create a society in which
there is no choice. That's what a free market [myth] is really all about: preventing any choice by the people
except what the government gives them. That's what the Austrian school was all about in the 1920s, waging
war and assassination against the labor leaders and the socialists in Vienna, and that's what the free
marketers in Chile were all about in the mass assassinations of labor leaders, university professors,
intellectuals, and that's exactly the situation in America today without the machine guns, because the
population doesn't really feel that it has any alternative, but has the illusion of choice in choosing
either between which is the lesser evil. They get to vote for the lesser evil when it's all really the
same process.
"... The American people don't know very much about war even if Washington has been fighting on multiple fronts since 9/11. The continental United States has not experienced the presence a hostile military force for more than 100 years and war for the current generation of Americans consists largely of the insights provided by video games and movies. The Pentagon's invention of embedded journalists, which limits any independent media insight into what is going on overseas, has contributed to the rendering of war as some kind of abstraction. Gone forever is anything like the press coverage of Vietnam, with nightly news and other media presentations showing prisoners being executed and young girls screaming while racing down the street in flames. ..."
"... Given all of that, it is perhaps no surprise that both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, neither of whom has served in uniform, should regard violence inflicted on people overseas with a considerable level of detachment. ..."
"... They both share to an extent the dominant New York-Washington policy consensus view that dealing with foreigners can sometimes get a bit bloody, but that is a price that someone in power has to be prepared to pay. One of Hillary's top advisers, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, famously declared that the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children due to U.S. led sanctions were "worth it." ..."
"... Hillary Clinton and her advisors, who believe strongly in Washington's leadership role globally and embrace their own definition of American exceptionalism, have been explicit in terms of what they would do to employ our military power. ..."
"... She would be an extremely proactive president in foreign policy, with a particular animus directed against Russia. ..."
"... Hillary has received support from foreign policy hawks, including a large number of formerly Republican neocons, to include Robert Kagan, Michael Chertoff, Michael Hayden, Eliot Cohen and Eric Edelman. James Stavridis, a retired admiral who was once vetted by Clinton as a possible vice president, recently warned of "the need to use deadly force against the Iranians. ..."
"... Hillary believes that Syria's president Bashar al-Assad is the root cause of the turmoil in that country and must be removed as the first priority. . It is a foolish policy as al-Assad in no way threatens the United States while his enemy ISIS does and regime change would create a power vacuum that will benefit the latter. ..."
"... Hillary has not recommended doing anything about Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey, all of which have at one time or another for various reasons supported ISIS, but she is clearly no friend of Iran, which has been fighting ISIS. ..."
"... One of Hillary's advisors, former CIA acting Director Michael Morell, has called for new sanctions on Tehran and has also recently recommended that the U.S. begin intercepting Iranian ships presumed to be carrying arms to the Houthis in Yemen. ..."
"... Hillary's dislike for Russia's Vladimir Putin is notorious. Syria aside, she has advocated arming Ukraine with game changing offensive weapons and also bringing Ukraine and Georgia into NATO, which would force a sharp Russian reaction. One suspects that she might be sympathetic to the views expressed recently by Carl Gershman in a Washington Post op-ed that received curiously little additional coverage in the media. Gershman is the head of the taxpayer funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which means that he is a powerful figure in Washington's foreign-policy establishment. NED has plausibly been described as doing the sorts of things that the CIA used to do. ..."
"... She would increase U.S. military presence in the South China Sea to deter any further attempts by Beijing to develop disputed islands and would also "ring China with defensive missiles," ostensibly as "protection" against Pyongyang but also to convince China to pressure North Korea over its nuclear and ballistic missile programs. One wonders what Beijing might think about being surrounded by made-in-America missiles. ..."
The American people don't know very much about war even if Washington has been fighting on
multiple fronts since 9/11. The continental United States has not experienced the presence a hostile
military force for more than 100 years and war for the current generation of Americans consists largely
of the insights provided by video games and movies. The Pentagon's invention of embedded journalists,
which limits any independent media insight into what is going on overseas, has contributed to the
rendering of war as some kind of abstraction. Gone forever is anything like the press coverage of
Vietnam, with nightly news and other media presentations showing prisoners being executed and young
girls screaming while racing down the street in flames.
Given all of that, it is perhaps no surprise that both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, neither
of whom has served in uniform, should regard violence inflicted on people overseas with a considerable
level of detachment. Hillary is notorious for her assessment of the brutal killing of Libya's
Moammar Gaddafi, saying "We came, we saw, he died." They both share to an extent the dominant
New York-Washington policy consensus view that dealing with foreigners can sometimes get a bit bloody,
but that is a price that someone in power has to be prepared to pay. One of Hillary's top advisers,
former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, famously declared that the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi
children due to U.S. led sanctions were "worth it."
In the election campaign there has, in fact, been little discussion of the issue of war and peace
or even of America's place in the world, though Trump did at one point note correctly that implementation
of Hillary's suggested foreign policy could escalate into World War III. It has been my contention
that the issue of war should be more front and center in the minds of Americans when they cast their
ballots as the prospect of an armed conflict in which little is actually at stake escalating and
going nuclear could conceivably end life on this planet as we know it.
With that in mind, it is useful to consider what the two candidates have been promising. First,
Hillary, who might reasonably be designated the Establishment's war candidate though she carefully
wraps it in humanitarian "liberal interventionism." As Senator and Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton
has always viewed a foreign crisis as an opportunity to use aggressive measures to seek a resolution.
She can always be relied upon to "do something," a reflection of the neocon driven Washington foreign
policy consensus.
Hillary Clinton and her advisors, who believe strongly in Washington's leadership role globally
and embrace their own definition of American exceptionalism, have been explicit in terms of what
they would do to employ our military power.
She would be an extremely proactive president in foreign policy, with a particular animus
directed against Russia. And, unfortunately, there would be little or no pushback against the
exercise of her admittedly poor instincts regarding what to do, as was demonstrated regarding Libya
and also with Benghazi. She would find little opposition in Congress and the media for an extremely
risky foreign policy, and would benefit from the Washington groupthink that prevails over the alleged
threats emanating from Russia, Iran, and China.
Hillary has received support from foreign policy hawks, including a large number of formerly
Republican neocons, to include Robert Kagan, Michael Chertoff, Michael Hayden, Eliot Cohen and Eric
Edelman. James Stavridis, a retired admiral who was once vetted by Clinton as a possible vice president,
recently warned of "the need to use deadly force against the Iranians. I think it's coming.
It's going to be maritime confrontation and if it doesn't happen immediately, I'll bet you a dollar
it's going to be happening after the presidential election, whoever is elected."
Hillary believes that Syria's president Bashar al-Assad is the root cause of the turmoil in
that country and must be removed as the first priority. . It is a foolish policy as al-Assad in no
way threatens the United States while his enemy ISIS does and regime change would create a power
vacuum that will benefit the latter. She has also called for a no-fly zone in Syria to protect
the local population as well as the insurgent groups that the U.S. supports, some of which had been
labeled as terrorists before they were renamed by current Secretary of State John Kerry. Such a zone
would dramatically raise the prospect of armed conflict with Russia and it puts Washington in an
odd position vis-ŕ-vis what is occurring in Syria. The U.S. is not at war with the Syrian government,
which, like it or not, is under international law sovereign within its own recognized borders. Damascus
has invited the Russians in to help against the rebels and objects to any other foreign presence
on Syrian territory. In spite of all that, Washington is asserting some kind of authority to intervene
and to confront the Russians as both a humanitarian mission and as an "inherent right of self-defense."
Hillary has not recommended doing anything about Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey, all of which
have at one time or another for various reasons supported ISIS, but she is clearly no friend of Iran,
which has been fighting ISIS. As a Senator, she threatened to "totally obliterate" Iran but
she has more recently reluctantly supported the recent nuclear agreement with that country negotiated
by President Barack Obama. But she has nevertheless warned that she will monitor the situation closely
for possible violations and will otherwise pushback against activity by the Islamic Republic. As
one of her key financial supporters is Israeli Haim Saban, who has said he is a one issue guy and
that issue is Israel, she is likely to pursue aggressive policies in the Persian Gulf. She has also
promised to move America's relationship with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to a "new level" and
has repeatedly declared that her support for Israel is unconditional.
One of Hillary's advisors, former CIA acting Director Michael Morell, has called for new sanctions
on Tehran and has also recently recommended that the U.S. begin intercepting Iranian ships presumed
to be carrying arms to the Houthis in Yemen. Washington is not at war with either Iran or Yemen
and the Houthis are not on the State Department terrorist list but our good friends the Saudis have
been assiduously bombing them for reasons that seem obscure. Stopping ships in international waters
without any legal pretext would be considered by many an act of piracy. Morell has also called for
covertly assassinating Iranians and Russians to express our displeasure with the foreign policies
of their respective governments.
Hillary's dislike for Russia's Vladimir Putin is notorious. Syria aside, she has advocated
arming Ukraine with game changing offensive weapons and also bringing Ukraine and Georgia into NATO,
which would force a sharp Russian reaction. One suspects that she might be sympathetic to the views
expressed recently by Carl Gershman in a Washington Post op-ed that received curiously little additional
coverage in the media. Gershman is the head of the taxpayer funded National Endowment for Democracy
(NED), which means that he is a powerful figure in Washington's foreign-policy establishment. NED
has plausibly been described as doing the sorts of things that the CIA used to do.
After making a number of bumper-sticker claims about Russia and Putin that are either partially
true, unproven or even ridiculous, Gershman concluded that "the United States has the power to contain
and defeat this danger. The issue is whether we can summon the will to do so." It is basically a
call for the next administration to remove Putin from power-as foolish a suggestion as has ever been
seen in a leading newspaper, as it implies that the risk of nuclear war is completely acceptable
to bring about regime change in a country whose very popular, democratically elected leadership we
disapprove of. But it is nevertheless symptomatic of the kind of thinking that goes on inside the
beltway and is quite possibly a position that Hillary Clinton will embrace. She also benefits from
having the perfect implementer of such a policy in Robert Kagan's wife Victoria Nuland, her extremely
dangerous protégé who is currently Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs
and who might wind up as Secretary of State in a Clinton Administration.
Shifting to East Asia, Hillary sees the admittedly genuine threat from North Korea but her response
is focused more on China. She would increase U.S. military presence in the South China Sea to
deter any further attempts by Beijing to develop disputed islands and would also "ring China with
defensive missiles," ostensibly as "protection" against Pyongyang but also to convince China to pressure
North Korea over its nuclear and ballistic missile programs. One wonders what Beijing might think
about being surrounded by made-in-America missiles.
Trump's foreign policy is admittedly quite sketchy and he has not always been consistent. He has
been appropriately enough slammed for being simple minded in saying that he would "bomb the crap
out of ISIS," but he has also taken on the Republican establishment by specifically condemning the
George W. Bush invasion of Iraq and has more than once indicated that he is not interested in either
being the world's policeman or in new wars in the Middle East. He has repeatedly stated that he supports
NATO but it should not be construed as hostile to Russia. He would work with Putin to address concerns
over Syria and Eastern Europe. He would demand that NATO countries spend more for their own defense
and also help pay for the maintenance of U.S. bases.
Trump's controversial call to stop all Muslim immigration has been rightly condemned but it contains
a kernel of truth in that the current process for vetting new arrivals in this country is far from
transparent and apparently not very effective. The Obama Administration has not been very forthcoming
on what might be done to fix the entire immigration process but Trump is promising to shake things
up, which is overdue, though what exactly a Trump Administration would try to accomplish is far from
clear.
Continuing on the negative side, Trump, who is largely ignorant of the world and its leaders,
has relied on a mixed bag of advisors. Former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency General Michael
Flynn appears to be the most prominent. Flynn is associated with arch neocon Michael Ledeen and both
are rabid about Iran, with Flynn suggesting that nearly all the unrest in the Middle East should
be laid at Tehran's door. Ledeen is, of course, a prominent Israel-firster who has long had Iran
in his sights. The advice of Ledeen and Flynn may have been instrumental in Trump's vehement denunciation
of the Iran nuclear agreement, which he has called a "disgrace," which he has said he would "tear
up." It is vintage dumb-think. The agreement cannot be canceled because there are five other signatories
to it and the denial of a nuclear weapons program to Tehran benefits everyone in the region, including
Israel. It is far better to have the agreement than to scrap it, if that were even possible.
Trump has said that he would be an even-handed negotiator between Israel and the Palestinians
but he has also declared that he is strongly pro-Israel and would move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem,
which is a bad idea, not in America's interest, even if Netanyahu would like it. It would produce
serious blowback from the Arab world and would inspire a new wave of terrorism directed against the
U.S.
Regarding the rest of the Middle East, Trump would prefer strong leaders, i.e. autocrats, who
are friendly rather than chaotic reformers. He rejects arming rebels as in Syria because we know
little about whom we are dealing with and find that we cannot control what develops. He is against
foreign aid in principle, particularly to countries like Pakistan where the U.S. is strongly disliked.
In East Asia, Trump would encourage Japan and South Korea to develop their own nuclear arsenals
to deter North Korea. It is a very bad idea, a proliferation nightmare. Like Hillary, he would prefer
that China intervene in North Korea and make Kim Jong Un "step down." He would put pressure on China
to devalue its currency because it is "bilking us of billions of dollars" and would also increase
U.S. military presence in the region to limit Beijing's expansion in the South China Sea.
So there you have it as you enter the voting booth. President Obama is going around warning that
"the fate of the world is teetering" over the electoral verdict, which he intends to be a ringing
endorsement of Hillary even though the choice is not nearly that clear cut. Part of the problem with
Trump is that he has some very bad ideas mixed in with a few good ones and no one knows what he would
actually do if he were president. Unfortunately, it is all too clear what Hillary would do.
> Ashcroft: What sort of president then will Hillary Clinton be?
> Hudson: A dictator. She… a vindictive dictator, punishing her enemies, appointing neocons in the secretary
of state, in the defense department, appointing Wall Street people in the Treasury and the Federal Reserve,
and the class war will really break out very explicitly. And she'll-as Warren Buffet said, there is
a class war and we're winning it.
> Ashcroft: As in the one percent are winning it.
> Hudson: The one percent are winning it. And she will try to use the rhetoric to tell people: "Nothing
to see here folks. Keep on moving," while the economy goes down and down and she cashes in as she's
been doing all along, richer and richer, and if she's president, there will not be an investigator of
the criminal conflict of interest of the Bill Clinton Foundation, of pay-to-play. You'll have a presidency
in which corporations who pay the Clintons will be able to set policy. Whoever has the money to buy
the politicians will buy control of policy because elections have been privatized and made part of the
market economy in the United States. That's what the Citizens United Supreme Court case was all about.
"... political correctness functions like a despotic regime. It is an oppressiveness that spreads its edicts further and further into the crevices of everyday life. ..."
"... Mr. Steele, a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, is the author of "Shame: How America's Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country" (Basic Books, 2015). ..."
The current election-regardless of its outcome-reveals something tragic in the way modern conservatism
sits in American life. As an ideology-and certainly as a political identity-conservatism is less
popular than the very principles and values it stands for. There is a presumption in the culture
that heartlessness and bigotry are somehow endemic to conservatism, that the rigors of freedom and
capitalism literally require exploitation and inequality - this despite the fact that so many liberal
policies since the 1960s have only worsened the inequalities they sought to overcome.
In the broader American culture-the mainstream media, the world of the arts and entertainment,
the high-tech world, and the entire enterprise of public and private education-conservatism suffers
a decided ill repute.
...And this is oppressive for conservatives because it puts them in the position of being a bit
embarrassed by who they really are and what they really believe.
Deference has been codified in American life as political correctness. And political correctness
functions like a despotic regime. It is an oppressiveness that spreads its edicts further and further
into the crevices of everyday life. We resent it, yet for the most part we at least tolerate
its demands. But it means that we live in a society that is ever willing to cast judgment on us,
to shame us in the name of a politics we don't really believe in. It means our decency requires a
degree of self-betrayal.
And into all this steps Mr. Trump, a fundamentally limited man but a man with overwhelming charisma,
a man impossible to ignore. The moment he entered the presidential contest America's long simmering
culture war rose to full boil. Mr. Trump was a non-deferential candidate. He seemed at odds with
every code of decency. He invoked every possible stigma, and screechingly argued against them all.
He did much of the dirty work that millions of Americans wanted to do but lacked the platform to
do.
Thus Mr. Trump's extraordinary charisma has been far more about what he represents than what he
might actually do as the president. He stands to alter the culture of deference itself.
... ... ...
Societies, like individuals, have intuitions. Donald Trump is an intuition. At least on the level
of symbol, maybe he would push back against the hegemony of deference-if not as a liberator then
possibly as a reformer...
Mr. Steele, a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, is the author of
"Shame: How America's Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country" (Basic Books, 2015).
"... Bush I and II, Mitt Romney, the neocons and the GOP commentariat all denounced Trump as morally and temperamentally unfit. Yet, seven of eight Republicans are voting for Trump, and he drew the largest and most enthusiastic crowds of any GOP nominee. ..."
"... How could the Republican establishment advance anew the trade and immigration policies that their base has so thunderously rejected? ..."
"... Do mainstream Republicans think that should Trump lose a Bush Restoration lies ahead? The dynasty is as dead as the Romanovs. ..."
"... The media, whose reputation has sunk to Congressional depths, has also suffered a blow to its credibility. ..."
"... Its hatred of Trump has been almost manic, and WikiLeaks revelations of the collusion between major media and Clintonites have convinced skeptics that the system is rigged and the referees of democracy are in the tank. ..."
"... But it is the national establishment that has suffered most. The Trump candidacy exposed what seems an unbridgeable gulf between this political class and the nation in whose name it purports to speak. ..."
"... Middle America believes the establishment is not looking out for the nation but for retention of its power. And in attacking Trump it is not upholding some objective moral standard but seeking to destroy a leader who represents a grave threat to that power. ..."
"... Moreover, they see the establishment as the quintessence of hypocrisy. Trump is instructed to stop using such toxic phrases as "America First" and "Make America Great Again" by elites... ..."
"... While a Trump victory would create the possibility of a coalition of conservatives, populists, patriots and nationalists governing America, should he lose, America's future appears disunited and grim. ..."
Herewith, a dissent. Whatever happens Tuesday, Trump has made history and has forever changed American
politics.
Though a novice in politics, he captured the Party of Lincoln with the largest turnout
of primary voters ever, and he has inflicted wounds on the nation's ruling class from which it may
not soon recover.
Bush I and II, Mitt Romney, the neocons and the GOP commentariat all denounced Trump as morally
and temperamentally unfit. Yet, seven of eight Republicans are voting for Trump, and he drew the
largest and most enthusiastic crowds of any GOP nominee.
Not only did he rout the Republican elites, he ash-canned their agenda and repudiated the wars
into which they plunged the country.
Trump did not create the forces that propelled his candidacy. But he recognized them, tapped into
them, and unleashed a gusher of nationalism and populism that will not soon dissipate.
Whatever happens Tuesday, there is no going back now.
How could the Republican establishment advance anew the trade and immigration policies that
their base has so thunderously rejected?
How can the GOP establishment credibly claim to speak for a party that spent the last year cheering
a candidate who repudiated the last two Republican presidents and the last two Republican nominees?
Do mainstream Republicans think that should Trump lose a Bush Restoration lies ahead? The
dynasty is as dead as the Romanovs.
The media, whose reputation has sunk to Congressional depths, has also suffered a blow to
its credibility.
Its hatred of Trump has been almost manic, and WikiLeaks revelations of the collusion between
major media and Clintonites have convinced skeptics that the system is rigged and the referees of
democracy are in the tank.
But it is the national establishment that has suffered most. The Trump candidacy exposed what
seems an unbridgeable gulf between this political class and the nation in whose name it purports
to speak.
Consider the litany of horrors it has charged Trump with.
He said John McCain was no hero, that some Mexican illegals are "rapists." He mocked a handicapped
reporter. He called some women "pigs." He wants a temporary ban to Muslim immigration. He fought
with a Gold Star mother and father. He once engaged in "fat-shaming" a Miss Universe, calling her
"Miss Piggy," and telling her to stay out of Burger King. He allegedly made crude advances on a dozen
women and starred in the "Access Hollywood" tape with Billy Bush.
While such "gaffes" are normally fatal for candidates, Trump's followers stood by him through
them all.
Why? asks an alarmed establishment. Why, in spite of all this, did Trump's support endure? Why
did the American people not react as they once would have? Why do these accusations not have the
bite they once did?
Answer. We are another country now, an us-or-them country.
Middle America believes the establishment is not looking out for the nation but for retention
of its power. And in attacking Trump it is not upholding some objective moral standard but seeking
to destroy a leader who represents a grave threat to that power.
Trump's followers see an American Spring as crucial, and they are not going to let past boorish
behavior cause them to abandon the last best chance to preserve the country they grew up in.
These are the Middle American Radicals, the MARs of whom my late friend Sam Francis wrote.
They recoil from the future the elites have mapped out for them and, realizing the stakes, will
overlook the faults and failings of a candidate who holds out the real promise of avoiding that future.
They believe Trump alone will secure the borders and rid us of a trade regime that has led to
the loss of 70,000 factories and 5 million manufacturing jobs since NAFTA. They believe Trump is
the best hope for keeping us out of the wars the Beltway think tanks are already planning for the
sons of the "deplorables" to fight.
Moreover, they see the establishment as the quintessence of hypocrisy. Trump is instructed
to stop using such toxic phrases as "America First" and "Make America Great Again" by elites...
... ... ...
While a Trump victory would create the possibility of a coalition of conservatives, populists,
patriots and nationalists governing America, should he lose, America's future appears disunited and
grim.
But, would the followers of Donald Trump, whom Hillary Clinton has called "racist, sexist, homophobic,
xenophobic, Islamophobic … bigots," to the cheers of her media retainers, unite behind her should
she win?
No. Win or lose, as Sen. Edward Kennedy said at the Democratic Convention of 1980, "The work goes
on, the cause endures."
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of the new book "The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon
Rose From Defeat to Create the New Majority."
Tuesday on Fox News Channel, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump offered
his thoughts on how the campaign proceeded as Election Day has finally come.
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One of his criticisms was how the polls had been handled, which he called in
some cases "phony" and "purposefully wrong."
Partial transcript as follows:
DOOCY: A couple of weeks ago you know it was revealed that part of Hillary
Clinton's game plan was to try, you know, to talk up the polls and make it seem
like the show's over, no way you can win. Then of course the polls for the most
part right now are too close to call. Ultimately though do you think the polls
that we've seen over the last week or two, going back, are wrong because the
pollsters are not factoring in how many Democrats are going to be voting for
you?
You know all this early voting stuff, they say well this many Democrats
requested ballots, this many Republicans. And also just the gigantic number of
Republicans who have turned out to see you, the enthusiasm level. Do you think
those things the pollsters are getting wrong?
TRUMP:
I do think a lot of the polls are purposefully wrong. I think I
can almost tell you by the people that do it. The media is very dishonest,
extremely dishonest. And I think a lot of the polls are phony. I don't even
think they interview people.
DOOCY: Right.
TRUMP:
I think they just put out phony numbers. I do think this, after
the debates, I think my numbers really started to go up well. And then I did a
series over the last two weeks, only of you know, really important speeches I
think. 20,000, 25,000 people, 31,000 people were showing up to these speeches.
You saw yesterday, you saw the kind of crowds we're getting. I said
something's happening here. Something incredible is happening here. And tell
you the enthusiasm and the love in those rooms, in those arenas, they're really
arenas, I mean in New Hampshire last night it was a tremendous arena, beautiful
arena. And same thing, we had a big convention center last night in Michigan.
But they're packed. I mean we have thousands of people.
DOOCY: Right.
TRUMP: We had last night in Michigan we had 10,000 people outside that
couldn't get in.
DOOCY: Wow.
EARHARDT: Wow.
TRUMP: 10,000 people. It's been amazing. So I said something's happening.
Something's really going on.
This neocon propagandists (or more correctly neocon provocateur) got all major facts wrong. And
who unleashed Flame and
Stuxnet I would like to ask him.
Was it Russians? And who invented the concept of "color revolution" in which influencing of election
was the major part of strategy ? And which nation instituted the program of covert access to email boxes
of all major webmail providers? He should study the history of malware and the USA covert operations
before writing this propagandist/provocateur opus to look a little bit more credible...
Notable quotes:
"... Email, a main conduit of communication for two decades, now appears so vulnerable that the nation seems to be wondering whether its bursting inboxes can ever be safe. ..."
The 2016 presidential race will be remembered for many ugly moments, but the most lasting historical
marker may be one that neither voters nor American intelligence agencies saw coming: It is the first
time that a foreign power has unleashed cyberweapons to disrupt, or perhaps influence, a United States
election.
And there is a foreboding sense that, in elections to come, there is no turning back.
The steady drumbeat of allegations of Russian troublemaking - leaks from stolen emails and probes
of election-system defenses - has continued through the campaign's last days. These intrusions, current
and former administration officials agree, will embolden other American adversaries, which have been
given a vivid demonstration that, when used with some subtlety, their growing digital arsenals can
be particularly damaging in the frenzy of a democratic election.
"Most of the biggest stories of this election cycle have had a cybercomponent to them - or the
use of information warfare techniques that the Russians, in particular, honed over decades," said
David Rothkopf, the chief executive and editor of Foreign Policy, who has written two histories of
the National Security Council. "From stolen emails, to WikiLeaks, to the hacking of the N.S.A.'s
tools, and even the debate about how much of this the Russians are responsible for, it's dominated
in a way that we haven't seen in any prior election."
The magnitude of this shift has gone largely unrecognized in the cacophony of a campaign dominated
by charges of groping and pay-for-play access. Yet the lessons have ranged from the intensely personal
to the geostrategic.
Email, a main conduit of communication for two decades, now appears so vulnerable that the
nation seems to be wondering whether its bursting inboxes can ever be safe. Election systems,
the underpinning of democracy, seem to be at such risk that it is unimaginable that the United States
will go into another national election without treating them as "critical infrastructure."
But President Obama has been oddly quiet on these issues. He delivered a private warning to President
Vladimir V. Putin of Russia during their final face-to-face encounter two months ago, aides say.
Still, Mr. Obama has barely spoken publicly about the implications of foreign meddling in the election.
His instincts, those who have worked with him on cyberissues say, are to deal with the problem by
developing new norms of international behavior or authorizing covert action rather than direct confrontation.
After a series of debates in the Situation Room, Mr. Obama and his aides concluded that any public
retaliation should be postponed until after the election - to avoid the appearance that politics
influenced his decision and to avoid provoking Russian counterstrikes while voting is underway. It
remains unclear whether Mr. Obama will act after Tuesday, as his aides hint, or leave the decision
about a "proportional response" to his successor.
Cybersleuths, historians and strategists will debate for years whether Russia's actions reflected
a grand campaign of interference or mere opportunism on the part of Mr. Putin. While the administration
has warned for years about the possibility of catastrophic attacks, what has happened in the past
six months has been far more subtle.
Russia has used the techniques - what they call "hybrid war," mixing new technologies with old-fashioned
propaganda, misinformation and disruption - for years in former Soviet states and elsewhere in Europe.
The only surprise was that Mr. Putin, as he intensified confrontations with Washington as part of
a nationalist campaign to solidify his own power amid a deteriorating economy, was willing to take
them to American shores.
The most common theory is that while the Russian leader would prefer the election of Donald J.
Trump - in part because Mr. Trump has suggested that NATO is irrelevant and that the United States
should pull its troops back to American shores - his primary motive is to undercut what he views
as a smug American sense of superiority about its democratic processes.
Madeleine K. Albright, a former secretary of state who is vigorously supporting Hillary Clinton,
wrote recently that Mr. Putin's goal was "to create doubt about the validity of the U.S. election
results, and to make us seem hypocritical when we question the conduct of elections in other countries."
If so, this is a very different use of power than what the Obama administration has long prepared
the nation for.
Four years ago, Leon E. Panetta, the defense secretary at the time, warned of an impending "cyber
Pearl Harbor" in which enemies could "contaminate the water supply in major cities or shut down the
power grid across large parts of the country," perhaps in conjunction with a conventional attack.
After all, Clinton is not going to make it into the Oval Office unless she can secure the votes of
those who backed the far-more progressive Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries.
Clinton's camp have wielded various sticks to beat these voters into submission. Not least they
have claimed that a refusal to vote for Clinton is an indication of one's
misogyny . But it has not been an easy task. Actor Susan Sarandon, for example, has
stated that she is not going to "vote with my vagina". As she notes, if the issue is simply about
proving one is not anti-women, there is a much worthier candidate for president who also happens
to be female: Jill Stein, of the Green Party.
Sarandon, who supported Sanders in the primaries, spoke for a vast swath of voters excluded by
the two-party system when she told BBC Newsnight:
I am worried about the wars, I am worried about Syria, I am worried about all of these things
that actually exist. TTP [Trans-Pacific Partnership] and I'm worried about fracking. I'm worrying
about the environment. No matter who gets in they don't address these things because money has
taken over our system.
Given that both Donald Trump and Clinton represent big money – and big money only – Clinton's
supporters have been forced to find another stick. And that has been the "lesser evil" argument.
Clinton may be bad, but Trump would be far worse. Voting for a non-evil candidate like Jill Stein
– who has no hope of winning – would split the progressive camp and ensure Trump, the more evil candidate,
triumphs. Therefore, there is a moral obligation on progressive voters to back Clinton, however bad
her track record as a senator and as secretary of state.
There is nothing new about this argument. It had been around for decades, and has been corralling
progressives into voting for Democratic presidents who have still advanced US neoconservative policy
goals abroad and neoliberal ones at home.
America's pseudo-democracy
So is it true that Clinton is the lesser-evil candidate? To answer that question, we need to examine
those "policy differences" with Trump.
On the negative side, Trump's platform poses a genuine threat to civil liberties. His bigoted,
"blame the immigrants" style of politics will harm many families in the US in very tangible ways.
Even if the inertia of the political system reins in his worst excesses, as is almost certain, his
inflammatory rhetoric is sure to damage the façade of democratic discourse in the US – a development
not to be dismissed lightly. Americans may be living in a pseudo-democracy, one run more like a plutocracy,
but destroying the politics of respect, and civil discourse, could quickly result in the normalisation
of political violence and intimidation.
On the plus side, Trump is an isolationist, with little appetite for foreign entanglements. Again,
the Washington policy elites may force him to engage abroad in ways he would prefer not to, but his
instincts to limit the projection of US military power on the international stage are likely to be
an overall good for the world's population outside the US. Any diminishment of US imperialism is
going to have real practical benefits for billions of people around the globe. His refusal to demonise
Vladimir Putin, for example, may be significant enough to halt the gradual slide towards a nuclear
confrontation with Russia, either in Ukraine or in the Middle East.
Clinton is the mirror image of Trump. Domestically, she largely abides by the rules of civil politics
– not least because respectful discourse benefits her as the candidate with plenty of political experience.
The US is likely to be a more stable, more predictable place under a Clinton presidency, even as
the plutocratic elite entrenches its power and the wealth gap grows relentlessly.
Abroad, however, the picture looks worse under Clinton. She has been an enthusiastic supporter
of all the many recent wars of aggression launched by the US, some declared and some covert. Personally,
as secretary of state, she helped engineer the overthrow of Col Muammar Gaddafi. That policy led
to an outcome – one that was entirely foreseeable – of Libya's reinvention as a failed state, with
jihadists of every stripe sucked into the resulting vacuum. Large parts of Gadaffi's arsenal followed
the jihadists as they exported their struggles across the Middle East, creating more bloodshed and
heightening the refugee crisis. Now Clinton wants to intensify US involvement in Syria, including
by imposing a no-fly zone – or rather, a US and allies-only fly zone – that would thrust the US into
a direct confrontation with another nuclear-armed power, Russia.
In the cost-benefit calculus of who to vote for in a two-party contest, the answer seems to be:
vote for Clinton if you are interested only in what happens in the narrow sphere of US domestic politics
(assuming Clinton does not push the US into a nuclear war); while if you are a global citizen worried
about the future of the planet, Trump may be the marginally better of two terribly evil choices.
(Neither, of course, cares a jot about the most pressing problem facing mankind: runaway climate
change.)
So even on the extremely blinkered logic of Clinton's supporters, Clinton might not be the winner
in a lesser-evil presidential contest.
Mounting disillusion
But there is a second, more important reason to reject the lesser-evil argument as grounds for
voting for Clinton.
Trump's popularity is a direct consequence of several decades of American progressives voting
for the lesser-evil candidate. Most Americans have never heard of Jill Stein, or the other three
candidates who are not running on behalf of the Republican and Democratic parties. These candidates
have received no mainstream media coverage – or the chance to appear in the candidate debates – because
their share of the vote is so minuscule. It remains minuscule precisely because progressives have
spent decades voting for the lesser-evil candidate. And nothing is going to change so long as progressives
keep responding to the electoral dog-whistle that they have to keep the Republican candidate out
at all costs, even at the price of their own consciences.
Growing numbers of Americans understand that their country was "stolen from them", to use a popular
slogan. They sense that the US no longer even aspires to its founding ideals, that it has become
a society run for the exclusive benefit of a tiny wealthy elite. Many are looking for someone to
articulate their frustration, their powerlessness, their hopelessness.
Two opposed antidotes for the mounting disillusionment with "normal politics" emerged during the
presidential race: a progressive one, in the form of Sanders, who suggested he was ready to hold
the plutocrats to account; and a populist one, in the form of Trump, determined to deflect anger
away from the plutocrats towards easy targets like immigrants. As we now know from Wikileaks' release
of Clinton campaign chair John Podesta's emails, the Democats worked hard to rig their own primaries
to make sure the progressive option, Sanders, was eliminated. The Republicans, by contrast, were
overwhelmed by the insurrection within their own party.
The wave of disaffection Sanders and Trump have been riding is not going away. In fact, a President
Clinton, the embodiment of the self-serving, self-aggrandising politics of the plutocrats, will only
fuel the disenchantment. The fixing of the Democratic primaries did not strengthen Clinton's moral
authority, it fuelled the kind of doubts about the system that bolster Trump. Trump's accusations
of a corrupt elite and a rigged political and media system are not merely figments of his imagination;
they are rooted in the realities of US politics.
Trump, however, is not the man to offer solutions. His interests are too close aligned to those
of the plutocrats for him to make meaningful changes.
Trump may lose this time, but someone like him will do better next time – unless ordinary Americans
are exposed to a different kind of politician, one who can articulate progressive, rather regressive,
remedies for the necrosis that is rotting the US body politic. Sanders began that process, but a
progressive challenge to "politics as normal" has to be sustained and extended if Trump and his ilk
are not to triumph eventually.
The battle cannot be delayed another few years, on the basis that one day a genuinely non-evil
candidate will emerge from nowhere to fix this rotten system. It won't happen of its own. Unless
progressive Americans show they are prepared to vote out of conviction, not out of necessity, the
Democratic party will never have to take account of their views. It will keep throwing up leaders
– in different colours and different sexes – to front the tiny elite that runs the US and seeks to
rule the world.
"... Neoliberalism is a kind of statecraft. It means organizing state policies by making them appear as if they are the consequences of depoliticized financial markets. ..."
"... It involves moving power from public institutions to private institutions, and allowing governance to happen through concentrated financial power. Actual open markets for goods and services tend to disappear in neoliberal societies. ..."
"... Neoliberalism is not faith in free markets. Neoliberalism is not free market capitalism. Neoliberalism is a specific form of statecraft that uses financial markets as a veil to disguise governing policies. ..."
"... The only consolation is that clearly a Dem or Repub president doesn't really matter, given the corporatocracy (or oligarchy, take your pick). So the bonus this year is that Drump destroyed the Bush dynasty and most of the RNC. And Clinton has burnt all her bridges and allies and the liberal MSM in getting to her (assumed) victory. ..."
"... remember whatever happens the world will go on and one US president or another will screw the serfs domestically and bomb Middle Eastern countries. ..."
"... Unless Hillary and the gung-ho neocons decide that we really should see just how far Putin can be pushed. ..."
"... I don't care which one wins, all I know is that the rest of us in the 90% will be screwed either way. But I will settle down in the evening, have a cuppa, and hope that TV will provide me with some schadenfreude. ..."
"... We cannot betray the ideal of a popular democracy by pretending this contrived political theater is free or fair or democratic. We cannot play their game. We cannot play by their rules. Our job is not to accommodate the corporate state…. ..."
"... "I do not, in the end, fight fascists because I will win. I fight fascists because they are fascists." ..."
"... "It is not my job to support someone who makes for a better Republican than they can come up with themselves." ..."
"... I will never again vote for the 'lesser of two evils'. Did it once for Obama (against Sarah Palin). Never again. It just encourages more crapification. ..."
"... I've read exactly one compelling argument for voting Hillary, by Jim Kunstler, who thinks it best if the crew responsible for the mess is still holding the bag when things really go south. ..."
Best pro-Trump piece I've seen: "The GOP's 'Ungrateful Bastard' Caucus" [
American Greatness ].
Best pro-Clinton piece remains: "Vote for the Lying Neoliberal Warmonger: It's Important" [
Common Dreams ].
The best reasons I can think of to vote for each candidate (as opposed to against the
other candidates). In no particular order:
Trump: A realist foreign policy Clinton: More of the same Stein: Break the two-party duopoloy
Johnson: Sanity on marijuna legalization
These reasons are, of course, entirely incommensurate.
"The American Conservative Presidential Symposium" [
The American Conservative ]. Michael Tracey: "Trump might be better than Hillary on foreign
policy (my top issue), but he's far too volatile to conclude that with any certainty, and he may
well end up being catastrophically worse. The Clintons' outrageous stoking of a war fervor over
Russia is quite simply depraved and should disqualify them from reentering the White House…. Democrats
deserve punishment for nominating a candidate with such severe legal problems, stifling a genuine
populist insurgent in the most craven possible fashion (I supported Bernie Sanders but find his
recent hectoring pro-Clinton conduct highly off-putting). Their shambolic, 'rigged' primary process
can't be countenanced, nor can the 2016 electoral debacle as a whole, so I'll do my small part
in rejecting this horror show by declining to vote."
Realignment
"America's Ruling Elite Has Failed and Deserves to Be Fired" [
Of Two Minds ]. "The last failed remnants of the state-cartel hierarchies left over from World
War II must implode before we can move forward. Healthcare, defense, pharmaceuticals, higher education,
the mainstream media and the systems of governance must all decay to the point that no one can
be protected from the destructive consequences of their failure, and no paychecks can be issued
by these failed systems." Tellingly, the author omits the FIRE sector. So I would say their definition
of elite is odd.
"[E]ducation levels are a more significant factor this year. Obama won a majority of those
with a high school diploma (or less) in 2012, while Romney won college-educated voters. This year
the numbers are reversed. Among white voters with only a high school education, Trump leads by
over 25 points. Among whites with a college degree, Clinton leads by about 10 percent. This is
the first time since serious polling began in 1952 that this has happened [
RealClearPoltiics ]. And when I ask myself who sent the United States heading toward Third
World status, it's not those without college degrees. In fact, it's Clinton's base.
[M]illions of Americans trudge through a bleak round of layoffs, wage cuts, part-time jobs
at minimal pay, and system-wide dysfunction. The crisis hasn't hit yet, but those members of
the political class who think that the people who used to be rock-solid American patriots will
turn out en masse to keep today's apparatchiks secure in their comfortable lifestyles have,
as the saying goes, another think coming. Nor is it irrelevant that most of the enlisted personnel
in the armed forces, who are the US government's ultimate bulwark against popular unrest, come
from the very classes that have lost faith most drastically in the American system. The one
significant difference between the Soviet case and the American one at this stage of the game
is that Soviet citizens had no choice but to accept the leaders the Communist Party of the
USSR foisted off on them, from Brezhnev to Andropov to Chernenko to Gorbachev, until the system
collapsed of its own weight…
If George W. Bush was our Leonid Brezhnev, as I'd suggest, and Barack Obama is our Yuri
Andropov, Hillary Clinton is running for the position of Konstantin Chernenko; her running
mate Tim Kaine, in turn, is waiting in the wings as a suitably idealistic and clueless Mikhail
Gorbachev, under whom the whole shebang can promptly go to bits. While I don't seriously expect
the trajectory of the United States to parallel that of the Soviet Union anything like as precisely
as this satiric metaphor would suggest, the basic pattern of cascading dysfunction ending in
political collapse is quite a common thing in history, and a galaxy of parallels suggests that
the same thing could very easily happen here within the next decade or so. The serene conviction
among the political class and their affluent hangers-on that nothing of the sort could possibly
take place is just another factor making it more likely.
"Why Trump Is Different-and Must Be Repelled" [Adam Gopnik,
The New Yorker ].
For the past months, and into this final week, as for much of the past year, many New Yorkers
have been in a position that recalls parents with a colicky baby: you put the baby down at
last, it seems safely asleep, grateful and unbelievably exhausted you return to bed-only to
hear the small tell-tale cough or sob that guarantees another crying jag is on the way. The
parents in this case, to fill in the metaphorical blanks, are liberal-minded folk; the baby's
cries are any indicators that Donald Trump may not be out of the race for President-as he seemed
to be even as recently as last week-and may actually have a real chance at being elected. Disbelief
crowds exhaustion: this can't be happening. If the colicky baby is a metaphor too sweet for
so infantile a figure as the orange menace, then let us think instead, perhaps, of the killer
in a teen horror movie of the vintage kind: every time Freddy seemed dispatched and buried,
there he was leaping up again, as the teens caught their breath and returned, too soon, to
their teendom.
Of course, Gopnik - who should really stick to writing sweetly atmospheric pieces about Paris
- is both passive-aggressive and infuriatingly smug. To "fill in the metaphorical blanks," but
for realz, both the "colicky baby" and the teen horror movie villain are infantilized and
displaced versions of a working class Other: The Trump voter that Eurostar-rider Gopnik hates
and fears, because he's afraid they're going to come and kill him and take his stuff. In short,
he has the guilty conscience of a classic liberal.
Democrat Email Hairball
"Dow surges 300 points as FBI clears Clinton on eve of election" [
USA Today ]. Hmm. Insiders go to HappyVille!
Our Famously Free Press
"Vox Scams Readers Into Thinking Prescient World Series Tweet Was A Scam [Update]" [
DeadSpin ].
Guillotine Watch
"Too Smug to Jail" [Matt Taibbi,
Rolling Stone ]. "As we reach the close of an election season marked by anger toward the unaccountable
rich, The Economist has chimed in with a defense of the beleaguered white-collar criminal."
[T]his is the crucial passage:
"Most corporate crime is the result of collective action rather than individual wrongdoing-long
chains of command that send (often half-understood) instructions, or corporate cultures that encourage
individuals to take risky actions. The authorities have rightly adjusted to this reality by increasingly
prosecuting companies rather than going after individual miscreants."
Yikes! This extraordinary argument is cousin to the
Lieutenant Calley defense , i.e., that soldiers bear no responsibility for crimes they were
ordered to execute. The Economist here would have you believe that there's no such thing
as an individual crime in a corporate context.
Neoliberalism is a kind of statecraft. It means organizing state policies by making them appear
as if they are the consequences of depoliticized financial markets.
It involves moving power from
public institutions to private institutions, and allowing governance to happen through concentrated
financial power. Actual open markets for goods and services tend to disappear in neoliberal societies.
Financial markets flourish, real markets morph into mass distribution middlemen like Walmart or
Amazon.
Neoliberalism is not faith in free markets. Neoliberalism is not free market capitalism. Neoliberalism
is a specific form of statecraft that uses financial markets as a veil to disguise governing policies.
"Uncovering Credit Disparities among Low- and Moderate-Income Areas" [
Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis ]. "Eggleston found that LMI [lower abd middle-income] neighborhoods
with relatively better credit tend to be in metros with a larger percentage of white residents, and
they are typically found in the East, West and parts of the upper Midwest. They also tend to be in
metros that have lower poverty rates."
Look at reddit r/politics. Did Hillary/Brock stop paying to downvote all anti-Hill posts/comments?
Reaction to the Daily Beast telling readers "YOU MUST VOTE HILLARY" was at 11,000. Maybe, Hillary
and Co are trying to get a handle on real voter sentiment?
Or they don't care now that it is in the bag.
LOL I was going to post (well, I guess I am doing so) that the finger I am counting down on
is my middle finger, which I shall extend to the DNC, the RNC, the MSM, and the rest of the corrupt
US oligarchy that brought us here. Especially the MSM - and note of course that it was Bill Clinton
who deregulated the media so it went from one hundred or so to the SIX corporate behemoths that
control 90%+ of the news that the average American consumes.
FU!
The only consolation is that clearly a Dem or Repub president doesn't really matter, given
the corporatocracy (or oligarchy, take your pick). So the bonus this year is that Drump destroyed
the Bush dynasty and most of the RNC. And Clinton has burnt all her bridges and allies and the
liberal MSM in getting to her (assumed) victory.
My humble advice for tomorrow: have a case of beer, wine, whiskey, or green tea at hand, relax,
play some good music, ignore the MSM, and remember whatever happens the world will go on and one
US president or another will screw the serfs domestically and bomb Middle Eastern countries.
Oh yeah, I will extend my own middle finger right back at them tomorrow. Voting for Stein will
at least give me the inner peace and comfort of knowing that I did not vote for the "lesser evil"
represented by Madame Secretary. I don't care which one wins, all I know is that the rest of us
in the 90% will be screwed either way. But I will settle down in the evening, have a cuppa, and
hope that TV will provide me with some schadenfreude.
I apologize if these concluding thoughts on an exhausting electoral season, by Chris Hedges,
have already been posted:
"We cannot betray the ideal of a popular democracy by pretending this contrived political
theater is free or fair or democratic. We cannot play their game. We cannot play by their rules.
Our job is not to accommodate the corporate state….
The state seeks to control us through fear, propaganda, wholesale surveillance and violence.
[This] is the only form of social control it has left. The lie of neoliberalism has been exposed.
Its credibility has imploded. The moment we cease being afraid, the moment we use our collective
strength as I saw in Eastern Europe in 1989 to make the rulers afraid of us, is the moment
of the system's downfall.
Go into the voting booth on Tuesday. Do not be afraid. Vote with your conscience."
Sounds too much like the Demos fighting for the people but never winning. Also a bit narcissistic.
And is Hedges a foe of, say, the government insurance of privately created deposits – a fascist
invention if ever there was?
Thanks for Correcting the Record! Glad that we can lump anyone who questions your narrative into four neat categories. There's
no possible way someone could have an original thought.
You only need to buy a plane etc. to hand out as favors, buy 4 or 5 dozen media personalities
at mainstream outlets (a network is a must), get your sycophants in elections offices all over
the country to purge your rival's voters and raise a billion dollars. Easy peasy.
Your assuming we don't get about a dozen Florida Hanging-chad scandals. If Trump wins the wrong
states – this will land in court, and all end in tears.
That Reed column, "Vote for the lying neoliberal warmonger; it's important, has always struck
me badly. His point that those who voted for a Democrat for President since '92 have done as badly
or worse than they would in voting for Clinton is just false. No one in my memory has so slavishly
supported finance capital and foreign wars. No one has made going to war with China, Russia or
Iran a central plank in their candidacy.
I, personally, can't get over that. Republicans will do what they will do, it is not my job
to support someone who makes for a better Republican than they can come up with themselves.
I will never again vote for the 'lesser of two evils'. Did it once for Obama (against Sarah
Palin).
Never again. It just encourages more crapification.
I've read exactly
one compelling
argument for voting Hillary, by Jim Kunstler, who thinks it best if the crew responsible for
the mess is still holding the bag when things really go south.
I'd be more inclined to value that possibility if it wasn't clear that the Executive Branch
can now launch wars of choice at will. I have a draft age daughter.
It's not a reference to Doing your Bit turning in family/friends/neighbors/coworkers who you
"know" to be abusing the system, and thus Causing the Problem??
First violence is not the answer. Still that does make one want to find a way to march the
people who came up with that along with the top management of Cigna to the stocks for some quality
communing time with their customers. That there should also be a huge pile of rotten produce near
the stocks would be merely coincidence.
LOL and tomorrow a majority of Americans will vote back in the crowd that brought this down
upon them. Wait til you see what they are gearing up to do to SocSec.
Maybe it's a deep-seated Calvinist/Protestant self-loathing? Catholic self-flaggelation? Stockholm
Syndrome?
Joe Bageant wrote about the curious phenomenon of the Republican base voting year in and year
out for candidates who acted in direct opposition to their own economic interests…maybe that's
both "sides" of politics now?
Ha! Nope. Bought a house in 2009 and thought it was appropriate, and have been using it on
finance / political forums ever since. Worked out OK for us, though.
" But lots of other states use electronic machines in some capacity" [Wired]. "
Much depends on exactly how. For an example, Oregon uses paper ballots marked by the voter,
but, at least in my county, electronic counters. But the paper ballots are audited and stored
for years, so it's easy to check up. Everything happens at the courthouse, so there's no transmission
from precincts, and transmission to the SOS is probably in person by phone, followed up by email.
I'm confident in this system, not least because Oregon is a "clean" state. One county official
has been caught cheating by filling in unvoted lines for Republicans, but went to jail. I can
think of other ways for insiders to cheat, but it would be dangerous and pretty easy to catch.
I'm not concerned about the electronic counters as long as they aren't connected to the internet
– no reason for them to be – and the results are properly audited, the biggest if. I wonder a
bit about very small rural counties, where everybody knows everybody else's business and there
isn't much money for safeguards.
In any case, from a national point of view Oregon's results are not in doubt. Now I have to
do some campaign work for our Ranked Choice Voting initiative, and I look forward to finding out
how it did in Maine.
Trump had big mo, maybe until yesterday…
Today's Ibd puts T ahead by 2, best for some time… Plus generally favorable LATimes…
And blacks not turning out nearly as 08/12.
And Brexit and MI primary polls were far off because ungrateful deplorables.
Regardless, FL is must win for T. If he gets that, then the following swings might fall into place:
OH, NV, NC, IA, NM, (270), and maybe NH bonus.
If he misses FL he would need PA plus CO, likely hopeless.
I guess we deserve what we've got here… Vastly corrupt warmonger running for Obomber's third
term vs loose racist/sexist cannon, albeit apparently the latter likes Putin and avoidsWWIII.
Does seem harsh.
Of course, if Hillary wins the bubble wins. Everyone with a 401k thinks they hit a triple,
but they were walked to third. They won't make it to "home" (comfy retirement).
Meanwhile, Trump is of the 80s heyday of corporate raids…letting it fall and buying up cheap.
Wall St knows.
Hillary wins – ride the bubble and pray you know when to dump (and you can't trust the MSM
info – otherwise suckers would have seen 2008 coming).
The election will continue until the correct result is obtained.
That could happen tomorrow; it could just as well drag into January if the EC is tied or, say,
the "Russians" interfere and we have to have a cyberwar or something. Wouldn't it be interesting
if the House of Rs had to pick the prez? Maybe if the Supremes hadn't lawlessly intervened in
the 2000 election, we wouldn't be in this pickle now. But they did. And we are.
The "correct result" one assumes is Hillary; one has assumed so since this morbid campaign
began. As appealing as Bernie could be at times, there was no chance he would be allowed to stand
as the Democratic nominee. And if the indications of chicanery are correct, he was actively prevented
from becoming the nominee regardless of the "vote."
At no time did those who rule us ever consider Trump for the Big Chair. He's just too open
and uncouth, don'tchaknow. Can't have that. Might give the game away. But he's a sop to the so-called
populists, and man does he run a masterful con. All the slick and perfumed members of his class
only wish they had his skill at suckering the rubes. Whoa. Dude.
Meanwhile, it's good to learn that there can be no corruption unless its name is Clinton (er,
correction: "Clintoon") or can be linked somehow, if only tangentially, to the Clintoon Crime
Syndicate, or it arises politically from the Democratic (er, correction: "Democrat") Party which
is the ultimate source of all corruption, even that of the Clintoons.
Nothing the Democrat Party or the Clintoons do is defensible; defenses for Trump, on the other
hand, well. "It's just business." Or my favorite: "At least he hasn't killed anybody (sotto voce:
yet… that we know of ") So let's give him a chance!
Our Rulers are close to panicking because no matter who is ultimately selected, they fear there
will be blood in the streets, and the unrest might get close to their compounds, lead to unpleasantness
in their high-rises, interfere, perhaps, with some of their looting and destruction for pleasure.
This election has, for once, discommoded the comfortable.
I voted for Stein, the completely incorrect candidate, though I toyed with leaving the topline
blank. Many people I know did that. But no, some of us feel the need to show solidarity with our
leftish comrades. So few though, in the end.
Also, if people are writing in a candidate to make a statement or as an act of personal conscience,
that's their choice, but if they want the vote counted the rules vary by state. In most states,
including Maine, the candidate has to file paperwork.
What's your prediction of how many votes Stein will get nationwide? The Wiki god of knowledge
says she got 470K in 2012. I'm going to say 3M in 2016 or about 2.5%.
One need only track the past month's series of outrages, each quickly receding into the
distance, to recall that he has done not one but almost innumerable things that in any previous
election would have been, quaint word, "disqualifying."
I don't know if it would ever occur to Gopnik, but perhaps people are tired of idiotic gaffes
and meaningless scandals sinking candidates. Maybe, for a sizable portion of the country,
the sex scandal has been overused as some kind of indicator for someone's ability to govern, or,
even though Gopnik doesn't understand this, it isn't a reflection on their ability to speak about
policies that mean something to them.
Talking with Trump supporters I know, they are all very much influenced by: 1) his embracing
of nationalism, 2) rejection of trade deals, 3) ideas about reforming government finance. Of course,
their distrust for Hillary is just as strong.
I haven't met any trump supporters saying, "Gee, I really think his misogyny lets me free my
own inherent sexism." But then again, when identity politics is what you rely on to make your
vote, anyone opposed to your candidate is part of a vast linked chain of ignorant brains and invisible
connections that only they can see or appreciate.
Also loved his closing line:
For, as Shakespeare would have grasped at once, there is no explaining Trump.
Isn't that your job, Adam? Put your keyboard down if you're unable to do it and spare us the
columns.
The slightest bit of self-discipline on Trump's part, and Clinton is suddenly in the race
of her life. Shows her extreme weakness as a candidate, and the decadence of the Democrat nomenklatura
that forced her nomination through, not to mention the decadence of the political class…
If Clinton wins by any margin that doesn't keep her up all night, will not be surprised if
she and Team Blue will act as if this is the most awesome-est triumph ever because they are the
most awesome-est ever. First women first couple both being Presidents etc etc. They don't seem
to have any sense of just how weak and disliked she/they are, and why. They will arrogantly proceed
to govern as if they received a powerful mandate and not give an inch anywhere on policy, confident
that the methods they used to get elected will work again in 4 years. It will be their way or
the highway.
A cynic might also view another first in this election: the first time that a "charitable"
foundation has been elected to the office! But perhaps I am being somewhat unfair in questioning
the esteemed institution's charity, as it has indeed been charitable towards some.
Taxable Donations to the Clinton Foundation could pay off the national debt – says Charles
Ortel, should a Trump administration request a grand jury to assess the many many deficiencies
and out and out crimes of that sham charity.
That is the spit and glue that binds the never Trump coalition. There are billions and billions
at stake. Wall St, foreign governments, world leaders and the Gates Foundation, Bezos, Slim, Geithner,
Paulson - all the big boys. Ortel does a splendid job on you tube explaining how strict the rules
are for charitable foundations.
The FBI has the goods on the Clinton's and their phony baloney "foundation".
All they need is a courageous and honest Atty General – state or federal – willing to literally
risk life, limb, children, dogs, cats and extended family members should they file charges on
the Royals and fail.
"The onus is on the charity" – says Ortel, to prove their innocence, once charges are filed.
And the Clinton Foundation has never EVER filed the proper paper work to do ANY of their activities.
AGAIN, the rules state you may not raise money for AIDS, unless your charter was filed to do so.
the Clintons have never filed the necessary paperwork. There is a 19 page expose on their failure
to file or provide the necessary forms.
Hundreds of billions in taxable penalties and interest will be due, should Trump prevail and
ask for a grand jury. He doesn't have to threaten them. THEY KNOW
When you see George Will, LInsay Graham, Bill Kristol and the Bush crime family pulling out
all the stops to end this revolution – it's because of EXPOSURE.
The Clinton Foundation is the GOLD MINE. Watch and listen.
Hillary Clinton's planned celebratory election night fireworks display over the Hudson River
has been canceled, it was revealed Monday.
"They do have a permit for fireworks, but at this point we believe the fireworks is canceled,"
NYPD chief of intelligence Tommy Galati said at a city press conference on Election Day security
with Mayor Bill de Blasio and Police Commissioner James O'Neill.
When asked by a reporter why the fireworks were canceled, Galati responded, "I cannot tell
you that."
Clinton was planning aerial detonations for her potential victory that would last for two
minutes starting as early at 9:30 p.m. - a half-hour after the polls close in New York.
Since Latino Turnout has been up and AA down Trumps best shot is hoping that the Philly transit
strike and Rain in Detroit and most of PA on tuesday suppress less enthusiastic Clinton voters.
Both have low early voting. Then he has to cross his fingers for NC and NH. http://www.270towin.com/maps/EXyOo
crud. Well maybe the rainstorm will blow in a little sooner then it is predicted, even then
it will only hit Pittsburgh though. But it will hit Detroit all day.
Gallup US Consumer Spending Measure, October 2016: " In October, Americans' daily self-reports
of spending averaged $93, similar to September's $91 average. However, it is among the highest
for the month of October in the survey's nine-year trend" [Econoday] - Was it too much to
hope for an economists-trying-to-sound-smart subtitle along the lines of "Economists cite effect
of Halloween falling in October this year" on this?
(And I wonder how that yuuge $2 rise compares to the error bars on the survey. Also whether
any portion can be attributed to all those new improved health insurance rates showering their
blessings on the country.)
What about the idea that if we elect Trump, Americans' anger will be diffused and most people
will be happy?
If Clinton gets it, everyone, except her financiers will be unhappy, sooner or later.
Four years of Hillary, continuing economic stagnation and more wars may usher in and elect
a candidate in 2020 who will make Trump look like a meek-mannered gentleman.
Will it really be worth it to the elite to elect Hillary and end up having to live behind locked
gates and only venture out in public with a cadre of bodyguards? Will the wealthy see their Teslas
and luxury cars stoned and trashed when they park them in public?
Or, should they just live with Trump and like it? If I were an elite, I'd vote for Trump for
that very reason.
Electing Trump will not defuse the anger–it will just mean that for a little while at least
the half of the population who owns most of the guns will be happier. That will give us a year
or so until they realize that he was never serious about helping them, and lacks the political
skills or even attention span to do so. By 2018, we'd be right back to the starting point–just
in time to start the whole stupid cycle all over again.
No, a lot of things would change. Clinton winning would be seen as validation of the status
quo. Trump winning would be destabilizing. To pretend that the two outcomes are the same is wrongheaded.
Trump winning would break the hold of the Clintons on the Democratic party, and since they've
made the party overly concerned with the Presidency, at the expense of building a bench or capturing
down-ticket races (all down the list, Congress, governorships, important state level posts), the
damage to the party would be profound. They were already expected to lose the Senate in 2018 even
if they recover it tomorrow.
Trump winning would also throw a wrench into the Republicans, although not to quite as profound
a degree, since him getting this far has already put them in disarray. It would put the orthodox
corporate types and many of the evangelicals in a tizzy. The lineup that Trump wants to bring
in as his team are either outsiders or not well like by the mainstream of the party. So you can
expect Trump to have to fight with much of his own party, as well as the Dems keen to re-establish
themselves in the face of their loss.
If nothing else, Trump can do a lot on the trade front without Congress, based on the analyses
I've seen so far. How far he would get in trying to wind down our over-involvement in the Middle
East is questionable, but it does appear that he would at least stop further escalation with Russia.
He also appears to have the ability to get INS rules enforced more strictly (Obama has deported
more people than is widely acknowledged).
In other words, the President has a fair bit of power to act unilaterally. That does not require
"political skills" since you don't need to get Congress to go along. I agree Trump would have
little success with Congress, based on the precedent of Jimmy Carter, who had been a governor
and had a House and Senate that were both solidly Democratic, and thus in theory should have gotten
some cooperation, but brought in a team of outsiders and acted as if being post-Watergate meant
he could do things differently.
I'm probably voting for Trump only because of TPP. Thanks to the trade traitors, fast track
passage made it much easier to pass TPP with a simple majority during the lame duck session. Clinton
will let it ride, but Trump will probably kill it, or at least try to.
If DARPA's robotics program will only come up with some cool enough robots we might send a
bot or two to closes down the flow of gated sewer lines or stop the flow of gated water - or add
a little something.
I never never even made these suggestions - a Russian spy working for PUTIN took over my keyboard.
I have absolutely no evidence that there's any manipulating of the polling data going on, or
how that would work if it were, but it seems to me that this down to the wire close and flip-flopping
polling data is hugely in the media's $$ interest. Gazillion$$ are being dumped into late media
buys especially for senate races. I can't see how they could manipulate it but if the media could
it's certainly in their $$ interest to do so.
I raised this yesterday as a comment, but would like to re-phrase as a question. Bearing in
mind that the Clinton 'team' had possession of all of her e-mails for 2 years prior to the original
request for the records re the Benghazi investigation, and that the Admin was kind enough to allow
Clinton's lawyers to be the ones who determined which e-mails were 'work-related' and which 'personal',
and further bearing in mind that the focus has been on whether or not any of the 'personal' e-mails
were classified or not, I'd like to ask everyone this:
Did the FBI audit all of the e-mails that Clinton lawyers put in the 'work-related' basket?
Given State is full of Clinton 'friendlies' would it not be possible that incriminating 'personal'
e-mails were improperly slotted as 'work-related' to hide them with State until it all blows over?
Alternately, was the FBI granted access to all Clinton's State Department '.gov' account messages,
and those on the systems often referenced by Clinton and others that was used for all important,
classified, secret stuff? Further, did FBI have access to all Clinton's (or others') communications
using State Department (or other Government) systems that may have been sent to the Foundation,
or to any of her usual suspects (Podesta, Mills, Abedin, Clinton lawyers, etc.)?
Two years is a long time for someone to think about what to do with a pile of incriminating
stuff – something a bit more selective than Podesta's 'dump it'.
Truly terrible NPR coverage of the start of the Dylann Roof trial in Charlestown on
both the
morning and
evening shows.
No mention of the fact that a charismatic black state senator, Clementa Pinckney, was assassinated.
Pinckney is referred to, and not by name, only as the pastor of the Mother Emanuel A.M.E. Church.
No breathless speculations or leaks from anonymous LE sources about how Roof was radicalized
or who else might have been involved in the plot.
No use of the phrase `domestic terrorism', which apparently is off limits in such cases.
Hillary Loses the Left
| 06 Nov 2016 | While Donald Trump has been
consolidating his base of support, the opposite appears to be happening for Democratic
nominee Hillary Clinton, who seems to be hemorrhaging supporters from her progressive
base...[I]n the closing days of the 2016 campaign, the rift has been laid bare through a
combination of WikiLeaks revelations, a series of high-profile endorsements for Green
Party presidential nominee Jill Stein from progressives like Marc Lamont Hill, Cornel
West, and Susan Sarandon, as well as polling data that suggests Trump's broad populist
messaging is resonating with Democrat-leaning voters. v Contrary to the narrative
perpetuated by corporate media, many prominent liberals are now expressing their belief
that installing Hillary Clinton, a "
corporatist
hawk
," in the White House is "
the
true danger
" and would be "
more
dangerous
" for progressive values, the well-being of the nation, and the stability
of the world than would four years of a Donald Trump presidency.
According to a new Wikileaks email, Bernie Sanders was just a Manchurian candidate and a
Clinton puppet all along. We finally have confirmation of what we have suspected since Bernie
said "people are sick of hearing about your damn emails" all the way back in 2015 during one
debate. That was a big give-away and a huge red flag which many have raised back then but now we
finally have irrefutable proof that Bernie Sanders was just a SCAM candidate and a con artist.
"... it's easy to imagine a President Trump refusing to heed our own highest court, which, as President Andrew Jackson observed, has no way, other than respect of institutions, to enforce its decisions. ..."
"... It's easy to carp like this but the sclerotic elite in charge of the country has failed to address demographic concerns, and has stamped out any politically incorrect thoughts as being signs of baseness. ..."
"... Now they are so upset that a challenger has arisen. It's unfortunate that this particular challenger has no background in government and will probably harm our economic growth with his lack of skill, but the elites will have to eat the cake they baked. ..."
"... Economists told us that free trade deals and open borders would make us prosperous and yet that hasn't happens. ..."
"... The technicians running trade policy, monetary policy and fiscal policy haven't held up their end of the bargain. ..."
"... Wealth and power has been redistributed upwards. ..."
"... The union movement has been destroyed in outright class war. ..."
"... The corporate media spread lies and distraction. It induces both apathy and a rat race/dog-eat-dog mentality. ..."
"... Consider how far we've moved right, so that Nixon e.g. would be considered hopelessly and radically leftist today. Given that, moving left should be one of the first things you consider. ..."
"... Yes, we've seen right wing policies killing jobs and steering wealth to the wealthy, and that's bad policy. But unfortunately it seems it's always possible to do *worse*. ..."
"... Trump's policies would double down on wealth transfer, while he spouts the typical RW mantra of "(my dopey policy which would destroy jobs) would be good for jobs." ..."
"... Economic growth fueled by foreign oil is nice while it lasts but what will happen to the country when the oil runs out or we are forced to fight a war that disrupts the supply? ..."
More Jobs, a Strong Economy, and a Threat to Institutions : ...Institutions are significant
to economists, who have come to see that countries become prosperous not because they have bounteous
natural resources or an educated population or the most advanced technology but because they have
good institutions. Crucially, formal structures are supported by informal, often unstated, social
agreements. A nation not only needs courts; its people need to believe that those courts can be
fair. ...
Over most of history, a small élite confiscated wealth from the poor. Subsistence farmers lived
under rules designed to tax them so that the rulers could live in palaces and pay for soldiers
to maintain their power. Every now and then, though, a system appeared in which leaders were forced
to accommodate the needs of at least some of their citizens. ... The societies with the most robust
systems for forcing the powerful to accommodate some of the needs of the powerless became wealthier
and more peaceful. ... Most nations without institutions to check the worst impulses of the rich
and powerful stay stuck in poverty and dysfunction. ...
This year's Presidential election has alarmed economists for several reasons. No economist,
save one , supports Donald J. Trump's stated economic plans, but an even larger concern is
that, were he elected, Trump would attack the very institutions that have provided our economic
stability. In his campaign, Trump has shown outright contempt for courts, free speech, international
treaties, and many other pillars of the American way of life. There is little reason to think
that, if granted the Presidency, Trump would soften his stand. ...
...it's easy to imagine a President Trump refusing to heed our own highest court, which, as
President Andrew Jackson observed, has no way, other than respect of institutions, to enforce
its decisions. No one knows what Trump would do as President, but, based on his statements on
the campaign trail, it's possible to imagine a nation where people have less confidence in the
courts, the military, and their rights to free speech and assembly. When this happens, history
tells us, people stop dreaming about what they could have if they invest in education, new businesses,
and new ideas. They focus, instead, on taking from others and holding tightly to what they've
already amassed. Those societies, without the institutions that protect us from our worst impulses,
become poorer, uglier, more violent. That is how nations fail.
It's easy to carp like this but the sclerotic elite in charge of the country has failed to address
demographic concerns, and has stamped out any politically incorrect thoughts as being signs of
baseness.
Now they are so upset that a challenger has arisen. It's unfortunate that this particular
challenger has no background in government and will probably harm our economic growth with his
lack of skill, but the elites will have to eat the cake they baked.
"No one knows what Trump would do as President, but, based on his statements on the campaign trail,
it's possible to imagine a nation where people have less confidence in the courts, the military,
and their rights to free speech and assembly. When this happens, history tells us, people stop
dreaming about what they could have if they invest in education, new businesses, and new ideas.
They focus, instead, on taking from others and holding tightly to what they've already amassed.
Those societies, without the institutions that protect us from our worst impulses, become poorer,
uglier, more violent. That is how nations fail."
This is all true but let's provide a little more context than the totebaggers' paint-by-numbers
narrative.
Economists told us that free trade deals and open borders would make us prosperous and
yet that hasn't happens.
The technicians running trade policy, monetary policy and fiscal policy haven't held up
their end of the bargain.
Wealth and power has been redistributed upwards.
The union movement has been destroyed in outright class war.
The corporate media spread lies and distraction. It induces both apathy and a rat race/dog-eat-dog
mentality.
The Democratic Party has been moved to right as the middle class has struggled.
And more and more people become susceptible to demagogues like Trump as Democrats try to play
both sides of the fence, instead of standing foresquarely behind the job class.
Let's hope we don't find out what Trump does if elected. My guess is that he'd delegate foreign
and domestic policy to Mike Pence as Trump himself would be free to pursue his own personal grudges
via whatever means are available.
Alex S -> Peter K.... , -1
As we can see here, through leftist glasses, the only possible remedy for solving a problem is
moving left.
Consider how far we've moved right, so that Nixon e.g. would be considered hopelessly and radically
leftist today.
Given that, moving left should be one of the first things you consider.
Consider how far we've moved right, so that Nixon e.g. would be considered hopelessly and radically
leftist today.
Given that, moving left should be one of the first things you consider.
Yes, we've seen right wing policies killing jobs and steering wealth to the wealthy, and that's
bad policy. But unfortunately it seems it's always possible to do *worse*.
Trump's policies would
double down on wealth transfer, while he spouts the typical RW mantra of "(my dopey policy which
would destroy jobs) would be good for jobs."
Tim Harford made a good case for trust accounting
for 99% of the difference in per capita GNP between the US and Somalia.
""If you take a broad enough definition of trust, then it would explain basically all the difference
between the per capita income of the United States and Somalia," ventures Steve Knack, a senior
economist at the World Bank who has been studying the economics of trust for over a decade. That
suggests that trust is worth $12.4 trillion dollars a year to the U.S., which, in case you are
wondering, is 99.5% of this country's income (2006 figures). If you make $40,000 a year, then
$200 is down to hard work and $39,800 is down to trust.
How could that be? Trust operates in all sorts of ways, from saving money that would have to
be spent on security to improving the functioning of the political system. But above all, trust
enables people to do business with each other. Doing business is what creates wealth." goo.gl/t3OqHc
Presidents and the US Economy: An Econometric Exploration
By Alan S. Blinder and Mark W. Watson
Abstract
The US economy has performed better when the president of the United States is a Democrat rather
than a Republican, almost regardless of how one measures performance. For many measures, including
real GDP growth (our focus), the performance gap is large and significant. This paper asks why.
The answer is not found in technical time series matters nor in systematically more expansionary
monetary or fiscal policy under Democrats. Rather, it appears that the Democratic edge stems mainly
from more benign oil shocks, superior total factor productivity (TFP) performance, a more favorable
international environment, and perhaps more optimistic consumer expectations about the near-term
future.
Economic growth fueled by foreign oil is nice while it lasts but what will happen to the country
when the oil runs out or we are forced to fight a war that disrupts the supply?
I was in college in the mid 1970's and we asked this question a lot. Some think this worry has
gone away. I don't agree with those types. Which is why a green technology investment drive makes
a lot of sense for so many reasons.
Quote from the paper you linked to: "Arguably, oil shocks have more to do with US foreign policy
than with US economic policy-the two Gulf Wars being prominent examples. That said, several economists
have claimed that US monetary policy played an important role in bringing on the oil shocks. See,
for example, Barsky and Kilian (2002)."
Do We Really Know that Oil Caused the Great Stagflation? A Monetary Alternative
By Robert B. Barsky and Lutz Kilian
Abstract
This paper argues that major oil price increases were not nearly as essential a part of the
causal mechanism that generated the stagflation of the 1970s as is often thought. There is neither
a theoretical presumption that oil supply shocks are stagflationary nor robust empirical evidence
for this view. In contrast, we show that monetary expansions and contractions can generate stagflation
of realistic magnitude even in the absence of supply shocks. Furthermore, monetary fluctuations
help to explain the historical movements of the prices of oil and other commodities, including
the surge in the prices of industrial commodities that preceded the 1973/74 oil price increase.
Thus, they can account for the striking coincidence of major oil price increases and worsening
stagflation.
My quote dragged on too long. I should have ended it with the first sentence. Monetary policy
could play a role but foreign policy could still be the biggest factor.
"Former Fed Vice Chairman Alan Blinder said he's skeptical that fiscal policy will be loosened
a great deal if Clinton wins the election, as seems likely based on recent voter surveys.
"She is promising not to make budget deficits bigger by her programs," said Blinder, who is
now a professor at Princeton University. "Whatever fiscal stimulus there is ought to be small
enough for the Fed practically to ignore it."
PGL told us that Hillary's fiscal program would be YUGE.
Dean Baker in "Rigged" * reminds me of the lasting limits to growth that appear to follow the
sacrifice of growth, especially to the extent of allowing a recession, for the sake of budget
balancing during a time of surrounding economic weakness:
Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich
Richer
By Dean Baker
Introduction: Trading in Myths
In winter 2016, near the peak of Bernie Sanders' bid for the Democratic presidential nomination,
a new line became popular among the nation's policy elite: Bernie Sanders is the enemy of the
world's poor. Their argument was that Sanders, by pushing trade policies to help U.S. workers,
specifically manufacturing workers, risked undermining the well-being of the world's poor because
exporting manufactured goods to the United States and other wealthy countries is their path out
of poverty. The role model was China, which by exporting has largely eliminated extreme poverty
and drastically reduced poverty among its population. Sanders and his supporters would block the
rest of the developing world from following the same course.
This line, in its Sanders-bashing permutation, appeared early on in Vox, the millennial-oriented
media upstart, and was quickly picked up elsewhere (Beauchamp 2016). After all, it was pretty
irresistible. The ally of the downtrodden and enemy of the rich was pushing policies that would
condemn much of the world to poverty.
The story made a nice contribution to preserving the status quo, but it was less valuable if
you respect honesty in public debate.
The problem in the logic of this argument should be apparent to anyone who has taken an introductory
economics course. It assumes that the basic problem of manufacturing workers in the developing
world is the need for someone who will buy their stuff. If people in the United States don't buy
it, then the workers will be out on the street and growth in the developing world will grind to
a halt. In this story, the problem is that we don't have enough people in the world to buy stuff.
In other words, there is a shortage of demand. But is it really true that no one else in the world
would buy the stuff produced by manufacturing workers in the developing world if they couldn't
sell it to consumers in the United States? Suppose people in the developing world bought the stuff
they produced raising their living standards by raising their own consumption.
That is how the economics is supposed to work. In the standard theory, general shortages of
demand are not a problem. Economists have traditionally assumed that economies tended toward full
employment. The basic economic constraint was a lack of supply. The problem was that we couldn't
produce enough goods and services, not that we were producing too much and couldn't find anyone
to buy them. In fact, this is why all the standard models used to analyze trade agreements like
the Trans-Pacific Partnership assume trade doesn't affect total employment. Economies adjust so
that shortages of demand are not a problem.
In this standard story (and the Sanders critics are people who care about textbook economics),
capital flows from slow-growing rich countries, where it is relatively plentiful and so gets a
low rate of return, to fast-growing poor countries, where it is scarce and gets a high rate of
return....
It is yuuuuge - and no I did not say anything of the sort. Rather I noted it would be less than
1% of GDP. This is what I get for trying to get the facts right. It gets too complicated for you
even when we simplify things so you get angry and start screaming "liar". Grow up.
Per capta GDP grew from $51,100 to $51,400 between July 1 2015 and July 1 2016. This 0.6% growth
does not seem to me to be a statistic supporting claims of improving employment and improving
wage growth.
Dean has suggested in one of his commentaries that wage growth may be an artifact of a decline
in the quality of health insurance coverage. Wage growth is not figured net of increased outlays
for deductibles and copays related to changes in health insurance. PPACA discourages low deductible
and low copay health plans by placing a "Cadillac tax" on them, or at least threatening to do
so. The consequent rise in wage workers' outlays for copays and deductibles are not captured in
the statistics that claim to measure wage gains. This results in an income transfer from the well
to the sick, but can produce statistics that can be interpreted in politically convenient ways
by those so inclined
I get why the plans are taxed. I don't believe that the results of that policy have been beneficial
for the bulk of the population. Most of the good done by PPACA was done by the expansion of Medicaid
eligibility. I believe that requiring the working poor people to settle for high deductible high
copay policies has had the practical effect of requiring them to choose between adequate medical
and further impoverishment. I do not believe that the PPACA could not have been financed in a
way less injurious to the working poor. As the insurers have been unable to make money in this
deal, the hospital operators seem to have been the only winners in that their bad debt problems
have been ameliorated.
"people stop dreaming about what they could have if they invest in education, new businesses,
and new ideas"
And this is entirely rational, as in the situation described, the fruits of their efforts will
likely be siphoned from their pockets by the elites and generally rent-seekers with higher social
standing and leverage, or at best their efforts will amount to too little to be worth the risk
(including the risk of wasting one's time i.e. opportunity cost). It also becomes correspondingly
harder to convince and motivate others to join or fund any worthwhile efforts. What also happens
(and has happened in "communism") is that people take their interests private, i.e. hidden from
the view of those who would usurp or derail them.
"Those who witness extreme social collapse at first hand seldom describe any deep revelation about
the truths of human existence. What they do mention, if asked, is their surprise at how easy it
is to die.
The pattern of ordinary life, in which so much stays the same from one day to the next, disguises
the fragility of its fabric. How many of our activities are made possible by the impression of
stability that pattern gives? So long as it repeats, or varies steadily enough, we are able to
plan for tomorrow as if all the things we rely on and don't think about too carefully will still
be there. When the pattern is broken, by civil war or natural disaster or the smaller-scale tragedies
that tear at its fabric, many of those activities become impossible or meaningless, while simply
meeting needs we once took for granted may occupy much of our lives.
What war correspondents and relief workers report is not only the fragility of the fabric,
but the speed with which it can unravel. As we write this, no one can say with certainty where
the unraveling of the financial and commercial fabric of our economies will end. Meanwhile, beyond
the cities, unchecked industrial exploitation frays the material basis of life in many parts of
the world, and pulls at the ecological systems which sustain it.
Precarious as this moment may be, however, an awareness of the fragility of what we call civilisation
is nothing new.
'Few men realise,' wrote Joseph Conrad in 1896, 'that their life, the very essence of their
character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in
the safety of their surroundings.' Conrad's writings exposed the civilisation exported by European
imperialists to be little more than a comforting illusion, not only in the dark, unconquerable
heart of Africa, but in the whited sepulchres of their capital cities. The inhabitants of that
civilisation believed 'blindly in the irresistible force of its institutions and its morals, in
the power of its police and of its opinion,' but their confidence could be maintained only by
the seeming solidity of the crowd of like-minded believers surrounding them. Outside the walls,
the wild remained as close to the surface as blood under skin, though the city-dweller was no
longer equipped to face it directly.
Bertrand Russell caught this vein in Conrad's worldview, suggesting that the novelist 'thought
of civilised and morally tolerable human life as a dangerous walk on a thin crust of barely cooled
lava which at any moment might break and let the unwary sink into fiery depths.' What both Russell
and Conrad were getting at was a simple fact which any historian could confirm: human civilisation
is an intensely fragile construction. It is built on little more than belief: belief in the rightness
of its values; belief in the strength of its system of law and order; belief in its currency;
above all, perhaps, belief in its future.
Once that belief begins to crumble, the collapse of a civilisation may become unstoppable.
That civilisations fall, sooner or later, is as much a law of history as gravity is a law of physics.
What remains after the fall is a wild mixture of cultural debris, confused and angry people whose
certainties have betrayed them, and those forces which were always there, deeper than the foundations
of the city walls: the desire to survive and the desire for meaning."
Slavoj Žižek Says He'd Vote Trump: Hillary Clinton 'Is the Real Danger'
|
04 Nov 2016 | Slovenian-born philosopher and cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek said a
Hillary Clinton presidency is a greater danger to the nation than a President Donald
Trump. Žižek explained that while he is "horrified" by Trump, he believes a Trump
presidency could result in a "big awakening" that could set into motion the formation of
"new political processes." By contrast, Žižek said he sees Clinton as "the true
danger"--pointing specifically to her insincerity, her ties to the Wall Street banks,
and her dedication to the "absolute inertia" of our established political system.
The author is a neocon...
Intermediate-Range Nuclear
Forces (INF) Treaty was deeply unfair as it did not eliminated see based missiles, only ground based
one. It is essentially a trap Gorbachov went into.
Notable quotes:
"... On the American side, the weapon of immediate concern is a new version of the AGM-86B air-launched cruise missile, usually carried by B-52 bombers. Also known as the Long-Range Standoff Weapon (LRSO) ..."
"... No wonder former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry called on President Obama to cancel the ALCM program in a recent Washington Post op-ed piece. "Because they… come in both nuclear and conventional variants," he wrote, "cruise missiles are a uniquely destabilizing type of weapon." And this issue is going to fall directly into the lap of the next president. ..."
By Michael T. Klare, a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and
the author, most recently, of The Race
for What's Left . A documentary movie version of his book Blood and Oil is available
from the Media Education Foundation . Follow him on Twitter at @mklare1. Originally published
at TomDispatch
... ... ..
With passions running high on both sides in this year's election and rising fears about Donald
Trump's impulsive nature and Hillary Clinton's hawkish one, it's hardly surprising that the "nuclear
button" question has surfaced repeatedly throughout the campaign. In one of the more pointed exchanges
of the first presidential debate, Hillary Clinton declared that Donald Trump lacked the mental composure
for the job. "A man who can be provoked by a tweet," she
commented , "should not have his fingers anywhere near the nuclear codes." Donald Trump has reciprocated
by charging that Clinton is too prone to intervene abroad. "You're going to end up in World War III
over Syria," he told
reporters in Florida last month.
For most election observers, however, the matter of personal character and temperament has dominated
discussions of the nuclear issue, with partisans on each side insisting that the other candidate
is temperamentally unfit to exercise control over the nuclear codes. There is, however, a more important
reason to worry about whose finger will be on that button this time around: at this very moment,
for a variety of reasons, the "nuclear threshold" - the point at which some party to a "conventional"
(non-nuclear) conflict chooses to employ atomic weapons - seems to be
moving dangerously lower.
Not so long ago, it was implausible that a major nuclear power - the United States, Russia, or
China - would consider using atomic weapons in any imaginable conflict scenario. No longer. Worse
yet, this is likely to be our reality for years to come, which means that the next president will
face a world in which a nuclear decision-making point might arrive far sooner than anyone would have
thought possible just a year or two ago - with potentially catastrophic consequences for us all.
No less worrisome, the major nuclear powers (and some smaller ones) are all in the process of
acquiring new nuclear arms, which could, in theory, push that threshold lower still. These include
a variety of cruise missiles and other delivery systems capable of being used in "limited" nuclear
wars - atomic conflicts that, in theory at least, could be confined to just a single country or one
area of the world (say, Eastern Europe) and so might be even easier for decision-makers to initiate.
The next president will have to decide whether the U.S. should actually produce weapons of this type
and also what measures should be taken in response to similar decisions by Washington's likely adversaries.
Lowering the Nuclear Threshold
During the dark days of the Cold War, nuclear strategists in the United States and the Soviet
Union conjured up elaborate conflict scenarios in which military actions by the two superpowers and
their allies might lead from, say, minor skirmishing along the Iron Curtain to full-scale tank combat
to, in the end, the use of "battlefield" nuclear weapons, and then city-busting versions of the same
to avert defeat. In some of these scenarios, strategists hypothesized about wielding "tactical" or
battlefield weaponry - nukes powerful enough to wipe out a major tank formation, but not Paris or
Moscow - and claimed that it would be possible to contain atomic warfare at such a devastating but
still sub-apocalyptic level. (Henry Kissinger, for instance, made his reputation by preaching this
lunatic doctrine in his first book, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy .) Eventually, leaders
on both sides concluded that the only feasible role for their atomic arsenals was to act as deterrents
to the use of such weaponry by the other side. This was, of course, the concept of "
mutually assured
destruction ," or - in one of the most classically apt acronyms of all times: MAD. It would,
in the end, form the basis for all subsequent arms control agreements between the two superpowers.
Anxiety over the escalatory potential of tactical nuclear weapons peaked in the 1970s when the
Soviet Union began deploying the
SS-20 intermediate-range
ballistic missile (capable of striking cities in Europe, but not the U.S.) and Washington responded
with plans to deploy nuclear-armed, ground-launched cruise missiles and the
Pershing-II ballistic missile
in Europe. The announcement of such plans provoked massive antinuclear demonstrations across Europe
and the United States. On December 8, 1987, at a time when worries had been growing about how a nuclear
conflagration in Europe might trigger an all-out nuclear exchange between the superpowers, President
Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev signed the
Intermediate-Range Nuclear
Forces (INF) Treaty.
That historic agreement - the first to eliminate an entire class of nuclear delivery systems -
banned the deployment of ground-based cruise or ballistic missiles with a range of 500 and
5,500 kilometers and required the destruction of all those then in existence. After the collapse
of the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation inherited the USSR's treaty obligations and pledged to
uphold the INF along with other U.S.-Soviet arms control agreements. In the view of most observers,
the prospect of a nuclear war between the two countries practically vanished as both sides made deep
cuts in their atomic stockpiles in accordance with already existing accords and then signed others,
including the
New START , the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty of 2010.
... ... ...
To put this in perspective, Russian leaders ardently believe that they are the victims of a
U.S.-led drive by NATO to encircle their country and diminish its international influence. They
point, in particular, to the
build-up
of NATO forces in the Baltic countries, involving the semi-permanent deployment of combat battalions
in what was once the territory of the Soviet Union, and in apparent violation of
promises made to Gorbachev in 1990 that NATO would not do so. As a result, Russia has been bolstering
its defenses in areas bordering Ukraine and the Baltic states, and
training its troops for a possible clash with the NATO forces stationed there.
... ... ...
On the American side, the weapon of immediate concern is a
new version of the AGM-86B air-launched cruise missile, usually carried by B-52 bombers. Also
known as the Long-Range Standoff Weapon (LRSO), it is, like the Iskander-M, expected to be deployed
in both nuclear and conventional versions, leaving those on the potential receiving end unsure what
might be heading their way.
In other words, as with the Iskander-M, the intended target might assume the worst in a crisis,
leading to the early use of nuclear weapons. Put another way, such missiles make for
twitchy trigger fingers
and are likely to lead to a heightened risk of nuclear war, which, once started, might in turn
take Washington and Moscow right up the escalatory ladder to a planetary holocaust.
No wonder former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry
called on President Obama to cancel the ALCM program in a recent Washington Post op-ed
piece. "Because they… come in both nuclear and conventional variants," he wrote, "cruise missiles
are a uniquely destabilizing type of weapon." And this issue is going to fall directly into the lap
of the next president.
scanning it, it keeps referring to the obama administration's beliefs about russia, and
claims by american officials. given the hysteria about putin allegedly hacking the us election,
and the propaganda surrounding the war on terror, i'm reluctant to rely on this kind of evidence.
But even Hillary Clinton, for all her experience as secretary of state, is
likely to have a hard time grappling with the pressures and dangers that are likely to arise
in the years ahead, especially given that her inclination is to toughen U.S. policy toward
Russia.
"Even" is a little rich, given that the Clinton campaign has systematically - I hate to
use the word, but - demonized* Putin. One can regard the political class as cynically able to
turn on a dime when the election is done, but Clinton has also induced her base of "NPR
tote baggers" to buy in, and the more massive base is harder to turn. And then of course the neo-cons
have gone over to her, and they certainly know which side their bread has blood on.
So, if Clinton wins, the dominant faction of the Democrat Party is - from the leadership
through the nomenklatura to the base - committed to a "muscular" foreign policy, including a "No
Fly Zone" in Syria, where shooting down a Russian plane would be an act of war, so far as Russia
is concerned. (In the last debate, Clinton pointedly didn't answer what she would do in that eventuality.)
It is what it is. We are where we are.
NOTE * I mean, come on. Trump and Comey as Putin's agents of influence? Beyond bizarre.
UPDATE One of the salient features of the bureaucratic infighters who brought about World War
I is their utter mediocrity; see
this review of The Sleepwalkers , a diplomatic history of how World War I came out. If you
want to see real mediocrity in today's terms, read the Podesta emails.
Agreed. Klare's order of presentation creates a questionable sense of causality by talking
first about Russian tech and strategy and then about what appear to be US responses. For example,
my understanding of recent developments of low yield nuclear weapons - I'm thinking of the "dial
a bomb" - has the US once again opening up a new strategic front the Russians feel compelled to
duplicate. His discussion of the Iskander M similarly elides the question of how the Russians
think about the B52-based cruise missiles the US has had for years.
He also seems to lose track of a point he introduces by referring to Kissinger's advocacy of
the use of low yield nukes. Kissinger's book came out in 1957, and afair only the US had battlefield
nuclear missile delivery systems back in early 60s. After Kissinger gained power in the Nixon
administration, they both thought that it was useful to look rationally irrational, to set out
a logic for dangerous policies in order to make opponents fearful of a catastrophic reaction.
The Russians are likely doing the same thing. I'm sure, too, that talking of a low first use threshold
is a way to split Europe from the US.
This article on nuclear strategy makes no mention of the single most destabilizing thing
that happened in nuclear affairs in this century: the USA's unilateral abrogation of the ABM Treaty.
How could the author make such an omission?
The biggest nuclear problem we face is that there are "serious" military and political leaders
in the USA who think that their new ABM systems will allow them to burst the shackles of assured-destruction,
and thus to actively employ escalation dominance as a foreign policy tool..
The author puts too much emphasis on anti-cities warfare at a pre-strategic level. A strike
will be more likely to be an EMP anti-infrastructure strike. In modern societies, one doesn't
need to kill people to break their resolve. Disrupting the provision of electricity, mobile, cable
and internet connection is amply enough to eliminate the appetite for overseas military adventures.
The nukes run on a dead-man switch. If one EMP's "everything", the periodic "please do not
launch today, sir"-signal will not reach the silos/submarines and missiles will launch automatically.
We can be pretty sure that the last missiles launched will be salted with some "well, fuck
you too!"-concoction to create massive fallout and maybe even some bio-weapons on top for all
those weakened immune systems (from the gamma radiation). The USSR did a lot of very high quality
research on biological weapons, obviously, everyone else has whatever they had in the 1980's.
People who ingest radioactive dust are goners sooner or later. Sooner with bio-weapons on top
of the radiation poisoning.
People, especially people "on top" who should be informed and know better, yet still think
ABM systems work effectively for any other purpose than moving billions of USD to into the pockets
of defense industry cronies, are simply deluded. Even with cooked tests, where the speed and trajectory
of the opposition missile is known to the missile defence in advance, the odds of an intercept
are low.
Why would the elites not want to win, compared to the first 70 years of the nuclear age?
They are like 70-80 years old, geriatrics already, soon diaper-cases. All thes powerful people
are in a desparate race with time to "set things right", before they lose all of their faculties
(or start smelling of poo so no-one invites them anymore).
Even more troubling, Russia has adopted a military doctrine that favors the early use
of nuclear weapons if it faces defeat in a conventional war, and NATO is considering comparable
measures in response. The nuclear threshold, in other words, is dropping rapidly.
Of course this is the exact mirror image of the US policy during the Cold War. We relied
on the threat of "theater nuclear war" to deter the huge Soviet conventional forces that NATO
had little chance of stopping with conventional forces. Of course the Germans joked that the definition
of a "theater" nuclear weapon was one that went off in Germany.
Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich
Richer By Dean Baker
Introduction: Trading in Myths
In winter 2016, near the peak of Bernie Sanders' bid for the Democratic presidential nomination,
a new line became popular among the nation's policy elite: Bernie Sanders is the enemy of the
world's poor. Their argument was that Sanders, by pushing trade policies to help U.S. workers,
specifically manufacturing workers, risked undermining the well-being of the world's poor because
exporting manufactured goods to the United States and other wealthy countries is their path out
of poverty. The role model was China, which by exporting has largely eliminated extreme poverty
and drastically reduced poverty among its population. Sanders and his supporters would block the
rest of the developing world from following the same course.
This line, in its Sanders-bashing permutation, appeared early on in Vox, the millennial-oriented
media upstart, and was quickly picked up elsewhere (Beauchamp 2016). After all, it was pretty
irresistible. The ally of the downtrodden and enemy of the rich was pushing policies that would
condemn much of the world to poverty.
The story made a nice contribution to preserving the status quo, but it was less valuable if
you respect honesty in public debate.
The problem in the logic of this argument should be apparent to anyone who has taken an introductory
economics course. It assumes that the basic problem of manufacturing workers in the developing
world is the need for someone who will buy their stuff. If people in the United States don't buy
it, then the workers will be out on the street and growth in the developing world will grind to
a halt. In this story, the problem is that we don't have enough people in the world to buy stuff.
In other words, there is a shortage of demand. But is it really true that no one else in the world
would buy the stuff produced by manufacturing workers in the developing world if they couldn't
sell it to consumers in the United States? Suppose people in the developing world bought the stuff
they produced raising their living standards by raising their own consumption.
That is how the economics is supposed to work. In the standard theory, general shortages of
demand are not a problem. Economists have traditionally assumed that economies tended toward full
employment. The basic economic constraint was a lack of supply. The problem was that we couldn't
produce enough goods and services, not that we were producing too much and couldn't find anyone
to buy them. In fact, this is why all the standard models used to analyze trade agreements like
the Trans-Pacific Partnership assume trade doesn't affect total employment. Economies adjust so
that shortages of demand are not a problem.
In this standard story (and the Sanders critics are people who care about textbook economics),
capital flows from slow-growing rich countries, where it is relatively plentiful and so gets a
low rate of return, to fast-growing poor countries, where it is scarce and gets a high rate of
return....
More Jobs, a Strong Economy, and a Threat to Institutions : ...Institutions are significant
to economists, who have come to see that countries become prosperous not because they have bounteous
natural resources or an educated population or the most advanced technology but because they have
good institutions. Crucially, formal structures are supported by informal, often unstated, social
agreements. A nation not only needs courts; its people need to believe that those courts can be
fair. ...
Over most of history, a small élite confiscated wealth from the poor. Subsistence farmers lived
under rules designed to tax them so that the rulers could live in palaces and pay for soldiers
to maintain their power. Every now and then, though, a system appeared in which leaders were forced
to accommodate the needs of at least some of their citizens. ... The societies with the most robust
systems for forcing the powerful to accommodate some of the needs of the powerless became wealthier
and more peaceful. ... Most nations without institutions to check the worst impulses of the rich
and powerful stay stuck in poverty and dysfunction. ...
This year's Presidential election has alarmed economists for several reasons. No economist,
save one , supports Donald J. Trump's stated economic plans, but an even larger concern is
that, were he elected, Trump would attack the very institutions that have provided our economic
stability. In his campaign, Trump has shown outright contempt for courts, free speech, international
treaties, and many other pillars of the American way of life. There is little reason to think
that, if granted the Presidency, Trump would soften his stand. ...
...it's easy to imagine a President Trump refusing to heed our own highest court, which, as
President Andrew Jackson observed, has no way, other than respect of institutions, to enforce
its decisions. No one knows what Trump would do as President, but, based on his statements on
the campaign trail, it's possible to imagine a nation where people have less confidence in the
courts, the military, and their rights to free speech and assembly. When this happens, history
tells us, people stop dreaming about what they could have if they invest in education, new businesses,
and new ideas. They focus, instead, on taking from others and holding tightly to what they've
already amassed. Those societies, without the institutions that protect us from our worst impulses,
become poorer, uglier, more violent. That is how nations fail.
It's easy to carp like this but the sclerotic elite in charge of the country has failed to address
demographic concerns, and has stamped out any politically incorrect thoughts as being signs of
baseness. Now they are so upset that a challenger has arisen. It's unfortunate that this particular
challenger has no background in government and will probably harm our economic growth with his
lack of skill, but the elites will have to eat the cake they baked.
"No one knows what Trump would do as President, but, based on his statements on the campaign trail,
it's possible to imagine a nation where people have less confidence in the courts, the military,
and their rights to free speech and assembly. When this happens, history tells us, people stop
dreaming about what they could have if they invest in education, new businesses, and new ideas.
They focus, instead, on taking from others and holding tightly to what they've already amassed.
Those societies, without the institutions that protect us from our worst impulses, become poorer,
uglier, more violent. That is how nations fail."
This is all true but let's provide a little more context than the totebaggers' paint-by-numbers
narrative.
Economists told us that free trade deals and open borders would make us prosperous and
yet that hasn't happens.
The technicians running trade policy, monetary policy and fiscal policy haven't held up
their end of the bargain.
Wealth and power has been redistributed upwards.
The union movement has been destroyed in outright class war.
The corporate media spread lies and distraction. It induces both apathy and a rat race/dog-eat-dog
mentality.
The Democratic Party has been moved to right as the middle class has struggled.
And more and more people become susceptible to demagogues like Trump as Democrats try to play
both sides of the fence, instead of standing foresquarely behind the job class.
Let's hope we don't find out what Trump does if elected. My guess is that he'd delegate foreign
and domestic policy to Mike Pence as Trump himself would be free to pursue his own personal grudges
via whatever means are available.
As Bernie Sanders's campaign demonstrated, there is still hope. In fact hope is growing.
Lucky for us Sanders campaigned hard for Hillary, knowing what the stakes are.
Given the way people like PGL treated Sanders during the campaign and given what Wikileaks
showed, I doubt the reverse would have been true had Sanders won the primary.
The reverse would have been true, because we Democrats would have voted party above all else and
especially in this election year. Remember "party" the thing that Bernie supporters and Bernie
himself denigrated? I believe the term
"elites" was used more than once to describe the party faithful.
Alex S -> Peter K.... , -1
As we can see here, through leftist glasses, the only possible remedy for solving a problem is
moving left.
Consider how far we've moved right, so that Nixon e.g. would be considered hopelessly and radically
leftist today.
Given that, moving left should be one of the first things you consider.
Does the Right Hold the Economy Hostage to Advance Its Militarist Agenda?
That's one way to read Tyler Cowen's New York Times column * noting that wars have often been
associated with major economic advances which carries the headline "the lack of major wars may
be hurting economic growth." Tyler lays out his central argument:
"It may seem repugnant to find a positive side to war in this regard, but a look at American
history suggests we cannot dismiss the idea so easily. Fundamental innovations such as nuclear
power, the computer and the modern aircraft were all pushed along by an American government eager
to defeat the Axis powers or, later, to win the Cold War. The Internet was initially designed
to help this country withstand a nuclear exchange, and Silicon Valley had its origins with military
contracting, not today's entrepreneurial social media start-ups. The Soviet launch of the Sputnik
satellite spurred American interest in science and technology, to the benefit of later economic
growth."
This is all quite true, but a moment's reflection may give a bit different spin to the story.
There has always been substantial support among liberals for the sort of government sponsored
research that he describes here. The opposition has largely come from the right. However the right
has been willing to go along with such spending in the context of meeting national defense needs.
Its support made these accomplishments possible.
This brings up the suggestion Paul Krugman made a while back (jokingly) that maybe we need
to convince the public that we face a threat from an attack from Mars. Krugman suggested this
as a way to prompt traditional Keynesian stimulus, but perhaps we can also use the threat to promote
an ambitious public investment agenda to bring us the next major set of technological breakthroughs.
1. Baker's peaceful spending scenario is not likely because of human nature.
2. Even if Baker's scenario happened, a given dollar will be used more efficiently in a war.
If there is a threat of losing, you have an incentive to cut waste and spend on what produces
results.
3. The United States would not exist at all if we had not conquered the territory.
US Budgetary Costs of Wars through 2016: $4.79 Trillion and Counting
Summary of Costs of the US Wars in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Pakistan and Homeland Security
By Neta C. Crawford
Summary
Wars cost money before, during and after they occur - as governments prepare for, wage, and
recover from them by replacing equipment, caring for the wounded and repairing the infrastructure
destroyed in the fighting. Although it is rare to have a precise accounting of the costs of war
- especially of long wars - one can get a sense of the rough scale of the costs by surveying the
major categories of spending.
As of August 2016, the US has already appropriated, spent, or taken on obligations to spend
more than $3.6 trillion in current dollars on the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Syria
and on Homeland Security (2001 through fiscal year 2016). To this total should be added the approximately
$65 billion in dedicated war spending the Department of Defense and State Department have requested
for the next fiscal year, 2017, along with an additional nearly $32 billion requested for the
Department of Homeland Security in 2017, and estimated spending on veterans in future years. When
those are included, the total US budgetary cost of the wars reaches $4.79 trillion.
But of course, a full accounting of any war's burdens cannot be placed in columns on a ledger....
Yes, we've seen right wing policies killing jobs and steering wealth to the wealthy, and that's
bad policy. But unfortunately it seems it's always possible to do *worse*. Trump's policies would
double down on wealth transfer, while he spouts the typical RW mantra of "(my dopey policy which
would destroy jobs) would be good for jobs." Tim Harford made a good case for trust accounting
for 99% of the difference in per capita GNP between the US and Somalia.
""If you take a broad enough definition of trust, then it would explain basically all the difference
between the per capita income of the United States and Somalia," ventures Steve Knack, a senior
economist at the World Bank who has been studying the economics of trust for over a decade. That
suggests that trust is worth $12.4 trillion dollars a year to the U.S., which, in case you are
wondering, is 99.5% of this country's income (2006 figures). If you make $40,000 a year, then
$200 is down to hard work and $39,800 is down to trust.
How could that be? Trust operates in all sorts of ways, from saving money that would have to
be spent on security to improving the functioning of the political system. But above all, trust
enables people to do business with each other. Doing business is what creates wealth." goo.gl/t3OqHc
Presidents and the US Economy: An Econometric Exploration
By Alan S. Blinder and Mark W. Watson
Abstract
The US economy has performed better when the president of the United States is a Democrat rather
than a Republican, almost regardless of how one measures performance. For many measures, including
real GDP growth (our focus), the performance gap is large and significant. This paper asks why.
The answer is not found in technical time series matters nor in systematically more expansionary
monetary or fiscal policy under Democrats. Rather, it appears that the Democratic edge stems mainly
from more benign oil shocks, superior total factor productivity (TFP) performance, a more favorable
international environment, and perhaps more optimistic consumer expectations about the near-term
future.
Economic growth fueled by foreign oil is nice while it lasts but what will happen to the country
when the oil runs out or we are forced to fight a war that disrupts the supply?
I was in college in the mid 1970's and we asked this question a lot. Some think this worry has
gone away. I don't agree with those types. Which is why a green technology investment drive makes
a lot of sense for so many reasons.
Economic growth fueled by foreign oil is nice while it lasts but what will happen to the country
when the oil runs out or we are forced to fight a war that disrupts the supply?
[ Having read and reread this question, I do not begin to understand what it means. There is
oil here, there is oil all about us, there is oil in Canada and Mexico and on and on, and the
supply of oil about us is not about to be disrupted by any conceivable war and an inconceivable
war is never going to be fought. ]
Economic growth fueled by foreign oil is nice while it lasts but what will happen to the country
when the oil runs out or we are forced to fight a war that disrupts the supply?
[ My guess is that this is a way of scarily pitching for fracking for oil right in my garden,
but I like my azealia bushes and mocking birds. ]
Quote from the paper you linked to: "Arguably, oil shocks have more to do with US foreign policy
than with US economic policy-the two Gulf Wars being prominent examples. That said, several economists
have claimed that US monetary policy played an important role in bringing on the oil shocks. See,
for example, Barsky and Kilian (2002)."
Do We Really Know that Oil Caused the Great Stagflation? A Monetary Alternative
By Robert B. Barsky and Lutz Kilian
Abstract
This paper argues that major oil price increases were not nearly as essential a part of the
causal mechanism that generated the stagflation of the 1970s as is often thought. There is neither
a theoretical presumption that oil supply shocks are stagflationary nor robust empirical evidence
for this view. In contrast, we show that monetary expansions and contractions can generate stagflation
of realistic magnitude even in the absence of supply shocks. Furthermore, monetary fluctuations
help to explain the historical movements of the prices of oil and other commodities, including
the surge in the prices of industrial commodities that preceded the 1973/74 oil price increase.
Thus, they can account for the striking coincidence of major oil price increases and worsening
stagflation.
My quote dragged on too long. I should have ended it with the first sentence. Monetary policy
could play a role but foreign policy could still be the biggest factor.
"Former Fed Vice Chairman Alan Blinder said he's skeptical that fiscal policy will be loosened
a great deal if Clinton wins the election, as seems likely based on recent voter surveys.
"She is promising not to make budget deficits bigger by her programs," said Blinder, who is
now a professor at Princeton University. "Whatever fiscal stimulus there is ought to be small
enough for the Fed practically to ignore it."
PGL told us that Hillary's fiscal program would be YUGE.
Dean Baker in "Rigged" * reminds me of the lasting limits to growth that appear to follow the
sacrifice of growth, especially to the extent of allowing a recession, for the sake of budget
balancing during a time of surrounding economic weakness:
Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich
Richer
By Dean Baker
Introduction: Trading in Myths
In winter 2016, near the peak of Bernie Sanders' bid for the Democratic presidential nomination,
a new line became popular among the nation's policy elite: Bernie Sanders is the enemy of the
world's poor. Their argument was that Sanders, by pushing trade policies to help U.S. workers,
specifically manufacturing workers, risked undermining the well-being of the world's poor because
exporting manufactured goods to the United States and other wealthy countries is their path out
of poverty. The role model was China, which by exporting has largely eliminated extreme poverty
and drastically reduced poverty among its population. Sanders and his supporters would block the
rest of the developing world from following the same course.
This line, in its Sanders-bashing permutation, appeared early on in Vox, the millennial-oriented
media upstart, and was quickly picked up elsewhere (Beauchamp 2016). After all, it was pretty
irresistible. The ally of the downtrodden and enemy of the rich was pushing policies that would
condemn much of the world to poverty.
The story made a nice contribution to preserving the status quo, but it was less valuable if
you respect honesty in public debate.
The problem in the logic of this argument should be apparent to anyone who has taken an introductory
economics course. It assumes that the basic problem of manufacturing workers in the developing
world is the need for someone who will buy their stuff. If people in the United States don't buy
it, then the workers will be out on the street and growth in the developing world will grind to
a halt. In this story, the problem is that we don't have enough people in the world to buy stuff.
In other words, there is a shortage of demand. But is it really true that no one else in the world
would buy the stuff produced by manufacturing workers in the developing world if they couldn't
sell it to consumers in the United States? Suppose people in the developing world bought the stuff
they produced raising their living standards by raising their own consumption.
That is how the economics is supposed to work. In the standard theory, general shortages of
demand are not a problem. Economists have traditionally assumed that economies tended toward full
employment. The basic economic constraint was a lack of supply. The problem was that we couldn't
produce enough goods and services, not that we were producing too much and couldn't find anyone
to buy them. In fact, this is why all the standard models used to analyze trade agreements like
the Trans-Pacific Partnership assume trade doesn't affect total employment. Economies adjust so
that shortages of demand are not a problem.
In this standard story (and the Sanders critics are people who care about textbook economics),
capital flows from slow-growing rich countries, where it is relatively plentiful and so gets a
low rate of return, to fast-growing poor countries, where it is scarce and gets a high rate of
return....
It is yuuuuge - and no I did not say anything of the sort. Rather I noted it would be less than
1% of GDP. This is what I get for trying to get the facts right. It gets too complicated for you
even when we simplify things so you get angry and start screaming "liar". Grow up.
Per capta GDP grew from $51,100 to $51,400 between July 1 2015 and July 1 2016. This 0.6% growth
does not seem to me to be a statistic supporting claims of improving employment and improving
wage growth.
Dean has suggested in one of his commentaries that wage growth may be an artifact of a decline
in the quality of health insurance coverage. Wage growth is not figured net of increased outlays
for deductibles and copays related to changes in health insurance. PPACA discourages low deductible
and low copay health plans by placing a "Cadillac tax" on them, or at least threatening to do
so. The consequent rise in wage workers' outlays for copays and deductibles are not captured in
the statistics that claim to measure wage gains. This results in an income transfer from the well
to the sick, but can produce statistics that can be interpreted in politically convenient ways
by those so inclined
I get why the plans are taxed. I don't believe that the results of that policy have been beneficial
for the bulk of the population. Most of the good done by PPACA was done by the expansion of Medicaid
eligibility. I believe that requiring the working poor people to settle for high deductible high
copay policies has had the practical effect of requiring them to choose between adequate medical
and further impoverishment. I do not believe that the PPACA could not have been financed in a
way less injurious to the working poor. As the insurers have been unable to make money in this
deal, the hospital operators seem to have been the only winners in that their bad debt problems
have been ameliorated.
"people stop dreaming about what they could have if they invest in education, new businesses,
and new ideas"
And this is entirely rational, as in the situation described, the fruits of their efforts will
likely be siphoned from their pockets by the elites and generally rent-seekers with higher social
standing and leverage, or at best their efforts will amount to too little to be worth the risk
(including the risk of wasting one's time i.e. opportunity cost). It also becomes correspondingly
harder to convince and motivate others to join or fund any worthwhile efforts. What also happens
(and has happened in "communism") is that people take their interests private, i.e. hidden from
the view of those who would usurp or derail them.
"Those who witness extreme social collapse at first hand seldom describe any deep revelation about
the truths of human existence. What they do mention, if asked, is their surprise at how easy it
is to die.
The pattern of ordinary life, in which so much stays the same from one day to the next, disguises
the fragility of its fabric. How many of our activities are made possible by the impression of
stability that pattern gives? So long as it repeats, or varies steadily enough, we are able to
plan for tomorrow as if all the things we rely on and don't think about too carefully will still
be there. When the pattern is broken, by civil war or natural disaster or the smaller-scale tragedies
that tear at its fabric, many of those activities become impossible or meaningless, while simply
meeting needs we once took for granted may occupy much of our lives.
What war correspondents and relief workers report is not only the fragility of the fabric,
but the speed with which it can unravel. As we write this, no one can say with certainty where
the unraveling of the financial and commercial fabric of our economies will end. Meanwhile, beyond
the cities, unchecked industrial exploitation frays the material basis of life in many parts of
the world, and pulls at the ecological systems which sustain it.
Precarious as this moment may be, however, an awareness of the fragility of what we call civilisation
is nothing new.
'Few men realise,' wrote Joseph Conrad in 1896, 'that their life, the very essence of their
character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in
the safety of their surroundings.' Conrad's writings exposed the civilisation exported by European
imperialists to be little more than a comforting illusion, not only in the dark, unconquerable
heart of Africa, but in the whited sepulchres of their capital cities. The inhabitants of that
civilisation believed 'blindly in the irresistible force of its institutions and its morals, in
the power of its police and of its opinion,' but their confidence could be maintained only by
the seeming solidity of the crowd of like-minded believers surrounding them. Outside the walls,
the wild remained as close to the surface as blood under skin, though the city-dweller was no
longer equipped to face it directly.
Bertrand Russell caught this vein in Conrad's worldview, suggesting that the novelist 'thought
of civilised and morally tolerable human life as a dangerous walk on a thin crust of barely cooled
lava which at any moment might break and let the unwary sink into fiery depths.' What both Russell
and Conrad were getting at was a simple fact which any historian could confirm: human civilisation
is an intensely fragile construction. It is built on little more than belief: belief in the rightness
of its values; belief in the strength of its system of law and order; belief in its currency;
above all, perhaps, belief in its future.
Once that belief begins to crumble, the collapse of a civilisation may become unstoppable.
That civilisations fall, sooner or later, is as much a law of history as gravity is a law of physics.
What remains after the fall is a wild mixture of cultural debris, confused and angry people whose
certainties have betrayed them, and those forces which were always there, deeper than the foundations
of the city walls: the desire to survive and the desire for meaning."
Donald Trump said on Tuesday that Hillary Clinton's plan for Syria would "lead to world war three"
because of the potential for conflict with military forces from nuclear-armed Russia.
In an interview focused largely on foreign policy, the Republican presidential nominee said defeating
Islamic State was a higher priority than persuading than Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, to step
down, playing down a long-held goal of US policy.
Trump questioned how his Democratic opponent would negotiate with Russia's president Vladimir
Putin after having demonized him; blamed Barack Obama for a downturn in US relations with the Philippines
under its new president, Rodrigo Duterte;
bemoaned a lack of Republican unity behind his candidacy
and said he would easily win the election if the party leaders supported him.
"If we had party unity, we couldn't lose this election to Hillary Clinton," he said.
On Syria's civil war, Trump said Clinton could drag the US into a world war with a more aggressive
posture toward resolving the conflict.
Clinton has called for the establishment of a no-fly zone and "safe zones" on the ground to
protect noncombatants. Some analysts fear that protecting those zones could bring the US bring into
direct conflict with Russian fighter jets.
"What we should do is focus on Isis. We should not be focusing on Syria," said Trump as he
dined on fried eggs and sausage at his Trump National Doral golf resort. "You're going to end up
in world war three over Syria if we listen to Hillary Clinton," Trump said.
"You're not fighting Syria any more, you're fighting Syria, Russia and Iran, all right? Russia
is a nuclear country, but a country where the nukes work as opposed to other countries that talk,"
he said.
Trump said Assad is much stronger now than he was three years ago. He said getting Assad to leave
power was less important than defeating Isis.
"Assad is secondary, to me, to Isis," he said.
On Russia, Trump again knocked Clinton's handling of US-Russian relations while secretary
of state and said her harsh criticism of Putin raised questions about "how she is going to go back
and negotiate with this man who she has made to be so evil", if she wins the presidency.
On the deterioration of ties with the Philippines, Trump aimed his criticism at Obama, saying
the president "wants to focus on his golf game" rather than engage with world leaders.
Since assuming office, Duterte has expressed open hostility towards the US, rejecting criticism
of his violent anti-drug clampdown, using an expletive to describe Obama and telling the US not to
treat his country "like a dog with a leash".
The Obama administration has expressed optimism that the two countries can remain firm allies.
Trump said Duterte's latest comments showed "a lack of respect for our country".
"... In the presidential debates, Clinton talked of establishing a "no-fly zone" or a "safe zone" inside Syria. However, it is hard to see how that would be done without risking a direct clash with Russia, with all the risks that entails. The generals at the Pentagon, who have long argued against the feasibility of establishing such a zone, would work hard to block such a scheme. A Clinton White House is also likely to explore ways of increasing the flow of arms to moderate opposition groups. ..."
"... Trump has indicated that he would seek to work with Assad and Putin in a combined fight against Isis, and has not voiced criticism of the bombardment of rebel-held areas such as eastern Aleppo. That policy would also have heavy costs. The Syrian opposition and the Gulf states would see it as a betrayal, and the new administration would have to deal with the reality that neither the regime nor Russia has much immediate interest in fighting Isis. ..."
"... Trump is likely to take the opposite approach. He avoided criticism of Russia for its actions in Ukraine, hinted he might accept the annexation of Crimea, and ignored US intelligence findings that Moscow was behind the hacking of Democratic party's email. ..."
"... Trump has suggested, by contrast, that Nato is obsolete and questioned whether its security commitments in Europe are worth what the US is currently spending on them. ..."
"... Clinton first supported the TPP and then criticised it in the face of the primary challenge from Bernie Sanders. Her reservations may prolong the negotiations, but she is ultimately expected to pursue and seek completion of the ambitious multilateral trade deals. ..."
"... Trump built his campaign on opposition to all such deals , which he has characterised as inherently unfavourable to the US. He has promised to seek bilateral trade deals on better terms and to punish other countries deemed to be trading unfairly with sanctions, ignoring the threat of retaliation. ..."
Within his or her first year in office, a new US president would also face a direct challenge
to US power in the western Pacific. The Chinese programme of laying claim to reefs and rocks in
the South China Sea and turning them into naval and air bases gives Beijing potential control
over some the busiest shipping lanes in the world. US influence is under further threat by the
rise of Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, who has
threatened to eject US troops , casting doubt on his predecessor's agreement to allow new
permanent American presence.
Clinton's likely policy will be to continue Obama's faltering "pivot to Asia", and to prioritise
restoring the faith of US allies in the region that Washington will help them resist Chinese attempts
to dominate the South China Sea. It is a policy that is held hostage to some extent by Duterte's
ultimate intentions, and it could lead to a rapid escalation of tension in the region.
Trump has pointed to the Chinese reef-building programme as a reflection of US weakness but has
not said what he would do about it. He has focused more on the threat posed to the US by its trade
relations with China. In the transactional model of foreign relations Trump favours, he
could
agree to turn a blind eye to creeping Chinese takeover in the South China Sea in exchange for
a bilateral trade deal with Beijing on better terms.
Syria
A new US president will arrive in office at a time of significant military advances against
Islamic State in Syria and
neighbouring Iraq, but diminishing options when it comes to helping shape the opposition battle
against the Assad regime and its Russian and Iranian backers. It is possible that the rebel stand
in Aleppo will have fallen by then, giving the regime the upper hand and postponing yet again
any hopes of a political transition.
In the presidential debates, Clinton
talked of establishing a "no-fly zone" or a "safe zone" inside Syria. However, it is hard to
see how that would be done without risking a direct clash with Russia, with all the risks that entails.
The generals at the Pentagon, who have long argued against the feasibility of establishing such a
zone, would work hard to block such a scheme. A Clinton White House is also likely to explore ways
of increasing the flow of arms to moderate opposition groups.
Trump has indicated that he would seek to work with Assad and Putin in a combined fight against
Isis, and has not voiced criticism of the bombardment of rebel-held areas such as eastern Aleppo.
That policy would also have heavy costs. The Syrian opposition and the Gulf states would see it as
a betrayal, and the new administration would have to deal with the reality that neither the regime
nor Russia has much immediate
interest in fighting Isis.
Russia and Ukraine
A Clinton administration is expected to take a tougher line with Moscow than the Obama White House,
all the more so because of the
substantial evidence of the Kremlin's efforts to try to intervene in the US presidential election
in her opponent's favour. Clinton could well seek to take a leadership role in negotiations with
Moscow over Ukraine and the stalled Minsk peace process, which have hitherto been left to Germany
and France. She could also opt to send lethal aid to Ukraine as a way of increasing US leverage.
Trump is likely to take the opposite approach. He avoided criticism of Russia for its
actions in Ukraine, hinted he might accept the annexation of Crimea, and ignored US
intelligence findings that Moscow was behind the hacking of Democratic party's email. A
Trump administration is unlikely to contest Russian enforcement of its influence in eastern
Ukraine.
Europe and Nato
Clinton aides have signalled consistently that one of her priorities would be to show US willingness
to shore up EU and Nato cohesion,
and will attend summits of both organisations in February.
Trump has suggested, by contrast, that Nato is obsolete and questioned whether its security commitments
in Europe are worth what the US is currently spending on them. He said he would check whether US
allies "fulfilled their obligation to us" before
coming to their defence , calling into question the purpose of the defence pact. Later in the
campaign, he changed tack, saying he would seek to strengthen the alliance, but a win for Trump on
Tuesday would nonetheless deepen anxiety in eastern European countries, such as the Baltic states,
that a US-led Nato would come to their defence in the face of Russian encroachment.
Trade
The two major free trade projects of the Obama administration, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment
Partnership with Europe (TTIP) and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) with the countries on the
Pacific rim, will probably still be under negotiation when the new president comes into office, giving
him or her the option of killing or completing them.
Clinton
first supported the TPP and then criticised it in the face of the primary challenge from Bernie
Sanders. Her reservations may prolong the negotiations, but she is ultimately expected to pursue
and seek completion of the ambitious multilateral trade deals.
Trump built his campaign on
opposition to all such deals , which he has characterised as inherently unfavourable to the US.
He has promised to seek bilateral trade deals on better terms and to punish other countries deemed
to be trading unfairly with sanctions, ignoring the threat of retaliation.
I think email sandals essentially zeroed Hillary changes to win any traditional Republican states...
But we will know for sure in two days. It also exposed such a level of incompetence by Hillary
herself and her close entourage that is really staggering even after Bush II administration.
Notable quotes:
"... Pence was not having it. "Ladies and gentlemen, mishandling classified information is a crime." He reminded the audience that "Hillary Clinton said there's nothing marked classified on her emails, sent or received, and the FBI director told to Congress, that's not true." ..."
"... Separate emails also indicated that a top State Department official had attempted to offer the FBI quid pro quo if the bureau agreed to let Clinton alter the classified status of the documents found on her private server. ..."
Republican vice presidential nominee Mike Pence tells New Hampshire residents that "mishandling
classified information is a crime" and is discussing Hillary Clinton's ethical lapses.
During a rally in North Carolina on Sunday, Pence taled about FBI Director James Comey, shortly
after news broke that Comey issued a written that the bureau had "not changed" its conclusions that
Clinton should not face indictment over her raucous email scandal.
Speaking at the Hickory Regional Airport, Pence said, "You have a four-star general that might
get five years in prison, before the end of this year, for mishandling classified information," of
retired Gen. James Cartwright who was charged with lying to the FBI about discussing classified information
with reporters about Iran's nuclear program, during a probe.
Pence continued, "you have a sailor that just went to jail for taking a half-a-dozen photographs
in a classified area of a nuclear submarine. So let me say this, if only for their decades of self-dealing
with the politics of personal enrichment, mishandling classified information and compromising our
national security, we must ensure that Hillary Clinton is never elected president of the United States
of America."
... ... ...
Comey wrote, "Based on our review, we have not changed our conclusions that we expressed in July
with respect to Secretary Clinton."
Pence was not having it. "Ladies and gentlemen, mishandling classified information is a crime."
He reminded the audience that "Hillary Clinton said there's nothing marked classified on her emails,
sent or received, and the FBI director told to Congress, that's not true."
He also pointed out that Clinton said she did not email any classified information to anyone. "And
the head of the FBI told to Congress, there was classified information that was emailed."
Separate emails also indicated that a top State Department official had attempted to offer the
FBI quid pro quo if the bureau agreed to let Clinton alter the classified status of the documents
found on her private server.
RNC chairman Reince Priebus
issued a statement to Breitbart News, following Comey's announcement, making it clear that the
FBI's public corruption investigation of the Clinton Foundation - which has raised billions of dollars
- is ongoing:
The FBI's findings from its criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton's secret email server
were a damning and unprecedented indictment of her judgment. The FBI found evidence Clinton broke
the law, that she placed highly classified national security information at risk and repeatedly
lied to the American people about her reckless conduct. None of this changes the fact that the
FBI continues to investigate the Clinton Foundation for corruption involving her tenure as secretary
of state. Hillary Clinton should never be president.
It is unclear whether it was actually hacked, but the server was so unprofessionally managed that
hacking it is within the reach of medium qualification hacker. It violates the USA guidelines
for setting government mail server in all major areas. The only thing that could saved it from
hacking is that it looked very much as honeypot. On state level hacking there are no idiots or
script kiddies. They would never attack the server directly. They would probably go first after 'no
so bright" Bryan Paglian home network, or, better, after home network of completely clueless in
computer security Huma Abedin. There are many ways to skin the cat, and after the USA
developed Flame and Stixnet the gloves went off. At least for Iranians, who were targeted by
those cyber attacks.
Notable quotes:
"... he is "100 percent confident" that Clinton's secret private email server was hacked by foreign enemies. ..."
"... Clinton could face espionage charges if FBI investigators find that she permitted national defense information to be "lost, stolen, abstracted, or destroyed" through "gross negligence," which includes dishonesty. ..."
"... Wouldn't we love to have in real time, the emails and the electronic communications of the Russian foreign minister, the Iranian foreign minister, and the Chinese? They're going to use that to exploit their advantage in their global strategy. That is what was going on. Our enemies were getting information on our national security issues, our economic security issues, in real time to plan their strategy for how they will thwart American interest. ..."
"... So what did we lose? Did she identify some of our sources? Some of the people that were working for the United States getting information. If we did, then we've got to go back and get those people out of the field. People might have died because of the information that she left and put onto her server. ..."
Former House Intelligence Committee chairman Rep. Pete Hoekstra said that he is "100 percent
confident" that Clinton's secret private email server was hacked by foreign enemies.
"I said this right away when we found out she had a secret server. I said, 'OK, that thing was
hacked by the Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, and maybe some other governments,'" Hoekstra said
on "Breitbart News Saturday" on Sirius/XM Channel 125.
Clinton could face espionage charges if FBI investigators find that she permitted national
defense information to be "lost, stolen, abstracted, or destroyed" through "gross negligence," which
includes dishonesty.
... ... ...
Wouldn't we love to have in real time, the emails and the electronic communications of
the Russian foreign minister, the Iranian foreign minister, and the Chinese? They're going to
use that to exploit their advantage in their global strategy. That is what was going on. Our enemies
were getting information on our national security issues, our economic security issues, in real
time to plan their strategy for how they will thwart American interest.
So what did we lose? Did she identify some of our sources? Some of the people that were
working for the United States getting information. If we did, then we've got to go back and get
those people out of the field. People might have died because of the information that she left
and put onto her server.
Breitbart News has led the media in exposing the national security ramifications of Clinton's private
email server. In a recent piece entitled, "Hillary Clinton Email Case Explained,"
Breitbart News reported:
Hillary's 2008 campaign IT specialist Bryan Pagliano
labored for months in a room on K Street in Washington, D.C., building the server for Clinton
to use.
Hillary Clinton kicked off her State Department career in Foggy Bottom in January 2009 with
a private Apple server, then switched to Pagliano's handcrafted server
in March 2009…
…Hillary Clinton went to great lengths to hide the fact that she was using a private email
server. She emailed with
President Obama while Obama was using a pseudonym. She kept her own State Department IT Help
Desk in the dark about her secret email activities, because her private email account
got flagged when she tried to send emails to her own staff. "It bounced back. She called the
email help desk at state (I guess assuming u had state email) and told them that. They had no
idea it was YOU," Abedin told her. Clinton even
paid a firm in Jacksonville called "Perfect Privacy LLC" to plug in phony owner names for
her email network on Internet databases.
The server
had an open webmail portal, making it easily vulnerable to run-of-the-mill hackers. James
Comey noted evidence showing
hacks by "hostile actors." Capitol Hill sources speak in hushed tones about
the "Russian
Files," which are said to include information about a Russian hack. Clinton was warned of
a security "vulnerability" on her BlackBerry on her first official trip to China, and the State
Department told her to stop using it. But Clinton decided to keep using it.
She told a private audience in a paid speech that her BlackBerry was under attack constantly
by the Chinese and Russians.
The State Department warned Clinton to stop using her Blackberry to conduct email
business after the Department flagged a major security "vulnerability" on Clinton's first
official trip to China as Secretary of State. But Clinton ignored the warning and kept using her
Blackberry.
Flynn said that the media is covering up Clinton's alleged crimes:
People need to know what this is and so the mainstream media-all of the media, basically 99 percent of the media-doesn't
even bother with it anymore. Nobody even covers it anymore. This is dangerous for our country and then you throw in all this
stuff from this past week-you have this case against Anthony Weiner and he's directly tied to Hillary Clinton.
He's under multiple investigations. Then you have the Clinton Foundation, which is under multiple investigations by the FBI,
and not just one but multiple.
You have the reopening of the national security investigation by the FBI directly against Hillary Clinton, that's another one
that's open.
So I mean we are stupid people, we are stupid people in this country is we elect Hillary Clinton to be our next president
because we're going to have nothing but scandal and dark cloud scandal over our country for the next four years and we cannot
afford it with all the problems we face in this country and all the problems we face around the world.
What we need is we need to drain the damn swamp .
We need to get new leadership in our country, we need to get fresh blood in our country, and we need to stop the madness we
are facing with this era of corruption in our country that has been going on for decades. We have got to stop it.
But the cough that she has struggled with during various moments of her campaign returned during
a rally in Ohio on Sunday afternoon. It was Clinton's second rally that day.
After coughing several times, Clinton reached for a lozenge and quickly popped it in her mouth
- then ended her speech just minutes later.
Sanders had non-aggression pact with Clinton who had "leverage" to enforce it Robby Mook
("re47") email reveals https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/47397#efmAAAAB2 …
Robert.
@robbiemakestees · Nov 4
@wikileaks the plot thickens. He basically handed her this nomination. What did he honestly
think was gonna happen?
Twitter has gone ballistic - anyone posting anything reasonably credible related to Clintons/Pedophilia/Lolita
Express/Epstein have their accounts deleted. 0HOUR1___ was blown away minutes after posting Bill
Clinton's Secret Service agent's connection to pedophilia/human trafficking. Any hashtags that associate
the Clintons with their circle of occult friends or pedophilia are removed from the 'Trending' statistics,
e.g., #spiritcooking
@0HOUR1__'s re-tweets can still be found (for now) using this Twitter
search .
And @0HOUR1__ has created yet another account and is posting again under
https://twitter.com/0hour . 2,200 followers
for an account 38 minutes old. His/her recently deleted account had 15k followers. I don't care if
this person is just making stuff up or not - CENSORSHIP = EVIL.
Whether the Clintons have real connections to Satanism/pedophilia or not can't be determined with
what little information has come out so far. What IS interesting is how aggressively Twitter and
Facebook are censoring rumors and innuendo based on a growing number of verifiable connections. I
have never seen them delete accounts as fast as they are now. So instead of allowing the conversations
to develop and the facts to unfold (or reason and critical thinking come into play), the message
Twitter and Facebook are sending to U.S. citizens is that you are not allowed to think for yourselves.
You must be protected from 'dangerous' thoughts. The MSM will decide if something is newsworthy or
not. You should go out and vote, but you are not allowed to base that decision on anything but MSM-approved
opinions. No 'little-people opinions' are welcome or permitted (unless they're anti-Trump).
And, oh yeah... the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Stazi warnings about Al Qaeda attacks
next week are rumors and innuendo based on 'secret information' they have that has constantly proven
to be wrong (unless DHS/FBI were the ones behind the fake attacks). So any re-reporting of DHS terrorizing
the population to 'keep them safe' is OK - you should heed their warnings. But any information/rumors
that the peons have that they could use to keep from electing a not-so-safe Satanist/pedophile/child-trafficker
should be censored. You must not have this opinion because it is not approved.
No Independent Thoughts - Obey - Believe - Consume - Conform - Vote
Here's something you probably never saw or heard about in the west. This is Putin answering questions
regarding ISIS from a US journalist at the Valdai International Discussion Club in late 2014.
from the U.S.. much love for you Putin. you really opened the eyes of many, even in our country.
this man is the definition of president and the u.s hasnt had one for over 40 years... smh.
As an American I can say that all of this is very confusing. However, one thing I believe is
true, Obama and Hillary are the worst thing to ever happen to my country !!!! Average Americans
don't want war with Russia. Why would we ?? The common people of both countries don't deserve
this !!!!
+Emanuil Penev Obama is a human puppet who chose to be controlled, He is therefore culpable
for his action of supporting Islamic terrorists. Right now Islamic invasion of western countries
is the real problem. The USA is now under the control of Obama the Muslim Trojan horse who wants
the world to be under the rule of an Islamic empire. USA's military action in the Middle East
is the result of USA being under occupation by a Muslim Trojan horse that wants to create tidal
waves of Muslim refugees harboring Muslim radicals and terrorists for invading Europe and the
USA. Watch video (copy and paste for search) *From Europe to America The Caliphate Muslim Trojan
Horse The USA is a victim, not a culprit, in the Muslim invasion of western counties. Obama and
his cohorts are the culprits.
basically Russia wants to be friends with America again and America ain't having it. they have
the capabilities to set up shop all around the world. it's like putting guard towers in everyone's
lawn just in case somebody wants commit crime. but you never see inside the towers or know who
is in them but they have giant guns mounted on them ready to kill. that's how Putin feels. I mean
I get it but every other country has nukes. get rid of the nukes and the missile defense will
go away. if the situation were reversed it would be out president voicing this frustration. but
Putin said it, America is a good example of success that's what Russia needs to do is be more
like America. they have been doing it in the last year or so. I think America will come around
and we will have good relations with Russia again. so wait... did we support isis as being generally
isis or support all Qaeda / Saddam's regime which lead to isis??
The US supported multiple Rebel Groups that fought against Syria, they armed them, gave them
money, and members of those groups split up and formed more Rebel groups or joined different ones.
ISIS (at the time, not as large) was supported by the rebel groups the US armed and they got weapons
and equipment from said Rebel Groups, even manpower as well.. That is how ISIS came to be the
threat it is today.
putin doesnt view the us as a threat to russia..?? he has said countless times that he considers
the us as a threat.. and that russian actions are a result of us aggression
US people are a threat for all the world because they are not interested in politics, they
don't want to know truth, they believe to their one-sided media and allow their government and
other warmongers in the US military industry to do whatever they wish all over the world. US politics
are dangerous and lead to a new big war where US territory won't stay away this time. It''s time
for Americans to understand it. If you allow your son to become a criminal, don't be surprised
that your house will be burned some day.
Obama and Clinton are progressive evil cunts funded by Soros. Their decision making is calculated
and they want these horrendous results because it weakens the US and benefits globalism. Putin
kicked the globalists the fuck out, and when Trump wins he will do the same! They are scared shitless.
TRUMP/PENCE 2016
With a stupid and warmongering opponent such as the USA, Russia do not need to construct a
narrative or think out some elaborate propaganda. Russia simply needs to speak the truth. And
this is why the US and its puppets hates Russia and Putin so much.
"... An awful lot of people out there think we live in a one-party state-that we're ruled by what is coming to be called the "Uniparty." ..."
"... There is a dawning realization, ever more widespread among ordinary Americans, that our national politics is not Left versus Right or Republican versus Democrat; it's we the people versus the politicians. ..."
"... Donald Trump is no nut. If he were a nut, he would not have amassed the fortune he has, nor nurtured the capable and affectionate family he has. ..."
"... To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss. ..."
"... Trump has all the right instincts. And he's had the guts and courage-and, just as important, the money -to do a thing that has badly needed doing for twenty years: to smash the power of the real nuts in the GOP Establishment. ..."
A couple of remarks in
Professor Susan
McWillams' recent Modern Age piece celebrating the 25th anniversary of Christopher Lasch's
1991 book
The True and Only Heaven , which analyzed the cult of progress in its American manifestation,
have stuck in my mind. Here's the first one:
McWilliams adds a footnote to that: The 19 percent figure is from 2012, she says. Then she tells
us that in 1964, 64 percent of Americans agreed with the same statement.
Wow. You have to think that those two numbers, from 64 percent down to 19 percent in two generations,
tell us something important and disturbing about our political life.
Second McWilliams quote:
In 2016 if you type the words "Democrats and Republicans" or "Republicans and Democrats" into
Google, the algorithms predict your next words will be "are the same".
I just tried this, and she's right. These guesses are of course based on the frequency with which
complete sentences show up all over the internet. An awful lot of people out there think we live
in a one-party state-that we're ruled by what is
coming to be called the "Uniparty."
There is a dawning realization, ever more widespread among ordinary Americans, that our national
politics is not Left versus Right or Republican versus Democrat; it's we the people
versus the politicians.
Which leads me to a different lady commentator: Peggy Noonan, in her October 20th Wall Street
Journal column.
The title of Peggy's piece was:
Imagine
a Sane Donald Trump . [
Alternate link ]Its gravamen:
Donald Trump has shown up the Republican Party Establishment as totally out of touch with their base,
which is good; but that he's bat-poop crazy, which is bad. If a sane Donald Trump had done
the good thing, the showing-up, we'd be on course to a major beneficial correction in our national
politics.
It's a good clever piece. A couple of months ago on Radio Derb I offered up one and a half cheers
for Peggy, who gets a lot right in spite of being a longtime Establishment Insider. So it
was here. Sample of what she got right last week:
Mr. Trump's great historical role was to reveal to the Republican Party what half of its
own base really thinks about the big issues. The party's leaders didn't know! They were shocked,
so much that they indulged in sheer denial and made believe it wasn't happening.
The party's leaders accept more or less open borders and like big trade deals. Half the base
does not! It is longtime GOP doctrine to cut entitlement spending. Half the base doesn't want
to, not right now! Republican leaders have what might be called assertive foreign-policy impulses.
When Mr. Trump insulted George W. Bush and nation-building and said he'd opposed the Iraq invasion,
the crowds, taking him at his word, cheered. He was, as they say, declaring that he didn't want
to invade the world and invite the world. Not only did half the base cheer him, at least half
the remaining half joined in when the primaries ended.
End of pause. OK, so Peggy got some things right there. She got a lot wrong, though
Start with the notion that Trump is crazy. He's a nut, she says, five times. His brain is "a TV
funhouse."
Well, Trump has some colorful quirks of personality, to be sure, as we all do. But he's no nut.
A nut can't be as successful in business as Trump has been.
I spent 32 years as an employee or contractor, mostly in private businesses but for two years
in a government department. Private businesses are intensely rational, as human affairs go-much more
rational than government departments. The price of irrationality in business is immediate and plainly
financial. Sanity-wise, Trump is a better bet than most people in high government positions.
Sure, politicians talk a good rational game. They present as sober and thoughtful on the Sunday
morning shows.
Look at the stuff they believe, though. Was it rational to respond to the collapse of the U.S.S.R.
by moving NATO right up to Russia's borders? Was it rational to expect that post-Saddam Iraq would
turn into a constitutional democracy? Was it rational to order insurance companies to sell healthcare
policies to people who are already sick? Was the Vietnam War a rational enterprise? Was it rational
to respond to the 9/11 attacks by massively increasing Muslim immigration?
Make your own list.
Donald Trump displays good healthy patriotic instincts. I'll take that, with the personality quirks
and all, over some earnest, careful, sober-sided guy whose head contains fantasies of putting the
world to rights, or flooding our country with unassimilable foreigners.
I'd add the point, made by many commentators, that belongs under the general heading: "You don't
have to be crazy to work here, but it helps." If Donald Trump was not so very different from run-of-the-mill
politicians-which I suspect is a big part of what Peggy means by calling him a nut-would he have
entered into the political adventure he's on?
Thor Heyerdahl sailed across the Pacific on a hand-built wooden raft to prove a point, which
is not the kind of thing your average ethnographer would do. Was he crazy? No, he wasn't. It was
only that some feature of his personality drove him to use that way to prove the point he
hoped to prove.
And then there is Peggy's assertion that the Republican Party's leaders didn't know that half
the party's base were at odds with them.
Did they really not? Didn't they get a clue when the GOP lost in 2012, mainly because millions
of Republican voters didn't turn out for Mitt Romney? Didn't they, come to think of it, get the glimmering
of a clue back in 1996, when Pat Buchanan won the New Hampshire primary?
Pat Buchanan is in fact a living counter-argument to Peggy's thesis-the "sane Donald Trump" that
she claims would win the hearts of GOP managers. Pat is Trump without the personality quirks. How
has the Republican Party treated him ?
Our own
Brad Griffin , here at VDARE.com on October 24th, offered a couple more "sane Donald Trumps":
Ron Paul and Mike Huckabee. How did they fare with the GOP Establishment?
Donald Trump is no nut. If he were a nut, he would not have amassed the fortune he
has, nor nurtured the capable and affectionate family he has. Probably he's less well-informed
about the world than the average pol. I doubt he could tell you what
the capital of Burkina Faso is. That's secondary, though. A President has people to look up that
stuff for him. The question that's been asked more than any other about Donald Trump is not, pace
Peggy Noonan, "Is he nuts?" but, "
Is he conservative? "
I'm sure he is. But my definition of "conservative" is temperamental, not political. My touchstone
here is the sketch of the conservative temperament given to us by the English political philosopher
Michael Oakeshott :
To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried
to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the
near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present
laughter to utopian bliss.
That fits Trump better than it fits any liberal you can think of-better also than many senior
Republicans.
For example, it was one of George W. Bush's senior associates-probably Karl Rove-who scoffed at opponents
of Bush's delusional foreign policy as "the reality-based community." It would be hard to think of
a more un -Oakeshottian turn of phrase.
Trump has all the right instincts. And he's had the guts and courage-and, just as important,
the money -to do a thing that has badly needed doing for twenty years: to smash the power
of the real nuts in the GOP Establishment.
I thank him for that, and look forward to his Presidency.
"... He opened his remarks by bashing Donald Trump on student loan debt, but then surprisingly turned to bashing Hillary Clinton from her own stage. "Unfortunately, Hillary doesn't really care about this issue either," Vanfosson said. "The only thing she cares about is pleasing her donors, the billionaires who fund her campaign. The only people that really trust Hillary are Goldman Sachs, CitiGroup can trust Hillary, the military industrial complex can trust Hillary. Her good friend Henry Kissinger can trust Hillary." ..."
"... "She is so trapped in the world of the elite that she has completely lost grip on what it's like to be an average person," Vanfosson continued. "She doesn't care. Voting for another lesser of two evils, there's no point." ..."
Just a few days before the general election, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Rodham
Clinton and her running mate Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) still can't unite her party. Supporters of
Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, her Democratic primary rival, are disrupting her campaign's
efforts to take on GOP nominee Donald J. Trump, and in Iowa on Saturday one prominent Sanders
backer was actually escorted out of a Clinton campaign event for urging those present not to vote
for Clinton-for which he was cheered by the crowd.
Kaleb Vanfosson, the president of Iowa State University's Students for Bernie chapter, bashed
Hillary Clinton and told rally-goers at her own campaign event not to vote for her. He was
cheered.
He opened his remarks by bashing Donald Trump on student loan debt, but then surprisingly
turned to bashing Hillary Clinton from her own stage. "Unfortunately, Hillary doesn't really care
about this issue either," Vanfosson said. "The only thing she cares about is pleasing her donors,
the billionaires who fund her campaign. The only people that really trust Hillary are Goldman
Sachs, CitiGroup can trust Hillary, the military industrial complex can trust Hillary. Her good
friend Henry Kissinger can trust Hillary."
The crowd at the Clinton-Kaine event erupted in applause.
"She is so trapped in the world of the elite that she has completely lost grip on what
it's like to be an average person," Vanfosson continued. "She doesn't care. Voting for another
lesser of two evils, there's no point."
At that point, a Clinton staffer rushed on stage and grabbed the young man by the arm to
escort him off the stage and out of the event.
Now the question is: if this is true, why the invetigation was reopened in the first place?
For many voters, this story comes too late. More than 12m votes have already been cast across
the country in early voting, representing around 10% of the likely total votes in this election.
The F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, told Congress on Sunday that he
had seen no evidence in a recently discovered trove of emails to change his conclusion that
Hillary Clinton should face no charges over her handling of classified information.
... ... ...
The letter was a dramatic final twist in a tumultuous nine days for
both Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Comey, who drew
widespread criticism for announcing that the F.B.I. had discovered new emails that might be
relevant to its investigation of Mrs. Clinton, which ended in July with no charges. That
criticism of Mr. Comey from both parties is likely to persist after the election.
"... WikiLeaks series on deals involving Hillary Clinton campaign Chairman John Podesta. Mr Podesta is a long-term associate of
the Clintons and was President Bill Clinton's Chief of Staff from 1998 until 2001. Mr Podesta also owns the Podesta Group with his brother
Tony, a major lobbying firm and is the Chair of the Center for American Progress (CAP), a Washington DC-based think tank. ..."
"... if President Obama signs this terrible legislation that blatantly validates Bernie's entire campaign message about Wall Street
running our government, this will give Bernie a huge boost and 10,000 -20,000 outraged citizens (who WILL turn up because they will
be so angry at the President for preemption vt) will be marching on the Mall with Bernie as their keynote speaker. " ..."
"... But Hirshberg does not stop here. In order to persuade Podesta about the seriousness of the matter, he claims that " It will
be terrible to hand Sanders this advantage at such a fragile time when we really need to save our $$$ for the Trump fight. " ..."
WikiLeaks series on deals involving Hillary Clinton campaign Chairman John Podesta. Mr Podesta is a long-term associate of the
Clintons and was President Bill Clinton's Chief of Staff from 1998 until 2001. Mr Podesta also owns the Podesta Group with his brother
Tony, a major lobbying firm and is the Chair of the Center for American Progress (CAP), a Washington DC-based think tank.
Hirshberg writes to a familiar person, as he was mentioned at the time as a possible 2008 Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate,
requesting Obama should not pass the Roberts bill because " if President Obama signs this terrible legislation that blatantly
validates Bernie's entire campaign message about Wall Street running our government, this will give Bernie a huge boost and 10,000
-20,000 outraged citizens (who WILL turn up because they will be so angry at the President for preemption vt) will be marching on
the Mall with Bernie as their keynote speaker. "
But Hirshberg does not stop here. In order to persuade Podesta about the seriousness of the matter, he claims that " It will
be terrible to hand Sanders this advantage at such a fragile time when we really need to save our $$$ for the Trump fight. "
"... according to the State Department, the previously undisclosed donation suggests there may be an ethics violation by the foundation, even though the State of Qatar is shown on the foundation's website as having given at least that amount. There is no date listed for the donation. ..."
"... Underscoring the potential flagrant abuse of ethical guidelines if the Qatar payment is confirmed, Hillary Clinton promised the U.S. government that while she served as secretary of state the foundation would not accept new funding from foreign governments without seeking clearance from the State Department's ethics office . The agreement was designed to dispel concerns that U.S. foreign policy could be swayed by donations to the foundation. ..."
"... She has another problem. Previous posts on ZH indicate that there exists a conflict between the Clinton Foundation and the CHAI the Clinton Health Access Initiative. ..."
"... The board of CHAI is upset that the CF accepts money intended for CHAI but this money never flows through to CHAI. The CF accepts funds and encourages donations based on CHAI activity but these funds do not appear to be transferrred to the legal entity undertaking the health work. ..."
"... "Pay my foundation": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GHth-bt0Qs ..."
"... We (CHAI) are very concerned about cases where we meet Clinton Foundation donors who believe they have given money to support CHAI's work because they have donated to the CF, when in reality CHAI does not receive the funds. ..."
"... only 5.7% goes to charitable causes. The remainder goes to salaries, travel and confrences. In other words, goes to pay Hillary's and Bill's personal and political expenses. ..."
"... The Clintons out Mafia the Mafia. ..."
"... "The amount of garbage that they found in these emails, of criminal activity by Hillary, by her immediate circle, and even by other Democratic members of Congress was so disgusting they gave it to the FBI, and they said, 'We're going to go public with this if you don't reopen the investigation and you don't do the right thing with timely indictments,'" ..."
Three weeks ago,
when we first reported that Qatar had offered to pay the Clinton Foundation $1 million after
a hacked Podesta email disclosed that the ambassador of Qatar " Would like to see WJC [William Jefferson
Clinton] 'for five minutes' in NYC, to present $1 million check that Qatar promised for WJC's birthday
in 2011 ", we said that in this particular case, the Clinton Foundation may also be in violation
of State Department ethics codes.
As we said in early October, while this has been seen by critics of the Clinton Foundation as yet
another instance of influence pandering and "pay-to-play", this time there may actually be consequences
for the Clinton Foundation: according to the State Department, the previously undisclosed donation
suggests there may be an ethics violation by the foundation, even though the State of Qatar is shown
on the foundation's website as having given at least that amount. There is no date listed for the
donation.
Underscoring the potential flagrant abuse of ethical guidelines if the Qatar payment is confirmed,
Hillary Clinton promised the U.S. government that while she served as secretary of state the foundation
would not accept new funding from foreign governments without seeking clearance from the State Department's
ethics office . The agreement was designed to dispel concerns that U.S. foreign policy could be swayed
by donations to the foundation.
Of course, US foreign policy could be very easily swayed if Hillary accepted money and simply
did not report it the receipt of such money.
She has another problem. Previous posts on ZH indicate that there exists a conflict between the
Clinton Foundation and the CHAI the Clinton Health Access Initiative.
The board of CHAI is upset that the CF accepts money intended for CHAI but this money never
flows through to CHAI. The CF accepts funds and encourages donations based on CHAI activity but
these funds do not appear to be transferrred to the legal entity undertaking the health work.
Next question is - Where does the money go? And who benefits? ,
CHAI is often portrayed by the Clinton Foundation (CF) as an initiative of the Foundation.
. . . We (CHAI) are very concerned about cases where we meet Clinton Foundation donors who believe
they have given money to support CHAI's work because they have donated to the CF, when in reality
CHAI does not receive the funds.
See paragraph 4 on page 3 of the full memo which is a part of the above ZH post.
Hillay said at one of the debates that the Clinton Foundation pays out 90% to charity.
NOT SO. Latest filing - 2014 - shows that only 5.7% goes to charitable causes. The remainder
goes to salaries, travel and confrences. In other words, goes to pay Hillary's and Bill's personal
and political expenses.
Ten years ago I considered setting up a Non-profit Family Charitable corporation, the minimum
yearly donation was 7% at that time, of course it may have changed.
Citing a "well-placed source" in the New York Police Department, Blackwater USA founder and
retired Navy SEAL Erik Prince.....said the NYPD wanted to do a press conference announcing the
warrants and the additional arrests they were making in the Weiner investigation but received
"huge pushback" from the Justice Department.
"The amount of garbage that they found in these emails, of criminal activity by Hillary, by
her immediate circle, and even by other Democratic members of Congress was so disgusting they
gave it to the FBI, and they said, 'We're going to go public with this if you don't reopen the
investigation and you don't do the right thing with timely indictments,'"
doublespeak (noun): deliberately ambiguous or obscure language designed to
mislead, for example the military expression collateral damage instead of civilian
deaths and injuries
Actress Susan Sarandon on Thursday tore into the Democratic National Committee (DNC), calling it "completely corrupt." "After
my experience in the primary, it's very clear to me the DNC is gone," she
told CNN's Carol Costello .
"Every superdelegate is a lobbyist. The way that the system is set up in terms of trying of having superdelegates - you could
win a state and not get the delegates. It's crazy."
"Look, Bernie has said 'don't ever listen to me if I tell you how to vote,' " she said.
"What [Sanders] did is show people that they counted. He brought them hope. He's supporting a lot of candidates. It's very important
to go and vote down the ticket."
"I think we've been voting the lesser of two evils for too long. The good news is everybody's so frustrated that at least we're
awake."
Sarandon on Monday
endorsed Green
Party nominee Jill Stein.
"It's clear a third-party is necessary and viable at this time," she said in a letter posted on Stein's campaign website. "And
this is the first step in accomplishing that end."
Hillary Clinton deleted a 2009 email in which she forwarded classified information to her daughter,
Chelsea.
The email was released on Friday by the State Department. It is one of thousands of documents
recovered by the FBI from Clinton's private email server.
The Dec. 20, 2009 email chain , entitled "Update," started with a message from Michael Froman,
who served as a deputy assistant to President Obama and deputy national security adviser for international
economic affairs.
The email, which is redacted because it contains information classified as "Confidential," was
sent to Jake Sullivan, Clinton's foreign policy adivser at the State Department, and several Obama
aides. Sullivan sent it to Hillary Clinton who then forwarded it to Chelsea, who emailed under the
pseudonym "Diane Reynolds."
"... If this is so, Hillary Clinton as security risk ranks right up there with Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White, though they acted out of treasonous ideology and she out of Clintonian hubris. What do these foreign intelligence agencies know about Clinton that the voters do not? ..."
"... The second revelation from Baier is that the Clinton Foundation has been under active investigation by the white-collar crime division of the FBI for a year and is a "very high priority." ..."
"... The FBI told Baier that they anticipate indictments. ..."
"... Indeed, with the sums involved, and the intimate ties between high officials of Bill's foundation, and Hillary and her close aides at State, it strains credulity to believe that deals were not discussed and cut. ..."
"... Wall Street Journal ..."
"... And he knows better than any other high official the answer to a critical question that needs answering before Tuesday: has Baier been fed exaggerated or false information by FBI agents hostile to Clinton? Or has Baier been told the truth? In the latter case, we are facing a constitutional crisis if Clinton is elected. And the American people surely have a right to know that before they go to the polls on Tuesday. ..."
"... Patrick J. Buchanan is a founding editor of ..."
For, if true, Clinton could face charges in 2017 and impeachment and removal from office in 2018.
According to Baier, FBI agents have found new emails, believed to have originated on Clinton's
server, on the computer jointly used by close aide Huma Abedin and her disgraced husband, Anthony
Weiner.
Abedin's failure to turn this computer over to the State Department on leaving State appears to
be a violation of U.S. law.
Moreover, the laptops of close Clinton aides Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson, thought destroyed
by the FBI, were apparently retained and are "being exploited" by the National Security division.
And here is the salient point. His FBI sources told Baier, "with 99 percent" certitude, that Clinton's
Chappaqua server "had been hacked by at least five foreign intelligence services."
If this is so, Hillary Clinton as security risk ranks right up there with Alger Hiss and Harry
Dexter White, though they acted out of treasonous ideology and she out of Clintonian hubris. What
do these foreign intelligence agencies know about Clinton that the voters do not?
The second revelation from Baier is that the Clinton Foundation has been under active investigation
by the white-collar crime division of the FBI for a year and is a "very high priority."
Specifically, the FBI is looking into published allegations of "pay-to-play." This is the charge
that the Clinton State Department traded access, influence, and policy decisions to foreign regimes
and to big donors who gave hundreds of millions to the Clinton Foundation, along with 15 years of
six-figure speaking fees for Bill and Hillary.
According to Baier's sources, FBI agents are "actively and aggressively" pursuing this case, have
interviewed and re-interviewed multiple persons, and are now being inundated in an "avalanche of
new information" from WikiLeaks documents and new emails.
The FBI told Baier that they anticipate indictments.
Indeed, with the sums involved, and the intimate ties between high officials of Bill's foundation,
and Hillary and her close aides at State, it strains credulity to believe that deals were not discussed
and cut.
Books have been written alleging and detailing them.
Also, not only Fox News but also the Wall Street Journal and other news sources are reporting
on what appears to be a rebellion inside the FBI against strictures on their investigations imposed
by higher ups in the Department of Justice of Attorney General Loretta Lynch.
Director Comey has come under fire from left and right-first for refusing to recommend the prosecution
of Clinton, then for last week's statement about the discovery of new and "pertinent" emails on the
Abedin-Weiner computer-but retains a reputation for integrity.
And he knows better than any other high official the answer to a critical question that needs
answering before Tuesday: has Baier been fed exaggerated or false information by FBI agents hostile
to Clinton? Or has Baier been told the truth? In the latter case, we are facing a constitutional crisis if Clinton is elected. And the American
people surely have a right to know that before they go to the polls on Tuesday.
What is predictable ahead?
Attorney General Lynch, whether she stays or goes, will be hauled before Congress to explain whether
she or top aides impeded the FBI investigations of the Clinton scandals. And witnesses from within
her Justice department and FBI will also be called to testify.
Moreover, Senate Republicans would block confirmation of any new attorney general who did not
first promise to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the email and pay-to-play scandals,
and any pressure from Lynch's Justice Department on the FBI.
Even Democrats would concede that a Department of Justice staffed by Hillary Clinton appointees
could not credibly be entrusted with investigating alleged high crimes and misdemeanors by former
Secretary of State Clinton and confidants like Abedin and Mills.
An independent counsel, a special prosecutor, appears inevitable.
And such individuals usually mark their success or failure by how many and how high are the indictments
and convictions they rack up.
Virtually the whole planet holds its collective breath at the prospect of Hillary Clinton possibly
becoming the next President of the United States (POTUS).
How's that humanly possible, as the (daily) Bonfire of The Scandals – relentlessly fed by WikiLeaks
revelations and now converging FBI investigations – can now be seen from interstellar space?
It's possible because Hillary Clinton, slouching through a paroxysm of manufactured hysteria,
is supported by virtually the whole US establishment, a consensual neocon/neoliberalcon War Party/Wall
Street/corporate media axis.
But History has a tendency to show us there's always a straw that breaks the camel's back.
... ... ...
As far as the Clinton machine is concerned, an interlocking influence peddling pile up is the
norm. John Podesta also happens to be the founder of the Center for American Progress – a George
Soros operation and prime recruiting ground for Obama administration officials, including US Treasury
operatives who decided which elite Too Big To Fail (TBTF) financial giants would be spared after
the 2008 crisis. DCLeaks.com , for its part, has
connected Soros Open Society foundations to global funding rackets directly leading to subversion
of governments and outright regime change (obviously sparing Clinton Foundation donors.)
Exceptional bananas, anyone?
The perfectly timed slow drip of WikiLeaks revelations, for the Clinton machine, feels like a
sophisticated form of Chinese torture. To alleviate the pain, the relentless standard spin has been
to change the subject, blame the messenger, and attribute it all to "evil" Russian hacking when the
real source for the leaks might have come straight from the
https://www.rt.com/news/365164-assange-interview-wikileaks-russia/
belly of the (Washington) beast.
At the Valdai discussion club last week, it took President Putin
"Another mythical and imaginary problem is what I can only call the hysteria the USA has
whipped up over supposed Russian meddling in the American presidential election. The United States
has plenty of genuinely urgent problems, it would seem, from the colossal public debt to the increase
in firearms violence and cases of arbitrary action by the police. You would think that the election
debates would concentrate on these and other unresolved problems, but the elite has nothing with
which to reassure society, it seems, and therefore attempt to distract public attention by pointing
instead to supposed Russian hackers, spies, agents of influence and so forth.
I have to ask myself and ask you too: Does anyone seriously imagine that Russia can somehow
influence the American people's choice? America is not some kind of 'banana republic', after all,
but is a great power. Do correct me if I am wrong."
Reality, though, continues to insist on offering multiple, overlapping banana republic instances,
configuring a giant black hole of transparency.
Anthropologist Janine Wedel has been one of the few in Clinton-linked US mainstream media
Now, less than a week before the election, we have come to the crucial juncture where the WikiLeaks
revelations are merging with the FBI investigations – all three of them.
this WikiLeaks bombshell; Peter Kadzik, who's now in charge of the Department of Justice (DOJ)
probe into the 650,000 emails found on the laptop shared by Clinton's right-hand woman Huma Abedin
and her estranged, pervert husband Anthony Wiener, is a Clinton asset.
Not only Kadzik was an attorney for Marc Rich when he was pardoned by Bill Clinton; Podesta
– as also revealed by WikiLeaks – thanked Kadzik for keeping him "out of jail"; and it was Kadzik
who gave Podesta a secret heads up
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/43150#efmABWAB8ACiACqACvADUADXAIF on the Clinton
email investigation.
The Clinton machine, starring a self-described virtuous Madonna, is actually a pretty nasty
business. Huma and her family's close connections to Saudi Arabia – and the Muslim Brotherhood –
are legendary (that includes his brother Hassan, who works for Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi). Podesta,
by the way, is a handsomely remunerated lobbyist for Saudi Arabia in Washington; that's part of the
Clinton Foundation connection.
Yet now, with Huma in the spotlight – still maintaining she didn't know all those emails were
in her and Wiener's laptop – it's no wonder Hillary has instantly downgraded her, publicly, to "one
of my aides". She used to be Hillary's ersatz
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/01/huma-abedin-hillary-clinton-adviser "daughter"; now she's
being framed as The Fall Princess.
And that brings us to the intersection of those three FBI investigations; on Hillary's Subterranean
Email Server (in theory closed by FBI's Comey last summer); on the Clinton Foundation; and on Wiener's
sexting of minors. The FBI has been investigating the Clinton Foundation for over a year now. Let's
try to cut a long story short.
Follow the evidence
Last July, the DOJ – under Clinton/Obama asset Loretta Lynch – decided not to prosecute anyone
on Emailgate. And yet FBI director Comey – who nonetheless stressed Hillary's "extreme carelessness"
– turbo-charged his no-denial mode on another investigation, as in the FBI "sought to refocus the
Clinton Foundation probe."
Soon we had Clinton Foundation FBI investigators trying to get access to all the emails turned
over in the Emailgate investigation. The East District of New York refused it. Very important point;
up to 2015, guess who was the US attorney at the East District; Clinton/Obama asset Lynch.
Enter an extra layer of legalese. Less than two months ago, the Clinton Foundation FBI investigators
discovered they could not have access to any Emailgate material that was connected to immunity agreements.
But then, roughly a month ago, another FBI team captured the by now famous laptop shared by
Huma and Wiener – using a warrant allowing only a probe on Weiner's sexting of a 15-year-old girl.
Subsequently they found Huma Abedin emails at all her accounts – from
[email protected]to the crucial
[email protected]. This meant not only that Huma
was forwarding State Dept. emails to her private accounts, but also that Hillary was sending emails
from the "secret" clintonemail.com to Huma at yahoo.com.
No one knew for sure, but some of these emails might be duplicates of those the Clinton Foundation
FBI investigators could not access because of the pesky immunity agreements.
What's established by now is that the metadata in the Huma/Wiener laptop was duly examined. Now
picture both teams of FBI investigators – Clinton Foundation and pervert Wiener – comparing notes.
And then they decide Huma's emails are "relevant".
Key questions apply; and the most pressing is how the emails were deemed "relevant" if the investigators
could only examine the metadata. What matters is that Comey certainly was made aware of the content
of the emails – a potential game-changer. That's why one of my sources
https://sputniknews.com/columnists/201610311046920348-clinton-fbi-november-surprise/ insists
his decision to go public came from above.
The other key question now is whether the DOJ – via Kadzik? – will once again thwart another
investigation, this time on the Clinton Foundation. Senior, serious FBI agents won't take that –
massive euphemism – kindly. The FBI has been on the Clinton Foundation for over a year. Now, arguably,
they are loaded with evidence – and they won't quit. Winning the presidency now seems to be the least
of Hillary Clinton's Bonfire of Scandals' problems.
Eric, November 4, 2016 1:08 pm
After the Nixon Watergate scandal, which avoided discussion of his war crimes and
treasonous undermining of Vietnamese peace talks, and probable role in JFK's assassination.
And after the Iran Contra scandal which also involved illegal arms transfers, obstruction of
justice, end running around supplying arms to terrorists, drug dealing, etc., it is refreshing
that after Bill's impeachment on relatively minor charges (do older guys having affairs with
younger women occur, and they don't want to talk about it?), to see some Democrats, who have
always portrayed themselves as the good guys against the evil Nixons and Reagans and Bushes,
being caught red handed in good oldfashioned money laundering, gun running, supplying arms to
terrorists and cavorting with and accepting money from good old fashioned head chopping human
rights violators, in true treasonous style.
As the saying goes, "The country is run by gangsters, and the ones who win are called 'The
Government'.
"... I'll be interested to see how much Hillary tries to "work with Republicans" when it comes to foreign or domestic policy, as she's promising on the campaign trail. ..."
"... In a recent interview Biden was talking about how his "friends" in the Senate like McCain, Lindsy Graham, etc. - the sane ones who hate Trump - have to come out in support of the Republican plan to block Clinton from nominating a Supreme Court judge, because of if they don't, the Koch brothers will primary them. ..."
"... While I agree that the Republican party has been interested in whatever argument will win elections and benefit their donor class, doesn't the Democratic Party also have a donor class? Haven't Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton had a close relationship with some business interests? Did anyone go to jail after the asset bubble? Did welfare reform work or simply shift the problem out of view? How complicit are the Democrats in the great risk shift? ..."
"... I would think the scorched earth politics of the neoliberals required Democrats to shift to the right if they ever hoped to win an election, again. That is what it has looked like to me. The American equivalent of New Labor in Britain. So, we have a more moderate business-interest group of Democrats and a radical business-interest group of Republicans during the past 40 years. I think Kevin Phillips has made this argument. ..."
"... Our grand experimental shift back to classical theory involved supply side tax cuts, deregulation based on the magic of new finance theory, and monetarist pro-financial monetary policy. All of which gave us the masquerade of a great moderation that ended in the mother of all asset bubbles. While we shredded the safety net. ..."
"... Now the population is learning the arguments about free trade magically lifting all boats up into the capitalist paradise has blown up. We've shifted the risk onto the working population and they couldn't bear it. ..."
"... Economists lied to the American people about trade and continue to lie about the issue day in and day out. Brainwashing kids with a silly model called comparative advantage. ..."
This is all true but Krugman always fails to tell the other side of the story.
I'll be interested to see how much Hillary tries to "work with Republicans" when it comes
to foreign or domestic policy, as she's promising on the campaign trail.
The centrists always do this to push through centrist, neoliberal "solutions" which anger the
left.
In a recent interview Biden was talking about how his "friends" in the Senate like McCain,
Lindsy Graham, etc. - the sane ones who hate Trump - have to come out in support of the Republican
plan to block Clinton from nominating a Supreme Court judge, because of if they don't, the Koch
brothers will primary them.
Let's hope Hillary does something about campaign finance reform and Citizen United and takes
a harder line against obstructionist Republicans.
While I agree that the Republican party has been interested in whatever argument will win
elections and benefit their donor class, doesn't the Democratic Party also have a donor class?
Haven't Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton had a close relationship with some business
interests? Did anyone go to jail after the asset bubble? Did welfare reform work or simply shift
the problem out of view? How complicit are the Democrats in the great risk shift?
I would think the scorched earth politics of the neoliberals required Democrats to shift
to the right if they ever hoped to win an election, again. That is what it has looked like to
me. The American equivalent of New Labor in Britain. So, we have a more moderate business-interest
group of Democrats and a radical business-interest group of Republicans during the past 40 years.
I think Kevin Phillips has made this argument.
Our grand experimental shift back to classical theory involved supply side tax cuts, deregulation
based on the magic of new finance theory, and monetarist pro-financial monetary policy. All of
which gave us the masquerade of a great moderation that ended in the mother of all asset bubbles.
While we shredded the safety net.
Now the population is learning the arguments about free trade magically lifting all boats
up into the capitalist paradise has blown up. We've shifted the risk onto the working population
and they couldn't bear it.
Perhaps the less partisan take-way would be - is it possible for any political candidate to
get elected in this environment without bowing to the proper interests? How close did Bernie get?
And, how do we fix it without first admitting that the policies of both political parties have
not really addressed the social adjustments necessary to capture the benefits of globalization?
We need an evolution of both political parties - not just the Republicans. If we don't get it,
we can expect the Trump argument to take even deeper root.
Economists lied to the American people about trade and continue to lie about the issue day
in and day out. Brainwashing kids with a silly model called comparative advantage. East Asian
economists including Ha Joon Chang among others debunked comparative advantage and Ricardianism
long ago.
Manufacturing is everything. It is all that matters. We needed tariffs yesterday. Without them
the country is lost.
"... With the reopening of the FBI investigation of Hillary and related scandals exploding all around her, election theft is not only more risky but also less likely to serve the Oligarchy's own interests. ..."
"... A Hillary presidency could put our country into chaos. I doubt the oligarchs are sufficiently stupid to think that once she is sworn in, Hillary can fire FBI Director Comey and shut down the investigation. The last president that tried that was Richard Nixon, and look where that got him. ..."
"... If you were an oligarch, would you want your agent under this kind of scrutiny? If you were Hillary, would you want to be under this kind of pressure? ..."
"... "Clinton's presence aboard Jeffrey Epstein's Boeing 727 on 11 occasions has been reported, but flight logs show the number is more than double that, and trips between 2001 and 2003 included extended junkets around the world with Epstein and fellow passengers identified on manifests by their initials or first names, including "Tatiana." The tricked-out jet earned its Nabakov-inspired nickname because it was reportedly outfitted with a bed where passengers had group sex with young girls." ..."
Yes they can ;-). that's how two party system is functioning by default. Rank-and-file are typically
screwed. the only exception is so called "revolutionary situation", when the elite lost legitimacy
and can't dictate its will on the people below.
November 4, 2016
The election was set up to be stolen from Trump. That was the purpose of the polls rigged by overweighting
Hillary supporters in the samples. After weeks of hearing poll results that Hillary was in the
lead, the public would discount a theft claim. Electronic voting makes elections easy to steal,
and I have posted explanations by election fraud experts of how it is done.
Clearly the Oligarchy does not want Donald Trump in the White House as they are unsure that
they could control him, and Hillary is their agent.
With the reopening of the FBI investigation of Hillary and related scandals exploding all
around her, election theft is not only more risky but also less likely to serve the Oligarchy's
own interests.
Image as well as money is part of Oligarchic power. The image of America takes a big hit if
the American people elect a president who is currently under felony investigation.
Moreover, a President Hillary would be under investigation for years. With so much spotlight
on her, she would not be able to serve the Oligarchy's interests. She would be worthless to them,
and, indeed, investigations that unearthed various connections between Hillary and oligarchs could
damage the oligarchs.
In other words, for the Oligarchy Hillary has moved from an asset to a liability.
A Hillary presidency could put our country into chaos. I doubt the oligarchs are sufficiently
stupid to think that once she is sworn in, Hillary can fire FBI Director Comey and shut down the
investigation. The last president that tried that was Richard Nixon, and look where that got him.
Moreover, the Republicans in the House and Senate would not stand for it. House Committee
on oversight and Government Reform chairman Jason Chaffetz has already declared Hillary to be
"a target-rich environment. Even before we get to day one, we've got two years worth of material
already lined up." House Speaker Paul Ryan said investigation will follow the evidence.
If you were an oligarch, would you want your agent under this kind of scrutiny? If you
were Hillary, would you want to be under this kind of pressure?
What happens if the FBI recommends the indictment of the president? Even insouciant Americans
would see the cover-up if the attorney general refused to prosecute the case. Americans would
lose all confidence in the government. Chaos would rule. Chaos can be revolutionary, and that
is not good for oligarchs.
Moreover, if reports can be believed, salacious scandals appear to be waiting their time on
stage. For example, last May Fox News reported:
"Former President Bill Clinton was a much more frequent flyer on a registered sex offender's
infamous jet than previously reported, with flight logs showing the former president taking at
least 26 trips aboard the "Lolita Express" - even apparently ditching his Secret Service detail
for at least five of the flights, according to records obtained by FoxNews.com.
"Clinton's presence aboard Jeffrey Epstein's Boeing 727 on 11 occasions has been reported,
but flight logs show the number is more than double that, and trips between 2001 and 2003 included
extended junkets around the world with Epstein and fellow passengers identified on manifests by
their initials or first names, including "Tatiana." The tricked-out jet earned its Nabakov-inspired
nickname because it was reportedly outfitted with a bed where passengers had group sex with young
girls."
Fox News reports that Epstein served time in prison for "solicitation and procurement of minors
for prostitution. He allegedly had a team of traffickers who procured girls as young as 12 to
service his friends on 'Orgy Island,' an estate on Epstein's 72-acre island, called Little St.
James, in the U.S. Virgin Islands."
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/05/13/flight-logs-show-bill-clinton-flew-on-sex-offenders-jet-much-more-than-previously-known.html
Some Internet sites, the credibility of which is unknown to me, have linked Hillary to these flights.
http
Thomas Frank
writes in The Guardian that the WikiLeaks emails to and from Hillary Clinton's campaign manager
John Podesta "offer an unprecedented view into the workings of the elite, and how it looks after
itself." They provide "a window into the soul of the Democratic party and into the dreams and thoughts
of the class to whom the party answers."
This genre of Podesta email, in which people try to arrange jobs for themselves or their kids,
points us toward the most fundamental thing we know about the people at the top of this class: their
loyalty to one another and the way it overrides everything else. Of course Hillary Clinton staffed
her state department with investment bankers and then did speaking engagements for investment banks
as soon as she was done at the state department. Of course she
appears to think that any kind of
bank reform should "come from the industry itself". And of course no elite bankers were ever prosecuted
by the Obama administration. Read these emails and you understand, with a start, that the people
at the top tier of American life all know each other. They are all engaged in promoting one another's
careers, constantly.
Everything blurs into everything else in this world. The state department, the banks, Silicon
Valley, the nonprofits, the "Global CEO Advisory Firm"
that
appears to have solicited donations for the Clinton Foundation. Executives here go from foundation
to government to thinktank to startup. There are honors. Venture capital. Foundation grants. Endowed
chairs. Advanced degrees. For them the door revolves. The friends all succeed. They break every boundary.But
the One Big Boundary remains. Yes, it's all supposed to be a meritocracy. But if you aren't part
of this happy, prosperous in-group – if you don't have John Podesta's email address – you're out.
Blackwater founder and former Navy SEAL Erik Prince told Breitbart News Daily on SiriusXM that
according to one of his "well-placed sources" in the New York Police Department, "The NYPD wanted
to do a press conference announcing the warrants and the additional arrests they were making" in
the Anthony Weiner investigation, but received "huge pushback" from the Justice Department.
Prince began by saying he had no problem believing reports that the FBI was highly confident multiple
foreign agencies
hacked Hillary Clinton's private email server . "I mean, it's not like the foreign intelligence
agencies leave a thank-you note after they've hacked and stolen your data," Prince said to SiriusXM
host Alex Marlow.
Prince claimed he had insider knowledge of the investigation that could help explain why FBI Director
James Comey had to announce he was reopening the investigation into Clinton's email server last week.
"Because of Weinergate and the sexting scandal, the NYPD started investigating it. Through a subpoena,
through a warrant, they searched his laptop, and sure enough, found those 650,000 emails. They found
way more stuff than just more information pertaining to the inappropriate sexting the guy was doing,"
Prince claimed.
"They found State Department emails. They found a lot of other really damning criminal information,
including money laundering, including the fact that Hillary went to this sex island with convicted
pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Bill Clinton went there more than 20 times. Hillary Clinton went there
at least six times," he said.
"The amount of garbage that they found in these emails, of criminal activity by Hillary, by her
immediate circle, and even by other Democratic members of Congress was so disgusting they gave it
to the FBI, and they said, 'We're going to go public with this if you don't reopen the investigation
and you don't do the right thing with timely indictments,'" Prince explained.
"I believe – I know, and this is from a very well-placed source of mine at 1PP, One Police Plaza
in New York – the NYPD wanted to do a press conference announcing the warrants and the additional
arrests they were making in this investigation, and they've gotten huge pushback, to the point of
coercion, from the Justice Department, with the Justice Department threatening to charge someone
that had been unrelated in the accidental heart attack death of Eric Garner almost two years ago.
That's the level of pushback the Obama Justice Department is doing against actually seeking justice
in the email and other related criminal matters," Prince said.
"There's five different parts of the FBI conducting investigations into these things, with constant
downdrafts from the Obama Justice Department. So in the, I hope, unlikely and very unfortunate event
that Hillary Clinton is elected president, we will have a constitutional crisis that we have not
seen since, I believe, 1860," Prince declared.
Marlow asked Prince to clarify these revelations.
"NYPD was the first one to look at that laptop," Prince elaborated. "Weiner and Huma Abedin, his
wife – the closest adviser of Hillary Clinton for 20 years – have both flipped. They are cooperating
with the government. They both have – they see potential jail time of many years for their crimes,
for Huma Abedin sending and receiving and even storing hundreds of thousands of messages from the
State Department server and from Hillary Clinton's own homebrew server, which contained classified
information. Weiner faces all kinds of exposure for the inappropriate sexting that was going on and
for other information that they found."
"So NYPD first gets that computer. They see how disgusting it is. They keep a copy of everything,
and they pass a copy on to the FBI, which finally pushes the FBI off their chairs, making Comey reopen
that investigation, which was indicated in the letter last week. The point being, NYPD has all the
information, and they will pursue justice within their rights if the FBI doesn't," Prince contended.
"There is all kinds of criminal culpability through all the emails they've seen of that 650,000,
including money laundering, underage sex, pay-for-play, and, of course, plenty of proof of inappropriate
handling, sending/receiving of classified information, up to SAP level Special Access Programs,"
he stated.
"So the plot thickens. NYPD was pushing because, as an article quoted one of the chiefs – that's
the level just below commissioner – he said as a parent, as a father with daughters, he could not
let that level of evil continue," Prince said.
He noted that the FBI can investigate these matters, "but they can't convene a grand jury. They
can't file charges."
"The prosecutors, the Justice Department has to do that," he explained. "Now, as I understand
it, Preet Bharara, the Manhattan prosecutor, has gotten ahold of some of this. From what I hear,
he's a stand-up guy, and hopefully he does the right thing."
Marlow agreed that Bharara's "sterling reputation" as a determined prosecutor was "bad news for
the Clintons."
Prince agreed, but said, "If people are willing to bend or break the law and don't really care
about the Constitution or due process – if you're willing to use Stalinist tactics against someone
– who knows what level of pressure" could be brought to bear against even the most tenacious law
enforcement officials?
"The point being, fortunately, it's not just the FBI; [there are] five different offices that
are in the hunt for justice, but the NYPD has it as well," Prince said, citing the Wall Street
Journal reporting that has "exposed downdraft, back pressure from the Justice Department" against
both the FBI and NYPD, in an effort to "keep the sunlight and the disinfecting effects of the truth
and transparency from shining on this great evil that has gone on, and is slowly being exposed."
"The Justice Department is trying to run out the clock, to elect Hillary Clinton, to prevent any
real justice from being done," he warned.
As for the mayor of New York City, Prince said he has heard that "de Blasio wants to stay away
from this."
"The evidence is so bad, the email content is so bad, that I think even he wants to stay away
from it, which is really telling," he said.
Prince reported that the other legislators involved in the case "have not been named yet," and
urged the NYPD to hold a press conference and name them.
"I wish they'd do it today," he said. "These are the unusual sliding-door moments of history,
that people can stand up and be counted, and make a real difference, and to save a Republic, save
a Constitution that we actually need and love, that our forefathers fought and died for. For any
cop that is aware of this level of wrongdoing, and they have veterans in their family, or deceased
veterans in their family, they owe it to them to stand up, to stand and be counted today ,
and shine the light of truth on this great evil."
"From what I understand, up to the commissioner or at least the chief level in NYPD, they wanted
to have a press conference, and DOJ, Washington people, political appointees have been exerting all
kinds of undue pressure on them to back down," he added.
Marlow suggested that some of those involved in keeping the details quiet might want to avoid
accusations of politicizing the case and seeking to influence the presidential election.
"Sure, that's it. That's the argument for it," Prince agreed. "But the fact is, you know that
if the Left had emails pointing to Donald Trump visiting, multiple times, an island with underage
sex slaves basically, emails, you know they'd be talking about it. They'd be shouting it from the
rooftops."
"This kind of evil, this kind of true dirt on Hillary Clinton – look, you don't have to make any
judgments. Just release the emails," he urged. "Just dump them. Let them out there. Let people see
the light of truth."
Prince dismissed the claims of people like Clinton campaign CEO John Podesta and DNC chair Donna
Brazile that some of the damaging emails already released by WikiLeaks were fabricated, noting that
"forensic analysis done shows that, indeed, they are not fabricated; they are really legitimate."
"This is stuff coming right off a hard drive that was owned by Weiner and his wife Huma Abedin,
Hillary's closest adviser for the last 20 years," he said of the new bombshells. "This is not from
some hacker or anybody else. This is a laptop seized from a warrant in a criminal investigation."
Prince confirmed that based on his information, Abedin is most likely looking at jail time, unless
she cuts a deal with prosecutors.
"There's a minimum of obstruction of justice and all kinds of unlawful handling of classified
information," he said. "Because remember, this laptop was in the possession of Weiner, who did not
have a security clearance. And many, many of those emails were from her Yahoo account, which had
State Department emails forwarded to them, so she could easier print these messages, scan them, and
send them on to Hillary. That's the carelessness that Hillary and her staff had for the classified
information that the intelligence community risks life and limb to collect in challenged, opposed
areas around the world."
"That's not who you want in the White House," Prince declared.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m.
Eastern.
"... The emails currently roiling the US presidential campaign are part of some unknown digital collection amassed by the troublesome Anthony Weiner, but if your purpose is to understand the clique of people who dominate Washington today, the emails that really matter are the ones being slowly released by WikiLeaks from the hacked account of Hillary Clinton's campaign chair John Podesta. ..."
"... "What is remarkable is that, in the party of Jackson and Bryan and Roosevelt, smiling financiers now seem to stand on every corner, constantly proffering advice about this and that". ..."
"... Do they want more of the same + the Clinton's insatiable appetite for self-enrichmentand that permanent insincere smile? If not, why not give Trump a chance. If they don't like him, kick him out in four years' time. ..."
"... My feeling is this sort of behaviour has its equivalents throughout history and that when it peaks we have upheaval and decline. ..."
"... "Yes, it's all supposed to be a meritocracy. But if you aren't part of this happy, prosperous in-group – if you don't have John Podesta's email address – you're out." ..."
"... Of course you are quite correct, the Democratic Party is a fraud for working people and a collection of self serving elitist. If you have a solution to solve why people keep voting for them I would love to hear it. ..."
"... I am sure the people of Syria and Libya are grateful to these amazing people for destroying their countries and stealing their resources. ..."
"... What's left is a pretty ugly, self-righteous and corrupt crowd. Their attacks on Comey have been despicable, beneath contempt and absurd. I think they're going to lose and they will deserve to. ..."
"... "Former National Endowment for the Arts chairman Bill Ivey says a leaked e-mail to Clinton deputy John Podesta did not reveal a 'master plan' for maintaining political power via 'an unaware and compliant citizenry.'" ..."
"... I use work in these circles and the soul crushing thing is that elites look out for themselves and their careers and have no real personality, morals, values, character, backbone and certainly no interest in the people. They have personalities of wet fish and are generally cowardice and an embarrassment to mankind. In sort a waste of space ..."
The emails currently roiling the US presidential campaign are part of some unknown digital
collection amassed by the troublesome Anthony Weiner, but if your purpose is to understand the clique
of people who dominate Washington today, the emails that really matter are the ones being slowly
released by WikiLeaks from the hacked account of Hillary Clinton's campaign chair John Podesta.
They are last week's scandal in a year running over with scandals, but in truth their significance
goes far beyond mere scandal: they are a window into the soul of the Democratic party and into the
dreams and thoughts of the class to whom the party answers.
The class to which I refer is not rising in angry protest; they are by and large pretty satisfied,
pretty contented. Nobody takes road trips to exotic West Virginia to see what the members of this
class looks like or how they live; on the contrary, they are the ones for whom such stories are written.
This bunch doesn't have to make do with a comb-over TV mountebank for a leader; for this class, the
choices are always pretty good, and this year they happen to be excellent.
They are the comfortable and well-educated mainstay of our modern Democratic party. They are also
the grandees of our national media; the architects of our software; the designers of our streets;
the high officials of our banking system; the authors of just about every plan to fix social security
or fine-tune the Middle East with precision droning. They are, they think, not a class at all but
rather the enlightened ones, the people who must be answered to but who need never explain themselves.
...I think the WikiLeaks releases furnish us with an opportunity to observe the upper reaches
of the American status hierarchy in all its righteousness and majesty.
The dramatis personae of the liberal class are all present in this amazing body of work: financial
innovators. High-achieving colleagues attempting to get jobs for their high-achieving children. Foundation
executives doing fine and noble things. Prizes, of course, and high academic achievement.
...Hillary's ingratiating speeches to Wall Street are well known of course, but what is remarkable
is that, in the party of Jackson and Bryan and Roosevelt, smiling financiers now seem to stand on
every corner, constantly proffering advice about this and that. In one now-famous email chain, for
example, the reader can watch current US trade representative Michael Froman, writing from a Citibank
email address in 2008, appear to name President Obama's cabinet even before the great hope-and-change
election was decided (incidentally, an important clue to understanding why that greatest of zombie
banks was never put out of its misery).
The far-sighted innovators of Silicon Valley are also here in force, interacting all the time
with the leaders of the party of the people. We watch as Podesta appears to email Sheryl Sandberg.
He makes plans to visit Mark Zuckerberg (who, according to one missive, wants to "learn more about
next steps for his philanthropy and social action"). Podesta exchanges emails with an entrepreneur
about an ugly race now unfolding for Silicon Valley's seat in Congress; this man, in turn, appears
to forward to Podesta the remarks of yet another Silicon Valley grandee, who complains that one of
the Democratic combatants in that fight was criticizing billionaires who give to Democrats. Specifically,
the miscreant Dem in question was said to be:
"… spinning (and attacking) donors who have supported Democrats. John Arnold and Marc Leder
have both given to Cory Booker, Joe Kennedy, and others. He is also attacking every billionaire
that donates to [Congressional candidate] Ro [Khanna], many whom support other Democrats as well."
Attacking billionaires! In the year 2015! It was, one of the correspondents appears to write,
"madness and political malpractice of the party to allow this to continue".
There are wonderful things to be found in this treasure trove when you search the gilded words
"Davos" or "Tahoe".
... ... ...
Then there is the apparent nepotism, the dozens if not hundreds of mundane emails in which petitioners
for this or that plum Washington job or high-profile academic appointment politely appeal to Podesta
– the ward-heeler of the meritocratic elite – for a solicitous word whispered in the ear of a powerful
crony.
This genre of Podesta email, in which people try to arrange jobs for themselves or their kids,
points us toward the most fundamental thing we know about the people at the top of this class: their
loyalty to one another and the way it overrides everything else. Of course Hillary Clinton staffed
her state department with investment bankers and then did speaking engagements for investment banks
as soon as she was done at the state department. Of course she appears to think that any kind of
bank reform should "come from the industry itself". And of course no elite bankers were ever prosecuted
by the Obama administration. Read these emails and you understand, with a start, that the people
at the top tier of American life all know each other. They are all engaged in promoting one another's
careers, constantly.
Everything blurs into everything else in this world. The state department, the banks, Silicon
Valley, the nonprofits, the "Global CEO Advisory Firm" that appears to have solicited donations for
the Clinton Foundation. Executives here go from foundation to government to thinktank to startup.
There are honors. Venture capital. Foundation grants. Endowed chairs. Advanced degrees. For them
the door revolves. The friends all succeed. They break every boundary.
But the One Big Boundary remains. Yes, it's all supposed to be a meritocracy. But if you aren't
part of this happy, prosperous in-group – if you don't have John Podesta's email address – you're
out.
It's all polyarchy,plutocracy and powerful lobbyists for the arms and finance industries. The
average US citizen counts for nothing. The higher up on the socio-economic scale you are, the
more you count. Except for a brainwashed vote once every 4 years.
From today's Guardian…
"US politics tends to be portrayed as driven by geopolitical interests rather than personalities,
and so most ordinary Russians assume that little will change, whoever wins."
"And nothing will change for the average US citizen, just like in Britain. Looks like most ordinary
Russians have got it spot on.
And as if that were not enough, the elections are 'rigged' in various ways.
Americans have a great responsibility not only to their country but to other so-called advanced
western democracies which follow they US model. A radical change in US politics to bring it in line
with genuine concern for the interests of the average citizen would greatly assist efforts here on
the other side of the Atlantic to do the same.
Astonishing that registered Democrats rejected one of the cleanest politicians in modern US
history in order to nominate the Queen of Wall St. What do they hope to gain from expanded corporate
globalism and entrenchment of the corporate coup d'etat at home?
Except that it was the same party grandees (Super-delegates - the very word sticks in your
throat no?) who all but confirmed Clinton's appointment before a single ballot was cast by the
party rank and file.
"What is remarkable is that, in the party of Jackson and Bryan and Roosevelt, smiling financiers
now seem to stand on every corner, constantly proffering advice about this and that".
Spot on. There's amnesia today about where the Democratic party historically stood in regard
to Wall Street and its interests.
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Real issues - like economic well-being for all - have been replaced by Democrats with mindless
identity politics. Clinton is literally running on "I will spend half a billion to reduce bullying",
on unisex bathrooms, and more women of color everywhere.
Is that what democracy should be all about? FDR and other real Democrats would die laughing
if they would see these current "progressive liberals" - they stand for nothing, they are a total
waste of time, as Obama so amply demonstrated.
The warning signals were screaming months ago and the mass media concocted a smear campaign against
Sanders because he wasn't owned and he was the wrong gender.
Sanders would have destroyed Trump in this election.
Yes he did endorse her. Because it is customary for the losing candidate(s) in the nomination
race to do so. He said he would endorse her if she won, right from the start of the process. For
the patently obvious reason, which he repeated again and again, that even a compromised HRC is
far better than Donald Trump.
And he kept his word, but not before he did his level best during the convention to get some
decent policies jammed into the Democratic Party platform.
And if the same sort of leakage had come from the Republicans you'd see exactly the same patronage
and influence peddling. If there's one area of politics that remains truly bipartisan it's the
gravitational pull of large sums of money.
We even read the pleadings of a man who wants to be invited to a state dinner at the White
House and who offers, as one of several exhibits in his favor, the fact that he "joined the DSCC
Majority Trust in Martha's Vineyard (contributing over $32,400 to Democratic senators) in July
2014".
Then there is the apparent nepotism, the dozens if not hundreds of mundane emails in which
petitioners for this or that plum Washington job or high-profile academic appointment politely
appeal to Podesta – the ward-heeler of the meritocratic elite – for a solicitous word whispered
in the ear of a powerful crony.
Something timeless about it all, isn't there? Like reading an account of court life in the
era of Charles II.
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There's nothing revelatory in the fact that this is happening among the Democrats, there is surely
a carbon copy going on with the Republicans! But somehow I don't think Wikileaks will be releasing
anything about that, until the GoP happens to do something that steps on Putin's toes...
We'll find out the truth about how Wikileaks operates one day. The alignment between Wikileaks
releases and interests of Russian foreign policy became suspicious a long time before you read
on Breitbart that Clinton made it up. And I wasn't in any way denying or diminishing the activities
described in the article. There are just better articles out there, which consider corruption
in "the system" from all sides - which is exactly how it should be viewed, not more of this divide
and conquer bullshit.
It is clear that rigging had taken place in the Democrat primaries, Bernie Sanders was more popular
with a big chunk of the electorate including the young, here in the Guardian few people had a
bad word to say about him, compare that to Hillary who's only strong point seems to be that she
is a safer choice than Trump.
I'm not so sure anymore either. For the world, maybe Trump is better in the end (ofc Clinton is
by far better for the US). I knew what a hawk Clinton is but seeing her "obliterate Iran" comments
made me think she might be even more dangerous than I thought.
The corollary is, Trump is the only candidate that Hillary can beat. That bares some thinking
over, I believe, especially in the light of the way we know the political system and the Democrats
in particular work. Oh well . . .
It didn't matter so much when the right-wing parties were puppets of billionaires.
The political crisis arrived when the supposedly "left-wing" parties sold out to them too.
At which point, democratic choice evaporated.
Financial interests have today captured the entire body-politic of Britain and America, and
it really doesn't matter which party you vote for - Goldman Sachs will call the shots regardless.
And they see you as simply a cash-cow to be milked for the benefit of the very rich, themselves
included.
Your general point is broadly accurate - however I would have second thoughts before singling
out Goldman Sachs any more than say Morgan Stanley , Citigroup or Bank of America.
I think he meant Goldman Sachs as a term for the larger banking group of interests (as you listed).
Some call them the 'white shoe boys'. Everyone knows the banks control everything now.
you've got it the wrong way round....it's the groups you mention that plead NOT speak with politicians.
Please don't include those running hospitals and universities with the worldwide business and
finance mafia.
"This genre of Podesta email, in which people try to arrange jobs for themselves or their kids,
points us toward the most fundamental thing we know about the people at the top of this class:
their loyalty to one another and the way it overrides everything else."
This is quite a mundane observation. To which social group does a tendency for in-group loyalty
NOT apply? I think what it actually shows is that high status people mix together and are more
confident in using such forms of communication with powerful people (with whom they assume a connection)
for personal gain. Hardly surprising. And also only applies to the sample - those who emailed
- rather than the general class. That is, it's a bad sample because it is self selecting, and
therefore says something more about people who are willing to communicate in this way, rather
than their broader class.
So to be clear, I don't think the two are mutually exclusive. One is about how often you are loyal
to your group, and the other is about the nature of loyalty itself.
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That the people at the very top of their industry and professions know each other and communicate
with each other is hardly a surprise. Nor is it bad - it helps the world to function. Nor is it
necessarily corrupt provided they operate within the law. What is important is that getting to
the top of these professions is an opportunity open to everyone with the ability and the drive.
That, sadly, is not the case. Nepotism does not help either.
These people at the top of their professions have a track-record of abysmal failure. Goldman Sachs,
Citigroup and the other banks should have been allowed to collapse in 2008, as fitting punishment
for their greed and incompetence. Instead, they used their paid-for access to the Bush White House
to demand and acquire a trillion-dollar bailout.
[neo]Liberal may be a dirty word to call someone in America but the author of this piece seems
unaware it doesn't work quite the same way the other side of the Atlantic. May I suggest panty-waisted
pointy-head instead?
Better yet: Globalist. Its an underlying theme that we have seen unite the Clintons and Bush/Romney
families in this election cycle...we now know who the enemy is, and they have infiltrated both
the Democrats and the Republicans. They have a secret badge they wear pledging an allegiance to
a higher power: the Clinton/Bush/Romney families are the jack-booted thugs of the American globalists.
The more the administrative class' borderless "humanism" aligns with the oligarchy's desire for
cheap labor, the less objectionable those cuddly persons become.
It's very easy to make a case that HRC is unfit for the presidency... Except for the fact the
alternative is Trump. A clique arranges matters for themselves and the electorate is basically
told to go to hell.
What is over there is on it's way over here if it hasn't happened already. You can build big
corporations with a flourishing financial sector or you can build a nation. I would say choose
but you don't get a choice.
Good job in presenting Hillary as the poor victim, when she has the whole weight of the neo-liberal
media-banking system behind her... Next up in Orwell land...
"Along with the concept of American Dream runs the notion that every man and woman is entitled
to an opinion and to one vote, no matter how ridiculous that opinion might be or how uninformed
the vote. It could be that the Borderer Presbyterian tradition of "stand up and say your rightful
piece" contributed to the American notion that our gut-level but uninformed opinions are some
sort of unvarnished foundational political truths.
I have been told that this is because we redneck working-class Scots Irish suffer from what
psychiatrists call "no insight".
Consequently, we will never agree with anyone outside our zone of ignorance because our belligerent
Borderer pride insists on the right to be dangerously wrong about everything while telling those
who are more educated to "bite my ass!"
― Joe Bageant, Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War
A meritocracy always crashes and crushes its actors and puppet masters whenever merit is neither
exhibited nor warranted ...... for then is it too much alike a fraudulent ponzi to be anything
else.
What Americans need to ask themselves is: Are they happy with things as they are after 8 years
of Obama? Do they want more of the same + the Clinton's insatiable appetite for self-enrichmentand
that permanent insincere smile? If not, why not give Trump a chance. If they don't like him, kick
him out in four years' time.
Are Americans happy with things as they are after 8 years of a Republican Congress stonewalling
every attempt to improve things for ordinary people, even shutting down the whole government in
pursuit of their partisan agenda? The childish antics of our 'democratic representatives' have
diminished the ideals of democracy and would sink even further with Trump, who could do a lot
of damage in four years.
Bit ironic, given your user name "noteasilyfooled". You are aware that Donald Trump (in spite
of several attempts to lose his fortune) is a billionaire?
It has been ongoing through out history, ancient Greece and the beginning of democracy, Romans,
Kings, Queens, courts and courtiers. Is it really a surprise that if you do not have a Harvard
MBA, you won't rise through the ranks of Goldman's and McKinsey? It's no different here in England,
Ł50,000 and up to dine with Dave and George last year.
Most of the population trusts who they elect to do the jobs they themselves would not do or
could not do, it's steeped in history that the well educated take the helm. Politics is nepotism
and money has always played a very large part, for every party, not just the democrats. Let's
not pretend the republicans are innocent saints in all of this, if Wikileaks were to delve into
their actions there would be a shit storm, remember the NRA is part and parcel of the Republican
party.
Most of the population trusts who they elect to do the jobs they themselves would not do or
could not do
Not sure we do .. We're totally apathetic and cynical in regards to politics, and certainly
those who put themselves forward mostly aren't up to the job but are seemingly unemployable elsewhere;
look no further than the last PM and his idiot chum, and now the current PM and her front bench.
Would you employ 'em?..
Ehm, sorry, no. Remember there is a word, democracy , which is taken to mean that governments
act according to the wishes of the people who elected them. Your petty partisanship is blinding
you.
They are the comfortable and well-educated mainstay of our modern Democratic party. They
are also the grandees of our national media; the architects of our software; the designers
of our streets; the high officials of our banking system; the authors of just about every plan
to fix social security or fine-tune the Middle East with precision droning. They are, they
think, not a class at all but rather the enlightened ones, the people who must be answered
to but who need never explain themselves.
This is across the WHOLE of the West no matter whether right leaning or left leaning.
The really interesting question is whether it has always been like this (and we just don't have
the emails to prove it) or whether this is a fairly new phenomenon. My feeling is this sort
of behaviour has its equivalents throughout history and that when it peaks we have upheaval and
decline.
The current malaise goes back a long way but was catalysed by the end of the Cold War. Because
the West 'won' with a system of liberal capitalist democracy, politics took a back seat to business
interests. The Clintonian and Blairite 'third way' was billed as a practical compromise but the
reality was an abdication of politics. Into this vacuum stepped the kind of self-serving elite
the Podesta emails reveal. Arrangements are starting to break down and Michael Gove's much derided
statement that people have 'had enough of experts' is actually the most insightful thing that
has been said about 21st Century politics so far.
Yes, yes, Thomas. But one click on your name reveals an approach to these elections which about
as unbiased against Clinton as Comley's - it's pretty clear who you want to win.
Among other things, if Trump wins, though, there will be war in Europe within 2 years, as Putin
grabs the Baltic states and the USA sits back, arms folded - you heard it here first.
And by electing Trump, we are trying to fuck up all of the people you mention in your article
above. We can't completely, but through things like term limits we can make Washington a city
full of strangers to them. It is much more difficult to deal with strangers in the "back room"
as you can't trust them.
We need to make Washington as inaccessible to those folks as it is to Main Street America.
We have to break America for these globalist elites before America will work for Main Street
again.
Because the American oligarchy has now turned globalist, their goals are now contrary to those
of the American people, and that's why all Hillary has is empty slogans like "I'll fight for you"
while Trump is saying tangible things like "I'll build a wall" and "I'll renegotiate or tear up
NAFTA."
We are done with them, and this is just getting started.
"Yes, it's all supposed to be a meritocracy. But if you aren't part of this happy, prosperous
in-group – if you don't have John Podesta's email address – you're out."
What's particularly interesting is to contrast the main-chance sleaziness of their internal jockeying
with the overwhelming self-righteousness of their pronouncements on public issues. No wonder the
voters want revenge.
Of course you are quite correct, the Democratic Party is a fraud for working people and a
collection of self serving elitist. If you have a solution to solve why people keep voting for
them I would love to hear it.
I think the point is that all politics is the same, democrat or republican. These people are self
serving leeches on the rest of society and they have us thanking them for it......well in the
USA they have you mindlessly chanting USA USA USA over and over again but you get my drift.
Wikileaks doesn't get 'directed'. It's very likely the leaks are from the inside of the Clinton
campaign. They've been very sloppy and not very tech savvy by all accounts.
That such a state of affairs exists is no surprise at all, especially as the whole proclaimed
basis of society in America is designed to produce it exactly.
They may couch it in different terms and dress it up to look like 'democracy and freedom',
but it is a selfish, greedy stampede where only the lucky or the nasty succeed.
We are forever told that anyone can achieve the 'American dream', but it is a complete myth.
The idea that if everyone just puts in the effort they could all live in limitless luxury is such
a false illusion you wonder why it hasn't been buried along with believing the world is flat and
the sun is a god.
no they don't! The freedom and democracy is just bullshot that cons the populace to not see that
it's really "nick all your stuff under the threat of violence". They're gangsters. That's all
they do.
Seriously? Your story is powerful people associate with each other and do each other favours?
Absent a pure dictatorship, that's how power works. Even then, I happen to know you're inferring
too much design in some of the events you describe.
This genre of Podesta email, in which people try to arrange jobs for themselves or their
kids, points us toward the most fundamental thing we know about the people at the top of this
class: their loyalty to one another and the way it overrides everything else.
We all know how people in power act in their own interests and that goes for both Parties, not
only the one singled out in this article.
What is less clear is how all this hysteria about personalities makes any difference to ordinary
people whose interests have been entirely sidelined in this election circus. Where is the discussion
about how Americans can get affordable healthcare, or a job that pays more than the minimum, or
how to respond to climate change, for instance?
The US presidential race signifies the way the political process has become irrevocably debased.
The e-mails merely highlight the cynicism of politicians who long ago ceded power to the financial
and corporate world.
Politicians don't really understand the complexities of finance, in the same way they are unable
to fathom the Middle east, or even what life has become like for huge swathes of the American
population. At the same time politicians have long ceased to be the engine of social progress,
in fact more often than not their policies are more likely to do great harm rather than good.
If anybody is surprised by the general tenor of these e-mails I assume they must have been
the sort of children who were heartbroken when one day their parents gently sat them down to break
it to them that Santa was actually Daddy in an oversized red suit.
" The dramatis personae of the liberal class are all present in this amazing body of work:
financial innovators. High-achieving colleagues attempting to get jobs for their high-achieving
children. Foundation executives doing fine and noble things. Prizes, of course, and high academic
achievement."
I am sure the people of Syria and Libya are grateful to these amazing people for destroying
their countries and stealing their resources.
Just look over here as former politicians get on the gravy train as they lose their seats or retire.
As for the Eton alumni - closer than the mafia ....
Yes ...just look at thsi stunning revent incisive Guardian journam=lism that has helped break
this open
"But if she wins, what an added bonus that, as the first woman to enter the White House, she
will also step through the door as by far the most qualified and experienced arrival there for
generations."
"Forget the FBI cache; the Podesta emails show how America is run"
First, no, no one in his right mind should forget the FBI cache which very likely contains
evidence of serious crimes by Clinton.
At the very least, they can prove she did not comply with subpoenas and destroyed evidence
and lied to the FBI.
Second, yes, the Podesta e-mails do show us something of how America is run, but the picture
is far from complete.
We've not had a enough look into the Clinton Foundation and its intertwining with the affairs
of a very senior official and the President himself.
One very much suspects Hillary of playing "pay for play" with foreign governments, much the
kind of corruption the US loves to accuse less-developed countries of.
After all, when the Clintons were in the White House, fund-raising gimmicks reached unprecedented
levels. President Bill came up with the offer of a sleep-over in the Lincoln Bedroom for rich
supporters who coughed up a $250,000 campaign contribution.
There are many indications, but no hard proof, of just how corrupt this foundation is. One
analyst who has spent some time studying it has called it a huge criminal scheme.
Let's not forget that Julian Assange, the man who gave us the Podesta material, has promised
revelations "which could put Hillary in jail" before the election.
You're right of course. All of politics is about doing favors for people high and low, you scratch
my back and I'll scratch yours. In the entire article the one real scandalous thing is that it
quotes from hacked personal emails that no on but those who wrote them have a right to see.
If anyone thinks that the immediate solution to not backing this type of behavior from one of
the major political parties is to elect a huckster riding the wave of righteous revulsion to all
of this, then they deserve everything that they will get when said huckster gets to the pinnacle
of power.
The solution does not lie with the other major political party either, boy would I love to
see a release of emails detailing how that organization is run. It is already in collapse due
to the eroding corruption resulting in downright robbery of the people, and on-going bigotry and
constant war-mongering to rob the world of its assets.
Nothing will happen to change any of this unless a realistic third party based on true service
to the people of this country gains national acceptance. The best thing that could come from these
emails and the fracturing of the Republican party would be that all disillusioned and disgruntled
citizens unite to form this third party. This will take the emergence of some genuine, selfless
leadership, but I have hopes that this can and will happen.
Otherwise, the future is not rosy, and one day we may look back at this hateful campaign with
nostalgia.
We have our own elite clubs in this country some of which have been here for centuries. All members
regardless of Party are connected through elite school networks and by of course the class system
which is copper fastened to keep the great unwashed out. Corruption, nepotism and cronyism are
all present here too even if concealed by the veil of respectability and having the right postcode.
From the comfort of their clubs, their marble homes and granite banks they rob the people of Britain
and the world.
I'd recommend reading "The Unwinding - An Inner History of the new America" by George Packer who
dissects this very well via potted biographies of several real people. The book also covers it's
opposite - the rising unemployment, de-industrialisation, repossessions and other themes. A very
useful background for understanding this election and whatever comes after. And a good read too
which can't always be said about such books.
Trump supporters say that Trump is not a politician or part of the Washington "establishment"
but he has built his empire by buying politicians for years. His flock is so fooled.
As someone who started in poverty and rose to do well through lots of hard work and lots of good
luck, the "revelation" that this country is controlled by a smug elite is not news. I may be liberal
but I have no illusions about the elitism and exclusionism that ruling cadres always exhibit.
And if I could achieve one thing, politically, in this lifetime it would be to break the back
of privilege in this country and on this planet forever, and make true meritocracy -- not cronyism,
not nepotism, not herdeitary wealth and power -- the ONLY determinant of success.
Then setup/ join a grassroots party.
I would like to see a pan-European, non-ideological party which will focus on getting people out
of the debt economy into economic and financial freedom. The price of housing and transportation
and education needs to be addressed. There needs to be less government, fewer MPs and more room
for people who create value and employment. There is a lot of innovation out there online for
example, but the mass of people are not being exposed to these options. A
This is how the rich, powerful and landed interest in all societies work. Constitutional democracy
was supposed to counter it`s worst excesses.
Voters everywhere understand how their governments have been subverted and that is why politicians
are mistrusted.
I was confused by your spelling for a second - David Icke.
One theory states that society would have had to crate a similar model if Icke hadn't provided
us with one. It is also, probably, better to blame alien overlords to human ones.
This is a pretty tame assessment. The more I see about HRC (who I once respected, not that long
ago) the more angry and saddened I feel. The Dems have lost their connection with the people they
were meant to represent. What's left is a pretty ugly, self-righteous and corrupt crowd. Their
attacks on Comey have been despicable, beneath contempt and absurd. I think they're going to lose
and they will deserve to.
The funniest thing about the comments of this article is the people who claim that electing Trump
will be different somehow. Trump will demolish the system, Trump will shake things up! Please!
Trump IS a part of this system, a system that has two clubs, A and B. Each club has its interests
and each club wants to elect a figure that would represent its interests. Moreover, clubs A and
B really work together, they are two groups of shareholders that are sometimes in disagreement
in the distribution of profit, but at the bottom line they are working for the same goal, the
enrichment of themselves and their associates. You have to be very naive to believe that POTUS,
a mere public relations figure, would be allowed to make any significiant executive decisions
in this company. That's not what a public relations officer does. The real decisions are with
the executives of the club, and they are not elected, they are admitted into the club. The real
question, however, is if it can be otherwise, if it has ever been otherwise, can we conceive of
a system that would be different. This should be the concern of all political experts, scientists
and journalists.
Yeah but he's going to build a wall, lock her up, tear up trade agreements with the neighbours,
bar Muslims from coming to the USA, create millions of well-paid jobs, open up loads of coal mines,
have a trade war with China, end lobbying, establish limited terms (if only a president could
have a third term) and sue umpteen women for alleging sexual assault.
"Just a bunch of expensive suits deciding on what's best for the world (and themselves)"
That's the wrong emphasis based on the points made in this article; surely it is "Just a bunch
of expensive suits deciding on what's best for the themselves (and the world)".
sanders said it and trump, an insider of independent means, are both right about the Clinton duo's
sleazy corruption. thank you Wikileaks, thank you perv Weiner, thank you Huma for sharing (one
of your) computers with your sex-fiend husband. thank you for sharing your total honesty and high
morality, all deserving that we citizens pay your pensions and salaries.
Its taken a while but i think I've decided. I genuinely want Clinton to lose, i think Trump will
be a disastrous president and the worst in history by far, and worse then Clinton.
That said
Clinton and the DNC deserve to lose for the horrific way they treated Sanders in the nomination
to see Clinton crowned the candidate... she does not deserve to win and i cannot face that smug
arrogant speech which will come if she does much less the next 4-8 years.
Lobbying, influence then a thin line to break into corruption and the system being run for the
selfish interest of the tiny few against the majority. The US is no exception to this, it is just
done more subtly with a smokescreen and sleight of hand.
I'm not sure where the "news" is in this piece. The same rules of engagement apply during Republican
administrations. The same rules of engagement apply in every administration in every country in
every part of our benighted World .... and, sadly, always have done. The only response to the
article that I can think of is that eternally useful Americanism ... "No s**t Sherlock."
it is the elite - both right and left wing who have accumulated all the power, know each other
very well and have one aim in life - to retain the power and priviledge for themselves, their
families and their peers - whether that is by social class, university, religion and yes race.
Bitter - you bet people are bitter - ignorant people who don't see they are all much of the same.
It's all about the power and the money that they have, you don't and you don't seem to care. Actually
you probably do have right power, money, class and race hence the pathetically flippant comment.
Well he's already aware of media bias and that a Deep State exists quietly in the background so
it will be interesting to see what happens after the election.
Brilliant. Absolutely and positively the best piece on the subject I have read. As an American,
once a cable installer who visited all the cliche homes of social-strata USA, I find a ray of
hope ij what you write. It is a hope that Americans will just admit the unbelievable folly of
Hillary Clinton as a choice for dog catcher, much less Commander in Chief of the US Armed Forces.
For God's sake, or the sake of Howard Hughes even, this group would nuke Idaho for not approving
of a transexual-animal wedding ceremony, let along disagreeing on healthcare. You have framed
and illuminated a portrait of the macabre aristocracy now in charge. I hope more people read this.
Neither of the two main political parties have a candidate worth anyone's time. The choice
is between a sexual predator and a serial liar to see who will lead the richest most powerful
country on the face of the earth and these two are what the parties have puked up for us to choose
between. I cant imagine a general or admiral sitting in front of either of these two specimens
and thinking themselves proud to be led by them.
This entire cycle is a disgrace, vote for Hillary, impeach her in a year stick Kaine in as
a caretaker and then have a proper election in 2020, its the only sane way out of this disaster.
"Sexual predator", really? You mean like Bill Cosby and Bill Clinton, 2 men with RAPE accusations
following them around for decades? All Trump did was kiss women in show biz and beauty contests,
and they LET him. I guess you never saw Richard Dawson on Family Feud?
You know damn well, people who get to the top in so called western capitalist representative democracy,
only represent themselves. The very idea they care about the people in general is totally demolished
by observing the evidence, how countries function and where the money flows to and where from.
The people are no better than domesticated cattle being led out to graze and brought back in
the evening to be milked. Marx was right when he talked about wage slavery. The slavers are those
in the legislatures of the west.
I really like Thomas Frank, author of the brilliant Pity the Billionaire.
I can't help feeling here that he's really softballed the the US elite (the Democrats in this
case) by only mildly calling them on their epic corruption.
If seen from Main street, is it any wonder the US electorate have in their millions turned aournd
and said "no, you're not going to ensnare us again with your bullshit promises because you want
our vote, you are the problem and we're going to kick YOU out"
I mean how many times can they hope to fool the electorate with bought and paid for contestants,
all the while with the media having their back. When the media is as corrupt and 'owned' as the
US mainstream media, people look elsewhere and there they find voices that are far far more critical
of what their awful rulers get up to.
Trump and Clinton have been friends for years. So the electorate is fooled once again. Every time
the public start to get wind of what's going on, the establishment just adds another layer to
the onion. By the time the hoi polloi catch up, they've siphoned tens of billions, hundreds of
billions for themselves, and created all new distractions and onion layers for the next election.
People are undeniably stupid.
This confirms the existence of a shadow government, made up of rich and powerful industrialists
and bankers who control the way elections results turn out, so that they can help themselves.
From their standpoint, Trump will be a wart in their rear end, because he basically lacks the
sophistication needed to hide excretion under the carpet and walk over it smiling. He is already
full of it and therefore is of no use to them. They did not expect him to come this far. There
is a first time surprise for everything. They did not expect Sanders to gain momentum either.
But they managed to contain it, phew! Now with Clinton, they can continue with their merry ways,
earning billions more, settings fires across the globe and making more profits out them. It is
not just the Democratic party that is full of stench. It includes the other party as well. Right
wing and left wing belong to the same bird. All the campaign for voting, right to vote, participate
etc. are just window wash. American democracy is buried deep in the Arlington cemetery. What runs
now is Plutocracy, whose roots have cracked through the foundations and pillars of this country.
Either a bloody revolution will happen one day soon or America will go the way of Brazil.
The US public are pretty happy generally with extra-judicial killing (we call that murder in
the UK, remember this for later on in the post), seems little concern about the on-record comments
of Clinton regarding Libya.
In fact the on-record comments of Clinton generally, that doesn't even involve hacked email
accounts, are absolutely damning to most Europeans.
However.. here in the UK what passes for satire comedy TV shows have rigorously stuck to the
line Trump is an idiot, Clinton is a democrat.
I can understand their fascination with Trump.. he's an easy target.. but nobody in the UK media
seems to have the balls to call out the fact that Clinton is neck deep in 'extra judicial killing',
which I find odd.. More importantly I find this to be an absolutely damning indictment of British
media. This organ not withstanding.
Interesting, but this just tells of the usual cronyism and nepotism; unedifying as it is. We see
very little here though of her true masters; i.e. Goldman Sachs; or more specifically the people
who own GS who are Hiliary's puppet masters. I would be more worried about Hiliarys ambition apparently
to push for a conflict with Russia; a conflict that serves the Military industrial complex and
the bankers that own it. DT may be a Narcicist but as Michael Moore says; "the enemy of my enemy....."
It's all supposed to be a meritocracy. But if you aren't part of this happy, prosperous
in-group – if you don't have XYZ's email address – you're out.
Great article that makes you think as a reader. For instance, though more ethical, it makes
you wonder how things are different in the BBC or The Guardian, or NYT, or other powerful organisations.
How far does merit count, how far does having the right background, how far not rocking the boat?
Hopefully the article will inspire others to look into the leaderships of American politics where
"everything blurs into everything in this world'.
The most shocking emails to me were the ones that revealed the Democratic Party had a substantial
role in creating and organizing groups like Catholics United, with the intent of using them to
try to liberalize the Catholic Church on issues like abortion and same sex marriage.
The same people who (rightly) cried foul over GW Bush crossing the church/state divide apparently
had no problem doing the same thing when it suited their agenda. I tend to vote Democratic, but
I don't know if I can continue to do that in the future. This kind of thing should not be happening
in America.
With a constitution like that of the US, with its establishment parties sharing a bought and sold
executive evey few years, and in the absence of representative parliamentary democracy, the psuedo
macarthyist insinuations of this article are as civilized as it can get.
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/3599
"And as I've mentioned, we've all been quite content to demean government, drop civics and in
general conspire to produce an unaware and compliant citizenry. The unawareness remains strong
but compliance is obviously fading rapidly. This problem demands some serious, serious thinking
- and not just poll driven, demographically-inspired messaging."
And there is the thinking of the elite rolled into a few sentences.
"Former National Endowment for the Arts chairman Bill Ivey says a leaked e-mail to Clinton
deputy John Podesta did not reveal a 'master plan' for maintaining political power via 'an unaware
and compliant citizenry.'"
One might think that after reading this article, that a liberal/progressive like me would hate
the Democratic Party and all of the elites in it. Well, you would be right (no pun intended),
but the folks that I really despise are on the GOP side of the equation.
My animosity begins with Eisenhower, who turned the Dulles brother lose on the world to start
so many of the fires that still rage today. Then came Nixon, with his "southern strategy", to
turn the hate and racism that existed in America since its founding into a political philosophy
that only an ignorant, half-assed Hollywood actor could fully weaponize. Then there was GWB who
threw jet fuel onto the still smoldering ashes left from the Dulles boys.
(And if you think you can throw LBJ back at me, consider that he saw no way out of Vietnam
simply because he knew the right was accuse him of being soft on communism - and so the big fool
pushed ever deeper into the Big Muddy.)
And the toxic fumes from those blazes then drifted over Donald J Trump and his fellow 16 clown
car occupants - all trying to out-hate each other.
There is simply no alternative to the Democratic Party because the GOP represents hate, misogyny,
racism, and the zombie legions that catered to the corporatocracy and the Christian right. It
was such a winning strategy that the Democratic Party created the Democratic Leadership Council
(DLC) - led by the likes of the Clinton's who out-repug'd the Repugnants, and stole their corporate
lunches. And this is what we have left (no pun intended).
First, Frank misunderstood Kansas. Now he says he was blind to the reality of the Democratic party
until the Podesta emails enlightened him. He's right though that the Democrats are never out of
power whether they win or lose elections (although it's always more convenient to win them, even
with a Clinton and the knowledge that he or she means nasty baggage to come). Republicans have
a lock on country clubs; Dems have a lock on government.
i understand that the republicans make up most of the governor positions as well as state houses
plus the fed. senate and congress...that is why america is now a banana republic [re: see the
fbi interference] and is why america is now an embarassment...run as it is by the republican duck
dynasty intellectual class. stay tuned as fascism follows. please don't stand close to me...you're
an american and embarrassing....
Trust me, middle and lower-class people also try to let eachother know that their kids need a
job, and can you help out. And I don't mind the bank exec promoting the dinner of locally grown/caught
produce with the tastesful wine pairing. Certainly pretty twee, but otherwise pretty normal.
What should be concentrated on is the amount of "OMG, they are complaining about billionaires!"
whining in these emails, and the amount of manipulative news cycle management and duplicitous
skullduggery that takes place.
And how about a law that prevents the Clintons from even stepping on Martha's Vineyard for
at least 4-5 years?
In all, a somewhat depressing but predictable confirmation that the Democratic party has embraced
the donor class to the extent that the donors are now the party's true constituents.
A self-interested, self-promoting, self-protecting "Elite" seeks to control and dominate. Clinton
is clearly integral to this abhorrent system. The USA is in desperate need of change yet the political
system is the antidote to any change. Trump is not the answer. Americans should be very worried.
The only benefit to Trump winning is that both parties will be blown up and recreated with new,
fresh faces - and Trump will be impeached within months.
Why isn't Trump the answer? No one can give me a valid rational reason. He is one of the few who
has shone light on the Swamp and is bringing the woke corrupt world down.
that elite you speak of happen to be your fellow americans and live on your street..unless of
course you live in a trailer park..in which case stop your whining and get yourself an education
and a better job instead of spending all your time watching wrestling and celebrity apprentice
and moaning about the elite...i notice trump hired his stupid kids instead of cracker jack executives...i
guess thats some of the nepotism you're crying about....ya rube.
Trump is different though. He socialized in these environments...the politicians...use hit him
up for donations....gossip too him about the goings on even try and sleep with him .
Trump does not drink so at these events he probably heard unlimited stories maybe even Bill Clinton
bragged to him.
For what ever reason he wants to bring
This scum down. Maybe they disgust him like they disgust us?
'This genre of Podesta email, in which people try to arrange jobs for themselves or their kids,
' I ss written as evidence of nepotism. But there is no mention of whether or not these requests
were successful. Nepotism requires that the person requesting the favour is granted it.
lol no she doesn't. she doesnt want single payer, neither did obama. she doesnt want a liberal
supreme court. she doesn't want the minimum wage raised to 15. she may support race gender lbgt
"fairness" as long as it is to her political advantage. but when it isn't, she will throw anybody
under the bus.
"Read these emails and you understand, with a start, that the people at the top tier of
American life all know each other. They are all engaged in promoting one another's careers,
constantly."
As long as that class division exists, nothing will ever change, and that class will never
relinquish that division of their own accord.
How different is this from anywhere else on the planet? There will always be " elites" composed
of well connected and/or powerful and/ or wealthy and/or famous people.
I have a good job in a good firm and i am inundated by emails from clients or their friends
trying to place their offspring. I decline politely, blame HR and PC, express my sincerest regrets
and delete.
As for wealthy and powerful people enjoying holidays in the company of other wealthy and powerful
people, so what? I spend my holiday with my friends and my friends tend to have the same professional
middle class background and outlook.
She should have said ."You guys are a bunch of cowardly, greedy, malformed humans. You are the
cream of everything wrong with society today.. And the worse of it all is,. you know it too. I
can smell it in this very room."
That's what!
If we followed the likes of Frank Democrats would be out of power for ever.
No, these Democrats would merely be members of the Republican Party, honestly declaring that the
people with money make the rules to benefit themselves. What's the moral point of being in power
if you have to be just as bad as the opposing party in order to stay in power?
I use work in these circles and the soul crushing thing is that elites look out for themselves
and their careers and have no real personality, morals, values, character, backbone and certainly
no interest in the people. They have personalities of wet fish and are generally cowardice and
an embarrassment to mankind. In sort a waste of space
A meritocracy wouldn't have such hob-nobbing going on for positions of power. There'd be no reason
to ask for special consideration for 'Johnny' -- since he would already have risen to the top
based on his own MERIT. So I don't understand why this author keeps insisting that this is a meritocracy
when the evidence is so clearly and so obviously the opposite.
Once upon a time these emails would have been front and centre of Guardian reporting, headline
news and leader columns, now a single opinion article tucked away from the front page. Truly the
gatekeepers have lost just as much credibility as the political class that they shill for.
It is well known that there is a deep state operating in America, if you want to learn something
instead of sneering and being ignorant, you could do worse than reading books such as these:
This is happening in America, which has always claimed that there are no classes here and everything
is done according to merit. So, yes, it's exactly like the triad you mention and it is the more
offensive for occurring in a country that expressly repudiates it.
That article adds up to zero, it does not tell us anything. There are people with networks, and
people promote other people they know. Nothing peculiar about this, it works like this in every
walk of life. By and large people with high stakes will choose other people who they know can
get very hard jobs done, otherwise their project becomes a failure. Can other talented people
break into these networks? They can and they do.
he's pretty powerful yes. he just runs interference for clinton controlled foundations as far
as i know, but i'm sure he will help out the big banks if called upon. your comment reeks of dishonesty.
The Democrats are as bad if not worse than the Republicans at deceit, manipulation of the media,
leaking false information, feeding out a narrative etc..
Its basically become like an arms race between the 2 parties to win by any means necessary
because they are so polarized.
The system needs to be overhauled and changed because its not fit for the 21st century. The
UK political system too needs to modernise because its creaking as well.
Frank (What's the matter with Frank? Frank) misses the point. completely. The amazing thing about
all these emails is how absolutely squeaky clean Podesta is. How many of us could say the same
if our personal emails from the last 10 years were blasted all over the internet?!? Not one --
not one! -- example of intemperate language, of bias, of unchained passions, of immaturity. I'm
proud to be his fellow citizen and would gladly let him serve as Chief of Staff again if he so
chose. Go Italian-Americans!
The Democratic Party faces exactly the same problem as the Labour Party in the UK.
They are both parties which are supposed to represent the interests of the working class and
middle class but they have been infiltrated by corrupt right wing groups lining their own pockets
and representing the interests of the oligarchy.
The Labour and Democratic parties need to work together to get these poisonous people out of
their organisations before they destroy they destroy them from within.
This is all fascinating, and disturbing, but sadly, not a surprise.
It also isn't restricted to the upper echelons of political parties either.
It is no coincidence we hear the same comedians/pundits/writers on Radio Four every week.
It is no coincidence we see the same people on tv.
It is no coincidence the sons and daughters of sons and daughters of the people who went to certain
universities go the same universities.
It is no coincidence certain arts grants go to a certain group of people a lot more than they
go to others.
It is no coincidence that European grants go to the same small groups of people running organisations.
I'll wager it is no coincidence at the Guardian certain people get work experience and internships.
Its the way the world works, and it stinks.
Great essay. It is hard to get all the thoughts about the elite into words when so much anger
and confusion exist now that all lines have blurred. No longer left and right, but top to bottom.
Whereas the world is mostly very grey for the bulk of us, these emails shed a light very clearly
on what is black and white and green all over for a few who are really in control. This election
has certainly pulled back the curtain and left everyone exposed. For so long Americans could pretend
there was virtue and dignity in the "democratic" foundation of our politics, but now with absolute
certainly we can see that it is not so and likely never was. No pretending anymore.
The class to which I refer is not rising in angry protest; they are by and large pretty satisfied,
pretty contented. Nobody takes road trips to exotic West Virginia to see what the members of this
class looks like or how they live; on the contrary, they are the ones for whom such stories are
written. This bunch doesn't have to make do with a comb-over TV mountebank for a leader; for this
class, the choices are always pretty good, and this year they happen to be excellent.
They are the comfortable and well-educated mainstay of our modern Democratic party. They
are also the grandees of our national media; the architects of our software; the designers of
our streets; the high officials of our banking system; the authors of just about every plan to
fix social security or fine-tune the Middle East with precision droning. They are, they think,
not a class at all but rather the enlightened ones, the people who must be answered to but who
need never explain themselves.
This is a good point. A lot of people who torpedoed Bernie Sanders' campaign against Hillary
Clinton in the primaries seem to be comfortable with little or no political change. They do not
seem willing to admit that the political and economic system in the US (and elsewhere) is fundamentally
broken, and effectively is in ruins.
You' re saying that one bad effect of hacks is that email security will be improved and it will
be harder to have secure communications. In effect, you hate the idea that the NSA can read our
emails, but you're worried that the Russians won't be able to. Personally, I don't want either
the government or Wikileaks to invade my privacy. You apparently think that data theft is OK as
long as Julian Assange does it.
That's an ahistorical understanding of the party. Yes, in the runup to the Civil War, the 'Democratic'
party was the party of proto-white supremacists, slave owners, and agriculturalists. But the party
system as it exists today with its alignment of Dems = liberal and Republicans = conservative
came into being around/after 1968. Claiming that today's 'Democrats' voted against slavery is
like claiming that today's 'Republicans' are worthy of being lauded for being abolitionists -
which would be high hypocrisy given their habits of racism and black voter suppression.
Righteousness and majesty...They are, they think, not a class at all but rather the enlightened
ones, the people who must be answered to but who need never explain themselves.
Exactly what Bernie Sanders was against, just think what 'could' have happened if he were the
nominee. The question is when will the email explicitly showing Clinton undermining him come out?
Hillary deserves every bit of what is coming out against her, she asked for it, she wants the
power and celebrity, but it comes with some pretty ugly stuff. As Mr. Sanders said, she is very
'ambitious', an understatement. If nothing comes out to prove her malice against Mr. Sanders,
I will always be convinced it is there somewhere. Now because of what the Democrats did against
him that was proven and oh by the way 'the Russians did it', we have her running neck and neck
with Trump. They asked for it, they got it.
Why is it that literally all Western democracies have developed totally incapable and immoral
political elites at the same time who seem to be lacking any kind of ethical compass?
It is blatantly obvious in the USA where both candidates are almost equally abysmal, but for
different reasons. But the same is also true in Germany, Great Britain, France and most other
Western countries I can judge on. How did that happen? Where are the politicians who are doing
the job for other reasons than self-fulfillment and ideology?
Trump, Clinton, May, Johnson, Farage, Hollande, Sarkozy, Le Pen, Merkel, Gabriel, Petry ...
and the rest are all product of a political system that is in a deep crisis. And this comes from
someone who has always and will always believe in democracy as such. But how can we finally get
better representatives of our political system again?
What the writer is describing and what the e-mails reveal, is, for anyone with half a brain not
too dumbed down by partisanship; is the structure of a system that isn't democracy at all, but
clearly an oligarchy. The super-rich rule and the rest are occasionaly alowed to vote for a candidate
chosen by the rich, giving the illusion of democracy.
Yup, that about sums it up. Yet in the case the choice is truly awful.
And whilst we are here let's remember that the European Parliament is very democratic. The
US system or the UK System would never allow so many nut jobs from UKIP, FN, Lega Nord and various
other facists have a voice. The EU parliament is very representative.
Good read. Money is like manure and if you spread it around it does a lot of good. But if you
pile it up in one place, like Silicon Valley or the banks, eventually it will smell pretty bad
and attract a lot of flies, like the one that seems attracted to Hillary.
You get some idea of just how batty the US electoral campaign system is when you consider that
John Podesta is the guy who has hinted at 'exposing' the US government 'cover up' of UFOs...and
even got Hillary Clinton making statements about looking into Area 51. Well, that's the vote of
all the multitude of conspiracy loons nicely in the bag -- It only shows just how desperate the
campaigns are.
world history has always provided that the wealthy look after themselves. What's new? Here, both
American candidates are wealthy. But Clinton appears to want to look after others and other will
look at and after her. I'm not sure what Trump can look after, perhaps his business dealings and
bankruptcy triumphs, and lawsuits. Perhaps America is going through a new type of revolution,
generational and the massive entry of the post-industrial age in America. How many Americans are
screaming for the past, while at least one U.S. automakers shifts some of their factories to Mexico
- e.g., Chrysler.
We get the candidates we deserve, in any so-called democracy. The west worships money and glitz
and celebrity, willingly watches "reality" TV, and in general can aspire to nothing better than
material superiority over the neighbours. The U.S., with its pathetic "American Dream," is the
most egregious victim of its own obsessions. Bernie Sanders, who in Canada, Britain, or western
Europe would be considered centrist, is vilified as a raving socialist. Genuinely well-disposed
people with a more humane alternative political vision lack the necessary millions to gain public
attention. And so one is left with Business-as-Usual Hillary Clinton (mendacious elitist one-percenter)
or the duplicitous demagogue Donald Trump (mendacious vulgar one-percenter).
The internet should be a democratic forum for intelligent discussion of alternatives but has
become largely the province of trolls and wingnuts. We should be able to do better.
I'm with MarkusKraut; not because of what the e-mails have discovered - I suspect we all suspected
this kind of machinery from BOTH parties - but because their discovery is entirely one-sided.
What does it prove? That the Republicans are any better? Or that Don is any more qualified to
be president than he was two weeks ago?
No. It proves one thing, and one thing only - that Republicans keep secrets better than
Dems do. At least the important ones.
And I say that as someone who was a security administrator for ten years. And I can guarantee
you one thing (and one thing only): The Russians would NOT have got past any e-mail server that
I built.
My worry is now not who gets elected - this was always a ship of fools - or who's to blame
(although I'm sure we'll be told in the first "hundred days"), but what it means for democracy.
And don't worry, I'm not going to try to equate democracy with Hillary (although I still support
her); but about secrecy .
E-mail has always been the most likely medium to be cracked (the correct term for illegal
hacking), and secrecy is anathema to democracy - always was, and always will be.
And having been caught with their pants down, I'd like to see the Democratic party, win or lose
this election, to say that ALL future e-mails will be a matter of public record. And challenge
the GOP to do the same.
Unfortunately, it'll simply be viewed as a failure of security that any administrator like
me could tell you is almost impossible, and they'll simply buy better servers for 2020.
I've never felt any of the mail to be particularly surprising, but merely a demonstration of what
a NeoLiberal society, run by money, looks like at a more granular level. I won't vote for a Trump,
but living in California I can vote Green without having to pull the lever for a Clinton. If California
goes Trump, then every other state in the nation will have swirled down the drain with him.
In the book 'Who Rules America" written by William Domhoff, first published in 1967, it laid out
how the ruling class sits on each others boards of directors, (which he called 'interlocking directorates",
inhabits certain think tanks and organizations like the Council on Foreign Relations or political
parties, goes to the same clubs, intermarries, and knows one another. I.E. the ruling class is
a coherent group of HUMAN BEINGS. People think they are some abstract, nameless wonder. They are
not. Podesta's e-mails, as Frank rightly notices, show the Democratic Party elite. Another set
will show the Republican Party elite, and how BOTH link to each other.
We are talking about the biggest war mongering outfit on the planet. An election. This ship is
being driven by assholes no one elected...and as per, walk away with money and knighthoods while
the fabric of our society is unravelling. Store water and tinned goods...or good luck on the help
line
Good comment except for the needless hand-wringing about reading "private" e-mails. The freak
show that is the 2016 US general election is yet another clear sign that neo-liberalism is a scam
run for and by bankers, corporate CEOs, kooky tech billionaires, corrupt politicians and other
wealthy and amoral sociopaths.
The media has become their propaganda arm and the divide between what people experience and
see and what the media tells them is happening grows ever wider. Alternative media outlets (although
some of these, such as VICE, are neo-lib shills also) and organisations like WikiLeaks are more
important than ever as they still speak truth to power. Even some dissidents and media 'agitators'
are coming down on the side of the establishment - I am thinking Snowden, Greenwald and Naomi
Klein all of whom have wagged their fingers at Julian Assange for doing a job the media used to
do.
A good rule of thumb that tells you who the establishment worries about is looking at who is
repeatedly denounced in the media. Trump, Assange and Putin currently have the powers that be
worried because they are giving them the proverbial two fingers (or one finger, depending on which
side of the Atlantic you are on) and exposing the rotten framework of lies and corruption that
hold the rickety system together. Media darlings like Snowden present no real threat and are tolerated,
even celebrated.
My analysis is that Trump would not be permitted to win. Why do I say that? Because he has had every
establishment off his side. Trump does not have one establishment, maybe with the exception of the
Evangelicals, if you can call them an establishment," said Assange. "Banks, intelligence, arms companies,
foreign money, etc. are all united behind Hillary Clinton. And the media as well. Media owners, and
the journalists themselves."
He is right, but the same was said about Brexit.
Cognitive Dissonance -> 1980XLS •Nov 4, 2016 8:10 AM
It seems the Shadow Government has decided to go full banana republic.
The sad fact is the vast majority of people simply don't believe this could happen 'here'.
Joe Davola -> two hoots •Nov 4, 2016 9:09 AM
In my opinion, the biggest thing to come out of these emails is the complete manipulation
of the "news". The only thing I can attribute it to is that the media are just another form
of the free-stuff crowd, because it's not as if Hillary offers a shining beacon of ideology. It's
easy to write stories when they're written for you, and it appears that you're really smart because
you "got the scoop".
Sure the Saudi angle is quite damning, but for most that's just too deep and difficult to piece
together - unless the news breaks it down to simple sound bytes (or an emoji). Heck, without Tyler
combing these dumps and lining them up with the overall picture of what was going down at the
time, it would be easy to just get swamped in the sheer volume. Much like the "we've printed out
50,000 emails" wasn't intended to help the investigation, it was intended to bog the process down.
Mike in GA -> I am a Man I am Forty •Nov 4, 2016 8:28 AM
Trump has pushed back on every issue that the establishment has thrown at him. Wikileaks has
helped with their steady drip of revealing emails giving us all a behind-the-scenes look at the
everyday thoughts of our "Leaders". The corruption, collusion and outright criminality thus exposed
could only have been accomplished by Trump - certainly no establishment Uniparty candidate would
so fearlessly take on the daily goring of everyone else's ox.
Now exposed, this corruption and criminality HAS to be addressed and can only be addressed
by an outsider, change-agent president. The opportunity to clean house so substantially does not
present itself often and may never again. If properly executed, the halls of power could largely
be purged of the criminal class so endemic in the wikileaked emails.
This is where it gets pretty hairy for Trump, and for America. These criminals, living large,
very large, on the taxpayer, will not go silently into the night. They will pull out every stop
to stop Trump or at least limit the damage. People will start dying a little faster in DC now.
Can anyone explain why that 55 y/o Major General, about to get the promotion of his lifetime
into the Air Force Missile Command would commit suicide? And why it took 2 months for the AF to
rule it a "suicide"? Rumor says he became privy to domestic EMP contingency plans and was unwilling
to comply.
When assassination becomes a tool of the ruling party, the Party has come to town.
"... The emails currently roiling the US presidential campaign are part of some unknown digital collection amassed by the troublesome
Anthony Weiner, but if your purpose is to understand the clique of people who dominate Washington today, the emails that really matter
are the ones being slowly released by WikiLeaks from the hacked account of Hillary Clinton's campaign chair John Podesta. ..."
The emails currently roiling the US presidential campaign are part of some unknown digital collection amassed by the troublesome
Anthony Weiner, but if your purpose is to understand the clique of people who dominate Washington today, the emails that really matter
are the ones being slowly released by WikiLeaks from the hacked account of Hillary Clinton's campaign chair John Podesta. They
are last week's scandal in a year running over with scandals, but in truth their significance goes far beyond mere scandal: they
are a window into the soul of the Democratic party and into the dreams and thoughts of the class to whom the party answers.
The class to which I refer is not rising in angry protest; they are by and large pretty satisfied, pretty contented. Nobody takes
road trips to exotic West Virginia to see what the members of this class looks like or how they live; on the contrary, they are the
ones for whom such stories are written. This bunch doesn't have to make do with a comb-over TV mountebank for a leader; for this
class, the choices are always pretty good, and this year they happen to be excellent.
They are the comfortable and well-educated mainstay of our modern Democratic party. They are also the grandees of our national
media; the architects of our software; the designers of our streets; the high officials of our banking system; the authors of just
about every plan to fix social security or fine-tune the Middle East with precision droning. They are, they think, not a class at
all but rather the enlightened ones, the people who must be answered to but who need never explain themselves.
"... The Saudis, the Qataris, the Moroccans, the Bahrainis, particularly the first two, are giving all this money to the Clinton Foundation, while Hillary Clinton is secretary of state, and the State Department is approving massive arms sales, particularly Saudi Arabia. ..."
"... this notorious jihadist group, called ISIL or ISIS, is created largely with money from people who are giving money to the Clinton Foundation? ..."
John Pilger: The Saudis, the Qataris, the Moroccans, the Bahrainis,
particularly the first two, are giving all this money to the Clinton Foundation, while
Hillary Clinton is secretary of state, and the State Department is approving massive
arms sales, particularly Saudi Arabia.
Julian Assange: Under Hillary Clinton – and the Clinton emails
reveal a significant discussion of it – the biggest-ever arms deal in the world was made
with Saudi Arabia: more than $80 billion. During her tenure, the total arms exports from
the US doubled in dollar value.
JP: Of course, the consequence of that is that this notorious
jihadist group, called ISIL or ISIS, is created largely with money from people who are
giving money to the Clinton Foundation?
"... 46 percent of likely voters believe the news media is "the primary threat that might try to change the election results." ..."
"... Our news is all manipulation of facts, distortions, ommissions and outright lies. All set to serve an official narrative created by some cabal. ..."
These are some pretty damning results for the mainstream media. Not only does the American public
see the media as a bigger threat to election results than Russian hackers, it's not even close.
Voters fear the media far more than Russian hackers when it comes to tampering with election
results.
According to a
Suffolk
University/USA Today poll , 46 percent of likely voters believe the news media is "the primary
threat that might try to change the election results."
The national political establishment was the second most-suspected group at 21 percent, and
another 13 percent were undecided.
Foreign interests, including "Russian hackers," ranked fourth with 10 percent and "local political
bosses" came in last with 9 percent of likely voters as the main threat to truthful election results.
With all the controversy and scandal on Hillary emerging from Wikileaks and the new FBI investigation
of the Clinton Foundation this is what Fox News was focused on yesterday; the poll numbers and
defending Hillary and slamming Donald J. Trump.
Fuck the crooked MSM and I am officially vowing to become a dedicated RT viewer. Our news is
all manipulation of facts, distortions, ommissions and outright lies. All set to serve an
official narrative created by some cabal. Fuck them all!!!
Just look at this partial list of major Clinton donors below. Fuck Hillary she deserves to
be in jail not running for president!
The list of donors to the Clinton campaign includes many of the most powerful media institutions
in the country - among the donors:
Comcast (which owns NBC, and its cable sister channels, such
as MSNBC);
James Murdoch of News Corporation (owner of Fox News and its sister stations, among
many other media holdings);
Time Warner (CNN, HBO, scores of other channels);
Bloomberg;
Reuters;
Viacom;
Howard Stringer (of CBS News);
AOL (owner of Huffington Post);
Google;
Twitter;
The Washington
Post Company;
George Stephanopoulos (host of ABC News' flagship Sunday show);
Donna Brazile was noticeably uncomfortable for every second of the following 10-minute interview
with Megyn Kelly of Fox News. Kelly pushed hard on the recent Project Veritas undercover videos showing
DNC operatives plotting to incite violence at Trump rallies and commit massive voter fraud and over
Brazile's leaked email showing that she provided a CNN debate question to Hillary ahead of a March
2016 debate with Bernie. Brazile tried every trick in the book to deflect and pivot but Kelly held
her feet to the fire.
Vladimir Putin in particular, and Russia in general, have been the focus of an intensive high-drama
propaganda campaign of late. Are you buying it? For the time being, Russophobia has replaced Islamophobia
as the driving force behind the lies. Various US officials have been frantically warning Americans
that the Russians are behind everything: hacking the DNC, controlling Trump, influencing the election
and breaking the Syrian ceasefire agreement. They might as well add making your girlfriend break
up with you, making your toast get burnt and making your car run out of fuel for all the evidence
they have presented. Many of these totally unfounded allegations stem from (naturally) the Clinton
campaign, home to career criminals
Bill and
Hillary
Clinton , who are desperately seeking to find something to gain some sort of shred of popularity
or advantage over Trump, who fills up arenas with 1000s of people more easily than Clinton can fill
a high school gym with 50. Many US officials and war hawks are trying to get in on the action; CIA
man Mike Morell indicated
it would be a good idea to covertly kill Russians to make them "pay a price" ;
Hillary Clinton called
Vladimir Putin the "grand godfather of extreme nationalism" and blamed him for the rising
popularity of right-wing leaders; and even standing VP
Joe Biden came out and
said that, "We're sending a message to Putin it will be at the time of our choosing and under
the circumstances that have the greatest impact" . It seems there is no depth to which some US
leaders won't stoop in order to gain some political advantage, even it means lying, demonizing and
destroying geopolitical partnerships in order to garner a few brownie points.
Vladimir Putin: It's All About Distraction During Election Season
You would think Russian President Vladimir President would be agitated by all of this mud-slinging.
At times he has been, for instance when he
issued a warning a few months ago about an impending WW3 due to NATO's constant aggression and
advancement towards Russian borders. However, judging by his own words and mostly calm demeanor,
he has seen through the agenda and understands what is going on. Putin spells out how it's all inflamed
rhetoric before an election season, an old trick used by politicians to distract when they have no
meaningful solutions for internal and domestic problems.
"You can expect anything from our American friends the only novelty is that for the first
time, on the highest level, the United States has admitted involvement in these activities, and
to some extent threatened [us] – which of course does not meet the standards of international
communication. As if we didn't know that US Government bodies snoop on and wiretap anyone? Everyone
knows this
Apparently, they are nervous. The question is why. I think there is a reason. You know,
in an election campaign, the current government carefully crafts a pre-election strategy, and
any government, especially when seeking re-election, always has unresolved issues. They need to
show, to explain to the voters why they remain unresolved. In the US, there are many such problems
for example, the massive public debt is a time bomb for the US economy and global financial
system more examples can be cited in foreign policy in these conditions, many choose to resort
to the usual tactics of distracting voters from their problems try to create an enemy and rally
the nation against that enemy
Iran and the Iranian threat did not work well for that. Russia is a more interesting story."
And that's exactly what this whole thing is: a giant story. However, as Voltaire once said, if
you can make someone believe absurdities, you can make them commit atrocities. Let's see what else
Vladimir Putin has to say on other topics of interest.
Russian Hacking: A Laughable Claim so the Clintons and DNC Can Try to Avoid Culpability
Let's face it: the whole Russophobia affair is about avoiding blame, dodging responsibility and
evading liability. Thanks to WikiLeaks, Project Veritas and many other sources, we know the entire
Hillary Clinton campaign has been rigged beyond belief. Fake primaries, fake speeches, fake images,
fake videos, fake crowds, fake supporters and fake debates. There is seemingly no depth of criminality
to which that woman won't sink. She's selling out the presidency before she even gets there, such
as the stunt of trying to promise future presidential executive orders to mega donors. There is not
a shred of evidence that Russia is affiliated with WikiLeaks or behind any of the DNC hacks. As this
Zero Hedge article
NSA Whistleblower: US Intelligence Worker Likely Behind DNC Leaks, Not Russia states:
"On "Judge Napolitano Chambers," the Judge said that while the DNC, government officials,
and the Clinton campaign all accuse the Russians of hacking into the DNC servers, "the Russians
had nothing to do with it." Napolitano then mentioned Binney, arguing the NSA veteran and whistleblower
who "developed the software that the NSA now uses, which allows it to capture not just metadata
but content of every telephone call, text message, email in the United States of every person
in [the country]" knew the NSA had hacked the DNC - not the Russians.
If Judge Napolitano and Binney are right and the NSA did hack the DNC, what was the motive?
According to the Judge, "members of the intelligence community simply do not want [Clinton]
to be president of the United States."
"She doesn't know how to handle state secrets," Napolitano continued. And since "some of
the state secrets that she revealed used the proper true names of American intelligence agents
operating undercover in the Middle East," some of these agents were allegedly captured and killed,
prompting NSA agents to feel compelled to act. Whether NSA agents hacked the DNC or not, one thing
is clear: there's no real evidence linking the DNC and Arizona and Illinois voting system hacks
to the Russian government."
The Mythical "Russian Threat"
Vladimir Putin directly addressed another mythical story, that of the so-called Russian threat
and Russian aggression , at the recent Valdai forum in Sochi from October 24-27, 2016:
"There is another mechanism to ensure the transatlantic security, European security, the
OC security and their attempt at turning this organization (NATO) into an instrument of someone's
political interests. So what the OC is doing is simply void. Mythical threats are devised like
the so-called Russian military threat. Certainly this can be (used to) gain some advantage, get
new budgets, make your allies comply with your demands, make NATO deploy the equipment and troops
closer to our border Russia is not trying to attack anyone. That would be ridiculous The population
of Europe is 300 million and the population of the US is 300 million, while the population of
Russia is 140 million, yet such menaces are served as a pretext. Hysteria has been fueled in the
US with regard to Russia's alleged influence with the current presidential election.
Is there anyone who seriously thinks that Russia can influence the choice of the American
people? Is the US a banana republic? The US is a great power. If I'm wrong please correct me."
Here's what he had to say about who the real aggressor is when it comes to the US (around and
Russia:
"Is it known to you that Russia, in the 90s, completely halted (as did the USSR) any strategic
aviation in the further afield regions of patrol, i.e. not in the closer abroad. We halted such
activity completely. US geostrategic aviation however, with nuclear weapons on board. They continued
to encircle us! What for? Who are you concerned about? Or why are you threatening us? We continued
with the non-patrol year after year. It is only since about 3 years ago that we restarted aviation
patrol further abroad.
Which party is the provocateur here? Is it us?
We have only 2 military bases abroad. They are known areas of terrorism dangers US bases
on the other hand are all over the world. And you are telling me that I am the aggressor? Have
you any common sense?
What are US forces doing in Europe, including nuclear weaponry? What business have they
got there? Listen to me. Our military budget, while increased slightly from last year, in the
dollar equivalent, is about US$50 billion. The military budget of the Pentagon is almost 10 times
that amount. $575 billion, I think Congress singed off on. And you're telling me I'm the aggressor
here? Have you no common sense at all? Is it us putting our forces on the border of the US? Or
other states? Is it NATo, or who, that is moving their bases closer to us? Military infrastructure!
It's not us. Does anyone even listen to us? Or try to have some kind of dialogue with us? The
repeated answer we get is 'mind your own business' and 'each country can choose its own security
measures'. Very well, so will we
And finally, on the antiballistic missile defense system, who was it that exited from the
treaty which was vital to the entire system of international security? Was it us? No. It was the
States. In a one-sided way, they simply withdrew from the treaty. Now they are threatening us,
turning their missiles towards us, not only from Alaska, but also from Europe too
We want to develop normal relations in the sphere of security, in the fight against terrorism,
in the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons. We want to work together with you so long as you
want that too."
US Repeatedly Broke Its Promises to Russia and Destroyed Trust
The Western MSM is so one-sided in its coverage of geopolitical events like Ukraine and Syria.
Anyone not toeing the line with US-UK-NATO interests is painted in a bad light. In point of fact,
it has actually been the US who has been breaking agreements with Russia since the end of the Cold
War. US leaders lied to Russian leaders at the time, by promising that NATO would not extend any
further eastward, and possibly even hinting that Russia could join NATO. As Eric Zuesse explains
in his article
America Trashes NATO Founding Act; Rushes Weapons to Russia's Borders :
"The NATO
Founding
Act was agreed to between the US and Russia in 1997 in order to provide to Russia's leader
Boris Yeltsin some modicum of assurance that America wouldn't invade his country. When his predecessor
Mikhail Gorbachev had ended the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact military alliance in 1991, the
representatives of US President GHW Bush told him that NATO wouldn't move "one inch to the east"
(toward Russia), but as soon as Gorbachev committed himself to end the Cold War, Bush
told his agents, regarding what they had all promised to Gorbachev (Bush's promise which had
been conveyed through them), "To hell with that! We prevailed, they didn't". In other words: Bush's
prior instructions to them were merely his lies to Gorbachev, his lies to say that the US wouldn't
try to conquer Russia (move its forces eastward to Russia's borders); but, now, since Gorbachev
was committed and had already agreed that East Germany was to be reunited with and an extension
of West Germany (and the process for doing that had begun), Bush pulled that rug of lies out from
under the end of the Cold War "
Bill Clinton carried on the great American legacy of exceptionalism (that is, excepting themselves
from obeying international law) spearheaded by Daddy Bush of surrounding and dominating Russia by
allowing NATO into the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. Russia got shafted by trusting the US
numerous times after the fall of the Soviet Union. Here's Vladimir Putin once again on America's
broken promises (in April
2016):
"In the early 2000s, we agreed with the Americans to destroy weapons-grade plutonium, on
both sides. We were talking about the excessive amounts that were manufactured by both the US
and Russia. This is the enriched uranium from which nuclear weapons are made. 34000 tonnes, from
both sides. We signed an agreement, and decided that this material would be destroyed in a specific
manner. It would be destroyed in an industrial way – for which special plants needed to be built.
We fulfilled our obligations – we built the necessary plant. Our American partners did not. Moreover,
recently they announced that rather than destroy the enriched material in the manner that we agreed,
and signed an international agreement on, that they would dilute it and store it in a holding
capacity. This means they retain the potential to bring it back
Surely our American partners must understand that, jokes are one thing, such as creating
smear campaigns against Russia, but questions of nuclear security are another thing entirely they
must learn to fulfill their promises.
They once said they would close down Guantanamo. And? Is it closed? No."
Incidentally, this is the exact same plutonium agreement which made the news last month, when
as reported on October 3rd, 216,
Russia suspended
their deal with the US on disposal of plutonium from decommissioned nuclear warheads. A decree
signed by Vladimir Putin lists " the radical change in the environment, a threat to strategic
stability posed by the hostile actions of the US against Russia, and the inability of the US to deliver
on the obligation to dispose of excessive weapons plutonium under international treaties, as well
as the need to take swift action to defend Russian security" as the reasons for why Russia chose
to suspend the deal.
Conclusion: Wake up and Smell the Russophobia
Expect Vladimir Putin and Russia to keep being demonized by the Clintons – and more importantly
the NWO manipulators who so desperately want them in power. Although the Clintons are a powerful
modern American mafia family, replete with a long body count behind them, it's important to remember
they are lackeys for far greater and more pervasive powers (check out some of
Hillary's lovey-dovey letters to Lynn Forester de Rothschild here ). There's a lot at stake here.
Right now, Vladimir Putin and Russia are being used with the sole purpose of getting Clinton elected.
Although Putin is not perfect and has his own dark side, he deserves respect for standing his ground
and refusing to become another US puppet. If we are to believe his own words, he has no qualm with
Americans or even America itself, but rather the selfish, imperialistic and murderous agenda of the
NWO agents running the USA:
"We have a great deal of respect and love for the United States, and especially for the
American people [however] the expansion of jurisdiction by one nation beyond the territory of
its borders, to the rest of the world, is unacceptable and destructive for international relations."
It's up to the American public to switch off CNN (Clinton News Network) and all the other duplicitous
MSM channels and get truly informed. Vladimir Putin is reaching out his hand to America, in the hope
that enough Americans can reclaim their country and work together with other nations in peace. On
the issue of Vladimir Putin and Russia, the MSM is not just one-sided, it's outright lying.
Presenting...the Clinton IT Department! This has not been an especially ennobling election.
Or a rewarding one. Or even entertaining. Pretty much everything about 2016 has been boorish and
grotesque. But finally it is time to laugh.
This has not been an especially ennobling election. Or a rewarding one. Or even entertaining.
Pretty much everything about 2016 has been boorish and grotesque. But finally it is time to laugh.
Ladies and gentlemen, I present the Clinton IT department.
Over the weekend we finally found out how Clinton campaign honcho John Podesta's emails were hacked.
But first a couple disclaimers:
1) Yes, it's unpleasant to munch on the fruit of the poisoned tree. But this isn't a court of
law and you can't just ignore information that's dragged into the public domain.
2) We're all vulnerable to hackers. Even if you're a security nut who uses VPNs and special email
encryption protocols, you can be hacked. The only real security is the anonymity of the herd. Once
a hacker targets you, specifically, you're toast.
I'm a pretty tech-savvy guy and if the Chinese decided to hack my emails tonight, you'd have everything
I've ever written posted to Wikileaks before the sun was up tomorrow.
But that is … not John Podesta's situation.
What happened was this: On March 19, Podesta got what looked--kind of, sort of--like an email
from Google's Gmail team. The email claimed that someone from the Ukraine had tried to hack into
Podesta's Gmail account and that he needed to change his password immediately.
This is what's called a "phishing" scam, where hackers send legitimate-looking emails that, when
you click on the links inside them, actually take you someplace dangerous. In Podesta's case, there
was a link that the email told him to click in order to change his password.
This was not an especially good bit of phishing.
Go have a look yourself. The email calls Podesta by his first name. It uses bit.ly as a link
shortener. Heck, the subject line is the preposterous "*someone has your password*". Why would Google
say "someone has your password?" They wouldn't. They'd say that there had been log-in attempts that
failed two-step authentication, maybe. Or that the account had been compromised, perhaps. If you've
spent any time using email over the last decade, you know exactly how these account security emails
are worded.
And what's more, you know that you never click on the link in the email. If you get a notice from
your email provider or your bank or anyone who holds sensitive information of yours saying that your
account has been compromised, you leave the email, open your web browser, type in the URL of the
website, and then manually open your account information. Again, let me emphasize: You never click
on the link in the email!
But what makes this story so priceless isn't that John Podesta got fooled by an fourth-rate phishing
scam. After all, he's just the guy who's going to be running Hillary Clinton's administration. What
does he know about tech? And Podesta, to his credit, knew what he didn't know: He emailed the Clinton
IT help desk and said, Hey, is this email legit?
And the Clinton tech team's response was: Hell yes!
No, really. Here's what they said: One member of the team responded to Podesta by saying "The
gmail one is REAL." Another answered by saying "This is a legitimate email. John needs to change
his password immediately."
It's like the Clinton IT department is run by 90-year-old grandmothers. I half-expect the next
Wikileaks dump to have an email from one Clinton techie to another asking for help setting their
VCR clock.
As the other guy likes to say, "only the best people."
Further to throwing Comey under the bus yesterday, Obama had this to say:
"I trust her," Obama said. "I know her. And I wouldn't be supporting her if I didn't have absolute
confidence in her integrity."
No amount of Bleach-bit can remove that yellow streak running down his back and straight through
the entirety of his 'legacy'. Not once did he come down on the side opposite entrenched power
– in fact, we can now add major 'obstruction of justice' to his prior litany of failures to prosecute
white collar criminals as the basis for its own section, splitting criminal activity into two
parts, one domestic, the other for a raft of war crimes.
Great interview. Very worthwhile to listen in full...
Notable quotes:
"... you're in the age of globalism, where a select few uber rich control everything and no one can do anything about it. ..."
"... She is every bit as banal and myopic as tRump. It is not about merit----it is about surrogates and political clans supported by gangster capitalists. ..."
Michael Hudson just sits there and details the exact situation and the real truth, as he
has been doing for a long time now. Remember this video in six months.
HarryObrian > NilbogResident
No, you're in the age of globalism, where a select few uber rich control everything and
no one can do anything about it. Everyone was warned about this over 30 years ago but
there wasn't enough exposure to the facts for enough people to care or do anything about it.
Now that the facts and reality have hit you have all these lazy alarmists like Hudson who prey
on the fear of a few who really can't do anything about it but who haven't realized it yet. Oh
well, whine on.
sufferingsuccatash > NilbogResident
Hillary is not a qualified leader either. She is every bit as banal and myopic as tRump.
It is not about merit----it is about surrogates and political clans supported by gangster
capitalists.
0040 • a day ago
Another great video from Mr Hudson. Von Clausewitz's axiom that "War is politics by other
means" has never been made clearer.
NormDP
Hudson is right on. Trump is the lesser of two evils. Under Trump, checks and balances will
remain strong and active. Under Hillary, they will disappear.
Glen Ford says Hillary Grand Bargain on the way (should she win).
But in the interim, Clinton will have a unique opportunity to cut grand austerity deals with all
the "big elements" of Simpson-Bowles, to renege on her corporate trade promises, and to wage war
with great gusto in the name of a "united" country. Ever since the Democratic National Convention
it has been clear that the Clintonites are encouraged to consider everyone outside of their grand
circle to be suspect, subversive, or depraved. Their inclusive rhetoric is really an invocation of
a ruling class consensus, now that Trump has supposedly brought the ruling class together under one
banner. In Hillary's tent, the boardrooms are always in session.
And yes, about the only thing "liberal" about Clinton involves identity politics. But if she is
elected, all of her supporters who used identity politics based attacks to smear Bernie Sanders
and his supporters (along with a good dose of that against Trump also) are going to be in for
a very rude awakening.
How easily in particular the gay and black communities forget the administration
of Bill Clinton and what he and Hillary did.
Just as a start, Clinton ignored the identity crowd by picking somebody for VP that the identity
crowd spent the previous year smearing the Sanders campaign over: Kaine is your prototypical straight
privileged white male who has failed upwards.
And not a peep from the identity crowd especially
black leaders who more than any other group put Clinton over the top (forgetting the cheating
for a moment). One of the early Wikileak revelations was a memo to Congressional candidates how
to marginalize BLM if they were ever confronted.
If BLM acts up and damages her politically, a President Hillary will smash the leaders and
movement in the same Obama violently smashed OWS
.
She will honor her "feminist" supporters by
appointing the most violent and virulent warmongering women into positions of power so they too
can like the men can decide which black and brown women and children to bomb.
She will stab in
the back such early supporters as SEIU by refusing to support min. wage increases. And women are
disproportionately the base of min. wage workers. She supports Simpson-Bowles as revealed by Wikileaks
and the Cat Food Commission recommended cutting social security. Guess which groups that will
really hurt? Maybe the next groveling task for John Lewis will be to attack people who are against
Hillary cutting social security.
And the hits just keep on comin' with the Abedin email stash:
"These emails, CBS News' Andres Triay reports, are not duplicates of emails found on Secretary
Clinton's private server. At this point, however, it remains to be seen whether these emails are
significant to the FBI's investigation into Clinton."
Two sources with intimate knowledge of the FBI's investigations told
Fox News Wednesday that a probe of the Clinton Foundation is likely to lead to an indictment.
Fox News's Bret Baier said Wednesday that the FBI probe into a possible pay-to-play scheme between
Democratic presidential nominee and the Clinton Foundation
has been going on for over a year. Sources told the news network that the investigation, which is
conducted by the White Collar Crime division of the FBI, is a "very high priority."
One source further
stated that the bureau collected "a lot of" evidence, adding that "there is an avalanche of new information
coming every day." Baier also said that the Clinton Foundation probe is more expansive than previously
thought, and that many individuals have been interviewed several times throughout the course of the
investigation. Sources said that they are "actively and aggressively pursuing this case" and that
investigations are likely to continue. Baier added that when he pressed the sources about the details
of both probes, they told him that they are likely to lead to an indictment. Additionally, Baier
reported that according to Fox News's sources, Clinton's private email server had been breached by
at least five foreign intelligence hackers. FBI Director James Comey said in July that he could not
say definitively whether her server had been breached.
"... If elected Hillary would have as much contempt for the electorate as she had for her staff. ..."
"... In an e-mail sent from Comcast after Clinton was interviewed by NBC's Matt Lauer, Lauer came under fire after questioning Hillary on the e-mails, according to the technical crew after the show Hillary proceeded to pick up a full glass of water and throw it at the face of her assistant and then the screaming started, she was in full meltdown, she came apart literally unglued, she is the most foul mouthed woman I've ever heard, and that voice at screech level…"If that f-ing bastard wins we all hang from nooses! Lauer's finished and if I lose its all on your heads for screwing this up". She screamed "she'd get that f-ing Lauer fired for this". ..."
"... Donna Brazile was singled out by Clinton.."I'm so sick of your face, you stare at the wall like a brain dead buffalo while letting that fucking Lauer get away with this. What are you good for really? Get the f–k to work janitoring this mess.. do I make myself clear". ..."
If elected Hillary would have as much contempt for the electorate as she had for her staff.
In
an e-mail sent from Comcast after Clinton was interviewed by NBC's Matt Lauer, Lauer came under
fire after questioning Hillary on the e-mails, according to the technical crew after the show
Hillary proceeded to pick up a full glass of water and throw it at the face of her assistant and
then the screaming started, she was in full meltdown, she came apart literally unglued, she is
the most foul mouthed woman I've ever heard, and that voice at screech level…"If that f-ing bastard
wins we all hang from nooses! Lauer's finished and if I lose its all on your heads for screwing
this up". She screamed "she'd get that f-ing Lauer fired for this".
Donna Brazile was singled out by Clinton.."I'm so sick of your face, you stare at the wall like
a brain dead buffalo while letting that fucking Lauer get away with this. What are you good for
really? Get the f–k to work janitoring this mess.. do I make myself clear". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NfFAaPZqs8
"... The outcome of the election remains in doubt despite one candidate's collapsing support. There are a number here who have been making similar arguments about the inefficacy of left-right labels. ..."
"... The prospect of a gutting of the Democratic party seems far more likely to me, if Brent Baier is to be believed, and that is a big 'if,' I concede. We should see the donor class candidate triumph as we normally do. ..."
"... The constituency that supports Trump is utterly indifferent to the Frums of the world, and even the Limbaughs. They are pissed-off, non-ideological, and highly-motivated. ..."
"... electoral politics in this country has come to such a pass but the Left (or what passes for it in the US) is as much to blame as the Right in that they haven't offered real substantive alternatives to the NeoLib/NeoCon orthodoxy that seems to dominate US policymaking. ..."
Corey does deserve credit for all the reasons jh notes. The outcome of the election
remains in doubt despite one candidate's collapsing support. There are a number here who have
been making similar arguments about the inefficacy of left-right labels.
... ... ...
The prospect of a gutting of the Democratic party seems far more likely to me, if Brent
Baier is to be believed, and that is a big 'if,' I concede. We should see the donor class
candidate triumph as we normally do. My basic read has not changed, however. The
constituency that supports Trump is utterly indifferent to the Frums of the world, and even
the Limbaughs. They are pissed-off, non-ideological, and highly-motivated.
Frum still hasn't figured out that he's just as likely to find himself the target of their
hostility as any Dem. And right now Trump supporters outnumber the Frums of the world by far
from inconsequential numbers.
I still say Trump edges it.
DMC 11.03.16 at 7:27 pm
There's just too many people in this country for whom "more of the same and harder" is a
deal breaker. They'll go with the guy who tells them "one more throw of the dice" and who
apparently scares the snot out of the Establishment types.
The ruder he is, the more they like it. The more the "grown-ups" say this is going to be
bad for the country, the better it sounds to people picking up cans off the road to make ends
meet. Its utterly hateful that electoral politics in this country has come to such a pass
but the Left (or what passes for it in the US) is as much to blame as the Right in that they
haven't offered real substantive alternatives to the NeoLib/NeoCon orthodoxy that seems to
dominate US policymaking.
It's looking increasingly like there is an ongoing mutiny underway within the FBI as the
Wall Street Journal is reporting that, according to "officials at multiple agencies", FBI agents
felt they had adequate evidence, including "secret recordings of a suspect talking about the Clinton
Foundation" , to pursue an investigation of the Clinton Foundation but were repeatedly obstructed
by officials at the Department of Justice.
Secret recordings of a suspect talking about the Clinton Foundation fueled an internal battle
between FBI agents who wanted to pursue the case and corruption prosecutors who viewed the statements
as worthless hearsay, people familiar with the matter said.
The roots of the dispute lie in a disagreement over the strength of the case, these people
said, which broadly centered on whether Clinton Foundation contributors received favorable treatment
from the State Department under Hillary Clinton.
Senior officials in the Justice Department and the FBI didn't think much of the evidence, while
investigators believed they had promising leads their bosses wouldn't let them pursue , they said.
Despite clear signals from the Justice Department to abandon the Clinton Foundation inquiries,
many FBI agents refused to stand down. Then, earlier this year in February 2016, the FBI presented
initial evidence at a meeting with Leslie Caldwell, the head of the DOJ's criminal division, after
which agents were delivered a clear message that "we're done here." But, as the WSJ points out, DOJ
became increasing frustrated with FBI agents that were " disregarding or disobeying their instructions"
which subsequently prompted an emphatic "stand down" message from the DOJ to "all the offices involved."
As 2015 came to a close, the FBI and Justice Department had a general understanding that neither
side would take major action on Clinton Foundation matters without meeting and discussing it first.
In February, a meeting was held in Washington among FBI officials, public-integrity prosecutors
and Leslie Caldwell, the head of the Justice Department's criminal division. Prosecutors from
the Eastern District of New York-Mr. Capers' office-didn't attend, these people said.
The public-integrity prosecutors weren't impressed with the FBI presentation, people familiar
with the discussion said. "The message was, 'We're done here,' " a person familiar with the matter
said.
Justice Department officials became increasingly frustrated that the agents seemed to be disregarding
or disobeying their instructions.
Following the February meeting, officials at Justice Department headquarters sent a message
to all the offices involved to " stand down ,'' a person familiar with the matter said.
The FBI had secretly recorded conversations of a suspect in a public-corruption case talking
about alleged deals the Clintons made , these people said. The agents listening to the recordings
couldn't tell from the conversations if what the suspect was describing was accurate, but it was,
they thought, worth checking out.
Obama can GTFO. He created this situation by allowing Loretta Lynch to be compromised, as well
as himself. The BFBI was left with little choice but to go public in a legal way via FOIA requests,
something that the corrupt DoJ can't stop. Jason Chaffetz has now formally asked another member
of the corrupt Government to recuse himself, as he too is compromised and was tipping off the
Clintons. We have yet to find out just how far these rabbit holes go, but the Illuminati appear
to be worried - $150M is a lot to explain away...
BillFromBoston 10h ago
Obama criticizes the FBI today...but didn't have a single bloody word to say when BillyBob
(that's Bill Clinton to you Brits) happened to bump into the nation's Attorney General several
days before she declared Hillary to be a candidate for sainthood.
But that's understandable...after all, all they talked about was grandchildren and golf.Just
ask them,they'll tell you!
curiouschak 10h ago
Idiot democrat primary voters. They actually ended up selecting such a toxic, defensive,
shifty corrupt candidate that she may up handing the election to an orange turd with a dead
raccoon on its head.
They couldn't do the right and smart thing and elect Sanders. He would have wiped the floor
with this tangerine blowhard
Chuckman 10h ago
You are pathetic, Obama, absolutely pathetic. Who ever heard of the chief magistrate criticizing
law enforcement during an investigation about which he indeed knows very little.
Or, maybe that should be, pretends to know very little. There are suggestions that some
material could be dangerous to Obama.
His previous testimony that he knew nothing about illegal, insecure computers being used
at State appears contradicted by the fact we now know from Wiki-Leaks material he had a pseudonym
and had e-mails back and forth from Hills and Company.
In an
interview with House magazine, Lord Richards of Herstmonceux – the former Chief of the Defence
staff – said Mr. Trump is "wise enough to get good people round him and probably knows that he's
got to listen to them and therefore I think we should not automatically think it will be less safe".
He added: "It's non-state actors like Isis that are the biggest threat to our security. If
countries and states could coalesce better to deal with these people – and I think Trump's instinct
is to go down that route – then I think there's the case for saying that the world certainly won't
be any less safe.
"It's that lack of understanding and empathy with each other as big power players that is a
risk to us all at the moment.
"Therefore I think he would reinvigorate big power relationships, which might make the world
ironically safer."
During the interview Lord Richards also discussed the somewhat controversial view that the
West should partner with Russia and Bashar al-Assad to take back the Syrian city of Aleppo.
He said: "If the humanitarian situation in Syria is our major concern, which it should be –
millions of lives have been ruined, hundreds of thousands have been killed – I believe there is
a strong case for allowing Assad to get in there and take the city back.
"The opposition groups – many of whom are not friends of ours, they're extremists – are now
intermingled with the original good opposition groups, are fighting from amongst the people. The
only quick way of solving it is to allow Assad to win. There's no way the opposition groups are
going to win."
Lord Richards added: "We want the humanitarian horror of Aleppo to come to a rapid halt. The
best and quickest way of doing that is to encourage the opposition groups to leave. The Russians
are undoubtedly using their weapons indiscriminately. If they're going to attack those groups
then there is inevitably going to be civilian casualties.
"The alternative is for the West to declare a no-fly zone and that means you've got to be prepared
to go to war with Russia ultimately. I see no appetite for that and nor, frankly, do I see much
sense in it. It sticks in my throat to say it because I have no love for Assad.
"The fact is, the only way to get it to stop now is to allow Assad to win and win quickly and
then turn on Isis with the Russians."
Fox News Channel's Bret Baier reports the latest news about the Clinton Foundation
investigation from two sources inside the FBI. He reveals five important new pieces of
information in these two short clips:
"... Holding on to the White House in 2016 is extremely important. We can't afford to let party elites jeopardize that by ignoring the will of the voters. Join me and DFA in telling superdelegates to pledge to support the popularly-elected winner of the nomination now. ..."
"... If Trump wins, all the Democratic party elites should be given their pink slips and never allowed to run the DNC again ..."
Recall this warning to the Democratic Party after Bernie Sander's landslide win in New Hampshire?
Shockingly, all the superdelegates went over to Hillary Clinton:
Holding on to the White House in 2016 is extremely important. We can't afford to let party
elites jeopardize that by ignoring the will of the voters. Join me and DFA in telling superdelegates
to pledge to support the popularly-elected winner of the nomination now.
If Trump wins, all the Democratic party elites should be given their pink slips and never allowed
to run the DNC again.
Donna Brazile was noticeably uncomfortable for every second of the following 10-minute interview
with Megyn Kelly of Fox News. Kelly pushed hard on the recent Project Veritas undercover videos showing
DNC operatives plotting to incite violence at Trump rallies and commit massive voter fraud and over
Brazile's leaked email showing that she provided a CNN debate question to Hillary ahead of a March
2016 debate with Bernie. Brazile tried every trick in the book to deflect and pivot but Kelly held
her feet to the fire.
By virtually every measurement, the United States is in deep crisis, as both a society and as the
headquarters of global capitalism. We can roughly measure the severity of some aspects of the crisis
with the tools of economic analysis. Such an analysis is quite useful in explaining why Washington
is so eager to risk war with Russia and China, whether in Syria or the South China Sea or along the
ever expanding borders of NATO. To put it simply, the U.S. and western Europe become smaller, in
terms of their economic influence, with every passing day, and cannot possibly maintain their political
dominance in the world except by military force, coercion and terror. Those are the only cards the
imperialists have left to play. The ruling circles in the U.S. are aware that time is not on their
side, and it makes them crazy -- or crazier than usual.
The ruling class's own analysts tell them that the center of the world economy is moving inexorably
to the East and the South; that this trend will continue for the foreseeable future; and that the
U.S. is already number two by some economic measures -- and dropping. The Lords of Capital know there
is no future for them in a world where the dollar is not supreme and where Wall Street's stocks,
bonds and derivatives are not backed by the full weight of unchallenged empire. Put another way,
U.S. imperialism is at an inflection point, with all the indicators pointing downward and no hope
of reversing the trend by peaceful means.
Now, that's actually not such a bad prognosis for the United States, as a country. The U.S. is
a big country, with an abundance of human and natural resources, and would do just fine in a world
among equals. But, the fate of the Lords of Capital is tied to the ongoing existence of empire. They
create nothing, but seek to monetize and turn a profit on everything. They cannot succeed in trade
unless it is rigged, and have placed bets in their casinos that are nominally seven times more valuable
than the total economic activity of planet Earth. In short, the Lords of Capital are creatures of
U.S. imperial dominance; they go out of business when the empire does.
Beat the Clock
The rulers are looking class death in the face -- and it terrifies them. And when the Lords of
Capital become frightened, they order their servants in politics and the war industries and the vast
national security networks to take care of the problem, by any means necessary. That means militarily
encircling Russia and China; arming and mobilizing tens of thousands of jihadist terrorists in Syria,
in an attempt to repeat the regime change in Libya; waging a war of economic sanctions and low-level
armed aggression against Iran; occupying most of the African continent through subversion of African
militaries; escalating subversion in Latin America; and spying on everyone on earth with a digital
connection. All this, to stop the clock that is ticking on U.S. and European world economic dominance.
Left political analysts that I greatly respect argue that Hillary Clinton and the mob she will
come in with in January will pull back from apocalyptic confrontation with Russia in Syria -- that
they're not really that crazy. But, I'm not at all convinced. The ruling class isn't just imagining
that their days are numbered; it's really true. And rulers do get crazy when their class is standing
at death's door.
For Black Agenda Radio, I'm Glen Ford. On the web, go to BlackAgendaReport.com.
"... When Hillary was Secretary of State, she convinced Obama to authorize a covert operation in Libya (which included sending in special forces and arming terrorist groups) in preparation for a US/Nato aeronaval attack. ..."
"... Clinton's emails that subsequently came to light, prove what the real motive for war might be: blocking Gaddafi's plan to harness Libya's sovereign funds to establish independent financial organizations, located within the African Union and an African currency that could serve as an alternative to the dollar and the CFA franc. ..."
"... Immediately after razing the State of Libya, the US and Nato brought in the Gulf Monarchies and set about a covert operation to destroy the State of Syria by infiltrating it with special forces and terrorist groups that gave birth to Isis. ..."
"... "the best way to help Israel is to help the rebellion in Syria that has now lasted for more than a year" (i.e. from 2011). How? By mounting the case that the use of force is a sina qua non to make Basshar Assad fold, so as to endanger his life and that of his family". ..."
"... "wrecking Assad would not only be a huge advantage for the security of the State of Israel, but would also go a long way to reducing Israel's justifiable fear that it will lose its nuclear monopoly". ..."
From time to time, it is in the interests of the Western media and political establishment to
do a bit of "political cleansing".
Thus the West pulls out some skeleton from the closet. A British Parliamentary Committee has criticized
David Cameron for authorizing the use of force in Libya when he was Prime Minister in 2011. However
the basis for criticism was not the war of aggression per se (even though it erased from the map
a sovereign state) but rather the fact that war was entered into without an adequate "intelligence"
foundation and also because there was no plan for "reconstruction" [
1 ].
The same mistake was made by President Obama: thus he declared last April that Libya was his "biggest
regret", not because he used US-led Nato forces to reduce it to smithereens but because he had failed
to plan for "the day after". At the same time, Obama has confirmed his support for Hillary Clinton
who is now running for president. When Hillary was Secretary of State, she convinced Obama to authorize
a covert operation in Libya (which included sending in special forces and arming terrorist groups)
in preparation for a US/Nato aeronaval attack.
Clinton's emails that subsequently came to light, prove what the real motive for war might be:
blocking Gaddafi's plan to harness Libya's sovereign funds to establish independent financial organizations,
located within the African Union and an African currency that could serve as an alternative to the
dollar and the CFA franc.
Immediately after razing the State of Libya, the US and Nato brought in the Gulf Monarchies and
set about a covert operation to destroy the State of Syria by infiltrating it with special forces
and terrorist groups that gave birth to Isis.
An e mail from Clinton, one of the many the Department of State was compelled to de-classify following
the uproar triggered by the disclosures on Wikileaks, proves what one of the key objectives of the
operation still underway. In an e mail dated 31 December 2012, declassified as "case no: F – 2014
– 20439, Doc No. CO5794998", Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, wrote [
2 ]:
"It is Iran's strategic relationship with the Bashar Assad regime that allows Iran to threaten Israel's
security – not through a direct attack but through its allies in Lebanon such as the Hezbollah."
She then emphasizes that:
"the best way to help Israel is to help the rebellion in Syria that has now lasted for more than
a year" (i.e. from 2011). How? By mounting the case that the use of force is a sina qua non to make
Basshar Assad fold, so as to endanger his life and that of his family".
And Clinton concludes:
"wrecking Assad would not only be a huge advantage for the security of the State of Israel, but would
also go a long way to reducing Israel's justifiable fear that it will lose its nuclear monopoly".
So, the former Secretary of State admits what officially is not said. That Israel is the only
country in the Middle East to possess nuclear weapons [
3 ].
The support given by the Obama Administration to Israel over and above some disagreements (more
formal than substantive) is confirmed by the agreement signed on 14 September at Washington under
which the United States agrees to supply Israel over a ten year period with weapons of the latest
design for a value of 38 billion dollars through an annual financing of 3.3 billion dollars plus
half a million for "missile defense".
In the meantime, after the Russian intervention scuppered the plan to engage in war to demolish
Syria from within, the US obtains a "truce" (which it immediately violated), launching at the same
time a fresh attack in Libya, in the sheepskin of humanitarian operations that Italy participates
in with its "para-medics".
Meanwhile Israel, lurking in the background, strengthens its nuclear monopoly so precious to Clinton.
Senior FBI officials were informed about the discovery of new emails potentially relevant to the
investigation of Hillary Clinton's private email server at least two weeks before Director James
B. Comey notified Congress, according to federal officials familiar with the investigation.
The officials said that Comey was told that there were new emails before he received a formal
briefing last Thursday, although the precise timing is unclear.
The information goes beyond the details provided in the letter that Comey sent to lawmakers last
week declaring that he was restarting the inquiry into whether Clinton mishandled classified material
during her tenure as secretary of state. He wrote in the Friday letter that "the investigative team
briefed me yesterday" about the additional emails.
The people familiar with the investigation said that senior officials had been informed weeks
earlier that a computer belonging to former congressman Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) contained emails
potentially pertinent to the Clinton investigation. Clinton's top aide, Huma Abedin, shared the computer
with her husband, from whom she is now separated.
"... The Presidency is the Clinton's last chance to protect their empire. ..."
"... People are theorizing that the Clinton emails were in a folder marked life insurance because Uma feared for her life and thought that the folder would protect from being murdered. Good thinking Uma! ..."
"... You know, Huma looks so totally clueless about everything mechanical or technical that I might actually believe it if she were to nailgun herself to death. Same for Hillary, for that matter. ..."
Changing subject lines of classified e-mails days before attorneys delete e-mails of personal
nature by...subject line contents!?!?! Intent motherfuckers.
Holy crap.....they are both changing this email to be personal so it can be deleted and not
turned over! This is obstruction of justice!
Podesta replies, changes the subject line, and adds personal comments a month later because
that is when the lawyers were sorting through the emails to determine which ones were personal.
Hillary replied too!
· "They do not plan to release anything publicly, so no posting online or anything public-facing,
just to the committee."
· "That of course includes the emails Sid turned over that HRC didn't, which will make clear
to them that she didn't have them in the first place, deleted them, or didn't turn them over.
It also includes emails that HRC had that Sid didn't."
· "Think we should hold emails to and from potus? That's the heart of his exec privilege. We
could get them to ask for that. They may not care, but I seems like they will."
· "We brought up the existence of emails in reserach this summer but were told that everything
was taken care of."
· "That of course includes the emails Sid turned over that HRC didn't, which will make clear
to them that she didn't have them in the first place, deleted them, or didn't turn them over."
· The State Department was:
o (1) Coordinating with the Clinton political campaign.
o (2) Colluding with the press to spin it positively.
o (3) Doing so BEFORE they released it to AN EQUAL BRANCH OF GOVERNMENT. The Clinton campaign
was always a step ahead of the committee investigating them. Shameful.
· Nick states "Just spoke to State" He goes on to reveal that State colluded with him about
which emails are being revealed to committee and that the State plans to plant a story with AP.
· Shows intent to withhold emails from the subpoena.
People are theorizing that the Clinton emails were in a folder marked life insurance because Uma
feared for her life and thought that the folder would protect from being murdered. Good thinking
Uma!
You know, Huma looks so totally clueless about everything mechanical or technical that I might
actually believe it if she were to nailgun herself to death. Same for Hillary, for that matter.
"... Now being reported that the Cheryl Millls laptop, thought to have been destroyed as part of her immunity deal, is actually intact and being reviewed by the FBI. Ruh Roh. Not sure if it will contain emails related to yoga classes or national security ..."
Now being reported that the Cheryl Millls laptop, thought to have been destroyed as part of
her immunity deal, is actually intact and being reviewed by the FBI. Ruh Roh. Not sure if it will
contain emails related to yoga classes or national security
Rouvas -> stratplaya 45m ago
Why does she get immunity anyway? Usually you give someone immunity in return for getting
them to blab on someone...
Oh yes, silly me, it's the Clinton's we are talking about... different rules apply
Today's release follows dramatic revelations in which we learned that the DOJ's Peter Kadzik had
colluded with John Podesta in the early days of the Clinton campaign, while in a serpate email we
found more evidence of collusion between the Clinton campaign, the NYT and the State Department in
drafting the "breaking" story that exposed Hillary's possession of a home email server.
"... In the latest update from Fox's Bret Baier , we learn that the Clinton Foundation investigation has now taken a "very high priority," perhaps courtesy of new documents revealed by Wikileaks which expressed not only a collusive element between Teneo, the Clinton Foundation and the "charitable foundation's" donors, which included the use of funds for personal gain, but also revealed deep reservations by people within the foundation about ongoing conflicts of interest. ..."
"... FBI agents are "actively and aggressively pursuing this case," and will be going back and interviewing the same people again, some for the third time, Baier's sources said. Agents also are going through what Clinton and top aides have said in previous interviews as well as the FBI 302 documents, which agents use to report interviews they conduct, to make sure notes line up, according to sources. ..."
"... As expected, the Clinton Foundation denied everything, and Foundation spokesman, Craig Minassian, told Fox news a statement: "We're not aware of any investigation into the Foundation by the Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, or any United States Attorney's Office and we have not received a subpoena from any of those agencies." ..."
"... Now that details of the infighting between the DOJ and FBI regarding the Foundation probe have been made public, Loretta Lynch may have no choice but to launch an official probe, including subpoeans. ..."
"... The information follows a report over the weekend by The Wall Street Journal that four FBI field offices have been collecting information about the foundation. The probes – in addition to the revived email investigation – have fueled renewed warnings from Republicans that if Clinton is elected next week, she could take office under a cloud of investigations. ..."
"... Separately, Fox News reports that authorities also are virtually certain, i.e., "there is about a 99 percent chance", that up to five foreign intelligence agencies may have accessed and taken emails from Hillary Clinton's private server, two separate sources with intimate knowledge of the FBI investigations told Fox News. If so, it would suggest that the original FBI probe - which found no evidence of breach - was either incomplete or tampered with. ..."
"... In other words, Anthony Weiner may be ultimately responsible not only for the downfall of Hillary Clinton's presidential candidacy, but also the collapse of the entire Clinton Foundation... which incidentally is just what Donald Trump warned could happen over a year ago. ..."
Now that thanks to first the
WSJ, and then
Fox News, the public is aware that a probe into the Clinton Foundation is not only a hot topic
for both the FBI and the DOJ (and has managed to split the law enforcement organizations along ideological
party lines), but is also actively ongoing despite the DOJ's attempts to squash it.
In the latest update from
Fox's Bret Baier, we learn that the Clinton Foundation investigation has now taken a "very high
priority," perhaps courtesy of new documents revealed by Wikileaks which expressed not only a collusive
element between Teneo, the Clinton Foundation and the "charitable foundation's" donors, which included
the use of funds for personal gain, but also revealed deep reservations by people within the foundation
about ongoing conflicts of interest.
As Baier also notes, the Clinton Foundation probe has been proceeding for more than a year, led
by the White-Collar Crime division.
Fox adds that even before the WikiLeaks dumps of alleged emails linked to the Clinton campaign,
FBI agents had collected a great deal of evidence, and FBI agents have interviewed and re-interviewed
multiple people regarding the case.
"There is an avalanche of new information coming in every day," one source told
Fox News, adding some of the new information is coming from the WikiLeaks documents and new emails.
FBI agents are "actively and aggressively pursuing this case," and will be going back and
interviewing the same people again, some for the third time, Baier's sources said. Agents also
are going through what Clinton and top aides have said in previous interviews as well as the FBI
302 documents, which agents use to report interviews they conduct, to make sure notes line up,
according to sources.
As expected, the Clinton Foundation denied everything, and Foundation spokesman, Craig Minassian,
told Fox news a statement: "We're not aware of any investigation into the Foundation by the
Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, or any United States Attorney's Office and
we have not received a subpoena from any of those agencies."
Now that details of the infighting between the DOJ and FBI regarding the Foundation probe have
been made public, Loretta Lynch may have no choice but to launch an official probe, including subpoeans.
The information follows a report over the weekend by The Wall Street Journal that four
FBI field offices have been collecting information about the foundation. The probes – in
addition to the revived email investigation – have fueled renewed warnings from Republicans that
if Clinton is elected next week, she could take office under a cloud of investigations.
"This is not just going to go away … if she ends up winning the election," Rep. Ron DeSantis,
R-Fla., told Fox News' "America's Newsroom" earlier this week.
Donald Trump has referenced this scenario, repeatedly saying on the stump this past week that
her election could trigger a "crisis."
Separately, Fox News reports that authorities also are virtually certain, i.e., "there is about
a 99 percent chance", that up to five foreign intelligence agencies may have accessed and
taken emails from Hillary Clinton's private server, two separate sources with intimate knowledge
of the FBI investigations told Fox News. If so, it would suggest that the original FBI probe - which
found no evidence of breach - was either incomplete or tampered with.
The revelation led House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCaul to describe Clinton's
handling of her email system during her tenure as secretary of state as "treason."
"She exposed [information] to our enemies," McCaul said on "Fox & Friends" Thursday morning. "Our
adversaries have this very sensitive information. … In my opinion, quite frankly, it's treason."
McCaul, R-Texas, said that FBI Director James Comey told him previously that foreign adversaries
likely had gotten into her server. When Comey publicly discussed the Clinton email case back in
July, he also said that while there was no evidence hostile actors breached the server, it was
"possible" they had gained access.
Clinton herself later pushed back, saying the director was merely "speculating."
But sources told Fox News that Comey should have said at the time there is an "almost certainty"
that several foreign intelligence agencies hacked into the server.
The claims come as Comey's FBI not only revisits the email investigation following the discovery
of additional emails on the laptop of ex-Rep. Anthony Weiner – the estranged husband of Clinton aide
Huma Abedin – but is proceeding in its investigation of the Clinton Foundation.
In other words, Anthony Weiner may be ultimately responsible not only for the downfall of Hillary
Clinton's presidential candidacy, but also the collapse of the entire Clinton Foundation... which
incidentally is just what Donald Trump warned could happen over a year ago.
A summary of Baier's latest reporting is in the clip below...
The FBI has unexpectedly published papers from an over ten-year-old investigation of former president
Bill Clinton's controversial pardon of a financier, reports
NTB.
The case against Clinton was dismissed without charges in 2005, and several Democrats therefore question
why the 129-page report of the investigation is published right now, a few days before the election,
in which Bill Clinton's wife Hillary Clinton is trying to become president.
The rage against the FBI is already great in the Democratic Party after the federal police last week
announced they will investigate new emails relating to Hillary Clinton.
Financier Marc Rich was indicted for tax fraud and lived in exile in Switzerland when Bill Clinton
pardoned him on his last day as president on January 20, 2001. Several reacted to the pardon, especially
since Rich's ex-wife was a major donor to the Democratic Party.
The FBI started to investigate the pardon the year after.
"... The support Trump has enjoyed is directly tied to the frustration many across the country feel toward Washington and its entrenched leaders, and they shouldn't expect that sentiment to dissipate regardless of whether Trump or Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton wins at the ballot box on Nov. 8, he said. ..."
Billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel reiterated his support for Republican presidential nominee
Donald Trump Monday morning, telling a room of journalists that a Washington outsider in the White
House would recalibrate lawmakers who have lost touch with the struggles of most Americans.
Thiel said it was "both insane and somehow inevitable" that political leaders would expect this presidential
election to be a contest between "political dynasties" that have shepherded the country into two
major financial crises: the tech bubble burst in the early 2000s, and the housing crisis and economic
recession later that decade.
The support Trump has enjoyed is directly tied to the frustration many across the country feel
toward Washington and its entrenched leaders, and they shouldn't expect that sentiment to dissipate
regardless of whether Trump or Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton wins at the ballot box on Nov.
8, he said.
"What Trump represents isn't crazy and it's not going away," he said.
I'd actually argue the opposite. Thousands of people are turning to Trump as a cynical form of
rebellion. They think that voting for him will be interesting/fun. If you were to ask them how
a Hillary Clinton presidency would seriously make their lives worse, they'd have nothing serious
to answer. At best they might say that they'll be fine, but that the rest of the country would
suffer, and then spout of a bunch of nonsense as to why that would be. It's a luxury to be so
reckless, which is where America is right now. If millions of lives literally depended on the
outcome of this election, people would be much more careful about how they plan to vote.
...they felt that mainstream America had left them and had gone by, didn't see
them, didn't recognize who they were and neither political party spoke to their
feelings and interests. In this sense, they felt like strangers in their own
land.
I'll give you an example of that.
One woman I spoke to said, "I'm
really glad you've come to interview us, because we are the fly-over-state and
people think of the South that we're ignorant, backward, that we have
old-fashioned attitudes, that we're pro-family, pro-life and that many people
think we're racist when we're not, and so they write us off, they call us
rednecks, so thanks for coming to see who we really are."
You've said that, "The conservatives of yesterday seem moderate or
liberal today" in the US. Can you elaborate on this move to the right in
American politics?
In 1968, Barry Goldwater was the first really
radical anti-government national candidate for the Republican presidency. His
wife was a founder of Planned Parenthood. Today, Republicans and the Tea Party
want to defund Planned Parenthood, which offers contraception, abortion, cancer
screening and other very important things.
Again, former Republican President Richard Nixon brought us the
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act,
and now Republicans are calling for the end of the EPA.
Yet again, former Republican President Eisenhower called for a minimum
wage; now Republicans oppose this. Eisenhower called for investments in public
infrastructure, now it's opposed. Today, the Republicans of the '50s, '60s,
'70s and '80s look liberal. That's how far right we've become.
Fighting against total of the big ghetto states is a bitch. Looks like Trump
needs to run the table as in FL,OH,GA,NC,AZ,CO,IA,NV. Not impossible but
something resembling a real kill shot from Wikileaks sure would help.
I have always believed that Trump is actually the elites choice and that
they have been practicing reverse psychology on the voters.
Nothing that
has happened during this 'selection' season has put me off of that hypothesis.
I told my husband months ago that there would be an October/November surprise
and that Trump may very well end up in the White House. Hillary is just too
broken to be able to pull it off. I've heard his economic policy speeches:
privatize social security, etc., and they all line up with just what the elites
have wanted for a long time. I know most ZHers don't feel this way, but
politics is a bitch, my friends. Let the down voting commence.
Your theory is actually a theory - In
politics NOTHING happens by chance.
Mark Twain said: If voting really mattered- They wouldn't let us do it!
I honestly believe that the PTB have every election sewn up through
controlled opposition- yet Trump would move us to Totalitarianism at a much
slower rate than the HitlerBeast. The Political Overton Window has shifted
hard to the left over the last 30 years. Both parties are to the left of
John F. Kennedy, sadly. Lesser of two evils is the new name of the game!
Evidence doesn't support your theory Rob. Ask yourself why every news
organization in the English speaking world is busy trashing Trump? Odd way
to for the elites to show support.
I'm an establishment hater and long to see Clinton's get their due, so support
Trump by default. What I think is instructive, if nothing else interesting, is
Brandon Smith's POV on Trump's potential "victory". The chess board is
fascinating, but may not be R's and D's playing the game at all. For the
planned crash, they'd rather have the "isolationist" (falsely painted term)
than the Globalist at the helm for blame. "See?? Its these same Brexit and
Trump voting "isolationist"! We need the SDR and the Big Boys back in
charge!".......still, I'd have a thrill run up my leg to watch a long-time
crook get her just comeuppance....
BREAKING: Steve Pieczenik.com from infowars and youtube videos:
2:40 in; Unedited
"We've initiated a counter coup through Assange and Wikileaks."
Comey's action reflected a response to the Silent Coup.
"We're going to stop you from making HRC President of the U.S."
Massive corruption under Clinton Foundation.
"I am just a small part of something bigger than myself."
"Brave men and women in the FBI, CIA,Director of Intelligence, Military
Intelligence and 15 other intelligence agencies who were sick and tired of
seeing this corruption in the White House, Justice Department, Intelligence
Services (so we) decided that there was something we had to do to save the
Republic so we initiated a Counter Coup through Julian Assange through emails
that we gave to him in order to undermine Hillary and Bill Clinton."
Pieczenik indicated this "Second American Revolution" had no guns, wapons, or
intent to kill or harm." He says the Counter Coup is made up of veterans in the
intelligence service like (himself.) He asserts that they will make sure Obama
leaves office without a pardon or any other "act of treason."
The coup "wants a peaceful transition."
Pieczenik said this is a "moment of history occurring right now."
I'm sick of hearing about this Pieczenik guy. It's been non-stop here at ZH
lately. There's no way this Tribe member is up to any good with his
counter-coup distraction.
What happens when states like Maryland, New Jersey, Colorado and Iowa vote for
Trump (because they didn't bother to rig in those areas), but Hilary still
"wins" in super battle ground states like Ohio and Pennsylvania because those
elections were rigged?
"... So no mention of the Department of Justice tipping off the Clinton campaign Guardian? Surely that it a pretty damning new revelation. Corrupt to the core. No of course not, ignoring wikileaks and shilling more of the same old wall to wall Anti Trump scaremongering. ..."
"... We get it, Trump is a jerk. Hillary Clinton is systemically corrupt. ..."
"... And here I was thinking the Guardian was progressive… but you'll stoop to anything to get your chosen corporatist candidate over the line eh? ..."
"... Obama changed his tone. The Dems are in desperate mode. Kinda nice to see them on the defense. However they will never change their globalist agenda to sell off the rest of middle class. ..."
"... Trump against the entire establishment with unlimited funds. They sent out their top politicians/celebrities in full force and still can't flip Florida. If he wins with only popular support it will be the best upset in modern history. ..."
"... Obama has destroyed the nation with his identity politics, his lies, his elitist BS, his lack of awareness of the constitution, his constant pronouncing of guilt or innocence from the WH, his inviting key players in the BLM movement and the various idiot celebs like Jay-Z and Beyonce, to the WH, his arrogance, etc. ..."
"... As the above LA Times poll shows, Trump now has a monstrous 5.4% lead. His supporters are growing on a daily basis, as he continues to attract African-American supporters and Democrats in record-breaking numbers for a Republican candidate. ..."
"... Obama is a master of calling people racists without actually coming out with it. He is also a master of playing on people's fears. He has been such a disappointment. Instead of uniting the country he has kept it divided. ..."
"... The Obamas are hypocrites of the highest order,In 2007/8 they said the Clintons were toxic and Hillary should not be allowed anywhere near the White House. The Obamas cronyism for the powerful and elite makes my blood boil ..."
"... The Obamas swept into the White House on a dream ticket provided in the main by the black vote, With the first 2 yrs of hobnobbing with the rich, powerful and famous he was slow to do a thing for the voter and all of 8 yrs on he still hasn't and we all know he never will ? ..."
"... The condescending Obamas are now out rallying for the very same woman they denounced 8 yrs earlier. They are in essence expecting the voter to forget everything that went on before and vote the impeached X President and his caustic wife ..."
"... Sure... He's all that. But he said he doesn't want a nuclear war with Russia. Hillary on the other hand is really keen on the idea. All her MIC backers agree. ..."
"... And clinton has the official endorsement of all the republican neocons who wrote and implemented the project for the new American century which embarked your country on a series of illegal wars in the middle east, millions of people dead, and created international terrorism. Oh and your national debt rose to trillions and your country's Infrastructure is falling apart and you have absolutely nothing tangible to show for it. Good luck with Hillary guys. ..."
"... "But it was Hillary Clinton, in an interview with Tom Brokaw, who quote 'paid tribute' to Ronald Reagan's economic and foreign policy. She championed NAFTA - even though it has cost South Carolina thousands of jobs. And worst of all, it was Hillary Clinton who voted for George Bush's war in Iraq. ..."
"... Hillary Clinton. She'll say anything, and change nothing. It's time to turn the page. ..."
"... Shouldn't it be illegal, for Obama, a government official, to attempt to influence the election? The Guardian already reported that Obama has been campaigning more than any sitting president before him. ..."
"... And besides, is that what he does on taxpayers' dime? Shouldn't he in general be addressing important issues of the country? ..."
Massive multi billion dollar corporate entities and
financial conglomerates who have a vested self interest in
the election will throw everything they have got into the
system. No effort too extreme, nothing out of bounds.
65jangle 6h ago
So no mention of the Department of Justice tipping off the Clinton campaign Guardian?
Surely that it a pretty damning new revelation. Corrupt to the core. No of course not, ignoring
wikileaks and shilling more of the same old wall to wall Anti Trump scaremongering.
We get it, Trump is a jerk. Hillary Clinton is systemically corrupt.
And here I was thinking the Guardian was progressive… but you'll stoop to anything to get your
chosen corporatist candidate over the line eh?
BlueberryCompote -> ByzantiumNovum 6h ago
The lunatic Russophobia of the US State Department makes your intervention unnecessary as Obama probably was the last bulwark against insanity.
Obama changed his tone. The Dems are in desperate mode. Kinda nice to see them on the
defense. However they will never change their globalist agenda to sell off the rest of middle class.
Trump against the entire establishment with unlimited funds. They sent out their top
politicians/celebrities in full force and still can't flip Florida. If he wins with only popular
support it will be the best upset in modern history.
aldebaranredstar 8h ago
Obama has destroyed the nation with his identity politics, his lies, his elitist BS, his
lack of awareness of the constitution, his constant pronouncing of guilt or innocence from the WH,
his inviting key players in the BLM movement and the various idiot celebs like Jay-Z and Beyonce,
to the WH, his arrogance, etc.
He has not only destroyed the Dem Party--which is weaker than it has ever been--but the entire
nation with his Executive orders that got overturned by the SCOTUS--the man is pure hell. A bad
leader is a bad leader, no matter the color. People are disgusted with his actions as POTUS and
that is the bottom line cause of the rise of DT. Obama has waged war in his own nation--not only
overseas. Peace Prize--HAHAHA.
Flugler 8h ago
Walkover;
As the above LA Times poll shows, Trump now has a monstrous 5.4% lead. His supporters are
growing on a daily basis, as he continues to attract African-American supporters and Democrats in
record-breaking numbers for a Republican candidate.
In addition to this, the polls may be horribly off, as Trump has what many are calling the
"monster vote" waiting in the wings. This is in reference to the stunning amount of previously
unregistered voters who have never voted in their life but plan on showing up to the polls to
support Donald Trump, as internal polling is showing.
Further supporting how strong his momentum is across all categories is the fact that Donald
Trump now has the majority of support across ALL age categories. A huge development, considering
that he has been struggling with young voters throughout much of his campaign.
rocjoc43rd 8h ago
Obama is a master of calling people racists without actually coming out with it. He is
also a master of playing on people's fears. He has been such a disappointment. Instead of uniting
the country he has kept it divided. I wonder if he is keeping the country safe while he
spends the next week campaigning for his replacement.
mandyjeancole 8h ago
The Obamas are hypocrites of the highest order,In 2007/8 they said the Clintons were toxic
and Hillary should not be allowed anywhere near the White House. The Obamas cronyism for the
powerful and elite makes my blood boil
The Obamas swept into the White House on a dream ticket provided in the main by the black
vote, With the first 2 yrs of hobnobbing with the rich, powerful and famous he was slow to do a
thing for the voter and all of 8 yrs on he still hasn't and we all know he never will ?
The
condescending Obamas are now out rallying for the very same woman they denounced 8 yrs
earlier. They are in essence expecting the voter to forget everything that went on before and vote
the impeached X President and his caustic wife another bite of the proverbial cherry, Donald
Trumps somewhat blundering campaign has been mired in his apparent misogyny and he has come in
for the most horrendous criticism by the world's press while Mrs. Clintons lies and, deceit up
until now were considered acceptable for a 30 yr veteran of politics.
Mr. Trump maybe an
all-American dreamer, he may not always come across as the most coherent, but he loves his Country. and he wants what's best for it.....If America is looking for mistakes made look no
further than Europe, The powers that be.. have made the most catastrophic decisions that have in
turn left the once proud cultures of Europe in the grip of Islamic fundamentalist whose barbaric
in doctoring wants to take us back a 1000 yrs. Give Mr. Trump 4 yrs.. its not too long..He just
might surprise you. MJC
Meep_Meep 8h ago
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump decried Democratic rival Hillary Clinton as
"the candidate of yesterday," calling himself and his supporters "the movement of the future."
Yeah...the future!
DeAngelOfPi -> Brighton181 8h ago
Sure... He's all that. But he said he doesn't want a nuclear war with Russia. Hillary on
the other hand is really keen on the idea. All her MIC backers agree.
SoloLoMejor -> PostTrotskyite 9h ago
And clinton has the official endorsement of all the republican neocons who wrote and
implemented the project for the new American century which embarked your country on a series of
illegal wars in the middle east, millions of people dead, and created international terrorism. Oh
and your national debt rose to trillions and your country's Infrastructure is falling apart and
you have absolutely nothing tangible to show for it. Good luck with Hillary guys.
RememberRemember 9h ago
2016 Obama, perhaps you would like a word with 2008 Obama.
Obama: "I'm Barack Obama, running for president and I approve this message."
Announcer: "It's what's wrong with politics today. Hillary Clinton will say anything to get
elected. Now she's making false attacks on Barack Obama.
"The Washington Post says Clinton isn't telling the truth. Obama 'did not say that he liked
the ideas of Republicans.' In fact, Obama's led the fight to raise the minimum wage, close
corporate tax loopholes and cut taxes for the middle class.
"But it was Hillary Clinton, in an interview with Tom Brokaw, who quote 'paid tribute' to
Ronald Reagan's economic and foreign policy. She championed NAFTA - even though it has cost
South Carolina thousands of jobs. And worst of all, it was Hillary Clinton who voted for
George Bush's war in Iraq.
"Hillary Clinton. She'll say anything, and change nothing. It's time to turn the page.
Paid for by Obama for America."
calderonparalapaz 9h ago
A Hillary ad should be about Clinton Inc as the american dream. Thanks Teneo!
"Until the Friday blockbuster news that the FBI was reopening its probe into the Hillary email
server, the biggest overhang facing the Clinton Campaign was the escalating scandal involving the
Clinton Foundation, Doug Band's consultancy firm Teneo, and Bill Clinton who as a result of a
leaked memo emerged was generously compensated for potential political favors by prominent
corporate clients using Teneo as a pass-thru vehicle for purchasing influence.
In a section of the memo entitled "Leveraging Teneo For The Foundation," Band spelled out all of
the donations he solicited from Teneo "clients" for the Clinton Foundation. In all, there are
roughly $14mm of donations listed with the largest contributors being Coca-Cola, Barclays, The
Rockefeller Foundation and Laureate International Universities. Some of these are shown below
(the full details can be found in "Leaked Memo Exposes Shady Dealings Between Clinton Foundation
Donors And Bill's "For-Profit" Activities")"
the more the media hush up on Huma Abedin, the more there is to know. it was her & criminally
accused Weiner's PC which (in a folder innocuously labelled) had 650,000 emails. Abedin comments
"she did not now how the 650,000 emails got there" (sic). the US media continues to cover up this
aspect of the Trio story: Abedin-Clinton-Weiner... the fact that Weiner is buddy with Israel's
Netanyahu simply adds to this intertwined messy cover-up.
BoSelecta 9h ago
The Clintonite corruption spreads in to the Justice Department:
Shouldn't it be illegal, for Obama, a government official, to attempt to influence the
election? The Guardian already reported that Obama has been campaigning more than any sitting
president before him.
And besides, is that what he does on taxpayers' dime? Shouldn't he in general be
addressing important issues of the country?
ALostIguana -> vr13vr 9h ago
Hatch Act explicitly excludes the President and Vice-President. They can take part in
political campaigning. Most other members of the executive are constrained by the Hatch Act.
"... Let's hope that Mr. Assange is saving the best for last, and delivers the coup de grace to the warmongering sociopathic harpy and she melts down like the wicked witch of the west. ..."
"... Either way, methinks that a great mass of unwashed deplorables may just rise up and sweep the authoritarian orange barbarian into power. ..."
The stench of desperation and corruption is surrounding the Dems like the piles of rotting
corpses Obama and Clinton have stacked up in Libya and Syria.
Let's hope that Mr. Assange is saving the best for last, and delivers the coup de grace
to the warmongering
sociopathic harpy and she melts down like the wicked witch of the west.
Either way, methinks that a great mass of unwashed deplorables may just rise up and sweep
the
authoritarian orange
barbarian into power.
Which is why I'm stocking up on ribeyes, scotch, and ammo for next week. Should Trump prevail,
I give better than even odds that the leftist chimps will, literally, go
berserk .
REPORTERS RSVP (28) 1. ABC – Liz Kreutz 2. AP – Julie Pace 3. AP - Ken Thomas 4. AP - Lisa Lerer 5. Bloomberg - Jennifer Epstein
6. Buzzfeed - Ruby Cramer 7. CBS – Steve Chagaris 8. CNBC - John Harwood 9. CNN - Dan Merica 10. Huffington Post - Amanda Terkel
11. LAT - Evan Handler 12. McClatchy - Anita Kumar 13. MSNBC - Alex Seitz-Wald 14. National Journal - Emily Schultheis 15. NBC
– Mark Murray 16. NPR - Mara Liassion 17. NPR – Tamara Keith 18. NYT - Amy Chozik 19. NYT - Maggie Haberman 20. Politico - Annie
Karni 21. Politico - Gabe Debenedetti 22. Politico - Glenn Thrush 23. Reuters - Amanda Becker 24. Washington Post - Anne Gearan
25. Washington Post – Phil Rucker 26. WSJ - Colleen McCain Nelson 27. WSJ - Laura Meckler 28. WSJ - Peter Nicholas
Pigeon •Nov 3, 2016 9:49 AM
It bothers me these stories are constantly prefaced with the idea that Wikileaks is saving Trump's bacon. Hillary wouldn't
even be close if the press weren't in the tank for her. How about Wikileaks evening the playing field with REAL STORIES AND
FACTS?
"Huma Abedin is a US citizen who was raised in Saudi Arabia. Her father is director of an academic
revue – of which, for many years, she was the sub-editor – which regularly prints comments from the
Muslim Brotherhood. Her mother is president of the Saudi association of female members of the Brotherhood,
and worked with the wife of Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi. Her brother Hassan works for Sheikh
Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the religious authority of the Brotherhood and spiritual counsellor of Al-Jazeera."
... ... ...
Huma Abedin is today a central figure of the Clinton campaign, alongside the campaign director,
John Podesta, ex-General Secretary of the White House under the Presidency of Bill Clinton. Podesta
is also the appointed Congressional lobbyist for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia – for the modest amount
of $200,000 per month. On 12 June 2016, Petra, the official Press agency of Jordan, published an
interview with the crown prince of Arabia, Mohamed Ben Salmane, in which he affirmed the modernity
of his family, which had illegally financed Hillary Clinton's Presidential campaign to the tune of
20%, despite the fact that she is a woman. The day after this publication, the agency cancelled the
dispatch and claimed that its Internet site had been hacked.
... ... ...
As it happens, in the team of her challenger, Donald Trump, we note the presence of General Michael
T. Flynn, who attempted to oppose the creation of the Caliphate by the White House, and resigned
from the direction of the Defense Intelligence Agency in order to signal his disapproval. He works
alongside Frank Gaffney, a historical "Cold Warrior", now qualified as a "conspiracy theorist" for
having denounced the presence of the Brotherhood in the Federal State.
It goes without saying that from the FBI's point of view, any support for jihadist organisations
is a crime, whatever the policy of the CIA may be. In 1991, the police – and Senator John Kerry –
had provoked the ecollapse of BCCI, a Pakistani bank (although it is registered in the Cayman Islands),
which the CIA used for all sorts of secret operations with the Muslim Brotherhood and also the Latino
drug cartels.
"... What if she is elected? Think of a nation suffering a bad economy and continuing chaos in the Middle East, and now also facing a criminal investigation of a president. Add to that congressional investigations and a public vision of Clinton as a Nixonian figure wandering the halls, wringing her hands. ..."
It's obvious the American political system is breaking down. It's been crumbling for some time now,
and the establishment elite know it and they're properly frightened.
Donald Trump, the vulgarian at their gates, is a symptom, not a cause. Hillary Clinton and husband
Bill are both cause and effect.
FBI director
James Comey's announcement about the renewed Clinton email investigation is the bombshell in
the presidential campaign. That he announced this so close to Election Day should tell every thinking
person that what the FBI is looking at is extremely serious.
This can't be about pervert Anthony Weiner and his reported desire for a teenage girl. But it
can be about the laptop of Weiner's wife, Clinton aide
Huma Abedin, and emails between her and Hillary. It comes after the FBI investigation in which
Comey concluded Clinton had lied and been "reckless" with national secrets, but said he could not
recommend prosecution.>
... ... ...
What if she is elected? Think of a nation suffering a bad economy and continuing chaos in
the Middle East, and now also facing a criminal investigation of a president. Add to that congressional
investigations and a public vision of Clinton as a Nixonian figure wandering the halls, wringing
her hands.
The best thing would be for Democrats to ask her to step down now. It would be the most responsible
thing to do, if the nation were more important to them than power. And the American news media -
fairly or not firmly identified in the public mind as Mrs. Clinton's political action committee -
should begin demanding it.
... ... ...
The Clintons weren't skilled merchants. They weren't traders or manufacturers. The Clintons never
produced anything tangible. They had no science, patents or devices to make them millions upon millions
of dollars.
All they had to sell, really, was influence. And they used our federal government to leverage it.
If a presidential election is as much about the people as it is about the candidates, then we'll
learn plenty about ourselves in the coming days, won't we?
After Podesta mentions in the original email chain 'Yes and interesting but not for this channel.',
he then sends this email back to Hillary's inbox a month later with a subject line of 'Congrats!'.
Could this be an example of altering email subject lines for the purpose of getting deleted as 'personal'
emails? This chain appears to have classified material. I would assume Clinton would not want this
email in her system, and Podesta very blatantly was aware of it not belonging there. (More aware
than Clinton herself, which is quite frightening).
Can we compare this email to the emails that were turned over to state? Or, compare it to the
date that Congress sent the order to provide all emails? When was that again? I'm assuming it's certainly
not there.
EDIT: The dates line up. This email subject was changed and sent at the same time Hillary's team
was wiping personal emails.
EDIT 2: This needs to get out to everyone. Media / FBI / Wikileaks / TYT / You name it. Please
share/tweet/whatever!
"... FBI agents have interviewed and re-interviewed multiple people on the foundation case, which is looking into possible pay for play interaction between then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation. The FBI's White Collar Crime Division is handling the investigation. ..."
"... Even before the WikiLeaks dumps of alleged emails linked to the Clinton campaign, FBI agents had collected a great deal of evidence, law enforcement sources tell Fox News. ..."
"... "There is an avalanche of new information coming in every day," one source told Fox News, who added some of the new information is coming from the WikiLeaks documents and new emails. ..."
A second FBI investigation involving Hillary Clinton is ongoing. The investigation to uncover
corruption by the Clinton Foundation and Hillary Clinton, is given high priority and now runs parallel
with the reopened FBI case of her using a private email server to avoid the Federal Records Act.
The FBI's investigation into the Clinton Foundation that has been going on for more than a year
has now taken a "very high priority," separate sources with intimate knowledge of the probe tell
Fox News .
FBI agents have interviewed and re-interviewed multiple people on the foundation case, which
is looking into possible pay for play interaction between then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
and the Clinton Foundation. The FBI's White Collar Crime Division is handling the investigation.
Even before the WikiLeaks dumps of alleged emails linked to the Clinton campaign, FBI agents
had collected a great deal of evidence, law enforcement sources tell Fox News.
"There is an avalanche of new information coming in every day," one source told Fox News,
who added some of the new information is coming from the WikiLeaks documents and new emails.
FBI agents are "actively and aggressively pursuing this case," and will be going back and interviewing
the same people again, some for the third time, sources said.
Agents are also going through what Clinton and top aides have said in previous interviews and
the FBI 302, documents agents use to report interviews they conduct, to make sure notes line up,
according to sources.
Mrs. Clinton's legal work included unsavory criminal cases. When a 41-year-old factory worker
was accused of raping a 12-year-old girl, and requested a female lawyer, a Fayetteville judge appointed
Mrs. Clinton, over her objections. The crime lab mistakenly discarded crucial evidence, and she reached
a plea bargain, reducing the charge to unlawful fondling; her client served less than a year in jail.
The victim in that case, Kathy Shelton, who supports Donald J. Trump, has accused Mrs. Clinton
of attacking her character and putting her through "something you would never put a 12-year-old through."
Mrs. Clinton's first jury trial was distasteful in an entirely different way.
She had married Mr. Clinton, moved with him to Little Rock - he was then the state attorney
general - and joined Rose, the state's most prestigious law firm and the oldest one west of
the Mississippi, as it calls itself. Her clients were mainly businesses
"... A pregnant double-humped camel in pantsuit is more likely to squeeze through the eye of the needle than Hillary is to win Arizona. ..."
"... Why is a person who is being investigated by the FBI being considered for the Presidency of the US? ..."
"... She's fucked either way now. Way too much shit on her and they say they've got even more that will be so damning she could go straight to prison. ..."
"... Wow, I didn't know it was getting this bad: Chicago Tribune Asks Clinton To Step Down ..."
"... progressivism & humanitarianism in war profiteering aka mongering...... "Civilian protective operations" panders a neocon excuse for organized state run murder. Bill went after the Tsar as soon as his closet neocon found out they could have the Germans send a mechanized brigade of Warsaw Pact armaments to the Croats and Yeltsin did nothing. ..."
"... The Russian version of Chamberlain and Munich was Croatian independence. ..."
"... Most career military pilots I knew were terrified by the thought of no more perpetual bombing. ..."
"... They would think Clinton and the neocons can keep a low boil going in the PNAC for another 100 years without tripping into a real war, or bankrupting the USA. ..."
"... It is a signifier of the moral bankruptcy that the exceptional carry as a badge. ..."
War hysteria in a country with imperial nostalgia, one-man rule and a weak economy cannot be
taken lightly.
Michael Khodarkovsky is a professor of history at Loyola University.
[ The fostering of fear of and disdain for Russia is continual now and however false the characterizations
of Russia are, and they are indeed false, the fear and disdain will influence and be self-defeating
for American foreign policy from here till a dramatic change comes from another administration.
I unfortunately find no such change in the offing. ]
progressivism & humanitarianism in war profiteering aka mongering......
"Civilian protective operations" panders a neocon excuse for organized state run murder.
Bill went after the Tsar as soon as his closet neocon found out they could have the Germans
send a mechanized brigade of Warsaw Pact armaments to the Croats and Yeltsin did nothing.
The Russian version of Chamberlain and Munich was Croatian independence.
ilsm -> anne... , -1
Most career military pilots I knew were terrified by the thought of no more perpetual bombing.
They would think Clinton and the neocons can keep a low boil going in the PNAC for another
100 years without tripping into a real war, or bankrupting the USA.
It is a signifier of the moral bankruptcy that the exceptional carry as a badge.
With the "defenses available" to Syria they could enforce no fly zones on GCC and their blood
thirsty allies as as might US over Raqqa.
Trump mirrors resentment with the current political culture. Unfortunately very few readers in this
forum understand that the emergence of Trump as a viable candidate in the current race, the candidate
who withstand 24x7 air bombarment by corrupt neoliberabl MSM (like Guardian ;-) signify deep crisis
of neoliberalsm and neoliberal globalization.
Notable quotes:
"... "What Madison could not have foreseen was the extent to which unconstrained campaign finance and a sophisticated lobbying industry would come to dominate an entire nation, regardless of its size." ..."
"... That's it – finance and sophisticated lobbying. And you can add to that mass brainwashing at election campaigns by means of choice language and orchestration as advised by cognitive scientists who are expressly recruited for this purpose. Voters remain largely unaware of the mind control they are undergoing. And of course the essential prerequisite for all of this is financial power. ..."
"... Now read again in this light Gore Vidal's famous pronouncement… "Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically by definition be disqualified from ever doing so." ..."
"... Worse still, the political spectrum runs from right to right. To all intents and purposes, one single party, the US Neoliberal party, with 2 factions catering for power and privilege. Anything to the left of that is simply not an available choice for voters. ..."
"... Americans have wakened up to the fact that they badly need a government which caters for the needs of the average citizen. In their desperation some will still vote for Trump warts and all. This for the same sorts of reasons that Italians voted for Berlusconi, whose winning slogan was basically 'I am not a politician'. ..."
"... The right choice was Bernie Sanders. Sadly, not powerful enough. So Americans missed the boat there. But at least there was a boat to miss this time around. You can be sure that similar future boats will be sunk well in advance. Corporate power has learnt its lesson and the art of election rigging has now become an exact science. ..."
"... Donald Trump, Brexit and Le Pen are all in their separate ways rejections of the dogma of liberalism, social and economic, that has dominated the West for the past three decades. ..."
"... In 2010, Chomsky wrote : ..."
"... The United States is extremely lucky.....if somebody comes along who is charismatic and honest this country is in real trouble because of the frustration, disillusionment, the justified anger and the absence of any coherent response. ..."
"... Dangerous times. The beauty of democracy is we get what we deserve ..."
"... The worst thing about Donald Trump is that he's the man in the mirror. ..."
"... He is the distillation of all that we have been induced to desire and admire. ..."
"... I thought that he is the mirror image, the reverse, of the current liberal consensus. A consensus driven by worthy ideals but driven too far, gradually losing acceptance and with no self correcting awareness. ..."
"... Trump is awful - but by speaking freely he challenges the excesses of those who would limit free speech. Trump is awful - but by demonising minorities he challenges those who would excuse minorities of all responsibility. Trump is awful - but by flaunting his wealth he challenges those who keep their connections and wealth hidden for the sake of appearances. ..."
"... Trump is awful because the system is out of balance. He is a consequence, not a cause. ..."
"... Voting for Trump is voting for peace. Voting for Clinton is voting for WW3. ..."
"... It's quite clearly because Hillary as President is an utterly terrifying prospect. When half the population would rather have Trump than her, it must be conceded that she has some serious reputational issues. ..."
"... Personally, I'd take Trump over Hillary if I was a US citizen. He may be a buffoon but she is profoundly dangerous, probably a genuine psychopath and shouldn't be allowed anywhere near the Presidency. Sanders is the man America needs now, though, barring one of Hillary's many crimes finally toppling her, it's not going to happen... ..."
"... The true constitution is plutocracy tempered by scandal ..."
"... And the shame is we seem to be becoming desensitized to scandal. We cannot be said to live in democracies when our political class are so obviously bought by the vastly rich. ..."
"... One of the things it says is that people are so sick of Identity Politics from the Left and believe the Left are not very true to the ideals of what should be the Left. ..."
"... When the people who are supposed to care about the poor and working joes and janes prefer to care about the minorities whose vote they can rely on, the poor and the working joes and janes will show their frustration by supporting someone who will come along and tell it as it is, even if he is part of how it got that way. ..."
"... People throughout the world have awoken to the Left being Right Light but with a more nauseating moral superiority complex. ..."
"... he is not an outsider but the perfect representation of his caste, the caste that runs the global economy and governs our politics ..."
"... 'Encouraged by the corporate media, the Republicans have been waging a full-spectrum assault on empathy, altruism and the decencies we owe to other people. Their gleeful stoving in of faces, their cackling destruction of political safeguards and democratic norms, their stomping on all that is generous and caring and cooperative in human nature, have turned the party into a game of Mortal Kombat scripted by Breitbart News.' ..."
"... Many years ago in the British Military, those with the right connections and enough money could buy an officer's commission and rise up the system to be an incompetent General. As a result, many battles were mismanaged and many lives wasted due to the incompetent (wealthy privileged few) buying their way to the top. American politics today works on exactly the same system of wealthy patronage and privilege for the incompetent, read Clinton and Trump. Until the best candidates are able to rise up through the political system without buying their way there then the whole corrupt farce will continue and we will be no different to the all the other tin pot republics of the world. ..."
"... There's the "culture wars" aspect. Many people don't like being told they are "deplorable" for opposing illegal (or even legal) immigration. They don't like being called "racist" for disagreeing with an ideology. ..."
"... I like the phrase Monbiot ends with - "He is our system, stripped of its pretences" - it reminds me of a phrase in the Communist Manifesto - but I don't think it's true. "Our" system is more than capitalism, it's culture. And Clinton is a far more "perfect representation" of the increasingly censorious, narrow [neo]liberal culture which dominates the Western world. ..."
"... Finally, Monbiot misses the chance to contrast Clinton's and Trump's apparent differences with regard to confronting nuclear-armed Russia over the skies of Syria. It could be like 1964 all over again - except in this election, the Democrat is the nearest thing to Barry Goldwater. ..."
"... As a life-long despiser of all things Trump, I cannot believe that I am saying this: Trump is good for world peace. ..."
"... I fully agree with Monbiot, American democracy is a sham - the lobby system has embedded corruption right in the heart of its body politic. Lets be clear here though, whatever is the problem with American democracy can in theory at least be fixed, but Trump simply can not and moreover he is not the answer ..."
"... His opponent, war child and Wall Street darling can count her lucky stars that the media leaves her alone (with husband Bill, hands firmly in his pockets, nodding approvingly) and concentrates on their feeding frenzy attacking Trump on sexual allegations of abusing women, giving Hillery, Yes, likely to tell lies, ( mendacious, remember when she claimed to be under enemy fire in Bosnia? remember how evasive she was on the Benghazi attack on the embassy) Yes Trump is a dangerous man running against an also extremely dangerous woman. ..."
"... Extremely interesting reference to the Madison paper, but the issue is less about the size of the electorate, and more about the power that the election provides to the victor. ..."
"... Democracy in the US is so corrupted by money that it is no longer recognisable as democracy. You can kick individual politicians out of office, but what do you do when the entire structure of politics is corrupt? ..."
"... When you look at speeches and conversations and debates with the so-called bogeyman, Putin, he is not at all in a league as low and vile as portrayed and says many more sensible things than anybody cares to listen to, because we're all brainwashed. We are complicit in wars (now in Syria) and cannot see why we have to connive with terrorists, tens of thousands of them, and they get supported by the war machine and friends like Saudis and Turkey which traded for years with ISIS. ..."
"... Clinton the war hawk, and shows us we are only capable of seeing one side and project all nastiness outward while we can feel good about ourselves by hating the other. ..."
"... It fits the Decline of an Empire image as it did in other Falls of Civilizations. ..."
"... Trump spoke to the executives at Ford like no one before ever has. He told them if they moved production to Mexico (as they plan to do) that he would slap huge tariffs on their cars in America and no one would buy them. ..."
"... What happens in Syria could be important to us all. Clinton doesn't hide her ambition to drive Assad from power and give Russia a kicking. It's actually very unpopular although the media doesn't like to say so; it prefers to lambast Spain for re-fueling Russian war ships off to fight the crazed Jihadists as if we supported the religious fanatics that want to slaughter all Infidels! There is an enormous gulf between what ordinary people want and the power crazy Generals in the Pentagon and NATO. ..."
"... USA has got itself in an unholy mess . It's politicians no longer work for the people . Their paymasters care not if life in Idaho resembles Dantes inferno . Trump has many faults but being "not Hilary" is not one of them. The very fact he is disliked by all the vested interests should make you take another look. And remember , the American constitution has many checks and balances , a President has a lot less power than most people imagine. ..."
"... Like many on the right, the left have unthinkingly accepted a narrative of an organized, conspiratorial system run by an elite of politicians and plutocrats. The problem with this narrative is it suggests politics and politicians are inherently nefarious, in turn suggesting there are no political solutions to be sought to problems, or anything people can do to challenge a global system of power. As Monbiot asks: "You can kick individual politicians out of office, but what do you do when the entire structure of politics is corrupt?" Well, what indeed? ..."
"... I don't think you need to believe in an organised conspiracy and I don't see any real evidence that George Monbiot does. The trouble is that the corporate and political interests align in a way that absorbs any attempt to challenge them and the narrative has been written that of course politics is all about economics and of course we need mighty corporations to sustain us. ..."
"... Not long after the start of the presidential campaign I began to reflect that in Trump we are seeing materializing before us the logical result of the neoliberal project ..."
"... The Republican party essentially offered their base nothing – that was the problem. ..."
"... They couldn't offer all the things that ordinary Americans want – better and wider Medicaid, better and wider social security, tax increases on the rich, an end to pointless foreign wars and the American empire. ..."
"... The Democrats have largely the same funding base, but they at least deliver crumbs – at least a nod to the needs of ordinary people through half-hearted social programmes. ..."
"... Trump is imperfect because he wants normal relations rather than war with Russia. No, Hillary Clinton is the ultimate representation of the system that is abusing us. What will occur when Goldman Sachs and the military-industrial complex coalition get their, what is it, 5th term in office would be a great subject of many Guardian opinion pieces, actually. But that will have to wait till after November 8. ..."
"... And, of course, we also have Hillary's Wall Street speeches -- thanks to Wikileaks we have the complete transcripts, in case Guardian readers are unaware. They expose the real thinking and 'private positions' of the central character in the next episode of 'Rule by Plutocracy'. ..."
"... The democrats is the party practicing hypocrisy, pretending that they somehow representing the interest of the working class. They are the ones spreading lies and hypocrisy and manipulating the working class everyday through their power over the media. Their function is to appease the working class. The real obstacle for improving conditions for the working class historically has always been the Democratic party, not the Republican party. ..."
"... In what concerns foreign politics, Trump some times seems more reasonable than Clinton and the establishment. Clinton is the best coached politician of all times. She doesn't know that she's coached. She just followed the most radical groups and isn't able to question anything at all. The only thing that the coaches didn't fix until now is her laughing which is considered even by her coaches as a sign of weirdness. ..."
"... Western economies are now so beholden to the patronage of the essentially stateless multinational, it has become a political imperative to appease their interests - it's difficult to see a future in which an administration might resist this force, because at its whim, national economies face ruination. In light of such helplessness our political representatives face an easier path in simply accepting their lot as mere administrators who will tinker at the margins [and potentially reap the rewards of a good servant], rather than hold to principle and resist an overwhelming force. ..."
"... "Trump personifies the traits promoted by the media and corporate worlds he affects to revile; the worlds that created him. He is the fetishisation of wealth, power and image in a nation where extrinsic values are championed throughout public discourse. His conspicuous consumption, self-amplification and towering (if fragile) ego are in tune with the dominant narratives of our age." ..."
"... Yes, they don't care any more if we see the full extent of their corruption as we've given up our power to do anything about it. ..."
"... It was once very common to see Democratic politicians as neighbors attending every community event. They were Teamsters, pipe fitters, and electricians. And they were coaches and ushers and pallbearers. Now they are academics and lawyers and NGO employees and managers who pop up during campaigns. The typical income of the elected Democrats outside their government check is north of $100,000. They don't live in, or even wander through, the poorer neighborhoods. So they are essentially clueless that government services like busses are run to suit government and not actual customers. ..."
"... Yea, 15 years of constant wars of empire with no end in sight has pretty much ran this country in the ground. ..."
"... We all talk about how much money is wasted by the federal government on unimportant endeavors like human services and education, but don't even bat an eye about the sieve of money that is the Pentagon. ..."
"... Half a trillion dollars for aircraft carriers we don't need and are already obsolete. China is on the verge of developing wickedly effective anti-ship missiles designed specifically to target these Gerald R. Ford-class vessels. You might as well paint a huge bull's-eye on these ships' 4-1/2 acre flight deck. ..."
"... There are plenty more examples of this crap and this doesn't even include the nearly TWO trillion dollars we've spent this past decade-and-a-half on stomping flat the Middle East and large swaths of the Indian subcontinent. ..."
"... And all this time, our nation's infrastructure is crumbling literally right out from underneath us and millions upon millions of children and their families experience a daily struggle just to eat. Eat?! In the "greatest," wealthiest nation on earth and we prefer to kill people at weddings with drones than feed our own children. ..."
"... I'd like to read an unbiased piece about why the media narrative doesn't match the reality of the Trump phenomenon. He is getting enormous crowds attend his rallies but hardly any coverage of that in the filtered news outlets. Hillary, is struggling to get anyone turn up without paying them. There is no real enthusiasm. ..."
"... The buzzwords and tired old catch phrases and cliches used by the left to suppress any alternative discussion, and divert from their own misdemeanors are fooling no one but themselves. Trump supporters simply don't care any more how Hillary supporters explain that she lied about dodging sniper fire. Or the numerous other times she and her cohorts have been caught out telling fibs. ..."
"... Very true. Throughout history the rich, the powerful, the landed, ennobled interest and their friends in the Law and money changing houses have sought to control governments and have usually succeeded. ..."
"... In the Media today the rich are fawned over by sycophantic journalists and programme makers. These are the people who make the political weather and create the prevailing narratives. ..."
"... Working class people fancied themselves to above the common herd and thought themselves part of some elite. ..."
"... It's quite disturbing the lengths this paper will go to in order to slur and discredit Trump, labelling him dangerous and alluding to the sexual assault allegations. This even goes so far to a very lengthy article regarding Trumps lack of knowledge on the Rumbelows Cup 25 years ago. ..."
"... Whereas very little examination is made into Hillary Clinton's background which includes serious allegation of fraud and involvement in assisting in covering up her husband's alleged series of rapes. There are also issues in the wikileaks emails that merit analysis as well as undercover tapes of seioau issues with her campaign team. ..."
"... One of the most important characteristics of the so-called neoliberalism is its negative selection. While mostly successfully camouflaged, that negative selection is more than obvious this time, in two US presidential candidates. It's hard to imagine lower than those two. ..."
"... Well, OK George. Tell me: if Trump's such an establishment candidate, then why does the whole of the establishment unanimously reject him? Is it normal for Republicans (such as the Bushes and the neocons) to endorse Democrats? Why does even the Speaker of the House (a Republican) and even, on occasion, Trump's own Vice-Presidential nominee seem to be trying to undermine his campaign? If Trump is really just more of the same as all that came before, why is he being treated different by the MSM and the political establishment? ..."
"... Obviously, there's something flawed about your assumption. ..."
"... Trump has exposed the corruption of the political system and the media and has promised to put a stop to it. By contrast, Clinton is financed by the very banks, corporates and financial elites who are responsible for the corruption. This Trump speech is explicit on what we all suspected is going on. Everybody should watch it, irrespective of whether they support him or not! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tab5vvo0TJw ..."
"... "I know a lot of people in Michigan that are planning to vote for Trump and they don't necessarily agree with him. They're not racist or redneck, they're actually pretty decent people and so after talking to a number of them I wanted to write this. ..."
"... Donald Trump came to the Detroit Economic Club and stood there in front of Ford Motor executives and said "if you close these factories as you're planning to do in Detroit and build them in Mexico, I'm going to put a 35% tariff on those cars when you send them back and nobody's going to buy them." It was an amazing thing to see. No politician, Republican or Democrat, had ever said anything like that to these executives, and it was music to the ears of people in Michigan and Ohio and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin - the "Brexit" states. ..."
"... Mrs Clinton is also the product of our political culture. A feminist who owes everything to her husband and men in the Democratic Party. A Democrat who started her political career as a Republican; a civil right activist who worked for Gerry Goldwater, one of last openly racist/segregationist politicians. A Secretary of State who has no clue about, or training in, foreign policy, and who received her position as compensation for losing the election. A pacifist, who has never had a gun in her hands, but supported every war in the last twenty years. A humanist who rejoiced over Qaddafi's death ("we came, we won, he is dead!") like a sadist. ..."
"... One thing that far right politics offers the ordinary white disaffected voter is 'pay back', it is a promised revenge-fest, putting up walls, getting rid of foreigners, punishing employers of foreigners, etc., etc. All the stuff that far right groups have wet dreams about. ..."
"... Because neoliberal politics has left a hell of a lot of people feeling pissed off, the far right capitalizes on this, whilst belonging to the same neoliberal dystopia so ultimately not being able to make good on their promises. Their promises address a lot of people's anger, which of course isn't really about foreigners at all, that is simply the decoy, but cutting through all the crap to make that clear is no easy task, not really sure how it can be done, certainly no political leader in the western hemisphere has the ability to do so. ..."
"... Wrong as always. Trump *is* an outsider. He's an unabashed nationalist who's set him up against the *actual* caste that governs our politics: Neo-liberal internationalists with socially trendy left-liberal politics (but not so left that they don't hire good tax lawyers to avoid paying a fraction of what they are legally obliged to). ..."
"... Best represented in the Goldman Sachs executives who are donating millions to Hillary Clinton because they are worried about Trump's opposition to free trade, and they know she will give them *everything* they want. ..."
"... Trumps the closest thing we're gotten to a genuine threat to the system in a long, long time, so of course George Monbiot and the rest of the Guardian writers has set themselves against him, because if you're gonna be wrong about the EU, wrong about New Labour, wrong about social liberalism, wrong about immigration, why change the habit of a lifetime? ..."
"... Lies: Emails, policy changes based on polls showing a complete lack of conviction, corporate collusion, Bosnia, Clinton Foundation, war mongering, etc. Racist stereotypes: Super predators. Misogyny: Aside from her laughing away her pedophile case and allegedly threatening the women who came out against Bill, you've also got this sexist gem "Women are the primary victims of war". ..."
"... Alleged gropings: Well she's killed people by texting. So unless your moral compass is so out of whack that somehow a man JOKING about his player status in private is worse than Clinton's actions throughout her political career, then I guess you could make the case that Clinton at least doesn't have this skeleton in her closet. ..."
"... Refusal to accept democratic outcomes: No. He's speaking out against the media's collusion with the democratic party favoring Clinton over every other nominee, including Bernie Sanders. He's talking about what was revealed in the DNC leaks and the O'Keefe tapes that show how dirty the tactics have been in order to legally persuade the voting public into electing one person or the other. ..."
"... When do the conspiracy theories about the criminality of his opponent no longer count as conspiracies? When we have a plethora of emails confirming there is indeed fire next to that smoke, corruption fire, collusion fire, fire of contempt for the electorate. When we have emails confirming the Saudi Arabians are actually funding terrorist schools across the globe, emails where Hilary herself admits it, but will not say anything publicly about terrorism and Saudi Arabia, what's conspiracy and what's reality? ..."
"... Is it because Saudi Arabia funded her foundation with $23 million, or because it doesn't fit with her great 'internationalists' global agenda? ..."
"... Yep trump is a buffoon, but the failure of all media to deliver serious debate means the US is about to elect someone probably more dangerous than trump, how the hell can that be ..."
"... Nothing wrong with a liberal internationalist utopia, it sounds rather good and worth striving for. It's just that what they've been pushing is actually a neoliberal globalist nirvana for the 1 per cent ..."
"... The problem is the left this paper represents were bought off with the small change by neoliberalism, and they expect the rest of us to suck it up so the elites from both sides can continue the game ..."
"... we near the end of the neoliberal model. That the USA has a choice between two 'demopublicans' is no choice at all. ..."
"... This is the culmination of living in a post-truth political world. Lies and smears, ably supported by the corporate media and Murdoch in particular means that the average person who doesn't closely follow politics is being misinformed. ..."
"... The complete failure of right wing economic 'theories' means they only have lies, smears and the old 'divide and conquer' left in their arsenal. 'Free speech' is their attempt to get lies and smears equal billing with the truth. All truth on the other hand must be suppressed. All experts and scientists who don't regurgitate the meaningless slogans of the right will be ignored, traduced, defunded, disbanded or silenced by law. ..."
"... Not so much an article about Trump as much as a rant. George Monbiot writes with the utter conviction of one who mistakenly believes that his readers share his bigotry. When he talks about the 'alleged gropings' or the 'alleged refusal to accept democratic outcomes', that is exactly what they are 'alleged'. ..."
"... The Democratic Party has been dredging up porn-stars and wannabe models who now make claims that Trump tried to 'kiss them without asking'. ..."
"... The press also ignored the tapes of the DNC paying thugs to cause violence at Trump rallies, the bribes paid to the Clintons for political favours and the stealing of the election from Bernie Sanders. Trump is quite right to think the 'democratic outcome' is being fixed. Not only were the votes for Sanders manipulated, but Al Gore's votes were also altered and manipulated to ensure a win for Bush in the 2000 presidential election. The same interests who engineered the 2000 election have switched from supporting the Republican Party to supporting Clinton. ..."
"... Great article. The neoliberals have been able to control the narrative and in doing so have managed to scapegoat all manner of minority groups, building anger among those disaffected with modern politics. Easy targets - minorities, immigrants, the poor, the disadvantaged and the low-paid workers. ..."
"... The real enemy here are those sitting atop the corporate tree, but with the media controlled by them, the truth is never revealed. ..."
America's fourth president, James Madison, envisaged the United States constitution as representation
tempered by competition between factions. In the 10th federalist paper, written in 1787, he argued
that large republics were better insulated from corruption than small, or "pure" democracies, as
the greater number of citizens would make it "more difficult for unworthy candidates to practise
with success the vicious arts by which elections are too often carried". A large electorate would
protect the system against oppressive interest groups. Politics practised on a grand scale would
be more likely to select people of "enlightened views and virtuous sentiments".
Instead, the US – in common with many other nations – now suffers the worst of both worlds: a
large electorate dominated by a tiny faction. Instead of republics being governed, as Madison feared,
by "the secret wishes of an unjust and interested majority", they are beholden to the not-so-secret
wishes of an unjust and interested minority. What Madison could not have foreseen was the extent
to which unconstrained campaign finance and a sophisticated lobbying industry would come to dominate
an entire nation, regardless of its size.
For every representative, Republican or Democrat, who retains a trace element of independence,
there are three sitting in the breast pocket of corporate capital. Since the supreme court decided
that there should be no effective limits on campaign finance, and, to a lesser extent, long before,
candidates have been reduced to tongue-tied automata, incapable of responding to those in need of
help, incapable of regulating those in need of restraint, for fear of upsetting their funders.
Democracy in the US is so corrupted by money that it is no longer recognisable as democracy. You
can kick individual politicians out of office, but what do you do when the entire structure of politics
is corrupt? Turn to the demagogue who rages into this political vacuum, denouncing the forces he
exemplifies. The problem is not, as Trump claims, that the election will be stolen by ballot rigging.
It is that the entire electoral process is stolen from the American people before they get anywhere
near casting their votes. When Trump claims that the little guy is being screwed by the system, he's
right. The only problem is that he is the system.
The political constitution of the United States is not, as Madison envisaged, representation tempered
by competition between factions. The true constitution is plutocracy tempered by scandal. In other
words, all that impedes the absolute power of money is the occasional exposure of the excesses of
the wealthy.
greatapedescendant 26 Oct 2016 4:11
A good read thanks. Nothing I really disagree with there. Just a few things to add and restate.
"What Madison could not have foreseen was the extent to which unconstrained campaign
finance and a sophisticated lobbying industry would come to dominate an entire nation, regardless
of its size."
That's it – finance and sophisticated lobbying. And you can add to that mass brainwashing
at election campaigns by means of choice language and orchestration as advised by cognitive scientists
who are expressly recruited for this purpose. Voters remain largely unaware of the mind control
they are undergoing. And of course the essential prerequisite for all of this is financial power.
Now read again in this light Gore Vidal's famous pronouncement… "Any American who is prepared
to run for president should automatically by definition be disqualified from ever doing so."
Which recalls Madison over 200 years before… "The truth is that all men having power ought
to be mistrusted."
What the US has is in effect is not a democracy but a plutocracy run by a polyarchy. Which
conserves some democratic elements. To which the US president is largely an obedient and subservient
puppet. And which openly fails to consider the needs of the average US citizen.
Worse still, the political spectrum runs from right to right. To all intents and purposes,
one single party, the US Neoliberal party, with 2 factions catering for power and privilege. Anything
to the left of that is simply not an available choice for voters.
Americans have wakened up to the fact that they badly need a government which caters for
the needs of the average citizen. In their desperation some will still vote for Trump warts and
all. This for the same sorts of reasons that Italians voted for Berlusconi, whose winning slogan
was basically 'I am not a politician'. Though that didn't work out too well. No longer able
to stomach more of the same, voters reach the stage of being willing to back anyone who might
bring about a break with the status quo. Even Trump.
The right choice was Bernie Sanders. Sadly, not powerful enough. So Americans missed the
boat there. But at least there was a boat to miss this time around. You can be sure that similar
future boats will be sunk well in advance. Corporate power has learnt its lesson and the art of
election rigging has now become an exact science.
UltraLightBeam 26 Oct 2016 4:11
Donald Trump, Brexit and Le Pen are all in their separate ways rejections of the dogma
of liberalism, social and economic, that has dominated the West for the past three decades.
The Guardian, among others, laments the loss of 'tolerance' and 'openness' as defining qualities
of our societies. But what's always left unsaid is: tolerance of what? Openness to what? Anything?
Everything?
Is it beyond the pale to critically assess some of the values brought by immigration, and to
reject them? Will only limitless, unthinking 'tolerance' and 'openness' do?
Once self-described 'progressives' engage with this topic, then maybe we'll see a reversal
in the momentum that Trump and the rest of the right wing demagogues have built up.
The United States is extremely lucky.....if somebody comes along who is charismatic
and honest this country is in real trouble because of the frustration, disillusionment, the
justified anger and the absence of any coherent response.
Dangerous times. The beauty of democracy is we get what we deserve.
DiscoveredJoys -> morelightlessheat 26 Oct 2016 6:11
The most telling part for me was:
The worst thing about Donald Trump is that he's the man in the mirror.
Except that instead of
He is the distillation of all that we have been induced to desire and admire.
I thought that he is the mirror image, the reverse, of the current liberal consensus. A consensus
driven by worthy ideals but driven too far, gradually losing acceptance and with no self correcting
awareness.
Trump is awful - but by speaking freely he challenges the excesses of those who would limit
free speech. Trump is awful - but by demonising minorities he challenges those who would excuse
minorities of all responsibility. Trump is awful - but by flaunting his wealth he challenges those
who keep their connections and wealth hidden for the sake of appearances.
Trump is awful because the system is out of balance. He is a consequence, not a cause.
Gman13 26 Oct 2016 4:25
Voting for Trump is voting for peace. Voting for Clinton is voting for WW3.
These events will unfold if Hillary wins:
1. No fly zone imposed in Syria to help "moderate opposition" on pretence of protecting civilians.
2. Syrian government nonetheless continues defending their country as terrorists shell Western
Aleppo.
3. Hillary's planes attack Syrian government planes and the Russians.
4. Russia and Syria respond as the war escalates. America intensifies arming of "moderate opposition"
and Saudis.
5. America arms "rebels" in various Russian regions who "fight for democracy" but this struggle
is somehow hijacked by terrorists, only they are not called terrorists but "opposition"
6. Ukranian government is encouraged to restart the war.
7. Iran enters the war openly against Saudi Arabia
8. Israel bombs Iran
9. Cornered Russia targets mainland US with nuclear weapons
10. Etc.
snakebrain -> Andthenandthen 26 Oct 2016 6:54
It's quite clearly because Hillary as President is an utterly terrifying prospect. When
half the population would rather have Trump than her, it must be conceded that she has some serious
reputational issues.
If Hillary and the DNC hadn't fixed the primaries, we'd now be looking at a Sanders-Trump race,
and a certain Democrat victory. As it is, it's on a knife edge as to whether we get Trump or Hillary.
Personally, I'd take Trump over Hillary if I was a US citizen. He may be a buffoon but
she is profoundly dangerous, probably a genuine psychopath and shouldn't be allowed anywhere near
the Presidency. Sanders is the man America needs now, though, barring one of Hillary's many crimes
finally toppling her, it's not going to happen...
jessthecrip 26 Oct 2016 4:29
Well said George.
The true constitution is plutocracy tempered by scandal
And the shame is we seem to be becoming desensitized to scandal. We cannot be said to live
in democracies when our political class are so obviously bought by the vastly rich.
Remko1 -> UnevenSurface 26 Oct 2016 7:43
You're mixing up your powers. legislative, executive and judicial are the powers of law. Money
and business are some of the keys to stay in command of a country. (there's also military, electorate,
bureaucracy etc.)
And if money is not on your side, it's against you, which gets quite nasty if your main tv-stations
are not state-run.
For example if the EU would (theoretically of course) set rules that make corruption more difficult
you would see that commercial media all over the EU and notoriously corrupted politicians would
start making propaganda to leave the EU. ;)
yamialwaysright chilledoutbeardie 26 Oct 2016 4:38
One of the things it says is that people are so sick of Identity Politics from the Left
and believe the Left are not very true to the ideals of what should be the Left.
When the people who are supposed to care about the poor and working joes and janes prefer
to care about the minorities whose vote they can rely on, the poor and the working joes and janes
will show their frustration by supporting someone who will come along and tell it as it is, even
if he is part of how it got that way.
People throughout the world have awoken to the Left being Right Light but with a more nauseating
moral superiority complex.
Danny Sheahan -> chilledoutbeardie 26 Oct 2016 5:25
That many people are so desperate for change that even being a billionaire but someone outside
the political elite is going to appeal to them.
Tom1Wright 26 Oct 2016 4:32
I find this line of thinking unjust and repulsive: the implication that Trump is a product
of the political establishment, and not an outsider, is to tar the entire Republican party and
its supporters with a great big flag marked 'racist'. That is a gross over simplification and
a total distortion.
UnevenSurface -> Tom1Wright 26 Oct 2016 5:05
But that's not what the article said at all: I quote:
he is not an outsider but the perfect representation of his caste, the caste that runs
the global economy and governs our politics
No mention of the GOP.
Tom1Wright -> UnevenSurface 26 Oct 2016 5:14
and I quote
'Encouraged by the corporate media, the Republicans have been waging a full-spectrum
assault on empathy, altruism and the decencies we owe to other people. Their gleeful stoving
in of faces, their cackling destruction of political safeguards and democratic norms, their
stomping on all that is generous and caring and cooperative in human nature, have turned the
party into a game of Mortal Kombat scripted by Breitbart News.'
HindsightMe 26 Oct 2016 4:33
the truth is there is an anti establishment movement and trump just got caught up in the ride.
He didnt start the movement but latched on to it. While we are still fixated on character flaws
the undercurrent of dissatisfaction by the public is still there. Hillary is going to have a tough
time in trying to bring together a divided nation
leadale 26 Oct 2016 4:37
Many years ago in the British Military, those with the right connections and enough money
could buy an officer's commission and rise up the system to be an incompetent General. As a result,
many battles were mismanaged and many lives wasted due to the incompetent (wealthy privileged
few) buying their way to the top. American politics today works on exactly the same system of
wealthy patronage and privilege for the incompetent, read Clinton and Trump. Until the best candidates
are able to rise up through the political system without buying their way there then the whole
corrupt farce will continue and we will be no different to the all the other tin pot republics
of the world.
arkley leadale 26 Oct 2016 5:48
As Wellington once said on reading the list of officers being sent out to him,
"My hope is that when the enemy reads these names he trembles as I do"
Some would argue however that the British system of bought commissions actually made the army
more effective in part because many competent officers had to stay in the field roles of platoon
and company commanders rather than get staff jobs and through the fact that promotion on merit
did exist for non-commissioned officers but there was a block on rising above sergeant.
Some would argue that the British class system ensured that during the Industrial Revolution
charge hands and foremen were appointed from the best workers but there was no way forward from
that, the result being that the best practices were applied through having the best practitioners
in charge at the sharp end.
rodmclaughlin 26 Oct 2016 4:37
"he is not an outsider but the perfect representation of his caste, the caste that runs the global
economy and governs our politics."
Obviously, Donald Trump is not an "outsider" in the economic
sense. Trump definitely belongs to the ruling "caste", or rather, "class". But he is by no means
the perfect representative of it. "The global economy", or rather, "capitalism", thrives better
with the free movement of (cheap) labour than without it. Economically, poor Americans would be
better off with more immigration control.
And there's more too it than economics. There's the "culture wars" aspect. Many people
don't like being told they are "deplorable" for opposing illegal (or even legal) immigration.
They don't like being called "racist" for disagreeing with an ideology.
I like the phrase Monbiot ends with - "He is our system, stripped of its pretences" - it
reminds me of a phrase in the Communist Manifesto - but I don't think it's true. "Our" system
is more than capitalism, it's culture. And Clinton is a far more "perfect representation" of the
increasingly censorious, narrow [neo]liberal culture which dominates the Western world.
Finally, Monbiot misses the chance to contrast Clinton's and Trump's apparent differences
with regard to confronting nuclear-armed Russia over the skies of Syria. It could be like 1964
all over again - except in this election, the Democrat is the nearest thing to Barry Goldwater.
nishville 26 Oct 2016 4:40
As a life-long despiser of all things Trump, I cannot believe that I am saying this: Trump
is good for world peace. He might be crap for everything else but I for one will sleep much
better if he is elected POTUS.
dylan37 26 Oct 2016 4:40
Agree, for once, with a piece by George. Trump is nothing new - we've seen his kind of faux-outsider
thing before, but he's amplifying it with the skills of a carnival barker and the "what me?" shrug
of the everyman - when we all know he's not. The election result can't be rigged because the game
is fixed from the start. A potential president needs millions of dollars behind them to even think
about running, and then needs to repay those bought favours once in office. Trump may just win
this one though - despite the polls, poor human qualities and negative press - simply because
he's possibly tapped into a rich seam of anti-politics and a growing desire for anything different,
even if it's distasteful and deplorable. It's that difference that might make the difference,
even when it's actually just more of the same. It's all in the packaging.
greenwichite 26 Oct 2016 4:41
Donald Trump is a clumsy, nasty opportunist who has got one thing right - people don't want globalisation.
What people want, is clean, high-tech industries in their own countries, that automate the
processes we are currently offshoring. They would rather their clothes were made by robots in
Rochdale than a sweat-shop in India.
Same goes for energy imports: we want clean, local renewables.
What people don't want is large, unpleasant multinational corporations negotiating themselves
tax cuts and "free trade" with corrupt politicians like Hillary Clinton.
Just my opinion, of course...
TheSandbag -> greenwichite 26 Oct 2016 4:50
Your right about globalisation, but I think wrong about the automation bit. People want Jobs because
its the only way to survive currently and they see them being shipped to the country with the
easiest to exploit workforce. I don't think many of them realize that those jobs are never coming
back. The socioeconomic system we exist in doesn't work for 90% of the population who are surplus
to requirements for sustaining the other 10%.
Shadenfraude 26 Oct 2016 4:43
I fully agree with Monbiot, American democracy is a sham - the lobby system has embedded corruption
right in the heart of its body politic. Lets be clear here though, whatever is the problem with
American democracy can in theory at least be fixed, but Trump simply can not and moreover he is
not the answer.
... ... ...
oddballs 26 Oct 2016 5:24
Trump threatened Ford that if they closed down US car plants and moved them to Mexico he would
put huge import tariffs on their products making them to expensive.
Export of jobs to low wage countries, how do you think Americans feel when they buy 'sports
wear, sweater, t-shirts shoes that cost say 3 $ to import into the US and then get sold for20
or 50 times as much, by the same US companies that moved production out of the country.
The anger many Americans feel how their lively-hoods have been outsourced, is the lake of discontent
Trump is fishing for votes.
His opponent, war child and Wall Street darling can count her lucky stars that the media
leaves her alone (with husband Bill, hands firmly in his pockets, nodding approvingly) and concentrates
on their feeding frenzy attacking Trump on sexual allegations of abusing women, giving Hillery,
Yes, likely to tell lies, ( mendacious, remember when she claimed to be under enemy fire in Bosnia?
remember how evasive she was on the Benghazi attack on the embassy)
Yes Trump is a dangerous man running against an also extremely dangerous woman.
onepieceman 26 Oct 2016 5:31
Extremely interesting reference to the Madison paper, but the issue is less about the size
of the electorate, and more about the power that the election provides to the victor.
One positive outcome that I hope will come of all of this is that people might think a little
more carefully about how much power an incoming president (or any politician) should be given.
The complacent assumption about a permanently benign government is overdue for a shakeup.
peccadillo -> Dean Alexander 26 Oct 2016 5:43
Democracy in the US is so corrupted by money that it is no longer recognisable as democracy.
You can kick individual politicians out of office, but what do you do when the entire structure
of politics is corrupt?
Having missed that bit, I wonder if you actually read the article.
tater 26 Oct 2016 5:46
The sad thing is that the victims of the corrupt economic and political processes are the small
town folk who try to see Trump as their saviour. The globalisation that the US promoted to expand
its hegemony had no safeguards to protect local economies from mega retail and finance corporations
that were left at liberty to strip wealth from localities. The Federal transfer payments that
might have helped compensate have been too small and were either corrupted pork barrel payments
or shameful social security payments. For a culture that prides itself on independent initiative
and self sufficiency this was always painful and that has made it all the easier for the lobbyists
to argue against increased transfer payments and the federal taxes they require. So more money
for the Trumps of this world.
And to the future. The US is facing the serious risk of a military take over. Already its foreign
policy emanates from the military and the corruption brings it ever closer to the corporations.
If the people don't demand better the coup will come.
MrMopp 26 Oct 2016 6:12
There's a reason turnout for presidential elections is barely above 50%.
Wised up, fed up Americans have long known their only choice is between a Coke or Pepsi President.
Well, this time they've got a Dr. Pepper candidate but they still know their democracy is just
a commodity to be bought and sold, traded and paraded; their elections an almost perpetual presidential
circus.
That a grotesque like Trump can emerge and still be within touching distance of the Whitehouse
isn't entirely down to the Democrats disastrous decision to market New Clinton Coke. Although
that's helped.
The unpalatable truth is, like Brexit, many Americans simply want to shake things up and shake
them up bigly, even if it means a very messy, sticky outcome.
Anyone with Netflix can watch the classic film, "Network" at the moment. And it is a film of
the moment.
"I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression.
Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's worth. Banks
are going bust. Shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street
and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it. We know the
air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TVs while some local
newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if
that's the way it's supposed to be.
We know things are bad - worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is
going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living
in is getting smaller, and all we say is: 'Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms.
Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won't say anything. Just leave
us alone.'
Well, I'm not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get MAD! I don't want you to protest. I
don't want you to riot - I don't want you to write to your congressman, because I wouldn't know
what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and
the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you've got to get mad. [shouting]
You've got to say: 'I'm a human being, god-dammit! My life has value!'
So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to
get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell: I'M AS MAD
AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!
I want you to get up right now. Sit up. Go to your windows. Open them and stick your head out
and yell - 'I'm as mad as hell and I'm not gonna take this anymore!' Things have got to change.
But first, you've gotta get mad!...You've got to say, I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO
TAKE THIS ANYMORE! Then we'll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and
the oil crisis. But first, get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and
yell, and say it: I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!"
And that was in 1976. A whole lot of shit has happened since then but essentially, Coke is
still Coke and Pepsi is still Pepsi.
Forty years later, millions are going to get out of their chairs. They are going to vote. For
millions of Americans of every stripe, Trump is the "I'M AS MAD AS HELL AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE
THIS ANYMORE", candidate.
And he's in with a shout.
André De Koning 26 Oct 2016 6:13
Trump is indeed the embodiment of our collective Shadow (As Jung called this unconscious side
of our Self). It does reflect the degeneration of the culture we live in where politics has turned
into a travesty; where all projections of this side are on the Other, the usual other who we can
collectively dislike. All the wars initiated by the US have started with a huge propaganda programme
to hate and project our own Shadow on to this other. Often these were first friends, whether in
Iran or Iraq, Libya: as soon as the oil was not for ""us" , they were depicted as monsters who
needed action: regime change through direct invasion and enormous numbers of war crimes or through
CIA programmed regime change, it all went according to shady plans and manipulation and lies lapped
up by the masses.
When you look at speeches and conversations and debates with the so-called bogeyman, Putin,
he is not at all in a league as low and vile as portrayed and says many more sensible things than
anybody cares to listen to, because we're all brainwashed. We are complicit in wars (now in Syria)
and cannot see why we have to connive with terrorists, tens of thousands of them, and they get
supported by the war machine and friends like Saudis and Turkey which traded for years with ISIS.
The Western culture has become more vile than we could have imagined and slowly, like the frog
in increasingly hot water, we have become used to neglecting most of the population of Syria and
focusing on the rebel held areas, totally unaware of what has happened to the many thousands who
have lived under the occupation by terrorists who come from abroad ad fight the proxy war for
the US (and Saudi and the EU). Trump dares to embody all this, as does Clinton the war hawk,
and shows us we are only capable of seeing one side and project all nastiness outward while we
can feel good about ourselves by hating the other.
It fits the Decline of an Empire image as it did in other Falls of Civilizations.
tashe222 26 Oct 2016 6:28
Lots of virtue signalling from Mr. M.
Trump spoke to the executives at Ford like no one before ever has. He told them if they
moved production to Mexico (as they plan to do) that he would slap huge tariffs on their cars
in America and no one would buy them.
Trump has said many stupid things in this campaign, but he has some independence and is not
totally beholden to vested interests, and so there is at least a 'glimmer' of hope for the future
with him as Potus.
Yes, when the Archdruid first posted that it helped me understand some of the forces that were
driving Trump's successes. I disagree with the idea that voting for Trump is a good idea because
it will bring change to a moribund system. Change is not a panacea and the type of change he is
likely to bring is not going to be pleasant.
Hanwell123 -> ArseButter 26 Oct 2016 6:59
What happens in Syria could be important to us all. Clinton doesn't hide her ambition to
drive Assad from power and give Russia a kicking. It's actually very unpopular although the media
doesn't like to say so; it prefers to lambast Spain for re-fueling Russian war ships off to fight
the crazed Jihadists as if we supported the religious fanatics that want to slaughter all Infidels!
There is an enormous gulf between what ordinary people want and the power crazy Generals in the
Pentagon and NATO.
unsubscriber 26 Oct 2016 6:43
George always writes so beautifully and so tellingly. My favourite sentence from this column is:
Their gleeful stoving in of faces, their cackling destruction of political safeguards and democratic
norms, their stomping on all that is generous and caring and cooperative in human nature, have
turned the party into a game of Mortal Kombat scripted by Breitbart News.
Cadmium 26 Oct 2016 6:51
Trump is not a misogynist, look the word up. He may be crude but that's not the same thing. He
also represents a lot more people than a tiny faction. He is also advocating coming down on lobbying,
which is good. He may be a climate change denier but that's because a lot of his supporters are,
he'd probably change if they did. The way to deal with it is with rational argument, character
assassination is counterproductive even if he himself does it. Although he seems to do it as a
reaction rather than as an attack. He probably has a lot higher chance of winning than most people
think since a lot of people outside the polls will feel represented by him and a lot of those
included in the polls may not vote for Hilary.
ID4755061 26 Oct 2016 6:52
George Monbiot is right. Trump is a conduit for primal stuff that has always been there and never
gone away. All the work that has been done to try to change values and attitudes, to make societies
more tolerant and accepting and sharing, to get rid of xenophobia and racism and the rest, has
merely supressed all these things. Also, while times were good (that hasn't been so for a long
time) most of this subterranean stuff got glossed over most of the time by some kind of feel good
factor and hope for a better future.
But once the protections have gone, if there is nothing to feel good about or there is little
hope left, the primitive fear of other and strange and different kicks back in. It's a basic survival
instinct from a time when everything around the human species was a threat and it is a fundamental
part of us and Trump and Palin at al before him have got this, even if they don't articulate it
this way, and it works and it will always work. It's a pure emotional response to threat that
we can't avoid, the only way out of it, whihc many of use use, is to use our intellects to challenge
the kick of emotion and see it for what it is and to understand the consequences of giving it
free reign. It's this last bit that Trump, Palin, Farage and their ilk just don't get and never
will, we aill always be fighting this fight.
PotholeKid 26 Oct 2016 6:56
Political culture includes the Clintons and Bushes, the Democratic party and Republican party.
exploring that culture using the DNC and Podesta leaks as reference, paints a much better picture
of the depth of depravity this culture represents..Trump is a symptom and no matter how much the
press focuses on maligning his character. The Clintons share a huge responsibility for the corruption
of the system. Mr. Monbiot would serve us well by looking at solutions for cleaning up the mess,
what Trumps likes to call "Draining the swamp"
lonelysoul72 26 Oct 2016 6:59
Trump for me , he is horrendous but Clinton is worse.
nooriginalthought 26 Oct 2016 7:06
"Democracy in the U.S. is so corrupted by money it is no longer recognisable as democracy."
Sounds like a quote from Frank Underwood. To catch a thief sometimes you need the services of
a thief. With a fair degree of certainty we can be sure a Clinton administration will offer us
continuity .
If that is what you think the world needs fine.
If you believe globalization to be of benefit only to the few .
If you believe Russia has no rights to a sphere of influence on its boarders.
If you believe America's self appointed role as world policemen a disaster.
If you believe trade agreements a backdoor to corporate control.
If your just pissed off with politicians .
Your probably going to vote Trump. Looking forward to a long list of articles here in November
prophecies of Armageddon a la brexit. You liberal lefties , you'll never learn. If you want to
know what people are thinking , you got to get out of the echochamber.
nooriginalthought -> aurlius 26 Oct 2016 7:45
Sorry , hate having to explain myself to the dim witted.
USA has got itself in an unholy mess . It's politicians no longer work for the people .
Their paymasters care not if life in Idaho resembles Dantes inferno .
Trump has many faults but being "not Hilary" is not one of them. The very fact he is disliked
by all the vested interests should make you take another look.
And remember , the American constitution has many checks and balances , a President has a lot
less power than most people imagine.
Pinkie123 26 Oct 2016 7:21
While it is impossible to credibly disagree with the general thrust of this, some of Monbiot's
assumptions exemplify problems with left-wing thinking at the moment.
But those traits ensure that he is not an outsider but the perfect representation of his
caste, the caste that runs the global economy and governs our politics. He is our system, stripped
of its pretences.
Like many on the right, the left have unthinkingly accepted a narrative of an organized,
conspiratorial system run by an elite of politicians and plutocrats. The problem with this narrative
is it suggests politics and politicians are inherently nefarious, in turn suggesting there are
no political solutions to be sought to problems, or anything people can do to challenge a global
system of power. As Monbiot asks: "You can kick individual politicians out of office, but what
do you do when the entire structure of politics is corrupt?" Well, what indeed?
I think Monbiot a principled, intelligent left-wing commentator, but at the same time he epitomises
a left-wing retreat into pessimism in the face of a putatively global network of power and inevitable
environmental catastrophe. In reality, while there is no shortage of perfidious, corrupt corporate
interests dominating global economies, there is no organized system or shadowy establishment -
only a chaotic mess rooted in complex political problems. Once you accept that reality, then it
becomes possible to imagine political solutions to the quandaries confronting us. Rather than
just railing against realities, you can envision a new world to replace them. And a new kind of
world is something you very rarely get from the left these days. Unlike the utopian socialists
of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there is little optimism or imagination - just anger,
pessimism and online echo chambers of 'clictivists'.
Like the documentarian Adam Curtis says, once you conclude that all politics is corrupt then
all you can do is sit there impotently and say: 'Oh dear'.
deltajones -> Pinkie123 26 Oct 2016 8:12
I don't think you need to believe in an organised conspiracy and I don't see any real evidence
that George Monbiot does. The trouble is that the corporate and political interests align in a
way that absorbs any attempt to challenge them and the narrative has been written that of course
politics is all about economics and of course we need mighty corporations to sustain us.
Even the left has largely taken on that narrative and it's seen as common sense. Challenging
this belief system is the toughest job that there is and we see that in the howling indignation
hurled at Jeremy Corbyn if he makes the slightest suggestion of nationalisation of the railways,
for instance.
ianfraser3 26 Oct 2016 7:29
Not long after the start of the presidential campaign I began to reflect that in Trump
we are seeing materializing before us the logical result of the neoliberal project, the ultimate
shopping spree, buy an election.
furiouspurpose -> IllusionOfFairness 26 Oct 2016 8:08
The Republican party essentially offered their base nothing – that was the problem.
They couldn't offer all the things that ordinary Americans want – better and wider Medicaid,
better and wider social security, tax increases on the rich, an end to pointless foreign wars
and the American empire. None of these things were acceptable to their funders so that only
left emotional issues – anti-abortion, anti-gay, pro-god, pro-gun. And all of the emotional issues
are on the wrong side of history as the US naturally grows more politically progressive. So the
Republican party couldn't even deliver on the emotionally driven agenda. I think their base realised
that they were being offered nothing – and that's why they turned to Trump. Perhaps a fascist
blowhard could bulldoze the system to deliver on the emotional side of the offer. That's why Trump
broke through
The Democrats have largely the same funding base, but they at least deliver crumbs – at
least a nod to the needs of ordinary people through half-hearted social programmes. In the
end the African Americans decided that Hillary could be relied upon to deliver some crumbs – so
they settled for that. That's why Sanders couldn't break through.
fairleft 26 Oct 2016 7:55
Trump is imperfect because he wants normal relations rather than war with Russia. No, Hillary
Clinton is the ultimate representation of the system that is abusing us. What will occur when
Goldman Sachs and the military-industrial complex coalition get their, what is it, 5th term in
office would be a great subject of many Guardian opinion pieces, actually. But that will have
to wait till after November 8.
Such commentary would be greatly aided the Podesta emails, which enlighten us as to the mind
and 'zeitgeist' of the HIllary team. And, of course, we also have Hillary's Wall Street speeches
-- thanks to Wikileaks we have the complete transcripts, in case Guardian readers are unaware.
They expose the real thinking and 'private positions' of the central character in the next episode
of 'Rule by Plutocracy'.
But, of course, opinion columns and think pieces on the Real Hillary and the Podesta emails
will have to wait ... forever.
toffee1 26 Oct 2016 7:58
Trump shows the true face of the ruling class with no hypocrisy. He is telling us the truth.
If we have a democracy, we should have a party representing the interests of the business class,
why not. The democrats is the party practicing hypocrisy, pretending that they somehow representing
the interest of the working class. They are the ones spreading lies and hypocrisy and manipulating
the working class everyday through their power over the media. Their function is to appease the
working class. The real obstacle for improving conditions for the working class historically has
always been the Democratic party, not the Republican party.
Kikinaskald Cadmium 26 Oct 2016 8:39
In fact presidents don't usually have much affect, they're prey to their advisors. Generally true.
But Obama was able to show that he was able to distance himself up to a certain point from what
was around him. He was aware of the power of the establishment and of their bias. So, when the
wave against Iran was as strong as never before, he made a deal with Iran. He also didn't want
to intervene more actively in Syria and even in what concerns Russia, he seems to have moderate
positions.
In what concerns foreign politics, Trump some times seems more reasonable than Clinton
and the establishment. Clinton is the best coached politician of all times. She doesn't know that
she's coached. She just followed the most radical groups and isn't able to question anything at
all. The only thing that the coaches didn't fix until now is her laughing which is considered
even by her coaches as a sign of weirdness.
Kikinaskald -> J.K. Stevens 26 Oct 2016 9:09
She is considered to be highly aggressive, she pushed for the bombing of a few countries and
intervening everywhere..
Unfortunately all politics in the west is based on a similar model with our own domestic landscape
perhaps most closely resembling that in the US. We've always been peddled convenient lies of course,
but perhaps as society itself becomes more polarised [in terms of distribution of wealth and the
social consequences of that], the dissonance with the manufactured version of reality becomes
ever sharper. It is deeply problematic because traditional popular media is dominated by the wealthy
elite and the reality it depicts is as much a reflection of the consensual outlook of that elite
as it is deliberate, organised mendacity [although there's plenty of that too].
Western economies are now so beholden to the patronage of the essentially stateless multinational,
it has become a political imperative to appease their interests - it's difficult to see a future
in which an administration might resist this force, because at its whim, national economies face
ruination. In light of such helplessness our political representatives face an easier path in
simply accepting their lot as mere administrators who will tinker at the margins [and potentially
reap the rewards of a good servant], rather than hold to principle and resist an overwhelming
force.
Meanwhile the electorate is become increasingly disaffected by this mainstream of politics
who they [rightly] sense is no longer truly representative of their interests in any substantive
way. To this backdrop the media has made notable blunders in securing the status quo. It has revealed
the corruption and self-seeking of many in politics and promoted the widespread distrust of mainstream
politicians for a variety of reasons. While the corruption is real and endemic, howls of protest
against political 'outsiders' from this same press is met with with the view that the political
establishment cannot be trusted engendered by the same sources.
The narrative for Brexit is somewhat similar. For many years the EU was the whipping boy for
all our ills and the idea that it is fundamentally undemocratic in contrast to our own system,
so unchallenged that it is taken for fact, even by the reasonably educated. Whilst I'm personally
deflated and not a little worried by our exit, it comes as little surprise that a distorted perspective
on the EU has led to a revolt against it.
There are of course now very many alternative narratives to those which are the preserve of
monied media magnates, but they're disparate, fractured and unfocused.
Only the malaise has any sort of consistency about it and it is bitterly ironic that figures
like Trump and Farage can so effectively plug into that in the guise of outsiders, to offer spurious
alternatives to that which is so desperately needed. It's gloomy stuff.
Western economies are now so beholden to the patronage of the essentially stateless
multinational, it has become a political imperative to appease their interests - it's difficult
to see a future in which an administration might resist this force, because at its whim, national
economies face ruination. In light of such helplessness our political representatives face
an easier path in simply accepting their lot as mere administrators who will tinker at the
margins [and potentially reap the rewards of a good servant], rather than hold to principle
and resist an overwhelming force.
I have been an advocate of this point for a long time.There is a saying in politics in America
that'' the only difference between a Democrat and a Republican is the speed at which they drop
to their knees when big business walks into the room''.
How it is going to be stopped or indeed if there is the will to do so,I do not know. The proponents
and those who have most to lose have been incredibly successful in propagating the myth that 'you
to can have what I have'and have convinced a sizeable minority that there is no alternative.
Until that changes and is exposed for the illusion that it is ,we are I fear heading for something
far worse than we have now.
"Trump personifies the traits promoted by the media and corporate worlds he affects
to revile; the worlds that created him. He is the fetishisation of wealth, power and image
in a nation where extrinsic values are championed throughout public discourse. His conspicuous
consumption, self-amplification and towering (if fragile) ego are in tune with the dominant
narratives of our age."
Because this is who we are and this is how we role. We got on rickety ships and braved the
cowardly waters to reach these shores, with tremendous realworld uncertainty and absolute religious
zeal. We are the manly men and womanly women who manifested our destiny, endured the cruel nature
naturing, and civilized the wild wild west, at the same time preserving our own wildness and rugged
individualism. Why should we go all soft and namby-pamby with this social safety nonsense? Let
the roadkills expire with dignified indignity on the margins of the social order. We will bequeath
a glorious legacy to the Randian ubermenschen who will inherit this land from us. They will live
in Thielian compounds wearing the trendiest Lululemons. They will regularly admonish their worses
with chants of: "Do you want to live? Pay, pal". If we go soft, if we falter, how will we ever
be able to look in the eye the ghosts of John Wayne, Marion Morrison, Curtis LeMay, Chuck Heston,
Chuck Norris, and the Great Great Ronnie Himself? Gut-check time folks, suck it up and get on
with the program.
"The political constitution of the United States is not, as Madison envisaged, representation
tempered by competition between factions. The true constitution is plutocracy tempered by scandal."
The Founders had a wicked sense of humor. They set up the structure of various branches so
as to allow for the possibility of a future take-over by the Funders. That leaves room for the
exorbitant influence of corporations and wealthy individuals and the rise of the Trumps, leading
to the eventual fall into a Mad Max world.
"Yes, [Trump] is a shallow, mendacious, boorish and extremely dangerous man. But those traits
ensure that he is not an outsider but the perfect representation of his caste, the caste that
runs the global economy and governs our politics. He is our system, stripped of its pretences."
It is irrelevant if everyone sees the emperor/system has no clothes, it quite enjoys walking
around naked now that it has absolute power.
'It is irrelevant if everyone sees the emperor/system has no clothes, it quite enjoys
walking around naked now that it has absolute power.'
Yes, they don't care any more if we see the full extent of their corruption as we've given
up our power to do anything about it.
chiefwiley -> Luftwaffe 26 Oct 2016 9:31
It was once very common to see Democratic politicians as neighbors attending every community
event. They were Teamsters, pipe fitters, and electricians. And they were coaches and ushers and
pallbearers. Now they are academics and lawyers and NGO employees and managers who pop up during
campaigns.
The typical income of the elected Democrats outside their government check is north of $100,000.
They don't live in, or even wander through, the poorer neighborhoods. So they are essentially
clueless that government services like busses are run to suit government and not actual customers.
It's sort of nice to have somebody looking after our interests in theory, but it would
be at least polite if they deemed to ask us what we think our best interests are. Notice the nasty
names and attributes being hurled at political "dissidents," especially around here, and there
should be little wonder why many think the benevolent and somewhat single minded and authoritarian
left is at least part of their problems.
ghstwrtrx7 -> allblues 26 Oct 2016 14:02
Yea, 15 years of constant wars of empire with no end in sight has pretty much ran this
country in the ground.
We all talk about how much money is wasted by the federal government on unimportant endeavors
like human services and education, but don't even bat an eye about the sieve of money that is
the Pentagon.
Half a trillion dollars for aircraft carriers we don't need and are already obsolete. China
is on the verge of developing wickedly effective anti-ship missiles designed specifically to target
these Gerald R. Ford-class vessels. You might as well paint a huge bull's-eye on these ships'
4-1/2 acre flight deck.
And then there there's the most egregious waste of money our historically over-bloated defense
budget has ever seen: The Lockheed-Martin F-35 Lightening II Joint Strike Fighter. Quite a mouthful,
isn't? When you hear how much this boondoggle costs the American taxpayer, you'll choke: $1.5
Trillion, with a t. What's even more retching is that aside from already being obsolete, it doesn't
even work.
There are plenty more examples of this crap and this doesn't even include the nearly TWO
trillion dollars we've spent this past decade-and-a-half on stomping flat the Middle East and
large swaths of the Indian subcontinent.
And all this time, our nation's infrastructure is crumbling literally right out from underneath
us and millions upon millions of children and their families experience a daily struggle just
to eat. Eat?! In the "greatest," wealthiest nation on earth and we prefer to kill people at weddings
with drones than feed our own children.
I can't speak for anyone else other than myself, but that, boys and girls, has a decided miasma
of evil about it.
transplendent 26 Oct 2016 9:49
I'd like to read an unbiased piece about why the media narrative doesn't match the reality
of the Trump phenomenon. He is getting enormous crowds attend his rallies but hardly any coverage
of that in the filtered news outlets. Hillary, is struggling to get anyone turn up without paying
them. There is no real enthusiasm.
If Hillary doesn't win by a major landslide (and I mean BIGLY) as the MSM would lead us to
believe she is going to, it could be curtains for the media, as what little credibility that is
not already swirling around the plughole will disappear down it once and for all.
The buzzwords and tired old catch phrases and cliches used by the left to suppress any
alternative discussion, and divert from their own misdemeanors are fooling no one but themselves.
Trump supporters simply don't care any more how Hillary supporters explain that she lied about
dodging sniper fire. Or the numerous other times she and her cohorts have been caught out telling
fibs.
leftofstalin 26 Oct 2016 10:06
Sorry George YOU and the chattering classes you represent are the reason for the rise of the
far right blinded by the false promises of new labour and it's ilk the working classes have been
demonized as striking troublemakers benefit frauds racists uneducated bigots etc etc and going
by the comments on these threads from remainders you STILL don't understand the psyche of the
working class
Gary Ruddock 26 Oct 2016 10:07
When Obama humiliated Trump at that dinner back in 2011 he may have set a course for his own
destruction. Lately, Obama does not appear anywhere near as confident as he once did.
Perhaps Trump has seen the light, seen the error of his ways, maybe he realizes if he doesn't
stand up against the system, then no one will.
transplendent 26 Oct 2016 10:38
Trump's only crime, is he buys into the idea of national identity and statehood (along with
every other nation state in the world mind you), and Hillary wants to kick down the doors and
hand over the US to Saudi Arabia and any international vested interest who can drop a few dollars
into the foundation coffers. I can't see Saudi Arabia throwing open the doors any day soon, unless
it is onto a one way street.
N.B. The Russians are not behind it.
gjjwatson 26 Oct 2016 11:10
Very true. Throughout history the rich, the powerful, the landed, ennobled interest and
their friends in the Law and money changing houses have sought to control governments and have
usually succeeded.
In the Media today the rich are fawned over by sycophantic journalists and programme makers.
These are the people who make the political weather and create the prevailing narratives.
I remember when President Reagan railed against government whilst he was in office, he said
the worst words a citizen could hear were "I`m from the government, I`m here to help you".
Working class people fancied themselves to above the common herd and thought themselves
part of some elite.
All of this chimes of course with American history and it`s constitution written by slave owning
colonists who proclaimed that "all men are created equal".
bonhiver 26 Oct 2016 12:10
It's quite disturbing the lengths this paper will go to in order to slur and discredit
Trump, labelling him dangerous and alluding to the sexual assault allegations. This even goes
so far to a very lengthy article regarding Trumps lack of knowledge on the Rumbelows Cup 25 years
ago.
Whereas very little examination is made into Hillary Clinton's background which includes
serious allegation of fraud and involvement in assisting in covering up her husband's alleged
series of rapes. There are also issues in the wikileaks emails that merit analysis as well as
undercover tapes of seioau issues with her campaign team.
Whereas it is fair to criticise Trump for a lot of stuff it does appear that there is no attempt
at balance as Clinton's faults appear to get covered up om this paper.
Whereas I can not vote in the US elections and therefore the partisan reporting has no substantive
effect on how I may vote or act it is troubling that a UK newspaper does not provide the reader
with an objective as possible reporting on the presidential race.
It suggests biased reporting elsewhere.
thevisitor2015 26 Oct 2016 12:46
One of the most important characteristics of the so-called neoliberalism is its negative
selection. While mostly successfully camouflaged, that negative selection is more than obvious
this time, in two US presidential candidates. It's hard to imagine lower than those two.
seamuspadraig 26 Oct 2016 13:37
Well, OK George. Tell me: if Trump's such an establishment candidate, then why does the
whole of the establishment unanimously reject him? Is it normal for Republicans (such as the Bushes
and the neocons) to endorse Democrats? Why does even the Speaker of the House (a Republican) and
even, on occasion, Trump's own Vice-Presidential nominee seem to be trying to undermine his campaign?
If Trump is really just more of the same as all that came before, why is he being treated different
by the MSM and the political establishment?
Obviously, there's something flawed about your assumption.
CharlesPDXOr -> seamuspadraig 26 Oct 2016 13:58
I think the answer to your question is in the article: because Trump has brought the truth
of the monied class into the open. He is a perfect example of all that class is and tries to pretend
it is not. And when the commoners see this in front of them, a whole lot of them are disgusted
by it. That doesn't sit well back in the country club and the boardroom, where they work so hard
to keep all of that behind closed doors. They hate him because he is one of them and is spilling
the beans on all of them.
bill9651 26 Oct 2016 13:01
Trump has exposed the corruption of the political system and the media and has promised to
put a stop to it. By contrast, Clinton is financed by the very banks, corporates and financial
elites who are responsible for the corruption. This Trump speech is explicit on what we all suspected
is going on. Everybody should watch it, irrespective of whether they support him or not!
Michael Moore explaining why a lot of people like him
"I know a lot of people in Michigan that are planning to vote for Trump and they don't necessarily
agree with him. They're not racist or redneck, they're actually pretty decent people and so after
talking to a number of them I wanted to write this.
Donald Trump came to the Detroit Economic Club and stood there in front of Ford Motor executives
and said "if you close these factories as you're planning to do in Detroit and build them in Mexico,
I'm going to put a 35% tariff on those cars when you send them back and nobody's going to buy
them." It was an amazing thing to see. No politician, Republican or Democrat, had ever said anything
like that to these executives, and it was music to the ears of people in Michigan and Ohio and
Pennsylvania and Wisconsin - the "Brexit" states.
You live here in Ohio, you know what I'm talking about. Whether Trump means it or not, is kind
of irrelevant because he's saying the things to people who are hurting, and that's why every beaten-down,
nameless, forgotten working stiff who used to be part of what was called the middle class loves
Trump. He is the human Molotov Cocktail that they've been waiting for; the human hand grande that
they can legally throw into the system that stole their lives from them. And on November 8, although
they lost their jobs, although they've been foreclose on by the bank, next came the divorce and
now the wife and kids are gone, the car's been repoed, they haven't had a real vacation in years,
they're stuck with the shitty Obamacare bronze plan where you can't even get a fucking percocet,
they've essentially lost everything they had except one thing - the one thing that doesn't cost
them a cent and is guaranteed to them by the American constitution: the right to vote.
They might be penniless, they might be homeless, they might be fucked over and fucked up it doesn't
matter, because it's equalized on that day - a millionaire has the same number of votes as the
person without a job: one. And there's more of the former middle class than there are in the millionaire
class. So on November 8 the dispossessed will walk into the voting booth, be handed a ballot,
close the curtain, and take that lever or felt pen or touchscreen and put a big fucking X in the
box by the name of the man who has threatened to upend and overturn the very system that has ruined
their lives: Donald J Trump.
They see that the elite who ruined their lives hate Trump. Corporate America hates Trump. Wall
Street hates Trump. The career politicians hate Trump. The media hates Trump, after they loved
him and created him, and now hate. Thank you media: the enemy of my enemy is who I'm voting for
on November 8.
Yes, on November 8, you Joe Blow, Steve Blow, Bob Blow, Billy Blow, all the Blows get to go
and blow up the whole goddamn system because it's your right. Trump's election is going to be
the biggest fuck you ever recorded in human history and it will feel good."
Michael Moore
Debreceni 26 Oct 2016 14:15
Mrs Clinton is also the product of our political culture. A feminist who owes everything
to her husband and men in the Democratic Party. A Democrat who started her political career as
a Republican; a civil right activist who worked for Gerry Goldwater, one of last openly racist/segregationist
politicians. A Secretary of State who has no clue about, or training in, foreign policy, and who
received her position as compensation for losing the election. A pacifist, who has never had a
gun in her hands, but supported every war in the last twenty years. A humanist who rejoiced over
Qaddafi's death ("we came, we won, he is dead!") like a sadist.
Both candidates have serious weaknesses. Yet Trump is very much an American character, his
vices and weaknesses are either overlooked, or widely shared, secretively respected and even admired
(even by those who vote against him). Clinton's arrogance, elitism and hypocrisy, coupled with
her lack of talent, charisma and personality, make her an aberration in American politics.
BabylonianSheDevil03 26 Oct 2016 15:26
One thing that far right politics offers the ordinary white disaffected voter is 'pay back',
it is a promised revenge-fest, putting up walls, getting rid of foreigners, punishing employers
of foreigners, etc., etc. All the stuff that far right groups have wet dreams about.
Farage used the same tactics in the UK. Le Pen is the same.
Because neoliberal politics has left a hell of a lot of people feeling pissed off, the
far right capitalizes on this, whilst belonging to the same neoliberal dystopia so ultimately
not being able to make good on their promises. Their promises address a lot of people's anger,
which of course isn't really about foreigners at all, that is simply the decoy, but cutting through
all the crap to make that clear is no easy task, not really sure how it can be done, certainly
no political leader in the western hemisphere has the ability to do so.
ProseBeforeHos 26 Oct 2016 15:45
"But those traits ensure that he is not an outsider but the perfect representation of his caste,
the caste that runs the global economy and governs our politics."
Wrong as always. Trump *is* an outsider. He's an unabashed nationalist who's set him up
against the *actual* caste that governs our politics: Neo-liberal internationalists with socially
trendy left-liberal politics (but not so left that they don't hire good tax lawyers to avoid paying
a fraction of what they are legally obliged to).
Best represented in the Goldman Sachs executives who are donating millions to Hillary Clinton
because they are worried about Trump's opposition to free trade, and they know she will give them
*everything* they want.
Trumps the closest thing we're gotten to a genuine threat to the system in a long, long
time, so of course George Monbiot and the rest of the Guardian writers has set themselves against
him, because if you're gonna be wrong about the EU, wrong about New Labour, wrong about social
liberalism, wrong about immigration, why change the habit of a lifetime?
aofeia1224 26 Oct 2016 16:09
"What is the worst thing about Donald Trump? The lies? The racist stereotypes? The misogyny?
The alleged gropings? The apparent refusal to accept democratic outcomes?"
Lies: Emails, policy changes based on polls showing a complete lack of conviction, corporate
collusion, Bosnia, Clinton Foundation, war mongering, etc.
Racist stereotypes: Super predators. Misogyny: Aside from her laughing away her pedophile case
and allegedly threatening the women who came out against Bill, you've also got this sexist gem
"Women are the primary victims of war".
Alleged gropings: Well she's killed people by texting. So unless your moral compass is
so out of whack that somehow a man JOKING about his player status in private is worse than Clinton's
actions throughout her political career, then I guess you could make the case that Clinton at
least doesn't have this skeleton in her closet.
Refusal to accept democratic outcomes: No. He's speaking out against the media's collusion
with the democratic party favoring Clinton over every other nominee, including Bernie Sanders.
He's talking about what was revealed in the DNC leaks and the O'Keefe tapes that show how dirty
the tactics have been in order to legally persuade the voting public into electing one person
or the other.
Besides that, who cares about his "refusal" to accept the outcome? The American people protested
when Bush won in 2000 saying it was rigged. Same goes with Obama saying the same "anti democratic"
shit back in 2008 in regards to the Bush Administration.
Pot call kettle black
caravanserai 26 Oct 2016 16:16
Republicans are crazy and their policies make little sense. Neo-conservatism? Trickle down
economics? Getting the poor to pay for the mess created by the bankers in 2008? Trump knows what
sells to his party's base. He throws them red meat. However, the Democrats are not much better.
They started to sell out when Bill Clinton was president. They pretend to still be the party of
the New Deal, but they don't want to offend Wall Street. US democracy is in trouble.
rooolf 26 Oct 2016 16:24
When do the conspiracy theories about the criminality of his opponent no longer count as
conspiracies? When we have a plethora of emails confirming there is indeed fire next to that smoke,
corruption fire, collusion fire, fire of contempt for the electorate. When we have emails confirming
the Saudi Arabians are actually funding terrorist schools across the globe, emails where Hilary
herself admits it, but will not say anything publicly about terrorism and Saudi Arabia, what's
conspiracy and what's reality?
Is it because Saudi Arabia funded her foundation with $23 million, or because it doesn't
fit with her great 'internationalists' global agenda?
Either way there seems to be some conspiring of some sort
When is it no longer theory? And where does the guardian fit into this corrupted corporate
media idea?
Yep trump is a buffoon, but the failure of all media to deliver serious debate means the
US is about to elect someone probably more dangerous than trump, how the hell can that be
What the author overlooks is the media's own complicity in allowing this to develop
Unfortunately the corruption of the system is so entrenched it takes an abnormality like trump
to challenge it
Hard to believe, but trump is a once in a lifetime opportunity to shake shit up, not a pleasant
one, in fact a damn ugly opportunity, but the media shut him down, got all caught up in self preservation
and missed the opportunity
it what comes next that is scary
BScHons -> rooolf 26 Oct 2016 17:09
Nothing wrong with a liberal internationalist utopia, it sounds rather good and worth striving
for. It's just that what they've been pushing is actually a neoliberal globalist nirvana for the
1 per cent
rooolf BScHons 26 Oct 2016 17:17
Totally agree
The problem is the left this paper represents were bought off with the small change by
neoliberalism, and they expect the rest of us to suck it up so the elites from both sides can
continue the game
Talking about the environment and diversity doesn't cut it
mrjonno 26 Oct 2016 17:02
Well said as ever George. Humanity is in a total mess as we near the end of the neoliberal
model. That the USA has a choice between two 'demopublicans' is no choice at all.
I would go further in your analysis - media controlled by these sociopaths has ensured that our
society shares the same values - we are a bankrupt species as is.
As long as you are here to provide sensible analysis, along with Peter Joseph, I have hope
that we can pull out of the nosedive that we are currently on a trajectory for.
Thank you for your sane input into an otherwise insane world. Thank you Mr Monbiot.
annedemontmorency 26 Oct 2016 19:08
We'll ignore the part about the inability to accept democratic outcomes since that afflicts
so many people and organisations - Brexit , anyone?
More to the point is how the summit of US politics produces candidates like Trump and Clinton.
Clinton is suffering the same damage the LibDems received during their coalition with the Tories
.Proximity to power exposed their inadequacies and hypocrisy in both cases.
Trump - unbelievably - remains a viable candidate but only because Hillary Clinton reeks of
graft and self interest.
The obvious media campaign against Trump could also backfire - voters know a hatchet job when
they see one - they watch House of Cards.
But politics is odd around the whole world.
The Guardian is running a piece about the Pirate party in Iceland.
Why go so far? - the most remarkable coup in recent politics was UKIP forcing a vote on the
EU which it not only won it did so in spite of only ever having ONE MP out of 630.
Trump may be America's UKIP - he resembles them in so many ways.
ID6209069 26 Oct 2016 20:35
It's possible that something like this was inevitable, in a nation which is populated by "consumers"
rather than as citizens. There are "valuable demographics" versus those that aren't worthy of
the attention of the constant bombardment of advertising. I jokingly said last year that as I
was turning 55 last year, I am no longer in the 'coveted 29-54 demo'. My worth as a consumer has
been changed merely by reaching a certain age, so I now see fewer ads about cars and electronics
and more about prescription medicines. The product of our media is eyeballs, not programs or articles.
The advertising is the money maker, the content merely a means of luring people in for a sales
pitch, not to educate or inform. If that structure sells us a hideous caricature of a successful
person and gives him political power, as long as the ad dollars keep rolling in.
GreyBags 26 Oct 2016 21:19
This is the culmination of living in a post-truth political world. Lies and smears, ably
supported by the corporate media and Murdoch in particular means that the average person who doesn't
closely follow politics is being misinformed.
The complete failure of right wing economic 'theories' means they only have lies, smears
and the old 'divide and conquer' left in their arsenal. 'Free speech' is their attempt to get
lies and smears equal billing with the truth. All truth on the other hand must be suppressed.
All experts and scientists who don't regurgitate the meaningless slogans of the right will be
ignored, traduced, defunded, disbanded or silenced by law.
We see the same corrupted philosophy in Australia as well.
JamesCameron 7d ago
Yet Trump, the "misogynist, racist and bigot"' has more women in executive and managerial positions
than any comparable company, pays these women the same or more than their male counterparts and
fought the West Palm Beach City Council to be allowed to open his newly purchased club to blacks
and Jews who had been banned until then. I suspect his views do chime with Americans fed up with
political correctness gone mad as well as the venality of the administration of Barak Obama, a
machine politician with dodgy bagmen from Chicago – the historically corrupt city in Illinois,
the most corrupt state in the Union. Finally, unlike The Hilary, he has actually held down a job,
worked hard and achieved success and perhaps they are more offended by what she does than what
he says.
aucourant 7d ago
Not so much an article about Trump as much as a rant. George Monbiot writes with the utter
conviction of one who mistakenly believes that his readers share his bigotry. When he talks about
the 'alleged gropings' or the 'alleged refusal to accept democratic outcomes', that is exactly
what they are 'alleged'.
The Democratic Party has been dredging up porn-stars and wannabe models who now make claims
that Trump tried to 'kiss them without asking'. This has become the nightly fare of the mainstream
media in the USA. At the same time the media ignores the destruction of Clinton's emails, the
bribing of top FBI officials who are investigating the destroyed tapes and the giving of immunity
to all those who aided Clinton in hiding and destroying subpoenaed evidence.
The press also ignored the tapes of the DNC paying thugs to cause violence at Trump rallies,
the bribes paid to the Clintons for political favours and the stealing of the election from Bernie
Sanders. Trump is quite right to think the 'democratic outcome' is being fixed. Not only were
the votes for Sanders manipulated, but Al Gore's votes were also altered and manipulated to ensure
a win for Bush in the 2000 presidential election. The same interests who engineered the 2000 election
have switched from supporting the Republican Party to supporting Clinton.
Anomander64 6d ago
Great article. The neoliberals have been able to control the narrative and in doing so
have managed to scapegoat all manner of minority groups, building anger among those disaffected
with modern politics. Easy targets - minorities, immigrants, the poor, the disadvantaged and the
low-paid workers.
The real enemy here are those sitting atop the corporate tree, but with the media controlled
by them, the truth is never revealed.
mochilero7687 5d ago
Perhaps next week George will write in detail about all the scandals Hildabeast has caused
and been involved in over the past 40 years - which have cost the US govt tens of millions of
dollars and millions of man hours - but I won't be holding my breath.
"... About three minutes into her 20-minute stump speech, a heckler shouted, "Bill Clinton is a rapist!" as he waved a neon green sign declaring the same statement. ..."
Hillary Clinton raged Tuesday night against a protester at her rally who denounced her husband
as a sexual predator.
About three minutes into her 20-minute stump speech, a heckler shouted, "Bill Clinton is a rapist!"
as he waved a neon green sign declaring the same statement.
Clinton pointed a finger at the protester.
"I am sick and tired of the negative, dark, divisive, dangerous vision and behavior of people
who support Donald Trump," Clinton shouted at her Fort Lauderdale, Fla., rally.
It's not uncommon for "rapist" protesters to show up at Clinton rallies, but the Democratic nominee
offered a rare reaction.
Trump shows the true face of the ruling class with no hypocrisy. He is telling us the
truth. If we have a democracy, we should have a party representing the interests of the
business class, why not.
The democrats is the party practicing hypocrisy, pretending that
they somehow representing the interest of the working class. They are the ones spreading lies
and hypocrisy and manipulating the working class everyday through their power over the media.
Their function is to appease the working class. The real obstacle for improving conditions for
the working class historically has always been the Democratic party, not the Republican party.
"... It also demands Brock "immediately and publicly retract any statement or inference by yourself and/or Media Matters to the effect that Officer Byrne was not fully truthful in recounting within 'Crisis of Character' details from any previous testimony." ..."
"... His lawyer states that "some of our best witnesses to such immediacy are George Stephanopoulos, John Podesta, Leon Panetta, Bruce Lindsey, Hillary Rodham Clinton and President Clinton himself - who appear to have already confirmed … under oath … the regular proximity of Officer Byrne to the President for many years." ..."
"... Byrne claims the liberal advocacy group tried to hurt his credibility to defend the Clintons. ..."
"Officer Byrne will bring legal action against you, in your personal capacity, and against Media
Matters," a lawyer for the former Secret Service officer wrote to Brock, a loyal Clinton ally and
the founder of the liberal advocacy group Media Matters.
The letter requests Brock and Media Matters to "hold" all records and communications associated
with their communications regarding Byrne - including "Any communication(s) between David Brock and
The Honorable Hillary Rodham Clinton" regarding the former Secret Service officer, suggesting there
might be collusion between the campaign and her defenders.
It also demands Brock "immediately and publicly retract any statement or inference by yourself
and/or Media Matters to the effect that Officer Byrne was not fully truthful in recounting within
'Crisis of Character' details from any previous testimony."
Additionally, Byrne's attorney demanded a retraction for "the utterly false statement(s) that
Officer Byrne was not in close proximity to President William Jefferson Clinton."
His lawyer states that "some of our best witnesses to such immediacy are George Stephanopoulos,
John Podesta, Leon Panetta, Bruce Lindsey, Hillary Rodham Clinton and President Clinton himself -
who appear to have already confirmed … under oath … the regular proximity of Officer Byrne to the
President for many years."
Byrne claims the liberal advocacy group tried to hurt his credibility to defend the Clintons.
In ''A Burden Too Heavy to Put Down,'' * David Brooks
writes, ''Inevitably, there will be atrocities'' committed by
our forces in Iraq. Did he forget to add that they must be
prosecuted?
War crimes are indeed more likely if influential
commentators foreshadow impunity for perpetrators of the
''brutal measures our own troops will have to adopt.''
The choice is not between committing war crimes and
retreating ''into the paradise of our own innocence.'' A
third option is for the United States to strive to avoid
complicity.
It is untrue that ''we have to take morally hazardous
action.'' Those who choose it, or urge others to, cannot
evade or distribute responsibility by asserting that ''we
live in a fallen world.''
If HRC wins, we have war with Russia, including possibly WW3. That makes environmental issues
moot.
Separately, HRC will not even agree to a carbon tax, she lobbied for two giant polluting coal
plants in South Africa, and she promotes fracking worldwide.
"... With US belief in "conspiracy theory" over 50 percent (see our previous article here ) elites are showing increasingly concern that they have lost control of their narrative. ..."
"... The article explains that if people grow paranoid about government, then the "norms" of government will collapse. ..."
"... The article also has parallels to an article we analyzed recently here by Cass Sunstein. His Bloomberg editorial suggested that nothing was more important from a political standpoint than returning "civility" to Congress and politics generally. ..."
"... The NeoCons will take the United States in the same direction it is going until its' bust. Endless war, run down infrastructure and poverty is the future. Tax receipts are falling fast and government can't pay the big bills with service sector jobs. ..."
"... Decommissioning the plethora of foreign airbases and dismantling NATO would see the Bankster/MIC die a death. Gotta starve those beasts pronto. ..."
"... "Conspiracy theory is called "paranoid politics" in this article but it amounts to the same thing." ..."
"... "conspiracy theory" ..."
"... "paranoid" ..."
"... "we should" ..."
"... "paranoid politics" ..."
"... "good" ..."
"... necessarily controlled ..."
"... "The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost invariably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And if he is not romantic personally, he is apt to spread discontent among those who are." ..."
With US belief in "conspiracy theory" over 50 percent (see our previous article
here ) elites are showing increasingly concern that they have lost control of their narrative.
This article again illustrates elite push back. The article explains that if people grow paranoid
about government, then the "norms" of government will collapse.
Conspiracy theory is called "paranoid politics" in this article but it amounts to the same thing.
The article also has parallels to an article we analyzed recently
here
by Cass Sunstein. His Bloomberg editorial suggested that nothing was more important from a political
standpoint than returning "civility" to Congress and politics generally.
This article runs along the same lines: Negative perceptions of the US government can make the
process of "governing" dysfunctional.
Herdee •Nov 1, 2016 12:13 AM
The NeoCons will take the United States in the same direction it is going until its' bust.
Endless war, run down infrastructure and poverty is the future. Tax receipts are falling fast
and government can't pay the big bills with service sector jobs.
WTFUD •Oct 31, 2016 11:14 PM
Major Civil Unrest is required in the USSofA to alleviate the pressure on Russia, the Elites'
would be bogeyman. The rest of the world would benefit too.
Decommissioning the plethora of foreign airbases and dismantling NATO would see the Bankster/MIC
die a death. Gotta starve those beasts pronto.
PoasterToaster •Oct 31, 2016 10:30 PM
Bankers hiding behind "government" and using the moral authority it carries in people's heads
to carry out their dirty deeds. But now the people have seen behind the curtain and the dope at
the controls has been found wanting. Writing is on the wall for them and they know it.
"The rise of paranoid politics could make America ungovernable"
We in America aren't supposed to be "governed". And our state of mind is none of your goddamned
business.
One of the most delightful ironies (to those with a sufficiently macabre sense of humour) is that
declassified CIA documents from the 1960s have proven that the mass media promotion of the
"conspiracy theory" meme was deliberately developed by the CIA, using their media assets.
Many people have developed ways to discuss the relatively slim differences between being "paranoid"
versus being realistic. After several decades of enjoying the luxury to
spend most of my time attempting to understand the political processes, my conclusion has always
been that THE MORE I LEARNED, THE WORSE IT GOT.
It is barely possible to exaggerate the degree to which "we should" seriously consider
"paranoid politics" as being the most realistic. Governments
are only "good" in the sense that they are the biggest forms of organized crime,
dominated by the best organized gangs of criminals. In my view, that conclusion can both
be derived from the basic principles of the ways that general energy systems operate, as well
as empirically confirmed by an overwhelming abundance of well-documented evidence. Indeed, more
rational evidence and logical arguments result in that any deeper analysis of politics ALWAYS
discovers and demonstrates the ways that civilization is necessarily controlled
by applications of the methods of organized crime, whose excessive successfulness are more and
more spinning out of control.
As H.L. Menchen stated:
"The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out
for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost invariably
he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and
intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And if he is not romantic
personally, he is apt to spread discontent among those who are."
The important things which most governments DO,
that are "dishonest, insane and intolerable,"
are ENFORCE FRAUDS by private banks.
Given those social FACTS, it is barely possible to develop a sufficiently
"paranoid politics," to encompass the degree to which the existing
political economy, based upon enforcing frauds, is being driven by advancing technologies
towards becoming exponentially more fraudulent. The problem is NOT that some
people are becoming too critical, but that the majority of them have not yet become critical enough
... "We need" to go beyond being merely superficially cynical, in order to become profoundly
cynical enough to perhaps cope with how and why governments ARE the biggest forms of organized
crime, dominated by the best organized gangs of criminals.
In my view, most of the content published on Zero Hedge, which engages in various
superficially correct analyses of those problems, tends to never engage in deeper levels of analysis,
due to the degree to which the resulting conclusions are way worse than anything which could be
adequately admitted and addressed. Rather, it is barely possible to exaggerate the degree to which
one is justifiably paranoid about the ways that the ruling classes in
Globalized Neolithic Civilization are becoming increasingly psychotic psychopaths:
THE EXCESSIVE SUCCESSFULNESS OF CONTROLLING CIVILIZATION
BY APPLICATIONS OF THE VARIOUS METHODS OF ORGANIZED CRIME
HAS RESULTED IN CIVILIZATION MANIFESTING CRIMINAL INSANITY!
Radical Marijuana -> medium giraffe •Nov 1, 2016 12:25 AM
Yes, mg, the CIA, in ways which were, of course, ILLEGAL, attempted to discredit those who
did not believe the official story regarding the assination of President Kennedy.
The most relevant conclusion of that documentary was that, at the highest levels, there is
no difference, because they blend together, between organized crime and government agencies such
as the CIA, which was effectively the American branch of the secret police employed by the international
bankers.
"... "And Valerie Jarrett was under explicit orders – I know people say, 'Well, you never really tell the Attorney General exactly what to do; you kind of wink.' There was no wink. She was told in no uncertain terms, according to my sources, that under no circumstances should Hillary Clinton be indicted because Barack Obama wants desperately for Hillary Clinton to succeed him in the White House, and not to have Donald Trump in the White House because Donald Trump will completely undo everything that Obama thinks is his legacy," he added. ..."
"... Obama's real endgame is to get Clinton over the finish line in the 2016 election, then let her running mate, Tim Kaine, the "real Obama guy," take over if she's removed from office. ..."
"... Tim Kaine and the Clintons were never good friends because Tim Kaine backed Obama in 2008 against Hillary, and one of the deals for Obama to back Hillary this time was for her to pick Tim Kaine, Obama's boy, as her vice president." ..."
"In my view, what has not been reported, and what I think is very significant, is that we've all
forgotten that Anthony Weiner is under investigation for what amounts to child pornography, alleged
child pornography," said Klein.
"Now, if he's found guilty on multiple charges, they can put him away for life because each
charge brings 15, 20 years. So if you're his attorney, you say to him, 'Tony, what can you give the
prosecutors in exchange for bringing down the number of years you're gonna have to serve?' And it's
my view that what he offered them was the computer, and that in exchange, he has gotten an agreement
to reduce his charges," he speculated.
"This computer apparently was unknown to the FBI, and I think the reason that it took two, three,
or even four weeks between the time that they stumbled on this computer – because Weiner made it
available in exchange for a deal – and the time that [James] Comey knew about it, the director of
the FBI, was because they were in the process of cutting this arrangement," Klein continued.
"Finally, it came to Comey's attention, as we know, and it became obvious to him and imperative
to him that he do something about it – because if he didn't, can you imagine what would happen after
the election, and it became knowledge that he knew about this, did nothing about it? Clearly, the
Congress would open a probe of the FBI and why it did nothing about it. And Comey would be, not only
on the hot seat, but perhaps even impeachable. So I think that this is the untold story of behind-the-scenes
maneuvering on these emails," he said.
Klein was convinced the allegations of Weiner "sexting" with underage children were "the alpha
and the omega of this whole story" because "otherwise, this computer would never have come to light."
Another factor Klein highlighted was the revolt among FBI agents angry at political interference
in their investigations of Hillary Clinton.
"That's not my opinion; this is my reporting," he said. "My reporting indicates from several sources
that the atmosphere at the FBI has never been, the morale has never been lower, that there is a stack,
literally a stack of resignations waiting on Comey's desk for him to sign, which he has yet to do,
that people, when they meet him in the hallway, and he says, 'Good morning' to them, many of them
don't even reply because they're not talking to him; that the sense within the FBI is that he disgraced
the institution back in July, when he knew quite well, obviously, that Mrs. Clinton had violated
not one, but several federal statutes in jeopardizing national security, and raked her over the coals
verbally – and then, for reasons that I think had to do with his not wanting to interfere in the
presidential race, let her off legally."
"Many of the people in the FBI thought that that was disgraceful," Klein asserted. "I think he's
been under huge pressure ever since to redeem himself. I'm told his wife even – who is not only his
most personal, deepest relationship, but also a major adviser in his career – has been telling him,
'Jim, you've got to do something about this.'"
"This is a guy who goes to church every Sunday. He's an evangelical Catholic," he said of Comey.
"He gets on his knees every night, prays to God, prays about his dead child that he lost, two or
three days after the child was born, believes deeply in his own moral rectitude and constantly thinks
that he is on the side of the angels. And I think he felt that what he did this time around, which
was to send this letter to the Congress, was the highest right, moral thing to do. Whether it was
or not, I think that's what motivated him."
Marlow suggested Comey would not have reopened the Clinton investigation "unless he knows he's
got the goods."
"I agree with you. I think the disgrace is not James Comey. I think the disgrace is the White
House and the Justice Department because as I report in my book Guilty as Sin, despite what
Loretta Lynch said about how independent she was or is, she and Valerie Jarrett were having secret
meetings last summer about the email investigation, keeping the President and the White House up
to date on everything that Jim Comey was doing," Klein said.
"And Valerie Jarrett was under explicit orders – I know people say, 'Well, you never really
tell the Attorney General exactly what to do; you kind of wink.' There was no wink. She was told
in no uncertain terms, according to my sources, that under no circumstances should Hillary Clinton
be indicted because Barack Obama wants desperately for Hillary Clinton to succeed him in the White
House, and not to have Donald Trump in the White House because Donald Trump will completely undo
everything that Obama thinks is his legacy," he added.
"So I think the disgrace is the Attorney General, and the Attorney General trying to interfere
with the FBI's investigations – both of the emails and the Clinton Foundation," Klein reiterated.
Marlow mentioned a theory proposed by Breitbart News Daily callers that Obama's real
endgame is to get Clinton over the finish line in the 2016 election, then let her running mate, Tim
Kaine, the "real Obama guy," take over if she's removed from office.
"That's not such a crazy theory," said Klein. "It may be a little far-fetched, but your callers
are completely right: Tim Kaine and the Clintons were never good friends because Tim Kaine backed
Obama in 2008 against Hillary, and one of the deals for Obama to back Hillary this time was for her
to pick Tim Kaine, Obama's boy, as her vice president."
"... 'The people he trusts the most have been the angriest at him,' the source continued. 'And that includes his wife, Pat. She kept urging him to admit that he had been wrong when he refused to press charges against the former secretary of state. ..."
"... 'He talks about the damage that he's done to himself and the institution [of the FBI], and how he's been shunned by the men and women who he admires and work for him. It's taken a tremendous toll on him. ..."
"... 'It shattered his ego. He looks like he's aged 10 years in the past four months.' ..."
"... But Comey's decision to reopen the case was more than an effort to heal the wound he inflicted on the FBI. He was also worried that after the presidential election, Republicans in Congress would mount a probe of how he had granted Hillary political favoritism. His announcement about the revived investigation, which came just 11 days before the presidential election, was greeted with shock and dismay by Attorney General Loretta Lynch and the prosecutors at the Justice Department. ..."
"... 'Lynch and Obama haven't contacted Jim directly,' said the source, 'but they've made it crystal clear through third parties that they disapprove of his effort to save face.' ..."
'The people he trusts the most have been the angriest at him,' the source continued. 'And that
includes his wife, Pat. She kept urging him to admit that he had been wrong when he refused to
press charges against the former secretary of state.
'He talks about the damage that he's done to himself and the institution [of the FBI], and
how he's been shunned by the men and women who he admires and work for him. It's taken a tremendous
toll on him.
'It shattered his ego. He looks like he's aged 10 years in the past four months.'
But Comey's decision to reopen the case was more than an effort to heal the wound he inflicted
on the FBI. He was also worried that after the presidential election, Republicans in Congress would mount
a probe of how he had granted Hillary political favoritism. His announcement about the revived investigation, which came just 11 days before the presidential
election, was greeted with shock and dismay by Attorney General Loretta Lynch and the prosecutors
at the Justice Department.
'Jim told me that Lynch and Obama are furious with him,' the source said. As I revealed in my latest New York Times bestseller
Guilty As Sin Obama said that appointing Comey as FBI direct was 'my worst mistake as president.'
'Lynch and Obama haven't contacted Jim directly,' said the source, 'but they've made it crystal
clear through third parties that they disapprove of his effort to save face.'
The attack on Iraq, the attack on Libya, the attack on Syria happened because the leader in each
of these countries was not a puppet of the West. The human rights record of a Saddam or a Gaddafi
was irrelevant. They did not obey orders and surrender control of their country.
The same fate awaited Slobodan Milosevic once he had refused to sign an "agreement" that demanded
the occupation of Serbia and its conversion to a market economy. His people were bombed, and he was
prosecuted in The Hague. Independence of this kind is intolerable.
As WikLeaks has revealed, it was only when the Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad in 2009 rejected
an oil pipeline, running through his country from Qatar to Europe, that he was attacked.
From that moment, the CIA planned to destroy the government of Syria with jihadist fanatics –
the same fanatics currently holding the people of Mosul and eastern Aleppo hostage.
Why is this not news? The former British Foreign Office official Carne Ross, who was responsible
for operating sanctions against Iraq, told me: "We would feed journalists factoids of sanitised intelligence,
or we would freeze them out. That is how it worked."
The West's medieval client, Saudi Arabia – to which the US and Britain sell billions of dollars'
worth of arms – is at present destroying Yemen, a country so poor that in the best of times, half
the children are malnourished.
"... HEDGES: Well what feeds the hatred toward the west has nothing to do with Donald Trump. It has to do with the one-thousand-pound iron fragmentation bombs and cruise missiles and 155 artillery shells that are being dropped all over areas that ISIS controls. ..."
"... That is a far more potent engine of rage than anything Trump says and I think sometimes we forget what we' re doing and the state terror that is delivered day in and day out on Muslims in areas that have been opened up by these failed states because of our military adventurism in countries like Libya and Iraq. ..."
"... : Chris the recently released WikiLeaks indicate that Hillary Clinton is involved in conspiring in maintaining Israels nuclear dominance in the region and containing Irans nuclear development program. ..."
"... Yea, I mean shes quite upfront. I have to give her credit on that in terms of her militantly pro-Israel stance. She of course has courted quite successfully wealthy pro-Israeli donors attacking the Boycott Divestment Sanctions Movement. ..."
"... So one of the dangers of Clinton and shes called for a no fly zone over Syria. Well, people forget that when you institute a no fly zone, that is patrolled and that requires very heavy presence of US forces. ..."
HEDGES: Well what feeds the hatred toward the west has nothing to do with Donald Trump. It
has to do with the one-thousand-pound iron fragmentation bombs and cruise missiles and 155 artillery
shells that are being dropped all over areas that ISIS controls.
That is a far more potent engine of rage than anything Trump says and I think sometimes we
forget what we' re doing and the state terror that is delivered day in and day out on Muslims in areas
that have been opened up by these failed states because of our military adventurism in countries
like Libya and Iraq.
PERIES: So connect those two for us. Give us some examples of how the war on terror in the Middle
East, Syria in particular, is causing this kind of islamophobia here and our hesitancy about doing
humanitarian work by accepting refugees that are fleeing these wars and how it manifests itself in
the form of islamophobia here.
HEDGES: Well, islamophobia here is a doctrine that plays quite conveniently into the goals of
the corporate state in the same way that anti-communism once played into the goals of our capitalist
democracy. So the caricature of threats from the Muslim world independent of the actual possibility
of those threats has especially since 9/11, one of the corner stones of the argument that has been
used by the security and surveillance state to strip us of basic civil liberties, including for instance,
under the Obama administration, misinterpreting the 2001 authorization to use military force act
as giving the executive branch to right to assassinate American citizens. Of course I'm talking about
Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son.
So the rise of islamophobia has been largely independent of anything Muslims have done other than
perhaps initially the attacks of 9/11. The continued over 15 years of indiscriminate violence, industrial
violence, delivered on whole swaps of the Muslim world has stirred up the kind of hornet' s nest that
we' re seeing enraged not only among Muslims in the Muslim world but Muslims in Europe and many other
parts of the globe who despite Clinton' s rhetoric see this as a war against Muslims. I think that
although she speaks in kind of a softer and more tolerate tone, Clinton has been one of the main
architects of the attacks for instance in Libya that have given or empowered or given rise to groups
like ISIS. While Clinton' s rhetoric is certainly more palatable, she has been an enthusiastic supporter
that we are going to bomb our way into peace in the Muslim world.
PERIES: Chris give us a sense of the climate created by what both candidates eluded to that Muslims
in this country has to help us in terms of identifying potential terrorists and any kind of activities
in the community that might feed terrorists attacks here. What does this do to a society?
HEDGES: Well it turns us into a society of informers. I think we have to acknowledge how pervasive
the harassment is of Muslim Americans when they go through the airport, intrusive invasions of their
privacy by Homeland Security, the FBI, and others. We have to acknowledge that almost all of the
homegrown terrorist attacks that the FBI have broken have been orchestrated by the FBI usually with
people of marginal means and sometimes marginal intelligence being prodded and often provided supposed
equipment to carry out terrorist attacks. The racial profiling that has gone on coupled with the
rhetoric and this is very dangerous because if you take already an alienated youth and subject it
to this kind of unrelenting harassment, then you provide a recipe for homegrown radicalism.
So yes it' s once again an effort in this case on part of the Trump rhetoric to blame the Muslims
for not only their own victimhood but for terrorist attacks that are being driven by jihadist whom
the vast majority, 99 plus percent of the Muslim world has no contact with and probably very little
empathy for, I mean there' s 4 to 5 million Muslims, I think I have that right, in the United States.
Most of them have integrated quite successfully into American. Unlike in Britain because Muslim immigrants
in the United States whereas in Europe, France, they came over as laborers, we largely absorbed Muslim
professional classes, doctors, engineers, and others and the Muslim community in the United States
is pretty solidly middle class and professional.
... ... ...
PERIES: Chris the recently released WikiLeaks indicate that Hillary Clinton
is involved in conspiring in maintaining Israels nuclear dominance in the region and containing
Irans nuclear development program. Your comments on those WikiLeaks.
HEDGES:Yea, I mean shes quite upfront. I have to give her credit on that in terms of
her militantly pro-Israel stance. She of course has courted quite successfully wealthy
pro-Israeli donors attacking the Boycott Divestment Sanctions Movement. And she has and will
continue what are considered Israeli interests in the region which are not our interest. Israel
pushed very heavily for an invasion of Iraq as a way to destroy a powerful state within the
region. That did not serve our interests at all. In fact, it elevated to the dominant position
within the region, Iran and out of these vacuums gave birth to these jihadist groups and got us
embroiled in wars that we can never win.
So one of the dangers of Clinton and shes called for a no fly zone over Syria. Well, people
forget that when you institute a no fly zone, that is patrolled and that requires very heavy
presence of US forces. Not just air forces but ground stations, radar stations,
anti-aircraft missile batteries. Shes quite openly calling for a further escalation for American
involvement in the Syrian quagmire which of course again we did so much to create by along with
our allies, the Saudis and Qataris and others pumping so many arms in them. I think we gave a
billion dollars worth of arms to Syrian rebels as if you can control where those arms go, just in
the last year.
"... You can disagree with the timing of Comey's disclosure, but that is not a matter for the Hatch Act or even an ethical charge in my view. ..."
"... Congress passed the Hatch Act in response to scandals during the 1938 congressional elections and intended the Act to bar federal employees from using "[their] official authority or influence for the purpose of interfering with or affecting the result of an election." Comey is not doing that in communicating with Congress on a matter of oversight. ..."
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid alleges that FBI Director Comey has violated the law by announcing
the re-opened investigation into Clinton emails so close to the presidential election.
In his letter to Comey, Reid raised the the Hatch Act, which prohibits partisan politicking
by government employees.
5 U.S.C. § 7323(a)(1) prohibits a government employee from "us[ing] his official authority
or influence for the purpose of interfering with or affecting the result of an election."
Reid argued:
"Your actions in recent months have demonstrated a disturbing double standard for the
treatment of sensitive information, with what appears to be a clear intent to aid one political
party over another. I am writing to inform you that my office has determined that these
actions may violate the Hatch Act, which bars FBI officials from using their official authority
to influence an election. Through your partisan actions, you may have broken the law."
The reference to "months" is curious. Comey has kept Congress informed in compliance with
oversight functions of the congressional committees but has been circumspect in the extent
of such disclosures. It is troubling to see Democrats (who historically favor both transparency
and checks on executive powers) argue against such disclosure and cooperation with oversight
committees. More importantly, the Hatch Act is simply a dog that will not hunt.
Richard W. Painter, a law professor at the University of Minnesota and the chief ethics
lawyer in the George W. Bush White House from 2005 to 2007, has filed a Hatch Act complaint
against Comey with the federal Office of Special Counsel and Office of Government Ethics. He
argues that "We cannot allow F.B.I. or Justice Department officials to unnecessarily publicize
pending investigations concerning candidates of either party while an election is underway."
However, Comey was between the horns of a dilemma. He could be accused of acts of commission
in making the disclosure or omission in withholding the disclosure in an election year. Quite
frankly, I found
Painter's justification for his filing remarkably speculative. He admits that he has no
evidence to suggest that Comey wants to influence the election or favors either candidate.
Intent is key under the Hatch investigations. You can disagree with the timing of Comey's disclosure,
but that is not a matter for the Hatch Act or even an ethical charge in my view.
Congress passed the Hatch Act in response to scandals during the 1938 congressional elections
and intended the Act to bar federal employees from using "[their] official authority or influence
for the purpose of interfering with or affecting the result of an election." Comey is not doing
that in communicating with Congress on a matter of oversight.
Such violations under the Hatch Act, even if proven, are not criminal matters . The Office
of Special Counsel can investigate such matters and seek discipline - a matter than can ultimately
go before the Merit Systems Protection Board.
All of this loses sight of how much the framing effects have skewed this entire discussion.
Bush's signature use of military force and the defining initiative of his presidency-the invasion
of Iraq-was an unusually extreme act as measured either by past U.S. foreign policy or standards
of international conduct that the United States expects of others.
One of the many flaws in the idea that the U.S. should seek a "middle ground" between Bush and
Obama is that it treats their respective records as offering equally damaging and extreme alternatives.
Of course, the cost to the U.S. from the two presidencies is drastically different. Bush's legacy
was to launch wars that have cost trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives, while Obama's
has been his failure to extricate the U.S. from them at a significant but much reduced cost. Obama
has certainly made some very serious and even indefensible mistakes (supporting the war on Yemen
being among the worst), but in terms of the damage done to U.S. interests the costs have been much
lower.
To believe that the U.S. needs to "moderate" between Bush's disasters and Obama's failures
is to believe that the U.S. needs a foreign policy that will be even more costly in American lives
and money than the one we have right now.
That is not only not a "moderate" position to take, but it is also a highly ideological one
that insists on the necessity of U.S. "leadership" no matter how much it costs us.
The 'middle ground" that Clinton offers is no middle ground at all, but rather represents moving
the U.S. in the direction of one of the worst foreign policy records in our history. Obama's great
foreign policy failure was that he could not or would not move the U.S. away from the disastrous
policies of the Bush era, and under Clinton there won't even be the pretense that the U.S. should
try to do this.
"Jen you probably have more on this but it looks like POTUS just said he found out HRC was using her personal email when he
saw it in the news we need to clean this up – he has emails from her – they do not say state.gov"
"How is that not classified?" Huma Abedin to FBI when shown email between Clinton & Obama using his pseudonym. Abedin then
expressed her amazement at the president's use of a pseudonym and asked if she could have a copy of the email."
I can't state how huge this is, it's a cover up involving the President of the United States. There are a lot of emails implying
this, but this email states it very clearly so anyone can understand. The email proves obstruction of justice and shows how they
lied to the FBI, and likely perjury of Congress. This at the very least proves intent by her Chief of Staff.
Obama used executive privilege on their correspondence. Cheryl Mills (who was given immunity) states they need to "clean up"
the Clinton/Obama e-mails because they lacked state.gov.
Additionally, Obama on video publicly denied knowing
about the server. He also claimed on video that he learned
about the secret server through the news like everyone else. The corruption goes all the way to the top! Obama is lying to the
American public.
Hillary Clinton set up her private server to hide her pay to play deals discovered throughout these leaks, and to prevent FOIA
(Freedom of Information Act) requests.
Paul Combetta was hired to modify the email headers that referred to a VERY VERY VIP individual, i.e. change the name of who
it was from. If you
read Stonetear/Combetta
story , it's easy to see this is exactly what he was attempting. He wanted to change header information on already sent mail
to show "state.gov" instead of Hillary's private email address. Multiple people informed him of the infeasibility (and illegality)
of it, so somewhere in the next 6 days it was decided that simply eradicating them was the only option left.
The FBI said they could not find intent of trying to break the law, therefore no recommendation of prosecution. This email
proves, in plain language, that there was intention, and knowingly broke the law.
Ask yourselves: why would they both be communicating on a secret server to each other? Why not through normal proper channels?
What were they hiding? We may soon find out
(Source: The Top 100 Most
Damaging WikiLeaks )
_ _ _
For the uninitiated this breakdown essentially says that President Barack Obama is stone-cold guilty of crimes and cover-ups that
would make Watergate look like a walk in the park .
In fact, Obama is so deeply involved with the criminal workings of State that he had no choice but to lie about his knowledge
of Clinton's private server and personal email account. This is why Emailgate is so HUGE- it's a massive cover-up of the greatest
crimes EVER committed by the US Government . And Obama lied his way all through the never-ending conspiratorial saga. As follows:
"... The Wall Street Journal today added to its so far excellent reporting on the Clinton issues by revealing the much bigger story behind it: FBI in Internal Feud Over Hillary Clinton Probe - Laptop may contain thousands of messages sent to or from Mrs. Clinton's private server (open copy here ). ..."
"... B, you're dead right, Hillary is screwed either way. Uncle Bill won't get to wave his mouldy bratwurst in the East Wing for long if she does get through this. ..."
"... Seems the entire "Atlantic media"(bbc, cnn etc etc, aka msm) have all put their collective eggs in Killary's leaky basket. Any pretence of balanced journalism's been thrown out of the window and replaced with brutal yellow propaganda - one which will make chairman Mao blush. ..."
"... The only downside of this for voters and for the people of the world is that a wounded Hillary Clinton may be even MORE likely to push for confrontation leading to WWIII. ..."
"... So did the FBI find Abedin's get out of jail insurance policy, and has that now become Comey's get out of jail insurance policy? ..."
"... Agree with WorldBLee. Hillary has virtually no mandate, little trust, and little support from we, the people...unless she can make the case for a big war. ..."
"... To rule, she will have to rely on her friends on Wall Street, the security establishment, and the media...all of whom find war to be lucrative. ..."
"... The dirt unearthed on HRC ought to have her facing prison for life. ..."
"... If HRC should somehow get elected, more than enough evidence already exists to Impeach and Convict ..."
"... b, you don't list the significance of the 650,000 (!) emails themselves among your bullets. That number of emails may well represent an image of Hillary's private server email store. It's said that several of her aides were tasked with their destruction ... but it now looks like Abedin 'forgot' about the copy on this machine. Once they're loose ... you're right when you say of Hillary that ... ..."
"... @7 stumpy, 'So did the FBI find Abedin's get out of jail insurance policy, and has that now become Comey's get out of jail insurance policy?' Very succinctly and well-put. ..."
According to the reporting, based on FBI sources, FBI agents in New York and elsewhere have been
looking into the Clinton Foundation for several months. They suspect that this "charity" was selling
political favors by then Secretary of State Clinton in exchange for donations that personally benefited
the Clinton family.
The Justice Department blocked further aggressive investigations into the issue, allegedly because
of the ongoing election. A high FBI official, Andrew McCabe, also showed disinterest in a further
pursuit of the issue. McCabe's wife had just tried to get elected as state senator and had receive
a campaign donation of nearly $500,000 from Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Clinton friend and at
times board member of the Clinton Foundation. The FBI agents pursuing the investigation into the
Clinton Foundation were not amused.
The separate investigation into former Congressman Weiner for sexual contacts with minors was
looking for pedophile stuff on Weiner's electronic devices. It didn't find any as far as we can tell,
but found some 650,000 emails archived on a laptop.
Several thousand of these emails were sent or received by Weiner's spouse, the intimate Clinton
aide Huma Abedin. They came through Clinton's private email server. At least some of these thousands
of emails are likely copies
of those that were deleted from Clinton's server when the (separate) investigation into it started.
They may be evidence that Clinton sent and received classified documents through her unsecured
system. Some of these emails may also contain serious dirt related to the Clinton Foundation. (It
is highly likely that at least some FBI agents know "unofficially" what these emails contain. Legally
they could not look at them without a warrant which they only got today.)
Thus we have three ongoing FBI investigations:
into Clinton's private email-server used illegally for official State Department business;
into the Clinton Foundation and its role in peddling political influence in exchange for donations;
into the personal conduct of Anthony Weiner.
Additional investigations that may come up are on:
the mixing of donations to the Clinton Foundation and personal compensation for Bill Clinton
for holding highly paid speeches;
for profit activities by the group of people
running Bill Clinton's businesses as well as the Clinton Foundation financing;
inappropriate hindering of the FBI investigations by the Justice Department and/or by McCabe.
With such a list of potentially very serious scandals pending it is highly understandable that
FBI director Comey went public and did not follow the advice from the Justice Department to pursue
these issues only on a reduced level. It would have been political suicide to try to keep this silent.
Way too many FBI agents eager to pursue these case were in the known and would have talked, as they
do now, to the media.
If Clinton gets elected she will be hampered by these scandals for the next two years. The
Republicans in Congress will jump on these issues as soon as possible. There will be endless hearings
with large media coverage. The only question is when the first attempts at an impeachment process
will be made - before or after she moves back into the White House. She and her family may be better
off with her losing the campaign.
If I'm not mistaken Eric Holder was a recurring chatacter in that 80's TV show CHIPS was he not...?
Something about that greasy B-Grade pornstar moustache.
B, you're dead right, Hillary is screwed either way. Uncle Bill won't get to wave his mouldy
bratwurst in the East Wing for long if she does get through this.
But she wont. Hillary has fallen off the cliff (see poll below) in the poll below and we're
all gonna get to Pitch'n'Putt a nice little 18 holes around the White House lawns on the back
of The Don.
No MSM poll is worth anything, especially with so many closet Trump voters this election...
but the USC/Dornslife Daybreak differs a little in it's methodology that's worthy of inspection
(random selection of 600-800 of the same 3000 participants emailed each day being the main feature).
Also worth checking the Characteristics of Candidate graphs - really interesting to get
ro know the demographics of what is going to drive what is now a likely landslide win.
Seems the entire "Atlantic media"(bbc, cnn etc etc, aka msm) have all put their collective
eggs in Killary's leaky basket. Any pretence of balanced journalism's been thrown out of the window
and replaced with brutal yellow propaganda - one which will make chairman Mao blush.
Trump is gunning for the WH those concerned better get use to it. The sad part is, the American
people are f*cked either way. Killary will only hasten America's decline and Trump will make it
a slow motion one.
What I don't get is, out of the approximately 300 million US citizens, couldn't they find any
smart,less crooked person to lead them???
Comey caved to right-wing criticism and pressure. In the U.S. there is a law that prohibits
a public official from influencing, or attempting to influence, an election and yet he took this
incomprehensible step against the advice of the Justice Dep't. lawyers.
The only downside of this for voters and for the people of the world is that a wounded Hillary
Clinton may be even MORE likely to push for confrontation leading to WWIII. Once talk of
war starts, all concern over illegal wrongdoing will fade to the background as everyone rallies
in the US to support the "Commander in Chief".
Many people have already voted via early voting and can't take back their votes even if they
wanted to. However, I suspect that dyed in the wool Clinton/DNC/Democrat zealots will continue
to shout that this is all a vast alt-right conspiracy to tarnish their sweet, innocent Hillary.
Agree with WorldBLee. Hillary has virtually no mandate, little trust, and little support from
we, the people...unless she can make the case for a big war.
To rule, she will have
to rely on her friends on Wall Street, the security establishment, and the media...all of whom
find war to be lucrative.
You do not want to give the GOP control of three branches of government, unless you really hate
the American people and want to see them suffer. Actually now it makes sense...
I suggest a triumvirat Trump-Johnson-Wilders or The Three Blond Mops to rule Amerikka and let
the rest of the world be a safer place without their interventionism (but if we look at the UK,
France or the Turks not to mention KSA and Qatar or Israel, it is hard to believe it would work
out).
The dirt unearthed on HRC ought to have her facing prison for life. Never knew about
the quaint rule chet380 @4 alludes to until I read Wheeler's item--a rule that grossly undermines
the Rule of Law and shouldn't exist!
If HRC should somehow get elected, more than enough evidence already exists to Impeach
and Convict -- but then the same was true regarding WJC's impeachment.
b, you don't list the significance of the 650,000 (!) emails themselves among your bullets.
That number of emails may well represent an image of Hillary's private server email store. It's
said that several of her aides were tasked with their destruction ... but it now looks like Abedin
'forgot' about the copy on this machine. Once they're loose ... you're right when you say of Hillary
that ...
She and her family may be better off with her losing the campaign.
... and the people on the other end of all those emails will be able to see that - and even more
clearly that they may be better off with her losing her campaign - even if dogged determination
keeps the blinders on the Clintons themselves.
Maybe Clinton will withdraw from the race. The DNC apparatchniks and the establishment have a
stake in defeating Trump. At what point do they bail on Hillary?
@7 stumpy, 'So did the FBI find Abedin's get out of jail insurance policy, and has that now
become Comey's get out of jail insurance policy?' Very succinctly and well-put.
Team Clinton was keeping tabs on Anthony Weiner's sexting habits as far back as 2011, according to
WikiLeaks emails.
One disturbing report came to the attention of John Podesta, now chair of Clinton's presidential
campaign, and Neera Tanden, a Senate aide and 2008 presidential campaign staffer, when Jennifer Palmieri,
the current campaign communications director, forwarded news of an investigation into Weiner's contacts
with a Delaware teenager.
"Police on Friday afternoon came to the home of a 17-year-old high school junior to ask her about
direct online communications she has had with Rep. Anthony Weiner," read the report dated June 10,
2011.
"Two officers from the New Castle County Police Department arrived at the girl's home around 4:30
p.m. and asked to speak with the girl's mother about the daughter's contact with Weiner. Another
officer appeared at the home a short time later."
Palmeiri passed along the news story to Podesta and Tanden with a one-word comment: "Oof."
Weiner resigned from Congress on June 21, 2011, after he accidentally tweeted a picture of himself
in bulging briefs.
He apparently intended to send the photo privately to a woman he communicated with online - and
though he first insisted his Twitter account had been hacked, he later admitted wrongdoing and stepped
down from Congress.
"... We must forgive Mark Twain for his error when he declared that "history never repeats itself but it often rhymes." After all, he'd never met the Clintons. ..."
"... Why didn't you turn that computer over to the FBI during its initial investigation? ..."
"... Did you lie to the FBI about having work-related emails on it? ..."
"... Also, did Weiner have access to classified material? ..."
We must forgive Mark Twain for his error when he declared that "history never repeats itself but
it often rhymes." After all, he'd never met the Clintons.
... ... ...
...Clinton is understandably panicked because the timing of Comey's announcement could cost her
the election. Her demand that he release everything immediately is also understandable, even as she
knows it is impossible for him to release potential evidence before it is examined.
Clinton created the mess with her incredibly stupid decision to use a private server as secretary
of state.
... ... ...
She could simply order Abedin to hold a press conference and answer any and every question about
the newest batch of emails. Let reporters ask Abedin directly:
What's in those emails?
Did any contain classified material?
Why didn't you turn that computer over to the FBI during its initial investigation?
Did you lie to the FBI about having work-related emails on it?
Also, did Weiner have access to classified material?
Was the computer ever hacked?
... ... ...
Hillary won't do any of that because the potential downside is also huge.
My guess is she
fears the worst, and may secretly subscribe to the idea that Comey wouldn't have acted in such a
bold and controversial way without some conviction that he had stumbled on a potential bombshell.
"... told agents to limit their pursuit of the case. ..."
"... Justice Department officials told the FBI at the meeting they wouldn't authorize more aggressive investigative techniques, such as subpoenas, formal witness interviews, or grand-jury activity. But the FBI officials believed they were still well within their authority to pursue the leads and methods already under way, these people said. ..."
The continuing work means that if Mrs. Clinton wins the White House, she will likely do so amid
at least one ongoing investigation into her inner circle being handled by law-enforcement officials
who are deeply divided over how to manage such cases.
The latest development began in early October when New York-based FBI officials notified Andrew
McCabe, the bureau's second-in-command, that while investigating Mr. Weiner for possibly sending
sexually charged messages to a minor, they had recovered a laptop with 650,000 emails. Many, they
said, were from the accounts of Ms. Abedin, according to people familiar with the matter.
Those emails stretched back years, these people said, and were on a laptop that both Mr. Weiner
and Ms. Abedin used and that hadn't previously come up in the Clinton email probe. Ms. Abedin said
in late August that the couple were separating.
The FBI had searched the computer while looking for child pornography, people familiar with the
matter said, but the warrant they used didn't give them authority to search for matters related to
Mrs. Clinton's email arrangement at the State Department. Mr. Weiner has denied sending explicit
or indecent messages to the teenager.
In their initial review of the laptop, the metadata showed many messages, apparently in the thousands,
that were either sent to or from the private email server at Mrs. Clinton's home that had been the
focus of so much investigative effort for the FBI. Senior FBI officials decided to let the Weiner
investigators proceed with a closer examination of the metadata on the computer, and report back
to them.
At a meeting early last week of senior Justice Department and FBI officials, a member of the department's
senior national-security staff asked for an update on the Weiner laptop, the people familiar with
the matter said. At that point, officials realized that no one had acted to obtain a warrant, these
people said.
... ... ...
New details show that senior law-enforcement officials repeatedly voiced skepticism of the strength
of the evidence in that probe, sought to condense what was at times a sprawling cross-country effort,
and, according to some people familiar with the matter, told agents to limit their pursuit of the
case.
That led to frustrations among some investigators, who viewed FBI leadership as uninterested in
probing the charity, these people said. Others involved disagreed sharply, defending FBI bosses and
saying Mr. McCabe in particular was caught between an increasingly acrimonious fight for control
between the Justice Department and FBI agents pursuing the Clinton Foundation case.
Such internal tensions are common, and it isn't unusual for field agents to favor a more aggressive
approach than supervisors and prosecutors think is merited. But the internal debates about the Clinton
Foundation show the high stakes when such disagreements occur surrounding someone who is running
for president.
The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Mr. McCabe's wife, Jill McCabe, received $467,500
in campaign funds in late 2015 from the political action committee of Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe,
a longtime ally of the Clintons and, until he was elected governor in November 2013, a Clinton Foundation
board member.
Mr. McAuliffe had supported Dr. McCabe in the hopes she and a handful of other Democrats might
help win a majority in the state Senate, giving Mr. McAuliffe more sway in the state capitol. Dr.
McCabe lost her race last November, and Democrats failed to win their majority.
A spokesman for the governor has said that "any insinuation that his support was tied to anything
other than his desire to elect candidates who would help pass his agenda is ridiculous."
Dr. McCabe told the Journal, "Once I decided to run, my husband had no formal role in my campaign
other than to be a supportive husband to me and our children."
In February of this year, Mr. McCabe ascended from the No. 3 position at the FBI to the deputy
director post, making him second only to Mr. Comey. When he assumed that role, officials say, he
started overseeing the probe into Mrs. Clinton's use of a private email server for government work
when she was secretary of state.
FBI officials have said Mr. McCabe had no role in the Clinton email probe until he became deputy
director, and there was no conflict of interest because by then his wife's campaign was over.
But other Clinton-related investigations were under way within the FBI, and they have been the
subject of internal debate for months, according to people familiar with the matter.
Early this year, four FBI field offices-New York, Los Angeles, Washington and Little Rock, Ark.-were
collecting information about the Clinton Foundation to see if there was evidence of financial crimes
or influence-peddling, according to people familiar with the matter.
Los Angeles agents had picked up information about the Clinton Foundation from an unrelated public
corruption case and had issued some subpoenas for bank records related to the foundation, these people
said.
The Washington field office was probing financial relationships involving Mr. McAuliffe before
he became a Clinton Foundation board member, these people said. Mr. McAuliffe has denied any wrongdoing,
and his lawyer has said the probe is focused on whether he failed to register as an agent of a foreign
entity.
Clinton Foundation officials have long denied any wrongdoing, saying it is a well-run charity
that has done immense good around the world.
The FBI field office in New York had done the most work on the Clinton Foundation case and received
help from the FBI field office in Little Rock, the people familiar with the matter said.
In February, FBI officials made a presentation to the Justice Department, according to these people.
By all accounts, the meeting didn't go well.
... ... ...
Justice Department officials told the FBI at the meeting they wouldn't authorize more aggressive
investigative techniques, such as subpoenas, formal witness interviews, or grand-jury activity. But
the FBI officials believed they were still well within their authority to pursue the leads and methods
already under way, these people said.
In July, Mr. Comey announced he was recommending against any prosecution in the Clinton email
case. About a week later, the FBI sought to refocus the Clinton Foundation probe, with Mr. McCabe
deciding the FBI's New York office would take the lead with assistance from Little Rock.
The Washington field office, FBI officials decided, would focus on a separate matter involving
Mr. McAuliffe. Mr. McCabe had decided earlier in the spring that he would continue to recuse himself
from that probe, given the governor's contributions to his wife's former political campaign.
Within the FBI, the decision was viewed with skepticism by some, who felt the probe would be stronger
if the foundation and McAuliffe matters were combined. Others, particularly senior officials at the
Justice Department, felt that both probes were weak, based largely on publicly available information,
and had found little that would merit expanded investigative authority.
According to a person familiar with the probes, on Aug. 12, a senior Justice Department official
called Mr. McCabe to voice his displeasure at finding that New York FBI agents were still openly
pursuing the Clinton Foundation probe, despite the department's refusal to allow more aggressive
investigative methods in the case. Mr. McCabe said agents still had the authority to pursue the issue
as long as they didn't use those methods.
... ... ...
Others further down the FBI chain of command, however, said agents were given a much starker
instruction on the case: "Stand down." When agents questioned why they weren't allowed to take more
aggressive steps, they said they were told the order had come from the deputy director-Mr. McCabe.
Others familiar with the matter deny Mr. McCabe or any other senior FBI official gave such
a stand-down instruction.
For agents who already felt uneasy about FBI leadership's handling of the Clinton Foundation case,
the moment only deepened their concerns, these people said. For those who felt the probe hadn't yet
found significant evidence of criminal conduct, the leadership's approach was the right response
to the facts on the ground.
In September, agents on the foundation case asked to see the emails contained on nongovernment
laptops that had been searched as part of the Clinton email case, but that request was rejected by
prosecutors at the Eastern District of New York, in Brooklyn. Those emails were given to the
FBI based on grants of partial immunity and limited-use agreements, meaning agents could only use
them for the purpose of investigating possible mishandling of classified information.
Some FBI agents were dissatisfied with that answer, and asked for permission to make a similar
request to federal prosecutors in Manhattan, according to people familiar with the matter. Mr. McCabe,
these people said, told them no and added that they could not "go prosecutor-shopping."
Not long after that discussion, FBI agents informed the bureau's leaders about the Weiner laptop,
prompting Mr. Comey's disclosure to Congress and setting of the furor that promises to consume the
final days of a tumultuous campaign.
Jill Stein to win over the hearts of some progressives and jump start her far-left "
people-powered
" movement.
"This is Jill Stein's moment," said longtime Democratic pollster and Fox News contributor Pat
Caddell.
"There are many Clinton voters who would rather vote their conscience than vote for a major party.
According to the latest Breitbart/Gravis poll, when given the choice of whether you should vote for
a major party candidate or vote your conscience, 44% of Clinton voters said you should vote your
conscience," Caddell explained.
Even before the FBI director's dramatic announcement on Friday, the ABC News/Washington Post
tracking poll
indicated that "loosely affiliated or reluctant Clinton supporters"- which includes white women
and young voters under the age of 30- seem to be floating off and "look less likely to vote."
Caddell explained that the polling data suggests "there are many people who are ambivalent
about Clinton who don't want to vote for Trump. Given these new revelations from WikiLeaks and the
re-intensity of the concern regarding the corruption of her emails, these ambivalent voters need
a place to go and Jill Stein-being not only a progressive woman, but an honest progressive woman-is
the obvious choice for so many of these voters, particularly for those who supported Bernie Sanders."
Indeed, nearly 60 percent of voters- including 43 percent of Democrats- believe America needs
a third major political party,
according to a Gallup poll released late last month.
As one former Bernie Sanders supporter told Breitbart News, "It's come to this: voting for
Hillary Clinton is voting for the lesser of two evils. But voting for the lesser of two evils is
still voting for evil, and I'm tired of voting for evil. That's why I'm voting for Jill Stein.
"
This sentiment has been echoed by Stein herself who has argued, "it's time to reject the lesser
of two evils and stand up for the greater good."
Stein seems ready to capitalize on the FBI's announcement as well as the steady stream of WikiLeaks
revelations that have exposed, what Stein has characterized as, the Clinton camp's "hostility" to
progressives.
"The FBI has re-opened the Clinton investigation. Will the American people rise up and vote for
honest change?" Stein asked on Friday, via Twitter.
... ... ...
Clinton's strained relationship with progressives has been well documented and could
present Stein– who has demonstrated a remarkable ability to articulately prosecute the progressive
case against Clinton– with an opening, especially as polling reveals a significant chunk of Clinton
voters believe voting their conscience ought to trump voting for a major political party.
As Politico reported in a piece
titled "WikiLeaks poisons Hillary's relationship with left" :
Some of the left's most influential voices and groups are taking offense at the way they
and their causes were discussed behind their backs by Clinton and some of her closest advisers
in the emails, which swipe liberal heroes and causes as "puritanical," "pompous", "naive", "radical"
and "dumb," calling some "freaks," who need to "get a life." […] among progressive operatives,
goodwill for Clinton - and confidence in key advisers featured in the emails including John Podesta,
Neera Tanden and Jake Sullivan - is eroding…
Even before the FBI's announcement, many noted that it was becoming increasingly difficult
to view a vote for Clinton as anything other than a vote to continue the worst aspects of political
corruption.
As columnist Kim Strassel recently
wrote , the
one thing in this election of which one can be certain is that "a Hillary Clinton presidency will
be built, from the ground up, on self-dealing, crony favors, and an utter disregard for the law."
As such, "anyone who pulls the lever for Mrs. Clinton takes responsibility for setting up the
nation for all the blatant corruption that will follow," Strassel
concludes
. "She just doesn't have a whole lot of integrity,"
said far-left progressive Cornel West.
West
endorsed Stein over Clinton explaining Stein is "the only progressive woman in the race."
"The Clinton train- [of] Wall Street, security surveillance, militaristic- is not going in
the same direction I'm going," West
told Bill Maher earlier this year.
She's a neoliberal… [I] believe neoliberalism is a disaster when it comes to poor people
and when it comes to people in other parts of the world dealing with U.S. foreign policy and militarism.
Oh, absolutely. Ask the people in Libya about that. Ask the people in the West Bank about that.
West has separately
explained that Clinton's "militarism makes the world a less safe place" and that her globalist
agenda created the "right-wing populism" that has fueled Trump's rise.
Clinton policies of the 1990s generated inequality, mass incarceration, privatization of schools
and Wall Street domination. There is also a sense that the Clinton policies helped produce the
right-wing populism that we're seeing now in the country. And we think she's going to come to
the rescue? That's not going to happen.
"It's too easy to view him [Trump] as an isolated individual and bash him," West
told Maher. "He's speaking to the pain in the country because white, working class brothers have
been overlooked by globalization, by these trade deals"– trade deals which Stein also opposes.
Stein has railed against the passage of TPP, which she and her party have described as "NAFTA
on steroids" that would "enrich wealthy corporations by exporting jobs and pushing down wages." They
have argued that the deal essentially amounts to a "global corporate coup" that "would give corporations
more power than nations" by letting them "challenge our laws".
Stein is
against the "massive expanding wars," "the meltdown of the climate," "the massive Wall Street
bailouts," and "the offshoring of our jobs."
Pointing to Clinton's "dangerous and immoral" militarism, Stein has
warned that "a vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote for war" and has explained how under a Clinton
presidency, "we could very quickly slide into nuclear war" or could start an air-war with Russia.
"No matter how her staff tries to rebrand her" Clinton is "not a progressive," Stein has
said -rather Clinton is a "corporatist hawk" that "
surrounds
herself with people who are hostile progressives" such as Debbie Wasserman Schultz "after she sabotaged
Bernie [Sanders]." Stein has warned progressives that the role of corporate Democrats like Clinton
is to "prevent progressives from defying corporate rule."
Stein has made a point to
highlight the fact that "we're now seeing many Republican leaders join Hillary Clinton in a neoliberal
uni-party that will fuel right-wing extremism," by continuing to push its "neoliberal agenda [of]
globalization, privatization, deregulation, [and] austerity for the rest of us."
In contrast to Clinton's corporatist "uni-party", Stein and her party have explained that their
campaign represents a "people's party with a populist progressive agenda" that-unlike Democrats and
Republicans- is not "funded by big corporate interests including Wall St. Banks, fossil fuel giants,
& war profiteer."
Stein is a Harvard Medical School graduate, a mother to two sons, and a practicing physician,
who became an environmental-health activist and organizer in the late 1990s. As the Green Party's
2012 presidential candidate, Stein already holds the record for the most votes ever received by a
female candidate for president in a general election.
In Jill Stein, her party writes, "progressives have a peace candidate not beholden to the billionaire
class."
"... For Comey to do what he did, when and how he did it, I gotta believe there is some extinction-level event inside those emails. Something so toxic that even Obama is throwing up his hands, or at least easing hiimself way, way back on the periphery. ..."
"... If Comey is playing politics with such an important job or can't even handle a mutiny us department, why did Obama nominate a life long Republican to the post of FBI Director? ..."
"... Interesting to literally see where Obama draws the line in the sand. "Sorry, you're on your own (smug Barry laugh meme)." ..."
"Clinton Foundation: Inurement" [
Amy Sterling Cassill ]. Word of the day: "The concept of "inurement" is one that most nonprofit
organization board members should be familiar with. In common language, "inurement" is a concept
that means a board member, donor, or employee can't benefit excessively from the organization's
funds."
"Donald Trump's Companies Destroyed Emails in Defiance of Court Orders" [Kurt Eichenwald,
Newsweek ]. Oppo
garbage truck unloads….
War Drums
"Harry Reid's incendiary claim about 'coordination' between Donald Trump and Russia" [
WaPo ].
But there is no public evidence to support Reid's claim of actual "coordination" between
the Trump campaign and the Russian government. And were that to be the case, it would be a
scandal of epic proportions. Asked what evidence exists of such a connection, Reid spokesman
Adam Jentleson cited classified briefings. "There have been classified briefings on this topic,"
Jentleson said. "That is all I can say."
Nudge nudge wink wink. Say no more! Say no more!
The Voters
"Signs Grow of Another Third-Party Fizzle" [
Wall Street Journal ]. "But it appears increasingly likely that no outside candidate will
take a meaningful chunk of the national vote, as seemed plausible in the early summer. The combined
clout of Mr. Johnson and Ms. Stein fell from 17% of registered voters in July to 9% in the most
recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll. The running RealClearPolitics polling average of all
four candidates is even less generous, showing Mr. Johnson and Ms. Stein dropping from around
12% at various times this summer to just 7% now."
Realignment
"Would Trump "Make a Deal" With The Left?" [
Michael Tracey ]. I doubt it. And would the Left make a deal with Trump? Still, if the deal
were to prevent a war…
The Trail
UPDATE "CNN says it is 'completely uncomfortable' with hacked emails showing former contributor
and interim DNC chair Donna Brazile sharing questions with the Clinton campaign before a debate
and a town hall during the Democratic primary, and has accepted her resignation" [
Politico ]. Too funny! Instant karma, and Brazile turns out to be just as clumsy and dishonest
a hack as Wasserman-Shultz. No doubt there will be a place for her in the Clinton administration.
"FT endorsement: For all her weaknesses, Clinton is the best hope" [
Financial
Times ].
"Donald Trump has a path to victory again thanks to Florida" [
WaPo ]. "Remember that winning Florida isn't a luxury for Trump - it's a necessity. If Clinton
wins the 18 states (plus D.C.) that every Democratic presidential nominee has carried between
1992 and 2012, she has 242 electoral votes. Add Florida's 29 to that total and Clinton is at 271
and the election is over."
Democrat Email Hairball
"How Clinton plans to deal with Comey's October surprise" [
Politico ]. "Projecting confidence" and "galvanizing supporters." Those are the talking points?
Really? Seems a little meta.
Corruption
"A $72-million apartment project. Top politicians. Unlikely donors." [
Los Angeles Times
]. "No one is registered to vote at the run-down house on 223rd Street. The living room window
has been broken for months. A grit-covered pickup sits in the dirt front yard with a flat tire.
Yet dozens of donations to local politicians - totaling more than $40,000 - have come from four
of the people who have lived there over the last eight years." That's so dumb. If you want to
launder money, you set up a family foundation. What's wrong with these people?
"When CIA and NSA Workers Blow the Whistle, Congress Plays Deaf" [
The Intercept ].
One could add a few more. The Panic of 1907. The bear market of 1917. The recession and bear
market (50% decline) of 1937. The recession and bear market of 1957. The bear market of 1977.
Not that I would trade on this decadal pattern alone. But "7" years see more than their fair
share of calamities.
Christine Lagarde said something about sevens
six months before MH17 was downed by drunken Ukies. 7 is one of the more common digits coerced
into weak passwords by password "diversity" standards.
It's bisyllabic and sibilant, therefore powerful and mystical to the ear.
But then again, who cares what a lame duck thinks?
White House press secretary Josh Earnest on Monday said President Obama does not believe
FBI Director James Comey was meddling in the presidential election by announcing Friday that
his agency discovered new emails that may be related to its investigation of Hillary Clinton's
private server.
In his daily press briefing, Earnest said Obama believes Comey "is a man of principle
and good character," and "doesn't believe that Director Comey is intentionally trying to influence
the outcome of the election."
"We've heard these rumors. We don't know what to believe. I'm sure there will be even more
rumors," she explained about the new emails being connected to Abedin and Weiner. "That's why
it is incumbent upon on the FBI to tell us what they're talking about."
For Comey to do what he did, when and how he did it, I gotta believe there is some extinction-level
event inside those emails. Something so toxic that even Obama is throwing up his hands, or at
least easing hiimself way, way back on the periphery.
Don't forget Obama can't be embarrassed or make mistakes. Comey as an Obama appointee will
always be defended by Obama until there is a risk of the stench reaching Obama or missing a round
of golf.
If Comey is playing politics with such an important job or can't even handle a mutiny us
department, why did Obama nominate a life long Republican to the post of FBI Director?
"... "…the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL and other
radical Sunni groups in the region." ..."
"... "Clintons should know better than to raise money from folks whose primary concern has been supporting the NIAC, a notorious
supporter of the Radical Islamic Mullahs. "The Clinton's have thrown principle out the window in exchange for cold hard cash…putting
money ahead of principle." ..."
"... If these revelations don't completely terminate Hillary Clinton's candidacy, certainly four straight years of Congressional
Emailgate hearings will, should she outright steal the election from Donald Trump on November 8th, or shortly thereafter. ..."
"…the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL and
other radical Sunni groups in the region."
"Clintons should know better than to raise money from folks whose primary concern has been supporting the NIAC, a notorious
supporter of the Radical Islamic Mullahs. "The Clinton's have thrown principle out the window in exchange for cold hard cash…putting
money ahead of principle."
Hillary's Chief of Staff admits in the 2nd link that foreign interests sway Hillary to do what they want her to do (money for
mandatory appearances). She also admits that the "Friend of Hillary" list is available and rentable to people who want to influence,
but that it's too sensitive to talk in email.
This leak shows Hillary knows Saudis and Qatar are funding ISIS, which is an enemy of the state. After knowing this, Hillary
accepted tens of millions in donations from these terrorist-funding governments (of course they are getting something back in
return). She also supported arms deals to them.
Saudi Arabia and Qatar commit horrible acts under Sharia law, including throwing gay people off of buildings, persecuting Christians,
Jews, and atheists, and making it legal to rape and beat women. They are the
leading funders of Hillary and her campaign through the Clinton Foundation.
If these revelations don't completely terminate Hillary Clinton's candidacy, certainly four straight years of Congressional
Emailgate hearings will, should she outright steal the election from Donald Trump on November 8th, or shortly thereafter.
Trump was commenting on the revelation by Wikileaks on Monday that CNN commentator Donna Brazile, who is now the chair of the Democratic
National Committee, had been caught again passing debate questions from the network to the Clinton campaign during the Democratic
primary.
Brazile had been exposed earlier doing the same - passing a question to the Clinton campaign in advance of a town hall debate
against Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT).
At the time, Brazile was not yet DNC chair, but was a regular CNN contributor.
CNN
fired Brazile on Monday, releasing a statement: ""We are completely uncomfortable with what we have learned about her interactions
with the Clinton campaign while she was a CNN contributor."
Their IT guy, Justin Cooper I believe, put spyware on Bill's phone (per Chelsea in one of the
Wikileaks emails) and also embezzled CF money (again, per Chelsea).
Also, he's apparently kind of dim as he had to get IT advice from Reddit. So either JC was
deep undercover for the feds and he set them up, or, when Huma was working from home during his
pregnancy he set up auto-sync on her devices. Or...if they were using iPhones and Macs, they idiot
proof syncing and it happens without someone who isn't computer literate even knowing.
The most likely scenario IMO is simply hubris and stupidity. IT guy set that laptop on auto-sync,
they forgot about it when the FBI came calling the first time because that computer had fallen
into Weiner's sticky fingers full-time for a few years by that point.
Carelessness and poor judgement seem most likely here--remember thesee folks can get the best
Google IT people to their home anytime to deal with their IT needs. They could have gotten the
best people at the NSA. They didn't even get the best guy out of the phone book. As their colleagues
say in various Wikileaked emails, they have terrible judgement.....
"... In the second act of this movie, Comey learns that the Weiner laptop had emails that were so damning it would be a crime against the public to allow them to vote without first seeing a big red flag. And a flag was the best he could do because it was too early in the investigation to leak out bits and pieces of the evidence. That would violate Clinton's rights. ..."
"... In this movie, Comey did the hero thing. He alerted the public to the fact that the FBI found DISQUALIFYING information on the Weiner laptop. And he took a second bullet to his reputation. ..."
"... I start by assuming Comey is the same man now as the one who was carefully vetted before being hired to protect the integrity of one of our most important institutions. And even Comey's critics concede he's smart. ..."
"... The way you know the new emails are disqualifying for Clinton is because otherwise our hero would have privately informed Congress and honored the tradition of not influencing elections. Comey is smart enough to know his options. And unless he suddenly turned rotten at his current age, he's got the character to jump in front of a second bullet for the Republic. ..."
I'm hearing several interpretations for these two observations:
1. Comey seemed pro -Clinton when he dropped the initial email case.
2. Comey seems anti -Clinton this week because he announced a new round of investigations
right before the election.
How can both behaviors be explained? Or, as I like to ask, which movie does the best job of explaining
our observations and also predicting the future?
Some say Comey is a political pawn in a rigged system. By that movie script we can explain why
he dropped the initial email case. But we can't explain why he's acting against Clinton's interests
now. What changed?
Well, some say Comey had to reopen the case against Clinton after discovering the Weiner laptop
emails. If he failed to act, there might be a revolt at the FBI and maybe a whistleblower would come
forward. But that leaves unexplained why Comey detailed to Congress how Clinton appeared to be guilty
of crimes at the same time he said the FBI was dropping the case. If Comey had been protecting Clinton
on the first round, he would have softened his description of her misdeeds, wouldn't he? But he didn't
seem to hold back anything.
And none of those hypotheses explain why the people who know Comey have high regard for his integrity.
Comey also has the security of a 10-year appointment as Director, so he has a low chance of getting
fired or politically influenced. That's exactly why the job has a 10-year term. Given what we know
of Comey before any of the Clinton emails, any movie that casts Comey as an ass-covering weasel is
probably making a casting mistake.
So allow me to offer an interpretation of events that casts Comey as more of a patriot and hero
than an ass-covering weasel. Compare my interpretation with whatever movie you have in your head
and see which one works best for explaining and predicting.
My movie says Comey had good evidence against Clinton during the initial investigation but made
a judgment call to leave the decision to the American public. For reasons of conscience, and acting
as a patriot, Comey explained in clear language to the public exactly what evidence the FBI found
against Clinton. The evidence looked damning because it was. Under this interpretation, Comey took
a bullet to his reputation for the sake of the Republic. He didn't want the FBI to steal this important
decision away from the people, but at the same time he couldn't let the people decide blind. So he
divulged the evidence and stepped away, like the action hero who doesn't look back at the explosion.
In the second act of this movie, Comey learns that the Weiner laptop had emails that were so damning
it would be a crime against the public to allow them to vote without first seeing a big red flag.
And a flag was the best he could do because it was too early in the investigation to leak out bits
and pieces of the evidence. That would violate Clinton's rights.
But Comey couldn't easily raise a red flag to warn the public because it was against FBI policy
to announce a criminal investigation about a candidate so close to election day. So Comey had a choice
of either taking another bullet for the Republic or screwing the very country that
he has spent his career protecting.
In this movie, Comey did the hero thing. He alerted the public to the fact that the FBI found
DISQUALIFYING information on the Weiner laptop. And he took a second bullet to his
reputation.
How do I know the new emails are that bad?
I start by assuming Comey is the same man now as the one who was carefully vetted before being
hired to protect the integrity of one of our most important institutions. And even Comey's critics
concede he's smart.
So…
The way you know the new emails are disqualifying for Clinton is because otherwise our hero would
have privately informed Congress and honored the tradition of not influencing elections. Comey is
smart enough to know his options. And unless he suddenly turned rotten at his current age, he's got
the character to jump in front of a second bullet for the Republic.
According to this movie, no matter who gets elected, we'll eventually learn of something disqualifying
in the Weiner emails.
And we can't say we weren't warned. Comey took two bullets to do it.
So compare this movie to your own movie and see which one does the best job of explaining the
observed facts. And when we find out what is in the Weiner laptop emails, compare that news to my
prediction that the information is disqualifying.
The Persuasion Filter says there is no prefered reality. We all see our own movies. In my movie,
Comey's has a consistent personality from start to finish. He starts out his career as a smart, competent
patriot and he later proves it by taking two bullets for the Republic. If your movie script has Comey
suddenly changing his basic character for this election season, don't expect an Oscar.
Twelve facts reveal what everyone needs to know about the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton's
email server.
Those twelve facts consist of:
On October 3, FBI agents
seized a laptop, an iPhone, and an iPad from disgraced former Congressman Anthony Weiner,
as part of the investigation into a report that he was sexting a 15-year-old girl. While searching
the laptop, FBI agents uncovered new emails that are likely connected to the agency's investigation
of Hillary Clinton's private email server. The laptop was used by Anthony Weiner and his wife
Huma Abedin and
reportedly has 650,000 emails on it. Earlier in the investigation, Huma Abedin
swore under oath in a deposition that she had turned over the devices that may have been used
to email Clinton: two laptops, a BlackBerry, files she found in her apartment. Huma Abedin reportedly
did not know about emails that were on the computer the FBI discovered. "The possibility that
this device contains any emails of hers is news to her," a source familiar with the investigation
told CNN . Anthony Weiner is cooperating with the FBI's investigation, according to Fox News
anchor Bret
Baier . FBI Director James Comey was
reportedly informed about the new emails last Thursday. He notified Congress the following
day. Comey had testified to Congress that the investigation was complete. He sent a letter on
Friday to both Democrats and Republican members of Congress to clarify that the case remained
open. Justice Department officials tried to stop James Comey from sending the letter, according
to the
New York Times , warning that it would be a break of longstanding policy. Investigators
believe that some of the emails deleted from Hillary Clinton's private server are on this laptop,
according
to CNN . Many of the emails were "either sent to or from the private email server at Mrs.
Clinton's home," according to the
Wall Street Journal . Officials received a
court order during the weekend to investigate the emails. The process has begun, but it will
take weeks, according to several sources.
Again, if you really believed that Hillary ever had a 12 point lead over Trump I've got
news for you. Functionally tied even with a +8 Dem oversampling. Brace for a Trumpslide.
This was even BEFORE the FBI announcement.
I found a
surprisingly good article on BBC news this morning addressing whether Trump can pull off
the election. The poor predictions of Brexit vote outcome have clearly raised concerns
about polling accuracy. A key point was that "Some 2.8 million people - about 6% of the
electorate - who had not voted for decades, if ever, turned up at the polling stations on
23 June and almost all of them voted to leave the EU."
The article covers a broad range of issues raising uncertainty in elections like the
impact of cellphone use and the increasing reluctance of the public to answer surveys.
It suggests that there is probably more uncertainty in all of the presidential race
polling than is being admitted – with some emphasis on the limits of "proprietary 'likely
voter' models used by most polling companies. The article ends quoting Nate Silver
suggesting that many pollsters have not factored enough uncertainty into their models..
Huma Abedin has VOIDED her immunity deal with the FBI. She will be facing jail time or give up
dirt on Hillary Clinton. Hillary has got to be crying big ol' gator tears right about now…
Huma Abedin has been by Hillary's side for a long time. After those emails were found on her husband
Anthony Weiner's computer. Hillary Clinton does not want her around anymore. According to Hillary's
campaign, Abedin is now sitting in a different section of the plane when it was traveling to Florida.
"... Abedin was deeply involved with the establishment of Hillary's private email server, which was used for all of her work as Secretary of State. Now, since we know Hillary had hundreds of classified or top-secret documents on her vulnerable server (despite her early lies saying she did not), any faith in Huma's judgment - at the very least - has been demolished. You will soon ask yourself, "how did this woman get a security clearance?" ..."
"... There is no doubt that she and Hillary have an extremely close relationship. She has been loyal and faithful to Hillary for twenty years. "I have one daughter. But if I had a second daughter, it would be Huma." So spoke Hillary in 2010. She even visited with Huma's mother Saleha in Saudi Arabia in 2011, telling her that Huma's position was "very important and sensitive." Saleha is reportedly an outspoken advocate for genital mutilation for girls in the Islamic world. ..."
"... One exception to this was the February 2016 issue of Vanity Fair . Author William D Cohen's story, titled "Is Huma Abedin Hillary Clinton's Secret Weapon or Her Next Big Problem?" tackled some of the issues I have gone over in this piece. It was well written, informative, and controversial. The backlash was immediate. ..."
Chic gal pal? Mild mannered politician's wife? Harmless clotheshorse? Saudi plant? Innocent aide?
Handler?
Huma Abedin is Vice Chair of Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign. But Huma is more, much
more than that. She is the person closest to the most powerful woman in American politics and perhaps
the next President. Huma has been described variously as Hillary's "body woman," a sort of glorified
go-to personal maid, gentle confidant, and by others as an Islamic spy. She may be all of these things,
because as we shall see, Huma Abedin has an interesting and complex career history.
Abedin was
deeply involved with the establishment of Hillary's private email server, which was used for
all of her work as Secretary of State. Now, since we know Hillary had hundreds of classified or top-secret
documents on her vulnerable server (despite her early lies saying she did not), any faith in Huma's
judgment - at the very least - has been demolished. You will soon ask yourself, "how did this woman
get a security clearance?"
She was born Huma Mahmood Abedin in 1976 in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Her father, Syed Zainul Abedin,
was Indian and born in New Delhi. In the early 1970s, he was affiliated with the Muslim Students
Association at Western Michigan University. The Muslim Students Association or MSA was
started in 1963 by
Saudi Arabia's biggest charity, the Muslim World League,
a group formed
and funded by the Kingdom to spread Islam throughout the world.
... ... ...
There were several issues being investigated both internally by the State Department and Sen.
Charles Grassley of the Senate Judiciary Committee for
conflicts of interest and embezzlement . She filed inaccurate time sheets overpaying herself
$10,000. Mr. Grassley has also questioned whether the deal with Abedin really met the requirements
for a special government employee status. One of those requirements is that someone's work as a contractor
be different enough from the original job to warrant giving the person contractor status. Documents
acquired by the Washington Times show that she told State officials that she planned to do the same
kind of work as an SGE that she did as Deputy Chief of Staff.
She became part of Hillary's transition team in 2013, helping her to return to private life. She
continued her work at the Clinton Foundation and set up her own consulting firm,
Zain Endeavors LLC .
On October 16, 2015, Abedin
testified in a closed session before the House Select Committee on Benghazi, in a session that
was expected to focus on the 2012 Benghazi attack during which Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens
and three other Americans were killed. She said, "I came here today to be as helpful as I could be
to the committee. I wanted to honor the service of those lost and injured in the Benghazi attacks,"
adding she was "honored" to work for Clinton at State and "proud" of her service there. Representative
Lynn Westmoreland, a Republican panel member, said Abedin frequently answered questions with responses
of "'I don't remember' and 'I don't recollect.'"
There is no doubt that she and Hillary have an extremely close relationship. She has been loyal
and faithful to Hillary for twenty years. "I have one daughter. But if I had a second daughter, it
would be Huma." So spoke Hillary in 2010. She even visited with Huma's mother Saleha in Saudi Arabia
in 2011, telling her that Huma's position was "very important and sensitive." Saleha is reportedly
an outspoken advocate for genital mutilation for girls in the Islamic world.
So how has the media dealt with Huma Abedin? In short, they haven't. The family's critics have
been attacked and labeled as conspiracy theorists.
One exception to this was the February 2016 issue of Vanity Fair . Author William D Cohen's
story, titled "Is Huma Abedin Hillary Clinton's Secret Weapon or Her Next Big Problem?" tackled
some of the issues I have gone over in this piece. It was well written, informative, and controversial.
The backlash was immediate.
"... I watch the Post twist itself into a pretzel, trying to explain, carefully walking through this latest Clinton mess, picking certain facts, ignoring others, not asking the obvious questions ..."
"... In a previous release of information as a result of a Freedom of Information suit, it became known that Huma Abedin had forwarded emails from Clinton's private email server, to Ms. Abedin's personal yahoo email account. ..."
"... I understand that Mrs. Clinton was SOS for four years. Nevertheless, how do you forward tens of thousands of emails? ..."
"... And what of the 30,000 destroyed (by Clinton) emails? The only thing that makes sense, is that the newly discovered emails include some of the missing emails. ..."
"... "We don't know what this means yet except that it's a real bombshell. And it is unthinkable that the Director of the FBI would take this action lightly, that he would put this letter forth to the Congress of the United States saying there is more information out there about classified e-mails and call it to the attention of congress unless it was something requiring serious investigation. So that's where we are..." ..."
As I watch the Post twist itself into a pretzel, trying to explain, carefully walking through
this latest Clinton mess, picking certain facts, ignoring others, not asking the obvious questions
(e.g. are some of the emails found on Weiner's laptop copies of the 30,000 emails that Clinton
destroyed, even though she was under subpoena to turn them over to the State Dept.?) it makes
me believe that there is not an honest, moral, trustworthy person, left in our government, our
political leadership, or our press corps.
In a previous release of information as a result of a Freedom of Information suit, it became known
that Huma Abedin had forwarded emails from Clinton's private email server, to Ms. Abedin's personal
yahoo email account.
The new bit of news today, is that the FBI found TENS OF THOUSANDS of Clinton
related emails on Weiner's (shared with Abedin?) laptop. I understand that Mrs. Clinton was SOS
for four years. Nevertheless, how do you forward tens of thousands of emails? I don't think it
can be a batch operation, they must have been forwarded individually. And what of the 30,000 destroyed
(by Clinton) emails? The only thing that makes sense, is that the newly discovered emails include
some of the missing emails. As Carl Bernstein (one of the two original Post reporters who broke
the Watergate story, which led to Nixon's resignation) said yesterday:
"We don't know what this means yet except that it's a real bombshell. And it is unthinkable that
the Director of the FBI would take this action lightly, that he would put this letter forth to
the Congress of the United States saying there is more information out there about classified
e-mails and call it to the attention of congress unless it was something requiring serious investigation.
So that's where we are..."
Top Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin has told people she is unsure how her emails could have ended
up on a device she viewed as her husband's computer, the seizure of which has reignited the Clinton
email investigation, according to a person familiar with the investigation and civil litigation over
the matter.
The person, who would not discuss the case unless granted anonymity, said Abedin was not a
regular user of the computer, and even when she agreed to turn over emails to the State Department
for federal records purposes, her lawyers did not search it for materials, not believing any of her
messages to be there.
….
Abedin told the FBI in an interview in April that her attorneys asked for guidance from the State
Department on how to conduct that review but did not receive a response.
Summarizing Abedin's interview, FBI agents wrote that she told them the attorneys "erred on
the side of caution and opted to include anything that they were unsure about."
In a sworn deposition in June, Abedin said she "looked for all the devices that may have any
of my State Department work on it and returned - returned - gave them to my attorneys for them to
review for all relevant documents."
============================================================= Curiouser and curiouser.
Sherlock Holmes: How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible,
whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?
We have a Russian Weiner in our computers…
And in an abundance of caution, I am checking my drawers…
"... I have to take the same or similar training as Hillary Clinton must have taken when she was secretary of state. The difference is that I do not have selective memory like Hillary nor am I a pathological liar. If I had done what Hillary has done no doubt I would be in federal prison! ..."
"... IMO either one is disqualifying to be President of the United States. Her extraordinary incompetence need not rise to the level of criminality. The court of public opinion is not a court of law, and candidates running for public office are judged in the court of public opinion accordingly. ..."
"... Apparently Weiner is "cooperating" with the FBI, which gives them the right to search emails on the laptop without an additional warrant... including the Abedin emails. I would likely think this would involve a plea deal for Weiner for throwing Abedin and Hillary under the bus. Despicable , but this is Weiner we're talking about. ..."
I work with classified data and create derivative classifications as part of my job as a civilian
with the Navy. Classified information is a pain in the ass, but it has to be dealt with properly
and securely. That is why we have SIPRNET to e-mail classified data.
The SIPRNET system forces a header at the top of all e-mail messages stating the classification
level and if foreign nationalities can view the data, etc. Additonally when creating a derivative
classification one has to consult the security classification guide for the program and mark the
data properly in any files.
I have to take the same or similar training as Hillary Clinton must have taken when she was
secretary of state. The difference is that I do not have selective memory like Hillary nor am
I a pathological liar. If I had done what Hillary has done no doubt I would be in federal prison!
IMO either one is disqualifying to be President of the United States. Her extraordinary incompetence
need not rise to the level of criminality. The court of public opinion is not a court of law,
and candidates running for public office are judged in the court of public opinion accordingly.
What may have been confusing you is that POP3 clients (generally speaking, unless told NOT
to) remove e-mail from the server and keep it locally. IMAP and MS Exchange can do that too but
you have to take extra configuration steps to ensure that the client removes the mail and stores
it locally (instead of the e-mail simultaneously residing on both the client and the server).
Apparently Weiner is "cooperating" with the FBI, which gives them the right to search emails
on the laptop without an additional warrant... including the Abedin emails. I would likely think
this would involve a plea deal for Weiner for throwing Abedin and Hillary under the bus. Despicable
, but this is Weiner we're talking about.
This morning the FBI also secured a warrant for the notebook, so warrant-less search is no
longer an issue to discuss. It has also been reported that there are somewhere around 650,000
emails to sort through between Weiner's and Abedin's emails. That has to be a very distasteful
task.. separating the wheat from the shaft.
I believe the first one indicates this scenario is unfolding:
1. laptop went with Weiner when they split, so the FBI did not review it during the initial
investigation. (Gross incompetence on their part.)
2. In the later investigation for Weiner's weenie wagging the FBI obtained the laptop and reviewed
HIS emails. In the process they found some to or from HER, most likely in a separate login account.
The warrant they were using for his investigation did not apply to the Clinton investigation,
and they passed the observation up the chain of command but did not read those emails (or will
not admit to reading them.)
which brings us to today
3. Huma says she doesn't know what is on that laptop and does not know how any of her emails
got there.
We have been speculating previously about what mail protocols were used. The presence of
a large number of emails when she expected none suggests to me that at some point she borrowed
his machine to check her emails. (Hers being on the blink or left at the office or some such thing.)
The email client used may have employed IMAP and while she thought it was just showing her the
couple of emails she needed to look at, in the background it was downloading a full copy of each
folder she accessed. She may not have expected that because on her machine whichever email client
this was was configured to not make local copies.
"... Now the threat is real; and for the foreseeable future we will have to live with and seek to reduce two closely interlinked dangers: the direct and potentially apocalyptic threat posed by terrorists, mainly (though by no means exclusively) based in the Muslim world, and the potential strengthening of those terrorists' resolve by misguided US actions. ..."
"... The most unilateralist Administration in modern American history has been forced to recognise, in principle at least, the country's pressing need for allies ..."
"... Apart from the fact that most European armies are useless when it comes to serious warfare, they are already showing great unwillingness to give the US a blank cheque for whatever military action the Bush Administration chooses to take. ..."
"... A strong sense of righteousness has always been present in the American tradition; but until 11 September, an acute sense of victimhood and persecution by the outside world was usually the preserve of the paranoid Right. ..."
"Who says we share common values with the Europeans? They don't even go to church!" Will the atrocities
of September 11 push America further to the right or open a new debate on foreign policy and the
need for alliances? In this exclusive online essay from the London Review of Books, Anatol Lieven
considers how the cold war legacy may affect the war on terrorism
Not long after the Bush Administration took power in January, I was invited to lunch at a glamorous
restaurant in New York by a group of editors and writers from an influential American right-wing
broadsheet. The food and wine were extremely expensive, the decor luxurious but discreet, the clientele
beautifully dressed, and much of the conversation more than mildly insane. With regard to the greater
part of the world outside America, my hosts' attitude was a combination of loathing, contempt, distrust
and fear: not only towards Arabs, Russians, Chinese, French and others, but towards 'European socialist
governments', whatever that was supposed to mean. This went with a strong desire - in theory at least
- to take military action against a broad range of countries across the world.
Two things were particularly striking here: a tendency to divide the world into friends and enemies,
and a difficulty verging on autism when it came to international opinions that didn't coincide with
their own - a combination more appropriate to the inhabitants of an ethnic slum in the Balkans than
to people who were, at that point, on top of the world.
Today Americans of all classes and opinions have reason to worry, and someone real to fear and
hate, while prolonged US military action overseas is thought to be inevitable. The building where
we had lunch is now rubble. Several of our fellow diners probably died last week, along with more
than six thousand other New Yorkers from every walk of life. Not only has the terrorist attack claimed
far more victims than any previous such attack anywhere in the world, but it has delivered a far
more damaging economic blow. Equally important, it has destroyed Americans' belief in their country's
invulnerability, on which so many other American attitudes and policies finally rested.
This shattering blow was delivered by a handful of anonymous agents hidden in the wider population,
working as part of a tightly-knit secret international conspiracy inspired by a fanatical and (to
the West) deeply 'alien' and 'exotic' religious ideology. Its members are ruthless; they have remarkable
organisational skills, a tremendous capacity for self-sacrifice and self-discipline, and a deep hatred
of the United States and the Western way of life. As Richard Hofstader and others have argued, for
more than two hundred years this kind of combination has always acted as a prompt for paranoid and
reactionary conspiracy theories, most of them groundless.
Now the threat is real; and for the foreseeable future we will have to live with and seek to reduce
two closely interlinked dangers: the direct and potentially apocalyptic threat posed by terrorists,
mainly (though by no means exclusively) based in the Muslim world, and the potential strengthening
of those terrorists' resolve by misguided US actions.
The latter danger has been greatly increased by the attacks. The terrorists have raised to white
heat certain smouldering tendencies among the American Right, while simultaneously - as is usually
the case at the start of wars - pushing American politics and most of its population in a sharply
rightward direction; all of which has taken place under an unexpectedly right-wing Administration.
If this leads to a crude military response, then the terrorists will have achieved part of their
purpose, which was to provoke the other side to indiscriminate retaliation, and thereby increase
their own support.
It is too early to say for sure how US strategies and attitudes will develop. At the time of writing
Afghanistan is the focus, but whatever happens there, it isn't clear whether the US Administration
will go on to launch a more general campaign of military pressure against other states which have
supported terrorist groups, and if so, what states and what kind of military pressure? US policy
is already pulled in two predictable but contradictory directions, amply illustrated in the op-ed
pages of US newspapers and in debates within the Government.
The most unilateralist Administration in modern American history has been forced to recognise,
in principle at least, the country's pressing need for allies. There are the beginnings, too, of
a real public debate on how US policy needs to be changed and shaped to fight the new 'war'. All
this is reminiscent of US attitudes and behaviour at the start of the Cold War, when Communism was
identified as the central menace to the US and to Western capitalism and democracy in general.
On the other hand, the public desire for revenge has strengthened certain attitudes - especially
in the Republican Party and media, as well as parts of the Administration - which, if they prevail,
will not only be dangerous in themselves, but will make the search for real allies difficult. And
real allies are essential, above all in the Arab and Muslim worlds. In the longer run, only the full
co-operation of Arab regimes - along with reform and economic development - can prevent the recruitment,
funding and operations of Arab-based terrorist groups.
As for Europe, British military support may be unconditional, but most European countries - Russia
among them - are likely to restrict their help to intelligence and policing. Apart from the fact
that most European armies are useless when it comes to serious warfare, they are already showing
great unwillingness to give the US a blank cheque for whatever military action the Bush Administration
chooses to take.
Yet a blank cheque is precisely what the Administration, and the greater part of US public opinion,
are asking for. This is Jim Hoagland, veteran establishment foreign correspondent and commentator,
in the generally liberal Washington Post:
"Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and many of the other Arab states Powell hopes to recruit for the bin
Laden posse have long been part of the problem, not part of the solution to international terrorism.
These states cannot be given free passes for going through the motions of helping the United States.
And European allies cannot be allowed to order an appetiser of bin Laden and not share in the costs
of the rest of a meal cooked in hell."
If this is the Post, then the sentiments in the right-wing press and the tabloids can well be
imagined. Here is Tod Lindberg, the editor of Policy Review, writing in the Washington Times:
"The United States is now energetically in the business of making governments pick a side: either
with us and against the terrorists, or against us and with them... Against the category of enemy
stands the category of 'friend'. Friends stand with us. Friends do whatever they can to help. Friends
don't, for example, engage in commerce with enemies, otherwise they aren't friends."
A strong sense of righteousness has always been present in the American tradition; but until 11
September, an acute sense of victimhood and persecution by the outside world was usually the preserve
of the paranoid Right. Now it has spread and, for the moment at least, some rather important ideas
have almost vanished from the public debate: among them, that other states have their own national
interests, and that in the end nothing compels them to help the US; that they, too, have been the
victims of terrorism - in the case of Britain, largely funded from groups in the United States -
but have not insisted on a right of unilateral military retaliation (this point was made by Niall
Ferguson in the New York Times, but not as yet in any op-ed by an American that I have seen); and
that in some cases these states may actually know more about their own part of the world than US
intelligence does.
Beyond the immediate and unforeseeable events in Afghanistan - and their sombre implications for
Pakistan - lies the bigger question of US policy in the Arab world. Here, too, Administration policy
may well be a good deal more cautious than the opinions of the right-wing media would suggest - which
again is fortunate, because much opinion on this subject is more than rabid. Here is AM Rosenthal
in the Washington Times arguing that an amazing range of states should be given ultimatums to surrender
not only alleged terrorists but also their own senior officials accused by the US of complicity:
"The ultimatum should go to the governments of Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria, Sudan and
any other devoted to the elimination of the United States or the constant incitement of hatred against
it... In the three days the terrorists consider the American ultimatum, the residents of the countries
would be urged 24 hours a day by the United States to flee the capital and major cities, because
they would be bombed to the ground beginning the fourth."
Rosenthal isn't a figure from the lunatic fringe ranting on a backwoods radio show, but the former
executive editor of the New York Times, writing in a paper with great influence in the Republican
Party, especially under the present Administration.
No Administration is going to do anything remotely like this. But if the Secretary of State, Colin
Powell, has emerged as the voice of moderation, with a proper commitment to multilateralism, other
voices are audible, too. Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defence, has spoken of "ending states
which support terrorism", and in the case of Iraq, there are those who would now like to complete
the work of the Gulf War and finish off Saddam Hussein.
Here, too, the mood of contempt for allies contributes to the ambition. Thus Kim Holmes, vice-president
of the right-wing Heritage Foundation, argued that only deference to America's Arab allies prevented
the US from destroying the Iraqi regime in 1991 (the profound unwillingness of Bush Senior to occupy
Iraq and take responsibility for the place also played its part in the decision): "To show that this
war is not with Islam per se, the US could be tempted to restrain itself militarily and accommodate
the complex and contradictory political agendas of Islamic states. This in turn could make the campaign
ineffectual, prolonging the problem of terrorism."
Getting rid of Saddam Hussein is not in itself a bad idea. His is a pernicious regime, a menace
to his own people and his neighbours, as well as to the West. And if the Iraqi threat to the Gulf
States could be eliminated, US troops might be withdrawn from Saudi Arabia: it was their permanent
stationing on the holy soil of Islam that turned Osama bin Laden from an anti-Soviet mujahid into
an anti-American terrorist.
But only if it were to take place in the context of an entirely new policy towards Palestine would
the US be able to mount such a campaign without provoking massive unrest across the Arab world; and
given what became of promises made during the Gulf War, there would first of all have to be firm
evidence of a US change of heart. The only borders between Israel and Palestine which would have
any chance of satisfying a majority of Palestinians and Arabs - and conforming to UN resolutions,
for what they are worth - would be those of 1967, possibly qualified by an internationalisation of
Jerusalem under UN control. This would entail the removal of the existing Jewish settlements in the
Occupied Territories, and would be absolutely unacceptable to any imaginable Israeli Government.
To win Israeli agreement would require not just US pressure, but the threat of a complete breach
of relations and the ending of aid.
There may be those in the Administration who would favour adopting such an approach at a later
stage. Bush Sr's was the most anti-Israeli Administration of the past two generations, and was disliked
accordingly by the Jewish and other ethnic lobbies. His son's is less beholden to those lobbies than
Clinton's was. And it may be that even pro-Israeli US politicians will at some point realise that
Israel's survival as such is not an issue: that it is absurd to increase the risk to Washington and
New York for the sake of 267 extremist settlers in Hebron and their comrades elsewhere.
Still, in the short term, a radical shift is unlikely, and an offensive against Iraq would therefore
be dangerous. The attacks on New York and the Pentagon and the celebrations in parts of the Arab
world have increased popular hostility to the Arabs in general and the Palestinians in particular,
a hostility assiduously stoked by Israeli propaganda. But when it comes to denouncing hate crimes
against Muslims - or those taken to be Muslims - within the US, the Administration has behaved decently,
perhaps because they have a rather sobering precedent in mind, one which has led to genuine shame:
the treatment of Japanese Americans during world war two.
This shame is the result of an applied historical intelligence that does not extend to the Arab
world. Americans tend - and perhaps need - to confuse the symptoms and the causes of Arab anger.
Since a key pro-Israel position in the US has been that fundamental Palestinian and Arab grievances
must not be allowed legitimacy or even discussed, the only explanation of Arab hostility to the US
and its ally must be sought in innate features of Arab society, whether a contemporary culture of
anti-semitism (and anti-Americanism) sanctioned by Arab leaderships, or ancient 'Muslim' traditions
of hostility to the West.
All of which may contain some truth: but the central issue, the role of Israeli policies in providing
a focus for such hatred, is overwhelmingly ignored. As a result, it is extremely difficult, and mostly
impossible, to hold any frank discussion of the most important issue affecting the position of the
US in the Middle East or the open sympathy for terrorism in the region. A passionately held nationalism
usually has the effect of corrupting or silencing those liberal intellectuals who espouse it. This
is the case of Israeli nationalism in the US. It is especially distressing that it should afflict
the Jewish liberal intelligentsia, that old bedrock of sanity and tolerance.
An Administration which wanted a radical change of policy towards Israel would have to generate
a new public debate almost from scratch - which would not be possible until some kind of tectonic
shift had taken place in American society. Too many outside observers who blame US Administrations
forget that on a wide range of issues, it is essentially Congress and not the White House or State
Department which determines foreign policy; this is above all true of US aid. An inability or unwillingness
to try to work on Congress, as opposed to going through normal diplomatic channels, has been a minor
contributory factor to Britain's inability to get any purchase on US policy in recent years.
The role of Congress brings out what might be called the Wilhelmine aspects of US foreign and
security policy. By that I do not mean extreme militarism or a love of silly hats, or even a shared
tendency to autism when it comes to understanding the perceptions of other countries, but rather
certain structural features in both the Wilhemine and the US system tending to produce over-ambition,
and above all a chronic incapacity to choose between diametrically opposite goals. Like Wilhelmine
Germany, the US has a legislature with very limited constitutional powers in the field of foreign
policy, even though it wields considerable de facto power and is not linked either institutionally
or by party discipline to the executive. The resulting lack of any responsibility for actual consequences
is a standing invitation to rhetorical grandstanding, and the pursuit of sectional interests at the
expense of overall policy.
Meanwhile, the executive, while in theory supremely powerful in this field, has in fact continually
to woo the legislature without ever being able to command its support. This, too, encourages dependence
on interest groups, as well as a tendency to overcome differences and gain support by making appeals
in terms of overheated patriotism rather than policy. Finally, in both systems, though for completely
different reasons, supreme executive power had or has a tendency to fall into the hands of people
totally unsuited for any but the ceremonial aspects of the job, and endlessly open to manipulation
by advisers, ministers and cliques.
In the US, this did not matter so much during the Cold War, when a range of Communist threats
- real, imagined or fabricated - held the system together in the pursuit of more or less common aims.
With the disappearance of the unifying threat, however, there has been a tendency, again very Wilhelmine,
to produce ambitious and aggressive policies in several directions simultaneously, often with little
reference at all to real US interests or any kind of principle.
The new 'war against terrorism' in Administration and Congressional rhetoric has been cast as
just such a principle, unifying the country and the political establishment behind a common goal
and affecting or determining a great range of other policies. The language has been reminiscent of
the global struggle against Communism, and confronting Islamist radicalism in the Muslim world does,
it's true, pose some of the same challenges, on a less global scale, though possibly with even greater
dangers for the world.
The likelihood that US strategy in the 'war against terrorism' will resemble that of the Cold
War is greatly increased by the way Cold War structures and attitudes have continued to dominate
the US foreign policy and security elites. Charles Tilly and others have written of the difficulty
states have in 'ratcheting down' wartime institutions and especially wartime spending. In the 1990s,
this failure on the part of the US to escape its Cold War legacy was a curse, ensuring unnecessarily
high military spending in the wrong fields, thoroughly negative attitudes to Russia, 'zero-sum' perceptions
of international security issues in general, and perceptions of danger which wholly failed, as we
now see, to meet the real threats to security and lives.
The idea of a National Missile Defense is predicated on a limited revival of the Cold War, with
China cast in the role of the Soviet Union and the Chinese nuclear deterrent as the force to be nullified.
Bush's foreign and security team is almost entirely a product of Cold War structures and circumscribed
by Cold War attitudes (which is not true of the President himself, who was never interested enough
in foreign policy; if he can get his mind round the rest of the world, he could well be more of a
free-thinker than many of his staff).
The collapse of the Communist alternative to Western-dominated modernisation and the integration
(however imperfect) of Russia and China into the world capitalist order have been a morally and socially
ambiguous process, to put it mildly; but in the early 1990s they seemed to promise the suspension
of hostility between the world's larger powers. The failure of the US to make use of this opportunity,
thanks to an utter confusion between an ideological victory and crudely-defined US geopolitical interests,
was a great misfortune which the 'war against terrorism' could in part rectify. Since 11 September,
the rhetoric in America has proposed a gulf between the 'civilised' states of the present world system,
and movements of 'barbaric', violent protest from outside and below - without much deference to the
ambiguities of 'civilisation', or the justifications of resistance to it, remarked on since Tacitus
at least.
How is the Cold War legacy likely to determine the 'war against terrorism'? Despite the general
conviction in the Republican Party that it was simply Reagan's military spending and the superiority
of the US system which destroyed Soviet Communism, more serious Cold War analysts were always aware
that it involved not just military force, or the threat of it, but ideological and political struggle,
socio-economic measures, and state-building. The latter in particular is an idea for which the Bush
team on their arrival in office had a deep dislike (if only to distance themselves from Clinton's
policies), but which they may now rediscover. Foreign aid - so shamefully reduced in the 1990s -
was also a key part of the Cold War, and if much of it was poured into kleptocratic regimes like
Mobutu's, or wasted on misguided projects, some at least helped produce flourishing economies in
Europe and East Asia.
The Republican Party is not only the party of Goldwater and Reagan, but of Eisenhower, Nixon and
Kissinger. Eisenhower is now almost forgotten by the party. 'Eisenhower Republicans', as they refer
to themselves, are usually far closer to Tony Blair (or perhaps more accurately, Helmut Schmidt)
than anyone the Republican Party has seen in recent years, and I'd wager that the majority of educated
Americans have forgotten that the original warning about the influence of the 'military industrial
complex' came from Eisenhower.
Kissinger is still very much alive, however, and his history is a reminder that one aspect of
the American capacity for extreme ruthlessness was also a capacity for radical changes of policy,
for reconciliation with states hitherto regarded as bitter enemies, and for cold-blooded abandonment
of close allies and clients whose usefulness was at an end. It would not altogether surprise me if
we were now to see a radical shift towards real co-operation with Russia, and even Iran.
In general, however, the Cold War legacies and parallels are discouraging and dangerous. To judge
by the language used in the days since 11 September, ignorance, demonisation and the drowning out
of nuanced debate indicate that much of the US establishment can no more tell the difference between
Iran and Afghanistan than they could between China and the Soviet Union in the early 1960s - the
inexcusable error which led to the American war in Vietnam. The preference for militarised solutions
continues (the 'War on Drugs', which will now have to be scaled back, is an example). Most worryingly,
the direct attack on American soil and American civilians - far worse than anything done to the US
in the Cold War - means that there is a real danger of a return to Cold War ruthlessness: not just
in terms of military tactics and covert operations, but in terms of the repulsive and endangered
regimes co-opted as local American clients.
The stakes are, if anything, a good deal higher than they were during the Cold War. Given what
we now know of Soviet policymaking, it is by no means clear that the Kremlin ever seriously contemplated
a nuclear strike against America. By contrast, it seems likely that bin Laden et al would in the
end use nuclear, chemical or biological weapons if they could deliver them.
There is also the question of the impact of US strategies (or, in the case of Israel, lack of
them) on the unity of the West - assuming that this is of some importance for the wellbeing of humanity.
However great the exasperation of many European states with US policy throughout the Cold War, the
Europeans were bound into the transatlantic alliance by an obvious Soviet threat - more immediate
to them than it was to the US. For the critical first decade of the Cold War, the economies of Europe
were hopelessly inferior to that of the US. Today, if European Governments feel that the US is dragging
them into unnecessary danger thanks to policies of which they disapprove, they will protest bitterly
- as many did during the Cold War - and then begin to distance themselves, which they could not afford
to do fifty years ago.
This is all the more likely if, as seems overwhelmingly probable, the US withdraws from the Balkans
- as it has already done in Macedonia - leaving Europeans with no good reason to require a US military
presence on their continent. At the same time, the cultural gap between Europeans and Republican
America (which does not mean a majority of Americans, but the dominant strain of policy) will continue
to widen. 'Who says we share common values with the Europeans?' a senior US politician remarked recently.
'They don't even go to church!' Among other harmful effects, the destruction of this relationship
could signal the collapse of whatever hope still exists for a common Western approach to global environmental
issues - which would, in the end, pose a greater danger to humanity than that of terrorism.
· Anatol Lieven is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington
DC.
Why thousands of emails were forwarded to unsecured computer shared by Abedin with her husband?
How they were forwarded, were they forwarded individually or as a batch operation ?
How many of them are those 30K deleted by Hillary "private" emails ?
Does this batch contains any of previously discovered classified emails?
What was the purpose of forwarding those emails to home computer.
Notable quotes:
"... Somebody at the F.B.I. must have picked up on the fact that the "FIX" was exposed hence on Friday an announcement was made by the F.B.I. that they had found further e-mails, I suspect that all the e-mails will have to be re-examined in the light of the lenient views taken by some F.B. I. Officers taken at the first pass or some more deletions will of necessity have to take place. ..."
"... Meanwhile Clinton is shouting and screaming at the F.B.I. because she now knows that a new fix will be very difficult or impossible in the light of the revealed information and her "charity donations" of over $800,000 have not only been wasted but have exposed her flank! ..."
"... ...the agents discovered the existence of tens of thousands of emails, some of them sent between Ms. Abedin and other Clinton aides, according to senior law enforcement officials ..."
"... Nevertheless, how do you forward tens of thousands of emails? I don't think it can be a batch operation, they must have been forwarded individually. And what of the 30,000 destroyed (by Clinton) emails? ..."
"... "We don't know what this means yet except that it's a real bombshell. And it is unthinkable that the Director of the FBI would take this action lightly, that he would put this letter forth to the Congress of the United States saying there is more information out there about classified e-mails and call it to the attention of congress unless it was something requiring serious investigation. So that's where we are..." ..."
The other day I was reading an article which was talking about two "charity donations" given to the wife of an F.B.I. Officer
involved in the e-mail investigation by "friends of the Clinton's".
The article was very low key it's author briefly wondered if the officer concerned should have excused himself from the investigation.
I also thought it strange that the officers interest had not been declared. Some time later I was reading about details concerning
the e-mails sent from Clinton's staff to members of the F.B.I. ,basically what was happening was that the security rating of the
information contained in non deleted mails was being talked down, at which point for me at least alarm bells were ringing loud
and clear but I did not expect there to be any reaction. O.K. So I'm that cynical.
Somebody at the F.B.I. must have picked up on the fact that the "FIX" was exposed hence on Friday an announcement was made
by the F.B.I. that they had found further e-mails, I suspect that all the e-mails will have to be re-examined in the light of
the lenient views taken by some F.B. I. Officers taken at the first pass or some more deletions will of necessity have to take
place.
Meanwhile Clinton is shouting and screaming at the F.B.I. because she now knows that a new fix will be very difficult or
impossible in the light of the revealed information and her "charity donations" of over $800,000 have not only been wasted but
have exposed her flank!
My Fellow Americans - Here is what the NYT is reporting in contrast to the WaPost's email count of more than 1,000, in terms of
an actual number of emails to be reviewed:
"...the agents discovered the existence of tens of thousands of emails, some of them sent between Ms. Abedin and other
Clinton aides, according to senior law enforcement officials."
Subsequently, that could change what the initial investigation by the Bureau had to look at this summer, and the understanding
that all of the parties acknowledge that about 30k emails were deleted. So the "tens of thousands" may be duplicates or perhaps
copies of the "thumb-drive" that one of HRC's lawyers was said to have been given?
At any rate, this must bring into play at least 18 U.S. Code § 2071 - Concealment, removal, or mutilation generally - and raise
the question about whether conflicting DOJ internal "policy" has any affect on any of the Administration's current or former appointees,
in terms of their "oath of office" or moving forward. And that would bring 5 U.S. Code § 3331 - Oath of office - into play as
well as the 5-year statute of limitations.
We're likely still "Doomed" - so don't get too happy just yet, because EPA could still disallow "draining" anything as a result
of the Clean Water Act, as amended.
CanardNoir 2:41 PM EDT
And here's the Sec. 2071 reason "why":
(b) "Whoever, having the custody of any such record, proceeding, map, book, document, paper, or other thing, willfully and
unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, falsifies, or destroys the same, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned
not more than three years, or both; and shall forfeit his office and be disqualified from holding any office under the United
States..."
[Edited] Lynch had to recuse herself after meeting with Bill Clinton. Had there not been information showing intent to violate
espionage laws, Comey would have never acted. The fact is she is a criminal and cannot be elected . Image an elected Hillary who
is impeached. The USA deserves better than a this and must turn the Clintons out to pasture forever.
The FBI used to be a respected agency. Now, not so much. Working for, and in collusion with Obama, Loretta Lynch, the Clinton's
and the media makes their "investigation" suspect, to say the least.
Hillary "will say anything and do anything" (Obama's words, not mine) to get elected. Trying to blame her malfeasance on the
FBI is simply stupid. She is so obsessed with money and power that she openly states "I have spent my life helping children and
women". Right. Like when she was an 8 year Senator who only introduced 3 bills naming a couple highways and a bank. Her followers
are dupes and dunces and we can only hope they don't outnumber rationally thinking people.
To think that Weiner and who knows who else had access to U.S. National Security information on the Weiner/Abedin computer.
Sure sounds like the FBI is after Abedin not Clinton.
Dems loved Comey when he slapped Clinton on the wrist for playing loose with U.S. National Security on her email server. Now
those same Dems want to burn Comey at the stake.
Let's not forget how Comey has come to be such a respected official http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic...
In vivid testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday, Comey said he alerted FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III and raced,
sirens blaring, to join Ashcroft in his hospital room, arriving minutes before Gonzales and Card. Ashcroft, summoning the strength
to lift his head and speak, refused to sign the papers they had brought. Gonzales and Card, who had never acknowledged Comey's
presence in the room, turned and left.
ad_icon
The sickbed visit was the start of a dramatic showdown between the White House and the Justice Department in early 2004 that,
according to Comey, was resolved only when Bush overruled Gonzales and Card. But that was not before Ashcroft, Comey, Mueller
and their aides prepared a mass resignation, Comey said. The domestic spying by the National Security Agency continued for several
weeks without Justice approval, wheresthechow
2:27 AM EST The Clinton's are just so amazing in their cavalier above-the-law attitude that they can't even renovate their
house without breaking the law.
Mr. Weiner has not aged well.....and it is not over....avoid park benches do not visit remote areas.....People you and I know
may have a Boat moored in a slip at a Dock or a Yacht club that's Normal Americana....Yet A.G.Loretta Lynch was waiting on the
Tarmac in her Jet Plane as Bill Clinton leaves His Jet Plane to chat with Loretta ....this is an area of privilege far above yacht
club status....and this meeting broke several laws very quickly...so the A.G. has no authority to comment on what the head of
F.B.I. has done regarding The Weiner Email discovery and whatever Bill had swindled for future favors or past I.O.U's has now
become a waste of AA jet fuel for the,"IN", crowd.....Hillary is starting to look a little like Mr.Weiner; facial tension ,gaunt,hollow
cheeks,terse lips,Bill was supposed to take care of all this....right?Now Mr. Comey had taken the J. Edgar Hoover pledge to Serve
and protect and that would have been us under all other circumstances.....but he has to be loyal to his associates for they are
the top 2% of the entire population and they deserve to be treated as the most important the bureau has....what transpired on
the first pass left them in Mayberry P.D. limbo and will never happen could someone help Loretta Lynch to see the light or the
exit sign ....Please
711810943 10/29/2016 10:56 PM EST
Yep, we're definitely talking about the battle of the twin dumpster fires here...
Celebrity gossip trumps policy, if you'll forgive the expression. But what can you expect in a country that can name three
Kardashian sisters, but not one foreign head of state.
Hmmm... Those deck chairs need rearranging... See ya...
Laptop or PC is property of US once claissified info discovered. 18USC 798, right? Who says a warrant is needed to seize, protect?
No so. And, for sure, they will read, use of which may or may not be impeded thereby. Still, there is allot to investigate, incl.
numerous apparent violations of ethics in govt. act, etc, failures to disclose gifts / income, etc.
The Clintons run a morally corrupt RICO that holds itself above the law. With Obama's support, the Justice Dept., IRS, FBI,
State Dept. have aided and abetted the Clinton corruption of our government. This illustrates Hayek's point in The Road To Serfdom
that when very powerful government institutions are created, "the worst rise to the top". Public power and money attract the least
scrupulous, least honest, most power hungry, and most determined. Though Clinton's cabal publicly poses themselves as humanitarian
progressives, the Doug Band statement of operations among Teneo, CGI, the Foundation, and the Clintons presents the underlying
purpose of selling influence and the crony capital structure devised to split the proceeds. The Clinton Foundation operates outside
the law. So where's the MSM, the IRS, the FBI, Justice...what justice?
To think that Weiner and who knows who else had access to U.S. National Security information on the Weiner/Abedin computer.
Sure sounds like the FBI is after Abedin not Clinton.
Dems loved Comey when he slapped Clinton on the wrist for playing loose with U.S. National Security on her email server. Now
those same Dems want to burn Comey at the stake.
Let's not forget how Comey has come to be such a respected official http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic...
In vivid testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday, Comey said he alerted FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III and raced,
sirens blaring, to join Ashcroft in his hospital room, arriving minutes before Gonzales and Card. Ashcroft, summoning the strength
to lift his head and speak, refused to sign the papers they had brought. Gonzales and Card, who had never acknowledged Comey's
presence in the room, turned and left.
ad_icon
The sickbed visit was the start of a dramatic showdown between the White House and the Justice Department in early 2004 that,
according to Comey, was resolved only when Bush overruled Gonzales and Card. But that was not before Ashcroft, Comey, Mueller
and their aides prepared a mass resignation, Comey said. The domestic spying by the National Security Agency continued for several
weeks without Justice approval, he said.
"I was angry," Comey testified. "I thought I just witnessed an effort to take advantage of a very sick man, who did not have
the powers of the attorney general because they had been transferred to me."
[Edited] In a previous release of information as a result of a Freedom of Information suit, it became known that Huma Abedin
had forwarded emails from Clinton's private email server, to Ms. Abedin's personal yahoo email account.
The new bit of news today, is that the FBI found TENS OF THOUSANDS of Clinton related emails on Weiner's (shared with Abedin?)
laptop. I understand that Mrs. Clinton was SOS for four years.
Nevertheless, how do you forward tens of thousands of emails? I don't think it can be a batch operation, they must have
been forwarded individually. And what of the 30,000 destroyed (by Clinton) emails?
The only thing that makes sense, is that the newly discovered emails include some of the missing emails. As Carl Bernstein
(one of the two original Post reporters who broke the Watergate story, which led to Nixon's resignation) said yesterday:
"We don't know what this means yet except that it's a real bombshell. And it is unthinkable that the Director of the
FBI would take this action lightly, that he would put this letter forth to the Congress of the United States saying there is
more information out there about classified e-mails and call it to the attention of congress unless it was something requiring
serious investigation. So that's where we are..."
"... A key justification of the Bush administration's purported strategy of 'democratising' the Middle East is the argument that democracies are pacific, and that Muslim democracies will therefore eventually settle down peacefully under the benign hegemony of the US. ..."
"... The president's title of 'commander-in-chief' is used by administration propagandists to suggest, in a way reminiscent of German militarists before 1914 attempting to defend their half-witted Kaiser, that any criticism of his record in external affairs comes close to a betrayal of the military and the country. ..."
"... The new American militarism is the handiwork of several disparate groups that shared little in common apart from being intent on undoing the purportedly nefarious effects of the 1960s. Military officers intent on rehabilitating their profession; intellectuals fearing that the loss of confidence at home was paving the way for the triumph of totalitarianism abroad; religious leaders dismayed by the collapse of traditional moral standards; strategists wrestling with the implications of a humiliating defeat that had undermined their credibility; politicians on the make; purveyors of pop culture looking to make a buck: as early as 1980, each saw military power as the apparent answer to any number of problems. ..."
"... Two other factors have also been critical: the dependence on imported oil is seen as requiring American hegemony over the Middle East; and the Israel lobby has worked assiduously and with extraordinary success to make sure that Israel's enemies are seen by Americans as also being those of the US. ..."
"... And let's not forget the role played by the entrenched interests of the military itself and what Dwight Eisenhower once denounced as the 'military-industrial-academic complex'. ..."
"... The security elites are obviously interested in the maintenance and expansion of US global military power, if only because their own jobs and profits depend on it. ..."
"... To achieve wider support in the media and among the public, it is also necessary to keep up the illusion that certain foreign nations constitute a threat to the US, and to maintain a permanent level of international tension. ..."
"... They would include the element of messianism embodied in American civic nationalism, with its quasi-religious belief in the universal and timeless validity of its own democratic system, and in its right and duty to spread that system to the rest of the world. ..."
"... Wall Street Journal ..."
"... Important sections of contemporary US popular culture are suffused with the language of militarism. ..."
"... Red Storm Rising ..."
"... Indeed, a portrait of US militarism today could be built around a set of such apparently glaring contradictions: the contradiction, for example, between the military coercion of other nations and the belief in the spreading of 'freedom' and 'democracy'. Among most non-Americans, and among many American realists and progressives, the collocation seems inherently ludicrous. But, as Bacevich brings out, it has deep roots in American history. Indeed, the combination is historically coterminous with Western imperialism. Historians of the future will perhaps see preaching 'freedom' at the point of an American rifle as no less morally and intellectually absurd than 'voluntary' conversion to Christianity at the point of a Spanish arquebus. ..."
"... Today, having dissolved any connection between claims to citizenship and obligation to serve, Americans entrust their security to a class of military professionals who see themselves in many respects as culturally and politically set apart from the rest of society. ..."
"... British power was far from unlimited. The British Empire could use its technological superiority, small numbers of professional troops and local auxiliaries to conquer backward and impoverished countries in Asia and Africa, but it would not have dreamed of intervening unilaterally in Europe or North America. ..."
"... As Iraq – and to a lesser extent Afghanistan – has demonstrated, the US can knock over states, but it cannot suppress the resulting insurgencies, even one based in such a comparatively small population as the Sunni Arabs of Iraq. ..."
"... Recognizing this, the army is beginning to imitate ancient Rome in offering citizenship to foreign mercenaries in return for military service – something that the amazing Boot approves, on the grounds that while it helped destroy the Roman Empire, it took four hundred years to do so. ..."
"... The fact that the Democrats completely failed to do this says a great deal about their lack of political will, leadership and capacity to employ a focused strategy. ..."
The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War by
Andrew Bacevich
Oxford, 270 pp, Ł16.99, August 2005, ISBN 0 19 517338 4
A key justification of the Bush administration's purported strategy of 'democratising' the
Middle East is the argument that democracies are pacific, and that Muslim democracies will therefore
eventually settle down peacefully under the benign hegemony of the US. Yet, as Andrew Bacevich
points out in one of the most acute analyses of America to have appeared in recent years, the United
States itself is in many ways a militaristic country, and becoming more so:
at the end of the Cold War, Americans said yes to military power. The skepticism about arms
and armies that informed the original Wilsonian vision, indeed, that pervaded the American experiment
from its founding, vanished. Political leaders, liberals and conservatives alike, became enamoured
with military might.
The ensuing affair had, and continues to have, a heedless, Gatsby-like aspect, a passion pursued
in utter disregard of any consequences that might ensue.
The president's title of 'commander-in-chief' is used by administration propagandists to suggest,
in a way reminiscent of German militarists before 1914 attempting to defend their half-witted Kaiser,
that any criticism of his record in external affairs comes close to a betrayal of the military and
the country. Compared to German and other past militarisms, however, the contemporary American
variant is extremely complex, and the forces that have generated it have very diverse origins and
widely differing motives:
The new American militarism is the handiwork of several disparate groups that shared little
in common apart from being intent on undoing the purportedly nefarious effects of the 1960s. Military
officers intent on rehabilitating their profession; intellectuals fearing that the loss of confidence
at home was paving the way for the triumph of totalitarianism abroad; religious leaders dismayed
by the collapse of traditional moral standards; strategists wrestling with the implications of
a humiliating defeat that had undermined their credibility; politicians on the make; purveyors
of pop culture looking to make a buck: as early as 1980, each saw military power as the apparent
answer to any number of problems.
Two other factors have also been critical: the dependence on imported oil is seen as requiring
American hegemony over the Middle East; and the Israel lobby has worked assiduously and with extraordinary
success to make sure that Israel's enemies are seen by Americans as also being those of the US.
And let's not forget the role played by the entrenched interests of the military itself and
what Dwight Eisenhower once denounced as the 'military-industrial-academic complex'.
The security elites are obviously interested in the maintenance and expansion of US global
military power, if only because their own jobs and profits depend on it. Jobs and patronage
also ensure the support of much of the Congress, which often authorizes defense spending on weapons
systems the Pentagon doesn't want and hasn't asked for, in order to help some group of senators and
congressmen in whose home states these systems are manufactured. To achieve wider support in
the media and among the public, it is also necessary to keep up the illusion that certain foreign
nations constitute a threat to the US, and to maintain a permanent level of international tension.
That's not the same, however, as having an actual desire for war, least of all for a major conflict
which might ruin the international economy. US ground forces have bitter memories of Vietnam, and
no wish to wage an aggressive war: Rumsfeld and his political appointees had to override the objections
of the senior generals, in particular those of the army chief of staff, General Eric Shinseki, before
the attack on Iraq. The navy and air force do not have to fight insurgents in hell-holes like Fallujah,
and so naturally have a more relaxed attitude.
To understand how the Bush administration was able to manipulate the public into supporting the
Iraq war one has to look for deeper explanations. They would include the element of messianism
embodied in American civic nationalism, with its quasi-religious belief in the universal and timeless
validity of its own democratic system, and in its right and duty to spread that system to the rest
of the world. This leads to a genuine belief that American soldiers can do no real wrong because
they are spreading 'freedom'. Also of great importance – at least until the Iraqi insurgency rubbed
American noses in the horrors of war – has been the development of an aesthetic that sees war as
waged by the US as technological, clean and antiseptic; and thanks to its supremacy in weaponry,
painlessly victorious. Victory over the Iraqi army in 2003 led to a new flowering of megalomania
in militarist quarters. The amazing Max Boot of the Wall Street Journal – an armchair commentator,
not a frontline journalist – declared that the US victory had made 'fabled generals such as Erwin
Rommel and Heinz Guderian seem positively incompetent by comparison'. Nor was this kind of talk restricted
to Republicans. More than two years into the Iraq quagmire, strategic thinkers from the Democratic
establishment were still declaring that 'American military power in today's world is practically
unlimited.'
Important sections of contemporary US popular culture are suffused with the language of militarism.
Take Bacevich on the popular novelist Tom Clancy:
In any Clancy novel, the international order is a dangerous and threatening place, awash with
heavily armed and implacably determined enemies who threaten the United States. That Americans
have managed to avoid Armageddon is attributable to a single fact: the men and women of America's
uniformed military and its intelligence services have thus far managed to avert those threats.
The typical Clancy novel is an unabashed tribute to the skill, honor, extraordinary technological
aptitude and sheer decency of the nation's defenders. To read Red Storm Rising is to
enter a world of 'virtuous men and perfect weapons', as one reviewer noted. 'All the Americans
are paragons of courage, endurance and devotion to service and country. Their officers are uniformly
competent and occasionally inspired. Men of all ranks are faithful husbands and devoted fathers.'
Indeed, in the contract that he signed for the filming of Red October, Clancy stipulated
that nothing in the film show the navy in a bad light.
Such attitudes go beyond simply glorying in violence, military might and technological prowess.
They reflect a belief – genuine or assumed – in what the Germans used to call Soldatentum:
the pre-eminent value of the military virtues of courage, discipline and sacrifice, and explicitly
or implicitly the superiority of these virtues to those of a hedonistic, contemptible and untrustworthy
civilian society and political class. In the words of Thomas Friedman, the ostensibly liberal foreign
affairs commentator of the ostensibly liberal New York Times, 'we do not deserve these people.
They are so much better than the country they are fighting for.' Such sentiments have a sinister
pedigree in modern history.
In the run-up to the last election, even a general as undistinguished as Wesley Clark could see
his past generalship alone as qualifying him for the presidency – and gain the support of leading
liberal intellectuals. Not that this was new: the first president was a general and throughout the
19th and 20th centuries both generals and more junior officers ran for the presidency on the strength
of their military records. And yet, as Bacevich points out, this does not mean that the uniformed
military have real power over policy-making, even in matters of war. General Tommy Franks may have
regarded Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense, as 'the stupidest fucking guy on the planet',
but he took Feith's orders, and those of the civilians standing behind him: Wolfowitz, Cheney, Rumsfeld
and the president himself. Their combination of militarism and contempt for military advice recalls
Clemenceau and Churchill – or Hitler and Stalin.
Indeed, a portrait of US militarism today could be built around a set of such apparently glaring
contradictions: the contradiction, for example, between the military coercion of other nations and
the belief in the spreading of 'freedom' and 'democracy'. Among most non-Americans, and among many
American realists and progressives, the collocation seems inherently ludicrous. But, as Bacevich
brings out, it has deep roots in American history. Indeed, the combination is historically coterminous
with Western imperialism. Historians of the future will perhaps see preaching 'freedom' at the point
of an American rifle as no less morally and intellectually absurd than 'voluntary' conversion to
Christianity at the point of a Spanish arquebus.
Its symbols may be often childish and its methods brutish, but American belief in 'freedom' is
a real and living force. This cuts two ways. On the one hand, the adherence of many leading intellectuals
in the Democratic Party to a belief in muscular democratization has had a disastrous effect on the
party's ability to put up a strong resistance to the policies of the administration. Bush's messianic
language of 'freedom' – supported by the specifically Israeli agenda of Natan Sharansky and his allies
in the US – has been all too successful in winning over much of the opposition. On the other hand,
the fact that a belief in freedom and democracy lies at the heart of civic nationalism places certain
limits on American imperialism – weak no doubt, but nonetheless real. It is not possible for the
US, unlike previous empires, to pursue a strategy of absolutely unconstrained Machtpolitik.
This has been demonstrated recently in the breach between the Bush administration and the Karimov
tyranny in Uzbekistan.
The most important contradiction, however, is between the near worship of the military in much
of American culture and the equally widespread unwillingness of most Americans – elites and masses
alike – to serve in the armed forces. If people like Friedman accompanied their stated admiration
for the military with a real desire to abandon their contemptible civilian lives and join the armed
services, then American power in the world really might be practically unlimited. But as Bacevich
notes,
having thus made plain his personal disdain for crass vulgarity and support for moral rectitude,
Friedman in the course of a single paragraph drops the military and moves on to other pursuits.
His many readers, meanwhile, having availed themselves of the opportunity to indulge, ever so
briefly, in self-loathing, put down their newspapers and themselves move on to other things. Nothing
has changed, but columnist and readers alike feel better for the cathartic effect of this oblique,
reassuring encounter with an alien world.
Today, having dissolved any connection between claims to citizenship and obligation to
serve, Americans entrust their security to a class of military professionals who see themselves
in many respects as culturally and politically set apart from the rest of society.
This combination of a theoretical adulation with a profound desire not to serve is not of course
new. It characterized most of British society in the 19th century, when, just as with the US today,
the overwhelming rejection of conscription – until 1916 – meant that, appearances to the contrary,
British power was far from unlimited. The British Empire could use its technological superiority,
small numbers of professional troops and local auxiliaries to conquer backward and impoverished countries
in Asia and Africa, but it would not have dreamed of intervening unilaterally in Europe or North
America.
Despite spending more on the military than the rest of the world combined, and despite enjoying
overwhelming technological superiority, American military power is actually quite limited. As
Iraq – and to a lesser extent Afghanistan – has demonstrated, the US can knock over states, but it
cannot suppress the resulting insurgencies, even one based in such a comparatively small population
as the Sunni Arabs of Iraq. As for invading and occupying a country the size of Iran, this is
coming to seem as unlikely as an invasion of mainland China.
In other words, when it comes to actually applying military power the US is pretty much where
it has been for several decades. Another war of occupation like Iraq would necessitate the restoration
of conscription: an idea which, with Vietnam in mind, the military detests, and which politicians
are well aware would probably make them unelectable. It is just possible that another terrorist attack
on the scale of 9/11 might lead to a new draft, but that would bring the end of the US military empire
several steps closer. Recognizing this, the army is beginning to imitate ancient Rome in offering
citizenship to foreign mercenaries in return for military service – something that the amazing Boot
approves, on the grounds that while it helped destroy the Roman Empire, it took four hundred years
to do so.
Facing these dangers squarely, Bacevich proposes refocusing American strategy away from
empire and towards genuine national security. It is a measure of the degree to which imperial thinking
now dominates US politics that these moderate and commonsensical proposals would seem nothing short
of revolutionary to the average member of the Washington establishment.
They include a renunciation of messianic dreams of improving the world through military force,
except where a solid international consensus exists in support of US action; a recovery by Congress
of its power over peace and war, as laid down in the constitution but shamefully surrendered in recent
years; the adoption of a strategic doctrine explicitly making war a matter of last resort; and a
decision that the military should focus on the defense of the nation, not the projection of US power.
As a means of keeping military expenditure in some relationship to actual needs, Bacevich suggests
pegging it to the combined annual expenditure of the next ten countries, just as in the 19th century
the size of the British navy was pegged to that of the next two largest fleets – it is an index of
the budgetary elephantiasis of recent years that this would lead to very considerable spending reductions.
This book is important not only for the acuteness of its perceptions, but also for the identity
of its author. Colonel Bacevich's views on the military, on US strategy and on world affairs were
profoundly shaped by his service in Vietnam. His year there 'fell in the conflict's bleak latter
stages long after an odor of failure had begun to envelop the entire enterprise'. The book is dedicated
to his brother-in-law, 'a casualty of a misbegotten war'.
Just as Vietnam shaped his view of how the US and the US military should not intervene in the
outside world, so the Cold War in Europe helped define his beliefs about the proper role of the military.
For Bacevich and his fellow officers in Europe in the 1970s and 1980s, defending the West from possible
Soviet aggression, 'not conquest, regime change, preventive war or imperial policing', was 'the American
soldier's true and honorable calling'.
In terms of cultural and political background, this former soldier remains a self-described Catholic
conservative, and intensely patriotic. During the 1990s Bacevich wrote for right-wing journals, and
still situates himself culturally on the right:
As long as we shared in the common cause of denouncing the foolishness and hypocrisies of the
Clinton years, my relationship with modern American conservatism remained a mutually agreeable
one But my disenchantment with what passes for mainstream conservatism, embodied in the Bush
administration and its groupies, is just about absolute. Fiscal irresponsibility, a buccaneering
foreign policy, a disregard for the constitution, the barest lip service as a response to profound
moral controversies: these do not qualify as authentically conservative values.
On this score my views have come to coincide with the critique long offered by the radical
left: it is the mainstream itself, the professional liberals as well as the professional conservatives,
who define the problem The Republican and Democratic Parties may not be identical,
but they produce nearly identical results.
Bacevich, in other words, is skeptical of the naive belief that replacing the present administration
with a Democrat one would lead to serious changes in the US approach to the world. Formal party allegiances
are becoming increasingly irrelevant as far as thinking about foreign and security policy is concerned.
Bacevich also makes plain the private anger of much of the US uniformed military at the way in
which it has been sacrificed, and its institutions damaged, by chickenhawk civilian chauvinists who
have taken good care never to see action themselves; and the deep private concern of senior officers
that they might be ordered into further wars that would wreck the army altogether. Now, as never
before, American progressives have the chance to overcome the knee-jerk hostility to the uniformed
military that has characterized the left since Vietnam, and to reach out not only to the soldiers
in uniform but also to the social, cultural and regional worlds from which they are drawn. For if
the American left is once again to become an effective political force, it must return to some of
its own military traditions, founded on the distinguished service of men like George McGovern, on
the old idea of the citizen soldier, and on a real identification with that soldier's interests and
values. With this in mind, Bacevich calls for moves to bind the military more closely into American
society, including compulsory education for all officers at a civilian university, not only at the
start of their careers but at intervals throughout them.
Or to put it another way, the left must fight imperialism in the name of patriotism. Barring a
revolutionary and highly unlikely transformation of American mass culture, any political party that
wishes to win majority support will have to demonstrate its commitment to the defense of the country.
The Bush administration has used the accusation of weakness in security policy to undermine its opponents,
and then used this advantage to pursue reckless strategies that have themselves drastically weakened
the US. The left needs to heed Bacevich and draw up a tough, realistic and convincing alternative.
It will also have to demonstrate its identification with the respectable aspects of military culture.
The Bush administration and the US establishment in general may have grossly mismanaged the threats
facing us, but the threats are real, and some at least may well need at some stage to be addressed
by military force. And any effective military force also requires the backing of a distinctive military
ethic embracing loyalty, discipline and a capacity for both sacrifice and ruthlessness.
In the terrible story of the Bush administration and the Iraq war, one of the most morally disgusting
moments took place at a Senate Committee hearing on 29 April 2004, when Paul Wolfowitz – another
warmonger who has never served himself – mistook, by a margin of hundreds, how many US soldiers had
died in a war for which he was largely responsible. If an official in a Democratic administration
had made a public mistake like that, the Republican opposition would have exploited it ruthlessly,
unceasingly, to win the next election. The fact that the Democrats completely failed to do this
says a great deal about their lack of political will, leadership and capacity to employ a focused
strategy.
Because they are the ones who pay the price for reckless warmongering and geopolitical megalomania,
soldiers and veterans of the army and marine corps could become valuable allies in the struggle to
curb American imperialism, and return America's relationship with its military to the old limited,
rational form. For this to happen, however, the soldiers have to believe that campaigns against the
Iraq war, and against current US strategy, are anti-militarist, but not anti-military. We have needed
the military desperately on occasions in the past; we will definitely need them again.
The success of [civil rights and anti-apartheid] movements did not end racism, but drove
it underground, allowing neoliberals to exploit racist and tribalist political support while
pursuing the interests of wealth and capital, at the expense of the (disproportionately non-white)
poor.
That coalition has now been replaced by one in which the tribalists and racists are dominant.
For the moment at least, [hard] neoliberals continue to support the parties they formerly controlled,
with the result that the balance of political forces between the right and the opposing coalition
of soft neoliberals and the left has not changed significantly.
There's an ambiguity in this narrative and in the three-party analysis.
Do we acknowledge that the soft neoliberals in control of the coalition that includes the inchoate
left also "exploit racist and tribalist political support while pursuing the interests of wealth
and capital, at the expense of the (disproportionately non-white) poor."? They do it with a different
style and maybe with some concession to economic melioration, as well as supporting anti-racist
and feminist policy to keep the inchoate left on board, but . . .
The new politics of the right has lost faith in the hard neoliberalism that formerly furnished
its policy agenda of tax cuts for the rich, war in the Middle East and so on, leaving the impure
resentment ungoverned and unfocused, as you say.
The soft neoliberals, it seems to me, are using anti-racism to discredit economic populism
and its motivations, using the new politics of the right as a foil.
The problem of how to oppose racism and tribalism effectively is now entangled with soft neoliberal
control of the remaining party coalition, which is to say with the credibility of the left party
as a vehicle for economic populism and the credibility of economic populism as an antidote for
racism or sexism. (cf js. @ 1,2)
The form of tribalism used to mobilize the left entails denying that an agenda of economic
populism is relevant to the problems of sexism and racism, because the deplorables must be deplored
to get out the vote. And, because the (soft) neoliberals in charge must keep economic populism
under control to deliver the goods to their donor base.
"... The US has one thing in common with the UK. A massive hidden disenfranchised underclass, who are often unemployed or underemployed . He will get that vote, just as brexit did, and the reason he invited Farage over was because he knows this. ..."
"... When you see all the corruption and fraud that goes on around the world by the wealthy and powerful you see that change by grass root movements doesn't stand a chance. ..."
"... Politicians with their nepotism and cronyism , CEO's, Bankers/Hedge Funnd Managers, Big Business, Big Pharma, Lobbyists, Industrialists, Multi-Nationals...all part part of a Global Cabal that doesn't care about the poor or the working class. ..."
"... it is my belief that they are already relatively certain that at least one State Department email with classified information, and perhaps many more, reside on a laptop computer owned by Anthony Weiner and used by him to exchange sexually explicit content with supposedly underage women -- and I say "supposedly" because posing as an available member of the opposite sex is a common clandestine maneuver. ..."
"... The war candidate is and always has been Hillary. Never met a war she didn't like. Trump OTOH is much more interested in money than in war. He is an isolationist. It's one reason I like his platform, I am tired of the wars. Hillary would continue them. ..."
"... The problem with Hillary (which the DNC should have thought about as they sabotaged Bernie Sander's bid in the primaries) is that there is more then enough kindling in her background to create a decent fire....and lots and lots of smoke! ..."
"... exactly - enough skeletons in her closet to fill a good sized cemetery. ..."
"... "Pseudo-scandal"? Or pseduo-journalism. Richard Wolffe's credibility as a journalist just went up in flames. If you want to read Hillary Clinton's media releases, cut out the middle man and go directly to her campaign website. ..."
"... Clinton is unpopular because, at the innermost core, she's unlikable. Sort of an evil stepmother type who's trying to look more motherly. ..."
"... Into this mess is the media, which refuses to provide serious discussion and analysis over important economic, social, environmental and foreign policy issues. Instead it turns everything into theatre with a focus on sex scandals, rumours, hair cuts and what the candidate is wearing. ..."
"... Elections are being won or lost on wafer thin margins because the choice of candidate are so poor. Policy is ignored or even mostly absent. Instead we have what is little better than a game show. ..."
"... It is like a choice between Pepsi and Coke, whatever choice you make you only get highly sugared and fizzy lolly water that won't do your health any good in the long run. ..."
"... Perhaps all politicians close to an election should be immune from the law for a period? ..."
"... No spin from the neoliberal establishment will save their queen Hillary. ..."
"... Because we're talking about the Big Circumcised Weiner, someone who self-identifies as "a perpetually horny middle-aged man", we've got the fun prospects of one or more sex crimes, along with volumes of sorta' consensual sex, being documented among the, possibly, famous and the soon to famous; and a little wealthier too. ..."
"... When the the swamp is drained the American people will be shocked and sickened by the crimes of the people behind the so-called progressive, globalist, socialist, thieving, murdering vermin that the bankster cabal sent among the people to destroy the United States. By all means, the corrupt politicians and their masters must be investigated. So too the people who run the disgusting corporate media and scurrilous vermin behind groups like "Media Matters" "Open Societies" etc. etc. etc. ..."
"... The trouble with your argument is that the Conservative side has analogous front organisations backed by oil and other interest groups which are intent on imposing their will regardless of the popular will. The Conservatives have indeed been outgunned by the Liberal mafia this time. ..."
"... " progressive, globalist, socialist, thieving, murdering vermin"... How are the "bankster cabal" you conjure in any way progressive and/or socialist? Do you have any clue, or are these just two of your go-to slurs? ..."
"... She doesn't mind the disgusting behaviour and carryings-on of Trump being exposed before an election and it shouldn't be any different for her either. We hear a lot about the accusations against Donald Trump in this country and we don't hear much about what Hillary has done with all her emails or what is alleged to have been written in them. ..."
"... You have got to be joking. How about the War in Yemen, 90% + casualty rates with drone strikes and targeted assassination, Saudi Arabia weapons deals, vetoing JASTA, War in Syria and Libya disaster, NSA surveillance continuing, Civil Asset forfeiture equitable sharing program, NDAA 2012 - 17 including indefinite detention and now women's draft, 2nd Amendment infringement and calls for Australian gun control , Guantanamo still open, still pursuing REAL ID, TSA groping, Biometric database and associated ID card to track movements 24/7, Militarization of the police under 1033 program, Federal government procurement of Stingrays and ALPR readers, smart meter program spying, CISA, IRS and Fast and Furious scandals, prosecution of Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, pursuance of TPP, TISA and TTIP ? ..."
"... "The latest pseudo-scandal to hit Clinton is unlikely to rob her of the presidency. But it sure isn't going to impress voters already sickened by a shocking campaign." ..."
"... Even a number of actions such as the possible destruction of 31,000 emails and several mobiles after receiving a Congressional subpoena to produce them was not enough to persuade him otherwise. ..."
"... A reasonable conclusion must be the latest criminal investigation concerns not the finding of these additional emails but the actual content of the emails. This matter therefore -far from a pseudo-scandal- must take a very serious form if it causes the FBI at this acutely sensitive time for the election to reopen criminal investigations. ..."
"... Comey has not re-opened the investigation, he simply notified Congress he is looking at "newly obtained info" to determine what it is and how should something be found) it might relate to a decision to re-open the investigation. Basically he is simply covering his ass, although, he now screwed that up and has Justice on his ass also calling for him to make a full disclosure. He will have to make public the info or possibly face a Justice Department investigation of his agency. Major error on his part. ..."
"... How many "non-stories" did Hillary generate in her lifetime? 50? 100? 200? It seems to me that wherever she goes, a "non-story" or two is sure to follow. This may be a non-story that broke the camel's back. Yes, Virginia, you can politically die of one "non-story" too many. ..."
"... Are they a banana republic? They are a great power, correct me if I'm wrong. ..."
"... It's bad enough that the 47 year old Jennifer Lopez, dressed in boots and suspenders is prancing about on stage in Miami. But she brings onto the stage the almost 70 year old Hillary Clinton who, as one of the worst speakers in political history, has the crowd silenced within seconds as she rants about how "we're not going to let Donald Trump get away with it". ..."
"... Her campaign is a fucking joke and they and the MSM are trying to sell this fetid pile of shit to the whole world ..."
"... Obama, Hillary, the Clinton Foundation, and Wall Street decided eight years ago she would be president in 2017. Americans are fed up with that sort of bullshit. ..."
"... Clinton's attacks on Russia are deeply worrying. I have no doubt at all that she'll try and impose a no fly zone in Syria, which will mean direct confrontation, risking an all out war. This woman is a warmonger and she needs to be stopped. ..."
"... People, this whole thing is merely a diversion to move attention from corruption in high places, onto Huma and Anthony Weiner. Comey's had to do something to move attention from the fact that Obama lied to the people, he lied to Congress concerning not knowing about Clinton's private e-mail arrangement and even used a pseudonym to connect with her. This is public knowledge now and not speculation. ..."
"... Clinton will make sure that the NWO gains control. It is being implemented in the background as all this is going. Many people are not the least bit interested in how their children are being brainwashed, how borders have been dissolved, how Obama has been quietly taking unilateral control of government. It seems that they will sit through the pantomime that is this election enjoying every diversionary twist, then when Clinton is elected, they will be unaware that the tentacles of the enemy of the people have penetrated every compartment of government. Vote for Clinton and you are voting for a one world government. There is a war going on and it is truly a battle between good and evil! God help the world. ..."
I think the reason people don't like Obama is because he has bombed 7 countries. Maybe Clinton
can get to 8 if she goes after Russia.
NotKindOrGentle 29 Oct 2016 17:52
How do the Americans ever get anything done when 18 months of their electoral cycle is taken
up with campaigning for the next one.
riggbeck -> NotKindOrGentle 29 Oct 2016 18:13
Then there's the lunacy of mid-term elections. Four years isn't very long for a president to
deliver on major election promises, yet the constitution potentially halves that time with the
threat of losing majorities in the House of Representatives or the Senate.
Checks and balances turn into gridlock.
GeeDeeSea 29 Oct 2016 17:54
It's not the FBI that made her use a private e-mail account. It's not the FBI that decided
to install a private server. Get real. These were her decisions in an attempt to conceal her activities
while in public office.
Preparetobeoffended 29 Oct 2016 17:58
And so it goes on.
Clinton, still heading for the White House? What planet are you on!
Will Bernie supporters vote for Clinton knowing the Democrats conspired to steal the nomination
from him. Will they, really.
Will Wikileaks and Project Veritas`s most damning offerings be ignored by these sheep with hands
covering ears yelling I`m not listening! Will they, really.
Trump is the less frightening of two frightening options, but at least he has going for him the
fact that he has tenaciously attacked the corruption clear to all capable of an independent thought.
Trump is going to win, and going to win comfortably. Get used to it.
GeeDeeSea 29 Oct 2016 18:01
2006 Audio Emerges of Hillary Clinton Proposing Rigging Palestine Election
"I do not think we should have pushed for an election in the Palestinian territories. I think
that was a big mistake," said Sen. Clinton. "And if we were going to push for an election, then
we should have made sure that we did something to determine who was going to win."
We don't know what the emails are, I wouldn't expect us to. If there's an investigation then
you don't release confidential information. But the information that we have gleaned from Wikileaks
shows that the State authorities have been involved in shutting things down, as has the Clinton
campaign and we know that a large and suspicious payment was made to a close relative of an investigator.
We also know that the IRS has been used over a period in a partisan manner to the disadvantage
of the Republicans and that the previous decision on the emails not to take action was met with
incredulity within the FBI.
If the FBI is making this announcement now then it must have discovered something that has worried
it. It made the announcement soon after the matter arose as it should have done given that this
is a very important piece of information of which voters need to be aware.
The press to date has handled Clinton with kid gloves and it still wants to do so. Fortunately
the revelations coming out and probably the true polls have been making them think again and so
they are allowing a little doubt to enter their coverage.
Hopefully this will be the end of the Clinton campaign, but with the money, contacts and other
resources available to it there will be an immense effort, from the State and campaign, to blacken
the reputation of a body which previously has served Clinton so well.
absentlyadjustable 29 Oct 2016 18:16
Can I point out as well how biased the reporting of the Presidential campaign has been in the
UK? Most of the media have been acting as the publicity wing of the Democrats and the only people
to be interviewed, especially on the BBC, seem to have been from the liberal Clinton supporting
press
AndyPandy1968 29 Oct 2016 18:29
I am sorry to say my personal feeling is that this is the last straw and Trump will win.
I don't support him but he is not stupid, and he was running too close for comfort even before
this. He is not playing to the Guardian, he is playing to an American audience, many of whom have
a totally different view of the world.
The US has one thing in common with the UK. A massive hidden disenfranchised underclass, who
are often unemployed or underemployed . He will get that vote, just as brexit did, and the reason
he invited Farage over was because he knows this.
That is why he says these clumsy things. Not because he is stupid. He says them because he is
playing to that audience. It is deliberate.
Let's hope I am wrong.
DogsLivesMatter 29 Oct 2016 18:31
When you see all the corruption and fraud that goes on around the world by the wealthy
and powerful you see that change by grass root movements doesn't stand a chance.
Politicians with their nepotism and cronyism , CEO's, Bankers/Hedge Funnd Managers, Big
Business, Big Pharma, Lobbyists, Industrialists, Multi-Nationals...all part part of a Global Cabal
that doesn't care about the poor or the working class.
Even the UN and WHO are stacked with those who have influential connections. Pay to Play has
become the norm. What choice does anyone have anymore other than going with the devil you know?
None!
Sappho53 29 Oct 2016 18:35
The world wants a complete investigation into the illegal Iraq War with consequences. The world
is still reeling form this Republican LIE and it has cost US allies dearly in lives, finances,
and terrorism. The Republicans have hidden from the biggest scandal of the past one hundred years.
Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice must answer and so must all of their supporters in the Republican
Party.
Glenn Smith 29 Oct 2016 18:40
Contrary to your interpretation, Mr. Wolffe, I think the FBI's brave action is going to have
precisely the result of denying Hillary the election, and justifiably so (and not that I think
Trump is any better): it is my belief that they are already relatively certain that at least
one State Department email with classified information, and perhaps many more, reside on a laptop
computer owned by Anthony Weiner and used by him to exchange sexually explicit content with supposedly
underage women -- and I say "supposedly" because posing as an available member of the opposite
sex is a common clandestine maneuver.
providenciales -> BlueberryCompote 29 Oct 2016 19:12
Actually, people will be able to buy the insurance they can afford and that they want if we
get rid of Obamacare. You wouldn't like unaffordable insurance with deductibles that mean you
don't have any coverage either.
Trump has already said who he would nominate to SCOTUS so you can't scaremonger on that score.
He gave a list in fact.
The war candidate is and always has been Hillary. Never met a war she didn't like. Trump OTOH
is much more interested in money than in war. He is an isolationist. It's one reason I like his
platform, I am tired of the wars. Hillary would continue them.
Casey13 29 Oct 2016 18:51
Once Hillary is elected the whole stinking cesspit of Clinton Inc will start crashing down
around her in a hodgepodge of scandals that make Watergate look like Jay walking. She will be
Impeached within a year.
JavaZee 29 Oct 2016 18:56
The problem with Hillary (which the DNC should have thought about as they sabotaged Bernie
Sander's bid in the primaries) is that there is more then enough kindling in her background to
create a decent fire....and lots and lots of smoke!
boxcarwillie -> JavaZee 29 Oct 2016 19:08
exactly - enough skeletons in her closet to fill a good sized cemetery.
Theleme1532 29 Oct 2016 19:03
"Pseudo-scandal"? Or pseduo-journalism. Richard Wolffe's credibility as a journalist just
went up in flames. If you want to read Hillary Clinton's media releases, cut out the middle man
and go directly to her campaign website.
boxcarwillie 29 Oct 2016 19:06
Clinton is unpopular because, at the innermost core, she's unlikable. Sort of an evil stepmother
type who's trying to look more motherly. doesn't work. with that said, the article is right
- this has been a dumpster fire campaign and i'll be glad to see it over. i doubt HRC will make
good on any of her campaign promises, but i would be afraid Trump would. Hope it's better next
time. Bernie would be 78, but that's not as old as it used to be.
Reality_Man 29 Oct 2016 19:14
On the web I read that the NY FBI office is in open rebellion with the DC FBI and that during
the Antony Wiener investigation they found classified emails on a shared laptop PC. Who knows
maybe Huma will be under arrest before November the 8th. One way or another it was done for a
reason I would suggest that the FBI is still a law enforcement agency not a political organization.
As the end of the Obama administration comes to pass it's only natural that the Chinese made him
get out of the back of air force one to show a lack of respect and other countries and agencies
may be showing what they feel. Strong Together may not work if Huma is separated from her baby.
She just may sing terrified bird. Just Saying.
Arcane 29 Oct 2016 19:15
This election is a sad reflection on the current state of democracy across much of the Western
World. The major political parties are so compromised with insider politics and a lack of genuine
concern for the long-term benefit of the voters they purport to represent that they keep on producing
candidates of the worst quality.
Into this mess is the media, which refuses to provide serious discussion and analysis over
important economic, social, environmental and foreign policy issues. Instead it turns everything
into theatre with a focus on sex scandals, rumours, hair cuts and what the candidate is wearing.
Our democracies - not just in the United States but around the world - are under threat from this
same malaise. It starts with political parties that care more about protecting the interests of
a few insiders and influential interest groups. These political movements no longer appeal to
the majority of voters.
Elections are being won or lost on wafer thin margins because the choice of candidate are
so poor. Policy is ignored or even mostly absent. Instead we have what is little better than a
game show.
It is like a choice between Pepsi and Coke, whatever choice you make you only get highly sugared
and fizzy lolly water that won't do your health any good in the long run.
BlueberryCompote -> Arcane 29 Oct 2016 19:22
You've got to admit, however, that America has the worst and most extreme version of this problem
with little sign of anyway out.
bookworm7 29 Oct 2016 19:29
This raises the obvious question: what on earth was the FBI director thinking when he
dropped his letter on Friday making it crystal clear that he knew nothing?
He said the investigation was being re-opened in the light of new evidence. If the investigators
'knew everything' why would they investigate? The above is a piece of sophistry conflating the
knowledge of the facts with the knowledge that the facts are to be investigated.
I can see how the timing looks suspect, but consider the alternative; if he knew about the new
evidence necessitating the re-opening of the investigation, and withheld telling Congress on purpose
because Clinton was a politician close to an electron, would this also not look bad? Could he
not be accused of withholding pertinent information for political purposes?
Perhaps all politicians close to an election should be immune from the law for a period?
PlayaGiron 29 Oct 2016 19:32
No spin from the neoliberal establishment will save their queen Hillary.
Gangoffour -> Bifocal 29 Oct 2016 20:52
Because we're talking about the Big Circumcised Weiner, someone who self-identifies as
"a perpetually horny middle-aged man", we've got the fun prospects of one or more sex crimes,
along with volumes of sorta' consensual sex, being documented among the, possibly, famous and
the soon to famous; and a little wealthier too.
I'm sure it's a lot easier to pick up honey pots when they provide a sympathetic shoulder to snuggle
into because your wife refuses to satisfy your needs since she's doing all of Hillary's work.
Who wouldn't want to be part of the Clinton matchmaking machine?
Berkeley2013 29 Oct 2016 20:22
Mr Wolffe writes:
"From the Clinton Foundation to the private email server, from Benghazi to Weiner, from
Whitewater to Monica, the list is as long as it is utterly spurious. Whatever crumbs of wrongdoing
there may be, they don't amount to something worthy of Watergate, or even the myriad gate-suffixed
scandals since. Questionable behavior is not the same as criminal or even impeachable conduct."
How could anything involving the protocols and laws regarding national security communications
be called "spurious?"
How can anything involving many separate pieces of DoS communication be called "crumbs of wrongdoing?"
gladiointurkey 29 Oct 2016 20:41
When the the swamp is drained the American people will be shocked and sickened by the crimes
of the people behind the so-called progressive, globalist, socialist, thieving, murdering vermin
that the bankster cabal sent among the people to destroy the United States. By all means, the
corrupt politicians and their masters must be investigated. So too the people who run the disgusting
corporate media and scurrilous vermin behind groups like "Media Matters" "Open Societies" etc.
etc. etc.
BlueberryCompote -> gladiointurkey 29 Oct 2016 20:45
The trouble with your argument is that the Conservative side has analogous front organisations
backed by oil and other interest groups which are intent on imposing their will regardless of
the popular will. The Conservatives have indeed been outgunned by the Liberal mafia this time.
nostrobo -> gladiointurkey 29 Oct 2016 20:57
" progressive, globalist, socialist, thieving, murdering vermin"... How are the "bankster
cabal" you conjure in any way progressive and/or socialist? Do you have any clue, or are these
just two of your go-to slurs?
AdamEdward88 29 Oct 2016 21:10
She doesn't mind the disgusting behaviour and carryings-on of Trump being exposed before
an election and it shouldn't be any different for her either. We hear a lot about the accusations
against Donald Trump in this country and we don't hear much about what Hillary has done with all
her emails or what is alleged to have been written in them. I'd be quite interested to find
out what was in any she might have sent to Tony Blair. She hasn't got a good track record on the
Middle-East and we base our opinions in this country on a different set of media reports to people
in the US.
Starwars102 29 Oct 2016 21:11
The integrity of the Obama administration.
You have got to be joking. How about the War in Yemen, 90% + casualty rates with drone
strikes and targeted assassination, Saudi Arabia weapons deals, vetoing JASTA, War in Syria and
Libya disaster, NSA surveillance continuing, Civil Asset forfeiture equitable sharing program,
NDAA 2012 - 17 including indefinite detention and now women's draft, 2nd Amendment infringement
and calls for Australian gun control , Guantanamo still open, still pursuing REAL ID, TSA groping,
Biometric database and associated ID card to track movements 24/7, Militarization of the police
under 1033 program, Federal government procurement of Stingrays and ALPR readers, smart meter
program spying, CISA, IRS and Fast and Furious scandals, prosecution of Chelsea Manning, Julian
Assange, Edward Snowden, pursuance of TPP, TISA and TTIP ?
That list of problems was a mile long and there is probably a lot more I have not mentioned. Says
a lot about Obama's time in office.
mrjonno 29 Oct 2016 21:26
And we still look to the USA for leadership in the world? Give me a break. This is a country
that is responsible for destroying much of the world through the economic paradigm of neoliberalism
which has seen the introduction of economy based in 'throw away and buy new' along with 'dodgy
money' to create the 1% leading to resource overshoot. On current trends we are well in deficit.
From World Footprint -
Moderate UN scenarios suggest that if current population and consumption trends continue,
by the 2030s, we will need the equivalent of two Earths to support us. And of course, we only
have one.
Neither Clinton nor Trump are suitable presidential material but when has the USA ever been
about being suitable for the world? Never.
BTW Earth Overshoot Day happened on August 8 this year. Since then we are using more than the
planet Earth can absorb or replenish. We are on a collision course with catastrophe.
Well done America....
unlywnted 29 Oct 2016 21:34
"The latest pseudo-scandal to hit Clinton is unlikely to rob her of the presidency.
But it sure isn't going to impress voters already sickened by a shocking campaign."
Pseudo-scandal??!! Where in Gods name are you coming from to arrive at that conclusion? FBI
Director Comey closed the file on further investigation a few months ago saying while Clinton's
casual handling of certain State Dept classified emails was reprehensible, he was not recommending
criminal action because there was an absence of any evidence she had acted with criminal intent.
Even a number of actions such as the possible destruction of 31,000 emails and several
mobiles after receiving a Congressional subpoena to produce them was not enough to persuade him
otherwise.
Yet now, despite clearly realising its dramatic effect on the impending presidential election
Comey informs all interested parties that the file on the criminal investigation is to be re-opened
because of new emails that have come to light. However, since his original ruling was that he
saw no criminal intent in Clinton's careless dissemination of State emails to private servers
it is difficult to understand why that ruling doesn't also cover the latest emails that presumably
are from Clinton's secretary's -or spouse- computer.
A reasonable conclusion must be the latest criminal investigation concerns not the finding
of these additional emails but the actual content of the emails. This matter therefore -far from
a pseudo-scandal- must take a very serious form if it causes the FBI at this acutely sensitive
time for the election to reopen criminal investigations.
OXIOXI20 -> unlywnted 29 Oct 2016 21:44
Comey informs all interested parties that the file on the criminal investigation is to be re-opened
because of new emails that have come to light.
NOT TRUE. That's the bullshit Trump is spewing. Comey has not re-opened the investigation,
he simply notified Congress he is looking at "newly obtained info" to determine what it is and
how should something be found) it might relate to a decision to re-open the investigation. Basically
he is simply covering his ass, although, he now screwed that up and has Justice on his ass also
calling for him to make a full disclosure. He will have to make public the info or possibly face
a Justice Department investigation of his agency. Major error on his part.
HerrPrincip -> sgwnmr 29 Oct 2016 22:38
How many "non-stories" did Hillary generate in her lifetime? 50? 100? 200? It seems to
me that wherever she goes, a "non-story" or two is sure to follow. This may be a non-story
that broke the camel's back. Yes, Virginia, you can politically die of one "non-story" too many.
pfox33 29 Oct 2016 22:13
Are they a banana republic? They are a great power, correct me if I'm wrong.
JuicyMinion 29 Oct 2016 22:15
It's bad enough that the 47 year old Jennifer Lopez, dressed in boots and suspenders is prancing
about on stage in Miami. But she brings onto the stage the almost 70 year old Hillary Clinton
who, as one of the worst speakers in political history, has the crowd silenced within seconds
as she rants about how "we're not going to let Donald Trump get away with it".
Her campaign is a fucking joke and they and the MSM are trying to sell this fetid pile
of shit to the whole world
antobojar -> JuicyMinion 29 Oct 2016 22:29
..Do you expect that declining empire, led by arrogant, corrupt and greedy "elite" can act
rationally..?
Look, who they chosen as a prospective saviours.. he he..
AveAtqueCave 29 Oct 2016 23:13
Obama, Hillary, the Clinton Foundation, and Wall Street decided eight years ago she would
be president in 2017. Americans are fed up with that sort of bullshit.
irishguy 30 Oct 2016 0:33
The author is baffled as to why the FBI has intervened this late in the election by opening
an apparent pseudo-scandal case against Clinton? Here's my theory why:
Maybe it's all about managing the psychology of the the majority voters through the media.
Maybe this whole episode has been orchestrated by the establishment (who want Clinton in);
is designed to go nowhere and allow Clinton to ultimately claim she was vindicated in the whole
email affair while at the same time with the purpose of maintaining a perceived sense of tension
in the minds of the US public in the run up to election day – in the sense that the election result
is not perceived to be a foregone conclusion already.
However, when you take a step back, it's not realistic to think Trump has a chance of getting
in at this point. He's alienated too much of the electorate already.
But the majority voters need to be made feel they're doing something positive by averting the
danger of Trump through voting Clinton – not simply voting for Clinton as the establishment's
chosen candidate in a foregone conclusion.
HarryFlashman 30 Oct 2016 1:26
Hillary Nixon. I mean would you buy a used car from her?
JVRTRL -> HarryFlashman 30 Oct 2016 3:19
It depends who the customer is. The Clintons have always taken very good care of their biggest
money donors. For ordinary people, it would be a bad idea. For their connected donors, it's a
completely different reality. The dealership and the other employees would have the problem, not
the rich and connected customer.
Donald Trump, on the other hand, would pawn off the lemons on unsuspecting customers, loot the
dealership purely for his own benefit, somehow get a tax credit for his trouble, and brag to the
world about what a smart and ethical guy he is.
europeangrayling 30 Oct 2016 1:35
Looks to me like the FBI got done taken over by Putin. This Putin guy, he is everywhere. Pike
fishing on horseback in Siberia while banging some hot Russian gold medal gymnast and overthrowing
the US government and running the FBI now. Putin is on a whole new level, he is changing the game.
And a few days ago, I got a pizza with hamburger and mushroom, and I didn't like it as much, the
regular mushroom one was better, and I said 'f-ing Putin man'. This guy, he did it again, made
me question myself and order that hamburger, meddling in our democracy. It was still OK, I ate
it, but that's 20 bucks I could have spent on a much better regular mushroom instead of that Russian
hamburger crap. Or at least put some chicken on it. Putin man.
furminator 30 Oct 2016 1:53
Anyway Howard Dean, you know primal scream Dean, is saying on his twitter that Comney is on
the side of Putin. Yes the Director of the FBI is really a Russian stooge, a sleeper agent. Poor
Hillary, the FBI, which is controlled by the Justice Department, which is controlled by the Obama
White House, is out to get her coz Russia. She's the victim of a vast right and left wing conspiracy.
Henrychan 30 Oct 2016 2:31
John Pilger's latest article:
"Propaganda is most effective when our consent is engineered by those with a fine education –
Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Columbia – and with careers on the BBC, the Guardian, the New York
Times, the Washington Post.
These organisations are known as the liberal media. They present themselves as enlightened, progressive
tribunes of the moral zeitgeist. They are anti-racist, pro-feminist and pro-LGBT.
And they love war.
While they speak up for feminism, they support rapacious wars that deny the rights of countless
women, including the right to life."
Clinton's attacks on Russia are deeply worrying. I have no doubt at all that she'll try
and impose a no fly zone in Syria, which will mean direct confrontation, risking an all out war.
This woman is a warmonger and she needs to be stopped.
Kess 30 Oct 2016 3:00
The media hasn't exactly cover itself in glory either. Throughout the nomination process Clinton
was given an incredibly easy ride. If the media (including the Guardian) had highlighted her issues
earlier then perhaps the DNC would'be been forced to nominate a candidate with a little more integrity,
and Trump wouldn't stand a chance.
BelieveItsTrue 30 Oct 2016 3:13
People, this whole thing is merely a diversion to move attention from corruption in
high places, onto Huma and Anthony Weiner. Comey's had to do something to move attention from
the fact that Obama lied to the people, he lied to Congress concerning not knowing about
Clinton's private e-mail arrangement and even used a pseudonym to connect with her. This is
public knowledge now and not speculation.
Of course HC has said publicise everything but she does not have to wait for the FBI to do
this, she could have done this to begin with, before she bleached her server, before evidence
was destroyed by the Democratic campaign (13 smart-phones) and lap tops destroyed by the FBI.
It is a croc and if you do not wake up to this, the world is lost.
Clinton will make sure that the NWO gains control. It is being implemented in the
background as all this is going. Many people are not the least bit interested in how their
children are being brainwashed, how borders have been dissolved, how Obama has been quietly
taking unilateral control of government. It seems that they will sit through the pantomime
that is this election enjoying every diversionary twist, then when Clinton is elected, they
will be unaware that the tentacles of the enemy of the people have penetrated every
compartment of government. Vote for Clinton and you are voting for a one world government.
There is a war going on and it is truly a battle between good and evil! God help the world.
"... Schrodinger's Election: Simultaneously hacked by Russia to make Trump win and not rigged at all if Killary wins. ..."
"... Hillary's tech guy asking questions on Reddit about how to manipulate/destroy email info for a VIP; ..."
"... Immunity given to virtually everyone involved that was close to Hillary. I believe that the number was 5 people. This seems overly generous and not in keeping with good investigative practice. ..."
"... Yes, people less well connected have gone to jail for lesser offenses than Hillary Clinton and her unsecured email thing. However, I think this issue is being deliberately raised specifically to shield Hillary Clinton and boost her candidacy. It's being used to flood the airwaves, and drive out the even more damning evidence against her. ..."
"... I mean, consider what she did in Libya: attacked a relatively prosperous and stable nation that was not a threat to us and was actually trying to cooperate, she allied us with Al Qaeda (!! why is this not blowing people's minds !!) blew it all to smithereens leaving behind a Mad max-style dystopia. And that's just for starters. There is her apparent desire to attack Russian forces in Syria, her desire to loot social security and give it all to her buddies in Wall Street, her desire to tear up the constitution and give supreme plenary power to multinational corporations... She is the Queen of Chaos, the candidate of Wall Street and War. ..."
"... I think the FBI suddenly raised this issue because the polls are tightening, and the establishment would prefer that in the remaining few days the airwaves be filled with lesser offenses that many Americans regard as technical, than with solid coverage of just what a corrupt monster Clinton really is. I mean, do you really think that any high governmeant official does anything that is not scripted and approved in advance? ..."
"... This would all be funny if it didn't represent the machinations of our overlords. This is like a carousel that is spinning out of control and now the pieces are starting to break off. ..."
"... Looks like he was wrong a lot farther back than July. Now we know that there was never a grand jury. Even the astute, ex-judge Andrew Napolitano claimed on more than one occasion that a GJ must be sitting. For instance, when the FIB gave immunity to Pagliano, that signaled to many in the know that a GJ had to be sitting. Not so. W/out a GJ, there was no real investigation. 147 FIB agents working on a sham. ..."
"... Napolitano also predicted a Saturday Massacre if Hilton was not indicted -- dozens of FIB agents would resign. ..."
"... He is doing Hilton a favor by trying to keep pissed-off FIB agents from jumping ship and spilling beans in the week before the election. ..."
"... Hillary is taking a risk in asking the FBI for more details. It could backfire. If Comey is put under heavy pressure to unveil the reasons that made him send this warning to the Congress, he may admit that at least one email his team checked was classified. ..."
"... That would be a huge blow to Hillary's campaign. She may have either to withdraw from the elections or risk been prosecuted after she is elected. She should pray that the FBI does not release more details... ..."
"... The funny aspect of this struggle is three women are involved in the justice abuse drama: Hillary Clinton, Huma Abedin and Loretta Lynch, while three men are involved in the sexual abuse drama: Trump, Bill Clinton and Weiner. ..."
"... Let me tell you, if the FIB ever got a search warrant for your husband's computer and found your criminal em's on that computer, the original search warrant for the computer would be more than enough to allow them to open your em's. But the rules are different for Hilton, Bilton, and the entire Clinton RICO team. ..."
"... Sounds like FIB is going to Abedin's suits and asking for permission to look at the em's. Like WTF???? Since when does FIB or any law enforcement seek permission from a target's legal team to carry out an investigation? ..."
"... (there are reports that Abedin -- as is customary -- swore under oath that she had scrubbed all state department documents from all of her personal devices ... and -- FWIW -- she was granted immunity during the earlier investigation ... ..."
"... So Comey didn't use any of the Podesta files as evidence ? He's still an establishment coward. Comedy is a A lower class of criminal still serving a higher class of partisan criminals. ..."
"... I think Abedin's career is over ... which is a good thing since the reports of Clinton's cult-like oh-so-"loyal" inner circle were dismaying (cough). ..."
"... If most of these people never really look at urls, their tech people and security people, did. They passed it as acceptable. ..."
"... Comey couldn't prosecute Clinton without prosecuting all those people too, which is impossible ..."
"... Huma no sign of today 30th on or near Clingon campaign plane Florida this AM. ..."
"... Obviously Huma had an email account on Weiner's computer. It seems that the existence of this account and its email contents were found while looking at Wiener's email account. ..."
"... My suspicion was always that Comey was trying to preempt a leak ... likely by some FBI-well connected congress critter ..."
"... Calling for the FBI to release information is double edged. If the emails are copies of the ones that Hillary destroyed from her server because they were too compromising then she will be in deep trouble. ..."
"... Gee! What could go wrong with a scenario like that – a high-ranking government official seeking to become president who exhibits callous disregard for national security protocols, a trusted aide who worked in her family magazine in Saudi Arabia on behalf of radical Islamic causes who was married to a Jewish member of Congress who had a propensity for compromising himself through illicit and bizarre sexual activity? ..."
"... Demanding that the DOJ or FBI "release all the information" is simply grandstanding ... they can't (they apparently don't have legal access and haven't reviewed it) ... and Weiner and Abedin are entitled to privacy protection for all non-related content, and the various government agencies also have security and other concerns ... ..."
"... Demand away!!! Film at 11!!! Shake that fist, hold your breath until your face is read and your eyes bulge ... show the world just how well you can simulate OUTRAGE. ..."
"... Let's recall 24 years ago the 11th hr indictment of Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger that doomed the re-election of president George H.W. Bush . ..."
"... The Clintons seized on the new indictment, howling about a "culture of corruption" that supposedly pervaded the administration. Bush's poll numbers declined and Bill Clinton won the election. ..."
"... Brace for more bombshells – up next, The Clinton Family Foundation. ..."
"... Question of the day. Over half million emails on Weiner's computer, are the 33,000 deleted emails in this trove? ..."
"... According to a NYPD source, the emails on Weiner's laptop are NOT about state secrets, but are in fact pointing to a pedophilia ring with the Clintons at the center. ..."
"... New headaches for VP nominee Tim Kaine as alleged mistress comes forward with tape of thr ..."
"... FWIW, I read today Huma was also getting paid by Tedeo ... she is always described as "like a daughter", working for clinton since SHE was a 19 year old intern ... she's now 40 ... shudder ... meaning 21 years or 1996 ... ..."
"... The Lewinsky scandal was an American political sex scandal that came to light in 1998, referring to a sexual relationship between 1995 and 1996 with then 49-year-old President Bill Clinton and a 22-year-old White House intern, Monica Lewinsky. ..."
"... I've always wondered how Chelsea feels about the oh-so-elegant like-a-daughter Abedin ..."
"... Still, while Bill was destroying long-term Clinton family relationships via Lewinsky (and demands that people lie for him), Hillary had "Huma" to lean" on and "mentor" ... It sounds so co-dependent. (and I suggest zero other impropriety) I've witnessed some very dysfunctional boss/assistant relationships ... shudder. ..."
"... This is what I like about Donald Trump... (not exactly the same words) If I'm elected you will go to jail and to Ford's executives in Detroit. If you move productions to Mexico, I'll impost a 35% on all vehicles from Mexico and no one will buy Ford! ..."
"... The #1 meme about Donald Trump is his racism ... and the racism of his supporters ... this has been the drumbeat since last Spring ... daily, constant, unrelenting and without exception ... and unfair and ridiculous, without nuance, rejecting all other explanations and flatly rejecting any number of contradicting Trump rally witness reports ... ..."
"... The meme has been: Support Trump and you are a racist ... full stop. That all Trump supporters want to go back to pre-Civil Rights, pre-Women's liberation, and support for Trump is a rage-induced quest regain lost "white privilege" ... ..."
Comey is under pressure. Either thru his own reading of the situation and head banging
("I have to act now"), because threats of new/other leaks are looming, or because some
are pushing to break the dams (e.g. internal to FBI) or just becos the info is so
damning covering it up if it ever comes out will spark disaster for him in any case. Or
a combination, or even other, extra, reasons.
He is compelled, or wishes to as a white knight, I doubt that actually, to 're-open'
with vague, indeterminate words, the HRC e-mail private-server matter. Obviously
coverin' his ass but waiting on decisions from the VIPs. (Lynch. Clinton.)
3 FBI investigs. are ongoing:
1) Into the Clinton Foundation, which was never halted but seems to limp along (held
back? bogged down as very complicated, e.g. insider trading?) See also the Bill Clinton
foundation, though afaik it is not under scrutiny?
2) Into the sexting Wiener scandal, which was 'independent'? Not, imho, an FBI
matter, but NY authorities? - Charges of sexting to minors, one person, one count, not
too hard to deal with, but when huma - clinton - govmt. e-mails were found on 'his'
laptop, another dimension came into play…
3) Killary private server, e-mail scandal, bis repetita
…> there might even be other unknowns
Imho these 3 investigs. have now become intertwined, there is simply no way for the
FBI to keep up any Chinese Walls any longer.
I wrote about Comey and the newly discovered emails on the Open Thread
here
and
here
There's still lots of questions.
Some thought that Comey was part of the 'fix' when Bill Clinton met with Lynch on the
tarmac and Comey subsequently made the judgment call to NOT recommend prosecution.
We then heard about flaws in the investigation:
1. Hillary's tech guy asking questions on Reddit about how to manipulate/destroy
email info for a VIP;
2. Immunity given to virtually everyone involved that was close to Hillary. I
believe that the number was 5 people. This seems overly generous and not in keeping
with good investigative practice.
Comey's letter to Congress has reinvigorated the Trump campaign but also:
1. served as a distraction to Wikileaks release of the Podesta emails
(MSMS wrote
more about Russian hacking than about the Podesta emails)
2. allowed Hillary & Co. to grandstand and beat their chests
It's likely that Huma has told Hillary what these emails are
(if Hillary didn't
already know)
. So look at how hard Obama/Hillary fight the FBI to get a sense for
how important these emails are.
There's a possibility that these emails are a nothingburger and that the Hillary
campaign
ultimately benefits
from the perception that Republicans are after
Hillary.
Have you ever been party to a bureaucracy with electronic mail policies? If you are
anal-retentive, have no family life and sleep an hour a day, you could possibly comply
with the panoply written by lawyers covering the legal ass of the organization. Other
than that….
"He should have pressed for charges against Clinton..."
Sorry, no. It is not his
position to press for charges or to advocate against him. It is his job to perform the
investigation and turn to facts over to the prosecutor who decides whether or not a
prosecution is warranted. He may decide that duties assigned to him are not consistent
with the law and refuse to perform them, and has done so, but he does not decide how the
law should be enforced.
The weiner-abedin computer that carries sexting and US state emails has certainly been
hacked. US state secrets are intermixed with porno emails and available to the public.
yes america is great!
I would like to propose an alternative explanation.
Yes, people less well connected
have gone to jail for lesser offenses than Hillary Clinton and her unsecured email
thing. However, I think this issue is being deliberately raised specifically to shield
Hillary Clinton and boost her candidacy. It's being used to flood the airwaves, and
drive out the even more damning evidence against her.
I mean, consider what she did in Libya: attacked a relatively prosperous and stable
nation that was not a threat to us and was actually trying to cooperate, she allied us
with Al Qaeda (!! why is this not blowing people's minds !!) blew it all to smithereens
leaving behind a Mad max-style dystopia. And that's just for starters. There is her
apparent desire to attack Russian forces in Syria, her desire to loot social security
and give it all to her buddies in Wall Street, her desire to tear up the constitution
and give supreme plenary power to multinational corporations... She is the Queen of
Chaos, the candidate of Wall Street and War. She is Vlad the Impaler on crack.
I think the FBI suddenly raised this issue because the polls are tightening, and the
establishment would prefer that in the remaining few days the airwaves be filled with
lesser offenses that many Americans regard as technical, than with solid coverage of
just what a corrupt monster Clinton really is. I mean, do you really think that any high
governmeant official does anything that is not scripted and approved in advance?
This would all be funny if it didn't represent the machinations of our overlords. This
is like a carousel that is spinning out of control and now the pieces are starting to
break off.
I hope that question that the rest of the world is asking itself is: Why
the heck are we continuing to buy American T-bills?
The global plutocrats have had since 2008 to set this casting of throwing the US
under the bus up. The US public will rise up but have been too brainwashed to do
anything intelligent, unfortunately.
We need to rid ourselves of the tools that the global plutocrats use to retain
control of the West, Private Finance and unfettered inheritance.
And yes, I voted for Jill Stein again because I want to see the Green party get to at
least 5% so we can build another choice than the bifurcated one before Americans
currently.
b: "I for one believe that Comey was wrong in July and is right today. He should have
pressed for charges against Clinton early on."
Looks like he was wrong a lot farther
back than July. Now we know that there was never a grand jury. Even the astute, ex-judge
Andrew Napolitano claimed on more than one occasion that a GJ must be sitting. For
instance, when the FIB gave immunity to Pagliano, that signaled to many in the know that
a GJ had to be sitting. Not so. W/out a GJ, there was no real investigation. 147 FIB
agents working on a sham.
Napolitano also predicted a Saturday Massacre if Hilton was not indicted -- dozens of
FIB agents would resign. Two days day before Comey's October IED Napolitano claimed that
was now happening -- FIB agents are resigning and once they are out, the leaks will
become a flood. Comey is the Dutch boy with his thumb stuck
up his ass
in the dike. He is doing Hilton a favor by trying to keep pissed-off FIB agents from
jumping ship and spilling beans in the week before the election.
There is one certainty in this election: Whoever loses it will be someone most
Americans absolutely despise. (It is important to emphasize the positive.)
Hillary is taking a risk in asking the FBI for more details. It could backfire. If Comey
is put under heavy pressure to unveil the reasons that made him send this warning to the
Congress, he may admit that at least one email his team checked was classified.
That would be a huge blow to Hillary's campaign. She may have either to withdraw from
the elections or risk been prosecuted after she is elected. She should pray that the FBI
does not release more details...
The funny aspect of this struggle is three women are involved in the justice abuse
drama: Hillary Clinton, Huma Abedin and Loretta Lynch, while three men are involved in
the sexual abuse drama: Trump, Bill Clinton and Weiner.
This will make the next successful series on HBO: Sex, power and politic!
The story now is that FIB agents investigating Weiner's kiddie sexting stumbled on
Abedin's em's on Weiner's laptop. Apparently, they think they have to have a special
search warrant to look at her em's.
Let me tell you, if the FIB ever got a search warrant for your husband's computer and
found your criminal em's on that computer, the original search warrant for the computer
would be more than enough to allow them to open your em's. But the rules are different
for Hilton, Bilton, and the entire Clinton RICO team.
Sounds like FIB is going to Abedin's suits and asking for permission to look at the
em's. Like WTF???? Since when does FIB or any law enforcement seek permission from a
target's legal team to carry out an investigation?
CNN also raises the specter of spousal privilege between Wiener and Abedin. Shouldn't
be a problem. Spousal privilege means one spouse cannot be compelled to testify against
another. It does not provide a safe haven on one spouse's computer for illegal em's of
the other . . . well, you know, unless you are on the Clinton RICO team. CNN's theory
(probably from Jeffrey Toobin) would be like saying, the cops can't look in a wife's
underwear drawer for a pistol used by the husband to commit a murder. What BS.
As far as I can tell, Comey knew that getting an expanded warrant (to cover actually
opening Abedin's newly discovered email trove) would be leaked and that that would be
more damaging (in many ways to many people) ... so he bit the bullet and is being
subjected to massive criticism from everyone ...
Imagine the bombshell if they had attempted to keep this secret and it had been
revealed next week or after the election ...
""The issue is complicated because the computer is considered to belong to Anthony
Weiner, her estranged husband, and the case may raise spousal privilege legal
protections for Abedin.
Government lawyers hope to secure the warrant to permit investigators to review
thousands of emails on a computer Abedin shared with Weiner, officials said.The new
search warrant is needed because the existing authorization, covered by a subpoena,
related only to the ongoing investigation of Weiner, who is accused of having
sexually explicit communications with an underage girl.Investigators from the FBI's
New York field office who are conducting the Weiner investigation " ""
cnn: Justice Department seeks approval for email search
(there are reports that Abedin -- as is customary -- swore under oath that she had
scrubbed all state department documents from all of her personal devices ... and -- FWIW
-- she was granted immunity during the earlier investigation ...
A political commentator believes the polls in the United States are being "manipulated,"
adding that they are not reflecting the will of the American people.
"Trump is an outsider. He is coming in new. He does not have any political history,
he has no political experience. He is coming as an agent of change," Mike Harris told
Press TV in an interview on Sunday.
Sometimes right on time, almost as if using a calendar(!), like 2011 when they
decided to sacrifice MF Global.
Or 2011 also when they ended their murderous bombing of Libya, started earlier MAR 31 by
those uncouth frenchie fokkers.
Sometimes "celebrated" late, as in 1956 NOV 5 with Brits sending invasion force to
take back Suez that Nasser just nationalized, or 1979 NOV 4 Iran US embassy hostages
(not like that wasn't due...Mossadegh was overthrown in 1953).
So Comey didn't use any of the Podesta files as evidence ? He's still an establishment
coward. Comedy is a A lower class of criminal still serving a higher class of partisan
criminals.
Sure drove WikiLeaks' (damning) Band memo out of discussion or consideration ... and the
irony is that this probably -- ultimately -- has nothing to do with Clinton ... I think Abedin's career is over ... which is a good thing since the reports of Clinton's
cult-like oh-so-"loyal" inner circle were dismaying (cough).
GOP congresscritters were already having kittens over the number of Clinton insiders
granted immunity during the long tangled course of the investigation ..
Cnn 09/23/201
.
Caveat: I previously found mention of Abedin getting immunity prior to July and now
cannot find a confirming source .... sigh
If using a private server to get around FOIA was a problem, it was a problem then, not
now. But getting around FOIA was something everybody else, as well as Clinton wanted.
That's why they had no problems sending and receiving emails from another server. If
most of these people never really look at urls, their tech people and security people,
did. They passed it as acceptable.
Comey couldn't prosecute Clinton without prosecuting
all those people too, which is impossible. Pretending you really give a shit about the
server when you don' care about all those other people who committed the same crime just
proves one thing: It's a political prosecution aimed exclusively at an opponent. Another
phrase for political prosecution is "show trial." You can't always make sure only the
people you don't like get prosecuted.
And, security issues? In the world of Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden and wikileaks,
no sensible and honest person thinks using government equipment means security.
The only use for this fake scandal is to pander to mad dog reactionaries.
Huma no sign of today 30th on or near Clingon campaign plane Florida this AM.
Supposedly Lord O tried but failed to directly intercede to block the FBI from searching
Anthony's computer.
Maybe that 'suicided' top US missile general a day ago was the start of the cleanup
crew moving, & the rats are doing what they always do---ratting, or scurrying for cover.
Obviously Huma had an email account on Weiner's computer. It seems that the existence of
this account and its email contents were found while looking at Wiener's email account.
Possibly it is a pop3 account (connected to Hillary server) meaning that these emails
have been downloaded from the server and are physically on the computer probably without
any password. If these emails are duplicates of 'classified' emails that Hillary has
purposely deleted from her server, then she and Huma could be in deep trouble. In any
case Huma is in trouble even if the emails are not classified as she did not declare
their existence to the FBI. I understand the Wiener computer is in the hands of the
Wiener's case investigators.
My guess is that the FBI has already had access to that computer and had a peek at these
emails. I think that after examining some of them, they realize they were relevant to
the investigation. As they have no warrant, they cannot announce anything officially.
The FBI is now waiting for a warrant from Huma's lawers to officially view the account.
If Hillary is so keen to have details from these email, Huma should immediately give the
ok for a warrant.
My opinion is that Hillary is terrified that these emails are very damaging so she needs
to obstruct their release, while still accusing the FBI of backstabbing. It seems that
her only chance is to discredit Comey and she is working on that now.
My suspicion was always that Comey was trying to preempt a leak ... likely by some
FBI-well connected congress critter ... According to the NYT, while Weiner investigators
(and god knows who else) have known about the e-mails for weeks, Comey was not informed
until shortly before his announcement (he must have been angry and horrified).
I still think that the shit-storm that would have erupted from a "leak" of a "secret"
newly expanded arm of a "closed" investigation would have been far worse ... wrt to the
whole "undermining" or "rigging" the election meme being sold -- by both parties ...
I'm getting conflicting impressions of "plausible deniability" by folks claiming to
have been blind-sided by Comey's announcement ... I think (as I've said before) Comey is
the designated whipping boy, and perhaps even volunteered to be just that, as everyone
and their brother expresses horror at something that cannot be undone ...
Calling for the FBI to release information is double edged.
If the emails are copies
of the ones that Hillary destroyed from her server because they were too compromising
then she will be in deep trouble.
I guess her only way out is to discredit Comey and get him out of the way. Is Comey
strong enough to stand against the war Clinton will start on him?
Gee! What could go wrong with a scenario like that – a high-ranking government
official seeking to become president who exhibits callous disregard for national
security protocols, a trusted aide who worked in her family magazine in Saudi Arabia
on behalf of radical Islamic causes who was married to a Jewish member of Congress
who had a propensity for compromising himself through illicit and bizarre sexual
activity?
"I have an idea! Let's make the architect of this mess the president of the United
States." That's what the Democratic Party decided.
Demanding that the DOJ or FBI "release all the information" is simply grandstanding ...
they can't (they apparently don't have legal access and haven't reviewed it) ... and
Weiner and Abedin are entitled to privacy protection for all non-related content, and
the various government agencies also have security and other concerns ...
Demand away!!! Film at 11!!! Shake that fist, hold your breath until your face is
read and your eyes bulge ... show the world just how well you can simulate OUTRAGE.
and let's not forget -- as everyone seems to be doing -- that these e-mails are years
old and that there is no genuine urgency to this matter, no matter how much outrage and
urgency and panic and other theatrics are demonstrated.
This investigation is (almost certainly) a dead parrot ... but like Weiner's sexting,
it's something everyone can quite safely be OUTRAGED!!! about. Democrats and Clinton
supporter long ago announce they didn't give a flying fig about Clinton's disregard for
rules or transparency or truthfulness ... and the Republicans demonstrated -- that like
Whitewater and Benghazi that came before -- that they didn't care about a lack of
actionable findings as determined by those empowered to make such determinations ...
There were no indictments because even the wrongdoing that was found was "determined" to
not rise to the criteria necessary wrt to intent.
so, they cry ... let's have another investigation, more hearings, maybe a change in
venues, leadership, oversight authority ...
(is it rigged? almost certainly, but more more and more isn't likely to change the
outcome)
Probably just a coincidence, but as for Kaine making demands on
Comey, one has to wonder why he doesn't just pick up the phone and call him?
How close they are (were) is hard to say, but they are certainly well acquainted.
Both lived in Richmond, and taught at the University of Richmond Law School, a small,
private school. Both moved in the same Richmond social circle and have friends in
common.
Believe me, I do not move in that social circle, or have many friends in Richmond,
but at least two are also friends of both Kaine and Comey. Maybe Kaine's wife could just
call Comey's wife to find out what's going on. Or maybe Kaine is starting to get cold
feet about running with Hillary and put Comey up to this. :-)
Small world. Just another oddity of this comedy-horror show of an election.
2 - Putin rigs elections
2.1 - Trump and Putin poisoned Hillary
2.2 - Assange sucks Putin's dick
2.3 - McCarthy runs for president
3 - News of Putin's rigging of election makes Americans question integrity of
election
3.1 - Obama threatens WW3 with Russia
3.2 - Obama launches cyber attack on Russia
3.3 - Trump won't accept result if he loses
4 - Obama cancels elections
5 - Hillary grabs pussy
6 - Historians find signs of intelligent life
7 - The ballots
Everything is sourced to the most reliable sources, like the
Washington Post
,
Wall Street Journal
, and
The New York Times
.
I do believe that Trump is a safer
candidate than Clinton, but he is still seriously flawed. He stands out as a peace
candidate next to Clinton, but he still makes statements about bombing ISIS and their
family members. Two war crimes in that statement seeing as the US is in Syria illegally.
He also wants to increase the defense budget... WTF, it's already more than half of the
federal discretionary spending. His choice of Pence is also a huge warning sign.
Stein is the only candidate that I have heard make a rational statement regarding
Syria... stop sending in more weapons. I'll concede that I may be naive, but as a true
outsider she has the best chance to rein in the military. We could discuss the deep
state and who calls the shots, but at point it wouldn't matter who gets elected.
Baraka's Soros connection should be considered, but let's not forget that Rothschild
helped bailout Trump with his casino. I'm also very concerned about his dealings and
potential ties with organized crime.
I think the possibility that there were "rogue" FBI investigators keeping Comey in the
dark -- to create an "October surprise" -- may be the most significant (and scary) part
of this story (if true) ... shades of the numerous other "rogue" factions we've seen
under Obama ... see also the 50 anonymous state department dissenters to Obama's
policies (obviously endorsing Hillary). I'm curious if they and this ruse will ever be
mentioned again.
Another failure of the chain of command ... lack of respect for authority within the
highest levels of government. I'm thinking some people understood the message in too
many movies glorifying renegades and mavericks. This isn't whistleblowing because no one
will listen, this is subverting the process because you didn't like the outcome ... will
cheating and fabrication come next to these ideology driven zealots? Has it already?
The Bezos' Wapo rag is expected to be selective. Credibility destroyed. Now, with all
the howling from The Clinton gang. The best display of what goes around, comes around!
……
Let's recall 24 years ago the 11th hr indictment of Secretary of Defense Casper
Weinberger that doomed the re-election of president George H.W. Bush .
This was the
weekend before the election!
Bill Clinton cheered 11th hour indictment that doomed Bush re-election
[24 years ago], as former President George H.W. Bush was surging back against
challenger Bill Clinton, a special prosecutor raised new charges against Bush in the
Iran-Contra probe, prompting Clinton to claim he was running against a "culture of
corruption."
[.] Many Republicans claimed that the indictment made by special prosecutor Lawrence
Walsh against former Reagan-era Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger the weekend before
the 1992 election cost Bush a second term. The indictment, later thrown out, challenged
Bush's claim that he did not know about a controversial arms-for-hostages deal that
dogged the Reagan-Bush administration."
[.]The Clintons seized on the new indictment, howling about a "culture of corruption"
that supposedly pervaded the administration. Bush's poll numbers declined and Bill
Clinton won the election.
Shortly after the election, a federal judge threw out the new indictment because it
violated the five-year statute of limitations and improperly broadened the original
charges. President Bush then pardoned Weinberger.
I think the possibility that there were "rogue" FBI investigators keeping Comey in
the dark -- to create an "October surprise" -- may be the most significant (and scary)
part of this story (if true) ... shades of the numerous other "rogue" factions we've
seen under Obama ... see also the 50 anonymous state department dissenters to Obama's
policies (obviously endorsing Hillary). I'm curious if they and this ruse will ever be
mentioned again.
It's called Mutiny
in D.C. Comey's hand was forced.
and, add this to the mix – I read an article on a credible site of a new bombshell
but before I link to it, the contents should be confirmed during week of November 1st.
However, this gem was included in the article:
"people at the Pentagon are aligned:
Will not silently sit still as one of their 4-Star generals get ramrodded for MUCH
less than Hillary did. They are aligned with the insurrectionists at the FBI.
"It was wrong for me to mislead the F.B.I. on Nov. 2, 2012, and I accept full
responsibility for this," General Cartwright said. "I knew I was not the source of the
story and I didn't want to be blamed for the leak. My only goal in talking to the
reporters was to protect American interests and lives; I love my country and continue to
this day to do everything I can to defend it."
~ ~ ~ ~
Brace for more bombshells – up next, The Clinton Family Foundation.
Question of the day. Over half million emails on Weiner's computer, are the 33,000
deleted emails in this trove?
There is another, rather adventurous accounting of the investigation. According to
this transcript
from a chat board,
some anonymous analyst at the Bureau turned to the public, basically saying they can't
do anything about the Clinton Foundation because the case is too big - it would mean
taking on the totally implied government, and exposing deeds that they fear might lead
to foreign declarations of war. He proceeded to ask the public instead to go after the
Foundation. But after seeing this route did actually not work out, the people at the
Bureau might have come up with plan B. This seems consistent; as long as you accept the
assumption. The transcript is a bit hard to read, but the story rather thrilling, and
definitely "se non č vero, č ben trovato".
You also might appreciate
Bill Still's
narration
of the Phoenix incident with Loretta Lynch.
The Clinton administration was bombing Iraq
three times a week during 1999 and 2000 at a cost of over $2 billion a year. Regardless
of who the next president was going to be, I think you could make a strong case that
they were going to war in Iraq. The war record of Clinton, followed by Bush, followed by
Obama lends credence to this assumption. Note that the attack on Afghanistan began on
October 7, 2001, less than a month after September 11. I'm not a military expert, but
that seems incredibly quick. Bush hadn't even been president for a year.
The Clinton Family Foundation seems so slushy ... the funds are totally at the family's
"discretion" and it's hard to imagine a genuine "scandal" The Foundation/CGI (Clinton
Global Initiative) really only needs a credible "dissatified customer" with records
saying they didn't get the quid-pro-quo what they paid for ... however, two credible
above-reproach dissatisified customers each other would be better. I've figured someone
like that exists (or even that one could have been created/manufactured for this
purpose) ... however, it's the bridgeburning involved in going public ....
(!) According to a NYPD source, the emails on Weiner's laptop are NOT about state
secrets, but are in fact pointing to a pedophilia ring with the Clintons at the center.
Looks like Bill wasn't alone on Epsteins Lolita Express. Hillary has a well documented
preference for underage girls.
Look into
-Jared Fogle
-Cathy O'^Brien
-the 'Hillary Clinton Tapes'
-Tim Kaine (WikiLeaks, VP choice since 07.2015(!))
The problem for the FBI, which once was a trusted American institution, but no
longer is, is that there is no longer any doubt that Donald Trump will win the
popular vote for president of the United States. His appearances are so heavily
attended that thousands are turned away by local fire/occupancy regulations. In
contrast, Hillary has curtailed her appearances, because she doesn't draw more than
30 or 40 people.
Americans are sick to death of the corrupt Clintons and the corrupt American
media. The Clintons are so completely bought-and-paid-for by the Oligarchy that they
were able to outspend Hollywood on their daughter's wedding, dropping $3,000,000 on
the event.
It's hard to imagine what "bombshell" could involve the Family
Foundation unless they's paying for the upkeep of Bill's baby-mamas and kiddy-farm ...
would anyone care?
Soon, more facts will be revealed - there is the probe of the Clinton Foundation that
the DOJ tried blocking but there is the mutiny.
One of the 7 appetizers before the main course:
via ZH:
Doug Band To John Podesta: "If This Story Gets Out, We Are Screwed"
Until the Friday blockbuster news that the FBI was reopening its probe into the
Hillary email server, the biggest overhang facing the Clinton Campaign was the
escalating scandal involving the Clinton Foundation, Doug Band's consultancy firm Teneo,
and Bill Clinton who as a result of a leaked memo emerged was generously compensated for
potential political favors by prominent corporate clients using Teneo as a passthru
vehicle for purchasing influence.
In a section of the memo entitled "Leveraging Teneo For The Foundation," Band spelled
out all of the donations he solicited from Teneo "clients" for the Clinton Foundation.
In all, there are roughly $14mm of donations listed with the largest contributors being
Coca-Cola, Barclays, The Rockefeller Foundation and Laureate International Universities.
Some of these are shown below (the full details can be found in "Leaked Memo Exposes
Shady Dealings Between Clinton Foundation Donors And Bill's "For-Profit" Activities")
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Do read the article and embedded links within.
Influence – peddling. I do recall some congress critters being charged and sent to
the other big house. This is more than pay-for-play
Added to what has already been exposed about the Clinton Foundation, here also ZH via
WSJ:
I had heard (sorry no memory of where and no cite) that the meeting on the tarmac was
actually about the Foundation probe ... it was ridiculous. That video is certainly
"partisan" but I had wondered who initiated the meeting and whose plane they met on ...
(as I recall those details somehow never made it into any article I read). So, if
accurate, Bill Clinton is an overbearing intimidating azzhole -- to his loyal long-term
"protégé" ... so what else is new. She can commiserate with the ex-Clinton-friend club
FWIW, I read today Huma was also getting paid by Tedeo ... she is always described as
"like a daughter", working for clinton since SHE was a 19 year old intern ... she's now
40 ... shudder ... meaning 21 years or 1996 ...
wiki:
The Lewinsky scandal was an American political sex scandal that came to light in
1998, referring to a sexual relationship between 1995 and 1996 with then 49-year-old
President Bill Clinton and a 22-year-old White House intern, Monica Lewinsky.
I've always wondered how Chelsea feels about the oh-so-elegant like-a-daughter
Abedin. I saw a picture of her on the phone "on the tarmac" in 4-5 inch stilettos ...
Even when slender and glammed up, Chelsea looks just like her "rather dumpy" mother ...
blech... forgive me. Weiner, by reports, is whip smart and very funny, very well read
and delightful company ... he's just a compulsive wanker -- apparently in need of
constant re-assurance and praise and attention ... blech.
Still, while Bill was destroying long-term Clinton family relationships via Lewinsky
(and demands that people lie for him), Hillary had "Huma" to lean" on and "mentor" ...
It sounds so co-dependent. (and I suggest zero other impropriety) I've witnessed some
very dysfunctional boss/assistant relationships ... shudder.
This is what I like about Donald Trump... (not exactly the same words) If I'm elected
you will go to jail and to Ford's executives in Detroit. If you move productions to
Mexico, I'll impost a 35% on all vehicles from Mexico and no one will buy Ford!
The #1 meme about Donald Trump is his racism ... and the racism of his supporters ...
this has been the drumbeat since last Spring ... daily, constant, unrelenting and
without exception ... and unfair and ridiculous, without nuance, rejecting all other
explanations and flatly rejecting any number of contradicting Trump rally witness
reports ...
The meme has been: Support Trump and you are a racist ... full stop. That all Trump
supporters want to go back to pre-Civil Rights, pre-Women's liberation, and support for
Trump is a rage-induced quest regain lost "white privilege" ...
It's not true ... but that's the drill... utter ostracism, forever, long past the
election ... it's very destructive and dangerous ... it's a red-line, unforegivable ...
Moore's movie challenged that mindset and he was criticised for his "tolerance" of and
reaching out to Trump voters... to the point that the "claim" more was supporting Trump
has been widely repeated (sliming Moore) ... Sorry I was so emphatic, it's just I
supported Moore's outreach (because it's humane and reality-based) ... and I hated
seeing him slimed by the intolerant ... ghastly election.
As you have heard, the 30% import tax is an absolute non-starter ... in that the
president does not have that power and there is probably still too many automotive jobs
and the auto lobby too strong for congress is spank them in that way ... Driving the
auto industry into bankruptcy isn't good for "America's bottom line" either.
Briefly, it seems Podesta received an email "You need to change your password", asked for professional advice from his
staff if it was legit, was told "Yes, you DO need to change your password", but then clicked on the link in the original email,
which was sent him with malicious intent, as he suspected at first and then was inappropriately reassured about - rather than
on the link sent him by the IT staffer.
Result - the "phishing" email got his password info, and the world now gets to see all his emails.
Personally, my hope is that Huma and HRC will be pardoned for all their crimes, by Obama, before he leaves office.
Then I hope that Huma's divorce will go through, and that once Hillary is sworn in she will at last be courageous enough to
divorce Bill (who actually performed the Huma-Anthony Weiner nuptials - you don't have to make these things up).
Then it could happen that the first same-sex marriage will be performed in the White House, probably by the minister of DC's
Foundry United Methodist Church, which has a policy of LBGQT equality. Or maybe Hillary, cautious and middle-of-the-road as usual,
will go to Foundry UMC sanctuary for the ceremony, recognizing that some Americans' sensibilities would be offended by having
the rite in the White House.
As Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan wrote, "Love is all there is, it makes the world go round, love and only love, it can't be denied.
No matter what you think about it, you just can't live without it, take a tip from one who's tried."
"... It appears there was rift between the FBI and the DOJ with how to move forward with the investigation. Agents in the Washington office were directed to focus on a separate issue relating to the actions of former Virginia Governor and Clinton Foundation Board Member Terry McAuliffe. Agents inside the FBI believed they could build a stronger case if the investigation of McAuliffe and the foundation were combined. ..."
"... FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe seemed to be caught in the middle of the fight between DOJ officials who appeared to want to slow down or shut down the investigation and FBI agents who were eager to pour more resources into the investigation. ..."
"... The story gets more complicated when you factor in that McCabe's wife, Dr. Jill McCabe had received a $467,500 campaign contribution in 2015 for a state senate race from McAuliffe . ..."
"... CNN also reported that multiple field offices were "in agreement a public corruption investigation should be launched" with Clinton Foundation officials as a target. The cable news network reported the investigation would have looked at "conflicts of interest by foreign donors and official acts by Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. ..."
FBI investigators from across the country have been following leads into reports of bribery
involving the Clinton Foundation. Multiple field offices have been involved in the investigation.
A report in Sunday's Wall Street Journal (WSJ) by Devlin Barrett revealed that agents assigned
to the New York field office have been carrying the bulk of the work in investigating the Clinton
Foundations. They have received assistance from the FBI field office in Little Rock according to
"people familiar with the matter, the WSJ reported. Other offices, including Los Angeles and
Washington, D.C., have been collecting evidence to regarding "financial crimes or influence-peddling."
As far back as February 2016, FBI agents made presentation to the Department of Justice (DOJ),
the WSJ's sources stated. "The meeting didn't go well," they wrote. While some sources said
the FBI's evidence was not strong enough, others believed the DOJ had no intention from the start
of going any further. Barrett wrote that the DOJ officials were "stern, icy and dismissive of the
case."
Barrett wrote, "'That was one of the weirdest meetings I've ever been to,' one participant told
others afterward, according to people familiar with the matter."
It appears there was rift between the FBI and the DOJ with how to move forward with the investigation.
Agents in the Washington office were directed to focus on a separate issue relating to the actions
of former Virginia Governor and Clinton Foundation Board Member Terry McAuliffe. Agents inside the
FBI believed they could build a stronger case if the investigation of McAuliffe and the foundation
were combined.
FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe seemed to be caught in the middle of the fight between DOJ officials
who appeared to want to slow down or shut down the investigation and FBI agents who were eager to
pour more resources into the investigation.
Barrett wrote, "'Are you telling me that I need to shut down a validly predicated investigation?'
Mr. McCabe asked, according to people familiar with the conversation. After a pause, the official
replied, 'Of course not,' these people said."
Some of the WSJ sources told Barrett that a "stand down" order had been given to the FBI
agents by McCabe. Others denied that no such order was given.
Preet Bharara, an assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, appears to have
taken in interest in moving forward from the DOJ side, the Daily Caller's Richard Pollock
reported in August.
Pollock wrote:
The New York-based probe is being led by Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District
of New York. Bharara's prosecutorial aggressiveness has resulted in a large number of convictions
of banks, hedge funds and Wall Street insiders.
He said prosecutorial support could come from multiple U.S. Attorneys Offices and stated this
was a major departure from other "centralized FBI investigations."
CNN also reported that multiple field offices were "in agreement a public corruption investigation
should be launched" with Clinton Foundation officials as a target. The cable news network reported
the investigation would have looked at "conflicts of interest by foreign donors and official acts
by Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State.
Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Democratic nominee for president of the United States, may have committed
perjury in testimony before Congress, two separate U.S. House committee chairmen detailed late Monday.
In
a letter from House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform chairman Rep. Jason Chaffetz
(R-UT) and House Judiciary Committee chairman Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) to U.S. Attorney for the
District of Columbia Channing Phillips, the two top House Republicans made their case that Clinton
committed perjury.
Chaffetz and Goodlatte wrote to Phillips:
On August 2, 2016, Assistant Attorney General Peter Kadzik confirmed that you received the
Committees' request for an investigation regarding certain statements made by former Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton during her testimony before Congress and will 'take appropriate action
as necessary. To assist the investigation, this letter identifies several pieces of Secretary
Clinton's testimony that appear to implicate 18 U.S.C. §§1621 and 1001 the criminal statutes that
prohibit perjury and false statements, respectively. The evidence collected by the Federal Bureau
of Investigation (FBI) during its investigation of Secretary Clinton's use of a personal email
system during her time as Secretary of State appears to directly contradict several aspects of
her sworn testimony, which are described in greater detail below.
Before detailing at least four specific instances in which Clinton allegedly committed perjury,
the House Republicans explained the matter a bit further:
During a House Select Committee on Benghazi hearing on October 22, 2015, Secretary Clinton
testified with respect to (1) whether she sent or received emails that were marked classified
at the time; (2) whether her attorneys reviewed each of the emails on her personal email system;
(3) whether there was one, or more servers that stored work-related emails during her time as
Secretary of State; and (4) whether she provided all her work-related emails to the Department
of State. Although there may be other aspects of Secretary Clinton's sworn testimony that are
at odds with the FBI's findings, her testimony in those four areas bears specific scrutiny in
light of the facts and evidence FBI Director James Comey described in his public statement on
July 5, 2016 and in testimony before the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on July
7, 2016.
The first of four main areas where Hillary Clinton allegedly perjured herself before the U.S.
Congress was with her claim in sworn testimony that she never sent or received emails on her illicit
home-brew email server-which was in violation of State Department guidelines, and according to FBI
director James Comey "extremely careless."
"With respect to whether she sent or received emails that were marked classified at the time,
Secretary Clinton testified under oath to the Select Committee that she did not," Chaffetz and Goodlatte
wrote to the U.S. Attorney for Washington, D.C. "Specifically, during questioning by Rep. Jim Jordan,
Secretary Clinton stated 'there was nothing marked classified on my emails, either sent or received.'"
Chaffetz and Goodlatte further quoted from Clinton's testimony by including this quote:
[M]any Americans have no idea how the classification process works. And therefore I wanted
to make it clear that there is a system within our government, certainly within the State Department
. . . where material that is thought to be classified is marked such, so that people have the
opportunity to know how they are supposed to be handling those materials . . . and that's why
it became clearer, I believe, to say that nothing was marked classified at the time I sent or
received it.
The two House Committee chairmen detail in the letter to the U.S. Attorney for D.C. that Clinton,
according to the FBI Director, was not telling the truth in that testimony before Congress:
The FBI, however, found several of Secretary Clinton's emails did in fact contain markings
that identified classified information therein. In Director Comey's public statement on July 5,
2016, he said, 'a very small number of the emails containing classified information bore the markings
indicating the presence of classified information.' When Director Comey testified on July 7, 2016,
he specifically addressed this issue. Rep. Trey Gowdy asked, 'Secretary Clinton said there was
nothing marked classified either sent or received. Was it true?' He said it was not. Director
Comey also stated, 'There was classified material emailed.' Specifically, he stated that three
documents on Secretary Clinton's private server contained classified information clearly marked
'Confidential.' He further testified, 'In the one involving 'top secret' information, Secretary
Clinton not only received but also sent emails that talked about the same subject.'
The second claim on which Hillary Clinton appears to have been caught perjuring herself according
to the two top House Republicans was with regard to her statements that her lawyers read all of her
emails.
"With respect to whether her attorneys reviewed each of the emails on her personal email system,
Secretary Clinton testified that her attorneys used search terms and reviewed every single email
to identify any that were work-related and should therefore be returned to the Department of State,"
Chaffetz and Goodlatte wrote, before quoting directly from Clinton's transcript from when she testified
under oath:
Rep. Jordan: But I'm asking how - I'm asking how it was done. Was
- did someone physically look at the 62,000 e-mails, or did you use search terms, date parameters?
I want to know the specifics.
Mrs. Clinton: They did all of that, and I did not look over their shoulders, because I thought
it would be appropriate for them to conduct that search, and they did.
Rep. Jordan: Will you provide this committee - or can you answer today, what were the search
terms?
Mrs. Clinton: The search terms were everything you could imagine that might be related to anything,
but they also went through every single e-mail.
"The FBI found, however, that Secretary Clinton's lawyers did not in fact read all of her emails-they
relied exclusively on a set of search terms to identify work-related messages," Chaffetz and Goodlatte
wrote, before quoting from Comey's July 5 testimony:
The lawyers doing the sorting for Secretary Clinton in 2014 did not individually read the content
of all of her e-mails, as we did for those available to us; instead, they relied on header information
and used search terms to try to find all work-related e-mails among the reportedly more than 60,000
total e-mails remaining on Secretary Clinton's personal system in 2014. It is highly likely their
search terms missed some work-related e-mails, and that we later found them, for example, in the
mailboxes of other officials or in the slack space of a server. It is also likely that there are
other work-related e-mails that they did not produce to State and that we did not find elsewhere,
and that are now gone because they deleted all e-mails they did not return to State, and the lawyers
cleaned their devices in such a way as to preclude complete forensic recovery.
The third area where Hillary Clinton seems to have perjured herself according to the two House
Committee chairmen is when she testified that she only used one server or device.
"With respect to whether there was one, or more servers that stored work-related emails during
her time as Secretary of State, Secretary Clinton testified there was only one server," Goodlatte
and Chaffetz wrote to the D.C. U.S. Attorney, before pulling another transcript of congressional
testimony:
Rep. Jordan: In March, you also said this: your server was physically located on your property,
which is protected by the Secret Service. I'm having a hard time figuring this out, because this
story's been all over the place. But - there was one server on your property in New York, and
a second server hosted by a Colorado company in - housed in New Jersey. Is that right? There were
two servers?
Mrs. Clinton: No.
Rep. Jordan: OK.
Mrs. Clinton: There was a - there was a server…
Rep. Jordan: Just one?
Mrs. Clinton: . . . that was already being used by my husband's team. An existing system in
our home that I used, and then later, again, my husband's office decided that they wanted to change
their arrangements, and that's when they contracted with the company in Colorado.
Rep. Jordan: And so there's only one server? Is that what you're telling me? And it's the one
server that the FBI has?
Mrs. Clinton: The FBI has the server that was used during the tenure of my State Department
service.
Goodlatte and Chaffetz also wrote:
The FBI, however, found Secretary Clinton stored work-related emails on several servers. In
Director Comey's public statement, he said, 'Secretary Clinton used several different servers
and administrators of those servers during her four years at the State Department, and used numerous
mobile devices to view and send e-mail on that personal domain.' In Director Comey's testimony
on July 7, 2016, he stated that Secretary Clinton used several devices to send and receive work-related
emails during her tenure as Secretary of State. He testified, 'She used multiple devices during
her four years as secretary of state.'
The fourth and final area where Clinton seems to have, according to Chaffetz and Goodlatte, perjured
herself while under oath was during her claim that she provided all of her work-related emails to
the Department of State.
"Finally, with respect to whether she provided all her work-related emails to the Department of
State, Secretary Clinton testified to the Select Committee that she had," Chaffetz and Goodlatte
wrote, before again pulling a transcript of Clinton's testimony before Congress.
Mrs. Clinton: Well, Congressman, I have said repeatedly that I take responsibility for my use
of personal e-mail. I've said it was a mistake. I've said that it was allowed, but it was not
a good choice. When I got to the department, we were faced with a global financial crisis, major
troop decisions on Afghanistan, the imperative to rebuild our alliances in Europe and Asia, an
ongoing war in Iraq, and so much else. E-mail was not my primary means of communication, as I
have said earlier. I did not have a computer on my desk. I've described how I did work: in meetings,
secure and unsecured phone calls, reviewing many, many pages of materials every day, attending
. . .
Rep. Jordan: I - I - I appreciate (inaudible).
Mrs. Clinton: . . . a great deal of meetings, and I provided the department, which has been
providing you, with all of my work-related e-mails, all that I had. Approximately 55,000 pages.
And they are being publicly released.
Chaffetz and Goodlatte wrote:
The FBI found, however, 'several thousand work-related e-mails that were not in the group of
30,000 that were returned by Secretary Clinton to State in 2014.' In the course of its investigation,
the FBI recovered 'still others . . . from the laborious review of the millions of e-mail fragments
dumped into the slack space of the server decommissioned in 2013.' When Director Comey appeared
before the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on July 7, 2016, he confirmed that Secretary
Clinton did not turn over all work-related emails to the FBI. He stated, 'We found work-related
emails, thousands, that were not returned.'
Chaffetz and Goodlatte wrapped their letter to the U.S. Attorney for D.C. by noting that the FBI's
findings prove Hillary Clinton was not telling the truth when she testified under oath before Congress.
"The four pieces of sworn testimony by Secretary Clinton described herein are incompatible with
the FBI's findings," Chaffetz and Goodlatte wrote.
Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton's top aide Huma Abedin said she doesn't know
how her emails wound up on a device she said was her husband's computer, according to a person
familiar with the investigation.
The person, who requested anonymity, said Abedin was not a regular user of the computer and
her lawyers did not search it for materials, thinking no messages would be there even after she
agreed to turn over her messages to the State Department for record-keeping, the
Washington Post reported.
On June 28, 2016, Abedin swore under oath that she looked for all devices containing work information
so the records could be given to the State Department, the
Daily Beast reported.
In the sworn oath, she said she "looked for all the devices that may have any of my State Department
work on it and returned - returned - gave them to my attorneys for them to review for all relevant
documents."
Investigators found thousands of emails on Weiner's computer that they believe to be relevant
to the Clinton investigation, according to federal law enforcement officials.
It is still unknown how the emails are relevant or whether or not they are significant.
Officials say it is possible that the messages could be duplicates of already investigated
emails, but that will not be determined until a computer program goes through the emails to weed
out the duplicates so officials can closely examine the emails for classified information.
"... "The problem here is this investigation was never a real investigation," he said. "That's the problem. They never had a grand jury empanelled, and the reason they never had a grand jury empanelled, I'm sure, is Loretta Lynch would not go along with that." ..."
"... Kallstrom blamed the FBI leadership under FBI Director James Comey as the reason the investigation was held back, but not the rest of the bureau. ..."
"... "The agents are furious with what's going on, I know that for a fact," he said. ..."
A former FBI official said Sunday that Bill and Hillary Clinton are part of a "crime family"
and added that top officials impeded the investigation into Clinton's email server while she was
secretary of state.
Former assistant FBI director James Kallstrom praised Donald Trump before he offered a take down
of the Clintons in a radio interview with John Catsimatidis,
The Hill reported.
"The Clintons, that's a crime family, basically," Kallstrom said. "It's like organized crime.
I mean the Clinton Foundation is a cesspool."
Kallstrom, best known for spearheading the investigation into the explosion of TWA flight 800
in the late '90s, called Clinton a "pathological liar" and blamed Attorney General Loretta Lynch
for botching the Clinton email server investigation.
"The problem here is this investigation was never a real investigation," he said. "That's the
problem. They never had a grand jury empanelled, and the reason they never had a grand jury empanelled,
I'm sure, is Loretta Lynch would not go along with that."
"God forbid we put someone like that in the White House," he added of Clinton.
Kallstrom blamed the FBI leadership under FBI Director James Comey as the reason the investigation
was held back, but not the rest of the bureau.
"The agents are furious with what's going on, I know that for a fact," he said.
Saturday on CNN while discussing the FBI reopening the investigation into Democratic presidential
nominee Hillary Clinton's use of a private unsecured email server during her tenure as secretary
of state, former Assistant Director of the FBI Thomas Fuentes said, "The FBI has an intensive investigation
ongoing into the Clinton Foundation."
He added, "The FBI made the determination that the investigation would go forward as a comprehensive
unified case and be coordinated, so that investigation is ongoing and Huma Abedin and her role and
activities concerning secretary of state in the nature of the foundation and possible pay to play,
that's still being looked at and now."
"... Her e-mailing practices have been under federal investigation ..."
"... Her unorthodox deals, including an agreement to speak in Morocco in exchange for a $12 million gift to the Clinton Global Initiative charity, have landed on the front pages of American newspapers. She infuriated liberals by cozying up to Wall Street banks. She's the consummate insider in the year of the political outsider. ..."
"... But at this point Clinton could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, to borrow one of Donald Trump's more remarkable boasts about himself, and she might not lose many votes. ..."
Her e-mailing practices have been under federal investigation for a big chunk of her
candidacy.
Her unorthodox deals, including an agreement to speak in Morocco in exchange for a $12 million
gift to the Clinton Global Initiative charity, have landed on the front pages of American newspapers.
She infuriated liberals by cozying up to Wall Street banks. She's the consummate insider in the year
of the political outsider.
... ... ...
"By any metric you would want to use, Hillary Clinton was probably the weakest possible general election
candidate the Democrats could have produced in 2016," said Tucker Martin, a Virginia-based Republican
strategist. "She was absolutely beatable."
But at this point Clinton could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, to
borrow one of Donald Trump's more remarkable boasts about himself, and she might not lose many votes.
"... Now the threat is real; and for the foreseeable future we will have to live with and seek to reduce two closely interlinked dangers: the direct and potentially apocalyptic threat posed by terrorists, mainly (though by no means exclusively) based in the Muslim world, and the potential strengthening of those terrorists' resolve by misguided US actions. ..."
"... The most unilateralist Administration in modern American history has been forced to recognise, in principle at least, the country's pressing need for allies ..."
"... Apart from the fact that most European armies are useless when it comes to serious warfare, they are already showing great unwillingness to give the US a blank cheque for whatever military action the Bush Administration chooses to take. ..."
"... A strong sense of righteousness has always been present in the American tradition; but until 11 September, an acute sense of victimhood and persecution by the outside world was usually the preserve of the paranoid Right. ..."
"Who says we share common values with the Europeans? They don't even go to church!" Will the atrocities
of September 11 push America further to the right or open a new debate on foreign policy and the
need for alliances? In this exclusive online essay from the London Review of Books, Anatol Lieven
considers how the cold war legacy may affect the war on terrorism
Not long after the Bush Administration took power in January, I was invited to lunch at a glamorous
restaurant in New York by a group of editors and writers from an influential American right-wing
broadsheet. The food and wine were extremely expensive, the decor luxurious but discreet, the clientele
beautifully dressed, and much of the conversation more than mildly insane. With regard to the greater
part of the world outside America, my hosts' attitude was a combination of loathing, contempt, distrust
and fear: not only towards Arabs, Russians, Chinese, French and others, but towards 'European socialist
governments', whatever that was supposed to mean. This went with a strong desire - in theory at least
- to take military action against a broad range of countries across the world.
Two things were particularly striking here: a tendency to divide the world into friends and enemies,
and a difficulty verging on autism when it came to international opinions that didn't coincide with
their own - a combination more appropriate to the inhabitants of an ethnic slum in the Balkans than
to people who were, at that point, on top of the world.
Today Americans of all classes and opinions have reason to worry, and someone real to fear and
hate, while prolonged US military action overseas is thought to be inevitable. The building where
we had lunch is now rubble. Several of our fellow diners probably died last week, along with more
than six thousand other New Yorkers from every walk of life. Not only has the terrorist attack claimed
far more victims than any previous such attack anywhere in the world, but it has delivered a far
more damaging economic blow. Equally important, it has destroyed Americans' belief in their country's
invulnerability, on which so many other American attitudes and policies finally rested.
This shattering blow was delivered by a handful of anonymous agents hidden in the wider population,
working as part of a tightly-knit secret international conspiracy inspired by a fanatical and (to
the West) deeply 'alien' and 'exotic' religious ideology. Its members are ruthless; they have remarkable
organisational skills, a tremendous capacity for self-sacrifice and self-discipline, and a deep hatred
of the United States and the Western way of life. As Richard Hofstader and others have argued, for
more than two hundred years this kind of combination has always acted as a prompt for paranoid and
reactionary conspiracy theories, most of them groundless.
Now the threat is real; and for the foreseeable future we will have to live with and seek to reduce
two closely interlinked dangers: the direct and potentially apocalyptic threat posed by terrorists,
mainly (though by no means exclusively) based in the Muslim world, and the potential strengthening
of those terrorists' resolve by misguided US actions.
The latter danger has been greatly increased by the attacks. The terrorists have raised to white
heat certain smouldering tendencies among the American Right, while simultaneously - as is usually
the case at the start of wars - pushing American politics and most of its population in a sharply
rightward direction; all of which has taken place under an unexpectedly right-wing Administration.
If this leads to a crude military response, then the terrorists will have achieved part of their
purpose, which was to provoke the other side to indiscriminate retaliation, and thereby increase
their own support.
It is too early to say for sure how US strategies and attitudes will develop. At the time of writing
Afghanistan is the focus, but whatever happens there, it isn't clear whether the US Administration
will go on to launch a more general campaign of military pressure against other states which have
supported terrorist groups, and if so, what states and what kind of military pressure? US policy
is already pulled in two predictable but contradictory directions, amply illustrated in the op-ed
pages of US newspapers and in debates within the Government.
The most unilateralist Administration in modern American history has been forced to recognise,
in principle at least, the country's pressing need for allies. There are the beginnings, too, of
a real public debate on how US policy needs to be changed and shaped to fight the new 'war'. All
this is reminiscent of US attitudes and behaviour at the start of the Cold War, when Communism was
identified as the central menace to the US and to Western capitalism and democracy in general.
On the other hand, the public desire for revenge has strengthened certain attitudes - especially
in the Republican Party and media, as well as parts of the Administration - which, if they prevail,
will not only be dangerous in themselves, but will make the search for real allies difficult. And
real allies are essential, above all in the Arab and Muslim worlds. In the longer run, only the full
co-operation of Arab regimes - along with reform and economic development - can prevent the recruitment,
funding and operations of Arab-based terrorist groups.
As for Europe, British military support may be unconditional, but most European countries - Russia
among them - are likely to restrict their help to intelligence and policing. Apart from the fact
that most European armies are useless when it comes to serious warfare, they are already showing
great unwillingness to give the US a blank cheque for whatever military action the Bush Administration
chooses to take.
Yet a blank cheque is precisely what the Administration, and the greater part of US public opinion,
are asking for. This is Jim Hoagland, veteran establishment foreign correspondent and commentator,
in the generally liberal Washington Post:
"Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and many of the other Arab states Powell hopes to recruit for the bin
Laden posse have long been part of the problem, not part of the solution to international terrorism.
These states cannot be given free passes for going through the motions of helping the United States.
And European allies cannot be allowed to order an appetiser of bin Laden and not share in the costs
of the rest of a meal cooked in hell."
If this is the Post, then the sentiments in the right-wing press and the tabloids can well be
imagined. Here is Tod Lindberg, the editor of Policy Review, writing in the Washington Times:
"The United States is now energetically in the business of making governments pick a side: either
with us and against the terrorists, or against us and with them... Against the category of enemy
stands the category of 'friend'. Friends stand with us. Friends do whatever they can to help. Friends
don't, for example, engage in commerce with enemies, otherwise they aren't friends."
A strong sense of righteousness has always been present in the American tradition; but until 11
September, an acute sense of victimhood and persecution by the outside world was usually the preserve
of the paranoid Right. Now it has spread and, for the moment at least, some rather important ideas
have almost vanished from the public debate: among them, that other states have their own national
interests, and that in the end nothing compels them to help the US; that they, too, have been the
victims of terrorism - in the case of Britain, largely funded from groups in the United States -
but have not insisted on a right of unilateral military retaliation (this point was made by Niall
Ferguson in the New York Times, but not as yet in any op-ed by an American that I have seen); and
that in some cases these states may actually know more about their own part of the world than US
intelligence does.
Beyond the immediate and unforeseeable events in Afghanistan - and their sombre implications for
Pakistan - lies the bigger question of US policy in the Arab world. Here, too, Administration policy
may well be a good deal more cautious than the opinions of the right-wing media would suggest - which
again is fortunate, because much opinion on this subject is more than rabid. Here is AM Rosenthal
in the Washington Times arguing that an amazing range of states should be given ultimatums to surrender
not only alleged terrorists but also their own senior officials accused by the US of complicity:
"The ultimatum should go to the governments of Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria, Sudan and
any other devoted to the elimination of the United States or the constant incitement of hatred against
it... In the three days the terrorists consider the American ultimatum, the residents of the countries
would be urged 24 hours a day by the United States to flee the capital and major cities, because
they would be bombed to the ground beginning the fourth."
Rosenthal isn't a figure from the lunatic fringe ranting on a backwoods radio show, but the former
executive editor of the New York Times, writing in a paper with great influence in the Republican
Party, especially under the present Administration.
No Administration is going to do anything remotely like this. But if the Secretary of State, Colin
Powell, has emerged as the voice of moderation, with a proper commitment to multilateralism, other
voices are audible, too. Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defence, has spoken of "ending states
which support terrorism", and in the case of Iraq, there are those who would now like to complete
the work of the Gulf War and finish off Saddam Hussein.
Here, too, the mood of contempt for allies contributes to the ambition. Thus Kim Holmes, vice-president
of the right-wing Heritage Foundation, argued that only deference to America's Arab allies prevented
the US from destroying the Iraqi regime in 1991 (the profound unwillingness of Bush Senior to occupy
Iraq and take responsibility for the place also played its part in the decision): "To show that this
war is not with Islam per se, the US could be tempted to restrain itself militarily and accommodate
the complex and contradictory political agendas of Islamic states. This in turn could make the campaign
ineffectual, prolonging the problem of terrorism."
Getting rid of Saddam Hussein is not in itself a bad idea. His is a pernicious regime, a menace
to his own people and his neighbours, as well as to the West. And if the Iraqi threat to the Gulf
States could be eliminated, US troops might be withdrawn from Saudi Arabia: it was their permanent
stationing on the holy soil of Islam that turned Osama bin Laden from an anti-Soviet mujahid into
an anti-American terrorist.
But only if it were to take place in the context of an entirely new policy towards Palestine would
the US be able to mount such a campaign without provoking massive unrest across the Arab world; and
given what became of promises made during the Gulf War, there would first of all have to be firm
evidence of a US change of heart. The only borders between Israel and Palestine which would have
any chance of satisfying a majority of Palestinians and Arabs - and conforming to UN resolutions,
for what they are worth - would be those of 1967, possibly qualified by an internationalisation of
Jerusalem under UN control. This would entail the removal of the existing Jewish settlements in the
Occupied Territories, and would be absolutely unacceptable to any imaginable Israeli Government.
To win Israeli agreement would require not just US pressure, but the threat of a complete breach
of relations and the ending of aid.
There may be those in the Administration who would favour adopting such an approach at a later
stage. Bush Sr's was the most anti-Israeli Administration of the past two generations, and was disliked
accordingly by the Jewish and other ethnic lobbies. His son's is less beholden to those lobbies than
Clinton's was. And it may be that even pro-Israeli US politicians will at some point realise that
Israel's survival as such is not an issue: that it is absurd to increase the risk to Washington and
New York for the sake of 267 extremist settlers in Hebron and their comrades elsewhere.
Still, in the short term, a radical shift is unlikely, and an offensive against Iraq would therefore
be dangerous. The attacks on New York and the Pentagon and the celebrations in parts of the Arab
world have increased popular hostility to the Arabs in general and the Palestinians in particular,
a hostility assiduously stoked by Israeli propaganda. But when it comes to denouncing hate crimes
against Muslims - or those taken to be Muslims - within the US, the Administration has behaved decently,
perhaps because they have a rather sobering precedent in mind, one which has led to genuine shame:
the treatment of Japanese Americans during world war two.
This shame is the result of an applied historical intelligence that does not extend to the Arab
world. Americans tend - and perhaps need - to confuse the symptoms and the causes of Arab anger.
Since a key pro-Israel position in the US has been that fundamental Palestinian and Arab grievances
must not be allowed legitimacy or even discussed, the only explanation of Arab hostility to the US
and its ally must be sought in innate features of Arab society, whether a contemporary culture of
anti-semitism (and anti-Americanism) sanctioned by Arab leaderships, or ancient 'Muslim' traditions
of hostility to the West.
All of which may contain some truth: but the central issue, the role of Israeli policies in providing
a focus for such hatred, is overwhelmingly ignored. As a result, it is extremely difficult, and mostly
impossible, to hold any frank discussion of the most important issue affecting the position of the
US in the Middle East or the open sympathy for terrorism in the region. A passionately held nationalism
usually has the effect of corrupting or silencing those liberal intellectuals who espouse it. This
is the case of Israeli nationalism in the US. It is especially distressing that it should afflict
the Jewish liberal intelligentsia, that old bedrock of sanity and tolerance.
An Administration which wanted a radical change of policy towards Israel would have to generate
a new public debate almost from scratch - which would not be possible until some kind of tectonic
shift had taken place in American society. Too many outside observers who blame US Administrations
forget that on a wide range of issues, it is essentially Congress and not the White House or State
Department which determines foreign policy; this is above all true of US aid. An inability or unwillingness
to try to work on Congress, as opposed to going through normal diplomatic channels, has been a minor
contributory factor to Britain's inability to get any purchase on US policy in recent years.
The role of Congress brings out what might be called the Wilhelmine aspects of US foreign and
security policy. By that I do not mean extreme militarism or a love of silly hats, or even a shared
tendency to autism when it comes to understanding the perceptions of other countries, but rather
certain structural features in both the Wilhemine and the US system tending to produce over-ambition,
and above all a chronic incapacity to choose between diametrically opposite goals. Like Wilhelmine
Germany, the US has a legislature with very limited constitutional powers in the field of foreign
policy, even though it wields considerable de facto power and is not linked either institutionally
or by party discipline to the executive. The resulting lack of any responsibility for actual consequences
is a standing invitation to rhetorical grandstanding, and the pursuit of sectional interests at the
expense of overall policy.
Meanwhile, the executive, while in theory supremely powerful in this field, has in fact continually
to woo the legislature without ever being able to command its support. This, too, encourages dependence
on interest groups, as well as a tendency to overcome differences and gain support by making appeals
in terms of overheated patriotism rather than policy. Finally, in both systems, though for completely
different reasons, supreme executive power had or has a tendency to fall into the hands of people
totally unsuited for any but the ceremonial aspects of the job, and endlessly open to manipulation
by advisers, ministers and cliques.
In the US, this did not matter so much during the Cold War, when a range of Communist threats
- real, imagined or fabricated - held the system together in the pursuit of more or less common aims.
With the disappearance of the unifying threat, however, there has been a tendency, again very Wilhelmine,
to produce ambitious and aggressive policies in several directions simultaneously, often with little
reference at all to real US interests or any kind of principle.
The new 'war against terrorism' in Administration and Congressional rhetoric has been cast as
just such a principle, unifying the country and the political establishment behind a common goal
and affecting or determining a great range of other policies. The language has been reminiscent of
the global struggle against Communism, and confronting Islamist radicalism in the Muslim world does,
it's true, pose some of the same challenges, on a less global scale, though possibly with even greater
dangers for the world.
The likelihood that US strategy in the 'war against terrorism' will resemble that of the Cold
War is greatly increased by the way Cold War structures and attitudes have continued to dominate
the US foreign policy and security elites. Charles Tilly and others have written of the difficulty
states have in 'ratcheting down' wartime institutions and especially wartime spending. In the 1990s,
this failure on the part of the US to escape its Cold War legacy was a curse, ensuring unnecessarily
high military spending in the wrong fields, thoroughly negative attitudes to Russia, 'zero-sum' perceptions
of international security issues in general, and perceptions of danger which wholly failed, as we
now see, to meet the real threats to security and lives.
The idea of a National Missile Defense is predicated on a limited revival of the Cold War, with
China cast in the role of the Soviet Union and the Chinese nuclear deterrent as the force to be nullified.
Bush's foreign and security team is almost entirely a product of Cold War structures and circumscribed
by Cold War attitudes (which is not true of the President himself, who was never interested enough
in foreign policy; if he can get his mind round the rest of the world, he could well be more of a
free-thinker than many of his staff).
The collapse of the Communist alternative to Western-dominated modernisation and the integration
(however imperfect) of Russia and China into the world capitalist order have been a morally and socially
ambiguous process, to put it mildly; but in the early 1990s they seemed to promise the suspension
of hostility between the world's larger powers. The failure of the US to make use of this opportunity,
thanks to an utter confusion between an ideological victory and crudely-defined US geopolitical interests,
was a great misfortune which the 'war against terrorism' could in part rectify. Since 11 September,
the rhetoric in America has proposed a gulf between the 'civilised' states of the present world system,
and movements of 'barbaric', violent protest from outside and below - without much deference to the
ambiguities of 'civilisation', or the justifications of resistance to it, remarked on since Tacitus
at least.
How is the Cold War legacy likely to determine the 'war against terrorism'? Despite the general
conviction in the Republican Party that it was simply Reagan's military spending and the superiority
of the US system which destroyed Soviet Communism, more serious Cold War analysts were always aware
that it involved not just military force, or the threat of it, but ideological and political struggle,
socio-economic measures, and state-building. The latter in particular is an idea for which the Bush
team on their arrival in office had a deep dislike (if only to distance themselves from Clinton's
policies), but which they may now rediscover. Foreign aid - so shamefully reduced in the 1990s -
was also a key part of the Cold War, and if much of it was poured into kleptocratic regimes like
Mobutu's, or wasted on misguided projects, some at least helped produce flourishing economies in
Europe and East Asia.
The Republican Party is not only the party of Goldwater and Reagan, but of Eisenhower, Nixon and
Kissinger. Eisenhower is now almost forgotten by the party. 'Eisenhower Republicans', as they refer
to themselves, are usually far closer to Tony Blair (or perhaps more accurately, Helmut Schmidt)
than anyone the Republican Party has seen in recent years, and I'd wager that the majority of educated
Americans have forgotten that the original warning about the influence of the 'military industrial
complex' came from Eisenhower.
Kissinger is still very much alive, however, and his history is a reminder that one aspect of
the American capacity for extreme ruthlessness was also a capacity for radical changes of policy,
for reconciliation with states hitherto regarded as bitter enemies, and for cold-blooded abandonment
of close allies and clients whose usefulness was at an end. It would not altogether surprise me if
we were now to see a radical shift towards real co-operation with Russia, and even Iran.
In general, however, the Cold War legacies and parallels are discouraging and dangerous. To judge
by the language used in the days since 11 September, ignorance, demonisation and the drowning out
of nuanced debate indicate that much of the US establishment can no more tell the difference between
Iran and Afghanistan than they could between China and the Soviet Union in the early 1960s - the
inexcusable error which led to the American war in Vietnam. The preference for militarised solutions
continues (the 'War on Drugs', which will now have to be scaled back, is an example). Most worryingly,
the direct attack on American soil and American civilians - far worse than anything done to the US
in the Cold War - means that there is a real danger of a return to Cold War ruthlessness: not just
in terms of military tactics and covert operations, but in terms of the repulsive and endangered
regimes co-opted as local American clients.
The stakes are, if anything, a good deal higher than they were during the Cold War. Given what
we now know of Soviet policymaking, it is by no means clear that the Kremlin ever seriously contemplated
a nuclear strike against America. By contrast, it seems likely that bin Laden et al would in the
end use nuclear, chemical or biological weapons if they could deliver them.
There is also the question of the impact of US strategies (or, in the case of Israel, lack of
them) on the unity of the West - assuming that this is of some importance for the wellbeing of humanity.
However great the exasperation of many European states with US policy throughout the Cold War, the
Europeans were bound into the transatlantic alliance by an obvious Soviet threat - more immediate
to them than it was to the US. For the critical first decade of the Cold War, the economies of Europe
were hopelessly inferior to that of the US. Today, if European Governments feel that the US is dragging
them into unnecessary danger thanks to policies of which they disapprove, they will protest bitterly
- as many did during the Cold War - and then begin to distance themselves, which they could not afford
to do fifty years ago.
This is all the more likely if, as seems overwhelmingly probable, the US withdraws from the Balkans
- as it has already done in Macedonia - leaving Europeans with no good reason to require a US military
presence on their continent. At the same time, the cultural gap between Europeans and Republican
America (which does not mean a majority of Americans, but the dominant strain of policy) will continue
to widen. 'Who says we share common values with the Europeans?' a senior US politician remarked recently.
'They don't even go to church!' Among other harmful effects, the destruction of this relationship
could signal the collapse of whatever hope still exists for a common Western approach to global environmental
issues - which would, in the end, pose a greater danger to humanity than that of terrorism.
· Anatol Lieven is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington
DC.
"... But the Clinton team also had to deal with a newly emboldened Mr. Trump, who urged voters at a rally on Saturday in Golden, Colo., to oppose Mrs. Clinton because of her "criminal action" that was "willful, deliberate, intentional and purposeful." ..."
"... Handed a new opening against Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Trump used the moment to baselessly claim there had been an internal F.B.I. "revolt" and made a sexually suggestive joke about Mr. Weiner. ..."
"... "As Podesta said, she's got bad instincts," Mr. Trump said, distorting a comment in one of the thousands of Mr. Podesta's hacked emails recently released by WikiLeaks. "Well, she's got bad instincts when her emails are on Anthony Weiner's wherever." ..."
"... The paramount fear among Clinton advisers and Democratic officials was that an election that had become a referendum on Mr. Trump's fitness for office, and that had increasingly seemed to be Mrs. Clinton's to lose, would now become just as much about her conduct. ..."
"... "This is like an 18-wheeler smacking into us, and it just becomes a huge distraction at the worst possible time," said Donna Brazile, the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee and a close Clinton ally. ..."
"... a reflection of 18 months of frustration that her personal decisions about her email practices and privacy were still generating unhelpful political drama. ..."
"... Two Clinton aides, for example, pointedly noted in interviews that it was difficult to press a counterattack without fully knowing what was in Ms. Abedin's emails. ..."
"... While some voters are undecided, about 20 million Americans have already cast ballots in early voting, and millions more long ago concluded which candidate they would support. ..."
"... In a polarized country where many are unwaveringly contemptuous of either Mr. Trump or Mrs. Clinton, the latest development in the email story prompted a mix of shrugs and renewed determination from the left and told-you-so claims of Clinton perfidy from the right. ..."
'Some prominent Democratic women, meanwhile, were angry that a murky announcement from the F.B.I.
might impede the election of the first female president of the United States.
"It worries me because it gives the Republicans something to blow up and fan folks' anger with,"
said former Representative Patricia Schroeder of Colorado, who considered a run for the Democratic
nomination for president in 1988. "I was on the Judiciary Committee when I was in Congress, and
I have never seen the F.B.I. handle any case the way they have handled hers."'
Hillary Clinton Assails James Comey, Calling Email
Decision 'Deeply Troubling' http://nyti.ms/2dYalYs
NYT - PATRICK HEALY and JONATHAN MARTIN - Oct 29
Hillary Clinton and her allies sprang onto a war footing on Saturday, opening a ferocious attack
on the F.B.I.'s director, James B. Comey, a day after he disclosed that his agency was looking
into a potential new batch of messages from her private email server.
Treating Mr. Comey as a threat to her candidacy, Mrs. Clinton took aim at the law enforcement
officer who had recommended no criminal charges less than four months earlier for her handling
of classified information as secretary of state.
"It's pretty strange to put something like that out with such little information right before
an election," Mrs. Clinton said at a rally in Daytona Beach, Fla. "In fact, it's not just strange;
it's unprecedented and it is deeply troubling."
For Democrats, it was also deeply worrying. Mrs. Clinton's advisers expressed concern that
the F.B.I.'s renewed attention to emails relating to the nominee would turn some voters against
her, hurt party candidates in competitive House and Senate races, and complicate efforts to win
over undecided Americans in the final days of the election.
So after stepping gingerly around the issue on Friday, calling on Mr. Comey to release more
specific information but not overtly criticizing him, her campaign made it personal on Saturday,
accusing the director of smearing Mrs. Clinton with innuendo late in the race and of violating
Justice Department rules.
The decision to target Mr. Comey for his unusual decision to publicly disclose the inquiry
came during an 8 a.m. internal conference call, after aides saw reports that Justice Department
officials were furious, believing he had violated longstanding guidelines advising against such
actions so close to an election.
Even before Mrs. Clinton spoke in Florida, her campaign chairman, John D. Podesta, and campaign
manager, Robby Mook, criticized Mr. Comey for putting out incomplete information and breaking
with Justice Department protocol.
"By providing selective information, he has allowed partisans to distort and exaggerate
to inflict maximum political damage," Mr. Podesta said during a conference call with reporters.
"Comey has not been forthcoming with the facts," he added, describing the director's letter to
Congress on Friday as "long on innuendo."
Whatever shortcomings Mrs. Clinton may have as a candidate, Saturday's coordinated effort showed
that the political organization that she, her husband and her allies had built over decades remained
potent and would not let what seemed like victory erode easily. By midday, Mr. Comey, a Republican
appointed by President Obama and confirmed nearly unanimously by the Senate, found himself in
its cross hairs.
Encouraged by Mrs. Clinton's senior aides to reframe the story and make it about Mr. Comey's
actions, liberal groups such as the Congressional Black Caucus demanded that he release more information.
Other surrogates were emailed talking points prodding them to deem it "extraordinary that 11 days
before the election a letter like this - with so few details - would be sent to 8 Republican committee
chairmen." (Ranking Democrats on the committees also received copies.)
Mr. Comey has not publicly commented on the investigation, other than with the letter saying
that more emails were being examined. He also wrote an email to F.B.I. employees explaining that
he felt he had to inform Congress even though the agency did not yet know "the significance of
this newly discovered collection of emails."
With Mrs. Clinton leading Donald J. Trump in nearly every battleground state, Clinton advisers
were emphatic that they would not be thrown off stride. They said they would not change any political
strategy, television advertising or campaign travel plans.
For months, the F.B.I. had investigated whether Mrs. Clinton had broken any laws by using a
private email server while she was secretary of state. This past summer, Mr. Comey said that Mrs.
Clinton had been "extremely careless" by allowing sensitive information to be discussed outside
secure government servers, but that the agency had concluded that Mrs. Clinton had not committed
a crime. The investigation was closed.
But on Friday, Mr. Comey notified Congress that the agency had discovered emails, possibly
relevant to the investigation, that belonged to Mrs. Clinton's top aide, Huma Abedin. The emails
were discovered on the computer of Ms. Abedin's estranged husband, Anthony D. Weiner, during a
separate investigation into allegations that he had exchanged sexually explicit messages with
a teenager.
According to several Clinton advisers, Mrs. Clinton told them overnight and on Saturday that
she wanted the campaign to operate normally, not rashly, while pressuring Mr. Comey to dispel
any possibility that her candidacy was under legal threat.
But the Clinton team also had to deal with a newly emboldened Mr. Trump, who urged voters
at a rally on Saturday in Golden, Colo., to oppose Mrs. Clinton because of her "criminal action"
that was "willful, deliberate, intentional and purposeful."
Handed a new opening against Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Trump used the moment to baselessly claim
there had been an internal F.B.I. "revolt" and made a sexually suggestive joke about Mr. Weiner.
"As Podesta said, she's got bad instincts," Mr. Trump said, distorting a comment in one
of the thousands of Mr. Podesta's hacked emails recently released by WikiLeaks. "Well, she's got
bad instincts when her emails are on Anthony Weiner's wherever."
The paramount fear among Clinton advisers and Democratic officials was that an election that
had become a referendum on Mr. Trump's fitness for office, and that had increasingly seemed to
be Mrs. Clinton's to lose, would now become just as much about her conduct.
In phone calls, email chains and text messages on Saturday, Clinton aides and allies were by
turns confident that the F.B.I. would find nothing to hurt Mrs. Clinton and concerned that the
inquiry would nudge demoralized Republicans to show up to vote for down-ballot candidates - and
perhaps even cast ballots, however reluctantly, for the battered Mr. Trump.
"This is like an 18-wheeler smacking into us, and it just becomes a huge distraction at the
worst possible time," said Donna Brazile, the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee
and a close Clinton ally. "We don't want it to knock us off our game. But on the second-to-last
weekend of the race, we find ourselves having to tell voters, 'Keep your focus; keep your eyes
on the prize.'"
As much as Clinton advisers stressed that they were not panicking, some of them radiated anger
at Mr. Comey, Mr. Weiner and even Mrs. Clinton - a reflection of 18 months of frustration that
her personal decisions about her email practices and privacy were still generating unhelpful political
drama.Two Clinton aides, for example, pointedly noted in interviews that it was difficult to
press a counterattack without fully knowing what was in Ms. Abedin's emails.
Some prominent Democratic women, meanwhile, were angry that a murky announcement from the F.B.I.
might impede the election of the first female president of the United States.
"It worries me because it gives the Republicans something to blow up and fan folks' anger with,"
said former Representative Patricia Schroeder of Colorado, who considered a run for the Democratic
nomination for president in 1988. "I was on the Judiciary Committee when I was in Congress, and
I have never seen the F.B.I. handle any case the way they have handled hers."
While some voters are undecided, about 20 million Americans have already cast ballots in
early voting, and millions more long ago concluded which candidate they would support.
In a polarized country where many are unwaveringly contemptuous of either Mr. Trump or
Mrs. Clinton, the latest development in the email story prompted a mix of shrugs and renewed determination
from the left and told-you-so claims of Clinton perfidy from the right.
'Hopefully, it will infuriate & motivate
Dem voters more than it will please
& energize GOPsters.'
likbez -> Fred C. Dobbs... , -1
"Encouraged by Mrs. Clinton's senior aides to reframe the story and make it about Mr. Comey's
actions"
Reminds me a reaction of a cornered rat...
It was she who created private "Shadow IT" within the State Department.
It was she who hired Huma Abedin who proved to be completely clueless in computer security
(and not only in computer security) and, as such, represented probably even higher level of security
risks then Mrs Clinton herself. Forwarding email to her private Web mail account for printing
because direct printing from the State Department email account was convoluted is an interesting
solution for a high level State Department official, who signed various non-disclosure documents.
It was she who was eliminated incriminating emails by claiming the they are private after investigation
was already opened and she was asked to provide them. Elimination was done using special software
to prevent recovery.
What is wrong with Bill Clinton? He just doesn't look right these days. Is he just stoned, or
is whatever is left of the rapist's brain drying up? Check out Bill Clinton yesterday in Arizona
where they forced Gabby Giffords to stumble through a speech for Hillary Clinton. Something about
BJ just doesn't seem right.
Something isn't right with Bill Clinton. Did he pick up some sort of disease from one of his
trips to Jeffrey Epstein's Pedo Island? He looked like he was about to pass out. You ALMOST want
to feel sorry for the old fogey, but I don't. dance...dancetotheradio
•
7 months ago
Never met a skirt he didn't hike in the Crooked Wagg'in Finger Days of Yore. Firing blanks..
he won't have wedlock problems of Pal Webster Hubbell.
Nor will a poor little baby suffer with the horrible affliction. 2 out of 3, It's more positive,
than negative. Bill has Great Health Care...He'll be Fine.
"... So we have a traitor as POTUS that is not only corrupt, but compromised...and a woman that is a serial liar, perjured herself multiple times at the Hearing whom is running for POTUS. ..."
WASHINGTON - Senior Justice Department officials warned the FBI that Director James B. Comey's
decision to notify Congress about renewing the investigation into Hillary Clinton's private
email server was not consistent with long-standing practices of the department, according to
officials familiar with the discussions.
"Comely went off the farm all on his own and must answer for his actions. Simple as that."
IMHO that's extremely naďve. Such a "career limiting move"(CLM) in Washington-speak almost
never done "on his own". Exception are whistleblowers like William Binney, who already decided
for themselves that "this is the last stand" and are ready to face consequences.
Few Washington bureaucrats want to became outcasts within the administration, even the lame
duck administration. Bureaucracy, at the end, is just another flavor of a political coalition
and they tend to cling to power by whatever means possible including criminal.
Moreover, Comey so far was viewed as an "Obama man" who abruptly squashed the "emailgate"
investigation instead of expanding it investigating Bill Clinton for his "accidental" meeting
with Loretta Lynch and possibly putting the old fogey on the bench for the obstruction of justice.
And who at the end granted immunity to all key members of Clinton entourage including Huma Abedin
who proved to be, security wise, not the sharpest tool in the shed.
The only plausible explanation that I see is that Comey action reflects a deep split within
the USA elite including internal cracks and pressure within FBI brass (possibly from rank-and-file
investigators, who understand what's going on) as for viability Hillary as the next POTUS.
I would ask you a very simple question: do you really want a POTUS that has, say, 80% probability
to be impeached by the House during the first year of his/her administration?
And any security specialist will tell you that Hillary creation of "shadow IT" within the
State Department is a crime. The behavior that would never be tolerated not only in super-secretive
State Department (which recently assumed some functions previously performed by CIA), but in any
large corporation.
It also might well be that there are new highly compromising evidence (not necessary from
Wiener case) which changed the "grand calculation".
Wikileaks needs to get this out (I have not verified the info sent to me last night):
So here's the REAL story.
Amb. Stevens was sent to Benghazi post haste in order to retrieve US made Stinger
missiles supplied to Ansar al Sharia without Congressional oversight or permission.
Hillary brokered the deal through Stevens and a private arms dealer named Marc Turi.
Then some of the shoulder fired missiles ended up in Afghanistan used against our own military.
It was July 25th, 2012 when a Chinook helicopter was taken down by one of our own Stingers,
but the idiot Taliban didn't arm the missile and the Chinook didn't explode, but had to
land anyway.
An ordnance team recovered the serial number off the missile which led back to a cache
of Stingers being kept in Qatar by the CIA
Obama and Hillary were now in full panic mode and Stevens was sent in to retrieve the
rest of the Stingers. This was a "do-or-die" mission, which explains the stand down orders
given to multiple commando teams.
It was the State Dept, not the CIA that supplied them to our sworn enemies, because Petraeus
wouldn't supply these deadly weapons due to their potential use on commercial aircraft.
Then, Obama threw Gen. Petraeus under the bus after he refused to testify that he OK'd the
BS talking points about a spontaneous uprising due to a Youtube video.
Obama and Hillary committed treason...and THIS is what the investigation is all about,
why she had a private server, (in order to delete the digital evidence), and why Obama,
two weeks after the attack, told the UN that the attack was because of a Youtube video,
even though everyone knew it was not.
Further...the Taliban knew that this administration aided and abetted the enemy without
Congressional approval when Boehner created the Select Cmte, and the Taliban began pushing
the Obama Administration for the release of 5 Taliban Generals. Bowe Bergdahl was just a
pawn...everyone KNEW he was a traitor.
So we have a traitor as POTUS that is not only corrupt, but compromised...and a woman
that is a serial liar, perjured herself multiple times at the Hearing whom is running for
POTUS.
Only the Dems, with their hands out, palms up, will support her. Perhaps this is why
no military aircraft was called in because the administration knew our enemies had Stingers.
"... FBI agents looking at Weiners weiner on his laptop, sees tons of Huma emails and Clinton emails, turn and tell their boss they are disgusted with all this and he needs to disrupt her winning office or they are going public. That's what happened! ..."
"... I think you are spot on with that observation. Comey was forced to tell Congress the Clinton e-mail investigation was being reopened. If he did not then sure as hell the existence of those e-mails on the Weiner computer would be leaked. ..."
"... I agree, it is all puppet theatre with some humor added. The more outrageous the more believable, right? ..."
"... It achieves some "unity" around Trump when there wasn't enough going down the home stretch, it became OBVIOUS she's not a winner, which anyone with half a brain has known since she announced? So maybe they are pulling the plug and she's been beat officially? Which leaves the question is Trump for real? ..."
"... I must say, fake or not he fought hard? I like Trump. I hope he realizes if he did decide to do GOOD, he could become very powerful. Why these leaders get to these positions and give it all up for a little greed is beyond me? They could be 10 times more powerful by just being GOOD? You've got the money Trump, if your GOOD, you'll obtain the power? Trump has some political capital and makes him more attractive to the establishment. My guess is, im being too optimistic for good things to happen? I hope Im wrong. ..."
"... The Clintons are a great success story. They never set out to be legal, only not to get sent to jail. By this standard they have succeeded. They have wealth and power and are 2 of the most admired people on earth. Lawyers and fines are just businesses expenses. ..."
"... I want to share my intentions with my fellow ZH Bloggers and Patriots, beginning today, I am going to be sending a series of communications directly to Paul Ryan by using his WEBSITE found at the following URL: http://www.speaker.gov/contact ..."
"... I plan to both encourage and challenge the Speaker. I know many on ZH look at Paul Ryan as a hypocrite. I understand why you may hold this position. I too am very disappointed with recent REPUBLICAN positions and communications. However, now is the time to unite as "WE THE PEOPLE". All of the data is suggesting that leadership within US Government Agencies is corrupted by special interests and their own fleshly nature. We see evidence of TREASON everywhere. But I believe brighter days lie ahead for America at least in the short term. ..."
"... AMERICA has lost her way and this needs to be corrected. ..."
FBI agents looking at Weiners weiner on his laptop, sees tons of Huma emails and Clinton emails, turn and tell their boss
they are disgusted with all this and he needs to disrupt her winning office or they are going public. That's what happened!
I think you are spot on with that observation. Comey was forced to tell Congress the Clinton e-mail investigation was being
reopened. If he did not then sure as hell the existence of those e-mails on the Weiner computer would be leaked.
I agree, it is all puppet theatre with some humor added. The more outrageous the more believable, right?
It achieves some "unity" around Trump when there wasn't enough going down the home stretch, it became OBVIOUS she's not
a winner, which anyone with half a brain has known since she announced? So maybe they are pulling the plug and she's been beat
officially? Which leaves the question is Trump for real?
I must say, fake or not he fought hard? I like Trump. I hope he realizes if he did decide to do GOOD, he could become very
powerful. Why these leaders get to these positions and give it all up for a little greed is beyond me? They could be 10 times
more powerful by just being GOOD? You've got the money Trump, if your GOOD, you'll obtain the power? Trump has some political
capital and makes him more attractive to the establishment. My guess is, im being too optimistic for good things to happen? I
hope Im wrong.
I've been burned so many times by BIG GOV. both DEM & REP? I just cant trust anyone that is near it?
They take lots of ideas from ZH these days, and its not good..... ZH offers them the ideas, the power, and the creativity of
the crowd. They use it against us, a very powerful tool.
The Clintons are a great success story. They never set out to be legal, only not to get sent to jail. By this standard they
have succeeded. They have wealth and power and are 2 of the most admired people on earth. Lawyers and fines are just businesses
expenses.
I want to share my intentions with my fellow ZH Bloggers and Patriots, beginning today, I am going to be sending a series
of communications directly to Paul Ryan by using his WEBSITE found at the following URL:
http://www.speaker.gov/contact
I plan to both encourage and challenge the Speaker. I know many on ZH look at Paul Ryan as a hypocrite. I understand why
you may hold this position. I too am very disappointed with recent REPUBLICAN positions and communications. However, now is the
time to unite as "WE THE PEOPLE". All of the data is suggesting that leadership within US Government Agencies is corrupted by
special interests and their own fleshly nature. We see evidence of TREASON everywhere. But I believe brighter days lie ahead for
America at least in the short term.
AMERICA has lost her way and this needs to be corrected.
I encourage everyone who reads this message to send a note to the SPEAKER encouraging him to do four things:
Get on board the TRUMP/PENCE train no matter what it takes which includes eating "HUMBLE PIE".
Go after Hillary R. Clinton and press for swift and immediate justice.
Enforce existing laws for TREASON that are on the books.
Do whatever it takes to ensure the integrity of the American POTUS Election process. MAKE OUR VOTE COUNT.
I plan to do this today and will be sending the speaker notes and comments from ZH.
If everyone contacts the SPEAKER, he will get the POINT.
GOD's SPEED in whatever you decide to do as a CITIZEN of these UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.
Or the racism of the middle class. People are tribal and arguably it is baked into our DNA.
That doesn't excuse the mental laziness of trafficking in stereotypes but one could make a case
that racism is as much a matter of ignorance as of evil character.
Obama with his "bitter clingers" and HIllary with her "deplorables" are talking about people
about whom they probably know almost nothing.
One of the long ago arguments for school integration was that propinquity fosters mutual understanding.
This met with a lot of resistance. And for people like our Pres and would be Pres a broader view
of the electorate would be inconvenient.
"... In recent interviews, Donald Trump's wife, Melania Trump, observed wryly that almost every malicious, lie-filled article about herself or he husband was written by a … female. ..."
"... On the Soviet-style witch-hunt launched against her husband with media mediation, she said this: "All sexual assault allegations should be handled in a court of law. To accuse someone, man or woman, without evidence is damaging and unfair." ..."
"... The very embodiment of the malevolent liberal matriarchy rising is the sainted Michelle Obama. The First Lady was lauded for an unhinged anti-Trump address to the nation's women. ..."
In recent interviews, Donald Trump's wife, Melania Trump, observed wryly that almost every malicious,
lie-filled article about herself or he husband was written by a … female.
... ... ...
When a liberal woman declares she's a strong woman (usually uttered in a tart-like, staccato inflection),
she's using a cliché. Look at her actions. You'll see that "strong" to liberal distaff means kicking
and screaming until she brings others into compliance with her worldview and ways.
... ... ...
More material than her mien were Melania Trump's words of reason. On the Soviet-style witch-hunt
launched against her husband with media mediation, she said this: "All sexual assault allegations
should be handled in a court of law. To accuse someone, man or woman, without evidence is damaging
and unfair."
This was the exact verdict of famed defense attorney Tom Mesereau, about the Bill Cosby
pile-on. Quit the feeding frenzy. Give the man his due process. Investigate the women, counseled
Mesereau, Esq., at the time.
... ... ...
The very embodiment of the malevolent liberal matriarchy rising is the sainted Michelle Obama.
The First Lady was lauded for an
unhinged anti-Trump
address to the nation's women. In a world where Americans have been beheaded on camera, women
raped en masse on Europe's streets, and Christians exterminated in the Middle East-the First Lady
bewailed being "shaken" to her shallow core by raunchy words. "I can't stop thinking about it," groaned
Michelle about Mr. Trump's Access Hollywood indiscretion. It "has shaken me to my core in a way I
could not have predicted."
In the aftermath of one of the most memorable (c)october shocks in presidential campaign history, Wikileaks continues its ongoing
broadside attack against the Clinton campaign with the relentless Podesta dump, by unveiling another 596 emails in the latest Part
22 of its Podesta release, bringing the total emails released so far to exactly 36,190, leaving less than 30% of the total dump left
to go.
As usual we will go parse through the disclosure and bring you some of the more notable ones.
* * *
In a February 2012 email from Chelsea Clinton's
NYU alias, [email protected], to Podesta and Mills, Bill and Hillary's frustrated
daughter once again points out the "frustration and confusion" among Clinton Foundation clients in the aftermath of the previously
noted scandals plaguing the Clinton consultancy, Teneo:
Over the past few days a few people from the Foundation have reached out to me frustrated or upset about _____ (fill in the
blank largely derived meetings Friday or Monday). I've responded to all w/ essentially the following (ie disintermediating myself,
again, emphatically) below. I also called my Dad last night to tell him of my explicit non-involvement and pushing all back to
you both and to him as I think that is indeed the right answer. Thanks
Sample: Please share any and all concerns, with examples, without pulling punches, with John and Cheryl as appropriate and
also if you feel very strongly with my Dad directly. Transitions are always challenging and to get to the right answer its critical
that voices are heard and understood, and in the most direct way - ie to them without intermediation. Particularly in an effort
to move more toward a professionalism and efficiency at the Foundation and for my father - and they're the decision-makers, my
Dad most of all
I have moved all the sussman money from unity '09 to cap and am reviewing the others . I will assess it and keep you informed
Something else for the DOJ to look into after the elections, perhaps?
* * *
And then there is this email from August 2015
in which German politician Michael Werz advises John Podesta that Turkish president Erdogan "is making substantial investments in
U.S. to counter opposition (CHP, Kurds, Gulenists etc.) outreach to policymakers" and the US Government.
John, heard this second hand but more than once. Seems Erdogan faction is making substantial investments in U.S. to counter
opposition (CHP, Kurds, Gulenists etc.) outreach to policymakers and USG. Am told that the Erdogan crew also tries to make inroads
via donations to Democratic candidates, including yours. Two names that you should be aware of are *Mehmet Celebi* and *Ali Cinar*.
Happy to elaborate on the phone, provided you are not shopping at the liquor store.
This should perhaps explain why the US has so far done absolutely nothing to halt Erdogan's unprecedented crackdown on "coup plotters"
which has seen as many as 100,000 workers lose their jobs, be arrested, or otherwise removed from Erdogan's political opposition.
The FBI announcement comes on the heels of a report yesterday
by journalist Paul Sperry, who gave new details about Abedin's role in the email scandal.
Protective detail assigned to guard former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her two residences
complained that her closest aide Huma Abedin often overrode standard security protocols during
trips to the Middle East, and personally changed procedures for handling classified information,
including highly sensitive intelligence briefs the CIA prepared for the president, newly released
FBI documents reveal.
The security agents, who were interviewed as witnesses in the FBI's investigation of Clinton's
use of an unauthorized private email server to send classified information, complained that Abedin
had unusual sway over security policies during Clinton's 2009-2013 tenure at Foggy Bottom.
Abedin's influence in these matters, including the revelation in Sperry's article that "Abedin
possessed much more power" over Clinton's staff, schedule, and security than other former chiefs
of staffs, is especially concerning given the links that Abedin has to the kingdom of Saudi Arabia
and to the Muslim World League, a group that Hillary Clinton herself said in 2009 was funding terrorism.
Hillary Clinton has stated publicly
that she helped "start and support" the Media Matters group, and that organization has consistently
come to her rescue with misinformation, half-truths, and smears that invariably get repeated by the
established media.
The Vanity Fair article apparently sent shockwaves through the Clinton camp. Any mainstream
press coverage of Huma Abedin is rare, and what coverage there is almost universally laudatory. Despite
the fawning coverage she has received, there are many unanswered questions about Abedin, especially
given Abedin's complete access to Hillary Clinton, one of the most powerful people in the world,
a former Secretary of State and possible future president.
As Vanity Fair's William Cohan
writes in his piece:
Over the years Huma has served in several positions, with increasingly important-sounding titles.
She has been Hillary's "body woman," her traveling chief of staff, a senior adviser, and a deputy
chief of staff when Hillary was secretary of state. Now, based in Brooklyn, she is the vice-chair
of Hillary's 2016 presidential campaign.
The Vanity Fair piece on the secretive Abedin confirmed a number of facts that have been
reported by conservative media for a couple of years but have been twisted and convoluted by the
mainstream media.
For example, the Vanity Fair article flatly lays out the information that Huma Abedin was
an assistant editor at a publication called the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs from 1996
until 2008. He writes:
When (Huma) Abedin was two years old, the family moved to Jidda, Saudi Arabia, where, with
the backing of Abdullah Omar Nasseef, then the president of King Abdulaziz University, her father
founded the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs, a think tank, and became the first editor of
its Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, which stated its mission as "shedding light" on minority
Muslim communities around the world in the hope of "securing the legitimate rights of these communities."…
It turns out the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs is an Abedin family business. Huma was
an assistant editor there between 1996 and 2008. Her brother, Hassan, 45, is a book-review editor
at the Journal and was a fellow at the Oxford Center for Islamic Studies, where Nasseef is chairman
of the board of trustees. Huma's sister, Heba, 26, is an assistant editor at the Journal.
Breitbart News added information this year that shows that the "Abedin family business" is housed
in the offices of the Muslim World League.
The webpage for the Institute for Muslim Minority Affairs site says how to reach the Journal
: "Editorial Correspondence including submission of articles and books for review should be addressed
to: Editor, Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 46 Goodge Street, London WIP 1FJ, U.K."
The current official Journal
website also lists the same 46 Goodge Street address, which is the same exact address listed
on the Muslim World League's London office address.
The official website for the Muslim World
League's London office lists its address as 46 Goodge Street.
A
Yelp! listing for the Muslim World League shows the same 46 Goodge Address and a photo of the
entrance.
Google Maps from 2008 -the earliest
date available-shows the Muslim Word League London office entrance, which appears to have office
space above a pizza restaurant .
This direct connection to the Muslim World League and a child organization called the World Arab
Muslim Youth Association (WAMY)-also housed at Goodge Street offices-is significant due to a 2009
State Department memo which reveals that while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State and Huma Abedin
was her top aide, and the Secretary of State's office was engaged in talks with Saudi Arabia about
stopping the Muslim World League from funding terrorism at the same time the "Abedin family business"
was operating out of the Muslim World League's London office.
This revelation shows that while Huma Abedin was serving at the highest level of government as
Hillary Clinton's aide and had access to this information, Abedin had a direct connection to a group
that was suspected of actively funding groups like al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and Hamas, which had not
only killed civilians around the world but also U.S. servicemen.
The memo, which
was originally
published by WikiLeaks , was sent on December 30, 2009 from the Secretary of State to the Department
of Treasury and ambassadors in several Gulf region countries including Saudi Arabia. The stated goal
of the memo is that "all action posts deliver the general talking points" to those countries.
The connection to terror funding is also listed in the infamous "missing 28 pages" from a report
by the 9/11 commission that were kept hidden for years until their release on a Friday afternoon
earlier this year. Page 24 of the 28-page report discusses Osama Bin Laden's half-brother and says
in part:
According to the FBI, Abdullah Bin Ladin has a number of connections to terrorist organizations.
He is the President and Director of the World Arab Muslim Youth Association (WAMY) and the Institute
of Islamic and Arabic Science in America. Both organizations are local branches of non-governmental
organizations (NGOs) based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
According to the FBI, there is reason to believe that WAMY is "closely associated with the
funding and financing of international terrorist activities and in the past has provided logistical
support to individuals wishing to to fight in the Afghan War." In 1998, the CIA published a paper
characterizing WAMY as a NGO that provides funding. logistical support and training with possible
connections to the Arab Afghans network, Hamas, Algerian extremists and Philippine militants.
Although the 28 pages make no mention of Abedin at all, the information in the 28 pages lays out
a timeline of events during the planning and execution of the 9/11 terror attack that shows that,
at all times, Huma Abedin was working for both Hillary Clinton and the WAMY organization the Institute
for Muslim Minority Affairs.
Another guard assigned to Clinton's residence in Chappaqua, N.Y., recalled in a February FBI
interview that new security procedures for handling delivery of the diplomatic pouch and receiving
via fax the highly classified Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) had been "established by Abedin."
The witness added that Abedin controlled the operations of a secure room known as a SCIF located
on the third floor of the residence.
In her own April 2016 interview with the FBI, Abedin contended that she "did not know that
Clinton had a private server until about a year and a half ago, when it became public knowledge."
The clintonemail.com server was set up in the basement of the Chappaqua residence.
However, another witness told agents that he and another Clinton aide with an IT background
built the new server system "at the recommendation of Huma Abedin," who first broached the idea
of an off-the-grid email server as early as the "fall (of) 2008," ostensibly after Barack Obama
was elected president.
With the FBI investigation reopened, it will be interesting to see if the mainstream media finally
begins to do their job and ask tough questions about Huma Abedin.
Polling offers some
clues . Last week, George Washington University
released the results of a survey of 1,000 adults who said they were registered and likely
to vote. Only 29% of those who said that they would vote for Clinton said their vote was intended
to stop Trump from getting to the White House. By contrast, 43% of Trump voters said their decision
was a defensive vote against Clinton.
That doesn't necessarily get us any closer to forecasting the results. It's a fact that voter
turnout will shape this election outcome but it's much harder to predict how human nature might affect
that turnout. What drives people to action more – support for a set of values or fear of the alternatives?
Love or hate?
What I do not get is how one can call himself/herself a democrat and be jingoistic monster.
That's the problem with Democratic Party and its supporters. Such people for me are DINO ("Democrats
only in name"). Closet neocons, if you wish. The level of militarism in the current US society
and MSM is really staggering. anti-war forces are completely destroyed (with the abandonment of
draft) and are limited for libertarians (such as Ron Paul) and paleoconservatives. There is almost
completely empty space on the left. Dennis Kucinich is one of the few exceptions
(see
http://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2016/10/27/must-read-of-the-day-dennis-kucinich-issues-extraordinary-warning-on-d-c-s-think-tank-warmongers/
)
I think that people like Robert Kagan, Victoria Nuland and Dick Cheney can now proudly join
Democratic Party and feel themselves quite at home.
BTW Hillary is actually very pleasant with people of the same level. It's only subordinates,
close relatives and Security Service agents, who are on the receiving end of her wrath. A typical
"kiss up, kick down personality".
The right word probably would not "nasty", but "duplicitous".
Or "treacherous" as this involves breaking of previous agreements (with a smile) as the USA
diplomacy essentially involves positioning the country above the international law. As in "I am
the law".
Obama is not that different. I think he even more sleazy then Hillary and as such is more difficult
to deal with. He also is at his prime, while she is definitely past hers:
== quote ==
Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday it was hard for him to work with the current
U.S. administration because it did not stick to any agreements, including on Syria.
Putin said he was ready to engage with a new president however, whoever the American people
chose, and to discuss any problem.
== end of quote ==
Syria is an "Obama-approved" adventure, is not it ? The same is true for Libya. So formally
he is no less jingoistic then Hillary, Nobel Peace price notwithstanding.
Other things equal, it might be easier for Putin to deal with Hillary then Obama, as she
has so many skeletons in the closet and might soon be impeached by House.
"... She [Hillary Clinton] has concurrently this Clinton Foundation business, where she is granting special favors, special partnerships, special government contracts, weapons deals, etc., to Clinton Foundation donors. So, there's just a lot here that represents how the economic and political elite are very much represented, I think, by both of these candidates, and underscores why it's really important for us to exercise our power in a democracy . ..."
"... To present a no-fly zone here as a solution is extremely dangerous. A no-fly zone means we are going to war with Russia, because it means we will be shooting down planes in the sky in order to create this no-fly zone, which is where Russia has a commitment to defending the Assad government. So, remember, there was a ceasefire, which was very hard-won, and that ceasefire was destroyed by the action of the Americans bombing, apparently by mistake, although some people say not by mistake, but it was our bombing of the Syrian troops that destroyed that ceasefire . ..."
"... That was our part, the U.S., in allowing the nuclear arms race to re-engage . Mikhail Gorbachev, the former premier of the Soviet Union, said last week that we are now at a more dangerous period regarding nuclear war than we have ever been. So, it's really important for the warmongers in the Democratic and Republican parties to be cooling their jets now and for us to be moving forward towards a weapons embargo and a freeze on the funding of those countries that are continuing to fund terrorist enterprises . ..."
'There was a ceasefire, which was very hard-won, and that ceasefire was destroyed by the action
of the Americans bombing, apparently by mistake, although some people say not by mistake, but it
was our bombing of the Syrian troops that destroyed that ceasefire'
Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! explains again the process, in this second presidential debate:
" We spend the rest of today's show airing excerpts of the Donald Trump-Hillary Clinton debate
and give Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein a chance to respond to the same questions
posed to the major-party candidates. Again, Dr. Stein and Libertarian presidential candidate Gary
Johnson were excluded from the debate under stringent rules set by the Commission on Presidential
Debates, which is controlled by the Democratic and Republican parties. We invited both Stein and
Johnson to join us on the program; only Stein took us up on the offer. "
In this last part of the second debate, Jill Stein, again, was the only presidential candidate
that told the whole truth to the American people without hesitation.
Concerning the Syrian mess and the Russian intervention, Hillary Clinton showed again why she
is the most dangerous to be the next US president. She avoided again to admit the huge responsibility
of the US intervention and their allies in Libya and the Middle East which created absolute chaos.
She blamed again the Russians, although - as Jill Stein stated very correctly - it was the US that
destroyed the hard-won ceasefire in Syria. Hillary showed again her absolute devotion to the neocon/neoliberal
agenda, therefore, start a war with Russia. She showed again how dangerous she is.
On the contrary, Jill Stein stated very clearly that war with Russia is out of question.
Key points:
She [Hillary Clinton] has concurrently this Clinton Foundation business, where she is granting
special favors, special partnerships, special government contracts, weapons deals, etc., to Clinton
Foundation donors. So, there's just a lot here that represents how the economic and political elite
are very much represented, I think, by both of these candidates, and underscores why it's really
important for us to exercise our power in a democracy . We have a right to know who we can vote
for, as well as a right to vote.
Syria is a disaster, and it's a very complicated disaster. It is a civil war. It is a proxy war
among many nations. It is a pipeline war also between Russia and the Gulf states, who are competing
to run their pipelines with fracked gas into Europe across Syria. So, this is a very complicated
situation, and there is a hornets' nest, a real circular firing squad of alliances here that's, you
know, extremely, extremely complicated.
To present a no-fly zone here as a solution is extremely dangerous. A no-fly zone means we
are going to war with Russia, because it means we will be shooting down planes in the sky in order
to create this no-fly zone, which is where Russia has a commitment to defending the Assad government.
So, remember, there was a ceasefire, which was very hard-won, and that ceasefire was destroyed by
the action of the Americans bombing, apparently by mistake, although some people say not by mistake,
but it was our bombing of the Syrian troops that destroyed that ceasefire .
We need to redouble our efforts here. And we need to acknowledge that war with Russia is not an
option. There are 2,000 nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert. And who was it that dropped out of
the nuclear arms control? That was George Bush. That was our part, the U.S., in allowing the
nuclear arms race to re-engage . Mikhail Gorbachev, the former premier of the Soviet Union, said
last week that we are now at a more dangerous period regarding nuclear war than we have ever been.
So, it's really important for the warmongers in the Democratic and Republican parties to be cooling
their jets now and for us to be moving forward towards a weapons embargo and a freeze on the funding
of those countries that are continuing to fund terrorist enterprises .
"... James Comey was on the Board of Directors of HSBC while they were money laundering for drug runners and terrorists, he has done squat to stop GamerGate, he has a horrible record as director of the FBI and should have never been nominated, never been confirmed, and is a completely horrible person. ..."
"... Mark Felt was of the same mind when it came to being passed over after J. Edgar Hoover died. And recall that he gained notoriety as Deep Throat. ..."
"... Here is a chance to redeem himself and stop Hillary. ..."
"... In a situation where one has an truly abysmal leader, that leader will need sidekicks who are obviously worse. The abysmal leader can position herself to the reasonable / competent side of the "bad cop" sidekicks, thus being not exactly the "good cop" but the "better cop" while still going in the desired direction of crazy and misery for all. ..."
"... If things get a bit out of hand, the blame can be pinned on the sidekick "going overboard" and the sidekick publicly sacrificed to "restore confidence" and "look forward". ..."
"... I think there is some possibilities, The rusty old ship "The Foundation" has simply sprung yet another leak and there is more evidence for FBI to dismiss and immunities to be doled out to fix the situation ..."
"... Something so nasty has come up so that the oligarch factions forming the "inner party" decided that Something Must be Done About The Situation – or Else. Jeffrey Epstein did home movies, apparently. ..."
James Comey was on the Board of Directors of HSBC while they were money laundering for drug runners
and terrorists, he has done squat to stop GamerGate, he has a
horrible record as director of the FBI
and should have never been nominated, never been confirmed,
and is a completely horrible person.
Mark Felt had already gained notoriety before Watergate because he was
one of the FBI's special agents who was charged for conducting illegal surveillance
on American leftists. It's one of those things all those conspiracy theorists
don't emphasis about COINTELPRO and other programs. The only people actually
charged and convicted in the matter were FBI agents.
He was also general counsel of the largest defense contractor in the world
(Lockheed Martin) and
general counsel of the largest hedge fund / personality cult in the world (Bridgewater).
Just a small town lawyer. If the town is Davos.
In a situation where one has an truly abysmal leader, that leader will need sidekicks who are
obviously worse. The abysmal leader can position herself to the reasonable / competent side of the
"bad cop" sidekicks, thus being not exactly the "good cop" but the "better cop" while still going
in the desired direction of crazy and misery for all.
If things get a bit out of hand, the blame can be pinned on the sidekick "going overboard" and
the sidekick publicly sacrificed to "restore confidence" and "look forward".
Why Obama needed Biden around, George Bush had Cheney … The European Left has the Islamists and
the Social Democrats has the neo-liberals to bisect against.
PS:
I think there is some possibilities, The rusty old ship "The Foundation" has simply sprung yet another
leak and there is more evidence for FBI to dismiss and immunities to be doled out to fix the situation
Enough mail-votes have come in to predict a crushing victory for Trump. Comey realizes that he
is maybe on the wrong side of this whole thing and goes for "incompetence" being part of his legacy
rather than "conspiracy"
Something so nasty has come up so that the oligarch factions forming the "inner party" decided
that Something Must be Done About The Situation – or Else. Jeffrey Epstein did home movies, apparently.
However, I think that it is just FBI doing another fix for Hillary.
"... Just like 0bama finding out about HRC's private email from the press … after he'd been corresponding with her from his own
private email address. ..."
"... With daily practice, the faux naif act comes easy. :-) ..."
"... I gather that Clintonland is honestly shocked, though. They're having to expose their talking points unmodified pushed directly
by people like Krugman, instead of their normal process of using CTR trolls for cover. ..."
"... It's also possible that the emails are more about Clinton Foundation corruption than they are State Department rule breaking,
so there wouldn't be any reason to notify State. (Although how that would connect to the original case without being at least in part
about transmitting classified information insecurely is beyond me.) ..."
UHH @4:30…State Department spokesman Mark Toner said Friday that the department knows nothing about why the FBI reopened its
investigation into Hillary Clinton's private email server just hours earlier.
"First, what do we know? Not much more than you know, in fact. About the same," Toner said. "We just learned about this when
we saw news reports of the letter."
"What emails they may be looking at, what they're looking for, any more details at all, we just don't know anything about the
scope of this new–I'm not even sure it's an investigation, but this effort to look at additional emails," Toner continued.
I gather that Clintonland is honestly shocked, though. They're having to expose their talking points unmodified pushed
directly by people like Krugman, instead of their normal process of using CTR trolls for cover.
I don't have an explanation for why Comey would start acting like a law enforcement official at this late date, but it does
look like he didn't notify Clintonland ahead of time, and apparently the State Department has basically been a Clinton sleeper
cell for the last four years, so that would include State.
It's also possible that the emails are more about Clinton Foundation corruption than they are State Department rule breaking,
so there wouldn't be any reason to notify State. (Although how that would connect to the original case without being at least
in part about transmitting classified information insecurely is beyond me.)
"... Intriguing. Maybe these emails have survived so far is, because Abedin's laptop was shared, it wasn't on the list of agreed-to-be-destroyed laptops (so far, at least). ..."
"... I wonder if there will be any public pressure on FBI to go after some of the numerous devices/servers you posted about on other threads about a week ago. If so, no one is talking about it yet. ..."
Cyberspace opened up the Clinton Foundation's Pay for Play scams for scrutiny despite the best efforts
of corporate media and the connected elite to keep it closed; the endless wars at Saudi Arabia and Israel's
bequest, the purposeful burdening of debt on anyone who needs housing, medical care or education, and
the utter contempt for the little people. Corruption so inept that missing Hillary Clinton e-mails are
in Carlos Danger's explicit underage passion filled smartphone in FBI's possession.
Intriguing. Maybe these emails have survived so far is, because Abedin's
laptop was shared, it wasn't on the list of agreed-to-be-destroyed laptops
(so far, at least).
I wonder if there will be any public pressure on FBI to go after some of the numerous devices/servers
you posted about on other threads about a week ago. If so, no one is talking about it yet.
maybe clinton made the decision unilaterally, which is quite possible.
seems like the campaign would want to bury the email scandal instead of
going on the offensive. i do so hope this means their internal polling
is scaring them.
"... After weeks of revealing information behind the Clinton Foundation and their self-motivated fundraising tactics, there is no other word to describe the Democratic nominee for President of the United States. She's engaged in behavior that is disqualifying to be a candidate for the highest office, and yet dozens of American legislators, leaders and even media outlets have endorsed her candidacy. ..."
"... She's swindled countries out of donations, she's swindled corporate America with her lofty promises and she's swindled the American people – over and over and over again. ..."
"... So why now, after the knowledge that top-tier corporations and other wealthy supporters paid to meet with both the former president and the now Democratic presidential nominee should we believe that she would change her behavior to act in the best interest of the country? In fact, one could argue that this information is a window into how Clinton would rule the land. She'd have an eye out for only herself and her family, while leaving the American people - who so desperately want a change - with the same old Clinton-first approach. ..."
"... Beyond her blatant disregard for the American public, Clinton's cavalier approach to national security has come into question from a myriad of angles. From the secret server in her home basement that received hundreds of confidential email communications, to the lack of response she paid to the Congress when asked about the issue, to the suggestion that she made promises to the FBI that would cause them to "look the other way" when ruling on the secret email server. And then how about the millions of dollars the Clinton Foundation took from countries that are of disrepute, not to mention those that show little concern for women's rights. ..."
It was 25 years ago that Martin Scorsese delighted audiences with his movie rendition of the Jim
Thompson novel, "The Grifters."
The story is an ingenious tale of deception and betrayal. By definition a grifter is someone who
has made money dishonestly, in a swindle or a confidence game.
After weeks of revealing information behind the Clinton Foundation and their self-motivated fundraising
tactics, there is no other word to describe the Democratic nominee for President of the United States.
She's engaged in behavior that is disqualifying to be a candidate for the highest office, and yet
dozens of American legislators, leaders and even media outlets have endorsed her candidacy.
She's swindled countries out of donations, she's swindled corporate America with her lofty promises
and she's swindled the American people – over and over and over again.
So why now, after the knowledge that top-tier corporations and other wealthy supporters paid to
meet with both the former president and the now Democratic presidential nominee should we believe
that she would change her behavior to act in the best interest of the country? In fact, one could
argue that this information is a window into how Clinton would rule the land. She'd have an eye out
for only herself and her family, while leaving the American people - who so desperately want a change
- with the same old Clinton-first approach.
Beyond her blatant disregard for the American public, Clinton's cavalier approach to national
security has come into question from a myriad of angles. From the secret server in her home basement
that received hundreds of confidential email communications, to the lack of response she paid to
the Congress when asked about the issue, to the suggestion that she made promises to the FBI that
would cause them to "look the other way" when ruling on the secret email server. And then how about
the millions of dollars the Clinton Foundation took from countries that are of disrepute, not to
mention those that show little concern for women's rights.
The most recent set of Clinton emails that have come to light are of such great concern to national
security that the FBI has announced they will conduct a new investigation of Clinton's emails. This
is just ELEVEN days before the country goes to the polls and decides on our next president.
Where has the leadership gone in this country? Since when do reputable news outlets stand behind
candidates who have proven themselves over and over to be out for themselves and dangerous, even?
It used to be that newspapers and legislators and leaders who speak from a platform would find themselves
offering wisdom. Wisdom about which candidate was best for the job – based on the facts. Instead
we find ourselves sifting through the list of endorsements for Clinton with little or no mention
of her disregard for the law, her lack of concern for those she serves, and the careless nature in
which she has proven herself to lead.
Now that the newspapers know better and have written about the truth in their own words, how can
the media and elected officials stand by their decision to endorse her? They need to rescind their
endorsement. That includes President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama.
In a quote from his book Thompson describes one of the characters, "Anyone who deprived her of
something she wanted, deserved what he got."
Sounds all too familiar to the Democratic nominee for grifter-in-chief. If she's not changed by
now, who is to say she'd be any different when she was the most powerful elected official in the
United States. Once a grifter, always a grifter.
Sharon Day is the Republican National Committee Co-Chair.
"... Wow, they clearly state Bill Clinton uses golfing to establish communication with donors ..."
"... "People with knowledge of the call in both camps said it was one of many that Clinton and Trump have had over the years, whether about golf or donations to the Clinton Foundation. But the call in May was considered especially sensitive, coming soon after Hillary Rodham Clinton had declared her own presidential run the month before." - source ..."
"... In total, The Wall Street Journal reports, two dozen companies and groups, plus the Abu Dhabi government, gave Bill more than $8 million for speeches, even as they were hoping for favorable treatment from Hillary's bureaucracy. And 15 of them also gave at least $5 million total to the foundation. ..."
"... Can someone help me see the shadiness, what am I missing? unless the "foundation donors require significant maintenance to keep them engaged and supportive of the foundation" means they are giving them political favors then it just looks like the clinton foundation is accepting donations and that is it. ..."
"... so pro-clinton sources have been propping up the Clinton Foundation for years as the pinnacle of charity while not really being able to explain where all the money goes; ..."
"... This shows that they require 20 million a year to operate with 8 employees. It shows they have to raid the Clinton Global Initiative for $6M to $11M every year to cover that budget hole... ..."
"... This is useful information that is probably not reflected on tax returns. Most importantly it shows that when Bill was offered a shady $8 million dollar over 2 year deal that would appear to be a conflict of interest while Hillary was Sect of State, Podesta and Band suggested hiding the money as payment for speeches. This boosts the accusation that the speeches are payments for quid pro quo. ..."
"... Does any of it contradict the MOU she signed when appointed Sec State? https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/34993 ..."
He also said they were talking about golf when he called Donald trump last year before trump decided
to run.
"People with knowledge of the call in both camps said it was one of many that Clinton
and Trump have had over the years, whether about golf or donations to the Clinton Foundation.
But the call in May was considered especially sensitive, coming soon after Hillary Rodham Clinton
had declared her own presidential run the month before." -
source
Question-Are we to assume that any OTHER speaking engagements that WJC did were not because of
the foundation, but from when his wife was SOS?
In total, The Wall Street Journal reports, two dozen companies and groups, plus the
Abu Dhabi government, gave Bill more than $8 million for speeches, even as they were hoping
for favorable treatment from Hillary's bureaucracy. And 15 of them also gave at least $5 million
total to the foundation.
Can someone help me see the shadiness, what am I missing? unless the "foundation donors require
significant maintenance to keep them engaged and supportive of the foundation" means they are
giving them political favors then it just looks like the clinton foundation is accepting donations
and that is it.
so pro-clinton sources have been propping up the Clinton Foundation for years as the pinnacle
of charity while not really being able to explain where all the money goes; because it sure
doesn't seem to be going to Haiti or many other charities.
This shows that they require 20 million a year to operate with 8 employees. It shows they
have to raid the Clinton Global Initiative for $6M to $11M every year to cover that budget hole...
so this gives credence to the suspicion that the CF is hiding money somewhere (laundering money
to Clintons and friends). Also this document shows how teneo made Bill Clinton " more than $50
million in for-profit activity we have personally helped to secure for President Clinton to date
or the $66 million in future contracts" as of 2011.
This is useful information that is probably not reflected on tax returns. Most importantly
it shows that when Bill was offered a shady $8 million dollar over 2 year deal that would appear
to be a conflict of interest while Hillary was Sect of State, Podesta and Band suggested hiding
the money as payment for speeches. This boosts the accusation that the speeches are payments for
quid pro quo.
Bill and Hillary Clinton failed to get required permits for a
rushed renovation of the house and grounds they recently bought next to
their original Westchester home, it was reported Friday.
Records show that the Clintons' contractors filled in an in-ground pool,
covering it with gravel, and extensively remodeled the interior of the
property - all without applying for permits and paying the required fees to
the town of New Castle.
Building Inspector William Maskiell inspected the Chappaqua property
after getting the tip about the pool work and then discovered the other
renovations that were underway.
Attached to the building inspector's letter was a document titled Clinton
Violation Inspection Report in which Maskiell said the contractor told him
the Clintons "were quite adamant about [the Thanksgiving deadline] and what
had started as a paint job turned into this," meaning the major renovation.
Crazy - there are more problems than just the lack of building permits:
The Clintons also have outstanding zoning and Building Department
problems at their residence next door at 15 Old House Lane,
They obtained variances in 2000 for a guard house on the property, for
a higher fence and for "lot coverage," or the amount of space buildings
take up on the property.
The variances must be renewed every five years - but the Clintons
never showed up before the Zoning Board of Appeals.
"Consequently, they are null and void. They should have come back in
2005, 2010 and 2015. So the variances have expired and they have to start
from scratch" and reapply, said the inspector.
The original home and a combination library and gym in an outbuilding
still have outstanding building permit issues as well, including a
sprinkler "sign off" by the town engineer and an electrical inspection in
the library/gym
I'm not seeing much basic competency here in executing home ownership
responsibilities. Next I'll hear Bill steals the neigbor's Sunday newspaper
off their porch.
"... Remember back when President Bill Clinton got into all that trouble molesting the young intern in his Oral Office? Remember the first thing the lying, conniving, dissembling commander-in-cheek did? ..."
"... In the latest batch of leaked emails, one top Democratic operative is still grappling with "WJC Issues." "How is what Bill Clinton did different from what Bill Cosby did?" Ron Klain asks in a list of questions worth posing to Mrs. Clinton. "You said every woman should be believed. Why not the women who accused him?" And, perhaps the best: "Will you apologize to the women who were wrongly smeared by your husband and his allies?" ..."
"... Never apologize. Never admit. And always keep lying. ..."
"... That is the very heart of the ethos of Hillary Clinton's campaign. Lie about everything. Lie all the time. ..."
"... Lie about emails. Lie about servers. Lie about national security. Lie about who knew what when. Lie about spilling classified secrets. Lie about dead soldiers. ..."
...l each batch of stolen emails is worse than the last.
Hillary Clinton is a liar. She has terrible instincts. She doesn't believe in anything. Her head
is broken. She doesn't know why she should be president. She is pathological. And she is psychotic.
Just ask everybody who works for her. Just ask campaign chairman John Podesta. Just ask the people
working the hardest to get her elected president.
I mean, in her most rabid streak of attacks on Donald Trump's alleged unfitness for office, Mrs.
Clinton doesn't call him "psychotic."
Psychotic! That is what her campaign chairman called her.
Remember back when President Bill Clinton got into all that trouble molesting the young intern
in his Oral Office? Remember the first thing the lying, conniving, dissembling commander-in-cheek
did?
Take a poll. And he found out that he could skate by on even this - even this! But first - the
poll told him - he had to stall for time. He had to lie about it for as long as he possibly could
before coming clean.
And that was exactly what he did. And he survived.
And good thing he survived so he could go on to haunt America another 15 years later.
In the latest batch of leaked emails, one top Democratic operative is still grappling with "WJC
Issues." "How is what Bill Clinton did different from what Bill Cosby did?" Ron Klain asks in a list of
questions worth posing to Mrs. Clinton. "You said every woman should be believed. Why not the women who accused him?" And, perhaps the best: "Will you apologize to the women who were wrongly smeared by your husband
and his allies?"
Answer: Not likely.
Never apologize. Never admit. And always keep lying.
That is the very heart of the ethos of Hillary Clinton's campaign. Lie about everything. Lie all
the time.
Lie about emails. Lie about servers. Lie about national security. Lie about who knew what when.
Lie about spilling classified secrets. Lie about dead soldiers.
Exhaust the people with lies. And then, very flippantly, after months or years of lying, say whatever
you have to say to make the press go away.
"I am sorry you were confused."
"I have already said I wish I had done it differently."
"What difference, at this point, does it make?"
It is all so shameless and dirty and befuddling that it would make Niccolo Machiavelli blush.
What is wrong with Bill Clinton? He just doesn't look right these days. Is he just stoned, or
is whatever is left of the rapist's brain drying up? Check out Bill Clinton yesterday in Arizona
where they forced Gabby Giffords to stumble through a speech for Hillary Clinton. Something about
BJ just doesn't seem right.
Something isn't right with Bill Clinton. Did he pick up some sort of disease from one of his
trips to Jeffrey Epstein's Pedo Island? He looked like he was about to pass out. You ALMOST want
to feel sorry for the old fogey, but I don't. dance...dancetotheradio
•
7 months ago
Never met a skirt he didn't hike in the Crooked Wagg'in Finger Days of Yore. Firing blanks..
he won't have wedlock problems of Pal Webster Hubbell.
Nor will a poor little baby suffer with the horrible affliction. 2 out of 3, It's more positive,
than negative. Bill has Great Health Care...He'll be Fine.
Rank Name Donations
1 Tom Steyer $38 million
2 Donald Sussman $23.4 million
3 Miriam & Sheldon Adelson $21.5 million
4 Robert Mercer $20.2 million
5 Michael Bloomberg $20.1 million
6 Fred Eychaner $20 million
7 Paul Singer $17.3 million
8 George Soros $16.5 million
9 Maurice "Hank" Greenberg $15.1 million
10 Elizabeth & Richard Uihlein $14 million
"... An acquaintance of mine said of the Clintons: "They define success as how much they can get away with." Clearly, this is just the latest example. ..."
"... Moreover, thousands of emails were erased from her server, even after she had reportedly been sent a subpoena from Congress to retain them. During her first two years as secretary of state, half of her outside visitors were contributors to the Clinton Foundation. Yet there was not a single quid pro quo, Clinton tells us. ..."
"... Pat is oh-so right: "This election is not over." In fact it's likely that Donald Trump will continue to surge and will win on November 8th. ..."
"... Remember: Many of the polls claiming to show statistically significant Clinton leads were commissioned by the same corrupt news organizations that have worked for months to bias their news coverage in an attempt to throw the election to Clinton. ..."
"... The problem facing the donor class and the party elites is that Trump supporters are not swayed by the media bias. A recent Gallup poll shows Americans trust in journalists to be at its lowest level since Gallup began asking the question. ..."
"... Americans are savvy to the media's rigging of election reporting. Election Day, Nov. 8th, will show that the dishonest reporting of the mainstream media and the cooked samplings of their polls were all for naught. ..."
"... More years of bank favoritism, corporate socialism, political corruption, failed social programs, deindustrialization, open borders lawlessness, erosion of liberties, interventionism and wage stagnation is all adding more steam to the pressure cooker. ..."
"... A Trump presidency would back the pressure off, a Clinton presidency would be a disaster. ..."
"... Why does PJB, of all people, cling to the abhorrent notion that presidential "greatness" is defined by territorial aggrandizement through war? ..."
"... Unfortunately, that new evidence of the Clinton Criminal Enterprise (CCE) caused nary a ripple in the MSM. It was merely noted in the Crony lapdog Washington Post and then quickly submerged into the bottom of the content swamp. The Clinton WikiLeaks documents and the James O'Keefe corruption videos are marginalized or not even acknowledged to exist by the various MSM outlets. ..."
"... Hillary is probably guilty of a lot of things. However, evidence from the counter-media and/or Congress means nothing to the MSM. In fact the MSM will actually conjure up a multitude of baseless red herrings to protect Hillary. E.g., the Trump as Putin puppet meme as a diversion away from documented Clinton corruption. ..."
"... The anti-Hillary elements can only mutually reinforce in their internet ghettos. Those ghettos do not provide enough political leverage to move against a President Hillary no matter how compelling the evidence of the Clinton's collective criminality. In that context, Hillary will be politically inoculated by the protective MSM against Republican congressional inquiries and attacks. ..."
"... Hillary's presidency will almost certainly be a catastrophe because it will manifest the haggard, corrupt, cronied-up, parasitic and mediocre qualities of the hack sitting in the Oval Office. Expect a one term fiasco and then Hillary will stumble out of the White House as even more of a political and personal wreck. ..."
Moreover, thousands of emails were erased from her server, even after she had reportedly been
sent a subpoena from Congress to retain them. During her first two years as secretary of state, half
of her outside visitors were contributors to the Clinton Foundation. Yet there was not a single quid
pro quo, Clinton tells us.
Yesterday's newspapers exploded with reports of how Bill Clinton aide Doug Band raised money for
the Clinton Foundation, and then hit up the same corporate contributors to pay huge fees for Bill's
speeches.
What were the corporations buying if not influence? What were the foreign contributors buying,
if not influence with an ex-president, and a secretary of state and possible future president?
Did none of the big donors receive any official favors?
"There's a lot of smoke and there's no fire," says Hillary Clinton.
Perhaps, but there seems to be more smoke every day.
If once or twice in her hours of testimony to the FBI, to a grand jury, or before Congress, Clinton
were proven to have lied, her Justice Department would be obligated to name a special prosecutor,
as was Nixon's.
And, with the election over, the investigative reporters of the adversary press, Pulitzers beckoning,
would be cut loose to go after her.
The Republican House is already gearing up for investigations that could last deep into Clinton's
first term.
There is a vast trove of public and sworn testimony from Hillary, about the server, the emails,
the erasures, the Clinton Foundation. Now, thanks to WikiLeaks, there are tens of thousands of emails
to sift through, and perhaps tens of thousands more to come.
What are the odds that not one contains information that contradicts her sworn testimony? Rep.
Jim Jordan contends that Clinton may already have perjured herself.
And as the full-court press would begin with her inauguration, Clinton would have to deal with
the Syrians, the Russians, the Taliban, the North Koreans, and Xi Jinping in the South China Sea-and
with Bill Clinton wandering around the White House with nothing to do.
This election is not over. But if Hillary Clinton wins, a truly hellish presidency could await
her, and us.
Pat is oh-so right: "This election is not over." In fact it's likely that Donald Trump will continue
to surge and will win on November 8th.
Remember: Many of the polls claiming to show statistically significant Clinton leads were commissioned
by the same corrupt news organizations that have worked for months to bias their news coverage
in an attempt to throw the election to Clinton.
On the other hand, several polls with a history of accuracy have consistently shown either
a Trump lead or a statistical dead-heat.
The problem facing the donor class and the party elites is that Trump supporters are not swayed
by the media bias. A recent Gallup poll shows Americans trust in journalists to be at its lowest
level since Gallup began asking the question.
Americans are savvy to the media's rigging of election reporting. Election Day, Nov. 8th, will
show that the dishonest reporting of the mainstream media and the cooked samplings of their polls
were all for naught.
Thus, fortunately, the American people will avoid the spectacle of a "truly hellish" Clinton
presidency.
More years of bank favoritism, corporate socialism, political corruption, failed social programs,
deindustrialization, open borders lawlessness, erosion of liberties, interventionism and wage
stagnation is all adding more steam to the pressure cooker.
A Trump presidency would back the pressure off, a Clinton presidency would be a disaster.
James Polk, no charmer, was a one-term president, but a great one, victorious in the Mexican
War, annexing California and the Southwest, negotiating a fair division of the Oregon territory
with the British.
Why does PJB, of all people, cling to the abhorrent notion that presidential "greatness" is
defined by territorial aggrandizement through war?
The only people responsible for that "cloud" are conservatives. If you wish to prevent the horrid
fate that you're describing, Pat, you need to apologize and concede that these investigations
are groundless. You can't say "where there's smoke, there's fire" if we can all see your smoke
machine.
The Visigoths will continue their advance on Rome by the millions. The Supreme Court and Fed will
shy away from diversity in their numbers. The alternative media will go bonkers, but to no avail.
The military will provide employment (endless wars) to those displaced by a permissive immigration
policy. Elizabeth I – will look down (up) in envy.
Re: "Yesterday's newspapers exploded with reports of how Bill Clinton aide Doug Band raised
money for the Clinton Foundation, and then hit up the same corporate contributors to pay huge
fees for Bill's speeches."
Unfortunately, that new evidence of the Clinton Criminal Enterprise (CCE) caused nary a ripple
in the MSM. It was merely noted in the Crony lapdog Washington Post and then quickly submerged
into the bottom of the content swamp. The Clinton WikiLeaks documents and the James O'Keefe corruption
videos are marginalized or not even acknowledged to exist by the various MSM outlets.
Hillary is probably guilty of a lot of things. However, evidence from the counter-media and/or
Congress means nothing to the MSM. In fact the MSM will actually conjure up a multitude of baseless
red herrings to protect Hillary. E.g., the Trump as Putin puppet meme as a diversion away from
documented Clinton corruption.
The anti-Hillary elements can only mutually reinforce in their internet ghettos. Those ghettos
do not provide enough political leverage to move against a President Hillary no matter how compelling
the evidence of the Clinton's collective criminality. In that context, Hillary will be politically
inoculated by the protective MSM against Republican congressional inquiries and attacks.
Hillary's presidency will almost certainly be a catastrophe because it will manifest the haggard,
corrupt, cronied-up, parasitic and mediocre qualities of the hack sitting in the Oval Office.
Expect a one term fiasco and then Hillary will stumble out of the White House as even more of
a political and personal wreck.
Agree with Pat though that it's going to be a wild ride for the rest of us – straight down.
P.S. A Republican Congress does have the power of the purse and could shave away Clinton's
Imperial use of the executive branch. But the feckless Congress has never been intelligent enough
to utilize that power effectively.
SteveM makes excellent points about the mainstream media cover-up of the Wikileaks revelations:
"Unfortunately, that new evidence of the Clinton Criminal Enterprise (CCE) caused nary a ripple
in the MSM. It was merely noted in the Crony lapdog Washington Post and then quickly submerged
into the bottom of the content swamp. The Clinton WikiLeaks documents and the James O'Keefe corruption
videos are marginalized or not even acknowledged to exist by the various MSM outlets."
Alex Pfeiffer (The Daily Caller) expands upon SteveM's critique in "The Anatomy Of A Press
Cover-Up." Great stuff:
@William N. Grigg: "Why does PJB, of all people, cling to the abhorrent notion that presidential
"greatness" is defined by territorial aggrandizement through war?"
Yes, that's one aspect of PJB's thought that has long disturbed me. Granted, PJB is a nationalist,
and I can see why an old-fashioned nationalist would admire Polk. But PJB also advocates an "enlightened
nationalism." There's nothing enlightened about stealing someone else's land. Frankly, I fail
to see how Polk's actions are any different from Hitler's actions a century later. I don't want
to offend anyone but, I'm sorry… this needs to be said.
I greatly admire Pat Buchanan, but this article is rather ridiculous.
"If once or twice in her hours of testimony to the FBI, to a grand jury, or before Congress,
Clinton were proven to have lied, her Justice Department would be obligated to name a special
prosecutor, as was Nixon's."
Translation: "I want revenge for Watergate."
Look, I admire Nixon. I think he was one of our greatest Presidents. I really mean that. I
also think that he was unfairly subjected to a witch hunt and that there was no valid reason for
him to have faced the prospect of impeachment (and the same is true, in my view, for both of the
Presidents who were actually impeached, interestingly enough). Nixon should have been allowed
to finish his second term.
I think Hillary Clinton is also facing a witch hunt. I don't agree with her foreign policy
views or with many of her domestic policy views, but this vicious attempt by the GOP to take her
down needs to stop. There is no evidence that she is any more corrupt than anybody else.
And, in any case, if she gets elected, she will be entitled to serve as President. To deliberately
try to sabotage her Presidency by hounding her with these investigations would be to show profound
contempt for democratic norms.
Enough already. I don't support Clinton or Trump. Jill Stein is my gal now. But I hope that
whoever wins does a great job and that all goes well for them. Nothing else would be in the best
interests of the country or the world.
"Remember: Many of the polls claiming to show statistically significant Clinton leads were commissioned
by the same corrupt news organizations that have worked for months to bias their news coverage
in an attempt to throw the election to Clinton.
On the other hand, several polls with a history of accuracy have consistently shown either a Trump
lead or a statistical dead-heat."
We heard this in 2012. Go back and read the Free Republic election night thread to see how
such comforting thoughts came crashing down as the night went on. Then read the posts today…all
the exact same people saying all the exact same things.
For a society to work well and to succeed, the good-will (trust and support) of it's productive,
tax-paying citizens is of paramount importance. The corrupt politics in DC for the last 25 years
has used up this good-will. Only few trust these elitists , as evidenced by the success of
the socialist, Sanders, and Trump.
With the election of the corrupt, lying, unaccomplished politician, the legitimacy of the
D.C. "Leaders" will be gone. It would be a disaster!
" She would enter office as the least-admired president in history, without a vision or a mandate.
She would take office with two-thirds of the nation believing she is untruthful and untrustworthy.
"
Funny you should go there. Sure, HRC has historically high unfavorability ratings. Fact: DJT's
unfavorability ratings are even higher. Check any reasonably non-partisan site such as RCP or
538.
Pretty much all the negatives about HRC are trumped by Trump. His flip-flopping makes hers
look amateur: he used to be a pro-choice Democrat; has publicly espoused admiration for HRC and
declared that WJC was unfairly criticized for his transgressions. Integrity: he's stiffed countless
businesses, small and large; he's been sued by his own lawyers for non-payment. Character: he
behaves like a child, 'nuff said.
Corruption: his daddy illegally bailed him out of a financial jam; Trump's foundation makes
the Clintons' look legit by comparison.
With HRC, the GOP had a huge chance to take back the WH: she has plenty of genuine baggage
to go along with the made-up stuff. However the GOP managed to nominate the one candidate who
makes her transgressions appear tolerable. The end result is that a significant number of moderate
Republicans are supporting no one, Johnson, or even HRC. Trump is so toxic that very few progressive
Dems will stray from HRC, despite being horrified by her corporate connections.
Re today: The FBI is not investigating her server. Servers don't send emails on their own. They
are investigating Hillary Clinton. They just don't like to say that. I wonder if it's in order
to – once again – announce Hillary's "innocence," just before the end of early voting and voting
day. We'll see.
For those interested in a functional government, note that this is three straight elections
– over twelve years – where the incoming president is a priori deemed illegitimate, regardless
of the scale of the victory, and the opposing political party has no interest in working with
that president.
In fact, some senators and representatives (Cruz, Gowdy, Issa, etc.) seem to take joy and pride
in noting the extent and length of these investigations, regardless of what they find. It is the
very process of governmental obstruction they seek, not necessarily justice or truth.
Could we have a new historic first if Hillary wins, the First Woman President to be impeached
by Congress? And the first couple in the history of the Republic to both be impeached?
At some point the Republicans have to be for something. I suppose they will be tempted to go after
Ms. Clinton for what she has elided or attempted to, but I think that is a major mistake. You
wrote: "Yet the hostility Clinton would face the day she takes office would almost seem to ensure
four years of pure hell.
The reason: her credibility, or rather her transparent lack of it."
There are a few assumptions in this – first, that any investigations into her past behavior
will be impartial. True or not, the impression will be hard to pull off – I expect they will easily
be framed as misogynist. And some most likely will be, so it takes a bit of thought and study
to determine which are motivated by misogyny and which are not. News cycles are too fast for that
sort of reflection, and in any event more or less all the major papers and television networks
are in her camp, so can't really expect journalism out of them anymore. It will be a called a
misogynist, partisan investigation and that will be the end of it.
Second, it assumes that the people doing the investigation have credibility. That's a big if
– the GOP went from Bush 43's two terms of military adventurism, increasing income inequality
and economic catastrophe to no introspection or admission of error in the ensuing 8 years of apparently
mindless, vindictive opposition. That is a long time of being kind of – well – less than thoughtful.
And it's had tremendous costs. Mr. Obama presents as a decent man in his profiles, but he was
very inexperienced when elected and in my opinion has more or less been bumbling around for almost
8 years now, kind of like Clouseau in those old Pink Panther movies. Only a lot of people of died,
lost their homes or have seen their communities consumed by despair. Government has been very
ineffective for many Americans, and the Republicans have a lot to answer for with the way they've
chosen to spend their time and direct their energy over the last 8 years. It's been a waste going
after Obama, and going after Clinton will just be more of the same.
And the last assumption is that with all that might be going on in the next few years, this
is important. Ms. Clinton has made some statements, some good, some bad. The bad, though, are
remarkably bad – she's for invading a Middle Eastern country and establishing control over their
airspace, as an example. In 2017. It's pure crazy. She has Democratic support. Hate to think if
she is elected the Republicans will be focusing on email.
when bloomberg was having problems w the times he called Arthur schulzburger and asked
for coffee. He made the case that they were treating him like a billionaire dilettante instead
of Third term mayor. It changed the coverage moderately but also aired the issues in the newsroom
so people were more conscious of it. But Arthur is a pretty big wuss so he's not going to do
a lot more than that.
Hillary would have to be the one to call.
He also thinks the brown and women pundits can shame the times and others on social
media. So cultivating Joan Walsh, Yglesias, Allen, perry bacon, Greg Sargent , to
defend her is helpful. They can be emboldened. Fwiw - I pushed pir to do this a yr ago.
I'm guessing Harvard graduate Matt Yglesias is thrilled to find out that Clintonland views
his usefulness primary through the prism of his skin color, particularly given that his family
background not actually all that "brown."
Videos constructed from public sources that show the true
Hillary Clinton. All video used under the doctrine of FAIR
USE.
For more, check out
http://www.vidzette.com
"... Let's see: Promoting the notion that it's okay for one country to interfere with and influence a democratic election of another country. I need to see if I can figure out what the implications of this might be in a current context. ..."
"The Clinton campaign raked in $101 million this month, pressing its cash advantage in the
final stretch to election day" [
Politico ]. "Only about $18 million of the haul came in checks of less than $200." Ka-ching.
Policy
"From the outset, I've argued that without a public option - a Medicare-like plan that would
be available to all Americans buying health insurance - insurance competition would dwindle and
premiums would skyrocket. Now that they have, it's time to do now what we should have done then:
take the simplest route to a more stable and affordable health care system." [Jacob Hacker,
New York Times ]. "Critics of the public option are convinced it's a one-way ticket to single
payer (the government alone provides coverage). History suggests the opposite: The public option
isn't a threat to a system of broad coverage through competing private plans. Instead, it's absolutely
critical to making such a system work." Notice the equivocation on "Medicare- like
plan," setting up exactly the same kind of
bait and switch operation that career "progressives" and Hacker personally ran in 2009 .
War Drums
"Political Airpower, Part I: Say No to the No-Fly Zone" [
War on the Rocks ].
The Voters
"This market barometer says Trump still has a chance at the White House" [
MarketWatch ]. "The slump [of the Mexican peso, a] key barometer of Trump's chances represents
'recognition that the election may be closer than polls suggest and growing fears U.S. political
uncertainty may be on the rise,' [Colin] Cieszynski says."
Downballot
"'There's a danger the dike could break for Republicans,' says Tim Storey, who analyzes politics
for the National Conference of State Legislatures. He found that there has been a sea change in
expectations on both sides since Oct. 7 when The Washington Post reported on the existence of
the 'Access Hollywood' tapes… Republicans have become increasingly concerned that they could lose
statehouse majorities in as many as 10 states, Storey said" [
RealClearPolitics ].
The Trail
"Clinton lead shrinks, even as nearly 6 in 10 expect her to win, Post-ABC tracking poll finds"
[
WaPo ]. Only one poll, so FWIW. "Trump saw his biggest gains among political independents,
favoring Trump by a 12-point margin in the latest tracking poll, 49 to 37 percent, after giving
Clinton a narrow edge in late last week." Now that's volatile!
Funny:
Democrat Email Hairball
"Clinton campaign manager John Podesta apparently thinks Eric Garner's death was justified"
[
Mic ].
Erica Garner reacts:
Check the responses…
And then this happened:
Oopsie.
UPDATES Good heavens!
"FBI to take new 'investigative steps' on Clinton emails" [
WaPo ]. "The FBI will investigate whether additional classified material is contained in emails
sent using Hillary Clinton's private email server while she was secretary of state, FBI Director
James B. Comey informed congressional leaders Friday. The announcement appears to restart the
FBI's probe of Clinton's server, which previously ended in July with no charges…"
"New Emails in Clinton Case Came From Anthony Weiner's Electronic Devices" [
New York Times ]. "Federal law enforcement officials said Friday that the new emails uncovered
in the closed investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server were discovered
after the F.B.I. seized electronic devices belonging to Huma Abedin, a top aide to Mrs. Clinton,
and her husband, Anthony Weiner… The bureau told Congress on Friday that it had uncovered new
emails related to the Clinton case - one federal official said they numbered in the thousands."
Then again, if Weiner runs true to form, classification won't be an issue. But that
most definitely does not mean Clinton's home free .
Quite the Friday afternoon news dump. And not a good week for the Clinton campaign, despite
the triumphalism.
This may get overshadowed by the FBI's reopened investigation of Hillary. But it shouldn't:
On September 5, 2006, Eli Chomsky was an editor and staff writer for the Jewish Press, and
Hillary Clinton was running for a shoo-in re-election as a U.S. senator. Her trip brought her
to Brooklyn to meet the editorial board of the Jewish Press.
The tape was never released and has only been heard by the small handful of staffers in
the room. According to Chomsky, his old-school audio cassette is the only existent copy and
no one has heard it since 2006, until today when he played it for the Observer.
Speaking about the January 25, 2006, election for the second Palestinian Legislative Council,
Clinton weighed in about the result, which was a resounding victory for Hamas (74 seats) over
the U.S.-preferred Fatah (45 seats).
"I do not think we should have pushed for an election in the Palestinian territories. I
think that was a big mistake," said Sen. Clinton. "And if we were going to push for an election,
then we should have made sure that we did something to determine who was going to win.
"
Let's see: Promoting the notion that it's okay for one country to interfere with and influence
a democratic election of another country. I need to see if I can figure out what the implications
of this might be in a current context.
The famine in Yemen caused by our Saudi allies is receiving very little attention in the US,
so I would expect our great American liberals to agree with Clinton that we have every right to
rig the elections of furriners.
I keep expecting that right after Clinton wins, the great humanitarian liberals will let out
their outrage, suppressed up to this point because of the need to stop Trump. Just kidding.
This is extraordinarily forthright. No wonder why her aides ensure that all her interviews
are scripted in advance. Don't miss the part where she seems to allude to the revenge-escalation of "these cultures."
I expect to see some hard work….. finding FBI Agent spouses to run for office, appoint to think
tanks and scam foundations so they can funnel some of that sweet, sweet repressive regime laundered
money. A corrupt political party's work is never done.
No, as a former SoS (and Senator, for that matter) they can impeach her after she left office
if it is connected to anything she did whilst she held the position.
I'm skeptical. Maybe this is just about throwing Huma under the bus and a pretext to restore
FBI morale while diverting attention from the abundant evidence the FBI is sitting on which easily
proves Clinton's many crimes?
Surprising. I had assumed that we could have video footage of Hillary barbecueing babies and
the FBI would just say "There was no intent! Nothing to see here folks, move along".
It looks as though an "October surprise" is coming from an unexpected place–
the FBI. There are numerous articles about this on the web now, but this one contains a decent
analysis.
I've been saying something big would happen before Election Day, as it would be uncharacteristic
of this crazy cycle to have a quiet home stretch. Kim Dotcom was claiming a couple of days ago
that he has her emails and sent them on to Wikileaks and Gowdy.
But I'm unsure of how this FBI investigation plays out. Obviously, the FBI won't release findings
on the new emails for months. And, FBI is not Wikileaks, they don't dump the emails for the public
to review.
Something tells me this is Comey covering his (and FBI) ass. Perhaps he's been made aware that
an outside source, e.g., Wikileaks, has the emails and is going to release soon, so he's trying
to get ahead of it.
I have no doubt that her emails are out there somewhere, I'm certain the NSA has had them all
along and has been using them for leverage. Any script kiddie could have hacked that joke of a
server they were running in their closet, let alone the NSA.
The response is the investigation has nothing to do with WL or hacking. So yes, I'd go with
it's him trying to get out in front of what he knows is coming.
I'll bet that Wall Street thought that Clinton's e-mail scandals had already been baked in.
They have recovered some, but that is one mighty jumpy graph.
TisTis: Trump Hopes "Justice Will Finally Be Done" As FBI Reopens Probe Into Hillary Clinton
Emails
JUSTICE WITHIN 2 WEEKS? i don't think soooo Rats and roaches live by competition under the
laws of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice
and mercy. ~Wendell Berry
Should Hillary be working on 'due to stress and bad health, I am quitting' speech?
From Nixon's last speech:
I would have preferred to carry through to the finish whatever the personal agony it would
have involved, and my family unanimously urged me to do so. But the interest of the Nation
must always come before any personal considerations.
Considering who her VP is, maybe the goal all along was for her to somehow crawl across the
finish line then turn over all the evil doing to Kaine while she enjoys her lavish rewards in
the nursing home.
NYT: "the F.B.I. seized electronic devices belonging to Huma Abedin and her husband, Anthony
Weiner."
Ah ha … wouldn't it be a hoot if the FBI's probe of Carlos Danger sexting a 15-year-old turned
up evidence that was right under their noses … if they'd only bothered to convene a grand jury
and subpoena it.
It came out that Huma Abedin knows all about Hillary's private illegal emails. Huma's PR
husband, Anthony Weiner, will tell the world.
11:50 AM – 3 Aug 2015
For those who don't look, it's very 2016….
On your left is Abedin leaning her head away with a face palm. In the center is Weiner, shirtless,
dopey wide eyed expression taking a selfie. On the right is Clinton, squinting with a hand up
blocking the glare of the bright lights being shone on her.
i caught his documentary with her in it…found it strange myself that she's still around…then
a toddler waddled into the frame.
can't help ponder they hadn't planned this for awhile…
It seems reasonable to assume that all "power couples" are sham marriages for the salt-of-the-earth
quaintsters. I have no idea how one might objectively rebut that conjecture regarding any particular
case.
If there is an email from Hillary, whether containing top secret info or not, which was pertinent
to Clinton's performance at State (and thus pertinent to the FBI inquiry,) but FBI never received
it or recovered it, then that shouldould make an open and shut case of obstruction and lying to
the FBI against her. Of course it's too late to stop her legally. But politically she could be
kneecapped. Impeachment proceedings launching during Inaugural speeches and balls are a real turd
in the punch bowl.
Could it be Abedin sending receiving on her computer with an address through Clinton's server
not involving Clinton at all? It is all exempt under the 'I don't recall' principle anyway.
If the OverClass has the power to prevent that impeachment, the OverClass will prevent that
impeachment.
Hillary is the designated Obama 2.0 President. Her job is to cement the Obama legacy just as
Obama's job was to cement the Bush legacy.
Don't expect any impeachment anytime soon.
The only way to stop Hillary is to vote for Trump and get Hillary defeated.
Can't remove a sitting president…unless you have the votes to impeach…the comey show…announce
something..and gosh darn it…got timed out by the election…
New on Friday usually means that the majority of Americans will have forgotten everything but
their name by the time Monday rolls around. All the MSM has to do is find another bright shiny
object to write about together on the weekend. Their past open collusion with HRC's campaign makes
that a foregone conclusion.
Chances are the FBI will ask Hillary which of the Weiner's emails she deems important.
I think Comey overestimated his standing and the standing of "FBI Director" with the populace
at large and expected everyone to just applaud when he criticized Clinton and expected Clinton
to win big or Republican voters to sour on Trump providing him protection going forward.
Heres what I believe scares Comey, the GOP base hasn't soured on Trump, Hillary won't big,
and the GOP House will remain intact with me ears under pressure for not supporting the elected
GOP leader. No one has really voted for Paul Ryan (Veep doesn't count) outside of one congressional
district.
The "left" (everyone who isn't a Republican and isnt on the CGI payroll is what I mean) won't
defend Hillary or actions to protect her past the 8th. If Comey has acted in anyway inappropriately
and has mutininous agents, he will be in trouble.
Further… didn't she get immunity? Seems like Comey needs to re-open, re-question and cover
these items under the immunity also so she can't be prosecuted for them in the future.
Why do we hear so much about the racism of the white working class and so little about the
racism of the ruling class?
Well, the Ruling Class remained silent in Public until Trump. Then the ugly truth was revealed
was revealed on TV, by both Trump (Mexicans) and Clinton (Deplorables).
And possibly by Romney as wee in his comment about the 49% who don't pay (income) taxes, and
the republican meme of Makers and Takers (stated in the wrong order I believe).
Front page of the Seattle Times had side-by-side articles of a Dakota Pipeline story (dozens
arrested) beside the story of the acquittal of Bundy's bunch. They're so factually different though.
One story involves powerful interests using and abusing the land to their own economic advantage
and squandering the land resources for future generations and the other story involves . . .
Or the racism of the middle class. People are tribal and arguably it is baked into our DNA.
That doesn't excuse the mental laziness of trafficking in stereotypes but one could make a case
that racism is as much a matter of ignorance as of evil character. Obama with his "bitter clingers"
and HIllary with her "deplorables" are talking about people about whom they probably know almost
nothing. One of the long ago arguments for school integration was that propinquity fosters mutual
understanding. This met with a lot of resistance. And for people like our Pres and would be Pres
a broader view of the electorate would be inconvenient. They might have to turn into actual liberals.
The McClatchy article on 'digital fingerprints' has a wonderful quote that should be hammered
into everyone's minds:
"We do freely make available information about ourselves episodically that we may think isn't
terribly revealing but aggregated, it reveals a whole lot." - Rebecca Weiner, New York City Police
Department
People who don't worry about what's actually lost in information disclosure and leakage simply
lack creativity. They don't conjure up the broader (or lateral) contexts for simple data to take
on broader meaning. It's actually nice to see this admitted openly and clearly by someone from
the NYPD. The next time someone speaks apologetically of surveillance because they have, "nothing
to hide," I may use this as part of a retort and pivot to a discussion on naivete and trust of
authority.
"Jury acquits Ammon Bundy, six others for standoff at Oregon wildlife refuge" [WaPo].
Were any of the defendants Black? I rather doubt it. Just as Driving-While-Black can be a capital
offense, I would assume that the penalty for Seizing-Federal-Property-While-Black is quite severe
also. The sentencing stage for Driving-While-Black is sometimes reached before there has even
been a trial.
Defense lawyers also raised questions about the FBI informants at the refuge. Prosecutors
confirmed there were 15 informants involved in the case, nine of whom were at the refuge –
including three who were identified at the trial. Six others at the refuge remained unidentified.
Without knowing who they were or what they did during the occupation, the lawyers didn't
know if any of the informants conspired with the defendants to commit any of the crimes alleged
in the indictment, defense lawyers argued. They revealed that one of the informants at the
refuge was a man who went by the alias "John Killman" but was really Fabio Minoggio of Las
Vegas, who was asked to oversee the shooting range at the refuge.
The prosecution dropped the ball and was incredibly complacent. They barely spent any time
laying out the charges. The whole trial amounted to the defense sucking up all the oxygen in the
courthouse.
It's disappointing but I'm even more disappointed by the fact the migrating birds didn't return
early and attack the yeehadists. After they come north they're all horny and mate. It makes them
particularly aggressive against puny humans who get in their way.
Ah, yes, the old Entrapment Ploy, wherein some of the illegality comes about through incitement
by informers/agents provocateur. Works wondrously well if you can keep the identities of the informers/agents
provocateur a secret, but no so well if you can't. I should imagine that the Bundy folks might
have been on the lookout for tells, such as when the individual who generally is passive, or stays
in the background starts making, uh, suggestions . Counter-intelligence 101.
Hah! If you can't spot a agent provocateur you're probably stupid enough to do something that
should land you in prison. The Department of Homeland Security's fusion centers in Portland and
Salem were busy during the wildlife refuge takeover. All those radicalized hipsters and lefties
supporting/harassing the yeehadists with their edible sex products et cetra.
-_^
Gotta help the white people collecting welfare via the US Intelligence community to keep receiving
those checks. I gotta wonder though if activists were targeted for inflammatory internet speech/actions
or if their Mormon co-religionists in the federal government didn't appreciate what amounted to
a crowdsourced psychological warfare campaign.
Re: "This market barometer says Trump still has a chance at the White House" et al.
The polls – Rasmussen, LA Times & IBD – say that Trump has a 50% (or more, since electoral
votes=independent-minded states determine the winner of the presidential race) chance at the White
House. The race continues to be a dead heat nationally, just as it has been for two or three weeks
now.
The FBI is making news at this hour, but is this going to be the Podesta email that makes the
largely worthless & discredited press wake up and take notice?
Bezzle Airbnb: [a fine of up to $7,500 on advertising short-term rentals of less than 30 days.
This means users can still list a room in their home, but cannot advertise entire apartments."]
Won't people just code their advertisements…. bdrm 900 sq ft, own kitchen and bath, sleeps
6. Owner travels.
Talking in pix or emojis gives a certain latitude, even deniability, which words, with their
specific meanings, (confound it,) just can't offer. Words can be tracked down, and mean specific
things, and hold you to account. We don't need that anymore. What we need in today's world is
cover for our vague jumble of impressions and our nagging feeling that global warming is simply
going to solve all of our problems for us – panic. Calm down, I say. Stop thinking in words, and
things will get a lot simpler for you.
re: Apple, it seems, is angling for the 'amateur creative' and isn't interested in anything
else anymore.
A few years back I bought a used 2009 Mac Pro for $800, upgraded the firmware to 2010-12, upgraded
the CPUs to two 2.8 ghz 6 cores for $400 and the memory to 24 GB 1333 MHz DDR3. I suspect that
when I shuffle off this mortal coil this machine will still be the fastest and most functional
Mac I'll ever have owned. Too bad the PCIe bus is old-timey but I'm not much of a game player.
For the last few years all of the released Macs have been a letdown.
I hope that one day I can get one of those 2013 trashcans for cheap but calling them Mac Pros
is completely inappropriate. Where I somewhat disagree with the author of the article is that
the trashcans were the proof that Apple had no interest in making a highly functional, professional
machines. These new, slower, unrepairable MacBook Pros are just more of the same for the portable
crowd.
Moore's law is dead and buried but no one wrote an obit. Apple is a bank wannabe that sells
some other products.
Is there a more accurate term than militarized police? They are former military, military equipment,
military training, military practices etc. They went around the constitution to put military on
the streets… They are more accurately mercenaries. Anyone familiar with any terms for the backdoor
military?
Thanks for the Apple IT links. Looks like the Touchbar was especially designed to sync with
Adobe graphics programs and other camera/photo programs, which would have been a nice addition
to the function keys. A Touchbar as a replacement to the function keys? Privileging app
users over program developers? (shakes head, mutters inaudibly)
Apple began to lose me with the MacBook Pro when they made it un-openable and replaced the
nice metal power button with just another key. Now it just seems like they have run out of incremental
things to "improve" with a machine that really has no huge issues, other than the need to keep
up with ongoing technological changes.
My guess: Apple bought a lot of tech properties before it knew how it would integrate them,
and before it had a project for them (e.g. bought wireless headphone maker Wi-Gear) . In this
new release Apple seemed to let the parts drive the project; to kludge together a few of these
acquired techs. Just a guess.
"What Trump is saying is dangerous. A person seeking to be the president of the United States
should not suggest violence in any way," Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook tweeted.
You had better luck than I did with my search. thanks! The one tweet left on his account makes
it sound like he just joined, even though the joined date says August 2015. Very odd.
I'm not from belgium, but the belgian SP/PS = basically neoliberal, while the Belgian labor
party (PvdA) is more properly thought of as Socialist (i.e., well to Bernie's left). (For reference,
in NL it's the other way around: the SP is actually socialist, while the PvdA is neolib with a
bleeding heart contingent that carps ineffectually from the sidelines, always accepting that "the
revolution will happen mańana". It may be that this was an act by Magnette, in the hope that he
could pacify that contingent, in or outside his party; I don't know who organized the reading
+ discussion of CETA in the Wallonian Parliament.)
It looks like the Walloon SP is a typical social dem party that has become neoliberal, but
they are being pushed hard in the regional elections by the Workers' Party of Belgium (PvdA-PTB).
I think this is an attempt by them to square the circle and give in to the demands of the EU ruling
class and attempt to head off the growing threat to their left. Seems incredibly cynical to me,
rather than coming from any genuine place. It remains to be seen what would happen if the Workers'
Party gained regional control after this: would they, too, capitulate or would they force a confrontation?
Hillary Clinton isn't saying anything yet about the FBI decision to investigate new emails
linked to her private email server.
Clinton ignored shouted questions from reporters about the FBI investigation as she walked
off her plane Friday in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
She smiled and waved to reporters gathered on the tarmac, but made no comments.
Clinton spent about 25 minutes on the plane after it landed before she emerged. Following Clinton
off the plane was famed photographer Annie Leibovitz. She was shooting photos of the candidate
for at least part of the time reporters were waiting for the candidate.
"The Army said Friday it has determined that suicide was the cause of death of a two-star general
who was found dead in his home on a military base in Alabama, the AP reports. Maj. Gen. John Rossi
was found dead July 31 at Redstone Arsenal, two days before he was to assume command of Army Space
and Missile Defense Command . He is the first Army general to commit suicide on active duty since
record-keeping began in 2000, according to the Army; USA Today reports that he is "the highest-ranking
soldier ever to have taken his own life."" hmmm
It's Bill Clinton's interstate emergency management agreement (then pitched for FEMA-type emergencies)
and not the PATRIOT Act's DHS Fusion Centers that are managing law enforcement response to #NoDAPL,
eh? That means that the federal agencies are not particularly involved yet, doesn't it?
People shake their heads when Trump says that he took advantage of tax loopholes like any other
businessman, but they are okay with the same law compliance bullshit that Hillary resorts to with
the emails, Clinton foundation etc.
this election has just really hammered in the message that people will simply ignore any logical
or factual realities if they contradict their own prejudices, even as they loudly proclaim their
moral and intellectual superiority in choosing the "right" candidate.
"The IRS rule apparently used by Trump and many others dates back to 1918. Put simply, businesses
can "carry forward" tax losses to future years. In other words, if a business loses $50,000 one
year, and makes the same amount the following year, it is considered to have "broken even." If
a business takes a loss of $1 million, it could theoretically make $100,000 for the next ten years
and pay no taxes.
In fact, in 1995 (the same year of Trump's tax return), 500,000 people used the same tax advantages
that Trump apparently used. However, unlike Trump's losses of nearly a billion dollars, the average
American's claimed loss was $97,500.
These losses are allowed to flow through the business to the benefit of the business owner.
So, the loss of the business can be used to offset personal income of the business owners.
Using the rule is perfectly legal, assuming of course that the losses claimed are legitimate
losses under the tax code. Losses must be real net operating loss, enough to cancel out any profit
made.
Advantages for Real Estate Owners
Real estate has a number of losses that can be claimed, including depreciation of the value
of real estate assets, real estate taxes, and costs to maintain the property. Real estate owners
also can use losses in real estate, to offset non-real estate gains in certain cases. So, for
example, if property depreciates, those losses can cover not only any profits made from the real
estate itself, but also any other business ventures the real estate owner may be involved in.
Owners of investment real estate, however, may be subject to the "passive activity" rules, which
limit the owner's ability to use real estate losses against other business income.
Real estate owners can also defer taxes by flipping property. If a developer exchanges property
routinely, the losses can be continually carried forward so that no taxes are actually paid."http://www.davidtobacklaw.com/what-is-the-trump-tax-loophole/
"Clinton foundation etc." would take up too much bandwith and unfair to other NC posters BUT
YOU GET THE POINT, RIGHT?
if not let's settle this with her own record… Forbes: Christopher Preble points out "Clinton
supported every one of the last seven U.S. military interventions abroad, plus two others we ended
up fighting." For instance, while First Lady she pushed for U.S. intervention in the Balkans-attacking
the Bosnian Serbs and then Serbia. She was an enthusiastic war advocate, explaining: "I urged
him [her husband] to bomb." Alas, Bosnia remains badly divided while Kosovo has turned into a
gangster state which, according to the New York Times, is "a font of Islamic extremism and a pipeline
for jihadists."
"Sen. Hillary Clinton supported the overbroad Authorization for Use of Military Force after September
11, which 15 years later the Obama administration claims as warrant for its very different war
against the Islamic State. She strongly backed the Iraq invasion. Only after it turned out badly
and threatened to damage her political career did she acknowledge her mistake. Of course, that
was too late to retrieve the thousands of American lives, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives,
and trillions of dollars squandered. At the same time, she said she was sorry for opposing the
2007 "surge" of troops, despite what Iraq became. Worse, a former State department aide reported
that Clinton later announced she would not feel "constrained" in the future by the failure in
Iraq."
It's working but I can't tell if they are serious or if that is some epic level trolling. That
seems to be consistent with the theme of this election though.
James Comey was on the Board of Directors of HSBC while they were money laundering for drug
runners and terrorists, he has done squat to stop GamerGate, he has a
horrible record as director of the FBI and should have never been nominated, never been confirmed,
and is a completely horrible person.
Mark Felt had already gained notoriety before Watergate because he was one of the FBI's special
agents who was charged for conducting illegal surveillance on American leftists. It's one of those
things all those conspiracy theorists don't emphasis about COINTELPRO and other programs. The
only people actually charged and convicted in the matter were FBI agents.
He was also general counsel of the largest defense contractor in the world (Lockheed Martin)
and
general counsel of the largest hedge fund / personality cult in the world (Bridgewater).
Just a small town lawyer. If the town is Davos.
I read the comments earlier in the day so not sure if this has been noted. In a new emergency
procedure, the Left Party is still trying to block the CETA agreement in the final hours before
the agreement. It is not clear whether the application has reached the court in time. I think
it would be called the Federal Constitutional Court. Preventatively the Left Party has also submitted
an alternative claim should the first one be too late to be considered
site in German
http://deutsche-wirtschafts-nachrichten.de/2016/10/28/wagenknecht-reicht-in-karlsruhe-eilantrag-gegen-ceta-ein/
I began to read today's Water Cooler and went, "What? Is this a parody?", about a link I no
longer recall, BUT I kept saying that to myself as I read on And felt the same about some other
reports I came across today. Have we passed some "red line" into another dimension?
These really are real links?
(Yeah, I know they are…it's just that they seem like they shouldn't be….)
Bill and Hillary Clinton failed to get required permits for a rushed renovation of the house
and grounds they recently bought next to their original Westchester home, it was reported Friday.
Records show that the Clintons' contractors filled in an in-ground pool, covering it with
gravel, and extensively remodeled the interior of the property - all without applying for permits
and paying the required fees to the town of New Castle.
Building Inspector William Maskiell inspected the Chappaqua property after getting the tip
about the pool work and then discovered the other renovations that were underway.
Attached to the building inspector's letter was a document titled Clinton Violation Inspection
Report in which Maskiell said the contractor told him the Clintons "were quite adamant about
[the Thanksgiving deadline] and what had started as a paint job turned into this," meaning
the major renovation.
Crazy - there are more problems than just the lack of building permits:
The Clintons also have outstanding zoning and Building Department problems at their residence
next door at 15 Old House Lane,
They obtained variances in 2000 for a guard house on the property, for a higher fence and
for "lot coverage," or the amount of space buildings take up on the property.
The variances must be renewed every five years - but the Clintons never showed up before
the Zoning Board of Appeals.
"Consequently, they are null and void. They should have come back in 2005, 2010 and 2015.
So the variances have expired and they have to start from scratch" and reapply, said the inspector.
The original home and a combination library and gym in an outbuilding still have outstanding
building permit issues as well, including a sprinkler "sign off" by the town engineer and an
electrical inspection in the library/gym
I'm not seeing much basic competency here in executing home ownership responsibilities. Next
I'll hear Bill steals the neigbor's Sunday newspaper off their porch.
Interesting tidbit about the Illinois US senate race. The incumbent, the Republican Mark Kirk,
had a stroke and since then has made notably non-PC comments. Last night he made a comment about
Tammy Duckworth's Chinese heritage (her mother is Chinese born in Thailand), and that comment
has drawn attention to his overall neurological health.
A friend of mine had a stroke which deeply affected the part of the brain responsible for impulse
control. He used to be highly organized, extremely conscious of ramifications of his actions,
spent carefully, prepared for exigencies, etc. Since the stroke, and especially when he's feeling
more energetic, he spends like a drunken sailor, swears like one, has no care about consequences
of his actions. If he's feeling under pressure this is even more exaggerated.
Kirk's recovery from his stroke has won him some sympathy, but I gather there's has not been
much reporting about any personality changes. The debate made this change a bit more open to scrutiny
and other examples are apparently being discussed.
During a debate between Rep. Tammy Duckworth and Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL) for his U.S. Senate
seat in Springfield, Illinois, Kirk mocked Duckworth's ancestry, saying in rebuttal of her
comments on the true cost of war,
"I had forgotten that your parents came all the way from Thailand to serve George Washington."
His remark came in response to her statement that, "My family has served this nation in
uniform going back to the Revolution. I am a Daughter of the American Revolution."
NC started the "Thanks Ms. Lewinsky for saving Social Security" meme ;
I don't think this scandal alone will sink Clinton, but if it does, would that make Anthony the
'boy Monica'?
In line with the Corruption theme, check out the election fraud documentation at
Fraction Magic – Short Version
video recently released. It shows manipulation of actual vote files (Statement of Votes Cast)
and how locations selected for audit were not tampered with.
The hero of the story is Bennie Smith, a soft-spoken Memphis TN-based genius who has skills
in computer programming and databases; accounting; and political demographic analysis. By luck
those are the same skills that convicted felon Jeffrey Dean had. (Dean wrote the software for
the Diebold voting machines–and I've been told they can now prove that Dean was the originator
of the fractionalized vote-counting software for the central tabulators.)
A longer version of the video is due out in days–in the meantime, the 9 min. excerpt on the
Short Version is amazing. Check out the tips at the end–how the public can help.
Don't worry, Lloyd Blankfein is checking Comey's work. FBI today placed the Weiner investigation
under their crack Special Agent for Witness Liquidation, Aaron McFarlane.
Hello …According to
Reuters , the European Union on Friday lifted limits on Gazprom's use of a link from its offshore
Nord Stream pipeline to Germany, allowing Russia to pump more gas to Europe and bypass its usual
routes via Ukraine.
UHH @4:30…State Department spokesman Mark Toner said Friday that the department knows nothing
about why the FBI reopened its investigation into Hillary Clinton's private email server just
hours earlier.
"First, what do we know? Not much more than you know, in fact. About the same," Toner said.
"We just learned about this when we saw news reports of the letter."
"What emails they may be looking at, what they're looking for, any more details at all, we
just don't know anything about the scope of this new–I'm not even sure it's an investigation,
but this effort to look at additional emails," Toner continued.
Cyberspace opened up the Clinton Foundation's Pay for Play scams for scrutiny despite the best
efforts of corporate media and the connected elite to keep it closed; the endless wars at Saudi
Arabia and Israel's bequest, the purposeful burdening of debt on anyone who needs housing, medical
care or education, and the utter contempt for the little people. Corruption so inept that missing
Hillary Clinton e-mails are in Carlos Danger's explicit underage passion filled smartphone in
FBI's possession.
The international community considers backroom corporate trade deals as one example of the
general problem of fragmentation. The US government tries to end-run the UN Charter with NATO.
It tries to end-run ILO conventions with the WTO. It tries to end-run economic and social rights
with ISDS. It tries to end-run sovereign debt principles (e.g. A/69/L.84) with the Paris Club
and the IMF. In response, the international community has been working to synthesize the different
legal regimes in an objective way.
Corporate special pleading gets subsumed in old-time diplomacy, finding common ground, so the
pitched-battle narrative is absent, but when Zayas comes out and says ISDS cannot negate human
rights, this is the context. They're trying to preserve a non-hierarchical regime in which the
only absolute is the purposes and principles of the UN: peace and development, which comes down
to human rights.
… One key Utah proponent of land transfer affirmed the importance of respectful dialogue
and seeking change through legal channels.
"I would hope there would never be a green light to act outside the rule of law. I can understand
the frustration, but in Utah we do things different. We honor the law," said Rep. Keven Stratton,
R-Orem. "Guns on either side would never be appropriate."
But when it comes to land management, Stratton said, the federal government has strayed
from "constitutional anchors of state sovereignty and equal footing." Restoring balance between
federal and state authority would help resolve issues before they lead to confrontations like
those at Bunkerville and Malheur. …
`Restoring balance … resolve issues' is Sage Brush Rebel for `My way or the
RS 2477 highway '.
New evidence appears to show how hackers earlier this year stole more than 50,000 emails
of Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, an audacious electronic attack blamed on Russia's government
and one that has resulted in embarrassing political disclosures about Democrats in the final
weeks before the U.S. presidential election.
The hackers sent John Podesta an official-looking email on Saturday, March 19, that appeared
to come from Google. It warned that someone in Ukraine had obtained Podesta's personal Gmail
password and tried unsuccessfully to log in, and it directed him to a website where he should
"change your password immediately."
Podesta's chief of staff, Sara Latham, forwarded the email to the operations help desk of
Clinton's campaign, where staffer Charles Delavan in Brooklyn, New York, wrote back 25 minutes
later, "This is a legitimate email. John needs to change his password immediately."
maybe clinton made the decision unilaterally, which is quite possible. seems like the campaign
would want to bury the email scandal instead of going on the offensive. i do so hope this means
their internal polling is scaring them.
I think my 1st year university student daughter [business with high distinctions] summed up
the election in the car whilst taking her to work – its stupid – and can't believe these are adults
running for president of America of all places….
Her immunity deal does not cover this incident. They now can force her sing...
Notable quotes:
"... Hillary Clinton's most trusted State Department aide Huma Abedin once left classified papers in the pocket behind the front seat of a staff car she was assigned in India, according to an email released Monday. ..."
"... Abedin wrote to Clinton's personal assistant Lauren Jiloty on July 20, 2009 to ask her to move the material to her trunk so an ambassador wouldn't see them when he rode with her in the back seat. ..."
"... She told Jiloty that the papers consisted of 'burn stuff,' indicating that they were classified documents that belonged among materials that agency rules required employees to place in 'burn bags' for incineration. ... ..."
"... New emails the FBI is examining related to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's use of a private computer server were discovered after the agency seized electronic devices belonging to Clinton aide Huma Abedin and her husband, Anthony Weiner, the New York Times reported on Friday, citing law enforcement officials. ... ..."
(So, more sloppy handling of classified
material going on, looks like. Not
by Hillary Clinton however.)
Bombshell email shows Huma Abedin left classified material in her CAR
http://dailym.ai/2bz34lU via @MailOnline
- Aug 23
Hillary Clinton's most trusted State Department aide Huma Abedin once left classified papers
in the pocket behind the front seat of a staff car she was assigned in India, according to an
email released Monday.
Abedin wrote to Clinton's personal assistant Lauren Jiloty on July 20, 2009 to ask her to move
the material to her trunk so an ambassador wouldn't see them when he rode with her in the back
seat.
She told Jiloty that the papers consisted of 'burn stuff,' indicating that they were classified
documents that belonged among materials that agency rules required employees to place in 'burn
bags' for incineration. ...
FBI found Clinton-related emails on devices belonging to Huma Abedin, Anthony Weiner http://aol.it/2ejHtuo via @AOL - Oct 28
New emails the FBI is examining related to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's
use of a private computer server were discovered after the agency seized electronic devices belonging
to Clinton aide Huma Abedin and her husband, Anthony Weiner, the New York Times reported on Friday,
citing law enforcement officials. ...
ilsm -> Fred C. Dobbs... , -1
Someone at FBI missed the cease and desist memo....
As
an old SDS-er, I found it hard to see Tom Hayden go. However meandering his path, he was at the heart
of radical history in the 60s, an erstwhile companion, if not always a comrade, on the route of every
boomer lefty.
One of his finer moments for me, which I've never seen mentioned (including among this week's
encomia) since he wrote it, was his 2006
article
, published on CounterPunch with an introduction by Alexander Cockburn, in which he apologized
for a "descent into moral ambiguity and realpolitick that still haunts me today." It would be respectful
of Hayden's admirers and critics, on the occasion of his passing, to remember which of his actions
"haunted" him the most.
The title of the article says it clearly: "I Was Israel's Dupe." In the essay, Hayden apologizes
for his support of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, which was for him that "descent into
moral ambiguity" More importantly, he explains why he did it, in a detailed narrative that everyone
should read.
Hayden sold out, as he tells it, because, in order to run as a Democratic candidate for the California
State Assembly, he had get the approval of the influential Democratic congressman Howard Berman.
Berman is a guy who, when he became Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, was proud to
tell the
Forward that he took the job because of his "interest in the Jewish state" and that: "Even before
I was a Democrat, I was a Zionist."
Hayden had to meet with Howard's brother Michael, who, acting as "the gatekeeper protecting
Los Angeles' Westside for Israel's political interests," told Hayden: "I represent the Israeli Defense
Forces"-a sentence that could serve as the motto of most American congress critters today. The "Berman-Waxman
machine," Hayden was told, would deign to "rent" him the Assembly seat on the "one condition: that
I always be a 'good friend of Israel.'"
But American congressmen were not the only "gatekeepers" through whose hands Hayden had to pass
before being allowed to run for Congress. Other "certifiers" included "the elites, beginning with
rabbis and heads of the multiple mainstream Jewish organizations, the American-Israel Political
Action Committee (AIPAC), [and].. Israeli ambassadors, counsels general and other officials."
In fact, Hayden had to, in his words, be "declared 'kosher' by the ultimate source, the region's
representative of the state of Israel," Benjamin Navon, Israel's Counsul-general in Los Angeles.
In other words, in this article Hayden was describing, in an unusually concrete way, how the
state of Israel, through its state officials and their compliant American partners, was effectively
managing-exercising veto power over Democratic Party candidates, at the very least-American elections
down to the level of State Assembly . In any constituency "attuned to the question of Israel,
even in local and state elections," Hayden knew he "had to be certified 'kosher,' not once but over
and over again."
This experience prompted Hayden to express a "fear that the 'Israeli lobby' is working overtime
to influence American public opinion on behalf of Israel's military effort to 'roll back the clock'
and 'change the map' of the region." Hayden warned of the "trepidation and confusion among rank-and-file
voters and activists, and the paralysis of politicians, especially Democrats," over support of Israel.
He vowed to "not make the same mistake again," and said: "Most important, Americans must not be timid
in speaking up, as I was 25 years ago."
Whatever else he did-and he was never particularly radical about Palestine-this article was a
genuinely honest and unusual intervention, and it deserves a lot more notice-as a moment in Tom Hayden's
history and that of the American left-than it has got. Looking back and regretfully acknowledging
that one had been duped and morally compromised by what seemed the least troublesome path 25 years
earlier, saying "I woulda, shoulda, coulda done the right thing," is a haunting moment for anyone.
Doing it in a way that exposes in detail how a foreign country constantly manipulates American elections
over decades is worthy of everyone's notice.
I doubt Hillary and her Democratic supporters will have anything to say about this "interference
"in American elections, even local and state. But I do hope many of those who are touched by the
loss of Tom Hayden heed these words from him, and don't wait another 25 years to overcome their "fear
and confusion" about saying and doing the right thing regarding the crimes of Israel, troublesome
as that might be.
"Because he interviewed Donald Trump so many times over the years, Howard Stern has become
an unlikely central figure in this year's presidential election, most notably by getting Trump
to go on the record in favor of the Iraq War in 2002. But the SiriusXM host rarely discusses politics,
which makes his latest comments this week about the Republican nominee and his own role in the
race significant. "None of this was hidden," Stern said on his show Tuesday about Trump's most
outrageous statements. "This is who Trump is. He was always bombastic. He always rated women.
He always talked in a misogynistic, sexist kind of way, but he did it sort of proudly and out
in the open; and he still won the Republican primary. In one sense, the fact that we do an interview
and people's personalities come out, I'm very proud of that."
"I, certainly, in a million years, I didn't expect Trump to seriously run for president," Stern
added..."
President Vladimir Putin on Thursday accused American politicians of whipping up hysteria about a
mythical Russian threat as a ploy to distract voters from their own failings in the run-up to the
U.S. presidential election.
Putin, addressing an audience of foreign policy experts gathered in southern Russia, repeatedly
lashed out at the Obama administration, saying it did not keep its word on Syria, did not honour
deals, and had falsely accused Moscow of all manner of sins.
The U.S. government has formally accused Russia of a campaign of cyber attacks against Democratic
Party organisations, while Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton has accused Republican rival Donald
Trump of being a Putin "puppet".
Putin said he found it hard to believe that anyone seriously thought Moscow was capable of influencing
the Nov. 8 election.
"Hysteria has been whipped up," said Putin.
He said that was a ruse to cover up for the fact that the U.S. political elite had nothing to
say about serious issues such as the country's national debt or gun control.
War hysteria in a country with imperial nostalgia, one-man rule and a weak economy cannot
be taken lightly.
Michael Khodarkovsky is a professor of history at Loyola University.
[ The fostering of fear of and disdain for Russia is continual now and however false the
characterizations of Russia are, and they are indeed false, the fear and disdain will influence
and be self-defeating for American foreign policy from here till a dramatic change comes from
another administration. I unfortunately find no such change in the offing. ]
progressivism & humanitarianism in war profiteering aka mongering......
"Civilian protective operations" panders a neocon excuse for organized state run murder.
Bill went after the Tsar as soon as his closet neocon found out they could have the Germans
send a mechanized brigade of Warsaw Pact armaments to the Croats and Yeltsin did nothing.
The Russian version of Chamberlain and Munich was Croatian independence.
ilsm -> anne... , -1
Most career military pilots I knew were terrified by the thought of no more perpetual bombing.
They would think Clinton and the neocons can keep a low boil going in the PNAC for another
100 years without tripping into a real war, or bankrupting the USA.
It is a signifier of the moral bankruptcy that the exceptional carry as a badge.
With the "defenses available" to Syria they could enforce no fly zones on GCC and their
blood thirsty allies as as might US over Raqqa.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday it was hard for him to work with the current U.S.
administration because it did not stick to any agreements, including on Syria.
Putin said he was ready to engage with a new president however, whoever the American people chose,
and to discuss any problem.
Trump
claims that Clinton's policy on Syria would lead to World War 3.
Let's fact check …
The Washington Post
points out that a vote for Clinton is a vote for escalating military confrontation in Syria and
elsewhere:
In the rarefied world of the Washington foreign policy establishment, President Obama's departure
from the White House - and the possible return of a more conventional and hawkish Hillary Clinton
- is being met with quiet relief.
The Republicans and Democrats who make up the foreign policy elite are laying the groundwork
for a more assertive American foreign policy, via a flurry of reports shaped by officials who
are likely to play senior roles in a potential Clinton White House .
***
The studies, which reflect Clinton's stated views, break most forcefully with Obama on Syria
…. call[ing] for stepped-up military action to deter President Bashar al-Assad's regime and Russian
forces in Syria.
***
Most of the studies propose limited American airstrikes with cruise missiles to punish Assad
….
***
Last year, Obama dismissed calls for a no-fly zone in northwestern Syria - a position advocated
by Clinton - as "
half-baked ."
***
Even pinprick cruise-missile strikes designed to hobble the Syrian air force or punish Assad
would risk a direct confrontation with Russian forces, which are scattered throughout the key
Syrian military bases that would be targeted.
"You can't pretend you can go to war against Assad and not go to war against the Russians,"
said a senior administration official who is involved in Middle East policy and was granted anonymity
to discuss internal White House deliberations.
The most liberal presidential candidate still running – Green Party candidate Jill Stein – says:
Hillary Clinton wants to start an air war with Russia. Let's be clear: That's what a no-fly
zone means. It is tantamount to a declaration of war against Russia.
***
Clearly the Democrats are incredibly embarrassed about the nature of these revelations, and
they've created a smokescreen here to try and distract from that. But that smokescreen is pushing
us to the brink of warfare with Russia now, where you have the U.S. head of defense, Ashton Carter,
talking about nuclear war. We just did a dry run dropping fake nuclear bombs over Nevada. This
is really dangerous stuff; this is not pretend. So we need to take a deep breath here, we need
to step back and stop beating the war drums. In this context, Hillary Clinton is talking about
starting an air war with Russia. Which could slide-you know, we're on the verge of nuclear war
right now.
***
The most likely nuclear threat right now is with Russia. There's no doubt about that. When
you have Mikhail Gorbachev, who was the prime minister of the Soviet Union during the Cold War,
saying that the threat of nuclear war is hotter now than it has ever been in all of history, you've
got to take that pretty seriously. And when you have Hillary Clinton then beating the war drums
against Russia, and essentially saying that if she's elected that we will declare war on Russia-because
that's what a no-fly zone over Syria amounts to. Shooting down Russian warplanes.
***
Hillary Clinton is a disastrous nuclear threat right now in a context where we're already off-the-charts
in the risk of nuclear war. She has stated in this context that she's essentially opening up a
battlefront with Russia. So to my mind, this emerges as the clearest and most present danger.
Prominent liberal economist Jeffrey Sachs
writes in the Huffington Post, in an essay bannered " Hillary Is the Candidate of the War
Machine ":
It is often believed that the Republicans are the neocons and the Democrats act as restraints
on the warmongering. This is not correct. Both parties are divided between neocon hawks and cautious
realists who don't want the US in unending war. Hillary is a staunch neocon whose record of favoring
American war adventures explains much of our current security danger.
Just as the last Clinton presidency set the stage for financial collapse, it also set the stage
for unending war. On October 31, 1998 President Clinton signed the
Iraq
Liberation Act that made it official US policy to support "regime change" in Iraq.
It should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed
by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and to promote the emergence of a democratic government to
replace that regime.
Thus were laid the foundations for the Iraq War in 2003.
Of course, by 2003, Hillary was a Senator and a staunch supporter of the Iraq War, which has
cost the US trillions of dollars, thousands of lives, and done more to create ISIS and Middle
East instability than any other single decision of modern foreign policy. In defending her vote,
Hillary parroted the phony propaganda of the CIA:
"In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein
has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability,
and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including
Al Qaeda members… "
After the Iraq Liberation Act came the 1999 Kosovo War, in which Bill Clinton called in NATO
to bomb Belgrade, in the heart of Europe, and unleashing another decade of unrest in the Balkans.
Hillary, traveling in Africa, called Bill: "I urged him to bomb," she told reporter Lucinda Frank.
Hillary's record as Secretary of State is among the most militaristic, and disastrous, of modern
US history . Some experience. Hilary was a staunch defender of the military-industrial-intelligence
complex at every turn, helping to spread the Iraq mayhem over a swath of violence that now stretches
from Mali to Afghanistan. Two disasters loom largest: Libya and Syria.
Hillary has been much attacked for the deaths of US diplomats in Benghazi, but her tireless
promotion of the overthrow Muammar Qaddafi by NATO bombing is the far graver disaster. Hillary
strongly promoted NATO-led regime change in Libya, not only in violation of international law
but counter to the most basic good judgment. After the NATO bombing, Libya descended into civil
war while the paramilitaries and unsecured arms stashes in Libya quickly spread west across the
African Sahel and east to Syria. The Libyan disaster has spawned war in Mali, fed weapons to Boko
Haram in Nigeria, and fueled ISIS in Syria and Iraq. In the meantime,
Hillary found it hilarious
to declare of Qaddafi: "We came, we saw, he died."
Perhaps the crowning disaster of this long list of disasters has been Hillary's relentless
promotion of CIA-led regime change in Syria . Once again Hillary bought into the CIA propaganda
that regime change to remove Bashir al-Assad would be quick, costless, and surely successful.
In August 2011, Hillary led the US into disaster with her declaration Assad must
"get out of the way," backed by
secret CIA operations.
Five years later, no place on the planet is more ravaged by unending war, and no place poses
a great threat to US security. More than 10 million Syrians are displaced, and the refugees are
drowning in the Mediterranean or undermining the political stability of Greece, Turkey, and the
European Union. Into the chaos created by the secret CIA-Saudi operations to overthrow Assad,
ISIS has filled the vacuum, and has used Syria as the base for worldwide terrorist attacks.
The list of her incompetence and warmongering goes on. Hillary's support at every turn for
NATO expansion, including even into Ukraine and Georgia against all common sense, was a trip wire
that violated the post-Cold War settlement in Europe in 1991 and that led to Russia's violent
counter-reactions in both Georgia and Ukraine. As Senator in 2008, Hilary co-sponsored
2008-SR439 , to include Ukraine and Georgia in NATO. As Secretary of State, she then presided
over the restart of the Cold War with Russia.
It is hard to know the roots of this record of disaster. Is it chronically bad judgment? Is
it her preternatural faith in the lying machine of the CIA? Is it a repeated attempt to show that
as a Democrat she would be more hawkish than the Republicans? Is it to satisfy her hardline campaign
financiers? Who knows? Maybe it's all of the above. But whatever the reasons, hers is a record
of disaster. Perhaps more than any other person, Hillary can lay claim to having stoked the violence
that stretches from West Africa to Central Asia and that threatens US security .
Trump would probably be the better choice in the question of war and peace than Clinton.
Clinton has expressly expressed the wish to establish a flight ban on Syria, or parts of it.
*** In truth, it would be an act of war. The risks are unpredictable. Above all, the risk of a
military conflict with Russia.
***
The highest soldier of the United States of America, General Joseph Dunford, President of the
United States General Staff of the United States Forces, is certain. To control the entire airspace
over Syria would mean war with Syria and Russia. Dunford's predecessor in office estimated a few
years ago that an effective flight bomb over Syria would involve the use of 70,000 soldiers and
a monthly cost of $ 1 billion.
But the bottom line is Clinton's proven historical track record … she's at least partly responsible
for war after catastrophic war and coup after disastrous coup in
Libya, Syria, Kosovo, Haiti, Honduras and
other countries
around the world.
"... Hillary has suggested on several occasions publicly that Trump cannot be trusted with the 'Nuclear Codes' because he is erratic and unstable. Now that most people agree that no matter where they came from the Wikileaks is telling the truth we can see how Hillary's own people are scared of her 'mood swings' and her health problems.... ..."
"... She is the one who should not have access to the Nuclear Codes much less be running for President ..."
"... Hillary's own campaign team is waging a war on women. ..."
"... The American media, nothing but despicable State Sycophant Propaganda Ministry runt traitors! ..."
"... Whether Russia is behind it or not is irrelevant. Its not like the USA is an innocent player in hacking other countries. What's of importance is the contents of the emails. Whoever hacked them - if any at all (they were most likely provided by disgruntled DNC insiders) did not alter them (as proven by security checks). HRC, the DNC and her campaign team are deeply corrupt, hence she is unqualified to lead the USA. ..."
"... So here's the REAL story. Amb. Stevens was sent to Benghazi post haste in order to retrieve US made Stinger missiles supplied to Ansar al Sharia without Congressional oversight or permission. Hillary brokered the deal through Stevens and a private arms dealer named Marc Turi. Then some of the shoulder fired missiles ended up in Afghanistan used against our own military. It was July 25th, 2012 when a Chinook helicopter was taken down by one of our own Stingers, but the idiot Taliban didn't arm the missile and the Chinook didn't explode, but had to land anyway. An ordnance team recovered the serial number off the missile which led back to a cache of Stingers being kept in Qatar by the CIA Obama and Hillary were now in full panic mode and Stevens was sent in to retrieve the rest of the Stingers. This was a "do-or-die" mission, which explains the stand down orders given to multiple commando teams. ..."
"... It was the State Dept, not the CIA that supplied them to our sworn enemies, because Petraeus wouldn't supply these deadly weapons due to their potential use on commercial aircraft. Then, Obama threw Gen. Petraeus under the bus after he refused to testify that he OK'd the BS talking points about a spontaneous uprising due to a Youtube video. ..."
"... Obama and Hillary committed treason...and THIS is what the investigation is all about, why she had a private server, (in order to delete the digital evidence), and why Obama, two weeks after the attack, told the UN that the attack was because of a Youtube video, even though everyone knew it was not. Further...the Taliban knew that this administration aided and abetted the enemy without Congressional approval when Boehner created the Select Cmte, and the Taliban began pushing the Obama Administration for the release of 5 Taliban Generals. Bowe Bergdahl was just a pawn...everyone KNEW he was a traitor. ..."
Hillary has suggested on several occasions publicly that Trump cannot be trusted with the 'Nuclear
Codes' because he is erratic and unstable. Now that most people agree that no matter where they came
from the Wikileaks is telling the truth we can see how Hillary's own people are scared of her 'mood
swings' and her health problems....
She is the one who should not have access to the Nuclear
Codes much less be running for President because she also is a Criminal and belongs in Federal
Prison.
This is coded speech microaggression. They are discriminating against her because she is a
woman, implying she is 'moody' you know 'hysterical'... hysterectomy... its sexist, its misogynist
its harassment, its abuse, its hate speech.
Come on Liberal media, where are you ... call it out... this is your bread and butter...
Hillary's own campaign team is waging a war on women.
They did it to Sarah Palin and Barbara Bachman... You know they'd do it if Trump said Hillary
was 'moody'.
The American media, nothing but despicable State Sycophant Propaganda Ministry runt traitors!
Whether Russia is behind it or not is irrelevant. Its not like the USA is an innocent player
in hacking other countries. What's of importance is the contents of the emails. Whoever hacked
them - if any at all (they were most likely provided by disgruntled DNC insiders) did not alter
them (as proven by security checks). HRC, the DNC and her campaign team are deeply corrupt, hence
she is unqualified to lead the USA.
Wikileaks needs to get this out (I have not verified the info sent to me last night):
So here's the REAL story. Amb. Stevens was sent to Benghazi post haste in order to retrieve
US made Stinger missiles supplied to Ansar al Sharia without Congressional oversight or permission.
Hillary brokered the deal through Stevens and a private arms dealer named Marc Turi. Then some
of the shoulder fired missiles ended up in Afghanistan used against our own military. It was July
25th, 2012 when a Chinook helicopter was taken down by one of our own Stingers, but the idiot
Taliban didn't arm the missile and the Chinook didn't explode, but had to land anyway. An ordnance
team recovered the serial number off the missile which led back to a cache of Stingers being kept
in Qatar by the CIA Obama and Hillary were now in full panic mode and Stevens was sent in to
retrieve the rest of the Stingers. This was a "do-or-die" mission, which explains the stand down
orders given to multiple commando teams.
It was the State Dept, not the CIA that supplied them to our sworn enemies, because Petraeus
wouldn't supply these deadly weapons due to their potential use on commercial aircraft. Then,
Obama threw Gen. Petraeus under the bus after he refused to testify that he OK'd the BS talking
points about a spontaneous uprising due to a Youtube video.
Obama and Hillary committed treason...and THIS is what the investigation is all about,
why she had a private server, (in order to delete the digital evidence), and why Obama, two weeks
after the attack, told the UN that the attack was because of a Youtube video, even though everyone
knew it was not. Further...the Taliban knew that this administration aided and abetted the enemy
without Congressional approval when Boehner created the Select Cmte, and the Taliban began pushing
the Obama Administration for the release of 5 Taliban Generals. Bowe Bergdahl was just a pawn...everyone
KNEW he was a traitor.
So we have a traitor as POTUS that is not only corrupt, but compromised...and a woman that
is a serial liar, perjured herself multiple times at the Hearing whom is running for POTUS. Only
the Dems, with their hands out, palms up, will support her. Perhaps this is why no military aircraft
was called in…because the administration knew our enemies had Stingers.
Tim Kaine: "I don't think we can dignify documents dumped by WikiLeaks and just assume that they're
all accurate and true,"
They were confirmed true when John Podesta's Twitter password was distributed in one of the
WikiLeaks email releases and his Twitter account was hijacked the same day by a troll saying,
"Trump 2016! Hi pol". Checkmate b!tch. see more DNC Russian Hacker Pepe
Regular Guy •
12 minutes ago The way they parse words, the Kaine statement still doesn't state the documents
are not accurate. He makes an editorial statement to mislead the listener into thinking there
is some reason to question the facts.
Sounds pretty much like poor temperament to me when you have mood problems. Can we please put
national security on hold for now, we have to check her mood ring. It is imperative for the best
outcome that we check her head space. WOW! That's a real dumb explanation. Maybe if we use the
word mood instead of temperament that will be better than telling people she has health problems
in her head.
"... So here's the REAL story. Amb. Stevens was sent to Benghazi post haste in order to retrieve US made Stinger missiles supplied to Ansar al Sharia without Congressional oversight or permission. Hillary brokered the deal through Stevens and a private arms dealer named Marc Turi. Then some of the shoulder fired missiles ended up in Afghanistan used against our own military. It was July 25th, 2012 when a Chinook helicopter was taken down by one of our own Stingers, but the idiot Taliban didn't arm the missile and the Chinook didn't explode, but had to land anyway. An ordnance team recovered the serial number off the missile which led back to a cache of Stingers being kept in Qatar by the CIA Obama and Hillary were now in full panic mode and Stevens was sent in to retrieve the rest of the Stingers. This was a "do-or-die" mission, which explains the stand down orders given to multiple commando teams. ..."
"... It was the State Dept, not the CIA that supplied them to our sworn enemies, because Petraeus wouldn't supply these deadly weapons due to their potential use on commercial aircraft. Then, Obama threw Gen. Petraeus under the bus after he refused to testify that he OK'd the BS talking points about a spontaneous uprising due to a Youtube video. ..."
"... Obama and Hillary committed treason...and THIS is what the investigation is all about, why she had a private server, (in order to delete the digital evidence), and why Obama, two weeks after the attack, told the UN that the attack was because of a Youtube video, even though everyone knew it was not. Further...the Taliban knew that this administration aided and abetted the enemy without Congressional approval when Boehner created the Select Cmte, and the Taliban began pushing the Obama Administration for the release of 5 Taliban Generals. Bowe Bergdahl was just a pawn...everyone KNEW he was a traitor. ..."
Wikileaks needs to get this out (I have not verified the info sent to me last night):
So here's the REAL story. Amb. Stevens was sent to Benghazi post haste in order to
retrieve US made Stinger missiles supplied to Ansar al Sharia without Congressional oversight
or permission. Hillary brokered the deal through Stevens and a private arms dealer named Marc
Turi. Then some of the shoulder fired missiles ended up in Afghanistan used against our own
military. It was July 25th, 2012 when a Chinook helicopter was taken down by one of our own
Stingers, but the idiot Taliban didn't arm the missile and the Chinook didn't explode, but had
to land anyway. An ordnance team recovered the serial number off the missile which led back to
a cache of Stingers being kept in Qatar by the CIA Obama and Hillary were now in full panic
mode and Stevens was sent in to retrieve the rest of the Stingers. This was a "do-or-die"
mission, which explains the stand down orders given to multiple commando teams.
It was the State Dept, not the CIA that supplied them to our sworn enemies, because
Petraeus wouldn't supply these deadly weapons due to their potential use on commercial
aircraft. Then, Obama threw Gen. Petraeus under the bus after he refused to testify that he
OK'd the BS talking points about a spontaneous uprising due to a Youtube video.
Obama and Hillary committed treason...and THIS is what the investigation is all about,
why she had a private server, (in order to delete the digital evidence), and why Obama, two
weeks after the attack, told the UN that the attack was because of a Youtube video, even
though everyone knew it was not. Further...the Taliban knew that this administration aided and
abetted the enemy without Congressional approval when Boehner created the Select Cmte, and the
Taliban began pushing the Obama Administration for the release of 5 Taliban Generals. Bowe
Bergdahl was just a pawn...everyone KNEW he was a traitor.
So we have a traitor as POTUS that is not only corrupt, but compromised...and a woman that
is a serial liar, perjured herself multiple times at the Hearing whom is running for POTUS.
Only the Dems, with their hands out, palms up, will support her. Perhaps this is why no
military aircraft was called in…because the administration knew our enemies had Stingers.
"... A few comparisons are in order. In their fine review of French history since 1870, Alice L. Conklin, Sarah Fishman, and Robert Zaretsky point out that French leaders at Vichy had several bargaining chips they could use against Hitler, but decided not to play them "because they had other priorities on their mind, including a 'National Revolution' to remake France, politically, socially, and economically." ..."
"... Petain was accompanied by legions of experts, administrators, and technocrats, who shared Petain's disdain for ordinary people and democratic processes, and by strident French fascists who even welcomed their country's defeat. Indeed, although fascists hated democracy, they also believed that Petain's measures did not go far enough to remake the country's institutions. The main thing this menagerie of "minorities" -- to use Stanley Hoffmann's phrase -- had in common was the loathing they shared of their own country. ..."
"... France was saved from its Vichy insanities by a country that was proclaimed, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, as the "last best hope on earth" -- that is, by the United States. The question is: Who will save America from its own Vichy regime? ..."
For the French, revisiting the time period when the Vichy Regime ruled what was left of the
country after its humiliating defeat by the Germans in 1940 involves trauma. But the lessons
imparted by those dark years of Nazi occupation transcend historical era and nationality,
touching upon equivalent circumstances in the United States for the past few years. Equivalent,
not identical: clearly, phalanxes of Nazi troops aren't goose-stepping down Pennsylvania
Avenue....
A few comparisons are in order. In their fine review of French history since 1870, Alice L. Conklin,
Sarah Fishman, and Robert Zaretsky point out that French leaders at Vichy had several bargaining
chips they could use against Hitler, but decided not to play them "because they had other priorities
on their mind, including a 'National Revolution' to remake France, politically, socially, and economically."
France's new leader, the 84-year-old Marshall Petain, was a deeply reactionary veteran who loathed
the Third Republic crushed by the Germans and vowed to take advantage of France's crisis to obliterate
the past and install a centralized, authoritarian government. His rejection of liberalism, egalitarianism,
and democracy prompted measures designed to return France to its pre-revolutionary roots: cities,
industrial plants, and factories were rejected in favor of a return to nature, to villages and small
shops. On top of this heap of nouveau-peasantry loomed the Marshall himself, whose grandfatherly
physiognomy was plastered on buildings in public arenas all over the country to remind French subjects
of who was in charge.
Petain was accompanied by legions of experts, administrators, and technocrats, who shared Petain's
disdain for ordinary people and democratic processes, and by strident French fascists who even welcomed
their country's defeat. Indeed, although fascists hated democracy, they also believed that Petain's
measures did not go far enough to remake the country's institutions. The main thing this menagerie
of "minorities" -- to use Stanley Hoffmann's phrase -- had in common was the loathing they shared
of their own country.
... .. ..
Further, like his aged counterpart before him, President Obama took advantage of a crisis to
"transform" American institutions instead of grappling with the country's main problems --
national debt, unemployment, recession, and burgeoning entitlement costs, to name a few. He made
matters worse by augmenting entitlements, exploding federal deficits, exacerbating unemployment,
and blaming others for the inevitable mess that ensued...
... ... ...
France was saved from its Vichy insanities by a country that was proclaimed, in the words of Abraham
Lincoln, as the "last best hope on earth" -- that is, by the United States. The question is: Who
will save America from its own Vichy regime?
Dr. Marvin Folkertsma is a professor of political science and Fellow for American Studies with
The Center for Vision & Values
at Grove City College. The author of several books, his latest release is a high-energy
novel titled "The Thirteenth Commandment."
"... The discussion, which was released by WikiLeaks from a batch of messages apparently stolen from Podesta's account, sheds additional light on the campaign's lack of preparation for questions about Clinton's bespoke setup. The private email arrangement has become a cloud over the Democratic presidential nominee and spurred a yearlong FBI investigation. ..."
Hillary Clinton presidential campaign-in-waiting appeared unprepared for a New York Times story
last year that exposed her exclusive use of private email account and server for government business,
according to a newly released email.
The day the
Times story was published, John Podesta, who would later be named campaign chairman, asked future
campaign manager Robby Mook
if he had seen it coming
.
"Did you have any idea of the depth of this story?" Podesta asked Mook in an email late on the evening
of March 2, 2015, roughly a month before Clinton launched her bid for the White House.
"Nope," Mook responded after 1 a.m. that night. "We brought up the existence of emails in research
(sic) this summer, but were told that everything was taken care of."
The discussion, which was released by WikiLeaks from a batch of messages apparently stolen from
Podesta's account, sheds additional light on the campaign's lack of preparation for questions about
Clinton's bespoke setup. The private email arrangement has become a cloud over the Democratic presidential
nominee and spurred a yearlong FBI investigation.
The email released on Thursday is one of several published by WikiLeaks detailing the Clinton
campaign's scurrying response to revelations about her email server.
Days later, President Obama would say that he was unaware of Clinton's email setup until it
became public knowledge.
However, Clinton's aides knew that he and the former secretary of State had exchanged emails,
and they worried that contradicted Obama's public statement.
"[W]e need to clean this up - he has emails from her - they do not say state.gov," Cheryl Mills,
Clinton's former State Department chief of staff,
told other aides on March 7.
The White House later said Obama was aware of Clinton's email address but did not know the
full scope of her unusual setup. Notes from the FBI investigation into Clinton's arrangement revealed
that Obama
used a pseudonym for emailing with Clinton and others.
As
an old SDS-er, I found it hard to see Tom Hayden go. However meandering his path, he was at the heart
of radical history in the 60s, an erstwhile companion, if not always a comrade, on the route of every
boomer lefty.
One of his finer moments for me, which I've never seen mentioned (including among this week's
encomia) since he wrote it, was his 2006
article
, published on CounterPunch with an introduction by Alexander Cockburn, in which he apologized
for a "descent into moral ambiguity and realpolitick that still haunts me today." It would be respectful
of Hayden's admirers and critics, on the occasion of his passing, to remember which of his actions
"haunted" him the most.
The title of the article says it clearly: "I Was Israel's Dupe." In the essay, Hayden apologizes
for his support of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, which was for him that "descent into
moral ambiguity" More importantly, he explains why he did it, in a detailed narrative that everyone
should read.
Hayden sold out, as he tells it, because, in order to run as a Democratic candidate for the California
State Assembly, he had get the approval of the influential Democratic congressman Howard Berman.
Berman is a guy who, when he became Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, was proud to
tell the
Forward that he took the job because of his "interest in the Jewish state" and that: "Even before
I was a Democrat, I was a Zionist."
Hayden had to meet with Howard's brother Michael, who, acting as "the gatekeeper protecting
Los Angeles' Westside for Israel's political interests," told Hayden: "I represent the Israeli Defense
Forces"-a sentence that could serve as the motto of most American congress critters today. The "Berman-Waxman
machine," Hayden was told, would deign to "rent" him the Assembly seat on the "one condition: that
I always be a 'good friend of Israel.'"
But American congressmen were not the only "gatekeepers" through whose hands Hayden had to pass
before being allowed to run for Congress. Other "certifiers" included "the elites, beginning with
rabbis and heads of the multiple mainstream Jewish organizations, the American-Israel Political
Action Committee (AIPAC), [and].. Israeli ambassadors, counsels general and other officials."
In fact, Hayden had to, in his words, be "declared 'kosher' by the ultimate source, the region's
representative of the state of Israel," Benjamin Navon, Israel's Counsul-general in Los Angeles.
In other words, in this article Hayden was describing, in an unusually concrete way, how the
state of Israel, through its state officials and their compliant American partners, was effectively
managing-exercising veto power over Democratic Party candidates, at the very least-American elections
down to the level of State Assembly . In any constituency "attuned to the question of Israel,
even in local and state elections," Hayden knew he "had to be certified 'kosher,' not once but over
and over again."
This experience prompted Hayden to express a "fear that the 'Israeli lobby' is working overtime
to influence American public opinion on behalf of Israel's military effort to 'roll back the clock'
and 'change the map' of the region." Hayden warned of the "trepidation and confusion among rank-and-file
voters and activists, and the paralysis of politicians, especially Democrats," over support of Israel.
He vowed to "not make the same mistake again," and said: "Most important, Americans must not be timid
in speaking up, as I was 25 years ago."
Whatever else he did-and he was never particularly radical about Palestine-this article was a
genuinely honest and unusual intervention, and it deserves a lot more notice-as a moment in Tom Hayden's
history and that of the American left-than it has got. Looking back and regretfully acknowledging
that one had been duped and morally compromised by what seemed the least troublesome path 25 years
earlier, saying "I woulda, shoulda, coulda done the right thing," is a haunting moment for anyone.
Doing it in a way that exposes in detail how a foreign country constantly manipulates American elections
over decades is worthy of everyone's notice.
I doubt Hillary and her Democratic supporters will have anything to say about this "interference
"in American elections, even local and state. But I do hope many of those who are touched by the
loss of Tom Hayden heed these words from him, and don't wait another 25 years to overcome their "fear
and confusion" about saying and doing the right thing regarding the crimes of Israel, troublesome
as that might be.
"... The announcement comes at a pivotal time in Clinton's presidential campaign, as recent polls have suggested she is strongly favored to win the presidential election. But with this recent development-coupled with embarrassing revelations recently released by WikiLeaks implicating the Clinton Foundation and exposing Clinton's policies as little more than political expediency --- a victory that seemed almost inevitable is now in jeopardy. ..."
"... What's more likely is that James Comey chose to announce the new evidence under the review in the investigation shortly after it was discovered, rather than wait to announce its review after the election, as that would politicize the investigation. If Democrats didn't want an FBI investigation impacting their presidential candidate, then they shouldn't have propped up a candidate who was under a FBI criminal investigation. ..."
The
FBI announced on October 28 that they are reopening their investigation into
Hillary Clinton's private email server.
"In connection with an unrelated case, the
FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation.
I am writing to inform you that the investigative team briefed me on this yesterday, and I agreed
that the
FBI should take appropriate investigative steps designed to allow investigators to review these
emails to determine whether they contain classified information, as well as to assess their importance
to our investigation," wrote FBI Director
James Comey in a
statement
.
The announcement comes at a pivotal time in
Clinton's presidential campaign, as recent polls have suggested she is strongly favored to win
the presidential election. But with this recent development-coupled with embarrassing revelations
recently released by
WikiLeaks implicating the
Clinton Foundation and exposing
Clinton's policies as little more than political expediency --- a victory that seemed almost
inevitable is now in jeopardy.
WikiLeaks emails from
Clinton Campaign Chair John Podesta confirmed criticisms of
Clinton's private email server. In the
leaked emails , her staff is shown coordinating with the State Department, the
White House , the Department of Justice, and
mainstream media to cover up the scandal and distort it as a partisan issue to protect
Clinton's presidential candidacy. Reports from the
State
Department Inspector General , FBI Director Comey, and two reports on the
FBI's investigation have effectively disproven every defense of
Clinton's private email server that has been utilized by
Clinton partisans since it's use was first revealed in early 2015.
And pro-Clinton
journalists are already trying to spin the FBI's latest announcement.
Newsweek 's Kurt Eichenwald
falsely claimed the FBI wasn't re-opening their investigation but that FBI Director Comey had
to amend his previous testimony. But Comey never testified the FBI reviewed all the evidence-rather,
he testified there is a list of evidence we saw in the investigation. If Eichenwald is correct about
Comey needing to amend his testimony, it is because the FBI found new evidence that suggests
Clinton is guilty. Eichenwald, notorious for touting disproven assumptions and theories-as with
a
Russian conspiracy theory he still pushes, which
The Washington Post , BuzzFeed and other news outlets have debunked-is incorrect. The FBI
investigation is being reopened because new emails were discovered, and the FBI is going to review
them.
Ian Millhiser of Think Progress , founded by Podesta,
called Comey
"extremely careless" for reopening the investigation before the election, and claimed the FBI director
was meddling in the election by doing so because he is a Republican. This is the same argument
Clinton partisans refuted when critics argued politics played a role in Comey's initial decision
not to recommend an indictment.
MSNBC's Joy
Reid made the same claim that Comey was meddling in the election.
What's more likely is that James Comey chose to announce the new evidence under the review
in the investigation shortly after it was discovered, rather than wait to announce its review after
the election, as that would politicize the investigation. If
Democrats
didn't want an FBI investigation impacting their presidential candidate, then they shouldn't
have propped up a candidate who was under a FBI criminal investigation.
"... The New York Times is reporting that the emails came from the FBI's investigation into the sexting habits of former New York Congressman Anthony Weiner , who was married to Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton's all-purpose factotum. The idea that another hack by persons unknown has truly opened Pandora's Box for Clinton, Inc. less than two weeks before the election, seems too delicious for some Republicans to contemplate. ..."
"... It could be the long-awaited "smoking gun" that establishes serious criminality by Clinton, Inc.-or it could be more emails of Hillary discussing yoga and how to figure out the DVR. ..."
"... That said, Democrats who are wordsmithing this development and prematurely declaring that it's no big deal-or worse, some nefarious Trumpian plot-need to step back and let the FBI do its job. It seems unlikely that the Bureau will wrap this up before November 8, and since Comey has informed Congress what's going on, the FBI director won't be telling the public much either. ..."
"... Just over a year ago I predicted that EmailGate was far from over, and it remains very much alive today, despite the best efforts of Hillary Clinton, her staff, and her ardent defenders in the media. Nobody should expect that the Democratic nominee will be charged with any crimes in EmailGate: the naked interference of President Obama's Justice Department in this case demonstrates that reality. ..."
"... However, this scandal remains very much alive as a political matter, and less than two weeks before the election, politics is what matters now. Hillary has never come up with very good answers about why she strictly avoided the use of State Department email when she was the boss at Foggy Bottom, much less why her "unclassified" emails contained so much highly classified information -and she seems unlikely to, all of a sudden. ..."
"... Throughout this scandal, Friday news-dumps have been a regular feature, per well-honed Beltway bureaucratic practice. This one may be the biggest of all. ..."
Newly incriminating Clinton emails may have been found during the FBI's investigation into the
sexting habits of former NY Congressman Anthony Weiner
FBI Is Re-Opening Clinton E-Mail Investigation Oct. 28 -- The inquiry into Hillary Clinton's use
of private e-mail as secretary of state is being re-opened by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
FBI Director James Comey sent a letter to Congressional committee chairman alerting them of his decision.
Bloomberg's Margaret Talev reports on "Bloomberg Markets."
Just 11 days before our presidential election, the explosive issue of EmailGate is back in the
news, thanks to James Comey, the FBI director who
less than four months ago gave Hillary Clinton a pass on her illegal use of email and a personal
server when the Democratic nominee was secretary of state.
After weeks of damaging revelations care of Wikileaks about just how much the Clinton camp knew
about EmailGate for years, and tried to downplay its significance in the media, Comey today sent
a
letter to the chairmen of the relevant Congressional committees-including, significantly, the
House and Senate Intelligence and Judiciary committees -- that blows EmailGate wide open all over again.
He says:
"In previous congressional testimony, I referred to the fact that the Federal Bureau of
Investigation (FBI) had completed its investigation of former Secretary Clinton's personal email
server. Due to recent developments, I am writing to supplement my previous testimony.
In connection with an unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of emails that
appear to be pertinent to the investigation. I am writing to inform you that the investigative
team briefed me on this yesterday, and I agreed that the FBI should take appropriate investigative
steps designed to allow investigators to review these emails to determine whether they contain
classified information, as well as to assess their importance to our investigation.
Although the FBI cannot yet assess whether or not this material may be significant, and
I cannot predict how long it will take us to complete this additional work, I believe it is important
to update your Committees about our efforts in light of my previous testimony."
Having
taken Comey to task for his serious mishandling of the FBI's year-long EmailGate investigation-particularly
how his account of what the Bureau discovered made Hillary's guilt clear, but he still declined to
ask the Department of Justice to seek prosecution-he deserves some credit for due diligence here.
It requires some political fortitude to do this practically on an election's eve.
Clearly the FBI has uncovered new emails-the mention of "connection with an unrelated case" is
intriguingly vague-that may (or may not) have relevance to the investigation. We don't yet know what
that information might be, or how it was obtained, but rumors are swirling as usual. Some are pointing
a finger at a leaker inside the U.S. Government; other rumors point to a foreign origin of these
newly discovered emails. The New York Times is reporting that the emails came from the
FBI's investigation into the sexting habits of former New York Congressman Anthony Weiner , who
was married to Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton's all-purpose factotum. The idea that another hack by
persons unknown has truly opened Pandora's Box for Clinton, Inc. less than two weeks before the election,
seems too delicious for some Republicans to contemplate.
In truth, the FBI isn't reopening the EmailGate investigation because it was never actually closed.
Director Comey here is merely doing what he's legally required to: inform the relevant Congressional
committees that new information which may have relevance has been discovered, and the FBI is now
assessing its value to the on-going investigation.
Republicans shouldn't get too excited just yet, since Comey hasn't told us anything about the
provenance of these emails. It could be the long-awaited "smoking gun" that establishes serious criminality
by Clinton, Inc.-or it could be more emails of Hillary discussing yoga and how to figure out the DVR.
That said,
Democrats who are wordsmithing this development and prematurely declaring that it's no big deal-or
worse, some nefarious Trumpian plot-need to step back and let the FBI do its job. It seems unlikely
that the Bureau will wrap this up before November 8, and since Comey has informed Congress what's
going on, the FBI director won't be telling the public much either.
Just over a year ago I
predicted that EmailGate was far from over, and it remains very much alive today, despite the
best efforts of Hillary Clinton, her staff, and her ardent defenders in the media. Nobody should
expect that the Democratic nominee will be charged with any crimes in EmailGate: the naked interference
of President Obama's Justice Department in this case demonstrates that reality.
However, this scandal remains very much alive as a political matter, and less than two weeks before
the election, politics is what matters now. Hillary has never come up with very good answers about
why she strictly avoided the use of State Department email when she was the boss at Foggy Bottom,
much less why her "unclassified" emails contained
so much highly classified information -and she seems unlikely to, all of a sudden.
For Team Clinton, EmailGate remains a nightmare that they would really prefer not to talk about.
But here we are, talking about it all over again, thanks to Director Comey. Throughout this scandal,
Friday news-dumps have been a regular feature, per well-honed Beltway bureaucratic practice. This
one may be the biggest of all.
Just 11 days before our presidential election, the explosive issue of EmailGate is back in
the news, thanks to James Comey, the FBI director who less than four months ago gave Hillary Clinton
a pass on her illegal use of email and a personal server when the Democratic nominee was secretary
of state.
After weeks of damaging revelations care of Wikileaks about just how much the Clinton camp
knew about EmailGate for years, and tried to downplay its significance in the media, Comey today
sent a letter to the chairmen of the relevant Congressional committees-including, significantly,
the House and Senate Intelligence and Judiciary committees-that blows EmailGate wide open all
over again. He says:
ADVERTISING
"In previous congressional testimony, I referred to the fact that the Federal Bureau of Investigation
(FBI) had completed its investigation of former Secretary Clinton's personal email server. Due
to recent developments, I am writing to supplement my previous testimony.
In connection with an unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear
to be pertinent to the investigation. I am writing to inform you that the investigative team briefed
me on this yesterday, and I agreed that the FBI should take appropriate investigative steps designed
to allow investigators to review these emails to determine whether they contain classified information,
as well as to assess their importance to our investigation.
Although the FBI cannot yet assess whether or not this material may be significant, and I cannot
predict how long it will take us to complete this additional work, I believe it is important to
update your Committees about our efforts in light of my previous testimony." ...
Fred C. Dobbs -> Fred C. Dobbs... , -1
New Emails in Clinton Case Came From Devices Once
Used by Anthony Weiner http://nyti.ms/2dU5zed
NYT - Oct 28
Just 11 days before our presidential election, the explosive issue of EmailGate is back in
the news, thanks to James Comey, the FBI director who less than four months ago gave Hillary Clinton
a pass on her illegal use of email and a personal server when the Democratic nominee was secretary
of state.
After weeks of damaging revelations care of Wikileaks about just how much the Clinton camp
knew about EmailGate for years, and tried to downplay its significance in the media, Comey today
sent a letter to the chairmen of the relevant Congressional committees-including, significantly,
the House and Senate Intelligence and Judiciary committees-that blows EmailGate wide open all
over again. He says:
ADVERTISING
"In previous congressional testimony, I referred to the fact that the Federal Bureau of Investigation
(FBI) had completed its investigation of former Secretary Clinton's personal email server. Due
to recent developments, I am writing to supplement my previous testimony.
In connection with an unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear
to be pertinent to the investigation. I am writing to inform you that the investigative team briefed
me on this yesterday, and I agreed that the FBI should take appropriate investigative steps designed
to allow investigators to review these emails to determine whether they contain classified information,
as well as to assess their importance to our investigation.
Although the FBI cannot yet assess whether or not this material may be significant, and I cannot
predict how long it will take us to complete this additional work, I believe it is important to
update your Committees about our efforts in light of my previous testimony." ...
Fred C. Dobbs -> Fred C. Dobbs... , -1
New Emails in Clinton Case Came From Devices Once
Used by Anthony Weiner http://nyti.ms/2dU5zed
NYT - Oct 28
ilsm : , -1
Suddenly, the FBI finding 'stuff'.
Too many 'agency' whistleblowers have been talking to congress persons!
Will the country be better off with a 'Nixon' gone in a few months or Trump with no public
trial of the crooked [yes, redundant word use] DNC 'establishment'?
As
CNBC adds , Donald Trump seized on the news Friday that the FBI is probing new emails related to Hillary Clinton's private server,
contending that she threatens United States security and cannot be trusted in the White House. "I have great respect for the fact
that the FBI and Department of Justice are now willing to have the courage to right the horrible mistake that they made," Trump said
at a rally in New Hampshire. "This was a grave miscarriage of justice that the American people fully understood and is about to be
corrected."
"In connection with an unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation.
I am writing to inform you that the investigative team briefed me on this yesterday, and I agreed that the FBI should take appropriate
investigative steps designed to allow investigators to review these emails to determine whether they contain classified information,
as well as to assess their importance to our investigation," Comey wrote.
"Although the FBI cannot yet assess whether or not this material may be significant, and I cannot predict how long it will take
us to complete this additional work, I believe it is important to update your Committees about our efforts in light of my previous
testimony," he concluded.
Trump claimed that "Clinton's corruption is on a scale we have never seen before."
Update:
More details from
CNN which writes that after recommending this year that the Department of Justice not press charges against the Secretary of
State, Comey said in the letter to eight congressional committee chairman that "recent developments" urged him to take another look.
"In connection with an unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear pertinent to the investigation,"
Comey wrote the chairmen. "I am writing to inform you that the investigative team briefed me on this yesterday, and I agreed that
the FBI should take appropriate investigative steps designed to allow investigators to review these emails to determine whether they
contain classified information, as well as to assess their importance to our investigation."
Comey said that he was not sure how long the additional review would take and said the FBI "cannot yet assess whether or not this
material may be significant."
Law enforcement sources say the newly discovered emails are not related to WikiLeaks or the Clinton Foundation. They would not
describe in further detail the content of the emails. It's also unclear whether the emails in question are from Clinton herself.
Clinton's campaign learned of the news while they were aboard a flight to Iowa. "We're learning about this just like you all are,"
a Clinton aide told CNN.
The surprising news jolts a presidential race that had largely settled as Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump struggled
in national and key battleground polls. Now, Clinton will be placed back on the defensive and forced to confront yet again questions
about her trustworthiness.
* * *
As we detailed earlier, in a stunning development moments ago Jason Chaffetz tweeted that the FBI's probe into Hillary Clinton
emails has been reopened: saying that "The FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation."
FBI Dir just informed me, "The FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation."
Case reopened
After being briefed by his investigative team, Comey "agreed that the FBI should take appropriate investigative steps designed
to allow investigators to review these emails to determine whether they contain classified information, as well as to asses their
importance to our investigation." Comey said he could not predict how long it would take the bureau to assess whether the new emails
are "significant."
Moments later, NBC News reported that the agency was reopening the investigation and shared a letter from FBI director James Comey
informing key lawmakers of the investigation.. .
"In connection with an unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation,"
Comey wrote.
"I am writing to inform you that the investigative team briefed me on this yesterday, and I agreed that the FBI should take
appropriate investigative steps designed to allow investigators to review these emails to determine whether they contain classified
information," Comey wrote
The full letter to members of Congress, in which FBI director James Comey said the agency had "learned of the existence of emails
that appear to be pertinent to the investigation" in connection with an unrelated case, is shown below.
No, it's not for real. How much more evidence can you possibly need? She is guilty of at least 5 violations of federal law by
any objective measure and they let her walk. Anyone thinking this will go any different hasn't been paying attention. Banana republic,
two sets of laws.
Blink and you missed it: in a brief, 3 minute 47 second address to the press, a defiant Hillary slammed the FBI, said that she hopes
that whatever information the Bureau has will be shared with the American people and added that she is confident that no charges
will be brought against her by the FBI, while taking the opportunity to ask people to go out and vote for her.
She took three questions which some have mockingly said were drafted and/or preapproved by Clinton campaign direction of communications
Jennifer Palmier.
"We are 11 days out from perhaps the most important national election of our lifetimes," Clinton said during the brief press conference
in Des Moines, Iowa. "Voting is already underway in our country, so the American people deserve to get the full and complete facts
immediately."
Hillary revealed that the FBI had not contacted her before or since Comey sent a letter to lawmakers Friday afternoon.
"So we don't know the facts, which is why we are calling on the FBI to release all the information that it has," she said.
"Even Director Comey noted that this new information may not be significant, so let's get it out."
Comey's letter said that the FBI was reviewing pertinent emails that it found in an unrelated investigation, but did not reveal
much more than that. Republicans and the GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump quickly pounced on the news.
Clinton was asked about a New York Times report that said the FBI had found the new emails in its separate investigation into
Anthony Weiner's sexting scandal.
"We've heard these rumors," she said "We don't know what to believe. And I'm sure there will be even more rumors. That's why it's
incumbent on the FBI to tell us what they're talking about, Jeff. Your guess is as good as mine and I don't think that's not good
enough."
Watch the brief recording below:
BREAKING: Hillary Clinton addresses FBI director's revelation of new review related to private email server case.
https://t.co/vSxftfXcIZ
Hillary's statement was similar to what Tim Kaine said earlier: it's "very, very troubling" that the FBI is releasing information
about a new probe into emails that may relate to Hillary Clinton just 11 days before the election. The Democratic vice presidential
nominee is commenting on the development in an interview with Vice News. Kaine says the FBI director needs to provide more details
on the situation. He suggests it's troubling that members of the press are finding out information before campaign officials. Kaine's
comments in turn echo the a statement made by Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, and thus by Hillary.
* * *
Finally, President Obama is staying silent - for now - on the FBI director's announcement of an investigation into new emails
related to Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server. Obama is in Orlando, Florida, where according to AP he is encouraging
voters - young voters in particular - to take advantage of their opportunity to cast their ballots before Election Day on Nov. 8.
by
Tyler Durden
Oct 28, 2016 3:22 PM
0
SHARES
In the latest stunning revelation in today's saga involving the FBI's second probe,
moments ago the
NYT reported
that the
new emails uncovered in the closed investigation into
Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server were discovered after the F.B.I. seized
electronic devices belonging to Huma Abedin and her husband, Anthony Weiner.
The F.B.I. is investigating illicit text messages that Mr. Weiner sent to
a 15-year-old girl in North Carolina
. The bureau told Congress on Friday
that it had uncovered new emails related to the Clinton case - one federal official
said they numbered in the thousands - potentially reigniting an issue that has
weighed on the presidential campaign and offering a lifeline to Donald J. Trump less
than two weeks before the election.
Until recently Anthony Weiner was married to Hillary Clinton's closest aide, Huma
Abedin, who separated from Weiner recently after news emerged that Weiner had engaged in
an online affair with an underage girl
.
The F.B.I. told Congress that it had uncovered new emails related to the closed
investigation into whether Mrs. Clinton or her aides had mishandled classified
information, potentially reigniting an issue that has weighed on the presidential
campaign and offering a lifeline to Donald J. Trump less than two weeks before the
election.
One clue as to what the FBI may have uncovered comes courtesy of FOIAed Judicial
Watch email disclosures, revealed one month ago, according to which Hillary Clinton's
chief of staff at the State Department, Cheryl Mills, had received classified national
security information through one of two or three personal, unsecured email accounts she
regularly used to communicate with Clinton aide Huma Abedin.
Approximately 10 percent of Abedin's emails released through Judicial Watch Freedom
of Information Act requests were addressed to one of Mills' various personal email
addresses. As
WND reported at the time
,
several were found to contain such highly
sensitive material that the State Department redacted 100 percent of the content pages,
marking many pages with a bold stamp reading "PAGE DENIED
."
Of the more than 160 emails in the latest Judicial Watch release, some 110
emails – two-thirds of the total – were forwarded by Abedin to two personal addresses
she controlled
. The Washington Times reported in August 2015 that the State
Department had admitted to a federal judge that Abedin and Mills used personal email
accounts to conduct government business in addition to Clinton's private
clintonemail.com to transact State Department business.
In a curious twist, one heavily redacted email, dated May 15, 2009, was sent by the
infamous Doug Band (who until today was the primary source of headaches for Hillary
Clinton due to his role as head of the Clinton Foundation-linked Teneo consulting firm
whose recently leaked confidential memo exposed the fund flows involving Bill Clinton),
to Mills at a personal address and to Huma Abedin at her State Department address.
Band was forwarding to Mills and Abedin an email request from an associate who was
seeking a State Department position in Charleston, South Carolina. Attached was a letter
that the office-seeker had first sent to Bill Clinton containing the office-seeker's
resume . In the email Band was making a State Department job request on behalf of a
Clinton Foundation and/or Teneo-related person.
The email from Band was completely redacted, except for a salutation and first
sentence. The letter the office-seeker had sent to President Clinton, as well as the
office-seeker's résumé, was redacted except for a phrase that reads, "Well organized,
driven professional."
A second email dated May 15, 2009, was sent by Abedin from her State Department email
to her personal email, presumably
[email protected]
. Abedin apparently was archiving in her personal
email account an email Hillary Clinton sent her from Clinton's private email server at
[email protected]. Abedin was asked to print out attachments to an email Mills
sent via a private address the previous day to Clinton involving "timetables and
deliverables" for her review via Alec Ross, a technology policy expert who then held the
title of senior adviser for innovation to Secretary Clinton.
The two pages of timetables and deliverables attached to the email were 100 percent
redacted, with "PAGE DENIED" stamped across the first redacted page.
DONALD J. TRUMP STATEMENT ON HILLARY CLINTON'S BAD JUDGMENT
"Huma is making a very wise decision. I know Anthony Weiner well, and she will be
far better off without h
im. I only worry for the country in that Hillary
Clinton was careless and negligent in allowing Weiner to have such close proximity to
highly classified information. Who knows what he learned and who he told? It's just
another example of Hillary Clinton's bad judgment. It is possible that our country
and its security have been greatly compromised by this.
" - Donald J. Trump
and then, previously with this August 3, 2015 tweet:
It came out that Huma Abedin knows all about Hillary's private
illegal emails. Huma's PR husband, Anthony Weiner, will tell the world.
Well, maybe not tell the world, but certainly drag Hillary into another scandal just
as she appeared certain to win the election with less than 2 weeks until D-Day.
The American journalist, Edward Bernays, is often described as the man who invented modern propaganda.
Trends
The nephew of Sigmund Freud, the pioneer of psycho-analysis, it was Bernays who coined the term
"public relations" as a euphemism for spin and its deceptions.
In 1929, he persuaded feminists to promote cigarettes for women by smoking in the New York Easter
Parade – behavior then considered outlandish. One feminist, Ruth Booth, declared, "Women! Light
another torch of freedom! Fight another sex taboo!"
Bernays' influence extended far beyond advertising. His greatest success was his role in convincing
the American public to join the slaughter of the First World War. The secret, he said, was "engineering
the consent" of people in order to "control and regiment [them] according to our will without
their knowing about it."
He described this as "the true ruling power in our society" and called it an "invisible
government."
Today, the invisible government has never been more powerful and less understood. In my career
as a journalist and film-maker, I have never known propaganda to insinuate our lives and as it does
now and to go unchallenged.
Imagine two cities.
Both are under siege by the forces of the government of that country. Both cities are occupied
by fanatics, who commit terrible atrocities, such as beheading people.
But there is a vital difference. In one siege, the government soldiers are described as liberators
by Western reporters embedded with them, who enthusiastically report their battles and air strikes.
There are front page pictures of these heroic soldiers giving a V-sign for victory. There is scant
mention of civilian casualties.
In the second city – in another country nearby – almost exactly the same is happening. Government
forces are laying siege to a city controlled by the same breed of fanatics.
The difference is that these fanatics are supported, supplied and armed by "us" – by the United
States and Britain. They even have a media center that is funded by Britain and America.
Another difference is that the government soldiers laying siege to this city are the bad guys,
condemned for assaulting and bombing the city – which is exactly what the good soldiers do in the
first city.
Confusing? Not really. Such is the basic double standard that is the essence of propaganda. I
am referring, of course, to the current siege of the city of Mosul by the government forces of Iraq,
who are backed by the United States and Britain and to the siege of Aleppo by the government forces
of Syria, backed by Russia. One is good; the other is bad.
What is seldom reported is that both cities would not be occupied by fanatics and ravaged by war
if Britain and the United States had not invaded Iraq in 2003. That criminal enterprise was launched
on lies strikingly similar to the propaganda that now distorts our understanding of the civil war
in Syria.
Without this drumbeat of propaganda dressed up as news, the monstrous ISIS and Al-Qaeda and al-Nusra
and the rest of the jihadist gang might not exist, and the people of Syria might not be fighting
for their lives today.
Some may remember in 2003 a succession of BBC reporters turning to the camera and telling us that
Blair was "vindicated" for what turned out to be the crime of the century. The US television
networks produced the same validation for George W. Bush. Fox News brought on Henry Kissinger to
effuse over Colin Powell's fabrications.
The same year, soon after the invasion, I filmed an interview in Washington with Charles Lewis,
the renowned American investigative journalist. I asked him, "What would have happened if the
freest media in the world had seriously challenged what turned out to be crude propaganda?"
He replied that if journalists had done their job, " there is a very, very good chance we would
not have gone to war in Iraq."
It was a shocking statement, and one supported by other famous journalists to whom I put the same
question - Dan Rather of CBS, David Rose of the Observer and journalists and producers in the BBC,
who wished to remain anonymous.
In other words, had journalists done their job, had they challenged and investigated the propaganda
instead of amplifying it, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children would be alive today,
and there would be no ISIS and no siege of Aleppo or Mosul.
There would have been no atrocity on the London Underground on 7th July 2005. There would have
been no flight of millions of refugees; there would be no miserable camps.
When the terrorist atrocity happened in Paris last November, President Francoise Hollande immediately
sent planes to bomb Syria – and more terrorism followed, predictably, the product of Hollande's bombast
about France being "at war" and "showing no mercy." That state violence and jihadist
violence feed off each other is the truth that no national leader has the courage to speak.
"When the truth is replaced by silence," said the Soviet dissident Yevtushenko, "the
silence is a lie."
The attack on Iraq, the attack on Libya, the attack on Syria happened because the leader in each
of these countries was not a puppet of the West. The human rights record of a Saddam or a Gaddafi
was irrelevant. They did not obey orders and surrender control of their country.
The same fate awaited Slobodan Milosevic once he had refused to sign an "agreement" that demanded
the occupation of Serbia and its conversion to a market economy. His people were bombed, and he was
prosecuted in The Hague. Independence of this kind is intolerable.
As WikiLeaks has revealed, it was only when the Syrian leader Bashar Assad in 2009 rejected an
oil pipeline, running through his country from Qatar to Europe, that he was attacked.
From that moment, the CIA planned to destroy the government of Syria with jihadist fanatics –
the same fanatics currently holding the people of Mosul and eastern Aleppo hostage.
Why is this not news? The former British Foreign Office official Carne Ross, who was responsible
for operating sanctions against Iraq, told me: "We would feed journalists factoids of sanitized
intelligence, or we would freeze them out. That is how it worked."
The West's medieval client, Saudi Arabia – to which the US and Britain sell billions of dollars'
worth of arms – is at present destroying Yemen, a country so poor that in the best of times, half
the children are malnourished.
Look on YouTube and you will see the kind of massive bombs – "our" bombs – that the Saudis
use against dirt-poor villages, and against weddings, and funerals.
The explosions look like small atomic bombs. The bomb aimers in Saudi Arabia work side-by-side
with British officers. This fact is not on the evening news.
Propaganda is most effective when our consent is engineered by those with a fine education – Oxford,
Cambridge, Harvard, Columbia - and with careers on the BBC, the Guardian, the New York Times, the
Washington Post.
These organizations are known as the liberal media. They present themselves as enlightened, progressive
tribunes of the moral zeitgeist. They are anti-racist, pro-feminist and pro-LGBT.
And they love war.
While they speak up for feminism, they support rapacious wars that deny the rights of countless
women, including the right to life.
In 2011, Libya, then a modern state, was destroyed on the pretext that Muammar Gaddafi was about
to commit genocide on his own people. That was the incessant news; and there was no evidence. It
was a lie.
In fact, Britain, Europe and the United States wanted what they like to call "regime change" in
Libya, the biggest oil producer in Africa. Gaddafi's influence in the continent and, above all, his
independence were intolerable.
So he was murdered with a knife in his rear by fanatics, backed by America, Britain and France.
Hillary Clinton cheered his gruesome death for the camera, declaring, "We came, we saw, he died!"
The destruction of Libya was a media triumph. As the war drums were beaten, Jonathan Freedland
wrote in the Guardian: "Though the risks are very real, the case for intervention remains strong."
Intervention - what a polite, benign, Guardian word, whose real meaning, for Libya, was death
and destruction.
According to its own records, NATO launched 9,700 "strike sorties" against Libya, of which
more than a third were aimed at civilian targets. They included missiles with uranium warheads. Look
at the photographs of the rubble of Misrata and Sirte, and the mass graves identified by the Red
Cross. The UNICEF report on the children killed says, "most [of them] under the age of ten."
As a direct consequence, Sirte became the capital of ISIS.
Ukraine is another media triumph. Respectable liberal newspapers such as the New York Times, the
Washington Post and the Guardian, and mainstream broadcasters such as the BBC, NBC, CBS, CNN have
played a critical role in conditioning their viewers to accept a new and dangerous cold war.
All have misrepresented events in Ukraine as a malign act by Russia when, in fact, the coup in
Ukraine in 2014 was the work of the United States, aided by Germany and NATO.
This inversion of reality is so pervasive that Washington's military intimidation of Russia is
not news; it is suppressed behind a smear and scare campaign of the kind I grew up with during the
first cold war. Once again, the 'Ruskies' are coming to get us, led by another Stalin, whom
The Economist depicts as the devil.
The suppression of the truth about Ukraine is one of the most complete news blackouts I can remember.
The fascists who engineered the coup in Kiev are the same breed that backed the Nazi invasion of
the Soviet Union in 1941. Of all the scares about the rise of fascist anti-Semitism in Europe, no
leader ever mentions the fascists in Ukraine – except Vladimir Putin, but he does not count.
Many in the Western media have worked hard to present the ethnic Russian-speaking population of
Ukraine as outsiders in their own country, as agents of Moscow, almost never as Ukrainians seeking
a federation within Ukraine and as Ukrainian citizens resisting a foreign-orchestrated coup against
their elected government.
There is almost the joie d'esprit of a class reunion of warmongers. The drum-beaters of the Washington
Post inciting war with Russia are the very same editorial writers who published the lie that Saddam
Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
To most of us, the American presidential campaign is a media freak show, in which Donald Trump
is the arch villain. But Trump is loathed by those with power in the United States for reasons that
have little to do with his obnoxious behavior and opinions. To the invisible government in Washington,
the unpredictable Trump is an obstacle to America's design for the 21st century.
This is to maintain the dominance of the United States and to subjugate Russia, and, if possible,
China.
To the militarists in Washington, the real problem with Trump is that, in his lucid moments, he
seems not to want a war with Russia; he wants to talk with the Russian president, not fight him;
he says he wants to talk with the president of China.
In the first debate with Hillary Clinton, Trump promised not to be the first to introduce nuclear
weapons into a conflict. He said, "I would certainly not do first strike. Once the nuclear alternative
happens, it's over." That was not news.
Did he really mean it? Who knows? He often contradicts himself. But what is clear is that Trump
is considered a serious threat to the status quo maintained by the vast national security machine
that runs the United States, regardless of who is in the White House.
The CIA wants him beaten. The Pentagon wants him beaten. The media wants him beaten. Even his
own party wants him beaten. He is a threat to the rulers of the world – unlike Clinton who has left
no doubt she is prepared to go to war with nuclear-armed Russia and China.
Clinton has the form, as she often boasts. Indeed, her record is proven. As a senator, she backed
the bloodbath in Iraq. When she ran against Obama in 2008, she threatened to "totally obliterate"
Iran. As Secretary of State, she colluded in the destruction of governments in Libya and Honduras
and set in train the baiting of China.
She has now pledged to support a no-fly zone in Syria - a direct provocation for war with Russia.
Clinton may well become the most dangerous president of the United States in my lifetime –a distinction
for which the competition is fierce.
Without a shred of evidence, she has accused Russia of supporting Trump and hacking her emails.
Released by WikiLeaks, these emails tell us that what Clinton says in private, in speeches to the
rich and powerful, is the opposite of what she says in public.
That is why silencing and threatening Julian Assange is so important. As the editor of WikiLeaks,
Assange knows the truth. And let me assure those who are concerned, he is well, and WikiLeaks is
operating on all cylinders.
Today, the greatest build-up of American-led forces since World War Two is under way – in the
Caucasus and Eastern Europe, on the border with Russia, and in Asia and the Pacific, where China
is the target.
Keep that in mind when the presidential election circus reaches its finale on November 8th, if
the winner is Clinton, a Greek chorus of witless commentators will celebrate her coronation as a
great step forward for women. None will mention Clinton's victims: the women of Syria, the women
of Iraq, the women of Libya. None will mention the civil defense drills being conducted in Russia.
None will recall Edward Bernays' "torches of freedom".
George Bush's press spokesman once called the media "complicit enablers." Coming from a
senior official in an administration whose lies, enabled by the media, caused such suffering, that
description is a warning from history.
In 1946, the Nuremberg Tribunal prosecutor said of the German media: "Before every major aggression,
they initiated a press campaign calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German people
psychologically for the attack. In the propaganda system, it was the daily press and the radio that
were the most important weapons."
"Because he interviewed Donald Trump so many times over the years, Howard Stern has become
an unlikely central figure in this year's presidential election, most notably by getting Trump
to go on the record in favor of the Iraq War in 2002.
But the SiriusXM host rarely discusses politics, which makes his latest comments this week
about the Republican nominee and his own role in the race significant. "None of this was hidden,"
Stern said on his show Tuesday about Trump's most outrageous statements. "This is who Trump
is. He was always bombastic. He always rated women. He always talked in a misogynistic, sexist
kind of way, but he did it sort of proudly and out in the open; and he still won the Republican
primary. In one sense, the fact that we do an interview and people's personalities come out, I'm
very proud of that."
"I, certainly, in a million years, I didn't expect Trump to seriously run for president," Stern
added..."
"... If you say so. For now I'll leave any decisions or actions taken on these outcomes to Russian citizens. I would, however, kindly tell Victoria Nuland and her ilk to fuck off with their senile Cold War fantasies, morally bankrupt, third-rate Great Game machinations, and total spectrum dominance sociopathy. ..."
"... "Personally, I don't believe that Ukraine is governed by fascists, or that Ukraine shot down that jetliner, but I'm sure a lot of Russians do." ..."
"... There's definitely some of 'em hanging about, but yeah it mostly seems to be a motley assortment of oligarchs, gangsters, and grifters tied into international neoliberal capital and money flows. No doubt Russian believe a lot things. I find Americans tend to believe a lot things as well. ..."
"So democratic structures have to be robust and transparent before we care about them?"
No.
My point was it's very misleading. Misleading to set the parameters of discussion on U.S. posture
toward Russia in such a way as to assume that Putin's actions against a purported Russian "democracy"
have anything at all to do with USian antagonism of Russia. I'm sure you'll note current U.S.
military cooperation with that boisterous hotbed of democratic activity, Saudi Arabia, in Yemen.
Our allies in the house of Saud require help in defending their democratic way of life against
the totalitarianism of Yemeni tribes, you see. The U.S. opposes anti-democratic forces whenever
and where ever it can, especially in the Middle East. I guess that explains USian antipathy to
Russia.
"I'd give a pretty high value to an independent press and contested elections."
Yeah, it'd be interesting to see what the U.S. looked like with those dynamics in place.
"Those have been slowly crushed in Russia. The results for transparency have not been
great."
If you say so. For now I'll leave any decisions or actions taken on these outcomes to Russian
citizens. I would, however, kindly tell Victoria Nuland and her ilk to fuck off with their senile
Cold War fantasies, morally bankrupt, third-rate Great Game machinations, and total spectrum dominance
sociopathy.
"Personally, I don't believe that Ukraine is governed by fascists, or that Ukraine shot
down that jetliner, but I'm sure a lot of Russians do."
There's definitely some of 'em hanging about, but yeah it mostly seems to be a motley assortment
of oligarchs, gangsters, and grifters tied into international neoliberal capital and money flows.
No doubt Russian believe a lot things. I find Americans tend to believe a lot things as well.
"... These are accurate, statistically sound statements. But they are something else, too. Declarations that Trump is highly unlikely to win also serve as counters to the Republican nominee's warning that the "rigged" election could be " stolen from us ." ..."
Callum Borchers, author at the Washington Post blog The Fix, admits that the press is
declaring victory for Hillary Clinton - to discredit claims that the election is rigged.
Since the final presidential debate last week, many news outlets have been delivering an unvarnished
message to Donald Trump supporters: Your candidate is virtually certain to lose the election Nov.
8.
These are accurate, statistically sound statements. But they are something else, too. Declarations
that Trump is highly unlikely to win also serve as counters to the Republican nominee's warning that
the "rigged" election could be "
stolen from us ."
"... "As secretary of state, Clinton was an early supporter of arming and training members of the Syrian opposition to fight Assad, a plan that faced resistance out of concern that it would be difficult to appropriately vet fighters and ensure that weapons didn't fall into the hands of extremists. Today, the program is off to a slow start, with only 54 graduates from the first class, several of whom scattered after coming under attack by an al Qaeda affiliate in Syria. As commander-in-chief, Clinton would dramatically escalate the program, she said. " Who was in charge of the training program? Ira Magaziner? ..."
"... Trump leads Clinton by 2 in Florida" [ Politico ]. Of course, it's madness to track individual polls, but since the miasma of Clinton trumphalism has grown so thick, people may need a breath of fresh air. ..."
"... "Hillary's 33,000 emails might not be 'missing' after all" Like a MacGuffin in a Hitchcock movie? [ New York Post ]. Important! ..."
"... "Richard Nixon could only wish he got Hillary's FBI treatment" [ New York Post ]. True! Sadly, I have to quote the New York Post twice in a row. It is what it is. We are where we are. ..."
"... Lordie. There are entire cultures where women are not at all liked….start with India. ..."
"... I could suggest American Black culture is similarly biased in general. The American Black antipathy to 'Gays' is a known ..."
"... Turning the argument on it's head, I would argue that so called 'feminine' characteristics on the part of Trump are a positive for his character. The less confrontational and more cooperative aspects of Trump's personality being dominant are good signs for a position where the gentle arts of politics are needed. ..."
"... Finally, well now, Trump is a complicated mess. So what. It's what he will do, and more importantly, what he will not do, when in office that are of interest. He can be as 'gay' as he wants. If he keeps us out of war with Russia, I'll back him as much as I can. Then he can compete in the Miss America pageant in drag for all I care. ..."
"... Personally, I think a corrupt woman warmonger claiming to speak for all women is an insult to all women, but maybe we both know different sets of women. ..."
"... Within one or two weeks after the fall of Libya, a central bank was established by the "rebels" there, whereby they immediately adopted the US dollar as their base currency. (Ghadaffi had been working with other African countries towards adopting an Afro-centric currency to trade in oil and commodities, and dropping the USD.) ..."
"... This is why all of the polls are BS. People do not want to be questioned incessantly nor bullied. But when it's just the voter and the ballot, watch what happens. ..."
"... I find the whole hysteria over Russian hacking very one-sided. If the US takes it upon itself, out of sincere concern, to help out "moderates" in overthrowing a repressive, evil government in Syria, Libya and Iraq, maybe the same thing happening to the US itself is not that weird? Here is a tyrannical government with little regard for its demotivated and demoralized citizens who can not on their own displace it. This government threatens nuclear war and kills an unjustified number of its own citizens. Its public infrastructure is in ruins and oligarchy is everywhere. In the past the US has set the example for dealing with such troubled states; its time the doctor took his own medicine. ..."
"... The "17 intelligence agencies" claim is complete Clinton bullshit. I'm kind of amazed that journalists are now stating this as fact. ..."
"... Love the headline for the Bay News article you linked to - "Hillary calls for unity." Old miss "basket of deplorables" - also known as Miss "hire bird dogs to incite violence at rallies and blame her opponent" - is getting all squishy to extol the virtues of unity. Seriously - does anyone still believe a word that comes out of her mouth? ..."
"... I believe her line she constantly repeats: "Celebrating diversity" is code for destroying the middle class! ..."
"But Trump's biggest local political donation [in Chicago] was the $50,000 he donated to
Emanuel's first mayoral campaign" [
Chicago Reader (DG)]. "That donation came on December 23, 2010, a couple months before
Rahm was elected. In 2011, Emanuel's administration approved the god-awful 20-foot-high "T-R-U-M-P"
sign that the Donald felt compelled to plaster on his building overlooking the Chicago River.
But Mayor Emanuel's not Trump's only Democratic pal in town. Trump also hired Alderman Burke's
law firm to handle his tax appeals to Assessor Berrios's office. Burke then won Trump several
million dollars worth of property tax breaks." There don't seem to be many degrees of separation
between the elites. I suppose that's why they're elites…
Policy
"A hotelier's guide to the 2016 presidential election" [
Hotel News Now ]. "Many hotels in the U.S. rely on a flow of legal immigrants to fill a
variety of positions. Hoteliers want that pipeline of potential employees to remain open, while
avoiding additional red tape to verify their statuses."
"Battlegrounds: The Fight for Mosul and Election Day Disruptions" (podcast) [
Foreign Policy Editor's Roundtable ]. If you want to get a good reading on the insanity
that is
The Blob , this is the podcast for you. The speakers spend a good twenty minutes discussing
the details of Syria and Iraq, concluding that historians will look back on it as "a forty
year's war," without ever once giving a reason for us to be there . Soothing NPR voices,
no anger, a lot of laughter. Smart people.
War Drums
"Hillary Clinton Promises A More Muscular Foreign Policy As President" [
HuffPo ]. "As secretary of state, Clinton was an early supporter of arming and training
members of the Syrian opposition to fight Assad, a plan that faced resistance out of concern
that it would be difficult to appropriately vet fighters and ensure that weapons didn't fall
into the hands of extremists. Today, the program is off to a slow start, with only 54 graduates
from the first class, several of whom scattered after coming under attack by an al Qaeda affiliate
in Syria. As commander-in-chief, Clinton would dramatically escalate the program, she said.
" Who was in charge of the training program? Ira Magaziner?
The Voters
"What Do Trump and Marx Have in Common?" [Jochen Bittner,
New York Times ]. This is another piece along the lines of the article from
the
Manhattan Institute's City Journal that Yves linked to this morning, although it's not
a piece of outright hackery. For example: "When Hillary Clinton calls half of Mr. Trump's voters
a 'basket of deplorables,' she sounds as aloof as Marie Antoinette, telling French subjects
who had no bread to 'eat cake.'" But both articles deploy the "angry populists of left and
right" vs. the "sensible center" trope (remember that in the Beltway you should never
display anger; it's a strong taboo). Bittner concludes: "Mrs. Clinton has the chance to
change, by leading a political establishment that examines and processes anger instead of merely
producing and dismissing it." Obama destroyed hope by not delivering change. And now Clinton
is holding the bag for the anger that caused. From the Department of Schadenfreude…
UPDATE "Clinton's image has improved 9 percentage points since the summer in the 18-29 age
group, while Trump's has remained the same" [
McClatchy ]. "But the survey also found that half of young voters are more 'fearful' about
the future than 'hopeful.' This was true across all demographic groups, with the highest level
of anxiety among whites. Under a third of white women thought they would better off financially
than their parents. More than a third of white men agreed."
The Trail
UPDATE "Poll: Trump leads Clinton by 2 in Florida" [
Politico ]. Of course, it's madness to track individual polls, but since the miasma of
Clinton trumphalism has grown so thick, people may need a breath of fresh air.
UPDATE "Hillary Clinton has a small lead in New Hampshire, according to the results of a
Monmouth University poll released Wednesday, but Donald Trump has shrunk her advantage since
the university's last survey of the battleground state" [
Politico ]. Same caveat, same rationale.
UPDATE "No, Texas' balky machines aren't switching Trump votes to Clinton" [
McClatchy
]. Electronic voting sucks and should be abolished in favor of hand-marked paper ballots
counted in public, but they don't suck for that reason .
"But academic research has picked up something that thousands of hours of campaign punditry
has missed completely: Donald Trump talks like a woman" [
Politico ]. "Donald Trump is a stunning outlier. His linguistic style is startlingly feminine,
so much so that the chasm between Trump and the next most feminine speaker, Ben Carson, is
about as great as the difference between Carson and the least feminine candidate, Jim Webb.
And Trump earns his ranking not just because he talks a lot about himself or avoids big words
(both of which are true); according to Jones, he also shows feminine patterns on the more subtle
measures, such as his use of prepositions and articles. The key then is not what Trump talks
about-making Mexico pay for the wall or bombing the hell out of ISIL-but rather how he says
it." Readers?
Well, well:
Realignment
"This party was dead before Lincoln got here" [
USA Today ]. "Pity the poor Republican Party, which has been on its deathbed since the
age of 2. Never mind that Republicans currently control both houses of Congress, 30 state legislatures
and 31 governors' mansions - this split between Establishment Republicans and Trump Republicans
is a sure sign the party will be flatlining any day now. Aaaaaany day now …"
Democrat Email Hairball
"Hillary's 33,000 emails might not be 'missing' after all" Like a
MacGuffin
in a Hitchcock movie? [
New York Post ]. Important!
"Richard Nixon could only wish he got Hillary's FBI treatment" [
New York Post ]. True! Sadly, I have to quote the New York Post twice in a row. It is what
it is. We are where we are.
And then there's this:
Hopefully, Our Neena can kiss that chief of staff position goodbye.
"New Research Blames Insiders, Not North Korea, for Sony Hack" [
Time
]. The obvious parallel being…
Police State Watch
"AT&T Is Spying on Americans for Profit, New Documents Reveal" [
Daily Beast
]. "The telecom giant is doing NSA-style work for law enforcement-without a warrant-and
earning millions of dollars a year from taxpayers." Not sure what's new here….
"The day when police zap suspects from the sky with drones carrying stun guns may be nearing"
[
Wall Street Journal
].
Black Injustice Tipping Point
"The U.N. Caused Haiti's Cholera Epidemic. Now the Obama Administration Is Fighting the Victims"
[
The New Republic
]. 2014, still relevant today.
Geographic Information Systems can be empowering:
Class Warfare
"Don't Diss the Dark Ages" [
Of Two Minds
]. " New modes of production and new social /political orders do not arise fully
formed. They are pieced together by trial and error and numerous cycles of adaptation, innovation
and failure." Salutary reminder!
"This issue brief explains how monopsony, or wage-setting power, in the labor market can reduce
wages, employment, and overall welfare, and describes various sources of monopsony power. It then
reviews evidence suggesting that firms may have wage-setting power in a broad range of settings
and describes several trends in recent decades consistent with a growing role for monopsony power
in wage determination. It concludes with a discussion of several policy actions taken by the Obama
Administration to help promote labor-market competition and ensure a level playing field for all
workers" [
Council of Economic Advisors
]. How I hate that dead "level playing field" metaphor. Generally,
playing fields are level. It's the refs and the crooked guys with their hands in the till
in the front office that I worry about.
"In late 2007, before the recession started, the prime-age employment-to-population ratio in
the U.S. was about the same as in other Group of Seven developed nations (which also include Canada,
France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the U.K.). The U.S., however, experienced a much larger decline
during the recession, and remains much farther from undoing the damage. As of June, the G-7 as
a whole had recovered almost completely, while the U.S. was only 60 percent back from its lowest
point" [
Bloomberg
]. "Prime-age" like "prime beef"…
A community-owned Twitter would result in new revenue streams, since we users would have
a chance to buy in as co-owners. We could re-open the platform's data to spur innovation.
We could set more transparent, accountable rules for handling abuse. And we would no longer
merely be fickle users; we'd be invested in your sustainability and success. The very meaning
of success would change. Without the short-term pressure of the stock markets, we believe
we can realize Twitter's full value-which the current business model has struggled to do
for years now.
So, here's the situation. A group of us wants to set up a cooperative to gather fellow
Twitter users in the hope that we'll be able to make a deal. A fair deal-one that rewards
and includes the people who helped create the Twitter we love. We hope they'll work with
us. And Twitter is only the start, a chance to flex our thinking and organizing around co-owning
a major platform utility; our cooperative is cooking up plans for bringing shared ownership
elsewhere on the internet, too.
We, the undersigned, call on Twitter to work with us to share the future of the company
with those who love and rely on it most.
Twitter, Inc. has shown they can't be trusted with control of a major communication platform.
Their management or other employees routinely censor trending hashtags to suit their own political
preferences. I don't know if a community managed version would be any better, but at least
it would be in different hands. Come to think about it, that sums up a lot of elections, too.
____. n. The despondency that steals over you when you're committed to inventing an election
drinking game but have just realized that no rules can possibly be adequate to the task.
Lordie. There are entire cultures where women are not at all liked….start with India.
And I don't buy this analysis at all.
If you are a guy with a high sex drive, you are thinking about sex a ton. One study said
men think about sex anywhere from twice a minute to twice a day. That means if you aren't getting
laid frequently, you are basically thinking about how you aren't getting enough sex. And there
is clearly more male appetite for sex than women willing to provide it, whether due to genetics
or cultural programming. That's why "prostitute" mean a female prostitute; you need to state
otherwise if male.
So if you are a guy not getting enough sex and you perceive women to be withholding sex
from you (which is a big undercurrent of male/female relations, women trading sex for security
and/or money), it isn't hard to imagine that the men are low or even high grade angry with
women all the time . The only women who would be exempt would be the ones too old to
be sex partners, except they may be guilty by association.
I could suggest American Black culture is similarly biased in general. The American Black
antipathy to 'Gays' is a known, (at least the segment of said culture observable here Down
South.) I might go so far as to posit this characteristic of the culture as having been inculcated
by White Southern culture in the past as a means of 'managing' the black population. Such trends
are generational in duration. Notice that Ben Carson was the next most 'effeminate' on the
list.
Turning the argument on it's head, I would argue that so called 'feminine' characteristics
on the part of Trump are a positive for his character. The less confrontational and more cooperative
aspects of Trump's personality being dominant are good signs for a position where the gentle
arts of politics are needed.
Finally, well now, Trump is a complicated mess. So what. It's what he will do, and more importantly,
what he will not do, when in office that are of interest. He can be as 'gay' as he wants. If
he keeps us out of war with Russia, I'll back him as much as I can. Then he can compete in
the Miss America pageant in drag for all I care.
Surely you know
that's not true . Save the rah-rah pom-pom waving for your Facebook page.
Personally, I think a corrupt woman warmonger claiming to speak for all women is an insult
to all women, but maybe we both know different sets of women.
1. Women apologize all the time. Just listen. Does Trump ever apologize?
2. Most women phrase orders as questions. Trump loves giving orders, famously, "You're fired!"
If you give orders like a guy as a woman, people get pissed with you.
3. Men interrupt women like crazy. Women are loath to interrupt and usually apologize when
they do. Trump has no inhibitions about interrupting.
I suspect the "talking like a man" is about professional class markers. If you talk like
a lawyer or an accountant, you are talking like a man, in what they depict as depersonalized
and distant and "complex" ergo masculine. Trump pointedly talks in a borderline lower class
manner.
And Trump is a salesman. The "personal" style is a selling technique.
Because it is not a civil war. Because financial hegemony is the ultimate goal.
Within one or two weeks after the fall of Libya, a central bank was established by the "rebels"
there, whereby they immediately adopted the US dollar as their base currency. (Ghadaffi had
been working with other African countries towards adopting an Afro-centric currency to trade
in oil and commodities, and dropping the USD.)
The north African states intended that the new currency would be backed by gold. It was
ready to implement (ex Egypt) and the French went berserk (again) about their disobedient (ex)
colonies. The president of France was also mindful of having accepted a large donation from
Ghadaffi to assist his re-election, he got caught out. That is illegal in France. He is running
for re-election again.
This is why all of the polls are BS. People do not want to be questioned incessantly nor
bullied. But when it's just the voter and the ballot, watch what happens.
If I were uber wealthy I might have done a flyer that says "Voting for a lesser evil is
still voting for evil. When you vote for X, your vote is for X regardless of who X is, it is
not a vote for A or B. People claiming otherwise are trying to prop up a weak candidate they
know is unacceptable by using scare tactics. They have the problem you do not. Never forget
that any party can nominate awful people and it is not limited to only one at a time. And this
is a wonderful example of both major Parties throwing a finger at the people of America and
nominating vastly disliked and distrusted people who are unfit for the office of President.
Vote for who you want and tell the whiners they screwed themselves and might want to nominate
a better candidate next time."
It never occurred to them to pick Bernie, an anti neolib, anti neocon.
They are the opposite of Bernie on absolutely every issue.
Guess he doesn't agree? Seems odd…
I find the whole hysteria over Russian hacking very one-sided. If the US takes it upon itself,
out of sincere concern, to help out "moderates" in overthrowing a repressive, evil government
in Syria, Libya and Iraq, maybe the same thing happening to the US itself is not that weird?
Here is a tyrannical government with little regard for its demotivated and demoralized citizens
who can not on their own displace it. This government threatens nuclear war and kills an unjustified
number of its own citizens. Its public infrastructure is in ruins and oligarchy is everywhere.
In the past the US has set the example for dealing with such troubled states; its time the
doctor took his own medicine.
The "evidence" for Russian hacking is so suspect that anyone who repeats the story instantly
stamps themselves as either a con or a mark. It's depressing to see media corruption so blatantly
displayed. Now I know what 2003 must have felt like (I was too young to have much of an opinion
back then).
What more evidence do you need than the word of Hillary and CNN? They both say that 17
intelligence agencies have confirmed it. Which makes me think that maybe we have too many
intelligence agencies.
The "17 intelligence agencies" claim is complete Clinton bullshit. I'm kind of amazed
that journalists are now stating this as fact. I could say I'm shocked but nothing the
presstitutes do surprises me anymore.
They are busy preening for their future White House
access. It kind of makes me want to get drunk and vote for the orange haired guy.
Just finished trying to "re-educate" my husband after he listened to [and apparently
believed] a report in the CBS Evening News on the "Russian hacking of Clinton's e-mails."
They reported it as complete "fact," without even a perfunctory "alleged."
Too difficult to do this correction one person at a time, while the networks have such
massive reach.
Love the headline for the Bay News article you linked to - "Hillary calls for unity."
Old miss "basket of deplorables" - also known as Miss "hire bird dogs to incite violence at
rallies and blame her opponent" - is getting all squishy to extol the virtues of unity. Seriously
- does anyone still believe a word that comes out of her mouth?
"... Former Congressman Dennis Kucinich has just penned an extremely powerful warning about the warmongers in Washington D.C. Who funds them, what their motives are, and why it is imperative for the American people to stop them. ..."
"... Washington, DC, may be the only place in the world where people openly flaunt their pseudo-intellectuality by banding together, declaring themselves "think tanks," and raising money from external interests, including foreign governments, to compile reports that advance policies inimical to the real-life concerns of the American people. ..."
"... As a former member of the House of Representatives, I remember 16 years of congressional hearings where pedigreed experts came to advocate wars in testimony based on circular, rococo thinking devoid of depth, reality, and truth. I remember other hearings where the Pentagon was unable to reconcile over $1 trillion in accounts, lost track of $12 billion in cash sent to Iraq, and rigged a missile-defense test so that an interceptor could easily home in on a target. War is first and foremost a profitable racket. ..."
"... According to the front page of this past Friday's Washington Post, the bipartisan foreign-policy elite recommends the next president show less restraint than President Obama. Acting at the urging of "liberal" hawks brandishing humanitarian intervention, read war, the Obama administration attacked Libya along with allied powers working through NATO. ..."
It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only
one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and
the losses in lives.
A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority
of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit
of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.
Former Congressman Dennis Kucinich has just penned an extremely powerful warning about the
warmongers in Washington D.C. Who funds them, what their motives are, and why it is imperative for
the American people to stop them.
Washington, DC, may be the only place in the world where people openly flaunt their pseudo-intellectuality
by banding together, declaring themselves "think tanks," and raising money from external interests,
including foreign governments, to compile reports that advance policies inimical to the real-life
concerns of the American people.
As a former member of the House of Representatives, I remember 16 years of congressional hearings
where pedigreed experts came to advocate wars in testimony based on circular, rococo thinking
devoid of depth, reality, and truth. I remember other hearings where the Pentagon was unable to
reconcile over $1 trillion in accounts, lost track of $12 billion in cash sent to Iraq, and rigged
a missile-defense test so that an interceptor could easily home in on a target. War is first and
foremost a profitable racket.
How else to explain that in the past 15 years this city's so called bipartisan foreign policy
elite has promoted wars in Iraq and Libya, and interventions in Syria and Yemen, which have opened
Pandora's box to a trusting world, to the tune of trillions of dollars, a windfall for military
contractors. DC's think "tanks" should rightly be included in the taxonomy of armored war vehicles
and not as gathering places for refugees from academia.
According to the
front page of this past Friday's Washington Post, the bipartisan foreign-policy elite recommends
the next president show less restraint than President Obama. Acting at the urging of "liberal"
hawks brandishing humanitarian intervention, read war, the Obama administration attacked Libya
along with allied powers working through NATO.
The think tankers fell in line with the Iraq invasion. Not being in the tank, I did my own
analysis of the call for war in October of 2002, based on readily accessible information, and
easily concluded that there was no justification for war. I distributed it widely in Congress
and led 125 Democrats in voting against the Iraq war resolution. There was no money to be made
from a conclusion that war was uncalled for, so, against millions protesting in the United States
and worldwide, our government launched into an abyss, with a lot of armchair generals waving combat
pennants. The marching band and chowder society of DC think tanks learned nothing from the Iraq
and Libya experience.
The only winners were arms dealers, oil companies, and jihadists. Immediately after the fall
of Libya, the black flag of Al Qaeda was raised over a municipal building in Benghazi, Gadhafi's
murder was soon to follow, with Secretary Clinton quipping with a laugh, "We came, we saw, he
died." President Obama apparently learned from this misadventure, but not the Washington policy
establishment, which is spoiling for more war.
The self-identified liberal
Center for American Progress (CAP) is now calling for Syria to be bombed, and estimates America's
current military adventures will be tidied up by 2025, a tardy twist on "mission accomplished."
CAP, according to
a report in The Nation, has received funding from war contractors Lockheed Martin and Boeing,
who make the bombers that CAP wants to rain hellfire on Syria.
As the drumbeat for an expanded war gets louder, Allen and Lister
jointly signed an op-ed in the Sunday Washington Post, calling for an attack on Syria. The
Brookings Institute,
in a report to Congress , admitted it received $250,000 from the US Central Command, Centcom,
where General Allen shared leadership duties with General David Petraeus. Pentagon money to think
tanks that endorse war? This is academic integrity, DC-style.
And why is Central Command, as well as the Food and Drug Administration, the US Department
of transportation, and the US Department of Health and Human Services giving money to Brookings?
Former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, who famously
told Colin
Powell , "What's the point of having this superb military you're always talking about if we
can't use it," predictably
says of this current moment , "We do think there needs to be more American action." A former
Bush administration top adviser is also
calling for the United States to launch a cruise missile attack on Syria.
The American people are fed up with war, but a concerted effort is being made through fearmongering,
propaganda, and lies to prepare our country for a dangerous confrontation, with Russia in Syria.
The demonization of Russia is a calculated plan to resurrect a raison d'ętre for stone-cold
warriors trying to escape from the dustbin of history by evoking the specter of Russian world
domination.
It's infectious. Earlier this year the BBC broadcast
a fictional show that contemplated
WWIII, beginning with a Russian invasion of Latvia (where 26 percent of the population is ethnic
Russian and 34 percent of Latvians speak Russian at home).
The imaginary WWIII scenario conjures Russia's targeting London for a nuclear strike. No wonder
that by the summer of 2016
a poll showed two-thirds of UK citizens approved the new British PM's launching a nuclear
strike in retaliation. So much for learning the lessons detailed in the Chilcot report.
As this year's presidential election comes to a conclusion, the Washington ideologues are regurgitating
the same bipartisan consensus that has kept America at war since 9/11 and made the world a decidedly
more dangerous place.
The DC think tanks provide cover for the political establishment, a political safety net, with
a fictive analytical framework providing a moral rationale for intervention, capitol casuistry.
I'm fed up with the DC policy elite who cash in on war while presenting themselves as experts,
at the cost of other people's lives, our national fortune, and the sacred honor of our country.
Any report advocating war that comes from any alleged think tank ought to be accompanied by
a list of the think tank's sponsors and donors and a statement of the lobbying connections of
the report's authors.
It is our patriotic duty to expose why the DC foreign-policy establishment and its sponsors
have not learned from their failures and instead are repeating them, with the acquiescence of
the political class and sleepwalkers with press passes.
It is also time for a new peace movement in America, one that includes progressives and libertarians
alike, both in and out of Congress, to organize on campuses, in cities, and towns across America,
to serve as an effective counterbalance to the Demuplican war party, its think tanks, and its
media cheerleaders. The work begins now, not after the Inauguration. We must not accept war as
inevitable, and those leaders who would lead us in that direction, whether in Congress or the
White House, must face visible opposition.
Just like Ron Paul (with whom he agrees on matters of foreign policy and the Fed), he was painted
by MSM as a kook. I wonder why. While I understand that many here would never vote for him because
he believes in things like social programs, so do all of the Republicans in Congress. He would
have made a far better president than zero or McCain.
"... Reality dictates ...abstaining or voting for anyone other than Donald Trump is a de facto vote for Hillary Clinton. As POTUS she has declared her intentions of imposing a (Libyan style) "NO FLY" zone over Syria, to "Obliterate" "Iran" and "Russia", confront China and expand the globalization of the American economy. ..."
"... For the sake of all humanity, criminal warmonger Hillary must be voted out on Nov.8 2016 ..."
"... While what you say may be half true, you miss the point entirely. It's irrelevant weather or not Trump keeps his words as we have no control over that anyway. What we do have control over however is not giving a mandate to Hillary's criminal war making intentions and the only way to do that under the circumstances, is to vote her out, by voting Trump in period. ..."
"... The clever economic left realizes that although Trump has some of dem ebul GOP economic ideas, he's more sensible than Hillary Clinton. ..."
"... I think b should've taken note of the Hillary camp's attempt in recent days to play down her militarism. ..."
"... IMO the best strategy is to vote Trump in battleground states and vote Green everywhere else. ..."
"... Very early on, I was of the opinion that Hillary's negatives were so high that her run should be seen as electing the Republican. But neocon defections, DNC collusion, 'sheepdog' Sanders, and more convinced me that the establishment really does want a Hillary coronation. ..."
"... The lesser-evilists are assuming that there aren't enough votes, so you are just taking votes from the lesser evil and helping the greater evil. True if their assumption is true, that there aren't enough votes for a third party to win. ..."
"... Another third-party argument is sending a signal to party leaders and the public that there are voters who despise the oligarchy candidates. That would improve growth of a third party (it would also attract oligarchy influence to them). ..."
"... We need to stop letting the corporate press goad us into fighting over trivia - transgenders in bathrooms! Trump's hair! Clinton's smile! - and focus on what is truly crucial. ..."
"... Hillary Clinton is a monster and God help us all if she wins. I envision President Clinton with perfectly coiffed hair with a rosy plastic smile (kudos to her mortician) giving a perfectly written speech with all the trendy buzzwords (celebrating diversity, helping the middle class, sustainable energy, etc.etc.) while outside the world burns. ..."
"... Whatever you do, no matter how much the corporate press tells you that Trump is 'finished,' go to the polls and vote. Because for the first time in decades, a US presidential election matters. ..."
"... Trump will meet with much resistance from the establishment. His worst instincts will be constrained. That is not true for Hillary & Co. ..."
"... A loss for a corrupted Democratic Party is best for the country. A strong showing by Greens is a further embarrassment. The left can then build on a solid foundation. ..."
"... Chomsky advocated for voting for Hillary in battleground states and Greens elsewhere. ..."
"... I do not believe that the 'Third Way' Democratic Party can be changed from within. The example of Obama and Hillary should have disabused any progressive of such fantasies. ..."
"... Trump, both domestically and internationally is the best breath of fresh air in American politics since FDR. Of course purists and utopians might disagree, but when he wins on Nov.8,I'll treat that day as the second 4th of July. America first, at long last, instead of traitors for zion. Hoo haw. Todays Wapoo intimates Trump anti-Semite. And Colin liar Powell is for the Hell Bitch. ..."
"... This elections cycle almost all fake leftist and NeoCon, both Democratic Party and Republicans voting for Hillary. ..."
"... Hillary Clinton's foreign policy is taken straight out of "A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties" by Oded Yinon, also known as The Yinon Plan. ..."
"... I am a spectator outside the USSA. USSA policies affect all of humanity on planet earth. A vote for the Clinton adds another potential 16 years reign in the WH, a continuation of the corruption, death, destruction and endless wars. ..."
"... Since the 1990s in Arkansas then in D.C., their retirement is long overdue. Stop the Clintons from enriching themselves on the public purse…foreign and domestic. ..."
"... OMg Illary cares about women's rights but takes $millions in donations from such likes as KSA, Qatar. Not to mention, countries that are steeped in poverty. Take a look at the donors to the Clinton Foundation. ..."
Some highlights of a recent Donald Trump
interview with Reuters:
U.S. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said on Tuesday that Democrat Hillary Clinton's
plan for Syria would "lead to World War Three," because of the potential for conflict with military
forces from nuclear-armed Russia.
In an interview focused largely on foreign policy, Trump said defeating Islamic State is a
higher priority than persuading Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to step down,..
Trump questioned how Clinton would negotiate with Russian President Vladimir Putin after
demonizing him; blamed President Barack Obama for a downturn in U.S. relations with the Philippines
under its new president, Rodrigo Duterte;...
Trump's foreign policy talk is far more sane than Clinton's and her camp's. It is ludicrous
to event think about openly attacking Russian (or Syrian) troops in Syria with an al-Qaeda supporting
"no-Fly-Zone". Russia would respond by taking down U.S. planes over Syria. The Russian government
would have to do so to uphold its authority internationally as well as at home.
The U.S. could respond by destroying all Russian assets in and around Syria. It has the capabilities.
But then what? If I were Putin my next step would be a nuclear test shoot in Siberia - a big one
- to make a point and to wake up the rest of the world. I would also provide secret support to any
indigenous anti-U.S. movement anywhere. China would support Russia as its first line of self defense.
"What we should do is focus on ISIS. We should not be focusing on Syria," said Trump as he dined
on fried eggs and sausage at his Trump National Doral golf resort. "You're going to end up in
World War Three over Syria if we listen to Hillary Clinton.
"You're not fighting Syria any more, you're fighting Syria, Russia and Iran, all right? Russia
is a nuclear country, but a country where the nukes work as opposed to other countries that talk,"
he said.
...
On Russia, Trump again knocked Clinton's handling of U.S.-Russian relations while secretary of
state and said her harsh criticism of Putin raised questions about "how she is going to go back
and negotiate with this man who she has made to be so evil," if she wins the presidency.
On the deterioration of ties with the Philippines, Trump aimed his criticism at Obama, saying
the president "wants to focus on his golf game" rather than engage with world leaders.
The last two points are important. Trump, despite all his bluster, knows about decency. What is
the point of arrogantly scolding negotiation partner who have the power to block agreements you want
or need?
Why blame Russia for hacking wide open email servers when
no Russian speakers were involved? Why blame Duterte? It is the U.S. that has a long
history of violent racism in the Philippines and FBI agents
committed false flag "terrorism" is Duterte's home town Davao. Bluster may paper over such history
for a moment but it does not change the facts or helps solving problems.
Trump's economic policies would be catastrophic for many people in the U.S. and elsewhere.
But Hillary Clinton would put her husband, the man who deregulated Wall Street, back in charge of
the economy. What do people expect the results would be?
The points above may be obvious and one might be tempted to just pass them and dig into some nig-nagging
of this or that election detail. But the above points as THE most important of any election. The
welfare of the people is not decided with some "liberal" concession to this or that niche of the
general society. The big issues count the most. Good or evil flow from them. Trumps principle, and
I think personal position, is leaning towards peaceful resolution of conflicts. Clinton's preference
is clearly, as her history shows, escalation and general belligerence. It is too risky to vote for
her.
Reality dictates ...abstaining or voting for anyone other than Donald Trump is a de facto vote
for Hillary Clinton. As POTUS she has declared her intentions of imposing a (Libyan style) "NO
FLY" zone over Syria, to "Obliterate" "Iran" and "Russia", confront China and expand the globalization
of the American economy.
Thus all Americans by default and their own actions will have given her a mandate to do her
will and thereby become complicit in their own economic destruction, war crimes and potentially
starting world war three and a planetary thermonuclear holocaust.
Striped of all the other none issue nonsense and distractions the critical choice we are all
faced with making is that simple. And one that will for all eternity weigh on our collective souls
conscience.
For the sake of all humanity, criminal warmonger Hillary must be voted out on Nov.8 2016
Why are you still beating on that worn out tin drum of yours, Dr. Jill Stein isn't going anywhere,
not even if she politically walks on water. You keep at it like the dog in a manger, gnawing on
the remains of some desiccated bone. What you (and others maintaining your OPINIONS) have become
is stool pigeons to land some herd of discontents into the position of self inflicted voter suppression,
their votes without effect on the outcome of the election. If you and the others weren't so completely
innumerate, you would realise the first division in the election was between elegible participants
and non-participants. Of the participants only voters for either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump
will decide the eventual winner (with the highly probable event of assisted voting machine fraud).
All other votes are the effete delusions of some morally deranged cult. There Is No Alternative
(TINA) is the illusion of your political kindred is saying there is an alternative. You cannot
point out even one city commission in the top thousand that either the 'Greens' or 'Libertarians'
exercise control over, at best there may be a Communist mayor somewhere in that number. If perchance
Dr Stein were to win, where is the political support necessary to conduct governance at any level?
No your ideas come from Walt Disney directly - they are cartoon delusions. You need to carry a
warning whenever you express your opinions, like those posted on nuts - My opinion may contain
delusions.
About the only ability for today's voter to have any effect on the voting system is to provide
an unexpected aggregate that would draw back the curtains to expose the expectations and machinations
of the vote counters. Voting as you suggest will only allow those manipulations to remain hidden
- not effective voting by any measure, nor is it voting one's interests. If any of your ilk have
a counter argument that will stand scrutiny, please have at it, otherwise your silence after once
stating your opinion might be your best course to follow.
While what you say may be half true, you miss the point entirely. It's irrelevant weather or
not Trump keeps his words as we have no control over that anyway. What we do have control over
however is not giving a mandate to Hillary's criminal war making intentions and the only way to
do that under the circumstances, is to vote her out, by voting Trump in period.
Anything else amounts to a dereliction of patriotic duty and criminal negligence.
The idea that there is any real "choice" here to be had, other than doing what's of a critical
necessity at this point in time, is totally delusional in and of itself buying into the illusion
that we have any real freedom of choices here. Sorry we don't have that luxury.
We don't have a choice, other than to resister our protest vote against the political establishment
which clearly doesn't want to see Trump win the presidency of the US empire under any circumstances.
Given how close trump has gotten to within the reach of taking real power as commander in chief
of the worlds most powerful imperial empire, the deep state and political establishment will make
sure that, that threat will never happen again, if they even allow him to live very much longer.
So no second chances here for us all in another 4-8 years down the road, nor for all the men,
women and children victims to be killed by wars in all the countries Hillary has set her cross-hair
sights on as soon as she takes control of the entire state apparatus from the white house.
Time to get off our asses and get real here, and back on the right side of history, if but
for once in our lifetimes.
Talk is cheep but action is not. As in Trump's Gettysburg address he said "we have now crossed
the Rubicon" and heaven or hell there's no going back to the status quo, as he's already declared
war on the corrupt state department, the media and the whole of the elite's political establishment.
"So there's but one choice left to make here, and it's which side are you fighting on?"
According to an email from Marissa Astor, Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook's assistant,
to Clinton campaign chair John Podesta, the campaign knew Trump was going to run, and pushed
his legitimacy as a candidate.
WikiLeaks' release shows that it was seen as in Clinton's best
interest to run against Trump in the general election. The memo, sent to the Democratic National
Committee (DNC) also reveals the DNC and Clinton campaign were strategizing on behalf of their
candidate at the very beginning of the primaries. "We think our goals mirror those of the DNC,"
stated the memo, attached to the email under the title "muddying the waters."
The memo named Trump, Sen. Ted Cruz, and Ben Carson as wanted candidates. "We need to be
elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are leaders of the pack and tell the press
to them seriously," the memo noted.
Clinton was widely presumed to be the Democratic presidential nominee long before the primaries
began. This assumption was held by the mainstream media and the Democratic Party leadership.
Expecting Clinton to be the nominee, the DNC and Clinton campaign developed strategies for
the general election.
In June, hacker Guccifer 2.0 released an opposition research dossier on Trump, dated December
19, 2015. Coincidentally, no other opposition research dossiers were released by Guccifer 2.0
from the DNC hacks.
It was in the best interest of Clinton, and therefore the Democratic Party, that Trump was
the Republican presidential nominee. Polls indicated Sen. Rubio, Gov. Kasich, or almost any
other establishment Republican would likely beat Clinton in a general election. Even Cruz,
who is reviled by most Republicans, would still maintain the ability to rally the Republican
Party-especially its wealthy donors-around his candidacy. Clinton and Democrats expected the
FBI investigation into her private email server would serve as a major obstacle to Clinton's
candidacy, and the public's familiarity with her scandals and flip-flopping political record
put her at a disadvantage against a newcomer. Donald Trump solved these problems.
All the Clinton campaign had to do was push the mainstream media in the general direction
of covering and attacking Trump as though he was the star of the Republican presidential primaries.
As the presumed Democratic nominee, whomever she decided to dignify by responding to-whether
the comments were directed at her or not-would be presumed to be the spokesperson, or nominee,
of the Republican Party.
"Clinton, Trump trade insults as rhetoric heats up between front-runners," read the headline
from a CNN article in September 2015. "Hillary Clinton Seizes On Donald Trump's Remarks to
Galvanize Women," read a New York Times headline from December. Several media outlets criticized
the mainstream media obsession with Trump, but despite a few concerns that the media was propping
up his legitimacy as a candidate with their constant news coverage, it continued unabatedly.
The mainstream media was more than willing to do the Clinton campaign and DNC's work for
them by creating a narrative that the 2016 presidential elections was about Hillary Clinton
vs. Donald Trump.
Hey T bear are you Aussie, their was a poster T bear banging on in Aussie press, quite liked your
arguments as of now.
As Trump policy I predicted it (quite like Alexander Mercouris ) by 1. observation of what is
said, what was not said and what you can tease out of the rest. After the 2 debate i was convinced
that Trump would not declare "Assad must go " Just for this he has my consent to be POTUS.
How does the saying go?... 'oh what a tangled web we weave when we seek to deceive". Hence
I don't believe that if Hillary actually chose Trump to be who she ran against, that she (nor
all the expert politico's around her)had any real idea of what a Pandora's box they were opening.
Same thing go's for Trump, whom I don't think understood how fate and destiney would seize
him and transform his role in life into a renegade against the systemic corruption of the deep
state's political establishment.
Now only a year back, I would never have thought and sooner die and be the last person on earth
to be plumbing for a megalomaniac character like billionaire Trump.
But when faced with the real prospect of a criminally indictable and clinically insane, maniacal
psychopathic personality like Hillary, having her finger on the red nuclear button, my instincts
for survival and that of all humanity, informs my rational judgements and actions.
And that's essentially the basis on which I've decided that voting for Trump is the only sane
option left to try and avert more wars and the possibility of a thermonuclear disaster.
Very early on, I was of the opinion that Hillary's negatives were so high that her run should
be seen as electing the Republican. But neocon defections, DNC collusion, 'sheepdog' Sanders, and more convinced me that the establishment
really does want a Hillary coronation.
"About 30% of what's on Veterans Today is patently false. About 40% of what I write is at
least purposefully partially false. Because if I didn't write false information I wouldn't
be alive. I simply have to do that."
Your points are good but there is no need for this vitriol: the opposing points are also good
as far as they go.
You believe that a third party is the only way out of the 2-party oligarchy sham. True only
if it works, which it hasn't. You are assuming that there are, or eventually would be enough voters.
That argument is missing so far. Provide that evidence and you beat the lesser-evilists.
The lesser-evilists are assuming that there aren't enough votes, so you are just taking votes
from the lesser evil and helping the greater evil. True if their assumption is true, that there
aren't enough votes for a third party to win.
You both need to get that evidence before getting angry.
Another third-party argument is sending a signal to party leaders and the public that there
are voters who despise the oligarchy candidates. That would improve growth of a third party (it
would also attract oligarchy influence to them).
I think that your anger would be better directed at the problem (take out MSM stations and
staff and oligarchy generally). Between ourselves, let's get the evidence on vote effects.
Consider each state a 'battleground' state, there are national aggregates to consider that,
if nothing else, shed light on the historical contest for future historians to inspect and pass
judgement, particularly should the qualified 'not participating' outnumber the qualified participants.
No telling what future criteria will be about the validity of sub-median voter turnout, in some
places it is enough to invalidate a poll, that could easily spread.
@ 12
No, not Aussie but have friends who were. I hold the Australian government to be the hiding
place for the 3rd Reich, so not likely any beneficial relationship will exist.
@ fairleft | Oct 26, 2016 8:05:28 AM | 14
Experience informs those who rely on 'ad hominem' as defence against another's argument are
incapable of mounting a counter argument using facts. Furthermore, with few exception most so
doing have developmental problems and have not matured much past adolescence, they going
through life as man-children. Check back when you have matured. And that is definitely an ad
hominem - to the person.
We need to stop letting the corporate press goad us into fighting over trivia - transgenders
in bathrooms! Trump's hair! Clinton's smile! - and focus on what is truly crucial.
It's rational to worry about Trump. Yes, he has a good track record of getting along with business
partners when it counts, but he has no track record in governance. But Hillary Clinton is a monster
and God help us all if she wins. I envision President Clinton with perfectly coiffed hair with
a rosy plastic smile (kudos to her mortician) giving a perfectly written speech with all the trendy
buzzwords (celebrating diversity, helping the middle class, sustainable energy, etc.etc.) while
outside the world burns.
Whatever you do, no matter how much the corporate press tells you that Trump is 'finished,'
go to the polls and vote. Because for the first time in decades, a US presidential election matters.
Trump will meet with much resistance from the establishment. His worst instincts will be constrained.
That is not true for Hillary & Co.
A loss for a corrupted Democratic Party is best for the country. A strong showing by Greens
is a further embarrassment. The left can then build on a solid foundation.
@fair Chomsky advocated for voting for Hillary in battleground states and Greens elsewhere.
I do not believe that the 'Third Way' Democratic Party can be changed from within. The example
of Obama and Hillary should have disabused any progressive of such fantasies.
Trump, both domestically and internationally is the best breath of fresh air in American politics
since FDR.
Of course purists and utopians might disagree, but when he wins on Nov.8,I'll treat that day as
the second 4th of July.
America first, at long last, instead of traitors for zion.
Hoo haw. Todays Wapoo intimates Trump anti-Semite.
And Colin liar Powell is for the Hell Bitch.
The U.S. could respond by destroying all Russian assets in and around Syria. It has the capabilities.
But then what? If I were Putin my next step would be a nuclear test shoot in Siberia - a big
one - to make a point and to wake up the rest of the world.
Russia's "deescalation" procedure (in reality it could be viewed both ways) is a take off of
several strategic bombers (TU-160 from Engels) and deployment into the Arctic Region with subsequent
launch of salvo of cruise missiles (Kh-102) armed with nuclear warheads into the polygons or uninhabited
spaces. Putting all RVSN (nuclear strategic missile forces) on the immediate readiness (Combat
Station) is also an option.
There are certain ways, including diplomatic ones, to make "partners"
more attentive to the events. Plus, most likely, the price, which US and NATO would pay in case
some moron will decide to eliminate Russian Forces in Syria, will be very high purely militarily
and, especially, reputation-wise.
Attack on Russian Forces in Syria will also be the beginning
of the end of NATO, if not the outright collapse. In the end, Russia has means to directly conventionally
counter US, just this last quarter alone Russian Navy took delivery of 100+ cruise and ASMs of
Kaliber and Onyx-classes. Contingencies have been counted and planned for.
Trump's foreign policy summed up in a 35% levy threat on Ford exporting jobs to Mexico. Read my
lips ...! Nails the underlying tensions in the Race for the Place. The Big "F__k You!" election... Even the spinless Bernie S. is slithering into criticism of Klinton and the Wall St Gang. "Michael Moore Explains Why TRUMP Will Win"
James Clapper thinks the Russians just might be serious.....
'...says he wouldn't put it past Russia to "to shoot down an American aircraft" if a no-fly
zone is imposed over Syria.'
A loss for a corrupted Democratic Party is best for the country. A strong showing by Greens
is a further embarrassment. The left can then build on a solid foundation.
We are on the same wavelength. YES , we can't have Green and Democratic Party at the
same time. First eliminates the Democratic party in this election cycle. You can't eat your cake
and have it too . Therefore, voting against Democratic Party is my first priority.
This elections cycle almost all fake leftist and NeoCon, both Democratic Party and Republicans
voting for Hillary.
Hillary Clinton's foreign policy is taken straight out of "A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen
Eighties" by Oded Yinon, also known as The Yinon Plan.
Here are are a few illustrative excerpts:
"The Western front, which on the surface appears more problematic, is in fact less complicated
than the Eastern front, in which most of the events that make the headlines have been taking place
recently. Lebanon's total dissolution into five provinces serves as a precedent for the entire
Arab world including Egypt, Syria, Iraq and the Arabian peninsula and is already following that
track. The dissolution of Syria and Iraq later on into ethnically or religiously unique areas
such as in Lebanon, is Israel's primary target on the Eastern front in the long run, while the
dissolution of the military power of those states serves as the primary short term target. Syria
will fall apart, in accordance with its ethnic and religious structure, into several states such
as in present day Lebanon, so that there will be a Shi'ite Alawi state along its coast, a Sunni
state in the Aleppo area, another Sunni state in Damascus hostile to its northern neighbor, and
the Druzes who will set up a state, maybe even in our Golan, and certainly in the Hauran and in
northern Jordan. This state of affairs will be the guarantee for peace and security in the area
in the long run, and that aim is already within our reach today.
Iraq, rich in oil on the one hand and internally torn on the other, is guaranteed as a candidate
for Israel's targets. Its dissolution is even more important for us than that of Syria. Iraq is
stronger than Syria. In the short run it is Iraqi power which constitutes the greatest threat
to Israel. An Iraqi-Iranian war will tear Iraq apart and cause its downfall at home even before
it is able to organize a struggle on a wide front against us. Every kind of inter-Arab confrontation
will assist us in the short run and will shorten the way to the more important aim of breaking
up Iraq into denominations as in Syria and in Lebanon. In Iraq, a division into provinces along
ethnic/religious lines as in Syria during Ottoman times is possible."
Now compare this to what Gen. Wesley Clarke revealed about the lead-up to the Iraq War. Six
weeks later, I saw the same officer, and asked: "Are we still going to attack Iraq?" He said:
"Sir, it's worse than that. He said – he pulled up a piece of paper off his desk – he said: "I
just got this memo from the Secretary of Defense's office. It says we're going to attack and destroy
the governments in 7 countries in five years – we're going to start with Iraq, and then we're
going to move to Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran."
This document, and the events which have followed its publication, should lay to rest once
and for all any illusions we might have harboured in relation to the various wars in the Middle
East.
The depths of the associated treason and treachery are simply breathtaking and will continue in
overdrive should Hillary Rodent Clinton be elected President.
The only answer is eliminating the pre-selection mechanism that delivers the 2-candidate,
elephant/jackass non-choice every election.
This is the election to do so: No to Clinton, no to Trump
jfl, I have always admired and read your comments here on MoA.
Sadly your posit means either of these two candidates will be (s)elected. Third Party rise
in the USSA Will. Not. Happen. Anytime .Soon. Third Party candidates will not attract the ->$7
+ billions required to run for the presidency. The status quo prevails.
So, in this very close election, wherein Soros told Bloomberg Hillary is a done deal,
http://toprightnews.com/the-fix-is-in-george-soros-says-hillary-election-a-done-deal-despite-trump-landslide/
Amerikans are left with these two options; voting for the least dangerous of the two:
[.] The media needs to be destroyed. And although voting for Trump won't do it, it's something.
Essentially, I am voting for Trump because of the people who don't want me to, and I believe I
must register my disgust with Hillary Clinton.
I am not of the mindset that any vote not for Trump is a vote for Hillary, but a vote for Trump
is a vote against Hillary. And I need to vote against Hillary. I need to vote against the media.
After the last debate, when no outlet "fact checked" Hillary's lie that her opposition to the
Heller decision had anything to do with children, or her lie that the State Department didn't
lose $6 billion under her leadership, I couldn't hold out any longer.
A Trump administration at least will include people I trust in positions that matter. I don't
know if they will be able to hold him completely in check, but I know a Clinton administration
will include people who have been her co-conspirators in corruption, and there won't even be a
media to hold her accountable.
The Wikileaks emails have exposed an arrogant cabal of misery profiteers who hold everyone,
even their fellow travelers deemed not pure enough, in contempt. These bigots who've made their
fortune from government service should be kept as far away from the levers of power as the car
keys should be kept from anyone named Kennedy on a Friday night. My one vote against it will not
be enough, but it's all I can do and I have to do all I can do.
I won't stop being critical of Trump when he deserves it; I won't pretend someone is handing
out flowers when they're shoveling BS. But I'd rather have BS shoveled out of a president than
our tax dollars shoveled to a president's friends and political allies.
The Project Vertias videos exposed a corrupt political machine journalists would have been
proud to expose in the past. The Wikileaks emails pulled back the curtain on why that didn't happen
– journalists are in on it. I can't pretend otherwise, and I have no choice but to oppose it.
[.]
I oppose much of what Donald Trump has said, but I oppose everything Hillary Clinton has done
and wants to do. And what someone says, no matter how objectionable, is less important than what
someone does, especially when it's so objectionable. A personal moral victory won't suffice when
the stakes are so high. As such, I am compelled to vote against Hillary by voting for the only
candidate with any chance whatsoever of beating her – Donald Trump.
~ ~ ~ I am a spectator outside the USSA. USSA policies affect all of humanity on planet earth. A vote
for the Clinton adds another potential 16 years reign in the WH, a continuation of the corruption,
death, destruction and endless wars.
Since the 1990s in Arkansas then in D.C., their retirement is long overdue. Stop the Clintons
from enriching themselves on the public purse…foreign and domestic.
OMg Illary cares about women's rights but takes $millions in donations from such likes as KSA,
Qatar. Not to mention, countries that are steeped in poverty. Take a look at the donors to the
Clinton Foundation.
The Clintons have no shame, no conscience and they can't grow one.
@ 12
No, not Aussie but have friends who were. I hold the Australian government to be one of
the hiding place s for the 3rd Reich, so not likely any beneficial relationship will exist.
...
Posted by: Formerly T-Bear | Oct 26, 2016 8:55:20 AM | 23
There, fixed it.
ALL of the Christian Colonial countries have pro-AmeriKKKan fascist governments which studiously
ignore the Will Of the People.
I can't think of a single X-tian government which has NOT fallen into lockstep with the US - in
flagrant defiance of the electorate.
Since we can't outbid the ppl who are bribing them to defy us, the only practical solution is
rg the lg's pitchforks.
I don't post here much anymore but Dr. Stein is the head of an NGO called the Green Party not
a political party. She is busy protesting in North Dakota to get on Democracy Now instead of camping
out in Bernie States pushing those voters to continue our political revolution with her. It's
a shame really.
I've never had much respect for the Green Party and they have shown that they are incapable
of becoming an oppisition party in the U.S.
If you are interested in 3rd parties take some time to check out the Justice Party and Rocky
Anderson. They are not active this cycle. The Justice Party does not have an International Party
which is problematic for the Greens in the U.S. The name Justice is much better in rhetorical
fights than Green and they are not riddled with former Democratic whores.
With that said vote for Trump in swing states. He is the Lesser of Two Evils and this time
we are talking about Nuclear War with Russia. Clinton is still a Goldwater Girl.
The Green Party should, for all intents and purposes, be opposed to a billionaire lobbyist like
Soros, however Jill Stein's running mate, Baraka, was also a board member at the Center for Constitutional
Rights, CCR.
There are other connections between the Green Party and George Soros, but I haven't got time
to pursue this....
Anyone interested should look into the period from 2004 to 2011, when Baraka was the Executive
Director of the US Human Rights Network, and look at who was funding the HUNDREDS of NGOs that
make up the Human Rights Network.
Anyone who seriously considers that voting...or NOT voting...for either of these creatures
will change a goddamned thing is totally asleep to what has happened in the U.S. over the past
60+ years.
Today the path to total dictatorship in the U.S. can be laid by strictly legal means, unseen
and unheard by Congress, the President, or the people. Outwardly we have a Constitutional
government. We have operating within our government and political system … a well-organized
political-action group in this country, determined to destroy our Constitution and establish
a one-party state…. The important point to remember about this group is not its ideology
but its organization… It operates secretly, silently, continuously to transform our Government….
This group … is answerable neither to the President, the Congress, nor the courts. It is
practically irremovable."
- Senator William Jenner, 1954 speech
Unaffected by elections. Unaltered by populist movements. Beyond the reach of the law.
Say hello to America's shadow government.
A corporatized, militarized, entrenched bureaucracy that is fully operational and staffed
by unelected officials who are, in essence, running the country, this shadow government represents
the hidden face of a government that has no respect for the freedom of its citizenry.
No matter which candidate wins the presidential election, this shadow government is here
to stay. Indeed, as recent documents by the FBI reveal, this shadow government-also referred
to as "The 7th Floor Group"-may well have played a part in who will win the White House this
year.
And then go take care of your own business as best you can. The status quo will remain...hidden
in various ways as it has been hidden since the late '40s/early '50s...until it fails of its own
doing. No amount of talky talk talk, no amount of organizing, no amount of anything is going to
change what is up here. The best any of us can do is to try to reach one mind at a time.
Eisenhower tried to warn us in his farewell speech:
The record of many decades stands as proof that our people and their Government have, in the
main, understood these truths and have responded to them well in the face of threat and stress.
But threats, new in kind or degree, constantly arise.
Of these, I mention two only.
A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty,
ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction.
Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors
in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.
Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American
makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can
no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create
a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million
men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military
security more than the net income of all United States corporations.
American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now
we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to
create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions.
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in
the American experience. The total influence – economic, political, even spiritual – is felt
in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative
need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil,
resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence,
whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous
rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.
We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the
proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods
and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture,
has been the technological revolution during recent decades.
In this revolution, research has become central, it also becomes more formalized, complex,
and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal
government.
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces
of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university,
historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution
in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract
becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are
now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations,
and the power of money is ever present – and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also
be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive
of a scientific-technological elite.
The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations,
and the power of money is ever present – and is gravely to be regarded.
It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces,
new and old, within the principles of our democratic system – ever aiming toward the supreme
goals of our free society.
"It is ludicrous to event think about openly attacking Russian (or Syrian) troops in Syria
with an al-Qaeda supporting "no-Fly-Zone". Russia would respond by taking down U.S. planes over
Syria. The Russian government would have to do so to uphold its authority internationally as well
as at home."
It is ludicrous. And stupid. It would also be tantamount to a declaration of war. And the chickenshit
US Military does NOT want a war with Russia, no matter what the daydreamers might say.
Stating that the Green Party can not win does not take reality into account. Only 18% of
voters participated in the primaries, the majority of voters are neither Democrats nor Republicans,
and the population of Millennials has surpassed that of the Baby Boomers.
Of course this doesn't change the fact that it is still very unlikely that Jill Stein will
win, but to imply that it's impossible is dishonest. I have always voted for the candidate that
I liked... never for the lesser of two evils. How different would the world be if Nader had either
won or gained popular support in 2000? Voting for the lesser of two evils has pushed the Republican
Party into crazy town with the Democratic Party taking their place.
I'm not arrogant enough to tell people how to vote, however I am arrogant enough to inform.
The lack of information and the inability to process more than one thought by both the voters
and the media, alternative included, is astounding.
I'm pretty sure that people on this site know what imposing a no-fly zone in Syria would entail.
How is this not advocating a war of aggression? Have we forgotten what the Nuremberg Tribunal
declared as the supreme international crime:
War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states
alone, but affect the whole world. To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only
an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war
crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.
Not only do you have the current administration committing war crimes, you also have it's presidential
candidate openly advocating a war crime.
[.] The media needs to be destroyed. And although voting for Trump won't do it, it's something.
Essentially, I am voting for Trump because of the people who don't want me to, and I believe I
must register my disgust with Hillary Clinton.
I am not of the mindset that any vote not for Trump is a vote for Hillary, but a vote for Trump
is a vote against Hillary. And I need to vote against Hillary. I need to vote against the media.
After the last debate, when no outlet "fact checked" Hillary's lie that her opposition to the
Heller decision had anything to do with children, or her lie that the State Department didn't
lose $6 billion under her leadership, I couldn't hold out any longer.
A Trump administration at least will include people I trust in positions that matter. I don't
know if they will be able to hold him completely in check, but I know a Clinton administration
will include people who have been her co-conspirators in corruption, and there won't even be a
media to hold her accountable.
The Wikileaks emails have exposed an arrogant cabal of misery profiteers who hold everyone,
even their fellow travelers deemed not pure enough, in contempt. These bigots who've made their
fortune from government service should be kept as far away from the levers of power as the car
keys should be kept from anyone named Kennedy on a Friday night. My one vote against it will not
be enough, but it's all I can do and I have to do all I can do.
I won't stop being critical of Trump when he deserves it; I won't pretend someone is handing
out flowers when they're shoveling BS. But I'd rather have BS shoveled out of a president than
our tax dollars shoveled to a president's friends and political allies.
The Project Vertias videos exposed a corrupt political machine journalists would have been
proud to expose in the past. The Wikileaks emails pulled back the curtain on why that didn't happen
– journalists are in on it. I can't pretend otherwise, and I have no choice but to oppose it.
[.]
I oppose much of what Donald Trump has said, but I oppose everything Hillary Clinton has
done and wants to do. And what someone says, no matter how objectionable, is less important than
what someone does, especially when it's so objectionable. A personal moral victory won't suffice
when the stakes are so high. As such, I am compelled to vote against Hillary by voting for the
only candidate with any chance whatsoever of beating her – Donald Trump.
~ ~ ~ ~
It is long past due and time to stop the corrupt Clintons from continuing to enrich themselves
off the backs of taxpayers; domestic and foreign.
Illary professes to care about women's rights yet her Clinton Family Foundation takes in $millions
from the likes of KSA and Qatar. Moreover, there is no shame in taking donations from small countries
steeped in poverty. It is high time to retire the Clintons. They have no conscience. If you haven't
a conscience you can't grow one.
RayB - well stated arguments to vote for Trump. Thank you for taking the time to post them.
As folks here already know, Hillary's stated commitment to impose a No-Fly Zone in Syria is
a show stopper for me. There is no way I can support more tragedy in Syria let alone elsewhere.
Any who don't think such a policy position does not matter tells me you are a supporter of
the neoliberal/neocon imperial building for which I cannot support. This is what a vote for Clinton
means.
I may have had a different opinion or thought about the U.S. morphing into the world's top
cop had I ever been asked, but I wasn't. I never was asked to vote on it or for/against it. These
sneaky rastards intentions were never spelled out, never communicated succinctly to the populous
let alone debated on the merits. Nope. These rastards are hell bent on shoving their neoliberal/neocon/third
way/nwo crap down American's throats.
And no, Donald is and always will be an outsider. If you believe otherwise you've obviously
not been paying much attention to him over the last four years. That man did not win the primaries
by chance, he won them handily through skill and out maneuvering his opponents. He has spent the
last four years learning up close the plethora of challenges an open border presents to the security
of the U.S. He gets the issues revolving around policing and the growing police state. He has
formiddable experience making, losing and making money again. He's had a front seat to big business
and its multiple machinations for decades.
And a vote for Hillary is a vote for the Establishment and their utopian new world order, which
includes WAR, WAR, and MORE WAR!
Touching naivety about Trump however the probability of him being 'different', given his record,
doesn't support it.
The problem with Trump is he made a #1 strategic mistake in supporting and giving in to the
religious right.
Apart from anything else this gives zero confidence that he'd stand up to the far more powerful
neo-liberal, neo-con 'war party' establishment if he got into power. If he caves totally to a
bunch of fundamentalist nutjobs, who themselves are neo-liberal and neo-conservative to the core,
it doesn't actually inspire any confidence whatsoever. Take one example Mike Pence is a neo-conservative
'Israel firster'... through and through.
Somehow I can't see the world being a safer place if the US tears itself to pieces trying to
become a fundamentalist religious 'state', dominated by a bunch of people wanting 'the end of
times'....
Despite the "with some "liberal" concession to this or that niche of the general society."
comment, he has threatened the rights of the majority of voters and even the very existence of
some.
In case no one had noticed 50% of the population are women, add in all the other minorities and
you have a healthy 60-70% he is directly threatening.
Religious right candidates (like Cruz and Pence) are unelectable, ever more so with time as
organised religion dies in the US and their policies on women and LGBTI people, plus let's not
forget their endemic racism, become every more unacceptable.
And note ALL the 'religious right' people are total neo-conservatives, that almost make Clinton
look like a pacifist.
Trump has nearly destroyed the Republican Party. And he has done so by speaking truths that
are rarely heard in "polite company": our politicians are puppets and our elections are "rigged".
Sanders spoke against inequality but he didn't go as far as Trump. He couldn't because he was
merely a sheepdog, leading his young 'flock' to Hillary.
If Trump wins, it would be a body blow to the Democrats who play on peoples fears to get elected
but never deliver workable solutions. Rinse. Repeat.
The Greens can win in 2020 after Trump fails and both parties are in disarray.
<> <> <> <> <> <> <>
I'm not telling people how to vote. I encourage people to think for themselves. This is only
MY opinion.
Its hard to emotionally accept the occurrence of a nuclear war today.
You should see how Saker couldn't cope with it at first.
If Russian assets in Syria get destroyed. The response will not to be nuking that little island
in the Indian ocean far away from everything or Hawaii that is in the middle of nowhere.
"The U.S. could respond by destroying all Russian assets in and around Syria. It has the capabilities.
But then what?" Then the US activates also activates phase D which is NATO invasion of Russia
(from Ukraine, the Baltics, Scandinavia) and China (from South Korea, Japan + other US bases scatered
all over the US empire).
I don't believe Trump's domestic and foreign policy will be any more different or peacefull.
I think he would just be facing a lot more resistance. Either way, unless Hillary dies there is
no doubt she will be the next POTUS.
As a 50 something adult who lives in a state where we have a healthy voter population of Christian
Right, which you refer to as religious right, folk let me assure you that your description of
them is way the hell out of line. Your distasteful comment shows just how inexperienced and ignorant
you are about this very American voting block.
Why are you even weighing in here? You seem more of a DailyKos kinda poster. Posters around
here tend to avoid language that is as divisive as yours and that all knowing punkish tone you
are using.
Maybe you haven't been paying attention, but these neoconservative you are talking about have
been leaving his camp in droves in the preceeding months. Please do not lecture us on some secret
collusion between Trump and those wicked shits. There is no doubt they will be crawling back to
the Donald when he sits on the throne. But make no mistake: he will not forget the treachery of
these subjects, just as the constituents of these jokers will not forget how they abandoned the
Donald and revealed their obedience to the uniparty. These are the voters that hate "politicians,"
remember? I can't wait to see Paul Ryan squirm.
And GTFO with your lgbtq trolling nonsense. Time to relegate these babies to their safe spaces
so we can all breathe a sigh of relief to be rid of their loud, obnoxious mental anguish over
their own petty insignificance. Remember, too, that Syrian lives matter. Once the culture of death
is curtailed anroad, we can tackle the culture of death at home. Ancient Chinese wisdom for dumb
trolls.
Trump sounds very scary in many ways but most of the stuff he babbles on about should not worry
anybody. The President of the US does not rule the US. Power in the US is distributed into the
three branches of government -- the executive, Congress and the judiciary. Most of Trump's worst
ideas will have to pass through Congress and the judiciary. There is only one area where the President
has total dominion and that is foreign policy and making war.
The question should come down to who do we want want as the next President -- a candidate that
seeks war with Russia or one who wants to negotiate and make deals? Given that question we will
be better off with Trump.
If Trump wins he will not have any support in Congress so it makes no sense that he will succeed
in cutting taxes for the richest or build the Mexican wall or any of the other nutty things he
advocates. But making peace with the Russians is the one thing he could accomplish.
Also I support Trump because the Democratic National Committee has been completely taken over
by the Hillary and neocon wing of the Democratic Party. As long as they control the Democratic
Party (which they do today) any US president that is a Democrat means that WWIII is a real option
always on the table. Tax cuts for the rich, increased monopolization of the economy, increased
poverty rates, restrictions on abortions, etc, are quite secondary. [BTW, I have served on a county
Democratic central committee for the last two decades and worked on presidential campaigns for
Democrats going back to Eisenhower-Stevens in 1956 (except for Humphrey in 1968). What I have
witnessed is that the entire party has been taken over by the big money contributions going down
to city council elections.] A Trump victory will give us a small chance for the grass roots Democrats
to regain some influence in national Party affairs -- today we have none.
NOT voting requires no amount of talky talk talk, no amount of organizing, no amount of anything.
but if everyone did it the central government would become immediately irrelevant and collapse,
and if the central government collapsed, its attendant institutions would unravel, the primary
grifters would atrophy on the vine, and the deep state would be in deep shit.
@1 I think it makes little sense to convince progressives that the should vote for Hillary. And
it is absurd to insist that a vote for anyone other than Trump is "a de facto vote for Hillary
Clinton." The more people that don't vote for Hillary the better. And a vote for Jill Stein builds
up the Green Party. If we could get the message out that Hillary is just too dangerous and that
a real progressive choice is Jill Stein, then it is possible that a good number of people who
may have voted for Hillary (and who can't stomach Trump) could take away Clinton's margin of victory
. I am voting for Jill Stein, I live in NY, it is not practical, given past elections, to think
Trump could win NY. I would be wasting my vote to vote for Trump in NY. When I vote for Jill Stein,
that is another vote NOT going to Hillary Clinton. see video:
VIDEO
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- In the U.S., 13% approve of the job Congress is doing, in line with approval
ratings ranging from 11% to 16% since August. The current rating is just four percentage points
above the record low of 9% recorded in November 2013.
'Selection' 2016 is a clown show. Trump, Hill & Bill, Bu$h I, Bu$h II even Romney are all heavily
involved is the drug money laundry business. A vote is a vote that legitimises the system.
I just cannot bring myself to vote for any of these criminals. Every vote legitimises this
freak show.
***Last letter of the alphabet does not work on my keyboard.
Donald Trump as the front runner and then candidate of the Republican Party didn't just happen.
This was by design, it was what the DNC and the Hillary campaign wanted and what they told the
media to do, to elevate him to leader of the pack. (
Wikileaks reveals
NOT voting requires no amount of talky talk talk, no amount of organizing, no amount of anything.
but if everyone did it the central government would become immediately irrelevant and collapse,
and if the central government collapsed, its attendant institutions would unravel, the primary
grifters would atrophy on the vine, and the deep state would be in deep shit.
A huge majority of the U.S. population is still caught up in the wonderful political virtual
reality game so generously provided for free by the Deep State-controlled media. They will clomp-clomp-clomp
on out of their zombified dwellings and vote for whichever of the two-dimensional VR candidates
for whom they root.
Ludicrous propaganda once again from b. B sure is trying his darndest to want to work for the
Russian state under his lord and saviour Putin the irresistible.
Trump himself said that China is a threat to the US. And he refuses to rule out no war with
China. Therefore Trump is likely wanting to start world War three by attacking China. How is that
worse than Hitlery wanting to attack Russia in Syria.
Trump will take Iraqs oil, make Mexico pay for a wall on the US side starting a war with them,
and so much more horrendous criminality
And Trumps foreign policy is "sane". What despicable ludicrous lies
Seriously people. If anyone believes either candidate means what they say, with all due respect,
you're delusional. No matter what, whomever "wins", they'll do as they're instructed to do.
Sorry b, with all due respect and gratitude for what you do, that includes you. Living up to
one's rhetoric is difficult, for anyone running for POTUS, impossible.
The only relevant vote against that crazy bitch from hell?
Of course:
Trump
A number of commentators have pointed out that the US could destroy Russia's assets - what they don't
point out is that this would expose US assets to destruction - which is why WW3 is almost inevitable
if the US escalates in Syria
A number of commentators have pointed out that the US could destroy Russia's assets - what they
don't point out is that this would expose US assets to destruction - which is why WW3 is almost
inevitable if the US escalates in Syria
Those who say: Its all a charade, voting changes nothing, Trump will do what he's told, etc. have
either given up in disgust or are purposely ignoring reality. The establishment is afraid of a
Trump win. There are numerous instances of their manipulating or attempting to manipulate the
election.
Vote Trump in swing states. Vote Green everywhere else.
So what? I've read that leak. Doesn't speak or reference in any way complicity of Trump's campaign
or even the repubs. I think you are framing that to fit your perspective that the DNC is the main
powerbroker, here. Whereas, the more hilarious conclusion to draw would be that, through their
arrogance and complete and utter disdain for the disaffected, they underestimated the threat of
a "fringe" candidate. Talk about the most fuckin' shortsighted political decision (all-time bone
head plays #1) this side of Joe Liebermann. God it makes me smile. And to think, the media played
right into Trump's tiny hands. That's showmanship. Face it: he is smarter and crafter and he knows
the people just a hair more.
Yes, we all want Trump to save the whales, make cake healthy, unite the Muslim world, make
college free, fix health-care, restore the rust-belt, solve climate - change while delivering
more jobs to energy sector, defeat Isis while not upsetting KSA, Qatar, et.al, and not go into
Syria.
I'll take one of those at least for my vote. Can you guess which one?
Lately I can understand why most people hate trump and love Clinton or vise versa. But I have
to say that both party's have great and solid points that needs to be taken serious the voting
will be harder then before that is for sure the only thing I hate about the politics is that when
the candidate has won all point's they have made in the election round will go out the window.
My dutch boyfriend just ask me why do they always put one man in the seat to control all why
not join forces will this not be a better option what do you think those he has a point or is
it just wrong thinking on his part.
Look at Greece. The progressives/socialists could not win. It seems that we need a nationalist.
It is a hard truth for progressives. The left has failed miserably to check the tyranny of
neolibcon Centrists who sell us all out to the highest bidder.
We need a Trump, like Russia needed a Putin. To right the ship.
When the dust settles, and lessons are learned, real progressives with integrity can rebuild.
Jimbo is giving a good daily rundown of the fraud coming in from the advance polls, & other things.
I like the one where the poll station workers are filling in the paper ballot votes after, for
those not voting. http://82.221.129.208/basepageq5.html
I don't know about Trump. But Hillary is a fucking nightmare. I don't live in America and I can't
vote there, but to those who do and can, please don't vote for that psycho bitch. Anyone else.
Anybody. But to cast a vote for her would be an exhibition of ignorance and willful sociopathy.
The world is begging you, please... Pleeeeeeeease. Do not vote for whole countries to be flushed
down the same toilet of meglomaniacal greed. Be nice. There are a lot of other people living on
this planet. We don't wanna kill anybody, we just wanna relax and thrive. Get with the program....
Trump loses in the Electoral College. Gets his own TV network and proceeds to preempt and co
opt 3rd party Constitution Party. Just like Dr. Ron Paul's campaign was co opted by supposed Tea
Party people who were in fact Conservative paid stooges. Right off the top the Cock brothers come
to mind.
@Jackrabbit 74
The Nationalist response is a natural one in the face of this unseen, centralising, globalist
beast. UK just had theirs with Brexit, and now we see the battle lines redrawn and subsequent
rally behind Corbyn. France could be next in Europe.
The left seems not to know where it is in the states... I agree it needs to fall into disarray
before rediscovering itself.
Trump has the momentum going down the straight, no one knows what the fuck is going on amongst
all the monkey shit being flung in the cage...but no one is oblivious to the the fact that the
establishment, from the neocon flight to the unprecedented MSM collusion and everything in-between,
is so OTT Trump. Too much so. It's what the progressive left always wanted, a hero like this,
to stand up to the machine.
All that money and all Hillary cam come up with is a naughty word and 'Never Trump' - almost
as if Trump goaded them into a shitfight by making idiotic, outlandish statements alongside his
more thoughtful output that doesn't make primetime cable news. Now the Dems have less than two
weeks to attack some real issues to quiet the silent majority's upcoming 'fuck you' vote...
I'd even go as far to say there will be plenty of silent Dems voting Trump if the election
was right now. No wonder Trump wants a 4th debate.
The only recourse the citizenry of the Outlaw US Empire has in attempting to restore its freedoms
and regain control of the national government is to revolt. Unfortunately, such a dire action
requires a high degree of solidarity amongst a body of citizens large enough to make the attempt
and there's no sign of such a body anywhere to be seen. Thus we'll see the selection of HRC and
the last gasp of the Neoliberalcons attempt to establish Full Spectrum Dominance of the planet
and its people that will likely escalate the already existing Hybrid WW3 to a hot war. In other
words, it doesn't matter who you vote for, so you ought to vote your conscience so you can be
right with yourself. Our household's voting Stein.
'The big issues count the most. Good or evil flow from them. Trumps principle, and I think personal
position, is leaning towards peaceful resolution of conflicts.' - b
The latter sentence contrasts with trump's determination to kill ISIS and take their oil. Sounds
like occupation to me. And his manner of fighting them - with unrestrained torture and bullets
dipped in pig's blood - is likely to catalyse supporty for them else where in the muslim world
(and the muslim parts of the west), even if ISIS is stomped flat in Syria/Iraq. Coup[led with
his blanket ban on muslim immigration, this sounds like a recipe for more conflict, not less.
Likewise with some other big issues: climate change and world trade. As shitty as the WTO system
can be, simply withdrawing and erecting huge tariffs would have catastrophic effects on world
trade that wwe comparable to if not worse than the 1931 Smoot-Hawley tariffs that crippled world
trade and set the stage for WW2. Worse, Trump's 100% opposition to acting on climate change, and
his determination to allow all fossil fuel extraction projects to go ahead, will guarantee catastrophic
global warming that will make WW2 itself look insignificant in the long run.
I agree that Hillary is a menace. But that doesn't make Trump less of one.
Perfect legacy of Obama is the just announced Obamacare insurance premium 25℅ avg rate increases.
Covered at WSWS but can't link from this phone. How about a $10,000 deductible for a family of
4 making $40,000? Things will get worse on several fronts next year, according to bipartisan plans
published in the NYT. Trump's 'solution' is going back to what we had before, ie he has no solution.
Wants to turn Medicaid, aid for our poor, into a voucher program. Don't vote for austerity, don't
vote for HillTrump.
Trump isn't a leftist, nor is he a pacifist. In fact, Trump is an ardent militarist, who has
been proposing actual colonial wars of conquest for years. It's a kind of nationalist hawkishness
that we haven't seen much of in the United States since the Cold War - but has supported some
of the most aggressive uses of force in American history.
You'll see a robust bill of particulars in the article; I've cited some of them earlier. To
little effect of course; Red Hats and Green Tea Bags make excellent counter-factual filters.
The author, Zack Beauchamp, quite helpfully puts The Day-Glo Orange Duckhead in historical
context. He quotes the historian Walter Russell Mead on the Jacksonian tradition in American foreign
policy. He's from Bard College, BTW, which rates fairly high up on the uber-liberal university
scale. So they don't be doin' too many Orange Jello Shots, know what I mean?
Jacksonians, according to Mead, are basically focused on the interests and reputation of the
United States. They are skeptical of ... idealistic quests removed from the interests of everyday
Americans. But when American interests are in question, or failing to fight will make America
look weak, Jacksonians are more aggressive than anyone.
"The Gulf War was a popular war in Jacksonian circles because the defense of the nation's
oil supply struck a chord with Jacksonian opinion.... With them it is an instinct rather than
an ideology - a culturally shaped set of beliefs and emotions rather than a set of ideas,"
Mead writes. Sound familiar?
Historically - and here's the important part - the Jacksonian tradition has been partly
responsible for a lot of what we see today as American atrocities....
Jackson himself is responsible for the "Trail of Tears."
On the campaign trail, Trump routinely cites Gens. George Patton and Douglas MacArthur as foreign
policy models - uber-Jacksonians both. Patton wanted to invade the Soviet Union after World
War II to head off perceived future threats to America. And President Harry Truman fired MacArthur,
despite his strategic genius, for publicly and insubordinately advocating total war against
China during the Korean War.
This is the tradition Trump's views seem to fit into. But while Patton and MacArthur at
least had real military expertise and intellectual heft animating their hawkishness, Trump
is just a collection of angry impulses. There's no worked-out strategic doctrine here, just
an impulse to act aggressively when it seems like America's interests and/or reputation are
at stake.
Just a bundle of anger, driven by emotion, no set plan, aggressive with poor impulse control.
What could possibly go wrong?
So he doesn't want the present wars in the Ukraine and Syria, he says, now. But all the better
to bomb Iraq and Iran into a pulp, it would seem.
Climate change is already affecting the world, and it will take a concerted effort over a much,
much longer period to get it under control, when compared to the Nazi threat.
This is scientifically certain. The prospect of WW3 under Hillary's presidency is very far from
being certain.
what oligarch will those pesky amerikkans vote for?
oligarch 1 - hillary
or oligarch 2 - trump
if it was me, i would be voting 2.. but being in canada, i don't get to vote.. i just get to
listen to bullshite 2016 election usa 24/7 any time i venture onto the internut..
The third - and final - presidential debate between Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican
Donald Trump was held Oct. 19 at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and moderated by Fox News'
Chris Wallace.
At one point Hillary said: "....and I'm going to continue to push for a no-fly zone and safe
havens within Syria"
A No Fly Zone means we shoot down Russian planes. And THAT MEANS WW-III.
= = = = Furthermore = = = =
With single-bid ("plurality") voting you only have two candidates to choose from.
I have described the strategic hedge simple score election method all over the Internet, and
it has been known of for many years. It is simple in the sense that does not require easily hackable
voting machines, and can easily work with hand counted paper ballots at non-centralized poling
stations. It is not hampered by any requirement to cater to so-called "sincere," "honest" (actually
artless and foolish) voters. It easily thwarts both the spoiler effect and the blind hurdle dilemma
(the "Burr Dilemma"), which prevents voters from exercising the strategies that they need to use
to defeat the big bosses. It just works.
Strategic hedge simple score voting can be described in one simple sentence: Strategically
bid no vote at all for undesired candidates (ignore them as though they did not exist), or strategically
cast from five to ten votes for any number of candidates you prefer (up to some reasonable limit
of, say, twelve candidates), and then simply add all the votes up.
Both IRV-style and approval voting methods suffer from the blind hurdle dilemma, which can
be overcome with the hedge voting strategy. An example of usage of the hedge strategy, presuming
the (most famous) case of a "leftist" voter, would be casting ten votes for Ralph Nader, and only
eight or nine "hedge votes" for Al Gore. This way, the voter would only sacrifice 20 or 10 percent
of their electoral influence if Nader did not win.
Don't be fooled by fake "alternatives" like "IRV" and "approval voting". Ranked choice voting
is supported by the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Open Society Foundations
(of Soros), and on and on.
Ranked choice voting is just as bad,or worse than out present single-bid ("plurality") method
with regard to enforcing the two party syndrome, and this has been demonstrated repeatedly in
history.
Score voting is fundamentally distinct from ranked choice voting, and does not promote the
two party syndrome. That's probably why it doesn't get hundreds of millions of promotion dollars
as the "Green" Party's ranked choice system does.
And demand hand counted paper ballots that cannot be rigged by "Russian hackers".
We are stuck with this miserable system because of a surprisingly large array of people who
I call the "election methods cognoscenti". Over many years, these cognoscenti have assembled an
enormous collection of distracting, unworkable election methods. This "intellectual subject" has,
for instance, consumed perhaps hundreds of pages in works such as the Wikipedia. These cognoscenti
have created a gigantic Glass Bead Game which serves no real purpose other than to facilitate
intellectual speculation. In nearly every instance where their election methods have been employed,
disaster has ensued, although in a few cases, their systems have languished on, providing no better
results than the choose-one voting system. Millions, perhaps tens of millions of dollars, have
been spent promoting the "IRV" method, which has been tried and abandoned in several venues where
it caused massive chaos.
We cannot afford any more of this intellectual masturbation, which has lead to this absurd
2016 "election". All we should be doing is protesting for safe, easy-to-understand strategic hedge
simple score voting.
And I will be voting for Donald Trump, even though I know that my "ballot" is going to be fed
into an infernal machine.
Clinton advised the mainstream media to push his legitimacy as a "pied piper" candidate because
she realized, after looking at the poll numbers, that she wouldn't stand a chance at winning the
presidency against any of the establishment republicans without making them "pied pipers" – it
just so happened that Donald was the easiest to play the role considering his long history of
friendship with the Clintons.
https://dollarvigilante.com/blog/2016/10/25/rigged-election-hillary-trump-caught-partying-like-bffs-kissinger-jesuit-gala.html
Oh c'mon. Stooping pretty low on that one. One of election's sicker sideshows: Briebert's site
covering Stein more then almost anyone else... when they can twist one of Jill's criticism's of
Hillary into and endorsement of Trump. Jill is most certainly a NASTY woman. :)
Trump has some strange ideas. And he'll cause some real harm in some areas.
But again, his strong medicine is what is needed. We can spill loads of electronic ink debating
the
reasons why and talking about how he sucks but that won't change the reality.
I am very much against the duopoly. But one of these two will win. A win by Trump and a strong
showing by the Greens is the best we can hope for.It sends a clear message. What message does
voting for Hillary send? That we will allow ourselves to be compromised yet AGAIN?
Trump says: "either you have a country, or you don't". So what are the 'borders' that the left
will
defend? Just how much will the Left allow its so-called leaders to compromise and marginalize
us?
There is a natural alliance between the principled left and principled right that the mercenary,
mendacious establishment fears. Don't be fooled by Hillary/DNC scare tactics and media manipulation!
Hillary tells some voters that she will continue Obama's policies and other voters that she
will be
different. She assures Goldman Sacks that her private positions differ very much from her public
positions. She runs pay to play scams via the Clinton Foundation, takes tons of money from Wall
Street
and pretends that none of that influences her. The Chair of the DNC joined her campaign after
her
work against Sanders was revealed! And Sanders response? He endorsed Hillary!!
The Democrats believe that YOU and your family, friends, and neighbors are confused and scared
or just
plain dumb and foolish enough to vote for Hillary and other Democrats that will ride her coattails.
Prove them wrong. Stand up for yourself! Vote for Trump in swing states and Jill Stein in other
states.
That the establishment candidate is not automatically the worst possible candidate. Not when
the other is an unrepentant racist determined to castrate the First Amendment and incinerate the
climate. What message does it send when a candidate whose campaign took off at the point he called
most - if not all - illegal immigrants 'rapists' wins the White House? Besides, you sound more
like a Sanders supporter than a Trump supporter - so maybe his thoughts are worth taking into
account here.
I had assumed your link would be garbage, but took a look, anyway. In fact, it raises significant
points. In particular, previously unknown (to me) details about his views about "taking the oil".
I'm definitely for Trump, consider him far safer and saner than Clinton wrt foreign policy
with most of the world (I suspect he could be worse wrt N Korea, than Clinton; also, no better
wrt Africa, than Clinton).
I have never been impressed with the Trumpian "take the oil" position that I learned of during
the campaign, and have described it as "goofy" and "sure sounding like a war crime". That this
particular stupidity (or hawkish stupidity, if you prefer) is nothing new, and extended to Libya,
is disappointing.
Still, on balance, compared to the endless hemming in and provocation of nuclear super-power
Russia (not to mention smearing of Putin), by the neocon class of which Hillary is an obvious
example of, the author's claim that Trump is more of a hawk than her still sounds absurd. Even
if the argument has some merits.
"Donald Trump's foreign policy speech last Wednesday deserves at least a solid B+ and you can
read my take on it in the June issue of Chronicles. It offered an eloquent argument for offensive
realism, based on the fact that the international system-composed of sovereign nation-states pursuing
their interests-is still essentially competitive and Hobbesian. Trump is the only candidate who
understands this cardinal fact, and who unambiguously states America is not and should not be
an exception to that timeless principle."
"Since leaving government, Flynn has angered U.S. officials over his friendly ties to Russia,
with which he has publicly advocated better relations and military cooperation in the Middle East
- a departure from the official Pentagon line. He even recently sat at the head table at a dinner
in Moscow with President Vladimir Putin, whom Trump has praised."
This same article also says,
"Much as Trump likes to keep things in the family, Flynn's son, Michael G. Flynn, serves as
a chief adviser."
The idea that Trump wouldn't consult with the likes of Flynn - who might be his Secretary of Defense
- also seems goofy. Of course he will.
The Obama Administration, of which Hillary was an integral part, deliberately allowed ISIS
to flourish, in it's early stages. Trump's incompetence as a political candidate is amply demonstrated
by the fact that, even given 3 national debate audiences, he FAILED to pin the US non-interdiction
of the mega ISIS oil trade, run through Turkey, on the Obama administration (thus, to one degree
or another, also on Clinton). See "Russian intel spots 12,000 oil tankers & trucks on Turkey-Iraq
border - General Staff" for photos that Trump should have (pardon the expression) trumpeted during
all 3 national debates. Had he done so, in stead of being politically inept and inarticulate,
he would have cemented in the public's mind just HOW evil the foreign policy of both Obama and
Clinton were. (Of course, he should have also mentioned the wikileaks tick tock memos, crediting
uber SoS failure Hilary Clinton with steps on the road to the destruction of Libya).
Hillary has not just spouted militaristic, imperialistic hokum. She was also in the decision
loop, as war crimes against Libya, in particular, were being decided on, then perpetrated. She
has a history that is far more evidential of catastrophic militarism than goofy statements about
"taking the oil".
Very kind of you to note your new-found concerns, anytime.
Trump has net yet been in the loop. I do not want him there, he would be bad for the country
and planet. His public statements suggest he would make far worse decisions.
{quote} > BREAKING: JILL STEIN ENDORSES DONALD TRUMP
Oh c'mon. Stooping pretty low on that one. {end quote}
You are misquoting me intensionally. I put: "BREAKING: JILL STEIN ENDORSES DONALD TRUMP [Sort
Of][1 min., 15 sec.]" And that is because YouTube links often break up while their titles remain
searchable.
You ignored that I added "[Sort of]"!
I think there are likely a lot of DailyKos zombies around here tonight.
Trump may be a bullheaded semi-thug, but I'll vote for him before I join the "die with Hillary"
movement.
"His public statements suggest he would make far worse decisions."
On balance, no, they don't. Even if Flynn couldn't talk any sense into him regarding "taking
the oil", and a President Trump somehow managed to pull that off, and it turned into an endless
conflict, the $$ cost of which exceeded the oil profits thus obtained, that would still be preferable
to nuclear exchanges with Russia.
I read just today about a Russian nuke, called "Satan", that supposedly can destroy a country
the size of France (or the state of Texas). I had to read it twice, since the claim seemed preposterous.
(I assume it's some sort of multiple warhead device, and what the claim really means is that it
can destroy all cities in an area the size of France.)
Peace with Russia is, to use a Star Trek phrase, the "prime directive". Trusting that to Clinton
is a fool's errand. Trusting that to Trump is not.
No matter the facts, and b has laid it out as clearly as one can, the left and the urban classes
in America will vote for the proven warmonger. Why? For them virtue signalling is more important
than the existential threat of riding up an escalatory ladder to a nuclear exchange with Russia.
After listening to right-wingers howl and whine today, droning on about big bad gumint and the
only salvation is their guy and/or the free market. I say we end the misery that the capitalist
system produces once and for all by throwing all support for Hillary. An anti-war vote for Trump
helps preserve the madness, how could any sane person help capitalism, that to me is abnormal
behaviour that Hillary can rectify. Death is an inevitable human condition, Right-wing evangelists
are nothing but cowards. Viva Hillary and cheers to accelerating the process!
President Tayyip Erdogan said Turkey's military operations in Syria aimed to secure al-Bab
and the town of Manbij, which a group of Kurdish and Arab militias seized from Islamic State
in August, but were not intended to stretch to Aleppo.
"Let's make a joint fight against terrorist organizations. But Aleppo belongs to the people
of Aleppo ... making calculations over Aleppo would not be right," he said in a speech in Ankara.
Turkey launched "Operation Euphrates Shield" two months ago, sending tanks and warplanes into
Syria in support of the largely Turkmen and Arab rebels.
Erdogan signaled Turkey could target the Afrin region of northwest Syria, which is controlled
by Kurdish YPG forces and lies just west of the "Euphrates Shield" area of operations.
"In order to defeat threats directed at our nation from Kilis to Kirikhan, we are also putting
that area on our agenda of cleansing from terror," he said, referring to two Turkish towns
across the border from Afrin.
Looks fairly clear the objectives are Al-bab & Manbij, and then the Afrin pocket. Definitely
if the Syrians/Russians don't intervene to "save" Afrin, then that would push the Kurds into the
arms of the Americans, but if that's all the Turks do, then that solidifies the Turkish-Russian
pact at the same time.
Inching ever closer, one reported death at a time, to the current world record holder who is either
Mark Twain or perhaps Binny himself.
http://en.alalam.ir/news/1877644
26 October 2016 14:48
Iraqi Analyst Discloses S.Arabia, Turkey's Plot to Transfer Al-Baghdadi to Libya
A prominent Iraqi military analyst disclosed that Riyadh and Ankara had hatched plots to transfer
ISIL leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi from Mosul to Libya but the massive presence of the popular forces
and Russian fighter jets at the bordering areas of Iraq and Syria dissuaded them.
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has said he wants all foreign troops, in which the majority
are American, out of the Philippines in the next two years.
This comes amidst his desire to realign his country with China and Russia, and further from
the grasps of Washington.
Russia has launched the latest addition to its series of super-stealth diesel-electric submarines,
the Veliky Novgorod, which sports advanced stealth technologies and increased combat range.
The latest addition to the Black Sea Fleet is capable of striking land, sea and underwater
targets and was officially launched from St. Petersburg's Admiralty Shipyard on Wednesday in the
presence of Russian Navy Deputy Commander Vice-Admiral Aleksandr Fedotenkov, and Admiralty Shipyard
CEO Alexander Buzakov.
GOP nominee Donald Trump does not believe that settlements built by the Zionist regime of Israel
in Palestine are illegal, his advisor on Israel says.
David Friedman, who was campaigning for the New York billionaire at a restaurant on Mount Zion
(Jabel Sahyoun) in East Jerusalem al-Quds, made the comments to AFP after the Wednesday rally.
Remember on November 8, vote for any party, but not The Democratic Party. The Democratic Party
is the war party.
For me still undecided - Donald Trump or Jill Stein.
Dr. William Wedin | Oct 27, 2016 12:48:06 AM |
112
I agree with Moon of Alabama's predictions up to the point that he asserts that Putin's "best"
or "most likely" response (I am not clear which) to having all of Russia's military assets in
Syria destroyed is the meek test-firing of a "big" tactical nuclear weapon in Siberia by way of
a non-lethal display of "shock and awe." Neither Putin nor his generals would ever let things
get so one-sided in America's father. Rather, the Russian military would respond the way Putin,
the 8th-degree black-belt Judoka has responded in every match that led to his becoming the Judo
Champion of Leningrad in 1976. Namely, they would attack, attack, attack--no matter the cost.
That's how General Zhukov defeated Hitler. The same way Grant won the Civil War. Zhukov never
let up the pressure. Putin learned his lesson on that score when he tried to teach the US the
Judo principle of Jita Kyoei (or the "mutual benefit") in mutual self-restraint in his acceptance
of a ceasefire and a partial pull-out of Russian forces back in March; followed by another betrayed
ceasefire last month. No more. Now if he is hit, he's going to hit back harder--in unexpected
places and ways. He has vowed to never fight another war on Russian soil. So he may well carry
the attack early to the US homeland. Study the way he won Judo matches--with lightning speed and
startling moves. The Saker would argue that Putin would go for lateral rather than vertical escalation.
But I think that Hillary's transsexual desire (I speak as a psychologist here) to prove herself
the "tougher man" may force Putin to launch a First Strike in the expectation she's about to.
Indeed he tells us that the first lesson he learned as a street fighter at the age of 10 was:
"Strike First." I think he will.
I can never under understand why so many 60s and 70s antiwar become warmongers today?
Amerika drops more than 7 millions tons of bombs, about 20 to 30% unexploded. They knew millions
innocent civilians perished and many more will die of unexploded bombs. Further Napalm & Agent
Orange was used and still causing deforms children today.
How can anyone vote for The Democratic Party is beyond common sense? The Democratic Party had
always been a warmonger party, yesterday, today and tomorrow....
With the Clinton's long list of shady deals Hillary would be an easy target for blackmail by some
organisation such as a security service that wants to control the policies of the president.
It's not funny how hypocritical the right-wing have become just to get their guy in office.
Fuck 'em I say. For those same fucktards that believe Obama a communist/socialist, they're simply
invoking a red scare tactic. The love to scapegoat the other, ie. teacher's, immigrants because
their brainwashed minds love their servitude and criticism of the capitalist system is beyond
the pale.
Both parties represent what you nominally call warmonger in one form or the other, serving
their corporate paymasters. Any minds reconciling the differences would be well advised to check
up on Glen Ford, Omali Yeshitela and the world socialist website periodically.
Would you please delete ArthurGilroy's comments
at #42 and #60?
#42 could have been an accident caused by
failure to Preview.
But #60 was a deliberate margin wrecker, imo.
@ psychohistorian | Oct 26, 2016 11:42:46 PM | 103
No they did not mess up their HTML, they put ==== well beyond the wrap limits. It happens when
commentators use any lengthy address that does not have hyphens incorporated. If the programming
were to put in a virtual hyphen, that changes the address for using, it seems. HTML is the tool
to use to get around that problem. The problem is few commentators are tool users; the result
is the reader suffers from one: stupid, inattention or intent. The perpetrator:
With Hillary Clinton in the audience, singer Adele told her fans at a Miami concert Tuesday
night not to vote for Donald Trump.
"Don't vote for him," the Grammy Award winner said on stage, according to a Clinton aide. "I can't
vote but I am 100% for Hillary Clinton, I love her, she's amazing."
http://edition.cnn.com/2016/10/26/politics/hillary-clinton-adele-concert/
And so on.
Also for example:
Elton John
John Fogerty
Neil Young
Paul mcCartney
Roger Waters
@119 FTH
Holier than thou superstars wrapped in the warm bosom of capitalism that is the 1%. Can't blame
them, they're being looked after. They just hear the un-pc bleating.
Working Class Nero | Oct 27, 2016 4:21:36 AM |
122
What makes me happiest about this election is that we are finally seeing some left/right cooperation
in the fight against the corporate oligarchy. I follow both sides closely and it is great to see
right wingers cheering Jill Stein, Julian Assange, and even Bernie Sanders.
In order for the left/right combination to work both sides have to make compromises. Certainly
we see the Trumpian right dumping the warmongering. as MoA is pointing out. Trumpsters are also
open to universal health care, and are less insistent on divisive social issues. And the rejection
of job-killing "free" trade is another great evolution towards sanity on the right.
The left are goig to have to abandon the idea of remaking America by pumping in millions of
3rd world immigrants. This is the largest wedge still existing between the left and right. if
you have not seen Bernie Sanders denouncing Open Borders as a Koch Borthers scam to lower wages
then you need to get busy on Google right now. Besides universal health care is absolutely impossible
without very tight borders -- just ask Canada who have far more Draconian immigration laws than
even Trump is proposing.
But the most important reason to vote Trump is because if he wins the Powers-That-Be will never
let him take power! Remember the Electoral College? TPTB can and will strip the victory away from
Trump and give it to someone else. This will do more to destroy the current capitalist system
than anything else.
@105, quoting Reuters: "Erdogan signaled Turkey could target the Afrin region of northwest Syria"
When Turkey launched "Operation Euphrates Shield" there was much commentary about how this
would end the Kurdish plan to link Kobane with the Afrin pocket.
At the time I thought to myself: OK, so does that leave the Afrin pocket exposed, or is it
pretty secure even when left to its own devices?
Nobody else seemed the slightest bit interested in pondering that though, apparently, Erdogan
has now decided that it is a blister that needs to be lanced.
@105: "then that would push the Kurds into the arms of the Americans"
Err, no, I suspect not. After all, it was Biden who ordered the Kurdish forces to withdraw
back behind the Euphrates once Erdogan started his little adventure, so it's pretty obvious that
if the choice is between (a) Turkey and (b) the Kurds then good ol' Uncle Sam is going to side
with the Turks.
Surprised to see Roger Waters on that list. WTF, Roger?
His condemnation of Israel and his love for Palestine has been clear.
Expressing his staunch I/P political views, Roger has consistently angered warmongering wingnuts
at his concerts. (They like his music, but they wish he would shut up about " his politics".)
Waters should know clearly that Hillary Rotten Clinton will explicitly follow the Yinon Plan
dictates for Greater Israel; and feed our sons and daughters (not hers) into the military meat
grinder.
Many thanks for those who read and comments.. I can never under understand why so many 60s
and 70s antiwar become warmongers today?
I'm from the sixties - baby boom generation, not antiwar but leaning from anti commie to warmonger.
I cannot understands why antiwar movements were against Vietnam war . America, land of
the free leading the fighting against the commies spreading from the North moving southward to
the two Korea, (Indochina) Laos, Cambodia, North &South Vietnam, Thailand, Malaya (independent),
Singapore British Crown colony, Hong Kong British Crown colony, Indonesia, The Philippines. The
warmonger was Lyndon B. Johnson a Democrat.
Blowin' In the Wind sang by leftist's antiwar singers. I'm especially touched by Peter, Paul
and Mary, Joan Baez... Where are they today? Warmongers for Hillary?
The red zionist leader pretend hates Trump.
Hee hee,the vitriol from the serial liars should be enough for sane human to vote Trump.
Imagine the debt that the HB will owe the zionists if they manage to steal this election for her,their
obvious chosen whore.
The zionists aint going to like the heartlands response to the fix.
The raw deal they are issuing to Trump will be rejected.
"But I think that Hillary's transsexual desire (I speak as a psychologist here) to prove herself
the "tougher man" may force Putin to launch a First Strike in the expectation she's about to.
Indeed he tells us that the first lesson he learned as a street fighter at the age of 10 was:
"Strike First." I think he will."
So do I. He did not go into Syria without a long-range strategy. And when he and China and
others use the term "multi-polar" they mean it. Their commitment/strategy is at the cellular level
which makes them unpredictable and dangerous to their adversary. Putin is all business.
----------------
Here's a vid of Podesta's think tank - Center for American Progress - where Mike Morrell NOT
Chris Morrell along with others discuss the Middle East and U.S. partners -
I've written along this line before, apologies for the repeat.
The US has lost power, particularly economic power, and some soft power -not military power-
in the last 20 or ++ years. An uncomfortable situation. This has disturbed, and will continue
to disrupt, nay shatter, the PTB (Shadow Gvmt., fake duopoly, corporate rule, neo-fascism, slot
in yr perso description) control.
The selection of Obama was a simplistic move: he could be ushered in as representing 'change',
and seemingly 'win' an 'election' twice, with biz as usual (hopefully) maintaining itself, continuing
with a puppet President. (As is organised 'abroad', see Poroshenko for ex.)
A crack on the political scene was the Tea Party, within Repub. circles, and it was genuine
(if wacky), unlike Occupy Wall Street, or the present Black Lives Matter, which are more or less
'fake color revol.' controlled splinters that can be turned on or off. The Sanders candidacy split
the Dem. base, and was either a nasty surprise for the neo-libs (they brought it on themselves,
read Podesta e-mails) or an 'allowed' move to maintain the pretense of real political options.
The Repubs. could not turn up a convincing candidate (anyone with brains would avoid this situation
like the plague, and the Rubio, Cruz type personas were just 'place holders') so the plan
morphed into letting Trump win the nomination and lose the election to the neo-lib-con (HRC)
faction. This plan was born out of arrogance, hubris, 'bubble' blindness and ignorance, and the
supposed iron grip control of the MSM, aka 'the narrative.'
Trump did much better than expected, went on doing so. CNN at first gave him a 1% chance of
winning the nomination, what a laugh. Imho Trump played the MSM masterfully, but that is neither
here nor there - the PTB were shocked to see their hold erode, they never imagined losing control
of the 'opposition' or the discontents, aka the rabble, the compliant sheeples: many different
strands: Greens, e.g. Stein, whose vicious tweets against HRC are something to behold, libertarians,
BernieBros for 'social democracy' and free college, now turned to Cleaning Out the Swamp, law
-n- order types, gun toters, Blacks for Trump, and on and on ..unimaginable.
As no reasoned politically argued response was available, the PTB went into attack mode which
completely backfired, as could readily be predicted. This is the post-Democracy Age (if it ever
existed and the term 'democracy' is of course BS.)
Trump appears to confusedly propose a way of dealing with the US loss of economic domination,
of power and place on the World Stage: nationalistic retrenchment, "better deals", OK, plus "a
stronger military," a double-pronged sword, not pacifist, on the face of it.
Makes a kind of hopeful sense, and appeals greatly. HRC (she is just a propped up figure) in
a corrupt circuit of PTB-NWO - the top 20% globalist class - has to push the agenda of the MIC,
of Wall Street, Big Corps, Silicon Valley, etc. for personal position. Donors who give mega-cash
get corp. and pol. favors, etc.
French MSM report as if it was the most natural thing in the world that Erdogan made a speech
to say he intends to get back Manbij from the Kurds and participate in getting back Northern Syria,
in cooperation with the US.
If the Turks enter that far, there is no doubt it will lead to a wider war ... Could that be the
reason Hollande is so sure of being reelected in May?
stopped going to VT several years ago during their grand support of the slaughter of Libya. duff
wrote I was posting from tel aviv.
have to be careful with vt. what is a lie and what is decent.
trump is hated/feared by repubs/dems, the establishment, wall st, the crooks, cronies, pedophiles,
liars, warmongers, creepers in the dark, rich beggars with hands out, culture-destroyers.
supporting legal immigration is sound national policy as is not wanting to fight wars for jewry.
supporting soc sec and medicare and spending tax dollars on repairing infrastructure in America
not Israel is also sound.
My take is similar to rufus magister, namely that Trump (a) talks a lot of nonsense, but unlike
a disciplined robot like Marco Rubio, he is eclectic and mixes that nonsense with surprisingly
reasonable statements.
Many attacks on Trump almost convince me that he is the best candidate out there. But his own
web site is much less convincing, and his personal appearances may be outright scary.
On domestic issues, he more or less follows all bad aspects of GOP model. His trade policy
ideas are so unworkable that nothing will come out of them. Not that I disagree that there is
too much of "free trade", but like with any complex system, it is much easier to make it worse
that to make it better.
Back to Trump as an architect of new, improved foreign policy. Here the room for improvement
is much more clear, because so much of the current policy is to effectively do little shits here
and there, and to sell more arms than before, so totally ineffective policy would be a plus. It
does not even need to be particularly consistent etc. But "greedy merchant" mentality exhibited
by Trump in many quotes, like "take their oil", "those allies do not pay their dues", and "why
did we give [returned!!!] money to Iran", make me genuinely worried that he would continue selling
weapons to Gulfies and help them bombing Yemen and smuggling weapons to Syria: if they pay us
that this is OK. Secondly, he was abjectly pandering to AIPAC. Thirdly, some mad statements about
decisive direct intervention and using torture. The only change that I would be sure under Trump
presidency is that CIA would be out of the loop, or at least, much less visible than now. And
he would probably stop pressing EU to maintain and expand sanctions on Russia. But he would restore
sanctions on Iran??
In other words, a mixed bag at best on foreign policy, probably ineffectual nonsense on trade
policy and very retrograde changes in domestic policy. To name the few, green light to all possible
abortion restriction, if not outlawing the abortion by SCOTUS, advocacy of police brutality, regressive
taxation, letting people with chronic diseases die as uninsurable etc. So one has to consider
how scary HRC is.
My estimate is that she would be basically Obama with inferior rhetoric. Leaked e-mails show
that her decision making is quite deliberative, and the circle of opinions that are included not
particularly insular. It is too neocon to my liking, and "Obama as is" happened to be much less
appealing than "Obama before elected". Since there is no consensus to attack the Russians, she
would not hammer it through.
Thus one can reasonably hope that HRC will be relatively harmless. And it is not even clear
that Russia is harmed by sanctions. They restrict somewhat the access to goods and financial services,
but during cheap oil, the top issues for Russia is import substitution, development of domestic
production, and curtailing the capital flight. Good access to financial services can be quite
detrimental to a country, as we can study on the example of Greece: joining Eurozone vastly improved
the access to the financial markets and enabled to borrow much more that prudent. As Russia remains
a net exporter by a quite large margin, keeping money at home is much more important than access
to credit.
That said, a reasonable hope does not exactly dispel the fears described above. Moreover, it
is predicated on the lack of "imperialist/neo-con consensus", and wobbly results of the elections
would help. Thus, everybody here who can vote should vote as she/he damn pleases. If you do not
like Clinton, I would suggest Stein, because she actually spells out a coherent and sensible position,
and not patches of senses and horror, so this is
Trump's policy and this is
Stein's
policy.
I thought I'd never say this, but Glenn Beck gave a very
thoughtful interview with Charley Rose last night. He
raised a lot of issues that the other Glenn (Glenn
Greenwald) has been raising--the moral bankruptcy of each
political party and the tendency of each to attack the
other for things that they themselves would deny, excuse,
and say that it doesn't
matter when their own party does it.
Glenn is not
supporting Trump. But he gives the example of the many
Republicans who viciously attacked Bill Clinton for his
sexual behavior but now deny, excuse and say that it
doesn't matter when Trump does it.
The flip side, of course, is found with the many
Democrats who viciously attack Trump but denied, excused,
and said that it didn't matter when Bill Clinton did it.
Glenn says that to restore trust with the American
people, both parties need to clean their houses and become
parties that put laws and principles first, which implies
criticizing their own instead of shielding them when
they misbehave.
This sounds like another attempt to claim the two parties
are equivalent. Your claim that "many
Democrats...viciously attack Trump but denied, excused,
and said that it didn't matter when Bill Clinton did it,"
would be a bit more credible if you actually named a few
of the alleged "many Democrats."
Most of the attacks on Trump are the result of Trump
boasting about sexually assaulting women, which Clinton
has not done. In any case, to claim that the Democratic
party needs to "clean its house" you need evidence that
there is a problem today, not merely one two decades ago
when Bill Clinton was in office.
Thanks for providing a great example of a Democrat trying
to deny, explain away, and say that Bill Clinton's
behavior in the 1990s didn't matter!
Of course, Bill
Clinton's radical deregulation of the 1990s (ending
Glass-Steagall, commodities deregulation, etc.) and ending
welfare as we knew it doesn't matter either...because it
was done by a Democrat.
Nor did his attack on Serbia, which set the precedent
for the pointless and futile war in Iraq. It's OK when
Democrats wage war, as long as it's papered over with
claims of 'humanitarian bombing.'
And Barack Obama's refusal to prosecute bankers and
torturers doesn't matter, though Democrats would have
cried 'bloody murder' if a Republican had behaved this
way. Nor does his embrace of NSA spying really matter. Nor
his proposed cuts to Social Security and social programs
in general...because his is a Democrat.
This is why economic elites love to have Democrats in
power...because they can push through horrible
reforms...and rest confident that many of the party
faithful will deny, excuse, and even claim that it didn't
matter...because a Democrat did it.
John, speaking only for myself, the defense of Bill
Clinton in the 1990's had nothing to do with excusing his
atrocious behavior -- it had to do with the opposition
engaging in a witch hunt to destroy a sitting president.
and exploiting the vehicle of a special prosecutor's
authority, granted to look into entirely different and
unrelated matters, to do so. This was a gross misuse of
official power. Clinton's mistake was in refusing to
answer questions unrelated to the authorized inquiry.
As to the other items on your list of objections to
Bill Clinton's actions, a few I'd agree with, and others
I'd disagree with; but they are all unrelated to the issue
of equivalence that you and Beck raise.
I'd agree that Democrats never organized a witch hunt
against any sitting Republican since Nixon.
Problem is,
they never organized a serious opposition either, and
readily bought into the opposition's tax cuts, budget
cuts, and pointless and futile wars.
If Democrats won't organize a serious opposition to the
likes of Cheney/Bush43, how can you take them seriously as
an opposition party?
Kenneth Almquist claims that Bill Clinton never assaulted
anyone, which provides yet more evidence of a Democratic
denial of charges against their guy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juanita_Broaddrick
Did
Juanita Brodderick's name ever register among the
Democratic faithful, staunch defenders of Bill Clinton,
right or wrong?
Brodderick's claim of rape was met with the typical
denial and disbelief, which is still commonplace
today...particularly when rape might have been done by
someone rich or powerful...
Yes the big difference is that Clinton never ran around
and said that sexual assault is OK, and he could get away
with it. He was accused but never convicted of sexual
assaults. You don't condemn a person for being accused of
something. The only actual sex was consensual sex with a
young woman.
The for-profit media thrive and depend on controversy and
generally content that is emotionally engaging. Racism is
only a small part of it, it is much more broadly appealing
- it is essentially "addressing", channeling, amplifying,
and redirecting existing grievances of a large part of the
public. If economy and society would be doing great and a
large majority of people would be happy/contented, these
anger-based media formats wouldn't find an audience.
The
same underlying causes as the success of Trump. The reason
why he can maintain considerable success despite of grave
shortcomings is because he continues to be a channel for
the anger that is not disappearing. (With the support of
the media, who are also interested in an ongoing
controversy with details as scandalous as possible.)
This "anger that is not disappearing" has
been based on racism for decades. None of these Trump
supporters are newly minted Rep voters; they have voted
Rep their entire lives.
This is not so new group based on outrage over the
problems of our "rigged system", this is the base that has
voted consistently against their economic well being for
decades.
"But holy hell, Republicans still refuse to be
convinced.
According to a new NBC News/SurveyMonkey poll,
seventy-two percent of registered Republicans "still
doubt" the President's place of birth. Forty-one percent
outright disagreed with the statement, "Barack Obama was
born in the United States," while only twenty-seven
percent of Republicans agree.
As NBC News blatantly states in the poll's findings,
"Only slightly more than one in four Republican voters
agreed that the president was born in the United States."
The main area where Faux needs to make a decision, is how
far it will move with the GOP base on closed borders. The
interest of the corporates is for open borders, whereas
the xenophobe GOP base is strongly against. If Faux decide
to remain on the corporates side of that issue, a Trump/Breibart
media would have a chance. The GOP will face the same
choice, but there is no way they split from the corporates
that owns them. So the question is whether Faux will split
with GOP on the issues that divide the GOP corporates from
the GOP base. Their business office would say yes (hold on
to the viewers), but they are not just a business.
I'd love to know exactly how pgl 'read' the video that our
host provided...transcript please!
The left needs media
that
1) Does not need Hillary
2) Does not engage in cold war fearmongering
3) Becomes less establishment and more progressive.
Will Krugman talk about that?
BTW Here's an address on inequality by Stiglitz, given
two weeks ago. When was the last time that Krugman, whose
day job at CUNY is allegedly about studying inequality,
even talked about the subject?
The trade deficit will continue to explode; the US will
lose most of its remaining industrial base over the next
few years and the population of new poor and unemployed
will grow sharply. Trump will be in a strong position to
say "I told you so" and pick up the pieces of our broken
society in 2020. You can't destroy the livelihood of
150-300 million people without some kind of political
movement emerging to restore the economy to its industrial
age prosperity.
reason
-> forgotten ghost of American
protectionism...
, -1
Where does 150-300 million people come from? And why
aren't you looking at what is happening in finance which
is just as important in driving the demise of US industry
(an overvalued currency is exactly the same as a cut in
tariffs).
"... Societies Under Siege is a sophisticated account of how, and why, economic sanctions applied in recent years to South Africa, Iraq and Myanmar affected the politics of those three countries without achieving the goals that the Western politicians which dictated them intended ..."
"... Precisely… The whole idea that "this is not the time for reform" Is complete crap. If these people are the best we've got, we are screwed. ..."
"... I do not believe "revolutions purity" means much more than continued bribes for access and favors for the Clinton Foundation, or its members. Or does it mean "clean money"? ..."
"... or they could create a character like Emmanuel Goldstein. they've sort of overlaid him on trump, but virtual reality is the bestest. ..."
"... I voted the straight republican ticket. If HRC wins I want her to get impeached immediately. Prior to this election, I never voted for any Republican. ..."
"... I voted for NO incumbents …. If that meant voting for Republican candidates ..well then, so be it … ..."
"... A good reason to vote for Stein is that if she gets 5+% of the vote, the Greens could get federal matching funds in 2020. We have to have more choices than the Republicrats! ..."
"... And would that mean that the Greens would start acting like a real political party? Instead of the ecology club for misfits? ..."
"... Forget the Easter Bunny. She can't win. But that's not the point, is it? The point is to send a multi-part message: (1) You're disgusted with the two big parties and (2) presumptive winner H had better keep looking over her left shoulder, because you are out there. ..."
"... Honestly, this is one of the best explanations of people voting against Hillary I have seen. Well worth the read. (I give it an A+ FWIW) jacobinmag.com ..."
"... Another must-read from Jacobin: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/10/haiti-clinton-guantanamo-hiv-aristide-constant/ I wasn't aware of this terrible chapter. Anyone who cares about Haiti should shun the Clintons. ..."
"... The fact that the Haitians seem to be so unanimously against them (in my observations) should be a clear WARNING to voters regarding their foreign affairs and personal character… Alas, so should so much of the other evidence. ..."
"... I wonder if Hillary will out herself as a Republican after the election… "No more hiding my private positions in a closet for me." ..."
"... These aren't health, labor and consumer groups - these are simply anti-American and anti-worker swine! No parsing about the TPP, it is a solid crapfest of which no portion should be passed, and any group which claims otherwise should be deported! ..."
"... Like it or not, only change candidate, now and for the foreseeable future, is trump. On the plus side, we avoid emptying out the Ibm silos. And maybe, just maybe, he really gets bills passed for infrastructure spending. Best of all, dems might actually move left. ..."
"As a longtime Bill Clinton adviser came under fire several years ago for
alleged conflicts of interest involving a private consulting firm and the
Clinton Foundation, he mounted an audacious defense: Bill Clinton's doing
it, too" [
Politico
].
"The unusual and brash rejoinder from veteran Clinton aide and Teneo
Consulting co-founder Doug Band is scattered across the thousands of
hacked emails published by WikiLeaks, but a
memo
released Wednesday provides the most detailed look to date at
the intertwined worlds of nonprofit, for-profit, official and political
activities involving Clinton and many of his top aides.
The memo at one point refers bluntly to the money-making part of
Clinton's life as 'Bill Clinton Inc.' and notes that in at least one case
a company - global education firm Laureate International Universities -
began paying Clinton personally after first being a donor to the Clinton
Foundation.
I think it's important for young women and girls to see that a corrupt
dynasty can occupy the White House a second time.
"Inside 'Bill Clinton Inc.': Hacked memo reveals intersection of charity
and personal income" [
WaPo
].
Gives "intersectionality" a new twist, eh? Rather a lot of detail in this;
well worth a read.
War Drums
"Societies Under Siege is a sophisticated account of how, and why,
economic sanctions applied in recent years to South Africa, Iraq and Myanmar
affected the politics of those three countries without achieving the goals
that the Western politicians which dictated them intended" [
Asian
Affairs
].
The Voters
"Goldman Sachs: Election Won't End Like Brexit" [Barrons, via
Across the Curve
]. "We think that the upcoming U.S. election won't end
up as another Brexit-styled surprise for for two reasons."
First, and most importantly, whole both situations represented an
opportunity for voters to endorse a change in the status quo, voters in
the UK were asked to decide on an idea whereas in the US they are being
asked to decide on a person. The distinction is illustrated in US polling
by the difference between the small share of Americans who believe the
country is moving in the right direction (29%) and majority who approve
of the job President Obama is doing (52%).
Second. While the polls conducted on the eve of the referendum vote
showed "remain" with a 4.6pp lead, in contrast to the 3.8pp actual vote
margin in favor of "leave", an average of polls published by the
Economist magazine the day before the election showed a tied race, and
showed "leave" leading for much of the prior month. As much as 10% of the
public in many of these surveys was also undecided. By contrast, Sec.
Clinton has led the average of presidential polls consistently for more
than a year, with the exception of one week in late July following the
Republican convention, and for most of the last year her lead has been
substantial, averaging 4pp since the last primary elections were held.
Includes a wrap-up of polling methodologies as well.
"Laboratories of change" [Tim Canova,
Medium
]. Florida referendum proposals. Interesting!
Downballot
"Less than two weeks from Election Day, Democrats are on track to pick up
between 10 and 20 House seats, a slight uptick in their fortunes, but still
well short of the 30 seats they need for the majority. Low enthusiasm for
the top of the GOP ticket remains a concern for down-ballot Republicans, but
Trump isn't as much of a drag outside of well-educated suburbs, which could
limit Democrats' gains" [
Cook
Political Report
].
The Trail
"Win or lose, the Republican candidate and his inner circle have built a
direct marketing operation that could power a TV network-or finish off the
GOP" [
Bloomberg
].
And Trump controls a lot of data. Fascinating article. Son of Berlusconi?
"Texas: Trump 45%, Clinton 42%, Johnson 7% (UT/Texas Tribune); Texas:
Trump 45%, Clinton 38%, Johnson 7% (Austin American Statesman); Florida:
Clinton 43%, Trump 39%, Johnson 6% (University of North Florida);
Pennsylvania: Clinton 46%, Trump 39% (NYT/Siena)" [
Political
Wire
]. FWIW!
UPDATE "20 percent of Florida voters have already cast their ballots" [
McClatchy
].
The breathless coverage of early voting, and its "historic levels," is
making me crazy. Early voting seems like a terrible idea to me. For some
large percent of the population, it renders the last part of the race
irrelevant, incentivizing earlier "surprises." The real answer is to make
Election Day a national holiday. Why the heck not?
Realignment
"For decades, Democratic presidential candidates have been making steady
gains among upper income whites and whites with college and postgraduate
degrees. This year, however, is the first time in at least six decades that
the Democratic nominee is positioned to win a majority of these upscale
voters" [
New
York Times
]. "What these figures suggest is that the 2016 election will
represent a complete inversion of the New Deal order among white voters.
From the 1930s into the 1980s and early 1990s, majorities of downscale
whites voted Democratic and upscale whites voted Republican. Now, looking at
combined male and female vote totals, the opposite is true."
"Elizabeth Warren, the Democrats' Madame Defarge, and Bernie Sanders,
winner of 22 millennial-fueled primaries, are going to guarantee the
revolution's purity in any Clinton presidency" [
Wall
Street Journal
, "The Warren-Sanders Presidency"]. "For starters, they
have a list.
Politico reported in early September that Sen. Warren and
progressive policy groups such as the Roosevelt Institute are 'developing a
hit list of the types of people they'll oppose-what one source called 'hell
no' appointments-in a Clinton administration.
'" Well,
we can but hope that the Roosevelt Institute has improved since 2011
.
Readers?
Democrat Email Hairball
UPDATE "Podesta tops Clinton's short list for chief of staff" [
Politico
].
"Podesta, the architect of President Barack Obama's climate initiatives, is
also rumored to be interested in a potential Cabinet post, such as energy
secretary. But that road would require Senate confirmation, which could be
an opening for hearings on the WikiLeaks release of his hacked email - in
total, the site plans to release 50,000 emails revealing behind-the-scenes
dealmaking going back 10 years."
By scaling internationally, Facebook is creating a situation whereby
future Trending failures will potentially occur at a scale unheard of in the
history of human communication. Fake stories and other dubious content could
reach far more people faster than ever before.
For Trending to become a reliable, global product, it will need to
account for the biases, bad actors, and other challenges that are endemic to
Facebook and the news media. Put another way, in order to succeed, the
Trending algorithm needs to be better than the very platform that spawned
it. That's because fake news is already polluting the platform's News Feed
organically. A recent BuzzFeed News analysis of giant hyperpartisan Facebook
pages found that 38% of posts on conservative pages and 19% of posts on
liberal pages featured false or misleading content
Imperial Collapse Watch
"Rise of the American Mercenary" [
The
American Conservative
]. " [T]he rise of the contractor to wage America's
military operations is Obama's silent national-security legacy, with more dead
contractors on his watch (1,540 as of March) and little or no transparency
about who these contractors are and what they do. [Foreign Policy writer Micah
Zenko] scoffed at Obama's insistence that he has pursued a 'fight U.S.
footprint' across these lonflict zones. "Were it not for these contractors,
Obama's 'light footprint' would suddenly be two or three times as large,' Zenko
wrote."
Gaia
" Globalization has greased the slippery slope from factory to landfill by
enabling the global distribution of defective parts. Whether they are pirated,
designed to fail or just the result of slipshod quality control, the flood of
defective parts guarantee that the entire assembly they are installed
in–stoves, vacuum cleaners, transmissions, electronics, you name it–will soon
fail and be shipped directly to the landfill, as repairing stuff is far
costlier than buying a new replacement" [
Of
Two Minds
].
"The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was slated to hold four days
of public meetings, Oct. 18-21, focused on essentially one question: Is
glyphosate, the world's most widely used herbicide, safe?" [
Alternet
].
"However, the EPA Scientific Advisory Panel (SAP) meetings were 'postponed,'
just four days before they were suppose to meet, after intense lobbying by the
agrichemical industry, including Monsanto."
Guillotine Watch
Class Warfare
"Iowans on their wages: 'I'm not stupid or lazy. It's just not there'" [
Des
Moines Register
].
When CIA and NSA Workers Blow the Whistle, Congress Plays Deaf
Do the committees that oversee the vast U.S. spying apparatus take
intelligence community whistleblowers seriously?
Do they earnestly investigate reports of waste, fraud, abuse,
professional negligence, or crimes against the Constitution reported by
employees or contractors working for agencies like the CIA or NSA?
For the last 20 years, the answer has been a resounding "no."
Looking deeper, were our founding fathers without personal faults?
Perhaps some were rude, with too much ego, didn't say acceptable nice things
about many people, etc.
But none tried to get into the White House (not sure it existed then)
through a personal foundation.
"
So let's recap Hillary's America, past, present, and future. It's a
land lacking in meaningful structural reform of the financial system, a
place where the big banks have been, and will continue to be, coddled by the
government. No CEO will be jailed, no matter how large the fines his bank is
saddled with or how widespread the crimes it committed. Instead, he's likely
to be invited to the inaugural ball in January.
"
Contains many other good observations; good enough that I hope Yves or
Lambert consider it for tomorrow's Links or Water-cooler.
"Elizabeth Warren, the Democrats' Madame Defarge, and Bernie Sanders,
winner of 22 millennial-fueled primaries, are going to guarantee the
revolution's purity in any Clinton presidency"
I have serious doubts that Warren and Sanders will be able to veto any
of Clinton's choices for office. I think we can expect to see plenty of clones
of Eric Holder, Timothy Geithner, Larry Summers, and Mary Jo White in a Clinton
administration. Similarly, we'll clones of Donald Rumsfeld, Hank Paulson, and
Alberto Gonzales in a Trump administration.
We missed our chance during the Democratic primaries - the oligarchs saved
themselves.
Elizabeth Warren, the Democrats' Madame Defarge, and Bernie
Sanders, winner of 22 millennial-fueled primaries, are going to
guarantee the revolution's purity in any Clinton presidency
I do not believe "revolutions purity" means much more than
continued bribes for access and favors for the Clinton Foundation, or
its members.
Or does it mean "clean money"?
The only people that can stop Clinton in DC are Jason Chaffetz
and Trey Gowdy. Sanders and Warren are going to play ball. They may
hold up a nominee or two but Clinton is already working with
Republicans to form a unity Cabinet. Sanders and Warren will have no
clout if Clinton is able to bring on Republican and Democratic
neo-cons/neo-liberals. Granted Warren is a politician now and has
clearly embraced Clinton on the trail…too the point that I get sick
when I see her. I really really really hope that Berniecrats primary
her.
Guaranteeing the revolutions purity: As I recall, the presidential election is winner-takes-all and to
quote Alec Baldwin from the movie Glengary-Glenross, "second place gets a
set of steak knives."
I suppose that in terms of leverage, it will depend on the outcome
of the Senate races to see if Warren or Sanders will get committee
chairmanships and thus be able to control legislation. If the Senate does
not trun over, Warren and Sanders will be seen as weak.
In truth it depends on the numbers AND how obstructionist the Republicans
choose to be.
Will the oligarchs demand that their most rewarded Senators support the
usual suspects for confirmation even though they are Clinton nominees
regardless of party OR will the Republicans need to continue obstructing the
Dems for the base? If it is the former, you are right that the Progressive
wing will have little say, the latter could mean that they have some
bargaining power, especially if the Dems have the majority and it is
embarassing to Clinton.
Frankly I figure it will be the former for anything the oligarchs care
about (which will be pretty much everything Warren cares about) and
obstruction for everything else.
My greatest fear is that the next 4 years will be exactly the same
as the last 6 months, including Trump is still running for prez and the
media is idolizing Hillary to stop the Trump threat. The Deep State and
oligarchs convince Congress they are "stronger together". WikiLeaks hacks
the FBI and deletes the FBI copies of Hillary's e-mails. 'Course I could
be wrong about that.
wow that is a scary thought. Hillary v Trump 2020.
I think the Republican party might try to stop any Trump threat in
the future, but it does a world of good for Hillary and the oligarchs.
It's been a long time since there has been a congressional group with
enough solidarity to push things around like this, I have many doubts.
(Well, except most of Congress regularly acting to do horrible things like
the TPP).
I have been wondering if the Democrats are just holding Warren and
Sanders out as bait. In a sense, they are bait to the voting public. In a
sense, they are bait to see which politicians will be foolhardy enough to
make a movement to join them. I suspect that they are being set up to be
purged. I'm surprised that the WSJ was so temperate (maybe the editorial
board is waiting for the elections). Why didn't WSJ signal better by calling
him Bernie Robespierre and her the Charlotte Corday of the Democratic Party?
A good reason to vote for Stein is that if she gets 5+% of the vote, the
Greens could get federal matching funds in 2020. We have to have more
choices than the Republicrats!
thanks, all I could find were old articles about how NC's
straight-party ballot that excludes prez resulted in undervoting –
assumed to be in error. but will keep looking. to be safe, guess I'll
vote Stein.
Forget the Easter Bunny. She can't win.
But that's not the point, is it? The point is to send a multi-part
message: (1) You're disgusted with the two big parties and (2) presumptive
winner H had better keep looking over her left shoulder, because you are out
there.
After the election, counties and states publish a canvass of the total
number of ballots cast, and how many votes each candidate got. The sum of
votes for candidates minus the vote total shows disengagement for that race.
Political researchers and campaign strategists examine these numbers, and
they work their way into future campaign strategies. PACs, lobbyist firms,
and other donor-funded groups also consider these figures along with others
to determine candidate viability.
Total Voters: 786522
Sum of all Presidential votes: 783757
Difference: 2765 (~0.35%)
But the NM Secretary of State's office did not publish total ballot
numbers for 2014. The current trend is for counties and state to publish
fewer and fewer details (and not just of elections). This is why state and
county seats are important.
Imperial Collapse Watch…. increasingly used on the domestic front also. I
don't believe the attack dogs used on the NoDAPL watchers were law enforcement.
Democracy Now is covering the military ramp up today but it looks like that is
police agencies (out of the area). Use of multiple MRAPs, sound cannon, armored
truck, bulldozer.
An interview about Money Laundering
By Golem XIV on October 27, 2016 in latest
Here is a 9 minute interview I did recently for Real Media about Money
Laundering and what happened to me when I wrote about it. It's an extract from
a much longer and wide ranging interview.
In case you're interested I wrote in more length about the incident in
"Making the Truth Illegal – revisited"
'the UK lobbied the US not to prosecute UK banks'
Well, the US doesn't prosecute US bank money launderers, so clean, clean
money must be the most important factor in making an economy successful*
I may have missed it, but I did not see this link to Conner Kilpatrick in
the Jacobin Magazine listed at this site.
Honestly, this is one of the best explanations of people voting against
Hillary I have seen.
Well worth the read. (I give it an A+ FWIW)
jacobinmag.com
The fact that the Haitians seem to be so unanimously against them (in
my observations) should be a clear WARNING to voters regarding their
foreign affairs and personal character… Alas, so should so much of the
other evidence.
NPR reported the Clinton Foundation reported they distributed half of
all HIV drugs globally.
So what are the odds she'll really fix Obama/Affordable care?
She's already sold us to the pharma's.
"Elizabeth Warren, the Democrats' Madame Defarge, and Bernie Sanders, winner
of 22 millennial-fueled primaries, are going to guarantee the revolution's
purity in any Clinton presidency"
The four "reports" below are the trial balloons so far for the post-election
counter-purity campaign to inoculate Clinton against her "supports". Beneath
the BS, there is the same derogatory message, belittling and denying any
Warren/Sanders agency under the new regime – at a point when it is not at all
clear whether they actually have any, anyway.
Belgium will ask the European Court of Justice to clarify the proposed
investment court system,
Hmm, I wonder if the Court will preserve it prerogative of being the Court
of last resort?
I also wonder about a constitutional challenge to ISDS in the US, based on
Marbury V Madison.
Synoia: I have a feeling that the Walloons know that it will, which is
why they are kicking the matter upstairs. The E C of J has overruled whole
piles of national law, sending legislators scurrying.
"Inside 'Bill Clinton Inc.': Hacked memo reveals intersection of charity
and personal income" [WaPo].
According to
this article
, as of 2012, the pension for ex U.S. Presidents is $199,700
per year, which explains why Bill Clinton needs so much money from other
sources. He held that job for a full 8 years, and he gets less than $200,000
per year from the U.S. government! Some folks might think that a six figure
pension like that should only be given to a person who has worked a full career
of 30 to 40 years.
Oops,
another article
says that the current pension is $205,700 - my bad.
According to page 5, George W. Bush ($214,000) and Bill Clinton ($218,000)
received more the statutory pension. There's no explanation as to why. Former
Presidents also get office allowances.
Note difference betw the ARMED Bundy standoffs in Oregon & Nevada vs. the
unarmed standoff in North Dakota. Full media coverage vs Silence.
And sure enough, currently no story on the front pages of the NYT or WaPo
about either the encampment in ND
or the occupation of the HRC campaign headquarters in Brooklyn.
TPP: "Health, labor and consumer groups are warning President Barack
Obama to refrain from including a 12-year monopoly period for biological drugs
in legislation to implement the TPP as a means for addressing congressional
concerns over the pact. . .
These aren't health, labor and consumer groups - these are simply
anti-American and anti-worker swine!
No parsing about the TPP, it is a solid crapfest of which no portion should
be passed, and any group which claims otherwise should be deported!
Obama McCain 2008… McCain possibly more belligerent, but Obama did smash
Libya, now Yemen.
Obama Romney 2012… Didn't matter who won. Identical policies.
Clinton trump 2016… Clinton more of same, trump?
People wanting change are waiting for an ideal changer. Not gonna happen.
Bernie one such, but wouldn't get into the mud with opponent. Imagine she wins
and runs again in 2020… Which of the 16 reps on the stage would be an
improvement? Or imagine she retires for health, or is impeached… Look who she
selected for veep… Might even be worse. And don't bleet the supremes… We know
she's considering a rep Texan.
Like it or not, only change candidate, now and for the foreseeable future,
is trump. On the plus side, we avoid emptying out the Ibm silos. And maybe,
just maybe, he really gets bills passed for infrastructure spending. Best of
all, dems might actually move left.
"... The revelations that - as Secretary of State - Clinton had committed such a huge security gaffe was quickly picked up on - and has since extensively been used by - Republican candidate Donald Trump, as an example of how Clinton is unfit for the presidency. ..."
"... "This is a change election: people (even those who support Obama) are not interested in the status quo. Therefore they want a candidate who will make change, actually fight the status quo." ..."
"... It is believed they will continue to be dripped out ahead of the presidential election on November 8. Apart from the embarrassment over the email account, the leaks show Clinton changing her position on free trade agreements. ..."
"... The question is not whether or not Donald or Hillary are fit to be US President. The question should be is the United States fit to exist in a civilized world? The answer is; not in its current form! Perhaps if the US returned to following its Constitution, but not otherwise! ..."
Whoever advised US Democratic Party presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton that she could use private
emails while in office should have been "drawn and quartered," according to the latest batch of emails
of the campaign chairman John Podesta, published by WikiLeaks on October 27.Clinton ran into huge
trouble when it was revealed that - while Secretary of State - she had been using insecure private
email accounts based on non-government servers, exposing the US administration to hacking or surveillance
from foreign nations.
In the latest cache of emails, one of Clinton's advisers, Neera Tanden wrote to Podesta asking: "Do
we actually know who told Hillary she could use a private email? And has that person been drawn and
quartered? Like whole thing is f****** insane."
One of the 'Podesta Emails' released by Wikileaks An investigation by the FBI concluded that 110
e-mails in 52 e-mail chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information
at the time they were sent or received. Eight of those chains contained information that was Top
Secret at the time they were sent; 36 chains contained Secret information at the time; and eight
contained Confidential information.
The revelations that - as Secretary of State - Clinton had committed such a huge security
gaffe was quickly picked up on - and has since extensively been used by - Republican candidate Donald
Trump, as an example of how Clinton is unfit for the presidency.
Apology Enough?
Another chain of emails delivered Clinton's advisers' verdict on her round of interviews with
the media apologizing for the email gaffe and saying: "As I look back at it now, even though it was
allowed, I should have used two accounts. That was a mistake. I'm sorry about that. I take responsibility."
Tanden responded: "She rocked it!" in a suggestion that the plan had been to admit culpability
personally - an honest appeal for empathy to kill the political furore.
Another adviser, Jennifer Palmieri replied: "I actually cried a little bit with relief."
However, John Podesta replied that Clinton may not have gone far enough and that Trump had
found her weak spot. "No good deed goes unpunished. Press takeaway was the whine of but 'she really
didn't apologize to the American people' I am beginning to think Trump is on to something," Podesta
wrote
Too 'Establishment'?
Meanwhile, another email - also from Tanden - show the sense of vulnerability within the Clinton
camp: her need to appeal to voters who conceive of her as being part of the establishment and - in
particular - part of the Obama set who promised much, but delivered little. "So if she attacks [Trump]
from the right (say on taxes), she will sound establishment/centrist and that hurts her. She needs
to reaffirm her liberal credentials, not just her doer credentials," Tanden wrote.
"This is a change election: people (even those who support Obama) are not interested in the
status quo. Therefore they want a candidate who will make change, actually fight the status quo."
Wikileaks has gradually been releasing more than 30,000 emails hacked from the account belonging
to Podesta since October 7, 2016, giving an insight into the background thinking within her team.
It is believed they will continue to be dripped out ahead of the presidential election on
November 8. Apart from the embarrassment over the email account, the leaks show Clinton changing
her position on free trade agreements.
The question is not whether or not Donald or Hillary are fit to be US President. The question
should be is the United States fit to exist in a civilized world? The answer is; not in its current
form! Perhaps if the US returned to following its Constitution, but not otherwise!
"... Any analysis that starts with the assumption reactionaries still has a great deal to its agenda to achieve, such as promoting regressive taxation; privatization of Social Security; limiting Medicare; privatization of education; expansion of the police state; using the military to support the dollar, banking, world markets, etc., rather than Corey Robin's belief that "the Right" has won is in my view an improvement on the OP. ..."
"... In the end, Putin will be done in by his oligarchs, despite the care he has taken to give them their share if they just refrain from wrecking everything with their excesses. Again, no need for NGOs. ..."
This is a very good analyses. But I am less pessimistic: the blowback against neoliberal globalization
is real and it is difficult to swipe it under the carpet.
There are some signs of the "revolutionary situation" in the USA in a sense that the neoliberal
elite lost control and their propaganda loss effectiveness, despite dusting off the "Red scare"
trick with "Reds in each computer" instead of "Reds under each bed". With Putin as a very convenient
bogeyman.
As somebody here said Trump might be a reaction of secular stagnation, kind of trump card put
into play by some part of the elite, because with continued secular stagnation, the social stability
in the USA is under real threat.
But the problem is that Hillary with her failing health is our of her prime and with a bunch
of neocons in key positions in her administration, she really represents a huge threat to world
peace. She might not last long as the level of stress inherent in POTUS job make it a killing
ground for anybody with advanced stage of Parkinson or similar degenerative neurological disease.
But that might make her more impulsive and more aggressive (and she always tried to outdo male
politicians in jingoism, real John McCain is the red pantsuit).
All-in-all it looks like she in not a solution for neoliberal elite problems, she is a part
of the problem
Adventurism of the US neoliberal elite, and especially possible aggressive moves in Syria by
Hillary regime ("no fly zone"), makes military alliance of Russia and China very likely (with
Pakistan, Iran and India as possible future members). So Hillary might really work like a powerful
China lobbyist, because the alliance with Russia will be on China terms.
Regime change via color revolution in either country requires at dense network of subservient
to the Western interests and financed via shadow channels MSM (including TV channels), strong
network of NGO and ability to distribute cash to selected members of the fifth column of neoliberal
globalization. All those condition were made more difficult in Russia and impossible in mainland
China. In Russia the US adventurism in Ukraine and the regime change of February 2014 (creation
of neo-fascist regime nicknamed by some "Kaganat of Nuland" (Asia Times
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/CEN-01-100315.html
)) essentially killed the neoliberal fifth column in Russia and IMHO it no longer represent
a viable political force.
Also Russians probably learned well lesson of unsuccessful attempt of regime change by interfering
into Russian Presidential election process attempted by Hillary and Obama in 2011-2012. I would
like to see the US MSM reaction if Russian ambassador invited Sanders and Trump into the embassy
and promised full and unconditional support for their effort to remove criminal Obama regime,
mired in corruption and subservient to Wall Street interests, the regime that produced misery
for so many American workers, lower middle class and older Americans ;-)
Ambassador McFaul soon left the country, NED was banned and screws were tightened enough to
make next attempt exceedingly difficult. Although everything can happen I would discount the possibility
of the next "White Revolution" in Russia. So called "Putin regime" survived the period of low
oil prices and with oil prices over $60 in 2017 Russian economy might be able to grow several
percent a year. At the same time the US "post-Obama" regime might well face the winds of returning
higher oil prices and their negative influence of economy growth and unemployment.
In China recent troubles in Hong Cong were also a perfect training ground for "anti color revolution"
measures and the next attempt would much more difficult, unless China experience economic destabilization
due to some bubble burst.
That means that excessive military adventurism inherent in the future Hillary regime might
speed up loss by the USA military dominance and re-alignment of some states beyond Philippines.
Angela Merkel regime also might not survive the next election and that event might change "pro-Atlantic"
balance in Europe.
Although the list in definitely not complete, we can see that there are distinct setbacks for
attempts of further neoliberalization beyond Brexit and TPP troubles.
So there are some countervailing forces in action and my impression that the Triumphal march
of neoliberalism with the USA as the hegemon of the new neoliberal order is either over, or soon
will be over. In certain regions of the globe the USA foreign policy is in trouble (Syria, Ukraine)
and while you can do anything using bayonets, you can't sit on them.
So while still there is no viable alternative to neoliberalism as a social system, the ideology
itself is discredited and like communism after 1945 lost its hold of hearts and minds of the USA
population. I would say that in the USA neoliberalism entered Zombie stage.
My hope is that reasonable voices in foreign policy prevail, and the disgust of unions members
toward DemoRats (Neoliberal Democrats) could play the decisive role in coming elections. As bad
as Trump is for domestic policy, it represent some hope as for foreign policy unless co-opted
by Republican establishment.
#70 But the problem is that Hillary with her failing health is our of her prime and with a bunch
of neocons in key positions in her administration, she really represents a huge threat to world
peace. She might not last long as the level of stress inherent in POTUS job make it a killing
ground for anybody with advanced stage of Parkinson or similar degenerative neurological disease.
But that might kale her more impulsive and more aggressive (and she always tried to outdo her
male politicians in jingoism, real John McCain is the red pantsuit).
Does the new CT moderation regime have any expectations about the veracity of claims made by
commenters? Because I think it would be useful in cases like this.
Yes, it was late and I was tired, or I wouldn't have said something so foolish. Still, the
point is that after centuries of constant war, Europe went 70 years without territorial conquest.
That strikes me as a significant achievement, and one whose breach should not be taken lightly.
phenomenal cat @64
So democratic structures have to be robust and transparent before we care about them? I'd give
a pretty high value to an independent press and contested elections. Those have been slowly crushed
in Russia. The results for transparency have not been great. Personally, I don't believe that
Ukraine is governed by fascists, or that Ukraine shot down that jetliner, but I'm sure a lot of
Russians do.
Russian leaders have always complained about "encirclement," but we don't have to believe them.
Do you really believe Russia's afraid of an attack from Estonia? Clearly what Putin wants is to
restore as much of the old Soviet empire as possible. Do you think the independence of the Baltic
states would be more secure or less secure if they weren't members of NATO? (Hint: compare to
Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova.)
' .makes military alliance of Russia and China very likely '
Any analysis which arrives at this conclusion is profoundly ignorant.
Meta-comment: Is it permitted to say that a moderation scheme which objects to engels as a
troll, while permitting this tripe from likbez has taken a wrong turn somewhere. Seriously, some
explanation called for.
Does the new CT moderation regime have any expectations about the veracity of claims made
by commenters? Because I think it would be useful in cases like this.
I would like to apologize about the number of typos, but I stand by statements made. Your implicit
assumption that I am lying was not specific, so let's concentrate on three claims made:
1. "Hillary has serious neurological disease for at least four years", 2. "Obama and Hillary tried to stage color revolution in Russia in 2011-2012 interfering in Russian
Presidential elections" 3. "Hillary Clinton is a neocon, a warmonger similar to John McCain"
1. Hillary Health : Whether she suffers from Parkinson disease or not in unclear, but signs
of some serious neurological disease are observable since 2012 (for four years). Parkinson is just
the most plausible hypothesis based on symptoms observed. Those symptoms suggests that she is at
Stage 2 of the disease due to an excellent treatment she gets:
http://www.viartis.net/parkinsons.disease/news/100312.htm
The average time taken to progress from Stage 1 (mild) to Stage 2 (mild but various symptoms)
was 1 year 8 months. The average time taken to progress from Stage 2 to Stage 3 (typical) was
7 years and 3 months. From Stage 3 to Stage 4 (severe) took 2 years. From Stage 4 to Stage 5 (incapacitated)
took 2 years and 2 months. So the stage with typical symptoms lasts the longest. Those factors
associated with faster progression were older age at diagnosis, and longer disease duration. Gender
and ethnicity were not associated with the rate of Parkinson's Disease progression.
These figures are only averages. Progression is not inevitable. Some people with Parkinson's
Disease have either : stayed the same for decades, reduced their symptoms, rid their symptoms,
or worsened at a rapid rate. For more current news go to Parkinson's Disease News.
Concern about Hillary health were voiced in many publications and signs of her neurological disease
are undisputable:
3. The opinion that Hillary as a neocon is supported by facts from all her career , but
especially during her tenure as the Secretary of State. She voted for Iraq war and was instrumental
in unleashing Libya war and Syria war. The amount of evidence can't be ignored:
If you have more specific concerns please voice them and I will try to support my statements with
references and known facts.
stevenjohnson 10.26.16 at 1:50 pm
likbez @70 Any analysis that starts with the assumption reactionaries still has a great
deal to its agenda to achieve, such as promoting regressive taxation; privatization of Social
Security; limiting Medicare; privatization of education; expansion of the police state; using
the military to support the dollar, banking, world markets, etc., rather than Corey Robin's
belief that "the Right" has won is in my view an improvement on the OP. But whether mine
is actually a deep analysis seems doubtful even to me.
But the OP is really limiting itself solely to domestic politics, and in that context the
resistance to "neoliberal globalization," (Why not use the term "imperialism?") is more or
less irrelevant. The OP seems to have some essentialist notion of the "Right" as openly aimed
at restoring the past, ignoring the content of policies. Reaction would be something blatant
like restoring censorship of TV and movies, instead of IP laws that favor giant
telecommunications companies, or abolition of divorce, instead of discriminatory enforcement
of child protection laws that break up poor families. This
cultural/psychological/moralizing/spiritual approach seems to me to be fundamentally a
diversion from a useful understanding.
There may be some sort of confused notions about popular morals and tastes clearly evolving
in a more leftish direction. Free love was never a conservative principle for instance, yet
many of its tenets are now those of the majority of the population. Personally I can only
observe that there's nothing quite like the usefulness of laws and law enforcement,
supplemented by the occasional illicit violence, to change social attitudes. The great model
of course is the de facto extermination of the Left by "McCarthyism." No doubt the
disappearance of the left targeted by "McCarthyism" is perceived to be a purification of the
real left. It is customary for the acceptable "left" to agree with the McCarthys that
communism lost its appeal to the people, rather than being driven out by mass repression. As
to populism, such reactionary goals as the abolition of public education are notoriously sold
as service to the people against the hifalutin' snobs, starting of course with lazy ass
teachers. It seems to me entirely mistaken to see the populist reactionaries as out of
ammunition because the old forms of race-baiting aren't working so well.
By the way, there already is a Chinese bourgeoisie, in Taiwan, Singapore, the Philippines,
Malaysia, Indonesia, Hong Kong, as well as elements in SEZs in China proper and select circles
in various financial capitals. Restoration of capitalism in China has run into the difficulty
that capitalism isn't holding up its end. President Xi Jinping is finding it difficult for
capitalism to keep the mainland economy growing at a sufficiently rapid rate to keep the
working class pacific, much less generate the so-called middle class whose stock market
portfolios will bind them to the new ruling class forever. These are the sources for a
revolution in China, not NGOs or a color revolution. In the end, Putin will be done in by
his oligarchs, despite the care he has taken to give them their share if they just refrain
from wrecking everything with their excesses. Again, no need for NGOs.
Val @72 I remember that there were only rare, vague hints about Reagan, not factual
evidence. So unless you are committed to the proposition his Alzheimer's disease only set in
January 21, 1992, demanding factual evidence about the mental and physical health of our
elective divinities seems unduly restrictive I think.
Layman @79 The Shanghai Cooperation Organization alone makes an analysis that a military
alliance between Russia and China reasonable enough. Even if incorrect in the end, it is not
"profoundly ignorant."
Meta-comment: Engels post was perceived as mocking, which was its offense. As for "trolling,"
that's an internet thing...
President Barack Obama used a pseudonym in email communications with Hillary Clinton and others,
according to FBI records made public Friday.
The disclosure came as the FBI released its second batch of documents from its investigation
into Clinton's private email server during her tenure as secretary of state.
Story Continued Below
The
189 pages the bureau released includes interviews with some of Clinton's closest aides, such
as Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills; senior State Department officials; and even Marcel Lazar, better
known as the Romanian hacker "Guccifer." In an April 5, 2016 interview with the FBI, Abedin was
shown an email exchange between Clinton and Obama, but the longtime Clinton aide did not recognize
the name of the sender.
"Once informed that the sender's name is believed to be a pseudonym used by the president,
Abedin exclaimed: 'How is this not classified?'" the report says. "Abedin then expressed her amazement
at the president's use of a pseudonym and asked if she could have a copy of the email."
"... The simplest explanation is usually best. All the indicators, especially the support of the donor class, elites of all kinds
etc. points towards a Democratic victory, perhaps a very strong victory if the poll numbers last weekend translate into electoral college
numbers. ..."
I stopped by to check if my comment had cleared moderation. What follows is a more thorough examination (not my own, entirely)
on Corey's point 1, and some data that may point towards a much narrower race than we're led to believe.
The leaked emails from one Democratic super-pac, the over-sampling I cited at zerohedge (@13o) is part of a two-step process
involving over-sampling of Democrats in polls combined with high frequency polling. The point being to encourage media
to promote the idea that the race is already over. We saw quite a bit of this last weekend. Let's say the leaked emails are reliable.
This suggests to me two things: first – the obvious, the race is much closer than the polls indicated, certainly the poll cited
by Corey in the OP. Corey questioned the validity of this poll, at least obliquely. Second, at least one super-pac working with
the campaign sees the need to depress Trump turn-out. The first point is the clearest and the most important – the polls, some
at least, are intentionally tilted to support a 'Hillary wins easily' narrative. The second allows for some possibly useful speculation
regarding the Clinton campaigns confidence in their own GOTV success.
The simplest explanation is usually best. All the indicators, especially the support of the donor class, elites of all
kinds etc. points towards a Democratic victory, perhaps a very strong victory if the poll numbers last weekend translate into
electoral college numbers.
That's a big if. I suggest Hillary continues to lead but by much smaller margins in key states. It's also useful to
point out that Trump's support in traditionally GOP states may well be equally shaky.
And that really is it from me on this topic barring a double digit swing to Hillary in the LA Times poll that has the race
at dead even.
Layman 10.25.16 at 11:31 am
kidneystones:
"The leaked emails from one Democratic super-pac, the over-sampling I cited at zerohedge (@13o) is part of a two-step
process involving over-sampling of Democrats in polls combined with high frequency polling."
Excellent analysis, only the email in question is eight years old. And it refers to a request for internal polling done by
the campaign. And it suggests over-sampling of particular demographics so the campaign could better assess attitudes among those
demographics.
And this is a completely normal practice which has nothing to do with the polling carried out by independent third parties
(e.g. Gallup, Ipsos, etc) for the purposes of gauging and reporting to the public the state of the race.
And when pollsters to over-sample, the over-sampling is used for analysis but is not reflected in the top-line poll results.
"... There are some signs of the "revolutionary situation" in the USA in a sense that the neoliberal elite lost control and their propaganda loss effectiveness, despite dusting off the "Red scare" trick with "Reds in each computer" instead of "Reds under each bed". With Putin as a very convenient bogeyman. ..."
"... But it looks like newly formed shadow "Committee for Saving [neo]Liberal Order" (with participation of three latter agencies, just read the recent "Red scare" memorandum ( https://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/press-releases/215-press-releases-2016/1423-joint-dhs-odni-election-security-statement ) want Hillary to be the POTUS. ..."
1. An ABC news poll says that Clinton has 50% of somebody (the electorate, likely voters?)
supporting her rabidly reactionary rhetoric. She demonizes Putin, imputes treason to a major party
candidate in a way hitherto seen only in Birch Society attacks on Eisenhower, shrieks that it
is utterly impossible to even hint that the current electoral system has no real legitimacy.
The only real criticisms acceptable in the face of her reactionary screeds are hints that
she is a traitor for Clinton Foundation cash and that she is lax on security . (The claim
that Clinton is pro-war are regressions to the Obama primary campaign in 2008. Since he promptly
proved the irrelevance of an anti-war rhetoric, the observations that Clinton has none are equally
irrelevant.)
2. The high levels of indecision suggest that a Trump defeat may well leave the Republican
establishment more or less as it was. Depending on turnout, which even at this late date is highly
uncertain, it is entirely possible the Republicans will maintain control of the Senate. At this
point it is probable they will keep the House. In any event, Clinton has openly committed to
a bipartisan a campaign against the Trump hijacking of the Republican party.
3. Consider the longevity of reactionary leaderships in the major parties. The Democratic
Leadership Council approach has dominated its party for decades. The Republican party projects
like ALEC, the Federalist Society, the Mighty Wurlitzer, the designated superstar talk personality
(no, shifting from Limbaugh to Beck is not a sea change,) everywhere you look behind the scenes
you see the same faces. What new faces appear turn out (like Obama) to be employees of the same
old political establishments. Alleged exceptions like Sanders and Warren are notable primarily
for their lack of commitment.
4. There are bold thinkers willing to imagine the conservative future. Think Jason Brennan
and his book Against Democracy. Even worse, the real strength of the conservatives lies in the
bottom line, not in polemics. Tragically, it's when the bottom line is written in read that it
shrieks the loudest, with the most conviction and the most urgent desire for the masters to unite
against the rest of us.
5. California politics has set the pace once again, demonstrating the absolute irrelevance
of a "Left" defined as a spiritual posture. The annihilation of an ugly materialist Left by "McCarthyism"
has purified the souls of the righetous, leaving socialism/communism unthinkable. California leftism
is entirely safe for capitalism, imperialism and a free market of ideas where the refined consumers
of ideas can have their gated neighborhoods of ideas.
6. The majority support for a more tolerant society makes no difference in policy. Being nicer
is not politics.
There is a fundamental reason for despair, the failures of the right to win the Holy Grail
of a functional capitalist society. Despite their successes in destroying organized labor (with
the help of counter-revolutionary "leftists" to be sure,) in limiting women's rights, in blunting
the real world effects of desegregation, the short-run prospects of capital are disquieting. And
the long run prospects, insofar as these people can see past the quarterly statement, are even
more frightening. Urged by their fears, the system will be ever more destabilized by desperate
adventures. The replacement of Social Security of course will be high on the agenda. The absolutely
vital need for ever more control over the world, including regime change in Russia and China,
has driven foreign policy in direct support of the dollar and banking since at least Bush 41.
But in the end, it is not the madness of the owners that is the cause for despair, but the
absolute indifference of the spiritual leftists who have joined in the rabidly reactionary campaign
against Clinton from the right. (You would have thought it rather difficult to criticize Clinton
from the right, but never underestimate the exigencies of struggle against totalitarianism.) Win
or lose, this campaign has endorsed reaction, top to bottom. On the upside, the likelihood of
a Clinton impeachment offers much value for your entertainment dollar.
likbez 10.26.16 at 1:10 am
stevenjohnson
@58
This is a very good analyses. But I am less pessimistic: the blowback against neoliberal globalization
is real and it is difficult to swipe it under the carpet.
There are some signs of the "revolutionary situation" in the USA in a sense that the neoliberal
elite lost control and their propaganda loss effectiveness, despite dusting off the "Red scare"
trick with "Reds in each computer" instead of "Reds under each bed". With Putin as a very convenient
bogeyman.
As somebody here said Trump might be a reaction to secular stagnation, kind of trump card put
into play by some part of the elite, because with continued secular stagnation, the social stability
in the USA is under a real threat.
But the problem is that Hillary with her failing health is our of her prime and with a bunch
of neocons in key positions in her administration, she really represents a huge threat to world
peace. She might not last long as the level of stress inherent in POTUS job make it a killing
ground for anybody with advanced stage of Parkinson or similar degenerative neurological disease.
But that might kale her more impulsive and more aggressive (and she always tried to outdo her
male politicians in jingoism, real John McCain is the red pantsuit).
All-in-all it looks like she in not a solution of neoliberal elite problems, she is a part
of the problem
Adventurism of the US neoliberal elite, and especially possible aggressive moves in Syria by
Hillary regime ("no fly zone"), makes military alliance of Russia and China very likely (with
Pakistan, Iran and India as possible future members). So Hillary might really work like a powerful
China lobbyist, because the alliance with Russia will be on China terms.
Regime change via color revolution in either country requires at dense network of subservient
to the Western interests and financed via shadow channels MSM (including TV channels), NGO and
ability to distribute cash to selection members of fifth column of neoliberalism. All those condition
were made more difficult in Russia and impossible in mainland China. In Russia the US adventurism
in Ukraine and the regime change of February 2014 (creation of neo-fascist regime nicknamed by
some "Kaganat of Nuland" (Asia times
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/CEN-01-100315.html
) essentially killed the neoliberal fifth column in Russia and IMHO it no longer represent
a viable political force.
Also Russians probably learned well lesson of unsuccessful attempt of regime change by interfering
into Russian Presidential election process attempted by Hillary and Obama in 2011-2012. I would
like to see the US MSM reaction if Russian ambassador invited Sanders and Trump into the embassy
and promised full and unconditional support for their effort to remove criminal Obama regime,
mired in corruption and subservient to Wall Street interest, the regime that produced misery for
so many American workers, lower middle class and older Americans ;-)
Ambassador McFaul soon left the country, NED was banned and screws were tightened enough to
make next attempt exceedingly difficult. Although everything can happen I would discount the possibility
of the next "While Revolution" in Russia. So called "Putin regime" survived the period of low
oil prices and with oil prices over $60 in 2017 Russian economy might be able to grow several
percent a year. At the same time the US "post-Obama" regime might well face the winds of returning
higher oil prices and their negative influence of economy growth and unemployment.
In China recent troubles in Hong Cong were also a perfect training ground for "anti color revolution"
measures and the next attempt would much more difficult, unless China experience economic destabilization
due to some bubble burst.
that means that excessive military adventurism inherent in the future Hillary regime might
speed up loss by the USA military dominance and re-alignment of some states beyond Philippines.
Angela Merkel regime also might not survive the next election and change "pro-Atlantic" balance
in Europe.
Although the list in definitely not complete, we can see that there are distinct setbacks for
attempts of further neoliberalization - Brexit and TPP troubles.
So there are some countervailing forces in action and my impression that the Triumphal march
of neoliberalism with the USA as a hegemon of the new neoliberal order is either over or soon
will be over. In certain regions of the globe the USA foreign policy is in trouble (Syria, Ukraine)
and while you can do anything using bayonets, you can't sit on them.
So while still there is no viable alternative to neoliberalism as social system, the ideology
itself is discredited and like communism after 1945 lost its hold of hearts and minds of the USA
population. I would say that in the USA neoliberalism entered Zombie stage.
My hope is that reasonable voices in foreign policy prevail, and the disgust of unions members
toward DemoRats (Neoliberal Democrats) could play the decisive role in coming elections. As bad
as Trump is for domestic policy, it represent some hope as for foreign policy unless co-opted
by Republican establishment.
likbez :
October 24, 2016 at 12:00 PM
My impression is that that key issue is as following: a vote
for Hillary is a vote for the War Party and is incompatible
with democratic principles.
She is way too militant, and is not that different in this
respect from Senator McCain. That creates a real danger of
unleashing the war with Russia.
Trump with all his warts gives us a chance to get some
kind of détente with Russia.
Just a hunch: a lot of this hoo-hah will simmer down after
the election.
But yeah, I'm really bummed that we are going
to be seeing a return of a lot of the same creeps who gave us
the foreign policy of the 90's that went belly up in 2001-03.
Just a reminder: I called attention several times to this
article in 2014 and 2015:
The Next Act of the Neocons
Are Neocons Getting Ready to Ally With Hillary Clinton?
By JACOB HEILBRUNN
WASHINGTON - AFTER nearly a decade in the political
wilderness, the neoconservative movement is back, using the
turmoil in Iraq and Ukraine to claim that it is President
Obama, not the movement's interventionist foreign policy that
dominated early George W. Bush-era Washington, that bears
responsibility for the current round of global crises.
Even as they castigate Mr. Obama, the neocons may be
preparing a more brazen feat: aligning themselves with
Hillary Rodham Clinton and her nascent presidential campaign,
in a bid to return to the driver's seat of American foreign
policy.
To be sure, the careers and reputations of the older
generation of neocons - Paul D. Wolfowitz, L. Paul Bremer
III, Douglas J. Feith, Richard N. Perle - are permanently
buried in the sands of Iraq. And not all of them are eager to
switch parties: In April, William Kristol, the editor of The
Weekly Standard, said that as president Mrs. Clinton would
"be a dutiful chaperone of further American decline."
But others appear to envisage a different direction - one
that might allow them to restore the neocon brand, at a time
when their erstwhile home in the Republican Party is turning
away from its traditional interventionist foreign policy.
It's not as outlandish as it may sound. Consider the
historian Robert Kagan, the author of a recent, roundly
praised article in The New Republic that amounted to a
neo-neocon manifesto. He has not only avoided the vitriolic
tone that has afflicted some of his intellectual brethren but
also co-founded an influential bipartisan advisory group
during Mrs. Clinton's time at the State Department.
Mr. Kagan has also been careful to avoid landing at
standard-issue neocon think tanks like the American
Enterprise Institute; instead, he's a senior fellow at the
Brookings Institution, that citadel of liberalism headed by
Strobe Talbott, who was deputy secretary of state under
President Bill Clinton and is considered a strong candidate
to become secretary of state in a new Democratic
administration. (Mr. Talbott called the Kagan article
"magisterial," in what amounts to a public baptism into the
liberal establishment.)
Perhaps most significantly, Mr. Kagan and others have
insisted on maintaining the link between modern
neoconservatism and its roots in muscular Cold War
liberalism. Among other things, he has frequently praised
Harry S. Truman's secretary of state, Dean Acheson, drawing a
line from him straight to the neocons' favorite president:
"It was not Eisenhower or Kennedy or Nixon but Reagan whose
policies most resembled those of Acheson and Truman."
Other neocons have followed Mr. Kagan's careful centrism
and respect for Mrs. Clinton. Max Boot, a senior fellow at
the Council on Foreign Relations,noted in The New Republic
this year that "it is clear that in administration councils
she was a principled voice for a strong stand on
controversial issues, whether supporting the Afghan surge or
the intervention in Libya."
And the thing is, these neocons have a point. Mrs. Clinton
voted for the Iraq war; supported sending arms to Syrian
rebels; likened Russia's president, Vladimir V. Putin, to
Adolf Hitler...
This former associate of Dick Cheney managed to completely
destroy pretty nice European county, unleashing the horror of
real starvation on the population.
Ukraine now is essentially Central African country in the
middle of the Europe. Retirees often live on less then $1 a
day. most adults (and lucky retirees) on less then $3 a day.
$6 a day is considered a high salary. At the same time
"oligarchs" drive on Maybachs, and personal jets.
Sex tourism is rampant. Probably the only "profession"
that prospered since "Maydan".
Young people try to get university education and emigrate
to any county that would accept them (repeating the story of
Baltic countries and Poland).
Now this a typical IMF debt slave with no chances to get
out of the hole.
Politically this is now a protectorate of the USA with the
USA ambassador as the real, de-facto ruler of the country.
Much like Kosovo is.
Standard of living dropped approximately three times since
2014.
"If the country continues on its present course, Odessa's
reformist governor Mikheil Saakashvili has noted
sarcastically, Ukraine will not reach the level of GDP it had
under former president Viktor Yanukovych for another fifteen
years"
"In Kiev, which is by far the wealthiest city in Ukraine,
payment arrears for electricity have risen by 32 percent
since the beginning of this year."
The Next Act of the Neocons
Are Neocons Getting Ready to Ally With Hillary Clinton?
By JACOB HEILBRUNN
WASHINGTON - AFTER nearly a decade in the political wilderness, the neoconservative movement
is back, using the turmoil in Iraq and Ukraine to claim that it is President Obama, not the movement's
interventionist foreign policy that dominated early George W. Bush-era Washington, that bears
responsibility for the current round of global crises.
Even as they castigate Mr. Obama, the neocons may be preparing a more brazen feat: aligning
themselves with Hillary Rodham Clinton and her nascent presidential campaign, in a bid to return
to the driver's seat of American foreign policy.
To be sure, the careers and reputations of the older generation of neocons - Paul D. Wolfowitz,
L. Paul Bremer III, Douglas J. Feith, Richard N. Perle - are permanently buried in the sands of
Iraq. And not all of them are eager to switch parties: In April, William Kristol, the editor of
The Weekly Standard, said that as president Mrs. Clinton would "be a dutiful chaperone of further
American decline."
But others appear to envisage a different direction - one that might allow them to restore
the neocon brand, at a time when their erstwhile home in the Republican Party is turning away
from its traditional interventionist foreign policy.
It's not as outlandish as it may sound.
Consider the historian Robert Kagan, the author
of a recent, roundly praised article in The New Republic that amounted to a neo-neocon manifesto.
He has not only avoided the vitriolic tone that has afflicted some of his intellectual brethren
but also co-founded an influential bipartisan advisory group during Mrs. Clinton's time at the
State Department.
Mr. Kagan has also been careful to avoid landing at standard-issue neocon think tanks like
the American Enterprise Institute; instead, he's a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution,
that citadel of liberalism headed by Strobe Talbott, who was deputy secretary of state under President
Bill Clinton and is considered a strong candidate to become secretary of state in a new Democratic
administration. (Mr. Talbott called the Kagan article "magisterial," in what amounts to a public
baptism into the liberal establishment.)
Perhaps most significantly, Mr. Kagan and others have insisted on maintaining the link between
modern neoconservatism and its roots in muscular Cold War liberalism. Among other things, he has
frequently praised Harry S. Truman's secretary of state, Dean Acheson, drawing a line from him
straight to the neocons' favorite president: "It was not Eisenhower or Kennedy or Nixon but Reagan
whose policies most resembled those of Acheson and Truman."
Other neocons have followed Mr. Kagan's careful centrism and respect for Mrs. Clinton. Max
Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, noted in The New Republic this year
that "it is clear that in administration councils she was a principled voice for a strong stand
on controversial issues, whether supporting the Afghan surge or the intervention in Libya."
And the thing is, these neocons have a point. Mrs. Clinton voted for the Iraq war; supported
sending arms to Syrian rebels; likened Russia's president, Vladimir V. Putin, to Adolf Hitler...
Anne and I have seen this for a while.
Nothing new Strobe Talbott was closeted [neocon], and
brought Mrs Kagan aka Victoria Nuland in to State in 1993.
Bill bearded the bear breaking Kosovo and Bosinia out of Serbia... The down payment for
Kyiv in 2012 was in 1996.
This former associate of Dick Cheney managed to completely destroy pretty nice European county,
unleashing the horror of real starvation on the population.
Ukraine now is essentially Central African country in the middle of the Europe. Retirees often
live on less then $1 a day. most adults (and lucky retirees) on less then $3 a day. $6 a day is
considered a high salary. At the same time "oligarchs" drive on Maybachs, and personal jets.
Sex tourism is rampant. Probably the only "profession" that prospered since "Maydan".
Young people try to get university education and emigrate to any county that would accept them
(repeating the story of Baltic countries and Poland).
Now this a typical IMF debt slave with no chances to get our the hole.
Politically this is now a protectorate of the USA with the USA ambassador as the real, de-facto
ruler of the county. Much like Kosovo is.
Standard of living dropped approximately three times since 2014.
"If the country continues on its present course, Odessa's reformist governor Mikheil
Saakashvili has noted sarcastically, Ukraine will not reach the level of GDP it had under former
president Viktor Yanukovych for another fifteen years"
"In Kiev, which is by far the wealthiest city in Ukraine, payment arrears for electricity
have risen by 32 percent since the beginning of this year."
"... Geithner's comments about his sacrifices in public service did not elicit any outcry from the media at the time because his perspective was widely shared. The implicit assumption is that the sort of person who is working at a high level government job could easily be earning a paycheck that is many times higher if they were employed elsewhere. In fact, this is often true. When he left his job as Treasury Secretary, Geithner took a position with a private equity company where his salary is likely several million dollars a year. ..."
"... The CEOs who are paid tens of millions a year would like the public to think that the market is simply compensating them for their extraordinary skills. A more realistic story is that a broken corporate governance process gives corporate boards of directors - the people who largely determine CEO pay -little incentive to hold down pay. Directors are more closely tied to top management than to the shareholders they are supposed to represent, and their positions are lucrative, usually paying six figures for very part-time work. Directors are almost never voted out by shareholders for their lack of attention to the job or for incompetence. ..."
"... We also have done little to foster medical travel. This could lead to enormous benefits to patients and the economy, since many high cost medical procedures can be performed at a fifth or even one-tenth the U.S. price in top quality medical facilities elsewhere in the world. In this context, it is not surprising that the median pay of physicians is over $250,000 a year and some areas of specialization earn close to twice this amount. In the case of physicians alone, if pay were reduced to West European-levels the savings would be close to $100 billion a year (@ 0.6 percent of GDP). ..."
"... As a technical matter, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York is a private bank. It is owned by the banks that are members of the Federal Reserve System in the New York District. ..."
Yves here. We are delighted to feature an excerpt from Dean Baker's new book
Rigged , which you can find at
http://deanbaker.net/books/rigged.htm via either a free download
or in hard copy for the cost of printing and shipping. The book argues that policy in five areas, macroeconomics, the financial sector,
intellectual property, corporate governance, and protection for highly paid professionals, have all led to the upward distribution
of income. The implication is that the yawning gap between the 0.1% and the 1% versus everyone else is not the result of virtue ("meritocracy")
but preferential treatment, and inequality would be substantially reduced if these policies were reversed.
I urge you to read his book in full and encourage your friends, colleagues, and family to do so as well.
By Dean Baker, Co-Director, Center for Economic and Policy Research
Chapter 1: Introduction: Trading in myths
In winter 2016, near the peak of Bernie Sanders' bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, a new line became popular among
the nation's policy elite: Bernie Sanders is the enemy of the world's poor. Their argument was that Sanders, by pushing trade policies
to help U.S. workers, specifically manufacturing workers, risked undermining the well-being of the world's poor because exporting
manufactured goods to the United States and other wealthy countries is their path out of poverty. The role model was China, which
by exporting has largely eliminated extreme poverty and drastically reduced poverty among its population. Sanders and his supporters
would block the rest of the developing world from following the same course.
This line, in its Sanders-bashing permutation, appeared early on in Vox, the millennial-oriented media upstart, and was quickly
picked up elsewhere (Beauchamp 2016).
[1] After all, it was pretty irresistible. The ally of the downtrodden and enemy of the rich was pushing policies that would
condemn much of the world to poverty.
The story made a nice contribution to preserving the status quo, but it was less valuable if you respect honesty in public debate.
The problem in the logic of this argument should be apparent to anyone who has taken an introductory economics course. It assumes
that the basic problem of manufacturing workers in the developing world is the need for someone who will buy their stuff. If people
in the United States don't buy it, then the workers will be out on the street and growth in the developing world will grind to a
halt.
In this story, the problem is that we don't have enough people in the world to buy stuff. In other words, there is a shortage
of demand. But is it really true that no one else in the world would buy the stuff produced by manufacturing workers in the developing
world if they couldn't sell it to consumers in the United States? Suppose people in the developing world bought the stuff they produced
raising their living standards by raising their own consumption.
That is how the economics is supposed to work. In the standard theory, general shortages of demand are not a problem.
[2] Economists have traditionally assumed that economies tended toward full employment. The basic economic constraint was a lack
of supply. The problem was that we couldn't produce enough goods and services, not that we were producing too much and couldn't find
anyone to buy them. In fact, this is why all the standard models used to analyze trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership
assume trade doesn't affect total employment.
[3] Economies adjust so that shortages of demand are not a problem.
In this standard story (and the Sanders critics are people who care about textbook economics), capital flows from slow-growing
rich countries, where it is relatively plentiful and so gets a low rate of return, to fast-growing poor countries, where it is scarce
and gets a high rate of return (Figure 1-1).
So the United States, Japan, and the European Union should be running large trade surpluses, which is what an outflow of capital
means. Rich countries like ours should be lending money to developing countries, providing them with the means to build up their
capital stock and infrastructure while they use their own resources to meet their people's basic needs.
This wasn't just theory. That story accurately described much of the developing world, especially Asia, through the 1990s. Countries
like Indonesia and Malaysia were experiencing rapid annual growth of 7.8 percent and 9.6 percent, respectively, even as they ran
large trade deficits, just over 2 percent of GDP each year in Indonesia and almost 5 percent in Malaysia.
These trade deficits probably were excessive, and a crisis of confidence hit East Asia and much of the developing world in the
summer of 1997. The inflow of capital from rich countries slowed or reversed, making it impossible for the developing countries to
sustain the fixed exchange rates most had at the time. One after another, they were forced to abandon their fixed exchange rates
and turn to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for help.
Rather than promulgating policies that would allow developing countries to continue the textbook development path of growth driven
by importing capital and running trade deficits, the IMF made debt repayment a top priority. The bailout, under the direction of
the Clinton administration Treasury Department, required developing countries to switch to large trade surpluses (Radelet and Sachs
2000, O'Neil 1999).
The countries of East Asia would be far richer today had they been allowed to continue on the growth path of the early and mid-1990s,
when they had large trade deficits (Figure 1-2). Four of the five would be more than twice as rich, and the fifth, Vietnam, would
be almost 50 percent richer. South Korea and Malaysia would have higher per capita incomes today than the United States.
In the wake of the East Asia bailout, countries throughout the developing world decided they had to build up reserves of foreign
exchange, primarily dollars, in order to avoid ever facing the same harsh bailout terms as the countries of East Asia. Building up
reserves meant running large trade surpluses, and it is no coincidence that the U.S. trade deficit has exploded, rising from just
over 1 percent of GDP in 1996 to almost 6 percent in 2005. The rise has coincided with the loss of more than 3 million manufacturing
jobs, roughly 20 percent of employment in the sector.
There was no reason the textbook growth pattern of the 1990s could not have continued. It wasn't the laws of economics that forced
developing countries to take a different path, it was the failed bailout and the international financial system. It would seem that
the enemy of the world's poor is not Bernie Sanders but rather the engineers of our current globalization policies.
There is a further point in this story that is generally missed: it is not only the volume of trade flows that is determined by
policy, but also the content. A major push in recent trade deals has been to require stronger and longer patent and copyright protection.
Paying the fees imposed by these terms, especially for prescription drugs, is a huge burden on the developing world. Bill Clinton
would have much less need to fly around the world for the Clinton Foundation had he not inserted the TRIPS (Trade Related Aspects
of Intellectual Property Rights ) provisions in the World Trade Organization (WTO) that require developing countries to adopt U.S.-style
patent protections. Generic drugs are almost always cheap -patent protection makes drugs expensive. The cancer and hepatitis drugs
that sell for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars a year would sell for a few hundred dollars in a free market. Cheap drugs
would be more widely available had the developed world not forced TRIPS on the developing world.
Of course, we have to pay for the research to develop new drugs or any innovation. We also have to compensate creative workers
who produce music, movies, and books. But there are efficient alternatives to patents and copyrights, and the efforts by the elites
in the United States and other wealthy countries to impose these relics on the developing world is just a mechanism for redistributing
income from the world's poor to Pfizer, Microsoft, and Disney. Stronger and longer patent and copyright protection is not a necessary
feature of a 21 st century economy.
In textbook trade theory, if a country has a larger trade surplus on payments for royalties and patent licensing fees, it will
have a larger trade deficit in manufactured goods and other areas. The reason is that, in theory, the trade balance is fixed by national
savings and investment, not by the ability of a country to export in a particular area. If the trade deficit is effectively fixed
by these macroeconomic factors, then more exports in one area mean fewer exports in other areas. Put another way, income gains for
Pfizer and Disney translate into lost jobs for workers in the steel and auto industries.
The conventional story is that we lose manufacturing jobs to developing countries because they have hundreds of millions of people
willing to do factory work at a fraction of the pay of manufacturing workers in the United States. This is true, but developing countries
also have tens of millions of smart and ambitious people willing to work as doctors and lawyers in the United States at a fraction
of the pay of the ones we have now.
Gains from trade work the same with doctors and lawyers as they do with textiles and steel. Our consumers would save hundreds
of billions a year if we could hire professionals from developing countries and pay them salaries that are substantially less than
what we pay our professionals now. The reason we import manufactured goods and not doctors is that we have designed the rules of
trade that way. We deliberately write trade pacts to make it as easy as possible for U.S. companies to set up manufacturing operations
abroad and ship the products back to the United States, but we have done little or nothing to remove the obstacles that professionals
from other countries face in trying to work in the United States. The reason is simple: doctors and lawyers have more political power
than autoworkers.
[4]
In short, there is no truth to the story that the job loss and wage stagnation faced by manufacturing workers in the United States
and other wealthy countries was a necessary price for reducing poverty in the developing world.
[5] This is a fiction that is used to justify the upward redistribution of income in rich countries. After all, it is pretty
selfish for rich country autoworkers and textile workers to begrudge hungry people in Africa and Asia and the means to secure food,
clothing, and shelter.
The other aspect of this story that deserves mention is the nature of the jobs to which our supposedly selfish workers feel entitled.
The manufacturing jobs that are being lost to the developing world pay in the range of $15 to $30 an hour, with the vast majority
closer to the bottom figure than the top. The average hourly wage for production and nonsupervisory workers in manufacturing in 2015
was just under $20 an hour, or about $40,000 a year. While a person earning $40,000 is doing much better than a subsistence farmer
in Sub-Saharan Africa, it is difficult to see this worker as especially privileged.
By contrast, many of the people remarking on the narrow-mindedness and sense of entitlement of manufacturing workers earn comfortable
six-figure salaries. Senior writers and editors at network news shows or at the New York Times and Washington Post
feel entitled to their pay because they feel they have the education and skills to be successful in a rapidly changing global economy.
These are the sort of people who consider it a sacrifice to work at a high-level government job for $150,000 to $200,000 a year.
For example, Timothy Geithner, President Obama's first treasury secretary, often boasts about his choice to work for various government
agencies rather than earn big bucks in the private sector. His sacrifice included a stint as president of the Federal Reserve Bank
of New York that paid $415,000 a year.
[6] This level of pay put Geithner well into the top 1 percent of wage earners.
Geithner's comments about his sacrifices in public service did not elicit any outcry from the media at the time because his perspective
was widely shared. The implicit assumption is that the sort of person who is working at a high level government job could easily
be earning a paycheck that is many times higher if they were employed elsewhere. In fact, this is often true. When he left his job
as Treasury Secretary, Geithner took a position with a private equity company where his salary is likely several million dollars
a year.
Not everyone who was complaining about entitled manufacturing workers was earning as much as Timothy Geithner, but it is a safe
bet that the average critic was earning far more than the average manufacturing worker - and certainly far more than the average
displaced manufacturing worker.
Turning the Debate Right-Side Up: Markets Are Structured
The perverse nature of the debate over a trade policy that would have the audacity to benefit workers in rich countries is a great
example of how we accept as givens not just markets themselves but also the policies that structure markets. If we accept it as a
fact of nature that poor countries cannot borrow from rich countries to finance their development, and that they can only export
manufactured goods, then their growth will depend on displacing manufacturing workers in the United States and other rich countries.
It is absurd to narrow the policy choices in this way, yet the centrists and conservatives who support the upward redistribution
of the last four decades have been extremely successful in doing just that, and progressives have largely let them set the terms
of the debate.
Markets are never just given. Neither God nor nature hands us a worked-out set of rules determining the way property relations
are defined, contracts are enforced, or macroeconomic policy is implemented. These matters are determined by policy choices. The
elites have written these rules to redistribute income upward. Needless to say, they are not eager to have the rules rewritten which
means they have no interest in even having them discussed.
But for progressive change to succeed, these rules must be addressed. While modest tweaks to tax and transfer policies can ameliorate
the harm done by a regressive market structure, their effect will be limited. The complaint of conservatives - that tampering with
market outcomes leads to inefficiencies and unintended outcomes - is largely correct, even if they may exaggerate the size of the
distortions from policy interventions. Rather than tinker with badly designed rules, it is far more important to rewrite the rules
so that markets lead to progressive and productive outcomes in which the benefits of economic growth and improving technology are
broadly shared
This book examines five broad areas where the rules now in place tend to redistribute income upward and where alternative rules
can lead to more equitable outcomes and a more efficient market:
Macroeconomic policies determining levels of employment and output. Financial regulation and the structure of financial markets.
Patent and copyright monopolies and alternative mechanisms for financing innovation and creative work. Pay of chief executive
officers (CEOs) and corporate governance structures. Protections for highly paid professionals, such as doctors and lawyers.
In each of these areas, it is possible to identify policy choices that have engineered the upward redistribution of the last four
decades.
In the case of macroeconomic policy, the United States and other wealthy countries have explicitly adopted policies that focus
on maintaining low rates of inflation. Central banks are quick to raise interest rates at the first sign of rising inflation and
sometimes even before. Higher interest rates slow inflation by reducing demand, thereby reducing job growth, and reduced job growth
weakens workers' bargaining power and puts downward pressure on wages. In other words, the commitment to an anti-inflation policy
is a commitment by the government, acting through central banks, to keep wages down. It should not be surprising that this policy
has the effect of redistributing income upward.
The changing structure of financial regulation and financial markets has also been an important factor in redistributing income
upward. This is a case where an industry has undergone very rapid change as a result of technological innovation. Information technology
has hugely reduced the cost of financial transactions and allowed for the development of an array of derivative instruments that
would have been unimaginable four decades ago. Rather than modernizing regulation to ensure that these technologies allow the financial
sector to better serve the productive economy, the United States and other countries have largely structured regulations to allow
a tiny group of bankers and hedge fund and private equity fund managers to become incredibly rich.
This changed structure of regulation over the last four decades was not "deregulation," as is often claimed. Almost no proponent
of deregulation argued against the bailouts that saved Wall Street in the financial crisis or against the elimination of government
deposit insurance that is an essential part of a stable banking system. Rather, they advocated a system in which the rules restricting
their ability to profit were eliminated, while the insurance provided by the Federal Reserve Board, the Federal Deposit Insurance
Corporation, and other arms of the government were left in place. The position of "deregulators" effectively amounted to arguing
that they should not have to pay for the insurance they were receiving.
The third area in which the rules have been written to ensure an upward redistribution is patent and copyright protection. Over
the last four decades these protections have been made stronger and longer. In the case of both patent and copyright, the duration
of the monopoly period has been extended. In addition, these monopolies have been applied to new areas. Patents can now be applied
to life forms, business methods, and software. Copyrights have been extended to cover digitally produced material as well as the
internet. Penalties for infringement have been increased and the United States has vigorously pursued their application in other
countries through trade agreements and diplomatic pressure.
Government-granted monopolies are not facts of nature, and there are alternative mechanisms for financing innovation and creative
work. Direct government funding, as opposed to government granted monopolies, is one obvious alternative. For example, the government
spends more than $30 billion a year on biomedical research through the National Institutes of Health - money that all parties agree
is very well spent. There are also other possible mechanisms. It is likely that these alternatives are more efficient than the current
patent and copyright system, in large part because they would be more market-oriented. And, they would likely lead to less upward
redistribution than the current system.
The CEOs who are paid tens of millions a year would like the public to think that the market is simply compensating them for their
extraordinary skills. A more realistic story is that a broken corporate governance process gives corporate boards of directors -
the people who largely determine CEO pay -little incentive to hold down pay. Directors are more closely tied to top management than
to the shareholders they are supposed to represent, and their positions are lucrative, usually paying six figures for very part-time
work. Directors are almost never voted out by shareholders for their lack of attention to the job or for incompetence.
The market discipline that holds down the pay of ordinary workers does not apply to CEOs, since their friends determine their
pay. And a director has little incentive to pick a fight with fellow directors or top management by asking a simple question like,
"Can we get a CEO just as good for half the pay?" This privilege matters not just for CEOs; it has the spillover effect of raising
the pay of other top managers in the corporate sector and putting upward pressure on the salaries of top management in universities,
hospitals, private charities, and other nonprofits.
Reformed corporate governance structures could empower shareholders to contain the pay of their top-level employees. Suppose directors
could count on boosts in their own pay if they cut the pay of top management without hurting profitability, With this sort of policy
change, CEOs and top management might start to experience some of the downward wage pressure that existing policies have made routine
for typical workers.
This is very much not a story of the natural workings of the market. Corporations are a legal entity created by the government,
which also sets the rules of corporate governance. Current law includes a lengthy set of restrictions on corporate governance practices.
It is easy to envision rules which would make it less likely that CEOs earn such outlandish paychecks by making it easier for shareholders
to curb excessive pay.
Finally, government policies strongly promote the upward redistribution of income for highly paid professionals by protecting
them from competition. To protect physicians and specialists, we restrict the ability of nurse practitioners or physician assistants
to perform tasks for which they are entirely competent. We require lawyers for work that paralegals are capable of completing. While
trade agreements go far to remove any obstacle that might protect an autoworker in the United States from competition with a low-paid
factory worker in Mexico or China, they do little or nothing to reduce the barriers that protect doctors, dentists, and lawyers from
the same sort of competition. To practice medicine in the United States, it is still necessary to complete a residency program here,
as though there were no other way for a person to become a competent doctor.
We also have done little to foster medical travel. This could lead to enormous benefits to patients and the economy, since many
high cost medical procedures can be performed at a fifth or even one-tenth the U.S. price in top quality medical facilities elsewhere
in the world. In this context, it is not surprising that the median pay of physicians is over $250,000 a year and some areas of specialization
earn close to twice this amount. In the case of physicians alone, if pay were reduced to West European-levels the savings would be
close to $100 billion a year (@ 0.6 percent of GDP).
Changing the rules in these five areas could reduce much and possibly all of the upward redistribution of the last four decades.
But changing the rules does not mean using government intervention to curb the market. It means restructuring the market to produce
different outcomes. The purpose of this book is to show how.
[1] See also Weissman (2016), Iacono (2016), Worstall (2016), Lane (2016), and Zakaria (2016).
[2] As explained in the next chapter, this view is not exactly correct, but it's what you're supposed to believe if you adhere
to the mainstream economic view.
[3] There can be modest changes in employment through a supply-side effect. If the trade deal increases the efficiency of the
economy, then the marginal product of labor should rise, leading to a higher real wage, which in turn should induce some people to
choose work over leisure. So the trade deal results in more people choosing to work, not an increased demand for labor.
[4] For those worried about brain drain from developing countries, there is an easy fix. Economists like to talk about taxing
the winners, in this case developing country professionals and rich country consumers, to compensate the losers, which would be the
home countries of the migrating professionals. We could tax a portion of the professionals' pay to allow their home countries to
train two or three professionals for every one that came to the United States. This is a classic win-win from trade.
[5] The loss of manufacturing jobs also reduced the wages of less-educated workers (those without college degrees) more generally.
The displaced manufacturing workers crowded into retail and other service sectors, putting downward pressure on wages there.
[6] As a technical matter, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York is a private bank. It is owned by the banks that are members
of the Federal Reserve System in the New York District.
"Markets are never just given. Neither God nor nature hands us a worked-out set of rules determining the way property relations
are defined, contracts are enforced, or macroeconomic policy is implemented. These matters are determined by policy choices. The
elites have written these rules to redistribute income upward. Needless to say, they are not eager to have the rules rewritten
which means they have no interest in even having them discussed."
======================================================
It is one of those remarkable hypocrisies that free "unregulated" trade requires deals of thousands of pages .
but if these deals weren't so carefully structured to help the 1%, support would melt like snowmen in Fresno on a July day
Or check your local indy, or one of those that take orders (I refrain from naming my favorite co-op in Chicago, and anyway
I admit there are others). Nice to support those when you can.
Almost no proponent of deregulation argued against the bailouts that saved Wall Street in the financial crisis or against
the elimination of government deposit insurance that is an essential part of a stable banking system.
Actually I believe there were some Republicans who denounced the Wall Street bailout as a violation of capitalist principles.
My state's Mark Sanford comes to mind. It was the Dems at the urging of Pelosi who saved the bailout. On the other hand many of
my local politicians are big on "public/private" partnerships which would be a violation of laissez-faire that they approve. Perhaps
it was simply that there are no giant banks headquartered in SC.
The truth is there is no coherent intellectual basis to how the US economy is currently run. It's all about power and what
you can do with it. Which is to say it is our politics, above all, that is broken.
"That is how the economics is supposed to work. In the standard theory, general shortages of demand are not a problem.[2]
Economists have traditionally assumed that economies tended toward full employment. The basic economic constraint was a lack of
supply. The problem was that we couldn't produce enough goods and services, not that we were producing too much and couldn't find
anyone to buy them. In fact, this is why all the standard models used to analyze trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership
assume trade doesn't affect total employment.[3] Economies adjust so that shortages of demand are not a problem."
Unbelievable.
By the 1920s they realised the system produced so much stuff that extensive advertising was needed to shift it all.
One hundred year's later, we might take this on board.
What is the global advertising budget?
The amount necessary to shift all the crap the system produces today.
We need to move on from Milton Freidman's ideas and discover what trade in a globalized world is really about.
We are still under the influence of Milton Freidman's ideas of a globalised free trade world.
These ideas came from Milton Freidman's imagination where he saw the ideal as small state, raw capitalism and thought the public
sector should be sold off and entitlement programs whittled down until everything must be purchased through the private sector.
"You are free to spend your money as you choose"
Not mentioning its other meaning:
"No money, no freedom"
After Milton Freedman's "shock therapy" in Russia, people were left with so little money they couldn't afford to eat and starved
to death. In Greece people cannot afford even bread today.
But this is economic liberalism, the economy comes first.
Milton Freidman used his imagination to work out what small state, raw capitalism looked like whereas he could have looked
at it in reality through history books of the 18th and 19th centuries where it had already existed.
The Classical Economists studied it and were able to see its problems first hand and noted the detrimental effects of the rentier
class on the economy. They were constantly looking to get "unearned" income from doing nothing; sucking purchasing power out of
the economy and bleeding it dry.
Adam Smith observed:
"The Labour and time of the poor is in civilised countries sacrificed to the maintaining of the rich in ease and luxury.
The Landlord is maintained in idleness and luxury by the labour of his tenants. The moneyed man is supported by his extractions
from the industrious merchant and the needy who are obliged to support him in ease by a return for the use of his money. But every
savage has the full fruits of his own labours; there are no landlords, no usurers and no tax gatherers."
Adam Smith saw landlords, usurers (bankers) and Government taxes as equally parasitic, all raising the cost of doing business.
He sees the lazy people at the top living off "unearned" income from their land and capital.
He sees the trickle up of Capitalism:
1) Those with excess capital collect rent and interest.
2) Those with insufficient capital pay rent and interest.
He differentiates between "earned" and "unearned" income.
Today we encourage a new rentier class of BTL landlords who look to extract the "earned" income of generation rent for "unearned"
income. If you have a large BTL portfolio you can become a true rentier, do nothing productive at all and live off "unearned"
income extracted from generation rent, the true capitalist parasite. (UK)
The Classical Economists realised capitalism has two sides, the productive side where "earned" income is generated and the
unproductive, parasitic, rentier side where "unearned" income is generated.
You should tax "unearned" income to discourage the parasitic side of capitalism.
You shouldn't tax "earned" income to encourage the productive side of capitalism.
You should provide low cost housing, education and services to create a low cost of living, giving a low minimum wage making
you globally competitive. This is to be funded by taxes on "unearned" income.
The US has probably been the most successful in making its labour force internationally uncompetitive with soaring costs of
housing, healthcare and student loan repayments.
These all have to be covered by wages and US businesses are now squealing about the high minimum wage.
That's Milton Freidman's imagined small state, raw capitalism.
What he imagined bears little resemblance to the reality the Classical Economists saw firsthand.
We need to move on from Milton Freidman fantasy land.
Small state, raw capitalism as observed by Adam Smith:
"But the rate of profit does not, like rent and wages, rise with the prosperity and fall with the declension of the society.
On the contrary, it is naturally low in rich and high in poor countries, and it is always highest in the countries which are going
fastest to ruin."
When rates of profit are high, capitalism is cannibalising itself by:
1) Not engaging in long term investment for the future
2) Paying insufficient wages to maintain demand for its products and services
In the 18th Century they would have understood today's problems with growth and demand.
Luckily Jeff Bezos didn't inhabit Milton Freidman fantasy land.
He re-invested almost everything to turn Amazon onto the global behemoth it is today.
' The commitment to an anti-inflation policy is a commitment by the government, acting through central banks, to keep wages
down. '
This is strikingly silly. Insert the word 'nominal' before wages, and it's not a howler anymore.
Anti-inflation policy in fact has little influence on real wages (the variable of concern, not nominal wages). But it has a
lot to do with preventing the social chaos of constantly rising prices, strikes for higher wages, inability of first-time home
buyers to borrow at affordable rates, and so on.
Inflationism is greasy kid stuff not to mention a brazen fraud on the public.
As one who walked the corridors of power in a very modest capacity in my country in the early to mid 1990s, can I just say
that people with power or influence then were aware that globalisation would create winners and losers. I recall the consensus
of those I knew then was that steps would need to be taken to compensate the losers. The tragedy is that these steps were never
taken, or, if they were, only to a wholly inadequate degree.
The always elusive referents for cost, price and value the flip-side of social chaos would seem the entropic degradation of
wasted lives, excluded from participating {either-OR} abandoned as irredeemable
Higher interest rates slow inflation by reducing demand, thereby reducing job growth, and reduced job growth weakens workers'
bargaining power and puts downward pressure on wages.
Your assertion that anti-inflation policy has little influence on real wages does not address Baker's statement about the mechanism
by which he says it does. Given an argument between two people, one of whom cites a mechanism he is probably prepared to document
with numbers and one of whom merely declares his belief, which are people more likely to trust? Granted always, they should go
look for the numbers before they fully accept the statement, his credibility is currently higher than yours on this subject.
By contrast, since the 1970s real wages stalled, while interest rates round-tripped back to 2 percent.
Over nearly seven decades, the correlation is quite the opposite from that made up claimed by Dean Bonkers.
Namely, real wages soared under a regime of steadily rising nominal interest rates.
Since my original reply has disappeared in limbo, I will merely note that numbers are probably even crunchier when you don't
generalize across a span of decades: first there was A, then there was B, nothing else happened. It's a sure way to obscure patterns.
And Jim, please quit the ad hominem stuff! It's ugly and needless. If you really have an argument you don't need it, and if
you don't you don't gain by it. You know perfectly well he's not making things up and he's not bonkers. When you say stuff like
that, the obvious presumption is that you just don't want to consider his arguments because they lead somewhere you don't want
to go.
Perhaps I am missing the point being made, but if you are suggesting that increases in real wages in the 1945-1975 period caused
inflation, why not provide the data on inflation which would in fact show that inflation was essentially tame for 20 years in
this period (1952-1972, with a slight hiccup in 1969-1971), thereby contradicting your point? And if you are suggesting that Fed
increases in interest rate have not resulted in suppression of wages you will have to demonstrate that using analysis that takes
into account the lag in time between increase in rate and transmission to wages, and in that case would you not also use the Fed
Funds Rate itself as a variable?
Bulltwacky, they have been globalizing wages downwards while globalizing housing prices upwards!
Every time some stupid and moronic newsy floozy on one of the CorporateNonMedia outlets claims housing purchases may be going
down because consumer confidence is plummeting, they CHOOSE to ignore the foreign buyers of said houses!
Did I get this right? Full employment is an assumed boundary condition and so is fixed balance of trade? If the model is to
work as advertised then the boundary conditions must be hard wired to be true, right?
If the top 25 hedge fund managers saved around $5 billion per year in being taxed on their income at capital gains rate (carried
interest ruling in tax code - utterly corrupt), then think of the amount that is being robbed from the tax base when one considers
ALL the hedge fund people, and ALL the private equity types (who also do this), a conservative amount of tax revenues remitted
should be around $100 billion per year!
The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed
the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political
organizations. The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and
WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations
of Russian-directed efforts. These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the
US election process. Such activity is not new to Moscow-the Russians have used similar tactics
and techniques across Europe and Eurasia, for example, to influence public opinion there. We
believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia's senior-most
officials could have authorized these activities.
First of all the fact that intelligence community issue a statement on such a matter is
very strange. There is executive branch and three letter agencies should generally keep their
mouth shut and allow others to voice the concerns, etc.
This might be a sigh of complete disorganization of executive branch with intelligence agencies
becoming a power players. Kind of "Deep State" morphing into "surface state".
There are might be also multiple valid reasons for disclosing such a sensitive information:
1. I want your money stupid Pinocchio.
2. Smoke screen to hide their own nefarious activities and/or blunders within the USA. Actually
existence of Hillary private server is somewhat incompatible with the existence of NSA.
This is one thing when Podesta using gmail. It's quite another when the Secretary of state
uses "bathroom server" with incompetent or semi-competent tech staff and completely clueless
entourage.
3. Pre-emptive strike reflecting some internal struggle within US Intelligence community
itself with a neocon faction going "all in" to force the viewpoint, and more aggressive toward
Russia stance, which might not be shared by others.
Please note that CIA and DOD are fighting each other in Iraq and Syria to a certain extent.
4. Increase Anti-Russian hysteria, which helps Hillary as a candidate of neocon establishment.
5. Russians might recently uncover some nefarious activities (I heard FSB did discover compromised
computers in some ministries) and this is the preparation for the blowback.
The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and
by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed
efforts....
-- Joint Statement from the Department of Homeland Security
and Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Election Security
[ "Consistent with the methods and motivations..." is a shocking supposition to be made
public, but we have been subject to such suppositions, seemingly with increasing frequency,
for these last 15 years. ]
Weapons of Mass Destruction! We have irrefutable evidence! Yellowcake!
Keith B. Alexander:"Those who would want to weave the story that we have millions or hundreds
of millions of dossiers on people, is absolutely false From my perspective, this is absolute
nonsense."
...
Senator Wyden: "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of
millions of Americans?"
DNI Clapper"No, sir."
Senator Wyden: "It does not?"
DNI Clapper:"Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently, perhaps, collect,
but not wittingly."
The [IN]operative word there was "collect" which in NSAspeak does not mean... collect.
Not shocking at all unless you are ignorant about tracing and analyzing hacks. The traces and
approaches are like fingerprints. Nobody in the business have any doubts that the Russians
did this - but they will never give you the details of how they got to that conclusion, because
this is a public website and the hacking wars are like the missile wars, if the other side
knows what you got they can counter it and make your job harder.
likbez -> DeDude... , -1
You might be a little bit naďve as for traces.
The first rule of such activities on state level is to pretend that you are somebody else
deliberately leaving false clues (IP space, keyboard layout, etc), everything that you call
traces.
Historically it was the USA that started cyberwar and who developed the most advanced capabilities
in this space. Remember the worm which tried to subvert functionality of Iranian centrifuges
electronics using specially designed malware and Trojans like Flame?
Using botnets essentially gives anybody substantial freedom about what IP space you want
to use. You can pretend to be Russian if you want to and use computers from Russian IP space.
More "paranoid claptrap" (or should that be Clappertrap?):
Edward Snowden: "...the breaking point was seeing the Director of National Intelligence,
James Clapper, directly lie under oath to Congress. Seeing that really meant for me there was
no going back."
That's not untrue, but it seems to me to be getting worse.
Or at least, we had been making progress, but now we are seeing a massive regression. There
have always been racists and misogynists but they used to be hidden under rocks, and the GOP
used to take pains to make their dog whistles to them subtle.
Trump really has brought them out and given the gen a sense of validation and community.
Though my working theory is that he merely hopped on to an existing trend, driven by the
way digital media allows people to create their own comfortable ideological bubbles and find
community for whatever spiteful, paranoid or asinine beliefs people have. This includes left
and right, though pretty obviously the wingnuts on the right dominate their party and have
more numbers and power.
Speaking as someone who grew up under segregation in Oklahoma in the 50s and 60s, it has been
getting progressively worse since the 1980s (it did did significantly better from 1968- the
early 80s). Nixon started this with his "Southern Strategy" and Reagan dialed it up with his
"Welfare Queens" and "strapping young bucks." All Trump did was replace the dog whistles with
a bullhorn.
"That's not untrue, but it seems to me to be getting worse."
Because of economic stagnation and anxiety among lower class Republicans.
Trump blames immigration and trade unlike traditional elite Republicans. These are economic
issues.
Trump supporters no longer believe or trust the Republican elite who they see as corrupt
which is partly true.
They've been backing Nixon, Reagan, Bush etc and things are just getting worse. They've
been played.
Granted it's complicated and partly they see their side as losing and so are doubling down
on the conservatism, racism, sexism etc.
But Trump *brags* that he was against the Iraq war. That's not an elite Republican opinion.
likbez -> DrDick... , -1
My impression is that Trump_vs_deep_state is more about dissatisfaction of the Republican base with the
Republican brass (which fully endorsed neoliberal globalization), the phenomenon somewhat similar
to Sanders.
Working class and lower middle class essentially abandoned DemoRats (Clinton democrats)
after so many years of betrayal and "they have nowhere to go" attitude.
Looks like they have found were to go this election cycle and this loss of the base is probably
was the biggest surprise for neoliberal Democrats.
Now they try to forge the alliance of highly paid professionals who benefitted from globalization("creative
class"), financial speculators and minorities. Which does not look like a stable coalition
to me.
Some data suggest that among unions which endorsed Hillary 3 out of 4 members will vote against
her. And that are data from union brass. Lower middle class might also demonstrate the same
pattern this election cycle.
In other words both Parties are now split and have two mini-parties inside. I am not sure
that Sanders part of Democratic party would support Hillary. The wounds caused by DNC betrayal
and double dealing are still too fresh.
We have something like what Marxists call "revolutionary situation" when the elite loses
control of "peons". And existence of Internet made MSM propaganda far less effective that it
would be otherwise.
"... It has recently turned out that Ukrainian oligarch Viktor Pinchuk, a vocal proponent of Ukraine's European integration, made huge contributions to the Clinton Foundation, while Hillary Clinton was the US Secretary of State. Although the foundation swore off donations from foreign governments while Mrs. Clinton was serving as a state official, it continued accepting money from private donors. Many of them had certain ties to their national governments like Viktor Pinchuk, a Ukrainian businessman and ex-parliamentarian. ..."
"... Viktor Pinchuk has always been one of the most vocal proponents of Ukraine's European integration. In 2004 Pinchuk founded the Yalta European Strategy (YES) platform in Kiev. YES is led by the board including ex-president of Poland Aleksander Kwasniewski and former NATO Secretary General Javier Solana. According to the website of the platform, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Condoleezza Rice, Kofi Annan, Radoslaw Sikorski, Vitaliy Klitschko, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, Petro Poroshenko and other prominent figures have participated in annual meetings of YES since 2004. ..."
"... Experts note that after the coup, the Ukrainian leadership has actually become Washington's puppet government. Several foreign citizens, including American civilian Natalie Jaresko, Lithuanian investment banker Aivaras Abromavicius and Georgia-born Alexander Kvitashvili have assumed high posts in the Ukrainian government. It should be noted that Natalie Jaresko, Ukraine's Financial Minister, have previously worked in the US State Department and has also been linked to oligarch Viktor Pinchuk. ..."
A sinister atmosphere surrounds the Clinton Foundation's role in Ukrainian military coup of February
2014, experts point out.
It has recently turned out that Ukrainian oligarch Viktor Pinchuk, a vocal proponent of Ukraine's
European integration, made huge contributions to the Clinton Foundation, while Hillary Clinton was
the US Secretary of State. Although the foundation swore off donations from foreign governments while
Mrs. Clinton was serving as a state official, it continued accepting money from private donors. Many
of them had certain ties to their national governments like Viktor Pinchuk, a Ukrainian businessman
and ex-parliamentarian.
Remarkably, among individual donors contributing to the Clinton Foundation in the period between
1999 and 2014, Ukrainian sponsors took first place in the list, providing the charity with almost
$10 million and pushing England and Saudi Arabia to second and third places respectively.
It is worth mentioning that the Viktor Pinchuk Foundation alone transferred at least $8.6 million
to the Clinton charity between 2009 and 2013. Pinchuk, who acquired his fortune from a pipe-making
business, served twice as a parliamentarian in Ukraine's Verkhovna Rada and was married to the daughter
of ex-president of Ukraine Leonid Kuchma.
Although the Clinton's charity denies that the donations were somehow connected with political
matters, experts doubt that international private sponsors received no political support in return.
In 2008 Pinchuk pledged to make a five-year $29 million contribution to the Clinton Global Initiative
in order to fund a program aimed at training future Ukrainian leaders and "modernizers." Remarkably,
several alumni of these courses are current members of Ukrainian parliament. Because of the global
financial crisis, the Pinchuk Foundation sent only $1.8 million.
Experts note that during Mrs. Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State, Viktor Pinchuk was introduced
to some influential American lobbyists. Curiously enough, he tried to use his powerful "friends"
to pressure Ukraine's then-President Viktor Yanukovych to free Yulia Tymoshenko, who served a jail
term.
Viktor Pinchuk has always been one of the most vocal proponents of Ukraine's European integration.
In 2004 Pinchuk founded the Yalta European Strategy (YES) platform in Kiev. YES is led by the board
including ex-president of Poland Aleksander Kwasniewski and former NATO Secretary General Javier
Solana. According to the website of the platform, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Condoleezza Rice,
Kofi Annan, Radoslaw Sikorski, Vitaliy Klitschko, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, Petro Poroshenko and other prominent
figures have participated in annual meetings of YES since 2004.
No one would argue that proponents of Ukraine's pro-Western course played the main role in organizing
the coup of February 2014 in Kiev. Furthermore, the exceptional role of the United States in ousting
then-president Viktor Yanukovich has also been recognized by political analysts, participants of
Euromaidan and even by Barack Obama, the US President.
Experts note that after the coup, the Ukrainian leadership has actually become Washington's puppet
government. Several foreign citizens, including American civilian Natalie Jaresko, Lithuanian investment
banker Aivaras Abromavicius and Georgia-born Alexander Kvitashvili have assumed high posts in the
Ukrainian government. It should be noted that Natalie Jaresko, Ukraine's Financial Minister, have
previously worked in the US State Department and has also been linked to oligarch Viktor Pinchuk.
So far, experts note, the recent "game of thrones" in Ukraine has been apparently instigated by
a few powerful clans of the US and Ukraine, who are evidently benefitting from the ongoing turmoil.
In this light the Clinton Foundation looks like something more than just a charity: in today's world
of fraudulent oligopoly we are facing with global cronyism, experts point out, warning against its
devastating consequences.
"... This outcome has an objective character. The two-party system is a political monopoly of the capitalist class. Both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are political instruments of big business. The claims of Bernie Sanders and his pseudo-left apologists that it is possible to reform or pressure the Democrats-and even carry out a "political revolution" through it-have proven to be lies ..."
"The 2016 election campaign was dominated for many months by explosive popular disaffection with
the whole political and corporate establishment. But it has concluded in a contest between two candidates
who personify that establishment-one a billionaire from the criminal world of real-estate swindling,
the other the consensus choice of the military-intelligence apparatus and Wall Street.
This outcome has an objective character. The two-party system is a political monopoly of the
capitalist class. Both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are political instruments of
big business. The claims of Bernie Sanders and his pseudo-left apologists that it is possible to
reform or pressure the Democrats-and even carry out a "political revolution" through it-have proven
to be lies."
"... Their grievances about a grift-maximized political economy were genuine, and Trump managed to make them look like a claque of sinister clowns. This cartoon of a rich kid with no internal boundaries was unable to articulate their legitimate complaints. His behavior during the so-called debates verged on psychotic. ..."
"... The "tell" in these late stages of the campaign has been the demonization of Russia - a way more idiotic exercise than the McCarthyite Cold War hysteria of the early 1950s, since there is no longer any ideological conflict between us and all the evidence indicates that the current state of bad relations is America's fault, in particular our sponsorship of the state failure in Ukraine and our avid deployment of NATO forces in war games on Russia's border. Hillary has had the full force of the foreign affairs establishment behind her in this war-drum-banging effort, yet they have not been able to produce any evidence, for instance, in their claim that Russia is behind the Wikileaks hack of Hillary's email. They apparently subscribe to the Joseph Goebbels theory of propaganda: if you're going to lie, make sure it's a whopper, and then repeat it incessantly. ..."
"... The media has been on-board with all this. The New York Times especially has acted as the hired amplifier for the establishment lies - such a difference from the same newspaper's role in the Vietnam War ruckus of yesteryear. Today (Monday) they ran an astounding editorial "explaining" the tactical necessity of Hillary's dishonesty: "In politics, hypocrisy and doublespeak are tools," The Times editorial board wrote. Oh, well, that's reassuring. Welcome to the George Orwell Theme Park of Democracy. ..."
"... Of course neither Trump nor Hillary show any signs of understanding the real problems afflicting the USA. They don't recognize the basic energy equation that has made it impossible for industrial economies to keep growing, or the deformities in banking and finance that result from official efforts to overcome these implacable conditions, namely, the piling up of ever-greater debt to "solve" the problem of over-indebtedness. ..."
"... Hillary would bring a more measured discredit to the system with the chance that our institutions might be rehabilitated - with the cherry-on-top being Hillary's eventual impeachment for lying, a fate that her husband and the late Richard Nixon both wiggled out of one way or another. ..."
It's getting hard to give a shit about this election, though you might still care about this country.
The damage has been done to the two long-reigning political parties and perhaps that's a good thing.
They deserved to be dragged into the gutter and now they can either go through a severe rehab or
be replaced by as-yet-unformed coalitions of reality-based interests.
Trump did a greater disservice all-in-all to the faction he supposedly represented. Their grievances
about a grift-maximized political economy were genuine, and Trump managed to make them look like
a claque of sinister clowns. This cartoon of a rich kid with no internal boundaries was unable to
articulate their legitimate complaints. His behavior during the so-called debates verged on
psychotic. If Trump loses, I will essay to guess that his followers' next step will be some
kind of violence. For the moment, pathetic as it is, Trump was their last best hope.
I'm more comfortable about Hillary - though I won't vote for her - because it will be salutary
for the ruling establishment to unravel with her in charge of it. That way, the right people will
be blamed for the mismanagement of our national affairs. This gang of elites needs to be circulated
out of power the hard way, under the burden of their own obvious perfidy, with no one else to point
their fingers at. Her election will sharpen awareness of the criminal conduct in our financial practices
and the neglect of regulation that marked the eight years of Obama's appointees at the Department
of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The "tell" in these late stages of the campaign has been the demonization of Russia - a way more
idiotic exercise than the McCarthyite Cold War hysteria of the early 1950s, since there is no longer
any ideological conflict between us and all the evidence indicates that the current state of bad
relations is America's fault, in particular our sponsorship of the state failure in Ukraine and our
avid deployment of NATO forces in war games on Russia's border. Hillary has had the full force of
the foreign affairs establishment behind her in this war-drum-banging effort, yet they have not been
able to produce any evidence, for instance, in their claim that Russia is behind the Wikileaks hack
of Hillary's email. They apparently subscribe to the Joseph Goebbels theory of propaganda: if you're
going to lie, make sure it's a whopper, and then repeat it incessantly.
The media has been on-board with all this. The New York Times especially has acted as the
hired amplifier for the establishment lies - such a difference from the same newspaper's role in
the Vietnam War ruckus of yesteryear. Today (Monday) they ran an
astounding editorial "explaining" the tactical necessity of Hillary's dishonesty: "In politics,
hypocrisy and doublespeak are tools," The Times editorial board wrote. Oh, well, that's reassuring.
Welcome to the George Orwell Theme Park of Democracy.
Of course neither Trump nor Hillary show any signs of understanding the real problems afflicting
the USA. They don't recognize the basic energy equation that has made it impossible for industrial
economies to keep growing, or the deformities in banking and finance that result from official efforts
to overcome these implacable conditions, namely, the piling up of ever-greater debt to "solve" the
problem of over-indebtedness.
The beginning of the way out of this quandary will be recognition that the federal government
is the greatest obstacle for America making the necessary adjustments to a world that has changed.
If Trump got elected, I'm convinced that he would be removed from office by a military coup inside
of a year, which would be an epic smash-up of our political machinery per se, comparable to the period
44 BCE in Rome, when the republic crashed. Hillary would bring a more measured discredit to the system
with the chance that our institutions might be rehabilitated - with the cherry-on-top being Hillary's
eventual impeachment for lying, a fate that her husband and the late Richard Nixon both wiggled out
of one way or another.
Hitler is accused of being the evil practitioner of the "Big Lie" technique, but as usual,
he was misquoted. Here's the entire idea in context:
"In this they [the Jews] proceeded on the sound principle that the magnitude of a lie always
contains a certain factor of credibility, since the great masses of the people in the very
bottom of their hearts tend to be corrupted rather than consciously and purposely evil, and
that, therefore, in view of the primitive simplicity of their minds, they more easily fall
victim to a big lie than to a little one, since they themselves lie in little things, but would
be ashamed of lies that were too big. Such a falsehood will never enter their heads, and they
will not be able to believe in the possibility of such monstrous effrontery and infamous misrepresentation
in others.…" (p. 231 of the Manheim translation)
Hitler is accusing the Jews of the Vienna press of this strategy. It is often taken as evidence
that Hitler advocated the "Big Lie." He is, in fact, accusing his enemies of lying.
One might say, rightly, that Trump and Hitler ARE on the same page here... both accusing the
jews of bearing grand false witness. (Trump implicitly)
You exist for my entertainment. Some of you are great eye candy. Some of you can deliver a
line with such conviction that you bring tears to my eyes. Some of you can scare the hell out
of me. Others make me laugh.
But you all have one thing in common, you only have a place in my world to entertain me. That's
it. You make your living pretending to be someone else . Playing dress up like a 6 year old. You
live in a make believe world in front of a camera.
And often when you are away from one too. Your entire existence depends on my patronage. I'll
crank the organ grinder; you dance. I don't really care where you stand on issues.
Honestly, your stance matters far less to me than that of my neighbor. You see, you aren't
real. I turn off my TV or shut down my computer and you cease to exist in my world . Once I am
done with you, I can put you back in your little box until I want you to entertain me again.
Get back into your bubble. I'll let you know when I'm in the mood for something blue and shiny.
And I'm also supposed to care that you will leave this great country if Trump becomes president?
Ha. Please don't forget to close the door behind you.
We'd like to reserve your seat for someone who loves this country and really wants to be here.
Make me laugh, or cry. Scare me. But realize that the only words of yours that matter are scripted.
I might agree with some of you from time to time, but it doesn't matter. In my world, you exist
solely as entertainment So, shut your pie hole and dance, monkey!
"In politics, hypocrisy and doublespeak are tools," but she has made it a way of life that nobody
knows if her campaign promises are essentially a "doublespeak". If only the criteria is being
the best liar, she would win the presidency hands down.
This gang of elites needs to be circulated out of power the hard way, under the burden of their
own obvious perfidy, with no one else to point their fingers at.
Ahh, but you think they'll be "circulated out of power" under Hillary?! No chance. The bitch
will have tanks in the street first. And after the financial collapse, the soldiers will cooperate,
because they won't want their families starving like everybody else's will be.
"I'm more comfortable about Hillary - though I won't vote for her - because it will be salutary
for the ruling establishment to unravel with her in charge of it."
Sorry, but that is a leap of faith I can't make. It's like being at the event horizon of a
black hole and deciding to jump into the hole because you look forward to seeing what is on the
other side. Chances are you will be spaghettified so that your atoms might arrive elsewhere, but
not in particular relation to the you that jumped into the hole, so you will not survive to see
any change of scenery.
There will be a USA after Hillary, but it will not be your father's USA, and getting to this
new promised land will be a very painful process. Rome lived on until 1453 in the form of the
Byzantine empire, but the Republic died well before the birth of Christ.
"... A former [key] IT staffer at the State Department who oversaw technology for senior officials invoked his Fifth Amendment right in a sworn deposition on Monday when asked about Hillary Clinton's private email server. ..."
John Bentel is one of the key future of "private email server" scandal, the manager who squashed
concerns of other IOt personnel about legality of the so called "bathroom server".
October 24, 2016
A former [key] IT staffer at the State Department who oversaw technology for senior officials invoked
his Fifth Amendment right in a sworn deposition on Monday when asked about Hillary Clinton's private
email server.
Bentel answered over 90 questions that were submitted him to by Judicial Watch, the conservative
watchdog group that has been leading the charge for more information from Clinton and her associates
regarding her email server. Bentel was ordered by a federal judge to answer the questions similarly
to how Clinton had been.
Judicial Watch says that the topics of the questions they submitted to Bentel included whether
Clinton was paying Bentel's legal fees or had offered him other compensation.
"On advice from my legal counsel, I decline to answer the question and I invoke my Fifth
Amendment rights," Bentel answered each question.
Bentel invoking the Fifth Amendment "highlights the disturbing implication that criminal acts
took place related to the Clinton email and our Freedom of Information Act requests," Judicial
Watch President Tom Fitton said Monday.
"... Wait just a damn minute. Why is the DNI telling THE RUSSIANS what the USIC suspects? Wouldn't
that blunt the capability for taking counter measures? Unless... red herring? ..."
"... The problem with "the Russians" tale is that the Podesta emails are rather weak sauce. Is there
anyone paying close attention that didn't know HRC's camp had influential contacts in the media and
the DNC and used them to their advantage? ..."
"... Indeed. So far there is a little of note in the leaked emails. They confirm, among the other
things we already knew: ..."
"... The Clintonites don't think very highly of Sanders. ..."
"... They have a lot of trusted friends in the media - some *very* trusted embeds. ..."
"... There is a difference between what Clinton says in public and what she really believes. ..."
"... They didn't want to release the content of the Goldman Sachs speeches because the contents
included a lot of Clinton pandering and rear-kissing to banksters. ..."
"... Podesta is an influential man, and a lot of people email him to use his influence and for help
them. ..."
"... Presumably, if US intelligence is so confident about Russian government methods, motivations,
tactics, tic tacs and techniques they also should have a pretty damn good idea about what is still out
there and also would have the means to disrupt its dissemination, if necessary. ..."
"... In other words, don't hold yer breath. ..."
"... "First of all the fact that intelligence community issue a statement on such a matter is very
strange." ..."
"... Weapons of Mass Destruction! We have irrefutable evidence! Yellowcake! ..."
"... Keith B. Alexander:"Those who would want to weave the story that we have millions or hundreds
of millions of dossiers on people, is absolutely false… From my perspective, this is absolute nonsense."
..."
"... "Two U.S. representatives accused Clapper of perjury for telling a congressional committee
in March 2013, that the NSA does not collect any type of data at all on millions of Americans. One senator
asked for his resignation, and a group of 26 senators complained about Clapper's responses under questioning.
Media observers have described Clapper as having lied under oath, having obstructed justice, and having
given false testimony." ..."
"... We have something like what Marxists call "revolutionary situation" when the elite loses control
of "peons". And existence of Internet made MSM propaganda far less effective that it would be otherwise.
..."
"... That's why they resort to war propaganda tricks. ..."
The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent
compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations.
The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the
Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts.
These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process. Such activity
is not new to Moscow-the Russians have used similar tactics and techniques across Europe and Eurasia,
for example, to influence public opinion there. We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of
these efforts, that only Russia's senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.
Wait just a damn minute. Why is the DNI telling THE RUSSIANS what the USIC suspects? Wouldn't
that blunt the capability for taking counter measures? Unless... red herring?
The problem with "the Russians" tale is that the Podesta emails are rather weak sauce. Is
there anyone paying close attention that didn't know HRC's camp had influential contacts in the
media and the DNC and used them to their advantage?
I'm shocked, shocked that there is backroom power politics going on in a political campaign!
The upshot of the WikiLeaks Podesta emails is to DISCREDIT WIKILEAKS as an independent source
of disclosure.
Indeed. So far there is a little of note in the leaked emails. They confirm, among the other
things we already knew:
1. The Clintonites don't think very highly of Sanders.
2. They have a lot of trusted friends in the media - some *very* trusted embeds.
3. There is a difference between what Clinton says in public and what she really believes.
4. They didn't want to release the content of the Goldman Sachs speeches because the contents
included a lot of Clinton pandering and rear-kissing to banksters.
5. Podesta is an influential man, and a lot of people email him to use his influence and
for help them.
"One of the first leaked files had been modified on a computer using Russian-language settings
by a user named "Feliks Dzerzhinsky." Dzerzhinsky was the founder of the Cheka, the Soviet secret
police"
The Russian connect was not "revealed" by NSA alone and the evidence for anybody who understand
computers and "trails" is quite strong.
The fact that the initial "leaks" were not such a big deal was no surprise. Given Julian's
desperate need to not get Clinton into the white house, you would expect him to save the most
juicy stuff until a few days before the election.
From the Esquire article: "Matt Tait, a former GCHQ operator... was particularly prolific. Hours
after the first Guccifer 2.0 dump, on the evening of June 15, Tait found something curious."
For the record, "GCHQ" does not refer to the magazine, Gentlemen's Quarterly.
Presumably, if US intelligence is so confident about Russian government methods, motivations,
tactics, tic tacs and techniques they also should have a pretty damn good idea about what is still
out there and also would have the means to disrupt its dissemination, if necessary.
Well, I assume Podesta has given somebody all of his emails, so they can compare against what
is already released and see what is to come. I think their only defense against it is to try to
discredit whatever it is ahead of time.
Only your imagination is the limit - since they are not real. But we will most likely never know
since even Assange knows that he can only lose this one.
No he would be the exact person to make such a mistake. After looking at them he would not have
the technical expertise to understand that he had left a fingerprint.
First of all the fact that intelligence community issue a statement on such a matter is very
strange. There is executive branch and three letter agencies should generally keep their mouth
shut and allow others to voice the concerns, etc.
This might be a sigh of complete disorganization of executive branch with intelligence agencies
becoming a power players. Kind of "Deep State" morphing into "surface state".
There are might be also multiple valid reasons for disclosing such a sensitive information:
I want your money stupid Pinocchio.
Smoke screen to hide their own nefarious activities and/or blunders within the USA. Actually
existence of Hillary private server is somewhat incompatible with the existence of NSA.
This is one thing when Podesta using gmail. It's quite another when the Secretary of state
uses "bathroom server" with incompetent or semi-competent tech staff and completely clueless
entourage.
Pre-emptive strike reflecting some internal struggle within US Intelligence community itself
with a neocon faction going "all in" to force the viewpoint, and more aggressive toward Russia
stance, which might not be shared by others.
Please note that CIA and DOD are fighting each other in Iraq and Syria to a certain extent.
Increase Anti-Russian hysteria, which helps Hillary as a candidate of neocon establishment.
Russians might recently uncover some nefarious activities (I heard FSB did discover compromised
computers in some ministries) and this is the preparation for the blowback.
The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by
the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed
efforts....
-- Joint Statement from the Department of Homeland Security
and Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Election Security
[ "Consistent with the methods and motivations..." is a shocking supposition to be made public,
but we have been subject to such suppositions, seemingly with increasing frequency, for these
last 15 years. ]
Weapons of Mass Destruction! We have irrefutable evidence! Yellowcake!
Keith B. Alexander:"Those who would want to weave the story that we have millions or hundreds
of millions of dossiers on people, is absolutely false… From my perspective, this is absolute
nonsense."
...
Senator Wyden: "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions
of Americans?"
DNI Clapper"No, sir."
Senator Wyden: "It does not?"
DNI Clapper:"Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently, perhaps, collect,
but not wittingly."
The [IN]operative word there was "collect" which in NSAspeak does not mean... collect.
[ "Consistent with the methods and motivations..." is a shocking supposition to be made public,
but we have been subject to such suppositions, seemingly with increasing frequency, for these
last 15 years. ]
Not shocking anymore. It is, after all, consistent with the methods and motivations of our
rulers.
Some paranoid claptrap to go along with your usual anti intellectualism.
Interestingly, with your completely unrelated non sequitur, you've actually illustrated something
that does relate to Krugmans post. Namely that there are wingnuts among us. They've taken over
the Republican Party, but the left has some too. Fortunately though the Democratic Party hasn't
been taken over by them yet, and is still mostly run by grown ups.
"I am confident that what you say here is consistent with your methods and motivations."
Pretty consistent, I agree. IMHO Sanjait might belong to the category that some people call
the "Vichy left" – essentially people who are ready to sacrifice all principles to ensure their
'own' prosperity and support the candidate who intends to protected it, everybody else be damned.
Very neoliberal approach if you ask me. Ann Rand would probably be proud for this representative
of "creative class".
Essentially the behavior the we've had for the last 8 years with the king of "bait and switch".
More "paranoid claptrap" (or should that be Clappertrap?):
Edward Snowden: "...the breaking point was seeing the Director of National Intelligence, James
Clapper, directly lie under oath to Congress. … Seeing that really meant for me there was no going
back."
"Two U.S. representatives accused Clapper of perjury for telling a congressional committee
in March 2013, that the NSA does not collect any type of data at all on millions of Americans.
One senator asked for his resignation, and a group of 26 senators complained about Clapper's responses
under questioning. Media observers have described Clapper as having lied under oath, having obstructed
justice, and having given false testimony."
My impression is that Trump_vs_deep_state is more about dissatisfaction of the Republican base with the Republican
brass (which fully endorsed neoliberal globalization), the phenomenon somewhat similar to Sanders.
Working class and lower middle class essentially abandoned DemoRats (Clinton democrats) after
so many years of betrayal and "they have nowhere to go" attitude.
Looks like they have found were to go this election cycle and this loss of the base is probably
was the biggest surprise for neoliberal Democrats.
Now they try to forge the alliance of highly paid professionals who benefitted from globalization("creative
class"), financial speculators and minorities. Which does not look like a stable coalition to
me.
Some data suggest that among unions which endorsed Hillary 3 out of 4 members will vote against
her. And that are data from union brass. Lower middle class might also demonstrate the same pattern
this election cycle.
In other words both Parties are now split and have two mini-parties inside. I am not sure that
Sanders part of Democratic party would support Hillary. The wounds caused by DNC betrayal and
double dealing are still too fresh.
We have something like what Marxists call "revolutionary situation" when the elite loses
control of "peons". And existence of Internet made MSM propaganda far less effective that it would
be otherwise.
I disagree with the basic premise of the post in that the right has been beaten because it
has won.
That's certainly not how the right sees the landscape. The tea party of 2010 was co-opted by
Richard Armey and the Kochs on the one hand and buried under a mountain of forms by Lois Lerner
on the other. The Armey group rallies to Ted Cruz, who is sure to have something to say about
America and the future of the Republican party should Trump be undone because of his lewd behavior
and actions.
The media is certain to be savaged no matter what the outcome. The number of artists and musicians
who both profit from and promote misogyny and violence invited to the WH over the last 8 years
to serve as role models for America's youth should raise nary an eyebrow. The prudery of the moment
is going to be the template for 'social reform' under the Republicans. If Hillary and her
media allies succeed in derailing the Trump insurgency via his mouth, his hands, and his zipper
they're going to face an extremely hostile electorate. Cruz is certain to try to step into Trump's
shoes as leader, preaching that Trump was a flawed messenger undone by an unforgiving god. This
will make sense for too many Americans to completely ignore. The unhappy white males who have
yet to self-identify as angry white males, rather than simply as Americans, may well decide to
do so.
Whatever few victories the Democrats enjoy lower down the ticket are unlikely to survive skyrocketing
Affordable Care Act premiums, some form of amnesty, and an extension of America's wars in the
ME. The Democrats are betting the farm that Republicans will never unlock the padlock Democrats
maintain over socially-conservative minorities. Cruz's ground game and networking with the evangelical
community didn't get the job done in 2016, but we can be sure that he and his team are already
mapping 2020.
Trump should be defeated according to most here. Some may actually believe Trump really
is the anti-Christ Hitler we've been constantly told he is, instead of a widely watched and often
admired vulgarian capitalist welcomed into living rooms across America for more than a decade.
Whatever Trump is, he's not Cruz. His supporters are not Cruz supporters. Yet.
I've no idea whether those supporting the Democratic candidate expect her to wake up on November
9, should she win, and suddenly decide to abandon the practices that got her this far. I certainly
don't. If you're nauseated at the prospect of 4-8 more years of secrecy, war, lies, and corruption
you're going to need to keep more than barf bags at hand, however. The polarization that has divided
America over the last 8 years is, imho, far more likely to become much more corrosive and
damaging with Democrats in charge.
Ted Cruz will literally be burning crosses and probably books, pornography, and anyone/thing
else that strikes his fancy. The donor class is praying that Hillary/Bush can stamp out the fires.
With rising unemployment, stagnating wages, and more and more Americans feeling that the system
isn't interested in them, or their children, there may very well be a little hell to pay, or a
lot.
@ 14 It won't surprise you to learn I think you're wrong about Trump. The battle against Trump
is for many a rejection of what they see in the mirror transposed onto Trump, as far as males
go. Many women, including some who support him, see in Trump a dangerous predator who offers the
promise of protection and wealth, but at a cost. Good thing no woman would ever sell herself,
or her principles, to such a man – and if Bill Clinton pops into your head, please don't blame
me.
Which is why, in this instance, I think the polls are wrong. Who in their right mind is
going to ever admit that Trump's language and behavior is not offensive? Nobody. Who in their
right mind looks out at America and sees Donald Trump, not Bill Cosby etc, etc, etc as a threat
to their own daughters, sisters, sons, etc? Which is why, in the end, enough voters are going
to say no thanks to Hillary and roll the dice with Donald.
I like your question re: Cruz. I find him such a phenomenally transparent phony that I can't
quite believe anyone trusts him. With Trump, and Bill Clinton, what you see is what you get –
Slick Willie.
At the moment Americans are being told they don't like what they see in Trump, but if that
were the case, why was he so popular back when he was actually on the Howard Stern show and otherwise
acting out? I frankly don't think most Americans give a toss what Trump did or said this week,
much less ten years ago. The stink coming out of the Clinton campaign is so rank it's actually
penetrating the media wall of silence. Given that social media provides numerous ways for candidates
to bypass the gate-keepers, I suspect enough voters are learning what's in the emails whether
CNN, or the Wapo, report the discoveries, or not.
Like I said. I think it will be close and right now I still say Trump edges it.
"One of your prime objectives," J. Edgar Hoover, the longtime F.B.I. director, said in one memo,
"should be to neutralize ... the New Left movement."
Notable quotes:
"... First of all the fact that intelligence community issue a statement on such a matter is very strange. There is executive branch and three letter agencies should generally keep their mouth shut and allow others to voice the concerns, etc. ..."
"... Where this kind of high level foreign policy is involved, the US government and intelligence services blew their cred with me long ago. I disbelieve them now on as a strong and resilient prior. ..."
First of all the fact that intelligence community issue a statement on such a matter is
very strange. There is executive branch and three letter agencies should generally keep their
mouth shut and allow others to voice the concerns, etc.
This might be a sigh of complete disorganization of executive branch with intelligence agencies
becoming a power players. Kind of "Deep State" morphing into "surface state".
There are might be also multiple valid reasons for disclosing such a sensitive information:
I want your money stupid Pinocchio.
Smoke screen to hide their own nefarious activities and/or blunders within the USA. Actually
existence of Hillary private server is somewhat incompatible with the existence of NSA.
This is one thing when Podesta using gmail. It's quite another when the Secretary of state
uses "bathroom server" with incompetent or semi-competent tech staff and completely clueless
entourage.
Pre-emptive strike reflecting some internal struggle within US Intelligence community itself
with a neocon faction going "all in" to force the viewpoint, and more aggressive toward Russia
stance, which might not be shared by others.
Please note that CIA and DOD are fighting each other in Iraq and Syria to a certain extent.
Increase Anti-Russian hysteria, which helps Hillary as a candidate of neocon establishment.
Russians might recently uncover some nefarious activities (I heard FSB did discover compromised
computers in some ministries) and this is the preparation for the blowback.
I can't claim that a mere mortal like me actually has the slightest clue what is really going
on. All I will hazard is that, whatever it is, it's a bunch of scams, lies and public manipulation
schemes.
Where this kind of high level foreign policy is involved, the US government and
intelligence services blew their cred with me long ago. I disbelieve them now on as a strong and
resilient prior.
"... There are a variety of potential threats around the world today: tensions in the South China Seas, a nuclear North Korea, conflict between Russia and Ukraine, and civil wars in the Middle East are just a few. In order to better think about these challenges and how they relate to U.S. national security, the Center for the National Interest partnered with the Charles Koch Institute to host a foreign policy roundtable which addressed the question: What is the most pressing issue for America's foreign policy? ..."
"... Mearsheimer argues that the second problematic dimension of U.S. foreign policy is that the United States is "heavily into transformation." By "transformation," Mearsheimer means that "We believe that what we should do in the process of running the world is topple governments that are not liberal democracies and transform them into [neo]liberal democracies." ..."
"... according to Mearsheimer, the United States is pursuing "a hopeless cause; there is a huge literature that makes it clear that promoting democracy around the world is extremely difficult to do, and doing it at the end of a rifle barrel is almost impossible." ..."
"... "It's remarkably difficult to understand why we still continue to think we can dominate the world and pursue the same foreign policy we've been pursuing at least since 2001, when it has led to abject failure after abject failure." ..."
"... Andrew Bacevich opines that the United States needs to "come to some understanding of who we are and why we do these things – a critical understanding of the American identity." Notre Dame's Michael Desch agrees: "That cuts to the core of American political culture. I think the root of the hubris is deep in the software that animates how we think about ourselves, and how we think about the world." ..."
There are a variety of potential threats around the world today: tensions in the South China
Seas, a nuclear North Korea, conflict between Russia and Ukraine, and civil wars in the Middle East
are just a few. In order to better think about these challenges and how they relate to U.S. national
security, the Center for the National Interest partnered with the Charles Koch Institute to host
a foreign policy roundtable which addressed the question: What is the most pressing issue for America's
foreign policy?
Watch the rest of the videos in the "Grand Strategy" series.
John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago doesn't shy away from a bold answer: The most pressing
issue is that the United States has a "fundamentally misguided foreign policy." Mearsheimer argues
that there are two dimensions to U.S. foreign policy that get the United States into "big trouble."
First, he says, "We believe that we can dominate the globe, that we can control what happens in every
nook and cranny of the world." The problem with this is that "the world is simply too big and nationalism
is much too powerful of a force to make it possible for us to come close to doing that."
Mearsheimer argues that the second problematic dimension of U.S. foreign policy is that the United
States is "heavily into transformation." By "transformation," Mearsheimer means that "We believe
that what we should do in the process of running the world is topple governments that are not liberal
democracies and transform them into [neo]liberal democracies."
The United States has engaged in numerous international military interventions over the past fifteen
years, primarily in the Middle East. Proponents of these interventions argue that they are necessary
in order to build stable democracies in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. However, according to Mearsheimer,
the United States is pursuing "a hopeless cause; there is a huge literature that makes it clear that
promoting democracy around the world is extremely difficult to do, and doing it at the end of a rifle
barrel is almost impossible."
So why has the United States continued to pursue policies and strategies that fail to convert
U.S. military might into political ends?
Eugene Gholz of the University of Texas at Austin suggests that the root of the issue could be
American hubris. The United States has made the mistake of "thinking we can control things we can't
control." Mearsheimer agrees with Gholz, although he finds the situation perplexing: "It's remarkably
difficult to understand why we still continue to think we can dominate the world and pursue the same
foreign policy we've been pursuing at least since 2001, when it has led to abject failure after abject
failure."
Several other scholars chime in to offer their own thoughts on this thorny issue. Boston University's
Andrew Bacevich opines that the United States needs to "come to some understanding of who we are
and why we do these things – a critical understanding of the American identity." Notre Dame's Michael Desch agrees: "That cuts to the core of American political culture. I think the root of the hubris
is deep in the software that animates how we think about ourselves, and how we think about the world."
Harvard University's Stephen Walt offers yet another possibility. Walt asks if the U.S. commitment
to its current misguided and damaging foreign policy is due to "deep culture" or if it is result
of "the national security apparatus we built after World War II." Walt thinks it is the latter: the
United States "was not a highly interventionist country until after the Second World War." After
World War II, "we built a large national security state, we had bases everywhere, and then we discovered
that we can't let go of any of that, even though the original reason for building it is gone."
Did the other panelists agree with Walt? Did anyone suggest a different problem as a candidate
for the most pressing issue? Watch the full video above to see and be sure to check out the other
videos of CNI and CKI's panel of nationally acclaimed foreign policy scholars addressing additional
questions.
"... My impression is that Trump_vs_deep_state is more about dissatisfaction of the Republican base with the Republican brass (which fully endorsed neoliberal globalization), the phenomenon somewhat similar to Sanders. ..."
"... Working class and lower middle class essentially abandoned DemoRats (Clinton democrats) after so many years of betrayal and "they have nowhere to go" attitude. ..."
"... Now they try to forge the alliance of highly paid professionals who benefitted from globalization("creative class"), financial speculators and minorities. Which does not look like a stable coalition to me. ..."
"... In other words both Parties are now split and have two mini-parties inside. I am not sure that Sanders part of Democratic party would support Hillary. The wounds caused by DNC betrayal and double dealing are still too fresh. ..."
"... We have something like what Marxists call "revolutionary situation" when the elite loses control of "peons". And existence of Internet made MSM propaganda far less effective that it would be otherwise. That's why they resort to war propaganda tricks. ..."
"That's not untrue, but it seems to me to be getting worse."
Because of economic stagnation and anxiety among lower class Republicans. Trump blames immigration
and trade unlike traditional elite Republicans. These are economic issues.
Trump supporters no longer believe or trust the Republican elite who they see as corrupt
which is partly true. They've been backing Nixon, Reagan, Bush etc and things are just getting
worse. They've been played.
Granted it's complicated and partly they see their side as losing and so are doubling down
on the conservatism, racism, sexism etc. But Trump *brags* that he was against the Iraq war.
That's not an elite Republican opinion.
likbez -> DrDick... , -1
My impression is that Trump_vs_deep_state is more about dissatisfaction of the Republican base with the Republican
brass (which fully endorsed neoliberal globalization), the phenomenon somewhat similar to Sanders.
Working class and lower middle class essentially abandoned DemoRats (Clinton democrats) after
so many years of betrayal and "they have nowhere to go" attitude.
Looks like they have found were to go this election cycle and this loss of the base is probably
was the biggest surprise for neoliberal Democrats.
Now they try to forge the alliance of highly paid professionals who benefitted from globalization("creative
class"), financial speculators and minorities. Which does not look like a stable coalition to
me.
Some data suggest that among unions which endorsed Hillary 3 out of 4 members will vote against
her. And that are data from union brass. Lower middle class might also demonstrate the same pattern
this election cycle.
In other words both Parties are now split and have two mini-parties inside. I am not sure that
Sanders part of Democratic party would support Hillary. The wounds caused by DNC betrayal and
double dealing are still too fresh.
We have something like what Marxists call "revolutionary situation" when the elite loses control
of "peons". And existence of Internet made MSM propaganda far less effective that it would be
otherwise. That's why they resort to war propaganda tricks.
They are the same neocon creeps... They forgot nothing and learn nothing.
Notable quotes:
"... My impression is that that key issue is as following: a vote for Hillary is a vote for the War Party and is incompatible with democratic principles. ..."
"... Trump with all his warts gives us a chance to get some kind of détente with Russia. ..."
"... In other words no real Democrat can vote for Hillary. ..."
"... Why do you think "wet kiss with neocons" is compatible with democratic principles ? ..."
"... I'm really bummed that we are going to be seeing a return of a lot of the same creeps who gave us the foreign policy of the 90's that went belly up in 2001-03. ..."
"... But most of the liberal bloggers obediently kept their mouths shut about it. ..."
Just a hunch: a lot of this hoo-hah will simmer down after the election.
But yeah, I'm really bummed that we are going to be seeing a return of a lot of the same
creeps who gave us the foreign policy of the 90's that went belly up in 2001-03.
Just a reminder: I called attention several times to this article in 2014 and 2015:
"... The Democratic nominee in the final debate reiterated her bellicose stance towards Syria. Combined with her 2003 vote for war in Iraq, and her central role in getting the U.S. into the 2011 war in Libya, Clinton could become the most hawkish candidate elected president in most Americans' lifetimes. ..."
"... Enforcing a no-fly zone is "basically an act of war," Michael Knights, a no-fly-zone expert at the Washington Institute told me in the run up to the Libyan war. ..."
"... "Hillary's War," was the Washington Post's headline for a flattering feature on the Secretary of State's central role in driving the U.S. to intervene in Libya's civil war in 2011. ..."
"... Clinton staff, published emails have shown, worked hard to get Clinton credit for the war. Clinton's confidante at the State Department Jake Sullivan drafted a memo on her "leadership/ownership/stewardship of this country's Libya policy from start to finish." ..."
"... Hillary's war was illegal-because the administration never obtained congressional authorization for it-and it was also disastrous. "Libya is in a state of meltdown," John Lee Anderson wrote in the Atlantic last summer. ..."
"... Yet somehow, through three general election debates, she never got a single question on Libya. Consider that: a former Secretary of State touted a war as a central achievement of hers, is running on her foreign-policy chops, and she is escaping accountability for that disastrous war. ..."
"... Clinton, of course, also voted for the Iraq War in 2003. She says now she thinks that war was a mistake because it destabilized region. But somehow she doesn't apply that supposed lesson to Libya or to Syria. ..."
"... The pattern is clear: Hillary Clinton is consistently and maybe blindly pro-war. She is now the clear frontrunner to become our next president. The antiwar movement that flourished under President George W. Bush has disappeared under President Obama . Will it revive under Hillary? Will Republicans have the power or the desire to check her ambitious interventionism. ..."
Hillary Clinton
can change her views in an instant on trade, guns, gay marriage, and all sorts of issues, but
she's consistent in this: she wants war.
The Democratic nominee in the final debate reiterated her bellicose stance towards Syria. Combined
with her 2003 vote for war in Iraq, and her central role in getting the U.S. into the 2011 war in
Libya, Clinton could become the most hawkish candidate elected president in most Americans' lifetimes.
"I am going to continue to push for a no-fly zone and safe havens within Syria," Clinton said
Wednesday night. Totally separate from the fight against ISIS, Clinton's "no-fly zones and safe havens"
are U.S. military intervention in the bloody and many-sided conflict between Syria's brutal government,
terrorist groups, and rebel groups.
Enforcing a no-fly zone is "basically an act of war," Michael Knights, a no-fly-zone expert at
the Washington Institute told me in the run up to the Libyan war. Air Force Gen. Paul Selva, vice
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified before the Senate that a no-fly zone created "the
potential of a direct conflict with the Syrian integrated air defense system or Syrian forces or,
by corollary, a confrontation with the Russians."
Defense Secretary Ash Carter testified in the same hearing that "safe zones" would require significant
U.S. boots on the ground.
So while Hillary says she doesn't want war with Russia or Syria, or boots on the ground in Syria,
she pushes policies that the Pentagon says risk war and require boots on the ground.
Hillary showed that same cavalier attitude toward war earlier this decade, laughingly
declaring "we came, we
saw, he died." This was her version of George W. Bush's "Mission Accomplished" moment, and Libya
was her smaller - and less legal - version of Bush's Iraq War.
"Hillary's War," was the Washington Post's headline for a flattering feature on the Secretary
of State's central role in driving the U.S. to intervene in Libya's civil war in 2011.
Clinton staff, published emails have shown, worked hard to get Clinton credit for the war.
Clinton's confidante at the State Department Jake Sullivan drafted a memo on her "leadership/ownership/stewardship
of this country's Libya policy from start to finish."
Sullivan listed, point-by-point, how Clinton helped bring about and shape the war. Before Obama's
attack on Moammar Gadhafi, "she [was] a leading voice for strong UNSC action and a NATO civilian
B5 protection mission," the memo explained.
Hillary's war was illegal-because the administration never obtained congressional authorization
for it-and it was also disastrous. "Libya is in a state of meltdown," John Lee Anderson wrote in
the Atlantic last summer.
ISIS has spread, no stable government has arisen, and the chaos has led to refugee and terrorism
crises.
Clinton nevertheless calls her war "smart power at its best," declaring during the primary season,
"I think President
Obama made the right decision at the time."
Yet somehow, through three general election debates, she never got a single question on Libya.
Consider that: a former Secretary of State touted a war as a central achievement of hers, is running
on her foreign-policy chops, and she is escaping accountability for that disastrous war.
Clinton, of course, also voted for the Iraq War in 2003. She says now she thinks that war
was a mistake because it destabilized region. But somehow she doesn't apply that supposed lesson
to Libya or to Syria.
The pattern is clear:
Hillary Clinton
is consistently and maybe blindly pro-war. She is now the clear frontrunner to become our next
president. The antiwar movement that flourished under President George W. Bush has disappeared under
President Obama
. Will it revive under Hillary? Will Republicans have the power or the desire to check her ambitious
interventionism.
If Hillary wins big and sweeps in a Senate majority with her, we could be in for four more years
of even more war.
Timothy P. Carney, the Washington Examiner's senior political columnist, can be contacted at
[email protected]. His column appears
Tuesday and Thursday nights on washingtonexaminer.com.
This strange statement of DIRECTOR OF NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE means direct involvement of Us
intelligence agencies in the US election.
Notable quotes:
"... Not to worry. The "Intelligence Community" (USIC) has it all figured out. ..."
"... Step one: discredit the whistle blowers by sending hacked emails to WikiLeaks and blaming Russia. Step two: collect mountains of data without oversight Step three: ?? anne -> Sandwichman ... , October 24, 2016 at 12:10 PM Step one: discredit the whistle blowers by sending hacked emails to WikiLeaks and blaming Russia. Step two: collect mountains of data without oversight Step three: ?? [ Step three could be terrifying if the new Washington and media Cold Warriors and McCarthyists continue on their way. Democrats have become wild, militarist Republicans on foreign affairs, so where is any counter to come from? ..."
"... TIME, the Economist, and the New Yorker have all now published covers portraying Putin as a scary, Evil menace ..."
"... This could be a poster for a horror movie. But it's just the sane, sober, centrist @TheEconomist, doing what they do best ..."
"... The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations. The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts. These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process. Such activity is not new to Moscow-the Russians have used similar tactics and techniques across Europe and Eurasia, for example, to influence public opinion there. We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia's senior-most officials could have authorized these activities. ..."
"... The problem with "the Russians" tale is that the Podesta emails are rather weak sauce. Is there anyone paying close attention that didn't know HRC's camp had influential contacts in the media and the DNC and used them to their advantage? ..."
"... The upshot of the WikiLeaks Podesta emails is to DISCREDIT WIKILEAKS as an independent source of disclosure. ..."
"... http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a49791/russian-dnc-emails-hacked/ "One of the first leaked files had been modified on a computer using Russian-language settings by a user named "Feliks Dzerzhinsky." Dzerzhinsky was the founder of the Cheka, the Soviet secret police" ..."
"... From the Esquire article: "Matt Tait, a former GCHQ operator... was particularly prolific. Hours after the first Guccifer 2.0 dump, on the evening of June 15, Tait found something curious." For the record, "GCHQ" does not refer to the magazine, Gentlemen's Quarterly. ..."
"... First of all the fact that intelligence community issue a statement on such a matter is very strange. ..."
"... The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts.... ..."
"... Weapons of Mass Destruction! We have irrefutable evidence! Yellowcake! ..."
"... Keith B. Alexander: "Those who would want to weave the story that we have millions or hundreds of millions of dossiers on people, is absolutely false… From my perspective, this is absolute nonsense." ..."
"... Senator Wyden: "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?" ..."
"... DNI Clapper "No, sir." ..."
"... Historically it was the USA that started cyberwar and who developed the most advanced capabilities in this space. Remember the worm which tried to subvert functionality of Iranian centrifuges electronics using specially designed malware and Trojans like Flame? ..."
"... So the first suspect should internal (kind of Snowden II), not external. There was also a story with an alternative viewpoint: http://www.amtvmedia.com/why-nsa-may-have-leaked-dnc-emails/ ..."
"... There were also rumors about FOXACID - The NSA's hacking program getting into DNC hands. http://investmentwatchblog.com/warning-trump-fans-be-careful-possible-leaked-info-on-plans-to-attack-trump-supporters/ ..."
"... Sanjait might belong to the category that some people call the "Vichy left" – essentially people who are ready to sacrifice all principles to ensure their 'own' prosperity and support the candidate who intends to protected it, everybody else be damned. ..."
"... Very neoliberal approach if you ask me. Ann Rand would probably be proud for this representative of "creative class". ..."
"... More "paranoid claptrap" (or should that be Clappertrap?): Edward Snowden: "...the breaking point was seeing the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, directly lie under oath to Congress. … Seeing that really meant for me there was no going back." ..."
"... "Two U.S. representatives accused Clapper of perjury for telling a congressional committee in March 2013, that the NSA does not collect any type of data at all on millions of Americans. One senator asked for his resignation, and a group of 26 senators complained about Clapper's responses under questioning. Media observers have described Clapper as having lied under oath, having obstructed justice, and having given false testimony." ..."
"... My impression is that that key issue is as following: a vote for Hillary is a vote for the War Party and is incompatible with democratic principles. ..."
"... In other words no real Democrat can vote for Hillary. ..."
It's Trump's Party, by Paul Krugman, NY Times : ...Everyone who endorsed Mr. Trump in the
past owns him now... And voters should realize that voting for any Trump endorser is, in effect,
a vote for Trump_vs_deep_state, whatever happens at the top of the ticket.
Step one: discredit the whistle blowers by sending hacked emails to WikiLeaks and blaming Russia.
Step two: collect mountains of data without oversight
Step three: ??
[ Step three could be terrifying if the new Washington and media Cold Warriors and McCarthyists
continue on their way. Democrats have become wild, militarist Republicans on foreign affairs,
so where is any counter to come from? ]
When I need to be reminded of just how afraid of the new McCarthyists I have to be, I will
look to the crazily prejudiced cover of The Economist and remember that I have yet to come
across a complaint by any academic economist.
No matter though, as I keep promising I will be naming names. I have my list, and am steadily
writing down names to name and name names from morning to evening I surely will.
The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed
the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political
organizations. The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and
WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations
of Russian-directed efforts. These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US
election process. Such activity is not new to Moscow-the Russians have used similar tactics and
techniques across Europe and Eurasia, for example, to influence public opinion there. We believe,
based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia's senior-most officials
could have authorized these activities.
The problem with "the Russians" tale is that the Podesta emails are rather weak sauce. Is
there anyone paying close attention that didn't know HRC's camp had influential contacts in the
media and the DNC and used them to their advantage?
I'm shocked, shocked that there is backroom power politics going on in a political campaign!
The upshot of the WikiLeaks Podesta emails is to DISCREDIT WIKILEAKS as an independent
source of disclosure.
Why would Putin want to do that? Why would CLAPPER want to do that?
The Russian connect was not "revealed" by NSA alone and the evidence for anybody who understand
computers and "trails" is quite strong.
The fact that the initial "leaks" were not such a big deal was no surprise. Given Julian's
desperate need to not get Clinton into the White house, you would expect him to save the most
juicy stuff until a few days before the election.
From the Esquire article: "Matt Tait, a former GCHQ operator... was particularly prolific.
Hours after the first Guccifer 2.0 dump, on the evening of June 15, Tait found something curious."
For the record, "GCHQ" does not refer to the magazine, Gentlemen's Quarterly.
First of all the fact that intelligence community issue a statement on such a matter is very
strange. There is executive branch and three letter agencies should generally keep their mouth
shut and allow others to voice the concerns, etc.
This might be a sigh of complete disorganization of executive branch with intelligence agencies
becoming a power players. Kind of "Deep State" morphing into "surface state".
There are might be also multiple valid reasons for disclosing such a sensitive information:
I want your money stupid Pinocchio.
Smoke screen to hide their own nefarious activities and/or blunders within the USA. Actually
existence of Hillary private server is somewhat incompatible with the existence of NSA.
This is one thing when Podesta using gmail. It's quite another when the Secretary of state
uses "bathroom server" with incompetent or semi-competent tech staff and completely clueless
entourage.
Pre-emptive strike reflecting some internal struggle within US Intelligence community itself
with a neocon faction going "all in" to force the viewpoint, and more aggressive toward Russia
stance, which might not be shared by others.
Please note that CIA and DOD are fighting each other in Iraq and Syria to a certain extent.
Increase Anti-Russian hysteria, which helps Hillary as a candidate of neocon establishment.
Russians might recently uncover some nefarious activities (I heard FSB did discover compromised
computers in some ministries) and this is the preparation for the blowback.
The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and
by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed
efforts....
-- Joint Statement from the Department of Homeland Security
and Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Election Security
[ "Consistent with the methods and motivations..." is a shocking supposition to be made
public, but we have been subject to such suppositions, seemingly with increasing frequency, for
these last 15 years. ]
Weapons of Mass Destruction! We have irrefutable evidence! Yellowcake!
Keith B. Alexander: "Those who would want to weave the story that we have millions or hundreds
of millions of dossiers on people, is absolutely false… From my perspective, this is absolute
nonsense."
...
Senator Wyden: "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of
millions of Americans?"
DNI Clapper "No, sir."
Senator Wyden: "It does not?"
DNI Clapper: "Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently, perhaps,
collect, but not wittingly."
The [IN]operative word there was "collect" which in NSAspeak does not mean... collect.
Not shocking at all unless you are ignorant about tracing and analyzing hacks. The traces and
approaches are like fingerprints. Nobody in the business have any doubts that the Russians did
this - but they will never give you the details of how they got to that conclusion, because this
is a public website and the hacking wars are like the missile wars, if the other side knows what
you got they can counter it and make your job harder.
The first rule of such activities on state level is to pretend that you are somebody else deliberately
leaving false clues (IP space, keyboard layout, etc), everything that you call traces.
Historically it was the USA that started cyberwar and who developed the most advanced capabilities
in this space. Remember the worm which tried to subvert functionality of Iranian centrifuges electronics
using specially designed malware and Trojans like Flame?
Using botnets essentially gives anybody substantial freedom about what IP space you want to
use. You can pretend to be Russian if you want to and use computers from Russian IP space.
Some paranoid claptrap to go along with your usual anti intellectualism.
Interestingly, with your completely unrelated non sequitur, you've actually illustrated something
that does relate to Krugmans post. Namely that there are wingnuts among us. They've taken over
the Republican Party, but the left has some too. Fortunately though the Democratic Party hasn't
been taken over by them yet, and is still mostly run by grown ups.
I am confident that what you say here is consistent with your methods and motivations.
likbez -> Sandwichman... October 24, 2016 at 06:05 PM
"I am confident that what you say here is consistent with your methods and motivations."
Pretty consistent, I agree. IMHO Sanjait might belong to the category that some people call
the "Vichy left" – essentially people who are ready to sacrifice all principles to ensure their
'own' prosperity and support the candidate who intends to protected it, everybody else be damned.
Very neoliberal approach if you ask me. Ann Rand would probably be proud for this representative
of "creative class".
Essentially the behavior the we've had for the last 8 years with the king of "bait and switch".
More "paranoid claptrap" (or should that be Clappertrap?): Edward Snowden: "...the breaking
point was seeing the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, directly lie under oath
to Congress. … Seeing that really meant for me there was no going back."
Private hackers may be tired of all this Russia friendly "measured response" from the US government
and take the matter of retaliation into their own hands.
"Two U.S. representatives accused Clapper of perjury for telling a congressional committee
in March 2013, that the NSA does not collect any type of data at all on millions of Americans.
One senator asked for his resignation, and a group of 26 senators complained about Clapper's responses
under questioning. Media observers have described Clapper as having lied under oath, having obstructed
justice, and having given false testimony." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_R._Clapper
Oliver Stone's movie was pretty good. I agree with you that the hacked email are pretty "weak
sauce" for the Russians to risk a confrontation with the sole super power. It's possible given
that Putin was upset over Hillary backing the pro-democracy movement publically in recent elections.
"... "I did not receive any questions from CNN, let's just be very clear," a shaky Brazile told Kelly. ..."
"... "I never got documents from CNN," she reiterated, adding that "a lot of those emails I would not give them the time of the day. I've seen so many doctored emails. I've seen things that come from me at two in the morning that I don't even send." (RELATED: DNC Chair Now Says Podesta Emails Were 'Doctored') ..."
"... Brazile then offered to share whatever documents she has. "If there is anything that I have I will share," she said. ..."
"... Martin, the TV One host suspected of giving Brazile the question, gave a convoluted answer last week when asked if he coordinated with Brazile. ..."
Democratic National Committee chairwoman Donna Brazile complained during an interview on Wednesday
that she is being "persecuted" by being asked questions about leaking a town hall question to the
Clinton campaign.
And during the interview, conducted on Fox News after the presidential debate, Brazile said that
her interviewer, Megyn Kelly, was "like a thief" because her questions cited emails that were stolen
from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and released by Wikileaks.
"From time to time I get the questions in advance," Brazile wrote in a March 12 email to Clinton's
communications director, Jennifer Palmieri.
The question, which was about the death penalty, was asked of Clinton by Roland Martin, a host
with TV One, which co-hosted the debate with CNN.
"I did not receive any questions from CNN, let's just be very clear," a shaky Brazile told Kelly.
"Where did you get it?" the host shot back.
"First of all what information are you providing to me that will let me see what you are talking
about?" said Brazile.
She grew more defensive.
"As a Christian woman I understand persecution, but I will not sit here and be persecuted because
your information is totally false," the operative said.
"Podesta's emails were stolen. You're like the thief that what's to bring into the night what
you found in the gutter," she continued.
"I am not going to try to validate falsified information. I have my documents, I have my files,"
Brazile told Kelly.
"I never got documents from CNN," she reiterated, adding that "a lot of those emails I would not
give them the time of the day. I've seen so many doctored emails. I've seen things that come from
me at two in the morning that I don't even send."
(RELATED: DNC Chair Now Says Podesta Emails Were 'Doctored')
Brazile then offered to share whatever documents she has. "If there is anything that I have I will share," she said.
Brazile did not return an email from The Daily Caller asking how she plans to prove that she did
not send the question to Palmieri.
Martin, the TV One host suspected of giving Brazile the question, gave a convoluted answer last
week when asked if he coordinated with Brazile.
Update: Brazile responded to TheDC's questions about the town hall questions and about her comments
in the interview with Megyn Kelly.
Asked if she would make good on her pledge to share the information she has and why she refused
to say that TV One was not the source of the town hall question, she responded: "You're so unprofessional."
TheDC followed up on the questions.
"Ask where the doctored videos were made. Chinese or Russians," Brazile responded.
It was painful watching Donna Brazile get caught in Megan Kelly's cross examination. She (Donna)
was loyal to a fault, making herself look like an idiot, a very sad idiot, when she claimed the
emails had been doctored.
"... I wonder if the various powers that be assembled some kind of "Committee to Defend the Liberal Order" when Trump began to make noises about re-assessing Nato ..."
"... A very interesting and pretty plausible hypothesis... That actually is the most deep insight I got from this interesting discussion. In such case intelligence agencies are definitely a part of "Committee to Defend the Liberal Order" which is yet another explanation of their strange behavior. ..."
"... it's a bunch of scams, lies and public manipulation schemes. ..."
I wonder if the various powers that be assembled some kind of "Committee to Defend the Liberal
Order" when Trump began to make noises about re-assessing Nato.
Reply
Monday, October 24, 2016 at 02:11 PM
> ...some kind of "Committee to Defend the Liberal Order" when Trump began to make noises about
re-assessing Nato.
A very interesting and pretty plausible hypothesis... That actually is the most deep insight
I got from this interesting discussion. In such case intelligence agencies are definitely a part
of "Committee to Defend the Liberal Order" which is yet another explanation of their strange behavior.
I can't claim that a mere mortal like me actually has the slightest clue what is really going
on. All I will hazard is that, whatever it is, it's a bunch of scams, lies and public manipulation
schemes.
Where this kind of high level foreign policy is involved, the US government and intelligence
services blew their cred with me long ago. I disbelieve them now on as a strong and resilient
prior.
"... the discontent that motivates the Trump voters seems less likely to just vanish. We seem to be in the midst of a realignment of both UK and US politics, of which Trump and Farrage are just symptoms ..."
"... Trump should be defeated according to most here. Some may actually believe Trump really is the anti-Christ Hitler we've been constantly told he is, instead of a widely watched and often admired vulgarian capitalist welcomed into living rooms across America for more than a decade. Whatever Trump is, he's not Cruz. His supporters are not Cruz supporters. Yet. ..."
"... Which is why, in this instance, I think the polls are wrong. Who in their right mind is going to ever admit that Trump's language and behavior is not offensive? Nobody. Who in their right mind looks out at America and sees Donald Trump, not Bill Cosby etc, etc, etc as a threat to their own daughters, sisters, sons, etc? Which is why, in the end, enough voters are going to say no thanks to Hillary and roll the dice with Donald. ..."
"... The stink coming out of the Clinton campaign is so rank it's actually penetrating the media wall of silence. Given that social media provides numerous ways for candidates to bypass the gate-keepers, I suspect enough voters are learning what's in the emails whether CNN, or the Wapo, report the discoveries, or not. ..."
"... On most wedge issues, Trump is running as a bog-standard Republican conservative, and he's losing on those issues. ..."
"... Indeed I see the synthesis of neo-conservatism and neo-liberalism as the final consolidation of conservatism and the end of what we have understood as history – the final triumph of capitalism as it dies. ..."
"... The right has also succeeded in the same way to reduce consumer rights. Arbitration agreements are attached to almost everything you buy that needs an agreement (software, mobile phones, etc.) before use. The agreements not only mandate secret arbitration they also prevent consumers from banding together in order to form a class thus making each individual consumer litigate alone. Obviously this reduces the power of individual consumers and also decreases the incentive for any one consumer to do something about what, on the individual level, may be a small injury. Basically it allows business to steal a small amount from a lot of people. ..."
"... On the "economy", "taxes", and, "foreign affairs" the respondents "trust" the GOP more than the Dems. Though on one key measure "caring about people like you" the Dems are trusted over the GOP by a slight margin. ..."
"... The reduction of marginal income tax rates on the highest "wage" incomes combined with new doctrines of corporate business leadership that emphasized the maximization of shareholder value created a new class of C-suite business executives occupying positions of great political power as allies and servants of the rentier class of Capital owners. The elaborate structures of financial repression and mutual finance were systematically demolished, removing many of the protections from financial predation afforded the working and middle classes. ..."
"... she's the least popular Democratic candidate perhaps ever! That's the only reason it would be close. A party built around the principles of white male supremacy and dedicated to expanding the wealth and income gap is at a massive disadvantage in any non-gerrymandered election. ..."
"... It is striking to me how even on the left the discussion of U.S. militarism and imperialism has been marginalized and does not come up much in casual conversation. We had an active peace movement through the worst days of the Cold War, and then there was a bit of a resurgence of it in response to the Iraq War. But Obama's acceptance of the core assumptions of the 'War on Terror' (even as he waged it more responsibly) seems to have led to the war party co-opting the liberals as well until there is no longer an effective opposition. The rhetoric of 'humanitarian intervention' has been hugely successful in that effort. ..."
Trump himself will go away, I think. But the discontent that motivates the Trump voters
seems less likely to just vanish. We seem to be in the midst of a realignment of both UK and US
politics, of which Trump and Farrage are just symptoms. Farrage has already made an attempt
at retiring from politics, and I could easily see Trump going back to reality television after
the election. The real question is: what will their supporters do next?
I am also surprised that Corey thinks feminism and the civil rights movement has been defeated.
These seem to me to be areas in which some progress has been made (along with other forms of identity
politics, e.g. gay marriage). It's been the class-based labour/union movement that's been the
real loser.
Possibly it depends on which time scale you're talking about, and that some of us now count
as old people, in that our implicit timescale is over our lifetimes. Maybe young college students
think that all the progress made by feminism happened before they were even born, and things have
slowed down of late. (With a slight hat-tip to Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions
, I could easily see some further progress on feminist issues being made simply by the older
guys in management positions dying off, and being replaced by younger people who grew up in a
different culture),
I disagree with the basic premise of the post in that the right has been beaten because it
has won.
That's certainly not how the right sees the landscape. The tea party of 2010 was co-opted by
Richard Armey and the Kochs on the one hand and buried under a mountain of forms by Lois Lerner
on the other. The Armey group rallies to Ted Cruz, who is sure to have something to say about
America and the future of the Republican party should Trump be undone because of his lewd behavior
and actions.
The media is certain to be savaged no matter what the outcome. The number of artists and musicians
who both profit from and promote misogyny and violence invited to the WH over the last 8 years
to serve as role models for America's youth should raise nary an eyebrow. The prudery of the moment
is going to be the template for 'social reform' under the Republicans. If Hillary and her
media allies succeed in derailing the Trump insurgency via his mouth, his hands, and his zipper
they're going to face an extremely hostile electorate. Cruz is certain to try to step into Trump's
shoes as leader, preaching that Trump was a flawed messenger undone by an unforgiving god. This
will make sense for too many Americans to completely ignore. The unhappy white males who have
yet to self-identify as angry white males, rather than simply as Americans, may well decide to
do so.
Whatever few victories the Democrats enjoy lower down the ticket are unlikely to survive skyrocketing
Affordable Care Act premiums, some form of amnesty, and an extension of America's wars in the
ME. The Democrats are betting the farm that Republicans will never unlock the padlock Democrats
maintain over socially-conservative minorities. Cruz's ground game and networking with the evangelical
community didn't get the job done in 2016, but we can be sure that he and his team are already
mapping 2020.
Trump should be defeated according to most here. Some may actually believe Trump really
is the anti-Christ Hitler we've been constantly told he is, instead of a widely watched and often
admired vulgarian capitalist welcomed into living rooms across America for more than a decade.
Whatever Trump is, he's not Cruz. His supporters are not Cruz supporters. Yet.
I've no idea whether those supporting the Democratic candidate expect her to wake up on November
9, should she win, and suddenly decide to abandon the practices that got her this far. I certainly
don't. If you're nauseated at the prospect of 4-8 more years of secrecy, war, lies, and corruption
you're going to need to keep more than barf bags at hand, however. The polarization that has divided
America over the last 8 years is, imho, far more likely to become much more corrosive and
damaging with Democrats in charge.
Ted Cruz will literally be burning crosses and probably books, pornography, and anyone/thing
else that strikes his fancy. The donor class is praying that Hillary/Bush can stamp out the fires.
With rising unemployment, stagnating wages, and more and more Americans feeling that the system
isn't interested in them, or their children, there may very well be a little hell to pay, or a
lot.
kidneystones 10.24.16 at 12:37 pm @ 14
It won't surprise you to learn I think you're wrong about Trump. The battle against Trump is
for many a rejection of what they see in the mirror transposed onto Trump, as far as males go.
Many women, including some who support him, see in Trump a dangerous predator who offers the promise
of protection and wealth, but at a cost. Good thing no woman would ever sell herself, or her principles,
to such a man – and if Bill Clinton pops into your head, please don't blame me.
Which is why, in this instance, I think the polls are wrong. Who in their right mind is
going to ever admit that Trump's language and behavior is not offensive? Nobody. Who in their
right mind looks out at America and sees Donald Trump, not Bill Cosby etc, etc, etc as a threat
to their own daughters, sisters, sons, etc? Which is why, in the end, enough voters are going
to say no thanks to Hillary and roll the dice with Donald.
I like your question re: Cruz. I find him such a phenomenally transparent phony that I can't
quite believe anyone trusts him. With Trump, and Bill Clinton, what you see is what you get –
Slick Willie.
At the moment Americans are being told they don't like what they see in Trump, but if that
were the case, why was he so popular back when he was actually on the Howard Stern show and otherwise
acting out? I frankly don't think most Americans give a toss what Trump did or said this week,
much less ten years ago.
The stink coming out of the Clinton campaign is so rank it's actually penetrating the media
wall of silence. Given that social media provides numerous ways for candidates to bypass the gate-keepers,
I suspect enough voters are learning what's in the emails whether CNN, or the Wapo, report the
discoveries, or not.
Like I said. I think it will be close and right now I still say Trump edges it.
Layman 10.24.16 at 12:55 pm
"Clinton will win easily, but it could easily be argued that the victory will be over
Trump the man than over any ideology. If Clinton were running against Cruz – who on any reasonable
measure is well to the right of Trump – would she be 20 points ahead with women?"
Hard to find more recent polling than this; but based on this, women would solidly still prefer
Clinton over Cruz.
I also doubt that notion that it is Trump's vulgarity, on its own, rather than Republican conservative
ideology which is driving the likely result. Trump does himself no favors, but Clinton's negatives
hold her back, too. On most wedge issues, Trump is running as a bog-standard Republican conservative,
and he's losing on those issues.
Which is why, in the end, enough voters are going to say no thanks to Hillary and roll the
dice with Donald.
What odds would you accept on this outcome?
SusanC 10.24.16 at 2:26 pm @20.
Indeed. There's a difference between a biased sample and the oversampling technique. The difference
being that with oversampling you statistically correct for the fact that you've intentionally
sampled some subpopulation more frequently than you would have done if you just chose members
of the whole population uniformly at random (while a biased sample just ignores or is ignorant
of the problem…)
(I hope this isn't too much of a derail. There is a grand CT tradition of yawn-not-that-again
OPs with derails where you might learn something).
I am not sanguine about the apparent collapse of this version (Trump) of American fascism. If
conservatism can be said to be that which argues for the preservation of traditional social institutions
and traditional political values then conservatism is far from dying. Indeed I see the synthesis
of neo-conservatism and neo-liberalism as the final consolidation of conservatism and the end
of what we have understood as history – the final triumph of capitalism as it dies.
Bernard Yomtov 10.24.16 at 3:59 pm
the reason I think the right has not much of a future is that it has won. If you consider its
great animating energies since the New Deal-anti-labor, anti-civil rights, and anti-feminism-the
right has achieved a considerable amount of success.
I agree with dd that this is just wrong. Are labor, the civil rights movement, women's rights,
worse than they were at the end of the New Deal? I don't see how.
The right has won or is winning in an some ways on labor and civil rights issues by changing the
procedure by which one can assert the rights that may exist.
The number of strikes are down as someone else mentioned. But the Right has also largely succeeded
in reducing the ability of individual employees to engage in private actions to vindicate their
rights. E.g. the huge increase in enforceable arbitration agreements in what are essentially contracts
of adhesion. The Right has solidified the ability of business to prevent employees from using
the independent, publicly funded judiciary, and instead forces them to use private, secretive,
arbitrators who essentially work for the companies (because the business is a repeat player and
the arbitrators rely on being chosen to arbitrate in order to make their money).
The right has also succeeded in the same way to reduce consumer rights. Arbitration agreements
are attached to almost everything you buy that needs an agreement (software, mobile phones, etc.)
before use. The agreements not only mandate secret arbitration they also prevent consumers from
banding together in order to form a class thus making each individual consumer litigate alone.
Obviously this reduces the power of individual consumers and also decreases the incentive for
any one consumer to do something about what, on the individual level, may be a small injury. Basically
it allows business to steal a small amount from a lot of people.
In regards to Clinton and her chances against any other Republican, here is some polling which
suggests the country at least trust the GOP over the Dems on a number of important issues. It
is from April, 2016 so not the freshest data. But it might indicate Trump's bog standard GOP policies
are not what is driving votes to Clinton/away from Trump.
On the "economy", "taxes", and, "foreign affairs" the respondents "trust" the GOP more
than the Dems. Though on one key measure "caring about people like you" the Dems are trusted over
the GOP by a slight margin.
bruce wilder 10.24.16 at 5:04 pm
Among the most successful projects of the Right was financialization of the economy.
The reduction of marginal income tax rates on the highest "wage" incomes combined with
new doctrines of corporate business leadership that emphasized the maximization of shareholder
value created a new class of C-suite business executives occupying positions of great political
power as allies and servants of the rentier class of Capital owners. The elaborate structures
of financial repression and mutual finance were systematically demolished, removing many of the
protections from financial predation afforded the working and middle classes.
In the current election, the Democratic Party has split on financial reform issues, with the
dominant faction represented by the Party's candidate prioritizing issues of race and gender equality.
"In regards to Clinton and her chances against any other Republican, here is some polling
which suggests the country at least trust the GOP over the Dems on a number of important issues."
I imagine any poll pitting 'generic Republican' against Hillary Clinton in April of this year
would have shown 'generic Republican' winning. The problem is, you can't run 'generic Republican'.
I'm hard pressed to point at any prominent Republican who I think would be handily beating
Clinton now. Once you name them, they have to say what they're for and against, and she takes
her shot at them, and they're fighting an uphill battle. And she's the least popular Democratic
candidate perhaps ever! That's the only reason it would be close. A party built around the principles
of white male supremacy and dedicated to expanding the wealth and income gap is at a massive disadvantage
in any non-gerrymandered election.
PGD 10.24.16 at 6:28 pm
It is striking to me how even on the left the discussion of U.S. militarism and imperialism
has been marginalized and does not come up much in casual conversation. We had an active peace
movement through the worst days of the Cold War, and then there was a bit of a resurgence of it
in response to the Iraq War. But Obama's acceptance of the core assumptions of the 'War on Terror'
(even as he waged it more responsibly) seems to have led to the war party co-opting the liberals
as well until there is no longer an effective opposition. The rhetoric of 'humanitarian intervention'
has been hugely successful in that effort.
One of the most depressing things about this election campaign to me has been to see
the Democrats using their full spectrum media dominance not to fight for a mandate for left policies,
but to run a coordinated and effective propaganda campaign for greater U.S. military involvement
in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, focusing on demonizing Putin and on humanitarian intervention
rhetoric around Aleppo and the like.
Qatar, like most Muslim countries, treats women as second-class citizens, but
champion-of-women Hillary never lets a little thing like that stop her from doing business. (See:
"On favors.") And a far greater threat than murderous Muslims adhering to a fanatical 7th-century
religious ideology lurks right here at home - those pesky Roman Catholics and their silly
2,000-year-old faith. (See: "On Catholics.")
Lloyd Blankfein is all in for HRC, so we know what sort of
economy we will get.
The Clinton administration will have a
tough balance, throwing enough crumbs to the left to keep
them happy while giving payback for the speaking fees.
Before Anne demands that you identify who this is - let me
help. Lloyd Craig Blankfein is an American business
executive. He is the CEO and Chairman of Goldman Sachs.
Now
was that so hard? As for "we know what sort of economy we
will get". No Rusty - we do not know WTF you mean by this. So
get to it as man splain this to us.
Since both major parties are owned by plutocrats, we get a
choice between quicker or slower misery. And since Hillary is
in bed with the neocons, we also get the probability of major
conflagration or US oppression of the globe.
If a
progressive/populist revolt doesn't change the current path
we are all screwed.
Last week, Jame O'keefe and Project Veritas Action potentially
altered the course of the U.S. election, or at a minimum raised serious doubts about the practices of the Clinton campaign and
the DNC, after releasing two undercover videos that revealed efforts of democrat operatives to incite violence at republican rallies
and commit "mass voter fraud." While democrats have vehemently denied the authenticity of the videos, two democratic operatives,
Robert Creamer and Scott Foval, have both been forced to resign over the allegations.
Many democrats made the rounds on various mainstream media outlets over the weekend in an attempt to debunk the Project Veritas
videos. Unfortunately for them, O'Keefe fired back with warnings that part 3 of his multi-part series was forthcoming and would
implicate Hillary Clinton directly.
Anything happens to me, there's a deadman's switch on Part III, which will be released Monday.
@HillaryClinton and
@donnabrazile implicated.
Now, we have the 3rd installment of O'Keefe's videos which does seemingly reveal direct coordination between Hillary Clinton,
Donna Brazile, Robert Creamer and Scott Foval to organize a smear campaign over Trump's failure to release his tax returns. Per
Project Veritas :
Part III of the undercover Project Veritas Action investigation dives further into the back room dealings of Democratic
politics. It exposes prohibited communications between Hillary Clinton's campaign, the DNC and the non-profit organization
Americans United for Change. And, it's all disguised as a duck. In this video, several Project Veritas Action undercover journalists
catch Democracy Partners founder directly implicating Hillary Clinton in FEC violations. " In the end, it was the candidate,
Hillary Clinton, the future president of the United States, who wanted ducks on the ground," says Creamer in one of several
exchanges. "So, by God, we would get ducks on the ground." It is made clear that high-level DNC operative Creamer realized
that this direct coordination between Democracy Partners and the campaign would be damning when he said: "Don't repeat that
to anybody."
Within the video both Clinton and Brazile are directly implicated by Creamer during the following exchange:
"The duck has to be an Americans United for Change entity. This had to do only with some problem between Donna Brazile and
ABC, which is owned by Disney, because they were worried about a trademark issue. That's why. It's really silly.
We originally launched this duck because Hillary Clinton wants the duck .
In any case, so she really wanted this duck figure out there doing this stuff, so that was fine. So, we put all these ducks
out there and got a lot of coverage. And Trump taxes. And then ABC/Disney went crazy because they thought our original slogan
was 'Donald ducks his taxes, releasing his tax returns."
They said it was a trademark issue. It's not, but anyway, Donna Brazile had a connection with them and she didn't want to
get sued. So we switched the ownership of the duck to Americans United for Change and now our signs say 'Trump ducks releasing
his tax returns.' And we haven't had anymore trouble."
As Project Veritas points out, this direct coordination between Clinton, Brazile and Americans United For Change is a violation
of federal election laws:
"The ducks on the ground are likely 'public communications' for purposes of the law. It's political activity opposing Trump,
paid for by Americans United For Change funds but controlled by Clinton/her campaign."
"As Project Veritas points out, this direct coordination between Clinton, Brazile and Americans United For Change is a violation
of federal election laws "
Yeah, you pretty much got the head shot there. Unfortunately, no gun to shoot it from. The enforcement authorities all work
FOR the Democrat party.
Full spectrum dominance. It's a bitch. Even if you catch them red-haned there's no "authorities" to report it to that will
listen to you.
Remember what happened to Planned Parenthood when they were caught red-handed selling human tissue for profit (which is also
illegal)? That's right. Nothing. Same thing here.
The problem is that the MSM isn't reporting on any of this stuff about Hillary. And, the Republicans in office aren't on the news
at all to talk about any of this. So, the only place it is reported is on the Trump campaign trail where just a few thousand hear
about.
If the media won't report it and the Republicans won't talk about it, Hillary gets a pass. The audience for sites like ZH and
Drudge are just preaching to the chior and not reaching the people who could change their minds or haven't made up their minds.
froze25 -> ImGumbydmmt •Oct 24, 2016 3:40 PM
What this video is, is evidence of collusion between a campaign and a SuperPac. That is illegal in a criminal court. This is enough
to open an investigation, problem is nothing will be done by Nov 8th. All we can do is share it non-stop.
Bastiat d Haus-Targaryen •Oct 24, 2016 2:11 PM
Don't discount the Enquirer: remember who took down Gary Hart and John Edwards:
Hillary Clinton's shady Mr. Fix It will tell all on TV tonight, just days after his explosive confession in The National ENQUIRER
hit the stands.
The man who's rocked Washington, D.C., will join Sean Hannity on tonight's episode of "Hannity" - airing on the FOX News Channel
at 10 p.m. EST - to reveal his true identity at last.
"... Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a longtime Clinton confidant, helped steer $675,000 to the election campaign of the wife of an FBI official who went on to lead the probe into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email system, according to a report. ..."
"... The money directed by McAuliffe began flowing two months after the FBI investigation into Clinton began in July 2015. Around that time, the candidate's husband was promoted from running the Washington field office for the FBI to the No. 3 position at the bureau. ..."
"... In a statement to the Journal, the FBI said McCabe "played no role, attended no events, and did not participate in fundraising or support of any kind. Months after the completion of her campaign, then-Associate Deputy Director McCabe was promoted to Deputy, where, in that position, he assumed for the first time, an oversight role in the investigation into Secretary Clinton's emails." ..."
Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a longtime Clinton confidant, helped steer $675,000 to the
election campaign of the wife of an FBI official who went on to lead the probe into Hillary
Clinton's use of a private email system, according to a report.
The political action committee of McAuliffe, the Clinton loyalist, gave $467,500 to the state
Senate campaign of the wife of Andrew McCabe, who is now deputy director of the FBI, according to
the Wall Street Journal.
The report states Jill McCabe received an additional $207,788 from the Virginia Democratic Party,
which is heavily influenced by McAuliffe.
The money directed by McAuliffe began flowing two months after the FBI investigation into
Clinton began in July 2015. Around that time, the candidate's husband was promoted from running
the Washington field office for the FBI to the No. 3 position at the bureau.
Within a year, McCabe was promoted to deputy director, the second-highest position in the bureau.
In a statement to the Journal, the FBI said McCabe "played no role, attended no events, and
did not participate in fundraising or support of any kind. Months after the completion of her
campaign, then-Associate Deputy Director McCabe was promoted to Deputy, where, in that position,
he assumed for the first time, an oversight role in the investigation into Secretary Clinton's
emails."
The governor's office claimed the FBI's McCabe met the governor only once - on March 7, 2015,
when McAuliffe persuaded Jill McCabe to run.
The 2015 Virginia state Senate run - her first attempt to gain public office - was unsuccessful
as she lost to the incumbent Republican.
McAuliffe "supported Jill McCabe because he believed she would be a good state senator. This is a
customary practice for Virginia governors … Any insinuation that his support was tied to anything
other than his desire to elect candidates who would help pass his agenda is ridiculous," a
spokesman for the Virginia governor told the Journal.
McAuliffe has been a longtime backer of the Clintons, even serving as Hillary Clinton's campaign
chair in 2008.
"... The Democratic nominee in the final debate reiterated her bellicose stance towards Syria. Combined with her 2003 vote for war in Iraq, and her central role in getting the U.S. into the 2011 war in Libya, Clinton could become the most hawkish candidate elected president in most Americans' lifetimes. ..."
"... Enforcing a no-fly zone is "basically an act of war," Michael Knights, a no-fly-zone expert at the Washington Institute told me in the run up to the Libyan war. ..."
"... "Hillary's War," was the Washington Post's headline for a flattering feature on the Secretary of State's central role in driving the U.S. to intervene in Libya's civil war in 2011. ..."
"... Clinton staff, published emails have shown, worked hard to get Clinton credit for the war. Clinton's confidante at the State Department Jake Sullivan drafted a memo on her "leadership/ownership/stewardship of this country's Libya policy from start to finish." ..."
"... Hillary's war was illegal-because the administration never obtained congressional authorization for it-and it was also disastrous. "Libya is in a state of meltdown," John Lee Anderson wrote in the Atlantic last summer. ..."
"... Yet somehow, through three general election debates, she never got a single question on Libya. Consider that: a former Secretary of State touted a war as a central achievement of hers, is running on her foreign-policy chops, and she is escaping accountability for that disastrous war. ..."
"... Clinton, of course, also voted for the Iraq War in 2003. She says now she thinks that war was a mistake because it destabilized region. But somehow she doesn't apply that supposed lesson to Libya or to Syria. ..."
"... The pattern is clear: Hillary Clinton is consistently and maybe blindly pro-war. She is now the clear frontrunner to become our next president. The antiwar movement that flourished under President George W. Bush has disappeared under President Obama . Will it revive under Hillary? Will Republicans have the power or the desire to check her ambitious interventionism. ..."
Hillary Clinton
can change her views in an instant on trade, guns, gay marriage, and all sorts of issues, but
she's consistent in this: she wants war.
The Democratic nominee in the final debate reiterated her bellicose stance towards Syria. Combined
with her 2003 vote for war in Iraq, and her central role in getting the U.S. into the 2011 war in
Libya, Clinton could become the most hawkish candidate elected president in most Americans' lifetimes.
"I am going to continue to push for a no-fly zone and safe havens within Syria," Clinton said
Wednesday night. Totally separate from the fight against ISIS, Clinton's "no-fly zones and safe havens"
are U.S. military intervention in the bloody and many-sided conflict between Syria's brutal government,
terrorist groups, and rebel groups.
Enforcing a no-fly zone is "basically an act of war," Michael Knights, a no-fly-zone expert at
the Washington Institute told me in the run up to the Libyan war. Air Force Gen. Paul Selva, vice
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified before the Senate that a no-fly zone created "the
potential of a direct conflict with the Syrian integrated air defense system or Syrian forces or,
by corollary, a confrontation with the Russians."
Defense Secretary Ash Carter testified in the same hearing that "safe zones" would require significant
U.S. boots on the ground.
So while Hillary says she doesn't want war with Russia or Syria, or boots on the ground in Syria,
she pushes policies that the Pentagon says risk war and require boots on the ground.
Hillary showed that same cavalier attitude toward war earlier this decade, laughingly
declaring "we came, we
saw, he died." This was her version of George W. Bush's "Mission Accomplished" moment, and Libya
was her smaller - and less legal - version of Bush's Iraq War.
"Hillary's War," was the Washington Post's headline for a flattering feature on the Secretary
of State's central role in driving the U.S. to intervene in Libya's civil war in 2011.
Clinton staff, published emails have shown, worked hard to get Clinton credit for the war.
Clinton's confidante at the State Department Jake Sullivan drafted a memo on her "leadership/ownership/stewardship
of this country's Libya policy from start to finish."
Sullivan listed, point-by-point, how Clinton helped bring about and shape the war. Before Obama's
attack on Moammar Gadhafi, "she [was] a leading voice for strong UNSC action and a NATO civilian
B5 protection mission," the memo explained.
Hillary's war was illegal-because the administration never obtained congressional authorization
for it-and it was also disastrous. "Libya is in a state of meltdown," John Lee Anderson wrote in
the Atlantic last summer.
ISIS has spread, no stable government has arisen, and the chaos has led to refugee and terrorism
crises.
Clinton nevertheless calls her war "smart power at its best," declaring during the primary season,
"I think President
Obama made the right decision at the time."
Yet somehow, through three general election debates, she never got a single question on Libya.
Consider that: a former Secretary of State touted a war as a central achievement of hers, is running
on her foreign-policy chops, and she is escaping accountability for that disastrous war.
Clinton, of course, also voted for the Iraq War in 2003. She says now she thinks that war
was a mistake because it destabilized region. But somehow she doesn't apply that supposed lesson
to Libya or to Syria.
The pattern is clear:
Hillary Clinton
is consistently and maybe blindly pro-war. She is now the clear frontrunner to become our next
president. The antiwar movement that flourished under President George W. Bush has disappeared under
President Obama
. Will it revive under Hillary? Will Republicans have the power or the desire to check her ambitious
interventionism.
If Hillary wins big and sweeps in a Senate majority with her, we could be in for four more years
of even more war.
Timothy P. Carney, the Washington Examiner's senior political columnist, can be contacted at
[email protected]. His column appears
Tuesday and Thursday nights on washingtonexaminer.com.
"... US-Russia-China cooperation will eliminate for the US the threat of war with the only two powers whose nuclear capabilities could pose existential threats to the US. ..."
"... Simultaneously, Trump will put an end to "the prevailing view that the U.S. is, and always must be, the benign hegemon, altruistically policing the world, while allowing its allies, satellites-and even rivals-to manufacture everything and thereby generate the jobs, profits, and knowhow…a view that elevated the ambitions and pretensions of the American elite over the well-being of the larger U.S. population…Instead of sacrificing American economic interests on the altar of U.S. 'leadership,' [Trump] will view the strengthening of the American economy as central to American greatness." ..."
"... President Trump will rebuild the decimated US manufacturing sector and return to Americans those tens of millions of jobs that America's globalist elites were allowed to ship overseas. Rebuilding the US economy – and jobs! – will be the centerpiece of a Donald Trump presidency. ..."
"... The problem is that everyone wants to call themselves a Realist, even the Neocons. The Neocons proclaim that promoting Democracy, nation building, and being the world's policeman is 'realism' because if you withdraw from the world the problems follow you home. Tom Rogan bellowed that we needed to destroy Syria in the name of realism. They are totally wrong but the point is that everyone wants to claim this mantle which is why I tend to avoid this term. ..."
"... I think we should embrace the Putin Doctrine but that name is toxic. Basically, he eschews destroying standing govts because it is highly destabilizing. This is common sense. ..."
"... Oh, when I hear 'Bush kept us safe' it tears my heart out when I see guys in their 20/30's walking around with those titanium prosthetics. Do the 4,000+ men who died in Iraq and 10,000+ severely wounded count? And this does not even start to count the chaos and death in the M.E. ..."
"... Mainstream media are besides themselves at the prospect of their masters having to relinquish their special entitlements; namely, designer wars, selection of the few to govern the many (Supreme Court and the Fed), and putting foreign dictates over American interests at an incredible cost to the U.S. in human and non-human resources. ..."
Donald Trump played a wily capitalistic trick on his Republican opponents in the primary fights
this year-he served an underserved market.
By now it's a cliché that Trump, while on his way to the GOP nomination, tapped into an unnoticed
reservoir of right-of-center opinion on domestic and economic concerns-namely, the populist-nationalists
who felt left out of the reigning market-libertarianism of the last few decades.
Indeed, of the 17 Republicans who ran this year, Trump had mostly to himself the populist issues:
that is, opposition to open borders, to free trade, and to earned-entitlement cutting. When the other
candidates were zigging toward the familiar-and unpopular-Chamber of Commerce-approved orthodoxy,
Trump was zagging toward the voters.
Moreover, the same sort of populist-nationalist reservoir-tapping was evident in the realm of
foreign affairs. To put it in bluntly Trumpian terms, the New Yorker hit 'em where they weren't.
The fact that Trump was doing something dramatically different became clear in the make-or-break
Republican debate in Greenville, S.C., on February 13. Back in those early days of the campaign,
Trump had lost one contest (Iowa) and won one (New Hampshire), and it was still anybody's guess who
would emerge victorious.
During that debate, Trump took what seemed to be an extraordinary gamble: he ripped into George
W. Bush's national-security record-in a state where the 43rd president was still popular. Speaking
of the Iraq War, Trump said, "George Bush made a mistake. We can make mistakes. But that one was
a beauty. We should have never been in Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East."
And then Trump went further, aiming indirectly at the former president, while slugging his brother
Jeb directly: "The World Trade Center came down during your brother's reign, remember that."
In response, Jeb intoned the usual Republican line, "He kept us safe." And others on the stage
in Greenville that night rushed to associate themselves with Bush 43.
In the aftermath of this verbal melee, many thought that Trump had doomed himself. As one unnamed
Republican "strategist" chortled to Politico , "Trump's attack on President George W. Bush
was galactic-level stupid in South Carolina."
Well, not quite: Trump triumphed in the Palmetto State primary a week later, winning by a 10-point
margin.
Thus, as we can see in retrospect, something had changed within the GOP. After 9/11, in the early
years of this century, South Carolinians had been eager to fight. Yet by the middle of the second
decade, they-or at least a plurality of them-had grown weary of endless foreign war.
Trump's victory in the Palmetto State was decisive, yet it was nevertheless only a plurality,
32.5 percent. Meanwhile, Sen. Marco Rubio, running as an unabashed neocon hawk, finished second.
So we can see that the Republican foreign-policy "market" is now segmented. And while Trump proved
effective at targeting crucial segments, they weren't the only segments-because, in actuality, there
are four easily identifiable blocs on the foreign-policy right. And as we delineate these four segments,
we can see that while some are highly organized and tightly articulate, others are loose and inchoate:
First, the libertarians. That is, the Cato Institute and other free-market think tanks, Reason
magazine, and so on. Libertarians are not so numerous around the country, but they are strong
among the intelligentsia.
Second, the old-right "isolationists." These folks, also known as "paleocons," often find common
ground with libertarians, yet their origins are different, and so is their outlook. Whereas the libertarians
typically have issued a blanket anathema to all foreign entanglements, the isolationists have been
more selective. During World War I, for example, their intellectual forbears were hostile to U.S.
involvement on the side of the Allies, but that was often because of specifically anti-English or
pro-German sentiments, not because they felt guided by an overall principle of non-intervention.
Indeed, the same isolationists were often eager to intervene in Latin America and in the Far East.
More recently, the temperamentally isolationist bloc has joined with the libertarians in opposition
to deeper U.S. involvement in the Middle East.
Third, the traditional hawks. On the proverbial Main Street, USA, plenty of people-not limited
to the active-duty military, veterans, and law-enforcers-believe that America's national honor is
worth fighting for.
Fourth, the neoconservatives. This group, which takes hawkishness to an avant-garde extreme, is
so praised, and so criticized, that there's little that needs be added here. Yet we can say this:
as with the libertarians, they are concentrated in Washington, DC; by contrast, out beyond the Beltway,
they are relatively scarce. Because of their connections to big donors to both parties, however,
they have been powerful, even preeminent, in foreign-policy circles over the last quarter-century.
Yet today, it's the neocons who feel most threatened by, and most hostile to, the Trump phenomenon.
We can pause to offer a contextual point: floating somewhere among the first three categories-libertarians,
isolationists, hawks-are the foreign-policy realists. These, of course, are the people, following
in the tradition of the great scholar Hans Morgenthau, who pride themselves on seeing the world as
it is, regarding foreign policy as just another application of Bismarckian wisdom-"the art of the
possible."
The realists, disproportionately academics and think-tankers, are a savvy and well-credentialed
group-or, according to critics, cynical and world-weary. Yet either way, they have made many alliances
with the aforementioned trio of groups, even as they have usually maintained their ideological flexibility.
To borrow the celebrated wisdom of the 19th-century realpolitiker Lord Palmerston, realists don't
have permanent attachments; they have permanent interests. And so it seems likely that if Trump wins-or
anyone like Trump in the future-many realists will be willing to emerge from their wood-paneled precincts
to engage in the hurly-burly of public service.
Returning to our basic quartet of blocs, we can quickly see that two of them, the libertarians
and the neocons, have been loudly successful in the "battle of ideas." That is, almost everyone knows
where the libertarians and the neocons stand on the controversies of the moment. Meanwhile, the other
two groups-the isolationists and the traditional hawks-have failed to make themselves heard. That
is, until Trump.
For the most part, the isolationists and hawks have not been organized; they've just been clusters
of veterans, cops, gun owners, and like-minded souls gathering here and there, feeling strongly about
the issues but never finding a national megaphone. Indeed, even organized groups, such as the American
Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars, sizable as they might be, have had little impact, of late,
on foreign affairs.
This paradoxical reality-that even big groups can be voiceless, allowing smaller groups to carry
the day-is well understood. Back in 1839, the historian Thomas Carlyle observed of his Britain, "The
speaking classes speak and debate," while the "deep-buried [working] class lies like an Enceladus"-a
mythological giant imprisoned under a volcano. Yet, Carlyle continued, the giant under the volcano
will not stay silent forever; one day it will erupt, and the inevitable eruption "has to produce
earthquakes!"
In our time, Trump has provoked the Enceladus-like earthquake. Over the past year, while the mainstream
media has continued to lavish attention on the fine points of libertarianism and neoconservatism,
the Peoples of the Volcano have blown up American politics.
Trump has spoken loudly to both of his groups. To the isolationists, he has highlighted his past
opposition to the Iraq and Libya misadventures, as well as his suspicions about NATO and other alliances.
(Here the libertarians, too, are on board.) At the same time, he has also talked the language of
the hawks, as when he has said, "Take the oil" and "Bomb the [bleep] out of them." Trump has also
attacked the Iran nuclear agreement, deriding it as "one of the worst deals ever made."
Thus earlier this year Trump mobilized the isolationists and the hawks, leaving the libertarians
to Rand Paul and the neocons to Rubio.
Now as we move to the general election, it appears that Trump has kept the loyalty of his core
groups. Many libertarians, meanwhile, are voting for Gary Johnson-the former Republican governor
at the top of the Libertarian Party's ticket-and they are being joined, most likely as a one-off,
by disaffected Republicans and Democrats. Meanwhile, the neocons, most of them, have become the objective
allies, if not the overt supporters, of Hillary Clinton.
Even if Trump loses, his energized supporters, having found their voice, will be a new and important
force within the GOP-a force that could make it significantly harder for a future president to, say,
"liberate" and "democratize" Syria.
♦♦♦
Yet now we must skip past the unknown unknowns of the election and ask: what might we expect if
Trump becomes president?
One immediate point to be borne in mind is that it will be a challenge to fill the cabinet and
the sub-cabinet-to say nothing of the thousands of "Schedule C" positions across the administration-with
true Trump loyalists. Yes, of course, if Trump wins that means he will have garnered 50 million or
more votes, but still, the number of people who have the right credentials and can pass all the background
checks-including, for most of the top jobs, Senate confirmation-is minuscule.
So here we might single out the foreign-policy realists as likely having a bright future in a
Trump administration: after all, they are often well-credentialed and, by their nature, have prudently
tended to keep their anti-Trump commentary to a minimum. (There's a piece of inside-the-Beltway realist
wisdom that seems relevant here: "You're for what happens.")
Yet the path to realist dominion in a Trump administration is not smooth. As a group, they have
been in eclipse since the Bush 41 era, so an entire generation of their cadres is missing. The realists
do not have long lists of age-appropriate alumni ready for another spin through the revolving door.
By contrast, the libertarians have lots of young staffers on some think-tank payroll or another.
And of course, the neocons have lots of experience and contacts-yes, they screwed up the last time
they were in power, but at least they know the jargon.
Thus, unless president-elect Trump makes a genuinely heroic effort to infuse his administration
with new blood, he will end up hiring a lot of folks who might not really agree with him-and who
perhaps even have strongly, if quietly, opposed him. That means that the path of a Trump presidency
could be channeled in an unexpected direction, as the adherents of other foreign-policy schools-including,
conceivably, schools from the left-clamber aboard. As they say in DC, "personnel is policy."
Still, Trump has a strong personality, and it's entirely possible that, as president, he will
succeed in imprinting his unique will on his appointees. (On the other hand, the career government,
starting with the State Department's foreign service officers, might well prove to be a different
story.)
Looking further ahead, as a hypothetical President Trump surveys the situation from the Sit Room,
here are nine things that will be in view:
1.
Trump will recall, always, that the Bush 43 presidency drove itself into a ditch on Iraq. So he
will surely see the supreme value of not sending U.S. ground troops-beyond a few advisors-into Middle
Eastern war zones.
2.
Trump will also realize that Barack Obama, for all his talk about hope and change, ended up preserving
the bulk of Bush 43's policies. The only difference is that Obama did it on the cheap, reducing defense
spending as he went along.
Obama similar to Bush-really? Yes. To be sure, Obama dropped all of Bush's democratic messianism,
but even with his cool detachment he kept all of Bush's alliances and commitments, including those
in Afghanistan and Iraq. And then he added a new international commitment: "climate change."
In other words, America now has a policy of "quintuple containment": Russia, China, Iran, ISIS/al-Qaeda,
and, of course, the carbon-dioxide molecule. Many would argue that today we aren't managing any of
these containments well; others insist that the Obama administration, perversely, seems most dedicated
to the containment of climate change: everything else can fall apart, but if the Obamans can maintain
the illusion of their international CO2 deals, as far as they are concerned all will be well.
In addition, Uncle Sam has another hundred or so minor commitments-including bilateral defense
treaties with countries most Americans have never heard of, along with special commitments to champion
the rights of children, women, dissidents, endangered species, etc. On a one-by-one basis, it's possible
to admire many of these efforts; on a cumulative basis, it's impossible to imagine how we can sustain
all of them.
3. A populist president like Trump will further realize that if the U.S. has just 4 percent of the
world's population and barely more than a fifth of world GDP, it's not possible that we can continue
to police the planet. Yes, we have many allies-on paper. Yet Trump's critique of many of them as
feckless, even faithless, resonated for one big reason: it was true.
So Trump will likely begin the process of rethinking U.S. commitments around the world. Do we
really want to risk nuclear war over the Spratly Islands? Or the eastern marches of Ukraine? Here,
Trump might well default to the wisdom of the realists: big powers are just that-big powers-and so
one must deal with them in all their authoritarian essentiality. And as for all the other countries
of the world-some we like and some we don't-we're not going to change them, either. (Although in
some cases, notably Iraq and Syria, partition, supervised by the great powers, may be the only solution.)
4.
Trump will surely see world diplomacy as an extension of what he has done best all his life-making
deals. This instinct will serve him well in two ways: first, he will be sharply separating himself
from his predecessors, Bush the hot-blooded unilateralist war-of-choicer and Obama the cool and detached
multilateralist leader-from-behind. Second, his deal-making desire will inspire him do what needs
to be done: build rapport with world leaders as a prelude to making things happen.
To cite one immediate example: there's no way that we will ever achieve anything resembling "peace
with honor" in Afghanistan without the full cooperation of the Taliban's masters in Pakistan. Ergo,
the needed deal must be struck in Islamabad, not Kabul.
Almost certainly, a President Trump will treat China and Russia as legitimate powers, not as rogue
states that must be single-handedly tamed by America.
Moreover, Trump's deal-making trope also suggests that instead of sacrificing American economic
interests on the altar of U.S. "leadership," he will view the strengthening of the American economy
as central to American greatness.
5.
Trump will further realize that his friends the realists have had a blind spot of late when it
comes to eco nomic matters. Once upon a time-that is, in the 19th century-economic nationalism was
at the forefront of American foreign-policy making. In the old days, as America's Manifest Destiny
stretched beyond the continental U.S., expansionism and Hamiltonianism went together: as they used
to say, trade follows the flag. Theodore Roosevelt's digging of the Panama Canal surely ranks as
one of the most successful fusions of foreign and economic policy in American history.
Yet in the past few decades, the economic nationalists and the foreign-policy realists have drifted
apart. For example, a Reagan official, Clyde Prestowitz of the Economic Strategy Institute, has been
mostly ignored by the realists, who have instead embraced the conventional elite view of free trade
and globalization.
So a President Trump will have the opportunity to reunite realism and economic nationalism; he
can once again put manufacturing exports, for example, at the top of the U.S. agenda. Indeed, Trump
might consider other economic-nationalist gambits: for example, if we are currently defending such
wealthy countries as Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Norway, why aren't they investing some of the trillions
of dollars in their sovereign-wealth funds into, say, American infrastructure?
6.
Trump will also come into power realizing that he has few friends in the foreign-policy establishment;
after all, most establishmentarians opposed him vehemently. Yet that could turn out to be a real
plus for the 45th president because it could enable him to discard the stodgy and outworn thinking
of the "experts." In particular, he could refute the prevailing view that the U.S. is, and always
must be, the benign hegemon, altruistically policing the world, while allowing its allies, satellites-and
even rivals-to manufacture everything and thereby generate the jobs, profits, and knowhow. That was
always, of course, a view that elevated the ambitions and pretensions of the American elite over
the well-being of the larger U.S. population-and maybe Trump can come up with a better and fairer
vision.
7.
As an instinctive deal-maker, Trump will have the capacity to clear away the underbrush of accumulated
obsolete doctrines and dogmas. To cite just one small but tragic example, there's the dopey chain
of thinking that has guided U.S. policy toward South Sudan. Today, we officially condemn both sides
in that country's ongoing civil war. Yet we might ask, how can that work out well for American interests?
After all, one side or the other is going to win, and we presumably want a friend in Juba, not a
Chinese-affiliated foe.
On the larger canvas, Trump will observe that if the U.S., China, and Russia are the three countries
capable of destroying the world, then it's smart to figure out a modus vivendi among this
threesome. Such practical deal-making, of course, would undermine the moralistic narrative that Xi
Jinping and Vladimir Putin are the potentates of new evil empires.
8.
Whether or not he's currently familiar with the terminology, Trump seems likely to recapitulate
the "multipolar" system envisioned by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger in the 1970s. Back then,
the multipolar vision included the U.S., the USSR, Western Europe, China, and Japan.
Yet multipolarity was lost in the '80s, as the American economy was Reaganized, the Cold War grew
colder, and the Soviet Union staggered to its self-implosion. Then in the '90s we had the "unipolar
moment," when the U.S. enjoyed "hyper-power" primacy.
Yet as with all moments, unipolarity soon passed, undone by the Iraq quagmire, America's economic
stagnation, and the rise of other powers. So today, multipolarity seems destined to re-emerge with
a slightly upgraded cast of players: the U.S., China, Russia, the European Union, and perhaps India.
9.
And, of course, Trump will have to build that wall along the U.S.-Mexican border.
♦♦♦
Some might object that I am reading too much into Trump. Indeed, the conventional wisdom, even
today, maintains that Trump is visceral, not intellectual, that he is buffoonish, not Kissingerian.
To such critics, this Trump supporter feels compelled to respond: when has the conventional wisdom
about the New Yorker been proven correct?
It's not easy to become president. In all of U.S. history, just 42 individuals have been elected
to the presidency-or to the vice presidency and succeeded a fallen president. That is, indeed, an
exclusive club. Or as Trump himself might say, it's not a club for dummies.
If Trump does, in fact, become the 45th president, then by definition, he will have proven himself
to be pretty darn strategic. And that's a portent that bodes well for his foreign policy.
James P. Pinkerton is a contributor to the Fox News Channel.
Among James Pinkerton's most compelling reasons to hope for a Trump presidency are these two:
[1] "Almost certainly, a President Trump will treat China and Russia as legitimate powers, not
as rogue states that must be single-handedly tamed by America…Trump will observe that if the U.S.,
China, and Russia are the three countries capable of destroying the world, then it's smart to
figure out amodus vivendi among this threesome…"
US-Russia-China cooperation will eliminate for the US the threat of war with the only two
powers whose nuclear capabilities could pose existential threats to the US.
[2] Simultaneously, Trump will put an end to "the prevailing view that the U.S. is,
and always must be, the benign hegemon, altruistically policing the world, while allowing its
allies, satellites-and even rivals-to manufacture everything and thereby generate the jobs, profits,
and knowhow…a view that elevated the ambitions and pretensions of the American elite over the
well-being of the larger U.S. population…Instead of sacrificing American economic interests on
the altar of U.S. 'leadership,' [Trump] will view the strengthening of the American economy as
central to American greatness."
President Trump will rebuild the decimated US manufacturing sector and return to Americans
those tens of millions of jobs that America's globalist elites were allowed to ship overseas.
Rebuilding the US economy – and jobs! – will be the centerpiece of a Donald Trump presidency.<
The problem is that everyone wants to call themselves a Realist, even the Neocons. The Neocons
proclaim that promoting Democracy, nation building, and being the world's policeman is 'realism'
because if you withdraw from the world the problems follow you home. Tom Rogan bellowed that we
needed to destroy Syria in the name of realism. They are totally wrong but the point is that everyone
wants to claim this mantle which is why I tend to avoid this term.
I think we should
embrace the Putin Doctrine but that name is toxic. Basically, he eschews destroying standing govts
because it is highly destabilizing. This is common sense.
Oh, when I hear 'Bush kept us safe' it tears my heart out when I see guys in their 20/30's
walking around with those titanium prosthetics. Do the 4,000+ men who died in Iraq and 10,000+
severely wounded count? And this does not even start to count the chaos and death in the M.E.
Trump just came across as different while maintaining conservative, albeit middle-American values.
Mainstream media are besides themselves at the prospect of their masters having to relinquish
their special entitlements; namely, designer wars, selection of the few to govern the many (Supreme
Court and the Fed), and putting foreign dictates over American interests at an incredible cost
to the U.S. in human and non-human resources.
The song goes on. Trump hit a real nerve. Even if he loses, the American people have had a
small but important victory. We are frustrated with the ruling cabal. A sleeping giant has been
awoken. This election could be the political Perl Harbor….
Pinkerton has spent thousands of words writing about someone who is not the Donald Trump anyone
has ever seen.
In this, he joins every other member of the Right, who wait in hopeful anticipation
to see a Champion for their cause in Donald Trump, and are willing to turn a blind eye to his
ignorance, outright stupidity, lack of self-discipline, and lack of serious intent.
Pinkerton, he will only follow your lead here if he sees what's in it for HIM, not for the
Right and certainly not for the benefit of the American people.
Flawed premise. This opine works its way through the rabbit hole pretzel of current methodologies
in D.C. The ones that don't work. The city of NY had a similar outcome building a certain ice
skating facility within the confines of a system designed to fail.
What Trump does is implode those failed systems, implements a methodology that has proven to
succeed, and then does it. Under budget and before the deadline. Finding the *right* bodies to
make it all work isn't as difficult as is surmised. What that shows is how difficult that task
would be for the author. Whenever I hear some pundit claim that Trump can't possibly do all that
means is the pundit couldn't possibly do it.
The current system is full of youcan'tdoits, what have you got to lose, more of the same?
LOL! "Very few voters that will vote from Clinton because of this "cold war rhetoric" schtick."
Putin/Russia were by far the most mentioned topics at the debates...yet EMichael has the naivety
to assert that cold war tactics don't matter. What a rube!
As usual, EMichael is as uninformed as ever. For his information, Russia/Putin were mentioned
178 times in the 3 debates, topping the list of topics covered.
By comparison, climate change got four mentions, poverty 10, and US economic performance--hold
onto your hats!--didn't make the list. NSA snooping didn't get mentioned either.
So, EMichael, if Russia/Putin don't matter to voters, why did candidates talk so much about
it? Oh, I know, to distract attention from more serious issues that their paymasters didn't want
them to talk about!
Clinton had attracted a lot of centrist Republicans to her campaign, and I think the hawkish and
old school foreign policy stance has something to do with it.
"... So… Russia is already isolated, its economy is in shreds… or not? Because you can't have isolation (as you, pressitudes, claimed since 2014) of Russia and demand it at the same time! At the same time, no – ignoring Russia completely and talking only about "plox, don't use nukes, m'cay?" is not a "diplomacy". ..."
"... Absolutely schizophrenic Clinton-McFoul (yes, I know that his surname is spelled differently), which is still dominants in the alls of power of the West boils down to the following: ..."
"... 1) Talk harsh (really harsh!) with Russia on things we don't like ..."
"... 2) Cooperate with Russia when it possible as if never happened. ..."
"... And when Russia says that there are direct links between 1) and 2), that you can't expect to get 2) after doing 1) – there is no use to fake a hurt innocence of Ukrainians from this old anecdote with the "А на за що?!" punchline, ..."
"... You want war? You will have one! Want peace? Then behave yourself accodringly. ..."
"... Eli Lake is a dork who used to be the 'National Security Correspondent' for the Daily Beast. You know what a rag that is. Also, he was educated at Trinity College, a private liberal-arts school. ..."
"... I know how we can reach a compromise – me and the Russian government. Every year on the day that article was published, they could have "Eli Lake Day". On that day, an American company could be chosen at random to be kicked out of the country and have all its assets confiscated. The documents could lead off with, "Congratulations! You have been selected to receive the Eli Lake Award for Bankruptcy. You can thank Eli Lake and his big fucking mouth". ..."
Unsurprisingly – this article is from the Blub-blub-bloomberg. What is surprising – it's not by
Lyonya Bershidski. It's by another titan of handshakability – Eli Lake.
Why, surely with the name like that the article must be honest, objective and answer to all
standards of the journalism (in the West)?
I was again surprised when the now standard litany of Kremlin sins suddenly became an accusation
of "Murder, Kidnapping and Jaywalking":
"Russia also poisons the international system in small ways… It continues to support Kirsan
Ilyumzhinov as head of the International Chess Federation, despite his chummy visits to rogue
states like North Korea and Iran. His recent plan to hold the international chess championship
in Iran has drawn protest from the U.S. women's chess champion, Nazi Paikidze-Barnes, because
Iran requires women to cover their heads with a hijab."
Wow. Yet another bottom is crushed successfully and the standards of journalism in the Free
West get new way to fall! Or was it a secret way to endorse a "legitimate" head of the Chess Federation
– fearless Gary Kimovich Kasparov?
With new way to fall achieved by crashing yet another bottom the article takes a plunge:
"Browder last month proposed a plan for Interpol to create a two-tiered system. Speaking
before a human-rights commission in Congress, he said that transparent countries like the U.S.
would have their red notice requests processed immediately, whereas countries like Russia,
known to abuse the system, would have their requests reviewed by a panel of objective and independent
experts before being sent out to member states."
How handshakable! Surely, such approach will demonstrate the equality of countries in the international
relations and the true value of the Rule of Law!
The article ends in – now traditional for all Westie journos – couple of self-contradicting
paragraphs:
"None of this should preclude diplomacy with Russia. The U.S. and Russia should still
have channels to discuss nuclear stockpiles and other matters. But as Secretary of State John
Kerry has learned in his fruitless engagements, Russian promises are worthless. Everyone in
U.S. politics, with the exception of Donald Trump and a few other extremists on the left and
right, understands this. Russia is a pariah.
Pariahs are not asked to cooperate on challenges to the global commons. They shouldn't
get to host events like the World Cup, as Russia is scheduled to do in 2018. They should not
be diplomatic partners in U.S. policy to disarm other pariahs like Iran. No, pariahs should
be quarantined. With Russia, it's the very least the U.S. and its allies can do to save the
international system from a country that seeks to destroy it."
So… Russia is already isolated, its economy is in shreds… or not? Because you can't have
isolation (as you, pressitudes, claimed since 2014) of Russia and demand it at the same time!
At the same time, no – ignoring Russia completely and talking only about "plox, don't use nukes,
m'cay?" is not a "diplomacy".
Absolutely schizophrenic Clinton-McFoul (yes, I know that his surname is spelled differently),
which is still dominants in the alls of power of the West boils down to the following:
1) Talk harsh (really harsh!) with Russia on things we don't like
2) Cooperate with Russia when it possible as if never happened.
Now imagine that your neighbour decided to harm you in some nasty, really mean way. Imagine
him throwing seeds on you car, parked outside, and then filming how birds land (and shit) o your
car on his phone – with lots, and lots of really "smart" comments. Then your neighbor uploads
this video on YouTube, his Facebook page, Twitter, Instagram etc, etc. Here he engages with other
commenters in the vein of "Yeah, I know – he's a total douche! He got what he deserved! But wait,
guys – I have more plans for my neighbour!!!:)".
Next week he asks you to borrow him a landmover – as if nothing has ever happened before.
And when Russia says that there are direct links between 1) and 2), that you can't expect
to get 2) after doing 1) – there is no use to fake a hurt innocence of Ukrainians from this old
anecdote with the "А на за що?!" punchline,
You want war? You will have one! Want peace? Then behave yourself accodringly.
Eli Lake is a dork who used to be the 'National Security Correspondent' for the Daily Beast.
You know what a rag that is. Also, he was educated at Trinity College, a private liberal-arts
school. But the day will come when it is Russia's choice to punish Americans for the ignorant
things people like Eli Lake said. I would do it in a heartbeat; I would chortle with glee as I
tore up American proposals for joint ventures, and send balaclava-sporting kids dressed like Voina
around to paint giant dicks on their office doors with the message, "This is for Eli", until they
fled for the airport gibbering with terror. But that's me. Russia probably won't do it, because
they are pragmatic and like business and profit.
I know how we can reach a compromise – me and the Russian government. Every year on the
day that article was published, they could have "Eli Lake Day". On that day, an American company
could be chosen at random to be kicked out of the country and have all its assets confiscated.
The documents could lead off with, "Congratulations! You have been selected to receive the Eli
Lake Award for Bankruptcy. You can thank Eli Lake and his big fucking mouth".
"... "We have not run this campaign as a campaign against the GOP with the big broad brush - we've run it against Donald Trump," Kaine told the Associated Press. "We're going to get a lot of Republican votes, and that will also be part of, right out of the gate, the way to bring folks back together." ..."
"... In an interview, Kaine said Saturday that he and Hillary Clinton have already discussed how to work with Republicans if they win the presidential election against Trump and his running-mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, in a little more than two weeks. He said that tackling economic anxieties, finding common policy ground with the GOP, and perhaps bringing Republicans into the administration would be elements of unity, though he added that he and Clinton did not discuss cabinet positions, the AP reported. ..."
"... So the plan isn't to try and turn the Senate blue? What kind of work can a Clinton/Kaine administration "get done" with a GOP congress? My first guess would be giving big business something they want in "exchange" for something they want like a repatriation tax holiday to gently suggest corporations bring some of the money they have overseas back to the US and using a small portion of that money to pay for infrastructure spending business associations like the US COC have been advocating for years. ..."
"... It's not like the Dems have a chance of taking congress or at least the Senate so why do anything that might annoy the GOP. Since the GOP are usually so reasonable and the slightest suggestion Dems may want to take over Congress would be the straw that broke the camel's back and turn the generally reasonable GOP into a well oiled "no" machine. ..."
Sen. Tim Kaine said he's already reaching out to Republicans as the Democratic
vice presidential hopeful looks for ways to repair damage done between the two parties during
th divisive race for the White House.
"We have not run this campaign as a campaign against the GOP with the big broad brush -
we've run it against Donald Trump," Kaine told the Associated Press. "We're going to get a lot
of Republican votes, and that will also be part of, right out of the gate, the way to bring folks
back together."
In an interview, Kaine said Saturday that he and Hillary Clinton have already discussed
how to work with Republicans if they win the presidential election against Trump and his running-mate,
Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, in a little more than two weeks. He said that tackling economic anxieties,
finding common policy ground with the GOP, and perhaps bringing Republicans into the administration
would be elements of unity, though he added that he and Clinton did not discuss cabinet positions,
the AP reported.
Kaine, who is in his fourth year as a senator from Virginia after serving as the state's governor,
said Clinton is stepping up efforts to help Democrats recapture Senate control, but he hasn't
made a specific pitch for a Democratic Senate. He's focusing his efforts on finding policies Republicans
and Democrats can agree on.
"I have very good relations with Republicans in the Senate," Kaine said.
"There's some people
who really want to get some good work done."
[So the plan isn't to try and turn the Senate blue? What kind of work can a Clinton/Kaine administration
"get done" with a GOP congress? My first guess would be giving big business something they want
in "exchange" for something they want like a repatriation tax holiday to gently suggest corporations
bring some of the money they have overseas back to the US and using a small portion of that money
to pay for infrastructure spending business associations like the US COC have been advocating
for years.
It's not like the Dems have a chance of taking congress or at least the Senate so why do anything
that might annoy the GOP. Since the GOP are usually so reasonable and the slightest suggestion
Dems may want to take over Congress would be the straw that broke the camel's back and turn the
generally reasonable GOP into a well oiled "no" machine.
"... It is an obvious fact that the oligarchic One Percent have anointed Hillary, despite her myriad problems to be President of the US. There are reports that her staff are already moving into their White House offices. This much confidence before the vote does suggest that the skids have been greased. ..."
"... Stolen elections are the American tradition. Elections are stolen at every level-state, local, and federal. Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley's theft of the Chicago and, thereby, Illinois vote for John F. Kennedy is legendary. The Republican US Supreme Court's theft of the 2000 presidential election from Al Gore by preventing the Florida vote recount is another legendary example. The discrepancies between exit polls and the vote count of the secretly programmed electronic voting machines that have no paper trails are also legendary. ..."
"... The presstitutes have gone all out to demonize both Trump and any mention of election rigging, because they know for a fact that the election will be stolen and that they will have the job of covering up the theft. ..."
"... Don't believe the polls that say Hillary won the Q&A sessions or the polls that say Hillary is ahead in the election. Pollsters work for political organizations. If pollsters produce unwelcome results, they don't have any customers. The desired results are that Hillary wins. The purpose of the rigged polls showing her to be ahead is to discourage Trump supporters from voting. ..."
"... Don't vote early. The purpose of early voting is to show the One Percent how the vote is shaping up. From this information, the oligarchs learn how to program the electronic machines in order to elect the candidate that they want. ..."
It is an obvious fact that the oligarchic One Percent have anointed Hillary, despite her myriad
problems to be President of the US. There are reports that her staff are already moving into their
White House offices. This much confidence before the vote does suggest that the skids have been greased.
The current cause celebre against Trump is his conditional statement that he might not accept
the election results if they appear to have been rigged. The presstitutes immediately jumped on him
for "discrediting American democracy" and for "breaking American tradition of accepting the people's
will."
What nonsense! Stolen elections are the American tradition. Elections are stolen at every
level-state, local, and federal. Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley's theft of the Chicago and, thereby,
Illinois vote for John F. Kennedy is legendary. The Republican US Supreme Court's theft of the 2000
presidential election from Al Gore by preventing the Florida vote recount is another legendary example.
The discrepancies between exit polls and the vote count of the secretly programmed electronic voting
machines that have no paper trails are also legendary.
So what's the big deal about Trump's suspicion of election rigging?
The black civil rights movement has fought vote rigging for decades. The rigging takes place in
a number of ways. Blacks simply can't get registered to vote. If they do get registered, there are
few polling places in their districts. And so on. After decades of struggle it is impossible that
there are any blacks who are not aware of how hard it can be for them to vote. Yet, I heard on the
presstitute radio network, NPR, Hillary's Uncle Toms saying how awful it was that Trump had cast
aspersion on the credibility of American election results.
I also heard a NPR announcer suggest that Russia had not only hacked Hillary's emails, but also
had altered them in order to make incriminating documents out of harmless emails.
The presstitutes have gone all out to demonize both Trump and any mention of election rigging,
because they know for a fact that the election will be stolen and that they will have the job of
covering up the theft.
Don't believe the polls that say Hillary won the Q&A sessions or the polls that say Hillary
is ahead in the election. Pollsters work for political organizations. If pollsters produce unwelcome
results, they don't have any customers. The desired results are that Hillary wins. The purpose of
the rigged polls showing her to be ahead is to discourage Trump supporters from voting.
Don't vote early. The purpose of early voting is to show the One Percent how the vote is shaping
up. From this information, the oligarchs learn how to program the electronic machines in order to
elect the candidate that they want.
"As president, I will make it clear that the United States will treat cyberattacks just
like any other attack," the Democratic presidential nominee said. "We will be ready with serious
political, economic and military responses. "
We need to tell everyone that for the sake of the word. do not vote for this
dangerous woman!
"... Yes if next week motherland security and other 3 letter govt. are crying they need more cash to fight this then just maybe they did to themselves. ..."
"... Internet hacks - it's this election cycle's white power in an envelope! ..."
"... I would laugh so hard if a selection of sites [that] were shut down. ..."
"... We so need to officially declare this whole bloody mess a parody: ..."
I would laugh so hard if a selection of sites [that] were shut down. Waaah! Assange won't shut up!
So Twitter, WL.org, Reddit, where else would make good spots to shut down discussion in these
last days before the election. WL thought they had a good marketing gimmick going with the drip,
drip and who knows maybe a special event for C's birthday? or creating a November surprise (I
really liked that idea as it reflects how quickly info moves)
The petty back and forth between C and WL on top is a sight.
"... Submitted by Darius Shahtamasebi via TheAntiMedia.org, ..."
"... Consider the source. Biden is a blowhard and an embarassment. He said it for domestic consumption. Obama knows the Russians are not responsible and he will do nothing. ..."
"... > ... "... Joe Biden's statement that the White House was preparing to send Vladimir Putin a "message" ..." ..."
"... Absolutely. If the US and Russia got together - talk about a SUPERPOWER. The NeoCons are way too stupid to realize what a win-win this could be ..."
"... "Americans marvel at the level and effectiveness of brainwashing in North Korea, and express shock that North Koreans revere Kim Jung-un as god, but the truth is that Americans are every bit as brainwashed and just as effectively. The god most Americans worship today is materialism." ..."
"... the patriot VA state Senator who knows the truth as well https://www.sott.net/article/318592-Virginia-State-Senator-Richard-Black... ..."
This past week, America's oldest continuously published weekly magazine, the Nation, asked the
question : has the White House declared war on Russia?
As the two nuclear powers sabre-rattle over conflicts within Syria, and to some extent, over the
Ukrainian crisis, asking these questions to determine who will pull the trigger first has become
more paramount than it was at the peak of the Cold War.
The Nation's contributing editor, Stephen F. Cohen, reported Vice President Joe Biden's statement
that the White House was preparing to send Vladimir Putin a "message" - most likely in the form of
a cyber attack - amounted to a virtual "American declaration of war on Russia" in Russia's eyes.
Biden's threat is reportedly in response to allegations that Russia hacked Democratic Party offices
in order to disrupt the presidential election.
Chuck Todd, host of the "Meet the Press" on NBC,
asked Joe Biden: "Why haven't we sent a message yet to Putin?"
Biden responded, "We are sending a message [to Putin] We have a capacity to do it, and "
"He'll know it?" Todd interrupted.
"He'll know it. It will be at the time of our choosing, and under the circumstances that will
have the greatest impact," the U.S. vice president replied.
What are the effects of this kind of rhetoric when dealing with international relations? Western
media decided to pay little attention to Biden's statements, yet his words have stunned Moscow. As
reported by the Nation:
" Biden's statement, which clearly had been planned by the White House, could scarcely have
been more dangerous or reckless - especially considering that there is no actual evidence or logic
for the two allegations against Russia that seem to have prompted it."
The statements will not come without any measured response from Russia. According to presidential
spokesman Dmitry Peskov, Russia's
response
is well underway:
"The fact is, US unpredictability and aggression keep growing, and such threats against Moscow
and our country's leadership are unprecedented, because the threat is being announced at the level
of the US Vice President. Of course, given such an aggressive, unpredictable line, we have to
take measures to protect our interests, somehow hedge the risks."
The fact that our media refuses to pay attention to the dangers of our own establishment in sending
warnings to adverse nuclear powers based on unasserted allegations shows our media is playing a very
dangerous game with us - the people. This attempt to pull the wool over our eyes and prepare us for
a direct confrontation with Russia can be seen clearly in the battle for Aleppo, Syria.
As the Nation astutely noted:
"Only a few weeks ago, President Obama had agreed with Putin on a joint US-Russian military
campaign against 'terrorists' in Aleppo. That agreement collapsed primarily because of an
attack by US warplanes
on Syrian forces. Russia and its Syrian allies continued their air assault on east Aleppo now,
according to Washington and the mainstream media, against anti-Assad 'rebels.' Where, asks Cohen,
have the jihad terrorists gone? They had been deleted from the US narrative, which now accused
Russia of 'war crimes' in Aleppo for the same military campaign in which Washington was to have
been a full partner."
So where is this conflict headed? A top U.S. general, Marine General Joseph Dunford,
told the
Senate Armed Services Committee in September of this year that the enforcement of a "no-fly zone"
in Syria would mean a U.S. war with both Syria and Russia. Hillary Clinton is well aware of the repercussions
of this war, as she acknowledged in a
secret
speech to Goldman Sachs (recently released by Wikileaks):
"To have a no-fly zone you have to take out all of the air defense, many of which are located
in populated areas. So our missiles, even if they are standoff missiles so we're not putting our
pilots at risk - you're going to kill a lot of Syrians So all of a sudden this intervention that
people talk about so glibly becomes an American and NATO involvement where you take a lot of civilians."
This is the same establishment that has been calling out Russia for allegedly committing war crimes
in Aleppo even though Clinton's proposal would result in far more civilian deaths and likely lead
to a direct war with Russia.
As the war against Syria transitions into a much wider global conflict that could include nuclear
powers Russia and China, our own media is deceiving us by dishonestly reporting on the events leading
up to the
activation of the doomsday clock.
History doesn't occur in a vacuum; when the U.S. and Russia confront each other directly, it won't
be because of a mere incident occurring in Syrian airspace.
It will be because the two nuclear powers have been confronting each other with little resistance
from the corporate media, which keeps us well entertained and preoccupied with political
charades
, celebrity gossip
, and outright
propaganda .
Zacktly. It's the NSA who is leaking the crooked DNC emails. Not Vlad.
MalteseFalcon d 847328_3527 •Oct 23, 2016 8:50 PM
"What are the effects of this kind of rhetoric when dealing with international relations?
"
Consider the source. Biden is a blowhard and an embarassment. He said it for domestic consumption.
Obama knows the Russians are not responsible and he will do nothing.
... "... Several US, Turkish, Saudi, Qatari and British officers were
also killed along with the Israeli officers. The foreign officers who were killed in
the Aleppo operations room were directing the terrorists' attacks in Aleppo and Idlib. ..."
This is why Israhell is furious with this Prez. And why they are seen in the Podesta emails
making sure that none of 'those two-state solution' people get into key foreign/defense posts
under Her Fury.
It's going to be all war, all the time, boys, according to Israeli timetables and objectives.
Unless We The People say NO on Nov. 8 and make it stick.
Interesting that you bring up the "two-state solution" speculation along those lines goes like
this. Clinton & Rabin were working on a two-state solution Rabin was assinated and Clinton was
trolled by a modern day "Esther" to ensnare Clinton and destroy the two-state solution. You heard
it here first on ZH my friend
Anti-colonial agenda. Plus, Barry was bottom bitch to his Paki lover back in the day.
Mandel Bot -> jmack •Oct 23, 2016 8:33 PM
Absolutely. If the US and Russia got together - talk about a SUPERPOWER. The NeoCons are
way too stupid to realize what a win-win this could be.
ebworthen •Oct 23, 2016 7:59 PM
Hitlary and the M.I.C. (and Wall Street/D.C. Imperial City) have no idea how much at risk they
put themselves and the rest of us.
Russia has been here and where America never has been, and they have defeated many, many, a
foe. Abject stupidity to poke the Russian bear and disrespect our agreements post WWII and Cold
War.
Shameful, absolutely shameful! Rot in HELL you D.C. Vichy!
RawPawg •Oct 23, 2016 7:59 PM
Meanwhile...in 'Merica. Sunday afternoon Football stands are Full. very surreal given the times
we live in,eh?
Lost in translation -> RawPawg •Oct 23, 2016 8:23 PM
After I explained that Americans don't care about the Podesta emails as long as the NFL is
on, and have no idea what WikiLeaks is but can tell you everything about the NLCS, Mrs. Lost said...
"Americans marvel at the level and effectiveness of brainwashing in North Korea, and express
shock that North Koreans revere Kim Jung-un as god, but the truth is that Americans are every
bit as brainwashed and just as effectively. The god most Americans worship today is materialism."
The native Orthodox Christian Russian people took back their nation when they collapsed the
Soviet Union and drove the mass murdering Bolsheviks out, many of whom came to the US & EU nations
""You must understand, the leading Bolsheviks who took over Russia were not Russians. They
hated Russians. They hated Christians. Driven by ethnic hatred, they tortured and slaughtered
millions of Russians without a shred of human remorse. It cannot be overstated, Bolshevism
committed the greatest slaughter of all time. The fact that most of the world is ignorant and
uncaring about this enormous crime is proof that the global media is in the hands of the perpetrators"""
Agreed. Just because we have a mad president, please don't think that we Americans are mad
(in the British sense of the word). We wish the Russian people no harm. In fact, many of us, myself
included, cheer your efforts in Syria to wipe out the rabid dogs of ISIS.
Please keep bombing the living shit out of them. And this is important, so please listen carefully...
That's explains vicious campaign by neoliberal MSM against Trump and swiping under the carpet all
criminal deeds of Clinton family. They feel the threat...
Notable quotes:
"... It should be remembered that fascism does not succeed in the real world as a crusade by race-obsessed lumpen. It succeeds when fascists are co-opted by capitalists, as was unambiguously the case in Nazi Germany and Italy. And big business supported fascism because it feared the alternatives: socialism and communism. ..."
"... That's because there is no more effective counter to class consciousness than race consciousness. That's one reason why, in my opinion, socialism hasn't done a better job of catching on in the United States. The contradictions between black and white labor formed a ready-made wedge. ..."
It should be remembered that fascism does not succeed in the real world as a crusade by
race-obsessed lumpen. It succeeds when fascists are co-opted by capitalists, as was unambiguously
the case in Nazi Germany and Italy. And big business supported fascism because it feared the alternatives:
socialism and communism.
That's because there is no more effective counter to class consciousness than race consciousness.
That's one reason why, in my opinion, socialism hasn't done a better job of catching on in the
United States. The contradictions between black and white labor formed a ready-made wedge.
The North's abhorrence at the spread of slavery into the American West before the Civil War
had more to do a desire to preserve these new realms for "free" labor-"free" in one context, from
the competition of slave labor-than egalitarian principle.[…]
There is more to Clintonism, I think, than simply playing the "identity politics" card to
screw Bernie Sanders or discombobulate the Trump campaign. "Identity politics" is near the core
of the Clintonian agenda as a bulwark against any class/populist upheaval that might threaten
her brand of billionaire-friendly liberalism.
In other words it's all part of a grand plan when the Clintonoids aren't busy debating the finer
points of her marketing and "mark"–a term normally applied to the graphic logo on a commercial product.
"... I would agree that Trump is horrible candidate. The candidate who (like Hillary) suggests complete degeneration of the US neoliberal elite. ..."
"... But the problem is that Hillary is even worse. Much worse and more dangerous because in addition to being a closet Republican she is also a warmonger. In foreign policy area she is John McCain in pantsuit. And if you believe that after one hour in White House she does not abandon all her election promises and start behaving like a far-right republican in foreign policy and a moderate republican in domestic policy, it's you who drunk too much Cool Aid. ..."
"... In other words, the USA [workers and middle class] now is in the political position that in chess is called Zugzwang: we face a choice between the compulsive liar, unrepentant, extremely dangerous and unstable warmonger with failing health vs. a bombastic, completely unprepared to governance of such a huge country crook. ..."
The key problems with Democratic Party and Hillary is that they lost working class and middle
class voters, becoming another party of highly paid professionals and Wall Street speculators
(let's say top 10%, not just 1%), the party of neoliberal elite.
It will be interesting to see if yet another attempt to "bait and switch" working class and
lower middle class works this time. I think it will not. Even upper middle class is very resentful
of Democrats and Hillary. So many votes will be not "for" but "against". This is the scenario
Democratic strategists fear the most, but they can do nothing about it.
She overplayed "identity politics" card. Her "identity politics" and her fake feminism are
completely insincere. She is completely numb to human suffering and interests of females and minorities.
Looks like she has a total lack of empathy for other people.
"What scares me is my knowledge of her career-long investment in trying to convince the
generals and the admirals that she is a 'tough bitch', ala Margaret Thatcher, who will not
hesitate to pull the trigger. An illuminating article in the NY Times (
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/24/magazine/how-hillary-clinton-became-a-hawk.html ) revealed
that she always advocates the most muscular and reckless dispositions of U.S. military forces
whenever her opinion is solicited. "
Usually people are resentful about Party which betrayed them so many times. It would be interesting
to see how this will play this time.
Beverly Mann October 23, 2016 12:00 pm
It will be interesting to see if yet another attempt to "bait and switch" working class and
lower middle class works this time?
Yup. The Republicans definitely have the interests of the working class and lower middle class
at heart when they give, and propose, ever deeper tax cuts for the wealthy, the repeal of the
estate tax that by now applies only to estates of more than $5 million, complete deregulation
of the finance industry, industry capture of every federal regulatory agency and cabinet department
and commission or board, from the SEC, to the EPA, to the Interior Dept. (in order to hand over
to the oil, gas and timber industries vast parts of federal lands), the FDA, the FTC, the FCC,
the NLRB, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and the Justice Dept. (including the Antitrust
Division)-to name only some.
And OF COURSE it's to serve the interests of the working class and lower middle class that
they concertedly appoint Supreme Court justices and lower federal court judges that are unabashed
proxies of big business.
And then there's the incessant push to privatize Social Security and Medicare. It ain't the
Dems that are pushing that.
You're drinking wayyy too much Kool Aid, likbez. Or maybe just reading too much Ayn Rand, at
Paul Ryan's recommendation.
beene October 23, 2016 10:31 am
I would suggest despite most of the elite in both parties supporting Hillary, and saying
she has the election in the bag is premature. In my opinion the fact that Trump rallies still
has large attendance; where Hillary's rallies would have trouble filling up a large room is a
better indication that Trump will win.
Even democrats are not voting democratic this time to be ignored till election again.
likbez October 23, 2016 12:56 pm
Beverly,
=== quote ===
Yup. The Republicans definitely have the interests of the working class and lower middle class
at heart when they give, and propose, ever deeper tax cuts for the wealthy, the repeal of the
estate tax that by now applies only to estates of more than $5 million, complete deregulation
of the finance industry, industry capture of every federal regulatory agency and cabinet department
and commission or board, from the SEC, to the EPA, to the Interior Dept. (in order to hand
over to the oil, gas and timber industries vast parts of federal lands), the FDA, the FTC,
the FCC, the NLRB, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and the Justice Dept. (including
the Antitrust Division) -- to name only some.
And OF COURSE it's to serve the interests of the working class and lower middle class that
they concertedly appoint Supreme Court justices and lower federal court judges that are unabashed
proxies of big business.
=== end of quote ===
This is all true. But Trump essentially running not as a Republican but as an independent on
(mostly) populist platform (with elements of nativism). That's why a large part of Republican
brass explicitly abandoned him. That does not exclude that he easily will be co-opted after the
election, if he wins.
And I would not be surprised one bit if Dick Cheney, Victoria Nuland, Paul Wolfowitz and Perle
vote for Hillary. Robert Kagan and papa Bush already declared such an intention. She is a neocon.
A wolf in sheep clothing, if we are talking about real anti-war democrats, not the USA brand of
DemoRats. She is crazy warmonger, no question about it, trying to compensate a complete lack of
diplomatic skills with jingoism and saber rattling.
The problem here might be that you implicitly idealize Hillary and demonize Trump.
I would agree that Trump is horrible candidate. The candidate who (like Hillary) suggests
complete degeneration of the US neoliberal elite.
But the problem is that Hillary is even worse. Much worse and more dangerous because in
addition to being a closet Republican she is also a warmonger. In foreign policy area she is John
McCain in pantsuit. And if you believe that after one hour in White House she does not abandon
all her election promises and start behaving like a far-right republican in foreign policy and
a moderate republican in domestic policy, it's you who drunk too much Cool Aid.
That's what classic neoliberal DemoRats "bait and switch" maneuver (previously executed
by Obama two times) means. And that's why working class now abandoned Democratic Party. Even unions
members of unions which endorses Clinton are expected to vote 3:1 against her. Serial betrayal
of interests of working class (and lower middle class) after 25 years gets on nerve. Not that
their choice is wise, but they made a choice. This is "What's the matter with Kansas" all over
again.
It reminds me the situation when Stalin was asked whether right revisionism of Marxism (social
democrats) or left (Trotskyites with their dream of World revolution) is better. He answered "both
are worse" :-).
In other words, the USA [workers and middle class] now is in the political position that
in chess is called Zugzwang: we face a choice between the compulsive liar, unrepentant, extremely
dangerous and unstable warmonger with failing health vs. a bombastic, completely unprepared to
governance of such a huge country crook.
Of course, we need also remember about existence of "deep state" which make each of
them mostly a figurehead, but still the power of "deep state" is not absolute and this is a very
sad situation.
Beverly Mann, October 23, 2016 1:57 pm
Good grace.
Two points: First, you apparently are unaware of Trump's proposed tax plan, written by Heritage
Foundation economists and political-think-tank types. It's literally more regressively extreme
evn than Paul Ryan's. It gives tax cuts to the wealthy that are exponentially more generous percentage-wise
than G.W. Bush's two tax cuts together were, it eliminates the estate tax, and it gives massive
tax cuts to corporations, including yuge ones.
Two billionaire Hamptons-based hedge funders, Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, have
been funding a super PAC for Trump and since late spring have met with Trump and handed him policy
proposals and suggestions for administrative agency heads and judicial appointments. Other yuge
funders are members of the Ricketts family, including Thomas Ricketts, CEO of TD Ameritrade and
a son of its founder.
Two other billionaires funding Trump: Forrest Lucas, founder of Lucas Oil and reportedly Trump's
choice for Interior Secretary if you and the working class and lower middle class folks whose
interests Trump has at heart get their way.
And then there's Texas oil billionaire Harold Hamm, Trump's very first billionaire mega-donor.
One of my recurring pet peeves about Clinton and her campaign is her failure to tell the public
that these billionaires are contributing mega-bucks to help fund Trump's campaign, and to tell
the public who exactly they are. As well as her failure to make a concerted effort to educate
the public about the the specifics of Trump's fiscal and deregulatory agenda as he has published
it.
As for your belief that I idealize Clinton, you obviously are very new to Angry Bear. I was
a virulent Sanders supporter throughout the primaries, to the very end. In 2008 I originally supported
John Edwards during the primaries and then, when it became clear that it was a two-candidate race,
supported Obama. My reason? I really, really, REALLY did not want to see another triangulation
Democratic administration. That's largely what we got during Obama's first term, though, and I
was not happy about it.
Bottom line: I'm not the gullible one here. You are.
likbez, October 23, 2016 2:37 pm
You demonstrate complete inability to weight the gravity of two dismal, but unequal in their
gravity options.
All your arguments about Supreme Court justices, taxes, inheritance and other similar things
make sense if and only if the country continues to exist.
Which is not given due to the craziness and the level of degeneration of neoliberal elite and
specifically Hillary ("no fly zone in Syria" is one example of her craziness). Playing chickens
with a nuclear power for the sake of proving imperial dominance in Middle East is a crazy policy.
Neocons rule the roost in both parties, which essentially became a single War Party with two
wings. Trump looks like the only chance somewhat to limit their influence and reach some détente
with Russia.
Looks like you organically unable to understand that your choice in this particular case is
between the decimation of the last remnants of the New Deal and a real chance of WWIII.
This is not "pick your poison" situation. Those are two events of completely difference magnitude:
one is reversible (and please note that Trump is bound by very controversial obligations to his
electorate and faces hostile Congress), the other is not.
We all should do our best to prevent the unleashing WWIII even if that means temporary decimation
of the remnants of New Deal.
Neoliberalism after 2008 entered zombie state, so while it is still strong, aggressive and
bloodthirsty it might not last for long. And in such case the defeat of democratic forces on domestic
front is temporary.
"As president, I will make it clear that the United States will treat cyberattacks just
like any other attack," the Democratic presidential nominee said. "We will be ready with serious
political, economic and military responses. "
We need to tell everyone that for the sake of the word. do not vote for this
dangerous woman!
"... Hillary Clinton did not just pay mercenaries to assault Trump supporters, she also violated the law on several occasions. ..."
"... In Illinois, Trump will be citing the Illinois criminal statute. The Mob action is a Class Four felony punishable by 3-6 years in prison and a $25,000 fine for each charge in Illinois. When Trump brings forward the paperwork, he very well could charge anyone associated with helping, planning, organizing, or paying anyone to commit acts of violence–which would include Hillary Clinton. ..."
In Illinois, Trump will be citing the Illinois criminal statute. The Mob action is a Class
Four felony punishable by 3-6 years in prison and a $25,000 fine for each charge in Illinois.
When Trump brings forward the paperwork, he very well could charge anyone associated with helping,
planning, organizing, or paying anyone to commit acts of violence–which would include Hillary
Clinton.
In Illinois, statute reads as follows:
A person commits mob action when he or she engages in any of the following:
The knowing or reckless use of force or violence disturbing the public peace by 2 or more persons
acting together and without authority of law;
The knowing assembly of 2 or more persons with the intent to commit or facilitate the commission
of a felony or misdemeanor; or
The knowing assembly of 2 or more persons, without authority of law, for the purpose of doing
violence to the person or property of anyone supposed to have been guilty of a violation of the
law, or for the purpose of exercising correctional powers or regulative powers over any person
by violence.
Donald Trump would win this case easily, but he is not stopping in Illinois. Trump and his
team have indicated that he will also be suing for the brutal attacks that occurred in San Diego,
California.
"... And continued and constant propaganda-peddling that the race is over because Trump's sexual assault allegations are "sucking all the air out of the room" compared to Hillary's stream of WikiLeaks facts. ..."
"... CNN made the mistake of asking its focus group of real Americans who won the final debate... and instantly regretted it... ..."
"... The media is just going to claim a winner on election night no matter what happens. You can't know otherwise. ..."
"... I know that in my day to day dealings, as a businessman and as a private individual, I am taking every opportunity to fuck over the main stream media and anyone that works in it, hard and without mercy. ..."
"... As Trump said CNN, CBS, NBC, ABC, Wash Post, NYT working hard to elect Hillary Rodent. ..."
"... Rep Sheila Jackson (D) continues to embarrass herself by denouncing Wikipedia for engaging in espionage. ..."
And continued and constant propaganda-peddling that the race is over because Trump's sexual
assault
allegations are "sucking all the air out of the room" compared to Hillary's stream of WikiLeaks facts.
CNN made the mistake of asking its focus group of real Americans who won the final debate...
and instantly regretted it...
I know that in my day to day dealings, as a businessman and as a private individual, I am taking
every opportunity to fuck over the main stream media and anyone that works in it, hard and without
mercy.
These opportunities are many and significant. I am enjoying it. Consequences, bitchezzz!!!
As Trump said CNN, CBS, NBC, ABC, Wash Post, NYT working hard to elect Hillary Rodent.
Rep Sheila Jackson (D) continues to embarrass herself by denouncing Wikipedia for engaging
in espionage.
She is the congresswoman from Mars
Claimed we sent a man to Mars
We won the Vietnam war
Hurricanes need more diverse names
Wore a gold Hillary Clinton campaign pin Wednesday to a House Judiciary Committee hearing on
the FBI investigation into Clinton's private email server.
In a lengthy speech on Saturday night in Manheim, Pennsylvania, Republican nominee for president
Donald J. Trump lambasted his opponent Democratic nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton for a secret tape
recording of her bashing supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont-and even called for Clinton
to be placed in prison and questioned as to whether she has been loyal to her husband former President
Bill Clinton.
Trump said in the speech on Saturday night:
A new audio tape that has surfaced just yesterday from another one of Hillary's high roller
fundraisers shows her demeaning and mocking Bernie Sanders and all of his supporters. You know,
and I'll tell you something we have a much bigger movement that Bernie Sanders ever had. We have
much bigger crowds than Sanders ever had. And we have a more important movement than Bernie Sanders
ever had because we're going to save our country, okay? We're going to save our country. But I
can tell you Bernie Sanders would have left a great, great legacy had he not made the deal with
the devil. He would have really left a great legacy. Now he shows up and 120 people come in to
hear him talk. Bernie Sanders would have left a great legacy had he not made the deal, had he
held his head high and walked away. Now he's on the other side perhaps from us and we want to
get along with everybody and we will-we're going to unite the country-but what Bernie Sanders
did to his supporters was very, very unfair. And they're really not his supporters any longer
and they're not going to support Hillary Clinton. I really believe a lot of those people are coming
over and largely because of trade, college education, lots of other things-but largely because
of trade, they're coming over to our side-you watch, you watch. Especially after Hillary mocks
him and mocks all of those people by attacking him and his supporters as 'living in their parents'
basements,' and trapped in dead-end careers. That's not what they are.
Also in his speech on Saturday night, Trump summed up exactly what came out in the latest Hillary
Clinton tapes in which she mocks Sanders supporters:
She describes many of them as ignorant, and [that] they want the United States to be more like
Scandinavia but that 'half the people don't know what that means' in a really sarcastic tone because
she's a sarcastic woman. To sum up, and I'll tell you the other thing-she's an incompetent woman.
She's an incompetent woman. I've seen it. Just take a look at what she touches. It never works
out, and you watch: her run for the presidency will never ever work out because we can't let it
work out. To sum up, Hillary Clinton thinks Bernie supporters are hopeless and ignorant basement
dwellers. Then, of course, she thinks people who vote for and follow us are deplorable and irredeemable.
I don't think so. I don't think so. We have the smartest people, we have the sharpest people,
we have the most amazing people, and you know in all of the years of this country they say, even
the pundits-most of them aren't worth the ground they're standing on, some of that ground could
be fairly wealthy but ground, but most of these people say they have never seen a phenomenon like
is going on. We have crowds like this wherever we go.
WATCH THE FULL SPEECH:
Later in the speech, Trump came back to the tape again and hammered her once more for it.
"Hillary Clinton all but said that most of the country is racist, including the men and women
of law enforcement," Trump said. "She said that the other night. Did anybody like Lester Holt? Did
anybody question her when she said that? No, she said it the other night. [If] you're not a die hard
Clinton fan-you're not a supporter-from Day One, Hillary Clinton thinks you are a defective person.
That's what she's going around saying."
In the speech, Trump questioned whether Clinton has the moral authority to lead when she considers
the majority of Americans-Trump supporters and Sanders supporters-to be "defective" people. And he
went so far as saying that Clinton "should be in prison." He went on:
How on earth can Hillary Clinton try to lead this country when she has nothing but contempt
for the people who live in this country? She's got contempt. First of all, she's got so many scandals
and she's been caught cheating so much. One of the worst things I've ever witnessed as a citizen
of the United States was last week when the FBI director was trying so hard to explain how she
away with what she got away with, because she should be in prison. Let me tell you. She should
be in prison. She's being totally protected by the New York Times and the Washington Post and
all of the media and CNN-Clinton News Network-which nobody is watching anyway so what difference
does it make? Don't even watch it. But she's being protected by many of these groups. It's not
like do you think she's guilty? They've actually admitted she's guilty. And then she lies and
lies, 33,000 emails deleted, bleached, acid-washed! And then they take their phones and they hammer
the hell out of them. How many people have acid washed or bleached a Tweet? How many?
He returned to the secret Clinton tape a little while later:
Hillary Clinton slanders and attacks anyone who wants to put America First, whether they
are Trump Voters or Bernie Voters. What she said about Bernie voters amazing. Like the European
Union, she wants to erase our borders and she wants to do it for her donors and she wants people
to pour into country without knowing who they are.
Trump later bashed the media as "dishonest as hell" when calling on the reporters at his event
to "turn your cameras" to show the crowd that came to see him.
"If they showed the kind of crowds we have-which people can hear, you know it's interesting: you
can hear the crowd when you hear the television but if they showed the crowd it would be better television,
but they don't know much about that. But it would actually be better television," Trump said.
Trump also questioned whether Hillary Clinton has been loyal to her husband, former President
Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton has been known to cheat on Hillary Clinton with a variety of mistresses
and has been accused of rape and sexual assault by some women.
"Hillary Clinton's only loyalty is to her financial contributors and to herself," Trump
said. "I don't even think she's loyal to Bill, if you want to know the truth. And really, folks,
really: Why should she be, right? Why should she be?"
Throughout the speech, Trump weaved together references to his new campaign theme about Clinton-"Follow
The Money"-with details about the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal. He said:
We're going to take on the corrupt media, the powerful lobbyists and the special interests
that have stolen your jobs, your factories, and your future-that's exactly what's happened. We're
going to stop Hillary Clinton from continuing to raid the industry from your state for her profit.
Hillary Clinton has collected millions of dollars from the same global corporations shipping
your jobs and your dreams to other countries. You know it and everybody else knows it. That's
why Clinton, if she ever got the chance, would 100 percent approve Trans Pacific Partnership-a
total disastrous trade deal. She called the deal the 'gold standard.' The TPP will bring economic
devastation to Pennsylvania and our campaign is the only chance to stop that and other bad things
that are happening to our country. She lied about the Gold Standard the other night at the debate.
She said she didn't say it-she said it. We want to stop the Trans Pacific Partnership and if we
don't-remember this, if we don't stop it, billions and billions [of dollars] in jobs and wealth
will be vacuumed right out of Pennsylvania and sent to these other countries. Just like NAFTA
was a disaster, this will be a disaster. Frankly I don't think it'll be as bad as NAFTA. It can't
get any worse than that-signed by Bill Clinton. All of us here in this massive room here tonight
can prevent this from happening. Together we can stop TPP and we can end the theft of American
jobs and prosperity.
Trump praised Sanders for being strongly opposed to the TPP:
I knew one man-I'm not a big fan-but one man who knew the dangers of the TPP was Bernie
Sanders. Crazy Bernie. He was right about one thing, only one thing, and that was trade. He was
right about it because he knew we were getting ripped off, but he wouldn't be able to do anything
about it . We're going to do a lot about it. We're going to have those highways running the
opposite direction. We're going to have a lot of trade, but it's going to come into our country.
We are going to start benefitting our country because right now it's one way road to trouble.
Our jobs leave us, our money leaves us. With Mexico, we get the drugs-they get the cash-it's that
simple.
Hillary Clinton, Trump noted, is "controlled by global special interests."
"She's on the opposite side of Bernie on the trade issue," Trump said. "She's totally on the opposite
side of Bernie."
He circled back to trade a bit later in the more-than-hour-long speech, hammering TPP and Clinton
cash connections. Trump continued:
Three TPP member countries gave between $6 and $15 million to Clinton. At least four lobbyists
who are actively lobbying for TPP passage have raised more than $800,000 for her campaign. I'm
just telling you Pennsylvania, we're going to make it. We're going to make it. We're going to
make it if we have Pennsylvania for sure. It'll be easy. But you cannot let this pass. NAFTA passed.
It's been the worst trade deal probably ever passed, not in this country but anywhere in the world.
It cleaned out New England. It cleaned out big portions of Pennsylvania. It cleaned out big portions
of Ohio and North Carolina and South Carolina-you can't let it happen.
Trump even called the politicians like Clinton "bloodsuckers" who have let America be drained
out of millions upon millions of jobs.
"These bloodsuckers want it to happen," Trump said. "They're politicians that are getting taken
care of by people that want it to happen. Other countries want it to happen because it's good for
them, but it's not good for us. So hopefully you're not going to let it happen. Whatever Hillary's
donors want, they get. They own her. On Nov. 8, we're going to end Clinton corruption. Hillary Clinton,
dishonest person, is an insider fighting for herself and for her friends. I'm an outsider fighting
for you. And by the way, just in case you're not aware, I used to be an insider but I thought this
was the right thing to do. This is the right thing to do, believe me."
"... in accordance with the prevailing American ideology, one can complain all they want about the system and pose limited questions why things are the way they are. But one is not allowed to seriously question the basis of the system without being labeled a heretic and banished to the hinterlands where demons and dragons reside. ..."
"... A perfect example is the setup we all witnessed during the final debate between Clinton and Trump. The Presidential Debates are long established ideological rituals designed to reinforce and affirm faith and belief in the system. They are part and parcel of the supporting façade the election process represents to the controlling meme. "We the People" select one of 'us' to travel to the capital city where rules and laws are enacted to protect 'us' from enemies foreign and domestic while at the same time enriching 'our' lives. ..."
"... It was no accident of chance the last question posed to both 'candidates' (would they accept and support the election results if they lose) was essentially a pledge of allegiance to the ideological ethos. And for Trump, the self appointed establishment heretic, it was a trap designed to fully ensnare and expel him, and his heathen campaign, into the fires of faithless hell. But by doing so the heretics are also affirmed in their belief both in their leader and their cause. ..."
"... Nor was it an accident Trump was chosen first to answer while the priest's favored candidate (whom I suspect was already alerted to the deception) sat ready to embrace the system and reject the wrong thinking dissenter. ..."
"... Of all the barbs and venom exchanged between the two candidates, is it really surprising at all that every major mainstream news outlet, known collectively as the mouthpiece of the ideological priests, led the next morning's ' news ' with huge headlines about the final nonconforming utterance from Trump? ..."
"... Burn the bastard at the stake, the angry priests wail in agony ..."
"... The more a prevailing political meme strays from its founding ideology, meaning in this case crony corruption and political favoritism, the tighter the screws must be turned to drive the antithetical strays back toward the center. And the place to begin this process is with its leadership, either established or budding. Uncharacteristically, the heretical plebes have long been without acknowledged leadership until Trump arrived on the scene. ..."
"... Whether he is controlled opposition, useful puppet or exactly who he appears to be, Trump has succeeded in flushing the misfits and malcontents from the redoubt woodpile and out into the open. This may be precisely why Trump was allowed to get this far and not promptly buried under the end zone in the new Giants Stadium when he first appeared on the political scene. ..."
"... How is it that political novice Trump not only appeared on the scene, but ascended the obviously rigged primary system to become the Republican nominee? Ron Paul (and others) knocked on this same door for decades and were quickly dispatched each time using time honored control techniques. Why not Trump? Because his time has come? Because he's the one? ..."
"... This is not to say Hillary Clinton isn't also being propelled forward by the very same mechanism that has empowered Trump. If " The Donald " is flawed, Hillary Clinton is mortally impaired. And it would made perfect sense from the control system's perspective to match or exceed the glaring imperfections of one candidate (Trump) with an even more egregious example of crony capitalism run riot in the other (Clinton). The great white hope verses establishment lackey and career criminal. The choice couldn't be both clearer and more obscure than as presented for your electoral blessing. ..."
"... This is the principal reason why I expect Trump to ' win ' this election, if not by hook then by mainstream crook. The crony capitalists represented by Clinton have had their fill at the public feeding trough and are more than capable of fending for their selves during the next spiraling leg downward. But those who had previously abandoned all hope, and thus were primed for more drastic (read destructive) measures if not properly corralled, have once again been engaged in the political system and have thrown their support behind the white knight. ..."
"... The golden rule of dying ideological Empires is simplicity itself. What it cannot subvert or corrupt it destroys. Significant and healing change cannot, and therefore will not, originate from within the Empire for that would disenfranchise the powerful priests, the hanger-on's and sycophants. ..."
"... Orders of magnitude hotter than burning magnesium, any effort made to dampen or disperse the white hot insanity of the dying Empire, either from within or externally, only succeeds in spreading and intensifying the Luciferian conflagration. Simply stated, madness breeds more madness. ..."
"... In my opinion this is the only explanation for the blatant media bias against Trump combined with the obviously scripted non media responses to all things Clinton, the in-your-face rigging and distortions of the political process ..."
"... Plato described the inability of a group of (ideological) prisoners chained in a cave to interpret reality based solely upon the play of shadows projected upon the stone wall in front of them. The utter futility of their efforts is only revealed when one prisoner frees himself, enabling him to fully view the puppeteers behind them creating the illusion. ..."
This is why, in accordance with the prevailing American ideology, one can complain all they want
about the system and pose limited questions why things are the way they are. But one is not allowed
to seriously question the basis of the system without being labeled a heretic and banished to the
hinterlands where demons and dragons reside.
A perfect example is the setup we all witnessed
during the final debate between Clinton and Trump. The Presidential Debates are long established
ideological rituals designed to reinforce and affirm faith and belief in the system. They are part
and parcel of the supporting façade the election process represents to the controlling meme. "We
the People" select one of 'us' to travel to the capital city where rules and laws are enacted to
protect 'us' from enemies foreign and domestic while at the same time enriching 'our' lives.
It was no accident of chance the last question posed to both 'candidates' (would they accept
and support the election results if they lose) was essentially a pledge of allegiance to the ideological
ethos. And for Trump, the self appointed establishment heretic, it was a trap designed to fully ensnare
and expel him, and his heathen campaign, into the fires of faithless hell. But by doing so the heretics
are also affirmed in their belief both in their leader and their cause.
Nor was it an accident Trump was chosen first to answer while the priest's favored candidate (whom
I suspect was already alerted to the deception) sat ready to embrace the system and reject the wrong
thinking dissenter.
Of all the barbs and venom exchanged between the two candidates, is it really
surprising at all that every major mainstream news outlet, known collectively as the mouthpiece of
the ideological priests, led the next morning's 'news' with huge headlines about the final
nonconforming utterance from Trump?
Burn the bastard at the stake, the angry priests wail in agony, their power and prestige coming
under serious attack from the process itself. Or so they piously claim.
The more a prevailing political meme strays from its founding ideology, meaning in this case
crony corruption and political favoritism, the tighter the screws must be turned to drive the antithetical
strays back toward the center. And the place to begin this process is with its leadership, either
established or budding. Uncharacteristically, the heretical plebes have long been without acknowledged
leadership until Trump arrived on the scene.
Regardless of who or what Donald Trump truly is, the long suffering and rapidly increasing ranks
of the disenfranchised and disillusioned have rallied around The Donald, elevating him to the revolutionary
figurehead of 'The Movement' determined to drain the ideological swamp that is present day
Washington DC.
Whether he is controlled opposition, useful puppet or exactly who he appears to be, Trump
has succeeded in flushing the misfits and malcontents from the redoubt woodpile and out into the
open. This may be precisely why Trump was allowed to get this far and not promptly buried under the
end zone in the new Giants Stadium when he first appeared on the political scene.
Since one must never be allowed to seriously question the system (because the doubt it raises
is threatening to the system) if one does question and is allowed to continue and even flourish (ala
Trump) there must be a hidden reason for this heretical event to occur 'naturally'.
Therefore to naively believe the priest's controllers have lost mastery over their ideology simply
because a heretic has appeared and is growing amongst their ranks is to misunderstand the methods
employed, honed and refined over thousands of years by those very same priests and their descendants,
regardless of the prevailing controlling meme. They've been doing this for thousands of years folks
and are quite accomplished at their craft.
How is it that political novice Trump not only appeared on the scene, but ascended the obviously
rigged primary system to become the Republican nominee? Ron Paul (and others) knocked on this same
door for decades and were quickly dispatched each time using time honored control techniques. Why
not Trump? Because his time has come? Because he's the one?
Really?
I do not disagree with those who carefully document the growing instability of the dominant socioeconomic/political
system. There is little doubt large and widening cracks are appearing in the carefully constructed
and nurtured ideological façade.
But to believe the Empire is so close to collapse that a revolutionary could slip between the
cracks and come within a few weeks of ascending to the throne is, in my humble opinion, pushing it
just a wee bit too far. Those shadows on the cave wall have little to no relation to reality.
Take the time to study the disruptive techniques used by the ideological establishment to co-opt
and control the last attempted American revolution, that of the anti war generation of the 60's and
early 70's. Nearly every counter cultural uprising during that period of time was thoroughly infiltrated
and sometimes directly controlled by operatives. To think this isn't happening today with the massive
increase in intrusive spy technology is to remain firmly planted in La-La Land.
Trump's popularity among the great unwashed is a product of the mainstream media, the very same
control device used on a daily basis to feed the indentured population its ration of
Soma. However, in an effort
to turn Trump into a super magnet for the downtrodden, the mainstream media needed to employ reverse
psychology and condemn that which they wished to empower with credibility. Quite frankly, this only
works if the population is so desperate for salvation to appear they would accept such a psychologically
flawed and egotistic front man as Donald Trump.
That alone doesn't necessarily make Trump an establishment 'made man'. But while he wasn't
breast fed at the political nipple, he certainly isn't an 'outsider' by any stretch of the
imagination. And yet here he is……the embodiment of all the hopes and dreams of a vast cross section
of disaffected and disenfranchised. It just doesn't get any better than this.
This is not to say Hillary Clinton isn't also being propelled forward by the very same mechanism
that has empowered Trump. If "The Donald" is flawed, Hillary Clinton is mortally impaired.
And it would made perfect sense from the control system's perspective to match or exceed the glaring
imperfections of one candidate (Trump) with an even more egregious example of crony capitalism run
riot in the other (Clinton). The great white hope verses establishment lackey and career criminal.
The choice couldn't be both clearer and more obscure than as presented for your electoral blessing.
And ultimately this may be the purpose for this obviously concocted and orchestrated charade.
The last stage of a dying Empire is the looting of the weak from within by the elite. When the barbarians
finally break through the outer gates, all they will find are empty vaults and the scattered remains
of a desperate native population, the valuables having long ago been strip-mined and spirited away.
But before this point in the end game can be reached, the natives must be held in place long enough
for the final rape to commence. As public confidence in a political solution dissipates and restlessness
(some might say desperation) grows, a false hope and belief must be re-instilled in various sub factions
of the population in order to draw them back in, ultimately imprisoned by their own ideological bent.
This occurred in 2008 with the great black hope, Barrack Obama, and once again is happening in
2016 with the great white hope, Donald Trump. Both of these individuals, while presenting as one
would expect political outsiders to appear, were/are deeply conflicted and entangled. Don't forget
Obama was a political newbie with only a few years in public office before being miraculously elevated
to the highest office in the land. It is more than coincidence they both talk a thoroughly convincing
game to the sub-set they were created to enthrall.
This is the principal reason why I expect Trump to 'win' this election, if not by hook
then by mainstream crook. The crony capitalists represented by Clinton have had their fill at the
public feeding trough and are more than capable of fending for their selves during the next spiraling
leg downward. But those who had previously abandoned all hope, and thus were primed for more drastic
(read destructive) measures if not properly corralled, have once again been engaged in the political
system and have thrown their support behind the white knight.
All the king's horse's and all the king's men couldn't put the Empire
back together again.
Emotionally stabilized and increasingly mesmerized, the plebes are now ripe for the rape if for
no other reason than they will wait and see if the revolution is actually tweeted and originates
from the White House.
I suspect 'they' will be severely disappointed.
The golden rule of dying ideological Empires is simplicity itself. What it cannot subvert or corrupt
it destroys. Significant and healing change cannot, and therefore will not, originate from within
the Empire for that would disenfranchise the powerful priests, the hanger-on's and sycophants.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely and power in the hands of the corrupt is never relinquished,
only forcefully taken and then passed from one dirty hand to the next. This renders any discussion
of a positive healthy change from within moot and a non starter.
This is an insanity very few understand when viewed from a distance, an all encompassing madness
that is always underestimated in its ferocity and velocity. When face to face with this evil phenomenon,
few have the strength of will to stand their ground, let alone survive the encounter. Evil madness
of this magnitude always self consumes and can never be extinguished by an external force.
Orders of magnitude hotter than burning magnesium, any effort made to dampen or disperse the white
hot insanity of the dying Empire, either from within or externally, only succeeds in spreading and
intensifying the Luciferian conflagration. Simply stated, madness breeds more madness. To
engage the madness is to feed the insanity.
In my opinion this is the only explanation for the blatant media bias against Trump combined
with the obviously scripted non media responses to all things Clinton, the in-your-face rigging and
distortions of the political process and the incomprehensible capitulation by so many previously
withdrawn and cynical ideological escapees who are willingly walking back into the belly of the political
beast to support a critically flawed and conflicted Trump.
Plato described
the inability of a group of (ideological) prisoners chained in a cave to interpret reality based
solely upon the play of shadows projected upon the stone wall in front of them. The utter futility
of their efforts is only revealed when one prisoner frees himself, enabling him to fully view the
puppeteers behind them creating the illusion.
Unless and until "We the Individuals" engage in a determined and consistent effort
to see beyond our ideological horse blinders and fully grasp the true nature of our reality, "We
the People" will remain at best mere spectators, and at worst indentured servants, to the
reality puppeteers behind us.
As much as I wish this insanity would just end, I fear we have many miles to go before the final
awakening.
A vote for Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump, the Clinton campaign has suggested in broad ways
and subtle ones, isn't just a vote for a Democrat over a Republican: It's a vote for safety over
risk, steady competence over boastful recklessness, psychological stability in the White House
over ungovernable passions.
This theme has been a winning one for Hillary, in her debates and in the wider campaign, and
for good reason. The perils of a Trump presidency are as distinctive as the candidate himself,
and a vote for Trump makes a long list of worst cases - the Western alliance system's unraveling,
a cycle of domestic radicalization, an accidental economic meltdown, a civilian-military crisis
- more likely than with any normal administration.
Indeed, Trump and his supporters almost admit as much. "We've tried sane, now let's try crazy,"
is basically his campaign's working motto. The promise to be a bull in a china shop is part of
his demagogue's appeal. Some of his more eloquent supporters have analogized a vote for Trump
to storming the cockpit of a hijacked plane, with the likelihood of a plane crash entirely factored
in.
But passing on the plane-crash candidate doesn't mean ignoring the dangers of his rival.
The dangers of a Hillary Clinton presidency are more familiar than Trump's authoritarian
unknowns, because we live with them in our politics already. They're the dangers of elite groupthink,
of Beltway power worship, of a cult of presidential action in the service of dubious ideals. They're
the dangers of a recklessness and radicalism that doesn't recognize itself as either, because
it's convinced that if an idea is mainstream and commonplace among the great and good then it
cannot possibly be folly.
Almost every crisis that has come upon the West in the last 15 years has its roots in this
establishmentarian type of folly. The Iraq War, which liberals prefer to remember as a conflict
conjured by a neoconservative cabal, was actually the work of a bipartisan interventionist consensus,
pushed hard by George W. Bush but embraced as well by a large slice of center-left opinion that
included Tony Blair and more than half of Senate Democrats.
Likewise the financial crisis: Whether you blame financial-services deregulation or happy-go-lucky
housing policy (or both), the policies that helped inflate and pop the bubble were embraced by
both wings of the political establishment. ...
(Crises happen. How are these two linked? The first came about because we were in the throes
of 9/11. The 2nd arguably because we were in the delayed throes of a dot.com bubble collapse.
And with a president who was out of his depth.)
likbez -> Fred C. Dobbs...
== quote ===
The dangers of a Hillary Clinton presidency are more familiar than Trump's authoritarian unknowns,
because we live with them in our politics already. They're the dangers of elite groupthink, of
Beltway power worship, of a cult of presidential action in the service of dubious ideals. They're
the dangers of a recklessness and radicalism that doesn't recognize itself as either, because
it's convinced that if an idea is mainstream and commonplace among the great and good then it
cannot possibly be folly.
=== end of quote ===
That looks like indirect attack on neocons which is atypical for NYT.
IMHO the main danger of Hillary presidency is the danger of WWIII due to her own jingoism and
recklessness as well as outsize neocons influence in her administration (she is the person who
promoted Cheney's associate Victoria Nuland, who got us into Ukrainian mess).
As such outweighs all possible dangers of Trump presidency by a wide margin.
Voting for Hillary is like voting for John McCain in a pantsuit in order to prevent decimation
of the remnants of the New Deal inherent in Trump administration.
Trump at least gives us some chance of détente with Russia.
Also he faces hostile Congress and "deep state", while Hillary is a creature of "deep state",
a marionette, if you wish, which will continue the current disastrous interventionist foreign
policy.
Of course Trump can be co-opted by "deep state" too. That's also a danger.
There is a nice cartoon, probably from Times, that I found at
"... From Clinton to Clinton they have deeply infiltrated the Pentagon, Foggy Bottom, and the three letter agencies. The Fed is their stronghold. How in the world will Trump deal with these rabid "crazies in the basement"? ..."
"... When Putin came to power he inherited a Kremlin every bit as corrupt and traitor-infested as the White House nowadays. As for Russia, she was in pretty much the same sorry shape as the Independent Nazi-run Ukraine. Russia was also run by bankers and AngloZionist puppets and most Russians led miserable lives. ..."
Option two: Trump wins. Problem: he will be completely alone. The Neocons have total, repeat
total, control of the Congress, the media, banking and finance, and the courts. From Clinton
to Clinton they have deeply infiltrated the Pentagon, Foggy Bottom, and the three letter agencies.
The Fed is their stronghold. How in the world will Trump deal with these rabid "crazies in the
basement"?
When Putin came to power he inherited a Kremlin every bit as corrupt and traitor-infested
as the White House nowadays. As for Russia, she was in pretty much the same sorry shape as the
Independent Nazi-run Ukraine. Russia was also run by bankers and AngloZionist puppets and most
Russians led miserable lives.
Their "Russian" they quote, works at, get this, the neocon *Cato Institute* in Wash DC (you would
be correct in assuming they don't mention that) try SourceWatch to get some info on them
The icing on the cake is they refer to the "Balkan Sea" throughout the article, and still haven't
corrected it, they just don't give a hoot anymore about the plebs they make up the dross for :D
Someone want to grab a copy of the page before they trash it?
"... Establishment panic is traceable to another fear: its [neoliberal] ideology, its political religion, is seen by growing millions as a golden calf, a 20th-century god that has failed. ..."
"... After having expunged Christianity from our public life and public square, our establishment installed "democracy" as the new deity, at whose altars we should all worship. And so our schools began to teach. ..."
"... Today, Clintons, Obamas, and Bushes send soldiers and secularist tutors to "establish democracy" among the "lesser breeds without the Law." ..."
"... By suggesting he might not accept the results of a "rigged election," Trump is committing an unpardonable sin. But this new cult, this devotion to a new holy trinity of diversity, democracy, and equality, is of recent vintage and has shallow roots. ..."
"... For none of the three-diversity, equality, democracy-is to be found in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Federalist Papers, or the Pledge of Allegiance. In the pledge, we are a republic. ..."
"... Among many in the silent majority, Clintonian democracy is not an improvement upon the old republic; it is the corruption of it. ..."
"... Consider: six months ago, Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, the Clinton bundler, announced that by executive action he would convert 200,000 convicted felons into eligible voters by November. ..."
"... Yet, some of us recall another time, when Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas wrote in "Points of Rebellion": "We must realize that today's Establishment is the new George III. Whether it will continue to adhere to his tactics, we do not know. If it does, the redress, honored in tradition, is also revolution." ..."
"... Baby-boomer radicals loved it, raising their fists in defiance of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew. But now that it is the populist-nationalist right that is moving beyond the niceties of liberal democracy to save the America that they love, elitist enthusiasm for "revolution" seems more constrained. ..."
What explains the hysteria of the establishment? In a word, fear. The establishment is horrified
at the Donald's defiance because, deep within its soul, it fears that the people for whom Trump speaks
no longer accept its political legitimacy or moral authority. It may rule and run the country, and
may rig the system through mass immigration and a mammoth welfare state so that Middle America is
never again able to elect one of its own. But that establishment, disconnected from the people it
rules, senses, rightly, that it is unloved and even detested.
Having fixed the future, the establishment
finds half of the country looking upon it with the same sullen contempt that our Founding Fathers
came to look upon the overlords Parliament sent to rule them.
Establishment panic is traceable to another fear: its [neoliberal] ideology, its political
religion, is seen by growing millions as a golden calf, a 20th-century god that has failed.
Trump is "talking down our democracy," said a shocked Clinton.
After having expunged Christianity from our public life and public square, our establishment
installed "democracy" as the new deity, at whose altars we should all worship. And so our schools
began to teach.
Half a millennia ago, missionaries and explorers set sail from Spain, England, and France to bring
Christianity to the New World.
Today, Clintons, Obamas, and Bushes send soldiers and secularist tutors to "establish democracy"
among the "lesser breeds without the Law."
Unfortunately, the natives, once democratized, return to their roots and vote for Hezbollah, Hamas,
and the Muslim Brotherhood, using democratic processes and procedures to reestablish their true God.
And Allah is no democrat.
By suggesting he might not accept the results of a "rigged election," Trump is committing
an unpardonable sin. But this new cult, this devotion to a new holy trinity of diversity, democracy,
and equality, is of recent vintage and has shallow roots.
For none of the three-diversity, equality, democracy-is to be found in the Constitution, the
Bill of Rights, the Federalist Papers, or the Pledge of Allegiance. In the pledge, we are a republic.
When Ben Franklin, emerging from the Philadelphia convention, was asked by a woman what kind of
government they had created, he answered, "A republic, if you can keep it."
Among many in the silent majority, Clintonian democracy is not an improvement upon the old
republic; it is the corruption of it.
Consider: six months ago, Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, the Clinton bundler, announced that
by executive action he would convert 200,000 convicted felons into eligible voters by November.
If that is democracy, many will say, to hell with it. And if felons decide the electoral votes
of Virginia, and Virginia decides who is our next U.S. president, are we obligated to honor that
election?
In 1824, Gen. Andrew Jackson ran first in popular and electoral votes. But, short of a majority,
the matter went to the House. There, Speaker Henry Clay and John Quincy Adams delivered the presidency
to Adams-and Adams made Clay secretary of state, putting him on the path to the presidency that had
been taken by Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and Adams himself. Were Jackson's people wrong to regard
as a "corrupt bargain" the deal that robbed the general of the presidency? The establishment also
recoiled in horror from Milwaukee Sheriff Dave Clarke's declaration that it is now "torches and pitchforks
time."
Yet, some of us recall another time, when Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas wrote in
"Points of Rebellion": "We must realize that today's Establishment is the new George III. Whether
it will continue to adhere to his tactics, we do not know. If it does, the redress, honored in tradition,
is also revolution."
Baby-boomer radicals loved it, raising their fists in defiance of Richard Nixon and Spiro
Agnew. But now that it is the populist-nationalist right that is moving beyond the niceties of liberal
democracy to save the America that they love, elitist enthusiasm for "revolution" seems more constrained.
The only way Hillary could be stopped would be if the Republican Party elite stood with Trump,
so Soros and the other donor who owns voting machines could be blocked from flipping/fractionalizing
votes. But that isn't happening. Soros machines are in key swing states like Colorado and Pennsylvania,
and we already have data from the primary that a good 15% (at least) can be flipped, compared to
exit polls/hand counts/paper trail or non-donor machines.
I guess it's still possible, like what happened in the Michigan Democratic primary, that the real
numbers are more like a 10% lead for Trump and they come out in force in unexpected locations, and
Clinton's small, unenthusiastic base stays home, thus making it too difficult to successfully flip.
But I'm trying not to count on something like that, because it seems too close optomism bias driven
"poll unskewing" – I mean, the polls clearly ARE skewed in favor of Hillary, but I doubt they're
off by 15%.
Stein could never take over the Democratic Party. It isn't even clear to me that the Greens could
replace the Democrats, although I do think their massive increase in ballot access this year is a
credit to the party and to Stein. That shows real organizing and management effectiveness.
I started this campaign season advocating for purging Clintonians out of the now hollow Democratic
Party and taking it over. That still seems like the most efficient path to an actual left national
party, in part because our current system is so corrupted and calcified. But I'm not sure it's possible.
At this point, I can imagine a cataclysmic revolution happening during Clinton's term more easily
than a reformed, citizen friendly Democratic Party.
I respect Juan Cole as a scholar, but his political commentary got so muddled in apologizing for
the Libyan disaster. I wrote him several times about problems in the Sahel, particularly among Tuareg,
resulting from the Libyan invasion, but he wriggled out of it, going to Libya and talking about how
great it was there and otherwise excusing the massacre.
Why suggest a no fly zone in Syria that can't be implemented. It is baffling.
Is it really that baffling? Read her emails. The No Fly Zone was the strategy used to destroy Gaddafi.
It's HRC's telegraph for invasion.
Cole misses that when Wallace asked her if she'd shoot down a Russian plan that violated the no-fly
zone, she dodged.
So what are people's sense of Clinton re Russia? Is it hubris, stupidity, or conspiracy, or
some combination of the three? I ask because her Wall Street speeches and foreshadowed Grand Bargain
are clearly conspiratorial; while her nonchalant violation of every security protocol seems pure
hubris; I guess I don't see how war with Russia could really benefit her that much, unless she
thinks it's the one thing that can keep her from being impeached; is that it, or is it something
else that's driving this, or just stupidity?
All the very serious people know the Russians are gonna cave. Who would fight a nuclear war
for Syria/ukraine? They can't match the US conventionally so we can just bleed them till they
let go.
It's been pointed out here that wargame scenarios of Russia vs NATO usually come out with Russia
winning. Why wouldn't that apply to other areas as well?
The War on Terra is getting tiresome and as pointed out above doesn't justify the really big
hardware, aircraft carriers, tanks etc.
They need a bigger enemy to keep the $$$ flowing from the chump taxpayer's pockets to billionaire
Raytheon shareholders' accounts in Panama. She serves Money and Death, and does a really good
job of it. You'd even say she's an expert.
And one point: GE owns NBC, and GE makes billions from war machines. Can't have a president
who might slow down the revenue stream, better yet to get a woman to put a friendly face on WW
III and why we need it so badly. Kinda like getting a young African American to sell health care
extraction and bank crimes and how they're really good, if just more young people would sign up
and if people would just stop "peddling fiction" about how awesome the economy is.
Oops! Good news then, I guess we really do have a diverse and unbiased press with no interest
is furthering the prospects of one candidate over another.
WJ wrote about Clinton on Russia: " Is it hubris, stupidity, or conspiracy, or some combination
of the three?"
Or is it that she thinks that the USA can fight a war against Russia, and win?
I suspect that a lot of the US foreign policy establishment are feeling bullish about their
BMD systems. They feel sure that they have finally escaped the toils of MAD. In other words, they
feel convinced, if it comes down to it, the USA can affordably prevail over Russia in a war at
any level of escalation, even though that would demand that the USA launch first strike.
If you want to see arrogance, just wait to see how that US elite behaves after they
win a major war, and come to enjoy truly unchecked power.
I'm sure. Luckily odds are most of us will be dead before that happens. Because it will either
be a long long time from now OR most of the country will be destroyed before victory can be declared
long enough to gloat.
If it weren't for the fact that it is a such a godawful idea for everyone BUT the elites, I'd
almost like to see the latter possibility which includes the loss of a whole lot of very expensive
"toys". But there are still humans attached to those toys, it will take a lot for them to get
they aren't winning, and even then they won't take responsibility for the massive amounts of damage
their hubris and sociopathy have caused – see Clinton in re either Honduras or Libya or both.
I'm pretty sure the Pentagon does NOT believe that our BMD systems can protect against a full
scale Russian ICBM attack on the US mainland. I would hope if any foreign policy types believed
so, they would be quickly garroted from behind with piano wire.
Then again, maybe they did go ahead and convert a bunch of West Virginia coal mines to luxury
condos, like Dr. Strangelove suggested.
Russia has re-stated their policy not to strike first. By contrast, in 2012 Obama reversed
America's long-standing commitment not to do so.
That we are even discussing this shows just how far the War Party and their money pig-men have
descended into true clinical mental illness territory, Dr. Strangelove has nothing on the levels
of reality-bending criminal insanity of our Dear Leaders.
No idea if this is accurate or not, but Wikipedia states that BMD systems are not effective
against ICBMs, which can now travel at hypersonic (Mach 5-6) speeds delivering up to eight separate
warheads (!) with pinpoint accuracy. So that's something to look forward to.
I do like the piano wire remedy :-{). There are a bunch of people in the State Department that
signed a memo recently that clearly fit the requisite description for its use.
"In the run up to the Iraq War when false intelligence abounded and dominated the discussion,"
The problem is that you see everything through a Donkey vs Elephant prism in stark Manichean terms.
People see the elite lying over the Iraq war - which Trump brags he opposed - and then they see
the elite Hillary and DNC using Russia interference as a way to distract for the content of the leaked
emails.
They don't see Hillary as their champion, just another lying elite.
Obama's NSA chief blatantly lied to the American people and said they weren't spying on us en
masse.
Why should we trust them about anything?
If (when) Hillary is elected I'm sure she'll make Russia pay if it's behind these hacks. Otherwise
Russia is an excuse not to discuss the hacked email.
Maybe Putin is that stupid and he feels threatened over the way Hillary championed the democratic
opposition in a recent election, but it seems to me to be colossally stupid for Russia to pick a
fight with the U.S.
You don't think Hillary is going to push back if (when) she's elected? Given that she's a hawk
and was courting the support of hawks like Paul Wolfowitz during the election she was probably going
to push Russia anyway no matter the hacking.
I think many Americans are deeply skeptical by now of the competence, aims and basic good will
of much of the US foreign policy establishment. Faced with a choice between the Putin approach
to global security and stability, and that represented by the zealot, neocon-tilting HRC wing
of the US establishment, it's a tough call.
Clinton has had abundant opportunity to attempt to distance herself from the many Iraq-era
neocons who are embracing her campaign. She hasn't. That is telling and worrisome.
The crazily prejudiced disdain * that folks at the Economist have for Russia by the way extends
to China. The Economist reflects perfectly the British regret that China is no longer part of
what was a sun-never-sets empire. As for Russia, the prejudiced disdain that has been fostered
by the foreign policy establishment is blinding.
What was the position of the economist on invading Iraq? Right.
Someone who a few months ago told me "no one is stupid enough to want war with Russia", just
this week changed that to "no one wants a hot war" and "we don't have the troops for a hot war"
because well it turns out that Clinton knows the no fly zone will mean war with Russia.
Sadly this is one of the many who think that Clinton is the sane one.
Everything tells me that whatever the real goal (and no it is not obvious what that is) Hillary
Rodham Clinton is stupid enough to not care about war with Russia, doesn't understand that we
don't have the troops for a hot war, and frankly is perfectly willing to play chicken with a nuclear
power killing this country in the process. So far, Putin has been far saner than Hillary Clinton
has ever been, but I'm pretty damn sure his patience is wearing out. I can only hope that Europe
begins to wake up and realize that America following the wishes of SA and Israel are causing their
refugee problems NOT Russia. And sanely decide that following America further down the rat hole
is a loser for them and the world, because that might be the only thing that wakes them up from
their fevered dream.
Luckily (for the planet) I suspect Putin is content to play the long game - increase the alliance
(especially economic) with China, build up relationships with e.g. Iran and Turkey (and now cf
Philippines), and most of all court the EU states who are most terrified of increased sabre-rattling
by the US.
It is so bizarre that in such an unstable world with such critical issues - global warming,
horrific global debt and faltering bubble-based economies, Mideast chaos - HRC and her cronies
think it is a good idea to stir up trouble with Russia! Talk about "opportunity cost" at the very
least.
The War on Terror has never really been profitable enough for the military-industrial complex,
and anyway may be approaching its sell-by date. The MIC wanted a return to big-platform - aircraft
carriers, big ships, enormously expensive new planes, and missile systems, big artillery - programs
and spending.
For big-platform spending you need a big-platform enemy to justify it. Hence, the Russkies.
Patrick Cockburn is good on this.
Not incidentally, the arms industry of the early 20th century was a big reason for WWI; probably
including in July 1914 being behind the assassination of Jean Jaurčs, a top French socialist,
who was blocking it.
The fun one to watch today is the US Army versus the CIA (Milo Minderbinder would be thrilled).
In Iraq the US Army is supporting the government against al-Qaeda in Mosul. In Syria of course
the CIA is backing al-Qaeda in Aleppo against the government.
So the breathless press coverage of the son et lumiere of the Mosul push is turning
into a dud. Why? Because al-Qaeda is slinking away out of Mosul. But where are they going? Oh,
look, the US is helpfully providing buses to take 6000 of them to the fight in Syria, once they
cross that imaginary line known as "the border" they magically turn into good guys again.
Cue John McCain high-fiving! And cue Lurch our Secretary of State, telling
the UN and the world that Russia is the one that is guilty of war crimes. LOLOLOLOL
For months she had only intimated it, or delegated the real dirty work to her surrogates and campaign
staff, but at the final televised debate this week Hillary Clinton finally let loose: Donald Trump
is "a puppet" of the Kremlin, she declared.
It's worth pausing to consider just how extreme and incendiary that allegation is. For Trump
to be a "puppet" of a hostile foreign power-especially Russia, arguably America's oldest continuous
adversary-would be an event of earth-shaking magnitude, unrivaled in all U.S. history. It would
mean that by some nefarious combination of subterfuge and collusion, the sinister Russian leader
Vladimir Putin had managed to infiltrate our political system at its very core, executing a
Manchurian Candidate -style scheme that would've been dismissed as outlandish in even the
most hyperbolic 1960s-era espionage movie script.
Trump is often accused of violating the "norms" that typically govern the tenor of U.S. presidential
campaigns. And these accusations very often have validity: at the same debate, he declined to
preemptively endorse the legitimacy of the election outcome, which appears to be without precedent.
As everyone is now keenly aware, he's unleashed a constant torrent of brash histrionics that defy
discursive standards and violate "norms" of many kinds-You're rigged! I'm rigged! We're all rigged!
But Hillary too violated a longstanding norm this week with her "puppet" screed, which was
the culmination of her campaign's months-long effort to tarnish Trump as a secret Russian lackey
using the kind of retrograde nomenclature ("Puppet"? Really?) that would've made even the most
hardened old-time Cold Warrior blush. Because of Hillary's barb, there will henceforth be a precedent
for accusing a rival major-party nominee of being a stealth agent of a fearsome foreign power,
based on only the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence.
Extrapolating from Trump's stated belief that cooperation, rather than antagonism, with nuclear-armed
Russia is desirable, Hillary's boosters have long surmised that he must therefore be under the
spell of a devious foreign spymaster: it can't be that he genuinely prefers to be friendly with
Russia and forge an alliance with their military. The only tenable explanation by their lights
is this harebrained mind-control conspiracy theory.
One central irony to all this is that Trump basically has the same position vis-ŕ-vis
Russia as Barack Obama. As Trump pointed out in the Wednesday night debate, Obama attempted
to broker a military alliance with Putin's Russia only a few weeks ago; it fell through after
American forces in Syria bombed soldiers loyal to Assad in direct contravention of the terms of
the agreement. But it was an instance of deal-making nevertheless, so if Trump is guilty of accommodating
the dastardly Russian menace, Obama must be similarly guilty.
Hillary's increasingly hostile rhetoric on the homefront also likely contributed to "nuking"
the accord with Russia, as she's repeatedly accused Putin of subverting the American electoral
process by way of hacks, as well as lambasting him as the
"grand godfather'' of global extremist movements-including the U.S. "alt-right."
It would be one thing if these fantastic claims were ever substantiated with ample evidence,
but they're just not. At the debate, Hillary attributed her theory regarding the Russian orchestration
of recent hacks on her campaign and the Democratic National Committee to unnamed "intelligence
professionals." These unspecified individuals have also failed to produce tangible evidence linking
Russia to Trump, or Russia to the hacks. They are also the same sorts of people whose proclamations
about Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq were uncritically parroted by media allies.
She launched into the "puppet" rant after moderator Chris Wallace quoted an excerpt from one
of her speeches delivered to a foreign bank, which had been published by WikiLeaks. It should
be reiterated that Hillary had actively concealed these speech transcripts over the course of
the entire presidential campaign, and the only reason the American public can now view them is
thanks to WikiLeaks. But in an effort to change the subject from her newly revealed (and damning)
comments before admiring cadres of financial elites, Hillary accused the rogue publishing organization
of being party to a Russian plot. "This has come from the highest levels of the Russian government,
clearly, from Putin himself," Hillary proclaimed.
What evidence has been furnished that demonstrates "Putin himself" directed such efforts? Absolutely
none that we are yet aware of. One could feasibly posit that such a blithe willingness to launch
baseless attacks against foreign leaders is indicative of a poor temperament on Hillary's part;
it's exactly the kind of bluster that could escalate into hot conflict, and will likely sour the
U.S.-Russia bilateral relationship for years to come under a prospective Clinton Administration.
In addition to accusing Putin of hacking the U.S. election, Hillary again announced her staunch
support for a "no-fly zone" in Syria, which would necessitate the deployment of thousands more
U.S. ground troops to the war-torn country and provoke direct, hostile confrontation with Russia,
which is sustaining its client Assad. When asked by Wallace if she would authorize the shoot-down
of Russian warplanes, Hillary evaded the question. (A simple "no" would've been nice.)
It's long been known that Hillary is a hawk; she is supported by
many of the same neoconservatives who once gravitated to George W. Bush. But her bellicosity
toward Russia, which climaxed with the "puppet" diatribe, demonstrates that her hawkish tendencies
are far from conventional; they are extreme. Hillary seems to be at her most animated (and one
might say, perhaps even crazed) when she is aiming ire at supposed foreign adversaries, which
of late has almost entirely been Russia, Russia, Russia. (Russia was the number-one topic broached
at all this year's debates,
according
to a tally by Adam Johnson of the media-watchdog organization FAIR.)
The tenor of the international situation has gotten exceptionally dire. Last Friday it was
reported that the CIA is preparing to launch an "unprecedented" cyberattack on Russia; relations
between the two states are at a dangerous nadir not seen in decades, to the point that former
Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev has warned that a nuclear exchange is perilously likely.
Trump, for all his faults, has long advocated a sort of détente .
So why aren't these developments front-and-center in media coverage of the campaign? Instead,
it's still a relentless focus on Trump's many foibles, notwithstanding what appears to be Hillary's
steady sleepwalk into a potentially catastrophic war.
Michael Tracey is a journalist based in New York City.
"... I find the spectacle of liberals heroically mounting the barricades against Trump-fascism rather amusing. ..."
"... Second thing is, Trump isn't fascist. In my opinion, Trump's an old-fashioned white American nativist, ..."
"... Tagging him as "fascist" allows his critics to put an alien, non-American gloss on a set of attitudes and policies that have been mainstreamed in American politics for at least 150 years and predate the formulation of fascism by several decades if not a century. Those nasty vetting/exclusion things he's proposing are as American as apple pie. For those interested in boning up on the Know Nothings and the Chinese Exclusion Act, I have this piece for you . ..."
"... Real fascism, in theory, is a rather interesting and nasty beast. In my opinion, it turns bolshevism on its head by using race or ethnic identity instead of class identity as the supreme, mobilizing force in national life. ..."
"... In both fascism and bolshevism, democratic outcomes lack inherent legitimacy. National legitimacy resides in the party, which embodies the essence of a threatened race or class in a way that Hegel might appreciate but Marx probably wouldn't. Subversion of democracy and seizure of state power are not only permissible; they are imperatives. ..."
"... The purest fascism movement I know of exists in Ukraine. I wrote about it here , and it's a piece I think is well worth reading to understand what a political movement organized on fascist principles really looks like. And Trump ain't no fascist. He's a nativist running a rather incompetent campaign. ..."
"... The most interesting application of the "fascist" analysis, rather surprisingly, applies to the Clinton campaign, not the Trump campaign, when considering the cultivation of a nexus between big business and *ahem* racially inflected politics. ..."
"... White labor originally had legal recourse to beating back the challenge/threat of African-American labor instead of accommodating it as a "class" ally; it subsequently relied on institutional and customary advantages. ..."
"... The most reliable wedge against working class solidarity and a socialist narrative in American politics used to be white privilege which, when it was reliably backed by US business and political muscle, was a doctrine of de facto white supremacy. ..."
"... The perception of marginalized white clout is reinforced by the nomination of Hillary Clinton and her campaign emphasis on the empowerment of previously marginalized but now demographically more important groups. ..."
"... The Clinton campaign has been all about race and its doppelganger -actually, the overarching and more ear-friendly term that encompasses racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual loyalties-"identity politics." ..."
"... The most calculated and systematic employment of racial politics was employed by the Hillary Clinton campaign in the Democratic primary to undercut the socialist-lite populist appeal of Bernie Sanders. ..."
"... My personal disdain for the Clinton campaign was born on the day that John Lewis intoned "I never saw him" in order to dismiss the civil rights credentials of Bernie Sanders ..."
"... In the primary, this translated into an attack on Sanders and the apparently mythical "Bernie bro" as racist swine threatening the legacy of the first black president, venerated by the African American electorate, Barack Obama. In the general, well, Donald Trump and his supporters provided acres more genuine grist for the identity warrior mill. ..."
"... Trump's ambitions to gain traction for a favorable American/populist/outsider narrative for his campaign have been frustrated by determined efforts to frame him as anti-Semitic, racist against blacks and Hispanics, sexist, and bigoted against the disabled-and ready to hold the door while Pepe the Frog feeds his opponents, including a large contingent of conservative and liberal Jewish journalists subjected to unimaginable invective by the Alt-Right– into the ovens. ..."
"... That campaign pretty much went by the wayside (as did Black Lives Matter, a racial justice initiative partially funded by core Clinton backer George Soros; interesting, no?) as a) black nationalists started shooting policemen and b) Clinton kicked off a charm campaign to help wedge the black-wary GOP establishment away from Trump. ..."
"... "Identity politics" is near the core of the Clintonian agenda as a bulwark against any class/populist upheaval that might threaten her brand of billionaire-friendly liberalism. ..."
"... Clinton's enduring and grotesque loyalty to her family's charitable foundation, an operation that in my opinion has no place on the resume of a public servant, as a font of prestige, conduit for influence, and model for billionaire-backed global engagement. ..."
"... By placing the focus of the campaign on identity politics and Trump's actual and putative crimes against various identity groups, the Clinton campaign has successfully obscured what I consider to be its fundamental identity as a vehicle for neoliberal globalists keen to preserve and employ the United States as a welcoming environment and supreme vehicle for supra-sovereign business interests. ..."
"... Clintonism's core identity is not, in other words, as a crusade for groups suffering from the legacy and future threat of oppression by Trump's white male followers. It is a full-court press to keep the wheels on the neoliberal sh*twagon as it careens down the road of globalization, and it recognizes the importance in American democracy of slicing and dicing the electorate by identity politics and co-opting useful demographics as the key to maintaining power. ..."
"... Trump has cornered the somewhat less entitled and increasingly threatened white ethnic group, some of whom are poised to make the jump to white nationalism with or without him. ..."
"... Clinton has cornered the increasingly entitled and assertive global billionaire group, which adores the class-busting anti-socialist identity-based politics she practices. ..."
I find the spectacle of liberals heroically mounting the barricades against Trump-fascism
rather amusing.
For one thing, liberals don't crush fascism. Liberals appease fascism, then they exploit fascism.
In between there's a great big war, where communists crush fascism. That's pretty much the lesson
of WWII.
Second thing is, Trump isn't fascist. In my opinion, Trump's an old-fashioned white American
nativist, which is pretty much indistinguishable from old-fashioned racist when considering
the subjugation of native Americans and African-Americans and Asian immigrants, but requires that
touch of "nativist" nuance when considering indigenous bigotry against Irish, Italian, and Jewish
immigrants and citizens.
Tagging him as "fascist" allows his critics to put an alien, non-American gloss on a set of
attitudes and policies that have been mainstreamed in American politics for at least 150 years and
predate the formulation of fascism by several decades if not a century. Those nasty vetting/exclusion
things he's proposing are as American as apple pie. For those interested in boning up on the Know
Nothings and the Chinese Exclusion Act,
I have this piece for you .
And for anybody who doesn't believe the US government does not already engage in intensive "extreme"
vetting and targeting of all Muslims immigrants, especially those from targeted countries, not only
to identify potential security risks but to groom potential intelligence assets, I got the Brooklyn
Bridge to sell you right here:
Real fascism, in theory, is a rather interesting and nasty beast. In my opinion, it turns
bolshevism on its head by using race or ethnic identity instead of class identity as the supreme,
mobilizing force in national life.
In both fascism and bolshevism, democratic outcomes lack inherent legitimacy. National legitimacy
resides in the party, which embodies the essence of a threatened race or class in a way that Hegel
might appreciate but Marx probably wouldn't. Subversion of democracy and seizure of state power are
not only permissible; they are imperatives.
The need to seize state power and hold it while a fascist or Bolshevik agenda is implemented dictates
the need for a military force loyal to and subservient to the party and its leadership, not the state.
The purest fascism movement I know of exists in Ukraine.
I wrote about it here , and it's a piece I think is well worth reading to understand what a political
movement organized on fascist principles really looks like. And Trump ain't no fascist. He's a nativist
running a rather incompetent campaign.
It's a little premature to throw dirt on the grave of the Trump candidacy, perhaps (I'll check
back in on November 9), but it looks like he spent too much time glorying in the adulation of his
white male nativist base and too little time, effort, and money trying to deliver a plausible message
that would allow other demographics to shrug off the "deplorable" tag and vote for him. I don't blame/credit
the media too much for burying Trump, a prejudice of mine perhaps. I blame Trump's inability to construct
an effective phalanx of pro-Trump messengers, a failure that's probably rooted in the fact that Trump
spent the primary and general campaign at war with the GOP establishment.
The only capital crime in politics is disunity, and the GOP and Trump are guilty on multiple counts.
The most interesting application of the "fascist" analysis, rather surprisingly, applies to
the Clinton campaign, not the Trump campaign, when considering the cultivation of a nexus between
big business and *ahem* racially inflected politics.
It should be remembered that fascism does not succeed in the real world as a crusade by race-obsessed
lumpen . It succeeds when fascists are co-opted by capitalists, as was unambiguously the case
in Nazi Germany and Italy. And big business supported fascism because it feared the alternatives:
socialism and communism.
That's because there is no more effective counter to class consciousness than race consciousness.
That's one reason why, in my opinion, socialism hasn't done a better job of catching on in the
United States. The contradictions between black and white labor formed a ready-made wedge. The North's
abhorrence at the spread of slavery into the American West before the Civil War had more to do a
desire to preserve these new realms for "free" labor-"free" in one context, from the competition
of slave labor-than egalitarian principle.
White labor originally had legal recourse to beating back the challenge/threat of African-American
labor instead of accommodating it as a "class" ally; it subsequently relied on institutional and
customary advantages.
If anyone harbors illusions concerning the kumbaya solidarity between white and black labor
in the post-World War II era, I think the article The Problem of Race in American Labor History
by Herbert Hill ( a freebie on
JSTOR ) is a good place to start.
The most reliable wedge against working class solidarity and a socialist narrative in American
politics used to be white privilege which, when it was reliably backed by US business and political
muscle, was a doctrine of de facto white supremacy.
However, in this campaign, the race wedge has cut the other way in a most interesting fashion.
White conservatives are appalled, and minority liberals energized, by the fact that the white guy,
despite winning the majority white male vote, lost to a black guy not once but twice, giving a White
Twilight/Black Dawn (TM) vibe to the national debate.
The perception of marginalized white clout is reinforced by the nomination of Hillary Clinton
and her campaign emphasis on the empowerment of previously marginalized but now demographically more
important groups.
The Clinton campaign has been all about race and its doppelganger -actually, the overarching
and more ear-friendly term that encompasses racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual loyalties-"identity
politics."
The most calculated and systematic employment of racial politics was employed by the Hillary
Clinton campaign in the Democratic primary to undercut the socialist-lite populist appeal of Bernie
Sanders.
My personal disdain for the Clinton campaign was born on the day that John Lewis intoned "I
never saw him" in order to dismiss the civil rights credentials of Bernie Sanders while announcing
the Black Congressional Caucus endorsement of Hillary Clinton. Bear in mind that during the 1960s,
Sanders had
affiliated his student group at the University of Chicago with Lewis' SNCC, the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee; during the same era, Hillary Clinton was at Wellesley
condemning
"the snicks" for their excessively confrontational tactics.
Ah, politics.
To understand the significance of this event, one should read Fracture by the guru of woke
Clintonism, Joy Reid. Or read
my piece on the subject . Or simply understand that after Hillary Clinton lost Lewis's endorsement,
the black vote, and the southern Democratic primaries to Barack Obama in 2008, and she was determined
above all to secure and exploit monolithic black support in the primaries and, later on, the general
in 2016.
So, in order to prevent Sanders from splitting the black vote to her disadvantage on ideological/class
lines, Clinton played the race card. Or, as we put it today when discussing the championing of historically
disadvantaged a.k.a. non white male heterosexual groups, celebrated "identity politics".
In the primary, this translated into an attack on Sanders and the apparently mythical "Bernie
bro" as racist swine threatening the legacy of the first black president, venerated by the African
American electorate, Barack Obama. In the general, well, Donald Trump and his supporters provided
acres more genuine grist for the identity warrior mill.
Trump's populism draws its heat from American nativism, not "soak the rich" populism of the Sandernista
stripe, and it was easily submerged in the "identity politics" narrative.
Trump's ambitions to gain traction for a favorable American/populist/outsider narrative for
his campaign have been frustrated by determined efforts to frame him as anti-Semitic, racist against
blacks and Hispanics, sexist, and bigoted against the disabled-and ready to hold the door while Pepe
the Frog feeds his opponents, including a large contingent of conservative and liberal Jewish journalists
subjected to unimaginable invective by the Alt-Right– into the ovens.
As an indication of the fungible & opportunistic character of the "identity politics" approach,
as far as I can tell from a recent visit to a swing state, as the Clinton campaign pivoted to the
general, the theme of Trump's anti-black racism has been retired in favor of pushing his offenses
against women and the disabled. Perhaps this reflects the fact that Clinton has a well-advertised
lock on the African-American vote and doesn't need to cater to it; also, racism being what it is,
playing the black card is not the best way to lure Republicans and indies to the Clinton camp.
The high water mark of the Clinton African-American tilt was perhaps the abortive campaign to
turn gun control into a referendum on the domination of Congress by white male conservatives. It
happened a few months ago, so who remembers? But John Lewis led a sit-in occupation of the Senate
floor in the wake of the Orlando shootings to highlight how America's future was being held hostage
to the whims of Trump-inclined white pols.
That campaign pretty much went by the wayside (as did Black Lives Matter, a racial justice
initiative partially funded by core Clinton backer George Soros; interesting, no?) as a) black nationalists
started shooting policemen and b) Clinton kicked off a charm campaign to help wedge the black-wary
GOP establishment away from Trump.
There is more to Clintonism, I think, than simply playing the "identity politics" card to screw
Bernie Sanders or discombobulate the Trump campaign. "Identity politics" is near the core of
the Clintonian agenda as a bulwark against any class/populist upheaval that might threaten her brand
of billionaire-friendly liberalism.
In my view, a key tell is Clinton's enduring and grotesque loyalty to her family's charitable
foundation, an operation that in my opinion has no place on the resume of a public servant, as a
font of prestige, conduit for influence, and model for billionaire-backed global engagement.
By placing the focus of the campaign on identity politics and Trump's actual and putative
crimes against various identity groups, the Clinton campaign has successfully obscured what I consider
to be its fundamental identity as a vehicle for neoliberal globalists keen to preserve and employ
the United States as a welcoming environment and supreme vehicle for supra-sovereign business interests.
Clintonism's core identity is not, in other words, as a crusade for groups suffering from
the legacy and future threat of oppression by Trump's white male followers. It is a full-court press
to keep the wheels on the neoliberal sh*twagon as it careens down the road of globalization, and
it recognizes the importance in American democracy of slicing and dicing the electorate by identity
politics and co-opting useful demographics as the key to maintaining power.
In my view, the Trump and Clinton campaigns are both protofascist.
Trump has cornered the somewhat less entitled and increasingly threatened white ethnic group,
some of whom are poised to make the jump to white nationalism with or without him.
Clinton has cornered the increasingly entitled and assertive global billionaire group, which
adores the class-busting anti-socialist identity-based politics she practices.
But the bottom line is race. U.S. racism has stacked up 400 years of tinder that might take a
few hundred more years, if ever, to burn off. And until it does, every politician in the country
is going to see his or her political future in flicking matches at it. And that's what we're seeing
in the current campaign. A lot. Not fascism.
(Reprinted from
China Matters by permission of author or representative)
After the first debate, numerous videos surfaced alleging that Hillary was using some sort of
teleprompter built into her podium to assist with answering questions or to offset whatever medical
condition she's dealing with. The videos were largely dismissed as "cooky alt-right conspiracy theories"
and didn't get much attention outside of those spheres.
But, when similar abnormalities surfaced on Hillary's podium in the third debate, combined with
the fact that she spent an awkward amount of time during her answers peering down rather than at
the camera, we grew a bit more curious.
With that said, here is a video analyzing the abnormalities from debate 1. Notice that around
18 seconds into this video one can very clearly see a light shut off on Hillary's podium even though
there is no such light at Trump's podium.
But, you don't have to take that guy's word for it. Here is the actual debate footage from NBC..
.fast forward to the 1:38:30 mark at the very end of this video and you can see the exact same phenomenon.
And here is a screen capture from the end of the debate. Notice there is a light on Hillary's
podium while Trump's is completely dark.
But where things get really interesting is that the exact same phenomenon occurred at debate 3
this week as pointed out by the following video posted by Anonymous.
Again, as you can see, there seems to be a light on Hillary's podium...
...but none at Trump's.
And here is one more angle...
And the two together...
But again, no need to take our word for it as you can simply scan through the full debate footage
posted by USA Today and see the phenomenon for yourself. Also note that, at numerous points while
answering questions throughout the debate, Hillary seems to be looking down at her podium for extended
periods of time rather than at the camera...to the point that it was actually awkward for people
watching the debate live.
Don't believe it? In the following video, fast forward to the 42:25 mark and watch Hillary's eyes
as she responds to the question... where is she looking?
Now, recall that debate 2 was structured as a town hall discussion so this type of cheating would
not have been feasible. That said, oddly enough, debate 2 was the one that almost everyone universally
thought she lost.
If this is rigged then so will the vote. All Trump supporters should stay at the booth on the
day as a show of force. That could be our only chance at non-violent revolution. Identify with
the group, T shirts (Bill is a Rapist!), placards, hats etc.
It's fascinating watching the America far right (libertarians, nationalists, ultraconservatives)
all in this election. Even the kitchen sink "teleprompter" they're throwing into our political
and our social systems. Now, are they right or wrong in doing so? Or, does it really matter?
On the surface one would not think so. But I think it matters a lot. Wonder why?
What will happen if they lose?
Or worse, let's imagine that Trump won.
Will the "vast majority" of clueless Americans know, or have a clue what will be coming in
either case?
Trump doesn't know how to lose unless there's something for him to gain. I do wonder what the
system will have to offer the Devil for his concession speech? And good luck to them post election,
because it will be impossible to govern, especially for the Republicans.
Now, the picture is much clear if Trump wins, and below is a good take, in my opinion. Found
it very insightful. It's by Norman Pagett: The "weimar Period" puts it very neatly
It really is worth reading up on Hi-ler's speeches in the 30s-Trump word for word pretty much.
HRC cant deliver any more than trump can, because the resources do not exist to "make America
great again" or even to sustain the economy at its current level.
when Hit-ler was saying exactly the same thing he had to invade Poland to sustain his fantasy,
and despite the wailing and contrition in 1945-the German people cheered him on when he was initially
successful. The same millions are cheering Trump now.
When the system collapses, as it must (as Hit-ler's ponzi scheme), the chaos that will ensure
will demand the takeover by a dictator, because faced with breakdown of society, governments have
no option but to introduce martial law and in US political terms-that means a theofascism-the
godbotherering wannabe dictators are waiting in the wings.
The military will fall in behind whoever pays their wages. There's no Poland to invade, and subjugate
therefore the only "masses" to subjugate will be the American people-at least that section of
them who are "unbelievers"-ie any kind of minority-and ultimately political opponent.
We all know what happened to minorities in Germany in the 30s. The same thing will happen again-someone
has to take the blame for what's gone wrong wth the country and its economy. The parallels are
exact.
The constitution?
Democracy is the child of affluence. It ends when democracy ends.
Hey toro , previously mofio then santafe then Aristotle of Greece then Gargoyle then bleu then
oops then lance-a-lot then most recently Loftie . Looks like Loftie got banned or just outed.
I shall miss him! Let's see how long toro survives, shall we?
You are a serial spammer and a serial pain in the ass. Might I politely suggest that you go
fuck yourself? And get a life.
PS. You might have noticed that my attempt to expose you for what you are is always the same.
That's because your Spam is always the same (Using fake links to your BS site which has no connection
to your comments; which are deliberately dramatic to mislead people into responding or clicking
on the fake link) so it seems only fair that my exposure of your crap should also always be the
same. An eye for an eye.
... check out the scumbag john poo desta trying his best while he struggled to explain, lie
some more and stuttered to deflect wikileaks facts exposed on his hacked emails and being called
out for his lies while being heckled non-stop by the public ... >>>
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=bce_1477088736
... and while you're at the site, take a look at this ... hiliary insults barack hussein at
the al smith 2016 dinner ... too funny ... >>>
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=ea3_1477070639
...
the part of hillary's third debate performance that seeemed the oddest was the "surprise" question
at the end as to why the voters should support them. hillary was first and ripped into it with
nary a glance down, like she was expecting it.
trump went second and gave a worse performance on that question, imo.
Upton Sinclair, author 'Grapes of Wrath, The Jungle,. ' wrote ' It Can't Happen Here' in the
1930s.
Leonard Piekoff wrote 'The Ominous Parallels' in 1982.
The Ominous Parallels: The End of Freedom in America is a 1982 book by philosopher Leonard
Peikoff, in which Peikoff compares the culture of the United States with the culture of Germany
leading up to the Nazis......
I said it was very dangerous Oct 16-21 with Mars conjunct Pluto at 15* Capricorn.
That is where the elites get the knife in the heart.
It happened at that Catholic dinner in NYC with media and Wall St bailout recipients.
Donald delivered it for us.
The Ruling Elite Has Lost the Consent of the Governed
Brimming with hubris and self-importance, the ruling Elite and mainstream media cannot believe
they have lost the consent of the governed.
Every ruling Elite needs the consent of the governed: even autocracies, dictatorships and corporatocracies
ultimately rule with the consent, however grudging, of the governed.
The American ruling Elite has lost the consent of the governed.
I was wrong, it wasn't a act of war between global powers, it is an act of war declared by
Donald Trump on our behalf.
With the money channel whore dressed in scarlet with her tits out and white leather gloves
on behind The Donald. The whole thing has been a magic lantern show put on by Hollywood to entertain
the sheep. While wages go down, jobs shipped out and cheap labor flooding in.
The Catholics support Hillary's rape of Haiti and phony chairty that she enriched herself with.
They were even uneasy with Donalds statement that "we need to celebrate the culture of life" meaning
don't use abortion as birth control. Tim Kaine a Jesuit, which is basically a Jewish organization
and Hillary 24 hrs before saying she supports partial birth abortion. They couldn't wait to congradulate
her and fawn all over her.
Dying Killer Kissinger melting behind the white funeral flowers in the pyramid table arrangement.
I should have known at 15* Capricorn it would be this. Watching them boo and hiss at him, he
was us and that was the knife in the heart with all masks down.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart;
the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed,
and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
-Willam Butler Yeats
This party is just getting started, I said it was going to start now and the real action (Execution
of French King, Execution of English King) takes place at the Pluto/Uranus opposition in 2046-2048.
Jewish power is hanging by a thread, that's only 30 yrs.
I won't be here in this form, but maybe you will be.
Good point. Nothing left to chance. I was so frustrated with Trump and his stupid, banal, vapid
speeches, and the fact that I could make all of the arguments against clinton better than him.
Now it makes sense.
How do you get an incompetent corrupt, and malignant candidate elected? You stand them off
against some other tainted character that will be just as controllable.
The pupetmasters have run this model to ground. They are not prepared to lose.
The fall of legacy media has assumed about it the hue of 'epic saga'. The People are really rooting
for us. Legacy media, so thoroughly detested among the masses as it is, having in this last election
permanently offended over 80% of their audience with demonstrative hostility to both of The People's
candidates (Donald Trump & Bernie Sanders), will NEVER regain any semblance of trust or veneration
in the broader public's sentiments. This David & Goliath epic being all the more heroic as The
People know, in their heart of hearts, that these scheming gremlins in the media are rotten to
the core, and they similarly know that we're pure of heart and motive. It truly is good vs. evil
story-book heroics...and the crowd is roaring for us with each blow stricken. This is serious;
The People not only want to see them defeated, they seek a punitive spectacle, they demand a grand
finale -- the ornery and agitated mob lusts for its pound of flesh. Gotta give the people what
they want.
A servant to all is mastered by none -- this has been my governing philosophy since declaring
war on this establishment some five years ago. Before initiating phase one of my campaign and
this adventure in Boston, I owned a restaurant back in Alabama. In that time, I learned a little
bit about satisfying the public's appetite...in a distinct and idiosyncratic way. I've gone about
revolution is just such a fashion -- iconaclastic and idiosyncratic. I've often had to improvise,
but have always adhered to an overarching strategy...or i should say 'recipe'. I've been working
on a formula of sorts...cooking up something for The People's consumption. I've been sorta chronicling
my adventures within the broader context of this societal/political shift -- a seismic rearrangement
of prevailing paradigm so profound and absolute you won't see anything like it for another millennia.
Yes, I knew something BIG was abrew in the machinations of this species back in Hickstick, Alabama.
Feeling janus had the wherewithal and talents sufficient to make some contribution to this great
turning, I devoted myself wholly to it. I'm not alone. There are many who've risked everything.
And it makes for a great story. But beyond the story, and regarding phase two, I have a bit of
surprise up my sleeve for tptb: the truth is, janus is a more effective and persuasive speaker
than writer. Please forgive me for saying so, and I do say this from a sense of rational modesty,
but I have something of a gift for words and their arrangement. Again, I'm not attempting to boast
-- I mean really, I would not keep going if I didn't know what kind of impact we're having on
the Hedge... janus has from the beginning pledged his gifts to this campaign...us vs. them...good
vs. evil. All the while I'd been hiding the greater talent under a bushel, preparing to make of
it another donation.
tptb, you will soon be forced to deal with my perspicacity in an extemporaneous setting. There
will be no way to mitigate the damages nor prepare. Imagine if you will the fearlessness, confidence
and courage of Donald Trump but from a manner imminently polite and courteous -- even to a fault.
Think about the quick and nimble thinking of Trump expressed with a command of language and erudition
that would make Cicero jealous. Throw into this the ability to instantly structure highly complex
arguments that are both cogent and stimulating to a wise mind. all of which is to say -- and pardon
my french -- tptb, you're fucked. One way or another, janus will soon start speaking...you have
my permission to start freaking. I told you all from the beginning, ain't a goddam thing you can
do to stop me. I'm better than you all...you used to laugh and now you gulp. What's that ole saying
about laughing last?
Meanwhile, as I rest and prepare my vocal chords, chef janus will carve another pound of flesh
from the carcass of a freshly slain legacy-media, slicing off a hunk while the beast still simpers
and serve it to the public rare, with the blood still in it. (just wait till I rip their heart
out while it beats for the grande finale) I've entitled it:
As The Pendulum Swings
The ponderous procession of Providence is subject to the laws of stasis and extremes. All things
tend to extremes and then return, ever so temporarily, to the equilibrium of stasis -- this is
the pattern of dynamism in nature; the inertia intrinsic to this swing back to stasis has a value
slightly greater than the force which propelled it to the most recent and retreating extreme.
As this relates to the mass-sentiments governing the hive-mind of mankind, we are just now starting
the descent from a peak of institutional perfidy. The political pendulum is edging ever so slightly
away from a totalitarian control matrix so absolute it would make stalin blush. We will soon pick
up speed and then accelerate quickly to arrests and trials. But the extreme to which these devils
have pushed The People being so far beyond what's ever been done in the civilized world, I feel
that by the time this is all over, we will see guillotines. Understand, this pitch of acrimony
is still only nascent. Once the dollar goes and everyone's investments, jobs, food stamps, etc.,
we are going to see a ferocity within the masses unique in all of history.
yes, media clowns, you are in great peril. The people will be calling for your hides. Sure,
you won't be the only targets, but you'll most certainly be a focus. How do you like it now that
it's your emails being hacked and scrutinized? How will you like it when your sordid private lives
are exposed? You thought it was funny when you were on the inside; but now that things are turning
inside out, do you feel so insulated? Think you're protected? hardly...your masters will happily
throw you to the baying mob hoping your hide will sate their appetite. Your fates are only these:
prison, death or, if you're lucky, menial service sector jobs. Yes, those of you wise enough to
start speaking the truth now will be spared prison or something more severe. I recommend you exercise
this option. Perhaps you think janus is exaggerating...but after everything that's happened, do
you think it wise to bet on tptb? janus has peered into the future. Predictable outcome: Good
Guys win. Not even close. In fact, you could call it a blood-bath:
You reap what you sow in this world. The metaphysical concept of equilibrium is what we call
justice; justice necessarily involves punitive measures. You journalists are the custodians of
democracy. You have abrogated your end of the social contract. You have betrayed The Public in
service to wickedness. Whether you did so from fear or to curry favor with The People's enemies
is largely immaterial, you cast your lot with evil which has for a while flourished -- you just
so happen to be involved in the time of its denoument...sucks to be you. In aiding and abetting
the deception and fleecing of the public, you have several wars to your credit, rivers of blood
stain you hands, the mass poisoning of the people has been undertaken as you advanced it...you
have not only sat back and watched The People suffer, you have contributed your life's work to
that end.
Same as Nuremberg, 'just following orders' will not be a permissible defense. As to this equilibrium
and its relationship to the concept of justice, when the punishments are meted out, they will
be far more severe than you can now fathom, but they will be proportionate to the sentiments of
the time. When the pendulum reaches the other extreme of its travel, when The People discover
the level of your involvement and participation, an eye for an eye won't do -- they'll be demanding
two. Mark my words, legacy media. Be ye therefore wise and know the signs of the times.
Donald Trump is just the beginning...there are several more volumes to this story...and the
best part is, there's a very happy ending.
The little seeds cast about here on the Hedge have germinated and are starting to take root
in The Public...just wait till they bloom:
{btw, the above song is from a band to which i give a five star recommendation...first such
honor since Houndmouth...and so, i introduce the Hedge to Shovels and Rope (gotta love that name)}
There was another part of the Post
article I cited in my
last post that I wanted to address:
"The dynamic is totally different from what I saw a decade ago" when Democratic and Republican
elites were feuding over the invasion of Iraq, said Brian Katulis, a senior Middle East analyst
at the Center for American Progress. Today, the focus among the foreign policy elite is on rebuilding
a more muscular and more "centrist internationalism," he said [bold mine-DL].
Every term used in that last sentence is either misleading or flat-out wrong. A more aggressive
policy in Syria or anywhere else
shouldn't be described as "muscular" for a few reasons. For one thing, committing the U.S. to
short-sighted and ill-conceived military interventions does nothing to enhance the strength or security
of the country. Such a policy doesn't build strength–it wastes it. Calling an aggressive policy "muscular"
betrays a bias that aggressive measures are the ones that demonstrate strength, when they usually
just demonstrate policymakers' crude and clumsy approach to foreign problems. One might just as easily
describe these policies as meat-headed instead.
"Centrist" is one of the most overused and abused words in our politics. The term is often used
to refer to positions that are supposedly moderate, pragmatic, and relatively free of ideological
bias, but here we can see that it refers to something very different. Many people that are considered
to be "centrists" on the normal left-right political spectrum are frequently in favor of a much more
aggressive foreign policy than the one we have now, but that doesn't make their foreign policy a
moderate or pragmatic one. In fact, this "centrism" is not really a position in between the two partisan
extremes, both of which would be satisfied with a less activist and interventionist foreign policy
than we have today, but represents an extreme all its own.
Besides, there's nothing moderate or pragmatic about being determined to entangle the U.S.
deeper in foreign wars, and that is what this so-called "centrist" foreign policy aims to do.
Likewise, it is fairly misleading to call what is being proposed here internationalist. It
shows no respect for international law. Hawkish proposals to attack Syria or carve out "safe zones"
by force simply ignore that the U.S. has no right or authority to do either of these things.
There appears to be scant interest in pursuing international cooperation, except insofar as it is
aimed at escalating existing conflicts. One would also look in vain for working through international
institutions. The only thing that is international about this "centrist internationalism" seems to
be that it seeks to inflict death and destruction on people in other countries.
Kocherlakota:"Another possibility, highlighted in Yellen's
speech, is that the recovery engineered by the Fed was so
slow that it did (possibly reversible) damage to the
supply side -- for example, as long-term unemployment
eroded the skills and motivation of workers"
Unfortunately they won´t give up their favorite Phillips
Curve Model:
https://thefaintofheart.wordpress.com/2016/03/18/the-fomc-its-forecasts/
US Budgetary Costs of Wars through 2016: $4.79 Trillion
and Counting
Summary of Costs of the US Wars in Iraq, Syria,
Afghanistan and Pakistan and Homeland Security
By Neta C. Crawford
Anne, wars are certainly "destructive", but why should
this one damage the supply side so much more than all the
other wars?
[ I would argue that the unprecedented
amount of time taken by the wars, the important actual
spending and what was not spent as a result of the
constraint of spending on the wars. Also, while there was
spending on the wars which bolstered the economy, I would
argue this spending did relatively little to build a
productive base for the economy.
We could properly argue that digging ditches and
filling them in provides needed work and support for the
economy in a recession, but we were lots better off
productively because of New Deal ditch digging and filling
designed for the Tennessee Valley Authority. ]
But just think what all of our pre-emptive invasions did
to the global environment....
[ A refrain that I have
often read, but have no reference just now, is that
American militarism has been the price of economic advance
or well-being. Likely because I am bothered by militarism
and such a generality, I have never set down a reference.
But, I have not thought about the environmental effects of
war since 2001. ]
The other problem with foreign wars is that, to the extent
that money is spent abroad and stays there, they represent
leakage to the US economy...IOW they are a contractionary
force. Of course, there is no reporting on how much of the
DOD budget gets spent abroad and stays there. However,
leasing alone of 800 plus military bases can't be cheap...
OTOH digging ditches and filling them in keeps money in
the economy and probably even has a positive multiplier.
anne -> JohnH...
, -1
The money spent abroad argument is faulty as such, since
dollars spent in abroad on development programs will in
turn be spent in the United States. China has begun a "one
belt, one road" program in which large, large sums will be
spent on infrastructure from Russia and Mongolia to Laos
and Cambodia to Pakistan and Bangladesh... to build an
Asian trading network.
Money spent abroad on fighting
however is another matter.
The Most Technologically Progressive Decade of the
Century
By Alexander J. Field
Abstract
There is now an emerging consensus that over the course
of U.S. economic history, multifactor productivity grew
fastest over a broad plateau between 1905 and 1966, and
within that period, in the two decades following 1929.
This paper argues that the bulk of the achieved
productivity levels in 1948 had already been attained
before full scale war mobilization in 1942. It was not
principally the war that laid the foundation for postwar
prosperity. It was technological progress across a broad
frontier of the American economy during the 1930s.
Ghost of Christmas
Future :
, -1
$800 billion trade
deficit still not a
major topic in
economics. This is
incredible. The US
has only 5% of the
world's population
yet we are
absorbing more than
a third of the
global trade
surplus of surplus
economies.
Is it easier for
5% of the world to
absorb $800 billion
a year in annual
trade deficits or
would it be easier
for 95% of the
world able to do
that? A trade
surplus for the US
of $800 billion is
much more
reasonable. A swing
of $1.6 trillion in
aggregate demand
would have enormous
consequences for US
development,
stability and
unemployment
levels. A
commitment to
industry, combined
with low interest
loans, government
contracts and high
tariffs would lead
to a boom in
industrial
investment rather
than its virtual
absence. The
working class could
actually find jobs
working again
rather than being
forced into the
drug trade and
prison - even
people in the
destroyed cities of
Camden, Chicago and
Buffalo could find
hope again. We
could get 10-14%
annual GDP growth
as 25-50 factories
were built a day.
(We lost 15 a day
from 2000-2010 with
our economists not
noticing or caring)
Why does the US
settle for economic
destruction when
Vietnam, Singapore,
China, Israel etc.
etc. show that
growth and
development are
easy? Why must we
accept poverty and
deindustrialization?
Why do Americans
need to be forced
to return to stone
age subsistence
agriculture, street
commerce,
prostitution,
begging, the drug
trade?
The pointless
destruction of the
US as an economy,
center of wealth
and technology
continues apace
without attracting
any attention from
our serious
economists. Trump
should continue to
focus on his
message - Clinton
won't fix anything,
and things may very
well collapse
between now and
November 2020. At
which point Trump
will be ideally
positioned to
champion the 40-70%
of the population
that is "new poor".
Our last hope is
that Trump wins in
November 2016 or
Nov. 2020 and as
soon as he takes
office both
disbands all
economics
departments and
raises tariffs to
the necessary
300-400% range.
Anything else is
continued insane
economic suicide.
ilsm -> Fred C. Dobbs...
, -1
Hegemon needs all the tools it can scrape up to perpetrate
its evil.
Obama was going to end Iraghistan, now US has
done Libya, is doing Syria and still losing lives and
wasting treasure in Iraghistan.
Obama advocated a nuclear free world until someone
offered a reason to add $30B a year to the pentagon
trough.
Safety and reliability is a sham in the pentagon
trough.
The only use of nuclear weapons is extending the terror
bpmbing which Le May and Bomber Harris perfected.
Smaller nuclear yields add the the useless but very
expensive read profitable strategy of bombing them "into
the stone age".
If the only strategy is count body bags then small
nukes fit.
Bottom line hegemon war is immoral.
Adding $30B a year is adding opportunity cost to the
immoral!
Love of "security" (cash for the trough) is the root of
all evil.
ilsm -> anne...
, -1
$30B a year for nuclear arms modifications on top of the
spending keeping the existing A-bombs ready to blow away
the world for the hege0mon!!!!!
Russia and China
spending less than half the pentagon core budgets which do
not include the munificent war supplements.
Between Russia's $78B a year and China's $140B per year
they have a long way to go with the US putting $500B a
year in the core pentagon trough and adding plus ups for
bombing Assad.
However, if China is as efficient in war as in
manufactures the $500B riddled with waste and welfare is
concerning.
Stein: Stop beating war drums. NATO surround Russia, war games
around russia, fake nucs as prep for war, Clinton virtual
declaration of war no fly zone, Brzyenski neo-con has changed,
Aleppo horrible US broke cease fire, we are not the bad guys, no
good guys or bad guys, need honest brokers instead of tools of
defense industry (Kerry good).
QCenk: less war footing, were would you use force. Ex. Syria:
Bagdadi, can we drone strike?
A: Israel had Eichmann, they did not take him out, they complied
w/inter law, captured, tried, paid price, world of laws or bullies,
I would use a force were int law, when under imminent threat or
under attack.
Q: Special forces like they did with Bin Laden or no?
A: SF acceptable in policing.
Q:Judgment in court would you enforce.
A: Inter respected rules Yes. Drones are assassination program.
Mobilize population against us. No drones as a weapon of war.
Q: Iraq/Syria: Our allies say they are advancing on Iraq what would
you do. Brinkmanship, engage weapons embargo, US, Russia, allies.
ISIS success supported by allies, cut that support by Saudis, hold
Baghdad for weeks but reversed, blindly continue? Fails and creates
next generation.
Q: If Russia goes into Estonia to protect some Russians, what would
you do?
Communicate starting now, brinkmanship, surrounding Russia, reverse
of Cuban missile crisis.
Q: That's long term, what is short term plan.
A: Estonia member of NATO. Obliged by NATO contract. Bacevich-let
NATO take care of Europe. Create truly defensible policy.
My question, too. For example, if Stephanie Kelton were
Stein's nominee for Treasury, I wouldn't worry so much about
Stein's views on what quantitiative easing can and cannot do.
I went looking. The
official GP site
links to the
"Green Shadow Cabinet"
site ("The Green Shadow Cabinet of
the United States is a civic project not sponsored by or
affiliated with any political party," so who knows whether
it's really authoritative, despite the GP link). From the
Cabinet Members
page:
I hate to be a critic of someone who has her heart in
the right place. but agreed in spades. Brown so does not
understand the Fed, money and banking that I sometimes
wonder if she's a plant to make people on the left spout
ideas that will discredit them.
The Green Shadow Cabinet was around during the 2012
elections. They are placeholders for these positions
though not yet official. I don't know if all the
'appointments' are current (I see 2015 dates), so some
of them may have changed.
Yves, I know you don't need homework (thanks for all
you do here), but if you have a moment and are so
inclined, maybe contact the campaign with your concerns
about Brown and offer an opinion as to why the choice
discredits them or their aims? Or don't. I realize your
time and experience is valuable and more suited to
remunerated advising than free opining.
Q6: Energy from coal etc. Stein: green new jobs etc.
Q: push.. short term would you shut down the coal mines? Stein? 17
years to zero out fossil fuels. Emergency put people to work in
other industries, solar, transportation, rail, or light rail or
it's curtains in a matter of decades. 2060 10,20,30 feet of sea
rise. Goodbye population centers, nuclear plants will go Fukashima,
where does money come from? 1/2 T essential for our survival.
Organizer in the white house instead of bloated military, or tax
wall street .2%.
Q: cenk still pushing. European countries limit coal mines, so
would you say no more coal mines, no oil drilling?
Stein: you can't negotiate with environment, climate. More jobs to
be created by doing what science says to do. zero mean zero.
Scientists say play with fire. EPA to protect environment and
health, extinction is not compatible with health.
Taking a break and then back to : are you a spoiler?
Q7: can't hear, hopefully someone will repeat?
Stein: dealing with congress that doesn't get anything done and a Pres that
does opposite of elected purpose? Turn the wh into the Green house. Political
house of cards is falling down. Dislike, distrusted candidates. When? organize
for life saving, civiliZation saving event. Organizer and chief. Lobbyists
calling the shots, predatory banks etc, we the public locked out, vast number
to mobilize end student debt, health care, agenda doable, flood offices
insisting (she's meandering) on green new deal, phone, e-mail, show up. Quaking
in boots, organized political power we have.
Q8: Campaign finance, lobby etc seems rigged, how to overcome?
Stein: passed Camp finance reform thru referendum as 85% D legislature wouldn't
do it. Public financing, money no longer in control can't buy elections,
holding airwarve hostage to corp profiteering, not rocket science. Mass. Ds
repealed public finance on voice vote, worser evil to make themselves
inevitable. (At least she admits what her state did was an ultimate failure)
Cenk: Constitutional amendment, what would it say? Stein: Yes, CU not only
problem, distorted constitution, money is not speech, 1$ 1 Vote, corps not
people, we have the right to democratically decide.
Cenk: Clinton too, within first 30 days?
Stein: Clinton only refers to unaccountable money pretends to support, ok
declared money,
Q9: If someone doesn't want Trump, vote for you instead of Clinton?
Stein: 4 out fo 10 don't vote, it will be 6 out of 10, stand up, what is exit
strategy of greater and lesser evil, Trumps' statements, Clinton's acts Libya,
bombing Muslims, D, unfathomable hr vilations against immigration, coup in
Honduras and refugees, R hate and fear, D deportation and night raids, they get
worse more corp, more militarist, interrupt the downward spiral. Trump scumbag
smokescreen for economic predators once Clinton wins, SS privatization, fool me
once, twice, three, vote like your lives depend on it because they do.
Cenk: T or C, who would you pick?
Difference not enough to save your job, environment, climate etc. I will not
sleep wll if T elected. I will not sleep well if C elected either, war with
Russia. This is a democracy.
Q10: drug war, 160,000 died against cartels, 1T$, drug use hasn't dropped.
Alcohol prohibition makes more powerful, drug also. Lack of regulation, arrests
(every 25 seconds) legalize, tax, regulate all drugs as prohibition makes it
work?
Stein: Instruct DEA to use science what will and won't be scheduled. Marijuana
off, pulls rug out from under mafioso industry. Decriminalize, health issue,
needs more study. Legalize marijuana.
MCR for all discussion.
Ooh, here we go: Sam Seder question: Some are voting to get the GP to 5%,
100 in office but that is less statewide. Do you have a plan for off years
and what is it? (I'm betting she won't answer)
Stein: So much we can do, fear campaign delivers what we're afraid of,
this democracy not for us, stand up, (still no plan) make most progressive
vote, rank choice voting, politics of fear, moral compass, raise up local
candidates, go to website, donate, independent parties lead the way,
abolition spoilers, (still no plan) Abraham Lincoln, stand up like your
lives depend on it…… nope, no plan.
"... Nonsense. You would have to be so incompetent as to need a daily caregiver to be a "liberal" activist and not know Hillary Clinton despises you. ..."
"... Didn't click on the link. I presume this is just face-saving blather from inside the pen. ..."
"... It's compatible with Hillary's three-act campaign's third act of "putting the Party back together" with the solvent glue of conflation and the structural adhesive of Stronger Together ("get in mah fasces, maggots"). ..."
Some fun dish in here: WikiLeaks poisons Hillary's relationship with left. After learning
how Clinton feels about them, liberals vow to push back against her agenda and appointments.
Nonsense. You would have to be so incompetent as to need a daily caregiver to be a "liberal"
activist and not know Hillary Clinton despises you.
Didn't click on the link. I presume this is just face-saving blather from inside the pen.
Gotta pretend you're not in the pen to get more calves in there with you. If they can actually
see the wires and the prods, it takes more effort to get them down the chute.
It's a decent bit of dish, but what one gets out of the forced synonymy of "liberal" and "left"
and "progressive" depends on what priors one brings in with it, and I don't think I'll wait for
the third time around before calling it as enemy design.
It's compatible with Hillary's three-act
campaign's third act of "putting the Party back together" with the solvent glue of conflation
and the structural adhesive of Stronger Together ("get in mah fasces, maggots").
Today's aptrogram from professional political kayfabe: Amanda Marcotte → At Drama, Moan Etc.
I agree with this. All a person has to do is look at a few of her votes in the Senate to see
how right wing she is. Some examples (which I posted during the primaries - sorry for the repetition):
Her vote in favor of the insidious bankruptcy reform act:
The 2001 bill did not become law, but it was similar to the 2005 bill (S. 256) which did
become law. Hillary Clinton was not present for the 2005 vote, because her husband was having
surgery for a partially collapsed lung:
She is a Democrat only by name. In reality she is a wolf in sheep clothing -- a neoliberal (and
a neocon -- a warmonger with the distinct anti-Russian bet) that betrayed working people
and middle class long ago and pandering only to the top 1%. The while "clitonized" Democratic party
is the party of top 1% (top 10% at best). Rejection of Hillary is just rejection of Demorats
(neoliberal democrats) betrayal of working and middle classes. It remains to be seen f Wall Street
managed to push her thrith the thoat of Americal people, despite all re revultion her candidacy
evoke, her corruption and her failing health.
The soullessness of [Clinton's] campaign - all ambition and entitlement - emerges
almost poignantly in the emails, especially when aides keep asking what the campaign
is about. In one largely overlooked passage,
Clinton
complains
that her speechwriters have not given her any overall theme or
rationale. Isn't that the candidate's job? Asked
one of her aides
, Joel Benenson: "Do we have any sense from her what she believes
or wants her core message to be?"
It's that emptiness at the core that makes every policy and
position negotiable and politically calculable. Hence the
embarrassing about-face
on the Trans-Pacific Partnership after the popular winds
swung decisively against free trade.
So too with financial regulation, as in Dodd-Frank
.
As she told
a Goldman Sachs gathering, after the financial collapse there was "a
need to do something because, for political reasons . . . you can't sit idly by and
do nothing."
Of course, we knew all this. But we hadn't seen it so clearly laid out.
Illicit and illegal as is WikiLeaks, it is the camera in the sausage factory. And
what it reveals is surpassingly unpretty.
Who on the left is genuinely excited about voting for Hillary Clinton? Sure, there
are some, but
she strikes me as being a Democratic figure who's a lot like Mitt
Romney was on the Right: the perfect distillation of a kind of Establishmentarianism
within their own party.
(I hasten to say that whatever my disagreement with Romney
over policy might have been, he always struck me as a thoroughly decent person. Hillary
Clinton … not.) It is hard to think of two more different figures on the Right than Mitt
Romney and Donald Trump - temperamentally and otherwise. Yet within four years, the GOP
convulsed so much that it got Donald Trump. What Trump's triumph over the GOP
Establishment showed was its deep weakness. It just needed a strong push.
Might that be the case for the Democrats post-Clinton? Who is the Donald Trump of the
Democratic Party? Where might he come from? I don't think we can see him (or her) now,
but I have a hunch that he's out there.
I find it hard to believe that the Democrats
are not going to be immune to the same economic and cultural forces that dismantled the
GOP. I could be wrong. Her sort of conniving, careerist, technocratic liberalism surely
is not long for this world. Yes?
Posted in
Democrats
,
Presidential politics
. Tagged
Charles
Krauthammer
,
Donald Trump
,
Hillary Clinton
.
There was a time, not long ago, when deficit scolds were
actively dangerous - when their huffing and puffing came
quite close to stampeding Washington into really bad policies
like raising the Medicare age (which wouldn't even have saved
money) and short-term fiscal austerity. At this point their
influence doesn't reach nearly that far. But they continue to
play a malign role in our national discourse - because they
divert and distract attention from much more deserving
problems, depriving crucial issues of political oxygen.
You saw that in the debates: four, count them, four
questions about debt from the Committee for a Responsible
Federal Budget, not one about climate change. And you see it
again in today's New York Times, with Pete Peterson (of
course) and Paul Volcker (sigh) lecturing us * about the
usual stuff.
What's so bad about this kind of deficit scolding? It's
deeply misleading on two levels: the problem it purports to
lay out is far less clearly a major issue than the scolds
claim, and the insistence that we need immediate action is
just incoherent.
So, about that supposed debt crisis: right now we have a
more or less stable ratio of debt to GDP, and no hint of a
financing problem. So claims that we are facing something
terrible rest on the presumption that the budget situation
will worsen dramatically over time. How sure are we about
that? Less than you may imagine.
Yes, the population is getting older, which means more
spending on Medicare and Social Security. But it's already
2016, which means that quite a few baby boomers are already
drawing on those programs; by 2020 we'll be about halfway
through the demographic transition, and current estimates
don't suggest a big budget problem.
Why, then, do you see projections of a large debt
increase? The answer lies not in a known factor - an aging
population - but in assumed growth in health care costs and
rising interest rates. And the truth is that we don't know
that these are going to happen. In fact, health costs have
grown much more slowly since 2010 than previously projected,
and interest rates have been much lower. As the chart above
shows, taking these favorable surprises into account has
already drastically reduced long-run debt projections. These
days the long-run outlook looks vastly less scary than people
used to imagine.
Still, it's probably true that something will eventually
have to be done to bring spending and revenues in line. But
that brings me to the second point: why is this a crucial
issue right now?
Are debt scolds demanding that we slash spending and raise
taxes right away? Actually, no: the economy is still weak,
interest rates still low (meaning that the Fed can't offset
fiscal tightening with easy money), and as a matter of
macroeconomic prudence we should probably be running bigger,
not smaller deficits in the medium term. So proposals to
"deal with" the supposed debt problem always involve
long-term cuts in benefits and (reluctantly) increases in
taxes. That is, they don't involve actual policy moves now,
or for the next 5-10 years.
So why is it so important to take up the issue right now,
with so much else on our plate?
Put it this way: yes, it's possible that we may at some
point in the future have to cut benefits. But deficit scolds
talk as if they offer a way to avoid this fate, when in fact
their solution to the prospect of future benefit cuts is … to
cut future benefits.
If you try really hard, you can argue that locking in
policies now for this future adjustment will make the
transition smoother. But that is really a second-order issue,
hardly deserving to take up a lot of our time. By putting the
debt question aside, we are NOT in any material way making
the future worse.
And that is a total contrast with climate change, where
our failure to act means pouring vast quantities of
greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, materially increasing
the odds of catastrophe with every year we wait.
So my message to the deficit scolds is this: yes, we may
face some hard choices a couple of decades from now. But we
might not, and in any case there aren't any choices that must
be made now. Meanwhile, there are genuinely scary things
happening as we speak, which we should be taking on but
aren't. And your fear-mongering is distracting us from these
real problems. Therefore, I would respectfully request that
you people just go away.
I keep trying to imagine what special interest is so invested in the no-fly zone that they
can force Hillary to keep proposing it, even though it is obviously no longer feasible. Is it
just inertia? She is so used to pushing the idea that she brings it up without thinking, and then
has to dodge out of the way? But the whole situation has passed out of the realm of rational thought.
It reminds me of Vietnam.
The idea the South and North Vietnam were separate countries was never
true, but John Foster Dulles insisted on repeating the lie at every opportunity and after a while
the Village all started to believe it.
None of the stated goals in Syria make any sense any longer
(if the ever did), but we keep pursuing them. Scary.
As Europeans assess the fallout from the U.K.'s
Brexit referendum
, they face a series of elections that could equally shake the political establishment. In the
coming 12 months, four of Europe's five largest economies have votes that will almost certainly mean
serious gains for right-wing populists and nationalists. Once seen as fringe groups, France's National
Front, Italy's Five Star Movement, and the Freedom Party in the Netherlands have attracted legions
of followers by tapping discontent over immigration, terrorism, and feeble economic performance.
"The Netherlands should again become a country of and for the Dutch people," says Evert Davelaar,
a Freedom Party backer who says immigrants don't share "Western and Christian values."
... ... ....
The populists are deeply skeptical of European integration, and those in France and the Netherlands
want to follow Britain's lead and quit the European Union. "Political risk in Europe is now far more
significant than in the United States," says Ajay Rajadhyaksha, head of macro research at Barclays.
... ... ...
...the biggest risk of the nationalist groundswell: increasingly fragmented parliaments that will
be unable or unwilling to tackle the problems hobbling their economies. True, populist leaders might
not have enough clout to enact controversial measures such as the Dutch Freedom Party's call to close
mosques and deport Muslims. And while the Brexit vote in June helped energize Eurosceptics, it's
unlikely that any major European country will soon quit the EU, Morgan Stanley economists wrote in
a recent report. But they added that "the protest parties promise to turn back the clock" on free-market
reforms while leaving "sclerotic" labour and market regulations in place. France's National Front,
for example, wants to temporarily renationalise banks and increase tariffs while embracing cumbersome
labour rules widely blamed for chronic double-digit unemployment. Such policies could damp already
weak euro zone growth, forecast by the International Monetary Fund to drop from 2 percent in 2015
to 1.5 percent in 2017. "Politics introduces a downside skew to growth," the economists said.
Please note that Hillary's path to the top was marked by proved beyond reasonable doubt DNC fraud.
With information contained in recent email leaks some DNC honchos probably might go to jail for
violation of elections laws. So for them this is a death match and people usually fight well when
they are against the wall. The same in true about Obama and his entourage.
And while this Nobel Peace Price winner managed to bomb just eight countries, Hillary might
improve this peace effort, which was definitely insufficient from the point of view of many diplomats
in State Department. Also the number of humanitarian bombs could be much greater. Here Hillary
election can really help.
From the other point of view this might well be a sign of the crisis of legitimacy of the US
ruling neoliberal elite (aka financial oligarchy).
After approximately 50 years in power the level of degeneration of the US neoliberal elite
reached the level when the quality of candidates reminds me the quality of candidates from the
USSR Politburo after Brezhnev death. Health-wise Hillary really bear some resemblance to Andropov
and Chernenko. And inability of the elite to replace either of them with a more viable candidate
speaks volumes.
The other factor that will not go away is that Obama effectively pardoned Hillary for emailgate
(after gentle encouragement from Bill via Loretta Lynch). Otherwise instead of candidate to POTUS,
she would be a viable candidate for orange suit too. Sure, the rule of law is not applicable to
neoliberal elite, so why Hilary should be an exception? But some naive schmucks might think that
this is highly improper. And be way too much upset with the fruits of neoliberal globalization.
Not that Brexit is easily repeatable in the USA, but vote against neoliberal globalization (protest
vote) might play a role.
Another interesting thing to observe is when (and if) the impeachment process starts, if she
is elected. With some FBI materials in hands of the Congress Republicans she in on the hook. A
simple majority of those present and voting is required for each article of impeachment, or the
resolution as a whole, to pass.
All-in-all her win might well be a Pyrrhic victory. And the unknown neurological disease that
she has (Parkinson?) makes her even more vulnerable after the election, then before. The role
of POTUS involves a lot of stress and requires substantial physical stamina as POTUS is the center
of intersection of all important government conflicts, conversations and communications. That's
a killing environment for anyone with Parkinson. And remember she was not able to survive the
pressure of the role of the Secretary of State when she was in much better health and has an earlier
stage of the disease.
Another interesting question, if the leaks continue after the election. That also can contribute
to the level of stress. Just anticipation is highly stressful. I do not buy the theory about "evil
Russians." This hypothesis does not survive Occam razor test. I think that there some anti-Hillary
forces within the USA ruling elite, possibly within the NSA or some other three letter agency
that has access to email boxes of major Web mail providers via NSA.
If this is a plausible hypothesis, that makes it more probable that the leaks continue. To
say nothing about possible damaging revelations about Bill (especially related to Clinton Foundation),
who really enjoyed his retirement way too much.
Those who vote for Hillary for the sake of stability need to be reminded that according to
the Minsky Theory stability sometimes can be very destabilizing
When Krugman is appointed to a top government post by Hillary Clinton we will be able to FOIA
his pay and attach a value to all the columns "electioneering" Krugman has written.
likbez -> anne...
Anne,
"An intolerably destructive essay that should never have been posted, and I assume no
such essay will be posted again on this blog. Shameful, shameful essay."
You mean that voting for the female warmonger with some psychopathic tendencies ("We came,
we saw, he died") is not shameful ?
An interesting approach I would say.
I am not fun of Trump, but he, at least, does not have the blood of innocent women and children
on his hands. And less likely to start WWIII unlike this completely out of control warmonger.
With the number of victims of wars of neoliberal empire expansion in Iraq, Libya and Syria,
you should be ashamed of yourself as a women.
Please think about your current position Anne. You really should be ashamed.
"... which may be the story one wishes for. But if there were a spread to compare her win against, it was Bernie who massively beat the spread. I'll leave it as an exercise to others to determine if her unfair advantages were as large as the winning margin. ..."
"... He makes a good point and you dismiss it. You bashed Bernie Sanders and "Bernie Bros" during the primary. Then you lie about it. That's why you're the worst. Dishonest as hell. ..."
"... Remember one thing anne, America is not a country. It is an idea. You cannot arrest it, murder it, or pretend it isn't there. We as a people are not perfect. But Mr Putin is stabbing directly at our democracy, not Hillary Clinton and not Paul Krugman. Time to be a little more objective, of which you are even more capable of than me. ..."
"... It is not exactly McCarthyism as stated (although kthomas with his previous Putin comments looks like a modern day McCarthyist). I think this is a pretty clear formulation of the credo of American Exceptionalism -- a flavor of nationalism adapted to the realities of the new continent. ..."
"... And Robert Kagan explained it earlier much better ... I wonder if Victoria Nuland and Dick Cheney vote for Hillary too. ..."
"...Mrs. Clinton won the Democratic nomination fairly easily..."
which may be the story one wishes for. But if there were a spread to compare her win against,
it was Bernie who massively beat the spread. I'll leave it as an exercise to others to determine
if her unfair advantages were as large as the winning margin.
"Why do people like you pretend to love Sen Sanders so much!?"
Why do you say he is pretending? What did he write to make you think that?
Are you just a dishonest troll centrist totebagger like PGL.
Peter K. -> to pgl...
What does that have to do with anything?
He makes a good point and you dismiss it. You bashed Bernie Sanders and "Bernie Bros" during
the primary. Then you lie about it. That's why you're the worst. Dishonest as hell. Are most
New Yorkers as dishonest as you, Trump, Guiliani, Christie, etc?
No. I am a fan of Sen Sanders, and not even he would believe your nonsense. History will not remember
it that way. What it will remember is how Putin Comrade meddled. And there is a price for that.
Sen Sanders wanted one, stated thing: to push the narrative to the left. He marginally accomplished
this. What he did succeed in was providing an opportunity for false-lefties like you and Mr Putin
who seem to think that America is the root of all evil.
Remember one thing anne, America is not a country. It is an idea. You cannot arrest it,
murder it, or pretend it isn't there. We as a people are not perfect. But Mr Putin is stabbing
directly at our democracy, not Hillary Clinton and not Paul Krugman. Time to be a little more
objective, of which you are even more capable of than me.
Sen Sanders wanted one stated thing: to push the narrative to the left. He marginally accomplished
this. What he did succeed in was providing an opportunity for false-lefties like --- and -- -----
who seem to think that America is the root of all evil....
[ Better to assume such an awful comment was never written, but the McCarthy-like tone to a
particular campaign has been disturbing and could prove lasting. ]
It is not exactly McCarthyism as stated (although kthomas with his previous Putin comments
looks like a modern day McCarthyist). I think this is a pretty clear formulation of the credo
of American Exceptionalism -- a flavor of nationalism adapted to the realities of the new continent.
BS, a remarkable.
No, I am sure he will be remembered more than that.
Bernard Sanders, last romantic politician to run his campaign on an average of $37 from 3,284,421
donations (or whatever Obama said at The Dinner). Remarkable but ineffectual. A good orator in
empty houses means he was practicing, not performing.
Why does Obama succeed and Sanders fail? Axelrod and co.
Peter K. -> cal... , -1
He was written off by the like of Krugman, PGL, you, KThomas etc.
He won what 13 million votes. Young people overwhelmingly voted for Sanders. He won New Hampshire,
Colorado, Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, Washington, Oregon, etc. etc. etc. And now the "unromantic"
complacent people have to lie about the campaign.
"... Instead of the investigative process being focused on achieving justice, Kucinich says it was "a very political process" that had "everything to do with the 2016 presidential election" in which Clinton is the Democratic nominee. Kucinich elaborates that "the executive branch of government made an early determination that no matter what came up that there was no way that Hillary Clinton was going to have to be accountable under law for anything dealing with the mishandling of classified information." ..."
Speaking Monday on Fox News with host Neil Cavuto, former Democratic presidential candidate
and United States House of Representatives Member from Ohio Dennis Kucinich opined that, from
early on, the US government's investigation of Hillary Clinton for mishandling confidential
information while she was Secretary of State was fixed in her favor.
Instead of the investigative process being focused on achieving justice, Kucinich says it
was "a very political process" that had "everything to do with the 2016 presidential election" in
which Clinton is the Democratic nominee. Kucinich elaborates that "the executive branch of
government made an early determination that no matter what came up that there was no way that
Hillary Clinton was going to have to be accountable under law for anything dealing with the
mishandling of classified information."
Its from World Socialist Web Site by thier analysys
does contain some valid points. Especially about betrayal of nomenklatura, and, especially, KGB nomenklatura,which was wholesale bought
by the USA for cash.
Note that the author is unable or unwilling to use the tterm "neoliberalism". Looks like orthodox Marxism has problem with this
notion as it contradict Marxism dogma that capitalism as an economic doctrine is final stage before arrival of socialism. Looks like
it is not the final ;-)
Notable quotes:
"... Russia Since 1980 ..."
"... History reveals that the grandsons of the Bolshevik coup d'état didn't destroy the Soviet Union in a valiant effort to advance the cause of communist prosperity or even to return to their common European home; instead, it transformed Soviet managers and ministers into roving bandits (asset-grabbing privateers) with a tacit presidential charter to privatize the people's assets and revenues to themselves under the new Muscovite rule of men ..."
"... The scale of this plunder was astounding. It not only bankrupted the Soviet Union, forcing Russian President Boris Yeltsin to appeal to the G-7 for $6 billion of assistance on December 6, 1991, but triggered a free fall in aggregate production commencing in 1990, aptly known as catastroika. ..."
"... In retrospect, the Soviet economy didn't collapse because the liberalized command economy devised after 1953 was marked for death. The system was inefficient, corrupt and reprehensible in a myriad of ways, but sustainable, as the CIA and most Sovietologists maintained. It was destroyed by Gorbachev's tolerance and complicity in allowing privateers to misappropriate state revenues, pilfer materials, spontaneously privatize, and hotwire their ill-gotten gains abroad, all of which disorganized production. ..."
"... The rapid growth and increasing complexity of the Soviet economy required access to the resources of the world economy. ..."
"... For the Soviet bureaucracy, a parasitic social caste committed to the defense of its privileges and terrified of the working class, the revolutionary solution to the contradictions of the Soviet economy was absolutely unthinkable. The only course that it could contemplate was the second-capitulation to imperialism. ..."
"... In other words, the integration of the USSR into the structure of the world capitalist economy on a capitalist basis means not the slow development of a backward national economy, but the rapid destruction of one which has sustained living conditions which are, at least for the working class, far closer to those that exist in the advanced countries than in the third world. ..."
"... The Fourth International ..."
"... The End of the USSR, ..."
"... The report related the destruction of the USSR by the ruling bureaucracy to a broader international phenomenon. The smashing up of the USSR was mirrored in the United States by the destruction of the trade unions as even partial instruments of working-class defense. ..."
"... Millions of people are going to see imperialism for what it really is. The democratic mask is going to be torn off. The idea that imperialism is compatible with peace is going to be exposed. The very elements which drove masses into revolutionary struggle in the past are once again present. The workers of Russia and the Ukraine are going to be reminded why they made a revolution in the first place. The American workers are going to be reminded why they themselves in an earlier period engaged in the most massive struggles against the corporations. The workers of Europe are going to be reminded why their continent was the birthplace of socialism and Karl Marx. [p. 25] ..."
This analysis has been vindicated by scholarly investigations into the causes of the Soviet economic collapse that facilitated
the bureaucracy's dissolution of the USSR. In Russia Since 1980, published in 2008 by Cambridge University Press, Professors
Steven Rosefielde and Stefan Hedlund present evidence that Gorbachev introduced measures that appear, in retrospect, to have been
aimed at sabotaging the Soviet economy. "Gorbachev and his entourage," they write, "seem to have had a venal hidden agenda that caused
things to get out of hand quickly." [p. 38] In a devastating appraisal of Gorbachev's policies, Rosefielde and Hedlund state:
History reveals that the grandsons of the Bolshevik coup d'état didn't destroy the Soviet Union in a valiant effort to advance
the cause of communist prosperity or even to return to their common European home; instead, it transformed Soviet managers and ministers
into roving bandits (asset-grabbing privateers) with a tacit presidential charter to privatize the people's assets and revenues to
themselves under the new Muscovite rule of men. [p. 40]
Instead of displaying due diligence over personal use of state revenues, materials and property, inculcated in every Bolshevik
since 1917, Gorbachev winked at a counterrevolution from below opening Pandora's Box. He allowed enterprises and others not only
to profit maximize for the state in various ways, which was beneficial, but also to misappropriate state assets, and export the proceeds
abroad. In the process, red directors disregarded state contracts and obligations, disorganizing inter-industrial intermediate input
flows, and triggering a depression from which the Soviet Union never recovered and Russia has barely emerged. [p. 47]
Given all the heated debates that would later ensue about how Yeltsin and his shock therapy engendered mass plunder, it should
be noted that the looting began under Gorbachev's watch. It was his malign neglect that transformed the rhetoric of Market Communism
into the pillage of the nation's assets.
The scale of this plunder was astounding. It not only bankrupted the Soviet Union, forcing Russian President Boris Yeltsin
to appeal to the G-7 for $6 billion of assistance on December 6, 1991, but triggered a free fall in aggregate production commencing
in 1990, aptly known as catastroika.
In retrospect, the Soviet economy didn't collapse because the liberalized command economy devised after 1953 was marked for
death. The system was inefficient, corrupt and reprehensible in a myriad of ways, but sustainable, as the CIA and most Sovietologists
maintained. It was destroyed by Gorbachev's tolerance and complicity in allowing privateers to misappropriate state revenues, pilfer
materials, spontaneously privatize, and hotwire their ill-gotten gains abroad, all of which disorganized production. [p. 49]
The analysis of Rosefielde and Hedlund, while accurate in its assessment of Gorbachev's actions, is simplistic. Gorbachev's policies
can be understood only within the framework of more fundamental political and socioeconomic factors. First, and most important, the
real objective crisis of the Soviet economy (which existed and preceded by many decades the accession of Gorbachev to power) developed
out of the contradictions of the autarkic nationalist policies pursued by the Soviet regime since Stalin and Bukharin introduced
the program of "socialism in one country" in 1924. The rapid growth and increasing complexity of the Soviet economy required
access to the resources of the world economy. This access could be achieved only in one of two ways: either through the spread
of socialist revolution into the advanced capitalist countries, or through the counterrevolutionary integration of the USSR into
the economic structures of world capitalism.
For the Soviet bureaucracy, a parasitic social caste committed to the defense of its privileges and terrified of the working
class, the revolutionary solution to the contradictions of the Soviet economy was absolutely unthinkable. The only course that it
could contemplate was the second-capitulation to imperialism. This second course, moreover, opened for the leading sections
of the bureaucracy the possibility of permanently securing their privileges and vastly expanding their wealth. The privileged caste
would become a ruling class. The corruption of Gorbachev, Yeltsin and their associates was merely the necessary means employed by
the bureaucracy to achieve this utterly reactionary and immensely destructive outcome.
On October 3, 1991, less than three months before the dissolution of the USSR, I delivered a lecture in Kiev in which I challenged
the argument-which was widely propagated by the Stalinist regime-that the restoration of capitalism would bring immense benefits
to the people. I stated:
In this country, capitalist restoration can only take place on the basis of the widespread destruction of the already existing
productive forces and the social- cultural institutions that depended upon them. In other words, the integration of the USSR
into the structure of the world capitalist economy on a capitalist basis means not the slow development of a backward national economy,
but the rapid destruction of one which has sustained living conditions which are, at least for the working class, far closer to those
that exist in the advanced countries than in the third world. When one examines the various schemes hatched by proponents of
capitalist restoration, one cannot but conclude that they are no less ignorant than Stalin of the real workings of the world capitalist
economy. And they are preparing the ground for a social tragedy that will eclipse that produced by the pragmatic and nationalistic
policies of Stalin. ["Soviet Union at the Crossroads," published in The Fourth International (Fall- Winter 1992, Volume
19, No. 1, p. 109), Emphasis in the original.]
Almost exactly 20 years ago, on January 4, 1992, the Workers League held a party membership meeting in Detroit to consider the
historical, political and social implications of the dissolution of the USSR. Rereading this report so many years later, I believe
that it has stood the test of time. It stated that the dissolution of the USSR "represents the juridical liquidation of the workers'
state and its replacement with regimes that are openly and unequivocally devoted to the destruction of the remnants of the national
economy and the planning system that issued from the October Revolution. To define the CIS [Confederation of Independent States]
or its independent republics as workers states would be to completely separate the definition from the concrete content which it
expressed during the previous period." [David North, The End of the USSR, Labor Publications, 1992, p. 6]
The report continued:
"A revolutionary party must face reality and state what is. The Soviet working class has suffered a serious defeat. The bureaucracy
has devoured the workers state before the working class was able to clean out the bureaucracy. This fact, however unpleasant, does
not refute the perspective of the Fourth International. Since it was founded in 1938, our movement has repeatedly said that if the
working class was not able to destroy this bureaucracy, then the Soviet Union would suffer a shipwreck. Trotsky did not call for
political revolution as some sort of exaggerated response to this or that act of bureaucratic malfeasance. He said that a political
revolution was necessary because only in that way could the Soviet Union, as a workers state, be defended against imperialism." [p.
6]
I sought to explain why the Soviet working class had failed to rise up in opposition to the bureaucracy's liquidation of the Soviet
Union. How was it possible that the destruction of the Soviet Union-having survived the horrors of the Nazi invasion-could be carried
out "by a miserable group of petty gangsters, acting in the interests of the scum of Soviet society?" I offered the following answer:
We must reply to these questions by stressing the implications of the massive destruction of revolutionary cadre carried out within
the Soviet Union by the Stalinist regime. Virtually all the human representatives of the revolutionary tradition who consciously
prepared and led that revolution were wiped out. And along with the political leaders of the revolution, the most creative representatives
of the intelligentsia who had flourished in the early years of the Soviet state were also annihilated or terrorized into silence.
Furthermore, we must point to the deep-going alienation of the working class itself from state property. Property belonged to
the state, but the state "belonged" to the bureaucracy, as Trotsky noted. The fundamental distinction between state property and
bourgeois property-however important from a theoretical standpoint-became less and less relevant from a practical standpoint. It
is true that capitalist exploitation did not exist in the scientific sense of the term, but that did not alter the fact that the
day-to-day conditions of life in factories and mines and other workplaces were as miserable as are to be found in any of the advanced
capitalist countries, and, in many cases, far worse.
Finally, we must consider the consequences of the protracted decay of the international socialist movement...
Especially during the past decade, the collapse of effective working class resistance in any part of the world to the bourgeois
offensive had a demoralizing effect on Soviet workers. Capitalism assumed an aura of "invincibility," although this aura was merely
the illusory reflection of the spinelessness of the labor bureaucracies all over the world, which have on every occasion betrayed
the workers and capitulated to the bourgeoisie. What the Soviet workers saw was not the bitter resistance of sections of workers
to the international offensive of capital, but defeats and their consequences. [p. 13-14]
The report related the destruction of the USSR by the ruling bureaucracy to a broader international phenomenon. The smashing
up of the USSR was mirrored in the United States by the destruction of the trade unions as even partial instruments of working-class
defense.
In every part of the world, including the advanced countries, the workers are discovering that their own parties and their own
trade union organizations are engaged in the related task of systematically lowering and impoverishing the working class. [p. 22]
Finally, the report dismissed any notion that the dissolution of the USSR signified a new era of progressive capitalist development.
Millions of people are going to see imperialism for what it really is. The democratic mask is going to be torn off. The idea
that imperialism is compatible with peace is going to be exposed. The very elements which drove masses into revolutionary struggle
in the past are once again present. The workers of Russia and the Ukraine are going to be reminded why they made a revolution in
the first place. The American workers are going to be reminded why they themselves in an earlier period engaged in the most massive
struggles against the corporations. The workers of Europe are going to be reminded why their continent was the birthplace of socialism
and Karl Marx. [p. 25]
The aftermath of the dissolution of the USSR: 20 years of economic crisis, social decay, and political reaction
According to liberal theory, the dissolution of the Soviet Union ought to have produced a new flowering of democracy. Of course,
nothing of the sort occurred-not in the former USSR or, for that matter, in the United States. Moreover, the breakup of the Soviet
Union-the so-called defeat of communism-was not followed by a triumphant resurgence of its irreconcilable enemies in the international
workers' movement, the social democratic and reformist trade unions and political parties. The opposite occurred. All these organizations
experienced, in the aftermath of the breakup of the USSR, a devastating and even terminal crisis. In the United States, the trade
union movement-whose principal preoccupation during the entire Cold War had been the defeat of Communism-has all but collapsed. During
the two decades that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, the AFL-CIO lost a substantial portion of its membership, was reduced
to a state of utter impotence, and ceased to exist as a workers' organization in any socially significant sense of the term. At the
same time, everywhere in the world, the social position of the working class-from the standpoint of its influence on the direction
of state policy and its ability to increase its share of the surplus value produced by its own labor-deteriorated dramatically.
Certain important conclusions flow from this fact. First, the breakup of the Soviet Union did not flow from the supposed failure
of Marxism and socialism. If that had been the case, the anti-Marxist and antisocialist labor organizations should have thrived in
the post-Soviet era. The fact that these organizations experienced ignominious failure compels one to uncover the common feature
in the program and orientation of all the so-called labor organizations, "communist" and anticommunist alike. What was the common
element in the political DNA of all these organization? The answer is that regardless of their names, conflicting political alignments
and superficial ideological differences, the large labor organizations of the post-World War II period pursued essentially nationalist
policies. They tied the fate of the working class to one or another nation-state. This left them incapable of responding to the increasing
integration of the world economy. The emergence of transnational corporations and the associated phenomena of capitalist globalization
shattered all labor organizations that based themselves on a nationalist program.
The second conclusion is that the improvement of conditions of the international working class was linked, to one degree or another,
to the existence of the Soviet Union. Despite the treachery and crimes of the Stalinist bureaucracy, the existence of the USSR, a
state that arose on the basis of a socialist revolution, imposed upon American and European imperialism certain political and social
restraints that would otherwise have been unacceptable. The political environment of the past two decades-characterized by unrestrained
imperialist militarism, the violations of international law, and the repudiation of essential principles of bourgeois democracy-is
the direct outcome of the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
The breakup of the USSR was, for the great masses of its former citizens, an unmitigated disaster. Twenty years after the October
Revolution, despite all the political crimes of the Stalinist regime, the new property relations established in the aftermath of
the October Revolution made possible an extraordinary social transformation of backward Russia. And even after suffering horrifying
losses during the four years of war with Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union experienced in the 20 years that followed the war a stupendous
growth of its economy, which was accompanied by advances in science and culture that astonished the entire world.
But what is the verdict on the post-Soviet experience of the Russian people? First and foremost, the dissolution of the USSR set
into motion a demographic catastrophe. Ten years after the breakup of the Soviet Union, the Russian population was shrinking at an
annual rate of 750,000. Between 1983 and 2001, the number of annual births dropped by one half. 75 percent of pregnant women in Russia
suffered some form of illness that endangered their unborn child. Only one quarter of infants were born healthy.
The overall health of the Russian people deteriorated dramatically after the restoration of capitalism. There was a staggering
rise in alcoholism, heart disease, cancer and sexually transmitted diseases. All this occurred against the backdrop of a catastrophic
breakdown of the economy of the former USSR and a dramatic rise in mass poverty.
As for democracy, the post-Soviet system was consolidated on the basis of mass murder. For more than 70 years, the Bolshevik regime's
dissolution of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918-an event that did not entail the loss of a single life-was trumpeted as an
unforgettable and unforgivable violation of democratic principles. But in October 1993, having lost a majority in the popularly elected
parliament, the Yeltsin regime ordered the bombardment of the White House-the seat of the Russian parliament-located in the middle
of Moscow. Estimates of the number of people who were killed in the military assault run as high as 2,000. On the basis of this carnage,
the Yeltsin regime was effectively transformed into a dictatorship, based on the military and security forces. The regime of Putin-Medvedev
continues along the same dictatorial lines. The assault on the White House was supported by the Clinton administration. Unlike the
dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, the bombardment of the Russian parliament is an event that has been all but forgotten.
What is there to be said of post-Soviet Russian culture? As always, there are talented people who do their best to produce serious
work. But the general picture is one of desolation. The words that have emerged from the breakup of the USSR and that define modern
Russian culture, or what is left of it, are "mafia," "biznessman" and "oligarch."
What has occurred in Russia is only an extreme expression of a social and cultural breakdown that is to be observed in all capitalist
countries. Can it even be said with certainty that the economic system devised in Russia is more corrupt that that which exists in
Britain or the United States? The Russian oligarchs are probably cruder and more vulgar in the methods they employ. However, the
argument could be plausibly made that their methods of plunder are less efficient than those employed by their counterparts in the
summits of American finance. After all, the American financial oligarchs, whose speculative operations brought about the near-collapse
of the US and global economy in the autumn of 2008, were able to orchestrate, within a matter of days, the transfer of the full burden
of their losses to the public.
It is undoubtedly true that the dissolution of the USSR at the end of 1991 opened up endless opportunities for the use of American
power-in the Balkans, the Middle East and Central Asia. But the eruption of American militarism was, in the final analysis, the expression
of a more profound and historically significant tendency-the long-term decline of the economic position of American capitalism. This
tendency was not reversed by the breakup of the USSR. The history of American capitalism during the past two decades has been one
of decay. The brief episodes of economic growth have been based on reckless and unsustainable speculation. The Clinton boom of the
1990s was fueled by the "irrational exuberance" of Wall Street speculation, the so-called dot.com bubble. The great corporate icons
of the decade-of which Enron was the shining symbol-were assigned staggering valuations on the basis of thoroughly criminal operations.
It all collapsed in 2000-2001. The subsequent revival was fueled by frenzied speculation in housing. And, finally, the collapse in
2008, from which there has been no recovery.
When historians begin to recover from their intellectual stupor, they will see the collapse of the USSR and the protracted decline
of American capitalism as interrelated episodes of a global crisis, arising from the inability to develop the massive productive
forces developed by mankind on the basis of private ownership of the means of production and within the framework of the nation-state
system.
debate is over!
Back to the real world.
Anyone here care to give a more detailed view of this mess, who is allied with who where, etc?
OCT 20
Syria War 2016 - GoPro POV Footage Of Turkish Backed Turkmen Fighters In Heavy Clashes With The
Syrian Army In Latakia
First Person point of view GoPro footage of Turkish backed Turkmen fighter groups in heavy
clashes with the Syrian Arab Army in the border region between Turkey and Syria.
The fighters you see here are part of the so called Syrian Turkmen Brigades an informal armed
opposition structure composed of Syrian Turkmen primarily fighting against the Syrian Army, Islamic
State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) and the Syrian Democratic Forces (YPG+FSA).
They are aligned with the Syrian opposition and are heavily supported by Turkey, who provides
funding and military training along with artillery and aerial support.
"... criminal record had to be suppressed by the Obama regime in order to move the oligarchs' candidate in the direction of the White House. So here we are on the verge of nuclear war with Russia and China, and the important issue before the American people is Trump's lewd comments with Billy Bush about sexually attractive women. ..."
"... why is lewd talk about women more important than military conflict with Russia, which could mean nuclear war and the end of life on earth? ..."
"... For Killary-Hillary the Russian issue is the unsupported and false allegation that the Russian government, in league with Donald Trump, hacked her emails and released them to WikiLeaks. The purpose of this absurd claim is to focus voters' attention away from the damning content of the emails. ..."
"... The real issue is that the idiots in Washington have convinced the Russian government that Russia is going to be the target of a pre-emptive nuclear strike. Once a nation is convinced of this, it is unlikely that they will just sit there waiting, especially a powerful nuclear power like Russia, which appears to have a strategic alliance with another major nuclear power-China. ..."
Russia's very able Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova,
said that
the US presidential campaign is "simply some sort of a global shame" unworthy of the American people.
She certainly hit the nail on the head.
Hitlery's criminal record had to be suppressed by the Obama regime in order to move the oligarchs'
candidate in the direction of the White House. So here we are on the verge of nuclear war with Russia
and China, and the important issue before the American people is Trump's lewd comments with Billy
Bush about sexually attractive women.
I mean really. Men's talk about women is like their fish and hunting stories. It has to be taken
with a grain of salt. But this aside, why is lewd talk about women more important than military
conflict with Russia, which could mean nuclear war and the end of life on earth?
Trump has declared that he sees no point in conflict with Russia and that he sees no point in
NATO a quarter century after the demise of the Soviet Union.
Is Trump's lewd talk about women worse than Hitlery's provocative talk about Russian President
Vladimir Putin, whom Hitlery calls "the new Hitler"? What kind of utter fool would throw gratuitous
insults at the President of a country that can wipe the US and all of Western Europe off of the face
of the earth in a few minutes?
Would you rather face a situation in which a few women were groped, or be vaporized in nuclear
war? If you don't know the correct answer, you are too stupid to be alive.
Are the American women really going to elect Hillary as a rebuff to Trump's lewd talk? If so,
they will confirm that it was a mistake to give women the vote, although there will be no one left
alive to record the mistake in the history books.
Hitlery, with the aid of the presstitutes-the whores who lie for a living and who constitute the
American print and TV media-have succeeded in focusing America's election of a president on issues
irrelevant to the dangerous situation with which Hitlery and her neoconservative colleagues confront
the world.
For Killary-Hillary the Russian issue is the unsupported and false allegation that the Russian
government, in league with Donald Trump, hacked her emails and released them to WikiLeaks. The purpose
of this absurd claim is to focus voters' attention away from the damning content of the emails.
The real issue is that the idiots in Washington have convinced the Russian government that
Russia is going to be the target of a pre-emptive nuclear strike. Once a nation is convinced of this,
it is unlikely that they will just sit there waiting, especially a powerful nuclear power like Russia,
which appears to have a strategic alliance with another major nuclear power-China.
A vote for the crazed killer bitch Hitlery is a vote for the end of life on earth.
"... Clinton says publically she believes that. Meanwhile supposedly smart economists like Tyler Cowen say they don't. Boston Fed President Rosengren says there are too many jobs. We need more unemployed. I'm Fed Up with regional Fed Presidents like him. ..."
"... Class issues are now a tough nut to crack, partly I think because the Democrats and some liberals take demands for economic fairness and try to give us identity politics instead, ..."
"... The meritocratic class who Krugman speaks for and centrist politicians like Clinton will slow-walk class issues like how Tim Geithner slow-walked financial reform. It's part of their job description and milieu. ..."
"... It's funny when neo-liberals/libertarians hate an activity engaged in by workers in what is clearly the product of a free market -- exercising the right of free association and organizing to do collective bargaining -- while think it is perfectly OK -- indeed, so "natural" that any question wouldn't even occur to them -- for owners of capital to organize themselves under the special protections of the state-created corporation. ..."
"... It's understandable, though, that they would consider the corporation to be ordained by natural law: the Founding Fathers, after all, were dedicated to the proposition that all men and corporations are endowed with certain unalienable rights by their Creator. (Never mind that the creator of the corporations is the state.) ..."
I liked how Hillary said in the third debate that she was for raising the minimum wage because
people who work full time shouldn't live in poverty. And "Donald" is against it. That's why people
are voting for her.
That's an ethical or moral notion, combined with "morally neutral" economics. People who work
hard full time, play by the rules and pay their dues shouldn't live in poverty.
Clinton says publically she believes that. Meanwhile supposedly smart economists like Tyler
Cowen say they don't. Boston Fed President Rosengren says there are too many jobs. We need more
unemployed. I'm Fed Up with regional Fed Presidents like him.
Think about the debate between the centrists and progressives over Trump supporters. The centrists
argue Trump supporters (nor anyone else besides a few) aren't suffering from economic anxiety
- that it's racism all of the way down. Matt Yglesias. Dylan Matthews. Krugman. Meyerson. Etc.
The progressives admit there's racism, but there's a wider context. The Nazis were racists,
but there was also the Treaty of Versailles and the Great Depression. And Germany got better in
the decades after the war just as the American South is better than it once was. Steve Randy Waldman
and James Kwak discussed in blog post how the wider context should be taken into consideration.
On some "non-economic issues" there has been progress even though the recent decades haven't
been as booming as the post-WWII decades were with rising living standards for all.
A black President. Legalized gay marriage. Legalized pot. I wouldn't have thought these things
as likely to happen when I was a teenager because of the bigoted authoritarian nature of many
voters and elites. During the Progressive era and when the New Deal was enacted, racism and sexism
and bigotry and anti-science thinking was virulent. Yet economic progress was made on the class
front.
Class issues are now a tough nut to crack, partly I think because the Democrats and some
liberals take demands for economic fairness and try to give us identity politics instead,
not that the latter isn't worthwhile. Partly b/c of what Mike Konczal discussed in his recent
Medium piece.
If we can just apply the morality and politics of electing a black President and legalizing
gay marriage and pot, to class issues. The meritocratic class who Krugman speaks for and centrist
politicians like Clinton will slow-walk class issues like how Tim Geithner slow-walked financial
reform. It's part of their job description and milieu.
But Clinton did talk to it during the third debate when she said she'd raise the minimum wage
because people who work full time shouldn't live in poverty. That is a morale issue as the new
Pope has been talking about.
Hillary should have joked last night about what God's Catholic representative here on Earth
had to say about Trump.
urban legend said...
It's funny when neo-liberals/libertarians hate an activity engaged in by workers in what is
clearly the product of a free market -- exercising the right of free association and organizing
to do collective bargaining -- while think it is perfectly OK -- indeed, so "natural" that any
question wouldn't even occur to them -- for owners of capital to organize themselves under the
special protections of the state-created corporation.
It's understandable, though, that they would consider the corporation to be ordained by
natural law: the Founding Fathers, after all, were dedicated to the proposition that all men and
corporations are endowed with certain unalienable rights by their Creator. (Never mind that the
creator of the corporations is the state.)
"... Once again, during the last hour of the third debate, Clinton reiterated her position on a 'no fly zone' and 'safe zones' in Syria. She is absolutely committed to this policy position which aligns with the anonymous 50+ state dept lifers and Beltway neocons stance. ..."
"... Trump's candidacy = sovereignty - NO War. Clinton's candidacy = Globalism - WAR. Your vote is either for War or against War. It's that simple... ..."
"... Simply incredible the borg,and all those who say she is a lock are in for a big surprise,as Americans don't believe the serial liars anymore. ..."
"... It will be a 'fuck you' vote more than a vote for The Don. ..."
"... The dems forgot to switch off the internet. The anti-Trump MSM campaign is so total and over the top because it has to be --> CNN is so last century. No one is getting out of bed to vote Hillary. ..."
"... Step away from your TVs, smartphones and computers with your brains in the air. Let them breathe freely. ..."
"... Clinton seems to have had some of the questions ahead of time. She seemed to be reading the answers off a telepromter in her lecturn. ..."
"... He should declare that Hillary helped arm Al Qaeda to topple Assad for her banker buddies (cant mention the Jewishness/Israeli Firsterism of the 'neocons' of course, not because false but because true) and will be happy to send African Americans and Latinos to die for 'oil companies' and her 'banker friends' and after decades of establishment Dems promising the sky, maybe they dont need an inveterate liar who arms Islamic terrorists. ..."
"... Hillary armed Al Qaeda and possibly ISIS - both AngloZionist proxies. How in the fuck is she not in jail??? ..."
"... As Noam Chomsky has pointed out, duopolistic elections are merely mechanisms of manufactured consent. When each of the major parties are controlled by the different factions of the oligarchy, there is only afforded the option to vote for the ideology put forth by each oligarchic group. ..."
"... What fascinates me is how Obama went all public about Trumps assertions of rigged elections. It appears the puppet masters are very afraid of a "cynical" (realistic) population. Manufactured consent only works if people play the game. As evidenced in South Africa when no one showed up to vote, the government collapsed. ..."
"... "Your vote is either for War or against War. It's that simple." Is this being lost sight off amongst all the noise? I hope not, for the sake of the Ukrainians and the Syrians. And for the sake of the countries yet to be destabilised. ..."
"... A vote for Clinton = War and a vote for Trump = NO war ..."
"... Don't know when WH was created but the whitehelmets.org domain name was registered (in Beirut not Syria) in August 2014 and it is hosted on Cloudflare in Texas. Maybe it took some time get the brand recognition going? ..."
"... she also tends to repeat the same talking points 900 times so i knew what she'd say before she said it. did catch her whining about imaginary "russian rigging". again; no surprise there. ..."
"... as for trump, he mentioned abortion stuff more than usual in what i'm guessing is an attempt to win back any jesus freaks he lost with the billy bush tape. ..."
"... For the first time I listened to a Trump speech - delivered in Florida on the 13th of this month. What struck me is how much the media attacks on him and his family have got to him. He mentions how he could have settled for a leisurely retirement, but that he felt he had to do something for his country. ..."
"... perhaps he hadn't quite realized the array of power that is lined up against him. They are not going to let one dude wreck their party. ..."
"... It examines Trump through the prism as a likely "Jacksonian Conservative", who are not dissimilar to traditional conservatives but are not non-interventionists as such, just far more honest about their interventionism (as they are unburdened by the neocon bullshit about "killing them to make them barbarians more civilised") and really only likely to want to apply aggression where they feel that fundamental American interests are threatened. ..."
"... Getting Julian Assange's internet connection cut off just makes the Obama regime look even more stupid and pathetic now. The document dumps keep on coming. Did they really think they would stop that by shutting off the LAN in the Ecuadoran embassy? ..."
"... The underlying problem seems to be that John Podesta bought into the marketing bullshit about The Cloud. So he kept all his very sensitive correspondence at his Gmail account, apparently using it as the archive of his correspondence. ..."
"... I don't know if we'll ever know who hacked his account. It is not that hard to do, so it doesn't really require a "state actor". Google only gives you a few tries at entering your password, so Podesta's account couldn't have been hacked by randomly trying every possibility. Somehow, the hacker got the actual password. Either it was exposed somewhere, or it was obtained by spear phishing . That involves sending your target an email that directs him to a Web page that asks him to enter his password. All that's required to do that is being able to write a plausible email, and setting up a Web site to mimic the Web site where the account you want to hack resides, Gmail in this case. ..."
"... Nearly all information technology security breaches are insider jobs, genuine crackers/hackers are rare. Wikileaks is by far the most likely being fed from the inside of the DNC etc. and/or from their suppliers or security detail by people that are disgusted, have personal vendettas, and so on. It's the real Anonymous, anyone anywhere, not the inept CIA stooges or the faux organized or ideological pretenders. In addition any analyst at the NSA with access to XKeyScore can supply Wikileaks with all the Podesta emails on a whim in less than half an hour of "work" and the actual data to be sent would be gotten with a single XKeyScore database query. That sort of query is exactly what the XKeyScore backend part was built to do as documented by Snowden and affirmed by Binney and others. ..."
"... Duterte may well be flawed but he has a keen nose for where things are heading, Filipinos should be proud of him. ..."
"... 'Hillary "We will follow ISIS to Raqqa to take it "back"' (take Raqqa back from the Syrians?) ..."
"... The crazy hyper-entitled White Supremacist bi*ch is beyond any belief. ..."
"... Jesus Christ, Adolf F. Hitler would've blushed if he said some of her shit. This woman admits she is a war criminal in real time. ..."
"... If Hillary is elected, she will be haunted by her 'mistakes' and by the exposure of her double face by Wikileaks. She is stigmatized as 'crooked Hillary' and as an unreliable decision maker. From now on, all her decisions will be tainted with suspicion. I doubt that she'll be able to lead the country properly during the 4 years she hopes to stay in power. ..."
"... the United States has strayed from its democratically-based roots to become a banking and corporate plutocracy. ..."
The candidates are not the first to blame for this. The first to blame are the moderators of such
debates, the alleged journalists 8and their overlords) who do not ask questions that are relevant
for the life of the general votes and who do not intervene at all when the debaters run off course.
The second group to blame are the general horse-race media who each play up their (owner's) special-interest
hobbyhorses as if those will be the decisive issue for the next four years. The candidates fight
for the attention of these media and adopt to them.
I didn't watch yesterday's debate but every media I skimmed tells me that Clinton was gorgeous
and Trump very bad. That means she said what they wanted to hear and Trump didn't. It doesn't
say what other people who watched though of it. Especially in the rural parts of the country they
likely fear the consequences of climate change way more than Russia, ISIS and Iran together.
Another reason why both candidates avoided to bring up the issues low in the list above is that
both hold positions that are socially somewhat liberal and both are corporatists. None of those low
ranked issues is personally relevant to them. No realistic answer to these would better their campaign
finances or their personal standing in the circles they move in. Personally they are both east coast
elite and don't give a fu***** sh** what real people care about.
As far as I can discern it from the various reports no new political issues were touched. Clinton
ran her usual focus group tested lies while Trump refrained from attacking her hard. A huge mistake
in my view. He can beat her by attacking her really, really hard, not on issues but personality.
Her disliked rate (like Trump's) is over -40%. She is vulnerable on many, many things in her past.
Her foreign policy is way more aggressive than most voters like. Calling this back into mind again
and again could probably send her below -50%. Who told him to leave that stuff alone? Trump is a
major
political disruption . He should have emphasized that but he barely hinted at it for whatever
reason.
The voters are served badly -if at all- by the TV debates in their current form. These do not
explain real choices. That is what this whole election circus should be about. But that is no longer
the case and maybe it never was.
I watched a couple of minutes of the Hillary&Donald show. Then got a book and read instead.
Granted the Queen of Chaos will now have an empire to rule over ... but there will be no honeymoon
- there are a lot of issues that will dog her heels irrespective of the so-called press trying
to help cover-up. The good news in that is the probability of political gridlock. The bad news
is that the QoC will have almost no control over her neo-con handlers, the military nor the CIA
...
It's going to be a helluva ride. The DuhMurriKKKan people have little to do with anything ...
and it is possible the economy may show a slight increase as the DuhMurriKKKan people do what
they've been trained to do: go on a shopping spree for shit they don't need on the grounds that
it'll make them feel better.
Plus, the DNC bus did dump shit in the street in Georgia ... a fitting symbol for politics
in Dumb-shit-MurriKKKah. Doh!
"In this venue, your honours, in this venue, I announce my separation from the United States,"
Duterte said to applause at a Chinese forum in the Great Hall of the People attended by Chinese
Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli. "Both in military, not maybe social, but economics also. America has
lost."
Obviously, TheRealDonald's missing Minot nuke will be visiting the Duterte presidential compound
shortly after the Trump-Clinton fraud selection, then Der Decider, whoever plays that 'hope and
chains' spox role for Deep State, will announce it was a 'Russian strike', against US 'peace-keeping'
forces in the Western Pacific, and then proceed accordingly to attack and occupy Crimea, to 'protect
our BFF in the Middle East, Israel'.
Deep State has already cued up a SCOTUS decision on Citizens United Ultra for 2017. QEn+ already
cued up to support junk T-bonds for 'The Wall' or 'The Infrastructure'. US national 'debt' (sic)
will hit $25,000,000,000,000 by 2020, then it's game over.
as an American citizen, I am truly terrified of this election. Hillary Clinton will most likely
start WW3 to serve her masters in Saudi Arabia which seek to eliminate Iran and Russia. Most of
us who read this page see Russia as the country fighting terrorist and the US as the one supporting
terrorism. Not good. The problem is Trump does himself no favors with the women voters. This election
I think also put the world and the normally clueless and self centered American citizens that
we are in alot of trouble. The fact that these are the two candidates means we are in serious
decline. The world has known that for a while and to be honest, a multi polar world is a good
thing
Hillary Clinton will most likely start WW3 to serve her masters in Saudi Arabia which seek
to eliminate Iran and Russia
Saudis are dumb, it was about them, now famous, Lavrov's phrase--debily, blyad' (fvcking morons),
but even they do understand that should the shit hit the fan--one of the first targets (even in
the counter-force mode) will be Saudi territory with one of the specific targets being Saudi royal
family and those who "serve" them. It is time to end Wahhabi scourge anyway.
I watched, it was boring. And I agree, Trump should have been more on the offensive, but with
more precision, not just his usual rambling.
jdmckay | Oct 20, 2016 10:26:19 AM | 11 He tried to distance himself from Putin, oddly the only thing he had going for him in my book
(realization Putin's got things done right, things we should have done, and US has lied about
it). Trump backed off...
YES, major point.
Once again, during the last hour of the third debate, Clinton reiterated her position on a
'no fly zone' and 'safe zones' in Syria. She is absolutely committed to this policy position which
aligns with the anonymous 50+ state dept lifers and Beltway neocons stance.
This irresponsible, shortsighted, deadly position alone disqualifies her completely from serving
as Commander in Chief.
Imagine, if you will, she wins. She convenes her military advisors and they discuss how to
implement this policy - no fly zone. Dunsford tells her, again, if said policy were to be implemented
we, the US, would risk shooting down a Russian fighter jet(s) who is safeguarding, by invitation,
the air space of the sovereign state of Syria. She says that is a risk we must take b/c our 'clients'
Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Israel are demanding such action and Assad must go.
Kaboom - we either have a very real WWIII scenario on our hands OR a complete revolt by our
armed forces...nobody in their right mind wants to go to war with Russia...and I'm no longer convinced
she's in her right mind.
So, what if Hillary wants WWIII?
What if this is in her and her fellow travelers long-term game 'Global' plan?
What if she's insane enough to believe the U.S. and our allies could beat Russia and their
allies?
What if she gets back into the WH and we spend the next four years poking, taunting, propagandizing
pure hate and fear at the bear all the while brainwashing the American psyche to hate, loathe
and fear all things Russian? How maddening will that be? Haven't we already been through enough
psychological warfare?
What if one of the next steps in the New World Order or Global governments game plan is to
untether the U.S. military from the shores of the U.S. and grow it into a Global government military
force? You know, the world's police force.
What if they scenario'd out WWIII plans and the implementation of a no fly zone in Syria is
where it all begins?
What if this is the reason Clinton isn't budging from her 'no fly zone' position? She wants
war. She believes we can win the war. If we win the war the American Globalists morph into 'World'
leaders.
Who in the hell would want this other than those that are quietly leading and championing this
monster. I don't. Do you?
This election is about one thing and one thing only. The people of the United States, our founding
documents, our sovereignty vs the American Globalist class, their control and their Global government
wet dream.
Trump's candidacy = sovereignty - NO War. Clinton's candidacy = Globalism - WAR. Your vote
is either for War or against War. It's that simple...
Simply incredible the borg,and all those who say she is a lock are in for a big surprise,as
Americans don't believe the serial liars anymore.
dahoit | Oct 20, 2016 10:47:07 AM | 14
I believe your assertion is correct. A low turn out, monster win is out there. It will
be a 'fuck you' vote more than a vote for The Don. I would imagine a lot of people are in
for a shock - and a bigger shock than the public backlash against austerity that Brexit was, where
'respected' polling was off by 10 points by election day.
The dems forgot to switch off the internet. The anti-Trump MSM campaign is so total and
over the top because it has to be --> CNN is so last century. No one is getting out of bed to
vote Hillary.
Scylla and Charybdis. Does it really matter much which one wins? I await the collapse of this
empire and pray that it does not totally explode. What we say and/or think will make absolutely
no difference to the final result. The controllers are in control and have been so since the assassination
'60s.
Step away from your TVs, smartphones and computers with your brains in the air. Let them
breathe freely.
The Strait of Messina is dangerous waters so the American public's only logical recourse is
to steer the ship of democracy towards sense and sensibility and let go the anchor of "None of
The Above". The people must demand new candidates who are worthy of holding the Office of the
President. The federal bureaucracy will continue to run the government through September of 2017,
plenty of time for a new election.
Declare Tuesday, November 8th a national day of voter independence and stay home!
That's a simply ludicrous position to take! Trump's 'The Wall' together with 'Defeat ISIS'
together with 'Stand with Israel' is EXACTLY the same Yinon Plan as Clinton's, although it probably
spares the poor folks in Crimea, now under the Russian Oligarchy, and does nothing at all for
the poor folks of Ukraine, now under the Israeli Junta Coup.
Either candidate is proposing soon $TRILLION Full Battle Rattle NeoCon DOD-DHS-NSA-CIA There's
zero daylight between them. The only difference is Trump will make sure that the Exceptionals
are relieved of any tax burden, while Clinton will make sure the burden falls on the Middle Class.
Again, there is zero daylight between them. For every tax increase, Mil.Gov.Fed.Biz receives the
equivalent salary increase or annual bonus.
This whole shittery falls on the Middle Class, and metastasizes OneParty to Stage Five.
Trump won't win in any case. His role was to throw FarRightRabbinicals off the cliff, and make
Hillary appear to voters to be a Nice Old Gal Centrist. She's not. The whole thing was rigged
from the 1998 and 9/11 coup, from Bernie and Donald, on down the rabbit hole.
Debates are to convince, not to illuminate. What a person did not figure out before the debates,
it is rather hopeless to explain.
Thus the stress on issues that are familiar even to the least inquisitive voters, heavily overrepresented
among the "undecided voters" who are, after all, the chief target. Number one, who is, and who
is not a bimbo?
The high position of Putin on the topic list is well deserved. This is about defending everything
we hold pure and dear. We do not want our daughters and our e-mail violated, unless we like to
read the content. Daughters are troublesome enough, but the threat to e-mails is something that
is hard to understand, and that necessitates nonsense. Somehow Putin gets in the mix, rather than
Microsoft, Apple, Google and other companies that destroyed the privacy of communications with
crappy software.
But does it matter? It is like exam in literature or history. It does not matter what the topic
is, but we want to see if the candidates can handle it to our satisfaction. For myself, I like
Clinton formula: "You will never find me signing praises of foreign dictators and strongmen who
do not love America". It is so realistic! First, given her age and fragile throat, I should advise
Mrs. Clinton to refrain from singing. And if she does, the subject should be on the well vetted
list, "leaders who love America". That touches upon some thorny issues, like "what is love", but
as long as Mrs. Clinton does not sing, it is fine.
Trump, if I understand him, took a more risky path, namely, the he is more highly regarded
by people who count, primarily Putin, than schwartzer Obama and "not so well looking chick" Clinton.
Why primarily Putin? It is a bit hard to see who else. The person should have some important leadership
position. And he/she should be on the record saying something nice about Trump. At that point
the scope of name-dropping is narrow.
Wasn't ''PEOPLES GET THE GOVERNMENT THEY DESERVE'',the regime change war cry of so called ''US''?.Dont
see why Madame ''we came we saw he died'' become POTUS approves ''no fly'' wet dream of war mongers
gets shot down by ''evil '' putin and aliies from the skies of Syria onto the ground in pieces.Than
discrimination for hundreds of years while ''americans'' figure out what happened withdrawing
into a shell like a wounded animal leaving the rest of the world to live in peace!
He should declare that Hillary helped arm Al Qaeda to topple Assad for her banker buddies
(cant mention the Jewishness/Israeli Firsterism of the 'neocons' of course, not because false
but because true) and will be happy to send African Americans and Latinos to die for 'oil companies'
and her 'banker friends' and after decades of establishment Dems promising the sky, maybe they
dont need an inveterate liar who arms Islamic terrorists.
Hillary armed Al Qaeda and possibly ISIS - both AngloZionist proxies. How in the fuck is
she not in jail???
As Noam Chomsky has pointed out, duopolistic elections are merely mechanisms of manufactured
consent. When each of the major parties are controlled by the different factions of the oligarchy,
there is only afforded the option to vote for the ideology put forth by each oligarchic group.
Each party defines their ideology to distinguish itself from the other to assure a divided
population. They also manipulate the population via identity politics and state it in such a way
that voters decisions are not rationally resolved but emotionally so, to assure that sufficient
cognitive dissonance is developed to produce a risky shift to a make a decision in favor of a
candidate that would otherwise be unacceptable.
Rigged from the get go is definitely true.
What fascinates me is how Obama went all public about Trumps assertions of rigged elections.
It appears the puppet masters are very afraid of a "cynical" (realistic) population. Manufactured
consent only works if people play the game. As evidenced in South Africa when no one showed up
to vote, the government collapsed.
"Your vote is either for War or against War. It's that simple." Is this being lost sight
off amongst all the noise? I hope not, for the sake of the Ukrainians and the Syrians. And for
the sake of the countries yet to be destabilised.
Where has Trump once advocated for a no fly zone let alone war? Links and sources please. Enlighten
me.
The only candidate who has been steadfast in support of a no fly zone in Syria is Clinton.
Trump avoids the entire Syrian mess like the plague. Have you not heard him attack Hillary on
her Iraq vote, Libyan tragedy, Syria etc? He's not only attacking her for her incompetence and
dishonesty, but b/c he finds these wars/regime changes abominable. As do I.
A vote for Clinton = War and a vote for Trump = NO war
I share your frustration. In my opinion televised 'debates' should be banned, and we should go
back to the time-honored technique of looking at the record. Whether Clinton is smooth or has
a weird smile, or Trump is composed or goes on a rant, makes no difference to me.
I know what Hillary Clinton will do, which is, what she has done for the past 20+ years. She
will aggressively fight even more wars, maybe even attacking Russian forces in Syria (!). She
will spend trillions on all this 'nation-destroying' folly, and of course, that will necessitate
gutting social security because deficits are bad. She will throw what's left of our retirement
funds to the tender mercies of Wall Street, and after they are through with us we will be lucky
to get pennies on the dollar. She will open the borders even more to unchecked third-world immigration,
which will kill the working class. She will push for having our laws and judiciary over-ruled
by foreign corporate lawyers meeting in secret (TPP etc. are not about trade - tariffs are already
near zero - they are about giving multinational corporations de-facto supreme legislative and
judicial power. Really). She will remain the Queen of Chaos, the candidate of Wall Street and
War, who never met a country that she didn't want to bomb into a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
Trump? He says a lot of sensible things, and despite his mouthing off in public, he has a track
record of amicably cooperating with people on long-term projects. But he has no track record in
governance, so of course, I don't really know. He's a gamble.
But right now I am so fed up with the status quo that I am willing to roll the dice. Trump
2016.
I agree Trump has had chance after chance to effectively attack Clinton. But here is the problem.
Much of that attack would have had to be done from a leftist angle. Outside of Russia, Trump looks
to be as much a militarist as Obama at least. The gop money daddies are just as militarist as
the democratic party money daddies. The gop is pro-war just they don't want democrats running
them.
Benghazi is a perfect example. They refuse to attack Clinton on her pro-war, destroy everybody
policies, so they they make up attacks about the handling of the Benghazi attacks, rather than
the reason why Americans were there--to send arms to jihadist terrorists in Syria. (By the way
this is why silence on Obama letting criminal banksters go--they would have done the same thing.)
Trump is intellectually challenged. He could have seen what was happening and brought along
his base to an anti-war position and attracted more people. His base was soft clay in his hands
as even he noticed. However he had no skills as political leader to understand nor the ability
to sculpt his base and win the election, which was given Clinton's horrible numbers, his to lose.
Q: Where you are on the question of a safe zone or a no-fly zone in Syria?
TRUMP: I love a safe zone for people. I do not like the migration. I do not like the people
coming. What they should do is, the countries should all get together, including the Gulf states,
who have nothing but money, they should all get together and they should take a big swath of land
in Syria and they do a safe zone for people, where they could to live, and then ultimately go
back to their country, go back to where they came from.
Q: Does the U.S. get involved in making that safe zone?
TRUMP: I would help them economically, even though we owe $19 trillion.
Source: CBS Face the Nation 2015 interview on Syrian Refugee crisis , Oct 11, 2015
I don't know about your read of Trump's response, but I don't think he's talking about the
same kind of safe zone the Brookings Institute has in mind aka carving up Syria. His answer suggests
he's thinking a 'safe zone' as more in terms of a temporary refugee zone/space/camp...'they do
a safe zone for people, where they could to live, and then ultimately go back to their country,
go back to where they came from.'
btw, does anyone know which exact month in 2013 the WH were founded?
It´s a minor detail, but it would fit so neatly if it is after the first week of September '13
when the "humanitarian" airstrike for the false-flag Ghouta attack was called off. Demonstrating
it was conceived as Project R2P Intervention 2.0 after the first one failed.
Don't know when WH was created but the whitehelmets.org domain name was registered (in
Beirut not Syria) in August 2014 and it is hosted on Cloudflare in Texas. Maybe it took some time
get the brand recognition going?
Le Mesurier claims that he persoanlly trained the first group of 20 volunteers in early 2013.
It seems these 20 'carefully vetted moderate rebels' each went on to train further groups of 20.
So, if we allow 1-2 months training, it looks like mid-late 2013 might be a reasonable date for
them to take an effective role in the PR business.
b, 'The voters are served badly -if at all- by the TV debates in their current form. These do
not explain real choices. That is what this whole election circus should be about. But that is
no longer the case and maybe it never was.'
No 'maybe' ... the 'political' process in the US is a complete fraud. The present political
class must be removed and replaced. People term 3rd Party/Write-in votes as 'protest votes' but
they can - must in my view - be more than that. They must be the first step taken to simply seize
power and control of the USA by US citizens. We cannot have a democracy - anywhere - without an
engaged demos. That's just the way it is.
No
to Clinton, no to Trump . No to the elephants and the jackasses and the menagerie. It will
take a decade/a dozen years. If we had begun in 2004 we'd be there by now.
downloaded it from youtube late last night. that gave me the option of skimming past hillary and
her WASPy passive aggressive act. she also tends to repeat the same talking points 900 times
so i knew what she'd say before she said it. did catch her whining about imaginary "russian rigging".
again; no surprise there.
as for trump, he mentioned abortion stuff more than usual in what i'm guessing is an attempt
to win back any jesus freaks he lost with the billy bush tape. the fact that he supposedly
went so far down in the polls from that tape makes the whole thing seem pointless ("who can pander
to uptight morons with moronic priorities more") but saying silly stuff about overturning roe
v wade seemed desperate. even if he got to appoint more than the one judge replacing the fat dead
greaseball he probably won't get another. and even in that case he would need approval from a
congress that agrees on nothing but their hatred for him.
even the things that got more mentions didn't matter. all i saw on the screeching MSM (especially
CliNtoN) was "oh mah gerd he said he's waiting until election day to comment on the election!
that means riots and bloodshed cuz that's what goes on in our dumb fuck heads all day!"
at least canada will be spared all the rich whining hipster pieces of trash like lena dunham.
small consolation.
For the first time I listened to a Trump speech - delivered in Florida on the 13th of this
month. What struck me is how much the media attacks on him and his family have got to him. He
mentions how he could have settled for a leisurely retirement, but that he felt he had to do something
for his country.
It's almost as if he'd already decided to back off, convincing himself
that maybe he can do more outside the White House. There is a resigned tone to his voice especially
the way he finishes sentences. Maybe he just knows, or was told, that he'd be assassinated if
he ever got elected. Or perhaps he hadn't quite realized the array of power that is lined
up against him. They are not going to let one dude wreck their party.
Good, substantive
interview with Jill Stein . Includes insightful discussion on ME, Syria & relations with Putin/Russia.
Especially for those not familiar with her may find this interesting. Conducted yesterday (10/19).
Nah, it's ludicrous. 'Cuz this is like the gazillionth time I posted this. And will sadly have
to do it a few more times in the next three weeks.
The Donald Trump dove myth dies hard.
In the past five years, Trump has consistently pushed one big foreign policy idea: America
should steal other countries' oil....
"In the old days when you won a war, you won a war. You kept the country," Trump said. "We
go fight a war for 10 years, 12 years, lose thousands of people, spend $1.5 trillion, and then
we hand the keys over to people that hate us on some council." He has repeated this idea for
years, saying during one 2013 Fox News appearance, "I've said it a thousand times."
....To be clear: Trump's plan is to use American ground troops to forcibly seize the most
valuable resource in two different sovereign countries. The word for that is colonialism.
Trump wants to wage war in the name of explicitly ransacking poorer countries for their
natural resources - something that's far more militarily aggressive than anything Clinton has
suggested.
This doesn't really track as "hawkishness" for most people, mostly because it's so outlandish.
A policy of naked colonialism has been completely unacceptable in American public discourse
for decades, so it seems hard to take Trump's proposals as seriously as, say, Clinton's support
for intervening more forcefully in Syria....
He also wants to bring back torture that's "much tougher" than waterboarding. "Don't kid
yourself, folks. It works, okay? It works. Only a stupid person would say it doesn't work,"
he said at a November campaign event. But "if it doesn't work, they deserve it anyway, for
what they're doing."
....The problem is that Trump's instincts are not actually that dovish. Trump... has a consistent
pattern of saying things that sound skeptical of war, while actually endorsing fairly aggressive
policies.
....In a March 2011 vlog post uncovered by BuzzFeed's Andrew Kaczynski and Christopher Massie,
Trump full-throatedly endorsed intervening in the country's civil war - albeit on humanitarian
grounds, not for its oil.
"Qaddafi in Libya is killing thousands of people, nobody knows how bad it is, and we're
sitting around," Trump said. "We should go in, we should stop this guy, which would be very
easy and very quick. We could do it surgically, stop him from doing it, and save these lives."
In a later interview, he went further, endorsing outright regime change: "if you don't get
rid of Gaddafi, it's a major, major black eye for this country."
Shortly after the US intervention in Libya began in March 2011, Trump criticized the Obama
administration's approach - for not being aggressive enough. Trump warned that the US was too
concerned with supporting the rebels and not trying hard enough to - you guessed it - take
the oil.
"I would take the oil - and stop this baby stuff," Trump declared. "I'm only interested
in Libya if we take the oil. If we don't take the oil, I'm not interested."
Throw in a needy, fragile ego -- the braggadocio is overcompensation -- and a hairtrigger temper,
and the invasion scenarios write themselves.
And by the way, he's apparently not really that good a businessman either.
Riches-to-Riches Trump Spins Fake Horatio Alger Tale . If he'd put his money into S&P 500
index fund, he'd be worth about eight times what he likely is now. Which is very likely substantially
less than what he says he is. Good reason to withhold the tax returns, no?
So I guess his only recommendation is a reality show with the tagline "You're fired!" All surface,
no depth, the ultimate post-modernist candidate. No fixed mean to that text, alright, he both
invites you to write your interpretation but polices "the other" outside of it.
Interesting that the first post-modern candidate is a bloodthirsty fascist (given his refusal
to accept the electoral results, I would now consider this not wholly inappropriate).
But then again, someone as innocent as
Chauncey Gardiner was
unlikely to emerge from the media.
Moon of Alabama Brecht quote
" Obama: Vote Rigging Is Impossible - If In Favor Of Hillary Clinton | Main
October 20, 2016
This Election Circus Is A Disservice To The People
Via Adam Johnson:
"Total mentions all 4 debates:
Russia/Putin 178
ISIS/terror 132
Iran 67
...
Abortion 17
Poverty 10
Climate change 4
Campaign finance 3
Privacy 0"
The candidates are not the first to blame for this. The first to blame are the moderators of such
debates, the alleged journalists 8and their overlords) who do not ask questions that are relevant
for the life of the general votes and who do not intervene at all when the debaters run off course.
The second group to blame are the general horse-race media who each play up their (owner's) special-interest
hobbyhorses as if those will be the decisive issue for the next four years. The candidates fight
for the attention of these media and adopt to them.
I didn't watch yesterday's debate but every media I skimmed tells me that Clinton was gorgeous
and Trump very bad. That means she said what they wanted to hear and Trump didn't. It doesn't
say what other people who watched though of it. Especially in the rural parts of the country they
likely fear the consequences of climate change way more than Russia, ISIS and Iran together.
Another reason why both candidates avoided to bring up the issues low in the list above is
that both hold positions that are socially somewhat liberal and both are corporatists. None of
those low ranked issues is personally relevant to them. No realistic answer to these would better
their campaign finances or their personal standing in the circles they move in. Personally they
are both east coast elite and don't give a fu***** sh** what real people care about.
As far as I can discern it from the various reports no new political issues were touched. Clinton
ran her usual focus group tested lies while Trump refrained from attacking her hard. A huge mistake
in my view. He can beat her by attacking her really, really hard, not on issues but personality.
Her disliked rate (like Trump's) is over -40%. She is vulnerable on many, many things in her past.
Her foreign policy is way more aggressive than most voters like. Calling this back into mind again
and again could probably send her below -50%. Who told him to leave that stuff alone? Trump is
a major political disruption. He should have emphasized that but he barely hinted at it for whatever
reason.
The voters are served badly -if at all- by the TV debates in their current form. These do not
explain real choices. That is what this whole election circus should be about. But that is no
longer the case and maybe it never was.
Posted by b on October 20, 2016 at 09:11 AM | Permalink
Comments
I didn't watch too.
Posted by: Jack Smith | Oct 20, 2016 9:22:12 AM | 1
I don't follow US elections closely, but my take on this - Trump had made a deal. He pretends
to be fighting, but he is not. Dunno what was that - either he was intimidated, blackmailed, bought
off, or any combination of thereof, and it doesn't matter actually.
Hail to the first Lady President of the United States. Best luck to Middle East, Eastern Europe
and SE Asia - they all gonna need it. Oh, and dear US voters - don't blame yourself, you don't
have any influence on the election, so it's not your fault. You'll pay the price too, though.
Posted by: Wizzy | Oct 20, 2016 9:27:47 AM | 2
"But that is no longer the case and maybe it never was"
It was when the League of Women Voters ran the show but when they wouldn't agree to selling
out the citizens in Amerika is when we got this dog and phoney show.
I didn't watch and I'll be Voting Green.
rg the lg | Oct 20, 2016 10:19:53 AM | 10
Strictly speaking, if the voters aren't getting what they want from the politicians in a democracy,
and they're too chickenshit to demand reform or else - then they should blame themselves because
it IS their fault.
We're getting really, really sick of the bullshit that passes for politics in 2 Party Oz. We
sent them a subtle message in 2015 by voting for independents and splinter groups and the "Government"
governs with a majority of 1 seat. Next election there will either be a responsive non-traitorous
Government, or a revolution. Some of them are starting to wake up and others are pretending not
to notice. But the writing is on the wall...
I've had a good look at your "The Donald Trump dove myth" article and I must admit that its
quality far exceeds your own verbal rubbish.
It examines Trump through the prism as a likely "Jacksonian Conservative", who are not
dissimilar to traditional conservatives but are not non-interventionists as such, just far more
honest about their interventionism (as they are unburdened by the neocon bullshit about "killing
them to make them barbarians more civilised") and really only likely to want to apply aggression
where they feel that fundamental American interests are threatened.
To me, that's a big step up from the NEOCON/NEOLIB false pretense garbage. I'd far rather have
an honest RATIONAL and RISK ASSESSING thug than a two faced snake, which better describes your
C**tory and her Kissenger/Albright gang of perfectly murderable certified war criminals. You can
call him a "fascist" if you like. You obviously prefer the 1984 thuggery to more honest, above
the table varieties. To each one his own.
One last note. Those goons that the Dems kept sending to Trump's rallies to stir violence up,
there's now the fucking Himalayas of evidence that it's entirely real and beyond any doubt.
Guess who was the historical king of criminal spamming of shit stirring goons at political
adversaries' rallies? The Bolsheviks and your own fixated Fascists/Nazis. Looks like your Hillary
learned from the best, inspired by the best, via her fascist mentor Klitsinger et num al.
So, enjoy your Clintory, dear Pom, and good luck as you and yer Britannia're gonna need it
if that discard of a dementia stricken half-human wins the elections.
Getting Julian Assange's internet connection cut off just makes the Obama regime look even
more stupid and pathetic now. The document dumps keep on coming. Did they really think they would
stop that by shutting off the LAN in the Ecuadoran embassy?
The underlying problem seems to be that John Podesta bought into the marketing bullshit
about The Cloud. So he kept all his very sensitive correspondence at his Gmail account, apparently
using it as the archive of his correspondence.
I don't know if we'll ever know who hacked his account. It is not that hard to do, so it
doesn't really require a "state actor". Google only gives you a few tries at entering your password,
so Podesta's account couldn't have been hacked by randomly trying every possibility. Somehow,
the hacker got the actual password. Either it was exposed somewhere, or it was obtained by
spear
phishing . That involves sending your target an email that directs him to a Web page that
asks him to enter his password. All that's required to do that is being able to write a plausible
email, and setting up a Web site to mimic the Web site where the account you want to hack resides,
Gmail in this case.
Nearly all information technology security breaches are insider jobs, genuine crackers/hackers
are rare. Wikileaks is by far the most likely being fed from the inside of the DNC etc. and/or
from their suppliers or security detail by people that are disgusted, have personal vendettas,
and so on. It's the real Anonymous, anyone anywhere, not the inept CIA stooges or the faux organized
or ideological pretenders. In addition any analyst at the NSA with access to XKeyScore can supply
Wikileaks with all the Podesta emails on a whim in less than half an hour of "work" and the actual
data to be sent would be gotten with a single XKeyScore database query. That sort of query is
exactly what the XKeyScore backend part was built to do as documented by Snowden and affirmed
by Binney and others.
The powers that be can cheat but people can ignore their efforts, it's what happens in every
revolution and civil war. It's hard to see how a second Clinton presidency will have any shred
of legitimacy in the US or in the world.
Duterte may well be flawed but he has a keen nose for where things are heading, Filipinos
should be proud of him.
Don't believe anyone who says what you do or don't do doesn't matter.
CLINTON: Well, I am encouraged that there is an effort led by the Iraqi army, supported by
Kurdish forces, and also given the help and advice from the number of special forces and other
Americans on the ground. But I will not support putting American soldiers into Iraq as an occupying
force. I don't think that is in our interest, and I don't think that would be smart to do.
In fact, Chris, I think that would be a big red flag waving for ISIS to reconstitute itself.
The goal here is to take back Mosul. It's going to be a hard fight. I've got no illusions
about that. And then continue to press into Syria to begin to take back and move on Raqqa,
which is the ISIS headquarters.
I am hopeful that the hard work that American military advisers have done will pay off
and that we will see a real - a really successful military operation. But we know we've got
lots of work to do. Syria will remain a hotbed of terrorism as long as the civil war, aided
and abetted by the Iranians and the Russians, continue.
Considering Lynn Forester de Rothschild's apparent hand in potential President Hillary Clinton's
economic policy, such theories don't appear so far from the truth - and only further prove the
United States has strayed from its democratically-based roots to become a banking and corporate
plutocracy.
This is a bit misinformed conclusion. Some of you may know "Wizard of Oz". It is a famous novel
for children that was used for the screenplay of an adorable movie with the same title. Not everybody
knows that it was also a novel for the adults, with a key: a political satire against banking
and corporate plutocracy that controlled the government of USA around 1900. If I recall, the title
figure of the Wizard was Mark Hanna, and Wicked Witch of the East stood for eastern banks which
at that time included the largest banks that were behind Mark Hanna (who in turn was the puppeteer
of the President). Certain things change in the last 120 years, for example, the rich and famous
largely abandoned the mansions in Rhode Island, but New York remains the financial capital. I
somewhat doubt that Rothschild secretly have the sway over this crowd, if one would have to point
to the most powerful financial entity I would pick Goldman Sachs. Yes, it helped that Lady de
Rothschild was sociable, amiable and communicated well with Hillary and numerous gentlemen who
could drop 100,000 on a plate to please the hostess, but at the end of the day, things were quite
similar when Rothschild largely sticked to Europe.
The structural problem is not a conspiracy, but simply, capitalism. Any way you cut it, democracy
relies on convincing the citizens what is good and what is bad for them, and that still requires
money. Money can come from numerous small donors or few large ones, or some combination. Unfortunately,
large donors have disproportional influence, until a politician creates his/her brand, too few
small donors would know about him/her. Nice thing about Sanders was that he operates largely outside
the circle of large donors. That said, both Clintons and Obama entered the political scene as
"outsiders".
I met rich people only few times in my life, and I must admit, it is a pleasant experience.
Sleeping is comfortable, food is good, when you go to restaurant the owner greets your party very
politely and explains the best dishes of the day and so on. In politics, there are reactionary
fat cats and progressive fat cats, but needless to say, they tend to share certain perspective
and they skew the media, the academia and the policies in a certain direction.
If Hillary is elected, she will be haunted by her 'mistakes' and by the exposure of her double
face by Wikileaks. She is stigmatized as 'crooked Hillary' and as an unreliable decision maker.
From now on, all her decisions will be tainted with suspicion. I doubt that she'll be able to
lead the country properly during the 4 years she hopes to stay in power.
@ Piotr Berman who wrote: The structural problem is not a conspiracy, but simply, capitalism.
I heartily disagree. Capitalism is a myth created to cover for decisions made by those who
own private finance.....part of my undergraduate degree is in macro economics. Your assertion
that the Rothschild influence is restricted to Europe is laughable.
Joe6pac has it right......the United States has strayed from its democratically-based roots
to become a banking and corporate plutocracy.
I believe that it is Piotr Berman that is misinformed.
With single-bid ("plurality") voting you only have two candidates to choose from.
I have described the strategic hedge simple score election method all over the Internet. It
is simple in the sense that does not require easily hackable voting machines, and can easily work
with hand counted paper ballots at non-centralized voting places. It is not hampered by any requirement
to cater to so-called "sincere," "honest" (actually artless and foolish) voters. It easily thwarts
both the spoiler effect and the blind hurdle dilemma (the "Burr Dilemma"). It just works.
Strategic hedge simple score voting can be described in one simple sentence: Strategically
bid no vote at all for undesired candidates (ignore them as though they did not exist), or strategically
cast from five to ten votes for any number of candidates you prefer (up to some reasonable limit
of, say, twelve candidates), and then simply add all the votes up.
Both IRV-style and approval voting methods suffer from the blind hurdle dilemma, which can
be overcome with the hedge voting strategy. An example of usage of the hedge strategy, presuming
the case of a "leftist" voter, would be casting ten votes for Ralph Nader, and only eight or nine
for Al Gore. This way, the voter would only sacrifice 20 or 10 percent of their electoral influence
if Nader did not win.
Don't be fooled by fake "alternatives like "IRV" and "approval voting".
And demand hand counted paper ballots that cannot be rigged by "Russian hackers".
Reagan delivered Stingers to the Northern Alliance and Taliban, why is Reagan not in prison?
Because of people like Ollie North and Dick Armitage. Because the Deep State is in control under
Continuance of Government, ever since the 2001 military coup.
Trump may have gone to Catholic prep school, but he's no choir boy either.
Hillary will win, it's in the bag, and she won't be haunted by anything at all, she doesn't
have an introspective bone in her hagsack. She will be our Nero for 21st C.
"We came, we saw, he died, haww, haww, haww."
Should have been bodybagged and tagged and disposed of at sea, her, not M.
"... Point being that not only would The Clintons have the Democratic Party machine to rely on for potential vote rigging in this stage of the process (distinguishing vs. primaries simply for rhetorical focus), ..."
"... but with the clear reality of the Republican Party elite also backing her, she can rely on at least some of the Republican Party machine also being available for potential vote rigging, and who have their experience in Florida, Ohio, etc to bring to the table. ..."
"... The longer term issue is the Imperial Oligarchy has now taken off the mask, they have abandoned the pretense of 2 party competition to unite behind the defender of status quo interests, with WikiLeaks detailing the gory bits of their corruption and malfeasance. And everybody in the system is tainted by that, both parties, media, etc. It has overtly collapsed to the reality of a single Party of Power (per the term Oligarch media like to use re: Russia for example). ..."
"... the Clinton faction is 100% "bi-partisan" and about confluence of both Oligarchic parties. ..."
"... I would say the Democratic primary was even a mirror of this, I would guess that Clinton had hoped to win more easily vs Sanders without rigging etc... essentially between Sanders and Trump turning anything but "radical status quo" into boogymen. ..."
"... That just reveals how close to the line the Imperial Oligarchy feels compelled to play... and, I suppose, how confident they are in the full spectrum of tools at their disposal to manipulate democracy. ..."
"... But that is also shown merely by the situation we are in, with the collapse of the two party system in order to maintain the strength of Imperial Oligarchy. ..."
Point being that not only would The Clintons have the Democratic Party machine to rely on
for potential vote rigging in this stage of the process (distinguishing vs. primaries simply for
rhetorical focus),
but with the clear reality of the Republican Party elite also backing her, she can rely
on at least some of the Republican Party machine also being available for potential vote rigging,
and who have their experience in Florida, Ohio, etc to bring to the table.
The longer term issue is the Imperial Oligarchy has now taken off the mask, they have abandoned
the pretense of 2 party competition to unite behind the defender of status quo interests, with
WikiLeaks detailing the gory bits of their corruption and malfeasance. And everybody in the system
is tainted by that, both parties, media, etc. It has overtly collapsed to the reality of a single
Party of Power (per the term Oligarch media like to use re: Russia for example).
And the craziest thing of course is not that this all happened by accident because some "scary
clown" appeared, but that this was nearly exactly planned BY The Clinton faction themselves (promoting
Trump in order to win vs. "scary clown"). Most notably, not simply as a seizure of power by Democratic
Party "against" Republicans... They are very clear the Clinton faction is 100% "bi-partisan"
and about confluence of both Oligarchic parties.
I would say the Democratic primary was even a mirror of this, I would guess that Clinton
had hoped to win more easily vs Sanders without rigging etc... essentially between Sanders and
Trump turning anything but "radical status quo" into boogymen. Only surprise was how well
Sanders did, necessitating fraud etc, with polls in fact showing Sanders was BETTER placed to
defeat Trump than Clinton.
That just reveals how close to the line the Imperial Oligarchy feels compelled to play...
and, I suppose, how confident they are in the full spectrum of tools at their disposal to manipulate
democracy.
But that is also shown merely by the situation we are in, with the collapse of the two
party system in order to maintain the strength of Imperial Oligarchy.
Washington forgot his role in color revolutions in Ukraine, Russia, Serbia and other countries,
when Washington controlled neoliberal media served as air support for local fifth column. Now
boomerang returned...
On Tuesday, the Foreign Ministry of Ecuador confirmed WikiLeaks' charge that Ecuador itself
had ordered the severing of Assange's Internet connection under pressure from the US government.
In a statement, the ministry said that WikiLeaks had "published a wealth of documents impacting
on the US election campaign," adding that the government of Ecuador "respects the principle of
non-intervention in the internal affairs of other states" and "does not interfere in external
electoral processes." On that grounds, the statement claimed, the Ecuadorian government decided
to "restrict access" to the communications network at its London embassy.
Looks like Yahoo commentariat is definitely anti-Hillary and did not buy the Yahoo story.
the first pro-hillary comment was in the second dozen of comments by ratings from Yahoo readers.
Brad
11 hours ago
I watched the presidential
candidates at the Al Smith dinner
tonight and thought how wonderful
that they raised $6 million for
the nations children..The thing
that is sad is that Hillary spent
over $150 million on negative adds
against Donald Trump in one
month...Goes to show exactly how
much Hillary truly cares about the
children when they stand in her
way ...Win at all cost...no matter
how the money could be better
spent...THIS COUNTRY NEEDS DONALD
TRUMP FOR PRESIDENT 2016
LisaAllenC
11 hours ago
Trump was not booed by anyone
but the far left stunked up
media, everyone else that i
could see was raising their
fist and laughing as they were
nodding that they agreed with
TRUMP, you little people of the
left media have really lost
yourself s, lost your
professionalism in your field,
i mean you took an oath when
you started that career as a
journalist to report as fairly
and as honest as you could and
you took that platform as
something that you would treat
as a place the American people
and the rest of the world could
come to for an honest and
balanced look at issues, not a
place to be used to push your
own interests on people in such
ways that even small children
that listen well can tell is
words filled full of lies and
dishonesty, words that are
filled with hate and such
lopsided views that our kids
are saying, turn that trash
daddy, it makes me sick to my
stomach to watch such lies, my
kids and our neighbors kids
actually said that, they are
watching very closely and you
people of the far left trash
machine should be so ashamed of
what you have been force
feeding not only these kids but
some of the very easily
confused people, i mean thats
the only ones you are hurting
because we the American people
know better but still you
should have to stand up and
answer to what you have done to
the ones you have terribly hurt
during this mess. You want to
ever say that you are someone
this country could ever trust
and believe, you wonder why
Trump knows not to trust
anything you may have your
hands or words mixed in with,
you have dishonored yourself's
and no one will ever believe
you again, we have your names
etched in our brains as
dishonest nobody's and know to
stop reading or listening to
anything you say or do, what a
shame but your true colors came
out and the honest people of
this country see you as who you
are. We are so glad and HONORED
TO VOTE FOR TRUMP, we know
there is no one that is perfect
but Christ himself but we also
know the heart of a person as
well and TRUMPS HEART IS IN THE
RIGHT PLACE, he wants real
honest change for us Americans
and he wants real honest help
to be given to ALL THE AMERICAN
PEOPLE, and without you left
twisting word machine, TRUMP
WANTS REAL HELP FOR OUR AFRICAN
AMERICANS AND OUR MEXICAN
AMERICANS, he does want the law
to be honored but he doesn't
want to harm anybody, you
people have twisted his words
in such dramatic fashion that
we rarely get to hear his real
plan to bring safety and lawful
ways at our borders. I have
heard the plans and i am no
genius but the plans make very
good since and they will be
fair and help people that want
to be here legally, now if you
are trying to break our laws,
thats another story but at
least he does have a great plan
that will work so much better
and give our men and women
officers at the border the help
they so desperately have been
needing, TRUMP IS BY FAR THE
BEST CHOICE FOR AMERICA, the
twisted person that you people
have tried to make him out to
be, will of course that person
is not who we need but thats
not TRUMP, WE NEED TRUMP FOR
CHANGE WE NEED TRUMP FOR OUR
COUNTRY AND OUR FAMILY, VOTE
TRUMP FOR CHANGE.
Louis
10 hours ago
I watch the whole thing, the
article is wrong. Hillary was
booed just as much, and her
insulting joke about Guiliani was
followed by an awkward silence.
The author here is very biased,
Trump was right, the media is in
collusion with HRC.
Melissa
11 hours ago
When I was a little girl I felt
such pride in America. I recall
hearing how awful Russia was
because their poor citizens didn't
know the truth because they were
filled with propaganda. I am so
disgusted with our country on so
many levels. Freedom of the press
was not meant to mean what you
people are doing. Didn't you take
some sort of pledge to honestly
report unbiased news when you
graduated from journalism school?
As Donald said to Hillary, you
should be ashamed.
carle
11 hours ago
Every time Trump is booed by the
media that equals another vote
from an undecided.
LOYAL
11 hours ago
I am not going to lie to you,
Hillary is stupid, confused,
and has been exposed. Her guilt
of running a stupid campaign
and a stupid office called the
Secretary of State is no longer
in question. During the debate
Hillary got confused on
proposed gun laws. On abortion,
Hillary thinks it's ok to kill
babies ready to be delivered.
This is like saying I love
children that have been
delivered alive but not so much
those not yet delivered. Sound
like, I like a hero that does
not get captured? Hillary is
all talk and no action. Black
people should understand this
by now. So should everyone
else.
Pro-Clinton interpretation, but with some interesting insights....
Notable quotes:
"... But Trump demonstrated greater self-control early in the debate than he has displayed at times previously, and he didn't take the bait. He countered by saying Clinton wanted "open borders" and emphasizing the necessity any sovereign nation has for clearly delineated borders. "Either we have a country or we don't," he said. "Either we have borders or we don't." ..."
"... "Look," he said at one point, "she's been proven to be a liar. This is just another lie." And he reverted to form late in the debate when he interjected into one of her perorations, "What a nasty woman!" ..."
"... In supporting his allegation that the election is "rigged," Trump cited three elements of concern. First, the mainstream media - "so bad, so dishonest, so corrupt; it is poisoning the minds of the voters." Second, he said millions of unqualified people have been added to the voter rolls when they shouldn't be registered. Third, he said Clinton "should not be allowed to run," presumably because of previous allegations of wrongdoing related to her private email server and the machinations of the Clinton Foundation. ..."
"... the suggestion that the media have poisoned the minds of citizens evinces a lack of faith in the voters' ability to sort through the events of the day and arrive at sound political judgments... ..."
The two existential challenges of any long-term government-democracy, dictatorship, oligarchy,
royalty-are the necessity of legitimacy and the dangers of succession. The American Founders crafted
a system designed to ensure both legitimacy and peaceful succession through a complex and delicately
balanced system of popular sovereignty. That system is healthy only when the nation at large accepts
its sanctity. Trump signaled that he might not accept it in the face of defeat.
The refusal was stunning in its revelation that this man who seeks the presidency wouldn't perceive
how incendiary - and, in the view of millions of Americans, disqualifying-such a pronouncement would
be. Perhaps Trump didn't really mean it. Perhaps he thought he was merely introducing "suspense"
into the race, as he put it, when he said, "I will look at it at the time." And no doubt his core
supporters will defend the position, tossing out comparisons to Al Gore in 2000 or Andrew Jackson
in 1824. But, in the annals of recent American presidential politics, it is difficult to think of
a candidate pronouncement more guaranteed to stymie that candidate's path to the White House.
Clinton, studied and pugnacious, avoided any such gaffe. After her first two outings with Trump,
she had mastered the art of delivering body blows at every opportunity, citing specific episodes
and anecdotes that she portrayed as demonstrating his unfitness for office-the controversy over his
alleged mistreatment of women, his rough language toward illegal immigrants, his criticisms of a
gold star family and a Hispanic federal judge, his purchase of Chinese steel to build his buildings.
She chided him for not mentioning the border wall he wants to build during a recent visit with Mexican
President Enrique Pena Nieto. "He didn't raise it," she declared, clearly seeking to get Trump's
goat. "He choked."
But Trump demonstrated greater self-control early in the debate than he has displayed at times
previously, and he didn't take the bait. He countered by saying Clinton wanted "open borders" and
emphasizing the necessity any sovereign nation has for clearly delineated borders. "Either we have
a country or we don't," he said. "Either we have borders or we don't."
But, when debate moderator Chris Wallace of Fox News, queried Clinton about a recent WikiLeaks
revelation that she extolled "open borders" to foreign bankers, the candidate deftly elided the thrust
of the question by saying she was talking merely about the transfer of electrical energy across borders
through an international grid system. Then she pounced on the WikiLeaks mention to slam Trump for
not condemning the Russians, considered by U.S. intelligence services to be behind the WikiLeaks
revelations.
Trump drew a smattering of laughter by calling her segue "a great pivot" and suggested nobody
really knows who is behind the ongoing WikiLeaks revelations. He repeated his call for better U.S.
relations with Russia, particularly in combatting the Islamic State, or ISIS, in Syria.
Clinton also demonstrated her rhetorical dexterity in avoiding any direct response to Wallace's
question about allegations of "pay to play" practices at the controversial Clinton Foundation, viewed
by many as an institution designed primarily to bolster the Clintons' political clout and generate
huge speaking fees for both Bill and Hillary Clinton. The Democratic candidate launched into an extensive
defense of the foundation's lofty good works that proved so long and off-point that Wallace repeatedly
sought to get her back to the question at hand. Clinton ignored him.
Trump seemed to enter the debate bent on avoiding the kind of jarringly harsh attacks he had engaged
in previously, and he succeeded for the most part. But he still reached for his blunderbuss from
time to time. "Look," he said at one point, "she's been proven to be a liar. This is just another
lie." And he reverted to form late in the debate when he interjected into one of her perorations,
"What a nasty woman!"
Wallace, who seemed resolved to get the candidates into some substantive discussions on major
issues facing the nation, elicited serious exchanges on the role of the Supreme Court in the American
constitutional system, abortion, immigration, economic policy, trade and the burgeoning national
debt, fueled significantly by unchecked entitlement spending. On the latter question, neither candidate
demonstrated much credibility as someone who particularly cares about reining in federal spending.
Clinton said she would "go where the money is"-the corporations and the rich-and placed unrealistic
expectations on the capacity of this fiscal approach to address the debt problem. Trump, without
much detail, said his policies, including big tax cuts, would generate so much economic growth, and
federal revenue, that entitlement spending won't be a problem.
Clinton seized every opportunity to direct her rhetoric to the constituent elements of her party
women , minorities, the LBGT community, affluent liberals. Hers was a program of expanded entitlements,
including federal support for college students, greater aid to education, and a solution to the Affordable
Care Act that would entail greater federal intervention into health care. She said little that separated
her from her socialist opponent in the primaries, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.
In supporting his allegation that the election is "rigged," Trump cited three elements of concern.
First, the mainstream media - "so bad, so dishonest, so corrupt; it is poisoning the minds of the
voters." Second, he said millions of unqualified people have been added to the voter rolls when they
shouldn't be registered. Third, he said Clinton "should not be allowed to run," presumably because
of previous allegations of wrongdoing related to her private email server and the machinations of
the Clinton Foundation.
While many observers, including some liberals, agree that the media establishment is largely against
Trump, and probably more overtly than we have seen in recent memory, the suggestion that the media
have poisoned the minds of citizens evinces a lack of faith in the voters' ability to sort through
the events of the day and arrive at sound political judgments...
"... The presidential candidate also tweeted the words of her running mate, Ajamu Baraka, who said, "It should [be] clear to everyone that a vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote for war." ..."
"... Regrettably for Americans, Stein is right about the Democratic nominee. Those concerned about the future of America with someone as erratic as Donald Trump in the Oval Office are justified in their worry, but to believe Hillary is somehow a "better option" is not only a naive assumption - but a reckless one. A vote for Hillary is undoubtedly a conscious vote to go war with a nuclear-armed superpower. ..."
"... US empire is bigger than any President. No president can change it. ..."
Dr. Stein, who has
strongly advocated
for a more
peaceful approach
to U.S. relations in the Middle East - as well as throughout the world - recently took to her
Twitter account to boldly state what may come as a shock to many Americans:
"Hillary Clinton's foreign policy is much scarier than Donald Trump's."
The presidential candidate also tweeted the words of her running mate, Ajamu Baraka, who said,
"It should [be] clear to everyone that a vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote for war."
Hillary Clinton's foreign policy is much scarier than Donald Trump's, who does not want to
go to war with Russia.
#PeaceOffensive
Dr. Stein elaborated on her social media statements when asked by a reporter in Texas this week
what she felt a Hillary Clinton presidency would look like.
"Well, we know what kind of Secretary of State she was,"
Stein said in her response.
"[Hillary] is in incredible service to Wall Street and to the war profiteers. She led the way
in Libya and she's trying to start an air war with Russia over Syria, which means, if Hillary
gets elected, we're kinda going to war with Russia, folks…a nuclear-armed power."
While many Americans act as if one's disdain for Hillary Clinton and her policies automatically
make them a supporter of Donald Trump for president - or vice versa - Stein went on to vocalize her
fear of both major party candidates.
"Who will sleep well with Trump in the White House? But you shouldn't sleep well with Hillary
in the White House either. Fortunately, we live in a democracy and we have more than two deadly
choices," Stein said, referring to herself and Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson.
Regrettably for Americans, Stein is right about the Democratic nominee. Those concerned about
the future of America with someone as erratic as Donald Trump in the Oval Office are justified in
their worry, but to believe Hillary is somehow a "better option" is not only a naive assumption -
but a reckless one. A vote for Hillary is undoubtedly a conscious vote to go war with a nuclear-armed
superpower.
Still not a believer? Watch the video below and see for yourself:
There are so many holes on Dr. Stein observations that I don't even know where to start.
First: US empire is bigger than any President. No president can change it.
Second: Only the naive can think that a neocon (Hillary) can be more dangerous than a bully
(Trump).
Third: Dr. Stein, could you please tell us what will happen when the empire has not enough
energy, food, and resources to give to its people? Tell us your "un-reckless" solution, because
I can't wait to hear.
Ohh. I just remember. You can't, because it doesn't exist.
This well-articulated executive summary (10 minutes of your time) integrates the consequences
of the world's biggest financial bubble with the risk of military escalation with Russia in Syria,
the Balkans, or Ukraine. Hilllary's foreign policy goes head-to-head with Russia's foreign policy:
they are different with respect to use of nuclear weapons, particularly tactical nuclear weapons.
Show me ANY stories from her on ANY of the Million Dicks in a Bag "credible" media.....
<tapping foot>...............
................yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeah
But Cankly-pooper has that jag off Air Force cucked dickwad on TeeVee ads every ten fucking
minutes saying Trump is unfit to have his finger on the button.
Just like the moron I talked to a couple of weeks ago, when he said he was voting for Catheter
because "Trump was going to take us to war".....(finding out he gets his "news" from social media,
Google News and the NYT)
MORONS...that's who Clinton has .....fucking morons....
Jill Stein - Green Party candidate, and Gary Johnson - Libtarian candidate .......
[In battleground states] BOTH need to come out and tell their voting supporters to NOT vote
for them but to vote Trump...and only vote for them if they can't vote Trump. Because there is
no point in a Greens platform if the planet is at war or in destruction, likewise their is no
chance of a Libertarian platform for a country in increased wars, or world at war.
The Libertarian and Greens platform assume a peaceful country and world - with Cliinton and
her backers the USA will ge the exact opposite.
This is why the Greens and Libitarians most not only endorse Trump but tell their voters they
must vote for Trump for there to be any hope for the USA's future.
In fact if I were Trump I would be making this pitch to them.
"... Also, Wallace has kept control of this thing... asked good questions to both of them and been the best moderator (IMO) by far of the 3 previous debates. At least tonight, both of them have been able to actually talk about some relevant policy... although nothing close to enlightening from either. ..."
"... Basically you have a treacherous but effective salesman that stiffs contractors versus a treacherous career politician. Two of the top in their class, respectively. Ultimately Russia, Iran and China will need to assess the future threats and assert the defense of their interests in anticipation of whatever the result may be, while being diplomatically astute. ..."
"... He was constantly on-topic and superior ..."
"... In the debate, Trump came across to me as someone who would make a welcome change to the phoniness of Reagan and Obama (Bill Clinton and Bush 2 came across not so much as phonies as hicks), while Hillary came across as someone playing her on Saturday Night Live. ..."
"... And Trump got the best final line ever of a final presidential debate: you want another Obama term, vote for her (words to that effect). ..."
"... Ultimately I think Trump made Hillary look worse to me than she made him, so he won the debates based upon their respective records. That's me however, and not the general voting public. ..."
Trump seemed subdued. Trying to be more Presidential?
- He should've:
- spoken of the connection between the Khans and the Democratic Party;
- talked about Hillary's having lied to the Benghazi families about why the reasons for
the Benghazi attack? (She says she has made working for families her life's work) ;
- discussed the failure of the Obama Administration to protect us from terrorism and the
heroin epidemic - most heroin comes from Afghanistan where we have had troops for years;
I think Trump made Hillary look worse to me than she made him, so he won the debates based upon
their respective records. That's me however, and not the general voting public.
The debate got particularly nasty. Trump went at her hard, but came off as being a bully. Hillary
dodged and weaved through some treacherous waters, and both continued to affirm their positions,
however good or bad.
Basically you have a treacherous but effective salesman that stiffs contractors versus
a treacherous career politician. Two of the top in their class, respectively. Ultimately Russia,
Iran and China will need to assess the future threats and assert the defense of their interests
in anticipation of whatever the result may be, while being diplomatically astute.
In the debate, Trump came across to me as someone who would make a welcome change to the phoniness
of Reagan and Obama (Bill Clinton and Bush 2 came across not so much as phonies as hicks), while
Hillary came across as someone playing her on Saturday Night Live.
And Trump got the best final line ever of a final presidential debate: you want another
Obama term, vote for her (words to that effect).
@111 But his bullying attitude possibly turns off many (female) voters, and he's most definitely
stiffed workers and investors. He is very very salesmanish, which is not such a good thing. Hillary
doesn't change her tune, despite how awful it is. I can't say the same about Trump.
Ultimately I think Trump made Hillary look worse to me than she made him, so he won the
debates based upon their respective records. That's me however, and not the general voting public.
I think people will hold their nose and vote for Hillary, while others will be scared to associate
themselves with Trump by voting for him. That's how I see it anyway. Perhaps the level of anger
with the status-quo will be substantial enough to tip the scales for Trump.
On September 28 the French mission to the UN claimed that two hospitals in east-Aleppo had been bombed.
It documented this in a tweet with
a picture of destroyed buildings in Gaza. The French later deleted that tweet.
It is not the first time such false claims and willful obfuscations were made by "western" officials.
But usually they shy away from outright lies.
Not so the US Secretary of State John Kerry. In a press event yesterday, before talks with the French
Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault about a new UN resolution,
he said (vid
@1:00) about Syria:
Last night, the regime attacked yet another hospital, and 20 people were killed and 100 people
were wounded. And Russia and the regime owe the world more than an explanation about why they
keep hitting hospitals and medical facilities and children and women.These are acts that beg for
an appropriate investigation of war crimes. And those who commit these would and should be held
accountable for these actions.
No opposition group has claimed that such an extremely grave event happened. None. No press agency
has a record of it. The MI-6 disinformation outlet SOHR in Britain, which quite reliably notes every
claimed casualty and is frequently cited in "western" media", has not said anything about such an
event anywhere in Syria.
The grave incident Kerry claimed did not happen. Kerry made it up. (Was it supposed to happen, got
canceled and Kerry missed the memo?) Kerry used the lie to call for war crime investigations and
punishment. This in front of cameras, at an official event with a foreign guest in the context of
a United Nations Security Council resolution.
This is grave. This is nearly as grave as Colin Powell's false claims of WMD in Iraq in front of
the UN Security Council.
Early reports, like
this one at CBSNEWS, repeat the Kerry claim:
Kerry said Syrian forces hit a hospital overnight, killing 20 people and wounding 100, describing
what would be the latest strike by Moscow or its ally in Damascus on a civilian target.
But the New York Times write up of the event, which includes Kerry's demand for war crime investigations,
does not mention the hospital bombing claim. Not at all. For the self-acclaimed "paper of record",
Kerry's lie did not happen. Likewise the Washington Post which in its own write up
makes no mention of the false Kerry claim.
The latest AP write up by Matthew Lee
also omits the lie. This is curious as Matt Lee is obviously aware of it. The State Departments
daily press briefing yesterday
had a whole section
on it. Video (@3:30)
shows that it is Matt who asks these questions:
QUESTION: Okay. On to Syria and the Secretary's comments earlier this morning, one is: Do you
know what strike he was talking about in his comments overnight on a hospital in Aleppo?
MR KIRBY: I think the Secretary's referring actually to a strike that we saw happen yesterday
on a field hospital in the Rif Dimashq Governorate. I'm not exactly positive that that's what
he was referring to, but I think he was referring to actually one that was --
QUESTION: Not one in Aleppo?
MR KIRBY: I believe it was – I think it was – I think he – my guess is – I'm guessing here that
he was a bit mistaken on location and referring to one --
...
QUESTION: But you don't have certainty, though?
MR KIRBY: I don't. Best I got, best information I got, is that he was most likely referring to
one yesterday in this governorate, but it could just be an honest mistake.
QUESTION: If we could – if we can nail that down with certainty what he was talking about --
MR KIRBY: I'll do the best I can, Matt.
...
This goes on for a while. But there was no hospital attack in Rif Dimashq nor in Aleppo. Later on
DoS spokesman Kirby basically admits that Kerry lied: "I can't corroborate that."
It also turns out that Kerry has no evidence for any war crimes and no plausible way to initiate
any official international procedure about such. And for what? To bully Russia? Fat chance, that
would be a hopeless endeavor and Kerry should know that.
Kerry is desperate. He completely lost the plot on Syria. Russia is in the lead and will do whatever
needs to be done. The Obama administration has, apart from starting a World War, no longer any way
to significantly influence that.
Kerry is only one tool of the Obama administration. Later that day the US Director of National Intelligence,
James Clapper, made other
accusations against Russia:
The US Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directedthe recent
compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations.
The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by
the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed
efforts. These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process.
Such activity is not new to Moscow-the Russians have used similar tactics and techniques across
Europe and Eurasia, for example, to influence public opinion there. We believe, based on the scope
and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia's senior-most officials could have authorized
these activities.
Translation: "WE DO NOT KNOW at all ("we are confident", "we believe", "directed") who did these
hacks and WE DO NOT HAVE the slightest evidence ("consistent with","based on the scope and sensitivity")
that Russia is involved, so let me throw some chaff and try to bamboozle you all."
The former British ambassador Craig Murray calls it
a
blatant neocon lie. It was obviously the DNC that manipulated the US election by, contrary to
its mandate, promoting Clinton over Sanders. The hackers only proved that. It is also easy to see
why these accusations are made now. Murray:
That the Obama administration has made a formal accusation of Russia based on no evidence is,
on one level, astonishing. But it is motivated by desperation. WikiLeaks have already announced
that they have a huge cache of other material relating to Hillary's shenanigans. The White House
is simply seeking to discredit it in advance by a completely false association with Russian intelligence.
The Obama administration is losing it. On Syria as well as on the election it can no longer assert
its will. Trump, despite all dirty boy's club talk he may do, has a significant chance to catch the
presidency. He (-44%) and Clinton (-41%) are
more disliked by the U.S electorate, than Putin (-38%). Any solution in Syria will be more in
Russia's than the Washington's favor.
Such desperation can be dangerous. Kerry is gasping at straws when he lies about Russia. The president
and his colleagues at the Pentagon and the CIA have more kinetic means to express themselves. Could
they order up something really stupid?
"... Clinton also says that the no-fly zone bombing in Syria she is arguing for "would kill a lot of Syrians" - all for humanitarian reasons of course. ..."
"... While this military/para-military operation is moving forward, we need to use our diplomatic and more traditional intelligence assets to bring pressure on the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia , which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL and other radical Sunni groups in the region. ..."
"... Not new - the 2012 DIA analysis provided as much , and more, - but these email's prove that Clinton was and is well aware that U.S. allies are financing the radical Islamists in Syria and Iraq. ..."
Quotes from the Wikileaks stash of Hillary
Clinton speeches and emails
from her campaign chair John Podesta.
Clinton in a 2013 speech to the Jewish United Fund Advance & Major Gifts Dinner (via
The Intercept ):
[Arming moderates has] been complicated by the fact that the Saudis and others are shipping large
amounts of weapons-and pretty indiscriminately-not at all targeted toward the people that we think
would be the more moderate, least likely, to cause problems in the future, ...
Clinton also says that the no-fly zone bombing in Syria she is arguing for "would kill a lot
of Syrians" - all for humanitarian reasons of course.
The following was written by Podesta, a well connected former White House Chief of Staff, in an
2014 email to Clinton.
As introduction Podesta notes: "Sources include Western intelligence, US intelligence and sources
in the region.":
While this military/para-military operation is moving forward, we need to use our diplomatic
and more traditional intelligence assets to bring pressure on the governments of Qatar and Saudi
Arabia , which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL and other radical
Sunni groups in the region.
Not new - the 2012 DIA analysis
provided as much , and more, - but these email's prove that Clinton was and is well aware that
U.S. allies are financing the radical Islamists in Syria and Iraq.
"... It is fortunate for Saudi Arabia and Qatar that the furor over the sexual antics of Donald Trump is preventing much attention being given to the latest batch of leaked emails to and from Hillary Clinton . Most fascinating of these is what reads like a US State Department memo , dated 17 August 2014, on the appropriate US response to the rapid advance of Isis forces, which were then sweeping through northern Iraq and eastern Syria. ..."
"... The memo says: "We need to use our diplomatic and more traditional intelligence assets to bring pressure on the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to Isis and other radical groups in the region." ..."
"... An earlier WikiLeaks release of a State Department cable sent under her name in December 2009 states that "Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support base for al-Qaeda, the Taliban, LeT [Lashkar-e-Taiba in Pakistan]." But Saudi complicity with these movements never became a central political issue in the US. Why not? ..."
"... The answer is that the US did not think it was in its interests to cut its traditional Sunni allies loose and put a great deal of resources into making sure that this did not happen. They brought on side compliant journalists, academics and politicians willing to give overt or covert support to Saudi positions. ..."
"... Iraqi and Kurdish leaders said that they did not believe a word of it, claiming privately that Isis was blackmailing the Gulf states by threatening violence on their territory unless they paid up. ..."
"... Going by the latest leaked email, the State Department and US intelligence clearly had no doubt that Saudi Arabia and Qatar were funding Isis. ..."
"... Hillary Clinton should be very vulnerable over the failings of US foreign policy during the years she was Secretary of State. But, such is the crudity of Trump's demagoguery, she has never had to answer for it. ..."
"... A Hillary Clinton presidency might mean closer amity with Saudi Arabia, but American attitudes towards the Saudi regime are becoming soured, as was shown recently when Congress overwhelmingly overturned a presidential veto of a bill allowing the relatives of 9/11 victims to sue the Saudi government. ..."
It is fortunate for
Saudi Arabia and Qatar
that the furor over the
sexual antics of Donald
Trump is preventing much attention being given to the latest batch of leaked emails to and from
Hillary Clinton.
Most fascinating of these is what reads like a
US State Department memo, dated 17 August 2014, on the appropriate US response to the rapid advance
of Isis forces, which were then sweeping through northern Iraq and eastern Syria.
At the time,
the US government was not admitting that Saudi Arabia and its Sunni allies were supporting
Isis and
al-Qaeda-type movements.
But in
the leaked memo, which says that it draws on "western intelligence, US intelligence and sources
in the region" there is no ambivalence about who is backing Isis, which at the time of writing was
butchering and raping Yazidi villagers and slaughtering captured Iraqi and Syrian soldiers.
The memo says: "We need to use our diplomatic and more traditional intelligence assets to
bring pressure on the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are providing clandestine financial
and logistic support to Isis and other radical groups in the region." This was evidently received
wisdom in the upper ranks of the US government, but never openly admitted because to it was held
that to antagonise Saudi Arabia, the Gulf monarchies, Turkey and Pakistan would fatally undermine
US power in the Middle East and South Asia.
For an extraordinarily long period after 9/11, the US refused to confront these traditional Sunni
allies and thereby ensured that the "War on Terror" would fail decisively; 15 years later, al-Qaeda
in its different guises is much stronger than it used to be because shadowy state sponsors, without
whom it could not have survived, were given a free pass.
It is not as if Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State and the US foreign policy establishment
in general did not know what was happening. An earlier WikiLeaks release of a State Department
cable sent under her name in December 2009 states that "Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial
support base for al-Qaeda, the Taliban, LeT [Lashkar-e-Taiba in Pakistan]." But Saudi complicity
with these movements never became a central political issue in the US. Why not?
The answer is that the US did not think it was in its interests to cut its traditional Sunni
allies loose and put a great deal of resources into making sure that this did not happen. They brought
on side compliant journalists, academics and politicians willing to give overt or covert support
to Saudi positions.
The real views of senior officials in the White House and the State Department were only periodically
visible and, even when their frankness made news, what they said was swiftly forgotten. Earlier this
year, for instance, Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic wrote a piece based on numerous interviews
with Barack Obama in which Obama "questioned, often harshly, the role that America's Sunni Arab allies
play in fomenting anti-American terrorism. He is clearly irritated that foreign policy orthodoxy
compels him to treat Saudi Arabia as an ally".
It is worth recalling White House cynicism about how that foreign policy orthodoxy in Washington
was produced and how easily its influence could be bought. Goldberg reported that "a widely held
sentiment inside the White House is that many of the most prominent foreign-policy think tanks in
Washington are doing the bidding of their Arab and pro-Israel funders. I've heard one administration
official refer to Massachusetts Avenue, the home of many of these think tanks, as 'Arab-occupied
territory'."
Despite this, television and newspaper interview self-declared academic experts from these same
think tanks on Isis, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf are wilfully ignoring or happily disregarding
their partisan sympathies.
The Hillary Clinton email of August 2014 takes for granted that Saudi Arabia and Qatar are funding
Isis – but this was not the journalistic or academic conventional wisdom of the day. Instead, there
was much assertion that the newly declared caliphate was self-supporting through the sale of oil,
taxes and antiquities; it therefore followed that Isis did not need money from Saudi Arabia and the
Gulf. The same argument could not be made to explain the funding of Jabhat al-Nusra, which controlled
no oilfields, but even in the case of Isis the belief in its self-sufficiency was always shaky.
Iraqi and Kurdish leaders said that they did not believe a word of it, claiming privately
that Isis was blackmailing the Gulf states by threatening violence on their territory unless they
paid up. The Iraqi and Kurdish officials never produced proof of this, but it seemed unlikely
that men as tough and ruthless as the Isis leaders would have satisfied themselves with taxing truck
traffic and shopkeepers in the extensive but poor lands they ruled and not extracted far larger sums
from fabulously wealthy private and state donors in the oil producers of the Gulf.
Going by the latest leaked email, the State Department and US intelligence clearly had no
doubt that Saudi Arabia and Qatar were funding Isis. But there has always been bizarre discontinuity
between what the Obama administration knew about Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states and what they would
say in public. Occasionally the truth would spill out, as when Vice-President Joe Biden told students
at Harvard in October 2014 that Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates "were so determined
to take down Assad and essentially have a proxy Sunni-Shia war. What did they do? They poured hundreds
of millions of dollars and thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad.
Except that the people who were being supplied were al-Nusra and al-Qaeda and the extremist elements
of jihadis coming from other parts of the world". Biden poured scorn on the idea that there were
Syrian "moderates" capable of fighting Isis and Assad at the same time.
Hillary Clinton should be very vulnerable over the failings of US foreign policy during the
years she was Secretary of State. But, such is the crudity of Trump's demagoguery, she has never
had to answer for it. Republican challenges have focussed on issues – the death of the US ambassador
in Benghazi in 2012 and the final US military withdrawal from Iraq in 2011 – for which she was not
responsible.
A Hillary Clinton presidency might mean closer amity with Saudi Arabia, but American attitudes
towards the Saudi regime are becoming soured, as was shown recently when Congress overwhelmingly
overturned a presidential veto of a bill allowing the relatives of 9/11 victims to sue the Saudi
government.
Another development is weakening Saudi Arabia and its Sunni allies. The leaked memo speaks of
the rival ambitions of Saudi Arabia and Qatar "to dominate the Sunni world". But this has not turned
out well, with east Aleppo and Mosul, two great Sunni cities, coming under attack and likely to fall.
Whatever Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and the others thought they were doing it has not happened and
the Sunni of Syria and Iraq are paying a heavy price. It is this failure which will shape the future
relations of the Sunni states with the new US administration.
"... President Obama acknowledged that danger at the end of the Nuclear Security Summit meeting in Washington early this month. He warned of the potential for "ramping up new and more deadly and more effective systems that end up leading to a whole new escalation of the arms race." ... ..."
"... United States' first 'smart' nuclear bomb signals new arms race with China and Russia: analysts South China Morning Post - August 18 ..."
"... Washington's green light for a new generation of steerable and smart tactical nuclear weapons may signal the start of a new US nuclear arms race with China and Russia, military analysts say. ..."
"... Russia and China are believed to have been developing similar weapons for decades, but Chinese experts are apparently keen to learn the lessons of the former Soviet Union's failed attempt to keep up with the United States in the cold war. ..."
"... Tactical nuclear weapons, known as non-strategic nuclear weapons, are designed to support naval, land and air forces in areas close to friendly forces and perhaps even on contested friendly territory. ..."
"... The new US weapon, the B61-12, is America's first guided, or "smart" nuclear bomb. It weighs 350kg and can penetrate fortified structures several metres underground. ..."
"... These nuclear happenings are why I think Hillary Clinton's labeling of Donald Trump as 'Putin's Puppet' is the more important takeaway for last night's debate, much more so than Trump's refusal to go on record as accepting the results of the election. ..."
"... The American Voting Public has 19 days to discover the loss of detente, the three way nuclear weapon build up ..."
By Paul Sonne & Julian E. Barnes & Gordon Lubold...Oct 19, 2016...5:47 p.m. ET
"The U.S. has summoned Russia to a mandatory meeting before a special treaty commission to answer
accusations that Moscow has violated a Cold War-era pact that bans the production, maintenance or
testing of medium-range missiles, according to U.S. and Western officials.
The U.S. for years has alleged that Russia is breaching the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces
Treaty, or INF Treaty, an agreement Washington and Moscow signed in 1987 to eliminate land-based
nuclear and conventional missiles with ranges from 500 to 5,500 kilometers, as well as their launchers.
Russia, in turn, has accused the U.S. of violating the pact.
Now the U.S. is convening the treaty's so-called Special Verification Commission to press its
case against Russia, triggering the compliance body's first meeting in 16 years, according to the
U.S. and Western officials. They said the SVC meeting would take place in the coming weeks."
Putin is one of the few sane politicians left in Europe. I would not object importing him and
putting him as a POTUS here instead of one psychically debilitated neocon warmonger (who is definitely
in the pocket of Wall Street, if not Russians, due to the amount of "compromat" on her and Bill
floating around) and another bombastic know-nothing billionaire who is unable to neither clearly
articulate, no capitalize on his winning anti-globalization position against such a compromised,
widely hated opponent.
Especially after the dirty details of her sinking Sanders became known. Why on the Earth he
can't just de-legitimize her by stressing that she obtained her position as the candidate from
Democratic Party by proven fraud by DNC is beyond me.
Looks like you might not understand that and the fact that neocons have had driven the US into
another useless war in Syria to protect not so much our own but Israeli and Saudi interests (the
key idea is partitioning of Syria and establishing a Sunni state as the counterweight the loss
of Iraq to Shiites, which means Iran) .
Race for Latest Class of Nuclear Arms Threatens
to Revive Cold War http://nyti.ms/268HJT6
NYT - WILLIAM J. BROAD and DAVID E. SANGER - APRIL 16, 2016
The United States, Russia and China are now aggressively pursuing a new generation of smaller,
less destructive nuclear weapons. The buildups threaten to revive a Cold War-era arms race and
unsettle the balance of destructive force among nations that has kept the nuclear peace for more
than a half-century.
It is, in large measure, an old dynamic playing out in new form as an economically declining
Russia, a rising China and an uncertain United States resume their one-upmanship.
American officials largely blame the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, saying his intransigence
has stymied efforts to build on a 2010 arms control treaty and further shrink the arsenals of
the two largest nuclear powers. Some blame the Chinese, who are looking for a technological edge
to keep the United States at bay. And some blame the United States itself for speeding ahead with
a nuclear "modernization" that, in the name of improving safety and reliability, risks throwing
fuel on the fire.
President Obama acknowledged that danger at the end of the Nuclear Security Summit meeting
in Washington early this month. He warned of the potential for "ramping up new and more deadly
and more effective systems that end up leading to a whole new escalation of the arms race." ...
---
United States' first 'smart' nuclear bomb signals new arms race with China and Russia:
analysts South China Morning Post - August 18
Washington's green light for a new generation of steerable and smart tactical nuclear weapons
may signal the start of a new US nuclear arms race with China and Russia, military analysts say.
Russia and China are believed to have been developing similar weapons for decades, but
Chinese experts are apparently keen to learn the lessons of the former Soviet Union's failed attempt
to keep up with the United States in the cold war.
Tactical nuclear weapons, known as non-strategic nuclear weapons, are designed to support
naval, land and air forces in areas close to friendly forces and perhaps even on contested friendly
territory.
The new US weapon, the B61-12, is America's first guided, or "smart" nuclear bomb. It weighs
350kg and can penetrate fortified structures several metres underground.
Unlike banned weapons of mass destruction, the B61-12 is designed to be carried by high-speed
stealth fighter jets to hit targets precisely with limited damage to structures and lives nearby.
...
im1dc -> im1dc... , -1
These nuclear happenings are why I think Hillary Clinton's labeling of Donald Trump as 'Putin's
Puppet' is the more important takeaway for last night's debate, much more so than Trump's refusal
to go on record as accepting the results of the election.
The American Voting Public has 19 days to discover the loss of detente, the three way nuclear
weapon build up , and connect Trump to Putin as Putin's Puppet.
This is far more important going forward than Trump being seen as a whiner and sore loser.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said she believes the US presidential campaign
is not worthy of the nation's people, calling it a "catastrophe" and "simply some sort of a global
shame" during a meeting with students on Tuesday.
Commenting on the heated 2016 presidential race in the US, Zakharova lamented that by accusing
Moscow of mounting cyber-attacks with an alleged aim of meddling in American politics, Washington
has turned Russia into a "real, serious factor of pre-election rhetoric."
They are constantly saying that Russia is carrying out cyber-attacks on certain US facilities,"
she said. Zakharova stressed that the US side provided no proof or any other data on the alleged
hackers' links to Moscow, which she says makes the allegations appear to be a "smokescreen" to cover
up serious domestic issues.
According to the spokeswoman, this "public bickering on Russia"as well as "locker-room jokes"
are "unworthy of a great power, [and] great people" of America.
"I simply believe that this campaign is not worthy of their people. As a person who was engaged
in information technologies when studying at the university, I believe that this is a catastrophic
campaign. May the colleagues of all kinds and countries forgive me, but I believe that this is simply
some sort of a global shame," Zakharova said at a meeting with students at the Moscow Aviation Institute,
Life.ru reported.
Earlier in October, the US government claimed it was "confident" that Russia was behind the hacking
attacks on US officials and organizations, alleging that revelations by WikiLeaks, DCLeaks and Guccifer
2.0. were directly authorized by the Russian government with the intention to "interfere with the
US election process."
"We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia's senior-most
officials could have authorized these activities," read the report, published by the Director of
National Intelligence James Clapper. The accusations were based on the fact that attacks "in most
cases originated from servers operated by a Russian company."
Moscow, for its part, completely dismissed the allegations, denying any involvement in the attacks.
Commenting on the report, Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov labeled the accusations "yet
another fit of nonsense,"adding that while many cyber-attacks Russia faces on a daily basis can be
traced back to US services, Russia refrains from calling US government responsible for cybercrimes.
This crazy warmonger Hillary Insists Putin Wants a 'Puppet' as US President. The truth is that with
the amount of "compromat" against her she is a puppet.
It didn't take long for the
final presidential debate in the US to be shifted to the Clinton campaign's favorite topic: accusing
the Trump campaign of being involved in a Russian plot to hack the US election to his benefit. Indeed,
it didn't even wait until the brief foreign policy segment.
During questions about immigration, the moderator asked a question of Hillary Clinton regarding
her comments at a closed-door speech to a Brazilian bank about open borders. Clinton quickly and
dramatically changed focus, noting that the quote came from WikiLeaks and declaring "what's really
important about WikiLeaks is that the Russian government has engaged in espionage against Americans."
She went on to declare that it was "clearly" Russian President Vladimir Putin behind the WikiLeaks
releases, and insisted that the entire intelligence community had confirmed Putin was doing so "to
influence our election." She then demanded Republican nominee Donald Trump "admit" to it.
When Trump noted that Clinton has "no idea" who was behind the hacks, and that he'd never even
met Putin, Clinton declared that Putin wanted Trump elected to be his puppet as US president. Trump
insisted it was Clinton, by contrast, who was the puppet.
Trump went on to say he'd condemn any foreign interference in the US election, no matter who it
was, but did say that he thought if the US and Russia got along it "wouldn't be so bad." Clinton
accused him of spouting "the Putin line."
The Clinton campaign has been accusing Russia of trying to hack the election since their summer
convention, blaming them for materially every leak that proved embarrassing to her campaign. Since
then, the allegations have gone hand-in-hand with claims that Trump is in on the matter. Russia denies
any involvement in the hacking, and has noted there is no public evidence to support the claims.
Beyond continuing to advance these allegations, the debate touched on foreign policy in a limited
fashion, with Clinton reiterating promises to impose a no fly zone in Syria to "gain some leverage
on the Russians." When asked about the possibility of that starting a war with Russia, she shifted
focus again to her confidence the no-fly zone would "save lives."
"... It is high time for the U.S. to return to paper-ballots and manual vote counting. The process is easier, comprehensible, less prone to manipulations and reproducible. Experience in other countries show that it is also nearly as fast, if not faster, than machine counting. There is simply no sensible reason why machines should be used at all. ..."
"... There is simply no sensible reason why machines should be used at all." Of course there is - to rig elections. What do you think they are used for. ..."
"... The price to pay is the ability to be alerted when vote rigging is going on. Bush won in 2000 because his people controlled the processes that mattered in Florida. ..."
"... There are the same allegations about 2004 in regards to Ohio. ..."
"... Here's the best statistical analysis of US vote count irregularities to date. Not a pretty picture. ..."
"... There is more needed than just paper ballots. A proportional system, a limit on donations and partisan/donor government posts, a stop to the corporate and lobbyist revolving doors. ..."
"... At present the US seem to be on their way to a one party system. Any democratic process will take place within this "private" club including a very small part of the population. ..."
"... for the 1 percent the system is not rigged, they have a preferred globalization candidate, and a police state fall back should the peasants rebell. ..."
"... US citizens are reduced to vote in a block to this power in the Senate and the House in continuous cycles. In the end that blocks any political progress there might be. ..."
"... There's lots of evidence that the 2004 election was stolen for Bush in Ohio. ..."
"... "smartmatic" is obviously the right choice. it's a name we know and trust. Like Deibold, Northrup, KBR, and Bellingcat. The integrity stands for itself. ..."
"... Just think of how many residents of graveyards will be voting their consciences (or lack thereof) this year. Remember Chicago advise - vote early, vote often. ..."
"... obomber has a friend in the vote rigging business. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-18/robert-creamer ..."
"... Concerted media campaign (scripted) against Trump portrays him as hysterical. Recall the trumped-up "(Howard) Dean Scream". ..."
"... Hillary is as nasty and hysterical as Trump or worse. She uses the F bomb regularly. Screams at her subordinates and she annihilated several countries worth of women and children. ..."
"... We should all be aware of what occurred in the two Baby Bush elections as far as voter machine tabulations and judicial fraud in his becoming president in both elections and the likely murder(s) to cover the fraud up. Small plane crashes being almost untraceable. ..."
"... paper vote or bust. Everything else hides an attempt at control and ultimately fraud. ..."
"... How does that help Trump? Most DNC *and* RNC Deep State insiders favor Hillary. ..."
"... Who is leaking all this stuff so well-timed together? Might just be the FBI, finding itself unable to prosecute officially, not only for fear of retribution, but also because the heap of shit that would get uncovered could be enough for the rest of the world to declare war on the US. ..."
"... In Vietnam, as in Iraq, the U.S. government pushed hard to get an election to sanctify its puppet regime. Ellsberg, who spent two years in Vietnam after his time in the Pentagon, aided some of the key U.S. officials in this effort who sought an honest vote. But when U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge heard their pitch, he replied, "You've got a gentleman in the White House right now [Johnson] who has spent most of his life rigging elections. I've spent most of my life rigging elections. I spent nine whole months rigging a Republican convention to choose Ike as a candidate rather than Bob Taft." Lodge later ordered, "Get it across to the press that they shouldn't apply higher standards here in Vietnam than they do in the U.S." ..."
"... Why is policy discussion absent from this election cycle? Its all Trump bashing,wo one iota of his policies being broadcast? ..."
"... Obomba, the most un-criticised POTUS in American history, is a laughable pos concerned about his terrible corrupt legacy of death war and division which Trump will reveal, once in. ..."
"... Election Fraud within the Outlaw US Empire has a long history. One very intrepid investigator and expert on this is Brad Friedman who runs the Brad Blog, whose current lead item is about this very topic. ..."
"... The Vote 'No Confidence' movement is growing. It's being actively discussed on FB and ZH now ..."
"... Trump say the election is rigged ? Obama's setting up a straw mam by changing the story to election fraud. There may well be fraud in the voting process but we are unlikely to ever know how much. But as to the election being rigged , that's so plainly obvious it's painful. ..."
"... And Germany doesn't allow electronic voting machines. Gotta be a clue there somewhere. ..."
"... There is ample evidence of election fraud, vote fraud, and various types of 'rigging' or 'organising' in the US it is just too long to go into in a short post. ..."
"... Poll Pro-HRC results are not trustworthy. They aren't necessarily outright fabricated (is easy to do and very hard to detect / prosecute), nor even fraudulently carried out, but 'arranged' to give the desired result, which might even, in some cases, be perfectly unconscious, just following SOP. (I could outline 10 major problems / procedures that twist the results.) ..."
"... Then, the media take it up, and cherry-pick the results, pro HRC. That includes internet sites like real clear politics, which I noticed recently is biased (paid?) in favor of HRC. ..."
"... It is amazing to me, yet very few ppl actually dig into the available info about the polls. (Maybe 300 ppl in the world?) HRC needs these fakelorum poll results because they will 'rig' the election as best as they can, they need to point back to them: "see we were winning all the time Trump deplorables yelling insults who cares" - Pathetic. Also, of course, controlling the polls while not the same as 'riggin' the election is part of the same MO. (See Podesta e-mails from Wikileaks.) ..."
"... I think things could get pretty ugly on Nov 9 if Trump wins because i don't see Hillary going quietly into the night and the dems have seeded "putin is rigging" the election idea to contest the results. Plus the establishment that wants Hillary controls the media and the executive office. ..."
"... Trump's delegitimizing the election before it takes place is definitely color revolution stuff - the carrot revolution? ..."
"... "Hillary Clinton now says her "number one priority" in Syria is the removal of Bashar al-Assad, putting us on the path of war with Syria and Russia next year. ..."
"... no-fly zone" over Syria will certainly be followed by the shooting down of both Russian and U.S. jets, in an unpredictable escalation that could easily spread ..."
"... Note the sums are shards of chewed peanuts and their shells. MSM are bought, controlled and are put in a lowly position, and pamper to power, any.… They will go where the money is but it takes them a long time to figure out who what where why etc. and what they are supposed to do. They cannot be outed as completely controlled, so have to do some 'moves' to retain credibility, and their clients/controllers understand that. Encouraging a corrupt 4th Estate has its major downsides. ..."
"... Rigged. Right. Let me tell you about rigged. The US system is rigged in a far larger sense than any Americans realize. It's rigged to blow off the Constitution. ..."
"... the idea of the Electoral College was that every four years communities vote for a local person who could be trusted to go to Washington and become part of the committee that chooses a president and vice-president. ..."
"... The process is "supposed" to be more akin to the Holy See choosing a pope. The electors were to meet in Washington, debate the possibilities, come up with short list, go to the top person on the list and ask if they would be willing to be president (or vice-president, as the case may be), and if they agreed, the deal was done. If not, go to the second person. ..."
"... And demand hand counted paper ballots that cannot be rigged by "Russian hackers". It's called simple score because it is almost the same as other well-known forms of score (and "range") voting, except it's optimized for hand counted paper ballots (i.e. no machines). ..."
"... Need to comb through the propositions carefully. Against big business and self serving liberals.. BTW, I'm a Californian from the Central Valley. Oh! How I wish there is a proposition. Should Hussein Obomo II charge for crimes against humanity? ..."
"... it is absolutely evident that Donald Trump is not only facing the mammoth Clinton political machine, but, also the combined forces of the viciously dishonest Mainstream Media." ..."
"... "When was the last time the media threw 100% of its support behind one party's presidential candidate? What does that say about the media?" ..."
"... Do you feel comfortable with the idea that a handful of TV and print-news executives are inserting themselves into the process and choosing our leaders for us?" ..."
"... It looks like ALL of the Neocon war criminals and architects of the mass slaughters in Iraq (Libya, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, etc) are standing with Hillary Clinton: ..."
"... Here's a partial list of neocon war criminals supporting Miss Neocon: Paul Wolfowitz (aka, the Prince of Darkness), Eliot Cohen, Richard Perle, David Wurmser, Robert Kagan, Max Boot, Bill Kristol, Dov Zakheim, Douglas Feith, Michael Ledeen, Marc Grossman, David Frum, Michael Chertoff, John Podhoretz, Elliot Abrams, Alan Dershowitz, etc ..."
"... All neocons stand with the CrookedC*nt because there hasn't been nearly enough pointless war, slaughter, dismemberment, death or trauma, it needs to go on FOREVER. ..."
"... To be blunt. It is not only MSM who are prostitutes of oligarchic ruling elite but all or most even so called left-leaning or independent media are all under guise of phony "opposition" or diversity of opinion where there is none. ..."
"... MSM even lacks this basic foundation of a rational thought and must be dismissed entirely. ..."
"... The freedom of speech and press, democracy and just simple decency are simply not allowed in these US under penalty of social marginalizing or even death as Assange and Manning are facing. The entire message of MSM propaganda false flag soldiers is fear. ..."
"... The US Elections themselves are regularity defrauded (read Greg Palast) for decades in thousands of well-documented different and additional ways to polls such as: ..."
"... No independent verification of the vote or serious reporting by international observers about violations, or independent exit polls, and many, many more ways every election is stolen as anybody who opens eyes can see. ..."
"... "The individual loses his substance by voluntarily bowing to an overpowering and distant oligarchy, while simultaneously "participating" in sham democracy." ..."
"... Remember this is a person that actually publicly admits he took 6 months off (from what?) to campaign for Mr Changey Hopey, The drone Bombing Nobel Peace Prize winner, so it's not like he could ever 5have any political insights worth listening to, now is it? ..."
"... Oddly, I looked to Russia for inspiration. RF believes in international law so greatly that she strives mightily at every turn to make it the way nations interact. And what we can see if we choose, is that this effort is paying off. The world is changing because of what Russia believes in. ..."
"... Although Clinton Won Massachusetts by 2%, Hand Counted Precincts in Massachusetts Favored Bernie Sanders by 17% ..."
"... Massachusetts, one of the participating states for the Super Tuesday election results, may need further scrutiny to allay concerns over election fraud using electronic voting machines. 68 out of the state's 351 jurisdictions used hand counted ballots and showed a much larger preference of 17% for Bernie Sanders than the rest of the jurisdictions tabulated by electronic voting machine vendors ES&S, Diebold and Dominion. Hillary Clinton was declared the winner of Massachusetts by 1.42 %. ..."
"... In the Dominican Republic's last elections (May 2016) voters forced the Electoral Office to get rid of the electronic count in favor of paper ballots, which were counted both, by scanner and by hand, one by one, in front of delegates from each party. This action avoided a credibility crisis and everything went smooth. ..."
Obama was asked about Trump's voter fraud assertions on Tuesday [..] He responded with a blistering
attack on the Republican candidate, noting that U.S. elections are run and monitored by local
officials, who may well be appointed by Republican governors of states, and saying that cases
of significant voter fraud were not to be found in American elections.
Obama said there was "no serious" person who would suggest it was possible to rig American
elections , adding, "I'd invite Mr. Trump to stop whining and go try to make his case to get votes."
That is curious. There are a lot of "non serious" persons in the Democratic Party who tell us
that Russia is trying to manipulate the U.S. elections. How is it going to that when it's not possible?
Is rigging the election only impossible when it is in favor of Hillary Clinton? This while rigging
the elections in favor of Donald Trump, by Russia or someone else, is entirely possible and even
"evident"?
Curious.
That said - I do believe that the U.S. election can be decided through manipulation. We have evidently
seen that in 2000 when Bush was "elected" by a fake "recount" and a Supreme Court decision.
The outcome of a U.S. presidential election can depend on very few votes in very few localities.
The various machines and processes used in U.S. elections can be influenced. It is no longer comprehensible
for the voters how the votes are counted and how the results created. *
The intense manipulation attempts by the Clinton camp, via the DNC against Sanders or by
creating a Russian boogeyman to propagandize against Trump, lets me believe that her side is well
capable of considering and implementing some vote count shenanigan. Neither are Trump or the Republicans
in general strangers to dirty methods and manipulations.
It is high time for the U.S. to return to paper-ballots and manual vote counting. The process
is easier, comprehensible, less prone to manipulations and reproducible. Experience in other countries
show that it is also nearly as fast, if not faster, than machine counting. There is simply no sensible
reason why machines should be used at all.
* (The German Constitutional Court prohibited the use of all voting machines in German
elections because for the general voters they institute irreproducible vote counting which leads
to a general loss of trust in the democratic process. The price to pay for using voting machines
is legitimacy.)
Posted by b on October 19, 2016 at 01:54 AM |
Permalink
I just found out that many states in the US use electronic voting systems made by Smartmatic which
is part of the SGO Group. Lord Mark Malloch-Brown is the chairman of SGO. This man is heavily
entangled with Soros. Hillary is Soros' candidate. You simply can't make this sh*t up
No. The price to pay is the ability to be alerted when vote rigging is going on. Bush won
in 2000 because his people controlled the processes that mattered in Florida.
There are the same allegations about 2004 in regards to Ohio.
There is more needed than just paper ballots. A proportional system, a limit on donations
and partisan/donor government posts, a stop to the corporate and lobbyist revolving doors.
And diverse political parties that present voters with a choice. At present the US seem
to be on their way to a one party system. Any democratic process will take place within this "private"
club including a very small part of the population.
But democracy never meant the power of the poor. So, no, for the 1 percent the system is
not rigged, they have a preferred globalization candidate, and a police state fall back should
the peasants rebell.
And in the end, this is the way things are run in Russia and China, with a lot less media circus.
Add - a limit to presidential power for one person. US citizens are reduced to vote in
a block to this power in the Senate and the House in continuous cycles. In the end that blocks
any political progress there might be. The US are the oldest modern democracy. It is like
being stuck in the age of steam engines.
Good one, wj2! Here's some more info on Lord Malloch-Brown and George Soros, courtesy of WikiPedia:
Malloch Brown has been closely associated with billionaire speculator George Soros. Working
for Refugees International, he was part of the Soros Advisory Committee on Bosnia in 1993–94,
formed by George Soros. He has since kept cordial relations with Soros, and rented an apartment
owned by Soros while working in New York on UN assignments. In May 2007, Soros' Quantum Fund
announced the appointment of Sir Mark as vice-president. In September 2007, The Observer reported
that he had resigned this position on becoming a government minister in the UK. Also in May
2007, Malloch Brown was named vice-chairman of Soros Fund Management and the Open Society Institute,
two other important Soros organisations.
DOOOOOOOOOM! "smartmatic" is obviously the right choice. it's a name we know and trust. Like
Deibold, Northrup, KBR, and Bellingcat. The integrity stands for itself. With a population
so gleefully ignorant and self centered as D'uhmerica, you should be lowering your expectations
significantly.
Are honest elections even legal in Texas and Louisiana? How about Massachusetts and New York?
They may be legal there but it would be dangerous to try to enforce that.
Just think of how many residents of graveyards will be voting their consciences (or lack thereof)
this year. Remember Chicago advise - vote early, vote often.
PB 13 "Concerning attacks from both sides, Trump is definitely more hysterical."
Concerted media campaign (scripted) against Trump portrays him as hysterical. Recall the
trumped-up "(Howard) Dean Scream".
Trump's hysterical rants (and the smear campaign) are played up in a organized attempt to knock
him out. People are getting kneecapped (Billy Bush) to demonstrate to others the wrath that may
be visited upon them for supporting the wrong candidate.
Take Bill O'Reilly for example, He told a subordinate female employee (documented court record)
that he wanted to "get a few wines in her and soap up her tits in the shower with a loofah and
falafel. There was a settlement and the story was under-reported. Forgotten and forgiven. In fact
Bill O stands as an arbiter of moral virtue.
Hillary is as nasty and hysterical as Trump or worse. She uses the F bomb regularly. Screams
at her subordinates and she annihilated several countries worth of women and children.
It is simply "not in the script" to malign Hillary with her own words and obnoxious behavior.
By the way, she is also a drunk.
We should all be aware of what occurred in the two Baby Bush elections as far as voter machine
tabulations and judicial fraud in his becoming president in both elections and the likely murder(s)
to cover the fraud up. Small plane crashes being almost untraceable.
https://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2008/12/26/bushs-it-guy-killed-in-plane-crash/
Who is leaking all this stuff so well-timed together? Might just be the FBI, finding itself
unable to prosecute officially, not only for fear of retribution, but also because the heap of
shit that would get uncovered could be enough for the rest of the world to declare war on the
US.
Daniel Ellsberg, in his book Secrets , recounts what he had learned during his government
service about the honesty of U.S. elections. As reported in
Counterpunch :
In Vietnam, as in Iraq, the U.S. government pushed hard to get an election to sanctify
its puppet regime. Ellsberg, who spent two years in Vietnam after his time in the Pentagon,
aided some of the key U.S. officials in this effort who sought an honest vote. But when U.S.
Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge heard their pitch, he replied, "You've got a gentleman in the
White House right now [Johnson] who has spent most of his life rigging elections. I've spent
most of my life rigging elections. I spent nine whole months rigging a Republican convention
to choose Ike as a candidate rather than Bob Taft." Lodge later ordered, "Get it across to
the press that they shouldn't apply higher standards here in Vietnam than they do in the U.S."
But Lodge's comments were downright uplifting compared with a meeting that Ellsberg attended
with former Vice President Richard Nixon, who was visiting Vietnam on a "fact-finding mission"
to help bolster his presidential aspirations. Former CIA operative Edward Lansdale told Nixon
that he and his colleagues wanted to help "make this the most honest election that's ever been
held in Vietnam." Nixon replied, "Oh, sure, honest, yes, honest, that's right … so long as
you win!" With the last words he did three things in quick succession: winked, drove his elbow
hard into Lansdale's arm, and slapped his own knee.
12,13,will you clowns keep your zippers closed? Your propaganda is unseemly, and we'll see just
whose victory will be huge Nov.8,won't we? Why does anyone put any credence in serial liar polls?
Why is policy discussion absent from this election cycle? Its all Trump bashing,wo one iota
of his policies being broadcast?
That is his vote rigging angle, that the MSM is corrupt and is politically assassinating him
daily,not the polls themselves being a major factor in the rigging accusations.
Obomba, the most un-criticised POTUS in American history, is a laughable pos concerned
about his terrible corrupt legacy of death war and division which Trump will reveal, once in.
And only commie morons would oppose that.
Election Fraud within the Outlaw US Empire has a long history. One very intrepid investigator
and expert on this is Brad Friedman who runs the Brad Blog, whose current lead item is about this
very topic. I suggest those interested in learning more take the time to investigate his
site and its many years of accumulated evidence proving Election Fraud a very big problem,
http://bradblog.com/
The Vote 'No Confidence' movement is growing. It's being actively discussed on FB and ZH now.
A bloviating bunko artist vers a grifting crypto neocon is not a 'choice', it's a suicide squad
lootfest it's taking America down.
In Humboldt County California we still use paper ballots. Our polling place also has one electronic
voting machine sitting in a corner for voters who can't use the paper ballots. I have never seen
it being used. There was a transparency program that I think they still do where all ballots were
scanned and the images made available online for the public to double check results. I'm no wiz
with machine vision but I think I could knock together enough code to do my own recount.
I'm not paying much attention but doesn't Trump say the election is rigged ? Obama's setting
up a straw mam by changing the story to election fraud. There may well be fraud in the voting
process but we are unlikely to ever know how much. But as to the election being rigged , that's
so plainly obvious it's painful.
And Germany doesn't allow electronic voting machines. Gotta be a clue there somewhere.
There is ample evidence of election fraud, vote fraud, and various types of 'rigging' or 'organising'
in the US it is just too long to go into in a short post. (See for ex. Adjuvant @ 6, john
@ 18)
Ideally, one would have to divide it into different types. It is also traditional, which some
forget, I only know about that from 'realistic' novels, I recently read Dos Passos' Manhattan
Transfer, and was amazed how little things change (despite horse-drawn carriages, rouge, spitoons,
cigars, sauerkraut, etc.) - see karlof1 @ 25.
Poll Pro-HRC results are not trustworthy. They aren't necessarily outright fabricated (is
easy to do and very hard to detect / prosecute), nor even fraudulently carried out, but 'arranged'
to give the desired result, which might even, in some cases, be perfectly unconscious, just following
SOP. (I could outline 10 major problems / procedures that twist the results.)
Then, the media take it up, and cherry-pick the results, pro HRC. That includes internet
sites like real clear politics, which I noticed recently is biased (paid?) in favor of
HRC.
It is amazing to me, yet very few ppl actually dig into the available info about the polls.
(Maybe 300 ppl in the world?) HRC needs these fakelorum poll results because they will 'rig' the
election as best as they can, they need to point back to them: "see we were winning all the time
Trump deplorables yelling insults who cares" - Pathetic. Also, of course, controlling the polls
while not the same as 'riggin' the election is part of the same MO. (See Podesta e-mails from
Wikileaks.)
This is also the reason for the mad accusations of Putin interference in US elections - if
somebody is doing illegit moves it is Trump's supporter Putin and so the 'bad stuff' is 'foreign
take-over' and not 'us', and btw NOT the Republicans, or Trump circle, which is very telling.
I didn't see the O Keefe, Project Veritas, vids mentioned. Here the first one. There is a second
one up and more coming.
I think things could get pretty ugly on Nov 9 if Trump wins because i don't see Hillary going
quietly into the night and the dems have seeded "putin is rigging" the election idea to contest
the results. Plus the establishment that wants Hillary controls the media and the executive office.
Trump's delegitimizing the election before it takes place is definitely color revolution
stuff - the carrot revolution?
It is an interesting experiment if you can make people vote for a candidate they don't like
by it being the only way to prevent a candidate they dislike even more. You just showed you aren't
able to.
"Hillary Clinton now says her "number one priority" in Syria is the removal of Bashar al-Assad,
putting us on the path of war with Syria and Russia next year.
Any "no-fly zone" over Syria will certainly be followed by the shooting down of both Russian
and U.S. jets, in an unpredictable escalation that could easily spread
Russia will not back down if we start shooting down its aircraft. Is Hillary willing to risk
nuclear war with Russia in order to protect al-Qaeda in Syria?
96% of disclosed campaign contributions from journalists went to the Clinton campaign.
From the MSM: TIME.
Note the sums are shards of chewed peanuts and their shells. MSM are bought, controlled
and are put in a lowly position, and pamper to power, any.… They will go where the money is but
it takes them a long time to figure out who what where why etc. and what they are supposed to
do. They cannot be outed as completely controlled, so have to do some 'moves' to retain credibility,
and their clients/controllers understand that. Encouraging a corrupt 4th Estate has its major
downsides.
Rigged. Right. Let me tell you about rigged. The US system is rigged in a far larger sense
than any Americans realize. It's rigged to blow off the Constitution.
If you want to know how badly rigged, ask any voter when they leave the voting venue: "What
is the name of the elector you just voted for?" You'll get either: 1) a dumb stare; 2) a laugh,
or 3) a "WTF is an elector?"
Under the Constitution, Americans vote for electors. They do not vote for presidents, and there's
a reason for that. It's called "mass stupidity."
The Fondling Fathers were smart enough to know that the people are too stupid to choose their
own leader. So the idea of the Electoral College was that every four years communities vote
for a local person who could be trusted to go to Washington and become part of the committee that
chooses a president and vice-president.
There is not "supposed" to be any campaign, candidates, or polls. The process is "supposed"
to be more akin to the Holy See choosing a pope. The electors were to meet in Washington, debate
the possibilities, come up with short list, go to the top person on the list and ask if they would
be willing to be president (or vice-president, as the case may be), and if they agreed, the deal
was done. If not, go to the second person. Pretty much how the CEO of a large corporation
is chosen.
Having the people of a community vote for the local person who would be the most trustworthy
to deliberate on who should be president is a reasonable objective. I mean, essentially the question
for the voter would be reduced to: "What person in our community would be least likely to be bought
off?" But having a gang-bang of 60 million voting Americans who don't really know shit about the
morons they are voting into office . . . that, on its face, is a sign of mass self-deception and
insanity. It is mass stupidity perpetuating itself.
The circus that the US presidential election has turned into – including the grotesque primaries
– just goes to show how fucking stupid Americans are. The system is an embarrassment to the entire
country. And it is an act of flipping-off the Fondling Fathers and their better judgment every
four years. But worst of all, the present system is virtually certain to eventually produce the
most powerful person in the world who is a complete moron, and who will precipitate a global catastrophe
– economic, or military, or both.
And demand hand counted paper ballots that cannot be rigged by "Russian hackers". It's
called simple score because it is almost the same as other well-known forms of score (and "range")
voting, except it's optimized for hand counted paper ballots (i.e. no machines).
Just got my mail-in ballots from the postman. Voting against all Democrats except, for POTUS.
Take a few days and vote either Jill Stein or Donald Trump.
Need to comb through the propositions carefully. Against big business and self serving
liberals.. BTW, I'm a Californian from the Central Valley. Oh! How I wish there is a proposition.
Should Hussein Obomo II charge for crimes against humanity?
"For any minimally conscious American citizen, it is absolutely evident that Donald Trump
is not only facing the mammoth Clinton political machine, but, also the combined forces of the
viciously dishonest Mainstream Media."
-Boyd D. Cathey, "The Tape, the Conspiracy, and the Death of the Old Politics", Unz Review
"When was the last time the media threw 100% of its support behind one party's presidential
candidate? What does that say about the media?"
Do you feel comfortable with the idea that a handful of TV and print-news executives are
inserting themselves into the process and choosing our leaders for us?"
If Jill Stein needs 5% of the vote in order to be considered a legitimate candidate (or to bring
the Green party up to legitimate third-party status for the 2020 election), then you can rest
assured that no matter how many votes she actually gets, her percentage will never be above 4.99%.
Just like when Obama swept into office in 2008, the powers-that-be made sure the Democrats never
had a filibuster-proof majority. Give 'em just enough to believe that the system works, but never
enough to create a situation where the lack of change can't be explained away by "gridlock". Brilliant
in its malevolence, really.
It looks like ALL of the Neocon war criminals and architects of the mass slaughters in Iraq
(Libya, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, etc) are standing with Hillary Clinton:
Here's a partial list of neocon war criminals supporting Miss Neocon: Paul Wolfowitz (aka,
the Prince of Darkness), Eliot Cohen, Richard Perle, David Wurmser, Robert Kagan, Max Boot, Bill
Kristol, Dov Zakheim, Douglas Feith, Michael Ledeen, Marc Grossman, David Frum, Michael Chertoff,
John Podhoretz, Elliot Abrams, Alan Dershowitz, etc
All neocons stand with the CrookedC*nt because there hasn't been nearly enough pointless
war, slaughter, dismemberment, death or trauma, it needs to go on FOREVER.
To be blunt. It is not only MSM who are prostitutes of oligarchic ruling elite but all or
most even so called left-leaning or independent media are all under guise of phony "opposition"
or diversity of opinion where there is none.
Actually MOA is one of few, more or less independent, aligning itself with any sane ideology,
a welcome island of order in the ocean of media cacophony and I often disagreed with MOA but I
appreciate its logical consistency and integrity, hard facts based journalism,no matter from what
moral stand MOA writings are coming from. MSM even lacks this basic foundation of a rational
thought and must be dismissed entirely.
But there is much, much more rigging going on, on massive, even global scale. The fraud is
so massive and so visible that blinds people from the truth about it. From the truth of how massively
they are being controlled in their opinions and thoughts.
The freedom of speech and press, democracy and just simple decency are simply not allowed
in these US under penalty of social marginalizing or even death as Assange and Manning are facing.
The entire message of MSM propaganda false flag soldiers is fear.
It may seem shocking for people under spell of overwhelming propaganda, but this government
run by Global oligarchs is dangerous to our physical and mental health and must be eradicated
as a matter of sanitary emergency.
Let's sweep all those political excretions into the sewage pipes where they belong. But first
we have to recognize the scale of their influence and their horrifying daily routine subversion
of social order, gross malfeasance or even horrendous crimes also war crimes covered up by MSM.
Only after we get rid of this abhorrent, brutal regime, cut the chains of enslavement we can
have decent democracy or voting, not before.
John Stuart Mill - "Government shapes our character, values, and intellect. It can affect
us positively or negatively. When political institutions are ill constructed, "the effect is
felt in a thousand ways in lowering the morality and deadening the intelligence and activity
of the people"
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, "I had come to see that everything was radically connected
with politics, and that however one proceeded, no people would be other than the nature of
its government.
And here we are, believing the shit those mofos and feeding us about freedom and democracy
citing bought and sold lies as "scientific research" concocted for one reason alone, to fuck us
up , exploit and discard when not needed.
Here is, in a small part, about how they do it, starting from phony polls that suppose to sway
you one way or another into following supposed projected winner anointed by the establishment.
Polls are routinely skewed, even MSM pundits say use polls they can trust i.e. which give them
results their bosses seek.
Now over hundred top newspapers and media outlets endorsed Hillary so you can safely remove
them from your list of polls you can rely on.
Anyway most polls are rigged even more than elections themselves, mostly by skewing the content
of a poling sample like in the above example. If you poll Dems about Reps that exactly you get
what you seek. But they are more insidious like doubling or tripling polling sample and then pick
an choose what answers they like, or focus sample on the area you know there is overall support
for your thesis or assertion of candidate regardless of official affiliation, and many more down
to raw rigging by fixing numbers or adjustments.
The US Elections themselves are regularity defrauded (read Greg Palast) for decades in
thousands of well-documented different and additional ways to polls such as:
By limiting selection of possible candidates and their access to statewide or national ballot
box via rigged undemocratic caucuses and primaries and other unreasonable requirements, goal-seeking
ad-hoc rules. by eliminating and/or confusing voters about voting at proper physical location
often changed in last moments, forcing into never counted provisional vote by purposely hiding
registered lists, purging made up "felons" from voter lists, requiring expensive or unavailable
or costly to obtain due to extensive travel, identifying documents, threatening citizen (of color)
with deportation, accusing them of voter fraud [baseless challenging that automatically pushes
voter into provisional vote], or strait offering meaningless provisional ballots instead of proper
ballot for people who can't read (English) well, eliminating students and military vote when needed
on phony registration issues, signature, pictures, purposefully misspelled names, mostly non-British
names etc., reducing number of polling places where majority votes for "rouge" candidate, forcing
people to stand in line for hours or preventing people from voting al together.
Selecting remote polling locations with obstructed public access by car or transit, paid parking,
exposed to weather elements, cold, wind and rain in November.
Hacking databases before and after vote, switching votes, adding votes for absent voters, and
switching party affiliations and vote at polling places as well up in the data collating chain,
county, state, filing in court last minute frivolous law suits aimed to block unwanted candidates
or challenging readiness of the polling places in certain neighborhoods deemed politically uncertain,
outrageous voting ON a WORKING DAY (everywhere else voting is on Sunday or a day free of work)
skewing that way votes toward older retired people.
Massive lying propaganda of whom we vote for, a fraudulent ballot supposedly voting for "candidates"
but in fact voting on unnamed electors, party apparatchiks instead, violating basic democratic
principle of transparency of candidates on the ballot and secrecy of a voter, outrageous electorate
college rules design to directly suppress democracy. Requirement of approval of the electoral
vote by congress is an outrageous thing illegal in quasi-democratic western countries due to division
of powers.
Outrageous, voting day propaganda to discourage voting by phony polling and predictions while
everywhere else there is campaigning ban, silence for two to three days before Election Day.
No independent verification of the vote or serious reporting by international observers
about violations, or independent exit polls, and many, many more ways every election is stolen
as anybody who opens eyes can see.
All the above fraud prepared by close group of election criminals on political party payroll,
months/years before election date often without any contribution from ordinary polling workers
who believe that nothing is rigged.
If somebody thinks that they would restrain themselves this time, think again. The regime,
in a form of mostly unsuspecting county registrars are tools of the establishment and will do
everything, everything they can and they can a lot, to defraud those elections and push an establishment
candidate down to our throats, without a thought crossing their comatose minds. "Just doing their
jobs like little Eichmanns of NAZI regime".
One way or another your vote will be stolen or manipulated up and down the ticket at will
and your participation would mean one thing legitimizing this abhorrent regime.
We must reject those rigged elections and demand that establishment must go, all of them GOP,
DNC and that including Hillary before any truly democratic electoral process worth participating
may commence.
"The individual loses his substance by voluntarily bowing to an overpowering and distant
oligarchy, while simultaneously "participating" in sham democracy."
C. Wright Mills,"The Power Elite" (1956)
Any sane person must thus conclude that an act of voting in the current helplessly tainted
and rigged political system is nothing but morally corrupting tool that divides us, conflicts
us, extorts from us an approval for the meaningless political puppets of the calcified, repugnant
oligarchic US regime, in a surrealistic act of utter futility aimed just to break us down,
to break our sense of human dignity, our individual will and self-determination since no true
choice is ever being offered to us and never will.
Idea of political/electoral boycott, unplugging from the system that corrupts us and ALTERNATIVE
POLITICAL PROCESS designed, developed and implemented for benefit of 99% of population is the
only viable idea to express our political views that are absent from official regime candidates'
agendas and from the rigged ballots. Let's not be afraid, it was already successfully done
in the past. It works." Without courage there is only slavery.
Remember this is a person that actually publicly admits he took 6 months off (from what?)
to campaign for Mr Changey Hopey, The drone Bombing Nobel Peace Prize winner, so it's not like
he could ever 5have any political insights worth listening to, now is it?
Grow up.
I took the time off (I'm a software engineer) after the primaries (having supported neither
BO or HRC) because that's who get got. We were coming off 8 years of BushCo which was, in summary...
a horror. The republicans were 100% unrepentant, and McCain was a far louder and steadfast supporter
of Iraq then Hillary... wasn't even close. McCain burried his Abramhoff investigation, sealed
their findings for 50 years. And his running mate was not just bereft of any policy expertise,
she was a loudmouth loon... even FOX canceled her post election show.
I was well aware of BO's questions/limitations. He didn't put his time in as a Senator and
sponsored no meaningful legislation. He played it safe. He had no real policy track record. And
as a Senator he quietly slipped away and hob-nobbed with Bush several times (no other Dem Senator
at the time did this that I was aware). So yeah, Obama was on open question.
I was going to pass on this election, but I've read a lot here about it and started to consider
what as a US voter I might do.
Oddly, I looked to Russia for inspiration. RF believes in international law so greatly
that she strives mightily at every turn to make it the way nations interact. And what we can see
if we choose, is that this effort is paying off. The world is changing because of what Russia
believes in.
I believe in voting. I believe in multiple parties. I believe the game is totally rigged but
sometimes you can win, except that you have to play for this to happen. I believe that you have
to be the thing you want.
I believe in a Green Party and I admire the sanity that comes from Dr. Jill Stein every time
I encounter her position. This is the world I believe in. This is the world I'll vote for and
support, with all tools that comes to hand, forever.
~~
I don't believe in the view that aspiring for betterment is foolish or naive, or the view that
current status cannot change or be changed. Such views fail to acknowledge the physical reality
of a new universe manifesting in each moment, always different in some way from that of the previous
moment. Such views are lost, bewildered, behind the curve, forever.
Term limits are useless. There could never be a Cynthia McKinney or a Dennis Kucinich -- Ever!
Term limited representatives would by definition be track record-free representatives. If you
really would like positive change, you simply need to get strategic hedge simple score voting:
SHSV
Although Clinton Won Massachusetts by 2%, Hand Counted Precincts in Massachusetts Favored
Bernie Sanders by 17%
Mar 06 2016
J.T. Waldron
Massachusetts, one of the participating states for the Super Tuesday election results,
may need further scrutiny to allay concerns over election fraud using electronic voting machines.
68 out of the state's 351 jurisdictions used hand counted ballots and showed a much larger preference
of 17% for Bernie Sanders than the rest of the jurisdictions tabulated by electronic voting machine
vendors ES&S, Diebold and Dominion. Hillary Clinton was declared the winner of Massachusetts by
1.42 %.
In the Dominican Republic's last elections (May 2016) voters forced the Electoral Office to
get rid of the electronic count in favor of paper ballots, which were counted both, by scanner
and by hand, one by one, in front of delegates from each party. This action avoided a credibility
crisis and everything went smooth.
"... I think that Trump is referring to Clinton's use of her private, insecure server for confidential e-mails of which she ordered 30,000 to be deleted and had Obama intervene to stop an FBI investigation. Honest and transparent, I think not. ..."
"... In "normal" circumstances she would have been disqualified as a candidate and possibly be facing criminal proceedings. Let's face it, neither candidate is at all suitable as leader of the western world. ..."
"... The current bedrocks of the capitalist system are at breaking point. Parliamentary democracy and the nation state are crumbling under various pressures. They may be saves but I think we are entering the period when they will be replaced. I have no idea what with though. ..."
"... Remember when U.S. NGOs were "respected" bodies around the world. Now we know they were spies and subverters, now banned from all self respecting countries around the world. ..."
"... Remember how the U.S. went into Iraq for De4mocracy. Now we know it was oil and deliberate mayhem. ..."
"... Ditto Afghanistan, Libya, and their failed attempt to lay waste Syria. ..."
"... Ukraine is just a stand alone shithole created by the U.S., lied about by them, down to the downing of MH17 ..."
"... If you want lies and deceit, look at the U.S ..."
"... Not to be too critical, but most of what you mentioned was perpetrated under a single presidential administration. Cheney was dividing Iraqi oilfields way before the "invasion". Bush was just a puppet. You know, the kind of guy you would like to have a beer with. Just a good ole'boy. ..."
"... Is Hillary trying to stir up her own counter revolution in case she loses too? It seems like a fatally flawed attempt. People barely have the energy to turn out to vote for her, let alone take up arms for her. ..."
"... The DNC rigged the vote to nominate Clinton over Sanders. Why wouldn't they employ the same tricks in the election itself? ..."
"... Any individual with a shred of decency should be extremely disturbed by the actions of Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the DNC. They privately discussed methods of discrediting Sanders based SOLELY on his religious affiliation. ..."
"... Despite having a tonne of shit thrown at him and the msm and big money donors squarely in Clinton's corner, Trump's still standing. Polls released today: LA Times +2 Trump; NBC +6 Clinton; Rasmussen +1 Clinton ..."
The fight over vote rigging in 2016 is a proxy war for a much deeper crisis: the legitimacy of
American democracy
Nearly 90% of Trump supporters agreed with a Rand Corporation survey statement that "people like
me don't have any say about what the government does." The irony here is that Trump voters are historically
some of the most enfranchised, with some of his strongest support coming from white protestant men.
A study done during the primaries also found that Trump backers make an average of $72,000 per year,
compared with a $61,000 average among likely Clinton voters.
... ... ...
Corporate citizens – as defined by Citizens United – now have an easier time getting a hold of
their elected representative than just about any other American. In other words, money talks in Washington,
and Super Pacs have spend just under $795m this election cycle. Because lobbying money courses through
every level of politics, the most successful candidates are the best at making friends in the Fortune
500.
Meanwhile, just
six
in 10 Americans are confident their votes will be accurately cast and counted. And unlike in
systems based on proportional representation, our winner-take-all electoral model creates some of
the highest barriers to entry for political outsiders of any democracy on earth.
Americans' distrust of politics is about more than just elections, though. Congressional approval
ratings have declined steadily
since
2009 , and now sit at just 20% – a high in the last few years. Unions – which used to cudgel
Democrats into representing working people's interests – are at their weakest point in decades, and
lack the sway they once held at the highest levels of government.
Declines in organized labor have been paired with the disappearance of steady and well-paid work,
either succumbed to automation or shipped overseas by free trade agreements. A jobless recovery from
the financial crisis has left many adrift in the economy, while executives from the firms that drove
it got golden parachutes courtesy of the Obama administration and the Federal Reserve.
On the table now are to very different responses to these crises. Using an apocryphal quote from
Frederich Engels, Rosa Luxemburg once
wrote
: "Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into
barbarism."
SmartestRs 2d ago
I think that Trump is referring to Clinton's use of her private, insecure server for confidential
e-mails of which she ordered 30,000 to be deleted and had Obama intervene to stop an FBI investigation.
Honest and transparent, I think not.
In "normal" circumstances she would have been disqualified
as a candidate and possibly be facing criminal proceedings. Let's face it, neither candidate is
at all suitable as leader of the western world.
furiouspurpose
When Mrsfuriouspurpose got a gig as a poll clerk on the EU referendum she offered everyone
who came through the door a pencil to write their cross.
Many brought their own pens and a fair few explained that they were concerned that pencil could
be rubbed out and wanted to make sure – just in case.
It ain't only the yanks who are getting suspicious about how honest our democracy has become.
davidc929 -> furiouspurpose
The current bedrocks of the capitalist system are at breaking point. Parliamentary democracy
and the nation state are crumbling under various pressures. They may be saves but I think we are
entering the period when they will be replaced. I have no idea what with though.
Kholrabi
Remember when U.S. NGOs were "respected" bodies around the world.
Now we know they were spies and subverters, now banned from all self respecting countries around
the world.
Remember how the U.S. went into Iraq for De4mocracy.
Now we know it was oil and deliberate mayhem.
Ditto Afghanistan, Libya, and their failed attempt to lay waste Syria.
Ukraine is just a stand alone shithole created by the U.S., lied about by them, down to the
downing of MH17.
If you want lies and deceit, look at the U.S.
Trump is right in his accusations. Idle chatter is just that, wasteful of time and distracting
idle chatter,
Thomas Hosking -> Kholrabi
Not to be too critical, but most of what you mentioned was perpetrated under a single presidential
administration. Cheney was dividing Iraqi oilfields way before the "invasion". Bush was just a
puppet. You know, the kind of guy you would like to have a beer with. Just a good ole'boy.
DaanSaaf -> Kholrabi
Ukraine is just a stand alone shithole created by the U.S.,
tbf, that was as much the handiwork of the EU as it ever was the US
leadale
For better or for worse, the 2016 presidential campaign was all about him.
Not about his policies. Not about calm analysis of what was wrong and how it could be fixed.
It was always about him. And now, the nation's attention is still focused on him and his peccadillos…rather
than Ms Clinton and her scams, corruptions, and Deep State flimflams.
'Remember, it's a rigged system. It's a rigged election,' said the candidate over the weekend.
Is the election really rigged? Probably not in the way Mr Trump intends listeners to believe.
But the 'system' is so rigged that the election results hardly matter.
A real conservative would shift the debate away from fanny pinching and other ungentlemanly comportment
to how it is rigged. Americans want to know. How come the economy no longer grows as it used to?
How come most Americans are poorer today than they were in 1999? How come we no longer win our
wars?
He would explain to listeners that much of the rigging took place while Hillary and Bill Clinton
were collecting more than $150 million in speaking fees, telling us how to improve the world!
Then, he would help listeners put two and two together - explaining how the fake dollar corrupted
the nation's economy…and its politics, too.
And he would offer real solutions.
As it is, nobody seems to care. Not the stock market. Not the bond market. Not commentators. Not
Hillary. Not Donald. Nobody.
Bill Bonnar - Daily reckoning
Ken Weller -> leadale
Actually, he did address those issues quite frequently, including during the debate. It's the
media that is trying to dictate what the important issues are.
Ken Weller
I recall that in previous elections, notably the 2004 presidential, progressive voices rightly
pointed to possible election rigging. I even remember DNC chair Howard Dean interviewing Bev Harris
of blackboxvoting.org about how this could be achieved. Now that Trump's people are concerned
about the issue, it's suddenly crazy.
Meanwhile, Clinton's camp has put forth there own conspiracy
theory that Russia may somehow rig it for Trump, never mind that that the voting machines are
disconnected from the internet and thus hackers.
Brett Hankinson -> Ken Weller
Is Hillary trying to stir up her own counter revolution in case she loses too? It seems like
a fatally flawed attempt. People barely have the energy to turn out to vote for her, let alone
take up arms for her.
Trump is far more effective and newsworthy because he's inciting violence during the US election
and it actually seems plausible that violence could result. He doesn't even need to win the popular
vote to wreck the place.
Whodeaux Brett Hankinson
It's win/win for Trump and his ilk. Or rather, if he wins then obviously he wins. If he loses
he can just say he won, his fanbois will take over bird sanctuaries left and right, and when FBI
and National Guard inevitably kill some of them he can screech about how Real Mericans® are being
picked on by those nasty Globalist Bankers and the Entitlement Class, those two terms being the
current dog whistles for what the John Birchers used to call Jews and Blacks.
Trump doesn't seem to realize actual people are going to be actually dead before this is all
over. One cannot untoast bread.
MountainMan23
The DNC rigged the vote to nominate Clinton over Sanders. Why wouldn't they employ the
same tricks in the election itself?
Our voting machines & tabulators are insecure - that's a known fact.
So the concern among all voters (not just Trump supporters) is real & justified.
HiramsMaxim MountainMan23
If I were a Sanders supporter I would be furious.
Hell, I'm not a Sanders supporter, and I am still furious. What matters an individual's vote,
if the outcome has already been determined by The Powers That Be?
Todd Owens HiramsMaxim
Any individual with a shred of decency should be extremely disturbed by the actions of
Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the DNC. They privately discussed methods of discrediting Sanders
based SOLELY on his religious affiliation.
"It might may (sic) no difference, but for KY and WVA can we get someone to ask his belief.
Does he believe in a God. He had skated on saying he has a Jewish heritage. I think I read he
is an atheist. This could make several points difference with my peeps. My Southern Baptist peeps
would draw a big difference between a Jew and an atheist," Bradley Marhsall, former CFO of the
DNC.
This is identity politics at its absolute worst.
HiramsMaxim ButtChocolate
Its a little more sophisticated than that.
In the Podesta email dumps, there is plenty of evidence of particular members of the Press
actively colluding with the Clinton campaign, and even submitting articles for review by the campaign
before publishing.
So, he is taking what are, at the very least, journalistic standards lapses, and spins it into
something larger. He takes a little fear, and makes a big story out of it. And, because these
media organisations cannot admit what they are doing, or deny the generally accepted verity of
the Wikileaks dumps, he gets a free shot.
Remember, to all the good progressives out there, Trump is not trying to appeal to you, convince
you, or make you like him. In fact, the more you hate him, the more "ideologically pure" he looks
to his supporters.
Example: Look at The Guardian reporting of the firebombing at the Republican office here in
NC. Any reasonable person would agree that firebombing is wrong. But, TG could not even use that
word. The article they published bent over backwards to minimise the action, and blame it on Trump.
Sure, that plays well to The Guardian readership. But, it just confirms (well, at least it
appears to confirm) the loud cries of media bias that Trump and his supporters rail against. The
irony is that when the same types of things happen domestically, by a Press that thinks it is
"helping" their preferred candidate, it only confirms the worst suspicions of the opposition.
And, it only taked one or two examples to give Trump room to condemn all media.
Trump has one overwhelming skill on display here. He is able to bait the media, and they cannot
resist rising to that bait. He is, for lack of a better term, a World Class Troll.
Harryy
"as his support slips"
Despite having a tonne of shit thrown at him and the msm and big money donors squarely
in Clinton's corner, Trump's still standing. Polls released today: LA Times +2 Trump; NBC +6 Clinton;
Rasmussen +1 Clinton
HiramsMaxim Harryy
It is facinating that the last two weeks of ugliness on both sides has had just about zero
effect on people.
Its as if both sides have already made up their minds, and refuse to pay attention to the Media.
"... The Official Monster Raving Loony Party is a registered political party established in the United Kingdom in 1983 by the musician David Sutch, better known as "Screaming Lord Sutch, 3rd Earl of Harrow" or simply "Screaming Lord Sutch". It is notable for its deliberately bizarre policies and it effectively exists to satirise British politics, and to offer itself as an poignant alternative for protest voters, especially in constituencies where the party holding the seat is unlikely to lose it and everyone else's vote would be quietly wasted. ..."
I watched that yesterday. Funny and a complete take down of Jill Stein. How come a British comedian
knows more about our issues than one of our candidates for the White House? Oh wait - even Jill
Stein knows more than Donald Trump. If it were not for that Constitutional matter, I'd say Oliver
for President.
Fred C. Dobbs -> pgl... , -1
All politics is 'wacky',
the third-party kind is
the wackiest of all.
Maybe the UK does it best.
The Official Monster Raving Loony Party is a registered political party established in
the United Kingdom in 1983 by the musician David Sutch, better known as "Screaming Lord Sutch,
3rd Earl of Harrow" or simply "Screaming Lord Sutch". It is notable for its deliberately bizarre
policies and it effectively exists to satirise British politics, and to offer itself as an poignant
alternative for protest voters, especially in constituencies where the party holding the seat
is unlikely to lose it and everyone else's vote would be quietly wasted.
(Wikipedia)
"... a simple fact (that escapes many participants of this forum, connected to TBTF) the that Hillary is an unrepentant neocon, a warmonger that might well bring another war, possibly even WWIII. ..."
"... One of the systemic dangers of psychopathic females in high political positions is that remaining as reckless as they are, they try to outdo men in hawkishness. ..."
"... Enthusiasm of people in this forum for Hillary is mainly enthusiasm for the ability of TBTF to rip people another four years. ..."
"... The level of passive social protest against neoliberal elite (aka "populism" in neoliberal media terms) scared the hell of Washington establishment. Look at neoliberal shills like Summers, who is now ready to abandon a large part of his Washington consensus dogma in order for neoliberalism to survive. ..."
"... And while open revolt in national security state has no chances, Trump with all his warts is a very dangerous development for "status quo" supporters, that might not go away after the elections. ..."
Trump is winning with people in their 50s and they have a higher chance of voting than millennials
do. That plus voter suppression may hand this to Trump yet. There was an LA Times poll this month
that showed a small Trump lead. An outlier, sure, but the same poll was right about Obama in 2012
when other polls were wrong. Just saying
likbez -> Adamski... , -1
> "Trump is winning with people in their 50s and they have a higher chance of voting than millennials
do."
Yes. Thank you for making this point.
Also people over 50 have more chances to understand and reject all the neoliberal bullshit
MSM are pouring on Americans.
As well as a simple fact (that escapes many participants of this forum, connected to TBTF)
the that Hillary is an unrepentant neocon, a warmonger that might well bring another war, possibly
even WWIII.
One of the systemic dangers of psychopathic females in high political positions is that
remaining as reckless as they are, they try to outdo men in hawkishness.
Enthusiasm of people in this forum for Hillary is mainly enthusiasm for the ability of
TBTF to rip people another four years.
Not that Trump is better, but on warmongering side he is the lesser evil, for sure.
The level of passive social protest against neoliberal elite (aka "populism" in neoliberal
media terms) scared the hell of Washington establishment. Look at neoliberal shills like Summers,
who is now ready to abandon a large part of his Washington consensus dogma in order for neoliberalism
to survive.
And while open revolt in national security state has no chances, Trump with all his warts
is a very dangerous development for "status quo" supporters, that might not go away after the
elections.
That's why they supposedly pump Hillary with drugs each debate :-).
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump added one more accusation against Democratic rival
Hillary Clinton: "inappropriately" getting the debate questions.
Trump's tweet with the latest allegation comes the day after the final presidential debate in
which he refused to commit to the outcome of the Nov. 8 election.
Why didn't Hillary Clinton announce that she was inappropriately given the debate questions -
she secretly used them! Crooked Hillary.
- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 20, 2016
Less than two hours after sending the tweet, the real estate mogul told a rally in Ohio that he
would accept the results of the election - if he wins.
"I would like to promise and pledge . . . that I will totally accept the results of this great
and historic presidential election if I win."
Trump later said in the rally that he would accept a clear result but reserves the right to contest
a questionable outcome.
Trump's comments about the election results during the debate were blasted by politicians on both
sides of the aisle, including Governor Charlie Baker and Libertarian vice presidential candidate
Bill Weld, a former governor of Massachusetts. Weld called the debate remarks "the death knell for
[Trump's] candidacy."
Senator John McCain of Arizona, a top Republican who withdrew his support of Trump earlier this
month, said he conceded defeat "without reluctance" in 2008 when then-Senator Barack Obama won the
presidential election. McCain said the loser has always congratulated the winner, calling the person
"my president."
"That's not just the Republican way or the Democratic way. It's the American way. This election
must not be any different," McCain said in a statement.
Trump and his supporters have been making unsubstantiated claims that the election is rigged,
putting officials on the defense weeks before most voters head to the polls. Civil rights activists
have called some of the accusations a thinly veiled racist attack.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump added one more accusation against Democratic rival
Hillary Clinton: "inappropriately" getting the debate questions.
Trump's tweet with the latest allegation comes the day after the final presidential debate
in which he refused to commit to the outcome of the Nov. 8 election.
Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump
Why didn't Hillary Clinton announce that she was inappropriately given the debate questions
- she secretly used them! Crooked Hillary.
10:55 AM - 20 Oct 2016
Less than two hours after sending the tweet, the real estate mogul told a rally in Ohio that
he would accept the results of the election - if he wins.
"I would like to promise and pledge ... that I will totally accept the results of this great
and historic presidential election if I win."
Fred C. Dobbs said in reply to Fred C. Dobbs...
(But he didn't want the job anyway.)
President? It would be a demotion, says
Donald Trump Jr http://dailym.ai/2eJLQ71
via @MailOnline - Oct 20
Donald Trump Jr said last night moving into the White House would be a 'step down' for his
father.
Trump Jr was being interviewed on Fox News after the third presidential debate in Las Vegas
and was asked how he thought the Republican candidate had performed during the final presidential
debate. ...
"... As I have tirelessly explained, the U.S. economy is not just neoliberal (the code word for
maximizing private gain by any means available, including theft, fraud, embezzlement, political fixing,
price-fixing, and so on)--it is neofeudal , meaning that it is structurally an updated version of Medieval
feudalism in which a top layer of financial-political nobility owns the engines of wealth and governs
the marginalized debt-serfs who toil to pay student loans, auto loans, credit cards, mortgages and taxes--all
of which benefit the financiers and political grifters. ..."
"... The media is in a self-referential frenzy to convince us the decision of the century is between
unrivaled political grifter Hillary Clinton and financier-cowboy Donald Trump. Both belong to the privileged
ruling Elite: both have access to cheap credit, insider information ( information asymmetry ) and political
influence. ..."
"... If you exit the Pentagon, CIA, NSA, etc. at a cushy managerial rank with a fat pension and
lifetime benefits and are hired at a fat salary the next day by a private "defense" contractor--the
famous revolving door between a bloated state and a bloated defense industry--the system works great.
..."
Brimming with hubris and self-importance, the ruling Elite and mainstream media cannot believe
they have lost the consent of the governed.
Every ruling Elite needs the consent of the governed: even autocracies, dictatorships and corporatocracies
ultimately rule with the consent, however grudging, of the governed.
The American ruling Elite has lost the consent of the governed. This reality is being masked by
the mainstream media, mouthpiece of the ruling class, which is ceaselessly promoting two false narratives:
The "great divide" in American politics is between left and right, Democrat/Republican
The ruling Elite has delivered "prosperity" not just to the privileged few but to the unprivileged
many they govern.
Both of these assertions are false. The Great Divide in America is between the ruling Elite and
the governed that the Elite has stripmined. The ruling Elite is privileged and protected, the governed
are unprivileged and unprotected. That's the divide that counts and the divide that is finally becoming
visible to the marginalized, unprivileged class of debt-serfs.
The "prosperity" of the 21st century has flowed solely to the ruling Elite and its army of technocrat
toadies, factotums, flunkies, apparatchiks and apologists. The Elite's army of technocrats and its
media apologists have engineered and promoted an endless spew of ginned-up phony statistics (the
super-low unemployment rate, etc.) to create the illusion of "growth" and "prosperity" that benefit
everyone rather than just the top 5%. The media is 100% committed to promoting these two false narratives
because the jig is up once the bottom 95% wake up to the reality that the ruling Elite has been stripmining
them for decades.
As I have tirelessly explained, the U.S. economy is not just neoliberal (the code word
for maximizing private gain by any means available, including theft, fraud, embezzlement, political
fixing, price-fixing, and so on)--it is neofeudal , meaning that it is structurally an updated
version of Medieval feudalism in which a top layer of financial-political nobility owns the engines
of wealth and governs the marginalized debt-serfs who toil to pay student loans, auto loans, credit
cards, mortgages and taxes--all of which benefit the financiers and political grifters.
The media is in a self-referential frenzy to convince us the decision of the century is between
unrivaled political grifter Hillary Clinton and financier-cowboy Donald Trump. Both belong to the
privileged ruling Elite: both have access to cheap credit, insider information ( information asymmetry
) and political influence.
The cold truth is the ruling Elite has shredded the social contract by skimming the income/wealth
of the unprivileged. The fake-"progressive" pandering apologists of the ruling Elite--Robert Reich,
Paul Krugman and the rest of the Keynesian Cargo Cultists--turn a blind eye to the suppression of
dissent and the looting the bottom 95% because they have cushy, protected positions as tenured faculty
(or equivalent). They cheerlead for more state-funded bread and circuses for the marginalized
rather than demand an end to exploitive privileges of the sort they themselves enjoy.
Consider just three of the unsustainably costly broken systems that enrich the privileged Elite
by stripmining the unprivileged:
healthcare (a.k.a. sickcare because sickness is profitable, prevention is unprofitable),
higher education
Imperial over-reach (the National Security State and its partner the privately owned Military-Industrial
Complex).
While the unprivileged and unprotected watch their healthcare premiums and co-pays soar year after
year, the CEOs of various sickcare cartels skim off tens of millions of dollars annually in pay and
stock options. The system works great if you get a $20 million paycheck. If you get a 30% increase
in monthly premiums for fewer actual healthcare services--the system is broken.
If you're skimming $250,000 as under-assistant dean to the provost for student services (or equivalent)
plus gold-plated benefits, higher education is working great. If you're a student burdened with tens
of thousands of dollars in student loan debt who is receiving a low-quality, essentially worthless
"education" from poorly paid graduate students ("adjuncts") and a handful of online courses that
you could get for free or for a low cost outside the university cartel--the system is broken.
If you exit the Pentagon, CIA, NSA, etc. at a cushy managerial rank with a fat pension and
lifetime benefits and are hired at a fat salary the next day by a private "defense" contractor--the
famous revolving door between a bloated state and a bloated defense industry--the system works great.
If you joined the Armed Forces to escape rural poverty and served at the point of the spear somewhere
in the Imperial Project--your perspective may well be considerably different.
Unfortunately for the ruling Elite and their army of engorged enablers and apologists, they have
already lost the consent of the governed.
They have bamboozled, conned and misled the bottom 95% for decades, but their phony facade of
political legitimacy and "the rising tide raises all boats" has cracked wide open, and the machinery
of oppression, looting and propaganda is now visible to everyone who isn't being paid to cover their
eyes. Brimming with hubris and self-importance, the ruling Elite and mainstream media cannot believe
they have lost the consent of the governed. The disillusioned governed have not fully absorbed this
epochal shift of the tides yet, either. They are aware of their own disillusionment and their own
declining financial security, but they have yet to grasp that they have, beneath the surface of everyday
life, already withdrawn their consent from a self-serving, predatory, parasitic, greedy and ultimately
self-destructive ruling Elite.
"... At bottom, the success of despotic governments and Big Brother societies hinges upon a certain
number of political, financial, and cultural developments. The first of which is an unwillingness in
the general populace to secure and defend their own freedoms, making them completely reliant on corrupt
establishment leadership. For totalitarianism to take hold, the masses must not only neglect the plight
of their country, and the plight of others, but also be completely uninformed of the inherent indirect
threats to their personal safety. ..."
"... The prevalence of apathy and ignorance sets the stage for the slow and highly deliberate process
of centralization. ..."
"... People who are easily frightened are easily dominated. This is not just a law of political
will, but a law of nature. Many wrongly assume that a tyrant's power comes purely from the application
of force. In fact, despotic regimes that rely solely on extreme violence are often very unsuccessful,
and easily overthrown. ..."
"... They instill apprehension in the public; a fear of the unknown, or a fear of the possible consequences
for standing against the state. They let our imaginations run wild until we see death around every corner,
whether it's actually there or not. When the masses are so blinded by the fear of reprisal that they
forget their fear of slavery, and take no action whatsoever to undo it, then they have been sufficiently
culled. ..."
"... The bread and circus lifestyle of the average westerner alone is enough to distract us from
connecting with each other in any meaningful fashion, but people still sometimes find ways to seek out
organized forms of activism. ..."
"... In more advanced forms of despotism, even fake organizations are disbanded. Curfews are enforced.
Normal communications are diminished or monitored. Compulsory paperwork is required. Checkpoints are
instituted. Free speech is punished. Existing groups are influenced to distrust each other or to disintegrate
entirely out of dread of being discovered. All of these measures are taken by tyrants primarily to prevent
ANY citizens from gathering and finding mutual support. People who work together and organize of their
own volition are unpredictable, and therefore, a potential risk to the state. ..."
"... Destitution leads not just to hunger, but also to crime (private and government). Crime leads
to anger, hatred, and fear. Fear leads to desperation. Desperation leads to the acceptance of anything
resembling a solution, even despotism. ..."
"... Autocracies pretend to cut through the dilemmas of economic dysfunction (usually while demanding
liberties be relinquished), however, behind the scenes they actually seek to maintain a proscribed level
of indigence and deprivation. The constant peril of homelessness and starvation keeps the masses thoroughly
distracted from such things as protest or dissent, while simultaneously chaining them to the idea that
their only chance is to cling to the very government out to end them. ..."
"... When law enforcement officials are no longer servants of the people, but agents of a government
concerned only with its own supremacy, serious crises emerge. Checks and balances are removed. The guidelines
that once reigned in police disappear, and suddenly, a philosophy of superiority emerges; an arrogant
exclusivity that breeds separation between law enforcement and the rest of the public. Finally, police
no longer see themselves as protectors of citizens, but prison guards out to keep us subdued and docile.
..."
"... Tyrants are generally men who have squelched their own consciences. They have no reservations
in using any means at their disposal to wipe out opposition. But, in the early stages of their ascent
to power, they must give the populace a reason for their ruthlessness, or risk being exposed, and instigating
even more dissent. The propaganda machine thus goes into overdrive, and any person or group that dares
to question the authority or the validity of the state is demonized in the minds of the masses. ..."
"... Tyrannical power structures cannot function without scapegoats. There must always be an elusive
boogie man under the bed of every citizen, otherwise, those citizens may turn their attention, and their
anger, towards the real culprit behind their troubles. By scapegoating stewards of the truth, such governments
are able to kill two birds with one stone. ..."
"... Citizen spying is almost always branded as a civic duty; an act of heroism and bravery. Citizen
spies are offered accolades and awards, and showered with praise from the upper echelons of their communities.
..."
"... Tyrannies are less concerned with dominating how we live, so much as dominating how we think
..."
"... Lies become "necessary" in protecting the safety of the state. War becomes a tool for "peace".
Torture becomes an ugly but "useful" method for gleaning important information. Police brutality is
sold as a "natural reaction" to increased crime. Rendition becomes normal, but only for those labeled
as "terrorists". Assassination is justified as a means for "saving lives". Genocide is done discretely,
but most everyone knows it is taking place. They simply don't discuss it. ..."
As we look back on the horrors of the dictatorships and autocracies of the past, one particular
question consistently arises; how was it possible for the common men of these eras to NOT notice
what was happening around them? How could they have stood as statues unaware or uncaring as their
cultures were overrun by fascism, communism, collectivism, and elitism? Of course, we have the advantage
of hindsight, and are able to research and examine the misdeeds of the past at our leisure. Unfortunately,
such hindsight does not necessarily shield us from the long cast shadow of tyranny in our own day.
For that, the increasingly uncommon gift of foresight is required…
At bottom, the success of despotic governments and Big Brother societies hinges upon a certain
number of political, financial, and cultural developments. The first of which is an unwillingness
in the general populace to secure and defend their own freedoms, making them completely reliant on
corrupt establishment leadership. For totalitarianism to take hold, the masses must not only neglect
the plight of their country, and the plight of others, but also be completely uninformed of the inherent
indirect threats to their personal safety. They must abandon all responsibility for their destinies,
and lose all respect for their own humanity. They must, indeed, become domesticated and mindless
herd animals without regard for anything except their fleeting momentary desires for entertainment
and short term survival. For a lumbering bloodthirsty behemoth to actually sneak up on you, you have
to be pretty damnably oblivious.
The prevalence of apathy and ignorance sets the stage for the slow and highly deliberate process
of centralization. Once dishonest governments accomplish an atmosphere of inaction and condition
a sense of frailty within the citizenry, the sky is truly the limit. However, a murderous power-monger's
day is never quite done. In my recent article
'The
Essential Rules of Liberty' we explored the fundamentally unassailable actions and mental preparations
required to ensure the continuance of a free society. In this article, let's examine the frequently
wielded tools of tyrants in their invariably insane quests for total control…
People who are easily frightened are easily dominated. This is not just a law of political
will, but a law of nature. Many wrongly assume that a tyrant's power comes purely from the application
of force. In fact, despotic regimes that rely solely on extreme violence are often very unsuccessful,
and easily overthrown. Brute strength is calculable. It can be analyzed, and thus, eventually
confronted and defeated.
Thriving tyrants instead utilize not just harm, but the imminent THREAT of harm. They instill
apprehension in the public; a fear of the unknown, or a fear of the possible consequences for
standing against the state. They let our imaginations run wild until we see death around every
corner, whether it's actually there or not. When the masses are so blinded by the fear of reprisal
that they forget their fear of slavery, and take no action whatsoever to undo it, then they have
been sufficiently culled.
In other cases, our fear is evoked and directed towards engineered enemies. Another race, another
religion, another political ideology, a "hidden" and ominous villain created out of thin air.
Autocrats assert that we "need them" in order to remain safe and secure from these illusory monsters
bent on our destruction. As always, this development is followed by the claim that all steps taken,
even those that dissolve our freedoms, are "for the greater good". Frightened people tend to shirk
their sense of independence and run towards the comfort of the collective, even if that collective
is built on immoral and unconscionable foundations. Once a society takes on a hive-mind mentality
almost any evil can be rationalized, and any injustice against the individual is simply overlooked
for the sake of the group.
In the past, elitist governments would often legislate and enforce severe penalties for public
gatherings, because defusing the ability of the citizenry to organize or to communicate was paramount
to control. In our technological era, such isolation is still used, but in far more advanced forms.
The bread and circus lifestyle of the average westerner alone is enough to distract us from connecting
with each other in any meaningful fashion, but people still sometimes find ways to seek out organized
forms of activism.
Through co-option, modern day tyrant's can direct and manipulate opposition movements. By creating
and administrating groups which oppose each other, elites can then micromanage all aspects of
a nation on the verge of revolution. These "false paradigms" give us the illusion of proactive
organization, and the false hope of changing the system, while at the same time preventing us
from seeking understanding in one another. All our energies are then muted and dispersed into
meaningless battles over "left and right", or "Democrat versus Republican", for example. Only
movements that cast aside such empty labels and concern themselves with the ultimate truth of
their country, regardless of what that truth might reveal, are able to enact real solutions to
the disasters wrought by tyranny.
In more advanced forms of despotism, even fake organizations are disbanded. Curfews are
enforced. Normal communications are diminished or monitored. Compulsory paperwork is required.
Checkpoints are instituted. Free speech is punished. Existing groups are influenced to distrust
each other or to disintegrate entirely out of dread of being discovered. All of these measures
are taken by tyrants primarily to prevent ANY citizens from gathering and finding mutual support.
People who work together and organize of their own volition are unpredictable, and therefore,
a potential risk to the state.
You'll find in nearly every instance of cultural descent into autocracy, the offending government
gained favor after the onset of economic collapse. Make the necessities of root survival an uncertainty,
and people without knowledge of self sustainability and without solid core principles will gladly
hand over their freedom, even for mere scraps from the tables of the same men who unleashed famine
upon them. Financial calamities are not dangerous because of the poverty they leave in their wake;
they are dangerous because of the doors to malevolence that they leave open.
Destitution leads not just to hunger, but also to crime (private and government). Crime
leads to anger, hatred, and fear. Fear leads to desperation. Desperation leads to the acceptance
of anything resembling a solution, even despotism.
Autocracies pretend to cut through the dilemmas of economic dysfunction (usually while
demanding liberties be relinquished), however, behind the scenes they actually seek to maintain
a proscribed level of indigence and deprivation. The constant peril of homelessness and starvation
keeps the masses thoroughly distracted from such things as protest or dissent, while simultaneously
chaining them to the idea that their only chance is to cling to the very government out to end
them.
This is the main symptom often associated with totalitarianism. So much so that our preconceived
notions of what a fascist government looks like prevent us from seeing other forms of tyranny
right under our noses. Some Americans believe that if the jackbooted thugs are not knocking on
every door, then we MUST still live in a free country. Obviously, this is a rather naďve position.
Admittedly, though, goon squads and secret police do eventually become prominent in every failed
nation, usually while the public is mesmerized by visions of war, depression, hyperinflation,
terrorism, etc.
When law enforcement officials are no longer servants of the people, but agents of a government
concerned only with its own supremacy, serious crises emerge. Checks and balances are removed.
The guidelines that once reigned in police disappear, and suddenly, a philosophy of superiority
emerges; an arrogant exclusivity that breeds separation between law enforcement and the rest of
the public. Finally, police no longer see themselves as protectors of citizens, but prison guards
out to keep us subdued and docile.
As tyranny grows, this behavior is encouraged. Good men are filtered out of the system, and
small (minded and hearted) men are promoted.
At its pinnacle, a police state will hide the identities of most of its agents and officers,
behind masks or behind red tape, because their crimes in the name of the state become so numerous
and so sadistic that personal vengeance on the part of their victims will become a daily concern.
Tyrants are generally men who have squelched their own consciences. They have no reservations
in using any means at their disposal to wipe out opposition. But, in the early stages of their
ascent to power, they must give the populace a reason for their ruthlessness, or risk being exposed,
and instigating even more dissent. The propaganda machine thus goes into overdrive, and any person
or group that dares to question the authority or the validity of the state is demonized in the
minds of the masses.
All disasters, all violent crimes, all the ills of the world, are hoisted upon the shoulders
of activist groups and political rivals. They are falsely associated with fringe elements already
disliked by society (racists, terrorists, etc). A bogus consensus is created through puppet media
in an attempt to make the public believe that "everyone else" must have the same exact views,
and those who express contrary positions must be "crazy", or "extremist". Events are even engineered
by the corrupt system and pinned on those demanding transparency and liberty. The goal is to drive
anti-totalitarian organizations into self censorship. That is to say, instead of silencing them
directly, the state causes activists to silence themselves.
Tyrannical power structures cannot function without scapegoats. There must always be an
elusive boogie man under the bed of every citizen, otherwise, those citizens may turn their attention,
and their anger, towards the real culprit behind their troubles. By scapegoating stewards of the
truth, such governments are able to kill two birds with one stone.
Ultimately, the life of a totalitarian government is not prolonged by the government itself,
but by the very people it subjugates. Citizen spies are the glue of any police state, and our
propensity for sticking our noses into other peoples business is highly valued by Big Brother
bureaucracies around the globe.
There are a number of reasons why people participate in this repulsive activity. Some are addicted
to the feeling of being a part of the collective, and "service" to this collective, sadly, is
the only way they are able to give their pathetic lives meaning. Some are vindictive, cold, and
soulless, and actually get enjoyment from ruining others. And still, like elites, some long for
power, even petty power, and are willing to do anything to fulfill their vile need to dictate
the destinies of perfect strangers.
Citizen spying is almost always branded as a civic duty; an act of heroism and bravery.
Citizen spies are offered accolades and awards, and showered with praise from the upper echelons
of their communities. People who lean towards citizen spying are often outwardly and inwardly
unimpressive; physically and mentally inept. For the average moral and emotional weakling with
persistent feelings of inadequacy, the allure of finally being given fifteen minutes of fame and
a hero's status (even if that status is based on a lie) is simply too much to resist. They begin
to see "extremists" and "terrorists" everywhere. Soon, people afraid of open ears everywhere start
to watch what they say at the supermarket, in their own backyards, or even to family members.
Free speech is effectively neutralized.
In the end, it is not enough for a government fueled by the putrid sludge of iniquity to lord
over us. At some point, it must also influence us to forsake our most valued principles. Tyrannies
are less concerned with dominating how we live, so much as dominating how we think. If they
can mold our very morality, they can exist unopposed indefinitely. Of course, the elements of
conscience are inborn, and not subject to environmental duress as long as a man is self aware.
However, conscience can be manipulated if a person has no sense of identity, and has never put
in the effort to explore his own strengths and failings. There are many people like this in America
today.
Lies become "necessary" in protecting the safety of the state. War becomes a tool for "peace".
Torture becomes an ugly but "useful" method for gleaning important information. Police brutality
is sold as a "natural reaction" to increased crime. Rendition becomes normal, but only for those
labeled as "terrorists". Assassination is justified as a means for "saving lives". Genocide is
done discretely, but most everyone knows it is taking place. They simply don't discuss it.
All tyrannical systems depend on the apathy and moral relativism of the inhabitants within
their borders. Without the cooperation of the public, these systems cannot function. The real
question is, how many of the above steps will be taken before we finally refuse to conform? At
what point will each man and woman decide to break free from the dark path blazed before us and
take measures to ensure their independence? Who will have the courage to develop their own communities,
their own alternative economies, their own organizations for mutual defense outside of establishment
constructs, and who will break under the pressure to bow like cowards? How many will hold the
line, and how many will flee?
For every American, for every human being across the planet who chooses to stand immovable
in the face of the very worst in mankind, we come that much closer to breathing life once again
into the very best in us all.
"... "Now we have the three [Goldman] transcripts. Everyone can read them, and everyone should. What they show is Clinton's extraordinary understanding of our world - its leaders and their politics, terrorist groups and their vulnerabilities, the interplay of global forces, and the economic well-being of Americans" ..."
"... I think this debate especially was "priced in" - any Trump supporter at this stage has lost the capacity for changing minds, especially as so much of it is anti-Hillary. ..."
"... It is astounding that with all her money and MSM support/collusion HRC is only a few digits ahead in the polls. I still see a slim chance that Trump will win, if his hidden and shy voters go out and some of Hillary's stay home (lazy and complacent). ..."
"... Having said that, the establishment is terrified of a Trump win, and so many of those voting machines don't leave an audit trail… ..."
I can tell what how the press stories will read from the headlines and the writers, so I won't
bother to link to them.
See the NC debate live blog for a rice bowl-free discussion.
"Trump had done well, delivering his best prepared and most substantive performance, but it
wasn't nearly good enough to reshape the race. He came into Las Vegas trailing big time, and surely
leaves the same way" [
New York Post ]. "Absent an unforeseeable black swan event that tips the table in his favor,
Hillary Clinton is headed to the White House." Although I'd bet the terrain is quite different
today from the terrain Clinton imagined back when she was influence peddling at Goldman in 2015.
... ... ..
And then there's this, which does seem to under cut the bizarre "our electoral system is perfection
itself" narrative that Democrat loyalists are pushing:
... ... ...
UPDATE "But the negativity in this campaign has been something else, and the debates have been
very heavy on character attacks. In terms of the overall impact on the health of American democracy,
I think there's one thing that's particularly concerning: These two candidates, whose personal
conduct and character have been impugned over and over, both went through competitive primaries.
There were other candidates. Clinton and Trump both won their nominations, fairly and decisively.
But for people who might tune in sporadically, the conclusion that this is the best we can do
might produce real dismay." [
FiveThirtyEight ]. Yes, it's called a legitimacy crisis.
"The stream posted on his Facebook wasn't anything different than what people saw on CNN or
Fox News or MSNBC, just a livestream of the debate, but more than 170,000 watched it at once.
By the time the broadcast ended, more than 8.7 million had tuned in at some point. Compare that
to the half a million views Time posted for its debate lifestream, or the nearly 900,000 who watched
BuzzFeed News'" [
Independent Journal Review ]. "Welcome to the first broadcast of Trump TV."
War Drums
"Anyone who believes the United States is not fighting enough wars in the Middle East can be
happy this week. We have just plunged into another one. Twice in recent days, cruise missiles
fired from an American destroyer have rained down on Yemen. The Pentagon, a practiced master of
Orwellian language, calls this bombing 'limited self-defense'" [
Boston Globe ]. "American forces were already involved in Yemen's civil war. Since 2002, our
drone attacks have reportedly killed more than 500 Yemenis, including at least 65 civilians. We
are also supplying weapons and intelligence to Saudi Arabia, which has killed thousands of Yemenis
in bombing raids over the last year and a half - including last week's attack on a funeral in
which more than 100 mourners were killed." But I'm sure none of the mourners were women or people
of color. So that's alright, then.
Wikileaks
"Now we have the three [Goldman] transcripts. Everyone can read them, and everyone should.
What they show is Clinton's extraordinary understanding of our world - its leaders and their politics,
terrorist groups and their vulnerabilities, the interplay of global forces, and the economic well-being
of Americans" [
RealClearPolitics ].
This is the line the Moustache of Understanding took. Which is all you need to know, really
Although this writer is a little vague on
just how they are "extraordinary."
"Walmart, Wendy Clark, Target and Apple: More WikiLeaked Clinton Campaign Messaging Secrets"
[
Advertising Age ].
The Trail
"Trump Holds On To 1-Point Lead As Debate Sparks Fly - IBD/TIPP Poll" [
Investors Business Daily ]. Incidentally, IBD sounds like the sort of publication Trump would
read.
There is one corner of Washington where Donald Trump's scorched-earth presidential campaign
is treated as a mere distraction and where bipartisanship reigns. In the rarefied world of
the Washington foreign policy establishment, President Obama's departure from the White House
- and the possible return of a more conventional and hawkish Hillary Clinton - is being met
with quiet relief.
The Republicans and Democrats who make up the foreign policy elite are laying the groundwork
for a more assertive American foreign policy via a flurry of reports shaped by officials who
are likely to play senior roles in a potential Clinton White House. …
This consensus is driven by broad-based backlash against a president who has repeatedly
stressed the dangers of overreach and the limits of American power, especially in the Middle
East. "There's a widespread perception that not being active enough or recognizing the limits
of American power has costs," said Philip Gordon, a senior foreign policy adviser to Obama
until 2015. "So the normal swing is to be more interventionist." …
Smart investors will go long producers of canned food and manufacturers of fallout shelter
materials.
George Saunders strives mightily to have us believe our economic situation has nothing to do
with the attractiveness of The Donald to certain constituencies. But even he has to acknowledge
what people are angry about (emphasis added):
"All along the fertile interstate-highway corridor, our corporations, those new and
powerful nation-states, had set up shop parasitically, so as to skim off the drive-past money
, and what those outposts had to offer was a blur of sugar, bright color, and crassness
that seemed causally related to more serious addictions. Standing in line at the pharmacy in an
Amarillo Walmart superstore, I imagined some kid who had moved only, or mostly, through such bland,
bright spaces, spaces constructed to suit the purposes of distant profit, and it occurred to me
how easy it would be, in that life, to feel powerless, to feel that the local was lame, the abstract
extraneous, to feel that the only valid words were those of materialism ("get" and "rise")-words
that are perfectly embodied by the candidate of the moment.
Something is wrong, the common person feels, correctly: she works too hard and gets too little;
a dulling disconnect exists between her actual day-to-day interests and (1) the way her leaders
act and speak, and (2) the way our mass media mistell or fail entirely to tell her story.
What does she want? Someone to notice her over here, having her troubles. "
Pavel, October 20, 2016 at 4:06 pm
I blissfully ignored the televised "debate" last night though I followed the comments here
at NC and on Twitter for a while. Not sure my blood pressure would survive 90 mins of Hillary's
voice and smug smile or anything about Trump.
It is amusing to note the OUTRAGE that Trump might dare question the election results. Jesus
H Christ the media are just taking us all for amnesiac idiots, aren't they?
I think this debate especially was "priced in" - any Trump supporter at this stage has
lost the capacity for changing minds, especially as so much of it is anti-Hillary.
It is astounding that with all her money and MSM support/collusion HRC is only a few digits
ahead in the polls. I still see a slim chance that Trump will win, if his hidden and shy voters
go out and some of Hillary's stay home (lazy and complacent).
Having said that, the establishment is terrified of a Trump win, and so many of those voting
machines don't leave an audit trail…
Twice in recent days, cruise missiles fired from an American destroyer have rained down
on Yemen.
Whoaaa. There may still be doubts about this. After all, what do the Houthis gain, especially
right after the Saudis have outdone themselves in atrocities.
Officials Saturday night were uncertain about what exactly happened, if there were multiple
incoming missiles or if there was a malfunction with the radar detection system on the destroyer.
Even if the Yemenis did, I fail to see why this is considered shocking and unacceptable. I
get that decades of kowtowing to Israel has conditioned the United States to not understand that
a blockade is inherently an act of war, but quite aside from starving the people of Yemen we've
been directly supporting the Saudi bombing. We've been belligerents in this conflict from the
start.
Yet another attempt to explain Trump success... and Democratic Party disintegration because Dems
lost working class voters and substantial part of middle class voters.
Notable quotes:
"... I have a great deal of empathy for the Donald Trump voters. ..."
"... The elites have failed the people so thoroughly that tens of millions of people, on any side of any issue, can legitimately say they don't think the system is working for them anymore, if it ever did. ..."
"... There are elements of racism, xenophobia and misogyny in the Trump movement, and there's also all kinds of legitimate of anxieties. ..."
"... The rise of Trump is a judgment on the progressive movement that has adopted a style that doesn't leave much room for a 55-year-old heterosexual white Republican living in a red state to feel that he has any place of honor or dignity in the world progressives are trying to create. We see the disrespect coming from them, but there's a subtle disrespect coming from us, the NPR crowd, that is intolerant of intolerance. Nobody wants to feel as though they don't count. ..."
I also believe that people are fundamentally good, but this election cycle has tried that
hypothesis for me.
I have a great deal of empathy for the Donald Trump voters. When you listen to them talk
about feeling hurt, scared and left behind, they sound like the Black Lives Matter activists.
How so? The elites have failed the people so thoroughly that tens
of millions of people, on any side of any issue, can legitimately say they don't think the system
is working for them anymore, if it ever did. ...
... ... ...
A lot of people are mocking the idea that you can explain the bigotry at a Trump rally
by writing it off as simply a response to economic anxiety.
There are elements of racism, xenophobia and misogyny in the Trump movement, and there's also
all kinds of legitimate of anxieties.
The rise of Trump is a judgment on the progressive movement that has adopted a style that
doesn't leave much room for a 55-year-old heterosexual white Republican living in a red state to
feel that he has any place of honor or dignity in the world progressives are trying to create. We
see the disrespect coming from them, but there's a subtle disrespect coming from us, the NPR crowd,
that is intolerant of intolerance. Nobody wants to feel as though they don't count.
They talked about poverty 8 times in one night? Krugman
only mentioned it 6 times yesterday. Krugman NEVER talk
about income inequality. Seriously - do you not get why
your own dog says you are a stupid bore?
Kind of like Obama's gift of mandated health insurance
coverage given to a health insurance industry that is
consolidating more and more every day...and becoming an
oligopoly?
Of course, we already know how this ends from
privatization of retirement plans in Britain and in
Chile--it's a boon mainly to the finance industry.
"Britain's experience with individual accounts has been
troubling. None other than the business oriented Wall
Street Journal, in fact, headlined an article on the
British experience: "Social Security Switch in U.K. is
Disastrous; A Caution to the U.S.?"[7] While the Journal
article mainly focused on a multi-billion dollar fraud
scandal in which British pension sellers gave workers bad
investment advice, others have critically noted the
system's unexpectedly high administrative costs and the
growing income inequality among the nation's workers"
http://www.eoionline.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/social-security/PensionPrivatizationBritainBoondoggle-Sep00.pdf
What else would you expect from the Clintons, who have
spent a good part of their careers sucking up to the
finance industry?
"... Trump should be ready for the Russia thing. I expect him to clearly delineate himself from HRC by saying he really really really wants no war with Russia. in fact, he's already said if he's elected he will meet with Putin before he's even inaugurated. It's a winning position for Trump. People hate war. ..."
"... I am skeptical of how much that will win over people in Hillary's base, since many well-to-do liberals I know swallow the Putin-is-evil propaganda without question and consider the threat of nuclear war as a distant, impossible thing. For them Trump is an immediate, concrete threat and bad relations with Russia leading to nuclear war a considerably more abstract proposition. ..."
"... Clinton: Citizens United "undermined" our democratic system. So, in other words, the system is indeed rigged. Glad they agree on something. ..."
"... I'm watching with a former TV producer who just pointed out that they've got soft light on her and hard light on him. ..."
"... I noticed that too, this debate and the last one. She has that Doris Day'ish type of look and he looks pale. The lighting – ..."
"... The heroin use is from having no jobs. ..."
"... and from doctors and Big Pharma pushing it. Marijuana appears to be better for pain and less harmful. ..."
"... That "she always supported the wall, never gets anything done so no wall" was quite adroit ..."
"... Clinton can't resist gleeful smirk, she can throw in some of her prepared remarks. ..."
"... ooh-Clinton's already on wikileaks and Russia and Putin. 17 intelligence people have supposedly confirmed they were trying to change the election. ..."
"... Trump–great calling her out on her pivot off the borders. ..."
"... "You encouraged espionage of our people" I remember Hillary calling for a bolstering of NSA surveillance efforts after Orlando? ..."
"... Of course no mention that Obama has deported more people than any other president. ..."
"... Clinton's pivot from "hemisphere without borders" to Wikileaks/Russia/Putin interfering with out democracy. Pathetic. The audience found it laughable. ..."
"... she just lied about nuclear weapons…the secty of defense has to approve…she…is…well…she always lies so what else is new… ..."
"... Hillary's eyes are very glassy, She's doped up ..."
"... Trump saying jobs are stagnant, last report so bad "I should win the election". ..."
"... Your 30 years of experience coincide with the utter screwing over of the working people. ..."
"... Amen. I just watched about two minutes… all I could take. Her smirk and lies drive me nuts. ..."
"... Her basic narrative is she is the single most qualified person in the history of things to ever be deign to run for President and then she mumbles about one thing she did between being a lawyer for Wal-Mart and the governor's wife. It's a terrible narrative. Oh, and being on the wrong side of every foreign policy decision for 25 years. ..."
"... American bombs and bullets are humanitarian, dontcha know? ..."
"... NBC set up the Billy Bush tape, if that's what's being referred to. The Clintons set up the big frontpage NYT 'accusers,' or whatever it was. ..."
"... These agents provacateurs accusations against Clinton are quite plausible (hey, they were on PBS Newshour) even if the source is shady. They just feel very Clintonesque. ..."
"... Dirty politics Clinton style. ..."
"... There is a lot of evidence dug up by reddit amateur investigators after the tape leaked. They found people on the tape in a few protest videos as well as a woman on the Clinton payroll. I don't trust the voter fraud tape at all, but the inciting violence at riots tapes looks like the real deal. ..."
"... They go along well with the shots fired into and the burglary/ransacking of Sander's Nevada campaign headquarters, and the firebombings of Republican campaign offices in swing states. ..."
"... well done $hillary…the question was for her to respond about bill and his stuff…good diversion…congrats… ..."
"... "America is great because America is good." We kill because we love… ..."
"... She twists everything. Chubby Checker would be proud of Shillary. ..."
"... Now he's bringing up her emails. What happened to the FBI, he asks? Talks about 1 guy getting 4 yrs in jail for 1 lie to the FBI, a 4-star general, but she makes hundreds of lies. ..."
"... Has Hillary Clinton ever apologized for anything? Or just said "I misspoke." ..."
"... Hillary did not respond to Trump's charge that she paid for people to riot in Chicago before his rally. Instead she began to speak very slowly to eat up her time. ..."
"... Oooh, Clinton uses rhetoric–says Trump is "dark, divisive, dangerous". She practiced that one. There was no context. ..."
"... Wallace is pressing her more on pay to play. Trump says it's a criminal enterprise, Saudi & Qatar giving lots of money. They kill women & treat them horribly, push gays off buildings, but Clinton takes their money. He says she should give their money back. He says in Haiti they hate Clinton, what the foundation did was a disgrace. ..."
"... Clinton claims they spend 90% of donations on their programs. (Pinocchio moment, anyone?) ..."
"... Spending money on programs is lawyerly language. From what I have read, CF runs events but does little that benefits people "on the ground" ..."
"... Too bad Trump doesn't have any facts on Haiti. He could have buried her. This is so boring. Just low grade snipes at each other. ..."
"... Almost focusing on Haiti, almost a good point, then narcissism derails Trump … ..."
"... Media dishonest & corrupt, NYT wrote about it, poisoned the minds of voters but he thinks people can see through it. ..."
"... the fbi did a one year investigation or a three day cover up…? ..."
"... Clinton claims we've had "free and fair elections". Now there's a huge lie. Bigger lie than about her emails. ..."
"... Oh noes, Trump is denigrating our democracy. So did the DNC by rigging the primaries. ..."
"... She's appalled? What hypocrisy! ..."
"... Grabbing women. Nine came forward, said you groped them. Why would so many women all make up these stories, and Clinton, what your husband, was that worse? ..."
"... Hey, it's the best democracy that Organized Money can buy! ..."
"... "Intelligence surge." Sounds bad and worse. ..."
"... I do have to say without Trump in this election the lid would not have been blown off the criminality of the government in Washington. Mouthing off about it all the time every chance he gets. Not that Trump will do anything to change it. But still. ..."
"... Good point. He's exposing this fraud for what she is. ..."
"... This election would have been all about transgender bathrooms. ..."
"... Trump: Sanders supporting Clinton is a big mistake. Amen. ..."
"... To Americans of either side who are sick of our failed foreign policy and wondering whether it's intentionally duplicitous, yah, I think it's a winner. Keep reading, you'll see. ..."
"... Hillary sticking to technicals and official truths – "FBI cleared me after a year-long investment"; "Google Trump Iraq – all these sources" etc. If she can validate it, it must be true! ..."
"... He should have mentioned wikileaks. They found her own oppo research said his Iraq war opposition would be a huge problem for her. ..."
"... Trump is kicking butt. Stein or Trump… Can't stomach Bill in the WH again. ..."
"... Wallace asks Clinton about no fly zone, risk of starting a war. She says those are genuine risks, but thinks she could "strike a deal". ..."
"... Oh god, she says no-fly zone would save lives…. ..."
"... Trump occasionally emits MMT-like sounds, but I'm not sure that he believes them. For example, he has previously accurately noted that US can't be forced to default on USD-denominated debt, since it prints its own currency. Then he suggested that we could reduce the outstanding debt by negotiating down the price of previously issued Treasury bonds (not sure the details; perhaps threaten to default, hammer the price by terrifying bond-holders, and buy the depressed price bonds.) ..."
"... Hillary has become a traditional Republican with regard to American exceptionalism. ..."
"... I couldn't believe it when she was appalled Trump criticized Reagan. All Obama did was say Reagan had some "good ideas." ..."
"... Liberal talking heads are hyperventilating about the Donald dissing Reagan. Tells me all I need to know. ..."
"... She's gonna create two classes of SS/Medicare recipients. Great. Some will get a fraction more, most will be screwed. ..."
"... I guess you could say Donald at least can learn. He's gotten better in each debate in terms of not appearing to be a drug addict with anger issues. ..."
"... "Because neo-liberalism. Because I like the idea, a lot, of catching the Mount Pelerin Society, Pinochet, Diane Rehm, the Friedmans, Joe Biden, Rush Limbaugh, and the people who drafted the Democratic platform in one big net, and then deep-sixing the entire squirming and gesticulating political class with language that's "exceptionally bloggy and aggressively casual and implicitly ironic." ..."
"... Media all freaking out about the "respect the results of the election" question. Strange that nobody has brought up Al Gore - it certainly would have been better for the country if Al had pushed harder in 2000. ..."
"... Wow ABC, the elections ain't rigged but Russia hacked them?! Make up your damned minds already, this is more schizophrenia in a single sentence than I can handle… ..."
"... #Breaking: Trump's lead advisor Roger Ailes has left the Trump campaign. According to reports: "[Fox] said the pair had a falling out, with both sides saying debate prep had not gone the way they wanted. The report came just hours before Wednesday's third presidential debate in Las Vegas, where Trump will try to dig out of a recent polling hole. ..."
"... The report said that Ailes had concerns that Trump could not focus and that preparation would be a "waste of time," while Trump thought Ailes spent too much prep time telling old stories." ..."
"... And Hillary is against Citizens United, now that she has been the one who has benefited the most and won't need it anymore. ..."
"... Just in terms of tone, whenever Clinton says something appalls her, it makes me think "Gee, that might be a good idea!" Not that it is, but that's my reaction at this point. ..."
"... With that forced smile of HER's …. I wouldn't get within 5 kilometers of the bloody white hag -- ..."
"... 'families' …. Cosa Nostra ?? ..."
"... The Clinton dynasty needs to be brought down asap. Their grip and influence is even more than most realize, I suspect. ..."
"... I thought Trump did pretty well, said more about "jobs" than Clinton, which is usually a smart move. Not a lot of specifics. Closing minute was a flop though. Clinton spent far too long accusing Russian hackers, which she can't substantiate, and people care less about than the content of the leaked information. ..."
"... And Hillary, do you promise then not to rig the elections with your allies like you did the Democratic primaries? "Bernie Sanders will not be a factor in N.J." 9/22/2015. https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/9846 ..."
"... Biggest muffed issue: Wallace asks Clinton if she'd shoot down a Russian plane that violated her no-fly zone. Clinton dodges, Wallace does not press her, Trump does not press her either. "No, Hillary, I'm anxious to know. How badly do you want a new war, this time with Russia?" or some such. ..."
"... I stand by my opinion of chris wallace being the best and this is really awkward but fox has great post-debate commentary. ..."
"... Fox is probably more free to push Clinton because their networks of political access are less tied to her campaign than all the other outlets, who seem scared shitless of being thought to cause the slightest embarrassment for her. ..."
"... actually, mr. wallace did the best job by far of any of these "moderators". ..."
"... The fact that wallace hit both sides hard made trump loom better. ..."
Trump should be ready for the Russia thing. I expect him to clearly delineate himself from
HRC by saying he really really really wants no war with Russia. in fact, he's already said if
he's elected he will meet with Putin before he's even inaugurated. It's a winning position for
Trump. People hate war.
I am skeptical of how much that will win over people in Hillary's base, since many well-to-do
liberals I know swallow the Putin-is-evil propaganda without question and consider the threat
of nuclear war as a distant, impossible thing. For them Trump is an immediate, concrete threat
and bad relations with Russia leading to nuclear war a considerably more abstract proposition.
I may switch to watching Call the Midwife on PBS after the first hour so as to restore my faith
in humanity and universal national healthcare, instituted in the UK seven decades ago during the
years of extreme postwar austerity while we trudge along here in "never ever" land.
CLINTON Clinton Need Supreme Court stand up for women LBTQ, stand up on Citiznes United [chutzpah]
Not reverse Roe v Wade, not reverse marriage inequality, stand up and say Supreme Court should
represent all of us
TRUMP What it's all about. Imperative have right justice. Ginsberg forced to apologize for
statements she made
Uphold Second Amendment, which is under seige. Justices I name pro-life, great scholars, interpret
the way the Founders waned it interpreted. Constitution way it was meant to be…
CLINTON Respect Second Amendment. But 33K year die, need background checks, close loopholes,
sensible reforms that do not conflict.
Heller: Disagree with SC application in that case. DC wanted to protect toddlers, a reasonable
regulation
WALLACE How will you ensure 2A protected?
TRUMP SHe was angry when Heller came down. Scalia well-crafted.
W Were you upset?
CLINTON Yes bc toddlers kill people with guns. No doubt I respect 2A and right to bear arms.
No conflict w sensible regulation. I understand Donald is funded by NRA and running millions of
ads against me.
W You support a national right to carry law?
TRUMP Chicago toughest laws, more violence than any other city. I support 2A, very proud to
have the NRA endorsement. We are going to appoint justices that will feel strongly about 2A, won't
damage it.
Trump fear mongering immigrants people kill people. Sheesh. Talking about heroin flooding across the southern border. I bet he won't mention the prescription
opiate issue.
There is no way the 11 million figure is real. No way.
They have been telling us it's 11 million for over 3 decades. It's got to be over 30 million by now.
Trump says "bad bad bad". Clinton – on immigration starts with things that sound sane then goes all cerebral, just more
word soup. She doesn't know when to shut up.
These debates seem to be mainly focused on scaring each tribe into showing up to vote there
is certainly no appeal to independents by either side.
Hillary really gave the liberals a good he's Hitler scare on immigration, "round them up",
"put them on trains", hmm I wonder what focus groups said those phrases reminded them of.
Of course no mention that Obama has deported more people than any other president.
Any job an illegal gets is a job a legal could have had, albeit at a higher wage.
This includes apple picking and all the others.
And the legal Hispanics and others have all worked this out.
When Alabama passed laws against undocumented immigrants, the tomatoes rotted on the plants
because no one else would do the work, even at higher wages.
I've pointed that out, but that is because the wages weren't high enough because….drumroll….those
farmers competed with farmers in other states that can and do hire illegal workers.
So this isn't a valid test of what would happen if you shut down the seasonal worker flow on
a widespread basis. You probably would have a very painful transition the first year as farmers
tried bidding for workers and bid too low.
When I was a kid, lots of kids picked strawberries in the summer. Not terribly pleasant work
but reasonably paid and only a few weeks. You could probably get teenagers in the summer for crops
that had short harvest windows.
Picking various crops meant new school clothes and a new bicycle for many kids back in the
day. There was a sense of camaraderie and shared experience that made the work seem easier, and
some brought transistor radios to provide background music. People generally had a good time and
kids saw the work ethic in action.
Guess you never had to work those jobs to survive;
manual labor jobs like construction and working in a restaurant and just about anything else that
the little people do.
Now most Americans can't get hired at those jobs.They go to illegals.
Trump's digs are more effective–short, clear words. "She's the puppet"
Clinton's ideas are sometimes better but it's overly cerebral and too word-soupy. Trump – "Putin has outsmarted her in Syria", etc. etc.
W Immigration. Trump wall, Clinton 100 days include pathway to citizenship
TRUMP Amnesty unfair to people waiting in line for years. In audience 4 mothers killed by illegal
immigrants. We have no country if we have no borders. Border control and ICE endorsed me. It means
their job is tougher. They want strong borders. Up NH, single biggest problem heroin, poisoning
the blood of our youth. Strong borders, amnesty, ICE, they all want the wall [Trump starts sniffing].
When the border is secured, we'll make a determination [about the rest of it]
CLINTON Carla, worried she was born here, parents were not. I don't want to see parents separated
from children. 11M undocumented, 4 million children. Would need a massive law enforcement presence
to round up the undocumented, then put them on trains and buses. Not in keeping with who we are,
would rip our country apart. Voted for border security. My comprehensive plan includes border
security. Get rid of violent. Trump went to Mexico, didn't mention the wall, got into a twitter
war
TRUMP Mexican President nice man, CLinton fought for the wall in 2006 but she never gets anything
done so naturally it was't built
WALL I voted for border security. It is clear what Donald has a different view of what to do.
Bring undocumented out of the shadows. Donald used undocumented workers to build Trump tower.
Don't want employers to exploit.
TRUMP Under Obama millions have already been moved out. We're a country of laws. We either
have a border or we don't. MIllions in line and waiting and unfair to have open borders, also
a disaster on trade. Obama has deported millions
CLINTON Open borders a rank mistatement. Used to be partisan
W $225K from bank stpeech, "my dream is open trade and open borders"
CLINTON I was talking about energy [!!]. I want an electric grid. Wikileaks has engaged in
espionage against Americans. Hacked and given info. Clearly from Putin himself, as 17 intel officials
say Most important question: Will Trump admit and condemn Russians have done this. Those are the
questions we need answered
TRUMP Big pivot she wants open borders. How'd we get to Putin
W [dithers]
TRUMP She wants open borders, 550% [more Syrians]. If Russia and US got along and went after
ISIS that would be good.
TRUMP 1800 nuclear warheads and she's playing chicken.
CLINTON He's rather have a puppet
TRUMP You're the puppet
CLINTON You are willing to sign up for Putin's wish list. He has a clear favorite. We've never
had a foreign govt try to interfere. 17 agencies all conclude highest levels Russian
TRUMP SHe has no idea if it's Russia or China
CLINTON 17 agents sworn to protect
TRUMP Putin has outsmarted her every step of the way. In Syria–
W Even if you don't know who, do you condemn?
TRUMP Of course I condemn. If we were friends with Russian. Putin has outsmarted them at every
step of the way. All you have to do is look at the Middle East. We've spent six trillion dollars
and they've taken over the middle east
CLINTON I find it ironiic she's raised nuclear weapons since he's been cavalier. Bottom line
on nuclear weapons When President gives order it must be followed. 4 minutes between order and
launch. 10 people who had responsibility would not trust Turmp
TRUMP 200 generals endorse. As far as Japan and other countries, all I said is we have to renegotiate
[can't afford].
Look, she's been proven to be a liar in so many ways.
CLINTON US has kept the peace through our alliances. They've made us safer.
Clinton seemed to almost tear up a little when she heard a particularly damning salvo, as when
Wallace asked about Bill, and then she pivoted. Her wet eyes were a tell.
Both are really solidifying their anti-status quo and pro-status quo credentials. No one who
still professes to be undecided is going to be convinced beyond their own pre-conceived tendencies.
Trump says Wallace is "correct" (during his debt/bailout related question to Clinton), with
big grin/smirk, some laughter from audience at how he got that in there.
Clinton feels like she's on the defensive about her budget's ability to get the economy moving.
$hillary…has there ever been an economic crash anywhere in the world where the clowns who were
running the show/economy into the ground were allowed and continue to be allowed to run the show…??
usually it is off with their heads…even if it is symbolic…
Depends what you mean by "doing well". He's holding his own, getting in a good few zingers,
not losing it. She keeps going on and on and on and sounds more defensive, he's more confident.
Unless you also have right wing political commentators on your Twitter feed, you are suffering
from sample bias. The MSM is all in for Clinton. Ditto any political sites in the center and left
save the pretty far left ones like Counterpunch and Black Agenda Report, which are willing to
entertain the idea that Clinton is the more effective evil.
Now here is a different slice of sample bias: my only mother in law survey has been of the
guys in my gym. Upscale Upper East Side (I get a big break by having been a charter member 21
years ago). They chat at night like hens, even about their love lives (which is kinda cute, particularly
given that the youngest guy is in his late 30s). So I am highly confident that only one guy there
is right wing (and he's the only guy who knows what I do, he's a Zero Hedge reader with a classic
libertarian mindset). Most were Sanders voters.
They are all gonna vote for Trump, including one of the trainers (who is clearly of a lower-class
background from the way he speaks, and he is one of the Sanders supporters). And what surprises
me more is that they are wiling to say this out loud in this neighborhood (heavy Clinton supporters)
when there are women (besides me) within earshot.
Just sayin'.
Now Trump may indeed not be doing all that well, but my Twitter feed is dominated by journalists,
and I don't even need to look to tell you that they would declare Clinton the winner, as they
did in debates with Sanders when polls later deemed Sanders to have come out on top.
You said upscale. That kinda gives it away. My experience in this neighborhood is those with
higher incomes generally are in or near management and generally vote republican even though they
may have little idea of the issues. Sanders may have tickled their fancy but Hillary, after all,
is a felon. Right? It says so right here all over my FB.
Was not on twitter during debate so I don't know what it was like there but I thought he did
both well and horrifically, depending on when/what. He was decent at the infighting part (very
good at the non-policy infighting), not so good at the policy part (granted, he has to get the
horrible-at-policy base to turn out, and what will work for them will not work for me).
He actually did a good job pointing out real (and some possibly not-real, I dunno about some
of it) corruption. If his allegations were false, Clinton certainly didn't seem in a hurry to
make impossible to walk back flat denials.
Clinton was on her game to begin with and cleaning his clock, except when she went stupid/scary
w/the anti-Russia stuff, but her evasions were glaringly obvious in places and he got better the
first third of the debate.
Debate also started w/Supreme Court, which was the one area the Dems have always been able
to reliably scare people into voting for candidates they don't want. And choice, where HIllary
was great and Trump was awful. Rest of debate occasionally appeared to have been sponsored by
the Peterson Foundation.
If I can't say her red glassy eyes are red and glassy you can not have the donation I planned.
I'm disappointed in the moderation of this thread. Will not forget.
Now Trump is attacking her about losing $6 Billion from the State Department. Criticizes her
record, her "bad experience". Oh no she's going on about Children's Defense Fund again. But she's on the defensive. Trying
to build up her experience–the trouble is she hasn't really done much.
Her basic narrative is she is the single most qualified person in the history of things to
ever be deign to run for President and then she mumbles about one thing she did between being
a lawyer for Wal-Mart and the governor's wife. It's a terrible narrative. Oh, and being on the wrong side of every foreign policy decision
for 25 years.
Then of course, there are the weekly introductions to the real Hillary her crooked friends
really like.
CLINTON I want biggest jobs program since WWII. New jobs and clean energy [she goes all singsong
when emitting talking points.] Raise minimum wage, equal pay. You will not get a tuition bill
from public college or u if plan Sanders and I worked out. Most gains gone to the top, and the
rich will pay for their share. Plan analyzed by experts, would gain 10 million jobs. Trump tax
cuts trickle down economics on steroids, cost us jobs, lead to recession
TRUMP Her plan will raise and even double your taxes. The rest of the public will pay for her
tuition.
Start off where we left. Japan, South Korea, Saudi Arabia. They're very rich, why aren't they
paying? Since I questioned, they've all started to pay up. She says "We love our allies," but
that makes it hard for them to pay up. DUring his regime, deficit doubled.
Look at all the places I just left, our jobs have fled. I'm going to renegotiate NAFTA, and
if we can't, walk away. Bring offshore taxes back into the country
CLINTON Let me translate that if I can.
TRUMP You can't
CLINTON He wants tax cuts. I have said no tax increase $250K. He mentioned the debt. We went
from deficit to surplus. Obama has cut the deficit by two-third. One of the ways you create jobs
is by investing in people. We've tried cutting taxes on the weathy
W Your plan similar to Obama stim plan, slowest growth
TRUMP Corrent
W Is your plan a continuation of Obama stimulus plan?
CLINTON Never seen people as physically distraught as Bushies. Obama doesn't get credit he
deserves for hard decisions. I'm proposed we invest from the middle out and the ground up. My
proposal won't add a penny to the debt. We're beginning to see increasing wages.
W Trump, even conservative economists say your numbers don't add up?
TRUMP India is growing at 8%, China at 7%. We are growing at 1% and I think it's going down.
Is that the last jobs report before the election? I should win easily! We've lost our jobs, products
pouring in from all over the world. I pass factories that were thriving 20 years ago. It's horrible
what happened. She can say her husband did well. Now she wants to sign TPP. She lied when she
said it wasn't gold standard
CLINTON When I saw the TPP, I was against. There's only one of us that's shipped jobs to China
and that's Donald. I fought Chinese dumping steel, but Donald bought Chinese steel. Crocodile
tears!
TRUMP She's been doing this for 30 years, why the hell didn't she do it for the last 15 years?
You have experience over me, but it's bad experience. The problem is you talk and don't do anything.
At State, $6 billion dollars is missing. Where did it go?
CLINTON State Dept untrue and debunk. [Deploys Children's Defense Fund]. On the day I was in
the briefing room [watching OBL get whacked], he was on the Apprentice
TRUMP I think I did a better job. I built a phenomenal company with that million dollar loan.
Take a look at Syria, Look at ISIS. She and Obama created a vacuum. She gave us ISIS as sure as
you're sitting there.
NBC set up the Billy Bush tape, if that's what's being referred to. The Clintons set up the
big frontpage NYT 'accusers,' or whatever it was. The latter story was written by Haberman & Jonathan Martin, two of the Clinton campaign's favorite
hacks named in the Wikileaks emails. Interesting, no?
(PS. With all due respect to site policy it is not a certainty that the NYT allegations are
false, but they are certainly suspicious for the reason given.)
These agents provacateurs accusations against Clinton are quite plausible (hey, they were on
PBS Newshour) even if the source is shady. They just feel very Clintonesque.
There is a lot of evidence dug up by reddit amateur investigators after the tape leaked. They
found people on the tape in a few protest videos as well as a woman on the Clinton payroll. I
don't trust the voter fraud tape at all, but the inciting violence at riots tapes looks like the
real deal.
They go along well with the shots fired into and the burglary/ransacking of Sander's Nevada
campaign headquarters, and the firebombings of Republican campaign offices in swing states.
Clinton is calling out Trump's criticism of women, their appearance, etc. She's on stronger
ground here. Now she's losing it again, word soup about what our country is. Why can't she stay
on a topic? She keeps weakening her points by going on and saying nothing. Making America great
again. Using his memes.
Trump saying no one respects women more than here.
Now he's bringing up her emails. What happened to the FBI, he asks? Talks about 1 guy getting
4 yrs in jail for 1 lie to the FBI, a 4-star general, but she makes hundreds of lies.
Hillary did not respond to Trump's charge that she paid for people to riot in Chicago before
his rally. Instead she began to speak very slowly to eat up her time.
Wallace asks her questions about Foundation, donation. Wallace is nervous. (When questioning
Trump, he uses a different tone – he's not as scared, he's more deprecating.)
Wallace is pressing her more on pay to play. Trump says it's a criminal enterprise, Saudi &
Qatar giving lots of money. They kill women & treat them horribly, push gays off buildings, but
Clinton takes their money. He says she should give their money back. He says in Haiti they hate
Clinton, what the foundation did was a disgrace.
Clinton claims they spend 90% of donations on their programs. (Pinocchio moment, anyone?)
Trump talks about his foundation, 100% used. Wallace asks if the money was used to pay his
debts. Trump says it went to building houses for veterans and disabled.
Clinton says we won't know cuz he won't release his tax returns, so we can't prove anything.
She claims her tax returns reveal something. (Ha ha ha ha–Clinton Foundation docs don't reveal
much.)
Trump says Clinton should have changed the law, she gets lots of money. He mentions his beautiful
hotel and she says again "built with Chinese steel", audience laughs. Wallace asks Trump about rigged election, will he commit to accept the result of the election,
he says he'll look at it at the time.
Media dishonest & corrupt, NYT wrote about it, poisoned the minds of voters but he thinks people
can see through it.
Voter roles – people on the register who shouldn't be.
the fbi did a one year investigation or a three day cover up…? but the question or statement was the transition of power… donald…just respond since he is not in power there is no issue here
W Grabbing women. Nine came forward, said you groped them. Why would so many women all make
up these stories, and Clinton, what your husband, was that worse?
TRUMP Debunked. I think she made them come forward. My rally in Chicago violent because them.
I didn't even apologize to my wife, sitting right here, bc I didn't do it. I don't know why. I
believe she got these people to step forward, or 10 minutes of fame. Lies or fiction
CLINTON At the last debate, we heard what Donald did. Others come forward. He went on to say
"Look at her." Donald thins belittling women makes him bigger. So we now know how Donald thinks
of women. That's who Donald is. It's up to all of us to say who we are. We want to celebrate our
diveristy. America is great because America is good….
TRUMP Nobody has more respect for women than I do. I want to talk about something slightly
different. What isn't fictionalized are her emails, where she destroyed 33K emails after getting
a subpoena. We have a general going to jail for 1 lie. She's A four star general. And she gets
away with it, and she can run for President.
CLINTON Every time Donald is pushed, he goes for denying responsibility. [Kahn, McCain…] It's
not onte thing, it's a pattern of divisiness, a dark vision where he incites violence at his rallies.
TRUMP So sad when she talks about violence at my rallies when she incites it!
W Clinton, in 2009 you promised to avoid appearance of Clinton with CF. Can you really say
you kept your pledge? WHy is this not "pay to play"
CLINTON Everything I did in furtherance of our country. CF is a world-renowned charity. 11M
get HIV treatment. We have made environment
W The question went to pay to play
TRUMP It's a criminal enterprise. Saudis gave millinos. These are people who kill gays. Why
don't you give back the money? In Little Haiti and they hate the Clintons because of what the
CF did in Clinton
CLINTON Happy to compare to Donald's foundation, portrait. Haiti is the poorest country. CF
raised 30 million. We're going to keep working to help.
TRUMP They don't want your help.
CLINTON Hasn't released his tax returns, so we don't know anything about his charities. Half
of all immigrants actually pay income taxes
TRUMP We're entitled to depreciate because of laws you passed. Most of her donors have done
what I did. You should have changed the law when you were a Senator. But you want change the law
because you've taken so much ad. I sat there and watched ad after ad after ad paid for by your
friends on Wall Street
W Trump, warned election rigged. Pence pledges will accept, Ivanka said will accept.
TRUMP I will look at it at the time. What I've seen is so bad. The media is so corrupt and
the pile-on is so amazing. If you look at your voter rolls you will see millions that are registered
to vote that shouldn't be. She's guilty of a serious crime and should not be allowed be to run.
In that respect it's rigged!
W A tradition is the peaceful transition of power. The country comes together.
TRUMP What I'm saying is that I'll tell you at the time.
CLINTON Donald always says everything was rigged. Trump U, claims judge is rigged. There was
even a time he didn't an Emmy three times. This is mindset, it's how he things. Funny but troubling.
We've been around 240 years, we've had free and fair elections [!!!!!]. Obama said, when you're
whining, you're not up to doing the job! He is denigrating, talking down to our democracy. I am
appalled.
TRUMP What the FBI did and the Justice did, including meeting with the AG on the tarmac in
Arizona, is a disgrace.
IF only Clinton would use her moments of impassioned rhetoric to talk about doing things for
the American people rather than pushing to shame Trump or defending the FBI… Now back to droning Clinton on protecting soldiers and conflict in Syria (yawn)
Clinton says we have a lot of work to do. Syria etc. We have to keep our eye on ISIS, we need
an "intelligence surge". Continue to push for no fly zone and gain leverage on Syrian gov't and
the Russians to bring the conflict to an end.
Trump – we had Mosul, she left, her fault. No secrecy, people talking about Mosul for 3 months. Clinton wants to look good for the election. The leaders we wanted to get (in Mosul) are all gone. Iran is taking over Iraq, we've made it easy for them. We'll take Mosul and Iran will benefit.
I do have to say without Trump in this election
the lid would not have been blown off the criminality
of the government in Washington. Mouthing off about it all the time every chance he gets. Not that Trump will do anything to change it.
But still.
Oh I don't know. I thought that when Trump pointed out the objective fact that Hillary is a
criminal who should be in prison right now rather than running for president that was pretty much
all that needed to be said for him to win.
To Americans of either side who are sick of our failed foreign policy and wondering whether
it's intentionally duplicitous, yah, I think it's a winner. Keep reading, you'll see.
Hillary sticking to technicals and official truths – "FBI cleared me after a year-long investment";
"Google Trump Iraq – all these sources" etc. If she can validate it, it must be true!
Trump, on the other hand, is winging it with "homebaked" truths – some bald lies, some half-truths,
some actual truths. However, if it resonates with the gut feeling of enough people, it is much
better basis for argument than pure technicality.
She just giggled after calling him the most dangerous man to have ever run for the Presidency.
Wtf.
Wallace says Aleppo has fallen, Trump says it's still there, still happening. Wallace sounds
shaky. Trump again "it's so sad". Says Assad is tougher than Clinton & Obama. Says it's our fault
Iran is powerful, we gave them bundles of cash, $1.7 Billion.
We're backing the rebels, but we don't know who the rebels are. If they ever did overthrow
Assad, they might end up with something worse than Assad. Causes Great Migration, in many cases
they are ISIS-aligned, great Trojan horse, "Thanks a lot Hillary for doing a great job."
Trump is kicking butt. Stein or Trump…
Can't stomach Bill in the WH again.
Even though I'm in CA, and should vote Stein; what if, Trump gets the majority???
Wallace asks Clinton about no fly zone, risk of starting a war. She says those are genuine
risks, but thinks she could "strike a deal".
Re: refugees, they will be vetted, but not close our doors, that boy with blood coming down
his face is haunting. Orlando Pulse Nightclub killer born in Queens just like Donald. (Wow that's
a low blow.)
Clinton: This great country of America is good because greatness of our good people. I don't
believe that Donald has greatness good enough for America because of his ungood comments about
women reporters I've disabled in defense of Children's Defense Fund. That's not the kind of double
plus goodness of America I want to fight for.
Trump: I have the highest regard for all overweight and disabled women. Always have. I will
let them speak for my successes. But Hillary is trying to distract from emails. Lots of generals
are in prison for breaking security but the FBI has to look the other way, because 6 billion is
lost in Syria and there is no action. I will renegotiate the Missouri Compromise, and the Louisiana
Purchase if I have to. They were bad deals for America's workers, and I have a lot of money.
W If we push ISIS out, you put troops into that vacuum?
CLINTON I am encouraged there is an effort by Iraq in Syria. Will not support American troops
"as an occupying force" [ZOMG, the lawerly parsing!] Hopeful that the hard work military advisors.
Intelligence surge… I'm going to continue to push for a no-fly zone. Need serious negotation to
bring conflict to an end.
TRUMP I've been reading about Mosul for three months. What about the element of surprise? They've
all left. Why are we doing it? So she can look tough for the election. So Mosul is going to be
a wonderful thing, and Iran should write us a letter of thanks.
CLINTON Once again, Donald is implying he dind't support Iraq. I just want everybody to Google
"Donald Trump Iraq" and you can hear the audio [thank you Eric Schmidt]. What's really important
is to understand all the interplay. We need to go after the leadership, "get rid of them" in Mosul,
then move on to Rakka. I'm amazed to see Donald thinks all these governments [colluded to elect
me].
TRUMP Wikileaks. Podesta said some horrible things about you and boy was he right. "Terrible
instincts." Sanders "bad judgment" I agree with both.
CLINTON Sanders says you're the most dangerous person to run and I think he's right
W Aleppo? Said some wrong things about Alepp
TRUMP It's a disaster
W ALso said Syria and Russia fighting ISIS but they've been been bombing.
TRUMP By fighting Assad, he was tougher and smarter than her and Obama. Now he's aligned with
Russia, and Iran, who we made stronger. They don't want ISIS. We're backing rebels. We don't know
who the rebels are. If the rebels overthrow Assad, could be worse. If she did nothing, we would
be better off. And she caused the Great Migration. What 'til you see what happens. Lots of luck
Hillary. Great job
W No-fly, Obama has refused to do. What if a Russian plane violates, shoot it down?
CLINTON I am aware of the legitimate concerns you have expressed. I think we could strike a
deal and make it clear that this was something in the best interests of people on the ground.
I am not going to get anybody into the country not vetted. Picture of the 4-year-old haunting.
We have [Doesn't answer about shooting the plane down]
TRUMP Had a ceasefire, Russia took over land, ceasefire ends. We are so outplayed by Putin
and Assad and Iran. Nobody can believe how stupid our leadership is.
Trump says ISIS never should have happened. No one can believe how stupid our leadership is. (He's probably right about that. Can't imagine what foreigners make of this crazy election.)
Four years ago I would have been surprised to see that the rhetoric and tactics are quite similar
to those frequently employed in Indian politics; I somehow thought that the developed, Enlightened
West would be above that. The thing that surprises me is not the abysmal quality of the candidates,
but the attitude of Americans towards this election.
They are much better informed than their
developing world counterparts and much better (or longer) educated – on average. And yet, they
are either enthusiastic for their candidate or unable to grasp just how truly broken their political
system is. They joke about it, post memes and get self-righteous on social media and in-person,
but they seem to have little to no concern about what it means in the big picture. They have no
willingness to be open-mindedness (although all of them worship the innovation and out-of-the-box
thinking of Silicon Valley and Steve Jobs) and consider points of view that may not align with
their preferences. As you may have guessed, I live on a University campus – which is not representative
of the USA, but is definitely the pool of people from which the "future leaders of the free world"
are expected to be drawn. I am not enthusiastic about that prospect.
This then, to me, is perhaps the most disappointing aspect of life in America and the most clarifying
aspect of this election.
Trump "I'm going to create the kind of country we used to be".
[Well God save us from someone who wants to take us backwards.]
We have to use our great people. We will create an economic machine, the likes of which we
haven't seen in many decades, companies that will grow and expand and start from new.
Trump occasionally emits MMT-like sounds, but I'm not sure that he believes them. For example,
he has previously accurately noted that US can't be forced to default on USD-denominated debt,
since it prints its own currency. Then he suggested that we could reduce the outstanding debt
by negotiating down the price of previously issued Treasury bonds (not sure the details; perhaps
threaten to default, hammer the price by terrifying bond-holders, and buy the depressed price
bonds.)
At other times Trump has criticized the level of debt, for example the fact that the nominal
public debt doubled under Obama (after doubling under Bush II, it must be admitted). It appears
to me that Trump favors lower nominal debt as a good thing in itself, without consideration of
the effect of lowering the debt on other sectors.
I'm not confident that Trump actually believes any MMT principles.
OTOH, I'm pretty confident that HRC rejects MMT completely. She boasts of WJC's surpluses,
for example. She evidently doesn't know elementary accounting facts such as the sectoral balances
identity.
back in 1987…he basically said then what he says now…because her beltway buddies have been
doing fine since 1987….the folks in youngstown ohio and johnstown pennsylvania….not so much…
Clinton criticizes a $100,000 ad Trump took out in 1987 criticizing things.
Clinton says she doesn't add a penny to the national debt. How we'll pay for education, infrastructure,
get prescription drug costs down–ask wealthy & corporations to pay their fair share, it won't
diminish growth.
We have to get back to building the middle class, I want to invest in you. (wonder who she
means by that)
Trump–"we've heard this before" He says he disagreed with Reagan on trade.
Wallace on entitlements, 60% of the budget, neither one has a plan to deal with this.
Trump – says cut taxes, grow the economy. Repeal & replace Obamacare, it's destroying out businesses.
It'll probably die of his own weight, premiums going up 70 80 100%. He says Clinton wants to make
it worse.
I don't understand how people accepted referring to SS and Medicare as "entitlements".
T: Obamacare has to go – increase in premiums – bad health care at most exp. price.
W: Same question: will you +taxes /-benefits to save SS?
C: I want to increase benefits for those who have been disadvantaged.
ACA extended solvency of Medicare Trust Fund. Have to get costs down, increase value (???), emphasize
wellness.
Wallace's question is really limiting the framing of the question about benefits, taxes, entitlements.
No room in his world for MMT or any kind of non-austerity approach.
W Clinton debt/GRP ratio to 86% and debt to 105%. Why aren't you dealing with the problem?
TRUMP They're wrong, because I'm going to create jobs. We could get to 1% growth to 5%. Have
business people not political hacks making trade deals. We will create an economic machine like
we haven't seen for decades. People will get back to work
CLINTON When did he think the country was great? Trump has been criticizing our government
for decades. He was criticizing President Reagan. To the debt, I won't add a penny to the debt.
We are going where the money is. Ask the rich and corps to pay their fair share. What economists
call "middle-out growth" [they do?]
TRUMP I disagreed with Reagan on trade. Now we're going to do it right.
W Biggest driver is entitlements, neither has a serious plan on Medicare and Social Security
running out of money?
Would President Trump do a Grand Bargain?
TRUMP Cutting taxes and grow economy. Repeal and replace ObamaCare. It's probably going to
die of its own weight. Premiums. "Bad health care at the most expensive price."
CLINTON I am on record as saying we need to put more money in SS Trust Fund, taxing rich, assuming
Donald doesnt' get out of them.
TRUMP Such a nasty woman
CLINTON I will not cut benefits. I want to enhance benefits for poor and women who have been
disadvantages.
Wallace gives them each 1 minute closing statement why they should be elected.
Clinton- everyone watching, I'm reaching out to everyone to help make our country what it should
be, make it fairer for everyone, we need your talents, energy, ambition. (Yeah she'll suck out
our energy for sure.) I'll stand up for your interests against powerful corporations. (Really???)
Trump–she's raising money from the people she wants to control. I'll take care of veterans
better than our immigrants. Law & order. Take care of everyone. I'll take better care of African
Americans & Latinos, better than she could do in a hundred years. We can't take 4 more years of
Barack Obama and that is what we would get with her.
CLINTON Reaching out to all Americans because we need everybody to make country what it should
be. I've been privileges to see presidency up close. I will stand up for families against powerful
interests, good jobs, rising incomes. Hope give me a chance to server.'
TRUMP She's raising money from people she wants to control. It doesn't work that way. Military,
police, law and order and justice. Inner cities a disaster. I will do more for AAs than she can
do in ten lifetimes. We are going to make America great again. We cannot take four more years
of Obama and that's what you get with her.
In the immortal words once electronically presented here on NC….
"Because neo-liberalism. Because I like the idea, a lot, of catching the Mount Pelerin Society,
Pinochet, Diane Rehm, the Friedmans, Joe Biden, Rush Limbaugh, and the people who drafted the
Democratic platform in one big net, and then deep-sixing the entire squirming and gesticulating
political class with language that's "exceptionally bloggy and aggressively casual and implicitly
ironic."
Whats that thingy again about being oblivious about irony…. oh yeah….
Excessive examples
Irony is the fact that Paul Wolfowitz gave his girlfriend a pay raise during an anti-corruption
drive by the World Bank.
Irony is that the drummer of ZZ Top, Frank Beard, is the only beardless member of the band.
Irony is that former Penn State coach and convicted sex offender Jerry Sandusky wrote an autobiography
in 2001 called Touched[wp] …and no one thought anything of it.[3]
Irony is that General David Petraeus' mistress biographer Paula Broadwell wrote a book in January
2012 called All In[wp] …and no one thought anything of it.[4]
Irony is the fact that Sax Rohmer, who did much to popularize the Yellow Peril with the Fu
Manchu series, died from the Asian flu.
Irony is that a military that costs six times more than its Chinese counterpart couldn't kill
one frail, kidney-failing terrorist in a timeframe longer than WWI and WWII combined.[5]
Irony is the fact that evil gummint-control of everything socialist countries have the highest
standards of living and political freedoms available on the planet.[6] They also place highly
on The Ease of Doing Business Index,[7] with socialist New Zealand, Denmark and Norway even topping
the US.
Irony is the fact that the Bush administration patriotically took away our rights in the name
of defending our rights. – snip
Media all freaking out about the "respect the results of the election" question. Strange that
nobody has brought up Al Gore - it certainly would have been better for the country if Al had
pushed harder in 2000.
And Podesta is claiming it was a "low moment" for Trump that he said he'd wait and see. Why should anyone accept results in advance with so much election rigging past & present?
Podesta again talks about "a dark place"–same wording Clinton used. That must be the new meme.
Wow ABC, the elections ain't rigged but Russia hacked them?! Make up your damned minds already,
this is more schizophrenia in a single sentence than I can handle…
#Breaking: Trump's lead advisor Roger Ailes has left the Trump campaign.
According to reports: "[Fox] said the pair had a falling out, with both sides saying debate prep had not gone the
way they wanted.
The report came just hours before Wednesday's third presidential debate in Las Vegas, where Trump
will try to dig out of a recent polling hole.
The report said that Ailes had concerns that Trump could not focus and that preparation would
be a "waste of time," while Trump thought Ailes spent too much prep time telling old stories."
The statements re: wikileaks no doubt were discussed, and Ailes couldn't support that. Has Trump been to enough shitty mid-western and southern towns with empty factories and had
an epiphany? Perhaps he's not just going to throw the election to H->
Nothing we didn't know before. She's a corrupt, lying warmonger with a record of policy debacles.
He's a stew of conservative talking points and failed policy nostrums, personal behaviors perhaps
no worse than many other billionaires, spiced with occasional sharp perceptions. Neither of them
are nice people. I wouldn't want to have a beer with him, and if I had coffee with her, I'd be
sure to bring a taster.
Tactically, Trump did well (although the Beltway is going to go nuts on Putin and Trump not
rolling over for a stolen election* like Gore did). If Trump had brought his game to this level
in debates one and two, he'd be a lot closer.
NOTE * Not that Trump is correct to say that voter fraud is significant; that's one of the
many conservative talking points that are just wrong.
I would have gone along with you on that a few days ago. However please explain why Democrats
are systematically engaging in election fraud, as proven by videos over the past two days, if
it has no impact. I changed my opinion on this subject specifically because of these videos by
the way.
Problem is that if Trump calls out election fraud, he won't be understood by his base, who
for various reasons prefer to believe that elections are rigged by busloads of sweaty brown people
with fake ID's rather than by a well-dressed white man sitting at a computer.
It really seemed both were focused on appealing to their tribes and not much else. There certainly
appeared to be no attempt to reach "undecideds" or independents. Maybe because internal polls show they are mostly staying home or voting third party? So no
point (al la CNN changing 3Rd party to "undecideds"). Basically, scare your tribe into showing up to vote, but only your tribe. Not even a passing
shout out to independents on positions (except trump on Russia)
Just in terms of tone, whenever Clinton says something appalls her, it makes me think "Gee,
that might be a good idea!" Not that it is, but that's my reaction at this point.
I watched a prime time show (on my computer) recently and noted it had a several second shot
of a street sign named Clinton that had no bearing whatsoever to the story. (Having become a cynic
during this election, I now notice small things like that)
Swell. Subliminal messaging it seems, since apparently all the in-your-face-naming
('Clinton, Clinton'!) wasn't judged to be sufficient.
The Clinton dynasty needs to be brought down asap. Their grip and influence is even more than
most realize, I suspect.
I thought Trump did pretty well, said more about "jobs" than Clinton, which is usually a smart
move. Not a lot of specifics. Closing minute was a flop though. Clinton spent far too long accusing Russian hackers, which she can't substantiate, and people
care less about than the content of the leaked information.
Clinton also tried too hard to show she's knowledgeable about foreign policy getting too far
into the weeds on Middle East strategy, so basically talking over the heads of most people. Her
closing statement was pretty good and well rehearsed (has she used this elsewhere?)
And Hillary, do you promise then not to rig the elections with your allies like you did the
Democratic primaries? "Bernie Sanders will not be a factor in N.J." 9/22/2015.
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/9846
But what does this really mean? It sounds like state-party politics in-speak but I am not certain
I understand what is being said. Here's the fuller quote from the email you link to:
"Presently the Chair has given the line to Hillary in 20 of the 21 counties which only assures
that Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders will not be a factor in N.J. Also, all of the major city mayors
are aligned with us as well."
Could mean lots of things, not all of them shady, no?
Biggest muffed issue: Wallace asks Clinton if she'd shoot down a Russian plane that violated her no-fly zone. Clinton dodges, Wallace does not press her, Trump does not press her either. "No, Hillary,
I'm anxious to know. How badly do you want a new war, this time with Russia?" or some such.
That is why i think trump lost. He cannot afford to miss those opportunities. I've got a few
beers in me so i'm missing dodges. Trump should have smelled blood and hammered those dodges.
He only picked at her over the 'open borders'
I stand by my opinion of chris wallace being the best and this is really awkward but fox has
great post-debate commentary. Am i just wasted? I swear they really are being fair and balanced.
Maybe they are doing their job because of their mixed feelings on trump?
Fox is probably more free to push Clinton because their networks of political access are less
tied to her campaign than all the other outlets, who seem scared shitless of being thought to
cause the slightest embarrassment for her. One upside to her presidency will be watching Wolf
Blitzer and Chuck Todd try to outdo one another like two beaten dogs in performing the requisite
rituals of submission.
I thought the questions in this debate were better then the last one. The answers from the
candidates were still mostly hot air. How many nanoseconds would a President Clinton need to decide
she actually likes trade agreements and Wall Street giveaways and the resulting contributions
after all? I liked that fact that Trump was calling out Clinton on her miserable record, even
though his facts/critique often seemed garbled/superficial. I was also glad he was questioning
the validity of our elections, although his reasons sounded wrong. I found Wallace's suggestion
that questions of election fraud should be ignored for the sake of unity disturbing. When a journalist
says something like this you have to wonder what crimes they are covering up in their own reporting
for "unity". I agreed with Clinton that Trump's economic and immigration plans are bogus nonsense.
If Trump becomes president I expect his truth-telling will end. As an outsider, speaking "truth
to power" helps him nut it would hurt him as an insider.
5. The private sector cannot consistently generate sufficient demand to create jobs for
everyone who wants one. As technology and productivity have increased, so it has become more
difficult. Entrepreneurs cannot be blamed for adding self-checkout lanes, they have families
and stockholders. But it means the store can sell the same volume of output with fewer employees–unemployment
therefore rises. (For more, see "Why the Private Sector NEEDS the Government to Spend Money.")
Hence, we need the public sector to spend in deficit so that a.) the private sector can
net save and b.) jobs are created to supplement those generated by the market system. And it
creates neither a default risk nor inflation–unless we are already at full-employment, which
means we don't need to be spending that much in the first place! It is noteworthy that when,
in the midst of the Great Depression, the government decided to try to reduce the deficit,
unemployment jumped from 14% (after having fallen from nearly 25%) to 19%. Once WWII hit, however,
any worries about government spending went right out the window and unemployment plummeted
to 1.9%. There's no reason we can't be there right now. Only bad policy can stand in our way.
I may have to re-watch to make sure I have this right, but I was shocked that Chris Wallace
said it would be 2-minute answers and then 10 minutes of free discussion.
But, with the first topic about the Constitution, after the 2-minute answers, he immediately
asked Clinton a question about partial-birth abortion …. wth did that come from? I have not heard
either candidate talking much about this … Trump has been tongue-tied about that earlier in the
year, and it's not one of his big points, anyway. Now, watching the C-Span post-debate calls,
people are harranguing Clinton for wanting to kill babies in the days before birth, when she wouldn't
do anything to touch Roe v. Wade, so it's a false issue. That didn't come from Trump; it came
from the moderator!!!!!
I feel the whole debate as sandbagged at that point, and it freed the topic about women to
get pivoted to Russia.
"... To this day, I am dumbfounded that the Trump campaign has never used "We came, we saw, he died!" or "What difference, at this point, does it make?" against Clinton. To not replay these gaffes over and over again is quite possibly the worst case of political amateurism I have ever seen. ..."
"... At least Trump *started,* however haltingly, to put the Washington foreign policy consensus under scrutiny. That was a small but unprecedented step for a major-party presidential candidate. ..."
"... This election has focused so (word removed by author) much on scandals about foundations and emails and groping and "OMG he said this" and "OMG she said that" that there's no room left to talk about actual policy. ..."
"... Trump is leading a voice desperate to be heard and needing to be heard, but he's the worst man for the job. ..."
"... His record and past is incredibly flawed and wide open to character attacks. This allowed Clinton to pivot every question she didn't like right into a character issue. Free trade issues? Trump used illegal Chinese Steel. Taxes? Trump never paid any. Jobs? Trump hires illegals and doesn't pay his contractors. Foreign policy? Trump worships Putin and wants to nuke and grab all the oil. So on so on. ..."
"... the folks of TAC and other conservative areas have plenty of good ideas of how he could do it, Trump doesn't do it. He just makes the same generic insults ("she's a disaster, it's a disaster, everything is a disaster, and everyone is smarter too") but beyond the initial quote-worthy line he doesn't press hard on specifics nor does he focus on enough specifics on what makes him better. ..."
"... Clinton is a candidate that started out with a lot of flaws and very low support from her base. A strong Republican Candidate would've either forced Clinton to clean up her act and pivot more into a populist stance or resulted in a stronger Democratic primary due to a desperate need to put up a more electable contender to follow up on Obama. ..."
"... Trump was put up as an alternative to Clinton. And after we saw him a hawkish extremely pro-life perfect example of "typical politician" with a lot of skeletons doesn't seem all that bad anymore. ..."
"... Look at this and tell me all he ways Trump is demonstrating his blatantly obvious dementia. Wandering speech. Inability to concentrate. Irrelevant replies to specific questions. Inability to remember his own talking points. Inability to recognize the meaning of what is said to him and around him. Inability to distinguish fact from fancy, his own fantasies from reality. The man is senile. ..."
"... let's remember that the three biggest crackpots in the primaries – Carson, Cruz, and Trump – got more than 60% of the votes. So, before we go around trying to make ourselves feel better by telling ourselves that, without Trump, everything would have been fine, just imagine what a disaster the GOP would be facing if Ted Cruz were the nominee. ..."
"... The alternative to Trump wasn't Rubio the lightweight, Jeb the retread, or Kasich. It was Cruz. Just ruminate on that a bit. ..."
"... Clinton lied through her teeth on the issue of the Clinton Foundation; which she made sound like God's personal charity. He didn't lay a glove on her on that issue. Why? ..."
"... As a Christian, I find Hillary Clinton unacceptable. I also find Donald Trump unacceptable. I think most people who are not Christians feel the same way. 2016 is a loss for everyone. ..."
"... Our republic– I'm sorry, our oligarchy - is in bad shape. But to the debate: The election isn't rigged if you are such an idiot that you are clearly losing it by your own fault. ..."
"... Cruz pokes all sorts of people (including people he needs as allies and voters) in their eyes, repeatedly, and then tells them it's for their own good, when it's perfectly apparent that his ego is so needy he will abandon his principles when the right opportunity arises (viz his endorsement of Trump as Trump looked likely to overtake HRC). ..."
"... Rubio is an empty suit for the Israel-Saudi Arabia neocon set. ..."
"... Because Cruz is a Dominist. Meaning he specifically wants to establish a Christian theocracy in America and thinks he was sent by God to create it. Claiming that the first amendment only applies to Christians is so antithetical to the American foundation it scares this even of us who dont share his beliefs. ..."
"... Foreign Policy is an area where Trump could have scored some points on Hillary Clinton's rather flawed record, Libya, Syria, etc. However, Trump is so undisciplined and unfocused that he failed to really nail her. ..."
"... On top of all of this, the Republican Party is fractured between the GOP Establishment and the GOP Base. The GOP Base strongly supports Trump, the the GOP Establishment is weak at best. Indeed, many of the GOP elite, such as the Bush Family cannot stand him and refuse to support him. ..."
"... He knew the question about his accepting the outcome of the election should he lose was going to come up, and he know he could only hurt himself by the answer he gave. He intentionally shot himself in the foot, once again. ..."
The
third presidential debate was arguably the most substantive of the general election, but that
wasn't a high bar to clear. It was also probably Trump's best performance against Clinton, but it
still wasn't nearly good enough to close the gap between them. His
refusal to say simply that he would accept the result of the election became the main takeaway
from the debate and the banner headline in practically every newspaper. Trump was very likely to
lose the election anyway at this point, but he seems determined to lose it in a way that will bring
even more discredit on him and his supporters. He managed to overshadow everything else he said during
the debate with that one answer, and anything else he said–for good or ill–will receive very little
attention. Since Trump was already trailing Clinton going into the debate, the onus was on him to
score a clear victory. He did not, and he missed his last major chance to make the election more
competitive. That failure is his, and no one else did it to him.
Clinton was forced to dodge questions about donors to the Clinton Foundation and her support for
a "no-fly zone" in Syria, but that was the result of tough questioning from the moderator. Her answers
to these questions were woefully inadequate and evasive, but her opponent didn't take advantage of
them. Trump never really managed to get the better of Clinton the entire night, and he tended to
ramble aimlessly in response to questions that might have worked to his advantage. On more than one
occasion, he ended up railing against the nuclear deal with Iran in response to questions that had
nothing to do with it. This not only kept him from giving a coherent answer to the questions he was
asked, but it also showed how heavily he relied on discredited hawkish talking points when he ran
into difficulty. At one point, Trump tried to attack Clinton over New START, which he laughably called
"the start-up." Even if there had been merit to Trump's criticism, he made such a hash of it as to
make his attack useless.
The result of all this was that Clinton was able to escape scrutiny of most of her record. She
was never asked to defend her support for the Libyan war, nor did she really have to answer for anything
else that she did as Secretary of State. Once again, her opponent didn't know enough to know how
to use her record against her. Despite her poor record on foreign policy, Clinton was able to get
off almost completely scot-free.
"The result of all this was that Clinton was able to escape scrutiny of most of her record. She
was never asked to defend her support for the Libyan war, nor did she really have to answer for
anything else that she did as Secretary of State."
Yes. I would have expected this if Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush had been the GOP nominee, but I
truly expected better from Trump.
To this day, I am dumbfounded that the Trump campaign has never used "We came, we saw, he died!"
or "What difference, at this point, does it make?" against Clinton. To not replay these gaffes
over and over again is quite possibly the worst case of political amateurism I have ever seen.
Just think back to 2008: one of the Obama campaign's most devastating tactics was to constantly
remind voters of McCain's "The fundamentals of the economy are strong" gaffe.
The GOP had a golden opportunity this year. Clinton is an incredibly flawed candidate. Yet
the GOP blew it by nominating a bad person who is totally unqualified to be President. My only
consolation is that Rubio or Bush would have been even worse candidates than Trump… and probably
worse Presidents than Clinton.
At least Trump *started,* however haltingly, to put the Washington foreign policy consensus
under scrutiny. That was a small but unprecedented step for a major-party presidential candidate.
Hopefully, it will pave the way for a more serious, profound, and systematic critique of the Washington
consensus from a major-party candidate in the future. Right now, I don't see who that could possibly
be, but then I never imagined Trump would ever actually throw his hat into the ring, much less
win the GOP nomination.
Firstly, let me start up with a suggestion for the country: Figure out a way to clone Wallace
twice and have each one of them run a debate. The only reason why this debate actually had a bit
of meat to it is because of what Wallace put into it and I loved how he kept both candidates feet
on the fire while actually letting them debate and go after each other at times.
The problem is that he had far too many issues to go over and not enough time to do it. This
election has focused so (word removed by author) much on scandals about foundations and emails
and groping and "OMG he said this" and "OMG she said that" that there's no room left to talk about
actual policy. That's part of the problem.
The main part, though, is Trump. Not his original platform, which I've repeatedly said is appealing
(even if I disagree with a good portion of it, it brings points of discussion that need to be
addressed) or his voter base (some of which are crazy, but as we've seen, the crazies of the democrats
are also fully active). Trump is leading a voice desperate to be heard and needing to be heard,
but he's the worst man for the job.
His record and past is incredibly flawed and wide open to character attacks. This allowed Clinton
to pivot every question she didn't like right into a character issue. Free trade issues? Trump
used illegal Chinese Steel. Taxes? Trump never paid any. Jobs? Trump hires illegals and doesn't
pay his contractors. Foreign policy? Trump worships Putin and wants to nuke and grab all the oil.
So on so on.
Of course you can do similar against Hillary and she's just as open. But while the folks of TAC and other conservative areas have plenty of good ideas of how he could do it, Trump doesn't
do it. He just makes the same generic insults ("she's a disaster, it's a disaster, everything
is a disaster, and everyone is smarter too") but beyond the initial quote-worthy line he doesn't
press hard on specifics nor does he focus on enough specifics on what makes him better. Or he's
hitting points that hurt him more than help. He based his claim that Clinton wants open boarders
on immigration on a wikileaks document that was about energy policy? He's attacking the Clinton
Foundation while holding a similarly shady Foundation of his own?
Though really all of this is moot since he tends to take ALL of the air out of the room with
talking points that have nothing to do with Clinton's policy issues or his benefits on policy
but are all about Trump. I take note that everyone, from the analysis after the debate to the
news sites to even TAC's first point to bring up about the debate was Trump's answer when asked
if he'll respect the results of the election. He could've spent the entire debate pinning Clinton
to the wall with a powerful performance and it'll all be useless because:
"Trump won't commit to accepting election results if he loses"
is the big takeaway.
And that's why I cringed when I saw what Republicans were selecting during the primaries. It
wasn't just because Trump is Trump, but also because a weak Republican candidate results in a
weak Democratic candidate that wins anyway. Clinton is a candidate that started out with a lot
of flaws and very low support from her base. A strong Republican Candidate would've either forced
Clinton to clean up her act and pivot more into a populist stance or resulted in a stronger Democratic
primary due to a desperate need to put up a more electable contender to follow up on Obama.
But we got Trump. Which, I remind myself, was still the best option from the primary (given
that Rand Paul fell off a cliff somehow). And because we got Trump THIS is the election we got.
Honestly the folks I feel worst about are his voting base, and I mean in a "I feel for your
loss" way. It's full of people who are either losing their way of life, such as blue collars that
used to be in manufacturing, and those who fear they are going to lose it, such as the evangelicals.
They have real issues, and this election realized their party isn't going to solve them, so they
looked for an alternative that would help.
And they got someone who, after wooing them by showing how little he's related to the GOP,
spent all his time with a horribly managed campaign, attacks that don't hold water even when they
are valid, presents enough material to easily feed a political media hungry for viewers, and who
pivots to become more like the GOP when he needs to get to specifics.
It's like Samsung and Apple. Apple brings out an expensive, disliked phone, Samsung decides
to throw a phone thinking "any phone will do that's not Apple." and now not only did it blow up
in their face but the public isn't as bothered about a phone with no headphone jack.
And so here. Trump was put up as an alternative to Clinton. And after we saw him a hawkish
extremely pro-life perfect example of "typical politician" with a lot of skeletons doesn't seem
all that bad anymore. Perhaps she also needs an election win rivaling Reagan and supreme court
slot left open just for her and her newly minted Democratic Senate?
I would say "perhaps this will result in a better, more reasonable, and stronger Republican
party come next time" but I said that in 2008 with McCain. And instead I get Trump.
So I don't know. Maybe folks like me who are left-of-center will be considered conservatives
now after this Left-shift is over. I'm already on the TAC more than I'm in the more leftward sites.
But if there's still hope for the current Right in 2020, please PLEASE, no more "anyone buts".
And seriously. Wallace Clones. 10 of them. THAT would help Make America Great Again.
Look at this and tell me all he ways Trump is demonstrating his blatantly obvious dementia. Wandering
speech. Inability to concentrate. Irrelevant replies to specific questions. Inability to remember
his own talking points. Inability to recognize the meaning of what is said to him and around him.
Inability to distinguish fact from fancy, his own fantasies from reality. The man is senile.
Before we get too much into ego-salving revisionism about which candidates would have been better
opponents to Hillary, let's remember that the three biggest crackpots in the primaries – Carson,
Cruz, and Trump – got more than 60% of the votes. So, before we go around trying to make ourselves
feel better by telling ourselves that, without Trump, everything would have been fine, just imagine
what a disaster the GOP would be facing if Ted Cruz were the nominee.
The alternative to Trump wasn't Rubio the lightweight, Jeb the retread, or Kasich. It was Cruz.
Just ruminate on that a bit.
Clinton lied through her teeth on the issue of the Clinton Foundation; which she made sound like
God's personal charity. He didn't lay a glove on her on that issue. Why?
Overseas reader here. A little bit off topic, but I'd really like to have TAC's writers (and commenters)
take on how the political processes would work if Trump in fact won the election. A President
totally unacceptable to all Democrats and many establishment Republicans, would he face a majority
working against him on all issues? Would we see the office of the President cut down to the bare
minimum the Constitution permits, or beyond? Would he be the lamest of lame ducks?
As a Christian, I find Hillary Clinton unacceptable. I also find Donald Trump unacceptable. I
think most people who are not Christians feel the same way. 2016 is a loss for everyone. My hope
is that a chastened Republican Party regroups and finds better leaders for 2018 and 2020. Trump
is an idiot savant at best. You can't assign thoughtful strategy to him. Our republic– I'm sorry,
our oligarchy - is in bad shape. But to the debate: The election isn't rigged if you are such
an idiot that you are clearly losing it by your own fault.
"I really don't understand why no one likes Cruz. He seems like a well-spoken, principled social
and fiscal conservative that has a healthy skepticism of U.S. interventions abroad."
In case you forget or never understood, it's because Cruz pokes all sorts of people (including
people he needs as allies and voters) in their eyes, repeatedly, and then tells them it's for
their own good, when it's perfectly apparent that his ego is so needy he will abandon his principles
when the right opportunity arises (viz his endorsement of Trump as Trump looked likely to overtake
HRC).
It doesn't help that his personality screams that he has Daddy Issues (his father treats
him like a new Messiah). People see him and go "eew" in a different way than they go "eew" with
Trump.
Rubio is an empty suit for the Israel-Saudi Arabia neocon set.
Cruz and Rubio were even worse than Trump. Which is saying a ton.
"I really don't understand why no one likes Cruz. He seems like a well-spoken, principled social
and fiscal conservative that has a healthy skepticism of U.S. interventions abroad."
Because Cruz is a Dominist. Meaning he specifically wants to establish a Christian theocracy
in America and thinks he was sent by God to create it. Claiming that the first amendment only
applies to Christians is so antithetical to the American foundation it scares this even of us
who dont share his beliefs.
And this isn't some light weight Anglican theocracy, he wants to bring back Old Testament punishments
for crimes… a woman who gets raped must be stoned to death and all of that.
Then Cruz wraps his amazingly scary theocracy nonsense in a creepy, slimy exterior.
Foreign Policy is an area where Trump could have scored some points on Hillary Clinton's rather
flawed record, Libya, Syria, etc. However, Trump is so undisciplined and unfocused that he failed
to really nail her.
He has some good ideas, but he fails to follow up and get specific on anything. He has this
hard core of supporters who think he is great, but he has not captured many moderates or undecided
voters.
On top of all of this, the Republican Party is fractured between the GOP Establishment and
the GOP Base. The GOP Base strongly supports Trump, the the GOP Establishment is weak at best.
Indeed, many of the GOP elite, such as the Bush Family cannot stand him and refuse to support
him.
I really cannot see him winning. The math is simply not there. When you consider that African-Americans,
Hispanics and educated women are strongly against him, it will be unusually difficult for him
to win swing states.
Trump has simply never been serious about this election. Last night only provided the 1,001st
piece of evidence of that.
He knew the question about his accepting the outcome of the election should he lose was going
to come up, and he know he could only hurt himself by the answer he gave. He intentionally shot
himself in the foot, once again.
He has never, ever been interested in responsibility of the presidency. He alluded to that
some months ago when he intimated that he may not be inaugurated should he win.
He went into this for attention, adulation and power, mostly attention. He is a deeply sick
man, who I honestly feel some pity for.
"... Much of the content of these speeches to U.S. bankers dealt with foreign policy, and virtually all of that with warfare, potential warfare, and opportunities for military-led domination of various regions of the globe. This stuff is more interesting and less insultingly presented than the idiocies spewed out at the public presidential debates. But it also fits an image of U.S. policy that Clinton might have preferred to keep private. Just as nobody advertised that, as emails now show, Wall Street bankers helped pick President Obama's cabinet, we're generally discouraged from thinking that wars and foreign bases are intended as services to financial overlords. "I'm representing all of you," Clinton says to the bankers in reference to her efforts at a meeting in Asia. Sub-Saharan Africa has great potential for U.S. "businesses and entrepreneurs," she says in reference to U.S. militarism there. ..."
"... "We're going to ring China with missile 'defense,'" Clinton tells Goldman Sachs. "We're going to put more of our fleet in the area." ..."
"... In public debates, Clinton demands a "no fly zone" or "no bombing zone" or "safe zone" in Syria, from which to organize a war to overthrow the government. In a speech to Goldman Sachs, however, she blurts out that creating such a zone would require bombing a lot more populated areas than was required in Libya. ..."
"... Clinton also makes clear that Syrian "jihadists" are being funded by Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Qatar. In October 2013, as the U.S. public had rejected bombing Syria, Blankfein asked if the public was now opposed to "interventions" - that clearly being understood as a hurdle to be overcome. Clinton said not to fear. "We're in a time in Syria," she said, "where they're not finished killing each other . . . and maybe you just have to wait and watch it." ..."
"... Regarding China again, Clinton claims to have told the Chinese that the United States could claim ownership of the entire Pacific as a result of having "liberated it." She goes on to claim to have told them that "We discovered Japan for heaven's sake." And: "We have proof of having bought [Hawaii]." Really? From whom? ..."
"... it's fascinating that even the bankers in whom Clinton confides her militarist mania ask her identical questions to those I get asked by peace activists at speaking events: "Is the U.S. political system completely broken?" "Should we scrap this and go with a parliamentary system?" ..."
In the speech transcripts from June 4, 2013, October 29, 2013, and October 19, 2015, Clinton was
apparently paid sufficiently to do something she denies most audiences. That is, she took questions
that it appears likely she was not secretly briefed on or engaged in negotiations over ahead of time.
In part this appears to be the case because some of the questions were lengthy speeches, and in part
because her answers were not all the sort of meaningless platitudes that she produces if given time
to prepare.
Much of the content of these speeches to U.S. bankers dealt with foreign policy, and
virtually all of that with warfare, potential warfare, and opportunities for military-led domination
of various regions of the globe. This stuff is more interesting and less insultingly presented than
the idiocies spewed out at the public presidential debates. But it also fits an image of U.S. policy
that Clinton might have preferred to keep private. Just as nobody advertised that, as emails now
show, Wall Street bankers helped pick President Obama's cabinet, we're generally discouraged from
thinking that wars and foreign bases are intended as services to financial overlords. "I'm representing
all of you," Clinton says to the bankers in reference to her efforts at a meeting in Asia. Sub-Saharan
Africa has great potential for U.S. "businesses and entrepreneurs," she says in reference to U.S.
militarism there.
Yet, in these speeches, Clinton projects exactly that approach, accurately or not, on other nations
and accuses China of just the sort of thing that her "far left" critics accuse her of all the time,
albeit outside the censorship of U.S. corporate media. China, Clinton says, may use hatred of Japan
as a means of distracting Chinese people from unpopular and harmful economic policies. China, Clinton
says, struggles to maintain civilian control over its military. Hmm. Where else have we seen these
problems?
"We're going to ring China with missile 'defense,'" Clinton tells Goldman Sachs. "We're going
to put more of our fleet in the area."
On Syria, Clinton says it's hard to figure out whom to arm - completely oblivious to any options
other than arming somebody. It's hard, she says, to predict at all what will happen. So, her advice,
which she blurts out to a room of bankers, is to wage war in Syria very "covertly."
In public debates, Clinton demands a "no fly zone" or "no bombing zone" or "safe zone" in Syria,
from which to organize a war to overthrow the government. In a speech to Goldman Sachs, however,
she blurts out that creating such a zone would require bombing a lot more populated areas than was
required in Libya. "You're going to kill a lot of Syrians," she admits. She even tries to distance
herself from the proposal by referring to "this intervention that people talk about so glibly" -
although she, before and at the time of that speech and ever since has been the leading such person.
Clinton also makes clear that Syrian "jihadists" are being funded by Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Qatar.
In October 2013, as the U.S. public had rejected bombing Syria, Blankfein asked if the public was
now opposed to "interventions" - that clearly being understood as a hurdle to be overcome. Clinton
said not to fear. "We're in a time in Syria," she said, "where they're not finished killing each
other . . . and maybe you just have to wait and watch it."
That's the view of many ill-meaning and many well-meaning people who have been persuaded that
the only two choices in foreign policy are bombing people and doing nothing. That clearly is the
understanding of the former Secretary of State, whose positions were more hawkish than those of her
counterpart at the Pentagon. It's also reminiscent of Harry Truman's comment that if the Germans
were winning you should help the Russians and vice versa, so that more people would die. That's not
exactly what Clinton said here, but it's pretty close, and it's something she would not say in a
scripted joint-media-appearance masquerading as a debate. The possibility of disarmament, nonviolent
peacework, actual aid on a massive scale, and respectful diplomacy that leaves U.S. influence out
of the resulting states is just not on Clinton's radar no matter who is in her audience.
On Iran, Clinton repeatedly hypes false claims about nuclear weapons and terrorism, even while
admitting far more openly than we're used to that Iran's religious leader denounces and opposes nuclear
weapons. She also admits that Saudi Arabia is already pursuing nuclear weapons and that UAE and Egypt
are likely to do so, at least if Iran does. She also admits that the Saudi government is far from
stable.
Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein asks Clinton at one point how a good war against Iran might
go - he suggesting that an occupation (yes, they use that forbidden word) might not be the best move.
Clinton replies that Iran can just be bombed. Blankfein, rather shockingly, appeals to reality -
something Clinton goes on at obnoxious length about elsewhere in these speeches. Has bombing a population
into submission ever worked, Blankfein asks. Clinton admits that it has not but suggests that it
just might work on Iranians because they are not democratic.
Regarding Egypt, Clinton makes clear her opposition to popular change.
Regarding China again, Clinton claims to have told the Chinese that the United States could claim
ownership of the entire Pacific as a result of having "liberated it." She goes on to claim to have
told them that "We discovered Japan for heaven's sake." And: "We have proof of having bought [Hawaii]."
Really? From whom?
This is ugly stuff, at least as damaging to human lives as the filth coming from Donald Trump.
Yet it's fascinating that even the bankers in whom Clinton confides her militarist mania ask her
identical questions to those I get asked by peace activists at speaking events: "Is the U.S. political
system completely broken?" "Should we scrap this and go with a parliamentary system?"
Et cetera.
In part their concern is the supposed gridlock created by differences between the two big parties,
whereas my biggest concern is the militarized destruction of people and the environment that never
seems to encounter even a slight traffic slowdown in Congress. But if you imagine that the people
Bernie Sanders always denounces as taking home all the profits are happy with the status quo, think
again. They benefit in certain ways, but they don't control their monster and it doesn't make them
feel fulfilled.
In the latest, 13th daily Podesta email release,
one particular email sticks out : on February 2, 2016 Neera Tanden, a close confidante of Hillary Clinton and according to many
one of the key organizers of her presidential campaign asks John Podesta a question which may be interpreted that banker money received
by Hillary can be deemed equivalent to a bribe.
Specifically, Tanden asks Podesta that " speaking at the banks... don't shoot me but if we lose badly maybe she should
just return the money ." To which she then adds "say she gets the anger and moves on. Feels a little like an open wound."
The exchange may be one of the more clear indications of a tentative "quid-pro-quo" arrangement, in which cash is provided in
exchange for 'services' which naturally would not be rendered if Hillary were to "lose badly."
Luckily for Tanden and Podesta, not to mention Hillary, at least according to the latest scientific polls, losing badly is not
a contingency that should be a major consideration, at least not as of this moment.
Christopher Barron
Donald Trump came to this behind in the polls and reeling after weeks of negative media coverage.
He needed a big night – and he got one.
For a campaign that prides itself on its mastery of policy, Hillary spent much of the night
trying trying to get Trump to take the bait on sideshow issues.
In previous debates, Trump took the bait. Tonight, however, we saw a much more disciplined
candidate. Trump stuck to the issues and forced Hillary to talk policy and – quite frankly – she
had her worst debate performance.
Unlike previous moderators, Chris Wallace was willing to properly challenge both Trump and
Clinton. His line of questioning, particularly when it came to the Clinton Foundation, kept
Hillary off balance.
Clinton also found herself on the defensive on foreign policy, where she seemed more like a
George W Bush Republican than a Democrat.
As a result, this ended up being Trump's best debate. For far too long, the Republican candidate
has let the campaign be about the circus and not about policy. If this race is about the circus
then Hillary Clinton wins. If its about policy then Trump has a shot. It's frustrating for me, as
a Trump supporter, that it has taken this long for him to focus on where his opponent stands on
the issues.
Foreign policy has received relatively little attention so far in the debates, but we
might hear a bit more about a wider range of these issues tonight. One of the announced
topics for the final 2016 presidential debate is "foreign hot spots," which suggests
that the candidates will be pressed for their views on various conflicts and flashpoints
around the globe. It is almost a given that one question will be on the recently
announced Mosul offensive against ISIS, and I assume there will be more of the same
leading Syria questions that we heard last time.
Ideally, we should also hear questions about at least two of the following: the
ongoing war in Afghanistan, heightened tensions between India and Pakistan following the
attack in Uri, the war on Yemen and the U.S. role in it, the supposed firing of missiles
at U.S. ships in the Red Sea related to that role, the Russian
deployment
of Iskander missiles to Kaliningrad, and the public rift between the U.S.
and the Philippines under its new president.
All of these involve U.S. policies and relationships in one way or another, and we
have not heard much of anything from either candidate about any of them. I doubt that
any of these additional topics will come up tonight, but Wallace may surprise me.
Tonight will be Trump's last chance to challenge Clinton on her lackluster foreign
policy record. He has mostly failed to do this in the last two debates, and I don't
expect him to do any better this time. If he could spell out the dangerous implications
of Clinton's Syria policy, that could finally put her on the defensive and possibly put
a dent in her support, but to do that he would have to know what he's talking about.
Meanwhile, Clinton has been allowed to skate through the entire campaign without facing
much scrutiny on foreign policy at all, and there is almost no time left. For all the
talk of how this was going to be a foreign policy election, the subject has mostly been
ignored for the duration of the general election. Considering that the next president
will take office while the U.S. is fighting and/or supporting at least three wars after
fifteen years of being at war somewhere in the world, this is a major failure on the
part of the candidates and the media. Americans are electing another wartime president,
but the candidates have had to answer remarkably few questions about how and why they
would continue America's entanglements in foreign conflicts.
P.S. As usual, I will be covering the debate on Twitter (
@DanielLarison
).
The debate begins at 9:00 p.m. Eastern.
Trump's promise to deport illegal immigrants and build a massive wall along the Mexican border
has been one of his signature issues of this campaign. "They are coming in illegally. Drugs are pouring
in through the border. We have no country if we have no border. Hillary wants to give amnesty, she
wants to have open borders," the GOP nominee argued.
And he also argued that the border problem was contributing to the drug and opioid crisis in the
country by allowing them to pore over the border.
"We're going to get them out, we're going to secure the border, and once the border is secured,
at a later date, we'll make a determination as to the rest, but we have some bad hombres here, and
we're going to get them out," Trump said.
Clinton said she didn't want to "rip families apart. I don't want to be sending parents away from
children. I don't want to see the deportation force that Donald has talked about in action in our
country." She pointed she voted for increased border security and that any violent person should
be deported.
"I think we are both a nation of immigrants and we are a nation of laws, and that we can act accordingly
and that's why I am introducing comprehensive immigration reform within the first hundred days with
a path to citizenship," Clinton promised.
Hillary Clinton is a secret sex freak who paid fixers to set up illicit romps
with both men AND women!
That's the blockbuster revelation from a former Clinton family operative who is sensationally
breaking ranks with his one-time bosses to speak to The National ENQUIRER in a bombshell
9-page cover story - on newsstands Wednesday.
"I arranged a meeting for Hillary and a woman in an exclusive Beverly Hills hotel," the man,
who was hired by the Clintons, via a Hollywood executive, to cover up their scandals, told
The ENQUIRER .
"She had come to the studio to see the filming of a movie in 1994."
"While I was there, I helped her slip out of a back exit for a one-on-one session with the other
woman. It was made to look casual, leaving quietly [rather] that being caught up in the melee but
really it was for something presumably more sordid."
What's more, it wasn't just Hillary's flings with women that the shadowy Mr. Fix It helped to
orchestrate! Hillary's former bagman finally confessed to The ENQUIRER just how
he helped her to cover up her affair with married lover Vince Foster
, too!
The shadowy figure - who provided PROOF of his employment for the Clintons - also revealed 12
fixes he covered-up, including:
+ How Hillary secretly plotted to a counter-attack on Bill's mistress Monica
Lewinsky - via a document
buried for two decades!
+ What crooked reporters were on the take from the Clinton camp!
+ How he covered up Bill's seedy romp with hookers!
+ Which A-list celebrity had a secret affair with Bill during his presidency!
Feeling the heat from congressional critics, Comey last week argued that the case was investigated by career FBI agents, "So
if I blew it, they blew it, too."
But agents say Comey tied investigators' hands by agreeing to unheard-of ground rules and other demands by the lawyers for
Clinton and her aides that limited their investigation.
"In my 25 years with the bureau, I never had any ground rules in my interviews," said retired agent Dennis V. Hughes, the first
chief of the FBI's computer investigations unit.
Instead of going to prosecutors and insisting on using grand jury leverage to compel testimony and seize evidence, Comey allowed
immunity for several key witnesses, including potential targets.
What's more, Comey cut a deal to give Clinton a "voluntary" witness interview on a major holiday, and even let her ex-chief
of staff sit in on the interview as a lawyer, even though she, too, was under investigation.
Agreed retired FBI agent Michael M. Biasello: "Comey has singlehandedly ruined the reputation of the organization."
Comey made the 25 agents who worked on the case sign nondisclosure agreements. But others say morale has sunk inside the bureau.
"The director is giving the bureau a bad rap with all the gaps in the investigation," one agent in the Washington field office
said. "There's a perception that the FBI has been politicized and let down the country."
While the above article focused on the opinions of retired agents, today's article zeros in on the growing frustrations of current
agency employees.
FBI agents say the bureau is alarmed over Director James Comey deciding not to suggest that the Justice Department prosecute
Hillary Clinton over her mishandling of classified information.
According to an interview transcript given to The Daily Caller, provided by an intermediary who spoke to two federal agents
with the bureau last Friday, agents are frustrated by Comey's leadership.
"This is a textbook case where a grand jury should have convened but was not. That is appalling," an FBI special agent who
has worked public corruption and criminal cases said of the decision. "We talk about it in the office and don't know how Comey
can keep going."
Another special agent for the bureau that worked counter-terrorism and criminal cases said he is offended by Comey's saying:
"we" and "I've been an investigator."
After graduating from law school, Comey became a law clerk to a U.S. District Judge in Manhattan and later became an associate
in a law firm in the city. After becoming a U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York, Comey's career moved through the
U.S. Attorney's Office until he became Deputy Attorney General during the George W. Bush administration.
After Bush left office, Comey entered the private sector and became general counsel and Senior Vice President for Lockheed
Martin, among other private sector posts. President Barack Obama appointed him to FBI director in 2013 replacing out going-director
Robert Mueller.
"Comey was never an investigator or special agent. The special agents are trained investigators and they are insulted that
Comey included them in 'collective we' statements in his testimony to imply that the SAs agreed that there was nothing there to
prosecute," the second agent said. "All the trained investigators agree that there is a lot to prosecuted but he stood in the
way."
In light of the latest revelations that the
NSA is spying on the communications of millions of Verizon customers courtesy of information provided by the FBI, it probably
makes sense to know a little more about Obama's nominee to head that Bureau. That man is James Comey, and he was a top Department
of Justice attorney under John Ashcroft during the George W. Bush Administration (since then he has worked at Lockheed Martin
and at the enormous Connecticut hedge fund Bridgewater Associates). This guy defines the revolving door cancer ruining these United
States.
Now back to The Daily Caller.
According to Washington D.C. attorney Joe DiGenova, more FBI agents will be talking about the problems at bureau and specifically
the handling of the Clinton case by Comey when Congress comes back into session and decides to force them to testify by subpoena.
DiGenova told WMAL radio's
Drive at Five last week, "People are starting to talk. They're calling their former friends outside the bureau asking for
help. We were asked to day to provide legal representation to people inside the bureau and agreed to do so and to former agents
who want to come forward and talk. Comey thought this was going to go away."
He explained, "It's not. People inside the bureau are furious. They are embarrassed. They feel like they are being led by a
hack but more than that that they think he's a crook. They think he's fundamentally dishonest. They have no confidence in him.
The bureau inside right now is a mess."
He added, "The most important thing of all is that the agents have decided that they are going to talk."
Corruption in the USA has now reached the level where it starts destroying the entire fabric of society itself. This is a very
dangerous moment.
It's already been done. After the Boston Marathon false flag, a number of FBI agents were assigned to the case. Two in particular
probably got too close to the hoax because suddenly they were sent on a naval training assignment. The FBI on a naval training
assignment in the middle of an investigation?
Excellent post pods. These agents are using the Nazi excuse of "just following orders". We'll, a corrupt order is corrupt.....and
so are you if you blindly follow it.
The NDAs were obviously procured through fraud thereby nullifying their binding nature. Dirty hands all over the Washington D.C.
cesspool. Are we ready to clean house yet?
The FBI has lost total street cred first after failing to indict Crooked Hillary, and then granting immunity to her co-conspirators.
the icing on the cake was Comey blaming other FBI.
When I was wanering thru the sports store yesterday, the feeling of animosity toward the FBI was very high. Once they were
highly respected...Comey has trashed that agency badly...People like John Malone 9who once heade the NYC FBI office), Tompkins
in the louisville area, etc would be revolted by Crooked Comey.
... I'm not implying that those 900(?) FBI files of prominent Americans given by the FBI to the Klinton Krime Kartel were being
used for blackmail ... and perhaps the reason why the dynamic duo keeps getting "get-out-of-jail-free" cards whenever they need
it ...
@hedgeless horseman: The FBI did not release the "Dancing Israelis." It was Judge Michael Chertoff. He was in charge of the Criminal
Division in the Justice Department on 9/11. Essentially responsible for the 9/11 non-investigation. He let hundreds of Israeli
spies who were arrested prior to and on 9/11 go back home to Israel. He was also a prosecuting judge in the first terrorist attack
on the WTC in 1993. Chertoff purportedly holds dual citizenship with the US and Israel. His family is one of the founding families
of the state of Israel and his mother was one of the first ever agents of the Mossad, Israel's spy agency. His father and uncle
are ordained rabbis and teachers of the Talmud.
He was subsequently named head of the Dept of Homeland Security. His company arranged for placement of Rapascan nude scanners
in American airports. Who says crime doesn't pay?
..... Comey last week argued that the case was investigated by career FBI agents, "So if I blew it, they blew it, too."
...... agents say Comey tied investigators' hands by agreeing to unheard-of ground rules and other demands by the lawyers
for Clinton and her aides that limited their investigation.
...... In my 25 years with the bureau, I never had any ground rules in my interviews," said retired agent Dennis V.
Hughes, the first chief of the FBI's computer investigations unit.
Time for Comey, Bill, Hillary, Lynch, Obama, MSM Media, and on, and on, to ALL
DANCE ON THE FUCKING AIR !!!
(Method of neck suspension, NOT rope.....piano wire..)
I get a kick out of these career FBI agents worrying that Comey has sullied the reputation of the FBI (he has). Here is a fucking
news flash for you assholes, if Clinton gets elected there is an almost certain chance that she starts a fucking thermo nuclear
war with Russia. You, your families and the precious FBI won't exist 30 minutes after that starts seeing that you are sitting
at ground zero. Does that do anything to get you off your asses and perhaps do your fucking jobs?
There is now about 30 minutes of video that proves the Clinton campaign conspired to incite violence at Trump rallys. How about
you fuckers get off your ass and start investigating this and the "pay to play" shit the Podesta tapes came out with? Or, how
about the email that indicates POTUS illegally influenced the Supreme Court Justice on ACA??? Christ, it's a target rich environment
for felony convictions out there and you guys are doing what????
Allegedly, there was a much larger contingent of Mossad agents that were detained immediately after 9/11. An additional 100 or
so were in the States "studying art" and similar cover stories when in fact they were carefully casing various buildings including
banks and Federal sites. For reasons never made public, the FBI let them all go back to Israel. Without waterboarding Dick Cheney,
the public will never know the truth.
" Sorry, intentions are one thing actions another at least among adults."
Actually, it can also be part of the game. Eisenhower is well known for his MIC warning on TV just as he was leaving office.
However, if you look at what he did, and what he allowed Allen Dulles to do, he was part of it. Making fake apologies after the
fact provides some balm but doesnt undo the damage.
I'm tellin ya.... rank-and-file aren't sitting around giggling that this fucking cunt is walking on water on shit they would be
hung out to dry for. The Podesta leaks are NSA standard intercepts. Anyone could have grabbed them from a standard intercept.
Tja, that's the problem when you go hooovering up the entire internet. Pretty fucking hard to compartmentalize collection efforts
on that scale.
We applaud and support the members of our armed forces and intelligence community who take their oath of office seriously and
refuse to let these murderous internationalists tear down our country without a fucking fight.
When Hillary gets in there all these old FBI white boyz will be shown the door and replaced with pussylesbo power. These are the
good old days,be afraid.
This guy is die hard neoliberal. That's why he is fond of Washington consensus. He does not understand
that the time is over for Washington consensus in 2008. this is just a delayed reaction :-)
Notable quotes:
"... after years of unusually sluggish and strikingly non-inclusive growth, the consensus is breaking down. Advanced-country citizens are frustrated with an "establishment" – including economic "experts," mainstream political leaders, and dominant multinational companies – which they increasingly blame for their economic travails. ..."
"... Anti-establishment movements and figures have been quick to seize on this frustration, using inflammatory and even combative rhetoric to win support. They do not even have to win elections to disrupt the transmission mechanism between economics and politics. ..."
"... They also included attacks on "international elites" and criticism of Bank of England policies that were instrumental in stabilizing the British economy in the referendum's immediate aftermath – thus giving May's new government time to formulate a coherent Brexit strategy. ..."
"... The risk is that, as bad politics crowds out good economics, popular anger and frustration will rise, making politics even more toxic. ..."
"... At one time, the people's government served as a check on the excesses of economic interests -- now, it is simply owned by them. ..."
"... The defects of the maximalist-globalist view were known for years before the "consensus began to break down". ..."
"... In at least some of these cases, the "transmission" of the consensus involved more than a little coercion and undermining local interests, sovereignty, and democracy. This is an central feature of the "consensus", and it is hard to see how it can by anything but irredeemable. ..."
"... However it is not bad politics crowding out out good economics, for the simple reason that the economic "consensus" itself, in embracing destructive and destabilizing economic policy crowded out the ostensibly centrist politics... ..."
"... The Inclusive Growth has remained only a Slogan and Politicians never ventured into the theme. In the changed version of the World.] essential equal opportunity and World of Social media, perspective and social Political scene is changed. Its more like reverting to mean. ..."
In the 1990s and 2000s, for example, the so-called Washington Consensus dominated policymaking
in much of the world...
... ... ...
But after years of unusually sluggish and strikingly non-inclusive growth, the consensus is
breaking down. Advanced-country citizens are frustrated with an "establishment" – including economic
"experts," mainstream political leaders, and dominant multinational companies – which they increasingly
blame for their economic travails.
Anti-establishment movements and figures have been quick to seize on this frustration, using
inflammatory and even combative rhetoric to win support. They do not even have to win elections to
disrupt the transmission mechanism between economics and politics. The United Kingdom proved
that in June, with its Brexit vote – a decision that directly defied the broad economic consensus
that remaining within the European Union was in Britain's best interest.
... ... ...
... speeches by Prime Minister Theresa May and members of her cabinet revealed an intention to
pursue a "hard Brexit," thereby dismantling trading arrangements that have served the economy well.
They also included attacks on "international elites" and criticism of Bank of England policies
that were instrumental in stabilizing the British economy in the referendum's immediate aftermath
– thus giving May's new government time to formulate a coherent Brexit strategy.
Several other advanced economies are experiencing analogous political developments. In Germany,
a surprisingly strong showing by the far-right Alternative für Deutschland in recent state
elections already appears to be affecting the government's behavior.
In the US, even if Donald Trump's presidential campaign fails to put a Republican back in the
White House (as appears increasingly likely, given that, in the latest twist of this highly unusual
campaign, many Republican leaders have now renounced their party's nominee), his candidacy will likely
leave a lasting impact on American politics. If not managed well, Italy's constitutional referendum
in December – a risky bid by Prime Minister Matteo Renzi to consolidate support – could backfire,
just like Cameron's referendum did, causing political disruption and undermining effective action
to address the country's economic challenges.
... ... ...
The risk is that, as bad politics crowds out good economics, popular anger and frustration
will rise, making politics even more toxic. ...
Mr El-Erian, I know you are a good man, but it seems as though everyone believes we can synthetically
engineer a way out of this never ending hole that financial engineering dug us into in the first
place.
Instead why don't we let this game collapse, you are a good man and you will play a role in
the rebuilding of better system, one that nurtures and guides instead of manipulate and lie.
The moral suasion you mention can only appear by allowing for the self annihilation of this
financial system. This way we can learn from the autopsies and leave speculative theories to third
rate economists
It is sadly true that "the relationship between politics and economics is changing," at least
in the U.S.. At one time, the people's government served as a check on the excesses of economic
interests -- now, it is simply owned by them.
It seems to me that the best we can hope for now is some sort of modest correction in the relationship
after 2020 -- and that the TBTF banks won't deliver another economic disaster in the meantime.
Petey Bee OCT 15, 2016
1. The defects of the maximalist-globalist view were known for years before the "consensus
began to break down".
2. In at least some of these cases, the "transmission" of the consensus involved more than
a little coercion and undermining local interests, sovereignty, and democracy. This is an central
feature of the "consensus", and it is hard to see how it can by anything but irredeemable.
In the concluding paragraph, the author states that the reaction is going to be slow. That's absolutely
correct, the evidence has been pushed higher and higher above the icy water line since 2008.
However it is not bad politics crowding out out good economics, for the simple reason that
the economic "consensus" itself, in embracing destructive and destabilizing economic policy crowded
out the ostensibly centrist politics...
Paul Daley OCT 15, 2016
The Washington consensus collapsed during the Great Recession but the latest "consensus" among
economists regarding "good economics" deserves respect.
atul baride OCT 15, 2016
The Inclusive Growth has remained only a Slogan and Politicians never ventured into the theme.
In the changed version of the World.] essential equal opportunity and World of Social media, perspective
and social Political scene is changed. Its more like reverting to mean.
"... The news was released that Hillarnazi had lesbian lovers, paid for sexual encounters, has had memory issues so severe going
back to 2009 that her own people aren't sure if she knows what planet she is on, can't walk without getting massively fatigued, a new
rape victim came forward, the Clinton Foundation stole over $2 billion in Haitian relief funds, the Clinton Foundation has a pay gap
between men and women of $190,000 and she referred to blacks repeatedly as the dreaded "n" word . ..."
"... Again, that is from YESTERDAY Yet there has been no movement in the polls. She is the most criminal and unethical candidate
in the history of America, and is likely to win. There is no greater indictment about our citizens than her candidacy. if thise was
1920, she would be in front of a firing squad. ..."
"... But we have 2016. This is not breaking news at the main media outlets. Only people actively digging know this. All this pales
in comparison with the fact of bussing people around different states to vote. If elections can be rigged then nothing else actually
matters. Nothing will change because the only tool to repair the country is the election. ..."
"... The ballot box is not the last remedy to fix things. Just saying. Voting is more to bring you into the system than you changing
the system. What better way to keep you happy inside the system than to give you the ability to "vote the bums out" at the next (s)election?
..."
"... Europe is also facing the problem of not enough breeding to keep up the exponential expansion of their currency (debt issued
with interest) so they import people to keep the ponzi going. Not going to work as the people you bring in are not going to be expanding
it at the rate that someone born into that system is going to. ..."
"... Sucks to be them - the humillatiion and embarrassment of the cockroaches as they all scurry for cover. Not to mention the career
nose-dives en masse for all the selfsame scum floating around the turd herself. I'm surprised Hillary hasn't told Podesta to eat a bullet
(or nail-gun) yet, given the damage he has caused by being hacked. Err...rewind, eh Hillary? Because it is not as if you are an angel
in this respect, you dumb fucking senile cunt. ..."
"... Neocons are IT illiterate, and this must be their primary weakness, given how fucking useless they are at securing their insidious
evil shit (now in the public domain - eh, Poddy, old chum, you evil CUNT). It must be a fucking disease given how utterly bereft of
intelligence with respect to IT security they collectively are. ..."
"... It definitely sucks to be Hillary when even the help knows you're crooked. It sucks to be the help too. HILLARY FOR PRISON
2017!!!! ..."
"... As if. Former Lousiana Governor Edwin Edwards in 1983 said "The only way I can lose this election is if I'm caught in bed with
either a dead girl or a live boy." In 2016, neither of those conditions is a bar to election to the presidency. ..."
"... Evidently the rats have been assured the ship isn't sinking. Besides it's insured if crossing is successful. ..."
"... Americans have the attention span of a gnat these days. The hypocrisy is stunning and has no bounds. ..."
"... The best part of waking up is realizing that TPTB had been pissing in our cup while we weren't looking. ..."
"... Another body to add to the Clinton Death List, this time the doctor who treated her for a concussion and knew about her glioma.
A devout Hindu, this doctor supposedly committed suicide after threatening to reveal Hillary medical information if prosecutors continued
to go after him for bogus criminal charges. http://www.govtslaves.info/clinton-doctor-who-confirmed-hillarys-brain-t... ..."
"... Neera Tanden must be suicidal by now. She probably doesn't even realise it yet. ..."
"... I was thinking the same thing. With so many on the "team" having such critical positions on their own "leader", why the fuck
are they supporting her, and why do they still have jobs? ..."
"... Power. Money. The belief that they will be able to run things themselves once she goes full brain clot. One thing I do know,
Hillary would be very unwise to let any of them pick her nursing home for her. ..."
"... Neera Tanden: "It worries me more that she doesn't seem to know what planet we are all living in at the moment." https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/18353
..."
"... I imagine cankle's inner circle are gobling a lot off drugs about now. Their paranoia is no doubt palpable. I hope they devour
one another. ..."
"... It ain't just the US where free press is extinct. Had Wiki dropped the lot, it would simply have sunk without a trace with
respect to the MSM reporting it to the sheeple, as we have seen in the last 12 days. ..."
"... Free Shit and open borders and speaking well while lying. The stupidity of the average person, particularly those who only
get their news from the corporate controlled media, is fuckin' amazing. Only a military coup could hunt down and arrest the Deep State...
The Kagans and Powers and Jarretts and every cunt who has given HRC money. ..."
"... Short of a coup, massive desertion would be very helpful. ..."
"... you hit the nail on the head - "speaking well while lying". Middle class English people speak very well - appear attractive
to Americans - when in fact they have zero monopoly on honesty, brains or ability ..."
"... just because someone speaks well does not mean they are legal, decent, honest and truthful - in fact clinton fails on all four
of these positives and is illegal, indecent, crooked and a liar ..."
"... The no fly zone doesn't like questions not preprogrammed. I hope his brother gets a chance to rip Obama a new asshole. ..."
"... rule by criminals REQUIRES deep knowledge and primary experience with criminal exploits. She is the ONLY candidate who is qualified
to run Gov-Co. ..."
"... Comey is a Dirty Cop – Former US Attorney. How Crooked Clinton Got Off. ..."
"... Juan Williams email to John Podesta found here: https://twitter.com/hashtag/DrainTheSwamp?src=hash ..."
"... How does it feel working for a total scumbag just to get a paycheck? ..."
The latest WikiLeaks dump reveals yet another bombshell from the outspoken, an likely soon to be unemployed, Neera Tanden.
The email chain comes from March of this year and begins when Neera distributes a memo on proposals for reform policies
relative to bribery and corruption of public officials . That said, apparently the folks within the Hillary campaign were
aware that this was a very dicey topic for their chosen candidate as even Tanden admits " she may be so tainted she's really
vulnerable. "
Meanwhile, Hillary advisor Jake Sullivan provided his thoughts that he really liked the following proposal on strengthening bribery
laws...
"Strengthen bribery laws to ensure that politicians don' change legislation for political donations."
...but subsequently admits that it might be problematic given Hillary's history.
"The second idea is a favorite of mine, as you know, but REALLY dicey territory for HRC, right?"
Even a month before these internal campaign discussions, Stan Greenberg, a democrat strategist of Democracy Corps, wrote to Podesta
highlighting that "reform of money and politics is where she is taking the biggest hit." That said, Stan was quick
to assure Podesta that there was no reason for concern as a specially crafted message and a little help from the media could make
the whole problem go away.
"We are also going to test some messages that include acknowledgement of being part of the system , and know how much
has to change. "
Finally, perhaps no one has better summarized why the Clinton camp may be worried about corruption charges than Obama:
The news was released that Hillarnazi had lesbian lovers, paid for sexual encounters, has had memory issues so severe going
back to 2009 that her own people aren't sure if she knows what planet she is on, can't walk without getting massively fatigued,
a new rape victim came forward, the Clinton Foundation stole over $2 billion in Haitian relief funds, the Clinton Foundation has
a
pay gap between men and women of $190,000 and
she referred to blacks repeatedly as the dreaded "n" word .
Again, that is from YESTERDAY Yet there has been no movement in the polls. She is the most criminal and unethical candidate
in the history of America, and is likely to win. There is no greater indictment about our citizens than her candidacy. if thise
was 1920, she would be in front of a firing squad.
But we have 2016. This is not breaking news at the main media outlets. Only people actively digging know this. All this pales
in comparison with the fact of bussing people around different states to vote. If elections can be rigged then nothing else actually
matters. Nothing will change because the only tool to repair the country is the election.
The ballot box is not the last remedy to fix things. Just saying. Voting is more to bring you into the system than you changing
the system. What better way to keep you happy inside the system than to give you the ability to "vote the bums out" at the next
(s)election?
Europe is also facing the problem of not enough breeding to keep up the exponential expansion of their currency (debt issued
with interest) so they import people to keep the ponzi going. Not going to work as the people you bring in are not going to be
expanding it at the rate that someone born into that system is going to.
But, it is a plausible explanation for why they are trying it. The moneychangers have their very lives depending on keeping
this going, so they have to try it.
All I know is, most the cunts behind the curtain have been completely compromised pre-election.
Sucks to be them - the humillatiion and embarrassment of the cockroaches as they all scurry for cover. Not to mention the
career nose-dives en masse for all the selfsame scum floating around the turd herself. I'm surprised Hillary hasn't told Podesta
to eat a bullet (or nail-gun) yet, given the damage he has caused by being hacked. Err...rewind, eh Hillary? Because it is not
as if you are an angel in this respect, you dumb fucking senile cunt.
The fucking irony is palpable.
Neocons are IT illiterate, and this must be their primary weakness, given how fucking useless they are at securing their
insidious evil shit (now in the public domain - eh, Poddy, old chum, you evil CUNT). It must be a fucking disease given how utterly
bereft of intelligence with respect to IT security they collectively are.
As if. Former Lousiana Governor Edwin Edwards in 1983 said "The only way I can lose this election is if I'm caught in bed
with either a dead girl or a live boy." In 2016, neither of those conditions is a bar to election to the presidency.
Another body to add to the Clinton Death List, this time the doctor who treated her for a concussion and knew about her glioma.
A devout Hindu, this doctor supposedly committed suicide after threatening to reveal Hillary medical information if prosecutors
continued to go after him for bogus criminal charges.
http://www.govtslaves.info/clinton-doctor-who-confirmed-hillarys-brain-t...
I was thinking the same thing. With so many on the "team" having such critical positions on their own "leader", why the fuck
are they supporting her, and why do they still have jobs?
Power. Money. The belief that they will be able to run things themselves once she goes full brain clot. One thing I do
know, Hillary would be very unwise to let any of them pick her nursing home for her.
Assange has played a blinder, and all those who bitched about him "not dropping everything at once" give some thought to the fact
that even in the UK barely one reference to the deluge of shit landing on Hillary thus far has been reported in the MSM. They
have killed virtually everything, and are mainlining Trump the mad man (for insinuating election fraud) shit.
It ain't just the US where free press is extinct. Had Wiki dropped the lot, it would simply have sunk without a trace with
respect to the MSM reporting it to the sheeple, as we have seen in the last 12 days.
Better a death by a thousand cuts to build up momentum, and give EVERYONE the chance to absorb the full criminallity of this
fundamentally evil bitch and her cohorts. There is way too much to take in one hit.
sadly, most Americans are going to vote based on which candidate they think is least 'offensive' to them, and ISMism prevails
in the corporate MSM and Regressive Left:
For secure borders and controlled immigration: RACIST
Against set asides for women or think rosie o'donnell could lose a few: MISOGYNIST.
But voting for a banker owned duplicitous warmonger who is the crooked politician par excellance of this millenium, one
who will pursue more neocon/zionist wars and involve arming and aiding Al Qaeda and worse.... : 'PROGRESSIVE'.
Why?
Free Shit and open borders and speaking well while lying. The stupidity of the average person, particularly those who only
get their news from the corporate controlled media, is fuckin' amazing. Only a military coup could hunt down and arrest the Deep
State... The Kagans and Powers and Jarretts and every cunt who has given HRC money.
Short of a coup, massive desertion would be very helpful.
you hit the nail on the head - "speaking well while lying". Middle class English people speak very well - appear attractive
to Americans - when in fact they have zero monopoly on honesty, brains or ability
just because someone speaks well does not mean they are legal, decent, honest and truthful - in fact clinton fails on all
four of these positives and is illegal, indecent, crooked and a liar
Authoritarian rule by criminals REQUIRES deep knowledge and primary experience with criminal exploits. She is the ONLY candidate
who is qualified to run Gov-Co.
Is this from "The Onion"? Seriously, these people are so fucking tone deaf and out of touch it's amazing. Throw 'em all in prison.
How does it feel working for a total scumbag just to get a paycheck?
"... Among the initial emails to stand out is this extensive exchange showing just how intimiately the narrative of Hillary's server
had been coached. The following September 2015 email exchange between Podesta and Nick Merrill, framed the "core language" to be used
in response to questions Clinton could be asked about her email server, and the decision to "bleach" emails from it. The emails contain
long and short versions of responses for Clinton. ..."
The daily dump continues. In the now traditional daily routine, one which forces the Clinton campaign to resort to ever more stark
sexual scandals involving Trump to provide a media distraction, moments ago Wikileaks released yet another 1,803 emails in Part 12
of its ongoing Podesta Email dump, which brings the total number of released emails to 18,953.
As a reminder among the most recent revelations we got further insights into Hillary's desire to see Obamacare "
unravel" , her contempt
for "doofus" Bernie Sanders, staff exchanges on handling media queries about Clinton "flip-flopping" on gay marriage, galvanizing
Latino support and locking down Clinton's healthcare policy. Just as notable has been the ongoing revelation of just how "captured"
the so-called independent press has been in its "off the record" discussions with John Podesta which got the head Politico correspondent,
Glenn Thrush, to admit he is a "hack" for allowing Podesta to dictate the content of his article.
The release comes on the day of the third and final presidential campaign between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, and as a result
we are confident it will be scrutinized especially carefully for any last minute clues that would allow Trump to lob a much needed
Hail Mary to boost his standing in the polls.
As there is a total of 50,000 emails, Wikileaks will keep the media busy over the next three weeks until the elections with another
30,000 emails still expected to be released.
* * *
Among the initial emails to stand out is this extensive exchange showing just how intimiately the narrative of Hillary's server
had been coached. The following September 2015 email
exchange between Podesta and Nick Merrill, framed the "core language" to be used in response to questions Clinton could be asked
about her email server, and the decision to "bleach" emails from it. The emails contain long and short versions of responses for
Clinton.
"Because the government already had everything that was work-related, and my personal emails were just that – personal – I
didn't see a reason to keep them so I asked that they be deleted, and that's what the company that managed my server did. And
we notified Congress of that back in March"
She was then presented with the following hypothetical scenario:
* "Why won't you say whether you wiped it?"
"After we went through the process to determine what was work related and what was not and provided the work related
emails to State, I decided not to keep the personal ones."
"We saved the work-related ones on a thumb drive that is now with the Department of Justice. And as I said in March, I chose
not to keep the personal ones. I asked that they be deleted, how that happened was up to the company that managed the server.
And they are cooperating fully with anyone that has questions."
* * *
Another notable email reveals the close
relationship between the Clinton Foundation and Ukraine billionaire Victor Pinchuk, a
prominent
donor to the Clinton Foundation , in which we see the latter's attempt to get a meeting with Bill Clinton to show support for
Ukraine:
From: Tina Flournoy < [email protected]>
Sent: Monday, March 30, 2015 9:58:55 AM
To: Amitabh Desai
Cc: Jon Davidson; Margaret Steenburg; Jake Sullivan; Dan Schwerin; Huma Abedin; John Podesta
Subject: Re: Victor Pinchuk
Team HRC - we'll get back to you on this
> On Mar 30, 2015, at 9:53 AM, Amitabh Desai < [email protected]> wrote:
>
> Victor Pinchuk is relentlessly following up (including this morning) about a meeting with WJC in London or anywhere in Europe.
Ideally he wants to bring together a few western leaders to show support for Ukraine, with WJC probably their most important participant.
If that's not palatable for us, then he'd like a bilat with WJC.
>
> If it's not next week, that's fine, but he wants a date. I keep saying we have no Europe plans, although we do have those events
in London in June. Are folks comfortable offering Victor a private meeting on one of those dates? At this point I get
the impression that although I keep saying WJC cares about Ukraine, Pinchuk feels like WJC hasn't taken enough action to demonstrate
that, particularly during this existential moment for the county and for him.
>
> I sense this is so important because Pinchuk is under Putin's heel right now, feeling a great degree of pressure and pain for
his many years of nurturing stronger ties with the West.
>
> I get all the downsides and share the concerns. I am happy to go back and say no. It would just be good to
know what WJC (and HRC and you all) would like to do, because this will likely impact the future of this relationship, and slow
walking our reply will only reinforce his growing angst.
>
> Thanks, and sorry for the glum note on a Monday morning...
Sure. Sorry for the delay I was on a plane.
On Apr 30, 2015 9:44 AM, "Glenn Thrush" < [email protected]> wrote:
> Can I send u a couple of grafs, OTR, to make sure I'm not fucking
> anything up?
* * *
Another notable moment emerges in the emails, involving Hillary Clinton's selective memory. Clinton's description of herself as
a moderate Democrat at a September 2015 event in Ohio caused an uproar amongst her team. In a
mail from Clinton advisor Neera Tanden to Podesta
in the days following the comment she asks why she said this.
"I pushed her on this on Sunday night. She claims she didn't remember saying it. Not sure I believe her," Podesta replies.
Tanden insists that the comment has made her job more difficult after "telling every reporter I know she's actually progressive".
" It worries me more that she doesn't seem to know what planet we are all living in at the moment ," she adds.
* * *
We also get additional insight into Clinton courting the Latino minority. A November 2008
email from Federico Peńa , who was on the Obama-Biden
transition team, called for a "Latino media person" to be added to the list of staff to appeal to Latino voters. Federico de Jesus
or Vince Casillas are seen as ideal candidates, both of whom were working in the Chicago operations.
"More importantly, it would helpful (sic) to Barack to do pro-active outreach to Latino media across the country to get our
positive message out before people start spreading negative rumors," Peńa writes.
* * *
Another email between Clinton's foreign policy adviser
Jake Sullivan and Tanden from March 2016 discussed how it was "REALLY dicey territory" for Clinton to comment on strengthening
"bribery laws to ensure that politicians don't change legislation for political donations." Tanden agrees with Sullivan:
" She may be so tainted she's really vulnerable - if so, maybe a message of I've seen how this sausage is
made, it needs to stop, I'm going to stop it will actually work."
* * *
One email suggested, sarcastically, to kneecap
bernie Sanders : Clinton's team issued advise regarding her tactics for the "make or break" Democratic presidential debate with
Sanders in Milwaukee on February 11, 2016. The mail to Podesta came from Philip Munger, a Democratic Party donor. He sent the mail
using an encrypted anonymous email service.
"She's going to have to kneecap him. She is going to have to take him down from his morally superior perch. She has done so
tentatively. She must go further," he says.
Clearly, the desire to get Sanders' supporters was a key imperative for the Clinton campaign. In a
September 2015 email to Podesta , Hill columnist
Brent Budowsky criticized the campaign for allegedly giving Clinton surrogates talking points to attack Bernie Sanders. "I cannot
think of anything more stupid and self-destructive for a campaign to do," he says. "Especially for a candidate who has dangerously
low levels of public trust," and in light of Sanders' campaign being based on "cleaning up politics."
Budowsky warns voters would be "disgusted" by attacks against Sanders and says he wouldn't discourage Podesta from sharing the
note with Clinton because "if she wants to become president she needs to understand the point I am making with crystal clarity."
"Make love to Bernie and his idealistic supporters, and co-opt as many of his progressive issues as possible."
Budowsky then adds that he was at a Washington university where " not one student gave enough of a damn for Hillary to
open a booth, or even wear a Hillary button. "
* * *
One email focused on how to address with the
topic of the TPP. National Policy Director for Hillary for America Amanda Renteria explains, "The goal here was to minimize our vulnerability
to the authenticity attack and not piss off the WH any more than necessary."
Democratic pollster Joel Benenson says, "the reality is HRC is more pro trade than anti and trying to turn her into something
she is not could reinforce our negative [sic] around authenticity. This is an agreement that she pushed for and largely advocated
for."
* * *
While claiming she is part of the people, an email exposes Hillary as being "
part of the system ." Clinton's team acknowledges
she is "part of the system" in an email regarding her strategies. As Stan Greenberg told Podesta:
" We are also going to test some messages that include acknowledgement of being part of the system, and know how much
has to change ,"
* * *
Some more on the topic of Hillary being extensively coached and all her words rehearsed, we find an email which reveals that
Clinton's words have to be tightly managed by her
team who are wary of what she might say. After the Iowa Democratic Party's presidential debate in November 2015 adviser Ron Klain
mails Podesta to say, "If she says something three times as an aside during practice (Wall Street supports me due to 9/11), we need
to assume she will say it in the debate, and tell her not to do so." Klain's mail reveals Sanders was their biggest fear in the debate.
"The only thing that would have been awful – a Sanders break out – didn't happen. So all in all, we were fine," he says.
The mail also reveals Klain's role in securing his daughter Hannah a position on Clinton's team. "I'm not asking anyone to make
a job, or put her in some place where she isn't wanted – it just needs a nudge over the finish line," Klain says. Hannah Klain worked
on Clinton's Surrogates team for nine months commencing in the month after her father's mail to Podesta, according to her Linkedin.
I love this...Assange is incommunicado, yet the data dumps keep coming!
Horse face looks like such a fool to the world as a result; & due to John Kerry's stupidity which is drawing major attention to
the whole matter; Americans are finally beginning to wake up & pay attention to this shit!
Looks like the Hitlery for Prez ship is starting to take on MASSIVE amounts of water!
I believe they are beyond the point where any more news of 'pussy grabbing' will save them from themselves (and Mr. Assange)!
The new lowered expectations federal government just expects to get lucre + bennies for sitting on their asses and holding
the door for gangsters. Traitors. Spies. Enemies foreign and domestic. Amphisbaegenic pot boiling.
With Creamer's tricks effective in Obama's re-election, it now makes sense why Obama was so confident when he said Trump would
never be president.
Trump is still ahead in the only poll I track. But i conduct my own personal poll on a daily basis and loads of Trump supporters
are in the closet and won't come out until they pull the lever for Trump on election day.
The DailyKos put out a report on Oct. 17 that WikiLeaks describes
as a "smear campaign plot to falsely accuse Julian Assange of pedophilia."
"An unknown entity posing as an internet dating agency prepared an elaborate plot to falsely claim that Julian Assange received
US$1M from the Russian government and a second plot to frame him sexually molesting an eight year old girl," WikiLeaks said in
a
press release Tuesday.
The press release went on: "The second plot includes the filing of a fabricated criminal complaint in the Bahamas, a court
complaint in the UK and laundering part of the attack through the United Nations. The plot happened durring WikiLeaks' Hillary
Clinton related publications, but the plot may have its first genesis in Mr. Assange's 16 months litigation against the UK in
the UN system, which concluded February 5 (Assange won. UK and Sweden lost & US State Dept tried to pressure the WGAD according
to its former Chair, Prof. Mads Andenas)."
The DailyKos reported that a Canadian family holidaying in the Bahamas reported to the police that their 8-year-old daughter
was "sexually molested online" by Assange on Toddandclare.com.
Julian Assange's legal team provided a timeline in the press release which showed that the self-claimed dating agency ToddAndClare.com
contacted WikiLeaks' defense team offering one million dollars for Assange to appear in a video advertisement for the "dating
agency".
Assange's defense wrote back, stating that the proposal appeared to be an "elaborate scam designed to entrap Mr. Assange's
reputation into unwanted and unwarranted publicity."
WikiLeaks was able to trace down the address of the front, posting an image on twitter of what appears to be a warehouse or
garage.
Here is the "headquarters" of the front (PAC?) behind the Assange "took US$1M from Russia" plot
Internet sleuths from Reddit were able to dig up some information about the dating service pushing the attacks on Assange,
finding that the company shares the address with a private intelligence corporation named Premise Data Corporation.
Here is the Reddit post that lays out the findings:
As other Redditors point out, the Center for American Progress was founded by Clinton campaign chair John Podesta and
was funded by billionaire and pro-Clintonite George Soros.
As one Redditor so laughably put it, "If this was merely a coincidence, then I'm the queen of England."
As
we reported yesterday , Fox News had told its audience Tuesday morning that Assange would be arrested "maybe in a matter of
hours," leading to the speculation that there could have been a plot to arrest Assange over the pedophilia accusations.
"... Yoko Ono has been talking about it for years and those who would be bothered by it, aren't voting for her anyway. ..."
"... I don't think anyone really cares especially since I doubt she's doing much of anything with anyone nowadays. ..."
"... Now, if she were to divorce Bill and have a public gay wedding ceremony with a divorced Huma Abedin, that might surprise some people but that wouldn't win her any points since it would alienate those who actually just like Bill . ..."
why bother, it's no secret to her voters I don't think Yoko Ono has been talking about
it for years and those who would be bothered by it, aren't voting for her anyway.
I don't think anyone really cares especially since I doubt she's doing much of anything with anyone
nowadays.
Now, if she were to divorce Bill and have a public gay wedding ceremony with a divorced Huma Abedin,
that might surprise some people but that wouldn't win her any points since it would alienate those
who actually just like Bill .
"... Rumors have abounded for years that Hillary's door swings this way and this is why she had no issue with Bill's marital infidelities. While the story is not a new one, if it came with credible proof to support those long persistent rumors, it could be a complete game-changer for the election that is now just a short, three weeks away. ..."
Popular Conservative news personality, Matt Drudge, has caused quite the stir. On Sunday
Drudge tweeted that he was about to unleash a bombshell like none other, one that could potentially
upend this contentious Presidential election.
"Oh, on the sex stuff. Hillary is about to get hers ," he wrote on Twitter,
sharing a photo of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton with talk show host-comedienne-actress
Ellen DeGeneres. The implications, of course, are that the rumors may force Hillary out of the closet
so to speak as a lesbian.
Rumors have abounded for years that Hillary's door swings this way and this is why she had no
issue with Bill's marital infidelities. While the story is not a new one, if it came with credible
proof to support those long persistent rumors, it could be a complete game-changer for the election
that is now just a short, three weeks away.
But come January, Democrats will continue to be the dominant political faction in the U.S. - more
so than ever - and the tactics they are now embracing will endure past the election, making them
worthy of scrutiny. Those tactics now most prominently include dismissing away any facts or documents
that reflect negatively on their leaders as fake, and strongly insinuating that anyone who questions
or opposes those leaders is
a stooge or agent of the Kremlin, tasked with a subversive and dangerously un-American mission
on behalf of hostile actors in Moscow.
To see how extreme and damaging this behavior has become,
let's just quickly examine two utterly false claims that Democrats over the past four days - led
by party-loyal journalists - have disseminated and induced thousands of people, if not more, to believe.
On Friday, WikiLeaks published its first installment of emails obtained from the account of Clinton
campaign chair John Podesta. Despite WikiLeaks' perfect, long-standing record of only publishing
authentic documents,
MSNBC's favorite ex-intelligence official, Malcolm Nance, within hours of the archive's release,
posted a tweet claiming - with zero evidence and without citation to a single document in the WikiLeaks
archive - that it was compromised with fakes:
As you can see, more than 4,000 people have re-tweeted this "Official Warning." That includes
not only random Clinton fans but also
high-profileClinton-supporting
journalists, who by spreading it around gave this claim their stamp of approval, intentionally
leading huge numbers of people to assume the WikiLeaks archive must be full of fakes, and its contents
should therefore simply be ignored. Clinton's campaign officials spent the day
fueling these
insinuations, strongly implying that the documents were unreliable and should thus be ignored.
Poof: Just like that, unpleasant facts about Hillary Clinton disappeared, like a fairy protecting
frightened children by waving her magic wand and sprinkling her dust over a demon, causing it to
scatter away.
Except the only fraud here was Nance's claim, not any of the documents published by WikiLeaks.
Those were all real. Indeed, at Sunday night's debate, when asked directly about the excerpts of
her Wall Street speeches found in the release, Clinton herself confirmed their authenticity. And
news outlets such as the New York Times and AP reported - and
continue to report - on their contents without any caveat that they may be frauds. No real print
journalists or actual newsrooms (as opposed to campaign operatives masquerading as journalists) fell
for this scam, so this tactic did not prevent reporting from being done.
But it did signal to Clinton's most devoted followers to simply ignore the contents of the release.
Anyone writing articles about what these documents revealed was instantly barraged with claims from
Democrats that they were fakes, by people often pointing to
"articles" like this one.
That article was shared almost 22,000 times on Facebook alone. In Nance's defense, it is true that
some unknown, random person posted a doctored email on the internet and claimed it was real, but
that did not come from the WikiLeaks archive and has nothing to do with assessing the reliability
of the archive (any more than
fake NYT stories on the internet impugn the reliability of articles in that paper). Not one person
has identified even a single email or document released by WikiLeaks of questionable authenticity
- that includes all of the Clinton officials whose names are listed as their authors and recipients
- yet these journalists and "experts" deliberately convinced who knows how many people to believe
a fairy tale: that WikiLeaks' archive is pervaded with forgeries.
More insidious and subtle,
but even worse, was what Newsweek and its Clinton-adoring writer Kurt Eichenwald did last night.
What happened - in reality, in the world of facts - was extremely trivial.
One of the emails
in the second installment of the WikiLeaks/Podesta archive - posted yesterday - was from Sidney Blumenthal
to Podesta. The sole purpose of Blumenthal's email was to show Podesta one of Eichenwald's endless
series of Clinton-exonerating articles,
this one about Benghazi. So in the body of the email to Podesta, Blumenthal simply pasted the
link and the full contents of the article. Although the purpose of Eichenwald's article (like everything
he says and does) was to defend Clinton, one paragraph in the middle acknowledged that one minor
criticism of Clinton on Benghazi was possibly rational.
Once WikiLeaks announced that this second email batch was online, many news organizations (including
The Intercept, along with the NYT and AP) began combing through them to find relevant information
and then published articles about them. One such story was published by Sputnik, the Russian government's
international outlet similar to RT, which highlighted that Blumenthal email. But the Sputnik story
inaccurately attributed the text of the Newsweek article to Blumenthal, thus suggesting that one
of Clinton's closest advisers had expressed criticism of her on Benghazi. Sputnik quickly removed
the article once Eichenwald pointed out that the words were his, not Blumenthal's. Then, in his campaign
speech last night, Trump made reference to the Sputnik article (hours after it was published and
spread on social media), claiming (obviously inaccurately) that even Blumenthal had criticized Clinton
on Benghazi.
That's all that happened. There is zero suggestion in the article, let alone evidence, that
any WikiLeaks email was doctored: It wasn't. It was just Sputnik misreporting the email. Once
Sputnik realized that its article misattributed the text to Blumenthal, it took it down. It's not
hard to imagine how a rushed, careless Sputnik staffer could glance at that email and fail to realize
that Blumenthal was forwarding Eichenwald's article rather than writing it himself. And while nobody
knows how this erroneous Sputnik story made its way to Trump for him to reference in his speech,
it's very easy to imagine how a Trump staffer on a shoddy, inept campaign - which has previously
cited InfoWars and white supremacist sites, among others - would have stumbled into
a widely shared
Sputnik story that had been published hours earlier on the internet and then passed it along
to Trump for him to highlight, without realizing the reasons to be skeptical.
In any event, based on the available evidence, this is a small embarrassment for Trump: He cited
an erroneous story from a non-credible Russian outlet, so it's worth noting. But that's not what
happened. Eichenwald, with increasing levels of hysteria, manically posted
no fewer than
three dozen tweets last night about his story, each time escalating his claims of what it proved.
By the time he was done, he had misled large numbers of people into believing that he found proof
that: 1) the documents in the WikiLeaks archive were altered; 2) Russia put forgeries into the WikiLeaks
archive; 3) Sputnik knew about the WikiLeaks archive ahead of time, before it was posted online;
4) WikiLeaks coordinated the release of the documents with the Russian government; and 5) the Russian
government and the Trump campaign coordinated to falsely attribute Eichenwald's words to Blumenthal.
In fact, Eichenwald literally has zero evidence for any of that. The point is not that his evidence
for these propositions is inconclusive or unpersuasive; the point is that there is zero evidence
for any of it. It's all just conspiracy theorizing and speculation that he invented. Worse, the article,
while hinting at these claims and encouraging readers to believe them, does not even expressly claim
any of those things. Instead, Eichenwald's increasingly unhinged tweets repeatedly inflated his insignificant
story from what it was - a misattribution of an email by Sputnik that Trump repeated - into a five-alarm
warning that an insidious Russian plot to subvert U.S. elections had been proven, with Trump and
fake WikiLeaks documents at the center.
By itself, this is not so notable: All journalists are tempted to hype their stories. But
Eichenwald went way, way beyond that, including - as demonstrated below - demonstrable lies.
But what makes it so significant is how many reasoned, perfectly smart journalists - just as they
did with Nance's "Official Warning" - started falling prey to the dual hysteria of Twitter group
dynamics and election blinders, to the point where CNN featured Eichenwald this morning to highlight
his major scoop linking Putin, Trump, and WikiLeaks in the plot to feed Americans heaps of Russian
disinformation.
Just watch how this warped narrative played out in a very short period of time, with nobody wanting
to get in the way of the speeding train for fear of being castigated as a Trump supporter or Putin
stooge (accusations that are - yet again - inevitably on their way as a result of this article):
To call all this overwrought deceit is to understate the case. In particular, the repeated claim
that his story has anything to do with, let alone demonstrates, that "wikileaks is working w/Putin"
or "wikileaks is compromised" is an outright fraud. The assertion in the second tweet - that "only
those two [Trump and Russia] knew" about the article - is an outright lie, since by the time Trump
cited it, it had been published hours earlier on the internet and shared widely on social media.
Moreover, none of the documents released by WikiLeaks have yet to be identified as anything but completely
authentic.
But look at his tweets: Each has been re-tweeted by close to 1,000 people, and in the case of
the most sensationalistic ones, many more. And they were quickly hyped by people who should know
better because anyone supporting Hillary Clinton wants to believe that this is true:
Russsia leaked hacked emails but created forgeries first plagiarizing a
reporter. Only Russian news posted the lie. Yet,
@realDonaldTrumphttps://t.co/mGizfPpHWF
Literally none of that happened. Or at least there is zero evidence that it did. These are smart,
rational people falling for a scam. Why? It's in part because Twitter fosters this group-think and
lack of critical thought - you just click a button and, with little effort, you've spread whatever
you want people to believe - but it's also because they're so convinced of the righteousness of their
cause (electing Clinton/defeating Trump) that they have cast all limits and constraints to the side,
believing that any narrative or accusation or smear, no matter how false or conspiratorial, is justified
in pursuit of it.
But while Donald Trump's candidacy poses grave dangers, so does group-think righteousness, particularly
when it engulfs those with the greatest influence. The problem is that none of this is going to vanish
after the election. This election-year machine that has been constructed based on elite unity in
support of Clinton - casually dismissing inconvenient facts as fraudulent to make them disappear,
branding critics and adversaries as tools or agents of an Enemy Power bent on destroying America
- is a powerful one. As is seen here, it is capable of implanting any narrative, no matter how false;
demonizing any critic, no matter how baseless; and riling up people to believe they're under attack.
For a long time, liberals heralded themselves as part of the "reality-based community" and derided
conservatives as faith-based victims of "epistemic closure." The dynamics seen here are anything
but byproducts of reason.
"... If you insist on focusing on individuals, you may miss the connection, because the worst off
within communities - actual chronic discouraged workers, addicts - are likely to express no opinion
to the degree they can be polled at all. Trump primary voters are white Republicans who vote, automatically
a more affluent baseline* than the white voters generally. ..."
EMichael quotes Steve Randy Waldman and Dylan Matthews in today's links:
""Trump voters, FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver found, had a median household income of $72,000,
a fair bit higher than the $62,000 median household income for non-Hispanic whites in America."
...
""But it is also obvious that, within the Republican Party, Trump's support comes disproportionately
from troubled communities, from places that have been left behind economically, that struggle
with unusual rates of opiate addiction, low educational achievement, and other social vices."
I followed the link and failed to find any numbers on the "troubled communities" thing. It
seems strange to me that the two comments above are in conflict with each other."
It seems like you are missing the point of Waldman's blog post (and Stiglitz and Shiller)
You didn't quote this part:
"... If you insist on focusing on individuals, you may miss the connection, because the
worst off within communities - actual chronic discouraged workers, addicts - are likely to express
no opinion to the degree they can be polled at all. Trump primary voters are white Republicans
who vote, automatically a more affluent baseline* than the white voters generally.
"Among Republicans, Trump supporters have slightly lower incomes. But what really differentiates
them?"]
"At the community level**, patterns are clear. (See this*** too.) Of course, it could still
all be racism, because within white communities, measures of social and economic dysfunction are
likely correlated with measures you could associate with racism."
Of course, it could still all be racism, because within white communities, measures of social
and economic dysfunction are likely correlated with measures you could associate with racism.
Social affairs are complicated and the real world does not hand us unique well-identified models.
We always have to choose our explanations,**** and we should think carefully about how and why
we do so. Explanations have consequences, not just for the people we are imposing them upon, but
for our polity as a whole. I don't get involved in these arguments to express some high-minded
empathy for Trump voters, but because I think that monocausally attributing a broad political
movement to racism when it has other plausible antecedents does real harm....
"... First, Clinton's neoliberalism is so bone deep that she refers to Medicare as a "single market" rather than "single payer"; ..."
"... Clinton frames solutions exclusively ..."
"... Policy Sciences ..."
"... Stalin spent his early days in a seminary. Masters of broken promises. I'm more interested in Clinton's Chinese connections. Probably tied through JP Morgan. The Chinese are very straightforward in their, dare I say, inscrutible way. The ministers are the ministers, and the palace is the palace. ..."
"... SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, I don't feel particularly courageous. I mean, if we're going to be an effective, efficient economy, we need to have all part of that engine running well, and that includes Wall Street and Main Street. ..."
"... Because she wont pay for quality speechwriters or coaching. Because she is a shyster, cheapskate and a fraud. They hired the most inept IT company to 'mange' their office server who then (in a further fit of cheapskate stupidity) hired an inept IT client manager who then (in a further fit of cheapskate stupidity) asked Reddit for a solution. ..."
"... One can say a lot of justifiable bad things about Ronald Reagan, but, he had competent advisors and he used them! With Hillary, Even if she knows she has accessed the best advice on the planet her instinct it to not trust it because "she knows better" and she absolutely will not tolerate dissent. Left to her own devices, she simply copies other people's thinking/ homework instead of building her own ideas with it. ..."
"... What surprises me is that Goldmans paid her for these speeches, you know? Hillary C typically pays "the audience" to listen to, and come to her speeches. You know? You know! ..."
"... I heard Hillary speak in summer '92, when Bill was running for Prez. She. was. amazing. No joke. Great speech, great ideas, great points. I thought then she should be the candidate. But there was in her speech just a tiny undercurrent of "the ends justify the means." i.e. 'we need to get lots of money so we can do good things.' Fast forward 20+ years. Seems to me that for the Clintons the "means" (getting lots of money) has become the end in itself. Reassuring Wall St. is one method for getting money – large, large amounts of money. ..."
"... A fine illustration of the maxim that "crime makes you stupid." ..."
"... in that context ..."
"... So I guess the moral of the story is (a) more deterioration, this time from 2008 to 2016, and (b) Clinton can actually make a good decision, but only when forced to by a catastrophe that will impact her personally. Whether she'll be able to rise to the occasion if elected is an open question, but this post argues not. ..."
"... Bingo! Think about it: She was speaking to a group of people whose time is "valued" at 100's if not 1,000's of dollars per hour. She took up their "valuable" time but provided nothing except politics-as-usual blather tailored to that particular audience. Yet she was paid $225k for a single speech… ..."
"... Hillary is a remarkably inarticulate person, which calls into question her intellectual fitness for the job (amidst many other questions, of course). I entirely agree with your depiction of her speeches as mindless drivel. ..."
"... Not to otherwise compare them, but Bush I's inarticulateness made him seem a buffoon, and that was not the case, either. ..."
"... Matt Tiabbi, Elizabeth Warren, Benie Sanders, Noam Chompsky–all those used to seem like bastions of integrity have, thanks to Hillary, been revealed as slimy little Weasels who should henceforth be completely disregarded. I'd have to thank Hillary for pulling back the nlindets on that; if not for this election I might have been still foolishly listening to these people. ..."
"... What scares me most about Clinton is her belligerence towards Russia and clamoring for a no-fly zone in Syria. The no-fly zone will mean war with Russia. If only Clinton were saying this, we might be safe, but the entire Washington deep state seems to be of one mind in favor of a war. During the cold war this would have been inconceivable; everyone understood a nuclear war must not be allowed. This is no longer true and it is terrifying. Every war game the pentagon used to simulate a war with the U.S.S.R. escalated into an all out nuclear war. What is the "plan B" Obama is pursuing in Syria? ..."
"... The current fear/fever over nuclear war with Russia requires madness in the Kremlin - of which there is no evidence. Our Rulers are depending on Putin and his cohorts being the sane ones as rhetoric from the US and the West ratchets ever upwards. ..."
"... But then, the Kremlin is looking for any hint of sanity on US and NATO side and is finding little… ..."
"... Curtis LeMay tried to provoke a nuclear war with the Soviets in the 1950's. By and large, however, the American state understood a nuclear war was unwinnable and avoided such a possibility. A no-fly zone in Syria would start a war with Russia. William Polk, who participated in the Cuban missle crisis and U.S. nuclear war games, argues in this article ..."
"... both of which present a clinical assessment that Hillary suffers from Parkinson's. Seems like an elephant in the room. ..."
"... The absolute vacuousness of Clinton's remarks, coupled with her ease at neoliberal conventional wisdom, make it clear that Goldman's payments were nothing more (or less) than a $675,000 anticipatory "so no quid pro quo ..."
"... The leaked emails confirm - even though she herself never writes them, which is really odd, when you consider that Podesta is her Campaign Chair and close ally going back decades - that she is compulsively secretive, controlling, and resistant to admitting she's wrong. The chain of people talking about how to get her to admit she was wrong about Nancy Reagan and AIDS was particularly fascinating that way; she was flat out factually inaccurate, and it had the potential to do tremendous harm to her campaign with a key donor group, and it was apparently still a major task to persuade her to say "I made a mistake." ..."
"... basically, every real world policy problem is related to every other real world policy problem ..."
"... Most noticeable thing is her subservience to them like a fresh college grad afraid of his boss at his first job ..."
As readers know, WikiLeaks has
released transcripts
of the three speeches to Goldman Sachs that Clinton gave in 2013, and for which she was paid
the eyewatering sum of $675,000. (The link is to an email dated January 23, 2016, from Cllinton staffer
Tony Carrk , Clinton's research director, which pulls out
"noteworthy quotes" from the speeches. The speeches themselves are attachments to that email.)
Readers, I read them. All three of them. What surprises - and when I tell you I had to take a
little nap about halfway through, I'm not making it up! - is the utter mediocrity of Clinton's thought
and mode of expression[1]. Perhaps that explains Clinton's
otherwise inexplicable refusal to release them. And perhaps my sang froid is preternatural,
but I don't see a "smoking gun," unless forking over $675,000 for interminable volumes of shopworn
conventional wisdom be, in itself, such a gun. What can Goldman Sachs possibly have thought they
were paying for?
WikiLeaks has, however, done voters a favor - in these speeches, and in the DNC and Podesta email
releases generally - by giving us a foretaste of what a Clinton administration will be like, once
in power, not merely on policy (the "first 100 days"), but on how they will make decisions. I call
the speeches a "munitions dump," because the views she expresses in these speeches are bombs that
can be expected to explode as the Clinton administration progresses.
With that, let's contextualize and comment upon some quotes from the speeches
The Democrats Are the Party of Wall Street
Of course, you knew that, but it's nice to have the matter confirmed. This material was flagged
by Carrk (as none of the following material will have been). It's enormously prolix, but I decided
to cut only a few paragraphs. From
Clinton's second
Goldman speech at the AIMS Alternative Investments Symposium:
MR. O'NEILL: Let's come back to the US. Since 2008, there's been an awful lot of seismic activity
around Wall Street and the big banks and regulators and politicians.
Now, without going over how we got to where we are right now , what would be your
advice to the Wall Street community and the big banks as to the way forward with those two important
decisions?
SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, I represented all of you for eight years. I had great relations and
worked so close together after 9/11 to rebuild downtown, and a lot of respect for the work you
do and the people who do it, but I do - I think that when we talk about the regulators and the
politicians, the economic consequences of bad decisions back in '08, you know, were devastating,
and they had repercussions throughout the world.
That was one of the reasons that I started traveling in February of '09, so people could, you
know, literally yell at me for the United States and our banking system causing this everywhere.
Now, that's an oversimplification we know, but it was the conventional wisdom [really?!].
And I think that there's a lot that could have been avoided in terms of both misunderstanding
and really politicizing [!] what happened with greater transparency, with greater openness on
all sides, you know, what happened, how did it happen, how do we prevent it from happening?
You guys help us figure it out and let's make sure that we do it right this time .
And I think that everybody was desperately trying to fend off the worst effects institutionally,
governmentally, and there just wasn't that opportunity to try to sort this out, and that
came later .
I mean, it's still happening, as you know. People are looking back and trying to, you know,
get compensation for bad mortgages and all the rest of it in some of the agreements that are being
reached.
There's nothing magic about regulations, too much is bad, too little is bad. How do you get
to the golden key, how do we figure out what works? And the people that know the industry
better than anybody are the people who work in the industry .
…
And we need banking. I mean, right now, there are so many places in our country where
the banks are not doing what they need to do because they're scared of regulations , they're
scared of the other shoe dropping, they're just plain scared, so credit is not flowing the way
it needs to to restart economic growth.
So people are, you know, a little - they're still uncertain, and they're uncertain both because
they don't know what might come next in terms of regulations, but they're also uncertain because
of changes in a global economy that we're only beginning to take hold of.
So first and foremost, more transparency, more openness, you know, trying to figure out,
we're all in this together , how we keep this incredible economic engine in this country
going. And this [finance] is, you know, the nerves, the
spinal column.
And with political people, again, I would say the same thing, you know, there was a lot
of complaining about Dodd-Frank, but there was also a need to do something because for political
reasons , if you were an elected member of Congress and people in your constituency were
losing jobs and shutting businesses and everybody in the press is saying it's all the fault of
Wall Street, you can't sit idly by and do nothing, but what you do is really important.
And I think the jury is still out on that because it was very difficult to sort of sort through
it all.
And, of course, I don't, you know, I know that banks and others were worried about continued
liability [oh, really?] and other problems down the road, so it would be better if we could
have had a more open exchange about what we needed to do to fix what had broken and then try to
make sure it didn't happen again, but we will keep working on it.
MR. O'NEILL: By the way, we really did appreciate when you were the senator from New York and
your continued involvement in the issues (inaudible) to be courageous in some respects to associated
with Wall Street and this environment. Thank you very much.
SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, I don't feel particularly courageous. I mean, if we're going to be
an effective, efficient economy, we need to have all part of that engine running well, and that
includes Wall Street and Main Street.
And there's a big disconnect and a lot of confusion right now. So I'm not interested in,
you know, turning the clock back or pointing fingers , but I am interested in trying to
figure out how we come together to chart a better way forward and one that will restore confidence
in, you know, small and medium-size businesses and consumers and begin to chip away at the unemployment
rate [five years into the recession!].
So it's something that I, you know, if you're a realist, you know that people have different
roles to play in politics, economics, and this is an important role, but I do think that there
has to be an understanding of how what happens here on Wall Street has such broad consequences
not just for the domestic but the global economy, so more thought has to be given to the process
and transactions and regulations so that we don't kill or maim what works, but we concentrate
on the most effective way of moving forward with the brainpower and the financial power
that exists here.
"Moving forward." And not looking back. (It would be nice to know what "continued liability"
the banks were worried about;
accounting
control fraud ? Maybe somebody could ask Clinton.) Again, I call your attention to the weird
combination of certainty and mediocrity of it; readers, I am sure, can demolish the detail. What
this extended quotation does show is that Clinton and Obama are as one with respect to the
role of the finance sector. Politico describes Obama's famous meeting with the bankster CEOs:
Arrayed around a long mahogany table in the White House state dining room last week, the CEOs
of the most powerful financial institutions in the world offered several explanations for paying
high salaries to their employees - and, by extension, to themselves.
"These are complicated companies," one CEO said. Offered another: "We're competing for talent
on an international market.".
But President Barack Obama wasn't in a mood to hear them out. He stopped the conversation and
offered a blunt reminder of the public's reaction to such explanations. "Be careful how you make
those statements, gentlemen. The public isn't buying that.".
"My administration," the president added, "is the only thing between you and the pitchforks."
And he did! He did! Clinton, however, by calling the finance sector the "the nerves, the spinal
column" of the country, goes farther than Obama ever did.
So, from the governance perspective, we can expect the FIRE sector to dominate a Clinton administration,
and the Clinton administration to service it. The Democrats are the Party of Wall Street. The bomb
that could explode there is corrupt dealings with cronies (for which the Wikileaks material provides
plenty of leads).
Clinton Advocates a "Night Watchman" State
The next quotes are shorter, I swear! Here's a quote from
Clinton's third
Goldman speech (not flagged by Carrk, no doubt because hearing drivel like this is perfectly
normal in HillaryLand):
SECRETARY CLINTON: And I tell you, I see any society like a three-legged stool. You have to
have an active free market that gives people the chance to live out their dreams by their own
hard work and skills. You have to have a functioning, effective government that provides
the right balance of oversight and protection of freedom and privacy and liberty and all the rest
of it that goes with it . And you have to have an active civil society. Because there's
so much about America that is volunteerism and religious faith and family and community activities.
So you take one of those legs away, it's pretty hard to balance it. So you've got to get back
to getting the right balance.
Apparently, the provision
of public services is not within government's remit -- What are Social Security and Medicare?
"All the rest of it"? Not only that, who said the free market was the only way to "live
out their dreams"? Madison, Franklin, even Hamilton would have something to say about that! Finally,
which one of those legs is out of balance? Civil society? Some would advocate less religion in politics
rather than more, including many Democrats. The markets? Not at Goldman? Government? Too much militarization,
way too little concrete material benefits, so far as I'm concerned, but Clinton doesn't say, making
the "stool" metaphor vacuous.
From a governance perspective, we can expect Clinton's blind spot on government's role in provisioning
servies to continue. Watch for continued privatization efforts (perhaps aided by Silicon Valley).
On any infrastructure projects, watch for "public-private partnerships." The bomb that could explode
there is corrupt dealings with a different set of cronies (even if the FIRE sector does
have a finger in every pie).
Clinton's Views on Health Care Reflect Market Fundamentalism
MR. O'NEILL: [O]bviously the Affordable Care Act has been upheld by the supreme court. It's
clearly having limitation problems [I don't know what that means]. It's unsettling, people still
- the Republicans want to repeal it or defund it. So how do you get to the middle on that clash
of absolutes?
SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, this is not the first time that we rolled out a big program with the
limitation problems [Clinton apparently does].
I was in the Senate when President Bush asked and signed legislation expanding Medicare benefits,
the Medicare Part D drug benefits. And people forget now that it was a very difficult implementation.
As a senator, my staff spent weeks working with people who were trying to sign up, because
it was in some sense even harder to manage because the population over 65, not the most computer-literate
group, and it was difficult. But, you know, people stuck with it, worked through it.
Now, this is on - it's on a different scale and it is more complex because it's trying to create
a market. In Medicare, you have a single market , you have, you know, the government
is increasing funding through government programs [sic] to provide people over 65 the drugs they
needed.
And there were a few variations that you could play out on it, but it was a much simpler market
than what the Affordable Care Act is aiming to set up.
Now, the way I look at this, Tim, is it's either going to work or it's not going to work.
First, Clinton's neoliberalism is so bone deep that she refers to Medicare as a "single market"
rather than "single payer"; but then
Clinton erases single payer whenever possible . Second, Clinton frames solutions exclusively
in terms of markets (and not the direct provision of services by government);
Obama does the same on health care in JAMA , simply erasing the possibility of single payer.
Third, rather than advocate a simple, rugged, and proven system like Canadian Medicare (single payer),
Clinton prefers to run an experiment ("it's either going to work or it's not going to work")
on the health of millions of people (and, I would urge, without their informed consent).
From a governance perspective, assume that if the Democrats propose
a "public option," it will be miserably inadequate. The bomb that could explode here is the ObamaCare
death spiral.
The Problems Are "Wicked," but Clinton Will Be Unable to Cope With Them
MR. BLANKFEIN: The next area which I think is actually literally closer to home but where American
lives have been at risk is the Middle East, I think is one topic. What seems to be the ambivalence
or the lack of a clear set of goals - maybe that ambivalence comes from not knowing what outcome
we want or who is our friend or what a better world is for the United States and of Syria, and
then ultimately on the Iranian side if you think of the Korean bomb as far away and just the Tehran
death spot, the Iranians are more calculated in a hotter area with - where does that go? And I
tell you, I couldn't - I couldn't myself tell - you know how we would like things to work out,
but it's not discernable to me what the policy of the United States is towards an outcome either
in Syria or where we get to in Iran.
MS. CLINTON: Well, part of it is it's a wicked problem , and it's a wicked
problem that is very hard to unpack in part because as you just said, Lloyd, it's not clear
what the outcome is going to be and how we could influence either that outcome or a different
outcome.
(I say "cope with" rather than "solve" for reasons that will become apparent.) Yes, Syria's bad,
as vividly shown by Blankfein's fumbling question, but I want to focus on the term "wicked problem,"
which comes from the the field of strategic planning, though it's also infiltrated
information technology
and management
theory . The concept originated in a famous paper by Horst W. J. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber
entitled: "Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning" (PDF), Policy Sciences 4 (1973), 155-169.
I couldn't summarize the literature even if I had the time, but here is Rittel and Webber's introduction:
There are at least ten distinguishing properties of planning-type problems, i.e. wicked ones,
that planners had better be alert to and which we shall comment upon in turn. As you will see,
we are calling them "wicked" not because these properties are themselves ethically deplorable.
We use the term "wicked" in a meaning akin to that of "malignant" (in contrast to "benign") or
"vicious" (like a circle) or "tricky" (like a leprechaun) or "aggressive" (like a lion, in contrast
to the docility of a lamb). We do not mean to personify these properties of social systems by
implying malicious intent. But then, you may agree that it becomes morally objectionable for the
planner to treat a wicked problem as though it were a tame one, or to tame a wicked problem prematurely,
or to refuse to recognize the inherent wickedness of social problems.
And here is a list of Rittel and Webber's ten properties of a "wicked problem" (
and a critique ):
There is no definite formulation of a wicked problem Wicked problems have no stopping rule Solutions
to wicked problems are not true-or-false, but good-or-bad. There is no immediate and no ultimate
test of a solution to a wicked problem. Every solution to a wicked problem is a "one-shot operation";
because there is no opportunity to learn by trial-and-error, every attempt counts significantly.
Wicked problems do not have an enumerable (or an exhaustively describable) set of potential solutions,
nor is there a well-described set of permissible operations that may be incorporated into the
plan. Every wicked problem is essentially unique. Every wicked problem can be considered to be
a symptom of another [wicked] problem. The causes of a wicked problem can be explained in numerous
ways. The choice of explanation determines the nature of the problem's resolution. [With wicked
problems,] the planner has no right to be wrong.
Of course, there's plenty of controversy about all of this, but if you throw these properties
against the Syrian clusterf*ck, I think you'll see a good fit, and can probably come up with other
examples. My particular concern, however, is with property #3:
Solutions to wicked problems are not true-or-false, but good-or-bad
There are conventionalized criteria for objectively deciding whether the offered solution to
an equation or whether the proposed structural formula of a chemical compound is correct or false.
They can be independently checked by other qualified persons who are familiar with the established
criteria; and the answer will be normally unambiguous.
For wicked planning problems, there are no true or false answers. Normally, many parties are
equally equipped, interested, and/or entitled to judge the solutions, although none has the power
to set formal decision rules to determine correctness. Their judgments are likely to differ widely
to accord with their group or personal interests, their special value-sets, and their ideological
predilections. Their assessments of proposed solutions are expressed as "good" or "bad" or, more
likely, as "better or worse" or "satisfying" or "good enough."
(Today, we would call these "many parties" "stakeholders.") My concern is that a Clinton administration,
far from compromising - to be fair, Clinton does genuflect toward "compromise" elsewhere - will try
to make wicked planning problems more tractable by reducing the number of parties to policy decisions.
That is, exactly, what "irredeemables" implies[2], which is unfortunate, especially when the cast
out amount to well over a third of the population. The same tendencies were also visible in the Clinton
campaigns approach to Sanders and Sanders supporters, and the general strategy of bringing the Blame
Cannons to bear on those who demonstrate insufficient fealty.
From a governance perspective, watch for many more executive orders acceptable to neither right
nor left, and plenty of decisions taken in secret. The bomb that could explode here is the
legitimacy of a Clinton administration, depending on the parties removed from the policy discussion,
and the nature of the decision taken.
Conclusion
I don't think volatility will decrease on November 8, should Clinton be elected and take office;
if anything, it will increase. A ruling party in thrall to finance, intent on treating government
functions as opportunities for looting by cronies, blinded by neoliberal ideology and hence incapable
of providing truly universal health care, and whose approach to problems of conflict in values is
to demonize and exclude the opposition is a recipe for continued crisis.
NOTES
[1]
Matt Taibbi takes the view that "Speaking to bankers and masters of the corporate universe, she
came off as relaxed, self-doubting, reflective, honest, philosophical rather than political, and
unafraid to admit she lacked all the answers." I don't buy it. It all read like the same old Clinton
to me, and I've read a lot of Clinton (see, e.g.,
here ,
here ,
here ,
here ,
here , and
here ).
[2] One is irresistibly reminded of Stalin's "No man, no problem," although some consider Stalin's
methods to be unsound. oho
October 17, 2016 at 1:14 pm
I had never read this article before. Near perfect diagnosis and even more relevant today than
it was then. For everyone's benefit, the central thesis:
Typically, these countries are in a desperate economic situation for one simple reason-the
powerful elites within them overreached in good times and took too many risks. Emerging-market
governments and their private-sector allies commonly form a tight-knit-and, most of the time,
genteel-oligarchy, running the country rather like a profit-seeking company in which they are
the controlling shareholders.
…
Of course, the U.S. is unique. And just as we have the world's most advanced economy, military,
and technology, we also have its most advanced oligarchy.
In a primitive political system, power is transmitted through violence, or the threat of
violence: military coups, private militias, and so on. In a less primitive system more typical
of emerging markets, power is transmitted via money: bribes, kickbacks, and offshore bank accounts.
Although lobbying and campaign contributions certainly play major roles in the American political
system, old-fashioned corruption-envelopes stuffed with $100 bills-is probably a sideshow today,
Jack Abramoff notwithstanding.
Instead, the American financial industry gained political power by amassing a kind of
cultural capital-a belief system. Once, perhaps, what was good for General Motors was good
for the country. Over the past decade, the attitude took hold that what was good for Wall Street
was good for the country. The banking-and-securities industry has become one of the top contributors
to political campaigns, but at the peak of its influence, it did not have to buy favors the
way, for example, the tobacco companies or military contractors might have to. Instead, it
benefited from the fact that Washington insiders already believed that large financial institutions
and free-flowing capital markets were crucial to America's position in the world.
A hypothesis (at least for "Main Street") proven true between 2009 and 2016:
Emerging-market countries have only a precarious hold on wealth, and are weaklings globally.
When they get into trouble, they quite literally run out of money -- or at least out of foreign
currency, without which they cannot survive. They must make difficult decisions; ultimately,
aggressive action is baked into the cake. But the U.S., of course, is the world's most powerful
nation, rich beyond measure, and blessed with the exorbitant privilege of paying its foreign
debts in its own currency, which it can print. As a result, it could very well stumble along
for years-as Japan did during its lost decade-never summoning the courage to do what it needs
to do, and never really recovering.
Lastly, the "bleak" scenario from 2009 that today looks about a decade too early, but could
with minor tuning (Southern instead of Eastern Europe, for example) end up hitting in a big way:
It goes like this: the global economy continues to deteriorate, the banking system in east-central
Europe collapses, and-because eastern Europe's banks are mostly owned by western European banks-justifiable
fears of government insolvency spread throughout the Continent. Creditors take further hits
and confidence falls further. The Asian economies that export manufactured goods are devastated,
and the commodity producers in Latin America and Africa are not much better off. A dramatic
worsening of the global environment forces the U.S. economy, already staggering, down onto
both knees. The baseline growth rates used in the administration's current budget are increasingly
seen as unrealistic, and the rosy "stress scenario" that the U.S. Treasury is currently using
to evaluate banks' balance sheets becomes a source of great embarrassment.
…
The conventional wisdom among the elite is still that the current slump "cannot be as
bad as the Great Depression." This view is wrong. What we face now could, in fact, be worse
than the Great Depression-because the world is now so much more interconnected and because
the banking sector is now so big. We face a synchronized downturn in almost all countries,
a weakening of confidence among individuals and firms, and major problems for government finances.
If our leadership wakes up to the potential consequences, we may yet see dramatic action on
the banking system and a breaking of the old elite. Let us hope it is not then too late.
That's a good reminder to us at NC that not all our readers have been with us since 2009 and
may not be familiar with the great financial crash and subsequent events. I remember reading the
Johnson article when it came out. And now, almost eight years later…
There's a reason that there's a "Banana Republic" category. Every time I read an article about
the political economy of a second- or third-world country I look for how it applies to this country,
and much of the time, it does, particularly on corruption.
We truly must consider the possibility Goldman wrote the 3 speeches, then paid Hillary to give
them.
Next, leak them to Wiki. Everything in them is pretty close to pure fiction – but it is neolib
banker fiction. Just makes it all seem more real when they do things this way.
Yike's, I'm turning into a crazy conspiracy theorist.
Don't fall for the 'status quo's' language Jedi mind trick crazyboy. I like to call myself
a "sane conspiracy theorist." You can too!
As for H Clinton's 'slavish' adherence to the Bankster Ethos; in psychology, there is the "Stockholm
Syndrome." Here, H Clinton displays the markers of "Wall Street Syndrome."
Ugh. Mindless drivel. Talking points provided by Wall St itself would sound identical.
Then there's this: She did NOT represent Wall St and the Banks while a Senator. They cannot
vote. They are not people. They are not citizens. She represented the PEOPLE. The PEOPLE that
can VOTE. You cannot represent a nonexistent entity like a corporation as an ELECTED official.
You can ONLY represent those who actually can, or do, vote. End of story.
I saw a video in high school years back that mentioned a specific congressional ruling that
gave Congress the equivalent to individual rights. I swear it was also in the 30s but I cannot
recall and have never been able to find what it was I saw. Do you have any insight here?
Historical Background and Legal Basis of the Federal Register / CFR Publications System
Why was the Federal Register System Established ?
New Deal legislation of the 1930's delegated responsibility from Congress to agencies to
regulate complex social and economic issues
Citizens needed access to new regulations to know their effect in advance
Agencies and Citizens needed a centralized filing and publication system to keep track of rules
Courts began to rule on "secret law" as a violation of right to due process under the Constitution
But don't forget. She is the most qualified candidate… EVER . Remind me again
how this species was able to bring three stranded Apollo 13 astronauts back from the abyss, the
vacuum of space with some tape and tubing.
This is like watching a cheap used car lot advertisement where the owner delivers obviously
false platitudes as the store and cars collapse, break, and burst into flames behind them.
Stalin spent his early days in a seminary. Masters of broken promises. I'm more interested
in Clinton's Chinese connections. Probably tied through JP Morgan. The Chinese are very straightforward
in their, dare I say, inscrutible way. The ministers are the ministers, and the palace is
the palace.
The show is disappointing, the debaters play at talking nuclear policy, but have *nothing*
to say about Saudi Arabia's new arsenal.
When politicos talk nuclear, they only mean to allege a threat to Israel, blame Russia, or
fear-monger the North Koreans.
We're in the loop, but only the quietest whispers of the conflict in Pakistan are available.
It sounds pretty serious, but there is only interest in attacking inconvenient Arabs.
On Trump, what an interesting study in communications. The no man you speak of. Even himself
caught between his own insincerity towards higher purpose and his own ego as 'the establishment'
turns on him.
The proles of his support are truely a silent majority. The Republicans promised us Reagan
for twenty years, and it's finally the quasi-Democrat Trump who delivers.
> This is like watching a cheap used car lot advertisement where the owner delivers obviously
false platitudes as the store and cars collapse, break, and burst into flames behind them.
+100
With a wall of American flags waving in the background as the smoke and flames rise.
SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, I don't feel particularly courageous. I mean, if we're going to
be an effective, efficient economy, we need to have all part of that engine running well, and
that includes Wall Street and Main Street.
this all reads like a cokehead's flow of consciousness on some ethereal topic with no intellectual
content on the matter to express. I would have said extemporaneous, but you know it was all scripted,
so that's even worse.
PHOTOJOURNALIST
"Do you know what the man is saying? Do you? This is dialectics.
It's very simple dialectics. One through nine, no maybes, no
supposes, no fractions - you can't travel in space, you can't go out
into space, you know, without, like, you know, with fractions - what
are you going to land on, one quarter, three-eighths - what are you
going to do when you go from here to Venus or something - that's
dialectic physics, OK? Dialectic logic is there's only love and hate, you
either love somebody or you hate them."
"Da5id's voice is deep and placid, with no trace of stress. The syllables roll off his tongue
like drool. As Hiro walks down the hallway he can hear Da5id talking all the way. 'i ge en i ge
en nu ge en nu ge en us sa tu ra lu ra ze em men….'" –Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
Completely agree. When I first read excerpts from her speeches, I was appalled at the constant
use of "you know" peppering most of her sentences. To me, people who constantly bifurcate sentences
with "you know" are simply blathering. They usually don't have any in-depth knowledge of the subject
matter on which they are opining. Compare Hillary being asked to comment on a subject with someone
such as Michael Hudson or Bill Black commenting on a subject and she simply sounds illiterate.
I have this feeling that her educational record is based on an ability to memorize and parrot
back answers rather than someone who can reach a conclusion by examining multiple concepts.
Here's what I don't understand: The lady (and her husband) have LOADS of money. Yet this is
the best that she can do?
Really?
Heck, if I had half the Clintons' money, I'd be hiring the BEST speechwriters, acting coaches,
and fashion consultants on the planet. And I'd be taking their advice and RUNNING with it. Sheesh.
Some people have more money than sense.
Because she wont pay for quality speechwriters or coaching. Because she is a shyster, cheapskate
and a fraud. They hired the most inept IT company to 'mange' their office server who then (in
a further fit of cheapskate stupidity) hired an inept IT client manager who then (in a further
fit of cheapskate stupidity) asked Reddit for a solution.
Its in the culture: Podesta does it, Blumenthal does it
And now they blame the Russians!!!! Imagine the lunacy within the white house if this fool
is elected.
I think she is just not that smart. Maybe intelligent but not flexible enough to do much with
it.
Smart people seek the advice of even smarter people and knowing that experts disagree, they
make sure that there is dissent on the advisory team. Then they make up their mind.
One can say a lot of justifiable bad things about Ronald Reagan, but, he had competent
advisors and he used them! With Hillary, Even if she knows she has accessed the best advice on
the planet her instinct it to not trust it because "she knows better" and she absolutely will
not tolerate dissent. Left to her own devices, she simply copies other people's thinking/ homework
instead of building her own ideas with it.
I don't think so. The "you know" has a name, it's called a "verbal tick" and is one of the
first things that is attacked when one learns how to speak publicly. Verbal ticks come in many
forms, the "ums" for example, or repeating the last few words you just said, over and over again.
The brain is complex. The various parts of the brain needed for speech; cognition, vocabulary,
and vocalizations, actually have difficulty synchronizing. The vocalization part tends to be faster
than the rest of the brain and can spit out words faster than the person can put them together.
As a result, the "buffer" if you will runs empty, and the speech part of the brains simply fills
in the gaps with random gibberish.
You can train yourself out of this habit of course – but it's something that takes practice.
So I take HRC's "you know" as evidence that these are unscripted speeches and is directly improvising.
How come her responses during the debates are not peppered with these verbal ticks. At least,
I don't recall her saying you know so many times. Isn't she improvising then?
As Lambert said, HRC doesn't do unscripted. The email leaks even sends us evidence that her
interviews were scripted and town hall events were carful staged. Even sidestepping that however,
dealing with verbal ticks is not all that difficult with a bit of practice and self-awareness.
"You know" is an insidious variation on "like" and "andum", the latter two being bias neutral
forms of mental vapor lock of tbe speech center pausing for higher level intellectual processes
to refill the speech centers tapped out RAM.
The "you know" variant is an end run on the listener's cognitive functions logic filters. Is
essence appropriating a claim to the listener.
I detest "you knows" immediately with "no i dont know, please explain."
The same with "they say" i will always ask "who are they?"
I think this is important to fo do to ppl for no ofher reason thanto nake them think critically
even if it is a fleeting annoyance.
Back on HRC, i have maintai we that many people overrate her intellectual grasp. Personally
I think she is a hea ily cosched parrot. "The US has achieved energy independence"…. TILT. Just
because you state things smugly doesnt mean its reality.
I think what I call the lacunae words are really revealing in people's speech. When she says
"you know" she is emphasizing that she and the listener both know what she is "talking around."
Shared context as a form of almost - encryption, you could say. "This" rather than '"finance"
Here rather than at Goldman.I don't know what you'd call it exactly- free floating referent? A
habit, methinks, of avoiding being quoted or pinned down. It reminds me of the leaked emails…everyone
is very careful to talk around things and they can because they all know what they are talking
about. Hillary is consistently referred to, in an eerie H. Rider Haggard way, as "her" - like
some She Who Must Not Be Named.
What surprises me is that Goldmans paid her for these speeches, you know?
Hillary C typically pays "the audience" to listen to, and come to her speeches. You know? You
know!
This election cycle just proves how bad things have become. The two top presidential candidates
are an egotistical ignoramus and the quintessential establishment politician and they are neck
and neck because the voting public is Planet Stupid. Things will just continue to fall apart in
slow motion until some spark (like another financial implosion) sets off the next revolution.
"Now, without going over how we got to where we are right now, what would be your advice
to the Wall Street community and the big banks as to the way forward with those two important
decisions?
"SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, I represented all of you [Wall St] for eight years."
I heard Hillary speak in summer '92, when Bill was running for Prez. She. was. amazing.
No joke. Great speech, great ideas, great points. I thought then she should be the candidate.
But there was in her speech just a tiny undercurrent of "the ends justify the means." i.e. 'we
need to get lots of money so we can do good things.' Fast forward 20+ years. Seems to me that
for the Clintons the "means" (getting lots of money) has become the end in itself. Reassuring
Wall St. is one method for getting money – large, large amounts of money.
I heard similar impressions of her at the time, from women who had dealt with her: Book smart.
Street smart. Likeable. But what might have been the best compromise you could get in one decade,
may have needed re-thinking as you moved along in time. The cast of players changes. Those who
once ruled are now gone. Oh, but the money! And so old ideas can calcify. I'm not suggesting that
Trump is even in the ballpark in terms of making compromises, speeches, life changes or anything
else to have ever been proud of. Still, the capacity to grow and change is important in a leader.
So where are we going now?
A fine illustration of the maxim that "crime makes you stupid."
I've said this once, but I'll say it again: After the 2008 caucus debacle, Clinton fired the
staff and rejiggered the campaign. They went to lots of small venues, like high school
gyms - in other words, "deplorables" territory - and Clinton did her detail, "I have a plan" thing,
which worked really well in that context because people who need government to deliver
concrete material benefits like that, and rightly. They also organized via cheap phones, because
that was how to reach their voters, who weren't hanging out at Starbucks. And, history being written
by the winners, we forget that using that strategy, Clinton won all the big states and (if all
the votes are counted) a majority of the popular vote. So, good decision on her part. And so from
that we've moved to the open corruption of the Clinton Foundation and Clinton campaign apparatus
that takes 11 people to polish and approve a single tweet.
So I guess the moral of the story is (a) more deterioration, this time from 2008 to 2016,
and (b) Clinton can actually make a good decision, but only when forced to by a catastrophe that
will impact her personally. Whether she'll be able to rise to the occasion if elected is an open
question, but this post argues not.
"Apparently, the provision of public services is not within government's remit! What are Social
Security and Medicare? "
What is the US Post Office? Rumor has it that the PO is mentioned in the US Constitution, a
fact that is conveniently forgotten by Strict Constructionists.
With respect to regulation, I think it should be less a case of quantity, and more one of quality,
but Clinton seems to want to make it about finding the sweet spot of exactly how many regulations
will be the right amount.
In general, when companies are willing to spot you $225,000 to speak for some relatively short
period of time, willing to meet your demands regarding transportation, hotel accommodations, etc.,
why would you take the chance of killing the goose that's laying those golden eggs by saying anything
likely to tick them off?
I'd like to think she's kind of embarrassed to have people see how humdrum/boring her speeches
were for how much she was paid to give them, but I think there's got to be more "there" somewhere
that she didn't want people to be made aware of – and it doesn't necessarily have to be Americans,
it could be something to do with foreign governments, foreign policy, trade, etc.
After learning how many people it takes to send out a tweet with her name on it, I have no
idea how she managed this speech thing, unless one of her requirements was that she had to be
presented with all questions in advance, so she could be prepared.
I am more depressed by the day, as it's really beginning to sink in that she's going to be
president, and it all just makes me want to stick needles in my eyes.
Also the "Wicked Problems" definitions are very, very interesting. Thank you for bringing those
in! I would add that these wicked problems lead to more wicked problems. It is basically dishonesty,
and to protect the lie you double down with more, and more, and more…. Most of Clinton's decisions
and career seem to be knots of wicked problems.
The wicked problem is quickly becoming our entire system of governance. Clinton has been described
as the malignant tumor here before, but even she is a place holder for the rot. One head of the
Hydra that I feel Establishment players would generally be okay with sacrificing if it came to
it (and maybe I am wrong there–but it seems as if a lot of the push fro her comes from her inner
circle and others play along).
Hail Hydra! Immortal Hydra! We shall never be destroyed! Cut off one limb and two more shall
take its place! We serve the Supreme Hydra, as the world shall soon serve us!
I've heard/read in some places Hillary Clinton described as a "safe pair of hands". I don't
understand where this characterization comes from. She's dangerous.
If she wins with as strong of an electoral map as Obama in '08, she'll take it as a strong
mandate and she'll have an ambitious agenda and likely attempt to overreach. I've been meaning
to call my congressional reps early and say "No military action on Syria, period!"
She might use a "public option" as an ACA stealth bailout scheme, but I don't think the public
has much appetite to see additional resources being thrown at a "failed experiment". I worry that
Bernie's being brought on board for this kind of thing. He should avoid it.
Is she crazy enough to go for a grand bargain right away? That seems nutty and has been a "Waterloo"
for many presidents.
Remember how important Obama's first year was. Bailouts and ACA were all done that first year.
How soon can we put President Clinton II in lame duck status?
Not really surprised by the intellectual and rhetorical poverty demonstrated by these speeches.
Given the current trajectory of our politics, the bar hasn't really been set very high. In fact
it looks like we're going to reach full Idiocracy long before originally predicted.
You ask, " What can Goldman Sachs possibly have thought they were paying for? "
But I think you know. Corruption has become so institutionalized that it is impossible to point
to any specific Quid Pro Quo. The Quo is the entire system in which GS operates and the care and
feeding of which the politicians are paid to administer.
We focus on HRC's speeches and payments here but I wonder how many other paid talks are given
to GS each year by others up and down the influence spectrum. As Bill Black says, a dollar given
to a politician provides the largest possible Return on Investment of any expenditure. It is Wall
Street's long-term health insurance plan.
Yeah we know which part of the "stool" we'll be getting.If the finance sector is "the nerves,
the spinal column" of the country, I suggest the country find a shallow pool in which to shove
it – head first.
I skimmed the /. comments on a story about this yesterday; basically everyone missed the obvious
and went with vox-type responses ("she's a creature of the system / in-fighter / Serious Person").
"So I'm not interested in, you know, turning the clock back or pointing fingers,
but I am interested in trying to figure out how we come together to chart a better way
forward and one that will restore confidence in, you know, small and medium-size businesses and
consumers and begin to chip away at the unemployment rate [five years into the recession!]."
Basically, even better than a get out of jail free card, in that it is rather a promise that
we won't go back and ever hold you responsible, and we have done the best we could so far to avoid
having you own up to anything or be held accountable in any way beyond some niggling fines, which
of course, you are happy to pay, because in the end, that is simply a handout to the legal industry,
who are your best drinking buddies.
The latter part of that quote is just mumbo jumbo non-sequitir blathering. Clinton appears
to know next to nothing about finance, only that it generates enormous amounts of cash for the
oh so deserving work that God told them to do.
+1 exactly: There will be no retrospective prosecutions and none in the future either, trust
me! Not the she is any better than Eric Holder but she is certain she should be paid more than
him.
Bingo! Think about it: She was speaking to a group of people whose time is "valued" at
100's if not 1,000's of dollars per hour. She took up their "valuable" time but provided nothing
except politics-as-usual blather tailored to that particular audience. Yet she was paid $225k
for a single speech…
I've only skimmed through the speech transcripts; did I miss something of substance?
Hillary is a remarkably inarticulate person, which calls into question her intellectual
fitness for the job (amidst many other questions, of course). I entirely agree with your depiction
of her speeches as mindless drivel.
However, you may be overthinking the "wicked problem" language. While it is certainly
possible that she is familiar with the literature that you cite, nothing else in her speeches
suggests that she commands that level of intellectual detail. This makes me think that somewhere
along the line she befriended someone from the greater Boston area who uses "wicked" the way Valley
Girls use "like". When I first heard the expression decades ago, I found it charming and incorporated
it into my own common usage. And I don't use it anything like you describe. To me it is simply
used for emphasis. Nothing more or less than that, but I am amused to see an entire literature
devoted to the concept of a "wicked problem".
I remain depressed by this election. No matter how it turns out, it's going to wicked suck
; )
I think the inarticulateness/cliche infestation is a ploy and a deflection; this is a very
intelligent woman who can effectively marshall language when she feels the need. That need was
more likely felt in private meetings with the inner cabal at Goldman.
Not to otherwise compare them, but Bush I's inarticulateness made him seem a buffoon, and
that was not the case, either.
Finally, as a thought experiment, I'd like to suggest that, granting that Clintonismo will
privilege those interests which best fortify their arguments with cash, it's also true that Bill
and Hillary are all about Bill and Hillary. In other words, it could be that she has the same
hustler's disregard toward the lumpen Assistant Vice Presidents filling that room at GS as she
does for the average voter. Thus, the empty, past-their-expiration-date calories.
Sure, she'll take their money and do their bidding, but why even bother to make any more effort
than necessary? On a very primal level with these two, it's all about the hustle and the action,
and everyone's a potential rube.
As in, when Bill put his presidency on the line, the base were expected to circle the wagons.
As in, "I'm With Her". Not "She's With Us", natch. It's *always* about the Clintons.
"Speaking to bankers and masters of the corporate universe, she came off as relaxed, self-doubting,
reflective, honest, philosophical rather than political, and unafraid to admit she lacked all
the answers."
seriously, matt taibbi? next, i would like to hear about the positive, feelgood, warmfuzzy
qualities of vampire squids (hugs cthulhu doll).
Matt Tiabbi, Elizabeth Warren, Benie Sanders, Noam Chompsky–all those used to seem like
bastions of integrity have, thanks to Hillary, been revealed as slimy little Weasels who should
henceforth be completely disregarded. I'd have to thank Hillary for pulling back the nlindets
on that; if not for this election I might have been still foolishly listening to these people.
agree w you except about Bernie. he always said he'd support the nominee. the suddenness of
his capitulation has led many of us to believe he was threatened. somewhere I read something about
"someone" planting kiddieporn on his son's computer if he didn't do…… I dunno. I reserve judgement
on Sanders until I learn more,…. if i ever do
Clinton's remarks were typically vague, as one might expect from a politician; she doesn't
want to be pinned down. This may be part of the banality of her remarks.
What scares me most about Clinton is her belligerence towards Russia and clamoring for
a no-fly zone in Syria. The no-fly zone will mean war with Russia. If only Clinton were saying
this, we might be safe, but the entire Washington deep state seems to be of one mind in favor
of a war. During the cold war this would have been inconceivable; everyone understood a nuclear
war must not be allowed. This is no longer true and it is terrifying. Every war game the pentagon
used to simulate a war with the U.S.S.R. escalated into an all out nuclear war. What is the "plan
B" Obama is pursuing in Syria?
In the Russian press every day for a long time now they have been discussing the prospect of
a conflict. Russia has been conducting civil defense drills in its cities and advised its citizens
to recall any children living abroad. This is never reported in our press, which only presents
us with caricatures of Putin. Russians are not taken seriously.
During the cold war this would have been inconceivable; everyone understood a nuclear war
must not be allowed.
No it wasn't. Far from it. By some miracle, the globe escaped instant incineration but only
barely. The Soviets, to their credit, were not about to risk nuclear annihilation to get one
up on the US of Perfidy. Our own Dauntless Warriors were more than willing, and I believe it's
only through dumb luck that a first strike wasn't launched deliberately or by deliberate "accident."
Review the Cold War concept of Brinkmanship.
The current fear/fever over nuclear war with Russia requires madness in the Kremlin - of
which there is no evidence. Our Rulers are depending on Putin and his cohorts being the sane
ones as rhetoric from the US and the West ratchets ever upwards.
But then, the Kremlin is looking for any hint of sanity on US and NATO side and is finding
little…
Curtis LeMay tried to provoke a nuclear war with the Soviets in the 1950's. By and large,
however, the American state understood a nuclear war was unwinnable and avoided such a possibility.
A no-fly zone in Syria would start a war with Russia. William Polk, who participated in the Cuban
missle crisis and U.S. nuclear war games, argues in this article
" "the nerves, the spinal column" of the country, goes farther than Obama ever did."
But this description is technically true. That is finance's proper function, co-ordinating
the flow of capital and resources, especially from where they're in excess to where they're needed.
It's a key decision-making system – for the economy, preferably not for society as a whole. That
would be the political system.
So on this basic level, the problem is that finance, more and more, has put its own institutional
and personal interests ahead of its proper function. It's grown far too huge, and stopped performing
its intended function – redistributing resources – in favor of just accumulating them, in the
rather illusory form of financial instruments, some of them pure vapor ware.
So yes, this line reflects a very bad attitude on Hillary's part, but by misappropriating a
truth – pretty typical propaganda.
No, finance does NOT "channel resources". Wash your mouth out. This is more neoliberal cant.
Financiers do not make investments in the real economy. The overwhelming majority of securities
trading is in secondary markets, which means it's speculation. And when a public company decides
whether or not to invest in a new project, it does not present a prospectus on that new project
to investors. It runs the numbers internally. For those projects, the most common source of funding
is retained earnings.
Clinton shows that she is either a Yale Law grad who does not have the slightest idea that
Wall Street does very little in the economy but fleece would-be investors, or that she is an obsequious
flatterer of those from whom she openly takes bribes.
Having heard Hillary, Chelsea (yes, she's being groomed) and many, many other politicians over
the years, including a stint covering Capitol Hill, Mme C's verbal style does not surprise to
me at all but rather strikes me as perfectly serviceable. It is a mellifluous drone designed to
lull the listener into thinking that she is on their side, and the weakness of the actual statements
only becomes clear when reading them on the page later (which rarely happens). The drowsy listener
will catch, among the words strung together like Christmas lights, just the key terms and concepts
that demonstrate knowledge of the brief and a soothing layer of vague sympathy. Those who can
award her $600K can assume with some confidence that, rhetoric aside, she will be in the tank
when needed. The rest of us have to blow away the chaff and peer into the yawning gaps lurking
behind the lawyerly parsing. In all fairness, this applies to 90% of seekers of public office.
The absolute vacuousness of Clinton's remarks, coupled with her ease at neoliberal conventional
wisdom, make it clear that Goldman's payments were nothing more (or less) than a $675,000 anticipatory
"so no quid pro quo here" bribe.
Who on earth gives up their vote to a politician who is so shameless an corrupt that she openly
accepts bribes from groups who equally shamelessly and corruptly are looting the commons? Apparently
many, but not me.
Nothing like making lemons out of lemonade, is there?
There really is a question why she didn't do this doc dump herself when Bernie asked. Yeah,
sure, she would have been criticized ("damned if you do, damned if you don't") but because of
who she is she'll be criticized no matter what. There is nothing she can do to avoid it.
Not only is there no smoking gun, it's almost as if she's trying to inject a modicum of social
conscience into a culture that has none. And no, she isn't speaking artfully; nor is she an orator.
Oh. Not that we didn't know already.
The most galling aspect is her devotion to the neoLibCon status quo. Steady as she goes. Apparently
a lot of people find the status quo satisfactory. Feh.
If this document dump came out during the primary campaign, then HRC may have lost. Even Black,
Southern ladies can smell the corrupting odor clinging to these "speeches".
Given the way DNC protected her during the primaries, and what looked like a pretty light touch
by Bernie and (who? O'Malley was it?) toward her, I doubt these speeches would have been her undoing.
Dull and relatively benign, and policy-wise almost identical to Obama's approach to the bankers'
role in the economic unpleasantness. "Consensus" stuff with some hint of a social conscience.
Not effective and not enough to do more than the least possible ("I told them they ought to
behave better. Really!") on behalf of the Rabble.
But not a campaign killer. Even so, by not releasing transcripts during the primary, she faced
- and still faces - mountains of criticism over it. No escape. Not for her.
I'm not sure that's an appropriate strategy for dealing with multiple interlocking wicked problems,
but I'm not sure why. Suppose we invoke the Precautionary Principle - is incremental change
really the way to avoid harm?
The Consensus (of Opinions That Matter) says it is. On the other hand, blowing up the System
leads to Uncertainty, and as we know, we can't have that. Mr. Market wouldn't like it…
The leaked emails confirm - even though she herself never writes them, which is really
odd, when you consider that Podesta is her Campaign Chair and close ally going back decades -
that she is compulsively secretive, controlling, and resistant to admitting she's wrong. The chain
of people talking about how to get her to admit she was wrong about Nancy Reagan and AIDS was
particularly fascinating that way; she was flat out factually inaccurate, and it had the potential
to do tremendous harm to her campaign with a key donor group, and it was apparently still a major
task to persuade her to say "I made a mistake."
So while I think you are wrong that the speeches wouldn't have hurt her in the primary, I also
think Huma would have had to knock her out and tie her up (not in a fun way) to get those speeches
released.
I can't imagine a worse temperament to govern, particularly under the conditions she'll be
facing. But she'll be fully incompetent before too long, so I don't suppose it matters that much.
I'm morbidly curious to see how long they can keep her mostly hidden and propped up for limited
appearances, before having to let Kaine officially take over. Will we be able to figure out who's
actually in power based on the line-up on some balcony?
Fair points, though the "temperament" issue may be one that follows from the nature of the
job - even "No Drama Obama" is said to have a fierce anger streak, and secrecy, controlling behavior,
and refusing to admit error is pretty typical of presidents, VPs, and other high officials. The
King/Queen can do no wrong, dontchaknow. (cf: Bush, GW, and his whole administration for recent
examples. History is filled with them, though.)
As for Hillary's obvious errors in judgment, I think they speak for themselves and they don't
speak well of her.
TINA vs WATA (we are the alternative)…the next two years are gonna be interesting…evil is often
a cover for total incompetence and exposure…our little tsarina will insist brigades that dont
exist move against enemies that are hardly there…when she & her useless minions were last in/on
the seat of power(j edger version of sop) the netizens of the world were young and dumb…now not
so much…
I got into wicked problems 35 years ago in the outstanding book by Ian Mitroff and R. O. Mason,
"Challenging Strategic Planning Assumptions." First page of Chapter One has subsection title COMPLEXITY,
followed by "A Little Experiment" Lets try the experiment with current problems.
One could come up with a list of major problems, but here is the one used by C. West Churchman
mentioned along with Horst Riddle. Churchman back in the 80's said that the problems of the world
were M*P**3, or M, P cubed, or M * P * P *P with the letters standing for Militarism, Population,
Poverty and Pollution.
Here is how they ran the exercise
1. Suppose there were a solution to any of these 4 problems, would that solution be related
to the other problems. Clearly.
2. Thus 'whenever a policy maker attempts to solve a complex policy problem, it is related
to all the others
Repeated attempts in other contexts give the same result: basically, every real world
policy problem is related to every other real world policy problem
This is from page 4, the second page of the book.
I ran this exercise for several years in ATT Bell Labs and ATT.
List major problems
How long have they been around? (most for ever except marketing was new after breakup in
'84
If one was solved, would that solution be related in any way to the other ones?
Do you know of any program that is making headway? (occasionally Quality was brought up)
This could be done in a few minutes, often less than 5 minutes
5. Conclusion: long term interdependent problems that are not being addressed
Thus the only grade that matters in this course on Corporate Transformation that now begins
is that you have new insights on these problems. This was my quest as an internal consultant in
ATT to transform the company. I failed.
I was a Sanders supporter. Many here will disagree, but if Clinton wins I don't think she's
going to act as she might have acted in 2008, if she had won.
Clinton is a politician, and *all* politicians dissemble in private, unless they're the mayor
of a small town of about 50 people – and even then! Politicians – in doing their work – *must*
compromise to some degree, with the best politicians compromising in ways that bring their constituents
more benefit, than not.
That said, Clinton is also a human being who is capable of change. This election cycle has
been an eye opener for both parties. If Clinton wins (and, I think she will), the memory of how
close it was with Sanders and the desperate anger and alienation she has experienced from Trump
supporters (and even Sanders' supporters) *must* have already gotten her thinking about what she
is going to have to get done to insure a 2020 win for Democrats, whether or not she is running
in 2020.
In sum, I think Clinton is open to change, and I don't believe that she is some deep state
evil incarnate; sge's *far* from perfect, and she's not "pure" in her positioning – thank god!,
because in politics, purists rarely accomplish anything.
If Clinton reverts to prior form (assuming she makes (POTUS), 2020 will make 2016 look like
a cakewalk, for both parties – including the appearance of serious 3rd party candidates with moxy,
smarts, and a phalanx of backers (unlike the current crop of two – Johnson and Stein).
"... Michael Isikoff, who was a leading reporter during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, said in a Thursday discussion that NBC should release a 17-year-old tape of an interview that it conducted with Broaddrick. ..."
"... Hillary Clinton was involved in quashing Broaddrick's rape claims. ..."
Michael Isikoff, who was a leading reporter during
the Monica Lewinsky scandal, said in a Thursday
discussion that NBC should release a 17-year-old
tape of an interview that it conducted with
Broaddrick.
Broaddrick has long claimed that the
interview that NBC aired edited out her claim that
Hillary Clinton was involved in quashing Broaddrick's rape claims.
Warns Hillary presidency 'would be destructive to the United States' Published: 05/18/2016
at 9:56 PM >
[Editor's note: WND sent Candice Jackson, attorney and author of the acclaimed book
"Their Lives: The Women Targeted by the Clinton Machine," to Arkansas to conduct a rare in-person
interview with Juanita Broaddrick, who claims Bill Clinton raped her in 1978. Jackson's revealing,
in-depth interview with Broaddrick is presented here for the first time. For those not familiar with
the actual details of Clinton's alleged felonious sexual assault on Broaddrick, WND has published
the entire Broaddrick rape narrative from "Their Lives"
here.
What follows, as Jackson explains, poignantly and in detail, reveals for the first time how
Broaddrick's life – like that of so many others – has been deeply and permanently scarred by her
alleged unwanted sexual encounter with Bill Clinton. Broaddrick also details Hillary Clinton's "haunting"
and intimidating interaction with her following the sexual assault.]
By Candice E. Jackson
Juanita Broaddrick first spoke publicly about her experience being raped by Bill Clinton in 1999.
I met her while featuring her story in my book,
"Their Lives: The Women Targeted By The Clinton Machine." She has largely stayed out of the public
eye for the last decade, but she has spoken out during this 2016 election cycle to urge the American
public to refuse to elect Hillary Clinton to the presidency. I was honored to meet with Juanita in
her Van Buren, Arkansas, home to talk about the long-lasting impact the Clintons' abuse has had on
her life.
The brutal sexual assault itself has been described in Juanita's own words in the
Wall Street Journal
, on
NBC's "Dateline" with Lisa Myers , and in my book
"Their Lives." This interview isn't about cheap headlines promising new revelations of details
surrounding the rape itself. This is about sharing publicly new details of how the rape has affected
Juanita over her lifetime. It's also about presenting Juanita's experience to a new generation, including
millennials who may be more open-minded to hearing the truth about the Clintons now than their baby
boomer parents were in the 1990s.
Juanita created a social media firestorm earlier this year by tweeting that she had been "dreading
seeing my abuser on TV campaign trail for enabler wife but his physical appearance reflects ghosts
of past are catching up." One of the many media figures who called her after this tweet was Andrea
Mitchell of NBC. Because she'd had a positive experience with Lisa Myers with NBC back in 1999, Andrea
Mitchell was one of the few calls Juanita returned in the aftermath of her trending tweets. Andrea
Mitchell asked her just one question, listened to her answer, and told Juanita condescendingly, "We're
not going to air anything with you because you have nothing new to add." Juanita felt bewildered
by Andrea Mitchell's dismissive attitude.
Nothing new? Hardly. What happened to Juanita in that Little Rock hotel room at the hands of Bill
Clinton in 1978 is "nothing new," and Hillary's inimical confrontation of Juanita weeks later, and
Bill Clinton's much-delayed and dubious "apology" to Juanita years later are historical events that
haven't changed for three decades. What's new is that Hillary Clinton has all but secured the Democratic
Party's nomination for president, and Juanita Broaddrick is willing to bravely come forward to shed
new light on the lifetime of pain Bill and Hillary Clinton have caused her (and so many women like
her).
"I could actually have respected Hillary if she had divorced Bill in 1978. But I feel like she
has always known about all of his dalliances and misdeeds either at the time or shortly after, and
now we know their marriage is just an arrangement. I can't respect a woman like that." She pauses,
reflecting, "I remember being shocked to hear that Hillary was pregnant. She'd been in Sweden or
Switzerland or something like that when I heard it on the news. I was shocked because of what Bill
had told me in that hotel room, you know, that I shouldn't worry about getting pregnant because he
was sterile after having had the mumps."
The decision to let Hillary Clinton off the hook for mishandling classified information has roiled the FBI and Department of Justice,
with one person closely involved in the year-long probe telling FoxNews.com that career agents and attorneys on the case unanimously
believed the Democratic presidential nominee should have been charged.
The source, who spoke to FoxNews.com on the condition of anonymity, said Obama appointee FBI Director James Comey's dramatic July
5 announcement that he would not recommend to the Attorney General's office that the former secretary of state be charged left members
of the investigative team dismayed and disgusted. More than 100 FBI agents and analysts worked around the clock with six attorneys
from the DOJ's National Security Division, Counter Espionage Section, to investigate the case.
"No trial level attorney agreed, no agent working the case agreed, with the decision not to prosecute - it was a top-down decision,"
said the source, whose identity and role in the case has been verified by FoxNews.com.
A high-ranking FBI official told Fox News that while it might not have been a unanimous decision, "It was unanimous that we all
wanted her [Clinton's] security clearance yanked."
"It is safe to say the vast majority felt she should be prosecuted," the senior FBI official told Fox News. "We were floored while
listening to the FBI briefing because Comey laid it all out, and then said 'but we are doing nothing,' which made no sense to us."
The FBI declined to comment directly, but instead referred Fox News to multiple public statements Comey has made in which he has
thrown water on the idea that politics played a role in the agency's decision not to recommend charges.
"... Everything Wikileaks is putting out on this simply continues to CONFIRM the verifiable existence of this vast network of Clinton MSM Media Mafia that Hill-Billery have constructed over the years. The MSM is absolutely IN THE TANK for the war-whore. ..."
"... AMAZING how the "Objective", "Fact-Checking" MSM is shown to be totally tainted, but the very stranglehold that the MSM mafia have on the information flow prevents these clear facts form being widely disseminated to the (sometimes willfully) stupid masses. ..."
"... George H.W. Bush - Potus - CIA, Bill Clinton - Potus - CIA, George W. Bush - Potus - CIA, Barack Obama - Potus - CIA, Hillary Clinton - CIA Is Trump toast or what? ..."
"... As an aside, the sheeples are easily persuaded by simple catchy headlines and seldom read deeper into the articles to separate fact from fiction. Look at how many facts have been released proving the massive widespread fraud by Hillary and the Clinton Foundation, yet there is not one indictment...yet. ..."
"... As corporate control of media outlets has tightened, the Democrats have become the party of hot-money Corporate America. As our economy disintegrates, most corporate interests are moving to finance as their main activity. The Clinton Democrats realized this faster than the Republicans did, and pivoted to represent Finance above all other sectors of the economy. So the Clintons have safely positioned themselves in alignment with the interests that control the media, and any opponents have to take on the media to get to the Clintons. ..."
Everything Wikileaks is putting out on this simply continues to CONFIRM
the verifiable existence of this vast network of Clinton MSM Media Mafia that Hill-Billery have constructed
over the years. The MSM is absolutely IN THE TANK for the war-whore.
AMAZING how the "Objective", "Fact-Checking" MSM is shown to be totally tainted, but the very
stranglehold that the MSM mafia have on the information flow prevents these clear facts form being
widely disseminated to the (sometimes willfully) stupid masses.
George H.W. Bush - Potus - CIA,
Bill Clinton - Potus - CIA,
George W. Bush - Potus - CIA,
Barack Obama - Potus - CIA,
Hillary Clinton - CIA Is Trump toast or what?
As an aside, the sheeples are easily persuaded by simple catchy headlines
and seldom read deeper into the articles to separate fact from fiction. Look at how many facts have
been released proving the massive widespread fraud by Hillary and the Clinton Foundation, yet there
is not one indictment...yet. Add to that the corrupt FBI cheif 0Comey) and DOJ AG (Lowrenta) and
Americans are royally screwed unless they read deeper and thoughtfully AND vote!
I will admit I used to be that simply way (pretty stupid) and seldom read analytically ... when
I was 6 years old. But a person needs to educate themselves for their own survival and read and listen
critically.
Simple. Two reasons, actually. As corporate control of media outlets has tightened, the
Democrats have become the party of hot-money Corporate America. As our economy disintegrates,
most corporate interests are moving to finance as their main activity. The Clinton Democrats
realized this faster than the Republicans did, and pivoted to represent Finance above all
other sectors of the economy. So the Clintons have safely positioned themselves in alignment
with the interests that control the media, and any opponents have to take on the media to get
to the Clintons.
Also, the Clintons have had to face the weakest and least media-attractive opponents available.
Trump is a little different, as he's a complete media creation and probably the most media-savvy
public figure out there, but what the media create, they can tear down also. When the media have
to choose between their paymasters and their creations, their paymasters win every time.
Global Hunter
y3maxx
Oct 16, 2016 1:06 PM
"In layman's terms...how have the clintons been so successful controlling
MSM?"
Clinton's are the public and political front and in return they have been given license to loot
whatever they can. The people the Clinton's represent control the MSM and pretty much all the people
who work in the MSM will do or say anything for not only money but esteem of their peers (or to feel
superior or better than their peers).
There are six big corporations that own 90% of the MSM, including Time Warner,
Comcast and Disney. Thus, they tightly control the CONTENT asnd FLOW of the news. They work together
controlling the NARRATIVE for the candidate they wish to promote.
sushi y3maxx
Oct 16, 2016 2:53 PM
Look at her advertising budget. It is in the hundreds of millions. Look
at Trumps advertising budget. It is the cost of his Twitter account.
The corporate media are bleeding. Advertisers are leaving for new media. The Clinton ad money
is manna from heaven. Would you risk being cut off the gravy train by running a negative story? No
way. This is why NBC holds a negative tape on Clinton but happily releases a negative tape on Trump.
This campaign shows the 1% all talking to themselves and assuring each other they are victorius.
Outside the 1% who counts? Nobody. They are all deplorable. I think the results on November 8th could
be shocker.
The Fourth Amendment gives protection against unlawful searches and seizures, and, as shown in
the previous cases, its protection applies to governmental action. Its origin and history clearly
show that it was intended as a restraint upon the activities of sovereign authority, and was not
intended to be a limitation upon other than governmental agencies; as against such authority, it
was the purpose of the Fourth Amendment to secure the citizen in the right of unmolested occupation
of his dwelling and the possession of his property, subject to the right of seizure by process duly
issued.
In the present case, the record clearly shows that no official of the federal government had anything
to do with the wrongful seizure of the petitioner's property or any knowledge thereof until several
months after the property had been taken from him and was in the possession of the Cities Service
Company. It is manifest that there was no invasion of the security afforded by the Fourth Amendment
against unreasonable search and seizure, as whatever wrong was done was the act of individuals in
taking the property of another. A portion of the property so taken and held was turned over to the
prosecuting officers of the federal government. We assume that petitioner has an unquestionable right
of redress against those who illegally and wrongfully took his private property under the circumstances
herein disclosed, but with such remedies we are not now concerned.
The Fifth Amendment, as its terms import, is intended to secure the citizen from compulsory testimony
against himself. It protects from extorted confessions, or examinations in court proceedings by compulsory
methods.
government retain incriminating papers coming to it in the manner described with a view to their
use in a subsequent investigation by a grand jury where such papers will be part of the evidence
against the accused, and may be used against him upon trial should an indictment be returned?
We know of no constitutional principle which requires the government to surrender the papers under
such circumstances. Had it learned that such incriminatory papers, tending to show a violation of
federal law, were in the hands of a person other than the accused, it having had no part in wrongfully
obtaining them, we know of no reason why a subpoena might not issue for the production of the papers
as evidence. Such production would require no unreasonable search or seizure, nor would it amount
to compelling the accused to testify against himself.
The papers having come into the possession of the government without a violation of petitioner's
rights by governmental authority, we see no reason why the fact that individuals, unconnected with
the government, may have wrongfully taken them should prevent them from being held for use in prosecuting
an offense where the documents are of an incriminatory character.
It follows that the district court erred in making the order appealed from, and the same is
Reversed.
MR. JUSTICE BRANDEIS dissenting with whom MR. JUSTICE HOLMES concurs.
Plaintiff's private papers were stolen. The thief, to further his own ends, delivered them to
the law officer of the United States. He, knowing them to have been stolen, retains them for use
against the plaintiff. Should the court permit him to do so?
That the court would restore the papers to plaintiff if they were still in the thief's possession
is not questioned. That it has power to control the disposition of these stolen papers, although
they have passed into the possession of the law officer, is also not questioned. But it is said that
no provision of the Constitution requires their surrender, and that the papers could have been subpoenaed.
This may be true. Still I cannot believe that action of a public official is necessarily lawful because
it does not violate constitutional prohibitions and because the same result might have been attained
by other and proper means. At the foundation of our civil liberty lies the principle which denies
to government officials an exceptional position before the law and which subjects them to the same
rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen. And, in the development of our liberty, insistence
upon procedural regularity has been large factor. Respect for law will not be advanced by resort,
in its enforcement, to means which shock the common man's sense of decency and fair play.
"... The trees, the forest and pretty much the entire landscape are screaming 2000 and 2004 didn't matter a damn. ..."
"... All the same media outlets and elites that were screaming for the invasion of Iraq are now howling for evil Syrian blood and the removal of another 'monster' before he destroys all the peace and stability we bring to the region. ..."
"... This time, of course, there's no Bush/Cheney in charge. But no matter, the decisions and the rationale are identical. Democracy will flower in the region once America and the UK kill enough of the bad guys and install their own puppets (I mean 'good guys') ..."
"... Hillary and the democrats are in charge of the killing, so all the death must be both necessary and humanitarian. The possibility that more death and more wars and more invasions and more regime change is pretty much built into the 'solution' is unthinkable. ..."
"... Watching all the cheering for 'victory in Mosul' and over the 'hold-outs' in Libya has actually driven me to turn off the nets ..."
"... Violent regime-change is 'unavoidable' regardless of which party is in power. And the current war is always better, safer, and less prone to blow-back than all those other earlier stupid wars ..."
Reading thru the link, my favorite part was the stated purpose of the cocktail party for elite
NY reporters: "Give reporters their first thoughts . . ."
@244 Good eye, Bruce. The trees, the forest and pretty much the entire landscape are screaming
2000 and 2004 didn't matter a damn.
All the same media outlets and elites that were screaming for the invasion of Iraq are
now howling for evil Syrian blood and the removal of another 'monster' before he destroys all
the peace and stability we bring to the region.
This time, of course, there's no Bush/Cheney in charge. But no matter, the decisions and
the rationale are identical. Democracy will flower in the region once America and the UK kill
enough of the bad guys and install their own puppets (I mean 'good guys') .
Hillary and the democrats are in charge of the killing, so all the death must be both necessary
and humanitarian. The possibility that more death and more wars and more invasions and more regime
change is pretty much built into the 'solution' is unthinkable.
Watching all the cheering for 'victory in Mosul' and over the 'hold-outs' in Libya has
actually driven me to turn off the nets .
Violent regime-change is 'unavoidable' regardless of which party is in power. And the current
war is always better, safer, and less prone to blow-back than all those other earlier stupid wars
.
I learned that reading the pro-Hillary 'liberal' press.
Warns Hillary presidency 'would be destructive to the United States' Published: 05/18/2016
at 9:56 PM >
[Editor's note: WND sent Candice Jackson, attorney and author of the acclaimed book
"Their Lives: The Women Targeted by the Clinton Machine," to Arkansas to conduct a rare in-person
interview with Juanita Broaddrick, who claims Bill Clinton raped her in 1978. Jackson's revealing,
in-depth interview with Broaddrick is presented here for the first time. For those not familiar with
the actual details of Clinton's alleged felonious sexual assault on Broaddrick, WND has published
the entire Broaddrick rape narrative from "Their Lives"
here.
What follows, as Jackson explains, poignantly and in detail, reveals for the first time how
Broaddrick's life – like that of so many others – has been deeply and permanently scarred by her
alleged unwanted sexual encounter with Bill Clinton. Broaddrick also details Hillary Clinton's "haunting"
and intimidating interaction with her following the sexual assault.]
By Candice E. Jackson
Juanita Broaddrick first spoke publicly about her experience being raped by Bill Clinton in 1999.
I met her while featuring her story in my book,
"Their Lives: The Women Targeted By The Clinton Machine." She has largely stayed out of the public
eye for the last decade, but she has spoken out during this 2016 election cycle to urge the American
public to refuse to elect Hillary Clinton to the presidency. I was honored to meet with Juanita in
her Van Buren, Arkansas, home to talk about the long-lasting impact the Clintons' abuse has had on
her life.
The brutal sexual assault itself has been described in Juanita's own words in the
Wall Street Journal
, on
NBC's "Dateline" with Lisa Myers , and in my book
"Their Lives." This interview isn't about cheap headlines promising new revelations of details
surrounding the rape itself. This is about sharing publicly new details of how the rape has affected
Juanita over her lifetime. It's also about presenting Juanita's experience to a new generation, including
millennials who may be more open-minded to hearing the truth about the Clintons now than their baby
boomer parents were in the 1990s.
Juanita created a social media firestorm earlier this year by tweeting that she had been "dreading
seeing my abuser on TV campaign trail for enabler wife but his physical appearance reflects ghosts
of past are catching up." One of the many media figures who called her after this tweet was Andrea
Mitchell of NBC. Because she'd had a positive experience with Lisa Myers with NBC back in 1999, Andrea
Mitchell was one of the few calls Juanita returned in the aftermath of her trending tweets. Andrea
Mitchell asked her just one question, listened to her answer, and told Juanita condescendingly, "We're
not going to air anything with you because you have nothing new to add." Juanita felt bewildered
by Andrea Mitchell's dismissive attitude.
Nothing new? Hardly. What happened to Juanita in that Little Rock hotel room at the hands of Bill
Clinton in 1978 is "nothing new," and Hillary's inimical confrontation of Juanita weeks later, and
Bill Clinton's much-delayed and dubious "apology" to Juanita years later are historical events that
haven't changed for three decades. What's new is that Hillary Clinton has all but secured the Democratic
Party's nomination for president, and Juanita Broaddrick is willing to bravely come forward to shed
new light on the lifetime of pain Bill and Hillary Clinton have caused her (and so many women like
her).
"I could actually have respected Hillary if she had divorced Bill in 1978. But I feel like she
has always known about all of his dalliances and misdeeds either at the time or shortly after, and
now we know their marriage is just an arrangement. I can't respect a woman like that." She pauses,
reflecting, "I remember being shocked to hear that Hillary was pregnant. She'd been in Sweden or
Switzerland or something like that when I heard it on the news. I was shocked because of what Bill
had told me in that hotel room, you know, that I shouldn't worry about getting pregnant because he
was sterile after having had the mumps."
"... she collapsed at the 9/11 memorial and went stiff as a board when she fell into the van....90 minutes later she comes out of Chelseas' apartment looking 20 pounds thinner! She was also grinning and hopping around....I'd like to know what they are giving her and order some..LOL ..."
"... They accused him of using cocaine, and he comes back by asking for a drug test for both. Sheer brilliance ..."
Huma Abedin, top aide to Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, asked a speechwriter
to shorten a potential statement to reporters because Clinton would not deliver it at a podium, according
to the latest Wikileaks release of messages from John Podesta's email accounts.
"I would make it shorter only because it's a bank of Mics and no podium," Abedin replied.
Based on contemporaneous news reports, Clinton's team appears to have scrapped a "post-game" statement
altogether - since Clinton ultimately sat and talked for 11 hours over the course of the hearing.
During that time, Clinton suffered a coughing fit for several minutes while answering questions from
Rep. Elijah Cummings.
That makes sense...because when she collapsed at the 9/11 memorial and went stiff as a board
when she fell into the van....90 minutes later she comes out of Chelseas' apartment looking 20
pounds thinner! She was also grinning and hopping around....I'd like to know what they are giving
her and order some..LOL
It reminds of the movie. "Death Becomes Her" with Goldie Hawn and Meryl Streep where they are
dead and Bruce Willis keeps them animated with "science"....
ladywarrior > Realistic Observer
Yes! I saw that medicinal drip apparatus in a photo of her leaning down talking to supporters
at the last debate....small box showing through her jacket with a hose running up the middle of
her back between her shoulder blades....it was clear as a bell.....she's being kept upright with
super drugs....
constitutionminded > Bloodaxe
They accused him of using cocaine, and he comes back by asking for a drug test for both. Sheer
brilliance.
"... So now David Axelrod suggests Hillary should drop out of third debate scheduled for Wednesday, blames Trump's call for drug test! ..."
"... Drudge says Hillary about to be very publicly finally forced out of the closet! ..."
"... Here's what the Clinton Staff say about Chelsea: "..the apple doesn't fall far. A kiss on the cheek while she's sticking a knife in the back, and the front." ..."
Among the latest, ninth round of Podesta email releases by Wikileaks this morning,
is a July 31, 2015 email
by Hillary Clinton's National Press Secretary Brian Fallon who lays out the agenda for the day's
rollout of Clinton's tax record and, more importantly, Hillary's "excellent health" medical statement,
where once again the media, listed as "AP, Politico, WSJ, WaPo, etc" is exposed as coordinating and
colluding with the campaign to send a message that Hillary is in great health.
In the email written in the early hours on Friday, Fallon writes that in the "rollout plan" for
that same day, the campaign will "Pitch the first round of stories to the travelling press corps
(AP, Politico, WSJ, WaPo, etc) with a 2 pm embargo."
He goes on to say that for these stories "we will provide the full text of HRC's physician's letter,
summarizing that she is in excellent health and is medically fit to perform the duties of President.
We will push that she is the FIRST presidential candidate to release this info."
In further evidence of the prepared media narrative, Fallon points out that "we expect the stories
that pop at 2 pm to have headlines such as "CLINTON IN 'EXCELLENT HEALTH,' MEDICAL RECORDS SAY" …
"CLINTON RELEASES HEALTH REPORT."
... ... ...
* * *
The above takes places several months after a
March 2015 email exchange
in which campaign manager Mook wrote Podesta, asking if he had talked to Hillary "about her taxes
and health:, admitting that both topics are "hypersensitive" to her, yet adding that "both are better
dealt with very early so we control them--rather than responding to calls for transparency."
* * *
And that is how Hillary's well-greased organization maintained the lid on her health narrative
from day one, and prevented it from sliding out of control in an undesired direction by coordinating
with the "friendly press." Of course, it was unable to do so for too long, as we noted over the summer;
at that point the Clinton campaign would simply smear those non-compliant press as "alt-right" elements,
or as has been the case recently, invoke "Russian-support" elements and suggest it is one vast conspiracy,
at least until a video of Hillary collapsing on September 11 emerged and confirmed it was all just
"conspiracy fact."
Yes We Can. But... •Oct 16, 2016 12:28 PM
So now David Axelrod suggests Hillary should drop out of third debate scheduled for Wednesday,
blames Trump's call for drug test!
And Drudge says Hillary about to be very publicly finally forced out of the closet! Payback
for going after Trump's supposed kissy-kissy feely-feely thing.
Methinks it all may be a bit more than she has the strength and/or willingness to bear this
Wednesday.
Here's what the Clinton Staff say about Chelsea:
"..the apple doesn't fall far. A kiss on the cheek while she's sticking a knife in the back, and the front."
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cu5G4KNVYAA9yw9.jpg
And here's Posdesta's racist remark about white people when he found out the San Bernadino
shooter was Muslim
WOW! Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein is on fire! After previously blasting Hillary
Clinton, accusing her of basically being a scary psychopath who "would start World War 3 with
Russia", Jill is now warning liberal progressives not to throw away their vote by supporting
corporatist Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton because she is a "two faced public and private
position, corporatist who takes Wall Street special interest big donor money, traitor who would
betray you, a crook who controls the media, a monster and your votes would be wasted on her" in
what is basically a summary of what Jill Stein said.
"Don't waste your vote on corporate Democrats. #InvestYourVote," Stein wrote on Twitter on
Wednesday:
"If Trump's campaign is flailing, does a "spoiler" vote even exist anymore? Don't waste your vote
on corporate Democrats."
Stein then retweeted a statement from the Green Party's official Twitter account which read,
"It's time to #InvestYourVote in building a people's party – not waste your vote on corporate
party candidates that continue to betray you."
"Unlike the Democrats and Republicans, we don't cuddle up to Wall Street and special interests
with our 'public' and 'private' positions," Stein added in a separate tweet, referring to the
recent WikiLeaks revelation that Hillary Clinton said that politicians need to have "both a
public and private position" on every issue:
"Unlike the Democrats and Republicans, we don't cuddle up to Wall Street and special interests
with our "public" and "private" positions."
she's right the Republicans are in the same boat! People like Paul Ryan, John McCain, there's
no doubt about it, they are just as corrupt as the Democrats. Its only Donald Trump himself who
is not bound to any Wall Street special interests and who doesn't accept donations from big
banks, but other Republicans are just as corrupt as your average Democrats. That's why GOP elites
are not endorsing Trump. Trump himself is also at war with the GOP establishment.
Stein observed that "corporations were originally chartered to serve the public good, but they've
become monsters that dominate our government."
Stein has previously explained that the liberal progressive agenda–on health care, crime, climate
change, trade, etc.– cannot be accomplished under a corporatist like Hillary Clinton. Stein
argued that a Clinton presidency will simply be the continuation of the policies supported by
Washington's "uniparty," which is controlled by special interest donors–and will not in any way
advance the goals of liberal progressives.
Seeming to borrow Trump's moniker for Clinton, Stein also attacked DNC chair Donna Brazile for
her "crooked" behavior– providing Clinton's campaign with a question in advance for a town hall
as Clinton was trying to defeat Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary:
"Invest your vote in a movement party, not in more crooked behavior from the Democrats!
PodestaEmails4 http://thehill.com/media/300427-emails-donna-brazile-gave-town-hall-questions-to-clinton-camp-in-advance
"
Stein is a Harvard Medical School graduate, a mother to two sons, and a practicing physician, who
became an environmental-health activist and organizer in the late 1990s. As the Green Party's
2012 presidential candidate, Stein holds the record for the most votes ever received by a female
candidate for president in a general election.
While third party Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson has received quite a bit of media attention
throughout this election, Stein said that she has experienced a virtual media blackout. Stein
urged supporters to help her "#BreakTheBlackout from corporate media."
Stein suggested that the reason for the media blackout stems is because she is an effective
messenger against Washington's "uniparty."
"I debated @MittRomney in 2002 and was declared the winner by viewers. After that they locked me
out of the debates," Stein tweeted. "The Democratic and Republican candidates + @GovGaryJohnson
refuse to debate me because they're scared. #OccupyTheDebate":
"Help us #BreakTheBlackout from corporate media – go to http://Jill2016.com and sign up to join
our team! #GreenTownHall"
WOW! Her anti-Hillary rants have been really strong lately! Its nice to finally see someone else
take on the crooked Democrats with such anger. Seeing Trump doing all the ranting all by himself
is really nice but now its even better. Perhaps the two should meet and discuss some sort of
alliance. Jill Stein could be an effective messenger to the Bernie voters. Perhaps Trump could
make her the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency or something, since she's
Green.
In exchange Jill should of course drop out and ask her 2% voter base to vote Trump. She should
also keep bashing the Democrats and target Bernie Sanders's people to vote Trump. Wouldn't be
such a bad idea, wouldn't it??
Among the latest, ninth round of Podesta email releases by Wikileaks this morning,
is a July 31, 2015 email
by Hillary Clinton's National Press Secretary Brian Fallon who lays out the agenda
for the day's rollout of Clinton's tax record and, more importantly, Hillary's
"excellent health" medical statement, where once again the media, listed as "AP,
Politico, WSJ, WaPo, etc" is exposed as coordinating and colluding with the campaign to
send a message that Hillary is in great health.
In the email written in the early
hours on Friday, Fallon writes that in the "rollout plan" for that same day, the
campaign will "Pitch the first round of stories to the travelling press corps (AP,
Politico, WSJ, WaPo, etc) with a 2 pm embargo."
He goes on to say that for these stories "we will provide the full text of HRC's
physician's letter, summarizing that she is in excellent health and is medically fit to
perform the duties of President. We will push that she is the FIRST presidential
candidate to release this info."
In further evidence of the prepared media narrative, Fallon points out that "we
expect the stories that pop at 2 pm to have headlines such as "CLINTON IN 'EXCELLENT
HEALTH,' MEDICAL RECORDS SAY" … "CLINTON RELEASES HEALTH REPORT."
... ... ...
* * *
The above takes places several months after a
March 2015 email exchange
in which campaign manager Mook wrote Podesta, asking if he had talked to Hillary
"about her taxes and health:, admitting that both topics are "hypersensitive" to her,
yet adding that "both are better dealt with very early so we control them--rather than
responding to calls for transparency."
* * *
And that is how Hillary's well-greased organization maintained the lid on her
health narrative from day one, and prevented it from sliding out of control in an
undesired direction by coordinating with the "friendly press." Of course, it was unable
to do so for too long, as we noted over the summer; at that point the Clinton campaign
would simply smear those non-compliant press as "alt-right" elements, or as has been the
case recently, invoke "Russian-support" elements and suggest it is one vast conspiracy,
at least until a video of Hillary collapsing on September 11 emerged and confirmed it
was all just "conspiracy fact."
Yes We Can. But...
•Oct 16, 2016 12:28 PM
So now David Axelrod suggests Hillary should drop out of third debate scheduled for
Wednesday, blames Trump's call for drug test!
And Drudge says Hillary about to be very publicly finally forced out of the closet! Payback
for going after Trump's supposed kissy-kissy feely-feely thing.
Methinks it all may be a bit more than she has the strength and/or willingness to bear this
Wednesday.
Clinton is converting Democratic Party into party of war with Russia...
Hillary was the Secretary of State when the USA tried to implement color revolution in Russia in
2011-2012.
Notable quotes:
"... Washington Post ..."
"... Clinton told a press conference Monday there were now "credible reports about Russian interference in our elections," adding, "I want everyone-Democrat, Republican, Independent-to understand the real threat that this represents." ..."
"... Clinton's suggestion of a Trump-Putin axis was followed up Tuesday in a speech in North Carolina by her vice-presidential running mate, Senator Tim Kaine, which was billed as a "major national security address" by the Democratic campaign. ..."
"... Clinton appeared Monday at several Labor Day rallies, but she chose to focus her attack on Trump on national security issues, where she has consistently attacked the billionaire real estate speculator from the right. ..."
"... Asked by a reporter if the alleged Russian actions amounted to a cyberwar, Clinton replied, "I'm not comfortable using the word 'war'." This demurral was only to disguise her intentions from the American people. However, in a speech last week to the American Legion convention, Clinton declared that cyberattacks on the United States should be answered by military force. ..."
"... Clinton claimed that Putin had all but confirmed Russia's role in the hacking of the DNC-a flat-out lie-adding, "The team around him certainly believe that there is some benefit to them to doing this." She then declared that the prospect of additional hacking into the state government systems used to conduct the November 8 elections represented "a threat from an adversarial foreign power." ..."
"... The Democratic candidate also criticized the role of the Russian government in Syria, in backing the regime of President Bashar al-Assad against Islamist forces armed and financed by the United States and the Gulf monarchies. She denounced "the refusal of the Russians and the Iranians to put the kind of pressure on Assad that is necessary " ..."
"... The article published Monday by the Washington Post ..."
"... As in previous reports by the Post ..."
"... Meanwhile, the claims of Russian hacking are being used to whip up a crisis atmosphere about the administration of the election itself. Earlier this summer the FBI issued a "flash" alert to election officials in all 50 states over the threat of cyber intrusions. Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson suggested that the entire US election system, including 9,000 polling places and 50 separate state election authorities, should be declared "critical infrastructure" subject to the same counterterrorism efforts as nuclear power plants and electrical power grids. ..."
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton this week publicly accused the Russian government
of intervening in the American election on behalf of her Republican opponent Donald Trump.
She cited an investigation by US intelligence agencies, first reported Monday night by the
Washington Post , into alleged Russian government hacking into the computer systems of the state
election officials in the United States.
Clinton told a press conference Monday there were now "credible reports about Russian interference
in our elections," adding, "I want everyone-Democrat, Republican, Independent-to understand the real
threat that this represents."
Clinton referred both to the Post report about hacking into state government computers
in Arizona and Illinois, and to the alleged Russian hacking of the emails of the Democratic National
Committee (DNC), which revealed backroom efforts by top DNC officials to ensure Clinton's victory.
Clinton's suggestion of a Trump-Putin axis was followed up Tuesday in a speech in North Carolina
by her vice-presidential running mate, Senator Tim Kaine, which was billed as a "major national security
address" by the Democratic campaign.
Kaine contrasted Clinton's going "toe-to-toe with Putin" as US secretary of state, to Trump's
suggestion that NATO was outmoded and that he could negotiate more successfully with Russia. He then
raised the question "why Trump seems to support Russian interests at the expense of American ones,"
suggesting that the billionaire real estate speculator was keeping his tax returns secret because
they might shed light on his financial ties to Russia. He concluded by citing the claim of former
acting CIA Director Michael Morell that Trump is an "unwitting agent" of the Russian intelligence
services.
Clinton appeared Monday at several Labor Day rallies, but she chose to focus her attack on
Trump on national security issues, where she has consistently attacked the billionaire real estate
speculator from the right.
Asked by a reporter if the alleged Russian actions amounted to a cyberwar, Clinton replied,
"I'm not comfortable using the word 'war'." This demurral was only to disguise her intentions from
the American people. However, in a speech last week to the American Legion convention, Clinton declared
that cyberattacks on the United States should be answered by military force.
Clinton claimed that Putin had all but confirmed Russia's role in the hacking of the DNC-a
flat-out lie-adding, "The team around him certainly believe that there is some benefit to them to
doing this." She then declared that the prospect of additional hacking into the state government
systems used to conduct the November 8 elections represented "a threat from an adversarial foreign
power."
The Democratic candidate also criticized the role of the Russian government in Syria, in backing
the regime of President Bashar al-Assad against Islamist forces armed and financed by the United
States and the Gulf monarchies. She denounced "the refusal of the Russians and the Iranians to put
the kind of pressure on Assad that is necessary "
Clinton reiterated her support for imposing a no-fly zone over parts of Syria held by the US-backed
"rebels," which would require US air strikes against Syrian anti-aircraft positions and could lead
to confrontations between Russian and American warplanes, which both conduct air strikes in the country.
"I think we need leverage," she said. "I've always believed that if that were on the table and
it were clear we were going to pursue it, that would give us the leverage we don't have now." Coming
just after the well-publicized failure of talks last weekend between Obama and Putin at the G20 summit
in China, Clinton was clearly seeking to stake out a more aggressive position on Syria than that
of the Obama administration.
The Democrat's claim to have discovered a Trump-Putin axis has two purposes: first, to cement
Clinton's standing as the consensus choice of the US military-intelligence apparatus; and second,
to integrate the election campaign itself into the war preparations by US imperialism, both in the
Middle East and against Russia (as well as China).
If Clinton wins the November 8 election over Trump, she will claim this to be a mandate for the
escalation of US military operations in Iraq and Syria, as well as the continued NATO military buildup
throughout Eastern Europe, openly aimed at preparing for war with Russia, a country with the world's
second-largest nuclear arsenal.
In her complaints about Russian interference in the US elections, Clinton is joining in the campaign
waged by the Pentagon and CIA to prepare US public opinion for such a conflict.
The article published Monday by the Washington Post is little more than a handout
from the intelligence agencies. It reports that the CIA, FBI, National Security Agency and Department
of Homeland Security have started an investigation, led by Director of National Intelligence James
Clapper, into a "broad covert Russian operation in the United States to sow public distrust in the
upcoming presidential election and in US political institutions."
In addition to discrediting the election among the American people-hardly necessary given that
the entire political system is deeply despised and the two main candidates hated-Russian officials
allegedly seek to "provide propaganda fodder to attack US democracy-building policies around the
world," the Post claimed.
As in previous reports by the Post and the New York Times about alleged
Russian hacking of the DNC, no evidence of any kind is cited in the article, only the unsupported
claims of intelligence officials, who even the Post reporters admit lack "definitive proof"
of either cyberattacks or even plans for cyberattacks.
Apparently the public is expected to treat such claims as the gospel, despite the decades of lying
by these agencies to cover up assassinations, coup plots and other conspiracies abroad, and the systematic
violation of the democratic rights of the American people at home.
Meanwhile, the claims of Russian hacking are being used to whip up a crisis atmosphere about
the administration of the election itself. Earlier this summer the FBI issued a "flash" alert to
election officials in all 50 states over the threat of cyber intrusions. Homeland Security Secretary
Jeh Johnson suggested that the entire US election system, including 9,000 polling places and 50 separate
state election authorities, should be declared "critical infrastructure" subject to the same counterterrorism
efforts as nuclear power plants and electrical power grids.
"... Can you imagine the reaction if Russian ambassador invited Trump and Sanders to the embassy and offered full and unconditional support for their noble cause of dislodging the corrupt neoliberal regime that exists in Washington. With cash injections to breitbart.com, similar sites, and especially organizations that conduct polls after that. ..."
"... Why Russia can't have something similar to help struggling American people to have more honest elections despite all the blatantly undemocratic mechanisms of "first to the post", primaries, state based counting of votes, and the United States Electoral College ? ..."
"... It would be really funny if Russians really resorted to color revolution tricks in the current presidential elections :-) ..."
"... Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton sharply criticized what she called "troubling practices" before and during the vote in Russia. "The Russian people, like people everywhere, deserve the right to have their voices heard and their votes counted," she said in Bonn, Germany. ..."
In a way Hillary laments about Russia interference are what is typically called "The pot calling
the kettle black" as she is exactly the specialist in this area. BTW there is a documented history
of the US interference into Russian elections of 2011-2012.
In which Hillary (via ambassador McFaul and the net of NGOs) was trying to stage a "color revolution"
(nicknamed "white revolution") in Russia and prevent the re-election of Putin. The main instrument
was claiming the fraud in ballot counting.
Can you imagine the reaction if Russian ambassador invited Trump and Sanders to the embassy
and offered full and unconditional support for their noble cause of dislodging the corrupt neoliberal
regime that exists in Washington. With cash injections to breitbart.com, similar sites, and especially
organizations that conduct polls after that.
And RT covered staged revelations of "Hillary campaign corruption" 24 x 7. As was done by Western
MSM in regard to Alexei Navalny web site and him personally as the savior of Russia from entrenched
corruption ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexei_Navalny
)
Actually the USA has several organizations explicitly oriented on interference in foreign elections
and promotion of "color revolutions", with functions that partially displaced old functions of
CIA (as in Italian elections of 1948). For example, NED.
Why Russia can't have something similar to help struggling American people to have more
honest elections despite all the blatantly undemocratic mechanisms of "first to the post", primaries,
state based counting of votes, and the United States Electoral College ?
It would be really funny if Russians really resorted to color revolution tricks in the
current presidential elections :-)
Here is a quote that can navigate them in right direction (note the irony of her words after
DNC throw Sanders under the bus ;-)
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton sharply criticized what she called "troubling
practices" before and during the vote in Russia. "The Russian people, like people everywhere,
deserve the right to have their voices heard and their votes counted," she said in Bonn, Germany.
With 99.9 percent of ballots processed, election officials said that United Russia had won
238 seats in Parliament, or about 53 percent, from 315 seats or 70 percent now. The Communist
Party won 92 seats; Just Russia, a social democratic party, won 64 seats and the national Liberal
Democratic Party won 56 seats.
Groupinggate was essentially an attempt to distract votes from a more serious issue, especially
Hillary warmongering, her role in mass rape of women in Syria and Libya, and latest Podesta emails leaks.
This was a defensive strike with material that was specifically reserved for this purpose.
Notable quotes:
"... there are many more than two sides in Syria's civil war. First of all the civil war is not limited to Syria. ISIL, Hezbollah, and arguably Kurdish Rojava are belligerents not particularly invested in the borders of long defunct Mandate Syria. ..."
"... The rebel forces arrayed against or for Assad in any particular area are various in their motivations and political identities and they never divide neatly into two opposed camps. ..."
"... In short, you either support US violent regime change in the ME, or you do not. ..."
"... All who are voting for Hillary Clinton are voting for US violent regime change in Syria. That's been the stated policy of the Obama administration for some years, Hillary was played a key role in formulating that policy as Secretary of State. Now, as candidate for President she has explicitly promised more US violent regime change in Iraq. ..."
"... Violent regime change in Syria is the stated policy of Hillary Clinton, the Democratic candidate most US members of the CT community plan to vote for in November. ..."
intervene in a civil war on the side of the rebels
I apologize if anyone feels I am harping on this too much, but there are many more than
two sides in Syria's civil war. First of all the civil war is not limited to Syria. ISIL, Hezbollah,
and arguably Kurdish Rojava are belligerents not particularly invested in the borders of long
defunct Mandate Syria.
The rebel forces arrayed against or for Assad in any particular area are various in their
motivations and political identities and they never divide neatly into two opposed camps.
kidneystones 10.15.16 at 8:06 am
@ 190 There aren't many times you're this wrong, Bruce. There are only two sides. The side that
holds a UN seat; votes or abstains on UN resolutions; borrows or does not borrow from the World
Bank; has the authority to sign, or abrogate international treaties along, for example, the Golan
heights – and the forces not aligned with the government.
The CT community evidently wants to 'confuse itself' and the issues. You are either in favor
of the US using US military power to unilaterally intercede in a civil war against the Assad government,
which as you and Peter T note, is inextricably linked to Iraq and other regional disputes, or
you oppose the unilateral use of US military power to topple governments in the ME.
In short, you either support US violent regime change in the ME, or you do not.
All who are voting for Hillary Clinton are voting for US violent regime change in Syria.
That's been the stated policy of the Obama administration for some years, Hillary was played a
key role in formulating that policy as Secretary of State. Now, as candidate for President she
has explicitly promised more US violent regime change in Iraq.
Violent regime change in Syria is the stated policy of Hillary Clinton, the Democratic
candidate most US members of the CT community plan to vote for in November.
"... Regarding Clinton, the revelation was the latest batch of WikiLeaks disclosures. It included excerpts of her speeches before Wall Street audiences, which she had refused to make public. Now we know why. They show her making nice-nice with her billionaire benefactors-no surprise there. After all, they paid her a standard fee of $225,000 per speech, for 92 speeches between 2013 and 2015, earning her $21.6 million in less than two years. How many of us could resist being nice-nice to nice people like that? ..."
"... Stop the presses! Trump is a misogynist! ..."
"... Friends of mine know that I am no fan, at all, of Ted Cruz. But he is the only person I've seen so far, before the second debate, who has stated the obvious. He tweeted: "NBC had tape 11 yrs. Apprentice producer says they have more & worse. So why not release in 2015? In March? Why wait till October? #MSMBias" ..."
"... As the saying goes, "Give me a break!" Presidents like Kennedy and Clinton did more than talk about groping women, they practiced it-and worse. But now people who voted for, or defended, these Presidents-and other politicians like the woman-killing Ted Kennedy-can strike poses of shock and horror at Trump's words. Politically correct philanderers and models of progressive sexual attitudes like Arnold Schwarzenegger can refuse to endorse the scoundrel. Politics is indeed a hothouse of fertilizer for hypocrisy. ..."
"... The difference in this debate, however, is that Trump fought back with passion, limiting her advantage with both zingers and policy contrasts. His policy positions are muddled, but hers are disingenuous at best. And with the possible exception of college and high-school debate contests, debates are rarely won on points. They are won with passion and-especially in the case of presidential debates-how you motivate your backers. And here Trump won the debate hands-down. ..."
"... Above all, we must remember that the election is mostly bread and circuses to distract us from issues that aren't being discussed-the disposition of over $150 trillion in sovereign state debt, the largest bubble in the history of the world; how our own $20 trillion in debt is exploding at a rate that is unsustainable; the role of the Deep State in making the concept of "democracy" a joke; and how the neocons' (Hillary included) policy of perpetual war is threatening us not only with national bankruptcy but the risk of a nuclear World War III. As Mark Twain or Emma Goldman said (take your pick as to who the real author was), "If voting made a difference, they wouldn't let us do it." ..."
Regarding Clinton, the revelation was the latest batch of WikiLeaks disclosures. It included
excerpts of her speeches before Wall Street audiences, which she had refused to make public. Now
we know why. They show her making nice-nice with her billionaire benefactors-no surprise there. After
all, they paid her a standard fee of $225,000 per speech, for 92 speeches between 2013 and 2015,
earning her $21.6 million in less than two years. How many of us could resist being nice-nice to
nice people like that?
But the excerpts from her speeches also show her saying she is for "open borders," which will
not endear her to the majority of American voters. They show her admitting she often has a private
position on issues (one satisfactory to her benefactors) different from her public position on those
issues, which does nothing to repair her reputation as a liar (though it could not have come as a
surprise to her benefactors, who are used to paying off two-faced politicians).
These and other revelations were potentially damning to Clinton's chances in a deadlocked race,
so the leftist media did what it had to do under the circumstances: it ignored the Clinton revelations
and went unhinged on the Trump "revelation." As a result, about the only place in the mainstream
media where you will find discussion of the Clinton speeches is Fox News. Thankfully, as many people
watch that cable news network as watch its two competitors combined, that is, the Clinton News Network
(CNN) and MSDNC.
Stop the presses! Trump is a misogynist!
... ... ...
Friends of mine know that I am no fan, at all, of Ted Cruz. But he is the only person I've
seen so far, before the second debate, who has stated the obvious. He tweeted: "NBC had tape 11 yrs.
Apprentice producer says they have more & worse. So why not release in 2015? In March? Why wait till
October? #MSMBias"
... ... ...
As the saying goes, "Give me a break!" Presidents like Kennedy and Clinton did more than talk
about groping women, they practiced it-and worse. But now people who voted for, or defended, these
Presidents-and other politicians like the woman-killing Ted Kennedy-can strike poses of shock and
horror at Trump's words. Politically correct philanderers and models of progressive sexual attitudes
like Arnold Schwarzenegger can refuse to endorse the scoundrel. Politics is indeed a hothouse of
fertilizer for hypocrisy.
... ... ...
Hillary Clinton will always be able to out-point Donald Trump on policy matters. That is the advantage
of being a politician for more than 30 years. "Slick Willie" has now been supplanted by slick Hillary.
But most Americans expected that.
The difference in this debate, however, is that Trump fought back with passion, limiting her
advantage with both zingers and policy contrasts. His policy positions are muddled, but hers are
disingenuous at best. And with the possible exception of college and high-school debate contests,
debates are rarely won on points. They are won with passion and-especially in the case of presidential
debates-how you motivate your backers. And here Trump won the debate hands-down.
... ... ...
Above all, we must remember that the election is mostly bread and circuses to distract us from
issues that aren't being discussed-the disposition of over $150 trillion in sovereign state debt,
the largest bubble in the history of the world; how our own $20 trillion in debt is exploding at
a rate that is unsustainable; the role of the Deep State in making the concept of "democracy" a joke;
and how the neocons' (Hillary included) policy of perpetual war is threatening us not only with national
bankruptcy but the risk of a nuclear World War III. As Mark Twain or Emma Goldman said (take your
pick as to who the real author was), "If voting made a difference, they wouldn't let us do it."
David Franke was a founder of the conservative movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
He is currently writing his magnum opus on the trajectory of conservatism and American politics during
his lifetime.
"... I don't buy the left neoliberal hysteria over Trump as the scariest reactionary dude evah. I think that's just to prevent the dissatisfaction that Trump has tapped into blending with the dissatisfaction Sanders tapped into. ..."
"... And, I tend to think that strategy has been successful in keeping the left v right neoliberal monopoly of power intact. The Republicans may take a hit, but it will only result in a slight shuffling among the seats of power. The left neoliberals will keep the right neoliberal seats warm for them. ymmv ..."
"... This really is another post 9/11 moment for the chattering classes. All their claims of expertise, clear eyed analysis, logic above emotion, has come crashing down around their hysterical, emotion driven response to the current political situation. There is, at this stage, basically zero willingness among these groups to do their Job of explaining the world, all they want to achieve is a combination of political signalling and intense personal satisfaction. ..."
"... The best analyses I've read were a couple of essays from 2015 comparing Trump to Berlusconi. Those interested will need to insert 2015 into the search string to skip past the more breathless 2016 versions. The 2015 essays are largely free of tbe breathless need to stop Trump cold that mar 2016 comparisons. ..."
"... middle-class unhappy with the rapine corruption and self-serving nature of the elites. ..."
"... The problem is that Trump is an entertainer/marketer and his product is him. Van Jones remains the single best pundit on Trump because Jones understands that the elections are about stagecraft, more than politics. ..."
"... the college-educated white new middle class (professionals and managers), is approximately 30 percent of the population, but are overrepresented, at 40 percent, among Trump supporters. Not surprisingly, the median household income of Trump voters is around $70,000 annually. ..."
"... More importantly, the category "non-college educated whites" includes both wage workers and the self-employed - the traditional middle class. The Economist found that "better-paid and better-educated voters have always formed as big a part of Mr. Trump's base as those at the lower end of the scale for income and education." ..."
"... 'I don't know, so I assume' is kind of the defining characteristic of reactions to the Trump Candidacy. Maybe he will, continue with neoliberalism. Or maybe he will go full communism now, or perhaps at least anti-imperialism, as one prolific poster here repeatedly claims. It all depends on which 10% of his statements you believe are not lies, and what you project into the gap left by the rest. ..."
"... But it could equally plausibly lead to a stable regime that would have European political scientists in lively debate as to whether or not it is most accurately called fascist. ..."
"... Clearly, Trump's right-wing opposition to neoliberal trade and tax policies resonates with a minority of older, white workers, including a minority of union members." ..."
"... these sectors have experiencing declining living standards and are fearful about their children's prospects of remaining in the middle class." ..."
"... The developments of late capitalism have to do with the transition of these decisions from the elite capitalist class as such to a group of managers. These managers can not and do not go against the traditional interests of capital as such. But their decisions characteristically favor their class in ways that a traditional class analysis can not fathom, and their ideology appeals to a group variously called "professionals", "technocrats", "the 10%" etc. who more broadly control the levers of power in society. ..."
"... The managerial class operates a world system - the system of trade agreements, monetary agreements, etc. This system keeps the world economy going as it is going through the cooperation of American economists, Eurocrat bureaucratic appointees, Chinese Communist Party higher-ups, important people in the financial industry (whether bankers or at central banks), CEOs of multinationals, and even the leaders of important NGOs. These interactions are observable and not a matter of conspiracy theory. ..."
soru: "Precisely because it is not left neoliberalism versus right neoliberalism, but left
neoliberalism versus something that is:
a: worse b: a predictable consequence of neoliberalism.
I think there is something to the thesis that Trump ripped the scab off the place where Luttwak's
"perfect non-sequitur" had rubbed the skin off the connection between the tax-cut loving Republican
establishment leadership and the Republican electoral base of male reactionary ignoramuses.
But, I don't know what actual policy follows from Trump_vs_deep_state, if not Mike Pence brand right neoliberalism.
A little light flavoring of theocracy on the tax cuts in other words.
I don't buy the left neoliberal hysteria over Trump as the scariest reactionary dude evah.
I think that's just to prevent the dissatisfaction that Trump has tapped into blending with the
dissatisfaction Sanders tapped into.
And, I tend to think that strategy has been successful in keeping the left v right neoliberal
monopoly of power intact. The Republicans may take a hit, but it will only result in a slight
shuffling among the seats of power. The left neoliberals will keep the right neoliberal seats
warm for them. ymmv
" The national polls (though not so much the state polls) were off in 2012. During the closing
month of the campaign, they showed, on average, a 0.3 point Romney lead. The RAND poll [LA Times],
by contrast, showed a 3.8 point Obama lead – which was almost exactly correct."
Sean Trende throws a big bucket of salt on the LA Times poll, before getting to the accuracy
of the poll in 2012.
This really is another post 9/11 moment for the chattering classes. All their claims of expertise,
clear eyed analysis, logic above emotion, has come crashing down around their hysterical, emotion
driven response to the current political situation. There is, at this stage, basically zero willingness
among these groups to do their Job of explaining the world, all they want to achieve is a combination
of political signalling and intense personal satisfaction.
@208 I generally agree. Thanks for the link to the Nation piece. I earlier skimmed this Guardian
piece by JJ which features an extended essay from the reviewed text. John has been beating this
drum for more than a year trying to wear his two hats: partisan Dem and serious social critic.
The first serious undermines the second.
The best analyses I've read were a couple of essays from 2015 comparing Trump to Berlusconi.
Those interested will need to insert 2015 into the search string to skip past the more breathless
2016 versions. The 2015 essays are largely free of tbe breathless need to stop Trump cold that
mar 2016 comparisons.
The Judis essay marries Trump too closely to George Wallace, another populist, but critically
also a professional politician, a Democrat, and a New Dealer.
Judis has a good quote, or two, from Wallace that definitely fit the Tea Party/Silent Majority
profile – rule followers, middle-class unhappy with the rapine corruption and self-serving
nature of the elites.
The problem is that Trump is an entertainer/marketer and his product is him. Van Jones
remains the single best pundit on Trump because Jones understands that the elections are about
stagecraft, more than politics. Both the Nation and the Guardian piece function as much as
thinly disguised GOTV arguments as academic assessments of the Trump phenomena.
What both get right, along with many others, is that removing Trump from the equation removes
nothing from the masses of ordinary folks who a/will not apologize for who they are and in fact
celebrate themselves and their values b/aren't interested in the approval, or the explications
of elites c/are completely determined to burn down this mess irrespective of whether Trump is
elected, or not.
Thanks for the link kidneystones, I'll check.it out. I'm working through Judis' book at the moment
and find larger parts, of it convincing.
Who. Is van Jones? Is it this lad?
…while approximately 55 percent of Trump supporters do not have a bachelor's degree, this
demographic makes up approximately 70 percent of the US population - they are underrepresented
among Trump voters. However, the college-educated white new middle class (professionals
and managers), is approximately 30 percent of the population, but are overrepresented, at 40
percent, among Trump supporters. Not surprisingly, the median household income of Trump voters
is around $70,000 annually.
More importantly, the category "non-college educated whites" includes both wage workers
and the self-employed - the traditional middle class. The Economist found that "better-paid
and better-educated voters have always formed as big a part of Mr. Trump's base as those at
the lower end of the scale for income and education."
A systematic review of Gallup polling data demonstrates, again, that most Trump supporters
are part of the traditional middle class (self-employed) and those sectors of the new middle
class (supervisors) who do not require college degrees. They tend to live in "white enclaves"…
Kidney stones I'll check out the link above when by a laptop.
Personally I don't know how j feel about the managerial class argument (I still have to read
both Hayes and Frank ) but it's becoming quite clear that large parts of the left and right "establishment"
(which is just a shorthand way of saying those with high profile journalistic, political and cultural
positions) are going out of their way to not acknowledge what is right in from of their eyes,
that there are political and economic (as well as racial and cultural) reasons behind the rise
of right wing populism.
> But, I don't know what actual policy follows from Trump_vs_deep_state, if not Mike Pence brand right neoliberalism.
'I don't know, so I assume' is kind of the defining characteristic of reactions to the
Trump Candidacy. Maybe he will, continue with neoliberalism. Or maybe he will go full communism
now, or perhaps at least anti-imperialism, as one prolific poster here repeatedly claims. It all
depends on which 10% of his statements you believe are not lies, and what you project into the
gap left by the rest.
If he was elected, things would be different from what they are, or at least are understood
to be. And things being different, they would continue to be so, taking a different path from
the continuation of a status quo. My personal evidence-free assumption is that this would likely
take the nature of a decade-long crisis that would end with a return to a weakened version of
the pre-Trump regime. A pale echo of the rosy days of Obama, Bush and Clinton.
But it could equally plausibly lead to a stable regime that would have European political
scientists in lively debate as to whether or not it is most accurately called fascist.
For those not wager to read the link, here are the bits engels cut. From the beginning.
"Who are Trump's voters? Despite claims that he has won the "white working class," the vast
majority of Trump's supporters, like those of the Tea Party, are drawn from the traditional
and new middle classes, especially the older, white male and less well-off strata of these
classes. Clearly, Trump's right-wing opposition to neoliberal trade and tax policies resonates
with a minority of older, white workers, including a minority of union members."
And after enclave
"isolated from immigrants and other people of color, have worse health than the average
US resident, and are experiencing low rates of intergenerational mobility. While not directly
affected either by the decline of industry in the Midwest or by immigration, these sectors
have experiencing declining living standards and are fearful about their children's prospects
of remaining in the middle class."
Roman, I already said I broadly agreed with you (is it the case you literally zzzzzzzzzzz)- I'm
delighted that via Luttwak you're groping towards a class analysis of fascism that has been standard
on the left since at least Trotsky…
Ronan(rf): "Personally I don't know how j feel about the managerial class argument"
There are certain decision makers who make all of the important decisions, or who at least
get a tremendously inordinate amount of power over those decisions. If they aren't making a decision
in a positive sense, their power often controls decisions in a negative sense by restricting the
available choices to those that are all acceptable to them.
The developments of late capitalism have to do with the transition of these decisions from
the elite capitalist class as such to a group of managers. These managers can not and do not go
against the traditional interests of capital as such. But their decisions characteristically favor
their class in ways that a traditional class analysis can not fathom, and their ideology appeals
to a group variously called "professionals", "technocrats", "the 10%" etc. who more broadly control
the levers of power in society.
The managerial class operates a world system - the system of trade agreements, monetary
agreements, etc. This system keeps the world economy going as it is going through the cooperation
of American economists, Eurocrat bureaucratic appointees, Chinese Communist Party higher-ups,
important people in the financial industry (whether bankers or at central banks), CEOs of multinationals,
and even the leaders of important NGOs. These interactions are observable and not a matter of
conspiracy theory.
"... "deep state" - the Washington-Wall-Street-Silicon-Valley Establishment - is a far greater threat to liberty than you think ..."
"... Yes, there is another government concealed behind the one that is visible at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue, a hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country according to consistent patterns in season and out, connected to, but only intermittently controlled by, the visible state whose leaders we choose. ..."
"... Cultural assimilation is partly a matter of what psychologist Irving L. Janis called "groupthink," the chameleon-like ability of people to adopt the views of their superiors and peers. This syndrome is endemic to Washington: The town is characterized by sudden fads, be it negotiating biennial budgeting, making grand bargains or invading countries. Then, after a while, all the town's cool kids drop those ideas as if they were radioactive. As in the military, everybody has to get on board with the mission, and questioning it is not a career-enhancing move. The universe of people who will critically examine the goings-on at the institutions they work for is always going to be a small one. As Upton Sinclair said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." ..."
Steve Sailer links to this
unsettling
essay by former career Congressional staffer Mike Lofgren, who says the "deep state" - the
Washington-Wall-Street-Silicon-Valley Establishment - is a far greater threat to liberty than you
think. The partisan rancor and gridlock in Washington conceals a more fundamental and pervasive
agreement.
Excerpts:
These are not isolated instances of a contradiction; they have been so pervasive that they
tend to be disregarded as background noise. During the time in 2011 when political warfare over
the debt ceiling was beginning to paralyze the business of governance in Washington, the United
States government somehow summoned the resources to overthrow Muammar Ghaddafi's regime in Libya,
and, when the instability created by that coup spilled over into Mali, provide overt and covert
assistance to French intervention there. At a time when there was heated debate about continuing
meat inspections and civilian air traffic control because of the budget crisis, our government
was somehow able to commit $115 millionto keeping a civil war going in Syria and to pay
at least
Ł100m to the United Kingdom's Government Communications Headquarters to buy influence over
and access to that country's intelligence. Since 2007, two bridges carrying interstate highways
have collapsed due to inadequate maintenance of infrastructure, one killing 13 people. During
that same period of time, the government spent
$1.7 billion constructing a building in Utah that is the size of 17 football fields. This
mammoth structure is intended to allow the National Security Agency to store a
yottabyte of information, the largest numerical designator computer scientists have coined.
A yottabyte is equal to 500 quintillion pages of text. They need that much storage to archive
every single trace of your electronic life.
Yes, there is another government concealed behind the one that is visible at either end
of Pennsylvania Avenue, a hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country
according to consistent patterns in season and out, connected to, but only intermittently controlled
by, the visible state whose leaders we choose. My analysis of this phenomenon is not
an exposé of a secret, conspiratorial cabal; the state within a state is hiding mostly in plain
sight, and its operators mainly act in the light of day. Nor can this other government be accurately
termed an "establishment." All complex societies have an establishment, a social network committed
to its own enrichment and perpetuation. In terms of its scope, financial resources and sheer global
reach, the American hybrid state, the Deep State, is in a class by itself. That said, it is neither
omniscient nor invincible. The institution is not so much sinister (although it has highly sinister
aspects) as it is relentlessly well entrenched. Far from being invincible, its failures, such
as those in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, are routine enough that it is only the Deep State's protectiveness
towards its higher-ranking personnel that allows them to escape the consequences of their frequent
ineptitude.
More:
Washington is the most important node of the Deep State that has taken over America, but it
is not the only one. Invisible threads of money and ambition connect the town to other nodes.
One is Wall Street, which supplies the cash that keeps the political machine quiescent and operating
as a diversionary marionette theater. Should the politicians forget their lines and threaten the
status quo, Wall Street floods the town with cash and lawyers to help the hired hands remember
their own best interests. The executives of the financial giants even have de facto criminal immunity.
On March 6, 2013, testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee,
Attorney General Eric Holder stated the following: "I am concerned that the size of some of
these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when
we are hit with indications that if you do prosecute, if you do bring a criminal charge, it will
have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy." This, from the
chief law enforcement officer of a justice system that has practically
abolished the constitutional right to
trial for poorer defendants charged with certain crimes. It is not too much to say that Wall
Street may be the ultimate owner of the Deep State and its strategies, if for no other reason
than that it has the money to reward government operatives with a second career that is lucrative
beyond the dreams of avarice - certainly beyond the dreams of a salaried government employee.
[3]
The corridor between Manhattan and Washington is a well trodden highway for the personalities
we have all gotten to know in the period since the massive deregulation of Wall Street: Robert
Rubin, Lawrence Summers, Henry Paulson, Timothy Geithner and many others. Not all the traffic
involves persons connected with the purely financial operations of the government: In 2013, General
David Petraeus
joined KKR (formerly Kohlberg Kravis Roberts) of 9 West 57th Street, New York, a private equity
firm with $62.3 billion in assets. KKR specializes in management buyouts and leveraged finance.
General Petraeus' expertise in these areas is unclear. His ability to peddle influence, however,
is a known and valued commodity. Unlike Cincinnatus, the military commanders of the Deep State
do not take up the plow once they lay down the sword. Petraeus also obtained a sinecure as a non-resident
senior fellow at theBelfer
Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard. The Ivy League is, of course, the
preferred bleaching tub and charm school of the American oligarchy.
Lofgren goes on to say that Silicon Valley is a node of the Deep State too, and that despite the
protestations of its chieftains against NSA spying, it's a vital part of the Deep State's apparatus.
More:
The Deep State is the big story of our time. It is the red thread that runs through the war
on terrorism, the financialization and deindustrialization of the American economy, the rise of
a plutocratic social structure and political dysfunction. Washington is the headquarters of the
Deep State, and its time in the sun as a rival to Rome, Constantinople or London may be term-limited
by its overweening sense of self-importance and its habit, as Winwood Reade said of Rome, to "live
upon its principal till ruin stared it in the face."
... I would love to see a study comparing the press coverage from 9/11 leading up to the Iraq War
with press coverage of the gay marriage issue from about 2006 till today. Specifically, I'd be curious
to know about how thoroughly the media covered the cases against the policies that the Deep State
and the Shallow State decided should prevail. I'm not suggesting a conspiracy here, not at all. I'm
only thinking back to how it seemed so obvious to me in 2002 that we should go to war with Iraq,
so perfectly clear that the only people who opposed it were fools or villains. The same consensus
has emerged around same-sex marriage. I know how overwhelmingly the news media have believed this
for some time, such that many American journalists simply cannot conceive that anyone against same-sex
marriage is anything other than a fool or a villain. Again, this isn't a conspiracy; it's in the
nature of the thing. Lofgren:
Cultural assimilation is partly a matter of what psychologist
Irving L. Janis called
"groupthink," the chameleon-like ability of people to adopt the views of their superiors and peers.
This syndrome is endemic to Washington: The town is characterized by sudden fads, be it negotiating
biennial budgeting, making grand bargains or invading countries. Then, after a while, all the
town's cool kids drop those ideas as if they were radioactive. As in the military, everybody has
to get on board with the mission, and questioning it is not a career-enhancing move. The universe
of people who will critically examine the goings-on at the institutions they work for is always
going to be a small one. As Upton Sinclair said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something
when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
A more elusive aspect of cultural assimilation is the sheer dead weight of the ordinariness
of it all once you have planted yourself in your office chair for the 10,000th time. Government
life is typically not some vignette from an Allen Drury novel about intrigue under the
Capitol dome. Sitting and staring at the clock on the off-white office wall when it's 11:00 in
the evening and you are vowing never, ever to eat another piece of takeout pizza in your life
is not an experience that summons the higher literary instincts of a would-be memoirist. After
a while, a functionary of the state begins to hear things that, in another context, would be quite
remarkable, or at least noteworthy, and yet that simply bounce off one's consciousness like pebbles
off steel plate: "You mean the
number of terrorist groups we are fighting is classified?" No wonder so few people are whistle-blowers, quite apart from the vicious
retaliation whistle-blowing often provokes: Unless one is blessed with imagination and a fine
sense of irony, growing immune to the curiousness of one's surroundings is easy. To paraphrase
the inimitable Donald Rumsfeld, I didn't know all that I knew, at least until I had had a couple
of years away from the government to reflect upon it.
When all you know is the people who surround you in your professional class bubble and your social
circles, you can think the whole world agrees with you, or should. It's probably not a coincidence
that the American media elite live, work, and socialize in New York and Washington, the two cities
that were attacked on 9/11, and whose elites - political, military, financial - were so genuinely
traumatized by the events.
Anyway, that's just a small part of it, about how the elite media manufacture consent. Here's
a final quote, one from
the Moyers interview with Lofgren:
BILL MOYERS: If, as you write, the ideology of the Deep State is not democrat
or republican, not left or right, what is it?
MIKE LOFGREN: It's an ideology. I just don't think we've named it. It's a
kind of corporatism. Now, the actors in this drama tend to steer clear of social issues. They
pretend to be merrily neutral servants of the state, giving the best advice possible on national
security or financial matters. But they hold a very deep ideology of the Washington consensus
at home, which is deregulation, outsourcing, de-industrialization and financialization. And they
believe in American exceptionalism abroad, which is boots on the ground everywhere, it's our right
to meddle everywhere in the world. And the result of that is perpetual war.
This can't last. We'd better hope it can't last. And we'd better hope it unwinds peacefully.
"... I would not precisely characterize the recognizable pattern of American choices and strategies - that is, of American policy - as that of "an imperial power bent on maintaining its global hegemony" without further qualification. I would say the pattern is that of a global hegemon approaching imperial collapse. There are important differences, with immediate relevance. ..."
"... When commenters decry the failure to observe the norms of international law, they are not just being moralists in an immoral world; they are decrying the erosion of international order, an erosion that has been accelerated by the U.S. turn toward futile expedience as a foreign policy justified by groundless self-righteousness. ..."
"... And, the R2P doctrine has been ruined not just by hypocrisy but by the demonstrated incapacity to match means to putative ends. It is not just suspicious that the impulse to humanitarianism emerges only when an opportunity to blow things up arises, it's criminal. Or should be. (sarcasm) But, of course, it is not criminal, because atrocities are only a problem when it is the other guy committing them. Then, we can exercise our righteousness for the good, old cause. (end sarcasm) ..."
"... This chaos, I repeat, is inherent in the organization of U.S. policy - it is an observable pattern, not a property by axiomatic definition as your strawman would have it, but it is very worrisome. It is a symptom of what I rather dramatically labeled "imperial collapse". That the next President of the U.S. cannot work out why a no-fly zone in a country where the Russians are flying might be a bad idea is not a good sign. That the same person was a proponent of the policy that plunged Libya into chaos is another not-good sign. That's not an argument for Trump; it is an argument that Trump is another symptom. ..."
Dropping the heavy mockery for a moment to get at the logic of my view:
I think that if Y wants to stop Z from happening, Y might consider as a first expedient, self-restraint:
not doing Z, itself. That is, discipling its own forces and reforming its own strategies, when
it finds itself either doing Z or creating the conditions where Z happens.
Your strawman summation of my view is actually not half-bad:
. . . we know a priori that X [the U.S.] cannot act without committing war crimes because X
[the U.S.] is an imperial power bent on maintaining its global hegemony, therefore any employment
of any military force in any way by X [the U.S.] anywhere necessarily constitutes a war crime,
because every aspect of X's [the U.S.'s] foreign policy is criminal and therefore every act
taken by X is criminal.
What makes this a strawman is the "we know a priori ". I don't think we know this
a priori . I think we know this, a posteriori , that is, from ample recent experience
and observation. I think there's a pattern of choice and strategy that we ought to recognize and,
if we recognize it, there might actually be an opportunity to choose differently and realize less
horrific consequences.
I would not precisely characterize the recognizable pattern of American choices and strategies
- that is, of American policy - as that of "an imperial power bent on maintaining its global hegemony"
without further qualification. I would say the pattern is that of a global hegemon approaching
imperial collapse. There are important differences, with immediate relevance.
A global hegemon in its prime is all about reducing the risks and costs of armed conflicts
and coordinating the cooperation of allied, nominally neutral and even rival states with the elaboration
of international law, norms, conventions and other agreements. The U.S. in its prime as global
hegemon was all about sponsoring the formation of organizations for global and regional multilateral
cooperation, even where its direct participation was not welcome. It is true that the political
autonomy of states was respected only to the extent that they adopted sufficiently reactionary
and economically conservative or authoritarian governments and the political costs to any other
course could be large. Back in the day, a Gaddafi or an Assad or a Saddam had to balance on an
international tightrope as well as a domestic one, but it was doable and such regimes could last
a long-time. Anyway, I do not want to litigate the mixed virtues and vices of (Anglo-)American
hegemony past, just to point out the contrast with our present circumstances.
The turn toward a palsied expedience is a distinct symptom of impending imperial collapse.
That the U.S. cannot seem to win a war or bring one to a conclusion in any finite period of time
is relevant. That a vast "deep state" is running on auto-pilot with no informed instruction or
policy control from Congress is a problem.
When commenters decry the failure to observe the norms of international law, they are not
just being moralists in an immoral world; they are decrying the erosion of international order,
an erosion that has been accelerated by the U.S. turn toward futile expedience as a foreign policy
justified by groundless self-righteousness.
"It's complicated" shouldn't be a preface to ungrounded simplification and just rounding up
the usual policy suspects: let's declare a no-fly zone, then find and train some moderate faction
of fierce fighters for liberal democracy (as if such exist). If we demonstrate the will and commitment
and stay the course . . . blah, blah, blah.
And, the R2P doctrine has been ruined not just by hypocrisy but by the demonstrated incapacity
to match means to putative ends. It is not just suspicious that the impulse to humanitarianism
emerges only when an opportunity to blow things up arises, it's criminal. Or should be. (sarcasm)
But, of course, it is not criminal, because atrocities are only a problem when it is the other
guy committing them. Then, we can exercise our righteousness for the good, old cause. (end sarcasm)
The situation in Syria is chaotic, but the chaos is in U.S. policy as well as on the ground.
But, the immediate question is not whether the U.S. will intervene, because, as other commenters
have pointed out, the U.S. has already involved itself quite deeply. The creation of ISIS, one
belligerent in the Syrian conflict is directly attributable to the failure of U.S. policy in Iraq
and the U.S. is actively attacking ISIS directly in Syrian as well as Iraqi territory. The U.S.
provides military support to multiple factions, including both Turkish-backed forces and the forces
of a Kurdish belligerent, which are in conflict with each other. Meanwhile, our great good allies,
the Saudis and Qataris are apparently funding Al Qaeda in Syria and maybe ISIS as well.
This chaos, I repeat, is inherent in the organization of U.S. policy - it is an observable
pattern, not a property by axiomatic definition as your strawman would have it, but it is very
worrisome. It is a symptom of what I rather dramatically labeled "imperial collapse". That the
next President of the U.S. cannot work out why a no-fly zone in a country where the Russians are
flying might be a bad idea is not a good sign. That the same person was a proponent of the policy
that plunged Libya into chaos is another not-good sign. That's not an argument for Trump;
it is an argument that Trump is another symptom.
The chaos, the breakdown of rational, deliberate and purposive control of policy, means that
policy and its rationales are often absurd. I mock the absurdity as a way of drawing attention
to it. Others seek to normalize. So, there you have it.
LFC: We do have Bruce Wilder mocking the notion that the Russians hacked into the DNC
email. Cyber specialists think it was the Russians to a 90 percent certainty, but of
course Wilder knows better. Anyway, who cares whether the Russians hacked the *******
email?
Most establishment news reporting has taken note that no evidence has been offered by
the U.S. officials making the attribution.
It looks like LFC is completely clueless about such notion as Occam's razor.
Why we need all those insinuations about Russian hackers when we know that all email boxes in
major Web mail providers are just a click away from NSA analysts.
Why Russians and not something like "Snowden II".
And what exactly Russians will get politically by torpedoing Hillary candidacy. They
probably have tons of "compromat" on her, Bill and Clinton Foundation. Trump stance on Iran is
no less dangerous and jingoistic then Hillary stance on Syria. Aggressive protectionism might
hurt Russian exports. And as for Syria, Trump can turn on a dime and became a second John
McCain anytime. Other then his idea of avoiding foreign military presence (or more correctly
that allies should pay for it) and anti-globalization stance he does not have a fixed set of
policies at all.
Yes, there is another government concealed behind the one that is visible at either end
of Pennsylvania Avenue, a hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the
country according to consistent patterns in season and out, connected to, but only
intermittently controlled by, the visible state whose leaders we choose. My analysis of
this phenomenon is not an exposé of a secret, conspiratorial cabal; the state within a
state is hiding mostly in plain sight, and its operators mainly act in the light of day.
Nor can this other government be accurately termed an "establishment." All complex
societies have an establishment, a social network committed to its own enrichment and
perpetuation. In terms of its scope, financial resources and sheer global reach, the
American hybrid state, the Deep State, is in a class by itself. That said, it is neither
omniscient nor invincible. The institution is not so much sinister (although it has highly
sinister aspects) as it is relentlessly well entrenched. Far from being invincible, its
failures, such as those in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, are routine enough that it is only
the Deep State's protectiveness towards its higher-ranking personnel that allows them to
escape the consequences of their frequent ineptitude.
In view of all this, LFC anti-Russian stance looks extremely naďve and/or represents
displaced anti-Semitism.
In a way Hillary laments about Russia interference are
what is typically called "The pot calling the kettle black" as she is exactly the specialist
in this area. BTW there is a documented history of the US interference into Russian elections
of 2011-2012.
In which Hillary (via ambassador McFaul and the net of NGOs) was trying to stage a "color
revolution" (nicknamed "white revolution") in Russia and prevent the re-election of Putin. The
main instrument was claiming the fraud in ballot counting.
Can you imagine the reaction if Russian ambassador invited Trump and Sanders to the embassy
and offered full and unconditional support for their noble cause of dislodging the corrupt
neoliberal regime that exists in Washington. With cash injections to breitbart.com, similar
sites, and especially organizations that conduct polls after that.
And RT covered staged revelations of "Hillary campaign corruption" 24 x 7. As was done by
Western MSM in regard to Alexei Navalny web site and him personally as the savior of Russia
from entrenched corruption (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexei_Navalny )
Actually the USA has several organizations explicitly oriented on interference in foreign
elections and promotion of "color revolutions", with functions that partially displaced old
functions of CIA (as in Italian elections of 1948). For example, NED.
Why Russia can't have something similar to help struggling American people to have more
honest elections despite all the blatantly undemocratic mechanisms of "first to the post",
primaries, state based counting of votes, and the United States Electoral College ?
It would be really funny if Russians really resorted to color revolution tricks in the
current presidential elections :-)
Here is a quote that can navigate them in right direction (note the irony of her words
after DNC throw Sanders under the bus ;-)
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton sharply criticized what she called "troubling
practices" before and during the vote in Russia. "The Russian people, like people
everywhere, deserve the right to have their voices heard and their votes counted," she said
in Bonn, Germany.
With 99.9 percent of ballots processed, election officials said that United Russia had
won 238 seats in Parliament, or about 53 percent, from 315 seats or 70 percent now. The
Communist Party won 92 seats; Just Russia, a social democratic party, won 64 seats and the
national Liberal Democratic Party won 56 seats.
Rich Puchalsky 10.16.16 at 9:26 pm
LFC: "Would a multilateral action - not unilateral by the U.S. alone, but multilateral -
undertaken in response to, e.g., the current situation in Aleppo necessarily violate
international law if it lacked UN sanction?"
This would be a kind of coalition - only of willing countries, of course - maybe we could
call it something catchy, like The Willing Coalition. Are we allowed to bring up recent history
at all, or does that make us America haters? It's strange how these hard cases just keep coming
up. Alternatively, we could go for Reset Theory. We need to look forwards instead of looking
backwards.
So let's avoid recent history, and just go to ancient history, like that long-outmoded relic,
the Security Council. I'd had some vague impression that the chance of military conflict between
Security Council members was supposed to be Very Very Bad and by definition worse than any other
result, so much so a lot of the legalities that you're casually thinking of writing into the law
books later were intended to prevent exactly the kinds of situations that you're proposing, in
which members of the Security Council started to think about gathering coalitions to shoot down
each other's planes.
But I'm a crazy anarchist, and you're an international affairs expert. So why don't you tell me.
Donald Trump's solid core of support comes from white working-class America. As the
blue-collar voter has become central to the political conversation, a clear picture of who we're
talking about has emerged: He's likely male and disillusioned with the economy and loss of
industry. He's a coal miner that's been
laid off in Hazard, Kentucky, and is scraping by off his wife's income; a machinists' union
member in a Pennsylvania steel town who
says "a guy like Donald Trump, he's pushing for change." Through the campaign, we've seen
endless portraits of Trump support in the heart of
Appalachian coal country, and a recent spate of books documents
white working-class alienation and the history of the
white underclass in America. Trump's iron grip on the support of blue-collar white Americans
has been one of the most striking threads of his unprecedented campaign.
... ... ...
...Thomas Frank, who recently published
Listen, Liberal, about the Democratic Party's abandonment of the working class and
Robert Reich, public policy professor at the University of California at Berkeley and former
secretary of labor in the Clinton administration. They
both have outlined a
series of Democratic moves to elevate free trade and an inability to defend unions as proof that
Democrats created a platform that left no room for the white working class.
Marginalized for years without working-class candidates or elected officials, "the white
working class found their voice in Trump," says Justin Gest, assistant professor of public policy
at George Mason University and author of The New Minority: White Working Class Politics in an
Age of Immigration and Inequality. "He speaks directly to conspiracy, frustration and a sense
of powerlessness, and they're grateful he speaks to them." Trump, too, has worked hard to burnish
his working-class cred,
telling a crowd in Pennsylvania on Tuesday that he considers himself "in a certain way to be
a blue-collar worker."
...In terms of the economy, white working-class women also differ from their male
counterparts. While manufacturing concerns and the white working class may be linked in our
cultural narrative (especially in Trump's campaign), the women were focused on different economic
concerns-in particular, the cost of higher education and preschooling.
.... Single women tend to lean to the left,and in recent years white working-class
marriage rates have fallen more sharply than those of their more educated and affluent
counterparts, who are more likely to delay marriage than not get married at all, according to
FiveThirtyEight's
analysis of
Census data. (Roughly 45 percent of white working-class women are unmarried, according to
GQRR's Nancy Zdunkewicz). In a June/July national survey by GQRR, white working-class womenput Trump 23 points ahead of Clinton in a three-way ballot, but when you looked at only
unmarried white non-college-educated women, that gap was only 11 percent-a preview, if current
trends continue, of a gap likely to grow in the future.
..For Democrats hoping to capitalize on this group, it's not obvious they can just
swoop in and grab alienated women. For one thing, white working-class women don't necessarily
trust Hillary Clinton any more than men do.
,,,For now, though, if Democrats continue bleeding white working-class men and women, the
party's white base will be mostly highly educated and white collar, a perhaps uncomfortable shift
for the so-called party of the people
Julia Sonenshein is California-born writer and editor living in New York City. Her work
focuses on social-political issues like reproductive rights, American gun culture and
intersectional feminism.
"... 'End of Growth' Sparks Wide Discontent By Alastair Crooke (October 14, 2016, consortiumnews): The global elites' false promise that neoliberal economics would cure all ills through the elixir of endless growth helps explain the angry nationalist movements ripping apart the West's politics. ..."
"... Yes, that would seem transparently obvious to anyone who doesn't have a vested interest in defending the neoliberal programme. ..."
"... The last thing that powerful elites and their court economists want to talk about is the relationship between an increasingly unequal distribution of income and wealth and the rise of ethnic nationalism...it might force the elites to do something about it. One would think that that would entail redistribution. Unfortunately, increasing militarization of the police seems to be a far cheaper solution...for the short term. ..."
"... The elites used religious, tribal and ethnic, conflict to keep a lid on the rabble for thousands of years. They are supremely comfortable with this, it's part of the toolbox. ..."
"... However I think they are overly complacent because it appears to me that in an industrial society such conflicts now involve a lot more than a few hundred peasants going after each other with random farm implements. ..."
"... The media is shocked -- just shocked -- that a foreign government would tamper with US elections...such behavior is supposed to be off limits to anyone but the CIA and National Endowment for Democracy or their deputies... ..."
"... I'm not sure that Putin has a preference. It may be enough for him to show that Russia can play the destabilization card as well as NED. Displaying the profound corruption of the US political system also serves to undermine the US abroad, since much of its standing is based on the myth of its taking the moral high ground. International elites will have a harder time garnering support for pro-US policies, if those policies are seen as morally bankrupt. ..."
"... Establishment economists are making excuses for slow growth and poor policy by pointing at things like demographics and technology. Excuse-making isn't going to stem the rising tide of ethnic nationalism. Thomas Friedman's Flat World is turning into Tribalistic World. ..."
"... Many of the "Rich" love to push the dialectics of "ethnic nationalism" where none is to be found in reality ..."
"... the pointless destruction of the manufacturing sector of Western economies because of their decision to have private banking systems and eschew tariffs - no surprises here folks ..."
"... Of course economy plus consequences of the state of the economy, i.e. many people being treated like shit, without recourse, except turning away from mainstream politics (which isn't much of a recourse usually). ..."
"... external factors are much more significant in determining success or lack of it than any personal virtues or failings the individual may have. It is not even luck. ..."
"... People do not blame the actual causes of their lack of success. Instead, they seek and find scapegoats. Most Trumpista have heard all their lives from people they respect that black and latino people unfairly get special treatment. That overrides the reality. ..."
"... The comment started with: "When things aren't going as you expect or want, people always have to find someone to blame... since the ego works to prevent you blaming yourself." ..."
In the United States, despite his attempts to woo minority voters, Donald J. Trump appears
to derive support from such sentiment. In Moscow, Vladimir V. Putin has used Russian nationalist
sentiment to inspire many of his countrymen. And we see growing ethnic political parties inspired
by national identity in countless other countries.
It is natural to ask whether something so broad might have a common cause, other than the obvious
circumstantial causes like the gradual fading of memories about the horrors of ethnic conflict
in World War II or the rise in this century of forms of violent ethnic terrorism.
Economics is my specialty, and I think economic factors may explain at least part of the trend.
...
'End of Growth' Sparks Wide Discontent By Alastair Crooke (October 14, 2016, consortiumnews):
The global elites' false promise that neoliberal economics would cure all ills through the elixir
of endless growth helps explain the angry nationalist movements ripping apart the West's politics.
The last thing that powerful elites and their court economists want to talk about is the relationship
between an increasingly unequal distribution of income and wealth and the rise of ethnic nationalism...it
might force the elites to do something about it. One would think that that would entail redistribution.
Unfortunately, increasing militarization of the police seems to be a far cheaper solution...for
the short term.
The elites used religious, tribal and ethnic, conflict to keep a lid on the rabble for thousands
of years. They are supremely comfortable with this, it's part of the toolbox.
However I think they are overly complacent because it appears to me that in an industrial
society such conflicts now involve a lot more than a few hundred peasants going after each other
with random farm implements.
The media is shocked -- just shocked -- that a foreign government would tamper with US
elections...such behavior is supposed to be off limits to anyone but the CIA and National Endowment
for Democracy or their deputies...
Paradoxically Pravda in old times did have real insights into the US political system and for
this reason was widely read by specialists. Especially materials published by the Institute
of the USA and Canada -- a powerful Russian think tank somewhat similar to the Council
on Foreign Relations.
As for your remark I think for many people in the USA Russophobia is just displaced Anti-Semitism.
JohnH remark is actually very apt and you should not "misunderestimate" the level of understanding
of the US political system by Russians. They did learn a lot about machinations of the neoliberal
foreign policy, especially about so called "color revolutions." Hillary&Obama has had a bloody
nose when they tried to stage a "color revolution" in 2011-2012 in Russia (so called "white revolution).
A typical US citizen probably never heard about it or heard only about "Pussy riot", Navalny and
couple of other minor figures. At the end poor ambassador Michael McFaul was recalled. NED was
expelled. Of course Russia is just a pale shadow of the USSR power-wise, so Obama later put her
on sanctions using MH17 incident as a pretext with no chances of retaliation. They also successfully
implemented regime change in Ukraine -- blooding Putin nose in return.
But I actually disagree with JohnH. First of all Putin does not need to interfere in a way
like the USA did in 2011-2012. It would be a waist of resources as both candidates are probably
equally bad for Russia (and it is the "deep state" which actually dictates the US foreign policy,
not POTUS.)
The US political system is already the can of worms and the deterioration of neoliberal society
this time created almost revolutionary situation in Marxists terms, when Repug elite was not able
to control the nomination. Democratic establishment still did OK and managed to squash the rebellion,
but here the level of degeneration demonstrated itself in the selection of the candidate.
Taking into account the level of dysfunction of the US political system, I am not so sure the
Trump is preferable to Hillary for Russians. I would say he is more unpredictable and more dangerous.
The main danger of Hillary is Syria war escalation, but the same is true for Trump who can turn
into the second John McCain on a dime.
Also the difference between two should not be exaggerated. Both are puppets of the forces the
brought them to the current level and in their POTUS role will need to be subservient to the "deep
state". Or at least to take into account its existence and power. And that makes them more of
prisoners of the position they want so much.
Trump probably to lesser extent then Hillary, but he also can't ignore the deep state. Both
require the support of Republican Congress for major legislative initiatives. And it will very
hostile to Hillary. Which is a major advantage for Russians, as this excludes the possibility
of some very stupid moves.
Again, IMHO in no way any of them will control the US foreign policy. In this area the deep
state is in charge since Allen Dulles and those who try to deviate too much might end as badly
as JFK. I think Obama understood this very well and did not try to rock the boat. And there are
people who will promptly explain this to Trump in a way that he understands.
In other words, neither of them will escape the limit on their power that "deep state" enforces.
And that virtually guarantee the continuity of the foreign policy, with just slight tactical variations.
So why Russians should prefer one to another? You can elect a dog as POTUS and the foreign
policy of the USA will be virtually the same as with Hillary or Trump.
In internal policy Trump looks more dangerous and more willing to experiment, while Hillary
is definitely a "status quo" candidate. The last thing Russians needs is the US stock market crush.
So from the point of internal economic policy Hillary is also preferable.
A lot of pundits stress the danger of war with Russia, and that might be true as women in high
political position try to outdo men in hawkishness. But here Hillary jingoism probably will be
tightly controlled by the "deep state". Hillary definitely tried to be "More Catholic then the
Pope" in this area while being the Secretary of State. That did not end well for her and she might
learn the lesson.
But if you think about the amount of "compromat" (Russian term ;-) on Hillary and Bill that
Russians may well already collected, in "normal circumstances" she might be a preferable counterpart
for Russians. As in "devil that we know". Both Lavrov and Putin met Hillary. Medvedev was burned
by Hillary. Taking into account the level of greed Hillary displayed during her career, I would
be worried what Russians have on her, as well as on Bill "transgressions" and RICO-style actions
of Clinton Foundation.
And taking into account the level of disgust amount the government officials with Hillary (and
this is not limited to Secret Service) , new leaks are quite possible, which might further complicate
her position as POTUS. In worst case, the first year (or two) leaks will continue. Especially
if damaging DNC leaks were the work of some disgruntled person within the USA intelligence and
not of some foreign hacker group. That might be a plus for Russians as such a constant distraction
might limit her possibility to make some stupid move in Syria. Or not.
As you know personal emails boxes for all major Web mail providers are just one click away
for NSA analysts. So "Snowden II" hypothesis might have the right to exist.
Also it is quite probably that impeachment process for Hillary will start soon after her election.
In the House Republicans have enough votes to try it. That also might be a plus for s for both
Russia and China. Trump is extremely jingoistic as for Iran, and that might be another area were
Hillary is preferable to Russians and Chinese over Trump.
Also do not discount her health problems. She does have some serious neurological disease,
which eventually might kill her. How fast she will deteriorate is not known but in a year or two
the current symptoms might become more pronounced. If Bill have STD (and sometime he looks like
a person with HIV;
http://joeforamerica.com/2016/07/bill-clinton-aids/)
that further complicates that picture (this is just a rumor, but he really looks bad).
I think that all those factors make her an equal, or even preferable candidate for such states
as Russia and China.
I'm not sure that Putin has a preference. It may be enough for him to show that Russia can
play the destabilization card as well as NED. Displaying the profound corruption of the US political
system also serves to undermine the US abroad, since much of its standing is based on the myth
of its taking the moral high ground. International elites will have a harder time garnering support
for pro-US policies, if those policies are seen as morally bankrupt.
Procopius -> likbez... October 16, 2016 at 05:01 AM
Your analysis does give me some comfort. My greatest fear is that the Deep State seems to currently
be in disarray. Their actions in Syria are divided, contradictory, foolish, counterproductive,
and without direction.
Obama has mostly obviously obeyed the Deep State but has seemed to sometimes "nudge" them in
a direction that seems to me better for the country. The deal with Iran is an exception. It's
significant, but it is both sensible and pragmatic. It's hard to believe anything as important
as that was not sanctioned by the Deep State, in defiance of Israel, and yet it is quite uncharacteristic
of the Deep State's behavior over the last fifteen years.
Walker Connor, perhaps the leading student of the origins and dynamics of ethnonationalism,
has consistently stressed the importance of its political implications. In these essays, which
have appeared over the course of the last three decades, he argues that Western scholars and policymakers
have almost invariably underrated the influence of ethnonationalism and misinterpreted its passionate
and nonrational qualities....
[ I do appreciate the reference, which strikes me as fine since I would like to read older
essays or essays extending over a few decades for perspective on the matter. I will begin here.
]
Brexit. Theresa May's recent speeches at the Conservative conference was very nationalistic and
Little Englander. See Benjamin Friedman's book The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth.
Establishment economists are making excuses for slow growth and poor policy by pointing
at things like demographics and technology. Excuse-making isn't going to stem the rising tide
of ethnic nationalism. Thomas Friedman's Flat World is turning into Tribalistic World.
Your usual theatrics, but I largely agree with you lattermost statement. Things are always best
when we share. Tribesman can be especially selfish, even amongst themselves.
Frankly, I am not seeing it. Many of the "Rich" love to push the dialectics of "ethnic nationalism"
where none is to be found in reality or manipulated like half-jew Donald Trump, who is being
run by the rothschild flank in Russia due to his disaster when he went with fellow jews during
the post-Soviet Oligarch scam. Much like all his businesses, it flopped. He owes the bank of russia(owned
by rothschild) 100's of millions of dollars. They own him.
The point? The "monied elite" tell you what they want you to believe. The dialectical illusion
and collision of the duelism is how they stay in power. I feel bad for Trump supporters, most
are old and not very smart. But I also feel bad for Trump opposition who refuse to bring this
up, mainly because they are financed by the same crowd(aka the Clinton have worked with Rothschild
as well, they come from the same cloth).
Growth adjusted for population was not overly impressive in the 70's or 90's. Yet...............
Neoliberalism creates an impulse for nationalism in several ways:
1. It destroys human solidarity. And resorting to nationalism in a compensational mechanism
to restore it in human societies. that's why the elite often resorts to foreign wars if it feels
that it losing the control over peons.
2. Neoliberalism impoverishes the majority of population enriching top 1% and provokes the
search for scapegoats. Which in the past traditionally were Jews. Now look like MSM are trying
to substitute them for Russians
3. Usually the rise of nationalism is correlated with the crisis in the society. There
is a crisis of neoliberalsm that we experience in the USA now: after 2008 neoliberalism entered
zombie state, when the ideology is discredited, but forces behind it are way too strong for any
social change to be implemented. Much like was the case during "Brezhnev socialism" in the USSR.
So those who claim that we are experiencing replay of late 1920th on a new level might be partially
right. With the important difference that it does not make sense to establish fascist dictatorship
in the USA. Combination of "Inverted totalitarism" and "national security state" already achieved
the same major objectives with much less blood and violence.
the pointless destruction of the manufacturing sector of Western economies because of their
decision to have private banking systems and eschew tariffs - no surprises here folks
cm -> cm... , -1
Of course economy plus consequences of the state of the economy, i.e. many people being treated
like shit, without recourse, except turning away from mainstream politics (which isn't much of
a recourse usually).
cm -> Longtooth... October 15, 2016 at 02:19 PM
This analysis totally misses the point that often external factors are much more significant
in determining success or lack of it than any personal virtues or failings the individual may
have. It is not even luck.
Procopius -> cm... October 16, 2016 at 05:22 AM
I think you miss Longtooth's point. You are, of course, right that personal virtues or failings
usually have no effect on success or lack of it, but if I understand Longtooth correctly, he is
saying that's irrelevant. People do not blame the actual causes of their lack of success.
Instead, they seek and find scapegoats. Most Trumpista have heard all their lives from people
they respect that black and latino people unfairly get special treatment. That overrides the reality.
cm -> Procopius...
The comment started with: "When things aren't going as you expect or want, people always
have to find someone to blame... since the ego works to prevent you blaming yourself."
In a recently-leaked speech from 2013, Hillary Clinton said that it is important to take both public
and private positions on each issue. Is this the language of the typical politician, or something
even more deceptive? How does that explain her positions on Syria and Saudi Arabia?
"... The Federal Bureau of Investigation [sic] revealed Friday that President Barack Obama used a private email address and pseudonym to communicate with Democratic presidential nominee Hillary R. Clinton and her own private email account as early as June 2012. ..."
The Federal Bureau of Investigation
[sic]
revealed
Friday that President Barack Obama used a private email address
and pseudonym to communicate with Democratic presidential
nominee Hillary R. Clinton and her own private email account as
early as June 2012.
Posted at the FBI's Vault site, the revelation was part of a
189-page document dump of interview notes from conversations its
agents conducted about how Clinton handled classified electronic
correspondence, other documents, and her private email scheme
during her tenure as secretary of State.
Obama told CBS News March 7, 2015 that he did not know about
Clinton's private email while she was his secretary of state
from Jan. 21, 2009 to Feb. 1, 2013.
Q: Mr. President, when did you first learn that Hillary Clinton
used an email system outside the U.S. government for official
business while she was secretary of state?
Obama: The same time everybody else learned it through news
reports.
"... Is the solution supposed to be that HRC's foreign policy team will be much better than Obama's? ..."
"... The US will unilaterally determine to seize sovereignty of Syrian airspace, intervene in a civil war on the side of the rebels, and shoot down Syrian government and Russian planes. ..."
"... Shooting down Russian planes is the plan. ..."
"... If anyone has any doubt how little Hillary and company have learned from invading Iraq, violent regime change in Iraq, and removing inconvenient one-time friends at will, we're living through it real time all over again. ..."
"... This is a community of adults: LFC, Lee, W Berry et al who lecture the rest of us for wankery, emotionalism etc. and who are now fully behind the candidate who is promising a 'do-over' of Iraq with the promise to this time get it right. ..."
"... Trump, whatever his real deficiencies is openly ready to cede Syrian air-space to Assad. Most informed observers I've read argue that the civil war in Syria has been extended by years thanks to US and UK wankery. ..."
"... At some point, the US may decide not to proceed with violent regime-change. Not yet, however, or so it seems. ..."
"... All the responsible US diplomats and generals who brought us Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria are lined-up to support the only candidate who is running on 4-8 years of violent regime change. ..."
"... With regard to Aleppo, the eastern part of the city has been under the control of the rebels for some years. The majority of the population is in western Aleppo, under government control. Eastern Aleppo is now cut off, and under attack by various pro-government forces supported by the Russian air force. Rebel forces in eastern Aleppo are estimated to be around half al-Qaeda linked Islamists and half local Sunnis. They regularly bombard the western part, as the government does the rebel enclave. ..."
"... The government has opened seven exit corridors for civilians to leave, and repeatedly offered the rebels evacuation to other areas (several similar offers have been accepted and carried through for rebel enclaves around Damascus). The latest news is that the rebels are reported to have mined the exits to prevent civilians leaving. ..."
"... A good foreign policy maxim is to choose a side that has a reasonable chance of winning and stick with it. Anything else prolongs the suffering without changing the outcome. US policy in the Middle East, as earlier in South-East Asia, seems unable to grasp this basic. ..."
"... Obviously you must want to turn a helpless population over to the evil Assad instead of the good(?) Islamists or the nonexistent moderates. Anything that equates to letting Assad win would be the ultimate proof of a love of dictators. ..."
"... I've often noticed that opponents of humanitarian intervention are cast as the ones peddling a simplistic, unrealistic set of fantasies - nonsense, in short. But whenever an actual case comes up, it appears that the reverse is true. The people calling for war are peddling fantastical nonsense. ..."
...I purposefully haven't addressed anything about the recent history of American involvement
in war in Syria, because that would lead to the same old accusations that this is about hating
America.
But now we're talking about the present as a guide to the future. Does anything about the known
history of recent American involvement in Syria indicate that there are detailed expert analyses
available that will do any good once filtered through policy? Is the solution supposed to
be that HRC's foreign policy team will be much better than Obama's?
What crap-for-brains doesn't seem to appreciate is that there are only two sets of pilots
and planes for the US to shoot down: pilots flying under the Syrian flag and those flying under
the Russian flag. There will be no 'random' misunderstandings and miscommunications for Hillary
to hide behind. And that's before Russia decides to flex in the Crimea, the Ukraine, and the Baltic
states.
The US will unilaterally determine to seize sovereignty of Syrian airspace, intervene in
a civil war on the side of the rebels, and shoot down Syrian government and Russian planes.
Shooting down Russian planes is the plan.
If anyone has any doubt how little Hillary and company have learned from invading Iraq,
violent regime change in Iraq, and removing inconvenient one-time friends at will, we're living
through it real time all over again.
This time we have the CT majority in favor of Bush III and her invasions.
@180 I'm extremely grateful, btw, to see you gaming out how the US plays chicken with the Russians
who 'back down' as a 'reason to vote for Hillary.'
This is a community of adults: LFC, Lee, W Berry et al who lecture the rest of us for wankery,
emotionalism etc. and who are now fully behind the candidate who is promising a 'do-over' of Iraq
with the promise to this time get it right.
Trump, whatever his real deficiencies is openly ready to cede Syrian air-space to Assad.
Most informed observers I've read argue that the civil war in Syria has been extended by years
thanks to US and UK wankery.
At some point, the US may decide not to proceed with violent regime-change. Not yet, however,
or so it seems.
All the responsible US diplomats and generals who brought us Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and
Syria are lined-up to support the only candidate who is running on 4-8 years of violent regime
change.
You're voting in favor of invading Iraq all over again. Thanks!!!
The Syrian/Iraqi wars are …complicated. But they are both – from the viewpoint of the major combatants
– the same war, a contest between the two current major streams of political thought in the Islamic
Middle East. Iraqi and Lebanese Shi'a militias are active in support of the regime in Damascus,
as are Sunni Palestinian ones and the Druze. Christian and Yezidi groups and Kurdish nationalists
have lined up behind both Baghdad and Damascus. One the other side is a loose grouping of Salafi
Islamists – ISIS, an-Nusra, the many groups under the FSA umbrella. There are, of course, a few
politiques in the middle, too small to count in the fighting, but much courted by the press, and
always trotted out as the "moderate opposition". Any intervention that tries to slice across the
broad lines of division soon gets hopelessly tangled diplomatically and militarily. As the US
has found out.
With regard to Aleppo, the eastern part of the city has been under the control of the rebels
for some years. The majority of the population is in western Aleppo, under government control.
Eastern Aleppo is now cut off, and under attack by various pro-government forces supported by
the Russian air force. Rebel forces in eastern Aleppo are estimated to be around half al-Qaeda
linked Islamists and half local Sunnis. They regularly bombard the western part, as the government
does the rebel enclave.
The government has opened seven exit corridors for civilians to leave, and repeatedly
offered the rebels evacuation to other areas (several similar offers have been accepted and carried
through for rebel enclaves around Damascus). The latest news is that the rebels are reported to
have mined the exits to prevent civilians leaving.
A good foreign policy maxim is to choose a side that has a reasonable chance of winning
and stick with it. Anything else prolongs the suffering without changing the outcome. US policy
in the Middle East, as earlier in South-East Asia, seems unable to grasp this basic.
Peter T: "A good foreign policy maxim is to choose a side that has a reasonable chance of winning
and stick with it. Anything else prolongs the suffering without changing the outcome. US policy
in the Middle East, as earlier in South-East Asia, seems unable to grasp this basic."
Obviously you must want to turn a helpless population over to the evil Assad instead of
the good(?) Islamists or the nonexistent moderates. Anything that equates to letting Assad win
would be the ultimate proof of a love of dictators.
I've often noticed that opponents of humanitarian intervention are cast as the ones peddling
a simplistic, unrealistic set of fantasies - nonsense, in short. But whenever an actual case comes
up, it appears that the reverse is true. The people calling for war are peddling fantastical nonsense.
He missed the foreign policy aspect of Hillary vs Trump candidacy. A vote for Hillary is vote for
continuation of wars of expansion of neoliberal empire.
Notable quotes:
"... reforms that political leaders promised would ensure prosperity for all – such as trade and financial liberalization – have not delivered. Far from it. And those whose standard of living has stagnated or declined have reached a simple conclusion: America's political leaders either didn't know what they were talking about or were lying (or both). ..."
"... Thus, many Americans feel buffeted by forces outside their control, leading to outcomes that are distinctly unfair. Long-standing assumptions – that America is a land of opportunity and that each generation will be better off than the last – have been called into question. The global financial crisis may have represented a turning point for many voters: their government saved the rich bankers who had brought the US to the brink of ruin, while seemingly doing almost nothing for the millions of ordinary Americans who lost their jobs and homes. The system not only produced unfair results, but seemed rigged to do so. ..."
"... Support for Trump is based, at least partly, on the widespread anger stemming from that loss of trust in government. ..."
"... The simplistic neo-liberal market-fundamentalist theories that have shaped so much economic policy during the last four decades are badly misleading, with GDP growth coming at the price of soaring inequality. Trickle-down economics hasn't and won't work. Markets don't exist in a vacuum. The Thatcher-Reagan "revolution," which rewrote the rules and restructured markets for the benefit of those at the top, succeeded all too well in increasing inequality, but utterly failed in its mission to increase growth. ..."
But several underlying factors also appear to have contributed to the closeness of the race. For
starters, many Americans are economically worse off than they were a quarter-century ago. The median
income of full-time male employees is lower than it was 42 years ago, and it is increasingly difficult
for those with limited education to get a full-time job that pays decent wages.
Indeed, real (inflation-adjusted) wages at the bottom of the income distribution are roughly where
they were 60 years ago. So it is no surprise that Trump finds a large, receptive audience when he
says the state of the economy is rotten. But Trump is wrong both about the diagnosis and the prescription.
The US economy as a whole has done well for the last six decades: GDP has increased nearly six-fold.
But the fruits of that growth have gone to a relatively few at the top – people like Trump, owing
partly to massive tax cuts that he would extend and deepen.
At the same time, reforms that political leaders promised would ensure prosperity for all – such
as trade and financial liberalization – have not delivered. Far from it. And those whose standard
of living has stagnated or declined have reached a simple conclusion: America's political leaders
either didn't know what they were talking about or were lying (or both).
Trump wants to blame all of America's problems on trade and immigration. He's wrong. The US would
have faced deindustrialization even without freer trade: global employment in manufacturing has been
declining, with productivity gains exceeding demand growth.
Where the trade agreements failed, it was not because the US was outsmarted by its trading partners;
it was because the US trade agenda was shaped by corporate interests. America's companies have done
well, and it is the Republicans who have blocked efforts to ensure that Americans made worse off
by trade agreements would share the benefits.
Thus, many Americans feel buffeted by forces outside their control, leading to outcomes that are
distinctly unfair. Long-standing assumptions – that America is a land of opportunity and that each
generation will be better off than the last – have been called into question. The global financial
crisis may have represented a turning point for many voters: their government saved the rich bankers
who had brought the US to the brink of ruin, while seemingly doing almost nothing for the millions
of ordinary Americans who lost their jobs and homes. The system not only produced unfair results,
but seemed rigged to do so.
Support for Trump is based, at least partly, on the widespread anger stemming from that loss of
trust in government. But Trump's proposed policies would make a bad situation much worse. Surely,
another dose of trickle-down economics of the kind he promises, with tax cuts aimed almost entirely
at rich Americans and corporations, would produce results no better than the last time they were
tried.
In fact, launching a trade war with China, Mexico, and other US trading partners, as Trump promises,
would make all Americans poorer and create new impediments to the global cooperation needed to address
critical global problems like the Islamic State, global terrorism, and climate change. Using money
that could be invested in technology, education, or infrastructure to build a wall between the US
and Mexico is a twofer in terms of wasting resources.
There are two messages US political elites should be hearing. The simplistic neo-liberal market-fundamentalist
theories that have shaped so much economic policy during the last four decades are badly misleading,
with GDP growth coming at the price of soaring inequality. Trickle-down economics hasn't and won't
work. Markets don't exist in a vacuum. The Thatcher-Reagan "revolution," which rewrote the rules
and restructured markets for the benefit of those at the top, succeeded all too well in increasing
inequality, but utterly failed in its mission to increase growth.
This leads to the second message: we need to rewrite the rules of the economy once again, this
time to ensure that ordinary citizens benefit. Politicians in the US and elsewhere who ignore this
lesson will be held accountable. Change entails risk. But the Trump phenomenon – and more than a
few similar political developments in Europe – has revealed the far greater risks entailed by failing
to heed this message: societies divided, democracies undermined, and economies weakened.
this part seems to support those of us who have been saying that those adopting a blinkered
class/income based argument to 'disprove' the economic insecurity arguments are not even trying
to get at the truth(imo, theyre purposely working backwards from their conclusions towards a
conventional answer)
"Hayes argues that the angriest voters are not going to be the people at the bottom, but the
people in the middle, who used to expect that they and their kids could do well through
enterprise and don't believe that anymore. Experts have disagreed over whether Trump supporters
are richer or poorer than the average. Yet emerging evidence is beginning to portray a more
nuanced portrait of Trump's supporters than those earlier takes.
Jonathan Rothwell, a senior economist at Gallup, has used survey data on nearly 113,000
Americans to ask what really drives Trump support. He finds that support for the mogul turned
politician is concentrated in the middle-income categories; in contrast, those who are relatively
rich and those who are relatively poor are less likely to support him. Furthermore, economic
insecurity is a huge factor – those who worry about their economic future are much more likely to
vote for Trump. Rothwell builds on work by Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren at Harvard to find
that people in living in areas with weak mobility for kids from middle-class families are more
likely to vote for Trump.
These findings are only the start of what is likely to be a long debate. Nonetheless, they
support Hayes's argument. People seem to be more likely to support an anti-system candidate like
Donald Trump when they have a middling income, when they feel economically insecure, and when
they live in places where middle-class kids have worse prospects for getting ahead."
Ronan(rf)
10.14.16 at 4:04 pm
towards a *convenient* answer (ie an answer they want to be true, as it supports their worldview
).
In one of the
more
interesting threads
to emerge from today's latest, seventh Wikileaks dump of Podesta
emails, we read a detailed exchange between Clinton press secretaries Brian Fallon and
Nick Merrill, in which we learn how on June 24, 2015 the Clinton Campaign was preparing
for the upcoming news release in which the State Department, and the mainstream press,
would acknowledge for the first time that Hillary Clinton had deleted a certain number
of Sid Blumenthal emails from the 55k pages of material produced by Hillary Clinton from
her personal server.
By way of background, this is what Fallon wrote in preparation
for the official and unofficial response the Clinton campaign would provide to the State
Department:
Q: The State Department says that at least 16 of the emails that Sid
Blumenthal turned over to the Benghazi Select Committee were not included in the
55,000 pages of materials produced by Hillary Clinton. Doesn't this prove that
Hillary Clinton deleted certain emails at some point before producing them to the
Department?
ON-THE-RECORD RESPONSE FROM SPOKESMAN NICK MERRILL:
"Hillary Clinton has turned over 55,000 pages of materials to the State
Department, including all emails in her possession from Mr. Blumenthal."
ADDITIONAL POINTS ON BACKGROUND FROM CLINTON AIDE:
Not only did Clinton turn over all emails that she has from Blumenthal, she
actually turned over more than a dozen emails that were not included in what Mr.
Blumenthal handed over to the House committee.
We do not have a record of other correspondence between Mrs. Clinton and Mr.
Blumenthal beyond that which was turned over to the State Department. In terms of the
documents provided by Mr. Blumenthal to the House committee, we do not recognize many
of those materials and cannot speak to their origin.
OFF RECORD, if pressed on whether we are essentially admitting the
possibility that she deleted some emails:
Look, we do not know what these materials are, or where they came from. Just take
a look at them: many of the documents are not even formatted as emails.
For all we know, it could be that, in the course of reproducing his emails after
his account was hacked,
Sid misremembered which memos he actually forwarded
to her and which he did not.
And hey, even if Sid is right and some of these documents were at some point sent
to Clinton, this is unremarkable anyway for two key reasons:
One, she would have been under no obligation to preserve them since Blumenthal
wasn't a government employee.
Two, there is nothing in any of these emails that is remotely new or interesting.
Indeed, none of these 16 emails are qualtitatively different than the dozens
of others that Hillary already produced to the State Department
.
So it is completely ridiculous to
suggest that there might have been any nefarious basis for her to want to delete any
of Sid's correspondence
.
After one turn of comments he revised his "Off the Record" statement to omit the "Sid
misremembered" part to end up with the following:
OFF RECORD, if pressed on whether we are essentially admitting the
possibility that she deleted some emails:
Look, we do not know what these materials are, or where they came from. Just take
a look at them: many of the documents are not even formatted as emails.
But even if Sid is right and some of these documents were at some point sent to
Clinton, there is nothing in any of these emails that is remotely new or interesting.
Indeed, none of these 16 emails are qualitatively different than the dozens of others
that Hillary already produced to the State Department. So it is completely ridiculous
to suggest that there might have been any nefarious basis for her to want to delete
any of Sid's correspondence.
The revision took place after Nick Merrill confirmed - yet again - that there had
been collusion between the State Department and the Clinton campaign when he said that "
Just
spoke to State a little more about this.
" He then noted the following updates:
1. The plan at the moment is for them to do this tomorrow, first thing in the
morning.
2. What that means specifically is that they are going to turn over all
the Blumenthal emails to the Committee that they hav along with some other HRC emails
that include
a slightly broader set of search terms
than
the original batch.
That of course includes the emails Sid turned over that
HRC didn't, which will make clear to them that she didn't have them in the first
place, deleted them, or didn't turn them over
. It also includes emails that
HRC had that Sid didn't, as Brian noted.
Then, providing further evidence of ongoing collusion not just between Hillary's
campaign and the State Department, but also the press, Merrill then adds the following
note to explain how the State Department hoped to use the Associated Press to product a
piece that "lays this out" before the "committee has a chance to realize what they
have.":
3.
They do not plan to release anything publicly, so no posting online or
anything public-facing, just to the committee
. That said,
they are
considering placing a story with a friendly at the AP (Matt Lee or Bradley Klapper
),
that would lay this out before the
majority on the committee has a chance to realize what they have and distort it
.
On that last piece, we think it would make sense to work with State and
the AP to deploy the below.
So assuming everyone is in agreement we'll
proceed. It would be good to frame this a little, and frankly to have it break
tomorrow when we'll likely be close to or in the midst of a SCOTUS decision taking
over the news hyenas.
But what is the most interesing part of this exchange is not what is in the email,
but what may have been discussed offline, for one reason: a curious discrepancy emerges
just one day later, when the
AP wrote an article,
as expected by the "friendly" AP reporters Bradley Klapper and
Matt Lee, which laid out the narrative precisely as the Clinton campaign wanted it.
While we are confident many readers recall it from when it first appeared last June,
from AP
:
WASHINGTON (AP) - The State Department cannot find in its records all or part of
15 work-related emails
from Hillary Rodham Clinton's private server
that were released this week by a House panel investigating the 2012 attack in
Benghazi, Libya, officials said Thursday.
The emails all predate the Sept. 11 assault on the U.S. diplomatic facility and
include scant words written by Clinton herself, the officials said. They consist of
more in a series of would-be intelligence reports passed to her by longtime political
confidant Sidney Blumenthal, the officials said.
Nevertheless, the fact that the State Department says it can't find them among
emails she provided surely will raise new questions about Clinton's use of a personal
email account and server while secretary of state and whether she has provided the
agency all of her work-related correspondence, as she claims.
The State Department has not been able to find emails from former Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton's private server in its archives, State Department officials
said Thursday.
The officials said the State Department is missing all or part of
15
emails
from longtime confidant Sidney Blumenthal released this week by a
House panel investigating the 2012 attack on the U.S. diplomatic facility in
Benghazi, Libya. Blumenthal provided the Select Committee on Benghazi with the
emails.
The State Department cannot find in its records all or part
of 15
work-related emails
from Hillary Rodham Clinton's private server that were
released this week by a House panel investigating the 2012 attack in Benghazi, Libya,
officials said Thursday.
The State Department said on Thursday
that 15 emails sent or received
by Hillary Rodham Clinton were missing from records that she has turned
over, raising new questions about whether she deleted work-related emails from the
private account she used exclusively while in office.
The State Department cannot find in its records all or part of
15
work-related emails
from Hillary Rodham Clinton's private server that were
released this week by a House panel investigating the 2012 attack in Benghazi, Libya,
officials said Thursday.
And so on, but
notice something similar: every press reports note
15
emails from Blumenthal were missing
.
Why is "
15
" strange? Because recall what the Clinton campaign was
discussing just one day prior in the preparation of its talking points to the State
Department:
... the State Department may acknowledge as soon as today
that
there were 16 Sid emails
missing from the 55k pages of material produced by HRC...
... none of
these 16 emails
are qualitatively different than the dozens of
others that Hillary already produced to the State Department...
... The State Department says that
at least 16 of the emails
that Sid Blumenthal turned over to the Benghazi Select Committee were not
included in the 55,000 pages of materials produced by Hillary Clinton...
We have just one question: how - and why - in the span of 24 hours, did a confirmed
sample of
16 deleted Sidney Blumenthal emails,
as discussed off the
record within the Clinton campaign, become
15 deleted emails
overnight
when the State Depratment unveiled its "official", and massaged especially for the
press, version of what Hillary had stated she had done with the Blumenthal's emails.
Was the publicly announced "embarrassing" deletion of
15 Blumenthal emails
merely a smokescreen to cover up the real malfeasance: the elimination of
just one
Blumenthal email which the State Department, in collusion with
Hillary, deemed would be too damaging to even disclose had been produced?
And if so, who at the State Department lied
and why
?
Actually we have another question: what was in the missing
, and (twice?)
deleted 16th
, email?
Alas, since one of the many pathways of undisputed coordinated, and collusion,
exposed thanks to this latest Wikileaks release is that between the government, the
mainstream press, and Hillary Clinton, we are confident we will never find out, and are
even more confident this question will never emerge.
still no mention of the clincher - that proves the entire democrat party has no respect for the office of president - or any other
government office for that matter..
stay on target!!!
(b) Whoever, having the custody of any such record, proceeding, map, book, document, paper, or other thing, willfully
and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, falsifies, or destroys the same, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned
not more than three years, or both; and shall forfeit his office and be
disqualified from holding any office under the United States .
"... the danger that he presents is shaking the rats from under the carpet. ..."
"... Yet the NYT keeps reporting that American intelligence asserts (without providing evidence) that Russian intelligence is behind the Clinton email hacks, and this is nothing less that attempts of American intelligence to manipulate the election. ..."
"... I'm afraid, when it comes to end-of-the-Republic stuff, it's worse when your own intelligence guys are trying to manipulate the election than when their intelligence guys are. ..."
I'll begin with the necessary avowal that I think Trump is a clown, and dangerous, and I hope
he goes down to a record defeat.
But still… the danger that he presents is shaking the rats from under the carpet.
How many times have I read that Russian intelligence is trying to manipulate the American election?
And that this is a Very Bad Thing?
Yet the NYT keeps reporting that American intelligence asserts (without providing evidence)
that Russian intelligence is behind the Clinton email hacks, and this is nothing less that attempts
of American intelligence to manipulate the election.
And I'm afraid, when it comes to end-of-the-Republic stuff, it's worse when your own intelligence
guys are trying to manipulate the election than when their intelligence guys are.
richsob
Oct 14, 2016 10:12 AM
Trump's biggest opponent is his own damn ego. He needs to simply say "I'm not
responding to these allegations and aspersions on my character any longer. I am
only going to make this important point one time. Whoever keeps making these
allegations and aspersions should stop immediately. If they don't, then they
better lawyer up". And then he should shut the hell up and only talk about jobs,
immigation and trade policy. Fuck his sensitive ego; it's going to cost him the
election and us the nation if he doesn't wise up. He can still win this thing.
And after the election he can either sue the living shit out of some people or
find another way to get even with those who he wants to go after.
Not My Real Name
richsob
Oct 14, 2016 11:38 AM
Yes, Trump has a very big ego. But saying that his ego is a bigger detriment to
his success than our corrupt media is ludicrous.
An unbiased media is
essential to maintaining a free republic and minimizing corruption at all
levels of government. The media is now just as corrupt as our government is.
In a way, the obvious
response to the media is 'if that's all they have on him, he's cleaner than every
other politician'.
The blanket coverage of her/she/it/that will also make many people become sick
of the sight of her/she/it/that, particularly as Trump has now let the cat out of
the bag regarding the rapes - all the undecided voters who watched that bit of the
debate will be thinking seriously about who is the greater evil here, even if they
remain ignorant of her/she/it/that's central role in smashing up Libya and Syria,
and trying to goad Russia into WWIII, her dream legacy to us peasants.
Dark
star
Oct 14, 2016 9:31 AM
America's media have betrayed the Nation.
The rest of the world in general, and
world leaders in particular know that Clinton is a crook and a liar; nothing she
says can be believed, her word is worthless, and she cannot be trusted in any
respect whatever.
A President Clinton would earn the same respect abroad as would Caligula's
horse had it been sent abroad to represent the Roman Empire. The crowds would
queue up to point their fingers, throw tomatoes and laugh at her.
0hedgehog
Oct 14, 2016 9:36 AM
I was in the business, (TV) and witnessed right around 20 years or so ago, the
entire concept of news was shifted over to entertainment, almost overnight.
Investigating and reportng solid news and information, which the electorate needs
in order to make sound decisions, went right out the window. I am not entertained.
moneybots
Oct 14, 2016 9:38 AM
"As Strassel points out, it's almost impossible to turn on the TV without hearing
about Trump's "lewd" comments while coverage of Hillary
"uniformly ignores
the flurry of bombshells"
inherent in the various WikiLeaks, FOIA
releases and FBI interviews.
It is impossible not to see media bias. The media is a traitor to the
American people.
Yes We Can. But...
rejected
Oct 14, 2016 12:33 PM
One could make a pretty solid case that the biggest problem - Problem #1 - this
country faces at this moment is the mountain of propaganda fed the masses. In
the darkness of the widespread shadow cast by Problem #1, other problems
difficult to discern and come to understand much less attempt to solve.
Barack Obama pushes Problem #1, and his notion of 'curating' the news
represents a furtherance of Problem #1. Getting the gubmint involved in 'curating'
the news would turn
unofficial
organs of the state - the MSNBCs of the
world - into
official
organs of the state.
Barack Obama's wet dream, and John Harwood's too.
We Are The Priests
Downtoolong
Oct 14, 2016 10:20 AM
It's the bedrock of their political strategy. They have no real policies to
tout, certainly none that any rational, independent thinking human being would
endorse, so they produce massive and relentless waves of derision aimed at
their opponents to keep the focus off themselves.
However, as we've seen this
election cycle, the Internet has changed everything and the tactics of the
Clinton political machine, wholly dependent on a subservient mockingbird print
and television media to shape and direct national narratives, just don't work
when you have a global, de-centralized iformation medium freely accessible to
all.
That said, say good-bye to the Internet as we now know it.
NobodyNowhere
Oct 14, 2016 10:00 AM
The media has betrayed America in the most blatant manner conceivable. This has
enormous implications for America, and millions of upright Americans have a task
cut out for themselves. America is the foremost yardstick of freedom, free
thought, progress and innovation that man has ever seen, a model of civilization
and advancement for centuries to come. The task is much bigger than just "take
our country back" - the task is to hunt and punish the entities that have struck
at the very foundation of the republic so that no one tries the same as long as
memory lasts.
gmak
Oct 14, 2016 10:02 AM
Who owns the WSJ? That billionaire has had enough, I guess. - or he didn't get
the entree he wanted at the $6million a plate pay-for-play. (hint: Rupert
Murdoch. Maybe Fox News will fall in line).
vegas
Oct 14, 2016 10:13 AM
Oh, this is rich; the WSJ pretending like they aren't part of the MSM, and have
"all of a sudden" discovered much to there shock ... SHOCK I TELL YOU ... that
news coverage is biased in favor of Cankles. Hmmm, this self reflection must have
been painfull.
Weren't these the same guys who teamed up with NBC to issue that absurd poll
right after the last debate, the one purporting to show Clinton up by 14 points?
The one that only used a two day average and about 300 RVs? The one that was
splashed all over the internet, at the top of every mainstream media webpage? The
one that has now disappeared nearly as fast as it was posted, after having
accomplished it's purpose ("Trump can't win, it's all over, stick a fork in it)?
The man didn't have the
qualifications to run your average convenience store.
Kina
Oct 14, 2016 10:19 AM
OH and Russia is now advising its people to prepare for nuclear war.
Well done Obama, neocons, Carlos Slim, NY Times, Washington Post, The Guardian
- maybe you just fried all your children, for what? A pat on the head from some
Oligarch.
847328_3527
Oct 14, 2016 10:19 AM
I copied this from a previous poster since it is truly shocking:
The media are
misleading the public on Syria
Coverage of the Syrian war will be remembered as one of the most shameful
episodes in the history of the American press. Reporting about carnage in the
ancient city of Aleppo is the latest reason why.
For three years, violent militants have run Aleppo. Their rule began with a
wave of repression. They posted notices warning residents: "Don't send your
children to school. If you do, we will get the backpack and you will get the
coffin." Then they destroyed factories, hoping that unemployed workers would have
no recourse other than to become fighters. They trucked looted machinery to Turkey
and sold it.
This month, people in Aleppo have finally seen glimmers of hope. The Syrian
army and its allies have been pushing militants out of the city. Last week they
reclaimed the main power plant. Regular electricity may soon be restored. The
militants' hold on the city could be ending.
This does not fit with Washington's narrative. As a result, much of the
American press is reporting the opposite of what is actually happening. Many news
reports suggest that Aleppo has been a "liberated zone" for three years but is now
being pulled back into misery.
Americans are being told that the virtuous course in Syria is to fight the
Assad regime and its Russian and Iranian partners. We are supposed to hope that a
righteous coalition of Americans, Turks, Saudis, Kurds, and the "moderate
opposition" will win.
This is convoluted nonsense, but Americans cannot be blamed for believing it.
We have almost no real information about the combatants, their goals, or their
tactics. Much blame for this lies with our media.
Inevitably, this kind of disinformation has bled into the American presidential
campaign. At the recent debate in Milwaukee, Hillary Clinton claimed that United
Nations peace efforts in Syria were based on "an agreement I negotiated in June of
2012 in Geneva." The precise opposite is true.
http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2016/02/18/the-media-are-misleading-p...
We Are The Priests
847328_3527
Oct 14, 2016 10:30 AM
The media has been misleading the public on everything for decades. This is
nothing new or shocking. What appears to be new is a sudden and dangerous
epidemic of healthy skepticism, critical independent thinking, a willingness to
question authority, and massive distrust of traditional power structures.
Not My Real Name
We Are The Priests
Oct 14, 2016 11:40 AM
Yes, but they were much more subtle about it. Now they no longer care about
appearances ... which tells me they are comfortable in knowing that the
overthrow of America from the inside is now all but complete.
replaceme
Oct 14, 2016 10:33 AM
I was listening to Breitbart this am, talked about a statute I had not heard of -
access fraud? Basically, it's illegal to sell government resources - the idea of
pay for play is patently illegal, something akin to bribery. I always knew it was
unethical, but the guy on had just done 4 years in a a federal pound you in the
ass prison for it. I'd say Hillary has something to fear if The Donald does win.
We Are The Priests
replaceme
Oct 14, 2016 10:39 AM
Pay to Play is not akin to bribery. It is bribery. It's just that Pay to Play
doesn't sound illegal and is much more innoquous--play doesn't sound like a bad
thing, right?
Son of Captain Nemo
Oct 14, 2016 11:23 AM
Question:
Why doesn't the Wall Street Journal "up the ante" by
drawing the line officially in the sand and putting across the front page of their
paper that
Any American voting for Hillary Clinton should be declared a
war criminal and guilty of treason
!....
Should have happened in the last two Administration(s) but didn't -but given
the
coronation
that is about to unfold no time like the present for the editors at
that "news organization" to attempt the retrieval of what is left of there
souls!!!
heretical
Oct 14, 2016 11:03 AM
THIS COULD BE THE SKINNY ON MDB -- HE'S A SINGULARLY INEPT EMPLOYEE OF THE CLINTON
CAMP!
From Stream.Org:
A significant portion of online support for Hillary Clinton is manufactured by
paid "astroturf" trolls: a large team of supporters who spend long hours
responding to negative news on the internet about her. The Clinton SuperPAC
Correct the Record, which is affiliated with her campaign, acknowledged in an
April press release that it was spending $1 million on project "Breaking Barriers"
to pay people to respond to negative information about Clinton on social media
sites like Facebook, Reddit, Instagram and Twitter. That amount has since
increased to over $6 million. The trolls create a false impression that Clinton
has more support than she really does, because one supporter will frequently
create multiple anonymous accounts.
Libby Watson of The Sunlight Foundation observed that the astroturf effort goes
far beyond merely defending Clinton, to targeting and intimidating those who
criticize her. She told The Daily Beast, "This seems to be going after essentially
random individuals online."
Brian Donahue, chief executive of the consulting firm Craft Media/Digital,
explained the troll operation to The Los Angeles Times, "It is meant to appear to
be coming organically from people and their social media networks in a groundswell
of activism, when in fact it is highly paid and highly tactical." He went on,
"That is what the Clinton campaign has always been about. It runs the risk of
being exactly what their opponents accuse them of being: a campaign that appears
to be populist but is a smokescreen that is paid and brought to you by lifetime
political operatives and high-level consultants."
conraddobler
Oct 14, 2016 11:18 AM
Everyone should vote Trump because of the two he's obviously better for the
people.
However I have no doubt all of this is all part of a larger plan so
whatever happens, was suppossed to happen.
Ultimately mankind needs to wake up to the fact that the battle against evil is
never ending you only get brief periods of calm to enjoy life, the rest of it is a
ceaseless struggle against the forces of darkness.
However it's really not what you think it is.
It's your own choices that is all it ever is.
The most heroic act on earth is to take unkindness and let it end with you. To
not pass it on but to let it wash over you and send in kindness in return.
That is the most powerful act in the universe which nothing can defeat and unto
which evil has no possible hold on.
withglee
conraddobler
Oct 14, 2016 11:44 AM
Your average American glued to the TV and their smart phones will
NEVER have a clue about what's really going on using these sources of
information.
Is our battle against evil easier if we are
organized globally ... or if we are organized in small enclaves of like minded
people?
Ultimately mankind can NOT survive without adherence to a higher moral code,
it's simply impossible.
Modern secularists are missing the fundamental spirit of mankind and I'm
not talking about religion, the Native American's had it, far from perfect,
they did have it. That is what is lost and what is being made to come back
and that is the ultimate goal or point. There is no reason a majority of
mankind can't be taught that, should be taught that, because without it,
there is no hope for anyone.
Small enclaves are easily overrun by bigger enclaves. You run towards
gunfire because if you don't, it will come to you. You can't hide from this
even though that would be preferable. They'd love to divide us all up and
have us hide. Then we'd be easy to pick off.
With technology today you have to get on top of all that are you are
under it and under it, you have no hope.
MAD used to serve as a deterent but it's obsolete now, because the
unthinkable is now thinkable made possible by underground bunkers. The
folishness of this was pointed out in one of my other posts.
Elites are elite because of their position on earth, if they destroy
earth, they destroy the source of their own power.
It will go how it goes to teach what needs to be taught.
Wall Street Journal Finally Lashes Out "The Press Is Burying Hillary
Clinton's Sins"
by
Tyler Durden
Oct 14, 2016 9:06 AM
0
SHARES
Even the
Wall Street Journal
is now fed up with the biased media coverage of the 2016
Presidential election as revealed by a scathing article written by Kimberly Strassel, a
member of their editorial board. As Strassel points out, it's almost impossible to turn
on the TV without hearing about Trump's "lewd" comments while coverage of Hillary
"uniformly ignores the flurry of bombshells"
inherent in the various
WikiLeaks, FOIA releases and FBI interviews.
If average voters turned on the TV for five minutes this week, chances are they
know that Donald Trump made lewd remarks a decade ago and now stands accused of
groping women.
But even if average voters had the TV on 24/7,
they still probably haven't
heard the news about Hillary Clinton: That the nation now has proof of pretty much
everything she has been accused of.
It comes from hacked emails dumped by WikiLeaks, documents released under the
Freedom of Information Act, and accounts from FBI insiders.
The media has
almost uniformly ignored the flurry of bombshells, preferring to devote its front
pages to the Trump story.
So let's review what amounts to a devastating case
against a Clinton presidency.
Of course, the list of Hillary scandals is becoming way to long to remember though
one of the biggest has been her establishment of the now infamous private email server
and the subsequent intentional destruction of federal records despite the existence of a
Congressional subpoena.
Start with a June 2015 email to Clinton staffers from Erika Rottenberg, the former
general counsel of LinkedIn. Ms. Rottenberg wrote that none of the attorneys in her
circle of friends
"can understand how it was viewed as ok/secure/appropriate
to use a private server for secure documents AND why further Hillary took it upon
herself to review them and delete documents."
She added:
"It smacks
of acting above the law and it smacks of the type of thing I've either gotten
discovery sanctions for, fired people for, etc."
A few months later, in a September 2015 email, a Clinton confidante fretted that
Mrs. Clinton was too bullheaded to acknowledge she'd done wrong.
"Everyone
wants her to apologize,"
wrote Neera Tanden, president of the liberal Center
for American Progress.
"And she should. Apologies are like her Achilles'
heel."
Clinton staffers debated how to evade a congressional subpoena of Mrs. Clinton's
emails-three weeks before a technician deleted them. The campaign later employed a
focus group to see if it could fool Americans into thinking the email scandal was
part of the Benghazi investigation (they are separate) and lay it all off as a
Republican plot.
Meanwhile, as
Fox News
reported yesterday, according to an anonymous source within the FBI the
"vast majority" of the people that worked on Hillary's case thought she should be
prosecuted adding that
"it was unanimous that we all wanted her [Clinton's]
security clearance yanked."
The source, who spoke to FoxNews.com on the condition of anonymity, said FBI
Director James Comey's dramatic July 5 announcement that he would not recommend to
the Attorney General's office that the former secretary of state be charged left
members of the investigative team dismayed and disgusted. More than 100 FBI agents
and analysts worked around the clock with six attorneys from the DOJ's National
Security Division, Counter Espionage Section, to investigate the case.
"No trial level attorney agreed, no agent working the case agreed, with
the decision not to prosecute -- it was a top-down decision,"
said the
source, whose identity and role in the case has been verified by FoxNews.com.
A high-ranking FBI official told Fox News that while it might not have been a
unanimous decision,
"It was unanimous that we all wanted her [Clinton's]
security clearance yanked."
"It is safe to say the vast majority felt she should be prosecuted,"
the senior FBI official told Fox News. "We were floored while listening to the FBI
briefing because Comey laid it all out, and then said 'but we are doing nothing,'
which made no sense to us."
Moreover, the Wall Street Journal points out that the Obama administration was
seemingly
"working as an extension of the Clinton campaign"
with both
the State Department and DOJ providing frequent updates to Hillary staffers about a
confidential criminal investigation into her misconduct.
The Obama administration-the federal government, supported by tax dollars-
was
working as an extension of the Clinton campaign.
The
State
Department coordinated with her staff in responding to the email scandal, and the
Justice Department kept her team informed about developments in the court case.
Worse, Mrs. Clinton's State Department, as documents obtained under the Freedom of
Information Act show,
took special care of donors to the Clinton Foundation.
In a series of 2010 emails, a senior aide to Mrs. Clinton asked a foundation official
to let her know which groups offering assistance with the Haitian earthquake relief
were "FOB" (Friends of Bill) or "WJC VIPs" (William Jefferson Clinton VIPs)
.
Those who made the cut appear to have been teed up for contracts. Those who weren't?
Routed to a standard government website.
The leaks show that the foundation was indeed the nexus of influence and
money.
The head of the Clinton Health Access Initiative, Ira Magaziner,
suggested in a 2011 email that Bill Clinton call Sheikh Mohammed of Saudi Arabia to
thank him for offering the use of a plane. In response, a top Clinton Foundation
official wrote:
"Unless Sheikh Mo has sent us a $6 million check, this sounds
crazy to do."
Strassel also takes direct aim at the press and admits that the "leaks also show that
the press is in Mrs. Clinton's pocket." While the WikiLeaks emails reveal substantial
coordination between Clinton and the press perhaps none are more disturbing than when
Donna Brazile, now DNC chair, sent the exact wording of a CNN town hall question
to Hillary ahead of a scheduled debate.
The leaks also show that the press is in Mrs. Clinton's pocket.
Donna Brazile, a former Clinton staffer and a TV pundit, sent the exact wording of a
coming CNN town hall question to the campaign in advance of the event.
Other
media allowed the Clinton camp to veto which quotes they used from interviews, worked
to maximize her press events and offered campaign advice.
Mrs. Clinton has been exposed to have no core,
to be someone who
constantly changes her position to maximize political gain. Leaked speeches prove
that she has two positions (public and private) on banks; two positions on the
wealthy; two positions on borders; two positions on energy. Her team had endless
discussions about what positions she should adopt to appease "the Red Army"-i.e. "the
base of the Democratic Party."
Finally, Strassle concludes by saying that "Voters might not know any of this,
because while both presidential candidates have plenty to answer for, the press
has focused solely on taking out Mr. Trump.
And the press is doing a diligent
job of it."
"Your word is your bond....and Barack Obama and I set out to
build lives guided by these values, and pass them on to the next
generations....Because we want our children, and all children in this
nation, to know that the only limit to the height of your"
FAILURES, is the level of your arrogance, evilness and
psychopathy.
HelluvaEngineer
TahoeBilly2012
Oct 14, 2016 9:30 AM
The WSJ can take the moral high ground, because all
they've done is slam Trump and fake their polls.
tmosley
HelluvaEngineer
Oct 14, 2016 9:34 AM
WSJ knows which way the wind is blowing. The rest of
the media save for those directly controlled will line
up soon after. The ones who are directly controlled
might stand with Hillary, until her other backers
abandon her.
It's over. Trump will take every state,
losing only DC. Book it.
NoDebt
tmosley
Oct 14, 2016 9:44
AM
I like your enthusiasm but it's not going to be that
easy. This is trench warfare and that never goes
quickly.
What Trump is fucking with is the entire
power structure of the Oligarchy. Hillary being
only one of it's manifestations. Quick and easy?
Unlikely. (Still worth doing? Absolutely!)
HopefulCynical
NoDebt
Oct 14, 2016
9:50 AM
It will take us decades to recover from the
Magical Marxist Mulatto.
Hanging him for
treason, after a proper trial, would be a start.
Shemp 4 Victory
HopefulCynical
Oct 14,
2016 10:13 AM
It will take us decades to recover from the US
policy of fucking the world since the end of
WW2. Obama is one of many parts in that
machine.
The machine is afraid of Trump.
This is why Western MSM tries to stretch an
owl on the globe over any minor incident in
the last 50 years which is even tangentially
related to Trump. In the meantime, Hillary has
a litany of crime and corruption which would
make Nixon blush, and it's treated like a
couple of unpaid parking tickets.
Occident Mortal
Shemp 4 Victory
Oct 14,
2016 10:53 AM
Don't you guys get it yet?
The Aramco IPO is going to be a $2 - 5
trillion transaction. If they pay 3% fees
that's could be $150 bn payday for the
banksters.
All of these pipeline wars, making
Russia a bogeyman to keep them out of EU,
making Elon Musk look credible, Saudi
2030...
It's all geared to the mother of all
IPO's.
tbone654
The Saint
Oct 14, 2016 12:17 PM
"The truth is that the newspaper is
not a place for information to be
given,
rather it is just hollow content, or
more than that, a provoker of
content.
If it prints lies about atrocities,
real atrocities are the result."
Karl Kraus, 1914
WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY.
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
1984
We are the world, we are
exceptional, we cannot fail. The
elite will lie, and the people will
pretend to believe them. Heck about
20 percent of the American public
will believe almost anything if it is
wrapped with the right prejudice and
appeal to passion. Have a pleasant
evening.
jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com,
Feb 04, 2015
Journalists manipulate us in the
interest of the Powerful
Bay of Pigs
SPONGE
Oct 14,
2016 11:21 AM
His speech yesterday was unbelieveable. I
never thought Id hear someone running for
POTUS saying these kinds of things to a
cheering American crowd.
I think the
extent of the MSM
revulsion effect is
starting to hit
them - in terms of
readership,
advertising
dollars,
circulation, or
something.
After all, when
you are continually
'scooped' by even
the smallest, most
podunk blogs on the
internet, b/c you
insisted on
ignoring the last,
oh, 500 biggest
stories of the year
so that you can
pretend they are
not happening...
well... people are
going to find their
news from
SOMEWHERE, and it
isn't gonna be you.
I was wondering
when the MSM would
begin to grok this.
When you choose to
be a PR mouthpiece,
you also choose to
give up journalism
(and relevance).
Can't really serve
both masters. Which
can become a bit of
a problem when your
job is technically
'journalism'.
Especially when the
subjects you're
avoiding are as
news-generating as
the Clintons and
their Foundation.
Wikileaks 'scoops'
have gone from
weekly to every
single day, lately!
You might figure
out - eventually -
that it's very
difficult to 'shape
the narrative' when
you're gagged from
even mentioning the
REAL NEWS.
Either that, or
they're trying to
get out in front of
some inevitable
Clinton-related
REAL investigation
that they got wind
was about to go
down. But I think
it's more likely
the former.
knukles
VinceFostersGhost
Oct 14, 2016 11:50 AM
Finally, a refugee attempting to hedge their position in the event of a Trump win OR a Hillbillary Disaster.
It was inevitable that Some MSM Outlet would Defend their franchise.
If Hillary is elected, at least half of Americans are going to believe that the Election is Rigged by the State electing the next Head of State.
Note the operative phrase "The State electing the next Head of State"
From this it seems that dictatorships are established
And for a Great PS, I'd suggest reading the first 164 or so pages of
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
. Only the names and dates have been changed to shield the guilty.
The financial enablers of Adolph thought that they too could control him.
Once in power with the tool of the spear at one's disposal in an environment of no laws (essentially) the New leader doesn't need the financial types. The New Leader just takes what they want from the bankers and if they bitch, they can go to a reeducation facility
Dig?
AlaricBalth
FireBrander
Oct 14, 2016 9:22 AM
The media is easier to control ever since consolidation and
cross-ownership was allowed. That translates to fewer companies owning
more media outlets, increasing the concentration of ownership. In
1983, 90% of US media was controlled by fifty companies; today, 90% is
controlled by just six companies. All one needs is a few friends in
high places and the narrative is massaged to influence the uninformed
masses.
Comcast
Holdings include: NBCUniversal, NBC
and Telemundo, Universal Pictures, Focus Features, DreamWorks
Animation, 26 television stations in the United States and cable
networks USA Network, Bravo, CNBC, The Weather Channel, MSNBC, Syfy,
NBCSN, Golf Channel, Esquire Network, E!, Cloo, Chiller, Universal HD
and the Comcast SportsNet regional system. Comcast also owns the
Philadelphia Flyers through a separate subsidiary.
The Walt Disney Company
Holdings include: ABC
Television Network, cable networks ESPN, the Disney Channel, A&E and
Lifetime, approximately 30 radio stations, music, video game, and book
publishing companies, production companies Touchstone, Marvel
Entertainment, Lucasfilm, Walt Disney Pictures, Pixar Animation
Studios, the cellular service Disney Mobile, Disney Consumer Products
and Interactive Media, and theme parks in several countries. Also has
a longstanding partnership with Hearst Corporation, which owns
additional TV stations, newspapers, magazines, and stakes in several
Disney television ventures.
21st Century Fox
Holdings include: the Fox
Broadcasting Company; cable networks Fox News Channel, Fox Business
Network, Fox Sports 1, Fox Sports 2, National Geographic, Nat Geo
Wild, FX, FXX, FX Movie Channel, and the regional Fox Sports Networks
; film production companies 20th Century Fox, Fox Searchlight Pictures
and Blue Sky Studios.
Time Warner
Formerly the largest media
conglomerate in the world, with holdings including: CNN, the CW (a
joint venture with CBS), HBO, Cinemax, Cartoon Network/Adult Swim, HLN,
NBA TV, TBS, TNT, truTV, Turner Classic Movies, Warner Bros. Pictures,
Castle Rock, DC Comics, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, and
New Line Cinema.
CBS Corporation
Holdings include: CBS Television
Network and the CW (a joint venture with Time Warner), cable networks
CBS Sports Network, Showtime, Pop; 30 television stations; CBS Radio,
Inc., which has 130 stations; CBS Television Studios; book publisher
Simon & Schuster.
Viacom Holdings
include: MTV, Nickelodeon/Nick at
Nite, VH1, BET, Comedy Central, Paramount Pictures, and Paramount Home
Entertainment.
SharkBit
Oct 14, 2016 9:20 AM
To all Sanders supporters. Your hero sold out to the devil. Your party is
corrupt to the core. If you care about America, voting Trump is the only way out
of this Shit Show. Otherwise, we all die as that corrupt bitch of your party is
crazy enough to take the USA into WWIII. You may not like Trump but he is nothing
compared to the Clinton Crime Family and all its globalist tenacles.
"... "This is a struggle for the survival of our nation. This election will determine whether we are a free nation, or whether we have only the illusion of democracy but are in fact controlled by a small handful of global special interests rigging the system." ..."
"... "Anyone who challenges their control is deemed a sexist, a racist, a xenophobe and morally deformed," Trump said. "They will attack you, they will slander you, they will seek to destroy your career and reputation. And they will lie, lie and lie even more." ..."
"... "It is not coincidence that these attacks come at the exact same moment, and all together at the same time, as the WikiLeaks documents expose the massive international corruption of the Clinton machine," he said. ..."
"... Before thousands in U.S. Bank Arena in Cincinnati, Trump said the email leaks have shown that Clinton and the Democrats "raped the system" to keep Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders from getting the nomination. ..."
"... The enthusiastic crowd responded loudly as Trump repeated his pledge to seek a special prosecutor on Clinton if he becomes president - a move constitutional experts have said would be dubious - to "investigate the investigation" of Clinton by the FBI. ..."
"... "A vote for me is a vote for you, and it's a vote for change," he said. "I honestly believe this is the last chance we'll ever get. … Either we win this election or we lose this country." ..."
After describing this year's election in apocalyptic terms earlier in the day,
Donald Trump was down to merely alleging Hillary Clinton is a criminal by the time he made a
pair of stops Thursday in Ohio.
"This is not simply another four-year election. This is a crossroads in the
history of our civilization," Trump said early Thursday afternoon in Palm Beach, Fla.
"This is a struggle for the survival of our nation. This election will determine
whether we are a free nation, or whether we have only the illusion of democracy but are in
fact controlled by a small handful of global special interests rigging the system."
Trump said Clinton and media co-conspirators are at the heart of the effort
against him.
"Anyone who challenges their control is deemed a sexist, a racist, a xenophobe
and morally deformed," Trump said. "They will attack you, they will slander you, they will
seek to destroy your career and reputation. And they will lie, lie and lie even more."
In the Florida speech, Trump elaborated for the first time on both an
11-year-old video of him describing his sexual advances and new allegations that he groped
women.
"It is not coincidence that these attacks come at the exact same moment, and all
together at the same time, as the WikiLeaks documents expose the massive international
corruption of the Clinton machine," he said.
"These claims about me of inappropriate conduct with women are totally and
absolutely false - and the Clinton machine knows it is. It's all fabricated. It's pure fiction
and outright lies. These events never happened …
"We already have substantial evidence to dispute these lies, and it will be made
public in the appropriate way and at the appropriate time."
When the crowd began chanting "Lock her up, lock her up!" Trump chuckled. "So
young and jaded already," he said. "You understand life at a young age."
Before thousands in U.S. Bank Arena in Cincinnati, Trump said the email
leaks have shown that Clinton and the Democrats "raped the system" to keep Vermont Sen. Bernie
Sanders from getting the nomination.
The enthusiastic crowd responded loudly as Trump repeated his pledge to seek a
special prosecutor on Clinton if he becomes president - a move constitutional experts have
said would be dubious - to "investigate the investigation" of Clinton by the FBI.
But the biggest response from the Queen City audience came after this Trump
pledge: "I am going to keep radical Islamic terrorists the hell out of our country."
The crowd in heavily Republican southwestern Ohio was probably Trump's largest
rally in the Buckeye State. Three days earlier, Clinton had her biggest crowd of the entire
campaign on the South Oval of Ohio State University.
Near the end of his 45-minute talk, Trump said, "You are going to remember this
rally for the rest of your life."
And once he wins the election, Trump said, his supporters will look back and
regard it as the most important vote ever because that's when the country started turning
around.
"A vote for me is a vote for you, and it's a vote for change," he said. "I
honestly believe this is the last chance we'll ever get. … Either we win this election or we
lose this country."
Yes, yes he is. That's why he's
pretty much single-handedly 1) multiplied his large inheritance into a much
larger fortune; 2) broken the Bush political machine (Jeb!); 3) repeatedly
humiliated the MSM news for its US election coverage; 4) broken the careers of
16 status-quo RNC pretenders and certain ex-pretenders such as Romney; 5) split
the establishment Repub party itself and driven out several of its worst
offenders (now voting Democrat!); 6) raised probably the biggest army of
citizen supporters since Reagan; 7) dominated news stories for free coverage
that tends to bring him more support; and 8) spent relatively little money
doing it.
All totally and completely by accident! Beginner's luck!
Thank God he's such a fucking moron, right? Just imagine the kind of damage
he could have done if he'd been wicked smart!
Renfield
WillyGroper
Oct 14, 2016 12:58 PM
<<
herd redirection. any press is good press. jerry springer reality
show politics. if this was the real deal he'd have been ron paul'd in the
press from the beginnning. ZERO time.
>>
Could well be. I have no
strong opinion on Trump since he has no record in office yet, so since
I'm not an American citizen & cannot vote in those elections anyway I
have to sit back and wait, see what the truth turns out to be. I
apologise for commenting on your elections, and normally I'd keep out of
it, but there's this:
The reason I have lately become a foreign 'Trump supporter' is that
the alternative is Hillary, a known war criminal. Living next door to you
guys I stand a much better chance of seeing old age if the Washington
string-puller for Canada's subsidiary of the Corporation isn't, you know,
already a known war criminal with a hard-on for Russia. Not that thrilled
with the prospect of an immediate & 'voter-supported' nuclear WW3. Hence,
I'm a Trump supporter now... as a foreign commenter the only current US
pollies I've a really strong opinion on are Jeb!, Barky, and Cankles.
That's b/c people (or in Jeb's case their immediate families) who've
already demonstrated their willingness to commit war crimes become very
relevant to those even outside American borders, especially when they
call the shots for my own, err, 'leaders'. (I know, that's our own damn
fault, too.)
I am very, very FOR your remaining non-war-criminal candidate since it
prevents Hillary as getting in as CEO of the US corporate office, with
"nuclear war" as her first order of business.
So here, just pointing out that DT, while he is and may be a lot of
things, is certainly not stupid! That particular MSM myth always makes me
giggle and reply flippantly (as above). Whether he's also evil, in my
foreigner's eyes, still remains to be seen from his record in office, if
he gets one. (Back to lurking, and let you better-informed Americans get
on with things!)
The
consequences (of Hillary's Libya decision as Secretary of State) would be more
far-reaching than anyone imagined, leaving Libya a failed state and a terrorist
haven, a place where the direst answers to Mrs. Clinton's questions have come
to pass.
The Hillary Clinton campaign says the hackers behind the leaked
email evidence of their collusion with the major media are from
Russia and linked to the Russian regime. If so, I want to publicly
thank those Russian hackers and their leader, Russian President
Vladimir Putin, for opening a window into the modern workings of
the United States government-corporate-media establishment.
We always knew that the major media were extensions of the
Democratic Party. But the email evidence of how figures like
Maggie
Haberman
of The New York Times,
Juliet
Eilperin
of The Washington Post, and
John
Harwood
of CNBC worked hand-in-glove with the Democrats is
important. The Daily Caller and Breitbart have led the way in
digging through the emails and exposing the nature of this
evidence. It is shocking even to those of us at Accuracy in Media
who always knew about, and had documented, such collusion through
analysis and observation.
The Clinton campaign and various intelligence officials insist
that the purpose of the Russian hacking is to weaken the confidence
of the American people in their system of government, and to
suggest that the American system is just as corrupt as the Russian
system is alleged to be. Perhaps our confidence in our system
should be shaken. The American people can see that our media are
not independent of the government or the political system and, in
fact, function as an arm of the political party in control of the
White House that wants to maintain that control after November 8.
In conjunction with other evidence, including the ability to
conduct vote fraud that benefits the Democrats, the results on
Election Day will be in question and will form the basis for Donald
J. Trump to continue to claim that the system is "rigged" against
outsiders like him.
The idea of an American system of free and fair elections that
includes an honest press has been terribly undermined by the
evidence that has come to light. We are not yet to the point of the
Russian system, where opposition outlets are run out of business
and dissidents killed in the streets. That means that the Russians
have not completely succeeded in destroying confidence in our
system. But we do know that federal agencies like the Federal
Election Commission (FEC) and Federal Communications Commission
(FCC) are poised to strike blows against free and independent
media. Earlier this year the three Democrats on the FEC
voted
to punish
filmmaker Joel Gilbert for distributing a film
critical of President Barack Obama during the 2012 campaign.
The New York Times is
reporting
that
Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta has been contacted by the
FBI about the alleged Russian hackers behind the leaks of his
emails. This is what Podesta and many in the media want to talk
about.
But the Russians, if they are responsible, have performed a
public service. And until there is a thorough house-cleaning of
those in the major media who have made a mockery of professional
journalism, the American people will continue to lack confidence in
their system. The media have been caught in the act of sabotaging
the public's right to know by taking sides in the presidential
contest. They have become a propaganda arm of the Democratic Party,
coordinating with the Hillary Clinton for president campaign, which
apparently was being run out of Georgetown University, where John
Podesta was based. Many emails carry the web address of
[email protected], a reference to the Georgetown
University position held by the chairman of the 2016 Hillary
Clinton presidential campaign. Podesta is a Visiting Professor at
Georgetown University Law Center. His other affiliations include
the George Soros-funded Center for American Progress and the United
Nations High Level Panel on the Post-2015 Development Agenda.
Podesta and the other members of this U.N. panel had proposed "
A
New Global Partnership for the World
," which advocated for a
"profound economic transformation" of the world's economic order
that would result in a new globalist system. Shouldn't the American
people be informed about what Podesta and his Democratic allies
have planned for the United States should they win on November 8?
That Podesta would serve the purposes of the U.N. is not a
surprise. But it is somewhat surprising that he would use his base
at Georgetown University to run the Hillary campaign. On the other
hand, Georgetown, the nation's oldest Catholic and Jesuit
university,
describes
itself
as preparing "the next generation of global citizens to lead and
make a difference in the world."
When a Catholic university serves as the base for the election
of a Democratic Party politician committed to taxpayer-funded
abortion on demand and transgender rights, you know America's
political system and academia are rotten to the core. The
disclosure from WikiLeaks that Podesta used his Georgetown email to
engage in party politics only confirms what we already knew.
If the Russians are ultimately responsible for the release of
these emails, some of which
show
an anti-Catholic animus
on the part of Clinton campaign
officials, we are grateful to them. The answer has to be to clean
out the American political system of those who corrupt it and
demonstrate to the world that we can achieve higher standards of
integrity and transparency.
For its part, Georgetown University should be stripped of its
Catholic affiliation and designated as an official arm of the
Democratic Party.
Paul Kersey
balolalo
Oct 14, 2016 12:02 PM
The well deserved hatred for Hillary and the globalists is so
great, that at least 40% of the males in this country would back
anyone who went up against the Clintons. That's just not the
same thing as "BUYING TRUMPS BULLSHIT HOOK, LINE, AND SINKER".
Trump is exposing the corruption and the hypocrisy of the
Clintons in a way that no one has ever had the guts to do in the
past. He's doing it on national TV with a large national
audience. With Trump we may get anarchy, but with the Clintons,
Deep State is guaranteed. It is Deep State that is working
overtime to finish building the expressway to neofeudalism.
We could always have a few murders and suspecious deaths looked
into again. .... A few to chose from:
-
Kevin Ives
and
Don Henry
, both 17, crushed by a train, August
23, 1987. Their deaths were ruled accidental, with the medical examiner saying
they had fallen asleep on a railroad line after smoking marijuana, but a grand
jury found they had been murdered before being placed on the tracks. They had
allegedly stumbled on a plot to smuggle drugs and guns from an airport in Mena,
Arkansas, that Bill Clinton was said to be involved in as state governor.
-
Victor Raiser
,
53, small plane crash, July 30, 1992. The second finance co-chair of Bill
Clinton's presidential campaign was killed along with his son during a fishing
vacation in Alaska. Campaign press secretary Dee Dee Myers called Raiser a major
player in the organization.
-
Paul Tully
,
48, heart attack, September 25, 1992. A chain-smoking, heavy drinking political
consultant who weighed more than 320lb. Tully died seven weeks before Clinton's
first presidential election win. He had been political director of the Democratic
National Committee (DNC) during Clinton's rise. Tully was on the left of the
Democratic Party and usually worked for those who shared his views, however he
agreed to work for Clinton because he thought he was the only Democrat who could
beat President George Bush.
-
Paula Gober
,
36, single car accident, December 7, 1992. She was Clinton's interpreter for the
deaf for several years and traveled with him while he was governor of Arkansas.
Her vehicle overturned on a bend, throwing her 30 feet. There were no witnesses.
-
Vince Foster
,
48, suicide, July 20, 1993. A long-time friend of the Clintons in Arkansas, new
president Bill Clinton appointed him Deputy White House Counsel. Foster soon
realized he hated the job and fell into a deep depression. He was found shot to
death in Fort Marcy Park in Washington.
-
Stanley Heard
,
47, small plane crash, September 3, 1993. An Arkansas chiropractor who, according
to the book, A Profession of One's Own, treated the Clinton family, Heard was
asked by Bill Clinton to represent the practice as plans for 'Hillarycare' were
being finalized. His attorney Steve Dickson, was flying him home from a healthcare
meeting in Washington, DC. On the way to the capital from his home in Kansas,
Dickson's small plane developed problems so he landed in St Louis and rented
another plane. That rented plane was the one that crashed in rural Virginia,
killing both men.
-
Jerry Parks
,
47, shot to death, September 23, 1993. The head of security for Bill Clinton's
headquarters in Arkansas was driving home in West Little Rock when two men pulled
alongside his car and sprayed it with semi-automatic gunfire. As Parks's car
stopped a man stepped out of the Chevy and shot him twice with a 9mm pistol and
sped off. Despite several witnesses, no-one was ever arrested. The killing came
two months after Parks had watched news of Foster's death and allegedly told his
son Gary 'I'm a dead man'. His wife Lois remarried, and her second husband, Dr
David Millstein was stabbed to death in 2006.
-
Ed Willey
, 60,
suicide, November 29, 1993. Husband of Bill Clinton accuser Kathleen Willey, he
was deeply in debt and shot himself to death on the day that his wife alleges she
was groped by Bill Clinton in the Oval Office.
-
Herschel Friday
,
70, small plane crash, March 1, 1994. Friday was an Arkansas lawyer who Richard
Nixon had once considered for the Supreme Court. Friday was known as a benefactor
of Bill Clinton, serving on his campaign finance committee.
-
Kathy Ferguson
,
37, gun suicide, May 11, 1994. She was the ex-wife of Arkansas State Trooper Danny
Ferguson, who was named in a sexual harassment suit brought by Paula Jones against
Bill Clinton. Ferguson left a note blaming problems with her fiancé, Bill Shelton.
A month later Shelton, upset about the suicide verdict, killed himself.
-
Ron Brown
, 54,
plane crash, April 3, 1996. Brown was chair of the Democratic National Committee
during Bill Clinton's rise to the presidential nomination and was rewarded with
the cabinet position. He was under a corruption investigation when his plane
slammed into a mountainside in Croatia. Doctors who examined his body found a
circular wound on the top of his head which led to suspicions that he had died
before the plane crashed, but that theory was later discounted. The crash was
attributed to pilot error.
-
Charles Meissner
,
56, same plane crash as Brown. Meissner was assistant secretary for international
trade and had been criticized for allegedly giving special security clearance to
John Huang, who later pleaded guilty to federal conspiracy charges for violating
campaign finance laws, in a case that enmeshed the Clinton administration.
-
Barbara Wise
,
48, natural causes, November 29, 1996. Wise, who worked alongside Brown, Meissner
and Huang in the Commerce Department was found dead at her desk on the day after
Thanksgiving 1996. Her death was originally classified as a homicide but police
later said Wise, 48, who had a history of severe ill health, had died from natural
causes. A local TV station initially quoted an unidentified police source as
saying her body was partially nude and her office was locked, but those reports
were later denied.
-
Mary Mahoney
,
25, armed robbery, July 7, 1997. Mahoney was a White House intern during the
Monica Lewinsky scandal. A lesbian gay rights activist, she never found herself
troubled by Clinton, but she did take to counseling those who did. She was shot
dead during a robbery at a Washington Starbucks where she worked.
-
Jim McDougal
,
57, heart attack, March 8, 1998. McDougal and his wife Susan were involved in the
Whitewater real estate scandal that rocked the Clinton administration. They and
the Clintons had invested $203,000 to buy land in the Ozarks but the venture
failed and McDougal was convicted of corruption for borrowing money from his
Savings and Loan to cover the cost. He died in federal prison in Fort Worth,
Texas.
-
John Ashe
, 61,
weightlifting accident, June 22, 2016. The Antiguan diplomat dropped a dumbbell on
his neck and asphyxiated himself at his home in Dobbs Ferry, New York. He was due
to stand trial for allegedly receiving $500,000 from billionaire real estate
developer Ng Lap Seng who was involved in a scandal involving illegally funneling
hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Democratic National Committee during Bill
Clinton's presidency.
-
Seth Rich
, 27,
armed robbery, July 26, 2016. A rising star in the DNC, Rich was robbed at
gunpoint after a night of drinking in Washington, DC. The robbers took nothing,
leaving his watch and wallet after shooting him several times in the back. Rich
had allegedly been involved in the leak of documents that brought down Hillary
Clinton ally Debbie Wasserman-Schultz.
-
Mark Weiner
,
62, leukemia, July 26, 2016. Despite his condition, Weiner, a prodigious Clinton
fundraiser, was due to attend the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia
and was dressing on the day he was due to travel from his home in Rhode Island.
But he suddenly felt ill and went to bed and never got up again.
-
Victor Thorn
,
54, suicide, August 1, 2016. Thorn shot himself in the head at the top of Nittany
Mountain, Pennsylvania, on his birthday. He had written four books highly critical
of the Clintons. He was also a Holocaust denier.
-
Shawn Lucas
,
38, unexplained, August 2, 2016. Just days before his death, Lucas, a process
server had delivered papers to the Democratic National Committee's headquarters in
Washington, DC, filming himself as he did so. He was found dead in his apartment
in the city.
There are more but these are a good start.
Live Hard, This Many Deaths Are Way More Than
Happenstance, Die Free
Killary only can beg that voters hold their noses and vote for her. Guardian neoliberal presstitutes
still don't want to understand that Hillary is more dangerous then trump, Sge with her attempt that
she is more militant then male neocons can really provoke a confrontation with Russia or China.
Notable quotes:
"... War at home versus another foreign war, nothing will get through Congress, and either will get impeached...so third party all the way for me. ..."
"... Keep in mind, the election is not over and that drip, drip, drip of Hillary emails may push more people towards Trump. ..."
"... Shameless. Absolutely shameless, Guardian. This is not-even-disguised Clinton sycophancy... ..."
"... Clinton has everything going for her. The media, the banks, big business, the UN, foreign leaders, special interest lobbyists, silicon valley, establishment Republicans. How can she not win in an landslide?! ..."
"... We came, we saw, and he grabbed some pussy. ..."
"... It seems nobody wants to talk about what is really going on here - instead we are fed this bilge from both sides about 'sexual misconduct' and other fluff ..."
"... The stagnation of middle-class incomes in the West may last another five decades or more. ..."
"... This calls into question either the sustainability of democracy under such conditions or the sustainability of globalization. ..."
"... These classes of "globalization losers," particularly in the United States, have had little political voice or influence, and perhaps this is why the backlash against globalization has been so muted. They have had little voice because the rich have come to control the political process. The rich, as can be seen by looking at the income gains of the global top 5 percent in Figure 1, have benefited immensely from globalization and they have keen interest in its continuation. ..."
"... But while their use of political power has enabled the continuation of globalization, it has also hollowed out national democracies and moved many countries closer to becoming plutocracies. Thus, the choice would seem either plutocracy and globalization – or populism and a halt to globalization. ..."
The vast majority of her support comes from people that will be holding their noses as they vote
for her. Seems to me that convincing those same people that you have it in the bag will just cause
them to think voting isn't worth their time since they don't want to anyway.
I know Trump's supporters, the real ones, and the anyone-but-Hillary club will show up as well.
Funny if this backfires and he wins.
I won't be voting for either one and couldn't care less which one wins. War at home versus
another foreign war, nothing will get through Congress, and either will get impeached...so third
party all the way for me.
"Trump has to be the limit, and there has to be a re-alignment"
Trump has shown one must fight fire with fire. The days of the meek and mild GOP are over. Twice
they tried with nice guys and failed. Trump has clearly shown come out with both fists swinging
and you attract needed media and you make the conversation about you. Trump's mistake was not
seeking that bit of polish that leaves your opponent on the floor.
Keep in mind, the election is not over and that drip, drip, drip of Hillary emails may
push more people towards Trump.
Shameless. Absolutely shameless, Guardian. This is not-even-disguised Clinton sycophancy...
tugend49
For every woman that's been sexually harassed, bullied, raped, assaulted, catcalled, groped,
objectified, and treated lesser than, a landslide victory for Clinton would be an especially sweet
"Fuck You" to the Trumps of this world.
Clinton has everything going for her. The media, the banks, big business, the UN, foreign
leaders, special interest lobbyists, silicon valley, establishment Republicans. How can she not
win in an landslide?!
It might be a reaction against Trump, but it's also a depressing example of the power of the
establishment, and their desire for control in democracy. Just look at how they squealed at Brexit.
It seems nobody wants to talk about what is really going on here - instead we are fed this
bilge from both sides about 'sexual misconduct' and other fluff
There is a report from two years ago, July 2014, before the candidates had even been selected,
by the economist Branko Milanovic for Yale 'Global' about the impact of Globalisation on the Lower
Middle Classes in the West and how this was basically going to turn into exactly the choice the
American electorate is facing now
Why won't the media discuss these issues instead of pushing this pointless circus?
These are the penultimate paragraphs of the article on the report (there is a similar one for
the Harvard Business Review
here ):
The populists warn disgruntled voters that economic trends observed during the past three
decades are just the first wave of cheap labor from Asia pitted in direct competition with
workers in the rich world, and more waves are on the way from poorer lands in Asia and Africa.
The stagnation of middle-class incomes in the West may last another five decades or more.
This calls into question either the sustainability of democracy under such conditions
or the sustainability of globalization.
If globalization is derailed, the middle classes of the West may be relieved from the immediate
pressure of cheaper Asian competition. But the longer-term costs to themselves and their countries,
let alone to the poor in Asia and Africa, will be high. Thus, the interests and the political
power of the middle classes in the rich world put them in a direct conflict with the interests
of the worldwide poor.
These classes of "globalization losers," particularly in the United States, have had
little political voice or influence, and perhaps this is why the backlash against globalization
has been so muted. They have had little voice because the rich have come to control the political
process. The rich, as can be seen by looking at the income gains of the global top 5 percent
in Figure 1, have benefited immensely from globalization and they have keen interest in its
continuation.
But while their use of political power has enabled the continuation of globalization, it
has also hollowed out national democracies and moved many countries closer to becoming plutocracies.
Thus, the choice would seem either plutocracy and globalization – or populism and a halt to
globalization.
Globalisation will continue to happen. It has pulled a large part of the world population out
of poverty and grown the global economy.
Sure on the downside it has also hugely benefitted the 1%, while the western middle classes
have done relatively less well and blue collar workers have suffered as they seek to turn to other
types (less well paid) of work.
The issue is the speed of change, how to manage globalisation and spread the wealth more equitably.
Maybe it will require slowing but it cannot and should not be stopped.
"... Meanwhile, between journalism's insiders and outsiders-between the ones who are rising and the ones who are sinking-there is no solidarity at all. Here in the capital city, every pundit and every would-be pundit identifies upward, always upward. ..."
"... We cling to our credentials and our professional-class fantasies, hobnobbing with senators and governors, trading witticisms with friendly Cabinet officials, helping ourselves to the champagne and lobster ..."
"... "The real "deplorables" generally aren't the people whom Hillary denounced as wholly "irredeemable," or at whom economically secure commentators fulminate on a regular basis. More obviously "deplorable" are Hillary's fellow financial, political, economic, and military elites who wrecked the economy, got us mired in endless unwinnable foreign wars, and erected a virtually impenetrable cultural barrier between everyday Americans trying to live fruitful lives and their pretentious, well-heeled superiors ensconced in select coastal enclaves. It is thanks to the actions of this "basket of deplorables" that we're in the situation we're in" ..."
I skimmed the Harpers article by Thomas Frank on the media's extermination of Bernie Sanders.
It's a good article about an unpleasant topic. One point that is not clear from the blurb is that
Frank isn't writing about the media's treatment of Sanders, but rather about the Washington Post's
treatment of Sanders. Occasionally other media outlets are mentioned (I saw a reference to the
Associated Press), but it's almost all about the Bezos Washington Post's unfairness
to Sanders. A lot of other newspapers mistreated him as well.
The article is excellent, but if anyone doesn't have the time to read it, I'd suggest going
straight to the last page, its a brilliant demolition of modern punditry journalism. The last
two paragraphs in particular:
Meanwhile, between journalism's insiders and outsiders-between the ones who are rising
and the ones who are sinking-there is no solidarity at all. Here in the capital city, every
pundit and every would-be pundit identifies upward, always upward.
We cling to our credentials and our professional-class fantasies, hobnobbing with senators
and governors, trading witticisms with friendly Cabinet officials, helping ourselves to the
champagne and lobster. Everyone wants to know our opinion, we like to believe, or to celebrate
our birthday, or to find out where we went for cocktails after work last night.
Until the day, that is, when you wake up and learn that the tycoon behind your media concern
has changed his mind and everyone is laid off and that it was never really about you in the
first place. Gone, the private office or award-winning column or cable-news show. The checks
start bouncing. The booker at MSNBC stops calling. And suddenly you find that you are a middle-aged
maker of paragraphs-of useless things-dumped out into a billionaire's world that has no need
for you, and doesn't really give a damn about your degree in comparative literature from Brown.
You start to think a little differently about universal health care and tuition-free college
and Wall Street bailouts. But of course it is too late now. Too late for all of us.
Yes, thanks for the link to Thomas Frank's essay in Harpers about the efforts of corporate
media, particularly the Washington Post and New York Times, to kill Senator Bernie Sanders' campaign
for the presidency.
Yesterday NC linked to an article from the American Conservative by Michael Tracey titled
"The Real Deplorables". In his article Tracey observed: …
"The real "deplorables" generally aren't the people whom Hillary denounced as wholly
"irredeemable," or at whom economically secure commentators fulminate on a regular basis. More
obviously "deplorable" are Hillary's fellow financial, political, economic, and military elites
who wrecked the economy, got us mired in endless unwinnable foreign wars, and erected a virtually
impenetrable cultural barrier between everyday Americans trying to live fruitful lives and
their pretentious, well-heeled superiors ensconced in select coastal enclaves. It is thanks
to the actions of this "basket of deplorables" that we're in the situation we're in"…
Clearly Michael Tracey overlooked a group. But what is particularly troubling me was Thomas
Frank's observation: …"for the sort of people who write and edit the opinion pages of the Post,
there was something deeply threatening about Sanders and his political views. He seems to have
represented something horrifying, something that could not be spoken of directly but that clearly
needed to be suppressed."
Statement of September 11th Advocates
Regarding
Saudia Arabia Support of ISIS
October 12, 2016
"Aren't the Saudis your friends?" Obama smiled. "It's complicated," he
said. "My view has never been that we should throw our traditional
allies"-the Saudis-"overboard in favor of Iran." President Barack Obama
"We have as solid a relationship, as clear an alliance and as strong a
friendship with the kingdom of Saudi Arabia as we have ever had." Secretary
of State John Kerry
"The strategic partnership between the United States and Saudi Arabia is
based on mutual interests and a longstanding commitment to facing our common
threats together." Speaker of the House Paul Ryan
"I think Saudi Arabia is a valuable partner in the war on terror. If you
want to lose Saudi Arabia as an ally, be careful what you wish for." Senator
Lindsey Graham
"There is a public relations issue that exists. That doesn't mean that
it's in our national interest to not have an alliance with them - I mean
they're an important part of our efforts in the Middle East." said Senate
Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker
Citing Western Intelligence, U.S. Intelligence, and Intelligence from the
Region, that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia-not just its rich donors– was
providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL and other
radical Sunni groups, we would like to know why President Obama, Secretary
of State John Kerry, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Speaker of the
House Paul Ryan, Senator Bob Corker, Senator Lindsey Graham, and Senator
John McCain, would EVER consider the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia our ally.
Markedly, this is not complicated, nor is it a friendship, a special
relationship, a valuable partnership, a clear alliance, a
strategicpartnership, or a public relations issue.
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is a sponsor of terrorism.
According to Western Intelligence, U.S. Intelligence and Intelligence
from the region, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia clandestinely funds and
logistically supports ISIS.
How could a nation like Saudi Arabia (or Qatar) that funds or
logistically supports ISIS be considered an ally of the United States in the
fight against ISIS?
The Saudis (and the Qataris) are funding and logistically supporting our
enemy.
The United States Government should not condone, enable, or turn a blind
eye to that fact.
As 9/11 family members whose husbands were brutally murdered by 19
radical Sunni terrorists, we strongly request these appointed and elected
officials immediately explain their indefensible positions with regard to
the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and its now clearly evident role in underwriting
and logistically supporting radical Sunni terror groups worldwide.
We also look forward to these appointed and elected officials immediately
explaining to the American public why they oppose JASTA or want to re-write
JASTA anti-terrorism legislation specifically designed to hold the Kingdom
of Saudi Arabia accountable for its funding and logistical support of
radical Sunni terror groups that kill Americans.
Finally, we would like to, once again, wholeheartedly thank all those
members of Congress who saw the wisdom in making JASTA law. Clearly, this
new evidence further validates your vote and support for JASTA. Furthermore,
this evidence proves that JASTA was not a political vote, but rather a vote
to keep Americans safer from terrorism.
Now that the most terrifyingly potent word in the English language, "PUSSY"
has been rediscovered and resurrected by the Democrat Digital Archaeologists, it is time
for reflection. "Pussy" has been detonated over the Trump campaign. Hillary Clinton will be elected.
Nuclear War with Russia and China now seems likely.
War may break out after Hillary's election but before she takes office (think June 22, 1941)
I am recommending downloading and securely storing as many recipes and photos of meals as possible!
Also war movies and series (Band of Brothers etc). Digital survivalists, the new reality.
Also, we MUST organize battalions of Social Justice Warriors
to pull the dead and dying from the smoking rubble, rebuild the electricity grid, maintain social
order and establish food supplies.
Most likely, the "deplorables" and the "irredeemables" will be otherwise occupied in their
own communities (that probably were not directly targeted)
Podesta's twitter account and i-devices were hacked yesterday using a password found in the
emails.
See here .
That is pretty good evidence that the emails are authentic, unless you believe the hackers
managed to guess his password by an astronomically lucky coincidence.
I think this is also evidence that the hacks were not carried out by an elite team of state-sponsored
cyber experts. Podesta was emailing his password in plain text, using a simple password, using
that password across multiple accounts. Further, he didn't bother to change his password despite
his mailbox being hacked and the contents spreading all over the internet!
This man is a dingbat on computer security matters. Literally anyone could have hacked him
using very simple techniques. That password (Hunter4567) could have been brute forced quickly
using tools available to everyone.
Have to go with Occam's razor and say this was probably not a massive Russian plot to influence
the election and install Trump, just an incompetent person getting caught with their pants down
by someone poking around.
"... Recast and repeated enough times, and they become facts. ..."
"... Trump has lost it. ..."
"... Voters are deserting him ..."
"... "Hillary will win ..."
"... The news organizations have (or used to have) a duty not to report lies. And remember, all it takes is one phone call from the DNC. So, if they are reporting it, the emails are legitimate. Wiki can leak, but they can ignore. ..."
"... If the MSM wanted to find out whether the emails were genuine or doctored or forgeries, all they have to do is ask Podesta for the authentic emails. The MSM hasn't done so, because the results would spoil their narrative. ..."
The news organizations have (or used to have) a duty not to report lies. And remember,
all it takes is one phone call from the DNC. So, if they are reporting it, the emails are legitimate.
Wiki can leak, but they can ignore.
If the MSM wanted to find out whether the emails were genuine or doctored or forgeries,
all they have to do is ask Podesta for the authentic emails. The MSM hasn't done so, because the
results would spoil their narrative.
"... I think the media destroyed Donald Trump as a candidate ..."
"... I have to say I am truly disappointed by this blog post. The election is a clear choice. Hillary has a confirmed track record of war, the death of muslim, laws that incarcerated black people, stumping for banks, stumping for Monsanto, stealing aid money, corruption and slut-shaming raped women. ..."
"... Socialists, Progressives, the Left, HATE corrupt HRC's actions, policies, behavior, and record. Why can't people get the terminology and concepts correct? ..."
"... HRC is the OPPOSITE of progresssive, socialist, leftist. Hillary Clinton is a NeoLiberal NeoCon. She wants reckless regime change, war, trade agreements that decimate US jobs and wages, etc. ..."
"... Mish is acting like some gal looking for the perfect man as a husband. There is no perfect man in either love or politics. Trump is the closest thing to it given what I see of the puppets of politics so far. The central bankers / globalists appear to hate him. That alone should be enough for Mish who has railed against both to vote for Trump. Imagine the heat Trump has already taken? An Mish just blithely jumps ship. And what for? Because of some imagined stampeded because Trump is hetero. ..."
"... Hillary destroyed evidence she was subpoenaed to turn over to criminal investigators. She should lose her law license just as Bill had. Instead, she will become president. ..."
"... I recently registered to vote for the first time in over 15 years. I'm voting for Trump and I've never voted for a Republican before in my life. I'm completely ignoring all the polls, all the talking heads, all of the 'smart' people, alt or otherwise. I'm going to vote for what I see as the only option for not *more of the same*. ..."
"... It is a fraud to reject Trump for his failures to make the best case against Hillary. It really doesn't matter as we have seen just in the last few days that the media is not covering the issues, no matter how much he brings them up. He has massive rallies and goes through all of this, yet NOTHING in the media ..."
"... Sure they will cover his vulgarities while saying NOTHING of Hillary's issues other than to claim the content of her emails is less relevant than a potential Trump/Russia conspiracy. Birther my ass, will they apologize for inferring Trump is a traitor or spy? I doubt it. ..."
"... The corrupt FBI cover-up of Clintons violations of the espionage act has convinced me that Clinton should be in prison. She wants to appoint left-wing ideological Supreme Court justices who further destroy the law and move us down the road to tyranny. She will not repeal the ACA. She will further destabilize the world just as she did Libya. ..."
"... Trump is a very flawed individual who really has no business being President. I disagree with many of his policies, but at this point, we all we have left is damage control. As much as I hate it, I will vote for Trump. ..."
"... Disagree. Voting for the 2 party system is what has got us where we are today. It's people like you, who will always vote for who the oligarchs give you, that has put the country in this position. ..."
"... Trump, even if elected, cannot do anything without an agreeable Congress. ..."
"... Trump may call himself a republican (as Ron Paul did) but in fact he is an independent. ..."
"... The oligarchs most certainly did not give us Trump, the people voted for Trump in spite of the oligarchs continuously trying to destroy him and supporting establishment professional politicians. ..."
"... Likely, if Hillary wins, they will attempt to change the laws and structure of party politics to make sure we NEVER see another Trump like candidacy. ..."
"... Trump is not a nation builder, which is why the neocons are against him. Wake up Mish – any vote against Trump is a vote for Hitlary, AND YOU KNOW IT, and would be a vote for what you despise. ..."
"... Oh please it's hardly over. Polls don't matter when a wikileak, 11 year-old tape, or bad debate performance could potentially swing sentiment overnight from one candidate to another. ..."
"... I conclude no one wants to admit who they support. The only reason anyone would vote for HIllary is to stop Trump. Now, if the polls show an easy win for Hillary, those people may figure their vote is not needed, and since they don't really care for her, not vote at all. By contrast, Trump supporters are more likely to be angry by how the press has treated him, and vote anyway. ..."
"... I expect record low turnout. It's possible that with a record low turnout that Trump might actually win. It's also possible that Johnson might get 15% of the vote and surprise everyone. It's a shame, honestly, that the Libertarians didn't nominate a more qualified nominee this year as this would have been the year for him to be taken seriously. ..."
"... If I put a 'Trump' sticker on my car, it would be vandalized. If I put a Trump sign on my building, it would be vandalized if not outright fire bombed. I live in a very blue district in a very blue state. ..."
"... Trump was not my first choice, but he is the better choice. I have warmed to him a bit seeing how he has upset the party oligarchs.. and not just in the USA ..."
"... It's easy to do. There is no chance in Hell that she will win, and you can set back and watch it all burn down with a clear conscience, right? This is what I love about principles. We pretend our principles are about the greater good…like we are sacrificing ourselves, when in reality, we are simply trying to shield our own delicate sensibilities from any thought of responsibility. ..."
"... The USA is not a nation (at least not in the traditional nation-state sense). It's too fractured and too diverse, it doesn't even have its own language and culture. How can one say "we"? How many of you can find enough people in your area with the same interests to form any organized group? ..."
"... Gary Johnson is the one expressing this "romantic" view, of an America that doesn't exist, never existed, has no chance of existing because it's too diverse and fractured in its social core, and it's against all global plans and policies of all other countries. He can only fracture the republican party even more, until republicans become "the other democrats" on the table. ..."
"... The same happened in Greece with the third party "To Potami", which helped bring Syriza in power after fracturing the center-right. It was a "catalyst" party that played its role and then almost vanished. ..."
"... I read Stockman's article in full, and he gets even more preposterous and unhinged from reality than that sentence you disagree with, Mish. Stockman seems to think the ruination of the USA under Hillary will be a good thing that leads to a Utopian paradise arising out of the financial ashes and radioactive rubble. Bolsheviks in 1917 and more recent Marxists such as Paul Pot in Cambodia have had that same vision of a Utopian society arising from the ashes and killing fields. I think Stockman needs to rethink that part of his narrative. Anyway, the Media did not kill Trump. Rather, the Media Have Made Trump. ..."
"... 40 million or so Trump supporters watching debate number two on TV saw it for themselves, and now more than ever know the falseness of the mainstream media narrative, both in its spin and coverage deletions. The media has been 99% anti-Trump from Day One, and ditto the GOP elite who are touted by the media as now ditching Trump. In that sense, what Trump and Bill Clinton have in common is that they both get stronger when under attack. If the media and GOP elite suddenly embraced Trump, that might confuse Trump's supporters into bolting. ..."
"... The Bush cousin, Billy, and NBC were a month too soon releasing the trash talking tape, and timing counts. People who watched the debate, including the Hillary voters, now have too much time to talk and reconsider. The danger to Hillary is that some of the robotic drones who vote Democratic by rote will agree that Hillary is all talk and empty words and that nothing will be done under her rule to help the black, Latinos and inner city people who robotically vote the Democratic ticket. That is the defection that could hurt Hillary on election day, defections among her own core believing that They Have Nothing to Lose by Voting Trump. The media cannot sustain the Bush family/NBC tape frenzy much longer. It will soon be old news, and something else will emerge to turn the election. ..."
"... My research shows evidence of poll fixing to make hillary look good. My independant polls and questions show trump will win election by a large margin. My guess he will beat Hillary by 6 million votes if not more. Media is so wrong on this. ..."
"... Whatever the media says is a lie, I have no doubt. My prediction is Hilary's team will know that she can't win, so they'll play the poor health card so that Obama will stall the election (with him in power) for another year. ..."
"... They hope that Clinton builds some kind of commanding position in the polls and they convince a significant number of voters that Trump will lose anyway. The problem is that everyone knows that the polls are rigged, and the more people see of Hillary and the more questions are asked, the more the people don't like her. The polls are still too close for comfort. ..."
"... But if there is one thing I have learned about neo-liberals (or whatever these creatures call themselves) over the past decade or so – that is they make and break the rules to suit themselves. Done in Europe all the time. We will see. ..."
"... Hillary will lead the polls but lose the election which will be proclaimed fraudulent due to Russian hacking at the behest of Trump. Its all set up. ..."
"... They keep bringing up all of these leaked and hacked emails, claiming they are all tracked back to Russia, which is impossible to actually verify WHO did it, but none the less, this will be their plan if ballot box stuffing and election fraud are not enough to get her across the finish line. They keep TELLING us that Hillary is the WINNER. They claim its not even close. ..."
"... I am not so sure that Trump will lose. People are so anti-establishment that it is likely the media by defiling Trump almost on a daily basis and their visible bias towards Hillary may be helping Trump along. However I do accept Trump can lose it with his foot-in-mouth disease but even now I do not think it is sure thing. If the anti-establishment crowd land up in droves to vote, it might well be Trump. ..."
"... I like David Stockman and enjoy what he has to say but it looks like he is trying to put some lipstick on the cover of his new book. He hoped that Trump would get to the left of Hillary on Wall Street and ruffle Janet's feathers. ..."
"... Basically David is saying that it will be a good thing that Hillary will be our next President because she will preside over the next recession. He also more or less said up to this point that it would be great if she gets "Trumped". ..."
"... We are ruled by largely a false consensus. Exactly what these polls are about…creating the perception of what the public believes in an effort to direct that perception. ..."
"... Trump has gotten to this point despite a massive push back from Republicans and an almost universal opposition from the mainstream media….and yet we still hear those proclaiming his candidacy is dead. If just a few more people would show a spine instead of running away from each and every Political correct attack, we MIGHT still have a democratic republic rather than a world ruled by powerful elites through political and corporate mouthpieces. ..."
"... I guess like many others, I slapped my forehead when the "tape" was released and initially thought it would be the last we saw of Donald Trump. Over the next few days I re-evaluated and came to the conclusion that it was inevitable that something like this would occur. TPTB will never allow Trump to ascend to the presidency willingly and if it can't be stopped by character assassination, they may well try another way. ..."
"... Personally I hope Donald wins by a good margin and Clinton, who couldn't keep the grin from her face, will be consigned to where she should be. ..."
"... Hillary will get the election simply by how the votes get counted. The character assassinations are a prelude and necessary part of the story as to why Trump lost. The faked vote counts for Hillary will be the reason Trump lost. But that won't be discussed. ..."
"... Hillary was a vote canvasser in Chicago in 1960 and learned a lot about vote fraud (she said so herself). I'm sure that will come in handy, no wonder she switched to the Vote Fraud Party. ..."
"... The way things are heating up between Washington and Russia, there's a lot more than the market to worry about, especially if Hillary is elected because she will not be able to control the Pentagon nor her neocon advisers like Paul Wolfowitz and Mike Morell. Simply put, they will get US into a war with Russia and Russia will defend itself with nukes because, for Russia, the 'conventional' alternative to nuclear war would be far worse. ..."
"... Russia will not likely allow that to happen. As part of the USSR, they lost 20m people during WWII, ejecting the Germans from their own territory while the Germans were fighting on multiple fronts. That represents as much of a "never again" tragedy for Russia as the holocaust represents for Jews. ..."
"... US military planners know this and will try to take out Russia's nukes as soon as the hostilities begin. The Russians know this and that they must launch as quickly as possible. It will be all out and all over, with little chance of negotiating a cease fire. ..."
"... As Lavrov said, we cannot even negotiate anymore. As soon as Kerry and he made their agreement last month, the Pentagon trashed it and attacked a Syrian base – as ISIS was attacking a nearby mountain. The Syrians even claim to have a recording of communications between US forces and ISIS – which 'our' government has yet to deny. We know now from Hillary's emails that the Saudis and Qataris were funding ISIS in 2014. There's surely more than that. ..."
"... I'm still voting for Trump as my big FU to the current way things are done. I still think a Trump presidency will result in something tangible being done to either our infrastructure needs or to causing everyone to re-engage in their local politics. Both positives in my mind. The World will take care of itself without the United States for a few years. ..."
"... Trump is still in the race and come Nov. 9 we will have our own version of Brexit. The dominant ruling minority have overstepped their bounds with the voting majority, who now see through all of the Zioglobalist falsehoods. ..."
"... The best we can hope for is Trump represents a different faction of our masters that realize a leech can't survive on a corpse. ..."
"... In the last debate I think I heard Trump say "oh so it's 3 against one again?" I was thinking the same thing before he said it. ..."
"... Only the MSM seem to be unaware of female sexuality – perhaps they think of them all as saints and mothers. I doubt that Trump has suffered lasting damage by the Bush inc. attack. Normal people are realists. ..."
"... Trump has many flaws and yes he has hurt himself but it is the media that is attempting to destroy him. Even Nixon got treated better then Trump. They cover up for Clinton, they work with Clinton. The media is doing a total hatchet job on Trump. ..."
"... According to my state Secretary of State, the second debate generated a flood of last minute new voter registrations, so it isn't over. ..."
"... I do agree Donald could have done way better in the first debate, and somewhat better in the second although he still won the second debate. We can also still hope the Most Evil Bitch will have a heart attack. If she is elected I am going to build a fallout shelter. ..."
"... And people are going to vote for Gary Johnson? Jesus Christ. Hope you're living on 10 acres of arable land in the middle of nowhere, Mish! ..."
"... The other problem for Bush was a short, mild recession during the election. Slick Willy made a big deal out of it; Bush said "don't worry, it won't amount to anything". Bush was right, but The Weasel won. ..."
"... Mish you are so wrong. I think Trump he will win solidly. The 2nd debate was a master stoke. If the election was over, you wouldn't have OBAMA and his wife, GORE, Sanders, Bill Clinton and assortment of idiotic actors all campaign wildly. ..."
"... Debates are never very memorable, statements are. The one-statement that will stay with everyone is you would be in Jail if I were president. ..."
"... A vote for Gary Johnson now is without a doubt a vote for Hillary, which in turn is a vote for WW3. That is not hyperbole. ..."
"... Political consultant Dick Morris knows the Clintons better than anybody and is vigorous in his support of Trump. He has been lambasting third party voters as Hillary votes and says it's really a wasted vote. ..."
"... Not sure why I would have to say this, but what Trump said into that hot mic was accurate. I lived in Miami for several years. Wealth purchases people and beauty is DEFINITELY purchaseable. They let him do it just the same as all of the athletes and celebs in the VIP sections of the clubs I frequented in SoBe. We used to joke that buying a bottle and getting a table in VIP increased our likelihood of hooking up by ~300%. Groping willing participants is not sexual assault. ..."
"... Don't be silly. If Trump loses this, he will be DONE. He has flown into the face of every power group in America, and if there is one thing we know about progressives, they do not forgive or forget. ..."
"... Personal destruction is their game. ..."
"... People want to think that Trump is just in it for publicity, which to me is to assume he is stupid, which I think is far from true. I think he truly does believe he can make a difference. He is probably wrong, but he is NOT stupid. This is his end. ..."
"... If anyone in the media had a clue about how voters feel, voters wouldn't be disconnecting their overpriced cable TV. 500 channels and they are all crap. ..."
"... Of course Trump will wreck Washington DC. That is the point. Of course Paul Ryan hates voters as much as Nancy Pelosi and Obama and McCain do - our public servants have made their hatred of the public quite clear. ..."
"... Believe it or not, Hillary started out as a conservative republican. At age 13 she canvassed for Nixon in Chicago in the 1960 election and saw vote fraud firsthand (seems to have made an impression!). In '64 she campaigned for Goldwater! Then in '65 she went to college and started drifting to the left. Her senior thesis was about Saul Alinsky. Enrolling at Yale in '69 she met Bill Clinton and joined the Dark Side. ..."
"... Clinton is still the Republican candidate. She is certainly to the right of Nixon or Eisenhower. Pro big business, pro free trade, pro immigration, pro defense spending. The only non-alignment is with the Christian-right. But they were just a play thing for votes by the GOP anyway. ..."
"... Go back and read Eisenhower's Farewell Address again Jon. It's the opposite of Hellary. ..."
"... The thing about Trump is that he hasn't got a plan. Lowering taxes and spending more on defense is not a plan. Saying you will do better deals is not a plan. Voters are just hoping that once he was in he would achieve things but really we don't know what he will do. ..."
"... Trump does not have a plan and it is obvious. But no plan is better than Hillary's bad plan. ..."
"... But he really lost me when he degenerated into pandering to every minority race, religion and special interest group that yelled the loudest… just like all the other politicians. And the most recent revelation about his vulgar views of women didn't help either. Nothing to love there. ..."
"... "Trump was asked several pointed questions. Hillary was asked none." ..."
"... Never mind preparing for a biased moderator, accepting the conditions of such a debate at all makes him look like failed leadership. He could have demanded better conditions, especially if he were slightly ahead as he may have been at the time. ..."
"... One more thing that struck me was that if the election was in the bag why would they release the tape? They might as well be preparing for the coronation. ..."
"... IMO, the establishment is still running scared and thus using all the dirty tricks that they are capable of and which they think will win them the election. The crux of the issue is that they do not want to acknowledge that people might prefer a discredited Trump to the establishment at this stage of the game. Establishment is the problem but they are masquerading as the solution. This is the problem with gaming people. At some point the game is up. ..."
"... Exactly. And why release polls with a so called 11% lead, polls conducted by a company connected to Clinton? That has an overweight in left/democratic voters? ..."
"... Brexit was supposed to be over before the final result came in. How quickly people forget. It is the people vs Wall Street/corrupt politicians. The latter is represented by Clinton. the former by Trump. We will see how angry the U.S. people really are at the current clique of career politicians, bought and paid for by the big companies. ..."
"... Why indeed would they send out Obama only yesterday to wag his finger in dire warning? The powers to be know it's NOT all over. The problem is that each time they send one of these 'asshat extrodinaires' out To preach to the public they simply cause MORE dissent, more mocking, and more retrenchment. ..."
"... Does anyone actually think that Obama, who has done more to divide the nation than anyone can make the blindest bit of difference at this stage? Respectfully, a curious Englishman. ..."
"... PS! It's not as though Obama has anything better to do with his time, is it? Enjoy 18 holes of golf, or go out campaigning for a woman he (allegedly) loathes and despises. Tough call, that one! ..."
"... "We will see how angry the U.S. people really are at the current clique of career politicians, bought and paid for by the big companies." ..."
"... I hope they are angry enough to come and vote for him in such numbers that it assures a Trump victory. Anybody but establishment is all I ask! What is happening is too nauseating to stomach any longer. ..."
"... Unfortunately Gary Johnson will split the anti-establishment vote, helping to elect the Soros and banksters funded candidate. ..."
"... This is not a vote for election. It is a vote against election. ..."
Stockman: "This election is over. Trump made a game defense of himself, enough to keep him in
the race, but it is going to descend deeper into the gutter from here, than ever before in American
history. And the people of America are going to be disgusted. And they're not going to come out and
vote. And a lot of them now feel free to vote their conscience and their conviction for the third
party candidate. So Hillary will have no mandate. And I think that's good. Because she stands for
everything that's wrecking this country. We're gonna now have a crisis; there will be a market crash;
there will be a recession. She will be a 45 percent politically-crippled mandate-less president,
and we are going to finally show the American people that this fantasy that both parties have been
projecting has to end. … I do not think she won the debate. I think the media destroyed Donald Trump
as a candidate."
General Agreement
There is very little I disagree with, until the final sentence.
It's pretty clear the election is over, but that was clear after the first debate.
I would not go so far as to say the markets will "crash", but that depends on the definition.
I actually suspect more like a 40-50% decline over seven to ten years with nothing much worse than
a 15-20% decline.
No year may look like a "crash" but the end result for pension plans will be worse.
Hillary certainly is damaged goods, but she will be able to damage the country with help of her
Republican neocon friends who would rather see her in the White House than Trump.
All things considered, that's a lot of agreements. But, if a "crash" is coming, however one defines
it, Donald Trump would not have stopped it either.
Media Destroyed Trump?
My main disagreement with Stockman is his statement " I think the media destroyed Donald Trump
as a candidate ." Certainly the media tried to destroy Trump, but the media failed every step
of the way.
Trump Destroyed Trump
It is Trump who destroyed Trump. The man finally imploded.
Heading into the first debate, it was Trump's election to lose, and he lost it with an amazing
set of gaffes.
When asked about taxes, he had an easy answer: "I pay may taxes according to the law, just as
I presume Hillary does. Warren Buffet complained his secretary pays more in taxes than he does. But
does Buffet voluntarily pay extra taxes? Does Hillary? If Hillary does not like the law, why didn't
she change it when she was a senator?"
How hard was that?
Why didn't Trump ever bring up the Clinton Foundation? Why didn't he press harder on Libya?
In regards to the "birther" issue, all Trump had to say was "I changed my mind once I saw the
birth certificate. Am I not allow to change my mind? Didn't Hillary change her mind on the Trans-Pacific
Trade Agreement (TPP)? Of course she did. She now agrees with me. If she can change her, mind why
can't I?
Trump was asked several pointed questions. Hillary was asked none. Trump could have and should
have, after the third pointed question, gone after the moderator with a comment "Doesn't Hillary
get any hard questions? Whose side are you on?" That would have brought lots of laughs.
Such a response to the moderator by Trump would have required some quick thinking, but there is
no excuse for Trump flat out not being prepared for the debate.
Ahead of the first debate, Trump was one state away from pulling into the lead, and a moderately
good debate would likely have done that. Answers like the above, easily worked out in advance, may
have been a knock out blow to Hillary.
Finally, and in regards to all the new sexual allegations, Trump should simply have said something
along the lines "I made a mistake. So did Hillary when she married Bill."
The bottom line is the medial did not destroy Trump, his own arrogance, lack of humility, and
total lack of preparation for the first debate did.
Barring a medical or other type of disaster, this election is indeed over.
I am voting for Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson.
Mike "Mish" Shedlock
thoughts on "Trump Destroyed Trump, Not the Media: "This Election is Over""
michael said:
October 11, 2016 8:44:34 at 8:44 PM Trump has not lost yet, although the mainstream media would
suggest otherwise. Of course they also predicted Brexit to fail. It is not over until the votes are
counted. It will be a travesty if Hillary is elected.
Gary Johnson believes Wall Street has committed no crimes. Hard rhetoric to stand behind.
Arvind Damarla
October 12, 2016 4:04:38 at 4:04 AM I have to say I am truly disappointed by this blog
post. The election is a clear choice. Hillary has a confirmed track record of war, the death of
muslim, laws that incarcerated black people, stumping for banks, stumping for Monsanto, stealing
aid money, corruption and slut-shaming raped women.
Trump has made fast and loose comments because he is not a slick politician. However I challenge
you to tell us what you find so objectionable about the *substance* of his statements (not the
media spin) that you would vote to allow Clinton in. Maybe you're in California and your vote
doesn't matter, but still … very disappointing.
CJ
October 12, 2016 12:37:29 at 12:37 PM The election "should" be a clear choice, but unfortunately
the democrat/liberal/progressive/socialist/fascist/communist fans of Hillary will not view, read
or discuss anything that is not favorable to their queen. The new voting block generation Y is
grossly uninformed, and being brainwashed by the MSM. Best thing to do is try to educate them.
mg
October 12, 2016 9:28:01 at 9:28 PM @CJ, Socialists, Progressives, the Left, HATE corrupt
HRC's actions, policies, behavior, and record. Why can't people get the terminology and concepts
correct?
HRC is the OPPOSITE of progresssive, socialist, leftist. Hillary Clinton is a NeoLiberal
NeoCon. She wants reckless regime change, war, trade agreements that decimate US jobs and wages,
etc.
October 13, 2016 7:50:33 at 7:50 AM Mish is acting like some gal looking for the perfect
man as a husband. There is no perfect man in either love or politics. Trump is the closest thing
to it given what I see of the puppets of politics so far. The central bankers / globalists appear
to hate him. That alone should be enough for Mish who has railed against both to vote for Trump.
Imagine the heat Trump has already taken? An Mish just blithely jumps ship. And what for? Because
of some imagined stampeded because Trump is hetero.
For those of you who think what Trump said is "bad". Well I guess it is considered bad. But
it is true. Women like powerful males and they drop their panties quite easily for them. I have
experience this. If you have not perhaps you think it is a myth. It is not. Even being relatively
fit and tall you would be surprised what a prim and proper lady will do if you intone that you
can keep a secret. Reality is those cloths come off quite rapidly.
So let's all stop the Victorian tongue clucking.
Diogenes
October 11, 2016 9:26:23 at 9:26 PM Exactly. I voted for Gary Johnson in 2012. It was/is a
mistake. He is unable to identify Aleppo as a Syrian city and flashpoint of ISIS terror.
Trump got a ton of free publicity in the primary. Hard to sit there now and gripe over how
he got treated.
Hillary destroyed evidence she was subpoenaed to turn over to criminal investigators. She
should lose her law license just as Bill had. Instead, she will become president.
The world recoils in horror as President What-Difference-Does-It-Make takes office.
the_gardener
October 11, 2016 8:52:36 at 8:52 PM I recently registered to vote for the first time in
over 15 years. I'm voting for Trump and I've never voted for a Republican before in my life. I'm
completely ignoring all the polls, all the talking heads, all of the 'smart' people, alt or otherwise.
I'm going to vote for what I see as the only option for not *more of the same*.
And I don't discuss it with anyone. I don't get into political arguments or discussions. I
don't have a lawn sign or a bumper sticker. I don't go to rally's.
I'm betting there are plenty more people just like me and there is a big surprise awaiting
all of the pundits.
October 12, 2016 7:56:30 at 7:56 AM So why do you believe Johnson is superior to Trump? Have
you seen the beat-downs he has given people for the use of the term "illegal Alien". Are you good
with open borders? Do you think he is anything close to a libertarian in hs views? Do you think
there is a chance in hell he can win?
It is a fraud to reject Trump for his failures to make the best case against Hillary. It
really doesn't matter as we have seen just in the last few days that the media is not covering
the issues, no matter how much he brings them up. He has massive rallies and goes through all
of this, yet NOTHING in the media .
Sure they will cover his vulgarities while saying NOTHING of Hillary's issues other than
to claim the content of her emails is less relevant than a potential Trump/Russia conspiracy.
Birther my ass, will they apologize for inferring Trump is a traitor or spy? I doubt it.
Mish, you are still free and can do as you wish, but you KNOW a vote for Johnson is a vote
for Hillary. YOU KNOW THINS, so please do us all a favor and not pretend it is some principled
stand. You are willing to vote for a loser because you think trump will lose…..ensuring he WILL
lose if others follow you path.
October 12, 2016 7:57:06 at 7:57 AM We are partially in this mess because of people like you
that don't take responsibility. Life is full of hard choices – make one. Sorry Mish, a vote for
Johnson, who does not have a plan for our biggest financial issue, healthcare spending, is also
spineless, or worse, because it helps an even bigger bag of horse sh*t – CROOKED Hitlary.
DesertRat
October 11, 2016 8:58:28 at 8:58 PM When Mike several months ago asked who his readers would
vote for, I replied that I could not imagine a universe that could exist in which I would vote
for Trump. Well I have found that universe.
The corrupt FBI cover-up of Clintons violations of the espionage act has convinced me that
Clinton should be in prison. She wants to appoint left-wing ideological Supreme Court justices
who further destroy the law and move us down the road to tyranny. She will not repeal the ACA.
She will further destabilize the world just as she did Libya.
Trump is a very flawed individual who really has no business being President. I disagree
with many of his policies, but at this point, we all we have left is damage control. As much as
I hate it, I will vote for Trump.
October 11, 2016 9:17:36 at 9:17 PM Gee thanks. After cheerleading for Trump all through the
Republican primaries, now you bail. Nothing that's happened wasn't predictable, in fact wasn't
predicted. Where were you when something could be done about it?
October 12, 2016 12:33:44 at 12:33 AM Please tell me what could have been done besides nothing.
If you say vote Cruz or Rubio I would throw up. The least warmonger will get my vote actually.
That may be Stein. I have to look. But it sure aint Cruz or Rubio. They are as bad as Hillary
October 12, 2016 8:06:58 at 8:06 AM Mish will vote for someone he KNOWS will lose rather than
risk his vote for someone who MIGHT lose. If Trump does lose it will be the result of people like
Mish. For someone who lives in alternate media, he sure swallows the main stream media's crap
whole.
It's sad. It's disappointing, but we live in a world of choices, one that ALWAYS revolves around
choosing the lesser of evils. The role of the media is ALWAYS to incentivize us to choose poorly,
be it in our consumption or politics. Humans have an inner need to self destruct and media and
the commercial interests they ultimately represent seek to push us a long, to buy what we don't
need and as ALWAYS lure us with "something for nothing" which is ALWAYS the most expensive "purchase"
we could have made.
"Buy" Johnson and get Hillary and all that comes with her.WAR and financial depression in perpetude.
Jon Sellers
October 12, 2016 11:41:14 at 11:41 AM Disagree. Voting for the 2 party system is what
has got us where we are today. It's people like you, who will always vote for who the oligarchs
give you, that has put the country in this position.
Trump, even if elected, cannot do anything without an agreeable Congress.
Mish is a self-professed Libertarian and is taking the reasonable and responsible stand. He
is voting his conscious. Everyone should.
CJ
October 12, 2016 12:56:47 at 12:56 PM And I disagree with you, Jon. Trump may call himself
a republican (as Ron Paul did) but in fact he is an independent. Look at all the repubs that
won't support "their" candidate. The oligarchs most certainly did not give us Trump, the people
voted for Trump in spite of the oligarchs continuously trying to destroy him and supporting establishment
professional politicians.
I am fine with Washington getting nothing done. What they do get done usually does more harm than
good. Do you want to have Hillary impose her 75% tax plan? Are you happy that Obama brought back
the Cold War, and Hillary intends to raise the temperature?
October 12, 2016 1:23:32 at 1:23 PM What CJ said.
What good are your principles if they have no effect on the outcome? A vote for a third party
is a vote for Hillary. Are you so deluded to think that Hillary will care, or ANYONE will care,
that Johnson got 10% of the vote? What good did it do to vote for Perot? WE got Clinton and what
we have today. IT IS THE MEDIA that controls the elections, and the two main parties are in league
with them. One reason they hate Trump so much is he has not spent the money Hillary has and his
political power is a public demonstration to other potential candidates that maybe they too do
not have to suckle at that tit of donors and media buys. This is a MAJOR threat to those running
our country. NO donors, OH SHIT!, No advertising, OH HELL NO! Trump is no hero, no savior, but
he is PROVING to be the only effective adversary to the powers that be. Only an fool would not
see this. Third parties are a waste of effort, always have been. With Trump, even if he loses,
it will change the political process for years to come.
Likely, if Hillary wins, they will attempt to change the laws and structure of party politics
to make sure we NEVER see another Trump like candidacy. There is SO MUCH riding on this election
and people are so caught up with the media shilling and traditional cognitive capture that they
just don't realize. The system IS the system and when you are inside of it it is invisible, but
when you are on the outside, trying to break in, you realize, be it business or politics, that
there are walls built to prevent you from doing so, and typically the only way in is to pay tribute
to the system, bend to its will, accept the corruption, fraud and criminality designed specifically
to limit access.
October 12, 2016 8:10:18 at 8:10 AM Trump is not a nation builder, which is why the neocons
are against him. Wake up Mish – any vote against Trump is a vote for Hitlary, AND YOU KNOW IT,
and would be a vote for what you despise.
Norman
October 12, 2016 8:43:40 at 8:43 AM You could vote for Trump and use your platform here to
encourage every 3rd party, undecided and uninterested citizen to also vote for Trump.
Everyone understands he is flawed but the alternative is the end of the United States as we
know it…the simple demographics of a Clinton presidency – likely 8 years followed by more Democratic
dictatorship will bring in millions of Syrian and other Muslims, tens of millions more illegal
aliens and we will become Greece/France/Germany/Sweden.
There are millions of Americans with young children who will be fighting the civil war and
bear the brunt of the violence that will occur – and in many places is already occurring but being
completely blacked out by the media.
Thanks for nothing pal.
Bayleaf
October 11, 2016 9:18:27 at 9:18 PM Oh please it's hardly over. Polls don't matter when
a wikileak, 11 year-old tape, or bad debate performance could potentially swing sentiment overnight
from one candidate to another.
Carl R
October 12, 2016 11:39:53 at 11:39 AM Or, maybe polls do matter, but not in the way most think.
In the last two weeks I have been keeping a count of yard signs I see for Presidential candidates.
There are many for local issues, but for President I have counted 0 for Hillary, 0 for Trump,
5 for Johnson. On bumper stickers I counted 1 for Bernie, and none for anyone else.
I conclude no one wants to admit who they support. The only reason anyone would vote for
HIllary is to stop Trump. Now, if the polls show an easy win for Hillary, those people may figure
their vote is not needed, and since they don't really care for her, not vote at all. By contrast,
Trump supporters are more likely to be angry by how the press has treated him, and vote anyway.
I expect record low turnout. It's possible that with a record low turnout that Trump might
actually win. It's also possible that Johnson might get 15% of the vote and surprise everyone.
It's a shame, honestly, that the Libertarians didn't nominate a more qualified nominee this year
as this would have been the year for him to be taken seriously.
On the whole of politics, I'll make one final comment. Back in the 60's politics was a dirty
business, featuring guys like LBJ and Nixon. After Watergate the mood changed, and instead we
got nice guys, and who could be nicer than Jimmy Carter or Gerald Ford? It's taken 30 years, but
we're right back where we were.
October 12, 2016 1:31:14 at 1:31 PM Not if it is a Johnson Libertarian platform.
Free trade? does he even know what that is? Because none of us do as we haven't had any in our
history. We PAY tariffs to just about every country we hope to export to and charge none at all.
Free my ass.
Open borders and citizenship for all? Does he understand supply and demand principles, does he
not look at the number of people out of the workforce? Does he have even the slightest clue how
economics works? He is a Utopian that is completely clueless. I'm sure he is smart enough to run
a business, but he has no business running mine. How many illegals did he hire when he had his
own business anyway? Here in Texas there are lots of successful businesses profiting from illegal
employment. Doesn't make it right.
Hell_Is_Like_Newark
October 12, 2016 3:06:15 at 3:06 PM If I put a 'Trump' sticker on my car, it would be
vandalized. If I put a Trump sign on my building, it would be vandalized if not outright fire
bombed. I live in a very blue district in a very blue state.
Trump was not my first choice, but he is the better choice. I have warmed to him a bit
seeing how he has upset the party oligarchs.. and not just in the USA . H
Robert
October 11, 2016 9:33:34 at 9:33 PM They're trying to set the narrative before anything happens
like a soothsayer. Nobody can say with certainty that Trump is finished. He isn't. He's still
attracting massive crowds and money.
The captured pollsters are like the credit rating agencies during the financial crisis. They
are putting a AAA-rating on a pile of dog crap. Buy it at your own risk.
Just as I have done with Trump, I am not going to judge you Mish on one bad call, but please
re-think your position. You are way too smart to come to your conclusion. The other smart people
coming to your decision are either 'useful idiots' or are establishment hacks, who benefit some
way from selling their soul.
October 12, 2016 12:30:44 at 12:30 AM Hillary without a doubt will carry Illinois. I never
really looked much beyond Trump. I heard today that Ron Paul said Stein had the best foreign policy.
So I will investigate.
October 12, 2016 8:10:20 at 8:10 AM I heard that Jesus had the BEST platform. Maybe we should
all vote for HIM.
It will be at least as effective as voting for Stein or Johnson, and if you are going for a principled
vote, how can you do better? At least we may have an express lane to heaven when Hillary's policies
will have us evaporated in a fireball from Russia.
It's easy to do. There is no chance in Hell that she will win, and you can set back and
watch it all burn down with a clear conscience, right?
This is what I love about principles. We pretend our principles are about the greater good…like
we are sacrificing ourselves, when in reality, we are simply trying to shield our own delicate
sensibilities from any thought of responsibility.
***don't look at me, I didn't vote for her/him/undecided***
It is like the way that radical Islamist shoot their rifles. They avoid aiming directly and
instead simply point their rifles in the general direction of who they want dead, but by not aiming
directly, they can claim that the resultant death was not their fault but Allah's will.
It is the typical progressive stance that they defend themselves from the destruction their
policies create by claiming that it was okay because they only had good intentions. People voting
for people that they know cannot win are no different. Our every action AND inaction has consequence
that only our deluded minds can shield us from. Every vote and non vote counts. Throwing your
vote away or not voting is but a delusion from accepting that responsibility, a pretense of "principles".
Real principles require personal sacrifice. You have to give up something for them, not receive
something (like absolution). No one is forcing you to vote (yet), but life is nothing else BUT
a choice of lesser evils, and to pretend it is not, to believe that simply not participating does
anything positive, flies in the face of the notion that all that evil requires to succeed is for
good people to do nothing (and voting for a third party is doing NOTHING). Half the country doesn't
vote now, and we are in the worst position ever. Voting for a sure loser is no different
The USA is not a nation (at least not in the traditional nation-state sense). It's too
fractured and too diverse, it doesn't even have its own language and culture. How can one say
"we"? How many of you can find enough people in your area with the same interests to form any
organized group?
The Democrats know this very well, and that is why they have been fracturing it further by
creating artificial "communities" (such as the "gay community" etc.).
What's over with this election is not Trump (who will go back to his business and find some peace),
but the very underlying "romantic" concept of America.
Gary Johnson is the one expressing this "romantic" view, of an America that doesn't exist,
never existed, has no chance of existing because it's too diverse and fractured in its social
core, and it's against all global plans and policies of all other countries. He can only fracture
the republican party even more, until republicans become "the other democrats" on the table.
The same happened in Greece with the third party "To Potami", which helped bring Syriza
in power after fracturing the center-right. It was a "catalyst" party that played its role and
then almost vanished.
kevinmackay
October 12, 2016 8:24:31 at 8:24 AM My son has a history book that says things like "We went
into world war two…", "America wanted to build a better…" and "Americans wanted more equality".
I asked him to define who "We", "America" and "Americans" were. He said he thought the book
was boring and repetitive and he only studied to get the grade. I said "good boy, keep the math
grade up."
Soon I'll have to explain what nonsense to write to slip under the literature teacher's radar.
Diogenes
October 12, 2016 1:37:24 at 1:37 PM Trump was responsible for Super Bowl sized audiences during
the GOP debates. The question is : can he get them to get off their butts and vote?
If he can, this is going to be very interesting indeed.
The historic concept of nation… where the people share the same race, religion, culture, language,
history and territory… is dying. TPTB want all nations to die to further their evil globalist
agenda. If a nation won't die a natural death, it will be given a lethal dose of diversity via
massive immigration.
I read Stockman's article in full, and he gets even more preposterous and unhinged from
reality than that sentence you disagree with, Mish. Stockman seems to think the ruination of the
USA under Hillary will be a good thing that leads to a Utopian paradise arising out of the financial
ashes and radioactive rubble. Bolsheviks in 1917 and more recent Marxists such as Paul Pot in
Cambodia have had that same vision of a Utopian society arising from the ashes and killing fields.
I think Stockman needs to rethink that part of his narrative. Anyway, the Media did not kill Trump.
Rather, the Media Have Made Trump.
40 million or so Trump supporters watching debate number two on TV saw it for themselves,
and now more than ever know the falseness of the mainstream media narrative, both in its spin
and coverage deletions. The media has been 99% anti-Trump from Day One, and ditto the GOP elite
who are touted by the media as now ditching Trump. In that sense, what Trump and Bill Clinton
have in common is that they both get stronger when under attack. If the media and GOP elite suddenly
embraced Trump, that might confuse Trump's supporters into bolting.
The Bush cousin, Billy, and NBC were a month too soon releasing the trash talking tape,
and timing counts. People who watched the debate, including the Hillary voters, now have too much
time to talk and reconsider. The danger to Hillary is that some of the robotic drones who vote
Democratic by rote will agree that Hillary is all talk and empty words and that nothing will be
done under her rule to help the black, Latinos and inner city people who robotically vote the
Democratic ticket. That is the defection that could hurt Hillary on election day, defections among
her own core believing that They Have Nothing to Lose by Voting Trump. The media cannot sustain
the Bush family/NBC tape frenzy much longer. It will soon be old news, and something else will
emerge to turn the election.
dan
October 11, 2016 10:38:08 at 10:38 PM My research shows evidence of poll fixing to make
hillary look good. My independant polls and questions show trump will win election by a large
margin. My guess he will beat Hillary by 6 million votes if not more. Media is so wrong on this.
mattson01
October 12, 2016 5:55:34 at 5:55 AM Whatever the media says is a lie, I have no doubt.
My prediction is Hilary's team will know that she can't win, so they'll play the poor health card
so that Obama will stall the election (with him in power) for another year.
A/ They get rid of Trump now and Clinton gets some kind of coronation. That is why they are
pulling out all of the stops with the current smear campaign. (Some geezer in the UN is the latest
to wag his finger), or
B/ They hope that Clinton builds some kind of commanding position in the polls and they
convince a significant number of voters that Trump will lose anyway. The problem is that everyone
knows that the polls are rigged, and the more people see of Hillary and the more questions are
asked, the more the people don't like her. The polls are still too close for comfort.
Roger
October 12, 2016 1:34:30 at 1:34 PM Well CJ, you are probably right. But if there is one
thing I have learned about neo-liberals (or whatever these creatures call themselves) over the
past decade or so – that is they make and break the rules to suit themselves. Done in Europe all
the time. We will see.
October 12, 2016 1:58:06 at 1:58 PM Hillary will lead the polls but lose the election
which will be proclaimed fraudulent due to Russian hacking at the behest of Trump. Its all set
up.
They keep bringing up all of these leaked and hacked emails, claiming they are all tracked
back to Russia, which is impossible to actually verify WHO did it, but none the less, this will
be their plan if ballot box stuffing and election fraud are not enough to get her across the finish
line. They keep TELLING us that Hillary is the WINNER. They claim its not even close.
Hillary is laughing at Trump supporters and denigrating them as she believes she is the heir
apparent. Look at the polls and see very lopsided democrat/republican sampling as well as other
metrics. Look at those running the polling companies who are also on Hillary's payroll. Its blatant
and it is sad, but they don't care because they own the media and will spin the story to their
ends. Most if not many will see through it, but they don't care, because no one will push back,
especially not from rank and file republicans. Only the Deplorables would be so crass. And we
know how much respect they get.
KPL
October 11, 2016 9:57:26 at 9:57 PM I am not so sure that Trump will lose. People are
so anti-establishment that it is likely the media by defiling Trump almost on a daily basis and
their visible bias towards Hillary may be helping Trump along. However I do accept Trump can lose
it with his foot-in-mouth disease but even now I do not think it is sure thing. If the anti-establishment
crowd land up in droves to vote, it might well be Trump.
October 11, 2016 9:58:13 at 9:58 PM I like David Stockman and enjoy what he has to say
but it looks like he is trying to put some lipstick on the cover of his new book. He hoped that
Trump would get to the left of Hillary on Wall Street and ruffle Janet's feathers.
Basically David is saying that it will be a good thing that Hillary will be our next President
because she will preside over the next recession. He also more or less said up to this point that
it would be great if she gets "Trumped".
October 12, 2016 8:18:56 at 8:18 AM Yeah, well I said that about Obama…TWICE, and look at
what we have. The dream that this will EVER blow back on progressives is pure delusion as the
"public" opinion as created by the media is the rule, not facts or reality. Conservatives have
been waiting for progressives to get slapped with the consequences of their actions for a hundred
years and still NOTHING. The PROOF is to look at where we are right NOW!
We are ruled by largely a false consensus. Exactly what these polls are about…creating
the perception of what the public believes in an effort to direct that perception.
Trump has gotten to this point despite a massive push back from Republicans and an almost
universal opposition from the mainstream media….and yet we still hear those proclaiming his candidacy
is dead. If just a few more people would show a spine instead of running away from each and every
Political correct attack, we MIGHT still have a democratic republic rather than a world ruled
by powerful elites through political and corporate mouthpieces.
DCMCM
October 11, 2016 10:00:51 at 10:00 PM While I have no vote in the US election, it doesn't
mean I have no interest. On the contrary, I have followed it closely.
I guess like many others, I slapped my forehead when the "tape" was released and initially
thought it would be the last we saw of Donald Trump. Over the next few days I re-evaluated and
came to the conclusion that it was inevitable that something like this would occur. TPTB will
never allow Trump to ascend to the presidency willingly and if it can't be stopped by character
assassination, they may well try another way.
What I am not seeing from Trump is humility. If anyone expects him to be a supernatural leader
in the event he does win, I suspect they will be very disappointed. He needs to come out with
a statement to the effect that he has said and done many silly things in his life and many of
them have come back to haunt him, however his love of America is much greater than his personal
failings and he will be able to make America GREAT AGAIN. To this end he will need to spell out
that he has a great vision of how to do this and that he knows how to find the right people for
his team to oversee the various changes that need to be made. He needs to stress that it will
not be easy and there will be pain, but that pain is on the way anyway and his plan will make
it as soft as possible.
In the event he does make it, the scene is set for undoing him. Maybe those pesky Russians will
hack the electronic voting so Obama can call the election a fraud and invalidate it. Personally
I hope Donald wins by a good margin and Clinton, who couldn't keep the grin from her face, will
be consigned to where she should be.
Jon Sellers
October 12, 2016 11:57:20 at 11:57 AM Hillary will get the election simply by how the
votes get counted. The character assassinations are a prelude and necessary part of the story
as to why Trump lost. The faked vote counts for Hillary will be the reason Trump lost. But that
won't be discussed.
CJ
October 12, 2016 1:18:53 at 1:18 PM Hillary was a vote canvasser in Chicago in 1960 and
learned a lot about vote fraud (she said so herself). I'm sure that will come in handy, no wonder
she switched to the Vote Fraud Party.
The way things are heating up between Washington and Russia, there's a lot more than the
market to worry about, especially if Hillary is elected because she will not be able to control
the Pentagon nor her neocon advisers like Paul Wolfowitz and Mike Morell. Simply put, they will
get US into a war with Russia and Russia will defend itself with nukes because, for Russia, the
'conventional' alternative to nuclear war would be far worse.
Russia, whose population is 1/6 of NATO's and whose economy is 1/20 of NATO's, has a long and
easily penetrable border. In a strictly conventional war, once its air defenses are gone, NATO
bombers will have field day, after field day, carpet-bombing Russian cities and towns, laying
waste that Chechen and other Muslims will scavenge. It would be far worse than the quick death
of nuclear war. They might hold out for a while, and make it costly for US, but they know they
would not hold out forever.
Russia will not likely allow that to happen. As part of the USSR, they lost 20m people
during WWII, ejecting the Germans from their own territory while the Germans were fighting on
multiple fronts. That represents as much of a "never again" tragedy for Russia as the holocaust
represents for Jews.
US military planners know this and will try to take out Russia's nukes as soon as the hostilities
begin. The Russians know this and that they must launch as quickly as possible. It will be all
out and all over, with little chance of negotiating a cease fire.
As Lavrov said, we cannot even negotiate anymore. As soon as Kerry and he made their agreement
last month, the Pentagon trashed it and attacked a Syrian base – as ISIS was attacking a nearby
mountain. The Syrians even claim to have a recording of communications between US forces and ISIS
– which 'our' government has yet to deny. We know now from Hillary's emails that the Saudis and
Qataris were funding ISIS in 2014. There's surely more than that.
Each day a new war tidbit is in the news. Today, we hear that Russia is advising government
officials to bring home their children who are studying abroad. Yesterday, Gorbachev warned of
the growing nuclear threat. But no one is paying attention, except those think the US can win.
So before the election, I shall stock up on needed items, drop my class and head for somewhere
safer than Phoenix. I hope I am wrong but this time it really could be doomsday.
October 11, 2016 10:20:42 at 10:20 PM I'm still voting for Trump as my big FU to the current
way things are done. I still think a Trump presidency will result in something tangible being
done to either our infrastructure needs or to causing everyone to re-engage in their local politics.
Both positives in my mind. The World will take care of itself without the United States for a
few years.
Seychelles
October 11, 2016 10:27:01 at 10:27 PM Trump is still in the race and come Nov. 9 we will
have our own version of Brexit. The dominant ruling minority have overstepped their bounds with
the voting majority, who now see through all of the Zioglobalist falsehoods.
Stuki Moi
October 11, 2016 11:02:23 at 11:02 PM No politician, least of all a Clinton, will tax their
biggest potential donors. "The rich" that stand to get taxed, are small business people and professionals
who have more important tings do do with their money than act as "job creators" for Clinton Foundation
jobs.
But you have to admit, tax RATE plans make for an excellent TALKING point… to the PERCEPTION
of the sacrificial Middle Class: a politician feels THEIR pain… but the reality is: the rich protected
their asse(t)s with LOOPHOLES long ago.
Stuki Moi
October 12, 2016 8:37:59 at 8:37 PM No doubt that's how it will be done. Straight out of the
Pancho Villa playbook: Kill off competent men after stealing all their stuff. Arrange grandiose
public spectacles where you publicly toss a small fraction of what you stole from her now deceased
husband to the starving, starry eyed, widow. Demonstrating what a "great leader" you are.
daddysteve
October 11, 2016 10:38:31 at 10:38 PM The best we can hope for is Trump represents a different
faction of our masters that realize a leech can't survive on a corpse.
October 11, 2016 10:41:03 at 10:41 PM I love it to study psychological cases through comments.
People express their reactions and never their cold reasoning
CJ
October 11, 2016 11:20:38 at 11:20 PM In the last debate I think I heard Trump say "oh
so it's 3 against one again?" I was thinking the same thing before he said it.
greg
October 12, 2016 12:03:39 at 12:03 AM Yaknow, really, the next debate should be done with
swords. Just put the 2 of them out on the stage in separate corners, with Anderson Cooper and
Martha Raddatz on the floor, front stage, tied to chairs and several winds of duct tape over their
mouths, a bell rings and they have at it. May the best man win.
Eric Coote
October 12, 2016 8:14:34 at 8:14 PM Yes Paul – I think most women realise that there are quite
a few (women) who line up for the attention of alpha males – so male hubris is somewhat encouraged.
It has been reported for instance that the lines outside the Beetles (pop group) hotel rooms in
Australia anyway, were very long, unruly and overheated to the extent that one Beetle told them
all to go and 'get *ucked' to which came the obvious reply.
Only the MSM seem to be unaware of female sexuality – perhaps they think of them all as
saints and mothers. I doubt that Trump has suffered lasting damage by the Bush inc. attack. Normal
people are realists.
For the record – I do not agree with molestation of women or forgive it. Nor do I agree with
men using their power position to enforce female compliance – but we should all be aware that
there are fuzzy lines and women are better than men at drawing them.
October 11, 2016 11:01:46 at 11:01 PM No one knows who is going to win. The polls are all
over the place and they are all different based on who is taking them. We will not know the outcome
of this election till election night or maybe even later.
Trump has many flaws and yes he has hurt himself but it is the media that is attempting
to destroy him. Even Nixon got treated better then Trump. They cover up for Clinton, they work
with Clinton. The media is doing a total hatchet job on Trump.
I think this election is going to have higher turnout numbers then we have seen in a very
long time and it's the reason Trump can still win. There is a lot of people that have given up
on the system that he's going to bring out to the polls and it can turn this election in his way.
It would also be something not counted in polls and would lead to a surprise victory.
Paul Niemi
October 11, 2016 11:13:50 at 11:13 PM According to my state Secretary of State, the second
debate generated a flood of last minute new voter registrations, so it isn't over.
The last time the media were so unanimous in depreciating a presidential candidate, I think,
was 1968, when Nixon was written off early. He won, and the mainstream press lost.
This telling voters the winner, before the election, can backfire, and I think it will. Voters
like to show their independence, and most do not make up their minds until just a few days before
the election. People know the polling methodologies are flawed or rigged. Only the exit polls
have any real validity, so we won't know the outcome until the election is over. What we do know
about polls, is that they consistently predict outcomes that underestimate the closeness of individual
races.
CJ
October 11, 2016 11:17:40 at 11:17 PM It ain't over until it's over. I like Mish's blog, but
really he is not a great forecaster. I forecast that wikileaks is saving the most damaging exposures
until just before the election. All political types know that just before has the greatest effect.
The MSM tried to withhold the Trump locker room talk tapes until as close to the election as possible
for the most damage, but had to release them now because they found out they were about to get
scooped.
I do agree Donald could have done way better in the first debate, and somewhat better in
the second although he still won the second debate. We can also still hope the Most Evil Bitch
will have a heart attack. If she is elected I am going to build a fallout shelter.
R G
October 11, 2016 11:37:50 at 11:37 PM LOL yep, spot on. People think it's a cute game to "vote
your conscience". I remember being naive enough to do that. I did it in 2008 for God's sake. But
this election is for all the marbles. This country has no moral compass right now. It's enraged;
a race war appears to be shaping up; we're drowning in debt; we're deployed all over the planet;
and there's not a single country that's not sick to death of us.
Now, if a Black Friday event can turn Americans into raving loons, think about what a Black
Swan would do.
And people are going to vote for Gary Johnson? Jesus Christ. Hope you're living on 10 acres
of arable land in the middle of nowhere, Mish!
October 12, 2016 2:47:20 at 2:47 PM Bush The First would probably have been re-elected in
'92 had it not been for his incredibly stupid "Read my lips, no new taxes" and then he raised
taxes. Since I am always against more of my earnings being confiscated and wasted, it sure soured
me on Bush.
The other problem for Bush was a short, mild recession during the election. Slick Willy
made a big deal out of it; Bush said "don't worry, it won't amount to anything". Bush was right,
but The Weasel won.
Tony of CA
October 11, 2016 11:24:38 at 11:24 PM Mish you are so wrong. I think Trump he will win
solidly. The 2nd debate was a master stoke. If the election was over, you wouldn't have OBAMA
and his wife, GORE, Sanders, Bill Clinton and assortment of idiotic actors all campaign wildly.
As for the 1st debate, no one can even remembers it. Debates are never very memorable,
statements are. The one-statement that will stay with everyone is you would be in Jail if I were
president.
R G
October 11, 2016 11:26:15 at 11:26 PM All I can say is that I truly hope people are prepared
for the ramifications of a Hillary presidency if they vote for anyone other than Trump. I have
never voted for a Republican POTUS. It's always been third party for me, with the exception of
2000, when my girlfriend and I neutralized each other's votes. I voted for Gary Johnson in 2012
and Bob Barr in 2008.
A vote for Gary Johnson now is without a doubt a vote for Hillary, which in turn is a vote
for WW3. That is not hyperbole.
R G
October 12, 2016 11:47:31 at 11:47 AM Then you're not thinking this thing through to its conclusion.
Throughout American history, which is the political party that ultimately splits the vote, or
even splinters? We could discuss political party history in this country but it would be out of
place. The Demo-Reps were NOT present-day Democrats. Bull Moose were NOT liberals. Libertarian
voters are generally NOT present-day Democrats.
I know this because I've been one of those voters from Perot onwards. This is no time in our
nation's history to be rolling the dice on a no-shot. Even if he were the next George Washington
(he's far from it), he stands no mathematical shot. Only a vote for one of the two major party
candidates does. We do not have a parliamentary system in this country. And even if we did, human
beings generally fall into one of two camps: Makers and Takers, or hard money guys (Gold Standard
Republicans) versus easy money guys (Silver Democrats).
I'm not trying to convince you to vote for someone else. My wife is debating a vote for Johnson
as well. But what I am saying is that not acknowledging the facts is unacceptable to me, and as
far as I'm concerned, third party voters in this election will be treated the same as Democrats
when we look back 10 years from now.
Political consultant Dick Morris knows the Clintons better than anybody and is vigorous
in his support of Trump. He has been lambasting third party voters as Hillary votes and says it's
really a wasted vote.
R G
October 12, 2016 9:32:39 at 9:32 AM Not sure why I would have to say this, but what Trump
said into that hot mic was accurate. I lived in Miami for several years. Wealth purchases people
and beauty is DEFINITELY purchaseable. They let him do it just the same as all of the athletes
and celebs in the VIP sections of the clubs I frequented in SoBe. We used to joke that buying
a bottle and getting a table in VIP increased our likelihood of hooking up by ~300%. Groping willing
participants is not sexual assault.
This race boils down to all of the marbles. Vote Johnson, a guy who mathematically stands no
chance of winning, and you're voting for Hillary. Johnson pulls more support from paleo-cons who
are so far right they're left. Been there, done that.
Recessions happen on average every 7-8 years. We're due. Imagine the state of this country
during the next recession with 7 years of ZIRP, a race war, and neocons fomenting world war.
Carl R
October 12, 2016 11:54:11 at 11:54 AM Well, first of all, Libertarians are normally isolationists,
so it isn't really relevant that he doesn't know Aleppo. In any case, I one voted for a Presidential
Candidate that confused Eastern Europe with Western Europe when questioned during a debate. If
the matter came up in a discussion were the topic was not taken out of context, I don't think
it would be an issue. I personally don't care for Johnson, but the "Aleppo" question would be
a stupid reason for deciding whether or not to vote for him.
CJ
October 12, 2016 1:28:31 at 1:28 PM Yes Libertarians tend to be isolationist, but that is
not an excuse for not knowing what is going on in the world. Aleppo is only one example. The presidency
is half foreign policy and half domestic policy. I wish the libertarians had a better candidate,
but then again if they got more votes it would just increase Hellary's chances.
October 12, 2016 2:31:26 at 2:31 PM Don't be silly. If Trump loses this, he will be DONE.
He has flown into the face of every power group in America, and if there is one thing we know
about progressives, they do not forgive or forget. When you cross a line with progressives,
they do not seek to just defeat you, they will DESTROY YOU. Personal destruction is their
game.
The youo not debate or argue on policies, they dig up dirt and then try to bury you in it.
This is especially true with those they see as traitors, people who were formally aligned with
the left, or are from a deomgraphic that they fell they OWN. Look at how they beat Herman Cain…not
policy, personal. Look at Bill Cosby who was their hero until he spoke out against black ignorance….does
anyone really think that only after decades of silence these women just "decided" to go public?
Ben Carson, they went after his history, not his policies. They we smart enough to bow out before
any lasting damage was done, but Trump? I believe they have hell waiting for him. Do you think
he will get any of his real estate deals done in these big cities. Do you not think they will
be digging up everything they can from his past to bedevil him to the grave? I do.
People want to think that Trump is just in it for publicity, which to me is to assume he
is stupid, which I think is far from true. I think he truly does believe he can make a difference.
He is probably wrong, but he is NOT stupid. This is his end.
Freddie
October 11, 2016 11:54:09 at 11:54 PM If anyone in the media had a clue about how voters
feel, voters wouldn't be disconnecting their overpriced cable TV. 500 channels and they are all
crap.
If anyone in the media could forecast elections (DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN, AGAIN!) - they have
been forecasting the end of Trump's campaign for over a year.
With markets all but disabled from inept central planning, Mish hasn't been able to talk about
economics in a long time. Unfortunately, he decided to try his hand at driverless cars (which
only work under ideal circumstances, and only when manufacturers "forget" to report accidents).
And now Mish is just parroting really bad media nonsense.
Mish's own polling posts show Trump is very much in the race. Hilary is out campaigning and
soliciting bribes (campaign contributions isn't fooling anyone) as though her career depends on
it - because her crime syndicate knows it is far from over.
No one believes or ever did believe that Trump is a saint. A giant ego, a giant hair pile,
a real estate empire that depends on cheap borrowing, two wildly popular TV shows (Miss universe
and Celeb Apprentice) that aren't exactly "high society".
Of course Trump will wreck Washington DC. That is the point. Of course Paul Ryan hates
voters as much as Nancy Pelosi and Obama and McCain do - our public servants have made their hatred
of the public quite clear.
Whether its ObamaCare, obeying illegal searches, lopsided prosecutions, or just plain arrogance
and greed - Washington DC doesn't eat its own cooking.
That is why "Trump" will win.
The federal government will be severely cash constrained for decades to come no matter who
wins. Anyone who can read the GAO reports on Medicare and Obamacare knows that.
Only a fool believes a parasite (government) can grow faster than its host (the tax base).
CJ
October 11, 2016 11:57:45 at 11:57 PM Believe it or not, Hillary started out as a conservative
republican. At age 13 she canvassed for Nixon in Chicago in the 1960 election and saw vote fraud
firsthand (seems to have made an impression!). In '64 she campaigned for Goldwater! Then in '65
she went to college and started drifting to the left. Her senior thesis was about Saul Alinsky.
Enrolling at Yale in '69 she met Bill Clinton and joined the Dark Side.
Jon Sellers
October 12, 2016 12:16:21 at 12:16 PM Clinton is still the Republican candidate. She is
certainly to the right of Nixon or Eisenhower. Pro big business, pro free trade, pro immigration,
pro defense spending. The only non-alignment is with the Christian-right. But they were just a
play thing for votes by the GOP anyway.
October 12, 2016 12:52:08 at 12:52 AM The thing about Trump is that he hasn't got a plan.
Lowering taxes and spending more on defense is not a plan. Saying you will do better deals is
not a plan.
Voters are just hoping that once he was in he would achieve things but really we don't know what
he will do.
Clinton is conservative and will retain the status quo. Hope she proves me wrong.
I voted for Trump in the GOP primary. Since then, he has said and done too much [or too little]
and lost my vote in the general election. He was terrible in the first debate. His Arizona immigration
speech was great. But he really lost me when he degenerated into pandering to every minority
race, religion and special interest group that yelled the loudest… just like all the other politicians.
And the most recent revelation about his vulgar views of women didn't help either. Nothing to
love there.
Yet you say the media didn't destroy him? His lack of preparation for the first debate destroyed
him?
Never mind preparing for a biased moderator, accepting the conditions of such a debate
at all makes him look like failed leadership. He could have demanded better conditions, especially
if he were slightly ahead as he may have been at the time.
"This battle is really the PEOPLE v CAPITOL HILL. It is a shame it has to be Trump leading
the charge." – But then someone is leading.
"This is also the end of the press. They have lost all credibility." – I am sure by now the bias
is obvious to anyone. This should also aid Trump IMHO.
"About 99% of donations to Trump come from small people" – These small people are definitely going
to vote for him. Also there could be equal number who did not donate but will be voting for him.
I am not sure whether he will win but this is one election where people are likely to try and
land a good punch on the establishment's face and this definitely should work in his favor.
KPL
October 12, 2016 3:34:50 at 3:34 AM One more thing that struck me was that if the election
was in the bag why would they release the tape? They might as well be preparing for the coronation.
IMO, the establishment is still running scared and thus using all the dirty tricks that
they are capable of and which they think will win them the election. The crux of the issue is
that they do not want to acknowledge that people might prefer a discredited Trump to the establishment
at this stage of the game. Establishment is the problem but they are masquerading as the solution.
This is the problem with gaming people. At some point the game is up. (Like interest rates..
you cannot ram it beyond a point)
Exactly. And why release polls with a so called 11% lead, polls conducted by a company
connected to Clinton? That has an overweight in left/democratic voters?
Brexit was supposed to be over before the final result came in. How quickly people forget.
It is the people vs Wall Street/corrupt politicians. The latter is represented by Clinton. the
former by Trump. We will see how angry the U.S. people really are at the current clique of career
politicians, bought and paid for by the big companies.
Roger
October 12, 2016 6:11:52 at 6:11 AM Why indeed would they send out Obama only yesterday
to wag his finger in dire warning? The powers to be know it's NOT all over. The problem is that
each time they send one of these 'asshat extrodinaires' out To preach to the public they simply
cause MORE dissent, more mocking, and more retrenchment.
Does anyone actually think that Obama, who has done more to divide the nation than anyone
can make the blindest bit of difference at this stage? Respectfully, a curious Englishman.
Roger
October 12, 2016 6:24:24 at 6:24 AM PS! It's not as though Obama has anything better to
do with his time, is it? Enjoy 18 holes of golf, or go out campaigning for a woman he (allegedly)
loathes and despises. Tough call, that one!
KPL
October 12, 2016 7:33:51 at 7:33 AM "We will see how angry the U.S. people really are
at the current clique of career politicians, bought and paid for by the big companies."
I hope they are angry enough to come and vote for him in such numbers that it assures a
Trump victory. Anybody but establishment is all I ask! What is happening is too nauseating to
stomach any longer.
CJ
October 12, 2016 10:48:49 at 10:48 AM Unfortunately Gary Johnson will split the anti-establishment
vote, helping to elect the Soros and banksters funded candidate.
JP
October 12, 2016 5:39:33 at 5:39 AM The problem with "voting your conscious" (Libertarian,
etc.) is you'll put Crooked Hillary in the Whitehouse. How bad could that be for the country?
Watch the video:
If Rotten Clinton is elected it's time to move to Italy or another Banana Republic. At least
the food is good and the citizens less ignorant.
Stockmarket
October 12, 2016 5:50:45 at 5:50 AM "I would not go so far as to say the markets will "crash",
but that depends on the definition. I actually suspect more like a 40-50% decline over seven to
ten years with nothing much worse than a 15-20% decline."
So you expect that rates on government bonds will drop to, let's say minus 3%? Minus 5%? Minus
10%? Why don't you show a historical graph of bonds vs stocks? Then you will see that stocks have
never been cheaper relative to bonds since….. WWII! The crash will be in bonds, not stocks. Furthermore,
capital from Europe will flow to the dollar, adding to a RISE in the stock market.
You make the crucial mistake to view the stock market in isolation. If big capital has to make
a decision to go for negative rates in bonds, or 3%-5% on blue chip stocks, what will they choose?
It is the bond market that is reaching the limit of 0% interest rates, after which there is only
one possibility for bonds to go: down.
Hence we will get a run up for the stock market first, with Dow at least 22,000-23,000. If
we exceed that, 30,000 – 35,000 becomes possible. Only THEN do we have a bubble and a crash. Big
money all over the world will scramble to buy the dollar and U.S. assets. A capital flow you also
don't see coming, because you only look at the domestic picture.
EVERYBODY is negative about stocks. And the majority is running to bonds. It is clear where
the bubble is going to be first. The majority is ALWAYS wrong.
Stockmarket
October 12, 2016 5:55:39 at 5:55 AM I don't think it is over yet. Just as with Brexit. The
polls giving Clinton a 11% lead, are seriously flawed. You can read it over here:
Thus what the media are telling you, is that there is a 11% lead. But those polls were held
by a company that is actually helping Clinton to get elected:
Zerohedge is correct: this is a mind game to make you think it is all over.
Tuberville
October 12, 2016 5:57:23 at 5:57 AM We had the same comments during Brexit, I waited for the
price to get upto 6/1 and took the price and I will do the same with Trump. Never forget the global
trends
Garry Gentry
October 12, 2016 6:07:38 at 6:07 AM Mish. hopefully after the election you can go back to
writing about economics instead of cheer-leading for Trump and Republicans in general. Reading
your economic writings is why I started reading your blog and I will be glad when this one is
over for a while and the Republicans can get on with obstructing everything and keep the gridlock
going until people are so feed-up they rebel.
Felix
October 12, 2016 6:17:24 at 6:17 AM Did anyone else get the feeling the 2nd debate was "Brought
to you by Facebook, the leading social network?" Lots of band plugs. Rather like modern news articles
filled with images of Tweets.
October 12, 2016 6:42:45 at 6:42 AM Trump was grossly unprepared for the first debate, "I'm
a great negotiator" isn't the correct answer to every question.
Instead of becoming more presidential as the campaign progressed he became more reality TV.
The digression into Trump vs Clinton pussy scores was lethal.
Hillary has a ton of political flaws and Trump didn't do his homework to inform the voters.
There is a huge disconnect between the RNC and Repub voters, the RNC acts like they're entitled
to veto power over the people's choice, once the unwashed masses chose Trump the RNC needed to
support him completely. If there's a congressional blowout they deserve it.
The silver lining is that Hillary isn't healthy enough for two terms, maybe not even one. The
bad news is that she'll probably continue/accelerate the pattern of Bush/Obama neo colonial wars.
PS The wildcard is a major mohammedan attack prior to the election. The Russians always had
General Winter to aid them, Trump has General Isis
R G
October 12, 2016 10:06:54 at 10:06 AM In all fairness, I don't think a terror attack will
change Americans' minds for more than a week. Look at Clinton…even one vote for her shows you
how grossly lost America is. She has overtly committed more crimes than any high level politician
in American history. Nixon, Grant, and Harding look like Marcus Aurelius when compared to her.
The most recent Wikileaks show you she wants no more America based on her views of borders
and markets…if you have open borders and markets, you have no nation-state. Her views of "irredeemables"
and her spokesman's views of Catholics are just more examples. I could write a book on this witch.
And yet people would vote for her. The unfortunate circumstance of that is that if she gets
in, it won't be just them glowing green.
CJ
October 12, 2016 11:09:16 at 11:09 AM I have found that many Generation Y types (born '77-'94)
have no clues about all the Clinton's lies and scandals. They weren't watching politics when much
of it happened. They are being misled by the MSM propaganda. When you have a chance, please educate
them, they are a big voting block now.
As for Hillary's health, keep in mind that Wilson and FDR were incapable of carrying out the duties
of president before their terms ended. In FDR's case, he was severely disabled even during his
last campaign in '44. They used the war as an excuse for not campaigning. However these issues
were kept secret from the public, and spouses and aides pretty much ran the country. I could see
the same thing happening with Hillary. It may have already begun.
teapartydoc
October 12, 2016 6:51:31 at 6:51 AM You are a handy source of information that many of us
otherwise would not have easy access to. If someone else did the job as well, you would be disposable.
I will continue to visit this site, but I think you are a political idiot.
October 12, 2016 8:49:10 at 8:49 AM Trump did indeed lose the election but not because he
failed to come up with snappy responses in the debates. He lost the election because he captured
one group of voters, those who have drunk the Hillary is the sum of all evil kool-aide. Instead
of backing down from that and moving into the space where he could accumulate voters who have
not geeked out on Obama/Clinton conspiracy trivia, he choose to double down.
And he did so because his character weakness is obvious to almost everyone who watches him
for an extended period of time. His absurdly inflated ego will not accept any criticism, any change,
and openness to collect facts and evaluate what should be done rather than deciding what should
be done and then making up the facts that support that.
Bashing Hillary over her marriage isn't flying now and wouldn't have flown better in the debates.
To those not in the conspiracy geek band wagon, what does that look like? "You're a bad person
for having a husband who had affairs, so voters should support me since I have affairs" Yea that
really worked well. 'Doubling down' just looks pathetic, like an aging rock star releasing new
songs that are just variations on the old hit song the guy had in the 80's.
The captured pollsters are like the credit rating agencies during the financial crisis. They
are putting a AAA-rating on a pile of dog crap. Buy it at your own risk.
Just as I have done with Trump, I am not going to judge you Mish on one bad call, but please
re-think your position. You are way too smart to come to your conclusion. The other smart people
coming to your decision are either 'useful idiots' or are establishment hacks, who benefit some
way from selling their soul.
I don't know about people like Stockman, Jim Rickards, Paul Craig Roberts, Jim Sinclair, and
other seamingly well intention fellows, who accurately descibe the problems, but get the solution
and markets reaction wrong. Are they just US-centric in their analysis, disregarding the overwhelming
influence of global capital flows, or is it as simple as them being gold bugs, who always say
" buy, buy, buy", say good by to your hard earned money?
Tony Bennett
October 12, 2016 9:21:01 at 9:21 AM Virginia's last governor's race (2013) was between Ken
Cuccinelli (wayy right social conservative) and Clintons' best bud Terry McAuliffe .
Virginia used to be red and has turned blue the past 10 to 12 years. Well, Cuccinelli way behind
in the polls all along. So much so that RNC wasted no money (yeah yeah social conservative … but
off year election and not much else going on … and if you can score a win helps Republicans going
into 2014 election season) on him. Guess what? Cuccinnelli lost by only 2.5 points … and McAuliffe
got less than 50% of the vote. ANY sort of help from national party and KC might have won.
Just don't trust polls. Just another data point to be goal seeked by TPTB (see the embarrassing
methodology on the nbc/wsj poll post second debate).
October 12, 2016 12:20:50 at 12:20 PM "The captured pollsters are like the credit rating agencies
during the financial crisis. They are putting a AAA-rating on a pile of dog crap. Buy it at your
own risk."
Only internet commentators are more protected from bad calls than rating agencies.
Let's recall it wasn't too long ago a certain chap around here was hawking a theory that Hillary
is in late stage Parkinson's disease. No doubt when Trump loses the election, those here telling
us the polls are rigged will disappear from accountability until the next big election rolls around.
When did the democratic party ever denounce John Kennedy?
When did the democratic party ever denounce Bill Clinton?
Joy Bahar just called one of Bill's victims a tramp, on The View.
Democrats have a double standard.
Polls are over sampling democrats, to skew the data. Polling fraud.
Why is there any need for polling fraud, if people have actually changed their vote?
They have all been out to get Trump, from the beginning. The government, the media, even the
republican party elitists.
Hardly any one in the media is talking about Venezuela. Given all of the other issues that
you touch on, would you keep us up to date on how things are evolving in Venezuela. Thanks,
Trump makes Venezuela great again and it becomes the next world power.
Seenitallbefore
October 12, 2016 10:56:40 at 10:56 AM This is not a vote for election. It is a vote against
election. Any vote other than trump is a vote for Hillary. Now I know how hitler got into power,
he run against a failed establishment. Luckily we have trump instead of hitler. If we don't turn
this around in a few elections, a hitler type will rise to power in America. Remember this is
a country who rounded up,and jailed an entire race of people at the start of WWII. It could happen
again when the final dictator emerges who crushes the constitution once and for all.
That is a very reasonable point of view. Is Trump more of an anti-establishment candidate than
Johnson?
CJ
October 12, 2016 1:42:09 at 1:42 PM "Is Trump more of an anti-establishment candidate than
Johnson?" If you rate the answer to that interesting question by how many establishment people
are bashing Johnson or Trump, Donald wins the anti-establishment rating by a landslide.
October 12, 2016 11:12:03 at 11:12 AM Slip-ups happen. You don't really think Obama thought
there were 57 states, do you? When you're campaigning 20 hours a day, it's bound to happen.
Well that would have been another obvious lie, since he was on the record multiple times saying
he didn't believe it was genuine.
Trump tweeted in August 2012 that "An 'extremely credible source' has called my office and
told me that Barack Obama's birth certificate is a fraud." In September of that year, Trump shared
via Twitter an article claiming the birth certificate was fake. In a June 2014 tweet, Trump boasted,
"I was the one who got Obama to release his birth certificate, or whatever that was!" And in 2013
he retweeted someone who alleged the long-form birth certificate was "a computer generated forgery."
October 12, 2016 11:55:00 at 11:55 AM OK – I changed my mind once I was convinced the birth
certificate was real.
There are easy alternatives to not look like a fool.
Bobby Hill
October 12, 2016 1:07:57 at 1:07 PM "How amazing, the State Health Director who verified copies
of Obama's "birth certificate" died in plane crash today. All others lived"
- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 12, 2013
Trump should have simply leveled with us by quoting Goebbels,"It would not be impossible to
prove with sufficient repetition and a psychological understanding of the people concerned that
a square is in fact a circle."
Mike
October 12, 2016 11:56:28 at 11:56 AM Doesn't matter which of the two wins if the bank's war
on the majority and pension plans continues regardless. Perhaps the libertarians will protect
us.
Gutsy call on coming out with your personal vote. You'll probably lose half of your readership.
People have become so wildly caught up with the day to day b.s. of the federal government that
their entire world-view and personal self-esteem are on the line. It's a tragedy.
Anyhow, my neighborhood now has 3 Trump signs, 2 Johnson signs, and 0 Clinton signs.
For those who might have a Biblical prophecy perspective… Trump may symbolize the "last trump"
that occurs when the power of the holy people is totally broken [Daniel 12:7] and heralds the
resurrection of the dead [1 Corinthians 15:52.]
Bobby Hill
October 12, 2016 12:39:24 at 12:39 PM "Heading into the first debate, it was Trump's election
to lose … ." I disagree. It has always been HRC's election to lose. Trump was never ahead. Sure,
he was gaining on her, but to say that he could actually have overtaken her but for this mistake
or that miscalculation is hyper-speculative. Clinton had not and has not even unleashed her GOTV
ops.
Trump has a ceiling of support, not much greater than his share of the primary electorate.
Peak Trump was right before the debate. Peak Hillary hasn't arrived. Her final assault armada
hasn't even landed.
Johnson is the best candidate. But he gets my vote only if the polls show HRC is 100% safe.
Trump is worse than Johnson is good. I'd consider writing-in Mish or Rand Paul, but again, only
if there is zero chance of Trump. NeverTrump
Bobby Hill
October 12, 2016 12:50:28 at 12:50 PM "Heading into the first debate, it was Trump's election
to lose … ." I disagree. It has always been HRC's election to lose. Trump was never ahead. Sure,
he was gaining on her, but to say that he could actually have overtaken her but for this mistake
or that miscalculation is hyper-speculative.
Trump has a ceiling of support, not much greater than his share of the Republican primary electorate.
Peak Trump was right before the debate. Peak Hillary hasn't arrived. Her final assault armada
(GOTV operations) hasn't even landed.
I agree that Johnson is the best candidate. But he gets my vote only if the polls show HRC
is 100% safe. Trump is worse than Johnson is good. I'd consider writing-in Mish or Rand Paul,
but again, only if there is zero chance of Trump. Mish is better than Paul on war and peace. Main
reservation on Mish for President is immigration, and refugees.
NeverTrump
October 12, 2016 2:20:48 at 2:20 PM Bill Clinton, serial philanderer and alleged rapist. Impeached
as prez, but not removed from office ("Bad president! Bad!") during his last term. Trump makes
locker room talk, it's the end of the world. Policy specifics don't matter. The entire series
of Clinton scandals, no problem at all. Teflon.
US voters get the results they deserve, simple as that.
October 13, 2016 12:43:58 at 12:43 AM Nigel Farage is a very intelligent and dynamic man.
No teleprompter needed for him! Quite an orator for sure. And quite a fighter. If we had a handful
of Nigel Farage's in the US Congress we could turn the corner and restore America back to the
beautiful, vigorous and envy of the world we once were. But I can't name even one Nigel Farage
that walks the hall of the Nation's Capital Building. We only have puppets driven by power and
money. And that's why we continue in decline mode – sliding down the slippery slope. What a travesty
for our younger and unborn generations.
October 12, 2016 3:26:47 at 3:26 PM I agree with you that Hillary is going to be a disaster.
Its going to be 1 scandal after another. Hillary has more enemies than the republicans…and she
has accumulated them over years.
Trump would not have been a utopia either. The same forces against him in his campaign would be
with him causing scandal for his entire administration.
However, we got more racial, gender, religious, sexual orientation, etc hatred while Obama
/ Clinton have been in office than ever in our history. Obama and Clinton have been using govt
law and victimization for democratic vote farming. People were pleading for Trump to win because
there were large segments of society that have been blamed, demeaned and targeted with massive
vitriol by the left simply for not being a member of their victimized minority (aka non-union,
white, religious, married, mother/father, husband/wife, straight, single gender, etc). Trump speak
was cutting right thru the straight jacket of political correctness, trigger warnings, safe spaces,
cultural Marxism, etc. People called Trump every name in the book and it amounted to nothing.
Trump was like Toto pulling the curtain back and exposing the wizard as a charlatan. Many people
hooked their star to Trump for that single reason.
Hillary said that if Trump wins, that she would use her political office to undermine him into
a failed presidency. I would be very very surprised if Trump goes away and doesn't do the exact
same thing to Hillary. The Trump-Rosie feud lasted what a decade. I think Trump now has a vendetta
against the republican establishment and a vendetta with Hillary. If true, expect the new GOP
to be much much more aggressive…worse than fascist radical democratic leftists. No matter who
wins or loses…its going to stay mean for a decade. Bill Clinton has already lost his legacy by
Hillary running for President…and before its all thru…I think there is going to be a lot more
destroyed on the Clinton side. Chelsea is no Hillary and no Bill Clinton BUT Trump has 3 children
and any one of those 3 could be a presidential contender. You know what happens when a dam cant
hold the water back any longer. what do you think will happen when the Clintons don't have the
money or power to deflect their crimes. do you think they will fade away into retirement or do
you think the wolves will circle. Before Trump, they would have faded into retirement. Now, I
think the wolves will circle them.
DFC
October 12, 2016 3:28:36 at 3:28 PM Hi Mish,
Our knowledge of what's happening in the electorate is imperfect. We can't make easy judgments
about this election based on available data. BUT, we do now know that the " elitist establishment'
has taken over large swaths of our government, media and popular culture for its own narrow and
largely selfish benefits. Our best bet is to vote for an anti-establishment candidate that has
a shot at making changes and providing a future where the electorate's influence can grow, not
shrink. That is still Donald Trump and, yes, there is still some doubt about how anti-establishment
he is. It's not a perfect world and we often have to make choices that are far from optimal or
certain. This election is one such example.
I urge you to reconsider.
Dave
October 12, 2016 11:15:35 at 11:15 PM I may indeed reconsider
But it will not matter. My personal vote is meaningless.
I was very upset at Trump following the first debate. It is clear he did not bother to prepare
for it.
Nadda. Not at all.
He could have won this thing. Easily. All he had to do was act presidential for 90 minutes, and
prepare for some obvious questions.
He did neither. Now it is all but over.
While we do not "know" what will happen, Hillary could have a massive medical attack for example.
But I do think for the first time all in 18 months Silver has the odds about right. They stand
today at 13% or so.
Yes, I am bitter over this. It was only at the last second I wrote I was voting for Johnson. I
do not remember precisely, but I may have even done it as an edit after I made the post.
Note to self, do not write when you are angry.
Mish
DFC
October 13, 2016 11:35:43 at 11:35 AM Thanks Mish – we are all frustrated. And I suspect that
will only get worse after 11/8 no matter who wins. But nothing gets us more frustrated than witnessing
the array of forces lines up against Trump. Particularly the media which has long been held up
as a centerpiece of liberty in America. No longer, their ethics have been laid bare for all to
see….. I for one believe that this race is much closer than the establishment would have us believe
– yes, even with Trump's warts and foibles. In large measure this is a reaction to the overplayed
hand in the media. Americans are fundamentally a fair people who love the underdog – even more
so if he is bullied. On that basis alone Trump enjoys widespread support IMHO. And it may be growing.
We won't know for sure until 11/9 as there is so little public trust left in the American media.
Pravda must be proud.
Dave
Mish always seem like a down-to-earth, sensible and logical communicator of the news.
Then he wrote this.
The media has treated Hillary and Bill with kid gloves and lambasted Trump for the smallest
of things from the very start. The media is tremendously influential over public opinion. This
election was fixed by the establishment. And the media are card carrying members of the establishment.
For Mish not to see that is willful blindness.
Then to add insult to injury – he says he's going to vote for Gary Johnson, the GOP retread
who endorses illegal immigration and told us no crimes were committed on Wall Street.
Sorry, Mish. I can't take you seriously anymore, sir. You've stepped over the line.
There's no possible way that Trump can fight all of them off.
The entire thing was fixed, start to finish.
Apparently Mish can't see that.
Now I've lost faith in him too.
CJ
October 12, 2016 4:45:21 at 4:45 PM Don't give up on Mish just yet LF, he hasn't voted yet
and I don't think he is firmly committed to his (this week's) position.
;Winston
October 12, 2016 6:42:29 at 6:42 PM As pointed out elsewhere, there were some big names who
communicated with her via emails to and from her unauthorized, unsecured server. One of them was
the POTUS. There be why there was no prosecution or even what was claimed as the unanimous FBI
and lawyer opinion according to that Fox article that her security clearance be pulled, something
which would have made her ineligible to serve at any decent level in government.
David
October 12, 2016 5:06:24 at 5:06 PM Mish, I've followed your blog for many years. Did I or
any of your blg followers ever say. "Hey. Mish was wrong about calling the top or the bottom in
anything. So therefore I will no longer follow him." You are too smart to see the obvious, have
you been at the rallies of Trump and compated them to Hillary's? Well, there's something an analyst
geek can't measure. it's called. PASSION! Go Trump!
Carl R
October 12, 2016 7:35:34 at 7:35 PM Going back to the primary, Mish predicted that Trump was
the only Republican who could win. I predicted that Trump could lose badly enough to cost both
the House and Senate as well as a number of states. I hope I'm wrong. I don't fear a Hillary presidency
so long as she doesn't control Congress, too.
October 12, 2016 7:57:13 at 7:57 PM You really don't get it, do you? Hillary is the the establishment
and CONgress is too. Look how much damage Obama did with a Republican Congress. It's the establishment
(D's, R's, the mainstream media, the military and healthcare industrial complexes, etc.), versus
the rest of us.
October 12, 2016 8:08:37 at 8:08 PM Not to mention decades and possibly permanent damage by
SCOTUS.
Sheep do not lament their lost freedoms as long a feeding time is reliable.
LFOldTimer
October 12, 2016 9:35:16 at 9:35 PM You're forgetting the fact that the next President will
likely appoint 4 Supreme Court Justices. We know SCJ's vote down ideological lines. The law be
damned. And those appointments could live another 20-30 years. It will be an overwhelmingly LIBERAL
SCOTUS.
If that happens all of us and our kids are screwed, blued and tattooed.
And if that happens you won't recognize this country in 20 years. We'll be a socialist hellhole
full of indigent illiterates from 3rd world nations.
Anybody with any aspirations in life will have an albatross tied around their necks. For every
dollar you earn the government will get 70 cents of it.
What you are watching is the continued DECLINE of an empire. And Hillary will only accelerate
that DECLINE.
Sorry, Carl R. Your theory is greatly flawed.
Carl R
October 13, 2016 12:36:12 at 12:36 PM My "best possible outcome" for this election is a Hillary
win, along with Republicans continuing to hold congress. Yes, there are problems with that outcome,
the the other possible outcomes are much worse. As far as the Supreme Court, Hillary would make
it more liberal, but her choices would be tempered by the need to get them by a Republican Senate.
If Hillary wins, and also wins the Senate, just think then how liberal her appointees will be?
Just think how many more crazy things she can get pushed through than Obama ever was able to.
Yes, the Republican Congress sucked, and didn't limit him as much as they should have, but they
did limit him.
The worst alternative is for Trump to completely divide and destroy the Republican party, which
I think is his true agenda. The result will be a repeat of the 30s and 40s, with Republicans being
irrelevant.
But you've missed an obvious weakness in your argument.
We have a Republican majority House and Senate now. Have they protected us from Obama? The
answer to that is "no". Obama got all his budget increases, debt ceiling increases, no realistic
pushback on Obamacare (when the Republicans had that opportunity), illegals continue to pour over
the border forcing innocent American to pay for them, the top Republicans support Obama's push
for TPP sending millions of more US jobs to the third world and allowing more foreigners to come
to America to steal ours, etc….
So if Hillary is elected it will be another replay. Every time the budget issue comes up the
GOP will use the excuse that we can't shut down the government because it will hurt the reputations
of the conservatives. So we can't win for losing, Carl R.
With Trump in the oval office we would have a veto vote. And he would NOT hesitate to use it
and his executive orders to start enforcing the damn laws again!!!
So while I appreciate your articulate response – I don't agree with it. If Hillary makes it
into the White House this nation is done. It is the end of America as we've know it. More government
control. Less for the ordinary citizens. More for the pigs who run the show.
No doubt you love your sons. And I'm sure that they are productive and valued citizens. Hillary
in the White House would ruin their lives prematurely. Please keep that in mind.
Of course. We all know that the US is in decline, and can not be saved. Once the limitations
on the Federal Government were removed (1913 – Enactment of 16th Amendment, 1913 – Creation of
the Federal Reserve, 1937 – FDR Court Packing plan), the end of the US has been inescapable. That's
proven by history. Nevertheless, the decline will be much faster with Hillary in power, and with
a Democratic Congress along with her. Just remember the irreparable damage that FDR and LBJ (Great
Society) were able to do, and contrast that with the 90's under Bill Clinton.
Obama, unfortunately, only had to deal with the feckless Boehner, rather that Newt Gingrich,
and was able to do more things than he should have been able to, but even a Boehner led Congress
slowed him down quite a bit. With all the other limitations gone (the Federal Government now has
the power to tax, spend, and print money), the separation of powers is all that's left, and it
is only a delaying tactic, slowly the inevitable collapse somewhat.
I have told my sons since they were born that they will live to see the end of the United States
as we know it, and that I may very well live long enough, too. I'm 62. I have predicted that we
will get through this economic downturn, but not the next one. Thus I expect the end in 2037 or
so, which I may live to see. If the US makes it one more cycle after that, I'll be gone, however.
Lest we think that the end of the US is some great tragedy, yes, it is sad for those that follow
us, but it is unavoidable. Even our founding fathers knew that a Republic was only a temporary
form of government. We should consider ourselves lucky that we lived in such a wonderful time.
I don't begrudge those who dream that they can stop the inevitable. It's a noble goal, and
I admire you for your goal. To me, however, it's as futile as tilting at windmills.
The rabbit hole goes even deeper and darker. T Roosevelt and Taft administrations teamed up
with Russian revolutionaries to undermine Russia's Tsar. In his April 1917 war speech to congress,
Wilson said the Russian revolutionaries [who weeks before had forced the Tsar to abdicate and
destroyed the Russian empire] were America's "partner." A few months later the Bolsheviks continued
the revolution to its horrific end.
October 12, 2016 7:54:34 at 7:54 PM I find this post to be very disappointing. It is worth
watching the PBS Frontline episode that aired yesterday
http://www.pbs.org/video/2365861606/
that shows just how inept this administration has been in the Middle East. Now you want to
vote for someone who doesn't even know what Aleppo is, over a wise and decisive leader.
Mish, your post is typical of the Boomer mentality that knows what is right, yet is weak enough
not to choose it. You'd rather carry on about the end of the world than do anything to really
change things. I once regarded you as a source of wisdom, yet now can't help but see an old crank.
October 12, 2016 8:07:56 at 8:07 PM Mish – I do want to thank you for your tolerance. There
are MANY sites that "moderate" comments, giving the host the opportunity to not post comments
they don't like. Other sites actually ban people that have a point of view and evidence that conflicts
with their beliefs and biases.
Eric Coote
October 12, 2016 9:36:51 at 9:36 PM Blacklist I support your comment. Also this site is reasonably
restrained and has not degenerated into rank abuse like happens on zero hedge sometimes. Mish
does a good job of bringing facts to attention of all even if we don't all agree with him
LFOldTimer
October 12, 2016 10:53:56 at 10:53 PM The primaries and this presidential runoff should have
taught an observer with working neurological synapses that your vote has been discounted and devalued
down to virtually nothing.
There's a small group of power brokers in the back room pulling the strings and deciding where
your vote will go.
The trick was to get you so disgusted with Trump that you would change your mind and waste
your vote on some goofball who didn't even know what "Allepo" is. And they've been successful
in many cases.
Trump was the first (and likely the last) candidate in many decades who wasn't formed and molded
by the corrupted establishment to ensure the status quo is strictly followed. And they've stepped
on the accelerator with a huge push for centralized globalization that is the main ingredient
for the New World Order and One-World Government.
Trump never had a chance from the beginning. Until you realize that you've missed the entire
point.
If you look around at the events occurring around the world and can't see what's coming get
your vision checked. It's as obvious as the nose on your face.
Trump was not in that plan. So he's been eliminated.
Hillary was selected President well over 2 years ago. You're just finding that out now.
Sure, they'll blame the Russians for it even without a scintilla of evidence.and it'll cause
an international incident. Maybe even halt the elections. Who knows?
Putin's the kind of guy who'll say "bring it on".
I don't think Obama has the nads – to be quite honest.
This could get interesting.
Don't leave the theater quite yet.
Sam Stovall
October 13, 2016 12:48:24 at 12:48 AM if you vote Johnson, in effect you are voting for crooked
and corrupt Hillary. If you do not understand that, you are dumber than my Lhasa Apso.
October 13, 2016 12:51:28 at 12:51 AM Don't be delusional. A vote for Johnson is a vote for
Johnson because the election is effectively over.
The only question left at this point is: Which is the bigger protest vote?
Mish
R G
October 13, 2016 8:27:11 at 8:27 AM Mish, it sounds like you're climbing a wall of worry.
Buy low, sell high. I agree that it appears there is nothing Trump can do to get elected in this
system. It doesn't matter what he would or would not have said. There is too much at stake for
the establishment to allow it. If it wasn't the latest nonsense which is so clearly a hatchet
job, it would have been something else.
A vote diverted away from Trump is effectively a vote for Hillary.
This isn't over until the fat lady sings.
Anything could happen between now and Nov 08. Particularly with all those bleached emails floating
around somewhere in cyberspace.
With all due respect, Mish….I believe claiming it's effectively over on Oct 12 is delusional.
If Johnson wasn't such an assclown I would halfway comprehend your position.
I simply don't understand your reasoning, Sir.
I have to be honest.
JayTe
October 13, 2016 4:47:41 at 4:47 AM Mish, You're not even close to correct. The establishment
is panicked. The locker room talk is a minor issue. You seem to have a short memory because I
remember another candidate who was accused of cheating on his wife (who is now running for president)
during the campaign who still won the election. And now you're saying that a candidate caught
talking trash in private about women cannot win the election?!?
Since the establishment know that there will be a steady stream of disclosures on Hilary up
to election day, there are looking high and low on anything that they can find to compromise Trump.
They even descended to putting out overtly biased polls saying Hilary now has a wide lead by a
Clinton operative who works for a Clinton Superpac where the selection processed was already biased
towards Democrats by 7% before the question of who they were voting for was even asked! And it's
given a veneer of acceptability by NBC and the Wall Street Journal. What you fail to grasp is
that large parts of the population are not going to come out and say anything in public about
who they really support. But you will discover who they really support (Trump) on election day.
That's why the establishment (Democrats and Republicans, the media, the intelligence services
who issue completely bogus statements about Russia being behind the hacks when they know very
well from the tools NSA talked about by Edward Snowden, etc) is going full tilt to get him to
drop out. Because otherwise they will be forced to stoop to open rigging of the election in order
to get Clinton into power. And if that happens, you will see open revolt.
Finally as concerns David Stockman, I respect him but is from time to time completely off in
terms of his opinions. A couple of weeks ago, he made the statement that the US infrastructure
was absolutely fine despite the fact that the American Society of Civil Engineers had given a
D grade about the USA's Infrastructure.
R G
October 13, 2016 8:10:39 at 8:10 AM Certain Russian politicians, no matter how bombastic they
are, are hinting toward what to expect in that Hillary may be our last POTUS if she were elected.
My caveats would be:
– Hillary would be the last woman POTUS just as Obama was likely the last black POTUS, fortunate
or unfortunate as that may be. Both Obama and Clinton have permanently tarnished even the consideration
of a future woman or minority POTUS for at least a generation. They would have been by far the
worst two POTUSes in American history. And that is saying something, because Twiggy was horrific.
Demographic trend won't make my caveat any less likely, because…
– Clinton as POTUS will either foment nuclear war, secession, or both. It should be obvious to
any discerning viewer that America like all "diverse" nations is ungovernable. Nation-states survive
and thrive based on conformity, common language, and common culture. When you have entire states
(CA) whose culture and language are not the foundational culture and language, regardless of official
language status, you have problems. It's like the Tower of Babel.
Such is the nature of history. It's cyclical like any good historian will attest to.
The more I think about it, I'm torn. In a warped way I am hoping for a Clinton Presidency.
Anything she does will be ultimately rendered null and void if my reasoning above pans out. And,
given the macroeconomic indicators, we shall know pretty doggone soon. We could get it over with
in a couple of years.
But on the flipside, what would fill that power vacuum? History teaches us that a Washington
is much, much less likely than a Napolean. That scares me.
CJ
October 13, 2016 9:55:20 at 9:55 AM I saw a study that found that if only women voted, Clinton
would win in a landslide. But if only men voted, Trump would win in a landslide. The women may
get what they want – the first woman president, but they may come to regret what they wished for.
Clinton being Clinton, it will be 4 years of scandals and investigations, and she will be blamed
for the inevitable economic failure. Add to that her dismal record of foreign policy failure.
Hillary will be the worst thing that ever happened to the Women's Movement.
I would never vote for a woman president. In the Bible, women rulers are a form of national
punishment. I prefer going back in time when only White male landowners could vote. Now that is
really un-PC, considering I am a woman.
I am totally serious. If you think I would run for president, you missed my point.
From an historical perspective, women voting is a recent travesty as are the majority of women
who have sacrificed family [allowing institutions to raise their children] to be in the workplace.
Many of these women prefer to be homemakers and be at home with their babies. But they are forced
to work because TPTB have destroyed society and the economy.
AS HE IS A FAMOUS INVESTMENT ADVISOR HE HAS A LONG EXPERIENCE AND KNOWLEDGE OF THE FINANCIAL
MARKETS SO HE COULD IMPLEMENT GOOD APPROPRIATE ECONOMIC REFORMS IN ORDER TO BOOST AMERICAN GROWTH
AND THE STXX MARKETS
Trump did a great job attacking Hillary in his West Palm Beach, Florida speech today… it is
well worth watching.
LFOldTimer
October 13, 2016 2:21:05 at 2:21 PM Now the women are coming out of the woodwork accusing
Trump of sexually assaulting them 20-30 years ago. The NY Times is having a field day.
Isn't it strange that none of these women apparently filed police reports?
If I were a woman and some guy started grabbing my breasts and trying to put his hand up my
skirt I wouldn't be able to call 911 fast enough – whether it happened today or in 1975.
Just the fact that these stories get legs should tell anyone with any intelligence that the
media is crooked and trying to throw the election.
They are maliciously interfering with the electoral process by floating these stories. IMO
there should be a law against it. It damages whatever sanctity remains in the electoral system
– which is supposed to be above reproach.
economicsjunkie
October 13, 2016 3:11:05 at 3:11 PM Trump's already threatened to sue them. He'll come out
confident and honest and the media as the usual crooked lying pieces of trash they are. It'll
only help him.
Below is a link to a video and transcript of Trump's great speech today in West Palm Beach,
Florida. I thought I remember hearing him also say the word, cabal… but maybe that was just wishful
thinking.
Liberal globalists are having a hissy-fit over Trump's speech.. they are using the words "bizarre
& frightening". One journalist said "Trump has gone nuts", that he has gone "full Breitbart."
Pi314
October 13, 2016 2:29:56 at 2:29 PM Mish, you may be jumping the gun in this case. I have
mostly ignored all polls except the USC tracking poll for obvious reasons. The USC tracking poll
showed Trump leading by 3.9% pre 1st debate. As of today, Trump leads by 0.1%. So Trump has lost
'merely' 3.8% after the debates and the tape. The poll appears to be trending up in Trump's favor
now. I believe we have seen the worst for Trump. If the rumored release of 33,000 emails is true,
it will have an impact on the poll.
This is a ridiculous election. We are electing president based on one locker room tape over
national issues.
October 13, 2016 6:42:27 at 6:42 PM The obvious reason you ignore all the other polls is that
they don't give the result you want.
This is going to be a massive loss, worse than the one that got Obama elected. If Trump had a
bit more depth (developed policies) and wasn't so lazy (prepared for debates) he could have won
but he is the wrong guy at the right spot in history, Clinton must be the luckiest politician
in US history. Unfortunately. I find all these media blaming a bit pathetic.Mish is right.
Check out this link, very funny take (Clarke and Dawe who Mish has previously published) from
the Australian viewpoint of this election. They are both hopeless candidates. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-10-1
…ace-is/7929574
October 13, 2016 5:34:29 at 5:34 PM The MSM has given 15x as much coverage to Trump's 10 yr
old Locker Room remarks than to emails that prove Hilary is bought and paid for by the people
who crashed our economy.
Shame on the voters if they vote the way teh MSM tells them too. It's no wonder Millenials
have zero trust for the MSM,
"... [Qatar] would like to see WJC 'for five minutes' in NYC, to present $1 million check that Qatar promised for WJC's birthday in 2011," an employee at The Clinton Foundation said to numerous aides, including Doug Brand ..."
"... No doubt! The Clintons sure were working the Haiti angle any way that they could. I wonder how that's playing in Florida? ..."
"[Qatar] would like to see WJC 'for five minutes' in NYC, to present $1 million check that
Qatar promised for WJC's birthday in 2011," an employee at The Clinton Foundation said to numerous
aides, including Doug Brand [isc]. "Qatar would welcome our suggestions for investments in Haiti
- particularly on education and health. They have allocated most of their $20 million but are
happy to consider projects we suggest. I'm collecting input from CF Haiti team."
No doubt! The Clintons sure were working the Haiti angle any way that they could. I wonder how
that's playing in Florida?
"... +A large part of the uproar over the Trump tapes is driven not by the fact that Trump's comments are shocking but because they are so familiar. We've heard similar, perhaps even more rancid, things from our fathers, uncles, brothers, coaches, teachers, pastors, teammates, and friends. Perhaps we've even made similar comments ourselves. Now the public wants to project its own shame onto Trump. His humiliation serves as a kind catharsis for the nation's own systemic sexism. Perhaps NOW will give him a medal one day for his "sacrifice"… ..."
Until a second Hunter Thompson comes along, the appropriately jaded Jeffrey St. Clair will have
to do [
Counterpunch ].
+A large part of the uproar over the Trump tapes is driven not by the fact that Trump's
comments are shocking but because they are so familiar. We've heard similar, perhaps even more
rancid, things from our fathers, uncles, brothers, coaches, teachers, pastors, teammates, and
friends. Perhaps we've even made similar comments ourselves. Now the public wants to project its
own shame onto Trump. His humiliation serves as a kind catharsis for the nation's own systemic
sexism. Perhaps NOW will give him a medal one day for his "sacrifice"…
"... I have never before seen the press take sides like they did this year, openly and even gleefully bad-mouthing candidates who did not meet with their approval. ..."
"... This shocked me when I first noticed it. It felt like the news stories went out of their way to mock Sanders or to twist his words, while the op-ed pages, which of course don't pretend to be balanced, seemed to be of one voice in denouncing my candidate. ..."
"... I propose that we look into this matter methodically, and that we do so by examining Sanders-related opinion columns in a single publication: the Washington Post, ..."
"... its practitioners have never aimed to be nonpartisan. They do not, therefore, show media bias in the traditional sense. But maybe the traditional definition needs to be updated. We live in an era of reflexive opinionating and quasi opinionating, and we derive much of our information about the world from websites that have themselves blurred the distinction between reporting and commentary, or obliterated it completely. ..."
Neoliberal press serves its neoliberal paymasters. As simple of that. There is no even hint of
Us press being press. In certain aspects US jounalists are more "solgers of the Party" then their
colleagues in the Brezhnev time Pravda and Izvesia.
For once, a politician like Sanders seemed to have a chance with the public. He won a
stunning victory over Hillary Clinton in the New Hampshire primary, and despite his
advanced age and avuncular finger-wagging, he was wildly popular among young voters.
Eventually he was flattened by the Clinton juggernaut, of course, but Sanders managed
to stay competitive almost all the way to the California primary in June.
His
chances with the prestige press were considerably more limited. Before we go into
details here, let me confess: I was a Sanders voter, and even interviewed him back in
2014, so perhaps I am naturally inclined to find fault in others' reporting on his
candidacy. Perhaps it was the very particular media diet I was on in early 2016,
which consisted of daily megadoses of the New York Times and the Washington Post and
almost nothing else. Even so,
I have never before seen the press take sides like
they did this year, openly and even gleefully bad-mouthing candidates who did not
meet with their approval.
This shocked me when I first noticed it. It felt like the news stories went
out of their way to mock Sanders or to twist his words, while the op-ed pages, which
of course don't pretend to be balanced, seemed to be of one voice in denouncing my
candidate.
A
New York Times
article greeted the Sanders campaign in
December by announcing that the public had moved away from his signature issue of the
crumbling middle class. "Americans are more anxious about terrorism than income
inequality," the paper declared-nice try, liberal, and thanks for playing. In March,
the
Times
was caught making a number of post-publication tweaks to a news
story about the senator, changing what had been a sunny tale of his legislative
victories into a darker account of his outrageous proposals. When Sanders was finally
defeated in June, the same paper waved him goodbye with a bedtime-for-Grandpa
headline,
hillary
clinton made history, but bernie sanders stubbornly ignored it.
I propose that we look into this matter methodically, and that we do so by
examining Sanders-related opinion columns in a single publication: the
Washington
Post,
the conscience of the nation's political class and one of America's few
remaining first-rate news organizations.
I admire the
Post
's
investigative and beat reporting. What I will focus on here, however, are pieces
published between January and May 2016 on the paper's editorial and op-ed pages, as
well as on its many blogs. Now, editorials and blog posts are obviously not the same
thing as news stories: punditry is my subject here, and
its practitioners have
never aimed to be nonpartisan. They do not, therefore, show media bias in the
traditional sense. But maybe the traditional definition needs to be updated. We live
in an era of reflexive opinionating and quasi opinionating, and we derive much of our
information about the world from websites that have themselves blurred the
distinction between reporting and commentary, or obliterated it completely.
For
many of us, this ungainly hybrid
is
the news. What matters, in any case, is
that all the pieces I review here, whether they appeared in pixels or in print, bear
the imprimatur of the
Washington Post,
the publication that defines the
limits of the permissible in the capital city.
... ... ...
On January 27, with the Iowa caucuses just days away, Dana Milbank nailed it with a
headline:
nominating sanders would be insane
. After promising that he adored the Vermont
senator, he cautioned his readers that "socialists don't win national elections in
the United States." The next day, the paper's editorial board chimed in with
a campaign full of
fiction
, in which they branded Sanders as a kind of flimflam artist: "Mr.
Sanders is not a brave truth-teller. He is a politician selling his own brand of
fiction to a slice of the country that eagerly wants to buy it."
Stung by the
Post
's trolling, Bernie Sanders fired back-which in turn allowed no fewer than
three of the paper's writers to report on the conflict between the candidate and
their employer as a bona fide news item. Sensing weakness, the editorial board came
back the next morning with yet another kidney punch, this one headlined
the real problem
with mr. sanders
. By now, you can guess what that problem was: his ideas
weren't practical, and besides, he still had "no plausible plan for plugging looming
deficits as the population ages."
... ... ...
After the previous week's lesson about Glass
–
Steagall, the editorial board
now instructed politicians to
stop reviling tarp
-i.e.,
the Wall Street bailouts with which the Bush and Obama Administrations tried to halt
the financial crisis. The bailouts had been controversial, the paper acknowledged,
but they were also bipartisan, and opposing or questioning them in the Sanders manner
was hereby declared anathema. After all, the editorial board intoned:
Contrary to much rhetoric, Wall Street banks and bankers still took losses and
suffered upheaval, despite the bailout-but TARP helped limit the collateral damage
that Main Street suffered from all of that. If not for the ingenuity of the
executive branch officials who designed and carried out the program, and the
responsibility of the legislators who approved it, the United States would be in
much worse shape economically.
As a brief history of the financial crisis and the bailout, this is absurd. It is
true that bailing out Wall Street was probably better than doing absolutely nothing,
but saying this ignores the many other options that were available to public
officials had they shown any real ingenuity in holding institutions accountable. All
the Wall Street banks that existed at the time of TARP are flourishing to this day,
since the government moved heaven and earth to spare them the consequences of the
toxic securities they had issued and the lousy mortgage bets they made. The big banks
were "made whole," as the saying goes. Main Street banks, meanwhile, died off by the
hundreds in 2009 and 2010. And average home owners, of course, got no comparable
bailout. Instead, Main Street America saw trillions in household wealth disappear; it
entered into a prolonged recession, with towering unemployment, increasing
inequality, and other effects that linger to this day. There has never been a TARP
for the rest of us.
... ... ...
Charles Krauthammer went into action on January 29, too, cautioning the Democrats that they
"would be risking a November electoral disaster of historic dimensions" should they nominate
Sanders-cynical advice that seems even more poisonous today, as scandal after scandal engulfs the
Democratic candidate that so many Post pundits favored.
... ... ...
The Iowa caucuses came the next day, and Stephen Stromberg was at the keyboard to identify the
"three delusions" that supposedly animated the campaigns of Sanders and the Republican Ted Cruz
alike. Namely: they had abandoned the "center," they believed that things were bad in the United
States, and they perceived an epidemic of corruption-in Sanders's case, corruption via
billionaires and campaign contributions. Delusions all.
... ... ...
On and on it went, for month after month, a steady drumbeat of denunciation. The paper hit
every possible anti-Sanders note, from the driest kind of math-based policy reproach to the
lowest sort of nerd-shaming-from his inexcusable failure to embrace taxes on soda pop to his
awkward gesticulating during a debate with Hillary Clinton ("an unrelenting hand jive," wrote
Post dance critic Sarah L. Kaufman, "that was missing only an upright bass and a plunky piano").
The paper's piling-up of the senator's faults grew increasingly long and complicated. Soon after
Sanders won the New Hampshire primary, the editorial board denounced him and Trump both as
"unacceptable leaders" who proposed "simple-sounding" solutions. Sanders used the plutocracy as a
"convenient scapegoat." He was hostile to nuclear power. He didn't have a specific recipe for
breaking up the big banks. He attacked trade deals with "bogus numbers that defy the overwhelming
consensus among economists." This last charge was a particular favorite of Post pundits: David
Ignatius and Charles Lane both scolded the candidate for putting prosperity at risk by
threatening our trade deals. Meanwhile, Charles Krauthammer grew so despondent over the meager
2016 options that he actually pined for the lost days of the Bill Clinton presidency, when
America was tough on crime, when welfare was being reformed, and when free trade was accorded its
proper respect.
... ... ...
The danger of Trump became an overwhelming fear as primary season drew to a close, and it
redoubled the resentment toward Sanders. By complaining about mistreatment from the Democratic
apparatus, the senator was supposedly weakening the party before its coming showdown with the
billionaire blowhard. This matter, like so many others, found columnists and bloggers and op-ed
panjandrums in solemn agreement. Even Eugene Robinson, who had stayed fairly neutral through most
of the primary season, piled on in a May 20 piece, blaming Sanders and his noisy horde for
"deliberately stoking anger and a sense of grievance-less against Clinton than the party itself,"
actions that "could put Trump in the White House." By then, the paper had buttressed its usual
cast of pundits with heavy hitters from outside its own peculiar ecosystem. In something of a
journalistic coup, the Post opened its blog pages in April to Jeffrey R. Immelt, the CEO of
General Electric, so that he, too, could join in the chorus of denunciation aimed at the senator
from Vermont. Comfort the comfortable, I suppose-and while you're at it, be sure to afflict the
afflicted.
... ... ...
It should be noted that there were some important exceptions to what I have
described. The paper's blogs, for instance, published regular pieces by Sanders
sympathizers like Katrina vanden Heuvel and the cartoonist Tom Toles. (The blogs also
featured the efforts of a few really persistent Clinton haters.) The Sunday Outlook
section once featured a pro-Sanders essay by none other than Ralph Nader, a kind of
demon figure and clay pigeon for many of the paper's commentators. But readers of the
editorial pages had to wait until May 26 to see a really full-throated essay
supporting Sanders's legislative proposals. Penned by Jeffrey Sachs, the eminent
economist and professor at Columbia University, it insisted that virtually all the
previous debate on the subject had been irrelevant, because standard economic models
did not take into account the sort of large-scale reforms that Sanders was
advocating:
It's been decades since the United States had a progressive economic strategy,
and mainstream economists have forgotten what one can deliver. In fact, Sanders's
recipes are supported by overwhelming evidence-notably from countries that already
follow the policies he advocates. On health care, growth and income inequality,
Sanders wins the policy debate hands down.
It was a striking departure from what nearly every opinionator had been saying for
the preceding six months. Too bad it came just eleven days before the
Post,
following the lead of the Associated Press, declared Hillary Clinton to be the
preemptive winner of the Democratic nomination.
What can we learn from reviewing one newspaper's lopsided editorial treatment of a left-wing
presidential candidate?
For one thing, we learn that the Washington Post, that gallant defender of a free press, that
bold bringer-down of presidents, has a real problem with some types of political advocacy.
Certain ideas, when voiced by certain people, are not merely debatable or incorrect or misguided,
in the paper's view: they are inadmissible. The ideas themselves might seem healthy, they might
have a long and distinguished history, they might be commonplace in other lands. Nevertheless,
when voiced by the people in question, they become damaging.
... ... ...
Clinging to this so-called pragmatism is also professionally self-serving. If "realism" is
recognized as the ultimate trump card in American politics, it automatically prioritizes the
thoughts and observations of the realism experts-also known as the Washington Post and its
brother institutions of insider knowledge and professional policy practicality. Realism is what
these organizations deal in; if you want it, you must come to them. Legitimacy is quite literally
their property. They dole it out as they see fit.
There is the admiration for consensus, the worship of pragmatism and bipartisanship, the
contempt for populist outcry, the repeated equating of dissent with partisan disloyalty. And
think of the specific policy pratfalls: the cheers for TARP, the jeers aimed at bank regulation,
the dismissal of single-payer health care as a preposterous dream.
This stuff is not mysterious. We can easily identify the political orientation behind it from one
of the very first pages of the Roger Tory Peterson Field Guide to the Ideologies. This is common
Seaboard Centrism, its markings of complacency and smugness as distinctive as ever, its habitat
the familiar Beltway precincts of comfort and exclusivity. Whether you encounter it during a
recession or a bull market, its call is the same: it reassures us that the experts who head up
our system of government have everything well under control.
It is, of course, an ideology of the professional class, of sound-minded East Coast strivers,
fresh out of Princeton or Harvard, eagerly quoting as "authorities" their peers in the other
professions, whether economists at MIT or analysts at Credit Suisse or political scientists at
Brookings. Above all, this is an insider's ideology; a way of thinking that comes from a place of
economic security and takes a view of the common people that is distinctly patrician.
Donald Trump is accusing the Clintons of cashing in on Haiti's deadly 2010 earthquake.
The Republican nominee cited State Department emails obtained by the Republican National
Committee through a public records request and detailed in an ABC News story.
At issue is whether friends of former President Bill Clinton, referred to as "friends of Bill,"
or "FOB," in the emails, received preferential treatment or contracts from the State Department
in the immediate aftermath of the 7.0-magnitude earthquake on Jan. 12, 2010. More than 230,000
people died, the U.S. has said.
I got news for you, Trump has enough enemies that if there was anything that could be pinned
on him he would have been in the slammer long ago; competitors , ex-wives, casino regulators,
you name it.
All they can come up with is Miss Universe, locker room banter and net operating loss carryforwards.
Absolutely spot on assessment. You can bet that from the intelligence community to querying
everyone he's ever been in contact with has been covered. The best they could come up with was
an 11 year old video of him preening his feathers.
+1000 Banzai! logged in just to upvote your coment.
Was thinking the same thing. is this the best dirt they got on him?
I see Trump's warts, I'm not blind.He's not Ron Paul, ok ok, we get it. and still I will
vote for Trump becasue i see how much opposition is being hurled at him everyday.
PLUS we see what a vile menace, murdering sack of fecal matter wrapped in corruption that "Die
Furher Hitlery" is.
And Because i've got two little kids that i dont want to die in Hitlery's nuclear war.
The Trump vs Clinton debacle seems to follow the UK's own pre-Brexit debate where the 'evil' (leavers)
were on the wrong end of a constant onslaught by the 'good' (remainers).
What was disregarded by the media and establishment alike was the undercurrent of disillusionment
of the PEOPLE with the system that was widely perceived to be betraying the public for the good
of a few - corporates, politicians, banksters et al - and they almost took it for granted that
remain would win the day.
Look how THAT turned out. The establishment line, backed by virtually all the media and the
apallingly corrupt BBC, were bitch-slapped the morning after the vote and it was a pleasure to
watch!
Parallels - right up to the 'bitch slapping' - this is what you may yet see.
Rape, pillage and plunder; it's as amerikan as apple pie. So whether you be a chump on da stump
for oligarch Trump or a psychopathic moron into the Clinton Crime Organization of sexual deviants
and murderers, in the end one of these bums is the real face of the USSAN thug state. Like NAZI
Germany before it (that other anglozionazi project) USSA will be "cured" from the outside and
that process is already well underway.
Good point. The Don has only "gamed the system," by using the rules and laws available to him.
He plays the press like a fiddle, therefore, generating free publicity, he would otherwise have
to pay for. The perpetual smirk, sneer, arrogance and disdain he has, is for many others, who
have done far worse, for far less, than he has.
"... When Hillary Clinton recently declared half of Trump supporters a "basket of deplorables", Zaitchik told another reporter, the language "could be read as another way of saying 'white-trash bin'." ..."
When Hillary Clinton recently declared half of Trump supporters a "basket of deplorables", Zaitchik
told another reporter, the language "could be read as another way of saying 'white-trash bin'."
Clinton
quickly apologized for the comment, the context of which contained compassion for many Trump voters.
But making such generalizations at a $6m fundraiser in downtown New York City, at which some attendees
paid $50,000 for a seat, recalled for me scenes from the television political satire Veep in which
powerful Washington figures discuss "normals" with distaste behind closed doors.
Beginning in the 1970s, it has increasingly become an organ of this same class. Affluent
white-collar professionals are today the voting bloc that Democrats represent most faithfully,
and they are the people whom Democrats see as the rightful winners in our economic order. Hillary
Clinton, with her fantastic résumé and her life of striving and her much-commented-on
qualifications, represents the aspirations of this class almost perfectly.
kaxitaksi
2
months ago (edited)
Only way to put this right and if DNC and Shillary
really wants the best for the people is to step down
and hand over the nomination to Bernie or Stein. I
don't want to listen to that lying bitch voice for
four years.
Lu A
5
days ago
If this is really Anonymous...I really hate to say
this but...these guys are the right guys for the job
to expose Hillary Clinton. If they wanna stop her
they gotta expose her at a huge hackable event.
Scott Lesley
17
hours ago
there is no humanity in that woman
Unity Anonymous
6
hours ago
remember the civilians, kids, ppl who they kill
Unlike Reuters' political "reporters" , it seems the hacker collective
"Anonymous" is less impressed by Hillary Clinton's awesomeness.
Following Wikileaks' recent release of leaks, Anonymous reminds Americans of the 'career criminal' in a video containing
a well researched list of wrong-doings, exposing the actions of Hillary over her career .
This includes things like:
fraud investigations
conflicts of interest
political corruption
wrongful pardons
campaign and finance law violations
business & political scandals
This is only a small list of what is explored in the video below...
With so much exposed already, why do we continue to follow, allow, and accept people like Hillary and Trump as potentials
to be country leaders? Truly think about it. Can we even take a system that puts these two so high up in the ranks seriously?
Is this not the perfect storm to allow us to wake up to the reality of our current state? We should be thankful
that this is going on so we can help wake up the world and begin a conversation about what we can legitimately do next.
This isn't about Trump vs Clinton. That is merely the illusion we are being invited to believe. This is about
awakening to the fact that our system is absurd and that it's time to do something different. What is the answer? That is what we
must discuss instead of playing this broken political game of dividing and choosing who to "vote" for.
Occident Mortal
Kidbuck
Oct 12, 2016 3:41 AM Any journalist should feel enormous professional humilation and deep personal shame at the fact a bunch
of teenagers are offering more scrutiny on this presidential candidate than the entire press industry.
Guided and also manufactured to a great degree by an MSM-fabricated matrix of misinformation at the behest of the fuckers pulling
the strings. The disinterest in the morals of policy and action and their effect on millions of people both at home and abroad is
quite jaw-dropping, and a sad reflection on how low society (not just in the US) has fallen.
However Brexit proved all hope is not lost and sheeple can develop an awareness (probaly as a result of the intimidating bullshit
they were being fed).
I wish you could say that was happening. I just don't see it at all. I see things getting worse, and it's this "business" mentality
that is sucking the rest of us all down beneath the waves to drown.
I tend to agree.
Though just personal anecdote, in my career, I've seen this 'business mentality' at work, and it can be ugly.
For instance, I was in the room, to hear the CFO and COO discuss how to 'reach the numbers' so that the COO would get his bonus.
The decision in this case was to rid 100+ employees, many with decades of experience and accumulated skillsets, to reduce costs,
hit the 'correct' bottom line for a quarter or two, and voila! Company 'hit the numbers' and COO gets his bonus...in addition to
the already lucrative salary, well beyond what most would 'need'. Within a week of the bonus, he drives up in a flashy, new, red
sportscar. Should have witnessed the rage many of the remaining, spared employees that had watched their friends/coworkers get axed
and still remain unemployed; there were literally conversations about lighting that car on fire in the parking lot.
There were similar decisions to gobble up local and other national competitor shops. Some were immediately shut down and everyone
axed, but some with more glowing numbers that could be used to pad forecasts, were kept on for a short while. After saddling the
company with immense debt to cover the acquisitions, boosting the sales and forecast figures 'on paper' for the foreseeable near
future, he penned himself a nice, shiny résumé about 'increasing sales 4x in just a year' landed himself a different COO job in California
and left. Soon thereafter, when the weight of everything crashed down (scarce employees, with little skill left to efficiently accomplish
a quality product...both measures suffering/declining), those acquisitions were shut down and the original company is now scarcely
a shadow of what it was, thereby causing more layoffs and terminations. Now the $150 million +/year company, with 900 employees,
is a $10 million/year company, with 200 employees.
But that COO? He's living it up in CA, several companies later, and my periodic checkup on the 'net shows he's done similarly
a few more times, yet entrenched in the network of corporate boards/COOs that still perpetuate this scheme. Contrary to 'building'
anything, they construct a false narrative and tear everyone down in the process. But he and his cohorts get rich.
No, not everyone at that level does this, but the incentives are such that it is very tempting to follow suit and a review of
corporate history in this nation shows it is/was quite typical over many decades...because it works for those that engage this behavior.
Sound familiar to U.S. policy abroad? michelp
luckylongshot
Oct 12, 2016 10:37 AM "The answer is to start studying what it takes to apply power productively and use the findings to select
and train appropriate leaders."
Sorry but! In the currupt USA run by zio and war machines any 'appropriate leader' is DOA (Dead on Arrival.)
Donald J. Trump
tbd108
Oct 12, 2016 3:58 AM As I'm sure there are some that put Ttump on a high horse, I think most Trump supporters are supporting
him because of the exact reason they are fed up with system as aanonymous says. Trump is a big middle finger to the status quo of
Washington politics. I for one hope he does as he says he will do to hopefully right the ship of the US. He may even sink the ship
but it's going down already, he's our only chance to right it. What he's done takes a certain level of celebrity, balls, and money,
and I can't think of another person who could do what he has done. As great a cure Trump may be for our country, there are some side
effects so talk to your doctor to see if Trump is right for you. Dial 1(844)LIB-TARD or (855)LIB-TARD for a free sample of Trump.
Btw- those phone numbers are available if someone could actually make a good use for it. I'm also interested if the other exchanges
that are already taken have anything to with libtards.
kevin b
1
day ago
+Eric Shutter tell that to the
investigation committee..the FBI and the
congress investigation who all covered her
with "gross misconduct" instead of guilty
by hacked emails to known hacking and
homeland security of confidential
documents! another clinton victory by
paying off or threatening these guys if she
gets into office. what an ugly person she
is..she does think the law is beneath her
to follow...typical elitist narcissistic
profile!
Hank Chinaski
1
day ago
This psycho bitch will start WWIII... elect her at
your own risk.
Tam
1
day ago
0:17
Travelgate
1:03
Vince
Foster's
Death
1:29
Hillary
Care
2:56
Whitewater
Investigation
4:44
Cattlegate
5:48
Filegate
6:22
The
Clinton
Legal
defense
fund
6:33
Chinagate
7:18
IRS
Abuses
7:52
Pardongate
9:41
FALN
Terrorists
10:58
New
York
Senate
Campaign
Finance
12:15
New
York
Senate
performance
12:50
Senate
Rules
Violations
13:11
2008
Presidential
Canidate
13:45
Madam
Secretary
15:08
State
Department
Scandals
and
Cover-ups
15:59
Benghazi
Terrorist
Attack
Cover-up
17:12
Clinton
Secrets
(FoI)
17:37
Clinton
Foundation
Conflicts
of
Interest
20:37
Various
snippets
hellopuppy00
2
days ago
The fact that so many corrupts scandals of one
person can be listed for 25 minutes straight like
this is bad enough. The horrific part is that
American is about to make her President.
Eric Barth
1
day ago (edited)
we have no control over who we get to
choose and even then electoral votes
control th powers above popular votes.
Citizens do not matter in this regard
whatsoever. This game is controlled from
the top while feigning that it is
controlled by the people.
Raymond Cestaro
1
day ago
and this video is just scratching the
surface
Erkuht Ateue
5
months ago
HOLY SHIT, How can american people be so fucking
blind? This is outrageous!
View all 55 replies
Kevin S
3
days ago
Two ways. 1. Dumbing Down of the
population. 2. Entertainment. It is
sickening!
Tom F
48
minutes ago
Past Mobsters never come close to besting this bitch
and her Billy.
Took the Red Pill
1
day ago
Holy shit this is amazing. The work here is
fantastic. FBI really outdid themselves here. Still
gonna vote for Clinton, we cannot allow a man who
likes Pussy into office. I'm with HER :D
jefftc14
4
months ago
anyone else notice or remember how the Clinton's
were heavily involved in massive amounts of cocaine
smuggling into the U.S. and then hmm look at all
their friends they bail out.. all cocaine kingpins..
of course sexism and bigotry is probably ALL wrapped up in people's economic plights. Back
in the real world women put up with sexual harassment at work etc. because they need the income.
Yes it's illegal, but it's not always enforced especially in the blue collar workplace. And yes
Trumps comments were mostly about consensual stuff and if so arent' harassment. But sexism as
such isn't actually separable from economics.
I heard it as consensual, too. Women "let me" grab them. Maybe I am more forgiving than others
because I worked for a famous musician when I was younger and witnessed women throwing themselves
at him constantly. Are we taking away the agency of women by assuming this was unwanted attention?
Is it possible there are women who might have enjoyed the contact with him? Assuming he was even
telling the truth in his statements.
Do you want the willfully, aggressively ignorant on your side?
Would you choose purposely to select the most willfully wrong person to do any task for
you for pay?
1)Certainly: Will, Aggression and Plenty of Ignorance is *exactly* what it takes to put a good
scar on the face of the most organized, high-level, well-connected, mob-operation run by the US
government since the Shah of Iran.
Trump "going over the top", thus attracting all the "fire", has set in motion a flood of leaks.
Soon we will see defections when the rats see that the ship is indeed leaking and the water is
getting close to their nest. Then there will be congress hearings, the hyenas sizing up which
parts of the carcass they like to have when it dies, impeachment, several years of some progress
for the little folks while the new management rebuilds the enterprise and re-tune the neglected
Engine of Looting at the core.
2)The only people doing any task for *me* *for pay* are the carpenter and the guy cleaning
the drain. We have a deal: I don't care about their opinions and they don't complain over my coffee.
You are a bit naive if you think any kind of leadership works for you. In the best situation,
your interests are aligned with theirs, it looks like "working together". And since one does not
look in the mouth of a gift horse, everyone are happy. Right now, "our interests" and "theirs"
are blatantly opposed.
"... I've never heard anyone say "grab them by the pussy" but I have heard young college males talk about porn in a college library loud enough for me to hear them 2 tables over. I've heard detail accounts of what they want to do w/ girls they no. I just stared out them for a few minutes but it was clear that they did not care about my opinion or that they were in the library. ..."
"... St. Claire is right. Anyone that says that Trump can not be in the White House better vote for Stein or Johnson otherwise they are giant hypocrites. Bill Clinton is a rapist and Hillary Clinton aided and abetted his history of abuse. ..."
I've never heard anyone say "grab them by the pussy" but I have heard young college males
talk about porn in a college library loud enough for me to hear them 2 tables over. I've heard
detail accounts of what they want to do w/ girls they no. I just stared out them for a few minutes
but it was clear that they did not care about my opinion or that they were in the library.
I spent much of my childhood around athletes. The higher you go up the food chain the more
crass the comments. I was never in a football locker room but baseball and basketball were pretty
terrible. I played at the national level in AAU and spent a lot of time around traveling baseball
players. They were into drugs and girls. The comments were reprehensible and they have not changed
much behind closed doors. I'm 34 now.
My brother is older and his friends have all said horrible things when no women were around.
I was typically the voice of reason which made me a target for gay bashing. I'm straight but since
I did not see the need to devalue women I was asked if I was gay.
St. Claire is right. Anyone that says that Trump can not be in the White House better vote
for Stein or Johnson otherwise they are giant hypocrites. Bill Clinton is a rapist and Hillary
Clinton aided and abetted his history of abuse.
"... 2018 and 2020 will be interesting indeed, assuming HRC hasn't started WW3 by then. ..."
"... Speaking of which, Ray McGovern warns against the sabre-rattling over Syria and the calls for
"no fly zones" in CounterPunch today: ..."
"... For instance, Russian defense spokesman Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov warned on Oct. 6 that Russia
is prepared to shoot down unidentified aircraft – including any stealth aircraft – over Syria. It is
a warning that I believe should be taken seriously ..."
"... It's true that experts differ as to whether the advanced air defense systems already in Syria
can bring down stealth aircraft, but it would be a mistake to dismiss this warning out of hand. Besides,
Konashenkov added, in a telling ex-ante-extenuating-circumstance vein, that Russian air defense "will
not have time to identify the origin" of the aircraft. ..."
"... In other words, U.S. aircraft, which have been operating in Syrian skies without Syrian government
approval, could be vulnerable to attack with the Russian government preemptively warning that such an
incident won't be Moscow's fault. ..."
"... Bush & Cheney & Co were horrific enough with their neocon games in the Mideast, but their actions
seem mild compared with the latest anti-Russian lunatic talk by Clinton and her neocon pals. Really
scary. ..."
"... Yes the entire situation with out-of-touch imperialist aristocrats blindly blundering their
way to Sarajevo Aleppo has a very reminiscent feel to it…an easy chapter to write in the future history
books. ..."
"... This should terrify everyone. I wish we would elect someone who says we should sit down and
talk to our biggest rivals, not just provoke them to world war. But oh I forgot he said vulgar things
about women 15 years ago. ..."
"... sexual misconduct in the oval office-while president ..."
"... while being the leader of our country! ..."
"... I have a hierarchy of reactions to issues and I just can't seem to put vulgar language above
the ultimate vulgarity of world war for profit. ..."
"... I can't seem to care more about people with hurt feelings than people with their heads blown
off because a Saudi billionaire or arms manufacturer just had to have some more ka-ching. There is nothing
more vulgar than that. ..."
re WikiLeaks: adding to the endless hypocrisy and double standards over Trump's "grabbing pussy"
remarks and HRC & Co's behaviour:
* Hillary herself wondered about extrajudicially killing Assange by droning. In what world
is that considered permissible?
* It seems that the Clinton campaign's Catholic "outreach" person was involved in a prostitution
ring. So that's all good.
I'm starting to think Trump might yet pull this off. The Clinton camp must be terrified and
trying desperately to see what else might come out. If only Bernie had agreed to run with Jill
Stein… I honestly think they might have won. In any case the Republican party is going down in
flames, and after the Podesta leaks the Dems will have absolutely ZERO credibility and not much
of a mandate. 2018 and 2020 will be interesting indeed, assuming HRC hasn't started WW3 by
then.
Speaking of which, Ray McGovern warns against the sabre-rattling over Syria and the calls
for "no fly zones" in CounterPunch today:
We analysts were responsible for picking up warnings from Moscow and other key capitals
that the U.S. news media often missed or downplayed, much as the major news outlets today are
ignoring the escalation of warnings from Russia over Syria.
For instance, Russian defense spokesman Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov warned on Oct. 6
that Russia is prepared to shoot down unidentified aircraft – including any stealth aircraft
– over Syria. It is a warning that I believe should be taken seriously .
It's true that experts differ as to whether the advanced air defense systems already
in Syria can bring down stealth aircraft, but it would be a mistake to dismiss this warning
out of hand. Besides, Konashenkov added, in a telling ex-ante-extenuating-circumstance vein,
that Russian air defense "will not have time to identify the origin" of the aircraft.
In other words, U.S. aircraft, which have been operating in Syrian skies without Syrian
government approval, could be vulnerable to attack with the Russian government preemptively
warning that such an incident won't be Moscow's fault.
Bush & Cheney & Co were horrific enough with their neocon games in the Mideast, but their
actions seem mild compared with the latest anti-Russian lunatic talk by Clinton and her neocon
pals. Really scary.
Yes the entire situation with out-of-touch imperialist aristocrats blindly blundering their
way to Sarajevo Aleppo has a very reminiscent feel to it…an easy chapter to write
in the future history books.
This should terrify everyone. I wish we would elect someone who says we should sit down
and talk to our biggest rivals, not just provoke them to world war. But oh I forgot he said vulgar
things about women 15 years ago.
"Why do so many men claim that's what men do typically (not universally)?"
Because it's usually true of most men at one time or another in their lives. For all the talk
(and the reality) about women being treated as second rate, they do have enormous power; the power
to reject. And reject they do. You can be the nicest guy in the world, but if you're not her type,
if there's no chemistry or you're not her "caliber", down in flames you go. It's not necessarily
mean on her part, it's just reality. And it's not just looks or money that is a consideration.
You can be a nice, successful guy at a time in her life when she's attracted to the rebellious,
slightly "dangerous", exciting "bad boy".
This can be frustrating. And it's magnified when you grow up being taught that you can do anything
if you just try hard enough. But that's just it; you can't. Guys want to be rich and successful
(like Trump) or rich/successful/famous, because that's the inside track to the most elite women.
Except that even then, it's no guarantee. Look at all the women who wouldn't get involved with
Trump if they were marooned on an island and he was the only man. All his fame, all his money,
and They. Just. Aren't. Interested. And it's the same with virtually every guy whose name isn't
Tom Brady. So like I said, it breeds frustration - sometimes soul-crushing frustration - which
is displayed in crude anger.
Jess, and, thanks to political correctness, there are a dwindling number of venues where one
might seek to build lateral relationships, especially of the romantic or life partner sort, and
a dwindling amount of discretionary time to spend in those venues. Never mind the most elite women
- ten-year-olds with bottle-blonde updos and optional silicone-enhanced "chopped chicken parts"
are actually kinda gross - the less elite but still very aspirational Modern woman's
standards and policies are too high (unrealistic, as the less aspirational might put it) for the
life partner market to clear without externalizing something.
"Because it's usually true of most men at one time or another in their lives."
And therefore SIN, or whatever the symbol manipulators might prefer to call it, and therefore
PENANCE (payable in 3 easy installments), and THEN absolution. We do know how path dependence
cramps the American liberal's style and their group narcissism.
"When we're an empire, we create our own reality."
Jess–
It works both ways. Men also have the power to reject, & they do.
Your own wording of "that's the inside track to the most elite women" (my
emphasis) seems to say that a woman must be beautiful in figure and face to attract a man.
So what's different about a woman wanting a man who is nice looking with a nice body?
None.
It's just two different views, depending on gender.
Regarding what Trump supposedly said/did many years ago, even as a woman, I still find the
fact Hellary's husband was engaged in sexual misconduct in the oval office-while president
-even more disgusting.
I saw/see that as a huge slap in the face and a big FU to the entire nation that he would conduct
himself in such a way while being the leader of our country!
He couldn't even keep it zipped while sitting in the WH? How dare he!
At least Trump wasn't our freakin' PRESIDENT when he said/did those things.
Yet Bill's behavior is still a 'hush-hush' subject because he's a Clinton, it seems. (Or because
people don't want to be on that 'Clinton' list and disappear?)
No, I do not support Trump or his actions or manners or ego.
But since it's being made such a big deal, then I'd like to see all the facts about Bill brought
up again in the way he acted while leading this country.
THEN maybe all these 'distractions' would end and we could get down to policies!
Until then, which it appears will never happen, this 'election' is a sick joke, at best.
Yes, but at least Hillary has come out boldly against the Saudi persecution of women, gays,
and other races, has denounced the Saudi genocide in Yemen, and fought vigorously as Secretary
of State to ensure arms including cluster bombs and white phosphorus were not sold to a regime
with such a dreadful human rights record. And the Clinton Foundation displayed their "whiter than
white" sense of ethics by returning the millions of dollars of Saudi donations.
And Trump's words from 11 years ago were much worse than anything the Saudis did, in any case.
I have a hierarchy of reactions to issues and I just can't seem to put vulgar language
above the ultimate vulgarity of world war for profit.
Try as I might, I can't seem to care more about people with hurt feelings than people with
their heads blown off because a Saudi billionaire or arms manufacturer just had to have some more
ka-ching. There is nothing more vulgar than that.
I am surprised that Trump is not making the Podesta Wikileaks into a major story. Perhaps Trump
is not earnestly trying to actually win, or Trump is a Bush43/Palin level low IQ person.
Trump & his media spokeshacks could repeat "Podesta Wikileaks show HClinton's actual 'private
position' is cut SS & MC, & pro-TPP. Trump will not cut SS & MC, & will veto TPP. Vote for Trump".
Even if Trump is lying, Trump could "pull an 0bama 2008 on NAFTA" & privately tell PRyan/Trump
BigFunders/Owners Trump's actual plan.
IMHO Trump could possibly win if he took such an approach. Why isn't he doing so?
"... Clinton talked of the need to have "both a public and a private position" on controversial issues. The former first lady also said her family's wealth had made her "kind of far removed" from the problems facing the middle class. ..."
"... one of the leaked Podesta emails appeared to show that the Clinton campaign had been in contact with the Justice Department during an open records court case in which it was not a party. The Trump campaign said the email "shows a level of collusion which calls into question the entire investigation into her private server." ..."
"... Trump has also seized on an email that revealed Clinton in one speech said that terrorism is "not a threat to us as a nation," clarifying, "it is not going to endanger our economy or our society, but it is a real threat." ..."
"... In "a speech made behind closed doors, crooked Hillary Clinton said that terrorism was not a threat - quote, 'not a threat to the nation,' " Trump said during a rally on Monday evening in Pennsylvania. ..."
On Tuesday, one of the leaked Podesta emails appeared to show that the Clinton campaign had
been in contact with the Justice Department during an open records court case in which it was not
a party. The Trump campaign said the email "shows a level of collusion which calls into question
the entire investigation into her private server."
Trump has also seized on an email that revealed Clinton in one speech said that terrorism
is "not a threat to us as a nation," clarifying, "it is not going to endanger our economy or our
society, but it is a real threat."
In "a speech made behind closed doors, crooked Hillary Clinton said that terrorism was not
a threat - quote, 'not a threat to the nation,' " Trump said during a rally on Monday evening in
Pennsylvania.
"During one of the secret speeches - amazing how nothing is secret today when you talk about the
internet - Hillary admitted that ISIS could infiltrate with the refugees," he added, referring to
the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. "Then why is she letting so many people into our country?"
Some of the emails released have no bearing on the campaign at all.
In one message, Podesta offers advice for cooking risotto (don't add the water all at once). In
others, the former guitarist for pop-punk band Blink-182, Tom DeLonge, suggests that Podesta
meet with a variety
of individuals, seemingly
to discuss UFOs.
The release comes at a time when the intelligence community is casting doubt on WikiLeaks and
its motives.
"... Stated Binney: "Now what he (Mueller) is talking about is going into the NSA database, which is shown of course in the (Edward) Snowden material released, which shows a direct access into the NSA database by the FBI and the CIA Which there is no oversight of by the way. So that means that NSA and a number of agencies in the U.S. government also have those emails." ..."
"... "Yes," he responded. "That would be my point. They have them all and the FBI can get them right there." ..."
"... And the other point is that Hillary, according to an article published by the Observer in March of this year, has a problem with NSA because she compromised Gamma material. Now that is the most sensitive material at NSA. And so there were a number of NSA officials complaining to the press or to the people who wrote the article that she did that. She lifted the material that was in her emails directly out of Gamma reporting. That is a direct compromise of the most sensitive material at the NSA. So she's got a real problem there. So there are many people who have problems with what she has done in the past. So I don't necessarily look at the Russians as the only one(s) who got into those emails. ..."
"... GAMMA compartment, which is an NSA handling caveat that is applied to extraordinarily sensitive information (for instance, decrypted conversations between top foreign leadership, as this was). ..."
Binney also proclaimed that the NSA has all of Clinton's deleted emails, and the FBI could gain access to them if they so wished.
No need for Trump to ask the Russians for those emails, he can just call on the FBI or NSA to hand them over.
Binney referenced
testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in March 2011 by then-FBI Director Robert S. Mueller in which Meuller spoke
of the FBI's ability to access various secretive databases "to track down known and suspected terrorists."
Stated Binney: "Now what he (Mueller) is talking about is going into the NSA database, which is shown
of course in the (Edward) Snowden material released, which shows a direct access into the NSA database by the FBI and the CIA
Which there is no oversight of by the way. So that means that NSA and a number of agencies in the U.S. government also have those
emails."
"So if the FBI really wanted them they can go into that database and get them right now," he stated of Clinton's
emails as well as DNC emails.
Asked point blank if he believed the NSA has copies of "all" of Clinton's emails, including the deleted correspondence, Binney
replied in the affirmative.
"Yes," he responded. "That would be my point. They have them all and the FBI can get them right there."
Binney surmised that the hack of the DNC could have been coordinated by someone inside the U.S. intelligence community angry
over Clinton's compromise of national security data with her email use.
And the other point is that Hillary, according to an
article published by the Observer in March
of this year, has a problem with NSA because she compromised Gamma material. Now that is the most sensitive material at NSA. And
so there were a number of NSA officials complaining to the press or to the people who wrote the article that she did that. She
lifted the material that was in her emails directly out of Gamma reporting. That is a direct compromise of the most sensitive
material at the NSA. So she's got a real problem there. So there are many people who have problems with what she has done in the
past. So I don't necessarily look at the Russians as the only one(s) who got into those emails.
The Observer defined the GAMMA classification:
GAMMA compartment, which is an NSA handling caveat that is applied to extraordinarily sensitive information (for instance,
decrypted conversations between top foreign leadership, as this was).
Over a year before Edward Snowden shocked the world in the summer of 2013 with revelations that have since changed everything
from domestic to foreign US policy but most of all, provided everyone a glimpse into just what the NSA truly does on a daily basis,
a former NSA staffer, and now famous whistleblower, William Binney, gave excruciating detail to Wired magazine about all that
Snowden would substantiate the following summer.
We covered it in a 2012 post titled "
We Are This Far From A Turnkey Totalitarian State" – Big Brother Goes Live September 2013." Not surprisingly, Binney received
little attention in 2012 – his suggestions at the time were seen as preposterous and ridiculously conspiratorial. Only after the
fact, did it become obvious that he was right. More importantly, in the aftermath of the Snowden revelations, what Binney
has to say has become gospel.
Binney was an architect of the NSA's surveillance program. He became a famed whistleblower when he resigned on October 31,
2001, after spending more than 30 years with the agency. He referenced testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in March
2011 by then-FBI Director Robert S. Mueller in which Meuller spoke of the FBI's ability to access various secretive databases
"to track down known and suspected terrorists."
"... Moreover since the DNC hack is a criminal offence, it is a statement of opinion made about a matter which is presumably being investigated by the police. ..."
"... If the statement is merely a statement of opinion based on inference of which guesses about Russian "motivations" apparently form a major part, and one which moreover concerns a matter which is or ought to be the subject of investigation by the police and not therefore the subject of this sort of comment, why was it published at all? ..."
"... The short answer is in order to help Hillary Clinton win the US Presidential election. ..."
"... To that end the statement fulfils two purposes: firstly, it discredits the content of any leaks that might otherwise damage Hillary Clinton's campaign by lending credence to her claim that they are part of a Russian 'dirty tricks' campaign against her; and secondly, it lends credence to the claim popularised by Hillary Clinton's campaign and by Hillary Clinton's supporters in the media that Donald Trump is Putin's candidate and that Putin is trying to help him win the election. ..."
"... That the second is one of the purposes of statement is proved by its reference to US intelligence's "belief" that the leak was authorised by "Russia's senior-most officials ". This is clearly intended to refer to Putin, and is intended to give the impression that Putin himself personally authorised the DNC leak in order to damage Hillary Clinton and to help Trump win the election and become President. ..."
"... US intelligence has meddled in elections in other countries on numerous occasions starting with the Italian parliamentary elections of 1948 ..."
"... To my knowledge this is however the first occasion that US intelligence has directly and publicly meddled in a US national election, acting to help one candidate defeat another. ..."
"... It matters not whether this was done by US intelligence on its own initiative, or whether it was pressured to do so by officials of the Obama administration or of Hillary Clinton's campaign. ..."
"... Either way the disturbing truth must now be faced: the practice of US intelligence meddling in and trying to influence national elections has now been imported home to the US. ..."
The single most important event of the US Presidential election took place last week and to my
knowledge it has gone completely unreported.
This was not the video tape of Donald Trump's grotesque and deeply offensive sexual banter from
2005.
It was the public confirmation that an intelligence agency is directly interfering in an ongoing
US Presidential election.
The intelligence agency in question is not however that of Russia as is being reported. It is
that of the United States itself.
To understand why this is so, consider the statement US intelligence published last week on the
subject of alleged Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee and of other US agencies
involved in the election. It
reads as follows :
"The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian
Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including
from US political organizations. The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like
DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the
methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts. These thefts and disclosures are
intended to interfere with the US election process. Such activity is not new to Moscow-the Russians
have used similar tactics and techniques across Europe and Eurasia, for example
, to influence public opinion there . We believe , based on
the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia's senior-most officials could have authorized these activities."
(bold italics added)
The statement is an implicit admission that US intelligence has no evidence to back its allegations
of Russian hacking.
It is merely "confident" – not "sure" – that it is the Russians who are behind the hacking, and
it is clear from the statement that it arrived at this conclusion purely through inference: because
the hacks supposedly were "consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed
efforts".
US intelligence assumes the Russians were behind the hack not because it knows this to be so but
in part because of what it believes Russian motives to be.
The statement backs its claim with a textual trick. It says "the Russians have used similar tactics
and techniques across Europe and Eurasia". It then immediately follows these words with the words
"for example".
These lead to the expectation that an actual example of such Russian "tactics and techniques"
is about to follow. Instead what is provided are the fact free words "to influence public opinion
there".
The words "for example" lend nothing to the meaning of the statement, which would be exactly the
same without them. These two words as used in the statement are actually meaningless. That is a sure
sign that their presence in the statement is intended to confuse the casual reader, and that this
is true of the statement as a whole.
The words are designed to create a subliminal impression to a casual reader that the Russians
have been caught doing this sort of thing before, without however providing a single actual example
when this was the case.
Demonstrating how thin the case of Russian government actually is, the statement then goes on
to say
"Some states have also recently seen scanning and probing of their election-related systems,
which in most cases originated from servers operated by a Russian company. However, we are
not now in a position to attribute this activity to the Russian Government ."
(bold italics added)
In other words US intelligence admits the mere fact servers operated by a Russian company may
have been used for "scanning and probing" – and presumably also for hacking – is not in itself
proof of the involvement of the Russian government.
This is consistent with what I have heard, which is that skilled and well-resourced hackers can
use compromised machines to carry out hacks by remote access, and that the mere discovery that a
particular machine has been used in a hack does not in and of itself implicate the owner. (I should
stress I am not an expert in this field and I may have misunderstood this. However it appears to
be what US intelligence is saying).
This part of the statement seems to me intended to prevent challenges to the eventual outcome
of the election based on US intelligence's claims of Russian hacking. US intelligence does not want
to be drawn into post-election arguments about the validity of the election outcome, which might
lead to demands that it make public its "evidence" of Russian hacking. In the process US intelligence
however casts doubt on what is almost certainly the only actual evidence it has of Russian state
involvement in the hacking.
In summary, the statement is a mere statement of opinion, it is not a statement of fact, and the
evidence upon which it is based is threadbare.
Moreover since the DNC hack is a criminal offence, it is a statement of opinion made about
a matter which is presumably being investigated by the police.
The relevant police agency is presumably the FBI, which significantly is not a co-author
of the statement.
That in turn begs a host of questions: has the FBI been shown the "evidence" upon which US intelligence
expresses its opinion and has made the statement? Has it asked to see this "evidence"? Was it invited
to co-author the statement? What does the FBI think of the public involvement of US intelligence
in a domestic criminal matter which falls within the FBI's exclusive competence?
If the statement is merely a statement of opinion based on inference of which guesses about
Russian "motivations" apparently form a major part, and one which moreover concerns a matter which
is or ought to be the subject of investigation by the police and not therefore the subject of this
sort of comment, why was it published at all?
The short answer is in order to help Hillary Clinton win the US Presidential election.
To that end the statement fulfils two purposes: firstly, it discredits the content of any
leaks that might otherwise damage Hillary Clinton's campaign by lending credence to her claim that
they are part of a Russian 'dirty tricks' campaign against her; and secondly, it lends credence to
the claim popularised by Hillary Clinton's campaign and by Hillary Clinton's supporters in the media
that Donald Trump is Putin's candidate and that Putin is trying to help him win the election.
That the second is one of the purposes of statement is proved by its reference to US intelligence's
"belief" that the leak was authorised by "Russia's senior-most officials ". This is clearly intended to refer to Putin, and is intended to give the impression that Putin
himself personally authorised the DNC leak in order to damage Hillary Clinton and to help Trump win
the election and become President.
To my knowledge this is however the first occasion that US intelligence has directly and publicly
meddled in a US national election, acting to help one candidate defeat another.
It matters not whether this was done by US intelligence on its own initiative, or whether
it was pressured to do so by officials of the Obama administration or of Hillary Clinton's campaign.
Either way the disturbing truth must now be faced: the practice of US intelligence meddling
in and trying to influence national elections has now been imported home to the US.
"... Lavrov: Well, I don't know whether this would ... English is not my mother's tongue and I don't know whether - I don't know - whether I would sound - I mean - decent. There are so many pussies around your presidential campaigns on both sides that I prefer not to comment. ..."
"... Reflecting different national usages, cunt is described as "an unpleasant or stupid person" in the Compact Oxford English Dictionary, whereas Merriam-Webster indicates that it is a "usually disparaging and obscene" term for a woman[1] or an "offensive way to refer to a woman" in the United States. ..."
"... So Lavrov's not only a diplomat, he knows a little comedy too. :) He's one of the most interesting people in government today. ..."
The Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov
in a recent interview with CNN's Amanpour:
Amanpour: Russia had its own Pussy Riot moment. What do you think of Donald Trump's pussy riot
moment?
Lavrov: Well, I don't know whether this would ... English is not my mother's tongue and
I don't know whether - I don't know - whether I would sound - I mean - decent. There are so many
pussies around your presidential campaigns on both sides that I prefer not to comment.
CitizenKane123 | Oct 12, 2016 12:02:27 PM | 4
Pussies are soft, warms and comfortable. I think what Lavrov really meant was:
There are so many cunts around your presidential campaigns on both sides that I prefer not
to comment.
It should be noted that British English and American English have different definitions for the
C word, and I suspect Lavrov understands that. From Wikipedia:
Reflecting different national usages, cunt is described as "an unpleasant or stupid person"
in the Compact Oxford English Dictionary, whereas Merriam-Webster indicates that it is a "usually
disparaging and obscene" term for a woman[1] or an "offensive way to refer to a woman" in the
United States.
Although I would suggest that the OED does understate the strength of the word somewhat.
Podesta - what a clown! Is there some rulebook about Presidents having to be protestant, while
all the shady puppetmasters are zionist catholics or zionist zionists?
Telling several members of the investment bank's board of directors how they had to check her out
whenever they get a chance, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein was overheard Monday describing to
friends how incredible it is to see Hillary Clinton live.
"You can forget any recordings you've heard of Hillary, because they don't even compare to the
experience of seeing her in person," said Blankfein, who excitedly recounted the first time he saw
the Democratic presidential nominee in a small, intimate venue back in 2013, noting how he was instantly
captivated by what he was hearing and found himself nodding along throughout the 90-minute solo performance.
"... They were in active collusion with the 1990s Clinton campaigns too, but I didn't have Wikileaks around to confirm it, or the internets for alternative sources of information. I suspected it anyway. I finally cut the cord after 2002. ..."
"... Well the NYT, WaPo, CNN et al have shot themselves in the foot with this blatant collusion with the Clinton campaign. They've pissed off their most intelligent readers & viewers, shown themselves to be knaves and fools, and what are they going to say when HRC is president and investigated up the wazoo for corruption? ..."
"... If you defeat Trump, you prevail over one guy. When Clinton is defeated, you win over all those 'with her.' ..."
"... Yes… But leverage much higher than 100:1… Not just MSM, but banks, neocons, corrupt ceo's, and all these alphabet groups keeping us safe… Hopefully he'd be vindictive against all the elites trying to defeat him. ..."
"... Some combination of "it's a Russian plot" and "we told you so." The MSM - they know everything. ..."
"... NEVER overestimate the intelligence of the American public. If Hillary can get an 11 point lead over a salacious story that affects almost nobody and yet get no drop in popularity over revelations that will affect everyone's lives, I don't think there is much hope that the NYT, WaPo, CNN, et al, will get their comeuppance. But Americans who drink in what these MSM sites are feeding them WILL get the President they so obviously deserve, won't they? ..."
"... Yes, it's the public's fault… despite being subject to the most brutal propaganda campaign in history and being assaulted by years of neoliberalism that barely gives them time to breathe between their three zero-hour contract jobs, it's their fault and they deserve a president who will grand-bargain away their social security benefits, TPP away the few remaining good jobs and start a civilisation-threatening war with Russia. ..."
"... And just for the record (/sarc), HRC only has an 11-point lead because most people won't be voting anyway, as they've correctly surmised that the system is completely rigged against them. ..."
"... I have not seen the data on that poll but I doubt that it is a "scientific poll". Many of the polls that I have taken the time to look at the data shows that they avoid asking 35 and under voters and heavily skew the data set to democrats. Lee Camp from Redacted Tonight has also shown this on his TV show on RT. Those even ruskies. ..."
"... Stupid Bloomberg headlines I never clicked on: The Trump Video Would Get Most CEOs Ousted. No doubt. But so would running their own private server outside the company system, then destroying emails in response to a Congressional subpoena. ..."
NYT: the toilet paper of record. In yet another Wikileaks dump it's come out that they're in
active collusion with Hillary's campaign. How anyone is still dumb enough to believe the lies
they're alwaus putting out is beyond me.
Really, it's fine to be biased lackeys for the rich and powerful as long as you're honest about
it. Pretending to be unbiased arbiters of truth while doing that though is pathetic.
These media presstitutes are so rancidly despicable that I want to throw up whenever I think
of them. Newspapers and the rest of the media: want to know why you're going bankrupt? It's not
the internet–it's because every day more and more people are clued into the fact that you are
pathetic lying scum. In my mind these media people are in the same exact category as child molesters.
They were in active collusion with the 1990s Clinton campaigns too, but I didn't have Wikileaks
around to confirm it, or the internets for alternative sources of information. I suspected it
anyway. I finally cut the cord after 2002.
Well the NYT, WaPo, CNN et al have shot themselves in the foot with this blatant collusion
with the Clinton campaign. They've pissed off their most intelligent readers & viewers, shown
themselves to be knaves and fools, and what are they going to say when HRC is president and investigated
up the wazoo for corruption?
Yes… But leverage much higher than 100:1… Not just MSM, but banks, neocons, corrupt ceo's,
and all these alphabet groups keeping us safe…
Hopefully he'd be vindictive against all the elites trying to defeat him.
NEVER overestimate the intelligence of the American public. If Hillary can get an 11 point
lead over a salacious story that affects almost nobody and yet get no drop in popularity over
revelations that will affect everyone's lives, I don't think there is much hope that the NYT,
WaPo, CNN, et al, will get their comeuppance. But Americans who drink in what these MSM sites
are feeding them WILL get the President they so obviously deserve, won't they?
Yes, it's the public's fault… despite being subject to the most brutal propaganda campaign
in history and being assaulted by years of neoliberalism that barely gives them time to breathe
between their three zero-hour contract jobs, it's their fault and they deserve a president who
will grand-bargain away their social security benefits, TPP away the few remaining good jobs and
start a civilisation-threatening war with Russia.
And just for the record (/sarc), HRC only has an 11-point lead because most people won't
be voting anyway, as they've correctly surmised that the system is completely rigged against them.
I have not seen the data on that poll but I doubt that it is a "scientific poll". Many
of the polls that I have taken the time to look at the data shows that they avoid asking 35 and
under voters and heavily skew the data set to democrats. Lee Camp from Redacted Tonight has also
shown this on his TV show on RT. Those even ruskies.
Just watched a documentary on the murder of Kitty Genovese. It sure made me think there has
been a culture of corruption at the New York Times for decades, enabled by outside journalists
refusing to question them for whatever reason (intimidation, careerism…).
Stupid Bloomberg headlines I never clicked on: The Trump Video Would Get Most CEOs Ousted.
No doubt. But so would running their own private server outside the company system, then destroying
emails in response to a Congressional subpoena.
WikiLeaks hack reveals DNC's favoritism as Clinton staff in damage control over Hillary's support
for DOMA
On October 10,
Wikileaks released part two of their emails from
Clinton campaign chair John Podesta.
Friday,
Wikileaks released their first batch of Podesta's emails, which included excerpts from
Clinton's Wall Street transcripts that reaffirmed why
Clinton refused to release them in full. During the second presidential debate,
Clinton confirmed their authenticity by attempting to defend one statement she made in the speech
about having a public and private stance on political issues. She
cited Abraham Lincoln, a defense comparable to her ridiculous
invocation of 9/11 when pressed on her ties to Wall Street during a
Democratic primary debate.
The latest release reveals current DNC chair Donna Brazile, when working as a
DNC vice chair, forwarded to the Clinton campaign a January 2016
email obtained from
the Bernie Sanders campaign, released by Sarah Ford, Sanders' deputy national press secretary, announcing
a Twitter storm from Sanders' African-American outreach team. "FYI" Brazile wrote to the Clinton
staff. "Thank you for the heads up on this Donna," replied Clinton campaign spokesperson Adrienne
Elrod.
One
email
, received by prolific
Clinton donor Haim Saban, was forwarded to
Clinton staff, praising the friendly moderators in the early March 2016 Democratic primary
debate co-hosted by Univision in Florida. "Haim, I just wanted to tell you that I thought the
moderators for last nights Debate were excellent. They were thoughtful, tough and incisive. I thought
it made
Hilary appear direct and strong in her resolve. I felt it advanced our candidate. Thanks for
Univision," wrote Rob Friedman, former co-chair of the Motion Picture Group.
Another email discusses planting a favorable Clinton story in The New York Times in March
2015. "NYT heroine. Should she call her today?" Podesta wrote to other Clinton campaign staffers
with the subject line 'Laura Donohoe.' "I do think it's a great idea! We can make it happen," replied
Huma Abedin. The story they referred to is likely "
In New Hampshire, Clinton Backers Buckle Up," published in The New York Times on March
12, 2015 about Laura Donohoe, a retired nurse and Clinton supporter in New Hampshire.
John Harwood, New York Times contributor and CNBC correspondent, regularly exchanged
emails with Podesta-communicating more as a
Clinton surrogate than a journalist.
In an October 2015
email thread, Clinton staff were in damage control over Hillary's support for the 1996 Defense
of Marriage Act (DOMA), which defined marriage as between a man and a woman.
Hillary Clinton would not disavow her support for it. "I'm not saying double down or ever say
it again. I'm just saying that she's not going to want to say she was wrong about that, given she
and her husband believe it and have repeated it many times. Better to reiterate evolution, opposition
to DOMA when court considered it, and forward looking stance."
Former
Clinton Foundation director, Darnell Strom of the Creative Artist Agency,
wrote
a condescending email
to Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard after she resigned from the
DNC
to endorse
Bernie Sanders , which he then forwarded to Clinton campaign staff. "For you to endorse a man
who has spent almost 40 years in public office with very few accomplishments, doesn't fall in line
with what we previously thought of you. Hillary Clinton will be our party's nominee and you standing
on ceremony to support the sinking Bernie Sanders ship is disrespectful to Hillary Clinton," wrote
Strom.
A memo sent from Clinton's general counsel, Marc Elias of the law firm Perkins Coie, outlined
legal tricks to circumvent campaign finance laws to raise money in tandem with Super Pacs.
In a March 2015 email
,
Clinton Campaign manager
Robby Mook expressed frustration DNC Chair
Debbie Wasserman Schultz hired a Convention CEO without consulting the Clinton campaign, which
suggests the
DNC and Clinton campaign regularly coordinated together from the early stages of the Democratic
primaries.
"... If only Frank Sinatra had had the foresight to get a hidden tape spool running, we could now
enjoy the lasting record of Senator John F.Kennedy's attitudes toward "poontang". ..."
"... Anyway, if HRC actually broke the law… shouldn't she face prosecution? I know some people (at
amconmag, as it happens) have called for members of the Bush administration to be put on trial. Over
here, the demand for Blair to be tried at the Hague for war crimes is now a tired old Left cliche. Obviously,
it would be new to demand punishment for the loser just for losing, but that isn't the context here.
..."
"... Looking at the FB timelines of my 'professional class' milquetoast 'progressive' acquaintances
in the US (who all gravitas/te towards Vox), who have since this weekend become unglued, this is very
much a case of people deliberately goading themselves into frenzies, tumbling over one another in their
attempts to win an apparent virtue-signalling-contest. ..."
"For months, I've been beating the drum of the non-novelty of Donald Trump, but try as I might,
even I can't remember a presidential candidate caught on tape bragging about assaulting women
and grabbing pussy."
If only Frank Sinatra had had the foresight to get a hidden tape spool running, we could
now enjoy the lasting record of Senator John F.Kennedy's attitudes toward "poontang".
Anyway, if HRC actually broke the law… shouldn't she face prosecution? I know some people
(at amconmag, as it happens) have called for members of the Bush administration to be put on trial.
Over here, the demand for Blair to be tried at the Hague for war crimes is now a tired old Left
cliche. Obviously, it would be new to demand punishment for the loser just for losing, but that
isn't the context here.
Looking at the FB timelines of my 'professional class' milquetoast 'progressive' acquaintances
in the US (who all gravitas/te towards Vox), who have since this weekend become unglued, this
is very much a case of people deliberately goading themselves into frenzies, tumbling over one
another in their attempts to win an apparent virtue-signalling-contest.
Meanwhile, nary a word about "we came, we saw, he died", as it apparently is just peachy to
destroy a country if you want to tick 'killing an autocrat who is not in the US's pocket' off
your bucket-list.
To put it bluntly, looking away and excusing evils one "understands" and thinks one can "contain"
(except insofar as it affects non-nationals and
the bottom 30-40%
, anyway, but who cares about them) because the "other side" is perceived to be "more" evil/disruptive/threatening
to the status quo is a pattern of behavior that disturbs me far more than the behavior of the
other side, however nasty that may be.
"... it's obvious why Hillary Clinton's campaign and her supporters in the media would want to ignore bad news from hacked emails in favor of decade-old comments Donald Trump made about women. ..."
"... On Friday we learned that the Obama administration actively worked to crush stories relating to Clinton's emails after the story broke in early 2015. In one email, White House Communications Director Jennifer Palmieri emailed her counterpart at the State Department: "between us on the shows… think we can get this done so he is not asked about email." Palmieri was trying to make sure Secretary of State John Kerry would not be asked about the email scandal on his Face the Nation ..."
"... The New York Times ..."
"... This is exactly what Sanders warned about during the primary -- that Clinton took money from Wall Street but was not adopting his position against the banks because it was politically popular. It was hard to believe that Clinton would be just as harsh against the banks privately as she was publicly. ..."
"... Clinton awkwardly defended this comment at the debate on Sunday by speaking at length about Lincoln. But it certainly plays into the notion of Clinton's corruption; that she will say anything to anyone to get elected. It also begs the question: Who is being told the truth? Is her private position the one that she will institute in the Oval Office or will she stick with the public position? How can we trust anything she says? ..."
"... Other hacked emails revealed Clinton's campaign privately insulting journalists who didn't praise the Democratic nominee. In one email, campaign Press Secretary Nick Merrill called New York Times ..."
"... Merrill also said he had tried "to shame" the Intercept's Emily Kopp's "lousy reporting" on Clinton using her campaign account as a slush fund. ..."
"... More emails were released on Monday, and they were just as bad. In one email , former Bill Clinton aide Doug Band called Hillary's daughter Chelsea "a spoiled brat kid." ..."
"... Disclosure: Donald Trump is the father-in-law of Jared Kushner, the publisher of Observer Media. ..."
The Left must stop pretending this is a nonstory
•
10/10/16
We're just a month away from the election, so it's obvious why Hillary
Clinton's campaign and her supporters in the media would want to ignore bad
news from hacked emails in favor of decade-old comments Donald Trump made about
women.
But the story isn't going away-especially if Clinton becomes president.
On Friday we learned that the Obama administration
actively worked to crush stories
relating to Clinton's emails after the
story broke in early 2015. In one email, White House Communications Director
Jennifer Palmieri emailed her counterpart at the State Department: "between us
on the shows… think we can get this done so he is not asked about email."
Palmieri was trying to make sure Secretary of State John Kerry would not be
asked about the email scandal on his
Face the Nation
appearance that
occurred three days later.
The next day, State Department Communications Director Jennifer
Psaki
responded: "Good to go on killing CBS idea." And guess what? Kerry
wasn't asked about the emails.
Also on Friday, leaked transcripts from Clinton's Wall Street speeches were
revealed by Wikileaks.
The New York Times
reported that
"The tone and language of the excerpts clash with the fiery
liberal approach she used later in her bitter primary battle with Senator
Bernie Sanders of Vermont and could have undermined her candidacy had they
become public."
Ouch.
Clinton said in the transcripts that she dreamed of "open trade and open
borders." She also spoke about how Abraham Lincoln twisted arms behind the
scenes to get things done, and said it was important to have "both a public and
a private position."
This is exactly what Sanders warned about during the primary -- that Clinton
took money from Wall Street but was not adopting his position against the banks
because it was politically popular. It was hard to believe that Clinton would
be just as harsh against the banks privately as she was publicly.
Clinton
awkwardly defended
this comment at the debate on Sunday by speaking at
length about Lincoln. But it certainly plays into the notion of Clinton's
corruption; that she will say anything to anyone to get elected. It also begs
the question: Who is being told the truth? Is her private position the one that
she will institute in the Oval Office or will she stick with the public
position? How can we trust anything she says?
While Trump's comments predictably dominated the news cycle over the
weekend, more damaging information was linked about Clinton.
Other hacked emails revealed Clinton's campaign
privately insulting journalists
who didn't praise the Democratic nominee.
In one email, campaign Press Secretary Nick Merrill called
New York Times
reporter Amy Chozick an "idiot" for writing an article about supporters
becoming wary of Campaign Manager Robby Mook after Clinton narrowly eked out a
win against Sanders.
Merrill also said he had tried "to shame" the Intercept's Emily Kopp's
"lousy reporting" on Clinton using her campaign account as a slush fund.
More emails were released on Monday, and they were just as bad. In
one email
, former Bill Clinton aide Doug Band called Hillary's daughter
Chelsea "a spoiled brat kid."
"I don't deserve this from her and deserve a tad more respect or at least a
direct dialogue for me to explain these things," Band wrote in response to a
dispute with Chelsea over the Clinton Foundation. "She is acting like a spoiled
brat kid who has nothing else to do but create issues to justify what she's
doing."
Band founded Teneo Strategies, which for a brief time employed Clinton aide
Huma Abedin while she was also working for the State Department.
Perhaps most damaging of all, it appears Team Clinton was "
petrified
"
of any GOP presidential nominee except Trump.
"Right now I am petrified that Hillary is almost totally dependent on
Republicans nominating Trump," wrote Brent Budowsky, a former Capitol Hill
staffer (and Observer
columnist
).
"She has huge endemic political weaknesses that she would be wise to rectify …
even a clown like Ted Cruz would be an even money bet to beat and this scares
the hell of out me."
Clinton's own campaign knew she wasn't a strong candidate and that the email
scandal was damaging-that's why they worked behind the scenes to crush stories
about the emails and disparaged reporters who didn't fall in line. They also
worked to make Trump the GOP nominee
because anyone else would have run
away with the election against such a flawed candidate.
The Left's response is always the same: Either this is a nonstory or it's
"old news." The more they make such proclamations, the more it's clear that
they just want the story to go away because they know how bad it is for
Clinton. Voters care about this issue; it's part of why Clinton is routinely
described as "untrustworthy."
The Left wouldn't be calling this a nonstory if the Secretary of State in
question were Condoleeza Rice (and to be fair, Republicans would then be the
ones claiming it was a non-story).
Disclosure: Donald Trump is the father-in-law of Jared Kushner, the
publisher of Observer Media.
"... Yes, on all points, especially this: "I don't know whether this obfuscation is due to the journalists themselves believing that Clinton is a crook and therefore shouting "Thief, thief!" to distract attention from this, or whether they're just being opportunistic and throwing raw meat to the rubes. But it's not a good sign for the future of American civil society either way." I say both . The donor class 1% that own the media, especially the new media, are solidly behind Hillary to an extent that I wonder whether we can call any of the media 'liberal.' Trump correctly noted that to even refer to the 33,000 documents she destroyed after receiving a federal subpoena as 'email' clouds the key facts: the FBI and government inspectors had to have access to all the documents to determine their status. ..."
"... In the short term, it's all upside. They won't be fighting in any of Hillary's wars. They aren't going to be drafted and they aren't going to be bombed. The are almost all staunchly and proudly anti-Republican and that's the sole metric by which actions are judged both morally and legally. ..."
"... When the elephant starts to take heat for the crap effect of donor class policies, the donor class simply pour money into donkey coffers to ensure the continuation of the donor class crap policies. ..."
"... Politically-motivated prosecutions of former presidents would obviously not be good, but prosecutions motivated by their legitimately criminal actions would be a welcome change. ..."
"... It's equally clear that you're quite comfortable with Clinton Inc. taking de facto control of the Democratic party so that Hillary did not have to face the kind of opposition she did in 2008. ..."
"... You're obviously equally cool with her 7 in a row coin toss escapade that 'won' her the Iowa primary, and the numerous cases of collusion between the Hillary campaign and the DNC, you know – the ones that forced Wasserman-Schultz to run fleeing from the podium during the train wreck called the Democratic Convention. ..."
"... Then there are the wars, none of which Hillary is responsible for. We came, we saw, he died has the character and the temperament to be in the oval office because she wouldn't say shit when she obviously has more than a mouthful, but a guy who engages in lewd locker room talk can credibly be compared to Hitler. ..."
"... She wants to confront Russia over control of Syrian airspace, an act that could well put America on a collision course with both Russia and Iran. Speaking of which, you can learn a little bit more of the kinds of geopolitical changes Bush-Clinton-Obama and their doofus allies have wrought in the ME. ..."
"... Her corruption is the corruption of the 1%, whom she serves. Her wars are the wars of the 1%. Her supporters are the elite 1%. The recent leaks confirm collusion between the Hillary campaign and the DNC to tilt the primary in favor of Hillary. The most recent leaks confirm the Obama WH and the Kerry State department worked to suppress evidence and FOI requests. ..."
"... Let's not dismiss this as ancient history. Do you know who else is being charged under the Espionage Acts of 1917? Snowden. This is still very much living U.S. law, ..."
"... "They were emailed to her personal server, for her own personal use." Wrong. The government owned emails were mailed to her government-purposed (at least in part) server for her professional use as an employee of the federal government. ..."
"... The entire exercise is, of course, absurd. As we've learned, US and UK politicians lie routinely to investigators over starting wars, torturing people, targeting dissidents for special treatment, punishing whistle-blowers, lying to the public, etc. with complete impunity. ..."
"... The mere suggestion that Ted Kennedy, or George Bush, or Hillary Clinton would ever be charged with any crime is laughable. Punishments and trials are for 'ordinary' citizens. ..."
"... Everyone knows that. Which is why Trump will win. ..."
@5 MFB Yes, on all points, especially this: "I don't know whether this obfuscation is due
to the journalists themselves believing that Clinton is a crook and therefore shouting "Thief,
thief!" to distract attention from this, or whether they're just being opportunistic and throwing
raw meat to the rubes. But it's not a good sign for the future of American civil society either
way."
I say both . The donor class 1% that own the media, especially the new media,
are solidly behind Hillary to an extent that I wonder whether we can call any of the media 'liberal.'
Trump correctly noted that to even refer to the 33,000 documents she destroyed after receiving
a federal subpoena as 'email' clouds the key facts: the FBI and government inspectors had to have
access to all the documents to determine their status.
The press understands all this, of course. They are neither forgetful, or entirely stupid.
They, however, quite blind to the damage they are doing to institutions they claim to care about.
In the short term, it's all upside. They won't be fighting in any of Hillary's wars. They
aren't going to be drafted and they aren't going to be bombed. The are almost all staunchly and
proudly anti-Republican and that's the sole metric by which actions are judged both morally and
legally.
Which makes them the perfect dupes of the donor class.
When the elephant starts to take heat for the crap effect of donor class policies, the
donor class simply pour money into donkey coffers to ensure the continuation of the donor class
crap policies.
Ezra and Ryan and their ilk are all aspiring VSPs. They'll get their 'one-on-one' interviews
to boost clicks and Hillary will simply forget to schedule more than one actual press conference
per year.
Liberals will clap and high five each other over the goofus they helped remove.
Politically-motivated prosecutions of former presidents would obviously not be good, but prosecutions
motivated by their legitimately criminal actions would be a welcome change. Everyone knows
that elite politicians (Bushes, Clintons) are basically immune from serious legal consequences,
and fury regarding the unfairness of our two-tiered justice system is part of what fuels the current
populism.
@19 Your legal expertise consists of exactly what? I have none but I know how to read and the
reading makes it quite clear that Hillary's use of the private server for State business was not
sanctioned, that mixing Foundation documents with government documents did not give her the authority
to destroy documents on the server after she received the subpoena, she was certainly not entitled
to destroy devices with a hammer, bleach her hard drives and otherwise do everything possible
to obstruct the FBI and justice department investigation.
Most tellingly, as the linked piece above at the NRO makes clear, Trump did not threaten to
put Hillary in jail. Unlike Obama, who used one arm of his administration, his own Justice department,
to investigate another arm of his own administration, the Secretary of State, Trump stipulated
clearly that he would distance himself and his administration from any investigation by appointing
a special prosecutor. His explicit remark re: jail was a counter-factual.
Had he been President, Hillary would have been in jail.
But you're clever enough (I hope) to know and understand all this. It's equally clear that
you're quite comfortable with Clinton Inc. taking de facto control of the Democratic party so
that Hillary did not have to face the kind of opposition she did in 2008.
You're obviously equally
cool with her 7 in a row coin toss escapade that 'won' her the Iowa primary, and the numerous
cases of collusion between the Hillary campaign and the DNC, you know – the ones that forced Wasserman-Schultz
to run fleeing from the podium during the train wreck called the Democratic Convention.
Down the
memory hole go the empty seats, the chain link fences, and emails suggesting Hillary's only obstacle
to power then was 'possibly' an agnostic, or a Jew. She gets paid hundreds of thousands of dollars
a pop to give secret speeches to bankers and her daughter collected three six-figure salaries,
one from NBC the folks who sat on the tape until just the right moment.
If she and Bill hadn't harassed Jones et al, why then was she so shocked and rattled to see
them up close? No desire for reconciliation? A healing hug? Bill banged a few of them, of that
there's no doubt and one credibly claimed he raped while serving as state attorney general.
Then there are the wars, none of which Hillary is responsible for. We came, we saw, he died
has the character and the temperament to be in the oval office because she wouldn't say shit when
she obviously has more than a mouthful, but a guy who engages in lewd locker room talk can credibly
be compared to Hitler.
Lee above says that Donald 'loomed' over Hillary. Ooooh. Well, she was sitting down half the
time and he six-foot.
I suppose Trump could have just stretched out on the floor staring at the ceiling microphone
in hand. That would have been the gentlemanly thing to do.
She wants to confront Russia over control of Syrian airspace, an act that could well put
America on a collision course with both Russia and Iran. Speaking of which, you can learn a little
bit more of the kinds of geopolitical changes Bush-Clinton-Obama and their doofus allies have
wrought in the ME.
One set of laws for the ruling class, and another for the rest of us. The FBI director stipulated
that any other suspected felon could not expect the same exceptional treatment.
Had she been charged and facing trial she would have been out of the race right now.
kidneystones @48 People in authority, which includes law enforcement, knew while Clinton
was Secretary of State she was taking emails on a private server. They had to know, because
the address for the emails had to be available or they couldn't have emailed her. If it wasn't
a problem then, it isn't a problem now.
That's true, even if a corrupt police bureaucrat like Comey wants to pretend his political
opinions are anything but an improper intervention. Unsafe to use a private server? After Snowden,
Manning and the entire career of wikileaks, not to mention the allegations about Russian and north
Korean cyberwarfare, Comey needs to explain how using a government server is safe! It's not even
unprecedented. Powell did the same, even if dumbasses want to excuse this as being somehow slipping
in before some regs.
No, sorry to say that buying into email scandal as anything but business as usual, especially
by people who vocally approve the American way of exceptional profits, is nothing but…sorry, no
way to be properly forceful but to correctly call it "dumbfuckery." This is probably why people
are looking for things like chauvinism or internalizing the decades of insane attacks by mad dog
reactionaries as the causes of such flagrant stupidity.
And yes, political prosecutions are legal, but highly destructive to any system that permits
such nonsense. I mean, really, it was the threat of a political prosecution that "forced" Caesar
to cross the Rubicon. The effects are rarely helpful. Consider for example one of the most notorious
political prosecutions in recent times, the impeachment of Bill Clinton. (Isn't the glee over
the Trump tape exactly like the glee over the blue dress? And just as likely to lead to anything
worthwhile?) Prof. Robin has either forgotten, or for some inexplicable reason things deems it
a good thing.
As for the election being over, the polls for Brexit or the polls for the FARC peace treaty
show that it's not over til the votes are counted, or not, as intimidation and fraud may (or may
not) determine. There isn't the slightest reason to be sure the down ballot Republican Party is
going to be dragged down by the candidate the party has resisted from the beginning.
It all depends on turnout. The relentless assault on Clinton will probably have its desired
effect of suppressing turnout. The humane feelings of the population at large have always suggested
the majority will endorse Clinton, who passes for human much better than Trump. But the US political
system is designed for minority rule. It's still too possible for Trump to win the electoral college.
Although CT and its commentariat unhesitatingly support the same viciously reactionary policies
in action under Obama (even as they pretend on occasion to oppose them as they predict Clinton's
future,) those same fundamentally incompetent policies leave Trump hope for a disaster that seemingly
vindicates him.
Last and least, the question of Trump's precedents is irrelevant when the gravity of Trump's
precedents are falsified. Trump's closest precedent is Nixon. The historical revisionism where
Nixon was just another conservative implicitly tells us Watergate was an unjust power grab by
malign liberal media. This is part and parcel of the increasing move towards reaction.
53@ The majority of Americans wanted her charged for her actions.
You're welcome to believe that her use of the private server (in direct violation of State
department guidelines, but useful when avoiding FOI requests), mishandling of classified materials,
and destruction of evidence merit no charges, or even investigation, as long as you understand
most Americans wanted her charged for her actions.
Her corruption is the corruption of the 1%, whom she serves. Her wars are the wars of the
1%. Her supporters are the elite 1%. The recent leaks confirm collusion between the Hillary campaign
and the DNC to tilt the primary in favor of Hillary. The most recent leaks confirm the Obama WH
and the Kerry State department worked to suppress evidence and FOI requests.
I don't dispute that parts of the Trump campaign are about 'revenge' or at least replying in
kind. The attacks on Bill's predatory sexual behavior is certainly that. The email case is simply
an illustrative example of elite corruption involving various branches of government, the media,
the Clinton foundation and a global list of grifters.
Some partisans suggest that Clinton was never going to be charged because the WH has known
from day 1 that charging Clinton would also mean charging Obama, who knew of the server from day
1, and well aware how insecure the system for handling State documents actually was. Hard as it
may be to imagine (and it is hard to imagine at this juncture) Clinton might not be the only one
indicted should Trump win and get his special prosecutor.
The world will certainly look very different should he pull this out. Hard to imagine.
@ 55 stevenjohnson. I have no problem with much of this, or most of your comments. You're quite
right to draw our attention to the grave insecurities in America's cyber defenses. I'm certainly
not one who sees the outcome as certain. The health of the Republicans at the state level is very
good already, in many cases, and the revulsion for the corruption in the media and government
that is fueling Trump_vs_deep_state and support for Bernie is unlikely to decline should Trump be defeated.
marcel proust: "Furthermore, he was not singled out for prosecution & jailing; many others (thousands?)
who actively opposed US participation in WW1 also went to jail: socialists and other pacifists
including religious objectors, as well as many of German (and perhaps Irish) ancestry."
Which is how the U.S. government broke the IWW: they had had an anti-war position for as long
as they existed, but backed down on doing any actual, coordinated resistance in favor of preserving
their ability to organize workers. But that wasn't enough and they were broken anyways.
Let's not dismiss this as ancient history. Do you know who else is being charged under
the Espionage Acts of 1917? Snowden. This is still very much living U.S. law, and the people
who say that we must elect HRC at all costs are generally the same people who don't care that
Obama is using it.
This election also can be seen in a more general, global context of how forces have been accommodating
to the end of the cold war. Perhaps a detour into the history of some 3rd world banana republics,
those that many Americans deem as deplorable as a Trump supporter, can shed some light.
Starting in the 50's, and with the expressed goal of modernizing their countries (meaning an
accelerated capitalist development with the US as its model and as the only possible model) military
and terror regimes took over South America (Paraguay: 1954-1991, Chile: 1973-1990, Argentina:
1976-1982, Uruguay: 1966- 1985). For the most part, before being forced out of power, these military
regimes declared amnesty for themselves. Enter truth commissions, whose purpose is to investigate
the causes of violence and human rights violations and to establish judicial responsibility.
Back in the US, those responsible for human rights violations around the world, such as torture,
extra-judicial assassinations, and renditions, have never been brought to justice and the mere
mention of Clinton (a politician!) facing jail for a very minor infraction is considered in undemocratic
bad taste.
Conclusion: perhaps more than a special prosecutor, a commission of truth is in order, but
not at the moment, after the US crumbles as the USSR did. Only then can 3rd worlders hope to see
Kissinger, Bush, Blair, Aznar, Obama, and all their enablers brought to justice. For the moment,
we have to put up with the spectacle of some Americans, in an intent at preemptive amnesty, outraged
at the mere thought that their presumptive tin-pot, global Caesar is not above suspicion and that
they themselves are better than 3rd worlders.
kidneystones @48 People in authority, which includes law enforcement, knew while Clinton
was Secretary of State she was taking emails on a private server. They had to know, because
the address for the emails had to be available or they couldn't have emailed her. If it wasn't
a problem then, it isn't a problem now.
This is technically incorrect. SMTP mail is very old and pretty convoluted protocol.
Existance of private address means only that the email server exists but it does not determine
where the mailbox is located (multiple layers of redirection are possible).
the level of incompetence and malevolence that Clinton and her associated demonstrated is simple
staggering for any specialist or lawyer. Which aspects of it can be proven beyond reasonable doubt
is an interesting theoretical question, but for any specialist it is clear that Hillary not only
cut corners and but also had driven on red light. As simple as that.
The essence of emailgate is not existence of email server per se. the strongest part of evidence
against her is the saga of destroying "non-essential" emails while being under investigation and
indirectly instructing technical personnel to use special technical means which make deleted emails
unrecoverable. You might wish to look at
Based on the amount of evidence collected my personal opinion is that this might well be a
provable offence.
That means that Hillary risks impeachment if elected. So the idea of assigning special prosecutor
is baked in the case independently of who wins in November.
18 U.S. Code § 793(e) and (f). This offense carries a potential penalty of ten years imprisonment.
Executive Order 13526 "The unauthorized disclosure of foreign government information is presumed
to cause damage to the national security." , Sec. 1.1(4)(d) (for violations committed after December
29, 2009)
44 U.S. Code § 3106 – Unlawful removal, destruction of records
A very simple question to you: Is not the notion of a "note relating to the national defense"
include emails, for example, emails related to the targets of drone strikes, which were present
in the steam?
As for "proper place of custody" this argument is not applicable to the deletion of emails
when a person is under federal or Congressional investigation. In this case the act of deletion
itself constitute the violation of the statute independently of the "proper place of custody"
and sensitivity of information in the email.
I would recommend to read (or re-read) URLs that were provided above. They contain wealth of
information and arguments both pro and contra. The one about 'shadow It" created by Hillary is
slightly outdated, but still useful. And they might help to answer your next questions :-)
I tend to view Hillary Clinton as a person, who escaped prosecution due to Obama pardon delivered
via Comey (probably under pressure from Bill Clinton via Loretta Lynch). Essentially putting herself
above the law, by the fact of belonging to "ruling neoliberal elite", the 0.01%. Your mileage
can vary.
Back to the OP. There's a bumper crop of new email on the topic of the press and debate moderators
colluding with the Hillary campaign to: screw Sanders (Boston Herald – also on board for anti-Trump),
minimize damage from the email fallout, and best of all (for me) John Harwood (neutral debate
moderator) providing written evidence that even that venue was tilted to damage Trump and protect
Hillary.
"They were emailed to her personal server, for her own personal use." Wrong.
The government owned emails were mailed to her government-purposed (at least in part) server
for her professional use as an employee of the federal government.
As an employee of the federal government she is bound by all (not some) federal laws respecting
government property, and by all (not some) State Department regulations regarding the handling
of government documents and electronic devices.
And whether she 'removed' the documents from their proper place for the purpose of espionage,
or not, the fact that we're now reading these emails, we are told by the Clinton campaign, thanks
to the insecurity of her private unsecured system – she's wide open to charges of gross negligence
in the handling of government documents, especially when State department regulations demand that
those with any kind of security clearance understand how government documents are to be handled
and fully comply with all protective measures.
Comey called her handling of sensitive documents 'extremely careless.'
That alone provides solid grounds for charges and a trial.
@112 Thanks for the clarity – you agree that she acted well outside the law. You agree there are
grounds to charge her and to proceed with a trial. Good.
I'm quite comfortable leaving charges and the trial to a special prosecutor, as Trump promises.
The majority of Americans certainly held the view that charges and a trial are warranted.
If you're of the opinion that she shouldn't be charged for possible crimes until after the
election, go ahead and make that case.
@119 Determining guilt, or innocence is not the job of the FBI. The job of the FBI is to determine
if there are grounds for charges to be laid.
"I said it appeared plausible she might have obstructed justice."
Let's first provide Hillary with a trial in order to determine if she actually committed
any crime. That's normally how it works. Then after the verdict if she's found guilty,
you're welcome to suggest appropriate punishment.
Still waiting for an answer: put Hillary on trial now, or after the election.
The entire exercise is, of course, absurd. As we've learned, US and UK politicians lie routinely
to investigators over starting wars, torturing people, targeting dissidents for special treatment,
punishing whistle-blowers, lying to the public, etc. with complete impunity.
The mere suggestion that Ted Kennedy, or George Bush, or Hillary Clinton would ever be
charged with any crime is laughable. Punishments and trials are for 'ordinary' citizens.
Obama called Sanders a 'shiny new object' while praising Clinton for
overcoming adversity
•
10/10/16 2:30pm
In an
interview
with Fox News this past April, President
Obama
asserted that he did not put pressure on the FBI's criminal
investigation into
Hillary Clinton's
private email server
. "I guarantee that there is no political influence in
any investigation conducted by the Justice Department, or the FBI-not just in
this case but in any case," he said. There is now mounting evidence suggesting
Obama's claim was false.
"Newly disclosed emails show top
Obama
Administration officials were in close contact with
Hillary
Clinton
's nascent presidential campaign in early 2015 about the potential
fallout from revelations that the former secretary of state used a private
email server,"
reported
Bryon Tau for
The Wall Street Journal
on October 7. The
emails were obtained by the Republican National Committee through a Freedom of
Information Act (FOIA)
lawsuit
requesting those records.
A few months before White House Communications Director Jennifer Palmieri
went to work for her campaign, emails show her in damage control for
Clinton
as early as 2015, when news first broke that Clinton's private
server existed. In one chain of emails between Palmieri and State Department
spokeswoman Jennifer Psaki, Palmieri asked Psaki to ensure that Secretary of
State John Kerry wasn't asked about
Clinton's
private email server
during an upcoming CBS interview. "Good to go on
killing CBS idea," Psaki responded back to Palmieri, according to the
Journal
,
adding, "going to hold on any other TV options just given the swirl of crap out
there."
In March 2015,
The New York Times
reported
that
Obama
said he didn't know
Clinton
was using a private email address. That turned out to be false, as
the second
FBI
report on their investigation into
Clinton's
private server
revealed
that the president used a pseudonym in email communications with
her. "How is this not classified?"
Clinton
aide Huma Abedin
asked
the FBI during their interview. Obama's use of a pseudonym suggests
he not only was aware of Clinton's private server, but he knew it wasn't
secured to communicate with
Clinton
, as there were no security officers to mark the correspondence as
classified.
Obama's administration has intervened to delay several FOIA requests until
after Election Day to shield
Clinton
from further scrutiny.
In October 2015, the White House
stopped
the release of emails between
Clinton
and Obama, citing the need to keep presidential communications
confidential.
In June, the Obama administration stepped in to
delay
the State Department fulfilling an FOIA request from International
Business Times for emails regarding the Trans-Pacific Partnership until 2017.
"The delay was issued in the same week the Obama administration filed a
court
motion
to try to kill a lawsuit aimed at forcing the federal government to
more quickly comply with open records requests for
Clinton
-era State Department documents,"
reported
David
Sirota.
President Obama has also repeatedly
defended
Clinton
when questioned about her
private server
,
blaming
the controversy on politics. But while the
FBI
was conducting an investigation, Obama should have refrained from
making his own judgment on the case.
This was the consensus among the
Democratic
Party
establishment: provide
Clinton
with impunity. No presidential candidate has ever won their party's
nomination while under a FBI investigation, yet the
Democratic Party
, with the president's support, protected
Clinton
throughout the private email server controversy. Though Obama
waited until after the end of the
Democratic primaries
to formally endorse
Clinton
, his support and praise throughout the primaries favored her. In
October 2015, CNN
reported
a top
Obama
strategist said he would support
Clinton
.
In a January interview with Politico, Obama
denigrated
Sen.
Bernie
Sanders'
support, calling him a "shiny new object" while praising Clinton
for overcoming adversity.
The
State Department Inspector General
and
FBI
Director
James Comey
issued severe criticisms in their reports on Hillary Clinton's
use of a
private server
. But to merit an indictment, the
FBI
would have been forced to be even more aggressive in their
investigation than usual. The investigation had already been polarized
politically, while
Clinton's
staff were granted immunity and a team of lawyers guided
Clinton
every step of the way throughout the investigation. For similar
reasons to why big bankers don't get indicted anymore,
Clinton
managed to avoid the FBI recommending an indictment. The political
climate in which all
Democratic Party
leaders stood behind
Clinton
,
that Obama affirmed repeatedly, made it virtually impossible for
Clinton
to be held accountable.
"... Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice ..."
"... Whoever knowingly alters, destroys, mutilates, conceals, covers up, falsifies, or makes a false entry in any record, document, or tangible object with the intent to impede, obstruct, or influence the investigation or proper administration of any matter within the jurisdiction of any department or agency of the United States or any case filed under title 11, or in relation to or contemplation of any such matter or case, shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both. ..."
"... Wall Street Journal ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... Sidney Powell worked in the Department of Justice for 10 years, in three federal districts under nine United States Attorneys from both political parties. She was lead counsel in more than 500 federal appeals. She is the author of Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice -a legal thriller that tells the inside story of high-profile prosecutions. ..."
"... Face the Nation ..."
"... The New York Times ..."
"... Disclosure: Donald Trump is the father-in-law of Jared Kushner, the publisher of Observer Media. ..."
"... The New York Times ..."
"... The New York Times ..."
"... The Wall Street Journal ..."
"... The New York Times ..."
"... Many Americans, you once told students at the University of New Hampshire, "don't seem to appreciate the link between what happens abroad and what happens here at home." Can you think of ways to strengthen that weak link? ..."
"... Name three people aside from yourself that Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton should pick as the next Secretary of State? ..."
"... So forgive and forget? ..."
"... This interview was edited and condensed ..."
"... Disclosure: Donald Trump is the father-in-law of Jared Kushner, the publisher of Observer Media. ..."
"... City & State ..."
"... City & State ..."
"... The New Republic ..."
"... International Business Times ..."
"... Los Angeles Times ..."
"... Los Angeles Times ..."
"... Social Science and Medicine ..."
"... Health Psychology ..."
"... John A. Tures is a professor of political science at LaGrange College in LaGrange, Ga. He can be reached at ..."
"... This story has been updated to clarify that the state's plan to rebuild the its transportation system includes federal funds and other sources. ..."
Former federal prosecutor says that Hillary obstructed justice and destroyed evidence-with
the support of the president himself • 10/11/16 8:30am
Just when one thinks the cavalier cabal of Clinton and her cronies has exhausted all manner of corruption,
yet another outrage surfaces, implicating even more people.
The bombshell this week is that Loretta Lynch and James Comey not only gave immunity to Hillary's
closest co-conspirators Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson-who, despite being attorneys, destroyed
evidence right and left-but, in a secret side deal, agreed to
limit the FBI's review of the Clinton team laptops to pre-January 2015 and to destroy the laptops
when the FBI review was complete.
Congress and every law-abiding citizen in this country should be outraged. This blatant destruction
of evidence is obstruction of justice itself.
We no longer have a Department of Justice: We have a Department of Obstructing and Corrupting
Justice to protect the power elite of the chosen side.
It's easy to see now why Lynch
secretly met Bill Clinton on an airport tarmac on June 27. Only a few days later, the FBI had
its little chat with Hillary-neither under oath nor with a rights warning-in the presence of her
coconspirators. Then, Hillary announced she would keep Lynch as Attorney General if she is elected
president. Surely by coincidence, the very next day Comey does his song and dance ending the "investigation."
Comey's "investigation" was a
farce . Any former prosecutor worth a flip would have convened a grand jury, issued subpoenas,
gotten search warrants, seized computers, run wire taps, indicted the Clinton cabal, and squeezed
the underlings to plead guilty and cooperate. This business of friendly chats, immunity agreements
handed out like party favors, and side deals that include the Attorney General approving the destruction
of evidence to keep it from Congress doesn't happen for others targeted by the feds.
Just ask any number of
Wall Street executives who for various reasons found themselves on the opposite side of the Department
of "Justice." In fact, my former client, Jim Brown, served a year in prison convicted of perjury
and obstruction of justice for testifying about his personal understanding of a telephone call to
which he was not even a party. Yes, you read that correctly. Read
Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice . It becomes more
relevant every day.
How did we get here?
Thanks to the work of
Judicial Watch and others, we learned over a year ago now that Hillary Clinton ran the most important
and confidential of world affairs and the United States Department of State through an unsecured
computer server assembled by her minions and ensconced in the basement of her New York home. She
did so despite repeated warnings of security risks, against protocol, and contrary to her
own memo to all of her underlings. That posed no problem simply because the rules don't apply
to
Clinton .
Conveniently, her server also handled
Clinton Foundation correspondence that facilitated the personal enrichment of Hillary and Bill
by hundreds of millions of dollars. That money came from Bill's remarkable "
speaking fees " at hundreds of events around the world-each of which was quickly approved as
requested by Clinton crony
Cheryl Mills at the State Department-as if there were no
conflict of interest . Simultaneously, foreign entities made "donations" of hundreds of millions
of dollars to the Clinton Foundation to obtain the immediate attention of and curry favor with the
secretary of state-and it worked.
The personal home server allowed Hillary Clinton to send and receive all of her emails and run
the State Department free from protected, secure, and
required government channels. It was established deliberately to circumvent the Federal Records
Act and the Freedom of Information Act-both of which applied to her work-related correspondence.
That was no problem for Clinton however, as she simply "didn't know how to use a computer," apparently
was incapable of learning to do so (unlike most toddlers in the country), and she liked her Blackberry-which
was reason enough for her highness to ignore the national security interests of the entire country.
One of our favorite Clinton lies is: 'My staff and I will cooperate completely with the investigation.'
Clinton's insistence on operating outside the government security protocols demonstrated at best
deliberate disregard for the law and national security-and, at worst, conduct that was treasonous.
That is why 18 USC 793 (d) and (f) make it a crime punishable by imprisonment for
10 years to even move
any information relating to the national defense from secure conditions or to fail to return it upon
demand. Clinton did both-repeatedly.
The unsecure server also facilitated the clearly conflicting roles of Clinton confidant and protégé
Huma Abedin, who was paid simultaneously by the Clinton Foundation and the taxpayers through the
State Department. That made it easier for the double-dipping Abedin to schedule meetings quickly
for Clinton with those who had paid to play-substantial donors to the Foundation, such as the Crown
Prince of Bahrain, who had been denied a face-to-face through those pesky State Department protocols
in place for mere mortals. His millions in contributions to the Foundation got him an appointment
with Clinton through Abedin in a matter of hours.
We wrote more than a year ago-as soon as we heard one Clinton server was "wiped"-about
the Countless Crimes of Hillary Clinton . We foresaw the need for a special prosecutor and predicted
that if emails could be found, they would likely implicate high ranking people across the government,
including the president.
Lo and behold, President Obama, who told the country he heard of Clinton's
private email from news reports, was in reality emailing her at Clintonemail.com and using an
alias. He must have forgotten. But, wait-just this week, we get more emails, and there's now evidence
that the
White House and the State Department coordinated an attempt
to minimize the problem.
Now we have a candidate for president of the United States who has committed lie after lie, obstructed
justice, and destroyed evidence with the support of the president himself-conduct for which many
people are in prison. Sometimes it's called False Statements to federal officials, punishable by
up to five years in prison under 18 USC
1001 . Under other circumstances, such as in sworn statements to federal judges or testimony
to Congress, it can be perjury under
18 USC 1621 or 1623.
And let's not forget obstruction of justice under 18 USC 1519. That statute was tailor-made to
fit the facts of the Clinton cabal's destruction of evidence. It reads:
Whoever knowingly alters, destroys, mutilates, conceals, covers up, falsifies, or makes a
false entry in any record, document, or tangible object with the intent to impede, obstruct, or influence
the investigation or proper administration of any matter within the jurisdiction of any department
or agency of the United States or any case filed under title 11, or in relation to or contemplation
of any such matter or case, shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 20 years, or
both.
Remember the man relentlessly prosecuted by the feds for throwing a few fish overboard?
That
case had to go all the way to the Supreme Court for them to decide that fish weren't the kind
of tangible objects/evidence to which Congress intended the new obstruction statute to apply. But
emails, computers, and servers are. Senator Clinton voted for that new statute-but it doesn't apply
to her. Well, it would, but Loretta Lynch and James Comey just agreed to destroy evidence of it themselves.
These false statement and obstruction offenses are so easy to prove that prosecutors often tack
them on to already multi-count indictments just for good measure when they want to hammer Wall Street
bankers or other citizens and business people who actually work for a living.
How many of these federal criminal offenses are established by the limited evidence that has been
pried out of the Clintons' hands or resurrected from unsuccessful although mighty attempts to destroy
it? They are truly countless, as each email would be a separate charge but, for the sake of brevity,
we'll just pick three or four-that don't even include all the conspiracy charge options routinely
used by "reasonable" prosecutors.
First, Clinton
testified to Congress that she "turned over all of her work-related emails." Second, she "only
wanted to use one device." Later, she chose her words carefully, claiming "nothing was marked classified
when it was sent or received." That sounds good to people who are not lawyers, but it's Clintonese
and not the law.
She "turned over all her work emails"?
First, her friend Sidney Blumenthal found a number of emails he exchanged with her about confidential
matters of State that she didn't produce. Next, that pesky Pentagon found over 1,000 emails between
Hillary and General Petraeus alone. Most recently, the FBI found roughly
15,000 Clinton thought had been erased completely when she had her servers "wiped" professionally
with BleachBit. We'll never know how many were deliberately destroyed to protect her incompetence
and corruption. Mills, Samuelson, and others at Platte River Networks destroyed whatever they wanted.
As both secretary of state and an attorney who had long been paid by the taxpayers, Clinton should
know that information "relating to the national defense" is what is protected under 18 USC 793(f).
It doesn't have to be "classified"-marked or unmarked-even though much of it was.
Sure, let's give her the presidency and the nuclear codes and access to every national secret-ISIS
can just hack her and use our own missiles to destroy us. They won't have to worry about trying to
bring nukes into the country.
Clinton may have only wanted "one device," but the truth is that
she had 13 "personal mobile devices that were lost, discarded, or destroyed."
Reporter Sharyl Attkisson has an excellent timeline of irrefutable, no-spin facts derived from
the part of the FBI's file that has been made public. The timeline of events alone is damning.
Not surprisingly, Attkisson reports that "[a]fter the State Dept. notified Hillary Clinton her
records would be sought by the House Benghazi Committee, copies of her email on the laptops of her
attorneys Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson were wiped with Bleachbit, and the FBI couldn't review
them. After her emails were subpoenaed, Hillary Clinton's email archive was also permanently deleted
from her then-server 'PRN' with BleachBit, and the FBI couldn't review it."
One of our favorite Clinton lies is: "My staff and I will cooperate completely with the investigation."
I guess that's why they invoked their Fifth Amendment privileges against self-incrimination, had
hard-drives wiped, destroyed devices with hammers, put the selected emails in the hands
of her attorney and refused to produce them for weeks, while her staff all refused to speak without
grants of immunity or took the Fifth. I guess it just depends on how you define "cooperation."
Enter stage left James Comey, Director of the FBI, who fills himself with righteous indignation
to tell Congress what a great job the FBI did in this "investigation." As Congressman
Trey Gowdy said , and I concur, "This isn't the FBI I used to work with."
Clinton ran her shenanigans without an Inspector General in the State Department. An Inspector
General is appointed by the President, but his or her job is to serve as a watchdog on behalf of
the taxpayers. As The Wall Street Journal reported, Clinton
declined to allow an Inspector General at the State Department during her entire tenure-so there
was no internal oversight, and President Obama allowed that. More than a year ago, the Inspector
Generals for State and for the Intelligence Community conducted a limited review of only 40 of Clinton's
emails. They quickly found several containing
classified information which they immediately reported to the executive branch and advised Congress.
They
wrote : "This classified information should never have been transmitted via an unclassified personal
system."
Remember Richard Nixon? Remember Attorney General John Mitchell? Remember White House Counsel
John Dean? Nixon White House cronies Haldeman and Erlichman?
They all went
to prison .
It's not just the private server. It's not about personal emails or even a few business emails
sent from a personal account.
It is about the fair administration of justice and trust in our justice system. It is about the
accountability of our highest officials. It is about destroying evidence in the face of a serious
investigation. It is about national security breaches of the highest order, and it's about the privatization
and sale of our State Department for personal enrichment. The conduct of the Clintons, their cronies,
their Foundation, and now our highest law enforcement officials make the entire Watergate scandal
look like an insignificant computer hack.
Where is the Congress? Where are what used to be our great newspapers? The sounds of silence are
terrifying indicators of how government-controlled our mainstream media has become. I guess that's
why Reporters Without Borders has dropped our Freedom of Press rank to 46 th world-wide.
FBI Director James Comey and Attorney General Loretta Lynch should be impeached for their roles
in whitewashing
Clinton's crimes and their own participation in the destruction of evidence . They facilitated
and participated in the obstruction of justice-spitting in the face of the Congressional investigation.
Congress should be able to name a special prosecutor when the Attorney General has a clear conflict-such
as meeting secretly with Bill Clinton during the "investigation" and receiving a promise of continuing
as Attorney General if Hillary is elected President. The timeline of events and their conduct reek
of corruption.
Stay tuned. Clinton's answers under oath to D.C. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan are due October
13. Remember, he's the judge who appointed a special prosecutor to investigate the Department of
Justice following the Bush administration's corrupted prosecution of former Alaska Senator Ted Stevens.
And it was Judge John Sirica-combined with what was then the great Washington Post -who
exposed the Nixon corruption.
With more and more government intrusion in every aspect of our individual businesses and lives,
we are quickly losing the land of the free, and we now must wonder if any of the brave are home.
Who has the chutzpah to stand up to the Clintons? Where are the real Americans? Hopefully, on election
day, they will pour out in droves and resoundingly demand real change. The election and Judge Sullivan
are our only chances for justice at all.
Sidney Powell worked in the Department of Justice for 10 years, in three federal districts
under nine United States Attorneys from both political parties. She was lead counsel in more than
500 federal appeals. She is the author of
Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice -a legal thriller that tells
the inside story of high-profile prosecutions.
Rod Dreher
hysterics became pretty annoying.
He dooes not want to understand that Hillary Clinton is a stuach neocon warmonger, has poor helath,
can be impeached even after winning due to emailgate and her platform is actually more of a moderate
republican, then a democrat. She is completly in the pcket of major Walll street bank and
enjoys this status.
Back in May, Michael Lind penned what I still think is
the most insightful essay
describing what's happening, and what is going to happen, in
US politics after this year. With the Left having won the culture war, the parties of the
future will be a nationalist GOP vs. a multiculturalist, globalist Democratic Party.
Excerpt:
The outlines of the two-party system of the 2020s and 2030s are dimly visible. The
Republicans will be a party of mostly working-class whites, based in the South and West
and suburbs and exurbs everywhere. They will favor universal, contributory social
insurance systems that benefit them and their families and reward work effort-programs
like Social Security and Medicare. But they will tend to oppose means-tested programs
for the poor whose benefits they and their families cannot enjoy.
They will oppose increases in both legal and illegal immigration, in some cases
because of ethnic prejudice; in other cases, for fear of economic competition. The
instinctive economic nationalism of tomorrow's Republicans could be invoked to justify
strategic trade as well as crude protectionism. They are likely to share
Trump's
view
of unproductive finance: "The hedge-fund guys didn't build this country. These
are guys that shift paper around and they get lucky."
The Democrats of the next generation will be even more of an alliance of upscale,
progressive whites with blacks and Latinos, based in large and diverse cities. They will
think of the U.S. as a version of their multicultural coalition of distinct racial and
ethnic identity groups writ large. Many younger progressives will take it for granted
that moral people are citizens of the world, equating nationalism and patriotism with
racism and fascism.
The withering-away of industrial unions, thanks to automation as well as offshoring,
will liberate the Democrats to embrace free trade along with mass immigration
wholeheartedly. The emerging progressive ideology of post-national cosmopolitanism will
fit nicely with urban economies which depend on finance, tech and other industries of
global scope, and which benefit from a constant stream of immigrants, both skilled and
unskilled.
"For months, I've been beating the drum of the non-novelty of Donald Trump, but try as I might,
even I can't remember a presidential candidate caught on tape bragging about assaulting women and
grabbing pussy."
If only Frank Sinatra had had the foresight to get a hidden tape spool
running, we could now enjoy the lasting record of Senator John F.Kennedy's attitudes toward "poontang".
Anyway, if HRC actually broke the law… shouldn't she face prosecution? I know some people (at
amconmag, as it happens) have called for members of the Bush administration to be put on trial.
Over here, the demand for Blair to be tried at the Hague for war crimes is now a tired old Left
cliche. Obviously, it would be new to demand punishment for the loser just for losing, but that
isn't the context here.
Looking at the FB timelines of my 'professional class' milquetoast 'progressive' acquaintances in
the US (who all
gravitas/te
towards Vox), who have since this weekend become unglued, this
is very much a case of people deliberately goading themselves into frenzies, tumbling over one
another in their attempts to win an apparent virtue-signalling-contest.
Meanwhile, nary a word about "we came, we saw, he died", as it apparently is just peachy to
destroy a country if you want to tick 'killing an autocrat who is not in the US's pocket' off
your bucket-list.
To put it bluntly, looking away and excusing evils one "understands" and thinks one can "contain"
(except insofar as it affects non-nationals and
the
bottom
30-40%
,
anyway, but who cares about them) because the "other side" is perceived to be "more"
evil/disruptive/threatening to the status quo is a pattern of behavior that disturbs me far more
than the behavior of the other side, however nasty that may be.
"... I better like the reasoning in Basic Instinct when Sharon Stone just after passing a lie detector test said to Nick in reference to his killing civilians while on cocaine: "You see Nick … we're both innocent." ..."
"In an election in which one of the nominees is promising he'll make great deals-that he'll
deliver everything under the sun, without remotely explaining how any of it would be politically
possible-there's something bold, even radical, in espousing such a practical philosophy for political
deal-making.
Maybe it's not a popular message in this populist moment, but it would have the virtue of being
honest."
"The Case for a 'Two-Faced' Hillary Clinton" [The New Republic]. "In an election in which one
of the nominees is promising he'll make great deals-that he'll deliver everything under the sun,
without remotely explaining how any of it would be politically possible-there's something bold,
even radical, in espousing such a practical philosophy for political deal-making. Maybe it's not
a popular message in this populist moment, but it would have the virtue of being honest."
I better like the reasoning in Basic Instinct when Sharon Stone just after passing a lie
detector test said to Nick in reference to his killing civilians while on cocaine: "You see Nick
… we're both innocent."
Yikes:
"We therefore hold that the CFPB is unconstitutionally structured,' the court said" … PHH said
the law creating the CFPB gave an unaccountable director too much authority."
Can we get this same judge to rule on the constitutionality of the AUMF, Patriot Act, or any
case brought regarding NSA spyiny?
"Can we get this same judge to rule on the constitutionality of the AUMF, Patriot Act, or any
case brought regarding NSA spyiny?"
Unfortunately, this very same judge has a long history on those issues,
including time in the Bush Cheney White House before getting a lifetime appointment
on the bench,
and for the most part it's not pretty. Emptywheel has an
entire archive devoted
to him.
This segues into an argument in favor of voting for Hillary Clinton that I can't rebut: Republicans
appoint bad people to both the Executive branch and to the Judiciary, but Democrats only appoint
bad people to the Executive branch. Therefore, one should vote for Hillary Clinton, Democrat.
I've oversimplified the argument, but in general, that's what some people have told me, and I
don't have a good counter argument.
That doesn't mean I'm going to vote for Clinton. She's a crook. I'll either leave the Presidential
part of the ballot blank, or vote for Stein, despite my great annoyance over some of the things
that Ajamu Baraka has said.
Merrick Garland, Obama's latest nominee, is pro-Ciizen's United, so not sure how "good" he
is. Conventional wisdom about Democratic vs. Republican appointees to the bench would seem suspect
to me in a day when the Overton window has shifted so far to the right that the Democratic candidate
for President is more conservative, more pro-business, more hawkish, and less environmentally
responsible than Richard Nixon,
I challenge you to find any Democratic judicial appointments of the past 3 decades that are
as bad as Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, or Samuel Alito.
As for Garland, he's not good, but he's certainly not as bad as any Republican
nominee would be. And he hasn't even been confirmed.
Hillary is surrounding herself with exactly the same cast of characters as those who appointed
the judges you name. Why do you think her taste in justices will be any different than her taste
in policy advisors or potential cabinet members?
After Clinton signs the TPP, the Supreme Court will be moot anyway.
Obama's Executive branch appointments have been dismal, but his judicial appointments seem
to be better - Sotomayor and Kagan. Bill Clinton appointed Breyer and Ginsburg. None of these
4 judges is remotely like Scalia.
I strongly suspect that Hillary Clinton would nominate similar judges.
We definitely don't want the TPP to pass. We need to keep the pressure on Congress, so we don't
have to worry about what a President might do.
I reiterate: there are many things wrong with Clinton, and I will not vote for her.
Sotomayor has been great, but Kagan has been a mixed bag. She voted (in a losing dissent,
along with Scalia, Kennedy and Silent Clarence) , to allow Sarbanes-Oxley to be used against
a fisherman for throwing his catch overboard. She was to the right of Roberts on this one. Even the liberal Harvard Law School …
Clinton's first "appointment," first in the line of succession, Tim Kaine, is pro-TPP, pro-Hyde
Amendment, anti-labor (pro-right-to-work-for-nothing), and pro-intervention in Syria.
Know what you mean but try asking people who bring up judges as the reason to vote blue, why
should we believe that when Dems can't even deliver on judges when their nominee is a
REPUBLICAN for goodness sakes? Then take exaggerated offense at being expected to settle
for so LITTLE .
I appreciate the feedback. However, I don't think it's clear that Garland is a Republican.
Prior to nominating him, there were trial balloons from the White House suggesting that Republican
Brian Sandoval of Nevada would be chosen.
The New Republic piece is a festering pile of shit, and I intend that phrase as purely descriptive
account of the object.
This is a woman who with her husband earned over $139 MILLION DOLLARS in paid speeches to the
.1%–the OLIGARCHY–between 2007-2014 ALONE!
And yet the cretin of a human being calling himself the author of this "piece" [of shit] chooses
to insult my intelligence–yea, even perpetrate fraud upon the species!–by pretending as if this
UNQUESTIONABLE FACT is simply IRRELEVANT to Clinton's "nuanced"–[insert sounds of my heaving vomit]–distinction
between her public and private position. A DISTINCTION THAT WOULD ITSELF HAVE BEEN WITHHELD FROM
THE PUBLIC RECORD IF IT HAD NOT BEEN LEAKED BY WIKILEAKS, THE FOUNDER OF WHOM SHE HAS PROPOSED
BE MURDERED BY DRONE STRIKE!!
No, MY PROBLEM, YOUR PROBLEM, ANYBODY'S PROBLEM with this avaricious sociopathic warmongering
ulcerous wretch is–MUST BE–that she is a WOMAN?!
"As substantively defensible-even virtuous-as dealmaking can be, taking this tack runs the
risk of confirming the public's worst fears about Clinton: that she's dishonest and lacking in
core conviction. That notion, which has a gendered element to it…." [but might also perhaps not
be unrelated to her long history of manipulation, lying, stealing, backstabbing, fraud, embezzlement,
fraud, more lying, murder, more murder, more fraud]…
Fuck it. The oligarchy doesn't even have to be good at "public relations" anymore. Might as
well get ahead of the curve and move to Brazil.
PHH is horrible. They purchased my mortgage last year, and started forclosure proceedings within
the 60 day grace period while my autopayment was still going to the previous servicer (as allowed
by law). Their customer support in Asia lied repeatedly, and when I starting informing them that
I would record the calls, they would hang up or refuse to talk to me.
They finally acknowledged their error after 3-4 calls (particularly once I found out I had
to keep asking for a supervisor until I was connected to the US), but it was a huge waste of my
time.
Nor the 'Necrotelecomnicon.' The handy guide to contacting H Clinton's core advisor circle.
As for which precise 'circle' (of H-,) H Clintons advisors come from; opinions are divided.
Hillary advocates are in a typical situation "The pot calling the kettle black". Bill Clinton
sexapades are much more serious that Trump said or ever attempted...
Notable quotes:
"... Krugman's hero, Hillary Rodham Clinton, is on the record for support Simpson-Bowles. Austerity and raising the Social Security age? What gives? ..."
"... I'd suggest, an underlying cynicism... We're talking about a party that has long exploited white backlash to mobilize working-class voters, while enacting policies that actually hurt those voters but benefit the wealthy. Anyone participating in that scam ... has to have the sense that politics is a sphere in which you can get away with a lot if you have the right connections ..."
"... There is also, I'd suggest, an underlying cynicism that pervades the Republican elite. We're talking about a party that has long exploited white backlash to mobilize working-class voters, while enacting policies that actually hurt those voters but benefit the wealthy. ..."
"... I agree, impugning the integrity of a large group of people is about as bad as calling a large group of people 'deplorables' or Romney's writing off 47% of the population. ..."
"... Unfortunately, history is clear that there is one group of people who routinely took sexual advantage of women: some of the rich and powerful. ..."
"... The main reason it was incomprehensible was that "Europe" practices the allegedly-French maxim "live and let live" in this regard - a considerable level of "benevolent" sin and debauchery will be tolerated and dutifully disregarded as long as it is properly hidden and orderly public perceptions are maintained (or if some of it gets out, at least a customary effort will have to have been made to keep it under wraps). I.e. if you make reasonable efforts to keep it private, it will be treated as private. But fail to make the effort or deliberately show off, then you will meet with scorn and resentment. ..."
"... Using positions of influence to actively take advantage or extract concessions, or abusive behavior of any kind, are not OK, and there is no presumption that it is a perk of power. ..."
"... And that it was viewed as extramarital relations was in good part because a lot of the media "coverage" concentrated on rehashing all the salacious "sexual" aspects in almost pornographic detail. If anybody defiled Ms. Lewinsky's virtue and reputation, it was the persecutors and the media. ..."
"... So why do the French tolerate behavior that would both shame and topple leaders in the U.S. or Britain? Because, despite French lip service to their revolution's promise of "egalite" for all citizens, voters still tend to defer to politicians as a class apart who enjoy entitlements once associated with royal courts. ..."
"... Italy was pretty tolerant of Berlusconi's behavior...until it was proven that he slept with an underage woman. ..."
"... Krugman's claim: "Yes, Bill Clinton had affairs; but there's a world of difference between consensual sex, however inappropriate, and abuse of power to force those less powerful to accept your urges." ..."
"... Wikipedia: "Bill Clinton, the 42nd President of the United States (1993-2001), has been publicly accused by several women of sexual misconduct. Juanita Broaddrick has accused Clinton of rape; Kathleen Willey has accused Clinton of groping her without consent; and Paula Jones accuses Clinton of exposing himself and sexually harassing her." ..."
"... Sadly, Krugman is just spewing the usual partisan sanctimony ...being shocked--just shocked--at the behavior of the other side while showing a shocking lack of curiosity in the misbehavior of politicians on his side...or denying that it might have happened. ..."
"... Let's be clear...Trump's behavior was despicable. Any maybe, just maybe, Bill Clinton's behavior was somewhat less despicable. Still, we can agree that both behaved badly, taking advantage of their power and position to take advantage of others. ..."
"... Clintons have no convictions. And there is always a worse criminal to excuse them. ..."
"... According to sexual harassment guidelines issued by the Clinton administration, large imbalances of power made "consensual" very problematic. For you irony fans..... ..."
"... How can Democrats be shocked--just shocked!--at Trump's behavior, while they continue to cover up and minimize Bill Clinton's? Can Democrats legitimately claim that Bill Clinton was the lesser of two evils when it came to sexual predation? I don't think so. How many hairs do you want to split when it comes to sexual predation? ..."
"... Certainly, Hillary must find it hard to have stood by her man, despite his sexual predations, and then attack Trump for the same behavior. As a result, she leaves the attacks to her army of partisan hacks...like Krugman. ..."
"... Of course he was abusing his power. Being an apologist for Clinton exploiting his power to get sex is pathetic. Failing to recognize the significance of the power differential between Clinton and the women he screwed is pathetic. ..."
"... Predator talk angst on faux prudes is nothing to neocon predator plans on entire countries. It is alleged that Trump does women. Hillary would do Syria, ousting Assad is her goal much like her murder of Qaddafi and Libya. The bait and switch! ..."
Predators in Arms, by Paul Krugman, NY Times
: As many people are
pointing out, Republicans now trying to distance themselves from
Donald Trump need to explain why The Tape was a breaking point, when
so many previous incidents weren't. ...
Meanwhile, the Trump-Ailes axis of abuse raises another question: Is
sexual predation by senior political figures - which Mr. Ailes
certainly was, even if he pretended to be in the journalism business -
a partisan phenomenon?
Just to be clear, I'm not talking about bad behavior in general...
Yes, Bill Clinton had affairs; but there's a world of difference
between consensual sex, however inappropriate, and abuse of power to
force those less powerful to accept your urges. ...
... ... ...
Mr. Trump, in other words, isn't so much an anomaly as he is a pure
distillation of his party's modern essence.
"There is also, I'd suggest, an underlying cynicism... We're
talking about a party that has long exploited white backlash
to mobilize working-class voters, while enacting policies
that actually hurt those voters but benefit the wealthy.
Anyone participating in that scam ... has to have the sense
that politics is a sphere in which you can get away with a
lot if you have the right connections. ..."
Times are
tough, our backs are against the wall. But, do Americans quit
? No.
Like when the Germans attacked Pearl Harbor ;-) ......
There is also, I'd suggest, an underlying cynicism that
pervades the Republican elite. We're talking about a party
that has long exploited white backlash to mobilize
working-class voters, while enacting policies that actually
hurt those voters but benefit the wealthy.
Anyone
participating in that scam - which is what it is - has to
have the sense that politics is a sphere in which you can get
away with a lot if you have the right connections. So in a
way it's not surprising if a disproportionate number of major
players feel empowered to abuse their position....
-- Paul
Krugman
[ This is the rationale of the generalizing in the column,
and possibly the rationale is correct as such and makes sense
of the stereotyping of individuals in the Republican Party. I
have no counter argument, though I feel I should have. ]
I agree, impugning the integrity of a large group of people
is about as bad as calling a large group of people
'deplorables' or Romney's writing off 47% of the population.
Unfortunately, history is clear that there is one group of
people who routinely took sexual advantage of women: some of
the rich and powerful.
The practice even has a name: Droit du seigneur, or droit
du jambage, whereby a lord was entitled to deflower the bride
of another man on her wedding night.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droit_du_seigneur
Though the Wikipedia entry casts some doubt on the
practice, because there was no proof (there wasn't proof of
much back then), it has been a recurring theme. Balzac and
Dumas, fils wrote novels about very young women brought into
wealthy households as playthings. Mario Vargas Llosa wrote a
novel about the dictator Trujillo's practice of having
virgins delivered to his palace during the 1950s. Amin Malouf
wrote a similar novel about a local lord in Lebanon in the
19th century.
My guess is that the practice is alive and well. Many
Europeans never understood why the Lewinsky affair became a
scandal, because they assumed that such behavior was just a
perk of the position. Certainly, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, IMF
Managing Director and a contender for the presidency of
France, felt no compunction about sexually assaulting a maid
in New York City in 2011.
Now I don't want to impugn the integrity of ALL people who
are rich and/or powerful, but there is clearly a problem with
some of them, regardless of nationality or political party.
The
Feast of the Goat (Spanish: La fiesta del chivo, 2000) is a
novel by the Peruvian Nobel Prize in Literature laureate
Mario Vargas Llosa. The book is set in the Dominican Republic
and portrays the assassination of Dominican dictator Rafael
Trujillo, and its aftermath, from two distinct standpoints a
generation apart: during and immediately after the
assassination itself, in May 1961; and thirty five years
later, in 1996. Throughout, there is also extensive
reflection on the heyday of the dictatorship, in the 1950s,
and its significance for the island and its inhabitants.
THE FEAST OF THE GOAT
By Mario Vargas Llosa.
Translated by Edith Grossman.
Sympathy, or at least empathy, for the Devil seldom fails
as a novelistic formula. Virtue may inspire, but evil
fascinates. Most fascinating of all, perhaps, is political
evil -- the sort of programmatic perfidy that doesn't just
harm individuals but roils the flow of history itself. For
all its richness as a subject, such large-scale wrongdoing
rarely gets much play in the work of North American writers,
who tend to favor stories of private crime over tales of
public villainy. Recent events may change this cultural
emphasis, but for now one has to look abroad, to talents such
as Mario Vargas Llosa, the prolific Peruvian essayist and
novelist, for the lowdown on organized evil in high
places....
Latin American literature is great...and it often deals with
the abuses of the politically powerful...Isabel Allende,
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes
and others. One of my favorites is 'El Otońo del Patriarca,"
a composite of many strongmen who ruled in Latin America.
The US once had great authors such as Steinbeck and Sinclair
Lewis. Barbara Kingsolver's 'The Lacuna' is a really good
story set in Mexico and The US in the 1930s and fascinating
commentary on art and politics of the time.
A Stunning Portrait of a Monstrous Caribbean Tyrant
By WILLIAM KENNEDY
THE AUTUMN OF THE PATRIARCH
By Gabriel García Márquez.
Translated by Gregory Rabassa.
In 1968 when he began to write this majestic novel,
Gabriel García Márquez told an interviewer that the only
image he had of it for years was that of an incredibly old
man walking through the huge, abandoned rooms of a palace
full of animals. Some of his friends remember him saying as
far back as 1958, when as a newsman he was witnessing the
fall of Marcos Pérez Jiménez in Venezuela, that he would one
day write a book about a dictator. He has since spoken of the
influence of the life of the Venezuelan caudillo, Juan
Vicente Gómez, on this book. He himself lived for years under
the Rojas Pinilla dictatorship in his native Colombia. He
covered the trial of a Batista butcher in the early days of
Castro's Cuban takeover. He lived in Spain during the
interminable rattlings of Franco's elusive death, when that
country was a hospitable journey's end for deposed Latin
dictators.
He has added to these times of his own life fragments from
the long history of dictators--the deaths of Julius Caesar
and Mussolini, the durability of Stroessner, the wife-worship
of Perón, what seems to be a close study of the times of
Trujillo and the United States and English
gunboat-puppeteering of so many bestial morons into the
dictator's palace. He has absorbed and re-imagined all this,
and more, and emerged with a stunning portrait of the
archetype: the pathological fascist tyrant.
García Márquez (his surname is García; Márquez is his
mother's name) began this novel in 1968 and said in 1971 that
it was finished. But he continued to embellish it until 1975
when he published it in Spain. Now Gregory Rabassa, who
translated the author's last novel, "One Hundred Years of
Solitude," and who on the basis of these two books alone
stands as one of the best translators who ever drew breath,
has given us the superb English equivalent of García
Márquez's magisterial Spanish.
The book, as is to be expected from García Márquez, is
mystical, surrealistic, Rabelaisian in its excesses, its
distortions and its exotic language. But García Márquez'
sense of life is that surreality is as much the norm as
banality. "In Mexico surrealism runs through the streets,"he
once said. And elsewhere: "The Latin American reality is
totally Rabelaisian."
And so his patriarch, the unnamed General (his precise
rank is General of the Universe) of an unnamed Caribbean
nation, lives to be anywhere between 107 and 232 years old,
sires 5,000 children, all runts, all born after seven-month
gestations. He is a bird woman's bastard, conceived in a
storm of bluebottle flies, born in a convent doorway, gifted
at birth with huge, deformed feet and an enlarged testicle
the size of a fig, which whistles a tune of pain to him every
moment of his impossibly long life. The graffiti on the walls
of the servants' toilet give him oracular insight into
traitorous cohorts, one of whom he serves roasted for dinner
to a gathering of his generals.
He has such power that when he orders the time of day
changed from three to eight in the morning to deliver himself
from darkness, the roses open two hours before dew time. His
influence is so indelible that eventually his cows are born
with his hereditary presidential brand. His venality such
that he rigs the weekly lottery, using children under seven
to draw the winning three numbers, and he always wins all
three. To quiet the children about their enforced complicity,
he imprisons them. When they number 2,000 and the Pope
anguishes publicly over their disappearance and the League of
Nations investigates it, he isolates the children in the
wilderness after a Nazi-like deportation in boxcars, and
finally drowns them at sea, denying they ever existed.
But his most fantastic depredation is the sale of the
Caribbean Sea to the gringos who have kept him in power. The
United States ambassador orders in giant suction dredges and
nautical engineers, who carry off the sea "in numbered pieces
to plant it far from the hurricanes in the blood-red dawns of
Arizona, they took it away with everything it had inside
general sir, with the reflection of our cities, our timid
drowned people, our demented dragons," and they leave behind
a torn crater, a deserted plain of harsh lunar dust. To
replace the breezes that were lost when the sea went away,
another U.S. ambassador gives the General a wind machine....
Latin American literature is great...and it often deals with
the abuses of the politically powerful...Isabel Allende,
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes
and others....
"Many Europeans never understood why the Lewinsky affair
became a scandal, because they assumed that such behavior was
just a perk of the position."
I disagree. I don't know any
Europeans who think like that.
Extramarital affairs are not really uncommon, and not
restricted to people of high social stature. The affair was
viewed more as extramarital relations than (passively) taking
advantage of somebody arguably in a position of occupational
dependence, and the whole impeachment proceedings were
recognized as a witch hunt by lecherous old bucks riding the
well-worn Puritan mock adultery outrage theme. (And some of
whom later turned out to have had affairs of their own going
on.)
The main reason it was incomprehensible was that "Europe"
practices the allegedly-French maxim "live and let live" in
this regard - a considerable level of "benevolent" sin and
debauchery will be tolerated and dutifully disregarded as
long as it is properly hidden and orderly public perceptions
are maintained (or if some of it gets out, at least a
customary effort will have to have been made to keep it under
wraps). I.e. if you make reasonable efforts to keep it
private, it will be treated as private. But fail to make the
effort or deliberately show off, then you will meet with
scorn and resentment.
Using positions of influence to actively take advantage or
extract concessions, or abusive behavior of any kind, are not
OK, and there is no presumption that it is a perk of power.
And that it was viewed as extramarital relations was in good
part because a lot of the media "coverage" concentrated on
rehashing all the salacious "sexual" aspects in almost
pornographic detail. If anybody defiled Ms. Lewinsky's virtue
and reputation, it was the persecutors and the media.
"So why do the French tolerate behavior that would both shame
and topple leaders in the U.S. or Britain? Because, despite
French lip service to their revolution's promise of "egalite"
for all citizens, voters still tend to defer to politicians
as a class apart who enjoy entitlements once associated with
royal courts."
I thought that Thoma would be wise enough not to republish
this Krugman column...but since he wasn't, here goes:
Krugman's claim: "Yes, Bill Clinton had affairs; but there's
a world of difference between consensual sex, however
inappropriate, and abuse of power to force those less
powerful to accept your urges."
Wikipedia: "Bill Clinton, the 42nd President of the United
States (1993-2001), has been publicly accused by several
women of sexual misconduct. Juanita Broaddrick has accused
Clinton of rape; Kathleen Willey has accused Clinton of
groping her without consent; and Paula Jones accuses Clinton
of exposing himself and sexually harassing her."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Clinton_sexual_misconduct_allegations
Sadly, Krugman is just spewing the usual partisan
sanctimony ...being shocked--just shocked--at the behavior of
the other side while showing a shocking lack of curiosity in
the misbehavior of politicians on his side...or denying that
it might have happened.
Let's be clear...Trump's behavior was despicable. Any
maybe, just maybe, Bill Clinton's behavior was somewhat less
despicable. Still, we can agree that both behaved badly,
taking advantage of their power and position to take
advantage of others.
I say, let's continue to expose the dirty laundry...all of
it. Historically, the media has chosen to treat Presidents
like royalty. But, as we know, the British royal family has
its share of tawdry scandals.
The American people deserve to see what's behind the
carefully fabricated public images of rich and powerful
people who choose to be our leaders. A spotlight needs to be
shown on powerful people who abuse their position both for
personal gain as well as exploitation of the less powerful.
What alternate universe do you live in? Bill Clinton - a bit
old and decrepit - goes down as a good president, isn't
running. We dems don't bring up GWB - a very bad president -
in re Trump.
The analogy to Clinton and Monika: there was evidence he did
the deed; she was bullied, she was the underling, she was
abused, and the process let Bill off. Why different standard
for no evidence but braggadocio Trump?
The shady "process"
that let H. Clinton off on security and federal records was
not like the process Bill endured.
According to sexual harassment guidelines issued by the
Clinton administration, large imbalances of power made
"consensual" very problematic.
For you irony fans.....
How can Democrats be shocked--just shocked!--at Trump's
behavior, while they continue to cover up and minimize Bill
Clinton's? Can Democrats legitimately claim that Bill Clinton
was the lesser of two evils when it came to sexual predation?
I don't think so. How many hairs do you want to split when it
comes to sexual predation?
Certainly, Hillary must find it
hard to have stood by her man, despite his sexual predations,
and then attack Trump for the same behavior. As a result, she
leaves the attacks to her army of partisan hacks...like
Krugman.
> Krugman's claim: "Yes, Bill Clinton had affairs; but
there's a world of difference between consensual sex, however
inappropriate, and abuse of power to force those less
powerful to accept your urges."
Wow. Show of hands: Who
believes Bill Clinton was not using his power to 'encourage'
less powerful people to accept his urges?
I can't keep a straight face with that. Of course he was
abusing his power. Being an apologist for Clinton exploiting
his power to get sex is pathetic. Failing to recognize the
significance of the power differential between Clinton and
the women he screwed is pathetic.
ilsm :
, -1
Predator talk angst on faux prudes is nothing to neocon
predator plans on entire countries.
It is alleged that
Trump does women.
Hillary would do Syria, ousting Assad is her goal much
like her murder of Qaddafi and Libya. The bait and switch!
Looks like Obama in working overclock to ensure the election of Trump ... anti-Russian hysteria
might have results different that he expects. Whether we are to have a world of sovereign nation-states
or one in which a single imperial superpower contends with increasingly fragmentary post-national and
sub-national threats around the globe will depend on the decisions that are made in the near future:
in the next few years.
Greenwald's astute observations were presumably made in response to Secretary of State John Kerry's
recent remarks that both
Russia and Syria should face war crimes investigations for their recent attacks on Syrian civilians.
"Russia and the regime owe the world more than an explanation about why they keep hitting
hospitals, and medical facilities, and women and children," Mr. Kerry said in Washington,
where he spoke alongside French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault, as reported by the Independent
.
Unsurprisingly, Russia responded by urging caution regarding allegations of war crimes considering
the United States has been waging wars in a number of countries since the end of World War II. It
has picked up a number of allegations of war crimes in the process.
Kerry's
continuous accusations that Russia bombed hospital infrastructure are particularly hypocritical
in light of the fact the United States has bombed hospitals in
Iraq
and
Afghanistan on more than one occasion over past decade.
Further, former congressman Ron Paul's Institute for Peace and Prosperity hit back at Kerry, accusing
him of completely fabricating the most recent alleged hospital attack. As the Institute
noted :
" In a press event yesterday, before talks with the French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault
about a new UN resolution,
he said
( vid @1:00) about
Syria:
"'Last night, the regime attacked yet another hospital, and 20 people were killed and 100 people
were wounded. And Russia and the regime owe the world more than an explanation about why they
keep hitting hospitals and medical facilities and children and women. These are acts that beg
for an appropriate investigation of war crimes. And those who commit these would and should be
held accountable for these actions.'
" No opposition group has claimed that such an extremely grave event happened. None. No press
agency has a record of it. The MI-6 disinformation outlet SOHR in Britain, which quite reliably
notes every claimed casualty and is frequently cited in 'western media,' has not said anything
about such an event anywhere in Syria. "
However, the most disturbing aspect of Kerry's allegation is that the accusations against
Russia run in tandem with Saudi Arabia's brutal assault on Yemen. Saudi Arabia, with the
aid of a few regional players - and with
ongoing American and British assistance (not to mention
billion dollar arms sales ) - has been bombing Yemen back into the Stone Age without any legal
basis whatsoever. Often, the Saudi-led coalition has completely decimated civilian infrastructure,
which has led a number of groups to accuse the coalition of
committing war crimes in the process.
Civilians and civilian infrastructure have been struck so routinely that the world has
become increasingly concerned the actual targets of the coalition strikes are civilians
(what could be a greater recruitment tool for al-Qaeda and ISIS in Yemen?) As
noted by Foreign Policy :
"The Houthis and their allies - armed groups loyal to Saleh - are the declared targets of the
coalition's 1-year-old air campaign. In reality, however, it is the civilians, such as Basrallah
and Rubaid, and their children, who are predominantly the victims of this protracted war. Hundreds
of civilians have been killed in airstrikes while asleep in their homes, when going about their
daily activities, or in the very places where they had sought refuge from the conflict. The United
States, Britain, and others, meanwhile, have continued to supply a steady stream of weaponry and
logistical support to Saudi Arabia and its coalition."
Just take one example of the cruel and disproportionate use of force that Saudi Arabia has used
in Yemen (using American-made and supplied aircraft and weapons) - against Judge Yahya Rubaid and
his family. As Foreign Policy
reported in March of this year:
"According to family members, Rubaid was a judge on a case against Yemeni President Abed Rabbo
Mansour Hadi, for treason in absentia. It is unclear whether his house was attacked for this reason.
What is clear, however, is that there was no legally valid basis for bombing his home, as he and
his family were civilians and under international law should not have been deliberately targeted."
At the time this article's publication,
over 140 Yemenis had
been killed and another 500 injured in a Saudi-coalition aerial attack on a funeral over the
weekend. The civilian death toll continues to rise in Yemen, completely unchallenged by any major
players at the U.N.
When the U.N. does attempt to quell Saudi actions , the Saudis threaten
severe
economic retaliation.
How Kerry can accuse Russia of committing war crimes in Syria with a straight face is unclear,
as reports of atrocious crimes committed in Yemen continue to surface.
This is not to say Russia and Syria should not be investigated for war crimes – but maybe, just
maybe, we could live in a world where everyone responsible for committing these gross acts could
be held accountable, instead of just those who
pose an economic
threat to the West . Mango327
38BWD22
Oct 11, 2016 3:47 PM
Madeline Albright, "Yes, I think the death of 500,000 Iraqi children under the age of 5 years
old by US sanctions, was a good price that had to be paid so we could get to Sadam Hussein "???
This bitch along with Kissinger, Soros, Rice, Clinton, Obama, Kerry, and all the news organizations
who have been cheerleaders for the slaughter of innocents should all be charged with Crimes against
humanity and SHOT!
"Who wants to be the last man to die for a mistake?" -- John Kerry, 197x
That was the supposed anti-war Kerry speaking of the Vietnam War, who rode
such comments into a congressional seat. We didn't know then that he was Skull and Bones or what
it might mean. Now we know it in spades.
Now it's clear he's just a lying sack of war mongering, deep state shit.
"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe
it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political,
economic and/or military consequences of the lie."
Goebbels used "Gas Lighting" as a form of Psychological manipulation on a population on a mass
scale. Operation Mocking Bird. It continues on today. 365 days a year, 24hrs a day, 7 days a week.
The Psyche Warefare / PsyOp War does not clos
There is an assumption that Russia would never go to war with the US over the Syrian dispute.
But yet, Russia is preparing for war. It has both first-strike and counter-strike capability in
the event the west (US State Dept.) continues with its bullying tactics and further escalates
its hostility. Russia is a sovereign nation; it has both the right and the power to do what is
in the best interests of its citizenry and its allies (Assad).
The US used to be that way until it was over-run in a silent, but effective liberal-coup that
has taken full control and stupidly re-newed the cold war with Russia.
And now America has been left more vulnerable that it ever has been. A simple shut-down of
the electric grid for several months, will, by itself, cut the population in half.
Ultra-liberalism is ultra self-destructive... we're about to see just how destructive that
really is.
Well this is a refreshing start, but only a start. Russia certainly had nothing to do with the
gunships that bombed the hospitals in Afghanistan into powder, killing patients including children,
doctors, nurses and other personell.
I for one would like to know who it was who flew those
planes and have them explain to all of us why they did not refuse orders? What sort of morals
have Americans got to behave ths way? The hospitals bombed in Syria, ditto. The Saudis are the
beasts they are and somebody needs to bomb them into oblivion. (Perhaps take out some other smug
financial centers too!) But Yemen is a very poor sandy country to begin with and Saudi must think
there's oil or something there. If some of the weapons used there weren't tactical nukes they
sure looked like them. Gee. Wonder where they got them?
Chomsky's been saying it for decades, "If they do it, they're terrorists; if we do it,
we're freedom fighters."
My take is that if you are the head of a government, you are a psychopath and any categorization
beyond this is moot.
Clinton / Trump, Obama / Putin, Assad / Erdogan, UN / Nationalism, whoever it may be, they're
all playing the same game, and we're not even allowed to watch, much less comment.
The only thing trickling-down (through a historical perspective) should be blood.
"... But if the third globalisation wave is mostly about taking advantage of cheap labour not commodities - whilst simultaneously reducing industrial capacity at home - today's global imbalances could result in a very different type of correction (something which may or may not be happening now). ..."
"... The immediate consequence may be the developed world's desire to engage in significant industrial on-shoring. ..."
"... I'm not convinced the end of globalization and the retrenchment of banking industry are the same thing. There are some things that can't be exp/imported. Maybe we just got to the point where it didn't make sense to order moules marinieres from Brussels!? ..."
"... You forget the third leg - reducing the price of labour for services via immigration of labour from poorer countries. On top of the supply-and-demand effects, it reduces social solidarity (see Robert Putnam) - of which trades union membership and activity is one indicator. It's a win-win for capital. ..."
According to strategists Bhanu Baweja, Manik Narain and Maximillian
Lin the elasticity of trade to GDP - a measure of wealth creating
globalisation - rose to as high as 2.2. in the so-called third wave
of globalisation which began in the 1980s. This compared to an
average of 1.5 since the 1950s. In the post-crisis era, however,
the elasticity of trade has fallen to 1.1, not far from the weak
average of the 1970s and early 1980s but well below the second and
third waves of globalisation.
... ... ...
The anti-globalist position has always been simple. Global trade isn't a net positive for anyone
if the terms of trade relationships aren't reciprocal or if the trade exists solely for the purpose
of taking advantage of undervalued local resources like labour or commodities whilst channeling
rents/profits to a single central beneficiary. That, they have always argued, makes it more akin to
an imperialistic relationship than a reciprocal one.
If the latest wave of "globalisation" is mostly an expression of
American imperialism, then it does seem logical it too will fade as
countries wake-up to the one-sided nature of the current global
value chains in place.
Back in the first wave of globalisation,
of course, much of the trade growth was driven by colonial empires
taking advantage of cheap commodity resources abroad in a bid to
add value to them domestically. When these supply chains unravelled,
that left Europe short of commodities but long industrial capacity
- a destabilising imbalance which coincided with two world wars.
Simplistically speaking, resource rich countries at this point
were faced with only two options: industrialising on their own
autonomous terms or be subjugated by even more oppressive
imperialist forces, which had even grander superiority agendas than
their old colonial foes. That left those empires boasting domestic
industrial capacity but lacking natural resources of their own,
with the option of fighting to defend the rights of their former
colonies in the hope that the promise of independence and friendly
future knowledge exchanges (alongside military protection) would be
enough to secure resource access from then on.
But if the third globalisation wave is mostly about taking
advantage of cheap labour not commodities - whilst simultaneously
reducing industrial capacity at home - today's global imbalances
could result in a very different type of correction (something
which may or may not be happening now).
The immediate consequence
may be the developed world's desire to engage in significant
industrial on-shoring.
But while reversing the off-shoring trend may boost productivity
in nations like the US or even in Europe, it's also likely to
reduce demand for mobile international capital as a whole. As UBS
notes, global cross border capital flows are already decelerating
significantly as a share of GDP post-crisis, and the peak-to-trough
swing in capital inflows to GDP over the past ten years has been
much more dramatic in developed markets than in emerging ones:
To note, in China trade as a % of GDP fell from
65% in 2006 to 42% in 2014. The relationship
between trade and GDP is in reality more variable
than is usually claimed.
I'm not convinced the end of globalization and
the retrenchment of banking industry are the same
thing. There are some things that can't be
exp/imported. Maybe we just got to the point
where it didn't make sense to order moules
marinieres from Brussels!?
"if the third globalisation wave is mostly about taking advantage of cheap labour not
commodities - whilst simultaneously reducing
industrial capacity at home"
You forget the third leg - reducing the
price of labour for services via immigration of
labour from poorer countries. On top of the
supply-and-demand effects, it reduces social
solidarity (see Robert Putnam) - of which trades
union membership and activity is one indicator.
It's a win-win for capital.
The simple problem with globalization is that it was based off economic views which looked
at things in aggregate - but people are
individuals, not aggregates. "On average, GDP
per person has gone up" doesn't do anything for
the person whose income has gone down. "Just
think about all the people in China who are so
much better off than they used to be" isn't going
to do much for an American or European whose
standard of living has slipped from middle class
to working class to government assistance.
"Redistribution" is routinely advertised as
the solution to all of this. I leave it as an
exercise to the reader to figure out how to
redistribute wealth from the areas that have
prospered the most (Asia, particularly China) to
the individuals (primarily in the West) who have
lost the most. In the absence of any viable
redistribution scheme, though, I suspect the most
likely outcome will be a pulling back on
globalization.
@
Terra_Desolata
The aggregates also do apply to countries -
i.e. the US on aggregate has benefited from
globalisation, but median wages have been
stagnant in real terms, meaning that the
benefits of globalisation have not been
well distributed across the country
(indeed, companies like Apple have
benefited hugely from reducing the costs of
production, while you could make the case
that much of the benefits of lower
production costs have been absorbed into
profit margins).
That suggests that redistribution can
occur at the country level, rather than
requiring a cross-border dimension.
@
Meh...
in the US, median male wages were
lower in 2014 than in 1973 - when a
far higher proportion of working-age
males were active in the labour
force.
Growing up in the 1970s, it would
have been unthinkable for wages to
have fallen since the 1930s.
Terra_Desolata
5pts
Featured
8 hours ago
@
Meh...
@
Terra_Desolata
Yes, there has been uneven
distribution of income within
countries as well as between them -
but as the Panama Papers revealed, in
a world of free movement of capital,
incomes can also move freely between
borders. (See: Apple.) While the
U.S. has lower tolerance than Europe
and Asia for such games, any attempts
at redistribution would necessarily
include an effort to keep incomes
from slipping across national
borders, which would have the same
effect: a net reduction in
globalization.
I did not take that to mean she hated actual, everyday Americans – I took it that she hates
that phrase.
I know she has begun to hate everyday Americans, but I think we should use it once
the first time she says I'm running for president because you and everyday Americans
need a champion. I think if she doesn't say it once, people will notice and
say we false started in Iowa.
And no, I don't know why the phrase wasn't put into quotes, but I note that there aren't any
quotes around the part that begins "she says I'm running for president because…" either. As I
read the e-mail, it sure seems to me like it's about the phrase, not about people.
Hillary advocates are in a typical situation "The pot calling the kettle black". Bill Clinton
sexapades are much more serious that Trump said or ever attempted...
Notable quotes:
"... Krugman's hero, Hillary Rodham Clinton, is on the record for support Simpson-Bowles. Austerity and raising the Social Security age? What gives? ..."
"... I'd suggest, an underlying cynicism... We're talking about a party that has long exploited white backlash to mobilize working-class voters, while enacting policies that actually hurt those voters but benefit the wealthy. Anyone participating in that scam ... has to have the sense that politics is a sphere in which you can get away with a lot if you have the right connections ..."
"... There is also, I'd suggest, an underlying cynicism that pervades the Republican elite. We're talking about a party that has long exploited white backlash to mobilize working-class voters, while enacting policies that actually hurt those voters but benefit the wealthy. ..."
"... I agree, impugning the integrity of a large group of people is about as bad as calling a large group of people 'deplorables' or Romney's writing off 47% of the population. ..."
"... Unfortunately, history is clear that there is one group of people who routinely took sexual advantage of women: some of the rich and powerful. ..."
"... The main reason it was incomprehensible was that "Europe" practices the allegedly-French maxim "live and let live" in this regard - a considerable level of "benevolent" sin and debauchery will be tolerated and dutifully disregarded as long as it is properly hidden and orderly public perceptions are maintained (or if some of it gets out, at least a customary effort will have to have been made to keep it under wraps). I.e. if you make reasonable efforts to keep it private, it will be treated as private. But fail to make the effort or deliberately show off, then you will meet with scorn and resentment. ..."
"... Using positions of influence to actively take advantage or extract concessions, or abusive behavior of any kind, are not OK, and there is no presumption that it is a perk of power. ..."
"... And that it was viewed as extramarital relations was in good part because a lot of the media "coverage" concentrated on rehashing all the salacious "sexual" aspects in almost pornographic detail. If anybody defiled Ms. Lewinsky's virtue and reputation, it was the persecutors and the media. ..."
"... So why do the French tolerate behavior that would both shame and topple leaders in the U.S. or Britain? Because, despite French lip service to their revolution's promise of "egalite" for all citizens, voters still tend to defer to politicians as a class apart who enjoy entitlements once associated with royal courts. ..."
"... Italy was pretty tolerant of Berlusconi's behavior...until it was proven that he slept with an underage woman. ..."
"... Krugman's claim: "Yes, Bill Clinton had affairs; but there's a world of difference between consensual sex, however inappropriate, and abuse of power to force those less powerful to accept your urges." ..."
"... Wikipedia: "Bill Clinton, the 42nd President of the United States (1993-2001), has been publicly accused by several women of sexual misconduct. Juanita Broaddrick has accused Clinton of rape; Kathleen Willey has accused Clinton of groping her without consent; and Paula Jones accuses Clinton of exposing himself and sexually harassing her." ..."
"... Sadly, Krugman is just spewing the usual partisan sanctimony ...being shocked--just shocked--at the behavior of the other side while showing a shocking lack of curiosity in the misbehavior of politicians on his side...or denying that it might have happened. ..."
"... Let's be clear...Trump's behavior was despicable. Any maybe, just maybe, Bill Clinton's behavior was somewhat less despicable. Still, we can agree that both behaved badly, taking advantage of their power and position to take advantage of others. ..."
"... Clintons have no convictions. And there is always a worse criminal to excuse them. ..."
"... According to sexual harassment guidelines issued by the Clinton administration, large imbalances of power made "consensual" very problematic. For you irony fans..... ..."
"... How can Democrats be shocked--just shocked!--at Trump's behavior, while they continue to cover up and minimize Bill Clinton's? Can Democrats legitimately claim that Bill Clinton was the lesser of two evils when it came to sexual predation? I don't think so. How many hairs do you want to split when it comes to sexual predation? ..."
"... Certainly, Hillary must find it hard to have stood by her man, despite his sexual predations, and then attack Trump for the same behavior. As a result, she leaves the attacks to her army of partisan hacks...like Krugman. ..."
"... Of course he was abusing his power. Being an apologist for Clinton exploiting his power to get sex is pathetic. Failing to recognize the significance of the power differential between Clinton and the women he screwed is pathetic. ..."
"... Predator talk angst on faux prudes is nothing to neocon predator plans on entire countries. It is alleged that Trump does women. Hillary would do Syria, ousting Assad is her goal much like her murder of Qaddafi and Libya. The bait and switch! ..."
Predators in Arms, by Paul Krugman, NY Times
: As many people are
pointing out, Republicans now trying to distance themselves from
Donald Trump need to explain why The Tape was a breaking point, when
so many previous incidents weren't. ...
Meanwhile, the Trump-Ailes axis of abuse raises another question: Is
sexual predation by senior political figures - which Mr. Ailes
certainly was, even if he pretended to be in the journalism business -
a partisan phenomenon?
Just to be clear, I'm not talking about bad behavior in general...
Yes, Bill Clinton had affairs; but there's a world of difference
between consensual sex, however inappropriate, and abuse of power to
force those less powerful to accept your urges. ...
... ... ...
Mr. Trump, in other words, isn't so much an anomaly as he is a pure
distillation of his party's modern essence.
"There is also, I'd suggest, an underlying cynicism... We're
talking about a party that has long exploited white backlash
to mobilize working-class voters, while enacting policies
that actually hurt those voters but benefit the wealthy.
Anyone participating in that scam ... has to have the sense
that politics is a sphere in which you can get away with a
lot if you have the right connections. ..."
Times are
tough, our backs are against the wall. But, do Americans quit
? No.
Like when the Germans attacked Pearl Harbor ;-) ......
There is also, I'd suggest, an underlying cynicism that
pervades the Republican elite. We're talking about a party
that has long exploited white backlash to mobilize
working-class voters, while enacting policies that actually
hurt those voters but benefit the wealthy.
Anyone
participating in that scam - which is what it is - has to
have the sense that politics is a sphere in which you can get
away with a lot if you have the right connections. So in a
way it's not surprising if a disproportionate number of major
players feel empowered to abuse their position....
-- Paul
Krugman
[ This is the rationale of the generalizing in the column,
and possibly the rationale is correct as such and makes sense
of the stereotyping of individuals in the Republican Party. I
have no counter argument, though I feel I should have. ]
I agree, impugning the integrity of a large group of people
is about as bad as calling a large group of people
'deplorables' or Romney's writing off 47% of the population.
Unfortunately, history is clear that there is one group of
people who routinely took sexual advantage of women: some of
the rich and powerful.
The practice even has a name: Droit du seigneur, or droit
du jambage, whereby a lord was entitled to deflower the bride
of another man on her wedding night.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droit_du_seigneur
Though the Wikipedia entry casts some doubt on the
practice, because there was no proof (there wasn't proof of
much back then), it has been a recurring theme. Balzac and
Dumas, fils wrote novels about very young women brought into
wealthy households as playthings. Mario Vargas Llosa wrote a
novel about the dictator Trujillo's practice of having
virgins delivered to his palace during the 1950s. Amin Malouf
wrote a similar novel about a local lord in Lebanon in the
19th century.
My guess is that the practice is alive and well. Many
Europeans never understood why the Lewinsky affair became a
scandal, because they assumed that such behavior was just a
perk of the position. Certainly, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, IMF
Managing Director and a contender for the presidency of
France, felt no compunction about sexually assaulting a maid
in New York City in 2011.
Now I don't want to impugn the integrity of ALL people who
are rich and/or powerful, but there is clearly a problem with
some of them, regardless of nationality or political party.
The
Feast of the Goat (Spanish: La fiesta del chivo, 2000) is a
novel by the Peruvian Nobel Prize in Literature laureate
Mario Vargas Llosa. The book is set in the Dominican Republic
and portrays the assassination of Dominican dictator Rafael
Trujillo, and its aftermath, from two distinct standpoints a
generation apart: during and immediately after the
assassination itself, in May 1961; and thirty five years
later, in 1996. Throughout, there is also extensive
reflection on the heyday of the dictatorship, in the 1950s,
and its significance for the island and its inhabitants.
THE FEAST OF THE GOAT
By Mario Vargas Llosa.
Translated by Edith Grossman.
Sympathy, or at least empathy, for the Devil seldom fails
as a novelistic formula. Virtue may inspire, but evil
fascinates. Most fascinating of all, perhaps, is political
evil -- the sort of programmatic perfidy that doesn't just
harm individuals but roils the flow of history itself. For
all its richness as a subject, such large-scale wrongdoing
rarely gets much play in the work of North American writers,
who tend to favor stories of private crime over tales of
public villainy. Recent events may change this cultural
emphasis, but for now one has to look abroad, to talents such
as Mario Vargas Llosa, the prolific Peruvian essayist and
novelist, for the lowdown on organized evil in high
places....
Latin American literature is great...and it often deals with
the abuses of the politically powerful...Isabel Allende,
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes
and others. One of my favorites is 'El Otońo del Patriarca,"
a composite of many strongmen who ruled in Latin America.
The US once had great authors such as Steinbeck and Sinclair
Lewis. Barbara Kingsolver's 'The Lacuna' is a really good
story set in Mexico and The US in the 1930s and fascinating
commentary on art and politics of the time.
A Stunning Portrait of a Monstrous Caribbean Tyrant
By WILLIAM KENNEDY
THE AUTUMN OF THE PATRIARCH
By Gabriel García Márquez.
Translated by Gregory Rabassa.
In 1968 when he began to write this majestic novel,
Gabriel García Márquez told an interviewer that the only
image he had of it for years was that of an incredibly old
man walking through the huge, abandoned rooms of a palace
full of animals. Some of his friends remember him saying as
far back as 1958, when as a newsman he was witnessing the
fall of Marcos Pérez Jiménez in Venezuela, that he would one
day write a book about a dictator. He has since spoken of the
influence of the life of the Venezuelan caudillo, Juan
Vicente Gómez, on this book. He himself lived for years under
the Rojas Pinilla dictatorship in his native Colombia. He
covered the trial of a Batista butcher in the early days of
Castro's Cuban takeover. He lived in Spain during the
interminable rattlings of Franco's elusive death, when that
country was a hospitable journey's end for deposed Latin
dictators.
He has added to these times of his own life fragments from
the long history of dictators--the deaths of Julius Caesar
and Mussolini, the durability of Stroessner, the wife-worship
of Perón, what seems to be a close study of the times of
Trujillo and the United States and English
gunboat-puppeteering of so many bestial morons into the
dictator's palace. He has absorbed and re-imagined all this,
and more, and emerged with a stunning portrait of the
archetype: the pathological fascist tyrant.
García Márquez (his surname is García; Márquez is his
mother's name) began this novel in 1968 and said in 1971 that
it was finished. But he continued to embellish it until 1975
when he published it in Spain. Now Gregory Rabassa, who
translated the author's last novel, "One Hundred Years of
Solitude," and who on the basis of these two books alone
stands as one of the best translators who ever drew breath,
has given us the superb English equivalent of García
Márquez's magisterial Spanish.
The book, as is to be expected from García Márquez, is
mystical, surrealistic, Rabelaisian in its excesses, its
distortions and its exotic language. But García Márquez'
sense of life is that surreality is as much the norm as
banality. "In Mexico surrealism runs through the streets,"he
once said. And elsewhere: "The Latin American reality is
totally Rabelaisian."
And so his patriarch, the unnamed General (his precise
rank is General of the Universe) of an unnamed Caribbean
nation, lives to be anywhere between 107 and 232 years old,
sires 5,000 children, all runts, all born after seven-month
gestations. He is a bird woman's bastard, conceived in a
storm of bluebottle flies, born in a convent doorway, gifted
at birth with huge, deformed feet and an enlarged testicle
the size of a fig, which whistles a tune of pain to him every
moment of his impossibly long life. The graffiti on the walls
of the servants' toilet give him oracular insight into
traitorous cohorts, one of whom he serves roasted for dinner
to a gathering of his generals.
He has such power that when he orders the time of day
changed from three to eight in the morning to deliver himself
from darkness, the roses open two hours before dew time. His
influence is so indelible that eventually his cows are born
with his hereditary presidential brand. His venality such
that he rigs the weekly lottery, using children under seven
to draw the winning three numbers, and he always wins all
three. To quiet the children about their enforced complicity,
he imprisons them. When they number 2,000 and the Pope
anguishes publicly over their disappearance and the League of
Nations investigates it, he isolates the children in the
wilderness after a Nazi-like deportation in boxcars, and
finally drowns them at sea, denying they ever existed.
But his most fantastic depredation is the sale of the
Caribbean Sea to the gringos who have kept him in power. The
United States ambassador orders in giant suction dredges and
nautical engineers, who carry off the sea "in numbered pieces
to plant it far from the hurricanes in the blood-red dawns of
Arizona, they took it away with everything it had inside
general sir, with the reflection of our cities, our timid
drowned people, our demented dragons," and they leave behind
a torn crater, a deserted plain of harsh lunar dust. To
replace the breezes that were lost when the sea went away,
another U.S. ambassador gives the General a wind machine....
Latin American literature is great...and it often deals with
the abuses of the politically powerful...Isabel Allende,
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes
and others....
"Many Europeans never understood why the Lewinsky affair
became a scandal, because they assumed that such behavior was
just a perk of the position."
I disagree. I don't know any
Europeans who think like that.
Extramarital affairs are not really uncommon, and not
restricted to people of high social stature. The affair was
viewed more as extramarital relations than (passively) taking
advantage of somebody arguably in a position of occupational
dependence, and the whole impeachment proceedings were
recognized as a witch hunt by lecherous old bucks riding the
well-worn Puritan mock adultery outrage theme. (And some of
whom later turned out to have had affairs of their own going
on.)
The main reason it was incomprehensible was that "Europe"
practices the allegedly-French maxim "live and let live" in
this regard - a considerable level of "benevolent" sin and
debauchery will be tolerated and dutifully disregarded as
long as it is properly hidden and orderly public perceptions
are maintained (or if some of it gets out, at least a
customary effort will have to have been made to keep it under
wraps). I.e. if you make reasonable efforts to keep it
private, it will be treated as private. But fail to make the
effort or deliberately show off, then you will meet with
scorn and resentment.
Using positions of influence to actively take advantage or
extract concessions, or abusive behavior of any kind, are not
OK, and there is no presumption that it is a perk of power.
And that it was viewed as extramarital relations was in good
part because a lot of the media "coverage" concentrated on
rehashing all the salacious "sexual" aspects in almost
pornographic detail. If anybody defiled Ms. Lewinsky's virtue
and reputation, it was the persecutors and the media.
"So why do the French tolerate behavior that would both shame
and topple leaders in the U.S. or Britain? Because, despite
French lip service to their revolution's promise of "egalite"
for all citizens, voters still tend to defer to politicians
as a class apart who enjoy entitlements once associated with
royal courts."
I thought that Thoma would be wise enough not to republish
this Krugman column...but since he wasn't, here goes:
Krugman's claim: "Yes, Bill Clinton had affairs; but there's
a world of difference between consensual sex, however
inappropriate, and abuse of power to force those less
powerful to accept your urges."
Wikipedia: "Bill Clinton, the 42nd President of the United
States (1993-2001), has been publicly accused by several
women of sexual misconduct. Juanita Broaddrick has accused
Clinton of rape; Kathleen Willey has accused Clinton of
groping her without consent; and Paula Jones accuses Clinton
of exposing himself and sexually harassing her."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Clinton_sexual_misconduct_allegations
Sadly, Krugman is just spewing the usual partisan
sanctimony ...being shocked--just shocked--at the behavior of
the other side while showing a shocking lack of curiosity in
the misbehavior of politicians on his side...or denying that
it might have happened.
Let's be clear...Trump's behavior was despicable. Any
maybe, just maybe, Bill Clinton's behavior was somewhat less
despicable. Still, we can agree that both behaved badly,
taking advantage of their power and position to take
advantage of others.
I say, let's continue to expose the dirty laundry...all of
it. Historically, the media has chosen to treat Presidents
like royalty. But, as we know, the British royal family has
its share of tawdry scandals.
The American people deserve to see what's behind the
carefully fabricated public images of rich and powerful
people who choose to be our leaders. A spotlight needs to be
shown on powerful people who abuse their position both for
personal gain as well as exploitation of the less powerful.
What alternate universe do you live in? Bill Clinton - a bit
old and decrepit - goes down as a good president, isn't
running. We dems don't bring up GWB - a very bad president -
in re Trump.
The analogy to Clinton and Monika: there was evidence he did
the deed; she was bullied, she was the underling, she was
abused, and the process let Bill off. Why different standard
for no evidence but braggadocio Trump?
The shady "process"
that let H. Clinton off on security and federal records was
not like the process Bill endured.
According to sexual harassment guidelines issued by the
Clinton administration, large imbalances of power made
"consensual" very problematic.
For you irony fans.....
How can Democrats be shocked--just shocked!--at Trump's
behavior, while they continue to cover up and minimize Bill
Clinton's? Can Democrats legitimately claim that Bill Clinton
was the lesser of two evils when it came to sexual predation?
I don't think so. How many hairs do you want to split when it
comes to sexual predation?
Certainly, Hillary must find it
hard to have stood by her man, despite his sexual predations,
and then attack Trump for the same behavior. As a result, she
leaves the attacks to her army of partisan hacks...like
Krugman.
> Krugman's claim: "Yes, Bill Clinton had affairs; but
there's a world of difference between consensual sex, however
inappropriate, and abuse of power to force those less
powerful to accept your urges."
Wow. Show of hands: Who
believes Bill Clinton was not using his power to 'encourage'
less powerful people to accept his urges?
I can't keep a straight face with that. Of course he was
abusing his power. Being an apologist for Clinton exploiting
his power to get sex is pathetic. Failing to recognize the
significance of the power differential between Clinton and
the women he screwed is pathetic.
ilsm :
, -1
Predator talk angst on faux prudes is nothing to neocon
predator plans on entire countries.
It is alleged that
Trump does women.
Hillary would do Syria, ousting Assad is her goal much
like her murder of Qaddafi and Libya. The bait and switch!
"... If nothing else, the I'm-with-her whole hog approach of the media to this election should put the lie to the notion that we have anything resembling a functioning press. ..."
"... Additionally, the blind adherence by the press to Hillary's spin that Trump would put her in jail amounts to a dictatorship ignores the fact that previous to that statement Trump had said he would push for a special prosecutor. IOW, a completely legalized, judicially approved criminal investigation. ..."
"... I agree about the press becoming so bought over by Hillary. Watched some speech Trump was giving a month or so ago and he talked about Iraq as I recall and the press totally spun it into some different meaning altogether. Funny thing was the next day Trump was giving another speech which I also happened to see and made mention of what he said the day before and what the press turned his comment into – from that point on I became very leery of believing anything they tell me. I too was amazed that almost immediately last night the press began reporting that Trump was talking to a dictatorship by saying he wanted her in jail when in fact that was completely taken out of context as well (as you mentioned above). ..."
"... I think the press has become very scary with all the power it has to twist the truth or what has been said as easily and quickly as they do. They must be very frightened by Trump. ..."
Why is the electorate seemingly more concerned with someone who is antagonistic towards certain
women than someone whose policies are antagonistic to whole nations and regions. Why aren't the
Wikileaks email revelations getting more traction or generating more outrage?
True. BigMedia is barely covering the Wikileaks story. My summary is that HClinton has a fake
"public position" & a genuine private position, that is pro-Grand Ripoff SS & MC cuts, & pro-TPP.
It should be a huge story, in that it calls as questionable any of HClinton's stated policies,
& given that Sanders repeatedly made the Wall $treet transcripts a major issue in the Primaries.
It takes a USian with intellectual curiosity, some free time, & enough critical thinking to
go to one of the few internet sources like nakedcapitalism or SecularTalk that actually will cover
the Wikileaks story honestly. IMHO sadly this is a small minority of the US eligible voter population.
BTW for Sanders to maintain my respect, he needs to "make news" in BigMedia by saying something
like "my support of HClinton is contingent on her 'public position' the approves the 2016 D party
platform, which is anti-TPP & anti-SS & MC cuts. If HClinton is elected & signs the TPP or SS/MC
cuts, she will be strongly primary challenged in 2020, & I will not support her if the Rs ever
impeach her"
If nothing else, the I'm-with-her whole hog approach of the media to this election should
put the lie to the notion that we have anything resembling a functioning press.
Just one example–I listened to some Clinton operative on msnbc radio today who was giving his
weaselly spin on Hillary's private position v. public position statement and who said that it
was only a few sentences out of an entire speech and needed to be viewed in context. Chuck Todd,
I think it was, never made note of the fact that there is no context to those statements since
the speeches have not and will not be released. There is no available context and Chuck just muttered
uh huh and let it pass.
Additionally, the blind adherence by the press to Hillary's spin that Trump would put her
in jail amounts to a dictatorship ignores the fact that previous to that statement Trump had said
he would push for a special prosecutor. IOW, a completely legalized, judicially approved criminal
investigation.
I agree about the press becoming so bought over by Hillary. Watched some speech Trump was
giving a month or so ago and he talked about Iraq as I recall and the press totally spun it into
some different meaning altogether. Funny thing was the next day Trump was giving another speech
which I also happened to see and made mention of what he said the day before and what the press
turned his comment into – from that point on I became very leery of believing anything they tell
me. I too was amazed that almost immediately last night the press began reporting that Trump was
talking to a dictatorship by saying he wanted her in jail when in fact that was completely taken
out of context as well (as you mentioned above).
I think the press has become very scary with all the power it has to twist the truth or
what has been said as easily and quickly as they do. They must be very frightened by Trump.
That was probably the best attack of the night, and Clinton looked completely flummoxed, almost
like she couldn't believe he went there with her. And then she jumped up so quick to re-direct.
I lost most of that exchange because the damn video cut out.
> She made millions using the power of her office
Teachout's operational definition of corruption. I imagine we'd see plenty of crony capitalism
under Trump (thinking back to Halliburton, et al, under Bush II). I don't know whether that would
be more or less corrosive than Clinton's style of corruption.
The most telling moment in that regard for me was when he brought up Sidney Blumenthal. She
looked, "anticipatory?" When he said he was a "bad guy" her eyes opened wide, got a visible lump
in her throat and had to swallow the nervous energy. That relationship is a weak point for her.
You might be right. That makes some sense. I believe the original Guccifer hack was on Sidney
Blumenthal's email address and he found out about Clintonemail by reading Sid's emails back and
forth with her.
Also, keep in mind Sidney Blumenthal's son Max is involved in the BDS movement (I think) or
at least speaks out against Israeli apartheid (using that term) and does do some interesting reporting.
With Clinton openly courting Netanyahu, might be a sore point.
"... Cooper consistently tried to cross-examine Trump with follow up questions and "so your saying" statement characterizations. Trump generally wouldn't let him. I saw nary an example of said behavior with HRC. ..."
Question to Radditz: Do you know there is a humanitarian crisis in Libya????????????
How do you think that happened?????
If not,your a disgrace.
If you do, your biased ..
Why don't you ask about libya
Its not the questions asked, its the ones not asked
Cooper consistently tried to cross-examine Trump with follow up questions and "so your
saying" statement characterizations. Trump generally wouldn't let him. I saw nary an example of
said behavior with HRC.
"... I've also seen an interview where Hersh praised Obama for not going through with the planned airstrikes (which were apparently going to be massive as drawn up). But he also criticized Obama for not coming clean with the public and saying "we're not attacking Assad because the rebels launched the gas attack, not Assad." ..."
"... Did you use the loophole? ..."
"... Of course. Just like her friends. I understand the tax code better than anyone. Hillary has friends that want all these provisions. Hillary is leaving carried interest. I used it. As did Buffet, Soros . I love depreciation. ..."
Q Images out of Aleppo. State Dept calls for war crimes investigation
FB If you were President, what about Aleppo. Isn't it like the Holocaust?
CLINTON We need leverage with the Russians because they won't come to the table w no leverage.
Work more closely with partners and allies on the ground.
Issue is ambition and aggressiveness of Russia. They've decided who they want to be President,
and its not me. I did cooperate, which is how we got the nuke treaty. But I do support a war crimes
investigation.
TRUMP The so-called line in the sand.
CLINTON I was gone
TRUMP Obama draws the line in the sand, laughed at. She talks tough but our nuclear program
is old and tired [!!!]. Bad thing. Every time we take rebels we're arming people. And they end
up being worse! Almost everything she's done has been a disaster ..
A treaty with Russia, look at the deal, Iran and Russia are against us. I don't like Assad
at all. But he's killing ISIS. As is Russian and
RADDATZ What would you do? Pence: Provocations by Russian need to be met. Should be prepared
to use force.
TRUMP He and I haven't spoken and I disagree (!!)
TRUMP I believe we have to get ISIS.
RADDATZ What happen if Aleppo falls?
TRUMP Already has. Look at Mosul. We telegraphed our attack and all the leaders left!
RADDATZ Some times there are reasons military does things [drips contempt]
TRUMP Why would we tell them? All I say is this: Patton and MacArthur are spinning in their
graves
RADDATZ You want Assad to go, arming rebels, too late for Aleppo, would you introduce force?
CLINTON Not American ground forces. Our troops should not hold territory. Use special forces.
Use enablers and trainers.
RADDATZ What would you do different?
CLINTON I hope we will have pushed ISIS out of Iraq. A lot of planning going on. To signal
Sunnis and Peshmerga they need to be involved. I would target Bagdadi. Let's arm the Kurds. Kurdish
and Arab fighters on the ground.
I've also seen an interview where Hersh praised Obama for not going through with the planned
airstrikes (which were apparently going to be massive as drawn up). But he also criticized Obama
for not coming clean with the public and saying "we're not attacking Assad because the rebels
launched the gas attack, not Assad."
Sorry - I still won't vote for Hillary even if she did kill the terrorist with her personal
weapon. Can she disassemble and and reassemble that weapon wearing a blindfold!?
TRUMPOf course. Just like her friends. I understand the tax code better than anyone.
Hillary has friends that want all these provisions. Hillary is leaving carried interest. I used
it. As did Buffet, Soros . I love depreciation.
If she has a problem, for thirty years she hasn't been doing anything. It's all talk. Again,
Bernie Sanders, bad judgment. Her and Obama, the vacuum they left, that formed ISIS. Congratulations.
CLINTON Here we go again. In favor of getting rid of 30 years.
TRUMP If you were an effective Senator you could have gotten it done.
CLINTON Under our constitution we have a thing called veto power [drips contempt].
CLINTON CHIP, 10 millino kids. Adoption. First responder help after 9/11. Kids medicine
(dosage?). As SoS go around the world advocate. Negotiated Russian nuke treaty. 400 pieces of
legislation have my name on ias sponsor or co-sponsor.
Hillary Clinton praises about not raising taxes on those who make $250,000, about cutting deficits,
surpluses, the USA getting Russia and Syria prosecuted for war crimes, and I think didn't mention
the public option for ACA.
"... Clinton stated "no fly zone" in Syria. Could no one prepare Trump for this so he could make the simple point that a NFZ means shooting down Russian planes? Then he could have asked Americans: "do you want Clinton as President and gamble she won't start a nuclear war?" ..."
Clinton stated "no fly zone" in Syria. Could no one prepare Trump for this so he could
make the simple point that a NFZ means shooting down Russian planes? Then he could have asked
Americans: "do you want Clinton as President and gamble she won't start a nuclear war?"
Trump did well on the supreme court question – someone who will follow the Constitution. Such
an old fashion sentiment.
"... Chekov said something like: "If you show a gun in Act One, make sure it goes off in Act Three." So, Act One was bringing in Bill Clinton's accusers. But then nothing. Odd. ..."
"... * Interesting comment from the analyst after, something like: "I was talking to Trump voters in Ohio. They say they know exactly who he is" (and from the analyst's tone, that wasn't positive with respect to his character. I think a lot of voters, across the spectrum, are appalled by the choices, which is what the trust/likeability numbers are telling us) ..."
"... In retrospect, all the media questioning whether or not Trump would be effective in this kind of venue seems silly. Of course Trump can work a room. ..."
"... When Trump says he will put Hillary in jail, what do you think his kids and wife see regarding a Clinton presidency? Will she go after her enemies? ..."
"... Media going blatantly in the tank prob boosts turnout for trump. Cnn concedes trump did pretty well. Fox seems contented with him. Glad to see him break with pence on russia. Glad to see him say get isis, not assad. Aleo enjoyed him zinging clinton. ..."
"... With all the Russian efforts to undermine our democracy I can only hope we return to paper ballots hand counted in front of skeptical witnesses to the process. ..."
"... No mention of any laws broken by any previous presidents. No concerns about droning us citizens, no sweating any wars of opportunity. ..."
"... Trump absolutely dominated this debate. Hillary was on the ropes all night. The moderation was pretty good too. ..."
"... CNN directs us dweebs that this was a "contentious, nasty debate". It was contentious but aren't most debates like that? Nasty? Not that much. Sometimes but not as much as I thought it could be. ..."
"... HuffPo headline: "Don in Flames" I think, all things considered, he did fine. Neither one is offering any serious or meaningful solutions to anything we need. ..."
"... On the other had, HRC kept treating the debate like the white-shoe lawyer she is. "Refer to my website" = "I filed a brief on this." No one reads either. Too much relying on subtle distinctions. Worst of all, most of the time she speaks with no passion or genuineness. This is death to a lawyer speaking to a jury. ..."
"... She wants the debate to be like a federal class action case with multiple motions and lengthy affidavits and briefs that the Judge's top-of-their-law-school-class clerks will dissect and recommend a decision upon. ..."
"... The genius of this is that Trump is the device through which all of the real arguments against Clinton, the ones relating to criminal conduct and atrocious policy, are symbolically cleansed, ritually bled out. Trump as the public's cry for contrition and oh, how she has suffered for her vanity! Yet she is redeemed through him. She has crossed the pit of burning hard drives and she is sorry for her sins, but after all, America is nothing if not a forgiving nation. ..."
"... Once again we see America will get the president it deserves. The world? Not so much. ..."
Where were the questions about the 30 million illegals?
About the H-1B sand Greencard foreigners taking our jobs?
About health care we can't afford?
About corporations paying no taxes?
About people killing themselves with heroin because they have no hope,
no way out of poverty?
Trump did better than the first debate, where I thought he was destroyed. I'm not sure who
won, both were pretty repulsive. I really, really dislike the both of them, whether on policies
or on personality.
It doesn't matter who won. The pundits will spend several days telling you who won and that
your eyes and ears are lying again….
Frankly, from the comments above, it is pretty obvious America was embarrased again……glad I didn't
watch it……
No contrition from Trump, either, even though that's what the establishment wants (not that
any amount of contrition would work).
Which makes sense: 1) His base doesn't care 2) Backing down would be worse than gutting it
out, because backing down would make him look weak, destroying his brand.*
Chekov said something like: "If you show a gun in Act One, make sure it goes off in Act
Three." So, Act One was bringing in Bill Clinton's accusers. But then nothing. Odd.
* Interesting comment from the analyst after, something like: "I was talking to Trump voters
in Ohio. They say they know exactly who he is" (and from the analyst's tone, that wasn't positive
with respect to his character. I think a lot of voters, across the spectrum, are appalled by the
choices, which is what the trust/likeability numbers are telling us).
Once the crowd reacted positively to his "33K emails" attacks, he calmed down. I got the sense
he decided he didn't have to go low, since there were some in the room still on his side.
In retrospect, all the media questioning whether or not Trump would be effective in this
kind of venue seems silly. Of course Trump can work a room.
Media going blatantly in the tank prob boosts turnout for trump. Cnn concedes trump did
pretty well. Fox seems contented with him. Glad to see him break with pence on russia. Glad to
see him say get isis, not assad. Aleo enjoyed him zinging clinton.
He's still an idiot and has terrible policy ideas.
With all the Russian efforts to undermine our democracy I can only hope we return to paper
ballots hand counted in front of skeptical witnesses to the process.
With all the talk about 'the Russians did it", I'm tempted to write in Putin just to p*ss off
the Dems! (but I won't) Both candidates suck worse than a tornado.
Cnn people very much on edge. Dana bash breathless at trump saying he'd put her in jail. Said
that's what makes us different than African dictators, stalin and hitler. I'm not kidding.
No mention of any laws broken by any previous presidents. No concerns about droning us
citizens, no sweating any wars of opportunity.
CNN directs us dweebs that this was a "contentious, nasty debate". It was contentious but
aren't most debates like that? Nasty? Not that much. Sometimes but not as much as I thought it
could be.
HuffPo headline: "Don in Flames" I think, all things considered, he did fine. Neither one
is offering any serious or meaningful solutions to anything we need. It was, unfortunately,
just some lame entertainment and both remain equally unlikable and untrustworthy and unhelpful.
Watching this I kept thinking that Trump has been working with trial lawyers to prepare.
He used a lot of tricks trial lawyers use to influence juries. One, don't let the facts get
in the way of a good story (i.e. Why didn't you as one of 100 senators change the tax code? Answer:
"if she was an effective senator she could have"). Another is make the jury think the judge is
biased against you. The main one is put the black hat on your opponent and keep it there. Jury
trials are pretty simple affairs that way, the big thing is to make the other side the bad guy.
On the other had, HRC kept treating the debate like the white-shoe lawyer she is. "Refer
to my website" = "I filed a brief on this." No one reads either. Too much relying on subtle distinctions.
Worst of all, most of the time she speaks with no passion or genuineness. This is death to a lawyer
speaking to a jury.
She wants the debate to be like a federal class action case with multiple motions and lengthy
affidavits and briefs that the Judge's top-of-their-law-school-class clerks will dissect and recommend
a decision upon.
But it's not. It's an afternoon trial in front of a bunch of bored people sitting in a jury
box in a hot county courthouse. "Smart" lawyers get creamed by savvy ones in that situation all
the time. That's what I saw tonight.
Some low-watt bulb writing tomorrow is going to say 'This is how America does politics, does
democracy. We let it all hang out. A big old barn burner. A national catharsis, a venting of pent-up
emotion and frustration at some things in America and the world that just haven't worked out for
everybody, no matter how hard we try. This is good for America, even necessary, in fact it's what
makes us Americans. We deal with things and move on. Let all that poison out. And we move on.
I'm inclined to think the third debate will be a much more civil affair.'
The genius of this is that Trump is the device through which all of the real arguments
against Clinton, the ones relating to criminal conduct and atrocious policy, are symbolically
cleansed, ritually bled out. Trump as the public's cry for contrition and oh, how she has suffered
for her vanity! Yet she is redeemed through him. She has crossed the pit of burning hard drives
and she is sorry for her sins, but after all, America is nothing if not a forgiving nation.
Raise your right hand, Mrs. Clinton, and repeat after me….no, your right hand, please…
Possibly, it will be interesting to see if the Clinton camp is going to use
this, and if so how Bill will be protected. Could be a case of Mutually Assured
Destruction.
The Billionaire Pedophile Who Could Bring Down Donald Trump and
Hillary Clinton
"Trump's supporters have long wondered whether he'd use billionaire
sicko Jeffrey Epstein as ammo against the Clintons-until a lurid new
lawsuit accused The Donald of raping one of Epstein's girls himself."
There's plenty other stuff if you google "Jeff Epstein" and "Bill
Clinton"
It's all pretty vile but not at all surprising for what these overage,
entitled "stars" do behind the scenes.
I never got a chance to respond to
Yves' comment to my comment about Schwarzenegger a few days ago. Three
women came forward to accuse him of groping (or whatever – I, mercifully,
forget the details now). Arnold, with Maria standing dutifully by his
side, publicly apologized and it all went away.
My contention is that: 1)
there were many, many more women who didn't come forward (the threat of
never working again in Hollywood is very real – Arnold was represented by
one of the most powerful and nastiest law firms) and 2) it all
disappeared quickly from the media because Arnold was able to buy off and
intimidate the media.
But the stories I read in alternate media at the
time were pretty awful. I can only imagine the lewd bragging Arnold did
behind the scenes. Don't forget that Arnold was screwing the nanny and
sired a child with her while the nanny was living under the same roof as
him and Maria. "The rich are different than you and I."
"... "You have called both myself and Michael Kives before about helping your campaign raise money, we no longer trust your judgement
so will not be raising money for your campaign." ..."
"... "How DARE you not give our Crown Princess the respect she deserves!" ..."
"... financially squeeze those not with status quo… guess they object to woman patriots that want to serve "all the people"??…..telling
..."
"For you to endorse a man who has spent almost 40 years in public office with very few accomplishments, doesn't fall in
line with what we previously thought of you. Hillary Clinton will be our party's nominee and you standing on ceremony to support
the sinking Bernie Sanders ship is disrespectful to Hillary Clinton."
"You have called both myself and Michael Kives before about helping your campaign raise money, we no longer trust your
judgement so will not be raising money for your campaign."
I sort of enjoy the typo in Podesta's intro to the forward, if not the sentiment aka gloating that a couple of CAA agents decided
to punish Gabbard for supporting the better candidate. I mean they are clearly a couple of pigs.
"... Hillary took it upon herself to review them and delete documents without providing anyone outside her circle a chance to weigh in. It smacks of acting above the law ..."
"... That sums up the Clintons right there: It smacks of acting above the law ..."
"... I've been browsing through #PodestaEmails2 and jeezus, there are some pretty incriminating docs there. Of course the MSM are doing their best to ignore them, but it looks like a real firestorm to me. ..."
More wikileaks, some interesting detail on Hill's emails I hadn't run
across before:
why the "twisted truth" (not my words) on why – with the two
problematic areas being (a) emails to bill (when they were to bill's
staff) and (b) i only used one device - BB, when 2 weeks earlier, it was
an iphone, BB and ipad. As Ann and I discussed, hopefully that's a timing
issue and whilst in state, she only used one. :)
While we all know of the occasional use of personal email addresses
for business, none of my friends circle can understand how it was viewed
as ok/secure/appropriate to use a private server for secure documents AND
why further
Hillary took it upon herself to review them and delete
documents without providing anyone outside her circle a chance to weigh
in. It smacks of acting above the law
and it smacks of the type of
thing I've either gotten discovery sanctions for, fired people for, etc.
My emphasis
From Erika Rottenberg (former Linked In General Counsel)
To Stephanie Hannon (CTO of Hillary For America), Ann O'Leary (senior policy
advisor)
CC Lindsay Roitman
Fwded to Podesta
That sums up the Clintons right there: It smacks of acting above
the law
I've been browsing through #PodestaEmails2 and jeezus, there are
some pretty incriminating docs there. Of course the MSM are doing their
best to ignore them, but it looks like a real firestorm to me.
"... For example, IMO now that we have in writing that Hillary has 2 positions on issues (a public and private position) it is 100%
fair that debate moderators and the media ask Clinton aggressively which position she is giving in her responses – her public or private
position? ..."
"... If the media won't focus on the public/private position issue (and Obama did the same in 2008 regarding NAFTA, I recall), then
Trump can force them to by putting that front and center in the debate. ..."
Not surprised, no. But IMO has definite implications.
For example, IMO now that we have in writing that Hillary has 2 positions on issues (a public and private position) it
is 100% fair that debate moderators and the media ask Clinton aggressively which position she is giving in her responses – her
public or private position?
Won't happen with our media, but IMO this should now be standard operating procedure for the media with regard to Hillary and
would be completely fair, prudent, and necessary to inform the public and voters.
The debate is setting up to be the mother of all debates.
If the media won't focus on the public/private position issue (and Obama did the same in 2008 regarding NAFTA, I recall),
then Trump can force them to by putting that front and center in the debate.
"... As a college educated white, I'm not thrilled with Trump; however I will vote for him as the last chance to prevent WW3 (that would begin almost immediately), thousands of Waco's and Ruby Ridge's, and the final clamp down by the American Stasi. As will my asian, latino, black, american indian, and other ethnic co-workers...college degree or not. ..."
"... Hillary is the embodiment of the establishment evil. WE, my co-workers and I, want to kill it...by any means possible. ..."
TRUMP: "Bernie Sanders and between super delegates and Debra Wassermann Schultz and
I was surprised to see him sign on with the devil. The thing that you should be apologizing
for are the 33,000 e-mails that you deleted and you acid washed and the two boxes of e-mails and
other things last week that were taken from an office are are now missing. I didn't knowledge
I would say this, but I'm going to and I hate to say it. If I win, I am going to instruct my attorney
general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation. There has never been so many
lies, so much exception. There has never been anything like it. We will have a special prosecutor.
I go out and speak and the people of this country are furious. The long time workers at the FBI
are furious. There has never been anything like this with e-mails. You get a subpoena and after
getting the subpoena you delete 33,000 e-mails and acid watch them or bleach them. An expensive
process . We will get a special prosecutor and look into it. You know what, people have
been -- their lives have been destroyed for doing 1/5 of what you have done. You should be a shamed."
COOPER: "Secretary Clinton, I will let you respond."
CLINTON: "Everything he said is absolutely false . It would be impossible
to be fact checking Donald all the time. I would never get to talk and make lives better for people.
Once again, go to Hillary clinton.com. You can fact check trump in realtime. Last time at the
first debate we had millions of people fact checking and we will have millions more fact checking.
It's just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the
law in our country."
TRUMP: "Because you would be in jail."
COOPER: " We want to remind the audience to please not talk out loud. Do not applaud.
You are wasting time. "
As a college educated white, I'm not thrilled with Trump; however I will vote for him as
the last chance to prevent WW3 (that would begin almost immediately), thousands of Waco's and
Ruby Ridge's, and the final clamp down by the American Stasi. As will my asian, latino, black,
american indian, and other ethnic co-workers...college degree or not.
Hillary is the embodiment of the establishment evil. WE, my co-workers and I, want to kill
it...by any means possible.
"... I'll admit, as a woman, I was disgusted by the tapes, but I turned on the debate just in time for the question on Syria, and his answer won me back. Pence's foreign policy had me worried, but Trump was willing to disagree with him and once again be the only person talking any sense about this situation. The contrast of his Supreme Court answer to hers ("real world experience" can only be code for social justice activist judges) was icing on the cake. I think John Gruskos' theory may be right. Next debate, Trump needs to point out that Clinton has all the neocon war hawk endorsements, and that tells you all you need to know on foreign policy. ..."
I like the phrase corrupt and half-competent status quo . It captures the real problem
we have- society has good reason for not trusting those of us in the elite, but in a real sense
the very survival of society depends on experts… (how long would most of the country last if our
systems for distributing food, water, power and money crashed?).
Trump certainly won tonight. I don't know that it changes the trajectory of the race (he was losing
before GEBTP) but it changes the speed. Hillary is counting on oppo dumps and ground game to see
her through.
The answer to why Hillary did not deliver a knockout blow is simple. She doesn't have one. There
is nothing Hillary could bring up that could end it for Trump.
Or is anyone really stupid enough to think that tape matters to the voters? People have real
things to worry about.
One thing is clear: all networks should fire their political commentators and hire Scott Adams.
And perhaps less clear, but is Trump delivering a death blow to political correctness with his
bizarre persona and performance-art campaign? (Not to excuse him for being a grotesque human being.)
I am not sure Trump won. He survived tonight. We have two liars: one is an idiot and another one
is the most corrupted politician in the US history. Any other Democrat would have destroyed Trump.
Any other Republican would have destroyed Hillary. What a nightmare.
Brit Hume tweeted something about Trump's performance making the lewd tape controversy "fade"
and he got hammered by anti-Trumpers for saying so, but I think he's right. That's just the nature
of our times–both the acceptance of coarseness, and the short memory of TV/Internet culture. Remember
how people speculated that if Bill Clinton had been eligible to run for a third term he very well
might have been elected? Heck his approval ratings were sky-high after the impeachment hearings
aired all the sordid details out for public view!
The main way Trump won was just by moving the debate forward from the tape stuff everyone was
expecting. We were back to Muslim vetting, and fossil fuel energy, and the email scandals…. It
really makes it feel like it's all just business as usual again.
I'll admit, as a woman, I was disgusted by the tapes, but I turned on the debate just in time
for the question on Syria, and his answer won me back. Pence's foreign policy had me worried,
but Trump was willing to disagree with him and once again be the only person talking any sense
about this situation. The contrast of his Supreme Court answer to hers ("real world experience"
can only be code for social justice activist judges) was icing on the cake. I think John Gruskos'
theory may be right. Next debate, Trump needs to point out that Clinton has all the neocon war
hawk endorsements, and that tells you all you need to know on foreign policy.
"... It's an election for and among the ruling class. ..."
"... Scott Adams who has been right so far says Trump still has a clear path to victory. The media is just trying to blackpill everyone. Why should we believe them? They are saying Trump can't win because they said he can't win. ..."
"... Somehow Clinton bragging about getting a pedophile off the hook is OK? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCDzRtZLUkc CLinton will start WW III. Trump may do so. What a choice. ..."
"... For nearly a generation now there have been decent candidates for US president who would, to a greater or lesser degree, have opposed our increasingly corrupt and violent oligarchy. Ross Perot, Ralph Nader, Pat Buchanan, Howard Dean, Jill Stein, Rick Santorum ... and many more you haven't heard of. The elites have perfected a system of taking them down, with no messy assassination. Ridicule them in the press, don't cover their positions, just their style, find a flaw or mis-statement and hammer hammer hammer until people believe that they are ridiculous, then ban them from the media. ..."
"... now the establishment is doubling down on the only thing it knows how to do. They are 'reporting' that Trump is finished. ..."
"... Donald Trump has said unfortunate off-the-cuff things. Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State, has actually DONE some things so crazy that if I wrote her up as a character in a work of fiction my editor would reject it as unbelievable. ..."
"... The Podesta e-mails show Killary in her true colors (see b.) The few I read though were unsurprising and boring, because she is mentally challenged, as is her staff, they are in a bubble. The leaks re. her speeches to Banksters ditto, and anyway the speeches are immaterial, they are just empty, fakelorum, performances carried out to legitimise bribery in a completely corrupt circuit. ..."
"... I concur with the very first post...it will be a Trump landslide. The silent majority- the plurality of voters who are neither D nor R. We have no voice in politics and no voice in the media. We already see through the lies and the hypocracy. That is Trumps target audience. Even if it is just a show at least Trump talks about policies ..."
"... Trump and his supporters must henceforth be more vigilant and pull no punches in exposing the Clintons' perfidy. ..."
"... And on other fronts - the Vice News vid I just watched was titled 'the US/Russia Proxy War in Ukraine'. I was shocked. Their prior coverage was 200% neocon blather. (Aka Simon Otrovsky IIRc) Could it be a beginning of a revolt by the MSM? If CNN begins to refer to Syria and Ukraine as proxy wars, it means the Empire's control of MSM is slipping. And that would spell the end for them. ..."
"... "This is a very dangerous game given that Russia, being in Syria at the invitation of the legitimate government of this country and having two bases there, has got air defense systems there to protect its assets," Lavrov said, according to Reuters. ..."
"... IMO Sanders is worst among all the POTUS hopefuls. He lied repeatedly, In a debate with Hillary on Edward Snowden "He broke the law … but what he did [exposing the NSA surveillance] should be taken into consideration," Edward Snowden wanna fair trial, but can he get it? Dun Forget Assange afraid of assassinated, to speak from Ecuador embassy balcony to exposed Hillary. Can you trust Obomo's Justice Dept. or anyone in his administration? ..."
"... Outrage Can No Longer Be Ignored. The elections methods enterprise consists of an imposing compilation of distracting, unworkable feints, erroneously purported to constitute viable election methods. Get strategic hedge simple score voting. No More Two-Party!!! No more!!! ..."
"... The social theorist Zygmunt Bauman argues that the age of nations states, which was born with the treaty that ended the Thirty Years War, and which we all take for granted, is now over. Nation States made decisions through politics and then used power to implement their wishes. Now, however, power no longer resides with the state, but instead is in the hands of international entities -- corporations, banks, criminal enterprises -- that are above, beyond and indifferent to any nation's political decisions. ..."
"... Although American presidents, the congress, the courts still pretend otherwise, it's pretty clear they know they have no real power, and so go through charades of legislating meaningless issues. Allowing Americans to sue Saudi Arabia, for example, when there's not the slightest chance of pinning 911 on the Saudis. ..."
"... The election is a circus meant to distract and entertain a powerless public. Might as well enjoy it. The Dems and Repugs like to strut and posture, rake in dollars and enjoy prestige, and try to make us believe they can still shape the future, but really it out of their control. ..."
"... Of course the U.S. has tremendous military power, but the "elected" government has no control over it, how it is used or where. JFK's murder ended that era, ..."
"... Many here think the U.S., and hence the U.S. military, is controlled by Israel, but Israel too is a nation state, and supra-national institutions ($$$$) seem to be running it as well, ..."
"... My take as an outsider. Use Trump to take down the elite. His foreign policy basics are consistent and solid - non intervention, pull back of US military to the US, protection of local manufacturing. ..."
"... US involvement in Libya began at Hillary's urging shortly after Hillary received this advice from her confidante Sidney Blumenthal. Note that the advice that the overthrow of Qaddafi needed to be connected with "an identifiable rebellion" in Syria means that it needs to be connected with civil war in Syria. US involvement in Libya was, of course, coordinated out of Benghazi, as the advice to Hillary suggested. ..."
"... Once the fall of Qaddafi was a fait accompli, Hillary's State Department advocated the overthrow of Bashar Assad as a critical component for calming Israel so that President Barrack Obama could accomplish his legacy nuclear pact with Iran without Israel blowing Iran up before the deal was sealed. ..."
"... No. Planning for overthrow of Assad - and use of extremists as a weapon of State - was begun in earnest in 2006; as described by Seymour Hersh in "The Redirection". ..."
"... Anyone else notice that Hillary couldn't remember what she did while in office? Major mistake. ..."
"... Clinton insisted she had retired from the government by the time that happened. Not so: Obama dared Assad to cross his line in August 2012, six months before Clinton's term ended. ..."
The tape of Trump talking dirty was released just in time to sidetrack from the release of more
of Clinton's dirty secrets by Wikileaks. Trump's talk was juvenile and sexist bragging in front of
other "boys". Surprising it was not. There will more releases like that, all timed to run cover for
Clinton.
The just released emails of
her campaign chairman John Podesta about Clinton's talk to Wall Street and other Clinton related
issues are indeed revealing. She
is the sell-out you
would expect her to be:
*CLINTON SAYS YOU NEED TO HAVE A PRIVATE AND PUBLIC POSITION ON POLICY*
Clinton: "But if everybody's watching, you know, all of the back room discussions and the deals,
you know, then people get a little nervous, to say the least. So, you need both a public and a
private position."
It is funny how the U.S. electorate has a deeper
"very negative" view of Trump (-44%) and Clinton (-41%) than of the much vilified Russian President
Putin (-38%).
When Trump will come back in the polls (not "if"), it will be a devious fight with daily "leaks"
followed by counter leaks and a lot of dirty laundry washed in front of the public. Good.
Many of the people who will vote will vote against a candidate, not for the one
that they will mark on their ballot. I expect a very low turn out election, barely giving a mandate,
to whomever may win or get selected to have won. Elwood | Oct 9, 2016 9:26:03 AM |
1
Uh no. The silent majority that swept Reagan into office will speak again this year.
Please stick to geo-politics and quit embarrassing yourself re: domestic US politics. Trump is
done and the longer it takes for you and the rest of the fake-left - both domestically and abroad
- to get their heads around that fact, the longer the rest of us have to witness the frightfully
shameful mental contortions your Trump-love takes.
Please stop. It's one thing to have to deal with shallow and inaccurate fake-left analysis
without a healthy dose of butt-hurt b/c Hillary will be POTUS.
Grow up and quit being a victim of the US propaganda arsenal.
In other words, I shall lie to the "Deplorables" to keep you safe from regulation and incarceration.
Give me money. I am a corrupt and experienced liar.
I had a home inspector come to my place last week, intelligent and skilled working class guy,
who didn't even know who Trump was. He knew Clinton was running and hates her. But had zero clue
who her opponent was. And he's never voted before. There are very few election signs on yards.
It's an election for and among the ruling class.
BURN. IT. DOWN. That was the WHOLE point of Trump voters from the get-go. And his slide toward
zionist scumbags was a HUUUGE problem. To me at least. Now he SEES. And he won't be shut down
by the fukwits. And regardless of what happens. He is likely carefully considering having his
son-in-law fall down a VERY deep hole. His daughter and grandchildren will thank him one day.
Et tu Brutus?
Here's what the Deplorables will be doing. On election day. 1) Bring black sharpie. 2) Demand
PAPER ballot. 3) Vote Trump. 4) Vote I or D down-ballot. 5) Fill in all blanks.
And by-the-way. To #2 Ron. We do this for Syria. And Yemen. And all the OTHER people the USG,
MIC, MSM ZIOthugs have been murdering and enslaving for the past 50+ years. Not just for ourselves
and our children. It's the absolute LEAST we can do. But its a start.
Scott Adams who has been right so far says Trump still has a clear path to victory. The media
is just trying to blackpill everyone. Why should we believe them? They are saying Trump can't
win because they said he can't win.
Ron is obviously a Clinton groupie.
Btw, how is what Trump said sexist? It's just real dude talk with the lads. Plenty of people
say that behind closed doors.
@2. I happen to think Trump is another wolf in a sheep's clothe and won't deliver any significant
part of his promises, so like you, I am baffled that someone like b could actually buy into this.
However unlike you, I don't think the election is predictable, I think it actually bodes well
for Trump, why? It seems clear from the polls, that Hillary isn't a preferred choice for majority
of the voters. If he was, she should be polling close to the 50 point mark by now, yet she's in
the low 40s, someone with her resume running against a political light weight like Trump should
be doing much better. So what does that mean? It means (at lest to me) voters have rejected Hillary
as a firs choice, she may be second or third but she's definitely not most voters first choice.
So Trump has a chance, although he's working his darnes to ruin it, Imagine if it was someone
else had Trumps message without the baggage?
The polls wouldn't be close, I think the undecided (who don't have Hillary has their first
choice) will decide this election at the last minute, if Trump has more recordings leaked (not
about his tryst) but for instance the NYT interview where he supposedly said he's not going to
build a wall? ( I think that will be leaked soon if the polls don't move in Hillary's favor, the
establishment clearly has their preference). If there are no more damages to Trump, he may very
well win this thing, but I suspect the empire has more leaks coming.
I for one thinks a third party candidate is where its at, but what do I know?
Want to read some original observations? (1) The Pence-Is-So-Presidential vp debate win was a
complete set-up, with the DNC complicit in instructing Tim Kaine to play the obvious heavy, a
movie caricature villian, complete with raised eyebrows, crazy expressions, and interrupting 70+
times. Made Pence a new hero. Reason? (2) GOP Rinos and DNC have been co-ordinating for months
on "perfect time" to release Trump's Naughty Audio Tape (sharp ears can also detect it was edited),
and this was reported by DC Whispers and journalists Mr/Mrs Bill & Beth Still in a recent video.
(3) Media had their 'talking points' to conclude with NBC's Chuck Todd yesterday: "The election
is over. Hillary has won." (4) GOP Paul Ryan did high-profile dis-invitation of Trump to Wisconsin;
and then Pence substitution at event (vetoed by Trump) was to support GOP Establishment plot to
replace Trump with Pence on the ticket, which they will still try to do when the DNC floats false
pedophile charges against Trump w/o Oct. 9 (DNC whistleblowers gave full plan to Alex Jones because
even there, some people are too disgusted with all this dirt to 'carry on camping'). Pence was
in on the conspiracy from the very beginning. Another smiling choirboy.
For nearly a generation now there have been decent candidates for US president who would, to a
greater or lesser degree, have opposed our increasingly corrupt and violent oligarchy. Ross Perot,
Ralph Nader, Pat Buchanan, Howard Dean, Jill Stein, Rick Santorum ... and many more you haven't
heard of. The elites have perfected a system of taking them down, with no messy assassination.
Ridicule them in the press, don't cover their positions, just their style, find a flaw or mis-statement
and hammer hammer hammer until people believe that they are ridiculous, then ban them from the
media.
Trump's big mouth and complete lack of shame has, for now, made him relatively immune to this
treatment. So now the establishment is doubling down on the only thing it knows how to do. They
are 'reporting' that Trump is finished. Perhaps yes, perhaps no. But it would be wise to remember
that the corporate press doesn't report the news any more, it is attempting to create the news,
out of whole cloth. Remember how many times they said that Trump was 'finished' during the primary?
I mean, how come what Trump said ten years ago in a private conversation, is headline news,
while Hillary Clinton's decision to ALLY THE UNITED STATES WITH AL QAEDA AND RISK WAR WITH RUSSIA
TO DEFEND THEM is somehow a minor detail? It's crazy when you think about it.
Donald Trump has said unfortunate off-the-cuff things. Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State,
has actually DONE some things so crazy that if I wrote her up as a character in a work of fiction
my editor would reject it as unbelievable.
So I am voting for Trump even if the New York Times says he is doomed. We don't really know
what he will do as president, but in the business world he has proven the ability to actually
get along with disparate people in a constructive way. Hillary Clinton is a bona fide monster
who should scare any sane person. We know exactly what she will do as president, and attacking
Russian forces in Syria will be just the start...
Better a chance on a wildcard, then certain doom. IMHO.
The Podesta e-mails show Killary in her true colors (see b.) The few I read though were unsurprising
and boring, because she is mentally challenged, as is her staff, they are in a bubble. The leaks
re. her speeches to Banksters ditto, and anyway the speeches are immaterial, they are just empty,
fakelorum, performances carried out to legitimise bribery in a completely corrupt circuit.
One e-mail (idk who wrote it and can't find it back): a campaign manager who had his head screwed
on stated that most likely one needs to add 10 points to Trump re. polls. Details were a bit bizarre
and convoluted...no matter...
It reminded me that in France all the 'official' polls use an 'algorithm' based on 'hunches
dressed up in fancy pyscho-babble verbiage' that add between 2 and 5% to NF votes (depending on
election, region, first/second round, etc.) Necessary for maintaining their credibility, to come
closer to what the real results will show.
As for Trump's locker-room bragaddacio, not one single Trump supporter will flip, and undecideds
etc. may switch to Trump, finding such an 'attack' illegit, frivolous, etc. It throws light on
the fact that what Killary is being accused of - e-mails, Benghazi, Clinton Foundation, pay to
play, etc. - is extremely serious, whereas smutty chat is part-o-life.
Imho the underlying aim of the release (first, serving to create buzzz! to cover over the leaks
natch) was to furnish a reason for segments of the PTB establishment base, nominally
Repubs., to come forward and support HRC, after they were subjected to pressure, arm-twisting,
possibly even blackmail.
I concur with the very first post...it will be a Trump landslide. The silent majority- the plurality
of voters who are neither D nor R. We have no voice in politics and no voice in the media. We
already see through the lies and the hypocracy. That is Trumps target audience. Even if it is
just a show at least Trump talks about policies
Trump is still going to "win" the election. I put the win in quotations because that will not
mean that he would be declared winner. The plan to rig the election has always been part of the
plan, what this leak provides is a way to persuade the gullible people that the tape cost Trump
the election. The oligarchs in both parties and all over the Western world are truly terrified
of a Trump presidency but equally terrified of the reaction of the masses, should the election
be brazenly rigged with no plausible reasons. They have tried to manipulate the polls and it is
not succeeding. But now they can go back to their pseudo pollsters and start dishing out dubious
polls until the election. That would appear credible to the credulous voters who by and large
are, frankly, dim. The two parties and the global oligarchs and their media shoeshine crew have
now found a convenient talking point to prepare the ground for an eventual rigging of the election.
Trump and his supporters must henceforth be more vigilant and pull no punches in exposing the
Clintons' perfidy.
#22 I'd say "war criminals who rule us" is Hillary's job title to a T. So many Hillary supporters
are giving off the scent of mixed rage and panic these days.
And on other fronts - the Vice News vid I just watched was titled 'the US/Russia Proxy War in
Ukraine'. I was shocked. Their prior coverage was 200% neocon blather. (Aka Simon Otrovsky IIRc)
Could it be a beginning of a revolt by the MSM? If CNN begins to refer to Syria and Ukraine as
proxy wars, it means the Empire's control of MSM is slipping. And that would spell the end for
them.
To 31. Nah. It's not the end of 'em. Just controlled opposition. Cuz thru all this miasma. LOTS
of decent folks are hip to what's happening in Yemen and Syria. The muppets are rubbing sleep
from their tired little eyes. And SEE what the MSM has been neglecting to tell them. The MSM aren't
stupid. They hope feeding the muppets some bit of truthiness, we'll fall back into an MSM-stupor.
Sadly. The MSM has lost too many muppets. Gone for good. This CIVIL WAR won't be fought carnally.
But it will be just as bloody. Cuz metaphysical warfare is something for which they are NOT prepared
to battle.
I think the term used here refers to any form of modern mass release of bombs or missiles.
Each B-52 which of course can refuel so fly from anywhere, & is ponderously slow, can release
about 24 cruise missiles, serially, from a rotary dispenser inside, from standoff distances.
So the problem becomes "How many 'rounds' do the russians have for each & every one of their
missile batteries there?"
Except that he didn't inherit or steal his money, he demonstrated he's nearly perfect example
of the 1% when he mocked any voter who has a opinion about anything except for his own opinion
that estate taxes are theft (though so would be Trump's inflation-based tax -- thereby demonstrating
Mr. Scott 1%-er Adams is less informed than he is rich) and that (according to Scott Adams himself)
is far and away the issue that matters to Scott Adams in this election.
Who gave you or the Democrats the right to demand changes after the Primaries? .....believe
Gallup's polls and anyone who happen to disagree with you a troll?
IMO Sanders is worst among all the POTUS hopefuls. He lied repeatedly, In a debate with Hillary
on Edward Snowden "He broke the law … but what he did [exposing the NSA surveillance] should be
taken into consideration," Edward Snowden wanna fair trial, but can he get it? Dun Forget Assange
afraid of assassinated, to speak from Ecuador embassy balcony to exposed Hillary. Can you trust
Obomo's Justice Dept. or anyone in his administration?
Sanders said "Well, as somebody who spent many months of my life when I was a kid in Israel,
who has family in Israel, of course Israel has a right not only to defend themselves, but to live
in peace and security without fear of terrorist attack." Did you look at Google's Palestine
map (taken down after protests)?
You have, perhaps, heard me mention "strategic hedge simple score voting" here before. Here are
two short pieces I have posted at the website "The Center for Election Science", at: https://electology.org/forums/theory
/~~~~~~~~~~
They tend to fall back on a Google+ Groups "site" which I do not use since I refuse to join (corporate)
"social media" at: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/electionscience
Outrage Can No Longer Be Ignored. The elections methods enterprise consists of an imposing
compilation of distracting, unworkable feints, erroneously purported to constitute viable election
methods. Get strategic hedge simple score voting. No More Two-Party!!! No more!!!
Giving Americans a choice of candidates no one wants is a way of humiliating them, of showing
them they have no say in how they are ruled. It's much like Caligula appointing his horse to the
Roman Senate to show his power and his contempt for the senators who might still have thought
they had a say in running Rome.
The social theorist Zygmunt Bauman argues that the age of nations states, which was born with
the treaty that ended the Thirty Years War, and which we all take for granted, is now over. Nation
States made decisions through politics and then used power to implement their wishes. Now, however,
power no longer resides with the state, but instead is in the hands of international entities
-- corporations, banks, criminal enterprises -- that are above, beyond and indifferent to any
nation's political decisions.
Although American presidents, the congress, the courts still pretend otherwise, it's pretty
clear they know they have no real power, and so go through charades of legislating meaningless
issues. Allowing Americans to sue Saudi Arabia, for example, when there's not the slightest chance
of pinning 911 on the Saudis.
If WW3 or anything else is in the cards it will happen no matter who is elected, Clinton, Trump
or someone else.
The election is a circus meant to distract and entertain a powerless public. Might as well
enjoy it. The Dems and Repugs like to strut and posture, rake in dollars and enjoy prestige, and
try to make us believe they can still shape the future, but really it out of their control.
Indeed, according to Bauman, things may be spinning out of anyone's control. That's everywhere,
not just in the U.S.
Of course the U.S. has tremendous military power, but the "elected" government has no control
over it, how it is used or where. JFK's murder ended that era,
Many here think the U.S., and hence the U.S. military, is controlled by Israel, but Israel
too is a nation state, and supra-national institutions ($$$$) seem to be running it as well,
Recently there have been plenty of posts here pointing out the contradictions and inexplicable
behavior of American leaders concerning Syria -- is the military opposing the State Department?
Is the "CIA" opposing both and calling the shots? I think Bauman would agree (?) that in the final
analysis, none of them are running things. Americans, including their supposed leaders, have lost
control of their destiny and can only do as they are told.
I'm not qualified to judge Bauman's assertion. I'm only suggesting it gives a plausible explanation
for the current insanity we're living through. "The State of Crisis" (2014). A great work (only
150 pages) that you'll be glad to read if you haven't already read it.
My take as an outsider. Use Trump to take down the elite. His foreign policy basics are consistent
and solid - non intervention, pull back of US military to the US, protection of local manufacturing.
These are the two best policies to break the globalised elite, US would go through some hard times
for a bit re-adjusting, then take off again as part of this world rather than wannabe ruler of
this world.
Trump's line about Gens. Macarthur and Patton rolling over in their graves was masterful. Telling
Hil that she doesn't know who Isis is. Declaring Aleppo lost. Scored some points. The Trump of
yesterday's news is not the Trump in the debate. I find this strangely reassuring. Got her on
the 3:00AM phone call in res Benghazi. Whoever ran Trump's prep gets a free drink on me.
US involvement in Libya began at Hillary's urging shortly after Hillary received this advice
from her confidante Sidney Blumenthal. Note that the advice that the overthrow of Qaddafi needed
to be connected with "an identifiable rebellion" in Syria means that it needs to be connected
with civil war in Syria. US involvement in Libya was, of course, coordinated out of Benghazi,
as the advice to Hillary suggested.
Once the fall of Qaddafi was a fait accompli, Hillary's State Department advocated the overthrow
of Bashar Assad as a critical component for calming Israel.
No. Planning for overthrow of Assad - and use of extremists as a weapon of State - was begun in
earnest in 2006; as described by Seymour Hersh in "The Redirection".
Anyone else notice that Hillary couldn't remember what she did while in office? Major mistake.
Trump recalled that Clinton was secretary of state when President Barack Obama drew his now-infamous
rhetorical 'red line' in Syria, ineffectively warning Bashar al-Assad not to use chemical weapons
against insurgents and civilians.
Clinton insisted she had retired from the government by the time that happened. Not so: Obama
dared Assad to cross his line in August 2012, six months before Clinton's term ended.
She can't even remain standing during a presidential debate, and can't remember what she did,
either.
@ 31 Vice "news" is a bad joke. All their Syria and Libya coverage is 200% pro al-Qaeda/DoS policy.
They even had a "journalist" embedded with al-Nusra in Aleppo in 2014 and portrayed them in a
favourable light. It doesn't surprise me that their Ukraine coverage follows a similar pattern.
"... He hit on her every issue he wanted to. Repeatedly and strongly. ..."
"... On that, his taking on one of the hardest gigs in the business/political world tonight after the last few days, and dealing with it, and winning, he may have convinced a swathe of undecideds that he has what it takes. ..."
"... Sad for all Trump haters, but he demolished the incredibly boring HRC. Trump says it how it is, even if he mixes in fibs and exaggerations. ..."
"... The Guardian's view of the debate is a predictable one, considering the complete lack of objectivity in covering the election. ..."
"... There has been no questioning of the fact that Hillary has received millions of dollars, for "speeches" given to Wall st banks. And of course, no questioning of the millions spent by the Clintons as "hush money" to women, in order that they keep quiet about Bill's sexual proclivities. Yep, no objectivity and little attempt at unbiased reporting here. ..."
"... Do you want to know why Trump won tonight? It's because all Hillary has to offer is the same pre-canned answers over and over again. She comes off as less genuine than any other candidate in history and it's dispicable. ..."
"... Saddam Hussein was a leader who did not have WMDs and whose orchestrated removal and subsequent murder opened the door to the biggest infestation of mass-murderers and islamic terrorism in the history of the world; Gadaffi was a popular leader who had turned Libya into the most prosperous and the only truly independent Arab nation in Africa, and Putin is the democratically elected leader of his country with a wide national mandate. Neither of the three can hold the candle to the menagerie of tyrannical and maniacal baboons and banana republic chipmonks who paraded and goose-stepped through Obama White House over the past eight years. ..."
"... I'm no fan of the United States since their criminal actions around the globe post '9-11' but I actually feel some pity for it at this point. ..."
"... Many of us are sickened more than you may realize. The unfortunate part is the entire system in the US is rigged against its own people. ..."
"... Hillary Clinton in favour of a no-fly zone in Syria, which basically means a hot war with Russia. Now, rebels are armed by Saudi Arabia amongst others. And Saudi Arabia is one of the biggest donors Clinton Foundation. Coincidence? ..."
"... This is terrifying. Hillary might put sons and husbands of American women in harm's way on behalf of interests of Saudi Arabia. ..."
"... hillary's biggest weakness in my opinion is that she is the "goldman sachs candidate" ..."
"... Then the debate switched to other topics and Trump landed blow after punishing blow. Hillary's non-answer to the question about whether she had public positions and private ones was (for her) uncharacteristically bizarre and rambling. Trump's Honest Abe retort was gold. ..."
"... On tax issues he noted she had 30 years to do something about the tax code and did nothing. Why? Because all of her billionaire donors use the same tax loopholes she accuses Trump of using, which is also why it won't change if she is elected. ..."
"... Trump is the first non-establishment presidential candidate to get this far, and he landed lots of painful punches on Hillary during this debate. ..."
"... The current administration has repeatedly taken unrealistic positions based on ideology and clung to them until the reality on the ground made them utterly untenable to hold onto. As exhibit one, does anyone remember Obama's big speech to the nation when he announced his plan to arm moderate Syrian rebels? That turned out to be one of the most ineffective flops in history, a complete waste of time, money, and resources. ..."
"... Instead of a debate that was focused on Trump's vulgar comments, the debate was focused on policy issues, and despite all of Clinton's "preparation" when it came to the nuts and bolts of policy, Trump managed to not only go toe-to-toe with Clinton, he often got the best of her. ..."
"... Finally, finally someone actually asked the question that had to be asked on Syria, despite all the pointless hand wringing. Those rebels, what do we actually know about them, that we are willing to go to war for them? Are they islamists? How will they govern? Do they have any popular support of any kind? ..."
"... And its not even the whole of Alleppo we are talking about. 2/3rds is already in govt control, Sorry but there is the bitter truth about civil wars. IF they cant come to an agreement, then the best thing that can happen is if one part wins and the fighting stops. ..."
"... Not many people could face off against a highly skilled politician like Hillary, and win - especially when all the media and grandees have extrapolated from a "locker room" recording to woman-hater/sex pervert. ..."
"... Trump showed up HRC as unexciting and mediocre. DT could still win. ..."
"... I fear the Presidency of Hillary Clinton as I believe that she is VERY capable of initiating a nuclear war with Russia. I truly believe that for Donald Trump, this would be a last alternative and that he would insist upon speaking, rather than acting, as HRC would. ..."
"... I just can not believe a word she utters. She has proven me correct with her "one position for public, and one position for private" quote. Two-faced liar. On the other hand is Trump. There are many laws or positions he endorses which would NEVER survive the two houses of Congress needed to implement them. ..."
"... You may like or loathe Trump, but it's impressive what he achieved tonight. They had him on the ropes, it was the middle of this fight and he knocked his opponent out tonight. ..."
"... Here's why. her record! She boasts of so many sponsored bills as senator, yet when you actually look at what she ACHIEVED - 3 meaningless bills - named a museum, a road and a post office! As for her SOS "achievements" are there any? The only things we can say for certain she did, ultimately she has admitted they were mistakes - experience is meaningless if you have poor judgement, and she has prove to have terrible judgement. ..."
"... And ultimately at the end of the day, IF the will is there, Trump can be prevented from causing ANY damage. Clinton on the other hand has openly stated that she will cooperate with the republicans, thus only right wing conservative bills will get passed! ..."
"... So she has proven poor judgement, a proven record of incompetence, and is desperate to raise the stakes with the Russians! Can anyone explain to me how she is better in any way. Remember Trump is disgusting, but she is a war criminal - her actions should have put her in the hague yet alone the whitehouse! ..."
"... Hillary's tough talk against Russia and regime change in Syria scare the crap out of me. She's talking nuclear war, and she and the media lie about Russia. ..."
"... Modern politics is all about have media houses in your pocket to promote your side of the story. For the life of me i cannot believe the presidential race is still so close even though there is a clear bias against trump. ..."
"... It's been rather stunning as to how far the Guardian has gone to blanket it's news with pro-hilly propaganda. The most shameful moments came when Bernie was running in the primary. ..."
"... of the two, Hillary represents the most acute, immediate threat to humanity with her calling for a no fly zone over Syria and her neo-McCarthy Russia bashing, demonizing Putin. ..."
"... The the recent events in Syria witness this threat, with the US openly protecting (supplying) the misogynist, stoneage Al Nusra in Eastern Alleppo, bombing Syrian soldiers who are actively engaged in combat against ISIS, and now bombing bridges leading to the ISIS capital of Raqqa thus preventing the advancing Syrian army from attacking ISIS. ..."
"... She is backed by the debt slavery banksters, the planet destroying fossil fuel parasites, the fascist military industrial security prison complex and the whole corporate fascist shadow state, not to mention the MSM (including this journal). At least Trump has said this, which is much saner than any of HIlliary's comments regarding Syria, (not to mention Lybia): ..."
"... Assad is killing ISIS. Russia is killing ISIS. Iran is killing ISIS. And those three have now lined up together because of our weak policy," he said. ..."
Terrible summary by Tom McCarthy of the debate completely omits the main event, namely Trump promising
to prosecute Clinton should he become President. WTF.
There's a job waiting for him at the NYT, the number 1 newspaper for anyone who wants to miss
what's actually going on in this election.
Trump won this debate because Clinton wanted to make the issue personal and the fact is that even
though Trump is disgusting, she hasn't got a great record to defend. It's shameful that the Democrats
chose her and the Republicans chose him.
I agree with you to a point, but to be entirely honest, I don't think any of the politicians have
more than a surface level knowledge of any of these issues. They rely on experts and advisors
to come up with solutions to complex problems and then they make decisions after weighing the
options presented. Politicians who have been in the game a long time know all the generic buzzwords
and slogans to use, whereas Trump doesn't have the lingo down. It's actually part of his charm.
Obama had almost no real world experience with any of this stuff and especially when it comes
to foreign policy it would be hard to argue that anyone could do much worse (and Hillary was part
of his administration).
Success of debates can only be based on their effectiveness or otherwise in improving a candidate's
position. Trump`s position was almost untenable before the debate. He`s now in an election. By
any standards that is a massive win for him.
Given that the only relevant audience are undecideds (and consider the politics of people as
yet undecided about voting for Trump), Trump played a blinder. He hit on her every issue he
wanted to. Repeatedly and strongly.
On that, his taking on one of the hardest gigs in the business/political world tonight
after the last few days, and dealing with it, and winning, he may have convinced a swathe of undecideds
that he has what it takes.
I am non-partisan. But I can`t see how anybody can conclude he didn`t win that big time. His
position now V before the debate? Answers itself.
Still don`t see an electoral path to victory for him. That was monumental television. Ugly
America. But it is ugly, that`s the reality.
The Guardian's view of the debate is a predictable one, considering the complete lack of objectivity
in covering the election. Much has been made of Trump's sexist comments, yet not even a raised
eyebrow at the Clinton foundation receiving tens of millions in "donations" from Saudi Arabia,
a nation that bans women from driving, voting or having human freedoms.
There has been no questioning of the fact that Hillary has received millions of dollars,
for "speeches" given to Wall st banks. And of course, no questioning of the millions spent by
the Clintons as "hush money" to women, in order that they keep quiet about Bill's sexual proclivities.
Yep, no objectivity and little attempt at unbiased reporting here.
Not everyone is a political junky and not everyone lives in a black and white world.
Telling people they are not qualified to vote because they haven't made up their minds yet
is an elitist statement. One of the main reasons I refuse to vote for Hillary or Bernie is because
of all the elitist people who like to demean others simply because they disagree with the progressive
or neo-liberal talking points.
Do you want to know why Trump won tonight? It's because all Hillary has to offer is the same
pre-canned answers over and over again. She comes off as less genuine than any other candidate
in history and it's dispicable. It was bad in the Democratic debates and it is atrocious
in the presidential debates. Is it really so hard to just speak what she is actually thinking
that she just robots out the same rhetoric over and over again? It seems so.
I was going to vote for her but after this debate, the level of disgust with her is too much.
Be a damn person for a change instead of this thing that makes me shudder when she opens her mouth.
I just can't do it, Bernie, sorry. Trump repulses me to think of voting for but she makes me physically
sick to think about voting for. They say I will be throwing my vote away to vote for a third party
candidate but I just don't care. To throw it away is better than to cast it for someone I would
forever regret voting for the rest of my like. That goes for the both of them.
Saddam Hussein was a leader who did not have WMDs and whose orchestrated removal and subsequent
murder opened the door to the biggest infestation of mass-murderers and islamic terrorism in the
history of the world; Gadaffi was a popular leader who had turned Libya into the most prosperous
and the only truly independent Arab nation in Africa, and Putin is the democratically elected
leader of his country with a wide national mandate. Neither of the three can hold the candle to
the menagerie of tyrannical and maniacal baboons and banana republic chipmonks who paraded and
goose-stepped through Obama White House over the past eight years.
Stay on topic. This thread is about alleged Trump's camaraderie with dictators which is now
totally and permanently debunked.
It was an awful display from any conceivable point of view. There were no winners; none at all.
I'm no fan of the United States since their criminal actions around the globe post '9-11'
but I actually feel some pity for it at this point. The fact that most Americans appear not
to be completely sickened and ashamed by their farce of an election speaks volumes about how far
their country as fallen on so very many fronts.
A very sad night for the world, but none more so than for the United States and their people.
Many of us are sickened more than you may realize. The unfortunate part is the entire system
in the US is rigged against its own people. We're fucked, we know it, if we try to do anything,
they shit all over us with lies and propaganda and wave their corruption in our faces like a damn
battle flag. It won't be long before the people finally stand up to this. Trouble is, it may already
be too late...
Hillary Clinton in favour of a no-fly zone in Syria, which basically means a hot war with
Russia. Now, rebels are armed by Saudi Arabia amongst others. And Saudi Arabia is one of the biggest
donors Clinton Foundation. Coincidence?
This is terrifying. Hillary might put sons and husbands of American women in harm's way
on behalf of interests of Saudi Arabia.
hillary's biggest weakness in my opinion is that she is the "goldman sachs candidate".
and trump was able to exploit that. trump said that he was only taking advantage of the same tax
laws that hillary's campaign-financing friends take advantage of. and he said that it had been
within hillary's powers to change those laws but she wouldn't because of her friends. all hillary
has to do is declare that she will stop big tax avoidance and claw bag these avoided taxes and
she would have the bernie sanders'
Christopher R Barron is not too far off the mark in scoring this one. Trump started the debate
with the same awkward and uncomfortable manner as he finished the last one. Hillary's line of
attack about Trump being unfit to be president was delivered with maximum skill and effectiveness,
and Donald's rebuttal was a bit flat and floundering. Things were looking gloomy in Trumpville.
Then the debate switched to other topics and Trump landed blow after punishing blow. Hillary's
non-answer to the question about whether she had public positions and private ones was (for her)
uncharacteristically bizarre and rambling. Trump's Honest Abe retort was gold. He killed
her on Obamacare, a real sore spot with middle class voters, pointing out that the premiums and
deductibles are so high you have to get hit by a Mack truck before it actually pays off. Foreign
policy, Russia, Iran, Iraq, Syria--all he had to do was point to 8 years of Obama and her own
tenure as Secretary of State leading to the present unmitigated disaster. Our friends don't trust
us and our enemies don't fear us.
On tax issues he noted she had 30 years to do something about the tax code and did nothing.
Why? Because all of her billionaire donors use the same tax loopholes she accuses Trump of using,
which is also why it won't change if she is elected. You can argue pro or con on everything
Trump said, but there is no question that this was a much stronger debate performance from him
than the first and the final question in which he complimented Hillary actually helped soften
his image quite a bit and ended the night on a perfect note.
Trump is the first non-establishment presidential candidate to get this far, and he landed
lots of painful punches on Hillary during this debate.
Hillary hardly touched Trump.
If no more serious revelations come to light, don't be surprised if he gets a Brexit victory
in one month: Americans are sick of polished elite politicians like the Clintons and Bush's.
I disagree with everyone here, every poll I've seen has had Trump on top in that debate by a majority.
I'd like to see links to other polls, always welcome! I have read the CNN poll was a majority
Democrat demographic, which many have stated render that poll biased. I don't know if this is
still the case?
The key thing is - IS TRUMP a lesser of two evils?
Simply, in my view, YES. Because I believe a less aggressive US foreign policy is essential
for global well-being in general The current war party in the white house, whose views Clinton
clearly espoused tonight in her accusations, denigration and aggressive stance toward Russia,
can only lead one way. It is archaic, medieval and dangerous.
If there can possibly be a turnaround in attitude from the barbaric, 1980s-style foreign policy
hysterically issuing forth from US Military officials atm I would very much recommend we encourage
it.
Trump did not fudge his words regarding the middle east and ISIS. He praised Russian and Syrian
combat of ISIS, he stated he did not hate Russia, unlike his rival. His message was altogether
one of more solidarity.
I am not a Trump butt-monkey, Putinbot or an idiot. But Clinton and her War Party are openly
arming moderate rebels in Syria, fighting a two-faced phoney war in order to unseat Assad - causing
a massive humanitarian disaster out there. The moderate rebels and, at one time, ISIS (I get the
impression they've gone out of control now) are nothing more than mercenaries, paid for and armed
out of US coffers. Can we wake up to the implications of this? Russia threatened to shoot down
US aircraft in Syrian airspace the other day! Are you not alarmed by Clintons gung-ho attitude
in this climate?
This is not a perspective much agreed on in the MSM, but I happen to believe it is the single
most important thing in the world today.
"He also obviously has no idea what is going on in Syria."
He said Allepo is probably already lost. There is a reality check for you.
The current administration has repeatedly taken unrealistic positions based on ideology
and clung to them until the reality on the ground made them utterly untenable to hold onto. As
exhibit one, does anyone remember Obama's big speech to the nation when he announced his plan
to arm moderate Syrian rebels? That turned out to be one of the most ineffective flops in history,
a complete waste of time, money, and resources.
The sad thing is that I remember numerous military commentators in the media who immediately
predicted it would be an utter failure and they were right.
Instead of a debate that was focused on Trump's vulgar comments, the debate was focused
on policy issues, and despite all of Clinton's "preparation" when it came to the nuts and bolts
of policy, Trump managed to not only go toe-to-toe with Clinton, he often got the best of her.
Trump needed to win tonight to stay alive. Clinton did not. Trump won, and he lives to fight
another day. This race is far from over.
An accurate analysis.
The CNN Democrat commentators were shell-shocked after the debate and were trying to convince
themselves and the viewers that it was a tie.
Neither Richard nor Jessica have actually given an analysis of who one the debate. Both are just
rehashing their own personal opinions about Trump, and Jessica, as she usually does, threw in
some complaints about men in general. Terrible journalism.
Hillary won on temperament but Trump won on the issues. He is an awful candidate, and it sucks
that such a terrible candidate is the message bearer but that is what it is.
Finally, finally someone actually asked the question that had to be asked on Syria, despite
all the pointless hand wringing. Those rebels, what do we actually know about them, that we are
willing to go to war for them? Are they islamists? How will they govern? Do they have any popular
support of any kind?
He should have also shouted out loudly when asked what are the consequences of Alleppo falling.
The answer is none! There is nothing in Alleppo that is worth a single American life. If anything
there might be good consequences. The civil war will end, people will go back to work and rebuilding
will begin. Alleppo falling could be the best thing that happens to Syria.
And its not even the whole of Alleppo we are talking about. 2/3rds is already in govt control,
Sorry but there is the bitter truth about civil wars. IF they cant come to an agreement, then
the best thing that can happen is if one part wins and the fighting stops.
Trump is a desperately poor candidate, but you lot on the left are not making it easy to defeat
him.
And he should have shouted
Not many people could face off against a highly skilled politician like Hillary, and win -
especially when all the media and grandees have extrapolated from a "locker room" recording to
woman-hater/sex pervert.
Trump showed up HRC as unexciting and mediocre. DT could still win.
This was actually a reasonably decent debate, as far as these two candidates are concerned. Trump
maintained his composure, Clinton came close to losing hers. And yes, I DID watch it.
I fear the Presidency of Hillary Clinton as I believe that she is VERY capable of initiating
a nuclear war with Russia. I truly believe that for Donald Trump, this would be a last alternative
and that he would insist upon speaking, rather than acting, as HRC would.
I just can not believe a word she utters. She has proven me correct with her "one position
for public, and one position for private" quote. Two-faced liar.
On the other hand is Trump. There are many laws or positions he endorses which would NEVER survive
the two houses of Congress needed to implement them.
HRC, on the other hand, has the "connections" which would give her the ability to do so. That
scares me. She is someone. two-faced, who can not be trusted.
You may like or loathe Trump, but it's impressive what he achieved tonight. They had him on
the ropes, it was the middle of this fight and he knocked his opponent out tonight.
It was the "rumble in the jungle" all over again - Trump absorbed all kinds of punishment,
he absorbed it all and then ended up in triumph. "Trump bomaye! Trump bomaye! :-)
What I found amusing was her line about keeping the high ground - immediately after making several
low blows and saying he was unqualified! She claimed she never says that about other candidates,
yet said it about both Obama and Sanders - and no doubt every other opponent she has faced!
This is the fundamental problem with Clinton. Because so many people despise her, she has always
campaigned negatively, and apart from the virtually uncontested NY senate positions (bought by
her wall street donors), she has lost each time! Now you can sling all the charges at Trump, and
I will not disagree with any other them. Trump is indeed unfit to be president. However Clinton
is infinitely less qualified.
Here's why. her record! She boasts of so many sponsored bills as senator, yet when you
actually look at what she ACHIEVED - 3 meaningless bills - named a museum, a road and a post office!
As for her SOS "achievements" are there any? The only things we can say for certain she did, ultimately
she has admitted they were mistakes - experience is meaningless if you have poor judgement, and
she has prove to have terrible judgement.
And ultimately at the end of the day, IF the will is there, Trump can be prevented from
causing ANY damage. Clinton on the other hand has openly stated that she will cooperate with the
republicans, thus only right wing conservative bills will get passed!
And as for SCOTUS picks, Obama has proven there is no guarantee of progressive picks, and AGAIN
if Trump picks an awful SCOTUS judge he CAN be blocked!
So she has proven poor judgement, a proven record of incompetence, and is desperate to
raise the stakes with the Russians! Can anyone explain to me how she is better in any way. Remember
Trump is disgusting, but she is a war criminal - her actions should have put her in the hague
yet alone the whitehouse!
But this is all moot as Clinton shills simply refuse to be honest with themselves and refuse
to look at her record. I have asked elsewhere dozens of times to Clinton supporters to name a
crime / charge against Trump that cannot be said against Clinton - STILL waiting.
Frankly it matters not who you vote for as they are both ubfit, but Clinton has a proven record
of incompetence and war crimes whereas Trump has not. Personally it is way over time to stuff
the 2 party nonsense and vote 3rd party - if they get 5% they get funding next time. Personally
I
Trump today had to show that he, not the GOP leadership, was master of his base. And his base
is by far the largest component of Republican voters so he is master of the party in the month
before an election. He is not going to drop out and if the party wants to push that fight, Donald
is going to decisively win it. His base wanted Hillary's blood and he gave it to them. In that
sense he won. But winning undecideds, no. In that sense he lost.
Hillary was addressing mainly women voters according to a statistical demographic profile.
Don't confront too much, stay calm and collected, and let him have it on his 2005 tape. She saw
the debate as a means to finally move women, maybe especially white women, to her side. She absolutely
did not need to nail down her actual base, and was out to decisively pick up undecided voters.
She probably succeeded. In that sense she won. And it is by far the bigger victory. And mostly
because it was already mission accomplished in the 48 hours before the debate.
In a week we will see the polling for the tape and for the debate. Hillary is going to increase
her lead by 2 points if not more. And that includes the battlegrounds. And Trump will very definitely
still be the candidate.
Hillary's tough talk against Russia and regime change in Syria scare the crap out of me. She's
talking nuclear war, and she and the media lie about Russia.
Trump was correct to point
out that if the US really wanted to knock out ISIS, they'd have to join forces with Russia. That
was the most intelligent thing he said all night. I will not vote for either of them. Because
as much as Trump is offensive, she has a sh*t eating grin which makes me sick. I think I'll write
in Vladimir Putin, as he is 'currently' along with Xi in China working to make their countries
true super-powers with science and technology.
A "pearl" from Hilarious : "Russia (when not) is hacking our mails". Then again, she kill the
messenger, but don't say 'what' was the contents of those e-mails. Especially those of the pre-campaign
against Sanders.
Modern politics is all about have media houses in your pocket to promote your side of the
story. For the life of me i cannot believe the presidential race is still so close even though
there is a clear bias against trump. As an observer i am curious to know why?
It's been rather stunning as to how far the Guardian has gone to blanket it's news with pro-hilly
propaganda. The most shameful moments came when Bernie was running in the primary.
Guardian bias is bordering on the bizarre. There are few news sites reporting that Hillary
won. So Trump won this debate and didn't take Anderson Coopers bate..... big deal.
I think an article on how this late comeback won't help Trump at this late stage in the election
would be more interesting.
They are both disgusting human beings. Though, of the two, Hillary represents the most acute,
immediate threat to humanity with her calling for a no fly zone over Syria and her neo-McCarthy
Russia bashing, demonizing Putin.
The the recent events in Syria witness this threat, with the US openly protecting (supplying)
the misogynist, stoneage Al Nusra in Eastern Alleppo, bombing Syrian soldiers who are actively
engaged in combat against ISIS, and now bombing bridges leading to the ISIS capital of Raqqa thus
preventing the advancing Syrian army from attacking ISIS.
Then you have her history -to name just a few of her callous, inhumane, and cruel in the name
of the 1%- of starving hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children to death, her admiration of Henry
Kissinger, her recent coup of a progressive, honest and legitimate president in Honduras and its
replacement with corporate controlled puppets using death squads to kill environmentalists, journalists,
etc.
She is backed by the debt slavery banksters, the planet destroying fossil fuel parasites,
the fascist military industrial security prison complex and the whole corporate fascist shadow
state, not to mention the MSM (including this journal). At least Trump has said this, which is
much saner than any of HIlliary's comments regarding Syria, (not to mention Lybia):
""Assad is killing ISIS. Russia is killing ISIS. Iran is killing ISIS. And those three
have now lined up together because of our weak policy," he said.
"I think it would be great if we got along with Russia. We could fight ISIS together," Trump
had said earlier in the evening."
Trump just neutralized his tape scandal and has made Hillary's emails an
issue again. His talking about the inner city isn't about getting the black
vote, but keeping it home on election day. The 30 years bit is effective,
which even for someone like me, an unrepentant leftist, made me smile and
think so true.
Clinton could have sunk the knife tonight, but instead, she comes out of
this more wounded than him, I believe.
RADDATZ On Wikikeasl, you need both a public and a private position. Is it
OK for politicians to be two-faced
CLINTON As I said, it was about Lincoln getting Congress getting the 13th
Amendment approved. It was principled and strategic.
CLINTON But lets talk about what's really going on. It's Russian hacking. We
don't know if its accurate. We have never been in a situation where an
adversary is working so hard to infuence the election. They're not doing it to
elect me. We deserve answers. Clinton should release tax returns.
TRUMP Caught in a lie. She lied. Now she's blaming the lie on Honest Abe. I
think it would be great if we got along with Russians. We could fight ISIS
together. I know nothing about the inner workings of Russia, no loans from
Russia. Segues into the glories of his balance sheet [!!!]. I have no loans
from the Russians, got govt work. Many of our friends took bigger deductions:
Soros, Buffet, take massive deductions. I pay 100s of millions. When audit
released…
While the Trump Tape scandal may end up far less damaging to the Trump campaign than
many pundits predicted, confirmed by several polls this morning which showed
rank-and-file Trump supporters barely changed their opinion of the candidate in the
aftermath of the hot mic recording leaked on Friday afternoon, he will have to pull off
a strong debate performance while ignoring loud calls from both the press and top
elected republicans to step aside, in order to offset a decline in polls has suffered
since the first debate.
That may be easier said than done, especially since over the past 24 hours Trump has
seen a barrage of attacks not only from the left but also from his own party, with
dozens of GOP lawmakers calling for him to stand down.
As Fox wrote earlier
, Trump was already struggling through a tough couple of weeks,
after the first debate with Clinton, in which she argued Trump was verbally abusive to a
1996 Miss Universe winner. Still, trying to appear unfazed, Trump struck a defiant tone
on Sunday in the face of calls for him to abandon the U.S. presidential race, attacking
prominent Republicans and saying he has "tremendous support."
As he so often has done in times of campaign stress, Trump took to social media to
try to squelch any speculation that he could leave the race. "Tremendous support (except
for some Republican leadership"). Thank you," Trump wrote on Twitter.
"So many self-righteous hypocrites. Watch their poll numbers - and elections - go
down!" Trump tweeted, apparently referring to Republican lawmakers seeking re-election
who have withdrawn their support for him over a 2005 video that emerged on Friday.
The negative speculation over the fate of Trump's campaign was the bulk of Saturday's
news cycle, and continued on Sunday.
As
Reuters
writes,
Clinton communications director Jennifer Palmieri told reporters on
Clinton's campaign plane: "We understand that this is uncharted territory ... to face an
opponent that is in the grips of a downward spiral in terms of his own party belatedly
walking away from him." A source close to the campaign of Trump's vice presidential
running mate, Mike Pence, dismissed talk among some political analysts the Indiana
governor might bolt the ticket in the uproar over Trump's comments. "Absolutely not,"
the source told Reuters.
Meanwhile, as noted above, with Republican Party leaders in crisis mode and doubts
emerging over Trump's ability to draw support from crucial undecided voters, it appeared
that many of Trump's core supporters would remain loyal despite the hot mic incident. A
public opinion poll by POLITICO/Morning Consult, taken just after news broke of the
video, found 39 percent of voters thought Trump should withdraw, and 45 percent said he
should stay. Of those who said Trump should leave, only 12 percent identified themselves
as Republicans.
Suggesting blowback may be in store for some Republicans who attacked Trump,
House
Speaker Paul Ryan was heckled by Trump supporters at a rally in his congressional
district in Wisconsin on Saturday, after having disinvited Trump following the release
of the recording of Trump making lewd remarks. "You better back Trump!" they yelled.
"You turned your back on him!" "Shame on you!"
But while there has been much verbal speculation about the future of the Trump
campaign, now one month ahead of the election, in practice it would be virtually
impossible to replace Trump. As we reported previously, in what have been largely
symbolic moves, at least two Republican governors, 10 senators and 11 House of
Representatives members withdrew their support of Trump, with some advising him to drop
out of the race, including John Thune of South Dakota, a member of the Senate Republican
leadership. But, as Reuters notes, any attempt to replace Trump on the ballot would face
huge legal and logistical hurdles.
The Trump campaign fought back, circulating "talking
points" to a core of high-profile Republicans who promote Trump in the news media. The
points sought to undermine establishment Republicans who have abandoned Trump.
"They are more concerned with their political future than they are about the future
of the country," said a copy of the talking points, described to Reuters by two sources
close to the campaign.
It might work: as we noted previously, Trump has made his battle against the
establishment a central campaign theme: what better way of underscoring that than by
showcasing that not only do Democrats hate his brand, as of this moment a vast majority
of Republicans do too.
"Phones have been blowing up for the past 24 hours," said a prominent Republican
political operative in Washington, referring to a heavy volume of calls among party
officials and Republican members of Congress.
There could be financial complications for Trump however. As we
reported last night
, Trump's troubles could steer campaign donations away from him
and to Republican candidates for Congress and other down-ballot offices.
But money may be the least of Trump's worries if he is unable to keep his head in
tonight's debate.
What should one expect?
According to one Reuters source, Trump could help himself if he himself quickly
addressed the video and the Oct. 1 New York Times report that he took so substantial a
tax deduction on a declared $916 million loss in 1995 that he could legally have avoided
paying any federal income taxes for up to 18 years.
Altternatively, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a Trump adviser, told Sunday
talk shows that at the debate Trump might choose to go on the offensive against Clinton
by bringing up past infidelities of her husband, former President Bill Clinton.
Interviewed on NBC's "Meet the Press," Giuliani said both presidential contenders were
flawed but that Trump feels he owes it to his supporters to stay in the race.
Republicans have attacked Clinton, 68, over what they say is her role in trying to
discredit women who accused her husband of sexual misconduct decades ago, and have
wondered why Trump ignored to approach the topic during the first debate.
According to the WSJ, which writes that "
Trump
Signals Attack on Bill Clinton in Coming Days
" a taste of what may be to
come was unveiled on Saturday when Bill Clinton was midway through a remark about
climate change Saturday when a heckler gave a taste of what he and his wife's
presidential campaign might get from Republican Donald Trump in coming days. "Nobody can
dispute the fact..." Mr. Clinton started to say at a rally in a union hall,
"...
that you're a rapist!"
the protester shouted, finishing the sentence for the
42nd president.
Previewing a hard-line attack on Clintons' sexual past, Trump on Sunday morning
tweeted an interview given by Juanita Broaddrick, who claimed Mr. Clinton sexually
assaulted her in the late 1970s.... Ms. Broaddrick tearfully recounts the episode in the
videotaped interview and said "I'm afraid of him."
As the WSJ adds, "Trump, facing fierce blowback for his lewd comments about women,
is signaling that he will target Mr. Clinton's behavior as he tries to stabilize
a campaign coping with its biggest crisis to date."
In weekend apologies for his remarks, the Republican nominee invoked Mr. Clinton
repeatedly, saying he had "abused women" and talked about them in ways that were more
offensive than his own in a 2005 video in which he boasted of sexual aggression.
He also claimed Mrs. Clinton attacked the women who accused her husband of sexual
misconduct.
"I've said some foolish things, but there's a big difference between the words
and actions of other people," Mr. Trump said in a Saturday morning video. "Bill
Clinton has actually abused women and Hillary has bullied, attacked, shamed and
intimidated his victims. We will discuss this more in the coming days."
That line of attack threatens to yank Mr. Clinton directly into the campaign
scrum, a space the former two-term president has largely avoided since his wife
launched her campaign a year and half ago.
The WSJ notes that according to strategists in both parties, a tactic where Trump
goes for Clinton's past infidelities may backfire.
Rudolph Giuliani, a Trump campaign surrogate, said Sunday on NBC that he didn't
expect his candidate to raise Mr. Clinton's past during an evening presidential town
hall meeting in St. Louis, Missouri.
Additionally, the WSJ notes that Bill Clinton remains a popular figure, outshining
his wife and her Republican opponent.
A recent Wall Street Journal/ NBC News poll found that 45% of voters said they
have very positive or somewhat positive feelings about the former president, compared
with 38% who have very negative or somewhat negative feelings.
The same survey found that 37% of voters have positive feelings about Mrs.
Clinton, while 52% have negative feelings. Meanwhile, just 28% of voters have very
positive or somewhat positive feelings about Mr. Trump; 61% have very negative or
somewhat negative feelings about him.
Neil Newhouse, a Republican pollster, said Mr. Trump would be playing to his base of
hard-core supporters by attacking Mr. Clinton, but he isn't winning over any new voters.
"If he were running a Republican primary race, this could be an effective strategy," Mr.
Newhouse said. Now, "it's a failed strategy to try to bring Bill Clinton to this."
Lashing out at the former president and saying that he has done something worse is "like
an argument that a third-grader might make," Mr. Newhouse said. " When you use an
apology to turn around and attack your opponent, you lose ground," he said.
A democratic strategist, Joe Trippi, believes that "there's no way out for him other
than to be humble and apologize", which on the other hand some say would show weakness
and give Hillary the offensive. He also pointed out that Trump now needs to somehow win
over women and college-educated white voters and that "taking aim at Mr. Clinton is only
going to "repulse them further."
* * *
While nobody has any idea what Trump's best angle of attack may be, or what the
republican presidential contender will say in under three hours when the townhall-styled
debate begins, it is certain that following a brief courteous open, the mudslinging on
both sides will promptly escalate, resulting in one of the most memorable, "deplorable"
yet entertaining slow-motion trainwrecks observed in primetime history. The biggest
unknown, however, is how America will respond to it: and for Trump that particular
gamble could mean the difference between victory and defeat.
"... the DNC is handling the public v. private comments of one Hillary Clinton is to declare all the leaked material suspect because it's "postmarked Russia," according to Donna Brazile, whom I just watched on This Week – so she says she hasn't read them, and is advising that no one read them. If you don't read them, that ends the discussion, which obviously was her goal. ..."
"... And it worked, as near as I can tell. Brazile hammered the public remarks only, so there you have it: just like the DNC hack that showed the games being played with the Sanders candidacy, the Wikileaks release on the paid speeches is delegitimized with one word: Russia. ..."
Well, and just so you know, the way the DNC is handling the public v. private comments
of one Hillary Clinton is to declare all the leaked material suspect because it's "postmarked
Russia," according to Donna Brazile, whom I just watched on This Week – so she says she hasn't
read them, and is advising that no one read them. If you don't read them, that ends the discussion,
which obviously was her goal.
And it worked, as near as I can tell. Brazile hammered the public remarks only, so there
you have it: just like the DNC hack that showed the games being played with the Sanders candidacy,
the Wikileaks release on the paid speeches is delegitimized with one word: Russia.
Not that Stephanopolous seemed all that reluctant to let her off the hook – he can say he brought
it up, but we all know today isn't about Clinton, it's once again about Trump.
I will say this: the town hall debate could be pretty interesting.
Following the first
official accusation lobbed at Russia on Friday by the Department of Homeland Security and Director
of National Intelligence on Election Security, in which US intelligence services formally stated
they were "confident" that the Russian government "directed the recent compromises of emails from
US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations", today Russia responded to
this latest diplomatic escalation by saying that U.S. accusations that Russia was responsible for
cyber attacks against Democratic Party organizations lack any proof and are an attempt by Washington
to fan "unprecedented anti-Russian hysteria", the Foreign Ministry in Moscow said.
After late on Friday the Kremlin called the U.S. allegations "nonsense", on Saturday Russia's
Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov,
cited by Reuters , said on the ministry's website that "this whipping up of emotions regarding
'Russian hackers' is used in the U.S. election campaign, and the current U.S. administration, taking
part in this fight, is not averse to using dirty tricks."
"There is no proof whatsoever for such grave accusations," Ryabkov said. "(They are) ...fabricated
by those who are now serving an obvious political order in Washington, continuing to whip up unprecedented
anti-Russian hysteria."
Ryabkov reiterated an offer to Washington, first made last year, to hold consultations on fighting
cyber crime together, but he also criticized John Kerry after the U.S. Secretary of State said late
on Friday that Russian and Syrian actions in the Syrian civil war, including bombings of hospitals,
"beg for" a war crimes investigation.
Such remarks are unacceptable and Moscow is disappointed to hear "new typically U.S. claims for
being a global judge", Ryabkov said in comments to Interfax news agency published on Saturday.
As Reuters adds, referring to a resolution on Syria proposed by France for debate at the United
Security Council later on Saturday, he said: "Unfortunately, we see less and less common sense in
the actions of Washington and Paris". The draft resolution demands an end to air strikes and military
flights over Aleppo. Moscow has already said this draft is unacceptable.
So with hopes of any joint Syrian action in tatters, and the US formally accusing Russia of being
a state sponsor of cyber attacks against the US, with the chairman of the US senate cyber hacking
subcommittee going so far as introducing a bill imposing sanctions on Russia after the political
hacking allegations, which Russia has duly denied, the ball is now again in Obama's court, where
the next step is most likely to be even more diplomatic tensions, and military escalations.
pods: Oct 8, 2016 11:00 AM
US policy: "When did you stop beating your wife?"
jcaz -> RagaMuffin: Oct 8, 2016 11:14 AM
Don't sweat it, Vlad- real America knows what this is about, and who did what.....
Ha, the article actually uses 'the Putin', as in ' featuring the Putin dressed in a suit in
front of the Russian flag with the word "Peacemaker" in capital letters' paging the late
Sen. Joe McCarthy, we have a fifth-column crisis! I blame the Donald for mollycoddling evil commies
like the Putin.
Update on the "banner day for the Putin" – Russian friend notes similar banner was hung in
Dresden, and the occasion is the Putin's birthday, 64th years young today.
Hillary: Huma dear, pour me another double Stoli & tonic, stat!
Huma: What if the schlubs hear you drink Stoli, maybe we should switch to Skyy?
Hillary: It's what Blankfein serves, only the best.
Huma: Maybe we should reconsider first strike, considering the caviar situation. Some VIP donors
will be sucking their thumbs.
Hillary: Memo to Blumenthal, we need a strategic caviar stockpile to last until the rubble is
sorted out.
"... Saw less than a dozen Trump Signs. Not a single Hillary. And this one that I meant to steal, but we came back a different route: 2016 EVERYONE SUCKS ..."
"... Contradicting FBI view, Clinton's leaked speeches portray her as computer savvy McClatchy ..."
"... charged with a computer facilitated crime – computer illiterate ..."
"... charged with generating funds from Silicon valley financiers – computer savvy… ..."
"... Public position, private position, Dan. She has been completely forthright about this. ;-) ..."
"... Similar to choosing Clinton for President despite her record of leading from behind on good things and disastrously wrong choices in financial policy and oversight, Foreign Policy and civil rights, choosing to listen to one thing Richard Rubin says after decades of evidence that he couldn't find his hands in front of his face on a sunny day… Oh wait these are only failures and disasters if you aren't part of the in crowd. ..."
"... there is a ton of material both in those emails AND from the hurricane where Clinton is extremely vulnerable. Attack her on the record of her actions and of the Foundation in Haiti and tie her to the dead from the hurricane (justified). Point out what her statements regarding the trade deals, Social Security, Medicare. even sending your kids to war. He has an opportunity and material, but can he or will he use it? ..."
Contradicting FBI view, Clinton's leaked speeches portray her as computer savvy McClatchy
Pretty simple charged with a computer facilitated crime – computer illiterate charged with generating funds from Silicon valley financiers – computer savvy…
Similar to choosing Clinton for President despite her record of leading from behind on good
things and disastrously wrong choices in financial policy and oversight, Foreign Policy and civil
rights, choosing to listen to one thing Richard Rubin says after decades of evidence that he couldn't
find his hands in front of his face on a sunny day… Oh wait these are only failures and disasters
if you aren't part of the in crowd.
I believe we will know how serious Trump is if he manages to shift the conversation tonight
to Clinton's own quotes and what they mean. He will have to say his prepared piece in answer to
the planted questions and refuse to let them get under his skin, ignore the bait to attack back
on that. Who knows if he can.
But there is a ton of material both in those emails AND from the
hurricane where Clinton is extremely vulnerable. Attack her on the record of her actions and of
the Foundation in Haiti and tie her to the dead from the hurricane (justified). Point out what
her statements regarding the trade deals, Social Security, Medicare. even sending your kids to
war. He has an opportunity and material, but can he or will he use it?
"... Zach Bee Of all the words you could chant, in the entire english language, they pick the ONE that rhymes with liar? What does Hillary! Fire! Even mean? I thought that was a joke at first. Wow. ..."
"... Moh Moony Spot on mate. No one ever accused Hillbots of being very bright. beidoll I kept thinking it should have been "Fire Hillary". I'd fire her before I'd hire her. ..."
For those who want a few laughs in these grim times, check out the excellent Jimmy Dore's video (6
minutes) comparing Bernie's rallies with Hillary's. There is a truly cringeworthy episode of HRC cheerleading
in the clip.
Heh. I liked this little exchange in the comments:
Zach Bee
Of all the words you could chant, in the entire english language, they pick the ONE that rhymes with
liar? What does Hillary! Fire! Even mean? I thought that was a joke at first. Wow.
Moh Moony
Spot on mate. No one ever accused Hillbots of being very bright.
beidoll
I kept thinking it should have been "Fire Hillary". I'd fire her before I'd hire her.
So even after Hillary says she's going to renounce every campaign promise
she made two hours after the polls close, Bernie can't wait to get out on the
campaign trail urge us to vote for our own extinction?
Donald may be "The Apprentice" but Bernie has got to be "The Biggest Loser"
Bernie is the Biggest Frigging Sellout, if you ask me. He spends 6 months
railing against HRC's policies and now is out promoting her. He is dead to
me now.
I can see the expediency of a reluctant endorsement at the convention,
but he's lost his credibility with this behaviour. They must've threatened
him with loss of his Senate committee positions or something.
…or offered to fund his foundation and invite hi to expensive
lectures. Carrot or stick, carrot or stick; so hard to tell. I imagine
the stick is avoided when possible; no point in bringing needless
ugliness into what could be a nice relationship.
BREAKING: The Alabama Media Group, publisher of the Mobile Press-Register,
The Birmingham News, The Huntsville Times and other publications, as well as
one of the most right wing publishers in the South, has endorsed Hillary
Clinton for President.
For those who are familiar with Alabama politics (Yves?) this is
yuuge.
And tomorrow, their subscription office will be flooded with
cancellations. The GOP hive mind simply doesn't work this way.
When people buy newspapers for the op-eds, they want to read what they
already think. The newspapers themselves are largely purchased as local
papers of record or status symbols. The Union Leader endorsed Hillary, and
New Hampshire isn't breaking for Hillary. The Union Leader is a huge deal.
I know Team Blue is excited, but Palin, McCain (Team Blue seems to love
his deranged positions), Shrub, Jeb, Reagan, Nixon, Rick Scott, Graham,
Thurmond, Helms, Mittens…do you see where I am going?…haven't destroyed the
GOP. Partisan politics matters, believe it or not. By the end of the week,
every Republican outside of the ones close to retirement will have
apologized and declare war on "micro aggressions."
Once you get past the BRANDING (repub versus dem) isn't it just obvious
that Hillary would have been to the comfortable with most of the repub
candidates, on most issues, except for a very, very few social issues, and
even there not significantly outside repub suburban norms???
The parties in my view are the biggest impediment to critical thinking
there is – their downfall can't happen soon enough.
But I agree – this is YUUGE! Its kinda like the death of Sears.
Many men talk like Donald Trump in private. And only other men can stop
them.
WaPo. The difference between these many men (at least the elite
ones) and Trump is that Trump aspired to political power. The implicit
Democrat narrative that Trump is a uniquely pernicious outlier is ludicrous
on its face, as indeed this article urges.
Lewd Donald Trump Tape Is a Breaking Point for Many in the G.O.P.
NYT.
Except… This is the Republican establishment that (a) fielded 17 candidates
none of whom could be bothered to do oppo even to the extent of listening to
Trump's
public
tapes on Howard Stern, that (b) failed to fund or
unify behind a candidate to stop Trump when they had the chance, and that
(c) is hated by the most powerful factions in its own base. I think they're
going to have to carry Trump to term.
AP Exclusive: Job hunt substantial part of Bayh's last year
AP. "Evan
Bayh spent substantial time during his last year in the Senate searching for
a private sector job even as he voted on issues of interest to his future
corporate bosses, according to the former Indiana lawmaker's 2010 schedule."
So what? Both party establishments accept the central doctrine of
Citizens United
, that absent a showing of
quid pro quo
,
there's no corruption. Move along, people, move along. There's no story
here.
I'm shocked that Trump would say rude things in private. Men (and women,
don't fool yourself) being rude. Huh. Never would have seen that coming. An
entire entertainment industry called comedy, especially standup, based on
levels of rudeness. Can't be.
World leaders like LBJ watching movies of animals copulating in the White
House or bragging about having a Senator doing his bidding indicated by having
the man's p*cker in his pocket.
Yesterday John McCain again showed that he is a national treasure when he
assailed Donald Trump's "demeaning comments about women." This voice of
decency and reason in 1998 told a meeting of Republicans: "Do you know why
Chelsea Clinton is so ugly? Because Janet Reno is her father." [1]
McCain was joined in withdrawing support from Trump by his fellow neocon
Condoleezza Rice. Rice demonstrated her superior judgement during the summer
of 2001 when she systematically devalued intel that explicitly warned of an
impending major terrorist attack on U.S. soil.
The Republican hawks repudiating Trump are motivated not by his attitude
towards women but by his refusal to kowtow to a War Machine that has bought
and paid for Hillary Clinton.
And given that it was already universally known that Trump is a
despicable lout, these defections look a lot more like part of a larger
orchestrated outrage than a spontaneous reaction to the Trump tape.
Three reporters from Arizona, on the condition of anonymity, also
let me in on another incident involving McCain's intemperateness. In
his 1992 Senate bid, McCain was joined on the campaign trail by his
wife, Cindy, as well as campaign aide Doug Cole and consultant Wes
Gullett. At one point, Cindy playfully twirled McCain's hair and said,
"You're getting a little thin up there." McCain's face reddened, and
he responded, "At least I don't plaster on the makeup like a trollop,
you cunt." McCain's excuse was that it had been a long day. If elected
president of the United States, McCain would have many long days.
Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair ran a great demolition
series on MCain during his presidential campaign, with a lot about his
disgusting behaviour towards his wife and general gilded misogyny. No
link here because the theme recurred through too many articles, a lot
of them the late Cockburn's wonderful Friday 'Diary' column (if you
missed those at the time, look them up and start reading anywhere;
also St Clair has lately revived the tradition, and his diary is
almost as good), but they should be easily searchable in the
Counterpunch archive. Or you could find them in AC's final book, 'A
Colossal Wreck'.
I could go all Plato and shadows on the cave walls, but everything we
see is filtered. Or emphasized.
Very, very rich people, with very, very specific agendas, do the
filtering and decide what you see, but more IMPORTANTLY, what you don't.
maybe they are just repudiating for a reason Trump if anyone on earth
would understand. They don't want to be seen with a loser (when Trump
loses the election).
Re: Badgers. From Hunter S. Thompson's Rolling Stone obituary for Richard
Nixon"
"It was Richard Nixon who got me into politics, and now that he's gone, I
feel lonely. He was a giant in his way. As long as Nixon was politically alive
- and he was, all the way to the end - we could always be sure of finding the
enemy on the Low Road. There was no need to look anywhere else for the evil
bastard. He had the fighting instincts of a badger trapped by hounds. The
badger will roll over on its back and emit a smell of death, which confuses the
dogs and lures them in for the traditional ripping and tearing action. But it
is usually the badger who does the ripping and tearing. It is a beast that
fights best on its back: rolling under the throat of the enemy and seizing it
by the head with all four claws.
"That was Nixon's style - and if you forgot, he would kill you as a lesson
to the others. Badgers don't fight fair, bubba. That's why God made dachshunds.
I haven't watched him in a while but I gotta feel concerned for CNN's Wolf
Blitzer. Having to acknowledge the Russian punk band Pussy Riot on the air a
couple of years ago. Now he has to acknowledge " grab them by the pussy" has to
be causing him some anguish. Because I'm sure he has never heard that before.
Then again a seven figure salary will undoubtedly sooth some of that faux
disgust.
You know, on PBS Gwen Ifil's Washington Week in Review, a woman
correspondent ACTUALLY quoted the audio tape that has Trump saying he grabs
a women's "P" – except she SAID, apparently to "clean it up" a woman's
"kitty cat."
I spit up my Cabernet!!!
Language – funny how the common name we use to name that small mammalian
predator, star of countless Youtube videos, that we keep as pets also refers
to womens's sexual organs – except apparently the other name we use for the
small mammalian predator can also be used (at least in hip hop videos), but
isn't as DIRTY…yet
(hmmm, I thought you could only say kitty cat if you were actually
referring to a…."cat" but you can't say "kitty cat" if your referring to a
"P" – odd…)
I imagine I could saaaaay any word in such a way to make it sound dirty…
a) Trump's comments are, of course, deplorable. But I do not see how they
are at all unexpected or out of character for Trump, especially given all the
preceding stories about how he behaved on the set of The Apprentice, etc. I
mean, what's next, Breaking News – Sun Rises in East as Previously Thought?
b) If you look at the electoral map (e.g. at RealClearPolitics) and make
some reasonable poll-based assumptions (e.g. Virginia and Indiana break for
Kaine and Pence, respectively), you end up with exactly three contested areas
of the country.
The Southwest – Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and Nevada. Let's say those
are split 50/50, although so long as Trump keeps flogging the "illegal brown
rapists" horse, who knows.
The Rust Belt-ish – the Pennsylvania-to-Wisconsin arc around the Great Lakes
(Penn, Ohio, Michigan, WI, MN, minus Indiana).
Florida.
So basically you're looking at something like six states that are likely
going to decide the whole contest, because everything else breaks 200-180 or
210-170 or some combination thereof.
Are Trump's comments going to have any influence whatsoever on his Rust Belt
vote? Or are those people voting for him because of anti-trade,
anti-establishment, anti-Clinton, whatever other factors? More bluntly, are the
pro-Trump women in those states going to shriek in horror at his latest
crudeness, or say something like "boys will be boys, but Clinton is still
worse"? I don't know. I doubt anyone in the media knows either. Maybe we'll
have an inkling in 1-2 weeks with fresh sets of polls.
Are Trump's comments going to really change the Florida-white-senior-citizen
vote, or whatever bloc over there is (reportedly, per Politico) breaking 2:1
for him? I don't know. I doubt anyone in the world knows. Maybe we'll have a
better view in 1-2 weeks (again).
c) Given (a) and (b), as well as the similarly-timed Wikileaks release, as
well as the similarly-timed "evil Russians are evil" release by the White
House, as well as the upcoming debate…nah, I'm just going to call the whole
thing a big set of coincidences and say the media is rightly focusing on the
most important story of the hour and not at all willfully ignoring anything
else of substance.
Lambert noted Trump is already an ugly billionaire who has made horrid
statements and noted it's likely this is priced in.
Three issues stand put:
-it's a claim from a very bizarre person with a history of ugly statements
not an accusation
-Bill is a serial predator. Lewinsky was an intern under his power. Hillary
has been part of smear campaigns and is a purveyor of violence to boot. I
recall Gaddafi was widely seen being raped before his death which produced
laughter. Also how many people laughed at Shrub's correspondents video where
he looks for WMDs. First hand accounts of the occupations and wars have been
spread for a long time now.
-the glee from the uni-party and msm can only backfire when they are widely
distrusted.
Virginia is breaking for military contracts. Northern Virginia is largely
"military Keynesianism" run amok. The vote there will break for whoever is
least likely to move federal spending to other locations. They have to lay
the mortgage on government salaries. Northern Virginia outside of a few
small enclaves is such a dump. Without the spending, no industry will
relocate there.
British blogger John Ward (self-exiled to France, I believe) made
similar and useful points today:
* The recording is eleven years old.
* It takes place in a locker room, where 97% of those mouthing off
this morning have never been in their lives. It was the sort of male
fantasy-boasting I listened to every Saturday before getting changed
into my footie kit.
* Nobody died. The US Ambassador wasn't anally raped and dragged
through the streets to a grisly demise. No whistleblower was taken out
with a drone.
* It didn't take place in the offices of Goldman Sachs, it didn't
take place in the Oval Office, and there were no cigars involved.
* If American men are shocked by this kind of talk, they're either
deaf or just never played sports.
* From the day he first opened his mouth in this campaign, anyone
with an iota of sensitivity could discern what kind of bloke he is:
crude, narcissistic and misogynist. This tape is, therefore, not news.
* The behaviour of his running mate evokes suspicion, I think. Mike
Pence voted for Cruz in his home State, and is renowned for his nose
being able to sniff a populist soundbite. Both he and Ryan (another
Trump-hater in private) were quick to condemn Trump's remarks
unequivocally. Senior GOP movers, however, are reputed to have told
the Vice-Presidential nominee that if he dumped Trump, they would make
him the Republican candidate "by acclamation".
* The source of the story – the Washington Post – is the biggest
non-surprise of all of all: the journalist involved there, David
Fahrenthold, has written several stories about Trump's charitable
foundation (but ignored the infinitely more septic Clinton Foundation)
while casting aspersions on his mental capacity to be President (while
ignoring Clinton's consistent inability to stand upright unaided.
* Fellow Washpost blogger Richard Cohen wrote two months ago (with
remarkable prescience) 'The way to hurt Trump is to ridicule him. He
is a man of immense pride, a pompous bloviator and a locker-room
towel-snapper. Either ignore him or ridicule him.'
* According to the Post, Farenthold knows the identity of the
person who leaked the video to him, but will not disclose it. It seems
the person works for NBC, who had a team working full-time to find
lewd tapes of Trump during production of their programming featuring
him. I understand, however, that NBC were going to leave airing the
featured extract until Monday – after the Second TV Debate – and so an
activist Democrat supporter downloaded the tape and gave it to
Farenthold.
I just cannot believe the level of outrage over this comments compared
to the real outrages and crimes going on in the world today. Ironically,
if Trump implodes, HRC will go on to win but more voters - assuming she
has it safely in the bag - may vote 3rd party. In any case the victory
will be a poisoned chalice. The most corrupt, dishonest, and disliked
candidate as POTUS?
Probably the best political analogy is "Bill's" Monica moment. The
institutional D party reaction was, "It's just about sex."
As for "Bill," so for Trump. If it's "just about sex," Trump's
supporters (including women) will rationalize it away, just as their
Democratic sisters did for "Bill."
Those for whom it's a deal killer were opponents anyway. So nothing
has really changed, except that the Clintons could end up getting
hoisted on their own petard if the counterattack includes some really
damning fresh dirt.
Incredible set of links, as always and nice work by our own Richard Smith.
SLPs being used to front illegal operations– who would've thought? Excellent
investigative work.
The revelations being sussed-out from the Goldman Sachs speeches could be
the last straw for Hillary's campaign, tipping undecideds and ex-Sanders
supporters further away from her. Public and private position, indeed. It's
also an apt term to describe people who answer polls and tell their friends and
colleagues they're voting for candidate A, while in fact voting for B,C, or D.
The Trump hot-take comes as another deflection, but it seems that his base
supporters could care less.
On a lighter note, the Onion hits the nail on the head once again:
The selective outrage regarding Trump's boorish behavior and Hillary
Clinton's bloodthirtsy and dangerous policy stances is profound.
In 2013, Clinton says,
"To have a no-fly zone you have to take out all of the air defenses, many
of which are located in populated areas. So our missiles, even if they are
standoff missiles so we're not putting our pilots at risk- you're going to
kill a lot of Syrians," Clinton admitted. She then expressed concern that
would make that "intervention that people talk about so glibly" a
full-fledged "American and NATO involvement where you take a lot of
civilians."
3 days ago, a Rueters report says:
"In a departure from the Obama administration, [Clinton] supports the
establishment of a no-fly zone over Syria and has called for an intensified
air campaign by the U.S.-led coalition."
See, it's okay when Clinton 'glibly' advocates for military escalation that
is guaranteed - by her own admission - to kill innocent civilians. Like a Hindu
goddess of death, she is in her rights to decide when it is acceptable to
"take" civilians.
But god forbid Trump mentions wanting to f*ck someone who he thinks is
attractive. There is no place for that kind of talk in Hillary's civilized
world!
Trump admitted to past sexual assualts, "hitting on married women by
kissing them & grabbing their p***y".
Far worse than expressing sexual desire towards another person. Agreed
that HClinton is worse. Trump sexually assaulting 10s of women, is lower on
the scale of moral atrocities than killing 1000s of innocent civilians.
Speaking of killing innocent civilians, your friendly reminder that the
entire Real Basket of Deplorables cohort of US politicians, including 0bama,
P Ryan, HClinton, Trump; kill 45K USians/yr per Harvard Public Health Profs,
by their continual blockage of Canada-style MedicareForAll, e.g. another
ANNUAL killing of 1000 of innocent (USian) civilians.
I believe part of the context is that Trump is boasting how his fame
gets him a lot of beautiful women and sex. This is undoubtedly true -
just look at Rupert Murdoch's recent marital history. The boasting (and
vulgarity) are such a part of his personality. It's odious and I wouldn't
want any of my female friends to associate with him, but compared to
killing 500,000 kids with Iraqi sanctions, I'd say it's relatively
unimportant in the scheme of things.
Henry Kissinger: "power is the ultimate aphrodisiac." He got to
screw Jill St. John, and a whole lot of Vietnamese, Cambodians,
Laotians, and me and my fellow troops, among others.
We're all screwed, us ordinary people. Don't even have the option
of "laying back and enjoying it." Too bad we don't have an organizing
principle we can coalesce around, to defeat the parasites and mass
murderers and enable a world of decency and comity and viable
stability…
So I just went to the
NY Times
"Politics" page at 9:30AM (Eastern
Time). Here is a list of the articles, in order. For your reading pleasure or
convenience, I have
bolded the articles not
about Donald
Trump. Note their position in the list.
Lewd Donald Trump Tape Is a Breaking Point for Many in the G.O.P.
By JONATHAN MARTIN, MAGGIE HABERMAN and ALEXANDER BURNS
Inside Trump Tower in Manhattan. Donald J. Trump is facing increasing
pressure in his own party to end his candidacy.
Pressure built on the candidate to withdraw from the presidential campaign
as party leaders urged the G.O.P. to shift its focus to down-ballot
contests.
Donald J. Trump waves to supporters outside Trump Tower in New York on
Saturday.
NEWS ANALYSIS
Donald Trump's Conduct Was Excused Again and Again. But Not This Time.
By MICHAEL BARBARO and PATRICK HEALY
It turns out that even the most self-interested members of the political
class, the true weather vanes swinging in the wind, have their limits.
Why Republicans Are Probably Stuck With Donald Trump
By ALAN RAPPEPORT
Unless he becomes incapacitated or quits, getting rid of him is, legally and
logistically, "the equivalent of a triple bank shot."
Donald Trump the Showman, Now Caught in the Klieg Lights
By JIM RUTENBERG 5:00 AM ET
Donald J. Trump deftly used the blending of news and entertainment to build
a brand, and then a campaign. But all that drama has turned into a big,
messy show.
Graphic: More Than 150 Republican Leaders Don't Support Donald Trump.
Here's When They Reached Their Breaking Point.
By KAREN YOURISH, LARRY BUCHANAN and ALICIA PARLAPIANO
Which statements caused Republicans to bail on Donald Trump.
Presidential Debate: What to Watch For
By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE 5:00 AM ET
To achieve anything resembling a victory, Donald J. Trump needs to focus on
the most compelling parts of his message: trade, the threat of terrorism,
and the creation of jobs.
Women React With Fury to Donald Trump's Remarks, but Some Offer Support
By ABBY GOODNOUGH and WINNIE HU
What to tell a 10-year-old daughter? Why hasn't Mr. Trump outgrown the
locker-room talk? These are among the questions being asked across the
country.
Men Say Trump's Remarks on Sex and Women Are Beyond the Pale
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEŃA
Men of many backgrounds and parts of the country had varied opinions on how
men talk, but they agreed that Mr. Trump's version was unacceptable.
Donald Trump's Long Record of Degrading Women
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
The candidate has a history of insulting or unwelcome conduct that goes back
several decades, The New York Times has found.
John McCain Withdraws Support for Donald Trump After Disclosure of
Recording
By ALAN RAPPEPORT
Mr. McCain became the latest party leader to distance himself from the
nominee after a recording showed Mr. Trump speaking about women in lewd and
degrading terms.
Paul Ryan, Reluctant Supporter, Weighs Response to Donald Trump's Remarks
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER
Mr. Ryan uninvited Mr. Trump from a rally on Saturday, and said he was
"sickened" by Mr. Trump's remarks about women. But he did not withdraw his
support.
Graphic: Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell Reject Donald Trump's Words, Over
and Over, but Not His Candidacy
By LARRY BUCHANAN, ALICIA PARLAPIANO and KAREN YOURISH
How the two top Republicans in Congress have responded to Mr. Trump's
comments.
Donald Trump Apology Caps Day of Outrage Over Lewd Tape
By ALEXANDER BURNS, MAGGIE HABERMAN and JONATHAN MARTIN
A vulgar discussion recorded in 2005 on a soap opera set added to evidence
that Mr. Trump has a record of sexist behavior.
Donald Trump's Apology That Wasn't
By MAGGIE HABERMAN
In a video expressing regret over his lewd comments, Mr. Trump remained
defiant, calling the disclosure a "distraction" and used it to renew
political and personal attacks on Hillary Clinton.
Donald Trump: King of the Old Boys' Club, and Perhaps Its Destroyer
By SUSAN DOMINUS
A taped conversation involving the Republican nominee shows a world women
rarely see, and may not forget before Election Day.
Can't Find a Plan on HealthCare.gov? One May Be Picked for You.
By ROBERT PEAR
Under a new policy to make sure people maintain insurance coverage in 2017,
the government may automatically enroll them.
What Options Does the U.S. Have After Accusing Russia of Hacks?
By DAVID E. SANGER and NICOLE PERLROTH
Pentagon and intelligence officials have been debating how to deter future
attacks while controlling the potential escalation of a cyberconflict.
To Redefine Homestretch, Hillary Clinton Cues the Children
By NICK CORASANITI
"Measure," a new ad that begins with girls checking their heights against
wall rulers, aims to stand out near the end of a negative campaign season.
Leaked Speech Excerpts Show a Hillary Clinton at Ease With Wall
Street
By AMY CHOZICK, NICHOLAS CONFESSORE and MICHAEL BARBARO
According to documents posted online by WikiLeaks, Mrs. Clinton displayed an
easy comfort with business and embraced unfettered trade in paid speeches to
financial firms.
Newly Released Hillary Clinton Emails Offer Glimpse at Husband's
Advice
By STEVEN LEE MYERS and ERIC LICHTBLAU
The State Department began releasing emails the F.B.I. collected during its
investigation into her use of a private email server.
Billy Bush, a cousin of former President George W. Bush, in August.
Billy Bush Says He's Ashamed by Lewd Talk With Donald Trump
By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM and JOHN KOBLIN
Mr. Bush, a cousin of President George W. Bush, said he was "less mature,
and acted foolishly" in a 2005 conversation with Mr. Trump about women.
Imagine if the sexual harassment and rape claims against Bill Clinton were
given the same amount of exposure? We know Trump is a lewd, sexist, buffoon,
but it was Bill who lied for six months about getting blowjobs from a 20 year
old intern in the Oval Office.
The Guardian this morning has a huge front page spread about Trump but not a
mention of the Wikileaks release of the Podesta emails.
The MSM just don't give a shit about their credibility.
I just have to note this. I remember how well argued and coordinated the
defense of Bill Clinton was. I believed it at first. Do you remember that he
couldn't have possibly had sex in the oval office because it is sooooo
busy??? (I still think the most outrageous lie is trying to convince people
that the president works hard). I could imagine the president having a
tryst…but in the Oval office!?!!?? don't be ridiculous.
That people come in and out (dirty side long glance) of the oval office
all day unexpectedly????
And of course, the despicable character assassination of Monica …by "pro
women" people.
I noticed that as well. Same at the Guardian - their main anti-Trump
pieces today have comments turned off. Mustn't have the "plebs" mention
Bill Clinton's past or bring up the Wikileaks Podesta emails!
(The email is a compilation of quotes from Clinton's paid speeches, not
otherwise available. It begins: "Attached are the flags from HRC's paid
speeches we have from HWA." The asterisked material is how the Clinton campaign
staffer "flagged" the quotes they considered dangerous.) Since these quotes are
from paid speeches, we can expect Clinton's private position - expect, that is,
if we assume that Clinton isn't cheating her clients by failing to deliver
value for money in terms of services to be rendered - to be a more accurate
representation of her views than her public one. In other words, we're looking
at a pitch to the donor class, when Clinton was laying the groundwork for her
campaign. In an oligarchy, this would be natural.
===============================================
Sorry, but as I have said before, I don't believe Clinton's speeches are
important – they are just a McGuffin to deflect from the real travesty
occurring in plain site – what Lloyd Blankfein tells Clinton at the gladhanding
after the speech….
As someone once told me in Washington, nothing TRULY important is ever
committed to paper.
The WikiLeaks material is highly relevant to how Clinton would
actually govern, as opposed to how she says she will govern. Because of
the oddly timed release of the Trump hot mike tape, this story seems to
be getting buried, so I'll go into it in some detail. First some links:
*CLINTON SAYS YOU NEED TO HAVE A PRIVATE AND PUBLIC POSITION ON
POLICY*
*Clinton: "But If Everybody's Watching, You Know, All Of The Back
Room Discussions And The Deals, You Know, Then People Get A Little
Nervous, To Say The Least. So, You Need Both A Public And A Private
Position."*
(The email is a compilation of quotes from Clinton's paid speeches,
not otherwise available. It begins: "Attached are the flags from HRC's
paid speeches we have from HWA." The asterisked material is how the
Clinton campaign staffer "flagged" the quotes they considered dangerous.)
Since these quotes are from paid speeches, we can expect Clinton's
private position - expect, that is, if we assume that Clinton isn't
cheating her clients by failing to deliver value for money in terms of
services to be rendered - to be a more accurate representation of her
views than her public one. In other words, we're looking at a pitch to
the donor class, when Clinton was laying the groundwork for her campaign.
In an
oligarchy
, this would be natural.
I believe I've mentioned to readers that my vision of the first 100
days of a Clinton administration includes a Grand Bargain, the passage of
TPP, and a new war. So you can read the following as confirmation bias,
if you will.
But Simpson-Bowles - and I know you heard from Erskine earlier
today - put forth the right framework. Namely, we have to
restrain spending
, we have to have adequate revenues, and we
have to incentivize growth. It's a three-part formula. The specifics
can be negotiated depending upon whether we're acting in good faith or
not [!!].
Readers will of course be aware that the fiscal views intrinsic to
Simpson-Bowles have been the perennial justification for Social Security
cuts (
"the
progressive give-up formula"
) and austerity generally. And if you
think Democrat orthodoxy on SImpson Bowles has changed, see Robert Rubin
today (below). If you buy Simpson-Bowles, you buy Social Security cuts.
The policy is bad enough, but "depending upon whether we're acting in
good faith or not" is, to me, the real mind-boggler.
Hillary Clinton Said Her Dream Is A Hemispheric Common Market, With
Open Trade And Open Markets. *"My dream is a hemispheric common
market, with
open trade and open borders
, some time in the
future with energy that is as green and sustainable as we can get it,
powering growth and opportunity for every person in the hemisphere."
On "green," see Clinton below on climate change. On trade, anybody
with a "dream" like that will not surrender TPP lightly.
Hillary Clinton Said One Of The Problems With A No Fly Zone Would
Be The Need To Take Out Syria's Air Defense, And "You're Going To Kill
A Lot Of Syrians." "So we're not as good as we used to be, but we
still-we can still deliver, and we should have in my view been trying
to do that so we would have better insight. But the idea that we would
have like a no fly zone-Syria, of course, did have when it started the
fourth biggest Army in the world. It had very sophisticated air
defense systems. They're getting more sophisticated thanks to Russian
imports. To have
a no fly zone
you have to take out all of
the air defense, many of which are located in populated areas. So our
missiles, even if they are standoff missiles so we're not putting our
pilots at risk-you're going to kill a lot of Syrians. So all of a
sudden this intervention that people talk about so glibly becomes an
American and NATO involvement where you take a lot of civilians." [
Speech to Goldman Sachs, 2013 IBD Ceo Annual Conference, 6/4/13]
And speaking of beating the war drums, there's this gobsmacking quote
on
climate change
(tinePublic, 2014):
Clinton Talked About "Phony Environmental Groups" Funded By The
Russians To Stand Against Pipelines And Fracking. "We were up against
Russia pushing oligarchs and others to buy media. We were even up
against phony environmental groups, and I'm a big environmentalist,
but these were funded by the Russians to stand against any effort, oh
that pipeline, that fracking, that whatever will be a problem for you,
and a lot of the money supporting that message was coming from
Russia." [Remarks at tinePublic, 6/18/14]
With the media exclusively attuned to every new, or 11-year-old as the case may be, twist in the
Trump "sex tape" saga, it appeared that everyone forgot that a little over 24 hours ago, Wikileaks
exposed the real reason why Hillary was keeping her Wall Street speech transcripts - which we now
know had always been within easy reach for her campaign - secret.
In her own words : "if everybody's watching, you know, all of the back room discussions and the
deals, you know, then people get a little nervous, to say the least. So, you need both a public and
a private position." In other words, you have to lie to the general public while promising those
who just paid you $250,000 for an hour of your speaking time something entirely different, which
is precisely what those accusing Hillary of hiding her WS transcripts had done; and as yesterday's
hacked documents revealed, they were right.
The Clinton campaign
refused to disavow the hacked excerpts, although it quickly tired to pin the blame again on Russia:
"We are not going to confirm the authenticity of stolen documents released by Julian Assange, who
has made no secret of his desire to damage Hillary Clinton," spokesman Glen Caplin said in a prepared
statement. Previous releases have "Guccifer 2.0 has already proven the warnings of top national security
officials that documents can be faked as part of a sophisticated Russian misinformation campaign."
Ironically, it was literally minutes before the Wikileaks release of the "Podesta Files" that
the US formally accused Russia of waging a hacking cyber attack on the US political establishment,
almost as if it knew Wikileaks was about to make the major disclosure, and sought to minimize its
impact by scapegoating Vladimir Putin.
And while the Trump campaign tried to slam the leak, with spokesman saying "now we finally get
confirmation of Clinton's catastrophic plans for completely open borders and diminishing America's
influence in the world. There is a reason Clinton gave these high-paid speeches in secret behind
closed doors - her real intentions will destroy American sovereignty as we know it, further illustrating
why Hillary Clinton is simply unfit to be president", Trump's campaign had its own raging inferno
to deal with.
So, courtesy of what Trump said about some woman 11 years ago, in all the din over the oddly coincident
Trump Tape leak, most of the noise created by the Hillary speeches was lost.
But not all.
According to
Reuters , supporters of former Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders on Saturday "
seethed ", and "expressed anger and vindication over leaked comments made by Hillary Clinton
to banks and big business that appeared to confirm their fears about her support for global trade
and tendency to cozy up to Wall Street. "
Clinton,
who last it emerged had slammed Bernie supporters as "basement dwellers" in a February fundraiser,
with virtually no media coverage, needs Sanders' coalition of young and left-leaning voters to propel
her to the presidency, pushes for open trade and open borders in one of the speeches, and
takes a conciliatory approach to Wall Street , both positions she later backed away from
in an effort to capture the popular appeal of Sanders' attacks on trade deals and powerful banks.
Needless to say, there was no actualy "backing away", and instead Hillary did what he truly excels
in better than most: she told the public what they wanted to hear, and will promptly reneg on once
she becomes president.
Only now, this is increasingly obvious to America's jilted youth: " this is a very clear
illustration of why there is a fundamental lack of trust from progressives for Hillary Clinton,"
said Tobita Chow, chair of the People's Lobby in Chicago, which endorsed Sanders in the
primary election.
" The progressive movement needs to make a call to Secretary Clinton to clarify where
she stands really on these issues and that's got to involve very clear renunciations of the positions
that are revealed in these transcripts," Chow said.
Good luck that, or even getting a response, even though Hillary was largely spared from providing
one: as Reuters correctly observes, the revelations were immediately overshadowed by the release
of an 11-year-old recording of Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, making lewd comments
about women. In fact, the revelations were almost entirely ignored by the same prime time TV that
has been glued to the Trump slow-motion trainwreck over the past 24 hours.
Still, the hacked speeches could lead to further erosion in support from the so very critical
to her successful candidacy, young American voter.
Clinton has worked hard to build trust with so-called progressives, adopting several of Sanders'
positions after she bested him in the primary race. The U.S. senator from Vermont now supports
his former rival in the Nov. 8 general election against Trump. Still, Clinton has struggled to
win support from young "millennials" who were crucial to Sanders' success, and some Democrats
expressed concern that the leaks would discourage those supporters from showing up to vote.
"That is a big concern and this certainly doesn't help," said Larry Cohen, chair
of the board of Our Revolution, a progressive organization formed in the wake of Sanders' bid for
the presidency, which aims to keep pushing the former candidate's ideas at a grassroots level. "It
matters in terms of turnout, energy, volunteering, all those things."
Still, despite the Trump media onslaught, the message appeared to filter through to those who
would be most impacted by Hillary selling out her voters if she were to win the presidency.
"Bernie was right about Hillary," wrote Facebook user Grace Tilly cited by Rueters, "she's a tool
for Wall Street."
"Clinton is the politicians' politician - exactly the Wall Street insider Bernie described," wrote
Facebook user Brian Leach.
Democratic strategist Steve Elmendorf said progressive voters would still choose the former first
lady, even with misgivings. "I'd like to meet the Bernie Sanders supporter who is going to say, 'Well
I'm a little worried about her on international trade, so I'm going to vote for Donald Trump'," he
said.
He just may meet a few, especially if Bernie's supporters ask themselves why Bernie's support
for Hillary remained so unwavering despite a leak confirming that Hillary was indeed all he had previously
railed against.
In a statement earlier, Sanders responded to the leak by saying that despite Hillary's paid speeches
to Wall Street in which she expressed an agenda diametrically opposite to that espoused by the Vermont
socialist, he reiterated his his support for the Democratic Party platform.
"Whatever Secretary Clinton may or may not have said behind closed doors on Wall Street, I am
determined to implement the agenda of the Democratic Party platform which was agreed upon by her
campaign," he said in a statement.
"Among other things, that agenda calls for breaking up the largest financial institutions
in this country, re-establishing Glass-Steagall and prosecuting those many Wall Street CEOs who engaged
in illegal behavior. "
In retrospect we find it fascinating that in the aftermath of October's two big surprises served
up on Friday, Sanders actually believes any of that having read through Hillary's
Wall Street speeches, certainly far more fascinating than the staged disgust with Trump who, the
media is suddenly stunned to find, was no more politically correct 11 year ago than he is today.
I'm surprised not to see anything here about the "political bombshell" of Trump's latest sexist
remarks.
As I listen to the talking heads bloviate about what a "death blow" this is to the Trump campaign,
it occurs to me that if the Repubs could engineer Trump's withdrawal from the top of the ticket,
they could probably beat Hillary with Pence. They would have to arrange it so that Trump goes
agreeably - should not be too hard to do, since many doubt if he WANTS to be president - and Pence
could pledge that he would carry forward all of Trump's wonderful Screw the Establishment policies.
Trump without the messy Trump_vs_deep_states.
Disgusting as Trump is, I'm sure not looking forward to the howls of misogyny that will be
coming from the Clinton camp. And, just another distraction from talking about policy.
1. Clinton is corrupt (again), liar (still), dishonest (again), warmonger (still) etc. Trump
is racist(still), bigot (again), misogynist (still), Hitler (Putin, Ahmedinejad)…. gets tedious
after the 20th time.
2. I think Trump does it on purpose as a response to a Clinton dump. It looks like her GS speeches
are out today so the networks can cover Trump's latest bigoted statement and ignore Clinton insulting
the voters and sucking up to the oligarchs.
"... Then, Mook reveals that the campaign is working with Epstein on a piece bashing Sanders staff for underhanded tactics. ..."
"... "We are also working with Jen Epstein for a story about this (not necessarily the 11pm knocks, which we are working to confirm) regarding Sanders staff coming to office openings, tracking us, lying about endorsements, other shady field activity, etc.," Mook says in the email. ..."
Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign collaborated with Bloomberg reporter Jennifer Epstein to
create an anti-Bernie Sanders story prior to the Nevada caucus.
In the vast trove of Clinton emails leaked Thursday by the organization DCLeaks, there is an email
exchange between Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook and Emily Ruiz, head of the campaign's Nevada
operation. In the exchange, Ruiz and Mook discuss rumors that Sanders volunteers were posing as Clinton
operatives and engaging in irritating behavior like knocking on voters' doors at 11 pm.
Then, Mook reveals that the campaign is working with Epstein on a piece bashing Sanders staff
for underhanded tactics.
"We are also working with Jen Epstein for a story about this (not necessarily the 11pm knocks,
which we are working to confirm) regarding Sanders staff coming to office openings, tracking us,
lying about endorsements, other shady field activity, etc.," Mook says in the email.
"... "In my lifetime I cannot remember anything like the scepticism about these values that we see today," said Suma Chakrabarti, president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. ..."
"... There was much discussion this week about the underlying causes of that scepticism - low growth, stagnant wages and other scars of the 2008 global financial crisis - together with calls for governments to do more to ensure the benefits of globalisation are distributed more widely. ..."
"... Lou Jiwei, China's finance minister, told reporters on Friday, the current "political risks" would in the immediate future lead only to "superficial changes" for the global economy. But underlying them was a deeper trend of "deglobalisation". ..."
The world's economic elite spent this week invoking fears of protectionism and the
existential
crisis facing globalisation
.... ... ...
Mr Trump has raised the possibility of trying to renegotiate the terms of the US sovereign debt
much as he did repeatedly with his own business debts as a property developer. He also has proposed
imposing punitive tariffs on imports from China and Mexico and ripping up existing US trade pacts.
... ... ...
"Once a tariff has been imposed on a country's exports, it is in that country's best interest
to retaliate, and when it does, both countries end up worse off," IMF economists wrote.
It is not just angst over Mr Trump. There are similar concerns over Brexit and the rise of populist
parties elsewhere in Europe. All present their own threats to the advance of the US-led path of economic
liberalisation pursued since Keynes and his peers gathered at Bretton Woods in 1944.
"In my lifetime I cannot remember anything like the scepticism about these values that we
see today," said Suma Chakrabarti, president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.
There was much discussion this week about the underlying causes of that scepticism - low growth,
stagnant wages and other scars of the 2008 global financial crisis - together with calls for governments
to do more to ensure the benefits of globalisation are distributed more widely.
Lou Jiwei, China's finance minister, told reporters on Friday, the current "political risks" would
in the immediate future lead only to "superficial changes" for the global economy. But underlying
them was a deeper trend of "deglobalisation".
"... Weak global trade, fears that the U.K. is marching towards a hard Brexit , and polls indicating that the U.S. election remains a tighter call than markets are pricing in have led a bevy of analysts to redouble their warnings that a backlash over globalization is poised to roil global financial markets-with profound consequences for the real economy and investment strategies. ..."
"... From the economists and politicians at the annual IMF meeting in Washington to strategists on Wall Street trying to advise clients, everyone seems to be pondering a future in which cooperation and global trade may look much different than they do now. ..."
"... "The main risk with potentially tough negotiating tactics is that trade partners could panic, especially if global coordination evaporates." ..."
Weak global trade, fears that the U.K. is marching towards a
hard Brexit , and polls indicating that the U.S. election remains a
tighter call than markets are
pricing in have led a bevy of analysts to redouble their warnings that a backlash over globalization
is poised to roil global financial markets-with profound consequences for the real economy and investment
strategies.
From the economists and politicians at the annual
IMF meeting in Washington to strategists on Wall Street trying to advise clients, everyone seems
to be pondering a future in which cooperation and
global trade may look much different than they do now.
Brexit
Suggestions that the U.K. will prioritize control over its migration policy at the expense of
open access to Europe's single market in negotiations to leave the European Union-a strategy that's
being dubbed a "hard Brexit"-loomed large over global markets. The U.K. government is "strongly supportive
of open markets, free markets, open economies, free trade," said
Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond during a Bloomberg Television interview in New York
on Thursday. "But we have a problem-and it's not just a British problem, it's a developed-world problem-in
keeping our populations engaged and supportive of our market capitalism, our economic model."
Trade
Citing the rising anti-trade sentiment, analysts from Bank of America Merrill Lynch warned that
"events show nations are becoming less willing to cooperate, more willing to contest," and a
backlash against inequality is likely to trigger more activist fiscal policies. Looser government
spending in developed countries-combined with trade protectionism and wealth redistribution-could
reshape global investment strategies, unleashing a wave of inflation, the bank argued, amid a looming
war against inequality.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew did his part to push for more openness. During an interview in
Washington on Thursday, he said that efforts to boost trade, combined with a more equitable distribution
of the fruits of economic growth, are key to ensuring
U.S. prosperity. Rolling back on globalization would be counterproductive to any attempt to boost
median incomes, he added.
Trump
Without mentioning him by name, Lew's comments appeared to nod to Donald Trump, who some believe
could take the U.S. down a more isolationist trading path should he be elected president in November.
"The emergence of Donald Trump as a political force reflects a mood of growing discontent about immigration,
globalization and the distribution of wealth," write analysts at Fathom Consulting, a London-based
research firm. Their central scenario is that a Trump administration might be benign for the U.S.
economy. "However, in our downside scenario, Donald Dark, global trade falls sharply and a global
recession looms. In this world, isolationism wins, not just in the U.S., but globally," they caution.
Analysts at Standard Chartered Plc agree that the tail risks of a Trump presidency could be significant.
"The main risk with potentially tough negotiating tactics is that trade partners could panic, especially
if global coordination evaporates." They add that business confidence could take a big hit in this
context. "The global trade system could descend into a spiral of trade tariffs, reminiscent of what
happened after the
Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930 , and ultimately a trade war, possibly accompanied by foreign-exchange
devaluations; this would be a 'lose-lose' deal for all."
Market participants are also concerned that populism could take root under a Hillary Clinton administration.
"We believe the liberal base's demands on a Clinton Administration could lead to an overly expansive
federal government with aggressive regulators," write analysts at Barclays Plc. "If the GOP does
not unify, Clinton may expand President Obama's use of executive authority to accomplish her goals."
"... Hillary Clinton and husband Bill will turn the White House and the U.S. Government into their personal bank. ..."
"... If the American electorate selects Hillary as their commander and chief she will immediately demand a No-Fly Zone over Syria. She will impose more economic sanctions on Russia, including an increase in NATO strength on Russia's western borders, just to show she is the Queen bitch. She will give israHell carte blanche to increase and expand further abuse in the Gaza strip. She is a woman scorned. And a very dangerous one. ..."
"... [neo]Liberalism is in terminal decline, and not a moment too soon. ..."
"... Hillary does not have any creative spark at all. She, like Obama is a dud, but one thing is for sure, she is not Donald. ..."
"... These same americans should go back, for once, to his 2008 campaign to defeat first Hillary in the primaries and then the republican McCain. ..."
"... The climate was dominated by the financial meltdown, which really started in the summer of 2007 and was evident by early spring of 2008. Hillary was the candidate of Wall Street, according to Obama, the republicans were one and the same with Wall Street and all the big corporate world, he was Hope and Change. ..."
"... Hope? What hope? And even more: change, what change? There has been little change, if almost half of the nation is now ready to accept Trump as a promise of change. Obama's main financial support came in 2008 from Wall Street, hedge funds in particular, and they were right because nobody like the first Afro-American president, himself inevitably the incarnation of progressivism, could save their ass after all the criminal finance they indulged in. ..."
"... So, Obama's inheritance is a problem, and Hillary is running on Obama's inheritance. ..."
"... Robert Kagan, ringleader of the cabal of neo-cons has endorsed Hillary, who is Roberts wife? why bless me if it isn't Victoria 'fuck the EU' Nuland, ..."
"... Samantha Powers is a neo-con acolyte, Ashton Carter is too, the State Dept. and the council of foreign relations is riddled with their people, all the horror figures of Dubya's days are lurking there and pulling strings, ..."
"... Kerry isn't really a neo-con, but the Pentagon and CIA sabotage anything half decent he tries to do, ..."
"... Basically Hillary is as genuine, left leaning and honest as Tony Blair.... ..."
"... Also remember the lack of believability of Hillary. She is a politician that has been caught in lies so often that people just don't believe her. She pushed the soda tax in Philly until Coca-Cola complained that they gave too much money to the Foundation to be treated that way. Hillary backed off. She made millions from speaking to Big Banks. So we really believe she will go after Wells Fargo? She is beholden to them (unless Goldman Sachs gets to choose). She says raise taxes to pay fair share, but her biggest supporters are Apple, Google, and their executives that keep billions of income overseas to avoid the highest corporate income tax in the world. Do we really think she will hurt the contributors to the Foundation? And the more the email saga plays out, the longer the untrustworthy issue remains in everyone's mind. MonotonousLanguor , 2016-10-07 20:58:06 Does anyone really believe Hillary Clinton will hold anyone on Wall Street accountable??? She is bought and paid for by Wall Street, starting with all the green backs Hillary and Bill stuffed in their pockets from the those speaking fees. Obama's Justice Department motto was, Too Big to Fail, Too Big to Jail. The Democrats are not going to bite their masters on Wall Street, and of course neither will the Republicans. IanB52 -> NoctilucentGinswig , 2016-10-07 20:41:06 Prosecuting bankers, prosecuting torturers, stopping white collar crime, wars, assassinations, warrantless spying and even scheduling of Marijuana are all under the control of the Executive Branch. Find even one of these where the President did the right thing. Uncle Putin , 2016-10-07 20:26:49 This is exactly what I was thinking during the first presidential debate. Hillary is an old pro at saying all the right things, pushing all the right buttons to get the votes she needs, but can you believe much of what she says? ..."
"... This is why, despite a poor debate performance overall, I thought Trump was spot on when he simply said she was a typical politician--all talk, no action, sounds great, none of it will ever happen. He's correct. ..."
"... What Frank seldom writes of but remains extremely important to many people on the left in the US is that Obama has governed as the effective prisoner of the Pentagon and security establishment. His wars (including on whistleblowers), nuclear build-up, and confrontation with Russia have given added momentum to growing neoconservative bipartisan consensus that will likely see a new President Clinton start a war with Russia in Syria and/or Ukraine. ..."
"... The Democrats are now both so neoliberal and so neoconservative that the only thing that differentiates them from Republicans is social progressivism. Given a choice between the latter and greatly increased likelihood of nuclear war, I have to confess to preferring that Trump win. Trump has been consistent in wanting to lessen tensions with Russia. ..."
"... Not even social progressivism, so much as a set of captive client constituencies whom they name-drop and weaponize. ..."
The puzzle that is currently frustrating the pundit minds of America is this: why is Hillary
Clinton not simply clobbering Donald Trump? How is this ranting, seething buffoon still competitive
with her? Trump has now stumbled through a series of the kind of blunders that break ordinary
political campaigns – the sort of deadly hypocrisies that always kill the demagogue in old movies
– and yet this particular demagogue keeps on trucking. Why?
Let us answer that burning pundit question of today by jumping to what will undoubtedly be
the next great object of pundit ardor: the legacy of President Barack Obama. Two months from now,
when all the TV wise men are playing historian and giving their estimation on where Obama ranks
in the pantheon of the greats, they will probably neglect to mention that his legacy helped to
determine Hillary's fortunes in this election cycle.
"As a beloved figure among Democrats, for example, Obama was instrumental in securing the nomination
for her. As a president who has accomplished little since 2011, however, Obama has pretty much
undermined Clinton's ability to sell us on another centrist Democratic presidency. His legacy
has diluted her promise
…. Or take this headline from just a few days ago: "Clinton promises to hold Wells Fargo accountable".
Go get 'em, Hillary! To see a president get tough with elite bankers and with CEOs in general
– that's something we can all cheer for. But then that nagging voice piped up again: if Democrats
think it is so critical to get tough with crooked banksters, why oh why didn't Barack Obama take
the many, many opportunities he had to do so back in the days when it would have really mattered?"
Senator Elizabeth Warren pronounced on the current state of middle America as follows:
Look around. Americans bust their tails, some working two or three jobs, but wages stay
flat. Meanwhile, the basic costs of making it from month to month keep going up. Housing, healthcare,
child care – costs are out of sight. Young people are getting crushed by student loans. Working
people are in debt. Seniors can't stretch a social security check to cover the basics.
It was a powerful indictment of what Warren called a "rigged" system – except for one thing:
that system is presided over by Barack Obama, a man that same Democratic convention was determined
to apotheosize as one of the greatest politicians of all times.
The larger problem facing them is the terminal irrelevance of their great, overarching campaign
theme. Remember the "man from Hope"? "Hope is on the way"? "Keep hope alive"? Well, this year
"hope" is most assuredly dead. Thanks to Obama's flagrant hope-dealing in the dark days of 2008
– followed up by his failure to reverse the disintegration of the middle class – this favorite
Democratic cliché has finally become just that: an empty phrase.
If the American electorate selects Hillary as their commander and chief she will immediately
demand a No-Fly Zone over Syria. She will impose more economic sanctions on Russia, including
an increase in NATO strength on Russia's western borders, just to show she is the Queen bitch.
She will give israHell carte blanche to increase and expand further abuse in the Gaza strip. She
is a woman scorned. And a very dangerous one.
[neo]Liberalism is in terminal decline, and not a moment too soon. It's far past time
we redeveloped a politics of interests rather than this Christianised values sham.
Hillary will win because she is not Trump. If she wins it is another 4 Obama like years and it
is Bill's Third Term in Office. Hillary does not have any creative spark at all. She, like
Obama is a dud, but one thing is for sure, she is not Donald.
Too many americans are mesmerized by the fact that Obama is young and articulate, plays well
the presidential role, is generally speaking what is called a nice person or at least behaves
formally as if he were one, has but only of late (thanks to Hillary and Trump perhaps, by contrast)
a fairly high popularity score.
These same americans should go back, for once, to his 2008 campaign to defeat first Hillary
in the primaries and then the republican McCain.
The climate was dominated by the financial meltdown, which really started in the summer
of 2007 and was evident by early spring of 2008. Hillary was the candidate of Wall Street, according
to Obama, the republicans were one and the same with Wall Street and all the big corporate world,
he was Hope and Change.
Hope? What hope? And even more: change, what change? There has been little change, if almost
half of the nation is now ready to accept Trump as a promise of change. Obama's main financial
support came in 2008 from Wall Street, hedge funds in particular, and they were right because
nobody like the first Afro-American president, himself inevitably the incarnation of progressivism,
could save their ass after all the criminal finance they indulged in.
And Obama did save their skin, as everybody knows. Obama took on board plenty of Clinton (and
Wall Street) people, starting in June 2008, when Hillary was finished. You cannot change that
much after the financial crisis if you take Lawrence Summers as economic top advisor and you install
young Geithner at the Treasury. Paul Volcker, who inspired so many good and useful judgements
for candidate Obama, was put in the closet.
Obama is a lawyer by education and he knows who is the best customer. That's not the man or
the woman of Main Street. To them, some of them, he gave Obamacare, which is not all bad and something
of it will remain, I think, but it's not at all that major reform he has been boasting about.
By november 8 everybody will know that Obamacare has serious problems.
So, Obama's inheritance is a problem, and Hillary is running on Obama's inheritance.
nice to see the Guardian have a moment of clarity!
I do feel sympathy for Obama, he, and his family, have effectively spent 8 years held hostage
in the White House by those perfidious neo-conservatives,
they existed in Ronnie Raygun's day but he laughed at them, G H Bush referred to them as 'the
crazies in the basement' and kept close tabs on them,
they were happily meddling away during Bill Clintons era helping destroy Yugoslavia and furiously
planning their 'Project for a New American Century' PNAC basically a blueprint and justification
for every shitty thing done since,
G W Bush let loose the neo-cons of war and we know what they've done,
Barack Obama's greatest folly was to not round them up on the first day of his presidency,
put them in a sack with a brick and throw them in the river,
they have infested his government and followed their own agenda whilst laughing at him, so
the story goes, at a private dinner party Barack was asked why he wasn't doing anything to thwart
these shits and his reply was 'you saw what they did to MLK'
now at the transition to Clinton these neo-cons are actively endorsing her, they consider her
'their girl' Clinton may well turn out to be George 'Dubya' with tits,
Robert Kagan, ringleader of the cabal of neo-cons has endorsed Hillary, who is Roberts
wife? why bless me if it isn't Victoria 'fuck the EU' Nuland,
Samantha Powers is a neo-con acolyte, Ashton Carter is too, the State Dept. and the council
of foreign relations is riddled with their people, all the horror figures of Dubya's days are
lurking there and pulling strings,
Kerry isn't really a neo-con, but the Pentagon and CIA sabotage anything half decent he
tries to do,
Elizabeth Warren as VP would have given Hillary great credibility but she is explicitly not
a neo-conservative,
Basically Hillary is as genuine, left leaning and honest as Tony Blair....
and people wonder why they pin their last tatter of hope Donald 'Mr Bombastic' Trump?
much as I find Trump and his hardcore supporters loathsome I have to point out that he has:
expressed interest in talking with and working with Putin as opposed to starting WW3
accepted the concept of climate change (massive move for a Republican) but pointed out nuclear
war is an even greater and more immediate threat,
pointed out the expenditure of 5-6 Trillion dollars on pointless wars whilst the country crumbles
to ruins, basically a third of the US national debt run up in 15 years,
the fact he wants to make America great again is because he acknowledges that it isn't great
atm,
he's pointed out that Hillary makes all these pledges but has been in a position of power for
decades and has done sod all about it,
and the establishment , especially the neo-cons absolutely hate him...
if you're going to hold your nose and vote for the lesser evil maybe chauvinism and casual
racism are those lesser evils,
LGBT rights will not defend you from nuclear bombs, the heat flash that vaporises you is fairly
indifferent to skin colour or religion,
Also remember the lack of believability of Hillary. She is a politician that has been caught
in lies so often that people just don't believe her. She pushed the soda tax in Philly until Coca-Cola
complained that they gave too much money to the Foundation to be treated that way. Hillary backed
off.
She made millions from speaking to Big Banks. So we really believe she will go after Wells
Fargo? She is beholden to them (unless Goldman Sachs gets to choose).
She says raise taxes to pay fair share, but her biggest supporters are Apple, Google, and their
executives that keep billions of income overseas to avoid the highest corporate income tax in
the world. Do we really think she will hurt the contributors to the Foundation?
And the more the email saga plays out, the longer the untrustworthy issue remains in everyone's
mind.
Does anyone really believe Hillary Clinton will hold anyone on Wall Street accountable??? She
is bought and paid for by Wall Street, starting with all the green backs Hillary and Bill stuffed
in their pockets from the those speaking fees.
Obama's Justice Department motto was, Too Big to Fail, Too Big to Jail. The Democrats are not
going to bite their masters on Wall Street, and of course neither will the Republicans.
Prosecuting bankers, prosecuting torturers, stopping white collar crime, wars, assassinations,
warrantless spying and even scheduling of Marijuana are all under the control of the Executive
Branch. Find even one of these where the President did the right thing.
This is exactly what I was thinking during the first presidential debate. Hillary is an old
pro at saying all the right things, pushing all the right buttons to get the votes she needs,
but can you believe much of what she says?
This is why, despite a poor debate performance overall, I thought Trump was spot on when
he simply said she was a typical politician--all talk, no action, sounds great, none of it will
ever happen. He's correct.
Hillary is promising all sorts of things that she knows will never come to fruition. I voted
for Obama twice, but I'm chomping at the bit to vote for Trump, for no other reason then the fact
that he is the true outsider here. It's a gamble for sure, but with the right advisors he could
potentially institute some major changes that will never happen under a cautious Hillary who will
be obsessed with re-election the minute she starts her first term.
What Frank seldom writes of but remains extremely important to many people on the left in
the US is that Obama has governed as the effective prisoner of the Pentagon and security establishment.
His wars (including on whistleblowers), nuclear build-up, and confrontation with Russia have given
added momentum to growing neoconservative bipartisan consensus that will likely see a new President
Clinton start a war with Russia in Syria and/or Ukraine.
The Democrats are now both so neoliberal and so neoconservative that the only thing that
differentiates them from Republicans is social progressivism. Given a choice between the latter
and greatly increased likelihood of nuclear war, I have to confess to preferring that Trump win.
Trump has been consistent in wanting to lessen tensions with Russia.
As a voter, of course, I could vote for neither, and so am voting for Jill Stein.
Thus my nightmares about the coming election. Consider:
Trump:
He promises to "make America great again."
("Deutschland uber alles," anyone?) He rants against immigrants and Muslims and
conniving foreign nations like Mexico and China. (Jews and gypsies get a pass this
time.) He is a bully. He promises hope to those who have been left behind economically
and socially. He attracts huge and very devoted crowds at his rallies. He has no
coherent program, at least yet-you have to believe in him as a great leader.
Whom does he remind you of, at least vaguely?
Clinton:
She is secretive to a fault, perhaps
paranoid in her pursuit of power. There are hints of hidden illnesses, so reminiscent of
Uncle Joe. An unhidden lust for money at any cost. Considering "two for the price of
one" (Bill and Hill), there are the key operatives who conveniently die when in
disfavor. They do not hesitate to use the Justice Department, and especially the IRS, to
persecute opponents. She runs a tight operation, as secretive as she is personally, and
has an ideological platform for totally transforming America.
Whom does she remind you of, at least vaguely?
Again, let me be clear. I do not think Trump has a
holocaust in mind; he is just an opportunist using "the other" both domestically and
abroad to gain power. And I do not think Clinton has the stamina for sustained great
purges and great gulags. Yes, she has a lust for power, but she has even more lust for
getting rich through politics. She can be bought, and has been, constantly.
It is these characteristics, however, that are so
disturbing. They build on what has come before, but suggest a revolutionary escalation.
Every president during my lifetime has added to the power of the American empire and the
deep state, but now we seem to be at an unprecedented and transformative junction.
This may actually help the Donald mobilize his base of pissed-off white
guys. I mean, how do you think
they
talk about women in their
locker rooms, truck stops, and on the unemployment line?
I don't recall those women actually being on the ballot for
president.
Good to know you wouldn't be offended to hear a bunch of women
treat you like a piece of meat and brag about how they attempted to
"nail you" even ignoring the fact that you were married? Nothing
offensive there right? You'd love it if women spent their time looking
at your pants straining to figure out the size of the bulge so they
can discuss it in detail instead of I don't know, actually listening
to you? It's classy and professional behavior(and yes Donald was there
for work).
Hey, I do have to respect that you've adopted his strategy also of
excusing his behavior by making this all about everyone else too-
incredibly adult. The "mommy they did it first" defense utilized by
Donald Trump, his defenders and 3 to 7 year olds throughout the US.
Right. Stop the presses. Trump is lascivious. That's news to who,
exactly?
And what's next? We learn that Trump sometimes farts in public? Or worse,
lets go the occasional SBD? "Revealed" to deflect the latest revelation of
Clinton greed and corruption, I'm sure.
Sheesh … what a low, debased and sad spectacle all around.
"But for all Trump's many faults and flaws, he saw things that were true
and important-and that few other leaders in his party have acknowledged in
the past two decades" [David Frum,
The Atlantic
].
Trump saw that Republican voters are much less religious in behavior
than they profess to pollsters. He saw that the social-insurance state
has arrived to stay. He saw that Americans regard healthcare as a right,
not a privilege. He saw that Republican voters had lost their optimism
about their personal futures-and the future of their country. He saw that
millions of ordinary people who do not deserve to be dismissed as bigots
were sick of the happy talk and reality-denial that goes by the too
generous label of "political correctness." He saw that the immigration
polices that might have worked for the mass-production economy of the
1910s don't make sense in the 2010s. He saw that rank-and-file
Republicans had become nearly as disgusted with the power of money in
politics as rank-and-file Democrats long have been. He saw that
Republican presidents are elected, when they are elected, by employees as
well as entrepreneurs. He saw these things, and he was right to see them.
Thanks for the link. Interesting and depressing. A snippet:
" Oligarchy is rule by the few. Plutocracy is rule by the wealthy.
Corporatocracy is a society governed or controlled by corporations. We have
all three."
Kathleen Lake
9m ago
1
2
Hillary, we believe Assange not you and you have earned
out contempt. It's sickening to know isn't it, that
almost ANY anonymous hacker has more credibility than
she who pretends to the throne (and in Clinton's case
it is a monarchy not a democracy as thev"line of
succession" was determined long before even one vote
was cast). Thanks for allowing your (lack of) character
to give us one more entry into you litany of lies,
corruption, deceit and infamy.", hillary. I will not
vote for corruption, lies and oil wars, so I will not
vote you... ever.
David Stalker
11m ago
0
1
Well what with Bill Clinton gaining the presidency and
Hillary the secretary of state position along with the
wealth they have generated how could they be none other
than establishment for those not familiar with that
phrase. and i quote from wikipedia. The Establishment
generally denotes a dominant group or elite that holds
power or authority in a nation or organization. The
Establishment may be a closed social group which
selects its own members or specific entrenched elite
structures, either in government or in specific
institutions. And as such my view is she will get the
job as President.
eldudeabides
14m ago
1
2
In public we hear her yarn about being against TTIP.....in
private, the opposite.
....In April 2015 the New York Times published a
story about a company called "Uranium One" which was
sold to Russian government-controlled interests,
giving Russia effective control of one-fifth of all
uranium production capacity in the United States.
Since uranium is considered a strategic asset, with
implications for the production of nuclear weapons,
the deal had to be approved by a committee composed
of representatives from a number of US government
agencies. Among the agencies that eventually signed
off the deal was the State Department, then headed
by Secretary Clinton. The Committee on Foreign
Investment in the United States (CFIUS) comprises,
among others, the secretaries of the Treasury,
Defense, Homeland Security, Commerce and Energy.
As Russian interests gradually took control of
Uranium One millions of dollars were donated to the
Clinton Foundation between 2009 and 2013 from
individuals directly connected to the deal including
the Chairman of Uranium One, Ian Telfer. Although
Mrs Clinton had an agreement with the Obama White
House to publicly identify all donors to the Clinton
Foundation, the contributions from the Chairman of
Uranium One were not publicly disclosed by the
Clintons.
sblejo
1h ago
3
4
How can anyone trust Clinton and CO. when they
undermined Bernie Sanders, of their own party, because
he was winning??? Despicable, disreputable, dishonest,
power hungry, corrupt. What else can be said about her
and her ilk. And then they blame Russia for exposing
the treachery, Americans, so easily led, ignored the
truth of the situation. Americans, still do not admit
the ugly truth, voting for power rather than ethics.
Incredible, she is the other side of the Trump coin.
Confucion
2h ago
3
4
"I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue
and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose voters,"
Trump said at a campaign rally here.
No difference between Trump and Hillary. They are
pathological liars, sociopath and extremely sick minds.
They can be caught constantly in their bad deeds but
yet they still US presidential candidates.
Time ago people will reject slavery, injustice and
abuse. Today it is laissez faire, laissez passer
because US people became zombies. Hopeless of hopeless.
europeangrayling
2h ago
8
9
It does not matter, people who support Hillary they
support Hillary. Does not matter, either they don't
believe it, it's right wing conspiracy, or it's OK,
nothing wrong with it.
She has a 'private and public position', that's
Hillary, she is so smart and experienced. She is for
TPP, then against TPP in the primary, now we see 'her
private position' is as many 'free trade' deals as we
can, they are fine with it. There was survey that says
over 70% of Americans don't know what the TPP is, so
that makes sense. She even said she supports cutting SS
and raising retirement age in a speech, called it
'sensible'.
Hillary's support for the Iraq war, Libya,
supporting the Saudis in Yemen and Syria, LIkud in
Israel, the Honduras coup of a democratic government
helped greatly by the US, that she admitted and
advocated for in her book, but then took it out in the
new paper back version.
Where now environmental Native American activists
and regime critics are being killed by the new regime,
and there's a lot more violence in general, but the new
regime is friendly' to western corporate interests and
Hillary donors, so Hillary loves it, still says there
was no coup at all. Even as the EU and our ambassador
to Honduras said it was a coup.
I don't know why, but that Honduras thing really hit
me, and Berta Cáceres's murder. I mean Hillary is
ruthless, or is so detached from reality of life and
what these policies and politics do to regular people,
I don't know. Just like Cheney, so it makes sense that
Wolfowitz and the neocons support her too. But the
Honduras things alone, I can't vote for all that.
"Some of Clinton's pledges sound great. Until you remember who's president"
(Thomas Frank)
Yes, and I don't recall (hey, that's
her
line!) the exact phraseology, but something
Mrs. Clinton said during the first debate reminded me strongly of Bill in '92. And we all know how
that
worked out.
No one believes the Dems' talking points any more because they have largely been unfulfilled during
the last two Democratic presidencies.
Oct 7, 2016 6:01 PM
Zero Hedge
0
SHARES
While the media is transfixed with the just released Washington Post leak of a
private Donald Trump conversation from 2005
in which he was speaking "lewdly" about
women, and for which he has apologized, roughly at the same time, Wikileaks released
part one of what it dubbed the "
Podesta
emails
", which it describes as "a series on deals involving Hillary Clinton campaign
Chairman John Podesta. Mr Podesta is a long-term associate of the Clintons and was
President Bill Clinton's Chief of Staff from 1998 until 2001. Mr Podesta also owns the
Podesta Group with his brother Tony, a major lobbying firm and is the Chair of the
Center for American Progress (CAP), a Washington DC-based think tank."
While the
underlying story in this specific case involves the alleged kickbacks received by the
Clinton Foundation from the Russian government-controlled "Uranium One", a story which
has been profiled previously by the NYT, and about which Wikileaks adds that "as Russian
interests gradually took control of Uranium One
millions of dollars were donated to
the Clinton Foundation between 2009 and 2013 from individuals directly connected to the
deal including the Chairman of Uranium One, Ian Telfer.
Although Mrs Clinton had an
agreement with the Obama White House to publicly identify all donors to the Clinton
Foundation, the contributions from the Chairman of Uranium One were not publicly
disclosed by the Clintons",
what caught our attention is an email from Tony
Carr,
a Research Director at
Hillary for America
, in which he lay outs hundreds of excerpts from the heretofore
missing transcripts of Hillary Clinton's infamous Wall Street speeches, with an emphasis
on those which should be flagged as they may be damaging to Hillary.
But first, here are the greatest hits as conveniently flagged by the Clinton Campaign
itself on page one of the 80 page addendum dubbed "
awkward"
Hillary Clinton: "I'm Kind Of Far Removed" From The Struggles Of The
Middle Class "Because The Life I've Lived And The Economic, You Know, Fortunes That
My Husband And I Now Enjoy."
"And I am not taking a position on any policy,
but I do think there is a growing sense of anxiety and even anger in the country over
the feeling that the game is rigged. And I never had that feeling when I was growing
up. Never. I mean, were there really rich people, of course there were. My father
loved to complain about big business and big government, but we had a solid middle
class upbringing. We had good public schools. We had accessible health care. We
had our little, you know, one-family house that, you know, he saved up his money,
didn't believe in mortgages. So I lived that. And now, obviously, I'm kind of far
removed because the life I've lived and the economic, you know, fortunes that my
husband and I now enjoy, but I haven't forgotten it." [Hillary Clinton Remarks at
Goldman-Black Rock, 2/4/14]
When A Questioner At Goldman Sachs Said She Raised Money For Hillary
Clinton In 2008, Hillary Clinton Joked "You Are The Smartest People
."
"PARTICIPANT: Secretary, Ann Chow from Houston, Texas. I have had the honor to
raise money for you when you were running for president in Texas. MS. CLINTON: You
are the smartest people. PARTICIPANT: I think you actually called me on my cell
phone, too. I talked to you afterwards." [ Speech to Goldman Sachs, 2013 IBD Ceo
Annual Conference, 6/4/13]
Hillary Clinton Joked That If Lloyd Blankfein Wanted To Run For Office, He
Should "Would Leave Goldman Sachs And Start Running A Soup Kitchen Somewhere
.
" "MR. BLANKFEIN: I'm saying for myself. MS. CLINTON: If you were going
to run here is what I would tell you to do -- MR. BLANKFEIN: Very
hypothetical. MS. CLINTON: I think you would leave Goldman Sachs and start running a
soup kitchen somewhere. MR. BLANKFEIN: For one thing the stock would go
up. MS. CLINTON: Then you could be a legend in your own time both when you were
there and when you left." [ Speech to Goldman Sachs, 2013 IBD Ceo Annual Conference,
6/4/13]
Hillary Clinton Noted President Clinton Had Spoken At The Same Goldman
Summit Last Year, And Blankfein Joked "He Increased Our Budget."
"SECRETARY
CLINTON: Well, first, thanks for having me here and giving me a chance to know a
little bit more about the builders and the innovators who you've gathered. Some of
you might have been here last year, and my husband was, I guess, in this very same
position. And he came back and was just thrilled by- MR. BLANKFEIN: He increased
our budget. SECRETARY CLINTON: Did he? MR. BLANKFEIN: Yes. That's why
we -- SECRETARY CLINTON: Good. I think he-I think he encouraged you to
grow it a little, too. But it really was a tremendous experience for him, so I've
been looking forward to it and hope we have a chance to talk about a lot of things."
[Goldman Sachs Builders And Innovators Summit, 10/29/13]
Clinton Said When She Got To State, Employees "Were Not Mostly Permitted
To Have Handheld Devices."
"You know, when Colin Powell showed up as
Secretary of State in 2001, most State Department employees still didn't even have
computers on their desks. When I got there they were not mostly permitted to have
handheld devices. I mean, so you're thinking how do we operate in this new
environment dominated by technology, globalizing forces? We have to change, and I
can't expect people to change if I don't try to model it and lead it." [Clinton
Speech For General Electric's Global Leadership Meeting – Boca Raton, FL, 1/6/14]
Clinton Joked It's "Risky" For Her To Speak To A Group Committed To
Futures Markets
Given Her Past Whitewater Scandal. "Now, it's always a
little bit risky for me to come speak to a group that is committed to the futures
markets because -- there's a few knowing laughs -- many years ago, I actually traded
in the futures markets. I mean, this was so long ago, it was before computers were
invented, I think. And I worked with a group of like-minded friends and associates
who traded in pork bellies and cotton and other such things, and I did pretty well. I
invested about a thousand dollars and traded up to about a hundred thousand. And then
my daughter was born, and I just didn't think I had enough time or mental space to
figure out anything having to do with trading other than trading time with my
daughter for time with the rest of my life. So I got out, and I thought that would be
the end of it." [Remarks to CME Group, 11/18/13]
Hillary Clinton Said Jordan Was Threatened Because
"They Can't Possibly
Vet All Those Refugees So They Don't Know If, You Know, Jihadists Are Coming In Along
With Legitimate Refugees."
"So I think you're right to have gone to the
places that you visited because there's a discussion going on now across the region
to try to see where there might be common ground to deal with the threat posed by
extremism and particularly with Syria which has everyone quite worried, Jordan
because it's on their border and they have hundreds of thousands of refugees and they
can't possibly vet all those refugees so they don't know if, you know, jihadists are
coming in along with legitimate refugees. Turkey for the same reason." [Jewish
United Fund Of Metropolitan Chicago Vanguard Luncheon, 10/28/13]
Hillary Clinton Said Her Dream Is A Hemispheric Common Market, With Open Trade And
Open Markets.
"My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and
open borders, some time in the future with energy that is as green and sustainable as
we can get it, powering growth and opportunity for every person in the hemisphere."
[05162013 Remarks to Banco Itau.doc, p. 28]
* * *
Here is the full email by Carrk as of January 25, 2016 laying out all the potentially
delicate issues that the Clinton campaign would wish to avoid from emerging. One thing
to note: as Michael Tracey points out, the
Hillary campaign had all the transcripts
at her disposal all along, despite repeated deflection.
Perhaps as a result of this
leak she will now release the full transcripts for the "proper context."
Attached are the flags from HRC's paid speeches we have from HWA. I put some
highlights below. There is a lot of policy positions that we should give an extra scrub
with Policy.
Hillary Clinton: "I'm Kind Of Far Removed" From The Struggles Of The Middle
Class "Because The Life I've Lived And The Economic, You Know, Fortunes That My Husband
And I Now Enjoy."
"And I am not taking a position on any policy, but I do think
there is a growing sense of anxiety and even anger in the country over the feeling that
the game is rigged. And I never had that feeling when I was growing up. Never. I mean,
were there really rich people, of course there were. My father loved to complain about
big business and big government, but we had a solid middle class upbringing. We had
good public schools. We had accessible health care. We had our little, you know,
one-family house that, you know, he saved up his money, didn't believe in mortgages. So
I lived that. And now, obviously, I'm kind of far removed because the life I've lived
and the economic, you know, fortunes that my husband and I now enjoy, but I haven't
forgotten it." [Hillary Clinton Remarks at Goldman-Black Rock, 2/4/14]
CLINTON SAYS YOU NEED TO HAVE A PRIVATE AND PUBLIC POSITION ON POLICY
Clinton: "But If Everybody's Watching, You Know, All Of The Back Room
Discussions And The Deals, You Know, Then People Get A Little Nervous, To Say The Least.
So, You Need Both A Public And A Private Position."
CLINTON: You just have to
sort of figure out how to -- getting back to that word, "balance" -- how to balance the
public and the private efforts that are necessary to be successful, politically, and
that's not just a comment about today. That, I think, has probably been true for all of
our history, and if you saw the Spielberg movie, Lincoln, and how he was maneuvering and
working to get the 13th Amendment passed, and he called one of my favorite predecessors,
Secretary Seward, who had been the governor and senator from New York, ran against
Lincoln for president, and he told Seward, I need your help to get this done. And Seward
called some of his lobbyist friends who knew how to make a deal, and they just kept
going at it. I mean, politics is like sausage being made. It is unsavory, and it always
has been that way, but we usually end up where we need to be. But if everybody's
watching, you know, all of the back room discussions and the deals, you know, then
people get a little nervous, to say the least. So, you need both a public and a private
position. And finally, I think -- I believe in evidence-based decision making. I want to
know what the facts are. I mean, it's like when you guys go into some kind of a deal,
you know, are you going to do that development or not, are you going to do that
renovation or not, you know, you look at the numbers. You try to figure out what's going
to work and what's not going to work. [Clinton Speech For National Multi-Housing
Council, 4/24/13]
CLINTON TALKS ABOUT HOLDING WALL STREET ACCOUNTABLE ONLY FOR POLITICAL
REASONS
Clinton Said That The Blame Placed On The United States Banking System For
The Crisis "Could Have Been Avoided In Terms Of Both Misunderstanding And Really
Politicizing What Happened."
"That was one of the reasons that I started
traveling in February of '09, so people could, you know, literally yell at me for the
United States and our banking system causing this everywhere. Now, that's an
oversimplification we know, but it was the conventional wisdom. And I think that there's
a lot that could have been avoided in terms of both misunderstanding and really
politicizing what happened with greater transparency, with greater openness on all
sides, you know, what happened, how did it happen, how do we prevent it from happening?
You guys help us figure it out and let's make sure that we do it right this time. And I
think that everybody was desperately trying to fend off the worst effects
institutionally, governmentally, and there just wasn't that opportunity to try to sort
this out, and that came later." [Goldman Sachs AIMS Alternative Investments Symposium,
10/24/13]
* * *
Clinton: "Even If It May Not Be 100 Percent True, If The Perception Is That
Somehow The Game Is Rigged, That Should Be A Problem For All Of Us."
"Now, it's
important to recognize the vital role that the financial markets play in our economy and
that so many of you are contributing to. To function effectively those markets and the
men and women who shape them have to command trust and confidence, because we all rely
on the market's transparency and integrity. So even if it may not be 100 percent true,
if the perception is that somehow the game is rigged, that should be a problem for all
of us, and we have to be willing to make that absolutely clear. And if there are
issues, if there's wrongdoing, people have to be held accountable and we have to try to
deter future bad behavior, because the public trust is at the core of both a free market
economy and a democracy." [Clinton Remarks to Deutsche Bank, 10/7/14]
CLINTON SUGGESTS WALL STREET INSIDERS ARE WHAT IS NEEDED TO FIX WALL
STREET
Clinton Said Financial Reform "Really Has To Come From The Industry Itself."
"Remember what Teddy Roosevelt did. Yes, he took on what he saw as the
excesses in the economy, but he also stood against the excesses in politics. He didn't
want to unleash a lot of nationalist, populistic reaction. He wanted to try to figure
out how to get back into that balance that has served America so well over our entire
nationhood. Today, there's more that can and should be done that really has to come from
the industry itself, and how we can strengthen our economy, create more jobs at a time
where that's increasingly challenging, to get back to Teddy Roosevelt's square deal.
And I really believe that our country and all of you are up to that job." [Clinton
Remarks to Deutsche Bank, 10/7/14]
* * *
Speaking About The Importance Of Proper Regulation, Clinton Said "The People
That Know The Industry Better Than Anybody Are The People Who Work In The Industry."
"I mean, it's still happening, as you know. People are looking back and trying to, you
know, get compensation for bad mortgages and all the rest of it in some of the
agreements that are being reached. There's nothing magic about regulations, too much is
bad, too little is bad. How do you get to the golden key, how do we figure out what
works? And the people that know the industry better than anybody are the people who
work in the industry. And I think there has to be a recognition that, you know, there's
so much at stake now, I mean, the business has changed so much and decisions are made so
quickly, in nano seconds basically. We spend trillions of dollars to travel around the
world, but it's in everybody's interest that we have a better framework, and not just
for the United States but for the entire world, in which to operate and trade." [Goldman
Sachs AIMS Alternative Investments Symposium, 10/24/13]
CLINTON ADMITS NEEDING WALL STREET FUNDING
Clinton Said That Because Candidates Needed Money From Wall Street To Run For
Office, People In New York Needed To Ask Tough Questions About The Economy Before
Handing Over Campaign Contributions.
"Secondly, running for office in our
country takes a lot of money, and candidates have to go out and raise it. New York is
probably the leading site for contributions for fundraising for candidates on both sides
of the aisle, and it's also our economic center. And there are a lot of people here who
should ask some tough questions before handing over campaign contributions to people who
were really playing chicken with our whole economy." [Goldman Sachs AIMS Alternative
Investments Symposium, 10/24/13]
* * *
Clinton: "It Would Be Very Difficult To Run For President Without Raising A
Huge Amount Of Money And Without Having Other People Supporting You Because Your
Opponent Will Have Their Supporters."
"So our system is, in many ways, more
difficult, certainly far more expensive and much longer than a parliamentary system, and
I really admire the people who subject themselves to it. Even when I, you know, think
they should not be elected president, I still think, well, you know, good for you I
guess, you're out there promoting democracy and those crazy ideas of yours. So I think
that it's something -- I would like -- you know, obviously as somebody who has been
through it, I would like it not to last as long because I think it's very distracting
from what we should be doing every day in our public business. I would like it not to
be so expensive. I have no idea how you do that. I mean, in my campaign -- I lose
track, but I think I raised $250 million or some such enormous amount, and in the last
campaign President Obama raised 1.1 billion, and that was before the Super PACs and all
of this other money just rushing in, and it's so ridiculous that we have this kind of
free for all with all of this financial interest at stake, but, you know, the Supreme
Court said that's basically what we're in for. So we're kind of in the wild west, and,
you know, it would be very difficult to run for president without raising a huge amount
of money and without having other people supporting you because your opponent will have
their supporters. So I think as hard as it was when I ran, I think it's even harder
now." [Clinton Speech For General Electric's Global Leadership Meeting – Boca Raton, FL,
1/6/14]
CLINTON TOUTS HER RELATIONSHIP TO WALL STREET AS A SENATOR
Clinton: As Senator, "I Represented And Worked With" So Many On Wall Street
And "Did All I Could To Make Sure They Continued To Prosper" But Still Called For
Closing Carried Interest Loophole.
In remarks at Robbins, Gellar, Rudman & Dowd
in San Diego, Hillary Clinton said, "When I was a Senator from New York, I represented
and worked with so many talented principled people who made their living in finance.
But even thought I represented them and did all I could to make sure they continued to
prosper, I called for closing the carried interest loophole and addressing skyrocketing
CEO pay. I also was calling in '06, '07 for doing something about the mortgage crisis,
because I saw every day from Wall Street literally to main streets across New York how a
well-functioning financial system is essential. So when I raised early warnings about
early warnings about subprime mortgages and called for regulating derivatives and over
complex financial products, I didn't get some big arguments, because people sort of
said, no, that makes sense. But boy, have we had fights about it ever since." [Hillary
Clinton's Remarks at Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd in San Diego, 9/04/14]
* * *
Clinton On Wall Street: "I Had Great Relations And Worked So Close Together
After 9/11 To Rebuild Downtown, And A Lot Of Respect For The Work You Do And The People
Who Do It."
"Now, without going over how we got to where we are right now, what
would be your advice to the Wall Street community and the big banks as to the way
forward with those two important decisions? SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, I represented all
of you for eight years. I had great relations and worked so close together after 9/11
to rebuild downtown, and a lot of respect for the work you do and the people who do it,
but I do -- I think that when we talk about the regulators and the politicians, the
economic consequences of bad decisions back in '08, you know, were devastating, and they
had repercussions throughout the world." [Goldman Sachs AIMS Alternative Investments
Symposium, 10/24/13]
CLINTON TALKS ABOUT THE CHALLENGES RUNNING FOR OFFICE
Hillary Clinton Said There Was "A Bias Against People Who Have Led Successful
And/Or Complicated Lives," Citing The Need To Divese Of Assets, Positions, And Stocks.
"SECRETARY CLINTON: Yeah. Well, you know what Bob Rubin said about that. He said,
you know, when he came to Washington, he had a fortune. And when he left Washington, he
had a small -- MR. BLANKFEIN: That's how you have a small fortune, is you
go to Washington. SECRETARY CLINTON: You go to Washington. Right. But,
you know, part of the problem with the political situation, too, is that there is such a
bias against people who have led successful and/or complicated lives. You know, the
divestment of assets, the stripping of all kinds of positions, the sale of stocks. It
just becomes very onerous and unnecessary." [Goldman Sachs Builders And Innovators
Summit, 10/29/13]
CLINTON SUGGESTS SHE IS A MODERATE
Clinton Said That Both The Democratic And Republican Parties Should Be
"Moderate."
"URSULA BURNS: Interesting. Democrats? SECRETARY CLINTON: Oh,
long, definitely. URSULA BURNS: Republicans? SECRETARY CLINTON: Unfortunately, at the
time, short. URSULA BURNS: Okay. We'll go back to questions. SECRETARY CLINTON: We
need two parties. URSULA BURNS: Yeah, we do need two parties. SECRETARY CLINTON: Two
sensible, moderate, pragmatic parties." [Hillary Clinton Remarks, Remarks at Xerox,
3/18/14]
* * *
Clinton: "Simpson-Bowles… Put Forth The Right Framework. Namely, We Have To
Restrain Spending, We Have To Have Adequate Revenues, And We Have To Incentivize Growth.
It's A Three-Part Formula… And They Reached An Agreement. But What Is Very Hard To Do Is
To Then Take That Agreement If You Don't Believe That You're Going To Be Able To Move
The Other Side."
SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, this may be borne more out of hope
than experience in the last few years. But Simpson-Bowles -- and I know you heard from
Erskine earlier today -- put forth the right framework. Namely, we have to restrain
spending, we have to have adequate revenues, and we have to incentivize growth. It's a
three-part formula. The specifics can be negotiated depending upon whether we're acting
in good faith or not. And what Senator Simpson and Erskine did was to bring Republicans
and Democrats alike to the table, and you had the full range of ideological views from I
think Tom Coburn to Dick Durbin. And they reached an agreement. But what is very hard
to do is to then take that agreement if you don't believe that you're going to be able
to move the other side. And where we are now is in this gridlocked dysfunction. So
you've got Democrats saying that, you know, you have to have more revenues; that's the
sine qua non of any kind of agreement. You have Republicans saying no, no, no on
revenues; you have to cut much more deeply into spending. Well, looks what's happened.
We are slowly returning to growth. It's not as much or as fast as many of us would like
to see, but, you know, we're certainly better off than our European friends, and we're
beginning to, I believe, kind of come out of the long aftermath of the '08 crisis.
[Clinton Speech For Morgan Stanley, 4/18/13]
* * *
Clinton: "The Simpson-Bowles Framework And The Big Elements Of It Were Right…
You Have To Restrain Spending, You Have To Have Adequate Revenues, And You Have To Have
Growth."
CLINTON: So, you know, the Simpson-Bowles framework and the big
elements of it were right. The specifics can be negotiated and argued over. But you
got to do all three. You have to restrain spending, you have to have adequate revenues,
and you have to have growth. And I think we are smart enough to figure out how to do
that. [Clinton Speech For Morgan Stanley, 4/18/13]
CLINTON IS AWARE OF SECURITY CONCERNS AROUND BLACKBERRIES
Clinton: "At The State Department We Were Attacked Every Hour, More Than Once
An Hour By Incoming Efforts To Penetrate Everything We Had. And That Was True Across
The U.S. Government."
CLINTON: But, at the State Department we were attacked
every hour, more than once an hour by incoming efforts to penetrate everything we had.
And that was true across the U.S. government. And we knew it was going on when I would
go to China, or I would go to Russia, we would leave all of our electronic equipment on
the plane, with the batteries out, because this is a new frontier. And they're trying
to find out not just about what we do in our government. They're trying to find out
about what a lot of companies do and they were going after the personal emails of people
who worked in the State Department. So it's not like the only government in the world
that is doing anything is the United States. But, the United States compared to a
number of our competitors is the only government in the world with any kind of
safeguards, any kind of checks and balances. They may in many respects need to be
strengthened and people need to be reassured, and they need to have their protections
embodied in law. But, I think turning over a lot of that material intentionally or
unintentionally, because of the way it can be drained, gave all kinds of information not
only to big countries, but to networks and terrorist groups, and the like. So I have a
hard time thinking that somebody who is a champion of privacy and liberty has taken
refuge in Russia under Putin's authority. And then he calls into a Putin talk show and
says, President Putin, do you spy on people? And President Putin says, well, from one
intelligence professional to another, of course not. Oh, thank you so much. I mean,
really, I don't know. I have a hard time following it. [Clinton Speech At UConn,
4/23/14]
* * *
Hillary Clinton: "When I Got To The State Department, It Was Still Against
The Rules To Let Most -- Or Let All Foreign Service Officers Have Access To A
Blackberry."
"I mean, let's face it, our government is woefully, woefully
behind in all of its policies that affect the use of technology. When I got to the
State Department, it was still against the rules to let most -- or let all Foreign
Service Officers have access to a Blackberry. You couldn't have desktop computers when
Colin Powell was there. Everything that you are taking advantage of, inventing and
using, is still a generation or two behind when it comes to our government." [Hillary
Clinton Remarks at Nexenta, 8/28/14]
* * *
Hillary Clinton: "We Couldn't Take Our Computers, We Couldn't Take Our
Personal Devices" Off The Plane In China And Russia.
"I mean, probably the most
frustrating part of this whole debate are countries acting like we're the only people in
the world trying to figure out what's going on. I mean, every time I went to countries
like China or Russia, I mean, we couldn't take our computers, we couldn't take our
personal devices, we couldn't take anything off the plane because they're so good, they
would penetrate them in a minute, less, a nanosecond. So we would take the batteries
out, we'd leave them on the plane." [Hillary Clinton Remarks at Nexenta, 8/28/14]
* * *
Clinton Said When She Got To State, Employees "Were Not Mostly Permitted To
Have Handheld Devices."
"You know, when Colin Powell showed up as Secretary of
State in 2001, most State Department employees still didn't even have computers on their
desks. When I got there they were not mostly permitted to have handheld devices. I
mean, so you're thinking how do we operate in this new environment dominated by
technology, globalizing forces? We have to change, and I can't expect people to change
if I don't try to model it and lead it." [Clinton Speech For General Electric's Global
Leadership Meeting – Boca Raton, FL, 1/6/14]
* * *
Hillary Clinton Said You Know You Can't Bring Your Phone And Computer When
Traveling To China And Russia And She Had To Take Her Batteries Out And Put them In A
Special Box.
"And anybody who has ever traveled in other countries, some of
which shall remain nameless, except for Russia and China, you know that you can't bring
your phones and your computers. And if you do, good luck. I mean, we would not only
take the batteries out, we would leave the batteries and the devices on the plane in
special boxes. Now, we didn't do that because we thought it would be fun to tell
somebody about. We did it because we knew that we were all targets and that we would be
totally vulnerable. So it's not only what others do to us and what we do to them and how
many people are involved in it. It's what's the purpose of it, what is being collected,
and how can it be used. And there are clearly people in this room who know a lot about
this, and some of you could be very useful contributors to that conversation because
you're sophisticated enough to know that it's not just, do it, don't do it. We have to
have a way of doing it, and then we have to have a way of analyzing it, and then we have
to have a way of sharing it." [Goldman Sachs Builders And Innovators Summit, 10/29/13]
* * *
Hillary Clinton Lamented How Far Behind The State Department Was In
Technology, Saying "People Were Not Even Allowed To Use Mobile Devices Because Of
Security Issues."
"Personally, having, you know, lived and worked in the White
House, having been a senator, having been Secretary of State, there has traditionally
been a great pool of very talented, hard-working people. And just as I was saying about
the credit market, our personnel policies haven't kept up with the changes necessary in
government. We have a lot of difficulties in getting-when I got to the State
Department, we were so far behind in technology, it was embarrassing. And, you know,
people were not even allowed to use mobile devices because of security issues and cost
issues, and we really had to try to push into the last part of the 20
th
Century in order to get people functioning in 2009 and '10." [Goldman Sachs Builders And
Innovators Summit, 10/29/13]
CLINTON REMARKS ARE PRO KEYSTONE AND PRO TRADE
Clinton: "So I Think That Keystone Is A Contentious Issue, And Of Course It
Is Important On Both Sides Of The Border For Different And Sometimes Opposing Reasons…"
"So I think that Keystone is a contentious issue, and of course it is important
on both sides of the border for different and sometimes opposing reasons, but that is
not our relationship. And I think our relationship will get deeper and stronger and put
us in a position to really be global leaders in energy and climate change if we worked
more closely together. And that's what I would like to see us do." [Remarks at
tinePublic, 6/18/14]
* * *
Hillary Clinton Said Her Dream Is A Hemispheric Common Market, With Open
Trade And Open Markets.
"My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open
trade and open borders, some time in the future with energy that is as green and
sustainable as we can get it, powering growth and opportunity for every person in the
hemisphere." [05162013 Remarks to Banco Itau.doc, p. 28]
* * *
Hillary Clinton Said We Have To Have A Concerted Plan To Increase Trade; We
Have To Resist Protectionism And Other Kinds Of Barriers To Trade.
"Secondly, I
think we have to have a concerted plan to increase trade already under the current
circumstances, you know, that Inter-American Development Bank figure is pretty
surprising. There is so much more we can do, there is a lot of low hanging fruit but
businesses on both sides have to make it a priority and it's not for governments to do
but governments can either make it easy or make it hard and we have to resist,
protectionism, other kinds of barriers to market access and to trade and I would like to
see this get much more attention and be not just a policy for a year under president X
or president Y but a consistent one." [05162013 Remarks to Banco Itau.doc, p. 32]
CLINTON IS MORE FAVORABLE TO CANADIAN HEALTH CARE AND SINGLE PAYER
Clinton Said Single-Payer Health Care Systems "Can Get Costs Down," And "Is
As Good Or Better On Primary Care," But "They Do Impose Things Like Waiting Times."
"If you look at countries that are comparable, like Switzerland or Germany, for
example, they have mixed systems. They don't have just a single-payer system, but they
have very clear controls over budgeting and accountability. If you look at the
single-payer systems, like Scandinavia, Canada, and elsewhere, they can get costs down
because, you know, although their care, according to statistics, overall is as good or
better on primary care, in particular, they do impose things like waiting times, you
know. It takes longer to get like a hip replacement than it might take here." [Hillary
Clinton remarks to ECGR Grand Rapids, 6/17/13]
* * *
Clinton Cited President Johnson's Success In Establishing Medicare And
Medicaid And Said She Wanted To See The U.S. Have Universal Health Care Like In Canada.
"You know, on healthcare we are the prisoner of our past. The way we got to develop any
kind of medical insurance program was during World War II when companies facing
shortages of workers began to offer healthcare benefits as an inducement for
employment. So from the early 1940s healthcare was seen as a privilege connected to
employment. And after the war when soldiers came back and went back into the market
there was a lot of competition, because the economy was so heated up. So that model
continued. And then of course our large labor unions bargained for healthcare with the
employers that their members worked for. So from the early 1940s until the early 1960s
we did not have any Medicare, or our program for the poor called Medicaid until
President Johnson was able to get both passed in 1965. So the employer model continued
as the primary means by which working people got health insurance. People over 65 were
eligible for Medicare. Medicaid, which was a partnership, a funding partnership between
the federal government and state governments, provided some, but by no means all poor
people with access to healthcare. So what we've been struggling with certainly Harry
Truman, then Johnson was successful on Medicare and Medicaid, but didn't touch the
employer based system, then actually Richard Nixon made a proposal that didn't go
anywhere, but was quite far reaching. Then with my husband's administration we worked
very hard to come up with a system, but we were very much constricted by the political
realities that if you had your insurance from your employer you were reluctant to try
anything else. And so we were trying to build a universal system around the
employer-based system. And indeed now with President Obama's legislative success in
getting the Affordable Care Act passed that is what we've done. We still have primarily
an employer-based system, but we now have people able to get subsidized insurance. So
we have health insurance companies playing a major role in the provision of healthcare,
both to the employed whose employers provide health insurance, and to those who are
working but on their own are not able to afford it and their employers either don't
provide it, or don't provide it at an affordable price. We are still struggling. We've
made a lot of progress. Ten million Americans now have insurance who didn't have it
before the Affordable Care Act, and that is a great step forward. (Applause.) And what
we're going to have to continue to do is monitor what the costs are and watch closely to
see whether employers drop more people from insurance so that they go into what we call
the health exchange system. So we're really just at the beginning. But we do have
Medicare for people over 65. And you couldn't, I don't think, take it away if you
tried, because people are very satisfied with it, but we also have a lot of political
and financial resistance to expanding that system to more people. So we're in a learning
period as we move forward with the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. And I'm
hoping that whatever the shortfalls or the glitches have been, which in a big piece of
legislation you're going to have, those will be remedied and we can really take a hard
look at what's succeeding, fix what isn't, and keep moving forward to get to affordable
universal healthcare coverage like you have here in Canada. [Clinton Speech For
tinePublic – Saskatoon, CA, 1/21/15]
* * *
Below is the full 80 page documents of "speech flags" in Hillary speeches:
"... What struck me was not so much Clinton's statements about letting Wall Street regulate Wall Street, the fact that she is "out of touch" with Main Street, or her favorable comments about single payer (very ironic given how she has not advocated for this publicly). No, what struck me is that she is NOT a leader. ..."
"... No, Clinton is many things, but not a leader. She is revealed as the perfect tool for the elite. Occasionally piping up to express some concern, but so distanced and entrenched in the establishment that she will never do anything of consequence for working Americans. ..."
"... I didn't even read the stuff about the blackberries and computer nonsense. She is incompetent with technology, doesn't understand digital security and is dangerously arrogant about her ignorance. Stipulated. ..."
What struck me was not so much Clinton's statements about letting Wall Street regulate Wall Street,
the fact that she is "out of touch" with Main Street, or her favorable comments about single payer (very
ironic given how she has not advocated for this publicly). No, what struck me is that she is NOT a leader.
Opposed to Citizens United?
… it's so ridiculous that we have this kind of free for all with all of this financial interest
at stake, but, you know, the Supreme Court said that's basically what we're in for. So we're kind of
in the wild west, and, you know, it would be very difficult to run for president without raising a huge
amount of money.
Sorta like, "Meh! This stinks, but this is how the world works so I'm gonna go raise me some cash."
A Forceful Champion of Wall Street Reform?
I called for closing the carried interest loophole and addressing skyrocketing CEO pay. I also
was calling in '06, '07 for doing something about the mortgage crisis, because I saw every day from
Wall Street literally to main streets across New York how a well-functioning financial system is essential.
So when I raised early warnings about early warnings about subprime mortgages and called for regulating
derivatives and over complex financial products, I didn't get some big arguments, because people sort
of said, no, that makes sense.
Really? She called for reinstatement of Glass-Steagall? I don't remember her anywhere near the scene
of the crime in '06/07. She (may have) made a few comments here and there but never took any real action
or was serious about meaningful reform. Still isn't.
And then there is this gem.
We need two parties. .. Two sensible, moderate, pragmatic parties.
A Model of Two Sensible, Pragmatic Parties Working Together: Simpson-Bowles
Simpson-Bowles framework and the big elements of it were right. The specifics can be negotiated
and argued over. But you got to do all three. You have to restrain spending, you have to have adequate
revenues, and you have to have growth. And I think we are smart enough to figure out how to do that.
Oh, no, we aren't! Not when "figuring it out" means following neoliberal dogma to extract more from
labor and give more and more and more to the 1%.
No, Clinton is many things, but not a leader. She is revealed as the perfect tool for the
elite. Occasionally piping up to express some concern, but so distanced and entrenched in the establishment
that she will never do anything of consequence for working Americans.
I didn't even read the stuff about the blackberries and computer nonsense. She is incompetent
with technology, doesn't understand digital security and is dangerously arrogant about her ignorance.
Stipulated.
She comes across as either naive or duplicitous, re Latin America "coming
out of 2 decades of doing well," but now having to deal with disruption and
regime change.
Yesterday
we pointed out the many amazing one-liners offered up by Hillary as she was out collecting millions of dollars for her "Wall
Street speeches." Here is an expanded sample:
Hillary Clinton: "I'm Kind Of Far Removed" From The Struggles Of The Middle Class "Because The Life I've Lived And
The Economic, You Know, Fortunes That My Husband And I Now Enjoy." "And I am not taking a position on any policy, but
I do think there is a growing sense of anxiety and even anger in the country over the feeling that the game is rigged. And I never
had that feeling when I was growing up. Never. I mean, were there really rich people, of course there were. My father loved to
complain about big business and big government, but we had a solid middle class upbringing. We had good public schools. We had
accessible health care. We had our little, you know, one-family house that, you know, he saved up his money, didn't believe in
mortgages. So I lived that. And now, obviously, I'm kind of far removed because the life I've lived and the economic, you know,
fortunes that my husband and I now enjoy, but I haven't forgotten it." [Hillary Clinton Remarks at Goldman-Black Rock, 2/4/14]
Hillary Clinton Said There Was "A Bias Against People Who Have Led Successful And/Or Complicated Lives," Citing The
Need To Divese Of Assets, Positions, And Stocks. "SECRETARY CLINTON: Yeah. Well, you know what Bob Rubin said about that.
He said, you know, when he came to Washington, he had a fortune. And when he left Washington, he had a small -- MR. BLANKFEIN:
That's how you have a small fortune, is you go to Washington. SECRETARY CLINTON: You go to Washington. Right. But, you know, part
of the problem with the political situation, too, is that there is such a bias against people who have led successful and/or complicated
lives. You know, the divestment of assets, the stripping of all kinds of positions, the sale of stocks. It just becomes very onerous
and unnecessary." [Goldman Sachs Builders And Innovators Summit, 10/29/13]
Hillary Clinton Noted President Clinton Had Spoken At The Same Goldman Summit Last Year, And Blankfein Joked "He Increased
Our Budget." "SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, first, thanks for having me here and giving me a chance to know a little bit more
about the builders and the innovators who you've gathered. Some of you might have been here last year, and my husband was, I guess,
in this very same position. And he came back and was just thrilled by- MR. BLANKFEIN: He increased our budget. SECRETARY CLINTON:
Did he? MR. BLANKFEIN: Yes. That's why we -- SECRETARY CLINTON: Good. I think he-I think he encouraged you to grow it a little,
too. But it really was a tremendous experience for him, so I've been looking forward to it and hope we have a chance to talk about
a lot of things." [Goldman Sachs Builders And Innovators Summit, 10/29/13]
Clinton Said When She Got To State, Employees "Were Not Mostly Permitted To Have Handheld Devices." "You know,
when Colin Powell showed up as Secretary of State in 2001, most State Department employees still didn't even have computers on
their desks. When I got there they were not mostly permitted to have handheld devices. I mean, so you're thinking how do we operate
in this new environment dominated by technology, globalizing forces? We have to change, and I can't expect people to change if
I don't try to model it and lead it." [Clinton Speech For General Electric's Global Leadership Meeting – Boca Raton, FL, 1/6/14]
Clinton Joked It's "Risky" For Her To Speak To A Group Committed To Futures Markets Given Her Past Whitewater
Scandal. "Now, it's always a little bit risky for me to come speak to a group that is committed to the futures markets because
-- there's a few knowing laughs -- many years ago, I actually traded in the futures markets. I mean, this was so long ago, it
was before computers were invented, I think. And I worked with a group of like-minded friends and associates who traded in pork
bellies and cotton and other such things, and I did pretty well. I invested about a thousand dollars and traded up to about a
hundred thousand. And then my daughter was born, and I just didn't think I had enough time or mental space to figure out anything
having to do with trading other than trading time with my daughter for time with the rest of my life. So I got out, and I thought
that would be the end of it." [Remarks to CME Group, 11/18/13]
Hillary Clinton Said Jordan Was Threatened Because "They Can't Possibly Vet All Those Refugees So They Don't Know If,
You Know, Jihadists Are Coming In Along With Legitimate Refugees." "So I think you're right to have gone to the places
that you visited because there's a discussion going on now across the region to try to see where there might be common ground
to deal with the threat posed by extremism and particularly with Syria which has everyone quite worried, Jordan because it's on
their border and they have hundreds of thousands of refugees and they can't possibly vet all those refugees so they don't know
if, you know, jihadists are coming in along with legitimate refugees. Turkey for the same reason." [Jewish United Fund Of Metropolitan
Chicago Vanguard Luncheon, 10/28/13]
Hillary Clinton Said The Saudis Opposed The Muslim Brotherhood, "Which Is Kind Of Ironic Since The Saudis Have Exported
More Extreme Ideology Than Any Other Place On Earth Over The Course Of The Last 30 Years." "And they are getting a lot
of help from the Saudis to the Emiratis-to go back to our original discussion-because the Saudis and the Emiratis see the Muslim
Brotherhood as threatening to them, which is kind of ironic since the Saudis have exported more extreme ideology than any other
place on earth over the course of the last 30 years." [2014 Jewish United Fund Advance & Major Gifts Dinner, 10/28/13]
Hillary Clinton Said Her Dream Is A Hemispheric Common Market, With Open Trade And Open Markets. "My dream is a hemispheric
common market, with open trade and open borders, some time in the future with energy that is as green and sustainable as we can
get it, powering growth and opportunity for every person in the hemisphere." [05162013 Remarks to Banco Itau.doc, p.
28]
Meanwhile, there are plenty of other great email exchanges as well.
The following exchange comes from the President of the Soros-funded "
Open Society Foundation " (we previously wrote about
the society's plan to "Enlarge electorate by at least 10 million voters"
here ) who offers some advice on "police reform." The email points Podesta to an article previously written
by the
Open
Society Foundation , ironically titled "
Get
the Politics Out of Policing ." Surprisingly, Stone points out that the problem isn't a lack of independence
by police but by politicians:
The problem is not a lack of independence just from the police , but independence from city politics.
Since 2007, Chicago has had an agency separate from the police to investigate officer-involved shootings, but the "independent"
agency (the Independent Police Review Authority, or IPRA) is still under the mayor, and generally retreats from any investigation
that might lead to criminal charges. Until we get investigations of cases like this out of the hands of politicians, even
the best policies a police chief can impose won't change the culture.
Well that seemed to backfire. To summarize, Stone says don't do exactly what the FBI did in its investigation of Hillary's
email scandal.
"... Krugman is such a deplorable hack. I know we are supposed to accept bribe-taking politicians and the economy run by looting robber barons. But can't we even have a goddamn fourth estate? ..."
"... The way Krugman murders journalism ethics by outright campaigning for one of the most corrupt politicians in American history is outrageous. Barfing up her disgusting campaign memes verbatim as if he's coordinating his columns with her war room. ..."
"... If you're a scientist you would know that economics does not remotely resemble a science. One familiar with the history of math and science will notice that their development (based on discovered facts) forms a tree-like structure. One discovery branches out to more discoveries. The growth is therefore exponential. ..."
Sure...Krugman will occasionally pay lip service to green energy.
The problem is that 'liberal' economists tend to keep separate silos for green energy and infrastructure.
Question is, why do they refuse to connect the dots between climate change mitigation, green
energy, fiscal stimulus, and lots of jobs? And why do they prioritize more road and bridges, which
will only make climate change worse?
Krugman is an abhorrent neoliberal hack (as well as Hillary stooge).
Who actually understand very little about climate change clearly being non-specialist without
any training of physics and geophysics. He is a second rate neoclassical economist with penchant
for mathiness (and a very talented writer).
The key question here is Clinton warmongering and the threat of nuclear war with Russia. Washington
neocon chichenhawks became recently realty crazy. Obama looks completely important and does not
control anything.
I think this is more immediate threat then climate change.
Oil depletion (which already started and will be in full force in a couple of decades) might
take care about climate change as period of "cheap oil" (aka "oil age") probably will last less
then 100 years and as such is just a blip in Earth history.
End of cheap oil also might lead to natural shrinking of human population -- another factor
in the global climate change and a threat to natural ecosystems.
Hillary is the fracking Queen. Claiming she's a champion of the environment is as ridiculous portraying
Donald Trump a feminist.
Obomba is another pretender on the environment. The Paris Agreement commits to absolutely nothing
but more talk at a future time. China signed on and is still keeping its commitment to do absolutely
nothing to reduce emissions until 2030. (By the time the West has exported the lion share of its
emissions to the country in a pointless GHG emissions shell game; emission per capita have skyrocketed
since 2002! a 25% increase!)
Krugman is such a deplorable hack. I know we are supposed to accept bribe-taking politicians
and the economy run by looting robber barons. But can't we even have a goddamn fourth estate?
The way Krugman murders journalism ethics by outright campaigning for one of the most corrupt
politicians in American history is outrageous. Barfing up her disgusting campaign memes verbatim
as if he's coordinating his columns with her war room.
So to all the pretend liberals out there who offer the people nothing more than more corruption,
lies, war-profiteering and public trust liquidation: you deserve Trump. And I pray that you get
him. (After him, a New Deal; and the 'me generation,' the Void.)
If you're a scientist you would know that economics does not remotely resemble a science.
One familiar with the history of math and science will notice that their development (based on
discovered facts) forms a tree-like structure. One discovery branches out to more discoveries.
The growth is therefore exponential.
Economic history does not follow this pattern.
With science there are paradigm shifts that occur with groundbreaking discoveries like the
theories of relativity and quantum mechanics. The Friedmanian paradigm shift was founded on jettisoning
all the enormously successful work Keynes accomplished and digging up failed 19th century ideology,
repeating disastrous history.
Even psychology follows the pattern. Although it began with a lot of unsubstantiated Aristotelian
philosophizing, it was a starting point from which a significant body of definite knowledge and
medical treatments developed. A real social science. (Not perfect. It was recently discovered
that about 50% of published psychological experiments were not reproducible.)
As an anthropologist you should know about cliques and group-think. Have an inkling of how
corruption could gradually develop and spread among upper-echelon cliques to the point where the
government, the economy, the courts and the news media become captured by the upper class. Understand
how cowards would rather look the other way than take a stand and deal with it: "see no evil,
hear no evil, speak no evil."
As an anthropologist, I can assert with confidence that you are babbling about things you do not
really understand at all. I have issues with a lot of economics, but you are completely incoherent.
Completely incoherent? Then it should be easy enough for you to tear apart what I wrote. It was
certainly easy enough for me to tear into Krugman's crass political pandering. But all you got
is lame generalizations. Stock insults that could be said about anything.
What issues do you have with "a lot of economics?" I bet you can't come up with anything. Come
on. Out with it! Say something intelligent about anything, if you are at all capable, Mr. Dick.
I have yet to read anything from you that indicates you have any knowledge about anything.
It is Dr. Dick, since I have a Ph.D. If you ever read the comments on this blog, you would know
full well what those issues are, since I have raised them here many times. For a start the assumption
of "rational actors" (only partially true), the assumption of economic maximization (people maximize
many different things which affect their economic choices), and the assumption of "rational markets"
(this ignores pervasive information assymetry and active deceit).
"... It's because they couldn't get assurances from him that his anti-globalization talk was just talk, unlike Hillary whom they have gotten assurances that the outsourcing bloodbath will continue unabated. ..."
"... If Trump tears up NAFTA and the TPP then Americans will, at least, have gotten SOMETHING out of "their" government over the past 35 years. Some little morsel of democratic representation. Something that can be marked as a turning point from 35 years of escalating political and economic corruption that has put civilization on the verge of implosion into fascist revolutions and world war repeating, verbatim, the history of the 1920s and 30s. ..."
"... For a $10-million donation to the Clinton Foundation, Hillary gave the thumbs up for the use of child soldiers in South Sudan as SoS. A shady businessman had an eye on African mining rights and regime change. (Hillary data-shredded "business" related emails on an illegal private server; smashed her smartphones with a hammer; to destroy evidence.) ..."
"... Really? Stiffing his employees. Stiffing his creditors. Stiffing the tax man. All "perfectly legal". ..."
"... Is not this is what neoliberalism is about? Especially for the employees part ..."
If Trump is all talk, why are all the establishment neocons as hysterical over him as the PC pearl
clutchers?
It's because they couldn't get assurances from him that his anti-globalization talk was just
talk, unlike Hillary whom they have gotten assurances that the outsourcing bloodbath will continue
unabated.
If Trump tears up NAFTA and the TPP then Americans will, at least, have gotten SOMETHING out
of "their" government over the past 35 years. Some little morsel of democratic representation.
Something that can be marked as a turning point from 35 years of escalating political and economic
corruption that has put civilization on the verge of implosion into fascist revolutions and world
war repeating, verbatim, the history of the 1920s and 30s.
Trump is a weasel of a businessman and a weasel of a politician (par for the course on the latter.)
But he made all his money legally.
The concept of pure corruption, however, might suit the Clintons, given they have pocketed
over $100-million in bribe-related wealth.
They deregulated the banks for kickbacks from Wall Street. Set the stage for the 2000s Bust
Out - a complex web of fraud among all manner of banker including cheerleading central banker
- that culminated in global economic collapse.
For money from the burgeoning private prison industry, they labeled African American youth
"super predators" with "no conscience; no empathy" (a most vicious of racist dog whistle that
blows anything Trump has said out of the water.) Hillary called for a police crackdown ("we can
talk about how they ended up that way, but they first must be brought to heel") that kicked off
the era of mass incarceration; produced a militant police force filled with racist thugs and cowards;
and created the Black Lives Matter movement.
For a $10-million donation to the Clinton Foundation, Hillary gave the thumbs up for the use
of child soldiers in South Sudan as SoS. A shady businessman had an eye on African mining rights
and regime change. (Hillary data-shredded "business" related emails on an illegal private server;
smashed her smartphones with a hammer; to destroy evidence.)
All this (and MOAR) might not be pure corruption. But something around 99.99% pure. Like Ivory
soap, except evil.
Trump is small potatoes compared to what the real Wolves of Wall Street did to the global economy.
But if he did break the law he should be thrown in jail, right along with the Clintons and all
the other bribe-taking criminals.
nikbez -> pgl... , -1
Is not this is what neoliberalism is about?
Especially for the employees part
"But, you know, part of the problem with the political situation, too, is that there is such a
bias against people who have led successful and/or complicated lives. You know, the divestment of
assets, the stripping of all kinds of positions, the sale of stocks. It just becomes so very onerous
and unnecessary."
Back aching scrubbing and knee straining cleaning to maintain a decent and safe environment is
exhausting. Accumulating wealth and being criticized for accumulating it at the expense of others
is equally exhausting. She is the personification of empathy.
Hmmm. … I thought this e-mail was a copy of the Wash Exam article, is
it really leaks of portions of Clinton's speeches? It's text book Clinton.
I couldn't find the WE article and now Buzzfeed writes it appears to be paid
speeches.
"SECRETARY CLINTON: Yeah. Well, you know what Bob Rubin said about that. He said, you
know, when he came to Washington he had a fortune. And when he left Washington, he had a small
– – MR. BLANKFEIN: That's how you
have a small fortune
, is you go to Washington.
. .
The sacrifices they make for us.
Reminds me of a saying in racing. How do you get a million bucks? Start with two.
*Hillary Clinton Said Her Dream Is A Hemispheric Common Market, With
Open Trade And Open Markets. *"My dream is a hemispheric common market,
with open trade and open borders, some time in the future with energy
that is as green and sustainable as we can get it, powering growth and
opportunity for every person in the hemisphere." [05162013 Remarks to
Banco Itau.doc, p. 28]
What? Open borders with Europe? She can't mean Russia. To be clear, she's also declaring
support for that greenest of projects, the Keystone pipeline in another speech.
Hillary is a very warm and nurturing person. When an 8-ball can't make
you feel good about your master of the universe self, you hire madame secretary
to fluff your fragile feelings a bit. Or you pay mr. president to put on
a comfortable pair of shoes and stand guard between you and the peasants
with the pitchforks.
In my continued talks with people who insist that voting for Clinton is the
only choice because TRUMP, I just got I would rather have war with Russia than
Putin deciding American policy because the President owes him money.
After I decimated that one by asking if everyone in Congress owes Putin as
well, I continued by noting that Congress is also a stumbling block if ACA was
really their only concern.
That they better figure out how to move to a country with a real health care
system or give up being an artist and find a better paying job with employer
provided insurance because the idea that Clinton has some magic method of
preventing it from dying is a fantasy.
The President cannot unilaterally do anything to stop insurance companies
from dropping out and no legislation saving it is going to pass in a Congress
where one or both of the Houses have Republican majorities. Sure she might stop
them from cutting their subsidy, but even with Clinton they have a couple of
years at most before they are royally screwed. Especially since Clinton's
Democratic Party is not bothering to try to fight every race in an attempt to
get the House, and even have grabbed money from the state parties for her
campaign.
Every once in a while I get a little annoyed with people who want to accuse
me of not being realistic and believing in unicorns when it is beyond clear
that they are dreaming.
I should note that they also pulled out the SCOTUS canard. I have to thank
Clinton for picking Kaine since just quoting his record as Governor pretty much
destroys the idea that she picks liberals.
Barry and the spooks make it official today –
Putin did it!
re: the DNC email leaks.
But as you note, the Dems are not coming off as particularly trustworthy.
Checking the comments of that article, the dogs aren't eating the dogfood
and seem to have noticed the claims are still based on absolutely no
evidence whatsoever.
"Wikileaks' Julian Assange to release 'significant' documents on US election, Google, arms trading over next 10 weeks" [
International Business Times ]. Oh, not the next 31 days?
Complete with a copy of everything problematic in her wall street spaces. https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/927#efmAIuAMKAViAXv
THEY ARE BAD
"But If Everybody's Watching, You Know, All Of The Back Room Discussions And The Deals, You Know, Then People Get A Little Nervous,
To Say The Least. So, You Need Both A Public And A Private Position ."
-100% pro trade
-Shits on single payer
-Wall Street should regulate itself… sigh.
Don't worry, the CTR shills are already on Reddit and social media framing this as another "nothing burger," or that it is
actually good for her. The campaign's pals in the MSM are sure to follow, especially considering the reprehensible recording of
Trump that was released earlier today (granted, as a man, I have heard many men say things as bad or worse than Trump has said
at various stages in my life) gives them a foil to wrap this hot potato in.
And WikiLeaks makes it official, Obama knew about Hilary's email, of
course he knew. So a bald-faced lie from the president of the United
States to millions of Americans:
"... For three years, violent militants have run Aleppo. Their rule began with a wave of repression. They posted notices warning residents: "Don't send your children to school. If you do, we will get the backpack and you will get the coffin." Then they destroyed factories, hoping that unemployed workers would have no recourse other than to become fighters. They trucked looted machinery to Turkey and sold it. ..."
"... Militants, true to form, are wreaking havoc as they are pushed out of the city by Russian and Syrian Army forces. "Turkish-Saudi backed 'moderate rebels' showered the residential neighborhoods of Aleppo with unguided rockets and gas jars," one Aleppo resident wrote on social media. The Beirut-based analyst Marwa Osma asked, "The Syrian Arab Army, which is led by President Bashar Assad, is the only force on the ground, along with their allies, who are fighting ISIS - so you want to weaken the only system that is fighting ISIS?" ..."
"... This does not fit with Washington's narrative. As a result, much of the American press is reporting the opposite of what is actually happening. Many news reports suggest that Aleppo has been a "liberated zone" for three years but is now being pulled back into misery. ..."
"... Americans are being told that the virtuous course in Syria is to fight the Assad regime and its Russian and Iranian partners. We are supposed to hope that a righteous coalition of Americans, Turks, Saudis, Kurds, and the "moderate opposition" will win. This is convoluted nonsense, but Americans cannot be blamed for believing it. We have almost no real information about the combatants, their goals, or their tactics. Much blame for this lies with our media. ..."
"... Astonishingly brave correspondents in the war zone, including Americans, seek to counteract Washington-based reporting. At great risk to their own safety, these reporters are pushing to find the truth about the Syrian war. Their reporting often illuminates the darkness of groupthink. Yet for many consumers of news, their voices are lost in the cacophony. Reporting from the ground is often overwhelmed by the Washington consensus. ..."
"... Inevitably, this kind of disinformation has bled into the American presidential campaign. At the recent debate in Milwaukee, Hillary Clinton claimed that United Nations peace efforts in Syria were based on "an agreement I negotiated in June of 2012 in Geneva." The precise opposite is true. In 2012 Secretary of State Clinton joined Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Israel in a successful effort to kill Kofi Annan's UN peace plan because it would have accommodated Iran and kept Assad in power, at least temporarily. No one on the Milwaukee stage knew enough to challenge her. ..."
"... The truth is that Kinzer is right. We have no idea what is going on in Syria. For the elites in Washington and their press lackeys to report that one side is moderate and the other is not is ludicrous. ..."
Coverage of the Syrian war will be remembered as one of the most shameful episodes in the history
of the American press. Reporting about carnage in the ancient city of Aleppo is the latest reason
why.
For three years, violent militants have run Aleppo. Their rule began with a wave of repression.
They posted notices warning residents: "Don't send your children to school. If you do, we will get
the backpack and you will get the coffin." Then they destroyed factories, hoping that unemployed
workers would have no recourse other than to become fighters. They trucked looted machinery to Turkey
and sold it.
This month, people in Aleppo have finally seen glimmers of hope. The Syrian army and its allies
have been pushing militants out of the city. Last week they reclaimed the main power plant. Regular
electricity may soon be restored. The militants' hold on the city could be ending.
Militants, true to form, are wreaking havoc as they are pushed out of the city by Russian
and Syrian Army forces. "Turkish-Saudi backed 'moderate rebels' showered the residential neighborhoods
of Aleppo with unguided rockets and gas jars," one Aleppo resident wrote on social media. The Beirut-based
analyst Marwa Osma asked, "The Syrian Arab Army, which is led by President Bashar Assad, is the only
force on the ground, along with their allies, who are fighting ISIS - so you want to weaken the only
system that is fighting ISIS?"
This does not fit with Washington's narrative. As a result, much of the American press is
reporting the opposite of what is actually happening. Many news reports suggest that Aleppo has been
a "liberated zone" for three years but is now being pulled back into misery.
Americans are being told that the virtuous course in Syria is to
fight the Assad regime and its Russian and Iranian partners. We are supposed
to hope that a righteous coalition of Americans, Turks, Saudis, Kurds,
and the "moderate opposition" will win. This is convoluted nonsense, but
Americans cannot be blamed for believing it. We have almost no real information
about the combatants, their goals, or their tactics. Much blame for this
lies with our media.
Under intense financial pressure, most American newspapers, magazines, and broadcast networks
have drastically reduced their corps of foreign correspondents. Much important news about the world
now comes from reporters based in Washington. In that environment, access and credibility depend
on acceptance of official paradigms. Reporters who cover Syria check with the Pentagon, the State
Department, the White House, and think tank "experts." After a spin on that soiled carousel, they
feel they have covered all sides of the story. This form of stenography produces the pabulum that
passes for news about Syria.
Astonishingly brave correspondents in the war zone, including Americans,
seek to counteract Washington-based reporting. At great risk to their own safety, these reporters
are pushing to find the truth about the Syrian war. Their reporting often illuminates the darkness
of groupthink. Yet for many consumers of news, their voices are lost in the cacophony. Reporting
from the ground is often overwhelmed by the Washington consensus.
Washington-based reporters tell us that one potent force in Syria, al-Nusra,
is made up of "rebels" or "moderates," not that it is the local al-Qaeda franchise. Saudi Arabia
is portrayed as aiding freedom fighters when in fact it is a prime sponsor of ISIS. Turkey has for
years been running a "rat line" for foreign fighters wanting to join terror groups in Syria, but
because the United States wants to stay on Turkey's good side, we hear little about it. Nor are we
often reminded that although we want to support the secular and battle-hardened Kurds, Turkey wants
to kill them. Everything Russia and Iran do in Syria is described as negative and destabilizing,
simply because it is they who are doing it - and because that is the official line in Washington.
Inevitably, this kind of disinformation has bled into the American presidential campaign. At the
recent debate in Milwaukee, Hillary Clinton claimed that United Nations peace efforts in Syria were
based on "an agreement I negotiated in June of 2012 in Geneva." The precise opposite is true. In
2012 Secretary of State Clinton joined Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Israel in a successful effort to
kill Kofi Annan's UN peace plan because it would have accommodated Iran and kept Assad in power,
at least temporarily. No one on the Milwaukee stage knew enough to challenge her.
Politicians may be forgiven for distorting their past actions. Governments may also be excused
for promoting whatever narrative they believe best suits them. Journalism, however, is supposed to
remain apart from the power elite and its inbred mendacity. In this crisis it has failed miserably.
Americans are said to be ignorant of the world. We are, but so are people in other countries.
If people in Bhutan or Bolivia misunderstand Syria, however, that has no real effect. Our ignorance
is more dangerous, because we act on it. The United States has the power to decree the death of nations.
It can do so with popular support because many Americans - and many journalists - are content with
the official story. In Syria, it is: "Fight Assad, Russia, and Iran! Join with our Turkish, Saudi,
and Kurdish friends to support peace!" This is appallingly distant from reality. It is also likely
to prolong the war and condemn more Syrians to suffering and death.
Stephen Kinzer is a senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown
University. Follow him on Twitter @stephenkinzer.
kaisy 02/18/16 03:38 PM
The truth is that Kinzer is right. We have no idea what is going on in Syria. For the
elites in Washington and their press lackeys to report that one side is moderate and the other
is not is ludicrous.
When the uprising against Assad began three years ago, initially we were on the side of the
angels, that is until we found out that they were mostly Al Queda. Fast forward and now we
have ISIS, the sworn enemy of the US and anybody else that disagrees with them. So now,
remarkably, some are looking at Assad as the voice of moderation. This is so akin to
Afghanistan and, decades ago, Vietnam. When you don't understand the players and their
ulterior motives, best to not get involved. Me, I'd leave this to the Saudis and Iran to fight
over. Cruz talks about carpet bombing Syria until the sand glows (btw, real Christianlike
there). I say defer to those over there. Eventually they'll run out of people to do the
fighting (happening already with ISIS), then, and only then, we can go in and pick up the
pieces.
jkupie02/19/16 07:16 AM
"Washington-based reporters tell us that one potent force in Syria, al-Nusra, is made
up of "rebels" or "moderates," not that it is the local al-Qaeda franchise."
I don't know enough about the area to confirm or disprove most of Mr. Kinzer's points but I
DO KNOW that this claim is false.
tyfox"n" 02/19/16 07:40 PM
jkupiue I absolutley agree. I have never read or heard al-Nusra described as anything but
an al-Qaeda group, and it is stated every time al-Nusra is mentioned.
pegnva 02/19/16 07:58 AM
Hard to know the truth...but it is interesting Kinzer was able to QUOTE former Sec'ty of
State, now presidential candidate Hillary Clinton at the recent Milwaukee debate for falsely
taking credit, some might say lying to the Am public.
kaisy 02/19/16 11:24 AM
Hillary is on the wrong side of this. She wants a no fly zone in Syria, just the Repubs.
She doesn't speak to the consequences of the policy. Unfortunately Bernie has not challenged
her on this. He really needs to.
NH-Repub 02/19/16 09:22 AM
Leftout is right and Hillary is the Queen of Doublespeak. Obama and his minions would like
nothing better than to mislead the masses and keep them in the dark about everything. That way
they control the media and by proxy - us!
A former Miss Universe who says Donald Trump 'fat-shamed' her and called her 'Miss Piggy' says
she's done battling the billionaire.
Alicia Machado will not give any more interviews on the way Trump treated her, representatives
for the Venezuelan-born beauty queen told DailyMail.com.
'We will not be discussing the Trump subject any further,' an email from her reps at Anderson
Public Relations Group said.
A statement from Machado that accompanied to the message blasted Trump and his campaign for 'launching
insults and are attempting to revive slanders and false accusations about my life, in order to humiliate,
intimidate, and unbalance me.
'These attacks are cheap lies with bad intentions,' she said.
A former Miss Universe who says Donald Trump 'fat-shamed' her and called her 'Miss Piggy' says
she's done battling the billionaire. Alicia Machado says she will not give any more interviews on
the way Trump treated her
Machado blasted Trump in a statement for 'launching insults and are attempting to revive slanders
and false accusations about my life, in order to humiliate, intimidate, and unbalance me.' She's
pictured fighting off the press on Oct. 1 at a Fashion Week event in California
After Hillary Clinton put a spotlight on Machado's strife with Trump in the first general election
debate, the 39-year-old's dirty laundry spilled out into the public.
Video from a Spanish reality TV show Machado participated in showed her having sex with another
contestant while she was engaged to baseball star Bobby Abreu.
It was further revealed that she was listed as an accomplice in an attempted murder in 1998, two
years after she carried the Miss Universe crown.
Machado allegedly drove the getaway car and threatened to kill the judge overseeing the case.
Her then-boyfriend was indicted in the criminal case.
Clinton's campaign has been unwilling to admit to knowing, or not knowing, about Machado's past.
'I don't think that in any way excuses what Trump has said about her,' Clinton's national press
secretary, Brian Fallon, told DailyMail.com.
Alicia Machado appears topless on reality show The Farm
Loaded:
ROLE (IN THE HAY) MODEL: Machado had sex in front of the cameras – and moaned about Spanish TV
host Fernando Acaso's 'p***a' – during a 2005 episode of 'La Granja'
Trump last week accused Machado of making a 'sex tape' as he lashed out at Clinton in a 3 AM Twitter
rant for propping her up.
That was a reference to a 2005 reality TV show modeled after 'Big Brother,' in which Machado was
filmed having intercourse on camera with a fellow contestant.
In the 2005 episode of 'La Granja,' she had sex in front of the cameras with Spanish TV host Fernando
Acaso.
Machado was engaged to Philadelphia Phillies right fielder Abreu at the time. The Venezuelan major-leaguer
called off the wedding after clips of the show appeared online.
The broadcast showed Acaso on top of her, with Machado whispering in Spanish about his manhood.
'Oh your d***, my love, what a tasty d***! Your d*** is divine,' she moans while they go at it.
Later during the broadcast replay, the show's host read aloud what Machado had written about the
man.
CRINGE: Machado's sex scene in the reality-show fun house was relived frame by frame complete
with mortified squirming, and her fiancé Bobby Abreu later called off their engagement
Interviewed about sex scene: Machado was interviewed about what she did in bed with Fernando Acaso,
appearing to be embarrassed as an interviewer revealed she had said: 'He f***s me like a b****.'
'Really, that guy is cute, he loves me, he understands me, he accepts me, he protects me, he supports
me, he respects me,' read her testimonial.
'He treats me like a goddess, he f***s me like a b****!'
Machado told Univision when she returned to Miami that 'I felt fine as a person, as a human being.'
'It was a very strong experience, very difficult in all senses, and I feel very happy with the
events in Spain. I had people's support once more and I gained respect for what I am as a person
and that was the purpose.'
Trump has also suggested that Clinton's campaign obtained U.S. citizenship for Machado. The Democrat's
aides say that's not true. Machado became a citizen on her own.
The scrutiny appears to have taken a toll on the actress and mother.
Hillary Clinton made Machado's strife with Trump over her weight the focal point of her charge
in last week's general election debate that the Republican is a sexist
In response to DailyMail.com's request for an interview, Machado's representatives said: 'Thank
you for reaching out regarding Alicia. At this point in time Alicia has said her comments about the
trump situation (please see her statement below) and we are no longer discussing the subject.
'If you are interested in talking about Alicia's career, her businesses and her philanthropy we
are open to discussing, however we will not be discussing the Trump subject any further.'
A long statement from Machado said Trump is 'attempting to distract from his campaign's real problems
and his inability to be the leader of this great country' by 'discrediting her.'
'When I was young, the now candidate, humiliated me, insulted me, disrespected me both publicly
and privately in the cruelest way. The same way this happened to me, it's clear that throughout the
years, he's continued his actions and behavior with other women.
'Therefore, I will continue to stand on my feet, sharing my story and my absolute support for
Secretary Clinton, on behalf of all women.'
Machado's commitment to spreading the word about the public humiliation she says the Republican
presidential nominee caused her does not, apparently, extend to interviews on the topic, however.
As of Wednesday evening, Hillary Clinton was still using Machado as an example of her opponent's
'lack of respect for women.'
'The list is long. He insulted Alicia Machado, the former Miss Universe. He said that pregnancy
is an inconvenience for a woman's employer,' Clinton said at a Women's Leadership Forum in Washington,
D.C..
She said, 'Recently, more than 20 people who worked on his TV show have come forward to say he
was frequently inappropriate with the cast and crew members – another reason why he is temperamentally
unfit to be president.'
Clinton was referring to an Associated Press report from Monday in which contestants and crew
members from The Apprentice claimed the married Trump rated participants by the size of their breasts
and talked about having sex with them.
Trump's campaign spokeswoman, Hope Hicks, said in response, 'These outlandish, unsubstantiated,
and totally false claims fabricated by publicity hungry, opportunistic, disgruntled former employees,
have no merit whatsoever.'
Defending his comments about women's looks Wednesday in a TV interview with Las Vegas channel
KSNV Trump said 'a lot of that was done for the purpose of entertainment.'
'I can tell you this: There is nobody – nobody,' he said, that has more respect for women than
I do.'
A spokesman for Clinton's campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Machado's
decision to stop doing interviews on Trump and how that might affect the Democratic candidate's own
speeches.
Clinton has no public events on her schedule between now and Sunday's presidential debate. Her
next rally is on Monday in Michigan.
FULL ALICIA MACHADO STATEMENT ON DONALD TRUMP
'The Republican candidate and his campaign are, once again launching attacks, insults and are
attempting to revive slanders and false accusations about my life, in order to humiliate, intimidate,
and unbalance me. These attacks are cheap lies with bad intentions. This, of course, is not the first
time the candidate insists on discrediting someone or insists on demoralizing women, minorities,
and people of certain religions through his hateful campaign. This is definitely one of his most
frightful characteristics. Through his attacks, he's attempting to distract from his campaign's real
problems and his inability to be the leader of this great country.
When I was young, the now candidate, humiliated me, insulted me, disrespected me both publicly
and privately in the cruelest way. The same way this happened to me, it's clear that throughout the
years, he's continued his actions and behavior with other women. Therefore, I will continue to stand
on my feet, sharing my story and my absolute support for Secretary Clinton, on behalf of all women
-- my sisters, aunts, grandmothers, cousins, women within the community. I want to thank all of my
Latinas and those who have supported me and given me love and respect for my career, and as a human
being. I became a United States citizen because my daughter was born here and because I wanted to
exercise my rights, among them, I wanted to vote.
I will continue standing firm in my lived experience as Miss Universe and even stronger with your
support. I've been so pleased and honored by so many kind and heartfelt words. I'm focusing on my
career and my work as a mother, and I will continue taking positive steps for the Latino community.
I will continue being an activist for women's rights and fighting for the respect we deserve. I appreciate
all your love and thank you again for your support.'
"... It's a pattern not just for the Clinton campaign, but liberals generally: the "irredeemable" "basket of deplorables"; the basement dwelling millenials. ..."
"... Worse, the Democrat approach is calculated: As Bernard Shaw says: "A blow in cold blood neither can nor should be forgiven." ..."
"... It's difficult to convince someone whose life is objectively worse that their life is better. And it's disengenuous to try. ..."
"... Neoliberal capitalism is not sustainable for these people. ..."
"... Neither party seems to be aligned with the interests of my union brothers and sisters. I'm sick and tired of hearing the kayfabe crap every election season about how I should vote dem to keep the evil GOPers from busting unions, when in reality both parties seem more or less committed to the corporate agenda of employment crapification. ..."
"... I believe in union's, but part of the decline can be directly laid at the feet of leadership that either knowingly or stupidly help elect people who aren't with their union members in any meaningful fashion. ..."
"... Some of the unions are straight out sell outs (I'm looking at you AFL/CIO – but the AFL kind of always has been, that's it's history, but now it's pretty appalling the positions being taken). Not sure about Teamsters and smaller unions are hit and miss I guess only a few are radical. The unions were defanged long ago in order to have un-threatening corporate unions and of course labor was the loser. But that still doesn't excuse their horrible political choices. ..."
"... Why in the hell are the Democrats parading around like they are the default? Oh my! The Republicans could get the White House snatched from the Dems! Why should an independent give a damn if the Democrats lose? If they are so freaking important, change your policies to win their votes legitimately you HACKs! ..."
"Fact-checking the vice-presidential debate between Kaine and Pence" [
WaPo ]. On the "insult-driven campaign" back-and-forth, where WaPo proffers a lovingly compiled
list of Trump's insults: If smearing an entire cohort of disfavored voters as racist and sexist
#BernieBros isn't an insult, I don't know what is. And that approach isn't isolated: It's
a pattern not just for the Clinton campaign, but liberals generally: the "irredeemable" "basket
of deplorables"; the basement dwelling millenials.
Worse, the Democrat approach is calculated: As Bernard Shaw says: "A blow in cold blood
neither can nor should be forgiven." So miss me with the insult discussion.
... ... ...
"I Listened to a Trump Supporter" [
Extra News Feed ]. The foreclosure crisis destroyed her landscraping business. Then she lost
her own house. "She told me that every week, it seemed there was another default letter, another
foreclosure, another bank demanding more blood from her dry veins. To her, that pile of default
notices and demands for payment looked suspiciously similar to Hillary Clinton's top donor list."
And she's not wrong.
"The Trump candidacy succeeded because of a massive revolt among rank-and-file Republicans
against their leaders. Should the Trump candidacy fail, as now seems likely, those leaders stand
ready to deny that the revolt ever happened. Instead, they'll have a story of a more or less normal
Republican undone only because (as Pence said last night) 'he's not a polished politician.' The
solution for 2020? Bring back the professionals-and return to business as usual" [David Frum,
The Atlantic ]. "It's unlikely to work. But you can understand why it's an attractive message
to a party elite that discovered to its horror that it had lost its base and lost its way."
"Trump faces new battleground threat from steelworkers: The United Steelworkers union is pledging
to make sure every one of its workers in make-or-break states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and
Ohio are well aware that the Republican presidential candidate may have circumvented U.S. laws
to import Chinese steel" [
Politico ].
"I Listened to a Trump Supporter" [Extra News Feed].
Thank the heavens the Banks made it out okay though. All those nice people might have had to
go through the same thing.
"It's difficult to convince someone whose life is objectively worse that their life is better.
And it's disengenuous to try. You can break down the specifics, sure.
What is the author talking about? Their lives ARE NOT better.
"Neoliberal capitalism is not sustainable for these people."
It is not sustainable period! What do you think will happen when all these people disappear?
My primary political concern is labor so why should I get behind a dem or a GOPer?
Neither party seems to be aligned with the interests of my union brothers and sisters. I'm
sick and tired of hearing the kayfabe crap every election season about how I should vote dem to
keep the evil GOPers from busting unions, when in reality both parties seem more or less committed
to the corporate agenda of employment crapification.
My union's bulletin arrived yesterday with a full color cover of Hillary touting how they are
with her.
I believe in union's, but part of the decline can be directly laid at the feet of leadership
that either knowingly or stupidly help elect people who aren't with their union members in any
meaningful fashion.
Some of the unions are straight out sell outs (I'm looking at you AFL/CIO – but the AFL kind
of always has been, that's it's history, but now it's pretty appalling the positions being taken).
Not sure about Teamsters and smaller unions are hit and miss I guess only a few are radical. The
unions were defanged long ago in order to have un-threatening corporate unions and of course labor
was the loser. But that still doesn't excuse their horrible political choices.
Al Gore: "The former vice president, a climate activist, will speak about not just Clinton's
plan to address global warming, but also the idea that voting for an independent presidential
candidate could deliver the White House to Republicans in the same way that Ralph Nader's candidacy
helped undermine his presidential bid in 2000."
Why in the hell are the Democrats parading around like they are the default? Oh my! The Republicans
could get the White House snatched from the Dems! Why should an independent give a damn if the
Democrats lose? If they are so freaking important, change your policies to win their votes legitimately
you HACKs!
Nah, just parade around an old loser… that will get those kids and independents invigorated
for sure! He made a movie! - ARGHH!!!! (this infuriates me).
"... Marshall's central importance to the Clintons' political operations was realized earlier this year by Citizens United. The conservative watchdog group filed a federal lawsuit for Marshall's State Department emails. ..."
"... At State, Marshall served as chief of protocol from 2009 to 2013. In that role, she helped the State Department and White House manage issues related to diplomatic protocol. ..."
"... The emails, which appear to be from Marshall's Gmail account, span the period from March 2015 through June 2016. ..."
Marshall's central importance to the Clintons' political operations was realized earlier this
year by Citizens United. The conservative watchdog group
filed a federal lawsuit for Marshall's State Department emails.
At State, Marshall served as chief of protocol from 2009 to 2013. In that role, she helped the
State Department and White House manage issues related to diplomatic protocol.
She entered the Clinton sphere during Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign, working as a
special assistant to Hillary Clinton. She later worked on Clinton's senatorial and presidential campaigns,
helping lead fundraising efforts.
The DC Leaks emails appear to be authentic.
The emails, which appear to be from Marshall's Gmail account, span the period from March 2015
through June 2016.
"... The Military Industrial Complex with the Saudi/Qatari/Gulf Mafia in cahoots with The Religious Cult We're No Longer Allowed To Mention, have it in the bag. ..."
"... Expect another war in the Middle East shortly after she's crowned. ..."
"... Oh please. Yeah I'd sooner eat a cyanide sandwich than vote for that corrupt witch. ..."
"... It's amusing to see the Guardian claim that it has "no bias", like when Marxists argue that their doctrine is a 'science' instead of a set of political beliefs. ..."
"... Do the 1%ers and biased media believe that even if Clinton wins that the Trump supporters will just shrug their shoulders? Not a chance. ..."
"... 2020 is going to be the most epic fought POTUS election in the history of America, that's if CLinton can stay upright and read the teleprompter for 4 years. ..."
"... The only winner here will be globalist bankers and mega multinationals, the losers will, as usual, be all of the common people. ..."
"... The Guardian will be 3 times a loser, despite it's supersonic propaganda campaign. 1) Brexit vote 2) Corbyn re-elected 3) Trump will win ..."
"... In terms of comparing how much they are working Trump is simply working harder. He was campaigning yesterday and is today as well. It shows how dedicated he is for this whilst Hillary is in hiding and no doubt will be until Sunday !!! ..."
"... At a townhall two days ago in Pennsylvania the Hillary Clinton campaign used a child actor, a daughter of a democrat state senator from Pennsylvania, to further her narrative. ..."
"... The American people are like a sleeping elephant, sedated by a tame and corrupt media, yet when awoken with the truth they will trample everything in their path. Clinton is running out of tranquilisers. ..."
The Military Industrial Complex with the Saudi/Qatari/Gulf Mafia in cahoots with The Religious
Cult We're No Longer Allowed To Mention, have it in the bag.
The Guardian is an independent voice in this year's election. That means no bias
It's amusing to see the Guardian claim that it has "no bias", like when Marxists argue
that their doctrine is a 'science' instead of a set of political beliefs.
Do the 1%ers and biased media believe that even if Clinton wins that the Trump supporters
will just shrug their shoulders? Not a chance.
2020 is going to be the most epic fought
POTUS election in the history of America, that's if CLinton can stay upright and read the teleprompter
for 4 years.
Trump and Sanders supporters are just getting started.
In terms of comparing how much they are working Trump is simply working harder. He was campaigning
yesterday and is today as well. It shows how dedicated he is for this whilst Hillary is in hiding
and no doubt will be until Sunday !!!
At a townhall two days ago in Pennsylvania the Hillary Clinton campaign used a child actor,
a daughter of a democrat state senator from Pennsylvania, to further her narrative.
Unfortunately all about Hillary is fake and as the media don't even pretend to practice journalism
concerning Hillary Clinton, citizen researchers have to do the media's job. Here is a video explaining
what took place.
The American people are like a sleeping elephant, sedated by a tame and corrupt media, yet
when awoken with the truth they will trample everything in their path. Clinton is running out
of tranquilisers.
Maybe instead of Al Gore, Michael Moore should hit the stump with Clinton
to work the crowd and sign people up to MoveOn.org membership since it will
be needed to defend Hillary in her up-coming impeachment trial in the
Republican Senate. It will bring back memories as we relive the Clinton
years all over again. And while the oxygen gets sucked out policy discussion
from Hillary's impeachment, she can get to work on Grand Bargain and finally
privatize SS and maybe no-fly zone & WW3, too. With so much stuff like that
going on, people should be sufficiently distracted from from their
shittacular healthcare, declining wages, and student loaners lurking in
basements as the number of states experiencing Obamacare "collapse" go from
current 4-7 to who knows … 10-20 or so.
The vice presidential debate was an irritating and boring event. One notable part was when Mike Pence
outlined his views of what the U.S. should do in Syria:
Asked how a Trump-Pence administration would stop the civil war carnage in Aleppo, Pence said
that he, at least, "truly believe(s) that what America ought to do right now is immediately establish
safe zones, so that families and children can work out of those areas," and "work with our partners [to]
make that happen. Provocations by Russia need to be met with American strength." If Russia "continues
to be involved" in airstrikes along with the Syrian government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad,
he said, "the United States of America should be prepared to use military force to strike the
military forces of the Assad regime" and "prevent this crisis in Aleppo."
Trump has said very little about Syria's civil war–and advocated none of the measures Pence
outlined.
That last part is not really true. Trump has
endorsed creating safe zones in Syria on
more than one occasion . While I don't believe Trump has a clear idea of what establishing a
safe zone requires, he has had no problem voicing support for the idea several times. The fact that
Pence felt comfortable outlining a very aggressive Syria policy in tonight's debate suggests that
Trump doesn't really have a problem with what his running mate proposed. As I said when I was watching
the debate, Pence's answer on Syria was deranged. He more or less threatened to initiate hostilities
with Russia, and he seemed oblivious to the serious negative consequences this would have. He kept
invoking "American leadership" and "American strength," as if uttering these phrases was all that
mattered. Pence's advocacy for much more U.S. involvement in Syria could have been an easy target
for Kaine, but of course he and Clinton have no disagreements with the Republican ticket on this
issue. For all the quarreling between the two campaigns, both tickets apparently support U.S. escalation
in Syria. As bad as the moderator for the debate was, she did at least manage to get both candidates
to take positions on an issue that was completely ignored in the first presidential debate.
Overall, Kaine's performance was shaky and didn't seem all that impressive to anyone that didn't
know much about him. Despite arguably having better foreign policy experience than Pence, he did
a worse job of demonstrating his readiness to be president if needed. His constant interruptions
of Pence were jarring and off-putting, and created the impression of being an overly loyal terrier
trying to defend his master. Pence's repeated failure to come to Trump's defense in response to Kaine's
many jabs presumably hurt Trump, but it also made Pence seem much less agitated and rattled. Neither
VP nominee significantly harmed his running mate, but Pence did a better job of making the case for
his party's ticket.
" it also made Pence seem much less agitated and rattled"
I agree. Kaine's nervousness, grimacing, and non-stop interruptions were annoying and a bit
flaky. Pence seemed more composed and stable, even if some of what he said was a lot of nonsense
straight out of the Interventionist Handbook.
Temperamentally, Pence is the guy you'd want a heartbeat away from taking that 3:00AM call
Kaine looked like he'd still be awake, jabbering into a dictaphone while vacuuming the Oval
Office for the fifth time.
As far as Syria, and the middle east in general, this is sort of why I glossed over the statements
that Hillary is a hawk: because I don't see any doves (that don't have far too many other problems
to support). Trump started out sounding like he was but as time went on it sounded more and more
like the regular republican "more money to the military. World Police! WIN!" talk.
So at this point it sounds like both are going to keep us in the middle east. Though it seems
Trump may mess with the Iran deal (though it might be less attacking it as it is just poking at
the administration any chance you get).
As far as the debate, Pence wanted a debate about policy while Kaine wanted a debate about
Trump. if this was a presidential debate Pence probably would've been in a better standing.
But I think Kaine wasn't even fighting him. He wasn't after policy. Beyond stating his points
and a token defense his primary purpose was one thing, to say "remember, you aren't voting for
Pence, but for Trump." He's picturing the public saying "Oh, Pence seems pretty coo..oh yeah,
but he's with Trump..ewww."
It pretty much sums up the entire deal with the republican side of the campaign. Take Trump
out of it and you have a strong platform and an actual attempt at trying to extend somewhat past
the old GOP mindset while evoking that Need For Change that pushed democrats back in '08. It's
an actual strong case.
The issue is that it's all on the hopes of Trump. And THAT is the hard sell. I don't even see
many supporters defending him. It's like Pence: they bypass him and either focus on the dream
or the enemy.
Which leads to something interesting: If the roles were reversed: same platform, same general
message, but Pence as President and Trump as VP, would it be hard for folks not two-feet in the
Democratic ticket to vote R? Would there be a questioin as to who would win?
I have a feeling that many would say : " I don't know. But I would have liked that campaign I
would have liked that campaign very much.
If you'd told me that one of the two gentlemen debating last night was a Virginian and asked me
who it was, I would have said Pence, solely because of his demeanor.
Pence's thoughts on Syria were dumb (and dangerous), but I find it hard to hold that against
run-of-the-mill politicians these days because they're getting such rotten information and advice
from establishment "experts" and mainstream pundits. The country needs a changing of the guard
when it comes to "experts".
Kaine struck me as a third stringer trying to compensate for his own weaknesses by poking a
stick in the other fellow's spokes. And no better on Syria, that's certain.
The way the question was phrased, evoking endangered children and the classic what should America
'do' .doesn't really allow a candidate to say 'nothing – we have no vital interests in Syria'.
If Pence is pushing that same "get tough with Russia and Assad" idea he's taking the opposite
tack than Trump. Either they aren't communicating, the campaign figured that they could get away
with completely altering their position from one debate to the next, or Pence doesn't really care
what Trump thinks and is an unreformed GOP hawk.
Isn't the joke here Pence had a great debate running for President? In reality, it is very likely
Pence does all the real work and all Donald really wants is the national audience to take the
credit. So it was a goo debate for Pence that has minimal effect on the polls because the headliners
personality are dominant this cycle.
Tim Kaine was overly-aggressive and appeared to be not ready for Prime time.
"The fact that Pence felt comfortable outlining a very aggressive Syria policy in tonight's debate
suggests that Trump doesn't really have a problem with what his running mate proposed. As I said
when I was watching the debate, Pence's answer on Syria was deranged. He more or less threatened
to initiate hostilities with Russia, and he seemed oblivious to the serious negative consequences
this would have. He kept invoking"
I didn't watch the debate. This morning, when I was asked about it - I didn't think it would
be a contest. Gov. Pence, should have no issues.
But if I had watched and heard the above comments. I might have had conniptions. I am not going
to say more at the moment. I would sound like I am abandoning my candidate. I like Gov. Pence,
but that response is rife with campaign and policy self inflicting damages - good grief.
Pence is a fine Christian man and I'm glad he did well last night. However, his hawkishness was
disturbing. Somebody who is pro life should be wary of policies that lead to wars and thousands
dying.
As somebody who wants our borders secured, I don't feel I have a choice on Nov. 8. I will be
praying, though, that Trump doesn't delegate the FP heavy lifting to his vice president as Bush
43 did to his.
"Safe Zones" sound all well and good, but the only way to guarantee a safe zone is to have US
troops on the ground in Syria. You cannot enforce a safe zone from the air.
So, it sounds like both parties are willing to commit US ground troops to Syria and risk a
possible confrontation with Russian troops who are already there.
This is more Neocon nonsense being foisted on the American people by politicians who do not
really understand the ramifications of their actions.
Jesus. Very disappointed in Pence's answer on Syria. War against russia would cost thousands of
american lives. We need to stay out of Syria plain and simple. Pence's statememt also goes completely
against "we need to beat ISIS" rant that trump goes on every two sentences. To beat ISIS we would
have to be on the same side as Syria/Russia. This whole election is cluster .How the heck did
we end up with these two choices?
LHM: exactly. I'd just add that war with Russia conventionally would probably costs hundreds of
thousands of us soldier lives and could cripple our military for subsequent actual DEFENSE against
the country that actually will have the means to threaten the very existence or freedom of the
USA:
China, with an economy vastly bigger and more diversified than Russia's, a population eight
times as numerous as Russia's, and for that matter a far, far larger diaspora to influence politics,
culture, and economics in the formerly white western countries (USA, Canada (especially "British"
Columbia), and Australia, in particular).
Also, as pointed out in columns on Unz and elsewhere, conventional war could escalate to nuclear
exchange more easily than many people think. God help us.
How many safe zones do we need in Syria, we already have 3. 1. Govt held areas (unless we bomb them).
2. Kurdish territory (unless Turkey bombs them). 3. The Turkish zone in N. Syria.
In fact weren't we begging Turkey to establish a zone just for this purpose?
Of course, what we really want is an Assad free zone that covers all of Syria and filled with
Al Qaeda groups that we pretend are moderates.
Trump needs to state clearly that he is not in agreement with Pence position on Russia & Syria.
To beat ISIS we need to be on the same side as Russia. If Pence is a fine Christian, how can he
be so carless to be on side of ISIS in Syria like Obama is, and have hand in destroying Syria
the cradle of Christianity.
"Jesus. Very disappointed in Pence's answer on Syria. War against russia would cost thousands
of american lives. We need to stay out of Syria plain and simple. Pence's statememt also goes
completely against "we need to beat ISIS" rant that trump goes on every two sentences. To beat
ISIS we would have to be on the same side as Syria/Russia."
it's the problem with being involved with the entire middle east without a firm desire of exactly
what we want from there. We started out fighting Sunni threats, then took out the big Sunni country
that we earlier set up to hold back the big Shi'a country we felt was a threat. So when said Shi'a
country gained power we stood against them. And..well, that sort of ended up with us fighting
both sides at the same time depending on the location.
It's much more complicated than that, which is why jumping in there without really understanding
the region was a bad idea.
" This whole election is cluster .How the heck did we end up with these two choices?"
My belief.
Democratic voters are used to 'playing it safe' instead of going for more Left choices since
"liberal" triggers a BIG backlash in this country. Thus why you get candidates like Clinton instead
of candidates like Sanders and why you keep getting things like Obamacare's quasi-private insurance
instead of single-payer.
Republican voters are sick of the GOP and wanted someone, anyone, who wasn't a democrat but
wasn't holding the GOP platform. Remember how, other than Trump, the other Republican candidates
were all trying to "Out Right" each other? Trump was the only one that did more than outright
ignore them.
So in a way, the GOP caused it all by putting so much hate against the Left that the Left always
plays it safe and caring so little about their base that they eloped to the first man that told
them they were pretty and deserved better.
Clinton was the 'safe pick'. Trump smiled. And here we are.
It actuslly sounds less stupid when you see it that way. It's less that we're all idiots and
more just a set of unfortunate events caused by a political scene that looked a lot like a youtube
comment section.
I tend to discount Pence's comments on Syria in the debate. If Trump manages to win, he rather
than Pence will be calling the shots on foreign policy. And to the extent that Trump has any coherent
ideas on foreign policy, how could he come down hard on the mistake of invading Iraq and support
getting deeply involved in Syria?
In fact, Trump may have welcomed Pence's statement on Syria, since it may have attracted the
votes of some establishment and neocon types without binding him to any particular policy if he
becomes president.
"In fact, Trump may have welcomed Pence's statement on Syria, since it may have attracted the
votes of some establishment and neocon types without binding him to any particular policy if he
becomes president."
Altogether too close to the Bush-Cheney parallel for comfort. The last thing we want is for
the neocons to come creeping back in through the Blair House back door.
Thought Pence was the superior of the two. Considering the options in Syria while running for
President/VP you have to show a position of strength. My thought is that Trump wants to play nice
with Putin for a while and eventually will pull out of Syria. You just can't say that during an
election or you look weak.
Pence is a fine Christian -- I admire his courage in bringing up abortion in such an important
debate. Unfortunately, most conservatives have a blind spot toward Christians in the Mideast.
Part of it might be bias–Orthodox Christians aren't "true" Christians. Also many Evangelicals
have been brain washed into believing that support of Israel is the only thing that counts.
"My thought is that Trump wants to play nice with Putin for a while and eventually will pull out
of Syria."
One thing Trump has successfully done is to launch a campaign so free of any real policy that
anything you want to believe can be projected onto him. Play nice with Putin and then pull out?
Sure! He's never said that, and in fact he's said the exact opposite but why not?
EMAIL RELEASE: Citizens United Releases 198 Pages Of Emails Between State Department And Clinton
Foundation
10/05/2016
Today Citizens United is releasing 198 pages of emails between the State Department and Clinton
Foundation on a host of issues.
43 of the pages have to do with the creation of the "Friends of the Clinton Centre" 501c3,
its connection to an official State Department trip to Ireland, and a dinner that Secretary Clinton
attended that doesn't appear on her schedule.
Other topics include China, Haiti, Iran, Cuba, Mexico, and more.
The specter of foreign influence and the appearance of conflicts of interest are critically
important issues. We will continue to release emails such as these in the weeks and months to
come.
In these emails, you'll find the following:
• "Is this accurate?"
• "Following Secretary Clinton's lecture at Dublin City University…Patrick McDermott will provide
a room for us for a brief discussion on the Friends of the Clinton Centre 501…"
• "And what does Megan Rodham have to do with this"
• "…asked wjc to help avoid currency legislation b/c it'll mean lots of Chinese businesses
collapsing…"
• "When HRC visited Sarajevo, she proposed a program to train Bosnian entrepreneurs through
the Clinton Foundation(?)"
• "Oh come on…you can make this happen…"
• "Jake - unfortunately, like a bad penny, I'll keep turning up one way or another."
• "Kicking DS off"
• "Greetings from Jet Li"
• "[REDACTED] wants barbados"
• "I think it should be okay. We have interacted with this guy."
Sadly, this is just business as usual for the FBI. Hoover accepted valuable gifts from wealthy
friends and refused to acknowledge the existence of the mob, much less prosecute them.
The entire hearings and so-called investigations surrounding Hillary's emails are a theatrical
production designed to make it appear as though the US Feral gangster government actually cares
about enforcing the Rule of Law. Nothing could be further from the truth. Everyone of the posturing
DemonRat–ReplutoRat Party political parasites have been bribed to NOT enforce the Law against
other political parasites, the banking gangsters, Con Street swindlers, criminal crony capitalist
conporations and filthy Oligarchs.
Not one single current or former KKK (Klinton Krime Klan) gangster will ever be charged with
a crime by our corrupt US Department of Corruption, Injustice & Persecution. Not one single current
or former KKK (Klinton Krime Klan) gangster will ever be prosecuted for their violations of any
US Federal criminal statutes. Not one single current or former KKK (Klinton Krime Klan) gangster
will ever see the inside of a prison cell regarding the innumerable Federal felonies committed
by the KKK (Klinton Krime Klan).
The investigations and hearings are all smoke and mirrors political theater. Enjoy it for the
sick display of utter corruption and indifference on display by the political parasites and government
gangster thugs (FBi). Remember it well when these criminals are begging for mercy at the gallows
and guillotines. Don't be swayed by their protestations of innocence at that time. They are all
very corrupt, very willing participants in the looting of America and the destruction of the Rule
of Law. They all richly deserve their eventual dates at the gallows and guillotines.
"... Today, Jason Chaffetz, Chair of the House Oversight Committee, sent a follow-up letter requesting additional information and blasting the investigative process in which the "FBI inexplicably agreed to destroy the laptops knowing that the contents were the subject of Congressional subpoenas and preservation letters." ..."
"... But, perhaps the most startling takeaway from the Chaffetz letter is that limitations imposed by "side agreements" with Mills and Samuelson strictly prohibited the FBI from investigating the "intent" of Hillary's staff to obstruct justice and/or destroy evidence subject to a Congressional subpoena . ..."
"... Even more disturbing, Chaffetz points out that the FBI agreed to the "side agreements" in June 2016 at which point they were already aware that Combetta deleted Hillary's emails using Bleachbit on 3/31/15 after a conference call with Cheryl Mills and Hillary attorney, David Kendall. That said, the restrictions imposed by the "side agreements" strictly prohibited the FBI from reviewing Mills' emails during that period which could have spoken to her intent to destroy evidence. ..."
Two days ago the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Bob Goodlatte (R-Virginia), wrote a letter
to AG Lynch that, for the first time, revealed that the FBI apparently struck "side agreements"
with both Cheryl Mills an Heather Samuelson to, among other things, "destroy" their "laptops after
concluding their search" (see "
FBI Allowed 2 Hillary Aides To "Destroy" Their Laptops In Newly Exposed 'Side Agreements' ").
Today, Jason Chaffetz, Chair of the House Oversight Committee, sent a follow-up
letter requesting additional information and blasting the investigative process in which the
"FBI inexplicably agreed to destroy the laptops knowing that the contents were the subject
of Congressional subpoenas and preservation letters."
But, perhaps the most startling takeaway from the Chaffetz letter is that limitations
imposed by "side agreements" with Mills and Samuelson strictly prohibited the FBI from investigating
the "intent" of Hillary's staff to obstruct justice and/or destroy evidence subject to a Congressional
subpoena . As pointed out by Chaffetz, the "side agreements" allowed the FBI to
only review emails between 6/1/14 through 2/1/15 and only those sent/received by one of Clinton's
four email addresses used during her tenure as Secretary of State .
Even more disturbing, Chaffetz points out that the FBI agreed to the "side agreements" in June
2016 at which point they were already aware that Combetta deleted Hillary's emails using Bleachbit
on 3/31/15 after a conference call with Cheryl Mills and Hillary attorney, David Kendall. That said,
the restrictions imposed by the "side agreements" strictly prohibited the FBI from reviewing Mills'
emails during that period which could have spoken to her intent to destroy evidence.
But, as always, we're sure the DOJ and FBI will promptly clarify all of these new questions in
a completely open and transparent way.
"prohibited the FBI from investigating the "intent" of Hillary's staff to obstruct justice
and/or destroy evidence subject to a Congressional subpoena"
Um… yeah, that was the whole purpose of the exercise..
People should be impeached here.
Start with Loretta for her tarmac golf and grandkid discussions with Bill and supervision of
the Hillary/FBI travesty.
Their hubris is what is shocking and frightening. Like a blitz they are trying to overwhelm the
rule of law. Like rabid dogs they are willing to take some hits if they can make it to the throats
of the system. Conspiracy theories of sleeper cells and fifth columns have nothing on the pervasive
nature of the threat we face.
While this election may be the last chance it is only the start since to root out this threat
to the Republic makes cancer look like a mild cold. These people are insidious and liberty loving
people better be prepared to stand on Election Day and beyond.
The Clinton Dynasty might be seeing what is happening and buying "no extradition agreement" with
some foreign countries and the getting the money "out of Dodge" before she loses. Every American
should read this and linked followups of this:
Of Harding's speechifying, H.L. Mencken wrote at the time, "It reminds me of a string of wet sponges."
Mencken characterized Harding's rhetoric as "so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It
drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh.
It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash." So, too, with Hillary
Clinton. She is our Warren G. Harding. In her oratory, flapdoodle and balderdash live on.
And when a person keeps pointing out the importance of keeping one's word, it almost always
means that he or she is lying.
At least Harding was aware of the damage his friends caused to him: "I have no trouble with
my enemies. I can take care of my enemies in a fight. But my friends, my goddamned friends, they're
the ones who keep me walking the floor at nights! "
As I mentioned a few weeks ago, Harding had the political courage to pardon, and free from
prison, Eugene V. Debs for his crime of giving an anti-war speech the Wilson administration did
not like.
Harding did not believe in foreign involvements and was never personally implicated in the
financial corruption of his administration.
The Presidency was pushed on him, and he admitted felt he was not qualified. I believe Harding gets a bad rap because he was not the leader of bold actions (wars) and the
corruption of people in his administration was well-documented. His death was widely mourned in the USA.
As far as long term harm to the country, the do-nothing Harding was not bad for the country.
If Clinton is to be compared to Harding, it would be to view Clinton as a "new" Harding who
now believes she is well qualified to be President, wants to do much foreign military involvement,
perhaps resulting in war, who is now trusting of her sociopathic friends to give her good advice,
and who is personally involved in selling government favors (via the Clinton foundation)
Clinton is probably well coached by well paid advisors in her oratory. Probably Harding
wrote his own. I would prefer Clinton to be like the old Harding, and the country would muddle through.
When it comes to war & nukes, I believe that HRC is the more dangerous of
the two.
Before I explain, I would like to invite Yves or any female NC reader to
consider & give their POV on what I'm about say.
HRC is more dangerous because she is the 1st woman to become a serious
contender for a position that has traditionally been considered a "man's job".
Therefore she believes she must not, in any way, be perceived as "soft" or
lacking "toughness" or aggressiveness. She feels compelled to "out-macho" the
macho guys.
Obviously this could have serious implications in any situation involving
escalating tensions. Negotiation or compromise would be off the table if she
thought it could be perceived as soft or weak (and she contemplates being a 2
term pres.)
What say you NC readers? Is this a justified concern or am I letting male
bias color my view?
"... Well, I would hope that informed voters who have a healthy fear of the military-industrial-political complex will vote to keep the scariest of the two re: nuclear war out of office. This particular concern is the reason why I will in all likelihood be voting for the man I've been ridiculing for most of the past year, simply because I am terrified of the prospect of Hillary Clinton as Commander-in-Chief. ..."
"... Trump is a bad choice for a long list of reasons, but the most outrageous things he has proposed require legislation and I think it will be possible to defeat his essential sociopathy on that level, since he will face not only the opposition of the Dem Party, but also MSM and a significant number of people from his own party. ..."
"... But when it comes to the President's ability to put American 'boots on the ground' vs. some theoretical enemy, no such approval from Congress is necessary. Hillary Clinton will be in a position to get us into a costly war without having to overcome any domestic opposition to pull it off. ..."
"... What scares me is my knowledge of her career-long investment in trying to convince the generals and the admirals that she is a 'tough bitch', ala Margaret Thatcher, who will not hesitate to pull the trigger. An illuminating article in the NY Times revealed that she always advocates the most muscular and reckless dispositions of U.S. military forces whenever her opinion is solicited. ..."
"... All of her experience re: foreign policy that she's been touting is actually the scariest thing about her, when you look at what her historical dispositions have been. The "No Fly Zone" she's been pushing since last year is just the latest example of her instinct to act recklessly, as it directly invites a military confrontation with Russia. ..."
"... Her greatest political fear-that she might one day be accused by Republicans of being "weak on America's enemies"-is what we have to fear. That fear is what drives her to the most extreme of war hawk positions, since her foundational strategy is to get out in front of the criticism she anticipates. ..."
"... How reckless is Trump likely to be? Well, like Clinton-and all other civilian Commanders-in-Chief, Trump be utterly dependent upon the advice of military professionals in deciding what kind of responses to order. But in the position of The Decider, there is one significant difference between Trump and Clinton. Trump is at least willing and able to 1) view Putin as someone who is not a threat to the United States and 2) is able/willing to question the rationality of America's continued participation in NATO. ..."
Well, I would hope that informed voters who have a healthy fear of the military-industrial-political
complex will vote to keep the scariest of the two re: nuclear war out of office. This particular
concern is the reason why I will in all likelihood be voting for the man I've been ridiculing
for most of the past year, simply because I am terrified of the prospect of Hillary Clinton as
Commander-in-Chief.
Trump is a bad choice for a long list of reasons, but the most outrageous things he has
proposed require legislation and I think it will be possible to defeat his essential sociopathy
on that level, since he will face not only the opposition of the Dem Party, but also MSM and a
significant number of people from his own party.
But when it comes to the President's ability to put American 'boots on the ground' vs.
some theoretical enemy, no such approval from Congress is necessary. Hillary Clinton will be in
a position to get us into a costly war without having to overcome any domestic opposition to pull
it off.
What scares me is my knowledge of her career-long investment in trying to convince the
generals and the admirals that she is a 'tough bitch', ala Margaret Thatcher, who will not hesitate
to pull the trigger. An illuminating
article in the NY Times revealed that she always advocates the most muscular and reckless
dispositions of U.S. military forces whenever her opinion is solicited.
All of her experience re: foreign policy that she's been touting is actually the scariest
thing about her, when you look at what her historical dispositions have been. The "No Fly Zone"
she's been pushing since last year is just the latest example of her instinct to act recklessly,
as it directly invites a military confrontation with Russia.
Her willingness to roll the dice, to gamble with other people's lives, is ingrained within
her political personality, of which she is so proud.
Her greatest political fear-that she might one day be accused by Republicans of being "weak
on America's enemies"-is what we have to fear. That fear is what drives her to
the most extreme of war hawk positions, since her foundational strategy is to get out in front
of the criticism she anticipates.
It is what we can count on. She will most assuredly get America into a war within the first
6-9 months of her Presidency, since she will be looking forward to the muscular response she will
order when she is 'tested', as she expects.
How reckless is Trump likely to be? Well, like Clinton-and all other civilian Commanders-in-Chief,
Trump be utterly dependent upon the advice of military professionals in deciding what kind of
responses to order. But in the position of The Decider, there is one significant difference between
Trump and Clinton. Trump is at least willing and able to 1) view Putin as someone who is not a
threat to the United States and 2) is able/willing to question the rationality of America's continued
participation in NATO.
These differences alone are enough to move me to actually vote for someone I find politically
detestable, simply because I fear that the alternative is a high probability of war, and a greatly
enhanced risk of nuclear annihilation-through miscalculation-under a Hillary Clinton Presidency.
Excellent, really excellent summary. Thank you. Especially this observation:
"Her greatest political fear-that she might one day be accused by Republicans of being "weak
on America's enemies"-is what we have to fear. That fear is what drives her to the most extreme
of war hawk positions, since her foundational strategy is to get out in front of the criticism
she anticipates."
2. She (like most sociopaths, although it is unclear whether she is one or not) is not able
to apologize for mistakes. New York Times:
In the end, she settled on language that was similar to Senator John Kerry's when he was the
Democratic nominee in 2004: that if she had known in 2002 what she knows now about Iraqi weaponry,
she would never have voted for the Senate resolution authorizing force.
Yet antiwar anger has festered, and yesterday morning Mrs. Clinton rolled out a new response
to those demanding contrition: She said she was willing to lose support from voters rather
than make an apology she did not believe in.
"If the most important thing to any of you is choosing someone who did not cast that vote or
has said his vote was a mistake, then there are others to choose from," Mrs. Clinton told an
audience in Dover, N.H., in a veiled reference to two rivals for the nomination, Senator Barack
Obama of Illinois and former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina.
Her decision not to apologize is regarded so seriously within her campaign that some advisers
believe it will be remembered as a turning point in the race: either ultimately galvanizing
voters against her (if she loses the nomination), or highlighting her resolve and her willingness
to buck Democratic conventional wisdom (if she wins).
At the same time, the level of Democratic anger has surprised some of her allies and advisers,
and her campaign is worried about how long it will last and how much damage it might cause
her.
3. Due to her greed she and her close entourage represent a huge security risk. Emailgate had
shown that as for computer security she is an absolute zero. Absolutely, horribly incompetent
and absolutely, horribly greedy (the key idea of private server was to hide her "pay for play"
deals related to Clinton foundation). The same level of computer security incompetence is prevalent
in her close circle (Huma Abedin, Cheryl Mills, etc) .
4. She strongly believe in the neoconservative foreign-policy agenda by re-casting the neoconservatives'
goals in liberal-interventionist terms. In reality the difference between "liberal interventionism"
and Neoconservatism are pretty superficial (Kagan already calls himself liberal interventionalist)
and Hillary's willingness to infest a foreign-policy establishment with neocons is beyond any
doubt and comparable with Bush II.
As the recent Republican primary contest had shown neoconservatives have virtually no support
among the US voters. Their base is exclusively military-industrial complex. So the reason she
is reaching out to those shady figures is a deceptively simple: she shares common views, respects
their supposed expertise, and wants them in her governing coalition. That means that "… today's
Democrats have become the Party of War: a home for arms merchants, mercenaries, academic war planners,
lobbyists for every foreign intervention, promoters of color revolutions, failed generals, exploiters
of the natural resources of corrupt governments. …" (
http://crookedtimber.org/2016/09/27/donald-trump-the-michael-dukakis-of-the-republican-party/#comment-693421
)
5. She is completely numb to human suffering. She has a total lack of empathy for other people.
"... The only bright spot in the prospect of a Hellary Klinton presidency is the probability that she may not survive long enough to start a war with Russia. I wonder how the training for the Mark I body double is coming? ..."
"... And how can anyone with a functioning brain cell think that anything a politician says or promises during an election has any connection to how they will act once elected? Remember Obama, Mr. "Audacity of Hope?" ..."
The only bright spot in the prospect of a Hellary Klinton presidency is the probability
that she may not survive long enough to start a war with Russia. I wonder how the training for
the Mark I body double is coming?
On the other hand, why should anyone think that a bubble-headed blowhard like Trumpet has the
intelligence or gumption to have any effect upon the operations of the Warfare State? When the
opinion makers of his own party and the neoliberal leaders of Klinton's party are all riding on
the Military-Industrial gravy train looking for the next enemy to keep business booming?
And how can anyone with a functioning brain cell think that anything a politician says
or promises during an election has any connection to how they will act once elected? Remember
Obama, Mr. "Audacity of Hope?"
"... "I am not satisfied [with the Chilcot report]," ..."
"... . "It won't bring me back my family; it won't bring me back my arms or it won't bring me back my country. My country Iraq is destroyed because of this invasion." ..."
"... "when the missile hit my home." ..."
"... "I was still young, living with my family. At 12:00 o'clock in the night I suddenly heard a very big blast hitting my home, the house collapsed on us. There was a lot of fire and I heard my family screaming and shouting," ..."
"... "We were farmers. We had sheep and cows outside. There wasn't a military base near to my home," ..."
"... "There are lots of people like me who lost some members of their family. So we have no answer for this: why they have done it – we don't know." ..."
"... "Yes, Saddam [Hussein] was a terrible person and a dictator, but what's happening now is much worse than it was under Saddam. They took one Saddam and they got us many more Saddams," ..."
"... "inadequate" ..."
"... "deeply sorry for the loss of life" ..."
"... "good faith". ..."
"... "This makes me angry. He just said 'sorry' and he also said he would do the same thing again. They have caused so many deaths and so much suffering […]," ..."
"... "to say 'sorry' and just walk away with it – it's not justice." ..."
"... "I want to ask him if he wants to come back with me to Iraq and tell the Iraqi people that he will do the same thing again…" ..."
"... "presented with a certainty that was not justified." ..."
"... "chaos" ..."
"... "Before the war started we knew that there were no weapons of mass destruction. We knew that they're only coming for economic reasons and to have power in this part of the world. And you can see what's happening today in the Middle East. Iraq, Syria – it's all linked to the 2003 invasions of Iraq," ..."
"... "There's was violence but now there's hundreds of more violence than before…If you want to rebuild Iraq again you need probably another hundred years to do this…I go back to Iraq and I see the country is destroyed," ..."
Published time: 02:03 Edited time: 8 Jul, 2016 02:55
Get short URL
Blair's apology for the Iraq invasion is not going to bring the "destroyed" country and dead people
back, a disabled Iraqi man, who lost his whole family, told RT. He demands justice for those whose
actions only created "many more Saddams". "I am not satisfied [with the Chilcot report],"
25-year-old Ali Abbas said . "It won't bring me back my family; it won't bring me back my
arms or it won't bring me back my country. My country Iraq is destroyed because of this invasion."
Thirteen years ago, Abbas lost his mother, father, and a little brother as well as 13 other members
of their family in the UK-US allied 2003 invasion.
Now residing in London, he recounts terrors of the war, saying he can vividly remember the day
and time "when the missile hit my home."
"I was still young, living with my family. At 12:00 o'clock in the night I suddenly heard
a very big blast hitting my home, the house collapsed on us. There was a lot of fire and I heard
my family screaming and shouting," Abbas said.
That attack left the young man disabled – having suffered burns to 60 percent of his body, he
lost his arms amputated due to severe burns.
The one thing that Abbas does not understand is why the militants had to target his home and family
of peaceful farmers.
"We were farmers. We had sheep and cows outside. There wasn't a military base near to my home,"
he said. "There are lots of people like me who lost some members of their family. So we
have no answer for this: why they have done it – we don't know."
Abbas says that the Iraq's 2003 invasion and the following regime change brought the country leaders
much worse than Saddam Hussein.
"Yes, Saddam [Hussein] was a terrible person and a dictator, but what's happening now is much
worse than it was under Saddam. They took one Saddam and they got us many more Saddams," he
said.
The so-called Chilcot inquiry released by Sir John Chilcot criticized former UK government led
by Tony Blair for "inadequate" planning and underestimation of the Iraq invasion's consequences.
It also found that Britain's choice to support the Iraq war unjustified.
Speaking in light of the Chilcot inquiry release, Tony Blair said he was "deeply sorry for
the loss of life" , but stressed that he acted in "good faith".
"This makes me angry. He just said 'sorry' and he also said he would do the same thing again.
They have caused so many deaths and so much suffering […]," Abbas said, adding that "to
say 'sorry' and just walk away with it – it's not justice."
"I want to ask him if he wants to come back with me to Iraq and tell the Iraqi people that
he will do the same thing again…" he says.
The Chilcot report also showed that Britain's decision to bomb Iraq was not clearly evaluated
as one of the major arguments for the campaign – Iraq's weapons of mass destruction – was "presented
with a certainty that was not justified."
Abbas agrees that the WMD was just a pretext for the UK and US to initiate war which resulted
in total "chaos" in the Middle East and proliferation of terrorism.
"Before the war started we knew that there were no weapons of mass destruction. We knew that
they're only coming for economic reasons and to have power in this part of the world. And you can
see what's happening today in the Middle East. Iraq, Syria – it's all linked to the 2003 invasions
of Iraq," Abbas said.
He says that the 2003 invasion unleashed terrorists that Iraq did not know of before.
"There's was violence but now there's hundreds of more violence than before…If you want to
rebuild Iraq again you need probably another hundred years to do this…I go back to Iraq and I see
the country is destroyed," he added.
"... Average US wages rose 350% in the 40 years between 1932 and 1972, but only 22% over the next 40 years. The pattern holds similar across the developed world. In other words, for all their hype, the computer and the internet have done less to lift economic growth than the flush toilet. ..."
"... ahem… the computer and the internet sped outsourcing to countries like China. Ask China or India how their economic growth has been since 1972. The author is mixing up several things at once. ..."
"... When so many of our jobs, technology and investment is offshored to China (and elsewhere), the future for innovation is certainly not bright, and this should be obvious to everyone, including the author. ..."
" Average US wages rose 350% in the 40 years between 1932 and 1972, but only 22% over the next
40 years. The pattern holds similar across the developed world. In other words, for all their hype,
the computer and the internet have done less to lift economic growth than the flush toilet."
ahem… the computer and the internet sped outsourcing to countries like China. Ask China or India
how their economic growth has been since 1972. The author is mixing up several things at once.
Great comments, and please allow me to piggyback off them:
When so many of our jobs, technology and investment is offshored to China (and elsewhere), the
future for innovation is certainly not bright, and this should be obvious to everyone, including
the author.
When so many have contributed so much, only to see their jobs and livelihoods offshored again
and again and again, that great jump the others have will then zero out OUR innovation!
"... The potential threats both candidates pose are real. Those advocating Hillary as the better, safer choice cannot offer any reliable assurances that she will be able, or willing, to pursue policies that increase the well-being and security of any but the already affluent and secure. ..."
"... Hillary's long and unhappy history of war-mongering has not, imho, received anything like the media scrutiny it deserves, and won't until she's correctly identified in the minds of most as an advocate of 'liberal interventionism'/violent regime change and on an equal footing of imbecility and irresponsibility in the minds of the public as Bush, Cheney, and Blair. ..."
"... When the busts of Hillary, Bush, Blair, and Cheney form a Mt. Rushmore of savage stupidity for all to see and all school children studying the early 21st-century American-UK wars recognize the monument as such, that task of 'highlighting' her role in this enormously costly and damaging humanitarian and political disaster will be at least part way done. ..."
"... Obama, as Stevenjohnson notes, has not entirely surrendered his dream of forcing 'democracy' on Syria. There is abundant evidence, however, the US and a number of other nations have been arming Syrian rebels (ISIL and Al Quaida) since 2011, at least. ..."
"... The result of Obama and Hillary's love of violent regime change has been an increase in the suffering of millions in North Africa and the Middle East, the collapse of basic services such as fresh water and hospitals, and a new flood of refugees seeking to escape the beneficence of Hillary Clinton and her boss. ..."
"... If you are supporting Hillary you are supporting violent regime change in the Middle East and the love of violence of Bush and Cheney, not too mention drone strikes, the surveillance state. That's who you are. ..."
"... Dealing first with Libya and Syria, Hillary Clinton served as the US Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013, which makes her at least one of the prime architects of US foreign policy, and certainly the most important administration official after Obama responsible for foreign policy. Facts which place the burden of proof regarding her involvement in US foreign policy formation and execution squarely on you. ..."
"... HRC's involvement in Iraq is less well-understood, and that's likely no accident either, given the mileage democrats have generated out of pinning the entire bi-partisan debacle on Bush and Cheney. From the linked dialogue above featuring Robert Wright and Max Abrahms (Northeastern) http://bloggingheads.tv/videos/43967?in=01:10&out=12:21 ..."
"... The chaotic civil war in Syria and Iraq seems like another example where the U.S. is having a hard time "thinking" things thru realistically. ..."
"... One interpretation is she's stupid and vicious as a badge of class honor, blissfully consistent with the bloodthirsty record of Madeleine Albright and Henry Kissinger. Unfortunately, that might be true, though I think if it is true, it is more likely a product of being caught up in the amoral bubble of political and media process that has enveloped the whole foreign policy establishment than any personal psychopathy. ..."
@ 278 There's nothing quite so amusing as advocates of free speech 'commanding' the comments section
of somebody else's blog and then issuing permissions to comment, or instructions to how and what
to post. (fn, rich, colin, TM in one form, or another)
Merian is quite right that in the artificially and arbitrarily limited universe of a one-time
choice between just two options, everything written can be seen as pro/con against one or the
other if everything that is written has only one meaning and will be read and understood
by all as having the same meaning.
The fact is that a great many people inside the US and outside the US may well lack any/much
understanding of the decision-making processes that led up to Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria,
not to mention America's long history with Iran, and America's support of Evil Axis bad guy number
1 Saddam Hussein. The dynamics are complex even for those familiar with the basic topography.
The rhetorical parallels leading up to the Iraq invasions and the presidential elections are
striking and easy to identify. Facts don't matter, the urgency and severity of the threat demands
uniform action, and the enemy is a once in an eon threat of epic proportion to the physical and
moral existence of the known universe.
The potential threats both candidates pose are real. Those advocating Hillary as the better,
safer choice cannot offer any reliable assurances that she will be able, or willing, to pursue
policies that increase the well-being and security of any but the already affluent and secure.
Hillary's long and unhappy history of war-mongering has not, imho, received anything like
the media scrutiny it deserves, and won't until she's correctly identified in the minds of most
as an advocate of 'liberal interventionism'/violent regime change and on an equal footing of imbecility
and irresponsibility in the minds of the public as Bush, Cheney, and Blair.
When the busts of Hillary, Bush, Blair, and Cheney form a Mt. Rushmore of savage stupidity
for all to see and all school children studying the early 21st-century American-UK wars recognize
the monument as such, that task of 'highlighting' her role in this enormously costly and damaging
humanitarian and political disaster will be at least part way done.
For Merian and others: a timely post from Matt Welch at Reason on Gary Johnson via the o'l perfessor
who sees the coverage of Hillary and Trump as you.
28 September 2015 "Obama tells the UN Assad must go."
18 August 2011 "Assad Must Go Obama Says" (Wapo) (no links to follow to avoid moderation)
1 August 2012 "Obama Authorizes Secret US Support for Syrian Rebels" (Reuters)
Obama, as Stevenjohnson notes, has not entirely surrendered his dream of forcing 'democracy'
on Syria. There is abundant evidence, however, the US and a number of other nations have been
arming Syrian rebels (ISIL and Al Quaida) since 2011, at least.
The result of Obama and Hillary's love of violent regime change has been an increase
in the suffering of millions in North Africa and the Middle East, the collapse of basic services
such as fresh water and hospitals, and a new flood of refugees seeking to escape the beneficence
of Hillary Clinton and her boss.
All this after the 'lessons' of Iraq and Afghanistan.
If you are supporting Hillary you are supporting violent regime change in the Middle East
and the love of violence of Bush and Cheney, not too mention drone strikes, the surveillance state.
That's who you are.
kidneystones 10.02.16 at 3:58 am
ZM@ 303. The linked dialogue above explores the role Hillary and Obama, in particular, played
in providing the arms and support to a rebellion that Assad, like Gaddafi, could have ended years
ago.
Like Gaddafi, Assad is not being attacked by moderate democrats keen to legalize gay marriage,
but rather Sunni militias deeply sympathetic to ISIL and Al Quaida, or those forces operating
in Syria and western Iraq.
You're right to point out that the only result of US support of ISIL related Sunnis has been
the prolonging of the civil war and the promulgation of the delusion that violent-regime change
brings peace and security. Yes, five years of US arms, threats, and intimidation has destroyed
Syria, in much the same was as the Hillary promoted war in Libya destroyed that regime.
The pro-Hillary-Obama media is extremely reluctant in the run-up to the election to point out
explicitly what a spectacular FP failure the US has created for itself right now, with Russian
jets flying over Aleppo and Assad about to finally humiliate the insurgents and all those like
Hillary and Obama who encouraged the bloodshed.
The Obama-Hillary policy has been a five-year bloodbath and there's no sign Hillary wants to
do anything but press for a no-fly zone over Syria in order for the US to continue to funnel more
death and destruction into the already devastated moonscape.
It ain't like anyone she knows is dying over there. Syrians can't vote in November.
The attitude of her supporters seems be: fuck it – Syria is on the other side of the world,
so what's the big deal?
Mitt Romney tied the family dog to the roof of his car. What about that ?
kidneystones 10.02.16 at 4:05 am
@ 305 Hi Merian.
Go tell your students that you're supporting the candidate who voted for the Iraq invasion
(biggest mistake in modern US history), persuaded plenty of other Democrats and ordinary Americans
to suspend their judgment and do the same. And who also played an instrumental role in destroying
Libya, promotes violent regime-change in Syria and enjoys the support of all the same neocon warmongers
who've made the US into a pariah state. Play the 'We came, we saw, he died – ha-ha-ha" Hillary
CBS video for them.
Then explain to them that Hillary is the better candidate.
See what happens.
Omega Centauri 10.02.16 at 4:40 am 314
I don't see HRC as a prime mover in either Iraq or Libya. In the first case Iraq was a neocon/Bush
project, and they were threatening to extract a terrible price from anyone who used their position
to block their ambitions. Libya was primarily a Arab-league cum French-British project. Not supporting
it could have potentially damaged our relationship with key allies France and Britain. Of course
Libya was a slippery slope, once started it soon became obvious there was no solution where Qaddafi
survived and the Libyan people wouldn't end up paying dearly. Not that her acquiescence in either
case demonstrated either good long term judgement or courage, but it also doesn't demonstrate
that she was a principle architect of either project.
314@ "I don't see HRC as a prime mover in either Iraq, or Libya."
That's probably a great comfort to the grifters keen to see her elected. The facts, however,
suggest otherwise. Dealing first with Libya and Syria, Hillary Clinton served as the US Secretary
of State from 2009 to 2013, which makes her at least one of the prime architects of US foreign
policy, and certainly the most important administration official after Obama responsible for foreign
policy. Facts which place the burden of proof regarding her involvement in US foreign policy formation
and execution squarely on you.
HRC's involvement in Iraq is less well-understood, and that's likely no accident either,
given the mileage democrats have generated out of pinning the entire bi-partisan debacle on Bush
and Cheney. From the linked dialogue above featuring Robert Wright and Max Abrahms (Northeastern)
http://bloggingheads.tv/videos/43967?in=01:10&out=12:21
bruce wilder 10.02.16 at 7:49 pm
Anarcissie @ 239: We basically have a whole class of people, at the top of the social order,
who seem devoid of a moral sense - a problem which the upcoming election isn't going to touch,
much less solve. I don't blame Clinton for this . . .
JimV @ 317: I am sorry if I mischaracterized BW as implying that HRC is evil, . . .
Peter T @ 320: Whatever the merits of their individual stances, there is no reason to suppose
that either Obama or Hillary can exert more than loose control over this mess [the multi-sided
regional civil war engulfing Syria and northern Iraq]
stevenjohnson @ 324: The recent leak that Clinton is against nuclear armed cruise missiles
and isn't committed to Obama's trillion dollar nuclear weapons upgrade appears to suggest she's
not quite on board with plans for general war.
LFC @ 330: I disagree w the notion that the pt of nuclear 'modernization' is to make plausible
the threat of "imminent general nuclear war." If U.S. military planners took hallucinogenic drugs
and went nuts, they could "plausibly" threaten "imminent general nuclear war" right now with the
US nuclear arsenal as currently configured. They don't need to upgrade the weapons to do that.
The program is prob more the result of rigid, unimaginative thinking at top levels of Pentagon
and influence of outside companies (e.g. Boeing etc) that work on the upgrades.
I don't know if that seems like a somewhat random collection of precursors to assemble as preface
to a comment. I was thinking of picking out a few upthread references to climate change and the
response to it (or inadequacy thereof) as well.
I am a little disturbed by the idea of leaving the impression that I think Hillary Clinton
is "evil". What I think is that American politics in general is not generating realistic, adaptive
governance.
I am using that bloodless phrase, "realistic, adaptive governance", deliberately, to emphasize
wanting to step outside the passions of the Presidential election. I think the Manichean narrative
where Trump is The Most Horrible Candidate Evah and Everyone Must Line Up Behind Clinton as an
Ethical Imperative of a High Order is part of the process of propaganda and manipulation that
distorts popular discussion and understanding and helps to create a politics that cannot govern
realistically and adaptively. This is not about me thinking Trump is anything but a horrible mess
of a candidate who ought to be kept far from power.
I see Clinton as someone who is trapped inside the dynamics of this seriously deranged politics
qua political process. I don't see her as entirely blameless. Politicians like Obama and either
Clinton, at the top of the political order, are masters (keeping in mind that there are many masters
working to some extent in opposition to one another as rivals, allies, enemies and so on) of the
process and create the process by the exercise of their mastery, as much as they are mastered
by it. I see them as trapped by the process they have helped (more than a little opportunistically)
to create, but trapped as Dr Frankenstein is by his Creature.
Clinton must struggle with the ethical contradictions of governance at the highest levels of
leadership: she must, in the exercise of power in office and out, practice the political art of
the possible in relation to crafting policy that will be "good" in the sense of passably effective
and efficient - this may involve a high degree of foresightful wonkery or a lethally ruthless
statesmanship, depending upon circumstances. Beside this business of making the great machinery
of the state lumber forward, she must strive to appear "good", like Machiavelli's Prince, even
while playing an amoral game of real politick, gathering and shepherding a complex coalition of
allies, supporters, donors and cooperative enemies.
Machiavelli, when he was considering the Princely business of appearing "good", was contending
with the hypocrisies and impossible idealism of authoritarian Catholic morality. He barely connected
with anything that we would recognize as democratic Public Opinion and could scarcely conceive
of what Ivy Lee or Edward Bernays, let alone Fox News, Vox and the world wide web might do to
politics.
We are trapped, just as Clinton is trapped, in the vast communication nightmare of surrealistic
news and opinion washing in upon us in a tide that never ebbs. We are trapped by the politics
of media "gotchas" and Kinsley Gaffes (A Kinsley gaffe occurs when a political gaffe reveals some
truth that a politician did not intend to admit.)
I don't think Clinton lacks a moral sense. What I think is that Clinton's moral sense is exhausted
calculating what to say or do within the parameters of media-synthesized conventional wisdom policed
by people who are themselves exhausted trying to manage it. Matt Lauer's interview with Clinton
was notorious for the relentless and clueless questioning about the email server, although I,
personally, was shocked when he asked her a question that seemed premised on the idea that veterans
should be offended by admitting the Iraq War was a mistake.
I would think it is easy to see that the media circus is out of control, especially when a
clown like Trump graduates from The Apprentice to the Republican nomination. YMMV, but
I think this is a serious problem that goes beyond vividly imagined sepia-toned parodies of Trump's
candidacy as the second coming of Mussolini.
While we're getting ourselves agitated over Trump's racism or threats to bar Muslims from entry,
apparently the Military-Industrial Complex, left on autopilot, is re-designing the nation's nuclear
arsenal to make the outbreak of nuclear war far more likely. And, the closest Clinton gets to
a comment, campaign commitment or public discussion, let alone an exercise of power, is a PR "leak"!!!
The chaotic civil war in Syria and Iraq seems like another example where the U.S. is having
a hard time "thinking" things thru realistically. Clinton offered up a sound-bite last year,
saying that she favored imposing a "no-fly" zone, which was exposed as kind of crazy idea, given
that the Russians as well as Assad's government are the ones flying, not to mention the recent
experience with a no-fly zone in Libya. One interpretation is she's stupid and vicious as
a badge of class honor, blissfully consistent with the bloodthirsty record of Madeleine Albright
and Henry Kissinger. Unfortunately, that might be true, though I think if it is true, it is more
likely a product of being caught up in the amoral bubble of political and media process that has
enveloped the whole foreign policy establishment than any personal psychopathy. What's most
alarming to me is that we cannot count on personal character to put the brakes on that process,
which is now the process of governance. I am writing now of the process of governance by public
relations that was has been exposed a bit in profiles of the Deputy National Security Advisor
for Strategic Communications, Ben Rhodes.
In Syria, it has become almost comical, if you can overlook the bodies piling up, as the U.S.
has sought a the mythical unicorn of Syrian Moderate Democrats whom the Pentagon or the CIA can
advise, train and arm. This is foreign policy by PR narrative and it is insanely unrealistic.
But, our politics is trapped in it, and, worse, policy is trapped in it. Layer after layer of
b.s. have piled up obscuring U.S. interests and practical options. Recently, U.S. forces supporting
the Turks have come dangerously close to blowing up U.S. forces supporting the Kurds. When you
find yourself on opposing sides of a civil war like Charles I you may be in the process of losing
your head. Some of the worst elements opposing Assad have been engaged in a transparent re-branding
exercise aimed at garnering U.S. aid. And, U.S. diplomats and media face the high challenge of
explaining why the U.S. supports Saudi Arabia in Yemen.
But, hey, Clinton will get Robert Kagan's vote and a better tomorrow is only a Friedman unit
away, so it is all good.
kidneystones 10.02.16 at 9:24 pm
@328 stevenjohnson and Peter T cover the details. As an outsider supportive of negotiated settlements
in all cases, rather than unilateral military action and violent regime change, I'm interested
principally in ensuring that partisan political preferences do not obscure the historical record.
Bluntly put, dictators routinely abuse bomb their own civilians as the 'need' arises. Nor is the
US the only state actor keen to profit in the broadest sense of the term from political division.
The UN was formed, in large part, to provide a forum/mechanism for peaceful conflict resolution.
Each time state actors such as Russia, China, the US, France, and the UK either bypass the UN,
or use the UN to sanction attacks by larger states on smaller states, the entire edifice becomes
a little weaker.
Hillary is not the only individual with Libyan and Syrian blood on her hands. She's simply
the only individual directly involved in Iraq, Libya, and Syria running to the 45th president
of the US.
bruce wilder 10.02.16 at 9:54 pm
Rich Puchalsky @ 334
People are in information overload most of the time, and where politics are concerned, they
really just want to know who to root for. They ask, "who is the good guy? who is the bad guy?"
"Whose right?" "What should be done?" And, people like the opinions they have, whatever those
opinions may be; they use their political opinions to feed their sense of self-esteem and social
belonging, for better and for worse.
I have some friends, who are really into a particular sport as fans, not participants. One
guy knows everything about baseball. It is fun to watch a game with him, because he knows when
someone is about to try to steal a base and stuff like that and he can explain the manager's strategy
and has gossip about the players careers and personal lives. And, apparently, he has an encyclopedic
knowledge of baseball history - appears to, anyway: what dramatic thing happened in game 3 of
the 1967 World Series and so on and exactly why everyone hated Ty Cobb.
No one like that shows up at CT to talk politics. Maybe it is just as well. Sports guys can
wield that knowledge and remain affable, but political guys tend to be arrogant and off-putting.
But, I do think we could use more of that spirit sometimes.
I was thinking about what a brilliant innovation the Clinton Foundation is, how well it is
designed to solve the problems of Machiavelli's Prince. But, we would struggle to discuss it in
those terms; the partisan contest means that the CF is either horribly corrupt or prosaically
innocent. The pressure to evaluate it is so high, that seeing the functional details is hard.
I've seen some articles that attempt to understand the CF as a means to the political ambitions
of the Clintons, but they seldom grasp the awesome accomplishment it is in ways that also fully
understand why enemies of the Clintons are keen to attack it and why it so reliably produces the
neoliberal pablum that Thomas Franks despises. If we could imagine a Marx tackling the CF as a
vehicle of class interest, that would be pretty interesting.
I took a $915 million loss on my taxes in 1995, while you, Hillary CLinton, lost $6
billion in taxpayer's money during your tenure as Secretary of State. grunk
Oct 4, 2016 7:52 PM
Clinton Son-in-Law's Firm Is Said to Close Greece Hedge Fund
"two years later, the Greece-focused fund is shutting down, after losing nearly 90 percent
of its value..."
" The one silver lining for the fund's investors from all of this is that they will
have a somewhat larger tax loss on investments to claim next year. "
"During 2011, Secretary of State Clinton
lobbied the leaders of European governments to bail out the Greek financial system. She advocated
imposing austerity measures on Greece-raising taxes, cutting public employee salaries and eliminating
social welfare programs-to make the investors holding the debt happy." are we there yet
Oct 4, 2016 9:09 PM Interesting, google is highly opinionated in its search engine about Hillary
and trump. Google trump news and Hillary news. Its selection is heavily slanted to Hillary is
great, Trump is falling off a cliff. Alternate reality.
The question was an obvious trap and looks like selected by Huma Abedin. Trump could decimate
Hillary responding with the questin about her defence of 12 years old girl rapist, but shoose not
to.
Notable quotes:
"... I've been writing here for years about the question "What makes large parts of the white working class vote for the GOP?" and my main answer is that people who are a step up from the bottom will do a lot to preserve their sense that they have someone to look down on, which racism functions socially to preserve. Social wages of whiteness, etc. ..."
"... Believe it or not, many strands of conservatism are / were critical of capitalism. If you view conservatism as wanting to preserve or reinstate a kind of aristocracy, it's pretty easy to see why. Aristocracies like hereditary lands, preserving them, etc. Conservatism has been captured by pro-capitalists for, again, historically path-dependent reasons. ..."
In the U.S., at least, perceived threats to social status obviously have something to do with
it. I've been writing here for years about the question "What makes large parts of the white working
class vote for the GOP?" and my main answer is that people who are a step up from the bottom will
do a lot to preserve their sense that they have someone to look down on, which racism functions
socially to preserve. Social wages of whiteness, etc.
Since you can't really do much about educating
people out of racism that hasn't already been done, maybe you can do something about the "step
up from the bottom" part by making society less precarious.
But whenever people here wrote something like this around the election, they were told that they
only wrote this because they were white, that they only cared about white people, and that they
supported white supremacy. That is the intellectual heritage that the HRC supporters here will
leave behind. It's tremendously stupid and they've added nothing.
merian: "Overall, though, you need to be at least to some degree critical of capitalism to mount
a coherent ecological political theory, I think."
Believe it or not, many strands of conservatism are / were critical of capitalism. If you view
conservatism as wanting to preserve or reinstate a kind of aristocracy, it's pretty easy to see
why. Aristocracies like hereditary lands, preserving them, etc. Conservatism has been captured
by pro-capitalists for, again, historically path-dependent reasons.
"... I think Trump may be the one and only person to increase the likelihood the US will still be an independent country in ten years. ..."
"... Trump may have some issues, but at least he psychologically identifies with the US. Most US elites think of themselves as world citizens and really couldn't care less if the US becomes like the DRC. ..."
"... Univision's lead owner is Hillary's largest contributor, the Israeli-American media mogul Haim Saban: ..."
"... This convenient FCC rule change hands them a nice exit strategy. Not convinced to contribute to the Clinton Foundation yet? They make magic happen. ..."
There is a real risk the media will be wholly foreign owned very soon. The FCC under Pres.
Obama eliminated the rule on foreign ownership. This, the TPP, and giving up internet control
are of a piece.
I think Trump may be the one and only person to increase the likelihood the US will still
be an independent country in ten years. With Clinton we may end up losing our sovereignty
by 2020. Trump may have some issues, but at least he psychologically identifies with the US.
Most US elites think of themselves as world citizens and really couldn't care less if the US becomes
like the DRC.
I trust Trump's instincts much more than Hillary's. The continued existence of an independent
US will be very, very important for the world to have any degree of pluralism. Any global hegemony
is likely to be unpleasant for most people.
Grupo Televisa, a Mexican company with a minority stake in the Spanish-language station
Univision, might now be able to increase its ownership.
Univision's lead owner is Hillary's largest contributor, the Israeli-American media mogul
Haim Saban:
On June 27, 2006, Saban Capital Group led a group of investors bidding for Univision
Communications, the largest Spanish-language media company in the United States.
Other investors in the Saban-led group were Texas Pacific Group of Fort Worth, Texas and
Thomas H. Lee Partners. The group was successful in acquiring Univision with a bid valued at
$13.7 billion.
This convenient FCC rule change hands them a nice exit strategy. Not convinced to contribute
to the Clinton Foundation yet? They make magic happen.
Afaict, neither HRC nor Trump has said much of anything about the worldwide
network of U.S. bases. HRC doesn't talk about (this aspect of) the U.S. global
military footprint, and while Trump rambles on about making S Korea and Japan
shoulder more (or all) of their own security (and ponders aloud whether it
might be a good idea for both to acquire their own nuclear weapons), I haven't
heard him address the issue of bases: a question is whether Trump even knows
that the base network exists.
See also
Girl Talk at Trump Tower
MoDo, NYT. "After working with psychologists to figure out how to goad
Trump into an outburst in the first debate, the commanding Hillary saved the Machado provocation
until the end."
This was such garbage from the get go. Anyone with minor audio production
experience would have known that was a mic problem. It isn't the kind of thing
I would wonder if someone did intentionally. They certainly could have tried to
correct the problem at the soundboard as the debate went on.
"... As a side note, it's obvious that there are at least three separate US policies active in Syria. The Defense Dept supports the largely Kurdish YPG against ISIS, the CIA works with Gulf backers to support the Free Syrian Army – an amalgam of mostly ineffective "moderate" rebels and effective, but murderous, Islamists affiliated to al-Qaeda, and State hovers around making noises about Assad, variously placating and irritating the Turks and dickering with the Russians. Whatever the merits of their individual stances, there is no reason to suppose that either Obama or Hillary can exert more than loose control over this mess. stevenjohnson , 10.02.16 at 12:59 pm LFC @300 It is unclear to me how a change from an independent secular national state in Syria to a patchwork of sectarian statelets wholly dependent upon foreign support is anything but a regime change. Unless of course, the phrase "regime change" merely means the murder of a designated leader and his replacement by someone acceptable to the regime changers. ..."
"... CIA of course, as more or less the President's Praetorian Guard over humanity at large, is no more under the Secretary of State than the Pentagon. ..."
"... It seems to have been forgotten that the democratic rebels were lynching black Africans within days of their glorious uprising. Barack Obama is too tan for the Klan, thus it was advisable for a loyal servant to provide an excuse for a half-Kenyan man to support the mass murder of darker skinned people. ..."
"... She repeated the performance in the Benghazi affair, where she loyally excused the murder of Stevens as a religious mob, instead of a falling out with his jihadi employees ..."
"... Lee A. Arnold is sort of correct there was once a genuine democratic Syrian opposition, largely inspired by the economic liberalization (neoliberalization according to many CTers,) in the face of the stresses of the world economic downturn and the prolonged Syrian droughts. Nonetheless there was from almost the very beginning an organized Islamist element that relied on violence, and refused to negotiate any reforms whatsoever, despite the Assad government's attempt to do so. Whether he was sincere is moot. ..."
"... Arnold's other point that Trump's professed plans are not for peace but victory is correct. Whether he has any real ideas how to achieve this other than firing generals until he gets a winner is anybody's guess. Like Nixon, Trump has a secret plan. ..."
"... The recent leak that Clinton is against nuclear armed cruise missiles and isn't committed to Obama's trillion dollar nuclear weapons upgrade appears to suggest she's not quite on board with plans for general war. (Yes, the purpose of this program is to prepare for general nuclear war, or at minimum, plausible threat of imminent general nuclear war.) It is unclear whether this was leaked to make her look good to the public, or to discredit her with the military's higher ups. (It is likely dissident military played a role in the leak, either way.) ..."
"... I firmly believe!…most ordinary people don't vote interests, they vote the national good. It's the rich and their favored employees who vote their interests. ..."
As a side note, it's obvious that there are at least three separate US policies active in
Syria. The Defense Dept supports the largely Kurdish YPG against ISIS, the CIA works with Gulf
backers to support the Free Syrian Army – an amalgam of mostly ineffective "moderate" rebels and
effective, but murderous, Islamists affiliated to al-Qaeda, and State hovers around making noises
about Assad, variously placating and irritating the Turks and dickering with the Russians.
Whatever the merits of their individual stances, there is no reason to suppose that either
Obama or Hillary can exert more than loose control over this mess.
stevenjohnson, 10.02.16 at 12:59 pm
LFC @300 It is unclear to me how a change from an independent secular national state in Syria
to a patchwork of sectarian statelets wholly dependent upon foreign support is anything but a
regime change. Unless of course, the phrase "regime change" merely means the murder of a designated
leader and his replacement by someone acceptable to the regime changers.
@306 "And (Clinton) also played an instrumental role in destroying Libya…"
@316 "Hillary Clinton served as the US Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013, which makes her at
least one of the prime architects of US foreign policy…"
It was NATO which attacked Libya. The prime "architects" were well known, namely, Cameron and
Sarkozy. The US role in this matter was conducted largely through NATO, the CIA and international
diplomacy. In the US, relations with Cameron and Sarkozy would be conducted largely by either
Obama personally, with other diplomatic duties taken up by the UN ambassador Samantha Power, a
figure that has always been in an ambiguous relationship with the Secretary of State. CIA
of course, as more or less the President's Praetorian Guard over humanity at large, is no more
under the Secretary of State than the Pentagon.
It seems to have been forgotten that the democratic rebels were lynching black Africans
within days of their glorious uprising. Barack Obama is too tan for the Klan, thus it was advisable
for a loyal servant to provide an excuse for a half-Kenyan man to support the mass murder of darker
skinned people. Enter that dutiful public servant, able to suffer undeserved ignominy in
service to her country. (She repeated the performance in the Benghazi affair, where she loyally
excused the murder of Stevens as a religious mob, instead of a falling out with his jihadi employees.)
Lee A. Arnold is sort of correct there was once a genuine democratic Syrian opposition,
largely inspired by the economic liberalization (neoliberalization according to many CTers,) in
the face of the stresses of the world economic downturn and the prolonged Syrian droughts. Nonetheless
there was from almost the very beginning an organized Islamist element that relied on violence,
and refused to negotiate any reforms whatsoever, despite the Assad government's attempt to do
so. Whether he was sincere is moot.
Arnold's other point that Trump's professed plans are not for peace but victory is correct.
Whether he has any real ideas how to achieve this other than firing generals until he gets a winner
is anybody's guess. Like Nixon, Trump has a secret plan.
Peter T @320 "As a side note, it's obvious that there are at least three separate US policies
active in Syria…Whatever the merits of their individual stances, there is no reason to suppose
that either Obama or Hillary can exert more than loose control over this mess." Skipping over
the question of how obvious it is to CT and its regular commentariat that the military has a semi-independent
policy, the idea of Presidential leadership does sort of include a vague notion that the President
sets the policy, not the generals. The facts being otherwise show how the US is a deeply militaristic
polity. I would add the CIA is very much the President's army. State is more or less, Other, on
the multiple choice exam. Trump's hint he would fire generals til he finds a winner suggests he
more or less agrees that the military is an independent enterprise in the political market (which
is what US governance seems to be modeled on.)
The recent leak that Clinton is against nuclear armed cruise missiles and isn't committed
to Obama's trillion dollar nuclear weapons upgrade appears to suggest she's not quite on board
with plans for general war. (Yes, the purpose of this program is to prepare for general nuclear
war, or at minimum, plausible threat of imminent general nuclear war.) It is unclear whether this
was leaked to make her look good to the public, or to discredit her with the military's higher
ups. (It is likely dissident military played a role in the leak, either way.)
The fact that these kinds of issues are ignored in favor of twaddle about Clinton Foundation,
emails and the actions of the Secretary State, an office whose relevance has been dubious for
decades, says much about the level of democratic discourse.
Rich Puchalsky, the primary reason so many white workers vote Republican is because they are
voting values, which are religious, not policies. Even more to the point, the notion that voting
is like a market transaction (a very liberal idea) founders on the fact…
I firmly believe!…most ordinary people don't vote interests, they vote the national good.
It's the rich and their favored employees who vote their interests.
As to the religious bigotry, well, once it was necessary to say or write "racial bigotry,"
because everyone knew bigotry to be an expression of religious belief. Today, the very notion
of religious bigotry is more or less forbidden as some sort of expression of anti-religious fanaticism.
"... The chaotic civil war in Syria and Iraq seems like another example where the U.S. is having a hard time "thinking" things thru realistically. ..."
"... One interpretation is she's stupid and vicious as a badge of class honor, blissfully consistent with the bloodthirsty record of Madeleine Albright and Henry Kissinger. Unfortunately, that might be true, though I think if it is true, it is more likely a product of being caught up in the amoral bubble of political and media process that has enveloped the whole foreign policy establishment than any personal psychopathy. ..."
Anarcissie @ 239: We basically have a whole class of people, at the top of the social order,
who seem devoid of a moral sense - a problem which the upcoming election isn't going to touch,
much less solve. I don't blame Clinton for this . . .
JimV @ 317: I am sorry if I mischaracterized BW as implying that HRC is evil, . . .
Peter T @ 320: Whatever the merits of their individual stances, there is no reason to suppose
that either Obama or Hillary can exert more than loose control over this mess [the multi-sided
regional civil war engulfing Syria and northern Iraq]
stevenjohnson @ 324: The recent leak that Clinton is against nuclear armed cruise missiles
and isn't committed to Obama's trillion dollar nuclear weapons upgrade appears to suggest she's
not quite on board with plans for general war.
LFC @ 330: I disagree w the notion that the pt of nuclear 'modernization' is to make plausible
the threat of "imminent general nuclear war." If U.S. military planners took hallucinogenic drugs
and went nuts, they could "plausibly" threaten "imminent general nuclear war" right now with the
US nuclear arsenal as currently configured. They don't need to upgrade the weapons to do that.
The program is prob more the result of rigid, unimaginative thinking at top levels of Pentagon
and influence of outside companies (e.g. Boeing etc) that work on the upgrades.
I don't know if that seems like a somewhat random collection of precursors to assemble as preface
to a comment. I was thinking of picking out a few upthread references to climate change and the
response to it (or inadequacy thereof) as well.
I am a little disturbed by the idea of leaving the impression that I think Hillary Clinton
is "evil". What I think is that American politics in general is not generating realistic, adaptive
governance.
I am using that bloodless phrase, "realistic, adaptive governance", deliberately, to emphasize
wanting to step outside the passions of the Presidential election. I think the Manichean narrative
where Trump is The Most Horrible Candidate Evah and Everyone Must Line Up Behind Clinton as an
Ethical Imperative of a High Order is part of the process of propaganda and manipulation that
distorts popular discussion and understanding and helps to create a politics that cannot govern
realistically and adaptively. This is not about me thinking Trump is anything but a horrible mess
of a candidate who ought to be kept far from power.
I see Clinton as someone who is trapped inside the dynamics of this seriously deranged politics
qua political process. I don't see her as entirely blameless. Politicians like Obama and either
Clinton, at the top of the political order, are masters (keeping in mind that there are many masters
working to some extent in opposition to one another as rivals, allies, enemies and so on) of the
process and create the process by the exercise of their mastery, as much as they are mastered
by it. I see them as trapped by the process they have helped (more than a little opportunistically)
to create, but trapped as Dr Frankenstein is by his Creature.
Clinton must struggle with the ethical contradictions of governance at the highest levels of
leadership: she must, in the exercise of power in office and out, practice the political art of
the possible in relation to crafting policy that will be "good" in the sense of passably effective
and efficient - this may involve a high degree of foresightful wonkery or a lethally ruthless
statesmanship, depending upon circumstances. Beside this business of making the great machinery
of the state lumber forward, she must strive to appear "good", like Machiavelli's Prince, even
while playing an amoral game of real politick, gathering and shepherding a complex coalition of
allies, supporters, donors and cooperative enemies.
Machiavelli, when he was considering the Princely business of appearing "good", was contending
with the hypocrisies and impossible idealism of authoritarian Catholic morality. He barely connected
with anything that we would recognize as democratic Public Opinion and could scarcely conceive
of what Ivy Lee or Edward Bernays, let alone Fox News, Vox and the world wide web might do to
politics.
We are trapped, just as Clinton is trapped, in the vast communication nightmare of surrealistic
news and opinion washing in upon us in a tide that never ebbs. We are trapped by the politics
of media "gotchas" and Kinsley Gaffes (A Kinsley gaffe occurs when a political gaffe reveals some
truth that a politician did not intend to admit.)
I don't think Clinton lacks a moral sense. What I think is that Clinton's moral sense is exhausted
calculating what to say or do within the parameters of media-synthesized conventional wisdom policed
by people who are themselves exhausted trying to manage it. Matt Lauer's interview with Clinton
was notorious for the relentless and clueless questioning about the email server, although I,
personally, was shocked when he asked her a question that seemed premised on the idea that veterans
should be offended by admitting the Iraq War was a mistake.
I would think it is easy to see that the media circus is out of control, especially when a
clown like Trump graduates from The Apprentice to the Republican nomination. YMMV, but
I think this is a serious problem that goes beyond vividly imagined sepia-toned parodies of Trump's
candidacy as the second coming of Mussolini.
While we're getting ourselves agitated over Trump's racism or threats to bar Muslims from entry,
apparently the Military-Industrial Complex, left on autopilot, is re-designing the nation's nuclear
arsenal to make the outbreak of nuclear war far more likely. And, the closest Clinton gets to
a comment, campaign commitment or public discussion, let alone an exercise of power, is a PR "leak"!!!
The chaotic civil war in Syria and Iraq seems like another example where the U.S. is having
a hard time "thinking" things thru realistically. Clinton offered up a sound-bite last year,
saying that she favored imposing a "no-fly" zone, which was exposed as kind of crazy idea, given
that the Russians as well as Assad's government are the ones flying, not to mention the recent
experience with a no-fly zone in Libya. One interpretation is she's stupid and vicious as
a badge of class honor, blissfully consistent with the bloodthirsty record of Madeleine Albright
and Henry Kissinger. Unfortunately, that might be true, though I think if it is true, it is more
likely a product of being caught up in the amoral bubble of political and media process that has
enveloped the whole foreign policy establishment than any personal psychopathy. What's most
alarming to me is that we cannot count on personal character to put the brakes on that process,
which is now the process of governance. I am writing now of the process of governance by public
relations that was has been exposed a bit in profiles of the Deputy National Security Advisor
for Strategic Communications, Ben Rhodes.
In Syria, it has become almost comical, if you can overlook the bodies piling up, as the U.S.
has sought a the mythical unicorn of Syrian Moderate Democrats whom the Pentagon or the CIA can
advise, train and arm. This is foreign policy by PR narrative and it is insanely unrealistic.
But, our politics is trapped in it, and, worse, policy is trapped in it. Layer after layer of
b.s. have piled up obscuring U.S. interests and practical options.
Recently, U.S. forces supporting
the Turks have come dangerously close to blowing up U.S. forces supporting the Kurds. When you
find yourself on opposing sides of a civil war like Charles I you may be in the process of losing
your head. Some of the worst elements opposing Assad have been engaged in a transparent re-branding
exercise aimed at garnering U.S. aid. And, U.S. diplomats and media face the high challenge of
explaining why the U.S. supports Saudi Arabia in Yemen.
But, hey, Clinton will get Robert Kagan's vote and a better tomorrow is only a Friedman unit
away, so it is all good.
"... If the goal for both candidates was to avoid self-inflicted wounds , Clinton certainly had the better showing. Trump showed how easily he could be baited and distracted by criticism ..."
"... the only attack on Clinton that really landed was when he hit her on her cynical maneuvering on TPP, and that attack worked because it happened to be true and reminded voters why Clinton isn't trustworthy, but the vast majority of Americans don't know or care about TPP and so the effect of this attack will likely be minimal. ..."
"... Remarkably, Trump mostly failed to use Clinton's foreign policy record against her, and he spent more of his time having to clarify or defend his own "positions" with little success. ..."
"... He mentioned the Libyan war only in passing, but never even tried to explain why Clinton was responsible for any of it. Clinton was able to deflect this by pointing out that Trump backed intervention in Libya, and that was the end of it. Foreign policy is one of Clinton's biggest liabilities and one of the most obvious ways to question her judgment, but Trump isn't prepared enough to talk about policy to use it against her. ..."
So she won the debate on points, and probably won it in the court of public opinion, and in
the process eased liberal anxiety and pushed the race back toward its "Hillary by four" equilibrium.
What she didn't do, however, was goad Trump into a true meltdown or knock him out with a truly
devastating attack.
If the goal for both candidates was to
avoid self-inflicted wounds, Clinton certainly had the better showing. Trump showed how easily
he could be baited and distracted by criticism, and even when he was gesturing in the direction of
talking about policy he fell back on many of his worst arguments (e.g., "take the oil," inane complaints
about the nuclear deal, etc.). As I recall, the only attack on Clinton that really landed was when he hit her on her cynical maneuvering on TPP, and that attack worked because it happened to be true
and reminded voters why Clinton isn't trustworthy, but the vast majority of Americans don't know
or care about TPP and so the effect of this attack will likely be minimal.
Remarkably, Trump mostly failed to use Clinton's foreign policy record against her, and he
spent more of his time having to clarify or defend his own "positions" with little success.
He mentioned the Libyan war only in passing, but never even tried to explain why Clinton was
responsible for any of it. Clinton was able to deflect this by pointing out that Trump backed intervention
in Libya, and that was the end of it. Foreign policy is one of Clinton's biggest liabilities and
one of the most obvious ways to question her judgment, but Trump isn't prepared enough to talk about
policy to use it against her.
Clinton also avoided having to say very much about her position on what should be done in Syria.
The candidates were never asked about it, and she mentioned the country briefly as part of an answer
about the war on ISIS. Overall, the foreign policy section of the debate touched on only a handful
of issues, most of which were related to U.S. policies in the Near East. If anyone wanted to know
about something other than the candidates' views on Iran and Russia, last night's debate wouldn't
have provided many answers.
"... Wow, that 5 minute video is well worth watching. HRC calls multiple times for walls and "barriers" to be constructed along the Mexican border. ..."
"... trump campaign should distribute that to every spanish speaking organization that's out there. ..."
"... Understandably, Hillary was filled with enthusiasm after visiting Israel's security wall and seeing how well it keeps out unwanted brown people. /sarc ..."
Guardian is firmly in Hillary camp. Neoliberal media defends neoliberal candidate. What can
you expect?
Notable quotes:
"... "Some people insist on disguising this Great Satan as the savior angel." -- Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamanei, referring to the United States, 2015. ..."
"... The US has already been doing that for a long time. Your country is currently allied with al Qaeda in Syria and other so called moderates whose intention is to create a sharia law fundamentalist society as aopposed to Assad who is euro centric and secular. ..."
"... From the article: We know from Wikileaks that she believed privately in the past that Saudi Arabia was the largest source for terrorist funding worldwide, and that the Saudi government was not doing enough to stop that funding. ..."
"... and yet the Clinton Foundation benefits massively from KSA donations ..."
"... I heard that Donald Trump speaks out against the USA funding extremists to overthrow leaders like Assad, while they couldn't care about human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia. Tourists are being shot in Tunisia from extremists in Libya since we became involved in killing Gaddafi. ..."
"... The USA armed and trained extremists in Afghanistan to get one over on Russia, and despite more British troops and civilians being killed by USA friendly fire than the 'enemy' our media never make the same fuss about the USA. ..."
"... The USA didn't care for years when the government they helped implement in Afghanistan made women walk around in blue tents and banned them from education. ..."
"... Different political systems; two people who come from very different backgrounds with different views and experiences. Ahmadinejad was a social conservative with a populist economic agenda. Trump is all over the map, but in terms of his staff and advisers and his economic plans he's much more of a conventional Republican. David Duke's admiration is the main thing the two have in common. ..."
"... Clinton is tripe. She, and her kin, have a ponderous history of talk, and either inaction, or actions that generate disastrous results. Zero accomplishments across the board. Those who'd vote for Hillary must have a "horse" in this race. ..."
"... Yawn... The Guardian has Trump and Putin bashing on the brain. ..."
"... John Bolton as possible Secretary of State? http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/john-bolton-no-regrets-about-toppling-saddam/article/2564463 Unless you're not talking about the guy who looks like a dead ringer for Mr Pastry that is a really terrifying proposition. ..."
"... USA and Britain are very directly responsible for Iran being ruled by the Islamic mafia which has been in power in Iran since 1979. Iran had a democratic government which for the benefit of its people and against the stealing of its oil by Britain, nationalised the oil. Britain then, desperate to carry on stealing the Iranian oil persuaded USA to collaborate with it to covertly organise a coup by MI5 and CIA to topple the legitimate democratic government and install a puppet dictatorship. ..."
"... All that happened in 1953, and Britain and USA totally admitted to all that 30 years later when the official secrets were declassified. ..."
"... ..., forgot to mention, Jimmy C1arter recently admitted that while he was the president, they contributed to the funding of the Khomeini gang against their own installed ally, the Shah in 1979 to topple him ..."
"... Trump makes George W Bush seem like an intellectual heavyweight and Hillary Clinton makes Bush seem as honest and truthful as a Girl Scout! ..."
"... What a shitty choice Americans have to make this time round. A compulsive liar warmonger or an ignorant buffoonish bigot.... ..."
"... US hatred for Iran is hard to fathom. Other adversaries have been forgiven: Germany, Italy, Japan, Vietnam, China. Iran is an outlier. ..."
"... I think it's mainly to keep US allies happy. Both Saudi Arabia and Israel regard Iran as their greatest enemy and the Syrian Civil War is largely a proxy conflict between the Saudis and the Iranians over their respective oil supplies, regional clout and religious affinity. ..."
"... Vote Clinton and absolutely nothing changes or improves. Hillary might as well take golf lessons from Barack, and saxophone lessons from bonking Bill, every day of her presidency. ..."
"... I wouldn't be at all surprised if the CIA and/or the US Armed Forces do that sort of thing too actually! The CIA, after all, toppled the then democratically elected PM of Iran in 1953, forcibly installing the Shah in his place, the CIA helped bring the Taliban and Saddam to power in Afghanistan and Iraq respectively in the first place, unleashing decades of death and destruction on the peoples of those two countries ..."
"... When the Iraqi people rose up against Saddam's brutal dictatorship back in 1991, the US actually helped him crush the rebellion, thus ensuring he stayed in power. ..."
"... One of Trump's top advisors John Bolton wrote an article for the New York Times titled "To Stop Iran's Bomb, Bomb Iran" calling for a joint US-Israel strike on Iran, including regime change. He could well end up being Sec. Of State if Trump wins. ..."
"... Meanwhile Clinton is on record as saying that Iran are the world's main sponsor of terrorism and that if she became president she would obliterate Iran if they attacked Israel. Given that Hezbollah are always involved in tit for tat encounters with Israel, and Clinton feels Hezbollah is effectively the state of Iran, it wouldn't take much. ..."
"... Bolton is a vile neocon of the lowest order, what a charade if he gets a senior post and they call Hillary a warmonger? Just wait for Bolton, you mugs ..."
"... Let's hope the Saudis defeat the Houthi uprising and support the internationally recognised government of Yemen. Oh, sorry this is the Guardian: let's hope the Russians defeat the Sunni uprising and support the internationally recognised government of Syria... ..."
"... Yes. Trump is going to steal ISIS's oil. Only slight hole in that theory is that ISIS doesn't own any phucking oil. They aren't a nation state, just thieves. Stealing a thief's stolen goods is still stealing. ..."
"... I've never understood why we're allied to Saudi. They were complicit in 9/11, they hate the west and despise us. ..."
"... >I've never understood why we're allied to Saudi. Oil. Oil. And more Oil. ..."
"... There's nothing bizarre about working with Russia on Middle Eastern issues unless you're married to the idea of a new Cold War. Why Washington is so hell-bent on making Russians the enemies again is beyond me. ..."
"... Russia - does it really need all that land? Wouldn't it be better if Vladivostok was Obamagrad and Ekaterinburg was Katemiddletown? ..."
"... What exactly is the US now? a supplier of sophisticated weaponary to "rebels" or rather terrorists that the legitimate governnent ( with Russian help thankfully) is trying to defeat... ..."
"... There is no moral equivalence here. Once you look at what western intel has been upto all these decades, nowhere could Russia be close to the evil that the US and UK are. ..."
Donny is the best chance for the lasting world peace and stability because he is more likely
to work with Russians on key geopolitical issues.
Hillary is the best chance for ww3 and nuclear anihilation of the mainland American cities
because she is russophobic, demonizer of Russia, hell bent on messing with them and unexplicably
encouraged to do so by supposedly "normal" people in mainstream media.
The US has already been doing that for a long time. Your country is currently allied with
al Qaeda in Syria and other so called moderates whose intention is to create a sharia law fundamentalist
society as aopposed to Assad who is euro centric and secular.
From the article: We know from Wikileaks that she believed privately in the past that Saudi
Arabia was the largest source for terrorist funding worldwide, and that the Saudi government was
not doing enough to stop that funding.
You know who else believes that about the KSA? Joe Biden.
I heard that Donald Trump speaks out against the USA funding extremists to overthrow leaders
like Assad, while they couldn't care about human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia. Tourists are being
shot in Tunisia from extremists in Libya since we became involved in killing Gaddafi.
The USA armed and trained extremists in Afghanistan to get one over on Russia, and despite
more British troops and civilians being killed by USA friendly fire than the 'enemy' our media
never make the same fuss about the USA. It wasn't long ago that many doctors were killed
in a hospital by a USA bomb, but I only found out about it on the Doctors Without Borders facebook
page.
The USA didn't care for years when the government they helped implement in Afghanistan
made women walk around in blue tents and banned them from education.
The Ahmadinejad - Trump comparison is a weak comparison.
Different political systems; two people who come from very different backgrounds with different
views and experiences. Ahmadinejad was a social conservative with a populist economic agenda.
Trump is all over the map, but in terms of his staff and advisers and his economic plans he's
much more of a conventional Republican. David Duke's admiration is the main thing the two have
in common.
Clinton is tripe. She, and her kin, have a ponderous history of talk, and either inaction,
or actions that generate disastrous results. Zero accomplishments across the board. Those who'd
vote for Hillary must have a "horse" in this race.
I won't be specific, but that horse, or horses, are generally the disenfranchised ones. What
to say: I get their plight. But Hillary? Elected, she only make sure they stay that way so she'll
be elected again. Time to wake up. There ain't no "pie in the sky", but with perserverance, all's
possible, and likely. Trump's the guy.
USA and Britain are very directly responsible for Iran being ruled by the Islamic mafia which
has been in power in Iran since 1979. Iran had a democratic government which for the benefit of
its people and against the stealing of its oil by Britain, nationalised the oil. Britain then,
desperate to carry on stealing the Iranian oil persuaded USA to collaborate with it to covertly
organise a coup by MI5 and CIA to topple the legitimate democratic government and install a puppet
dictatorship.
All that happened in 1953, and Britain and USA totally admitted to all that 30 years later
when the official secrets were declassified. One of the consequences of that criminal act
was that it lead to the Islamic revolution which brought the Islam clergy to power which turned
this most strategically, economically, and culturally important country of the region into an
enemy of the west, supporter of terrorism, human rights abuser, arch enemy of Israel, total economic
ruin, and eternal nuclear threat to the region- not to mention the Shia-Sunni sectarian division
that it has perpetrated which to the large extent has contributed to the mighty mess that the
Middle East is in now and potentially spreading to the outside of the region.
..., forgot to mention, Jimmy C1arter recently admitted that while he was the president, they
contributed to the funding of the Khomeini gang against their own installed ally, the Shah in
1979 to topple him
I think it's mainly to keep US allies happy. Both Saudi Arabia and Israel regard Iran as their
greatest enemy and the Syrian Civil War is largely a proxy conflict between the Saudis and the
Iranians over their respective oil supplies, regional clout and religious affinity.
Though the continuance of PNAC's schema shouldn't be discounted either. US policy hawks close
to both Clinton and Trump still aim for dominance in Central Eurasia. I expect if they could press
a button and magically summon up a new Shah for Iran they'd jump at the chance.
Cuba spent over half a century living beneath the shadow of American wrath too for different
reasons. Though perhaps burning revenge at the loss of a compliant puppet also played a role.
Vote Clinton and absolutely nothing changes or improves. Hillary might as well take golf lessons
from Barack, and saxophone lessons from bonking Bill, every day of her presidency.
Vote Trump and things are going to change in America. No more pussyfooting around.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if the CIA and/or the US Armed Forces do that sort of thing
too actually! The CIA, after all, toppled the then democratically elected PM of Iran in 1953,
forcibly installing the Shah in his place, the CIA helped bring the Taliban and Saddam to power
in Afghanistan and Iraq respectively in the first place, unleashing decades of death and destruction
on the peoples of those two countries.
When the Iraqi people rose up against Saddam's brutal dictatorship back in 1991, the US
actually helped him crush the rebellion, thus ensuring he stayed in power. So the US is arguably
at least partly responsible for the crimes Saddam and the Taliban committed (in the case of Iraq,
as well as murdering at least hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, the US is probably also partly
responsible for Saddam's DRAINING OF THE MARSHLANDS OF SOUTHER IRAQ).
One of Trump's top advisors John Bolton wrote an article for the New York Times titled "To
Stop Iran's Bomb, Bomb Iran" calling for a joint US-Israel strike on Iran, including regime change.
He could well end up being Sec. Of State if Trump wins.
Meanwhile Clinton is on record as saying that Iran are the world's main sponsor of terrorism
and that if she became president she would obliterate Iran if they attacked Israel. Given that
Hezbollah are always involved in tit for tat encounters with Israel, and Clinton feels Hezbollah
is effectively the state of Iran, it wouldn't take much.
Let's hope the Saudis defeat the Houthi uprising and support the internationally recognised
government of Yemen. Oh, sorry this is the Guardian: let's hope the Russians defeat the Sunni
uprising and support the internationally recognised government of Syria...
Yes. Trump is going to steal ISIS's oil. Only slight hole in that theory is that ISIS doesn't
own any phucking oil. They aren't a nation state, just thieves. Stealing a thief's stolen goods
is still stealing.
There's nothing bizarre about working with Russia on Middle Eastern issues unless you're married
to the idea of a new Cold War. Why Washington is so hell-bent on making Russians the enemies again
is beyond me.
What exactly is the US now? a supplier of sophisticated weaponary to "rebels" or rather terrorists
that the legitimate governnent ( with Russian help thankfully) is trying to defeat...
Both America and Russia have been supplying arms to terrorists or to destabilise elected Govts.
Since the end of WW2. Neither country has a right to take the moral high ground especially not
Russia at this time with the revelations coming out about shooting down passenger aircraft. You're
both as bad as each other.
There is no moral equivalence here. Once you look at what western intel has been upto all
these decades, nowhere could Russia be close to the evil that the US and UK are.
There is a real risk the media will be wholly foreign owned very soon. The
FCC under Pres. Obama eliminated the rule on foreign ownership. This, the TPP,
and giving up internet control are of a piece.
I think Trump may be the one and only person to increase the likelihood the
US will still be an independent country in ten years. With Clinton we may end
up losing our sovereignty by 2020. Trump may have some issues, but at least he
psychologically identifies with the US. Most US elites think of themselves as
world citizens and really couldn't care less if the US becomes like the DRC. I
trust Trump's instincts much more than Hillary's. The continued existence of an
independent US will be very, very important for the world to have any degree of
pluralism. Any global hegemony is likely to be unpleasant for most people.
Grupo Televisa, a Mexican company with a minority stake in the
Spanish-language station Univision, might now be able to increase its
ownership.
Univision's lead owner is Hillary's largest contributor, the
Israeli-American media mogul Haim Saban:
On June 27, 2006, Saban Capital Group led a group of investors bidding
for Univision Communications, the largest Spanish-language media company
in the United States.
Other investors in the Saban-led group were Texas Pacific Group of
Fort Worth, Texas and Thomas H. Lee Partners. The group was successful in
acquiring Univision with a bid valued at $13.7 billion.
This convenient FCC rule change hands them a nice exit strategy.
Convinced to contribute to the Clinton Foundation yet?
They make magic
happen.
"... "Clinton is an insider in an outsider year. It's as simple as that. Trying to blame everything and everyone but her is really tiresome and not helping her actually win." ..."
"... Thank you. How can such very serious people ignore the Bernie Sanders phenomenon and dismiss that so easily? People want reform, they want change. And the two party system keeps serving up more of the same rotten, ineffective corruption. ..."
"... Hillary is a candidate of "status quo" and as such is in bad position. As you correctly noted "People want reform, they want change." And her health, abhorrent warmongering and emailgate make her political position only worse. Please note that calling her "a staunch warmonger" is just a politically correct definition of the type of politician she represents. If we take the standards of Nuremberg trials, she might well be considered a war criminal ..."
"... the charter defined three categories of crimes: crimes against peace (including planning, preparing, starting or waging wars of aggression or wars in violation of international agreements), war crimes (including violations of customs or laws of war, including improper treatment of civilians and prisoners of war) and crimes against humanity (including murder, enslavement or deportation of civilians or persecution on political, religious or racial grounds). ..."
"... It was determined that civilian officials as well as military officers could be accused of war crimes. ..."
"... today's Democrats have become the Party of War: a home for arms merchants, mercenaries, academic war planners, lobbyists for every foreign intervention, promoters of color revolutions, failed generals, exploiters of the natural resources of corrupt governments. We have American military bases in 80 countries, and there are now American military personnel on the ground in about 130 countries, a remarkable achievement since there are only 192 recognized countries. Generals and admirals announce our national policies. Theater commanders are our principal ambassadors. Our first answer to trouble or opposition of any kind seems always to be a military movement or action. ..."
"... Re "first past the post": You are absolutely correct and this is the main obstacle to the rise of third parties. The Green Party has as one of the main campaign items the need for ranked choice. ..."
"... I think changing this is perhaps the single most urgent reform item in our politics, and can be accomplished at the local and state level without running afoul of federal or constitutional constraints. ..."
"... the occupied [nations officials] are the only candidate for war crime trials...... Lemay, Harris, everyone in 8 nations that own them involved in nuclear weapons in any way would be hanged if their targets got their way ..."
"... dnc insider [is] definition of crooked! ..."
"... There's a pendulum, which sometimes swings the wrong way. Go figure. Bush Jr was the outsider. Gore was the insider. Likewise Trump and Hillary Clinton? ..."
"... The race baiting has to stop. Krugman should travel to Camden, Rochester, East St. Louis or any of the thousands of towns and cities that were stripped of their wealth thanks to free trade policies he championed. ..."
"... It is close because Trump offers hope. People remember that times were much, much better when their cities had factories before the so-called globalization hurricane just "naturally" swept everything away. Twenty years of protectionism and an undervalued currency will turn the US into a star trek land like Singapore. 10 more years on our current free trade trajectory and we'll be Haiti, another free trade paradise. ..."
"Clinton is an insider in an outsider year. It's as simple as that. Trying to blame everything and
everyone but her is really tiresome and not helping her actually win."
Thank you. How can such very serious people ignore the Bernie Sanders phenomenon and dismiss that
so easily? People want reform, they want change. And the two party system keeps serving up more of
the same rotten, ineffective corruption.
Disencruft Macro -> to Jesse...
insider in an outsider year. It's as simple as that. Trying to blame everything and everyone but
her is really tiresome and not helping her actually win.
She needs to either regain some outsider cred (impossible, her entire candidacy is based on her
being the "most accomplished candidate ever" which necessarily implies having experience on the inside)
Or tar Trump with insider status. That should be doable but it's proving a hard sell. People seem
to be excusing Trump's links and ties with insiders. It seem people will excuse what he has done
because he was just playing the game by the rules that already existed. On the other hand, Clinton
is seen (wrongly in my opinion) as being one of the rule makers and then breaking the rules to her
benefit.
That might be the crucial distinction. Trump had no part in making the rules so breaking them
is understandable. But if Clinton was part of the people who made the rules it is hypocritical for
her to break the rules she made for other people to abide by.
I don't think Clinton is especially bad and I'm definitely voting for her. I'm only positing a
theory as to why Trump's proven malfeasance doesn't seem to impact his standing with the voters while
Clinton's implied, but not proven, malfeasance is a big issue.
"And the two party system keeps serving up more of the same rotten, ineffective corruption."
That's by design. "First past the post" system is perfect for maintaining status quo. It is essentially
an ingenious modification of a one party rule, disguised as two party "equilibrium". It is not that
different from the USSR system of elections -- a predefined by the elite candidate eventually wins
in all cases. The only difference is that in this case there two such predefined, preapproved candidates
and associated exciting political theater, instead of boring (but more economical and honest ;-)
single one.
I think the Communists would only increase their legitimacy (and might prolong the life of the
USSR) by switching to this system. The essence -- communist nomenclatura rule in case of the USSR,
neoliberal elite (financial oligarchy) in case of the USA are the same.
In this system any new movement (think Sanders) can be immaculated and integrated into existing
neoliberal framework by one of two semi-identical parties of "hard" and "soft" neoliberalism. And
that "self-stabilizing" function of crushing any political insurrection "by integration" while it
is in its infancy works fine until the total crash of the system.
In this regard, the appearance of Trump on the scene as a candidate from Repugs is a surprise
and might be viewed as a revolutionary moment as it shows that the republican elite lost control
over peons. The Dem elite managed to crush the insurrection, as expected.
Trump is a sign of a mounting backlash against neoliberal globalization, of political destabilization
due to rejection of neoliberal dogma by the majority of population. At this point neoliberal brainwashing
stops working, much like happened in the USSR with communist propaganda.
Hillary is a candidate of "status quo" and as such is in bad position. As you correctly noted
"People want reform, they want change." And her health, abhorrent warmongering and emailgate make
her political position only worse. Please note that calling her "a staunch warmonger" is just a politically
correct definition of the type of politician she represents. If we take the standards of Nuremberg
trials, she might well be considered a war criminal :
The Allies eventually established the laws and procedures for the Nuremberg trials with the
London Charter of the International Military Tribunal (IMT), issued on August 8, 1945. Among other
things, the charter defined three categories of crimes: crimes against peace (including planning,
preparing, starting or waging wars of aggression or wars in violation of international agreements),
war crimes (including violations of customs or laws of war, including improper treatment of civilians
and prisoners of war) and crimes against humanity (including murder, enslavement or deportation
of civilians or persecution on political, religious or racial grounds).
It was determined that civilian officials as well as military officers could be accused
of war crimes.
John and Robert Kennedy devoted their greatest commitments and energies to the prevention of
war and the preservation of peace. To them that was not an abstract formula but the necessary
foundation of human life. But today's Democrats have become the Party of War: a home for arms
merchants, mercenaries, academic war planners, lobbyists for every foreign intervention, promoters
of color revolutions, failed generals, exploiters of the natural resources of corrupt governments.
We have American military bases in 80 countries, and there are now American military personnel
on the ground in about 130 countries, a remarkable achievement since there are only 192 recognized
countries. Generals and admirals announce our national policies. Theater commanders are our principal
ambassadors. Our first answer to trouble or opposition of any kind seems always to be a military
movement or action.
Re "first past the post": You are absolutely correct and this is the main obstacle to the rise of
third parties. The Green Party has as one of the main campaign items the need for ranked choice.
I think changing this is perhaps the single most urgent reform item in our politics, and can be
accomplished at the local and state level without running afoul of federal or constitutional constraints.
the occupied [nations officials] are
the only candidate for war crime trials...... Lemay, Harris, everyone in 8 nations that own them involved in nuclear weapons in any way would
be hanged if their targets got their way
Pinkybum -> efcdons...
"Clinton is an insider in an outsider year."
Having voted for Bernie this is not the choice we are faced with.
"She needs to either regain some outsider cred"
Having ran as an insider and won she needs to do no such thing...
lsm -> Pinkybum...
dnc insider [is]
definition of crooked! no conviction...
Fred C. Dobbs said...
There's a pendulum, which
sometimes swings the wrong way. Go figure. Bush Jr was the outsider. Gore was the insider. Likewise Trump and Hillary Clinton?
This pendulum has (almost) magical effects. As for me, and many here, I hope its effect is not
felt this time.
The race
baiting has to stop. Krugman should travel to Camden, Rochester, East St. Louis or any of the thousands
of towns and cities that were stripped of their wealth thanks to free trade policies he championed.
It is close because Trump offers hope. People remember that times were much, much better when
their cities had factories before the so-called globalization hurricane just "naturally" swept everything
away. Twenty years of protectionism and an undervalued currency will turn the US into a star trek
land like Singapore. 10 more years on our current free trade trajectory and we'll be Haiti, another
free trade paradise.
"... "Progress for USA Political Action Committee" ..."
"... "time bomb" ..."
"... "We lost to the losing party, a unique case in history," ..."
"... "tyrant." ..."
"... The arguments presented are as light-weight as the production is heavy-handed. The Clinton side claims that Trump made millions selling Russian rights for Miss Universe. That may be true, but Trump owned the organization for 19 years and sold entitlements in dozens of other countries, holding the actual event in Russia only once during that time. ..."
"... "Russian language promotional video (which) attracted people to buy Condos in Florida." ..."
"... Then Mike Morrell appears and declares that someone who doesn't want to pursue an aggressive military policy toward Russia is an "unwitting agent of the Russian Federation." ..."
Sometimes it is downright stunning to witness American election campaigners creating, and promoting,
websites like " PutinTrump.org ." Paid for by
the pro-Clinton "Progress for USA Political Action Committee" it collates media stories
which connect the Republican candidate and the Russian president. That could be dismissed as merely
slightly odd behavior, until you see the logo, which is drumroll a hammer and sickle!
Yes, that eternally recognizable communist symbol. Reds in the Bed
In case Team Clinton is reading this: it looks like it might be time for a bit of a world history
refresher. Any person even moderately informed about Russian affairs can tell you that Putin's government
is far from communist. Hell, most decently educated school children can tell you the same. The Russian
government has promoted a pro-business agenda for well over a decade and has long maintained a flat
income tax rate of 13 percent.
Indeed, only this year, the Russian president has
denounced socialist hero Vladimir Lenin and his Bolshevik government for their brutal repression
and accused him of having placed a "time bomb" under the state. He also admonished the Bolsheviks
for making Russia suffer defeat at the hands of Germany in the First World War. "We lost to the
losing party, a unique case in history," the President said. Furthermore, Putin is no big fan
of Stalin either. While recognizing his contribution to defeating the Nazis, he also
described him as a "tyrant."
It's just as doubtful that Trump – a man who just boasted about not paying any federal taxes!
– is a fan of Karl Marx's theories. The idea of distributing wealth to labor, from financiers, is
surely alien to a man who has essentially admitted to not paying people he has hired because he wasn't
happy with their work.
Put plainly, these commie associations are absurd. But of course, Team Clinton knows this. That's
the big reveal. The idea is to conflate the fading memory of the 'Red Menace' of Soviet communism
with modern Russia. The purpose of this is pretty obvious too: to instill fear of the 'Big Bad' Putin
in vulnerable American hearts and minds.
The Green Logo Menace
You need to go no further for proof than Clinton campaign's official messaging. Take a look at
this video, where Hillary's team flings Russia slanders like they going out of fashion.
Cue the foreboding music - you could ask why they didn't just license the tunes from 'Jaws' and
have done with it – multiple RT logos and, no joke, Russian mafia references. You know the clichés
that Bond films have dropped for being too crude.
The arguments presented are as light-weight as the production is heavy-handed. The Clinton
side claims that Trump made millions selling Russian rights for Miss Universe. That may be true,
but Trump owned the organization for 19 years and sold entitlements in dozens of other countries,
holding the actual event in Russia only once during that time.
The video also implies that Trump is bad because he produced a "Russian language promotional
video (which) attracted people to buy Condos in Florida." Hold on here, what is so unusual about
that? During the oil boom of the mid-to late 00's, Russians were well known for buying property all
over the world. Indeed, if you walk around hot spots like London, Nice or Dubai, you will still see
Russian language signs outside many high-end estate offices. Probably all homes for the sleeper agents,
huh.
Then Mike Morrell appears and declares that someone who doesn't want to pursue an aggressive
military policy toward Russia is an "unwitting agent of the Russian Federation." And at
this point, we probably reach peak preposterous. Essentially the message is that if you don't want
to saber rattle with Moscow, you are working for it.
"... "There's just a deep desire to believe that we can have free college, free healthcare, that what we've done hasn't gone far enough, and that we just need to, you know, go as far as, you know, Scandinavia, whatever that means, and half the people don't know what that means, but it's something that they deeply feel," ..."
"... "I am occupying from the center-left to the center-right. And I don't have much company there. Because it is difficult when you're running to be president, and you understand how hard the job is – I don't want to overpromise," said Clinton, who has customarily eschewed political spectrum labels. ..."
"... "understanding" ..."
"... "Some are new to politics completely. They're children of the Great Recession. And they are living in their parents' basement. They feel they got their education and the jobs that are available to them are not at all what they envisioned for themselves. And they don't see much of a future," ..."
"... "If you're feeling like you're consigned to, you know, being a barista, or you know, some other job that doesn't pay a lot, and doesn't have some other ladder of opportunity attached to it, then the idea that maybe, just maybe, you could be part of a political revolution is pretty appealing." ..."
"... "listening to the concerns" of "the most diverse, open-minded generation in history." ..."
"... People who have the TV on all day and watch the news from the mainstream media are naturally going to get hoodwinked. They aren't the brightest, but they're also distracted and mislead. ..."
"... She is the definition of implicit bias. ..."
"... After all, they are the deplorables. HRC is truly the most despicable, scandal ridden, lying war monger to ever grace American politics. ..."
"... Shame on Sanders for supporting that Nazi witch. ..."
"... Millions of people were adversely harmed by her misguided policies and her "pay-to-play" operations involving favors in return for donations to the Clinton Foundation and Clinton Global Initiative. ..."
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton made forthright remarks about Bernie Sanders'
supporters during a private meeting with fundraisers, an audio from which has been leaked following
an email hack.
"There's just a deep desire to believe that we can have free college, free healthcare, that
what we've done hasn't gone far enough, and that we just need to, you know, go as far as, you know,
Scandinavia, whatever that means, and half the people don't know what that means, but it's something
that they deeply feel," Clinton said during a Q&A with potential donors in McLean in Virginia,
in February, when she was still in a close primary race with Sanders.
The frontrunner to become the next US President said that herself and other election observers
had been "bewildered" by the rise of the "populist, nationalist, xenophobic, discriminatory"
Republican candidates, presumably Donald Trump, on the one side, and the radical left-wing idealists
on the other.
Clinton painted herself as a moderate and realistic contrast to the groundswell.
"I am occupying from the center-left to the center-right. And I don't have much company there.
Because it is difficult when you're running to be president, and you understand how hard the job
is – I don't want to overpromise," said Clinton, who has customarily eschewed political spectrum
labels.
According to the Washington Free Beacon, which posted the audio of Clinton's remarks, the recording
was attached to an email sent out by a campaign staffer, which has been hacked. It is unclear if
the leak is the work of the same hackers who got hold of a trove of Democratic National Committee
(DNC) emails in July.
... ... ...
In the session, Clinton called for an "understanding" of the motives of Sanders' younger
backers, while describing them in terms that fluctuate between patronizing and unflattering.
"Some are new to politics completely. They're children of the Great Recession. And they are
living in their parents' basement. They feel they got their education and the jobs that are available
to them are not at all what they envisioned for themselves. And they don't see much of a future,"
said Clinton, who obtained the support of about 2,800 delegates, compared to approximately 1,900
for Sanders, when the results were tallied in July.
"If you're feeling like you're consigned to, you know, being a barista, or you know, some
other job that doesn't pay a lot, and doesn't have some other ladder of opportunity attached to it,
then the idea that maybe, just maybe, you could be part of a political revolution is pretty appealing."
Despite well-publicized tensions, particularly between the more vocal backers, Sanders endorsed
Clinton at the Democratic National Convention two months ago, and the two politicians have campaigned
together this week, sharing the stage.
Following the leak, the Clinton campaign has not apologized for the audio, insisting that it shows
that the nominee and is "listening to the concerns" of "the most diverse, open-minded generation
in history."
"As Hillary Clinton said in those remarks , she wants young people to be idealistic and set big
goals," said her spokesman Glen Caplin. "She is fighting for exactly millennial generation cares
more about – a fairer, more equal, just world."
In other parts of the 50-minute recording, Clinton spoke about US capacity to "retaliate"
against foreign hackers that would serve as a "deterrence" and said she would be "inclined"
to mothball the costly upgrade of the Long Range Standoff (LRSO) missile program.
The more she runs her mouth the more support she loses.
Gold Carrot -> Olive Sailboat 6m
Well if somebody is supported by Soros, Warren Buffet, Walmart family, Gates, Moskowitz, Pritzker,
Saban and Session what do you expect. Give me 8 names of other Americans who can top their money
worth. And even so called financial supporters of Republican party like Whitman and Koch brothers
are not supporting Trump. Whitman actually donate to Clinton. In fact most of the donation for
Trump campaign is coming from people who donate at average less than 200 dollars. Clinton represent
BIG MONEY that... See more
GA 2h
Clinton has a supremacist problem, she considers all americans under deserving people, she
thinks she is a pharaoh and we are little people. Reply Share 15
Red Ducky -> GA 23m
you think trump is different? ask yourself this question: Why do Rich people spend hundreds
of millions of dollars for a job that only pays $400K a year?
Rabid Rotty -> Red Ducky 9m
And Trump has stated several times that he will not take the Presidential Salary
pHiL SwEeT -> Rabid Rotty 8m
Uh, yah, Red Ducky just explained how it's not about the money, they're already rich. It's
about power, status, control and legacy.
Green Weights 2h
if Clinton sends her followers and their families to concentration camps, they'll still continue
supporting her. yes, that's how stupid they really are.
Olive Basketball -> Green Weights 55m
People who have the TV on all day and watch the news from the mainstream media are naturally
going to get hoodwinked. They aren't the brightest, but they're also distracted and mislead.
Cyan Beer 2h
She is the definition of implicit bias.
Norm de Plume
Sure enough. The real Americans. Not people, like her, who have dedicated their lives to
aggrandizing
themselves living effectively tax-free at the people's expense.
Seve141 7m
After all, they are the deplorables. HRC is truly the most despicable, scandal ridden, lying war
monger to ever grace American politics.
Tornado_Doom 12m
Shame on Sanders for supporting that Nazi witch.
Green Band Aid -> Tornado_Doom 12m
Sanders will be getting paid. All he does is for money.
Tornado_Doom -> Green Band Aid 11m
Does an old rich man like him need money?
Green Leaf 43m
Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State during Barack Obama's first term was an unmitigated
disaster for many nations around the world. The media has never adequately described how a
number of countries around the world suffered horribly from HC's foreign policy decisions.
Millions of people were adversely harmed by her misguided policies and her "pay-to-play" operations
involving favors in return for donations to the Clinton Foundation and Clinton Global Initiative.
Countries adversely impacted by HC's foreign policy decisions include Abkhazia, Argentina,
Bolivia, Brazil, Central African Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, Germany, Greece, Guatemala, Haiti,
Honduras, Iraq, Kosovo, Libya, Malaysia, Palestine, Paraguay, South Sudan, Syria, Thailand,
Tunisia, Turkey, Ukraine, Venezuela, Western Sahara, Yemen - one would think they had
a visit from the anti-Christ instead of HC. Or is HC the anti-Christ in disguise?
Green Leaf 45m
The majority of American's will vote Trump for 3 primary reasons.
1. National Security: They
trust him when it comes to protecting national security and to stop illegal aliens from entering
US boarders along with stopping the mass importation of un-vetted refugees from the middle
east.
2. Economy: They know he knows how to get things done under budget and ahead of schedule..
and he knows how to make money. They want a successful businessman in office, not another political
who is out to enrich his or herself at their expense. In addition he knows how to create jobs
and he has a major plan to cut taxes to help the poor - no tax for anyone earning less then
$50,000 and
3. Hillary's severe covered-up health problems: With all of the problems that the
US is experience they don't want someone who passes out from a seizure in the middle of the
day running the country. This is a severely ill woman is, evidently, of the rare kind that
requires a permanent traveling physician and a "mystery man" who rushes to her side whenever
she has one of her frequent and uncontrollable seizure "episodes" (or otherwise freezes up
with a brain "short-circuit" during a speech). She has Parkinson's. The pneumonia was just
a symptom for something much more serious. She even had a mini seizure during the debate for
those with a medical background to see.
"... But Paul Krugman I have lost a lot of respect for. There was a candidate that people believed in and that stood up for working people and liberal values and that motivated people to come out and support him and his goals for the U.S.A. A candidate that would have neutralized Trump's appeal to the working class (which is mostly where I am). Krugman trashed him relentlessly using his very large soap box. ..."
I won't say bad things about Clinton. Because she is far better than the alternative at this point.
But Paul Krugman I have lost a lot of respect for. There was a candidate that people believed
in and that stood up for working people and liberal values and that motivated people to come out
and support him and his goals for the U.S.A. A candidate that would have neutralized Trump's appeal
to the working class (which is mostly where I am). Krugman trashed him relentlessly using his
very large soap box.
Now he is horrified that the polls are so close.
I can't say anything more without being negative. Except vote for Clinton- she's better than
Trump. Which is a pathetic endorsement.
"... I have noticed a pattern with you where you are misconstruing Trump's positions and framing his behaviour as the corrupt media wishes you to frame it. Trump is not great, but he's also not nearly as awful as you're thinking he is. Don't be so influenced by the propaganda coming from Hillary and her devoted lackeys in the MSM. ..."
"... As a female voter I don't give a crap how bad he is, I'd still rather watch Congress go nuts impeaching him than I would Hillary taking us to war with Russia. ..."
Uh that only happens if someone manages to duct tape Trump's mouth shut.
Trump's got his own brand of offensive and apparently his goal this week was to alienate female
voters even more with his antics.
I hear that at the next debate his big idea is to blame Hillary for Bill's wandering penis.
That should go over like a lead balloon (because believe it or not women don't like to be blamed
for the times men act like dogs.)
I have noticed a pattern with you where you are misconstruing Trump's positions and framing
his behaviour as the corrupt media wishes you to frame it. Trump is not great, but he's also not
nearly as awful as you're thinking he is. Don't be so influenced by the propaganda coming from
Hillary and her devoted lackeys in the MSM.
You want to run on the fact the guy has no public record per se (Look! He didn't bomb anybody!
Yeah, that's probably because he didn't have the means to do so either.). That's great.
However, he does have a very real past and I refuse to wallpaper over that past. It's completely
unacceptable and unprofessional to call your employees Miss Piggy. Acknowledge it. Move on.
Oh like anyone is left who wasn't already aware that Trump's a misogynist gasbag.
As a
female voter I don't give a crap how bad he is, I'd still rather watch Congress go nuts impeaching
him than I would Hillary taking us to war with Russia.
"... The race baiting has to stop. Krugman should travel to Camden, Rochester, East St. Louis or any of the thousands of towns and cities that were stripped of their wealth thanks to free trade policies he championed. ..."
"... It is close because Trump offers hope. People remember that times were much, much better when their cities had factories before the so-called globalization hurricane just "naturally" swept everything away. ..."
"... Twenty years of protectionism and an undervalued currency will turn the US into a star trek land like Singapore. 10 more years on our current free trade trajectory and we'll be Haiti, another free trade paradise. ..."
The race baiting has to stop. Krugman should travel to Camden, Rochester, East St. Louis
or any of the thousands of towns and cities that were stripped of their wealth thanks to free
trade policies he championed.
It is close because Trump offers hope. People remember that times were much, much better when
their cities had factories before the so-called globalization hurricane just "naturally" swept
everything away.
Twenty years of protectionism and an undervalued currency will turn the US into
a star trek land like Singapore. 10 more years on our current free trade trajectory and we'll
be Haiti, another free trade paradise.
Only to relatively prosperous, uneducated, old white men who are terrified by watching their
privilege slip away. Trump would actually make all those issues you mention far worse.
"... But today's Democrats have become the Party of War: a home for arms merchants, mercenaries, academic war planners, lobbyists for every foreign intervention, promoters of color revolutions, failed generals, exploiters of the natural resources of corrupt governments. We have American military bases in 80 countries, and there are now American military personnel on the ground in about 130 countries, a remarkable achievement since there are only 192 recognized countries. ..."
"... How you can defend such a deeply flawed (as in insane) candidate is beyond me. ..."
"... Robert Kagan is desperate to save us from fascism, you see. Because anything Athens did wrong in the Peloponnesian War, America can do again, but bigger. And, his wife is a favorite to become Secretary of State. She's deeply experienced, having brought peace to Ukraine. ..."
"... I went through this with them in a recent discussion. For the most part, liberals (American terminology) simply do not care for or about anti-war and anti-imperialism arguments. Just saving everyone a little time here. ..."
John and Robert Kennedy devoted their greatest commitments and energies to the prevention of
war and the preservation of peace. To them that was not an abstract formula but the necessary
foundation of human life. But today's Democrats have become the Party of War: a home for
arms merchants, mercenaries, academic war planners, lobbyists for every foreign intervention,
promoters of color revolutions, failed generals, exploiters of the natural resources of corrupt
governments. We have American military bases in 80 countries, and there are now American military
personnel on the ground in about 130 countries, a remarkable achievement since there are only
192 recognized countries. Generals and admirals announce our national policies. Theater
commanders are our principal ambassadors. Our first answer to trouble or opposition of any
kind seems always to be a military movement or action.
How you can defend such a deeply flawed (as in insane) candidate is beyond me.
likbez: How you can defend such a deeply flawed (as in insane) candidate is beyond me.
How? By focusing on the other guy, on Trump.
Today, Brad Delong points to the daily anti-Trump screed by James Fallows, which features a
four month old piece by Robert Kagan: I disagree with Robert Kagan on just about everything.
But in the months since he originally published his essay, called "This Is How Fascism Comes to
America," I think his arguments have come to seem more rather than less relevant.
Robert Kagan is desperate to save us from fascism, you see. Because anything Athens did
wrong in the Peloponnesian War, America can do again, but bigger. And, his wife is a favorite
to become Secretary of State. She's deeply experienced, having brought peace to Ukraine.
None of that matters because Trump is unprecedented.
Anarcissie 09.29.16 at 2:47 am
likbez 09.29.16 at 12:35 am @ 118 -
I went through this with them in a recent discussion. For the most part, liberals (American
terminology) simply do not care for or about anti-war and anti-imperialism arguments. Just saving
everyone a little time here.
OK, here's what puzzles me. Looking back upthread, what is the source of the really deep antipathy
that people on CT have for Hillary Clinton? I haven't heard anyone say that her tax policy is
not progressive enough. That's a legitimate argument, but no one seems excited about it. Apparently
two things really get people hot under the collar. (1) She is somewhat interventionist militarily.
Of course, people aren't content just to say that, they have to say that she is a "war criminal"
(sorry, could I have some specifics on this?), or at least a warmonger. But basically, by that
they just mean that she is somewhat interventionist militarily. (2) She's more inclined toward
trade agreements than most people here.
OK, fine, these are legitimate areas of disagreement. Here's what puzzles me: those are the
traditional positions of paleoliberals in the Democratic Party. You don't have to like them, but
there's nothing neo about them. So how is Clinton a neoliberal?
There's one respect in which Clinton follows the DLC line: this business of favoring means-testing
rather than universal programs. I think that as a political strategy this is bad, and I get irritated
every time she trots out that line about not wanting to pay for Donald Trump's kids (there just
aren't that many rich people, and they're not sending their kids to state schools anyway). But
I haven't heard anyone say they could never vote for Clinton because of this. So what's neo about
Clinton? What distinguishes her from Mondale?
... ... ...
LFC 09.29.16 at 1:29 pm
@H Frant
I'm glad you picked up on the imbalanced quote re JFK etc, b/c I was too lazy to do it. The
explanation is that the quoted piece is by Adam Walinsky, who was (I think, w/o Wiki'ing) a speechwriter/adviser
for RFK. Walinsky's probably getting on in years, and his idea of a column is to contrast the
peace-loving JFK (and RFK) to the bad promoters of American empire and bases-around-the-world
who followed him/them. Which is somewhat weird.
This is a pt about the overall trajectory of US f.p. since c.1947, which has exhibited a good
deal (though not, of course, complete) continuity (as well as some variation from admin to admin.).
[Whether JFK, had he lived, wd have gotten involved in Vietnam in the major way LBJ did, or wd
have stopped short of that kind of escalation, is a separate and disputed question, and there
is evidence to support conflicting answers – but it doesn't alter the main pt above. A past CT
commenter, who went by 'mattski' iirc, was very big on the JFK-wd-not-have-escalated-had-he-lived
thesis, so one can find some cites supporting that view if one searches on mattski's past comments
here.]
Walinsky also lumps JFK and RFK together, which is problematic since, inter alia, RFK lived
5 yrs longer and into a diff. historical period in which he played a major role.
"... Forget the Bernie hack, this one shows David Brock (Hilary Super-PAC) in action. Apparently they got access to FoxAcid, the top secret NSA software Snowden exposed. ..."
"... Honey for the conspiracy bears but this does smell right, and if it's real it's a bombshell: ..."
Forget the Bernie hack, this one shows David Brock (Hilary Super-PAC) in action. Apparently
they got access to FoxAcid, the top secret NSA software Snowden exposed.
Honey for the conspiracy bears but this does smell right, and if it's real it's a bombshell:
The way Lester Holt "corrected" Donald Trump at Monday's debate (as he was clearly instructed
to do) regarding the Iraq War, you'd think the answer to whether he supported it or not was clear-cut.
The truth is, it may not be that simple.
Joe Concha (who has been doing some great work by the way), just wrote an excellent
article at The Hill exploring the topic in detail. Here's what he found:
Question: Did Donald Trump oppose or support the Iraq War?
Before answering, a quick note on why providing clarity around a relatively simple question:
It's rare that cooler heads can prevail in this media world we live in. Lines in the sand have
never been drawn between blue and red media as vividly as they are now. And as a result, simple
logic and lucidity is supplied less and less to drawing a verdict on whether a story is true or
not.
Exhibit A today is the aforementioned question: Did Trump - as he insists - oppose the Iraq
War?
At first, given that Trump wasn't a politician in 2002 and therefore had no official vote on
the war authorization (as is the case with Hillary Clinton 's support of it), the press simply
took him at his word on the matter with no evidence readily available to provide otherwise.
Except there was evidence, albeit flimsy at best, thanks to the dogged work of Buzzfeed's Andrew
Kaczynski and Nathan McDermott in unearthing a 2002 interview Trump did with Howard Stern.
Here's what Trump said when asked by Stern during a typically long interview (Howard can go
more than an hour without taking a break) if he was for going into Iraq.
"Yeah, I guess so," Trump responded. "I wish the first time it was done correctly."
So to review, Trump, a businessman at that time, didn't broach the topic. There are no other
public statements by him on the matter in 2002.
"Yeah, I guess so" isn't what one would call someone absolutely advocating the invasion of
another country.
Instead, a reasonable person listening could only conclude that Trump probably hadn't given
the matter even a passing thought and answered matter-of-factly. Because if Trump was so pro-Iraq
War at the time, as he's being portrayed of being by the media in 2016, one would think he - who
seemingly shares every perspective that enters his head - would be mentioning it every chance
he got in other interviews, which never happens.
Trump's next interview occurred with Fox's Neil Cavuto in February 2003, just weeks before
the invasion occurred.
In the video, Cavuto asks Trump how much time President Bush should spend on the economy vs.
Iraq.
"Well, I'm starting to think that people are much more focused now on the economy," Trump said.
"They're getting a little bit tired of hearing 'We're going in, we're not going in.' Whatever
happened to the days of Douglas MacArthur? Either do it or don't do it."
Trump continued: "Perhaps he shouldn't be doing it yet. And perhaps we should be waiting for
the United Nations."
But during Monday night's debate, Lester Holt followed the lead of many in the media who had
come to a definitive conclusion on Trump's (at first) apathetic-turned-ambiguous stance.
"The record shows it," Lester Holt pushed back on Trump after the candidate challenged the
moderator's assertion that Trump absolutely was for the Iraq War. The record also shows Trump
cautioning that the United Nations needs to be on board.
The Secretary-General of the United Nations at the time, Kofi Annan, said this when speaking
on the invasion:
"I have indicated it was not in conformity with the U.N. Charter. From our point of view, from
the charter point of view, it was illegal."
So if following Trump logic in his interview with Cavuto, if the U.S. and its allies had waited
for U.N. approval, the war likely never happens.
But here's an important nugget few are speaking about: On March 26, 2003, just one week after
the invasion began, Trump says at an Academy Awards after-party, "The war's a mess," according
to The Washington Post. One day earlier, a Gallup poll showed public support for the war at 72
percent.
The "war's a mess" quote is even included in Politifact's verdict before coming to the conclusion
that Trump is absolutely false in stating he opposed the war.
In the end, the solution here is simple: Politifact needs to change its "False" rating on Trump's
claim. That isn't to say it should be not characterized as "True" or "Mostly True" either.
Instead, in a suggestion likely to send the usual suspects in our polarized media crazy, the
rating of "Half True" needs to be applied here.
The Hill reached out to Politifact for comment but did not get a response.
As for media organizations (and this applies to almost every one), who keep insisting that
Trump supported the Iraq War so definitively, not every situation lives in absolutes. Not every
question has an absolute "yes" or "no" as a final verdict.
In the case of businessman Donald Trump circa 2002 and 2003, chalk up his perspective on the
Iraq War before it started as the following:
- At first - months before it began to get any real traction in the American mindset - Trump's
thought process was one of ambivalence via having not given it almost any thought before being
asked about it by Stern, which was nothing more than a quick tangent in an interview focusing
on 20 other things.
- And then in January 2003, Trump's public "stance" was one of caution-before-proceeding by
stating a need to wait for the United Nations before rushing in. Note: There weren't declarations
around the threat of weapons of mass destruction, spreading democracy or the need to remove a
brutal dictator. Trump never cites any of those common arguments for war even once, as Republicans
and even some Democrats did.
In March of 2003, as the war just began, Trump declares "the war's a mess."
Bottom line: There's was nothing to indicate Trump supported the war, as the so-called record
showed.
He didn't seem 100 percent against it either.
"On the fence" would be another apt way to describe it.
Cooler heads need to prevail here.
But "sanity," "media," and "this year's election" are five words rarely seen in the same sentence
anymore.
Meanwhile, we know for sure which candidate absolutely loves war and leaves a trail of death and
destruction in her wake: Hillary Clinton.
RE: Debate Night Message: The Markets Are Afraid of Donald Trump
[ Justin Wolfers convincingly argues that Wall Street's darling in this election is Hillary Clinton
and not Donald Trump although that was probably an unintended consequence of making his case without
reading between his own line.]
Wall Street fears a Trump presidency. Stocks may lose 10 to 12 percent of their value if he wins
the November election, and there may be a broader economic downturn.
These conclusions arise from close analysis of financial markets during Monday's presidential
debate, which provides a fascinating case study of the complex interconnections between American
politics and economics. The market's judgment stands in sharp opposition to Donald J. Trump's claims
that his presidency would be good for business.
Decoding these market signals is no easy task because it is difficult to disentangle correlation
from causation. Ideally we would observe stock prices in parallel universes with identical economic
conditions, with a single exception: In one, Mr. Trump has a good shot at becoming president, while
in the other, his chances are low.
Monday's presidential debate provided a rough approximation of this experiment. At 9 p.m., before
the debate began, the betting markets gave Mr. Trump a 35 percent chance of becoming president. Two
hours later, after the debate, we had entered the parallel universe in which economic conditions
were the same, but Mr. Trump's chances had fallen a tad below 30 percent...
RC AKA Darryl, Ron said in reply to RC AKA Darryl,
Ron... , -1
"The stock market has forecast nine of the last five recessions." Paul Samuelson (1966), quoted
in: John C Bluedorn et al. Do Asset Price Drops Foreshadow Recessions? (2013), p. 4
[Of course the real question is how well do the betting markets predict the stock market? The
only question actually answered was "Who do you love?"]
"... Not because of policy, but because they *hate* Clinton's dishonest scumbags like Debbie Wasserman Shultz... They know them and hate them. ..."
"... Clinton brags about how much she's done for the children meanwhile she's a millionaire who gives speeches to Goldman Sachs and does nothing but attend fundraisers thrown by rich donors. ..."
"... a lot of Sanders supporters have a visceral dislike of Sanders people who lied to them and about us... The dishonesty is blatant, just how Hillary lied about Sanders during the primary. ..."
"... wait until the election is over. The hatred toward Clinton and surrogates ... will come pouring out. That is if she wins. ..."
Peter K. :
September 30, 2016 at 06:35 AM
Clinton should be beating Trump easily in the polls. Sanders
would be. Trump is the worst candidate in history.
Why
isn't she don't better? It's because Clinton surrogates like
PGL are hateful and obnoxious. The voters hate these people
and don't agree with Clinton's centrism. The voters hate the
BS we're expected to believe like how corporate trade is
nothing but beneficial or that the Obama years were great.
Not
because of policy, but because they *hate* Clinton's
dishonest scumbags like Debbie Wasserman Shultz... They
know them and hate them.
Clinton brags about how much she's done for the children
meanwhile she's a millionaire who gives speeches to Goldman
Sachs and does nothing but attend fundraisers thrown by rich
donors.
I'll vote for Hillary but
a lot of Sanders supporters
have a visceral dislike of Sanders people who lied to them
and about us... The dishonesty is blatant, just how
Hillary lied about Sanders during the primary.
But Sanders
knows policywise Trump is much, much worse than Hillary even
if she's not that good.
Peter K. -> Peter K....
, -1
That's why Sanders is campaigning for Hillary. But
wait
until the election is over. The hatred toward Clinton and
surrogates ... will come pouring out. That is if she
wins.
Actually, a Malfunction Did
Affect Donald Trump's
Voice at the Debate
http://nyti.ms/2cGN1m8
NYT - NICHOLAS CONFESSORE and PATRICK HEALY - SEPT. 30
The Commission on Presidential Debates said Friday that the first debate on Monday was marred
by an unspecified technical malfunction that affected the volume of Mr. Trump's voice in the debate
hall.
Mr. Trump complained after the debate that the event's organizers had given him a "defective mike,"
contributing to his widely panned performance against Hillary Clinton. Mrs. Clinton lampooned Mr.
Trump's claim, telling reporters on her campaign plane, "Anybody who complains about the microphone
is not having a good night."
Mr. Trump was clearly audible to the television audience. And there is no evidence of sabotage.
But it turns out he was on to something.
"Regarding the first debate, there were issues regarding Donald Trump's audio that affected the
sound level in the debate hall," the commission said in its statement.
The commission, a nonprofit organization that sponsors the presidential debates, released no other
information about the malfunction, including how it was discovered, which equipment was to blame,
or why the problem was admitted to only on Friday, four days after the debate.
Reached by phone, a member of the commission's media staff said she was not authorized to speak
about the matter.
Some members of the audience, held at Hofstra University in New York, recalled in interviews that
the amplification of Mr. Trump's voice was at times significantly lower than that for Mrs. Clinton.
And at times Mr. Trump appeared to be hunching down to get his face closer to his microphone.
Zeke Miller, a reporter for Time Magazine who attended the debate, mentioned the difference on
Monday in a report to the traveling press pool for Mr. Trump. From his vantage point, Mr. Miller
wrote, Mr. Trump was sometimes "a little quieter" than Mrs. Clinton.
In an interview, Mr. Trump said he had tested out the audio system two hours before the event
and found it "flawless." Only during the debate did he notice the problem, Mr. Trump said, and he
tried to compensate by leaning down more closely to the microphone. He complained that the changing
volume had distracted him and alleged again that someone had created the problem deliberately.
"They had somebody modulating the microphone, so when I was speaking, the mike would go up and
down," Mr. Trump said. "I spent 50 percent of my thought process working the mike." ...
Doing what contemporary American economists
suggest: eliminate tariffs, don't worry about huge capital inflows or a ridiculously overvalued dollar,
has led the US from being the envy of the world to being a non-developed economy with worse roads
than Cuba or Ghana.
That US economists are still treated with any degree of credibility it totally
appalling. They are so obviously bought-and-paid for snake oil salesmen that people are finally tuning
them out.
TRUMP 2016: Return America to Protectionism - Screw globalism
[There is a pdf at the link. Olivier Blanchard has
surprised me again. As establishment economists go he is not
so bad. There is plenty that he still glosses over but
insofar as status quo establishment macroeconomics goes he is
thorough and coherent. One might hope that those that do not
understand either the debate for higher inflation targets or
the debate for fiscal policy to accomplish what monetary
policy cannot might learn from this article by Olivier
Blanchard, but I will not hold my breath waiting for that. In
any case the article is worth a read for anyone that can.]
RC AKA Darryl, Ron -> RC AKA Darryl, Ron...
,
Friday, September 30, 2016 at 07:07 AM
Get real! No alumni of the Peterson Institute and IMF is
going to go all mushy on the down sides of globalization and
wealth distribution.
The State of Advanced Economies and Related Policy
Debates: A Fall 2016 Assessment
By Olivier Blanchard
Perhaps the most striking macroeconomic fact about
advanced economies today is how anemic demand remains in the
face of zero interest rates.
In the wake of the global financial crisis, we had a
plausible explanation why demand was persistently weak:
Legacies of the crisis, from deleveraging by banks, to fiscal
austerity by governments, to lasting anxiety by consumers and
firms, could all explain why, despite low rates, demand
remained depressed.
This explanation is steadily becoming less convincing.
Banks have largely deleveraged, credit supply has loosened,
fiscal consolidation has been largely put on hold, and the
financial crisis is farther in the rearview mirror. Demand
should have steadily strengthened. Yet, demand growth has
remained low.
Why? The likely answer is that, as the legacies of the
past have faded, the future has looked steadily bleaker.
Forecasts of potential growth have been repeatedly revised
down. And consumers and firms-anticipating a gloomier
future-are cutting back spending, leading to unusually low
demand growth today....
Young people reject neoliberalism... And thus they reject Hillary. As simple as that...
Notable quotes:
"... Here is my own wild take on why millennials don't support Clinton "enough": Many younger American voters, perhaps a sufficient number of them to seriously imperil Clinton's chances, have significant ideological differences with the candidate. That's my theory ..."
"... I would like to suggest that the threat these young voters pose to technocratic [neo]liberalism is not the possibility of electing Donald Trump. Despite Clinton's flagging numbers, her chances of success remain high. Rather, the fear is that if younger voters really are committed to a host of ideological positions at odds with the mainstream of the Democratic Party, then that Party, without a Trump-sized cudgel, is doomed. ..."
"... So why have liberal pundits resisted such a move? Why are they intent on not just defeating but discrediting the ideological preferences of the young left, dismissing them not as a legitimate divergence but as mere ignorance and confusion? ..."
The given causes vary but the consensus is clear: Young voters are pathological and the cure is
to disabuse them of their ignorance.
Here is my own wild take on why millennials don't support Clinton "enough": Many younger American
voters, perhaps a sufficient number of them to seriously imperil Clinton's chances, have significant
ideological differences with the candidate. That's my theory. Many liberal pundits seem unimpressed
by this idea perhaps because it suggests that votes must be earned in a democracy, but it does have
the benefit of the evidence.
... ... ...
I would like to suggest that the threat these young voters pose to technocratic [neo]liberalism
is not the possibility of electing Donald Trump. Despite Clinton's flagging numbers, her chances
of success remain high. Rather, the fear is that if younger voters really are committed to a host
of ideological positions at odds with the mainstream of the Democratic Party, then that Party, without
a Trump-sized cudgel, is doomed. It should not escape anybody's notice that politics by negative
definition-the argument, at bottom, that "we're better than those guys"-has become the dominant electoral
strategy of the Democratic Party, and that despite the escalation of the "those guys" negatives,
the mere promise to be preferable has yielded diminishing returns. At some point, the Democratic
Party will either need to embrace a platform significantly to the left of their current orthodoxy,
or they will lose.
... ... ...
This might not seem such a bad thing. Positions shift. Parties evolve. A serious threat of millennial
desertion might lead to a natural compromise: support, in exchange for real policy concessions going
forward. So why have liberal pundits resisted such a move? Why are they intent on not just defeating
but discrediting the ideological preferences of the young left, dismissing them not as a legitimate
divergence but as mere ignorance and confusion?
Emmett Rensin is a writer based in Iowa City, Iowa. His previous work has appeared in Vox,The
New Republic, The Atlantic and The Los Angeles Review of Books (where he is a contributing editor).
Follow him on Twitter at @EmmettRensin.
"... Right now, the SYSTEM(establishment) is rigged favoring Hillary. Trump is no saint but unpredictable as perceived by deep state and the MSM. What more damage he can do compared to Bush, Obama or the Hilabama. At least he is challenging the status quo and the establishment, unlike any other candidates in the past! ..."
"... I am vacillating about whom to vote. Bernie would have been my choice. Now Trump vote by default is a protest vote, against the rigged system. Not the best choice but I am fed up with status quo. It needs a jolt and now, only Trump can do that. ..."
"... Paul Ryan went on record that if Trump is elected they'll just ignore him and further the agenda hammered out for them by their Kochtopus overlords. Which is exactly what I have expected would be the case all along. This isn't a damned game, but the more I hear the more it seems that's how it's being viewed, as if the final winner has no real-world relevance. ..."
"... Amen. These so-called "best and brightest" like Clinton and Obama are not only morally bankrupt, the awful truth is they are also obviously poorly informed and self-evidently not very bright either. Obama could, in fact, be almost the definition of the "empty suit". ..."
"... I no longer entertain any such illusions, Hilary and Obama know full well what the consequences of their actions are, all the way from Yemen to Minnesota health insurers. Obama is working toward a sexy retirement golfing with billionaires and raising funds for his Library, as for Hilary, her lust for pure unbridled power for its own sake knows no bounds. From the hallowed halls of Goldman Sachs to the board room at Monsanto, Hilary knows *precisely* where she can get the funds to satisfy her blood and power lusts. ..."
"... Well, her leaked audio fits in with her new plan to give all those "basement dwellers" something to do – that National Service Reserve thing…… But yea, all you stupid millennials – get off the couch and vote for Hillary because she told you to!! And then get off her lawn! ..."
"... Beyond a tone-deafness in self-expression that's astonishing for an experienced politician (even if she did not expect the statement to become public), I find it amazing that there is not even a hint of the thought, "well, maybe there's something about our economy that we need to adjust." ..."
"... Maybe not super generous, but the U.S. medical system already costs more than single payer, so there is more than that going on than just "can't afford it". I have often though the citizens of an empire must be kept in abject poverty, so they don't get to questioning the empire thing (maybe they learned from Vietnam). ..."
"... As Hillary derides those who think we ought to be more like Scandinavia, with free college, free national health care, what she isn't making clear is that America the nation is paying more military money than most of the rest of the world combined. In her mindset, we are the Global Police, and if that $791 billion of military spending reduces us to recession, unaffordable college, unaffordable medical care, and a few dozen people owning over half of all the assets in a nation of 300 million, well that's the price of being the Good Guys. ..."
"... What this tells me about Hillary is she thinks the economy is fine, thinks the current economic policies and trade deals are fine, and has no intention of changing anything. For her, the current economic situation is the best of all possible worlds. ..."
"... Not to mention selling cluster bombs and white phosphorus to the same Saudi despots who use them against Yemeni civilians with the US's assistance. 10s of thousands have been killed and there is a dreadful famine affecting hundreds of thousands. ..."
"... But Trump called a woman fat, so he is the evil one. ..."
About that hacked audio, I suddenly saw it all over youtube last night on various progressive
channels from around midnight on. Well, here is a primary source! 2 minutes of Hillary explaining
that Bernie supporters are basement dwelling barista losers without futures who are too naive
to understand how politics really work. And she confirms she's center-right, in case anyone was
fooled by her recent ostensible leftness:
...Right now, the SYSTEM(establishment) is rigged favoring Hillary. Trump is no saint but
unpredictable as perceived by deep state and the MSM. What more damage he can do compared to Bush,
Obama or the Hilabama. At least he is challenging the status quo and the establishment, unlike
any other candidates in the past!
I am vacillating about whom to vote. Bernie would have been my choice. Now Trump vote by
default is a protest vote, against the rigged system. Not the best choice but I am fed up with
status quo. It needs a jolt and now, only Trump can do that.
A vote for Greens is not a vote for Hillary. A vote for the Green candidate is a vote for the
Green candidate.
The GOP should have vetted someone who wasn't a buffoon and who wasn't going to treat minority
populations with disdain and use their pain as a tool. In much the same way that the Democratic
Party shouldn't have ignored the pain of average Americans and rigged their primary for Hillary.
You're entitled to your own strategy for how to vote, however be gracious enough to let others
have that same courtesy.
The GOPs idea of 'vetting' was the usual one this go-round: They gave a lot of media attention
to the crazies like Rubio and Cruz and Trump. The way it always worked before was the media would
then focus on the 'grown-up' or the 'serious' candidate. In this case it was JEB!
The problem was Trump went off the reservation talking about things the Republican base actually
cares about. And stole a lot of Bernie's thunder since Bernie had a long list of no-go issues
(we can rail against the banks but can't actually do anything about them)
It didn't help that JEB! so obviously didn't want the job. Maybe because he can see the trainwreck
coming down the pike. For the same reason Trump ended the debate by shouting about the bubble
economy. (When it wasn't his turn, natch)
"…vote for Greens not worthless. If they average 5% of the vote nationwide they will get
matching funds in 2020. Please consider this and also spread the word."
And by 2020, if the Republicans gain control of all three branches of government, those "matching
funds" will be a memory. I know I'm going to catch flack for this, but in the sense that too many
of the younger voters have had an all but nonexistent education in political science, history
and civics, Clinton is at least right on that score. I've seen it too often-and been attacked
for trying to point out that election fraud and party corruption are not what we should
be focused on now when the future of the republic is in jeopardy.
How any intelligent human being can say, much less believe, that allowing Trump to be elected
will "teach the Democrats" anything is beyond my comprehension. After all, it's not as if anything
that happens after that will affect them in any discernible way. It will be the poor and the elderly
and the people of color who'll bear the weight of a GOP-owned government.
Paul Ryan went on record that if Trump is elected they'll just ignore him and further the
agenda hammered out for them by their Kochtopus overlords. Which is exactly what I have expected
would be the case all along. This isn't a damned game, but the more I hear the more it seems that's
how it's being viewed, as if the final winner has no real-world relevance.
In a rush to judgment, I decided Clinton did not understand ACA when she said its problems
could be addressed with incremental changes. Nice to have proof this is one more area the self
proclaimed policy wonk is unaware of the details of the policy and its effects.
Don't confuse her awareness with her propaganda talking points. She is perfectly aware of what
ACA is for and she is glad. Does she want us to share her awareness? No.
I agree she understands its true purpose. Where I differ is that I don't for a moment belief
that either Clinton or Obama have a clue what is really in that law or what its true effect would
be over time. I think it of it this way – both of them understood the true purpose of overthrowing
Qaddafi, neither of them or the architects of that strategy began to understand that it would
not just continue to destabilize the region it would destabilize Europe.
Do you think either of them recognized that forcing people to buy garbage insurance with no
health care attached in order to entrench insurance companies was going to significantly help
their opponents? Endanger Clinton's election? Or that it might not last long enough for the opening
of the Obama library because the sheer weight of it was unsustainable?
True, they don't care, but it also shows how stupid not caring is.
I don't think they cared if it helped their "opponents." Remaining in power is less important
than the payout afterwards – I think they just don't think in the long term because the short
term is good enough for their purposes.
Amen. These so-called "best and brightest" like Clinton and Obama are not only morally
bankrupt, the awful truth is they are also obviously poorly informed and self-evidently not very
bright either. Obama could, in fact, be almost the definition of the "empty suit".
Look at who goes onto the success track out of the Ivies, if it isn't legacy offspring dimbulbs
like Chelsea, it's frequently superficially articulate suck-ups who can be trusted to faithfully
and unquestioningly follow orders and has almost an inverse relationship with objective merit
of the sort we are sold.
I was ahead of the curve and saw that the fix was in before Obama's inauguration, boy that
was an unpopular stance. Then I went through a long internal debate: is he stupid or is he evil?
I chose "stupid" for quite a while, giving the benefit of the doubt, I just *wanted to believe*
that Lucy would not pull the football away at the last minute this time around.
I no longer entertain any such illusions, Hilary and Obama know full well what the consequences
of their actions are, all the way from Yemen to Minnesota health insurers. Obama is working toward
a sexy retirement golfing with billionaires and raising funds for his Library, as for Hilary,
her lust for pure unbridled power for its own sake knows no bounds. From the hallowed halls of
Goldman Sachs to the board room at Monsanto, Hilary knows *precisely* where she can get the funds
to satisfy her blood and power lusts.
Funny how that leaked in a week where Clinton, and the Obamas were busy explaining political
reality according to the usual suspects to those same basement dwellers. You know the one where
any vote not for Clinton was automatically the same as voting for Trump, and voters couldn't really
do that because Hillary was not perfect. But now we have proof that Clinton isn't just "not perfect"
she isn't even interested in the concerns of those voters the entitled turds were lecturing.
Well according to Hillary and Obama a vote for Jill Stein is the same as a vote against Hillary.
Then that means that a vote for Trump is like two votes against Hillary! Think about it.
Well, her leaked audio fits in with her new plan to give all those "basement dwellers"
something to do – that National Service Reserve thing……
But yea, all you stupid millennials – get off the couch and vote for Hillary because she told
you to!! And then get off her lawn!
Uh I don't even see what is so bad about anything she says at least in the clip (maybe I'm
missing some larger context). Otherwise much ado about nothing. Look I'm not a fan of Hillary's
policies, it's unlikely I'd vote for Hillary but … really … mountains out of molehills. It's like
Trump's comment about how it might be a 400 pound person who hacked the DNC and suddenly it's
a fat person's rights issue or something, and frankly his statement was more offensive than this,
only in context it was a common throwaway nerd stereotype in the face of Hillary falsely blaming
a nuclear power.
But no not everyone who has been in an election or more knows any history is bewildered. When
times are bad the choice is always go left or go right. And go right always ends in disaster,
but if going left is blocked, it's exactly what people will do even so. The way to avoid that
it to keep the left alive, but the ruling class will risk the hard right over going left every
time.
Free health care of course is not "going as far as Scandinavia" but is what every developed
country on earth has pretty much except the U.S.. So yes it's offensive if one imagined Hillary
was for single payer, but did anyone seriously think this? It is not like she has campaigned on
it.
OK, if you don't see it, you don't see it. Just take my word for it then: whatever slim chance
Hillary had to win just went out the window. Other than that it's not a big deal.
After all we've (1%) done? for those educated? basement living? baristas?!!
Each one of those is problematic (based on memes mocking millenials) not to mention she's doing
it in a room of 1%ers. The rich flat out mocking the people they victimize is not going to go
over well. Her statements are worse than Rmoney's 47% garbage. MSM can ignore it, which takes
care of half the citizenry but the other half is on-line.
Beyond a tone-deafness in self-expression that's astonishing for an experienced politician
(even if she did not expect the statement to become public), I find it amazing that there is not
even a hint of the thought, "well, maybe there's something about our economy that we need to adjust."
It's clear that the only adjustment HRC feels necessary is citizens' expectations of their
future in the USA. This person is not fit for public service at any level. I hope every voter
who's thinking of voting for her listens carefully to exactly what she said here and ponders what
it reveals about her assessment of the challenges we face.
It's unclear what people just don't understand about Scandinavia. Higher taxes? Yea it's true
people might balk at Scandinavian level taxes, however at the actual point in the continuum the
U.S. actually exists in, I think a lot of people would trade higher taxes for the benefits of
a welfare state (not dealing with insurance companies, not facing poverty in old age – and hey
paid sick time and paid 6 week vacations).
When I was in the insurance biz I met a Swedish woman who was an up and coming exec in the
company. She had been a school teacher in Sweden and had moved to the U.S. to earn more and pay
less taxes. Her plan, once she had made her pile, was to move back to Sweden explaining, "because
I would never want to be old in America."
What Americans don't understand about Scandinavia is that those countries don't have a bloated
military – or any military really – to protect their 'exorbitant privilege'.
An Empire cannot be a welfare state, and vice versa.
Maybe not super generous, but the U.S. medical system already costs more than single payer,
so there is more than that going on than just "can't afford it". I have often though the citizens
of an empire must be kept in abject poverty, so they don't get to questioning the empire thing
(maybe they learned from Vietnam).
An Empire's priorities are usually not with the welfare and general well-being of its citizenry.
In fact its population can best be kept in a precarious state in order to lower labor costs,
limit social demands and, or course, fill the lower military ranks.
Quite a revealing mindset on Hillary's part. Reminds me of Romney dismissing 47% of the population
as free riders.
As Hillary derides those who think we ought to be more like Scandinavia, with free college,
free national health care, what she isn't making clear is that America the nation is paying more
military money than most of the rest of the world combined. In her mindset, we are the Global
Police, and if that $791 billion of military spending reduces us to recession, unaffordable college,
unaffordable medical care, and a few dozen people owning over half of all the assets in a nation
of 300 million, well that's the price of being the Good Guys.
This brings up a new (old) definition of nationalism; the simple idea that you take care of
your own people and infrastructure first, and that your military expenses are only for defensive
purposes - not for establishing 800+ military bases all over the world, and dividing the entire
globe into theaters of war. That's what our military and political leaders have done, following
the wishes of the very, very few ultra wealthy who make billions every year off this system.
A nation, any nation, has no more precious and priceless resource than the minds of its young
people. The health and wellbeing of its young people. Where do they think the citizens of coming
decades are going to come from? Some other country?
America the nation is dying because America's Empire is pulling up the floorboards and chopping
up the furniture to feed the flames of endless wars around the world, wars which accomplish nothing
for America but poverty of its citizens. We need voters and political leaders who will stand against
America's Empire, who will dismantle it and return our attention to becoming a leading nation
among nations, not Number One in arms sales, not Number One in blood spilled, not Number One in
war crimes.
wow…… clueless in bubble-land. So a bad economy for most (since 2008 at least) and poor job
prospects for most is a matter of "mind set" ? Oh, if only the young did positive thinking. That
would fix everything.
What this tells me about Hillary is she thinks the economy is fine, thinks the current
economic policies and trade deals are fine, and has no intention of changing anything. For her,
the current economic situation is the best of all possible worlds. If people can't find decent
jobs it's their own fault.
Her audio clip sounds like Mitt Romney's 47 percent comment: "And so my job is not to worry
about those people - I'll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and
care for their lives." – Romney
"What this tells me about Hillary is she thinks the economy is fine, thinks the current economic
policies and trade deals are fine, and has no intention of changing anything. For her, the current
economic situation is the best of all possible worlds."
This is why the concept of a Buy Nothing Month in October is being mentioned as a means of
passive protest. No discretionary purchases. Cash only for essentials to hammer Wells Fargo and
the credit card tapeworms in the economy.
Most people are already down to essentials, and those who aren't likely agree with Hillary
or don't see why they should suffer more for a very tenuous possibility of doing mild harm to
their tormentors.
Poor, brave Hillary - trapped between the Deplorables and the Basement Dwellers (presumably
on their way to becoming the Morlocks and the Eloi). What I find hysterical is the way she depicts
herself as the sane one in a world gone mad.
It's appalling that Hillary and her media toadies are playing up the fact that Trump called
women fat, while that same media completely ignores that Hillary took money from Saudi Arabia
to send America to war against Libya.
Seriously, in the entire history of the human race has there ever, ever been a more singularly
corrupt act than to take money from a foreign power to send your own nation to war against some
other nation? And all we hear about is that Trump called women fat! These people are out of their
minds.
Not to mention selling cluster bombs and white phosphorus to the same Saudi despots who
use them against Yemeni civilians with the US's assistance. 10s of thousands have been killed
and there is a dreadful famine affecting hundreds of thousands.
But Trump called a woman fat, so he is the evil one.
The famine is affecting millions. Yemen is enduring the worst humanitarian crisis on the
planet. That is a war for Saudi Arabia to flex its muscle against Iran and shiites to counteract
their economic weakness from oil price declines. No one has any real geopolitical interest there.
Only Trump brings attention to Yemen on the campaign trail. Not the media, and definitely not
Clinton who gleefully increased weapons sales to Saudi Arabia while she was at State.
The Obama/Hilary government in action. Anyone voting for a continuation is complicit.
So yes, you can have a president who did not call someone "fat"….but be sure and keep a photo
of the Yemeni girl with her arms blown off on your bedside table to remind you the price you paid
for that crucial advantage.
OpenThePodBayDoorsHAL
Re: Syria, Yemen, Honduras, Poland, Ukraine, Brazil et alia ad nauseam.
What we need is an American Anti-Imperialist League, it should have a former president, a titan
of industry, and a famous celebrity as founding members.
Oh, look, we had one already, with Grover Cleveland, Andrew Carnegie, and Mark Twain:
"... Hey get that straight, NBC paid her Six Hundred Thousand a year for the years she was there. And I apologize I was under the impression that her contract was allowed to lapse, but it was renewed once. They really were paying her for nothing after the first year… ..."
"... You and your son might want to think about the fact that extended families living together has been historically and still is the norm for many. My son works in the building trades and doesn't make enough money to buy a house in our neighborhood. He has been living with me for several years and our relationship is very good. ..."
About that hacked audio, I suddenly saw it all over youtube last night on various progressive
channels from around midnight on. Well, here is a primary source! 2 minutes of Hillary explaining
that Bernie supporters are basement dwelling barista losers without futures who are too naive to
understand how politics really work. And she confirms she's center-right, in case anyone was fooled
by her recent ostensible leftness:
Our son is one of those recent grads Hillary disdains. He has just picked up his third slightly
above minimum wage part time job. He has had two interviews in his chosen field only to be told at
the end of each the companies were 'just looking' at the job field prospects and did not actually
have an open job available…. he has applied for a number of generic type jobs that just require a
college degree as well… to no response so far. He is personalble, bright and according to the managers
at his part time jobs he was a great interviewee…
He has severe kidney stone issues that require hospitalization and stents about once a year –
often for ten day stays and so we have chosen to pay for a Cadillac policy for him ourselves so he
gets the quality care he needs ( no the ACA was useless – he tried) . He is embarrassed we have to
do this for him… He spends every bit of his meager pay paying off his small student loan debt so he can at least get
that burden off and keeping his ancient little car in repair. He refused to allow us to help him
pay his loans and or buy him a better car. He lives at home and feels terrible about it – and so
is constantly doing all the home work he can during the few hours between his jobs to 'make up' for
needing our help. Friends go out to dinner and movies sports games etc and have stopped asking him
because he usually does not have the money …. So….. He is on his way to depression I think…. all that work in college. He has a solid 3.4 GPA and a 3.7
GPA in his field.and he is willing to move anywhere immediately and would not mind a job that entailed
a lot of travel…. But I guess Hillary just thinks he is some unmotivated stupid despite all that….
I know a vote for Stein is totally useless but other that leaving it blank I have no options here.
This country is tanking….I cannot believe this is happening to my son. Spouse and I walked out of
college with a 3.1 and 3.0 gpas directly into decent paying career jobs and an upward trajectory
that continues to this day… he is smarter and works harder than either of us ever have frankly….
Meanwhile Chelsea (who "doesn't care about being rich" or whatever nonsense she spouted) is grifted
into a $500K/year do-nothing job at NBC, marries a hedge fund manager, and flies in private jets.
And her mom and dad make $300,000 for one hour speeches.
Hey get that straight, NBC paid her Six Hundred Thousand a year for the years she was there.
And I apologize I was under the impression that her contract was allowed to lapse, but it was
renewed once. They really were paying her for nothing after the first year…
And don't forget the various Boards she serves on, mostly Clinton entities.
You and your son might want to think about the fact that extended families living together
has been historically and still is the norm for many. My son works in the building trades and
doesn't make enough money to buy a house in our neighborhood. He has been living with me for several
years and our relationship is very good. I am the son of a man who abandoned his own children,
which perhaps accounts for my finding our arrangement particularly gratifying and take great pleasure
in his company as well as that of his friends and lovers.
brilliant son in college, nothing out there at all except 711 jobs. the store he works and
was on shift at got robbed twice on consecutive nights and i had to ask him to stop going there
for his safety.
it is sad sad sad how the future of the kids is being destroyed. the 0.01% have "arranged"
sinecures for their kids and they dont care about our kids. Go into debt to get an education no
one seems to need to pay overpaid professors and administrators at the university, and then carry
that around your neck all your life.
I hope your son does find what he's looking for. I'm worried for my own children and what they
will do too.
What strikes me the most about stories like yours is how much luck factors into things. Graduating
into a recession is horrible. Decisions that made sense 4 years prior to graduation suddenly seem
irresponsible when the day comes to leave college.
So much of my own career has benefitted from being in the right place at the right time, and
I could only have been at this place at that time because I graduated when I did. Sure, I've hustled
and taken advantage of opportunities too. I've always been willing to get dirty and do the things
other people weren't willing to do. But the fact is that I was in a position to do all of that
because of many things that had nothing to do with how hard I worked, how smart I was, or what
degrees I had. If I had been born a year later, graduated a year earlier, chosen a slightly different
discipline… so many things would be different for me now. It's one reason why I don't complain
too much about taxes.
"... This means the "default position" of the Clinton campaign and her friendly media is, "if there's something wrong in the world, criticize George W. Bush." ..."
"... "Why not? It worked for Obama. Maybe it will work for her as well," Bolton said. "And I think the fact that the media are aiding and abetting this approach shouldn't surprise anybody. I think no matter who the Republican nominee was this year, the media were going to be – as the Wall Street Journal has so aptly called them – stenographers for the White House and the Clinton campaign. And that's exactly what they're doing." ..."
"... Most people watching 90 minutes of a debate like that don't score it on this debating point, or that debating point. They look at the entire thing. They want to know about the character of the people. And I think the fact that Trump was there for 90 minutes and held his own, or more than, in a format that Hillary Clinton has been familiar with since she was in law school, accomplished what he needed to accomplish. ..."
"I think it's entirely understandable that what Clinton will try to do is avoid criticizing Obama,
because she desperately needs to recreate the Obama coalition on November the 8th," said Bolton.
"She has gone out of her way, including in her 600-page-long tedious memoir about her days at the
State Department, failing to distance herself from Obama."
This means the "default position" of the Clinton campaign and her friendly media is, "if there's
something wrong in the world, criticize George W. Bush."
"Why not? It worked for Obama. Maybe it will work for her as well," Bolton said. "And I think
the fact that the media are aiding and abetting this approach shouldn't surprise anybody. I think
no matter who the Republican nominee was this year, the media were going to be – as the Wall Street
Journal has so aptly called them – stenographers for the White House and the Clinton campaign.
And that's exactly what they're doing."
Bolton thought Trump "did what he needed to do" at the first presidential debate:
Most people watching 90 minutes of a debate like that don't score it on this debating point,
or that debating point. They look at the entire thing. They want to know about the character of
the people. And I think the fact that Trump was there for 90 minutes and held his own, or more
than, in a format that Hillary Clinton has been familiar with since she was in law school, accomplished
what he needed to accomplish.
My critique of his performance would be that he missed opportunities. For example, you mentioned
the foreign policy section, when they were asked about cyber warfare, and the dangers to the United
States of hacking, and that gave Clinton a chance to give a little college-type lecture on Russia
– by the way, omitting China, Iran, North Korea, and others – I thought at that point Trump could
have talked about her email homebrew server for his entire time, and just drilled that point home.
But, you know, people at home aren't sitting there grading on that basis. I think the second
debate, and the third debate, will be very different, and those – particularly in the media –
who now confidently predict the outcome of the election, based on their take of this debate, are
smoking something.
"... This means the "default position" of the Clinton campaign and her friendly media is, "if there's something wrong in the world, criticize George W. Bush." ..."
"... "Why not? It worked for Obama. Maybe it will work for her as well," Bolton said. "And I think the fact that the media are aiding and abetting this approach shouldn't surprise anybody. I think no matter who the Republican nominee was this year, the media were going to be – as the Wall Street Journal has so aptly called them – stenographers for the White House and the Clinton campaign. And that's exactly what they're doing." ..."
"... Most people watching 90 minutes of a debate like that don't score it on this debating point, or that debating point. They look at the entire thing. They want to know about the character of the people. And I think the fact that Trump was there for 90 minutes and held his own, or more than, in a format that Hillary Clinton has been familiar with since she was in law school, accomplished what he needed to accomplish. ..."
"I think it's entirely understandable that what Clinton will try to do is avoid criticizing Obama,
because she desperately needs to recreate the Obama coalition on November the 8th," said Bolton.
"She has gone out of her way, including in her 600-page-long tedious memoir about her days at the
State Department, failing to distance herself from Obama."
This means the "default position" of the Clinton campaign and her friendly media is, "if there's
something wrong in the world, criticize George W. Bush."
"Why not? It worked for Obama. Maybe it will work for her as well," Bolton said. "And I think
the fact that the media are aiding and abetting this approach shouldn't surprise anybody. I think
no matter who the Republican nominee was this year, the media were going to be – as the Wall Street
Journal has so aptly called them – stenographers for the White House and the Clinton campaign.
And that's exactly what they're doing."
Bolton thought Trump "did what he needed to do" at the first presidential debate:
Most people watching 90 minutes of a debate like that don't score it on this debating point,
or that debating point. They look at the entire thing. They want to know about the character of
the people. And I think the fact that Trump was there for 90 minutes and held his own, or more
than, in a format that Hillary Clinton has been familiar with since she was in law school, accomplished
what he needed to accomplish.
My critique of his performance would be that he missed opportunities. For example, you mentioned
the foreign policy section, when they were asked about cyber warfare, and the dangers to the United
States of hacking, and that gave Clinton a chance to give a little college-type lecture on Russia
– by the way, omitting China, Iran, North Korea, and others – I thought at that point Trump could
have talked about her email homebrew server for his entire time, and just drilled that point home.
But, you know, people at home aren't sitting there grading on that basis. I think the second
debate, and the third debate, will be very different, and those – particularly in the media –
who now confidently predict the outcome of the election, based on their take of this debate, are
smoking something.
2) Trade. With only 4 percent of the world's population, we buy almost one-fourth of the world's
goods. Every country is champing at the bit to get into our markets. We have tremendous leverage
on trade that we have not used. We do not want or need trade wars. But we should, in a friendly way,
tell other countries-especially the Chinese-"We want to trade with you, but we can't sustain our
huge trade deficit. You are going to have to find some things to buy from us, too."
3) Immigration.
With 58 percent of the world's population-almost 4 billion people-having to get by on $4 or less
a day, hundreds of millions would come here over the next few years if we simply opened our borders.
Our entire infrastructure-our schools, jails, sewers, hospitals, roads-and our economy as a whole
could not handle such a massive, rapid influx of people. The American people are the kindest, most
generous people in the world, and we have already allowed many millions more than any other country
to immigrate here, legally and illegally. But we must do a much better job enforcing our immigration
laws.
4) Wars. I am now the only Republican left in Congress who voted against going to war in
Iraq. For the first three of four years, it was the most unpopular vote I ever cast. I even once
was disinvited to speak at a Baptist church. Now, it is probably the most popular vote I ever cast.
The American people are tired of permanent, forever wars. While everyone wants a friendly relationship
with Israel, I do not believe the American people will continue to support wars that primarily benefit
Israel but cause thousands of young Americans to be killed or horribly maimed for life.
5) Jobs. Almost any member of Congress, if asked what is the greatest need in their district,
would probably say more good jobs. Radical environmentalists have caused many thousands of U.S. businesses
to go to other countries or close for good. We have ended up with the best-educated waiters and waitresses
in the world. When I was in Vietnam a few years ago, I was told if you wanted to start a business
there, you just went out and did it. The place was booming. It is now apparently easier to start
a small business in some former communist countries than in the supposedly free-enterprise U.S.
... ... ...
Rep. John J. Duncan Jr. represents the 2nd district of Tennessee in the U.S. House of Representatives.represents
the 2nd district of Tennessee in the U.S. House of Representatives.
"... "Over the last 25 years, the number of people living in extreme poverty has been cut from nearly 40 percent of humanity to under 10 percent." This is roughly true, according to World Bank data, but the story of how it happened goes against his whole speech - which argues that this progress is a result of the "globalization" that Washington leads and supports wherever it has influence in the developing world. In fact, the majority of the reduction in extreme poverty during this period (more than 1.1 billion people worldwide) took place in China. But during this period China was really the counterexample to the "principles of open markets" with which Obama insists "we must go forward, not backward." ..."
"... If we go back a bit more and look at 1981–2012, China accounted for even more of the reduction of the world population in extreme poverty, about 70 percent. This would indicate that other parts of the developing world increased their economic and social progress during the 21st century, relative to China, and indeed many developing countries did (as compared to the last two decades of the 20th century). But China played an increasingly large role in reducing poverty in other countries during this period. ..."
"... It was so successful in its economic growth and development - by far the fastest in world history - that it became the largest economy in the world, and pulled up many developing countries through its imports. Chinese imports went from a negligible 0.1 percent of other developing countries' exports to 3 percent, from 1980–2010. China also provided hundreds of billions of dollars in investment, loans, and aid to low- and middle-income countries in the 21st century. (In the last few years, Chinese growth has slowed, along with that of most countries, and that has contributed - although perhaps not as much as Europe has - to the global slowdown since 2011.) ..."
"... the "principles of open markets" that Obama refers to is really code for "policies that Washington supports." ..."
"... In his defense of a world economic order ruled by Washington and its rich country allies, President Obama also asserted that "we have made international institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund more representative." But that is a gross exaggeration: the most recent reform of IMF voting shares left the US with an unchanged 16.7 percent share, enough to veto many important decisions (that require an 85 percent majority) by itself; and it left Washington and its traditional rich country allies with a solid majority of more than 60 percent of votes. Of course, it is the developing countries, especially poorer ones, that are most subject to IMF decisions. But the IMF is - by a gentleman's agreement among the rich country governments - headed by a European, and the World Bank by an American. It should not be surprising if these institutions do not look out for the interests of the developing world. ..."
President Obama Inadvertently Gives High Praise to China
in UN Speech
By Mark Weisbrot
President Obama's speech at the UN last week was mostly a
defense of the world's economic and political status quo,
especially that part of it that is led or held in place by
the US government and the global institutions that Washington
controls or dominates. In doing so, he said some things that
were exaggerated or wrong, or somewhat misleading. It is
worth looking at some of the things that media reports on
this speech missed.
"Over the last 25 years, the number of people living
in extreme poverty has been cut from nearly 40 percent of
humanity to under 10 percent." This is roughly true,
according to World Bank data, but the story of how it
happened goes against his whole speech - which argues that
this progress is a result of the "globalization" that
Washington leads and supports wherever it has influence in
the developing world. In fact, the majority of the reduction
in extreme poverty during this period (more than 1.1 billion
people worldwide) took place in China. But during this period
China was really the counterexample to the "principles of
open markets" with which Obama insists "we must go forward,
not backward."
China's historically unprecedented economic growth in the
past 25 years (or 35 years, or even more) was accomplished
with state-owned enterprises and banks dominating the
economy. State control over investment, technology transfer,
and foreign exchange was vastly greater than in other
developing countries. China rejected the neoliberal policies
of an "independent central bank," indiscriminate opening to
international trade and investment, and rapid privatization
of state companies. Instead, it chose a gradual transition,
over 35 years, from an overwhelmingly planned economy to a
mixed economy in which the state still plays a leading role.
Even today, China expanded the investment of state-owned
enterprises by 23.5 percent in the first six months of 2016
(as compared to the same period in 2015), to help boost the
economy.
If we go back a bit more and look at 1981–2012, China
accounted for even more of the reduction of the world
population in extreme poverty, about 70 percent. This would
indicate that other parts of the developing world increased
their economic and social progress during the 21st century,
relative to China, and indeed many developing countries did
(as compared to the last two decades of the 20th century).
But China played an increasingly large role in reducing
poverty in other countries during this period.
It was so
successful in its economic growth and development - by far
the fastest in world history - that it became the largest
economy in the world, and pulled up many developing countries
through its imports. Chinese imports went from a negligible
0.1 percent of other developing countries' exports to 3
percent, from 1980–2010. China also provided hundreds of
billions of dollars in investment, loans, and aid to low- and
middle-income countries in the 21st century. (In the last few
years, Chinese growth has slowed, along with that of most
countries, and that has contributed - although perhaps not as
much as Europe has - to the global slowdown since 2011.)
Of course, the "principles of open markets" that Obama
refers to is really code for "policies that Washington
supports." Some of them are the exact opposite of "open
markets," such as the lengthening and strengthening of patent
and copyright protection included in the Trans-Pacific
Partnership (TPP) agreement. President Obama also made a plug
for the TPP in his speech, asserting that "we've worked to
reach trade agreements that raise labor standards and raise
environmental standards, as we've done with the Trans-Pacific
Partnership, so that the benefits [of globalization] are more
broadly shared." But the labor and environmental standards in
the TPP, as with those in previous US-led commercial
agreements, are not enforceable; whereas if a government
approves laws or regulations that infringe on the future
profit potential of a multinational corporation - even if
such laws or regulations are to protect public health or
safety - that government can be hit with billions of dollars
in fines. And they must pay these fines, or be subject to
trade sanctions.
In his defense of a world economic order ruled by
Washington and its rich country allies, President Obama also
asserted that "we have made international institutions like
the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund more
representative." But that is a gross exaggeration: the most
recent reform of IMF voting shares left the US with an
unchanged 16.7 percent share, enough to veto many important
decisions (that require an 85 percent majority) by itself;
and it left Washington and its traditional rich country
allies with a solid majority of more than 60 percent of
votes. Of course, it is the developing countries, especially
poorer ones, that are most subject to IMF decisions. But the
IMF is - by a gentleman's agreement among the rich country
governments - headed by a European, and the World Bank by an
American. It should not be surprising if these institutions
do not look out for the interests of the developing world.
"We can choose to press forward with a better model of
cooperation and integration," President Obama told the world
at the UN General Assembly. "Or we can retreat into a world
sharply divided, and ultimately in conflict, along age-old
lines of nation and tribe and race and religion."
But the rich country governments led by Washington are not
offering the rest of the world any better model of
cooperation and integration than the failed model they have
been offering for the past 35 years. And that is a big part
of the problem....
China's historically unprecedented economic growth in the
past 25 years (or 35 years, or even more) was accomplished
with state-owned enterprises and banks dominating the
economy. State control over investment, technology transfer,
and foreign exchange was vastly greater than in other
developing countries. China rejected the neoliberal policies
of an "independent central bank," indiscriminate opening to
international trade and investment, and rapid privatization
of state companies. Instead, it chose a gradual transition,
over 35 years, from an overwhelmingly planned economy to a
mixed economy in which the state still plays a leading role.
Even today, China expanded the investment of state-owned
enterprises by 23.5 percent in the first six months of 2016
(as compared to the same period in 2015), to help boost the
economy....
Even today, China expanded the investment of state-owned
enterprises by 23.5 percent in the first six months of 2016
(as compared to the same period in 2015), to help boost the
economy....
Yale Professors Offer Economic Prescriptions
By Brenda Cronin - Wall Street Journal
Richard C. Levin, president of Yale - and also a professor
of economics - moderated the conversation among Professors
Judith Chevalier, John Geanakoplos, William D. Nordhaus,
Robert J. Shiller and Aleh Tsyvinski....
An early mistake during the recession, Mr. Levin said, was
not targeting more stimulus funds to job creation. He
contrasted America's meager pace of growth in gross domestic
product in the past few years with China's often double-digit
pace, noting that after the crisis hit, Washington allocated
roughly 2% of GDP to job creation while Beijing directed 15%
of GDP to that goal....
Repeatedly there are warnings from Western economists that
the Chinese economy is near collapse, nonetheless economic
growth through the first 2 quarters this year is running at
6.7% and the third quarter looks about the same. The point is
to ask and describe how after these last 39 remarkable years:
Before the crash, complacent Democrats, ... tended to agree
with them that the economy was largely self-correcting.
Who is a complacent Democrat? Obama ran as a fiscal
conservative and appointed a GOP as his SecTreas. Geithner
was a "banks need to be bailed out" and the economy self
corrects. Geithner was not in favor of cram down or mortgage
programs that would have bailed out the injured little folks.
Democrats like Romer and Summers were in favor a fiscal
stimulus, but not enough of it. I expect to see the Clinton
economic team include a lot more women and especially focus
on economic policies that help working women and families.
I have always thought that a big reason for the Bush
jobless recovery was his lack of true fiscal stimulus. Bush
had tax cuts for the wealthy, but the latest from Summers
shows why trickle down does not work.
Full employment may have been missing from the 1992
platform, but full employment was pursued aggressively by
Bill Clinton. He got AG to agree to allow unemployment to
drop to 4% in exchange for raising taxes and dropping the
middle class tax cuts. Bill Clinton used fiscal policy to tax
the economy and as a break so monetary policy could be
accommodating.
He should include raising the MinWage. Maybe that has not
changed but it is a lynchpin for putting money in the pockets
of the working poor.
"... Will the media ever stop the ridiculous charade of pretending that the path of globalization that we are on is somehow and natural and that it is the outcome of a "free" market? Are longer and stronger patent and copyright monopolies the results of a free market? ..."
"... The NYT should up its game in this respect. It had a good piece on the devastation to millions of working class people and their communities from the flood of imports of manufactured goods in the last decade, but then it turns to hand-wringing nonsense about how it was all a necessary part of globalization. Actually, none of it was a necessary part of a free trade. ..."
"... First, the huge trade deficits were the direct result of the decision of China and other developing countries to buy massive amounts of U.S. dollars to hold as reserves in this period. This raised the value of the dollar and made our goods and services less competitive internationally. This problem of a seriously over-valued dollar stems from the bungling of the East Asian bailout by the Clinton Treasury Department and the I.M.F. ..."
"... The second point is political leaders are constantly working to make patents and copyrights stronger and longer. This raises the price that ordinary workers have to pay for everything from drugs to computer games. The result is lower real wages for ordinary workers and higher incomes for the beneficiaries of these rents. It also slows economic growth since markets are not smart enough to distinguish between a 10,000 percent price increase due to a tariff and a 10,000 percent price increase due to a patent monopoly. (In other words, all the bad things that "free trade" economists say about tariffs also apply to patents and copyrights, except the impact is far larger in the later case.) ..."
Why are none of the "free trade" members of
Congress pushing to change the regulations that require
doctors go through a U.S. residency program to be able to
practice medicine in the United States? Obviously they are
all protectionist Neanderthals.
Will the media ever stop the ridiculous charade of
pretending that the path of globalization that we are on is
somehow and natural and that it is the outcome of a "free"
market? Are longer and stronger patent and copyright
monopolies the results of a free market?
The NYT should up its game in this respect. It had a good
piece on the devastation to millions of working class people
and their communities from the flood of imports of
manufactured goods in the last decade, but then it turns to
hand-wringing nonsense about how it was all a necessary part
of globalization. Actually, none of it was a necessary part
of a free trade.
First, the huge trade deficits were the direct result of
the decision of China and other developing countries to buy
massive amounts of U.S. dollars to hold as reserves in this
period. This raised the value of the dollar and made our
goods and services less competitive internationally. This
problem of a seriously over-valued dollar stems from the
bungling of the East Asian bailout by the Clinton Treasury
Department and the I.M.F.
If we had a more competent team in place, that didn't
botch the workings of the international financial system,
then we would have expected the dollar to drop as more
imports entered the U.S. market. This would have moved the
U.S. trade deficit toward balance and prevented the massive
loss of manufacturing jobs we saw in the last decade.
The second point is political leaders are constantly
working to make patents and copyrights stronger and longer.
This raises the price that ordinary workers have to pay for
everything from drugs to computer games. The result is lower
real wages for ordinary workers and higher incomes for the
beneficiaries of these rents. It also slows economic growth
since markets are not smart enough to distinguish between a
10,000 percent price increase due to a tariff and a 10,000
percent price increase due to a patent monopoly. (In other
words, all the bad things that "free trade" economists say
about tariffs also apply to patents and copyrights, except
the impact is far larger in the later case.)
Finally, the fact that trade has exposed manufacturing
workers to international competition, but not doctors and
lawyers, was a policy choice, not a natural development.
There are enormous potential gains from allowing smart and
ambitious young people in the developing world to come to the
United States to work in the highly paid professions. We have
not opened these doors because doctors and lawyers are far
more powerful than autoworkers and textile workers. And, we
rarely even hear the idea mentioned because doctors and
lawyers have brothers and sisters who are reporters and
economists.
Addendum:
Since some folks asked about the botched bailout from the
East Asian financial crisis, the point is actually quite
simple. Prior to 1997 developing countries were largely
following the textbook model, borrowing capital from the West
to finance development. This meant running large trade
deficits. This reversed following the crisis as the
conventional view in the developing world was that you needed
massive amounts of reserves to avoid being in the situation
of the East Asian countries and being forced to beg for help
from the I.M.F. This led to the situation where developing
countries, especially those in the region, began running very
large trade surpluses, exporting capital to the United
States. (I am quite sure China noticed how its fellow East
Asian countries were being treated in 1997.)
"... By the standards of the Nuremberg trials, then, the aggressive, unjustified invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 were unquestionably war crimes. A just government would have put Bush, Cheney, Rice, Powell, and so forth on trial. One might note that the Nuremberg trials, the crime was taken seriously enough to earn condemnation to death by hanging. ..."
Howard Frant 09.29.16 at
4:21 am @ 130:
'… She is somewhat
interventionist
militarily. Of course,
people aren't content
just to say that, they
have to say that she is a
"war criminal" (sorry,
could I have some
specifics on this?)….'
I was giving this a rest,
but since you ask, it is
my duty to comply with
your request.
First, we need to
determine what a war
criminal is. I go by the
standards of the
Nuremberg War Crimes
Trials, in whose
charter
we read
(Article 6):
The following acts,
or any of them, are
crimes coming within
the jurisdiction of
the Tribunal for which
there shall be
individual
responsibility:
(a) CRIMES AGAINST
PEACE: namely,
planning, preparation,
initiation or waging
of a war of
aggression, or a war
in violation of
international
treaties, agreements
or assurances, or
participation in a
common plan or
conspiracy for the
accomplishment of any
of the foregoing….
I think this is a
pretty good definition of
a war crime, although if
you disagree I will be
glad to argue in its
favor.
By the standards
of the Nuremberg trials,
then, the aggressive,
unjustified invasion and
occupation of Iraq in
2003 were unquestionably
war crimes. A just
government would have put
Bush, Cheney, Rice,
Powell, and so forth on
trial. One might note
that the Nuremberg
trials, the crime was
taken seriously enough to
earn condemnation to
death by hanging.
Clinton's connection
to this crime was, of
course, at least her vote
in 2002 to enable it,
which made her an
accomplice. Her
subsequent excuse was
'bad intelligence', but
given her position as a
US senator, her
connections, her powers,
her fame, and her
undoubted wits, it is
almost impossible to
believe that she believed
Bush's pack of lies. It
seems much more likely
that her calculus was as
follows: 'If the war goes
"badly", it'll be on
Bush. If it goes "well",
we Democrats will have
been in on it. Win-win.'
However, one must concede
that if she were brought
to trial, she might be
able to plead monumental
ignorance and
incompetence. Of course
there will be no such
trial, so everyone
confronted by the
question must answer it
for her- or himself with
whatever means may be at
hand. To me the evidence
seems pretty conclusive.
Layman 09.30.16 at 1:20 pm @ 197 -
If the war was a criminal act, then voting
for the war, by making the voter an
accomplice, was also a criminal act.
Believable
ignorance, incompetence, or
other personal defects might mitigate, but
would not exonerate.
I asked about 'going
on with this' because at least one
participant seemed to feel that the
cataloguing of Clinton's flaws had become
superfluous. Some people might regard war
criminality as a flaw, so perhaps we are
offending as we persist.
Layman
09.30.16 at 2:54 pm
Anarcissie: "If the war was a criminal act, then voting for
the war, by making the voter an accomplice, was also a
criminal act."
Look, I personally believe it was wrong to
vote for the authorization, and that it was a political
calculation, but I wonder if you've actually read the
resolution? It is consistent with the claim that some people
make, that they assumed that Bush would act in concert with
the UN, because the resolution says he would act in concert
with themUN. The resolution was passed in October, the Bush
admin went to the UN in November, but failed to get a clear
authorization from the UN for the war.
You brought up Nuremberg. How many people were prosecuted
at Nuremberg for the crime of having voted for the Enabling
Law of 1933, which granted dictatorial powers and led
directly to everything that followed. None, right? Doesn't
that undermine your case?
Layman 09.30.16 at 2:38 am @ 169:
'"Because a proper trial can't be held, people must make up their minds
individually."
Which is another way of saying that it is not a fact, and that you acknowledge
it isn't a fact, and that rather undermines your entire response.'
I
think you are mistaken. If you believe in any sort of objective universe, then
there are facts which are hidden - in fact, given our lack of omniscience, most
of them. Nevertheless we must proceed in the world in some way, so we - some of
us, anyway - try to establish an idea of the facts through the best evidence
available, rational procedures, intuition, and so on. Some people believe that
the question of whether Clinton is a war criminal is important. There is a
reasonable argument in favor of the proposition, which Howard Frant wanted to
know, or pretended to want to know. I have given it.
Do you really want to go on with this? It does not make your favored
candidate look good, and in any case, most of the people reading and writing
here evidently don't really care that much one way or the other.
Hillary supporters, or "the media," had reason to be happy: She looked healthy! She probably could
have kept reciting her snarky little talking points for another hour.
In fact, it was the best I've ever seen Hillary. She avoided that honking thing she does, smiled
a lot - a little too much, actually (maybe ease up on the pep pills next time) - and, as the entire
media has gleefully reported, she managed to "bait" Trump.
... ... ...
Hillary - with assists from the moderator - "baited" Trump on how rich he is, the loan from his
father, a lawsuit in 1972, the birther claims, who he said what to about the Iraq War from 2001 to
2003, and so on.
... ... ...
For the media, their gal was winning whenever precious minutes of a 90-minute debate were
spent rehashing allegations about Trump. Ha ha! We prevented Trump from talking about issues
that matter to the American people! That was scored as a "win."
... in foreign
policy, the modern American president has become a virtual
monarch. He or she can launch military actions without
congressional approval (just ask Presidents Clinton and
Obama), reach agreements with foreign nations, and establish
or rescind diplomatic relations. The Constitution is supposed
to check the power of the president to declare war or to
enter treaties, but presidents have been shedding those
restraints for generations. The president holds the power of
war and peace in his or her hands, and the entire world -
including our enemies - pays attention to the president's
every word and deed.
If you're a geopolitical rival of the United States, Trump
is a delight. He's America's leading Putin apologist, wasting
several agonizing turns in the debate defending Russia from
the charge of meddling in U.S. elections and bizarrely
wondering if a "400-pound" man "sitting on their bed" hacked
Democratic National Committee e-mails. He said he hasn't
"given lots of thought to NATO" and then went ahead and
proved the truth of that statement by fundamentally
misunderstanding the alliance. He treats it as a glorified
protection racket whereby NATO countries allegedly pay us to
defend Europe and they're not paying what they owe. He even
doubled down on his claim - an incredibly bizarre claim given
Russia's military resurgence - that NATO "could be obsolete."
...
Reply
Thursday, September 29, 2016 at 06:49 AM
pgl -> Fred C. Dobbs...
,
Thursday, September 29, 2016 at 07:05 AM
I agree Gary Johnson is not ready to be commander in chief
but he is far more ready than Trump. A low bar.
likbez -> Fred C. Dobbs...
, -1
Why you are reproducing neocon garbage in this blog ?
"He's America's leading Putin apologist"
That's pretty idiotic statement, even taking into account
the abhorrent level of Russophobia of the US elite for whom
Russophobia by-and-large replaced anti-Semitism. .
Anybody who blabber such things (and that includes Ms.
Goldman Sachs) should not be allowed to approach closer then
10 miles to Washington, DC, to say nothing about holding any
elected government position.
"... Only three references to Comey as a "Treas-Weasel" appear in a Google search. ..."
"... Are there no longer any "deep throats" left at the FBI? Because now would be an excellent opportunity for one of them to start making phone calls – but to who? Greenwald maybe? He seems to be the only investigative journalist left but he doesn't even live in this country .. ..."
"I knew there were going to be all kinds of rocks thrown, but this organization and the people who did this are honest,
independent people."
Well Comey, it is not that we do not trust the agents, we do not trust the leadership. If any of the
underground reports I have seen are indications, the agents were trying and struggling to do their jobs.
Are there no longer any "deep throats" left at the FBI? Because now would be an excellent opportunity for one of them to start
making phone calls – but to who? Greenwald maybe? He seems to be the only investigative journalist left but he doesn't even live
in this country ..
"... GOP lawmakers focused in particular on the Justice Department's decision to give a form of immunity to Clinton lawyers Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson to obtain computers containing emails related to the case. ..."
"... Republicans also questioned why Mills and Samuelson were allowed to attend Clinton's July 2 interview at FBI headquarters as her attorneys, given that they had been interviewed as witnesses in the email probe. ..."
"... "I don't think there's any reasonable prosecutor out there who would have allowed two immunized witnesses central to the prosecution and proving the case against her to sit in the room with the FBI interview of the subject of that investigation," said Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-Texas), a former U.S. attorney. He said those circumstances signaled that the decision not to prosecute Clinton was already made when she sat down for the interview. ..."
"... Ratcliffe said Clinton and the others should have been called to a grand jury, where no one is allowed to accompany the witness. ..."
"You can call us wrong, but don't call us weasels. We are not weasels," Comey declared
Wednesday at a House Judiciary Committee hearing. "We are honest people and whether or not you
agree with the result, this was done the way you want it to be done."
... ... ...
"I would be in big trouble, and I should be in big trouble, if I did something like that,"
said Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.). "There seems to be different strokes for different folks.
I think there's a heavy hand coming from someplace else."
Comey insisted there is no double standard, though he said there would be serious consequences -
short of criminal prosecution - if FBI personnel handled classified information as Clinton and
her aides did.
... ... ...
Republicans suggested there were numerous potential targets of prosecution in the case and
repeatedly questioned prosecutors' decisions to grant forms of immunity to at least five people
in connection with the probe.
"You cleaned the slate before you even knew. You gave immunity to people that you were going to
need to make a case if a case was to be made," said Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas).
GOP lawmakers focused in particular on the Justice Department's decision to give a form of
immunity to Clinton lawyers Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson to obtain computers containing
emails related to the case.
"Laptops don't go to the Bureau of Prisons," Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) said. "The immunity was
not for the laptop, it was for Cheryl Mills."
The FBI director repeated an explanation he gave for the first time at a Senate hearing Tuesday,
that the deal to get the laptops was wise because subpoenaing computers from an attorney would be
complex and time consuming.
"Anytime you know you're subpoenaing a laptop from a lawyer that involved a lawyer's practice
of law, you know you're getting into a big megillah," Comey said.
Republicans also questioned why Mills and Samuelson were allowed to attend Clinton's July 2
interview at FBI headquarters as her attorneys, given that they had been interviewed as witnesses
in the email probe.
"I don't think there's any reasonable prosecutor out there who would have allowed two immunized
witnesses central to the prosecution and proving the case against her to sit in the room with the
FBI interview of the subject of that investigation," said Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-Texas), a former
U.S. attorney. He said those circumstances signaled that the decision not to prosecute Clinton
was already made when she sat down for the interview.
"I don't think there's any reasonable prosecutor out there who would have allowed two
immunized witnesses central to the prosecution and proving the case against her to sit in the
room with the FBI interview of the subject of that investigation," said Rep. John Ratcliffe
(R-Texas), a former U.S. attorney. He said those circumstances signaled that the decision not to
prosecute Clinton was already made when she sat down for the interview.
"If colleagues of ours believe I am lying about when I made this decision, please urge them to
contact me privately so we can have a conversation about this," Comey said. "The decision was
made after that because I didn't know what was going to happen during the interview. She would
maybe lie in the interview in a way we could prove."
Comey also said it wasn't the FBI's role to dictate who could or couldn't act as Clinton's
lawyers. "I would also urge you to tell me what tools we have as prosecutors and investigators to
kick out of the interview someone that the subject says is their lawyer," the FBI chief said,
while acknowledging he'd never encountered such a situation before.
Ratcliffe said Clinton and the others should have been called to a grand jury, where no one
is allowed to accompany the witness.
Comey did say there was no chance of charges against Mills or Samuelson by the time of the
Clinton interview.
"... I can give you a list of things that I can't stand about Clinton – a long one – but given the likelihood that my state will be solidly in the tank for Clinton, I won't have to vote for her to save the world from President Trump. But where I am coming to is that, if that's what it came down to, I don't think I could participate in anything that aided his election. ..."
"... Funny, I can think of at few things that make Trump more attractive to me in comparison to Clinton. One being his lack of interest in war with Russia, and his ability to understand that 'regime change' has been a loser for American interests, and the other being that he gets that our current trade policy has been a 'loser'. ..."
"... That said, both are disastrous choices, it may be for different reasons, but both are despicable. Neither one of them should be allowed to enter the White House in a tour group, much less live there. And I for one do not want to participate in anything that elects Hillary Rodham Clinton or Donald Trump to dog catcher, much less President. I'm going to vote my conscience and let the chips fall where they may. I would be doing it no matter where I live. See, there is a point where you figure out that you are going to lose out no matter what. There are no softer landings available. ..."
"... One being his lack of interest in war with Russia ..."
"... In contrast with the (admittedly horrific) Trump, HRC has surrounded herself with anti-Russia, neocon advisors. ..."
"... I recognize that voting for him would be a knee jerk reaction. However, I do understand why I have that knee jerk reaction. For years now, average Americans, like myself, have seen the media collude with the DC insiders and watched as we've seen our standard of living decline. We've watched our children struggle with unaffordable college. We've watched our parents struggle with unaffordable health care. We've watched our neighbors struggle to afford housing. We've watched our work weeks increase to 60 hours to pay for basics and heard them tell us that we need to work from cradle to grave(and let's be clear for lower middle class and middle class 70 is until grave) with little to no respite(we don't even have a mandatory vacation or sick policy in this country.) With that in mind, why should I want their standard bearer of status quo to win? I DON'T. I want Hillary Clinton to lose, not because I like Trump, but because I hate what these people have done and will continue to do to this country if allowed to remain in power. That's his case. ..."
"... I can't think of a single thing that would make Clinton appear more attractive, compared to pretty much anyone. ..."
"... I find it ironic that the HRC supporters are now desperately pleading with third-party supporters to vote Hillary BECAUSE TRUMP. Let's not forget it was Hillary herself who tweeted to all "Vote your conscience". ..."
Yes, the media and the DC insiders are all begging us to drag HRC across the finish line in
an effort to defeat TRUMP. Normally, a candidate might inspire and give voters reasons to go the
polls, but we've been asked to do all the work and heavy lifting this year to prevent TRUMP.
The funny thing is because of WHO is asking, it makes Trump appear more attractive and almost
makes me want to vote for the guy out of spite.
After all, what exactly have the media or the DC insiders done for the American people? Ignored
issues and blatantly supported policies that have harmed Americans? It's rather audacious of them
to even bother asking most of us when most of us don't see the answer to the question of what
has been done for us as a net positive. Most from the left and the right might even go so far
as to say media and DC insiders have lined their pockets on the backs of average Americans' pain.
Beg us to do something for them? They deserve to be kicked in the teeth in the same manner they've
been doing it to average Americans for years.
Yes. As indicated by the telling finish of the quote above:
" We need to think about information policies - including media literacy programs - that can
offer urgently needed counterweights to the echo chambers and conspiracy factories of the internet."
Gutless, hackneyed drivel topped off with an urgent plea to the policy-making class to up their
propaganda game.
I can't think of a single thing that would make Trump appear more attractive, outside of seeing
the back of him slowly disappearing from view – forever. Yes, I get that it's totally galling
to be inundated with begging pleas from the likes of Hillary Clinton and some of her cronies –
I routinely mail back to her every last shred of paper she sends me, in the postage-paid envelope,
so I know that teeth-clenching, migraine-inducing rush of ire that she can induce.
I can give you a list of things that I can't stand about Clinton – a long one – but given
the likelihood that my state will be solidly in the tank for Clinton, I won't have to vote for
her to save the world from President Trump. But where I am coming to is that, if that's what it
came down to, I don't think I could participate in anything that aided his election.
I came away from that debate wanting to stick needles in my eyes. Trump is a thin-skinned,
prevaricating, floridly egotistical, vindictive, bigoted, misogynistic bully whose flaws will
only expand and possibly explode if he is elected.
There is nothing even remotely attractive about Trump – I can't even contemplate just how bad
Clinton would need to be to make him look like the better choice.
Funny, I can think of at few things that make Trump more attractive to me in comparison
to Clinton. One being his lack of interest in war with Russia, and his ability to understand that
'regime change' has been a loser for American interests, and the other being that he gets that
our current trade policy has been a 'loser'.
That said, both are disastrous choices, it may be for different reasons, but both are despicable.
Neither one of them should be allowed to enter the White House in a tour group, much less live
there. And I for one do not want to participate in anything that elects Hillary Rodham Clinton
or Donald Trump to dog catcher, much less President. I'm going to vote my conscience and let the
chips fall where they may. I would be doing it no matter where I live. See, there is a point where
you figure out that you are going to lose out no matter what. There are no softer landings available.
In contrast with the (admittedly horrific) Trump, HRC has surrounded herself with anti-Russia,
neocon advisors.
Needless to say, Putin isn't perfect, but how does further upgrading the conflict and risking
WW3 and global destruction help matters? The NATO exercises on the Russian border and Syrian escalations
are truly scary.
Trump isn't attractive to me either. However, defeating the DC insiders and media that have
brought us to this point in history where my choices are bad and worse is attractive to me
I recognize that voting for him would be a knee jerk reaction. However, I do understand
why I have that knee jerk reaction. For years now, average Americans, like myself, have seen the
media collude with the DC insiders and watched as we've seen our standard of living decline. We've
watched our children struggle with unaffordable college. We've watched our parents struggle with
unaffordable health care. We've watched our neighbors struggle to afford housing. We've watched
our work weeks increase to 60 hours to pay for basics and heard them tell us that we need to work
from cradle to grave(and let's be clear for lower middle class and middle class 70 is until grave)
with little to no respite(we don't even have a mandatory vacation or sick policy in this country.)
With that in mind, why should I want their standard bearer of status quo to win? I DON'T. I want
Hillary Clinton to lose, not because I like Trump, but because I hate what these people have done
and will continue to do to this country if allowed to remain in power. That's his case.
I live in a swing state and I'll be voting for Stein. Screw the pundits and their *begging*.
They deserve this loss.
I can't think of a single thing that would make Clinton appear more attractive, compared
to pretty much anyone. I'll be voting Stein, the only remaining candidate who aligns with
my views and reflects my interests. If she hadn't made it onto the ballot here in Georgia, I would
not be voting in the presidential election for the first time since I became eligible to vote
in 1980. Neither of the two ruling-party sociopaths is at all palatable.
I find it ironic that the HRC supporters are now desperately pleading with third-party
supporters to vote Hillary BECAUSE TRUMP. Let's not forget it was Hillary herself who tweeted
to all "Vote your conscience".
Jill Stein is anti-war, anti-greed, pro-environment. Rather the opposite of HRC.
"... HRC, the PTB, deep state, neo-lib-cons, still think they can 'win' by using these kinds of blatant domineering tactics. ..."
"... I was surprised, while watching the debate, at how subdued it all was. The subject matter was clearly circumscribed by previous agreement. The public can never escape the scripted product they receive; and another way of saying this, is that the agreed-upon lies, always make up the bulk of the debate. ..."
"... The narrative is sanitized to an important degree, and just shows the effect of suffocating control. Neither person won the debate after all, for the oppressively scripted event was only meant to impress the public with the idea that the race is still a close one. And who, after all, knows what will happen. ..."
"... To anyone awake and questioning the legitimacy of the 'arrangements' made for the election, especially the 'newborn' skeptics who abound at this point, this whole 'show' is just confirmation of their worst fears. ..."
A last point about the debate. They are very scripted, organised, funelled, etc. Much much
more so than the public realises, by the promoters (network), the PTB, etc. Viperous bitter discussions
take place about what can or cannot be mentioned. (I presume as that is the case in other countries
besides the US.) Trump tweeted he 'held back' because he did not want to embarass HRC, but imho
he was muzzled in part by the ''deals' as the show itself illustrated, softball to HRC and interrupting
DT etc. Imho HRC was given the questions beforehand, DT not (but who knows?) and basically everything
was organised beforehand to put him at a disadvantage.
HRC, the PTB, deep state, neo-lib-cons, still think they can 'win' by using these kinds
of blatant domineering tactics. The point has been made by many: all these standard coercitive
controlling moves can now backfire badly, they only serve to show up that the Establishment creeps
use illegit. actions, and in any case Trump supporters won't be moved an inch, he could give out
a recipe for Texas BBQ (as one pol I saw did but for rabbit, see previous posts), or flat out
ask the moderator, well IDK, what do you think? and that would be peachy..
Trump followed the no. 1 rule (campaign for myself not against the other), as he was surely
advised to do. Various excuses, rationalisations are put forward for it: he wanted to appeal to
the conventional Repub base, appear as a legit candidate to ppl who had never seen him 'live'
before, he is holding back for the next debates, etc. Still, his performance was not tops, in
the sense of a maverick breaking the mold, he fell down, was a disapointment. He was shown up
to be low man on the pole, constrained by negotiations which he could not dominate, rules which
he could not transgress. Of course many DT supporters and possible new ones perceived the manipulations
quite clearly, and were thus on his side, so a mixed bag. (It's all optics so i wrote nothing
about the real issues.)
I was surprised, while watching the debate, at how subdued it all was. The subject matter
was clearly circumscribed by previous agreement. The public can never escape the scripted product
they receive; and another way of saying this, is that the agreed-upon lies, always make up the
bulk of the debate.
The narrative is sanitized to an important degree, and just shows the effect of suffocating
control. Neither person won the debate after all, for the oppressively scripted event was only
meant to impress the public with the idea that the race is still a close one. And who, after all,
knows what will happen.
While inside the debate moderator Lester Holt failed to ask questions about joblessness, medical
care, student loans, police murder or mass incarceration, New York police outside the debate
showed the world how to suppress free speech with a soft hand, diverting more than two thousand
protesters into "free speech zones" long lines and checkpoints and spaces artfully designed
to prevent groups from concentrating in one place or finding each other.
If the Green Party's Jill Stein had been allowed in this week's presidential debate, it would
have transformed the discussion and altered the race. That's why Democrats and Republicans
kept it a duopoly-only affair. "The only circumstances in which either Trump or Clinton can
muster a minimally compelling argument, is against each other."
To anyone awake and questioning the legitimacy of the 'arrangements' made for the election,
especially the 'newborn' skeptics who abound at this point, this whole 'show' is just confirmation
of their worst fears.
The Powers That Are can't do anything right any longer. Everything they do is
wrong, and is immediately apparent as wrong, on the big screen and booming through the big megaphone.
They'd do better just to lay off but, like all the extras brought on to push Xmas after Thanksgiving,
there are just too many of them wound-up and let loose, stepping and slipping from one pile of
dog-doo to another, as they tear down the streets of NYC and Hollywood.
I think there's a very good chance that this is the year the extravaganza implodes.
"... Both were highly disciplined, one being a billionaire who has made it mostly on his own and the other having survived in public life for at least 45 years with no jail time. ..."
"... Hillary's response was that Donald had used bad language in public, lacked the proper "temperament" to be president, and favored the rich whom she would hit with higher taxes to pay for her giveaways. That last line about the rich is a bit much given the fact that Hillary is the creature of Wall Street, Hollywood, and large donations. Whereas Donald relies on mostly modest donations. ..."
After Hillary's coughing spells, after her wobbly display at the Sept. 11 ceremony in New York
City (she almost fell face forward on the running board of her van), after her admission to pneumonia
and all the rumors that admission gave rise to, you had expected something highly dramatic. Perhaps
the cough would return. Perhaps she might pass out under
Donald Trump 's
relentless barbs, possibly to be wheeled out on a gurney. Or perhaps you thought
Donald might explode
or go into a wild rant. Well, it did not happen. Both debaters pretty much played to form. Both
were highly disciplined, one being a billionaire who has made it mostly on his own and the other
having survived in public life for at least 45 years with no jail time.
... Donald had
things under control. As he has done for weeks he was talking directly to the American public through
the awkward stage prop of Hillary. He would start up the economy from its measly growth rate of barely
2 percent. He would get Americans working again. He would tear up trade agreements that favor crony
capitalists and foreign governments. He would prevent companies from leaving America unscathed. Hillary
had been a part of this system for decades. She was a standpatter and defender of the status quo.
She had revealed bad judgment.
Hillary's response was that
Donald had used
bad language in public, lacked the proper "temperament" to be president, and favored the rich whom
she would hit with higher taxes to pay for her giveaways. That last line about the rich is a bit
much given the fact that Hillary is the creature of Wall Street, Hollywood, and large donations.
Whereas Donald
relies on mostly modest donations. Oh, yes, and her needling him on his "temperament" - who
was the last presidential candidate to be attacked for his temperament? Does the name Ronald Reagan
come to mind?
... ... ...
Perhaps Hillary did not notice it because
Donald talks like
an ordinary American rather than a standard-issue politician, but he was talking to America and she
was talking to official Washington. Official Washington claimed he "missed opportunities." He could
have done more with the Wall, Obamacare in free-fall, immigration and immigrant criminals, terrorism
and Benghazi. He should have done more with her errant emails, the Clinton Foundation, her mishandling
of classified documents. He could have cited her lies to Congress, the FBI and how FBI Director James
Comey has contradicted her on her lies.
"... He said he wasn't aware one of Mrs. Clinton 's tech staffers called the deletion of her emails a "coverup operation," but said none of the other information made public about grants of immunity or efforts to delete the messages has changed his mind. ..."
"... Mr. Comey also said he couldn't remember another instance where the subject of an investigation - Mrs. Clinton 's former chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, sat in on the FBI 's interview with another subject, in this case Mrs. Clinton . ..."
He said he wasn't aware one of
Mrs. Clinton
's tech staffers called the deletion of her emails a "coverup operation," but said none of the other
information made public about grants of immunity or efforts to delete the messages has changed his
mind.
Mr. Comey also
said he couldn't remember another instance where the subject of an investigation -
Mrs. Clinton
's former chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, sat in on the
FBI 's interview with another subject, in this case
Mrs. Clinton
.
"... The neoliberalist denial that anything was wrong with their economic model before or after 2008 could well create the perfect storm for chaos with either result ..."
"... Trump was Trump, Hillary was Hillary, but the real Trump is a New York blowhard 'type' most Americans are very familiar with, a bit annoyed by, but definitely not 'scared' of. That's a very tough sale Hillary the mainstream media has for itself. On the other hand Hillary was Hillary. Same old same old Washington insider politician yada yada that most people are tired of, especially in these endless hard economic times. 'Cancel that show' is the natural reaction, as Demian says. ..."
"... Who's Scarier: This has to be Clinton. Of course we know both will be obedient to the deep state, the militarist and financial elites, Israel, and so on. But look at the difference between Obama and Clinton. Obama sensibly held back from full on rape of Syria, he's been non-belligerent toward Iran. ..."
"... So there are different grades of Neocon. Clinton would be the full on "we lied, we lied, he died" sort. My guess is that Trump, a know-nothing feeling his way, would be a less confident neocon and therefore more cautious, if not much more cautious, and would continue forward with the 'normal relations with Russia' concept he has made a big deal of. ..."
...The colluding media-commercial-complex getting properly rogered by one of
the monsters it gave birth to. Poetic really.
The neoliberalist denial
that anything was wrong with their economic model before or after 2008 could
well create the perfect storm for chaos with either result
.
The main emotion of any sane and well-informed leftist is disgust after watching 45
minutes of the debatoid, and that's how I felt.
Horserace Talk:
Demian's point at 49 is excellent: "But Trump did not come across as beyond the pale
in this debate. Thus, he took away the narrative that the public needs to believe in
order not to do what it would usually do – vote out the incumbent party when it is
unhappy with the status quo."
Trump was Trump, Hillary was Hillary, but the real Trump is a New York blowhard
'type' most Americans are very familiar with, a bit annoyed by, but definitely not
'scared' of. That's a very tough sale Hillary the mainstream media has for itself. On
the other hand Hillary was Hillary. Same old same old Washington insider politician yada
yada that most people are tired of, especially in these endless hard economic times.
'Cancel that show' is the natural reaction, as Demian says.
Who's Scarier: This has to be Clinton. Of course we know both will be obedient to
the deep state, the militarist and financial elites, Israel, and so on. But look at the
difference between Obama and Clinton. Obama sensibly held back from full on rape of
Syria, he's been non-belligerent toward Iran.
So there are different grades of Neocon. Clinton would be the full on "we lied,
we lied, he died" sort. My guess is that Trump, a know-nothing feeling his way, would be
a less confident neocon and therefore more cautious, if not much more cautious, and
would continue forward with the 'normal relations with Russia' concept he has made a big
deal of.
But hey, his 'cut the taxes for the rich' insanity is a pretty horrible deform from
an already horrible status quo. Anyway, vote for Jill as a protest is my half-hearted
advice. It's depressing and disgusting and we are helplessly watching it roll on.
/div>
nothing will change | Sep 28, 2016 1:27:22 AM |
83
The Hell Bitch was nothing more than an edition of the Enquirer, bringing up long ago
attacks on Trump, that have absolutely nothing to do with policy or Americas future.
And her face was just too made up,with her false eyelashes fluttering behind a wall of
pancake makeup,her eyes glittering with some demonic presence,as she lashed out like a
furriner extolling all immigrants,weirdos and fat foreign beauty queens and not
appealing one iota to US deplorables.
And yeah,both genuflected to Israel,but is there a more powerful influential force in
America than the dual citizen traitors?A sad and terrible fact,but they own every media
outlet,witnessed by the fact there is not one MSM outlet pro Trump,a never before
scenario in our history.
And of course world leaders don't like Trump,as he will cut off the spigots and make
them pay for their own defense,instead of US.
But only those prejudiced rufus and America haters fail to note that.
Forgive me if this is a repeat, but it wouldn't hurt if so, since so rarely does a third
candidate get mentioned. Amy Goodman did the American public a great service by
publishing the transcript of the debate, with Jill Stein's answers (had she been
permitted to attend) within the transcript - you really, really all should read this:
So Hitlary is apparently alive and not in jail contrary to previous rumors.
Lame-scream media announced her win in the debate as 1-0 - does it mean the
establishment is not behind Trump, who received some strange endorsements recently from
former enemies like Ted Cruz?
What I consider interesting is that being that far in the game still any options seem
to be opened:
1) Killary wins (trough rigged votes or claim of Russian hacking in favor of Trump)
2) Trump wins
3) Congress appoints the president because of tie in the electoral votes
4) Obama continues his presidency because of some "emergency": "Russian hackers"
attacking the election systems, false flag massacre in the US, ME, Ukraine, "natural"
disaster (is the constitution still suspended after 9/11 and COG in play? NDAA?)
5) Bernie Sanders joins the race as an independent because of new grave evidence
against Hitlary
6) Hitlary withdraws "because of her sudden health problems" - Demockrats appoint
Biden, Pence, Michelle Obama, ...?
7) Military organizes a coup against Obama
8) Security apparatus organizes a coup against Hitlary after her election
9) Deep state organizes a coup against Trump after his election (remember "business
plot" against FDR headed by Prescott Bush and defused by general Butler?)
10) Third party wins because Trump and Clinton become unelectable
Anyway many signals indicate that we are to see an "October Surprise" for sure.
It seems that the plan is the keep people guessing until the very end.
Trump did great for a guy who has never run for political office before – and didn't
cram for the debate. Hillary has debated at the presidential level so many times she
could probably do it half of it in her sleep. If I go into the ring with heavyweight
boxing champion Tyson Fury and manage to survive a round with all but one of my
teeth, it's fair to say that I won. …
Maybe the herd is right. Maybe it's a simple matter of she did better, he did
worse. But I keep thinking, debates are graded on a curve. She was supposed to kick
his ass. Yet there he is, dead even in the polls with her.
Well, "We The People" still have some time before the election to get the
psycho-ops weapons we do not have – mental masturbators on behalf of our
"populist" issues…
From Robert Reich:
THE NEW COMMON GROUND BETWEEN POPULIST LEFT AND RIGHT
The old debate goes something like this:
'You don't believe women have reproductive rights."
"You don't value human life."
Or this:
"You think everyone should own a gun."
"You think we're safer if only criminals have them."
Or this:
"You don't care about poor people."
"You think they're better off with handouts."
Or this:
"You want to cut taxes on the rich."
"You want to tax everyone to death."
But we're seeing the emergence of a new debate where the populist left
and right are on the same side:
Both are against the rich to spend as much as they want corrupting our
democracy.
Both are against crony capitalism.
Both are against corporate welfare.
Both are against another Wall Street bailout.
Both want to stop subsidizing Big Agriculture, Big Oil, and the
pharmaceutical industry.
Both want to close the tax loophole for hedge fund partners.
Both want to ban inside trading on Wall Street.
Both want to stop CEOs from pumping up share prices with stock buy-backs
… and then cashing in their stock options.
Both want to stop tax deductions of CEO pay over $1 million.
Both want to get big money out of politics, reverse Citizens United, and
restore our democracy,
If we join together, we can make these things happen.
Lots of words in your response, but I don't see where you
identified the model candidate who meets your high standards. You just told
us that HRC doesn't, which we already knew. Does no one meet your standards,
or is there a reason you won't say who?
Re "lesser of two evils"–if you don't like Trump or HRC, the election
boils down to three choices:
– you vote for the greater evil
– you vote for someone who can't win, or you stay home, which is effectively
a half vote for the greater evil
– you vote for the lesser evil
Not choosing is essentially half-ass choosing the greater evil.
–
skunk
|
August 28, 2016 at 10:24 am
|
Pub, I don't think she has eight years left in her, she's about to croak on
stage, limiting her ability to forget what happened yesterday so she or
(another democrat) can carry the democratic mantra tomorrow. She has passed
out, fallen, tripped like a Ford just not going down hill yet, had her
intestines ripped out because of bad behavior, and this is just in public.
Imagine how many blunders have occurred with her in private. She is a
disaster just waiting to happen, a Nixon at a Kennedy debate. She hasn't
held a press conference in almost 3/4 of a year, is trying to ride to the
rescue of her own created problems under the guise of the Clinton
foundation. 8 years, I want to see her survive the next eight weeks.
Plus there is nothing left to choose from except 100% pure unadulterated,
political evil.
Now, who's your ideal politician? We'll loosen the requirements. You can
choose from life or literature. :-)
skunk
|
August 28, 2016 at 11:56 am
|
I don't think so, I know her and Bill too well. She even got mad when I was
going to send somebody over there to have Bill take the drug test. Like we
really need politicians who are beholden to their drug dealers.
As for ideal politician, I can't say we have ever had one beyond the
founders, and life so is different today that the comparison is moot.
Buddy Haley was on the right track, but since the wrong track is the
majority it just goes to show how doomed politics really is.
This country
got outsmarted by the Germans and had to retaliate by out gunning them and
never recognizing their grievances. Now that the tables have turned and we
are the guilty ones, we turn to denial and war as the end of all solutions.
Their is no political solution, hence the beating of the dead horse as it
gets pitch black outside. And it's hard to fight the reaper coming up behind
you with his surprise execution when you can no longer see where you are
going.
skunk
|
August 28, 2016 at 1:23 pm
|
Haven't looked into it that closely. I first thought that the three 2 term
succession administrations since the founding of the country was the greater
consideration of the end of all, now that i've been proved wrong, I aint so
sure what's goin on next.
Ray LaPan-Love
|
August 28, 2016 at 6:26 pm
|
Pub,
So, if only 25% of the eligible voters participate, as opposed to the usual
40something%, you believe that the additional non-voters are saying little
or nothing?
"Not choosing is essentially half-ass choosing the greater evil".
But
doesn't choosing the lesser of two evils simply perpetuate evil? Saying
something like "yea, we know this is not really a democracy, the political
parties do of course decide who we vote for, but ah shucks, it is fun to
pretend, and yea, the system is obviously corrupt but my candidate promises
that he/she will change that. And just because he/she takes money from bad
people doesn't mean he/she'll do just like every other politician has done,
always, my candidate will be different. To heck with Einstein's theory of
insanity."
So is it not conceivable that the lessor of two evil votes "is
essentially half-ass choosing" to be duped over and over again? While a
non-vote might say enough is enough?
Anyway, you seem to represent living proof that the conditioning in
regards to what a non-vote truly means is working quite well. The following
being a solid example of that conditioning:
"three choices:
– you vote for the greater evil
– you vote for someone who can't win, or you stay home, which is effectively
a half vote for the greater evil
– you vote for the lesser evil"
But what if nobody voted other than a small number of political zombies,
and of course the establishment?
"Anyway, you seem to represent living proof that the conditioning in
regards to what a non-vote truly means is working quite well. The following
being a solid example of that conditioning"
You know how self-righteous and condescending this is, right? And from
what I've seen of your logic and the evidence you muster to support you're
opinion, I see little reason for such arrogance other than possibly
insecurity.
If you can't name a single political leader from anywhere in time or
space that meets your standards of righteousness, that says a lot. And I
suspect I know what it says. You don't want to show your true colors, or you
feel you can't back up your choice.
Which is it?
Ray LaPan-Love
|
August 28, 2016 at 8:44 pm
|
Wow, pub, you are even more of a zombie than I thought. I write ten times as
many words on this board as you do, teeming with contentions that you could
challenge, but you ignore nearly all of those opportunities to defend your
champion of less evil only to keep coming back with some lame nonsense about
who I might support.
And by "condescending" do you mean like this:"Lots of words in your
response, but I don't see where you identified the model candidate who meets
your high standards".
But of course telling me what we 'should' be talking about after suggesting
that my "words" are not worthy of any effort on your part, is not just
condescending but rudely so and evasive. As if the topic here is what you
say it is, not HRC's questionable behavior, but instead this all important
quest of yours to discover my "single political leader from anywhere in time
or space". As if such folly matters in the actual time and space that we can
do something about.
And questioning my "true colors" as if suggest that I'm trolling or
whatever. Should I now expect the name-calling and context tweaking to
follow? Or must the moaning and chanting simply go on until election day.
who is your dreammm can-di-da-te?", lessor of two evils, do you have an
ideal can-di-date? you only have 3 choices, ya 'know. lessor of two evils.
lessor of two evils. All leaders have flaws. not voting as I do is half-ass.
wanna talk about the best candidate taken from all of history. lessor of two
evils. don't be half-ass. lessor of two evils. I like standing in line, do
you?
But then too there is the big tell of big tells:
"And from what I've seen of your logic and the evidence you muster to
support you're opinion, I see little reason for such arrogance other than
possibly insecurity".
Do have any notion of how hypocritical and low-integrity it is to not
provide 'any' support for such a claim? What logic! What evidence! What
reason do you 'actually' see? Where be the 'why'? Did you flunk English all
through school?
I've written enough on this board that even the laziest blogger at the
worst site could of found at least some sort of an example, or shred of
evidence, to back up at least something. Crap like your comment just says
"hey look, I don't know the first rule of sound analysis, or good writing in
general, but I've analyzed you using low standards and I don't like you
because you don't agree with me and that makes you insecure". Wow again.
BRUCE E. WOYCH
|
August 29, 2016 at 1:46 pm
|
Closer to Homebase: "WHO CARES?"
Department of Homeland Security Has Surprise for Bernie Supporters at DNC
Lawsuit Hearing
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 29, 2016
There are political issues not being covered by mainstream media
http://wallstreetonparade.com/2016/08/department-of-homeland-security-has-surprise-for-bernie-supporters-at-dnc-lawsuit-hearing/
…that
have more to do with election questions concerning the DNC and its efforts
to evade accountability for its conduct, along with certain too close for
comfort insider support to keep things confused:
(QUOTED)
The lawsuit against the DNC is Wilding et al v DNC Services Corporation and
Deborah 'Debbie' Wasserman Schultz. The case is being heard in the Federal
District Court for the Southern District of Florida. (Case Number
16-cv-61511-WJZ.) The Sanders supporters are being represented in the
lawsuit by the following law firms: Beck & Lee Trial Lawyers of Miami;
Cullin O'Brien Law, P.A. of Fort Lauderdale, Florida; and Antonino G.
Hernandez P.A. of Miami.
(QUOTED):
"the first hearing on August 23 in the Federal lawsuit that has been filed
by Senator Bernie Sanders' supporters against the Democratic National
Committee and its former Chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz. The lawsuit, which
currently has more than 100 plaintiffs and more than a thousand in the wings
with retainer agreements, is charging the DNC with fraud, negligent
misrepresentation, deceptive conduct, unjust enrichment, breach of fiduciary
duty, and negligence."
MAINSTREAM MEDIA FAILED TO COVER IT.
Regardless of the voting; the exposure of corrupting political practice must
be considered equal to the election voting itself.
thoughtful person
|
August 29, 2016 at 9:27 pm
|
"Some progressives seem to prefer purity over progress. This puts a
millstone around the necks of pragmatic progressives, like HRC, who are
warriors and make the compromises necessary to gain and then exercise power
for progressive ends"
Bob Snodgrass
|
September 1, 2016 at 1:19 pm
|
Wow, I found your article OK although too much in the all pure or all evil
genre. We can't deal with this kind of problem in isolation from the rest of
our culture and government, any more than we can impose a nationally funded
Medicare for all without changing our NASCAR, celebrity/millionaire
worshipping, racialist- tribalist (not the same as racist which has lost
most of its meaning, closer to Barry Goldwater's viewpoint) controlling
central core. That's a tall order, not even Bernie has the answer although
reducing financialization & imposing a security transaction tax would be a
start. If we somehow snuck in Medicare for all or an improved and expanded
Obamacare, the controlling central core which includes the Koch brothers,
would ensure that it failed because of their stranglehold on Washington and
federal + state budgets.
Turing to the comments, there are many that make
me cringe. This is a harmful side of the Internet, reading comments makes me
feel that Armageddon is nigh. It is not in reality.
"... Reuters reports that an investigation conducted by it in 2013 found that around three-fourths of the 50 biggest U.S. technology companies use practices that are similar to Apple's to avoid paying tax. So Verstager has taken on not just one giant, but the worlds corporate elite. She should not lose. But even if she does this time, this is a battle well begun. ..."
"... Thus the power of the multinationals comes not just from their own size and reach, and from the support that their own governments afford them, but from their ability to divide desperate countries seeking the presence of global giants to make a small difference to their economic conditions ..."
"... Those who support globalisation support this power disparity. ..."
The case of Apple's Irish operations is an extreme example of such tax avoidance accounting. It relates
to two Apple subsidiaries Apple Sales International and Apple Operations Europe. Apple Inc US has
given the rights to Apple Sales International (ASI) to use its "intellectual property" to sell and
manufacture its products outside of North and South America, in return for which Apple Inc of the
US receives payments of more than $2 billion per year. The consequence of this arrangement is that
any Apple product sold outside the Americas is implicitly first bought by ASI, Ireland from different
manufacturers across the globe and sold along with the intellectual property to buyers everywhere
except the Americas. So all such sales are by ASI and all profits from those sales are recorded in
Ireland. Stage one is complete: incomes earned from sales in different jurisdictions outside the
Americas (including India) accrue in Ireland, where tax laws are investor-friendly. What is important
here that this was not a straight forward case of exercising the "transfer pricing" weapon. The profits
recorded in Ireland were large because the payment made to Apple Inc in the US for the right to use
intellectual property was a fraction of the net earnings of ASI.
Does this imply that Apple would
pay taxes on these profits in Ireland, however high or low the rate may be? The Commission found
it did not. In two rather curious rulings first made in 1991 and then reiterated in 2007 the Irish
tax authority allowed ASI to split it profits into two parts: one accruing to the Irish branch of
Apple and another to its "head office". That "head office" existed purely on paper, with no formal
location, actual offices, employees or activities. Interestingly, this made-of-nothing head office
got a lion's share of the profits that accrued to ASI, with only a small fraction going to the Irish
branch office. According to Verstager's Statement: "In 2011, Apple Sales International made profits
of 16 billion euros. Less than 50 million euros were allocated to the Irish branch. All the rest
was allocated to the 'head office', where they remained untaxed." As a result, across time, Apple
paid very little by way of taxes to the Irish government. The effective tax rate on its aggregate
profits was short of 1 per cent. The Commissioner saw this as illegal under the European Commission's
"state aid rules", and as amounting to aid that harms competition, since it diverts investment away
from other members who are unwilling to offer such special deals to companies.
In the books, however, taxes due on the "head office" profits of Apple are reportedly treated
as including a component of deferred taxes. The claim is that these profits will finally have to
be repatriated to the US parent, where they would be taxed as per US tax law. But it is well known
that US transnationals hold large volumes of surplus funds abroad to avoid US taxation and the evidence
is they take very little of it back to the home country. In fact, using the plea that it has "permanent
establishment" in Ireland and, therefore, is liable to be taxed there, and benefiting from the special
deal the Irish government has offered it, Apple has accumulated large surpluses. A study by two non-profit
groups published in 2015 has argued that Apple is holding as much as $181 billion of accumulated
profits outside the US, a record among US companies. Moreover, The Washington Post reports that Apple's
Chief Executive Tim Cook told its columnist Jena McGregor, "that the company won't bring its international
cash stockpile back to the United States to invest here until there's a 'fair rate' for corporate
taxation in America."
This has created a peculiar situation where the US is expressing concern about the EC decision
not because it disputes the conclusion about tax avoidance, but because it sees the tax revenues
as due to it rather than to Ireland or any other EU country. US Treasury Secretary Jack Lew criticised
the ruling saying, "I have been concerned that it reflected an attempt to reach into the U.S. tax
base to tax income that ought to be taxed in the United States." In Europe on the other hand, the
French Finance Minister and the German Economy Minister, among others, have come out in support of
Verstager, recognizing the implication this has for their own tax revenues. Governments other than
in Ireland are not with Apple, even if not always for reasons advanced by the EC.
... ... ...
Thus the power of the multinationals comes not just from their own size and reach, and from
the support that their own governments afford them, but from their ability to divide desperate
countries seeking the presence of global giants to make a small difference to their economic
conditions. The costs of garnering that difference are, therefore, often missed. Reuters
reports that an investigation conducted by it in 2013 found that around three-fourths of the 50
biggest U.S. technology companies use practices that are similar to Apple's to avoid paying tax.
So Verstager has taken on not just one giant, but the worlds corporate elite. She should not
lose. But even if she does this time, this is a battle well begun.
I think the common misconception that multinational corporations exist because "they are big
companies that happen to operate in more than one country" is one of the biggest lies ever told.
From the beginning (e.g. Standard Oil, United Fruit) it was clear that multinational status
was an exercise in political arbitrage.
" Thus the power of the multinationals comes not just from their own size and reach, and
from the support that their own governments afford them, but from their ability to divide desperate
countries seeking the presence of global giants to make a small difference to their economic conditions
"
Those who support globalisation support this power disparity.
"... I'd actually say that endorsing Hillary very much reflects conservative ideals and Republican (party) principles. Kudos to them on maintaining their streak. ..."
> "Since The Arizona Republic began publication in
1890, we have never endorsed a Democrat over a Republican
for president. Never. This reflects a deep philosophical
appreciation for conservative ideals and Republican
principles"
I'd actually say that endorsing Hillary very much
reflects conservative ideals and Republican (party)
principles. Kudos to them on maintaining their streak.
"... I think one reason Sanders was respected by some of these people, even when his views were radically opposed to theirs, was because this theme of fairness resonated with them, they sensed he was operating on a similar principle, even if disagreeing on the content. ..."
"... I actually find it easier to imagine why someone listening to the debate might place forlorn hope in Trump than to conjure up the people who could listen to Clinton's platitudes and not recall any of the history. Corey Robin is right that Trump is a standard Republican in everything but style, but there was also a break between the Republican electorate and the Republican establishment that put Trump on that stage, and Clinton has embraced the Republican establishment. ..."
"... In Labour Party politics, the insistence of the PLP on Tory-lite policy stances seems, from my great distance, farcical. The Clinton embrace of the Republican establishment drains the last drop of populism from the Democrats even while Late Trump proves how ill-suited the Republicans are to populist appeal despite years of petty demagoguery. ..."
"... I think Trump differs very substantially from the standard Republican politician. Sure he mostly channels the same meme's, but he is willing to consume some sacred ideological cows at the same time. ..."
"... Given that Trump loudly opposes trade deals, it is difficult to say that he on economics is a typical Republican. People vote for Trump because they think the system is rigged against them, and Hilary Clinton is running as the candidate of the status quo. They will see Hilary's resemblance to past candidates as a reminder of what they have gotten from the past 40 years of government policy. ..."
"... Clinton is socially embedded but apparently unaware of the deficiencies of elite performance. This makes her a favorite of the new class, but also makes it very difficult to rally broad popular support or avoid policy disaster. ..."
"... She wants George W Bush's vote. No joke. Why so many on the left are clueless about this and what it implies about policy is left as an exercise. ..."
"... Sure, he supported the Iraq War, but at least he lies about it. And Hillary (with Lester Holt's help) successfully maneuvered around her own vulnerability on that score. She doesn't need to be invoking GW Bush. ..."
"... aside from the Iran agreement, HRC has pretty much carried the neocons water. ..."
"... in the primaries, Trump seriously trashed Bush's most excellent Mesopotamian adventure. Hillary can't do that without creating blowback from her vote for the war. ..."
"... She may well believe that, but if so it's self-deception. She'll get nothing from Republicans in Congress, who will treat her as even more illegitimate than Obama. ..."
"... No way the median Republican member of Congress will open up to a primary challenge just because Clinton is playing nice with the Bushes. ..."
"... Only of the many unhelpful aspects of the HRC presidency will be that since her reachout to Republicans turns off base Dems, she is likely to face a Repub House and Senate, who will be at least as obstructive to her as they have been to Obama. That leaves her room to abandon all the half-hearted dog treats she threw to the Bernie supporters as "now impossible", and plenty of room to get "bipartisan" on passing the TPP and cutting SS. ..."
"... And it won't impede her military desires to enlarge the empire one iota. ..."
"... The comments here strike me as very sensible and sober. Given that the CT community shares little with a great swath of the electorate and in fact share HRC's view that they are both deplorable and irredeemable, its probably sound reasoning to deduce that if people here thought HRC won, a great many 'others' believe the opposite. ..."
"... Hillary succeeded in the first debate because she didn't fall over, cough a lot, and looked alive in that bright, red dress. That isn't enough to convince voters that she's not the candidate of the past. ..."
"... We begin from the assumption that Clinton is standard-bearer of "neoliberalism," and then interpret everything she does as evidence of that. ..."
"... the Democratic Party was once the party of the working class and old-style liberalism, but, starting with Bill Clinton, they abandoned this, and now they have lost the loyalty of the working class. In actuality, the last old-style liberal in the Democratic Party was Mondale, and he lost the popular vote by eighteen percentage points, more than anyone since. ..."
"... In foreign policy, we need a new term that we can drain of all meaning, and so Clinton becomes a "neoconservative," virtually indistinguishable from Charles Krauthammer, and eager to rain down destruction on the rest of the world. ..."
"... A no-fly zone? Those neocons will stop at nothing! ..."
Against a background anxiety surrounding a
sense that things are not working. The old ideologies are not working, every
thing has to change and we hate much of the change we do see creeping up. The
conservative party serves up a wrecking ball. The reform party serves up the
status quo warmed over. ("Intelligent surge") We fear change. We fear the
continuation of the status quo and the degeneration the status quo promises to
continue.
Yan
09.27.16 at 5:46 pm
"On the other hand, there's a not so small current in American politics that
would hear that, that Trump didn't pay his taxes, and think, with him, that he
was indeed smart for having outsmarted the system. …This is a nation of conmen
(and women)…"
I think this is right but misleading, since the voters who
probably liked that comment don't see themselves as conmen out for a quick
buck, but as victims gaming a rigged system. They think taxes are an injustice,
and that they're John Dillinger fighting for their rightful earnings against
the thieving IRS.
This is generally important for understanding Trump voters: for all their
quirks, at bottom they are, like most Americans, very strongly motivated by a
skewed notion of fairness: they think others are cutting in line, getting a
handout, getting special rights and favors.
I think one reason Sanders was respected by some of these people, even
when his views were radically opposed to theirs, was because this theme of
fairness resonated with them, they sensed he was operating on a similar
principle, even if disagreeing on the content.
bruce wilder
09.27.16 at 6:20 pm
Watching British Labour Party politics from afar is like seeing Democratic
Party politics in a fun house mirror. One thing that is writ in primary colors
and big block letters in the Labour Party struggle is the tension between the
new class and everyone else seeking protection from the globalizing plutocracy
and whose only ideological models are anachronisms.
I actually find it
easier to imagine why someone listening to the debate might place forlorn hope
in Trump than to conjure up the people who could listen to Clinton's platitudes
and not recall any of the history. Corey Robin is right that Trump is a
standard Republican in everything but style, but there was also a break between
the Republican electorate and the Republican establishment that put Trump on
that stage, and Clinton has embraced the Republican establishment.
In Labour Party politics, the insistence of the PLP on Tory-lite policy
stances seems, from my great distance, farcical. The Clinton embrace of the
Republican establishment drains the last drop of populism from the Democrats
even while Late Trump proves how ill-suited the Republicans are to populist
appeal despite years of petty demagoguery.
I think Trumps policies frequently look like a generic Republicans because he
didn't enter this election as a serious candidate, and now that he's the actual
nominee he's been scrambling to come up with any policies at all. So he's
copying from the party that nominated him.
His campaign has always been very ad hoc. Look at his "make Mexico pay for
the wall" thing. He clearly just threw that out there as bluster, then when it
went viral cobbled together a pseudo plan to make it sound plausible.
His line on taxes was perfect, unfortunately. On taxes, for a lot of people
the question is whether he behaved legally. If you can legally not pay taxes
but you do anyway, you're a chump. Can anyone who does their own taxes honestly
say that they've chosen to NOT take an exemption or deduction for which they
were qualified? I can't.
The people who feel this way may wish it wasn't legal for Trump to do this.
But as far as condemning him for it assuming it WAS legal… maybe they can drum
up some generic resentment of the rich, or tell themselves that he probably
broke the law somewhere, somehow, but that's about it. They're not going to
adopt a principled belief that he should pay taxes he doesn't have to pay. And
if Democrats push on this there's no shortage of "rich democrat does lawful but
resentment inducing rich-guy thing" stories that can be used as a smokescreen.
Now… are Trumps taxes actually on the level? Probably not. I suppose the IRS
will tell us eventually, after the election. It's not like Trump will release
them in the meantime.
Other than that Hillary Clinton won but it won't matter because
conservatives live in a creepy little bubble where HRC is a shadowy murderess
who assassinates her rivals and must be kept from the throne at all costs.
Omega Centauri
09.27.16 at 6:28 pm
I think Trump differs very substantially from the standard Republican
politician. Sure he mostly channels the same meme's, but he is willing to
consume some sacred ideological cows at the same time.
Just recently he
said he'd allow over the counter contraception. He tried to Savage war hero
John McCain because he'd been captured. He hasn't just thrown away the dog
whistle, he is willing to jetison any part of the ideology he finds
inconvenient.
Watson Ladd
09.27.16 at 6:51 pm
Given that Trump loudly opposes trade deals, it is difficult to say that he
on economics is a typical Republican. People vote for Trump because they think
the system is rigged against them, and Hilary Clinton is running as the
candidate of the status quo. They will see Hilary's resemblance to past
candidates as a reminder of what they have gotten from the past 40 years of
government policy.
bruce wilder
09.27.16 at 7:06 pm
Omega Centauri @ 21
Listening to Trump has a way of casting his audience into
the same position as the dogs in a Gary Larson
Far Side
cartoon, where
the dogs only hear a few words they are hungry to hear.
Clinton's patter seems more conventionally structured, but its highlights
are righteous self-regard, well past its sell-by date.
There is no coherence (beyond class interest) to Trump. He is a socially
isolated Billionaire who is lazy, inattentive, arrogant . . . but put him in
front of an audience and he will talk randomly until he finds a laugh or
applause.
Clinton is socially embedded but apparently unaware of the deficiencies
of elite performance. This makes her a favorite of the new class, but also
makes it very difficult to rally broad popular support or avoid policy
disaster.
She will win the election, but after that . . . things are unlikely to go
well.
People make the observation that both have high negatives. But, beneath
those high negatives, each has pursued coalition-building strategies almost
guaranteed to narrow their respective bases of support below a majority
threshold.
Why isn't Clinton saying "Trump is a more reckless, less coherent George W.
Bush"
She wants George W Bush's vote. No joke. Why so many on the
left are clueless about this and what it implies about policy is left as an
exercise.
politicalfootball
09.27.16 at 7:46 pm
I wouldn't read too much into HRCs apparent decision not to tar Trump with
Bush.
That's a charge that simply wouldn't stick. Trump has quite
persuasively separated himself from the Bushes - and vice versa.
Sure, he supported the Iraq War, but at least he lies about it. And
Hillary (with Lester Holt's help) successfully maneuvered around her own
vulnerability on that score. She doesn't need to be invoking GW Bush.
I would be curious for Bruce to explain anything that Hillary has actually
done
to get Bush's vote. Seems to me she continues to run to the left.
Omega Centauri
09.27.16 at 8:33 pm
I'm not Bruce, but
aside from the Iran agreement, HRC has pretty much
carried the neocons water.
But, I think its mainly that the Bushes see
Trump as crazy beyond the pale, and Clinton as a somewhat steady hand. Also
in the primaries, Trump seriously trashed Bush's most excellent Mesopotamian
adventure. Hillary can't do that without creating blowback from her vote for
the war.
JimV
09.27.16 at 8:56 pm
I agree with Bruce Wilder than HRC doesn't want to offend Republicans
unnecessarily. He seems to see it as a character flaw, and maybe it is, but it
could be simply that she can get more done in office if she doesn't make a lot
of bitter Republican enemies. And I think it is the polite way to behave even
with those with whom you disagree, but I won't lobby for that motive here.
If
Trump avoided taxes legally and that is a smart, enviable thing to do, why
doesn't he release his tax information to show how smart he was? Why is he
really hiding the information? Inquiring campaign adds will want to know, if
people can't figure that out for themselves.
Ideology: I like the ideology that climate science is not a hoax, that
universal health insurance is a good thing with more work needed on it, and
some other parts of HRC's agenda that do not seem to be the current ideology
(in power).
"Smart surge": that was another palpable hit by Bruce Wilder (along with
"no-fly zone in Syria"). Ouch. (I'm not being sarcastic, if it is difficult to
tell.) I'm going to write her a letter opposing that. She's sent me a couple
letters, so I should have her return address. I think I haven't recycled the
last one yet.
Layman
09.27.16 at 9:25 pm
"…it could be simply that she can get more done in office if she doesn't make a
lot of bitter Republican enemies."
She may well believe that, but if so
it's self-deception. She'll get nothing from Republicans in Congress, who will
treat her as even more illegitimate than Obama.
There's no obvious
incentive for them to do anything else, and the base think she's a murderer and
traitor.
No way the median Republican member of Congress will open up to a
primary challenge just because Clinton is playing nice with the Bushes.
marku52
09.27.16 at 9:46 pm
Only of the many unhelpful aspects of the HRC presidency will be that since
her reachout to Republicans turns off base Dems, she is likely to face a Repub
House and Senate, who will be at least as obstructive to her as they have been
to Obama. That leaves her room to abandon all the half-hearted dog treats she
threw to the Bernie supporters as "now impossible", and plenty of room to get
"bipartisan" on passing the TPP and cutting SS.
And it won't impede
her military desires to enlarge the empire one iota.
A Trump presidency would be hated by all parties to the duo-gopoly, and
would be stymied at everything.
The point about not paying tax is on point, I think. I wrote something yonks
ago about Berlusconi and 'patrimonial populism' – the idea being that
Berlusconi was seen as both the figurehead of the nihilistic "screw politics"
crowd and a national sugar daddy, dishing out favours from the national budget
in just the same way that he lobbed sweeteners to business partners. One
Italian commentator spotted a graffito that called on Berlusconi to abolish
speed limits – "Silvio, let us speed on the autostrada!" Because you knew
he
would, and if you voted for him, hey, maybe he'd let you do it too.
(Berlusconi hasn't been in government for a while, but he was Prime Minister
for ten years in total between 1994 and 2011. He's still involved in three
court cases relating to corruption and fraud, and has been found guilty in
another; he served a sentence of house arrest and community service. He will be
80 on Thursday.)
kidneystones
09.27.16 at 10:05 pm
The comments here strike me as very sensible and sober. Given that the CT
community shares little with a great swath of the electorate and in fact share
HRC's view that they are both deplorable and irredeemable, its probably sound
reasoning to deduce that if people here thought HRC won, a great many 'others'
believe the opposite.
derrida derider
09.27.16 at 11:17 pm
The best way to assess how a national TV debate went is to watch the whole
thing with the sound turned off. Swing voters are almost by definition the
least interested watchers who will just not care about coherence, patter,
policy, ideology, etc because they don't just don't care about politics much.
Subconscious impressions, mainly set by body language with perhaps the odd
striking expression, are what persuades or dissuades them.
ZM 09.27.16 at 11:24 pm @ 45:
'This is a paper by Paul Gilding on a war time mobilisation response,
although he isn't connected to the Democrats I don't think: WAR. What Is It
Good For? WWII Economic Mobilisation An Analogy For Climate Action
http://media.wix.com/ugd/148cb0_1bfd229f6638410f8fcf230e12b1e285.pdf
'
I criticized the war metaphor before, mostly on literary or stylistic grounds,
but having seen this publication, I feel it is necessary to offer as well a
practical consideration, out of character as that may be. War metaphors and
models appeal to many people because a good-sized war, especially in our era,
appears as an existential crisis, and in properly organized wartime all
dissidence and discussion are swept away by the power of necessity, harnessed
by great leaders and experts. It is a paradise of authority.
kidneystones
09.28.16 at 12:25 am
@ 52 "My main takeaway from the debate is that it finally refuted any notion
that Trump has any idea what he's doing."
What markers did Trump provide that are significantly different from any of
the ravings that propelled him past a stable of extremely well-funded and
politically-skilled GOP politicians?
The fact that a rodeo clown like Trump is even on the same stage as HRC
suggests that whatever his perceived defects here, Trump commands the
attention, affection, and respect of almost as many Americans, perhaps more,
than the candidate of Goldman-Sachs.
Trump is not going to 'win' any of the debates. Trump is marketing the Trump
brand on the biggest stage possible. What actually takes place on stage is
negligible in a world where superficiality is much more important than
substance.
What will happen is that Trump is going to remind the audience that Hillary
does indeed sound very clever and well-grounded. Then, he'll catalogue the
questions: 'How can HRC credibly claim not to know what the initial 'C' means
on a classified document?' etc.
The most recent good poll I saw on HRC identified the voters' principal
concerns with HRC: Syria, Libya, emails – in short, her judgment and her
honesty.
Hillary succeeded in the first debate because she didn't fall over,
cough a lot, and looked alive in that bright, red dress. That isn't enough to
convince voters that she's not the candidate of the past.
As others have noted, the Dukakis title doesn't make any sense to me at all.
She's done.
kidneystones
09.28.16 at 12:30 am
And then there's the health issue (the one that can't be wished away).
The Arizona Republic, Arizona's biggest newspaper (Phoenix), just endorsed
Clinton for President, the first time it has endorsed a Democrat in its
126-year history.
Glen Tomkins
09.28.16 at 1:56 pm
Rich,
"…that no one is really pushing these propaganda lines on people."
That's the very thing, isn't it? That's what US politics has gotten too.
There is a very conventional approach to a national campaign that dictates that
you do messaging, which means that you carefully avoid saying anything with any
public policy entailments. Having the candidate say anything of this sort is
especially to be avoided, because that ties the campaign most concretely to
specifics, and specific public policy your side advocates can be fitted into a
different, hostile, theoretical frame by the other side. Yet candidates have to
say things, it's expected. So they have refined a method that avoids
propagandizing for anything in terms more concrete than "Make America Great
Again", or "Stronger Together", both of which are brilliant at hinting at
whatever good thing you might want them to mean, without pushing any actual
policy.
In that silence from the campaigns themselves step all of the sorts of
sophisticated people such as those of us in the CT commentariat. The media rise
no higher on the intellectual food chain than the attempt to fill the silence
with theorizing about campaigns as horse races, who's winning and why. We here
at CT are a superior sort, so we tend to weave in theories about the actual
supposed subject of politics, public policy. But at all levels of this effort,
we theorize because we are of the species Homo theoreticus, and we must have
theories. The more sophisticated we are the more we need them. We fill the
silence by propagandizing on a DIY, freebie basis.
Not that any of this is new. Swift told us all about it in Tale of a Tub,
the oracle of our age. Think of this campaign as a tub bobbing on the waves.
Worry it as you will, and it just moves to the next wave.
Glen Tomkins: "We here at CT are a superior sort, so we tend to weave in
theories about the actual supposed subject of politics, public policy."
Does
not fit the observables. These theories are not about public policy and are not
good on any theoretical level (even if you consider this goodness to be
possible if it is decoupled from fact and is purely a matter of internal
consistency).
Almost all of these "theories" are based on a simple three-step;
1. HRC is the lesser evil.
2. I can't stand voting for someone purely as the lesser evil: my ego
requires that I affirmatively support someone.
3. Therefore the lesser evil is really kind of good and anyone against it is
bad.
As usual, I find a lot of discussion here about worlds totally unlike the one
that I live in.
We begin from the assumption that Clinton is
standard-bearer of "neoliberalism," and then interpret everything she does as
evidence of that.
Um… people.. she was Secretary of State. Can we really
think of no reason she might favor an agreement that includes the US and east
Asia, but not China, other than subservience to international capital? Can we
think of no reason a Secretary of State might want to encourage fracking in
Bulgaria other than anticipated future contributions from the oil and gas
industry? (Hint: Russia is monopoly supplier of natural gas to Europe, and not
shy about reminding them of that.)
In this imaginary world,
the Democratic Party was once the party of the
working class and old-style liberalism, but, starting with Bill Clinton, they
abandoned this, and now they have lost the loyalty of the working class. In
actuality, the last old-style liberal in the Democratic Party was Mondale, and
he lost the popular vote by eighteen percentage points, more than anyone since.
In foreign policy, we need a new term that we can drain of all meaning,
and so Clinton becomes a "neoconservative," virtually indistinguishable from
Charles Krauthammer, and eager to rain down destruction on the rest of the
world.
Um.. people… destruction has been raining down on Syria for years
now. There have been 400,000 people killed, and, as you may have noticed, a
whole lot of refugees. The left doesn't seem to be overly concerned about this,
other than bitterly oppose any attempts to use military force to do anything
about it.
A no-fly zone? Those neocons will stop at nothing!
If Obama
had carried out his threat over the "red line" by striking at the Syrian air
force, it would have saved many, many lives, but that would be imperialism.
Possibly people at CT, even Americans, have gotten used to thinking of
politics in parliamentary terms, in which platforms actually have some
practical effect, and winning means winning a legislative majority. (That's the
only way a Sanders candidacy would have made sense.) As you know, though, the
US doesn't work that way, and so the question is what can get done. If Clinton
is able to actually carry out the things she is talking about – an increase in
the minimum wage, paid family leave, increased infrastructure spending -- it
will make a much bigger difference in people's lives than bringing back
Glass-Steagall would.
likbez
09.28.16
at 4:45 pm
@80
Rich,
This "HRC is the lesser evil" is a very questionable line of thinking that
is not supported by the facts.
How Hillary can be a lesser evil if by any reasonable standard she is a war
criminal. War criminal like absolute zero is an absolute evil. You just can't
go lower.
Trump might be a crook, but he still did not committed any war crimes. Yet.
Calling the people whose endorsements Clinton has spent her time since the DNC
pursuing "moderate Republicans" seems suspect. After all, apart from Wall
Street financier types whose rigid party identification tends to dissolve in
the bipartisan solvent of the neoliberal financial establishment [I shouldn't
say "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie" or liberals will throw a tantrum], the
Republican public figures she's been most aggressive about shepherding into her
corner are the neoconservative foreign policy hawks whose coups, death squads,
invasions, and so on were allegedly supposed to embody the worst and most
immoderate
excesses of the Bush and Reagan administrations.
It seems the idea is to impress so-called moderate
voters
with a show
of establishment unanimity across all prior "extremes" as a show of Clinton's
seriousness and Trump's unseriousness, but then we have to reckon with the way
"moderate voters" is most often a euphemism for "low-information voters with a
vague sense of not wanting to be seen as rocking the boat who otherwise don't
give much of a damn about electoral politics at all", which has little to do
with what "moderate" means when describing actual public figures.
If we took any real effort to directly hash out "moderate"
inclinations of the depoliticized public at large the same way we do those of
the institutions through which this public is supposed to funnel its political
engagement, we'd probably come up with something very different.
Also, Rich @ 106, you're more or less echoing what Nathan Robinson writes
about "objectively pro-Trump" anti-leftist Hillary supporters
here
.
ZM's wartime mobilisation, bob's politics of continual catastrophe, or even
bruce's Two-To-Three-Year Plan will not happen, in part because of
neoliberalism's constant drive toward depoliticization of issues that might
interfere with short-term corporate profits
, and also in part because
First-World politics is well practiced at not giving a shit about the suffering
of the Third World
Which of course is where the most immediately catastrophic suffering from
climate change will be borne at least at first. Lee's "chink in the rightwing
cognitive armor" won't happen either, not in response to any empirical facts
about the actual climate: this cognitive armor exists because there are vested
interests promoting its existence, interests that aren't themselves stupid
enough to completely deny the basic parameters of climate science (
e.g.
).
If anything the least starry-eyed one here is Layman for implying that
neoliberalism would tackle climate change by radically reconfiguring market
incentives to make prevention and/or mitigation a profitable business, which is
close to how people like Charles Koch see the issue too - but in this case I
have to agree with everybody else here that this kind of gentle nudging of
markets wouldn't be enough, without slamming on the brakes much harder than our
current thoroughly marketized mechanisms are capable of doing.
What's needed is impossible under our present institutions, and what's
possible is inadequate.
Will G-R #114: "this cognitive armor exists because there are vested interests
promoting its existence"
I don't think so. I think it emerged when the Great
Chain of Being was overturned in the public imagination in the middle of the
18th Century (see Lovejoy) and so, at the same moment, the market economy began
to be accepted as a way to escape the status positions of traditional society.
The change in emotional expectation about the source of social status
immediately formed a left/right politics, generally reflecting the interests of
the have-nots and the haves. Promotion by vested interests is not a cause of
this, rather it is a predicable symptom of it.
And it won't be overturned by anything less than a reversal in the reign of
the status-psychology of money which has characterized the last 250 years.
Which may be closer than we think, because a part of "status" has always
been since ancient times a signal of being able to avoid need - but it is
unavoidably becoming ever clearer that our basest owners are in the richest
things superfluous.
Perhaps we will soon be ready to read the social tragedy of our next
romantic Shelleyan horror myth: the Trumpenstein monster!
"... As secretary of state in 2011, Mrs. Clinton vocally supported the war against Libya to overthrow Muammar Gaddafi on the heels of his abandonment of weapons of mass destruction. She boasted with the dripping arrogance of Julius Caesar after Gaddafi's death: "We came, we saw, he died." She insisted that regime change in Libya was for humanitarian purposes. She agreed with President Barack Obama that to be faithful to "who we are," we must overthrow governments that are oppressing their citizens by force and violence. ..."
"... Like the French Bourbons who forgot nothing and learned nothing, Mrs. Clinton eagerness to initiate wars for regime change was undiminished by the Iraq and Libya debacles. She urged war against Syria to oust President Bashar al-Assad. She confidently insinuated that we could transform Syria into a flourishing democracy sans James Madisons, George Washingtons or Thomas Jeffersons because of our unique nation-building genius. ..."
"... Wars for regime change are immoral. We have not been tasked by a Supreme Being to appraise foreign nations like a schoolmarm and to invade those to whom we have superciliously assigned a failing grade. ..."
"... Wars for regime change also violate international law. Article 2 (4) of the United Nations Charter generally prohibits "the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state…." Article 51 creates a narrow exception for wars in self-defense "if an armed attack occurs…." Regime change wars do not fit that narrow exception. ..."
"... Mrs. Clinton underscores in her memoir that she would rather be "caught trying" something kinetic than to try masterly inactivity like Fabius Maximus. She would rather be criticized for fighting too many wars for regime change than too few. She is the war hawks' dream candidate. ..."
Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton champions wars to effectuate regime change.
Their immorality, illegality and stupidity do not diminish Mrs. Clinton's enthusiasm for treating
independent nations as serfs of the United States.
As first aady, she warmly supported the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, which made it the policy of
the Unites States to overthrow Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. As United States Senator, she
invoked the 1998 policy in voting for the 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force Against Iraq.
Saddam's successors proved a cure worse than the disease. Shiite dominated governments allied
with Iran, oppressed Sunnis, Kurds, and Turkmen, and created a power vacuum that gave birth to
the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Our national security has been weakened.
As secretary of state in 2011, Mrs. Clinton vocally supported the war against Libya to
overthrow Muammar Gaddafi on the heels of his abandonment of weapons of mass destruction. She
boasted with the dripping arrogance of Julius Caesar after Gaddafi's death: "We came, we saw, he
died." She insisted that regime change in Libya was for humanitarian purposes. She agreed with
President Barack Obama that to be faithful to "who we are," we must overthrow governments that
are oppressing their citizens by force and violence.
Libya predictably descended into dystopia after Gaddafi's murder. (It had no democratic
cultural, historical, or philosophical credentials.) Tribal militias proliferated. Competing
governments emerged. ISIS entered into the power vacuum in Sirte, which has required the return
of United States military forces in Libya. Terrorists murdered our Ambassador and three other
Americans in Benghazi. Gaddafi's conventional weapons were looted and spread throughout the
Middle East. Hundreds of thousands of refugees have fled and are continuing to flee Libyan shores
for Europe. North Korea and Iran hardened their nuclear ambitions to avoid Gaddafi's grisly fate.
Our national security has been weakened.
Like the French Bourbons who forgot nothing and learned nothing, Mrs. Clinton eagerness to
initiate wars for regime change was undiminished by the Iraq and Libya debacles. She urged war
against Syria to oust President Bashar al-Assad. She confidently insinuated that we could
transform Syria into a flourishing democracy sans James Madisons, George Washingtons or Thomas
Jeffersons because of our unique nation-building genius.
She forgot South Sudan. We midwifed its independence in 2011. Despite our hopes and prayers,
the new nation descended into a gruesome ongoing civil war including child soldiers between the
Dinka led by President Salva Kiir and the Nuer led by former Vice President Riek Machar. More
than 50,000 have died, more than 2.2 million have been displaced, and a harrowing number have
been murdered, tortured or raped. South Sudan epitomizes our nation-building incompetence.
Wars for regime change are immoral. We have not been tasked by a Supreme Being to appraise
foreign nations like a schoolmarm and to invade those to whom we have superciliously assigned a
failing grade. As Jesus sermonized in Matthew 7: 1-3:
"Judge not, that ye be not judged.
"For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be
measured to you again.
"And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that
is in thine own eye?"
Thus, Thomas Jefferson wrote to President James Monroe in 1823: "The presumption of dictating to
an independent nation the form of its government is so arrogant, so atrocious, that indignation
as well as moral sentiment enlists all our partialities and prayers in favor of one and our equal
execrations against the other."
Wars for regime change also violate international law. Article 2 (4) of the United Nations
Charter generally prohibits "the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or
political independence of any state…." Article 51 creates a narrow exception for wars in
self-defense "if an armed attack occurs…." Regime change wars do not fit that narrow exception.
They are also stupid, like playing Russian roulette. We lack the wisdom necessary to insure that
successor regimes will strengthen rather than weaken our national security taking into account,
among other things, the staggering military and financial costs of propping up corrupt,
incompetent, and unpopular governments.
Mrs. Clinton underscores in her memoir that she would rather be "caught trying" something
kinetic than to try masterly inactivity like Fabius Maximus. She would rather be criticized for
fighting too many wars for regime change than too few. She is the war hawks' dream candidate.
Domestic-policy successes such as paid family leave count for little if the U.S. is at
war with Russia.
Hillary Clinton has some impressive goals for the United States. And it is
conceivable that, to whatever extent, she can even achieve them. These include
(courtesy of
NPR
):
Make public college debt-free. Fund universal pre-K. Create a comprehensive
background check system and close loopholes. Give the government a role in
setting insurance rates. Waive deportation and give undocumented residents a
path to legal status. Enact an infrastructure plan that also serves as a
stimulus to the economy. Raise capital gains taxes [We will overlook her
coziness with Wall Street for the moment.]
But what does domestic-policy success avail us if the United States is fighting
a major war? It is common knowledge that when it comes to foreign policy, Hillary
Clinton gives many of us on the left the heebie-jeebies. A blurb on the issues
page of her official campaign website suggests traditional Democratic
overcompensation on defense, but to the nth degree: "Military and defense[:] We
should maintain the best-trained, best-equipped, and strongest military the world
has ever known."
The extent to which Russian President Vladimir Putin considers Ms. Clinton a
nemesis (and Donald Trump a potential ally) can be seen in a new article by
Simon Shuster at
Time
. But, obviously, no American election should be
decided by which candidate the leader of another superpower prefers. The real
issue, without going into detail, is her policy toward Russia, summarized by
Jeffrey Sachs at Huffington Post
.
… she championed a remarkably confrontational approach with Russia based on
NATO expansion to Ukraine and Georgia and a new nuclear arms race that will
cost American taxpayers more than $355 billion over a decade.
There we have the two weakest links of Hillary Clinton foreign policy bundled
into one. She is likely to increase tensions with Russia, thus putting us at risk
of war with nuclear weapons, the modernization of which she champions.
To put it another way, an aggressive stance toward Russia and more nuclear
weapons would cancel out domestic initiatives and achievements. After all, what
good is paid parental leave if the United States is waging a major war and not
only is there no money left over from defense for such programs, but, the number
of families left standing to benefit from these programs is, shudder, drastically
diminished?
Bottom line: Without a visionary policy that works toward alleviating tensions
with, not confronting or attacking, other countries, domestic policy successes
count for little.
Here it is. John and Robert Kennedy devoted their greatest commitments and energies to the prevention
of war and the preservation of peace. To them that was not an abstract formula but the necessary
foundation of human life. But today's Democrats have become the Party of War: a home for arms merchants,
mercenaries, academic war planners, lobbyists for every foreign intervention, promoters of color
revolutions, failed generals, exploiters of the natural resources of corrupt governments. We have
American military bases in 80 countries, and there are now American military personnel on the ground
in about 130 countries, a remarkable achievement since there are only 192 recognized countries. Generals
and admirals announce our national policies. Theater commanders are our principal ambassadors. Our
first answer to trouble or opposition of any kind seems always to be a military movement or action.
Nor has the Democratic Party candidate for president this year, Hillary Clinton, sought peace. Instead
she has pushed America into successive invasions, successive efforts at "regime change." She has
sought to prevent Americans from seeking friendship or cooperation with President Vladimir Putin
of Russia by characterizing him as "another Hitler." She proclaims herself ready to invade Syria
immediately after taking the oath of office. Her shadow War Cabinet brims with the architects of
war and disaster for the past decades, the neocons who led us to our present pass, in Iraq, in Afghanistan,
Syria, Libya, Yemen, in Ukraine, unrepentant of all past errors, ready to resume it all with fresh
trillions and fresh blood. And the Democrats she leads seem intent on worsening relations with Russia,
for example by sending American warships into the Black Sea, or by introducing nuclear weapons ever
closer to Russia itself.
In fact, in all the years of the so-called War on Terror, only one potential American president
has had the intelligence, the vision, the sheer sanity to see that America cannot fight the entire
world at once; who sees that America's natural and necessary allies in this fight must include the
advanced and civilized nations that are most exposed and experienced in their own terror wars, and
have the requisite military power and willingness to use it. Only one American candidate has pointed
out how senseless it is to seek confrontation with Russia and China, at the same time that we are
trying to suppress the very jihadist movements that they also are attacking.
That candidate is Donald Trump. Throughout this campaign, he has said that as president, he would
quickly sit down with President Putin and seek relaxation of tensions between our nations, and possible
collaboration in the fight against terrorists. On this ground alone, he marks himself as greatly
superior to all his competitors, earlier in the primaries and now in the general election.
Imagine that while George W. Bush was governor of
Texas and president of the United States, various people and companies decided
to write him checks for hundreds of thousands of dollars, just because they
thought he was a great guy. Those people and companies, just coincidentally,
happened to have interests that were affected by the policies of Texas and the
United States. But when he thanked them for their money, Bush never promised to
do anything in particular for them. You would be suspicious, right?
Now, that's roughly what has been happening with the Clinton Foundation.
Various people and companies have been writing checks for millions of dollars
to the Foundation during the same time that Hillary Clinton was secretary of
state and, following that, the most likely next president of the United
States-a title she has held since the day Barack Obama's second term began.
(The Clintons finally decided to
scale back the Foundation
earlier this week.)
... ... ...
So the real question is this: Do you think it would be appropriate for people and companies
affected by U.S. policy to be writing $1 million checks directly to the Clintons? If the answer
is yes, then you should be against any campaign finance rules whatsoever. If the answer is no,
you should be worried about the Clinton Foundation.
Vinny Idol
|
August 25, 2016 at 8:02 pm
|
I disagree whole heartedly with this post. The clinton foundation is a
big deal, because its proof positive that America was founded on Money
laundering, the elite that run this country make and made their money
through money laundering; and no one wants that in the White House. Thats
ok for the rest of America sociery, but not the government where peoples
lives hang on the balance through every speech, law and policy that is
conducted on capitol hill.
The Clintons destroyed Libya, Honduras, Haiti through their money
laundering scheme called the clinton foundation. Theres no justification
for that.
Ray LaPan-Love
|
August 26, 2016 at 12:40 am
|
Trump thinks very highly of Reagan, but very lowly of Mexicans, so if
Trump were to win I suspect he will secretly sell some of our nukes, this
finally giving him the financial boost needed to overtake Carlos Slim on
the list of the world's richest men. This 'deal of deals' then also
harkens back to another historical 'deal' (Iran/Contra), and of course
Reagan, while simultaneously eliminating Trump's deepest regret which is
that of being bested by a Mexican. This being the real reason that he
decided to run in the first place.
Probably though, HRC will win. The
problem there being that all of the scrutiny that she has been receiving
for so long, coupled with Bills' infidelities, and other various setbacks
and slights, have left her very angry and bitter. Combining this seething
hatred of all humans, especially men, with the fact that there has never
been a women president to look up to, HRC's only influence is a secretary
who worked for Woodrow Wilson by the name of Mildred Jingowitz, or Ms.
Jingo as she was called. Ms. Jingo stands out for HRC because she
actually wrote the Espionage Act of 1917 and the the Sedition Act of
1918. Those combining to "cover a broader range of offenses, notably
speech and the expression of opinion that cast the government or the war
effort in a negative light or interfered with the sale of government
bonds."
"The Sedition Act of 1918 stated that people or countries cannot say
negative things about the government or the war."
"It forbade the use of "disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive
language" about the United States government, its flag, or its armed
forces or that caused others to view the American government or its
institutions with contempt." Most importantly though, these acts gave the
Government the legal right to prosecute draft dodgers, and …these could
bring an end to at least some of the scrutiny that has plagued HRC for so
long just so long as we remain at war.
So, if you are wondering what any of this has to do with the Clinton
Foundation, well, HRC used the Foundation to facilitate at least one very
large arms deal with at least one Royal Gulfie. But it matters little
whether she used the foundation or not, HRC used her tenure at Foggy
Bottom to arrange a record number of weapons deals, and of course she is
mad as hell and determined to prove just how tough women can be (and
there is of course one man who she respects, H. Kissinger).
Anyway, it doesn't take a historian specializing in the build-up
leading to the two World Wars to figure out the rest. BOOM!!!
I'm a long-time reader. I admire what you and Simon have
done educating us about the financial crisis and its aftermath, and I
agree with most of your political positions, especially related to the
corrupting influence of money in politics. I have seen this first hand
over my years in politics and government, and I believe it is the single
most important issue we face because progress on all others depends on
it.
But in taking yet another hack at Hillary Clinton in this post, you've
contradicted yourself in a way that unravels your argument, while
engaging in false equivalencies and blowing a key fact out of proportion.
First, the internal contradiction:
"Bill and Hillary are getting on in years, they only have one child,
and she is married to a hedge fund manager. When you have that much
money, a dollar in your foundation is as good as a dollar in your bank
account. Once you have all your consumption needs covered, what do you
need money for?"
You imply, here, that the Clintons' wealth and Marc Mezvinsky's hedge
fund income have made the marginal value of another dollar in income de
minimis for the Clintons' personal finances. Then you write,
paraphrasing, that a dollar donated to the Foundation is as good as a
dollar deposited in their personal bank account; therefore, you imply,
money that goes to their foundation is as corrupting as money that goes
into their personal accounts.
You see the problem in claiming that a contribution to the Clinton
Foundation is a powerful incentive for HRC to tilt her foreign policy
positions, right? You just made the case for why a donation to the
Foundation has little personal value to the Clintons:
MV of $ to bank account = 0.
MV of $ to Foundation = MV of $ to bank account.
But you don't proceed to: Therefore, MV of $ to Foundation = 0. So,
according to your logic, there can be no corrupting influence.
You follow this, writing:
"If you're a Clinton, you want to have an impact in the world, reward
your friends, and burnish your legacy. A foundation is an excellent
vehicle for all of those purposes, for obvious reasons. It is also an
excellent way to transfer money to your daughter free of estate tax,
since she can control it after you die."
Your imply that the Clintons give equal weight to their desires to
reward their friends, burnish their legacy, and have an impact on the
world. What evidence do you have of this? Also, you implicitly denigrate
their charitable motives by describing them as a desire "to have an
impact on the world" without a nod to their clear intent to have an
impact that is profoundly constructive. You also speculate, without
providing any support, that the Foundation is a tax avoidance scheme to
enrich their daughter. I think you've crossed a line here.
Now for the false equivalencies:
"Imagine that while George W. Bush was governor of Texas and president
of the United States, various people and companies decided to write him
checks for hundreds of thousands of dollars, just because they thought he
was a great guy. Those people and companies, just coincidentally,
happened to have interests that were affected by the policies of Texas
and the United States. But when he thanked them for their money, Bush
never promised to do anything in particular for them. You would be
suspicious, right?"
Why imagine? We have the real-world case of the Saudis bailing out
George W's Harken Energy while his father was president. Of course, this
is only one example of how the lucrative Bush-Saudi relationship
generated income that went straight into the Bush "coffers".
So you implicitly compare HRC's alleged conflict related to the
family's charity with the Bush family conflict related to their own
personal bank accounts. While HW Bush, as president, made use of his long
friendship with the Saudis for the family's personal gain, HRC gave
access to the likes of the crown prince of Bahrain and Nobel Peace Prize
Winner Muhammad Yunus. Not equivalent. Not even close. I wonder how
routine it is for a Secretary of State to meet with the crown prince of
an oil-producing nation or a Nobel Prize winner versus how routine is it
for foreign oligarchs friendly to a president to bailout his son.
But at least the Saudis were allies of the US. Today, the GOP nominee
has undisclosed but apparently significant business ties to close allies
of the president of our greatest strategic adversary, and expresses his
admiration for an autocrat who is seizing territory in Europe and
terminating his opponents. I've missed your post on this one, though I'm
sure there is one.
One last point: This controversy involved some 85 meetings or
telephone calls HRC granted to Foundation donors. The media have morphed
this into 85 meetings, dropping the "and telephone calls," and made this
out to be a pretty big number. Naive readers and Hillary haters have
accepted it as such. If fact, 85 meetings and telephone calls over four
years are, well, de minimis.
Many of these donors had standing sufficient to get them in the door
whether they gave to the Foundation or not. But let's say all of them
gained access solely as a result of their donations. Over the four years
HRC was Secretary of State, 85 meetings and telephone calls work out to
1.8 meetings/calls per month. Let's make a guess that she met or talked
on the phone with an average of 15 people a day. So, one of every 250
people HRC met or had a phone call with each month, or 21 out of 3000
each year, would have secured their contact with her by donating to the
Foundation. 85 doesn't look so big in context, especially since no one
has presented any evidence of any quid pro quos.
Ray LaPan-Love
|
August 26, 2016 at 2:42 am
|
Philip,
The 85 meetings occurred during about half of HRC's term and I've not
heard anyone else dilute things with "phone calls".
Plus, the Bahrainis
were approved for a major arms deal after donating. The Prince tried to
make an appointment with HRC privately, but was made to go through State
Dept. channels before being allowed a meeting.
HRC was also involved in the selling of more weapons in her term than
all of those occurring during the Bush 43 terms combined.
Ray LaPan-Love
|
August 26, 2016 at 2:50 am
|
Philip.
Also, there is this:
"You had a situation, that The Wall Street Journal reported, where
Hillary Clinton herself intervened in a case dealing with taxes with UBS,
a Swiss bank, and then, suddenly, after that, UBS began donating big to
the Clinton Foundation. So there are many examples of-I mean, there's oil
companies-that's another one I should mention right now, which is that
oil companies were giving big to the Clinton Foundation while lobbying
the State Department-successfully-for the passage of the Alberta Clipper,
the tar sands pipeline."
David Sarota, interview:
http://www.democracynow.org/2016/8/25/weapons_pipelines_wall_st_did_clinton
Ray LaPan-Love
|
August 26, 2016 at 9:40 am
|
Other noteworthy donors to the Clinton Foundation:
$1,000,000-$5,000,000
Carlos Slim
Chairman & CEO of Telmex, largest New York Times shareholder
James Murdoch
Chief Operating Officer of 21st Century Fox
Newsmax Media
Florida-based conservative media network
Thomson Reuters
Owner of the Reuters news service
$500,000-$1,000,000
Google
News Corporation Foundation
Philanthropic arm of former Fox News parent company
$250,000-$500,000
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publisher
Richard Mellon Scaife
Owner of Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
$100,000-$250,000
Abigail Disney
Documentary filmmaker
Bloomberg Philanthropies
Howard Stringer
Former CBS, CBS News and Sony executive
Intermountain West Communications Company
Local television affiliate owner (formerly Sunbelt Communications)
$50,000-$100,000
Bloomberg L.P.
Discovery Communications Inc.
George Stephanopoulos
ABC News chief anchor and chief political correspondent
Mort Zuckerman
Owner of New York Daily News and U.S. News & World Report
Time Warner Inc.
Owner of CNN parent company Turner Broadcasting
First, I'd appreciate it if you could provide a cite
supporting the statement that move arms sales occurred during HRC's four
years than during W's eight years. I'd like to look under the cover of
that one.
Also, it's important to note that a lot more people are involved in
approving arms sales than the SoS, including Republicans on the Hill.
Second, the AP touted its original story as being "meetings" but when
you read the story itself you found it was "meetings and phone calls."
Subsequently, the media and commentariat referred to 85 meetings,
dropping reference to phone calls.
Now for the arms sales to Bahrain. This one is especially juicy
because it's an excellent example of how HRC is being tarred.
The US has massive military assets in Bahrain, which hosts the largest
US military outpost in the Gulf. We've been making massive arms sale to
Bahrain for many years. So no surprise that we'd make some when HRC was
SoS.
And considering the strategic importance of Bahrain, there's no
surprise in HRC meeting with the crown prince. The surprise would be if
she declined to do so.
Now, if memory serves, and I encourage you to check me on this, the US
suspended arms sales to Bahrain while HRC was SoS in response to the
Bahrain's suppression of dissent among its Shia minority. Later, we
partially lifted the suspension to allow sales of arms Related to
protecting our huge naval base in Bahrain. I think this decision also
came while HRC was SoS.
So, the arm sales to Bahrain illustrates my objections to the facile
claims that contributions to the CF suggest that HRC is corrupt. These
claims bring one sliver of information to the discussion: so and so
donated money to the CF and then talked to HRC on the phone (or got a
meeting). No evidence is produced that there's a causal relationship
between the two much less a quid pro quo in which the donation and
meeting led HRC to act in an official capacity to benefit the
contributor.
All of the examples I've seen so far, the oil companies, UBS, etc. are
like this. No context, no evidence of a quid pro quo, all inuendo.
publiustex
|
August 26, 2016 at 10:20 am
|
I consider some of these contributors to be unsavory, and I wish they'd
give the Clinton Foundation a lot more money so they'd have less to sink
into GOP House and Senate races.
Philip Diehl
|
August 26, 2016 at 11:05 am
|
Ray LaPan-Love: You left out this quote from the interview with David
Sirota. Context matters.
'DAVID SIROTA: Well, my reaction to it is that
I think that if you look at some of these individual examples, I think
Paul is right that it's hard to argue that their donations to the
foundation got them access. They are - a lot of these people in the AP
story are people who knew her."
Ray LaPan-Love
|
August 26, 2016 at 11:21 am
|
Pub,
I can't remember where I saw the comparison between the arms sales of HRC
and the shrub. But, if it comes to me I'll add it later. Meanwhile, here
is a link to lots of related info:
And yes, "no context, no evidence of a quid pro quo", and almost as if
she knew she might run for the prez job.
Ray LaPan-Love
|
August 26, 2016 at 11:41 am
|
Sorry Phillip, but gee whiz, am I to assume that nobody else has any
'context' on a story that is difficult to miss. Where does one draw such
lines? And the spin you are hoping for is somewhat unwound by David using
the phrase "hard to argue". That could be interpreted to simply mean that
the CF is good at obfuscating. And as someone who has worked in politics
and even for a large NPO, I can atably assure you
Ray LaPan-Love
|
August 26, 2016 at 11:59 am
|
….!!!!!! my cursor got stuck on the previous comment as I tried to use
spell-check.
Anyway, I was trying to comfratably assure you that these organizations
are commonly structured to allow for deceptive practices. The Sierra Club
for example has affiliates that collect donations and then those funds
are used to pay the overhead of the affiliate 'before' any money is
donated to the Sierra Club. Thus, the Sierra club's solicitation costs
are not reflected in the percentage of funds used toward whatever cause.
This is not of course very subtle, and a Foundation such the CF could not
likely get away something this obvious, but…schemes such those exposed by
the Panama Papers should make us all hesitant to assume anything.
I'm a long-time fan of your smart writing and the important work that
you (and Simon) do. But what's with this constant Clinton Derangement
Syndrome? Why look so hard to find some morsel of "scandal" with the
Clintons when there's an entire herd of elephants in the room with the
Republican candidate??
As a wealth manager of many years, I must disagree with your
dismissive assessment of the Clintons' personal philanthropy as a
personal piggy bank. For sure, in a regular family foundation (many of my
clients!) the grants and donations are entirely at the discretion of the
controlling family, and very often it's all about shiny brass plaques and
photo ops with museum directors or mayors. Fine, that's our system, and
at least something gets done. And then the donors die and the plaques
fade. A shawl has no pockets.
But the Clinton operation is unique: they choose specific issues,
partner with competent outside groups, and then direct enormous extra
outside funds - not just their own meager foundation money - to tackle
the problems. This is only possible because of their international
status; not a Gates nor a Slim nor a Zuckerberg could engineer the same.
One can certainly speculate about who got access (a phone call,
seriously?) or who was schmoozed in what way in order to secure their
donations. But to broad-brush the whole of the Clinton philanthropy as
personal corruption is truly unfair. And it sure doesn't make sense when
there's so much worse and genuinely scandalous material on the other side
just waiting to be uncovered.
Keep the faith!
Bruce E. Woych
|
August 27, 2016 at 2:39 pm
|
Note: (from Global Research critique @ (eg:
https://mail.aol.com/webmail-std/en-us/suite
) cited above:
"Philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist, Andre
Vltchek has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. His latest
books are: "Exposing Lies Of The Empire" and "Fighting Against Western
Imperialism". Discussion with Noam Chomsky: On Western Terrorism. Point
of No Return is his critically acclaimed political novel. Oceania – a
book on Western imperialism in the South Pacific. His provocative book
about Indonesia: "Indonesia – The Archipelago of Fear". Andre is making
films for teleSUR and Press TV.
Ray LaPan-Love
|
August 27, 2016 at 3:42 pm
|
Bruce, (been awhile),
High grade stuff there. Yet, I'm not as taken by Caros' comment as you
seem to be. Near the end, this part: "The Clinton family business is
benefiting themselves AND OTHERS by way of their prominence."
To begin with, the Clinton's influence in arming the royal gulfies may
get us all killed, and so his comparison to the Bushs, while apt in a
current sense, it may well be…dangerously premature. Then too, Caro is of
course taking sides as if the Clintons don't fully realize the P.R.
benefits of giving away other peoples money. Which segs the question of
how could the Clintons have put so much time and effort into Hillary's
run, while creating so many pitfalls for themselves? Did they think the
Repubs might get nice? Are they stupid, arrogant maybe? Or just so
corrupt that they just can't stop like so many kleptomaniacs? In any
case, it isn't only Trump's fitness that we should be questioning.
I'm all for reducing the unmanageably high levels of total immigration
into the U.S., and I strongly believe in penalizing illegal employers, but I
think you have exaggerated the number of illegal immigrants.
According to Numbers USA, there are about 12 million illegal immigrants in
the U.S.:
"... Of course the root cause is Baathists aligned with non Sunnis running a sector of land lusted after by the Saudis and GCC. ..."
"... That the US supported the Sunnis (since the Iranians ousted CIA puppets) against the Baathists did not start the civil war, it merely keeps it growing in lust for death and destruction. ..."
"... While that Sep 2012 skirmish in Benghazi included CIA ground troops otherwise there securing the sea lanes supporting Syrian Al Qaeda with Qaddafi's arms, less stingers. ..."
"... "Settle for the crooked, Wall St, war monger because real change is too hard and the other guy is insane, supported by racists and don't think Russia should praise American exceptionalism." ..."
"As for Syria, here too I'm not sure why you think this country caused its civil war, but it
did not."
Of course the root cause is Baathists aligned with non Sunnis running a sector of land lusted
after by the Saudis and GCC.
That the US supported the Sunnis (since the Iranians ousted CIA puppets) against the Baathists
did not start the civil war, it merely keeps it growing in lust for death and destruction.
While that Sep 2012 skirmish in Benghazi included CIA ground troops otherwise there securing
the sea lanes supporting Syrian Al Qaeda with Qaddafi's arms, less stingers.
ilsm August 31, 2016 9:44 pm
"Settle for the crooked, Wall St, war monger because real change is too hard and the other
guy is insane, supported by racists and don't think Russia should praise American exceptionalism."
Obama might as well have voted with Hillary for AUMF forever, he is running it.
"... Here's an interesting analysis someone posted to reddit (in annoying gif screenshot form) about Holt being biased in favor of Clinton: https://i.redd.it/jixd3s8d05ox.png ..."
"... And here's a semi-CT saying that NBC tipped Clinton off to the debate questions a week in advance: http://baltimoregazette.com/clinton-received-debate-questions-week-debate/ ..."
Here's an interesting analysis someone posted to reddit (in annoying gif screenshot form)
about Holt being biased in favor of Clinton:
https://i.redd.it/jixd3s8d05ox.png
"... To my untrained eyes and ears, Hillary Clinton doesn't look sufficiently healthy – mentally or otherwise – to be leading the country. If you disagree, take a look at the now-famous " Why aren't I 50 points ahead " video clip. Likewise, Bill Clinton seems to be in bad shape too, and Hillary wouldn't be much use to the country if she is taking care of a dying husband on the side. ..."
"... So when Clinton supporters ask me how I could support a "fascist," the answer is that he isn't one. Clinton's team, with the help of Godzilla, have effectively persuaded the public to see Trump as scary. The persuasion works because Trump's "pacing" system is not obvious to the public. They see his "first offers" as evidence of evil. They are not. They are technique. ..."
"... The battle with ISIS is also a persuasion problem. The entire purpose of military action against ISIS is to persuade them to stop, not to kill every single one of them. We need military-grade persuasion to get at the root of the problem. Trump understands persuasion, so he is likely to put more emphasis in that area. ..."
"... Most of the job of president is persuasion. Presidents don't need to understand policy minutia. They need to listen to experts and then help sell the best expert solutions to the public. Trump sells better than anyone you have ever seen, even if you haven't personally bought into him yet. You can't deny his persuasion talents that have gotten him this far. ..."
As most of you know, I had been endorsing Hillary Clinton for president, for my personal safety,
because I live in California. It isn't safe to be a Trump supporter where I live. And it's bad for
business too. But recently I switched my endorsement to Trump, and I owe you an explanation. So here
it goes.
1. Things I Don't Know: There are many things I don't know. For example, I don't know the
best way to defeat ISIS. Neither do you. I don't know the best way to negotiate trade policies. Neither
do you. I don't know the best tax policy to lift all boats. Neither do you. My opinion on abortion
is that men should follow the lead of women on that topic because doing so produces the most credible
laws. So on most political topics, I don't know enough to make a decision. Neither do you, but you
probably think you do.
Given the uncertainty about each candidate – at least in my own mind – I have been saying I am
not smart enough to know who would be the best president. That neutrality changed when Clinton proposed
raising estate taxes. I understand that issue and I view it as robbery by government.
I'll say more about that, plus some other issues I do understand, below.
... ... ...
4. Clinton's Health: To my untrained eyes and ears, Hillary Clinton doesn't look sufficiently
healthy – mentally or otherwise – to be leading the country. If you disagree, take a look at the
now-famous "
Why aren't I 50 points ahead " video clip. Likewise, Bill Clinton seems to be in bad shape too,
and Hillary wouldn't be much use to the country if she is taking care of a dying husband on the side.
5. Pacing and Leading: Trump always takes the extreme position on matters of safety and
security for the country, even if those positions are unconstitutional, impractical, evil, or something
that the military would refuse to do. Normal people see this as a dangerous situation. Trained persuaders
like me see this as something called pacing and leading . Trump "paces" the public – meaning
he matches them in their emotional state, and then some. He does that with his extreme responses
on immigration, fighting ISIS, stop-and-frisk, etc. Once Trump has established himself as the biggest
bad-ass on the topic, he is free to "lead," which we see him do by softening his deportation stand,
limiting his stop-and-frisk comment to Chicago, reversing his first answer on penalties for abortion,
and so on. If you are not trained in persuasion, Trump look scary. If you understand pacing and leading,
you might see him as the safest candidate who has ever gotten this close to the presidency. That's
how I see him.
So when Clinton supporters ask me how I could support a "fascist," the answer is that he isn't
one. Clinton's team, with the help of Godzilla, have effectively persuaded the public to see Trump
as scary. The persuasion works because Trump's "pacing" system is not obvious to the public. They
see his "first offers" as evidence of evil. They are not. They are technique.
And being chummy with Putin is more likely to keep us safe, whether you find that distasteful
or not. Clinton wants to insult Putin into doing what we want. That approach seems dangerous as hell
to me.
6. Persuasion: Economies are driven by psychology. If you expect things to go well tomorrow,
you invest today, which causes things to go well tomorrow, as long as others are doing
the same. The best kind of president for managing the psychology of citizens – and therefore the
economy – is a trained persuader. You can call that persuader a con man, a snake oil salesman, a
carnival barker, or full of shit. It's all persuasion. And Trump simply does it better than I have
ever seen anyone do it.
The battle with ISIS is also a persuasion problem. The entire purpose of military action against
ISIS is to persuade them to stop, not to kill every single one of them. We need military-grade persuasion
to get at the root of the problem. Trump understands persuasion, so he is likely to put more emphasis
in that area.
Most of the job of president is persuasion. Presidents don't need to understand policy minutia.
They need to listen to experts and then help sell the best expert solutions to the public. Trump
sells better than anyone you have ever seen, even if you haven't personally bought into him yet.
You can't deny his persuasion talents that have gotten him this far.
In summary, I don't understand the policy details and implications of most of either Trump's or
Clinton's proposed ideas. Neither do you. But I do understand persuasion. I also understand when
the government is planning to confiscate the majority of my assets. And I can also distinguish between
a deeply unhealthy person and a healthy person, even though I have no medical training. (So can you.)
I will be
live streaming my viewing of the debate Monday night, with my co-host and neighbor,
Kristina Basham . Tune your television to the debate and use your phone or iPad with the Periscope
app, and look for me at @ScottAdamsSays.
"... Flawed as he may be, Trump is telling more of the truth than politicians of our day. Most important, he offers a path away from constant war, a path of businesslike accommodation with all reasonable people and nations, concentrating our forces and efforts against the true enemies of civilization. Thus, to dwell on his faults and errors is to evade the great questions of war and peace, life and death for our people and our country. You and I will have to compensate for his deficits of civility, in return for peace, we may hope as Lincoln hoped, among ourselves and with all nations. ..."
"... No doubt, clinton supporters will snicker and deride efforts to treat Trump's positions seriously as this essay does. ..."
Flawed as he may be, Trump is telling more of the truth than politicians of our day. Most
important, he offers a path away from constant war, a path of businesslike accommodation with
all reasonable people and nations, concentrating our forces and efforts against the true enemies
of civilization. Thus, to dwell on his faults and errors is to evade the great questions of war
and peace, life and death for our people and our country. You and I will have to compensate for
his deficits of civility, in return for peace, we may hope as Lincoln hoped, among ourselves and
with all nations.
No doubt, clinton supporters will snicker and deride efforts to treat Trump's positions seriously
as this essay does.
But for anyone who is the slightest bit aware of how the maniac imperialists have hijacked
the public means of persuasion for a generation to the detriment of countless foreign countries
as well as our own, the obsession with turning Trump into a cartoon character with joke "policies"
should sound an alarm.
No "politician" was ever going to buck this system. Bernie Sanders, fiery and committed though
he was, proved that. It was always going to take an over-sized personality with an over-sized
ego to withstand the shit storm that a demand for profound change would create, and some "incivility"
seems a small price to pay to break the vice grip of the status quo.
I, for one, have no intention of squandering this opportunity to throw sand in the gears. There
has never been a third candidate allowed to plead their case in a presidential "debate" since
Ross Perot threw a scare into TPTB in 1992. Should clinton manage to pull this one out, the lesson
of Trump will be learned, and we may not be "given" the opportunity to choose an "outsider" again
for a very long time. It's worth taking a minute to separate the message from the messenger.
"... It is not clear what the NYT thinks it is telling readers with this comment. The economy grows and creates jobs, sort of like the tree in my backyard grows every year. The issue is the rate of growth and job creation. While the economy has recovered from the lows of the recession, employment rates of prime age workers (ages 25-54) are still down by almost 2.0 percentage points from the pre-recession level and almost 4.0 percentage points from 2000 peaks. There is much research ** *** showing that trade has played a role in this drop in employment. ..."
"... It is not surprising that Ford's CEO would say that shifting production to Mexico would not cost U.S. jobs. It is likely he would make this claim whether or not it is true. Furthermore, his actual statement is that Ford is not cutting U.S. jobs. If the jobs being created in Mexico would otherwise be created in the United States, then the switch is costing U.S. jobs. The fact that Michigan and Ohio added 75,000 jobs last year has as much to do with this issue as the winner of last night's Yankees' game. ..."
"... The piece goes on to say that the North American Free Trade Agreement has "for more than two decades has been widely counted as a main achievement of [Bill Clinton]." It doesn't say who holds this view. The deal did not lead to a rise in the U.S. trade surplus with Mexico, which was a claim by its proponents before its passage. It also has not led to more rapid growth in Mexico which has actually fallen further behind the United States in the two decades since NAFTA. ..."
"... It is worth noting that none of the analyses that provide the basis for this assertion take into the account the impact of the increased protectionism, in the form of longer and stronger patent and copyright protections, which are a major part of the TPP. These forms of protection are equivalent to tariffs of several thousand percent on the protected items. As they apply to an ever growing share of the economy, the resulting economic losses will expand substantially in the next decade, especially if the TPP is approved. ..."
NYT Editorial In News Section for TPP Short on Substance
When the issue is trade deals, like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the New York Times
throws out its usual journalistic standards to push its pro-trade deal agenda. Therefore it is
not surprising to see a story * in the news section that was essentially a misleading advertisement
for these trade deals.
The headline tells readers that Donald Trump's comments on trade in the Monday night debate
lacked accuracy. The second paragraph adds:
"His aggressiveness may have been offset somewhat by demerits on substance."
These comments could well describe this NYT piece.
For example, it ostensibly indicts Trump with the comment:
"His [Trump's] first words of the night were the claim that "our jobs are fleeing the country,"
though nearly 15 million new jobs have been created since the economic recovery began."
It is not clear what the NYT thinks it is telling readers with this comment. The economy
grows and creates jobs, sort of like the tree in my backyard grows every year. The issue is the
rate of growth and job creation. While the economy has recovered from the lows of the recession,
employment rates of prime age workers (ages 25-54) are still down by almost 2.0 percentage points
from the pre-recession level and almost 4.0 percentage points from 2000 peaks. There is much research
** *** showing that trade has played a role in this drop in employment.
The NYT piece continues:
"[Trump] singled out Ford for sending thousands of jobs to Mexico to build small cars and worsening
manufacturing job losses in Michigan and Ohio, but the company's chief executive has said 'zero'
American workers would be cut. Those states each gained more than 75,000 jobs in just the last
year."
It is not surprising that Ford's CEO would say that shifting production to Mexico would
not cost U.S. jobs. It is likely he would make this claim whether or not it is true. Furthermore,
his actual statement is that Ford is not cutting U.S. jobs. If the jobs being created in Mexico
would otherwise be created in the United States, then the switch is costing U.S. jobs. The fact
that Michigan and Ohio added 75,000 jobs last year has as much to do with this issue as the winner
of last night's Yankees' game.
The next sentence adds:
"Mr. Trump said China was devaluing its currency for unfair price advantages, yet it ended
that practice several years ago and is now propping up the value of its currency."
While China has recently been trying to keep up the value of its currency by selling reserves,
it still holds more than $4 trillion in foreign reserves, counting its sovereign wealth fund.
This is more than four times the holdings that would typically be expected of a country its side.
These holdings have the effect of keeping down the value of China's currency.
If this seems difficult to understand, the Federal Reserve now holds more than $3 trillion
in assets as a result of its quantitative easing programs of the last seven years. It raised its
short-term interest rate by a quarter point last December, nonetheless almost all economists would
agree the net effect of the Fed's actions is the keep interest rates lower than they would otherwise
be. The same is true of China and its foreign reserve position.
The piece goes on to say that the North American Free Trade Agreement has "for more than
two decades has been widely counted as a main achievement of [Bill Clinton]." It doesn't say who
holds this view. The deal did not lead to a rise in the U.S. trade surplus with Mexico, which
was a claim by its proponents before its passage. It also has not led to more rapid growth in
Mexico which has actually fallen further behind the United States in the two decades since NAFTA.
In later discussing the TPP the piece tells readers:
"Economists generally have said the Pacific nations agreement would increase incomes, exports
and growth in the United States, but not significantly."
It is worth noting that none of the analyses that provide the basis for this assertion
take into the account the impact of the increased protectionism, in the form of longer and stronger
patent and copyright protections, which are a major part of the TPP. These forms of protection
are equivalent to tariffs of several thousand percent on the protected items. As they apply to
an ever growing share of the economy, the resulting economic losses will expand substantially
in the next decade, especially if the TPP is approved.
Hillary Clinton's campaign manager Robby Mook and other top Democrats refused to answer whether
Clinton wants President Barack Obama to withdraw the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) from consideration
before Congress during interviews with Breitbart News in the spin room after the first presidential
debate here at Hofstra University on Monday night.
The fact that Mook, Clinton campaign
spokesman Brian Fallon, and Democratic National Committee (DNC) chairwoman Donna Brazile each refused
to answer the simple question that would prove Clinton is actually opposed to the Trans Pacific Partnership
now after praising it 40 times and calling it the "gold standard" is somewhat shocking.
After initially ignoring the question entirely four separate times, Mook finally replied to Breitbart
News. But when he did respond, he didn't answer the question:
BREITBART NEWS: "Robby, does Secretary Clinton believe that the president should withdraw the
TPP?"
ROBBY MOOK: "Secretary Clinton, as she said in the debate, evaluated the final TPP language
and came to the conclusion that she cannot support it."
BREITBART NEWS: "Does she think the president should withdraw it?"
ROBBY MOOK: "She has said the president should not support it."
Obama is attempting to ram TPP through Congress as his last act as president during a lame duck
session of Congress. Clinton previously supported the TPP, and called it the "Gold Standard" of trade
deals. That's something Brazile, the new chairwoman of the DNC who took over after Rep. Debbie Wasserman
Schultz (D-FL) was forced to resign after email leaks showed she and her staff at the DNC undermined
the presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and in an untoward way forced the nomination
into Clinton's hands, openly confirmed in her own interview with Breitbart News in the spin room
post debate. Brazile similarly refused to answer if Clinton should call on Obama to withdraw the
TPP from consideration before Congress.
"... If you're wondering why a large portion of American consumers are strung out and breathless and have trouble spending more and cranking up the economy, here's the New York Fed with an answer. And it's going to get worse. ..."
"... That the real median income of men has declined 4% since 1973 is an ugly tidbit that the Census Bureau hammered home in its Income and Poverty report two weeks ago, which I highlighted in this article – That 5.2% Jump in Household Income? Nope, People Aren't Suddenly Getting Big-Fat Paychecks – and it includes the interactive chart below that shows how the real median wage of women rose 36% from 1973 through 2015, while it fell 4% for men... ..."
"... Nominal wages are sticky downwards but not real wages. That is why the FED, the banks, the corporate sector and the economists support persistent inflation, i.e. it lowers real wages. The "study" correlating wage growth with aging is one of those empirical pieces by economists to obscure the role of inflation in lowering real wages. ..."
"... Real Wage Growth chart very interesting, crossing negative at about 55 for no college, and 43 for a Bachelor's degree. 43!! Not even halfway through a work-life, and none better since 2003 at best. ..."
By Wolf Richter, a San Francisco based executive, entrepreneur, start up specialist, and
author, with extensive international work experience. Originally published at
Wolf Street.
The New York Fed published an eye-opener of an article on its blog,
Liberty Street Economics , seemingly about the aging of the US labor force as one of the big
economic trends of our times with "implications for the behavior of real wage growth." Then it explained
why "negative growth" – the politically correct jargon for "decline" – in real wages is going to
be the new normal for an ever larger part of the labor force.
If you're wondering why a large portion of American consumers are strung out and breathless and
have trouble spending more and cranking up the economy, here's the New York Fed with an answer. And
it's going to get worse.
The authors looked at the wages of all employed people aged 16 and older in the Current Population
Survey (CPS), both monthly data from 1982 through May 2016 and annual data from 1969 through 1981.
They then restricted the sample to employed individuals with wages, which boiled it down to 7.6 million
statistical observations.
Then they adjusted the wages via the Consumer Price Index to 2014 dollars and divide the sample
into 140 different "demographic cohorts" by decade of birth, sex, race, and education. As an illustration
of the principles at work, they picked the cohort of white males born in the decade of the 1950s.
That the real median income of men has declined 4% since 1973 is an ugly tidbit that the Census
Bureau hammered home in its Income and Poverty report two weeks ago, which I highlighted in this
article –
That 5.2% Jump in Household Income? Nope, People Aren't Suddenly Getting Big-Fat Paychecks –
and it includes the interactive chart below that shows how the real median wage of women rose 36%
from 1973 through 2015, while it fell 4% for men...
The number of public companies have been cut in half in the last 20 years. Just for one metric.
So for those born in the 50's, reaching middle or senior management by the time they were in
their mid 40's (1999) was increasingly harder as the probability of getting squeezed out multiplied.
In the last ten years, the birth / death rate of startups / small business has reversed as well.
There is probably ten other examples of why age is not the mitigating criteria for the decline
in wages. It's not skill sets, not ambition, not flexibility. Pure number of chances for advancement
and therefore associated higher wages has declined precipitously.
Anti Trust Enforcement went out the window as Neo-Liberal policies converted to political donations
for promoting consolidation.
Now watch even those in their 20-30 age group will experience the same thing as H-1b unlimited
takes hold with the Obama / Clinton TTP burning those at younger demographics. Are you going to
say they are "too old" as well to write software?
Tell me where you want to go, and I will focus on selective facts and subjective interpretation
of those selective facts to yield the desired conclusions.
Barack Peddling Fiction Obama – BS at the B.L.S. – has a multiplicity of these metrics.
Nominal wages are sticky downwards but not real wages. That is why the FED, the banks, the
corporate sector and the economists support persistent inflation, i.e. it lowers real wages. The
"study" correlating wage growth with aging is one of those empirical pieces by economists to obscure
the role of inflation in lowering real wages.
Real Wage Growth chart very interesting, crossing negative at about 55 for no college, and
43 for a Bachelor's degree. 43!! Not even halfway through a work-life, and none better since 2003
at best.
The VAT export rebate is a huge subsidy to exporters who
are exporting to non-VAT countries such as the US. That's
why nearly every large country has VAT. VAT rebates also
give foreign producers a competitive advantage over US
manufacturers in third-country markets.
It's also a major incentive for US companies to supply the
US market via Mexico or other VAT countries, since VAT
countries rely on VAT for a huge chunk of their tax base.
Since foreign profits of US companies are not taxed unless
repatriated, the incentives against US production are
compounded.
Or ... VAT is just a sales tax collected on the production
side. It's not like importers to the US get to avoid US
sales taxes.
MacAuley -> sanjait...
, -1
The difference is that VAT countries tend to rely much
more heavily on the VAT than the US relies on sales taxes,
so sales taxes are much less than VAT. Sales taxes in the
US range from Zero in Indiana to 7.5% in California. VAT
rates in the EU range between 20% and 25%. The VAT is 16%
in Mexico and 17% in China.
There may be some
intellectual equivalence in your argument, but the
real-world difference is huge.
Dave Maxwell :
, -1
The VAT indirectly subsidizes exports. If you have country
A that relies 100% on VAT for tax revenue then the
exporting corporation in that country incurs and pays zero
taxes on exports. If the company exports 100% of its
product that company pays zero in taxes.
In the US states generally exclude sales tax on materials
purchased for manufacturing and on products sold for
resale and for export outside that state (including to
other states)so there is similarity with the VAT. The big
difference is magnitude of the tax. States sales taxes
average around 7% compared to VAT in the 15% to 20% range.
VAT is a much bigger subsidy.
Sanjait -> Dave Maxwell...
, -1
Well, I should have scrolled down before expressing
disbelief.
But if you want to talk facts, then note that
no country relies 100% on a VAT. No country is even close:
Mexico is actually the highest in reliance on
consumption taxes generally (which is how the OECD
classifies a VAT), but as the report notes, only part of
the consumption tax mix is VAT. It also includes other
excise taxes and fees. In Mexico I'd assume this includes
oil industry revenues going to the government, which as of
recently made up a third of the national government's
total revenue mix.
Anyway, what is the point you guys are really trying to
make? Is it that the policy mix of taxes has some effect
on export incentives? Well, yeah that's true. But
consumption taxes aren't even the whole story there. How
about the way the US handles international transfer
pricing? Lots of things factor in.
Actually most countries have VAT and when two countries
with VAT trade, then VAT is always raised on all goods
where they are sold to an end consumer. Simple. The issue
comes when a country has no VAT and relies almost only on
income tax. Income tax is then levied on exports but not
on imports, so that the exports from such a country are at
a relative disadvantage UNLESS the real exchange rate
adjusts (as it should). Because the real exchange rate
should adjust to equalize such effects, this argument is
really just hot air. But of course, if he really wanted to
do something about it, he could offer to institute a VAT
himself, as most countries have.
"... "They have a few pro-Trump voices, but pretty much the CNN as a network is for Clinton – just like Fox is for Trump. They are not really media outlets; they are echo chambers for the respective political campaign," ..."
"... "The debate showed how vapid, how sensationalized, how empty the American political election cycle is – very expensive, but very long, and very empty. Both of them tried to outdo each other to show who had more support from the generals and admirals. It is not a good harbinger of where things are going in terms of American politics," ..."
"... "unwitting agent" ..."
"... "US national security." ..."
"... "The attack on Russia, the attempt to blame Russia for all things, including for the hack of the DNC [Democratic National Committee] files that showed the DNC was violating its own rules and trying to tilt the election for Clinton, which happened on the first day of the Democratic national convention. Russia became a convenient punching bag, so that the Democratic Party could divert attention from its own wrongdoing. But it's manifested itself into something more than just a diversion," ..."
"... "Clinton has the support of all of the neoconservatives: Robert Kagan, husband of Victoria Nuland; a hundred of Republican foreign policy elites. I think they represent the mainstream Washington consensus, which is the consensus of the military industrial complex, which wants to incentivize American public opposition or even hatred toward Russia as a pretext for building up the military armaments business. The expansion or escalation of tension with Russia is very good for the arms business, very good for the military industrial complex. So it is not just electoral politics. I think this is the Hillary Clinton presidency we see in the making. If she is elected, I think this bodes very badly for US- Russian relations," ..."
The debate has shown how sensationalized, vapid and empty the US election cycle is, said Brian Becker,
from the anti-war Answer Coalition, adding that the candidates' attempts to outdo each other on military
support is not a good harbinger for US politics.
A CNN/ORC
poll shows that majority of voters feel Hillary Clinton won Monday night's
debate over Donald Trump.
According to Brian Becker of the anti-war Answer Coalition, one cannot judge who won by CNN polls
as it has been actively campaigning for Clinton.
"They have a few pro-Trump voices, but pretty much the CNN as a network is for Clinton – just
like Fox is for Trump. They are not really media outlets; they are echo chambers for the respective
political campaign," he told RT.
"The debate showed how vapid, how sensationalized, how empty the American political election
cycle is – very expensive, but very long, and very empty. Both of them tried to outdo each other
to show who had more support from the generals and admirals. It is not a good harbinger of where
things are going in terms of American politics," Becker said.
Ahead of the election, Clinton and her supporters have been repeatedly using anti-Russia rhetoric
and accusing Trump of being "unwitting agent" of President Putin and posing a threat to
"US national security." On Monday, Clinton played her Russian card again to attack her opponent.
In Becker's view, it's an attempt to divert public attention from the party's own wrongdoing and,
also, the escalation of tensions with Moscow will only benefit the US military industrial complex
who supports Clinton.
"The attack on Russia, the attempt to blame Russia for all things, including for the hack
of the DNC [Democratic National Committee] files that showed the DNC was violating its own rules
and trying to tilt the election for Clinton, which happened on the first day of the Democratic national
convention. Russia became a convenient punching bag, so that the Democratic Party could divert attention
from its own wrongdoing. But it's manifested itself into something more than just a diversion,"
he said.
"Clinton has the support of all of the neoconservatives: Robert Kagan, husband of Victoria
Nuland; a hundred of Republican foreign policy elites. I think they represent the mainstream Washington
consensus, which is the consensus of the military industrial complex, which wants to incentivize
American public opposition or even hatred toward Russia as a pretext for building up the military
armaments business. The expansion or escalation of tension with Russia is very good for the arms
business, very good for the military industrial complex. So it is not just electoral politics. I
think this is the Hillary Clinton presidency we see in the making. If she is elected, I think this
bodes very badly for US- Russian relations," Becker added.
Peter K. :
September 27, 2016 at 06:45 AM DeLong on helicopter money: "The swelling wave of argument and
discussion around "helicopter money" has two origins:
First, as Harvard's Robert Barro says: there has been no recovery since 2010.
The unemployment rate here in the U.S. has come down, yes. But the unemployment rate has come
down primarily because people who were unemployed have given up and dropped out of the labor force.
Shrinkage in the share of people unemployed has been a distinctly secondary factor. Moreover, the
small increase in the share of people with jobs has been neutralized, as far as its effects on how
prosperous we are, by much slower productivity growth since 2010 than America had previously seen,
had good reason to anticipate, and deserves.
The only bright spot is a relative one: things in other rich countries are even worse.
..."
I thought Krugman and Furman were bragging about Obama's tenure.
"Now note that back in 1936 [John Maynard Keynes had disagreed][]:
"The State will have to exercise a guiding influence... partly by fixing the rate of interest,
and partly, perhaps, in other ways.... It seems unlikely that the influence of banking policy on
the rate of interest will be sufficient by itself.... I conceive, therefore, that a somewhat comprehensive
socialisation of investment will prove the only means of securing an approximation to full employment;
though this need not exclude all manner of compromises and of devices by which public authority will
co-operate with private initiative..."
By the 1980s, however, for Keynes himself the long run had come, and he was dead. The Great Moderation
of the business cycle from 1984-2007 was a rich enough pudding to be proof, for the rough consensus
of mainstream economists at least, that Keynes had been wrong and Friedman had been right.
But in the aftermath of 2007 it became very clear that they-or, rather, we, for I am certainly
one of the mainstream economists in the roughly consensus-were very, tragically, dismally and grossly
wrong."
DeLong sounds very much left rather than center-left. His reasons for supporting Hillary over
Sanders eludes me.
Hillary's $275 billion over 5 years is substantially too small as center-leftist Krugman put it.
Now we face a choice:
Do we accept economic performance that all of our predecessors would have characterized as grossly
subpar-having assigned the Federal Reserve and other independent central banks a mission and then
kept from them the policy tools they need to successfully accomplish it?
Do we return the task of managing the business cycle to the political branches of government-so
that they don't just occasionally joggle the elbows of the technocratic professionals but actually
take on a co-leading or a leading role?
Or do we extend the Federal Reserve's toolkit in a structured way to give it the tools it needs?
Helicopter money is an attempt to choose door number (3). Our intellectual adversaries mostly
seek to choose door number (1)-and then to tell us that the "cold douche", as Schumpeter put it,
of unemployment will in the long run turn out to be good medicine, for some reason or other. And
our intellectual adversaries mostly seek to argue that in reality there is no door number (3)-that
attempts to go through it will rob central banks of their independence and wind up with us going
through door number (2), which we know ends badly..."
------------
Some commenters believe more fiscal policy via Congress is politically more realistic than helicopter
money.
I don't know, maybe they're right. I do know Hillary's proposals are too small. And her aversion
to government debt and deficit is wrong given the economic context and market demand for safe assets.
"Moreover, the small increase in the share of people with jobs has been neutralized, as far as
its effects on how prosperous we are, by much slower productivity growth since 2010 than America
had previously seen, had good reason to anticipate, and deserves."
?????? The rate of (measured) productivity growth is not all that important. What has happened
to real median income.
And why are quoting from Robert Barro who is basically a freshwater economist. Couldn't you
find somebody sensible?
Barro wants us to believe we have been at full employment all along. Of course that would mean
any increase in aggregate demand would only cause inflation. Of course many of us think Barro
lost it years ago.
These little distinctions are alas lost on PeterK.
[1] Do we accept economic performance that all of our predecessors would have characterized
as grossly subpar-having assigned the Federal Reserve and other independent central banks a mission
and then kept from them the policy tools they need to successfully accomplish it?
[2] Do we return the task of managing the business cycle to the political branches of government-so
that they don't just occasionally joggle the elbows of the technocratic professionals but actually
take on a co-leading or a leading role?
[3] Or do we extend the Federal Reserve's toolkit in a structured way to give it the tools
it needs?
Helicopter money is an attempt to choose door number (3). Our intellectual adversaries mostly
seek to choose door number (1)-and then to tell us that the "cold douche", as Schumpeter put it,
of unemployment will in the long run turn out to be good medicine, for some reason or other. And
our intellectual adversaries mostly seek to argue that in reality there is no door number (3)-that
attempts to go through it will rob central banks of their independence and wind up with us going
through door number (2), which we know ends badly...""
---------------------
Conservatives want 1 and 2 ends badly, so 3 is the only choice.
Lambert: " "Smart" is one of those 10%-er weasel words. Was NAFTA smart? Why or what not? Smart
for whom?"
----
Indeed. Whether a deal is smart to make depends on one's real objective. Hows'about clearing that
question up, Mrs C?
"... Global is gone as a main driving force, pan-European is gone, and whether the United States will stay united is far from a done deal. We are moving towards a mass movement of dozens of separate countries and states and societies looking inward. All of which are in some form of -impending- trouble or another. ..."
"... And of course it's confusing that the protests against the 'old regimes' and the growth and centralization -first- manifest in the rise of faces and voices who do not reject all of the above offhand. That is to say, the likes of Marine Le Pen, Donald Trump and Nigel Farage may be against more centralization, but none of them has a clue about growth being over. They don't get that part anymore than Hillary or Hollande or Merkel do. ..."
"... Dems in the US, Labour in the UK, and Hollande's 'Socialists' in France have all become part of the two-headed monster that is the political center, and that is (held) responsible for the deterioration in people's lives. ..."
But nobody seems to really know or understand. Which is odd, because it's not that hard. That
is, this all happens because growth is over. And if growth is over, so are expansion and centralization
in all the myriad of shapes and forms they come in.
Global is gone as a main driving force, pan-European is gone, and whether the United States
will stay united is far from a done deal. We are moving towards a mass movement of dozens of separate
countries and states and societies looking inward. All of which are in some form of -impending-
trouble or another.
What makes the entire situation so hard to grasp for everyone is that nobody wants to acknowledge
any of this. Even though tales of often bitter poverty emanate from all the exact same places
that Trump and Brexit and Le Pen come from too.
That the politico-econo-media machine churns out positive growth messages 24/7 goes some way
towards explaining the lack of acknowledgement and self-reflection, but only some way. The rest
is due to who we ourselves are. We think we deserve eternal growth.
And of course it's confusing that the protests against the 'old regimes' and the growth
and centralization -first- manifest in the rise of faces and voices who do not reject all of the
above offhand. That is to say, the likes of Marine Le Pen, Donald Trump and Nigel Farage may be
against more centralization, but none of them has a clue about growth being over. They don't get
that part anymore than Hillary or Hollande or Merkel do.
So why these people? Look closer and you see that in the US, UK and France, there is nobody
left who used to speak for the 'poor and poorer'. While at the same time, the numbers of poor
and poorer increase at a rapid clip. They just have nowhere left to turn to. There is literally
no left left.
Dems in the US, Labour in the UK, and Hollande's 'Socialists' in France have all become
part of the two-headed monster that is the political center, and that is (held) responsible for
the deterioration in people's lives. Moreover, at least for now, the actual left wing may
try to stand up in the form of Jeremy Corbyn or Bernie Sanders, but they are both being stangled
by the two-headed monster's fake left in their countries and their own parties.
================================================
This is from today's Links, but I didn't have a chance to post this snippet. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A191RL1A225NBEA
Long time since we had 5% – if the whole system is financial scheme is premised on growth,
and there is less and less of it ever year, it doesn't look sustainable. How bad http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/09/200pm-water-cooler-9272016.html#comment-2676054does
it have to get for how many before the model is chucked???
In the great depression, even the bankers were having a tough time. If the rich are exempt
from suffering, I think history has shown that a small elite can impose suffering on masses for
a long time…
'there is nobody left who used to speak for the 'poor and poorer'.
Actually, there are plenty who SPEAK for the poor, there just is NONE who ACT.
How would we measure this growth that is supposed to be over? Yes of course there are the conventional
measurements like GDP, but it's not zero. Yes of course if inflation is understated it would overstate
GDP, and yes GDP measurements may not measure much as many critics have said. But what about other
measures?
Is oil use down, are CO2 emissions down, is resource use in general down? If not it's growth
(or groath). This growth is at the cost of the planet but that's why GDP is flawed. And the benefit
of this groath goes entirely to the 1%ers, but that's distribution.
The left failed, I don't know all the reasons (and it's always hard to oppose the powers that
be, the field always tilts toward them, it's never a fair fight) but it failed. That's what we
see the results of.
Someone very smart said "the Fed makes the economy more stable".
He also quoted The Princess Bride: "You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you
think".
Definition of stable: firm; steady; not wavering or changeable.
As in: US GDP growth of a paltry 1.22% per year.
But hey it only took an additional trillion $ in debt per year to stay "stable".
there are plenty who SPEAK for the poor, there just is NONE who ACT.
========
That's why in 1992 Francis Futurama refirmed the end of history that was predicted by Hegel some
150 years earlier.
"... "I don't believe she has the stamina to be the president," he said on Fox. "You know, she's home all the time." ..."
"... Better late then never. This issue should be raised during the debates. Serious neurological disease that Hillary is suffering from should be a campaign issue. It is a fair game. ..."
"... That does not make Trump immune from counter-attacks as he is older then Clinton and might have skeletons in the closet too, but voters have right to know the real state of health of candidates. ..."
"... "Khan Gambit" was the most shameful part of Clinton attacks on Trump. ..."
The Morning After the Debate, Donald Trump Goes on the Attack http://nyti.ms/2cSvOlO
NYT - ALEXANDER BURNS - SEPT. 27, 2016
A defensive Donald J. Trump lashed out at the debate moderator, complained about his microphone
and threatened to make Bill Clinton's marital infidelity a campaign issue in a television appearance
on Tuesday just hours after his first presidential debate with Hillary Clinton.
And defying conventions of civility and political common sense, Mr. Trump leveled cutting personal
criticism at a Miss Universe pageant winner, held up by Mrs. Clinton in Monday night's debate
as an example of her opponent's disrespect for women.
Mr. Trump insisted in the Fox News appearance that he had been right to disparage the beauty
queen, Alicia Machado, for her physique.
"She was the winner and she gained a massive amount of weight, and it was a real problem,"
said Mr. Trump, who was the pageant's executive producer at the time. "Not only that - her attitude.
And we had a real problem with her."
Mrs. Clinton mentioned Ms. Machado by name, quoting insults that Ms. Machado has attributed
to Mr. Trump and noting that the pageant winner had become a citizen to vote in the 2016 election.
During the debate, he showed disbelief at the charge that he had ridiculed Ms. Machado, asking
Mrs. Clinton repeatedly, "Where did you find this?"
But Mr. Trump abruptly shifted course a few hours later, with comments that threatened to escalate
and extend an argument that appeared to be one of his weakest moments of the debate.
Mrs. Clinton assailed him late in the debate for deriding women as "pigs, slobs and dogs."
Mr. Trump had no ready answer for the charge of sexism, and offered a muddled reply that cited
his past feud with the comedian Rosie O'Donnell.
His comments attacking Ms. Machado recalled his frequent practice, during the Republican primaries
and much of the general election campaign, of bickering harshly with political bystanders, sometimes
savaging them in charged language that ended up alienating voters. In the past, he has made extended
personal attacks on the Muslim parents of an Army captain killed in Iraq and on a Hispanic federal
judge.
Trump aides considered it a sign of progress in recent weeks that the Republican nominee was
more focused on criticizing Mrs. Clinton, and less prone to veering off into such self-destructive
public feuds.
Going after Ms. Machado may be especially tone deaf for Mr. Trump, at a moment in the race
when he is seeking to reverse voters' ingrained negative views of his personality. Sixty percent
of Americans in an ABC News/Washington Post poll this month said they thought Mr. Trump was biased
against women and minorities, and Mrs. Clinton has been airing a television commercial highlighting
his history of caustic and graphic comments about women.
Mrs. Clinton pressed her advantage on Tuesday, telling reporters on her campaign plane that
Mr. Trump had raised "offensive and off-putting" views that called into question his fitness for
the presidency.
"The real point," she said, "is about temperament and fitness and qualification to hold the
most important, hardest job in the world."
Both Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton will strike out on the campaign trail on Tuesday with the goal
of framing the debate's outcome to their advantage. While Mr. Trump is in Florida, Mrs. Clinton
plans to campaign in North Carolina, a traditionally Republican state where polls show her and
Mr. Trump virtually tied.
It will likely take a few days to measure any shift in the race after the candidates' clash
at Hofstra University on Long Island. Polls had shown the presidential race narrowing almost to
a dead heat on the national level, with Mr. Trump drawing close to Mrs. Clinton in several swing
states where she had long held an advantage.
But Mr. Trump appeared thrown on Tuesday by his uneven performance the night before, offering
a series of different explanations for the results. On Fox, he cited "unfair questions" posed
by the moderator, Lester Holt of NBC News, and insinuated that someone might have tampered with
his microphone.
Moving forward in his contest with Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Trump said he might "hit her harder,"
perhaps raising the issue of "her husband's women." Should Mr. Trump opt for that risky approach,
he could begin to do so during a campaign swing in Florida on Tuesday.
And in another indication that Mr. Trump has little intention of shifting his tone, the Republican
nominee repeated the attack on Mrs. Clinton that spurred their Monday exchange about gender in
the first place: that she lacks the physical vigor to be president.
"I don't believe she has the stamina to be the president," he said on Fox. "You know, she's
home all the time."
Mrs. Clinton was dismissive on Tuesday of Mr. Trump's barbs, shrugging off a question about
his threat to go after Mrs. Clinton and her husband personally and his dismay about the microphone.
"Anybody who complains about the microphone is not having a good night," she said. ...
Fred C. Dobbs said in reply to Fred C. Dobbs... Shamed and Angry: Alicia Machado, a Miss Universe
Mocked by Donald Trump http://nyti.ms/2cSGwsk
NYT - MICHAEL BARBARO and MEGAN TWOHEY - Sep 27
For 20 years, Alicia Machado has lived with the agony of what Donald J. Trump did to her after
she won the Miss Universe title: shame her, over and over, for gaining weight.
Private scolding was apparently insufficient. Mr. Trump, at the time an executive producer
of the pageant, insisted on accompanying Ms. Machado, then a teenager, to a gym, where dozens
of reporters and cameramen watched as she exercised.
Mr. Trump, in his trademark suit and tie, posed for photographs beside her as she burned calories
in front of the news media. "This is somebody who likes to eat," Mr. Trump said from inside the
gym. ...
(The Donald is clearly no slouch in that department.)
Trump, 'the candidate who almost always flies home in his private Boeing 757 to Trump Tower in
New York or to his palatial Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla.' ...
Donald Trump Means Business in Iowa: Night in Motel, and a Day in Church
http://nyti.ms/1UlcJI3
NYT - MAGGIE HABERMAN - JAN. 24, 2016
MUSCATINE, Iowa - Donald J. Trump spent the last seven months saying he wanted to win. Now
he is really acting like it. ...
On Friday night, the candidate who almost always flies home in his private Boeing 757 to Trump
Tower in New York or to his palatial Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla., instead slept in a
Holiday Inn Express in Sioux Center, Iowa. ("Good mattress," he said afterward. "Clean.") ...
"I don't believe she has the stamina to be the president," he said on Fox. "You know, she's
home all the time."
Better late then never. This issue should be raised during the debates. Serious neurological
disease that Hillary is suffering from should be a campaign issue. It is a fair game.
That does not make Trump immune from counter-attacks as he is older then Clinton and might
have skeletons in the closet too, but voters have right to know the real state of health of candidates.
This is a fair game.
"... The manner is which she secured the Democratic nomination is a signature of the Clinton style. The Clinton 'charitable foundation' is a beacon for everything that is wrong with the American economic and political system today. ..."
"... I consider this upcoming national election to be the signal failure of the two party political system as it is today, choked by a self-referential elite, corrupted by a lust for power and big money. ..."
"The narcissist devours people, consumes their output, and casts the empty, writhing shells aside."
Sam Vaknin
I make it no secret that I find Hillary Clinton to be both morally repugnant and appallingly dishonest.
The manner is which she secured the Democratic nomination is a signature of the Clinton style.
The Clinton 'charitable foundation' is a beacon for everything that is wrong with the American economic
and political system today.
But that does not mean that I am blind to what is being offered by The Donald.
I consider this upcoming national election to be the signal failure of the two party political
system as it is today, choked by a self-referential elite, corrupted by a lust for power and big
money.
What Krugman doesn't get is that trade
is resonating as a an issue and it's resonating for a reason. Look at Brexit. Preaching to the choir
that we should it ignore it - it makes corporations and the donor class happy - doesn't change that
fact.
Maybe you missed the simple point.
Having a sales tax is not trade protection. Trump is either an idiot or he is playing people
to be idiots. I guess you are OK with this.
I have repeatedly pointed out
that if country A mostly uses VAT (which taxes imports but not exports) and country B mostly
uses income tax (which taxes exports but not imports) then that affects the effective exchange
rate.
IN PRINCIPLE the exchange rate should adjust for this. The question is whether it does (but
note also the incentive to export effects). The problem with all these issues is that it is
complicated and for people who can't think in terms of more than 15 words at a time it is difficult.
The US$ and Mexican peso do float
with respect to each other so you are correct. Besides, the Republican plan to replace those
massive income tax cuts for the rich that Trump wants is to hit the rest of us with sales (aka
VAT) taxes.
"... Bill Clinton's tenure wasn't all good. He said the "era of big government was over." He enacted Republican lite policies which helped lead to the financial crisis. He didn't enact policies that helped globalization's losers. The Clinton years ended in a tech-stock bubble and financial crisis in East Asia. ..."
"... The reason to win elections is not just to prevent disastrous conservative policies. It's to enact good policies. Left policies are better than center-left. Hillary is center-left as Krugman pointed out. Corbyn is left. Yes the next 40 days has a contest between between the center-left and insane right, but that doesn't mean we cant' fact check the center-left pundits like Krugman. ..."
Trump was proud he evaded taxes and yet he complains about the state of American infrastructure?
He babbled incoherently about Yellen and the Fed.
Yes Republicans and Bush squandered the fact
that Clinton/Gingrich balanced the budget with tax cuts for the rich.
Krugman has made the distinction between center-left and left in the context of attacking Bernie
Sanders. Read Simon Wren-Lewis's blog post on UK Labour.
Hillary rightly lambasted trickle-down economics last night and contrasted Republican economics
with Democrats' "middle class" economics. But she mostly went after Trump at a personal level and
I thought she was effective. Maybe in the next debates she'll talk more about economics.
Her description of what caused the financial crisis wasn't really accurate but so what, it was
close enough.
She did brag about her husband's tenure (and how many times during the primary we were told by
supporters that it wasn't fair to equate her with her husband.
Which is where Trump would go off on NAFTA.
Bill Clinton's tenure wasn't all good. He said
the "era of big government was over." He enacted Republican lite policies which helped lead to the
financial crisis. He didn't enact policies that helped globalization's losers. The Clinton years
ended in a tech-stock bubble and financial crisis in East Asia.
Simon Wren-Lewis's blog post doesn't make much sense to me. Maybe it's my fault. All he does is
link to the Owen Smith piece which says Labour doesn't poll well and SWL complains Corbyn won't win
elections.
The reason to win elections is not just to prevent disastrous conservative policies. It's
to enact good policies. Left policies are better than center-left. Hillary is center-left as Krugman
pointed out. Corbyn is left. Yes the next 40 days has a contest between between the center-left and
insane right, but that doesn't mean we cant' fact check the center-left pundits like Krugman.
As even Krugman pointed out, Hillary's "investment" of $275 billion over 5 years is substantially
too small. It will lead to a reliance on monetary policy from a shaky Fed which may create more asset
bubbles if regulators and regulations aren't up to the task of preventing them.
It was very center-left of Hillary to brag that her plan is revenue neutral. Maybe that's the
smart thing to do politically, but not economically and it's not being honest with the voters.
I hate how shes smiling and at one part almost laughed at something serious like this is a game.
she never directly responds to what lester or trump asks, but you see trump directly answering
or responding to what she asks. One thing i want to know is, but will never know, does she want
to destroy this country or is she so ignorant that she will destroy it by trying to help. Her
views are wrong on economy, there may be somethings that i will agree with her but when it comes
to economy she will wreck this country.
If Hillary is in the White House then we may as well has the Islamic flag above it instead of
the stars & stripes. Craigslist has ads for protesters to be paid to show where there's a Trump
rally to harass. In the paper a few months back a man woke to find windows of his car bashed in.
The car had a Trump sticker. The anti Trump climate in networks NBC & MSNBC & CNN & Morning CBS.
On YouTube Hillary is bringing 65K rufugees to US next year.
"... Yes, people kept saying how they wish Trump would win the R primaries because it would be so exciting when he took his attack to Hillary and gave her what she may very well deserve. And I was always "I'll believe it when I see it, not until then". ..."
"... May be… He could easily bury her, but preferred not to. He was definitely unprepared. Also he might be afraid of Clinton clan. ..."
"... He's 70 years old and can be knocked off balance defending !insults! about a beauty queen. ..."
Yes, people kept saying how they wish Trump would win the R primaries because it would be so
exciting when he took his attack to Hillary and gave her what she may very well deserve. And I
was always "I'll believe it when I see it, not until then".
I don't think Trump was vastly different in the R primary debates (he was unfocused and narcissistic
then as well), but I always suspected somehow that he would play softball rather than hardball
when it came to the REAL showdown with Clinton (no "little Rubio" here). Well I told ya so. Although
there are 3 more debates so I guess I could still be proved wrong. But it's looking like I told
you so.
What so great or even fun and entertaining about Trump again? These circuses are completely
boring!!! Well he's not Clinton I suppose there is always that.
----
I guess the 10% think they got there by doing well on tests and not sheer luck and choosing the
right parents. Hmm well screw em.
likbez
"I have seen people say he is saving it….?dry powder?"
May be… He could easily bury her, but preferred not to. He was definitely unprepared. Also
he might be afraid of Clinton clan.
"A lot of people check out after the first 30 minutes of one debate and never come back."
True -- It was pretty disgusting performance on both sides.
ChiGal in Carolina
Just had my first in-person encounter with an apparent Trump supporter, 40ish lifeguard at
the community pool down here. He was very pleased with last night's debate, thought Trump showed
he has self-control and was generally presidential (!).
All my friends and family thought Clinton "won" but it's not gonna matter.
charles leseau
He's 70 years old and can be knocked off balance defending !insults! about a beauty queen.
Amen. It takes very little wit to point out immediately how irrelevant such a thing is to a
presidential debate, but instead he walked right into it like a rattled kid who doesn't think
half a second before responding.
Here's St. Clair's liveblog of the big debate. Sampler
+ Lester Holt needs to be extremely cautious tonight. Lots of police and armed security in
the debate hall. No sudden movements. Holt must keep his hands firmly on the podium at all times.
+ Bill and Melania shake hands at center stage. Bill whispers something in her ear. I think
it was: "Text me."
+ No national anthem. Kaepernick wins!
+ Hillary enters, as the Woman in Red. The stains of Iraq, Libya, Honduras, Syria and Yemen.
"Gah. A VAT is basically a sales tax. It is levied on both
domestic and imported goods, so that it doesn't protect
against imports - which is why it's allowed under
international trade rules, and not considered a
protectionist trade policy."
I think what Trump was
getting at was that exports are typically exempt from VAT.
So while Krugman is correct that Mexican VAT applies
equally to Mexican goods sold in Mexico and US goods
imported into Mexico, it doesn't apply to Mexican goods
exported to the US.
But honestly, who cares? Trump is not espousing any
sort of realistic solution to the problems facing the
middle class. Imposing tariffs, tearing up trade
agreements, and kicking out immigrants is baby talk
intended to placate the ill-informed.
Yes I think trump garbled his point
In the briefing he got from his brain trust
I suspect he heard something like this
The vat advantage is more like an undervalued peso
effect on lowering "the cost "
of US exports
But without the protectionist effect of raising the cost
of US imports
Perhaps his apparent ADHD
Betrayed him here
He heard the word protectionist and forgot the details and
the precise fact
There is no protectionist effect of the vat export rebate
PRD -> pgl...
, -1
Correct me if I'm wrong but this is the arithmetic I'm
picking up from Krugman which shows Trump's fallacy.
If you have a $10,000 Mexican car that paid a $2,000
VAT, the exporter gets reimbursed for the $2,000 dollar
paid in VAT which would normally get passed along to the
consumer, thus making the price that it is exported at
$8,000. That $8,000 dollar car would subsequently pay
sales tax in the USA.
If you have a $10,000 USA car being exported to Mexico,
it would get the VAT tax added on to be passed along to
the consumer, thus making it $12,500. That same car would
pay sales tax in the United States on it being worth
$10,000.
So basically, the Mexican car is actually only worth
$8,000 because the VAT that would have been passed along
to the consumers (and had been paid already) is reimbursed
to the exporter. The American car is worth $10,000 and
must pay the VAT, because the Mexican car would pay the
VAT in Mexico as well. Essentially he's equating an $8,000
Mexican car with a $10,000 American car.
Shah of Bratpuhr :
, -1
I highly doubt Trump considers people that understand
economics to be his target audience. Trump speaks only to
his target audience not about issues, but rather how they
feel right now at this exact moment. Perhaps his strategy
is to keep people angry and fearful enough by Election
Day?
His message to his audience: "you feel badly because
you're not rich", audience nods, "it's this scapegoat's
fault", audience cheers, "Only I can rid you of this
scapegoat and when I do, you'll feel better"
Paine -> Shah of Bratpuhr...
, -1
Yes
He has learned the devil can easily hide in the
details
JohnH :
, -1
"Trump's whole view on trade is that other people are
taking advantage of us - that it's all about dominance,
and that we're weak."
You have to admit, Trump was
right...he just doesn't understand who's taking advantage
of whom. He really should understand this (and probably
does)...the winners are all around him on Park Ave, Fifth
Ave, and Wall Street. Of course, you'd never expect Trump
to admit that he's part of the predatory class, would you?
Ben Groves :
, -1
Trade agreements hurt a lot of country's that American
"businesses" deal with more than America a good deal of
the time. NAFTA killed Mexican farming. It was part of the
package along with the 2002 subsidy agreement after 9/11
that started nationalizing agri-business. This also
allowed drug production to take off and cartels to expand
quickly, using the increased volume of business
transactions to ship more drugs across the borders into
Donald Trump supporters noses and veins.
"After a shaky start, Clinton was mostly prepared, disciplined, and methodical in her attacks.
By contrast, after landing some early blows on trade, Trump was mostly winging it" [NBC]. That's
how it felt to me. Of course, 10%-ers like preparation. Preparation leads to passing your test! But
in this case, they are right to do so.
==================================================== Trump could have brought up:
deplorables – and could have talked for 15 minutes virtue pounding Clinton into the ground
Goldman Sachs – and could have talked for 15 minutes virtue pounding Clinton into the ground
email – and could have talked for 15 minutes virtue pounding Clinton into the ground
bankers – and could have talked for 15 minutes virtue pounding Clinton into the ground
I have seen people say he is saving it….?dry powder? A lot of people check out after the first
30 minutes of one debate and never come back. And I'm really into it – and I doubt I will waste my time again. Even though I am a big believer
in judging people/politicians by what they do and not what they say, Trump's immaturity has frayed
my last nerve. He's 70 years old and can be knocked off balance defending !insults! about a beauty
queen.
"... Should Trump succeed in renegotiating US trade deals, corporations - currently at their most indebted level in history - will be deprived of revenues to service their debts. Some will default. ..."
"... Meanwhile, realizing whatever benefits accrue from more domestic production takes time and capital to construct plants. That's a problem, when corporate leverage already is too high. ..."
"... Most likely, the Business Roundtable will sit down for The Talk with Trump, and his wacky promises to restructure the global trade system will quickly be forgotten. ..."
No chief executive at the nation's 100 largest companies had donated to
Republican Donald Trump's presidential campaign through August, a sharp
reversal from 2012, when nearly a third of Fortune 100 CEOs supported Mitt
Romney.
One executive is quoted taking offense at Trump's ethnic slurs. But that
doesn't explain the complete unanimity. What does explain it: overseas sales
account for a third of large companies' revenues. Chart:
Should Trump succeed in renegotiating US trade deals, corporations -
currently at their most indebted level in history - will be deprived of
revenues to service their debts. Some will default.
Meanwhile, realizing whatever benefits accrue from more domestic
production takes time and capital to construct plants. That's a problem, when
corporate leverage already is too high.
Most likely, the Business Roundtable will sit down for The Talk with
Trump, and his wacky promises to restructure the global trade system will
quickly be forgotten.
If Donnie's serious, then he's Herbert Hoover II, and the long-suffering Dr
Hussman becomes a billionaire after the Crash Heard Round the World.
"... This is an impossible task. She is a war criminal, a stanch neoliberal (like her husband, who sold Democratic Party to Wall Street) and unrepentant neocon. ..."
"... My feel is that Democrats lost the support of rank and file union members in this election cycle. Serial betrays starting from Bill Clinton "triangulation" and "third way" scams finally got under the skin of workers and they do not any longer consider Democratic Party as a political entity representing their interests. And financial oligarchy and professional classes voters are not numerous enough to secure the victory. ..."
Trump supporters will not be converted.
What we need to do is 1) get people who lean Clinton to show up and vote for her and 2) convince
fence-sitters that she's the better choice and to show up and vote for her. Towards that end, we
need to establish what's important to them: policy positions, nice clothes, likes dogs? Find out
what appeals to THEM, not necessarily you, and if Clinton has those traits even a little bit then
make the pitch for her based on those traits. Engage those voters. Don't just speculate on what might
or should appeal to them. Ask them what is important to them and ASK FOR THEIR VOTE!
I have come across a few Trump
supporters in my travels and what they all have in common is what they have to say about Hillary,
while about Trump they are mostly mute.
Hillary hate is strong.* It's
not as widespread in eastern MA as it is in other parts of the country but where it exists
it looks like it's just as intense.
*There's no intellectual consistency to it. It's visceral.
"convince fence-sitters that
she's the better choice and to show up and vote for her"
This is an impossible task. She
is a war criminal, a stanch neoliberal (like her husband, who sold Democratic Party to Wall
Street) and unrepentant neocon.
Trump might be a crook and as bad as she is, but in a larger scale of things he did not
committed the crimes she committed. Yet. And at least on the surface he is against neoliberal
globalization.
My feel is that Democrats lost the support of rank and file union members in this election
cycle. Serial betrays starting from Bill Clinton "triangulation" and "third way" scams finally
got under the skin of workers and they do not any longer consider Democratic Party as a political
entity representing their interests. And financial oligarchy and professional classes voters
are not numerous enough to secure the victory.
And that might well spells doom for Demorats.
On the other hand Trump could bury Clinton but choose do not even touch her most vulnerable
points (Iraq war vote, emailgate, Libya, Clinton Foundation scam. health issues, Bill Clinton
"legacy"). Is he afraid of something or just saving the shots ? Also he looked completely unprepared.
Clinton relied on notes and pre-defined gambits, while Trump relied on intuition. It did not
play well for him.
"... Personally, I came out of this feeling more sympathetic to Trump as a person, believe it or not. I think he genuinely sees the infrastructural decay and it frosts him. ..."
"... Same with "you had 30 years to solve it." Undeniably true; Clinton's whole "let's build on our success" schtick is such a steaming lot of 10%-er-ness. But if Trump wants to make this election a referendum on the political class, he's going to have to do a lot better than this ..."
"... Hillary gave no indication she is going to change the course we are on now; in fact, reading between the lines, she thinks things are going great and there is no reason to change anything. ..."
"... I think there is a better chance that Trump will actually try to fix things, but tax policy and several other things did not give me great hope that he has any idea how to fix things, or will learn & adapt quickly enough. On the plus side, some people talk better than they deliver; some people deliver better than they talk. At least there's a chance he's one of the latter. ..."
"... I can't find where he would refuse "trade deals", only ones "These Morons running things" have negotiated. I'm betting he would push them with minor changes, as will HRC. ISDS is a foregone conclusion, with either. Jesus, one of his advisors is Larry f'n Kudlow. If the regulars here are not appalled by the guys he has surrounded himself with, I sure am. I can see it coming… ..."
"... I think Trump's probably serious about trade. But if I understand the structural issues correctly, it doesn't really matter whether he is serious or not. Apparently the Republican base is now strongly opposed to free trade. ..."
"... If my assessment is correct, TPP dies with a Trump win. There isn't an option to reopen negotiations, is there? A brand new "Trump style" treaty would take years to negotiate, and he has "one term" written all over him. This also would kill TISA, right? Is it technically contingent on TPP passing first? ..."
"... The Democrats in opposition will be just as feckless as the Republicans have been effective. ..."
"... One particular provision of TISA is as bad as anything in TPP (bar ISDS) and that is the prohibition on remunicipalization of privatized public resources. Governments would not be allowed to take back things such as British Rail that have been sold off to the private sector, and would be prohibited from nationalizing any other public good now in private hands. It's another hit to national sovereignty. ..."
"... HRC, you knew from the beginning, who she was tied to/advised by/paid for by. She is a "known known". We are all seeking to know what or who DT represents, as he is harder to pin down. ..."
"... I don't think Clinton won every category just most. I think Trump won on "there is no evidence Russia hacked the DNC". ..."
"... How are we gonna survive 4 years with either of them at the helm? ..."
"... That was my take exactly. Since I don't honestly think Stein is going to win, and I think Johnson might be worse than either of these, I was hoping one of them would give me a reason to feel optimistic that they would do a decent job. They … both failed horribly. ..."
"... What universe are they living in? Half of these people used to be Bernie supporters. Are people that easily manipulated? Did I used to be that easily manipulated? Or have I gone completely insane now. This was some kind of masterful performance? She mouthed a lot of decent sounding platitudes with no specifics re: policy (while everyone praises her for specifics, and I think she championed the ideas of specifics themselves) while doing a decent but not great job of hitting Trump on some areas where he's very vulnerable. ..."
"... He did a great job finding areas where she's vulnerable, but a terrible job of hitting her on them. ..."
"... "Are people that easily manipulated?" Yes. Was I that easily manipulated? Probably. Don't feel bad though most of us were naďve enough to believe the BS for at least some period of time. ..."
"... Uh it's scripted reality TV. The "debates" are vetted and agreed upon by the two parties who sponsored the darn thing via their little pretend front group. Anyone, at this point, who thinks these things matter is fooling themselves. It's a 90 minute infomercial, so if you find infomercials masterful then I guess. ..."
"... Thank you for pointing out that as usual, the unconstitutional and illegitimate two-party duopoly has excluded other candidates who will be on the ballot. Who exactly gave them this privilege of exclusion? ..."
"... Private enterprise, Jim. You can always put up the money for third party candidates to debate on prime time. Thought that was how the market "works". ..."
"... I disagree strongly that Trump is incoherent; I saw him in Bangor. What he is, is discursive and improvisational. He has his main points that he always ..."
"... However, that style doesn't work for him in this debate. He doesn't get to determine the structure, there's no time in a two minute answer to do the kind of excursions he likes to do, and the crowd was told not to react. ..."
"... The format works very much against Trump, and very much for Clinton. Delivering bullet points successfully is a marker that a candidate is president-y. Considering what PowerPoint has done to the Pentagon, that might not be such a great idea, but it is what it is and we are where we are. ..."
"... I'm surprised that no one mentioned the one best line to the non political junkie. They HATE political commercials. He nailed her on spending Millions attacking him and he came across gentlemanly saying he wouldn't / hasn't done that to her. ..."
"... Honestly, I've seen 5 years olds who could resist the bait better than Trump… ..."
"... I don't know why this is surprising, Trump is the narcissist he is regardless of what people want to project on him. Of course none of that makes Clinton any better. Whether it's effective, eh who knows, if it's authoritarians voting for him maybe that is what they like, but I don't think there are enough of them for him to win on that alone. If people are just casting random angry votes for anything but the status quo then maybe. ..."
"... I disagree. I think both candidates are isolated within elite bubbles, leading to behaviors we consider narcissistic (armchair diagnosis, when you think about it. I mean, "I'm with her….") ..."
"... So which one is the Grandiose and the other an Insecure type ..."
"... ….Did anyone else notice how consistently Hillary looked down at the podium? I believe she was being fed "Cliff Notes" ON AN IPAD by her staff re every topic that was bought up….she was ALWAYS looking down and, I assume she was being fed CUES AND WORDS OR PHRASES that she should use….she not only looked down a lot before the time she was supposed to speak but also looked down a lot during her responses…… ..."
"... OTOH, Trump was "winging it" and "shooting from the hip"…..Hillary won because the notes kept her on track….If trump had done any serious prep and could take advice, he could have destroyed her…But, he doesn't do prep, so he can't effectively respond……. ..."
"... Hillary's closing comments were stronger, but by then I don't think their were many left watching who were "Persuadables"….those of us left were "political junkies" hoping for a last lap NASCAR worthy Candidate Crash….. ..."
"... I think Trump had the opportunity to win the debate handed to him on a silver platter by Hillary, but his failure to Prepare and Do the Little Things that would have helped him be ready for her totally expected responses/statements/stalking points cost him dearly….. ..."
"... He remains the Rich Guy, who does what he wants….. She remains the Robotic Gal, who will probably get what she wants…. ..."
"... Yes she was looking down a lot. Were they allowed to have iPads to look at? ..."
"... I think one of the CBS commentators said that Hillary appeared to be using notes. She did look down a lot, and I also thought she seemed unusually subdued. At times she appeared to look sleepy and bored. I don't think this "debate" changed anyone's mind. I think Trump was trying to "dial it back", and he did miss several opportunities to zing Clinton. It did confirm one thing for me – we're all screwed. ..."
"... I don't think in the great scheme of things this matters much. If there was an iPad and it worked for Clinton, then why the heck didn't the Trump team give their guy an equivalent advantage? ..."
"... Two impressions, on the bus where I could just hear them, it was pretty equal. Both spouted nonsense and both had decent points regarding the other. Home where I had visuals, before I switched, she looked relaxed and yes healthy. She even appeared amused by him.He was flustered and floundering. There were at least two opportunities where he could have landed blows on her policies which he lost by being defensive. His judgment is better than her's, but that is an incredibly low bar. Based on 2, she won. ..."
"... Ironic that in this post-democratic world I watched my first political debate ever. Give the credit to the great entertainer: Donald Trump. Problem was: he wasn't the least bit entertaining tonight. I thought Clinton did well, however she is playing a losing hand. Trump is on the right side of all the issues that matter. Unfortunately(for everyone) the only reality Clinton and the entire western political establishment cares about is how many of the 1% will pay $500 a plate for a dinner and a speech. ..."
"... Bottom line is, all Murica could do was cough up these two turds. Yeah, deliberately mixed metaphor. Main difference is, if Trump gets elected it will certify Murica before the whole world as a country full of arseholes who've finally got to elect their very own Arsehole in Chief. ..."
"... One point made by a friend of the blog: Neither candidate appealed to anyone other than their base. And it's hard to see why anyone undecided would be moved. It's even harder to see why a voter committed to Johnson or Stein would move. ..."
"... Watched the whole thing. Trump missed a good opportunity to respond to Hillary's comment that trickle down was the reason for the financial crisis. Trump could have spoken up and said it was Goldman Sachs and big banks that played the key role in bringing on the financial crisis – which would have lead many to think again about her speeches at GS. Outside of the fact that Hillary's comment made me super confused – and maybe Trump as well – it would have been great if he could have mentioned the banks and what did she promise the big banks during her speeches. ..."
"... I was wondering if he's holding the GS speech transcripts in reserve? I was hoping for more of a pounding. I wonder if his team will do polling to determine how hard-hitting he can go before it gets too negative? The history of Glass-Steagall repeal is pretty damning. I'm also hoping to hear her defence of her cattle futures trading, but perhaps that is too ancient of history? ..."
"... Also, was interesting wrt his usage of the word "secretary" - a la Scott Adams, I suspect he's hoping the average viewer will subconsciously associate Hillary with the office secretary, rather than Secretary of State. ..."
"... Before I forget, Trump was very strong on trade, early. Nailed Clinton on NAFTA, nailed her on TPP. Fits right in with "you've had 30 years," but (B team, not top tier school) he didn't keep hammering that point. An early win (on the theory that debates are won early) but for me overshadowed by the rest of it). ..."
"... Absolutely. If it had been a 35 minute debate, Trump would have won hands down. Of course, the minute they moved to taxes, the incoherence of Trump's economic policy becomes apparent. ..."
"... Among others, 3 mistakes by Trump that a seasoned politician wouldn't have made. First, Clinton accuses him of not paying maids, contractors, architects, etc. and Trump basically agrees. He doesn't dispute this, instead says "maybe they didn't do the work." In a time of economic stagnation, this was a miss. (A seasoned politician would have just lied and said "not true.") Second, the tax stuff where Clinton outlines possible reasons he isn't releasing and he didn't do the simple thing and say "none of those are true." Instead, maybe not paying taxes is a "smart thing." Third, Trump can't even do the short work to memorize a story tying the creation of ISIS to Clinton's interventionism (and thus refugee crisis). Instead he bloviates about the Iran deal that very few Americans know enough about to judge good or bad. ..."
"... Not having watched one second of this "debate," I think it's important to note that there are many different kinds of communication. As far as I can tell, Trump's a decent salesman. That's a very specific type of communication, that specifically is NOT about delivering information or or enhancing understanding. It's about establishing control of your target and leading them to do/buy what you want them to do/buy. It doesn't sound like he figured out a way to make this very different situation work for him, the way he apparently did the very different Republican debates. Note that I'm not claiming he IS a master communicator. I don't think either of them are. ..."
"... Trump is giving mixed messages - that's his communication failure. We're supposed to be disgusted by Obama/Clinton foreign policy, but it's never clear why. Because the policy is failed at the start - intervening in Middle Eastern affairs is foolish? Or, we should be intervening for the sake of American power? Trump never articulates a policy goal either way. This is the empty rhetoric of "America first." He never argues a long term strategy of foreign policy for America or the world at large ..."
"... I don't consider Hillary Clinton very smart. Her complete lack of morals and empathy are a far more significant factor in her success than her intelligence. Trump seems fairly bright in some ways, and he's certainly good at understanding certain kinds of non-verbal communication. (For example, all that gold that seems so vulgar to one audience is very appealing to another.) Beyond that, I have no strong opinion about him in this regard. Do I think he's a sizzling intellect? No. ..."
"... I'm basically with Lambert: the best we can hope for is gridlock. But since Clinton is running as an efficient, bloodthirsty Republican, and what she really wants to do is wage war, which requires no Congressional action, Trump's the better bet for gridlock, even with a Republican majority. We'll get Democrats forced to playact the role of "Democrat;" it's something. ..."
"... Clinton doesn't have her thumbs on the button yet she's just threatened Russia with a cyber-war in retaliation for purported Russian attacks on the DNC etc., 'hacks' for which there is less proof than there is an interest on Clinton's part in changing the channel away from what the 'hacks' revealed about her own nefarious doings. So, in retaliation for something that may not have happened at all Clinton's instinct is to hit what could well be the wrong guy because it suits her personal interest – more egregious still, in this instance the wrong guy happens to be engaged in an existential struggle for independent, sovereign survival on the same planet as the US Empire and quite desperately needs an American leader of calibre. ..."
"... If he'd wanted to win he could've sat down with any high school coach to map out a strategy and a set of talking points that would not just defeat Clinton, but quite possibly send a bunch of people to jail. That's why it's Trump (or could've been Cruz). You could not draw a more perfect stereo-typically encumbered character beside which to contrast Clinton, whose entire public career persona has been premised on 'breaking down' same – even if her husband did send a million poor, mostly young black Americans away to rot in fantastically lucrative private prisons working for slave wages. ..."
"... Trump doesn't have to play that "arrest the banker" card to win, and there are plenty of reasons why he would not, including he wants to stay alive. Plus, there's selling and then there's giving away. ..."
"... Senior Romney strategist: Trump brought 20 minutes of material to a 90 minute show. ..."
"... Personally, I'm not sure laziness is a disqualifying characteristic in a Presidential candidate. If a machine is so broken that all its outputs are bad, then it behooves one to turn the crank more slowly than faster. ..."
"... This was a pathetic performance all around. Hillary looked like a polished turd in the debate, compared to Trump who came off as an unpolished turd. My feeling is that Hillary was the "winner" though that word doesn't seem suitable. ..."
"... Yes she jabbed him to death, while Trump held his punches. The question is: why? Having already done the Foreman trick of KOing five guys in one night, was he guarding against punching himself out? Seeing he's already won debates with aggression, was he trying to win by playing defense? Am I simply reading into it what I want to – spinning for Trump to excuse a mediocre performance? ..."
"... Did Trump suffer a mini-stroke on stage? After slurring a word, he began to answer questions for a while with incoherent, freely associated chains of slogans and phrases. This, about the time he blurted out about Hillary's stamina–, psychological projection perhaps? Then he began to list to his left and lean pronouncedly on his podium. After the debate, he left the hall rather too promptly. Was the elderly Trump physically fit enough to withstand a one-on-one 90 minute debate? ..."
I think he genuinely sees the infrastructural decay and it frosts him.
Yes, and connects the $6 trillion invested in blowing up the Middle East to what it could have
been used for instead, and repeatedly called out big bureaucracy for big mistakes.
Personally, I came out of this feeling more sympathetic to Trump as a person, believe
it or not. I think he genuinely sees the infrastructural decay and it frosts him.
Same with "you had 30 years to solve it." Undeniably true; Clinton's whole "let's build
on our success" schtick is such a steaming lot of 10%-er-ness. But if Trump wants to make this
election a referendum on the political class, he's going to have to do a lot better than this
Agreed here. My SO put it better than me: Hillary gave no indication she is going to change
the course we are on now; in fact, reading between the lines, she thinks things are going great
and there is no reason to change anything. " And Trump did do a good job of identifying a
number of things that are wrong, even if he wasn't particularly articulate in discussing them.
I think there is a better chance that Trump will actually try to fix things, but tax policy
and several other things did not give me great hope that he has any idea how to fix things, or
will learn & adapt quickly enough. On the plus side, some people talk better than they deliver;
some people deliver better than they talk. At least there's a chance he's one of the latter.
Hillary… we know what we are getting. She won't deliver better than she talks. I have nothing
kind to say here, other than she did a good job of finishing her sentences, and her tax policy
is better than Trump's. And that she used to be much, much better in debates. I remain flummoxed
that people are giving her credit for doing well in this one.
Trump makes an occasional noise in that direction, IF there has been a related segment on the
talk shows or one of the conservative sites. Where in his stated policy (ie on his website or
in positions in writing) is anything to suggest he will fix any of that misery? Tax cuts and deregulation?
Letting him negotiate trade deals, instead of Obama people?
I can't find where he would refuse "trade deals", only ones "These Morons running things"
have negotiated. I'm betting he would push them with minor changes, as will HRC. ISDS is a foregone
conclusion, with either. Jesus, one of his advisors is Larry f'n Kudlow. If the regulars here
are not appalled by the guys he has surrounded himself with, I sure am. I can see it coming…
At least Trump has the good taste not to have Kudlow sit on his lap. Or vice versa.
Reading liberals explain how George W. Bush is just a misunderstood patriot has been…educational.
Not in the way they intend.
I think Trump's probably serious about trade. But if I understand the structural issues
correctly, it doesn't really matter whether he is serious or not. Apparently the Republican base
is now strongly opposed to free trade. (I think most already were, but now they have permission
to affirmatively say so, and pick up stragglers.)
I know Obama is counting on getting votes from people thrown out of office and looking for
lobbying work. But I don't think there will be enough of them, will there? The Dems aren't going
to flip either house, it looks like - certainly not by large numbers. That means there won't be
tons of "loose" Republican votes, Republicans returning won't be incentivized to betray their
incoming President for Obama, and Democrats on their way out may see shrinking lobbying opportunities,
as the Democratic Party - IF Clinton doesn't take power - will be very weak at both the federal
and state level.
If my assessment is correct, TPP dies with a Trump win. There isn't an option to reopen
negotiations, is there? A brand new "Trump style" treaty would take years to negotiate, and he
has "one term" written all over him. This also would kill TISA, right? Is it technically contingent
on TPP passing first?
I am looking forward to Democratic Senators using secret holds and such to stop Republican
tax plans that benefit corporations and the wealthy.
Okay, now that I've stopped laughing, I'll correct this. I'm assuming BERNIE will use holds
and such to stop this stuff. But it will be entertaining to watch the Democrats explain why the
Republican can top from the bottom, but they never can.
@aab – "This also would kill TISA, right? Is it technically contingent on TPP passing first?"
I don't think TISA depends on TPP being passed. As I understand it, they are being negotiated
separately.
One particular provision of TISA is as bad as anything in TPP (bar ISDS) and that is the
prohibition on remunicipalization of privatized public resources. Governments would not be allowed
to take back things such as British Rail that have been sold off to the private sector, and would
be prohibited from nationalizing any other public good now in private hands. It's another hit
to national sovereignty.
You are right, indeed. I just think DT is getting more "benefit of the doubt" than is warranted,
given what I know of his past, and the sources he apparently uses, and the advisors he surrounds
with.
HRC, you knew from the beginning, who she was tied to/advised by/paid for by. She is a
"known known". We are all seeking to know what or who DT represents, as he is harder to pin down.
HRC and Bill are the most successful organized crime outfit since Wall St., and that
is enough to categorize them, even without the obvious foreign policy horrors .
How are we gonna survive 4 years with either of them at the helm?
That was my take exactly. Since I don't honestly think Stein is going to win, and I think
Johnson might be worse than either of these, I was hoping one of them would give me a reason to
feel optimistic that they would do a decent job. They … both failed horribly.
And what is up with all the people on NBC and now in my twitter feed repeating this mantra
that "We had high expectations for Hillary, and she exceeded them!"
What universe are they living in? Half of these people used to be Bernie supporters. Are
people that easily manipulated? Did I used to be that easily manipulated? Or have I gone completely
insane now. This was some kind of masterful performance? She mouthed a lot of decent sounding
platitudes with no specifics re: policy (while everyone praises her for specifics, and I think
she championed the ideas of specifics themselves) while doing a decent but not great job of hitting
Trump on some areas where he's very vulnerable.
He did a great job finding areas where she's vulnerable, but a terrible job of hitting
her on them.
She did a better job of finishing her sentences, but … wow. That was the bar for coherence
and specificity here.
Meanwhile, my twitter feed is full of people who think one or the other landed telling blows.
The pundits all think she was terrif. His partisans seem to think he did well.
He looked like he was posing half the time. I don't even know what to say about her expressions.
I hate when people talk about stuff like that but what else is there to say here?
My SO and I were constantly covering our eyes and putting our heads down and occasionally laughing
at each others expressions and occasionally laughing so hard we had tears running down our eyes
at what (both) the candidates were saying. Now it's over I just want to cry.
I know a lot of people here are not fans of the Green Party, but hate on Jill all you want,
she would have almost certainly been better up there tonight than either of these people. It would
have been hard to be worse.
"Are people that easily manipulated?" Yes. Was I that easily manipulated? Probably. Don't
feel bad though most of us were naďve enough to believe the BS for at least some period of time.
This was some kind of masterful performance?
Uh it's scripted reality TV. The "debates" are vetted and agreed upon by the two parties
who sponsored the darn thing via their little pretend front group. Anyone, at this point, who
thinks these things matter is fooling themselves. It's a 90 minute infomercial, so if you find
infomercials masterful then I guess.
Personally, I'm boycotting these things until they actually allow ALL the candidates that qualify
for the ballot on stage.
Thank you for pointing out that as usual, the unconstitutional and illegitimate two-party
duopoly has excluded other candidates who will be on the ballot. Who exactly gave them this privilege
of exclusion?
Trump can go off on 5 tangents in each sentence. I keep waiting for him to make his damn point,
already. It all comes off as gibberish. I cannot wait for a verbatim transcript of this cluster****.
It will be largely incomprehensible. As for "HER", I aint with her either. We are screwwwed.
It was like that in the Republican debates for anyone who bothered to read the transcripts.
Trump was incoherent, the other candidates were basically coherent (wrong, liars and horrible
many of them, but able to form a coherent sentence. Trump stood out).
I disagree strongly that Trump is incoherent;
I saw him in Bangor. What he is, is discursive and improvisational. He has his main points
that he always circles back to, but he riffs and reacts to the crowd.
However, that style doesn't work for him in this debate. He doesn't get to determine the
structure, there's no time in a two minute answer to do the kind of excursions he likes to do,
and the crowd was told not to react.
The format works very much against Trump, and very much for Clinton. Delivering bullet
points successfully is a marker that a candidate is president-y. Considering what PowerPoint has
done to the Pentagon, that might not be such a great idea, but it is what it is and we are where
we are.
Prediction markets are saying she killed him. I would look to see the results of multiple online
polls. Both Hillary and Trump fans will be trying to game them but it will be hard to skew results
across the entire web.
Dunno with Rs, but the online polls showed Sanders to be a winner in debates where the MSM
called him a loser, and Sanders continued gains in later, conventional polls v. Clinton seemed
way more in line with the online polls than MSM takes.
I'm surprised that no one mentioned the one best line to the non political junkie. They
HATE political commercials. He nailed her on spending Millions attacking him and he came across
gentlemanly saying he wouldn't / hasn't done that to her.
All I can think after I watched this is that I could have dismembered, dissected, discombobulated,
and reduced Hillary not only to cells, not just to molecules, but to quarks.
looking at it, I just can't see how anybody could think Trump is actually very smart, or smart,
or much above ANY New York cabbie…or any or those horses in central park….or the south end of
any of those horses….
Honestly, I've seen 5 years olds who could resist the bait better than Trump…
I don't know why this is surprising, Trump is the narcissist he is regardless of what people
want to project on him. Of course none of that makes Clinton any better.
Whether it's effective, eh who knows, if it's authoritarians voting for him maybe that is what
they like, but I don't think there are enough of them for him to win on that alone. If people
are just casting random angry votes for anything but the status quo then maybe.
I disagree. I think both candidates are isolated within elite bubbles, leading to behaviors
we consider narcissistic (armchair diagnosis, when you think about it. I mean, "I'm with her….")
I watched the debate on CSPAN, where a split screen was used that showed the candidates at
all times…
….Did anyone else notice how consistently Hillary looked down at the podium? I believe
she was being fed "Cliff Notes" ON AN IPAD by her staff re every topic that was bought up….she
was ALWAYS looking down and, I assume she was being fed CUES AND WORDS OR PHRASES that she should
use….she not only looked down a lot before the time she was supposed to speak but also looked
down a lot during her responses……
OTOH, Trump was "winging it" and "shooting from the hip"…..Hillary won because the notes
kept her on track….If trump had done any serious prep and could take advice, he could have destroyed
her…But, he doesn't do prep, so he can't effectively respond…….
She was told to smile when he attacked….she did this……this response aggravated me, but didn't
hurt her with the public of "Undecideds"
He was told to refrain from interrupting…he did an excellent job of interjecting comments at
the beginning, but lost control as the night wore on…..
Lester was about the worst Moderator I have listened/watched/prayed for during a Debate…..of
course, the job is "thankless"
Hillary's closing comments were stronger, but by then I don't think their were many left
watching who were "Persuadables"….those of us left were "political junkies" hoping for a last
lap NASCAR worthy Candidate Crash…..
I think Trump had the opportunity to win the debate handed to him on a silver platter by
Hillary, but his failure to Prepare and Do the Little Things that would have helped him be ready
for her totally expected responses/statements/stalking points cost him dearly…..
He remains the Rich Guy, who does what he wants….. She remains the Robotic Gal, who will
probably get what she wants….
Yes she was looking down a lot. Were they allowed to have iPads to look at?
I felt she was listening a lot–she had that look some newscasters have when their
producers are telling them updated news or giving suggestions through an ear device. Could she
have been wired up? Are there rules about this?
I think one of the CBS commentators said that Hillary appeared to be using notes. She did
look down a lot, and I also thought she seemed unusually subdued. At times she appeared to look
sleepy and bored. I don't think this "debate" changed anyone's mind. I think Trump was trying
to "dial it back", and he did miss several opportunities to zing Clinton. It did confirm one thing
for me – we're all screwed.
I don't think in the great scheme of things this matters much. If there was an iPad and
it worked for Clinton, then why the heck didn't the Trump team give their guy an equivalent advantage?
(If true, this shows the dangers of an overly lean campaign team.)
Two impressions, on the bus where I could just hear them, it was pretty equal. Both spouted
nonsense and both had decent points regarding the other. Home where I had visuals, before I switched,
she looked relaxed and yes healthy. She even appeared amused by him.He was flustered and floundering.
There were at least two opportunities where he could have landed blows on her policies which he
lost by being defensive. His judgment is better than her's, but that is an incredibly low bar.
Based on 2, she won.
Based on the nonsense they both reeled off the biggest loser tonight, election day and the
future are the American people either way.
J-Yel must be shocked that Trump ripped her early on. The earnest bureaucrats at the Fed are
not used to being fodder for campaign criticism.
Trump went on to call today's economy a "big fat Bubble." (I call it Bubble III.) He implied
that one rate hike will be the pin that pops it, and he's probably right.
Knowing this does not mean he can do anything about it. Currently J-Yel plans to hike in December
during the interregnum, when the US political system is inert and the MSM is all focused on cabinet
picks.
Almost certainly, the next president will have a close-up, personal encounter with a harsh
recession. The only advice from pros is "get it behind you early." That's why I have it penciled
in for 2017-18.
That's what the hotel people think (see yesterday's water cooler). Hotel bookings being a fine
indicator of the animal spirits of the managing and investing classes. Whether they are a leading
indicator remains to be seen….
And in 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson, who wanted cheap credit to finance the Vietnam
War and his Great Society, summoned Fed chairman William McChesney Martin to his Texas ranch.
There, after asking other officials to leave the room, Johnson reportedly shoved Martin against
the wall as he demanding that the Fed once again hold down interest rates. Martin caved, the
Fed printed money, and inflation kept climbing until the early 1980s.
Ironic that in this post-democratic world I watched my first political debate ever. Give
the credit to the great entertainer: Donald Trump. Problem was: he wasn't the least bit entertaining
tonight. I thought Clinton did well, however she is playing a losing hand. Trump is on the right
side of all the issues that matter. Unfortunately(for everyone) the only reality Clinton and the
entire western political establishment cares about is how many of the 1% will pay $500 a plate
for a dinner and a speech.
Regarding tonight's shenanagans, I thought Lester Holt was the winner. A good moderator should
be virtually invisible, let the candidates do their thing. Clinton scored her debating points
but I'm not convinced that won her any votes. Was Trump performing in a strait jacket? Seemed
like he was more worried about appearing reserved and presidential. And holy repetitive! I was
looking forward to Tyson-Spinks, instead I got Tyson-Douglas! Yet I wouldn't be surprised if it
all worked and Trump comes out ahead in the polls. He certainly didn't look scary tonight. Boring
yes, however doesn't boring deflate these ideas that he's an out of control amateur who can't
be trusted?
Bottom line is, all Murica could do was cough up these two turds. Yeah, deliberately mixed
metaphor. Main difference is, if Trump gets elected it will certify Murica before the whole world
as a country full of arseholes who've finally got to elect their very own Arsehole in Chief.
One point made by a friend of the blog: Neither candidate appealed to anyone other than
their base. And it's hard to see why anyone undecided would be moved. It's even harder to see
why a voter committed to Johnson or Stein would move.
Therefore, we would not expect the polls to move. And what matters is a tiny population of
voters in swing counties in swing states (not national polls), which data is not available to
us.
Of course, since the political class is all in for Clinton, they will portray it as an overwhelming
win for Clinton (as did I, since I am a 10%-er manqué ). However, exactly as with TV
advertising, the pronouncements of the political class have had greatly diminished returns this
year….
I'll be interested what old-school people like Nooners have to say….
I don't see them as playing only to their respective bases - it seems like they also were trying
to affect overarching narratives. Clinton's case against Trump is that he's monstrous. I think
he cut against that indictment tonight (and it wasn't a foregone conclusion that he would). Trump's
case against Clinton is that she's a corrupt and dishonest version of politics as usual, which
already is corrupt and dishonest. I don't know whether she moved the dial on that. Apart from
immediate reactions, wonder if there will be any shifts.
Watched the whole thing. Trump missed a good opportunity to respond to Hillary's comment
that trickle down was the reason for the financial crisis. Trump could have spoken up and said
it was Goldman Sachs and big banks that played the key role in bringing on the financial crisis
– which would have lead many to think again about her speeches at GS. Outside of the fact that
Hillary's comment made me super confused – and maybe Trump as well – it would have been great
if he could have mentioned the banks and what did she promise the big banks during her speeches.
Very good point on Goldman. In a way, it seems that Clinton threw the kitchen sink on Trump
(her assault on his business dealings, using the income tax thing as a hook, was prepared but
highly effective). But Trump didn't throw the kitchen sink back at her. Odd.
Voting has already started. I don't see any benefit to going soft on her. He relied on free
media in the primary, and he has much less money than she does. If he's serious about winning,
this was an important opportunity that he apparently blew. The next one isn't even a pseudo-debate,
is it? I read today it's a Town Hall - i.e., completely useless. Actually less than useless; it
should be a very poor format for him, and a very protected format for her.
By the time they get to the next direct confrontation, a lot of votes will have been banked.
i'm starting to try to mentally prepare myself for a clinton win. or steal, or whatever. "i
survived reagan, i didn't totally lose it during the time of the chimp, i can do this. happy thoughts".
I can't. I'm too afraid of her. I can picture surviving Trump. But Clinton really scares me.
I have a draft age child; that's a not insignificant element. That plus TPP.
@aab – I feel your pain about your kid and the draft. I was in the first draft lottery in 1969
and came out with #27. Fortunately, I was able to avoid being drafted due to it being suspended
for the first 90 days of 1972 because they had enough soldiers and were beginning to draw down
the forces in Viet Nam.
I was wondering if he's holding the GS speech transcripts in reserve? I was hoping for
more of a pounding. I wonder if his team will do polling to determine how hard-hitting he can
go before it gets too negative? The history of Glass-Steagall repeal is pretty damning. I'm also
hoping to hear her defence of her cattle futures trading, but perhaps that is too ancient of history?
Also, was interesting wrt his usage of the word "secretary" - a la Scott Adams, I suspect
he's hoping the average viewer will subconsciously associate Hillary with the office secretary,
rather than Secretary of State.
Old news (from May), but sad to see the "fact checkers" on the
birther
origins …
Before I forget, Trump was very strong on trade, early. Nailed Clinton on NAFTA, nailed
her on TPP. Fits right in with "you've had 30 years," but (B team, not top tier school) he didn't
keep hammering that point. An early win (on the theory that debates are won early) but for me
overshadowed by the rest of it).
Absolutely. If it had been a 35 minute debate, Trump would have won hands down. Of course,
the minute they moved to taxes, the incoherence of Trump's economic policy becomes apparent.
Among others, 3 mistakes by Trump that a seasoned politician wouldn't have made. First,
Clinton accuses him of not paying maids, contractors, architects, etc. and Trump basically agrees.
He doesn't dispute this, instead says "maybe they didn't do the work." In a time of economic stagnation,
this was a miss. (A seasoned politician would have just lied and said "not true.") Second, the
tax stuff where Clinton outlines possible reasons he isn't releasing and he didn't do the simple
thing and say "none of those are true." Instead, maybe not paying taxes is a "smart thing." Third,
Trump can't even do the short work to memorize a story tying the creation of ISIS to Clinton's
interventionism (and thus refugee crisis). Instead he bloviates about the Iran deal that very
few Americans know enough about to judge good or bad.
Trump's team needs to slap some sense into him (if that's possible and he can listen). So many
winning arguments left on the table (and ripe for Trump's simple language, too).
Upon a second watch of the debate (ok, I'm crazy), he actually does make the point about the
creation of ISIS. Unfortunately, his rhetoric ends on "we should have taken the oil." So he doesn't
distinguish the story as the failure of Obama/Clinton foreign policy as a policy of interventionism
. His argument is that interventionism must pay out in some way.
Trump didn't help himself by claiming earlier that Clinton has been fighting ISIS her whole
life. That obvious gaffe makes it hard to hear anything he says later in the debate.
I'm in agreement with Corey Robin - Trump is not a master communicator. Pace Scott
Adams.
Also, it's not nice that Hillary buys negative ads
Not having watched one second of this "debate," I think it's important to note that there
are many different kinds of communication. As far as I can tell, Trump's a decent salesman. That's
a very specific type of communication, that specifically is NOT about delivering information or
or enhancing understanding. It's about establishing control of your target and leading them to
do/buy what you want them to do/buy. It doesn't sound like he figured out a way to make this very
different situation work for him, the way he apparently did the very different Republican debates.
Note that I'm not claiming he IS a master communicator. I don't think either of them are.
So many people are saying she was obviously looking down a lot and reading from notes or possibly
an iPad. If so, why wouldn't he call her out on it?
Trump is giving mixed messages - that's his communication failure. We're supposed to be
disgusted by Obama/Clinton foreign policy, but it's never clear why. Because the policy is failed
at the start - intervening in Middle Eastern affairs is foolish? Or, we should be intervening
for the sake of American power? Trump never articulates a policy goal either way. This is the
empty rhetoric of "America first." He never argues a long term strategy of foreign policy for
America or the world at large .
NATO is just a tool. For what? Not clear.
If you think, well: America shouldn't be articulating a strategy for global politics. Fine.
I'm happy to listen, but so far, Trump hasn't even made this idea coherent.
Bear in mind, I didn't watch tonight. I'm not an expert on Trump. But I'm so sick of all this
discourse around "intelligence" and "communication" that defines both concepts in extremely limited
and fundamentally false ways that align with the proclivities of those in the position to do the
defining. I don't consider Hillary Clinton very smart. Her complete lack of morals and empathy
are a far more significant factor in her success than her intelligence. Trump seems fairly bright
in some ways, and he's certainly good at understanding certain kinds of non-verbal communication.
(For example, all that gold that seems so vulgar to one audience is very appealing to another.)
Beyond that, I have no strong opinion about him in this regard. Do I think he's a sizzling intellect?
No.
Again, salesmanship has nothing to do with messaging per se. In fact, one sales technique
would be to using contradictory messaging at differing points in the sales path, to confuse the
target. Salesmanship is about control and manipulation.
Persuasion is a different process, where messaging, as the term is generally used, matters.
I would have liked him to take her out tonight. But beyond the strategic goal of keeping her
out of power, I don't know whether I'd prefer a smart and/or disciplined Trump over a less smart,
less disciplined one. I'd like him to be smart enough not to be a stooge for the existing "bipartisan"
elite, since merely resisting their desires and goals seems like it would good for the rest of
us. But it's possible (probable?) he means all or part of that noxious traditional Republican
swill he's offering up. In which case, being less smart and less disciplined might be better in
terms of him acting as an obstacle to business as usual - as long as he's stubborn.
I'm basically with Lambert: the best we can hope for is gridlock. But since Clinton is
running as an efficient, bloodthirsty Republican, and what she really wants to do is wage war,
which requires no Congressional action, Trump's the better bet for gridlock, even with a Republican
majority. We'll get Democrats forced to playact the role of "Democrat;" it's something.
That's why I focus mostly on the structural stuff. We know what Clinton is and will do,
and it's horrendous. That's why throwing the Trump spanner into the works is worth doing. I would
love for him to govern way to the left of how he ran, just as Obama governed way to the right
of how he ran. But there really aren't a lot of incentives for Trump to do that, unlike for Obama.
I'm not naive enough to count on Trump's human decency, although I do get the impression he may
have a sliver of it, unlike both Obama and Clinton. But I also think he's sincerely racist. If
Clinton wasn't such a profound and effectively violent racist, Trump's racism would really give
me pause.
Anyway, my key point is that doing very badly in the format and conditions of tonight's event
does not prove he is a bad communicator in some overarching sense.
Now that's what I call talent. But as one of them is going to be President, I just want to
point out the one thing worth noting she said all night.
Clinton doesn't have her thumbs on the button yet she's just threatened Russia with a cyber-war
in retaliation for purported Russian attacks on the DNC etc., 'hacks' for which there is less
proof than there is an interest on Clinton's part in changing the channel away from what the 'hacks'
revealed about her own nefarious doings. So, in retaliation for something that may not have happened
at all Clinton's instinct is to hit what could well be the wrong guy because it suits her personal
interest – more egregious still, in this instance the wrong guy happens to be engaged in an existential
struggle for independent, sovereign survival on the same planet as the US Empire and quite desperately
needs an American leader of calibre.
I know it's hard to look past the enormous frozen smile, still, close your eyes and try to
remember the look in her eyes, the downward cut of her mouth and clamped jaw when Trump briefly
brushed past a sore spot – that person in there, that is the person who will be the next Leader
of The Free World, that is to say, the woman who will lead the revolution of the globalists over
the tyranny of nations. The effort to re-assert US hegemony will prove calamitous.
It does seem to me that the voice that can proclaim with little evidence that Russia hacked
into the DNC can easily become the same voice that can proclaim with little evidence that Iraq
has WMDs (that is the modern version of that for the enemy du jour of course).
That's actually brilliant, and the fact he didn't/hasn't so far supports my thesis – so don't
expect him to try it. Trump doesn't want to win – what he wants is to lose without being a 'loser'.
It's been evident for a long time now.
If he'd wanted to win he could've sat down with any high school coach to map out a strategy
and a set of talking points that would not just defeat Clinton, but quite possibly send a bunch
of people to jail. That's why it's Trump (or could've been Cruz). You could not draw a more perfect
stereo-typically encumbered character beside which to contrast Clinton, whose entire public career
persona has been premised on 'breaking down' same – even if her husband did send a million poor,
mostly young black Americans away to rot in fantastically lucrative private prisons working for
slave wages.
I suspect if he wanted to win he would spend on advertising, just saying. It may or may not
pan out, but why not make use of things that might help him win if winning was what he wanted?
http://www.wsj.com/articles/donald-trumps-special-1474910731
Trump doesn't have to play that "arrest the banker" card to win, and there are plenty of reasons
why he would not, including he wants to stay alive. Plus, there's selling and then there's giving
away.
If he wanted to loose and yet come out a winner, then I'd expect him to take the high ground
or stake a claim in a way that would allow him to claim the vote was rigged. Not seeing that at
all.
The critical issue is, we're undecideds moved?
How about this blog? By definition, undecideds don't much like either… Pretty much like NC. So
who here is now decided? And which way?
Personally, I'm not sure laziness is a disqualifying characteristic in a Presidential candidate.
If a machine is so broken that all its outputs are bad, then it behooves one to turn the crank
more slowly than faster.
Just finished watching. She cleaned his clock, and I wanted to see him prevail. The exchange
early in the debate about Trump not paying people … that really came back to mind when he started
talking about how the countries we support don't pay their fair share. Really hypocritical. Bad
night for DT; he will be hopping mad, kind of like after that trip to Mexico. I wonder what his
reaction will be in next day or two.
I think Adams is prone to tunnel vision – focusing on one thing he especially likes or dislikes
– as exemplified by his recent switch in endorsement from Hillary ("for my safety, as I live in
CA") to Trump, based on Hillary's endorsement (hard to tell if genuine or mere triangulation)
of the estate tax.
In tonight's case, I suspect any points Trump may have won for the statement Adams focuses
on were more than negated by his stop-and-frisk inanity, but being white like Adams, I can't claim
to speak for the AA community in any way.
On a separate-but-related note, my sister – who strongly supported Bernie during the primaries
– does seem to fit Adam's claim that subjective impressions rule, and we humans busily construct
rational-sounding narratives to justify our gut takes. In her case, she appears to have been as
off-put by Hillary's Martin-Shkreli-esque smug smirking as Yves was:
I watched almost all of it and thought he did pretty well, in fact i thought he totally trounced
her in many areas. I'm shocked to see every single mainstream media outlet say she was the clear
winner and he was the total loser and unprepared. She was smug and ingenuous [sic – she clearly
meant 'dis'-], can't stand her.
Sanders supporters are not representative of anything other than Sanders supporters…but they
do constitute a decent chuck of Dem voters and bigger chunk of independents. The ones who were
paying attention were painfully of the MSM misrepresentations re Sanders, the DNC putting its
finger on the scale (confirmed only by Wikileaks), Clinton campaign totally bogus attacks (BernieBros,
when he had more female millennial supporters than male AND Clinton supporters were more aggressive
in social media than Sanders supporters), and the rampant cheating in NY and even worse in CA.
So there is a burning resentment of Clinton in many Sanders voters looking for continued proof
of Clinton's dishonesty and bad character.
Having said all that, a contact who is a "pox on both their houses" type said the comments
re Clinton's smugness were widespread. The question is then how big a demerit that is to different
voters.
This was a pathetic performance all around. Hillary looked like a polished turd in the
debate, compared to Trump who came off as an unpolished turd. My feeling is that Hillary was the
"winner" though that word doesn't seem suitable.
I will preface this by saying that substance and issues are completely irrelevant now. If you
are someone who cares about that stuff then you're out of luck this time around.
1) All the people who already like Trump thought he was great, while everyone who hates him
will stick with Hillary. Independents, I don't know. I can't imagine that people are going to
be motivated to do much of anything either way after that.
2) Trump had multiple opputinites to destroy Hillary and end the race but passed them all up.
The consequence is that this will continue dragging out. Hillary did about as well as she could
have considering how compromised she is; she is lucky that Trump is was so unprepared.
3) Trump had shown an ability to learn from his mistakes. I want to believe that he will immediately
start doing preparation for the next debate rather than blowing this off. If he fails to, whether
or not he can win will be in doubt.
4) As someone else mentioned the one thing of actual import said tonight was by Hillary: she
reiterated that she wants to get belligerent with Russia over these these cyber attacks, even
though there is zero evidence of Russian involvement in them. This is a reaffirmation of of why
Hillary scares the crap out of me, and the reason she is unfit to be president.
5) We know something more about Trump's character now: He's a smart, lazy, loudmouthed braggart
who relies on his very good intuition and people skills decide things. He wings everything because
he can't be bothered to study anything too deeply. Hillary? She is a very well scripted psychopath
with bad people skills. And she enjoys war. Lots and lots of war.
6) I'm going to call this debate a wash even if it was slightly in Hillary's favor. Trump is
still on a trajectory to win, he's just going to have to put in actual effort accomplish that–which
he should realize now.
7) We are screwed no matter who is president in 2017, but simply as a matter of survival we
have to support Trump.
8) surprisingly Hillary didn't keel over tonight. This is both good and bad. Good for Trump
because Hillary is someone he's likely to win against, bad for us because there is still a slight
chance that Hillary could win, meaning that war war and more war, including nuclear war, could
be on the agenda from 2017 on. I don't believe we'll survive that.
Trump is talking about problems… Hillary is talking about solutions. Voters always want
to hear solutions.
#DebateNight
- Frank Luntz (@FrankLuntz)
September
27, 2016
So Clinton stole Trump's clothes on law and order (which she would do; "super-predators,"
for-profit prisons).
Yes she jabbed him to death, while Trump held his punches. The question is: why? Having
already done the Foreman trick of KOing five guys in one night, was he guarding against punching
himself out? Seeing he's already won debates with aggression, was he trying to win by playing
defense? Am I simply reading into it what I want to – spinning for Trump to excuse a mediocre
performance?
I guess all politicians and non-politicians have their limitations. Trump's talent is he's
a salesman and what he sells is himself. He's not an intellectual. He's likely not even a thoughtful
person. What amused me most tonight was his egotism. Compared to Trump, if Narcissus looked at
his reflection he'd be filled with self loathing.
"Personally, I came out of this feeling more sympathetic to Trump as a person, believe it or
not. I think he genuinely sees the infrastructural decay and it frosts him. Same with "you had
30 years to solve it." Undeniably true; Clinton's whole "let's build on our success" schtick is
such a steaming lot of 10%-er-ness. But if Trump wants to make this election a referendum on the
political class, he's going to have to do a lot better than this. If you regard success in the
debate as emitting presidential markers (like NATO Article 5), then Clinton unquestionably won."
Well said and thanks for doing this, Lambert. I went to bed right after the debate so it's
great to get a recap with this excellent comment thread. I watched on C-Span and after the debate
the candidates went down to the foot of the stage and it seemed that apart from family no one
wanted to shake Trump's hand. The whole crowd was around Clinton. Trump and his family just looked
at each other and headed for the exit. It was weird and sad.
Did Trump suffer a mini-stroke on stage? After slurring a word, he began to answer questions
for a while with incoherent, freely associated chains of slogans and phrases. This, about the
time he blurted out about Hillary's stamina–, psychological projection perhaps? Then he began
to list to his left and lean pronouncedly on his podium. After the debate, he left the hall rather
too promptly. Was the elderly Trump physically fit enough to withstand a one-on-one 90 minute
debate?
"... The first is that Clinton has consistently sided with the conventional wisdom in Washington at the time about what the U.S. should do in response to any conflict or crisis. She has reliably backed more aggressive measures abroad in part because that is what pundits and analysts in Washington are usually demanding on any given issue. She isn't one to resist demands to "do something," because she typically sees no reason to resist them, and often enough she is making the same demands. ..."
"... Clinton will have few opportunities to advance a domestic agenda in the face of determined resistance in Congress. Even if Clinton has a Senate majority, she won't have one in the House, so it is doubtful that she will be able to get any "domestic reforms" passed. ..."
"... It is quite possible that governing as an liberal hawk will "derail her presidency," as Walt says, but we have at least one example that tell us that isn't necessarily true. Obama has presided over eight continuous years of war, including at least two interventions that he started and continued illegally without Congressional approval, and yet he is poised to leave office with a reasonably good approval rating ..."
"... That isn't going to discourage Clinton from her usual interventionism. The Obama years have reminded us of the unfortunate truth that the public will tolerate quite a few foreign wars as long as the direct costs to the U.S. in American lives are low. ..."
"... Remember, Clinton doesn't think that the Libyan war was a failure or a mistake, but rather considers it "smart power at its best." ..."
Stephen Walt
isn't persuaded that Hillary Clinton will be as hawkish a president as her record suggests:
If Clinton goes overboard with more globalization, expanded U.S. security guarantees, open-ended
nation-building in distant lands, or even expensive acts of international philanthropy, all those
skeptical people beguiled by Trump or Sanders will be even angrier. By contrast, if she can win
over some of the people during her first term, her popularity will soar and re-election would
be easy. The lesson? Clinton should focus on domestic reforms and not on international crusades.
And as former State Department officials Jeremy Shapiro and Richard Sokolsky suggest, that's been
her basic inclination all along.
Clinton would be unwise to pursue an even more activist and militarized foreign policy
agenda as president, but Walt and I agree about this because we generally view that sort of foreign
policy as dangerous and contrary to American interests anyway. It does seem foolish for any president
to want to do the things that Clinton thinks the U.S. should do, but that is not a reason to think
it won't happen. I have made my objections to Shapiro and Sokolsky's piece
before , so I won't repeat all of them here, but there are at least four major reasons why we
should assume that Clinton's foreign policy will be even more hawkish and interventionist than Obama's
.
The first is that Clinton has consistently sided with the conventional wisdom in Washington at
the time about what the U.S. should do in response to any conflict or crisis. She has reliably backed
more aggressive measures abroad in part because that is what pundits and analysts in Washington are
usually demanding on any given issue. She isn't one to resist demands to "do something," because
she typically sees no reason to resist them, and often enough she is making the same demands.
The
second is that Clinton won't be able to "focus on domestic reforms" alone because foreign events
and her public enthusiasm for U.S. "leadership" won't allow her to do that. There will probably be
a new civil war or international crisis at some point over the next four years, and she will feel
compelled to be seen doing something about it, and given her record that will almost certainly mean
deeper U.S. involvement than most Americans would prefer.
The third is that Clinton will have few
opportunities to advance a domestic agenda in the face of determined resistance in Congress. Even
if Clinton has a Senate majority, she won't have one in the House, so it is doubtful that she will
be able to get any "domestic reforms" passed. The one area where Congress is totally submissive to
the executive is foreign policy, and that is what Clinton will spend a disproportionate amount of
her time on because she will mostly be stymied at home. Clinton won't be hemmed in by budgetary concerns.
The other party has been insisting for years that we must throw more money at the Pentagon, and there
is no reason to think that Clinton worries about paying for this through borrowing. Finally, Clinton
will be inheriting at least two ongoing wars, one of which she will be under significant pressure
to escalate, and she will also inherit the Obama administration's horrible enabling of the Saudi-led
war on Yemen. In that sense, it won't be entirely up to Clinton how much time these matters take
up in her first term, because she is already committed to continuing these missions for the foreseeable
future.
It is quite possible that governing as an liberal hawk will "derail her presidency," as Walt says,
but we have at least one example that tell us that isn't necessarily true. Obama has presided over
eight continuous years of war, including at least two interventions that he started and continued
illegally without Congressional approval, and yet he is poised to leave office with a reasonably
good approval rating and (if this scenario is to be believed) about to be succeeded as president
by a member of his own party.
That isn't going to discourage Clinton from her usual interventionism.
The Obama years have reminded us of the unfortunate truth that the public will tolerate quite a few
foreign wars as long as the direct costs to the U.S. in American lives are low. So we should expect
Clinton to rely heavily on air wars and missile strikes as Obama and her husband did. There presumably
won't be a repeat of something on the scale of Iraq, but we should assume that there will be other
Libya-like interventions and some of them will be in places that we're not even thinking about at
the moment.
Remember, Clinton doesn't think that the Libyan war was a failure or a mistake, but rather
considers it "smart power at its best." I'm fairly sure about all this because Clinton has never
given us any reason to think that she doesn't want to govern this way, and almost everything in her
foreign policy record says that this is how she will govern.
While the Press celebrates the Democratic Party victory of the first female billionaire in history,
a somber legal battle is going on in the shadows.
The State Department report on Hillary Clinton's emails, and the different legal proceedings which
followed, establish that she is guilty of :
Obstruction of Justice by Mrs. Clinton and her advisors (Section 1410) ;
Obstruction of Criminal Enquiries (Section 1511) ;
Obstruction of the application of local and Federal laws (Section 1411) ;
Federal crime of negligence with classified information and documents (Section 1924) ;
Detention in her computer, at home and on a non-secure server, of 1,200 secret documents (Section
1924)
Felony – Mrs. Clinton declared under oath to a Federal judge that she had given all her emails
to the State Department. However, the Inspector General of the State Department declared this
week that this was a lie (Section 798) ;
Moreover, she declared under oath that the State Department had authorised her to use her
personal computer to work at home. The Inspector General of the State Department declared this
week that this was a lie (Section 798) ;
Mrs. Clinton did not alert the authorities, nor even her own Department, that her personal
computer had been hacked several times. Yet she had asked her system administrator to try to protect
her computer.
Misappropriation and Concealment. The Clinton Foundation and Mrs. Clinton were corrupted so
that the State Department would close their eyes to various practices (Rico Law and Section 1503).
In principle, and since the facts and their gravity have been established by the FBI, the State
Departement, and a Federal judge, Hillary Clinton should have been arrested this week.
Bernie Sanders, the other candidate for the Democratic nomination, was counting on Mrs. Clinton's
arrest before their party's convention. He therefore decided to stay in the running, although he
does not have enough delegates. But he was summoned to the White House, and informed that President
Barack Obama would prevent his administration from applying the law. Obama then followed through
by publicly announcing his support for the candidacy of Mrs. Clinton.
Springsteen, who has dramatised the plight of working-class Americans in his music, said he
understands how Trump could seem "compelling" to people who are economically insecure.
"The
absurdity is beyond cartoon-like. But he's gotten close enough [to the White House] so it can
make you nervous," he told the talk show Skavlan.
"I don't think he's going to win, but even him running is a great embarrassment if you're
an American," he said.
Trump knows how to tell voters "some of the things they want to hear," he added, including
to people "uncomfortable with the 'browning' of America."
"We have certain problems in the United States – tremendous inequality of wealth
distribution. That makes for ripe ground for demagoguery," Springsteen said.
"He has a very simple answer to all these very, very complex problems."
Springsteen recorded the interview with the talk show ahead of next week's release of his
memoir, Born to Run, which describes his childhood in New Jersey and rise to fame.
The singer, famous for his onstage stamina, has drawn a diverse field of devoted fans for
decades, including New Jersey governor Chris Christie, one of Trump's most public backers.
Springsteen insisted for years that he would let his music speak for him but has been more
openly political since the election in 2004, when he campaigned for John Kerry in his
unsuccessful bid to win the White House from George W Bush.
One hit wonder boy who climbed to fame on the back of his jingoistic melody 'Born in the
USA.' What he knows about politics could be written on a stamp!
I don't know too about Hilary being the ebb and flow of this countrys future. She outspent
Trump 3 to 1. She spent a wooping 360 million dollars on this campaign alone. The
Libertarian party also spent it up up to 7 million for their parties choice of President.
Some are saying that Hilary is not so popular with the vulture class. Those who feel
that her 300,000 a plate dinners to raise huge wads of cash could be spent on the poor.
1. Springsteen is eminently qualified to comment on being in a moronic state. (Huh?)
2. The issue doesn't revolve around the candidates' intelligence , but rather the ability
to make sound, timely and balanced judgments on many things with which you may or may not
have requisite familiarity. THOSE DECISIONS MUST BE MADE WITH COURAGE and sometimes almost
instantly.
3. Then, there is there are the issues of Trust, Honesty, Openness and the SECURITY OF THE
UNITED STATES.
But, then, I'm a Yank. (I hold 2 MBA's, I'm a Senior, a former executive with a major
international corporation, a father and grandfather, and a Veteran.), so what do I know?
against Sanders (who gave up far too soon) neither Hillary nor Trump would have a chance.
But the DNC, in its corrupt establishment wisdom, cf. Mme Wassermann-Schultz... undermined
his fair chances of raising real questions of why America is slipping economically,
socially, morally.
Who of the two is going to be less destructive for the US and the world ?
Well , I am not ready to say the lady is.
A professional politician and a non professional one. By the look of what the present has
to offer, I would be inclined to go for the non professional.
Goldman Sachs made Hillary's tie? Does she even wear a tie?
===============
$675,000.00 says Goldman Sachs has her tied around their chubby greedy finger.
Springsteen and Trump are alike in that they are both cowards when it came time for them to
do their duty in Vietnam. Springsteen told his draft board he was homosexual (funny he
hasn't been acting homosexual), whereas Trump got deferments for heel spurs. Dick Cheny is
like Springsteen and Trump as well in this regard.
I thought you Americans had finally decided that the Vietnam campaign was a bad error of
political judgement. Nothing cowardly about saying "no" to a draft that included, inter
alia, carpet bombing of innocents and applications of agent orange where the fall out is
still happening.
"... Tonight's first US presidential debate involves two candidates who actually depict emphatically the high degree of the US politics degeneration: deeply pro-establishment, war-thirsty Hillary Clinton, against the reserve of the establishment , racist billionaire Donald Trump. ..."
"... She knows that these voters, and especially the American youth, had enough of the neoliberal establishment in previous years, and therefore, it would be very hard to be persuaded that the warmongering Hillary has been "relocated" further to the Left. There is no need to expose her absolute commitment to conduct more dirty wars because the US deep state and the neocons know very well that she will focus on this policy, in case that she will be the next US president. Furthermore, it seems that she does not expect anything from the most conservative voters to the Right, who are clearly determined to support Trump. ..."
"... It appears that after Sanders, the US voters are left with zero options, again. Yet, they do have options which the corporate media don't want to become known. ..."
...Tonight's first US presidential debate involves two candidates who actually depict emphatically
the high degree of the US politics degeneration: deeply pro-establishment, war-thirsty Hillary Clinton,
against the
reserve of the establishment, racist billionaire Donald Trump.
No matter how they act, no matter what they say and what rhetoric they use, they can both be identified,
more or less, by the few characteristics above. It would be rather pointless for someone to expect
anything better from both.
As we approach the day of the US elections, time is running out and the two candidates will naturally
focus on one thing: fix their picture to attract more voters and increase their chances to win. As
polls show that it will be a tight race, the two will try to attract as many voters as possible from
the huge tank of undecided US citizens.
Hillary took a good taste from the fight for the Democratic nomination against Bernie Sanders.
She will probably try to retain a more progressive profile which was forced to exhibit during the
race against Bernie, in order to gain voters from the tank of the mass movement he created. She
knows that these voters, and especially the American youth, had enough of the neoliberal establishment
in previous years, and therefore, it would be very hard to be persuaded that the warmongering Hillary
has been "relocated" further to the Left. There is no need to expose her absolute commitment to conduct
more dirty wars because the US deep state and the neocons know very well that she will focus on this
policy, in case that she will be the next US president. Furthermore, it seems that she does not expect
anything from the most conservative voters to the Right, who are clearly determined to support Trump.
Trump has also a difficult job. He has to find a balance between the highly conservative audience,
which is the core of his voters, and the more moderate, undecided ones, who may determine the outcome
of the elections. Therefore, he is expected to smooth his extremely patriotic (to the point that
becomes racist) rhetoric, in order to
become "more presidential", as actually warned recently by the establishment. He
knows that he can't win without taking a crucial percentage of the more moderate tank.
It appears that after Sanders, the US voters are left with zero options, again. Yet, they
do have options which the corporate media don't want to become known.
"... My hunch is still that this election will come down to a deeply felt "not-Clinton" attitude in the general U.S. electorate. ..."
"... Both candidates are obviously lying. Clinton proudly knows some very selective facts ..."
"... The fate of the world should not be left in the hands of some Intellectuals but Idiots , to people who can not see beyond their noses, to "thinkers" for whom human history starts with their high school prom. ..."
"... Trump started off horribly. He went after Hillary on foreign policy at the end which was pretty decent.. ..."
"... Both went after each others shadiness. Very fun to watch. I'm not sure if it will amount to much of anything, but I at least enjoyed that she was gotten after for her atrocious policymaking. ..."
"... Nothing of substance is allowed to be discussed. Their main function is to convince Americans that these two are the only possible choices to vote for on 8 November. ..."
"... Spending energy on discussing presidential elections only feeds the established political psycopathy, and energizes the inherently corrupt status quo. I feel that my energy would be better spent reinforcing my local community, where a much higher degree of open democracy manifests. ..."
"... The only countries I know about that still apply true and open democracy are Iceland and to a lesser degree Costa Rica. In Iceland at least, there is still a very valid reason to vote in the national elections. For the rest of us unfortunate souls I'm afraid that ship has sailed. ..."
"... The idea that cataclysmic change is necessary for improvement is madness. A dramatic collapse of the Western economies will likely lead to the evil elite thrusting us into WW3. From which humanity may never recover. Collapse of the US economy has a good chance of them lashing out with their military to retain their hegemony, also leading to WW3, or a cataclysmic nuclear war. ..."
"... Any dramatic political change will far more likely lead to the eventual rise of a fascist demagogues across western politics. The way US politics is headed, with Trump and Hitlery. ..."
"... She fully intends to finish the annihilation of the Shia crescent from one end to the other for her Israeli/Saudi masters. The U.S. will be at war with Iran within a year if she is elected ..."
"... If Trump wins, he too will eventually be convinced to start a war with them at the behest of his Israeli/Saudi/CIA handlers, but I expect that 'project' to take years before he's confident enough to commit to it. The U.S. might be gone by then. You would think Iranians would be a little more inclined to go with him in the interests of a few more years of Iranian self-preservation. ..."
"... I'm somewhat convinced that if Clinton wins office (not an election); 2017 will make the last 15 years seem peaceful. My only question is; will it go nuclear? Given the insane development of small nukes, stupidly called tactical, too many have themselves convinced there is justification for their use. ..."
"... You're link to a worldwide vote for U.S. president is interesting, but Iran voting for Clinton? yeah, that one threw me for a loop as well, but as you pointed out, 17 or so votes for Clinton out of 79 million Iranians is pretty much meaningless. probably just a cluster of 'progressive' exchange students. ..."
"... Forcefully resisting the brand of globalization imposed on us by the thugs and slave drivers of disaster capitalism is a moral obligation all world citizens should embrace. When people in power live in the castle of their own lies, it is time to dismantle the fortress. When governance has lost all moral ground and reason, it is time to call for a revolution ..."
"... The foundational myths of the United States are becoming less and less credible by the day. As more people stop believing them and, even more importantly, realize that others do not believe them either, compliance in the system becomes less and less. ..."
"... People do not even need to think in terms of self sacrifice for some greater good, or in terms of being part of a revolution. They actually only have to realize that their own best interests are served better by non compliance than compliance. ..."
"... In recent history 19.6% of Americans voted for neither Clinton nor Bush in 1992. A hard hurdle to beat I reckon, and frankly I can't see it happening. ..."
"... Wrong, catalysmic collapse is what lies in stall for the US and probably Europe but it's not annihilation. Just that they got no money for hegemony anymore but they are still alive. And they still chose to remain alive just like in the Soviet Union. ..."
"... The whole debate was unreal. Trump was bragging about his business successes with a sad grim while Hillary with a forever ironic botoxed smile and an empty look in her eyes looked like a worn out robot. It was more a scene from the Muppets show than a presidential debate! ..."
"... I like Trump because he is hated by all the right people. ..."
From the first reactions I see the show made no difference to the outcome of the U.S. election. Both
sides spin that their paymasters won.
My hunch is still that this election will come down to a deeply felt "not-Clinton" attitude
in the general U.S. electorate.
Would that be good or bad? I don't know. Both candidates are obviously lying. Clinton proudly
knows some very selective facts . Her general plans can be inferred from her political history.
They would be mostly bad for this world. Trump doesn't care about facts, nor do most voters. Nobody
seems to know what his real plans would be. With him we all are in for a lot of surprises - likely
bad ones.
From a global perspective the election again shows why U.S. global influences must be cut to size.
The fate of the world should not be left in the hands of some
Intellectuals
but Idiots , to people who can not see beyond their noses, to "thinkers" for whom human history
starts with their high school prom. Their linear analysis, their inexperience with real life,
their linear solutions are inadequate for our complex, non-linear world. This needs to change.
Such a change requires some cataclysmic events. Both candidates seem well positioned to achieve
such.
"Both candidates are obviously lying. Clinton proudly knows some very selective facts. Her general
plans can be inferred from her political history. They would be mostly bad for this world. Trump
doesn't care about facts, nor do most voters."
Trump started off horribly. He went after Hillary on foreign policy at the end which was pretty
decent.. All and all it was cringworthy but entertaining. I think I'll be writing Harambe instead
of voting for these 2
Trump also kept pimping his business.. He clearly wants to advertise! Both went after each others
shadiness. Very fun to watch. I'm not sure if it will amount to much of anything, but I at least
enjoyed that she was gotten after for her atrocious policymaking.
Missed the 'debate'. In the USA the Amalgamated Republicrat/Demoblican Party controls the debates
and limits participation in them to themselves ... the Republicrat and Demoblican candidates.
Nothing of substance is allowed to be discussed. Their main function is to convince Americans
that these two are the only possible choices to vote for on 8 November.
I hope that more of us than ever before choose a candidate other than one of these two, ideally
that both of these trail the aggregate vote cast for candidates other than themselves. That's
the cataclysmic event I'd like to see happen.
These people and this system depend entirely on power that we the people give them. Spending energy
on discussing presidential elections only feeds the established political psycopathy, and energizes
the inherently corrupt status quo. I feel that my energy would be better spent reinforcing my
local community, where a much higher degree of open democracy manifests.
I am not from the US, but the same principle applies here. The only countries I know about
that still apply true and open democracy are Iceland and to a lesser degree Costa Rica. In Iceland
at least, there is still a very valid reason to vote in the national elections. For the rest of
us unfortunate souls I'm afraid that ship has sailed.
The idea that cataclysmic change is necessary for improvement is madness. A dramatic collapse
of the Western economies will likely lead to the evil elite thrusting us into WW3. From which
humanity may never recover. Collapse of the US economy has a good chance of them lashing out with
their military to retain their hegemony, also leading to WW3, or a cataclysmic nuclear war.
Any dramatic political change will far more likely lead to the eventual rise of a fascist demagogues
across western politics. The way US politics is headed, with Trump and Hitlery.
And if it's not as bad as the next to worst outcomes, then the time lost necessary over the
short to midterm of combating climate change, Will mean chronic food and water shortages in the
frayed will see humans are reverting to selfish struggle.
Putting your head in a hole in the sand is not going to make your or my national government
go away.
Yes, certainly work at the more democratic, more local levels of government. But if we want
to stop the wars - I do - we have to (re)gain control of the national government to do so. At
least we citizens of the US - author of all war in this century - must do so.
Paying attention to these two is a waste of time. The only way to deal with them,
and their endless replacements, is to deal them out of the popular vote.
No
to Clinton, no to Trump on 8 November ... and every election year thereafter to their elephant
and jackass replacements and to those in the House and Senate as well, until we can select a minimalist
platform acceptable to us in our majority and replace such candidates from the menagerie with
spokespeople chosen from among ourselves.
It's a multiyear program, but that's what it will take, it seems to me. Alternatives welcome.
But it does seem to me that change is essential, and that we're the only ones who can bring it
about. I'm going to do my part. I hope my 229,000,000 fellows will too.
john@8 - You're link to a worldwide vote for U.S. president is interesting, but Iran voting for
Clinton? That's hard to believe. She fully intends to finish the annihilation of the Shia
crescent from one end to the other for her Israeli/Saudi masters. The U.S. will be at war with
Iran within a year if she is elected (and I regretfully but sincerely expect both to happen).
Drinking the blood of live infants is only going to keep her corpse alive for - what - maybe a
year or two? She is going to hit the ground running, and will not be satisfied until the Iranian
death toll cracks two million. She came, she saw, they died [cackle, cackle!].
If Trump wins, he too will eventually be convinced to start a war with them at the behest
of his Israeli/Saudi/CIA handlers, but I expect that 'project' to take years before he's confident
enough to commit to it. The U.S. might be gone by then. You would think Iranians would be a little
more inclined to go with him in the interests of a few more years of Iranian self-preservation.
Since the on-line fantasy election is in English and only 31 Iranians have voted so far, it's
probably too early to tell. I'm thinking they are not representative of the other 78 million Iranians,
but who really knows?
Indeed, left port a decade ago.
Posted by me @ Ian Welsh's;
Didn't watch any of "it" (not a debate).
With all that's going on in the world today, militarily,
I'm somewhat convinced that if Clinton
wins office (not an election); 2017 will make the last 15 years seem peaceful.
My only question is; will it go nuclear? Given the insane development of small nukes, stupidly
called tactical, too many have themselves convinced there is justification for their use.
Us humans are not the brightest bulbs in the known universe; I've removed optimistic/optimism
from my vocabulary.
In my definition of intelligence; humans are not even in the top 100…
That's my view at this time; voting is a very bad joke.
You're link to a worldwide vote for U.S. president is interesting, but Iran voting for
Clinton? yeah, that one threw me for a loop as well, but as you pointed out, 17 or so votes
for Clinton out of 79 million Iranians is pretty much meaningless. probably just a cluster of
'progressive' exchange students.
All members of the fake left advocate that the system must be changed progressively from
within and that a collapse would be mainly a disaster for the poor and weak. This notion is
as valid as to claim that a building destroyed by an earthquake is in need of some fresh window
dressing. Regardless of the global elite's arrogance, a systemic collapse is on its way and
will exponentially take hold of the planet within two or three decades. The super-rich will
eventually have nowhere to run or hide, and no private armies to protect them from the wrath
of nature.
Forcefully resisting the brand of globalization imposed on us by the thugs and slave
drivers of disaster capitalism is a moral obligation all world citizens should embrace. When
people in power live in the castle of their own lies, it is time to dismantle the fortress.
When governance has lost all moral ground and reason, it is time to call for a revolution ( Gilbert
Mercier )
so vote however the fuck you want, but please spare us your tedious proselytizing.
Dan's point in 12 is an excellent one. The foundational myths of the United States are becoming
less and less credible by the day. As more people stop believing them and, even more importantly,
realize that others do not believe them either, compliance in the system becomes less and less.
People do not even need to think in terms of self sacrifice for some greater good, or in terms
of being part of a revolution. They actually only have to realize that their own best interests
are served better by non compliance than compliance.
One early example is the housing crisis back in 2008. People simply stopped paying their mortgages
while continuing to live in the houses. Banks were able to force a bailout, but that only encouraged
more people to feel justified in defaulting. Ignore your debts to credit card companies, banks,
etc and you are striking a serious blow against the system. While actually freeing yourself.
That is just one more example of resistance. Dan mentioned many others. The system's best weapon
is that they got most people to believe in it, which encourages semi voluntary obedience.
Wrong, catalysmic collapse is what lies in stall for the US and probably Europe but it's not
annihilation. Just that they got no money for hegemony anymore but they are still alive.
And they still chose to remain alive just like in the Soviet Union.
The whole debate was unreal. Trump was bragging about his business successes with a sad grim
while Hillary with a forever ironic botoxed smile and an empty look in her eyes looked like a
worn out robot. It was more a scene from the Muppets show than a presidential debate!
That's it. Trump blew this thing, in my view. Hillary caught her stride about a half-hour in, and
showed herself to be presidential. He came off as extremely unprepared. I cannot believe Trump helped
himself tonight, though for all I know, the voters loved him. Hillary didn't have a big win, but
she did win, and I believe that she stopped the bleeding for her campaign.
I know that everybody has a different standard for Trump, but if Trump ends up judged the winner
of this debate in the polls, I don't know what to say anymore. There is no way Donald Trump is ready
to be President of the United States. No way. And I don't believe many undecided voters changed their
mind to vote for Trump based on his performance tonight.
"... Russia even hacked into the Democratic National Committee, maybe even some state election systems. So, we've got to step up our game. Make sure we are well defended and able to take the fight to those who go after us. As President, I will make it clear, that the United States will treat cyber attacks just like any other attack . We will be ready with serious political, economic and military responses. ..."
"... "We need to respond to evolving threats from states like Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea from networks, criminal and terrorist networks like ISIS. We need a military that is ready and agile so it can meet the full range of threats, and operate on short notice across every domain, not just land, sea, air and space, but also cyberspace". ..."
"... "serious political, economic and military responses" ..."
"... notwithstanding ..."
"... The mainstream The Hill newspaper bannered, "Clinton: Treat cyberattacks 'like any other attack'" , and reported that, "Since many high-profile cyberattacks could be interpreted as traditional intelligence-gathering - something the US itself also engages in - the White House is often in a tricky political position when it comes to its response". That's not critical of her position, but at least it makes note of the crucial fact that if the US were to treat a hacker's attack as being an excuse to invade Russia, it would treat the US itself as being already an invader of Russia - which the US prior to a President Hillary Clinton never actually has been, notwithstanding the routine nature of international cyber espionage (which Clinton has now stated she wants to become a cause of war), which has been, and will continue to be, essential in the present era. ..."
"... The International Business Times, an online-only site, headlined September 1 st , "Clinton: US should use 'military response' to fight cyberattacks from Russia and China" , and reported that a Pentagon official had testified to Congress on July 13 th , that current US policy on this matter is: "When determining whether a cyber incident constitutes an armed attack, the US government considers a broad range of factors, including the nature and extent of injury or death to persons and the destruction of or damage to property. Cyber incidents are reviewed on a case-by-case basis, and the national security leadership and the president will make a determination if it's an armed attack". ..."
"... Hillary's statement on this matter was simply ignored by The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, NBC, ABC, CBS, PBS, NPR, Fox, CNN, The Nation, The Atlantic, Harper's, National Review, Common Dreams, Alternet, Truthout, and all the rest of the US standard and 'alternative news' reporting organizations. Perhaps when Americans go to the polls to elect a President on November 8th, almost none of them will have learned about her policy on this incredibly important matter. ..."
"... Hillary's statement was in line with the current Administration's direction of policy, but is farther along in that direction than the Obama Administration's policy yet is. ..."
"... On Tuesday, June 14 th , NATO announced that if a NATO member country becomes the victim of a cyber attack by persons in a non-NATO country such as Russia or China, then NATO's Article V "collective defense" provision requires each NATO member country to join that NATO member country if it decides to strike back against the attacking country. ..."
"... NATO is now alleging that because Russian hackers had copied the emails on Hillary Clinton's home computer , this action of someone in Russia taking advantage of her having privatized her US State Department communications to her unsecured home computer and of such a Russian's then snooping into the US State Department business that was stored on it, might constitute a Russian attack against the United States of America, and would, if the US President declares it to be a Russian invasion of the US, trigger NATO's mutual-defense clause and so require all NATO nations to join with the US government in going to war against Russia, if the US government so decides. ..."
"... And finally, we did talk about cyber-security generally. I'm not going to comment on specific investigations that are still alive and active, but I will tell you that we've had problems with cyber-intrusions from Russia in the past, from other countries in the past, and, look, we're moving into a new era here, where a number of countries have significant capacities, and frankly we've got more capacity than anybody both offensively and defensively, but our goal is not to suddenly in the cyber-arena duplicate a cycle of escalation that we saw when it comes to other arms-races in the past, but rather to start instituting (9:00) some norms so that everybody's acting responsibly. ..."
"... "neoconservative" ..."
"... Hillary is now the neoconservatives' candidate . (And she's also the close friend of many of them, and hired and promoted many of them at her State Department .) If she becomes the next President, then we might end up having the most neoconservative (i.e., military-industrial-complex-run) government ever. This would be terrific for America's weapons-makers, but it very possibly would be horrific for everybody else. That's the worst lobby of all, to run the country . (And, as that link there shows, Clinton has received over five times as much money from it as has her Republican opponent.) ..."
"... George Herbert Walker Bush knows lots that the 'news' media don't report (even when it has already been leaked in one way or another), and the Clinton plan to destroy Russia is part of that. Will the Russian government accept it? Or will it do whatever is required in order to defeat it? This is already a serious nuclear confrontation . ..."
Hillary Clinton, on September 19th, was endorsed for President, by the most historically important,
intelligent, and dangerous, Republican of modern times.
She was endorsed then by the person who in 1990 cunningly engineered the end of the Soviet Union
and of its Warsaw Pact military alliance in such a way as
to continue the West's war against Russia so as to conquer Russia gradually for the owners of
US international corporations. The person, who kept his plan secret even from his closest advisors,
until the night of 24 February 1990, when he told them that what he had previously instructed them
to tell Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev as the West's future military intentions about Russia if
the USSR were to end, was actually a lie.
He also told them that they were henceforth to proceed forward on the basis that the residual
stump of the former Soviet Union, Russia, will instead be treated as if it still is an enemy-nation,
and that the fundamental aim of the Western alliance will then remain: to conquer Russia (notwithstanding
the end of the USSR, of its communism, and of its military alliances) - that the Cold War is to end
only on the Russian side, not at all, really, on the Western side. (All of that is documented from
the historical record, at that linked-to article.)
This person was the former Director of the US CIA, born US aristocrat, and committed champion
of US conquest of the entire world, the President of the United States at the time (1990):
George Herbert Walker Bush .
He informed the daughter of Robert F. Kennedy, Kathleen Hartington Kennedy Townsend - as she posted
it, apparently ecstatically, on September 19th, to her facebook page after personally having just
met with Mr. Bush - "The President told me he's voting for Hillary!!" She then confirmed this to
Politico the same day, which headlined promptly,
"George H.W. Bush to Vote for Hillary" .
G.H.W. Bush is an insider's insider: he would not do this if he felt that Hillary Clinton wouldn't
carry forward his plan (
which has been adhered-to by each of the US Presidents after him ), and if he felt that Donald
Trump - Bush's own successor now as the Republican US candidate for President - would not carry it
forward. (This was his most important and history-shaping decision during his entire Presidency,
and therefore it's understandable now that he would be willing even to cross Party-lines on his Presidential
ballot in order to have it followed-through to its ultimate conclusion.)
What indications exist publicly, that she will carry it forward? Hillary Clinton has already publicly
stated (though tactfully, so that the US press could ignore it) her intention to push things up to
and beyond the nuclear brink, with regard to Russia:
Russia even hacked into the Democratic National Committee, maybe even some state election
systems. So, we've got to step up our game. Make sure we are well defended and able to take the fight
to those who go after us. As President, I will make it clear, that the United States will
treat cyber attacks just like any other attack . We will be ready with serious political,
economic and military responses.
Russia denies that it did any such thing, but
the US even taps the phone conversations of Angela Merkel and other US allies ; and, of course,
the US and Russia routinely hack into each others' email and other communications; so, even if Russia
did what Clinton says, then to call it "like any other attack" against the United States and to threaten
to answer it with "military responses", would itself be historically unprecedented - which is what
Hillary Clinton is promising to do.
Historically unprecedented, like nuclear war itself would be. And she was saying this in the context
of her alleging that Russia had "attacked" the DNC (Democratic National Committee), and she as President
might "attack" back, perhaps even with "military responses". This was not an off-the-cuff remark
from her - it was her prepared text in a speech. She said it though, for example, on 26 October 2013,
Britain's Telegraph had headlined,
"US 'operates 80 listening posts worldwide, 19 in Europe, and snooped on Merkel mobile 2002-2013'
: US intelligence targeted Angela Merkel's phone from 2002 to 2013, according to new eavesdropping
leaks".
But now, this tapping against Merkel would, according to Hillary Clinton's logic (unless she intends
it to apply only by the United States against Russia), constitute reason for Germany (and
34 other nations ) to go to war against the United States.
Clinton also said there: "We need to respond to evolving threats from states like Russia,
China, Iran, and North Korea from networks, criminal and terrorist networks like ISIS. We need a
military that is ready and agile so it can meet the full range of threats, and operate on short notice
across every domain, not just land, sea, air and space, but also cyberspace".
She also said that the sequester agreement between the Congress and the President must end, because
US military spending should not be limited: "I am all for cutting the fat out of the budget and making
sure we stretch our dollars But we cannot impose arbitrary limits on something as important as our
military. That makes no sense at all. The sequester makes our country less secure. Let's end it and
get a budget deal that supports America's military". She wasn't opposing "arbitrary limits" on non-military
spending; she implied that that's not "as important as our military".
She was clear: this is a wartime US, not a peacetime nation; we're already at war, in her view;
and therefore continued unlimited cost-overruns to Lockheed Martin etc. need to be accepted, not
limited (by "arbitrary limits" or otherwise). She favors "cutting the fat out of the budget" for
healthcare, education, subsidies to the poor, environmental protection, etc., but not for war, not
for this war. A more bellicose speech, especially against "threats from states like Russia, China,
Iran, and North Korea from networks, criminal and terrorist networks like ISIS", all equating "states"
such as Russia and China, with "terrorist networks like ISIS", could hardly be imagined - as if Russia
and China are anything like jihadist organizations, and are hostile toward America, as such jihadist
groups are.
However, her threat to respond to an alleged "cyber attack" from Russia by "serious political,
economic and military responses" , is unprecedented, even from her. It was big news when she
said it, though virtually ignored by America's newsmedia.
The only US newsmedia to have picked up on Clinton's shocking threat were Republican-Party-oriented
ones, because the Democratic-Party and nonpartisan 'news' media in the US don't criticize a Democratic
nominee's neoconservatism - they hide it, or else find excuses for it (even after the Republican
neoconservative President George W. Bush's catastrophic and
lie-based neoconservative invasion of Iraq - then headed by the Moscow-friendly Saddam Hussein
- in 2003, which many Democratic office-holders, such as Hillary Clinton backed).
So, everything in today's USA 'news' media is favorable toward neoconservatism - it's now the
"Establishment" foreign policy, established notwithstanding the catastrophic Iraq-invasion,
from which America's 'news' media have evidently learned nothing whatsoever (because they're essentially
unchanged and committed to the same aristocracy as has long controlled them).
However, now that the Republican Party's Presidential nominee, Donald Trump, is openly critical
of Hillary Clinton's and George W. Bush's neoconservatism, any Republican-oriented 'news' media that
support Trump's candidacy allows its 'journalists' to criticize Clinton's neoconservatism; and, so,
there were a few such critiques of this shocking statement from Clinton.
The Republican Party's "Daily Caller" headlined about this more directly than any other US 'news'
medium,
"Clinton Advocates Response To DNC Hack That Would Likely Bring On WWIII" , and reported, on
September 1st, that "Clinton's cavalier attitude toward going to war over cyber attacks seems to
contradict her assertion that she is the responsible voice on foreign policy in the current election".
The Republican Washington Times newspaper headlined
"Hillary Clinton: US will treat cyberattacks 'just like any other attack'" , and reported that
she would consider using the "military to respond to cyberattacks," but that her Republican opponent
had indicated he would instead use only cyber against cyber: "'I am a fan of the future, and cyber
is the future,' he said when asked by Time magazine during the Republican National Convention about
using cyberweapons". However, Trump was not asked there whether he would escalate from a cyber attack
to a physical one. Trump has many times said that having good relations with Russia would be a priority
if he becomes President. That would obviously be impossible if he (like Hillary) were to be seeking
a pretext for war against Russia.
The mainstream The Hill newspaper bannered,
"Clinton: Treat cyberattacks 'like any other attack'" , and reported that, "Since many high-profile
cyberattacks could be interpreted as traditional intelligence-gathering - something the US itself
also engages in - the White House is often in a tricky political position when it comes to its response".
That's not critical of her position, but at least it makes note of the crucial fact that if the US
were to treat a hacker's attack as being an excuse to invade Russia, it would treat the US itself
as being already an invader of Russia - which the US prior to a President Hillary Clinton never actually
has been, notwithstanding the routine nature of international cyber espionage (which Clinton has
now stated she wants to become a cause of war), which has been, and will continue to be, essential
in the present era.
The International Business Times, an online-only site, headlined September 1 st ,
"Clinton: US should use 'military response' to fight cyberattacks from Russia and China" , and
reported that a Pentagon official had
testified to Congress on July 13 th , that current US policy on this matter is: "When
determining whether a cyber incident constitutes an armed attack, the US government considers a broad
range of factors, including the nature and extent of injury or death to persons and the destruction
of or damage to property. Cyber incidents are reviewed on a case-by-case basis, and the national
security leadership and the president will make a determination if it's an armed attack".
Hillary's statement on this matter was simply ignored by The New York Times, Wall Street Journal,
Washington Post, NBC, ABC, CBS, PBS, NPR, Fox, CNN, The Nation, The Atlantic, Harper's, National
Review, Common Dreams, Alternet, Truthout, and all the rest of the US standard and 'alternative news'
reporting organizations. Perhaps when Americans go to the polls to elect a President on November
8th, almost none of them will have learned about her policy on this incredibly important matter.
Hillary's statement was in line with the current Administration's direction of policy, but is
farther along in that direction than the Obama Administration's policy yet is.
As
the German Economic News article had noted, but only in passing: "Just a few months ago, US President
Barack Obama had laid the legal basis for this procedure and signed a decree that equates hacker
attacks with military attacks". However, this slightly overstated the degree to which Obama has advanced
"this procedure". On 1 April 2016 - and not as any April Fool's joke - techdirt had headlined
"President Obama Signs Executive Order Saying That Now He's Going To Be Really Mad If He Catches
Someone Cyberattacking Us" and linked to the document, which techdirt noted was "allowing the
White House to issue sanctions on those 'engaging in significant malicious cyber-enabled activities'".
The writer, Mike Masnick, continued, quite accurately: "To make this work, the President officially
declared foreign hacking to be a 'national emergency' (no, really) and basically said that if the
government decides that some foreign person is doing a bit too much hacking, the US government can
basically do all sorts of bad stuff to them, like seize anything they have in the US and block them
from coming to the US". What Hillary Clinton wants to add to this policy is physical, military, invasion,
for practices such as (if Russia becomes declared by the US President to have been behind the hacking
of the DNC) what is actually routine activity of the CIA, NSA, and, of course, of Russia's (and other
countries') intelligence operations.
It wasn't directly Obama's own action that led most powerfully up to Hillary Clinton's policy
on this, but instead NATO's recent action - and NATO has always been an extension of the US President,
it's his military club, and it authorizes him to go to war against any nation that it decides to
have been invaded by some non-member country (especially Russia or China - the Saudis, Qataris, and
other funders behind international jihadist attacks are institutionally prohibited from being considered
for invasion by NATO, because the US keeps those regimes in power, and those regimes are generally
the biggest purchasers of US weapons). I reported on this at The Saker's site, on 15 June 2016, headlining
"NATO Says It Might Now Have Grounds to Attack Russia" . That report opened:
On Tuesday, June 14 th ,
NATO announced that if a NATO member country becomes the victim of a cyber attack by persons
in a non-NATO country such as Russia or China, then NATO's Article V
"collective defense"
provision requires each NATO member country to join that NATO member country if it decides to
strike back against the attacking country.
NATO is now alleging that because
Russian hackers had copied the emails on Hillary Clinton's home computer , this action of someone
in Russia taking advantage of her having privatized her US State Department communications to her
unsecured home computer and of such a Russian's then snooping into the US State Department business
that was stored on it, might constitute a Russian attack against the United States of America, and
would, if the US President declares it to be a Russian invasion of the US, trigger NATO's mutual-defense
clause and so require all NATO nations to join with the US government in going to war against Russia,
if the US government so decides.
So, Obama is using NATO to set the groundwork for Hillary Clinton's policy as (he hopes) America's
next President. Meanwhile, Obama's public rhetoric on the matter is far more modest, and less scary.
It's sane-sounding falsehoods. At the end of the G-20 Summit in Beijing, he held a
press conference September
5th (VIDEO at this link) , in which he was asked specifically (3:15) "Q: On the cyber front,
do you think Russia is trying to influence the US election?" and he went into a lengthy statement,
insulting Putin and saying (until 6:40 on the video) why Obama is superior to Putin on the Syrian
war, and then (until 8:07 in the video) blaming Putin for, what is actually, the refusal of the Ukrainian
parliament or Rada to approve the federalization of Ukraine that's stated in the Minsk agreement
as being a prerequisite to direct talks being held between the Donbass residents and
the Obama-installed regime
in Kiev that's been
trying to exterminate the residents of Donbass . Then (8:07 in the video), Obama got around to
the reporter's question:
And finally, we did talk about cyber-security generally. I'm not going to comment on specific
investigations that are still alive and active, but I will tell you that we've had problems with
cyber-intrusions from Russia in the past, from other countries in the past, and, look, we're moving
into a new era here, where a number of countries have significant capacities, and frankly we've got
more capacity than anybody both offensively and defensively, but our goal is not to suddenly in the
cyber-arena duplicate a cycle of escalation that we saw when it comes to other arms-races in the
past, but rather to start instituting (9:00) some norms so that everybody's acting responsibly.
He is a far more effective deceiver than is his intended successor, but Hillary's goals and his,
have always been the same: achieving what the US aristocracy want. Whereas she operates with a sledgehammer,
he
operates with a scalpel . And he hopes to hand this operation off to her on 20 January 2017.
This is what Hillary's statement that "the United States will treat cyber attacks just like any
other attack" is reflecting: it's reflecting that the US will, if she becomes President, be actively
seeking an excuse to invade Russia. The Obama-mask will then be off.
If this turns out to be the case, then it will be raw control of the US Government by the
military-industrial complex, which includes the arms-makers plus the universities . It's the
owners - the aristocrats - plus their servants; and at least 90% of the military-industrial complex
support Hillary Clinton's candidacy. Like her, they are all demanding that the sequester be ended
and that any future efforts to reduce the US Government's debts must come from cutting expenditures
for healthcare, education, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, environmental protection, and expenditures
on the poor; no cuts (but only increases) for the military. This is based on the conservative theory,
that the last thing to cut in government is the military.
George Herbert Walker Bush knows lots that the 'news' media don't report (even when it has already
been leaked in one way or another), and
the
Clinton plan to destroy Russia is part of that. Will the Russian government accept it? Or will
it do whatever is required in order to defeat it? This is already
a serious nuclear confrontation .
It was a cover up operation. No questions about that. Such instruction by a person under any investigation clearly mean tha attempt
of cover up...
Notable quotes:
"... There was a document dump on Friday, that we learned from the FBI that an IT contractor managing Hillary Clinton's private email server made reference to the "Hillary coverup operation" in a work ticket. He used those words after a senior Clinton aide asked him to automatically delete emails after 60 days. This IT worker certainly sounded like he was covering something up, no? ..."
"... The FBI dumped another 189 pages of documents pertaining to Clinton's use of an unsecured private server during her time as Secretary of State online Friday, with one note about a "coverup" raising eyebrows: ..."
"... After reviewing an email dated December 11, 2014 with the subject line 'RE: 2 items for IT support,' and a December 12, 2014 work ticket referencing email retention changes and archive/email cleanup, [redacted] stated his reference in the email to ' the Hilary [sic] coverup [sic] operation ' was probably due to the requested change to a 60 day email retention policy and the comment was a joke. ..."
"... "The fact an IT staffer maintaining Clinton's secret server called a new retention policy designed to delete emails after 60 days a 'Hillary coverup operation' suggests there was a concerted effort to systematically destroy potentially incriminating information. It's no wonder that at least five individuals tied to the email scandal, including Clinton's top State Department aide and attorney Cheryl Mills, secured immunity deals from the Obama Justice Department to avoid prosecution," said Trump spokesman Jason Miller in a statement on Friday. ..."
"... Comey told the House Oversight Committee on July 7 that the FBI "did not find evidence sufficient to establish that she knew she was sending classified information beyond a reasonable doubt to meet that - the intent standard" while claiming that prosecuting Clinton for gross negligence would perpetuate a "double standard." ..."
CNN anchor Jake Tapper confronted
Hillary Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook Sunday over an IT worker handling her private email server joking in a 2014 email about
a "Hillary coverup operation," with Mook dodging the question and blaming Republicans for "selectively leaking documents."
TAPPER:There was a document dump on Friday, that we learned from the FBI that an IT contractor managing Hillary
Clinton's private email server made reference to the "Hillary coverup operation" in a work ticket. He used those words after a
senior Clinton aide asked him to automatically delete emails after 60 days. This IT worker certainly sounded like he was covering
something up, no?
MOOK: Look, Jake, I'm - first of all I'm glad you asked that question. A lot of this stuff is swirling around in the
ether. It's important to pull back and look at the facts here. The FBI did a comprehensive and deep investigation into this. And
at the conclusion of that, FBI Director Comey came out and said to the world that there was no case here, that they have no evidence
of wrongdoing on Hillary's part.
TAPPER: So what's the "Hillary coverup operation" that the IT worker was referring to?
MOOK: Well, well, but this is - but this is - this is the perfect example of what's going on here. Republicans on the
House side are selectively leaking documents for the purpose of making Hillary look bad. We've asked the FBI to release all information
that they've shared with Republicans so they can get the full picture. But again, I would trust the career professionals at the
FBI and the Justice Department who looked into this matter, concluded that was no case, than I would Republicans who are selectively
leaking information.
The FBI dumped another 189 pages of documents pertaining to Clinton's use of an unsecured private server during her time as Secretary
of State online Friday,
with one
note about a "coverup" raising eyebrows:
After reviewing an email dated December 11, 2014 with the subject line 'RE: 2 items for IT support,' and a December 12,
2014 work ticket referencing email retention changes and archive/email cleanup, [redacted] stated his reference in the email to
' the Hilary [sic] coverup [sic] operation ' was probably due to the requested change to a 60 day email retention policy and the
comment was a joke.
The Trump campaign quickly leapt on the FBI's findings.
"The fact an IT staffer maintaining Clinton's secret server called a new retention policy designed to delete emails after
60 days a 'Hillary coverup operation' suggests there was a concerted effort to systematically destroy potentially incriminating information.
It's no wonder that at least five individuals tied to the email scandal, including Clinton's top State Department aide and attorney
Cheryl Mills, secured immunity deals from the Obama Justice Department to avoid prosecution," said Trump spokesman Jason Miller in
a statement on Friday.
Comey
told the House Oversight Committee on July 7 that the FBI "did not find evidence sufficient to establish that she knew she was
sending classified information beyond a reasonable doubt to meet that - the intent standard" while claiming that prosecuting Clinton
for gross negligence would perpetuate a "double standard."
"... Were I advising Trump I would have him cite the two criminal codes the FBI decided not to pursue..... by title and section. The rest of the questioning is inconsequential in relation to the huge favor the FBI gave Mrs. Clinton. ..."
"... Might be a wrong advice. This would be more directed at Obama, then Hillary. It was Obama who pardoned Hillary by exerting pressure on FBI. ..."
Were I advising Trump I would have him cite the two criminal codes the FBI decided not to pursue..... by title and section.
The rest of the questioning is inconsequential in relation to the huge favor the FBI gave Mrs. Clinton.
likbez -> ilsm... , -1
ilsm,
"...two criminal codes the FBI decided not to pursue....."
Might be a wrong advice. This would be more directed at Obama, then Hillary. It was Obama who pardoned Hillary by exerting
pressure on FBI.
"... Right there Clinton proves that she has absolutely no idea how basic diplomacy or negotiation (what the democrats like to call "compromise") works. You start from your best possible outcome (without treating your partner as a subhuman piece of trash or calling them by 3rd grade slanderous names) and work your way down to an agreement. You don't start from the worst possible outcome and work your way up like some crazy sadist. No wonder her judgement is so terrible. Her "success" measure is set just above " complete and utter failure, destruction". ..."
"... "Get Russia to the table"? Why would Putin want to "get to the table" when he knows very well the menu consists solely of a sh*t sandwich and the dinner host is calling you "Hitler"? ..."
"I'm trying to figure out what leverage we have to get Russia to the table. You know, diplomacy
is not about getting to the perfect solution. It's about how you balance the risks."
Right there Clinton proves that she has absolutely no idea how basic diplomacy or negotiation
(what the democrats like to call "compromise") works. You start from your best possible outcome
(without treating your partner as a subhuman piece of trash or calling them by 3rd grade slanderous
names) and work your way down to an agreement. You don't start from the worst possible outcome
and work your way up like some crazy sadist. No wonder her judgement is so terrible. Her "success"
measure is set just above " complete and utter failure, destruction".
"Get Russia to the table"? Why would Putin want to "get to the table" when he knows very
well the menu consists solely of a sh*t sandwich and the dinner host is calling you "Hitler"?
... ... ... Coughing can be a symptom of so many different illnesses, but it is interesting to
note that it happens to be one of the symptoms
of Parkinson's Disease …
Difficulty swallowing, called dysphagia, can happen at any stage of Parkinson disease. Signs
and symptoms can range from mild to severe and may include: difficulty swallowing certain foods
or liquids, coughing or throat clearing during or after eating/drinking, and feeling as if food
is getting stuck . As the disease progresses, swallowing can become severely compromised and food/liquid
can get into the lungs, causing aspiration pneumonia. Aspiration pneumonia is the leading cause
of death in PD.
By itself, it would be impossible to link Hillary Clinton with Parkinson's Disease just based
on her coughing. But the truth is that she has exhibited so many of the other symptoms as well.
According
to Google , here are some of the other symptoms that Parkinson's Disease victims often exhibit…
Tremor: can occur at rest, in the hands, limbs, or can be postural
Muscular: stiff muscles, difficulty standing, difficulty walking, difficulty with bodily
movements, involuntary movements, muscle rigidity, problems with coordination, rhythmic muscle contractions,
slow bodily movement, or slow shuffling gait
Sleep: daytime sleepiness, early awakening, nightmares, or restless sleep
Whole body: fatigue, dizziness, poor balance, or restlessness
Cognitive: amnesia, confusion in the evening hours, dementia, or difficulty thinking and
understanding
A lot of those should ring a bell if you have been following Hillary's bizarre behavior in recent
months.
In this
video , a medical doctor with 36 years of experience named Ted Noel puts the pieces together
and explains how he reached his conclusion that Hillary Clinton is suffering with Parkinson's Disease.
I think that you will find that his reasoning is quite compelling…
"... Russia even hacked into the Democratic National Committee, maybe even some state election systems. So, we've got to step up our game. Make sure we are well defended and able to take the fight to those who go after us. As President, I will make it clear, that the United States will treat cyber attacks just like any other attack . We will be ready with serious political, economic and military responses. ..."
"... "We need to respond to evolving threats from states like Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea from networks, criminal and terrorist networks like ISIS. We need a military that is ready and agile so it can meet the full range of threats, and operate on short notice across every domain, not just land, sea, air and space, but also cyberspace". ..."
"... "serious political, economic and military responses" ..."
"... notwithstanding ..."
"... The mainstream The Hill newspaper bannered, "Clinton: Treat cyberattacks 'like any other attack'" , and reported that, "Since many high-profile cyberattacks could be interpreted as traditional intelligence-gathering - something the US itself also engages in - the White House is often in a tricky political position when it comes to its response". That's not critical of her position, but at least it makes note of the crucial fact that if the US were to treat a hacker's attack as being an excuse to invade Russia, it would treat the US itself as being already an invader of Russia - which the US prior to a President Hillary Clinton never actually has been, notwithstanding the routine nature of international cyber espionage (which Clinton has now stated she wants to become a cause of war), which has been, and will continue to be, essential in the present era. ..."
"... The International Business Times, an online-only site, headlined September 1 st , "Clinton: US should use 'military response' to fight cyberattacks from Russia and China" , and reported that a Pentagon official had testified to Congress on July 13 th , that current US policy on this matter is: "When determining whether a cyber incident constitutes an armed attack, the US government considers a broad range of factors, including the nature and extent of injury or death to persons and the destruction of or damage to property. Cyber incidents are reviewed on a case-by-case basis, and the national security leadership and the president will make a determination if it's an armed attack". ..."
"... Hillary's statement on this matter was simply ignored by The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, NBC, ABC, CBS, PBS, NPR, Fox, CNN, The Nation, The Atlantic, Harper's, National Review, Common Dreams, Alternet, Truthout, and all the rest of the US standard and 'alternative news' reporting organizations. Perhaps when Americans go to the polls to elect a President on November 8th, almost none of them will have learned about her policy on this incredibly important matter. ..."
"... Hillary's statement was in line with the current Administration's direction of policy, but is farther along in that direction than the Obama Administration's policy yet is. ..."
"... On Tuesday, June 14 th , NATO announced that if a NATO member country becomes the victim of a cyber attack by persons in a non-NATO country such as Russia or China, then NATO's Article V "collective defense" provision requires each NATO member country to join that NATO member country if it decides to strike back against the attacking country. ..."
"... NATO is now alleging that because Russian hackers had copied the emails on Hillary Clinton's home computer , this action of someone in Russia taking advantage of her having privatized her US State Department communications to her unsecured home computer and of such a Russian's then snooping into the US State Department business that was stored on it, might constitute a Russian attack against the United States of America, and would, if the US President declares it to be a Russian invasion of the US, trigger NATO's mutual-defense clause and so require all NATO nations to join with the US government in going to war against Russia, if the US government so decides. ..."
"... And finally, we did talk about cyber-security generally. I'm not going to comment on specific investigations that are still alive and active, but I will tell you that we've had problems with cyber-intrusions from Russia in the past, from other countries in the past, and, look, we're moving into a new era here, where a number of countries have significant capacities, and frankly we've got more capacity than anybody both offensively and defensively, but our goal is not to suddenly in the cyber-arena duplicate a cycle of escalation that we saw when it comes to other arms-races in the past, but rather to start instituting (9:00) some norms so that everybody's acting responsibly. ..."
"... "neoconservative" ..."
"... Hillary is now the neoconservatives' candidate . (And she's also the close friend of many of them, and hired and promoted many of them at her State Department .) If she becomes the next President, then we might end up having the most neoconservative (i.e., military-industrial-complex-run) government ever. This would be terrific for America's weapons-makers, but it very possibly would be horrific for everybody else. That's the worst lobby of all, to run the country . (And, as that link there shows, Clinton has received over five times as much money from it as has her Republican opponent.) ..."
"... George Herbert Walker Bush knows lots that the 'news' media don't report (even when it has already been leaked in one way or another), and the Clinton plan to destroy Russia is part of that. Will the Russian government accept it? Or will it do whatever is required in order to defeat it? This is already a serious nuclear confrontation . ..."
Hillary Clinton, on September 19th, was endorsed for President, by the most historically important,
intelligent, and dangerous, Republican of modern times.
She was endorsed then by the person who in 1990 cunningly engineered the end of the Soviet Union
and of its Warsaw Pact military alliance in such a way as
to continue the West's war against Russia so as to conquer Russia gradually for the owners of
US international corporations. The person, who kept his plan secret even from his closest advisors,
until the night of 24 February 1990, when he told them that what he had previously instructed them
to tell Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev as the West's future military intentions about Russia if
the USSR were to end, was actually a lie.
He also told them that they were henceforth to proceed forward on the basis that the residual
stump of the former Soviet Union, Russia, will instead be treated as if it still is an enemy-nation,
and that the fundamental aim of the Western alliance will then remain: to conquer Russia (notwithstanding
the end of the USSR, of its communism, and of its military alliances) - that the Cold War is to end
only on the Russian side, not at all, really, on the Western side. (All of that is documented from
the historical record, at that linked-to article.)
This person was the former Director of the US CIA, born US aristocrat, and committed champion
of US conquest of the entire world, the President of the United States at the time (1990):
George Herbert Walker Bush .
He informed the daughter of Robert F. Kennedy, Kathleen Hartington Kennedy Townsend - as she posted
it, apparently ecstatically, on September 19th, to her facebook page after personally having just
met with Mr. Bush - "The President told me he's voting for Hillary!!" She then confirmed this to
Politico the same day, which headlined promptly,
"George H.W. Bush to Vote for Hillary" .
G.H.W. Bush is an insider's insider: he would not do this if he felt that Hillary Clinton wouldn't
carry forward his plan (
which has been adhered-to by each of the US Presidents after him ), and if he felt that Donald
Trump - Bush's own successor now as the Republican US candidate for President - would not carry it
forward. (This was his most important and history-shaping decision during his entire Presidency,
and therefore it's understandable now that he would be willing even to cross Party-lines on his Presidential
ballot in order to have it followed-through to its ultimate conclusion.)
What indications exist publicly, that she will carry it forward? Hillary Clinton has already publicly
stated (though tactfully, so that the US press could ignore it) her intention to push things up to
and beyond the nuclear brink, with regard to Russia:
Russia even hacked into the Democratic National Committee, maybe even some state election
systems. So, we've got to step up our game. Make sure we are well defended and able to take the fight
to those who go after us. As President, I will make it clear, that the United States will
treat cyber attacks just like any other attack . We will be ready with serious political,
economic and military responses.
Russia denies that it did any such thing, but
the US even taps the phone conversations of Angela Merkel and other US allies ; and, of course,
the US and Russia routinely hack into each others' email and other communications; so, even if Russia
did what Clinton says, then to call it "like any other attack" against the United States and to threaten
to answer it with "military responses", would itself be historically unprecedented - which is what
Hillary Clinton is promising to do.
Historically unprecedented, like nuclear war itself would be. And she was saying this in the context
of her alleging that Russia had "attacked" the DNC (Democratic National Committee), and she as President
might "attack" back, perhaps even with "military responses". This was not an off-the-cuff remark
from her - it was her prepared text in a speech. She said it though, for example, on 26 October 2013,
Britain's Telegraph had headlined,
"US 'operates 80 listening posts worldwide, 19 in Europe, and snooped on Merkel mobile 2002-2013'
: US intelligence targeted Angela Merkel's phone from 2002 to 2013, according to new eavesdropping
leaks".
But now, this tapping against Merkel would, according to Hillary Clinton's logic (unless she intends
it to apply only by the United States against Russia), constitute reason for Germany (and
34 other nations ) to go to war against the United States.
Clinton also said there: "We need to respond to evolving threats from states like Russia,
China, Iran, and North Korea from networks, criminal and terrorist networks like ISIS. We need a
military that is ready and agile so it can meet the full range of threats, and operate on short notice
across every domain, not just land, sea, air and space, but also cyberspace".
She also said that the sequester agreement between the Congress and the President must end, because
US military spending should not be limited: "I am all for cutting the fat out of the budget and making
sure we stretch our dollars But we cannot impose arbitrary limits on something as important as our
military. That makes no sense at all. The sequester makes our country less secure. Let's end it and
get a budget deal that supports America's military". She wasn't opposing "arbitrary limits" on non-military
spending; she implied that that's not "as important as our military".
She was clear: this is a wartime US, not a peacetime nation; we're already at war, in her view;
and therefore continued unlimited cost-overruns to Lockheed Martin etc. need to be accepted, not
limited (by "arbitrary limits" or otherwise). She favors "cutting the fat out of the budget" for
healthcare, education, subsidies to the poor, environmental protection, etc., but not for war, not
for this war. A more bellicose speech, especially against "threats from states like Russia, China,
Iran, and North Korea from networks, criminal and terrorist networks like ISIS", all equating "states"
such as Russia and China, with "terrorist networks like ISIS", could hardly be imagined - as if Russia
and China are anything like jihadist organizations, and are hostile toward America, as such jihadist
groups are.
However, her threat to respond to an alleged "cyber attack" from Russia by "serious political,
economic and military responses" , is unprecedented, even from her. It was big news when she
said it, though virtually ignored by America's newsmedia.
The only US newsmedia to have picked up on Clinton's shocking threat were Republican-Party-oriented
ones, because the Democratic-Party and nonpartisan 'news' media in the US don't criticize a Democratic
nominee's neoconservatism - they hide it, or else find excuses for it (even after the Republican
neoconservative President George W. Bush's catastrophic and
lie-based neoconservative invasion of Iraq - then headed by the Moscow-friendly Saddam Hussein
- in 2003, which many Democratic office-holders, such as Hillary Clinton backed).
So, everything in today's USA 'news' media is favorable toward neoconservatism - it's now the
"Establishment" foreign policy, established notwithstanding the catastrophic Iraq-invasion,
from which America's 'news' media have evidently learned nothing whatsoever (because they're essentially
unchanged and committed to the same aristocracy as has long controlled them).
However, now that the Republican Party's Presidential nominee, Donald Trump, is openly critical
of Hillary Clinton's and George W. Bush's neoconservatism, any Republican-oriented 'news' media that
support Trump's candidacy allows its 'journalists' to criticize Clinton's neoconservatism; and, so,
there were a few such critiques of this shocking statement from Clinton.
The Republican Party's "Daily Caller" headlined about this more directly than any other US 'news'
medium,
"Clinton Advocates Response To DNC Hack That Would Likely Bring On WWIII" , and reported, on
September 1st, that "Clinton's cavalier attitude toward going to war over cyber attacks seems to
contradict her assertion that she is the responsible voice on foreign policy in the current election".
The Republican Washington Times newspaper headlined
"Hillary Clinton: US will treat cyberattacks 'just like any other attack'" , and reported that
she would consider using the "military to respond to cyberattacks," but that her Republican opponent
had indicated he would instead use only cyber against cyber: "'I am a fan of the future, and cyber
is the future,' he said when asked by Time magazine during the Republican National Convention about
using cyberweapons". However, Trump was not asked there whether he would escalate from a cyber attack
to a physical one. Trump has many times said that having good relations with Russia would be a priority
if he becomes President. That would obviously be impossible if he (like Hillary) were to be seeking
a pretext for war against Russia.
The mainstream The Hill newspaper bannered,
"Clinton: Treat cyberattacks 'like any other attack'" , and reported that, "Since many high-profile
cyberattacks could be interpreted as traditional intelligence-gathering - something the US itself
also engages in - the White House is often in a tricky political position when it comes to its response".
That's not critical of her position, but at least it makes note of the crucial fact that if the US
were to treat a hacker's attack as being an excuse to invade Russia, it would treat the US itself
as being already an invader of Russia - which the US prior to a President Hillary Clinton never actually
has been, notwithstanding the routine nature of international cyber espionage (which Clinton has
now stated she wants to become a cause of war), which has been, and will continue to be, essential
in the present era.
The International Business Times, an online-only site, headlined September 1 st ,
"Clinton: US should use 'military response' to fight cyberattacks from Russia and China" , and
reported that a Pentagon official had
testified to Congress on July 13 th , that current US policy on this matter is: "When
determining whether a cyber incident constitutes an armed attack, the US government considers a broad
range of factors, including the nature and extent of injury or death to persons and the destruction
of or damage to property. Cyber incidents are reviewed on a case-by-case basis, and the national
security leadership and the president will make a determination if it's an armed attack".
Hillary's statement on this matter was simply ignored by The New York Times, Wall Street Journal,
Washington Post, NBC, ABC, CBS, PBS, NPR, Fox, CNN, The Nation, The Atlantic, Harper's, National
Review, Common Dreams, Alternet, Truthout, and all the rest of the US standard and 'alternative news'
reporting organizations. Perhaps when Americans go to the polls to elect a President on November
8th, almost none of them will have learned about her policy on this incredibly important matter.
Hillary's statement was in line with the current Administration's direction of policy, but is
farther along in that direction than the Obama Administration's policy yet is.
As
the German Economic News article had noted, but only in passing: "Just a few months ago, US President
Barack Obama had laid the legal basis for this procedure and signed a decree that equates hacker
attacks with military attacks". However, this slightly overstated the degree to which Obama has advanced
"this procedure". On 1 April 2016 - and not as any April Fool's joke - techdirt had headlined
"President Obama Signs Executive Order Saying That Now He's Going To Be Really Mad If He Catches
Someone Cyberattacking Us" and linked to the document, which techdirt noted was "allowing the
White House to issue sanctions on those 'engaging in significant malicious cyber-enabled activities'".
The writer, Mike Masnick, continued, quite accurately: "To make this work, the President officially
declared foreign hacking to be a 'national emergency' (no, really) and basically said that if the
government decides that some foreign person is doing a bit too much hacking, the US government can
basically do all sorts of bad stuff to them, like seize anything they have in the US and block them
from coming to the US". What Hillary Clinton wants to add to this policy is physical, military, invasion,
for practices such as (if Russia becomes declared by the US President to have been behind the hacking
of the DNC) what is actually routine activity of the CIA, NSA, and, of course, of Russia's (and other
countries') intelligence operations.
It wasn't directly Obama's own action that led most powerfully up to Hillary Clinton's policy
on this, but instead NATO's recent action - and NATO has always been an extension of the US President,
it's his military club, and it authorizes him to go to war against any nation that it decides to
have been invaded by some non-member country (especially Russia or China - the Saudis, Qataris, and
other funders behind international jihadist attacks are institutionally prohibited from being considered
for invasion by NATO, because the US keeps those regimes in power, and those regimes are generally
the biggest purchasers of US weapons). I reported on this at The Saker's site, on 15 June 2016, headlining
"NATO Says It Might Now Have Grounds to Attack Russia" . That report opened:
On Tuesday, June 14 th ,
NATO announced that if a NATO member country becomes the victim of a cyber attack by persons
in a non-NATO country such as Russia or China, then NATO's Article V
"collective defense"
provision requires each NATO member country to join that NATO member country if it decides to
strike back against the attacking country.
NATO is now alleging that because
Russian hackers had copied the emails on Hillary Clinton's home computer , this action of someone
in Russia taking advantage of her having privatized her US State Department communications to her
unsecured home computer and of such a Russian's then snooping into the US State Department business
that was stored on it, might constitute a Russian attack against the United States of America, and
would, if the US President declares it to be a Russian invasion of the US, trigger NATO's mutual-defense
clause and so require all NATO nations to join with the US government in going to war against Russia,
if the US government so decides.
So, Obama is using NATO to set the groundwork for Hillary Clinton's policy as (he hopes) America's
next President. Meanwhile, Obama's public rhetoric on the matter is far more modest, and less scary.
It's sane-sounding falsehoods. At the end of the G-20 Summit in Beijing, he held a
press conference September
5th (VIDEO at this link) , in which he was asked specifically (3:15) "Q: On the cyber front,
do you think Russia is trying to influence the US election?" and he went into a lengthy statement,
insulting Putin and saying (until 6:40 on the video) why Obama is superior to Putin on the Syrian
war, and then (until 8:07 in the video) blaming Putin for, what is actually, the refusal of the Ukrainian
parliament or Rada to approve the federalization of Ukraine that's stated in the Minsk agreement
as being a prerequisite to direct talks being held between the Donbass residents and
the Obama-installed regime
in Kiev that's been
trying to exterminate the residents of Donbass . Then (8:07 in the video), Obama got around to
the reporter's question:
And finally, we did talk about cyber-security generally. I'm not going to comment on specific
investigations that are still alive and active, but I will tell you that we've had problems with
cyber-intrusions from Russia in the past, from other countries in the past, and, look, we're moving
into a new era here, where a number of countries have significant capacities, and frankly we've got
more capacity than anybody both offensively and defensively, but our goal is not to suddenly in the
cyber-arena duplicate a cycle of escalation that we saw when it comes to other arms-races in the
past, but rather to start instituting (9:00) some norms so that everybody's acting responsibly.
He is a far more effective deceiver than is his intended successor, but Hillary's goals and his,
have always been the same: achieving what the US aristocracy want. Whereas she operates with a sledgehammer,
he
operates with a scalpel . And he hopes to hand this operation off to her on 20 January 2017.
This is what Hillary's statement that "the United States will treat cyber attacks just like any
other attack" is reflecting: it's reflecting that the US will, if she becomes President, be actively
seeking an excuse to invade Russia. The Obama-mask will then be off.
If this turns out to be the case, then it will be raw control of the US Government by the
military-industrial complex, which includes the arms-makers plus the universities . It's the
owners - the aristocrats - plus their servants; and at least 90% of the military-industrial complex
support Hillary Clinton's candidacy. Like her, they are all demanding that the sequester be ended
and that any future efforts to reduce the US Government's debts must come from cutting expenditures
for healthcare, education, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, environmental protection, and expenditures
on the poor; no cuts (but only increases) for the military. This is based on the conservative theory,
that the last thing to cut in government is the military.
George Herbert Walker Bush knows lots that the 'news' media don't report (even when it has already
been leaked in one way or another), and
the
Clinton plan to destroy Russia is part of that. Will the Russian government accept it? Or will
it do whatever is required in order to defeat it? This is already
a serious nuclear confrontation .
"... First, I would certainly agree that Trump lies. Which is not to be confused with his inchoate policy prescriptions and vast ignorance. But as I have noted, Trump lies are – to use an overused phrase – "transparent". ..."
"... Compare to Hillary's lies – which are well crafted, well designed, and are lawyerly dissertations on misdirection and obfuscation. As well as being made to advance policy goals that are for the benefit of the 1%. Is Hillary against TPP in ANY sense of the meaning of the word "against" ? ..."
"... And with regard to media "fact checkers" – their "fact" checks take political statements at face value, and strike me as hopelessly unsophisticated and naive, and additionally hopelessly uninformed. As well as the "frame" of the question. Do a search regarding whether Clinton started birtherism. And than do a search whether Clinton used racist dog whistles to advance her 2008 campaign. Quite a difference. Which is effectively worse (hmmm – thats a twofer: is Clinton using dog whistles or is the media not asking relevant questions worse)??? ..."
"... People understand that it is all hype, all spin, and usually worse all the time. Is that too cynical? Well, when money and power are involved, it probably isn't…. ..."
"... An interesting take in that article, essentially arguing that the public has been gaslighted for so long by PR and image scrubbing that they crave Trump because his egotism is at least real ..."
"... So classic! The example Loofbourow gives to show how people are sick of gaslighting is… a classic case of gaslighting itself, as Trump never said he "loves" Putin, and Putin never called him a "genius". Rather these are the memes that our Acela Bubble gaslighters have been flooding into our brains. ..."
"... brangelina article . ..."
"... There is no perfect explanation that will account for Trump supporters' anger. They seem to share with Bernie Sanders supporters a deep sense of betrayal, of fundamental and unsolvable mistrust. ..."
"... One major problem with clinton's campaign message of portraying trump as nuts and 'unfit' is that 1) trump has no history of mental illness or known medical issues. I've read he doesn't drink and hasn't had any incidents where he's lost his temper and done something crazy that she can point to. 2) the whole 'unfit' thing presumes that people have confidence in the current political class and will reject someone who isn't up to that standard. ..."
"One visible frustration shared by Team Clinton and its many allies in the punditocracy is
that many voters are ignoring what they think the rules should be, particularly that Trump routinely
says things that are false, yet poll responses suggest that respondents don't care all that much
about how often Trump lies or wings it and gets it wrong."
First, I would certainly agree that Trump lies. Which is not to be confused with his inchoate
policy prescriptions and vast ignorance. But as I have noted, Trump lies are – to use an overused
phrase – "transparent".
Compare to Hillary's lies – which are well crafted, well designed, and are lawyerly dissertations
on misdirection and obfuscation. As well as being made to advance policy goals that are for the
benefit of the 1%. Is Hillary against TPP in ANY sense of the meaning of the word "against" ?
And with regard to media "fact checkers" – their "fact" checks take political statements
at face value, and strike me as hopelessly unsophisticated and naive, and additionally hopelessly
uninformed. As well as the "frame" of the question. Do a search regarding whether Clinton started
birtherism. And than do a search whether Clinton used racist dog whistles to advance her 2008
campaign. Quite a difference. Which is effectively worse (hmmm – thats a twofer: is Clinton using
dog whistles or is the media not asking relevant questions worse)???
Now, for me, its hard to believe that media people, whose ONLY job is to write about politics,
are so uninformed as to not understand the term "dog whistle" or to not understand that an awful
lot of politics is trying to smear your opposition without leaving fingerprints. How many stories
have you read in the MSM about the Clinton foundation that gave a detailed analysis of what they
spend money on by someone that you trust really understands and can explain how a charity should
operate???
Now, this link to "Brangelina" I think actually is pertinent to why media "fact checkers" are
so scorned – the second half of the article offers insight how the modern press relations business
runs circles around the media and how people who want to portray a "message" can easily do so.
People understand that it is all hype, all spin, and usually worse all the time. Is that
too cynical? Well, when money and power are involved, it probably isn't….
An interesting take in that article, essentially arguing that the public has been gaslighted
for so long by PR and image scrubbing that they crave Trump because his egotism is at least real:
You know who does seem authentic? Someone who does everything out of nothing but naked
self-interest, and admits it frankly. Someone who makes no pretense that he's trying to live
up to some notion of decency. Someone whose only metric - whose admitted basis of action on
any topic - is how it will affect him. Donald Trump loves Vladimir Putin. Why? Because Putin
called him a genius. What else could possibly matter? To pretend one cares about anything else
would be just that: a pretense. His rationale may not be good, but it is at least pure, uncontaminated
by considerations of how things will look.
So classic! The example Loofbourow gives to show how people are sick of gaslighting is…
a classic case of gaslighting itself, as Trump never said he "loves" Putin, and Putin never called
him a "genius". Rather these are the memes that our Acela Bubble gaslighters have been flooding
into our brains.
And another quote that ends the brangelina article
.
There is no perfect explanation that will account for Trump supporters' anger. They
seem to share with Bernie Sanders supporters a deep sense of betrayal, of fundamental and unsolvable
mistrust. And of course a great deal of that sense of grievance has to do with class,
and race, and gender - and the economy and our justice system and racism and education and
income inequality and foreign wars and xenophobia.
But we're in danger of missing a huge chunk of what drives the American psyche if we forget
just how frivolous we are, if we forget to look at what Americans actually think about and
watch in their spare time. And that isn't politics. It's The Bachelorette. It's Instagram.
It's the Kardashians. This week, it's Brangelina and the peculiar wave of nostalgia their breakup
inspired as we remember a time when we weren't quite this jaded.
The Jolie-Pitt divorce has been hailed as the end of an era. So it is: The end of their
union marks the end of a style of celebrity fluent in rewriting the narrative, of spinning
scandal into decency and a happy ending so convincing that people threw away their #TeamJen
shirts. Sure, sure, this is a "real family." Yes, these are "real people." This story is no
doubt "complicated." But secretly, we believe complexity is a con. Really, the end of Brangelina
just confirms our suspicions: It's lies all the way down, just as we always feared.
One major problem with clinton's campaign message of portraying trump as nuts and 'unfit'
is that 1) trump has no history of mental illness or known medical issues. I've read he doesn't
drink and hasn't had any incidents where he's lost his temper and done something crazy that she
can point to. 2) the whole 'unfit' thing presumes that people have confidence in the current political
class and will reject someone who isn't up to that standard.
Trump just needs to seems reasonable and not like the whacko seen in the constant barrage of
clinton ads.
Everyone's gotten over sensitized after that creepy but brief head bobbing incident. If you
hadn't seen that, I doubt you't take any notice of her nodding here. Looks more like an attempt
to channel nervousness or hide the effort to stay faux pleasant.
I'm more bothered by her claim that she's "met the standard" for releasing health records.
Bullshit. McCain released 10,000 pages and Shrub, 4,000. By contrast, she's given a page or two
of letters from her local Dr. Feelgood.
It depends on what the meaning of the word "standard" is..
This is just one of the reasons she isn't up by 50.. no one trusts her so why bother to care
about her policy or her proposals. She will just make up excuses as she goes along for whatever
she wants to do.
It's worth pointing out she said she's had memory problems since the concussion when she had
her interview with the fbi. So she's reaping what she's sowed as far as doubts about her health.
It's not like she's been consistent about how good her health is….much like she's not consistent
about…well…
Dunno if this has been posted here but this is part 3: "The following is adapted from the new
book Superpredator: Bill Clinton's Use and Abuse of Black America .
The Evictor-in-Chief
Bill Clinton's crime policies left many poor people with only two options: prison, or homelessness.
by Nathan J. Robinson
"... Informative to follow the link and get more of what Trump said and what Clinton waffles upon.
League of Conservation Voters is a DNC front. ..."
"... Clean coal, like her clean tar sands' pipeline costs more in HGH than just burning low sulfur
stuff. So much needs to stay in the ground, not a Clinton theme. Nor one for LCV! ..."
"... She doesn't pander to the left or to the peacenicks. I bet the debate will all about diversity
and little about economic populism. The center-left dislikes the left, just like in the UK. ..."
Clean coal, like her clean tar sands' pipeline costs more in HGH than just burning low sulfur
stuff. So much needs to stay in the ground, not a Clinton theme. Nor one for LCV!
She doesn't pander to the left or to the peacenicks. I bet the debate will all about diversity
and little about economic populism. The center-left dislikes the left, just like in the UK.
"... While Dems throw younger voters under the bus, they are cozying up to "W"–quite literally. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3806509/Photo-Michelle-Obama-George-W-Bush-hugging-edited.html ..."
"... A whole generation of school kids in their formative years got the message from their parents that Bills behavior was a national embarrassment. So why would they be excited about or vote for Mrs. Clinton? ..."
"... I'm pretty jaded and cynical but that photo of Michelle Obama hugging GWB shocked even me. It's getting scathing comments on Twitter as well (cf @DavidSirota for one). ..."
"... You should probably read the book: Blood Feud: The Clintons vs. the Obamas. It looks like Michelle was a dangerous, power hungry player from the very beginning. ..."
One thing I never see discussed in the media is the effect of the sorry Clinton/Lewinsky/Impeachment
episode on millennials. As a parent of school kids in the suburbs at that time I can tell you
that I and other parents were none too pleased to see the presidents sexual infidelities on the
evening news and headlined in the paper for all youngsters to see (and emulate?).
A whole generation
of school kids in their formative years got the message from their parents that Bills behavior
was a national embarrassment. So why would they be excited about or vote for Mrs. Clinton?
Jomo–We don't see anything about Billy's former indiscretions in the news anymore.
They'd rather the millennials forget about it.
That's all been carefully swept back into a little box gathering dust in the corner.
How convenient.
'Look over there! It's a Trump!'.
Distractions, distractions…
I lost all respect for Hellary (not that I had much, to begin with) when she 'stood by her
man' following the Monica incident.
She would have impressed me had she planted her foot up his a** all the way up to her cankles,
instead.
I've no doubt part of the 'bargain' of her staying by his side was to get her into the WH.
I've thought that since it happened. Call me Nostradamus.
I'm pretty jaded and cynical but that photo of Michelle Obama hugging GWB shocked even me.
It's getting scathing comments on Twitter as well (cf @DavidSirota for one).
Michelle was the only one I had any respect for… now… POOF like Keyser Soze that respect is
gone.
You should probably read the book: Blood Feud: The Clintons vs. the Obamas. It looks like Michelle was a dangerous, power hungry player from the very beginning.
"... The trouble is that the candidate they are meant to support does not appear to find that show particularly horrifying ..."
"... People under 40 or 35 grew up under title IX. Electing the wife of a lousy President isnt relevant ..."
"... Then of course, 9/11 would also explain the voting problems. Fear mongering doesn't work when fear mongering has been omnipresent in the lives of millennials for 15 years. ..."
"... Basically, a bunch of Democrats are voting against their interests because they are shallow as they seem. ..."
"... Why the young don't like Hillary? Our friends got blown apart in a war, came home w/ ptsd-missing limbs, getting little care & she wants even more war. Her husband's trade deals destroyed the economy & we know she is pro TPP. ..."
"... She is clearly a liar & has track record of a sell out. She & DNC cheated Bernie & we can't forgive even if he has. ..."
"... The Clintons have been terrible for a long time. The question is why are (did) so many Democrats especially older ones voting against their own interests. ..."
"... I've tried multiple times to explain this to my parents, but they just can't get how much has changed since the 90s, especially for the young. It's key, of course, that they still rely on the New York Times and PBS to get their news. They view "blogs" with reflexive disdain. ..."
"... When I go from hospital room to room at work there are many more older folks (40+) watching fox news, expressing interest in Trump & their hatred of the Clintons. Except in CT where everyone loves their Dems, corrupt or not. This was over last yr working in CT, NY, ME & AZ. I don't see how Clinton can win unless she cheats. ..."
"... So yes, lie, cheat, and steal, those are three things she and her crew excel at. ..."
"... Or, in short form, why the young (and a lot of other people) don't like HIllary: Why would they? The strange media delusion that the dislike needs to be explained, and is moreover terribly puzzling and hard to explain, is itself in greater need of explanation. ..."
"... That Newsweek article you posted on Hillary's millennial "problem" is an amazing read. So satisfying to finally see something in MSM that states obvious truths. Nice little video clip too. ..."
"... Many younger American voters, perhaps a sufficient number of them to seriously imperil Clinton's chances, have significant ideological differences with the candidate. ..."
"... Millennials might vote for Dad or Mom. They are being asked to vote for Granny, who is wobbly, eccentric and does not even live in the same Century as them. ..."
"Here is my own wild take on why millennials don't support Clinton "enough": Many younger American
voters, perhaps a sufficient number of them to seriously imperil Clinton's chances, have significant
ideological differences with the candidate. That's my theory. Many liberal pundits seem unimpressed
by this idea perhaps because it suggests that votes must be earned in a democracy, but it does
have the benefit of the evidence."
And
"The Clinton campaign might be forgiven for imagining these voters would "come home" had it
not spent the weeks since the Democratic Convention fundraising and playing Bush administration
endorsement bingo. The trouble is not that young people are insufficiently familiar with the neoconservative
horror show of their own childhoods. The trouble is that the candidate they are meant to support
does not appear to find that show particularly horrifying ."
And
"There are only so many times one can insist that young voters capitulate to a political party's
sole demand-vote for us!-in exchange for nothing."
I would suggest the ideological differences extend past the 38 age barrier, but
1. People under 40 or 35 grew up under title IX. Electing the wife of a lousy President isnt
relevant
2. No one under 38 voted for Bill Clinton. The youth haven't twisted themselves into voting for
that ass in the first place. Even then Bill's 1996 campaign when he failed to crack 50% against
Mumbly Joe was marked by record low minority turnout, just what is being worried about now. Gee.
3. Then of course, 9/11 would also explain the voting problems. Fear mongering doesn't work when
fear mongering has been omnipresent in the lives of millennials for 15 years.
Basically, a bunch of Democrats are voting against their interests because they are shallow
as they seem.
Why the young don't like Hillary?
Our friends got blown apart in a war, came home w/ ptsd-missing limbs, getting little care & she
wants even more war. Her husband's trade deals destroyed the economy & we know she is pro TPP.
She is pro fracking, pushing it overseas & once in office will promote it here. She is a corporatist bankster & won't release Goldman speeches. We have no jobs, no prospects, large amount of school
debt & must come of age during the second great depression. She is clearly a liar & has track
record of a sell out. She & DNC cheated Bernie & we can't forgive even if he has.
The Clintons have been terrible for a long time. The question is why are (did) so many Democrats
especially older ones voting against their own interests.
Obama enjoys a relative popularity with young people despite being a disaster.
My guess is, that after twelve years of Reagan and Bush, any Democrat was a relief. Unfortunately,
so many in the Democratic Party and in the commentariat came of age during that time, so they
just assume that this is the way that it has to be.
Actually, no, Clinton did not look like a good option in 1992, and certainly wasn't my choice
in the primary. Even then there were a lot of people who only got talked into voting for him in
November on the lesser evil principle, regretted it, and did not vote for him again in 1996.
Plus they turned Ross Perot into a crazy loon because he kept attacking nafta, which was a
big deal at the time, effectively making it a more "manageable" two person race.
Hmmm…….Now that I think about it, that sounds kind of familiar.
Katniss–Looking back, I think when I voted for Ross Perot that was the last time I voted for
someone I actually wanted, rather than just voting the LOTE.
Bernie was the only candidate since I've actually wanted to win. I'm heartsick and mad as hell
he's not in the running.
BTW, I'm still trying to figure out how DWS beat Tim Canova in FL after all the dirty dealings
about DWS came out? More manipulation at the polls?
This is definitely true of my parents (both barely pre-boomers). After watching McGovern flop,
then Carter flail, they both assumed the Clintons were the best a liberal could hope for in this
country. Also my mother admired Hillary for being an unapologetic career woman when, especially
in the South, this was still controversial.
Indeed, having grown up in the age of Reagan and George HW, I basically agreed with them in
the 90s, even though I hoped more would be possible at some point. It wasn't until the financial
crisis (and, importantly, beginning to read NC!) that I began to realize how toxic the Clinton
legacy really was. Also, as a grad student, I was teaching lots of millennials and began to realize
how genuinely screwed they were by what we now all call the neoliberal (and neocon) era.
I've tried multiple times to explain this to my parents, but they just can't get how much has
changed since the 90s, especially for the young. It's key, of course, that they still rely on
the New York Times and PBS to get their news. They view "blogs" with reflexive disdain.
When I told "older" people I would vote for Bernie, now Trump to shake things up-all I got
was a lecture. Clinton's will protect wall street & 401ks. And I think there is a lot of fear
about moving away from the token/chosen candidates.
When I go from hospital room to room at work there are many more older folks (40+) watching fox
news, expressing interest in Trump & their hatred of the Clintons. Except in CT where everyone
loves their Dems, corrupt or not. This was over last yr working in CT, NY, ME & AZ. I don't see
how Clinton can win unless she cheats.
In Philly last time around they had 53 precincts that were without a single non-Obama vote.
Not one. The Black Panthers at the door shooed out the Republican observers and the magic happened,
this time around it will be much easier. And then we might end up with hanging chads on steroids,
with an 8-person Supreme Court that should be a fun-fest.
So yes, lie, cheat, and steal, those are three things she and her crew excel at.
Or, in short form, why the young (and a lot of other people) don't like HIllary: Why would they? The strange media delusion that the dislike needs to be explained, and is moreover terribly
puzzling and hard to explain, is itself in greater need of explanation.
That Newsweek article you posted on Hillary's millennial "problem" is an amazing read. So satisfying to finally see something in MSM that states obvious truths. Nice little video
clip too.
Many younger American voters, perhaps a sufficient number of them to seriously imperil Clinton's
chances, have significant ideological differences with the candidate.
Millennials might vote for Dad or Mom. They are being asked to vote for Granny, who is wobbly,
eccentric and does not even live in the same Century as them.
That Newsweek article you posted on Hillary's millennial "problem" is an amazing read. So satisfying to finally see something in MSM that states obvious truths. Nice little video
clip too.
"... So Obama sent Emails to Clinton's private Email address that contained classified information. Was his handle "BBC"? Truly funny! ..."
"... I find this revelation to be particularly galling, how richly this entire crew deserves ankle bracelets at a very minimum for perjury. When the president and the SoS lie and break the law and nothing happens…um precisely where do we go from there? ..."
I find this revelation to be particularly galling, how richly this entire crew deserves ankle
bracelets at a very minimum for perjury. When the president and the SoS lie and break the law
and nothing happens…um precisely where do we go from there?
"... The real standard will be, as it was for Obama in 2008, the capacity to touch people on an emotional level. Policy does not matter. Obama touched our desire for positive human solidarity (black and white together) The foundation of Trump's appeal is also on a emotional level. Trump, at his best, exudes a powerful resentment–a type of negative solidarity based on anger and contempt. ..."
"What standards do you think will matter for who really wins the debate, as in does better
with voters."
The real standard will be, as it was for Obama in 2008, the capacity to touch people on
an emotional level. Policy does not matter. Obama touched our desire for positive human solidarity
(black and white together) The foundation of Trump's appeal is also on a emotional level. Trump,
at his best, exudes a powerful resentment–a type of negative solidarity based on anger and contempt.
i just saw a good comment at the guardian comparing trump to chemo, the "poison that we take
to cure us of the dnc/rnc cancer in hope they don't kill us first".
"... Supposedly, per this Social Security Works advocate, Trump's advisor told Paul Ryan he will agree to cutting Social Security, ala 2008 0bama's advisor telling Canadian officials that 0bama wouldn't really negotiate NAFTA. ..."
Supposedly, per this Social Security Works advocate, Trump's advisor told Paul Ryan he will
agree to cutting Social Security, ala 2008 0bama's advisor telling Canadian officials that 0bama
wouldn't really negotiate NAFTA.
"In 2015, the work rate (or employment-to-population
ratio) for American males ages 25 to 54 was slightly lower
than it had been in 1940, at the tail end of the Great
Depression. If we were back at 1965 levels today, nearly 10
million additional men would have paying jobs. The collapse
of male work is due almost entirely to a flight out of the
labor force-and that flight has on the whole been voluntary.
The fact that only 1 in 7 prime-age men are not in the labor
force points to a lack of jobs as the reason they are not
working."
Uh Nick – thanks for telling us what we already knew –
labor force participation is down. But do you realize how you
just contradicted yourself. Keynesians like myself would
agree that is due to a lack of jobs (aka low aggregate
demand). So is this a voluntary thing?
Let's read on:
"these unworking men are floated by other household
members (wives, girlfriends, relatives) and by Uncle Sam.
Government disability programs figure prominently in the
calculus of support for unworking men-ever more prominently
over time."
Since government provided benefits have not been scaled up
by our policy makers – he must think the hard working ladies
are cuddling young men for their good lucks or something. Uh
Nick – come to NYC and you will see that the ladies here
think this is so stupid. His next excuse is all those dudes
in prison. Seriously? Does this AEI clown not realize crime
is much lower than it was a generation ago? This piece was
dumb even by AEI "standards". But at least he did not dwell
on the Tyler Cowen porn thing.And at the risk of repeating
myself (and Noah Smith) if their thesis that young men had
suddenly decided to loaf, then the inward shift of the labor
supply curve would mean higher real wages than we are seeing.
Reply
Sunday, September 25, 2016 at 09:37 AM
pgl said in reply to pgl...
I decided to put these thoughts in the following Econospeak
post which goes a little further debunking the
misrepresentations from the AEI hack:
I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night
Alive as you or me
Says I, But Joe, you're ten years dead
I never died, says he
I never died, says he
In Salt Lake, Joe, says I to him
Him standing by my bed
They framed you on a murder charge
Says Joe, But I ain't dead
Says Joe, But I ain't dead
The copper bosses killed you, Joe
They shot you, Joe, says I
Takes more than guns to kill a man
Says Joe, I didn't die
Says Joe, I didn't die
And standing there as big as life
And smiling with his eyes
Joe says, What they forgot to kill
Went on to organize
Went on to organize
Joe Hill ain't dead, he says to me
Joe Hill ain't never died
Where working men are out on strike
Joe Hill is at their side
Joe Hill is at their side
From San Diego up to Maine
In every mine and mill
Where workers strike and organize
Says he, You'll find Joe Hill
Says he, You'll find Joe Hill
I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night
Alive as you or me
Says I, But Joe, you're ten years dead
I never died, says he
I never died, says he
[More about Joe Hill and Alfred Hayes at the link.]
Reply
Sunday, September 25, 2016 at 10:10 AM
RC AKA Darryl, Ron said in reply to RC AKA Darryl, Ron...
Fortunately I will have very little spare time for idle or
addle minded leisure now until well after the election and
even well after the subsequent coronation save those days so
rainy that outdoor activity is entirely impractical.
Reply
Sunday, September 25, 2016 at 10:14 AM
pgl said...
I never liked Ross Douhart. The political right thinks he has
written something very important:
"At the same time, outside the liberal tent, the feeling
of being suffocated by the left's cultural dominance is
turning voting Republican into an act of cultural rebellion -
which may be one reason the Obama years, so good for
liberalism in the culture, have seen sharp G.O.P. gains at
every level of the country's government. This spirit of
political-cultural rebellion is obviously crucial to Trump's
act."
Vote for a racist like Trump because liberals are
suffocating. Did I say I really do not like Ross Douhart?
Reply
Sunday, September 25, 2016 at 11:55 AM
Peter K. said in reply to pgl...
Again we agree. (Signs of the apocalypse? I guess Trump is
going to win.)
Douchehat is the worst hypocrite. He wants
readers to believe he's an expert in morality and morale
rectitude and that's what conservative should be known for
when in reality Republicans chose Trump as their candidate,
one grand example of immorality and dishonesty.
And still Douthat turns on the liberals as behaving badly.
Suffocating? Howabout the insanity of the Republican
convention? That was suffocating.
He even quotes Internet Troll Steve Sailor!!!
*rubs eyes*
"(The alt-right-ish columnist Steve Sailer made the punk
rock analogy as well.)"
It's like Douthat writing about JohnH or BINY. Every one
of Sailor's Internet comments would be racist ones about
immigration. He's mentally unhinged.
"But it remains an advantage for the G.O.P., and a
liability for the Democratic Party, that the new cultural
orthodoxy is sufficiently stifling to leave many Americans
looking to the voting booth as a way to register dissent."
Clueless Douthat. The culture is getting better in certain
ways because the TV executives just want to sell advertising
and these performers are popular. It's capitalism at work.
Kudos to John Oliver for winning an Emmy.
"Among millennials, especially, there's a growing
constituency for whom right-wing ideas are so alien or
triggering, left-wing orthodoxy so pervasive and
unquestioned, that supporting a candidate like Hillary
Clinton looks like a needless form of compromise."
Note the disdain for millennials. "Triggering."
Conservative like Douthat and Bobo Brooks "trigger" the
hate and anger centers of my brain.
The fact is that Samantha Bee is right and NBC facilitated
the rise of Trump with the Apprentice and treating him well
on other shows like Jimmy Fallon and SNL.
[ Do not use sickening
language on this blog. Never ever use such language here. ]
Reply
Sunday, September 25, 2016 at 02:44 PM
pgl said...
I have provided this link to some of the papers by Michael
Bruno – many co-authored by Jeffrey Sachs – for a couple of
reasons:
The minor reason is they have a nice paper on the Dutch
Disease – something JohnH thinks he understands but he needs
to read up on this topic. But the main reason has to do with
a stupid comment from Paine on my Econospeak post, which goes
to show how very little Paine actually learned in graduate
school.
I was try to paint a picture of some Real Business Cycle
claim that Bruno and Sachs emphasized when I was in graduate
school. I never truly bought their story as I was (and still
am) a die hard Keynesian. But here is how it went as applied
to the early 1980's (the period I was talking about). If a
nation enjoys a massive real appreciation and if aggregate
demand does not matter (the New Classical view which we
Keynesians do not buy) then the real wages of its domestic
workers rise. These workers supply more labor driving down
wages relative to domestic prices. So domestic firms hire
more workers.
That is their story. I do not buy it as I was clearly
mocking it. Alas Paine never learned this. And so he mocks
someone who did. Just another day at the EV comment section.
Aals.
Reply
Sunday, September 25, 2016 at 12:24 PM
anne said in reply to pgl...
Just another day at the -- ------- section.
"... "In terms of booked TV and radio ad time from today through election day, Team Clinton is tracking at roughly 33 times the outlay of Team Trump" [ Advertising Age ]. "To put all this another way, of the $149,912,723 millon in booked TV and radio spending through election day for these three presidential candidates, $145,299,727 is being spent by the Clinton campaign combined with pro-Clinton PACs." Wowsers. ..."
"In terms of booked TV and radio ad time from today through election
day, Team Clinton is tracking at roughly 33 times the outlay of Team Trump"
[
Advertising
Age
]. "To put all this another way, of the $149,912,723 millon in booked
TV and radio spending through election day for these three presidential
candidates, $145,299,727 is being spent by the Clinton campaign combined
with pro-Clinton PACs." Wowsers.
"Trump's ads last ran nearly a week ago in four battleground states:
Florida, North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Since then, the GOP
presidential nominee has ceded the airwaves to Hillary Clinton - and is only
poised to launch a limited, less-targeted ad campaign in the days before
next week's debate" [
Politico
].
"Hillary Clinton is reserving $30 million in digital advertising as she
seeks to connect with young voters" [Business Insider]. The quotes in this
thing are pathetic, both Michelle Obama and Clinton's. Anybody who uses the
trope "I get that" automatically doesn't.
"Elizabeth Warren Tells Hillary Clinton Not To Hire Wall Street Donors" [
International
Business Times
]. At the Center for American Progress:
"I know that personnel is policy," she told the group. "But let me be
clear - when we talk about personnel, we don't mean advisors who just pay
lip service to Hillary's bold agenda [irony, surely?], coupled with a
sigh, a knowing glance, and a twiddling of thumbs until it's time for the
next swing through the revolving door, serving government then going back
to the very same industries they regulate. We don't mean Citigroup or
Morgan Stanley or BlackRock getting to choose who runs the economy in
this country so they can capture our government."
This,
before
November 8! They must be gritting their teeth in
Brooklyn, as Warren underlines her status as a party baron once more.
"The Clinton Global Initiative wraps up its 12th and final annual meeting
Wednesday amid intense scrutiny about the access its donors received while
Hillary Clinton was the nation's top diplomat" [
McClatchy
].
So I guess they're closing out the fund? And the payouts will come over the
course of a future Clinton administration….
Our endorsement is rooted in respect
for her intellect, experience and courage. ...
In any normal election year, we'd compare the two presidential candidates side by side on the
issues. But this is not a normal election year. A comparison like that would be an empty exercise
in a race where one candidate - our choice, Hillary Clinton - has a record of service and a raft
of pragmatic ideas, and the other, Donald Trump, discloses nothing concrete about himself or his
plans while promising the moon and offering the stars on layaway. (We will explain in a subsequent
editorial why we believe Mr. Trump to be the worst nominee put forward by a major party in modern
American history.)
But this endorsement would also be an empty exercise if it merely affirmed the choice of Clinton
supporters. We're aiming instead to persuade those of you who are hesitating to vote for Mrs.
Clinton - because you are reluctant to vote for a Democrat, or for another Clinton, or for a candidate
who might appear, on the surface, not to offer change from an establishment that seems indifferent
and a political system that seems broken. ...
2008 Crisis Deepened the Ties Between Clintons and Goldman Sachs
http://nyti.ms/2cLHnuY
NYT - NICHOLAS CONFESSORE and SUSANNE CRAIG - Sep 24
A blue-ribbon commission had just excoriated Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street banks for
fueling the financial crisis. Prosecutors were investigating whether Goldman had misled investors.
The company was a whipping boy for politicians looking to lay blame for the crash.
But in spring of 2011, Lloyd C. Blankfein, leading one of the nation's most reviled companies,
found himself onstage with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, one of the nation's most admired
public figures at the time. And Mrs. Clinton had come to praise Goldman Sachs.
The State Department, Mrs. Clinton announced that day in an auditorium in its Foggy Bottom
headquarters, would throw its weight behind a Goldman philanthropic initiative aimed at encouraging
female entrepreneurs around the world - a program Goldman viewed as central to rehabilitating
its reputation.
Mrs. Clinton's blessing - an important public seal of approval for Goldman at a time when it
had few defenders in Washington - underscored a long-running relationship between one of the country's
most powerful financial firms and one of its most famous political families. Over 20-plus years,
Goldman provided the Clintons with some of their most influential advisers, millions of dollars
in campaign contributions and speaking fees, and financial support for the family foundation's
charitable programs.
And in the wake of the worst crash since the Great Depression, as the firm fended off investigations
and criticism from Republicans and Democrats alike, the Clintons drew Goldman only closer. Bill
Clinton publicly defended the company and leased office space from Goldman for his foundation.
Mrs. Clinton, after leaving the State Department, earned $675,000 to deliver three speeches at
Goldman events, where she reassured executives that they had an important role to play in the
nation's recovery.
The four years between the end of the financial crisis and the start of Mrs. Clinton's second
White House bid revealed a family that viewed Wall Street's elite as friends and collaborators
even as the public viewed them with suspicion and scorn. ...
So these people think it is a big deal for the Sec of State to appear at a dinner with GS where
the bank starts a program to help women in business throughout the world.
10,000 Women is a program organized by Goldman Sachs with the goal of helping to grow local
economies by providing business education, mentoring and networking, and access to capital to
underserved women entrepreneurs globally. ...
I know about the program. A local charity group I do a little work for has partnered with it.
My question was doe the writers in that Times article mention the program?
If not, it is just another in a long series of attacks on the Clintons with little basis in
fact. I am not a big fan of either of them, but this treatment is beyond the pale.
ilsm -> Fred C. Dobbs... , -1
The NYT board like Mrs. Clinton has no idea about providing for the common defense.
Experience that could not remember nor take responsibility for safeguarding information that
could damage US well being...........
Nor remember the most basic requirements for filing public records.
"... my goodness..she didn't realise what she was getting into? Clearly her advisors / staff etc. are just as idiotic, careless and zombied-out as she is. (See also Paul Combetta story about the e-mails.) ..."
"... I saw a headline yesterday, that she plans to put inheritance tax at 65% (?), what will her potential Repub and pro-establishment type voters think of that? Yikes! (Insiders know this is just trash talk.) ..."
"... One might say she lost the plot because she is sick, imho she never grasped politics at all, nor computers - the internet, nor the MSM, because, hmm running a criminal enterprise is a completely different kind of biz. ..."
"... Let's not forget that besides winning in dubious circumstances a Senate seat, and being nominated by Obiman (whole ugly squirming can of worms there for sure) she is a two-time loser. She lost to her rival Barak while doing all to undermine him, and then in RL lost to Sanders but won by cheats, manipulations, and fraud. ..."
"... You have to compare with Obama who did the same show. The comedian did give her a chance in the beginning to talk policy but she did not take it. By playing defensive she enabled/encouraged him to get through to his last nasty question. ..."
"... To go to a show like this and answer in one-liners is a very bad idea. She must have gone completely unprepared. ..."
somebody @ 98,
my goodness..she didn't realise what she was getting into? Clearly her
advisors / staff etc. are just as idiotic, careless and zombied-out as she is. (See also
Paul Combetta story about the e-mails.)
I saw a headline yesterday, that she plans to put inheritance tax at 65% (?), what will
her potential Repub and pro-establishment type voters think of that? Yikes! (Insiders know
this is just trash talk.)
One might say she
lost the plot because she is sick, imho she never grasped politics at all, nor computers
- the internet, nor the MSM, because, hmm running a criminal enterprise is a
completely
different kind of biz.
Let's not forget that besides winning in dubious circumstances a Senate seat, and
being nominated by Obiman (whole ugly squirming can of worms there for sure) she is a
two-time loser. She lost to her rival Barak while doing all to undermine him, and then
in RL lost to Sanders but won by cheats, manipulations, and fraud.
You have to compare with Obama who
did the same show. The comedian did give her a chance in the beginning to talk policy
but she did not take it. By playing defensive she enabled/encouraged him to get through
to his last nasty question.
Hillary would have still had a chance to talk policy after that Trump commercial -
explaining why America is already great whatever.
To go to a show like this and answer in one-liners is a very bad idea. She must have
gone completely unprepared.
Zero Hedge
Earlier this week, a twitter user named " Katica " seemingly proved
the "intent" of the Hillary campaign to destroy and/or tamper with federal records by revealing the
Reddit thread of Paul Combetta (aka the "Oh Shit" guy; aka "stonetear"). But
what's most crazy about this story is that "Katica" was able to discover the greatest "bombshell" of the entire Hillary email
scandal with just a couple of internet searches while the FBI, with unlimited access to government records, spent
months "investigating" this case and missed it all . The only question now is whether the FBI "missed" this evidence because
of gross incompetence or because of other motivating factors ?
Now, courtesy of an opinion piece posted on
The Daily Caller
, we know exactly how "Katica" pieced her "bombshell" discovery together... the folks at the FBI may want to take some notes.
Per the twitter discussion below with @RepStevenSmith , "Katica"
discovered Combetta's Reddit thread on September 16th. But while she suspected that Paul Combetta and the Reddit user known
as "stonetear" were, in fact, the same person, she had to prove it...
"... telling pollsters that they now favor the Donald seems to be the only way many people have to tell Hillary and the people around her what they think of them. ..."
And Jill Stein is eager to do so now. She could do a far better job than Sanders too, because
her progressive vision, unlike his, doesn't end at the country's borders. She, unlike he, would
at least try to take American imperialism on.
But in the actual world, Jill Stein is still "Jill who?," and telling pollsters that they
now favor the Donald seems to be the only way many people have to tell Hillary and the people
around her what they think of them.
"... More power, more money, more control goes to a smaller group of people. We were disenfranchised, without noticing it. The financiers and their new nobility of discourse took over the world as completely as the aristocracy did in 11th century. ..."
"... The last decisive battle for preservation of democracy now takes place in the US. Its unlikely champion, Donald Trump , is hated by the political establishment, by the bought media, by instigated minorities as much as Putin, Corbyn or Le Pen are hated. ..."
More power, more money, more control goes to a smaller group of people. We were
disenfranchised, without noticing it. The financiers and their new nobility of
discourse took over the world as completely as the aristocracy did in 11th century.
Russia with its very limited democracy
is still better off: their nobility
of discourse polled less than three per cent of the votes in the last elections,
though they are still heavily represented in the government.
The last decisive battle for preservation of democracy now takes place in the
US. Its unlikely champion, Donald Trump
, is hated by the political establishment,
by the bought media, by instigated minorities as much as Putin, Corbyn or Le Pen are
hated.
"... By Miguel Nińo-Zarazúa, Research Fellow, UNU-WIDE, Laurence Roope, Researcher, Health Economics Research Centre, University of Oxford, and Finn Tarp, Director, UNU-WIDER. Originally published at VoxEU ..."
"... See original post for references ..."
"... John Ross argues that the reduction in poverty has been pretty much all China. I'm also not convinced China is actually that much richer than before. A sweatshop worker has a higher income than a traditional farmer, but probably has a lower standard of living, and while the traditional farmer maintains the natural resource base, the industrial worker destroys it. ..."
"... Globalization is an economic and ecological disaster. We have outsourced wealth creation to China and they do it in the most polluting way possible, turning their country into a toxic waste dump in the process. ..."
"... The peasants slaving away in the cinder block hellholes of their factories churning out the crapola on Wal-Mart's shelves also get paid squat, while the leaders of the Chinese Criminal Party steal half of their effort for themselves and smuggle the loot out, to get away from the pollution. The other half gets stolen by the likes of Wal-Mart and Apple. ..."
"... The elites sold globalization as something that would generate such a munificent surplus that those in harms way would be helped. It ends up as a lie, where the elites the world over help themselves to the stolen sweat of the lowest people in society, with nothing left over, except for a polluted planet. ..."
"... Yes, those who "have seen their incomes stagnating in real terms for over 20 years" are indeed experiencing "considerable discontent." But this anodyne phrasing masks the reality of entire communities seeing their means of livelihood ripped out and shipped across the globe. This rhetoric makes it sound like, Oh those prosperous American workers can't buy as many luxuries now, boo hoo, when the standard practice from NAFTA on of globalization-as-corporate-welfare has meant real impoverishment for hundreds of thousands of individuals, entire cities and large chunks of whole states. As Lambert always says, Whose economy? ..."
...if you look at absolute inequality, as opposed to relative inequality, inequality has increased
around the world. This calls into question one of the big arguments made in favor of globalization:
that the cost to workers in advanced economies are offset by gains to workers in developing economies,
and is thus virtuous by lowering inequality more broadly measured.
By Miguel Nińo-Zarazúa, Research Fellow, UNU-WIDE, Laurence Roope, Researcher, Health
Economics Research Centre, University of Oxford, and Finn Tarp, Director, UNU-WIDER. Originally published
at VoxEU
Since the turn of the century, inequality in the distribution of income, together with concerns
over the pace and nature of globalisation, have risen to be among the most prominent policy issues
of our time. These concerns took centre stage at the recent annual G20 summit in China. From President
Obama to President Xi, there was broad agreement that the global economy needs more inclusive and
sustainable growth, where the economic pie increases in size and is at the same time divided more
fairly. As President Obama emphasised, "[t]he international order is under strain." The consensus
is well founded, following as it does the recent Brexit vote, and the rise of populism (especially
on the right) in the US and Europe, with its hard stance against free trade agreements, capital flows
and migration.
... ... ...
The inclusivity aspect of growth is now more imperative than ever. Globalisation has not been
a zero sum game. Overall perhaps more have benefitted, especially in fast-growing economies in the
developing world. However, many others, for example among the working middle class in industrialised
nations, have seen their incomes stagnating in real terms for over 20 years. It is unsurprising that
this has bred considerable discontent, and it is an urgent priority that concrete steps are taken
to reduce the underlying sources of this discontent. Those who feel they have not benefitted, and
those who have even lost from globalisation, have legitimate reasons for their discontent. Appropriate
action will require not only the provision of social protection to the poorest and most vulnerable.
It is essential that the very nature of the ongoing processes of globalisation, growth, and economic
transformation are scrutinised, and that broad based investments are made in education, skills, and
health, particularly among relatively disadvantaged groups. Only in this way will the world experience
sustained – and sustainable – economic growth and the convergence of nations in the years to come.
John Ross argues that the reduction in poverty has been pretty much all China. I'm also
not convinced China is actually that much richer than before. A sweatshop worker has a higher
income than a traditional farmer, but probably has a lower standard of living, and while the traditional
farmer maintains the natural resource base, the industrial worker destroys it.
Only in this way will the world experience sustained – and sustainable
– economic growth and the convergence of nations in the years to come.
Globalization is an economic and ecological disaster. We have outsourced wealth creation
to China and they do it in the most polluting way possible, turning their country into a toxic
waste dump in the process.
The peasants slaving away in the cinder block hellholes of their factories churning out
the crapola on Wal-Mart's shelves also get paid squat, while the leaders of the Chinese Criminal
Party steal half of their effort for themselves and smuggle the loot out, to get away from the
pollution. The other half gets stolen by the likes of Wal-Mart and Apple.
The elites sold globalization as something that would generate such a munificent surplus
that those in harms way would be helped. It ends up as a lie, where the elites the world over
help themselves to the stolen sweat of the lowest people in society, with nothing left over, except
for a polluted planet.
The notable presence of public policies that exacerbate racial and economic inequality and
the lack of will by Washington to change the system mean that the ethnic/racial wealth gap is
becoming more firmly entrenched in society.
"broad based investments are made in education, skills, and health, particularly among relatively
disadvantaged groups. Only in this way will the world experience sustained – and sustainable
– economic growth and the convergence of nations in the years to come."
…I guess if the skills were sustainable low chemical and diverse farming in 5 acre lots or
in co-ops then I might have less complaint, however the skills people apparently are going to
need are supervising robots and going to non jobs in autonomous vehicles and being fed on chemical
mush shaped like things we used to eat, a grim dystopia.
Yesterday I had the unpleasant experience of reading the hard copy nyt wherein kristof opined
that hey it's not so bad, extreme poverty has eased (the same as in this article, but without
this article's Vietnamese example where 1 v. 8 becomes 8 v. 80),ignoring the relative difference
while on another lackluster page there was an article saying immigrants don't take jobs from citizens
which had to be one of the most thinly veiled press releases of some study made by some important
sounding acronym and and, of course a supposed "balance" between pro and anti immigration academics.
because in this case, they claim we're relatively better off.
So there you have it, it's all relative. Bi color bird cage liner, dedicated to the ever shrinking
population of affluent/wealthy who are relatively better off as opposed to the ever increasing
population of people who are actually worse off…There was also an article on the desert dwelling
uighur and their system of canals bringing glacier water to farm their arid land which showed
some people who were fine for thousands of years, but now thanks to fracking, industrial pollution
and less community involvement (kids used to clean the karatz, keeping it healthy) now these people
can be uplifted into the modern world(…so great…) that was reminiscent of the nyt of olde which
presented the conundrum but left out the policy prescription which now always seems to be "the
richer I get the less extreme poverty there is in the world so stop your whining and borrow a
few hundred thousand to buy a PhD "
Yes, those who "have seen their incomes stagnating in real terms for over 20 years" are
indeed experiencing "considerable discontent." But this anodyne phrasing masks the reality of
entire communities seeing their means of livelihood ripped out and shipped across the globe. This
rhetoric makes it sound like, Oh those prosperous American workers can't buy as many luxuries
now, boo hoo, when the standard practice from NAFTA on of globalization-as-corporate-welfare has
meant real impoverishment for hundreds of thousands of individuals, entire cities and large chunks
of whole states. As Lambert always says, Whose economy?
Three reading recommendations for anyone who doesn't grasp your sentiment, shared by millions:
Sold Out , by Michelle Malkin Outsourcing America , by Ron Hira America: Who
Stole the Dream? , by Donald L. Barlett
Reply ↓
Mr. Galifianakis then briefly interrupted the interview to play a campaign commercial for Mr.
Trump, claiming the billionaire businessman was the show's top sponsor. He then wrapped up the
exchange by telling Mrs. Clinton the two should stay in touch.
"What's the best way to reach you? Email?" he said.
The State Department said Friday it likely has more than 2,800 new emails former Secretary Hillary Clinton never turned over but
were recovered by the FBI, and will begin releasing them in batches beginning next month.
But only a small percentage will be processed before the election, the department said in court, arguing its resources are stretched
too thin to get them done.
All told, the FBI turned over 15,171 emails it recovered that involved Mrs. Clinton, and of those about 60 percent have been deemed
purely personal. That leaves some 5,600 that are work-related, but based on a sample of data, nearly half of those are duplicates,
leaving the 2,800 or so that are new.
Does that mean that he knewq that he is sending email to an unsecure private server?
Notable quotes:
"... The president's previously unreported use of a pen name is referenced in notes from federal investigators' April 5, 2016 interview with Huma Abedin ..."
President Obama emailed
Hillary Clinton
using a pseudonym while she served as his secretary of state, according to
FBI documents released Friday.
The president's previously unreported use of a pen name
is referenced in notes from federal investigators' April 5, 2016 interview with
Huma Abedin,
one of Mrs.
Clinton's closest aides, contained within 189 pages of records released late Friday afternoon
by the
FBI concerning its review of the Democratic presidential nominee's use of a private email
server while in office.
During that interview, investigators showed the aide an email exchange dated June 28, 2012
with the subject "Re: Congratulations!"
"Abedin did
not recognize the name of the sender. Once informed that the sender's name is believed to be a
pseudonym used by the president,
Abedin exclaimed
'How is this not classified?'" according to the
FBI's summary of the interview.
"Abedin then
expressed her amazement at the president's use of a pseudonym and asked if she could have a copy
of the email."
The
FBI's revelation quickly spurred questions about the president's past claims concerning his
knowledge of
Mrs. Clinton's private email server.
Mrs. Clinton's
non-governmental email address was first revealed in 2013 when a Romanian computer hacker
breached the AOL account of Sidney Blumenthal, a longtime
Clinton
confidant, and subsequently leaked messages to the media that were sent to an account operated by
Mrs. Clinton's
outside of the .gov realm.
"... The polls are turning against her. "But Trump is lying!" Of course he is. Everyone knows he is lying. He is a salesman seeking his own advantage. He is expected to lie and to exaggerate. He does not even hide it. He is authentic in his lying. That's why he is - to many people - still a likeable man who one can deep down basically trust. ..."
"... Hillary Clinton is a politician. She claims not lie. But from her extensive public record people know that lying is exactly what she does. She is not thereby not authentic. She does not inspire confidence. Nor does she inspire sympathy. Just see her terrible, angry performance above. ..."
"... Does she really believe that campaign ads with Michael Hayden, Max Boot and other failed neocons will get her any votes? ..."
"... She already lost the young people. She lost the military who are far less interventionist than the politicians. No one of the real, non-interventionist left will ever vote for her. Here move to the right, away from criticizing the Republican party, enables Republicans to win more congressional seats than necessary ..."
"... Some may also wish to checkout this post "The Hidden Smoking Gun: the Combetta Cover-Up" http://www.thompsontimeline.com/the-hidden-smoking-gun-the-combetta-cover-up/ ..."
"... And I concur, she has lost this election by her own doing. The anger and frustration she exudes in the vid to the very people expected to volunteer for GOTV calls and rally's, poll watchers, transporting voters to the polls and so much more shows the depth of the cocoon she's living in. That's the real Hillary, btw. She is totally detached and out of touch with her base. ..."
"... Demonising of Russia and Putin must stop. Direct or indirect training and weaponising jihadis must stop. In that respect the only hope seems Trump. And that's why US citizens have an obligation to the World: Vote for Trump (otherwise Clinton wins) ..."
"... If there is one country in the World that needs regime change, it is the USA. 15 years of warmongering neocons is enough! ..."
"... Who gives a flying fart about this election or either of the establishment's offerings. Unfortunately voting by the American electorate will only bestow legitimacy on a corrupt system of management by those that hide in the shadows and conduct the business of 'national interest' as it were their own. ..."
"... The Republic is dead! Replaced with an Imperial executive to which all political power and all the levers of power have been given under the original Continuity of Government Act declaration on 9/11, which suspends the Constitution in whole or part under secret clauses. ..."
"... Lies by Trump?As far as I know, I haven't seen any, maybe some walk back on off the cuff stuff, but remember any news of Trump comes from serial liars who own the MSM, and there is not one MSM news outlet in America pro Trump, and that includes Fox. Any accusing lies promoted by serial liars should not be taken as truth. ..."
"... First axiom in know your enemy. ..."
"... Worse than that, demonizing Clinton's foreign policy is making alibis for the real author of the last eight years' catastrophes, Barack Obama. The US has just openly attacked Syrian forces in alliance with Islamic State. ..."
"... Seems a few people are unaware of the fundamental policy of the Outlaw US Empire: Attain Full Spectrum Domination of the planet and its people as spelled out in its own publications--Vision 2010 and Vision 2020. Clinton is the one wanting to further that goal; Trump is not. ..."
"... The only neocon I can think of that's as ugly as Clinton is Cheney. ..."
"... She is a neocon;. Any country that is not run by US corporations and whose leaders do not contribute to the Clinton Foundation may be bombed... ..."
"... Tulsi Gabbard is one of the few people in Congress that is not a crook or an idiot, and who understands the existential threat posed by nuclear war. ..."
"... It is all a complete sham, a circus, but I guess, what else can one do, how can one live? Ppl need to hang onto their afforded, allowed, 'ersatz' agency, the dot power of one vote one perso opinion is built-in, deliberately, and as managed by the MSM and Diebold (other..) is just a scam, a confidence trick. I like Jill Stein, fine, no results. ..."
"... Remember for ex. the massive w-wide protests, biggest ever, against the invasion of Iraq, which had no effect on events at all. ..."
"... I agree that Trump is a much more attractive lier, but his "abolish the EPA my first day in office" expresses a death wish for the species I can't reconcile with. Such stupidity, however and unlike WW3, is survivable and from Trump has the look of a forward bargaining position, but who can know? Kill us fast or kill us slow? At least with slow the body may awake before its dead and try to save itself. ..."
"... Trump has John Bolton as one of his foreign policy advisors. He is likely to become Sec. of State if Trump wins. ..."
"... As to Trump's potential cabinet picks, what's been said is nothing more than media speculation, particularly the promotion of Bolton by neocon-based media. Given that former Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn's Trump's main Foreign Policy advisor is an arch adversary of Bolton, I very much doubt there's any credibility in what's being written in media. And the hype surrounding Bolton as SoS reached its peak at the end of August with very little being said since. ..."
"... Oh jeez Tulsi Gabbard another invention of the CIA connected to hari krishna cults and everything you'd expect from a poltician made in the same factory as Barack Obama, fake deracinated unrecognizable name and all. ..."
"... No one in their right mind should vote for Hillary Clinton, regardless of your feelings about Trump. ..."
"... Whoever wins will be seen as illegitimate by half of the country. America is entering terminal stage, regardless the outcome of this race. With Trump you get the horrible end, with Clinton - endless horror. I'd vote for Trump. ..."
"... The American election has NOTHING to do with what goes on in Syria. Everything that happens there which is done by the U.S. is done on orders of the Rothschild cabal in its City of London, the owners of the U.S. and almost every other nation in the world today. Rothschild's neo cons carry the orders into action. None of it is random. All of it is part of their plot. ..."
"... I wouldn't be at all surprised if Trump wins. Voters for Trump are much like voters for Brexit in Britain. A blind fury against what is being done to them by neo-liberal banksterism. Which is manifested in racism and xenophobia. ..."
"... It's a sort of popular revolt against neo-liberal corporatism, which expects consumers to buy, but exports the jobs which might furnish the income for consumption to China. In the end, corporate chiefs will understand that people have to have income in order to be able to spend, but not now. ..."
"... Trump reverse-messages through "dancing muslims" and "bad bad Iran deal" which serves to focus attention in a DIRECTION. Not to reality. ..."
"... "In fact, in all the years of the so-called War on Terror, only one potential American president has had the intelligence, the vision, the sheer sanity to see that America cannot fight the entire world at once; who sees that America's natural and necessary allies in this fight must include the advanced and civilized nations that are most exposed and experienced in their own terror wars, and have the requisite military power and willingness to use it. Only one American candidate has pointed out how senseless it is to seek confrontation with Russia and China, at the same time that we are trying to suppress the very jihadist movements that they also are attacking. ..."
"... That candidate is Donald Trump." ..."
"... I've never voted for a Republican, ever (and maybe twice for Democrats), but I expect to vote for Trump. Clinton is a certifiable nutjob when it comes to destabilizing countries like Libya and Syria, and provoking Russia. She belongs nowhere near power. ..."
"... I feel voting for either major party candidate would be simply perpetuating a broken system. Very sad state of affairs in the world. My own country is like this but perhaps not quite so in your face. ..."
"... Could one argue - a sincere question - that HRC does represent a large part of the electorate - MIC (war party), security, big corps, media, new media, higher education and its scams, banking and banksters, health insurance etc. Big. Gov. and all the employees in there, basically the upper classes and middles? ..."
"... For those considering not voting, please consider that your vote for Jill Stein this year could help her get to the 5% threshold that would provide funding and ballot access for the Green Party in future elections. ..."
"... The economist Michael Hudson has made the excellent point that a President Trump would face, in effect, two opposition parties in Congress. So his ability to achieve his crazier policies would be extremely limited. ..."
"... Hell there are two documentaries at the top of NEtflix's list right now glorifying the Nazis in Ukraine and the White Helmets farce in Syria. Five Star rated. Literally every current show on TV and most films find a way to reference scary Russia. The "savvy" TV watcher is WITH HER to the point that they can laugh off her collapsing in public like it's no big deal!! ..."
"... The words that come out of Hillary's mouth, would have to be spoken by someone else, to be believed. She is totally maxed out on her lack of credibility. The Clintons sold out working people a long time ago. ..."
"... Hilton would probably be less disastrous for the domestic side of things, what with 3-4 USSCt nominations coming up and the whole racism/illegal migrants pot about to boil over. But Hilton is Yisrael's goy-to girl and her history in the ME is almost as frightening as her threats for a NFZ in Syria. She is to Netanyahu as Monica is to Bilton. ..."
"... I can almost see TheDonald going into the-art-of-the-deal mode and telling Netanyahu no more playing softball, if you want the $38 billion get your fucking fat ass in line with Palestine. ..."
"... The Democrats would have to be out of their stinking minds to put Biden in the running. He is a political dinosaur, erratic in his speech, mean spirited, and is fit to charm no one. He is probably senile. He has an irrational hatred for Putin, so don't count on surviving a Biden presidency, either. Since Sanders was swindled out of the nomination, it would only be the decent thing to do, to give him the nomination, since he at least received a huge number of votes. ..."
"... US citizens have been turning a toy steering wheel for so long, being assured with certainty their whole lives that it's connected to and controls the front wheels. A little over-reaction when the wheel actually does something for once is understandable and expected. ..."
"... After watching Rouhani and Lavrov speeches at the UN it struck me just how inane the US system is that it cannot present a lucid and logical argument through it's political elite. Seriously. The best we can have is Kerry's and Power's emotive obfuscation that is neither cogent nor persuasive. The US is losing its shorts based on rhetoric alone. Remember Kennedy's little photo collection of Cuban countryside littered with missile launchers? Or the Shock and Awe Hour on CNN, live from Baghdad? ..."
"... Clinton and the Democratic party have lost the base, possibly forever. Counting on the war loving, anti-worker, reactionary "center" is the poison the Democrats swallowed. Both the Republican and the Democratic party are damaged beyond repair and this whole "democracy" fraud is wearing thinner than ever. ..."
"... I repeat -- do not blow shit up, like the political system, if you do not know where the pieces will land (and on whom), and how to put them back together again. ..."
"... This has to be the best proof yet that the establishment is totally delusional and has gone off the deep end. This "murderous hostile dictator" to quite a few in this country seems to be the only grownup in the room. God help us with our "betters" thinking like this, we are in for a real shit storm. ..."
"... It seems Clinton left a classified briefing book in her room at a Moscow hotel a while back. I guess we are lucky that it wasn't the infamous nuclear football. ..."
The U.S. presidential election of 2016 is decided. Hillary Clinton will not win. She
knows it:
(You can turn the sound off. It is irrelevant.)
Clinton was
talking
during a video conference of the Laborers' International Union of North
America. She is furious with everything around her. She does not understand why she (again)
failed.
The polls are turning against her. "But Trump is lying!" Of course he is. Everyone
knows he is lying. He is a salesman seeking his own advantage. He is expected to lie and to
exaggerate. He does not even hide it. He is authentic in his lying. That's why he is - to
many people - still a likeable man who one can deep down basically trust.
Hillary Clinton is a politician. She claims not lie. But from her extensive public
record people know that lying is exactly what she does. She is not thereby not authentic.
She does not inspire confidence. Nor does she inspire sympathy. Just see her terrible,
angry performance above.
Does she really believe that
campaign ads with
Michael Hayden, Max Boot and other failed neocons will get her any
votes?
She already lost the young people. She lost the military who are
far less interventionist
than the politicians. No one of the real, non-interventionist
left will ever vote for her. Here move to the right, away from criticizing the Republican
party,
enables Republicans
to win more congressional seats than necessary
:
Through the end of May, the plan to "disaggregate" Trump, as it was described in one
lengthy email, remained a source of frustration for Miranda, the campaign's go-between
on messaging at the DNC. In the same email, subject-lined "Problem with HFA [Hillary For
America]," he argued that the campaign's frame - that "Trump is much worse than regular
Republicans" - would give down-ballot GOP candidates an "easy out" and put every
Democrat not named Clinton at a possible disadvantage. ("It might be a good strategy
ONLY for Clinton," Miranda wrote.) Worse, he added, the strategy would put the party "at
odds" with the its own broader message against Republicanism.
This is a (well deserved) disaster for her party.
There is some Hail Mary chance for the Democrats to still win. Immediately retire
Clinton for medical reasons. Draft Sanders and offer Tulsi Gabbard the vice-presidency.
Otherwise, I predict, Trump will win.
To what outcome?
Nobody knows. Electing Trump is a blind dart throw with unpredictable results. But that
still feels better than to again see a Clinton in the White House.
This morning brings an article in Politico by one of RFK's speech writers on why he is
voting for Trump as the "peace candidate" -- be it ever so humble, even tenuous, when
the alternative is Clinton.
The Guardian has Clinton declaring her magic way to defeat ISIL is to kill Baghdadi
... yup, more of the old-time religious "cut of the head of the snake" mythology
From the get-go 'quickened' US voters were FU Deep State not necessarily USA-USA-Trump.
Nothing's changed. Except being more convinced every day a vote for Trump is the ONLY
means we have to 'smoke the hive'. And buy some time. For better angels to emerge.
And yes, I'm sure someone will take issue with the site BUT the post is written by the
attorney who worked with the gal that discovered Oh Shit Guy's Reddit posts -
"All of this was caused by the amazing sleuthing of a student majoring in eDiscovery
and litigation, then promoted by a Twitter parody account, then expanded upon and
disseminated by an army of Reddit users. Nothing can be weirder than this election,
but I hope this article proves that this revelation didn't involve a "conspiracy"
between Putin and Trump -- it was simply the crowdsourced efforts of people who are sick
and tired of Hillary Clinton's corruption and cover-ups."
Some are speculating that this newly found material is why she canceled her NC
fundraiser on Tuesday and has all but disappeared from the campaign trail.
And I concur, she has lost this election by her own doing. The anger and frustration
she exudes in the vid to the very people expected to volunteer for GOTV calls and
rally's, poll watchers, transporting voters to the polls and so much more shows the
depth of the cocoon she's living in. That's the real Hillary, btw. She is totally
detached and out of touch with her base.
Heh I have been banging on about this for ages and now it is MS. The polls play
catch-up; not because they are rigged though that is definetly easy to do (and some
might be I wouldn't know) but because the polls are run by hangers-on to the PTB,
establishment types who cater to their brethen that can afford the fees and have
expectations concerning the result.
The methods used are deficient, there is a subconscious / old regulatory element in
play, the rules are thus, the procedure is this, the automatic machine analysis (which
nobody except some rare top dogs understand, statistics is a lost art/science) churns
out these results, etc.
To not loose credibility for evah, they have to adjust a bit, get real, and start
getting with what is going on. In fact the polls (in the main, carried out by
independent biz. who charge for their services) are better than, but can be compared to,
the BLS who spew out meaningless numbers that don't reflect the employment situation in
the USA. No doubt at the BLS hordes of employees are busy following the directives and
the laid-down calc. procedures and so on, but they churn out fantasy numbers in favor of
a political imperative.
We make our own reality
is getting not only tired, old
but a point or rebellion. Other measures (GDP) are just as bad.
Demonising of Russia and Putin must stop.
Direct or indirect training and weaponising jihadis must stop.
In that respect the only hope seems Trump.
And that's why US citizens have an obligation to the World: Vote for Trump (otherwise
Clinton wins)
If there is one country in the World that needs regime change, it is the USA.
15 years of warmongering neocons is enough!
Who gives a flying fart about this election or either of the establishment's offerings.
Unfortunately voting by the American electorate will only bestow legitimacy on a corrupt
system of management by those that hide in the shadows and conduct the business of
'national interest' as it were their own.
The Republic is dead! Replaced with an
Imperial executive to which all political power and all the levers of power have been
given under the original Continuity of Government Act declaration on 9/11, which
suspends the Constitution in whole or part under secret clauses. This Act has been
renewed ever since, including recently by Obama, now labeled as a 'State of Emergency'.
Under a SoE all political power is entrusted to the executive branch under the President
who assumes all power. They just have not informed the public on what is entailed when a
SoE is declared. The President has become a figurehead, taking orders from the wealthy
oligarchs, and either exalted or to be dismissed by a Praetorian Guard, whose commanders
in the military security surveillance complex are in the pay of these same
oligarchs.
Congress is now a redundant body playing a farcical role in a grotesque
pantomime of Republicanism. This state of affairs is largely repeated to varying degrees
throughout western civilization or wherever the western oligarch's sphere of influence
extends.
Lies by Trump?As far as I know, I haven't seen any, maybe some walk back on off the cuff
stuff, but remember any news of Trump comes from serial liars who own the MSM, and there
is not one MSM news outlet in America pro Trump, and that includes Fox.
Any accusing lies promoted by serial liars should not be taken as truth.
In his co-conference with Clinton with some military people, Trump talked about the
generals being reduced to "rubble," and said more or less openly he would fire generals
who couldn't deliver. Trump is running on a platform of winning wars, as in conquering
the people instead of just flying over a wasteland created by bombing. He is not the
peace candidate. He is MacArthur versus Hilary's Truman.
Worse than that, demonizing Clinton's foreign policy is making alibis for the real
author of the last eight years' catastrophes, Barack Obama. The US has just openly
attacked Syrian forces in alliance with Islamic State. Just today I read more boasts of
supposedly preemptive attacks, which means unprovoked, by the highly unstable south
Korean state on the north. NATO is moving troops into eastern Europe while preparing for
war. Trump has no problem with this, and pretending Clinton is somehow going to be worse
is more or less insane.
As for the liar thing? Trump did not get billions by being honest. The Clintons pay
taxes, which is probably more than you can say for Trump.
You cannot vote against someone. Either you vote for someone who actually ran for
some of the things you want, or your vote against Trump or Clinton will be read as
support for things you don't want. If you're against the US attacks on the world, then
you need to vote for someone like Gloria La Riva or Jerry White. (Who? You ask.
Precisely.) They at least know that invading other countries is not just a deplorable
vice, but business. Trump is for business, just like Clinton.
Seems a few people are unaware of the fundamental policy of the Outlaw US Empire: Attain
Full Spectrum Domination of the planet and its people as spelled out in its own
publications--Vision 2010 and Vision 2020. Clinton is the one wanting to further that
goal; Trump is not. Neither will actually pursue the interests of the citizenry--only
Stein and the Greens have stated they will. The only neocon I can think of that's as
ugly as Clinton is Cheney.
Thank you, kind sir. Hillary is a bad news bear. One columnist at counterpunch.org
descibed her as a "moral mosster," (tED RALL THE CARTOONIST)
She is a neocon;. Any
country that is not run by US corporations and whose leaders do not contribute to the
Clinton Foundation may be bombed...
I do not ave any speakers hooked up to my Pc, so I
didn't have to listen to her... There are some great new cartoons caLLed Masha and the
Bear - from the dreaded Russia... EXCEllent. Mentioned on rt.com news a douple of months
ago... RT is one of the best news shows in the world.
I rather like the suggestion: "Draft Sanders and offer Tulsi Gabbard the
vice-presidency." Tulsi Gabbard is one of the few people in Congress that is not a crook or an idiot, and
who understands the existential threat posed by nuclear war.
Ppl are actually writing about voting for that or that figure, Clinton, Trump, third
party, Wilders, in different contexts / countries? Like their personal expression on
Facebouk *likes* expressed in a vote has some import or validity or will be even ever
taken into account? (My posts about predictions of the vote in the US are at another
level.)
It is all a complete sham, a circus, but I guess, what else can one do, how
can one live? Ppl need to hang onto their afforded, allowed, 'ersatz' agency, the dot
power of one vote one perso opinion is built-in, deliberately, and as managed by the MSM
and Diebold (other..) is just a scam, a confidence trick. I like Jill Stein, fine, no
results.
Remember for ex. the massive w-wide protests, biggest ever, against the invasion of
Iraq, which had no effect on events at all.
To my mind, the biggest danger the US faces is someone who can distract the electorate
for another term with foreign entanglements. Opposition is organizing across the
left/right spectrum and the depth of the legitimacy crisis is growing with each day of
the Dollary Clump Campaign.
I agree that Trump is a much more attractive lier, but his "abolish the EPA my first
day in office" expresses a death wish for the species I can't reconcile with. Such
stupidity, however and unlike WW3, is survivable and from Trump has the look of a
forward bargaining position, but who can know? Kill us fast or kill us slow? At least
with slow the body may awake before its dead and try to save itself.
Trump has John Bolton as one of his foreign policy advisors. He is likely to become Sec.
of State if Trump wins.
He is more keen on war than Clinton if that is possible. And
it's highly likely Trump will listen to him. Even if he doesn't he will hold enough
power to make an impact.
No matter who wins it is likely the wars will continue.
As to Trump's potential cabinet picks, what's been said is nothing more than media
speculation, particularly the promotion of Bolton by neocon-based media. Given that
former Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn's Trump's main Foreign Policy advisor is an arch adversary
of Bolton, I very much doubt there's any credibility in what's being written in media.
And the hype surrounding Bolton as SoS reached its peak at the end of August with very
little being said since.
Oh jeez Tulsi Gabbard another invention of the CIA connected to hari krishna cults and
everything you'd expect from a poltician made in the same factory as Barack Obama, fake
deracinated unrecognizable name and all.
No one in their right mind should vote for Hillary Clinton, regardless of your feelings
about Trump. There is not only a trail of corruption a mile long with money from Saudi
Arabia and other shady places, but a real threat to the world as we know it in the form
of her warmongering. It appears Hillary and people like George Soros want to flood the
world with refugees after the blow up countries, thereby giving the government reason to
form a police state. The eventual goal seems to be globalization in the form of one
government for one world.
Thats if we survive the nuclear holocaust that would take place if we attack Russia
which no one wants. We need to forge closer with Russia as we share some common
interests and common enemies. No one wants to watch the world burn so the elites can
gain more power. The people are tired of it. It should never have gotten to the point
where its at in America. Its on a bad course. This election is the most important of our
lifetimes as its really for the fate of the human race as we know it
Whoever wins will be seen as illegitimate by half of the country. America is entering
terminal stage, regardless the outcome of this race. With Trump you get the horrible
end, with Clinton - endless horror. I'd vote for Trump.
When Hillary loses, we'll be treated to a bevy of thought-pieces on how only the
suppressed-but-all-too-real power of male chauvinism separated her - "the clearly better
qualified candidate" - from the prize that she deserved. If Bernie Sanders' milquetoast
coffee shop social democrat youths could be successfully re-cast as racist, chair
throwing "Bernie Bros," then anything is possible. Anyone left of Mussolini who has any
spine at all (if such people exist) will be "Naderized" pretty heavily. The only
advantage of the Olympics vs. national elections is that the former, while replete with
much the same sort of rancid schmaltz and mind-killing banality as the latter, is
mercifully short by comparison.
All this is on the assumption that votes count in American "elections," which is pure
nonsense. The votes are fixed always. Besides, the same money owns both parties and the
media (and practically everything else) so what difference does it make who is put in
office (not elected)? None. Words are meaningless coming from a political prostitute's
mouth.
The American election has NOTHING to do with what goes on in Syria. Everything that
happens there which is done by the U.S. is done on orders of the Rothschild cabal in its
City of London, the owners of the U.S. and almost every other nation in the world today.
Rothschild's neo cons carry the orders into action. None of it is random. All of it is
part of their plot.
However, the Russians may have a better plot - simply tell the truth and then act upon
it.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if Trump wins. Voters for Trump are much like voters for
Brexit in Britain. A blind fury against what is being done to them by neo-liberal
banksterism. Which is manifested in racism and xenophobia.
All are being lied to, and
they won't achieve what they want.
It's a sort of popular revolt against neo-liberal corporatism, which expects
consumers to buy, but exports the jobs which might furnish the income for consumption to
China. In the end, corporate chiefs will understand that people have to have income in
order to be able to spend, but not now.
Now we have blind revolt against poverty. The same in de-industrialised Ohio as in
post-industrial Wales. In the latter case, they were being heavily funded by the EU for
reconstruction, but they still voted for Brexit. Trump in Ohio much the same.
Neither candidate ever really address foreign policy. Cuz everyone knows all roads lead
to zion. And all the switches get flipped if anyone touches that rail. So Trump
reverse-messages through "dancing muslims" and "bad bad Iran deal" which serves to focus
attention in a DIRECTION. Not to reality. Cuz reality might get him whacked.
We are all dancing on the edge of sanity. Having lived the very definition of
insanity for more years than one cares to admit. Most can't tell the difference anymore.
All things considered. This is BEST. ELECTION. EVER.
"In fact, in all the years of the so-called War on
Terror, only one potential American president has had the intelligence, the vision, the
sheer sanity to see that America cannot fight the entire world at once; who sees that
America's natural and necessary allies in this fight must include the advanced and
civilized nations that are most exposed and experienced in their own terror wars, and
have the requisite military power and willingness to use it. Only one American candidate
has pointed out how senseless it is to seek confrontation with Russia and China, at the
same time that we are trying to suppress the very jihadist movements that they also are
attacking.
That candidate is Donald Trump."
I've never voted for a Republican, ever (and maybe twice for Democrats), but I expect
to vote for Trump. Clinton is a certifiable nutjob when it comes to destabilizing
countries like Libya and Syria, and provoking Russia. She belongs nowhere near power.
I'm afraid that Trump might behave like a loose canon with respect to Korea, and
other smaller countries. That would still not be the disaster that going toe to toe with
Russia would be.
Srdja Trifkovic, the brilliant foreign affairs editor for Chronicles Magazine, has
given high marks to Trump for a foreign policy speech, and an "advantage Trump" for the
recent commander-in-chief interview.
Last I heard, he has a non-existent replacement for Obamacare (I seriously doubt just
letting companies compete across state lines will solve most of the problems), and
generally seems weak regarding domestic and economic policy. Let's hope he hires good
people, and is not just a good listener, but also makes good calls.
That's precisely my thoughts. Very well said. I'm not American so perhaps my voice
counts for a different perspective than the domestic population but at the same time
it's painfully obvious both candidates are vying for a chance to serve big business.
Perhaps in slightly different ways but they both will surely bow down before most of the
same powerful interests. Both have no interest in reigning in the MIC nor environmental
destruction. Just look at the competition for the Israeli government's blessing.
I feel voting for either major party candidate would be simply perpetuating a broken system.
Very sad state of affairs in the world. My own country is like this but perhaps not quite so in your
face. It's like, I regret voting in the last election for my country's liberal party candidate
because in the end he operates like the conservative incumbent just with a different face. In the
USA it's much more bold faced though.
Trump may be somewhat of a wildcard but I wouldn't count on him being much different
in the end if he indeed wins the election. Who he's already surrounded himself with in
the Republican party is very telling and doesn't exactly point to change in my eyes.
I've never voted for a Republican, ever (and maybe twice for
Democrats), but I expect to vote for Trump.,
Same here. But Trump is not an orthodox Republican. If McCain, Romney, or a Bush were
running against Hillary, I would vote Green, as I did in the last election.
The keys, which are explained in depth in Lichtman's book "Predicting the Next
President: The Keys to the White House 2016" are:
Party Mandate: After the midterm elections, the incumbent party holds more seats
in the U.S. House of Representatives than after the previous midterm elections.
Contest: There is no serious contest for the incumbent party nomination.
Incumbency: The incumbent party candidate is the sitting president.
Third party: There is no significant third party or independent campaign.
Short-term economy: The economy is not in recession during the election campaign.
Long-term economy: Real per capita economic growth during the term equals or exceeds
mean growth during the previous two terms.
Policy change: The incumbent administration effects major changes in national policy.
Social unrest: There is no sustained social unrest during the term.
Scandal: The incumbent administration is untainted by major scandal.
Foreign/military failure: The incumbent administration suffers no major failure in
foreign or military affairs.
Foreign/military success: The incumbent administration achieves a major success in
foreign or military affairs.
Incumbent charisma: The incumbent party candidate is charismatic or a national hero.
Challenger charisma: The challenging party candidate is not charismatic or a national
hero.
The Dems don't have enough keys to win this election, according to Licthman. He sounds
like a Republican but gives the impression that he hates Trump (but that could just be
to maintain respectability with his academic colleagues).
Lichtman's system is pretty simple and assumes that an election turns around whether
voters are satisfied with the performance of the incumbent party. On a basic level,
common sense tells one that that is indeed what elections are about. And in this
election cycle, people are fed up with the status quo. So what the Dems do is run the
most status quo candidate imaginable. The way Dems hoped to get around this problem is
to convince people that this is not a normal election, that Trump is beyond the pale.
(Lichtman follows that line himself in that interview.)
Another factor that might come into play that I haven't seen mentioned in the
mainstream press is that blacks are as fed up with the state of things as anyone. The
Dem strategy of triangulation depends on getting enough demographics into their camp.
But I have a feeling that Hillary will lose a lot of black votes that Obama got. They
showed their loyalty to Obama by voting for Hillary in the primaries. The pressure to
show that loyalty a second time is weaker, since his term is almost over.
Could one argue - a sincere question - that HRC does represent a large part of the
electorate - MIC (war party), security, big corps, media, new media, higher education
and its scams, banking and banksters, health insurance etc. Big. Gov. and all the
employees in there, basically the upper classes and middles?
Yeah, but it's not a majority.
DT represents - or pretends to - some portions of the underclass, veterans, the
left-outs, white workers in de-industralised zones, cops fighting crime, the
nefarious influence of foreigners (criminals etc.), national pref. of a kind, and on
an on?
You'd think as a graduate of Yale Law School she would know that "Why aren't I...."
is incorrect. Maybe she did know that at one time and now it's just the meds.
No fun being a grammar cop, but it"s "Why am I not...." But then as W showed, you
don't have to speak standard English to be the pres.
For those considering not voting, please consider that your vote for Jill Stein this
year could help her get to the 5% threshold that would provide funding and ballot access
for the Green Party in future elections.
The economist Michael Hudson has made the excellent point that a President Trump would
face, in effect, two opposition parties in Congress. So his ability to achieve his
crazier policies would be extremely limited.
He would likely be a one term POTUS, and
during that term the American people would be afforded some breathing space to
acknowledge how off the rails things have gotten, and some time to start to build true
alternatives. Clinton delivers more of the same with the attendant illusion of normality
which provided cover for Obama. More of the same means direct confrontation with Russia
and China.
Nope. The millenials/meme generation/literally everyone under 30, the SJWs young and
old, the MIC horde(who btw are the current class with the most to lose with a vote
against the status quo, and friggin YUGE in number since this is the only remaining
growth industry), the "military"; well the ones who want to keep their jobs, retirees
who remember who Trump really is, everyone in higher education, big Pharma,
"liberals"....
The people voting for Trump are the isolated, vanilla nouveau rich; a few Hollywood
pundits, and racist retirees.
I visit enough of the normal internet and the real street to know this, no poll will
reflect it, and you can't predict anything based on rallies, pundits, or even the
actions and personalities of the candidates themselves. FEAR is what sells Hillary, not
her personality or lack of. Everyone is afraid of Russia, etc bc of the current regime's
lies. And by regime I mean the media, too. Hell there are two documentaries at the top
of NEtflix's list right now glorifying the Nazis in Ukraine and the White Helmets farce
in Syria. Five Star rated. Literally every current show on TV and most films find a way
to reference scary Russia. The "savvy" TV watcher is WITH HER to the point that they can
laugh off her collapsing in public like it's no big deal!!
The "non-interventionist left" is literally in the few thousands at most. Hell half
of us are here on this board.
Anyway it doesn't matter. The officials/spinmeisters will stay, just like Obama kept
Bush's people. Trump will fall in line if he hasn't already, and when they show him the
MIC balance sheets he'll be just as much if not more "ALL IN" than Clinton. He's already
pushing for and even more fascistic police force.
She'll have to keel over permanently for Trump to win. Even if he wins by a hair,
there will be malfeasance.
The words that come out of Hillary's mouth, would have to be spoken by someone else, to
be believed. She is totally maxed out on her lack of credibility. The Clintons sold out
working people a long time ago.
b:
"There is some Hail Mary chance for the Democrats to still win. Immediately retire
Clinton for medical reasons. Draft Sanders and offer Tulsi Gabbard the vice-presidency."
Yeah, good to see some out-of-the-box thinking, especially when it reflects my multiple
comments on this august blog going back to February when I
predicted
Hilton will bow out or be knocked out and Biden will step in. I'm
stickin'
to that prediction.
But at this point Sanders is a lot farther out of the box than Biden, and I like
that. Maybe a side-deal with Sanders is the way the Democrats shut him up.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"Electing Trump is a blind dart throw with unpredictable results. But that still
feels better than to again see a Clinton in the White House."
I tend to agree. Hilton would probably be less disastrous for the domestic side of
things, what with 3-4 USSCt nominations coming up and the whole racism/illegal migrants
pot about to boil over. But Hilton is Yisrael's goy-to girl and her history in the ME is
almost as frightening as her threats for a NFZ in Syria. She is to Netanyahu as Monica
is to Bilton.
I can almost see TheDonald going into the-art-of-the-deal mode and telling Netanyahu
no more playing softball, if you want the $38 billion get your fucking fat ass in line
with Palestine.
If Biden steps in, it's election over. Bernie, I don't know. I don't think the
country is going to elect a septuagenarian Jew ideologue over a septuagenarian Queens
blow-hard with bad hair.
no matter how much it shouts
no matter if it is alive or dead
nsa spielberg lucas vision computer simulation
to saturn infinity
or body double thinner look alike e
she it cannot win a race or a fight
No One Beats Al Qaeda
The US has tried for years to beat Al Qaeda, but now, after Americans have given up
much freedom to central government and borrowed trillions of dollars from central banks,
there is more terrorism than ever before. Nevertheless, don't blame the FBI or the CIA,
or Bush or Obama. There is no shame in being beaten by the best.
Al Qaeda must be at least a generation ahead of the US – both strategically and
technologically.
In fact, the only weakness of Al Qaeda is that they keep leaving their passports at
the crime scene, but consider that their passports are indestructable. America simply
doesn't have the technology yet to make indestructable passports, so clearly, those Al
Qaeda scientists in those caves in Afghanistan are at least a generation ahead of the
US. Al Qaeda passports are so tough that they were found on the street after the towers
collapsed – unscathed. Maybe this doesn't sound as scary as it should … until one
considers that none of the four black boxes were recovered from the towers. So,
America's most indestructable technology (black boxes) were vaporized under conditions
where Al Qaeda passports survived – unscathed. It's not as if American black boxes are
crap either (they have never been completely destroyed before); it's that Al Qaeda
technology is just that good.
What other possible explanation could there be? It's almost as if …
See what I mean about strategic brilliance? Al Qaeda almost tricked me into
considering whether 9/11 could be an inside job, and whether those Al Qaeda scientists
in those Afghan caves are not really a generation ahead of the US, but an inside job is
clearly impossibe because the CIA is not allowed to operate inside the US.
The evidence for Al Qaeda superiority is overwhelming. Consider that Al Qaeda knocked
down three towers with only two planes! No one else could have done that. Two planes hit
two towers, and then a third tower (WTC7) collapsed a few hours later. The NIST
explained a few years later that it was an ordinary office fire that resulted in what
everyone says looks exactly like a controlled demolition, but how is it that only Al
Qaeda knew that WTC 7 was the only building in the world that would collapse exactly
like a controlled demolition as a result of an ordinary office fire? What's more, they
somehow tricked the owner, Larry Silverstein, and John Kerry too, into claiming years
earlier that we brought WTC 7 down as a controlled demolition because it was badly
damaged, but how did they trick America's best into confessing to a conspiracy that
never happened? Clearly, they even have some kind of mind control.
I could go on for pages and pages, but there is one hope – Israel. Israel may lag
behind Al Qaeda scientists in those Afghan caves, but their strategic brilliance may be
as advaned as that of Al Qaeda, so America's best bet is to give Israel all of our
technology, and to borrow trillions more dollars and give them to Israel.
Unfortunately, Al Qaeda has already thought of this, and may have successfully
neutralized Israel when it tricked several Mossad agents into setting up cameras ahead
of time on 9/11 and dancing with joy when the towers collapsed. Even if Al Qaeda's
preemptive move has made it politically impossible to give everything to Israel, at
least Israel is our strongest ally in the region and is thus far more important than
before 9/11 …
The Democrats would have to be out of their stinking minds to put Biden in the running.
He is a political dinosaur, erratic in his speech, mean spirited, and is fit to charm no
one. He is probably senile. He has an irrational hatred for Putin, so don't count on
surviving a Biden presidency, either. Since Sanders was swindled out of the nomination,
it would only be the decent thing to do, to give him the nomination, since he at least
received a huge number of votes.
Sanders has discredited himself. He really WAS a sheepdog!
Evil vs. awful? Why not
vote Green?
Peace is not the absence of conflict, it is the presence of justice
-- Martin Luther King
US citizens have been turning a toy steering wheel for so long, being assured with certainty
their whole lives that it's connected to and controls the front wheels. A little over-reaction when
the wheel actually does something for once is understandable and expected.
After watching Rouhani and Lavrov speeches at the UN it struck me just how inane the US
system is that it cannot present a lucid and logical argument through it's political
elite. Seriously. The best we can have is Kerry's and Power's emotive obfuscation that
is neither cogent nor persuasive. The US is losing its shorts based on rhetoric alone.
Remember Kennedy's little photo collection of Cuban countryside littered with missile
launchers? Or the Shock and Awe Hour
on CNN, live from Baghdad?
Clinton and the Democratic party have lost the base, possibly forever. Counting on the
war loving, anti-worker, reactionary "center" is the poison the Democrats swallowed.
Both the Republican and the Democratic party are damaged beyond repair and this whole
"democracy" fraud is wearing thinner than ever.
Did you all catch Netanyahu's UN address? It was more Warner Bros cartoonery of course
put notably, only the US, and a few puupets like Jordan and Egypt were there to listen
to him. So it was like a standup comedian performing to a packed audience his family and
and like 2 friends.
Didn't someone say that about the fascists in Germany? "Oh, Hindenberg, von Papen, and
the army will keep him in line." I'm not saying Trump is a fascist (still at the theory
and not practice of mass violence), but he is a volatile and dangerously delusional
demagogue.
Hasn't anybody ever heard of the notion of "The Imperial Presidency"? I mean, Arthur
Schlesinger only wrote a damn best-seller on it.
Assuming, bizarrely, that he can't ginger up enough Tea Partiers to ram his agenda
through (they effectively run the House), he still has plenty of executive authority and
will find more than enough ambitious hacks to do his bidding in the Trump
"Administration." The Presidential limo should be a clown car.
And further assuming, contra to sejomoje fine exposition at 65, he oddly enough gets
elected. The last I saw, he still fails in the Electoral College, despite The Duckhead's
rise in the polls.
I repeat -- do not blow shit up, like the political system, if you do not know where
the pieces will land (and on whom), and how to put them back together again.
Trump could
easily
fuck up, and get us all killed. Could he be impeached
before he did serious damage? Who knows?
For real change, don't vote Orange. Or Greeen. Vote Red.
Years ago, during the Bush v. Gore debates, the sound was off on the TV and my wife (who
doesn't follow politics) made the remark: "Gore is going to lose". I asked her why she
thought so and she said "Bush seems very comfortable with who he is, Gore doesn't look
like it" (this was after the bit where Gore charged the podium and Bush looked back, a
bit surprised and amused.
The point is this: I have come to believe that debates are won and lost largely on
visuals - it's like a cattle auction. The one with the greatest presence, the poise, the
body language and the one you feel comfortable with is the one that wins. The media may
care deeply about whether the candidate correctly identified some obscure Iraqi general,
but the public doesn't really care.
It will be an interesting debate to see (I'm tempted to watch it with the sound off).
Evil reinforces evil and unchecked, leads to Orwell's chilling outlook: "a boot stamping
on a human face - forever".
The duopoly is a shell game. The more focused one is on finding the lesser-evil
pebble, the less one is aware that they are being played. And the more that is lost, the
more eager are the dupes to play again.
It may be that nothing changes until the 'reset'
(the point at which the "music
stops" and failure can no longer be covered up)
but still, I'd rather light a candle
than curse the darkness.
That's liberalism's fault, not the left's. They're the religious
wackadoos trying to build a bourgeois utopia, not us! You and I both know the liberal
State is a self-enforcing fraud designed to manage the affairs of (and only of) the
bourgeoisie and their property.
I repeat -- do not blow shit up, like the political system, if you do not know where
the pieces will land (and on whom), and how to put them back together again.
And
WHY NOT?
I'm in Uncle Sambo's dominion, too, but that doesn't mean that I don't see the whole
stinkin' show needs to be blown up, like that scene in
Platoon
when the suicide
bomber runs into the command room of the Americans during the night raid. Beauty
scene...and their faces! If Trump wants to 'splode the whole thing, perhaps for the
reason the Frontline feature asserts of him being lampooned at the 2011 White House
Correspondents Dinner, then I'm just dandy with that. Besides, your scaremongering of
The Big Orange One, intermixed with...oh wait, your whole post is that. Pure,
unadulterated scaremongering. Have you even looked at his opponent and that prospect? I
see you have warmth for the Russians in Donetsk, so why wouldn't you want to take a
chance with Trump? He has repeated his respect for Russia and their leadership, DESPITE
the negative effect that the fruits of propaganda in recent years would entail. He has
gone out on a limb for Russia.
And I respect that.
At the very least, I have heard someone mention, maybe on the Saker boards, that
Donald will be so inept (perhaps due to gridlock) that he will effectively freeze the
gears of empire. I'm sure several Generals, as he says, would appreciate that, knowing
that suicide is on the horizon with Hillary. Get out of here with that "Donald's small
fingers on the red button" thing, Rufus. Take it back to Slate.
More power, more money, more control goes to a smaller group of people. We were
disenfranchised, without noticing it. The financiers and their new nobility of
discourse took over the world as completely as the aristocracy did in 11th century.
Russia with its very limited democracy
is still better off: their nobility
of discourse polled less than three per cent of the votes in the last elections,
though they are still heavily represented in the government.
The last decisive battle for preservation of democracy now takes place in the
US. Its unlikely champion, Donald Trump
, is hated by the political establishment,
by the bought media, by instigated minorities as much as Putin, Corbyn or Le Pen are
hated.
I think she was being sarcastic. She was talking to a trade union and - probably - this
was not meant to become public.
The so called "right to work" is highly popular in the
US. It means trade unions cannot force their membership on you when you work in
unionized industries.
German trade unions never did this. When there is a strike you simply do not get
paid. Union membership is kind of insurance. In industries like the car industry (or
airlines, transport) employers cannot keep services running with non unionized labor.
So when Hillary turns against the "right for non union membership" she is doing
something in support of the labor bureaucracy unpopular to something like 75 percent of
the population. It is useless anyway as this seems state regulated.
Neither Obama nor Sanders seem to have fallen into a similar trap.
Donald Trump has made this the most difficult election to assess since 1984. We have
never before seen a candidate like Donald Trump, and Donald Trump may well break
patterns of history that have held since 1860.
We've never before seen a candidate who's spent his life enriching himself at the
expense of others. He's the first candidate in our history to be a serial fabricator,
making up things as he goes along. Even when he tells the truth, such as, "Barack
Obama really was born in the U.S.," he adds two lines, that Hillary Clinton started
the birther movement, and that he finished it, even though when Barack Obama put out
his birth certificate, he didn't believe it. We've never had a candidate before who
not just once, but twice in a thinly disguised way, has incited violence against an
opponent. We've never had a candidate before who's invited a hostile foreign power to
meddle in American elections. We've never had a candidate before who's threatened to
start a war by blowing ships out of the water in the Persian Gulf if they come too
close to us. We've never had a candidate before who has embraced as a role model a
murderous, hostile foreign dictator. Given all of these exceptions that Donald Trump
represents, he may well shatter patterns of history that have held for more than 150
years, lose this election even if the historical circumstances favor it.
and
I think the fact that he's a bit of a maverick, and nobody knows where he stands on
policy, because he's constantly shifting. I defy anyone to say what his immigration
policy is, what his policy is on banning Muslims, or whoever, from entering the
United States, that's certainly a factor. But it's more his history in Trump
University, the Trump Institute, his bankruptcies, the charitable foundation, of
enriching himself at the expense of others, and all of the lies and dangerous things
he's said in this campaign, that could make him a precedent-shattering candidate.
and for some sanitiy in who to vote for
and, you know, I've seen this movie before. My first vote was in 1968, when I was the
equivalent of a millennial, and lots of my friends, very liberal, wouldn't vote for
Hubert Humphrey because he was part of the Democratic establishment, and guess what?
They elected Richard Nixon.
Re: the academic with the perfect record of predicting presidential races.
" We've never had a candidate before who has embraced as a role model a
murderous, hostile foreign dictator. "
This has to be the best proof yet that the establishment is totally delusional and
has gone off the deep end. This "murderous hostile dictator" to quite a few in this
country seems to be the only grownup in the room. God help us with our "betters"
thinking like this, we are in for a real shit storm.
It seems Clinton left a classified briefing book in her room at a Moscow hotel a while
back. I guess we are lucky that it wasn't the infamous nuclear football.
"... If Mr Pat Buchanan were running, he would be in good stead save or his speaking style which is far more formal. Mr. Trump's carefree (of sorts) delivery punches through and gives the impression that he's an everyman. His boundless energy has that sense earnest sincerity. His "imperfections" tend to work in his favor. But if his message was counter to where most people are already at - he would not be the nominee. ..."
"... We Christians are in Hillary Clinton's Basket of Deplorables." ..."
"Conservative" Christians aren't going to stop voting
Republican. They're just going to offer a different
reason for doing it, when asked.
I will bet all the
money in my pockets against all the money in Rod's
pockets that there will NEVER, in either of our
lifetimes, be a time when he feels compelled by his
principles to vote for a Democratic candidate for
federal office over a Republican one.
And finally, I note that someone above asked a
version of the same question I've periodically had: What
does Dreherdom look like? If orthodox Christians
controlled the levers of power, what do you propose to
DO with your (cultural AND legal) authority? And what
will be the status of the "other" in that brave new
world?
[NFR: They will be captured and enslaved and sent
to work in the
boudin
mines. And I will spend whatever percentage
of the Gross National Product it takes to hire the
Rolling Stones to play "Exile On Main Street" live, from
start to finish, in a national broadcast that I will
require every citizen to watch, on pain of being
assigned to hard labor in the boudin mines. Also, I will
eat boudin. - RD]
[Connor: While I can't speak for Rod, I can speak for
many traditional Catholics. The end goal is the
re-establishment of the social reign of Christ, which
means a majority Christian nation, Christian culture,
and a state which governs according to Christian
principles (read Quas Primas). In that situation, and in
that situation alone, would the Ben Op no longer be
necessary.]
That's interesting. Well, I think you're
right that about 3/4 of the readers would lose their
minds if that was stated as an explicit political goal.
It would confirm in the minds of many the suspicion that
the primary strategy of the religious right is the
establishment of an anti-democratic, theocracy or
Caesaropapist regime. I would consider that the extreme
"utopian" or some would even say "totalitarian" position
of religious conservatives and not "conservative" in any
sense that I understand "Conservatism".
Saltlick's minimal requirement seems to moderate that
goal to "a national reaffirmation that our rights, as
partially defined in the Constitution and Bill of
Rights, come from God the Creator, that life is valuable
from the moment of conception, and that the traditional
family is the best promoter of sound moral, cultural and
economic health.", but even in that he regards it as
only a half-measure for Saltlick. Needless to say, what
a "traditional" family is would need some definition.
If nothing short of establishing the City of God on
earth would secure the comfort of some Christians then
that is a pretty high bar and you have every right to
feel insecure… as do the rest of us.
I would be curious to know how many of your
co-religionists on these boards share your view? And how
many would reject it?
Mr Dreher, I always read your articles with great
interest, although I often disagree with you. For
example, I don't think anybody of any political
persuasion is going to try to stamp out Christianity or
those who espouse it. Indeed, I think many people will
be delighted if all Christians would exercise the
Benedict Option. A lot of people are tired of the
Religious Right's attempt to gain political power in
order to impose Christian views of morality. A lot of
people believe that there should be a separation of
church and state, not only in the Constitutional sense
of having no state-established religion, but also in the
general sense that morality should be a private matter,
not the subject of politics.
[NFR: That's
incredibly naive. Aside from procedural laws, all laws
are nothing but legislated morality. Somebody's morality
is going to be reflected in law. It is unavoidable. -
RD]
Michelle: Obama advisor Al Sharpton has been
responsible for stirring up more Jew hatred than Trump.
Have you ever given a care about that? Do you care that
Hillary's Mexican and Muslim immigrants are sure to be
more antisemitic than the native whites of the US that
you fret about over and over?
Sharpton isn't
running for president and I didn't vote for him when he
was. Same for Jesse Jackson. I'm well aware of
antisemitism within the black community but doubt it
comes anywhere close to that of the alt-right and
nationalist groups, who foment hate against both blacks
and Jews. And duh, of course there's plenty of
anti-semitism among Muslims. Who's pretending otherwise.
It also appears that you didn't read what I wrote.
I
favor strong borders but think you can do so without
demagoguery and appealing to people's baser instincts
and hatreds, which is what Trump does. I realize all you Trump apologists aren't about to
recognize the danger the man poses. I don't care as long
as there are enough people who do to keep him out of the
presidency.
Rod, you clearly have unresolved cognitive dissonance,
because if your vote is based on which candidate is best
with religious liberty and the right of Christians to
live as Christians, the answer is clear and unambiguous:
Trump. Yet you refuse to vote for him.
The author of
this piece actually has you nailed perfectly, which is
why it makes you so uncomfortable. He sees that you are
absolving yourself from the consequences of political
engagement by acting like you can stay firm on your
principles, while refusing to choose from the only two
real sides on offer. That choice is the messy business
of politics, and inevitably imperfect because politics
is a human practice and humans are fallen. Because you
are unwilling to make that choice, you are out of the
politics business whether you realize it or not.
What you have not abandoned, but I believe should
when it comes to the topics of politics, is the public
square.
You recognize that your generation failed to fight.
You very clearly have no intention of fighting even now.
You have decided to build a Benedict Option because you
think that's the only viable option. That's fine. In
fact, I heartily approve.
But other people have chosen differently. They have
chosen to fight. Donald Trump for one. You might not
like his methods. But he's not willing to see his
country destroyed without doing everything he can to
stop it. He's not alone. Many people are standing up and
recognizing that though the odds are long, they owe it
to their children and grandchildren to stand up and be
counted. That choice deserves respect too, Rod.
The problem with you is not the BenOp, but your
active demonization of those who actually have the
temerity to fight for their country instead of
surrendering it to go hide in your BenOp bunker with
you.
Trump, the alt-right, etc. may be wrong
metaphysically and they may be wrong ethically, but they
are right about some very important things – things that
you, Rod Dreher, and your entire generation of
conservatives were very, very wrong on. Rather than
admit that, you want to stand back from the fight,
pretending you're too gosh darned principled to soil
your hands voting for one of the two candidates who have
a shot to be our president, and acting like you're a
morally superior person for doing so.
You should focus on the important work of building
and evangelizing for BenOp, and leave the field of
political discourse to those who are actually willing to
engage in the business of politics.
"I realize all you Trump apologists aren't about to
recognize the danger the man poses. I don't care as long
as there are enough people who do to keep him out of the
presidency."
So basically this boils down to you
asking us to trust that your gut is right in spite of
what we can see with our lying eyes?
Yeah, no thanks.
So many colorful descriptions of how Trump lies from so
many commenters… Could y'all give at least one that
doesn't fit his opponent perfectly and even with double
intensity?
Michelle: Obama advisor Al Sharpton has been responsible
for stirring up more Jew hatred than Trump. Have you
ever given a care about that? Do you care that Hillary's
Mexican and Muslim immigrants are sure to be more
antisemitic than the native whites of the US that you
fret about over and over?
Rod, when you say the following, you articulate exactly
why I have reluctantly become a libertarian:
-"On a
practical level, that means that I will no longer vote
primarily on the social issues that have dictated my
vote in the past, but I will vote primarily for
candidates who will be better at protecting my
community's right to be left alone."-
Last year after listening to the same-sex marriage
oral arguments presented before the Supreme Court, I
concluded that libertarianism and either the current
Libertarian Party or some spinoff offers the best that
those of us with traditional religious and moral
convictions can hope for in a decidedly post-Christian
America. I wrote about why I believe this to be so at
http://www.skiprigney.com/2015/04/29/how-the-ssm-debate-made-me-a-libertarian/
I don't believe for a minute that the majority of
elected officials in the Republican Party have the
backbone to stand up for religious liberty in the face
of corporate pressure. You need look no farther than how
the Republicans caved last year in Indiana on the
protection of religious liberty.
There are many libertarians who are going to work to
protect the rights of people to do things that undermine
the common good. But, I have more faith that they'll
protect the rights of a cultural minority such as
traditionalist Christians than I have in either the
Republicans or the Democrats.
It isn't true that Trump and his supporters are against
identity politics. It's just that they have a far
simpler view of identity politics. There are white
people, and there are blah people. White people will be
in charge, and blah people can have a piece of the pie
to the extent they agree to pretend to be white people.
Cecelia wonders: "Are we as a people really capable of
being citizens of a Republic or are we simply fools to
be manipulated by people like Trump?"
My two cents: We're capable of being citizens of a
Republic if our government creates the conditions for a
thriving middle class: the most important condition
being good, high-paying jobs that allow people to live
an independent existence. The vast majority of
manufacturing jobs have been shipped overseas, and even
higher-skilled jobs (such as research and development)
are increasingly being outsourced as well.
If you look at the monthly payroll jobs reports put
out by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, you will see that
the vast majority of new jobs are in retail trade,
health care and social assistance, waitresses and
bartenders, and government. Most of these jobs are
part-time jobs. None of these jobs produce any goods
than can be exported. Aside from government jobs, these
are not jobs that pay well enough for people to thrive
independently. This is why more Americans aged 25-34
live with their parents than independently with spouses
and children of their own. It is also why many people
now must work multiple jobs in order to make ends meet.
As for government jobs, they are tax-supported, and thus
a drain on the economy. I'm not a libertarian. I
recognize that government provides many crucial
services. But it is unproductive to have too many
bureaucrats living off of tax revenues.
Basically, the middle class is disappearing. Without
a thriving middle class, democracy is unsustainable.
Struggling people filled with hate and resentment are
ripe for manipulation by nefarious forces.
Spain's Francisco Franco understood this very well.
His goal was to make it unthinkable for his country to
descend into civil war ever again. He achieved this.
Before Franco, Spain was a Third World h*llhole plagued
by radical ideologies like communism, regional
separatism, and anarchism. [Fascism had its following as
well, but it was never too popular. The Falange (which
was the closest thing to a fascist movement in Spain,
though it was not really fascist, as it was profoundly
Christian and rejected Nietzschean neo-paganism) was
irrelevant before Francoism. Under Francoism, it was one
of the three pillars that supported the regime (the
other two being monarchists and Catholics), but it was
never the most influential pillar.] When Franco died,
Spain was the ninth-largest economy in the world, and
the second-fastest growing economy in the world (behind
only Japan). It became a liberal democracy almost
overnight. When Franco was on his deathbed, he was asked
what he thought his most important legacy was. He
replied, "The middle class." Franco was not a democrat,
but he'd created the conditions for liberal democracy in
Spain.
To get back to the US, we now have a Third World
economy. We can't too surprised that our politics also
look increasingly like those of a Third World country.
Thus, the rise of Trump, Sanders, the alt-right, the
SJW's, Black Lives Matter, etc.
The evolution of the MSM into an
American version of Pravda/Izvestia has been a lengthy
process and dates back at least to the days of Walter
Lippmann (ostensibly a journalist but upon whom
Roosevelt, Truman and JFK had no qualms about calling
for advice).
With the emergence of the Internet and the phenomenon
of the blogosphere, the MSM has no choice but to cast
off whatever pretensions to objectivity they may have
had and, instead, now preach to the choir so they can
keep themselves viable in an increasingly competitive
market where more people get their news from such as
Matt Drudge than from the NY-LA Times or the WaPo
Suppose a more composed candidate stood up against the
PC police, and generally stood for these same 6
principles, and did so in a much more coherent and
rational manner. I propose that he would be demolished
within no time at all. Take a Pat Buchanan…how do you
think he would be doing in this election? Trumps three
ring show prevents the charges against him from finding
any fertile soil to grow in. If he ran on principle
instead of capturing an undefined spirit, if he tried to
answer the charges against him in a rational manner, all
it would do it produce more fertile soil for the PC
charges to stick. Trump may have stumbled upon the model
for future conservative candidates when running in a
nation where the mainstream press is so thoroughly
against you. Just make a lot of noise and ignore them.
If you engage in the argument with them, they'll destroy
you.
@Cecelia: The issue is not Trump – it is those who
support him. Are we as a people really capable of being
citizens of a Republic or are we simply fools to be
manipulated by people like Trump ?
Yes. Tell me,
during the Great Depression, as Nazi Germany and
Imperial Japan began their march to what would bring
this world to war and state-sponsored genocide, why did
my grandparents and my parents who were teenagers in the
30s not succumb to all this doom, gloom, and anger at
the supposed lack of prospects for improvement in their
lives that Trump's followers whine about? By any
standard, conditions then were worse for the white
working class than is the case today, and yes, my
grandparents were working class: one grandfather worked
for the railroad, the other for a lumber mill. And yes,
there was alcoholism, and domestic abuse, and crime, and
suicide amongst the populace in the 1930s. The role of
religion was more pervasive then, but to tell the truth,
I expect Rod would describe my grandparents on both side
as Moral Therapeutic Deists; by Rod's standard I believe
that is true for most Christians throughout history.
Just what is different about today, that brings all
this rage and resentment? Could it be that racial and
ethnic and religious minorities, and women now have a
piece of the pie and a good part of the white working
class cannot stand it?
And Trump doesn't scare me nearly as much as does the
fact that so very many Americans support him, whether
wholeheartedly swallowing his poison, or because they
close their eyes and minds and hearts to just what kind
of a man he is.
The promotion of an increasingly interconnected world in
and of itself isnt necessarily bad. However, the
annihilation of culture, religion, and autonomy at the
hands of multinational corporations and a Gramscian
elite certainly is – and that is what is happening under
what is referred to as globalization. The revolt against
the evil being pushed out of Brussels and Washington has
now spread into the West itself. May the victory of the
rebels be swift and complete.
"You're misdefining "grievance industry;" the central
tenet of the grievance industry is that whatever
happens, white people are to blame and should continue
paying for it."
If we all accept your definition then
we can't argue with you. Whatever you want to call it,
there is an entire industry (most conservative media)
that feeds a victimization mentality among whites,
conservatives, evangelicals etc (all those labels apply
to me by the way) that closely resembles the grievance
outlook. The only difference is in what circles it is
taken seriously. Why else do so many of us get so bent
out of shape when employees have the audacity to say
"happy holidays" at the department store. As made
apparent on this blog we do need to be realistic and
vigilant about the real threats and the direction the
culture is going, but by whining about every perceived
slight and insisting everyone buy into our version of
"Christian America" (while anointing a vile figure like
Trump as our strongman) we are undercutting the
legitimate grievances we do have.
Everyone has heard how far is moving small car
production to Mexico and forwarded saying no one in
America will lose their jobs because the production will
be shifted to SUVs and other vehicles.
That's not the
problem the problem is instead of creating more jobs in
America the jobs are being created in Mexico and not
helping Americans.
"BenOp is fascinating, but most cultural conservative
now active in the game will not drop out. They may not
like the adrenalin rush politics gives them more than
they like Jesus–but they ain't going to give it up."
Exactly. This is why Christian boycotts never succeed.
They claim that they hate Disneyworld because of their
pro-gay policies, but when they have to choose between
Jesus and a Fun Family Vacation, Jesus always loses.
What happens when the status quo media turns a
presidential election into a referendum regarding the
media's ability to shape public opinion and direct
"purchasing" choices?
The Corporate Media is corrupt and Americans are
waking up to it.
This will almost always mean voting for the
Republicans in national elections, but in a primary
situation, I will vote for the Republican who can
best be counted on to defend religious liberty, even
if he's not 100 percent on board with what I
consider to be promoting the Good. If it means
voting for a Republican that the defense hawks or
the Chamber of Commerce disdain, I have no problem
at all with that.
How is this different than cultural conservatives
voted before Trump?
We have had three decades of culture wars and everyone
can pretty much agree that the traditionalists lost. Now
whether Dreher et all lost because the broader culture
refused to listen or because they simply couldn't make a
convincing argument is a question that surrounds a very
particular program pursued by conservatives,
traditionalists and the religious right. It is certain
that the Republican Party as a vehicle for those values
has been taken out and been beat like a rented mule. It
seems to that Josh Stuart has pulled a rabbit out of the
hat. Trump is, if anything, pretty incoherent and
whatever "principles" he represents were discovered in
the breach; a little like bad gunnery practice, one shot
low, one shot lower and then a hit. If Trump represents
anything it is the fact that the base of the party was
not who many of us thought they were. Whatever Christian
values we thought they were representing are hardly
recognizable now.
What truly puzzles me more and
increasingly so is Rod's vision of what America is
supposed to be under a Dreher regime. I'm not sure what
that regime looks like? Behind all the theological
underpinning and high-sounding abstractions what does a
ground-level political and legislative program for
achieving a society he is willing to whole-heartedly
participate in look like?
Politics is a reflection of culture but culture is
responsive to politics. What political order does the
Ben Op crowd wish to install in place of the one we have
now – short of the parousia – and how does that affect
our life and autonomy as citizens and individuals? He
says Christians just want to be left alone but they seem
to have made and are still making a lot of noise for
people who want to be left alone so I have to assume
they want something over and above being left alone.
I guess the question I want to zero in on is; What
minimal, concrete programmatic or cultural change or
changes would necessitate abandoning the Ben Op? Or
equally, what is the post-Ben Op vision of America that
allows Rod and company to relax?
a couple "ideas" come to mind. re: deplorable. SOME (no
value in speculating or establishing a number) are
deplorable. it's funny (actually, quite sad) Trump's we
don't have time to be politically correct mantra is
ignored when his opponent (a politician who helped
establish the concept of politically correctness) steals
a page from his playbook. on a certain level, perhaps
the eastern elite, intellectual liberal grabbed the
"irony" hammer from the toolbox? ever the shrewd,
calculating (narcissistic and insecure) carny barker,
Trump has not offered any "new" ideas. he's merely (like
any politician) put his finger in the air and decided to
"run" from the "nationalist, racist, nativist, side of
the politically correct/incorrect betting line. at the
end of the day, there are likely as many deplorable
folks on the Clinton bandwagon; it's just (obviously)
not in her interests to expose these "boosters" at HER
rallies/fundraising events. in many ways it speaks to
the lesser of two evils is still evil "idea". politics –
especially national campaigns are not so much about
which party/candidate has the better ideas, but rather
which is less deplorable.
"Instead, it has everything to do with his
wink/nod attitude toward the alt-right and white
nationalist groups and with his willingness to
appropriate their anti-semitic, racist memes for his own
advancement. He's dangerous. Period. Dangerous and scary
to anyone familiar with lynchings, pogroms, and mob
violence. To anyone familiar with history. Trump has
unleashed dark forces that will not easily be quelled
even if, and probably especially if, he loses. The
possibility that he might win has left me wondering
whether I even belong in this country any more, no
matter how much sympathy I might feel for the folks
globalism has left behind."
One can just as easily make the point that the
globalists have unleashed dark forces against white
people and Western civilization that are nor easily
quelled.
The most interesting part of the essay is near the end,
where he briefly discusses how non-whites might react to
our political realignment.
After all, will the white
liberal be able to manipulate these groups forever?
For example, we are seeing the 'official black
leaders' who represent them on TV shift from being
activist clergymen to being (white paid and hosed) gay
activists and mulattoes from outside the mainstream of
black culture. How long can this continue?
"Call it anti-Semitic if
you want but all my Jewish cousins and the several other
Jewish business associates I know feel uncontrollable
hate for Trump.
"thinly buried in his rhetoric: (1) borders matter;
(2) immigration policy matters; (3) national interests,
not so-called universal interests, matter; (4)
entrepreneurship matters; (5) decentralization matters;
(6) PC speech-without which identity politics is
inconceivable-must be repudiated."
They seem to think that any attempt to stop mass 3rd
world immigration, stop pc thought police, or up hold
Christian-ish values are a direct threat to them."
The Jews, having lived as strangers among foreign
peoples for the better part of 2 millennia, have always
been on the receiving end of racial hatred. As a result
many Western Jews have an instinctive mistrust of
nationalist movements and have a natural tendency towards
globalism.
The media has done a splendid job of portraying Trump
as the next Hitler, so, understandably, there's a lot of
fear. My Jewish grandparents are terrified of the man.
I am not a globalist, and (due to the SCOTUS issue)
will probably vote for Trump, even though I have no love
for the man himself. I think the "Trump the racist" meme
is based on confirmation bias, not reality, but I
understand where the fear comes from.
"I think that many casual hearers of Ben Op ideas
assume that Ben Op is a one-dimensional, cultural
dropping-out of cultural/religious conservatives into
irrelevant enclaves.
To me, Ben-Op is more returning to the Tocquevillean
idea that the best American ways of living work their
way up from organic, formative local communities that
have largely disappeared from our socio-cultural
experience. Without independent formative local
communities, we human beings are mere products rolling
off the assembly line that serves the interests of the
elites of our big government-big business-big education
conglomerate.
If these formative communities hold to authentic,
compassionate Judeo-Christian values and practices, all
the better–for everybody! Ben Op will offer an
alternative to the assembly-line politically correct
cultural warriors being produced by many of our elite
cultural institutions."
Bingo.
If you want to fundamentally transform the culture,
you have to withdraw from it, at least partially. But
there's no need to wall yourself off. A Benedict Option
community can and should be politically active,
primarily at the local level, where the most good can be
done.
The Benedictine monks from whom Rod draws inspiration
didn't just shut themselves up and refuse to have
anything to do with the crumbling world around them.
They retreated into their monasteries to strengthen
their souls, and then went out into the world and
rebuilt it for Christ.
"Clinton assassination fantasies"? I call bullsh*t on
that notion. Trump merely pointed our the absolute
hypocrisy of elites like Clinton and her ilk, the guns
for me but not for thee crowd. He was not fantasizing
about her assassination. Far from it. To suggest he was
is to engage in the same sort of dishonesty for which
Clinton is so well known.
I never cared much for Trump
but he has all the right enemies and is growing on me.
"It isn't true that Trump and his supporters are against
identity politics. It's just that they have a far
simpler view of identity politics. There are white
people, and there are blah people. "
They love Ben
Carson and Allan West, last time I checked neither men
were white.
"Yes. Tell me, during the Great Depression, as Nazi
Germany and Imperial Japan began their march to what
would bring this world to war and state-sponsored
genocide, why did my grandparents and my parents who
were teenagers in the 30s not succumb to all this doom,
gloom, and anger at the supposed lack of prospects for
improvement in their lives that Trump's followers whine
about?"
Well, back then, the government was doing
stuff for the common people. A lot of stuff. WPA, NRA,
Social Security, FDIC, FHA, AAA, etc. FDR remembered the
"forgotten man." Today, the government is subservient to
multinationals and Rothschilds. The forgotten men and
women that make up the backbone of our economy have been
forgotten once again, and nobody seems to remember them
- with the *possible,* partial exception of Trump.
The Globalist clap-trap that has so enamoured both
parties reminds me of this quote from C.S.
Lewis'"Screwtape Proposes a Toast":
"…They ever be allowed to raise Aristotle's question:
whether "democratic behavior" means the behavior that
democracies like or the behavior that will preserve a
democracy. For if they did, it could hardly fail to
occur to them that these need not be the same."
Globalism is just swell for the multinational
corporation, but it is nothing more or less than
Lawlessness writ large. The Corporation is given
legal/fictional life by the state…the trouble is it,
like Frankenstein, will turns on its creator and
imagines it can enjoy Absolute Independence.
One can just as easily make the point that the
globalists have unleashed dark forces against white
people and Western civilization that are nor easily
quelled.
And you would have the benefit of evidence (or, well,
evidence that is not stale by nearly a century). It
wasn't Trump supporters beating up people in San Jose.
And if you look to Europe as a guide to what can happen
in America, things start looking far, far worse.
"I guess the question I
want to zero in on is; What minimal, concrete
programmatic or cultural change or changes would
necessitate abandoning the Ben Op? Or equally, what is
the post-Ben Op vision of America that allows Rod and
company to relax?"
While I can't speak for Rod, I can speak for many
traditional Catholics. The end goal is the
re-establishment of the social reign of Christ, which
means a majority Christian nation, Christian culture,
and a state which governs according to Christian
principles (read Quas Primas). In that situation, and in
that situation alone, would the Ben Op no longer be
necessary.
I am guessing that Rod has not said this explicitly,
or laid out a concrete plan, because he is writing a
book for Christians in general. And if you get into too
many specifics, you are going to run right into the
enormous theological and philosophical differences
between Catholicism and Protestantism.
Also, if Rod were to start talking about "The Social
Reign of Christ the King", 3/4 of you would lose your
minds.
Of course, the current prospect for a Christian
culture and state look bleak, to say the least. But we
can play the long game, the Catholic Church is good at
that. It took over 300 years to convert the Roman
Empire. It was 700 years from the founding of the first
Benedictine monastery until St. Thomas Aquinas and the
High Middle Ages. We can wait that long, at least.
I rather think, in concurrence with Prof. Cole, that
Trump is a simulacrum within a simulacrum with a
simulacrum: there is no "extra-mediatic" Trump
candidate, ergo there is no "extra-mediatic"
presidential electoral race (if limited to the two
"mainstreamed" candidates), ergo there is no
presidential election tout court, ergo there is no
democracy at the presidential election level in the
U.S–just simulacra deceptively reflecting simulacra, in
any case, the resulting effect is a mirage, a
distortion, but above all an ILLUSION.
All this is, it seems to me, is a transition to a
different favorite deadly sin. We've had pride, avarice,
and the current favorite is lust; the new favorite
appears to be wrath. Gluttony, sloth, and envy have not
been absent, but they have not been the driving force in
politics recently.
Also important was the fact that FDR did not stoke
the fires of class conflict. A patrician himself, FDR's
goal was not to overturn the existing social order but
rather to preserve it by correcting its injustices. FDR
was the moderate leader the country needed at the time.
Without him, we might well have succumbed to a demagogic
or perhaps even dictatorial government under Charles
Coughlin, Huey Long, or Norman Thomas. In contrast,
Hillary and Trump seek to use fringe groups (BLM,
alt-right) for their own agendas. Let's hope whoever
wins can keep her or his pets mollified and contained,
but courting extremists is always a risky business.
Indeed, Hillary may be worse than Trump in this respect,
since there appears to be no daylight between her and
the SJW's.
To me, Ben-Op is more returning to the Tocquevillean
idea that the best American ways of living work their
way up from organic, formative local communities that
have largely disappeared from our socio-cultural
experience. Without independent formative local
communities, we human beings are mere products rolling
off the assembly line that serves the interests of the
elites of our big government-big business-big education
conglomerate.
Ben Op or not, its always a great
notion. And you don't have to withdraw from the culture,
THIS IS American culture (traditionally speaking). We
just need to reaffirm it.
So many colorful descriptions of how Trump lies
from so many commenters… Could y'all give at least one
that doesn't fit his opponent perfectly and even with
double intensity?
Hillary Clinton doesn't have a long list of unpaid
contractors suing her… of course that's because she
never built hotels, and I don't think she ever declared
bankruptcy either. We have a batch of slumlords in
Milwaukee who are little Trumps… they run up hundreds of
thousands of dollars in fines for building violations,
declare bankruptcy or plead poverty and make occasional
payments of $50, and meantime they spend tends of
thousands of dollars buying up distressed property at
sheriff's auctions. All of them are black, all of them
have beautiful homes in mostly "white" suburbs, and I
wouldn't vote for any of them for dogcatcher, much less
president.
That said, Hillary is an ego-bloated lying sleaze,
and I wouldn't vote for her if she were running against
almost anyone but Trump.
Nonetheless I am still tired of the ominous
warnings about right-wing white mobs that are about to
rememerge any day. It's been decades since there was a
white riot in this country.
There hasn't been a real riot of any nature in quite
a while. And no, that little fracas in Milwaukee doesn't
count. A few dozen thugs burning four black-owned
businesses while everyone living in the neighborhood
denounces then falls short of a riot.
I agree that we are not likely to see right-wing
"white" mobs posing much of a threat to anyone… they're
mostly couch potatoes anyway. But it is true that until
the 1940s, a "race riot" meant a white mob rampaging
through a black neighborhood. And there have been very
few black riots that went deep into a "white"
neighborhood … they stayed in black neighborhoods too.
This is an election about feeling under siege.
But we're not, and most of the adults in the room
know it.
Trump continues to be a walking, talking Rorschach
test for pundits peddling a point of view.
I think that explains a lot of Trump's support. Its
not who he is, what he says, or what he does or will do,
its what they think they SEE in him. I have to admit, I
did a bit of that over Barack Obama in 2008, and he did
disappoint. Obama has been one of our best presidents in
a long time, but that's a rather low bar.
"There are, then, two developments we are likely to see
going forward. First, cultural conservatives will
seriously consider a political "Benedict Option,"
dropping out of the Republican Party and forming a
like-minded Book Group, unconcerned with winning
elections and very concerned with maintaining their
"principles." Their fidelity is to Aristotle rather than
to winning the battle for the political soul of America.
…"
You know, people spout this stuff as if the
Republican party is conservative. It started drifting
from conservative frame more than forty years ago. By
the time we get to the 2000 elections, it;s been home an
entrenched band of strategics concerned primarily with
winning to advance policies tat have little to do with
conservative thought.
I doubt that I will become a member of a book club.
And I doubt that I will stop voting according to my
conservative view points.
I generally think any idea that Christians are going
to be left to their own devices doubtful or that they
would want to design communities not already defined by
scripture and a life in Christ.
_______________
"If the Ben Op doesn't call on Christians to abandon
politics altogether, it does call on them to recalibrate
their (our) understanding of what politics is and what
it can do. Politics, rightly understood, is more than
statecraft. Ben Op politics are Christian politics for a
post-Christian culture - that is, a culture that no
longer shares some key basic Christian values . . ."
I am just at a loss to comprehend this. A person who
claims to live in Christ already calibrates their lives
in the frame of Christ and led by some extent by the
Spirit of Christ. Nothing about a world destined to
become more worldly will change that. What may happen is
that a kind of christian spiritual revival and renewal
will occur.
" . . . orthodox Christians will come to be seen as
threats to the common good, simply because of the views
we hold and the practices we live by out of fidelity to
our religion. . ."
If this accurate, that christians are deemed a threat
to the state, unless that threat is just to their
participation, the idea "safe spaces" wheres christians
hang out and do their own thing hardly seems a
realistic. If christians are considered a threat – then
most likely the ultimate goal will be to get rid of them
altogether. You outlaw faith and practice. Or you do
what HS and colleges have done to students who arrive on
the campuses. You inundate them with how backward their
thinking until the student and then proceed to tell them
they are just like everyone else.
Believers are expected to be in the world and not of
it. And by in it, I think Christ intended them to be
active participants.
"Rod, I don't know if you've seen this already, but
National Review has a small piece about Archbishop
Charles Chaput, who calls for Christians to become more
engaged in the public square, not less. Your name and
the Benedict Option are referenced in the piece as
well."
Let me answer it for him. Perhaps just like not
everyone is called to the contemplative life in a
monastery but are called to the secular world, so is the
church as a whole these days individually called to
different arenas. That said, the basic principles of the
Ben Op are hardly opposed to being active in the broader
community. It just means there has to be some
intentionality in maintaining a Christian worldview in a
hostile larger culture.
"The Benedictine monks from whom Rod draws inspiration
didn't just shut themselves up and refuse to have
anything to do with the crumbling world around them.
They retreated into their monasteries to strengthen
their souls, and then went out into the world and
rebuilt it for Christ."
Just a technical comment. You
have to pay attention to which orders you are referring
to, because many of them were indeed founded to retreat
from the world. At one time, the idea of a monk
wandering outside of the monastery, or a nun
particularly, was considered scandalous. I read alot of
monastic history about 20 years ago, and I seem to
recall the Benedictines were actually focused on prayer
and manual labor/work within the monastery area. It was
later with orders like the Dominicans that were sent out
into the community, and they caused the bishops a lot of
headaches because they competed with priests and bishops
in preaching publicly. It took awhile to sort out who
was allowed to do what. Modern religious orders founded
since the 18th century are quite different from the old
orders.
Another area of interest you could check out, besides
reading some of the religious rules of life of many of
these old orders just for the sake of comparison, is the
differences between the cenobitic and eremitic monastic
communities of the very early church. The original
founding of religious orders even back then was also
considered a direct challenge to the church hierarchy
and took a lot of time sorting out that they weren't
some kind of troublemakers, too. Modern Catholics have
entirely too little knowledge of the development and
maybe too pious a view of it.
The question is this: what do you do when the policies
or ideas you stand for or at least, agree with, are
advanced by someone with as appalling a character as
Trump? What I observe in practice is that friends and
acquaintances of mine who agree with Trump on the issues
find it necessary to defend his utterly indefensible and
vile character – which makes them less than honest as
well.
I'd be more impressed if, after Edwin Edwards,
Trump's fans said "Vote for the swindler, it's
important" – rather than use lies or their own credulity
to defend him.
I read this on Friday and have thought much about it
since. I came by earlier this evening and had about half
of a long post written in response, but got too caught
up in the Georgia/Missouri game to finish it. I also
determined that it wouldn't matter what I said. The
conservatives would continue to harp about the evils of
identity politics, refusing to acknowledge the long
history of conservatives engaging in identity politics
in both Europe and America from roughly the high Middle
Ages to the present. It seemed more rational to delete
what I had written rather than save it and come back to
finish it.
It just so happened that as the game ended,
I clicked on Huffingtonpost to check the headlines. Lo
and behold, the top story was this one about Jane
Goodall's latest statement regarding identity politics
in the animal kingdom:
"What I observe in practice is that friends and
acquaintances of mine who agree with Trump on the issues
find it necessary to defend his utterly indefensible and
vile character – which makes them less than honest as
well."
I don't defend his vile character. I
readily admit it. So do most of those I know who intend
to vote for him.
It's too bad that Clinton is at least equally vile.
For Hillary that's a big problem – the "character"
issue is at best a wash, so the choice boils down to
other things.
The most highly motivated voters in this election
cycle seem to be insurgents pushing back against corrupt
and incompetent elites and the Establishment. That does
not bode well for Clinton.
"I guess the question I
want to zero in on is; What minimal, concrete
programmatic or cultural change or changes would
necessitate abandoning the Ben Op? Or equally, what is
the post-Ben Op vision of America that allows Rod and
company to relax?"
------
I think those are good questions, and read in the best
light possible, might be interpreted as being asked by
someone honestly seeking to understand the concerns of
traditional Christians today.
I can't answer for Rod, but for me the short answers
are,
"1) In present America, I don't think there are any
"cultural change" possible which might reassure
Christians, because we are in a downward spiral which
has not yet run its course. The articles and commentary
posted here by Rod show we've not yet reached the peak
of what government and technology will do to the lives
of believing Christians.
2) The post-BenOp - perhaps decades in the future -
vision that would allow me to relax would be a national
reaffirmation that our rights, as partially defined in
the Constitution and Bill of Rights, come from God the
Creator, that life is valuable from the moment of
conception, and that the traditional family is the best
promoter of sound moral, cultural and economic health.
I'd relax a bit, though not entirely, if that happened.
In a September 2015 interview with NBC, Clinton
defended partial-birth abortions again and voiced her
support for late-term abortions up until birth, too.
She also openly supports forcing taxpayers to fund
these abortions by repealing the Hyde Amendment. The
amendment prohibits direct taxpayer funding of abortion
in Medicaid. If repealed, researchers estimate that
33,000 more babies will be aborted every year in the
U.S.
Yes, We Christians are in Hillary Clinton's Basket of
Deplorables.
"Take a Pat Buchanan…how do you think he would be doing
in this election? Trumps three ring show prevents the
charges against him from finding any fertile soil to
grow in."
I think far too much credit is being given
to Mr. Trump. The reason he can stand is because the
people he represents have been fed up with the some of
what he stands for long before he entered the fray.
If Mr Pat Buchanan were running, he would be in good
stead save or his speaking style which is far more
formal. Mr. Trump's carefree (of sorts) delivery punches
through and gives the impression that he's an everyman.
His boundless energy has that sense earnest sincerity.
His "imperfections" tend to work in his favor. But if
his message was counter to where most people are already
at - he would not be the nominee.
There's a difference in being a .Mr. Trump fan and a
supporter. As a supporter, I would be curious to know
what lies I have used to support him. We have some
serious differences, but I think my support has been
fairly above board. In fact, i think the support of most
have been fairly straight up I am not sure there is much
hidden about Mr. Trump.
The only new issue that has been brought up is the issue
of staff accountability. Has he neglected to pay his
staff, is this just an organizational natter or complete
nonsense.
The other factor that has played out to his
advantage are the news stories that repeatedly turn out
false, distorted or nonexistent.
The media already in the credibility hole seems very
content to dig themselves in deeper.
I didn't see the post where you disavowed
liberals as well, so I was too hasty with the "your
side"
Nonetheless I am still tired of the ominous warnings
about right-wing white mobs that are about to rememerge
any day. It's been decades since there was a white riot
in this country.
fwiw, my sense is that the Benedict Option (from the
snippets that you have shared with usm particularly in
the posts on Norcia and other communities already
pursuing some sort of "option") represents a return of
conservative Christians to a more healthy, hands-off
relationship with national politics. Conservative
Christians danced with the Republican Party for a
long-time, but past a certain point had to stop
pretending that the Republican Party cared more about
them than about their slice of Mammon (big business and
the MIC mainly). Liberal Christians, some of them,
danced with the other side of Mammon (big government and
social programs, etc) and perhaps just got absorbed. But
the point is I think you are returning to a better
place, reverting to some sort of norm, the alliance with
the GOP was a strange infatuation that wasn't going to
sustain anyway.
So many colorful descriptions of how Trump lies from so
many commenters… Could y'all give at least one that
doesn't fit his opponent perfectly and even with double
intensity?
Michelle: Obama advisor Al Sharpton has been responsible
for stirring up more Jew hatred than Trump. Have you
ever given a care about that? Do you care that Hillary's
Mexican and Muslim immigrants are sure to be more
antisemitic than the native whites of the US that you
fret about over and over?
Rod, when you say the following, you articulate exactly
why I have reluctantly become a libertarian:
-"On a
practical level, that means that I will no longer vote
primarily on the social issues that have dictated my
vote in the past, but I will vote primarily for
candidates who will be better at protecting my
community's right to be left alone."-
Last year after listening to the same-sex marriage
oral arguments presented before the Supreme Court, I
concluded that libertarianism and either the current
Libertarian Party or some spinoff offers the best that
those of us with traditional religious and moral
convictions can hope for in a decidedly post-Christian
America. I wrote about why I believe this to be so at
http://www.skiprigney.com/2015/04/29/how-the-ssm-debate-made-me-a-libertarian/
I don't believe for a minute that the majority of
elected officials in the Republican Party have the
backbone to stand up for religious liberty in the face
of corporate pressure. You need look no farther than how
the Republicans caved last year in Indiana on the
protection of religious liberty.
There are many libertarians who are going to work to
protect the rights of people to do things that undermine
the common good. But, I have more faith that they'll
protect the rights of a cultural minority such as
traditionalist Christians than I have in either the
Republicans or the Democrats.
It isn't true that Trump and his supporters are against
identity politics. It's just that they have a far
simpler view of identity politics. There are white
people, and there are blah people. White people will be
in charge, and blah people can have a piece of the pie
to the extent they agree to pretend to be white people.
Cecelia wonders: "Are we as a people really capable of
being citizens of a Republic or are we simply fools to
be manipulated by people like Trump?"
My two cents: We're capable of being citizens of a
Republic if our government creates the conditions for a
thriving middle class: the most important condition
being good, high-paying jobs that allow people to live
an independent existence. The vast majority of
manufacturing jobs have been shipped overseas, and even
higher-skilled jobs (such as research and development)
are increasingly being outsourced as well.
If you look at the monthly payroll jobs reports put
out by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, you will see that
the vast majority of new jobs are in retail trade,
health care and social assistance, waitresses and
bartenders, and government. Most of these jobs are
part-time jobs. None of these jobs produce any goods
than can be exported. Aside from government jobs, these
are not jobs that pay well enough for people to thrive
independently. This is why more Americans aged 25-34
live with their parents than independently with spouses
and children of their own. It is also why many people
now must work multiple jobs in order to make ends meet.
As for government jobs, they are tax-supported, and thus
a drain on the economy. I'm not a libertarian. I
recognize that government provides many crucial
services. But it is unproductive to have too many
bureaucrats living off of tax revenues.
Basically, the middle class is disappearing. Without
a thriving middle class, democracy is unsustainable.
Struggling people filled with hate and resentment are
ripe for manipulation by nefarious forces.
Spain's Francisco Franco understood this very well.
His goal was to make it unthinkable for his country to
descend into civil war ever again. He achieved this.
Before Franco, Spain was a Third World h*llhole plagued
by radical ideologies like communism, regional
separatism, and anarchism. [Fascism had its following as
well, but it was never too popular. The Falange (which
was the closest thing to a fascist movement in Spain,
though it was not really fascist, as it was profoundly
Christian and rejected Nietzschean neo-paganism) was
irrelevant before Francoism. Under Francoism, it was one
of the three pillars that supported the regime (the
other two being monarchists and Catholics), but it was
never the most influential pillar.] When Franco died,
Spain was the ninth-largest economy in the world, and
the second-fastest growing economy in the world (behind
only Japan). It became a liberal democracy almost
overnight. When Franco was on his deathbed, he was asked
what he thought his most important legacy was. He
replied, "The middle class." Franco was not a democrat,
but he'd created the conditions for liberal democracy in
Spain.
To get back to the US, we now have a Third World
economy. We can't too surprised that our politics also
look increasingly like those of a Third World country.
Thus, the rise of Trump, Sanders, the alt-right, the
SJW's, Black Lives Matter, etc.
The evolution of the MSM into an
American version of Pravda/Izvestia has been a lengthy
process and dates back at least to the days of Walter
Lippmann (ostensibly a journalist but upon whom
Roosevelt, Truman and JFK had no qualms about calling
for advice).
With the emergence of the Internet and the phenomenon
of the blogosphere, the MSM has no choice but to cast
off whatever pretensions to objectivity they may have
had and, instead, now preach to the choir so they can
keep themselves viable in an increasingly competitive
market where more people get their news from such as
Matt Drudge than from the NY-LA Times or the WaPo
Suppose a more composed candidate stood up against the
PC police, and generally stood for these same 6
principles, and did so in a much more coherent and
rational manner. I propose that he would be demolished
within no time at all. Take a Pat Buchanan…how do you
think he would be doing in this election? Trumps three
ring show prevents the charges against him from finding
any fertile soil to grow in. If he ran on principle
instead of capturing an undefined spirit, if he tried to
answer the charges against him in a rational manner, all
it would do it produce more fertile soil for the PC
charges to stick. Trump may have stumbled upon the model
for future conservative candidates when running in a
nation where the mainstream press is so thoroughly
against you. Just make a lot of noise and ignore them.
If you engage in the argument with them, they'll destroy
you.
@Cecelia: The issue is not Trump – it is those who
support him. Are we as a people really capable of being
citizens of a Republic or are we simply fools to be
manipulated by people like Trump ?
Yes. Tell me,
during the Great Depression, as Nazi Germany and
Imperial Japan began their march to what would bring
this world to war and state-sponsored genocide, why did
my grandparents and my parents who were teenagers in the
30s not succumb to all this doom, gloom, and anger at
the supposed lack of prospects for improvement in their
lives that Trump's followers whine about? By any
standard, conditions then were worse for the white
working class than is the case today, and yes, my
grandparents were working class: one grandfather worked
for the railroad, the other for a lumber mill. And yes,
there was alcoholism, and domestic abuse, and crime, and
suicide amongst the populace in the 1930s. The role of
religion was more pervasive then, but to tell the truth,
I expect Rod would describe my grandparents on both side
as Moral Therapeutic Deists; by Rod's standard I believe
that is true for most Christians throughout history.
Just what is different about today, that brings all
this rage and resentment? Could it be that racial and
ethnic and religious minorities, and women now have a
piece of the pie and a good part of the white working
class cannot stand it?
And Trump doesn't scare me nearly as much as does the
fact that so very many Americans support him, whether
wholeheartedly swallowing his poison, or because they
close their eyes and minds and hearts to just what kind
of a man he is.
The promotion of an increasingly interconnected world in
and of itself isnt necessarily bad. However, the
annihilation of culture,religion, and autonomy at the
hands of multinational corporations and a Gramscian
elite certainly is – and that is what is happening under
what is referred to as globalization. The revolt against
the evil being pushed out of Brussels and Washington has
now spread into the West itself. May the victory of the
rebels be swift and complete.
"You're misdefining "grievance industry;" the central
tenet of the grievance industry is that whatever
happens, white people are to blame and should continue
paying for it."
If we all accept your definition then
we can't argue with you. Whatever you want to call it,
there is an entire industry (most conservative media)
that feeds a victimization mentality among whites,
conservatives, evangelicals etc (all those labels apply
to me by the way) that closely resembles the grievance
outlook. The only difference is in what circles it is
taken seriously. Why else do so many of us get so bent
out of shape when employees have the audacity to say
"happy holidays" at the department store. As made
apparent on this blog we do need to be realistic and
vigilant about the real threats and the direction the
culture is going, but by whining about every perceived
slight and insisting everyone buy into our version of
"Christian America" (while anointing a vile figure like
Trump as our strongman) we are undercutting the
legitimate grievances we do have.
Everyone has heard how far is moving small car
production to Mexico and forwarded saying no one in
America will lose their jobs because the production will
be shifted to SUVs and other vehicles.
That's not the
problem the problem is instead of creating more jobs in
America the jobs are being created in Mexico and not
helping Americans.
"BenOp is fascinating, but most cultural conservative
now active in the game will not drop out. They may not
like the adrenalin rush politics gives them more than
they like Jesus–but they ain't going to give it up."
Exactly. This is why Christian boycotts never succeed.
They claim that they hate Disneyworld because of their
pro-gay policies, but when they have to choose between
Jesus and a Fun Family Vacation, Jesus always loses.
What happens when the status quo media turns a
presidential election into a referendum regarding the
media's ability to shape public opinion and direct
"purchasing" choices?
The Corporate Media is corrupt and Americans are
waking up to it.
This will almost always mean voting for the
Republicans in national elections, but in a primary
situation, I will vote for the Republican who can
best be counted on to defend religious liberty, even
if he's not 100 percent on board with what I
consider to be promoting the Good. If it means
voting for a Republican that the defense hawks or
the Chamber of Commerce disdain, I have no problem
at all with that.
How is this different than cultural conservatives
voted before Trump?
If we elect Trump as POTUS, we deserve everything that
happens to us.
Don't blame the progressives when Trump says
something about defaulting on the US debt and the stock
market crashes.
Don't blame the progressives when China moves ahead
us by leaps and bound in science and technology because
we pull a Kansas and cut taxes left right and center,
then decide to get rid of all government-funded
research.
Don't blame the progressives when The Wall doesn't
get built, Trump says "who, me? I never promised
anything!" Ditto for the lack of return of well-paid
coal-mining jobs.
And don't blame the progressives when you discover
Trump has sold you down the river for a song, refuses to
appoint "conservatives" as SCOTUS judges, and throws the
First Amendment out the window.
We have had three decades of culture wars and everyone
can pretty much agree that the traditionalists lost. Now
whether Dreher et all lost because the broader culture
refused to listen or because they simply couldn't make a
convincing argument is a question that surrounds a very
particular program pursued by conservatives,
traditionalists and the religious right. It is certain
that the Republican Party as a vehicle for those values
has been taken out and been beat like a rented mule. It
seems to that Josh Stuart has pulled a rabbit out of the
hat. Trump is, if anything, pretty incoherent and
whatever "principles" he represents were discovered in
the breach; a little like bad gunnery practice, one shot
low, one shot lower and then a hit. If Trump represents
anything it is the fact that the base of the party was
not who many of us thought they were. Whatever Christian
values we thought they were representing are hardly
recognizable now.
What truly puzzles me more and
increasingly so is Rod's vision of what America is
supposed to be under a Dreher regime. I'm not sure what
that regime looks like? Behind all the theological
underpinning and high-sounding abstractions what does a
ground-level political and legislative program for
achieving a society he is willing to whole-heartedly
participate in look like?
Politics is a reflection of culture but culture is
responsive to politics. What political order does the
Ben Op crowd wish to install in place of the one we have
now – short of the parousia – and how does that affect
our life and autonomy as citizens and individuals? He
says Christians just want to be left alone but they seem
to have made and are still making a lot of noise for
people who want to be left alone so I have to assume
they want something over and above being left alone.
I guess the question I want to zero in on is; What
minimal, concrete programmatic or cultural change or
changes would necessitate abandoning the Ben Op? Or
equally, what is the post-Ben Op vision of America that
allows Rod and company to relax?
a couple "ideas" come to mind. re: deplorable. SOME (no
value in speculating or establishing a number) are
deplorable. it's funny (actually, quite sad) Trump's we
don't have time to be politically correct mantra is
ignored when his opponent (a politician who helped
establish the concept of politically correctness) steals
a page from his playbook. on a certain level, perhaps
the eastern elite, intellectual liberal grabbed the
"irony" hammer from the toolbox? ever the shrewd,
calculating (narcissistic and insecure) carny barker,
Trump has not offered any "new" ideas. he's merely (like
any politician) put his finger in the air and decided to
"run" from the "nationalist, racist, nativist, side of
the politically correct/incorrect betting line. at the
end of the day, there are likely as many deplorable
folks on the Clinton bandwagon; it's just (obviously)
not in her interests to expose these "boosters" at HER
rallies/fundraising events. in many ways it speaks to
the lesser of two evils is still evil "idea". politics –
especially national campaigns are not so much about
which party/candidate has the better ideas, but rather
which is less deplorable.
"Instead, it has everything to do with his
wink/nod attitude toward the alt-right and white
nationalist groups and with his willingness to
appropriate their anti-semitic, racist memes for his own
advancement. He's dangerous. Period. Dangerous and scary
to anyone familiar with lynchings, pogroms, and mob
violence. To anyone familiar with history. Trump has
unleashed dark forces that will not easily be quelled
even if, and probably especially if, he loses. The
possibility that he might win has left me wondering
whether I even belong in this country any more, no
matter how much sympathy I might feel for the folks
globalism has left behind."
One can just as easily make the point that the
globalists have unleashed dark forces against white
people and Western civilization that are nor easily
quelled.
The most interesting part of the essay is near the end,
where he briefly discusses how non-whites might react to
our political realignment.
After all, will the white
liberal be able to manipulate these groups forever?
For example, we are seeing the 'official black
leaders' who represent them on TV shift from being
activist clergymen to being (white paid and hosed) gay
activists and mulattoes from outside the mainstream of
black culture. How long can this continue?
"Call it anti-Semitic if
you want but all my Jewish cousins and the several other
Jewish business associates I know feel uncontrollable
hate for Trump.
"thinly buried in his rhetoric: (1) borders matter;
(2) immigration policy matters; (3) national interests,
not so-called universal interests, matter; (4)
entrepreneurship matters; (5) decentralization matters;
(6) PC speech-without which identity politics is
inconceivable-must be repudiated."
They seem to think that any attempt to stop mass 3rd
world immigration, stop pc thought police, or up hold
Christian-ish values are a direct threat to them."
The Jews, having lived as strangers among foreign
peoples for the better part of 2 millennia, have always
been on the receiving end of racial hatred. As a result
many Western Jews have an instinctive mistrust of
nationalist movements and a natural tendency towards
globalism.
The media has done a splendid job of portraying Trump
as the next Hitler, so, understandably, there's a lot of
fear. My Jewish grandparents are terrified of the man.
I am not a globalist, and (due to the SCOTUS issue)
will probably vote for Trump, even though I have no love
for the man himself. I think the "Trump the racist" meme
is based on confirmation bias, not reality, but I
understand where the fear comes from.
"I think that many casual hearers of Ben Op ideas
assume that Ben Op is a one-dimensional, cultural
dropping-out of cultural/religious conservatives into
irrelevant enclaves.
To me, Ben-Op is more returning to the Tocquevillean
idea that the best American ways of living work their
way up from organic, formative local communities that
have largely disappeared from our socio-cultural
experience. Without independent formative local
communities, we human beings are mere products rolling
off the assembly line that serves the interests of the
elites of our big government-big business-big education
conglomerate.
If these formative communities hold to authentic,
compassionate Judeo-Christian values and practices, all
the better–for everybody! Ben Op will offer an
alternative to the assembly-line politically correct
cultural warriors being produced by many of our elite
cultural institutions."
Bingo.
If you want to fundamentally transform the culture,
you have to withdraw from it, at least partially. But
there's no need to wall yourself off. A Benedict Option
community can and should be politically active,
primarily at the local level, where the most good can be
done.
The Benedictine monks from whom Rod draws inspiration
didn't just shut themselves up and refuse to have
anything to do with the crumbling world around them.
They retreated into their monasteries to strengthen
their souls, and then went out into the world and
rebuilt it for Christ.
"Clinton assassination fantasies"? I call bullsh*t on
that notion. Trump merely pointed our the absolute
hypocrisy of elites like Clinton and her ilk, the guns
for me but not for thee crowd. He was not fantasizing
about her assassination. Far from it. To suggest he was
is to engage in the same sort of dishonesty for which
Clinton is so well known.
I never cared much for Trump
but he has all the right enemies and is growing on me.
"It isn't true that Trump and his supporters are against
identity politics. It's just that they have a far
simpler view of identity politics. There are white
people, and there are blah people. "
They love Ben
Carson and Allan West, last time I checked neither men
were white.
"Yes. Tell me, during the Great Depression, as Nazi
Germany and Imperial Japan began their march to what
would bring this world to war and state-sponsored
genocide, why did my grandparents and my parents who
were teenagers in the 30s not succumb to all this doom,
gloom, and anger at the supposed lack of prospects for
improvement in their lives that Trump's followers whine
about?"
Well, back then, the government was doing
stuff for the common people. A lot of stuff. WPA, NRA,
Social Security, FDIC, FHA, AAA, etc. FDR remembered the
"forgotten man." Today, the government is subservient to
multinationals and Rothschilds. The forgotten men and
women that make up the backbone of our economy have been
forgotten once again, and nobody seems to remember them
- with the *possible,* partial exception of Trump.
The Globalist clap-trap that has so enamoured both
parties reminds me of this quote from C.S.
Lewis'"Screwtape Proposes a Toast":
"…They ever be allowed to raise Aristotle's question:
whether "democratic behavior" means the behavior that
democracies like or the behavior that will preserve a
democracy. For if they did, it could hardly fail to
occur to them that these need not be the same."
Globalism is just swell for the multinational
corporation, but it is nothing more or less than
Lawlessness writ large. The Corporation is given
legal/fictional life by the state…the trouble is it,
like Frankenstein, will turns on its creator and
imagines it can enjoy Absolute Independence.
One can just as easily make the point that the
globalists have unleashed dark forces against white
people and Western civilization that are nor easily
quelled.
And you would have the benefit of evidence (or, well,
evidence that is not stale by nearly a century). It
wasn't Trump supporters beating up people in San Jose.
And if you look to Europe as a guide to what can happen
in America, things start looking far, far worse.
"I guess the question I
want to zero in on is; What minimal, concrete
programmatic or cultural change or changes would
necessitate abandoning the Ben Op? Or equally, what is
the post-Ben Op vision of America that allows Rod and
company to relax?"
While I can't speak for Rod, I can speak for many
traditional Catholics. The end goal is the
re-establishment of the social reign of Christ, which
means a majority Christian nation, Christian culture,
and a state which governs according to Christian
principles (read Quas Primas). In that situation, and in
that situation alone, would the Ben Op no longer be
necessary.
I am guessing that Rod has not said this explicitly,
or laid out a concrete plan, because he is writing a
book for Christians in general. And if you get into too
many specifics, you are going to run right into the
enormous theological and philosophical differences
between Catholicism and Protestantism.
Also, if Rod were to start talking about "The Social
Reign of Christ the King", 3/4 of you would lose your
minds.
Of course, the current prospect for a Christian
culture and state look bleak, to say the least. But we
can play the long game, the Catholic Church is good at
that. It took over 300 years to convert the Roman
Empire. It was 700 years from the founding of the first
Benedictine monastery until St. Thomas Aquinas and the
High Middle Ages. We can wait that long, at least.
I rather think, in concurrence with Prof. Cole, that
Trump is a simulacrum within a simulacrum with a
simulacrum: there is no "extra-mediatic" Trump
candidate, ergo there is no "extra-mediatic"
presidential electoral race (if limited to the two
"mainstreamed" candidates), ergo there is no
presidential election tout court, ergo there is no
democracy at the presidential election level in the
U.S–just simulacra deceptively reflecting simulacra, in
any case, the resulting effect is a mirage, a
distortion, but above all an ILLUSION.
All this is, it seems to me, is a transition to a
different favorite deadly sin. We've had pride, avarice,
and the current favorite is lust; the new favorite
appears to be wrath. Gluttony, sloth, and envy have not
been absent, but they have not been the driving force in
politics recently.
Also important was the fact that FDR did not stoke
the fires of class conflict. A patrician himself, FDR's
goal was not to overturn the existing social order but
rather to preserve it by correcting its injustices. FDR
was the moderate leader the country needed at the time.
Without him, we might well have succumbed to a demagogic
or perhaps even dictatorial government under Charles
Coughlin, Huey Long, or Norman Thomas. In contrast,
Hillary and Trump seek to use fringe groups (BLM,
alt-right) for their own agendas. Let's hope whoever
wins can keep her or his pets mollified and contained,
but courting extremists is always a risky business.
Indeed, Hillary may be worse than Trump in this respect,
since there appears to be no daylight between her and
the SJW's.
To me, Ben-Op is more returning to the Tocquevillean
idea that the best American ways of living work their
way up from organic, formative local communities that
have largely disappeared from our socio-cultural
experience. Without independent formative local
communities, we human beings are mere products rolling
off the assembly line that serves the interests of the
elites of our big government-big business-big education
conglomerate.
Ben Op or not, its always a great
notion. And you don't have to withdraw from the culture,
THIS IS American culture (traditionally speaking). We
just need to reaffirm it.
So many colorful descriptions of how Trump lies
from so many commenters… Could y'all give at least one
that doesn't fit his opponent perfectly and even with
double intensity?
Hillary Clinton doesn't have a long list of unpaid
contractors suing her… of course that's because she
never built hotels, and I don't think she ever declared
bankruptcy either. We have a batch of slumlords in
Milwaukee who are little Trumps… they run up hundreds of
thousands of dollars in fines for building violations,
declare bankruptcy or plead poverty and make occasional
payments of $50, and meantime they spend tends of
thousands of dollars buying up distressed property at
sheriff's auctions. All of them are black, all of them
have beautiful homes in mostly "white" suburbs, and I
wouldn't vote for any of them for dogcatcher, much less
president.
That said, Hillary is an ego-bloated lying sleaze,
and I wouldn't vote for her if she were running against
almost anyone but Trump.
Nonetheless I am still tired of the ominous
warnings about right-wing white mobs that are about to
rememerge any day. It's been decades since there was a
white riot in this country.
There hasn't been a real riot of any nature in quite
a while. And no, that little fracas in Milwaukee doesn't
count. A few dozen thugs burning four black-owned
businesses while everyone living in the neighborhood
denounces then falls short of a riot.
I agree that we are not likely to see right-wing
"white" mobs posing much of a threat to anyone… they're
mostly couch potatoes anyway. But it is true that until
the 1940s, a "race riot" meant a white mob rampaging
through a black neighborhood. And there have been very
few black riots that went deep into a "white"
neighborhood … they stayed in black neighborhoods too.
This is an election about feeling under siege.
But we're not, and most of the adults in the room
know it.
Trump continues to be a walking, talking Rorschach
test for pundits peddling a point of view.
I think that explains a lot of Trump's support. Its
not who he is, what he says, or what he does or will do,
its what they think they SEE in him. I have to admit, I
did a bit of that over Barack Obama in 2008, and he did
disappoint. Obama has been one of our best presidents in
a long time, but that's a rather low bar.
"There are, then, two developments we are likely to see
going forward. First, cultural conservatives will
seriously consider a political "Benedict Option,"
dropping out of the Republican Party and forming a
like-minded Book Group, unconcerned with winning
elections and very concerned with maintaining their
"principles." Their fidelity is to Aristotle rather than
to winning the battle for the political soul of America.
…"
You know, people spout this stuff as if the
Republican party is conservative. It started drifting
from conservative frame more than forty years ago. By
the time we get to the 2000 elections, it;s been home an
entrenched band of strategics concerned primarily with
winning to advance policies tat have little to do with
conservative thought.
I doubt that I will become a member of a book club.
And I doubt that I will stop voting according to my
conservative view points.
I generally think any idea that Christians are going
to be left to their own devices doubtful or that they
would want to design communities not already defined by
scripture and a life in Christ.
_______________
"If the Ben Op doesn't call on Christians to abandon
politics altogether, it does call on them to recalibrate
their (our) understanding of what politics is and what
it can do. Politics, rightly understood, is more than
statecraft. Ben Op politics are Christian politics for a
post-Christian culture - that is, a culture that no
longer shares some key basic Christian values . . ."
I am just at a loss to comprehend this. A person who
claims to live in Christ already calibrates their lives
in the frame of Christ and led by some extent by the
Spirit of Christ. Nothing about a world destined to
become more worldly will change that. What may happen is
that a kind of christian spiritual revival and renewal
will occur.
" . . . orthodox Christians will come to be seen as
threats to the common good, simply because of the views
we hold and the practices we live by out of fidelity to
our religion. . ."
If this accurate, that christians are deemed a threat
to the state, unless that threat is just to their
participation, the idea "safe spaces" wheres christians
hang out and do their own thing hardly seems a
realistic. If christians are considered a threat – then
most likely the ultimate goal will be to get rid of them
altogether. You outlaw faith and practice. Or you do
what HS and colleges have done to students who arrive on
the campuses. You inundate them with how backward their
thinking until the student and then proceed to tell them
they are just like everyone else.
Believers are expected to be in the world and not of
it. And by in it, I think Christ intended them to be
active participants.
"Rod, I don't know if you've seen this already, but
National Review has a small piece about Archbishop
Charles Chaput, who calls for Christians to become more
engaged in the public square, not less. Your name and
the Benedict Option are referenced in the piece as
well."
Let me answer it for him. Perhaps just like not
everyone is called to the contemplative life in a
monastery but are called to the secular world, so is the
church as a whole these days individually called to
different arenas. That said, the basic principles of the
Ben Op are hardly opposed to being active in the broader
community. It just means there has to be some
intentionality in maintaining a Christian worldview in a
hostile larger culture.
"The Benedictine monks from whom Rod draws inspiration
didn't just shut themselves up and refuse to have
anything to do with the crumbling world around them.
They retreated into their monasteries to strengthen
their souls, and then went out into the world and
rebuilt it for Christ."
Just a technical comment. You
have to pay attention to which orders you are referring
to, because many of them were indeed founded to retreat
from the world. At one time, the idea of a monk
wandering outside of the monastery, or a nun
particularly, was considered scandalous. I read alot of
monastic history about 20 years ago, and I seem to
recall the Benedictines were actually focused on prayer
and manual labor/work within the monastery area. It was
later with orders like the Dominicans that were sent out
into the community, and they caused the bishops a lot of
headaches because they competed with priests and bishops
in preaching publicly. It took awhile to sort out who
was allowed to do what. Modern religious orders founded
since the 18th century are quite different from the old
orders.
Another area of interest you could check out, besides
reading some of the religious rules of life of many of
these old orders just for the sake of comparison, is the
differences between the cenobitic and eremitic monastic
communities of the very early church. The original
founding of religious orders even back then was also
considered a direct challenge to the church hierarchy
and took a lot of time sorting out that they weren't
some kind of troublemakers, too. Modern Catholics have
entirely too little knowledge of the development and
maybe too pious a view of it.
The question is this: what do you do when the policies
or ideas you stand for or at least, agree with, are
advanced by someone with as appalling a character as
Trump? What I observe in practice is that friends and
acquaintances of mine who agree with Trump on the issues
find it necessary to defend his utterly indefensible and
vile character – which makes them less than honest as
well.
I'd be more impressed if, after Edwin Edwards,
Trump's fans said "Vote for the swindler, it's
important" – rather than use lies or their own credulity
to defend him.
I read this on Friday and have thought much about it
since. I came by earlier this evening and had about half
of a long post written in response, but got too caught
up in the Georgia/Missouri game to finish it. I also
determined that it wouldn't matter what I said. The
conservatives would continue to harp about the evils of
identity politics, refusing to acknowledge the long
history of conservatives engaging in identity politics
in both Europe and America from roughly the high Middle
Ages to the present. It seemed more rational to delete
what I had written rather than save it and come back to
finish it.
It just so happened that as the game ended,
I clicked on Huffingtonpost to check the headlines. Lo
and behold, the top story was this one about Jane
Goodall's latest statement regarding identity politics
in the animal kingdom:
"What I observe in practice is that friends and
acquaintances of mine who agree with Trump on the issues
find it necessary to defend his utterly indefensible and
vile character – which makes them less than honest as
well."
I don't defend his vile character. I
readily admit it. So do most of those I know who intend
to vote for him.
It's too bad that Clinton is at least equally vile.
For Hillary that's a big problem – the "character"
issue is at best a wash, so the choice boils down to
other things.
The most highly motivated voters in this election
cycle seem to be insurgents pushing back against corrupt
and incompetent elites and the Establishment. That does
not bode well for Clinton.
"I guess the question I
want to zero in on is; What minimal, concrete
programmatic or cultural change or changes would
necessitate abandoning the Ben Op? Or equally, what is
the post-Ben Op vision of America that allows Rod and
company to relax?"
------
I think those are good questions, and read in the best
light possible, might be interpreted as being asked by
someone honestly seeking to understand the concerns of
traditional Christians today.
I can't answer for Rod, but for me the short answers
are,
"1) In present America, I don't think there are any
"cultural change" possible which might reassure
Christians, because we are in a downward spiral which
has not yet run its course. The articles and commentary
posted here by Rod show we've not yet reached the peak
of what government and technology will do to the lives
of believing Christians.
2) The post-BenOp - perhaps decades in the future -
vision that would allow me to relax would be a national
reaffirmation that our rights, as partially defined in
the Constitution and Bill of Rights, come from God the
Creator, that life is valuable from the moment of
conception, and that the traditional family is the best
promoter of sound moral, cultural and economic health.
I'd relax a bit, though not entirely, if that happened.
In a September 2015 interview with NBC, Clinton
defended partial-birth abortions again and voiced her
support for late-term abortions up until birth, too.
She also openly supports forcing taxpayers to fund
these abortions by repealing the Hyde Amendment. The
amendment prohibits direct taxpayer funding of abortion
in Medicaid. If repealed, researchers estimate that
33,000 more babies will be aborted every year in the
U.S.
Yes, We Christians are in Hillary Clinton's Basket of
Deplorables.
"Take a Pat Buchanan…how do you think he would be doing
in this election? Trumps three ring show prevents the
charges against him from finding any fertile soil to
grow in."
I think far too much credit is being given
to Mr. Trump. The reason he can stand is because the
people he represents have been fed up with the some of
what he stands for long before he entered the fray.
If Mr Pat Buchanan were running, he would be in
good stead save or his speaking style which is far more
formal. Mr. Trump's carefree (of sorts) delivery punches
through and gives the impression that he's an everyman.
His boundless energy has that sense earnest sincerity.
His "imperfections" tend to work in his favor. But if
his message was counter to where most people are already
at - he would not be the nominee.
There's a difference in being a .Mr. Trump fan and a
supporter. As a supporter, I would be curious to know
what lies I have used to support him. We have some
serious differences, but I think my support has been
fairly above board. In fact, i think the support of most
have been fairly straight up I am not sure there is much
hidden about Mr. Trump.
Hillary Clinton,
"Laws have to be backed up with resources and
political will and deep-seated cultural codes, religious
beliefs and structural biases have to be changed."
Uh Oh -- We Christians are in Hillary Clinton's Basket of
Deplorables.
That's a shame RD, because I was looking forward to
joining a like-minded Book Group, unconcerned with
winning elections and very concerned with maintaining
our "principles." With fidelity is to Aristotle rather
than to winning the battle for the political soul of
America.
[NFR: You can still have your Ben Op book
group. - RD]
I'm going to start and end with globalization by
referring to G.K.Chesterton in Orthodoxy(pg 101).
"This is what makes Christendom at once so perplexing
and so much more interesting than the Pagan empires;…If
anyone wants a modern proof of all this, let him
consider the curious fact that, under Christianity,
Europe has broken up into individual nations. Patriotism
is a perfect example of this deliberate balance of one
emphasis against another emphasis. The instinct of the
Pagan empire would have said, 'You shall all be Roman
citizens, and grow alike; let the German grow less slow
and reverent; the Frenchmen less experimental and
swift.' But the instinct of Christian Europe says, 'Let
the German remain slow and reverent, that the Frenchman
may the more safely be swift and experimental. We will
make an equipoise out of these excesses. The absurdity
called Germany shall correct the insanity called
France."
Isn't it interesting that has Christianity has left the
northern hemisphere for the southern, that Europe has
tried union, the USA has been into interventionism, and
globalization has become so mainstream. You shall all be
one world citizens doesn't have a balancing instinct.
And Chesterton was deliberating about the balancing
instinct.
I think Mitchell is basically right. Aside from his jab
at the Benedict Option, I have just one quibble with his
analysis: "And Trump is the first American candidate to
bring some coherence to them, however raucous his
formulations have been."
Wrong. Trump is definitely
not the first candidate to do this. He was preceded by
Pat Buchanan, who also brought (and still brings) much
more coherence to the six ideas than Trump. Clearly,
Buchanan ran at a time when the post-1989 order was in
its infancy, and so few saw any fundamental problem with
it. He was ahead of his time. But he was a candidate
that presented the six ideas and attracted a
non-negligible amount of support. Trump is not a pioneer
in this regard. People should give Buchanan his due.
I hope Trump wins; he's rather bizarre and not very
likable as a person, but the last 25 years have been
disastrous politically in Western nations and it's time
to repudiate the ruling orthodoxy. The US still is the
Western hegemon and exports its ideas across the
Atlantic (most unfortunate in cases like "critical
whiteness studies"); if there's change in the US towards
a (soft, civic) nationalism, it might open up new
options in Europe as well.
In any case these are exciting times…however it turns
out, we may well be living through years which will be
seen as decisive in retrospect.
This comment on the Politico article stood out to me:
"It is its very existence, and mantra, for a religion
the advertise itself, something that is frowned upon as
being Incredibly un-American under the Constitution, and
contrary to our core beliefs. Yes Republicans not only
embrace this, they help their religion advertise."
In other words, this commenter admits that he
believes it "incredibly un-American" for religions to
"advertise," and, by extension, to even exist (he says
advertising is religion's "very existence.")
The comment has a high number of "thumbs-up."
We really are in trouble. America has become Jacobin
country.
Red brick
September 16, 2016 at 6:36 pm
Call it anti-Semitic if you want but all my Jewish
cousins and the several other Jewish business associates
I know feel uncontrollable hate for Trump.'
Perhaps
due to very recent memories that herrenvolk regimes are
not good for the Jews. The online troll army of out and
proud anti-semites can't help but contribute to this.
Re "the DC elites are clueless" what ABOUT John Kasich
up there on the podium advocating for the latest free
trade deal? Yessir, that'll get us in our "states that
begin with a vowel" to totally change our minds on that,
you betcha!
Trump continues to be a walking, talking Rorschach test
for pundits peddling a point of view. Funny how he
proves so many intellectuals right about so many
contradictory things, all without having to take
responsibility for any particular idea.
Nobody has remained more adamant than the writer of this
blog that there is something sacred about sex between
one woman and one man, and them married. God bless him
for staying true.
So I am going to try to say( G.K Chesterton please
forgive me)…..Let the LBGTQIA remain true to their
identity, that the married male/female may be more
safely true to their identity. We can make an equipoise
out of these excesses( despite those who want us to be
all the same). The absurdity called LBGTQIA shall
correct the insanity called one man/one woman.
Trump is certainly not unraveling
identity politics. He's adding another identity to the
grievance industry, that of (downscale) whites.
You're misdefining "grievance industry;" the central
tenet of the grievance industry is that whatever
happens, white people are to blame and should continue
paying for it. Whether you agree with white identity
politics or not, its proponents are obviously not
adding
to the grievance industry, but attempting to
defend against it, i.e. stating that white people are
not
to blame for everything, and no, they
shouldn't
continue to pay for it. To merely maintain
that position is sufficient to be labeled as a white
supremacist by the grievance industry hacks.
Rod, I don't know if you've seen this already, but
National Review has a small piece about Archbishop
Charles Chaput, who calls for Christians to become
more
engaged in the public square, not less. Your
name and the Benedict Option are referenced in the piece
as well.
Dear mainstream media: you have lost your
credibility because you are incapable of skeptical
inquiry into your chosen candidate or official
statistics/ pronouncements.
Your dismissal of
skeptical inquiries as "conspiracies" or "hoaxes" is
nothing but a crass repackaging of the propaganda
techniques of totalitarian state media.
Dear MSM: You have forsaken your duty in a
democracy and are a disgrace to investigative,
unbiased journalism.
You have substituted
Orwellian-level propaganda for honest, skeptical
journalism. We can only hope viewers and advertisers
respond appropriately, i.e. turn you off.
Here's the mainstream media's new mantra:
"skepticism is always a conspiracy or a hoax."
The Ministry of Propaganda and the MSM are now one
agency.
The curtain is being pulled back on the Wizard of Oz.
How soon before the Wicked Witch starts to melt?
Do people who are willing to accept characterization as
"angry, provincial bigots" still have any right to
political self-expression? Believe it or not, it's an
important question.
Identity politics definition: a tendency for people of a
particular religion, race, social background, etc., to
form exclusive political alliances, moving away from
traditional broad-based party politics.
I find it odd
that the party of older white straight Christian men
accuses the party of everyone else to be guilty of
"identity politics". It just doesn't make any sense.
(1) borders matter; Ok, but they're not all that.
(2) immigration policy matters; Ditto. We should have a
policy.
(3) national interests, not so-called universal
interests, matter; Depends. National interests matter,
but if they are all that matters… I think you just
stepped outside the Gospels.
(4) entrepreneurship matters; It can, for good OR for
evil.
(5) decentralization matters; Another thorny one… SOME
things need to be more decentralized, some don't, and we
need to have an honest conversation about which is
which.
(6) PC speech-without which identity politics is
inconceivable-must be repudiated. ABSOLUTELY!
All in
all, I think this Georgetown prof has done the usual
short list of The Latest Attempt To Reduce Reality To a
Nice Short Checklist.
Not much of a guide to the future. We could all write
our own lists.
You can largely agree with Mitchell's six points (and,
for the most part I do) and nonetheless recognize that
an unprincipled, ruthless charlatan like Trump–a
pathological liar and narcissist interested in nothing
but his own self-promotion–will do nothing meaningful to
advance them. His latest birther charade shows him for
the lying, unprincipled scum bucket he is.
The
cultural ground is shifting as the emptiness of advanced
consumer capitalism and globalism becomes ever more
apparent. Large scale organizations are, by their very
nature, dehumanizing, demoralizing, and corrupt. I've
believed so for the better part of my life now. It's
that belief that lead me to the University of Rochester
and Christopher Lasch in the 1980s and, subsequently to
MacIntyre, Rieff, and Berry. It's also a belief that has
lead me to distrust both the corporate order and
politics as a means to salvation. I certainly don't
consider myself a conservative, at least not in the
shallow American sense of the term, and the chances that
I will ever vote for a Republican again are nil. But I'm
not a liberal in the American sense of the term either
because agreeing with Mitchell's six points pretty much
pretty much rules me out of that tribe. I have, for a
long time, felt pretty homeless in the American
wilderness.
I suppose that's one reason I keep reading your blog,
Rod, though I disagree deeply with many of your views.
As a Jew, I'm not much interested in the Benedict
Option, but I do agree that our society suffers from a
certain soul sickness that politics, consumption, and
technology can't cure.
Call it anti-Semitic if you want but all my Jewish
cousins and the several other Jewish business associates
I know feel uncontrollable hate for Trump.
As one
of those American Jews who feels a deep hatred for
Trump, perhaps I can shed some light on the reasons. It
has nothing to do with his alleged desire to enforce
borders. Nations require them. Nor does it have anything
to do with his lip service to Christianist values. He's
no Christian. He's pure heathen.
Instead, it has everything to do with his wink/nod
attitude toward the alt-right and white nationalist
groups and with his willingness to appropriate their
anti-semitic, racist memes for his own advancement. He's
dangerous. Period. Dangerous and scary to anyone
familiar with lynchings, pogroms, and mob violence. To
anyone familiar with history. Trump has unleashed dark
forces that will not easily be quelled even if, and
probably especially if, he loses. The possibility that
he might win has left me wondering whether I even belong
in this country any more, no matter how much sympathy I
might feel for the folks globalism has left behind.
Call it anti-Semitic if you want but all my Jewish
cousins and the several other Jewish business associates
I know feel uncontrollable hate for Trump…They seem to
think that any attempt to stop mass 3rd world
immigration, stop pc thought police, or up hold
Christian-ish values are a direct threat to them.
Or it could be that Trump reminds them of some
historical figure who was rather bad for the Jews. I
wonder who that could be?
And saying all the Jews that the commenter knows feel
an "uncontrollable" emotion
is
a touch
anti-Semitic.
But to talk about the OP: Joshua Mitchell gives the
game away by consistently referring to 1989 as the state
of a "new order," which he thinks is a combination of
globalization and identity politics. Of course neither
was new. Admittedly globalization received a boost by
the end of the Cold War, but it's been well underway for
a century or so. Mitchell wants to return to Reagan's
"morning in America." But there was no such morning.
"Identity politics" is what the suffragettes and
abolitionists would have been accused of, if the term
had been invented back in their day. Are there stupid
things done and said under the umbrella of "identity
politics"? Of course. That doesn't make the
discrimination and mistreatment that led to such
politics any less real.
The fundamental flaw in Mitchell's argument, though,
is that the Trump he describes (or, more accurately,
wishes for) simply doesn't exist. The Trump he describes
has ideas and beliefs. It's a little ironic that
Mitchell thinks that Trump "expressly opposes" the ideas
of Marx and Nietzsche, because the real-world Trump has
no beliefs other than he is an ubermensch.
I read an entire article on Trump in which Hitler
wasn't mentioned once.
It wasn't even smug, and there was no list of liberal
cliches and denunciations of heretics so between
drooling I never knew whether shout "Boo!" or "Hurah!"
Couldn't they throw in one "racist, sexist,
homophobic" so I could feel morally superior to stupid
white people in fly-over country?
Having now read Mitchell's article, all I can say is
that while I agree with his six points, his hope that
Trump is some kind of pragmatist is deeply misguided.
Like most political scientists, he knows little about
history.
For thise who think Trump is harmless, here
he is, tonight, riffing on his
Clinton assassination fantasies.
Where is Leni
Reifenstahl when you need her? Trump is no pragmatist.
He's no Christian. And he's no leader.
If Mitchell is correct–and I believe that he is–how does
this bode poorly for conservative Christians? If the
BenOp is primarily a reaction to the post-1989 culture,
shouldn't the crumbling of that culture obviate the need
for a BenOp?
[NFR: Well, if there were a candidate
advocating these positions who WASN'T Donald Trump, I
would eagerly vote for him or her. I think Trump is
thoroughly untrustworthy and demagogic. But I would not
be under any illusion that casting a vote for that
person - again, even if he or she was a saint - would
mean any kind of Christian restoration. The Ben Op is
premised on the idea that we are living in
post-Christian times. The Ben Op is a religious movement
with political implications, not a political movement.
Liquid modernity will not suddenly solidify depending on
a change of government in Washington. - RD]
This is an election about feeling under siege. Once that
is understood all else makes sense. It is also a
manifestation about what happens when a word is
overused, in this case racism. It creates a reaction of,
"Ask us if we care," which becomes, "Yeah, we are, and
we like it."
It backfires.
The Ben Op may prove to be in better position that it
looks.
I think populists who haven't gotten much attention from
either party are projecting an awful lot onto a
seriously flawed candidate who doesn't have firm
convictions on anything, beyond making the sale. This
objective he pursues by being willing to say whatever he
thinks will get him the sale, with no regard for decency
or truth or consistency. If he gets himself elected, who
knows what he will do to retain his popularity with what
he perceives to be the majority view. Those hoping for a
sea change are engaged in some pretty serious wishful
thinking, I think.
@T.S.Gay, You are correct that this election is a battle
of Nationalism vs Globalism. But, Nationalism is
Identity Politics in its purest form and that is why the
Globalist oppose it.
Globalists use identity politics,
that is true. However, they bear no love for the
identities they publicly promote. Rather, they
dehumanize them, using them as nothing more than weapons
against Nationalism.
As a Nationalist I will support and promote my
Nation(People), but I also recognize the inherent right
of other Nations(Peoples) to support and promote
themselves.
I'm absolutely sure Donald Trump isn't going to do to
us, what that other person has planned for us
deplorables:
"Laws have to be backed up with resources
and political will and deep-seated cultural codes,
religious beliefs and structural biases have to be
changed."
After her shot across the bow promises to marginalize
us in society, complete with cheers from those at her
back, that is just about all that counts.
Mitchell's description echoes Oliver Stone's comments
from Oct. 2001: "There's been conglomeration under six
principal princes-they're kings, they're barons!-and
these six companies have control of the world! … That's
what the new world order is. They control culture, they
control ideas. And I think the revolt of September 11
was about 'F- you! F- your order!'"
It is quite amusing to contemplate how it works. An
average progressive (I mean average progressive with
brains, not SJW) comes with a genuine desire to
criticize Trump for his ideas. But he faces something
"deplorable" almost at once. "Deplorable" things are
known to immediately trigger the incessant spouting of
words like "bigot", "racist", logically impossible
"white nationalist", "chovinist", fascist and on, and
on, and on. No way to control it, completely automatic.
A deep-seated emotional reaction all the way long from
uncle Freud's works. And, as a result, Trump's actual
ideas remain largely uncriticized. And the ideas that
are often mentioned but seldom confronted with a
coherent critical response are almost impossible to
defeat. So yes, his ideas are thinly buried in his
rhetoric. There are simply too many of them for being
suddenly blurted out even without all of the above,
especially when similar ideas simultaneously blossom all
around Europe. French Revolution, Russian Revolution,
American Progressivism – the West is simply tired of two
centuries of modernist and postmodernist experiments.
And now the giant starts awakening. Though, instead of
"thinly buried", I would rather prefer "subtly woven"
metaphor.
sure the ground is moving – it was inevitable.
Everything changes.
But is Trump a harbinger of the change? Or is he – or
rather his supporters – simply hoping to stop change –
to bring back some nostalgic notion of 1950's America?
Trump is a con man who seeks only his own
aggrandizement. He is not really committed to any
refutation of the existing order. He lies constantly and
when one set of lies stops working he switches to a new
set of lies. He was forced to back down on birtherism –
which is what propelled him to the attention of the Fox
News conspiracy folks. And let us be clear – birtherism
is fundamentally racist. Now he has to give up his
birther position so he can get the votes of a few soccer
Moms. So he creates new lies – Hilary started
birtherism. It becomes impossible to keep up with his
lies. And as he bounces from one new set of realities to
another – he takes his supporters along with him. He is
playing a con – making a sale.
Now he suggests that the Secret Service detail give
up their guns and then "Let's see what happens to her".
There is no great movement with him – just a demented
man who thrives on the adoration of the crowds and will
say anything however obscene to get those cheers.
The issue is not Trump – it is those who support him.
Are we as a people really capable of being citizens of a
Republic or are we simply fools to be manipulated by
people like Trump ?
Very interesting piece, and I had not really connected
the Brexit and EU jitters to what's going on in the US –
and I think Mitchell is right about that. When we were
still in primary season and Trump was ahead, I recall
one author – probably on The Corner – wondered how a
Trump presidency might look. He figured Trump would be
very pragmatic, perhaps actually fixing Obamacare, and
focusing on our interests here at home.
"I will vote primarily for candidates who will be
better at protecting my community's right to be left
alone."
I've been voting that way for years; mostly
Republicans, but a good sprinkling of Democrats as well.
Good article. I think Mitchell identifies the right
ideas buried within Trump's rhetoric. But even if it
were true that Trump had no ideas, I would still vote
for him. After all, where have politic ideas gotten us
lately?
"Conservative principles" espoused by wonks
and political scientists culminated in the wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan. Ideology told us that democracy was a
divine right, transferable across time and culture.
Moreover, do we really want our politicians playing
with ideas? Think back to George W. Bush's speech at the
2004 Republican convention, perhaps the most idea-driven
speech in recent history. The sight of W. spinning a
neo-Hegelian apocalyptic narrative was like watching a
gorilla perform opera.
I think that many casual hearers of Ben Op ideas assume
that Ben Op is a one-dimensional, cultural dropping-out
of cultural/religious conservatives into irrelevant
enclaves.
To me, Ben-Op is more returning to the Tocquevillean
idea that the best American ways of living work their
way up from organic, formative local communities that
have largely disappeared from our socio-cultural
experience. Without independent formative local
communities, we human beings are mere products rolling
off the assembly line that serves the interests of the
elites of our big government-big business-big education
conglomerate.
If these formative communities hold to authentic,
compassionate Judeo-Christian values and practices, all
the better–for everybody! Ben Op will offer an
alternative to the assembly-line politically correct
cultural warriors being produced by many of our elite
cultural institutions.
A recently heard description of Trump – a fat, orange,
poorly educated, intellectually shallow pathologic liar,
bigot, and narcissistic jerk.
Well, I don't know that
much about the guy, but some of that description seems
correct. He rarely reads, he says, gets his information
from "the shows", so if there are intellectual
preparations which we should expect in a presidential
candidate he falls short, but those preparations usually
create some intellectual bias, which he doesn't seem to
have on any important matter. So maybe just "muddling
through" problems as they arise will work. One has to
hope so, because whatever ability to do that he has is
all he's got.
"cavalierly undermining decades worth of social and
political certainties"
Sorry, that is just silly. Only
political junkies and culture warriors even care about
stuff like this. In my life… in my experience of living
in the USA every day, none of this matters. It just
doesn't.
People don't live their lives thinking about any of
those things cited. What would it mean to you or me to
have "borders matter"? Ford just announced they were
moving some more production to Mexico. That decision
WILL affect the lives of those who lose their jobs. Does
anyone honestly think that anyone… even a President
Trump, would lift a finger to stop them? Of course not.
It is silly to assert otherwise.
Very good essay and commentary, but I caution against
the notion that you are looking at permanent change.
JonF's two 20th century ideas (Free Trade benefits
everyone and Supply Side economics) are not going away.
In fact, Larry Kudlow, the crassest exponent of both
those ideas is one of Trump's economic advisors.
BenOp
is fascinating, but most cultural conservative now
active in the game will not drop out. They may not like
the adrenalin rush politics gives them more than they
like Jesus–but they ain't going to give it up.
Great. He's got six ideas. Six ideas with either no
detailed policy or approach attached to them, policies
or approaches that seemingly change on a whim (evidence
that at best he hasn't given much thought to any of
them), or has no realistic political path for making
those ideas a reality.
"That is what the Trump campaign, ghastly though it may
at times be, leads us toward: A future where states
matter."
With that sentence, I think Mitchell stumbles
into a truth he might not have intended - The "state" -
as in "administrative state" - is going to continue
growing even under Trump.
Given the increasing intolerance of our society for
traditional values, that's all Christians need to know.
Clint writes:
"Hillary Clinton,
'L;aws have to be backed up with resources and political
will and deep-seated cultural codes, religious bel:efs
and structural biases have to be changed.
Uh Oh --
We Christians are in Hillary Clinton's Basket of
Deplorables."
"He's dangerous. Period. Dangerous and scary to anyone
familiar with lynchings, pogroms, and mob violence. To
anyone familiar with history. Trump has unleashed dark
forces that will not easily be quelled even if, and
probably especially if, he loses."
Given the amount
violence and disruption your side has caused this year
this accusation really should be laughable. Trump
supporters aren't out beating up Clinton supporters and
making sure they can't have a rally in the wrong
neighborhood. Members of the alt-right aren't
threatening student journalists with violence on their
own campuses, or getting on stage with speakers they
dislike and slapping them.
It's your own side that has been perpetuating the mob
violence while the liberal establishment denies it or
excuses it.
This post is spot-on; thank you for sharing the
preliminary BenOp talking points.
We need Thomas Paine's
Common Sense
for our
age, for these are times that try men's souls. Problem
is this: Paine's citizenry were 90% literate, unified by
culture, and cognitively engaged … today we're 70%
literate (at 4th grade reading level), multicultural,
and amused to death.
"... OK, let's be more charitable here – if Hillary did indeed overheat and become dehydrated, then it was a partial truth, but it was made a lie because it wasn't the whole story ..."
"... she did not tell either her staff or running mate Tim Kaine of the pneumonia diagnosis until after her Sunday collapse ..."
"... visiting the 9/11 ceremonies was certainly a high-risk event for Hillary to attend, since there were lots of people, lots of things going on with multiple distractions occurring at the same time in an uncontrolled environment, lots of reporters, lots of cameras taking pictures ..."
Only four days after I wrote "The
Decrepit Candidate" here at American Thinker, Hillary Clinton took ill at the 9/11 fifteenth
anniversary memorial ceremonies in New York City, ditched her press pool, left prematurely, and
was unceremoniously stuffed, stiff as a board, into her van to escape to daughter Chelsea's
apartment. Thanks to a
citizen video, taken by Zdenek Gazda and now viewed by millions of people worldwide, we know
that the Clinton campaign's original statement that Hillary became "overheated" is a lie.
OK, let's be more charitable here – if Hillary did indeed overheat and become
dehydrated, then it was a partial truth, but it was made a lie because it wasn't the whole story.
After Gazda's video became public, a new excuse explanation was needed, and it was provided by
Hillary's personal physician, Dr. Lisa Bardack, who has written that she examined Hillary on
Friday, September 9, performed tests, and diagnosed "a mild non-contagious bacterial pneumonia"
(whatever that is; probably a simplified description in layman's terms). Hillary was put on
antibiotics (for the second time since September 2) and told to rest. Presumably ignoring
the good doctor's advice, Hillary returned to full-bore campaigning and fundraising that same
day.
I don't doubt that Hillary had pneumonia, but is this also a lie, because it is not the
complete story? We now understand that Hillary is very secretive about her health, as
she did not tell either her staff or running mate Tim Kaine of the pneumonia diagnosis until
after her Sunday collapse.
I remain skeptical that Hillary is really in good health, and I think there are very good odds
that the very secretive Hillary is hiding a degenerative neurological condition from the public,
and probably from most everybody except those people closest to her, possibly even from her
primary care physician (Dr. Bardack).
If so, then visiting the 9/11 ceremonies was certainly a high-risk event for Hillary to
attend, since there were lots of people, lots of things going on with multiple distractions
occurring at the same time in an uncontrolled environment, lots of reporters, lots of cameras
taking pictures, a lot of chances to spot evidence of a neurological disorder, and not a
good time for something to go "wrong," which it did.
Hillary just can't help herself. Her political instincts (and those of her
campaign) are just plain stupid. Everything backfires on her, probably because
she is living in a fantasy bubble called the Political Industrial Complex (PIC).
The Political Industrial Complex encompasses all those elites whose livelihoods
are predicated on central-control of resources and who determine who is allowed
to succeed in society. It is a bipartisan exclusive club. It includes the Politicians
and their career staffers. It includes crony donors and lobbyists who reap government
windfalls and special treatment that average citizens cannot obtain. It includes
the PIC industrial base of pollsters, consultants, etc. And it includes the
pliant news media, whose success rest on access to those in power, and in return
for access making sure no bad news will disrupt said power.
This strange and bizarre parallel universe is where all the political elites
hang out – isolated from Main Street America (and the commoner world as well).
The denizens of the PIC are very wealthy, very cozy with each other and one
of they live in the most dense echo chamber on the planet.
Hillary is just the epitome of Political Correctness dripping from the center
of the PIC.
But now Hillary has created a massive movement in the country, outside the
PIC. She has created " The Deplorables! ".
It is becoming a badge of honor to be feared and attacked by the PIC. It
is becoming fun to watch members of the PIC just collapse into lick-spittle
rage, as the voters reject their self-anointed brilliance.
For example :
Hillary, you recently labeled me - and millions of Americans like me
- "deplorable."
I am not deplorable. What I am is your worst nightmare: a woman, a mother
and a voter who sees right through you.
In your remarks to an LGBT group, with liberal millionaire mouthpiece
Barbra Streisand hosting your appearance, you waved your invisible scepter
and banished millions of people from respectable society, just because you
felt like it.
"Racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it,"
you said last Friday. "There are people like that, and [Trump] has lifted
them up."
Well, I'm concerned about national security, supportive of law enforcement,
and a believer in traditional marriage. How does that make me "deplorable?"
You may be a deplorable if you just got your car inspected.
If you're deployable, you're definitely deplorable.
If you wake before noon, if you call Islamic terrorists Islamic terrorists,
if you don't have an Obamaphone and you don't believe that global warming
is "settled science" - can you say deplorable?
…
Or if while watching the second Monday night NFL game you were less irritated
by the streaker than you were by all the fawning coverage of Colin Kaepernick
on the pre-game show.
You may be a deplorable if you resent training your H1-B replacement.
Or the fact that the Earned Income Tax Credit is NOT earned.
Nothing says deplorable like the National Rifle Association.
Hillary wanted to brand Trump Voters as subhuman (well, at least below the
standards of the PIC). But by giving them a name, she gave them a rallying point,
a joint cause.
Honestly, how could she have helped Trump even more? Given her political
skills I am sure we will find out soon enough.
"... When Samuelson described the sorting process in her FBI interview , she said that her first step was to find all the emails to or from Clinton and the people she regularly worked with in the State Department, and put all of those emails in the "work-related" category. ..."
"... But from the Abedin emails released so far, about 200 are previously unreleased emails between her and Clinton . Anyone who looks at these can see that the vast majority, if not all, of them are work-related. ..."
"... The Abedin emails released so far are only a small percentage of all her emails that are going to be released on a monthly basis well into 2017 . It is likely that Clinton's supposed 31,000 "personal" emails contain thousands of work-related emails to and from Abedin alone. Consider that only about 15% of the 30,000 Clinton emails released so far were between her and Abedin. ..."
"... It is further worth noting that these emails were not handed over with the rest of Clinton's 30,000 work-related emails, despite clearly being work-related, but were somehow uncovered by the State Department inspector general 's office. Those very emails are good examples of the kind of material Clinton may have tried to keep secret by controlling the sorting process. ..."
"... How many more headlines like that would there be if all 31,000 deleted emails became public before the November 2016 presidential election? It's easy to imagine a political motive for Clinton wanting to keep some work-related emails secret. ..."
"... on or around December 2014 or January 2015 , Mills and Samuelson requested that [Platte River Networks (PRN) employee Paul Combetta] remove from their laptops all of the emails from the July and September 2014 exports. [Combetta] used a program called BleachBit to delete the email-related files so they could not be recovered." ..."
"... With the emails of Mills and Samuelson wiped clean, and the old version of the server wiped clean, that left just two known copies of the emails: one on the new server, and one on the back-up Datto SIRIS device connected to the new server. ..."
"... Mills was interviewed by the FBI in April 2016 . She claimed that in December 2014 , Clinton decided she no longer needed access to any of her emails older than 60 days . Note that this came not long after the State Department formally asked Clinton for all of her work-related emails, on October 28, 2014 . Mills told the FBI that she instructed Combetta to modify the email retention policy on Clinton's clintonemail.com email account to reflect this change. Emails older than 60 days would then be overwritten several times, wiping them just as effectively as BleachBit. ..."
"... So although the retention policy change sounds like a mere technicality, in fact, Clinton passed the message through Mills that she wanted all her emails from when she was secretary of state to be permanently wiped. ..."
"... Think about Clinton wanting to delete all her old "personal" emails. As a politician with a wide network of contributors and supporters, the information in them could be highly valuable for her. For instance, if a major donor contacted her, she probably would want to review their past correspondence before responding. She'd preserved these emails for nearly two years, but just when investigators started to demand to see them, she decided she didn't want ANY of them, and all traces of them should be permanently wiped. And yet we're supposed to believe the timing is just a coincidence? ..."
"... New York Times ..."
"... New York Times ..."
"... According to what Combetta later told the FBI, at some point between these two calls, he had an "Oh shit!" moment and remembered that he'd forgotten to make the requested retention policy change back in December . So, even though he told the FBI that he was aware of the emails from Mills mentioning the Congressional request to preserve all of Clinton's emails, he took action. ..."
"... the Datto backups of the server were also manually deleted during this timeframe ." ..."
"... Already, Combetta's behavior is damning. He didn't just change the data retention policy, as Mills had asked him to do, causing them to be permanently deleted 60 days later. He immediately deleted all of Clinton's emails and then wiped them for good measure, and almost certainly deleted them from the Datto back-up device too. ..."
"... To make matters worse for Combetta, on March 20, 2015 , the House Benghazi Committee sent a letter to Clinton's lawyer Kendall , asking Clinton to turn her server over to a neutral third party so it could be examined to see if any work-related emails were still on it. This was reported in the New York Times ..."
"... However, despite all these clear signs that the emails should be preserved, not only did Combetta confess in an FBI interview that "at the time he made the deletions in March 2015 , he was aware of the existence of the preservation request and the fact that it meant he should not disturb Clinton's email data on the [server]," he said that " he did not receive guidance from other PRN personnel, PRN's legal counsel or others regarding the meaning of the preservation request." So he confessed to obstruction of justice and other possible crimes, all to the apparent benefit of Clinton instead of himself! ..."
"... The FBI interviewed PRN's staff in September 2015. This almost certainly included Combetta and Bill Thornton, because they were the only two PRN employees actively managing Clinton's server. ..."
"... The fact that the FBI falsely claimed Combetta was only interviewed twice grows in importance given a recent New York Times ..."
"... Then, in May 2016 , he completely changed his story. He said that in fact he did make the deletions in late March 2015 after all, plus he'd wiped her emails with BleachBit, as described earlier. He also confessed to being aware of the Mills email with the preservation request. ..."
"... New York Times ..."
"... For the FBI to give Combetta an immunity deal and then still not learn if he had been told to delete the emails by anyone working for Clinton due to a completely legally indefensible "attorney-client privilege" excuse is beyond belief. It would make sense, however, if the FBI was actually trying to protect Clinton from prosecution instead of trying to find evidence to prosecute her. ..."
"... In one Reddit post , he asked other server managers: "I may be facing a very interesting situation where I need to strip out a VIP's (VERY VIP) email address from a bunch of archived email that I have both in a live Exchange mailbox, as well as a .pst file. Basically, they don't want the VIP's email address exposed to anyone, and want to be able to either strip out or replace the email address in the to/from fields in all of the emails we want to send out. Does anyone have experience with something like this, and/or suggestions on how this might be accomplished?" ..."
"... Recall how Clinton allegedly claimed she didn't want to keep any of her deleted emails. It looks like that wasn't true after all. It sounds exactly as if Mills or someone else working for Clinton told him to make it look like all the "personal" emails were permanently deleted due to the 60 day policy change, while actually keeping copies of emails they still wanted. ..."
"... New York Times ..."
"... First off, it's interesting that he said he did "a bunch" of "email filters and cleanup," because what has been reported by the FBI is that he only made a copy of all of Clinton's email and sent them off to be sorted in late July 2014 . That fits with his July 2014 Reddit post where he was trying to modify somebody's email address. ..."
"... For now, let us turn back to events in the fall of 2015 . In mid-August 2015 , Senator Ron Johnson (R) asked for and got a staff-level briefing from PRN about the management of Clinton's server, as part of Republican Congressional oversight of the FBI's investigation. It seems very likely that Combetta was a part of that briefing, or at least his knowledge heavily informed the briefing, because again only two PRN employees actively managed her server, and he was one of them. ..."
"... The dishonesty or ignorance of PRN in this time period can be clearly seen due to a September 12, 2015 Washington Post ..."
"... Datto expressed a willingness to cooperate. But because Datto had been subcontracted by PRN to help manage Clinton's server, they needed PRN's permission to share any information relating to that account. When PRN was first asked in early October 2015 , they gave permission. But about a week later, they changed their mind , forcing Datto to stay quiet. ..."
"... But more importantly, consider what was mentioned in an NBC News ..."
"... In an August 18, 2015 email, Combetta expressed concern that CESC, the Clinton family company, had directed PRN to reduce the length of time backups, and PRN wanted proof of this so they wouldn't be blamed. But he said in the email, "this was all phone comms [communications]." ..."
"... On September 2, 2016 , the FBI's final report of their Clinton email investigation was released (along with a summary of Clinton's FBI interview). This report revealed the late March 2015 deletions for the first time. Combetta's name was redacted, but his role, as well as his immunity deal, was revealed in the New York Times ..."
"... Chaffetz also wants an explanation from PRN how Combetta could refuse to talk to the FBI about the conference calls if the only lawyers involved in the call were Clinton's. ..."
"... PRN employees Combetta and Thornton were also given subpoenas on September 8 , ordering them to testify at a Congressional hearing on September 13, 2016 . Both of them showed up with their lawyers, but both of them pled the Fifth , leaving many questions unanswered. ..."
"... In a Senate speech on September 12, 2016 , Senator Charles Grassley (R) accused the FBI of manipulating which information about the Clinton email investigation becomes public . He said that although the FBI has taken the unusual step of releasing the FBI's final report, "its summary is misleading or inaccurate in some key details and leaves out other important facts altogether." He pointed in particular to Combetta's deletions, saying: "[T]here is key information related to that issue that is still being kept secret, even though it is unclassified. If I honor the FBI's 'instruction' not to disclose the unclassified information it provided to Congress, I cannot explain why." ..."
"... Regarding the FBI's failure to inform Congressional oversight committees of Combetta's immunity deal, Representative Trey Gowdy (R) recently commented, "If there is a reason to withhold the immunity agreement from Congress-and by extension, the people we represent-I cannot think of what it would be." ..."
"... The behavior of the FBI is even stranger. Comey was a registered Republican most of his life, and it is well known that most FBI agents are politically conservative. Be that as it may, if Comey made a decision beforehand based on some political calculation to avoid indicting Clinton no matter what the actual evidence was, that the FBI's peculiar behavior specifically relating to the Combetta deletions make much more sense. It would be an unprecedented and bold move to recommend indicting someone with Hillary Clinton's power right in the middle of her presidential election campaign. ..."
"... In this scenario, the FBI having Combetta take the fall for the deletions while making a secret immunity deal with him is a particularly clever move to prevent anyone from being indicted. Note that Combetta's confession about making the deletions came in his May 2016 FBI interview, which came after Mills' April 2016 interview in which she claimed she'd never heard of any deletions. Thus, the only way to have Combetta take the fall for the deletions without Mills getting caught clearly lying to the FBI is by dodging the issue of what was said in the March 31, 2015 conference with a nonsensical claim of "attorney-client privilege." ..."
"... I believe that criminal behavior needs to be properly investigated and prosecuted, regardless of political persuasion and regardless of the election calendar. Combetta clearly committed a crime and he even confessed to do so, given what he admitted in his last FBI interview. If he got a limited immunity deal instead of blanket immunity, which is highly likely, it still would be possible to indict and convict him based on evidence outside of his interviews. That would help explain why he recently pled the Fifth, because he's still in legal danger. ..."
"... But more importantly, who else is guilty with him? Logic and the available evidence strongly suggest that Clinton's lawyer Cheryl Mills at least knew about the deletions at the time they happened. Combetta has already confessed to criminal behavior-and yet somehow hasn't even been fired by PRN. If he didn't at least tell Mills and the others in the conference call about the deletions, there would be no logical reason to assert attorney-client privilege in the first place. Only the nonsensical assertion of this privilege is preventing the evidence coming out that should lead to Mills being charged with lying to the FBI at a minimum. And if Mills knew, can anyone seriously believe that Clinton didn't know too? ..."
Fast forward to the middle of 2014 . The
House Benghazi Committee was formed to investigate the US government's actions surrounding the 2012 terrorist
attack in Benghazi, Libya , and
soon a handful of emails were discovered relating to this attack involving Clinton's [email protected]
email address. At this point, nobody outside of Clinton's inner circle of associates knew she had exclusively used that private email
account for all her email communications while she was secretary of state, or that she'd hosted it on her own private email server.
It was decided that over 30,000 emails were work-related, and those were
turned over to the State Department on December 5, 2014 . These have all since been publicly released, though
with redactions. Another over 31,000 emails were
deemed personal , and Clinton kept those. They were later deleted in controversial circumstances that this essay explores in
detail.
It has become increasingly clear in recent months that this sorting process was highly flawed. Clinton has said any emails that
were borderline cases were given to the State Department, just to be on the safe side. But in fact,
the FBI later recovered about 17,500 of Clinton's "personal" emails . It is probable no government agency has yet gone through
all of these to officially determine which ones were work-related and which ones were not, but FBI Director
James Comey has said that "
thousands " were work-related.
We can get a glimpse of just how flawed the sorting process was because hundreds of emails from
Huma Abedin have been released in recent months, as
part of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit . Abedin was Clinton's deputy chief of staff and still is one of her closest
aides.
When
Samuelson described the sorting process in her FBI interview , she said that her first step was to find all the emails to or
from Clinton and the people she regularly worked with in the State Department, and put all of those emails in the "work-related"
category.
But from the Abedin emails released so far,
about 200 are previously unreleased emails between her and Clinton . Anyone who looks at these can see that the vast majority,
if not all, of them are work-related. Many involve Abedin's state.gov government address, not her clintonemail.com
private address, so how on Earth did Samuelson's sorting process miss those? It has even come to light recently that a small
number of emails mentioning "Benghazi" have been found in the 17,500 recovered by the FBI, but
Samuelson told the FBI she had specifically searched for all emails using that word.
A sample of an email between Clinton and Abedin using her state.gov address. (Credit: public domain)
The
Abedin emails released so far are only a small percentage of all her emails that are going to be released on a monthly basis
well into 2017 . It is likely that Clinton's supposed 31,000 "personal" emails contain thousands of work-related
emails to and from Abedin alone. Consider that only about 15% of the 30,000 Clinton emails released so far were between her and Abedin.
If the rest of her deleted emails follow the same pattern as the Abedin ones, it is highly likely that the majority, and maybe
even the vast majority, of Clinton's deleted "personal" emails in fact are work-related.
... ... ...
FBI Director Comey has said he trusts that Clinton had made a sincere sorting effort, but the sheer number of
work-related emails that keep getting discovered suggests otherwise. Furthermore, logic and other evidence also suggest otherwise.
For instance,
in home
video footage from a private fundraiser in 2000 , Clinton talked about how she had deliberately avoided using
email so she wouldn't leave a paper trail: "As much as I've been investigated and all of that, you know, why would I? I don't even
want Why would I ever want to do email? Can you imagine?"
Practical considerations forced her to start using email a few years later. But what if her exclusive use of a private email address
on her own private server was not done out of "
convenience " as she claims, but so she could retain control of them, only turning over emails to FOIA requests and later government
investigators that she wanted to?
Note also that in a November 2010 email exchange between Clinton and Abedin, Abedin suggested that Clinton might
want to use a State Department email account due because the department computer system kept flagging emails from her private email
account as spam. Clinton replied that she was open to some kind of change, but "
I don't want any risk of the personal being accessible ." It is further worth noting that these emails were not handed over
with the rest of Clinton's 30,000 work-related emails, despite clearly being work-related, but were somehow uncovered by the
State Department inspector
general 's office. Those very emails are good examples of the kind of material Clinton may have tried to keep secret by controlling
the sorting process.
This essay will explore this possibility more later. But if it is the case that she wanted to keep those 31,000 "personal" emails
out of the public eye, she had obstacles to overcome. In 2014 , PRN had managerial control of both Clinton's new
and old server. Thus,
in July 2014 and
again in September 2014 , PRN employee Combetta had to send copies of all the emails to the laptop of Clinton
lawyer Cheryl Mills, and another copy to the laptop of Clinton lawyer Heather Samuelson, to be used for the sorting process.
With the sorting done, if Clinton didn't want the public to ever see her deleted emails, you would expect all these copies of
those emails to be permanently deleted, and that's exactly what happened. According to a later FBI report, "
on or around December 2014 or January 2015 , Mills and Samuelson requested that [Platte
River Networks (PRN) employee Paul Combetta] remove from their laptops all of the emails from the July and September 2014 exports.
[Combetta] used a program called BleachBit to delete the email-related files so they could not be recovered."
The FBI report explained, "BleachBit is open source software that allows users to 'shred' files, clear Internet history, delete
system and temporary files, and wipe free space on a hard drive. Free space is the area of the hard drive that can contain data that
has been deleted. BleachBit's 'shred files' function claims to securely erase files by overwriting data to make the data unrecoverable."
BleachBit advertises that it can "shred" files so they can never be recovered again.
With the emails of Mills and Samuelson wiped clean, and the old version of the server wiped clean, that left just two known
copies of the emails: one on the new server, and one on the back-up Datto SIRIS device connected to the new server.
Mills was interviewed by the FBI in April 2016 . She claimed that in December 2014 ,
Clinton decided she no longer needed access to any of her emails older than 60 days . Note that this came not long after the
State Department formally asked Clinton for all of her work-related emails,
on October 28, 2014 . Mills told the FBI that she instructed Combetta to modify the email retention policy on
Clinton's clintonemail.com email account to reflect this change. Emails older than 60 days would then be overwritten several times,
wiping them just as effectively as BleachBit.
Clinton essentially said the same thing as Mills
when she was interviewed by the FBI . Clinton also was interviewed by the FBI. According to the FBI summary of the interview,
she claimed that after her staff sent the 30,000 work-related emails to the State Department on December 5, 2014
, "she was asked what she wanted to do with her remaining [31,000] personal emails.
Clinton instructed her staff she no longer needed the emails."
So although the retention policy change sounds like a mere technicality, in fact, Clinton passed the message through Mills
that she wanted all her emails from when she was secretary of state to be permanently wiped.
Think about Clinton wanting to delete all her old "personal" emails. As a politician with a wide network of contributors and
supporters, the information in them could be highly valuable for her. For instance, if a major donor contacted her, she probably
would want to review their past correspondence before responding. She'd preserved these emails for nearly two years, but just when
investigators started to demand to see them, she decided she didn't want ANY of them, and all traces of them should be permanently
wiped. And yet we're supposed to believe the timing is just a coincidence?
But there was a problem with deleting them. Combetta later claimed that he simply forgot to make this change.
Then, on March 2, 2015 ,
the headline on the front page of the New York Times was a story revealing that while Clinton was secretary of state,
she had exclusively used a private email address hosted on her private server, thus keeping all of her email communications secret.
This became THE big story of the month, and the start of a high-profile controversy that continues until today.
Then, a day after that, on March 4, 2015 ,
the committee issued two subpoenas to her . One subpoena ordered her to turn over all emails relating to the Benghazi attack.
The committee had already
received about 300 such emails from the State Department in February 2015 , but after the Times story,
the committee worried that the department might not have some of her relevant emails. (That would later prove to be the case, given
the small number of Benghazi emails eventually recovered by the FBI.) The second subpoena ordered her to turn over documents it requested
in November 2014 but still has not received from the State Department, relating to communications between Clinton
and ten senior department officials.
Cheryl Mills (Credit: Twitter)
If Clinton had already deleted her emails to keep them from future investigators, these requests shouldn't have been a problem.
On March 9, 2015 ,
Mills sent an email to PRN employees , including Combetta, to make sure they were aware of the committee's request that all of
Clinton's emails be preserved. One can see this as a CYA ("cover your ass") move, since Mills would have believed all copies of Clinton's
"personal" emails had been permanently deleted and wiped by this time. The Times story and the requests for copies of Clinton's
emails that followed had seemingly come too late.
But that wasn't actually the case, since Combetta had forgotten to make the deletions!
Combetta deletes everything that is left
Sitting behind Combetta is co-founder of Platte River Brent Allshouse (left) and PRN attorney, Ken Eichner. (Credit: CSpan)
According to a later Combetta FBI interview, he claimed that on March 25, 2015,
there was a conference call between PRN employees , including himself, and some members of Bill Clinton's staff. (Hillary Clinton's
private server hosted the emails of Bill Clinton's staff too, and one unnamed staffer hired PRN back in 2013 .)
There was another conference call between PRN and Clinton staffers on March 31, 2015 , with at least Combetta,
Mills, and Clinton lawyer David Kendall taking part in that later call.
According to what Combetta later told the FBI, at some point between these two calls, he had an "Oh shit!" moment and remembered
that he'd forgotten to make the requested retention policy change back in December . So, even though he told the
FBI that he was aware of the emails from Mills mentioning the Congressional request to preserve all of Clinton's emails, he took
action. Instead of simply making the retention policy change, which would have preserved the emails for another two months,
he immediately deleted all of Clinton's emails from her server. Then he used BleachBit to permanently wipe them.
The Datto SIRIS S2000 was used for back-up services. (Credit: Datto, Inc.)
However, recall that there was a Datto SIRIS back-up device connected to the server and periodically making copies of all the
data on the server. Apparently, Combetta didn't mention this to the FBI, but the FBI found "evidence of these [server] deletions
and determined the Datto backups of the server were
also manually deleted during this timeframe ." The Datto device sent a records log back to the Datto company whenever any
changes were made, and according to a letter from Datto to the FBI that later became public, the deletions on the device were made
around noon on March 31, 2015 , the same date as the second conference call. (Although the server and Datto device
were in New Jersey and Combetta was working remotely from Rhode Island, he could make changes remotely, as he or other PRN employees
did on other occasions.)
A recent Congressional committee letter mentioned that the other deletions were also made on or around March 31, 2015
. So it's probable they were all done at the same time by the same person: Combetta.
Already, Combetta's behavior is damning. He didn't just change the data retention policy, as Mills had asked him to do, causing
them to be permanently deleted 60 days later. He immediately deleted all of Clinton's emails and then wiped them for good measure,
and almost certainly deleted them from the Datto back-up device too.
To make matters worse for Combetta, on March 20, 2015 ,
the House Benghazi Committee sent a letter to Clinton's lawyer Kendall , asking Clinton to turn her server over to a neutral
third party so it could be examined to see if any work-related emails were still on it. This was reported in the New York Times
and other media outlets.
Then, on March 27, 2015 ,
Kendall replied to the committee in a letter that also was reported on by the Times and others that same day. Kendall
wrote, "There is no basis to support the proposed third-party review of the server To avoid prolonging a discussion that would be
academic, I have confirmed with the secretary's IT [information technology] support that no emails for the time period January
21, 2009 through February 1, 2013 reside on the server or on any back-up systems associated with the server."
David Kendall (Credit: Above the Law)
When Kendall mentioned Clinton's IT support, that had to have been a reference to PRN. So what actually happened? Did Kendall
or someone else working for Clinton ask Combetta and/or other PRN employees if there were any emails still on the server in the
March 25, 2015 conference call, just two days before he sent his letter? Did Combetta lie in that
call and say they were already deleted and then rush to delete them afterwards to cover up his mistake? Or did someone working for
Clinton tell or hint that he should delete them now if they hadn't been deleted already? We don't know, because the FBI has revealed
nothing about what was said in that conference call or the one that took place a week later.
However, despite all these clear signs that the emails should be preserved, not only did Combetta confess in an FBI interview
that "at the time he made the deletions in March 2015 , he was aware of the existence of the preservation request
and the fact that it meant he should not disturb Clinton's email data on the [server]," he said that "
he did not receive guidance from other PRN personnel, PRN's legal counsel or others regarding the meaning of the preservation
request." So he confessed to obstruction of justice and other possible crimes, all to the apparent benefit of Clinton instead of
himself!
Investigations and cover-ups
This is perplexing enough already, but it gets stranger still, if we continue to follow the behavior of Combetta and PRN as a
whole.
An inside look at the Equinix facility in Secaucus, NJ. (Credit: Chang W. Lee / New York Time)
By August 2015 , the FBI's Clinton investigation was in full swing, and they began interviewing witnesses and
confiscating equipment for analysis. Because the FBI never empanelled a grand jury, it didn't have subpoena power, so it had to ask
Clinton for permission to seize her server.
She gave that permission on August 11, 2015 , and the server was
picked up from the data center in New Jersey the next day . But remember that there actually were two servers
there, an old one and a new one. All the data had been wiped from the old one and moved to the new one, so the new one was the more
important one to analyze. But the FBI only picked up the old one.
According to the FBI's final report, "At the time of the FBI's acquisition of the [server], Williams & Connolly [the law firm
of Clinton's personal lawyer David Kendall] did not advise the US government of the existence of the additional equipment associated
with the [old server], or that Clinton's clintonemail.com emails had been migrated to the successor [server] remaining at [the] Equinix
[data center]. The FBI's subsequent investigation identified this additional equipment and revealed the email migration." As a result,
the
FBI finally picked up the new server on October 3, 2015 .
A snippet from the invoice published by Complete Colorado on October 19, 2015. (Credit: Todd Shepherd / Complete Colorado) (Used
with express permission from CompleteColorado.com. Do not duplicate or republish.)
It's particularly important to know if Combetta was interviewed at this time. The FBI's final report clearly stated that
he was interviewed twice, in February 2016 and May 2016 , and repeatedly referred to what was
said in his "first interview" and "second interview." However, we luckily know that he was interviewed in September 2015
as well, because of a PRN invoice billed to Clinton Executive Service Corp. (CESC), a Clinton family company, that was made
public later in 2015 . The invoice made clear that Combetta, who was working remotely from Rhode Island, flew to
Colorado on September 14, 2015, and then "federal interviews" took place on September 15 . Combetta's
rental car, hotel, and return airfare costs were itemized as well. As this essay later makes clear, PRN was refusing to cooperate
with anyone else in the US government but the FBI by this time, so "federal interviews" can only mean the FBI.
One other person in the investigation, Bryan Pagliano, was given immunity as well. But his immunity deal was leaked to the media
and
had been widely reported on since March 2016 . By contrast, Combetta's immunity wasn't even mentioned in the
FBI's final report, and members of Congress were upset to first read about it in the Times , because they had never been
told about it either.
The mystery of this situation deepens when one looks at the FBI report regarding what Combetta said in his February 2016
and May 2016 interviews.
In February 2016 , he claimed that he remembered in late March 2015 that he forgot to make
the change to the email retention policy on Clinton's server, but that was it. He claimed he never did make any deletions. He also
claimed that he was unaware of the March 9, 2015 email from Mills warning of the Congressional request to preserve
all of Clinton's emails.
Paul Combetta (Credit: public domain)
Then, in May 2016 , he completely changed his story. He said that in fact he did make the deletions in
late March 2015 after all, plus he'd wiped her emails with BleachBit, as described earlier. He also confessed to
being aware of the Mills email with the preservation request.
It still hasn't been reported when Combetta's immunity deal was made. However, it seems probable that this took place between
his February 2016 and May 2016 interviews, causing the drastic change in his account. Yet, it looks
that he still hasn't been fully honest or forthcoming. Note that he didn't confess to the deletion of data on the Datto back-up device,
even though it took place at the same time as the other deletions. The FBI learned that on their own by analyzing the device.
Attorney-client privilege?!
More crucially, we know that Combetta has not revealed what took place in the second conference call between PRN and Clinton employees.
Here is all the FBI's final report has to say about that: "Investigation identified a PRN work ticket, which referenced a conference
call among PRN, Kendall, and Mills on March 31, 2015. PRN's attorney advised [Combetta] not to comment on the conversation with Kendall,
based upon the assertion of the attorney-client privilege ."
Sitting behind Paul Combetta at the House Oversight Committee hearing on September 13, 2016, is Platte River Networks attorney
Ken Eichner. (Credit: CSpan)
This is extremely bizarre. What "attorney-client privilege"?! That would only apply for communications between Combetta and his
lawyer or lawyers. It's clear that Combetta's lawyer isn't Mills or Kendall. The New York Times article about the immunity
deal made a passing reference to his lawyer, and, when Combetta showed up for a Congressional hearing on September 12
, he was accompanied by a lawyer who photographs from the hearing make clear is Ken Eichner, who has been the legal counsel
for PRN as a whole regarding Clinton's server.
Even if Combetta's lawyer Eichner was participating in the call, there is no way that should protect Combetta from having to tell
what he said to Clinton employees like Mills or Kendall. If that's how the law works, criminals could simply always travel with a
lawyer and then claim anything they do or say with the lawyer present is inadmissible as evidence due to attorney-client privilege.
It's absurd.
For the FBI to give Combetta an immunity deal and then still not learn if he had been told to delete the emails by anyone
working for Clinton due to a completely legally indefensible "attorney-client privilege" excuse is beyond belief. It would make sense,
however, if the FBI was actually trying to protect Clinton from prosecution instead of trying to find evidence to prosecute her.
Combetta's Reddit posts
A photo comparison of Combetta at the House Oversight Committee hearing (left) and a captured shot of Combetta as stonetear (right).
(Credit: CSpan and public domain)
Furthermore, how much can Combetta be trusted, even in an FBI interview? It has recently come to light that he made Reddit posts
under the username "stonetear." There can be no doubt this was him, because the details match perfectly, including him signing a
post "Paul," having another social media account for a Paul Combetta with the username "stonetear," having a combetta.com website
mentioning his "stonetear" alias, and even posting a photo of "stonetear" that matches other known photos of Combetta.
In one Reddit post , he asked other server managers: "I may be facing a very interesting situation where I need to strip
out a VIP's (VERY VIP) email address from a bunch of archived email that I have both in a live Exchange mailbox, as well as a .pst
file. Basically, they don't want the VIP's email address exposed to anyone, and want to be able to either strip out or replace the
email address in the to/from fields in all of the emails we want to send out. Does anyone have experience with something like this,
and/or suggestions on how this might be accomplished?"
The date of the post- July 24, 2014 -is very significant, because that was just one day after
Combetta sent CESE (the Clinton family company) DVDs containing some of Clinton's emails , so Clinton's lawyers could start the
sorting process. Also on July 23, 2014 , an unnamed PRN employee sent Samuelson and Mills the same emails electronically
directly to their laptops.
A response captured in the Reddit chat warning stonetear aka Combetta that what he wants to do could result in major legal issues.
(Credit: Reddit)
Popular software made by companies like Microsoft have tried to make it impossible for people to change email records, so people
facing legal trouble can't tamper with emails after they've been sent. Thus, when Combetta posed his problem at Reddit, other Reddit
users told him that what he wanted to do "could result in major legal issues." But that didn't deter him, and he kept asking for
various ways to get it accomplished anyway.
It isn't clear why Clinton would have wanted her email address removed from all her emails, since her exact address had already
been exposed in the media back in March 2013 by the hacker known as Guccifer. One Gawker reporter even used it to
email Clinton on March 20, 2013 : "[W] ere your emails to and from the [email protected] account archived according
to the provisions of the President Records Act and Freedom of Information Act?" (Clinton never replied, maybe because it's clear
in hindsight that an honest answer would have been "no.") But the fact that Combetta was willing to at least try to do this raises
questions, especially his seeming willingness to do something illegal for his "VIP" customer Hillary Clinton.
Combetta made another important Reddit post a few months later:
"Hello- I have a client who wants to push out a 60 day email retention policy for certain users. However, they also want these
users to have a 'Save Folder' in their Exchange folder list where the users can drop items that they want to hang onto longer than
the 60 day window. All email in any other folder in the mailbox should purge anything older than 60 days (should not apply to calendar
or contact items of course). How would I go about this? Some combination of retention and managed folder policy?"
Another question was captured of 'stonetear' aka Combetta asking Reddit users for technical help. (Credit: Reddit)
A captured shot of Combetta's 'stonetear' Gmail account with picture included. (Credit: public domain)
Recall how Clinton allegedly claimed she didn't want to keep any of her deleted emails. It looks like that wasn't true after
all. It sounds exactly as if Mills or someone else working for Clinton told him to make it look like all the "personal" emails were
permanently deleted due to the 60 day policy change, while actually keeping copies of emails they still wanted.
Looking at Combetta's two Reddit posts detailed above, there are only two possibilities. One is that Combetta failed to disclose
crucial information to the FBI, despite his immunity deal. The second is that he did, but the FBI didn't mention it in its final
report. Either way, it's already clear that the FBI has failed to present the full story of Combetta's actions to the public. And
how much of what Combetta has said can be trusted, even in his most recent and supposedly most forthcoming FBI interview?
David DeCamillis (Credit: Twitter)
Remarkably, there is a hint that Combetta was being dishonest even before his late March 2015 deletions. On
March 3, 2015 , one day after the front-page New York Times story revealing Clinton's use of a private
server, PRN's vice president of sales David DeCamillis sent an email to some or all of the other PRN employees. The email has only
been paraphrased in news reports so far, but he was already
wondering what Clinton emails the company might be asked to turn over .
Combetta replied to the email , "I've done quite a bit already in the last few months related to this. Her [Clinton's] team had
me do a bunch of exports and email filters and cleanup to provide a .pst [personal storage file] of all of HRC's [Hillary Rodham
Clinton's] emails to/from any .gov addresses. I billed probably close to 10 hours in on-call tickets with CESC related to it :)."
First off, it's interesting that he said he did "a bunch" of "email filters and cleanup," because what has been reported by
the FBI is that he only made a copy of all of Clinton's email and sent them off to be sorted in late July 2014 .
That fits with his July 2014 Reddit post where he was trying to modify somebody's email address.
But also, assuming that there aren't important parts to his email that haven't been mentioned by the media, consider what he didn't
say. The topic was possibly turning over Clinton's emails, and yet by this time Combetta had already deleted and wiped all of Clinton's
emails from the laptops of two Clinton lawyers and been asked to change the email retention policy on Clinton's server so that all
her emails would be permanently deleted there too, and yet he didn't bother to mention this to anyone else at PRN. Why?
We can only speculate based on the limited amount of information made public so far. But it seems as if Combetta was covering
up for Clinton and/or the people working for her even BEFORE he made his late March 2015 deletions!
Who knows about the deletions, and how?
Senator Ron Johnson (Credit: John Shinkle / Politico)
For now, let us turn back to events in the fall of 2015 . In mid-August 2015 ,
Senator Ron Johnson (R) asked for and got a staff-level briefing from PRN about the management of Clinton's server, as part of
Republican Congressional oversight of the FBI's investigation. It seems very likely that Combetta was a part of that briefing, or
at least his knowledge heavily informed the briefing, because again only two PRN employees actively managed her server, and he was
one of them.
Regardless of whether he was there or not, it is clear that PRN was not honest in the briefing. Almost nothing is publicly known
about the briefing except that it took place. However, from questions Johnson asked PRN in later letters, one can see that he knew
nothing about the March 2015 deletions by Combetta. In fact, just like the FBI, there is no indication he knew anything
about the transfer of the data from the old server to the new in that time period, which would be a basic fact in any such briefing.
Andy Boian (Credit: public domain)
The dishonesty or ignorance of PRN in this time period can be clearly seen due to a September 12, 2015 Washington Post article. In it, PRN spokesperson Andy Boian said, "
Platte River has no knowledge of the server being wiped ." He added, "All the information we have is that the server wasn't wiped."
We now know that not only was this untrue, but a PRN employee did the wiping!
This leads to two possibilities. One is that Combetta lied to his PRN bosses, so in September 2015 nobody else
in PRN knew about the deletions he'd made. The other is that additional people at PRN knew, but they joined in a cover-up.
At this point, it's impossible to know which of these is true, but one of them must be. PRN employees created work tickets and
other documentary evidence of the work they made, so one would think the company leadership would have quickly learned about the
deletions if they did any examination of their managerial actions to prepare for investigative briefings and interviews.
But either way, PRN as a whole began acting as if there was something to hide. Although the company agreed to the briefing of
Congressional staffers in mid-August 2015 , when
Senator Johnson wanted to follow this up with interviews of individual PRN employees in early September, PRN said no . When Congressional
committees began asking PRN for documents, they also said no, and kept saying no. Recently, as we shall see later, they've even defied
a Congressional subpoena for documents.
Austin McChord, founder and CEO of Datto, Inc. (Credit: Erik Traufmann / Hearst Connecticut Media)
At the same time Congressional committees began asking PRN for documents and interviews, they made those requests to Datto as
well.
Datto expressed a willingness to cooperate. But because Datto had been subcontracted by PRN to help manage Clinton's server,
they needed PRN's permission to share any information relating to that account. When PRN was first asked in early October
2015 , they gave permission.
But about a week later, they changed their mind , forcing Datto to stay quiet.
To make matters worse, in early November 2015 , PRN spokesperson Andy Boian gave a completely bogus public excuse
about this, saying that PRN and Datto had mutually agreed it was more convenient for investigators to deal with just one company.
Datto immediately complained in a letter sent to PRN and Senator Johnson that no such discussion or agreement between PRN and
Datto had ever taken place.
What is PRN hiding?
The Datto cloud mystery
There is another strange twist to Datto's involvement. Back in June 2013 when Datto was first subcontracted to
help with backing up the server data,
the Clinton family company CESC made explicit that they didn't want any of the data to be stored remotely . But due to some snafu
or miscommunication, it turns out that in addition to local back-ups being stored on the Datto device connected to the server, Datto
had been making periodic copies of the server data the whole time in the "cloud!" That means back-up copies of the data were being
transferred over the Internet and stored remotely, probably on other servers controlled by Datto.
Co-founders of PRN are Brent Allshouse (left) and Treve Suazo (right) (Credit: PRN)
PRN only
discovered this in early August 2015 , around the time the roles of PRN and Datto had with the server began
to be made public. PRN contacted Datto, told them to stop doing this, put all the data on a thumb drive, send it to them, and then
permanently wipe their remote copies of the server data.
It is unclear what happened after that. The FBI's final report
mentions a Datto back-up made on June 29, 2013 , just after all the data had been moved from the old server
to the new sever with the back-up, had been useful to investigators and allowed them to find some Clinton emails dating all the way
back to the first two months of her secretary of state tenure. However, it isn't clear if this is due to the local Datto SIRIS device
or the accidental Datto cloud back-up. Congressional committee letters show that they don't know either and have been trying to find
out.
Adding to the mystery, one would think that if Datto was making periodic back-ups either or both ways, the FBI would have been
able to recover all of Clinton's over 31,000 deleted emails and not just 17,000 of them. Consider that when PRN employees sent Clinton's
lawyers all of Clinton's emails to be sorted in July and September 2014 , they simply copied what
was on the server at the time, which presumably was the same amount of emails from years earlier than had been there in June
2013 , and thus backed up by Datto many times.
It's likely there are more twists to the cloud back-up story that have yet to be revealed.
What did Clinton and her aides know about the deletions?
Meanwhile, let's consider what Clinton and her aides may have known and when they knew it. When
Mills was interviewed by the FBI in April 2016 , according to the FBI, "Mills stated she was unaware that [Combetta]
had conducted these deletions and modifications in March 2015 ." Then,
when Clinton was interviewed by the FBI in July 2016 , "Clinton stated she was unaware of the March 2015 email
deletions by PRN."
This is pretty hard to believe. Mills was and still is one of Clinton's lawyers, and even attended Clinton's FBI interview. So
why wouldn't she have mentioned the deletions to Clinton between April and July 2016 , after she learned about them
from the FBI's questions to her? One would think Clinton would have been extremely curious to know anything about the FBI's possible
recovery of her deleted emails.
Clinton making a joking wipe gesture while speaking at a town hall on August 18, 2015, in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Credit: John Locher
/ The Associated Press)
But more importantly, consider what was mentioned in an NBC News report on August 19, 2015 . Clinton's
campaign acknowledged "that
there was an attempt to wipe [Clinton's] server before it was turned over last week to the FBI. But two sources with direct knowledge
of the investigation told NBC News that the [FBI] may be able to recover at least some data."
Is it plausible that people within Clinton's campaign knew this, and yet neither Mills nor Clinton did? How could that be? Note
that just one day before the NBC News report, Clinton had been directly asked if her server had been wiped.
She dodged the question by making the joke , " What-like with a cloth, or something?" Then she said she didn't "know how it works
digitally at all." Despite the controversy at the time about the cloth joke, her spokesperson claimed one month later, "I don't know
what 'wiped' means."
It's highly likely the issue had to have been discussed with Clinton at the time, but there was a conscious effort not to have
her admit to knowing anything, due to the on-going FBI investigation.
But more crucially, how could anyone at all working for Clinton know about the deletions as far back as August 2015
? Recall that this was within days of PRN giving a briefing to Congressional staffers and not telling them, and several
weeks prior to a PRN public comment that there was no evidence the server had been wiped.
Moreover, we have no evidence that the FBI knew about the deletions yet. Datto conducted an analysis of its device that had been
attached to Clinton's new server, and in an October 23, 2015 email,
told the FBI for the first time that deletions had taken place on that device on March 31, 2015 . Keep in mind
that even in his February 2016 FBI interview, Combetta claimed that no deletions had taken place in that time frame.
Does it make sense that he would have said that if he had reason to believe that PRN had been talking to Clinton's staff about it
in the months before? (None of the interviews in the FBI"s investigations were done under oath, but lying to the FBI is a felony
with a maximum five-year prison sentence.)
A sample of the email sent to the FBI by Datto attorney, Steven Cash on October 23, 2015. (Credit: House Science Committee)
So, again, how could Clinton's campaign know about the wiping in August 2015 ? The logical answer is that it
had been discussed in the conference call on March 31, 2015 , that took place within hours of the deletions.
Paul Combetta (Credit: public domain)
Perhaps Mills, Kendall, or someone else working for Clinton told Combetta to make the deletions, possibly during the first conference
call on March 25, 2015 . If that is the case, there should be obstruction of justice charges brought against anyone
involved. Or maybe Combetta did that on his own to cover his earlier mistake and then mentioned what he'd done in the second conference
call. If either scenario is true, Mills should be charged with lying to the FBI for claiming in her FBI interview that she knew nothing
about any of this. Clinton might be charged for the same if it could be proved what she knew and when.
Just as the email retention policy on the Clinton server was changed on the orders of people working for Clinton, so was the retention
policy on the Datto device connected to the server, in the same time period.
In an August 18, 2015 email, Combetta expressed concern that CESC, the Clinton family company, had directed
PRN to reduce the length of time backups, and PRN wanted proof of this so they wouldn't be blamed. But he said in the email, "this
was all phone comms [communications]."
Paul Combetta (left) Bill Thornton (right) (Credit: The Associated Press)
The next day , there was another email,
this one written by Thornton to Combetta and possibly others in PRN . The email has the subject heading "CESC Datto." Thornton
wrote: "Any chance you found an old email with their directive to cut the backup back in Oct-Feb. I know they had you cut it once
in Oct-Nov, then again to 30 days in Feb-ish." (Presumably this refers to October 2014 through February
2015 .)
Thornton continued: "If we had that email, then we're golden. [ ] Wondering how we can sneak an email in now after the fact asking
them when they told us to cut the backups and have them confirm it for our records. Starting to think this whole thing really is
covering up some shady shit. I just think if we have it in writing that they [CESC] told us to cut the backups, and we can go public
with our statement saying we have had backups since day one, then we were told to trim to 30 days, it would make us look a WHOLE
LOT better."
Combetta replied: "I'll look again, but I'm almost positive we don't have anything about the 60 day cut. [ ] It's up to lawyer
crap now, so just sit back and enjoy the silly headlines."
As an aside, it's curious that Combetta made some unsolicited additional comments in that same email that was supportive of Clinton's
position in the email controversy: "It wasn't the law to be required to use government email servers at the State Department, believe
it or not. Colin Powell used an AOL address for communicating with his staff, believe it or not."
If we take this email exchange at face value, then it appears that Clinton employees requested an email retention policy change
that would result in more deletion of data on the Datto back-up device in the October to November 2014 time range.
Keep in mind that the
State Department formally asked Clinton for all of her work-related emails , on October 28, 2014 , after informally
asking starting in July 2014 . Then, around February 2015 , Clinton employees asked for another
change that would have resulted in more deletions. Plus, they did this on the phone, leaving no paper trail. Is it any wonder that
Thornton wrote, "Starting to think this whole thing really is covering up some shady shit?"
News about PRN went quiet for the first half of 2016 . Congressional committees kept asking PRN and Datto for
more information (including another request for interviews in January 2016 ), and PRN kept saying no as well as
not giving Datto permission to respond.
James Comey (Credit: Fox News)
Then, on July 5, 2016 , FBI Director James Comey gave a surprise public speech in which
he announced he wouldn't recommend any criminal charges against Clinton or anyone else in the investigation. In the course of
his speech, he said it was "likely" that some emails may have disappeared forever because Clinton's lawyers "deleted all emails they
did not return to State, and the lawyers cleaned their devices in such a way as to preclude complete forensic recovery." But he said
that after interviews and technical examination, "we believe our investigation has been sufficient to give us reasonable confidence
there was no intentional misconduct in connection with that sorting effort."
Two days later, on July 7, 2016 , Comey had to explain his decision in front of a Congressional committee. During
that hearing, he was asked by Representative Trey Gowdy (R), "Secretary Clinton said neither she nor anyone else deleted work-related
emails from her personal account. Was that true?"
Comey replied: "That's a harder one to answer. We found traces of work-related emails in-on devices or in slack space. Whether
they were deleted or whether when the server was changed out, something happened to them. There's no doubt that the work-related
emails were removed electronically from the email system."
Consider that response. By the time Comey made those comments, the FBI's final report had already been finished, the report that
detailed Combetta's confession of deliberately deleting and then wiping all of Clinton's emails from her server. Comey was explicitly
asked if "anyone" had made such deletions, and yet he said he wasn't sure. Comey should be investigated for lying to Congress! Had
he revealed even the rough outlines of Combetta's late March 2015 deletions in his July 5, 2016
public speech or his Congressional testimony two days later , it would have significantly changed the public perception
of the results of the FBI investigation. That also would have allowed Congressional committees to start focusing on this
two months earlier than they did, enabling them to uncover more in the limited time before the November
presidential election.
The SECNAP Logo (Credit: SECNAP)
Despite the fact that the Combetta deletions were still unknown, Congressional committees began putting increasing pressure on
PRN anyway.
On July 12, 2016 , two committees jointly wrote a letter to PRN , threatening subpoenas if they still refused
to cooperate. The letter listed seven PRN employees they wanted to interview, including Combetta and Thornton. Similar letters went
out to Datto and SECNAP. (SECNAP was subcontracted by PRN to carry out threat monitoring of the network connected to Clinton's server.)
On August 22, 2016 , after all three companies still refused to cooperate, Representative Lamar Smith (R), chair
of the Committee on Science, Space and Technology,
issued subpoenas for PRN, Datto, and SECNAP .
On September 2, 2016 ,
the FBI's final report of their Clinton email investigation was released (along with a summary of Clinton's FBI interview). This
report revealed the late March 2015 deletions for the first time. Combetta's name was redacted, but his role, as
well as his immunity deal, was revealed in the New York Times article published a few days later.
Congressional investigators fight back
Channing Phillips (Credit: public domain)
Since the report has been released, Congressional Republicans have stepped up their efforts to get answers about the Combetta
mystery, using the powers of the committees they control. On September 6, 2016 , Representative Jason Chaffetz (R),
chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee,
wrote a letter to Channing Phillips , the US attorney for the District of Columbia. He asked the Justice Department to "investigate
and determine whether Secretary Clinton or her employees and contractors violated statutes that prohibit destruction of records,
obstruction of congressional inquiries, and concealment or cover up of evidence material to a congressional investigation." Clearly,
this relates to the Combetta deletions.
Representative Jason Chaffetz. (Credit: Cliff Owen / The Associated Press)
On the same day ,
Chaffetz sent a letter to PRN warning that Combetta could face federal charges for deleting and wiping Clinton's emails in
late March 2015 , due to the Congressional request to preserve them earlier in the month that he admitted he was
aware of. Chaffetz also wants an explanation from PRN how Combetta could refuse to talk to the FBI about the conference calls
if the only lawyers involved in the call were Clinton's.
Chaffetz serves the FBI a subpoena during a House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee hearing on September 9, 2016. (Credit:
ABC News)
On September 9 ,
Chaffetz served the FBI a subpoena for all the unredacted interviews from the FBI's Clinton investigation, especially those of
Combetta and the other PRN employees. This came after an FBI official testifying at a hearing remarkably suggested that Chaffetz
should file a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to get the documents, just like any private citizen can.
On September 8, 2016 ,
Congressional committees served the subpoenas they'd threatened in August. PRN, Datto, and SECNAP were given until the end of
September 12 to finally turn over the documents the committees had been requesting for year. Datto complied and
turned over the documents in time. However, PRN and SECNAP did not.
Representative Lamar Smith (Credit: public domain)
The next day, September 13 , Representative Lamar Smith (R) said , "just this morning SECNAP's [legal] counsel
confirmed to my staff that the Clinton's private LLC [Clinton Executive Service Corp.] is actively engaged in directing their obstructionist
responses to Congressional subpoenas."
PRN employees Combetta and Thornton were also given subpoenas on September 8 , ordering them to testify at
a Congressional hearing on September 13, 2016 . Both of them showed up with their lawyers, but
both of them pled the Fifth , leaving many questions unanswered.
An FBI cover-up?
In a Senate speech on September 12, 2016 , Senator Charles Grassley (R)
accused the FBI of manipulating which information about the Clinton email investigation becomes public . He said that although
the FBI has taken the unusual step of releasing the FBI's final report, "its summary is misleading or inaccurate in some key details
and leaves out other important facts altogether." He pointed in particular to Combetta's deletions, saying: "[T]here is key information
related to that issue that is still being kept secret, even though it is unclassified. If I honor the FBI's 'instruction' not to
disclose the unclassified information it provided to Congress, I cannot explain why."
Senator Charles Grassley takes to the Senate floor on September 12, 2016. (Credit: CSpan)
He also said there are dozens of completely unclassified witness reports, but even some of his Congressional staffers can't see
them "because the FBI improperly bundled [them] with a small amount of classified information, and told the Senate to treat it all
as if it were classified." The normal procedure is for documents to have the classified portions marked. Then the unclassified portions
can be released. But in defiance of regulations and a clear executive order on how such material should be handled, "the FBI has
'instructed' the Senate office that handles classified information not to separate the unclassified information." As a result, Grassley
claims: "Inaccuracies are spreading because of the FBI's selective release. For example, the FBI's recently released summary memo
may be contradicted by other unclassified interview summaries that are being kept locked away from the public."
He said he has been fighting the FBI on this, but without success so far, as the FBI isn't even replying to his letters.
Thus, it seems that Comey failing to mention anything about the Combetta deletions in the July 7, 2016 Congressional
hearing, even when directly asked about it, was no accident. Having the FBI report claim that Combetta was only interviewed twice
when there is clear evidence of three interviews also fits a pattern of concealment related to the deletions.
James Comey testifies to the House Benghazi Committee on July 7, 2016. (Credit: Jack Gruber / USA Today)
Regarding the FBI's failure to inform Congressional oversight committees of Combetta's immunity deal, Representative Trey
Gowdy (R) recently commented, "If there is a reason to withhold the immunity agreement from Congress-and by extension, the people
we represent-I cannot think of what it would be."
Gowdy, who is a former federal prosecutor, also
said on September 9 that there are two types of immunity Combetta could have received : use and transactional.
"If the FBI and the Department of Justice gave this witness transactional immunity, it is tantamount to giving the triggerman immunity
in a robbery case." He added that he is "stunned" because "It looks like they gave immunity to the very person you would most want
to prosecute."
This is as much as we know so far, but surely the story won't stop there. PRN has been served a new subpoena. It is likely the
requested documents will be seized from them soon if they continue to resist.
Taking the fall and running out the clock
But why does PRN resist so much? Computer companies often resist sharing information with the government so their reputation with
their clients won't be harmed. But defying a subpoena when there clearly are legitimate questions to be answered goes way beyond
what companies normally do and threatens PRN's reputation in a different way. Could it be that PRN-an inexplicable choice to manage
Clinton's server-was chosen precisely because whatever Clinton aide hired them had reason to believe they would be loyal if a problem
like this arose?
David DeCamillis (Credit: public domain)
There is some anecdotal evidence to support this. It has been
reported that PRN has ties to prominent Democrats . For instance, the company's vice president of sales David DeCamillis is said
to be a prominent supporter of Democratic politicians, and once offered to let Senator Joe Biden (D) stay in his house in
2008 , not long before Biden became Obama's vice president. The company also has done work for John Hickenlooper, the Democratic
governor of Colorado. And recall the email in which Combetta brought up points to defend Clinton in her email controversy, even though
the email exchange was on a different topic.
The behavior of the FBI is even stranger. Comey was a registered Republican most of his life, and it is well known that most
FBI agents are politically conservative. Be that as it may, if Comey made a decision beforehand based on some political calculation
to avoid indicting Clinton no matter what the actual evidence was, that the FBI's peculiar behavior specifically relating to the
Combetta deletions make much more sense. It would be an unprecedented and bold move to recommend indicting someone with Hillary Clinton's
power right in the middle of her presidential election campaign.
It's naive to think that political factors don't play a role, on both sides. Consider that virtually every Democratic politician
has been supportive of Clinton in her email controversy, or at least silent about it, while virtually every Republican has been critical
of her about it or silent. Comey was appointed by Obama, and if the odds makers are right and Clinton wins in November
, Comey will continue to be the FBI director under President Clinton. (Comey was appointed to a ten-year term, but Congress
needs to vote to reappoint him after the election.) How could that not affect his thinking?
Comey could be trying to run out the clock, first delaying the revelations of the Combetta's deletions as much as possible, then
releasing only selected facts to diminish the attention on the story.
In this scenario, the FBI having Combetta take the fall for the deletions while making a secret immunity deal with him is
a particularly clever move to prevent anyone from being indicted. Note that Combetta's confession about making the deletions came
in his May 2016 FBI interview, which came after Mills' April 2016 interview in which she claimed
she'd never heard of any deletions. Thus, the only way to have Combetta take the fall for the deletions without Mills getting caught
clearly lying to the FBI is by dodging the issue of what was said in the March 31, 2015 conference with a nonsensical
claim of "attorney-client privilege."
Unfortunately, if that is Comey's plan, it looks like it's working. Since the FBI's final report came out on September
2, 2016 , the mainstream media has largely failed to grasp the significance of Combetta and his deletions, focusing on far
less important matters instead, such as the destruction of a couple of Clinton's BlackBerry devices with hammers-which actually was
better than not destroying them and possibly letting them fall into the wrong hands.
The House Benghazi Committee in session in 2015. (Credit: C-SPAN3)
What happens next appears to largely be in the hands of Congressional Republicans, who no doubt will keep pushing to find out
more, if only to politically hurt Clinton before the election. But it's also in the hands of you, the members of the general public.
If enough people pay attention, then it will be impossible to sweep this controversy under the rug.
I believe that criminal behavior needs to be properly investigated and prosecuted, regardless of political persuasion and
regardless of the election calendar. Combetta clearly committed a crime and he even confessed to do so, given what he admitted in
his last FBI interview. If he got a limited immunity deal instead of blanket immunity, which is highly likely, it still would be
possible to indict and convict him based on evidence outside of his interviews. That would help explain why he recently pled the
Fifth, because he's still in legal danger.
Paul Combetta and Bill Thornton plead the Fifth on September 13, 2016. (Credit: CSpan)
But more importantly, who else is guilty with him? Logic and the available evidence strongly suggest that Clinton's lawyer
Cheryl Mills at least knew about the deletions at the time they happened. Combetta has already confessed to criminal behavior-and
yet somehow hasn't even been fired by PRN. If he didn't at least tell Mills and the others in the conference call about the deletions,
there would be no logical reason to assert attorney-client privilege in the first place. Only the nonsensical assertion of this privilege
is preventing the evidence coming out that should lead to Mills being charged with lying to the FBI at a minimum. And if Mills knew,
can anyone seriously believe that Clinton didn't know too?
As the saying goes, "it's not the crime, it's the cover up." This is an important story, and not just election season mudslinging.
The public needs to know what really happened.
"... I wonder if there is a simpler explanation. US immigration policy has come to be about suppressing wages. The suppressing wages operation has been great for those at the top of the food chain at the cost of overall growth. ..."
"... As long as there exist Western countries to act as "safety valves" there is no incentive for immigrant source countries to correct the deficiencies in their economical / political / social systems or resolve ongoing conflicts. In fact, there is every incentive to maintain the status quo. ..."
"... And when will the Wester polity finally figure out that if you destabilize a metastable regime by force, the result isn't stability but inevitably chaos and a further flood of refugee/immigrants? ..."
"... Now most of the net immigration across the US-Mexican border comes from Central America: countries such as El Salvador and Guatemala destabilized by the Reagan regime in the 1980s. Now they're dominated by violent gangs trained in California prisons and repatriated to Central America. ..."
"... Immigration across the U.S.-Mexican border is driven by Central American refugees fleeing gross instability, crime and violence in Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala; not by Mexicans. The U.S. played a deep long-term role in creating the mess that Central America is today. ..."
"... U.S. creates instability (war, coup) in a region. ..."
"... The ensuing instability creates a class of desperate folks, who then seek bodily, economic, and political safety within the borders of the empire. This leads to a class of desperate workers, often undocumented and constantly at risk of deportation, willing to work for far less compensation than the native population. ..."
"... Poorer countries suffer brain drain. They do receive large amount of remittances, but an economy which sends its best and the brightest to benefit the industrial countries and receives industrial products in exchange does not seem like it can develop very easily. ..."
"... Here's a somewhat interesting backgrounder on American immigration. The author's premise is that US immigration policies were always about race (white Europeans welcome to stay, brown Mexicans welcome to do manual labor and leave) but this is undoubtedly a simplification as the discrimination in favor of high skills–talked about in the above post–undoubtedly a factor. ..."
"... most other countries do not offer citizenship unless you have something valuable to offer them. An acquaintance who thought about becoming Canadian found this out. ..."
"... It is dangerous for Trump to demonize undocumented immigrants without holding the corporations that attracted and hired them responsible and the system that allowed it. ..."
"... I would argue that migration has both positive and negative impact on the receiving country. But at some point I believe the 'self' is selfish and not necessarily selfless. In a world of limited resources and opportunities it is normal for the 'self' to be highly selfish hence the contradictory nature of the theory of free market economy under globalization. ..."
"... So the UK National Health system nurtured me through my early years, and the UK education system gave me primary, secondary and degree level education. I have spent most of my working life doing an R&D job in the US. The US has benefited from my work during my working life. If I should choose to retire back to the UK, I will remit my pension income back there, and because of the tax treaty, pay income taxes there, which I claim as a full credit against the US tax return. So I'm "taking money out of the US, to the detriment of social cohesion and economic growth". ..."
"... H1-B visas tap larger, typically Asian populations than the U.S. for their best & brightest. ..."
"... Roughly 50% of the undocumented are from Asia. Yet 90% of the deportations are Hispanic. ..."
"... My experience is that the Asian population is either native or here on student visas. The chinese student population is quite large in Los Angeles. Student visas don't allow foreign students to work off-campus, so many of them are family-funded. So they're not taking jobs, but do impact the housing/rental market. (The California colleges love them for their out-of-state fees and strong study habits.) ..."
Posted on
September 21, 2016 by
Yves Smith Yves here.
I wonder if there is a simpler explanation. US immigration policy has come to be about suppressing
wages. The suppressing wages operation has been great for those at the top of the food chain at the
cost of overall growth.
In
a
recent post , I showed that looking at data since 1950 or so, the percentage of the population
that is foreign born is negatively correlated with job creation in later years. I promised an explanation,
and I will attempt to deliver on that promise in this post.
I can think of a few reasons for the finding, just about all of which would have been amplified
since LBJ's Presidency due to two things: the 1965 Hart-Cellar Act and the launch of the Great Society.
The Hart-Cellar Act may be better known as the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. It phased
out country quotas in existence since the 1920s. As a result of these quotas, about 70% of all immigrants
were coming from England, Germany and Ireland, with most of the remainder coming from elsewhere in
Western Europe and from Latin America. The Great Society, of course, included a number of welfare
programs, many of which (or their descendants) are still in existence.
With that, reasons why the foreign born population is negatively correlated with subsequent job
creation include:
1. Immigrants who are sufficiently similar to the existing population when it comes to language,
culture, skillsets and expectations will integrate more smoothly. Slower and more imperfect integration
necessarily requires more expenditure of resources, resources which otherwise could go toward economic
development.
2. Naturally, skills and values that are more productive and efficient than those of the existing
population are conducive toward growth. Conversely, bringing inferior technology and processes
does not improve the economy. As the source of immigrants shifted away from sources of sources of
high technology like England and Germany and toward the developing and not-developing world, the
likelihood that a randomly selected new immigrant will improve productivity diminishes.
3. Eligibility for welfare can change the incentive structure for existing and potential immigrants.
An immigrant arriving in the US in 1890 certainly had no expectation of being supported by the
state. It may be that most immigrants arriving in the US now also don't have that expectation. However,
it is no secret that welfare exists so some percentage of potential immigrants arrive expecting to
be supported to some degree by the state. In some (many?) cases, the expectation increases post-arrival.
(Like any great economist, Milton Friedman got a lot of things wrong about how the economy works
but he had a point when he said you can have a welfare state or open borders but not both.)
4. Rightly or wrongly, reasons 1 – 3 above may combine to create resentment in the existing
population. Think "my grandparents came to this country with nothing and nobody gave them anything "
Resentment can break down trust and institutions necessary for the economy to function smoothly.
5. Over time, transportation has become cheaper and easier. As a result, the likelihood
that an immigrant has come to the US to stay has diminished. Many immigrants come to the US for several
years and then go back to their country of origin. This in turn leads to four issues that can have
negative impacts on the economy:
5a. Immigrants that expect to leave often send back remittances, taking resources out of the
US economy. For example, in 2010, remittances from workers in the US
amounted to 2.1% of Mexican GDP .
5b. Relative to many non-Western countries, the US taxpayer invests heavily in the creation
of a state that is conducive toward acquiring useful skills and education. Often, the acquisition
of such skills and education is heavily subsidized. When people acquire those tools and then leave
without applying them, the value of the resources could have been better spent elsewhere.
5c. Immigrants who don't expect to stay can have less reason to integrate culturally and economically;
any real estate investor can tell you that all else being equal, a neighborhood made up largely
of homeowners is almost always nicer than a neighborhood made up largely of renters.
5d. Immigrants who arrive with a non-negligible expectation of leaving are, on average, more
likely to take risks which generate private gains and social losses. If the bet goes well, congratulations.
If the bet goes bad, "so long suckers!" The bet may even involve a crime.
6. (This one is more conjecture than the others – I think it is true, but I haven't given it
enough thought, particularly whether it is entirely separate from the previous reasons.) The
non-existence of a lump of labor does not mean there isn't a population to labor multiplier, or that
the multiplier cannot change over time. In an era of relatively slow economic growth, economies of
scale, and outsourcing abroad, the number of new employment opportunities per new customer (i.e.,
job creation per resident) can shrink. We've certainly seen something resembling that since about
2000.
None of this is to say that immigration is good or bad, or even that it should be opposed or encouraged.
In this post I simply tried to explain what I saw in the data. I will have one or more follow-up
posts.
I think one of the best things the US can do re immigration is to develop policies that make
it easier for people to stay in their country of origin which many probably want to do. Our policies
have tended to have the opposite effect such as
and Syria/Libya etc "An estimated 11 million Syrians have fled their homes
since the outbreak of the civil war in March 2011. Now, in the sixth year of war, 13.5 million
are in need of humanitarian assistance within the country. " (
http://syrianrefugees.eu/ )
We are also very much in need of a job guarantee paying a living wage which would put pressure
on major employers such as Walmart and McDonalds and get their executives off of government subsidies.
(they pay a wage so low their workers are forced into food stamps and medicaid) (One of the major
beneficiaries of the nation's food-stamp program is actually a hugely profitable company:
Walmart .) (
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/31/walmart-food-stamps_n_4181862.html )
Another great post, read word-for-word, and I very much look forward your subsequent ones.
You've cogently explored the "yin" of immigration, but what about the "yang"?
As long as there exist Western countries to act as "safety valves" there is no incentive
for immigrant source countries to correct the deficiencies in their economical / political / social
systems or resolve ongoing conflicts. In fact, there is every incentive to maintain the status
quo.
And when will the Wester polity finally figure out that if you destabilize a metastable
regime by force, the result isn't stability but inevitably chaos and a further flood of refugee/immigrants?
'As long as there exist Western countries to act as "safety valves" there is no incentive
for immigrant source countries to correct the deficiencies in their economical / political / social
systems or resolve ongoing conflicts.'
After a mere ten years, NAFTA succeeded in reversing net immigration from Mexico.
Now most of the net immigration across the US-Mexican border comes from Central America:
countries such as El Salvador and Guatemala destabilized by the Reagan regime in the 1980s. Now
they're dominated by violent gangs trained in California prisons and repatriated to Central America.
Increasingly Mexico will focus on its own southern border with Guatemala, as it becomes more
of a destination country rather than simply a transit country, as detailed here:
Immigration across the U.S.-Mexican border is driven by Central American refugees fleeing
gross instability, crime and violence in Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala; not by Mexicans.
The U.S. played a deep long-term role in creating the mess that Central America is today.
Yes. It is a pernicious cycle with something like these dimensions. . .
U.S. creates instability (war, coup) in a region.
The ensuing instability creates a class of desperate folks, who then seek bodily, economic,
and political safety within the borders of the empire. This leads to a class of desperate workers,
often undocumented and constantly at risk of deportation, willing to work for far less compensation
than the native population.
Native population sees the contours of its society change with the influx along with a
lessening in quality of living standards, which leads to dangerous, xenophobic mental associations.
Xenophobic politics begin to take root and thrive.
The real solution is for our country to stop doing step 1.
Poorer countries suffer brain drain. They do receive large amount of remittances, but an
economy which sends its best and the brightest to benefit the industrial countries and receives
industrial products in exchange does not seem like it can develop very easily.
Its clear that the emigree benefits, and the receiving country receives a subsidy in the form
of valuable human capital. But how does the originating country develop? Invest in education and
the best leave. Invest in industry and you compete with the products of the developed countries.
And of course, the rich in unstable countries have little reason to care about the long term
consequences of their actions if they can take their loot and run. There is a reason so many rich
Chinese are emigrating.
David Harvey once told a story about how he warned investment bankers that if things keep getting
worse, the US could end up a failed state like Mexico. In typical Wall Street fashion they asked
Harvey if they should buy villas in France.
I think this is the first article I have EVER read that even supposes there might be negative
ECONOMIC effects of immigration.
I would note that if there ever was a jobs program with the explicit goal of reducing unemployment
to 4% (and not pretending the people who have dropped out don't want a job because they CAN'T
get a job) and providing a job to any and all applicants – well, I think the immigration from
South America that has slowed would amp right up again – of course.
You know, I have been reading some of the Davos Man class going on and on about how they didn't
really do enough to ameliorate the negative effects of "free" trade on those who don't benefit
from trade. But NAFTA is going on a quarter of a century – and in every subsequent trade deal
such promises are either never kept or never effectively implemented.
I suspect that to REALLY provide jobs of equal pay and equal benefits is not economically feasible.
Think of it this way – people who worked as landscapers, when displaced by immigrants, may not
have the aptitude, skills, or even desire to change careers – if you work outside, why in the
hell do you want to have to start working indoors???
Go to college and become a computer programmer .H1b .
What are you gonna do keep these people employed – have the same lawn mowed twice every week?
Have the same computer code written twice?????
Again, the whole scenario has struck me as not being ever critically thought through. The benefits
to consumers getting low prices are endlessly pointed out, but the negative effect of fewer jobs
at low pay are glossed over or NOT ACKNOWLEDGED. The whole deal is that less income to workers
and more income to capital – is it REALLY unforseeable that eventually there will be a demand
dearth?? Decades of experience of jobs shipped overseas and not replaced are not acknowledged.
Ever growing inequality. We have been sold a load of bullsh*t because it benefited a very, very
narrow slice at the top only.
Go to college and become a computer programmer .H1b .
Over 100K H-1B Visas issued so far for 2016 alone, over 10% of those were issued in my state
of Massachusetts. The Mathworks Inc. of Natick was given a $3 million dollar state tax subsidy
in return for "creating" 600 new jobs – they created jobs alright, 386 H-1B jobs so far, Americans
need not apply.
The HB-1 Indian workers that have flooded Boston's labor market seem to fit this part because
they get on and off Public transportation enmass at stops with clusters of rental buildings --
"5c. Immigrants who don't expect to stay can have less reason to integrate culturally and economically;
any real estate investor can tell you that all else being equal, a neighborhood made up largely
of homeowners is almost always nicer than a neighborhood made up largely of renters."
As a lifelong blue collar worker for nearly 40 years, I found my ability to remain employed
competing against a never-ending influx of 22 year old immigrants to be a sinking, and finally
sunk quagmire. I lost. I cannot be 22 forever.
Coming up in the 1970's many of my acquaintances and I were skilled laborers, we got up in
the morning and went out everyday to work hard for a living. None of us would even be considered
for any of those entry level positions any more. They all go to immigrants from somewhere else
or another. As a native born white American you don't even get a chance at those jobs anymore,
no employer would even bother talking to you.
The US has all but done away with apprenticeship programs for the skilled trades. We just bring
in exploitable people from all over the world to build our stuff, and then when we're done with
them, they go back to where they came from. I know this is true because I've asked them, I've
worked with them – they have no intention of staying in America longer than it takes to educate
their kids, build up a nest egg, and go back home. A lot of them don't really like it here.
But we Americans don't have those options. We can't go to Guatemala or Germany or the Philippines
to work for 10 or 20 years to return to America with saved money on which we can survive for the
rest of a lifetime.
This deal is a one-way street.
As an American, I challenge you to get a job abroad. I challenge you to get a foreign residency
visa or a work visa. I challenge you to do any of the things that immigrants do in our country.
You can't.
I'm not anti-immigrant. I'm pro- our people first. Us first, and then when we need other folks
they're welcome too. But that's not what has been happening in my work lifetime of the last 40
years.
Here's a somewhat interesting backgrounder on American immigration. The author's premise
is that US immigration policies were always about race (white Europeans welcome to stay, brown
Mexicans welcome to do manual labor and leave) but this is undoubtedly a simplification as the
discrimination in favor of high skills–talked about in the above post–undoubtedly a factor.
For example most other countries do not offer citizenship unless you have something valuable
to offer them. An acquaintance who thought about becoming Canadian found this out.
In any case the below author does talk about how the notion of "illegal" immigrants is a more
recent phenomenon and in earlier periods Mexicans were freely allowed to come across and work.
I think it's also useful to consider private prison labor. This article notes that half this
revenue comes from undocumented immigrants but that means the other half comes from US citizens.
private prisons
""Private prisons bring in about $3 billion in revenue annually, and over half of that comes
from holding facilities for undocumented immigrants. Private operations run between 50% to 55%
of immigrant detainment facilities. The immigration bill battling its way through Washington right
now might also mean good things for private prisons. Some estimate that the crackdown on undocumented
immigrants will lead to 14,000 more inmates annually with 80% of that business going to private
prisons.
The prison industry has also made money by contracting prison labor to private companies. The
companies that have benefited from this cheap labor include Starbucks (SBUX), Boeing (BA), Victoria's
Secret, McDonalds (MCD) and even the U.S. military. Prison laborers cost between 93 cents and
$4 a day and don't need to collect benefits, thus making them cheap employees.""
It is dangerous for Trump to demonize undocumented immigrants without holding the corporations
that attracted and hired them responsible and the system that allowed it.
Now that they are here and have settled with families, it is deplorable to speak of mass deportation.
As has been noted with the Walmart expample, those that massively profit from this abberation
should bear the major cost of public services required for a 'Shadow Workforce'.
And Hillary Clinton and her neocon crowd, whose policies have created chaos resulting in mass
immigration of refugees offers no apology but more of the same. Insanity doing the same thing
over and over for a different result?
I would argue that migration has both positive and negative impact on the receiving country.
But at some point I believe the 'self' is selfish and not necessarily selfless. In a world of
limited resources and opportunities it is normal for the 'self' to be highly selfish hence the
contradictory nature of the theory of free market economy under globalization.
I argue that the theory is self contradictory because it is normal human nature being selfish
hence anti competition. When threatened by the influx of seemingly hard working, creative and
passive immigrants, I tend to gravitate towards conservatism. I start taking necessary steps towards
protecting myself, my immediate family and hence my domestic market. These rules are typically
borrowed from nature. How to balance the impulsive theory of free market economics vs the reality
of limited resources and opportunities is a unique challenge to governments, policy and decision
makers worldwide hence globalization in the short run presents unique challenges (conflicts) sometimes.
Johnson supports private, for-profit prisons. As Governor of New Mexico he dealt with overcrowded
prisons (and approximately seven hundred prisoners held out-of-state due to a lack of available
space) by opening two private prisons, later arguing that "building two private prisons in
New Mexico solved some very serious problems – and saved the taxpayers a lot of money."
He could have saved the taxpayers even more money by releasing non-violent prisoners convicted
of minor crimes. But that would have offended some of his campaign donors.
Bernie's goal is to ban private prisons. Hillary has a similar goal, but takes money from
prison lobbyists. Does this make sense to you?
According to Lee Fang of The Intercept, Private Prison Lobbyists Are Raising Cash for Hillary
Clinton.
After pressure from civil rights groups, Vice News explains Hillary Clinton Shuns Private
Prison Cash, Activists Want Others to Follow Suit.
The Huffington Post writes "Lobbying firms that work for two major private prison giants,
GEO Group and Corrections Corporation of America, gave $133,246 to the Ready for Hillary PAC,
according to Vice."
Do you trust Clinton?
I guess this means that we should vote for Sanders in the primary. Oh gosh, there's a minor
problem. The primaries are over, and Clinton is the nominee.
"I do think we can do a lot of privatizations, and private prisons it seems to work a lot
better," said Trump when asked how he planned to reform the country's prison system.
For more research on the topic – I found the following very readable, gave me a lot of insight
into the factors influencing whether or when immigration is good or bad from which point of view:
So the UK National Health system nurtured me through my early years, and the UK education
system gave me primary, secondary and degree level education. I have spent most of my working
life doing an R&D job in the US. The US has benefited from my work during my working life. If
I should choose to retire back to the UK, I will remit my pension income back there, and because
of the tax treaty, pay income taxes there, which I claim as a full credit against the US tax return.
So I'm "taking money out of the US, to the detriment of social cohesion and economic growth".
Question is, how much of the pension and/or social security and/or investment gains do I owe
to the US, and how much to the UK? I think I owe more there than I do here. Particularly in light
of the fact that the UK paid for my college education, but my nephews and nieces have to pay for
their own, so I have hitherto been a drain on the UKs social investment strategy.
I see it as much a moral question as an economic one that I should help support my family's
education directly, and the UK social system through future taxes paid from pension. I have after
all supported the US social and military-industrial systems through work done and taxes paid during
my working life.
1. Undocumented immigrants are not eligible for welfare they can barely get emergency room
care.
2. H1-B visas tap larger, typically Asian populations than the U.S. for their best & brightest.
Could India actually make use of its intelligent people? Is it moral for the U.S. to, in effect,
bribe them to leave their native country? (A point made by Ralph Nader in answering a libertarian
at his Google talk )
3. Roughly 50% of the undocumented are from Asia. Yet 90% of the deportations are Hispanic.
Got a link on this? My experience is that the Asian population is either native or here
on student visas. The chinese student population is quite large in Los Angeles. Student visas
don't allow foreign students to work off-campus, so many of them are family-funded. So they're
not taking jobs, but do impact the housing/rental market. (The California colleges love them for
their out-of-state fees and strong study habits.)
I can only speak for Texas, but the nail salons, massage parlors, dry cleaners, restaurants,
fishing boats and electronics refurbishing can't ALL be H1-B visas. And that isn't even counting
all the people from India I see. Most of them are too old to be students.
Trump's statement that he will issue an executive order forcing employers to use E-Verify for
all new employees is a good start. While that program has a few flaws, the net effect would be
massive for favoring citizens over illegals.
To be fair, employers should still have the option of using illegals, however, they should
put their money where their mouths and labor savings are, by not being able to deduct the non
E-Verifiable wages from their income for taxation purposes.
The author fails to distinguish between two (intermixed) faction so of Repugs
-- neocons and neolib.
Neoconservatives and neoliberals are "enemy within" the Republican Party as
they have nothing to do with either republicanism or conservatism. They are Empire
builders. Neocons should be purged as they definitely do not belong. They already
started moving to Democratic party (Robert Kagan is a typical case) ...
Neoliberals are more complex and difficult case. They are the essence of the
current republican establishment, the face of the party. Here a Stalin-type purge
(Trotskyites were very influential before the purge) is necessary to get rid of
this faction, in order to return the Party to Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt
roots...
Notable quotes:
"... Only one outcome in November would forestall a complete, likely irreversible fracturing: the election of Hillary Clinton. Thus, many elite Republican operators-including lobbyists, elected officials, and pundits-are desperately hoping that Trump loses. Some are limited to expressing this desire privately, for fear of alienating the conservative voters on whom their continued electoral (or business) prospects depend. ..."
"... Republicans who were especially devoted to Marco Rubio during the primary-whose interests align with the perpetuation of the party's status quo-are perhaps the most strident in their wish for a Trump defeat. ..."
"... Under a President Trump, such establishmentarian actors would lose power. Maybe they'd retain some measure of influence within the administration, as Trump exerted his deal-making prowess to bring them into the fold, but their interests would no longer be paramount. Other forces would have propelled Trump to victory, and he would likely prioritize them in governance. ..."
"... "True conservatives" of the Cruz variety could feasibly come to include the free marketeers and conventional national-security hawks who cannot countenance Trump. ..."
"... It should also be noted that while this schism is especially pronounced among elites-such as those with sinecures at prestigious think tanks, or lobbyists with powerful clients to please-the divisions are far less evident at the voter level. Support for Trump among Republicans is around 90 percent , according to recent polling. ..."
"... those whose livelihood depends on conservative-movement institutions have added incentive to root for a Trump loss. ..."
"... In sum, Trump poses an existential threat to American movement [neo]conservatives. Hillary is their only hope. ..."
Obviously there is . It has been developing for years, and could be seen
to some extent in earlier presidential cycles, but was opened fully and dramatically
by the improbable candidacy of Donald Trump. Only one outcome in November
would forestall a complete, likely irreversible fracturing: the election of
Hillary Clinton. Thus, many elite Republican operators-including lobbyists,
elected officials, and pundits-are desperately hoping that Trump loses. Some
are limited to expressing this desire privately, for fear of alienating the
conservative voters on whom their continued electoral (or business) prospects
depend.
Republicans who were especially devoted to Marco Rubio during the primary-whose
interests align with the perpetuation of the party's status quo-are perhaps
the most strident in their wish for a Trump defeat. (Recall that the few
areas where Rubio prevailed earlier this year included
Washington, D.C., and its
Northern Virginia suburbs-locations that have profited immensely from the
post-9/11 military-industrial buildup.)
Under a President Trump, such establishmentarian actors would lose power.
Maybe they'd retain some measure of influence within the administration, as
Trump exerted his deal-making prowess to bring them into the fold, but their
interests would no longer be paramount. Other forces would have propelled Trump
to victory, and he would likely prioritize them in governance.
After Trump's election, many conservative organs and their congressional
allies would position themselves as Trump's enemies, coordinating with Democrats
on key initiatives to block his agenda. At the same time, other conservative
organs, in tandem with Trump-sympathetic factions of the Republican congressional
caucus, would coalesce around the sitting president and support his agenda.
Eventually, these factions' coexistence within the same movement would prove
untenable, practically and philosophically.
The result would be less overall leverage for traditional Republican institutions
in Washington, the kind whose existence is premised on the maintenance of the
decades-old "three-legged stool" formula-social conservatism, free markets,
and hawkish foreign policy-for entrenching conservative political power. Trump
would saw off one or two of the stool's legs, and there would be no replacing
them, at least not in the short term.
Though a Trump win would necessitate a realignment, it would not happen overnight.
Think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation
would not undergo a sudden ideological makeover; institutional inertia precludes
such rapid transformation. Change would happen slowly, but surely. A president
always influences the ideological composition of the body politic-within his
own party and the opposition. For instance, Obama's eight-year term has reshaped
the Democratic Party coalition, and also engendered commensurate shifts within
internal Republican dynamics.
Under a President Trump, the Republican congressional caucus and affiliated
movement-conservative entities would be constantly wracked by internecine warfare
of the type that was on vivid display during the GOP primaries. No doubt Ted
Cruz would be at the forefront of whatever organized conservative opposition
to Trump emerged as he positioned himself for a likely presidential primary
challenge in 2020. Cruz would be well situated to pick up the mantle of "true
conservatism"-however that ended up getting defined-and he would be able to
(convincingly) blame establishment-GOP squishes for fostering the conditions
that gave rise to Trump. "True conservatives" of the Cruz variety could
feasibly come to include the free marketeers and conventional national-security
hawks who cannot countenance Trump.
Conversely, under a President Hillary, movement conservatives could comfortably
unify the party in opposition to their longstanding enemy, papering over the
ideological divisions exposed by Trump. Such divisions would still exist, but
dealing with them would be subordinated to the overriding task of undermining
Hillary. Movement conservatives could easily discount Trump's nomination and
failed general-election run as an aberration, and revert more or less back to
form. They'd probably proffer some superficial initiatives to address "Trump_vs_deep_state"
at the urging of prominent columnists-the somber panel discussions would be
manifold-but "Trump_vs_deep_state" as a political program is so ill-defined and malleable
that, in practice, any remedial actions wouldn't amount to much.
It should also be noted that while this schism is especially pronounced
among elites-such as those with sinecures at prestigious think tanks, or lobbyists
with powerful clients to please-the divisions are far less evident at the voter
level. Support for Trump among Republicans is
around 90 percent , according to recent polling. In addition to keeping
the traditional movement-conservative coalition intact, a Trump loss would narrow
the gap between ordinary Republican voters and conservative elites, who could
unite in their disdain for Hillary. Thus, those whose livelihood depends on
conservative-movement institutions have added incentive to root for a Trump
loss.
In sum, Trump poses an existential threat to American movement [neo]conservatives.
Hillary is their only hope.
Michael Tracey is a journalist based in New York City.
BenOp is unrealistic. conservative Christians will not stop voting Republicans.
Notable quotes:
"... Conservative" Christians aren't going to stop voting Republican. They're just going to offer a different reason for doing it, when asked. ..."
"... Well, I think you're right that about 3/4 of the readers would lose their minds if that was stated as an explicit political goal. It would confirm in the minds of many the suspicion that the primary strategy of the religious right is the establishment of an anti-democratic, theocracy or Caesaropapist regime. ..."
"... A lot of people are tired of the Religious Right's attempt to gain political power in order to impose Christian views of morality. ..."
"... A lot of people believe that there should be a separation of church and state, not only in the Constitutional sense of having no state-established religion, but also in the general sense that morality should be a private matter, not the subject of politics. ..."
"... So basically this boils down to you asking us to trust that your gut is right in spite of what we can see with our lying eyes? Yeah, no thanks. ..."
"... Conservative Christians danced with the Republican Party for a long-time, but past a certain point had to stop pretending that the Republican Party cared more about them than about their slice of Mammon (big business and the MIC mainly). ..."
"... Liberal Christians, some of them, danced with the other side of Mammon (big government and social programs, etc) and perhaps just got absorbed. But the point is I think you are returning to a better place, reverting to some sort of norm, the alliance with the GOP was a strange infatuation that wasn't going to sustain anyway. ..."
"... So many colorful descriptions of how Trump lies from so many commenters… Could y'all give at least one that doesn't fit his opponent perfectly and even with double intensity? ..."
"... Michelle: Obama advisor Al Sharpton has been responsible for stirring up more Jew hatred than Trump. Have you ever given a care about that? Do you care that Hillary's Mexican and Muslim immigrants are sure to be more antisemitic than the native whites of the US that you fret about over and over? ..."
"... Last year after listening to the same-sex marriage oral arguments presented before the Supreme Court, I concluded that libertarianism and either the current Libertarian Party or some spinoff offers the best that those of us with traditional religious and moral convictions can hope for in a decidedly post-Christian America. ..."
"... "Are we as a people really capable of being citizens of a Republic or are we simply fools to be manipulated by people like Trump?" ..."
"... My two cents: We're capable of being citizens of a Republic if our government creates the conditions for a thriving middle class: the most important condition being good, high-paying jobs that allow people to live an independent existence. The vast majority of manufacturing jobs have been shipped overseas, and even higher-skilled jobs (such as research and development) are increasingly being outsourced as well. ..."
"... Basically, the middle class is disappearing. Without a thriving middle class, democracy is unsustainable. Struggling people filled with hate and resentment are ripe for manipulation by nefarious forces. ..."
"... Spain's Francisco Franco understood this very well. His goal was to make it unthinkable for his country to descend into civil war ever again. He achieved this ..."
"... When Franco died, Spain was the ninth-largest economy in the world, and the second-fastest growing economy in the world (behind only Japan). It became a liberal democracy almost overnight. When Franco was on his deathbed, he was asked what he thought his most important legacy was. He replied, "The middle class." Franco was not a democrat, but he'd created the conditions for liberal democracy in Spain. ..."
"... The promotion of an increasingly interconnected world in and of itself isnt necessarily bad. However, the annihilation of culture, religion, and autonomy at the hands of multinational corporations and a Gramscian elite certainly is – and that is what is happening under what is referred to as globalization. The revolt against the evil being pushed out of Brussels and Washington has now spread into the West itself. May the victory of the rebels be swift and complete. ..."
"... "You're misdefining "grievance industry;" the central tenet of the grievance industry is that whatever happens, white people are to blame and should continue paying for it." ..."
"... "BenOp is fascinating, but most cultural conservative now active in the game will not drop out. They may not like the adrenalin rush politics gives them more than they like Jesus–but they ain't going to give it up." ..."
"... Exactly. This is why Christian boycotts never succeed. They claim that they hate Disneyworld because of their pro-gay policies, but when they have to choose between Jesus and a Fun Family Vacation, Jesus always loses. ..."
"... The Corporate Media is corrupt and Americans are waking up to it. ..."
"... We have had three decades of culture wars and everyone can pretty much agree that the traditionalists lost. ..."
"... "Clinton assassination fantasies"? I call bullsh*t on that notion. Trump merely pointed our the absolute hypocrisy of elites like Clinton and her ilk, the guns for me but not for thee crowd. He was not fantasizing about her assassination. Far from it. To suggest he was is to engage in the same sort of dishonesty for which Clinton is so well known. ..."
"... Well, back then, the government was doing stuff for the common people. A lot of stuff. WPA, NRA, Social Security, FDIC, FHA, AAA, etc. FDR remembered the "forgotten man." Today, the government is subservient to multinationals and Rothschilds. The forgotten men and women that make up the backbone of our economy have been forgotten once again, and nobody seems to remember them - with the *possible,* partial exception of Trump. ..."
"... The Globalist clap-trap that has so enamoured both parties reminds me of this quote from C.S. Lewis'"Screwtape Proposes a Toast": "…They ever be allowed to raise Aristotle's question: whether "democratic behavior" means the behavior that democracies like or the behavior that will preserve a democracy. For if they did, it could hardly fail to occur to them that these need not be the same." ..."
"... Globalism is just swell for the multinational corporation, but it is nothing more or less than Lawlessness writ large. The Corporation is given legal/fictional life by the state…the trouble is it, like Frankenstein, will turns on its creator and imagines it can enjoy Absolute Independence. ..."
"... If Mr Pat Buchanan were running, he would be in good stead save or his speaking style which is far more formal. Mr. Trump's carefree (of sorts) delivery punches through and gives the impression that he's an everyman. His boundless energy has that sense earnest sincerity. His "imperfections" tend to work in his favor. But if his message was counter to where most people are already at - he would not be the nominee. ..."
"... Good article. I think Mitchell identifies the right ideas buried within Trump's rhetoric. But even if it were true that Trump had no ideas, I would still vote for him. After all, where have politic ideas gotten us lately? ..."
"... "Conservative principles" espoused by wonks and political scientists culminated in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Ideology told us that democracy was a divine right, transferable across time and culture. ..."
"... In fact, Larry Kudlow, the crassest exponent of both those ideas is one of Trump's economic advisors. ..."
"... We Christians are in Hillary Clinton's Basket of Deplorables." ..."
"Conservative" Christians aren't going to stop voting Republican.
They're just going to offer a different reason for doing it, when asked.
I will bet all the money in my pockets against all the money in Rod's
pockets that there will NEVER, in either of our lifetimes, be a time when
he feels compelled by his principles to vote for a Democratic candidate
for federal office over a Republican one.
And finally, I note that someone above asked a version of the same question
I've periodically had: What does Dreherdom look like? If orthodox Christians
controlled the levers of power, what do you propose to DO with your (cultural
AND legal) authority? And what will be the status of the "other" in that
brave new world?
[NFR: They will be captured and enslaved and sent to work in the
boudin
mines. And I will spend whatever percentage of the Gross National Product
it takes to hire the Rolling Stones to play "Exile On Main Street" live,
from start to finish, in a national broadcast that I will require every
citizen to watch, on pain of being assigned to hard labor in the boudin
mines. Also, I will eat boudin. - RD]
While I can't speak for Rod, I can speak for many traditional Catholics.
The end goal is the re-establishment of the social reign of Christ,
which means a majority Christian nation, Christian culture, and a state
which governs according to Christian principles (read Quas Primas).
In that situation, and in that situation alone, would the Ben Op no
longer be necessary.]
That's interesting. Well, I think you're right that about 3/4 of the
readers would lose their minds if that was stated as an explicit political
goal. It would confirm in the minds of many the suspicion that the primary
strategy of the religious right is the establishment of an anti-democratic,
theocracy or Caesaropapist regime. I would consider that the extreme "utopian"
or some would even say "totalitarian" position of religious conservatives
and not "conservative" in any sense that I understand "Conservatism".
Saltlick's minimal requirement seems to moderate that goal to "a national
reaffirmation that our rights, as partially defined in the Constitution
and Bill of Rights, come from God the Creator, that life is valuable from
the moment of conception, and that the traditional family is the best promoter
of sound moral, cultural and economic health.", but even in that he regards
it as only a half-measure for Saltlick. Needless to say, what a "traditional"
family is would need some definition.
If nothing short of establishing the City of God on earth would secure
the comfort of some Christians then that is a pretty high bar and you have
every right to feel insecure… as do the rest of us.
I would be curious to know how many of your co-religionists on these
boards share your view? And how many would reject it?
Mr Dreher, I always read your articles with great interest, although
I often disagree with you. For example, I don't think anybody of any political
persuasion is going to try to stamp out Christianity or those who espouse
it. Indeed, I think many people will be delighted if all Christians would
exercise the Benedict Option.
A lot of people are tired of the Religious Right's attempt to gain
political power in order to impose Christian views of morality.
A lot of people believe that there should be a separation of church
and state, not only in the Constitutional sense of having no state-established
religion, but also in the general sense that morality should be a private
matter, not the subject of politics.
[NFR: That's incredibly naive. Aside from procedural laws, all laws
are nothing but legislated morality. Somebody's morality is going to be
reflected in law. It is unavoidable. - RD]
Michelle: Obama advisor Al Sharpton has been responsible for stirring
up more Jew hatred than Trump. Have you ever given a care about that? Do
you care that Hillary's Mexican and Muslim immigrants are sure to be more
antisemitic than the native whites of the US that you fret about over and
over?
Sharpton isn't running for president and I didn't vote for him when he
was. Same for Jesse Jackson. I'm well aware of antisemitism within the black
community but doubt it comes anywhere close to that of the alt-right and
nationalist groups, who foment hate against both blacks and Jews.
And duh,
of course there's plenty of anti-semitism among Muslims. Who's pretending
otherwise. It also appears that you didn't read what I wrote. I favor strong
borders but think you can do so without demagoguery and appealing to people's
baser instincts and hatreds, which is what Trump does.
I realize all you Trump apologists aren't about to recognize the danger
the man poses. I don't care as long as there are enough people who do to
keep him out of the presidency.
Rod, you clearly have unresolved cognitive dissonance, because if your vote
is based on which candidate is best with religious liberty and the right
of Christians to live as Christians, the answer is clear and unambiguous:
Trump. Yet you refuse to vote for him.
The author of this piece actually has you nailed perfectly, which is
why it makes you so uncomfortable. He sees that you are absolving yourself
from the consequences of political engagement by acting like you can stay
firm on your principles, while refusing to choose from the only two real
sides on offer. That choice is the messy business of politics, and inevitably
imperfect because politics is a human practice and humans are fallen. Because
you are unwilling to make that choice, you are out of the politics business
whether you realize it or not.
What you have not abandoned, but I believe should when it comes to the
topics of politics, is the public square.
You recognize that your generation failed to fight. You very clearly
have no intention of fighting even now. You have decided to build a Benedict
Option because you think that's the only viable option. That's fine. In
fact, I heartily approve.
But other people have chosen differently. They have chosen to fight.
Donald Trump for one. You might not like his methods. But he's not willing
to see his country destroyed without doing everything he can to stop it.
He's not alone. Many people are standing up and recognizing that though
the odds are long, they owe it to their children and grandchildren to stand
up and be counted. That choice deserves respect too, Rod.
The problem with you is not the BenOp, but your active demonization of
those who actually have the temerity to fight for their country instead
of surrendering it to go hide in your BenOp bunker with you.
Trump, the alt-right, etc. may be wrong metaphysically and they may be
wrong ethically, but they are right about some very important things – things
that you, Rod Dreher, and your entire generation of conservatives were very,
very wrong on. Rather than admit that, you want to stand back from the fight,
pretending you're too gosh darned principled to soil your hands voting for
one of the two candidates who have a shot to be our president, and acting
like you're a morally superior person for doing so.
You should focus on the important work of building and evangelizing for
BenOp, and leave the field of political discourse to those who are actually
willing to engage in the business of politics.
No lengthy cerebral essay will cover up the fact that Trump is a crude,
belligerent, and unethical con-artist. Clinton for her part has her own
problems but both are a blot on American history. No amount of blabber will
put a shine on Trump's character. He is for himself, and no one else.
"I realize all you Trump apologists aren't about to recognize the danger
the man poses. I don't care as long as there are enough people who do
to keep him out of the presidency."
So basically this boils down to you asking us to trust that your
gut is right in spite of what we can see with our lying eyes? Yeah, no thanks.
fwiw, my sense is that the Benedict Option (from the snippets that you have
shared with us particularly in the posts on Norcia and other communities
already pursuing some sort of "option") represents a return of conservative
Christians to a more healthy, hands-off relationship with national politics.
Conservative Christians danced with the Republican Party for a long-time,
but past a certain point had to stop pretending that the Republican Party
cared more about them than about their slice of Mammon (big business and
the MIC mainly).
Liberal Christians, some of them, danced with the other side of Mammon
(big government and social programs, etc) and perhaps just got absorbed.
But the point is I think you are returning to a better place, reverting
to some sort of norm, the alliance with the GOP was a strange infatuation
that wasn't going to sustain anyway.
So many colorful descriptions of how Trump lies from so many commenters…
Could y'all give at least one that doesn't fit his opponent perfectly and
even with double intensity?
Michelle: Obama advisor Al Sharpton has been responsible for stirring up
more Jew hatred than Trump. Have you ever given a care about that? Do you
care that Hillary's Mexican and Muslim immigrants are sure to be more antisemitic
than the native whites of the US that you fret about over and over?
Rod, when you say the following, you articulate exactly why I have reluctantly
become a libertarian:
-"On a practical level, that means that I will no longer vote primarily
on the social issues that have dictated my vote in the past, but I will
vote primarily for candidates who will be better at protecting my community's
right to be left alone."-
Last year after listening to the same-sex marriage oral arguments
presented before the Supreme Court, I concluded that libertarianism and
either the current Libertarian Party or some spinoff offers the best that
those of us with traditional religious and moral convictions can hope for
in a decidedly post-Christian America.
I don't believe for a minute that the majority of elected officials in
the Republican Party have the backbone to stand up for religious liberty
in the face of corporate pressure. You need look no farther than how the
Republicans caved last year in Indiana on the protection of religious liberty.
There are many libertarians who are going to work to protect the rights
of people to do things that undermine the common good. But, I have more
faith that they'll protect the rights of a cultural minority such as traditionalist
Christians than I have in either the Republicans or the Democrats.
It isn't true that Trump and his supporters are against identity politics.
It's just that they have a far simpler view of identity politics. There
are white people, and there are blah people. White people will be in charge,
and blah people can have a piece of the pie to the extent they agree to
pretend to be white people.
Cecelia wonders: "Are we as a people really capable of being citizens
of a Republic or are we simply fools to be manipulated by people like
Trump?"
My two cents: We're capable of being citizens of a Republic if our government
creates the conditions for a thriving middle class: the most important condition
being good, high-paying jobs that allow people to live an independent existence.
The vast majority of manufacturing jobs have been shipped overseas, and
even higher-skilled jobs (such as research and development) are increasingly
being outsourced as well.
If you look at the monthly payroll jobs reports put out by the Bureau
of Labor Statistics, you will see that the vast majority of new jobs are
in retail trade, health care and social assistance, waitresses and bartenders,
and government. Most of these jobs are part-time jobs. None of these jobs
produce any goods than can be exported. Aside from government jobs, these
are not jobs that pay well enough for people to thrive independently. This
is why more Americans aged 25-34 live with their parents than independently
with spouses and children of their own. It is also why many people now must
work multiple jobs in order to make ends meet. As for government jobs, they
are tax-supported, and thus a drain on the economy. I'm not a libertarian.
I recognize that government provides many crucial services. But it is unproductive
to have too many bureaucrats living off of tax revenues.
Basically, the middle class is disappearing. Without a thriving middle
class, democracy is unsustainable. Struggling people filled with hate and
resentment are ripe for manipulation by nefarious forces.
Spain's Francisco Franco understood this very well. His goal was to make
it unthinkable for his country to descend into civil war ever again. He
achieved this. Before Franco, Spain was a Third World h*llhole plagued by
radical ideologies like communism, regional separatism, and anarchism. [Fascism
had its following as well, but it was never too popular. The Falange (which
was the closest thing to a fascist movement in Spain, though it was not
really fascist, as it was profoundly Christian and rejected Nietzschean
neo-paganism) was irrelevant before Francoism. Under Francoism, it was one
of the three pillars that supported the regime (the other two being monarchists
and Catholics), but it was never the most influential pillar.] When
Franco died, Spain was the ninth-largest economy in the world, and the second-fastest
growing economy in the world (behind only Japan). It became a liberal democracy
almost overnight. When Franco was on his deathbed, he was asked what he
thought his most important legacy was. He replied, "The middle class." Franco
was not a democrat, but he'd created the conditions for liberal democracy
in Spain.
To get back to the US, we now have a Third World economy. We can't too
surprised that our politics also look increasingly like those of a Third
World country. Thus, the rise of Trump, Sanders, the alt-right, the SJW's,
Black Lives Matter, etc.
The evolution of the MSM into an American version of Pravda/Izvestia
has been a lengthy process and dates back at least to the days of Walter
Lippmann (ostensibly a journalist but upon whom Roosevelt, Truman and JFK
had no qualms about calling for advice).
With the emergence of the Internet and the phenomenon of the blogosphere,
the MSM has no choice but to cast off whatever pretensions to objectivity
they may have had and, instead, now preach to the choir so they can keep
themselves viable in an increasingly competitive market where more people
get their news from such as Matt Drudge than from the NY-LA Times or the
WaPo
Suppose a more composed candidate stood up against the PC police, and generally
stood for these same 6 principles, and did so in a much more coherent and
rational manner. I propose that he would be demolished within no time at
all. Take a Pat Buchanan…how do you think he would be doing in this election?
Trumps three ring show prevents the charges against him from finding any
fertile soil to grow in. If he ran on principle instead of capturing an
undefined spirit, if he tried to answer the charges against him in a rational
manner, all it would do it produce more fertile soil for the PC charges
to stick. Trump may have stumbled upon the model for future conservative
candidates when running in a nation where the mainstream press is so thoroughly
against you. Just make a lot of noise and ignore them. If you engage in
the argument with them, they'll destroy you.
@Cecelia: The issue is not Trump – it is those who support him. Are
we as a people really capable of being citizens of a Republic or are
we simply fools to be manipulated by people like Trump ?
Yes. Tell me, during the Great Depression, as Nazi Germany and Imperial
Japan began their march to what would bring this world to war and state-sponsored
genocide, why did my grandparents and my parents who were teenagers in the
30s not succumb to all this doom, gloom, and anger at the supposed lack
of prospects for improvement in their lives that Trump's followers whine
about?
By any standard, conditions then were worse for the white working class
than is the case today, and yes, my grandparents were working class: one
grandfather worked for the railroad, the other for a lumber mill. And yes,
there was alcoholism, and domestic abuse, and crime, and suicide amongst
the populace in the 1930s.
The role of religion was more pervasive then, but to tell the truth,
I expect Rod would describe my grandparents on both side as Moral Therapeutic
Deists; by Rod's standard I believe that is true for most Christians throughout
history.
Just what is different about today, that brings all this rage and resentment?
Could it be that racial and ethnic and religious minorities, and women now
have a piece of the pie and a good part of the white working class cannot
stand it?
And Trump doesn't scare me nearly as much as does the fact that so very
many Americans support him, whether wholeheartedly swallowing his poison,
or because they close their eyes and minds and hearts to just what kind
of a man he is.
The promotion of an increasingly interconnected world in and of itself isnt
necessarily bad. However, the annihilation of culture, religion, and autonomy
at the hands of multinational corporations and a Gramscian elite certainly
is – and that is what is happening under what is referred to as globalization.
The revolt against the evil being pushed out of Brussels and Washington
has now spread into the West itself. May the victory of the rebels be swift
and complete.
"You're misdefining "grievance industry;" the central tenet of the grievance
industry is that whatever happens, white people are to blame and should
continue paying for it."
If we all accept your definition then we can't argue with you. Whatever
you want to call it, there is an entire industry (most conservative media)
that feeds a victimization mentality among whites, conservatives, evangelicals
etc (all those labels apply to me by the way) that closely resembles the
grievance outlook. The only difference is in what circles it is taken seriously.
Why else do so many of us get so bent out of shape when employees have the
audacity to say "happy holidays" at the department store. As made apparent
on this blog we do need to be realistic and vigilant about the real threats
and the direction the culture is going, but by whining about every perceived
slight and insisting everyone buy into our version of "Christian America"
(while anointing a vile figure like Trump as our strongman) we are undercutting
the legitimate grievances we do have.
Everyone has heard how far is moving small car production to Mexico and
forwarded saying no one in America will lose their jobs because the production
will be shifted to SUVs and other vehicles.
That's not the problem the problem is instead of creating more jobs in
America the jobs are being created in Mexico and not helping Americans.
"BenOp is fascinating, but most cultural conservative now active
in the game will not drop out. They may not like the adrenalin rush
politics gives them more than they like Jesus–but they ain't going
to give it up."
Exactly. This is why Christian boycotts never succeed. They claim that
they hate Disneyworld because of their pro-gay policies, but when they have
to choose between Jesus and a Fun Family Vacation, Jesus always loses.
What happens when the status quo media turns a presidential election
into a referendum regarding the media's ability to shape public opinion
and direct "purchasing" choices?
The Corporate Media is corrupt and Americans are waking up to it.
This will almost always mean voting for the Republicans in national elections,
but in a primary situation, I will vote for the Republican who can best
be counted on to defend religious liberty, even if he's not 100 percent
on board with what I consider to be promoting the Good. If it means voting
for a Republican that the defense hawks or the Chamber of Commerce disdain,
I have no problem at all with that.
How is this different than cultural conservatives voted before Trump?
We have had three decades of culture wars and everyone can pretty much
agree that the traditionalists lost.
Now whether Dreher et all lost because the broader culture refused to
listen or because they simply couldn't make a convincing argument is a question
that surrounds a very particular program pursued by conservatives, traditionalists
and the religious right. It is certain that the Republican Party as a vehicle
for those values has been taken out and been beat like a rented mule. It
seems to that Josh Stuart has pulled a rabbit out of the hat. Trump is,
if anything, pretty incoherent and whatever "principles" he represents were
discovered in the breach; a little like bad gunnery practice, one shot low,
one shot lower and then a hit. If Trump represents anything it is the fact
that the base of the party was not who many of us thought they were. Whatever
Christian values we thought they were representing are hardly recognizable
now.
What truly puzzles me more and increasingly so is Rod's vision of what
America is supposed to be under a Dreher regime. I'm not sure what that
regime looks like? Behind all the theological underpinning and high-sounding
abstractions what does a ground-level political and legislative program
for achieving a society he is willing to whole-heartedly participate in
look like?
Politics is a reflection of culture but culture is responsive to politics.
What political order does the Ben Op crowd wish to install in place of the
one we have now – short of the parousia – and how does that affect our life
and autonomy as citizens and individuals? He says Christians just want to
be left alone but they seem to have made and are still making a lot of noise
for people who want to be left alone so I have to assume they want something
over and above being left alone.
I guess the question I want to zero in on is; What minimal, concrete
programmatic or cultural change or changes would necessitate abandoning
the Ben Op? Or equally, what is the post-Ben Op vision of America that allows
Rod and company to relax?
a couple "ideas" come to mind. re: deplorable. SOME (no value in speculating
or establishing a number) are deplorable. it's funny (actually, quite sad)
Trump's we don't have time to be politically correct mantra is ignored when
his opponent (a politician who helped establish the concept of politically
correctness) steals a page from his playbook. on a certain level, perhaps
the eastern elite, intellectual liberal grabbed the "irony" hammer from
the toolbox? ever the shrewd, calculating (narcissistic and insecure) carny
barker, Trump has not offered any "new" ideas. he's merely (like any politician)
put his finger in the air and decided to "run" from the "nationalist, racist,
nativist, side of the politically correct/incorrect betting line. at the
end of the day, there are likely as many deplorable folks on the Clinton
bandwagon; it's just (obviously) not in her interests to expose these "boosters"
at HER rallies/fundraising events. in many ways it speaks to the lesser
of two evils is still evil "idea". politics – especially national campaigns
are not so much about which party/candidate has the better ideas, but rather
which is less deplorable.
"Instead, it has everything to do with his wink/nod attitude toward the
alt-right and white nationalist groups and with his willingness to appropriate
their anti-semitic, racist memes for his own advancement. He's dangerous.
Period. Dangerous and scary to anyone familiar with lynchings, pogroms,
and mob violence. To anyone familiar with history. Trump has unleashed dark
forces that will not easily be quelled even if, and probably especially
if, he loses. The possibility that he might win has left me wondering whether
I even belong in this country any more, no matter how much sympathy I might
feel for the folks globalism has left behind."
One can just as easily make the point that the globalists have unleashed
dark forces against white people and Western civilization that are nor easily
quelled.
The most interesting part of the essay is near the end, where he briefly
discusses how non-whites might react to our political realignment.
After all, will the white liberal be able to manipulate these groups
forever?
For example, we are seeing the 'official black leaders' who represent
them on TV shift from being activist clergymen to being (white paid and
hosed) gay activists and mulattoes from outside the mainstream of black
culture. How long can this continue?
"Call it anti-Semitic if you want but all my Jewish cousins and the several
other Jewish business associates I know feel uncontrollable hate for Trump.
"thinly buried in his rhetoric: (1) borders matter; (2) immigration policy
matters; (3) national interests, not so-called universal interests, matter;
(4) entrepreneurship matters; (5) decentralization matters; (6) PC speech-without
which identity politics is inconceivable-must be repudiated."
They seem to think that any attempt to stop mass 3rd world immigration,
stop pc thought police, or up hold Christian-ish values are a direct threat
to them."
The Jews, having lived as strangers among foreign peoples for the better
part of 2 millennia, have always been on the receiving end of racial hatred.
As a result many Western Jews have an instinctive mistrust of nationalist
movements and a natural tendency towards globalism.
The media has done a splendid job of portraying Trump as the next Hitler,
so, understandably, there's a lot of fear. My Jewish grandparents are terrified
of the man.
I am not a globalist, and (due to the SCOTUS issue) will probably vote
for Trump, even though I have no love for the man himself. I think the "Trump
the racist" meme is based on confirmation bias, not reality, but I understand
where the fear comes from.
"I think that many casual hearers of Ben Op ideas assume that Ben Op
is a one-dimensional, cultural dropping-out of cultural/religious conservatives
into irrelevant enclaves.
To me, Ben-Op is more returning to the Tocquevillean idea that the best
American ways of living work their way up from organic, formative local
communities that have largely disappeared from our socio-cultural experience.
Without independent formative local communities, we human beings are mere
products rolling off the assembly line that serves the interests of the
elites of our big government-big business-big education conglomerate.
If these formative communities hold to authentic, compassionate Judeo-Christian
values and practices, all the better–for everybody! Ben Op will offer an
alternative to the assembly-line politically correct cultural warriors being
produced by many of our elite cultural institutions."
Bingo.
If you want to fundamentally transform the culture, you have to withdraw
from it, at least partially. But there's no need to wall yourself off. A
Benedict Option community can and should be politically active, primarily
at the local level, where the most good can be done.
The Benedictine monks from whom Rod draws inspiration didn't just shut
themselves up and refuse to have anything to do with the crumbling world
around them. They retreated into their monasteries to strengthen their souls,
and then went out into the world and rebuilt it for Christ.
"Clinton assassination fantasies"? I call bullsh*t on that notion. Trump
merely pointed our the absolute hypocrisy of elites like Clinton and her
ilk, the guns for me but not for thee crowd. He was not fantasizing about
her assassination. Far from it. To suggest he was is to engage in the same
sort of dishonesty for which Clinton is so well known.
I never cared much for Trump but he has all the right enemies and is
growing on me.
"It isn't true that Trump and his supporters are against identity politics.
It's just that they have a far simpler view of identity politics. There
are white people, and there are blah people. "
They love Ben Carson and Allan West, last time I checked neither men
were white.
"Yes. Tell me, during the Great Depression, as Nazi Germany and Imperial
Japan began their march to what would bring this world to war and state-sponsored
genocide, why did my grandparents and my parents who were teenagers in the
30s not succumb to all this doom, gloom, and anger at the supposed lack
of prospects for improvement in their lives that Trump's followers whine
about?"
Well, back then, the government was doing stuff for the common people.
A lot of stuff. WPA, NRA, Social Security, FDIC, FHA, AAA, etc. FDR remembered
the "forgotten man." Today, the government is subservient to multinationals
and Rothschilds. The forgotten men and women that make up the backbone of
our economy have been forgotten once again, and nobody seems to remember
them - with the *possible,* partial exception of Trump.
The Globalist clap-trap that has so enamoured both parties reminds me
of this quote from C.S. Lewis'"Screwtape Proposes a Toast": "…They ever
be allowed to raise Aristotle's question: whether "democratic behavior"
means the behavior that democracies like or the behavior that will preserve
a democracy. For if they did, it could hardly fail to occur to them that
these need not be the same."
Globalism is just swell for the multinational corporation, but it is
nothing more or less than Lawlessness writ large. The Corporation is given
legal/fictional life by the state…the trouble is it, like Frankenstein,
will turns on its creator and imagines it can enjoy Absolute Independence.
One can just as easily make the point that the globalists have unleashed
dark forces against white people and Western civilization that are nor
easily quelled.
And you would have the benefit of evidence (or, well, evidence that is
not stale by nearly a century). It wasn't Trump supporters beating up people
in San Jose. And if you look to Europe as a guide to what can happen in
America, things start looking far, far worse.
"I guess the question I want to zero in on is; What minimal, concrete
programmatic or cultural change or changes would necessitate abandoning
the Ben Op? Or equally, what is the post-Ben Op vision of America that allows
Rod and company to relax?"
While I can't speak for Rod, I can speak for many traditional Catholics.
The end goal is the re-establishment of the social reign of Christ, which
means a majority Christian nation, Christian culture, and a state which
governs according to Christian principles (read Quas Primas). In that situation,
and in that situation alone, would the Ben Op no longer be necessary.
I am guessing that Rod has not said this explicitly, or laid out a concrete
plan, because he is writing a book for Christians in general. And if you
get into too many specifics, you are going to run right into the enormous
theological and philosophical differences between Catholicism and Protestantism.
Also, if Rod were to start talking about "The Social Reign of Christ
the King", 3/4 of you would lose your minds.
Of course, the current prospect for a Christian culture and state look
bleak, to say the least. But we can play the long game, the Catholic Church
is good at that. It took over 300 years to convert the Roman Empire. It
was 700 years from the founding of the first Benedictine monastery until
St. Thomas Aquinas and the High Middle Ages. We can wait that long, at least.
I rather think, in concurrence with Prof. Cole, that Trump is a simulacrum
within a simulacrum with a simulacrum: there is no "extra-mediatic" Trump
candidate, ergo there is no "extra-mediatic" presidential electoral race
(if limited to the two "mainstreamed" candidates), ergo there is no presidential
election tout court, ergo there is no democracy at the presidential election
level in the U.S–just simulacra deceptively reflecting simulacra, in any
case, the resulting effect is a mirage, a distortion, but above all an ILLUSION.
All this is, it seems to me, is a transition to a different favorite deadly
sin. We've had pride, avarice, and the current favorite is lust; the new
favorite appears to be wrath. Gluttony, sloth, and envy have not been absent,
but they have not been the driving force in politics recently.
Also important was the fact that FDR did not stoke the fires of class
conflict. A patrician himself, FDR's goal was not to overturn the existing
social order but rather to preserve it by correcting its injustices. FDR
was the moderate leader the country needed at the time. Without him, we
might well have succumbed to a demagogic or perhaps even dictatorial government
under Charles Coughlin, Huey Long, or Norman Thomas. In contrast, Hillary
and Trump seek to use fringe groups (BLM, alt-right) for their own agendas.
Let's hope whoever wins can keep her or his pets mollified and contained,
but courting extremists is always a risky business. Indeed, Hillary may
be worse than Trump in this respect, since there appears to be no daylight
between her and the SJW's.
To me, Ben-Op is more returning to the Tocquevillean idea that the best
American ways of living work their way up from organic, formative local
communities that have largely disappeared from our socio-cultural experience.
Without independent formative local communities, we human beings are mere
products rolling off the assembly line that serves the interests of the
elites of our big government-big business-big education conglomerate.
Ben Op or not, its always a great notion. And you don't have to withdraw
from the culture, THIS IS American culture (traditionally speaking). We
just need to reaffirm it.
So many colorful descriptions of how Trump lies from so many commenters…
Could y'all give at least one that doesn't fit his opponent perfectly and
even with double intensity?
Hillary Clinton doesn't have a long list of unpaid contractors suing
her… of course that's because she never built hotels, and I don't think
she ever declared bankruptcy either. We have a batch of slumlords in Milwaukee
who are little Trumps… they run up hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines
for building violations, declare bankruptcy or plead poverty and make occasional
payments of $50, and meantime they spend tends of thousands of dollars buying
up distressed property at sheriff's auctions. All of them are black, all
of them have beautiful homes in mostly "white" suburbs, and I wouldn't vote
for any of them for dogcatcher, much less president.
That said, Hillary is an ego-bloated lying sleaze, and I wouldn't vote
for her if she were running against almost anyone but Trump.
Nonetheless I am still tired of the ominous warnings about right-wing
white mobs that are about to rememerge any day. It's been decades since
there was a white riot in this country.
There hasn't been a real riot of any nature in quite a while. And no,
that little fracas in Milwaukee doesn't count. A few dozen thugs burning
four black-owned businesses while everyone living in the neighborhood denounces
then falls short of a riot.
I agree that we are not likely to see right-wing "white" mobs posing
much of a threat to anyone… they're mostly couch potatoes anyway. But it
is true that until the 1940s, a "race riot" meant a white mob rampaging
through a black neighborhood. And there have been very few black riots that
went deep into a "white" neighborhood … they stayed in black neighborhoods
too.
This is an election about feeling under siege.
But we're not, and most of the adults in the room know it.
Trump continues to be a walking, talking Rorschach test for pundits
peddling a point of view.
I think that explains a lot of Trump's support. Its not who he is, what
he says, or what he does or will do, its what they think they SEE in him.
I have to admit, I did a bit of that over Barack Obama in 2008, and he did
disappoint. Obama has been one of our best presidents in a long time, but
that's a rather low bar.
"There are, then, two developments we are likely to see going forward. First,
cultural conservatives will seriously consider a political "Benedict Option,"
dropping out of the Republican Party and forming a like-minded Book Group,
unconcerned with winning elections and very concerned with maintaining their
"principles." Their fidelity is to Aristotle rather than to winning the
battle for the political soul of America. …"
You know, people spout this stuff as if the Republican party is conservative.
It started drifting from conservative frame more than forty years ago. By
the time we get to the 2000 elections, it;s been home an entrenched band
of strategics concerned primarily with winning to advance policies tat have
little to do with conservative thought.
I doubt that I will become a member of a book club. And I doubt that
I will stop voting according to my conservative view points.
I generally think any idea that Christians are going to be left to their
own devices doubtful or that they would want to design communities not already
defined by scripture and a life in Christ.
_______________
"If the Ben Op doesn't call on Christians to abandon politics altogether,
it does call on them to recalibrate their (our) understanding of what politics
is and what it can do. Politics, rightly understood, is more than statecraft.
Ben Op politics are Christian politics for a post-Christian culture - that
is, a culture that no longer shares some key basic Christian values . .
."
I am just at a loss to comprehend this. A person who claims to live in
Christ already calibrates their lives in the frame of Christ and led by
some extent by the Spirit of Christ. Nothing about a world destined to become
more worldly will change that. What may happen is that a kind of christian
spiritual revival and renewal will occur.
" . . . orthodox Christians will come to be seen as threats to the common
good, simply because of the views we hold and the practices we live by out
of fidelity to our religion. . ."
If this accurate, that christians are deemed a threat to the state, unless
that threat is just to their participation, the idea "safe spaces" wheres
christians hang out and do their own thing hardly seems a realistic. If
christians are considered a threat – then most likely the ultimate goal
will be to get rid of them altogether. You outlaw faith and practice. Or
you do what HS and colleges have done to students who arrive on the campuses.
You inundate them with how backward their thinking until the student and
then proceed to tell them they are just like everyone else.
Believers are expected to be in the world and not of it. And by in it,
I think Christ intended them to be active participants.
The question is this: what do you do when the policies or ideas you stand
for or at least, agree with, are advanced by someone with as appalling a
character as Trump? What I observe in practice is that friends and acquaintances
of mine who agree with Trump on the issues find it necessary to defend his
utterly indefensible and vile character – which makes them less than honest
as well.
I'd be more impressed if, after Edwin Edwards, Trump's fans said "Vote
for the swindler, it's important" – rather than use lies or their own credulity
to defend him.
I read this on Friday and have thought much about it since. I came by earlier
this evening and had about half of a long post written in response, but
got too caught up in the Georgia/Missouri game to finish it. I also determined
that it wouldn't matter what I said. The conservatives would continue to
harp about the evils of identity politics, refusing to acknowledge the long
history of conservatives engaging in identity politics in both Europe and
America from roughly the high Middle Ages to the present. It seemed more
rational to delete what I had written rather than save it and come back
to finish it.
It just so happened that as the game ended, I clicked on Huffingtonpost
to check the headlines. Lo and behold, the top story was this one about
Jane Goodall's latest statement regarding identity politics in the animal
kingdom:
"What I observe in practice is that friends and acquaintances of mine
who agree with Trump on the issues find it necessary to defend his utterly
indefensible and vile character – which makes them less than honest as well."
I don't defend his vile character. I readily admit it. So do most of
those I know who intend to vote for him.
It's too bad that Clinton is at least equally vile.
For Hillary that's a big problem – the "character" issue is at best a
wash, so the choice boils down to other things.
The most highly motivated voters in this election cycle seem to be insurgents
pushing back against corrupt and incompetent elites and the Establishment.
That does not bode well for Clinton.
"I guess the question I want to zero in on is; What minimal, concrete
programmatic or cultural change or changes would necessitate abandoning
the Ben Op? Or equally, what is the post-Ben Op vision of America that allows
Rod and company to relax?"
------
I think those are good questions, and read in the best light possible, might
be interpreted as being asked by someone honestly seeking to understand
the concerns of traditional Christians today.
I can't answer for Rod, but for me the short answers are,
"1) In present America, I don't think there are any "cultural change"
possible which might reassure Christians, because we are in a downward spiral
which has not yet run its course. The articles and commentary posted here
by Rod show we've not yet reached the peak of what government and technology
will do to the lives of believing Christians.
2) The post-BenOp - perhaps decades in the future - vision that would
allow me to relax would be a national reaffirmation that our rights, as
partially defined in the Constitution and Bill of Rights, come from God
the Creator, that life is valuable from the moment of conception, and that
the traditional family is the best promoter of sound moral, cultural and
economic health. I'd relax a bit, though not entirely, if that happened.
In a September 2015 interview with NBC, Clinton defended partial-birth
abortions again and voiced her support for late-term abortions up until
birth, too.
She also openly supports forcing taxpayers to fund these abortions by
repealing the Hyde Amendment. The amendment prohibits direct taxpayer funding
of abortion in Medicaid. If repealed, researchers estimate that 33,000 more
babies will be aborted every year in the U.S.
Yes, We Christians are in Hillary Clinton's Basket of Deplorables.
"Take a Pat Buchanan…how do you think he would be doing in this election?
Trumps three ring show prevents the charges against him from finding any
fertile soil to grow in."
I think far too much credit is being given to Mr. Trump. The reason he
can stand is because the people he represents have been fed up with the
some of what he stands for long before he entered the fray.
If Mr Pat Buchanan were running, he would be in good stead save or his
speaking style which is far more formal. Mr. Trump's carefree (of sorts)
delivery punches through and gives the impression that he's an everyman.
His boundless energy has that sense earnest sincerity. His "imperfections"
tend to work in his favor. But if his message was counter to where most
people are already at - he would not be the nominee.
There's a difference in being a .Mr. Trump fan and a supporter. As a
supporter, I would be curious to know what lies I have used to support him.
We have some serious differences, but I think my support has been fairly
above board. In fact, i think the support of most have been fairly straight
up I am not sure there is much hidden about Mr. Trump.
The only new issue that has been brought up is the issue of staff accountability.
Has he neglected to pay his staff, is this just an organizational natter
or complete nonsense.
The other factor that has played out to his advantage are the news stories
that repeatedly turn out false, distorted or nonexistent.
The media already in the credibility hole seems very content to dig themselves
in deeper.
I didn't see the post where you disavowed liberals as well, so I was
too hasty with the "your side"
Nonetheless I am still tired of the ominous warnings about right-wing
white mobs that are about to rememerge any day. It's been decades since
there was a white riot in this country.
fwiw, my sense is that the Benedict Option (from the snippets that you have
shared with usm particularly in the posts on Norcia and other communities
already pursuing some sort of "option") represents a return of conservative
Christians to a more healthy, hands-off relationship with national politics.
Conservative Christians danced with the Republican Party for a long-time,
but past a certain point had to stop pretending that the Republican Party
cared more about them than about their slice of Mammon (big business and
the MIC mainly). Liberal Christians, some of them, danced with the other
side of Mammon (big government and social programs, etc) and perhaps just
got absorbed. But the point is I think you are returning to a better place,
reverting to some sort of norm, the alliance with the GOP was a strange
infatuation that wasn't going to sustain anyway.
So many colorful descriptions of how Trump lies from so many commenters…
Could y'all give at least one that doesn't fit his opponent perfectly and
even with double intensity?
Michelle: Obama advisor Al Sharpton has been responsible for stirring up
more Jew hatred than Trump. Have you ever given a care about that? Do you
care that Hillary's Mexican and Muslim immigrants are sure to be more antisemitic
than the native whites of the US that you fret about over and over?
Rod, when you say the following, you articulate exactly why I have reluctantly
become a libertarian:
-"On a practical level, that means that I will no longer vote primarily
on the social issues that have dictated my vote in the past, but I will
vote primarily for candidates who will be better at protecting my community's
right to be left alone."-
Last year after listening to the same-sex marriage oral arguments presented
before the Supreme Court, I concluded that libertarianism and either the
current Libertarian Party or some spinoff offers the best that those of
us with traditional religious and moral convictions can hope for in a decidedly
post-Christian America. I wrote about why I believe this to be so at
http://www.skiprigney.com/2015/04/29/how-the-ssm-debate-made-me-a-libertarian/
I don't believe for a minute that the majority of elected officials in
the Republican Party have the backbone to stand up for religious liberty
in the face of corporate pressure. You need look no farther than how the
Republicans caved last year in Indiana on the protection of religious liberty.
There are many libertarians who are going to work to protect the rights
of people to do things that undermine the common good. But, I have more
faith that they'll protect the rights of a cultural minority such as traditionalist
Christians than I have in either the Republicans or the Democrats.
It isn't true that Trump and his supporters are against identity politics.
It's just that they have a far simpler view of identity politics. There
are white people, and there are blah people. White people will be in charge,
and blah people can have a piece of the pie to the extent they agree to
pretend to be white people.
Cecelia wonders: "Are we as a people really capable of being citizens of
a Republic or are we simply fools to be manipulated by people like Trump?"
My two cents: We're capable of being citizens of a Republic if our government
creates the conditions for a thriving middle class: the most important condition
being good, high-paying jobs that allow people to live an independent existence.
The vast majority of manufacturing jobs have been shipped overseas, and
even higher-skilled jobs (such as research and development) are increasingly
being outsourced as well.
If you look at the monthly payroll jobs reports put out by the Bureau
of Labor Statistics, you will see that the vast majority of new jobs are
in retail trade, health care and social assistance, waitresses and bartenders,
and government. Most of these jobs are part-time jobs. None of these jobs
produce any goods than can be exported. Aside from government jobs, these
are not jobs that pay well enough for people to thrive independently. This
is why more Americans aged 25-34 live with their parents than independently
with spouses and children of their own. It is also why many people now must
work multiple jobs in order to make ends meet. As for government jobs, they
are tax-supported, and thus a drain on the economy. I'm not a libertarian.
I recognize that government provides many crucial services. But it is unproductive
to have too many bureaucrats living off of tax revenues.
Basically, the middle class is disappearing. Without a thriving middle
class, democracy is unsustainable. Struggling people filled with hate and
resentment are ripe for manipulation by nefarious forces.
Spain's Francisco Franco understood this very well. His goal was to make
it unthinkable for his country to descend into civil war ever again. He
achieved this. Before Franco, Spain was a Third World h*llhole plagued by
radical ideologies like communism, regional separatism, and anarchism. [Fascism
had its following as well, but it was never too popular. The Falange (which
was the closest thing to a fascist movement in Spain, though it was not
really fascist, as it was profoundly Christian and rejected Nietzschean
neo-paganism) was irrelevant before Francoism. Under Francoism, it was one
of the three pillars that supported the regime (the other two being monarchists
and Catholics), but it was never the most influential pillar.] When Franco
died, Spain was the ninth-largest economy in the world, and the second-fastest
growing economy in the world (behind only Japan). It became a liberal democracy
almost overnight. When Franco was on his deathbed, he was asked what he
thought his most important legacy was. He replied, "The middle class." Franco
was not a democrat, but he'd created the conditions for liberal democracy
in Spain.
To get back to the US, we now have a Third World economy. We can't too
surprised that our politics also look increasingly like those of a Third
World country. Thus, the rise of Trump, Sanders, the alt-right, the SJW's,
Black Lives Matter, etc.
The evolution of the MSM into an American version of Pravda/Izvestia
has been a lengthy process and dates back at least to the days of Walter
Lippmann (ostensibly a journalist but upon whom Roosevelt, Truman and JFK
had no qualms about calling for advice).
With the emergence of the Internet and the phenomenon of the blogosphere,
the MSM has no choice but to cast off whatever pretensions to objectivity
they may have had and, instead, now preach to the choir so they can keep
themselves viable in an increasingly competitive market where more people
get their news from such as Matt Drudge than from the NY-LA Times or the
WaPo
Suppose a more composed candidate stood up against the PC police, and generally
stood for these same 6 principles, and did so in a much more coherent and
rational manner. I propose that he would be demolished within no time at
all. Take a Pat Buchanan…how do you think he would be doing in this election?
Trumps three ring show prevents the charges against him from finding any
fertile soil to grow in. If he ran on principle instead of capturing an
undefined spirit, if he tried to answer the charges against him in a rational
manner, all it would do it produce more fertile soil for the PC charges
to stick. Trump may have stumbled upon the model for future conservative
candidates when running in a nation where the mainstream press is so thoroughly
against you. Just make a lot of noise and ignore them. If you engage in
the argument with them, they'll destroy you.
@Cecelia: The issue is not Trump – it is those who support him. Are we as
a people really capable of being citizens of a Republic or are we simply
fools to be manipulated by people like Trump ?
Yes. Tell me, during the Great Depression, as Nazi Germany and Imperial
Japan began their march to what would bring this world to war and state-sponsored
genocide, why did my grandparents and my parents who were teenagers in the
30s not succumb to all this doom, gloom, and anger at the supposed lack
of prospects for improvement in their lives that Trump's followers whine
about? By any standard, conditions then were worse for the white working
class than is the case today, and yes, my grandparents were working class:
one grandfather worked for the railroad, the other for a lumber mill. And
yes, there was alcoholism, and domestic abuse, and crime, and suicide amongst
the populace in the 1930s. The role of religion was more pervasive then,
but to tell the truth, I expect Rod would describe my grandparents on both
side as Moral Therapeutic Deists; by Rod's standard I believe that is true
for most Christians throughout history.
Just what is different about today, that brings all this rage and resentment?
Could it be that racial and ethnic and religious minorities, and women now
have a piece of the pie and a good part of the white working class cannot
stand it?
And Trump doesn't scare me nearly as much as does the fact that so very
many Americans support him, whether wholeheartedly swallowing his poison,
or because they close their eyes and minds and hearts to just what kind
of a man he is.
The promotion of an increasingly interconnected world in and of itself isnt
necessarily bad. However, the annihilation of culture,religion, and autonomy
at the hands of multinational corporations and a Gramscian elite certainly
is – and that is what is happening under what is referred to as globalization.
The revolt against the evil being pushed out of Brussels and Washington
has now spread into the West itself. May the victory of the rebels be swift
and complete.
"You're misdefining "grievance industry;" the central tenet of the grievance
industry is that whatever happens, white people are to blame and should
continue paying for it."
If we all accept your definition then we can't argue with you. Whatever
you want to call it, there is an entire industry (most conservative media)
that feeds a victimization mentality among whites, conservatives, evangelicals
etc (all those labels apply to me by the way) that closely resembles the
grievance outlook. The only difference is in what circles it is taken seriously.
Why else do so many of us get so bent out of shape when employees have the
audacity to say "happy holidays" at the department store. As made apparent
on this blog we do need to be realistic and vigilant about the real threats
and the direction the culture is going, but by whining about every perceived
slight and insisting everyone buy into our version of "Christian America"
(while anointing a vile figure like Trump as our strongman) we are undercutting
the legitimate grievances we do have.
Everyone has heard how far is moving small car production to Mexico and
forwarded saying no one in America will lose their jobs because the production
will be shifted to SUVs and other vehicles.
That's not the problem the problem is instead of creating more jobs in
America the jobs are being created in Mexico and not helping Americans.
"BenOp is fascinating, but most cultural conservative now active in the
game will not drop out. They may not like the adrenalin rush politics gives
them more than they like Jesus–but they ain't going to give it up."
Exactly. This is why Christian boycotts never succeed. They claim that
they hate Disneyworld because of their pro-gay policies, but when they have
to choose between Jesus and a Fun Family Vacation, Jesus always loses.
What happens when the status quo media turns a presidential election
into a referendum regarding the media's ability to shape public opinion
and direct "purchasing" choices?
The Corporate Media is corrupt and Americans are waking up to it.
This will almost always mean voting for the Republicans in national elections,
but in a primary situation, I will vote for the Republican who can best
be counted on to defend religious liberty, even if he's not 100 percent
on board with what I consider to be promoting the Good. If it means voting
for a Republican that the defense hawks or the Chamber of Commerce disdain,
I have no problem at all with that.
How is this different than cultural conservatives voted before Trump?
If we elect Trump as POTUS, we deserve everything that happens to us.
Don't blame the progressives when Trump says something about defaulting
on the US debt and the stock market crashes.
Don't blame the progressives when China moves ahead us by leaps and bound
in science and technology because we pull a Kansas and cut taxes left right
and center, then decide to get rid of all government-funded research.
Don't blame the progressives when The Wall doesn't get built, Trump says
"who, me? I never promised anything!" Ditto for the lack of return of well-paid
coal-mining jobs.
And don't blame the progressives when you discover Trump has sold you
down the river for a song, refuses to appoint "conservatives" as SCOTUS
judges, and throws the First Amendment out the window.
We have had three decades of culture wars and everyone can pretty much agree
that the traditionalists lost. Now whether Dreher et all lost because the
broader culture refused to listen or because they simply couldn't make a
convincing argument is a question that surrounds a very particular program
pursued by conservatives, traditionalists and the religious right. It is
certain that the Republican Party as a vehicle for those values has been
taken out and been beat like a rented mule. It seems to that Josh Stuart
has pulled a rabbit out of the hat. Trump is, if anything, pretty incoherent
and whatever "principles" he represents were discovered in the breach; a
little like bad gunnery practice, one shot low, one shot lower and then
a hit. If Trump represents anything it is the fact that the base of the
party was not who many of us thought they were. Whatever Christian values
we thought they were representing are hardly recognizable now.
What truly puzzles me more and increasingly so is Rod's vision of what
America is supposed to be under a Dreher regime. I'm not sure what that
regime looks like? Behind all the theological underpinning and high-sounding
abstractions what does a ground-level political and legislative program
for achieving a society he is willing to whole-heartedly participate in
look like?
Politics is a reflection of culture but culture is responsive to politics.
What political order does the Ben Op crowd wish to install in place of the
one we have now – short of the parousia – and how does that affect our life
and autonomy as citizens and individuals? He says Christians just want to
be left alone but they seem to have made and are still making a lot of noise
for people who want to be left alone so I have to assume they want something
over and above being left alone.
I guess the question I want to zero in on is; What minimal, concrete
programmatic or cultural change or changes would necessitate abandoning
the Ben Op? Or equally, what is the post-Ben Op vision of America that allows
Rod and company to relax?
a couple "ideas" come to mind. re: deplorable. SOME (no value in speculating
or establishing a number) are deplorable. it's funny (actually, quite sad)
Trump's we don't have time to be politically correct mantra is ignored when
his opponent (a politician who helped establish the concept of politically
correctness) steals a page from his playbook. on a certain level, perhaps
the eastern elite, intellectual liberal grabbed the "irony" hammer from
the toolbox? ever the shrewd, calculating (narcissistic and insecure) carny
barker, Trump has not offered any "new" ideas. he's merely (like any politician)
put his finger in the air and decided to "run" from the "nationalist, racist,
nativist, side of the politically correct/incorrect betting line. at the
end of the day, there are likely as many deplorable folks on the Clinton
bandwagon; it's just (obviously) not in her interests to expose these "boosters"
at HER rallies/fundraising events. in many ways it speaks to the lesser
of two evils is still evil "idea". politics – especially national campaigns
are not so much about which party/candidate has the better ideas, but rather
which is less deplorable.
"Instead, it has everything to do with his wink/nod attitude toward the
alt-right and white nationalist groups and with his willingness to appropriate
their anti-semitic, racist memes for his own advancement. He's dangerous.
Period. Dangerous and scary to anyone familiar with lynchings, pogroms,
and mob violence. To anyone familiar with history. Trump has unleashed dark
forces that will not easily be quelled even if, and probably especially
if, he loses. The possibility that he might win has left me wondering whether
I even belong in this country any more, no matter how much sympathy I might
feel for the folks globalism has left behind."
One can just as easily make the point that the globalists have unleashed
dark forces against white people and Western civilization that are nor easily
quelled.
The most interesting part of the essay is near the end, where he briefly
discusses how non-whites might react to our political realignment.
After all, will the white liberal be able to manipulate these groups
forever?
For example, we are seeing the 'official black leaders' who represent
them on TV shift from being activist clergymen to being (white paid and
hosed) gay activists and mulattoes from outside the mainstream of black
culture. How long can this continue?
"Call it anti-Semitic if you want but all my Jewish cousins and the several
other Jewish business associates I know feel uncontrollable hate for Trump.
"thinly buried in his rhetoric: (1) borders matter; (2) immigration policy
matters; (3) national interests, not so-called universal interests, matter;
(4) entrepreneurship matters; (5) decentralization matters; (6) PC speech-without
which identity politics is inconceivable-must be repudiated."
They seem to think that any attempt to stop mass 3rd world immigration,
stop pc thought police, or up hold Christian-ish values are a direct threat
to them."
The Jews, having lived as strangers among foreign peoples for the better
part of 2 millennia, have always been on the receiving end of racial hatred.
As a result many Western Jews have an instinctive mistrust of nationalist
movements and a natural tendency towards globalism.
The media has done a splendid job of portraying Trump as the next Hitler,
so, understandably, there's a lot of fear. My Jewish grandparents are terrified
of the man.
I am not a globalist, and (due to the SCOTUS issue) will probably vote
for Trump, even though I have no love for the man himself. I think the "Trump
the racist" meme is based on confirmation bias, not reality, but I understand
where the fear comes from.
"I think that many casual hearers of Ben Op ideas assume that Ben Op
is a one-dimensional, cultural dropping-out of cultural/religious conservatives
into irrelevant enclaves.
To me, Ben-Op is more returning to the Tocquevillean idea that the best
American ways of living work their way up from organic, formative local
communities that have largely disappeared from our socio-cultural experience.
Without independent formative local communities, we human beings are mere
products rolling off the assembly line that serves the interests of the
elites of our big government-big business-big education conglomerate.
If these formative communities hold to authentic, compassionate Judeo-Christian
values and practices, all the better–for everybody! Ben Op will offer an
alternative to the assembly-line politically correct cultural warriors being
produced by many of our elite cultural institutions."
Bingo.
If you want to fundamentally transform the culture, you have to withdraw
from it, at least partially. But there's no need to wall yourself off. A
Benedict Option community can and should be politically active, primarily
at the local level, where the most good can be done.
The Benedictine monks from whom Rod draws inspiration didn't just shut
themselves up and refuse to have anything to do with the crumbling world
around them. They retreated into their monasteries to strengthen their souls,
and then went out into the world and rebuilt it for Christ.
"Clinton assassination fantasies"? I call bullsh*t on that notion. Trump
merely pointed our the absolute hypocrisy of elites like Clinton and her
ilk, the guns for me but not for thee crowd. He was not fantasizing about
her assassination. Far from it. To suggest he was is to engage in the same
sort of dishonesty for which Clinton is so well known.
I never cared much for Trump but he has all the right enemies and is
growing on me.
"It isn't true that Trump and his supporters are against identity politics.
It's just that they have a far simpler view of identity politics. There
are white people, and there are blah people. "
They love Ben Carson and Allan West, last time I checked neither men
were white.
"Yes. Tell me, during the Great Depression, as Nazi Germany and Imperial
Japan began their march to what would bring this world to war and state-sponsored
genocide, why did my grandparents and my parents who were teenagers in the
30s not succumb to all this doom, gloom, and anger at the supposed lack
of prospects for improvement in their lives that Trump's followers whine
about?"
Well, back then, the government was doing stuff for the common people.
A lot of stuff. WPA, NRA, Social Security, FDIC, FHA, AAA, etc. FDR remembered
the "forgotten man." Today, the government is subservient to multinationals
and Rothschilds. The forgotten men and women that make up the backbone of
our economy have been forgotten once again, and nobody seems to remember
them - with the *possible,* partial exception of Trump.
The Globalist clap-trap that has so enamoured both parties reminds me of
this quote from C.S. Lewis'"Screwtape Proposes a Toast":
"…They ever be allowed to raise Aristotle's question: whether "democratic
behavior" means the behavior that democracies like or the behavior that
will preserve a democracy. For if they did, it could hardly fail to occur
to them that these need not be the same."
Globalism is just swell for the multinational corporation, but it is
nothing more or less than Lawlessness writ large. The Corporation is given
legal/fictional life by the state…the trouble is it, like Frankenstein,
will turns on its creator and imagines it can enjoy Absolute Independence.
One can just as easily make the point that the globalists have unleashed
dark forces against white people and Western civilization that are nor easily
quelled.
And you would have the benefit of evidence (or, well, evidence that is not
stale by nearly a century). It wasn't Trump supporters beating up people in
San Jose. And if you look to Europe as a guide to what can happen in America,
things start looking far, far worse.
"I guess the question I want to zero in on is; What minimal, concrete
programmatic or cultural change or changes would necessitate abandoning
the Ben Op? Or equally, what is the post-Ben Op vision of America that allows
Rod and company to relax?"
While I can't speak for Rod, I can speak for many traditional Catholics.
The end goal is the re-establishment of the social reign of Christ, which
means a majority Christian nation, Christian culture, and a state which
governs according to Christian principles (read Quas Primas). In that situation,
and in that situation alone, would the Ben Op no longer be necessary.
I am guessing that Rod has not said this explicitly, or laid out a concrete
plan, because he is writing a book for Christians in general. And if you
get into too many specifics, you are going to run right into the enormous
theological and philosophical differences between Catholicism and Protestantism.
Also, if Rod were to start talking about "The Social Reign of Christ
the King", 3/4 of you would lose your minds.
Of course, the current prospect for a Christian culture and state look
bleak, to say the least. But we can play the long game, the Catholic Church
is good at that. It took over 300 years to convert the Roman Empire. It
was 700 years from the founding of the first Benedictine monastery until
St. Thomas Aquinas and the High Middle Ages. We can wait that long, at least.
I rather think, in concurrence with Prof. Cole, that Trump is a simulacrum
within a simulacrum with a simulacrum: there is no "extra-mediatic" Trump
candidate, ergo there is no "extra-mediatic" presidential electoral race
(if limited to the two "mainstreamed" candidates), ergo there is no presidential
election tout court, ergo there is no democracy at the presidential election
level in the U.S–just simulacra deceptively reflecting simulacra, in any
case, the resulting effect is a mirage, a distortion, but above all an ILLUSION.
All this is, it seems to me, is a transition to a different favorite deadly
sin. We've had pride, avarice, and the current favorite is lust; the new
favorite appears to be wrath. Gluttony, sloth, and envy have not been absent,
but they have not been the driving force in politics recently.
Also important was the fact that FDR did not stoke the fires of class
conflict. A patrician himself, FDR's goal was not to overturn the existing
social order but rather to preserve it by correcting its injustices. FDR
was the moderate leader the country needed at the time. Without him, we
might well have succumbed to a demagogic or perhaps even dictatorial government
under Charles Coughlin, Huey Long, or Norman Thomas. In contrast, Hillary
and Trump seek to use fringe groups (BLM, alt-right) for their own agendas.
Let's hope whoever wins can keep her or his pets mollified and contained,
but courting extremists is always a risky business. Indeed, Hillary may
be worse than Trump in this respect, since there appears to be no daylight
between her and the SJW's.
To me, Ben-Op is more returning to the Tocquevillean idea that the best
American ways of living work their way up from organic, formative local
communities that have largely disappeared from our socio-cultural experience.
Without independent formative local communities, we human beings are mere
products rolling off the assembly line that serves the interests of the
elites of our big government-big business-big education conglomerate.
Ben Op or not, its always a great notion. And you don't have to withdraw
from the culture, THIS IS American culture (traditionally speaking). We
just need to reaffirm it.
So many colorful descriptions of how Trump lies from so many commenters…
Could y'all give at least one that doesn't fit his opponent perfectly and
even with double intensity?
Hillary Clinton doesn't have a long list of unpaid contractors suing
her… of course that's because she never built hotels, and I don't think
she ever declared bankruptcy either. We have a batch of slumlords in Milwaukee
who are little Trumps… they run up hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines
for building violations, declare bankruptcy or plead poverty and make occasional
payments of $50, and meantime they spend tends of thousands of dollars buying
up distressed property at sheriff's auctions. All of them are black, all
of them have beautiful homes in mostly "white" suburbs, and I wouldn't vote
for any of them for dogcatcher, much less president.
That said, Hillary is an ego-bloated lying sleaze, and I wouldn't vote
for her if she were running against almost anyone but Trump.
Nonetheless I am still tired of the ominous warnings about right-wing
white mobs that are about to rememerge any day. It's been decades since
there was a white riot in this country.
There hasn't been a real riot of any nature in quite a while. And no,
that little fracas in Milwaukee doesn't count. A few dozen thugs burning
four black-owned businesses while everyone living in the neighborhood denounces
then falls short of a riot.
I agree that we are not likely to see right-wing "white" mobs posing
much of a threat to anyone… they're mostly couch potatoes anyway. But it
is true that until the 1940s, a "race riot" meant a white mob rampaging
through a black neighborhood. And there have been very few black riots that
went deep into a "white" neighborhood … they stayed in black neighborhoods
too.
This is an election about feeling under siege.
But we're not, and most of the adults in the room know it.
Trump continues to be a walking, talking Rorschach test for pundits
peddling a point of view.
I think that explains a lot of Trump's support. Its not who he is, what
he says, or what he does or will do, its what they think they SEE in him.
I have to admit, I did a bit of that over Barack Obama in 2008, and he did
disappoint. Obama has been one of our best presidents in a long time, but
that's a rather low bar.
"There are, then, two developments we are likely to see going forward. First,
cultural conservatives will seriously consider a political "Benedict Option,"
dropping out of the Republican Party and forming a like-minded Book Group,
unconcerned with winning elections and very concerned with maintaining their
"principles." Their fidelity is to Aristotle rather than to winning the
battle for the political soul of America. …"
You know, people spout this stuff as if the Republican party is conservative.
It started drifting from conservative frame more than forty years ago. By
the time we get to the 2000 elections, it;s been home an entrenched band
of strategics concerned primarily with winning to advance policies tat have
little to do with conservative thought.
I doubt that I will become a member of a book club. And I doubt that
I will stop voting according to my conservative view points.
I generally think any idea that Christians are going to be left to their
own devices doubtful or that they would want to design communities not already
defined by scripture and a life in Christ.
_______________
"If the Ben Op doesn't call on Christians to abandon politics altogether,
it does call on them to recalibrate their (our) understanding of what politics
is and what it can do. Politics, rightly understood, is more than statecraft.
Ben Op politics are Christian politics for a post-Christian culture - that
is, a culture that no longer shares some key basic Christian values . .
."
I am just at a loss to comprehend this. A person who claims to live in
Christ already calibrates their lives in the frame of Christ and led by
some extent by the Spirit of Christ. Nothing about a world destined to become
more worldly will change that. What may happen is that a kind of christian
spiritual revival and renewal will occur.
" . . . orthodox Christians will come to be seen as threats to the common
good, simply because of the views we hold and the practices we live by out
of fidelity to our religion. . ."
If this accurate, that christians are deemed a threat to the state, unless
that threat is just to their participation, the idea "safe spaces" wheres
christians hang out and do their own thing hardly seems a realistic. If
christians are considered a threat – then most likely the ultimate goal
will be to get rid of them altogether. You outlaw faith and practice. Or
you do what HS and colleges have done to students who arrive on the campuses.
You inundate them with how backward their thinking until the student and
then proceed to tell them they are just like everyone else.
Believers are expected to be in the world and not of it. And by in it,
I think Christ intended them to be active participants.
"Rod, I don't know if you've seen this already, but National Review has
a small piece about Archbishop Charles Chaput, who calls for Christians
to become more engaged in the public square, not less. Your name and the
Benedict Option are referenced in the piece as well."
Let me answer it for him. Perhaps just like not everyone is called to
the contemplative life in a monastery but are called to the secular world,
so is the church as a whole these days individually called to different
arenas. That said, the basic principles of the Ben Op are hardly opposed
to being active in the broader community. It just means there has to be
some intentionality in maintaining a Christian worldview in a hostile larger
culture.
"The Benedictine monks from whom Rod draws inspiration didn't just shut
themselves up and refuse to have anything to do with the crumbling world
around them. They retreated into their monasteries to strengthen their souls,
and then went out into the world and rebuilt it for Christ."
Just a technical comment. You have to pay attention to which orders you
are referring to, because many of them were indeed founded to retreat from
the world. At one time, the idea of a monk wandering outside of the monastery,
or a nun particularly, was considered scandalous. I read alot of monastic
history about 20 years ago, and I seem to recall the Benedictines were actually
focused on prayer and manual labor/work within the monastery area. It was
later with orders like the Dominicans that were sent out into the community,
and they caused the bishops a lot of headaches because they competed with
priests and bishops in preaching publicly. It took awhile to sort out who
was allowed to do what. Modern religious orders founded since the 18th century
are quite different from the old orders.
Another area of interest you could check out, besides reading some of
the religious rules of life of many of these old orders just for the sake
of comparison, is the differences between the cenobitic and eremitic monastic
communities of the very early church. The original founding of religious
orders even back then was also considered a direct challenge to the church
hierarchy and took a lot of time sorting out that they weren't some kind
of troublemakers, too. Modern Catholics have entirely too little knowledge
of the development and maybe too pious a view of it.
The question is this: what do you do when the policies or ideas you stand
for or at least, agree with, are advanced by someone with as appalling a
character as Trump? What I observe in practice is that friends and acquaintances
of mine who agree with Trump on the issues find it necessary to defend his
utterly indefensible and vile character – which makes them less than honest
as well.
I'd be more impressed if, after Edwin Edwards, Trump's fans said "Vote
for the swindler, it's important" – rather than use lies or their own credulity
to defend him.
I read this on Friday and have thought much about it since. I came by earlier
this evening and had about half of a long post written in response, but
got too caught up in the Georgia/Missouri game to finish it. I also determined
that it wouldn't matter what I said. The conservatives would continue to
harp about the evils of identity politics, refusing to acknowledge the long
history of conservatives engaging in identity politics in both Europe and
America from roughly the high Middle Ages to the present. It seemed more
rational to delete what I had written rather than save it and come back
to finish it.
It just so happened that as the game ended, I clicked on Huffingtonpost
to check the headlines. Lo and behold, the top story was this one about
Jane Goodall's latest statement regarding identity politics in the animal
kingdom:
"What I observe in practice is that friends and acquaintances of mine
who agree with Trump on the issues find it necessary to defend his utterly
indefensible and vile character – which makes them less than honest as well."
I don't defend his vile character. I readily admit it. So do most of
those I know who intend to vote for him.
It's too bad that Clinton is at least equally vile.
For Hillary that's a big problem – the "character" issue is at best a
wash, so the choice boils down to other things.
The most highly motivated voters in this election cycle seem to be insurgents
pushing back against corrupt and incompetent elites and the Establishment.
That does not bode well for Clinton.
"I guess the question I want to zero in on is; What minimal, concrete
programmatic or cultural change or changes would necessitate abandoning
the Ben Op? Or equally, what is the post-Ben Op vision of America that allows
Rod and company to relax?"
------
I think those are good questions, and read in the best light possible, might
be interpreted as being asked by someone honestly seeking to understand
the concerns of traditional Christians today.
I can't answer for Rod, but for me the short answers are,
"1) In present America, I don't think there are any "cultural change"
possible which might reassure Christians, because we are in a downward spiral
which has not yet run its course. The articles and commentary posted here
by Rod show we've not yet reached the peak of what government and technology
will do to the lives of believing Christians.
2) The post-BenOp - perhaps decades in the future - vision that would
allow me to relax would be a national reaffirmation that our rights, as
partially defined in the Constitution and Bill of Rights, come from God
the Creator, that life is valuable from the moment of conception, and that
the traditional family is the best promoter of sound moral, cultural and
economic health. I'd relax a bit, though not entirely, if that happened.
In a September 2015 interview with NBC, Clinton defended partial-birth
abortions again and voiced her support for late-term abortions up until
birth, too.
She also openly supports forcing taxpayers to fund these abortions by
repealing the Hyde Amendment. The amendment prohibits direct taxpayer funding
of abortion in Medicaid. If repealed, researchers estimate that 33,000 more
babies will be aborted every year in the U.S.
Yes, We Christians are in Hillary Clinton's Basket of Deplorables.
"Take a Pat Buchanan…how do you think he would be doing in this election?
Trumps three ring show prevents the charges against him from finding any
fertile soil to grow in."
I think far too much credit is being given to Mr. Trump. The reason he
can stand is because the people he represents have been fed up with the
some of what he stands for long before he entered the fray.
If Mr Pat Buchanan were running, he would be in good stead save or
his speaking style which is far more formal. Mr. Trump's carefree (of sorts)
delivery punches through and gives the impression that he's an everyman.
His boundless energy has that sense earnest sincerity. His "imperfections"
tend to work in his favor. But if his message was counter to where most
people are already at - he would not be the nominee.
There's a difference in being a .Mr. Trump fan and a supporter. As a
supporter, I would be curious to know what lies I have used to support him.
We have some serious differences, but I think my support has been fairly
above board. In fact, i think the support of most have been fairly straight
up I am not sure there is much hidden about Mr. Trump.
Hillary Clinton, "Laws have to be backed up with resources and political will and deep-seated
cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed."
Uh Oh -- We Christians are in Hillary Clinton's Basket of Deplorables.
That's a shame RD, because I was looking forward to joining a like-minded
Book Group, unconcerned with winning elections and very concerned with maintaining
our "principles." With fidelity is to Aristotle rather than to winning the
battle for the political soul of America.
[NFR: You can still have your Ben Op book group. - RD]
I'm going to start and end with globalization by referring to G.K.Chesterton
in Orthodoxy(pg 101).
"This is what makes Christendom at once so perplexing and so much more interesting
than the Pagan empires;…If anyone wants a modern proof of all this, let
him consider the curious fact that, under Christianity, Europe has broken
up into individual nations. Patriotism is a perfect example of this deliberate
balance of one emphasis against another emphasis. The instinct of the Pagan
empire would have said, 'You shall all be Roman citizens, and grow alike;
let the German grow less slow and reverent; the Frenchmen less experimental
and swift.' But the instinct of Christian Europe says, 'Let the German remain
slow and reverent, that the Frenchman may the more safely be swift and experimental.
We will make an equipoise out of these excesses. The absurdity called Germany
shall correct the insanity called France."
Isn't it interesting that has Christianity has left the northern hemisphere
for the southern, that Europe has tried union, the USA has been into interventionism,
and globalization has become so mainstream. You shall all be one world citizens
doesn't have a balancing instinct. And Chesterton was deliberating about
the balancing instinct.
I think Mitchell is basically right. Aside from his jab at the Benedict
Option, I have just one quibble with his analysis: "And Trump is the first
American candidate to bring some coherence to them, however raucous his
formulations have been."
Wrong. Trump is definitely not the first candidate to do this. He was
preceded by Pat Buchanan, who also brought (and still brings) much more
coherence to the six ideas than Trump. Clearly, Buchanan ran at a time when
the post-1989 order was in its infancy, and so few saw any fundamental problem
with it. He was ahead of his time. But he was a candidate that presented
the six ideas and attracted a non-negligible amount of support. Trump is
not a pioneer in this regard. People should give Buchanan his due.
I hope Trump wins; he's rather bizarre and not very likable as a person,
but the last 25 years have been disastrous politically in Western nations
and it's time to repudiate the ruling orthodoxy. The US still is the Western
hegemon and exports its ideas across the Atlantic (most unfortunate in cases
like "critical whiteness studies"); if there's change in the US towards
a (soft, civic) nationalism, it might open up new options in Europe as well.
In any case these are exciting times…however it turns out, we may well be
living through years which will be seen as decisive in retrospect.
This comment on the Politico article stood out to me: "It is its very existence,
and mantra, for a religion the advertise itself, something that is frowned
upon as being Incredibly un-American under the Constitution, and contrary
to our core beliefs. Yes Republicans not only embrace this, they help their
religion advertise."
In other words, this commenter admits that he believes it "incredibly
un-American" for religions to "advertise," and, by extension, to even exist
(he says advertising is religion's "very existence.")
The comment has a high number of "thumbs-up."
We really are in trouble. America has become Jacobin country.
Red brick
September 16, 2016 at 6:36 pm
Call it anti-Semitic if you want but all my Jewish cousins and the several
other Jewish business associates I know feel uncontrollable hate for Trump.'
Perhaps due to very recent memories that herrenvolk regimes are not good
for the Jews. The online troll army of out and proud anti-semites can't
help but contribute to this.
Re "the DC elites are clueless" what ABOUT John Kasich up there on the podium
advocating for the latest free trade deal? Yessir, that'll get us in our
"states that begin with a vowel" to totally change our minds on that, you
betcha!
Trump continues to be a walking, talking Rorschach test for pundits peddling
a point of view. Funny how he proves so many intellectuals right about so
many contradictory things, all without having to take responsibility for
any particular idea.
Nobody has remained more adamant than the writer of this blog that there
is something sacred about sex between one woman and one man, and them married.
God bless him for staying true.
So I am going to try to say( G.K Chesterton please forgive me)…..Let the
LBGTQIA remain true to their identity, that the married male/female may
be more safely true to their identity. We can make an equipoise out of these
excesses( despite those who want us to be all the same). The absurdity called
LBGTQIA shall correct the insanity called one man/one woman.
Trump is certainly not unraveling identity politics. He's adding another
identity to the grievance industry, that of (downscale) whites.
You're misdefining "grievance industry;" the central tenet of the grievance
industry is that whatever happens, white people are to blame and should
continue paying for it. Whether you agree with white identity politics or
not, its proponents are obviously not adding to the grievance industry,
but attempting to defend against it, i.e. stating that white people are
not to blame for everything, and no, they shouldn't continue
to pay for it. To merely maintain that position is sufficient to be labeled
as a white supremacist by the grievance industry hacks.
Rod, I don't know if you've seen this already, but National Review has a
small piece about Archbishop Charles Chaput, who calls for Christians to
become more engaged in the public square, not less. Your name and
the Benedict Option are referenced in the piece as well.
Dear mainstream media: you have lost your credibility because
you are incapable of skeptical inquiry into your chosen candidate or
official statistics/ pronouncements. Your dismissal of skeptical
inquiries as "conspiracies" or "hoaxes" is nothing but a crass repackaging
of the propaganda techniques of totalitarian state media.
Dear MSM: You have forsaken your duty in a democracy and are a
disgrace to investigative, unbiased journalism. You have substituted
Orwellian-level propaganda for honest, skeptical journalism. We can
only hope viewers and advertisers respond appropriately, i.e. turn you
off.
Here's the mainstream media's new mantra: "skepticism is always
a conspiracy or a hoax." The Ministry of Propaganda and the MSM
are now one agency.
The curtain is being pulled back on the Wizard of Oz. How soon before
the Wicked Witch starts to melt?
Do people who are willing to accept characterization as "angry, provincial
bigots" still have any right to political self-expression? Believe it or
not, it's an important question.
Identity politics definition: a tendency for people of a particular religion,
race, social background, etc., to form exclusive political alliances, moving
away from traditional broad-based party politics.
I find it odd that the party of older white straight Christian men accuses
the party of everyone else to be guilty of "identity politics". It just
doesn't make any sense.
(1) borders matter; Ok, but they're not all that.
(2) immigration policy matters; Ditto. We should have a policy.
(3) national interests, not so-called universal interests, matter; Depends.
National interests matter, but if they are all that matters… I think you
just stepped outside the Gospels.
(4) entrepreneurship matters; It can, for good OR for evil.
(5) decentralization matters; Another thorny one… SOME things need to be
more decentralized, some don't, and we need to have an honest conversation
about which is which.
(6) PC speech-without which identity politics is inconceivable-must be repudiated.
ABSOLUTELY!
All in all, I think this Georgetown prof has done the usual short list
of The Latest Attempt To Reduce Reality To a Nice Short Checklist.
Not much of a guide to the future. We could all write our own lists.
You can largely agree with Mitchell's six points (and, for the most part
I do) and nonetheless recognize that an unprincipled, ruthless charlatan
like Trump–a pathological liar and narcissist interested in nothing but
his own self-promotion–will do nothing meaningful to advance them. His latest
birther charade shows him for the lying, unprincipled scum bucket he is.
The cultural ground is shifting as the emptiness of advanced consumer
capitalism and globalism becomes ever more apparent. Large scale organizations
are, by their very nature, dehumanizing, demoralizing, and corrupt. I've
believed so for the better part of my life now. It's that belief that lead
me to the University of Rochester and Christopher Lasch in the 1980s and,
subsequently to MacIntyre, Rieff, and Berry. It's also a belief that has
lead me to distrust both the corporate order and politics as a means to
salvation. I certainly don't consider myself a conservative, at least not
in the shallow American sense of the term, and the chances that I will ever
vote for a Republican again are nil. But I'm not a liberal in the American
sense of the term either because agreeing with Mitchell's six points pretty
much pretty much rules me out of that tribe. I have, for a long time, felt
pretty homeless in the American wilderness.
I suppose that's one reason I keep reading your blog, Rod, though I disagree
deeply with many of your views. As a Jew, I'm not much interested in the
Benedict Option, but I do agree that our society suffers from a certain
soul sickness that politics, consumption, and technology can't cure.
Call it anti-Semitic if you want but all my Jewish cousins and the several
other Jewish business associates I know feel uncontrollable hate for Trump.
As one of those American Jews who feels a deep hatred for Trump, perhaps
I can shed some light on the reasons. It has nothing to do with his alleged
desire to enforce borders. Nations require them. Nor does it have anything
to do with his lip service to Christianist values. He's no Christian. He's
pure heathen.
Instead, it has everything to do with his wink/nod attitude toward the
alt-right and white nationalist groups and with his willingness to appropriate
their anti-semitic, racist memes for his own advancement. He's dangerous.
Period. Dangerous and scary to anyone familiar with lynchings, pogroms,
and mob violence. To anyone familiar with history. Trump has unleashed dark
forces that will not easily be quelled even if, and probably especially
if, he loses. The possibility that he might win has left me wondering whether
I even belong in this country any more, no matter how much sympathy I might
feel for the folks globalism has left behind.
Call it anti-Semitic if you want but all my Jewish cousins and the several
other Jewish business associates I know feel uncontrollable hate for Trump…They
seem to think that any attempt to stop mass 3rd world immigration, stop
pc thought police, or up hold Christian-ish values are a direct threat to
them.
Or it could be that Trump reminds them of some historical figure who
was rather bad for the Jews. I wonder who that could be?
And saying all the Jews that the commenter knows feel an "uncontrollable"
emotion is a touch anti-Semitic.
But to talk about the OP: Joshua Mitchell gives the game away by consistently
referring to 1989 as the state of a "new order," which he thinks is a combination
of globalization and identity politics. Of course neither was new. Admittedly
globalization received a boost by the end of the Cold War, but it's been
well underway for a century or so. Mitchell wants to return to Reagan's
"morning in America." But there was no such morning.
"Identity politics" is what the suffragettes and abolitionists would
have been accused of, if the term had been invented back in their day. Are
there stupid things done and said under the umbrella of "identity politics"?
Of course. That doesn't make the discrimination and mistreatment that led
to such politics any less real.
The fundamental flaw in Mitchell's argument, though, is that the Trump
he describes (or, more accurately, wishes for) simply doesn't exist. The
Trump he describes has ideas and beliefs. It's a little ironic that Mitchell
thinks that Trump "expressly opposes" the ideas of Marx and Nietzsche, because
the real-world Trump has no beliefs other than he is an ubermensch.
I read an entire article on Trump in which Hitler wasn't mentioned once.
It wasn't even smug, and there was no list of liberal cliches and denunciations
of heretics so between drooling I never knew whether shout "Boo!" or "Hurah!"
Couldn't they throw in one "racist, sexist, homophobic" so I could feel
morally superior to stupid white people in fly-over country?
Having now read Mitchell's article, all I can say is that while I agree
with his six points, his hope that Trump is some kind of pragmatist is deeply
misguided. Like most political scientists, he knows little about history.
For thise who think Trump is harmless, here he is, tonight, riffing on
his
Clinton assassination fantasies. Where is Leni Reifenstahl when you
need her? Trump is no pragmatist. He's no Christian. And he's no leader.
If Mitchell is correct–and I believe that he is–how does this bode poorly
for conservative Christians? If the BenOp is primarily a reaction to the
post-1989 culture, shouldn't the crumbling of that culture obviate the need
for a BenOp?
[NFR: Well, if there were a candidate advocating these positions who
WASN'T Donald Trump, I would eagerly vote for him or her. I think Trump
is thoroughly untrustworthy and demagogic. But I would not be under any
illusion that casting a vote for that person - again, even if he or she
was a saint - would mean any kind of Christian restoration. The Ben Op is
premised on the idea that we are living in post-Christian times. The Ben
Op is a religious movement with political implications, not a political
movement. Liquid modernity will not suddenly solidify depending on a change
of government in Washington. - RD]
This is an election about feeling under siege. Once that is understood all
else makes sense. It is also a manifestation about what happens when a word
is overused, in this case racism. It creates a reaction of, "Ask us if we
care," which becomes, "Yeah, we are, and we like it."
It backfires.
The Ben Op may prove to be in better position that it looks.
I think populists who haven't gotten much attention from either party are
projecting an awful lot onto a seriously flawed candidate who doesn't have
firm convictions on anything, beyond making the sale. This objective he
pursues by being willing to say whatever he thinks will get him the sale,
with no regard for decency or truth or consistency. If he gets himself elected,
who knows what he will do to retain his popularity with what he perceives
to be the majority view. Those hoping for a sea change are engaged in some
pretty serious wishful thinking, I think.
@T.S.Gay, You are correct that this election is a battle of Nationalism
vs Globalism. But, Nationalism is Identity Politics in its purest form and
that is why the Globalist oppose it.
Globalists use identity politics, that is true. However, they bear no
love for the identities they publicly promote. Rather, they dehumanize them,
using them as nothing more than weapons against Nationalism.
As a Nationalist I will support and promote my Nation(People), but I
also recognize the inherent right of other Nations(Peoples) to support and
promote themselves.
I'm absolutely sure Donald Trump isn't going to do to us, what that other
person has planned for us deplorables:
"Laws have to be backed up with resources and political will and deep-seated
cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed."
After her shot across the bow promises to marginalize us in society,
complete with cheers from those at her back, that is just about all that
counts.
Mitchell's description echoes Oliver Stone's comments from Oct. 2001: "There's
been conglomeration under six principal princes-they're kings, they're barons!-and
these six companies have control of the world! … That's what the new world
order is. They control culture, they control ideas. And I think the revolt
of September 11 was about 'F- you! F- your order!'"
Very interesting piece, and I had not really connected the Brexit and EU
jitters to what's going on in the US – and I think Mitchell is right about
that. When we were still in primary season and Trump was ahead, I recall
one author – probably on The Corner – wondered how a Trump presidency might
look. He figured Trump would be very pragmatic, perhaps actually fixing
Obamacare, and focusing on our interests here at home.
"I will vote primarily for candidates who will be better at protecting
my community's right to be left alone."
I've been voting that way for years; mostly Republicans, but a good sprinkling
of Democrats as well.
Good article. I think Mitchell identifies the right ideas buried within
Trump's rhetoric. But even if it were true that Trump had no ideas, I would
still vote for him. After all, where have politic ideas gotten us lately?
"Conservative principles" espoused by wonks and political scientists
culminated in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Ideology told us that democracy
was a divine right, transferable across time and culture.
Moreover, do we really want our politicians playing with ideas? Think
back to George W. Bush's speech at the 2004 Republican convention, perhaps
the most idea-driven speech in recent history. The sight of W. spinning
a neo-Hegelian apocalyptic narrative was like watching a gorilla perform
opera.
I think that many casual hearers of Ben Op ideas assume that Ben Op is a
one-dimensional, cultural dropping-out of cultural/religious conservatives
into irrelevant enclaves.
To me, Ben-Op is more returning to the Tocquevillean idea that the best
American ways of living work their way up from organic, formative local
communities that have largely disappeared from our socio-cultural experience.
Without independent formative local communities, we human beings are mere
products rolling off the assembly line that serves the interests of the
elites of our big government-big business-big education conglomerate.
If these formative communities hold to authentic, compassionate Judeo-Christian
values and practices, all the better–for everybody! Ben Op will offer an
alternative to the assembly-line politically correct cultural warriors being
produced by many of our elite cultural institutions.
"cavalierly undermining decades worth of social and political certainties"
Sorry, that is just silly. Only political junkies and culture warriors
even care about stuff like this. In my life… in my experience of living
in the USA every day, none of this matters. It just doesn't.
People don't live their lives thinking about any of those things cited.
What would it mean to you or me to have "borders matter"? Ford just announced
they were moving some more production to Mexico. That decision WILL affect
the lives of those who lose their jobs. Does anyone honestly think that
anyone… even a President Trump, would lift a finger to stop them? Of course
not. It is silly to assert otherwise.
Very good essay and commentary, but I caution against the notion that you
are looking at permanent change. JonF's two 20th century ideas (Free Trade
benefits everyone and Supply Side economics) are not going away. In
fact, Larry Kudlow, the crassest exponent of both those ideas is one of
Trump's economic advisors.
BenOp is fascinating, but most cultural conservative now active in the
game will not drop out. They may not like the adrenalin rush politics gives
them more than they like Jesus–but they ain't going to give it up.
Great. He's got six ideas. Six ideas with either no detailed policy or approach
attached to them, policies or approaches that seemingly change on a whim
(evidence that at best he hasn't given much thought to any of them), or
has no realistic political path for making those ideas a reality.
"That is what the Trump campaign, ghastly though it may at times be, leads
us toward: A future where states matter."
With that sentence, I think Mitchell stumbles into a truth he might not
have intended - The "state" - as in "administrative state" - is going to
continue growing even under Trump.
Given the increasing intolerance of our society for traditional values,
that's all Christians need to know.
Clint writes:
"Hillary Clinton,
'L;aws have to be backed up with resources and political will and deep-seated
cultural codes, religious bel:efs and structural biases have to be changed.
Uh Oh -- We Christians are in Hillary Clinton's Basket of Deplorables."
"He's dangerous. Period. Dangerous and scary to anyone familiar with lynchings,
pogroms, and mob violence. To anyone familiar with history. Trump has unleashed
dark forces that will not easily be quelled even if, and probably especially
if, he loses."
Given the amount violence and disruption your side has caused this year
this accusation really should be laughable. Trump supporters aren't out
beating up Clinton supporters and making sure they can't have a rally in
the wrong neighborhood. Members of the alt-right aren't threatening student
journalists with violence on their own campuses, or getting on stage with
speakers they dislike and slapping them.
It's your own side that has been perpetuating the mob violence while
the liberal establishment denies it or excuses it.
This post is spot-on; thank you for sharing the preliminary BenOp talking
points.
We need Thomas Paine's Common Sense for our age, for these are
times that try men's souls. Problem is this: Paine's citizenry were 90%
literate, unified by culture, and cognitively engaged … today we're 70%
literate (at 4th grade reading level), multicultural, and amused to death.
Joseph R.
Murray II
Guest
columnist
Political incorrectness is to Trump what spinach is to
Popeye: Columnist.
When the term paleo-conservative is floated in conversation,
most folks imagine a creature out of Jurassic World. But paleo-conservatism
- a near extinct brand of conservatism that heralds limited
government, nonintervention, economic nationalism and Western
traditions - is finding a comeback in an unlikely spokesperson.
The history-making campaign of
Donald Trump
is turning the clock of U.S. politics back to a
time when hubris was heroic and the truth, no matter how blunt,
was king. It is resurrecting a political thought that does not
play by the rules of modern politics.
And as the nation saw the top-tier
GOP
candidates take the stage for the first time, they saw
Trump, unapologetic and confident, alongside eight candidates
clueless on how to contain him and a tongue-lashed Rand Paul.
The debate itself highlighted the fear a Trump candidacy is
creating throughout the political establishment. The very first
question asked the candidates to pledge unconditional support to
the eventual GOP nominee and refrain from a third-party run.
Trump refused.
But why should he blindly accept the party's unknown nominee?
If Jeb Bush receives the nomination, the GOP will put forth a
candidate who favors amnesty and is weak on trade, supportive of
Common Core and unable, if not unwilling, to come out from under
his brother's failed foreign policy.
In refusing to take the pledge, Trump was honest, and it is
his honesty that has made his campaign endearing. Trump has no
secrets and turns what many consider mistakes into triumphs.
The incident with
Megyn Kelly
is a prime example. When moderator Kelly
confronted Trump about his past comments about women, Trump
refused to apologize and told Kelly there is no time for
political correctness.
In the aftermath, Trump blasted Kelly's performance and
landed in hot water. In an interview with CNN's Don Lemon, Trump
said that "[y]ou could see there was blood coming out of her
eyes. Blood coming out of her - wherever."
The "wherever" part created a firestorm. Though vague, Trump
detractors claimed that the "wherever" part meant Trump was
implying Kelly was menstruating, while Trump claimed he was
referring to her nose. Trump's version made more sense, but to a
political class desperate to derail him, the headlines went with
the former.
Those in the Beltway resumed drafting Trump's political
obituary. But while they were busy scribbling, post-debate polls
showed Trump jumped in the polls. Republicans are ignoring their
orders from headquarters and deflecting to the Donald.
Shell-shocked, his foes, unwilling to admit their politically
correct system has tanked, failed to understand that political
incorrectness is to Trump what spinach is to Popeye.
"So many 'politically correct' fools in our country," Trump
tweeted. "We have to all get back to work and stop wasting time
and energy on nonsense!"
Is he not correct? Days before the nation started debating
Kelly's metaphorical blood, an unauthorized immigrant in New
Jersey pleaded guilty to actually spilling the blood of
30-year-old Sviatlana Dranko and setting her body on fire. In
the media, Dranko's blood is second fiddle. This contrast is not
lost on the silent majority flocking to Trump.
Trump's candidacy is about so much more than personality.
Once the media are forced to report Trump's positions, instead
of his persona, even more Americans will see that Trump is the
sole Republican who rejects a "free trade" that gives away the
keys to the store and opposed the ill-fated Iraq war. He is the
type of candidate Americans always wanted but the party
establishments are too afraid to provide.
The last time America saw a strong paleo-conservative was
Pat Buchanan
in 1996. An early win in Louisiana caused
Buchanan to place second in Iowa and first in New Hampshire
Lacking money, Buchanan was steamrolled by the establishment
in Arizona and, in terms of paleo-conservatism, many thought he
was the Last of the Mohicans.
Trump's campaign is Buchananesque with one difference: Trump
has money, and loads of it. He can fend off any attack and
self-finance his campaign. He is establishment kryptonite.
This reality is what makes him the new face of
paleo-conservativism. It might also make him president.
Joseph R. Murray II is a civil-rights attorney, a
conservative commentator and a former official with Pat
Buchanan's 2000 campaign.
The intelligentsia (Latin: intellegentia, Polish: inteligencja, Russian: интеллигенция; IPA: [ɪntʲɪlʲɪˈɡʲentsɨjə])
is a social class of people engaged in complex mental labor aimed at guiding or critiquing, or
otherwise playing a leadership role in shaping a society's culture and politics.[1] This therefore
might include everyone from artists to school teachers, as well as academics, writers, journalists,
and other hommes de lettres (men of letters) more usually thought of as being the main constituents
of the intelligentsia.
Intelligentsia is the subject of active polemics concerning its own role in the development of
modern society not always positive historically, often contributing to higher degree of progress,
but also to its backward movement.[2]... In pre-revolutionary Russia the term was first used to
describe people possessing cultural and political initiative.[3] It was commonly used by
those individuals themselves to create an apparent distance from the masses, and generally retained
that narrow self-definition. [citation needed]
If intellectuals replace the current professional politicians as the leaders
of society the situation would become much worse. Because they have neither
the sense of reality, nor common sense. For them, the words and speeches are
more important than the actual social laws and the dominant trends, the dominant
social dynamics of the society. The psychological principle of the intellectuals
is that we could organize everything much better, but we are not allowed to
do it.
But the actual situation is as following: they could organize the life of
society as they wish and plan, in the way they view is the best only if under
conditions that are not present now are not feasible in the future. Therefore
they are not able to act even at the level of current leaders of the society,
which they despise. The actual leaders are influenced by social pressures, by
the current social situation, but at least they doing something. Intellectuals
are unhappy that the real stream of life they are living in. They consider it
wrong. that makes them very dangerous, because they look really smart, while
in reality being sophisticated professional idiots.
"... traditional ways of life are dissolving as a new class of entrepreneur-warriors are wielding unprecedented power - and changing the global landscape. ..."
"... It's a huge psychological dent in people's faith in the system. I think what's going to happen in the next few years is huge unemployment in the middle class in America because a lot of their jobs will be outsourced or automated. ..."
Novelist Rana Dasgupta recently turned to nonfiction to explore the explosive
social and economic changes in Delhi starting in 1991, when India launched a
series of transformative economic reforms. In
Capital: The Eruption of Delhi, he describes a city where the epic hopes
of globalization have dimmed in the face of a sterner, more elitist world. In
Part 1 of an interview with the
Institute for New Economic
Thinking, Dasgupta traces a turbulent time in which traditional ways
of life are dissolving as a new class of entrepreneur-warriors are wielding
unprecedented power - and changing the global landscape.
Lynn Parramore: Why did you decide to move from New York to Delhi
in 2000, and then to write a book about the city?
Rana Dasgupta: I moved to be with my partner who lived in Delhi, and soon
realized it was a great place to have landed. I was trying write a novel and
there were a lot of people doing creative things. There was a fascinating intellectual
climate, all linked to changes in society and the economy. It was 10 years since
liberalization and a lot of the impact of that was just being felt and widely
sensed.
There was a sense of opportunity, not any more just on the part of business
people, but everyone. People felt that things were really going to change in
a deep way - in every part of the political spectrum and every class of society.
Products and technology spread, affecting even very poor people. Coke made ads
about the rickshaw drivers with their mobile phones -people who had never had
access to a landline. A lot of people sensed a new possibility for their own
lives.
Amongst the artists and intellectuals that I found myself with, there were
very big hopes for what kind of society Delhi could become and they were very
interested in being part of creating that. They were setting up institutions,
publications, publishing houses, and businesses. They were thinking new ideas.
When I arrived, I felt, this is where stuff is happening. The scale of conversations,
the philosophy of change was just amazing.
LP: You've interviewed many of the young tycoons who emerged during
Delhi's transformation. How would you describe this new figure? How do they
do business?
RD: Many of their fathers and grandfathers had run significant provincial
businesses. They were frugal in their habits and didn't like to advertise themselves,
and anyway their wealth remained local both in its magnitude and its reach.
They had business and political associates that they drank with and whose weddings
they went to, and so it was a tight-knit kind of wealth.
But the sons, who would probably be now between 35 and 45, had an entirely
different experience. Their adult life happened after globalization. Because
their fathers often didn't have the skills or qualifications to tap into the
forces of globalization, the sons were sent abroad, probably to do an MBA, so
they could walk into a meeting with a management consultancy firm or a bank
and give a presentation. When they came back they operated not from the local
hubs where their fathers ruled but from Delhi, where they could plug into federal
politics and global capital.
So you have these very powerful combinations of father/son businesses. The
sons revere the fathers, these muscular, huge masculine figures who have often
done much more risky and difficult work building their businesses and have cultivated
relationships across the political spectrum. They are very savvy, charismatic
people. They know who to give gifts to, how to do favors.
The sons often don't have that set of skills, but they have corporate skills.
They can talk finance in a kind of international language. Neither skill set
is enough on its own by early 2000's: they need each other. And what's interesting
about this package is that it's very powerful elsewhere, too. It's kind of a
world-beating combination. The son fits into an American style world of business
and finance, but the thing about American-style business is that there are lots
of things in the world that are closed to it. It's very difficult for an American
real estate company or food company to go to the president of an African country
and do a deal. They don't have the skills for it. But even if they did, they
are legally prevented from all the kinds of practices involved, the bribes and
everything.
This Indian business combination can go into places like Africa and Central
Asia and do all the things required. If they need to go to market and raise
money, they can do that. But if they need to sit around and drink with some
government guys and figure out who are the players that need to be kept happy,
they can do that, too. They see a lot of the world open to themselves.
LP: How do these figures compare to American tycoons during, say,
the Gilded Age?
RD: When American observers see these people they think, well, we had these
guys between 1890 and 1920, but then they all kind of went under because there
was a massive escalation of state power and state wealth and basically the state
declared a kind of protracted war on them.
Americans think this is a stage of development that will pass. But I think
it's not going to pass in our case. The Indian state is never going to have
the same power over private interests as the U.S. state because lots of things
have to happen. The Depression and the Second World War were very important
in creating a U.S. state that was that powerful and a rationale for defeating
these private interests. I think those private interests saw much more benefit
in consenting to, collaborating in, and producing a stronger U.S. state.
Over time, American business allied itself with the government, which did
a lot to open up other markets for it. In India, I think these private interests
will not for many years see a benefit in operating differently, precisely because
continents like Africa, with their particular set of attributes, have such a
bright future. It's not just about what India's like, but what other places
are like, and how there aren't that many people in the world that can do what
they can do.
LP: What has been lost and gained in a place like Delhi under global
capitalism?
RD: Undeniably there has been immense material gain in the city since 1991,
including the very poorest people, who are richer and have more access to information.
What my book tracks is a kind of spiritual and moral crisis that affects rich
and poor alike.
One kind of malaise is political and economic. Even though the poorest are
richer, they have less political influence. In a socialist system, everything
is done in the name of the poor, for good or for bad, and the poor occupy center
stage in political discourse. But since 1991 the poor have become much less
prominent in political and economic ideology. As the proportion of wealth held
by the richest few families of India has grown massively larger, the situation
is very much like the break-up of the Soviet Union, which leads to a much more
hierarchical economy where people closest to power have the best information,
contacts, and access to capital. They can just expand massively.
Suddenly there's a state infrastructure that's been built for 70 years or
60 years which is transferred to the private domain and that is hugely valuable.
People gain access to telecommunication systems, mines, land, and forests for
almost nothing. So ordinary people say, yes, we are richer, and we have all
these products and things, but those making the decisions about our society
are not elected and hugely wealthy.
Imagine the upper-middle-class guy who has been to Harvard, works for a management
consultancy firm or for an ad agency, and enjoys a kind of international-style
middle-class life. He thinks he deserves to make decisions about how the country
is run and how resources are used. He feels himself to be a significant figure
in his society. Then he realizes that he's not. There's another, infinitely
wealthier class of people who are involved in all kinds of backroom deals that
dramatically alter the landscape of his life. New private highways and new private
townships are being built all around him. They're sucking the water out of the
ground. There's a very rapid and seemingly reckless transformation of the landscape
that's being wrought and he has no part in it.
If he did have a say, he might ask, is this really the way that we want this
landscape to look? Isn't there enormous ecological damage? Have we not just
kicked 10,000 farmers off their land?
All these conversations that democracies have are not being had. People think,
this exactly what the socialists told us that capitalism was - it's pillage
and it creates a very wealthy elite exploiting the poor majority. To some extent,
I think that explains a lot of why capitalism is so turbulent in places like
India and China. No one ever expected capitalism to be tranquil. They had been
told for the better part of a century that capitalism was the imperialist curse.
So when it comes, and it's very violent, and everyone thinks, well that's what
we expected. One of the reasons that it still has a lot of ideological consensus
is that people are prepared for that. They go into it as an act of war, not
as an act of peace, and all they know is that the rewards for the people at
the top are very high, so you'd better be on the top.
The other kind of malaise is one of culture. Basically, America and Britain
invented capitalism and they also invented the philosophical and cultural furniture
to make it acceptable. Places where capitalism is going in anew do not have
200 years of cultural readiness. It's just a huge shock. Of course, Indians
are prepared for some aspects of it because many of them are trading communities
and they understand money and deals. But a lot of those trading communities
are actually incredibly conservative about culture - about what kind of lifestyle
their daughters will have, what kinds of careers their sons will have. They
don't think that their son goes to Brown to become a professor of literature,
but to come back and run the family business.
LP: What is changing between men and women?
RD: A lot of the fallout is about families. Will women work? If so, will
they still cook and be the kind of wife they're supposed to be? Will they be
out on the street with their boyfriends dressed in Western clothes and going
to movies and clearly advertising the fact that they are economically independent,
sexually independent, socially independent? How will we deal with the backlash
of violent crimes that have everything to do with all these changes?
This capitalist system has produced a new figure, which is the economically
successful and independent middle-class woman. She's extremely globalized in
the sense of what she should be able to do in her life. It's also created a
set of lower-middle-class men who had a much greater sense of stability both
in their gender and professional situation 30 years ago, when they could rely
on a family member or fellow caste member to keep them employed even if they
didn't have any marketable attributes. They had a wife who made sure that the
culture of the family was intact - religion, cuisine, that kind of stuff.
Thirty years later, those guys are not going to get jobs because that whole
caste value thing has no place in the very fast-moving market economy. Without
a high school diploma, they just have nothing to offer. Those guys in the streets
are thinking, I don't have a claim on the economy, or on women anymore because
I can't earn anything. Women across the middle classes - and it's not just across
India, it's across Asia -are trying to opt out of marriage for as long as they
can because they see only a downside. Remaining single allows all kinds of benefits
– social, romantic, professional. So those guys are pretty bitter and there's
a backlash that can become quite violent. We also have an upswing of Hindu fundamentalism
as a way of trying to preserve things. It's very appealing to people who think
society is falling apart.
LP: You've described India's experience of global capitalism as traumatic.
How is the trauma distinct in Delhi, and in what ways is it universal?
RD: Delhi suffers specifically from the trauma of Partition, which has created
a distinct society. When India became independent, it was divided into India
and Pakistan. Pakistan was essentially a Muslim state, and Hindis and Sikhs
left. The border was about 400 kilometers from Delhi, which was a tiny, empty
city, a British administrative town. Most of those Hindis and Sikhs settled
in Delhi where they were allocated housing as refugees. Muslims went in the
other direction to Pakistan, and as we know, something between 1 and 2 million
were killed in that event.
The people who arrived in Delhi arrived traumatized, having lost their businesses,
properties, friends, and communities, and having seen their family members murdered,
raped and abducted. Like the Jewish Holocaust, everyone can tell the stories
and everyone has experienced loss. When they all arrive in Delhi, they have
a fairly homogeneous reaction: they're never going to let this happen to them
again. They become fiercely concerned with security, physical and financial.
They're not interested in having nice neighbors and the lighter things of life.
They say, it was our neighbors that killed us, so we're going to trust only
our blood and run businesses with our brother and our sons. We're going to build
high walls around our houses.
When the grandchildren of these people grow up, it's a problem because none
of this has been exorcised. The families have not talked about it. The state
has not dealt with it and wants to remember only that India became independent
and that was a glorious moment. So the catastrophe actually becomes focused
within families rather than the reverse. A lot of grandchildren are more fearful
and hateful of Muslims than the grandparents, who remembered a time before when
they actually had very deep friendships with Muslims.
Parents of my generation grew up with immense silence in their households
and they knew that in that silence was Islam - a terrifying thing. When you're
one year old, you don't even know yet what Islam is, you just know that it's
something which is the greatest horror in the universe.
The Punjabi businessman is a very distinct species. They have treated business
as warfare, and they are still doing it like that 70 years later and they are
very good at it. They enter the global economy at a time when it's becoming
much less civilized as well. In many cases they succeed not because they have
a good idea, but because they know how to seize global assets and resources.
Punjabi businessmen are not inventing Facebook. They are about mines and oil
and water and food -things that everyone understands and needs.
In this moment of globalization, the world will have to realize that events
like the Partition of India are not local history anymore but global history.
Especially in this moment when the West no longer controls the whole system,
these traumas explode onto the world and affect all of us, like the Holocaust.
They introduce levels of turbulence into businesses and practices that we didn't
expect necessarily.
Then there's the trauma of capitalism itself, and here I think it's important
for us to re-remember the West's own history. Capitalism achieved a level of
consensus in the second half of the 20th century very accidentally, and by a
number of enormous forces, not all of which were intended. There's no guarantee
that such consensus will be achieved everywhere in the emerging world. India
and China don't have an empire to ship people off to as a safety valve when
suffering become immense. They just have to absorb all that stuff.
For a century or so, people in power in Paris and London and Washington felt
that they had to save the capitalist system from socialist revolution, so they
gave enormous concessions to their populations. Very quickly, people in the
West forgot that there was that level of dissent. They thought that everyone
loved capitalism. I think as we come into the next period where the kind of
consensus has already been dealt a huge blow in the West, we're going to have
to deal with some of those forces again.
LP: When you say that the consensus on capitalism has been dealt
a blow, are you talking about the financial crisis?
RD: Yes, the sense that the nation-state - I'm talking about the U.S. context
- can no longer control global capital, global processes, or, indeed, it's own
financial elite.
It's a huge psychological dent in people's faith in the system. I think
what's going to happen in the next few years is huge unemployment in the middle
class in America because a lot of their jobs will be outsourced or automated.
Then, if you have 30-40 percent unemployment in America, which has always
been the ideological leader in capitalism, America will start to re-theorize
capitalism very profoundly (and maybe the Institute of New Economic Thinking
is part of that). Meanwhile, I think the middle class in India would not have
these kinds of problems. It's precisely because American technology and finance
are so advanced that they're going to hit a lot of those problems. I think in
places like India there's so much work to be done that no one needs to leap
to the next stage of making the middle class obsolete. They're still useful.
Lynn Parramore is contributing editor at AlterNet. She is cofounder of Recessionwire,
founding editor of New Deal 2.0, and author of "Reading the Sphinx: Ancient
Egypt in Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture." She received her Ph.D. in English
and cultural theory from NYU. Follow her on Twitter @LynnParramore.
In a minute, we'll be joined by former third-party presidential candidate
Ralph Nader. But first, this is
George Farah, the founder and executive director of Open Debates, speaking
on Democracy Now! about how the Democrats and Republicans took control of the
debate process.
GEORGE FARAH:
GEORGE FARAH: The League
of Women Voters ran the presidential debate process from 1976 until 1984,
and they were a very courageous and genuinely independent, nonpartisan sponsor.
And whenever the candidates attempted to manipulate the presidential debates
behind closed doors, either to exclude a viable independent candidate or
to sanitize the formats, the league had the courage to challenge the Republican
and Democratic nominees and, if necessary, go public.
In 1980, independent candidate John B. Anderson was polling about 12
percent in the polls. The league insisted that Anderson be allowed to participate,
because the vast majority of the American people wanted to see him, but
Jimmy Carter, President Jimmy Carter, refused to debate him. The league
went forward anyway and held a presidential debate with an empty chair,
showing that Jimmy Carter wasn't going to show up.
Four years later, when the Republican and Democratic nominees tried to
get rid of difficult questions by vetoing 80 of the moderators that they
had proposed to host the debates, the league said, "This is unacceptable."
They held a press conference and attacked the campaigns for trying to get
rid of difficult questions.
And lastly, in 1988, was the first attempt by the Republican and Democratic
campaigns to negotiate a detailed contract. It was tame by comparison, a
mere 12 pages. It talked about who could be in the audience and how the
format would be structured, but the league found that kind of lack of transparency
and that kind of candidate control to be fundamentally outrageous and antithetical
to our democratic process. They released the contract and stated they refuse
to be an accessory to the hoodwinking of the American people and refuse
to implement it.
And today, what do we have? We have a private corporation that was created
by the Republican and Democratic parties called the Commission on Presidential
Debates. It seized control of the presidential debates precisely because
the league was independent, precisely because this women's organization
had the guts to stand up to the candidates that the major-party candidates
had nominated.
"... "emails" has been the most frequently recalled word in Americans' reports of news about Mrs. Clinton - the exceptions being the week of the Democratic convention, when emails fell to second place, and this past week when "pneumonia" and "health" eclipsed emails. ..."
"... the research shows that the relevance of Mrs. Clinton's emails is very real in the minds of average Americans. ..."
"... Americans are certainly not ignoring the election and they appear to be closely following what constitutes the campaign as it unfolds. As a result, the public may be learning about the candidates' temperament, character, personality and health issues, but from what they tell us, Americans aren't getting much in the way of real substance. ..."
Since July we have asked more than 30,000 Americans to say exactly what
it was they read, saw or heard about the two major party candidates over the
past several days. The type of information getting through to Americans
varies significantly depending on whether the candidate in question is Mr.
Trump or Mrs. Clinton. Americans' daily reports about Mr. Trump are directly
tied to what he is doing and saying. If Mr. Trump talks about Muslim parents
and their son who was killed in action, that's what the public remembers. If
he goes to Mexico or Louisiana, that's what they recall reading or hearing
about him. If Mr. Trump calls President Obama the founder of the Islamic
State, "ISIS" moves to the top of the list of what Americans tell us they
are hearing about the Republican candidate.
What Americans recall hearing about Mrs. Clinton is significantly less
varied. Specifically - and to an extraordinary degree - Americans have
consistently told us that they are reading and hearing about her handling of
emails while she was secretary of state during President Obama's first term.
In eight of the past 10 weeks, "emails" has been the most frequently
recalled word in Americans' reports of news about Mrs. Clinton - the
exceptions being the week of the Democratic convention, when emails fell to
second place, and this past week when "pneumonia" and "health" eclipsed
emails.
When Matt Lauer of NBC News questioned Clinton about her emails for a
third of the allotted time during the commander-in-chief forum on MSNBC
earlier this month, he was criticized for focusing on an irrelevant issue.
But the research shows that the relevance of Mrs. Clinton's emails is
very real in the minds of average Americans.
... ... ...
For as long as I have been involved in election year research, the
absence of serious discussion of issues and policies by the candidates has
been a source of disgruntlement with the campaign process. So far, it
doesn't look like 2016 is providing an exception. Americans are
certainly not ignoring the election and they appear to be closely following
what constitutes the campaign as it unfolds. As a result, the public may be
learning about the candidates' temperament, character, personality and
health issues, but from what they tell us, Americans aren't getting much in
the way of real substance.
The moderators of the coming series of debates will most likely focus
directly on the candidates' positions on issues. This may shift what
Americans tell us they are learning about the candidates, and if so, it
could signal a significant upgrade in the way the process is working.
But that also means that a lot still depends on the candidates themselves
and how they end up shaping the contours of the debates.
This set of principles in the core of "Trump_vs_deep_state" probably can be
improved, but still are interesting: "... If you listen closely to Trump, you'll hear a direct repudiation of the
system of globalization and identity politics that has defined the world order since
the Cold War. There are, in fact, six specific ideas that he has either blurted
out or thinly buried in his rhetoric: (1) borders matter; (2) immigration policy
matters; (3) national interests, not so-called universal interests, matter; (4)
entrepreneurship matters; (5) decentralization matters; (6) PC speech-without which
identity politics is inconceivable-must be repudiated. ..."
Notable quotes:
"... If you listen closely to Trump, you'll hear a direct repudiation of the system of globalization and identity politics that has defined the world order since the Cold War. There are, in fact, six specific ideas that he has either blurted out or thinly buried in his rhetoric: (1) borders matter; (2) immigration policy matters; (3) national interests, not so-called universal interests, matter; (4) entrepreneurship matters; (5) decentralization matters; (6) PC speech-without which identity politics is inconceivable-must be repudiated. ..."
"... These six ideas together point to an end to the unstable experiment with supra- and sub-national sovereignty that many of our elites have guided us toward, siren-like, since 1989. ..."
"... if anti-Trumpers convince themselves that that's all ..."
"... What is going on is that "globalization-and-identity-politics-speak" is being boldly challenged. Inside the Beltway, along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, there is scarcely any evidence of this challenge. There are people in those places who will vote for Trump, but they dare not say it, for fear of ostracism. ..."
"... Out beyond this hermetically sealed bicoastal consensus, there are Trump placards everywhere, not because citizens are racists or homophobes or some other vermin that needs to be eradicated, but because there is little evidence in their own lives that this vast post-1989 experiment with "globalization" and identity politics has done them much good. ..."
"... The most highly motivated voters in this election cycle seem to be insurgents pushing back against corrupt and incompetent elites and the Establishment. That does not bode well for Clinton. ..."
"... Another page in the annals of American elite incompetence, only five days after the ceasefire in Syria was negotiated, we broke it by bombing a well-known Syrian position. After Russia took us to the woodshed, Samantha Power responds by basically saying, "We messed up, but Russia is a moralistic hypocrite because they support Assad and he is, like, really bad and stuff." ..."
"... They seem to think that any attempt to stop mass 3rd world immigration, stop pc thought police, or up hold Christian-ish values are a direct threat to them. ..."
"... The enthusiasm for Bernie Sanders and Trump can only be understood as an overdue awakening of voters--finally recognizing that voting for more of the same tools of the plutocrats and oligarchs (which was represented by all candidates other than Trump and Sanders) will only serve the war profiteers, neocons, and other beltway bandits--at the expense of every other voter. ..."
"... Once the voters have awakened, they will not return to slumber or accept the establishment politics as usual. It is going to be a very interesting process to watch, and the political operatives who think we will return to the same old GOP and Democratic politics as usual should brace themselves for a rude awakening. ..."
"... Trump vs. Clinton = Nationalism vs. Globalism ..."
If you listen closely to Trump, you'll hear a direct repudiation
of the system of globalization and identity politics that has defined the
world order since the Cold War. There are, in fact, six specific ideas that
he has either blurted out or thinly buried in his rhetoric: (1) borders
matter; (2) immigration policy matters; (3) national interests, not so-called
universal interests, matter; (4) entrepreneurship matters; (5) decentralization
matters; (6) PC speech-without which identity politics is inconceivable-must
be repudiated.
These six ideas together point to an end to the unstable experiment
with supra- and sub-national sovereignty that many of our elites have guided
us toward, siren-like, since 1989.
That is what the Trump campaign, ghastly though it may at times be, leads
us toward: A future where states matter. A future where people are citizens,
working together toward (bourgeois) improvement of their lot. His ideas
do not yet fully cohere. They are a bit too much like mental dust that has
yet to come together. But they can come together. And Trump is the first
American candidate to bring some coherence to them, however raucous his
formulations have been.
Mitchell goes on to say that political elites call Trump "unprincipled,"
and perhaps they're right: that he only does what's good for Trump. On the other
hand, maybe Trump's principles are not ideological, but pragmatic. That is,
Trump might be a quintessential American political type: the leader who gets
into a situation and figures out how to muddle through. Or, as Mitchell puts
it:
This doesn't necessarily mean that he is unprincipled; it means rather
that he doesn't believe that yet another policy paper based on conservative
"principles" is going to save either America or the Republican Party.
Also, Mitchell says that there are no doubt voters in the Trump coalition
who are nothing but angry, provincial bigots. But if anti-Trumpers convince
themselves that that's all the Trump voters are, they will miss something
profoundly important about how Western politics are changing because of deep
instincts emerging from within the body politic:
What is going on is that "globalization-and-identity-politics-speak"
is being boldly challenged. Inside the Beltway, along the Atlantic
and Pacific coasts, there is scarcely any evidence of this challenge. There
are people in those places who will vote for Trump, but they dare not say
it, for fear of ostracism.
They think that identity politics has gone too
far, or that if it hasn't yet gone too far, there is no principled place
where it must stop. They believe that the state can't be our only large-scale
political unit, but they see that on the post-1989 model, there will, finally,
be no place for the state.
Out beyond this hermetically sealed bicoastal consensus, there are Trump
placards everywhere, not because citizens are racists or homophobes or some
other vermin that needs to be eradicated, but because there is little evidence
in their own lives that this vast post-1989 experiment with "globalization"
and identity politics has done them much good.
There's lots more here, including his prediction of what's going to happen
to the GOP.
Read the whole thing.
The most highly motivated voters in this election cycle seem to be
insurgents pushing back against corrupt and incompetent elites and the
Establishment. That does not bode well for Clinton.
Another page in the annals of American elite incompetence, only five
days after the ceasefire in Syria was negotiated, we broke it by
bombing a well-known Syrian position. After Russia took us to the woodshed,
Samantha Power responds by basically saying, "We messed up, but Russia is
a moralistic hypocrite because they support Assad and he is, like, really
bad and stuff."
Which not only makes it seem more likely that we were targeting
Assad's forces to anyone reasonably distrustful of American involvement
in the war, but also shows the moral reasoning ability of nothing greater
than a 6 year old.
Seriously, accusing Russia of moralism, and then moralistically trying
to hide responsibility by listing atrocities committed by Assad? It is self-parody.
Call it anti-Semitic if you want but all my Jewish cousins and the several
other Jewish business associates I know feel uncontrollable hate for Trump.
"thinly buried in his rhetoric:
borders matter;
immigration policy matters;
national interests, not so-called universal interests, matter;
entrepreneurship matters;
decentralization matters;
PC speech-without which identity politics is inconceivable-must
be repudiated."
They seem to think that any attempt to stop mass 3rd world immigration,
stop pc thought police, or up hold Christian-ish values are a direct threat
to them.
I cannot speak to what is best for conservative Christians, but change is
definitely in the air. Since the start of this election, I have had a clear
sense that we are seeing a beginning of a new political reality.
The enthusiasm for Bernie Sanders and Trump can only be understood
as an overdue awakening of voters--finally recognizing that voting for more
of the same tools of the plutocrats and oligarchs (which was represented
by all candidates other than Trump and Sanders) will only serve the war
profiteers, neocons, and other beltway bandits--at the expense of every
other voter.
Too many voters have finally come to recognize that neither party serves
them in any real way. This will forcibly result in a serious reform process
of one or both parties, a third party that actually represents working people,
or if neither reform or a new party is viable-–a new American revolution,
which I fear greatly.
Once the voters have awakened, they will not return to slumber or
accept the establishment politics as usual. It is going to be a very interesting
process to watch, and the political operatives who think we will return
to the same old GOP and Democratic politics as usual should brace themselves
for a rude awakening.
I'm certainly not
the first to say this, but perhaps the first to post it on this blog. RD,
perhaps rightfully, has steered this post toward the Benedict Option, but
what should be debated is the repudiation of globalization and identity
politics.
"Laws have to be backed up with resources and political will and
deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases
have to be changed."
Uh Oh -- We Christians are in Hillary Clinton's Basket of Deplorables.
"... Moscow did indeed support secessionist pro-Russia rebels in East Ukraine. But did not the U.S. launch a 78-day bombing campaign on tiny Serbia to effect a secession of its cradle province of Kosovo? ..."
"... Russia is reportedly hacking into our political institutions. If so, it ought to stop. But have not our own CIA, National Endowment for Democracy, and NGOs meddled in Russia's internal affairs for years? ..."
"... Scores of the world's 190-odd nations are today ruled by autocrats. How does it advance our interests or diplomacy to have congressional leaders yapping "thug" at the ruler of a nation with hundreds of nuclear warheads? ..."
"... Very good article indeed. Knee-jerk reaction of american politicians and journalists looks extremely strange. As a matter of fact they look like idiots or puppets. ..."
"... Rubio and Graham are reflexively ready to push US influence everywhere, all the time, with military force always on the agenda, and McCain seems to be in a state of constant agitation ..."
"... Very sensible article. And as the EU falls further into disarray and possible disintegration, due to migration and other catastrophically mishandled problems, a working partnership with Russia will become even more important. Right now, we treat Russia as an enemy and Saudi Arabia as a friend. That makes no sense at all. ..."
"... As I've stated many times, Obama the narcissist hates Putin because Putin doesn't play the sycophantic lapdog yapping about how good it is to interact with the "smartest person in the room". ..."
"... I'm serious. Obama craves sources of narcissistic supply and has visceral contempt for sources of narcissistic injury. I.e., people who may reveal the mediocrity that he actually is. Obama considers Putin a threat in that context. ..."
"... The downside for the U.S. is that Obama has extended hating Putin to hating Russia. And yes, Washington is flooded with sources of sycophantic narcissistic supply for Obama including the MSM. And they are happy to massage his twisted ego by enthusiastically playing along with the Putin/Russia fear-monger bashing. ..."
"... P.S. too bad Hillary is saturated with her own psychopathology that portends more Global Cop wreckage. ..."
"... Anyway, what Buchanan is saying is, "We have to deal with him," not "favor him." The two terms should not be confused. ..."
"... There are a lot of "allies" of questionable usefulness that the US should stop "favoring," and a lot of competitors (and potential allies in the true sense) out there the US should begin "dealing" with. ..."
"... Everything the Western elite does is about dollar hegemony and control of energy. ..."
"... As long as Russia is not a puppet of the globalist banking cartel they will be presented as an "enemy". Standing in the way of energy imperialism was the last straw for the all out hybrid war being launched on Russia now. ..."
"... If the Western public wasn't so lazy and stupid we would remove the globalists controlling us. Instead people, especially liberals, get in bed with the globalists plans against Russia bc they can't stand Russia is Christian and supports the family. ..."
"... Every word about Russia allowed in the Western establishment are lies funded and molded by people like Soros and warmongers. This is the reality. Nobody who will speak honestly or positively about Russia is allowed any voice. And scumbag neoliberal globalists like Kasperov are presented as "Russians" while real Russian people are given zero voice. ..."
"... What the Western elite is doing right now in Ukraine and Syria is reprehensible and its all our fault for letting these people control us. ..."
...Arriving on Capitol Hill to repair ties between Trump and party elites,
Gov. Mike Pence was taken straight to the woodshed.
John McCain told Pence that Putin was a "thug and a butcher," and Trump's
embrace of him intolerable.
Said Lindsey Graham: "Vladimir Putin is a thug, a dictator … who has
his opposition killed in the streets," and Trump's views bring to mind Munich.
Putin is an "authoritarian thug," added "Little Marco" Rubio.
What causes the Republican Party to lose it whenever the name of Vladimir
Putin is raised?
Putin is no Stalin, whom FDR and Harry Truman called "Good old Joe" and "Uncle
Joe." Unlike Nikita Khrushchev, he never drowned a Hungarian Revolution in blood.
He did crush the Chechen secession. But what did he do there that General Sherman
did not do to Atlanta when Georgia seceded from Mr. Lincoln's Union?
Putin supported the U.S. in Afghanistan, backed our nuclear deal with Iran,
and signed on to John Kerry's plan have us ensure a cease fire in Syria and
go hunting together for ISIS and al-Qaida terrorists.
Still, Putin committed "aggression" in Ukraine, we are told. But was that
really aggression, or reflexive strategic reaction? We helped dump over a pro-Putin
democratically elected regime in Kiev, and Putin acted to secure his Black Sea
naval base by re-annexing Crimea, a peninsula that has belonged to Russia from
Catherine the Great to Khrushchev. Great powers do such things.
When the Castros pulled Cuba out of America's orbit, we decided to keep Guantanamo,
and dismiss Havana's protests?
Moscow did indeed support secessionist pro-Russia rebels in East Ukraine.
But did not the U.S. launch a 78-day bombing campaign on tiny Serbia to effect
a secession of its cradle province of Kosovo?
... ... ...
Russia is reportedly hacking into our political institutions. If so,
it ought to stop. But have not our own CIA, National Endowment for Democracy,
and NGOs meddled in Russia's internal affairs for years?
... ... ...
Is Putin's Russia more repressive than Xi Jinping's China? Yet, Republicans
rarely use "thug" when speaking about Xi. During the Cold War, we partnered
with such autocrats as the Shah of Iran and General Pinochet of Chile, Ferdinand
Marcos in Manila, and Park Chung-Hee of South Korea. Cold War necessity required
it.
Scores of the world's 190-odd nations are today ruled by autocrats. How
does it advance our interests or diplomacy to have congressional leaders yapping
"thug" at the ruler of a nation with hundreds of nuclear warheads?
>>During the Cold War, we partnered with such autocrats as the Shah
of Iran and General Pinochet of Chile, Ferdinand Marcos in Manila, and Park
Chung-Hee of South Korea
buttressed could be even more pertinent)
Very good article indeed. Knee-jerk reaction of american politicians
and journalists looks extremely strange. As a matter of fact they look like
idiots or puppets.
Rubio
and Graham are reflexively ready to push US influence everywhere, all the
time, with military force always on the agenda, and McCain seems to be in
a state of constant agitation whenever US forces are not actively engaged
in combat somewhere. They are loud voices, yes, but irrational voices, too.
Very sensible article. And as the EU falls further into disarray
and possible disintegration, due to migration and other catastrophically
mishandled problems, a working partnership with Russia will become even
more important. Right now, we treat Russia as an enemy and Saudi Arabia
as a friend. That makes no sense at all.
"Just" states the starvation of the Ukraine is a western lie. The Harvest
of Sorrow by Robert Conquest refutes this dangerous falsehood. Perhaps "Just"
believes The Great Leap Forward did not lead to starvation of tens of millions
in China. After all, this could be another "western lie". So to could be
the Armenian genocide in Turkey or slaughter of Communists in Indonesia.
As I've stated many times, Obama the narcissist hates Putin because
Putin doesn't play the sycophantic lapdog yapping about how good it is to
interact with the "smartest person in the room".
I'm serious. Obama craves sources of narcissistic supply and has
visceral contempt for sources of narcissistic injury. I.e., people who may
reveal the mediocrity that he actually is. Obama considers Putin a threat
in that context.
The downside for the U.S. is that Obama has extended hating Putin
to hating Russia. And yes, Washington is flooded with sources of sycophantic
narcissistic supply for Obama including the MSM. And they are happy to massage
his twisted ego by enthusiastically playing along with the Putin/Russia
fear-monger bashing.
And so the U.S. – Russia relationship is wrecked by the "smartest person
in the room".
P.S. too bad Hillary is saturated with her own psychopathology that
portends more Global Cop wreckage.
John asks, "We also have to deal with our current allies. Whom would
Mr. Buchanan like to favor?"
Well, we could redouble our commitment to our democracy and peace loving
friends in Saudi Arabia, we could deepen our ties to those gentle folk in
Egypt, and maybe for a change give some meaningful support to Israel. Oh,
and our defensive alliances will be becoming so much stronger with Montenegro
as a member, we will need to pour more resources into that country.
Anyway, what Buchanan is saying is, "We have to deal with him," not
"favor him." The two terms should not be confused.
There are a lot of "allies" of questionable usefulness that the US
should stop "favoring," and a lot of competitors (and potential allies in
the true sense) out there the US should begin "dealing" with.
"During the Cold War, we partnered with such autocrats as the Shah of
Iran and General Pinochet of Chile, Ferdinand Marcos in Manila, and Park
Chung-Hee of South Korea. Cold War necessity required it (funny, you failed
to mention Laos, South Vietnam, Nicaragua, Noriega/Panama, and everyone's
favorite 9/11 co-conspirator and WMD developer, Saddam Hussein). either
way how did these "alliances" work out for the US? really doesn't matter,
does it? it is early 21st century, not mid 20th century. there is a school
of thought in the worlds of counter-terrorism/intelligence operations, which
suggests if you want to be successful, you have to partner with some pretty
nasty folks. Trump is being "handled" by an experienced, ruthless (that's
a compliment), and focused "operator". unless, of course, Trump is actually
the superior operator, in which case, this would be the greatest black op
of all time.
"From Russia With Money - Hillary Clinton, the Russian Reset and Cronyism,"
"Of the 28 US, European and Russian companies that participated in Skolkovo,
17 of them were Clinton Foundation donors" or sponsored speeches by former
President Bill Clinton, Schweizer told The Post.
Everything the Western elite does is about dollar hegemony and control
of energy. Once you understand that then the (evil)actions of the Western
elite make sense. Anyone who stands in the way of those things is an "enemy".
This is how they determine an "enemy".
As long as Russia is not a puppet of the globalist banking cartel
they will be presented as an "enemy". Standing in the way of energy imperialism
was the last straw for the all out hybrid war being launched on Russia now.
If the Western public wasn't so lazy and stupid we would remove the
globalists controlling us. Instead people, especially liberals, get in bed
with the globalists plans against Russia bc they can't stand Russia is Christian
and supports the family.
Every word about Russia allowed in the Western establishment are
lies funded and molded by people like Soros and warmongers. This is the
reality. Nobody who will speak honestly or positively about Russia is allowed
any voice. And scumbag neoliberal globalists like Kasperov are presented
as "Russians" while real Russian people are given zero voice.
What the Western elite is doing right now in Ukraine and Syria is
reprehensible and its all our fault for letting these people control us.
You need to substitute PIC (a.k.a., The Elites or Political Class)) for
neoliberal elite for the article to make more sense.
Notable quotes:
"... Our nation is in the grip of such poisonous thinking. The DNC with its "Super Delegates" already has a way to control who will be their candidate. In an irony to beat all ironies, the DNC's Super Delegates were able to stop Bernie Sanders... ..."
"... The reason Trump is still rising (and I believe will win handily) is he clearly represents the original image of America: a self made success story based on capitalism and the free market. ..."
This election cycle is so amazing one cannot help but think it has been scripted
by some invisible, all-powerful, hand. I mean, how could we have two completely
opposite candidates, perfectly reflecting the forces at play in this day and
age? It truly is a clash between The Elites and The Masses!
Main Street vs Wall & K Street.
The Political Industrial Complex (PIC – a.k.a., The Elites or Political Class)
is all up arms over the outsider barging in on their big con. The PIC is beside
itself trying to stop Donald Trump from gaining the Presidency, where he will
be able to clean out the People's House and the bureaucratic cesspool that has
shackled Main Street with political correctness, propaganda, impossibly expensive
health care, ridiculous taxes and a national debt that will take generations
to pay off.
The PIC has run amok long enough – illustrated perfectly by the defect ridden
democrat candidate: Hillary Clinton. I mean, how could you frame America's choices
this cycle
any better than this --
Back in July, Democratic presidential nominee and former Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton said, "there is
absolutely no connection between anything that I did as secretary of
state and the Clinton Foundation."
On Monday of this week,
ABC's Liz Kreutzer reminded people of that statement, as a new batch
of emails reveal that there was a connection, and
it was cash .
…
The Abedin emails reveal that the longtime Clinton aide apparently served
as a conduit between Clinton Foundation donors and Hillary Clinton while
Clinton served as secretary of state. In more than a dozen email exchanges,
Abedin provided expedited, direct access to Clinton for donors who had contributed
from $25,000 to $10 million to the Clinton Foundation. In many instances,
Clinton Foundation top executive Doug Band, who worked with the Foundation
throughout Hillary Clinton's tenure at State, coordinated closely with Abedin.
In Abedin's June deposition to Judicial Watch, she conceded that part of
her job at the State Department was taking care of "
Clinton family matters ."
This is what has Main Street so fed up with Wall & K street (big business,
big government). The Clinton foundation is a cash cow for Clinton, Inc. So while
our taxes go up, our debt sky rockets and our health care becomes too expensive
to afford, Clan Clinton has made 100's of millions of dollars selling access
(and obviously doing favors, because no one spends that kind of money without
results).
The PIC is circling the wagons with its news media arm shrilly screaming
anything and everything about Trump as if they could fool Main Street with their
worn out propaganda. I seriously doubt it will work. The Internet has broken
the information monopoly that allowed the PIC in the not too distant past to
control what people knew and thought.
Massachusetts has a long history of using the power of incumbency to
cripple political opponents. In fact, it's a leading state for such partisan
gamesmanship. Dating back to 1812, when Gov. Elbridge Gerry signed into
law a redistricting plan for state Senate districts that favored his Democratic-Republican
Party, the era of Massachusetts rule rigging began. It has continued, unabated,
ever since.
Given the insider dealing and venality that epitomized the 2016 presidential
primary process, I'd hoped that politicians would think twice before abusing
the power of the state for political purposes. Galvin quickly diminished
any such prospect of moderation in the sketchy behavior of elected officials.
He hid his actions behind the thin veil of fiscal responsibility. He claimed
to be troubled by the additional $56,000 he was going to have to spend printing
ballots to accommodate Independent voters. He conveniently ignored the fact
that thousands of these UIP members have been paying taxes for decades to
support a primary process that excludes them.
…
In my home state of Kansas, where my 2014 candidacy threatened to take
a U.S. Senate seat from the Republicans, they responded predictably. Instead
of becoming more responsive to voters, our state's highly partisan secretary
of state, Kris Kobach, introduced legislation that would bring back one
of the great excesses of machine politics: straight party-line voting –
which is designed to discourage voters from considering an Independent candidacy
altogether. Kobach's rationale, like Galvin's, was laughable. He described
it as a "convenience" for voters.
The article goes on to note these acts by the PIC are an affront to the large
swath of the electorate who really choose who will win elections:
In a recent Gallup poll, 60 percent of Americans said they do not feel
well-represented by the Democrats and Republicans and believe a third major
party is needed. Fully 42 percent of Americans now describe themselves
as politically independent .
That means the two main parties are each smaller in size than the independents
(68% divided by 2 equals 34%), which is why independents pick which side will
win. If the PIC attacks this group – guess what the response will look like?
I recently had a discussion with someone from Washington State who is pretty
much my opposite policy-wise. She is a deep blue democrat voter, whereas I am
a deep purple independent who is more small-government Tea Party than conservative-GOP.
She was lamenting the fact that her state has caucuses, which is one method
to blunt Main Street voters from having a say. It was interesting that we quickly
and strongly agreed on one thing above all else: open primaries. We both knew
that if the voters had the only say in who are leaders
would be, all sides could abide that decision easily. It is when PIC intervenes
that things get ugly.
Open primaries make the political parties accountable to the voters. Open
primaries make it harder for the PIC to control who gets into office, and reduces
the leverage of big donors. Open primaries reflect the will of the states and
the nation – not the vested interests (read bank accounts) of the PIC.
Without doubt, one of the most troublesome aspects of the current system
is its gross inefficiency. Whereas generations ago selecting a nominee
took relatively little time and money , today's process has resulted
in a near-permanent campaign. Because would-be nominees have to
win primaries and open caucuses in several states, they must put
together vast campaign apparatuses that spread across the nation, beginning
years in advance and raising tens of millions of dollars.
The length of the campaign alone keeps many potential candidates on the
sidelines. In particular, those in positions of leadership at various
levels of our government cannot easily put aside their duties and
shift into full-time campaign mode for such an extended period.
It is amazing how this kind of thinking can be considered legitimate. Note
how independent voters are evil in the mind of the PIC, and only government
leaders need apply. Not surprising, their answer is to control access to the
ballot:
During the week of Lincoln's birthday (February 12), the Republican Party
would hold a Republican Nomination Convention that would borrow from the
process by which the Constitution was ratified. Delegates to the
convention would be selected by rank-and-file Republicans in their local
communities , and those chosen delegates would meet, deliberate,
and ultimately nominate five people who, if willing, would each
be named as one of the party's officially sanctioned finalists for its presidential
nomination. Those five would subsequently debate one another a half-dozen
times.
Brexit became a political force because the European Union was not accountable
to the voters. The EU members are also selected by members of the European PIC
– not citizens of the EU. Without direct accountability to all citizens (a.k.a.
– voters) there is no democracy –
just a variant
of communism:
During the Russian Civil War (1918–1922), the Bolsheviks nationalized
all productive property and imposed a policy named war communism,
which put factories and railroads under strict government control,
collected and rationed food, and introduced some bourgeois management of
industry . After three years of war and the 1921 Kronstadt rebellion,
Lenin declared the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1921, which was to give
a "limited place for a limited time to capitalism." The NEP lasted until
1928, when Joseph Stalin achieved party leadership, and the introduction
of the Five Year Plans spelled the end of it. Following the Russian Civil
War, the Bolsheviks, in 1922, formed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
(USSR), or Soviet Union, from the former Russian Empire.
Following Lenin's democratic centralism, the Leninist parties
were organized on a hierarchical basis, with active cells of members as
the broad base; they were made up only of elite cadres approved by higher
members of the party as being reliable and completely subject to party discipline
.
Emphasis mine. Note how communism begins with government control of major
industries. The current con job about Global Warming is the cover-excuse for
a government grab of the energy sector. Obamacare is an attempt to grab the
healthcare sector. And Wall Street already controls the banking sector. See
a trend yet?
This is then followed by imposing a rigid hierarchy of "leaders" at all levels
of politics – so no opposing views can gain traction. Party discipline uber
alles!
Our nation is in the grip of such poisonous thinking. The DNC with its "Super
Delegates" already has a way to control who will be their candidate. In an irony
to beat all ironies, the DNC's Super Delegates were able to stop Bernie Sanders...
The reason Trump is still rising (and I believe will win handily) is he clearly
represents the original image of America: a self made success story based on
capitalism and the free market.
His opponent is the epitome of the Political Industrial Complex – a cancer
that has eaten away America's free market foundation and core strength. A person
who wants to impose government on the individual.
"... As I've stated many times, Obama the narcissist hates Putin because Putin doesn't play the sycophantic lapdog yapping about how good it is to interact with the "smartest person in the room". ..."
"... I'm serious. Obama craves sources of narcissistic supply and has visceral contempt for sources of narcissistic injury. I.e., people who may reveal the mediocrity that he actually is. Obama considers Putin a threat in that context. ..."
"... The downside for the U.S. is that Obama has extended hating Putin to hating Russia. And yes, Washington is flooded with sources of sycophantic narcissistic supply for Obama including the MSM. And they are happy to massage his twisted ego by enthusiastically playing along with the Putin/Russia fear-monger bashing. ..."
"... P.S. too bad Hillary is saturated with her own psychopathology that portends more Global Cop wreckage. ..."
As I've stated many times, Obama the
narcissist hates Putin because Putin doesn't play the sycophantic lapdog yapping
about how good it is to interact with the "smartest person in the room".
I'm serious. Obama craves sources of narcissistic supply and has visceral
contempt for sources of narcissistic injury. I.e., people who may reveal the
mediocrity that he actually is. Obama considers Putin a threat in that context.
The downside for the U.S. is that Obama has extended hating Putin to
hating Russia. And yes, Washington is flooded with sources of sycophantic narcissistic
supply for Obama including the MSM. And they are happy to massage his twisted
ego by enthusiastically playing along with the Putin/Russia fear-monger bashing.
And so the U.S. – Russia relationship is wrecked by the "smartest person
in the room".
P.S. too bad Hillary is saturated with her own psychopathology that portends
more Global Cop wreckage.
"... These OFF episodes occur without warning when the patient is in the ON state and at unexpected times ..."
"... OFF episodes can have a tremendous negative impact on patients' daily lives. The potential for unexpected loss of motor function or the unpredictable onset of benefit of one's PD medications can result in patients' avoidance of certain social settings and hinder performance of simple daily tasks such as eating, bathing and dressing. ..."
"... I think the fact she bounced back so quickly and put on a great act at Chelsea's three hours after being unable to walk would indicate this is not pneumonia plus dehydration plus overheating (overheating seems a big stretch given the temps that morning). So the question is, if not those then what? ..."
"... And no, I think the campaign's credibility is pretty much shot on any and all excuses they provide which do not stand up to simple logic and common sense. ..."
This neurological disorder, by definition, most frequently occurs as
the result of long-term (usually at least 3 months duration) or high-dose
use of
antipsychotic
drugs.
…
In some cases, an individual's legs can be so affected that walking becomes
difficult or impossible
…
Respiratory irregularity, such as grunting and difficulty breathing,
is another symptom associated with tardive dyskinesia, although studies
have shown that the prevalence rate is relatively low
These OFF episodes occur without warning when the patient is in the ON
state and at unexpected times. The goal of levodopa therapy is to maintain
a constant blood level of levodopa that is expected to result in a constant
supply of levodopa to the brain and, therefore, a constant level of dopamine
and dopaminergic stimulation. However, the brain does not utilize dopamine
at a constant rate. Changes in activity level or changes in mood such as
agitation or anxiety result in an increased use of dopamine. The brain then
depletes the reserves of dopamine, and more time is required to rebuild
that dopamine deficit. As a result, a patient in the ON state can unexpectedly
and suddenly turn OFF when their normal PD medications are typically effective.
OFF episodes can have a tremendous negative impact on patients' daily
lives. The potential for unexpected loss of motor function or the unpredictable
onset of benefit of one's PD medications can result in patients' avoidance
of certain social settings and hinder performance of simple daily tasks
such as eating, bathing and dressing. Further, a patient's varying
consumption of dopamine from variable "daily stresses" as well as the loss
of dopaminergic cells, exacerbates the frequency, duration and severity
of OFF episodes.
Does Hillary suffer from one of these? No clue – not a doctor. But I
think the fact she bounced back so quickly and put on a great act at Chelsea's
three hours after being unable to walk would indicate this is not pneumonia
plus dehydration plus overheating (overheating seems a big stretch given the
temps that morning). So the question is, if not those then what?
And no, I think the campaign's credibility is pretty much shot on any
and all excuses they provide which do not stand up to simple logic and common
sense. Hillary's responses to the Benghazi and Email issues torched that.
Not to mention the fact we heard a string of conflicting and changing reasons
all day long. This indicates we are not done yet hearing more "clarifications".
Like Hillary regularly gets so dehydrated she faints :
Bill Clinton's attempt on Monday at downplaying his wife's recent fainting
spell may have backfired.
During an interview with CBS News' Charlie Rose, the former president
said that Hillary Clinton has "on more than one occasion" had a fainting
episode after becoming "severely dehydrated."
So this HAS happened before – guess that is why
the secret service were so well choreographed.
"... Rooster coming home to roost! I would wager the reason the DNC email server was compromised was due to the lack of security on Clinton's "personal" (read political) email server. HRC left the IT Security door open and that exposed everyone she was in contact with – government, DNC and friends! ..."
Everyone is proposing those toxic DNC emails that roiled the Democrat National
Convention this weekend were hacked by Russia. Which I actually do not doubt.
But please understand, to hack into a system someone needs to be sloppy and
"invite" the hackers in! So how is it that HRC emails and DNC emails were both
exposed to the voters during this election year?
Clinton's server was configured to allow users to connect openly from
the Internet and control it remotely using Microsoft's Remote Desktop Services.
[64] It is known that hackers in Russia were aware of
Clinton's non-public email address as early as 2011 . [71]
It is also known that Secretary Clinton and her staff were aware of
hacking attempts in 2011, and were worried about them. [72]
In 2012, according to server records, a hacker in Serbia scanned
Clinton's Chappaqua server at least twice , in August and in December
2012. It was unclear whether the hacker knew the server belonged to Clinton,
although it did identify itself as providing email services for clintonemail.com
. [64] During 2014, Clinton's server was the target
of repeated intrusions originating in Germany, China, and South Korea.
Threat monitoring software on the server blocked at least five
such attempts. The software was installed in October 2013, and for three
months prior to that, no such software had been installed.
Now we know for a fact the "personal" side of Clinton's electronic communication
was to pave the way for her second run at the presidential election. In fact,
the server originated in 2008 to support her first run. Clinton would not want
"Personal Political" emails to become public – for many reasons! (especially
to hide any nexus between
Bill's speaking fees and State Department Policy decisions ).
Everyone knows Politicians set up one account for "official business" and
one for political business – a separation required by federal law. So if HRC
was in communication with politicians and the DNC, it was through her personal
server!
We do assess that hostile actors gained access to the private
commercial e-mail accounts of people with whom Secretary Clinton was in
regular contact from her personal account . We also assess that
Secretary Clinton's use of a personal e-mail domain was both known by a
large number of people and readily apparent. She also used her personal
e-mail extensively while outside the United States, including sending and
receiving work-related e-mails in the territory of sophisticated adversaries.
Given that combination of factors, we assess it is possible that hostile
actors gained access to Secretary Clinton's personal e-mail account.
Rooster coming home to roost! I would wager the reason the DNC email
server was compromised was due to the lack of security on Clinton's "personal"
(read political) email server. HRC left the IT Security door open and that exposed
everyone she was in contact with – government, DNC and friends!
Coming on the heels of Brexit and in tandem with many other
anti-globalist-cronyism movements, it is a societal reaction
that has been building for years (since Bush 2, and definitely
since the Tea Party before it was co-opted by the Political
Elite). When the elite bend and break the rules to line their
pockets, and the masses end up being severely financially
impacted in return, then there is going to be a visceral
response to those hoarding the nation's riches and
opportunities.
What is amazing is the depth of ignorance (or compliance) in
the news media. Take Jonathan Chait at the New York Times, who
has been in near constant apocalyptic fit since the "debate" on
national security.
Hillary Clinton Is a Flawed But Normal
Politician. Why Can't America See That?
My only quibble with Chait is I would title it:
Hillary Clinton Is a Flawed But
Typical
Politician.
Why Can't America See That?
My only response is to inform Chait of the blatantly
obvious: Of course we see Clinton as a typical and flawed
politician!!
So were the establisment GOP contenders in the primary. So
are all the power brokers in the Political Industrial Complex (PIC).
So is the pliant, PIC-suckling news media.
Why do you think Clinton is sinking in the polls during an
election cycle where the vast majority of voters on Main Street
USA see the country heading in the wrong direction? Does this
translate to "more of the same please?"!!
Why would a swath of voters who sees their slice of the
American Dream being trampled want more of the same policies
from the "globalist" Political Elite sitting behind their gated
communities in their posh mansions?
Of course we see her that way. She is simply not what the
country wants – nor deserves.
The PIC should realize that when their best argument is "the
worst of us is better than anyone from outside the PIC" – they
have hit rock bottom. And it is sooooo obvious!
"... Though while bereaved families are forced to crowd fund to bring Blair to court, any legal defence mounted by the multimillionaire will come from the public purse. They have raised over Ł160,000 to date so the story is not yet over. ..."
"... Yet Blair has no shame and remains belligerent. On the day the Chilcot Inquiry report was published he declared he would do the same again. Later that day veteran anti-war campaigner and Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn called a press conference to apologise on behalf of Labour for the war. Such a move is central to why Corbyn has won such an enthusiastic mass following after first standing for and winning the Labour leadership in the summer of 2015. ..."
"... The seeds of the deep bitterness about mainstream politicians and the establishment were sown in 2003. When Britain joined the US assault on Iraq despite the opposition of the majority of the population it politicised millions. The 2 million strong demonstration organised by the Stop the War Coalition in February 2003 was Britain's biggest ever. But Chilcot proved that Blair had already promised US president George W Bush that Britain would be with him "whatever". ..."
"... The warmongers' contempt for the electorate, let alone the people of Iraq and region, is staggering. ..."
The Chilcot report went further than many expected in condemning Tony Blair's
role in the invasion of Iraq. As Judith Orr says, it also reinforced the need
to be vigilant against all warmongers.
It took 12 days for the Chilcot report on the Iraq war to be read aloud non-stop
at the Edinburgh Festival event last month. The 2.6 million words of the report
were not the whitewash some had feared. In fact they were a confirmation of
what so many of those who protested against the war at the time said.
There were no lawyers on the Chilcot panel; this inquiry was never going
to call for charges against chief British warmonger Tony Blair. But families
of soldiers killed in the war are using the evidence brought forward in the
report to pursue a legal case against him. Because, although he didn't take
a line on the legality of the war, Chilcot criticised the process Blair drove
through to declare that invasion was legal: "We have, however, concluded that
the circumstances in which it was decided that there was a legal basis for UK
military action were far from satisfactory."
As human rights lawyer Philippe Sands pointed out, "'Far from satisfactory'
is a career-ending phrase in mandarin-speak, a large boot put in with considerable
force."
Though while bereaved families are forced to crowd fund to bring Blair
to court, any legal defence mounted by the multimillionaire will come from the
public purse. They have raised over Ł160,000 to date so the story is not yet
over.
Yet Blair has no shame and remains belligerent. On the day the Chilcot
Inquiry report was published he declared he would do the same again. Later that
day veteran anti-war campaigner and Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn called a press
conference to apologise on behalf of Labour for the war. Such a move is central
to why Corbyn has won such an enthusiastic mass following after first standing
for and winning the Labour leadership in the summer of 2015.
The seeds of the deep bitterness about mainstream politicians and the
establishment were sown in 2003. When Britain joined the US assault on Iraq
despite the opposition of the majority of the population it politicised millions.
The 2 million strong demonstration organised by the Stop the War Coalition in
February 2003 was Britain's biggest ever. But Chilcot proved that Blair had
already promised US president George W Bush that Britain would be with him "whatever".
The warmongers' contempt for the electorate, let alone the people of
Iraq and region, is staggering.
Guccifer 2.0
's latest release of DNC documents is generally described as:
In total, the latest dump contains more than 600 megabytes of documents.
It is the first Guccifer 2.0 release to not come from the hacker's WordPress
account. Instead, it was given out via a link to the small group of security
experts attending the London conference.
Guccifer 2.0 drops more DNC docs by Cory Bennett.
The "600 megabytes of documents" is an attention grabber, but how much of
that 600 megabytes is useful and/or interesting?
The answer turns out to be, not a lot.
Here's an overview of the directories and files:
/CIR
Financial investment data.
/CNBC
Financial investment data.
/DNC
Redistricting documents.
/DNCBSUser
One file with fields of VANDatabaseCode StateID VanID cons_id?
/documentation
A large amount of documentation for "IQ8," apparently address cleaning software.
Possibly useful if you want to know address cleaning rules from eight years
ago.
/DonorAnalysis
Sound promising but is summary data based on media markets.
/early
Early voting analysis.
/eday
Typical election voting analysis, from 2002 to 2008.
/FEC
Duplicates to FEC filings. Checking the .csv file, data from
2008. BTW, you can find this date (2008) and later data of the same type at:
http://fec.gov .
/finance
More duplicates to FEC filings. 11-26-08 NFC Members Raised.xlsx (no credit
cards) – Dated but 453 names with contacts, amounts raised, etc.
September 14th, 2016
Guccifer 2.0 dropped
a new bundle of DNC documents on September 13, 2016! Like most dumps, there
was no accompanying guide to make use of that dump easier.
Not a criticism, just an observation.
As a starting point to make your use of that dump a little easier, I am posting
an ls -lR listing of all the files in that dump, post extraction
with 7z and unrar .
Guccifer2.0-13Sept2016-filelist.txt .
I'm working on a list of the files most likely to be of interest. Look for
that tomorrow.
I can advise that no credit card numbers were included in this dump.
While selling public offices surprises some authors, whose names I omitted
out of courtesy to their families, selling offices is a regularized activity
in the United States.
Every four years, just after the Presidential election, " United States Government Policy and Supporting Positions " is published. It is commonly known as the "Plum Book" and is
alternately published between the House and Senate.
The Plum Book is a listing of over 9,000 civil service leadership and
support positions (filled and vacant) in the Legislative and Executive branches
of the Federal Government that may be subject to noncompetitive appointments,
or in other words by direct appointment.
These "plum" positions include agency heads and their immediate subordinates,
policy executives and advisors, and aides who report to these officials.
Many positions have duties which support Administration policies and programs.
The people holding these positions usually have a close and confidential
relationship with the agency head or other key officials.
Even though the 2012 "plum" book is currently on sale for $19.00 (usual price
is $38.00), given that a new one will appear later this year, consider using
the free online version at:
Plum Book 2012
.
The online interface is nothing to brag on. You have to select filters and
then find to obtain further information on positions. Very poor UI.
However, if under title you select "Chief of Mission, Monaco" and then select
"find," the resulting screen looks something like this:
To your far right there is a small arrow that if selected, takes you to the
details:
If you were teaching a high school civics class, the question would be:
How much did Charles Rivkin have to donate to obtain the position of Chief
of Mission, Monaco?
Monaco, bordering France on the Mediterranean coast, is a popular resort,
attracting tourists to its casino and pleasant climate. The principality
also is a banking center and has successfully sought to diversify into services
and small, high-value-added, nonpolluting industries.
Entering the name Rivkin, Charles and select "Get Listing."
Rivkin's contributions are broken into categories and helpfully summed to
assist you in finding the total.
Contributions to All Other Political Committees Except Joint Fundraising
Committees – $72399.00
Joint Fundraising Contributions – $22300.00
Recipient of Joint Fundraiser Contributions – $36052.00
Caution: There is an anomalous Rivkin in that last category, contributing
$40 to Donald Trump. For present discussions, I would subtract that from the
grand total of:
$130,711 to be the Chief of Mission, Monaco.
Realize that this was not a lump sum payment but a steady stream of contributions
starting in the year 2000.
Jane Hartley paid DNC $605,000 and then was nominated by Obama to serve
concurrently as the U.S. Ambassador to the French Republic and the Principality
of Monaco.
Contributions to Super PACs, Hybrid PACs and Historical Soft Money Party
Accounts – $5000.00
Contributions to All Other Political Committees Except Joint Fundraising
Committees – $516609.71
Joint Fundraising Contributions – $116000.00
Grand total: $637,609.71.
So, $637,609.71, not $605,000.00 but also as a series of contributions starting
in 1997, not one lump sum .
You don't have to search discarded hard drives to get pay-to-play appointment
pricing. It's all a matter of public record.
PS: I'm not sure how accurate or complete
Nominations & Appointments (White House) may be, but its an easier starting
place for current appointees than the online Plum book.
PPS: Estimated pricing for "Plum" book positions could be made more transparent.
Not a freebie. Let me know if you are interested.
"... "You could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?" smirked Clinton to cheers and laughter. "The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it." They are "irredeemable," but they are "not America." ..."
"... "You can take Trump supporters and put them in two baskets." First there are "the deplorables, the racists, and the haters, and the people who … think somehow he's going to restore an America that no longer exists. So, just eliminate them from your thinking." And who might be in the other basket backing Donald Trump? They are people, said Clinton, "who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them. … These are people we have to understand and empathize with." ..."
"... Patrick J. Buchanan is a founding editor of ..."
Speaking to 1,000 of the overprivileged at an LGBT fundraiser,
where the chairs ponied up $250,000 each and Barbra Streisand sang,
Hillary Clinton gave New York's social liberals what they came to
hear.
"You could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call
the basket of deplorables. Right?" smirked Clinton to cheers and
laughter. "The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic,
you name it." They are "irredeemable," but they are "not America."
This was no verbal slip. Clinton had invited the press in to
cover the LGBT gala at Cipriani Wall Street where the cheap seats
went for $1,200. And she had tried out her new lines earlier on
Israeli TV:
"You can take Trump supporters and put them in two baskets."
First there are "the deplorables, the racists, and the haters, and
the people who … think somehow he's going to restore an America that
no longer exists. So, just eliminate them from your thinking." And
who might be in the other basket backing Donald Trump? They are
people, said Clinton, "who feel that the government has let them
down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them. …
These are people we have to understand and empathize with."
In short, Trump's support consists of one-half xenophobes,
bigots, and racists, and one-half losers we should pity.
And she is running on the slogan "Stronger Together."
Her remarks echo those of Barack Obama in 2008 to San Francisco
fat cats puzzled about those strange Pennsylvanians.
They are "bitter," said Obama, they "cling to guns or religion or
antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment
or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustration."
In short, Pennsylvania is a backwater of alienated Bible-banging
gun nuts and bigots suspicious of outsiders and foreigners.
But who really are these folks our new class detests, sneers at,
and pities? As African-Americans are 90 percent behind Clinton, it
is not black folks. Nor is it Hispanics, who are solidly in the
Clinton camp.
Nor would Clinton tolerate such slurs directed at Third World
immigrants who are making America better by making us more diverse
than that old "America that no longer exists."
No, the folks Obama and
Clinton detest, disparage, and pity are the white working- and
middle-class folks Richard Nixon celebrated as Middle Americans and
the Silent Majority.
They are the folks who brought America through the Depression,
won World War II, and carried us through the Cold War from Truman in
1945 to victory with Ronald Reagan in 1989.
These are the Trump supporters. They reside mostly in red states
like West Virginia, Kentucky, and Middle Pennsylvania, and southern,
plains, and mountain states that have provided a disproportionate
share of the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines who fought and
died to guarantee the freedom of plutocratic LGBT lovers to laugh at
and mock them at $2,400-a-plate dinners.
Yet, there is truth in what Clinton said about eliminating "from
your thinking" people who believe Trump can "restore an America that
no longer exists."
For the last chance to restore America, as Trump himself told
Christian Broadcasting's "Brody File" on Friday, September 9, is
slipping away:
"I think this will be the last election if I don't win … because
you're going to have people flowing across the border, you're going
to have illegal immigrants coming in and they're going to be
legalized and they're going to be able to vote, and once that all
happens, you can forget it."
Politically and demographically, America is at a tipping point.
Minorities are now 40 percent of the population and will be 30
percent of the electorate in November. If past trends hold, 4 of 5
will vote for Clinton.
Meanwhile, white folks, who normally vote 60 percent Republican,
will fall to 70 percent of the electorate, the lowest ever, and will
decline in every subsequent presidential year.
The passing of the greatest generation and silent generation,
and, soon, the baby-boom generation, is turning former red states
like Virginia, North Carolina, Colorado, Arizona, and Nevada purple,
and putting crucial states like Florida and Ohio in peril.
What has happened to America is astonishing. A country 90 percent
Christian after World War II has been secularized by a dictatorial
Supreme Court with only feeble protest and resistance.
A nation, 90 percent of whose population traced their roots to
Europe, will have been changed by mass immigration and an invasion
across its Southern border into a predominantly Third World country
by 2042.
What will then be left of the old America to conserve?
No wonder Clinton was so giddy at the LGBT bash. They are taking
America away from the "haters," as they look down in moral supremacy
on the pitiable Middle Americans who are passing away.
But a question arises for 2017.
Why should Middle America, given what she thinks of us, render a
President Hillary Clinton and her regime any more allegiance or
loyalty than Colin Kaepernick renders to the America he so abhors?
"... cultural nationalism is the only ideology capable of being a legitimising ideology under the prevailing global and national political economy. ..."
"... Neoliberalism cannot perform this role since its simplicities make it harsh not just towards the lower orders, but give it the potential for damaging politically important interests amongst capitalist classes themselves. ..."
"... In this form, cultural nationalism provides national ruling classes a sense of their identity and purpose, as well as a form of legitimation among thelower orders. ..."
"... As Gramsci said, these are the main functions of every ruling ideology. Cultural nationalism masks, and to a degree resolves, the intense competition between capitals over access to the state for support domestically and in the international arena – in various bilateral and multilateral fora – where it bargainsfor the most favoured national capitalist interests within the global and imperial hierarchy. ..."
This is where cultural nationalism comes in. Only it can serve to mask, and
bridge, the divides within the 'cartel of anxiety' in a neoliberal context.
Cultural nationalism is a nationalism shorn of its civic-egalitarian and developmentalist
thrust, one reduced to its cultural core. It is structured around the culture
of thee conomically dominant classes in every country, with higher or lower
positions accorded to other groups within the nation relative to it. These positions
correspond, on the whole, to the groups' economic positions, and as such it
organises the dominant classes, and concentric circles of their allies, into
a collective national force. It also gives coherence to, and legitimises, the
activities of the nation-state on behalf of capital, or sections thereof, in
the international sphere.
Indeed, cultural nationalism is the only ideology capable of being a legitimising
ideology under the prevailing global and national political economy.
Neoliberalism
cannot perform this role since its simplicities make it harsh not just towards
the lower orders, but give it the potential for damaging politically important
interests amongst capitalist classes themselves. The activities of the state
on behalf of this or that capitalist interest necessarily exceed the Spartan
limits that neoliberalism sets. Such activities can only be legitimised as being
'in the national interest.'
Second, however, the nationalism that articulates
these interests is necessarily different from, but can easily (and given its
function as a legitimising ideology, it must be said, performatively) be mis-recognised
as, nationalism as widely understood: as being in some real sense in the interests
of all members of the nation. In this form, cultural nationalism provides national
ruling classes a sense of their identity and purpose, as well as a form of legitimation
among thelower orders.
As Gramsci said, these are the main functions of every
ruling ideology. Cultural nationalism masks, and to a degree resolves, the intense
competition between capitals over access to the state for support domestically
and in the international arena – in various bilateral and multilateral fora
– where it bargainsfor the most favoured national capitalist interests within
the global and imperial hierarchy.
Except for a commitment to neoliberal policies, the economic policy content
of this nationalism cannot be consistent: within the country, and inter-nationally,
the capitalist system is volatile and the positions of the various elements
of capital in the national and international hierarchies shift constantly as
does the economic policy of cultural nationalist governments. It is this volatility
that also increases the need for corruption – since that is how competitive
access of individual capitals to the state is today organised.
Whatever its utility to the capitalist classes, however, cultural nationalism
can never have a settled or secure hold on those who are marginalised or sub-ordinated
by it. In neoliberal regimes the scope for offering genuine economic gains to
the people at large, however measured they might be, is small.
This is a problem for right politics since even the broadest coalition of
the propertied can never be an electoral majority, even a viable plurality.
This is only in the nature of capitalist private property. While the left remains
in retreat or disarray, elec-toral apathy is a useful political resource but
even where, as in most countries, political choices are minimal, the electorate
as a whole is volatile. Despite, orperhaps because of, being reduced to a competition
between parties of capital, electoral politics in the age of the New Right entails
very large electoral costs, theextensive and often vain use of the media in
elections and in politics generally, and political compromises which may clash
with the high and shrilly ambitiou sdemands of the primary social base in the propertied
classes. Instability, uncertainty ...
"... What is "Globalization" and "Free Trade" really?… Does it encompass the slave trade, trading in narcotics, deforestation and export of a nation's tropical hardwood forests, environmentally damaging transnational oil pipelines or coal ports, fisheries depletion, laying off millions of workers and replacing them and the products they make with workers and products made in a foreign country, trading with an enemy, investing capital in a foreign country through a subsidiary or supplier that abuses its workers to the point that some commit suicide, no limits on or regulation of financial derivatives and transnational financial intermediaries?… the list is endless. ..."
"... As always, the questions are "Cui bono?"… "Who benefits"?… How and Why they benefit?… Who selects the short-term "Winners" and "Losers"? And WRT those questions, the final sentence of this post hints at its purpose. ..."
"... Yeah, how is European colonialism - starting in, what, like the 15th century, or something - not "globalisation"? What about the Roman and Persian and Selucid empires? Wasn't that globalisation? I think we've pretty much always lived in a globalised world, one way or another (if "globalised world" even makes sense). ..."
"... Bring back the broader, and more meaningful conception of Political Economy and some actual understanding can be gained. The study of economics cannot be separated from the political dimension of society. Politics being defined as who gets what in social interactions. ..."
"... The neoliberal experiment has run its course. Milton Friedman and his tribe had their alternative plan ready to go and implemented it when they could- to their great success. The best looting system developed-ever. This system only works with the availability of abundant resources and the mental justifications to support that gross exploitation. Both of which are reaching limits. ..."
"... If only the Milton Friedman tribe had interested itself in sports instead of economics. They could have argued that referees and umpires should be removed from the game for greater efficiency of play, and that sports teams would follow game rules by self-regulation. ..."
"... Wouldn't the whole thing just work out more efficiently if you leave traffic lights and rules out of it? Just let everyone figure it out at each light, survival of the fittest. ..."
"... With increasingly free movement of people as tourists whose spending impacts nations GDP, where does it fit in to discussions on globalization and trade? ..."
What is "Globalization" and "Free Trade" really?… Does it encompass
the slave trade, trading in narcotics, deforestation and export of a nation's
tropical hardwood forests, environmentally damaging transnational oil pipelines
or coal ports, fisheries depletion, laying off millions of workers and replacing
them and the products they make with workers and products made in a foreign
country, trading with an enemy, investing capital in a foreign country through
a subsidiary or supplier that abuses its workers to the point that some
commit suicide, no limits on or regulation of financial derivatives and
transnational financial intermediaries?… the list is endless.
As always, the questions are "Cui bono?"… "Who benefits"?… How and
Why they benefit?… Who selects the short-term "Winners" and "Losers"? And
WRT those questions, the final sentence of this post hints at its purpose.
diptherio
Yeah, how is European colonialism - starting in, what, like the 15th
century, or something - not "globalisation"? What about the Roman and Persian
and Selucid empires? Wasn't that globalisation? I think we've pretty much
always lived in a globalised world, one way or another (if "globalised world"
even makes sense).
Norb
Bring back the broader, and more meaningful conception of Political
Economy and some actual understanding can be gained. The study of economics
cannot be separated from the political dimension of society. Politics being
defined as who gets what in social interactions.
What folly. All this complexity and strident study of minutia to bring
about what end? Human history on this planet has been about how societies
form, develop, then recede form prominence. This flow being determined by
how well the society provided for its members or could support their worldview.
Talk about not seeing the forest for the trees.
The neoliberal experiment has run its course. Milton Friedman and
his tribe had their alternative plan ready to go and implemented it when
they could- to their great success. The best looting system developed-ever.
This system only works with the availability of abundant resources and the
mental justifications to support that gross exploitation. Both of which
are reaching limits.
Only by thinking, and communicating in the broader terms of political
economy can we hope to understand our current conditions. Until then, change
will be difficult to enact. Hard landings for all indeed.
flora
If only the Milton Friedman tribe had interested itself in sports
instead of economics. They could have argued that referees and umpires should
be removed from the game for greater efficiency of play, and that sports
teams would follow game rules by self-regulation.
LA Mike September 17, 2016 at 8:15 pm
While in traffic, I was thinking about that today. For some time now,
I've viewed the traffic intersection as being a good example of the social
contract. We all agree on its benefits. But today, I thought about it in
terms of the Friedman Neoliberals.
Why should they have to stop at red lights. Wouldn't the whole thing
just work out more efficiently if you leave traffic lights and rules out
of it? Just let everyone figure it out at each light, survival of the fittest.
sd
Something I have wondered for some time, how does tourism fit into trade?
With increasingly free movement of people as tourists whose spending
impacts nations GDP, where does it fit in to discussions on globalization
and trade?
I Have Strange Dreams
Other things to consider:
– negative effects of immigration (skilled workers leave developing countries
where they are most needed)
– environmental pollution
– destruction of cultures/habitats
– importation of western diet leading to decreased health
– spread of disease (black death, hiv, ebola, bird flu)
– resource wars
– drugs
– happiness
How are these "externalities" calculated?
"... Something along the lines of Sweden, or maybe Germany: the means of production is left in private hands and the owning class is welcome to get rich (there are the equivalent of billionaires in both countries) but there are strict limits as to how much they can screw their workers, cheat their customers or damage the environment. ..."
"... Also, basic social welfare matters (healthcare, child care etc.) are publicly provided, or at least publicly backstopped. The model may not be perfect but it appears to work quite well all in all. ..."
"... Sweden has no taxes on inheritance or residential property, and its 22 percent corporate income tax rate is far lower than America's 35 percent." ..."
"... I do not think that drag queens reading stories, Lionel Shriver's speech and backlash, or the latest Clinton scandal mean civilizational death. They are outliers, but serve to remind the vast majority of the country that there is plenty of room in America for eccentrics of every description to pursue life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. ..."
"... HRC is not really unthinkable. She is just not preferable. A vote for HRC is an acquiescence to the status quo of corrupt, big money politics. Voting for the status quo is unthinkable only if you think the apocalypse is around the next bend. Let's be serious. ..."
"... "we are at the mercy of systematic forces, difficult to name, which can be manipulated by the powerful but not governed by them, and that our problems are unsolvable" ..."
"... I would argue that the "system" is capitalism grown decadent and corrupt. It is a secular religion that we've given ourselves over to and is exactly as he describes: a massive systemic force that some can manipulate for their own gain, but as a society we've lost the will or ability to control it's macro forces which have the power grind up whole demographics, communities, or crash the whole economy. ..."
"... The reaction and fall out from the financial crisis amounted to everyone shrugging and declaring innocence and ignorance. They seemed to say, how could anyone see such a thing coming or do anything about it? How could anyone control such a huge system? ..."
"... I'm always struck by these posts detailing how everything is coming apart in America. I look around and frankly, life looks pretty good. Maybe it's because I'm a minority female, who grew up poor and now has a solidly middle class life. My mother, God rest her soul, was smarter and worked harder than I ever will but did not have one-quarter of the opportunities (education, housing) I've had. My sons have travelled the globe, and have decent jobs and good friends. I am grateful. ..."
"... I wouldn't say that [neo] Liberalism is "spent" as a force, rather that its credibility is. As a cultural force (covering both politics and the economy, among other things), its strength is and remains vast. It is Leviathan. For all intents and purposes, it defines the culture, and thus dictates the imperatives and methods, of our governing and economic elites. ..."
"... Bush proved that electing an imbecile to the Presidency has real consequences for our standing in the world. ..."
"... Trump starts speaking without knowing how his sentence will end, and then he will go to down fighting to defend whatever it was he said even though he never really meant it in the first place. That mix of arrogance and stupidity is more dangerous than Bush. ..."
"... Totally unconvincing. It couldn't be more obvious that Hillary stands for rule by globalists whereas Trump intends to return control of the federal government to We the People. ..."
"... Which candidate is traveling to Louisiana? Flint? Detroit? Mexico (on behalf of America)? Which candidate calls tens of millions of Americans irredeemable and thus it would be justified in exterminating them? ..."
"... What makes Mr. Cosimano so sure that what America is passing into is anything like a "civilization" at all? We could simple pass into barbarism. Can anyone name the leaders who hope to build any kind of civilization at all? ..."
"... For 70+ years, other than while working on a university degree in history, I never gave a thought to civilizational collapse, so I would have been a poor choice to ask for a definition of the term. But after a few years of reading TAC I think I have a handle on it. It's a situation in which someone or some group sees broad social change they don't like. So probably civilizational collapse is constant and ongoing. ..."
"... I would only point out that there is no clear path to economic safety for working Americans, whether they are white are black. Training and hard work will only take you so far in our demand-constrained economy. Whether black optimism or white pessimism turns out to be empirically justified is far from certain. We are constructing the future as we speak, and our actions will determine the answer to this question. ..."
"... As the WikiLeaks dox show, it wasn't "barrel bombs" or "chemical warfare against his own people" that made the elites hungry to overthrow the government there, it was the 2009 decision by Syria not to allow an oil pipeline through from Qatar to Turkey, whereupon the CIA was directed to start funding jihadists and regime change. ..."
"... I'd note that Popes going back to Leo XIII have written on the destructive effects of capitalism or rather the unmitigated pursuit of wealth. Both Benedict and Francis have eloquently expressed the need for a spiritual conversion to solve the world's problems. A conversion which recognizes our solidarity with one another as well as our obligation to the health of Creation. I rather doubt we will find the impetus for this conversion among our politicians. ..."
"... The problem is not civilization-level, Mr. Dreher. The problem is species -level. Humanity as a whole is discovering that it cannot handle too high a level of technology without losing its ability to get feedback from its environment. Without that feedback, its elite classes drift off into literal insanity. The rest of the society soon follows. ..."
"... James Parker in The Atlantic comes to a similar conclusion from a very different starting place ..."
"... "For Trump to be revealed as a salvational figure, the conditions around him must be dire. Trump_vs_deep_state-like fascism, like a certain kind of smash-it-up punk rock-begins in apprehensions of apocalypse." ..."
"... Classical [neo]liberalism presents itself not as a tentative theory of how society might be organized but as a theory of nature. It claims to lay out the forces of nature and to make these a model for social order. Thus free-market fundamentalism, letting the market function "as nature intended". It's an absurd position when applied dogmatically, and no more "natural" than other economic arrangements humans might come up with. ..."
"... Further, as I suggest, our two camps "left" and "right" are no longer distinctly left and right in any traditional sense. The market forces and self-marketing that lead to the fetishization of identity by the left are the same market forces championed by the capitalist right. In America today, both left and right are merely different bourgeois cults of Self. ..."
"... "Pope Francis (and to a slighly lesser degree, his two predecessors) has spoken frequently about unbridled capitalism as a source of the world ills. But his message hasn't been that well received among American conservatives." ..."
Re: we have yet to hear a cogent description of what "bridled" capitalism
is/looks like
Something along the lines of Sweden, or maybe Germany: the means
of production is left in private hands and the owning class is welcome
to get rich (there are the equivalent of billionaires in both countries)
but there are strict limits as to how much they can screw their workers,
cheat their customers or damage the environment.
Also, basic social welfare matters (healthcare, child care etc.)
are publicly provided, or at least publicly backstopped. The model may
not be perfect but it appears to work quite well all in all.
I think a lot of American capitalists would welcome those bridles.
As for Hanby's critique of the liberal order that (thankfully) prevails
in the West, it is only because of that liberal order that we are freely
discussing these matters here, that we can talk about a Benedict Option
in which we can create an economy within the economy, because in the
non-liberal orders that prevailed through most of history, and that
still prevail in a lot of places, we'd be under threat from the state
for free discussion, and we would have little or no choice of education
or jobs, because we'd be serfs or slaves or forced by government to
go into a certain line of work (like my husband's Mandarin teacher,
a scientist who was forced into the countryside during the Cultural
Revolution and then told that she had to become a language teacher.)
I'd be interested to know what kind of system Hanby would like to
see replace our liberal order. Presumably one where he would be in charge.
[neo]Liberalism is exhausted? What does that even mean, except as a
high-brow insult?
If there is one statistic that disproves this claim, it's that religious
attendance is plummeting and the number of people who are "nones" are
rising rapidly.
What's exhausted is religion as a necessary component of social life.
Since that is indisputably true, I guess the only thing that is left
is for the remaining stalwarts resisting the tide to project this idea
of exhaustion onto the other side.
[NFR: You don't understand his point. He's not talking about liberalism
as the philosophy of the Democratic Party. He's talking about liberalism
as the political culture and system of the West. - RD]
"There is nothing like a good shock of pain for dissolving certain
kinds of magic."
Could be that Trump is God's Hot Foot Angel With The Dirty Face waking
Americans up to the increasingly Godless Agenda of The Washington Establishment
and The Corporate Media.
Talk about cynical. There's a lot to take exception to here, but let's
start with this:
"In other words, the fact that we are in civilizational crisis is
becoming unavoidably apparent, though there is obviously little agreement
as to what this crisis consists in or what its causes are and little
interest from the omnipresent media beyond how perceptions of crisis
affect voter behavior."
Possibly because he's one of the relatively few people who think
we're in such a crisis. A lot of us – Republican and Democrat – still
believe ideas and ideals are important and we support them (and their
torchbearers, however flawed) with all the vigor we can muster.
I do not think that drag queens reading stories, Lionel Shriver's
speech and backlash, or the latest Clinton scandal mean civilizational
death. They are outliers, but serve to remind the vast majority of the
country that there is plenty of room in America for eccentrics of every
description to pursue life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I
will admit to thinking this kind of thing much more important on college
campuses, where it can affect the quality of an education.
"We would not see it as a crisis of soul, but a crisis of management…"
Probably true: I'm not so sure that our founding principles really
envision our civilization as having a soul rather than virtues. And
the idea of a national government mucking around with the souls of the
people gives me the heebie-jeebies much as Putin's alliance with the
Orthodox church does you. And if there's anything we can take from the
current election, I think it's that Americans have had enough sociologists,
economists, lawyers, and other "experts" tell them what to do to last
a lifetime. It's part and parcel of the distrust you just posted about.
And I'm not at all sure that Americans are generally despairing,
though it's pretty clear they think our country is on the wrong track.
Hillary ought to be running away with this thing – why isn't she? Because
she's seen as more of the same. Sanders offered the hope of something
new, something transformative: the same thing people see in Trump. Their
hope MAY be misplaced but time will tell. This election cycle ought
to make people a little less confident in their predictions.
"Hope is hard, I admit. But my response is that it is not the pessimist
about liberalism who lacks hope, but the optimist who cannot see beyond
its horizons."
Hope is hard if you're investing in our institutions to carry us
through. They aren't designed to. Our hope is in Christ, Our Redeemer,
and that His will "be done on earth as it is in Heaven." And I will
gladly admit to not being able to see beyond liberalism's horizons –
again, the predictions of experts and philosophers haven't held up too
well over time.
I can say that blithely because my hope is not in liberalism, ultimately.
Do I think some semblance of liberalism can and will survive? Yes, but
the cultural struggles we are going through are part and parcel of the
system. Do I like that? No.
And as much as we need to reinforce communities (through the BenOp)
we also need to recognize that our job isn't always to understand and
prepare. As Christians, it is to obey. It means we repent, fast, and
pray. It means we take the Great Commission seriously even when it's
uncomfortable.
I'm sorry to rip your friend here, I just don't find his piece compelling
at all.
HRC is not really unthinkable. She is just not preferable. A vote for
HRC is an acquiescence to the status quo of corrupt, big money politics.
Voting for the status quo is unthinkable only if you think the apocalypse
is around the next bend. Let's be serious.
Voting for Trump is unthinkable because he is totally clueless about
seemingly he talks about. His arrogance is only surpassed by his ignorance.
Gary Johnson was excoriated because he did not know what Aleppo is.
I bet a paycheck Trump couldn't point to Syria on a map. Trump get's
no serious criticism for insistence that we steal Iraq's oil, his confusion
about why Iran wasn't buying our airplanes, his assertion that Iran
is North Koreas largest trading partner, that South Korea and Japan
ought to have nukes, his threats to extort our NATO allies. There are
dozens of gems like these, but you get the picture. One only needs to
read transcripts from his interviews to understand the limits of his
intellect. Voting for such a profound ignoramus is truly unthinkable.
Teenagers born after 2000 – the so-called 'Generation Z' – are
the most socially conservative generation since the Second World War,
a new study has found.
The youngsters surveyed had more conservative views on gay marriage,
transgender rights and drugs than Baby Boomers, Generation X or Millennials.
The questioned were more prudent than Millennials, Generation X and
Baby Boomers but not quite as cash-savvy as those born in 1945 or before.
…
Only 14 and 15-year-olds were surveyed, by brand consultancy The Gild,
as they were classed as being able to form credible opinions by that
age.
When asked to comment on same-sex marriage, transgender rights and
cannabis legislation, 59 per cent of Generation X teenagers said they
had conservative views.
Around 85 per cent of Millennials and those in Generation X had a
'quite' or 'very liberal' stance overall.
When asked for their specific view on each topic only the Silent
Generation was more conservative that Generation Z.
One in seven – 14% – of the 14 and 15-year-olds took a 'quite conservative'
approach, while only two per cent of Millennials and one per cent of
Generation X.
The Silent Generation had a 'quite conservative' rating of 34
per cent.
I think this was done in Britain but as we know, social trends in
the rest of the West tend to spill over into the States.
Are we looking at another Alex P. Keaton generation? Kids likely
to rebel against the liberalism of their parents?
I can never quite understand the tension between these two concepts:
enlightenment liberalism as a spent force, enervated, listless, barely
able to stir itself even in its own defense, and simultaneously weaponized
SJWism, modern day Jacobins, an army of clenched-jawed fanatics who
will stop at nothing to destroy its enemies.
It seems that one of these perspectives must be less true than the
other.
[NFR: SJWs are a betrayal of classical liberalism. - RD]
I realize that I only comment here when something sets me off, and not
when I agree with you (which is after all why I keep reading you).
So here I am agreeing with this post.
"we are at the mercy of systematic forces, difficult to name, which
can be manipulated by the powerful but not governed by them, and that
our problems are unsolvable"
I would argue that the "system" is capitalism grown decadent and
corrupt. It is a secular religion that we've given ourselves over to
and is exactly as he describes: a massive systemic force that some can
manipulate for their own gain, but as a society we've lost the will
or ability to control it's macro forces which have the power grind up
whole demographics, communities, or crash the whole economy.
The reaction and fall out from the financial crisis amounted to everyone
shrugging and declaring innocence and ignorance. They seemed to say,
how could anyone see such a thing coming or do anything about it? How
could anyone control such a huge system?
As your friend says, even if we want to exert more control over this
system (which we can with the will), this would end up being a technocratic
project, not a spiritual one. Sad because a spiritual argument against
the excesses of capitalism might actually gain more traction at this
point, than tired liberal arguments.
I'm always struck by these posts detailing how everything is coming
apart in America. I look around and frankly, life looks pretty good.
Maybe it's because I'm a minority female, who grew up poor and now has
a solidly middle class life. My mother, God rest her soul, was smarter
and worked harder than I ever will but did not have one-quarter of the
opportunities (education, housing) I've had. My sons have travelled
the globe, and have decent jobs and good friends. I am grateful.
My friends and I went out the other night in Austin, and there were
families, very diverse, walking in the outdoor mall, standing in line
to buy $5 scoops of ice cream for their children. Not hipsters, or God
forbid the elite, just regular middle class folk enjoying an evening
out. The truth is, life has improved immeasurably for many Americans.
Do we have serious problems? Of course, but can we have just a wee bit
of perspective?
You may be right about the problem, but not its nature. Capitalism
is not an impersonal force that can't be controlled, it's what people
do economically if they are left alone to do it. The problem comes when
people are not, simply put, virtuous. When people seek a return on investment
that is not simply reasonable, but rather the most they can possibly
get. We have had a capitalist system for long enough that some people
who are both good at manipulating it and, often, unethical enough to
not care what impact their choices have on others, have accumulated
vast amounts of wealth while others, over generations, have made choices
that have not been profitable, have lost wealth.
There used to be mechanisms for preventing these trends to continue
to their logical conclusion, as they are here. Judea had Jubilee. The
Byzantine Empire had an Emperor whose interests were served by a prosperous
landed middle class to populate the Thematic armies and who would occasionally
step in and return the land his part time soldiers had lost through
bad loans from aristocrats. We have no such mechanism for a farmer to
regain land lost due to foreclosure.
We should not redistribute wealth in such a way that a person has no
incentive to work, but we should never allow a person's means of earning
a livelihood to be taken from them.
I wouldn't say that [neo] Liberalism is "spent" as a force, rather that its
credibility is. As a cultural force (covering both politics and the
economy, among other things), its strength is and remains vast. It is
Leviathan. For all intents and purposes, it defines the culture, and
thus dictates the imperatives and methods, of our governing and economic
elites. The crisis of Western political legitimacy that is manifest
in the nomination of Trump, Brexit and numerous other movements and
incidents is a sign that the legitimacy of this order has been undermined
and is dissolving within the societies it effectively governs; in some
unspoken sense, the unwashed masses of the West (those not part of the
so-called "New Class") have come to understand that they have been betrayed
by the Liberal order, that it has not lived up to its promises, even
that it is becoming or has become a force destructive of their communities
and their ability to thrive as human beings.
The ever-increasing autonomy promised by the Liberal order has turned
out to be a poisoned chalice for many. As it has dissolved the bonds
of families and communities, it has atomized people into individuals
without traditional social supports in an increasingly cutthroat and
uncaring world. People cannot help but understand that they have lost
something or are missing something, even if they are not able to articulate
or identify that loss. It is a sickness of the soul, in the sense that
the ailment is somewhere close to the heart of what it means to be human.
We are what we are, and the Liberal order is pushing us into opposition
to our own natures, as if we can choose to be something other than what
we are.
This idea that Democrats hate Hillary in the same way Republicans despise
Trump is way off base in my opinion. This attempt at equivalency, like
so many others, is false. I voted for Sanders because I liked him better,
but I am not holding my nose to vote for Hillary Clinton. There are
several things I actually admire about her, including her attention
to detail and tenacity. I'll always remember how she sat before Congress
as First Lady, no paper or crib sheet in sight, and presented her detailed
and compelling case for national health care . I thought that was awesome
then, and still do.
Still, as I've noted many times, I never liked the Clintons that
much, mainly because I hated a lot of what Bill Clinton stood for and
what he did. Aside from his embarrassing sexual escapades, most of that
pertained to positions that seemed more Republican than Democratic (on
welfare mothers, mental patients, deregulation of the broadcast industry,
etc.) I also didn't like their position on abortion nor the way their
people treated Gov. Casey at the party convention, nor the dialing back
on Jimmy Carter's uncompromising stand for human rights in the third
world. Some of Hillary's hawkish positions are still a concern, but
what she stands for in general is far and away more humane and within
my understanding of what's good for the country and the world at large
than anything Republicans represent. Their ideas hurt people on too
many fronts to justify voting for them just because I may agree with
them on principle when it comes to matters such abortion. Trump just
adds insult to injury in every regard.
Very well said. What accounts for the relative optimism of minorities
vs. whites?
State of the economy, personal situation, optimism that your kids future
will be better than yours, etc. In all of these surveys, it is the pessimism
of whites, untethered from empirical reality, that stands out as the
outlier.
"Sad because a spiritual argument against the excesses of capitalism
might actually gain more traction at this point, than tired liberal
arguments."
It would gain more traction, and it would be better focused at what
is much larger cause of the current social, economic, and family problems
of the working classes.
But the argument won't be made, because the majority of those that
believe in a societal crisis have pinned the origin of this crisis on
feminism, the sexual revolution, and SJW, and have bought in full the
bootstraps language of the radical capitalism. Even the majority crunchy
cons, that would be sympathetic to the arguments against capitalism,
would rather try to solve the ills of the world via cultural instead
of economic ways.
Pope Francis (and to a slighly lesser degree, his two predecessors)
has spoken frequently about unbridled capitalism as a source of the
world ills. But his message hasn't been that well received among American
conservatives
[NFR: Pope St. John Paul II and Pope Benedict said the same thing.
- RD]
Bush proved that electing an imbecile to the Presidency has real
consequences for our standing in the world. Trump is just as stupid,
but he is far more dangerous. At least Bush wasn't a egomaniac.
Trump starts speaking without knowing how his sentence will end, and
then he will go to down fighting to defend whatever it was he said even
though he never really meant it in the first place. That mix of arrogance
and stupidity is more dangerous than Bush.
"In fact, I doubt we any longer possess enough of a 'civilization' to
understand what a 'civilizational crisis' would really mean."
I think someone has no idea what "civilization" means. None of his
definitions apply.
What we are seeing is the radical change in Western Civilization
from the old Graeco-Roman/Christian model to a yet undefined American
model. (Which is why Islam in Europe is not very important. Europe is
no longer very important.) No one guards the "glory that was Greece"
any more. We've moved out of that. The debate will be when did the transition
occur. Did it begin in the 19th Century with the Age of Invention? Did
it occur in the flash of gunpowder that was WW1? Was it the blasting
to rubble of Monte Cassino when the weapons of the new blew the symbol
of the old to ruin? Was it the moment men stood upon the Moon and nothing
the bronze age pilers of rocks had to say was of any value any more?
The key to understanding the change is that the old values are dead
and we are in the process of creating new ones. No one knows where that
is going to go. It is all too new.
Hanby is wrong. We have a civilization, but it is leaving his in
the dust.
Totally unconvincing. It couldn't be more obvious that Hillary stands
for rule by globalists whereas Trump intends to return control of the
federal government to We the People.
Which candidate is traveling to Louisiana? Flint? Detroit? Mexico
(on behalf of America)? Which candidate calls tens of millions of Americans
irredeemable and thus it would be justified in exterminating them?
Seriously, only one of these two appears interested in leading the
nation.
"What's exhausted is religion as a necessary component of social
life."
This is so hilariously untrue, but also very sad that the secular
Left cannot see its own idols or even read its own headlines.
What does he think is happening in the United States besides the
rise of a revolutionary moral order, ruled by fickle tastemakers who
believe that their own emotions and thoughts have creative power? How
else would history have a "side"? How else could "gender" be entirely
unmoored from sex and any other scientific fact? Progressivism even
has "climate change" as its chosen apocalypse which will visit destruction
if not enough fealty is granted to an ever-more-omnipotent and omniscient
central government? Does he not see how over and over again, this week's
progressive leaders attacks last week's? Amy Schumer, anyone?
Once a culture abolishes the One True God, as ours has, then that
culture begins to find other sources for the attributes of God and for
the definitions of virtues and vices.
What makes Mr. Cosimano so sure that what America is passing into
is anything like a "civilization" at all? We could simple pass into
barbarism. Can anyone name the leaders who hope to build any kind of
civilization at all?
Never forget that there is a real and clear choice before us.
Clinton will deliver amnesty to 40 million illegals. Continue the
1 million legal immigrants per yer all from the Third World. She will
radically upsize the Muslim refugee influx to hundreds of thousands
per year. All terrible things.
Trump will do the opposite. This will make a massive difference to
the future of the country - Trump, good…Clinton, bad - and is what this
election is about.
For 70+ years, other than while working on a university degree in history,
I never gave a thought to civilizational collapse, so I would have been
a poor choice to ask for a definition of the term. But after a few years
of reading TAC I think I have a handle on it. It's a situation in which
someone or some group sees broad social change they don't like. So probably
civilizational collapse is constant and ongoing.
As for me, I'm outside somewhere every day and so far not even a
tiny piece of the sky has fallen on me.
@xrdsmom
Empirical reality depends on where you stand. Younote that your prospects
have improved relative to your mom's. For the working class whites working
at low paying jobs, they have declined. Is their anger simply a response
to loss of white privilege? In the sense that this privilege consisted
of access to well-paying jobs out of high school, the answer is yes.
I would only point out that there is no clear path to economic safety
for working Americans, whether they are white are black. Training and
hard work will only take you so far in our demand-constrained economy.
Whether black optimism or white pessimism turns out to be empirically
justified is far from certain. We are constructing the future as we
speak, and our actions will determine the answer to this question.
It's true a lot of people couldn't point to Syria; because that's how
important it is to most people. So why are we now involved in a full
scale war there, when the American people clearly stated they didn't
want another war?
As the WikiLeaks dox show, it wasn't "barrel bombs" or "chemical
warfare against his own people" that made the elites hungry to overthrow
the government there, it was the 2009 decision by Syria not to allow
an oil pipeline through from Qatar to Turkey, whereupon the CIA was
directed to start funding jihadists and regime change.
Hillary is not as corrupt as some think nor is Trump likely to be able
to enact much of his agenda(most of which he has no commitment to –
it is all a performance). So I do not see either as end times candidates.
However – a civilization must assure certain things – order, cohesion,
safety from invasion and occupation. It also must assure that the resources
we secure from the earth are available – good soil, clean water, sustainable
management of energy sources etc. This is where our civilization is
failing – if you doubt this – spend a moment looking up soil erosion
on Google. Or dead zones Mississippi and Nile deltas. Depletion of fish
stocks. Loss of arable land and potable water all over the planet. Is
this calamitous failure a function of liberalism or capitalism run amok?
Perhaps the two go hand in hand?
I'd note that Popes going back to
Leo XIII have written on the destructive effects of capitalism or rather
the unmitigated pursuit of wealth. Both Benedict and Francis have eloquently
expressed the need for a spiritual conversion to solve the world's problems.
A conversion which recognizes our solidarity with one another as well
as our obligation to the health of Creation. I rather doubt we will
find the impetus for this conversion among our politicians.
But there are certainly all over the earth groups of people who have
experienced this conversion and are seeking to build civilizations which
are just and sustainable. Rod has written about some – his friends in
Italy as an example.
The problem is not civilization-level, Mr. Dreher. The problem is
species -level. Humanity as a whole is discovering that it cannot handle
too high a level of technology without losing its ability to get feedback
from its environment. Without that feedback, its elite classes drift
off into literal insanity. The rest of the society soon follows.
The trick is going to be recovering our connection with the Realities
of existence without bringing technological civilization down or re-engineering
Humanity into something we would not recognize.
Color me less than optimistic about our prospects.
"I really think there is a pervasive, but unarticulated sense that
liberalism is exhausted, that we are at the mercy of systematic forces,
difficult to name, which can be manipulated by the powerful but not
governed by them, and that our problems are unsolvable. The reasons
for this anxiety are manifold and cannot be reduced to politics or economics…"
"For Trump to be revealed as a salvational figure, the conditions
around him must be dire. Trump_vs_deep_state-like fascism, like a certain kind
of smash-it-up punk rock-begins in apprehensions of apocalypse."
Hanky's diagnosis is brilliant. Yes, thanks for posting, Rod.
One of our fundamental problems, along with the conceptual horizons
imposed by liberalism, is the obsolete language of "left" and "right"
that we continue to apply when weighing our options. This too is part
of why we can't construct a politics of hope, and in my reading it explains
the decline of the left into identity politics (our Democratic Party
is not any more "the left" in any meaningful way) and of the right into
"movement conservatism" or Trumpian nationalism.
Classical [neo]liberalism presents itself not as a tentative theory of
how society might be organized but as a theory of nature. It claims
to lay out the forces of nature and to make these a model for social
order. Thus free-market fundamentalism, letting the market function
"as nature intended". It's an absurd position when applied dogmatically,
and no more "natural" than other economic arrangements humans might
come up with.
The only truly rock solid aspect of classical liberalism in my mind
is its theory of individual dignity, the permanent and nonnegotiable
value of each individual in essence and before the law. The left has
taken this and run with it and turned it into a divination of individual
desire and self-definition, which is something different. The capitalist
right has taken it and turned it into a theory of individual responsibility
for one's economic fate, which is helpful in ways, but not decisive
or even fully explanatory as to why people end up where they are. And
a lot of people are not in a good place thanks to the free trade enthusiasts
who believe what they're up to somehow reflects the eternal forces of
nature.
Further, as I suggest, our two camps "left" and "right" are no
longer distinctly left and right in any traditional sense. The market
forces and self-marketing that lead to the fetishization of identity
by the left are the same market forces championed by the capitalist
right. In America today, both left and right are merely different bourgeois
cults of Self.
It should be no surprise that the inalienable dignity of the individual,
that rock solid core of liberal thinking, grew directly from the Christian
soil of Paul's assertion of the equality of all–men, women, Greek, Jew,
freed, slave–in Christ. (Galatians 3:28) The world's current thinking
on "human rights" is merely a universalized version of Paul's thought,
hatched in a Christian Europe by philosophes who didn't recognize
just how Christian they were.
After all the utopian dusts settle, whether the dust of Adam Smith
or the dust of PC Non-Discrimination, we must see that the one thing
holding us together is this recognition that the political order must
respect human rights. The core issue at present is thus that we legislate
in ways that reflect a realistic understanding of these rights. As for
"movement conservatism" or PC progressivism, they each represent pipe
dreams that don't address the economic or legal challenges in coherent
ways, and they each sacrifice true rights at one altar or another.
The obsolete language of "left" and "right" keeps us unwilling to
grapple with the real economic and legal challenges, if only because
we're too busy cheerleading either one version of the capitalist cult
or the other.
I'm looking forward to The Benedict Option mainly as providing
some answers as to how the remnant of faithful Christians in this mayhem
might both hold their faith intact while perhaps simultaneously developing
less utopian modes of thinking about community. The neoliberal order
may very well be shaping up to be for us something like the pagan Roman
Empire was to the early church. We finally have to face that, politically
speaking, we are in the world but not of it.
Re: Clinton will deliver amnesty to 40 million illegals.
Will she be inviting them in from parallel universes? Because we
do not have 40 million illegals. The number is closer to eleven million.
Also the president can't do this on his/her own. Congress has to
act. The House will remain GOP. The Senate may too, or will flip back
to GOP after 2018. As I mentioned Clinton's hands will be tied as much
as Obama's have been since 2010. That includes Supreme Court appointments.
Only the most boring of moderates will get through– sure, they won't
overturn Roe or Oberfell, but they won't rubber stamp much new either.
"Pope Francis (and to a slighly lesser degree, his two predecessors)
has spoken frequently about unbridled capitalism as a source of the world
ills. But his message hasn't been that well received among American conservatives."
[NFR: Pope St. John Paul II and Pope Benedict said the same thing. -
RD]"
It doesn't sit well for two reasons: (a) we have yet to hear a cogent
description of what "bridled" capitalism is/looks like and (b) capitalism
has its faults, but it has raised far more boats than it has swamped.
Until we hear an admission of (b) and an explanation of (a), their statements
will continue to fall on deaf ears. Particularly from Pope Francis, whose
grip on economic ideas seems tenuous at best.
"... If that record is perceived as unacceptable, then again it doesn't much matter who the challenger is or what he or she says or does. The incumbent or incumbent party loses. ..."
"... The Clinton email thing does not begin to rise to the level of Watergate or the Monica Lewinsky affair, except perhaps in the fever swamps of Fox News. ..."
"... My guess is that ultimately the two third parties fielding candidates this election will not trigger this key; they are what Lichtman calls "perennial third parties" and not really insurgencies led by well-known political figures, which is when the third party key is generally triggered. ..."
"... Having said all that, I congratulate the author for recognizing and engaging with Lichtman's work. It's a very substantial theory with a great track record that, for reasons I don't fully understand, is generally overlooked by journalists who write about such things. ..."
"... Right now, polling composite scores put Hillary Clinton at +5 or more over Trump in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Michigan, Colorado, Wisconsin, and Virginia. Add in the safely blue states and her floor is 272 electoral votes, even assuming she underperforms relative to her polling by 5 points across the board. Hillary wins even on a bad night. ..."
"... We elected Obama in large part to repudiate Bush, who was a total disaster. Now, if your hypothesis holds, we may elect Trump over Hillary as a repudiation of Obama who is becoming more of a disaster with each passing minute. In 4 or 8 years, which loser will the Democrats trot out to repudiate Trump, who is virtually guaranteed to be a total disaster? Most sane Americans just want this roller coaster to be over. ..."
"... Trump has the momentum right now, as Hillary Clinton stumbles. ..."
"... The overall national numbers show a slight and late recovery from recession. However, the average and median numbers conceal a split, in which a majority of voters did not participate in the recovery, especially in key swing states. ..."
"... Trump is actively drawing support from this sense of failure to recover, so it is not just theoretical. I'd score the recovery against the incumbent too, because key voting segments would. ..."
"... We are seeing a good example of the preference cascade. For well over a year Clinton has been capped at 45%, usually in the low 40's. As it becomes more respectable to vote for Trump, the more people are willing to move from the undecided/third party column to the Trump column. ..."
"... If I recall correctly, Lichtman also scores both the foreign policy/military success and failure keys differently. ISIS is a foreign policy failure, but not on the public perception of Pearl Harbor, the fall of Vietnam, or the Iran hostage crisis. And the Iran deal is a foreign policy success, but not on the level of, say, winning WWII. ..."
"... Polls, by themselves, don't predict much, and certainly not long-term – although I agree that Clinton remains the likely winner this year. ..."
"... Obama (I did not vote for him in '08 or '12) has succeeded and some areas, and failed in others – such is the nature of the job. ..."
"... As a student of history, I suspect his presidency will be graded somewhere between B- and C+; slightly above average. Whereas, by your assessment, his predecessor was "can't miss" disasters (D- leaning toward F). ..."
"... we may elect Trump over Hillary as a repudiation of Obama who is becoming more of a disaster with each passing minute ..."
"... At the end of the day, though, Lichtman's model, like most models of voting behavior, is not intended so much as a predictive system as an attempt to explain how voters make decisions. The Lichtman theory does a remarkable job of modeling such decision-making, and demonstrates clearly his hypothesis that presidential elections are mostly referenda on the performance of the incumbent party. That doesn't mean it will always be so, but he makes a compelling case that it's been that way since the Civil War. ..."
"... Obama's economy isn't gonna help Hillary Clinton. Government data show that the economy only grew by 1.2 percent in the second quarter. First quarter growth was also revised down from 1.1 percent to 0.8 percent. ..."
"... Hillary Clinton addressed the sluggish economy in her speech last night, admitting that Americans "feel like the economy just isn't working." Although she cited economic growth under president Obama, she insisted that "none of us can be satisfied with the status quo." ..."
In 1976, Washington insider Averell Harriman famously said of Georgia peanut
farmer Jimmy Carter, the one-term governor and presidential aspirant, "He can't
be nominated, I don't know him and I don't know anyone who does.'' Within months
Jimmy Carter was president. Harriman's predictive folly serves as an allegory
of democratic politics. The unthinkable can happen, and when it does it becomes
not only thinkable but natural, even commonplace. The many compelling elements
of Carter's unusual presidential quest remained shrouded from Harriman's vision
because they didn't track with his particular experiences and political perceptions.
Call it the Harriman syndrome.
The Harriman syndrome has been on full display during the presidential candidacy
of Donald Trump. He couldn't possibly get the Republican nomination. Too boorish.
A political neophyte. No organization. No intellectual depth. A divisive character
out of sync with Republicans' true sensibilities. Then he got the nomination,
and now those same perceptions are being trotted out to bolster the view that
he can't possibly become president. Besides, goes the conventional wisdom, demographic
trends are impinging upon the Electoral College in ways that pretty much preclude
any Republican from winning the presidency in our time.
But Trump actually can win, despite his gaffe-prone ways and his poor standing
in the polls as the general-election campaign gets under way. I say this based
upon my thesis, explored in my latest book ( Where They Stand: The American
Presidents in the Eyes of Voters and Historians ), that presidential elections
are largely referendums on the incumbent or incumbent party. If the incumbent's
record is adjudged by the electorate to be exemplary, it doesn't matter who
the challenger is or what he or she says or does. The incumbent wins. If
that record is perceived as unacceptable, then again it doesn't much matter
who the challenger is or what he or she says or does. The incumbent or incumbent
party loses.
Worth noting is that Lichtman himself scores the keys differently than does
the author of this post. As the inventor of the system, his analysis deserves
considerable weight. In particular, he scores the nomination contest key,
the scandal key, and the challenger charisma key as all favorable to Democrats.
I'm not sure I agree with him about the nomination contest key, but I
think that, by the criteria he used in analyzing past elections, he's right
about the other two. The Clinton email thing does not begin to rise
to the level of Watergate or the Monica Lewinsky affair, except perhaps
in the fever swamps of Fox News. As far as charisma, Lichtman identified
four 20th-century candidates as charismatic: the two Roosevelts, Kennedy,
and Reagan. Trump is not in that league.
The third-party key is, as the author states, not really possible to
call at this point. My guess is that ultimately the two third parties
fielding candidates this election will not trigger this key; they are what
Lichtman calls "perennial third parties" and not really insurgencies led
by well-known political figures, which is when the third party key is generally
triggered.
One other point is worth mentioning. Lichtman's first key, the incumbent
mandate key, changed during the development of his theory. It was originally
based on whether the incumbent party had received an absolute majority of
the popular vote in the previous election (which, in this case, would have
favored the Democrats). But, because that led to the system predicting an
incorrect outcome in one particular election (I don't remember which one),
he changed it to the current comparison of seats won in the previous two
mid-terms. I think there's a case to be made that the advanced state of
the gerrymandering art may have rendered this key useless; it is now entirely
possible for a party to gain seats from one mid-term to the next while actually
doing less well in the popular vote. In fact, that's exactly what happened
from 2010 to 2014; the percentage of the vote that Republican house members
received was lower in 2014 than it was in 2010, even though they gained
more seats in 2014. In any case, I don't think that it really favors Trump
in the way the author of the OP thinks it does.
Having said all that, I congratulate the author for recognizing and
engaging with Lichtman's work. It's a very substantial theory with a great
track record that, for reasons I don't fully understand, is generally overlooked
by journalists who write about such things.
I'm highly skeptical of this kind of historic analysis. It's the sort of
thing that works until it doesn't, and even then only sort of works because
the idea's proponents wind up explaining away the exceptions.
What I trust is polling. It's quite well refined, and averaging the results
of multiple polls tends to smooth out errors.
Right now, polling composite scores put Hillary Clinton at +5 or
more over Trump in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Michigan, Colorado, Wisconsin,
and Virginia. Add in the safely blue states and her floor is 272 electoral
votes, even assuming she underperforms relative to her polling by 5 points
across the board. Hillary wins even on a bad night.
Of course Trump might close some of that gap in the next seven weeks.
We'll see.
"If the incumbent's record is adjudged by the electorate to be exemplary,
it doesn't matter who the challenger is or what he or she says or does.
The incumbent wins. If that record is perceived as unacceptable, then
again it doesn't much matter who the challenger is or what he or she
says or does. The incumbent or incumbent party loses."
That is a compelling hypothesis which I find very plausible. As our two
parties drift farther apart and become incapable of giving us any representatives
whom we find exemplary, what happens to us? We elected Obama in large
part to repudiate Bush, who was a total disaster. Now, if your hypothesis
holds, we may elect Trump over Hillary as a repudiation of Obama who is
becoming more of a disaster with each passing minute. In 4 or 8 years, which
loser will the Democrats trot out to repudiate Trump, who is virtually guaranteed
to be a total disaster? Most sane Americans just want this roller coaster
to be over.
I'm highly skeptical of this kind of historic analysis. It's the
sort of thing that works until it doesn't, and even then only sort of
works because the idea's proponents wind up explaining away the exceptions.
This, in spades. Plus, many of these keys are so subjective (at least
prospectively) as to render them meaningless for anything but fun predictive
parlor games.
What I trust is polling. It's quite well refined, and averaging
the results of multiple polls tends to smooth out errors.
Yes and no. Gallup thought this, too, when it predicted Dewey would defeat
Truman. Nate Silver was absolutely positive that Trump could never ever
ever win the Republican nomination, until he did.
My analysis is that under the old, pre-Big Data-driven elections (i.e.
micro-targeting your likely voters, registering them if they are unregistered,
and stopping at nothing (probably not even the election laws) in getting
them to the polls), Trump would win rather handily, but under the new Big
Data-driven campaigns that the initial Obama campaign was the first to master,
Clinton is a huge favorite, baggage and all. Organization and ground game
trumps a lot – not everything, but a lot.
The overall national numbers show a slight and late recovery from recession.
However, the average and median numbers conceal a split, in which a majority
of voters did not participate in the recovery, especially in key swing states.
Trump is actively drawing support from this sense of failure to recover,
so it is not just theoretical. I'd score the recovery against the incumbent
too, because key voting segments would.
Averaging polls is the sort of thing people not good at math like to say,
believing it makes them sound good at math.
We are seeing a good example of the preference cascade. For well
over a year Clinton has been capped at 45%, usually in the low 40's. As
it becomes more respectable to vote for Trump, the more people are willing
to move from the undecided/third party column to the Trump column.
If I recall correctly, Lichtman also scores both the foreign policy/military
success and failure keys differently. ISIS is a foreign policy failure,
but not on the public perception of Pearl Harbor, the fall of Vietnam, or
the Iran hostage crisis. And the Iran deal is a foreign policy success,
but not on the level of, say, winning WWII.
I'm highly skeptical of this kind of historic analysis. It's
the sort of thing that works until it doesn't, and even then only sort
of works because the idea's proponents wind up explaining away the exceptions.
What I trust is polling. It's quite well refined, and averaging
the results of multiple polls tends to smooth out errors.
Lichtman has been able to predict successfully the popular-vote winner
for the last 7 or 8 elections, in many cases many months in advance – which,
by standards of electoral prediction models, is pretty remarkable. Polls,
by themselves, don't predict much, and certainly not long-term – although
I agree that Clinton remains the likely winner this year.
@Tim, How has/is Obama "becoming more of a disaster with each passing minute."?
The consensus might be on the Foreign Policy side of the equation, but truthfully,
he's spent 8 years cleaning up the mess handed him by the "total disaster"
who preceded him. If you want the rollercoaster to be over, get off the
rollercoaster. That is to say, most of the excitement offered by the rollercoaster
lies in its design (partisan/tribal/echo chamber nonsense).
See: Benghazi, Clinton Foundation, emails, Parkinson's, etc., etc. be
legitimate concerns for a John Q. Public, the hyperbolic birther indignation
does a disservice to critical thinking, rational Americans. Make no mistake,
the GOP candidate has literally made a career (TV/Pro Wrestling) trading
in this currency, but in the end, such hyperbole is a distraction. Obama
(I did not vote for him in '08 or '12) has succeeded and some areas, and
failed in others – such is the nature of the job.
As a student of history, I suspect his presidency will be graded
somewhere between B- and C+; slightly above average. Whereas, by your assessment,
his predecessor was "can't miss" disasters (D- leaning toward F).
I also fail to see how President Obama, a veritable reincarnation of Bill
Clinton, but without the scandals, is "becoming more of a disaster each
passing minute." We have less (visible) war, we have more jobs, and we have
better pay. Yes, the small segment of the population that was paying peanuts
for narrowly-defined healthcare 'plans' is paying more now for healthcare
than they were 6 years ago, but a large segment now has healthcare that
previously did not. This will take decades to unfold but the savings will
be immense over the long run. Our international prestige is as high or higher
than it was at its peak in 2002 (before Bush started the stupider of his
two wars).
It's barely an exaggeration to say that, outside of the echo chamber,
none of partisan concerns of the right wing are shared by the electorate
at large. The plight of the underclass (of any color) is not being addressed
regardless of which candidate you choose in this election. Immigration is
a red herring issue, designed to hide the fact that your boss hasn't given
you a raise in 20 years.
I'm sure it makes Obama haters and Republican partisans feel good to think
that Obama's Presidency is the cause for Hillary Clinton's loss (if she
does indeed lose). Economic indicators along with Presidential approval
ratings however suggest that if Hillary does lose it will be in spite of
the electorates feelings on Obama not because of it.
many of these keys are so subjective (at least prospectively) as to render
them meaningless for anything but fun predictive parlor games.
That is the usual objection to Lichtman's theory. But his work gives
pretty clear examples of what he considers the kind of events that drive
his predictors. For example, "foreign policy/military success" looks like
winning WWII and not like the Iran nuclear deal; "foreign policy/military
failure" looks like Pearl Harbor and not ISIS' (temporary) success in gaining
territory. "Scandal" looks like Watergate, and not like Clinton's email
(or, interestingly, Iran/Contra, if memory serves). "Social unrest" looks
like the summer of 1968, and not like the shootings in Orlando, Dallas,
and San Bernadino.
In short, events that drive his predictors are things that are the main
(or even sole) subject of national conversation for weeks. Deciding what
events are such drivers is not completely objective, perhaps, but it's also
not hard to figure out what the author of the system would consider a given
event. A system like his only works if one scores things as honestly as
possible, and not as one might wish them to be. Then it can work very well.
At the end of the day, though, Lichtman's model, like most models
of voting behavior, is not intended so much as a predictive system as an
attempt to explain how voters make decisions. The Lichtman theory does a
remarkable job of modeling such decision-making, and demonstrates clearly
his hypothesis that presidential elections are mostly referenda on the performance
of the incumbent party. That doesn't mean it will always be so, but he makes
a compelling case that it's been that way since the Civil War.
With the chance that Donald will be President, and his followers rejecting
outright the Washington establishment and corporate media as enemies; if
he does come to power, who are We, the People, supposed to respect and trust?
How can you be loyal to, and obey the laws of, a country governed by "Washington
insiders"? How can you trust the liberal, coastal, educated, elite media
reporting government malfeasance? In who or what should we place our trust?
Dark days ahead, dark days.
The hope must be in a reinvigorated Republican Party in 2018 and 2020. As
Trump again raises his birther conspiracy, the strongman will give voters
plenty of reasons to reject his incoherent campaign. Total waste, when 2016
should have firmly been in Republican hands. I understand why he demolished
the Republican field and realigned the issues that galvanize Republican
voters, but in the end his pathological narcissism will be his downfall.
If he wins, it will be the best thing that ever happened to the Democratic
Party. They will control government from 2018 to the end of our lives.
Obama's economy isn't gonna help Hillary Clinton. Government data show
that the economy only grew by 1.2 percent in the second quarter. First quarter
growth was also revised down from 1.1 percent to 0.8 percent.
Hillary Clinton addressed the sluggish economy in her speech last
night, admitting that Americans "feel like the economy just isn't working."
Although she cited economic growth under president Obama, she insisted that
"none of us can be satisfied with the status quo."
"... Seems a dangerous practice to rely on one's size to shield them from consequences of ineffectual decisions. I think we are already stretched thin, but our size buffers the stumbles. ..."
"... Like the runner on pain killers, who keeps running despite a shattered knee caps. Sometimes we press through our pain. Sometimes we need to slow down. Sometimes we need to stop. But unless we experience the pain – we simply don't know. ..."
"... It all starts with that ridiculous belief in "American Exceptionalism". The belief that we are the one country, the only country, who is going to save the world, again and again. ..."
"... Once you've adopted this frame of reference, what happens anywhere in the world for any Reason is America's fault and responsibility. And once you put on those exceptionally colored glasses it's not possible to have a rational view of other countries and their actions; because they can never be seen as anything other than an affirmation or rejection of our exceptionalism. Another effect of this is, being exceptional, whatever America does is just and pure and right. ..."
"... It blinds us to our own stupidity and errors, it gets us sucked into other peoples troubles and it makes it easy for other countries to manipulate us to their ends. ..."
Ben Denison
criticizes a familiar flaw in foreign policy commentary:
When a surprising event occurs that threatens U.S. interests, many are
quick to blame Washington's lack of leadership and deride the administration
for failing to anticipate and prevent the crisis. Recent examples from the
continuing conflict in Syria, Russia's intervention in Ukraine, Iran's pursuit
of a nuclear weapon, and even the attempted coup in Turkey, all illustrate
how this is a regular impulse for the foreign policy punditry class. This
impulse, while comforting to some, fails to consider the interests and agency
of the other countries involved in the crisis. Instead of turning to detailed
analysis and tracing the international context of a crisis, often we are
bombarded with an abundance of concerns about a lack of American leadership.
The inability or unwillingness to acknowledge and take into account the agency
and interests of other political actors around the world is one of the more
serious flaws in the way many Americans think and talk about these issues. This
not only fails to consider how other actors are likely to respond to a proposed
U.S. action, but it credits the U.S. with far more control over other parts
of the world and much more competence in handling any given issue than any government
has ever possessed or ever will. Because the U.S. is the preeminent major power
in the world, there is a tendency to treat any undesirable event as something
that our government has "allowed" to happen through carelessness, misplaced
priorities, or some other mistake. Many foreign policy pundits recoil from the
idea that there are events beyond our government's ability to "shape" or that
there are actors that cannot be compelled to behave as we wish (provided we
simply have enough "resolve"), because it means that there are many problems
around the world that the U.S. cannot and shouldn't attempt to fix.
When a protest movement takes to the streets in another country and is then
brutally suppressed, many people, especially hawkish pundits, decry our government's
"failure" to "support" the movement, as if it were the lack of U.S. support
and not internal political factors that produced the outcome. When the overthrow
of a foreign government by a protest movement leads to an intervention by a
neighboring major power, the U.S. is again faulted for "failing" to stop the
intervention, as if it could have done so short of risking great power conflict.
Even more absurdly, the same intervention is sometimes blamed on a U.S. decision
not to attack a third country in another part of the world unrelated to the
crisis in question. In order to claim all these things, one not only has to
fail to take account of the interests and agency of other states, but one also
has to believe that the rest of the world revolves around us and every action
others take can ultimately be traced back to what our government does (or doesn't
do). That's not just shoddy analysis, but a serious delusion about how people
all around the world behave. At the same time, there is a remarkable eagerness
on the part of many of the same people to overlook the consequences of things
that the U.S. has actually done, so that many of our pundits ignore our own
government's agency when it suits them.
"At the same time, there is a remarkable eagerness on the part of many
of the same people to overlook the consequences of things that the U.S.
has actually done, so that many of our pundits ignore our own government's
agency when it suits them."
It is the failure of the after party assessment. Regardless of success
or failure (however defined) the tend not to have an after action report
by the political class is why there's little movement in this area.
Seems a dangerous practice to rely on one's size to shield them from
consequences of ineffectual decisions. I think we are already stretched
thin, but our size buffers the stumbles.
Like the runner on pain killers, who keeps running despite a shattered
knee caps. Sometimes we press through our pain. Sometimes we need to slow
down. Sometimes we need to stop. But unless we experience the pain – we
simply don't know.
It all starts with that ridiculous belief in "American Exceptionalism".
The belief that we are the one country, the only country, who is going to
save the world, again and again.
Once you've adopted this frame of reference, what happens anywhere
in the world for any Reason is America's fault and responsibility. And once
you put on those exceptionally colored glasses it's not possible to have
a rational view of other countries and their actions; because they can never
be seen as anything other than an affirmation or rejection of our exceptionalism.
Another effect of this is, being exceptional, whatever America does is just
and pure and right.
It blinds us to our own stupidity and errors, it gets us sucked into
other peoples troubles and it makes it easy for other countries to manipulate
us to their ends.
"one also has to believe that the rest of the world revolves around us
and every action others take can ultimately be traced back to what our government
does (or doesn't do). That's not just shoddy analysis, but a serious delusion
about how people all around the world behave."
It also overlooks the quality of those we send to do the meddling and
intervening.
We don't have enough intelligent, educated, competent people.
The imperial Brits had their own problems, Lord knows, But the general
level of British competence, intelligence, and education in the Raj and
other colonies was far higher than that of our own congeries of corrupt,
half-educated hacks and incompetents.
"... Because many members of Congress do not believe that the FBI acted free of political interference, they demanded to see the full FBI files in the case, not just the selected portions of the files that the FBI had released. In the case of the House, the FBI declined to surrender its files, and the agent it sent to testify about them declined to reveal their contents. This led to a dramatic service of a subpoena by the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on that FBI agent while he was testifying - all captured on live nationally broadcast television. ..."
"... According to Sen. Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the FBI violated federal law by commingling classified and unclassified materials in the safe room, thereby making it unlawful for senators to discuss publicly the unclassified material. ..."
"... Imposing such a burden of silence on U.S. senators about unclassified materials is unlawful and unconstitutional. What does the FBI have to hide? Whence comes the authority of the FBI to bar senators from commenting on unclassified materials? ..."
"... What is going on here? The FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton has not served the rule of law. The rule of law - a pillar of American constitutional freedom since the end of the Civil War - mandates that the laws are to be enforced equally. No one is beneath their protection, and no one is above ..."
It is hard to believe that the FBI was free to do its work, and it is probably true that the FBI was restrained by the White House
early on. There were numerous aberrations in the investigation. There was no grand jury; no subpoenas were issued; no search warrants
were served. Two people claimed to have received immunity, yet the statutory prerequisite for immunity - giving testimony before
a grand or trial jury - was never present.
Because many members of Congress do not believe that the FBI acted free of political interference, they demanded to see the full
FBI files in the case, not just the selected portions of the files that the FBI had released. In the case of the House, the FBI declined
to surrender its files, and the agent it sent to testify about them declined to reveal their contents. This led to a dramatic service
of a subpoena by the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on that FBI agent while he was testifying -
all captured on live nationally broadcast television.
Now the FBI, which usually serves subpoenas and executes search warrants, is left with the alternative of complying with this
unwanted subpoena by producing its entire file or arguing to a federal judge why it should not be compelled to do so.
On the Senate side, matters are even more out of hand. There, in response to a request from the Senate Judiciary Committee, the
FBI sent both classified and unclassified materials to the Senate safe room. The Senate safe room is a secure location that is available
only to senators and their senior staff, all of whom must surrender their mobile devices and writing materials and swear in writing
not to reveal whatever they see while in the room before they are permitted to enter.
According to Sen. Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the FBI violated federal law by commingling classified
and unclassified materials in the safe room, thereby making it unlawful for senators to discuss publicly the unclassified material.
Imposing such a burden of silence on U.S. senators about unclassified materials is unlawful and unconstitutional. What does the
FBI have to hide? Whence comes the authority of the FBI to bar senators from commenting on unclassified materials?
Who cares about this? Everyone who believes that the government works for us should care because we have a right to know what
the government - here the FBI - has done in our names. Sen. Grassley has opined that if he could reveal what he has seen in the FBI
unclassified records, it would be of profound interest to American voters.
What is going on here? The FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton has not served the rule of law. The rule of law - a pillar of
American constitutional freedom since the end of the Civil War - mandates that the laws are to be enforced equally. No one is beneath
their protection, and no one is above
Short Squeeze •Sep 16, 2016 12:12 PM
My theory is that when Comey stated "no reasonable prosecutor would prosecute", he already knew of her health issues. Would
a prosecutor go after someone with 6 months to live?
saloonsf •Sep 16, 2016 12:03 PM
That's not FBI's responsibilities-exposing the elites cupabilities. The FBI primary objective is to protect the elites and
the system that benefit them.
Atomizer •Sep 16, 2016 12:10 PM
The wagons are circling around the Clinton Foundation. Chelsea's husband is going to get nicked.
withglee •Sep 16, 2016 12:25 PM
Sen. Grassley has opined that if he could reveal what he has seen in the FBI unclassified records, it would be of
profound interest to American voters.
So what's keeping Grassley from asking that those unclassified documents be taken from the room and laid on his desk. He is
not allowed to talk about what he saw in the room. But for sure he is allowed to talk about unclassified documents laid upon his
desk ... even if they were once in the room. If that wasn't the case, the government would just run every document through the
room ... to give it official immunity from inspection and exposure.
"... The State Deptartment had been using Blackberries since 2006, and diplomats overseas had been using them for just as long. ..."
"... Hillary Clinton didn't need to use a fancy NSA-approved smartphone to access classified data. Whenever she went overseas, she had a team of IT specialists who was able to provide her with ClassNet access, and they're able to do so without any technical support from a US Embassy. ..."
"... The Exchange and BES software were likely purchased by Hillary '08, and properly licensed for that usage. But as far as after that.... ..."
"... In a country where a standing governer running as VP could be found explicitly and intentionally using Yahoo email for the express purpose of avoiding FOIA on relevant government business, and there be no investigation whatsoever well. Let's just say there's an exceedingly strong whiff of double standards in the air. ..."
"... Most interesting to me was confirmation that the server was breached. Unknown parties accessed it from TOR multiple times. From your link, an individual email account on the server was breached. ..."
"... This happens all the time, for varying reasons, mostly due to a phishing compromise of the account, and occasionally due to password re-use and related vectors of compromise. While it's bad for the individual account's contents, it's absolutely irrelevant beyond that. ..."
"... If that's the worst they can find then personally I'm actually impressed. I was expecting that the server(s) had been root/fully compromised at least once, given how they get perennially described. If that turns out to not be the case, then they've actually been run better and more securely than the State Department's [at least non-classified] servers, from all reports. ..."
"... A 'breach' of an account is not a breach of the server. The account being access via TOR implies the user credentials were acquired through some means. Was this 'breached' account a classified account? ..."
"... "multiple times" is 3 times in this case, and it wasn't the server that was breached, it was 1 person's email. ..."
Hillary Clinton didn't need to use her own Blackberry. The State
Deptartment had been using Blackberries since 2006, and diplomats overseas
had been using them for just as long.
Hillary Clinton didn't need to use a fancy NSA-approved smartphone
to access classified data. Whenever she went overseas, she had a team of
IT specialists who was able to provide her with ClassNet access, and they're
able to do so without any technical support from a US Embassy.
Quote: First, the Clintons had requested, according to a
PRN employee interviewed by the FBI, that the contents of the server be
encrypted so that only mail recipients could read the content. This was
not done, largely so that PRN technicians could "troubleshoot problems occurring
within user accounts," the FBI memo reports.
Also, while the Clintons had requested only local backups, the Datto
appliance initially also used Datto's secure cloud backup service until
August of 2015. \
Sounds like some of the problem was the contractor not following the
procedures established by the client.
Just to clarify, the move to a hosted solution - with requested encryption
- was initiated after Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State (January 21,
2009 – February 1, 2013) was completed in February, 2013, and FOIA requests
were no longer applicable as she was no longer a government employee.
I think that would depend on the scope of the migration. Did they migrate
all of the history over to the hosted solution? i.e. Did they migrate the
OS, Exchange and BES servers into PRN's datacenter? Or, did they start from
scratch with a clean slate, fresh install and no data migration. If it's
the former and not the latter, I'd be pretty damned certain it'd still be
subject to FOIA requests.
In a country where a standing governer running as VP could be
found explicitly and intentionally using Yahoo email for the express
purpose of avoiding FOIA on relevant government business, and there
be no investigation whatsoever well. Let's just say there's an exceedingly
strong whiff of double standards in the air.
I'm not fond of this private server crap. I think it's bullshit and
it never should have been allowed in the first place. She should have
simply been told that it's not permissible, whatsoever. But I also think
the classified email issues are red herrings in the context of the use
of private servers, as they would have been just as much an issue on
State Department non classified servers.
And I think that it's been made abundantly clear that the tools to
do business over email and modern mobile computing were extremely lacking,
outside of a solution like this, and what tools were available were
purposefully withheld over what sounds like ridiculous political fighting
under the guise of bureaucracy.
None of this means what she did was ok, but it's also hard to not
look askance at the relentless witchhunting when it's placed in that
broader context.
Personally I've reached a point where I'm done caring on the topic.
There doesn't seem to be any kind of smoking gun, just a lot of hemming
and hawing. Normally I would care about this, but honestly I'm a bit
inured at this point. Where is the show of her using these specifically
to avoid FOIA on work material actually relevant to FOIA?
That's really the only true relevant question when it comes to moving
to private servers. Classified material isn't supposed to be on unclassified
government servers either, so the attempt to focus on that (mostly with
retroactive or improperly labeled material and a few other issues) really
seems awkward when we're supposed to care about the private servers
as if they're damning.
Most interesting to me was confirmation that the
server was breached. Unknown parties accessed it from TOR multiple times.
From your link, an individual email account on the server was breached.
This happens all the time, for varying reasons, mostly due to a phishing
compromise of the account, and occasionally due to password re-use and related
vectors of compromise. While it's bad for the individual account's contents,
it's absolutely irrelevant beyond that.
If that's the worst they can find then personally I'm actually impressed.
I was expecting that the server(s) had been root/fully compromised at least
once, given how they get perennially described. If that turns out to not
be the case, then they've actually been run better and more securely than
the State Department's [at least non-classified] servers, from all reports.
Look, getting all up in arms over crap like that link is why people like
me are no longer convinced there's anything here worth paying attention
to. I'm actually willing to listen if there's some kind of smoking gun,
but that's some petty bullshit right there.
Not sure why you are being down voted on newly revealed information that
seems to confirm that one of the servers email accounts was breached.
If you're down voting him, perhaps an explanation as to why?
Do you say that "google's servers got breached" every time an individual
email account on them is compromised?
What he said is factually incorrect. The server was not breached. An
individual email account was accessed. They're not the same thing. Not even
an OS user level account. An email account.
Rommel102 wrote: Most interesting to me was confirmation that the
server was breached. Unknown parties accessed it from TOR multiple
times.
"multiple times" is 3 times in this case, and it wasn't the server that
was breached, it was 1 person's email.
Even if this person was clinton herself, we already know there was not
much damaging information stored on this server. And considering this seems
more like someone used a weak password or was phished, this is a vulnerability
no matter what email provider you're using.
Not sure why you are being down voted on newly revealed information that
seems to confirm that one of the servers email accounts was breached.
If you're down voting him, perhaps an explanation as to why?
Probably because we know DOJ email servers have also been breached. He's
implying that her servers were less secure and somehow put information in
harms way. History seems to show us that it wasn't at any more risk.
I didn't imply that at all. Here we have fairly solid evidence that a
breach of Hillary's server happened. That seems to contradict the FBI's
stance, Comey's statement and testimony, and is a first as far as I know.
And in comparison, the DOJs non-classified email systems were hacked.
There is no evidence that the classified system ever was.
A 'breach' of an account is not a breach of the server. The account
being access via TOR implies the user credentials were acquired through
some means. Was this 'breached' account a classified account?
I could be wrong, but I think that all classified emails from DoD and
State have to go through SIPRNet.
If this was strictly respected, then Clinton's server should contain
no classified information. In real-life, we saw that a few classified things
went through her personal email system, so it wasn't fully respected, or
some of the info was not yet classified.
Story Author Popular
omniron wrote:
Rommel102 wrote: Most interesting to me was confirmation that the
server was breached. Unknown parties accessed it from TOR multiple times.
"multiple times" is 3 times in this case, and it wasn't the server
that was breached, it was 1 person's email.
Even if this person was clinton herself, we already know there was not
much damaging information stored on this server. And considering this seems
more like someone used a weak password or was phished, this is a vulnerability
no matter what email provider you're using.
We're going to get into this in a story I'm currently writing (probably
for next week, so it's not a Friday newsdumpster move). But it's worth noting
THE ENTIRETY OF THE STATE DEPARTMENT'S UNCLAS EMAIL SYSTEM WAS PWNED FOR
OVER A YEAR. I'm sorry, did I type that in all-caps? Also, between Chelsea
Manning/ Wikileaks and the repeated hacks of State, the White House, etc
between 2009 and 2014, it is highly likely that everything short of the
TS/SAP stuff (and even some of that) that Clinton touched was already breached.
This does not excuse Clinton and her staff's-I'm looking at you, Jake
Sullivan-for the extreme error of passing Top Secret/ Special Access Program
classified data back and forth over Blackberries and a non-governmental
e-mail system. I would expect that Sullivan, at a minimum, will have his
clearance revoked and he will not be getting a job as a national security
adviser if Clinton wins the election. Or at least, I think that's a reasonable
expectation.
LordDaMan Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
reply
Sep 2, 2016 7:24 PM
arcite wrote: She wanted to use her Blackberry, and she wanted all her
accounts in one easy to access place. The solution was sloppy, but there
was no ill-intent.
Except she used multiple devices. She also ignored the repeated comments
towards her to not to have a private server. The server was deliberately
wiped violating the various laws about data retention. She used an alias
to send e-mails to her daughter. She, despite being first lady. many years
in congress, and sec. of state somehow didn't understand what classified
material is or how even without marking some info is "born" classified.
She lied multiple times under oath about all of this.
In an enterprise environment? 50/50. For some "side work" from an IT
guy in the government? Id almost guarantee either CALs were missing, or
the entire thing was running on images Pagliano "got" from his day job.
Doubly so when the client is buying used servers and networking gear.
Ok so that will be $2,900 for hardware, and it looks like it will be
right around 9,000 for software licenses.
Pfff, here is 3,000, just make it work and keep the change for yourself
Not sure why you are being down voted on newly revealed information that
seems to confirm that one of the servers email accounts was breached.
If you're down voting him, perhaps an explanation as to why?
Probably because we know DOJ email servers have also been breached. He's
implying that her servers were less secure and somehow put information in
harms way. History seems to show us that it wasn't at any more risk.
Yeah, but the FBI is saying there was no evidence that the server was
hacked.
And then we find out that one of the email accounts was accessed over the
TOR network and the user of the email account had never heard of TOR much
less used it to access email.
That seems like yet another skewing of the finding to put them in the
best possible light. (EDIT: not saying she was or was not, but I would say
that there was indicators that it was possibly compromised)
DOJ, OPM, Pentagon, doesnt have any relevance on if she was irresponsible
for having this whole set up. That same article states they werent even
able to confirm if TLS was ever enabled. And Why? Because Clinton/IT took
steps to make sure it couldnt be found out before turning over the equipment.
You know, this level of twisting is why you and Rommel are not credible
on the topic. You just come off sounding like a conspiracy nut when you
can go from the article linked to "her servers got hacked."
Let's be clear: if there had been a full breach, there would have been
no need to be accessing an individual account over Exchange via TOR. You
could just grab the whole thing directly, instead. This is, if anything,
evidence of a lack of a full breach, at least by whatever actor was accessing
the particular account in question.
But, you know, why don't you two just keep shooting yourselves in the
kneecaps over this. It's not like your hyperbolic approach to this is hurting
your credibility at all. We can either assume you're both excessively biased
or incompetent on the topic from how you're running with that story.
Not that I'm calling you technically incompetent, mind. Unless you actually
believe there's not a distinction between an email account being individually
compromised and a "server being hacked." I expect you're just intentionally
twisting what you're saying. But hey, maybe you don't actually know better?
The way you two are trying to play this is why you have so many people
turning away in disgust-not at Hillary, but at the ongoing digging for gold
and related hyperbole and even outright lies in what is more and more clearly
a dustbowl, with the only apparent motivation being a smear campaign rather
than anything to do with actual justice or a real care about security.
A perfectly valid reason for accessing Exchange via Tor is exactly to
prevent the intrusion from being detected. Create yourself a valid account,
access it as any other normal user would and your hack will look like normal
user traffic.
'grabbing the whole thing directly' has only a fleeting value; taking
exchange offline to copy the mailboxes as you describe will certainly alert
someone to your presence and encourage them to mediate the intrusion.
Now, lets pretend you are Russia, and you have persistent access to her
and other email systems.
.
Now when you need to claim some new land in Georgia or Ukraine.. we get
reliable information about what the world police will actually do about
it. Not merely what they say they will do.
Sep 2, 2016 10:11 PM Popular
Rommel102 wrote: if one random person was able to get into the server
via TOR, that implies that the server was known to the hacking community.
You're making it sound much more dramatic than reality.
The one random person didn't "get into the server" in any meaningful
way. They accessed an email account.
As for the server being "known to the hacking community", DNS records
are public, so in reality the server was "known" to the entire world. As
are billions of others.
For practical purposes, every device on the internet is "known" to everybody.
Either DNS records point to it, or you can just scan IP address ranges to
find it.
RAH Seniorius Lurkius
reply
Sep 2, 2016 10:18 PM New Poster Popular A missing piece of this whole
conversation is what IT would be in place for the Secretary of State instead
of personal email servers. Government servers that have been known to be
all too easily hacked? And, just which department has the responsibility
for government security? As with all bureaucracies, the responsibility is
spread among many departments, including the FBI.
It is NSA's responsibility to provide communications for the heads of
departments, including the Secretary of State. Clinton supposedly asked
for a secure Blackberry like Obama's, but the NSA refused, siting cost.
The NSA seems to think the Secretary of State only needs the security found
within the SCIF in the State Department offices, and not portable security.
Really? No one travels more than the Secretary of State.
John Kerry's mobile systems (now that they finally have them) were updated
just weeks ago, and if you look at what he now has, you will find that those
systems are five years behind the times.
I am much more concerned about IT security within all departments of
the federal government than I am what Clinton did or did not do.
The question is whether there was any intention to skirt the legal requirements
for security and confidentiality. I don't believe Hillary had the technical
savvy to even begin to think about that.
Also, despite Comey's caustic remarks to Congress about recklessness,
etc., let's remember that he's not exactly credible, either, when it comes
to technology. I mean, he's the same guy who thinks the government should
have a backdoor into what would otherwise be secure private systems.
Red Foreman Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
reply
Sep 3, 2016 12:32 AM
RAH wrote: ...It is NSA's responsibility to provide communications for
the heads of departments, including the Secretary of State. Clinton supposedly
asked for a secure Blackberry like Obama's, but the NSA refused, siting
cost. The NSA seems to think the Secretary of State only needs the security
found within the SCIF in the State Department offices, and not portable
security. Really? No one travels more than the Secretary of State...
BREAKING NEWS: NSA Rejected Hillary Clinton's request for a Blackberry
That's the headline I keep reading. And it looks like you've read it
too. What they don't tell us is that instead they wanted her to use a General
Dynamics Sectéra Edge. Which while NSA approved for mobile SCIF classified
communication, it wasn't cool enough for Hillary.
It's a breach of protocol. She mishandled classified information she
otherwise had clearance to see. It's about equivalent to discussing state
secrets over an unsecured phone line in a seedy motel, or leaving top secret
information lying out on your kitchen table while you have your friends
over for a BBQ. It was incredibly stupid of her, and she's lucky there's
only theoretical evidence of a possibility of a leak, but it's not criminal.
I agree with Comey's conclusion on the matter. It's something any "regular"
person would've been fired over, probably blackballed from any sensitive
government position for life, though it's nothing anyone would go to jail
over.
Last edited by
Renzatic on Sat Sep 03, 2016 12:01 am
symphony3 Ars Centurion
reply
Sep 3, 2016 3:18 AM
RAH wrote: A missing piece of this whole conversation is what IT would
be in place for the Secretary of State instead of personal email servers.
Government servers that have been known to be all too easily hacked? And,
just which department has the responsibility for government security? As
with all bureaucracies, the responsibility is spread among many departments,
including the FBI.
It is NSA's responsibility to provide communications for the heads of
departments, including the Secretary of State. Clinton supposedly asked
for a secure Blackberry like Obama's, but the NSA refused, siting cost.
The NSA seems to think the Secretary of State only needs the security found
within the SCIF in the State Department offices, and not portable security.
Really? No one travels more than the Secretary of State.
John Kerry's mobile systems (now that they finally have them) were updated
just weeks ago, and if you look at what he now has, you will find that those
systems are five years behind the times.
I am much more concerned about IT security within all departments of
the federal government than I am what Clinton did or did not do.
I'm concerned about IT security, which makes me very concerned about
finally funding IT so it can succeed. Every government organization I've
worked with, even with top level universities, fund their landscaping better
than their IT. And that means the buck stops with whatever boss determines
funding.
Please don't tell me this is about the taxpayer deciding funding for
IT, because we know that Social Security was better prepared for Y2K than
almost any other government department. If the unknown director of Social
Security could wrangle a decent IT budget (past tense on that), then it
can still be done by much bigger names & departments. (Not singling out
one department, too many hacks to choose from)
None of this means what she did was ok, but it's also hard to not look
askance at the relentless witchhunting when it's placed in that broader
context.
...
My personal evolution on this issue has gone from "having a privately
controlled email server sounds really really bad, and was probably done
to avoid monitoring! I'm really upset about this!" to "wow, these allegations
sound extremely serious!" to "oh, those allegations were not really true
at all" to "yikes, this again? how much more whining and knashing of the
the teeth am I going to have to put up with?" If this had been any other
politican, like, literally any other politician would we have heard more
than a week or two about it? Would we have the FBI releasing their investigation
documents to the public? Would all of Clinton's emails been open to the
public like this? The amount of transparency, the lack of smoking guns,
and the irrationally emotional anger have made me completely turn around
on this issue.
The reason it keeps coming back is that each new revelation seems to
reveal more lies and more proof of lies by Hillary Clinton. You suggest
if it was any other politician it would be instantly forgotten. Not exactly.
Not if they stood a very good chance of being the next president of the
United States. And certainly not if they had the same background of corruption,
lying, and disastrous job performance as Clinton does (getting Americans
killed in Benghazi and then lying to their families about it, her lies about
being under sniper attack on the tarmac in the Balkans years ago, etc etc).
Nixon was forced to resign for far less dishonesty than this woman has been
caught in. So yes, it is a big deal, and it should be. Not only did she
take the classified workflow outside of the secure state department infrastructure,
she did it to avoid accountability and just exactly the kind of scandal
that would ensue if it was ever found out, which it obviously was. She put
national security at risk for her own political gain, and then lied about
it repeatedly on many occasions and in all kinds of settings. Not only did
she commit crimes and SHOULD have been charged by DOJ (her hubby's little
illicit chit-chat w/ Lynch on the Phoenix tarmac notwithstanding), but she
demonstrated by all she has done she doesn't have the one thing a real president
needs: good judgement. Plenty of other things as well, honesty, etc, should
also be requirements, but generally aren't, lately. But having better judgement
than a 2 year old is crucial, and she's proven she hasn't got that.
A recap ( Comey's testimony) of just some of the lies told by Clinton,
to both the public, Congress, and the FBI, about her emails, server, etc
:
ArchieG Smack-Fu Master, in training
reply
Sep 3, 2016 6:37 AM Quote: The reason it keeps coming back is
that each new revelation seems to reveal more lies and more proof of lies
by Hillary Clinton. You suggest if it was any other politician it would
be instantly forgotten. Not exactly. Not if they stood a very good chance
of being the next president of the United States. And certainly not if they
had the same background of corruption, lying, and disastrous job performance
as Clinton does (getting Americans killed in Benghazi and then lying to
their families about it, her lies about being under sniper attack on the
tarmac in the Balkans years ago, etc etc). Nixon was forced to resign for
far less dishonesty than this woman has been caught in. So yes, it is a
big deal, and it should be. Not only did she take the classified workflow
outside of the secure state department infrastructure, she did it to avoid
accountability and just exactly the kind of scandal that would ensue if
it was ever found out, which it obviously was. She put national security
at risk for her own political gain, and then lied about it repeatedly on
many occasions and in all kinds of settings. Not only did she commit crimes
and SHOULD have been charged by DOJ (her hubby's little illicit chit-chat
w/ Lynch on the Phoenix tarmac notwithstanding), but she demonstrated by
all she has done she doesn't have the one thing a real president needs:
good judgement. Plenty of other things as well, honesty, etc, should also
be requirements, but generally aren't, lately. But having better judgement
than a 2 year old is crucial, and she's proven she hasn't got that.
Could you at least break your thoughts into paragraphs? Also, back up
your whining with actual facts. Yeah, that would be nice.
bthylafh Ars Praefectus
reply
Sep 3, 2016 8:54 AM
mat735 wrote: Wow. Not only is this article misleading and poorly composed,
it is factually incorrect (pic being one example). At the time this happened
was it uncommon for a company to manage their own email servers/hardware?
What were BlackBerry recommendations on hosting? Who actually ordered the
hardware? Who is PRN and what other clients do they represent?
This is the point anyone who cares about the country should be making,
and I really wish Hillary had raised it early on. Federal IT is bad not
because of the usual right-wing tropes about government workers but because
there are too many barriers enshrined in federal law and policy. Things
like procurement, hiring, and even the simple ability to deploy an application
have slow, expensive processes full of counter-productive incentives. The
pay-scale for federal staff tops out well below the private sector, there's
been a couple decades of Congress trying to encourage outsourcing (I'm sure
it's just a coincidence that large contracting companies can make campaign
donations), and a lot of senior management and policy have tried to treat
IT as a purchase rather than a skill to be developed, all of which means
that the federal workforce is aging and the best people are routinely asking
themselves whether they believe in their agency's mission enough to keep
turning down a hefty pay raise. GitHub's Ben Balter, a former Presidential
Innovation Fellow, has written a lot about this – see
What's next for federal IT policy, IMHO ,
Three things you learn going from the most bureaucratic organization in
the world to the least ,
Want to innovate government? Focus on culture , etc.
This has already been a big deal during the Obama administration and
I think it's going to become critical for the next president as both our
dependencies on IT continue to increase – remember that due to decades of
budget cuts, many agencies are still relatively early in the migration to
fully electronic processes – and the demands increase, both for general
worker productivity and especially for across-the-board security improvements
as the sophistication of attacks has gone up. Security is one of the hardest
parts of IT because it's not a commodity which you can purchase, requires
broader skills and constant adjustment, and the field is full of hucksters
peddling purchases or bureaucratic process as easy solutions. The low federal
pay-scale is especially bad since there's so much private sector demand,
which means that it's hard to keep skilled practitioners on staff and that
reduces the pool of qualified people getting hired into management.
This is the kind of thing people should be asking the candidates to talk
about but due to the prolonged bad-faith attempts to trump up scandals from
things like these emails it's really hard to see any sort of honest policy
discussion breaking out. Every citizen should care about changing that dynamic
since in addition to the areas where the failures are themselves major crises
everywhere else they're behind the scenes making projects more expensive
and less successful across the board.
Sep 3, 2016 11:01 AM
roman wrote:
mat735 wrote: Wow. Not only is this article misleading and poorly composed,
it is factually incorrect (pic being one example). At the time this happened
was it uncommon for a company to manage their own email servers/hardware?
What were BlackBerry recommendations on hosting? Who actually ordered the
hardware? Who is PRN and what other clients do they represent?
During the "growing" age of the Internet but before cloud computing (I'd
say early 1990's to mid 2000's) it was very easy/common to run your own
servers. All you needed was a constant internet connection and a static
IP addr.
This was especially common among non-IT centric businesses in my experience
– doctors, lawyers, non-profits, etc. would pay a consultant to set something
up and give their front-office staff instructions about changing backup
tapes, etc. but they didn't want to have to deal with the complexity and
expense of a real data center operation, hiring staff, etc. You probably
wanted a business cable/DSL connection anyway, buy a copy of
Windows Small business Server or
OS X
Server depending on your tastes and you have everything "done" for a
fixed up-front cost. A lot of consultants made good livings doing the same
setup for a bunch of clients which weren't quite big enough to have IT staffing
or balked at paying someone above desktop-support level.
The biggest things which killed that market were security and disaster
recovery, as maintaining an email server became a full-time job and stories
about someone losing everything in a hack / fire / flood / etc. became fairly
common, coupled with the availability of high-quality services (
Google Apps for Your Domain launched in 2006 ) at prices which were
much less than you could match for things like spam filtering, user interface
quality, and performance at a scale of less than hundreds of users. Things
like PCI or HIPAA accelerated that process by telling entire fields it was
no longer a good area to skimp.
By now it's assumed most small operations will use a cloud provider but
it took years to establish that the service quality and pricing would stick.
By the time Hillary took office, however, that was still in transition.
It doesn't surprise me at all that someone – especially someone mid-career
or older – would go back to what was familiar when their boss asked them
to get something done in a hurry. It's the same process you can find all
over the business world where someone has a "mission critical" Access database,
Excel file, PHP app on a shared host, etc. because they were told to get
it done ASAP and didn't have time to learn something new, especially if
this wasn't a core part of their job. It'll just be a temporary fix until
we do things the right way
gbjbaanb Ars Scholae Palatinae
reply
Sep 3, 2016 2:11 PM Well it does get a little more interesting every
day. Today the news is of a missing laptop and thumbdrive containing an
archive of emails that were not handed over to the FBI (apparently they
were forgotten).
Quote: In early 2014, Hanley located the laptop at her home and
tried to transfer the email archive to an IT company, apparently without
success. It appears the emails were then transferred to an unnamed person's
personal Gmail account and there were problems around Apple software not
being compatible with that of Microsoft.
"Neither Hanley nor [redacted] could identify the current whereabouts
of the archive laptop or thumb drive containing the archive, and the FBI
does not have either item in its possession."
One thing, regardless of the political affiliation of the commenters
and voters here, this is all sloppy IT work that should never be allowed
to go unchallenged. If you're going to do this kind of thing, at least get
someone who knows what they're doing to do it properly. As an IT professional,
this kind of lackadaisical attitude to IT administration offends me.
That doesn't make it OK and he should be under investigation as well.
haven't you heard the law doesn't apply to republicans.
They were no laws broken by clinton than we can tell, it's just a weird
thing. Powell clearly used private email to skirt records requests (and
IIRC the Bush admin lost millions of emails). But Clinton seemed aware information
is public record no matter how it's sent.
And if we compare the number of times this server was breached to government
breaches, i don't know if this makes the idea of using your own server look
like a bad idea. most intrusions are via social engineering, and there's
probably a lot more weak points in the staff of gov email than this private
one.
What i find strange is that Clinton was secretary of state, and was probably
handling classified information constantly. How is it after the FBI has
reviewed 45,000 of the 60,0000 emails there are so few classified emails
being sent around (only 1 was sent BY clinton). Does the government just
not send classified information through email at all? I'm more interested,
from a technological perspective, in how this is handled.
She violated quite a few laws the press is willfully ignoring
As someone who has gone through the hassle of trying to get a Security Clearance
AND clearance to work on classified networks we were clearly told of the
laws and penalties to be incurred for misuse of the resources
Hillary went above and beyond to try and keep knowingly and marked classified
documents out of the "secure" White House network, there is the violations
of the laws. You notice how they handled the acquisition of the hardware?
She and her minions KNEW what they were doing and purposely used Bills staff
to hide it and keep the supplier in the dark to keep their illegal behavior
as secret as possible
But no, she didn't do anything wrong and definitely didn't violate a
dozen or so laws, nope, just another "right wing conspiracy" she swears
is always going on
And it's the Democratic party, not the Democrat party.
And she's not the Commander-in-Chief so I don't even know how you got
the notion that she's responsible for American citizens getting killed.
If we put government officials in jail according to how many people died
under their watch, George W Bush would be in prison for hundreds and hundreds
of years for all the dead in the 911 attack, the thousands of military service
personnel that died in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and the millions of
innocent civilian lives that were lost because of his stupidity, not to
mention all the lies that were told to justify the war in the first place.
Take your partisan bullshit somewhere else.
Lol....she violated the espionage act! And she had every intent in doing
so. If that's not illegal then I don't know what is.
And yes, she may well be responsible for getting Americans killed. If
her server was hacked then no doubt she put American lives at risk.
Clearly, Crooked Hillary was more concerned about protecting her own
secrets and the Clinton Foundation's secrets more than she was about protecting
America's secrets.
She's not fit for any government job, let alone president.
JaxMac Smack-Fu Master, in training
et Subscriptor
reply
Sep 3, 2016 7:45 PM New Poster The Power Mac G4 was sold prior to the
release of OS X. Thus it's operating system was the Classical Mac OS. The
Classical Mac OS had no command line, thus it was practically unhackable
remotely. I believe that this was also true of the Power Mac G5.
If the Clinton email had been maintained on either of these two Macs
there would be no questions about infiltration by anyone.
Andrew Norton Ars Scholae Palatinae
reply
Sep 3, 2016 11:42 PM
davecadron wrote: Did everyone miss the part where hillary decided to
wipe the server after foia requests were made and after records were subpoenaed
by Congress?
Obstruction of justice is a felony.
Everything you say may be true.
However the first paragraph has absolutely zero relevance to the last (separate)
line.
The stuff up top might get you 'contempt of congress', or violation of
a court order that doesn't actually exist.
Obstruction of justice is a whole 'nother matter and has nothing to do
with FOIA's or congressional subpoenas.
Obstruction of justice is a felony.
Everything you say may be true.
However the first paragraph has absolutely zero relevance to the last (separate)
line.
The stuff up top might get you 'contempt of congress', or violation of
a court order that doesn't actually exist.
Obstruction of justice is a whole 'nother matter and has nothing to do
with FOIA's or congressional subpoenas.
As always seems to be the case the coverup is worse then the crime, certainly
so with the Clintons given their history. If any the obstruction of justice
hasn't been their attempting to conceal their public records from being
properly archived, as required by law and thus being open to being disclosed
under FOIA.
Rather it's their efforts after the fact. And that would be potentially
lying under oath to investigators and or destruction of/concealing of evidence,
in an attempt to explain away the email scandal, and of course try to publicly
cast it in the light of just another illegitimate "vast right-wing conspiracy"
to get them. Because that's what the Clintons always do when they're backed
into a corner.
Red Foreman Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
reply
Sep 4, 2016 10:07 PM
Renzatic wrote:
Red Foreman wrote: The Clinton email saga with it's oh-so-typical Clinton-esque
coverup that's far worse then the original fuck-up isn't a non-story. And
it has nothing to do with Donald Trump.
I've said this elsewhere, but I feel it bears repeating here.
For roughly 30 years now, Hillary Clinton has been dogged by a party
made up primarily of lawyers, judges, DAs, and others in the legal profession,
with millions of dollars and all the institutions of government at their
fingertips.
In all this time, with all this knowledge, power and influence at their
disposal, what have they discovered? That the Clintons tend to bend the
rules if it benefits them, and like to scratch the backs of people who can
and will scratch theirs. For all their efforts, they haven't discovered
evidence of anything truly heinous or illegal. Rather, they've merely uncovered
the fact they're a little seedy.
...so how are they any different than any other politician in Washington?
How is it any different? This one it running for President of the United
States at the moment. As such scrutinizing her dealings is fair game. After
all, as you said the Clintons are a little seedy, tend to bend the rules
if it benefits themselves, and like to scratch the backs of people who can
and will scratch theirs.
Speaking of which...
Bill, Hillary, Loretta Lynch, James Comey and the emails
Corruption in plain sight
Tuesday, June 28: Former President Bill Clinton suddenly appears to Attorney
General Loretta Lynch in the cabin of her airplane parked on the tarmac
in Phoenix, Arizona. Secret Service agents deny access to news photos and
videos of the visit. They visit for 30 minutes.
Thursday, June 29: Lynch denies that any discussion with Bill Clinton
of the FBI's investigation of Hillary Clinton's email scandal took place,
and states that she expects to accept the recommendation of the FBI as to
further actions in the Clinton case. She does not, however, recuse herself
or appoint a Special Prosecutor. The FBI also announces that the Clinton
interview will take place on this coming Saturday, during the holiday weekend.
Friday, June 30: Hillary Clinton campaign leaks that Loretta Lynch may
be retained in her present job under a Hillary Clinton administration.
Saturday, July 1: Hillary Clinton's long-delayed interview with the FBI
takes place. It lasts 3 1/2 hours. Clinton not under oath. FBI Director
Comey does not attend, will not reveal who was in attendance.
Tuesday, July 5: FBI Director Comey conducts a press conference without
questions. Details a long list of Clinton's violations, but concludes that
he met with prosecutors and decided not to make a criminal referral for
either convening a Grand Jury or an indictment because she didn't mean to
do anything bad. He cited "reasonable prosecutors" (presumably the ones
he consulted) who would not want to prosecute the case.
Tuesday, July 5: While Comey was making his announcement, President Barack
Obama, in a previously scheduled appearance, was campaigning in North Carolina
with Hillary Clinton.
Wednesday, July 6: Attorney General Lynch announces that she accepts
the recommendation of Comey and will not review the evidence herself.
What really happened appears to be that Bill Clinton successfully conveyed
to Loretta Lynch that she would keep her job if Hillary is elected. Lynch
then successfully conveyed to Comey that she expected a clean referral from
the FBI. Finally, Comey undertook a nearly unprecedented step by publicly
announcing all the reasons for a criminal referral, then refusing to follow
his own logic. In the meantime, Obama, boss of Lynch and Comey, obviously
knew well in advance what the outcome of this charade would be and scheduled
accordingly."
"... "Trump must hold all 24 states carried by Mitt Romney in 2012 and add Ohio and Florida to the tally. A loss in Florida, Ohio or in increasingly competitive North Carolina – which Romney carried by just 2.2 percentage points over President Barack Obama – would hand Clinton the presidency"" [ US News ]. ..."
"... Voters in mid-September do not swing between Clinton and Trump (my colleagues and I have dubbed that The Mythical Swing Voter), but between undecided and/or third-party support and Clinton or Trump ..."
"... The Republican establishment doesn't trust Trump. But they need him, and are in the process of supplying the efficient field organization ..."
"... Hillary represents despair in the form of cynicism and resignation, as evidenced by the fact that neither she, nor her surrogates, nor even her flacks in the press really pretend to believe in what she is selling. ..."
"... Trump represents despair in the form of anger and desperation, the willingness to embrace a strongman and a charlatan in the (false) hopes of regaining some kind of control over 'the system', whatever it is (which is a fascinating question, by the way.) ..."
"... He's the one who convinced these folks that Clinton was in the pocket of Wall Street. ..."
"... He's the one who convinced them she was a tool of wealthy elites. ..."
"... He's the one who convinced them she was a corporate shill. She supported the TPP! ..."
"... most of it can be laid at the feet of Bernie Sanders. He convinced young voters that Hillary Clinton was a shifty, corrupt, lying shill who cared nothing for real progressive values-despite a literal lifetime of fighting for them. Sadly, that stuck. ..."
"... To date, we hear Bernie did it, Colin did it, Bush did it, Trump (or his baby-sized foundation) did it, Goldman Sachs offered it, or pneumonia caused it. ..."
"... re: The Despair Election " Both are absolutely awful, indeed unthinkable, albeit in different ways, and yet this is what liberal neoliberal order has come to." There, fixed it. ..."
"... Pennsylvania is often cited as a model of the country as a whole with Philidelphia, on one end, Pittsburgh on the other, and the south in between. In reality it is a good model in some ways but not that way. ..."
"... The Philidelphia area has the new shipping facilities and is poised to gain logistics jobs especially under any new trade deal with Europe. ..."
"... Pittsburgh has rusting steel factories, decaying infrastructure, industrial pollution that is scary, and is now serving as a testbed for driverless uber. ..."
"... And Central Pennsylvania has farming families that are unsure what will happen. Rural towns that have been transformed, and in some cases irretrievably polluted, by fracking. And factories that may or may not stay in business. ..."
"... Some percentage (say 1 or so) of those people have won in the new economy. Others such as the educated in Pittsburgh may be poised to take advantage of high speed rail to build a new tech hub, or they may be too late. And many others are simply shut out of real power or decisionmaking. ..."
"... I expect that Clinton will carry the cities and Trump will carry the rural areas. The deciding vote will lie in the suburbs which have swung both ways. ..."
"... She is an abominable candidate, a wooden speaker, a cynical triangulator, and-to put it kindly-ethically challenged." ..."
"... Is anyone asking Kevin Drum, why blame Bernie Sanders when the Democratic Party tied one of their hands behind their back by overwhelming supporting the candidate that almost half of America already hated? ..."
"... When every poll showed that Clinton had barely fifty percent of America that didn't dislike her at the start, ..."
"... Still the party elite, for reasons that had nothing to do with what was best for the country decided to game the system and nominate Clinton despite her flaws, her well noted campaign problems (as in she is terrible at it) ..."
"... Clearly the only people to blame if Clinton loses, are the people who insisted that she was the only candidate from the beginning – the Clintons, their donors, the Democratic Party which they have corrupted so completely. ..."
"... 'Hillary Clinton was a shifty, corrupt, lying shill who cared nothing for real progressive values…' ..."
"Trump must hold all 24 states carried by Mitt Romney in 2012 and
add Ohio and Florida to the tally. A loss in Florida, Ohio or in increasingly
competitive North Carolina – which Romney carried by just 2.2 percentage
points over President Barack Obama – would hand Clinton the presidency""
[
US News ].
UPDATE "Why the Whole Trump-Clinton Election Could Probably Just Be Held
in Pennsylvania" [
New York Times ]. This is a very interesting article, well worth a read.
It caught my eye because Pennsylvania is also part of the shipping story,
with new warehousing and infrastructure. So I'd be interested in what our
Pennsylvania readers think. Another tidbit: "Voters in mid-September
do not swing between Clinton and Trump (my colleagues and I have dubbed
that The Mythical Swing Voter), but between undecided and/or third-party
support and Clinton or Trump. So the larger that pool, the larger the
potential swing." And one more: "Voting is a major cost for many Americans
with hourly wage jobs." So I could have filed this under Class Warfare.
"The Republican establishment doesn't trust Trump. But they need
him, and are in the process of supplying the efficient field organization
he's never shown any interest in building" [
Bloomberg ]. "
... ... ...
UPDATE "Clinton and Trump's demographic tug of war" (handy charts) [
WaPo ]. I knew before I looked at this they wouldn't slice by income.
UPDATE "The Despair Election" [
The American Conservative ]. Quoting Michael Hanby, a Catholic philosopher:
"hat we have in this election is fundamentally a contest between two forms
of despair: Hillary represents despair in the form of cynicism and resignation,
as evidenced by the fact that neither she, nor her surrogates, nor even
her flacks in the press really pretend to believe in what she is selling.
There is obvious cynicism within Trump_vs_deep_state as well; his supporters, on those
rare occasions when he makes sense, seem to know that he is lying to them.
But Trump represents despair in the form of anger and desperation, the
willingness to embrace a strongman and a charlatan in the (false) hopes
of regaining some kind of control over 'the system', whatever it is (which
is a fascinating question, by the way.) Both are absolutely awful,
indeed unthinkable, albeit in different ways, and yet this is what liberal
order has come to."
UPDATE "A Reuters survey found local governments in nearly a dozen, mostly
Republican-dominated counties in Georgia have adopted plans to reduce the
number of voting stations, citing cost savings and efficiency" [
Reuters ]. Don't they always.
* * *
A Scott Adams roundup. Chronologically: "It turns out that Trump's base
personality is 'winning.' Everything else he does is designed to get that
result. He needed to be loud and outrageous in the primaries, so he was.
He needs to be presidential in this phase of the election cycle, so he is"
[
Scott Adams ].
"Sometimes you need a 'fake because' to rationalize whatever you are
doing. … When Clinton collapsed at the 9-11 site, that was enough to end
her chances of winning. But adding the 'fake because' to her 'deplorable'
comment will super-charge whatever was going to happen anyway" [
Scott Adams ].
"Checking My Predictions About Clinton's Health" [
Scott Adams ].
"The Race for President is (Probably) Over" [
Scott Adams ]. "If humans were rational creatures, the time and place
of Clinton's 'overheating' wouldn't matter at all. But when it comes to
American psychology, there is no more powerful symbol of terrorism and fear
than 9-11 . When a would-be Commander-in-Chief withers – literally – in
front of our most emotional reminder of an attack on the homeland, we feel
unsafe. And safety is our first priority."
* * *
As soon as the race tightened, there was a rash of stories about Millenials
[ugh] not voting for Clinton. And now various Democrat apparatchiks
have started to browbeat them, apparently believing that's the best
strategy. Here's one such: "Blame Millennials for President Trump" [
Daily Beast ]. I'm sure you've seen others.
UPDATE Other Democrat operatives are preparing the way to pin the blame
on anybody but the Democrat establishment and the candidate it chose. Here,
Kevin Drum squanders the good will on his balance sheet from his story on
lead and crime: "Don't Hate Millennials. Save It For Bernie Sanders" [Kevin
Drum,
Mother Jones ].
I reserve most of my frustration for Bernie Sanders. He's the one
who convinced these folks that Clinton was in the pocket of Wall Street.
She gave a speech to Goldman Sachs! He's the one who convinced them
she was a tool of wealthy elites. She's raising money from rich
people! He's the one who convinced them she was a corporate shill.
She supported the TPP! He's the one who, when he finally endorsed
her, did it so grudgingly that he sounded like a guy being held hostage.
He's the one who did next to nothing to get his supporters to stop booing
her from the convention floor. He's the one who promised he'd campaign
his heart out to defeat Donald Trump, but has done hardly anything since-despite
finding plenty of time to campaign against Debbie Wasserman Schultz
and set up an anti-TPP movement.
There's a reason that very young millennials are strongly anti-Clinton
even though the same age group supported Obama energetically during
his elections-and it's not because their policy views are very different.
A small part of it is probably just that Clinton is 68 years old (though
Sanders was older). Part of it is probably that she isn't the inspirational
speaker Obama was. But most of it can be laid at the feet of Bernie
Sanders. He convinced young voters that Hillary Clinton was a shifty,
corrupt, lying shill who cared nothing for real progressive values-despite
a literal lifetime of fighting for them. Sadly, that stuck.
In other words, these young (i.e., silly, unlike wise old farts like
Drum) didn't
"do their own research." And so apparently the demonic Sanders found
it very easy to deceive them. Sad! Oh, and it's also interesting to see
liberal Drum explicitly legitimizing hate. Again, this election has been
wonderfully clarifying.
"Don't Hate Millennials. Save It For Bernie Sanders" [Kevin Drum,
Mother Jones].
Shouldn't we blame Hillary Clinton for people's perception that she is
in the pocket of Wall Street, that she is tool of wealthy elites, that she
is a corporate shill, and that she supports the TPP? Because she is in the
pocket of Wall Street, she is tool of wealthy elites, she is a corporate
shill, and she does support the TPP (few people really believe her recent
claims to oppose it).
Wow. Read that for a ride on the blame train. When are HRC and her buddies
going to start offering something instead of pointing the finger at others?
To date, we hear Bernie did it, Colin did it, Bush did it, Trump
(or his baby-sized foundation) did it, Goldman Sachs offered it, or pneumonia
caused it.
re: The Despair Election " Both are absolutely awful, indeed unthinkable,
albeit in different ways, and yet this is what liberal neoliberal order
has come to." There, fixed it.
Indeed, the Democrat freakout about millennials is hilarious. They're
trotting out Al Gore and the discredited notion that votes for Nader spoiled
the election, rather than, say, a defective candidate.
UPDATE "Why the Whole Trump-Clinton Election Could Probably Just
Be Held in Pennsylvania" [New York Times]. This is a very interesting
article, well worth a read. It caught my eye because Pennsylvania is
also part of the shipping story, with new warehousing and infrastructure.
So I'd be interested in what our Pennsylvania readers think.
I strongly suspect that will depend upon which Pennsylvania voter you
ask. Pennsylvania is often cited as a model of the country as a whole
with Philidelphia, on one end, Pittsburgh on the other, and the south in
between. In reality it is a good model in some ways but not that way.
The Philidelphia area has the new shipping facilities and is poised
to gain logistics jobs especially under any new trade deal with Europe.
Pittsburgh has rusting steel factories, decaying infrastructure,
industrial pollution that is scary, and is now serving as a testbed for
driverless uber.
And Central Pennsylvania has farming families that are unsure what
will happen. Rural towns that have been transformed, and in some cases irretrievably
polluted, by fracking. And factories that may or may not stay in business.
Some percentage (say 1 or so) of those people have won in the new
economy. Others such as the educated in Pittsburgh may be poised to take
advantage of high speed rail to build a new tech hub, or they may be too
late. And many others are simply shut out of real power or decisionmaking.
I expect that Clinton will carry the cities and Trump will carry
the rural areas. The deciding vote will lie in the suburbs which have swung
both ways.
At the beginning, the author says about Clinton, "She is an abominable
candidate, a wooden speaker, a cynical triangulator, and-to put it kindly-ethically
challenged."
Then, he spends the rest of the article asking why Millenials don't
want to vote for her.
I have no words.
And the best part is the last line: "If Trump wins, we'll get what we
deserve"
Is anyone asking Kevin Drum, why blame Bernie Sanders when the Democratic
Party tied one of their hands behind their back by overwhelming supporting
the candidate that almost half of America already hated?
When every poll showed that Clinton had barely fifty percent of America
that didn't dislike her at the start, when all the polls after Trump
had pretty much cinched the nomination made it clear that Sanders was the
stronger candidate, the only logical choice if you wanted a Democratic President
was to nominate Sanders. Still the party elite, for reasons that had
nothing to do with what was best for the country decided to game the system
and nominate Clinton despite her flaws, her well noted campaign problems
(as in she is terrible at it), and the fact that no matter how many
times she reintroduces herself a huge percentage of people do not like her
and largely do not trust her (and didn't before Sanders even entered the
race) and pretend she could wipe the floor with Trump.
Clearly the only people to blame if Clinton loses, are the people
who insisted that she was the only candidate from the beginning – the Clintons,
their donors, the Democratic Party which they have corrupted so completely.
This coupled with media idiots like Drum who either are paid to be
oblivious and chose that life OR are so divorced from the reality of life
for the majority of Americans they cannot comprehend why anyone could despise
the status quo they would be willing to roll the dice with the unknown quantity.
I might have tried taking it on, but there will be no convincing him
(or the readers stupid enough to blame Sanders or the millenials). He cannot
blame the candidate herself and her machine, because that would admit that
the Empress not only has no clothes, is a physical wreck, and has more strings
attached than a marionette is a fast route to oblivion in a dying industry
even if he has already realized it.
"... What about the large number of donors who, immediately after their hefty donations, received cushy ambassadorships? ..."
"... You gotta remember, [neo]liberals love to justify bad behavior, by pointing to (often unrelated) ... bad behavior. ..."
"... Remember, when someone like David Duke endorses Donald Trump and Trump says, "Who is David Duke, and why should I care?" this proves Trump is a racist. When Hillary Clinton talks about how Robert Byrd was her "friend and mentor" this also proves that Trump is a racist. See how easy that is? ..."
"... So it's okay to give money to a private political organization in order to get favors from the government? Why don't we just auction off ambassadorships then? ..."
"... The last set of documents showed that the DNC broke campaign finance laws and yet absolutely nothing was done about it. Since any damning evidence in documents from democrats will be ignored, why do they even try? It won't make any difference. ..."
"... Under Obama's administration political considerations trump the law every time. ..."
"... What are you talking about? Every media outlet except FOX is sucking at Hillary's big toes, and even at times FOX is sucking her toes and licking them. Whether it be in the US or Canada or the bloody UK. Hell NBC deleted a segment from a broadcast last night when Bill Clinton said Hillary "Frequently fainted" sorry I mean "occasionally fainted" that of course saved them all of 1.5 seconds from their 1hr broadcast time limit, which was their excuse. ..."
"... It is like when the talking heads on one news program (CNN I believe) described New York City on Sunday as "Sweltering", when it was 78 Degrees out, in an attempt to make Hillary's lie about dehydration seem more legitimate. Obviously they are "pro-Trump". ..."
"... Wouldn't surprise me. Here's the thing on CBC editing the news [thehill.com] earlier too. ..."
For the past several months, the hacker who calls himself "Guccifer 2.0"
has been releasing documents about the Democratic National Committee. Today,
he has released a new hoard of documents. Politico reports: The hacker persona
Guccifer 2.0 has released a new trove of documents that allegedly reveal more
information about the Democratic National Committee's finances and personal
information on Democratic donors, as well as details about the DNC's network
infrastructure. The cache also includes purported memos on tech initiatives
from Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine's time as governor of Virginia,
and some years-old missives on redistricting efforts and DNC donor outreach
strategy. Most notable among Tuesday's documents may be the detailed spreadsheets
allegedly about DNC fundraising efforts, including lists of DNC donors with
names, addresses, emails, phone numbers and other sensitive details. Tuesday's
documents regarding the DNC's information technology setup include several reports
from 2010 purporting to show that the committee's network passed multiple security
scans.
In total, the latest dump contains more than 600 megabytes of documents.
It is the first Guccifer 2.0 release to not come from the hacker's WordPress
account. Instead, it was given out via a link to the small group of security
experts attending [a London cybersecurity conference].
meta-monkey ( 321000 ) on Wednesday September 14, 2016 @09:09AM (#52885111)
Journal
Summary missing important piece... (Score:5, Informative)
What about the large number of donors who, immediately after their
hefty donations, received cushy ambassadorships?
Iconoc ( 2646179 ) on Wednesday September 14, 2016 @09:12AM (#52885127)
Archangel Michael ( 180766 ) on Wednesday September 14, 2016 @10:40AM
(#52885673) Journal
You gotta remember, [neo]liberals love to justify bad behavior, by
pointing to (often unrelated) ... bad behavior.
It is as if they are four year olds getting in trouble, and saying "but
Billy's Mom lets him drink beer/smoke dope". The problem is, nobody calls
it "childish" behavior (which it is), because that is insulting to children.
Zak3056 ( 69287 ) on Wednesday September 14, 2016 @04:28PM (#52888579)
Journal
Re:Summary missing important piece... (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember, when someone like David Duke endorses Donald Trump and
Trump says, "Who is David Duke, and why should I care?" this proves Trump
is a racist. When Hillary Clinton talks about how Robert Byrd was her "friend
and mentor" this also proves that Trump is a racist. See how easy that is?
Ambassadorships to friendly countries, the UK in particular, have always
been given as rewards to political friends. You could count the number of
people who became UK ambassador on merit on one hand which had been run
through a wood chipper.
The reason you didn't know about this before is because it never became
an issue. Tuttle made a bit of a kerfuffle a decade ago, but it takes a
lot to start a diplomatic incident with a close ally and being ambassador
to the UK or France or Australia really requires no great skill as a peacemaker.
If you were being particularly charitable, you could even say that fundraisers
and diplomats have a lot in common.
Everyone has plenty of dirty laundry, including you and me. 'Innocent
until proven guilty' is an excellent attitude in criminal court, but the
attitude 'innocent until doxxed' skews our perceptions and gives power to
doxxers. Honestly I'm a bit surprised these leaks haven't found more than
'omg, politics at political party!'
Remember, parties are not obligated to be democratic or unbiased. Legally
and constitutionally there's only one vote, the general election in November.
Anyone* can be nominated as a candidate for that election, and if both parties
decided to nominate whomever they pleased they might be breaking their own
rules but not the law. Everything up to and including the conventions is
just meant to give supporters a feel of involvement and to remove unpopular
candidates without invoking the wrath of their supporters. But the parties
want to win, and if one candidate seems more 'electable' you can bet the
party will give then a leg up on the rest.
meta-monkey ( 321000 ) on Wednesday September 14, 2016 @11:28AM (#52886055)
Journal
So it's okay to give money to a private political organization in
order to get favors from the government? Why don't we just auction off ambassadorships
then?
meta-monkey ( 321000 ) on Wednesday September 14, 2016 @02:02PM (#52887279)
Journal
There's been plenty of interesting stuff in previous releases of Hillary's
particular emails. I would say the most amazing was acknowledgment that
the reason we backed the moderate beheaders in Syria against Assad was so
the Israelis would feel better about a nuclear Iran without a stable Syria
as a base of operations for Hezbollah. The 400,000 war dead, the creation
of ISIS, the blowback attacks in Paris, San Bernardino, Brussels, Nice,
Orlando, and the refugee crisis that threatens to destabilize all of western
Europe...no problem for Hillary and her supporters. It's unreal. But here
we are.
Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 14, 2016 @09:38AM (#52885273)
The last set showed laws broken by DNC (Score:5, Informative)
The last set of documents showed that the DNC broke campaign finance
laws and yet absolutely nothing was done about it. Since any damning evidence
in documents from democrats will be ignored, why do they even try? It won't
make any difference.
Now, if a similar trove of documents from the RNC was dumped, you can
bet the DOJ would be all over it. Under Obama's administration political
considerations trump the law every time.
DumbSwede ( 521261 ) <[email protected]> on Wednesday September
14, 2016 @10:31AM (#52885603) Homepage Journal
I'd say Glass Houses is the real reason (Score:2)
There is reluctance to take actions base on evidence uncovered by illegally
hacked emails. Doing so would invite more entities with political motivations
to just hack more...
Mashiki ( 184564 ) <`moc.liamg' `ta' `ikihsam'> on Wednesday September
14, 2016 @10:25AM (#52885549) Homepage
What are you talking about? Every media outlet except FOX is sucking
at Hillary's big toes, and even at times FOX is sucking her toes and licking
them. Whether it be in the US or Canada or the bloody UK. Hell NBC deleted
a segment from a broadcast last night when Bill Clinton said Hillary "Frequently
fainted" sorry I mean "occasionally fainted" that of course saved them all
of 1.5 seconds from their 1hr broadcast time limit, which was their excuse.
Nearly every site is sucking at her toes. Even on reddit from /r/politics
to /r/news to /r/worldnews is deleting anti-Hillary stories, even when they
use the exact title.
Archangel Michael ( 180766 ) on Wednesday September 14, 2016 @10:57AM
(#52885797) Journal
It is like when the talking heads on one news program (CNN I believe)
described New York City on Sunday as "Sweltering", when it was 78 Degrees
out, in an attempt to make Hillary's lie about dehydration seem more legitimate.
Obviously they are "pro-Trump".
Mashiki ( 184564 ) <`moc.liamg' `ta' `ikihsam'> on Wednesday September
14, 2016 @11:31AM (#52886073) Homepage
(arstechnica.com)
223
Posted
by
BeauHD
on Friday September 02, 2016 @08:10PM
from the
data-capturing-devices
dept.
An anonymous reader shares with us an excerpt from a
report via Ars Technica:
As she was being
confirmed as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton
contacted Colin Powell to ask him about his use of a
Blackberry while in the same role. According to a
Federal Bureau of Investigations memorandum
published today
(PDF), Powell warned Clinton
that if it became public that she was using a
Blackberry to "do business," her e-mails would be
treated as "official" record and be subject to the
law. "Be very careful," Powell said according to the
FBI. "I got around it all by not saying much and not
using systems that captured the data."
Perhaps Clinton's troubles began when she
switched from a Blackberry-hosted e-mail account to
an account on her Clintonemail.com domain -- a
domain
hosted on an Apple Power Mac "G4 or G5" tower
running in the Clintons' Chappaqua, New York
residence. The switch to the Power Mac as a server
occurred the same month she exchanged messages with
Powell.
The Power Mac, originally purchased in 2007 by
former President Clinton's aide Justin Cooper, had
acted as the server for presidentclinton.com and
wjcoffice.com. Cooper managed most of the technology
support for Bill Clinton and took charge of setting
up Hillary Clinton's new personal mail system on the
Power Mac, which sat alongside a firewall and
network switching hardware in the basement of the
Clintons' home.
But the Power Mac was having difficulty
handling the additional load created by Blackberry
usage from Secretary Clinton and her staff, so a
decision was made quickly to upgrade the server
hardware. Secretary Clinton's deputy chief of staff
at the State Department, Huma Abedin, connected
Cooper with Brian Pagliano, who had worked in IT for
the secretary's 2008 presidential campaign. Cooper
inquired with Pagliano about getting some of the
campaign's computer hardware as a replacement for
the Power Mac, and Pagliano was in the process of
selling the equipment off.
by
quantaman
(
517394
)
writes:
on
Saturday
September
03,
2016
@03:20AM
(
#52820193
)
A
sailor
going
and
photographing
classified
sections
of a
submarine
over
a
period
of
months.
Basically
looking
like
he
was
engaged
in
active
espionage.
Oooh,
"10
people
were
actually
punished
for
similar
or
lesser
offenses
than
what
Mrs.
Clinton
got
away
with
yesterday".
This
should
be
good
for
a
laugh.
1.
"pleaded
guilty
in
2005
to
illegally
sneaking
classified
documents
from
the
National
Archives
by
stuffing
papers
in
his
suit.
He
later
destroyed
some
of
them
in
his
office
and
lied
about
it."
Nope,
he
was
deliberately
removed
classified
documents
and
they
proved
he
lied
about
it.
2.
"Peter
Van
Buren,
a
foreign
service
officer
for
Hillary's
State
Department,
was
fired
and
his
security
clearance
revoked
for
quoting
a
Wikileaks
document
AFTER
publishing
a
book
critical
of
Clinton.
In
fact,
the
Washington
Post
reported
that
one
of
his
firing
infractions
was
"showing
'bad
judgement'
by
criticizing
Clinton
and
then-Rep.
Michele
Bachmann
on
his
blog."
Sounds
more
like
someone
being
punished
for
writing
a
book
critical
of
their
employer.
3.
Was
a
CIA
director
storing
classified
info
at
home.
This
is
the
most
comparable
though
the
CIA
director
was
dealing
with
more
sensitive
information,
should
have
been
more
aware
than
Hillary,
and
it
sounds
like
he
knew
he
had
mishandled
classified
intel.
So a
little
worse
than
Hillary
though
roughly
comparable.
He
also
got
pardoned
by
Bill
Clinton
before
he
even
finished
the
plea
deal.
So
that
actually
kinda
sets
a no
jail-time
incident.
4.
"A
Navy
intelligence
specialist
admitted
Thursday
that
he
smuggled
classified
documents
out
of
Fort
Bragg
in
folders
and
his
pants
pockets,
then
sold
them
for
$11,500
to a
man
he
believed
was
a
Chinese
agent."
Wow,
#4
and
they're
already
claiming
a
guy
trying
to
sell
classified
intelligence
to
the
Chinese
was
a
lesser
offence
than
Hillary?
I
seriously
checked
all
of
the
examples
and
even
read
the
links
on a
few
that
looked
promising.
This
one
was
actually
hilarious:
Lab
Tech
Steals
Data
from
Nuclear
Facility.
Jessica
Lynn
Quintana,
a
former
worker
at
the
Los
Alamos
National
Laboratory,
pleaded
guilty
in
federal
court
to
"knowingly
removing
classified
information
from
the
national
security
research
laboratory,
after
she
took
home
sensitive
documents
and
data
from
the
lab
last
year."
Talk
about
misrepresenting
the
facts.
She
was
charged
because
she
was
running
a
meth
lab!!
Still
I
learned
something,
don't
believe
a
damn
thing
you
read
on
"The
Political
Insider".
(f) Whoever,
being entrusted
with or having
lawful
possession or
control of any
document,
writing, code
book, signal
book, sketch,
photograph,
photographic
negative,
blueprint, plan,
map, model,
instrument,
appliance, note,
or information,
relating to the
national
defense, (1)
through gross
negligence
permits the same
to be removed
from its proper
place of custody
or delivered to
anyone in
violation of his
trust, or to be
lost, stolen,
abstracted, or
destroyed, or
(2) having
knowledge that
the same has
been illegally
removed from its
proper place of
custody or
delivered to
anyone in
violation of its
trust, or lost,
or stolen,
abstracted, or
destroyed, and
fails to make
prompt report of
such loss,
theft,
abstraction, or
destruction to
his superior
officer-
Shall be fined
under this title
or imprisoned
not more than
ten years, or
both.
tl;dr - she didn't
have to know it was
wrong, she simply had to
be "extremely careless"
(aka, "grossly
negligent")
tl;dr - she
didn't have
to know it
was wrong,
she simply
had to be
"extremely
careless"
(aka,
"grossly
negligent")
And despite the
fact the FBI
director used the
phrase "extreme
carelessness" wrt
the handling of
sensitive info,
somehow the
defenders of
lawlessness still
admit to the fact
that she very
clearly committed
multiple crimes.
I know you
paid shills
like to try
to sway
people to
your side
with a good
bit of
cherry
picking, you
really
should pick
your targets
better.
And
did
that
"extreme
carelessness"
result
in
confidential
information
being
destroyed
or
delivered
to
people
in
violation
of
trust?
Interesting
how you
removed half
a clause
from your
copy & paste
from above,
specifically:
through
gross
negligence
permits
the
same
to
be
removed
from
its
proper
place
of
custody
Was
Clinton's
email server
a proper
place of
custody? If
not, then
she violated
that statute
through
gross
negligence
at minimum.
One,
we
don't
know
what/if
anything
was
stolen,
we
just
know
that
there
was
at
least
one
successful
login
to
the
server
via
Tor
on a
user
account
where
the
owner
claimed
no
knowledge
of
the
software:
http://www.politico.com/story/...
[politico.com]
Two,
Clinton
did
not
do
the
reasonable
thing
in
the
setting
up
of
the
server,
nor
recognizing
classified
information,
nor
allowing
her
aids
to
re-handle
the
information
in
rather
careless
ways,
so
by
your
very
own
logic,
she
should
be
held
criminally
responsible
for
her
actions.
(prnewswire.com)
628
Posted
by
BeauHD
on Friday September 09, 2016 @09:00AM
from the
turn-your-head-and-cough
dept.
schwit1
PR Newswire:
Concerns about Hillary Clinton's
health are "serious --
could be disqualifying for the position of President
of the U.S.
," say nearly 71% of 250 physicians
responding to an
informal internet survey
by the Association of
American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS). About 20%
said concerns were "likely overblown, but should be
addressed as by full release of medical records."
Only 2.7% responded that they were "just a political
attack; I have confidence in the letter from her
physician and see no cause for concern." While more
than 81% were aware of her history of a concussion,
only 59% were aware of the cerebral sinus
thrombosis, and 52% of the history of deep venous
thrombosis. More than 78% said the health concerns
had received "not enough emphasis" in the media, and
only 2.7% that there had been "too much emphasis."
Nearly two-thirds said that a physician who had a
concern about a candidate's fitness to serve for
health reasons should "make the concerns known to
the public." Only 11% said a physician should "keep
silent unless he had personally examined the
patient," and 10% that the candidate's health was
"off limits for public discussion." A
poll of 833 randomly selected registered voters
by Gravis Marketing showed that nearly half (49%)
were not aware of the "well documented major health
issues that Hillary Clinton has." Nearly
three-fourths (74%) were unaware of Bill Clinton's
statement that Hillary suffered a "terrible"
concussion requiring "six months of very serious
work to get over." The majority (57%) thought that
candidates should release their medical records.
"... Mexican workers were in rural areas over thirty years ago doing the farm labor that was formerly done by blacks. Often they lived in barracks together on the farms they worked. The ownership class of those hose lily white conservatives were the first to use them to displace native born workers and drive down wages. This was being done in California all the way back to 1910. ..."
"... Part time immigrants displace resident workers at wages no family could survive on in the US. These workers either stay in barracks on the farm or they crowd into cheap rental dwellings meant for a fraction of the number of occupants that they group in. ..."
"... As to H1B types, meme chose as off-shoring; as well as a missed opportunity to increase the skills of native-borns. http://angrybearblog.com/2006/12/disappearing-americans-and-illegal.html ..."
"... "Caesar Chavez understood the effects the effects of illegal immigation". That he did. Governor Pete Wilson promoted this to keep wages down for this agribusiness buddies. But then Wilson flip flopped in a draconian way with Prop 197. Every Republican in California came to realize this destroyed their chances with not only the Hispanic vote but also the votes are non-racist Californians. ..."
"... I grew up in a beautiful beach town called San Juan Capistrano. That's a Spanish name, and there was a Spanish mission where the swallows fly back to. Los Angeles, San Francisco. Spanish names. In my school days I had many Mexican American friends. At university I had a Guatamalan and then a Chinese American room mate. You heard the term wetback sometimes, but to me they were just friends, and Americans. You spend 5 minutes with em and you can't think anything else. We are all, save Native Americans, immigrants. ..."
"... Attacking immigrants is not new. But America has managed to be above that for the most part. ..."
"... "If immigration isn't the problem, then what is? The real problems faced by workers are globalization, technological change, and lack of bargaining power in wage negotiations, problems for which Donald Trump has no effective solutions. Reducing international trade through tariffs and the trade wars that come with them will make us worse off in the long-run – we will end up with fewer jobs, not more, and there's no reason to think the average job will be any better. Trump has nothing to offer in the way of providing more support for workers who lose their jobs due to the adoption of digital, robotic, and other technology or to help workers gain a stronger hand when wages are negotiated." ..."
"... I disagree. The heart of the matter is that so long as economists and corporate enablers ensure that protecting against globalisation is off the table, the problems will never be solved. Free trade is their snake oil. And if your "free trade" partner happens to be an autocracy, which will use the $Trillions they siphon out of you to build up their military, use that military to alter the lines on the map, intimidate their neighbors, and ultimately maybe even destroy you, well, those events never show up in their glorious equations, so they must not exist. ..."
"... The paradigm is that the white working class has not been able to form a majority by itself since the pre-Civil War Jacksonian era. They must either make a coalition with other minorities (the New Deal) or with Wall Street and corporate power (the GOP's Southern Strategy). In the 1970s with racial quotas and increasing taxation they felt abandoned by the Democrats, and now that they realize that the GOP corporate paradise is killing them, they are adrift. They once again can either make an alliance with the minorities who live in the next poorer neighborhood who they fear will rob them of their wallets, or with Wall Street who will rob them of everything they own over a much longer period of time, and live in fabulous palaces far far away. ..."
Trump's Taco Truck Fear Campaign Diverts Attention From the Real Issues : Donald Trump would
like you to believe that immigration is largely responsible for the difficult economic conditions
the working class has experienced in recent decades. But immigration is not the problem. The real
culprits are globalization, technological change, and labor's dwindling bargaining power in wage
negotiations.
Mexican workers were in rural areas over thirty years ago doing the farm labor that was formerly
done by blacks. Often they lived in barracks together on the farms they worked. The ownership
class of those hose lily white conservatives were the first to use them to displace native born
workers and drive down wages. This was being done in California all the way back to 1910.
Lettuce Wars: Ten Years of Work and Struggle in the Fields of California
In 1971, Bruce Neuburger-young, out of work, and radicalized by the 60s counterculture in Berkeley-took
a job as a farmworker on a whim. He could have hardly anticipated that he would spend the next
decade laboring up and down the agricultural valleys of California, alongside the anonymous and
largely immigrant workforce that feeds the nation. This account of his journey begins at a remarkable
moment, after the birth of the United Farm Workers union and the ensuing uptick in worker militancy.
As a participant in organizing efforts, strikes, and boycotts, Neuburger saw first-hand the struggles
of farmworkers for better wages and working conditions, and the lengths the growers would go to
suppress worker unity...
Mexican migrants were in Ohio 60+ years ago, making the vegetable circuit. (The biggest Campbells
Soup plant is in Napoleon Ohio. The region has some of the best top soil on the planet). Some
of them settled and are on the third generation. They even hang out with the white working class,
who are their neighbors and co-workers. Some of them even marry Germans and Swedes.
Yeah, guest workers go way back at least 100 years in the US. And sure many stayed and, in that
case, I am totally fine with actual immigration when they become citizens and pay taxes and buy
or rent homes here as permanent residents. Green card workers and illegals are doing a lot of
the farm work in VA on the Northern Neck and Eastern Shore and have been for thirty years.
Part time immigrants displace resident workers at wages no family could survive on in the US.
These workers either stay in barracks on the farm or they crowd into cheap rental dwellings meant
for a fraction of the number of occupants that they group in.
I understand the effect of illegal immigration, Caesar Chavez understood the effects the effects
of illegal immigation, ...., in fact almost all working class Americans understand the effects
of illegal immigration.
"Caesar Chavez understood the effects the effects of illegal immigation". That he did. Governor
Pete Wilson promoted this to keep wages down for this agribusiness buddies. But then Wilson flip
flopped in a draconian way with Prop 197. Every Republican in California came to realize this
destroyed their chances with not only the Hispanic vote but also the votes are non-racist Californians.
Mark Thoma is suggesting a humane alternative to Wilson's two extremes.
If there was a basic income with a substantial residency requirement for immigrants - this would
be a non-issue, since qualified residents could live better than immigrants on the same wages.
I grew up in a beautiful beach town called San Juan Capistrano. That's a Spanish name, and
there was a Spanish mission where the swallows fly back to. Los Angeles, San Francisco. Spanish
names. In my school days I had many Mexican American friends. At university I had a Guatamalan
and then a Chinese American room mate. You heard the term wetback sometimes, but to me they were
just friends, and Americans. You spend 5 minutes with em and you can't think anything else. We
are all, save Native Americans, immigrants.
I remember those old World War 2 movies where the squad is made up of diverse immigrants. You
got the Italian, the Jew, the Irsh guy, etc. And they formed a team. E pluribus unim. Attacking
immigrants is not new. But America has managed to be above that for the most part. E
"Attacking immigrants is not new. But America has managed to be above that for the most"
Conservatives have been attacking immigrants for years. They hated JFK and Catholics. Being
a Catholic Jew is not new to me, but Cons hated Catholics and then they used us Jews for their
political gains. It never worked on us. Most Jews are too intelligent for conservatism. Take care.
Our excellent host gets to the heart of the matter:
"If immigration isn't the problem, then what is? The real problems faced by workers are
globalization, technological change, and lack of bargaining power in wage negotiations, problems
for which Donald Trump has no effective solutions. Reducing international trade through tariffs
and the trade wars that come with them will make us worse off in the long-run – we will end up
with fewer jobs, not more, and there's no reason to think the average job will be any better.
Trump has nothing to offer in the way of providing more support for workers who lose their jobs
due to the adoption of digital, robotic, and other technology or to help workers gain a stronger
hand when wages are negotiated."
Trump has nothing to offer except hate. Besides - who could object to more tacos. Oh wait -
I need to do a long run before eating Mexican food tonight.
I disagree. The heart of the matter is that so long as economists and corporate enablers ensure
that protecting against globalisation is off the table, the problems will never be solved. Free
trade is their snake oil. And if your "free trade" partner happens to be an autocracy, which will
use the $Trillions they siphon out of you to build up their military, use that military to alter
the lines on the map, intimidate their neighbors, and ultimately maybe even destroy you, well,
those events never show up in their glorious equations, so they must not exist.
The paradigm is that the white working class has not been able to form a majority by itself
since the pre-Civil War Jacksonian era. They must either make a coalition with other minorities
(the New Deal) or with Wall Street and corporate power (the GOP's Southern Strategy). In the 1970s
with racial quotas and increasing taxation they felt abandoned by the Democrats, and now that
they realize that the GOP corporate paradise is killing them, they are adrift. They once again
can either make an alliance with the minorities who live in the next poorer neighborhood who they
fear will rob them of their wallets, or with Wall Street who will rob them of everything they
own over a much longer period of time, and live in fabulous palaces far far away.
And if your "free trade" partner happens to be an autocracy, which will use the $Trillions they
siphon out of you to build up their military, use that military to alter the lines on the map,
intimidate their neighbors, and ultimately maybe even destroy you, well, those events never show
up in their glorious equations, so they must not exist....
[ Perfectly paraphrased from Dr. Strangelove. We are being siphoned, OMG. ]
Washington Post Presents an Overly Simplistic View of Trade
It is unfortunate that it now acceptable in polite circles to connect a view with Donald Trump
and then dismiss it. The result is that many fallacious arguments can now be accepted without
being seriously questioned. (Hey folks, I hear Donald Trump believes in evolution.)
The Post plays this game * in noting that the U.S. trade deficit with Germany is now larger
than its deficit with Mexico, putting Germany second only to China. It then asks why people aren't
upset about the trade deficit with Germany.
It partly answers this story itself. Germany's huge trade surplus stems in large part from
the fact that it is in the euro zone. The euro might be properly valued against the dollar, but
because Germany is the most competitive country in the euro zone, it effectively has an under-valued
currency relative to the dollar.
The answer to this problem would be to get Germany to have more inflationary policies to allow
other countries to regain competitiveness -- just as the other euro zone countries were generous
enough to run inflationary policies in the first half of the last decade to allow Germany to regain
competitiveness. However, the Germans refuse to return this favor because their great great great
great grandparents lived through the hyper-inflation in Weimar Germany. (Yes, they say this.)
Anyhow, this issue has actually gotten considerable attention from economists and other policy
types. Unfortunately it is very difficult to force a country in the euro zone -- especially the
largest country -- to run more expansionary countries. As a result, Germany is forcing depression
conditions on the countries of southern Europe and running a large trade surplus with the United
States.
The other part of the difference between Germany and China and Mexico is that Germany is a
rich country, while China and Mexico are developing countries. Folks that took intro econ courses
know that rich countries are expected to run trade surpluses.
The story is that rich countries are slow growing with a large amount of capital. By contrast,
developing countries are supposed to fast growing (okay, that doesn't apply to post-NAFTA Mexico),
with relatively little capital. Capital then flows from where it is relatively plentiful and getting
a low return to developing countries where it is scarce and can get a high return.
The outflow of capital from rich countries implies a trade surplus with developing countries.
Developing countries are in turn supposed to be borrowing capital to finance trade deficits. These
trade deficits allow them to build up their capital stocks even as they maintain the consumption
standards of their populations.
In the case of the large trade surpluses run by China and other developing countries, we are
seeing the opposite of the textbook story. We are seeing fast growing developing countries with
outflows of capital. This largely because they have had a policy of deliberately depressing the
value of their currencies by buying up large amounts of foreign reserves (mostly dollars.)
So the economics textbooks explain clearly why we should see the trade deficits that the U.S.
runs with China and Mexico as being different than the one it runs with Germany. And that happens
to be true regardless of what Donald Trump may or may not say.
By the way, this piece also asserts that "Germany on average has lower wages than Belgium or
Ireland." This is not true according to our friends at the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
China is building its military at a huge rate. Double digit growth per yer over almost 20 years.
They are at $150 billion a year(if you believe their figures).
You have a point with China at $150B a year going to real engineering and not inept Lockheed
you need to worry. Those PLA re-education camps might make you another McCain.
US' Pentagon welfare trough: $500B "core" per year even with the sequestration.
Paying for DoD part of drones delivering collateral damage justified by its military utility*:
$80B in FY 16 (was $150B in FY 12).
CIA contracted drones and contractor (See the guys killed in Benghazi) run wars we can know
nothing about $XXB a year.
*If Germany had won WW II Bomber Harris would have been hanged.
Rusty - your usual confusion. Economists only advise. Lawyers make these decisions. And most lawyers
either do not listen to economists or if they do they get really confused. But will a lawyer ever
admit they are confused or not listening?
I don't see your call to take America back to the 60s and tube radios and TVs because they are
cheaper than semiconductor manufacturing because all the tube electronic factories already exist.
Nor do I see you extolling the virtue of $8 gasoline and heating oil thanks to the total ban
on fossil fuel imports.
I'd love someone to ask Trump if he would ban imports of oil and iPhones and Samsung electronics
in his first 100 days as president.
If he says yes and doesn't lose popularity, I'll make sure to buy all the electronics I'll
want for a few years. I've already sworn off gasoline.
Surely fuller then full employment
and a largest possible share of net income
going to primary producers isn't precluded by external trade restrictions
Economies of scale ?
Adequate competition between producing units ?
North America is plenty big for most optimal "plant sizes "
And at least three firms for each product
See Stiglitz on the second best real market firm structure
See Stiglitz on the second best real market firm structure
[ Of course, that will take reading through the last 30 years or so of work by Joseph Stiglitz
since I am not going to give a reader a clue as to how to find such a reference. No problem though,
just start reading. ]
There will be no relief until we "euthanize the rentiers". Raise top marginal rates to confiscatory
levels on income over $1 million, treat all income the same, prohibit corporations from deducting
executive compensate over $1 million, eliminate all tax breaks for individuals that do not widely
apply to those in the bottom half of the income distribution and all corporate tax subsidies.
Not even close, just a return to the 1950s, when the economy boomed. The idea that the wealthy
and large corporations will physically move to countries with more favorable tax regimes, most
of which are in the third world, is pure fantasy, which is why most of the super rich live in
New York, California, and other high tax states.
I understand the differences, but was merely addressing Rusty's nonsense implying this was somehow
outrageous and unprecedented. In addition to the trade advantages the US had, the emergence of
new industries in electronics, aviation, and petrochemicals, which all needed a lot of highly
skilled workers and paid very well, was vital as well. Nonetheless, the policies I mentioned would
go a long way to addressing our current problems, including reducing the incentives to offshore
production (contrary to Rusty).
You don't understand the point of tax dodges, do you? The tax dodges are rewards for paying workers
to build capital assets. But they need high marginal rates to justify paying workers.
Capital gains needs to return to the hold for five years or more to get the incentive. It isn't
really "capital" if not held because it's productive.
However, if inflation in the price of productive capital that barely retains its value is taxed
as income, you punish building productive capital. Asset basis price can be inflation adjusted
reasonably well these days thanks to computer technology making detailed calculations simple for
humans.
I'd have loved to pay workers to install solar and batteries to dodge 50-70% marginal tax rates
in the 90s. Much better than the best case 30% tax credit for paying workers these days. Of course,
given the penalty for paying workers due to low tax rates, I have no high wage income to be taxed
at high rates.
As Milton Friedman pointed out in the 60s and then later in the 80s as I recall, the 50-70-90%
tax rates never raised much revenue because the tax dodges rewarded paying worker to do wasteful
things, in his opinion, like production too much cheap energy, producing too much innovation which
ended up in too many new consumer products the wastefully overpaid workers bought.
This is an irrelevant aside. Friday was a minor bloodbath for investors inequities and bonds.
Thing is, I was like okay, I lost paper money, why.? I could not find a reason the market was
tanking other than Fed fears. Now I realize equities markets can behave like crack addicts or
lemmings. But 2.45 percent based on Fed fears of a rate hike?
Usually when the market is down I go to Calculated risk to see what must be some bad data.
Friday is a profit taking day. But as a small investor that was a really bad day.
Also, Los Lobos version of Hotel California via the Big Libowski is essential.
Final trading session before the 15th anniversary of 9-11 disaster! Would you guess that lot of
folks hedged with ultra-short-ETF earlier in the week? Lot of folks took profits before labour
day?
A day like that is why there needs to be a micro tax on trades. I get it if people sell based
on fundamentals. Everyone hedges, too, that's why you diversify. But the ultimate purpose of investing
is to provide companies with the capital to make productive investment.
A good part of the market is just short term bets. How is that socially useful. And the funny
thing, a lot of these guys don't make money for their clients, they just make money on the commission.
Like a casino owner. Like the con man running for prez.
Technological change is definitely not an issue. Productivity growth is slower now than in 1945-1973
when we had a large middle class. Cross nationally the arguments that robots are taking jobs doesn't
make any sense. If you traveled in both the non-industrial world (Africa, Haiti etc) and East
Asia, you will be aware of this. In the non-industrial world formal sector employment is only
10-20% of the labor force; 80% of the pop. is involved in "gig" jobs selling candy on the street
etc. In East Asia you have virtually no unemployment, but these are the places with by far the
largest deployment of robots, much, much higher than the US. The robots argument is convenient
politically, but doesn't make any sense to anyone whose traveled the world or knows anything about
economic history.
Before, auto plants hired 5,500 @ and produced X vehicles; after, they hired 1,200 @ and produced
1.4 vehicles. You don't get to have your own reality.
I bet that tamales truck is run by a Mexican. I hope so as it would likely mean you are enjoying
awesome tamales. Trump has no idea what good Mexican food is as it does not exist in Manhattan.
I think we need to change the compound growth capitalism we've had since forever. It will not
be sustainable much longer. We need 'de-globalization' not more globalization, in my opinion.
The efficiency bookkeeping model that promotes globalization is deeply flawed. What about the
pollution issues involved in global distribution of products that can easily be made at home?
Again, Keynes said it best. "The decadent international but individualistic capitalism, in the
hands of which we found ourselves after the war, is not a success. It is not intelligent, it is
not beautiful, it is not just, it is not virtuous--and it doesn't deliver the goods. In short,
we dislike it, and we are beginning to despise it. But when we wonder what to put in its place,
we are extremely perplexed."
https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/interwar/keynes.htm
After the Berlin Wall fell, and defense budgets got cut, the SoCal economy changed as income
and jobs drained out. Blacks occupied the lower end of support jobs and got underbid by Hispanics,
so they moved away from LA. The same trend impacted lower income whites, who largely moved out
of state. Middle and upper income whites adapted as the local economy transitioned to absorb the
laid-off engineering talent, often through new business ventures along the 101 corridor and in
the multi-media areas in Santa Monica and the south bay. What took a few decades in Pittsburgh
and other cities impacted by major industry changes took about a decade in LA.
In southern California overall, the combination of illegal immigration and a higher total fertility
rate among Hispanics has brought about significant population and employment changes, particularly
over the last 25 years. As well-documented by demographers, blacks suffered significantly through
those changes and were displaced from low end jobs by the burgeoning Hispanic population.
For example, south central LA has transitioned from majority black to majority Hispanic as
a result of job changes and influx. Blacks moved to San Bernardino, Victorville and other areas
where cheaper housing and potential employment were available.
Now the taco trucks are supplemented by grilled cheese trucks, crepe trucks, Korean taco trucks
and other variations designed to serve a more diverse population.
That is actually a decent description of LA. And the diversity of food is why some sing "I Love
LA". It has its issues but I do miss southern CAL .. especially during these harsh NYC winters.
Urbanites like Trump probably see
'taco trucks' frequently as their
limos whiz by. They appreciate
their visibility to likely
Trumpy supporters.
(Limos & trucks both?)
'Doing something about pesky
immigrants should garner a few votes!'
Except The Donald didn't start the tweet storm.
'Taco Trucks on Every Corner': Trump Supporter's
Anti-Immigration Warning http://nyti.ms/2bIeFyw
NYT - NIRAJ CHOKSHI - SEPT. 2, 2016
"My culture is a very dominant culture, and it's imposing and it's causing problems. If you
don't do something about it, you're going to have taco trucks on every corner."
That was Marco Gutierrez, founder of the group Latinos for Trump, issuing a dire warning to
the United States in an interview with Joy Reid on MSNBC on Thursday night.
Trump campaign manager repeatedly grilled about
candidate's false proclamations on Iraq War
position http://read.bi/2bZ6iyG
via @BusinessInsider - Sep 9
Donald Trump's campaign manager was repeatedly pressed Friday as she attempted to explain inconsistencies
in the Republican presidential nominee's statements on the Iraq War.
On two separate morning shows, Kellyanne Conway said Trump's declaration of support for the
war during a 2002 interview with radio host Howard Stern was not a reliable indication of how
he felt at the time.
On CNN, anchor Chris Cuomo pressed Conway on Trump's Iraq War flip-flops.
"He doesn't want to own that he wasn't against it before it started," Cuomo said. "Why not?
Why not just own it? And as you like to say, he was a private citizen."
Conway insisted that despite Trump responding "yeah, I guess so" when Stern asked if he supported
the invasion of Iraq, his statement wasn't equal to then Sen. Hillary Clinton's vote in favor
of the war. ...
(At least, 'Trump has acknowledged that
Clinton's vote (for the war - *) was a mistake.')
... "The point is, as you know, he constantly says 'I was always against the war,'" host Charlie
Rose said to Conway. "Here he says 'I guess' I would support it. That's a contradiction."
Conway pushed back, offering a similar defense to the one she gave CNN.
"Not really, Charlie," she said. "And here is why: He is giving - he is on a radio show. Hillary
Clinton went into the well of the United States Senate representing this state of New York and
case a vote in favor of the Iraq War."
Rose said that "this is not about Hillary Clinton."
"She has acknowledged that vote and acknowledged it was a mistake," Rose said. "He has not,
and he wants to have it both ways."
Conway said that Trump has acknowledged that Clinton's vote was a mistake, to which Rose replied,
"No, but he has not acknowledged that at one point he said he was for the war.
"Why can't he simply say that?" Rose asked. "'At one point I was, and then I changed my mind."
...
(When Trump criticized the Iraq War in 2004,
it was because we hadn't seized their oil
assets as spoils, ostensibly.)
*- Iraq Resolution (formally the Authorization
for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002)
"Kellyanne Conway said Trump's declaration of support for the war during a 2002 interview with
radio host Howard Stern was not a reliable indication of how he felt at the time."
Of course Kellyanne Conway lies even more than her client.
Hillary Clinton Calls Many Trump Backers 'Deplorables' ... http://nyti.ms/2c1UlbC
NYT - AMY CHOZICK - SEPT. 10
... Mrs. Clinton's comments Friday night, which were a variation of a sentiment she has expressed
in other settings recently, came at a fund-raiser in Manhattan.
"You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what
I call the basket of deplorables. Right?" she said to applause and laughter. "The racist, sexist,
homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic - you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that.
And he has lifted them up."
By Saturday morning, #BasketofDeplorables was trending on Twitter as Mr. Trump's campaign demanded
an apology. His supporters hoped to use the remark as as evidence that Mrs. Clinton cannot connect
to the voters she hopes to represent as president.
"Wow, Hillary Clinton was SO INSULTING to my supporters, millions of amazing, hard working
people. I think it will cost her at the polls!" Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter. ...
Immigration PLUS the "demobilization" of labor unions (the discontinuance of collective bargaining
with the concomitant dismemberment of middle class political punch) EQUALS the impoverishment
of low skilled workers ...
... equates to reducing what should be $800 jobs to $400 jobs ...
... which is the alpha and the omega of today's income inequality -- at least lowest income
inequality; the folks who work fast food and supermarkets (the wrong end of two-tier supermarket
contracts, gradually going low tier all the way). I'm not especially concerned that more low skilled
jobs add more higher skilled employment.
********************************
Why are 100,000 out of something like 200,000 Chicago gang-age, minority males in street gangs?
Where are the American raised taxi drivers? Could be $600 fast food jobs imm-sourced to Mexico
and India -- could be $800 taxi jobs imm-sourced to the whole world? $1000 construction jobs imm-sourced
to Eastern Europe and Mexico?
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/gang-wars-at-the-root-of-chicagos-high-murder-rate/
The way it works is COLLECTIVE BARGAINING SETS THE PRICE OF LABOR BY THE MOST THE CONSUMER
WILL TOLERATE -- RACE TO THE BOTTOM WAGES ARE SET BY THE LEAST THE EMPLOYEE WILL TOLERATE.
*****************************
Even zero immigration would only (as in merely) keep American labor from hitting rock bottom --
or at least hoping to find non-criminal employment w/o collective bargaining.
Current union busting penalties carry about as much weight as the "FBI warning" you get when
you start a DVD. More actually: if you actually enter a movie theater to copy a new movie before
it goes to DVD you face a couple of years mandatory federal hospitality.
OTH if you fire an organizer the most you face is hiring the organizer back and maybe a little
back pay while she's waiting to fired again for "something else." The labor market is the only
market where you can break the law and face zero penalties at all.
New idea: an NLRB finding of illegally blocking union organization should be able to lead to
a mandate that a certification election must be taken. This may only be implementable at the federal
level.
Beyond that union busting should be a felony at state and federal levels -- backed by RICO
for persistent violators to keep employers from playing at the edges. Our most progressive/pro
labor states (WA, OR, CA, NV, IL, MN, NY, MD?) could do that right now if someone would just raise
the issue.
IF SOMEONE, SOMEWHERE WOULD JUST RAISE THE ISSUE!!!!!!!!!!
Wanna stop the shoot-em-ups in Chicago and elsewhere? To paraphrase a line from Superfly: It's
the American dream dog: flush toilet down the hall, AM radio, electric light in every room.
Let's call that $200/wk job level -- in today's money. And the year is ...
... 1916 ...
.. and today's gang members, not to mention my American raised taxi driver "gang" would be
willing to put in a hard week's work for it ...
... in 1916.
But today's "gangs" are not going to work for $400, 100 years later. Hell, about 50 years later
...
... 1968 ...
... the federal minimum wage was $440 in today's money -- at half today's per capita income!
I read James Julius Wilson's book When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor and
Sudhir Venkatesh's book American Project: The Rise and Fall of a Modern Ghetto, at the same time
-- and the projects only descended into gang infested hell as the bottom dropped out of the minimum
wage.
Beautiful thing about collective bargaining is: you know you have squeezed the most practicable
out (of your fellow consumers -- not the boss) of the economy and technology of your era.
Just don't forget Centralized bargaining so the Walmarts of the world can't squeeze better
contracts elsewhere. Walmart closed 88 big boxes in Germany which has centralized bargaining.
Wal-Mart's "advantage" is not in low labor cost, but logistics and market dominance allowing it
to boss around suppliers.
German labor laws may have contributed to its "problems", but the primary issues were its US-centric
logistics operation and having to compete against local incumbents who were at least its equals,
and had the home turf advantage. And competition as well as labor relations in German retail are
at least as cutthroat as in the US. Most recent (few years ago) scandals involving treatment of
workers and systematic intimidation were in large chain retailers.
There were also stories about how they were trying to sell US bedware sizes which are different
from the German sizes, and similar market research goofs, which seems to indicate a certain arrogance,
and that they probably underestimated the effort and sunk cost that had to be invested to become
successful.
Some of these stories also had a background of a general anti-US sentiment as neoliberal safety
net "reforms" and (labor) market "flexibilization" were prominently justified with US comparisons
(by officials). But I doubt this had much practical impact on the decision to cut the experiment.
"A staggering 96 per cent of America's net job growth since 1990 has come from sectors known
to have low productivity (construction, retail, bars, restaurants, and other low-paying services
were responsible for 46 percentage points of total growth) and sectors where low productivity
is merely suspected in the absence of competition and proper measurement techniques (healthcare,
education, government, and finance explain the remaining 50 percentage points)".
So we are expanding jobs that produce services. With increased robotics and productivity, a
smaller and smaller % of the workforce will be needed to produce all the food and merchandise
people need (or can consume). So the future growth of the job market will have to be in producing
services. The challenge will be to make sure that those jobs are paying sufficiently high salaries
to ensure continuous robust growth in demand. Otherwise we will be entering a permanent period
of low growth in the economy.
ensure that workers have more bargaining power so that the growth in output is shared rather than
"
~~MT~
Workers need to get a handle on bargaining power, need to realize that uncontrolled reproduction
will inevitably bid down the price of labour. Look!
American family should find it cheaper to reduce child bearing to one child per female. The
one child can then inherit the entire estate of the couple with no expense for legal battles with
rival siblings. The one child will have more quality time with parents, grand parents, and aunts
for mentor-ing and help with school work, be on the fast track of career path that requires quality
education. Some jobs here require local folks with better language skills. Such jobs do not adapt
easily to recent immigrants. Reduction in our birth rate cannot be completely de-fang-ed by immigration.
Our birth control will remain a windfall to our workers in aggregate sprint as well as in separate
family's economics.
One child per 2 parents would be an economic disaster. Unless productivity per worker exploded
we would find that the total GDP would shrink rather than increase. The national debt per worker
would also increase even if we somehow managed to stop adding to it. The current problem of a
much smaller number of workers to help pay retirement and medical cost for the old people would
become extremely hard to solve (without exploding tax rates). Growing the population either by
birth or by allowing immigrants to come here is part of why US is doing better than Europe.
national debt per worker would also increase even if we somehow managed to stop adding to it.
The current problem of a much smaller number of workers to help pay retirement and medical cost
for the old people would become extremely hard to solve (without exploding tax rates). Growing
the population
"
Believe it! I just crunched approximate numbers to find that each child with only $2 in pocket
owes $57,000 to public debt, each retired pensioner, each billionaire and each millionaire owe
same thing, 57 K. But!
But 33% of Americans couldn't come up with $555 to handle an emergency. The answer to national
debt?
Endless exponential population expansion until natural resources run dry, no air to breath,
no water to drink, fug-get about food.
Population expansion is a social Ponzi scheme. Eventually it collapses -- we starve.
The remarkable instance of population control started when Deng Xiaoping crunched the numbers
and decided to opt for a draconian return to a rational World. The one child tradition began with
the most dramatic success at making folks rich enough to enjoy life and produce things for people
around the World to enjoy. Let the good times roll and thrill your soul. Got soul?
From my point of view as an employer, the Mexican and Caribbean immigrants have been good hires.
They are generally reliable and good cooperators. Other employers seem to think so as well, judging
by what I see when I go to the doctor or the dentist or the mechanic shop or just about anywhere
else that low to intermediate skill personnel are essential to running the shop.
I would not say that immigrants' effect on wages is trivial except in the macro sense. The
union tradesmen in our area are suffering badly due to having their wages undercut by low wage
immigrants. The wage-rate cuts are on the order of 50%, $32/hr down to $16/hr. Unlike the doctors,
where immigrant doctors don't seem to depress wages much, the scarcity value of trained tradesmen
is substantially reduced by an influx of immigrants with similar skills. Auto mechanics, auto
body men, carpenters, electricians, plumbers, etc are badly hurt by the competition. Perhaps because
their skills are more easily acquired than those of the doctors. We have a large number of asian
scientific and technical people in the area and they are also high wage folks and native born
scientists and technical personnel do not seem to have been adversely affected. There is next
to no mechanism for the doctors and scientists and engineers, who arguably have been helped by
immigration, to help out the tradesmen who have been hurt.
Higher taxes may not be the only answer. Private and religious efforts are underway, mostly
religious in my locale. There is a Cristo Rey school that has received a lot of support from businesses
in the area, particularly the science and technology-based businesses. The Catholics organized
it and run it, but it is open to all. The kids get a better education than they can get in the
corruptly run, disorganized, deteriorating public high schools nearby. They are matched with a
team of 4 and each kid works one day per week at his or her sponsoring business and the earnings
pay for the schooling. The kids meet and work with business and professional people they would
not otherwise meet.
Higher tax rates may take too long to occur to make a difference in the lives of today's young
people struggling to get some security or a future worth living out. Supporting and participating
in religious and community-based efforts is something we can all do today.
Back when, before the onslaught, when I was a young man; a young man out of high school could
work construction, learn how to do a day's work, get paid enough to get a car, court a girl, go
to college, ... join the union, maybe get married, buy a home, start a family; it was a path upward
for so many. These days, those jobs are held by $10-15/hr illegals working as contract labor while
our own young men out of high school have never held a job, don't how to do a day's work, ...
may be on heroin or meth. This is not win win, this is not working. Time to stop pretending.
Re: " The union tradesmen in our area are suffering badly due to having their wages undercut by
low wage immigrants. The wage-rate cuts are on the order of 50%, $32/hr down to $16/hr. "
The way it works is COLLECTIVE BARGAINING SETS THE PRICE OF LABOR BY THE MOST THE CONSUMER WILL
TOLERATE -- RACE TO THE BOTTOM WAGES (as you describe here) ARE SET BY THE LEAST THE EMPLOYEE
WILL TOLERATE.
What you describe would never happen with sufficient (high!) union density. See Germany.
******************
What to do:
Current union busting penalties carry about as much weight as the "FBI warning" you get when
you start a DVD. More actually: if you actually enter a movie theater to copy a new movie before
it goes to DVD you face a couple of years mandatory federal hospitality.
OTH if you fire an organizer the most you face is hiring the organizer back and maybe a little
back pay while she's waiting to fired again for "something else." The labor market is the only
market where you can break the law and face zero penalties at all.
New idea: an NLRB finding of illegally blocking union organization should be able to lead to
a mandate that a certification election must be taken. This may only be implementable at the federal
level.
Beyond that union busting should be a felony at state and federal levels -- backed by RICO
for persistent violators to keep employers from playing at the edges. Our most progressive/pro
labor states (WA, OR, CA, NV, IL, MN, NY, MD?) could do that right now if someone would just raise
the issue.
Like any other collective action, collective bargaining relies on cohesion among the collective.
The objective of any collective, whether a trade group or union, is collective action on behalf
of its members. Cohesion among the group members is absolutely necessary to successful collective
action. Weakness of union bargaining is due to the inability of the collective to maintain cohesion.
Your own cabdrivers' union has been undercut by Uber. My friends among the local tradesmen are
being undercut by men with comparable skills who are not eligible for union membership under current
rules, but are willing to do comparable work for half the union scale. My friends in industrial
unions have been undercut by foreign competitors. Technological advances have played a large role
in assisting circumstances to undercut cabbies, carpenters, and machinists all.
"We have a large number of asian scientific and technical people in the area and they are also
high wage folks and native born scientists and technical personnel do not seem to have been adversely
affected."
A significant part of age discrimination complaints in tech is actually about preferring young
*foreign* or foreign-origin labor to locals who started their careers in the 80's and 90's, and
who are now around 40-60 years old.
There has been the related observation that EE/CS and other tech-related majors have been majority
foreign-populated as the share of locals has declined due to lower job prospects and escalating
tuition and ancillary costs.
Almost all entry-level hiring in "established" industries has been either abroad, or bringing
in visa workes, which after temporary labor crunches in the Y2K/dotcom booms led to an oversupply
of experienced but older workers who would be hired at more senior levels as long as they had
related recent work credentials, or not quite senior levels but expected to have age-appropriate
experience and work contribution.
But that works only for a few years. Once you are out of the industry for a while or stuck
at level because there is no need for advancement, prospects decline a lot.
In parallel there has been a widely bemoaned innovation stagnation, and that goes together
with more people being needed for maintenance-type jobs and only few for advanced R&D (and even
advanced R&D has a lot of mundane legwork - consider Edison's quip "invention is 1% inspiration
and 99% perspiration").
That relatively few people were hired at the entry level "here" since about 2000 has also contributed
to perceived "talent shortages" - as companies got used to the idea you can just poach talent
or hire from the market, as some point the supply of *young* local workers dried up as the pipeline
wasn't refilled.
If nobody has hired and trained freshers locally let's say for 5-10 years, how can anybody
expect to find people in that range of experience (who haven't "peaked" yet and can still be motivated
for a while with promises of career advancement, or still have headroom for actual advancement)?
That's actually what age discrimination is about.
Be careful who you call a racist. BTW racists are deplorable and some polls indicate that 60%
of Trump's supporters are racists. So "half" could be seen as an underestimate.
"none of the Trump campaign pushback to Clinton's "basket of deplorables" comments have said
anything about the people Clinton was talking about not being racist, not being misogynist or
by whatever definition not being 'haters.' It's not referenced once. Check out the statements
after the jump."
They cannot refute what Clinton said because Trump's supporters are racists. Rusty may be uncomfortable
with this reality but it is true.
Sanders style welfare proposals are misplaced. Continuing to subsidize people to live in areas
that are not sustainable does not fix the problem. Money is taken from urban areas that is needed
for renewal and investments in urban residents in sustainable areas and used to subsidize unsustainable
middle class lifestyles in exurban and rural areas. A more permanent solution is some combination
of transformation & relocation. Sanders tossed out the same 50 year old SWP nonsense without much
thought to whether it would work in today's economy. He made vague proposals that people were
free to interpret as matching their own. It was never in any sense a plan.
The world is urbanizing. The future is urban. The sooner we start planning and building for
the future, the less problems we will have with these unsustainable areas and lifestyles. An integrated
urban planning sustainable approach is needed.
Bernie's solution were those of the 70s, like the broken clock, he stood and waited, then yelled
I have the answer when he hadn't a clue what was happening. Hillary's are of the 90s and shall
prove worthless going forward, though she's not quite as clueless; the question is: Is she smart
enough to change her mind?
P T Trump, like his predecessors in such times, is offering snake oil remedies. His advantage,
his medium is the media (the man can see and admire himself when he's performing on stage and
camera), and enough suckers have already been born.. . America's love of snake oil has been the
subject of writers like Twain, movies, theater, ... is world renowned.
Supporting and participating in religious and community-based efforts is something we can all
do today.
"
Try it! You'll love it! Look!
Our rulers are in business for themselves, their votes, their re-election, and their own t-bonds
but not our jobs and families. We got to support our own community. Our pioneers learned that
from the Indians and passed it on to us. It starts with a block party on 4th of July and grows
in all directions -- looking
The US has a trade deficit of 2-3 billion dollars a year. Our exports to Asia are mostly transfer
pricing attempts to avoid foreign taxes and smuggle profits back to the US. Trump is the first
presidential candidate in forty years to make correcting the trade deficit a centerpiece of his
campaign.
There is no country today, and never has been, nor will there be one that has no industry and
is also wealthy. The US was once a protectionist manufacturing heavy country. DJT wants to take
us back to pre-1970 protectionism; this is our only hope.
$2-3 billion a day. Imagine if we manufactured cellphones, computers, socks, etc. etc. the Delta,
Appalachia, and Michigan, New Haven CT etc. wouldn't be quickly becoming hell holes.
BenIsNotYoda : , -1
Thanks to Mark Thoma for highlighting some good effects of legal immigration. From the article:
Immigrants also own a larger share of small businesses than natives, are no more likely to
be unemployed, are no less likely to assimilate than in the past (no matter their country of origin),
and they have contributed greatly to technological development in the US. One study estimates
that "25.3 percent of the technology and engineering businesses launched in the United States
between 1995 to 2005 had a foreign-born founder. In California, this percentage was 38.8 percent.
In Silicon Valley, the center of the high-tech industry, 52.4 percent of the new tech start-ups
had a foreign-born owner."
Now only if the extreme liberals would stop bad mouthing H-1B program that brings in these
very people. To those who oppose H-1B: some abuse of the program to shut down the program is like
shutting down Medicare because there was a little fraud in Medicare. Obviously it is not a good
enough argument. Therefore I have to conclude it is pure discrimination disguised as something
else.
"...a full 95% of the cash that went to Greece ran a trip through Greece
and went straight back to creditors which in plain English is banks. So,
public taxpayers money was pushed through Greece to basically bail out banks...So
austerity becomes a side effect of a general policy of bank bailouts that
nobody wants to own. That's really what happened, ok?
Why are we peddling nonsense? Nobody wants to own up to a gigantic bailout
of the entire European banking system that took six years. Austerity was
a cover.
If the EU at the end of the day and the Euro is not actually improving
the lives of the majority of the people, what is it for? That's the question
that they've brought no answer to.
...the Hamptons is not a defensible position. The Hamptons is a very
rich area on Long Island that lies on low lying beaches. Very hard to defend
a low lying beach. Eventually people are going to come for you.
What's clear is that every social democratic party in Europe needs to
find a new reason to exist. Because as I said earlier over the past 20 years
they have sold their core constituency down the line for a bunch of floaters
in the middle who don't protect them or really don't particularly care for
them. Because the only offers on the agenda are basically austerity and
tax cuts for those who already have, versus austerity, apologies, and a
minimum wage."
Mark Blyth
Although I may not agree with every particular that Mark Blyth may say, directionally
he is exactly correct in diagnosing the problems in Europe.
And yes, I am aware that the subtitles are at times in error, and sometimes
outrageously so. Many of the errors were picked up and corrected in the comments.
No stimulus, no plans, no official actions, no monetary theories can be sustainably
effective in revitalizing an economy that is as bent as these have become without
serious reform at the first.
This was the lesson that was given by Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. There
will be no lasting recovery without it; it is a sine qua non . One cannot
turn their economy around when the political and business structures are systemically
corrupt, and the elites are preoccupied with looting it, and hiding their spoils
offshore.
"... "State Department Delays Records Request About Clinton-Linked Firm Until After The 2016 Election" [ International Business Times ]. "Beacon Global Strategies is a shadowy consulting firm that's stacked with former Obama administration officials, high profile Republicans and a number of Hillary Clinton's closest foreign policy advisers. But beyond its billing as a firm that works with the defense industry, it is unclear for whom specifically the company works, exactly what it does, and if Beacon employees have tried to influence national security policy since the firm's founding in 2013. ..."
"... UPDATE "New York-based Teneo, with 575 employees, markets itself as a one-stop shop for CEOs to get advice on a wide range of issues, including mergers and acquisitions, handling crises and managing public relations. For its services, it generally charges clients monthly retainer fees of $100,000 to $300,000." [ Wall Street Journal , "Teneo, Consulting Firm with Clinton Ties, Eyes $1 Billion IPO"]. Founder Douglas Band was Bill Clinton's body man . One can only wonder what a body man does to become worth $1 billion to, well, the people who made him worth a billion. ..."
"... The donors expect that their support of the Clinton Foundation will help them get access to the State Department, [Doug] Band see above] expects that he can count on [Huma] Abedin to help, and Abedin seems to understand that she needs to be responsive to Band. This would be a lot of effort for powerful people to expend, if it led to nothing at all. ..."
"... UPDATE "Even as the Clintons are touting plans to distance themselves from their foundation and limit its fundraising if Hillary Clinton is elected president, they're planning one last glitzy fundraising bash on Friday to belatedly celebrate Bill Clinton's 70th birthday" [ Politico ]. ..."
"... "Plans called for performances by Wynton Marsalis, Jon Bon Jovi and Barbra Streisand, according to people briefed on the planning. They said that major donors are being asked to give $250,000 to be listed as a chair for the party, $100,000 to be listed a co-chair and $50,000 to be listed as a vice-chair." Sounds lovely! How I wish I could go… ..."
"State Department Delays Records Request About Clinton-Linked Firm Until
After The 2016 Election" [
International Business Times ]. "Beacon Global Strategies is a shadowy consulting
firm that's stacked with former Obama administration officials, high profile
Republicans and a number of Hillary Clinton's closest foreign policy advisers.
But beyond its billing as a firm that works with the defense industry, it is
unclear for whom specifically the company works, exactly what it does, and if
Beacon employees have tried to influence national security policy since the
firm's founding in 2013.
UPDATE "New York-based Teneo, with 575 employees, markets itself as a one-stop
shop for CEOs to get advice on a wide range of issues, including mergers and
acquisitions, handling crises and managing public relations. For its services,
it generally charges clients monthly retainer fees of $100,000 to $300,000."
[
Wall Street Journal , "Teneo, Consulting Firm with Clinton Ties, Eyes $1
Billion IPO"]. Founder Douglas Band was Bill Clinton's
body man
. One can only wonder what a body man does to become worth $1 billion to,
well, the people who made him worth a billion.
"[I]n many of these [Clinton Foundation] episodes you can see expectations
operating like an electrical circuit. The donors expect that their support of
the Clinton Foundation will help them get access to the State Department, [Doug]
Band see above] expects that he can count on [Huma] Abedin to help, and Abedin
seems to understand that she needs to be responsive to Band. This would be a
lot of effort for powerful people to expend, if it led to nothing at all. There
are two obvious possibilities. One is that the State Department actually was
granting important favors to Clinton Foundation donors that the many sustained
investigations have somehow failed to detect. The other, which is more likely,
is that someone, somewhere along the line, was getting played" [
The New Yorker ]. Surely those two possibilities are not mutually exclusive?
And public office is being used for private gain in either case?
UPDATE "Even as the Clintons are touting plans to distance themselves from
their foundation and limit its fundraising if Hillary Clinton is elected president,
they're planning one last glitzy fundraising bash on Friday to belatedly celebrate
Bill Clinton's 70th birthday" [
Politico ].
"Plans called for performances by Wynton Marsalis, Jon Bon Jovi
and Barbra Streisand, according to people briefed on the planning. They said
that major donors are being asked to give $250,000 to be listed as a chair for
the party, $100,000 to be listed a co-chair and $50,000 to be listed as a vice-chair."
Sounds lovely! How I wish I could go…
"But part of the answer lies in something Americans have a hard time
talking about: class. Trade is a class issue. The trade agreements we have
entered into over the past few decades have consistently harmed some
Americans (manufacturing workers) while just as consistently benefiting
others (owners and professionals). …
To understand "free trade" in such a way has made it difficult for people
in the bubble of the consensus to acknowledge the actual consequences of the
agreements we have negotiated over the years."
13. How can we know you won't (again) impulsively damage
relationships with crucial allies to preserve your own ego?
Hillary Clinton added,
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
Dopey Prince @Alwaleed_Talal wants to control our U.S.
politicians with daddy's money. Can't do it when I get
elected. #Trump2016
Is such incompetence in messaging a reflection of Hillary Clinton
own confusion? Or are the categories "terrorist and dictator" versus
"crucial allies" solely depending on the size of payments to the
Clinton Foundation?
She is sliding to throwing mud ,. what ever will stick will do
the trick I guess .This started after some polls showing the
Donald ahead a few points .
I recognize election season is always crazy in the states,
especially as an outside observer looking in, but this cycle
seems so far beyond that norm compared even to 4 years ago it
makes me quite uncomfortable. It reeks of a growing desperation
by the elites to me. The 2012 campaigns of the two major parties
were a circus by any measure, but they seem completely measured
and intellectual by this year's standards.
I understand American culture dwells a lot on violence, but
the new standards of political rhetoric disturb me greatly. It
seems most of the country's population is either willfully
ignorant of the destruction their country creates or cheers it
on wildly and willingly. How anybody could advocate carpet
bombing without irony or rebuttal is frightenening. That it
could drum up support - well that's just depressing.
The two most important topics in this election, nuclear
weapons and global warming, both candidates have been decidedly
silent about. It scares me that neither party even attempts to
appeal to the left anymore, except by manipulating them by fear
and non existent 'security' issues. If it's all about PR and
perception management anyways, I wonder why Clinton wears her
right leaning nature and war mongering history on her sleeve?
Maybe content and debate matters less than I assume it does to
the average American voter. Maybe it's totally about spectacle
and personality now and nothing else. Sad, sad days for those
who live in the middle of the Empire but it's hard to be
sympathetic sometimes. It seems the hot new consumer electronic
device gets more of a thorough analysis and debate than does
either major party candidates' platform (if you could even call
it that).
Vote republican and catastrophic, irreversible climate change
is almost guaranteed, with a hearty chance of more war and more
regime change operations (despite attempts to paint the
candidate as 'isolationist').
Vote democrat for more wars and regime change, with the
status quo of environmental destruction happily maintained
(despite the attempts to paint the candidate as an
'environmentalist').
this us election is much more pathetic then usual... witnessing
the standing president refer to putin akin to saddam hussain is
frankly insane, but shows how depraved the usa has gotten...
and, besides that, since when did the average usa person even
know where any place outside the usa was on a map, let alone
having actually been their? oh - i guess it doesn't matter...
as @1 originalone says basically 'putin did it'...
The Obama administration authorized CIA backing of the
rebellion almost before it started. In all likelihood, it
started several years before the revolt, and the authorization
was to provide legal cover for activity that was already
ongoing.
Unfortunately, your observations are sharp,
correct and to the point. All I can weakly offer is something
Ralph Nader said. Ralph Nader once noted that the difference
between the democrats and republicans is the difference between
a car hitting a wall at 60 miles per hour versus 120 miles per
hour. Not so anymore. Now both cars will hit the wall going as
fast as they can. And the passengers will jump for joy at the
speed.
"... Despite the neoliberal obsession with wage suppression, history suggests that such a policy is self-destructive. Periods of high wages are associated with rapid technological change. ..."
"... On the ideological front, the South adopted a shallow, but rigid libertarian perspective which resembled modern neoliberalism. Samuel Johnson may have been the first person to see through the hypocrisy of the hollowness of southern libertarianism. ..."
"... the famous Powell Memo helped to spark a well-financed movement of well-finance right-wing political activism which morphed into right-wing political extremism both in economics and politics. ..."
"... In short, neoliberalism was surging ahead and the economy of high wages was now beyond the pale. These new conditions gave new force to the southern "yelps of liberty." The social safety net was taken down and reconstructed as the flag of neoliberalism. The one difference between the rhetoric of the slaveholders and that of the modern neoliberals was that entrepreneurial superiority replaced racial superiority as their battle cry. ..."
Despite the neoliberal obsession with wage suppression, history suggests
that such a policy is self-destructive. Periods of high wages are associated
with rapid technological change.
... ... ...
On the ideological front, the South adopted a shallow, but rigid libertarian
perspective which resembled modern neoliberalism. Samuel Johnson may have been
the first person to see through the hypocrisy of the hollowness of southern
libertarianism. Responding to the colonists' complaint that taxation by
the British was a form of tyranny, Samuel Johnson published his 1775 tract,
"Taxation No Tyranny: An answer to the Resolutions and Address of the American
Congress," asking the obvious question, "how is it that we hear the loudest
yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?" In The Works of Samuel Johnson,
LL. D.: Political Tracts. Political Essays. Miscellaneous Essays (London: J.
Buckland, 1787): pp. 60-146, p. 142.
... ... ...
By the late 19th century, David A Wells, an industrial technician who later
became the chief economic expert in the federal government, by virtue of his
position of overseeing federal taxes. After a trip to Europe, Wells reconsidered
his strong support for protectionism. Rather than comparing the dynamism of
the northern states with the technological backward of their southern counterparts,
he was responding to the fear that American industry could not compete with
the cheap "pauper" labor of Europe. Instead, he insisted that the United States
had little to fear from, the competition from cheap labor, because the relatively
high cost of American labor would ensure rapid technological change, which,
indeed, was more rapid in the United States than anywhere else in the world,
with the possible exception of Germany. Both countries were about to rapidly
surpass England's industrial prowess.
The now-forgotten Wells was so highly regarded that the prize for the best
economics dissertation at Harvard is still known as the David A Wells prize.
His efforts gave rise to a very powerful idea in economic theory at the time,
known as "the economy of high wages," which insisted that high wages drove economic
prosperity. With his emphasis on technical change, driven by the strong competitive
pressures from high wages, Wells anticipated Schumpeter's idea of creative destruction,
except that for him, high wages rather than entrepreneurial genius drove this
process.
Although the economy of high wages remained highly influential through the
1920s, the extensive growth of government powers during World War I reignited
the antipathy for big government. Laissez-faire economics began come back into
vogue with the election of Calvin Coolidge, while the once-powerful progressive
movement was becoming excluded from the ranks of reputable economics.
... ... ...
With Barry Goldwater's humiliating defeat in his presidential campaign,
the famous Powell Memo helped to spark a well-financed movement of well-finance
right-wing political activism which morphed into right-wing political extremism
both in economics and politics. Symbolic of the narrowness of this new
mindset among economists, Milton Friedman's close associate, George Stigler,
said in 1976 that "one evidence of professional integrity of the economist is
the fact that it is not possible to enlist good economists to defend minimum
wage laws." Stigler, G. J. 1982. The Economist as Preacher and Other Essays
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press): p. 60.
In short, neoliberalism was surging ahead and the economy of high wages
was now beyond the pale. These new conditions gave new force to the southern
"yelps of liberty." The social safety net was taken down and reconstructed as
the flag of neoliberalism. The one difference between the rhetoric of the slaveholders
and that of the modern neoliberals was that entrepreneurial superiority replaced
racial superiority as their battle cry.
One final irony: evangelical Christians were at the forefront of the abolitionist
movement. Today, some of them are providing the firepower for the epidemic of
neoliberalism.
"... the US has been successful in dictating neoliberal policies, acting partly through the IMF and World Bank and partly through direct pressure. ..."
"... From roughly the mid 1930s to the mid 1970s a new "interventionist" approach replaced classical liberalism, and it became the accepted belief that capitalism requires significant state regulation in order to be viable. In the 1970s the Old Religion of classical liberalism made a rapid comeback, first in academic economics and then in the realm of public policy. ..."
"... Neoliberal theory claims that a largely unregulated capitalist system (a "free market economy" not only embodies the ideal of free individual choice but also achieves optimum economic performance with respect to efficiency, economic growth, technical progress, and distributional justice. ..."
"... The policy recommendations of neoliberalism are concerned mainly with dismantling what remains of the regulationist welfare state. ..."
"... This paper argues that the resurgence and tenacity of neoliberalism during the past two decades cannot be explained, in an instrumental fashion, by any favorable effects of neoliberal policies on capitalist economic performance. On the contrary, we will present a case that neoliberalism has been harmful for long-run capitalist economic performance, even judging economic performance from the perspective of the interests of capital. It will be argued that the resurgence and continuing dominance of neoliberalism can be explained, at least in part, by changes in the competitive structure of world capitalism, which have resulted in turn from the particular form of global economic integration that has developed in recent decades. The changed competitive structure of capitalism has altered the political posture of big business with regard to economic policy and the role of the state, turning big business from a supporter of state-regulated capitalism into an opponent of it. ..."
"... Second, the neoliberal model creates instability on the macroeconomic level by renouncing state counter-cyclical spending and taxation policies, by reducing the effectiveness of "automatic stabilizers" through shrinking social welfare programs,3 and by loosening public regulation of the financial sector. This renders the system more vulnerable to major financial crises and depressions. Third, the neoliberal model tends to intensify class conflict, which can potentially discourage capitalist investment.4 ..."
"... The evidence from GDP and labor productivity growth rates supports the claim that the neoliberal model is inferior to the state regulationist model for key dimensions of capitalist economic performance. There is ample evidence that the neoliberal model has shifted income and wealth in the direction of the already wealthy. However, the ability to shift income upward has limits in an economy that is not growing rapidly. Neoliberalism does not appear to be delivering the goods in the ways that matter the most for capitalism's long-run stability and survival. ..."
"... Once capitalism had become well established in the US after the Civil War, it entered a period of cutthroat competition and wild accumulation known as the Robber Baron era. In this period a coherent anti-interventionist liberal position emerged and became politically dominant. Despite the enormous inequalities, the severe business cycle, and the outrageous and often unlawful behavior of the Goulds and Rockefellers, the idea that government should not intervene in the economy held sway through the end of the 19th century. ..."
"... Small business has remained adamantly opposed to the big, interventionist state, from the Progressive Era through the New Deal down to the present. This division between big and small business is chronicled for the Progressive Era in Weinstein (1968). In the decades immediately following World War II one can observe this division in the divergent views of the Business Roundtable, a big business organization which often supported interventionist programs, and the US Chambers of Commerce, the premier small business organization, which hewed to an antigovernment stance. ..."
"... By contrast, the typical small business faces a daily battle for survival, which prevents attention to long-run considerations and which places a premium on avoiding the short-run costs of taxation and state regulation. This explains the radically different positions that big business and small business held regarding the proper state role in the economy for the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. ..."
"... This long-standing division between big business and small business appeared to vanish in the US starting in the 1970s. Large corporations and banks which had formerly supported foundations that advocated an active government role in the economy, such as the Brookings Institution, became big donors to neoliberal foundations such as the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation. As a result, such right-wing foundations, which previously had to rely mainly on contributions from small business, became very wealthy and influential.10 It was big business=s desertion of the political coalition supporting state intervention and its shift to neoliberalism that rebuilt support for neoliberal theories and policies in the US, starting in the 1970s. With business now unified on economic policy, the shift was dramatic. Big grants became available for economics research having a neoliberal slant. The major media shifted their spin on political developments, and the phrase "government programs" now could not be printed except with the word "bloated" before it. ..."
"... Globalization is usually defined as an increase in the volume of cross-border economic interactions and resource flows, producing a qualitative shift in the relations between national economies and between nation-states (Baker et. al., 1998, p. 5; Kozul-Wright and Rowthorn, 1998, p. 1). Three kinds of economic interactions have increased substantially in past decades: merchandise trade flows, foreign direct investment, and cross-border financial investments. We will briefly examine each, with an eye on their effects on the competitive structure of contemporary capitalism. ..."
"... By the close of the twentieth century, capitalism had become significantly more globalized than it had been fifty years ago, and by some measures it is much more globalized than it had been at the previous peak of this process in 1913. The most important features of globalization today are greatly increased international trade, increased flows of capital across national boundaries (particularly speculative short-term capital), and a major role for large TNCs in manufacturing, extractive activities, and finance, operating worldwide yet retaining in nearly all cases a clear base in a single nation-state. ..."
"... Some analysts argue that globalization has produced a world of such economic interdependence that individual nation-states no longer have the power to regulate capital. However, while global interdependence does create difficulties for state regulation, this effect has been greatly exaggerated. Nation-states still retain a good deal of potential power vis-a-vis capitalist firms, provided that the political will is present to exercise such power. For example, even such a small country as Malaysia proved able to successfully impose capital controls following the Asian financial crisis of 1997, despite the opposition of the IMF and the US government. ..."
"... Globalization appears to be one factor that has transformed big business from a supporter to an opponent of the interventionist state. It has done so partly by producing TNCs whose tie to the domestic markets for goods and labor is limited. ..."
"... Globalization has produced a world capitalism that bears some resemblance to the Robber Baron Era in the US. Giant corporations battle one another in a system lacking well defined rules. Mergers and acquisitions abound, including some that cross national boundaries, but so far few world industries have evolved the kind of tight oligopolistic structure that would lay the basis for a more controlled form of market relations. Like the late 19th century US Robber Barons, today's large corporations and banks above all want freedom from political burdens and restraints as they confront one another in world markets.18 ..."
"... The existence of a powerful bloc of Communist-run states with an alternative "state socialist" socioeconomic system tended to push capitalism toward a state regulationist form. It reinforced the fear among capitalists that their own working classes might turn against capitalism. It also had an impact on relations among the leading capitalist states, promoting inter-state unity behind US leadership, which facilitated the creation and operation of a world-system of state-regulated capitalism.19 The demise of state socialism during 1989-91 removed one more factor that had reinforced the regulationist state. ..."
"... If state socialism re-emerged in one or more major countries, perhaps this might push the capitalist world back toward the regulationist state. However, such a development does not seem likely. Even if Russia or Ukraine at some point does head in that direction, it would be unlikely to produce a serious rival socioeconomic system to that of world capitalism. ..."
Department of Economics and Political Economy Research Institute Thompson Hall
University of Massachusetts Amherst, MA 01003 U.S.A. Telephone 413-545-1248
Fax 413-545-2921 Email [email protected] August, 2000 This paper was published
in Rethinking Marxism, Volume 12, Number 2, Summer 2002, pp. 64-79.
Research assistance was provided by Elizabeth Ramey and Deger Eryar. Research
funding was provided by the Political Economy Research Institute of the University
of Massachusetts at Amherst. Globalization and Neoliberalism 1 For some
two decades neoliberalism has dominated economic policymaking in the US and
the UK. Neoliberalism has strong advocates in continental Western Europe and
Japan, but substantial popular resistance there has limited its influence so
far, despite continuing US efforts to impose neoliberal policies on them. In
much of the Third World, and in the transition countries (except for China),
the US has been successful in dictating neoliberal policies, acting partly through
the IMF and World Bank and partly through direct pressure.
Neoliberalism is an updated version of the classical liberal economic thought
that was dominant in the US and UK prior to the Great Depression of the 1930s.
From roughly the mid 1930s to the mid 1970s a new "interventionist" approach
replaced classical liberalism, and it became the accepted belief that capitalism
requires significant state regulation in order to be viable. In the 1970s the
Old Religion of classical liberalism made a rapid comeback, first in academic
economics and then in the realm of public policy.
Neoliberalism is both a body of economic theory and a policy stance.
Neoliberal theory claims that a largely unregulated capitalist system (a "free
market economy" not only embodies the ideal of free individual choice but also
achieves optimum economic performance with respect to efficiency, economic growth,
technical progress, and distributional justice. The state is assigned a
very limited economic role: defining property rights, enforcing contracts, and
regulating the money supply.1 State intervention to correct market failures
is viewed with suspicion, on the ground that such intervention is likely to
create more problems than it solves.
The policy recommendations of neoliberalism are concerned mainly with
dismantling what remains of the regulationist welfare state. These recommendations
include deregulation of business; privatization of public activities and assets;
elimination of, or cutbacks in, social welfare programs; and reduction of taxes
on businesses and the investing class. In the international sphere, neoliberalism
calls for free movement of goods, services, capital, and money (but not people)
across national boundaries. That is, corporations, banks, and individual investors
should be free to move their property across national boundaries, and free to
acquire property across national boundaries, although free cross-border movement
by individuals is not part of the neoliberal program. How can the re-emergence
of a seemingly outdated and outmoded economic theory be explained? At first
many progressive economists viewed the 1970s lurch toward liberalism as a temporary
response to the economic instability of that decade. As corporate interests
decided that the Keynesian regulationist approach no longer worked to their
advantage, they looked for an alternative and found only the old liberal ideas,
which could at least serve as an ideological basis for cutting those state programs
viewed as obstacles to profit-making. However, neoliberalism has proved to be
more than just a temporary response. It has outlasted the late 1970s/early 1980s
right-wing political victories in the UK (Thatcher) and US (Reagan). Under a
Democratic Party administration in the US and a Labor Party government in the
UK in the 1990s, neoliberalism solidified its position of dominance.
This paper argues that the resurgence and tenacity of neoliberalism during
the past two decades cannot be explained, in an instrumental fashion, by any
favorable effects of neoliberal policies on capitalist economic performance.
On the contrary, we will present a case that neoliberalism has been harmful
for long-run capitalist economic performance, even judging economic performance
from the perspective of the interests of capital. It will be argued that the
resurgence and continuing dominance of neoliberalism can be explained, at least
in part, by changes in the competitive structure of world capitalism, which
have resulted in turn from the particular form of global economic integration
that has developed in recent decades. The changed competitive structure of capitalism
has altered the political posture of big business with regard to economic policy
and the role of the state, turning big business from a supporter of state-regulated
capitalism into an opponent of it.
The Problematic Character of Neoliberalism
Neoliberalism appears to be problematic as a dominant theory for contemporary
capitalism. The stability and survival of the capitalist system depends on its
ability to bring vigorous capital accumulation, where the latter process is
understood to include not just economic expansion but also technological progress.
Vigorous capital accumulation permits rising profits to coexist with rising
living standards for a substantial part of the population over the long-run.2
However, it does not appear that neoliberalism promotes vigorous capital accumulation
in contemporary capitalism. There are a number of reasons why one would not
expect the neoliberal model to promote rapid accumulation. First, it gives rise
to a problem of insufficient aggregate demand over the long run, stemming from
the powerful tendency of the neoliberal regime to lower both real wages and
public spending. Second, the neoliberal model creates instability on the
macroeconomic level by renouncing state counter-cyclical spending and taxation
policies, by reducing the effectiveness of "automatic stabilizers" through shrinking
social welfare programs,3 and by loosening public regulation of the financial
sector. This renders the system more vulnerable to major financial crises and
depressions. Third, the neoliberal model tends to intensify class conflict,
which can potentially discourage capitalist investment.4
The historical evidence confirms doubts about the ability of the neoliberal
model to promote rapid capital accumulation. We will look at growth rates of
gross domestic product (GDP) and of labor productivity. The GDP growth rate
provides at least a rough approximation of the rate of capital accumulation,
while the labor productivity growth rate tells us something about the extent
to which capitalism is developing the forces of production via rising ratios
of means of production to direct labor, technological advance, and improved
labor skills.5 Table 1 shows average annual real GDP growth rates for six leading
developed capitalist countries over two periods, 1950-73 and 1973-99. The first
period was the heyday of state-regulated capitalism, both within those six countries
and in the capitalist world-system as a whole. The second period covers the
era of growing neoliberal dominance. All six countries had significantly faster
GDP growth in the earlier period than in the later one.
While Japan and the major Western European economies have been relatively
depressed in the 1990s, the US is often portrayed as rebounding to great prosperity
over the past decade. Neoliberals often claim that US adherence to neoliberal
policies finally paid off in the 1990s, while the more timid moves away from
state-interventionist policies in Europe and Japan kept them mired in stagnation.
Table 2 shows GDP and labor productivity growth rates for the US economy for
three subperiods during 1948-99.6 Column 1 of Table 2 shows that GDP growth
was significantly slower in 1973-90 B a period of transition from state-regulated
capitalism to the neoliberal model in the US B than in 1948-73. While GDP growth
improved slightly in 1990-99, it remained well below that of the era of state-regulated
capitalism. Some analysts cite the fact that GDP growth accelerated after 1995,
averaging 4.1% per year during 1995-99 (US Bureau of Economic Analysis, 2000).
However, it is not meaningful to compare a short fragment of the 1990s business
cycle expansion to the longrun performance of the economy during 1948-73.7
Column 2 of Table 1 shows that the high rate of labor productivity growth
recorded in 1948- 73 fell by more than half in 1973-90. While there was significant
improvement in productivity growth in the 1990s, it remained well below the
1948-73 rate, despite the rapid spread of what should be productivity-enhancing
communication and information-management technologies during the past decade.
The evidence from GDP and labor productivity growth rates supports the
claim that the neoliberal model is inferior to the state regulationist model
for key dimensions of capitalist economic performance. There is ample evidence
that the neoliberal model has shifted income and wealth in the direction of
the already wealthy. However, the ability to shift income upward has limits
in an economy that is not growing rapidly. Neoliberalism does not appear to
be delivering the goods in the ways that matter the most for capitalism's long-run
stability and survival.
The Structure of Competition and Economic Policy
The processes through which the dominant economic ideology and policies
are selected in a capitalist system are complex and many-sided. No general rule
operates to assure that those economic policies which would be most favorable
for capitalism are automatically adopted. History suggests that one important
determinant of the dominant economic ideology and policy stance is the competitive
structure of capitalism in a given era. Specifically, this paper argues that
periods of relatively unconstrained competition tend to produce the intellectual
and public policy dominance of liberalism, while periods of relatively constrained,
oligopolistic market relations tend to promote interventionist ideas and policies.
A relation in the opposite direction also exists, one which is often commented
upon. That is, one can argue that interventionist policies promote monopoly
power in markets, while liberal policies promote greater competition. This latter
relation is not being denied here. Rather, it will be argued that there is a
normally-overlooked direction of influence, having significant historical explanatory
power, which runs from competitive structure to public policy. In the period
when capitalism first became well established in the US, during 1800-1860, the
government played a relatively interventionist role. The federal government
placed high tariffs on competing manufactured goods from Europe, and federal,
state, and local levels of government all actively financed, and in some cases
built and operated, the new canal and rail system that created a large internal
market. There was no serious debate over the propriety of public financing of
transportation improvements in that era -- the only debate was over which regions
would get the key subsidized routes.
Once capitalism had become well established in the US after the Civil
War, it entered a period of cutthroat competition and wild accumulation known
as the Robber Baron era. In this period a coherent anti-interventionist liberal
position emerged and became politically dominant. Despite the enormous inequalities,
the severe business cycle, and the outrageous and often unlawful behavior of
the Goulds and Rockefellers, the idea that government should not intervene in
the economy held sway through the end of the 19th century.
From roughly 1890 to 1903 a huge merger wave transformed the competitive
structure of US capitalism. Out of that merger wave emerged giant corporations
possessing significant monopoly power in the manufacturing, mining, transportation,
and communication sectors. US industry settled down to a more restrained form
of oligopolistic rivalry. At the same time, many of the new monopoly capitalists
began to criticize the old Laissez Faire ideas and support a more interventionist
role for the state.8 The combination of big business support for state regulation
of business, together with similar demands arising from a popular anti-monopoly
movement based among small farmers and middle class professionals, ushered in
what is called the Progressive Era, from 1900-16. The building of a regulationist
state that was begun in the Progressive Era was completed during the New Deal
era a few decades later, when once again both big business leaders and a vigorous
popular movement (this time based among industrial workers) supported an interventionist
state. Both in the Progressive Era and the New Deal, big business and the popular
movement differed about what types of state intervention were needed. Big business
favored measures to increase the stability of the system and to improve conditions
for profit-making, while the popular movement sought to use the state to restrain
the power and privileges of big business and provide greater security for ordinary
people. The outcome in both cases was a political compromise, one weighted toward
the interests of big business, reflecting the relative power of the latter in
American capitalism.
Small business has remained adamantly opposed to the big, interventionist
state, from the Progressive Era through the New Deal down to the present. This
division between big and small business is chronicled for the Progressive Era
in Weinstein (1968). In the decades immediately following World War II one can
observe this division in the divergent views of the Business Roundtable, a big
business organization which often supported interventionist programs, and the
US Chambers of Commerce, the premier small business organization, which hewed
to an antigovernment stance.
What explains this political difference between large and small business?
When large corporations achieve significant market power and become freed from
fear concerning their immediate survival, they tend to develop a long time horizon
and pay attention to the requirements for assuring growing profits over time.9
They come to see the state as a potential ally. Having high and stable monopoly
profits, they tend to view the cost of government programs as something they
can afford, given their potential benefits. By contrast, the typical small
business faces a daily battle for survival, which prevents attention to long-run
considerations and which places a premium on avoiding the short-run costs of
taxation and state regulation. This explains the radically different positions
that big business and small business held regarding the proper state role in
the economy for the first two-thirds of the twentieth century.
This long-standing division between big business and small business appeared
to vanish in the US starting in the 1970s. Large corporations and banks which
had formerly supported foundations that advocated an active government role
in the economy, such as the Brookings Institution, became big donors to neoliberal
foundations such as the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation.
As a result, such right-wing foundations, which previously had to rely mainly
on contributions from small business, became very wealthy and influential.10
It was big business=s desertion of the political coalition supporting state
intervention and its shift to neoliberalism that rebuilt support for neoliberal
theories and policies in the US, starting in the 1970s. With business now unified
on economic policy, the shift was dramatic. Big grants became available for
economics research having a neoliberal slant. The major media shifted their
spin on political developments, and the phrase "government programs" now could
not be printed except with the word "bloated" before it.
This switch in the dominant economic model first showed up in the mid 1970s
in academic economics, as the previously marginalized Chicago School spread
its influence far beyond the University of Chicago. This was soon followed by
a radical shift in the public policy arena. In 1978- 79 the previously interventionist
Carter Administration began sounding the very neoliberal themes B deregulation
of business, cutbacks in social programs, and general fiscal and monetary austerity
B that were to become the centerpiece of Reagan Administration policies in 1981.
What caused the radical change in the political posture of big business regarding
state intervention in the economy? This paper argues that a major part of the
explanation lies in the effects of the globalization of the world capitalist
economy in the post-World War II period.
Globalization and Competition
Globalization is usually defined as an increase in the volume of cross-border
economic interactions and resource flows, producing a qualitative shift in the
relations between national economies and between nation-states (Baker et. al.,
1998, p. 5; Kozul-Wright and Rowthorn, 1998, p. 1). Three kinds of economic
interactions have increased substantially in past decades: merchandise trade
flows, foreign direct investment, and cross-border financial investments. We
will briefly examine each, with an eye on their effects on the competitive structure
of contemporary capitalism.
Table 3 shows the ratio of merchandise exports to gross domestic product
for selected years from 1820 to 1992, for the world and also for Western Europe,
the US, and Japan. Capitalism brought a five-fold rise in world exports relative
to output from 1820-70, followed by another increase of nearly three-fourths
by 1913. After declining in the interwar period, world exports reached a new
peak of 11.2% of world output in 1973, rising further to 13.5% in 1992. The
1992 figure was over fifty per cent higher than the pre-World War I peak.
Merchandise exports include physical goods only, while GDP includes services,
many of which are not tradable, as well as goods. In the twentieth century the
proportion of services in GDP has risen significantly. Table 4 shows an estimate
of the ratio of world merchandise exports to the good-only portion of world
GDP. This ratio nearly tripled during 1950-92, with merchandise exports rising
to nearly one-third of total goods output in the latter year. The 1992 figure
was 2.6 times as high as that of 1913.
Western Europe, the US, and Japan all experienced significant increases in
exports relative to GDP during 1950-92, as Table 3 shows. All of them achieved
ratios of exports to GDP far in excess of the 1913 level. While exports were
only 8.2% of the total GDP of the US in 1992, exports amounted to 22.0% of the
non-service portion of GDP that year (Economic Report of the President,
1999, pp. 338, 444).
Many analysts view foreign direct investment as the most important form of
cross-border economic interchange. It is associated with the movement of technology
and organizational methods, not just goods. Table 5 shows two measures of foreign
direct investment. Column 1 gives the outstanding stock of foreign direct investment
in the world as a percentage of world output. This measure has more than doubled
since 1975, although it is not much greater today than it was in 1913. Column
2 shows the annual inflow of direct foreign investment as a percentage of gross
fixed capital formation. This measure increased rapidly during 1975-95. However,
it is still relatively low in absolute terms, with foreign direct investment
accounting for only 5.2 per cent of gross fixed capital formation in 1995.
Not all, or even most, international capital flows take the form of direct
investment. Financial flows (such as cross-border purchases of securities and
deposits in foreign bank accounts) are normally larger. One measure that takes
account of financial as well as direct investment is the total net movement
of capital into or out of a country. That measure indicates the extent to which
capital from one country finances development in other countries. Table 6 shows
the absolute value of current account surpluses or deficits as a percentage
of GDP for 12 major capitalist countries. Since net capital inflow or outflow
is approximately equal to the current account deficit or surplus (differing
only due to errors and omissions), this indicates the size of net cross-border
capital flows. The ratio nearly doubled from 1970-74 to 1990-96, although it
remained well below the figure for 1910-14.
Cross-border gross capital movements have grown much more rapidly
than cross-border net capital movements.11 In recent times a very large
and rapidly growing volume of capital has moved back and forth across national
boundaries. Much of this capital flow is speculative in nature, reflecting growing
amounts of short-term capital that are moved around the world in search of the
best temporary return. No data on such flows are available for the early part
of this century, but the data for recent decades are impressive. During 1980-95
cross-border transactions in bonds and equities as a percentage of GDP rose
from 9% to 136% for the US, from 8% to 168% for Germany, and from 8% to 66%
for Japan (Baker et. al., 1998, p. 10). The total volume of foreign exchange
transactions in the world rose from about $15 billion per day in 1973 to $80
billion per day in 1980 and $1260 billion per day in 1995. Trade in goods and
services accounted for 15% of foreign exchange transactions in 1973 but for
less than 2% of foreign exchange transactions in 1995 (Bhaduri, 1998, p. 152).
While cross-border flows of goods and capital are usually considered to be
the best indicators of possible globalization of capitalism, changes that have
occurred over time within capitalist enterprises are also relevant. That is,
the much-discussed rise of the transnational corporation (TNC) is relevant here,
where a TNC is a corporation which has a substantial proportion of its sales,
assets, and employees outside its home country.12 TNCs existed in the pre-World
War I era, primarily in the extractive sector. In the post-World War II period
many large manufacturing corporations in the US, Western Europe, and Japan became
TNCs.
The largest TNCs are very international measured by the location of their
activities. One study found that the 100 largest TNCs in the world (ranked by
assets) had 40.4% of their assets abroad, 50.0% of output abroad, and 47.9%
of employment abroad in 1996 (Sutcliffe and Glyn, 1999, p. 125). While this
shows that the largest TNCs are significantly international in their activities,
all but a handful have retained a single national base for top officials and
major stockholders.13 The top 200 TNCs ranked by output were estimated to produce
only about 10 per cent of world GDP in 1995 (Sutcliffe and Glyn, 1999, p. 122).
By the close of the twentieth century, capitalism had become significantly
more globalized than it had been fifty years ago, and by some measures it is
much more globalized than it had been at the previous peak of this process in
1913. The most important features of globalization today are greatly increased
international trade, increased flows of capital across national boundaries (particularly
speculative short-term capital), and a major role for large TNCs in manufacturing,
extractive activities, and finance, operating worldwide yet retaining in nearly
all cases a clear base in a single nation-state.
While the earlier wave of globalization before World War I did produce a
capitalism that was significantly international, two features of that earlier
international system differed from the current global capitalism in ways that
are relevant here. First, the pre-world War I globalization took place within
a world carved up into a few great colonial empires, which meant that much of
the so-called "cross-border" trade and investment of that earlier era actually
occurred within a space controlled by a single state. Second, the high level
of world trade reached before World War I occurred within a system based much
more on specialization and division of labor. That is, manufactured goods were
exported by the advanced capitalist countries in exchange for primary products,
unlike today when most trade is in manufactured goods. In 1913 62.5% of world
trade was in primary products (Bairoch and Kozul-Wright, 1998, p. 45). By contrast,
in 1970 60.9% of world exports were manufactured goods, rising to 74.7% in 1994
(Baker et. al., 1998, p. 7).
Some analysts argue that globalization has produced a world of such economic
interdependence that individual nation-states no longer have the power to regulate
capital. However, while global interdependence does create difficulties for
state regulation, this effect has been greatly exaggerated. Nation-states still
retain a good deal of potential power vis-a-vis capitalist firms, provided that
the political will is present to exercise such power. For example, even such
a small country as Malaysia proved able to successfully impose capital controls
following the Asian financial crisis of 1997, despite the opposition of the
IMF and the US government. A state that has the political will to exercise
some control over movements of goods and capital across its borders still retains
significant power to regulate business. The more important effect of globalization
has been on the political will to undertake state regulation, rather than on
the technical feasibility of doing so. Globalization has had this effect by
changing the competitive structure of capitalism. It appears that globalization
in this period has made capitalism significantly more competitive, in several
ways. First, the rapid growth of trade has changed the situation faced by large
corporations. Large corporations that had previously operated in relatively
controlled oligopolistic domestic markets now face competition from other large
corporations based abroad, both in domestic and foreign markets. In the US the
rate of import penetration of domestic manufacturing markets was only 2 per
cent in 1950; it rose to 8% in 1971 and 16% by 1993, an 8-fold increase since
1950 (Sutcliffe and Glyn, 1999, p. 116).
Second, the rapid increase in foreign direct investment has in many cases
placed TNCs production facilities in the home markets of their foreign rivals.
General Motors not only faces import competition from Toyota and Honda but has
to compete with US-produced Toyota and Honda vehicles. Third, the increasingly
integrated and open world financial system has thrown the major banks and other
financial institutions of the leading capitalist nations increasingly into competition
with one another.
Globalization appears to be one factor that has transformed big business
from a supporter to an opponent of the interventionist state. It has done so
partly by producing TNCs whose tie to the domestic markets for goods and labor
is limited. More importantly, globalization tends to turn big business
into small business. The process of globalization has increased the competitive
pressure faced by large corporations and banks, as competition has become a
world-wide relationship.17 Even if those who run large corporations and financial
institutions recognize the need for a strong nationstate in their home base,
the new competitive pressure they face shortens their time horizon. It pushes
them toward support for any means to reduce their tax burden and lift their
regulatory constraints, to free them to compete more effectively with their
global rivals. While a regulationist state may seem to be in the interests of
big business, in that it can more effectively promote capital accumulation in
the long run, in a highly competitive environment big business is drawn away
from supporting a regulationist state.
Globalization has produced a world capitalism that bears some resemblance
to the Robber Baron Era in the US. Giant corporations battle one another in
a system lacking well defined rules. Mergers and acquisitions abound, including
some that cross national boundaries, but so far few world industries have evolved
the kind of tight oligopolistic structure that would lay the basis for a more
controlled form of market relations. Like the late 19th century US Robber Barons,
today's large corporations and banks above all want freedom from political burdens
and restraints as they confront one another in world markets.18
The above interpretation of the rise and persistence of neoliberalism attributes
it, at least in part, to the changed competitive structure of world capitalism
resulting from the process of globalization. As neoliberalism gained influence
starting in the 1970s, it became a force propelling the globalization process
further. One reason for stressing the line of causation running from globalization
to neoliberalism is the time sequence of the developments. The process of globalization,
which had been reversed to some extent by political and economic events in the
interwar period, resumed right after World War II, producing a significantly
more globalized world economy and eroding the monopoly power of large corporations
well before neoliberalism began its second coming in the mid 1970s. The rapid
rise in merchandise exports began during the Bretton Woods period, as Table
3 showed. So too did the growing role for TNC's. These two aspects of the current
globalization had their roots in the postwar era of state-regulated capitalism.
This suggests that, to some extent, globalization reflects a long-run tendency
in the capital accumulation process rather than just being a result of the rising
influence of neoliberal policies. On the other hand, once neoliberalism became
dominant, it accelerated the process of globalization. This can be seen most
clearly in the data on cross-border flows of both real and financial capital,
which began to grow rapidly only after the 1960s.
Other Factors Promoting Neoliberalism
The changed competitive structure of capitalism provides part of the explanation
for the rise from the ashes of classical liberalism and its persistence in the
face of widespread evidence of its failure to deliver the goods. However, three
additional factors have played a role in promoting neoliberal dominance. These
are the weakening of socialist movements in the industrialized capitalist countries,
the demise of state socialism, and the long period that has elapsed since the
last major capitalist economic crisis. There is space here for only some brief
comments about these additional factors.
The socialist movements in the industrialized capitalist countries have declined
in strength significantly over the past few decades. While Social Democratic
parties have come to office in several European countries recently, they no
longer represent a threat of even significant modification of capitalism, much
less the specter of replacing capitalism with an alternative socialist system.
The regulationist state was always partly a response to the fear of socialism,
a point illustrated by the emergence of the first major regulationist state
of the era of mature capitalism in Germany in the late 19th century, in response
to the world=s first major socialist movement. As the threat coming from socialist
movements in the industrialized capitalist countries has receded, so too has
to incentive to retain the regulationist state.
The existence of a powerful bloc of Communist-run states with an alternative
"state socialist" socioeconomic system tended to push capitalism toward a state
regulationist form. It reinforced the fear among capitalists that their own
working classes might turn against capitalism. It also had an impact on relations
among the leading capitalist states, promoting inter-state unity behind US leadership,
which facilitated the creation and operation of a world-system of state-regulated
capitalism.19 The demise of state socialism during 1989-91 removed one more
factor that had reinforced the regulationist state.
The occurrence of a major economic crisis tends to promote an interventionist
state, since active state intervention is required to overcome a major crisis.
The memory of a recent major crisis tends to keep up support for a regulationist
state, which is correctly seen as a stabilizing force tending to head off major
crises. As the Great Depression of the 1930s has receded into the distant past,
the belief has taken hold that major economic crises have been banished forever.
This reduces the perceived need to retain the regulationist state.
Concluding Comments
If neoliberalism continues to reign as the dominant ideology and policy stance,
it can be argued that world capitalism faces a future of stagnation, instability,
and even eventual social breakdown.20 However, from the factors that have promoted
neoliberalism one can see possible sources of a move back toward state-regulated
capitalism at some point. One possibility would be the development of tight
oligopoly and regulated competition on a world scale. Perhaps the current merger
wave might continue until, as happened at the beginning of the 20th century
within the US and in other industrialized capitalist economies, oligopoly replaced
cutthroat competition, but this time on a world scale. Such a development might
revive big business support for an interventionist state. However, this does
not seem to be likely in the foreseeable future. The world is a big place, with
differing cultures, laws, and business practices in different countries, which
serve as obstacles to overcoming the competitive tendency in market relations.
Transforming an industry=s structure so that two to four companies produce the
bulk of the output is not sufficient in itself to achieve stable monopoly power,
if the rivals are unable to communicate effectively with one another and find
common ground for cooperation. Also, it would be difficult for international
monopolies to exercise effective regulation via national governments, and a
genuine world capitalist state is not a possibility for the foreseeable future.
If state socialism re-emerged in one or more major countries, perhaps
this might push the capitalist world back toward the regulationist state. However,
such a development does not seem likely. Even if Russia or Ukraine at some point
does head in that direction, it would be unlikely to produce a serious rival
socioeconomic system to that of world capitalism.
A more likely source of a new era of state interventionism might come from
one of the remaining two factors considered above. The macro-instability of
neoliberal global capitalism might produce a major economic crisis at some point,
one which spins out of the control of the weakened regulatory authorities. This
would almost certainly revive the politics of the regulationist state. Finally,
the increasing exploitation and other social problems generated by neoliberal
global capitalism might prod the socialist movement back to life at some point.
Should socialist movements revive and begin to seriously challenge capitalism
in one or more major capitalist countries, state regulationism might return
in response to it. Such a development would also revive the possibility of finally
superceding capitalism and replacing it with a system based on human need rather
than private profit.
"... Elites can continue on the current path of pursuing integration projects and defending existing
integration, hoping to win enough popular support that their efforts are not thwarted. On the evidence
of the U.S. presidential campaign and the Brexit debate, this strategy may have run its course. ...
..."
"... I think some fellows already had this idea: "Much more promising is this idea: The promotion
of global integration can become a bottom-up rather than a top-down project" -- "Workers of the World,
Unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains!" ~Marx/Engels, 1848 ..."
"... Krugman sort of said this when he saw that apparel multinationals were shifting jobs out of
China to Bangladesh. Like $3 an hour is just way too high for workers. ..."
"... The "populists" are raging against global trade which benefits the world poor. The Very Serious
economists know what is really going on and have to interests of the poor at heart. Plus they are smarter
than the "populists" who are just dumb hippies. ..."
"... And what about neocolonialism and debt slavery ? http://historum.com/blogs/solidaire/245-debt-slavery-neo-colonialism-neoliberalism.html
..."
"... International debtors are the modern colonialists, sucking the marrow of countries; no armies
are needed anymore to keep those countries subjugated. Debt is the modern instrument of enslavement,
the international banks, corporations and hedge funds the modern colonial powers, and its enforcers
are instruments like the Global Bank, the IMF, and the corrupt, collaborationist governments (and totalitarian
regimes) of those countries, supported and propped up by these neo-colonials. ..."
"... Cover your a$$ much Larry? No mention of mass immigration? No mention of the elites' conscious,
planned attack on homogeneous societies in Western Europe, the US, and now Japan? ..."
"... The US was 88% European as of 1960. As of 1800 it was like 90% English. So yes, it was basically
a homogeneous society prior to the immigration act of 1965. Today it is extremely hard for Europeans
to get into the US -- but easier for non-Europeans. Now why would that be? Hmm .... ..."
"... The only trade that is actually free is trade not covered by laws and/or treaties. All other
trade is regulated trade. ..."
"... Here's a good rule to follow. When someone calls something the exact opposite of what it is,
in all probability they are trying to hustle your wallet. ..."
"... ISIS was invented by Wall Street who financed them. ISIS is a scam, just like Bin Laden's group,
just like "COMMUNISM!!!!" to control people. To manipulate them. ..."
"... Guys, the bourgeois state is a protection racket and always has been. It makes you feel safe,
secure and "feel like man". So we can enjoy every indulgent individual lust the world has to offer.
Then comes in dialectics of what that protection racket should do. ..."
"... To me, the bourgeois state is nothing more than a protection racket for the rich, something
you should not forget. ..."
"... I find it rather precious that Summers pretends not to understand why people hate TPP. I do
not think there is any real widespread antipathy toward global integration, though it does pose some
rather substantial systemic dangers, as we saw in the global financial collapse. What people, including
me, oppose is how that integration is structured. These agreements are about is not "free trade", but
removing all restrictions on global capital and that is a big problem. ..."
"... TPP is not free trade. It is protectionism for the rich. ..."
"... All or most modern "free trade" agreements are like that. What people oppose is agreements
which impoverish them and enrich capital. ..."
"... More free trade arrangement are not always better trade arrangements. People have seen the
results of the labor race to the bottom caused by earlier free trade agreements; and now they are guessing
we're going to get the same kind of race to the bottom with TPP when we have to put all of our environmental
laws and other domestic regulations into capitalist competition with backward countries. ..."
"... progressive states (WA, OR, CA, NV, IL, NY, MD) could simply treat union busting the same way
any OTHER major muscling or manipulation of the free market is treated: make it a felony. ..."
"... Summers: "Pie in the Sky" So trade negotiations would have to be lead by labor advocates and
environmental groups -- sounds great to me, but I can't for the life of me figure out why the goods
and service producers (i.e. capital owners) would have any incentive to promote trade under such a negotiated
trade agreement... or that trade would actually occur. You'd have to eliminate private enterprise incentives
to profit I think.. not something the U.S.'s "individualism" god can't tolerate. ..."
"... Alas, the Kaiser, the Tsar, and the Emperor did not act in accord with its tenets. Either increased
global trade is irrelevant to war and peace, or World War I didn't happen. Your pick which to believe.
..."
What's behind the revolt against global integration? : Since the end of World War II, a broad
consensus in support of global economic integration as a force for peace and prosperity has been
a pillar of the international order. ...
This broad program of global integration has been more successful than could reasonably have
been hoped. ... Yet a revolt against global integration is underway in the West. ...
One substantial part of what is behind the resistance is a lack of knowledge. ...The core of
the revolt against global integration, though, is not ignorance. It is a sense - unfortunately
not wholly unwarranted - that it is a project being carried out by elites for elites, with little
consideration for the interests of ordinary people. ...
Elites can continue on the current path of pursuing integration projects and defending
existing integration, hoping to win enough popular support that their efforts are not thwarted.
On the evidence of the U.S. presidential campaign and the Brexit debate, this strategy may have
run its course. ...
Much more promising is this idea: The promotion of global integration can become a bottom-up
rather than a top-down project. The emphasis can shift from promoting integration to managing
its consequences. This would mean a shift from international trade agreements to international
harmonization agreements, whereby issues such as labor rights and environmental protection would
be central, while issues related to empowering foreign producers would be secondary. It would
also mean devoting as much political capital to the trillions of dollars that escape taxation
or evade regulation through cross-border capital flows as we now devote to trade agreements. And
it would mean an emphasis on the challenges of middle-class parents everywhere who doubt, but
still hope desperately, that their kids can have better lives than they did.
I think some fellows already had this idea: "Much more promising is this idea: The promotion
of global integration can become a bottom-up rather than a top-down project" -- "Workers of the
World, Unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains!" ~Marx/Engels, 1848
Krugman sort of said this when he saw that apparel multinationals were shifting jobs out of
China to Bangladesh. Like $3 an hour is just way too high for workers.
A large part of the concern over free trade comes from the weak economic performances around the
globe. Summers could have addressed this. Jared Bernstein and Dean Baker - both sensible economists
- for example recently called on the US to do its own currency manipulation so as to reverse the
US$ appreciation which is lowering our net exports quite a bit.
What they left out is the fact that both China and Japan have seen currency appreciations as
well. If we raise our net exports at their expense, that lowers their economic activity. Better
would be global fiscal stimulus. I wish Larry had raised this issue here.
The "populists" are raging against global trade which benefits the world poor. The Very Serious
economists know what is really going on and have to interests of the poor at heart. Plus they
are smarter than the "populists" who are just dumb hippies.
One of the most fundamental reasons for the poverty and underdevelopment of Africa (and of
almost all "third world" countries) is neo-colonialism, which in modern history takes the shape
of external debt.
When countries are forced to pay 40,50,60% of their government budgets just to pay the interests
of their enormous debts, there is little room for actual prosperity left.
International debtors are the modern colonialists, sucking the marrow of countries; no
armies are needed anymore to keep those countries subjugated. Debt is the modern instrument of
enslavement, the international banks, corporations and hedge funds the modern colonial powers,
and its enforcers are instruments like the Global Bank, the IMF, and the corrupt, collaborationist
governments (and totalitarian regimes) of those countries, supported and propped up by these neo-colonials.
In reality, not much has changed since the fall of the great colonial empires. In paper, countries
have gained their sovereignty, but in reality they are enslaved to the international credit system.
The only thing that has changed, is that now the very colonial powers of the past, are threatened
to become debt colonies themselves. You see, global capitalism and credit system has no country,
nationality, colour; it only recognises the colour of money, earned at all cost by the very few,
on the expense of the vast, unsuspected and lulled masses.
Debt had always been a very efficient way of control, either on a personal, or state level.
And while most of us are aware of the implementations of personal debt and the risks involved,
the corridors of government debt are poorly lit, albeit this kind of debt is affecting all citizens
of a country and in ways more profound and far reaching into the future than those of private
debt.
Global capitalism was flourishing after WW2, and reached an apex somewhere in the 70's.
The lower classes in the mature capitalist countries had gained a respectable portion of the
distributed wealth, rights and privileges inconceivable several decades before. The purchasing
power of the average American for example, was very satisfactory, fully justifying the American
dream. Similar phenomena were taking place all over the "developed" world.
Cover your a$$ much Larry? No mention of mass immigration? No mention of the elites' conscious,
planned attack on homogeneous societies in Western Europe, the US, and now Japan?
There is of course no reasonable answering to prejudice, since prejudice is always unreasonable,
but should there be a question, when was the last time that, say, the United States or the territory
that the US now covers was a homogeneous society?
Before the US engulfed Spanish peoples? Before the US engulfed African peoples? Before the
US engulfed Indian peoples? When did the Irish, just to think of a random nationality, ruin "our"
homogeneity?
I could continue, but how much of a point is there in being reasonable?
The US was 88% European as of 1960. As of 1800 it was like 90% English. So yes, it was basically
a homogeneous society prior to the immigration act of 1965. Today it is extremely hard for Europeans
to get into the US -- but easier for non-Europeans. Now why would that be? Hmm ....
ISIS was invented by Wall Street who financed them. ISIS is a scam, just like Bin Laden's
group, just like "COMMUNISM!!!!" to control people. To manipulate them.
It is like using the internet to think you are "edgy". Some dudes like psuedo-science scam
artist Mike Adams are uncovering secrets to this witty viewer............then you wonder why society
is degenerating. What should happen with Mike Adams is, he should be beaten up and castrated.
My guess he would talk then. Boy would his idiot followers get a surprise and that surprise would
have results other than "poor mikey, he was robbed".
This explains why guys like Trump get delegates. Not because he uses illegal immigrants in
his old businesses, not because of some flat real wages going over 40 years, not because he is
a conman marketer.........he makes them feel safe. That is purely it. I think its pathetic, but
that is what happens in a emasculated world. Safety becomes absolute concern. "Trump makes me
feel safe".
Guys, the bourgeois state is a protection racket and always has been. It makes you feel
safe, secure and "feel like man". So we can enjoy every indulgent individual lust the world has
to offer. Then comes in dialectics of what that protection racket should do.
To me, the bourgeois state is nothing more than a protection racket for the rich, something
you should not forget.
I find it rather precious that Summers pretends not to understand why people hate TPP. I do
not think there is any real widespread antipathy toward global integration, though it does pose
some rather substantial systemic dangers, as we saw in the global financial collapse. What people,
including me, oppose is how that integration is structured. These agreements are about is not
"free trade", but removing all restrictions on global capital and that is a big problem.
Actually, this is my first actual response to the post itself, but you were too busy being and
a*****e to notice. All or most modern "free trade" agreements are like that. What people oppose
is agreements which impoverish them and enrich capital.
This has become a popular line, and it's not exactly false. But so what if it were a "free trade"
agreement? More free trade arrangement are not always better trade arrangements. People have
seen the results of the labor race to the bottom caused by earlier free trade agreements; and
now they are guessing we're going to get the same kind of race to the bottom with TPP when we
have to put all of our environmental laws and other domestic regulations into capitalist competition
with backward countries.
" The promotion of global integration can become a bottom-up rather than a top-down project. "
" ... whereby issues such as labor rights and environmental protection would be central ...
"
+1
Now if we could just adopt that policy internally in the United States first we could then
(and only then) support it externally across the world.
Easy approach: (FOR THE TEN MILLIONTH TIME!) progressive states (WA, OR, CA, NV, IL, NY,
MD) could simply treat union busting the same way any OTHER major muscling or manipulation of
the free market is treated: make it a felony. FYI (for those who are not aware) states can
add to federal labor protections, just not subtract.
A completely renewed, re-constituted democracy would be born.
Biggest obstacle to this being done in my (crackpot?) view: human males. Being instinctive
pack hunters, before they check out any idea they, first, check in with the pack (all those other
boys who are also checking in with the pack) -- almost automatically infer impossibility to overcome
what they see (correctly?) as wheels within wheels of inertia.
Self-fulfilling prophecy: nothing (not the most obvious, SHOULD BE easiest possible to get
support for actions) ever gets done.
I'm not the only one seeking a new path forward on trade.
by Jared Bernstein
April 11th, 2016 at 9:20 am
"...
Here's Larry's view of the way forward:
"The promotion of global integration can become a bottom-up rather than a top-down project.
The emphasis can shift from promoting integration to managing its consequences. This would
mean a shift from international trade agreements to international harmonization agreements,
whereby issues such as labor rights and environmental protection would be central, while issues
related to empowering foreign producers would be secondary. It would also mean devoting as
much political capital to the trillions of dollars that escape taxation or evade regulation
through cross-border capital flows as we now devote to trade agreements. And it would mean
an emphasis on the challenges of middle-class parents everywhere who doubt, but still hope
desperately, that their kids can have better lives than they did.
Good points, all. "Bottom-up" means what I've been calling a more representative, inclusive
process. But what's this about "international harmonization?""
It's a way of saying that we need to reduce the "frictions" and thus costs between trading
partners at the level of pragmatic infrastructure, not corporate power. One way to think of
this is TFAs, not FTAs. TFAs are trade facilitation agreements, which are more about integrating
ports, rail, and paperwork than patents that protect big Pharma.
It's refreshing to see mainstreamers thinking creatively about the anger that's surfaced
around globalization. Waiting for the anger to dissipate and then reverting back to the old
trade regimes may be the preferred path for elites, but that path may well be blocked. We'd
best clear a new, wider path, one that better accommodates folks from all walks of life, both
here and abroad."
Summers: "Pie in the Sky" So trade negotiations would have to be lead by labor advocates and
environmental groups -- sounds great to me, but I can't for the life of me figure out why the
goods and service producers (i.e. capital owners) would have any incentive to promote trade under
such a negotiated trade agreement... or that trade would actually occur. You'd have to eliminate
private enterprise incentives to profit I think.. not something the U.S.'s "individualism" god
can't tolerate.
Imagine a trade deal negotiated by the AFL-CIO. Labor wins a lot and capital owners lose a little.
We can all then smile and say to the latter - go get your buddies in Congress more serious about
the compensation principle. Turn the table!
"consensus in support of global economic integration as a force for peace and prosperity " --
"The Great Illusion" (
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Illusion
)
That increased trade is a bulwark against war rears its ugly head again. The above book which
so ironically delivered the message was published in 1910.
Alas, the Kaiser, the Tsar, and the Emperor did not act in accord with its tenets. Either
increased global trade is irrelevant to war and peace, or World War I didn't happen. Your pick
which to believe.
Our problems began back in the 1970s when we abandoned the Bretton Woods international capital
controls and then broke the unions, cut taxes on corporations and upper income groups, and deregulated
the financial system. This eventually led a stagnation of wages in the US and an increase in the
concentration of income at the top of the income distribution throughout the world:
http://www.rwEconomics.com/Ch_1.htm
When combined with tax cuts and financial deregulation it led to increasing debt relative to
income in the importing countries that caused the financial catastrophe we went through in 2008,
the economic stagnation that followed, and the social unrest we see throughout the world today.
This, in turn, created a situation in which the full utilization of our economic resources can
only be maintained through an unsustainable increase in debt relative to income:
http://www.rwEconomics.com/htm/WDCh3e.htm
This is what has to be overcome if we are to get out of the mess the world is in today, and
it's not going to be overcome by pretending that it's just going to go away if people can just
become educated about the benefits of trade. At least that's not the way it worked out in the
1930s: http://www.rwEconomics.com/LTLGAD.htm
"... From Tunis to Tel Aviv, Madrid to Oakland, a new generation of youth activists is challenging the neoliberal state that has dominated the world ever since the Cold War ended. ..."
"... young rebels are reacting to a single stunning worldwide development: the extreme concentration of wealth in a few hands thanks to neoliberal policies of deregulation and union busting. They have taken to the streets, parks, plazas and squares to protest against the resulting corruption, the way politicians can be bought and sold, and the impunity ..."
"... In the "glorious thirty years" after World War II, North America and Western Europe achieved remarkable rates of economic growth and relatively low levels of inequality for capitalist societies, while instituting a broad range of benefits for workers, students and retirees. From roughly 1980 on, however, the neoliberal movement, rooted in the laissez-faire economic theories of Milton Friedman, launched what became a full-scale assault on workers' power and an attempt, often remarkably successful, to eviscerate the social welfare state. ..."
"... "Washington consensus" meant that the urge to impose privatisation on stagnating, nepotistic postcolonial states would become the order of the day. ..."
"... While neoliberalism has produced more unequal societies throughout the world, nowhere else has the income of the poor declined quite so strikingly. The concentration of wealth in a few hands profoundly contradicts the founding principles of Israel's Labour Zionism, and results from decades of right-wing Likud policies punishing the poor and middle classes and shifting wealth to the top of society. ..."
"... Juan Cole is the Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History and the director of the Centre for South Asian Studies at the University of Michigan. His latest book, ..."
"... Engaging the Muslim World , is just out in a revised paperback edition from Palgrave Macmillan. He runs the Informed Comment website. ..."
"... A version of this article was first published on Tom Dispatch . ..."
"... The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy. ..."
ANN ARBOR, MICHIGAN - From Tunis to Tel Aviv, Madrid to Oakland, a new
generation of youth activists is challenging the neoliberal state that has dominated
the world ever since the Cold War ended. The massive popular protests that
shook the globe this year have much in common, though most of the reporting
on them in the mainstream media has obscured the similarities.
Whether in Egypt or the United States, young rebels are reacting to a
single stunning worldwide development: the extreme concentration of wealth in
a few hands thanks to neoliberal policies of deregulation and union busting.
They have taken to the streets, parks, plazas and squares to protest against
the resulting corruption, the way politicians can be bought and sold, and the
impunity
ANN ARBOR, MICHIGAN - From Tunis to Tel Aviv, Madrid to
Oakland, a new generation of youth activists is challenging the neoliberal state
that has dominated the world ever since the Cold War ended. The massive popular
protests that shook the globe this year have much in common, though most of
the reporting on them in the mainstream media has obscured the similarities.
Whether in Egypt or the United States, young rebels are reacting to a single
stunning worldwide development: the extreme concentration of wealth in a few
hands thanks to neoliberal policies of deregulation and union busting. They
have taken to the streets, parks, plazas and squares to protest against the
resulting corruption, the way politicians can be bought and sold, and the impunity
of the white-collar criminals who have run riot in societies everywhere. They
are objecting to high rates of unemployment, reduced social services, blighted
futures and above all the substitution of the market for all other values as
the matrix of human ethics and life.
Pasha the Tiger
In the "glorious thirty years" after World War II, North America and
Western Europe achieved remarkable rates of economic growth and relatively low
levels of inequality for capitalist societies, while instituting a broad range
of benefits for workers, students and retirees. From roughly 1980 on, however,
the neoliberal movement, rooted in the laissez-faire economic theories of Milton
Friedman, launched what became a full-scale assault on workers' power and an
attempt, often remarkably successful, to eviscerate the social welfare state.
Neoliberals chanted the mantra that everyone would benefit if the public
sector were privatised, businesses deregulated and market mechanisms allowed
to distribute wealth. But as economist David Harvey
argues, from the beginning it was a doctrine that primarily benefited the
wealthy, its adoption allowing the top one per cent in any neoliberal society
to capture a disproportionate share of whatever wealth was generated.
In the global South, countries that gained their independence from European
colonialism after World War II tended to create large public sectors as part
of the process of industrialization. Often, living standards improved as a result,
but by the 1970s, such developing economies were generally experiencing a levelling-off
of growth. This happened just as neoliberalism became ascendant in Washington,
Paris and London as well as in Bretton Woods institutions like the International
Monetary Fund. This "Washington consensus" meant that the urge to impose
privatisation on stagnating, nepotistic postcolonial states would become the
order of the day.
Egypt and Tunisia, to take two countries in the spotlight for sparking the
Arab Spring, were successfully pressured in the 1990s to privatise their relatively
large public sectors. Moving public resources into the private sector created
an almost endless range of opportunities for staggering levels of corruption
on the part of the ruling families of autocrats
Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in Tunis and
Hosni Mubarak in Cairo. International banks, central banks and emerging
local private banks aided and abetted their agenda.
It was not surprising then that one of the first targets of Tunisian crowds
in the course of the revolution they made last January was the
Zitouna bank, a branch of which they torched. Its owner? Sakher El Materi,
a son-in-law of President Ben Ali and the notorious owner of
Pasha, the well-fed pet tiger that prowled the grounds of one of his sumptuous
mansions. Not even the way his outfit sought legitimacy by practicing "Islamic
banking" could forestall popular rage. A 2006 State Department cable released
by WikiLeaks
observed, "One local financial expert blames the [Ben Ali] Family for chronic
banking sector woes due to the great percentage of non-performing loans issued
through crony connections, and has essentially paralysed banking authorities
from genuine recovery efforts." That is, the banks were used by the regime to
give away money to his cronies, with no expectation of repayment.
Tunisian activists similarly directed their ire at foreign banks and lenders
to which their country owes $14.4bn. Tunisians are still railing and rallying
against the repayment of all that money, some of which they believe was
borrowed profligately by the corrupt former regime and then squandered quite
privately.
Tunisians had their own one per cent, a thin commercial elite,
half of whom were related to or closely connected to President Ben Ali.
As a group, they were accused by young activists of mafia-like, predatory practices,
such as demanding pay-offs from legitimate businesses, and discouraging foreign
investment by tying it to a stupendous system of bribes. The closed, top-heavy
character of the Tunisian economic system was blamed for the bottom-heavy waves
of suffering that followed: cost of living increases that hit people on fixed
incomes or those like students and peddlers in the marginal economy especially
hard.
It was no happenstance that the young man who
immolated himself and so sparked the Tunisian rebellion was a hard-pressed
vegetable peddler. It's easy now to overlook what clearly ties the beginning
of the Arab Spring to the European Summer and the present American Fall: the
point of the Tunisian revolution was not just to gain political rights, but
to sweep away that one per cent, popularly imagined as a sort of dam against
economic opportunity.
Tahrir Square, Zuccotti Park, Rothschild Avenue
The success of the Tunisian revolution in removing the octopus-like Ben Ali
plutocracy inspired the dramatic events in Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Syria and even
Israel that are redrawing the political map of the Middle East. But the 2011
youth protest movement was hardly contained in the Middle East. Estonian-Canadian
activist Kalle Lasn and his anti-consumerist colleagues at the Vancouver-based
Adbusters Media Foundation
were inspired by the success of the revolutionaries in Tahrir Square in
deposing dictator Hosni Mubarak.
Their organisation specialises in combatting advertising culture through
spoofs and pranks. It was Adbusters magazine that sent out the call
on Twitter in the summer of 2011 for a rally at Wall Street on September 17,
with the now-famous hash tag #OccupyWallStreet. A thousand protesters gathered
on the designated date, commemorating the 2008 economic meltdown that had thrown
millions of Americans out of their jobs and their homes. Some camped out in
nearby Zuccotti Park, another unexpected global spark for protest.
The Occupy Wall Street movement has now spread throughout the United States,
sometimes in the face of serious acts of repression, as in
Oakland, California. It has followed in the spirit of the Arab and European
movements in demanding an end to special privileges for the richest one per
cent, including their ability to more or less buy the US government for purposes
of their choosing. What is often forgotten is that the Ben Alis, Mubaraks and
Gaddafis were not simply authoritarian tyrants. They were the one per
cent and the guardians of the one per cent, in their own societies - and loathed
for exactly that.
Last April, around the time that Lasn began imagining Wall Street protests,
progressive activists in Israel started planning their own movement. In July,
sales clerk and aspiring filmmaker Daphne Leef found herself
unable
to cover a sudden rent increase on her Tel Aviv apartment. So she started
a protest Facebook page similar to the ones that fuelled the Arab Spring and
moved into a tent on the posh Rothschild Avenue where she was soon joined by
hundreds of other protesting Israelis. Week by week, the demonstrations grew,
spreading to cities throughout the country and
culminating on September 3 in a massive rally, the largest in Israel's history.
Some 300,000 protesters came out in Tel Aviv, 50,000 in Jerusalem and 40,000
in Haifa. Their demands
included not just lower housing costs, but a rollback of neoliberal policies,
less regressive taxes and more progressive, direct taxation, a halt to the privatisation
of the economy, and the funding of a system of inexpensive education and child
care.
Many on the left in Israel are also
deeply troubled by the political and economic power of right-wing settlers
on the West Bank, but most decline to bring the Palestinian issue into the movement's
demands for fear of losing support among the middle class. For the same reason,
the way the Israeli movement was inspired by Tahrir Square and the Egyptian
revolution has been downplayed, although
"Walk like an Egyptian" signs - a reference both to the Cairo demonstrations
and the 1986 Bangles hit song - have been spotted on Rothschild Avenue.
Most of the Israeli activists in the coastal cities know that they are victims
of the same neoliberal order that displaces the Palestinians, punishes them
and keeps them stateless. Indeed, the Palestinians, altogether lacking a state
but at the complete mercy of various forms of international capital controlled
by elites elsewhere, are the ultimate victims of the neoliberal order. But in
order to avoid a split in the Israeli protest movement, a quiet agreement was
reached to focus on economic discontents and so avoid the divisive issue of
the much-despised West Bank settlements.
There has been little reporting in the Western press about a key source of
Israeli unease, which was palpable to me when I visited the country in May.
Even then, before the local protests had fully hit their stride, Israelis I
met were complaining about the rise to power of an Israeli one per cent. There
are now
16 billionaires in the country, who control $45bn in assets, and the current
crop of 10,153 millionaires is 20 per cent larger than it was in the previous
fiscal year. In terms of its distribution of wealth, Israel is now among the
most unequal of the countries in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation
and Development. Since the late 1980s, the average household income of families
in the bottom fifth of the population has been declining at an annual rate of
1.1 per cent. Over the same period, the average household income of families
among the richest 20 per cent went up at an annual rate of 2.4 per cent.
While neoliberalism has produced more unequal societies throughout the
world, nowhere else has the income of the poor declined quite so strikingly.
The concentration of wealth in a few hands profoundly contradicts the founding
principles of Israel's Labour Zionism, and results from decades of right-wing
Likud policies punishing the poor and middle classes and shifting wealth to
the top of society.
The indignant ones
European youth were also inspired by the Tunisians and Egyptians - and by
a similar flight of wealth. I was in Barcelona on May 27, when the police attacked
demonstrators camped out at the Placa de Catalunya, provoking widespread consternation.
The government of the region is currently led by the centrist Convergence and
Union Party, a moderate proponent of Catalan nationalism. It is relatively popular
locally, and so Catalans had not expected such heavy-handed police action to
be ordered. The crackdown, however, underlined the very point of the protesters,
that the neoliberal state, whatever its political makeup, is protecting the
same set of wealthy miscreants.
Spain's "indignados" (indignant ones) got
their start in mid-May with huge protests at Madrid's Puerta del Sol Plaza
against the country's persistent 21 per cent unemployment rate (and double that
among the young). Egyptian activists in Tahrir Square
immediately sent a statement of warm support to those in the Spanish capital
(as they would months later to New York's demonstrators). Again following the
same pattern, the Spanish movement does not restrict its objections to unemployment
(and the lack of benefits attending the few new temporary or contract jobs that
do arise). Its targets are the banks, bank bailouts, financial corruption and
cuts in education and other services.
Youth activists I met in Toledo and Madrid this summer
denounced
both of the country's major parties and, indeed, the very consumer society that
emphasised wealth accumulation over community and material acquisition over
personal enrichment. In the past two months Spain's young protesters have concentrated
on demonstrating against cuts to education, with crowds of 70,000 to 90,000
coming out more than once in Madrid and tens of thousands in other cities. For
marches in support of the Occupy Wall Street movement,
hundreds of thousands reportedly took to the streets of Madrid and Barcelona,
among other cities.
The global reach and connectedness of these movements has yet to be fully
appreciated. The Madrid education protesters, for example, cited for inspiration
Chilean students who, through persistent, innovative, and large-scale demonstrations
this summer and fall, have forced that country's neoliberal government, headed
by the increasingly unpopular billionaire president Sebastian Pinera, to inject
$1.6bn in new money into education. Neither the crowds of youth in Madrid nor
those in Santiago are likely to be mollified, however, by new dorms and laboratories.
Chilean students have
already moved on from insisting on an end to an ever more expensive class-based
education system to demands that the country's lucrative copper mines be nationalised
so as to generate revenues for investment in education. In every instance, the
underlying goal of specific protests by the youthful reformists is the neoliberal
order itself.
The word "union" was little uttered in American television news coverage
of the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, even though factory workers and sympathy
strikes of all sorts played a
key role in them. The right-wing press in the US actually went out of its
way to contrast Egyptian demonstrations against Mubarak with the Wisconsin rallies
of government workers against Governor Scott Walker's measure to cripple the
bargaining power of their unions.
The Egyptians, Commentary typically
wrote,
were risking their lives, while Wisconsin's union activists were taking the
day off from cushy jobs to parade around with placards, immune from being fired
for joining the rallies. The implication: the Egyptian revolution was against
tyranny, whereas already spoiled American workers were demanding further coddling.
The American right has never been interested in recognising this reality:
that forbidding unions and strikes is a form of tyranny. In fact, it wasn't
just progressive bloggers who saw a connection between Tahrir Square and Madison.
The head of the newly formed independent union federation in Egypt dispatched
an
explicit expression of solidarity to the Wisconsin workers, centering on
worker's rights.
At least,Commentary did us one favour: it clarified
why the story has been told as it has in most of the American media. If the
revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya were merely about individualistic political
rights - about the holding of elections and the guarantee of due process - then
they could be depicted as largely irrelevant to politics in the US and Europe,
where such norms already prevailed.
If, however, they centered on economic rights (as they certainly did), then
clearly the discontents of North African youth when it came to plutocracy, corruption,
the curbing of workers' rights, and persistent unemployment deeply resembled
those of their American counterparts.
The global protests of 2011 have been cast in the American media largely
as an "Arab Spring" challenging local dictatorships - as though Spain, Chile
and Israel do not exist. The constant speculation by pundits and television
news anchors in the US about whether "Islam" would benefit from the Arab Spring
functioned as an Orientalist way of marking events in North Africa as alien
and vaguely menacing, but also as not germane to the day to day concerns of
working Americans. The inhabitants of Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan clearly
feel differently.
Facebook flash mobs
If we focus on economic trends, then the neoliberal state looks eerily similar,
whether it is a democracy or a dictatorship, whether the government is nominally
right of centre or left of centre. As a package, deregulation, the privatisation
of public resources and firms, corruption and forms of insider trading and interference
in the ability of workers to organise or engage in collective bargaining have
allowed the top one per cent in Israel, just as in Tunisia or the US, to capture
the lion's share of profits from the growth of the last decades.
Observers were puzzled by the huge crowds that turned out in both Tunis and
Tel Aviv in 2011, especially given that economic growth in those countries had
been running at a seemingly healthy five per cent per annum. "Growth", defined
generally and without regard to its distribution, is the answer to a neoliberal
question. The question of the 99 per cent, however, is: Who is getting the increased
wealth? In both of those countries, as in the US and other neoliberal lands,
the answer is: disproportionately the one per cent.
If you were wondering why outraged young people around the globe are chanting
such similar slogans and using such similar tactics (including Facebook "flash
mobs"), it is because they have seen more clearly than their elders through
the neoliberal shell game.
Juan Cole is the Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History and
the director of the Centre for South Asian Studies at the University of Michigan.
His latest book,
Engaging the Muslim World, is just out in a revised paperback edition from
Palgrave Macmillan. He runs the
Informed Comment website.
A version of this article was first published on
Tom Dispatch.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and
do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.
Yet another response [ to globalization] is that I term 21stcentury fascism.The ultra-right is an insurgent force in many countries. In broad strokes,
this project seeks to fuse reactionary political power with transnational capital
and to organise a mass base among historically privileged sectors of the global
working class – such as white workers in the North and middle layers in the
South – that are now experiencing heightened insecurity and the specter of downward
mobility. It involves militarism, extreme masculinisation, homophobia, racism
and racist mobilisations, including the search for scapegoats, such as immigrant
workers and, in the West, Muslims. Twenty-first century fascism evokes mystifying
ideologies, often involving race/culture supremacy and xenophobia, embracing an
idealised and mythical past. Neo-fascist culture normalises and glamorises warfare
and social violence, indeed, generates a fascination with domination that is portrayed
even as heroic.
Notable quotes:
"... over-accumulation ..."
"... Cyclical crises ..."
"... . Structural crises ..."
"... systemic crisis ..."
"... social reproduction. ..."
"... crisis of humanity ..."
"... 1984 has arrived; ..."
"... The crisis has resulted in a rapid political polarisation in global society. ..."
"... In broad strokes, this project seeks to fuse reactionary political power with transnational capital and to organise a mass base among historically privileged sectors of the global working class ..."
"... It involves militarism, extreme masculinisation, homophobia, racism and racist mobilisations, including the search for scapegoats, such as immigrant workers and, in the West, Muslims. ..."
"... Neo-fascist culture normalises and glamorises warfare and social violence, indeed, generates a fascination with domination that is portrayed even as heroic. ..."
World capitalism is experiencing the worst crisis in its 500 year history.
Global capitalism is a qualitatively new stage in the open ended evolution of
capitalism characterised by the rise of transnational capital, a transnational
capitalist class, and a transnational state. Below, William I. Robinson argues
that the global crisis is structural and threatens to become systemic, raising
the specter of collapse and a global police state in the face of ecological
holocaust, concentration of the means of violence, displacement of billions,
limits to extensive expansion and crises of state legitimacy, and suggests that
a massive redistribution of wealth and power downward to the poor majority of
humanity is the only viable solution.
The New Global Capitalism and the 21st Century Crisis
The world capitalist system is arguably experiencing the worst crisis in
its 500 year history. World capitalism has experienced a profound restructuring
through globalisation over the past few decades and has been transformed in
ways that make it fundamentally distinct from its earlier incarnations. Similarly,
the current crisis exhibits features that set it apart from earlier crises of
the system and raise the stakes for humanity. If we are to avert disastrous
outcomes we must understand both the nature of the new global capitalism and
the nature of its crisis. Analysis of capitalist globalisation provides a template
for probing a wide range of social, political, cultural and ideological processes
in this 21st century. Following Marx, we want to focus on the internal dynamics
of capitalism to understand crisis. And following the global capitalism perspective,
we want to see how capitalism has qualitatively evolved in recent decades.
The system-wide crisis we face is not a repeat of earlier such episodes such
as that of the the 1930s or the 1970s precisely because capitalism is fundamentally
different in the 21st century. Globalisation constitutes a qualitatively new
epoch in the ongoing and open-ended evolution of world capitalism, marked by
a number of qualitative shifts in the capitalist system and by novel articulations
of social power. I highlight four aspects unique to this epoch.1
First is the rise of truly transnational capital and a new global production
and financial system into which all nations and much of humanity has been integrated,
either directly or indirectly. We have gone from a world economy, in
which countries and regions were linked to each other via trade and financial
flows in an integrated international market, to a global economy, in
which nations are linked to each more organically through the transnationalisation
of the production process, of finance, and of the circuits of capital accumulation.
No single nation-state can remain insulated from the global economy or prevent
the penetration of the social, political, and cultural superstructure of global
capitalism. Second is the rise of a Transnational Capitalist Class (TCC), a
class group that has drawn in contingents from most countries around the world,
North and South, and has attempted to position itself as a global ruling class.
This TCC is the hegemonic fraction of capital on a world scale. Third
is the rise of Transnational State (TNS) apparatuses. The TNS is constituted
as a loose network made up of trans-, and supranational organisations together
with national states. It functions to organise the conditions for transnational
accumulation. The TCC attempts to organise and institutionally exercise its
class power through TNS apparatuses. Fourth are novel relations of inequality,
domination and exploitation in global society, including an increasing importance
of transnational social and class inequalities relative to North-South inequalities.
Cyclical, Structural, and Systemic Crises
Most commentators on the contemporary crisis refer to the "Great Recession"
of 2008 and its aftermath. Yet the causal origins of global crisis are to be
found in over-accumulation and also in contradictions of state
power, or in what Marxists call the internal contradictions of the capitalist
system. Moreover, because the system is now global, crisis in any one place
tends to represent crisis for the system as a whole. The system cannot expand
because the marginalisation of a significant portion of humanity from direct
productive participation, the downward pressure on wages and popular consumption
worldwide, and the polarisation of income, has reduced the ability of the world
market to absorb world output. At the same time, given the particular configuration
of social and class forces and the correlation of these forces worldwide, national
states are hard-pressed to regulate transnational circuits of accumulation and
offset the explosive contradictions built into the system.
Is this crisis cyclical, structural, or systemic? Cyclical crises
are recurrent to capitalism about once every 10 years and involve recessions
that act as self-correcting mechanisms without any major restructuring of the
system. The recessions of the early 1980s, the early 1990s, and of 2001 were
cyclical crises. In contrast, the 2008 crisis signaled the slide into astructural
crisis. Structural crises reflect deeper contradictions that can only
be resolved by a major restructuring of the system. The structural crisis of
the 1970s was resolved through capitalist globalisation. Prior to that, the
structural crisis of the 1930s was resolved through the creation of a new model
of redistributive capitalism, and prior to that the structural crisis of the
1870s resulted in the development of corporate capitalism. A systemic crisis
involves the replacement of a system by an entirely new system or
by an outright collapse. A structural crisis opens up the possibility
for a systemic crisis. But if it actually snowballs into a systemic crisis –
in this case, if it gives way either to capitalism being superseded or to a
breakdown of global civilisation – is not predetermined and depends entirely
on the response of social and political forces to the crisis and on historical
contingencies that are not easy to forecast. This is an historic moment of extreme
uncertainty, in which collective responses from distinct social and class forces
to the crisis are in great flux.
Hence my concept of global crisis is broader than financial. There are multiple
and mutually constitutive dimensions – economic, social, political, cultural,
ideological and ecological, not to mention the existential crisis of our consciousness,
values and very being. There is a crisis of social polarisation, that is, of
social reproduction. The system cannot meet the needs or assure the
survival of millions of people, perhaps a majority of humanity. There are crises
of state legitimacy and political authority, or of hegemony and
domination. National states face spiraling crises of legitimacy as they
fail to meet the social grievances of local working and popular classes experiencing
downward mobility, unemployment, heightened insecurity and greater hardships.
The legitimacy of the system has increasingly been called into question by millions,
perhaps even billions, of people around the world, and is facing expanded counter-hegemonic
challenges. Global elites have been unable counter this erosion of the system's
authority in the face of worldwide pressures for a global moral economy. And
a canopy that envelops all these dimensions is a crisis of sustainability rooted
in an ecological holocaust that has already begun, expressed in climate change
and the impending collapse of centralised agricultural systems in several regions
of the world, among other indicators.
By a crisis of humanity I mean a crisis that is approaching systemic
proportions, threatening the ability of billions of people to survive, and raising
the specter of a collapse of world civilisation and degeneration into a new
"Dark Ages."2
Global capitalism now couples human and natural history in such a way
as to threaten to bring about what would be the sixth mass extinction in the
known history of life on earth.
This crisis of humanity shares a
number of aspects with earlier structural crises but there are also several
features unique to the present:
The system is fast reaching the ecological limits of its reproduction.
Global capitalism now couples human and natural history in such a way as
to threaten to bring about what would be the sixth mass extinction in the
known history of life on earth.3 This mass extinction would
be caused not by a natural catastrophe such as a meteor impact or by evolutionary
changes such as the end of an ice age but by purposive human activity. According
to leading environmental scientists there are nine "planetary boundaries"
crucial to maintaining an earth system environment in which humans can exist,
four of which are experiencing at this time the onset of irreversible environmental
degradation and three of which (climate change, the nitrogen cycle, and
biodiversity loss) are at "tipping points," meaning that these processes
have already crossed their planetary boundaries.
The magnitude of the means of violence and social control is unprecedented,
as is the concentration of the means of global communication and symbolic
production and circulation in the hands of a very few powerful groups.
Computerised wars, drones, bunker-buster bombs, star wars, and so forth,
have changed the face of warfare. Warfare has become normalised and sanitised
for those not directly at the receiving end of armed aggression. At the
same time we have arrived at the panoptical surveillance society and the
age of thought control by those who control global flows of communication,
images and symbolic production. The world of Edward Snowden is the world
of George Orwell; 1984 has arrived;
Capitalism is reaching apparent limits to its extensive
expansion. There are no longer any new territories of significance that
can be integrated into world capitalism, de-ruralisation is now well advanced,
and the commodification of the countryside and of pre- and non-capitalist
spaces has intensified, that is, converted in hot-house fashion into spaces
of capital, so that intensive expansion is reaching depths never
before seen. Capitalism must continually expand or collapse. How or where
will it now expand?
There is the rise of a vast surplus population inhabiting a "planet
of slums,"4 alienated from the productive economy, thrown
into the margins, and subject to sophisticated systems of social control
and to destruction – to a mortal cycle of dispossession-exploitation-exclusion.
This includes prison-industrial and immigrant-detention complexes, omnipresent
policing, militarised gentrification, and so on;
There is a disjuncture between a globalising economy and a nation-state
based system of political authority. Transnational state apparatuses
are incipient and have not been able to play the role of what social scientists
refer to as a "hegemon," or a leading nation-state that has enough power
and authority to organise and stabilise the system. The spread of weapons
of mass destruction and the unprecedented militarisation of social life
and conflict across the globe makes it hard to imagine that the system can
come under any stable political authority that assures its reproduction.
Global Police State
How have social and political forces worldwide responded to crisis? The
crisis has resulted in a rapid political polarisation in global society.
Both right and left-wing forces are ascendant. Three responses seem to be in
dispute.
One is what we could call "reformism from above." This elite reformism is
aimed at stabilising the system, at saving the system from itself and from more
radical responses from below. Nonetheless, in the years following the 2008 collapse
of the global financial system it seems these reformers are unable (or unwilling)
to prevail over the power of transnational financial capital. A second response
is popular, grassroots and leftist resistance from below. As social and political
conflict escalates around the world there appears to be a mounting global revolt.
While such resistance appears insurgent in the wake of 2008 it is spread very
unevenly across countries and regions and facing many problems and challenges.
Yet another response is that I term 21stcentury fascism.5
The ultra-right is an insurgent force in many countries. In broad
strokes, this project seeks to fuse reactionary political power with transnational
capital and to organise a mass base among historically privileged sectors of
the global working class – such as white workers in the North and middle
layers in the South – that are now experiencing heightened insecurity and the
specter of downward mobility. It involves militarism, extreme masculinisation,
homophobia, racism and racist mobilisations, including the search for scapegoats,
such as immigrant workers and, in the West, Muslims. Twenty-first century
fascism evokes mystifying ideologies, often involving race/culture supremacy
and xenophobia, embracing an idealised and mythical past. Neo-fascist culture
normalises and glamorises warfare and social violence, indeed, generates a fascination
with domination that is portrayed even as heroic.
The need for dominant groups around the world to secure widespread, organised
mass social control of the world's surplus population and rebellious forces
from below gives a powerful impulse to projects of 21st century fascism. Simply
put, the immense structural inequalities of the global political economy cannot
easily be contained through consensual mechanisms of social control. We have
been witnessing transitions from social welfare to social control states around
the world. We have entered a period of great upheavals, momentous changes and
uncertainties. The only viable solution to the crisis of global capitalism is
a massive redistribution of wealth and power downward towards the poor majority
of humanity along the lines of a 21st century democratic socialism, in which
humanity is no longer at war with itself and with nature.
About the Author
William I. Robinson is professor of sociology, global and
international studies, and Latin American studies, at the University of California-Santa
Barbara. Among his many books are Promoting Polyarchy (1996),
Transnational Conflicts (2003), A Theory of Global Capitalism
(2004), Latin America and Global Capitalism (2008),
and
Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity (2014).
A pretty devious scheme -- creating difficulty for the government neoliberal
wanted to depose by pushing neoliberal reforms via IMF and such. They channeling
the discontent into uprising against the legitimate government. Similar process
happened with Yanukovich in Ukraine.
Notable quotes:
"... the Syrian government put staying in power via adopting neoliberal strictures ahead of the welfare of Syrians ..."
"... it doesn't make President Assad virtuous of himself and neither does it reflect the reality that when push came to shove Assad put his position ahead of the people of Syria and kissed neoliberal butt. ..."
"... President Assad revealed his stupidity when he didn't pay attention to what happens to a leader who has previously been featured as a 'tyrant' in western media if he lets the neoliberals in: They fawn & scrape all the while developing connections to undermine him/her. If the undermining is ineffective there is no backing off. The next option is war. The instances are legion from President Noriega of Panama to President Hussein of Iraq to Colonel Ghaddaffi of Libya - that one really hurts as the Colonel was a genuinely committed and astute man. Assad is just another hack in comparison. ..."
"... Syrian leaders are politicians, they suffer the same flaws of politicians across the world. They are power seekers who inevitably come to regard the welfare of their population as a means to an end rather than an end in itself. ..."
"... No one denies that the opposition have been used and abused by FUKUSi, but that of itself does not invalidate the very real issues that persuaded them to resist an austerity imposed from above by assholes who weren't practicing what they preached. ..."
"... According to the European model of diplomacy imposed upon the globe, countries have interests not friends. ..."
"... A solution which reduces numbers of humans killed is worth attempting. ..."
"... Just because someone chooses an option that you disagree with does not make them evil or headchoppers or Islamofacist. ..."
"... On balance I would rather see Assad continue as leader of Syria but I'm not so naive as to believe he is capable of finding a long term resolution, or that there are not a good number of self interested murderous sadists in his crew. ..."
"... This war is about destroying real history, civilization, culture and replacing with fake. The war in Yemen is the same. Who in that region wants to replace real history with fake. Think about it. Most Islamic,Christian, Assyrian history is systematically being destroyed. ..."
"... you make some good points concerning Assad flirting with neoliberalism however, i don't know how you call an opposition 'moderate' when its toting firearms. ..."
"... The protests against Assad were moderate, and to his credit Assad was willing to meet them halfway. However, this situation was exploited by (((foreign powers))) ..."
"... This is not about "good or evil", this is about TOW missiles made in USA against T-55, Saudi money for mercenaries, Israeli regional ambitions and so on. Syria is another country that the US wants to destroy. Six years ago Syria was a peaceful country. ..."
"... Allegedly president Assad is a bad guy but Erdogan, Netanyhu and bin Saud are noble and good men. Who believes in such nonsense? The US has become similar to Israel and this is the reason why "Assad must go". Sick countries do sick things. ..."
"... no, because one side is so simplistically evi l(armed to the fucking teeth and resolved to violent insurrection!!!), if Assad didn't have the backing of the vast majority of his people and of his overreached army it would have ended a long time ago and Syria would be a failed state flailing away in the grip of anarchy. perhaps your Syrian 'friends' should meditate on this naked truth. ..."
"... when that shitty little country called Israel was squeezed onto the map in 1948, Syria welcomed Palestinian refugees with open arms by the hundreds of thousands. no, they didn't grant them citizenship, but prettty much all other rights. ..."
"... This whole nightmare was dreamed up from within the US Embassy in Damascus in 2006. Bashir al Assad was too popular in the country and the region for America's liking, so they plotted to get rid of him. Near all the organ eating, child killing, head chopping "moderate" opposition are from other countries, those that are Syrian, as was the case in Iraq, mostly live outside the country and are not in touch with main stream opinion, but very in touch with US, Saudi etc $$$s. ..."
"... I consider Bashar al-Assad the legitimate Syrian President and attempts to remove him by external interests as grounds for charges of crimes against humanity, crimes of war. ..."
"... As one of the bloggers rightly stated Wesley Clarke spilled the whole beans and revealed their true ilk. 7 countries in 5 years. How coincidental post 9/11. ..."
"... If you say "Assad was flirting with Neo Liberalism" then this is actually a compliment to Assad. Why? Because he wanted to win time. He wanted to prevent the same happening to Syria that has happened to Iraq. At that time there was no other protective power around. Russia was still busy recovering. ..."
"... As demeter said Posted by: Demeter @14, the flirrting with neoliberalism bought them time as neocons were slavering for a new target. It also made the inner circle a ridiculous amount of money. Drought made life terrible for many rural syrians. When the conflict started, if you read this website you'd notice people wondering what was going on and as facts unfolded. realizing that Assad was the lesser of two evils, and as the war has gone on, look like an angel in comparison to the opposition. ..."
"... Salafism is Racism. It de-egitimizes the entire anti Assad revolution. ..."
"... Wesley Clark's "seven countries in five years" transcript for anyone who has forgotten: http://genius.com/General-wesley-clark-seven-countries-in-five-years-annotated ..."
"... the armed conflict originated with scheming by foreign governments to use extremists as a weapon. ..."
"... Furthermore, Debsisdead sets up the same "binary division" that he says he opposes by tarnishing those who oppose using extremists as a weapon of state as Assad loving racists. The plot was described by Sy Hersh in 2007 in "The Redirection" . ..."
"... The fight IS "binary". You support Assad and his fighters, the true rebels, or you don't. Calling Assad a "hack" is a slander of a veritable hero. Watch his interviews. Assad presides over a multi-cultural, multi-confessional, diverse, secular state, PRECISELY what the Reptilians claim they cherish. ..."
"... "the Syrian government put staying in power via adopting neoliberal strictures ahead of the welfare of Syrians." - on that we can agree. ..."
"... It continues to annoy me that the primary trigger for the civil war in Syria has been totally censored from the press. The government deliberately ignited a population explosion, making the sale or possession of condoms or birth control pills illegal and propagandizing that it was every woman's patriotic duty to have six kids. The population doubled every 18 years, from 5 million to 10 million to 20 million and then at 22 the water ran out and things fells apart. Syria is a small country mostly arid plateau, in principle it could be developed to support even more people just not in that amount of time and with the resources that the Syrians actually had. ..."
"... It doesn't mean he's a saint that Assad is leading the very popular 'secular/multi-confessional Syria' resistance against an extremely well-funded army primarily of non-Syrians who are mainly 'headchoppers' who will stop at nothing to impose Saudi-style religious dictatorship on Syria. ..."
"... The 'moderate' opposition to Assad has largely disappeared (back into the loyal opposition that does NOT want a Saudi-style state imposed on Syria), but those who remain in armed rebellion surely must know that they are a powerless, very small portion of what is in fact mercenary army completely subservient to the needs and directives of its primary funders/enablers, the US and Saudi Arabia. So whatever their original noble intentions, they've become part of the Saudi/US imperial problem. ..."
"... All that land, all that resource...and a unifying language. Amazing. If only the Arab world could unite for the collective good of the region we might witness a rogue state in an abrupt and full decline. A sad tactic of colonial powers over the years, setting the native tribes upon each other. We've not evolved here. ..."
"... t in recent history the foreign policy of powerful nations is aimed at sponsoring social disintegration within the borders of targeted countries. ..."
"... Ethnic cleansing means destruction of culture, of historical memory, the forced disappearance of communities that were rooted in a place. ..."
"... Compare President Assad's leadership to that of the western, or Saudi, sponsors of terror; or measure his decisions against those of the hodgepodge of rebels and mercenaries, with their endless internal squabbles and infighting. Assad is so much more of a spokesman for the rights of sovereignty, and his words carry more weight and outshine the banalities that spring from the mouths of those who are paying the bills, and supplying weapons, and giving all kinds of diplomatic comfort to the enemies of the Syrian government. ..."
"... There is no need for sorting things into absolutes of good and evil. But there is a condition under which fewer, a lot fewer, humans would have died in Syria, Without foreign interference--money, weapons, and training--Assad's government would have won this war quite a while ago. ..."
"... And as for "Islamic Fundamentalism", it is this abnormal form of Islam that is purely based on racism and not the other way around. Islamic fundamentalists call everybody, and I mean everybody, who is not living according to their rule a non-believer, a Takfiri, who does not deserver to live. ..."
"... Fundamentalism is never satisfied until it can become a tyranny over the mind. Racism and fundamentalism are as American as apple pie. You have to take a close look at who is pouring oil on this fire! ..."
"... I disagree with you in that neoliberalism is seriously not difficult to define. It boils down to belief that public programs are bad/'inefficient' and that society would be better served by privatizing many things(or even everything) and opening services up to 'competition'. It's mainly just cover for parasites to come in and get rich off of the masses misery. The 'neoliberalism is just a snarl word' meme is incredibly stupid, since plenty of books and articles have been written explicitly defining it. ..."
"... American economic hegemony is inherently neoliberal, and has been for decades. The IMF is essentially an international loan shark that gives countries money on the condition that they dismantle their public spending apparatus and let the market run things. ..."
"... The situation is different now. One Syrian lady, who came to see me in April, who lives in California, told me that her father, who was a big pre-war oppositionist, now just wants to return to Syria to die. There's no question. if you want peace in Syria, Asad is the only choice. The jihadis, who dominate the opposition, don't offer an alternative. ..."
"... The lesson of Viet Nam was to keep the dead and wounded off the six o'clock news. ..."
"... The jackals are going in. Another coup. Syria was on the list. Remap the Middle East. Make it like Disney World. Israel as Mad King Ludwig's Neuschwanstein. ..."
"... I don't think anyone who comments here regularly ever assumed that Bashar al Assad was a knight in white shining armour. Most of us are aware of how he came to be President and that his father did rule the country from 1971 to 2000 with an iron fist. Some if not most also know that initially when Bashar al Assad succeeded to the Presidency, he did have a reformist agenda in mind. How well or not he succeeded in putting that across, what compromises he had to make, who or what opposed him, how he negotiated his way between and among various and opposed power structures in Syrian politics we do not know. ..."
"... Yes, I have trouble reconciling the fact that Bashar al Assad's government did allow CIA renditioning with his reformist agenda in my own head. That is something he will have to come to terms with in the future. I don't know if Assad was naive, under pressure or willing, even eager in agreeing to cooperate with the CIA, or trying to buy time to prepare for invasion once Iraq was down. Whether Assad also realises that he was duped by the IMF and World Bank in following their advice on economic "reforms" (such as privatising Syria's water) is another thing as well. ..."
"... I don't see why you call the problem "Islamic fundamentalism" when in fact it is Sunni fundamentalism. ..."
"... Manifest Destiny is fundamentalism. ..."
"... "Full Spectrum Dominance" and other US Military doctrines are fundamentalist in nature. ..."
"... I have no doubt that Assad was little more than a crude Arab strongman/dictator prince back in the 2011 when the uprising started. Since then, he has evolved into a committed, engaged defender of his country against multilateral foreign aggression, willingly leaving his balls in the vice and all. ..."
"... He could have fled the sinking ship many times so far. Instead, he decided to stay and fight the Takfiri river flowing in through the crack, and risk going down with the ship he inherited. The majority of the Syrians know this very well. ..."
"... Bashar of 2016 (not so much the one of 5 1/2 years ago) would not only win the next free elections, but destroy any opposition. The aggressors know that as a fact. ..."
"... if Syria had control over its borders with Turkey, Israel, Jordan and Iraq would the war have ended a long time ago ? Answer honestly. ..."
"... If yes, then the so-called "opposition" of the union of headchoppers does not represent a significant portion of the Syrian people. Were it otherwise Assad wouldnt be able to survive a single year, let alone 5. With or without foreign help. ..."
"... OK here is an interesting article from 2011 on Abdallah Dardari, the fellow who persuaded Bashar al Assad to adopt the disastrous neoliberal economic reforms that not only ruined Syria's economy and the country's agriculture in particular but also created an underclass who resented the reforms and who initially joined the "rebels". http://english.al-akhbar.com/node/2097 ..."
"... And where is Dardari now? He jumped ship in 2011 and went to Beirut to work for the UN's Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA). He seems like someone to keep a watchful eye on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdullah_Dardari ..."
"... of COURSE assad flirted with the west. between housing cia rendition houses and the less-than-flattering aspects of the wikileaks "syria files", assad and/or his handlers (family and/or military) have tried a little too hard to "assimilate" to western ideals (or the lack thereof). ..."
"... i seriously doubt they will make that mistake again. they saw what happened to al-qaddafi after he tried to play nice and mistook western politicians for human beings. they've learned their lesson and become more ruthless but they were always machiavellians because they have to be. not an endorsement, just an acceptance of how the region is. ..."
"... also: israel, the saudis (along with qatar and the other GCC psychopaths in supporting capacity) and the US are the main actors and throwing european "powers" into the circle of actual power does them an undue favor by ignoring their status as pathetic vassal states. "FrUkDeUSZiowhatever" isn't necessary. ..."
"... Look I know the MSM is utterly controlled - but the extent of that control still shocks at times. It is simply not possible to be "informed" by any normal definition of the word anymore without the alternative media - and for that reason this site serves a valuable purpose and I once again thank the host and contributors. ..."
"... The irony is, Assad is 10x smarter and bigger person than Debs. Yes, he made some mistakes, but if not "flirting with neoliberalism", war against Syria would have started many years earlier, when Resistance wasnt ready one bit (neither Russia, nor Iran, while on the other hand US was more powerful). ..."
"... Support for rebel groups was misguided at best at the beginning of the war. One could conceivably not appreciate the capacity of the KSA/USA/Quatar/Israel to influence and control and create these groups. Jesus it's hard for me to think of a single local opposition group that isnt drenched in fanaticism besides the Kurds. ..."
"... There's no way to a solution for the Syrian people, the population not imported that is, if these groups win. I hate to be so binary but its so naive in my eyes to think anything good will come from the long arm of the gulf countries and the USA taking control. ..."
"... As I've said repeatedly, the GOAL of the Syria crisis for the Western elites, Israel and the ME dictatorships is to take Syria OUT by any means necessary in order to get to IRAN. Nothing else matters to these people. In the same vein, nothing else matters to ninety percent of the CURRENT insurgents than to establish some Salafist state, exterminate the Shia, etc., etc. ..."
"... So, yes, right NOW the whole story is about US elites, Zionist "evil", corrupt monarchs, and scumbag fanatics, etc., etc. Until THAT is resolved, nothing about how Syria is being run is going to matter. ..."
"... Copeland @60: No, I don't think the problem is fundamentalism. It's the warring crusade method of spreading a belief's 'empire' that is the problem. This is a problem uniquely of the Saudi 'do whatever it takes' crusade to convert the entire 'Arab and Muslim world' to their worst, most misogynist form of Islam. ..."
"... Just want to mention that from the beginning there were people who took up arms against the government. This is why the situation went out of control. People ambushed groups of young soldiers. Snipers of unknown origin fired on police and civilians. ..."
"... I rather like Assad. I won't lie. But, he is not the reason for the insurrection in Syria ~ well, except for his alliances with Russia and Iran and his pipeline decisions and his support for Palestinian and Iraqi refugees. What happened in Syria is happening all over the globe because the nation with the most resources in the world, the self-declared exceptionalist state thinks this is the way to rule the world. . . . because they want to rule and they don't care how much destruction it takes to do so. And lucky for us there is no one big enough and bad enough to do it to us - except for our own government. ..."
"... There were a lot of people posting how Bashar al Assad was doing full neoliberalism. And at was true. ..."
"... So Assad was hit by a Tri-horror: global warming, dwindling cash FF resources, and IMF-type pressure, leaving out the trad. enemies, KSA, pipelines , etc. MSM prefer to cover up serious issues with 'ethnic strife' (sunni, shia, black lives matter, etc.) ..."
It is sad to see so many are so locked into their particular views that they
see any offering of an alternative as 'neoliberal' or laughable or - if it weren't
so serious - Zionist.
1/ I do not see the Syrian civil war as racist or race based, I do believe
however that the rejection of all Islamic fundamentalism as being entirely comprised
of 'headchoppers' is racist down to its core. It is that same old same old whitefella
bullshit which refuses to consider other points of view on their own terms but
considers everything through the lens of 'western' culture which it then declares
wanting and discards.
2/ Noirette comes close to identifying one of the issues that kicked
off the conflict, that the Syrian government put staying in power via adopting
neoliberal strictures ahead of the welfare of Syrians. I realize many have
quite foolishly IMO, adopted President Assad as some sort of model of virtue
- mostly because he is seen to be standing up to American imperialism. That
is a virtuous position but it doesn't make President Assad virtuous of himself
and neither does it reflect the reality that when push came to shove Assad put
his position ahead of the people of Syria and kissed neoliberal butt.
3/ President Assad revealed his stupidity when he didn't pay attention
to what happens to a leader who has previously been featured as a 'tyrant' in
western media if he lets the neoliberals in: They fawn & scrape all the while
developing connections to undermine him/her. If the undermining is ineffective
there is no backing off. The next option is war. The instances are legion from
President Noriega of Panama to President Hussein of Iraq to Colonel Ghaddaffi
of Libya - that one really hurts as the Colonel was a genuinely committed and
astute man. Assad is just another hack in comparison.
4/ These Syrian leaders are politicians, they suffer the same flaws of
politicians across the world. They are power seekers who inevitably come to
regard the welfare of their population as a means to an end rather than an end
in itself.
5/ My Syrians friends are an interesting bunch drawn from a range of people
currently living inside and outside of Syria. Some longer term readers might
recall that I'm not American, don't live in America and nowadays don't visit
much at all. The first of the 'refugee' Syrians I got to know, although refugee
is a misnomer since my friend came here on a migrant's visa because his skills
are in demand, is the grandchild of Palestinian refugees - so maybe he is a
refugee but not in the usual sense. Without going into too many specifics as
this is his story not mine, he was born and lived in a refugee camp which was
essentially just another Damascus suburb. As he puts it, although a Palestinian
at heart, he was born in Syria and when he thinks of home it is/was Damascus.
All sides in the conflict claimed to support Palestinian liberation, yet he
and his family were starved out of their homes by both Syrian government militias
and the FSA.
When he left he was initially a stateless person because even though he was
born in Syria he wasn't entitled to Syrian citizenship. He bears no particular
grudge against the government there but he told me once he does wish they were
a lot smarter.
On the other hand he also understands why the people fighting the government
are doing so. I'm not talking about the leadership of course (see above - pols
are pols) but the Syrians who just couldn't take the fading future and the petty
oppression by assholes any longer.
6/ No one denies that the opposition have been used and abused by FUKUSi,
but that of itself does not invalidate the very real issues that persuaded them
to resist an austerity imposed from above by assholes who weren't practicing
what they preached.
I really despair at the mindset which reduces everything to a binary division
- if group A are the people I support they must all be wonderful humans and
group B those who are fighting Group A are all evil assholes.
If group A claim to support Palestinian self determination (even though they
have done sweet fuck all to actually advance that cause) then everyone in Group
B must be pro-Zionist even though I don't know what they say about it (the leadership
of the various resistance groups are ME politicians and therefore most claim
to also support Palestinian independence). Yes assholes in the opposition have
done sleazy deals with Israel over Golan but the Ba'ath administration has done
similar opportunist sell outs over the 40 years when the situation demanded
it.
I fucking hate that as much as anyone else who despises the ersatz state
of Israel, but the reality is that just about every ME leader has put expedience
ahead of principle with regard to Palestine. Colonel Ghadaffi would be the only
leader I'm aware of who didn't. Why do they? That is what all pols and diplomats
do not just Arab ones. According to the European model of diplomacy imposed
upon the globe, countries have interests not friends.
As yet no alternative to that model has succeeded since any attempt to do
so has been rejected with great violence. The use of hostages offered by each
party to guarantee a treaty was once an honorable solution, the hostages were
well treated and the security they afforded reduced conflict - if Oblamblam
had to put up one of his daughters to guarantee a deal does anyone think he
would break it as easily as he currently does? Yet the very notion of hostages
is considered 'terrorism' in the west. But I digress.
The only points I wanted to make was the same as those I have already made:
A solution which reduces numbers of humans killed is worth attempting.
Just because someone chooses an option that you disagree with does
not make them evil or headchoppers or Islamofacist.
On balance I would rather see Assad continue as leader of Syria
but I'm not so naive as to believe he is capable of finding a long term
resolution, or that there are not a good number of self interested murderous
sadists in his crew. By the same token I don't believe all of those
resisting the Ba'athist administration are headchopping jihadists or foreign
mercenaries. This war is about 5 years old. If either side were so simplistically
good or evil it would have ended a long time ago.
Plus one more - it is humorous and saddening to see people throw senseless
name-calling into the mix. It is the method preferred by those who are too
stupid and ill informed to develop a logical point of view.
If you want to call me a Zionist lackey of the imperialists or whatever it
was go right ahead - it is only yourself who you tarnish, I'm secure in the
knowledge of my own work against imperialism, corporate domination and Zionism
but perhaps you, who have a need to throw aspersions are not?
Posted by b on September 12, 2016 at 03:33 AM |
Permalink
Plus one more - it is humorous and saddening to see people throw senseless
name-calling into the mix. It is the method preferred by those who are
too stupid and ill informed to develop a logical point of view.
why you think your article is different from others senseless name-calling,
i see exactly the same.
This war is about destroying real history, civilization, culture
and replacing with fake. The war in Yemen is the same. Who in that region
wants to replace real history with fake. Think about it. Most Islamic,Christian,
Assyrian history is systematically being destroyed.
you make some good points concerning Assad flirting with neoliberalism
however, i don't know how you call an opposition 'moderate' when its toting
firearms.
The protests against Assad were moderate, and to his credit Assad
was willing to meet them halfway. However, this situation was exploited
by (((foreign powers)))
If either side were so simplistically good or evil it would have ended
a long time ago.
This is not about "good or evil", this is about TOW missiles made in
USA against T-55, Saudi money for mercenaries, Israeli regional ambitions
and so on. Syria is another country that the US wants to destroy. Six years
ago Syria was a peaceful country.
Allegedly president Assad is a bad guy but Erdogan, Netanyhu and
bin Saud are noble and good men. Who believes in such nonsense? The US has
become similar to Israel and this is the reason why "Assad must go". Sick
countries do sick things.
If either side were so simplistically good or evil it would have
ended a long time ago
no, because one side is so simplistically evi l(armed to the fucking
teeth and resolved to violent insurrection!!!), if Assad didn't have the
backing of the vast majority of his people and of his overreached army it
would have ended a long time ago and Syria would be a failed state flailing
away in the grip of anarchy. perhaps your Syrian 'friends' should meditate
on this naked truth.
If group A claim to support Palestinian self determination (even
though they have done sweet fuck all to actually advance that cause)...
when that shitty little country called Israel was squeezed onto the
map in 1948, Syria welcomed Palestinian refugees with open arms by the hundreds
of thousands. no, they didn't grant them citizenship, but prettty much all
other rights.
so thanks, b, for headlining this obfuscatory drivel. thus, for posterity.
This whole nightmare was dreamed up from within the US Embassy in Damascus
in 2006. Bashir al Assad was too popular in the country and the region for
America's liking, so they plotted to get rid of him. Near all the organ
eating, child killing, head chopping "moderate" opposition are from other
countries, those that are Syrian, as was the case in Iraq, mostly live outside
the country and are not in touch with main stream opinion, but very in touch
with US, Saudi etc $$$s.
Here again is the reality of where this all started, article from 2012
(below.). And never forget Wesley Clark's Pentagon informant after 9/11
of attacking "seven countries in five years." Those in chaos through US
attacks or attempted "liberation" were on the list, a few more to go and
they are a bit behind schedule. All responsible for this Armageddon should
be answering for their actions in shackles and yellow jump suits in The
Hague.
|~b~ Thank you for putting Debsisdead's comment @ 135 prior post into readable
form. Failing eyesight made the original in its extended format difficult
to read.
Reference Debsisdead comment:
Your definition of neoliberal would be nice to have. Usually it is used
as ephemerally as a mirage, to appear in uncountable numbers of meaning.
Having determined your definition of neoliberal, are you sure it WAS
neoliberal rather than a hegemonic entity? Neoliberal seems best used as
the reactionary faux historic liberalism as applied to economic agendas
(neocon is the political twin for neoliberal, libertarian had been previously
been co-opted).
Instead of F•UK•US•i, maybe a F•UK•UZoP would suffice (France•United
Kingdom•United Zionist occupied Palestine) given the spheres of influence
involved.
Agree with your observations about the limited mentality of dualism;
manichaeism is a crutch for disabled minds unaware and blind to subtle distinctions
that comprise spectrums.
Though not paying close attention to Syrian history, it was Hafez al-Assad
who became master of the Syrian Ba'athist coup d'état and politically stabilised
Syria under Ba'athist hegemony. In the midst of the 'Arab-spring' zeitgeist,
an incident involving a child with security forces led to a genuine public
outcry being suppressed by state security forces. This incident, quickly
settled became cause célčbre for a subsequent revolt, initially by SAA dissidents
but soon thereafter by external interests having the motive of regime overthrow
of Syrian Ba'athists and their leadership. Other narratives generally make
little sense though may contain some factors involved; the waters have been
sufficiently muddied as to obscure many original factors - possibly Bashar
al-Assad's awareness of his security forces involvement in US rendition
and torture as to compromise his immediately assuming command of his security
forces in the original public protest over the child. Those things are now
well concealed under the fogs of conflict and are future historians to sort.
I consider Bashar al-Assad the legitimate Syrian President and attempts
to remove him by external interests as grounds for charges of crimes against
humanity, crimes of war.
Classic western sheeple disconnect. As one of the bloggers rightly stated
Wesley Clarke spilled the whole beans and revealed their true ilk. 7 countries
in 5 years. How coincidental post 9/11. This total disconnect with global
realities is a massive problem in the west cause the 86000 elite /oligarchs
r pushing for a war with both the bears/ Russian and Chinese along with
Iran. These countries have blatantly stated they will not be extorted by
fascism. All western countries r all living a Corporate state. Just look
all around every facet of our society is financialised. Health ,education
, public services.
Wake up cause if we dont we will be extinct Nuclear winter
I am of syrian origin, born in Beirut Lebanon.
My family lived a happy life there, but shortly after I was born, Israel
invaded Lebanon, and my family fled and emigrated to Europe, I was 1 year
old.
I call major bullshit on your piece.
If you say "Assad was flirting with Neo Liberalism" then this is actually
a compliment to Assad.
Why? Because he wanted to win time. He wanted to prevent the same happening
to Syria that has happened to Iraq. At that time there was no other protective
power around. Russia was still busy recovering.
What do you think would
have happened had Assad not pretended he would go along? Syria would have
been bombed to pieces right then. Why did Assad change his mind later and
refused to cooperate with Qatar, Saudi and US? Because the balance of power
was about to change. Iran and Russia were rising powers (mainly in the military
field).
I could say so much more. I stopped reading your post when you mentioned
that your Palestinian friend ( I know the neighbourhood in Damascus, it
is called Yarmouk and it is indeed a very nice suburb) does not have Syrian
citizenship. Do you know why Palaestinians don't get Syrian citizenship?
Because they are supposed to return to their homeland Palestine.
And they can only do that as Palestinians and not as Syrians. That is
why.
And that so many (not all!) Palestinians chose to backstab the country
that has hosted them and fed them and gave them a life for so many years,
and fought side by side with islamist terrorists and so called Free Syrian
Army traitors is a human error, is based on false promises, is lack of character
and honour and understanding of the broader context and interests. How will
some of these fools and misguided young men feel when they realise that
they have played right into the hand of their biggest enemy, the Zionists.
I would like to remind some of you who might have forgotten that famous
incident described by Robert Fisk years ago, when a Syrian Officer told
him upon the capture of some of these "freedom fighters' on Syrian soil,
one of them said: "I did not know that Palestine was so beautiful", not
realising that he was not fighting in Palestine but in Syria.
And as for "Islamic Fundamentalism", it is this abnormal form of Islam
that is purely based on racism and not the other way around. Islamic fundamentalists
call everybody, and I mean everybody, who is not living according to their
rule a non-believer, a Takfiri, who does not deserver to live.
Though reluctant to get involved in what seems to be for some a personal
spat, I would like to point out one fundemental point that renders the above
published and counter arguments difficult to comprehend which is that they
lack a time frame.
The 'Syrian opposition' or what ever you wish to call it is not now what
it was 6 years ago. Thus, for me, at least, it is not possible to discuss
the make up of the opposition unless there are some time frames applied.
An example is a Syrian who was an officer in the FSA but fled to Canada
last year. He fled the Syrian conflict over 3 years ago to Turkey -which
is how I know him - where he did not continue ties with any group. He simply
put his head down and worked slavishly living at his place of work most
of the time to escape to Canada - he feared remaining in Istanbul. He claimed
that he and others had all been taken in by promises and that the conflict
had been usurped by extremists. He was not a headchopper, he was not the
beheader of 12 year old children. He was and is a devout Muslim. He was
a citizen of Aleppo city. I know him and of him through other local Syrians
in Istanbul and believe his testimony. I mention him only to highlight that
the conflict is not what it was, not what some intended it to be ... Nor
is it what some paint it to be. There are many who fight whomever attacks
their community be they pro / anti Government. - Arabs especially have extended
village communities/ tribes and pragmatically they 'agree' to be occupied
as long as they are allowed to continue their lives in peace. If conflict
breaks out they fight whomever is necessary.
DebIsDead makes some very excellent points in his/her comments. They
deserve appraisal and respectful response. It is also clear thar he/she
is writing defensively in some parts and those detract from what is actually
being said.
The piece suffers from several errors. As demeter said Posted by: Demeter
@14, the flirrting with neoliberalism bought them time as neocons were slavering
for a new target. It also made the inner circle a ridiculous amount of money.
Drought made life terrible for many rural syrians. When the conflict started,
if you read this website you'd notice people wondering what was going on
and as facts unfolded. realizing that Assad was the lesser of two evils,
and as the war has gone on, look like an angel in comparison to the opposition.
You can't change the fact that it took less than 2 years for the opposition
to be dominated by both foreign and domestic takfiris who wanted to impose
saudi style culture on an open relatively prosperous cosmopolitan country.
They've succeeded in smashing it to pieces. Snuff your balanced account
and your bold anti racism
Debsisdead sets up a strawman - racism against Islamic fundamentalists
and validity of opposition against Assad - and uses this to sidestep
that the armed conflict originated with scheming by foreign governments
to use extremists as a weapon.
"If you want to call me a Zionist lackey of the imperialists or whatever
it was go right ahead - it is only yourself who you tarnish, I'm secure
in the knowledge of my own work against imperialism, corporate domination
and Zionism but perhaps you, who have a need to throw aspersions are not?"
Passive-aggressive much?
The fight IS "binary". You support Assad and his fighters, the true rebels,
or you don't. Calling Assad a "hack" is a slander of a veritable hero. Watch
his interviews. Assad presides over a multi-cultural, multi-confessional,
diverse, secular state, PRECISELY what the Reptilians claim they cherish.
"the Syrian government put staying in power via adopting neoliberal strictures
ahead of the welfare of Syrians." - on that we can agree.
It continues to annoy me that the primary trigger for the civil war in
Syria has been totally censored from the press. The government deliberately
ignited a population explosion, making the sale or possession of condoms
or birth control pills illegal and propagandizing that it was every woman's
patriotic duty to have six kids. The population doubled every 18 years,
from 5 million to 10 million to 20 million and then at 22 the water ran
out and things fells apart. Syria is a small country mostly arid plateau,
in principle it could be developed to support even more people just not
in that amount of time and with the resources that the Syrians actually
had.
No the issue was not 'climate change'. The aquifers in Syria had been
falling for years, even when rainfall was above normal. Don't blame the
weather.
"The more the merrier" - tell me exactly how people having more children
than they can support creates wealth? It doesn't and it never has.
Whenever governments treat their people as if they were cattle, demanding
that they breed the 'correct' number of children rather than making the
decision based on their own desires and judgement of how many they can support,
the result is always bad.
Assad treated the people of Syria as if they were cattle. Surely this
deserves mention?
Cultural "left" bullshit at its best. Cultural "leftists" don't need to
know any hostory or have any understanding of a political issue: it's sufficient
to pull out a few details from the NATO press and apply their grad school
"oppression" analysis.
Thanks to b for posting the comment of Debs is Dead. The point I would take
issue with is where he states "I realize many have quite foolishly IMO,
adopted President Assad as some sort of model of virtue. . ."
I don't believe this is a correct realization. I think the many to whom
he refers know very well that any person in leadership of a country can
be found to have flaws, major and minor, and even to have more of such than
the average mortal. The crucial counterpoint, however, which used to be
raised fairly often, is that it is the acceptance of the majority of the
people governed by such leaders that ought to be the international norm
for diplomatic relations.
I respect the knowledge DiD has gained from his Syrian friends and contacts.
But I also remember a man called Chilabi and am very leery of destabilization
attempts this country has been engaged in lo these many generations, using
such displaced persons as surrogates. And rather than properly mourn the
9/11 victims and brave firemen and rescuers of that terrible day, I find
myself mourning the larger tragedy of unnecessary wars launched as a consequence
of our collective horror at that critical moment in our history.
After making sound point about black-and-white worldview being unrealistic,
the guy goes full retard. Position towards Palestinians as the one and only
criteria to judge ME developments... C'mon, it's not even funny.
And while started from a "My Syrian friends" then he goes on reasoning on
behalf of one single ex-Palestinian ex-Syrian guy...
Looks like self-revelation of a kind. Some guy, sitting in Israel, or whatever,
waging informational warfare for the Mossad/CIA/NGO who pays his rent.
"The government deliberately ignited a population explosion, making the
sale or possession of condoms or birth control pills illegal and propagandizing
that it was every woman's patriotic duty to have six kids."
DiD: "I realize many have quite foolishly IMO, adopted President Assad as
some sort of model of virtue. . ." The big reveal is that DiD can't name
a single contributor here who has written that Assad is "some sort of model
of virtue."
It doesn't mean he's a saint that Assad is leading the very popular 'secular/multi-confessional
Syria' resistance against an extremely well-funded army primarily of non-Syrians
who are mainly 'headchoppers' who will stop at nothing to impose Saudi-style
religious dictatorship on Syria.
The 'moderate' opposition to Assad has
largely disappeared (back into the loyal opposition that does NOT want a
Saudi-style state imposed on Syria), but those who remain in armed rebellion
surely must know that they are a powerless, very small portion of what is
in fact mercenary army completely subservient to the needs and directives
of its primary funders/enablers, the US and Saudi Arabia. So whatever their
original noble intentions, they've become part of the Saudi/US imperial
problem.
Thanks for addressing the problem of angry comments by some posters who
just want to throw verbal grenades is unacceptable. I hope this site continues
to be a great source for sharing information and ideas.
Why in God's name was this pointless comment by Debs is Dead promoted this
way?!!! The only point being made, that I can see, is that the war in Syria
does have some legitimate issues at its root. WELL OF COURSE IT DOES. The
Hegemon rarely to never makes up civil unrest in countries it wants to overthrow
out of whole cloth. They take some dispute that is already there and ramp
it up; this process escalates until it turns into some form of a proxy war
or coup. In other words, the domestic political process is DISTORTED until
it is no longer remotely recognizable as a domestic process.
So sure, if the US and its allies had not stoked political factionism
in Syria into a global proxy war, we could discuss the fine details of the
Syrian domestic process very usefully. At this point, though, IT IS IRRELEVANT.
I do agree on one point: Assad joins the horrendous list of overlords
who thought they could make a deal with the Hegemon on their own terms.
Assad will pay for that mistake with his life very soon I would guess and
I think that Putin will too, though that might take a little longer. If
they had chosen to stand on principle as Chavez did, maybe they would be
dead as Chavez is (possibly done in, who knows), but they'd be remembered
with honor as Chavez is.
It is a shame no one stood up for Libya, for a surviving Gaddafi would have
emerged considerably stronger - as Assad eventually will.
Whatever genuine opposition there was has long been hijacked by opportunistic
takfiris, wahabbists and there various paymasters. And so as ruralito says
@25: "The fight IS "binary...". The fight is indeed binary, the enemy is
plural. Assad versus the many appearances of both the first and fourth kind.
Appearances to the mind are of four kinds.
Things either are what they appear to be;
or they neither are, nor appear to be;
or they are, and do not appear to be;
or they are not, and yet appear to be.
Rightly to aim in all these cases is the wise man's task. ~Epictetus
Where there is obfuscation lay the enemy, hence Russia's long game of
identification.
Does anyone remember the essay posted on this site a while back titled "The
Feckless Left?" I don't believe B posted it, but if memory serves it's posted
front and centre on the navigation bar beside this piece?
It really hammers those people like Tariq Ali, who while surely having
legitimate grievances against the Assad govt, opened the door for legitimation
of foreign sponsored war. They thought that funneling millions of dollars
worth of training, weapons and mercs would open the door for another secular
govt, but this time much 'better.' Surely.
No one thinks Assad is great. I really have trouble understanding where
that notion comes from. It's just that the alternative is surely much worse.
Lots of people didn't like Ghaddafi but jesus, I'm sure most Libyans would
wish they could turn back the clock (at the risk of putting words in their
mouths). It's not binary, no one sees this as good vs evil, its just that
its become so painfully obvious at this point that if the opposition wins
Syria will be so fucked in every which way. Those with real, tangible grievances
are never going to have their voices heard. It will become the next Libya,
except the US and it's clients will actually have a say in what's left of
the political body in the country if you could even label it that at that
point (which is quite frightenening in my eyes. Libya is already a shit
show and they don't have much of a foothold there besides airstrikes and
that little coastal base for the GNA to have their photo ops).
I find it ironic that when criticisms are levelled at Assad from the
left they usually point out things that had he done more of, and worse of,
he probably would be free of this situation and still firmly in power. If
he had bowed down to Qatar and the KSA/USA I wonder if the 'armed opposition'
would still have their problems with him? That's the ultimate irony to me.
If he had accepted the pipelines, the privatization regimes, etc. would
they still be hollering his name? It's very sad that even with the balancing
act he did his country has been destroyed. Even if the SAA is able to come
out on top at this point, the country is wholly destroyed. What's even the
point of a having a 'legitimate' or 'illegitimate' opposition when they're
essentially fighting over scraps now. I'd be surprised if they could rebuild
the country in 120 years. Libya in my eyes will never be what it once was.
It'll never have the same standards of living after being hit with a sledgehammer.
I don't mean to be ironic or pessimistic, its just a sad state of affairs
all around and everyday it seems more and more unlikely that any halfway
decent solution for the POPULATION OF SYRIA, not Assad, will come out of
this.. It's like, I'm no nationalist, but in many countries I kind of would
rather that than the alternative. Ghaddafi wasn't great but his people could've
been a lot worse of - and ARE a lot worse of now. I'm no Assad fan, but
my god look what the alternative is here. If it wasnt 95% foreign sponsored
maybe id see your point.
Read the essay posted on the left there. "Syria, the Feckless Left" IIRC.
I thought that summed up my thoughts well enough.
And guys, even if you agree with me please refrain from the name calling.
It makes those of you with a legitimate rebuttal seem silly and wrong. I've
always thought MoA was so refreshing because it was (somewhat) free of that.
At least B is generating discussion. I kind of appreciate that. It's nice
to hear ither views, even if they are a little unrealistic and pro violent
and anti democratic.
An example of an armed opposition with legitimate grievances that is
far from perfect but still very sympathetic (in my eyes) is hizbollah. They
have real problems to deal with. While they recieve foreign sponsorship
they aren't a foreign group the way the Syrian opposition is. And they will
be all but destroyed when their supply lines from Syria are cut off. I wonder
how that fits in with OPs post.
What makes Debs is Dead's turgid comment so irrational is that it endorses
Regime Change in Syria as an ongoing, but necessary and inevitable, "good".
But in doing so it tip-toes around the fact that it doesn't matter how Evil
an elected President is, or is not, it's up to the the people who elected
him to decide when they've had enough. It most certainly is NOT Neoconned
AmeriKKKa's concern.
Debs also 'forgot' to justify totally wrecking yet another of many ME
countries because of perceived and imaginary character flaws in a single
individual.
It does not compute; but then neither does "Israel's" 70 year (and counting)
hate crime, The Perpetual Palestinian Holohoax.
Whatever happened to the age old expression that one has to walk in someone
else's shoes to understand their walk in life?
In an all too obvious fashion, another arm chair expert is blessing the
world with his/her drivel.
To make it as concise as possible:
What would you have done in Assad's position? The U.S. is trying to annex
Syria since 1948 and never gave up on the plan to convert it to what the
neo-fascists turned Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia and the Republic of
Yugoslavia - whereas Yemen is still in the making, together with Ukraine,
Turkey and Africa as a whole.
In the light of U.S. 'foreign policy', the piece reeks of the stench
of obfuscation.
Debs also 'forgot' to justify totally wrecking yet another of many ME
countries because of perceived and imaginary character flaws in a single
individual.
We shouldn't be surprised. Even a basic pragmatic approach to this conflict
has been lost by many in the one sided, over the top shower of faeces that
is the western MSM.
It does not compute; but then neither does "Israel's" 70 year (and
counting) hate crime, The Perpetual Palestinian Holohoax.
All that land, all that resource...and a unifying language. Amazing.
If only the Arab world could unite for the collective good of the region
we might witness a rogue state in an abrupt and full decline. A sad tactic of colonial powers over the years, setting the native tribes
upon each other. We've not evolved here.
It is impossible for any one of us to possess the whole picture, which is
why we pool our experience, and benefit from these discussions. The thing
I see at the root of the Syrian war is the process of ethnic cleansing.
In many cases that involve murderous prejudice, it erupts as civil war;
but in recent history the foreign policy of powerful nations is aimed at
sponsoring social disintegration within the borders of targeted countries.
Ethnic cleansing means destruction of culture, of historical memory,
the forced disappearance of communities that were rooted in a place.
The objectives of the perpetrators have nothing to do with the convictions
of the fundamentalists who do the dirty work; and the sectarian and mercenary
troops are merely the tools of those who are creating hell on earth.
I agree with what papa wrote at the top of this thread:
why you think your article is different from others senseless name-calling,[?]
i see exactly the same. This war is about destroying real history, civilization,
culture and replacing with fake. The war in Yemen is the same. Who in
that region wants to replace real history with fake. Think about it.
Most Islamic,Christian, Assyrian history is systematically being destroyed.
Compare President Assad's leadership to that of the western, or Saudi, sponsors
of terror; or measure his decisions against those of the hodgepodge of rebels
and mercenaries, with their endless internal squabbles and infighting. Assad
is so much more of a spokesman for the rights of sovereignty, and his words
carry more weight and outshine the banalities that spring from the mouths
of those who are paying the bills, and supplying weapons, and giving all
kinds of diplomatic comfort to the enemies of the Syrian government.
Debsisdead has always brought much food for thought to this watering
hole. I have always respected him, and I think he has a fine mind. Nonetheless,
despite the valuable contribution of this piece as a beginning place, in
which we might reevaluate some of our presumptions, I maintain there are
a few errors which stand out, and ought to be discussed.
I call into question these two points:
(1) Just because someone chooses an option that you disagree with does
not make them evil or headchoppers or Islamofacist.
Up thread @14, we were reminded of Robert Fisk's report about misdirected,
misinformed "freedom fighters" naively wandering around in Syria, while
thinking that they were fighting in Palestine. In this ruin of Syria, where
the well-intentioned are captured, or co-opted into evil acts against the
civilian population, --is it really incumbent upon us, --from where we sit,
to agonize over the motives of those who are committing the actual atrocities
against the defenseless? What is the point?
(2) On balance I would rather see Assad continue as leader of Syria
but I'm not so naive as to believe he is capable of finding a long term
resolution, or that there are not a good number of self interested murderous
sadists in his crew. By the same token I don't believe all of those
resisting the Ba'athist administration are headchopping jihadists or
foreign mercenaries. This war is about 5 years old. If either side were
so simplistically good or evil it would have ended a long time ago.
There is no need for sorting things into absolutes of good and evil.
But there is a condition under which fewer, a lot fewer, humans would have
died in Syria, Without foreign interference--money, weapons, and training--Assad's
government would have won this war quite a while ago.
And as for "Islamic Fundamentalism", it is this abnormal form of Islam
that is purely based on racism and not the other way around. Islamic
fundamentalists call everybody, and I mean everybody, who is not living
according to their rule a non-believer, a Takfiri, who does not deserver
to live.
Fundamentalism is never satisfied until it can become a tyranny over the
mind. Racism and fundamentalism are as American as apple pie. You have to
take a close look at who is pouring oil on this fire!
@9 I disagree with you in that neoliberalism is seriously not difficult to
define. It boils down to belief that public programs are bad/'inefficient'
and that society would be better served by privatizing many things(or even
everything) and opening services up to 'competition'. It's mainly just cover
for parasites to come in and get rich off of the masses misery. The 'neoliberalism
is just a snarl word' meme is incredibly stupid, since plenty of books and
articles have been written explicitly defining it.
"Having determined your definition of neoliberal, are you sure it WAS
neoliberal rather than a hegemonic entity?"
American economic hegemony is inherently neoliberal, and has been for
decades. The IMF is essentially an international loan shark that gives countries
money on the condition that they dismantle their public spending apparatus
and let the market run things.
I usually enjoy DiD's rants (rant in the nice sense), but in this case he
is wrong. His remarks are out of date.
No doubt he has Syrian friends in NZ, including the Syro-Palestinian
he mentions. They will have been living their past vision of Syria for some
time. Yes, back in 2011, there was a big vision of a future democratic Syria
among the intellectuals. However those who fight for the rebellion are not
middle class (who left) but rural Islamist Sunnis, who have a primitive
al-Qa'ida style view.
The Syrian civil war is quite like the Spanish civil war. It started
with noble republicans, including foreigners like Orwell, fighting against
nasty Franco, but finished with Stalin's communists fighting against Nazi-supported
fascists.
The situation is different now. One Syrian lady, who came to see me in
April, who lives in California, told me that her father, who was a big pre-war
oppositionist, now just wants to return to Syria to die. There's no question. if you want peace in Syria, Asad is the only choice.
The jihadis, who dominate the opposition, don't offer an alternative.
Noirette comes close to identifying one of the issues that kicked off
the conflict, that the Syrian government put staying in power via adopting
neoliberal strictures ahead of the welfare of Syrians.
The Ba'thist regime is a mafia of the family, not a dictatorship of Bashshar.
Evidently their own interest plays a premier role, but otherwise why not
in favour of the Syrian people? There's lot of evidence in favour of Syrian
peace.
The lesson of Viet Nam was to keep the dead and wounded off the six o'clock
news.
The jackals are going in. Another coup. Syria was on the list. Remap
the Middle East. Make it like Disney World. Israel as Mad King Ludwig's
Neuschwanstein.
Islam and its backward dictates, and Christianity with its backward dictates
and Manifest Destiny are problematic.
I may be white and I may be a fella but don't believe I'm in the fold as
described. Fundamentalists of any sort are free to believe as they will
but when they force it on others via gun, govt, societal pressures, violence
there's trouble. I've seen comparisons to the extremes from Christianity's
past with the excuse of Islam as being in its early years. No excuses. Fundies
out. But we don't see that in places like Saudi Arabia or Iran. Facts on
the ground rule. Iran had a bit more moderation but only under the tyrant
Shah. A majority may have voted for the Islamic Republic and all that entails
but what of the minority?
BTW, where are the stories (links) that show Bashar has embraced neoliberalism?
In the end, DiD reduced to pointing to two evils (with multi-facets) and
it looks like Assad is the lesser. But who can come up with a solution for
a country so divided and so infiltrated by outsiders? And here in the US,
look at the choice of future leaders that so many do not want. Where is
the one who will lead the US out of its BS? And who will vote for him/her?
Thanks to B for republishing the comment from Debsisdead. The comment raises
some issues about how people generally see the war in Syria, if they know
of it, as some sort of real-life video game substitute for bashing one side
or another.
I am not sure though that Debsisdead realises the full import of what
s/he has said and that much criticism s/he makes about comments in MoA comments
forums could apply equally to what s/he says and has said in the past.
I don't think anyone who comments here regularly ever assumed that Bashar
al Assad was a knight in white shining armour. Most of us are aware of how
he came to be President and that his father did rule the country from 1971
to 2000 with an iron fist. Some if not most also know that initially when
Bashar al Assad succeeded to the Presidency, he did have a reformist agenda
in mind. How well or not he succeeded in putting that across, what compromises
he had to make, who or what opposed him, how he negotiated his way between
and among various and opposed power structures in Syrian politics we do
not know.
Yes, I have trouble reconciling the fact that Bashar al Assad's government
did allow CIA renditioning with his reformist agenda in my own head. That
is something he will have to come to terms with in the future. I don't know
if Assad was naive, under pressure or willing, even eager in agreeing to
cooperate with the CIA, or trying to buy time to prepare for invasion once
Iraq was down. Whether Assad also realises that he was duped by the IMF
and World Bank in following their advice on economic "reforms" (such as
privatising Syria's water) is another thing as well.
But one thing that Debsisdead has overlooked is the fact that Bashar
al Assad is popular among the Syrian public, who returned him as President
in multi-candidate direct elections held in June 2014 with at least 88%
of the vote (with a turnout of 73%, better than some Western countries)
and who confirmed his popularity in parliamentary elections held in April
2016 with his Ba'ath Party-led coalition winning roughly two-thirds of seats.
The fact that Syrians themselves hold Assad in such high regard must
say something about his leadership that has endeared him to them. If as
Debsisdead suggests, Assad practises self-interested "realpolitik" like
so many other Middle Eastern politicians, even to the extent of offering
reconciliation to jihadis who lay down their weapons and surrender, how
has he managed to survive and how did Syria manage to hold off the jihadis
and US-Turkish intervention and supply before requesting Russian help?
Copeland @58: I don't see why you call the problem "Islamic fundamentalism"
when in fact it is Sunni fundamentalism. Admittedly it's tough to 'name'
the problem. I'm sure I speak for most here that the problem isn't fundamentalism
but 'warring imperialist fundamentalist and misogynist Sunni Islam' that
is the problem.
It'd be nice to have a brief and accurate way of saying
what this is: 'Saudi Arabia violently exporting its worst form of Islam'.
When people refer to Christian fundamentalism they use the broad term
as well. Nothing is otherwise wrong with denominational belief, if past
a certain point it is not fundamentalist. You say the problem is not fundamentalism,
but something else. Indeed, the problem is fundamentalism.
Manifest
Destiny is fundamentalism. There are even atheist fundamentalists. "Full
Spectrum Dominance" and other US Military doctrines are fundamentalist in
nature. We are awash in fundamentalism, consumerist fundamentalism, capitalist
fundamentalism. If we are unlucky and don't succeed in changing the path
we are on; then we will understand too late the inscription that appeared
in the Temple of Apollo: "Nothing too much".
They say that the first casualty of war is truth and from what I read in
comments such a mental state prevails among readers, they see Assad, quite
reasonably, as the only one who can end this horrible war and the only one
who is really interested in doing so while US and even seemingly Russia
seems to treat this conflict as a instrument of global geopolitical struggle
instigated by US imperial delusions.
But of course one cannot escape conclusion that although provoked by
the CIA operation Bashir Assad failed years befor 2011 exactly because,
living in London, did not see neoliberalism as an existential threat ad
his father did but a system that has its benefits and can be dealt with,
so for a short while Saddam, Gaddafi and Mubarak thought while they were
pampered by western elites.
Now Assad is the only choice I'd Syrians want to keep what would resemble
unified Syrian state since nobody else seems to care.
I have no doubt that Assad was little more than a crude Arab strongman/dictator
prince back in the 2011 when the uprising started.
Since then, he has evolved into a committed, engaged defender of his
country against multilateral foreign aggression, willingly leaving his balls
in the vice and all.
He could have fled the sinking ship many times so far. Instead, he decided
to stay and fight the Takfiri river flowing in through the crack, and risk
going down with the ship he inherited. The majority of the Syrians know
this very well.
Bashar of 2016 (not so much the one of 5 1/2 years ago) would not only
win the next free elections, but destroy any opposition. The aggressors
know that as a fact.
Which is precisely why he "must go" prior to any such elections. He would
be invincible.
"This war is about 5 years old. If either side were so simplistically
good or evil it would have ended a long time ago."
Question to you:
if Syria had control over its borders with Turkey, Israel, Jordan and
Iraq would the war have ended a long time ago ? Answer honestly.
If yes, then the so-called "opposition" of the union of headchoppers
does not represent a significant portion of the Syrian people. Were it otherwise
Assad wouldnt be able to survive a single year, let alone 5. With or without
foreign help.
And that, my friend, may be the biggest oft ignored cui bono of the entire
Syrian war.
If Assad goes:
Syria falls apart. Western Golan has no more debtor nation to be returned
to as far as the UN go. It immediately becomes fee simple property of the
occupying entity, for as long as the occupier shall exist (and, with Western
Golan included, that might be a bit longer perchance...).
Hizbullah loses both its best supply line and all the strategic depth
it might have as well as the only ally anywhere close enough to help. It
becomes a military non-entity. Who benefits?
I think this cui bono (and a double one at that!) is a $100 difficulty
level question, although it feels like a $64k one.
Best opinion post I've yet read on this site. "Binary division," also very
much affects the U.S. election. If you hate Hillary, you must just LOVE
Trump, even though many of the best reasons to hate her--her arrogance,
her incompetence, her phoniness, her lies, her and Bill's relentless acquisition
of great wealth, etc.--are also reasons to hate Trump. Assad is a bastard,
Putin is a bastard, Saddam was a bastard--but so are Obama, Netanyahu, Hollande,
etc. Is it REALLY that hard to figure out?
@ 62 john... we'll have to wait for debs to explain how all that (in your
link) adds up, so long as no one calls him any name/s.... i'd like to say
'the anticipation of debs commenting again is killing me', but regardless,
killing innocent people in faraway lands thanks usa foreign policy is ongoing..
OK here is an interesting article from 2011 on Abdallah Dardari, the fellow
who persuaded Bashar al Assad to adopt the disastrous neoliberal economic
reforms that not only ruined Syria's economy and the country's agriculture
in particular but also created an underclass who resented the reforms and
who initially joined the "rebels". http://english.al-akhbar.com/node/2097
And where is Dardari now? He jumped ship in 2011 and went to Beirut to
work for the UN's Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA).
He seems like someone to keep a watchful eye on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdullah_Dardari
not even sure where to begin...this article is barely worthy of a random
facebook post and contains a roughly even mix of straw men and stuff most
people already know and don't need dictated to them by random internet folks.
of COURSE assad flirted with the west. between housing cia rendition
houses and the less-than-flattering aspects of the wikileaks "syria files",
assad and/or his handlers (family and/or military) have tried a little too
hard to "assimilate" to western ideals (or the lack thereof).
i seriously
doubt they will make that mistake again. they saw what happened to al-qaddafi
after he tried to play nice and mistook western politicians for human beings.
they've learned their lesson and become more ruthless but they were always
machiavellians because they have to be. not an endorsement, just an acceptance
of how the region is.
and then there's "just about every ME leader has put expedience ahead
of principle with regard to Palestine. Colonel Ghadaffi would be the only
leader I'm aware of who didn't". that might be a surprise to nasrallah and
a fair share of iran's power base. i'd also say "expedience" is an odd way
to describe the simple choice of avoiding israeli/saudi/US aggression in
the short term since the alternative would be what we're seeing in syria
and libya as we speak. again, not an endorsment of their relative cowardice.
just saying i understand the urge to avoid salfist proxy wars.
[also: israel, the saudis (along with qatar and the other GCC psychopaths
in supporting capacity) and the US are the main actors and throwing european
"powers" into the circle of actual power does them an undue favor by ignoring
their status as pathetic vassal states. "FrUkDeUSZiowhatever" isn't necessary.]
as for "calling all islamic fundamentalism" "headchopping" being "racist",
be sure not to smoke around all those straw men. never mind the inanity
of pretending that all islamic "fundamentalism" is the same. never mind
conflating religion with ethnicity. outside of typical western sites that
lean to the right and are open about it few people would say anything like
that. maybe you meant to post this on glenn beck's site?
whatever. hopefully there won't be more guest posts in the future.
I read this site regularly and give thanks to the numerous intelligent posters
who share their knowledge of the middle east and Syria in particular. Still,
I do try to read alternative views to understand opposition perspectives
no matter how biased or damaging these might they appear to the readers
of this blog. So in the wake of recent agreements, I try find out what the
mainstream media is saying about the Ahrar al-Sham refusal to recognize
the US/Russia sponsored peace plan....and type that into google.......and
crickets. All that comes up is a single Al-Masdar report.
Look I know the
MSM is utterly controlled - but the extent of that control still shocks
at times. It is simply not possible to be "informed" by any normal definition
of the word anymore without the alternative media - and for that reason
this site serves a valuable purpose and I once again thank the host and
contributors.
The irony is, Assad is 10x smarter and bigger person than Debs. Yes, he
made some mistakes, but if not "flirting with neoliberalism", war against
Syria would have started many years earlier, when Resistance wasnt ready
one bit (neither Russia, nor Iran, while on the other hand US was more powerful).
The other ironic point, Debs is guilty of many things he blames other
for, hence comments about his hypocrisy and lack of self-awareness.
The essay I refered to earlier at 45/46 from this site I'll post below.
I think it has a lot of bearing on what DiD is implying here. It's DEFINITELY
worth a read and is probably the reason why I started appreciating this
site in the first place.
Support for rebel groups was misguided at best at the beginning of the
war. One could conceivably not appreciate the capacity of the KSA/USA/Quatar/Israel
to influence and control and create these groups. Jesus it's hard for me
to think of a single local opposition group that isnt drenched in fanaticism
besides the Kurds. But now that we understand the makeup and texture of
these groups much more and to continue support, even just in the most minor
of ways, is really disheartening.
There's no way to a solution for the Syrian
people, the population not imported that is, if these groups win. I hate
to be so binary but its so naive in my eyes to think anything good will
come from the long arm of the gulf countries and the USA taking control.
WORTH A READ. ONE OF THE BEST THINGS EVER POSTED ON MoA.
Richard Steven Hack | Sep 13, 2016 3:38:32 AM |
79
The problem with this post is simple: all this might have been true back
when the insurgency STARTED. TODAY it is UTTERLY IRRELEVANT.
As I've said repeatedly, the GOAL of the Syria crisis for the Western
elites, Israel and the ME dictatorships is to take Syria OUT by any means
necessary in order to get to IRAN. Nothing else matters to these people.
In the same vein, nothing else matters to ninety percent of the CURRENT
insurgents than to establish some Salafist state, exterminate the Shia,
etc., etc.
So, yes, right NOW the whole story is about US elites, Zionist "evil",
corrupt monarchs, and scumbag fanatics, etc., etc. Until THAT is resolved,
nothing about how Syria is being run is going to matter.
I don't know and have never read ANYONE who is a serious commenter on
this issue - and by that I mean NOT the trolls that infest every comment
thread on every blog - who seriously thinks Assad is a "decent ruler". At
this point it does not matter. He personally does not matter. What matters
is that Syria is not destroyed, so that Hizballah is not destroyed, so that
Iran is not destroyed, so that Israel rules a fragmented Middle East and
eventually destroys the Palestinians and that the US gets all the oil for
free. This is what Russia is trying to defend, not Assad.
And if this leaves a certain percentage of Syrian citizens screwed over
by Assad, well, they should have figured that out as much as Assad should
have figured out that he never should have tried to get along with the US.
Frankly, this is a pointless post which is WAY out of date.
Posted by: Richard Steven Hack | Sep 13, 2016 3:38:32 AM | 79
In the same vein, nothing else matters to ninety percent of the CURRENT
insurgents than to establish some Salafist state, exterminate the Shia,
etc., etc.
"We had to be fighters," he said, "because we didn't find any other
job. If you want to stay inside you need to be a part of the FSA [Free
Syrian Army, the group that has closest relations with the West]. Everything
is very expensive. They pay us $100 a month but it is not enough.
"All this war is a lie. We had good lives before the revolution.
Anyway this is not a revolution. They lied to us in the name of religion.
"I don't want to go on fighting but I need to find a job, a house.
Everything I have is here in Muadhamiya."
...
.. who seriously thinks Assad is a "decent ruler". At this point it does
not matter. He personally does not matter.
...
Frankly, this is a pointless post which is WAY out of date.
Posted by: Richard Steven Hack | Sep 13, 2016 3:38:32 AM | 79
Well, according to RSH, who specialises in being wrong...
Assad does matter because he is the ELECTED leader chosen by the People
of Syria in MORE THAN ONE election.
Did you forget?
Did you not know?
Or doesn't any of that "democracy" stuff matter either?
Israel said its aircraft attacked a Syrian army position on Tuesday after
a stray mortar bomb struck the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights, and it
denied a Syrian statement that a warplane and drone were shot down.
The air strike was a now-routine Israeli response to the occasional spillover
from fighting in a five-year-old civil war, and across Syria a ceasefire
was holding at the start of its second day.
Syria's army command said in a statement that Israeli warplanes had attacked
an army position at 1 a.m. on Tuesday (2200 GMT, Monday) in the countryside
of Quneitra province.
The Israeli military said its aircraft attacked targets in Syria hours
after the mortar bomb from fighting among factions in Syria struck the Golan
Heights. Israel captured the plateau from Syria in a 1967 war.
The Syrian army said it had shot down an Israeli warplane and a drone
after the Israeli attack.
Denying any of its aircraft had been lost, the Israeli military said
in a statement: "Overnight two surface-to-air missiles were launched from
Syria after the mission to target Syrian artillery positions. At no point
was the safety of (Israeli) aircraft compromised."
The seven-day truce in Syria, brokered by Russia and the United States,
is their second attempt this year by to halt the bloodshed.
Copeland @60: No, I don't think the problem is fundamentalism. It's the
warring crusade method of spreading a belief's 'empire' that is the problem.
This is a problem uniquely of the Saudi 'do whatever it takes' crusade to
convert the entire 'Arab and Muslim world' to their worst, most misogynist
form of Islam. T
here are of course many fundamentalists (the Amish and some
Mennonites are examples from Christianity) that are not evangelical, or
put severe (no violence, no manipulation, no kidnapping, stop pushing if
the person says 'no') limits on their evangelism.
Only the Saudis, or pushers
of their version of Islam, seem to put no limits at all on their sect's
crusade.
Just want to mention that from the beginning there were people who took
up arms against the government. This is why the situation went out of control.
People ambushed groups of young soldiers. Snipers of unknown origin fired
on police and civilians.
There are plenty of people in the United States right now who are just
as oppressed - I would wager more so - than anyone in Syria. Immigrants
from the south are treated horribly here. There are still black enclaves
in large cities where young men are shot by the police on a daily basis
for suspicious behavior and minor driving infractions. And then there are
the disenfranchised white folks in the Teaparty who belong to the NRA and
insist on 'open carry' of their weapons on the street and train in the back
woods for a coming war. Tell me what would happen if there were a guarantor
these people found believable who promised them that if they took up arms
against the government (and anyone else in the country they felt threatened
by) they would be guaranteed to win and become the government of a 'New
America'. What if that foreign guarantor were to pay them and improve their
armaments while providing political cover.
I rather like Assad. I won't lie. But, he is not the reason for the insurrection
in Syria ~ well, except for his alliances with Russia and Iran and his pipeline
decisions and his support for Palestinian and Iraqi refugees. What happened
in Syria is happening all over the globe because the nation with the most
resources in the world, the self-declared exceptionalist state thinks this
is the way to rule the world. . . . because they want to rule and they don't
care how much destruction it takes to do so. And lucky for us there is no
one big enough and bad enough to do it to us - except for our own government.
"All of the petrodollars Saudi Arabia spends to advance this claim of
leadership and the monopolistic use of Islam's greatest holy sites to manufacture
a claim of entitlement to Muslim leadership were shattered by this collective
revolt from leading Sunni Muslim scholars and institutions who refused to
allow extremism, takfir, and terror ideology to be legitimized in their
name by a fringe they decided that it is even not part of their community.
This is the beginning of a new era of Muslim awakening the Wahhabis spared
no efforts and no precious resources to ensure it will never arrive."
Assad (=> group in power), whose stated aim was to pass from a 'socialist'
to a 'market' economy. Notes.
*decreased public sector employment.* -- was about 30%, went far
lower (1) - was a staple: one 'smart' graduate in the family guaranteed
a good Gvmt job, could support many.
*cut subsidies* (energy, water, housing, food, etc.) drought (2005>)
plus these moves threw millions into cities with no jobs.. pre-drought
about 20% agri empl. cuts to agri subsidies created the most disruption.
…imho was spurred by the sharply declining oil revenues (peak oil..)
which accounted for ?, 15% GDP in 2002 for ex to a few slim points edging
to nil in 2012, consequences:
> a. unemployment rose 'n rose (to 35-40% youth? xyz overall?), and social
stability was affected by family/extended f/ district etc. organisation
being smashed. education health care in poor regions suffered (2)
> b. small biz of various types went under becos loss of subs, competition
from outsiders (free market policy), lack of bank loans it is said by some
but idk, and loss of clients as these became impoverished. Syria does not
have a national (afaik) unemployment scheme. Assad to his credit
set up a cash-transfer thingie to poor families, but that is not a subsitute
for 'growing employment..'
*opened up the country's banking system* (can't treat the details..)
So Assad was hit by a Tri-horror: global warming, dwindling cash
FF resources, and IMF-type pressure, leaving out the trad. enemies, KSA,
pipelines , etc. MSM prefer to cover up serious issues with 'ethnic strife'
(sunni, shia, black lives matter, etc.)
1. all nos off the top of my head.
2. Acceptance of a massive refugee pop. (Pals in the past, Kurds, but
numerically important now, Iraqis) plus the high birth rate
2011> 10 year plan syria in arabic (which i can't read) but look at images
and 'supporters' etc.
Clinton is neither well-liked nor trusted. She is just a marionette promoted
by neocon cabal. Sanders team has a point that Clinton is like the job candidate
wit the impressive resume who sounds great on paper, but then when you meet her
in person, you realize she's not he right person for the job.
Notable quotes:
"... She has never acknowledged, maybe even to herself, that routing diplomatic emails with classified information through a homebrew server was an outrageous, reckless and foolish thing to do, and disloyal to Obama, whose administration put in place rules for record-keeping that she flouted. ..."
"... And Hillary did not merely fail the ask the right questions. The questions were asked and the answers were given. Joe Biden, Robert Gates and much of the military and intelligence communities advised against the Libya intervention. Hillary just chose to ignore the advice, because she is a radical neoconservative at heart. ..."
"... She volunteered that that the United States should continue to "look for missions" that NATO will support ..."
"... She vows to go around looking for new military adventures. ..."
"... Maureen is right that Hillary has huge character problems. Sure, she can't admit mistakes and compulsively blames others when things go wrong. That's a given. But it's not the biggest problem. The biggest problem is that she will take our country down the wrong path, both in terms of domestic and foreign policy. ..."
"... She has had 40-some years to develop this kind of judgment, imagination and long term reflection, and she has proudly, aggressively, mean-spiritedly run the opposite direction every time and viciously attacked anyone who called her on it. It's time to stop this game of "wondering" whether she can change, wondering whether all of these terrible moments were "the real Hillary" or not. They were. Voting someone in as President on the hope that they will be a completely different person once in office then they have been in 40 years is the definition of insanity. ..."
"... it's about her paranoia about secrecy that made her think she could get away with a private email server in one of the nation's most high-profile jobs, or taking huge sums of money for Wall Street speeches she now refuses to release, or doubling-down on her ill-considered, if not ill-informed (as you note), hawkish regime change views by advocating for it again in Libya that has, as a result, turned into an ISIS outpost. ..."
"... Clinton did herself no favors in the debate, drawing even more attention to her dependence on that money and the impossibility of being completely free to make policy without repaying debts. ..."
"... They don't, but it is telling that Bill said that. His chosen exaggeration displays who he sees as Hillary's side in this. When he says, "they are coming for us" he means Wall Street. ..."
"... "Clinton, who talked Obama into it" on Libya and claimed credit, but when it went poorly, she blamed Obama for listening to her, "On Libya, she noted that "the decision was the president's."" That is her claim to experience, and not something we ought to vote to experience again. ..."
"... Hillary is a self-serving, power hungry politician. She is only ever sorry if she fails to get what she wants, or is forced to explain her actions. She feels she is above "the masses." As for her qualifications, job titles alone don't cut it. What did she actually accomplish as a Senator or SecState? Any major laws? Treaties? No. She failed with Russia, Syria and Libya to name just a few. She is not qualified to be president based on qualifications and personality. ..."
... Clinton sowed suspicion again, refusing to cough up her Wall Street speech
transcripts.
... ... ...
Hillary alternately tried to blame and hug the men in her life, divvying
up credit in a self-serving way.
After showing some remorse for the 1994 crime bill, saying it had had "unintended"
consequences, she stressed that her husband "was the president who actually
signed it." On Libya, she noted that "the decision was the president's." And
on her desire to train and arm Syrian rebels, she recalled, "The president said
no."
But she wrapped herself in President Obama's record on climate change and,
when criticized on her "super PACs," said, well, Obama did it, too.
Sanders accused her of pandering to Israel after she said that "if Yasir
Arafat had agreed with my husband at Camp David," there would have been a Palestinian
state for 15 years.
Bernie is right that Hillary's judgment has often been faulty.
She has shown an unwillingness to be introspective and learn from her mistakes.
From health care to Iraq to the email server, she only apologizes at the point
of a gun. And even then, she leaves the impression that she is merely sorry
to be facing criticism, not that she miscalculated in the first place.
... ... ...
She has never acknowledged, maybe even to herself, that routing diplomatic
emails with classified information through a homebrew server was an outrageous,
reckless and foolish thing to do, and disloyal to Obama, whose administration
put in place rules for record-keeping that she flouted.
Advertisement Continue reading the main story Wouldn't it be a relief to
people if Hillary just acknowledged some mistakes?
... ... ...
Clinton accused Sanders of not doing his homework on how he would break up
the banks. And she is the queen of homework, always impressively well versed
in meetings. But that is what makes her failure to read the National Intelligence
Estimate that raised doubts about whether Iraq posed a threat to the U.S. so
egregious.
P. Greenberg El Cerrito, CA
Maureen Dowd fundamentally misunderstands Hillary Clinton's foreign policy
failings. When it comes to Libya, Clinton does not merely need to apologize
for getting distracted by other global issues and "taking her eye off the
ball". The decision to go in was wrong, not the failure to follow through.
And Hillary did not merely fail the ask the right questions. The
questions were asked and the answers were given. Joe Biden, Robert Gates
and much of the military and intelligence communities advised against the
Libya intervention. Hillary just chose to ignore the advice, because she
is a radical neoconservative at heart.
Clinton continues to adhere to the neoconservative approach to foreign
policy. Her choice of words during the Brooklyn debate were significant.
She volunteered that that the United States should continue to "look
for missions" that NATO will support. That says it all. She vows
to go around looking for new military adventures.
Maureen is right that Hillary has huge character problems. Sure,
she can't admit mistakes and compulsively blames others when things go wrong.
That's a given. But it's not the biggest problem. The biggest problem is
that she will take our country down the wrong path, both in terms of domestic
and foreign policy.
And please Maureen, stop denigrating Bernie Sanders with pejorative adjectives
and vague accusations. He has held elective office for 35 years, showing
leadership and good judgment and good values.
Brett Morris California,
She has had 40-some years to develop this kind of judgment, imagination
and long term reflection, and she has proudly, aggressively, mean-spiritedly
run the opposite direction every time and viciously attacked anyone who
called her on it. It's time to stop this game of "wondering" whether she
can change, wondering whether all of these terrible moments were "the real
Hillary" or not. They were. Voting someone in as President on the hope that
they will be a completely different person once in office then they have
been in 40 years is the definition of insanity.
That said, of course she is better than the republicans. But she is the
worst possible candidate for the Democratic Party, especially in this era
where we have a serious opportunity to turn away from Reagan's Overton Window.
And right now we actually have a candidate available who represents our
best ideas. Can't we just ditch her while we have the chance? If she gets
elected, more war is absolutely guaranteed. A one-term Presidency is also
highly likely, because nobody will be on her side. She loses trust and support
the more she exposes herself, every time.
Paul Long island
I agree when you say of Hillary Clinton, "She has shown an unwillingness
to be introspective and learn from her mistakes." That is only part of her
problem because her judgment seems always wrong, despite all the "listening
tours," whether it's about her paranoia about secrecy that made her
think she could get away with a private email server in one of the nation's
most high-profile jobs, or taking huge sums of money for Wall Street speeches
she now refuses to release, or doubling-down on her ill-considered, if not
ill-informed (as you note), hawkish regime change views by advocating for
it again in Libya that has, as a result, turned into an ISIS outpost.
To say she's "sorry" would only confirm her consistently bad judgment since
she has so much to be sorry about. So, what we have instead is a very "sorry"
candidate who, despite her resume and establishment backing, is having immense
trouble overcoming "a choleric 74-year-old democratic socialist" and will
have an even harder time if she's the Democratic nominee in November.
Rima Regas is a trusted commenter Mission Viejo, CA
Hillary isn't sorry. Bill is definitely not sorry. Bernie Sanders isn't
a senator with few accomplishments.
Hillary isn't sorry about anything. She hasn't apologized for the superpredator
comment. Saying she wouldn't say it now is hardly an apology and during
Thursday's debate, she talked about her husband apologizing for it instead
of talking about herself (since that was what she was being asked to do),
when Bill has yet to apologize. (Clips here: http://wp.me/p2KJ3H-2bw) If
anything, he doubled down on defending her and himself. When it comes to
mass-incarceration, they both exhibit a kind of moral absenteeism. http://wp.me/p2KJ3H-2b7
On money in politics, Clinton did herself no favors in the debate,
drawing even more attention to her dependence on that money and the impossibility
of being completely free to make policy without repaying debts. Debbie
Wasserman Schultz was no help to her this week when in an answer, she included
big money in the "Big Tent" that the democratic party is supposed to be.
http://wp.me/p2KJ3H-2bO
During his entire tenure in both houses of Congress, Sanders has distinguished
himself as one who can work with the other side, propose legislation gets
things done through amendments. There is a yuuuge difference in approach
between Clinton and Sanders and the willingness to trust Sanders over Clinton.
When the choice in front of Americans becomes Trump versus Clinton or Sanders,
Sanders wins by a wider margin. Sanders will take more from Trump.
Mark Thomason is a trusted commenter Clawson, Mich
So Bill claimed Bernie supporters think, "Just shoot every third person
on Wall Street and everything will be fine."
They don't, but it is telling that Bill said that. His chosen exaggeration
displays who he sees as Hillary's side in this. When he says, "they are
coming for us" he means Wall Street.
"Clinton, who talked Obama into it" on Libya and claimed credit,
but when it went poorly, she blamed Obama for listening to her, "On Libya,
she noted that "the decision was the president's.""
That is her claim to experience, and not something we ought to vote to
experience again.
That is important, because she still wants to sink us deeper into it.
Her own adviser on this says, Hillary "does not see the Libya intervention
as a failure, but as a work in progress."
"Like other decisions, it was put through a political filter and a paranoid
mind-set." That is the essence of what makes Hillary so dangerous in a responsible
office. From Iraq in the beginning to Libya now, the homework lady did all
her work and then saw the wrong things and got it wrong.
Joe Pike Gotham City
Hillary is a self-serving, power hungry politician. She is only ever
sorry if she fails to get what she wants, or is forced to explain her actions.
She feels she is above "the masses." As for her qualifications, job titles
alone don't cut it. What did she actually accomplish as a Senator or SecState?
Any major laws? Treaties? No. She failed with Russia, Syria and Libya to
name just a few. She is not qualified to be president based on qualifications
and personality.
Bill
looks
sick
too. Notice
the
extreme
thinness,
and
that
red
waxy
pallor.
I
wonder
if
he's
got
AIDS.
Serve
the
mass-murdering
psychopathic
SOB
right.
Did
you
miss
the
part
about
surveillance
cameras
being
set
up
in
key
places
around
the
compound
to
record
people
engaging
in
child
rape
so
that
it
could
be
used
for
blackmail?
It
may
be
PC
to
say
one's
sex
life
is
personal
and
no
one's
business,
but
when
you
are
a
public
servant
(which
is
all
these
scum-fucking-bags
are
supposed
to
be,
not
elitist
rulers),
then
the
personal
life
becomes
one
of
national
importance.
If
the
sociopathic
rug-muncher
Shitlary
manages
to
steal
what
the
feminazis
will
rebrand
as
the
"Ova
Office,"
you
can
be
damn
sure
that
she
is
very
vulnerable
to
being
blackmailed
for
her
scumbag
husband's
lifetime
of
rape.
She
will
give
the
blackmailers
whatever
the
fuck
they
want
because
she'll
want
her
term
to
be
so
many
years
of
'peace
and
prosperity,'
the
same
lie
the
leftists
used
to
rewrite
the
history
of
the
92-2000.
"What do these insurgents have in common? All have called into question
the interventionist consensus in foreign policy."
But today we have this:
Trump pledges big US military expansion . Trump doesn't appear to have
any coherent policy, he just says whatever seems to be useful at that particular
moment.
The article is from July 2015. It is interesting to compare views expressed a year ago with the
current situation. Who would predict the her health bacome No.1 issue in September 2016?
Now we start to see dirty MSM games and tricks with election polls. It is well known that the key
idea of polls is to influence electorate. Desirable result that conditions those who did not yet decided
to vote "for the winner" can be achieved in a very subtle way. For example if electorate of one candidate
is younger, you can run poll using landline phones. Gaius Publius provide a good analysis of now MSM
sell establishment candidate to lemmings in his July 10, 2015 post in Naked capitalism blog (The
Clinton Campaign Notices the Sanders Campaign, or How to Read the Media)
.
"...I don't think the Clinton herders care who actually votes, only who funds."
.
"...HRC is the biggest threat to the Democrats winning the White House. She is so far to the right
on almost every issue, she is the most unelectable of them all. I basically view her campaign as a front
for Jeb!"
.
"...I will take at face value the statement that Sanders' personal views are a threat to the capitalists
who control both major parties. But his strategy is not. In spite of his best intentions, he will end
up being the sheepdog that makes sure the progressive movement stays in the Democratic Party (for the
term "sheepdog" and supporting analysis see http://www.blackagendareport.com/bernie-sanders-sheepdog-4-hillary)."
Notable quotes:
"... A second example involves Wall Street banks, in particular, a policy of breaking them up, reinstating Glass-Steagall, and prosecuting Wall Street fraud. Can you imagine any announced candidate doing any of these things, save Bernie Sanders? ..."
"... If a 25 year old woman in 2008 didn't vote for Hillary, what has Hillary done to change her mind or attract the 17 year old from 2008? ..."
"... I don't think the Clinton herders care who actually votes, only who funds. ..."
"... If Hillary feels she can control primary voters through local Democratic party machines, that might explain her standpoint. ..."
"... Now organized money has too much economic power ..."
"... HRC is the biggest threat to the Democrats winning the White House. She is so far to the right on almost every issue, she is the most unelectable of them all. I basically view her campaign as a front for Jeb! ..."
"... I will take at face value the statement that Sanders' personal views are a threat to the capitalists who control both major parties. But his strategy is not. In spite of his best intentions, he will end up being the sheepdog that makes sure the progressive movement stays in the Democratic Party (for the term "sheepdog" and supporting analysis see http://www.blackagendareport.com/bernie-sanders-sheepdog-4-hillary). ..."
"... They also need enduring organizations, which are called political parties. ..."
The most important thing to consider when thinking about the Sanders campaign is this. Everyone
else who's running, on both sides, is an insider playing within - and supporting - the "insider game,"
the one that keeps insiders wealthy and outsiders struggling, the one where the wealthy and their
retainers operate government for their benefit only. What sets Sanders apart is his determination
to dismantle that game, to take it apart and send its players home (back to the private sector) or
to jail.
Two examples should make this clear. One is Fast Track and the "trade" agreements being forced
upon us. The pressure to pass these agreements is coming equally from mainstream Democrats like Barack
Obama, a "liberal," and from mainstream Republicans, supposed "conservatives." They may differ on
"rights" policy, like abortion rights, but not on money matters. Trade agreements are wealth-serving
policies promoted by people in both parties who serve wealth, which means most of them. People like
Sanders, Warren and others, by contrast, would neuter these agreement as job-killing profit protection
schemes and turn them into something else.
A second example involves Wall Street banks, in particular, a policy of breaking them up,
reinstating Glass-Steagall, and prosecuting Wall Street fraud. Can you imagine any announced candidate
doing any of these things, save Bernie Sanders?
In both of these cases, Sanders would aggressively challenge the insider profit-protection racket,
not just give lip service to challenging it. Which tells you why he is so popular. Many of us in
the bleachers have noticed the insider game - after all, it's been happening in front of us for decades-
and most of us are done with it. Ask any Tea Party Republican voter, for example, what she thinks
of the bank bailout of 2008-09. She'll tell you she hated it, whether she explains it in our terms
or not.
And that's why Sanders, like Warren before him, draws such enthusiastic crowds. The pendulum has
swung so far in the direction of wealth that the nation may well change permanently, and people know
it. People are ready, just as they were in 2008, prior to eight years of betrayal. People have been
discouraged about the chance for change lately, but they're ready for the real thing if they see
it.
The Clinton Campaign Notices Sanders
There's been an attempt to downplay the Sanders candidacy since the beginning, to sink his campaign
beneath a
wave of silence. That ended a bit ago, and the press has begun to take notice, if
snippily. Now the Clinton campaign is noticing, if the New York Times is to be believed.
I found the following fascinating, for a number of reasons.
The
piece first along with some news, then a little exegesis (my emphasis):
Hillary Clinton's Team Is Wary as Bernie Sanders Finds Footing in Iowa
The ample crowds and unexpectedly strong showing by Senator Bernie Sanders are setting off
worry among advisers and allies of Hillary Rodham Clinton, who believe the Vermont senator
could overtake her in Iowa polls by the fall and even defeat her in the nation's first nominating
contest there.
The enthusiasm that Mr. Sanders has generated - including a rally attended by 2,500 people
in Council Bluffs, Iowa, on Friday - has called into question Mrs. Clinton's early strategy of
focusing on a listening tour of small group gatherings and wooing big donors in private settings.
In May, Mrs. Clinton led with 60 percent support to Mr. Sanders' 15 percent in a Quinnipiac
poll. Last week the same poll showed Mrs. Clinton at 52 percent to Mr. Sanders's 33 percent.
"We are worried about him, sure. He will be a serious force for the campaign, and I don't think
that will diminish," Jennifer Palmieri, the Clinton campaign's communications director, said Monday
in an interview on MSNBC's "Morning Joe."
Some of Mrs. Clinton's advisers acknowledged that they were surprised by Mr. Sanders' momentum
and said there were enough liberal voters in Iowa, including many who supported Barack Obama or
John Edwards in 2008, to create problems for her there.
"I think we underestimated that Sanders would quickly attract so many Democrats in Iowa who
weren't likely to support Hillary," said one Clinton adviser, who like several others spoke on
the condition of anonymity to candidly share views about the race. "It's too early to change strategy
because no one knows if Sanders will be able to hold on to these voters in the months ahead. We're
working hard to win them over, but yeah, it's a real competition there."
I don't want to quote the whole thing (well, I do, but I can't). So I encourage you to
read it. There's much there worth noticing.
What to Look at When the Times Reports on Clinton
Now, some exegesis, meta-reading of the media, especially corporate media like the Times.
My three main points are bulleted below.
First, when you expose yourself to any of the "liberal" U.S. outlets (as opposed to, say,
The Guardian) be aware that because they are owned by establishment corporations they're
already pro-Clinton. Subtly, not blatantly, but certainly.
That sounds like prejudice, so let me explain. For one thing, neither the outlets nor their
owning corporation can afford not to prepare their seat at the Clinton White House table. It's
just a fact. Media want access and corporations want government to smile on their profit schemes.
At this point, currying favor with Sanders is on no one's mind, and the Clintons are known to
"have long memories they punish their enemies and help their friends" (quoted
here). The incentives are all aligned.
But also, mainstream insider corporations are completely aligned with the insider game for
the obvious reason - they're part of it. No one inside the game wants to see it damaged. Hayes
and Maddow, as people, may or may not prefer Sanders over Clinton, but MSNBC has a clear favorite
and if you listen carefully and consistently, it shows. Their owners, and all of the other big
media owners, can't afford (literally afford, as in, there's major money at stake) to play this
one straight. You may find some unskewed reporting, but not a lot of it.
In the present instance, for example, I read the story above (click through for
all of it) as being pro-Clinton, and in fact, most stories like these will be painted that
way, with a light brush or a heavy one, for some time to come. If you don't spot this bias where
present, you're not reading the story as written.
In the same way that every New York Times story I read in the last two months, literally
every one, used the inaccurate and propagandistic phrase "pro-trade Democrats" to describe Ron
Wyden, Earl Blumenauer and the small handful of other Dems who defied their voters to support
the White House and the wealthy - in that same way you'll have a hard time finding mainstream
Sanders or Clinton coverage that doesn't in some way sell Clinton. If that's not a fact, I'll
be eager to be proven wrong.
Second, be aware that much so-called reporting is the result of "placement," a term
from advertising. Ad placement is when you buy space in a publication or media program into which
you can put your message. Campaigns, among other entities, frequently do the same with reporters.
The reporter offers space, a container, into which the campaign can put its message. (The reward
is usually "access.")
It's certainly true that many reporters and writers openly advocate; I'm often one of
them and I'm not alone. But no one suspects open advocates of trickery. It's much more subtle,
and dangerous for readers, when the advocacy is hidden, as it is in supposed "straight news" articles.
In cases like these - certainly not all cases of reporting, but far too many - the reporter
doesn't "get" the news. The news "gets" the reporter. A campaign's messenger comes to the reporter,
offers the message, and the reporter builds a genuine and frequently interesting news story around
it, including research from other sources, but always starting with the seed provided by the campaign
or public official.
In the present instance, the article above, you should therefore ask:
Is it really true that the Clinton campaign just now discovered Sanders' popularity and
that he may be a threat?
Or could the following be true? That the Clinton campaign always knew a Warren-like opponent
could gain ground but were publicly ignoring it; now, however, it's time to appear to be noticing,
so they approached a reporter with their take on the Sanders surge.
In other words, is the bolded part of the first sentence of the article its seed? Who approached
whom? That first sentence again:
The ample crowds and unexpectedly strong showing by Senator Bernie Sanders are setting off
worry among advisers and allies of Hillary Rodham Clinton
I don't have an answer to the bulleted questions above. Either could be correct. I'm a little
suspicious though. First, by the obvious but subtle bias in the story - similar to the constant
bias in all of the Times Fast Track reporting. Second, by the plurals above: "among
advisers and allies of Hillary Rodham Clinton." This isn't one person speaking, but
a coordinated effort by staffers and surrogates ("allies") to say a coordinated single thing to
the Times reporters.
Third, I'm made suspicious by this, a little further down:
"I think we underestimated that Sanders would quickly attract so many Democrats in Iowa
who weren't likely to support Hillary," said one Clinton adviser, who like several others
spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly share views about the race. "It's too early
to change strategy because no one knows if Sanders will be able to hold on to these voters
in the months ahead. We're working hard to win them over, but yeah, it's a real competition
there."
There's obvious messaging, especially in the last part of the paragraph. But look at the bolded
part. Of those in the campaign, the only ones quoted in the article by name are Clinton herself
and Jennifer Palmieri, who spoke, not to the reporters, but to "Morning Joe." Everyone else is
off the record, speaking to these reporters "on the condition of anonymity to candidly
share views about the race."
"Candidly" implies leaking, not messaging or spin, and here's where the deception seems more
clear. Have these reporters really found a minor army of leakers? If these are truly leakers,
expect them to be fired soon.
So, scenario one: Sanders is surging, the Clinton campaign is caught by surprise, and
two Times reporters find a bunch of anonymous campaign leakers who say (paraphrasing),
"Sure, Sanders caught us by surprise. We're aiming for one type of Democrat and he's getting the
other type. It's too early to change strategy - the man could trip and fall - but yes, there's
now competition."
(Did you notice that part about two kinds of Democrat? The actual quote says: "We underestimated
that Sanders would quickly attract so many Democrats in Iowa who weren't likely to support Hillary."
I think the campaign knows exactly what kind of Democrat they were ignoring, and if you think
about it carefully, you will too.)
Or, scenario two: The Clinton campaign is ignoring the Warren wing, giving them nothing
but platitudes and (as in the case of Fast Track) avoidance. Now the "Sanders surge" is in the
news and the campaign has to respond. They get their message together - "Yes, we're surprised,
and we have to admit that out loud. But it's early days, and if we keep getting reporters to say
'socialist' and 'anathema,' we won't have to counter his specifics with our specifics. So let's
round up some reporters and get 'Morning Joe' on the phone."
Did the reference to "socialist" and "anathema" surprise you? Read on.
Finally, because of the two points above, you'll find that in many cases the story supports
the campaign, while justifying itself as "reporting." Both bolded pieces are important.
Let's look at each element above. First, "the story supports the campaign":
Those who see Mrs. Clinton as being at risk in Iowa say she is still far better positioned
to win the nomination than Mr. Sanders, who lags by double digits in Iowa polling. He also
has far less money than she does, and his socialist leanings are anathema to many
Americans.
In the first sentence the campaign is being subtly and indirectly quoted. But the bolded phrases
above are pretty strong language in a sentence that isn't necessarily an indirect quote, and echoes
open Clinton surrogates like Claire McCaskill. Even "leanings" lends an unsavory color, since
it echoes the phrase "communist leanings."
(The alternative to the last sentence above, by the way, and much more honestly sourced, would
be something like this: "The anonymous campaign adviser also said, 'Frankly, we think if we just
keep saying 'socialist' whenever we can, we won't have to change our strategy of being vague on
the economic issues. At least we're sticking with that for now.'" I would buy that as excellent
honest reporting.)
Second, "justifying itself as reporting": Once you present the core message as provided by
the messengers, the reporter can then call around for other, non-Clinton-sourced comment. Thus
the quotes, much further down from Joe Trippi, Carter Eskew and the Sanders campaign.
Add in a little of the reporters' own analysis, much of it good:
"The enthusiasm that Mr. Sanders has generated - including a rally attended by 2,500 people
in Council Bluffs, Iowa, on Friday - has called into question Mrs. Clinton's early strategy
of focusing on a listening tour of small group gatherings and wooing big donors in private
settings."
and you have the makings of a news story friendly to Clinton built around a news hook and potentially
"placed" elements. The hook, the "placed" elements (if they were placed), and some original analysis
go at the top, and the rest of the story is built to follow that.
Bottom Line
If you like this exercise in reading behind the media, please read
the article again with the above thoughts in mind. Is this original reporting (i.e., reporters
starting a conversation), or did the campaign make the first approach? Does the article carry Clinton
water, subtly support the campaign? Are any opposing viewpoints featured at the top, or are they
buried below the point where most people stop reading?
This Times story may be a completely honest exercise in independent journalism. There certainly
is a Sanders phenomenon, and it's detailed honestly and factually, so there's value in reading it.
But there's an obvious bias toward Clinton messaging in the reporters' own prose, so I'm suspicious,
and you should be as well.
I'll also say that most stories about campaigns operate this way, as do many other news stories
involving public figures. What will make reporting the Sanders campaign different is what I wrote
above - Sanders wants to take apart the insider game. What major media outlet will help Sanders do
that, will shut the door to corporate favors, media access and other prizes from a future Clinton
administration, in order to be even-handed?
My guess is few or none.
Reader note: Gaius asked for me to allow comments on this post, so please have at it!
AJ, July 10, 2015 at 8:14 am
I was that Sanders rally in Council Bluffs. I follow politics especially on the left very closely
so I didn't really come home with any thing new (besides some extra Bernie stickers). However,
the crowd was huge and engaged. It almost had the feel of a big tent revival.
One issue that I've been thinking about lately that I haven't seen publicly addressed (except
for in the comments on the 538 article Lambert posted yesterday) is how reliable do we think sine
of these polling numbers are? Given that Sanders support definitely skews younger, would these
people even be captured in telephone polls? I tend to think this is why the Greek vote was as
big of a surprise as it was. I think there is a large going progressive part of the population
(both on the US and abroad) that doesn't get picked up in the polling. If true, Sanders could
be a lot closer to Clinton than these numbers suggest.
NotTimothyGeithner, July 10, 2015 at 9:06 am
Pollsters know this, but there are three kinds: the national subscription polls who just want
to be relevant, paid polls, and the local reputation polls. Because of the distance to the election,
there won't be good responses, and cell phone users have grown reliant on texting and are less
likely to respond. The pollsters know this. Needless to say, the Quinnipiac poll should be disconcerting
for the Clinton camp and the Democrats who thought Hillary would shower them with cash and appearances.
That result means they see enough to make this claim even though they aren't quite on the ground
the way a Roanoke College poll is in Virginia. The local reputation poll has a sense of the electorate
because they've polled every local election while CNN was trying to interview Nessie.
There is dissatisfaction within Team Blue that Hillary Clinton can't bridge. There is a myth
about Bill's magical campaign touch Democrats have internalized despite a lack of evidence, and
I think Team Blue elites feel Obama failed them and want to bring Hillary in as a savior. Obviously,
they weren't around in '94.
pat b, July 10, 2015 at 8:15 pm
Bill and Al ran a magical campaign in 92, but that was a long time ago, and they spent two
decades
triangulating against the Base. Bill signed NAFTA and HRC spent 23 years defending it.
In 92 the clinton's were selling the dream of the 90's. Now, they are selling Windows 98.
Nick, July 10, 2015 at 10:26 am
Too bad young people have a horrible track record actually voting. Clinton knows the game well
enough.
NotTimothyGeithner, July 10, 2015 at 11:11 am
Hillary is 8 years older, so are her core nostalgia supporters. Without a message for the now
under 45 crowd, Hillary has lost 8 years worth of supporters to relative infirmity or death.
She didn't rally the crowds for Grimes, Landrieu, or Hagan. Shaheen was the incumbent she saved,
but she was running against an unremarkable Massachusetts carpet bagger. I'm not certain the Democrats
have ever left the Spring of '94.
vidimi, July 10, 2015 at 11:33 am
don't underestimate the number of young, white females voting clinton. it will be somewhere
near all of them.
mn, July 10, 2015 at 11:43 am
What about college debt and the fact that there are no jobs. Gender seems to be a selling point,
like race the last time. Not all younger females will be that stupid again.
NotTimothyGeithner, July 10, 2015 at 12:50 pm
Actually, Obama won younger females. Credit where credit is due. Gender may have affected older
voters who come from an obviously more repressive era, but I suspect brand loyalty and legitimacy
(it's her turn messaging), racism, and nostalgia played a hand in Clinton's 2008 support more
than gender. If a 25 year old woman in 2008 didn't vote for Hillary, what has Hillary done
to change her mind or attract the 17 year old from 2008? In many ways, Hillary has to replace
8 years of death to her base.
mn, July 10, 2015 at 1:01 pm
At that time people were saying to vote for Hillary because she would prop up destroyed 401ks
(to me the mindless young voter). I fell for the hope and change b.s., I won't do that again.
Long time Bernie fan.
As for my friends they are voting for Hillary because they don't think Bernie can win, others
that hate her are sitting out. Yes, many females really do not like her. Love Ann Richards! RIP.
pat b, July 10, 2015 at 8:34 pm
The Silent Generation anchored Reagan and was much more conservative and risk averse then the
Boomers of which Hillary is one. However, the issue isn't Hillary vs the GOP's aging angry silent
generation types, it's more Hillary's aging Boomer female base vs the millenials who think the
Boomers shafted them. It was the Boomers who benefited from cheap college tuition then voted in
Reagan to cut taxes and dump these costs onto Gen X, GenY and the Millenials.
Paul Tioxon, July 10, 2015 at 11:14 pm
My point is that of the passing of an era. And not only in terms of voters,the army of the
silent majority which saw the blue collar conservatives, the hard hats, the cops, leave the democrats
en mass and the democrats having little to replace them. The defection of the dixiecrats from
the dems to the republicans, as witnessed in the complete turnover of Texas to the republicans
amalgamated what was a coalition into a choke hold from 1968 until 2008, with only 12 years dems
in the WH only 2 dem presidents over 40 years. And of course, Clinton may as well have been George
Bush for all that it mattered for domestic policies.
So Hillary and the dems do not have the army of voters against them that they used to have
plus what ever momentarily disaffected Millenials seeking payback or another group to reinforce
numbers making the republicans a majority party. They are not.
The point is that as your opposition declines in numbers as far as the ballot box goes, and your
likely supporters increase, the odds favor your party as a majority.
Millenials, according to Pew Polls, the 18-33 year olds, are 51% democrat/ leaning democrat
vs 35% republican/leaning republican. Even though independent is now the largest of the 3 categories,
leaning is the place to go when there is no alternative choice, apparently.
I am not sure the younger group is following the republican strategist wedge issue that the
old people are stealing from the young with college debt, social security, Medicare being blamed
for the diminished prosperity of the young. Trying to turn their grandparents who are retired
after a lifetime of hard work into the new welfare queens is not getting the traction you would
think. Apparently holding onto ritual Thanksgiving Day dinners and baking cookies around the holidays
is more of a social bond than fabricated grievances by political consultants can even rend asunder.
And of course, blood is thicker than water. Don't expect granny and pop pop to pushed off on an
iceberg anytime soon because of college debt.
Praedor, July 10, 2015 at 11:07 am
What I see in this is the potential for a low turnout election. POTENTIAL. Those enthusiastic
young voters, or the previously disgusted sideline sitters who have come out anew for Sanders
(or previously for Warren) are NOT likely to shrug their shoulders and vote for Hillary if she
ends up pulling in the pre-anointed crown. It's hard to get all fired up and enthusiastic about
candidate A only to be stuck with candidate B who you weren't interested in before. This has the
potential to really change things or gut the process of any participants except the true believer
core of the Democrats.
Uahsenaa, July 10, 2015 at 8:51 am
I found this sentence to be rather curious: "Mrs. Clinton's advisers, meanwhile, have deep
experience pulling off upsets and comeback political victories, and Mrs. Clinton often performs
best when she is under pressure from rivals." The first part is unsubstantiated vaguery, but the
second part is demonstrably untrue. Or, if not "untrue," then it implies that Sec. Clinton's "best"
is still "loses." Also there's the earlier bit about Sanders being "untested" nationally, yet,
when you parse that, you realize Ms. Clinton's "testedness" amounts to "lost to an insurgent candidate
who had been in national politics for all of a few minutes."
Since I'm still somewhat skeptical of what a Sanders candidacy means, I am quite happy to see
how, along with Bernie, others in various facets of government seem to be emboldened to fight
back. TPA may have been a loss in the short term, but the administration was clearly taken aback
by having to fight resistance at all. My hope is the Sanders campaign, at a bare minimum, will
demonstrate how popular fighting back really is and stiffen the spines of those in government
who want to do something but fear genuine reprisal.
Did you see the date? This article could be about 2014. There is a dangerous myth about the
Clinton touch.
Uahsenaa, July 10, 2015 at 9:53 am
It's been surprising to me how willing Sec. Clinton has been to alienate core constituencies
of the Democratic party. When O'Malley and Sanders came to Iowa City, they both reached out to
local unions for support/attendance/whatever, but when Clinton came here on Tuesday, I found out
about it when I showed up with my daughter for reading time at the library.
I hear again and again about the Clintons' political savvy, yet in practice I just don't see
it.
They may be ruthless, but ruthless only gets you so far. She cannot take Democratic stalwarts
for granted this election cycle, especially when the AFL-CIO went into open war with the administration
over TPA.
Who does she think shows up for the polls in primary elections?
redleg, July 10, 2015 at 10:16 am
Hubris. I don't think the Clinton herders care who actually votes, only who funds.
DolleyMadison, July 10, 2015 at 11:22 am
EXACTLY.
flora, July 10, 2015 at 2:33 pm
Bill and Hill's speaking fees give a whole new meaning to "the Clinton touch."
TheCatSaid, July 10, 2015 at 2:09 pm
"Who does she think shows up for the polls in primary elections?"
This seems like the key question.
It's one thing to motivate people to vote for a presidential election, but motivating people
to turnout for a primary might be different entirely. For example, do as many young voters and
minority voters turn out for a primary? If not, what would it take to change this?
If Hillary feels she can control primary voters through local Democratic party machines,
that might explain her standpoint.
Lambert Strether, July 10, 2015 at 2:24 pm
I wonder how effective the local Democratic party machines are, or whether Obama's reverse
Midas touch destroyed them. (Certainly my own local machine is ineffectual, and the state party
is corrupt (landfills)).
I wonder if there's a comparison to be made between ObamaCare signups and GOTV (I mean a literal
one, in that the same apparatchiks would get walking around money for both, and the data might
even be/have been dual-purposed). My first impulse is to say, if so, "Good luck, and let me know
how that works out!" but I don't know how directly the metrics translate.
Jeremy Grimm, July 10, 2015 at 9:22 pm
For the last few years I have been a lowly member of the local Democratic Party machine, a
volunteer co-precinct leader (though hardly similar to what a precinct leader used to be). The
local party leadership and membership is old, late boomer, steadfast and immobile. Republican
party opposition in this area is virtually non-existent so I have no idea how effective our local
organization is as opposed to how skewed the demographics of my area. With little or no efforts,
we consistently turn out a substantial Democratic vote. I believe the corruption of politics in
my state, New Jersey, is justly famous. I have no idea what corruption might exist in my local
township, though I am starting to wonder. As for President Obama's reverse Midas touch I live
near the headquarters of several big pharmaceutical corporations. I am sure they have wide-open
purses for both parties.
As of late last year, our organization has had few meetings and poor attendance at the one
meeting I showed up for. I learned at that meeting, about a month ago, that several of the other
precinct leads have resigned, though I don't know why. I am moving away and will also resign as
of the end of this month.
I suspect our local organization will come out strongly in favor of Hillary Clinton though
provide little in the way of support. When I raised concern about the TPA and TPP at the last
meeting I attended and urged the other members of this supposedly political organization to call
or write to our Representative few of the members knew what I was talking about. The chair tried
to rule my concern out of order though all other business was done and our Democratic Mayor, who
is a member of the organization, suggested we should each hear views from both sides before deciding
our individual stance on the TPA or TPP since there were arguments for both sides (even though
the TPA was coming up for a vote in a few days). I should add a little context this meeting
consisted of the eleven or so people who showed up. In my experience this close watch over all
dissent from local, state or national party line typified our organization. All questions other
than very specific procedural questions and discussions were NOT welcome.
I can only speak of my own alienation from the Democratic Party, local, state and national.
I voted for Obama with enthusiasm in 2008 but with disgust in 2012. I have been a Democrat since
Adlai Stevenson II (though I was too young to vote for him). I will continue to register as a
Democrat but I doubt many Democrats will receive my vote and certainly no Republicans. I have
no plans to further participate in Party politics. I will vote for candidates I like but never
again vote for the "lesser of two evils." I cannot gauge the extent to which my alienation typifies
other Democrats since political discussions are generally considered impolite except among close
friends.
Pissed Younger baby boomer, July 11, 2015 at 2:59 am
I am too disillusioned with the democratic party .where i live in Oregon ,my congressman is
a blue dog dem. i called his a least five times to voice my opposition to TPP. A few months ago
I signed up for phone town hall meeting .i never received an e-mail invitation .YES talking about
suppressing dissent.i am considering switch to the greens or a socialist party. My fear i hope
we do not become fascist country and three out of four congressmen vote for TPA and senator Wyden
voted for it too.I also lost faith in the phony liberal media.
NotTimothyGeithner, July 11, 2015 at 9:33 am
The GOP organizes through churches and other outfits. Ted aren't as noticeable wherever one
is, but the GOP isn't interested in turnout as much as making sure their people vote. They have
minders who phish for potential voters. Why do women ever vote Republican? Because they have a
club that demands it. Your area may be skewed but half of Dean's 50 state strategy was lifted
from GOP election approaches.
Uahsenaa, July 10, 2015 at 4:30 pm
With the exception of Illinois, because Chicago, the state democratic parties in most midwestern
states are in shambles, so the likelihood of the "machine" squeaking out a win is quite low. In
the absence of that, what you have left are the institutions traditionally loyal to the D party
who have been thrown under the bus so many times over the past 8 years, it's bewildering. I mentioned
the AFL-CIO break with the administration over "trade," (scare quotes don't quite seem big enough)
precisely because it seems to indicate a willingness to break from tradition, if an opportunity
presents itself.
Now, I have no idea what things are like in the South, and those states plus NY/IL/CA might
be enough to push Hillary through to the nomination. However, if she continues the way she has
so far, the apparatus in a large number of states is not going to be enough to buttress her against
popular grumbling.
John Zelnicker, July 10, 2015 at 8:45 pm
In Alabama the Democratic Party apparatus is a total mess and completely ineffectual. The party
"leaders" spend most of their time protecting their little fiefdoms and fighting efforts to expand
and diversify the membership of the statewide committees and local affiliates. In fact, it has
gotten so bad that some activists are trying to set up independent Party committees to recruit
candidates for local and state elections and run GOTV efforts.
C. dentata, July 10, 2015 at 10:49 am
I think it may not be pro-Clinton as much as anti-Sanders bias. The corporate media are certainly
happy to ridiculously hype any of the nonstories about Hillary that Trey Gowdy feeds them.
anonymous123, July 10, 2015 at 11:07 am
It was really nice to see someone deconstruct this article. When I read it the other day I
had the same thoughts go through my head about the overt messaging going on.
vidimi, July 10, 2015 at 11:29 am
pro-trade reminds me of pro-russian rebels. seems very likely that the chamber of commerce
or state department or somesuch approached all editors and ordered them to use these two terms
for their respective designees. classic propaganda tactic.
Vatch, July 10, 2015 at 12:14 pm
I expect to vote for Sanders in the primary, and for an as yet unknown third party candidate
in the election. Obama and Bill Clinton have taught me that main stream Democratic politicians
only differ from Republican politicians on a few social issues; on everything else they are the
same. I refuse to knowingly vote for a voluntary agent of the oligarchs, which is what Hillary
Clinton is.
flora , July 10, 2015 at 2:31 pm
Yes. Both the GOP and the DLC Dems agree on all major economic issues. The electioneering so
far has been personality oriented. Jeb!, The Donald, Hillary!, etc.
Except for Sanders, who isn't running a personality campaign. He's talking about important
economic issues in a way the others won't.
In the late '70s conventional wisdom solidified around the idea that economic stagnation was
due to organized labor having too much economic power (true or not, my point isn't to re-argue
that case). The 'Reagan revolution' promised to re-balance and right the economy by reining in
organized labor.
Now organized money has too much economic power. It's harming the whole economy. Bernie
is talking about reining in organized money. How do the other candidates deal with this without
bursting their ideological bubble for the audience? The NYTimes article is a case in point.
Cano Doncha Know, July 11, 2015 at 5:31 am
HRC is the biggest threat to the Democrats winning the White House. She is so far to the
right on almost every issue, she is the most unelectable of them all. I basically view her campaign
as a front for Jeb!
cm, July 10, 2015 at 12:38 pm
Some laughable NY Times articles about their inability to write articles without relying on anonymous
sources, despite their own (ignored) policies:
If Sanders wins a few primaries, I would expect a moderate-bot to be trundled in. The Webb, for
instance, has already been turned on and is humming, ready to go. (The O'Malley seems to have
already burned through its batteries.)
NotTimothyGeithner, July 10, 2015 at 2:00 pm
The Webb? No, no, no, no, no. As a Webb primary voter, I can assure you the man has 0 personality
and isn't a big campaigner. If the young Hillary supporters in NYC found Hillary uninspiring,
they might collapse into a blob and just stop after listening to Webb. I just assumed he is running
because he likes Iowa.
O'Malley has already attacked Sanders and doesn't pick up the Hillary experience narrative
as well as having to roll out during the Baltimore protests.
Bob Richard, July 10, 2015 at 5:55 pm
Nothing GP is says about the Times article or reporting in general is wrong. But the MSM, including
the Times reporter, is completely missing the real story of the Sanders campaign.
I will take at face value the statement that Sanders' personal views are a threat to the
capitalists who control both major parties. But his strategy is not. In spite of his best intentions,
he will end up being the sheepdog that makes sure the progressive movement stays in the Democratic
Party (for the term "sheepdog" and supporting analysis see http://www.blackagendareport.com/bernie-sanders-sheepdog-4-hillary).
Like Ralph Nader before him, Sanders has a completely wrong approach to political parties.
Nader understood that he needed to work outside the major party framework but did not understand
that social movements don't just need popular candidates. They also need enduring organizations,
which are called political parties. For most of his career, Sanders has been able work both
sides of this fence, helping to create a state-level organization (the Progressive Party) in Vermont
but also running with Democratic Party endorsements. This spring was a moment of truth for him.
He has (or until now had) the stature to create a new political party, perhaps from scratch or
perhaps by joining and helping build the Green Party. He chose to turn his back on the left.
The left needs a political party. Yes, I know, we have a two party system. But that is the
problem. Believing that the two party system is an immutable law of nature is not part of any
solution.
RPY, July 10, 2015 at 6:06 pm
Bernie I believe because of his message, is attracting people from both sides of the aisle.
Everyday people who are tired of partisan politics and are just glad to hear someone willing to
speak the truth of how screwed things are. From the corruption of wall street to the corruption
of Washington, DC politics.
Lambert Strether, July 10, 2015 at 7:50 pm
Some of us on the left would rather deal with a straightforward reactionary who's honest about
their intentions than backstabbing "Join the conversation" Democrats. I wonder if there's a similar
dynamic on the right: They'd rather deal with an honest-to-gawd Socialist than McConnnell and
Boehner (Exhibit A: TPP).
RPY, July 10, 2015 at 6:06 pm
Bernie I believe because of his message, is attracting people from both sides of the aisle.
Everyday people who are tired of partisan politics and are just glad to hear someone willing to
speak the truth of how screwed things are. From the corruption of wall street to the corruption
of Washington, DC politics.
Lambert Strether, July 10, 2015 at 7:50 pm
Some of us on the left would rather deal with a straightforward reactionary who's honest about
their intentions than backstabbing "Join the conversation" Democrats. I wonder if there's a similar
dynamic on the right: They'd rather deal with an honest-to-gawd Socialist than McConnnell and
Boehner (Exhibit A: TPP).
oho, July 11, 2015 at 2:36 pm
*** First, when you expose yourself to any of the "liberal" U.S. outlets (as opposed to, say,
The Guardian) be aware that because they are owned by establishment corporations they're already
pro-Clinton. ***
While the Guardian is nominally independent, it ain't much better at being "liberal" that the
NYT.
Guardian editors like access to Westminster, their fellow Oxbridge alums and invites to cocktail
parties in Kensington too.
"... Nevertheless, the ludicrous Washington Post, beloved rag of the neocons who have now flocked to Clinton's campaign, have seen fit to run the story above, which has even less evidential backing than the typical Enquirer or Prison Planet piece. ..."
"... I don't care about Clinton's swoon and its various medical causes. ..."
"... What I do care about is that the Washington Post is publishing crackpot paranoid conspiracy theories with potentially dangerous foreign policy consequences. ..."
Yesterday, I sardonically commented here that I was surprised the Putin-paranoid Clintonites had
not tried blaming Putin for Hillary Clinton's pneumonia.
Little did I know that Putimonia theory
was already out there!
The sad, sad, sad continuing decline of the American mind.
Dan Kervick said in reply to pgl...
It was 80 degrees. There have been many far hotter days here in the northeast this summer.
Clinton didn't pass out because it was hot and humid. She passed out because she has pneumonia.
It happens; people get sick.
Nevertheless, the ludicrous Washington Post, beloved rag of the neocons who have now flocked
to Clinton's campaign, have seen fit to run the story above, which has even less evidential backing
than the typical Enquirer or Prison Planet piece.
America has jumped the shark. You fools will have to launch WW III on the strength of your
own votes, since you won't have mine.
Dan Kervick -> DeDude...
I don't care about Clinton's swoon and its various medical causes.
What I do care about is that the Washington Post is publishing crackpot paranoid conspiracy
theories with potentially dangerous foreign policy consequences.
Hmmmmm - are we a little overheated this morning? May I suggest sitting down and drinking some
gatorade.
Dan Kervick said in reply to DeDude...
It is indeed dangerous when one of the most prominent newspapers in America floats a cuckoo
conspiracy theory - without even a tiny shred of evidence - to the effect that a prominent foreign
leader might have poisoned a presidential candidate.
Democrats are now plunging en masse down these various rabbit holes because they see a short-term
political edge in them, and because their anxiety.
Partisanship is a terrible mental illness. It makes previously sane people lose their bearings.
DeDude said in reply to Dan Kervick...
Omalu was previously sane???? Must have been before my time. Seriously Dan - Gatorade!!!
Dan Kervick said in reply to DeDude...
I'm talking about you people. Also, the editors of the Washington Post.
If you think that Omalu is not sane then don't you agree it is irresponsible to publish his
ravings?
According to a front-page
story in the Washington Post , U.S. agencies are investigating what they perceive as
"a broad covert Russian operation in the United States to sow public distrust in the upcoming presidential
election and in U.S. political institutions". The story is vague and short on details.
... ... ...
One of several unfortunate truths regarding the weakening integrity of American democracy involves
the destruction of campaign finance laws and making electoral outcomes reflect the wallets of a few
at least as much as the minds of many. Another unattractive and undemocratic element is the extensive
gerrymandering in which both major parties indulge, thereby subordinating popular will to the crude
power of incumbency. Even more of an affront to democracy in the last few years has been the blatant
use of legislative power at the state level by members of one party to impede the ability of followers
of the other party to exercise their right to vote, with the rationale for this power play being
prevention of a form of voter fraud that has been so rare as to be almost nonexistent. American democracy
is looking less and less distinct from the rickety versions of democracy in much of the less developed
world, in which the bending of rules by incumbents to frustrate challenges to their rule is common.
Most recently we have the presidential nominee of one major party, Donald Trump, declaring preemptively
that if he loses it will be because the process was rigged. This also sounds a lot like many of those
unstable political systems that purport to be democracies, and in which non-acceptance of electoral
results is common. (See Gabon for
a recent example .)
American democracy is less of a shining, distinctive exemplar of political fairness and popular
sovereignty than it once was...
Meanwhile, Norman Birnbaum has good advice for Hillary Clinton in urging her "to shelve her devotion
to extending democracy to the rest of the world to concentrate on rescuing it for ourselves."
Spirited defense of the establishment from one of financial oligarchy members.
" The economy overall is doing just fine." Does this include QE? If the Fed is pouring
billions of new money into the economy, how accurate is it to say that the economy
is doing just fine?
Notable quotes:
"... "That was a number that was devised, statistically devised, to make politicians - and in particular, presidents - look good. And I wouldn't be getting the kind of massive crowds that I'm getting if the number was a real number." ..."
"... In the 1950s and 1960s, for instance, organized labor was fairly convinced that the government was purposely underestimating inflation and the cost of living to keep Social Security payments low and wages from rising. George Meany, the powerful head of the American Federation of Labor at the time, claimed that the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which compiled both employment and inflation numbers, had "become identified with an effort to freeze wages and is not longer a free agency of statistical research." ..."
"... Employment figures are sometimes seen as equally suspect. Jack Welch, the once-legendary former CEO of GE, blithely accused the Obama administration of manipulating the final employment report before the 2012 election to make the economic recovery look better than it was. "Unbelievable jobs numbers … these Chicago guys will do anything … can't debate so change numbers," he tweeted ..."
"... His arguments were later fleshed out by New York Post columnist John Crudele , who went on to charge the Census Bureau (which works with BLS to create the samples for the unemployment rate) with faking and fabricating the numbers to help Obama win reelection. ..."
"... The chairman of the Gallup organization, Jim Clifton, sees so many flaws with the way unemployment is measured that he has called the official rate a "Big Lie." In the Democratic presidential campaign, Bernie Sanders has also weighed in, saying the real unemployment rate is at best above 10 percent. ..."
"... What a useless article. The author explains precisely nothing about what the official statistics do and do not measure, what they miss and what they capture. ..."
"... I had the same impression as well. Notice he does not mention that the Gallop number is over 10% and is based on their polling data. ..."
"... But never mentioned that Reagan changed how Unemployment was figured in the early 80's. He included all people in the military service, as employed. Before that, they was counted neither way. He also intentionally left out that when Obama, had the unemployed numbers dropped one month before the election, from 8.1% to 7.8% --because it was believed that no one could be reelected if it was above 8%. ..."
"... U6 is 9.8% for March 2016. We still have 94 million unemployed and you want to say its 5 % what journalistic malpractice. ..."
"... Trump has emphasized that he is looking at the percent of the population that is participating in the workforce - and that this participation rate is currently at historical lows -- and Trump has been clear that his approach to paying down the national debt is based on getting the participation rates back to historical levels ..."
"... "The government can't lie about a hundred billion dollars of Social Security money stolen for the Clinton 'balanced budget', that would be a crime against the citizens, they would revolt. John, come one now. " ..."
"... I didn't say it first, Senator Ernest Hollings did, on the Senate floor. ..."
"... And here is how they did it: http://www.craigsteiner.us/articles/16 ..."
"... There is plenty of evidence the figures are cooked, folks, enough to fill a book: Atlas Shouts. Don't believe trash like this article claims. GDP, unemployment and inflation are all manipulated numbers, as Campbell's Law predicts. ..."
"... I can't believe the Washington Post prints propaganda like this. ..."
"... I do remember when the officially-announced unemployment rate stopped including those who were no longer looking for work. That *was* a significant shift, and there's no doubt it made politicians (Reagan, I think it was) look better; of course, no President since then has reversed it, as it would instantly make themselves look worse. ..."
"... Working one hour a week, at minimum wage, is 'employed', according to the government. No wonder unemployment is at 5%. ..."
"... Add in people who are working, but want and need full time jobs, add in people who have dropped out of the labor market and/or retired earlier than they wanted to, and unemployment is at least 10%. Ten seconds on Google will show you that. ..."
"... The writer should be sacked for taking a very serious issue and turning it into a piece of non-informative fluff. Bad mouthing Trump and Sanders is the same as endorsing Hilly. ..."
Yes, Donald Trump is wrong about unemployment. But he's not the only one. -
The Washington Post
Listen to President Obama, and you'll hear that job growth is stronger than
at any point in the past 20 years, and - as
he said in his final State of the Union address - "anyone claiming that
America's economy is in decline is peddling fiction."
Listen to Donald Trump and you'll hear something completely different. The
billionaire Republican candidate for president told The Washington Post last
week that
the economy is one big Federal Reserve bubble waiting to burst, and that
as for job growth, "we're not at 5 percent unemployment. We're at a number that's
probably into the 20s if you look at the real number." Not only that, Trump
said, but the numbers are juiced: "That was a number that was devised, statistically
devised, to make politicians - and in particular, presidents - look good. And
I wouldn't be getting the kind of massive crowds that I'm getting if the number
was a real number."
It's easy enough to dismiss - as a phalanx of economists and analysts
did - Trump's claims as yet another one of his all-too-frequent campaign
lines that have little to do with reality. But with this one, at least, Trump
is tapping into a deep and mostly overlooked well of popular suspicion of government
numbers and a deeply held belief that what "we the people" are told about the
economy by the government is
lies, damn
lies and statistics designed to benefit the elite at the expense of the
working class. The stubborn persistence of these beliefs should be a reminder
that just because the United States is doing well in general, that doesn't mean
everyone in the country is. It's also a warning to experts and policymakers
that in the real world,
there is no "the economy," there are many, and generalizations have a way
of glossing over some very rough patches.
Since the mid-20th century, when the U.S. government began keeping
and compiling our modern suite of economic numbers, there has been constant
skepticism of the reports, coming from different corners depending on economic
trends and the broader political climate. In the 1950s and 1960s, for instance,
organized labor was fairly convinced that the government was purposely underestimating
inflation and the cost of living to keep Social Security payments low and wages
from rising. George Meany, the powerful head of the American Federation of Labor
at the time, claimed that the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which compiled both
employment and inflation numbers, had "become identified with an effort to freeze
wages and is not longer a free agency of statistical research."
Over the decades, those views hardened. Throughout the 1970s, as workers
struggled with unemployment and stagflation, the government continually tweaked
its formulas for measuring prices. By and large, these changes and new formulas
were designed to make the figures more accurate in a fast-changing world. But
for those who were already convinced the government was trying to paint a deliberately
false picture, the tweaks and innovations were interpreted as a devious way
to avoid spending money to help the ailing middle class, not trying to measure
what was actually happening to design policies to help address it. The commissioner
of BLS at the time, Janet Norwood, dismissed those concerns
in testimony to Congress in the late 1970s, saying that when people don't
get the number they want, "they feel there must be something wrong with the
indicator itself."
Employment figures are sometimes seen as equally suspect. Jack Welch,
the once-legendary former CEO of GE,
blithely accused the Obama administration of manipulating the final employment
report before the 2012 election to make the economic recovery look better than
it was. "Unbelievable jobs numbers … these Chicago guys will do anything … can't
debate so change numbers," he tweeted after that last October report showed
better-than-expected job growth and lower-than-anticipated unemployment rate.
His arguments were later fleshed out by New York Post columnist
John Crudele, who went on to charge the Census Bureau (which works with
BLS to create the samples for the unemployment rate) with faking and fabricating
the numbers to help Obama win reelection.
These views are not fringe. Type the search terms "inflation
is false" into Google, and you will get reams of articles and analysis from
mainstream outlets and voices, including investment guru Bill Gross (who referred
to inflation numbers as a "haute
con job"). Similar results pop up with the terms "real
unemployment rate," and given how many ways there are to count employment,
there are legitimate issues with the headline number.
The cohort that responds to Trump reads those numbers in a starkly different
light from the cohort laughing at him for it. Whenever the unemployment rate
comes out showing improvement and hiring, those who are experiencing dwindling
wages and shrinking opportunities might see a meticulously constructed web of
lies meant to paint a positive picture so that the plight of tens of millions
who have dropped out of the workforce can be ignored. The chairman of the
Gallup organization, Jim Clifton, sees so many flaws with the way unemployment
is measured that he has called the
official rate a "Big Lie." In the Democratic presidential campaign,
Bernie Sanders has also weighed in, saying the real unemployment rate is
at best above 10 percent.
Beneath the anger and the distrust - which extend to a booming stock market
that helps the wealthy and banks flush with profit even after the financial
crisis - there lies a very real problem with how economists, the media and policymakers
discuss economics. No, the bureaucrats in the Labor and Commerce departments
who compile these numbers aren't a cabal engaged in a cover-up. And no, the
Fed is not an Illuminati conspiracy. But the idea that a few simple big numbers
that are at best averages to describe a large system we call "the economy" can
adequately capture the stories of 320 million people is a fiction, one that
we tell ourselves regularly, and which millions of people know to be false to
their own experience.
It may be true that there is a national unemployment rate measured at
5 percent.
But it is also true that for white men without a college degree, or white men
who had worked factory jobs until the mid-2000s with no more than a high school
education, the unemployment reality is much worse (though it's even worse for
black
and Hispanic men, who don't seem to be responding by flocking to Trump in
large numbers). Even when those with these skill sets can get a job, the pay
is woefully below a living wage. Jobs that don't pay well still count, in the
stats, as jobs. Telling people who are barely getting by that the economy is
just fine must appear much more than insensitive. It is insulting, and it feels
like a denial of what they are experiencing.
The chords Trump strikes when he makes these claims, therefore, should be
taken more seriously than the claims themselves. We need to be much more diligent
in understanding what our national numbers do and do not tell us, and how much
they obscure. In trying to hang our sense of what's what on a few big numbers,
we risk glossing over the tens of millions whose lives don't fit those numbers
and don't fit the story. "The economy" may be doing just fine, but that doesn't
mean that everyone is. Inflation might be low, but millions can be struggling
to meet basic costs just the same.
So yes, Trump is wrong, and he's the culmination of decades of paranoia and
distrust of government reports. The economy overall is doing just fine.
But people are still struggling. We don't have to share the paranoia or buy
into the conspiratorial narrative to acknowledge that. A great nation, the one
Trump promises to restore, can embrace more than one story, and can afford to
speak to those left out of our rosy national numbers along with those whose
experience reflect them.
the3sattlers, 4/8/2016 1:05 PM EDT
" The economy overall is doing just fine." Does this include QE? If the
Fed is pouring billions of new money into the economy, how accurate is it
to say that the economy is doing just fine?
james_harrigan, 4/8/2016 10:14 AM EDT
What a useless article. The author explains precisely nothing about
what the official statistics do and do not measure, what they miss and what
they capture.
Derbigdog, 4/8/2016 11:40 AM EDT
I had the same impression as well. Notice he does not mention that
the Gallop number is over 10% and is based on their polling data.
captdon1, 4/8/2016 5:51 AM EDT
Not reported by WP
The first two years of Obama's presidency Democrats controlled the house
and Senate. The second two years, Republicans controlled the Senate. The
last two years of Obama's term, the Republicans controlled house and Senate.
During this six years the national debt increase $10 TRILLION and the Government
collected $9 TRILLION in taxes and borrowed $10 TRILLION. ($19 Trillion
In Six Years!!!) (Where did our lovely politicians spend this enormous amount
of money??? (Republicans and Democrats!)
reussere, 4/8/2016 1:43 AM EDT
Reading the comments below it strikes me again and again how far out
of whack most people are with reality. It's absolutely true that using a
single number for the employment rate reflects the overall average of the
economy certainly doesn't measure how every person is doing, anymore than
an average global temperature doesn't measure any local temperatures.
One thing not emphasized in the article is that there is a number of
different statistics. The 5% figure refers to the U-3 statistic. Nearly
all of the rest of the employment statistics are higher, some considerably
so because they include different groups of people. But when you compare
U-3 from different years, you are comparing apples and apples. The rest
of the numbers very closely track with U-3. That is when U-3 goes up and
down, U-6 go up and down pretty much in lockstep.
It is unfortunate that subpopulations of Americans are doing far worse
(and some doing far better) than average. But that is the nature of averages
after all. It is simply impossible for a single number (or even a group
of a dozen different employment measurements) to accurately reflect a complex
reality.
Smoothcountryside, 4/8/2016 12:04 PM EDT
The alternative measures of labor underutilization are defined as U-1
through U-6 with U-6 being the broadest measure and probably the closes
to the "true" level of unemployment. Otherwise, all the rest of your commentary
is correct.
southernbaked, 4/7/2016 11:02 PM EDT
Because this highly educated writer is totally bias, he left out some
key parts, I personally lived though. He referred back to the late 70's
twice. But never mentioned that Reagan changed how Unemployment was
figured in the early 80's. He included all people in the military service,
as employed. Before that, they was counted neither way. He also intentionally
left out that when Obama, had the unemployed numbers dropped one month before
the election, from 8.1% to 7.8% --because it was believed that no one could
be reelected if it was above 8%.
Then after he was sworn in--- in January, they had to readjust the numbers
back up. They blamed it on one employees mistakes-- PS. no one was fired
or disciplined for fudging. Bottom line is, for every 1.8 manufacturing
job, there are 2 government jobs, that is disaster. Because this writer
is to young to have lived in America when it was great. When for every 1
government job, you had 3 manufacturing jobs.
I will enlighten him. I joined the workforce -- With no higher education
-- when you merely walked down the road, and picked out a job. Because jobs
hang on trees like apples. By 35 I COMPLETELY owned my first 3 bedroom brick
house, and the 2 newer cars parked in the driveway. Anyone care to try that
now ??
As for all this talk about education-- I have a bit of knowledge about
that subject-- because I paid in full to send all under my roof through
it. Without one dime of aide from anyone. The above writer is proof-- you
can be heavily educated, and DEAD WRONG. There is nothing good about this
economy. Signed, UN-affiliated to either corrupted party
Bluhorizons, 4/7/2016 9:43 PM EDT
"we're not at 5 percent unemployment. We're at a number that's probably
into the 20s if you look at the real number." Trump is correct. The unemployment
data is contrived from data about people receiving unemployment compensation
but the people who's unemployment has ended and people who have just given
up is invisible.
"It may be true that there is a national unemployment rate measured at
5 percent. But it is also true that for white men without a college degree,
or white men who had worked factory jobs until the mid-2000s with no more
than a high school education, the unemployment reality is much worse "
The author goes on and on about the legitimate distrust of government
unemployment data and then tells us Trump is wrong. But the article convinces
us Trump is right! So, this article its not really about the legitimate
distrust of government data is is about the author's not liking Trump. Typical
New Left bs
Aushax, 4/7/2016 8:24 PM EDT
Last jobs report before the 2012 election the number unusually dropped
then was readjusted up after the election. Coincidentally?
George Mason, 4/7/2016 8:15 PM EDT
U6 is 9.8% for March 2016. We still have 94 million unemployed and
you want to say its 5 % what journalistic malpractice.
F mackey, 4/7/2016 7:57 PM EDT
hey reporter,Todays WSJ, More than 40% of the student borrowers aren't
making payments? WHY? easy,they owe big $ money$ & cant get a job or a well
paying job to pay back the loans,hey reporter,i'd send you $10 bucks to
buy a clue,but you'd probably get lost going to the store,what a %@%@%@,another
reporter,who doesn't have a clue on whats going on,jmo
SimpleCountryActuary, 4/7/2016 7:57 PM EDT
This reporter is a Hillary tool. Even the Los Angeles Times on March
6th had to admit:
"Trump is partly right in saying that trade has cost the U.S. economy
jobs and held down wages. He may also be correct - to a degree - in saying
that low-skilled immigrants have depressed salaries for certain jobs or
industries..."
If this is the quality of reporting the WaPo is going to provide, namely
even worse than the Los Angeles Times, then Bezos had better fire the editorial
staff and buy a new one.
Clyde4, 4/7/2016 7:34 PM EDT [Edited]
This article dismissing Trump is exactly what is wrong with journalism
today - all about creating a false reality for people instead of investigating
and reporting
Trump has emphasized that he is looking at the percent of the population
that is participating in the workforce - and that this participation rate
is currently at historical lows -- and Trump has been clear that his approach
to paying down the national debt is based on getting the participation rates
back to historical levels
The author completely ignored the big elephant in the room -- that is
irresponsible journalism
The author may want to look into how the unemployment rate shot up in
2008 when the government extended benefits and then the unemployment rate
plummeted again when unemployment benefits were decrease (around 2011, I
believe) - if I were the author I would do a little research into whether
the unemployment rate correlates with how much is paid out in benefits or
with unemployment determined through some other approach (like surveys
dangerbird1225, 4/7/2016 7:25 PM EDT
Bunch of crap. If you stop counting those that stop looking for a job,
your numbers are wrong. Period. Why didn't this apologist for statistics
mention that?
"The government can't lie about a hundred billion dollars of Social
Security money stolen for the Clinton 'balanced budget', that would be a
crime against the citizens, they would revolt. John, come one now. "
I didn't say it first, Senator Ernest Hollings did, on the Senate
floor.
"Both Democrats and Republicans are all running this year and next
and saying surplus, surplus. Look what we have done. It is false. The
actual figures show that from the beginning of the fiscal year until
now we had to borrow $127,800,000,000." - Senate speech, Democratic
Senator Ernest Hollings, October 28, 1999
Go to New Orleans Chicago Atlanta Los Angeles Detroit stop anybody on
the street and ask if unemployment is 5% and that there is a 95% chance
a guy can get a job.
Then you will have a statistic reference point. Its not a Democratic
or republican issue because both of them have manipulated the system for
so long its meaningless. Go Trump 2016 and get this crap sorted out with
common sense plain English
AtlasRocked, 4/7/2016 4:37 PM EDT
There is plenty of evidence the figures are cooked, folks, enough
to fill a book: Atlas Shouts. Don't believe trash like this article claims.
GDP, unemployment and inflation are all manipulated numbers, as Campbell's
Law predicts.
I can't believe the Washington Post prints propaganda like this.
TimberDave, 4/7/2016 2:23 PM EDT
I do remember when the officially-announced unemployment rate stopped
including those who were no longer looking for work. That *was* a significant
shift, and there's no doubt it made politicians (Reagan, I think it was)
look better; of course, no President since then has reversed it, as it would
instantly make themselves look worse.
astroboy_2000, 4/7/2016 1:28 PM EDT
This would be a much more intelligent article if the writer actually
said what the government considers as 'employed'.
Working one hour a week, at minimum wage, is 'employed', according
to the government. No wonder unemployment is at 5%.
Add in people who are working, but want and need full time jobs,
add in people who have dropped out of the labor market and/or retired earlier
than they wanted to, and unemployment is at least 10%. Ten seconds on Google
will show you that.
The writer should be sacked for taking a very serious issue and turning
it into a piece of non-informative fluff. Bad mouthing Trump and Sanders
is the same as endorsing Hilly.
Manchester0913, 4/7/2016 2:12 PM EDT
The number you're referencing is captured under U6. However, U3 is the
traditional measure.
Son House, 4/7/2016 2:24 PM EDT
The government doesn't claim that working one hour a week is employed.
Google U 3 unemployment. Then google U 6 unemployment. You can be enlightened.
Liz in AL, 4/7/2016 7:21 PM EDT
I've found this compilation of all 6 of the "U-rates" very useful. It
encompasses the most restrictive (and thus smallest) U-1 rate, though the
most expansive U-6. It provides brief descriptions of what gets counted
for each rate, and (at least for more recent years) provides the ability
to compare at the monthly level of detail.
U6 Unemployment Rate Portal Seven
This
article outlines the main elements of
rupture and continuity in the global political economy since the global
economic crisis of
2008-2009. While the current calamity poses a more systemic challenge to
neoliberal
globalization than genetically similar turbulences in the
semi-periphery during the 1990s, we find that evidence for its
transformative significance remains mixed. Efforts to reform the distressed
capitalist models in the North encounter severe resistance, and the
broadened multilateralism of the G-20 is yet
to provide effective global economic governance. Overall,
neoliberal
globalization looks set to survive, but in more heterodox and
multipolar fashion. Without tighter coordination between old and emerging
powers, this new synthesis is unlikely to inspire lasting solutions to
pressing global problems such as an unsustainable international financial
architecture and the pending environmental catastrophe, and may even fail to
preserve some modest democratic and developmental gains
of the recent past.
"... He said they took an innocuous email that she had received from one of her underlings and put the markings on it that indicated it was an email classified as SECRET. They asked Hillary if she had ever seen the email before, she said, "No." ..."
"... The FBI by marking the email with the markings that indicated that it was SECRET was only attempting to get Hillary to indicate that she understood what the markings meant and she did. ..."
The FBI set up a trap for Hillary Clinton during their questioning of her
and she fell right into it, according to Judge Andrew Napolitano.
Judge Napolitano appeared yesterday morning on the Don Imus Show on WABC
radio and told Imus that at one point early in their questioning of her they
lied to her. He said that, under law, they are allowed to do so and did so
to set a trap.
He said they took an innocuous email that she had received from one of
her underlings and put the markings on it that indicated it was an email
classified as SECRET. They asked Hillary if she had ever seen the email
before, she said, "No."
But upon reading the email, she went on to say, "I don't know why this is
marked secret. There is nothing classified in it." Bam, she fell into the
trap.
The FBI by marking the email with the markings that indicated that it
was SECRET was only attempting to get Hillary to indicate that she
understood what the markings meant and she did.
Judge Napolitano also told Imus that there will be more negative news coming
out about the Clintons, especially the Clinton Foundation, He did not
provide details.
"... How can anyone take the claim that Hillary has pneumonia seriously? Are everyone's bullsh*t detectors are broken? ..."
"... Very likely to be BS. All speculation at this point...though I haven't got the will to sift through the MSM and blogosphere to attempt a reading between the lines. ..."
"... Speculation that she may have late stage Parkinsons is reaching a fever pitch. Parkinsons patients often contract pneumonia. ..."
"... What is happening now with Hillary is not another example of planning by the deep state; it is just the usual pattern among declining empires that their systems are too corrupt for good leaders to be chosen. ..."
"... Hillary is and has been a very sick lady for some time now. The fire, energy and determination she exuded during the 2008 campaign has not been visible during this run. The image of her stubbornly giving a speech in the rain to thousands of supporters in '08 are not seen this time around. The packed rally's are gone. She's a shell of the person she once was. ..."
"... Kaine was the Governor. Virginia put Obama in the White House. ..."
"... I am suggesting the neolib leadership has known Hillary's ailment was extremely serious for some time now, and I'm just guessing here, but I'm confident many tried to talk her out of running in '16 for the sake of her health and her family. ..."
"... What we are witnessing is Operation 'it takes a Village', that is, the entire Dem elite cabal has circled their wagons to ensure Hillary's lifelong wish is realized -- being sworn in as the first woman to the U.S. Presidency no matter how ill she may be. ..."
"... The pneumonia narrative that is peddled by her campaign and echoed by western presstitute media is obviously damage control. ..."
"... The Democratic Party doesn't really care if the Republicans win. C'mon, now. Democrats might be unreliable on enacting the GOP policy the Third Way imperialist traitors want. Republicans will be very reliable at "balancing" the needs of the rich and well-connected with the bother of the poor and atomized. ..."
"... That comment is definitely the best speculation about Hillary's condition I have seen thus far. I started reading Atlantic comments recently. The Atlantic's posts are about as pro-Hillary as Salon's, but the comment section of the Atlantic turns out not to be a Dem echo chamber, as Salon and HuffPo entertainingly are. ..."
"... It's just that the signs of whatever her neurological disorder are becoming more prominent -- coughing fits, seizures, queer eye movement, a lack of energy and now collapse. ..."
"... ...The action of her security detail in the video reveals that they are aware of an ongoing issue. ..."
At this juncture I don't believe one damn thing the press (CCM; corporate
controlled media) says about anything; and especially Clinton's health.
I think she's on her way out.
Word is that Hillary is suffering from "vascular dementia" and will probably
die within a year. Or maybe even before the elections.
My guess is she
would be replaced by her vice presidential pick Tim Kaine or possibly Joe
Biden. Kain would perhaps be less than a total disaster, but relatively
little information about him can be discovered immediately. Biden is a hopeless,
ancient, corrupt political hack.
Or maybe Hillary will be secretly "replaced" by a double (the Beatles
ruse)? If she suddenly recovers the conspiracy world will instantly go on
red alert.
NY Times initially reported Hillary's collapse as a stumble. Do they understand
in that elite tower that YouTube video all over Twitter almost in real time
showed a dramatic fainting collapse? NYT needs a competent PR pro to explain
in easy to understand English that it must improve its lying so it accords
with immediately and easily observed reality. But ... too arrogant, too
privileged. I suppose, though, we should take some hope from the breakdown
of traditional uniparty media/propaganda.
From Wikipedia
: "In early 1984, Chernenko was hospitalized for over
a month, but kept working by sending the Politburo notes and letters. During
the summer, his doctors sent him to Kislovodsk for the mineral spas, but
on the day of his arrival at the resort Chernenko's health deteriorated,
and he contracted
pneumonia
.
Chernenko did not return to the Kremlin until later in 1984.
By the end of 1984, Chernenko could hardly leave the Central Clinical
Hospital, a heavily guarded facility in west Moscow, and the Politburo was
affixing a facsimile of his signature to all letters, as Chernenko had done
with Andropov's when he was dying. Chernenko's illness was first acknowledged
publicly on 22 February 1985 during a televised election rally."
No, Sec Clinton clearly goes rigid, the distinction is important.
Here's a video with a close up of her feet on the left in the second half
of the video.
How can anyone take the claim that Hillary has pneumonia seriously? Are
everyone's bullsh*t detectors are broken?
She lambasted those who claimed that she was ill only a week or so before.
So why would she try to hide any real illness - especially one that seems
rather mild (mild enough that she went to the 911 event and appeared healthy
when leaving Chelsea's apartment). Shifting explanations from the campaign
were amateurish for a condition that was supposedly diagnosed on FRIDAY.
As pointed by commenters on several different websites:
>> a pneumonia vaccine is recommended for anyone over 65 and with Hillary
hectic campaign schedule and travels she should have had the vaccine;
>> getting dragged into the van is not consistent with "overheated"
or pneumonia;
>> if she had pneumonia, why would she get close to a child
(after
leaving she Chelsea's apartment)
?
"Pneumonia" is likely to be BS. See my comment @11.
Very likely to be BS. All speculation at
this point...though I haven't got the will to sift through the MSM and blogosphere
to attempt a reading between the lines.
With that said, where there is smoke there's fire. Her limited public
schedule appears to be protecting something. Trump will no doubt play hardball
with the networks as only he can, but in the end he should engage Hillary
to share as much podium time as he can.
Sec Clinton clearly goes rigid, the distinction is important. Here's
a video with a close up of her feet on the left in the second half of the
video.
Also, to me it looks like she is doing that head bobbing thing again,
like she did when she was asked questions by several reporters simultaneously
while walking, and then at the Democratic convention. On those two previous
occasions, one had to point out that a person can have a (petit mal) seizure
without falling. This time, she fell.
Hillary's fund-raising trip to California planned for today and tomorrow
has been cancelled. The pneumonia story provides cover for that. (Which
is not to say that she does not have pneumonia. The point is that pneumonia
cannot explain her collapse.)
Speculation that she may have late stage Parkinsons is reaching a fever
pitch. Parkinsons patients often contract pneumonia. From a personal and
not political point of view, watching the videos was painful.
I think
she is withdrawing from the race in a matter of days.
Clinton would eliminate all other Dem contenders and
then she'd be pulled at the last minute for Biden to step in.
That seems to employ an interpretive framework common here at MoA. This
is that the Empire is infinitely knowledgeable and clever, so that anything
of geopolitical significance that happens anywhere must be explained as
another clever trick by the Empire's planners and strategists. (Obama fools
Putin once again with Turkey's invasion of Syria.)
So Hillary is to be seen as a mere instrument of the US Establishment,
in the same way that Obama is. (Obama does seem to be a creation
of the CIA
.) But I see Hillary more as an American Chernenko, as
Petri Krohn
does at #6 above. What is happening now with Hillary is
not another example of planning by the deep state; it is just the usual
pattern among declining empires that their systems are too corrupt for good
leaders to be chosen.
Heh,
deplorables
is not proper Eng. but from Sp. / Fr.
Before this incident - was
Game Over
…since at least a month…
The 'health' meme will be used as that is a legit, for HRC to get off
the stage. Rather than the e-mail scandal (Comey, head of FBI, could not
recommend 'prosecution' as he and his brother are tied to the Clintons in
various huge lucrative deals), the Total Corruption (bold it) of the Clinton
Foundation has to be swept under the lying carpet, etc.
HRC is on her last buckling legs and seizure bobbing head. So sad 'n
bad that her performance on stage etc. even if carefully monitored and contolled
by guardians, the audience who scrutinise are no longer fooled.
Besides her own ambition, is the q. of overall corruption. Billions were
invested in HRC, now they have to write down the loss, or are rabid about
being misled, angry at being lied to, some still want her propped up as
a Zombie, raking in fav decisions, others are like …this is the END…cue
music…
My hunch for quite some time now has been Hillary has some debilitating
affliction that modern medicine cannot overcome. Many have speculated that
it might be Parkinson's or what blues said @3 "vascular dementia". Whatever
her diagnosis is it appears to be neurologically related given her falls,
her seizures, her concussion (which I believe was a Traumatic Brain Injury
aka TBI). A concussion is a mild brain injury that can take up to three
or so months to recover. TBI's are a lifetime.
A family member of mine had a serious fall in her early sixties and she
was hospitalized with a TBI for six months. The first couple of weeks were
in ICU and then she was transferred to a long-term nursing facility. She
takes coumadin due to the two serious injuries to her brain. Sadly, her
health continues to deteriorate and she will remain in a long-term nursing
facility till her last breath.
Hillary is and has been a very sick lady for some time now. The fire,
energy and determination she exuded during the 2008 campaign has not been
visible during this run. The image of her stubbornly giving a speech in
the rain to thousands of supporters in '08 are not seen this time around.
The packed rally's are gone. She's a shell of the person she once was.
blues @3 said "My guess is she would be replaced by her vice presidential
pick Tim Kaine or possibly Joe Biden. Kain would perhaps be less than a
total disaster, but relatively little information about him can be discovered
immediately. Biden is a hopeless, ancient, corrupt political hack."
Tim Kaine IS Obama's third term. He IS Obama's pick. Not Hillary's. Kaine
screwed Hillary in '08 by peeling off many of Hillary's super delegates
in Virginia to support Obama. I know what that man did to eliminate her
support in this state as do many others who left the Party, as I did, in
total disgust. Never forget Virginia was a fire red state until the '08
election. Kaine was the Governor. Virginia put Obama in the White House.
A funny thing happened a couple of years after the '08 election along
with other extremely odd wins for other D's in both local and statewide
elections in Virginia. The voting machines in several key districts that
went blue were quietly removed due to a preponderance of evidence of manipulation.
There was only one alt news outlet that covered the story. No one in mainstream
touched it. I'm thinking both parties were aware, both parties manipulated
and both parties agreed to kill the story. Lots of elections I'm sure would
be over turned like say the match up b/w George Allen and Jim Webb...
I am suggesting the neolib leadership has known Hillary's ailment was
extremely serious for some time now, and I'm just guessing here, but I'm
confident many tried to talk her out of running in '16 for the sake of her
health and her family. But knowing Hillary, and pretty much any woman who
had come so close to reaching the pinnacle of her/their lifetime dreams
-- to crack the highest glass ceiling in elite land -- the US Presidency
-- she wasn't going to let any illness, no matter how serious, get in her
way.
What we are witnessing is Operation 'it takes a Village', that is, the
entire Dem elite cabal has circled their wagons to ensure Hillary's lifelong
wish is realized -- being sworn in as the first woman to the U.S. Presidency
no matter how ill she may be. Phase two of Operation 'it takes a Village'
is to have in place Obama's chosen predecessor -- Tim Kaine ready to take
the helm when she finally succumbs to her illness.
I predict she won't make it to November. Then what?
The pneumonia narrative that is peddled by her campaign and echoed by western
presstitute media is obviously damage control. I wonder how all those powerful
elites that gave her millions of bribes (donor money) must feel now. The
chance that she will need to be replaced is real and propping up a replacement
will again cost millions. Trump who has been dragged trough the mud (his
naked wife, small penis, ...) is remarkably tame on the issue. If it's not
because both he and Clinton have conspired right from the start, then it
must be that his campaigns strategy is to look like the "nice guy".
Here's
her "pneumonia" episode but from another angle. If you watch her hands,
it's clear she lost total control which of course is confirmed seconds later
when she drops like a rag doll.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/11-EAzsGxgQ
And again her creepy performance before the journos. The comments are
also quite funny: "This honestly creeped me out... I think it was demon
coming out of her..." or "My guess is that she's truly a reptilian creature
and it's fighting to retain its humanoid form."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMHOcmDVBP0
If such episode would occur during her presidency she'd probably wag
the dog like her husband did during the Lewinsky case and bomb some pharmaceutical
factories to rubbles in some poor defenseless country.
Guess Google will have to crank
their false search results
up a notch as to prevent Jill Stein causing
a 2000 election moment and having the republicans win.
The Democratic Party doesn't
really
care if the Republicans
win. C'mon, now. Democrats might be unreliable on enacting the GOP policy
the Third Way imperialist traitors want. Republicans will be very reliable
at "balancing" the needs of the rich and well-connected with the bother
of the poor and atomized.
@22 Demian,
Kindly leave your bourgeois liberal priors at the door. Clearly you are
a self-absorbed managerialist who believes in the holiness of the Quantified
Self and one-true-wayism, i.e. the Problem personified, or you would recognize
that competence is not uniform across subjects and your ideological quest
for bourgeois excellence motivates nobody who's sane and honest.
So, having said that, it's a lot easier to run a stage show when you
control the angles (Fernsehen) than when you don't. And statecraft is, aside
from the cold-blooded murder required to subjugate a people against its
will, just stagecraft writ large.
I have been reading a lot of sites and am now convinced that Clinton has
been very ill for some time. There are countless photos which give it away
- from the neurological test of gripping two fingers presented to her which
her aides do often, to the pictures of aides taking her pulse while waiting
for her ride yesterday, the repeated head movements she makes when being
'ambushed' by journalist, the placement of her hands to stop trembling,
the coughing, the weird fixed smile - they all indicate middle-stage Parkinson's.
Yes, there has been speculation about Parkinson's for months, but I never
accepted that, because Parkinson's is characterized by the inability to
initiate movement, so that a feature is having a stone-faced look, which
Hillary does not have.
She can't walk, she can't control her own oral secretions and so she
is aspirating them...they are going down into her lung. Hence the cough,
and now aspiration pneumonia. Her fall and head injury weren't the cause...something
caused the fall.
I think she has a progressive neurological disease. Some speculate
Parkinson's, but I favor Progressive Supranuclear Palsy...the disease
the late Dudley Moore, actor, had. It is insidious in onset but starts
with balance and gait difficulties. It's been 4 years since Hillary
fell and got her concussion, so the disease is inexorably progressing.
Also...she had to be dragged into that van. Her feet were being dragged.
If this was the first time something like this happened, she would have
been taken to the ER. No lay people would have done anything else. So,
this is a recurrent problem they've dealt with before.
The symptoms of the disease listed by Wikipedia seem to match what we've
seen of Hillary pretty well.
That comment is definitely the best speculation about Hillary's condition
I have seen thus far. I started reading Atlantic comments recently. The
Atlantic's posts are about as pro-Hillary as Salon's, but the comment section
of the Atlantic turns out not to be a Dem echo chamber, as Salon and HuffPo
entertainingly are.
A psychopath runs for president of the United States with serious
medical problems when they worship the God of Mammon/private finance/global
plutocracy/or whatever you call our Hillary sick society.
That is an incredible story. I followed the link, and sure
enough, the addresses match. Why would someone put a medical facility in
an expensive residential building?
mischi : "what kind of a psychopath runs for president of the United States
with serious medical problems?"
The kind of person millions of Americans
would vote for: an habitual liar, a psycho, a person with cold-hearted ambition
and no compunction over spilled blood.
Hillary Clinton is a metaphor now, and is a testament to the level to
which this country has sunk.
She still doesn't strike me as sociopathic.
Just very ambitious, completely dishonest, highly blackmailable, and, by
the look of it, seriously ill.
I think the question should be - what person, or more likely, what group
of people make a vulnerable (however flawed) person with quickly progressing
disability run for POTUS on their behalf, and what do they hope to achieve
through her weakness and dependency on them, while fully accessing the greatest
executive power on planet Earth?
Someone on ZH just observed that Pres's Wilson and FDR were both basically
disabled by the time each presided over US entering another World War. Ominous.
(and I am not saying D Trump would be any better, just possibly harder
to control - and even that comes with a big question mark, reality show
hosting and all)
Maybe Hillary is being used as a means to an end. The Clintons
and the Bushes hide a rat's nest of secrets. She runs for the presidency,
in the way someone in the mafia might have to pay off a debt. And for an
example elsewhere, General Pinochet, the infamous head of the Chilean Junta,
escaped prosecution over reasons of incapacity to stand trial and ill health,
even though he was arrested, extradited, and brought back to Chile for trial.
The cancer that is the Clinton Foundation will escape scrutiny probably
because it remains an instrument of the permanent government, or Deep State.
But nothing would surprise me now. If there is an October Surprise, it is
probably another damn coup. It seems we are on a roll. Don't get too comfortable,
or think that we will come out unscathed, or that we will not have another
president selected for us.
The funny thing with the Hillary at 9/11 video was that they showed the
stumble but the part with the woman holding her up before the misstep is
sort of hidden.
jackrabbit @41 said "There were few concerns about her health during the
campaign for the Democratic nomination. Most of the heath concerns raised
have been in the last few weeks."
This is not accurate. Many have been
posting and discussing her health for many, many months now with some for
years. Drudge, Breitbart, the Conservative Treehouse, Right Side, Gateway
Pundit and so many more.
It's just that the signs of whatever her neurological disorder are becoming
more prominent -- coughing fits, seizures, queer eye movement, a lack of
energy and now collapse.
I know I've been following her health concerns for several years now.
It's just hard to do b/c her team protects and covers up for her. Nothing
to see here...move along...and the useless political press corp says nothing.
Only alt news and the right do.
Copeland@42 -
"...Maybe Hillary is being used as a means to an end..."
Give yourself a little more credit, Copeland. She
IS CLEARLY
being
used as a means to an end. What everyone should be wondering about isn't
whether she or Kaine will be sitting in the White House, but who is the
next Cheney that will be pulling the strings behind the scenes for either
of them. What is the next 9/11 the future Cheney is scheming? The thought
that either of these two will actually run anything is preposterous - they
are distractions. They are to serve as the brightly-dressed clowns with
big, floppy shoes and neon green wigs dancing around in front of us while
some version of Cheney II opens up the gold vaults and blood chutes back
in DC.
I'll humbly suggest that most people
are looking in the rear-view
mirror
for answers. Every U.S. citizens should
look closely in
the shadows around them now
for their next evil masters. The U.S.
MSM is
not
trying to get Hillary elected. They are desperately trying
to look like they are
so the debate goes on endlessly
. And it's working
absolutely wonderfully in an insidious, evil, psychopathic sort of way.
Americans are easy - we will all honestly be surprised by the
next
9/11 and it's inevitable result. Hillary or Trump are just sideshow freaks;
they're
not
the main attraction.
'Means to an end' is the job description of the entire
political class. We need to make choices of representatives/spokespersons
from among ourselves, and ultimately to empower ourselves, to turn down
our own deplorable, now exclusive reliance on representatives/spokespersons.
No one has our interests at heart but ourselves.
No to Clinton, no to Trump
.
...The action of her security detail in the video reveals that they are
aware of an ongoing issue. First, a collapse after an alleged pneumonia
diagnosis should have meant immediate medical care. Instead she is ferried
to her daughter's apartment and back on the street in an hour. Second, the
detail circles around her as she is placed in the van, blocking the view,
in a practiced deliberate manner. There is no surprise or second glances.
@ Paveway IV, I think you are right. Best to keep an eye on the shadows
gathering around us.
@ crone, Thanks for that video; but I thought is
was a little creepy that the doctor identifies his means of gathering evidence,
with the methods of the CIA
Hillary Clinton is a metaphor now, and is a testament
to the level to which this country has sunk.
I used to think that Lady Macbeth is the literary character who best
represents Hillary, but now I think it is Zola's
Nana
:
Nana
tells the story of Nana Coupeau's rise from streetwalker
to high-class prostitute during the last three years of the French Second
Empire. …
"What emerges from [Nana] is the completeness of Nana's destructive
force, brought to a culmination in the thirteenth chapter by a kind
of roll call of the victims of her voracity".
Zola has Nana die a horrible death in July 1870 from smallpox: "What
lay on the pillow was a charnel house, a heap of pus and blood, a shovelful
of putrid flesh. The pustules had invaded the whole face, so that one
pock touched the next". Outside her window the crowd is madly cheering
"To Berlin! To Berlin!" to greet the start of the Franco-Prussian War,
which will end in defeat for France and the end of the Second Empire.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zr1IDQ2V1eM&feature=youtu.be
PARKINSONS
& Hillary. Seems credible. By a doctor. Goes back to 2005 & observes minutely--
even certain ways of using the hands. As far as I can see he's accounted
for every symptom. The clips are really interesting.
It should be beyond obvious that Clinton is not fit for the office of president.
Further, it could be said she is not concerned about her country, but rather
her own self aggrandizement.
The very embodiment of the worst of all possible leaders.
She's in advanced Parkinson's. Her symptoms can't be masked anymore.
Even
Google (which is in league with the Clintons) will suggest "Parkinson's"
if you type "hillary clinton p" into a search box.
Even if Hillary has no more events like she did on Sunday until the election,
it is very clear that she has Parkinson's, and there's a lot of buzz about
that on the Net. So keeping her name on the ballot on election day would
do more damage to the legitimacy of the American political system than the
theft of the 2000 election did. So I doubt that the establishment will run
the risk of keeping her name on.
And if she does manage to make it to November and get elected, her chances
of making it through another two months to get inaugurated are not that
good.
"What do these insurgents have in common? All have called into question
the interventionist consensus in foreign policy."
But today we have this:
Trump pledges big US military expansion . Trump doesn't appear to have
any coherent policy, he just says whatever seems to be useful at that particular
moment.
"... Liberal hawks will complain that the Iraq war was run incompetently (and it was), but they don't give up on the idea of preventive war or the belief that the U.S. is entitled to attack other states more or less at will in the name of "leadership." Neoconservatives will fault Obama for not doing more in Libya after the regime was overthrown, but it would never occur to them that toppling foreign governments by force is wrong or undesirable. There remains a broad consensus that the U.S. "leads" the world and in order to exercise that "leadership" it is free to destabilize and attack other states as it sees fit. The justifications change from country to country, but the assumptions behind them are always the same: we have the right to interfere in the affairs of other nations, our interference is benevolent and beneficial (and any bad results cannot be tied to our interference), and "failure" to interfere constitutes abdication of "leadership." ..."
"... Everyone is familiar with Iraq war dead-enders, who continue to claim to this day that the war had been "won" by the end of Bush's second term and that it was only by withdrawing that the U.S. frittered away its "victory." The defense of the Libyan war is somewhat different, but at its core it shares the same ideological refusal to own up to failure. In Libya, the mistake was not in taking sides in a civil war in which the U.S. had nothing at stake, but in failing to commit to an open-ended mission to stabilize the country after the regime was overthrown. Libyan war supporters don't accept that their preferred policy backfired and harmed the country it was supposedly trying to help. That would not only require them to acknowledge that they got one of the more important foreign policy questions of the last decade badly wrong, but it would contradict one of their core assumptions about the U.S. role in the world. As far as they're concerned, Libya is still the "model" and "good" intervention that they claimed it was five years ago, and nothing that has happened in Libya can ever prove otherwise. ..."
"... unfortunately pro-war dead-enders continue to have considerable influence in shaping our foreign policy debates on other issues. They bring the same bankrupt assumptions to debates over what the U.S. should be doing in Syria, Ukraine, Iran, and elsewhere, and they apply the same faulty judgment that led them to think regime change and taking sides in foreign civil wars was smart. They still haven't learned anything from the failures of previous interventions (because they don't accept that they were failures), and so keep making many of the same mistakes of analysis and prescription that they made in the past. ..."
Andrew Bacevich has written an excellent
article on the need to end our ongoing "war for the Greater Middle East."
This part jumped out at me in connection with the debate over the
Libyan war:
A particular campaign that goes awry [bold mine-DL]
like Somalia or Iraq or Libya may attract passing attention, but
never the context in which that campaign was undertaken [bold mine-DL].
We can be certain that the election of 2016 will be no different.
It is almost never mentioned now, so it is easy to forget that many Libyan
war supporters initially argued for intervention in order to save the "Arab
Spring." Their idea was that the U.S. and its allies could discourage other
regimes from forcibly putting down protests by siding with the opposition in
Libya, and that if the U.S. didn't do this it would "signal" dictators that
they could crush protests with impunity. This never made sense at the time.
Other regimes would have to believe that the U.S. would consistently side with
their opponents, and there was never any chance of that happening. If it sent
any message to them, the intervention in Libya sent other regimes a very different
message: don't let yourself be internationally isolated like Gaddafi, and you
won't suffer his fate. Another argument for the intervention was that it would
change the way the U.S. was perceived in the region for the better. That didn't
make sense, either, since Western intervention in Libya wasn't popular in most
countries there, and even if it had been it wouldn't change the fact that the
U.S. was pursuing many other policies hated by people throughout the region.
It was on the foundation of shoddy arguments such as these that the case for
war in Libya was built.
Bacevich is right that many critics fault specific interventions for their
failings without questioning the larger assumptions about the U.S. role in the
region that led to those wars. Liberal hawks will complain that the Iraq
war was run incompetently (and it was), but they don't give up on the idea of
preventive war or the belief that the U.S. is entitled to attack other states
more or less at will in the name of "leadership." Neoconservatives will fault
Obama for not doing more in Libya after the regime was overthrown, but
it would never occur to them that toppling foreign governments by force is wrong
or undesirable. There remains a broad consensus that the U.S. "leads" the world
and in order to exercise that "leadership" it is free to destabilize and attack
other states as it sees fit. The justifications change from country to country,
but the assumptions behind them are always the same: we have the right to interfere
in the affairs of other nations, our interference is benevolent and beneficial
(and any bad results cannot be tied to our interference), and "failure" to interfere
constitutes abdication of "leadership."
To make matters worse, every intervention always has a die-hard group of
dead-enders that will defend the rightness and success of their war no matter
what results it produces. They don't think the war they supported every really
went "awry" except when it was ended "too soon." Everyone is familiar with
Iraq war dead-enders, who continue to claim to this day that the war
had been "won" by the end of Bush's second term and that it was only by withdrawing
that the U.S. frittered away its "victory." The defense of the Libyan war is
somewhat different, but at its core it shares the same ideological refusal to
own up to failure. In Libya, the mistake was not in taking sides in a civil
war in which the U.S. had nothing at stake, but in failing to commit to an open-ended
mission to stabilize the country after the regime was overthrown. Libyan war
supporters don't accept that their preferred policy backfired and harmed the
country it was supposedly trying to help. That would not only require them to
acknowledge that they got one of the more important foreign policy questions
of the last decade badly wrong, but it would contradict one of their core assumptions
about the U.S. role in the world. As far as they're concerned, Libya is still
the "model" and "good" intervention that they claimed it was five years ago,
and nothing that has happened in Libya can ever prove otherwise.
That might not matter too much, but unfortunately pro-war dead-enders
continue to have considerable influence in shaping our foreign policy debates
on other issues. They bring the same bankrupt assumptions to debates over what
the U.S. should be doing in Syria, Ukraine, Iran, and elsewhere, and they apply
the same faulty judgment that led them to think regime change and taking sides
in foreign civil wars was smart. They still haven't learned anything from the
failures of previous interventions (because they don't accept that they were
failures), and so keep making many of the same mistakes of analysis and prescription
that they made in the past.
Remember when Larry Lindsey was fired as Bush's economic advisor when he
suggested
that the costs could be as high as $200 billion?
Good times, but at this point the Dems own it as much as the GOP.
"... Some of the other – possible – position purchases were a little disturbing, though, such as Julius Genachowski's FCC Chairmanship or Tony West's appointment as Deputy Attorney General. If true that donations were the clincher, then it does smell a little like corruption. ..."
"... In addition to Jim Haygood's report above I would flag Lee Fang's Twitter bulletin, which includes emails (you click on the actual emails imaged in the tweet to read the original) that reveal Colin Powell and Jeffrey Leeds discussing how much the Clintons hate Obama ("that man"), and how questionable Hillary's health is. This appears to be from a separate DNC Leaks hack of Powell's emails unrelated to the Guccifer 2.0 release. ..."
"... But the quote of the evening so far is from a Colin Powell email complaining about how Hillary is responsible for the whole email debacle at State and was trying to scapegoat him for her mess despite his protestations. Boy, was Powell pissed off, and to the point: " Everything HRC touches she kind of screws up with hubris. " ..."
I saw that too, earlier today and at first I thought "another example!".
Then I stepped back and realized that other than an inflation gauge,
so what? That has been a perk for donors in this country (and many other
I assume) for over 200 years… at least as far as the ambassadorships are
concerned.
Some of the other – possible – position purchases were a little disturbing,
though, such as Julius Genachowski's FCC Chairmanship or Tony West's appointment
as Deputy Attorney General. If true that donations were the clincher, then
it does smell a little like corruption.
I was away from the computer for a few hours and all leak-hell has broken
loose. Unfortunately, the actual dumps are not being made as easy to access
directly as in prior releases - the Guccifer 2.0 release requires a "torrent"
download and DNCLeaks.org seems to have been vaporized. And there's a lot
of it, so we're having to rely on piecemeal, secondhand reports at the moment.
In addition to Jim Haygood's report above I would flag Lee Fang's
Twitter bulletin, which includes emails (you click on the actual emails
imaged in the tweet to read the original) that reveal Colin Powell and Jeffrey
Leeds discussing how much the Clintons hate Obama ("that man"), and how
questionable Hillary's health is. This appears to be from a separate DNC
Leaks hack of Powell's emails unrelated to the Guccifer 2.0 release.
But the quote of the evening so far is from a Colin Powell email
complaining about how Hillary is responsible for the whole email debacle
at State and was trying to scapegoat him for her mess despite his protestations.
Boy, was Powell pissed off, and to the point: " Everything HRC touches
she kind of screws up with hubris. "
Clinton is neither well-liked nor trusted. She is just a marionette promoted
by neocon cabal. Sanders team has a point that Clinton is like the job candidate
wit the impressive resume who sounds great on paper, but then when you meet her
in person, you realize she's not he right person for the job.
Notable quotes:
"... She has never acknowledged, maybe even to herself, that routing diplomatic emails with classified information through a homebrew server was an outrageous, reckless and foolish thing to do, and disloyal to Obama, whose administration put in place rules for record-keeping that she flouted. ..."
"... And Hillary did not merely fail the ask the right questions. The questions were asked and the answers were given. Joe Biden, Robert Gates and much of the military and intelligence communities advised against the Libya intervention. Hillary just chose to ignore the advice, because she is a radical neoconservative at heart. ..."
"... She volunteered that that the United States should continue to "look for missions" that NATO will support ..."
"... She vows to go around looking for new military adventures. ..."
"... Maureen is right that Hillary has huge character problems. Sure, she can't admit mistakes and compulsively blames others when things go wrong. That's a given. But it's not the biggest problem. The biggest problem is that she will take our country down the wrong path, both in terms of domestic and foreign policy. ..."
"... She has had 40-some years to develop this kind of judgment, imagination and long term reflection, and she has proudly, aggressively, mean-spiritedly run the opposite direction every time and viciously attacked anyone who called her on it. It's time to stop this game of "wondering" whether she can change, wondering whether all of these terrible moments were "the real Hillary" or not. They were. Voting someone in as President on the hope that they will be a completely different person once in office then they have been in 40 years is the definition of insanity. ..."
"... it's about her paranoia about secrecy that made her think she could get away with a private email server in one of the nation's most high-profile jobs, or taking huge sums of money for Wall Street speeches she now refuses to release, or doubling-down on her ill-considered, if not ill-informed (as you note), hawkish regime change views by advocating for it again in Libya that has, as a result, turned into an ISIS outpost. ..."
"... Clinton did herself no favors in the debate, drawing even more attention to her dependence on that money and the impossibility of being completely free to make policy without repaying debts. ..."
"... They don't, but it is telling that Bill said that. His chosen exaggeration displays who he sees as Hillary's side in this. When he says, "they are coming for us" he means Wall Street. ..."
"... "Clinton, who talked Obama into it" on Libya and claimed credit, but when it went poorly, she blamed Obama for listening to her, "On Libya, she noted that "the decision was the president's."" That is her claim to experience, and not something we ought to vote to experience again. ..."
"... Hillary is a self-serving, power hungry politician. She is only ever sorry if she fails to get what she wants, or is forced to explain her actions. She feels she is above "the masses." As for her qualifications, job titles alone don't cut it. What did she actually accomplish as a Senator or SecState? Any major laws? Treaties? No. She failed with Russia, Syria and Libya to name just a few. She is not qualified to be president based on qualifications and personality. ..."
... Clinton sowed suspicion again, refusing to cough up her Wall Street speech
transcripts.
... ... ...
Hillary alternately tried to blame and hug the men in her life, divvying
up credit in a self-serving way.
After showing some remorse for the 1994 crime bill, saying it had had "unintended"
consequences, she stressed that her husband "was the president who actually
signed it." On Libya, she noted that "the decision was the president's." And
on her desire to train and arm Syrian rebels, she recalled, "The president said
no."
But she wrapped herself in President Obama's record on climate change and,
when criticized on her "super PACs," said, well, Obama did it, too.
Sanders accused her of pandering to Israel after she said that "if Yasir
Arafat had agreed with my husband at Camp David," there would have been a Palestinian
state for 15 years.
Bernie is right that Hillary's judgment has often been faulty.
She has shown an unwillingness to be introspective and learn from her mistakes.
From health care to Iraq to the email server, she only apologizes at the point
of a gun. And even then, she leaves the impression that she is merely sorry
to be facing criticism, not that she miscalculated in the first place.
... ... ...
She has never acknowledged, maybe even to herself, that routing diplomatic
emails with classified information through a homebrew server was an outrageous,
reckless and foolish thing to do, and disloyal to Obama, whose administration
put in place rules for record-keeping that she flouted.
Advertisement Continue reading the main story Wouldn't it be a relief to
people if Hillary just acknowledged some mistakes?
... ... ...
Clinton accused Sanders of not doing his homework on how he would break up
the banks. And she is the queen of homework, always impressively well versed
in meetings. But that is what makes her failure to read the National Intelligence
Estimate that raised doubts about whether Iraq posed a threat to the U.S. so
egregious.
P. Greenberg El Cerrito, CA
Maureen Dowd fundamentally misunderstands Hillary Clinton's foreign policy
failings. When it comes to Libya, Clinton does not merely need to apologize
for getting distracted by other global issues and "taking her eye off the
ball". The decision to go in was wrong, not the failure to follow through.
And Hillary did not merely fail the ask the right questions. The
questions were asked and the answers were given. Joe Biden, Robert Gates
and much of the military and intelligence communities advised against the
Libya intervention. Hillary just chose to ignore the advice, because she
is a radical neoconservative at heart.
Clinton continues to adhere to the neoconservative approach to foreign
policy. Her choice of words during the Brooklyn debate were significant.
She volunteered that that the United States should continue to "look
for missions" that NATO will support. That says it all. She vows
to go around looking for new military adventures.
Maureen is right that Hillary has huge character problems. Sure,
she can't admit mistakes and compulsively blames others when things go wrong.
That's a given. But it's not the biggest problem. The biggest problem is
that she will take our country down the wrong path, both in terms of domestic
and foreign policy.
And please Maureen, stop denigrating Bernie Sanders with pejorative adjectives
and vague accusations. He has held elective office for 35 years, showing
leadership and good judgment and good values.
Brett Morris California,
She has had 40-some years to develop this kind of judgment, imagination
and long term reflection, and she has proudly, aggressively, mean-spiritedly
run the opposite direction every time and viciously attacked anyone who
called her on it. It's time to stop this game of "wondering" whether she
can change, wondering whether all of these terrible moments were "the real
Hillary" or not. They were. Voting someone in as President on the hope that
they will be a completely different person once in office then they have
been in 40 years is the definition of insanity.
That said, of course she is better than the republicans. But she is the
worst possible candidate for the Democratic Party, especially in this era
where we have a serious opportunity to turn away from Reagan's Overton Window.
And right now we actually have a candidate available who represents our
best ideas. Can't we just ditch her while we have the chance? If she gets
elected, more war is absolutely guaranteed. A one-term Presidency is also
highly likely, because nobody will be on her side. She loses trust and support
the more she exposes herself, every time.
Paul Long island
I agree when you say of Hillary Clinton, "She has shown an unwillingness
to be introspective and learn from her mistakes." That is only part of her
problem because her judgment seems always wrong, despite all the "listening
tours," whether it's about her paranoia about secrecy that made her
think she could get away with a private email server in one of the nation's
most high-profile jobs, or taking huge sums of money for Wall Street speeches
she now refuses to release, or doubling-down on her ill-considered, if not
ill-informed (as you note), hawkish regime change views by advocating for
it again in Libya that has, as a result, turned into an ISIS outpost.
To say she's "sorry" would only confirm her consistently bad judgment since
she has so much to be sorry about. So, what we have instead is a very "sorry"
candidate who, despite her resume and establishment backing, is having immense
trouble overcoming "a choleric 74-year-old democratic socialist" and will
have an even harder time if she's the Democratic nominee in November.
Rima Regas is a trusted commenter Mission Viejo, CA
Hillary isn't sorry. Bill is definitely not sorry. Bernie Sanders isn't
a senator with few accomplishments.
Hillary isn't sorry about anything. She hasn't apologized for the superpredator
comment. Saying she wouldn't say it now is hardly an apology and during
Thursday's debate, she talked about her husband apologizing for it instead
of talking about herself (since that was what she was being asked to do),
when Bill has yet to apologize. (Clips here: http://wp.me/p2KJ3H-2bw) If
anything, he doubled down on defending her and himself. When it comes to
mass-incarceration, they both exhibit a kind of moral absenteeism. http://wp.me/p2KJ3H-2b7
On money in politics, Clinton did herself no favors in the debate,
drawing even more attention to her dependence on that money and the impossibility
of being completely free to make policy without repaying debts. Debbie
Wasserman Schultz was no help to her this week when in an answer, she included
big money in the "Big Tent" that the democratic party is supposed to be.
http://wp.me/p2KJ3H-2bO
During his entire tenure in both houses of Congress, Sanders has distinguished
himself as one who can work with the other side, propose legislation gets
things done through amendments. There is a yuuuge difference in approach
between Clinton and Sanders and the willingness to trust Sanders over Clinton.
When the choice in front of Americans becomes Trump versus Clinton or Sanders,
Sanders wins by a wider margin. Sanders will take more from Trump.
Mark Thomason is a trusted commenter Clawson, Mich
So Bill claimed Bernie supporters think, "Just shoot every third person
on Wall Street and everything will be fine."
They don't, but it is telling that Bill said that. His chosen exaggeration
displays who he sees as Hillary's side in this. When he says, "they are
coming for us" he means Wall Street.
"Clinton, who talked Obama into it" on Libya and claimed credit,
but when it went poorly, she blamed Obama for listening to her, "On Libya,
she noted that "the decision was the president's.""
That is her claim to experience, and not something we ought to vote to
experience again.
That is important, because she still wants to sink us deeper into it.
Her own adviser on this says, Hillary "does not see the Libya intervention
as a failure, but as a work in progress."
"Like other decisions, it was put through a political filter and a paranoid
mind-set." That is the essence of what makes Hillary so dangerous in a responsible
office. From Iraq in the beginning to Libya now, the homework lady did all
her work and then saw the wrong things and got it wrong.
Joe Pike Gotham City
Hillary is a self-serving, power hungry politician. She is only ever
sorry if she fails to get what she wants, or is forced to explain her actions.
She feels she is above "the masses." As for her qualifications, job titles
alone don't cut it. What did she actually accomplish as a Senator or SecState?
Any major laws? Treaties? No. She failed with Russia, Syria and Libya to
name just a few. She is not qualified to be president based on qualifications
and personality.
"... True. I attribute it all to deep-seated self loathing. Somewhere deep down the vestigal organ known as the "conscience" is paying attention. ..."
"... was taken as evidence in his own mind ..."
"... Liberals believe in addressing every issue within a socio-economic context (Crime, Terrorism, …) Except racism. That issue is context free ..."
"... Kids just feel and act, unconditioned. ..."
"... They are pure and genuine. They are not cheaters. Kids are our masters, we must learn from them. We should be more like kids. ..."
"... Today we can learn from them, just watch these kids in action. ..."
"... I was a-falling 'till you put on the brakes ..."
"... "I am skeptical that a large-scale expansion of government spending by itself is the best way forward, since larger fiscal deficits will lead to higher expected future taxes, which could further undermine private sector confidence" Neel Kashkari ..."
"... "In the minds of many, soil is simply dirt, but without it we would all cease to exist. Unlike the water we drink and the air we breathe, soil is not protected in the EU and its quality is getting worse" ..."
"Basket of deplorables," how pithy a metaphor for placing your detractors
in a container from which their voices and needs can be discounted. Clinton
gives us a great turn of phrase with which we can contemplate her inclination
to strip the prerogatives of citizenship – such as the inclination not to select
her at the ballot – from her detractors.
Agamben's thesis is that western constitutional democracies inevitably turn
to the state of exception and strip citizenship from their peoples on the way.
We have been at it a long time in America. The delightful new twist is contemplating
the election of a candidate who tells us that not being a card carrying identity
politics connected elitist, or sycophant of, will get you relegated to the ranks
of homo sacer – the bare human. And oh yes, the Secretary is inclined to be
the decider. There is no functional distinction between the nightmares these
candidates represent.
Re: Charles Blow, "if the basket fits…"
_____________
Blow makes it official: this is the Best Election Ever for Team Blue.
First they get to bring their "kick-the-left" game up to the next level
with the mugging of the Sanders campaign. Then they (finally!) get to copulate
in public with their neo-con friends-with-benefits. And now, as Blow demonstrates,
they are at last free to spew their hate against the ignorant chumps in
flyover: all the bile they have piled up but just couldn't articulate because
you gotta be PC ("impolitic" dixit Blow).
Read the comments on the NYT articles or in other liberal goodthink rags:
HRC was just articulating what the entire Acela bubble wanted to say but
was too tactful. Listen to HRC making the actual comments: there were no
boos or gasps, just laughter (sadly showing how part of the LGBT movement
has become appallingly intolerant: a vast cry from the movement's origins).
Blow is just one voice in a blue chorus singing battlesongs against the
poor and the left. A very clarifying election indeed.
> "Wells Fargo Exec Who Headed Phony Accounts Unit Collected $125 Million"
[Fortune]. I think it's very important that a woman –Carrie Tolstedt - shattered
the glass ceiling for accounting control fraud.
When the story first broke a few days ago, I knew right away (as in,
before even finishing reading the headline) that this was another accounting
control fraud. It's really sad that NC is the only place where the term
"control fraud" is used in connection with this scandal.
I was entertaining a variation of that very idea. Some honest to God
disgruntled and disappointed Justice Fighter from the FBI goes rogue, righting
Comey's wrong, with the Russian Conspiracy twist(polonium) thrown in for
ironic flair.
The only positive thing to happen during this election season is
the death of mainstream media. With their insufferable propaganda fully
exposed, there is no coming back.
I have a bleaker view of human cognition, and so disagree. It must be
noted that in the past couple weeks, an NC commenter honestly felt he needed
to inform me of my own country of origin, because in his mind this was something
that I clearly needed to be schooled about. Yes, the fact that I disagreed
with his narrative was taken as evidence in his own mind that he
needed to school me - to teach me where I'm from, and teach me how my friends
and family died. A clearer example of basic cognitive failure would be hard
to come by.
Yet, as 20th century world history shows very clearly, when a culture
shifts in that direction, such self-certain lunacy just becomes the new
order of the day. It becomes the style.
It seems that many of my previous NC comments mention Robert Jay Lifton's
books, and, well, can't avoid doing it again. Critics of his analyses fault
them for being "unfalsifiable," etc, but I counter by saying that they were
offered in a totally different spirit as a summary of his painstaking observations
rather than a cognitive theory.
If there's any hope of digging out of the cultural hole in the near term,
I'd say that'd be the place to start.
""Wells Fargo Exec Who Headed Phony Accounts Unit Collected $125 Million"
[Fortune]. I think it's very important that a woman –Carrie Tolstedt - shattered
the glass ceiling for accounting control fraud."
See? We're living in a post racist, sexist world. Now it's not only white
men who can eff over everyone else, African-Americans and women can join
that elite club of amoral people. And get rich doing it!
Liberals believe in addressing every issue within a socio-economic
context (Crime, Terrorism, …)
Except racism. That issue is context free
Maybe it is just me but I disagree vehemently with this sentiment.
The reasoning is fairly simple: these issues that are used to divide
us (racism, sexism, religion, economics) are made much stronger when the
economy is the weakest.
If you need proof look to the great industrial states of the Midwest
with their racist (now, never before) governments: Michigan, Wisconsin,
Ohio, and even Rauner in Illinois. These political beliefs would never gain
traction when the economies were going great. Working people have taken
the brunt of the globalization bullshit and the endless contempt of "Clinton
Liberals" everywhere (apparently)
Economic hardship is an amplifier of racism. This is what the limousine
liberals never seem to understand. For them is it much more satisfying to
demonstrate their moral superiority through contempt for the deplorables.
2 days ago i went to a local park just to swing and to be honest, cry…
where no one would be put out. took about a minute for a toddler to bring
me a tiny flower…i didn't even know she was near. at first i was embarrassed
but then realized her heart will grow thru endearing gestures. i smiled
and asked her if she could show me how to swing as high as she does. hope
yall get a rise out of kids. they can be near at the strangest moment…when
we let them.
Given that we're all becoming resigned to having a horrible president
yet again I'm taking a surprising delight in the proliferating Clinton conspiracy
theories after her collapse Sunday (the body double, the catheter, etc.).
I hadn't seen this one before and thought I would share with the group –
that Chelsea's 10M condo (where Hillary was taken), at
The Whitman at 21 E. 26th St. in the NY – is supposedly (I have no idea)
the same building as has listed "
Metrocare Home Services "
The conspiracy theory is that Hillary has her own private hospital in
the same building, which going to "Chelsea's apartment" is cover for.
I'm sure it's not true but, like all the others, it'd be pretty funny
if it was and I'm sure the Clinton team would have zero compunction about
the deception involved.
It is amazing what one can come up with when one absolutely does not
trust another. Let me say, first of all, that Hillary allowing herself to
go out on a hot day in the middle of a large crowd after working like a
"demon" (!!!) is not the best political move. It is like sticking one's
head into the jaws of the conspiracy theorists and saying bite down hard.
But, if, perhaps Clinton is not soooo politically inept, which, Lord
knows, she gives every evidence of being, here is an alternative perspective
I cooked up with a little appetizer. . .
First item..The Clintons tell Loretta Lynch they want to keep her on
at DOJ. But that will be hard to do if she is the face of not filing charges
against Hillary. Let's do an impromptu meeting (Bill and Loretta Lynch)
on airplane, then put it out in marquis letters so the conspiracy theorists
run with it. Loretta Lynch honorably steps down, gets to keep her job if
Hillary is elected.
From this line of thinking, conspiratorial as it also well is, Hillary
is expected to clobber Donald Trump in the debates. Politically speaking,
she has set for herself a very high bar, being so qualified and all. Let's
use this illness thing, cook up a minor illness and Hillary faints at the
9/11 memorial. The conspiracy theorists run away with it, she is on death's
door, yadayada. Some upside is that she will engender some sympathy.
Two weeks later at Hofstra, bar much lower, she comes back as robust
as can be, bar set much , much lower. Headlines read "Clinton Comes Back
Swinging" and "Clinton Alive and Well at Hofstra".
In the movie "Being There", the super rich guy played by Melvyn Douglas
has a mini hospital in his home. Maybe that's standard operating procedure
for the oligarchs!
And one door away from the emergency chute that empties in the sub basement,
where a disused subway tunnel has been refurbished to whisk away any particularly
privacy-oriented presidential candidate, safe from prying eyes.
The whole building seems to have been the admin. headquarters for an
outfit called Metrocare Home Services before it was refitted as a swanky,
4-unit residential building. Amusing, but no "there" there.
Besides, she or anyone else with dough can have an ostentatiously well-appointed
sickroom within the apartment, regardless of previous or present tenants
of the building. And a home health care business wouldn't make a particularly
useful front to stockpile advanced treatments etc. for what ails her. They
tend not to keep much inventory, in my limited experience.
Had my catalytic converter stolen by thieves with battery operated sawsall's.
They are under the car
and out in two minutes. Locally they get $40.00-50.00 for them. Cost to
replace…Dealer $2,200.00,
local guy you know $1200.00 .
Police report in my area from two weeks ago said 12 were stolen in one
night's rampage.
Car broken into, rummaged thru, change stolen from center console.
Money stolen = About four bucks
Damage to car = Shattered window, prybar damage to "A" pillar and window
seals, when they tried to pry the window open = $1500.
Damage/theft ratio = 375 to 1
But according to this morning's post, they were probably tearing up my
s##t because they were hungry, so I guess I should blame myself for only
paying half my income in various taxes.
That statement is wrong on numerous levels, number one of which is that
while an employer may withhold earnings of a W-2 employee for the purpose
of paying income taxes, it is the employee that pays those taxes. Until
a return is filed and processed, the withheld amount is a deposit made on
the employee's behalf. The amount of the deposit is based on the gross wages
of the employee. If the tax rate drops, also would the deposit, and ultimately
the tax. But the amount of gross wages are unaffected.
Also, last I checked, employers generally don't pay sales or property
taxes for employees on non-employment related purchases.
Oh good God, over 40% of the population gets their payroll taxes back.
Yes, it sucks that they are taken out to begin with, particularly when
there are definitely pay periods when the 50 bucks could be utilized to
pay a co pay or buy things that one needs.
Additionally, if you are paying property taxes to begin with you're one
up on much of the population, it means you have a house or a car. You've
made a conscious choice to own things. The streets your car and house are
located on aren't free. The schools in your communities aren't no cost.
I'm so over people whining about paying taxes.
My comment strictly relates to the erroneous characterizations of the
responsibility for paying taxes and the effect of a tax reduction on gross
wages asserted by Robert Hahl.
I did not intend to address the amount thereof, justification for, nor
the proper amount of self-righteousness a taxpayer may exude for paying
said taxes.
I probably should have just called BS on his claim that he pays 50% in
taxes or called him on his lack of empathy for those that actually go hungry(many
of which are CHILDREN.)
My first instinct to tell those fortunate enough to have to pay is to
tell them to go ahead and "spite" the system by getting that job at BK so
they can live the "good life" on minimum wage and then they too can not
pay taxes….of course, they'll also forgo retirement accounts, vacation days,
owning a home, struggle with owning a car and the costs associated with
it, etc, etc but hey, they won't be paying 50% in taxes.
Personally, I am profoundly grateful that our family pays a percentage
in taxes(not 50% but above Mitt Romney.) It means we can afford a car, a
house and we have a decent income. It means I can afford that DVD that I
pay sales tax on. All in all it means our family is accumulating wealth.
Anyway, I should have directed this at the OP, not you.
Pretty sure my federal taxes go to defense contractors to make war. My
state and local taxes cover what doesn't come from the feds anymore cause
they're too busy spending on war. That's why I complain.
They go organizations that work on roads, they go to organizations that
make sure you have clean water, organizations that make sure your kids don't
eat lead, organizations that make sure you aren't eating food filled with
e coli- Don't go to the states to help pay for schools or other local programs
not covered by your local or state taxes.
Don't get me wrong, way too much money goes to war. On that we are in
absolute agreement however, be angry instead that our government has so
much potential to do so much more than destroy with that money. Our government
could be doing more for things like schooling or health care and it would
be a way better use of the monies we pay.
I think the right and left agree that the government is failing us. Where
we disagree is on what to do about it. The right thinks that things will
be better if the government gets smaller and gets out of the way. I tend
to disagree. It needs good leaders that believe in accountability and have
vision. It needs people to right size it, not downsize it and people that
negotiate in good faith with the private sector, not roll over for it.
A government is only as good as it's leadership and right now we've got
some pretty questionable leadership.
I would dearly love to know how to get it all back every year, having
spent my entire life under 30k and paying (aggregate) about 20% per anum.
What really gets me is listening to co-workers go on about how people go
on welfare because the gov't gives them so much money.
All my experiences with those on welfare is it's a pretty miserable experience.
After my stepfather died, my mom had to get help financially for her 3 minor
children. They means tested everything, she couldn't even own a car for
more than something ridiculous like $3000.
I also know someone who turned down work because actually working hours
she did not know would be guaranteed the next month would have cut her food
stamps the following month.
It seems positively contradictory to me to set up a system that encourages
reliance forever because you are continually threatening the safety net
of a person the minute they get a tiny bit ahead.
Personally, I'd love to see the government start doing what it does for
the very rich and allowing or helping people to put assets away in an "emergency
account(up to $5,000)." Instead it's only the really rich and middle class
who get to put money away tax free for retirement(401ks, hsas, IRAs) schools
for their kids, health care, etc, etc. All of this money is meant for long
term savings which for someone on the bottom of the income ladder is something
they can't do because they're too worried about having access to money when
that crappy $3000 car breaks down.
It's a stupid, crazy system and I know we could be doing better.
I am told that the tattoo approval test is a generational thing…if you're
old, you are not likely to have one or know a friend who has one (most of
time…many wonderful older people – in this country or many other countries
– have them).
Then you have theft of theft, that is, theft of property.
Property theft is under reported, it feels to me (based on my personal
experience and talking with neighbors around here…do i live in a bad neighborhood?).
Going from memory here, but I seem to recall reading in a car magazine
- late 60s, early 70s - that master thieves in NYC could drop a 4-speed
transmission from a curb-parked Corvette in 8 minutes flat.
Dropping a trans is not a trivial task.
Now butchers with sawzalls can swipe a cat converter in 2 minutes, with
two quick, crude cuts through a thinwall exhaust pipe.
Just goes to show how skills have declined. :-(
I was a butcher cutting up meat
My hands were bloody, I'm dying on my feet
I was a surgeon 'till I start to shake
I was a-falling 'till you put on the brakes
"I am skeptical that a large-scale expansion of government spending
by itself is the best way forward, since larger fiscal deficits will
lead to higher expected future taxes, which could further undermine
private sector confidence" Neel Kashkari
I am surprised you didn't comment on this, Lambert. The federal deficit
is just a number. Kashkari's argument that increasing the deficit implies
future higher taxes is bunk – displaying a lack in understanding monetary
theory. I admit to only a cursory understanding, but the real purpose of
income taxes is to slow the flow of money through the economy to reduce
inflationary pressures. Federal infrastructure spending would boost the
lagging economy, with virtually no downside. There is absolutely no need
to pay-down the debt. I would be more comfortable with Kashkari as the treasurer
of my local PTA than a regional Federal Reserve Bank president. Can't we
do better?
Kashkari's argument that increasing the deficit implies future higher
taxes is bunk – displaying a lack in understanding monetary theory.
Kashkari, as a big banker, would presumably be the recipient of those
higher taxes, since he would presumably be part of those financing said
deficit. He's talking business, not monetary theory. It's the flexian way
to presume that managers are there to be served.
Can either cut taxes, boost spending, or raise interest rates to suppress
inflation.
Taxing citizens give value to the currency and thereby makes them willing
to sell their goods and services to gov to obtain sufficient taxes to pay
tax.
So gov levies a tax to obtain goods and services, not dollars that have
no value to the entity that creates them.
She argued in part that, thanks to its new tools of forward guidance
and long-term asset purchases, the Fed would be able to offset the next
recession, even if interest rates eventually stabilized at historically
low levels.
…
Yet] two years into this hypothetical recession, the Fed would be refusing
to provide more accommodation, even though the unemployment rate would
be above 9 percent and it would be expecting the inflation rate to be
falling further below its target for another three years.
But I wonder why the good econo-doctor has only got religion now that
he is off the Fed.
Southern California Gas Co. agreed to a $4-million settlement Tuesday
to end a criminal case filed by Los Angeles County prosecutors over
the utility's handling of the massive gas leak near Porter Ranch last
year.
The gas company pleaded no contest to one misdemeanor count of failing
to immediately notify the California Office of Emergency Services and
Los Angeles County Fire Department of the leak that began on or around
Oct. 23, 2015, in the Aliso Canyon natural gas storage field. The utility
will pay the maximum fine of $75,000 for that three-day delay, according
to the L.A. County district attorney's office.
The gas company will pay $232,500 in state penalties on top of that
fine and $246,672 for the fire department's response to the leak.
Three other misdemeanor counts will be dismissed when the utility
is sentenced on Nov. 29.
End of story. Literally.
This is believed to be one of the largest releases in human history of
the most powerful green house gas.
another confusing plantidote. Is the plantidoe the yellow flower or is
it the green thingies by the rocks?
I suppose it's up to the viewer to decide. Which seems like a lot of
work. Some crackpot might choose the rocks themselves and then argue that
there's microscopic plants on the rocks and that's what they mean. if you
can't see them, that's your problem. The world is like that, crackpots pointing
at things only they can see and blaming you for not seeing them. Then kicking
your ass if they can.
Things should be obvous. And they are obvious, if you know what's what.
Then you don't need to kick people's ass unless they really deserve it.
mostly you just lay around waiting for people to see the things you see,
knowing that they would if they could. That's a lot different than blaming
them and kicking their ass. That's a lot of work - to kick someone's ass.
What a pain. Work is to be avoided if at all possible. That should be obvious
to everybody
Thank you for keeping the spotlight focused on efforts of the TBTF banks
and transnational corporations to gain passage of the TPP, TTIP and TiSA,
Lambert. Appears their lobbyists and the Obama administration have a full-court
press underway on members of Congress now. One can only guess at what is
being offered our congressional representatives for their vote during the
lame duck session after the November election in exchange for trading away
our national sovereignty.
"……..Doctors get continuing medical education (CME) through events like
lectures and conferences. CME is necessary because many physicians practise
for 30 or 40 years, and medicine is changing continuously, so they cannot
rely on their medical school training, which might have happened in the
1960s. Doctors are required to get a certain number of hours of CME every
year. You might imagine that doctors learn from unbiased experts dedicated
to learning. Actually, nothing is further from the truth. The dirty little
secret is that virtually all CME is sponsored heavily by Big Pharma giving
them huge influence over what information is presented to doctors.
Every single level of CME has been corrupted by $$$. Let's start at the
bottom.
In virtually every hospital in North America, there are lectures called
'rounds'. They happen in every specialty and almost every single day, mostly
at lunchtime. What a great idea. Doctors would spend lunchtime teaching
each other the intricacies of their specialty. Sorry, no. Most doctors don't
prepare a full hours worth of lecture topic. Most are too busy to spend
an hour listening a the lecture anyway. So, the friendly drug rep from Big
Pharma helpfully gets lunch for everybody. Free lunch! That helps bring
in the audience, but it doesn't help the fact that they still need a speaker………"
This probably explains, IMO, the pickle that HRC finds herself in
It isn't about her health, it's about her judgment. It's about the apparent
decision not to disclose the pneumonia diagnosis until they were forced
to – and even then, they tried three other "explanations" before – hours
later – they announced that fully 48 hours earlier, she had been diagnosed
with pneumonia. First, she wasn't feeling well. Then she became overheated.
Then she was dehydrated. It wasn't until some time after her reappearance
on the street looking fine and dandy that they disclosed the pneumonia.
Do you see the pattern? It's the same one we saw with the e-mails. We're
seeing it with the Clinton Foundation. This is a woman who doesn't seem
to feel any obligation or accept any responsibility for playing by the rules,
for following the protocols.
And she has the nerve to blame the right-wing conspiracy that's out to
get her when in reality she creates much of the controversy all by herself.
I don't frankly care if she has or had pneumonia or her toenail fungus
was acting up, but what she has once again managed to do is make it impossible
for people to believe whichever story qualifies as the latest, and if anything
she said before then has even a shred of truth in it.
What I fear, and what I do think would be a concern, is if the pneumonia
diagnosis is a giant head-fake designed to cover up that she may be experiencing
some neurological problems, perhaps related to the 2012 concussion (and
Lord only knows if that story was factual) that even her husband says took
her every bit of 6 months to recover from.
I get why she would want to hide anything even remotely like that, but
what she doesn't seem to understand is that she really has no right, as
a candidate for the highest office in the land, to hide it. Again, and again,
she allows her personal ambition to cloud her judgment; years and years
of important and wealthy people telling her she's one of the smartest people
in the room, paying to be in her presence, have convinced her she just knows
better than anyone. That she doesn't have to listen, that she has nothing
to learn.
And sometimes, she probably does, but she doesn't ever seem to be able
to know when she doesn't. That – the judgment problem – that's what she
has, and that's what matters here.
Oh, I absolutely agree with you she has a judgment problem, straight
down to ignoring good advice.
I just think it is interesting that the post I was commenting on seems
to be a jab at doctors and continuing education and
Pharma may be responsible for many things, Hillary Clinton's decision
not to follow her doctor's instructions on rest and fluid aren't one of
them though. They are in no way responsible for "the pickle that HRC finds
herself in." Hillary owns that.
The EU did have a Soil Framework Directive in the works for years but
it was eventually stymied by the UK, as
George Monbiot has pointed out . One of the good things about Brexit
is that it will undoubtedly improve the EU's capacity to bring forward more
environmental protect directives – the UK has always been one of the main
obstacles in this.
"I am skeptical that a large-scale expansion of government spending
by itself is the best way forward, since larger fiscal deficits will lead
to higher expected future taxes, which could further undermine private sector
confidence" Neel Kashkari
"In the minds of many, soil is simply dirt, but without it we would
all cease to exist. Unlike the water we drink and the air we breathe, soil
is not protected in the EU and its quality is getting worse"
Primary Day in NH. I went about 6:45p, 15 minutes before the polls closed.
On my way out, I asked the nice ladies staffing the place if turnout had
been light. They said "Very" and made disappointed faces.
"... My money's on H Clinton suffering a "serious relapse" into pneumonia, necessitating an 'indefinite' postponement of the debates. ..."
"... Native what, Algonquin? As in, "Hillary" =..small pox infested blankets. ..."
"... like your idol, you never reply with a straight answer when engaged on your talking points. I think you owe us - all the American people - much, much more than that. ..."
"... It's obvious you missed the fact I was 'speaking' tongue-in-cheek when I commented, as I was referencing an earlier comment regarding Warfarin being used to eradicate rats. (That and the *wink* I'd added sailed right over your head, apparently). Hateful? Yes. I've grown to hate Clinton for her complete dishonesty. ..."
"... First she says she turned over all the emails, and then Oops! The FBI found thousands more. ..."
"... She said she didn't have classified info on her personal server. Oops! Proven to be a lie once again. ..."
"... In response she said she didn't know how to distinguish classified emails from others. Really?! Remember, she was a senior partner at a law firm before entering the White House as First Lady. ..."
"... I don't expect her to participate in the debates, even if she doesn't drop out. I think that is the plan all along unless she's really behind in the polls. ..."
"... Nixon increased food stamps, created the EPA, expanded Medicaid… Maybe we could resurrect him to have an option to the left of the Goldwater Girl. ..."
"... I've read that Nixon was for socialized medicine, but it wasn't good enough for Teddy Kennedy, who helped kill it. ..."
"... If Clinton is elected, one can only hope she follows the "good" NIxon model. but my fear is she will be an even more hawkish Obama, cynically saying one thing while doing another. ..."
"... The Democrats and moderate Republicans pushed Nixon to do things, but that countervailing force is gone now. ..."
"... He also nominated L. Powell, of the infamous "Powell memo" , to the SCOTUS…and while he(Nixon) might have publically postured and declared-"we're all keynesians now", the new deal was being hijacked (Hayeked) where it mattered. ..."
"... If Hillary really does have pneumonia - who knows, though, as the announcements and reporting have not necessarily been paragons of candor - it is serious. Pneumonia can turn fatal to old folks (68 is plenty old enough), sometimes when it seems to be under control. At the least, it can be debilitating for months. ..."
"... Something's fishy here. Whatever her problem really is I found it strange her handlers floated out the term, "pneumonia." Why use such a scary, ominous sounding word when something more benign, like a "mild respiratory ailment" would've sufficed just fine? ..."
"... Sounds like the beginning of "plausible deniability" exit possibilities have begun. ..."
"... Exactly, she should have been resting. IF she was diagnosed with pneumonia, she should have suspended activities for a few days. She is not President, there was nothing vital for her to do this weekend. Send delegates to the fundraisers, and offer a statement about 9/11. ..."
"... But instead she ends up having an episode that is clearly NOT pneumonia and there are at least two damning videos about it. Of course that means there is the other question: does she really have pneumonia or was that the least problematic excuse they could come up with? ..."
"... unfit to serve as president ..."
"... pre-9/11 memorial, one allegation floating in the conservative blogosphere was that Hillary Clinton wears a catheter given some odd bulges in some Clinton photos. ..."
"... Our real enemies aren't the rulers who act in their interest but the corporations, if we know a way by pure deceit to defeat them it might be more than worth it. But just getting tweedledee instead of tweddledum acting in their name not really. All we've done is pervert our own capacity to perceive reality for a non-plan. Our politicians already take advantage of our gullibility to believing whatever (Iraq had WMD etc.). ..."
"... That is not just pneumonia, she was having a seizure, something else that has been observed on video. Didn't they originally say this was dehydration? ..."
"... Epilepsy as a side effect of something tramatic versus Pneumonia. Fancy blue Zeiss lenses are sometimes used to treat epilepsy. Short-term, often predictable loss of motor control is common. An aide being close at all times, as in the person guiding her to the van, would be expected. ..."
"... Pneumonia does not produce motor issues but is often accompanied by powerful bouts of coughing. Pneumonia does not require an aide but generally involves lots of bed rest. It doesn't lead to rapid dehydration either. She was there for less than an hour. ..."
"... If they had planned better they would have said that Hillary had a bout of food poisoning. Instead it was the explained as the heat and then, Hillary showing no obvious symptoms, trying to imitate Typhoid Mary. I thought politicians were better at fibbing than this. ..."
"... [H]er visible symptoms are consistent with a severe and/or long untreated case of pneumonia ..."
"... However, the facts of the situation are not. As far as "severe" goes, according to her release, she was diagnosed on Friday, and given antibiotics. As anyone who has suffered bacterial respiratory infection knows, antibiotics will usually get you on the road to recovery pretty quickly. Combined with plenty of fluid intake, she should have been out of the woods, not hurtling towards a complete physical breakdown. Also, the prevailing message is that its's a "mild" case and that the real bugbear is dehydration. It stretches credulity to suggest a person with a team of handlers surrounding her at all times can't keep hydrated. ..."
"... "Undiagnosed?" Seriously? She is admittedly under the care and supervision of some ..."
"... As someone who has suffered from pneumonia three times in his life, the fact is that when I was at my sickest point in each battle (high fever, massive coughing, exhaustion), at no time did I become spastic. A person who loses complete motor function due to pneumonia needs to get rushed to a hospital, not her daughter's apartment. ..."
"... I agree with the pneumonia claim being dodgy. Does not add up to what happened on the tape. ..."
"... Has anyone commented on the two women who to appear to be nurses who are accompanying Clinton? ..."
"... PS the dropping metal thing looked like it might be a lipstick. ..."
"... One of the 'nurses' appears to be her personal doctor, Dr Lisa Bardack, who was named in the press release stating that Hillary has pneumonia. ..."
"... In these photos you can see Dr Bardack appearing to take her pulse as they walked and also appearing to test Hillary's motor skills by asking her to squeeze her fingers. Also notice when her pulse is being taken that Hillary puts her right hand flat on on her chest – she does this a lot – does she do it to hide/control a tremor? ..."
"... I remember back in the day laughing at the efforts of the old Soviet Union or North Korea trying to hide the health failures of their leaders… welcome to the club ..."
"... I wish Hillary well and hope she recovers from what ever ails her. However, watching the two videos prior to her entering the car, you can see she is leaning against the chrome pillar for support, her right shoulder is significantly lower than her left, then as she walks forward she can't control her head, her right foot goes completely backward and is dragging along the ground, then she collapses into the car. Perhaps a doctor can explain all this, but I have had pneumonia three times and never had these symptoms. ..."
"... I also wonder what the little metal vile or what not was that dropped from her pants or around her as she was falling. ..."
"... I've been privately comparing her Chappaqua MD to Michael Jackson's MD, in that ..."
"... Her medical report looked like it was written by Hillary's lawyers, ..."
"... She's been awfully amped at some of her events, which could be Adderall or other upper-ish drugs, which a conservative MD might be reluctant to prescribe regularly to someone of her age. But the idea of drug interactions is actually sorta obvious and should have occurred to me. ..."
"... Many 'celebrities' (esp. secretive ones) receive concierge medical care, which tends to be substandard. Maybe it's b/c of the secrecy, i dunno… but it tends to be lousy. ..."
"... extend that thought to all professional services. I get the impression that despite their wealth, many celebrities are awful bad at finding competent service providers. ..."
"... Indeed, when I volunteered at a treatment centre, a fair number of high-functioning chemically-dependent patients (C-level execs, senior clinicians, politicians) came in as - and this choice of words is intentional - victims of bespoke top-flight one-2-one primary care as provided by luxury outfits in London's Harley Street or "hospitals" ..."
"... What usually pushed the patients I saw over the edge - and gave the medicine-as-consumerism practitioners sufficient worry to finally throw in the towel - was an episode of physical collapse as both the doctors and their unfortunate charges fell off the tightropes they'd been walking. ..."
"... You'd expect someone at Hillary's level to have a top doctor at a NY teaching hospital but you can't keep secrets in places like that ..."
"... When it comes to VIP patients if anyone were to access their records you better have a reason. Those are the only patients where the officials take Hipaa seriously. Fired, fined and lose your license. Hope that gossip rag pays well. ..."
"... My reaction to that is why the hell didn't she step down at that time, at least for a while, if her memory was so compromised? If she was so affected by a concussion, she was obviously not well enough to be conducting business as SOS. ..."
"... Yet she uses that as an excuse now in relation to her total disregard for security concerns and that makes it all okay, regardless of the outcome created? ..."
"... Not just meds being out of wack. It could be drug abuse. As if any one would deny any thing she wanted. This would enplane why they felt it necessary to be less than forthcoming on the issue. ..."
"... I highly doubt it is pneumonia. What grandmother with a serious illness show up at her daughter's house with a not even 3 month old and a two year old? There's campaigning and then there's the family dynasty. I doubt even Hilary's ambitions would put herself ahead of her grandkids. Regardless, it is poor judgement and more fodder for Trump. ..."
"... If intentional "Here's a woman who cares more for herself then her child or grand children" ..."
"... If unintentional "Here's a woman who's judgement is so poor she puts her family at risk with a contagious disease. If she's that unthinking about her actions towards her family, what about America's families." ..."
"... Chelsea took one for the Team. Any detour to a hospital or other non-private space would have sparked untold media frenzies. Oh, wait… ..."
"... Ms Clinton and Mr Mezvinsky's apartment has six and a half bathrooms, a home office and den, plus a 252-square-foot planting terrace and a private storage unit. ..."
"... My guess is, though, that Chelsea's was the only place they could go that was close by and where they were guaranteed to be able to control the situation. Had she been taken to a hospital, there's no way any of what transpired would not have ended up being leaked. ..."
"... How many hands did Clinton shake between receiving her diagnosis and being on medication for 24 hours? ..."
"... Pretty sure I'm not the only one who's noticed that all the coughing Clinton does she does into her hand, not into her elbow, so she's pretty much a traveling Typhoid Mary. ..."
"... Yes, I suppose 6+ bathrooms would be required in the Clinton family. ..."
Hateful?! afisher, if we hate you, it is because, like your idol, you
never reply with a straight answer when engaged on your talking points.
I think you owe us - all the American people - much, much more than that.
afisher– It's obvious you missed the fact I was 'speaking' tongue-in-cheek when I
commented, as I was referencing an earlier comment regarding Warfarin being
used to eradicate rats. (That and the *wink* I'd added sailed right over
your head, apparently). Hateful? Yes. I've grown to hate Clinton for her complete dishonesty.
First she says she turned over all the emails, and then Oops! The FBI
found thousands more.
She said she didn't have classified info on her personal server.
Oops! Proven to be a lie once again.
In response she said she didn't know how to distinguish classified emails
from others.
Really?! Remember, she was a senior partner at a law firm before entering
the White House as First Lady.
As to my "ignorance"?
THAT I take exception to. Education does not come just from books or schooling.
"Hateful and ignorance"?
If you're still paying off that student loan for a college education, you
should demand your money back.
My mere h.s. education taught me better than that.
I don't expect her to participate in the debates, even if she doesn't
drop out. I think that is the plan all along unless she's really behind
in the polls.
"But on April 17, 1973, Nixon stunned reporters by saying that he had
conducted an investigation that raised the prospect of involvement by White
House officials."
"Mr. Ziegler told a puzzled press corps that this was now the "operative
statement," repeating the word operative six times. Finally, R. W. Apple
Jr. of The New York Times asked, "Would it be fair for us to infer, since
what the president said today is now considered the operative statement,
to quote you, that the other statement is no longer operative, that it is
now inoperative?" "
Now we need to recycle more Nixon people and have Dick Cheney endorse
HRC's health, perhaps by saying. "Many people thought my health was suspect
in 1999, but, through medical science, I've been able to continue to "serve"
my country until the present day." Maybe the Clinton campaign is reaching out to Cheney today..
And Nixon's politically inspired war on drugs did have rehab and treatment
as part of the plan, which was largely removed by subsequent administrations
who ramped up prison time.
I've read that Nixon was for socialized medicine, but it wasn't good
enough for Teddy Kennedy, who helped kill it. Sometimes cynical, self-serving people do good things when pushed, while
compromised "good" people do harmful things.
If Clinton is elected, one can only hope she follows the "good" NIxon
model. but my fear is she will be an even more hawkish Obama, cynically
saying one thing while doing another.
The Democrats and moderate Republicans pushed Nixon to do things, but
that countervailing force is gone now.
He also nominated L. Powell, of the infamous "Powell memo" , to the SCOTUS…and
while he(Nixon) might have publically postured and declared-"we're all keynesians
now", the new deal was being hijacked (Hayeked) where it mattered.
If Hillary really does have pneumonia - who knows, though, as the announcements
and reporting have not necessarily been paragons of candor - it is serious.
Pneumonia can turn fatal to old folks (68 is plenty old enough), sometimes
when it seems to be under control. At the least, it can be debilitating
for months.
As for her use of Coumadin it's been well-known and pretty widely reported
for years.
The media speculation about her health, though, is little more than the
usual political season bullshit. Believe nothing; it's all crap. No matter
who is purveying it.
I experienced pneumonia at age 39. I was given antibiotics and told to
go home and rest. The next week of my life was nothing short of a near death
experience and for a couple of months thereafter, I was in a physically
weak condition. If Hillary was diagnosed with pneumonia on Friday, as the
AP has reported, her entourage would have had to not only carry her into
her car, they would have had to carry her out as well, and probably with
an IV still attached.
I don't know whether I've ever had pneumonia, but I've had both bacterial
bronchitis and type A influenza. My experiences were quite bad, although
not as severe as yours. In both cases, it took a month for me to fully recover.
When I had "walking" pneumonia, I could only pray for a cough as mild
and infrequent as hillary's seemed to be. Every time I had to cough, which
was constantly, I had to wrap my arms tightly around my ribs and squeeze
because otherwise the pain was unbearable.
Something's fishy here. Whatever her problem really is I found it strange
her handlers floated out the term, "pneumonia." Why use such a scary, ominous
sounding word when something more benign, like a "mild respiratory ailment"
would've sufficed just fine?
Sounds like the beginning of "plausible deniability" exit possibilities
have begun.
Exactly, she should have been resting. IF she was diagnosed with pneumonia,
she should have suspended activities for a few days. She is not President,
there was nothing vital for her to do this weekend. Send delegates to the
fundraisers, and offer a statement about 9/11.
There was no reason for her
to soldier on this weekend. Oh, but it would have fueled the rumors. No,
it would have done a lot to end the rumors. She gets up in front of the
press, and notes that they know she went to the doctor, she has developed
a mild case of pneumonia and as sad as it makes her to miss X, Y and Z she
is going to take the weekend to rest and allow the antibiotics to get started.
"I will be sending __________to this event, and Chelsea to represent me
at the 9/11 memorial" or something like that.
But instead she ends up having an episode that is clearly NOT pneumonia
and there are at least two damning videos about it. Of course that means
there is the other question: does she really have pneumonia or was that
the least problematic excuse they could come up with?
And if you find the speculation 'feverish' and "unpleasant" I suggest
you turn off the media, the news and the internet until you hear otherwise
because this is not going to go away, and even if it fades unless she starts
leaping up stairs, stops coughing and frankly never has a moment of confusion
on this campaign again it will start all over. Largely because most people
do not believe Hillary Clinton or her people about anything, and have no
reason to do so especially when their stories don't really add up.
But he delivered his lengthy inaugural address in a pouring March rain.
Hillary would at least have an umbrella. (Didn't Obama at one of his inaugurations?
Or have I mixed a remembered picture from some other occasion with memories
of an inauguration?)
Hillary is done. The video is absolutely damning and it was taken from
three angles. Metal objects were falling out of her pant leg. During her
big coughing spell, there was video of her vomiting mucus into a glass and
then drinking it. She's had her Dukakis moment and doesn't know it yet.
Obama has said Trump is unfit to serve as president and other
comments like:
"I continue to believe Mr. Trump will not be president," Obama said
at a news conference in California after a meeting with southeast Asian
leaders. "And the reason is that I have a lot of faith in the American
people. Being president is a serious job. It's not hosting a talk show,
or a reality show."
I used to think that right wing conspiracies about an Obama third term
were bullshit, through and through. But now I am concerned about a peaceful
transition in power. Will Obama give the reins to Trump? Will he put off
the election until there is a better result?
More importantly, will the American people be okay with that?
Could you post the links to those videos, I haven't seen the one with
the metal things falling out of her pants leg or the one with her drinking
vomit.
pre-9/11 memorial, one allegation floating in the conservative blogosphere
was that Hillary Clinton wears a catheter given some odd bulges in some
Clinton photos.
just repeating what I read…i'm in the camp that extraordinary claims
require extraordinary evidence.
unfortunately I doubt anyone will get Clinton to raise her pant legs
in public.
I had to wear one of those catheters for about a week after a procedure.
I had the smallest one available and there is no way the wrinkles in those
pictures accounts for the actual size of an empty bag, let alone one with
natural fluids. It's nonsense.
The mucus glass video is a total fake. Watch the source video, there
is clearly no green blob (though your source is a much better edit then
the one I saw on twitter).
As far as the fall, I have seen only two video with distinctly different
angles (main 45 degree angle and then one slightly off centered) and then
a third that is the same is the main video but mirrored laterally. I have
no idea why no one else points that out or why people are claiming it is
a third angle.
So let's give the old gal, who is no respecter of truth and decency herself
I would have to observe, a break, ok? Because we are such careful kindly
people who want to make sure of all the facts we think we have access to
before making any kind of statement or judgment about events. The Dem campaign,
the ants eating the aphids (see my little post below) being all about honesty
and issues and all that. Because "we" are "better than that," and so we
get our wings eaten off and milked of our sustenance and provide handy snack
food for the Foraminifera Rulers…
I am not advocating proving any breaks of excuses (if this is what you
mean). I am of the opinion that (in our dichotomous world) Trump is a poor
candidate, but that Clinton needs to go. That said, we need to
make sure the supporting material is real. I find the glob video highly
suspect, especially as the globes appear to disappear in translucent water
and glass as soon as the glass is brought down from her sip.
Well what do you imagine will happen if we decide not to be honest to
those who aren't honest. The resurrection of Bernie Sanders candidacy in
time for the election via our strategic lying or something?
Nah. So why not preserve an attempt at objectivity being we are going
to get screwed regardless.
Our real enemies aren't the rulers who act in
their interest but the corporations, if we know a way by pure deceit to
defeat them it might be more than worth it. But just getting tweedledee
instead of tweddledum acting in their name not really. All we've done is
pervert our own capacity to perceive reality for a non-plan. Our politicians
already take advantage of our gullibility to believing whatever (Iraq had
WMD etc.).
You're absolutely right about the mistakenly described "different" angle
that is actually a mirrored image, which I myself didn't catch either until
you mentioned it on my post of the video yesterday. (It's obvious of course
from the direction the van is facing, but the eye doesn't always catch the
"obvious.") The better angle from almost directly behind Clinton is harder
to find as a standalone video, and I haven't seen it posted as much. Here's
the best link I could find in a quick search.
She wasn't vomiting mucus, she lost – or deliberately spit out – the
cough drop she had put in her mouth earlier. I've done that myself, usually
out of fear of inadvertently inhaling the cough drop if I'm hit with a spell
of coughing.
That's my take as well, she was just trying to do it discretely.
Thing is, if we saw her occasionally spit a cough drop into a handkerchief
and then make a joke about all the talking she does, she might be seen as
more human and therefore likeable.
Epilepsy as a side effect of something tramatic versus Pneumonia. Fancy blue Zeiss lenses are sometimes used to treat epilepsy.
Short-term, often predictable loss of motor control is common.
An aide being close at all times, as in the person guiding her to the van,
would be expected.
Pneumonia does not produce motor issues but is often accompanied
by powerful bouts of coughing. Pneumonia does not require an aide but generally
involves lots of bed rest. It doesn't lead to rapid dehydration either.
She was there for less than an hour.
She didn't cough in the video and she couldn't stand on her own when
she moved from the post.
If they had planned better they would have said that Hillary had a bout
of food poisoning. Instead it was the explained as the heat and then, Hillary
showing no obvious symptoms, trying to imitate Typhoid Mary. I thought politicians
were better at fibbing than this.
These strange and erroneous notions about pneumonia and its effects are
spreading and they're pernicious. There's no way for us to be certain the reports of Hillary having pneumonia
are true or not, but her visible symptoms are consistent with a severe and/or
long untreated case of pneumonia, symptoms which can include shaking, dehydration,
feeling faint or passing out, high fever, "out of body" experience, severe
cough, and so on.
The people who are reporting their own experiences with pneumonia in
this thread can testify. I've been there too. I had a severe cough for weeks.
Motor problems seemed to hit from out of the blue. I passed out in a supermarket
line. When I finally got to the ER they hooked me up to an IV stat because
I was so dehydrated. I was in the hospital for eleven days on IV antibiotics
and fluids. And it was months before I recovered fully.
All of Hillary's visible symptoms are consistent with such a severe case
of pneumonia.
On the other hand, it could be something else or something else and pneumonia.
It's serious. And it could be deadly even if treated.
[H]er visible symptoms are consistent with a severe and/or long untreated
case of pneumonia
However, the facts of the situation are not. As far as "severe" goes, according to her release, she was diagnosed
on Friday, and given antibiotics. As anyone who has suffered bacterial respiratory
infection knows, antibiotics will usually get you on the road to recovery
pretty quickly. Combined with plenty of fluid intake, she should have been
out of the woods, not hurtling towards a complete physical breakdown. Also,
the prevailing message is that its's a "mild" case and that the real bugbear
is dehydration. It stretches credulity to suggest a person with a team of
handlers surrounding her at all times can't keep hydrated.
"Undiagnosed?" Seriously? She is admittedly under the care and supervision
of some medical staff. Pneumonia is fairly easy to spot if you're
examined. It's not like she's homeless or someone avoiding medical interaction
because of lack of insurance or funds.
As someone who has suffered from pneumonia three times in his life,
the fact is that when I was at my sickest point in each battle (high fever,
massive coughing, exhaustion), at no time did I become spastic. A person
who loses complete motor function due to pneumonia needs to get rushed to
a hospital, not her daughter's apartment.
While you caution against speculation, you actually engage in some pretty
tenuous, and I believe dangerous speculation in an attempt to lend credence
to what is obviously a poor, belated cover story.
You are way too optimistic re the curative powers of antibiotics. You've
got no idea how long she had it. And I've had much less serious infections
that have not responded well to meds. I'm as healthy as a horse yet I've
had multiple instances of it taking more than one course of antibiotics
to do much.
Having said that, I agree with the pneumonia claim being dodgy. Does
not add up to what happened on the tape.
Has anyone commented on the two women who to appear to be nurses
who are accompanying Clinton? They are in the video, both are
wearing identical navy blue dresses with short sleeves and both wear
flat beige colored shoes. They help Clinton into the vehicle.
I just wondered if it was standard procedure for medical personnel to
always travel with presidential candidates.
PS the dropping metal thing looked like it might be a lipstick.
One of the 'nurses' appears to be her personal doctor, Dr Lisa Bardack,
who was named in the press release stating that Hillary has pneumonia.
In these photos you can see Dr Bardack appearing to take her pulse
as they walked and also appearing to test Hillary's motor skills by asking
her to squeeze her fingers. Also notice when her pulse is being taken that
Hillary puts her right hand flat on on her chest – she does this a lot –
does she do it to hide/control a tremor?
It's also interesting that Dr Bardack just happened to be immediately
on hand when required – so it's not just a nurse but a doctor by her side
at all times now?
(Don't like using an obviously right wing website for the photos but
it's the best I can find at the moment).
I remember back in the day laughing at the efforts of the old Soviet
Union or North Korea trying to hide the health failures of their leaders…
welcome to the club … I wonder when the body double appears?!
I wish Hillary well and hope she recovers from what ever ails her.
However, watching the two videos prior to her entering the car, you can
see she is leaning against the chrome pillar for support, her right shoulder
is significantly lower than her left, then as she walks forward she can't
control her head, her right foot goes completely backward and is dragging
along the ground, then she collapses into the car. Perhaps a doctor can
explain all this, but I have had pneumonia three times and never had these
symptoms.
Even before she moves her head is shaky and cocked upwards. It doesn't
look good. I also wonder what the little metal vile or what not was that
dropped from her pants or around her as she was falling.
Oh, duh, I NEVER thought of that, that her meds could be what's messing
her up. I've been privately comparing her Chappaqua MD to Michael Jackson's
MD, in that
1. Her medical report looked like it was written by Hillary's lawyers,
2. You'd expect someone at Hillary's level to have a top doctor at a
NY teaching hospital but you can't keep secrets in places like that and
3. She's been awfully amped at some of her events, which could be
Adderall or other upper-ish drugs, which a conservative MD might be reluctant
to prescribe regularly to someone of her age. But the idea of drug interactions
is actually sorta obvious and should have occurred to me.
Many 'celebrities' (esp. secretive ones) receive concierge medical
care, which tends to be substandard. Maybe it's b/c of the secrecy, i dunno…
but it tends to be lousy.
"Many 'celebrities' (esp. secretive ones) receive concierge medical care,
which tends to be substandard."
extend that thought to all professional services. I get the impression
that despite their wealth, many celebrities are awful bad at finding competent
service providers.
Indeed, when I volunteered at a treatment centre, a fair number of high-functioning
chemically-dependent patients (C-level execs, senior clinicians, politicians)
came in as - and this choice of words is intentional - victims of bespoke
top-flight one-2-one primary care as provided by luxury outfits in London's
Harley Street or "hospitals" of the kind where a liveried footman helps
you from the limo at the entrance.
The drug regimes these places offered usually started with uppers or
downers to help, in the words of Philip Marlow, with the occasional "humps"
in the road; except of course, eventually it was all humps.
Then came the polypharmacy in often ever more bizarre and scarcely feasible
doses and combinations.
What usually pushed the patients I saw over the edge - and gave the medicine-as-consumerism
practitioners sufficient worry to finally throw in the towel - was an episode
of physical collapse as both the doctors and their unfortunate charges fell
off the tightropes they'd been walking.
When it comes to VIP patients if anyone were to access their records
you better have a reason. Those are the only patients where the officials
take Hipaa seriously. Fired, fined and lose your license. Hope that gossip
rag pays well.
Yves, I hadn't thought of that either. Good point offered by ambrit.
Excuses don't cut it with me, however. The end result is still the same.
I'm still having a problem with her saying that she doesn't remember
certain 'security briefings' back in 2012 due to her concussion. WHAT?
My reaction to that is why the hell didn't she step down at that
time, at least for a while, if her memory was so compromised? If she was
so affected by a concussion, she was obviously not well enough to be conducting
business as SOS.
Yet she uses that as an excuse now in relation to her total disregard
for security concerns and that makes it all okay, regardless of the outcome
created?
I have the same feelings about any drugs she may be on or medical condition
she obviously has if she's not willing to reveal it. She is not currently
well enough to be elected POTUS. The excuse for her behavior doesn't change
the facts her health is obviously compromised in some way, as it was then,
and should disqualify her.
Which, of course, is why she and her team are trying to hide it.
It's 'her turn' no matter what, apparently.
Is she setting the stage for if/when she starts a war with Russia, so
she can then fly above the destruction on Air Force One and blame her poor
decision on her meds this time?
Not just meds being out of wack. It could be drug abuse. As if any
one would deny any thing she wanted. This would enplane why they felt it
necessary to be less than forthcoming on the issue.
But then there is that cage little thing called the lack of evidence.
I highly doubt it is pneumonia. What grandmother with a serious illness
show up at her daughter's house with a not even 3 month old and a two year
old? There's campaigning and then there's the family dynasty. I doubt even
Hilary's ambitions would put herself ahead of her grandkids. Regardless,
it is poor judgement and more fodder for Trump.
If intentional "Here's a woman who cares more for herself then her
child or grand children"
If unintentional "Here's a woman who's judgement is so poor she puts
her family at risk with a contagious disease. If she's that unthinking about
her actions towards her family, what about America's families."
Once you connect the 9/11 event with that head bobbing incident. She
has something serious going on with her health. Ironically, she may actually
be telling the truth when she says she can't remember things about the e-mail
server, if she has Parkinson's.
By Sunday, and assuming she started on the antibiotics on Friday, she
had at least 24 hours of medication on board. And assuming she was not running
a fever, she would not be considered to be contagious when she arrived at
her daughter's.
Also, let's remember that Chelsea's apartment is no cold-water flat;
it is a 5,000 sq. ft. space that cost $10 million.
Here's a link to some photos and more .
Ms Clinton and Mr Mezvinsky's apartment has six and a half bathrooms,
a home office and den, plus a 252-square-foot planting terrace and a
private storage unit.
The couple will also enjoy two dishwashers, two washer/dryers, his
and her maze-like closet spaces and commodes, as well as natural light
flooding the female dressing room – with double-sided vanity mirrors.
'Wives eyes light up when they see the closets,' said Ms Lazenby,
the daughter of James Bond actor George Lazenby.
'They smile and say they'll need more clothes to live here. Their
husbands just shake their heads.
'The long apartment, located at 21 East 26th St enables 'one spouse
to be fast asleep while the other has a huge dinner party. All on one
floor,' she added.
One person who toured the building, which was built in 1924 by luxury
textile manufacturer Clarence B. Whitman & Sons, joked that residents
of The Whitman will have a longer walk to their kitchen than many New
Yorkers have to the corner store.
So…my point is that in a space that large, there was little danger of
exposing the babies to anything contagious.
I'm sure they do, but with 24 hours of medication, and assuming no fever
(and assuming she even had pneumonia), she likely wasn't contagious anyway.
In fact, most day care facilities/homes and schools permit children to
return under those same guidelines.
My guess is, though, that Chelsea's was the only place they could go
that was close by and where they were guaranteed to be able to control the
situation. Had she been taken to a hospital, there's no way any of what
transpired would not have ended up being leaked.
How many hands did Clinton shake between receiving her diagnosis and
being on medication for 24 hours?
Pretty sure I'm not the only one who's noticed that all the coughing
Clinton does she does into her hand, not into her elbow, so she's pretty
much a traveling Typhoid Mary.
Sorry, but my head's still spinnin' over the "6 1/2 bathrooms", which
begs the question how full of 'it' must a couple with 2 small children be
that they require that many bathrooms?
I remain disgusted with the fact Hillary claimed they were 'broke' when
they left the WH, and only able to afford '2 houses, Chelsea's education,
and helping out relatives'.
Yes, I suppose 6+ bathrooms would be required in the Clinton family.
"Why Are The Media Objectively Pro-Trump?"
[Paul Krugman,
The New York Times
]. He's got a point. After
all, the press systematically suppressed stories
about Sanders, who would have been a stronger
opponent for Trump than Clinton.
At the end of the day, I have concluded that my
focus on Hillary as of late (vs. Trump) has as much
to with my disgust for the mainstream media as
anything else.
To see these organs, which have destroyed this
country by keeping the people uninformed for
decades, now rally around a sickly, corrupt,
oligarch coddling politician as the empire enters
the collapse stage is simply too much to stomach.
Although I'm still voting 3rd party, it's now become
obvious that if my sentiments are widely reflected
across the country, Donald Trump will win the
election handily. As I tweeted earlier today:
The only positive thing to happen during this
election season is the death of mainstream media.
With their insufferable propaganda fully exposed,
there is no coming back.
Another positive thing is the demise of the
Bush dynasty. And if Donald Trump pulls it off,
the Clinton dynasty. I can't decide with is
worse though I tend to detest the Clinton
dynasty more especially now the its present star
is mucking the place up.
Another positive thing is the demise of the
Bush dynasty. And if Donald Trump pulls it off,
the Clinton dynasty. I can't decide with is
worse though I tend to detest the Clinton
dynasty more especially now the its present star
is mucking the place up.
Speaking of losing credibility… here is a
real shocker via The Hill:
CBS News edited a video clip and
transcript to remove former President Bill
Clinton's comment during an interview that
Hillary Clinton, now the Democratic
presidential nominee, "frequently" fainted
in the past.
Bill Clinton sat down with CBS's Charlie
Rose on Monday to try to clear the air
around questions regarding his wife's health
after she collapsed while getting into a van
at a 9/11 memorial ceremony on Sunday.
"Well, if it is, then it's a mystery to
me and all of her doctors," Bill Clinton
said when Rose asked him if Hillary Clinton
was simply dehydrated or if the situation
was more serious. "Frequently - well, not
frequently, rarely, on more than one
occasion, over the last many, many years,
the same sort of thing's happened to her
when she got severely dehydrated, and she's
worked like a demon, as you know, as
secretary of State, as a senator and in the
year since."
But the "CBS Evening News" version cut
Clinton's use of "frequently" out. And a
review by The Hill of the official
transcript released by the network shows
that Clinton saying "Frequently - well, not
frequently," is omitted as well.
Their credibility has eroded constantly with
the rise of alternative methods of
communication…it's just the election cycle that
lays it bare, like rain washing away a bunch of
soil where roots have already died.
According to evolving campaign lore, Donald Trump's son called failed Republican
candidate John Kasich ahead of Trump's VP pick in July and told him he could
be "the most powerful vice president" ever-in charge of foreign policy, and
domestic too-if he agreed to come on board.
While Trump's people have
denied such a lavish entreaty ever occurred, it has become a powerful political
meme: the Republican nominee's lack of experience would force him to default
to others, particularly on the international front, which is a never-ending
series of flash points dotting Europe, Asia, and the Middle East like a child's
Lite Brite.
On the Democratic side there is no such concern-Hillary Clinton has plenty
of experience as a senator and secretary of state, and was a "two-for-one" first
lady who not only took part (unsuccessfully) in the domestic health-care debate,
but
passionately advocated (successfully) for the bombing campaigns in Bosnia
and Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
So what of Trump and Clinton's vice-presidential picks? For starters, they
are both hawkish.
Indiana Gov. Mike Pence was an apt pupil of Bush and Cheney during the neoconservative
years, voting for the Iraq War in 2002 and serving as one of David Petraeus's
cheerleaders in favor of the 2007 surge. He has since supported every intervention
his fellow Republicans did, even giving
early praise to Hillary Clinton and the Obama administration for the 2011
intervention in Libya.
On the other side, Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine is as far from the Bernie Sanders
mold as they come: a centrist Democrat who supports a muscular, liberal-interventionist
foreign policy, and who has been pushing for greater intervention in Syria,
just like Hillary Clinton.
If veeps do matter-and as we saw with
Dick Cheney , in many ways they can, bigtime-the non-interventionists can
expect nothing but the status quo when it comes to war policy and the war machine
at home for the next four years. Under the right conditions, Pence would help
drag Trump to the right on war and defense, and Kaine would do nothing but bolster
Clinton's already hawkish views on a host of issues, including those involving
Syria, Russia, the Middle East, and China.
If anything, Pence could end up having more influence in the White House,
said Bonnie Kristian, a writer and
fellow at Defense
Priorities , in an interview with TAC . "With these two campaigns,
I would predict that Pence would have more of a chance of playing a bigger role
[in the presidency] than Tim Kaine does," she offered. Pence could bring to
bear a dozen years of experience as a pro-war congressman, including two years
on the foreign-affairs committee. "He's been a pretty typical Republican on
foreign policy and has a lot of neoconservative impulses. I don't think we could
expect anything different," she added.
For his part, Trump "has been all over the place" on foreign policy, she
said, and while his talk about restraint and Iraq being a failure appeals to
her and others who would like to see America's overseas operations scaled back,
his bench of close advisors is not encouraging.
Walid Phares ,
Gen. Michael Flynn ,
Chris Christie ,
Rudy Giuliani : along with Pence, all could fit like neat little pieces
into the Bush-administration puzzle circa 2003, and none has ever expressed
the same disregard for the Bush and Obama war policies as Trump has on the campaign
trail.
"On one hand, [Trump] has referred to the war in Iraq and regime change as
bad and nation-building as bad, but at the same time he has no ideological grounding,"
said Jack Hunter, politics editor at
Rare . If Trump leaves the policymaking up to others, including Pence, "that
doesn't bode well for those who think the last Republican administration was
too hawkish and did not exhibit restraint."
Pence,
Kristian reminds us , gave a speech just last year at the Conservative Political
Action Conference (CPAC) in which he called for a massive increase in military
spending. "It is imperative that conservatives again embrace America's role
as leader of the free world and the arsenal of democracy," Pence said, predicting
then that 2016 would be a "foreign-policy election."
"He embraces wholeheartedly a future in which America polices the world-forever-refusing
to reorient our foreign policy away from nation-building and toward restraint,
diplomacy and free trade to ensure U.S. security," Kristian wrote in
The Hill back when Pence accepted his place on the Trump ticket
in July. Since then, he has muted his support for Iraq (Trump has said Pence's
2003 vote doesn't matter, even calling it
"a mistake" ). Clearly the two men prefer to meet on the issue of Islamic
threats and the promise of "rebuilding the military," areas where they have
been equally enthusiastic.
Meanwhile, former Bernie Sanders supporters should be rather underwhelmed
with Kaine on national-security policy. On one hand,
writers rush to point out that Kaine split with President Obama and Hillary
Clinton just a few years ago, arguing the administration could not continue
to use the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) to fight ISIS
in Iraq and Syria. He also proposed legislation with Sen. John McCain to
update the War Powers Act; the bill would have required the president to
consult with Congress when starting a war, and Congress to vote on any war within
seven days of military action. That would tighten the constitutional responsibilities
of both branches, the senators said in 2013.
On the War Powers Act, Kaine gets points with constitutionalists like University
of Texas law professor Steven Vladeck, who said Kaine's effort "recognizes,
as we all should, the broader problems with the War Powers Resolution as currently
written-and with the contemporary separation of war powers between Congress
and the executive branch." But on the issue of the AUMF, Vladeck and others
have not been so keen on Kaine.
Kaine has made
two proposals relating to the AUMF, and both would leave the door open to
extended overseas military combat operations-including air strikes, raids, and
assassinations-without a specific declaration of war. The first directs the
president to modify or repeal the 2001 AUMF "by September 2017"; the second,
authored with Republican Sen. Jeff Flake, keeps the 2001 AUMF but updates the
2002 AUMF used to attack Iraq to include ISIS.
A revised AUMF is likely to do precisely what the Bush administration
sought to do in the run-up to the Iraq War: codify a dangerous unilateral
theory of preemptive war, and provide a veneer of legality for an open-ended
conflict against an endlessly expanding list of targets.
While he might be applauded for trying to strengthen "the rule of law on
foreign policy," said Kristian, it's not clear he wants to do it "to scale back
these interventions." As a member of both the armed-services and foreign-relations
committees, he has already argued for greater intervention in Syria, calling
for "humanitarian zones"-which, like "no-fly zones" and "no-bombing zones,"
mean the U.S. better be ready to tangle with the Syrian president and Russia
as well as ISIS.
Plus, when Kaine was running for his Senate seat in 2011, and Obama-with
Clinton's urging-was in the midst of a coalition bombing campaign in Libya,
Kaine
was much more noncommittal when it came to the War Powers Act, saying Obama
had a "good rationale" for going in. When asked if he believed the War Powers
Act legally bound the president to get congressional approval to continue operations
there, he said, "I'm not a lawyer on that."
If anything, Kaine will serve as a reliable backup to a president who is
perfectly willing to use military force to promote "democracy" overseas. He
neither softens Clinton's edges on military and war, nor is necessary to sharpen
them. "Does Tim Kaine change [any dynamic]? I don't think so," said Hunter,
adding, "I can't imagine he is as hawkish as her on foreign policy-she is the
worst of the worst."
So when it comes to veep picks, the value is in the eye of the beholder.
"If you are a conservative and you don't think Trump is hawkish enough, you
will like it that Pence is there," notes Hunter. On the other hand, if you like
Trump's attitude on the messes overseas-preferring diplomacy over destruction,
as he said in his
speech Wednesday -Pence might make you think twice, added Kristian. "I'm
not sure Pence is going to further those inclinations, if indeed they do exist."
To make it more complicated, the American public is unsure how it wants to
proceed overseas anyway. While a majority favor airstrikes and sending in special-operations
groups to fight ISIS in Syria, only a minority want to insert combat troops
or even fund anti-Assad groups, according to an
August poll . A slim majority-52 percent-want to establish no-fly zones.
Yet only 31 percent want to to see a deal that would keep Bashar Assad in power.
A tall order for any White House.
Kelley Beaucar Vlahos is a Washington, D.C.-based freelance reporter.
"... If Donald Trump really is doing Presidential Campaign as performance art, it may turn out that his Doctor's letter about his awesome health is the most brilliant aspect of it. Call me wild and crazy but I'm beginning to think that item with its sheer obvious level of BS was a fairly brilliant parody of what we have seen and probably will see from Clinton. ..."
"... The Putin-did-it comments on that article are depressing and ..."
If Donald Trump really is doing Presidential
Campaign as performance art, it may turn out that his
Doctor's letter about his awesome health is the most
brilliant aspect of it. Call me wild and crazy but I'm
beginning to think that item with its sheer obvious
level of BS was a fairly brilliant parody of what we
have seen and probably will see from Clinton.
Of course, he isn't and that means it is just taking the BS to the nth degree
at least until we see the new Clinton release.
RE: poisoning - gee, who is next in line
behind Hillary? I mean, on the Dem side? This
whole "political season" is looking more like
something out of the Borgia era. And there is
no history of one part or another of the CIA
poisoning people like Fidel Castro or whatever,
and how many parts of the CIA and the other
bits of runaway Empire would like Clinton gone
so maybe they could slide a Biden into the slot…
"Questions for the presidential candidates on nuclear
terrorism, proliferation, weapons policy, and energy"
Can we first stop talking about nuclear terrorism like it's actually a thing?
If no terrorists managed to get the bomb during the deluge of corruption and
broken bureaucracy that was the collapse of the USSR (yes, NATO and Pentagon,
the Soviet Union also isn't a thing anymore), then none ever are.
No nuclear
country, be it Pakistan or anyone else, is dumb enough to hand over a nuke.
Can you imagine the witch hunt that would ensue if someone turned a city into
a mushroom cloud? Assuming WW3 didn't just start right then and there. No amount
of money would make the certain risk of getting caught worth it.
All that leaves is a dirty bomb, which is actually a whole lot of effort
for something that is no better than an infinitely easier fertilizer bomb.
Bill
looks
sick
too. Notice
the
extreme
thinness,
and
that
red
waxy
pallor.
I
wonder
if
he's
got
AIDS.
Serve
the
mass-murdering
psychopathic
SOB
right.
Did
you
miss
the
part
about
surveillance
cameras
being
set
up
in
key
places
around
the
compound
to
record
people
engaging
in
child
rape
so
that
it
could
be
used
for
blackmail?
It
may
be
PC
to
say
one's
sex
life
is
personal
and
no
one's
business,
but
when
you
are
a
public
servant
(which
is
all
these
scum-fucking-bags
are
supposed
to
be,
not
elitist
rulers),
then
the
personal
life
becomes
one
of
national
importance.
If
the
sociopathic
rug-muncher
Shitlary
manages
to
steal
what
the
feminazis
will
rebrand
as
the
"Ova
Office,"
you
can
be
damn
sure
that
she
is
very
vulnerable
to
being
blackmailed
for
her
scumbag
husband's
lifetime
of
rape.
She
will
give
the
blackmailers
whatever
the
fuck
they
want
because
she'll
want
her
term
to
be
so
many
years
of
'peace
and
prosperity,'
the
same
lie
the
leftists
used
to
rewrite
the
history
of
the
92-2000.
If Hillary Clinton or any other Democratic nominee had to leave the race,
the DNC would need to gavel back into session and re-do the process all over
again. The DNC consists of more than 200 members, selected by Democrats in
all 50 states as well as the chairs and vice chairs of each state party.
Except this time, the average Joe rank-and-file Democrat would be shut out;
it is the DNC officials that were railed at throughout this year's campaign
who are afforded the power of finding a replacement.
Article
III, Section 1
, the clause that provides the DNC with that power, is
as straightforward as can be: "The Democratic National Committee shall have
general responsibility for the affairs of the Democratic Party between
National Conventions...This responsibility shall include...filling vacancies
in the nominations for the office of President and Vice President."
"... In fact, HRC may be a better prospect for neocons, because they can distract the Dem base with how cool it is for a "strong woman" to send men into battle. Anyone opposed must be a misogynist/sexist pig. By contrast Jeb would be too obvious. ..."
"... "There is no prospect of a non-interventionist president." ..."
"... Exactly. Obama has certainly proved this to be true, for those who might've thought otherwise. And since it is true, if one is going to vote anyway, then the decision won't be made on the basis of not "wanting more wars with terrible outcomes." There will have to be another, different, deciding factor, since that factor would rule out Ms. Clinton AND every other candidate. ..."
"... Yes, I have to second Lysander's view. People - both in and outside the US - must first disabuse themselves of ANY notion that the US is a democratic state, that "changes" in leadership will actually bring about ANY difference in foreign/domestic policy and that the American war criminal ship can be righted by the people utilizing the "democratic" mechanisms at their disposal. ..."
"... Furthermore, after the Obama debacle and his utter betrayal etc of his supporters if anyone thinks someone in the American Establishment is looking out for their peon asses why then they probably also believe that the US was "surprised/caught off guard" - yet again - by ISIS et al in Iraq. ..."
"... I wish Rand Paul had his fathers balls, but he doesnt. Ron was a Libertarian pretending to be a Republican, while Rand is a Republican pretending to be a Libertarian... Rand would be no different than any other Republican or Democratic establishment schmuck. ..."
"... I never did like Ron Pauls economic policy, being left leaning, and I'm doubtful whether he would have actually accomplished anything useful as President, but his NonInterventionism was admirable and I was happy to put his name in in the Rethug primary in 2012 for that reason alone. ..."
"... Mr. Kristol said he, too, sensed "more willingness to rethink" neoconservatism, which he called "vindicated to some degree" by the fruits of Mr. Obama's detached approach to Syria and Eastern Europe. Mr. Kagan, he said, gives historical heft to arguments "that are very consistent with the arguments I made, and he made, 20 years ago, 10 years ago." ..."
"... After all the slaughter these people feel like crowing. They are clearly, as JSorrentine often reminds us, pyschopath butchers. ..."
"... Incidentally, where is the outrage from Samantha Powers about the ISIS massacre in Tikrit? ..."
"... Well, I guess the world just can't talk about how the amazingly rapid rise of ISIS/L and fall of Iraq completely continues the plans of the apartheid genocidal state of Israel's - and their traitorous Zionist partners in the American Establishment - as set out in the Yinon Plan and Clean Break strategies because - HOW FORTUITOUS...I mean, terribly sad and unexpected, sorry - some unlucky Israeli teenagers just happened to be "kidnapped" by "Hamas" just as the ISIS show was kicking off or so that's what the apartheid genocidal state of Israel is telling the world. ..."
"... Shrillary wouldn't be where she is today if she wasn't criminally insane. I want her to become President. She'll redefine the meaning of Eerily Inept (a label coined by Gore Vidal and attached to G Dubya Bush). Her greatest moment was when Lavrov called her out on her RESET button and pointed out, with a chuckle, "You got it wrong. It doesn't say RESET it says SHORT CIRCUIT." ..."
"... Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who argued in favor of arming Syrian rebels, said last week at an event in New York hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations, "this is not just a Syrian problem anymore. I never thought it was just a Syrian problem. I thought it was a regional problem. ..."
"... Why, even HILLARY is just SOOOO SURPRISED about people trying to erase boundaries, huh? Funny, she should have read further into yesterday's times where it seems that the Zionist mouthpiece of record was desperately trying to get "out in front" of anyone mentioning that the fracturing of Iraq and the ME was all part of long-time Israeli strategy: ..."
"... In 2006, it was Ralph Peters, the retired lieutenant colonel turned columnist, who sketched a map that subdivided Saudi Arabia and Pakistan and envisioned Kurdish, Sunni and Shiite republics emerging from a no-longer-united Iraq. Two years later, The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg imagined similar partings-of-the-ways, with new microstates -- an Alawite Republic, an Islamic Emirate of Gaza -- taking shape and Afghanistan splitting up as well. Last year, it was Robin Wright's turn in this newspaper, in a map that (keeping up with events) subdivided Libya as well. ..."
"... As president she's da bomb! ..."
"... Hillary is a loathsome war mongering bitch. She almost had a public orgasm when Libyan leader Quadaffi was tortured and murdered by US supported Libyan rebels. The muder of Chris Stevens was a case of what goes around comes around. ..."
"... A point which nobody else has made as far as I know. To wit there is a big overlap between the banking and Israel lobbies since wealthy Jews account for a hugely disproportionate number of top financial movers and shakers. Anything that helps the financial industry also helps the war mongering Israel and neo con lobbies. The heavily Jewish Fed is another enabler of all that is wrong with America today. ..."
"... I, also agree, with the possible exception of replacing the word "Zionist", with the word "Corporatist", although both can be rightly used. We'll still get the person the 1%ers want us to have. Ain't Oligarchies grand? ..."
"... Hillary's election depends on two things still unknown: her health and whether the Republicans can manage to choose someone sufficiently batshit crazy to make her the best of abysmal alternatives. ..."
"... HRH is a Neo Liberal of Arianne 'Sniff Sniff' Huffington's type, the 'Third Way Up Your Ass' of Globalist NAFTA/TPP Free Trade Neonazi destruction of labor and environmental protections, and in your face with NOOOOO apologies. ..."
"... And Victoria Nuland indicates that she agrees with her husband Robert Kagan's criticism of Obama's foreign policy. ..."
"... Would it be safe to say Hillary's White Trash ? ..."
"... There are some really nice photographs of Hillary being very friendly with bearded famous Libyan Islamists (Gaddafi was still alive then). In combination with Benghazi - I think you probably can connect the people greeting Hillary with what happened there (and today's Iraq) I would not think she has a chance to convince with foreign policy. ..."
"... 'You have a schism between Sunni and Shia throughout the region that is profound. Some of it is directed or abetted by states who are in contests for power there.'" Now, if only he had mentioned the states included and featured the (United) States and Israel. Obama...usually a day late and a dollar short and leading or retreating from behind. ..."
"... I would rank Obama as the most cynical one. He is doing the dark colonial art. You can berate Bush for bombing Iraq (Obama did that with Libya, just as bad), but he did sink American manpower and treasure for all this futile nation building stuff, ie he tried to repair it. ..."
"... Obama tried to double down on the nation building stuff in Afghanistan, even copying the "surge". He is still not out of Afghanistan. ..."
"... He then tried to continue Bush's policy on the cheap, scrapping the nation building stuff and concentrating on shock and awe in Libya. When Russia put a stop to that in Syria he doubled down on the subversion supporting guerilla groups. He is now back in Iraq with allies supporting a "Sunni" insurrection by proxy. After a "color revolution" in Ukraine. ..."
"... It is not "US foreign policy" but the policy of the british empire. If he was running a US foreign policy, he would at least sometimes do something positive for Americans, by accident if nothing more. ..."
"... Economic policy to vote on? Are you joking? Whichever party we elect we get Neoliberalism anyway. ..."
"... "That smile and her gloating about his death made me feel she was some sort of sociopath." Massinissa, you meant psychopath, didn't you? ..."
Here is the reason why Hillary Clinton should never ever become President
of the United States.
A (sympathetic) New York Times profile of neocon Robert Kagan has
this on Clinton II:
But Exhibit A for what Robert Kagan describes as his "mainstream" view of
American force is his relationship with former Secretary of State
Hillary Rodham Clinton, who remains the vessel into which many interventionists
are pouring their hopes. Mr. Kagan pointed out that he had recently
attended a dinner of foreign-policy experts at which Mrs. Clinton was the
guest of honor, and that he had served on her bipartisan group of foreign-policy
heavy hitters at the State Department, where his wife worked as her spokeswoman.
"I feel comfortable with her on foreign policy," Mr. Kagan said,
adding that the next step after Mr. Obama's more realist approach "could
theoretically be whatever Hillary brings to the table" if elected president.
"If she pursues a policy which we think she will pursue," he added,
"it's something that might have been called neocon, but clearly
her supporters are not going to call it that; they are going to call it
something else."
Want more wars with terrible outcomes and no winner at all? Vote the neocon's
vessel, Hillary Clinton.
Clinton, by the way, is also
a coward,
unprincipled and
greedy. Her achievements as Secretary of State were about zero. Why would
anyone vote for her?
Posted by b on June 16, 2014 at 09:09 AM |
Permalink
I'm afraid you focus too much on elections that have no meaning. It seems
we may be cornered into choosing between HR Clinton and Jeb Bush. The latter,
I'm sure, would earn equal praise from the Kagan clan. There is no prospect
of a non-interventionist president. There is no prospect of a president
that is not a Zionist stooge.
In fact, HRC may be a better prospect for neocons, because they can
distract the Dem base with how cool it is for a "strong woman" to send men
into battle. Anyone opposed must be a misogynist/sexist pig. By contrast
Jeb would be too obvious.
Personally, I don't think she is anyone to worry about gaining the office.
Too much hatred of her by most Americans, from her serial lying to her terrible
foreign policy, to her standing by bent dick, in her lust for power. She
will be backed by feminazis,homonazis and zionazis(Kagan).
Not enough devil worshippers in America,at least not yet,and I believe
Americans,from current events that our traitor MSM will be unable to counter
with their usual BS,that we are down the rabbit hole of idiotic intervention,and
we will end this nonsense,and return to worrying about America,not foreign
malevolent monsters like Israel.
Well,I can at least hope,it springs eternal.
"There is no prospect of a non-interventionist president."
Exactly. Obama has certainly proved this to be true, for those who
might've thought otherwise. And since it is true, if one is going to vote
anyway, then the decision won't be made on the basis of not "wanting more
wars with terrible outcomes." There will have to be another, different,
deciding factor, since that factor would rule out Ms. Clinton AND every
other candidate.
Yes, I have to second Lysander's view. People - both in and outside
the US - must first disabuse themselves of ANY notion that the US is a democratic
state, that "changes" in leadership will actually bring about ANY difference
in foreign/domestic policy and that the American war criminal ship can be
righted by the people utilizing the "democratic" mechanisms at their disposal.
I understand that some speak to how corrupt our institutions are but
there always seems to be a "feel-goodiness" - i.e., we can still fix it
all, boys and girls, if you all just clap your hands LOUDER!! - implicit
in their analyses/prescriptions when there should be nothing but anger,
fear and revulsion towards the fascist war criminal state that we live within.
Furthermore, after the Obama debacle and his utter betrayal etc of
his supporters if anyone thinks someone in the American Establishment is
looking out for their peon asses why then they probably also believe that
the US was "surprised/caught off guard" - yet again - by ISIS et al in Iraq.
"There is no chance of a non-interventionist president"
I wish Rand Paul had his fathers balls, but he doesnt. Ron was a
Libertarian pretending to be a Republican, while Rand is a Republican pretending
to be a Libertarian... Rand would be no different than any other Republican
or Democratic establishment schmuck.
I never did like Ron Pauls economic policy, being left leaning, and
I'm doubtful whether he would have actually accomplished anything useful
as President, but his NonInterventionism was admirable and I was happy to
put his name in in the Rethug primary in 2012 for that reason alone.
Great post, b. I saw the article and felt the same thing. While commentators
are right to say that the foreign policy of the U.S. remains largely untouched
regardless of which candidate or party wins the White House (which the NYT
piece does a fine job illustrating), I do think Hillary is the worst the
Democrats have to offer.
What I found amazing about the story is how neocons are now preening
about as if they have been vindicated:
Mr. Kristol said he, too, sensed "more willingness to rethink" neoconservatism,
which he called "vindicated to some degree" by the fruits of Mr. Obama's
detached approach to Syria and Eastern Europe. Mr. Kagan, he said, gives
historical heft to arguments "that are very consistent with the arguments
I made, and he made, 20 years ago, 10 years ago."
After all the slaughter these people feel like crowing. They are clearly,
as JSorrentine often reminds us, pyschopath butchers.
Incidentally,
where is the outrage from Samantha Powers about the ISIS massacre in Tikrit?
Well, I guess the world just can't talk about how the amazingly rapid
rise of ISIS/L and fall of Iraq completely continues the plans of the apartheid
genocidal state of Israel's - and their traitorous Zionist partners in the
American Establishment - as set out in the
Yinon Plan and Clean Break strategies because - HOW FORTUITOUS...I mean,
terribly sad and unexpected, sorry - some unlucky Israeli teenagers just
happened to be "kidnapped" by "Hamas" just as the ISIS show was kicking
off or so that's what the apartheid genocidal state of Israel is telling
the world.
Yeah, I bet the apartheid genocidal state of Israel probably has just
NO IDEA about what's going on in Iraq what with their harrowing search -
read: collective punishment for the residents of the
illegally occupied territories - for the 3 missing boys who haven't
been ransomed or claimed to have been taken by anyone.
Wait a second...what if it was ISIS/L and NOT Hamas that "kidnapped"
the boys!!!Holy tie-in, Bat-Man!!!!
Then there would be NO WAY that what we're witnessing is the furthering
of the Yinon Plan because the apartheid genocidal Israelis would never instigate
false flag terror to further/distract from their own ends/agenda, would
they?
Nah.
A Qaeda-inspired group calling itself the Islamic State in Iraq and
Syria - Palestine, West Bank claimed responsibility for the kidnappings,
saying it wanted to avenge Israel's killing of three of its group in
the Hebron area late last year and to try to free prisoners from Israeli
jails. The credibility of the claim was not immediately clear.
But clear enough for the Zionist mouthpiece of the NYT to print it, right?
Shrillary wouldn't be where she is today if she wasn't criminally
insane. I want her to become President. She'll redefine the meaning of Eerily
Inept (a label coined by Gore Vidal and attached to G Dubya Bush). Her greatest
moment was when Lavrov called her out on her RESET button and pointed out,
with a chuckle, "You got it wrong. It doesn't say RESET it says SHORT CIRCUIT."
Then he laughed. At her, not with her. She's a sick, intellectually lazy,
dumb, joke. America deserves her.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who argued in
favor of arming Syrian rebels, said last week at an event in New York
hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations, "this is not just a Syrian
problem anymore. I never thought it was just a Syrian problem. I thought
it was a regional problem. I could not have predicted, however,
the extent to which ISIS could be effective in seizing cities in Iraq
and trying to erase boundaries to create an Islamic state."
Why, even HILLARY is just SOOOO SURPRISED about people trying to
erase boundaries, huh? Funny, she should have read further into yesterday's
times where it seems that the Zionist mouthpiece of record was desperately
trying to get "out in front" of anyone mentioning that the fracturing of
Iraq and the ME was all part of long-time Israeli strategy:
In 2006, it was Ralph Peters, the retired lieutenant colonel turned
columnist, who sketched a map that subdivided Saudi Arabia and Pakistan
and envisioned Kurdish, Sunni and Shiite republics emerging from a no-longer-united
Iraq. Two years later, The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg imagined similar
partings-of-the-ways, with new microstates -- an Alawite Republic, an
Islamic Emirate of Gaza -- taking shape and Afghanistan splitting up
as well. Last year, it was Robin Wright's turn in this newspaper, in
a map that (keeping up with events) subdivided Libya as well.
Peters's map, which ran in Armed Forces Journal, inspired conspiracy
theories about how this was America's real plan for remaking the Middle
East. But the reality is entirely different: One reason these maps have
remained strictly hypothetical, even amid regional turmoil, is that
the United States has a powerful interest in preserving the Sykes-Picot
status quo.
This is not because the existing borders are in any way ideal. Indeed,
there's a very good chance that a Middle East that was more politically
segregated by ethnicity and faith might become a more stable and harmonious
region in the long run.
My favorite part of the above column is that it references a previous
column from the Zionist NYT from last year in which a war criminal even
drew up the
new map of the ME!!
Oh, but that war criminal thought SYRIA was going to be the trigger that
allowed for the culmination of the Yinon Plan. Oops!
And then ALSO YESTERDAY in the
NYT everyone's favorite little war Establishment mouthpiece Nicholas
Kristoff had this to say:
The crucial step, and the one we should apply diplomatic pressure to
try to achieve, is for Maliki to step back and share power with Sunnis
while accepting decentralization of government.
If Maliki does all that, it may still be possible to save Iraq. Without
that, airstrikes would be a further waste in a land in which we've already
squandered far, far too much.
DECENTRALIZATION, huh? Why, Nicky, that sounds like what Putin has suggested
for Ukraine, huh? Shhhhhhhh
And of course Mr. Fuckhead Tom Friedman weighs in ALSO YESTERDAY in the
NYT with this:
THE disintegration of Iraq and Syria is upending an order that has defined
the Middle East for a century. It is a huge event, and we as a country
need to think very carefully about how to respond. Having just returned
from Iraq two weeks ago, my own thinking is guided by five principles,
and the first is that, in Iraq today, my enemy's enemy is my enemy.
Other than the Kurds, we have no friends in this fight. Neither Sunni
nor Shiite leaders spearheading the war in Iraq today share our values.
The ME is going to be split up inevitably: check
The US/Israel are JUST NOWHERE to be found: check
Thanks, Tom, you fucking war criminal scum!!!
To review:
Everyone in the Establishment - fake left, right, center, dove, hawk,
blah blah - says that it's just inevitable now that Iraq and the ME will
probably be broken up.
Everyone in the Establishment also agrees that NO ONE could see this
whole ISIS etc shitpile coming, right?
Anyone else get the feeling that this is a coordinated continuation of
the Zionist Plan for the Middle East?
Naahh. Nothing to see here, fuckers!!! Move along!!!!
She ties right in with the whole pink power agenda. She is the woMAN
version and can also be useful for the women=victims, but, no way for the
women/whore
women/victim/whore is quintessentially Pussy Riot
And if you criticize HC you are just a woman hater!
(you know like antisemitic)
Same as Obama- criticize him, you are just a racist
Shuts the complaints right off!
Hillary is a loathsome war mongering bitch. She almost had a public
orgasm when Libyan leader Quadaffi was tortured and murdered by US supported
Libyan rebels. The muder of Chris Stevens was a case of what goes around
comes around.
A point which nobody else has made as far as I know. To wit there
is a big overlap between the banking and Israel lobbies since wealthy Jews
account for a hugely disproportionate number of top financial movers and
shakers. Anything that helps the financial industry also helps the war mongering
Israel and neo con lobbies. The heavily Jewish Fed is another enabler of
all that is wrong with America today.
lysander @ 4: "There is no prospect of a president that is not a Zionist
stooge."
I, also agree, with the possible exception of replacing the word
"Zionist", with the word "Corporatist", although both can be rightly used.
We'll still get the person the 1%ers want us to have. Ain't Oligarchies
grand?
Hillary's election depends on two things still unknown: her health
and whether the Republicans can manage to choose someone sufficiently batshit
crazy to make her the best of abysmal alternatives. I think her health
is the critical variable, as the PTB are going to make sure that the Republican
candidate will come out strongly for privatization of social security and
reversing the 19th amendment. Vote-rigging and gerrymandering will maintain
a sufficiently close election to preserve the simulacrum of a free election.
HRH is a Neo Liberal of Arianne 'Sniff Sniff' Huffington's type,
the 'Third Way Up Your
Ass' of Globalist NAFTA/TPP Free Trade Neonazi destruction of labor and
environmental
protections, and in your face with NOOOOO apologies.
That she is a totally-disjointed Royal is clear in her 'dead broke' claim.
That she is a famous Hectorian, constantly checking which way public opinion
is flowing, then crafting
her confabulated dialogue as screed to her real intents, is well known.
Der Prevaricator.
What should be equally well known, if news got around, Hillary (and UKs
Milliband) grifted
Hamid Karzai $5 BILLION of Americans' last life savings, stolen from US
Humanitarian Aid
to Afghanistan, then made five trips to Kabul for no apparent purpose, before
announcing
that her $-35 MILLION 'dead broke' presidential campaign had been paid off
by 'anonymous
donors'. This is all public record; in the 2009 International Conference
on Afghanistan in
London, right in the conference speeches, framed as 'Karzai's demand', but
in fact, that
speech of Karzai's was written by US State Department. I read the drafts.
'Bicycling'.
Hillary soon had to fly back one more time and grift Karzai an emergency
$3.5 BILLION
theft, after he lost Americans' $5 BILLION while speculating in Dubai R/E
by looting
his Bank of Kabul. Her 'injection of capital' saved the bank from being
audited, and
no doubt saved all the Kaganites from an embarrassing and public episiotomy.
In the end, Hillary retired with a fortune of $50 MILLION, again announced
publicly, which
together with the $-35 MILLION campaign payoff in violation of all US election
regulations,
is exactly 1% of the $8.5 BILLION she grifted to Karzai. She's in the 'One
Percent Club'.
"It's a Great Big Club, ...and you ain't in it!" George 'The Man' Carlin
But who cares? I'll tell you. The Russian know about this grift, certainly
the Israelis
know about this grift, the Millibandits know, the London Karzais know, and
if G-d forbid,
Hillary became HRHOTUS, Americans will be blackmailed down to their underdrawers.
There are some really nice photographs of Hillary being very friendly
with bearded famous Libyan Islamists (Gaddafi was still alive then). In
combination with Benghazi - I think you probably can connect the people
greeting Hillary with what happened there (and today's Iraq) I would not
think she has a chance to convince with foreign policy.
"Well at the risk of being a smartass her achievements were negative,
the American hegemony is in worse condition because of her."
Because of her and it.
Dubhaltach gets it right, and as applied to events inclusive of and after
9-11-2001. The purported masterful seamless garment of conspiracy,
yet it weakened the US and helped get Israel whacked good by Hezbollah.
As for the unmentioned Saudi, it is of course impossible that Saudi could
outplay longterm both the US and Israel longterm.
Just as it was impossible Chalabi could outplay the neocons and help
win Iran the Iraq War. Who is playing catch up and who is
playing masterfully cohesive and unbeatable conspiracy?
Dubhaltach gets it right, the US will be pushed out of the Mideast and
Israel is longterm DOOMED.
Here is Obama in the very recent Remnick interview
"Obama said:
'You have a schism between Sunni and Shia throughout the region
that is profound. Some of it is directed or abetted by states who are in
contests for power there.'" Now, if only he had mentioned the states
included and featured the (United) States and Israel. Obama...usually a
day late and a dollar short and leading or retreating from behind.
I would rank Obama as the most cynical one. He is doing the dark
colonial art. You can berate Bush for bombing Iraq (Obama did that with
Libya, just as bad), but he did sink American manpower and treasure for
all this futile nation building stuff, ie he tried to repair it.
Obama tried to double down on the nation building stuff in Afghanistan,
even copying the "surge". He is still not out of Afghanistan.
He then tried to continue Bush's policy on the cheap, scrapping the
nation building stuff and concentrating on shock and awe in Libya. When
Russia put a stop to that in Syria he doubled down on the subversion supporting
guerilla groups. He is now back in Iraq with allies supporting a "Sunni"
insurrection by proxy. After a "color revolution" in Ukraine.
He just "sold" US foreign policy in a different target group, Hillary
will sell it to her target group, Jeb Bush to his.
It is not "US foreign policy" but the policy of the british empire.
If he was running a US foreign policy, he would at least sometimes do something
positive for Americans, by accident if nothing more.
"That smile and her gloating about his death made me feel she was
some sort of sociopath." Massinissa, you meant psychopath, didn't you?
the following is an excerpt from essay written by James at Winter Patriot:
"... Psychopaths are people without a conscience; without compassion
for others; without a sense of shame or guilt. The majority of people carry
within them the concern for others that evolution has instilled in us to
allow us to survive as groups. This is the evolutionary basis of the quality
of compassion. Compassion is not just a matter of virtue; it is a matter
of survival. Psychopaths do not have this concern for others and so are
a danger to the survival of the rest of us.
Psychopaths, as a homogeneous group, would not survive one or two generations
by themselves. They are motivated only by self interest and would exploit
each other till they ended up killing each other. Which gives one pause
for thought! They are parasites and need the rest of us to survive. In doing
so they compromise the survival of the whole species.
Psychopaths represent approximately between 1% and 20% of the population
in western countries depending on whose research you go by and also depending
on how broad a definition of the condition you adopt. It is generally held,
though, that there is a hard core of between 4-6% or so and maybe another
10 -15% of the population that is functionally psychopathic in that they
will exploit their fellow human being without hesitation.
The hard core are untreatable. They see nothing wrong with who or what
they are. The other 10-15% group may be persuaded to act differently in
a different environment or a different society. The second group act out
of a misguided strategy of survival. I'll concentrate on the hard core 5%
and the singular fact that must be borne in mind with them is that they
are incapable of change for the better. They cannot reform or be reformed.
And you can take that to the bank in every case! They must never be trusted.
Documented liars like those that populate the current Kiev regime
can be confidently assumed to be psychopaths from their behaviour and so
will never negotiate in good faith and will always renege on any deals they
make. The same can be said for the governments of the US and UK who back
them. Historically, they have never made a treaty that they did not subsequently
break."
James' essay is extremely informative wrt group psychopathy... some of
you may want to give it a read:
psychopath: a person suffering from chronic mental disorder with abnormal
or violent social behavior.
an unstable and aggressive person. "schoolyard psychopaths will gather around
a fight to encourage the combatants"
Mina, now that I've looked up these links for you, I am confused myself!
Since a sociopath is less of a danger to the rest of us, I prefer to call
TPTB and their puppets psychopaths. Not your bad at all, apparently the
two are so similar as to there being difficulty telling them apart.
btw, I always enjoy your posts ~ not only do I get new info, but often
new sources... which is great. Thanks!
"... Hillary Clinton's National Security Advisers Are a "Who's Who" of the Warfare State ..."
"... The list of key advisers - which includes the general who executed the troop surge in Iraq and a former Bush homeland security chief turned terror profiteer - is a strong indicator that Clinton's national security policy will not threaten the post-9/11 national-security status quo that includes active use of military power abroad and heightened security measures at home. ..."
Hillary Clinton's National Security Advisers Are a "Who's Who" of the
Warfare State By Zaid Jilani, Alex Emmons, and Naomi LaChance
HILLARY CLINTON IS meeting with a new national security "working group"
that is filled with an elite "who's who" of the military-industrial complex
and the security deep state.
The list of key advisers - which includes the general who executed the
troop surge in Iraq and a former Bush homeland security chief turned terror
profiteer - is a strong indicator that Clinton's national security policy
will not threaten the post-9/11 national-security status quo that includes
active use of military power abroad and heightened security measures at
home.
It's a story we've seen before in President Obama's early appointments.
In retrospect, analysts have pointed to the continuity in national security
and intelligence advisers as an early sign that despite his campaign rhetoric
Obama would end up building on - rather than tearing down - the often-extralegal,
Bush-Cheney counterterror regime. For instance, while Obama promised in
2008 to reform the NSA, its director was kept on and its reach continued
to grow.
Obama's most fateful decision may have been choosing former National
Counterterrorism Center Director John Brennan to be national security adviser,
despite Brennan's support of Bush's torture program. Brennan would go on
to run the president's drone program, lead the CIA, fight the Senate's torture
investigation, and then lie about searching Senate computers.
That backdrop is what makes Clinton's new list of advisers so significant.
It includes Gen. David Petraeus, the major architect of the 2007 Iraq
War troop surge, which brought 30,000 more troops to Iraq. Picking him indicates
at partiality to combative ideology. It also represents a return to good
standing for the general after he pled guilty to leaking notebooks full
of classified information to his lover, Paula Broadwell, and got off with
two years of probation and a fine. Petraeus currently works at the investment
firm KKR & Co.
Another notable member of Clinton's group is Michael Chertoff, a hardliner
who served as President George W. Bush's last secretary of the Department
of Homeland Security, and who since leaving government in 2009 has helmed
a corporate consulting firm called the Chertoff Group that promotes security-industry
priorities. For example, in 2010, he gave dozens of media interviews touting
full-body scanners at airports while his firm was employed by a company
that produced body scanning machines. His firmalso employs a number of other
ex-security state officials, such as former CIA and NSA Director Michael
Hayden. It does not disclose a complete list of its clients - all of whom
now have a line of access to Clinton.
Many others on the list are open advocates of military escalation overseas.
Mike Morell, the former acting director of the CIA, endorsed Clinton last
month in a New York Times opinion piece that accused Trump of being an "unwitting
agent of the Russian Federation." The Times was criticized for not disclosing
his current employment by Beacon Global Strategies, a politically powerful
national-security consulting firm with strong links to Clinton. Three days
later, Morell told Charlie Rose in a PBS interview that the CIA should actively
assassinate Russians and Iranians in Syria.
During his time at the CIA, Morell was connected to some of the worst
scandals and intelligence failures of the Bush administration. In his book,
he apologizes for giving flawed intelligence to Colin Powell about Iraq's
supposed weapons of mass destruction, but defends the CIA torture program
as legal and ethical.
Jim Stavridis, a former NATO supreme allied commander Europe on Clinton's
advisory group, told Fox News Radio in July, when he was being vetted by
Clinton as a possible vice presidential nominee, that "we have got to get
more aggressive going into Syria and Iraq and go after [ISIS] because if
we don't they're going to come to us. It's a pretty simple equation." He
said he would "encourage the president to take a more aggressive stance
against Iran, to increase our military forces in Iraq and Syria, and to
confront Vladmir Putin" over his moves in Crimea.
The New York Times reported in 2011 that Michael Vickers, a former Pentagon
official on Clinton's new list, led the use of drone strikes. He would grin
and tell his colleagues at meetings, "I just want to kill those guys."
Others on the list played a role in the targeted killing policies of
the Obama administration, including Chris Fussell, a top aide to Gen. Stanley
McChrystal, and now a partner with him at his lucrative consulting firm,
the McChrystal Group....
Bill Clinton made multiple trips to Epstein's private island, Little St
James (pictured), between 2002 and 2005
However, the people attending the lavish residence are
likely do not go there to discuss "cutting edge scientific
and medical research" as the Epstein VI Foundation would
like you to believe, but rather go there to experience
full-on sexual encounters with underage girls as young as
fourteen.
That's right, just like a scene out of the
Hollywood blockbuster film Eyes Wide Shut, starring Tom
Cruise, from wild parties to prostitution, orgies and even
underage sex,
Little St. James
reportedly has it all and is seemingly
a gathering point frequented by prominent jet-setters, and
it is all being exposed. The cat is out of the bag so to
speak.
Back in 2005 police conducted an 11-month-long undercover
investigation on Jeffery Epstein and his estate after the
mother of a 14-year-old girl went to police after suspecting
her daughter was paid $300 for at least one sexual act on
the island in which she was ordered to strip, leaving on
just her panties while giving Epstein a massage.
Although police found tons of photos of young women on
the island and even interviewed eyewitnesses, Epstein was
hit with a mere slap on the wrist after "pleading to a
single charge of prostitution." Epstein later served
13-months of his 18-month service in jail.
In 2008 Epstein was hit again, this time with a $50
million civil suit after another victim, a woman, made a
filing in a federal court claiming that she was "recruited"
by Epstein to give him a "massage" but was essentially
forced into having sexual intercourse with him for $200,
which was payable upon completion.
Additionally it is important to point out that Bill
Clinton has been mentioned by the press often over the years
- and not just for his controversial relationship with
Monica Lewinsky, but rather his friendship with Jeffery
Epstein.
In fact, flight records indicate that ol' Billy-boy would
frequent the island paradise around the 2002 and 2005 era,
while Hillary, Bill's wife, was a Senator in New York.
The Daily Mail
wrote about
one woman's experience on the island:
'I remember asking Jeffrey what's Bill Clinton doing
here kind of thing, and he laughed it off and said well
he owes me a favor,' one unidentified woman said in the
lawsuit, which was filed in Palm Beach Circuit Court.
The woman went on to say how orgies were a regular
occurrence and she recalled two young girls from New
York who were always seen around the five-house compound
but their personal backstories were never revealed.
"At least one woman on the compound was there
unwillingly" and was an actual sex slave, according to the
Daily Mail.
The woman was allegedly forced to have sex with
"politicians, businessmen, royalty, [and] academics" at the
retreat and was just one of "more than 40 women" that have
come forth with claims against Epstein, showing the vast
scale of the man's dark operations, which aren't limited
only to 'Orgy Island.'
Moreover Epstein was invited to Chelsea Clinton's wedding in
2010, amongst 400 other guests, demonstrating his close
friendship with the Clinton family.
To top it all off
"Prince Andrew was allegedly one of the house's visitors. On
Friday, the Duke of York was
named
in a federal lawsuit filed against Epstein, whom
the FBI once reportedly linked to 40 young women. Filed in
2008 in the Southern District of Florida, the $50 million
lawsuit
claimed
Epstein had a "sexual preference and obsession
for underage minor girls gained access to primarily
economically disadvantaged minor girls in his home, sexually
assaulted these girls", as
reported
by the Washington Post.
Manthong
bamawatson
May 29, 2016 6:10 PM
Hey,
I thought that
his personal life did not matter.
Damn, would I
love to see one of those teeny
boppers come forward and finger the
former f'r-in-chief.
He was on
Epstein's "Lolita Express" something
like 26 times.
philipat
Chris Dakota
May 29, 2016 11:56 PM
If Epstein needs to restock merchandise, ISIS now have a bargain line in sex slaves.
Wait
until
the
scumbag
'whose
cultural
identity
must
not
be
named'
has
another
high-power
orgy
and
then
let
the
navy
use
it
for
target
practice.
Crash
Overide
HowdyDoody
May 30,
2016
7:15 PM
Rumor is
Epstein
recorded
a lot of
the
sexual
acts
without
people
knowledge.
Now the idea that Hillary can beat Trump looks pretty questionable. Probably
corrupt honchos at DNC now realized that by sinking Sanders they sunk the Party.
Notable quotes:
"... "The people don't want a phony Democrat." – President Harry Truman, Address at the National Convention Banquet of the Americans for Democratic Action, 1952 ..."
"... Totally 'liberating' these Truman quotes for FB electioneering. Corporate 'crapification' of both Republican and Democratic parties is complete, since the most authentic – like it or not – candidates in this election are not party members per usual (Trump and Sanders). Think we may already have our third party… the Up Yours party! ..."
"... Trump's support sure looks like a big middle finger salute to the party establishment more than anything else. ..."
"... You have forgotten the rules: when it is close to fifty fifty but Clinton has the advantage it is a clear victory for Clinton, when Sanders has the advantage it must be a tie! Especially for the Bezos Gazette and the Grey Lady's fish wrap. ..."
"... - Poll: Clinton would easily beat Trump How shameless is that? ..."
"... I mainly only listen to local NPR programs, the NPR classical/jazz station (local), and some of the weekend non-news shows. I avoid NPR Faux Nooz Lite like the plague. ..."
"... It's now owned by the corporations anyway. ..."
"... Post owner Jeff Bezos was rated "Worst boss in the world" by the ITUC (International Trade Union Confederation), ..."
"... Amazon was awarded a $16.5 million contract with the State Department the last year Clinton ran it. ..."
"... The lower and middle classes do all the work and the upper, leisure Class, live in the lap of luxury. The lower class does the manual work; the middle class does the administrative and managerial work and the upper, leisure, class live a life of luxury and leisure. ..."
"... Number one among the Nuremberg principles and charter of the United Nations: no aggressive war. So yes perhaps the MSM should be painting that little mustache on Hillary rather than Trump. Trump seems eager to build walls to keep the rest of the world out. By contrast the 20th century fascists were all militarists and big believers that "war is the health of the state." When the media go on and on about Trump as fascist it could be a case of what the psychologists call projection. ..."
"... That said, there has always been an authoritarian bully boy quality to the modern Republican party and Trump seems quite willing to appeal to it. But it was always there–the unfortunate result of our transition from republic to empire. Perhaps our bloated and far too powerful military establishment is to blame. Politicians are always in danger of temptation by this "ring of power." ..."
"... murdering people a central tenet of one's life? ..."
"... Reading through some of the specific polls that fivethirtyeight uses, it's interesting that some of them don't try to catch it. They outsource the demographic projection to some other group, for example, or they do things like saying landlines are close enough to a good approximation that they don't need to include cell phones. And something else about the polls, nearly all of them were conducted before the Democratic debate in Michigan, which seems kind of odd then to base any predictions off of them unless one assumes debates held in the very location of the election are irrelevant (which itself is interesting). ..."
"... Yeah, I think Clinton's general election pitch is pretty straightforward. She's the pragmatic Republican protecting us from Trumpomania. No Good Democrat would prefer Hitler over a Republican, after all! ..."
"... Banner ad from the HC campaign on my email site today "Stand with Hillary to fight Trump." ..."
Yesterday was one of those days when there was a settlement.
"It is a pity that Wall Street, with its ability to control all the wealth
of the nation and to hire the best law brains in the country, has not produced
some statesmen, some men who could see the dangers of bigness and of the
concentration of the control of wealth. Instead of working to meet the situation,
they are still employing the best law brains to serve greed and self-interest.
People can only stand so much and one of these days there will be a settlement."
– Senator Harry S. Truman, Congressional Record, 1937
"The people don't want a phony Democrat." – President Harry Truman,
Address at the National Convention Banquet of the Americans for Democratic
Action, 1952
Totally 'liberating' these Truman quotes for FB electioneering. Corporate
'crapification' of both Republican and Democratic parties is complete, since
the most authentic – like it or not – candidates in this election are not
party members per usual (Trump and Sanders). Think we may already have our
third party… the Up Yours party!
You have forgotten the rules: when it is close to fifty fifty but
Clinton has the advantage it is a clear victory for Clinton, when Sanders
has the advantage it must be a tie! Especially for the Bezos Gazette and
the Grey Lady's fish wrap.
Here is similar grossly biased "reporting": On The Hill's home page today
there is an article link:
Poll: Clinton would easily beat Trump
Sanders also tops Trump in a hypothetical general election matchup.
From the article itself:
Democrat Hillary Clinton would defeat Republican presidential rival
Donald Trump by double digits in a hypothetical general election matchup,
according to a poll released Wednesday.
Clinton would edge out Trump by 13 points in a one-on-one
vote, 51 percent to 38 percent , in the latest NBC News/Wall
Street Journal survey.
Trump, the controversial GOP front-runner, would lose even more soundly
to Bernie Sanders should the Independent Vermont senator secure the
Democratic nomination.
Sanders bests Trump by 18 points, 55 to 37 percent.
Sanders picked up a surprise win over Clinton in Michigan on
Tuesday, though Clinton expanded her overall delegate lead.
I mainly only listen to local NPR programs, the NPR classical/jazz
station (local), and some of the weekend non-news shows. I avoid NPR Faux
Nooz Lite like the plague. A lot of their stenographers also work for
Fox (really). It's a pointless exercise in futility to waste my valuable
time and brain cells listen to Faux Nooz National Propaganda Radio.
NPR here in san diego said it was a win for hill because she got more delegates
when missippi and michigan are added together…
...Comments re sanders
not having congressional support are actually even more true with trump,
he will face considerable obstruction, while clinton will take the reins
from obama on the fly and drive the buggy full tilt down the road to neo
libbercon utopia
...Capitalism is essentially the same as every other social system since
the dawn of civilisation.
The lower and middle classes do all the work and the upper, leisure
Class, live in the lap of luxury. The lower class does the manual work;
the middle class does the administrative and managerial work and the upper,
leisure, class live a life of luxury and leisure.
The nature of the Leisure Class, to which the benefits of every system
accrue, was studied over 100 years ago.
"The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions",
by Thorstein Veblen.
(The Wikipedia entry gives a good insight. It was written a long time
ago but much of it is as true today as it was then. This is the source of
the term conspicuous consumption.)
We still have our leisure class in the UK, the Aristocracy, and they
have been doing very little for centuries.
The UK's aristocracy has seen social systems come and go, but they all
provide a life of luxury and leisure and with someone else doing all the
work.
Feudalism – exploit the masses through land ownership
Capitalism – exploit the masses through wealth (Capital)
Today this is done through the parasitic, rentier trickle up of Capitalism:
a) Those with excess capital invest it and collect interest, dividends
and rent.
b) Those with insufficient capital borrow money and pay interest and rent.
All this was much easier to see in Capitalism's earlier days.
Malthus and Ricardo never saw those at the bottom rising out of a bare
subsistence living. This was the way it had always been and always would
be, the benefits of the system only accrue to those at the top.
It was very obvious to Adam Smith:
"The Labour and time of the poor is in civilised countries sacrificed
to the maintaining of the rich in ease and luxury. The Landlord is maintained
in idleness and luxury by the labour of his tenants. The moneyed man is
supported by his extractions from the industrious merchant and the needy
who are obliged to support him in ease by a return for the use of his money.
But every savage has the full fruits of his own labours; there are no landlords,
no usurers and no tax gatherers."
Like most classical economists he differentiated between "earned" and
"unearned" wealth and noted how the wealthy maintained themselves in idleness
and luxury via "unearned", rentier income from their land and capital.
We can no longer see the difference between the productive side of the
economy and the unproductive, parasitic, rentier side. This is probably
why inequality is rising so fast, the mechanisms by which the system looks
after those at the top are now hidden from us.
In the 19th Century things were still very obvious.
1) Those at the top were very wealthy
2) Those lower down lived in grinding poverty, paid just enough to keep
them alive to work with as little time off as possible.
3) Slavery
4) Child Labour
Immense wealth at the top with nothing trickling down, just like today.
This is what Capitalism maximized for profit looks like.
Labour costs are reduced to the absolute minimum to maximise profit.
The beginnings of regulation to deal with the wealthy UK businessman
seeking to maximise profit, the abolition of slavery and child labour.
The function of the system is still laid bare.
The lower class does the manual work; the middle class does the administrative
and managerial work and the upper, leisure, class live a life of luxury
and leisure.
The majority only got a larger slice of the pie through organised Labour
movements.
By the 1920s, mass production techniques had improved to such an extent
that relatively wealthy consumers were required to purchase all the output
the system could produce and extensive advertising was required to manufacture
demand for the chronic over-supply the Capitalist system could produce.
They knew that if wealth concentrated too much there would not be enough
demand.
Of course the Capitalists could never find it in themselves to raise
wages and it took the New Deal and Keynesian thinking to usher in the consumer
society.
In the 1950s, when Capitalism had healthy competition, it was essential
that the Capitalist system could demonstrate that it was better than the
competition.
The US was able to demonstrate the superior lifestyle it offered to its
average citizens.
Now the competition has gone, the US middle class is being wiped out.
The US is going third world, with just rich and poor and no middle class.
Raw Capitalism can only return Capitalism to its true state where there
is little demand and those at the bottom live a life of bare subsistence.
Capitalism is a very old system designed to maintain an upper, Leisure,
class. The mechanisms by which parasitic, rentier, "unearned", income are
obtained need to kept to an absolute minimum by whatever means necessary
(legislation, taxation, etc ..)
Michael Hudson's book "Killing the Host" illustrates these problems very
well.
When you realise the true nature of Capitalism, you know why some kind
of redistribution is necessary and strong progressive taxation is the only
way a consumer society can ever be kept functioning. The Capitalists never
seem to recognise that employees are the consumers that buy their products
and services and are very reluctant to raise wages to keep the whole system
going.
A good quote from John Kenneth Galbraith's book "The Affluent Society",
which in turn comes from Marx.
"The Marxian capitalist has infinite shrewdness and cunning on everything
except matters pertaining to his own ultimate survival. On these, he is
not subject to education. He continues wilfully and reliably down the path
to his own destruction"
Marx made some mistakes but he got quite a lot right.
Jeez, no one told me that global employees are the global consumers.
So as we all increase profits by cutting labour costs we are effectively
cutting our own throats.
You got it.
Number one among the Nuremberg principles and charter of the United
Nations: no aggressive war. So yes perhaps the MSM should be painting that
little mustache on Hillary rather than Trump. Trump seems eager to build
walls to keep the rest of the world out. By contrast the 20th century fascists
were all militarists and big believers that "war is the health of the state."
When the media go on and on about Trump as fascist it could be a case of
what the psychologists call projection.
That said, there has always been an authoritarian bully boy quality
to the modern Republican party and Trump seems quite willing to appeal to
it. But it was always there–the unfortunate result of our transition from
republic to empire. Perhaps our bloated and far too powerful military establishment
is to blame. Politicians are always in danger of temptation by this "ring
of power."
Really, this is one of Earth's oldest taboos, and yet it has become cool
to flaunt your not-caring-about it like that is some badge of honor, and
better qualifies you for office. How about if say kindness, and honesty,
and "first, do no harm," were exalted into the same high positions? Everything
would be flipped on its head, and in my opinion, we'd be a lot better for
it. It's not silly.
I was in the bag for Bernie from day one, but I like to look ahead and
see what I'm getting myself into. My own expectations of B. Obama were quite
low in 2008 but he managed to underperform them (while the Republicans came
through in grand style).
So what does a thoughtful person see ahead with a President Bernie? Can
we cast a clear eye? How does this play out?
I'm thinking of looking to possible comparisons to previous (J. Carter,
'76) and current (J. Corbyn across the pond, in progress) cases of, well,
political outsider from the left end up at the head of the table (and maybe
some similar qualities of temperament), and what happened then.
If memory serves (and please set me straight if it doesn't) Carter, always
something of a loner, had a hard time getting traction with Congress, as
well as considerably confusion and derision from the (nascent, burgeoning)
neo-con right that came after, and from within his own party, and the press.
I believe I see a similar overall pattern (again, correct me) for Corbyn,
only more so: press is skeptical to derisive, and Labor is still procession
what it all really means for them (how much of this is sheer denial of inevitable
transformation and how much is stubborn inertial durability is not clear
to me). Lessons here might serve not only to anticipate some obvious pitfalls,
but perhaps to sidestep (or even strategically use) some of them.
A Bernie presidency would represent a huge challenge for the Dem establishment,
not completely different from what the Republican party is going through
but with different specifics (and also a later start). Without a continuing
and active grassroots network (writing, marching, contributing, putting
up candidates, etc), I think Bernie would be dead in the water come 2017.
And accepting a largely negative reaction from business, how much will be
a unified front, and what kind of internecine squabbling could take place?
Can a post-presidential grassroots activist network flip Congress in
two years (it took the Tea Party 4-6)? I don't think Sanders has a second
term without significant success in his first? The stakes are even higher;
2020 is a census year, as in: redistricting time.
Also, the disenfranchised usually get hit the hardest when systems shift
gears (for example, loss of some good policies in the ACA rollout, not to
mention the website). Given a hostile business front that will try to punish
the vulnerable, what is the blowback on a $15 minimum wage.
Thoughts? Links? Take your time, no rush (yet). Lambert?
Reading through some of the specific polls that fivethirtyeight uses,
it's interesting that some of them don't try to catch it. They outsource
the demographic projection to some other group, for example, or they do
things like saying landlines are close enough to a good approximation that
they don't need to include cell phones. And something else about the polls,
nearly all of them were conducted before the Democratic debate in Michigan,
which seems kind of odd then to base any predictions off of them unless
one assumes debates held in the very location of the election are irrelevant
(which itself is interesting).
For example, to pick on the YouGov poll that underestimated younger voter
support for Sanders. It was conducted a week ago, and the poll found that
1/3 of Dem primary voters had not firmly decided on their candidate at that
time. YouGov also included a sample that was 30% for those under 45, whereas
exit polling from CNN suggests actual turnout for those under 45 was more
like 45%. And it gave a 32 point advantage to Sanders in the under 30 crowd,
whereas CNN's exit poll suggested an actual spread of more like 62 points.
When things go as expected, the various assumptions and simplifications
hold. But that very bias makes it virtually impossible to predict discontinuous
change, since by definition, that is assumed away by the modeling.
But isn't the takeaway there that she lost the independents in large
numbers? How does she win a general election without young voters and independents?
My guess is she would pivot in her usual clumsy manner away from the more
left-leaning positions she's been pushed to take, and go back to her comfort
zone as a center-right Rockefeller-style Republican with a (D) after her
name.
I am less concerned that she is screwed than that the Dem establishment
would rather screw us all over in order to protect their comfortable positions
in the power structure.
Yeah, I think Clinton's general election pitch is pretty straightforward.
She's the pragmatic Republican protecting us from Trumpomania. No Good Democrat
would prefer Hitler over a Republican, after all!
Independents have been breaking hard for Sanders (not just in Michigan).
In CNN's exit polling, for example, in SC – a state Clinton won by a huge
margin – Sanders still actually won voters under 30 (by 8 points) and Independents
(by 7 points). Go to a state that was competitive, like Massachusetts, and
it's a 30 point spread for voters under 30 and a 33 point spread on Independents.
CNN didn't even do exit polling in places like Minnesota and Kansas. In
Oklahoma, Sanders won under 30 voters by 65 points and Independents by 48.
Neocons like Nicholas Kristof support Hillar y, no question about it. But that
does not make her less disonest. Actually that makes her more "dishonest/liar/don't
trust her/poor character."
Notable quotes:
"... But Clinton's big challenge is the trust issue: The share of voters who have negative feelings toward her has soared from 25 percent in early 2013 to 56 percent today, and a reason for that is that they distrust her. Only a bit more than one-third of American voters regard Clinton as "honest and trustworthy." ..."
"... Indeed, when Gallup asks Americans to say the first word that comes to mind when they hear "Hillary Clinton," the most common response can be summed up as "dishonest/liar/don't trust her/poor character." Another common category is "criminal/crooked/thief/belongs in jail." ..."
"... Hillary isn't crooked. She is dishonest in the sense that she gets to power by any means she can, including doing a complete turn on long-held opinions or saying she's evolved but not changing the bits and pieces that go with that evolution. She is dishonest in the sense that she defends taking money from Wall Street but refuses to show what she took it for, while maintaining that she has never changed a decision as a result. The thing is, she's never been faced with having to vote against Wall Street in any significant way or make a decision that, potentially, Wall Street would view as negative. ..."
"... She is intellectually dishonest in that she adopts her opponents' positions in name only but refuses to adopt the planks that go along with it, all the while calling herself a progressive who gets things done. Hillary Clinton has always been a neoliberal Democrat. She and Bill Clinton redefined center right democrat during his tenure. There is nothing wrong with owning up to that political bent. There is everything wrong with pretending someone you are not, as evidenced by her favorability numbers. ..."
"... Dishonesty and the paranoid secrecy that goes with it are fundamental to her personality. That many American are not wrong in their widespread judgment of her character. That is something that juries and other such groups judge well. ..."
"... She has many specific instances of dishonesty. She was not shot at in Bosnia for example. Her sneaky dishonest attacks on Bernie were accompanied by sly smiles when she did them, pleased with herself for laying out a considered and prepared lie. ..."
"... To support Hillary, you must believe receiving hundreds of millions from special interests (speaking fees, the foundation & campaign) does not make you beholden to those special interests. Democrats used to claim money given to politicians had a corrupting influence, but now with Hillary the chosen one, Democrats require a showing of quid pro corruption. ..."
"... Her foreign policy experience--it should scare us all. She voted for the Iraq war before politically being required to apologize for it. As Sec. of State, she supported bombing Libya into a stateless terrorist haven, supported rebels, turned terrorists in Syria and she is an Israeli hawk. ..."
"... It is not because she is a woman. That is an excuse. It is because she is an extreme hawk, a Washington Consensus neoliberal of trade deals and Wall Street. It is because she is Hillary, not because Hillary happens to be a woman. ..."
"... No other candidate running for president has given paid speeches to Wall Street and corporate America. Clinton is the ONLY candidate to do so. She accepted speaking fees until early 2015 knowing she was about to announce her candidacy. This is UNPRECEDENTED. ..."
"... This label of dishonesty that trails Clinton is not just about the most recent stuff. There's the story from way back when about how the Clintons took almost $200,000 worth of stuff when they left the White House. They eventually decided to return or pay for $114,000 worth of items. Things they'd claimed to have received before taking up residence were shown to have been received after they arrived; they claimed as personal gifts things donors specified as designated for the White House itself, etc. ..."
"... So, repeat after me--taking hundreds of millions from every special interest group does not in any way influence Hillary's independent judgment. Keep repeating and eventually you will believe it. See how easy that is. ..."
"... Now on to repeating how the neocon foreign policy hawks supporting Hillary as the best commander in chief is good. ..."
"... is a trusted commenter Mission Viejo, CA 22 hours ago ..."
"... People have noticed how assiduously both Clintons have courted money over the years, whether it is Whitewater and everything else leading up to the present day fundraising, including the Times' revelatory piece on Ukrainian money in an energy deal, it all reeks, but as is wont with the Clintons, stops just shy of actual misdeed. ..."
"... With the proliferation of small digital sound recording devices, someone out there made a recording. And when it winds up public (probably during the general election campaign when it would do the most damage), it will be Mrs. Clinton's "47% moment". ..."
"... People find her dishonest and untrustworthy because she is. It doesn't take an advanced degree to see that she's a self-interested political animal through and through. She has a long, well-documented history of taking whatever position is most politically expedient and changing it when the polling changes. ..."
"... Furthermore her and her husband's well-documented history of taking money from everybody from Wall St. banksters to foreign autocrats for everything from private speeches the proceeds of which go directly into their pockets to their "foundation" suggests at the minimum a clueless recklessness about the appearance or corruption and at worst outright contempt for the intelligence of American voters. ..."
"... Again, it doesn't take membership in Mensa to apply a little critical thought and personal experience to the issue of her honesty or trustworthiness. Anybody who's ever done anything they felt even the tiniest bit ethically or morally uncomfortable about in order to keep their job or anybody who's observed this behavior in even the smallest or least significant way from colleagues knows Wall St. banksters and the Saudis princes don't give millions of dollars to people who aren't minimally receptive to their interests and people who take those millions don't do so with the intention of turning off that spigot down the line. ..."
"... What if decades of facially shady conduct is true? What if Bill Safire is right that HRC is a congenital liar? Why doesn't HRC give all this the lie by releasing her speech transcripts? Since leaving office the Clintons and the Foundation have amassed millions. Can we not think, as did Honore de Balzac that "behind every great fortune is a great crime"? How Mrs. Clinton must actually hate Barack Obama, Bernard Sanders and those under 40 who have or may yet deny her the crown. ..."
"... Often, the corruption is in the form of compensation after the public official leaves office. I used to work in NJ State Government. I can cite numerous examples of regulators who left public service, and were rewarded with lucrative contracts by the firms they formerly regulated. This would sometimes be laundered. For example, the former public official would join a law firm or consulting firm, and suddenly that firm would get a big contract from the firm they formerly regulated. ..."
"... In the case of Mrs Clinton, she was a "private citizen" only temporarily. She resigned as Secretary of State, but it was public knowledge that she was going to announce a Presidential run. ..."
"... She may not be dishonest, but boy is she greedy. ..."
"... Hillary is less transparent. She hides a lot. Does that make her dishonest? Maybe not. But unlikeable for sure. ..."
"... Sorry--the burden is squarely on Hillary to explain how money corrupts politicians, but she, Bill, the foundation and campaign taking hundreds of millions from special interests does not. Or, is a politician free to take all of the money her heart desires, unless there is iron clad proof of quid pro quo corruption? And if you believe that. you agree with the right wing majority in Citizens United. ..."
"... So the whitewashing of Hillary by the nominal Progressives begins. Whether or not she is "fundamentally" honest, as Jill Abrahamson has written, means what exactly? That she won't rob a bank, or pick your pocket? Yet she will defend bankers who rob their own banks and brokers who pick their investors' pockets every trading day by skimming others' potential profits with their high speed trades. Her husband's candidacy was rescued by winning the New York primary after his loss in New Hampshire and as President he deregulated the banks, and once he was in private life again, he became a centa millionaire by speaking in front of bankers. One would be naive to believe the Clintons did not make a deal the the banks put out the word. Perhaps there was no quid pro quo, but there certainly was some quo pro quid. Ditto for Hillary. ..."
"... Why a "Progressive" would paper over the record of Goldwater girl turned "NeoLiberal," which is pretty much the same thing, who is fundamentally against everything real Progressives stand for boggles the imagination. ..."
AFTER the New York primary, the betting websites are giving Hillary Clinton
about a 94 percent chance of being the Democratic nominee, and Donald Trump
a 66 percent chance of ending up as the Republican nominee.
But Clinton's big challenge is the trust issue: The share of voters who
have negative feelings toward her has soared from 25 percent in early 2013 to
56 percent today, and a reason for that is that they distrust her. Only a bit
more than one-third of American voters regard Clinton as "honest and trustworthy."
Indeed, when Gallup asks Americans to say the first word that comes to
mind when they hear "Hillary Clinton," the most common response can be summed
up as "dishonest/liar/don't trust her/poor character." Another common category
is "criminal/crooked/thief/belongs in jail."
... My late friend and Times colleague William Safire in 1996
dubbed Clinton "a congenital liar."
... Then there's the question of Clinton raking in hundreds of thousands
of dollars from
speeches to Goldman Sachs and other companies. For a person planning to
run for president, this was nuts. It also created potential conflicts of interest
...
... As for the fundamental question of whether Clinton risked American national
security with her email server, I suspect the problem has been exaggerated
Hillary isn't crooked. She is dishonest in the sense that she gets
to power by any means she can, including doing a complete turn on long-held
opinions or saying she's evolved but not changing the bits and pieces that
go with that evolution. She is dishonest in the sense that she defends taking
money from Wall Street but refuses to show what she took it for, while maintaining
that she has never changed a decision as a result. The thing is, she's never
been faced with having to vote against Wall Street in any significant way
or make a decision that, potentially, Wall Street would view as negative.
She is intellectually dishonest in that she adopts her opponents'
positions in name only but refuses to adopt the planks that go along with
it, all the while calling herself a progressive who gets things done. Hillary
Clinton has always been a neoliberal Democrat. She and Bill Clinton redefined
center right democrat during his tenure. There is nothing wrong with owning
up to that political bent. There is everything wrong with pretending someone
you are not, as evidenced by her favorability numbers.
Hillary is not, nor has she ever been a progressive Democrat. That title
is reserved for Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Raul Grijalva, Keith Ellison,
and many other distinguished Democrats who have been in the progressive
trenches for decades.
http://wp.me/p2KJ3H-2cQ
You can't pretend to be someone you're not and expect everyone else to
play along. http://wp.me/p2KJ3H-27p
Mark Thomason, is a trusted commenter Clawson, Mich
23 hours ago
Yes, Hillary is dishonest.
Dishonesty and the paranoid secrecy that goes with it are fundamental
to her personality. That many American are not wrong in their widespread
judgment of her character. That is something that juries and other such
groups judge well.
She has many specific instances of dishonesty. She was not shot at
in Bosnia for example. Her sneaky dishonest attacks on Bernie were accompanied
by sly smiles when she did them, pleased with herself for laying out a considered
and prepared lie.
If she is elected, we will be so sick of this that NYT columnists will
be writing "how could we have not seen this?" Well, it is them leading the
way.
They should expect to be reminded loudly and often.
ScottW, is a trusted commenter Chapel Hill, NC
22 hours ago
To support Hillary, you must believe receiving hundreds of millions
from special interests (speaking fees, the foundation & campaign) does not
make you beholden to those special interests. Democrats used to claim money
given to politicians had a corrupting influence, but now with Hillary the
chosen one, Democrats require a showing of quid pro corruption.
Sorry -- either money is corrupting or it is not, and the Clintons have
personally received hundreds of millions from every possible special interest.
By supporting Hillary you are saying special interest money is a good thing.
The Times also ran an interesting profile in the magazine section about
how Hillary became a hawk. She follows the neocons playbook and as stated
in the piece, one of her significant military advisors is a Fox news pundit.
Hillary admits a mutual admiration with Kissinger.
So I don't trust Hillary when she says special interests do not influence
her judgment. If they really don't--which is impossible to believe--they
have wasted millions paying for 40 minute speeches. Lobbyists don't contribute
money to candidates who don't not help their causes.
Her foreign policy experience--it should scare us all. She voted
for the Iraq war before politically being required to apologize for it.
As Sec. of State, she supported bombing Libya into a stateless terrorist
haven, supported rebels, turned terrorists in Syria and she is an Israeli
hawk.
All of this causes grave concerns that go well beyond trust.
It comes down to the fact the HRC is the best Democratic aspirant for
the party's presidential nomination in 2016.
I cast my ballot for her in the Illinois primary and will gladly do so
again in November.
Do I have reservations? Surely.
But think of the reservations about some earlier Democratic as well as
Republican nominees ....
Franklin Delano Roosevelt reneged on his longtime support for the League
of Nations and adamantly refused to cross swords with Southern Democrats.
Would you vote for Hoover, Landon, or Willkie?
Harry Truman had longstanding ties to Kansas City's Pendergast gang.
I would have voted for him.
Eisenhower evaded a golden opportunity to denounce Joseph McCarthy while
campaigning in Wisconsin during 1952. He forfeited the opportunity to call
out McCarthy for his frontal attack on General George C. Marshall.
JFK as a US Senator stepped to the side on the Joseph McCarthy issue
because his father was something of an enthusiast. If I could have voted
in 1960, it would have been easy to vote for JFK rather than RMN.
LBJ was a political animal to his very core, but hands down a better
choice than Senator Goldwater.
Jimmy Carter had made his way to the governorship of Georgia because
of ties to the Talmadge organization that was out-and-out segregationist.
In campaigning for the governorship JEC was something of a muted segregationist.
I gladly voted for him over Gerald Ford.
And so on and so forth.
Saints don't rise to the presidency.
David Underwood,is a trusted commenter Citrus Heights
18 hours ago
Dishonest, you want dishonest, try Rumsfeld, Cheney, and the whole lot
of them. She is evasive, she has made some exaggerations like being shot
at, and yes she voted for W to attack Saddam if he did not stop killing
his own people. She also has supported the Syrian rebels, as many of us
have done, until they got subverted by Daesh.
The email issue is a GOP tail chase which is going nowhere, but keeps
them accusing her, just as they did with Benghazi. She is tough putting
up with all the crap I see from people here. Lies, opinions made of suppositions,
unprovable accusations, a lesser person would have folded by now.
Anetliner Netliner, is a trusted commenter Washington, DC area 20
hours ago
I will vote for Clinton if she is the Democratic nominee, but find her deeply
untrustworthy. Examples, gong back to the early '90s:
-The commodities trading episode. Clinton asserted that she learned to
trade commodities "by reading the Wall Street Journal", which is impossible.
I was a great fan of Clinton's until I heard her utter this falsehood on
national television.
-Travelgate. Career civil service employees improperly fired at Clinton's
behest, so that they could be replaced with the services of a member of
the Clintons' inner circle.
-Poor judgment on foreign policy: Iraq (not bothering to read the National
Intelligence Estimate before voting to go to war.) Libya. No fly zone in
Syria. Failure to close the U.S. mission to Libya in the summer of 2012:
the UK closed its mission in response to growing danger; why did the U.S.
not follow suit?
-Poor judgment in governmental administration: use of a private e-mail server.
Initial explanation: "I didn't want to carry two devices." (Absurd on its
face to anyone who has ever used a smart phone.)
-Shifting positions: Keystone XL, Trans-Pacific Partnership, single-payer
health care.
-Distortion of opponents' positions. From the current campaign: distortion
of Bernie Sanders' positions on the auto bailout and gun control.
I could go on, but the pattern is clear. I respect Clinton's intelligence,
but deplore her duplicity and poor judgment. I'll support her in November
only because the alternatives are worse.
Mark Thomason, is a trusted commenter Clawson, Mich 22 hours ago
It is not because she is a woman. That is an excuse. It is because
she is an extreme hawk, a Washington Consensus neoliberal of trade deals
and Wall Street. It is because she is Hillary, not because Hillary happens
to be a woman.
Mark Thomason, is a trusted commenter Clawson, Mich 22 hours ago
"and yet, she has been highly vetted prior to becoming First Lady,
most certainly so prior to becoming a Senator for NYC"
Nonsense. Nobody vets the President's wife. She is who he married. Nobody
vets a Senator either. We've got some pretty strange Senators, arrested
in bathrooms and stuff. They'd never get past vetting.
RLS, is a trusted commenter Virginia 19 hours ago
Winchestereast,
No other candidate running for president has given paid speeches
to Wall Street and corporate America. Clinton is the ONLY candidate to do
so. She accepted speaking fees until early 2015 knowing she was about to
announce her candidacy. This is UNPRECEDENTED. Of course, congressional
Democrats don't say it publicly but many wish that Clinton had shown better
judgment.
Siobhan, is a trusted commenter New York 21 hours ago
This label of dishonesty that trails Clinton is not just about the
most recent stuff. There's the story from way back when about how the Clintons
took almost $200,000 worth of stuff when they left the White House. They
eventually decided to return or pay for $114,000 worth of items. Things
they'd claimed to have received before taking up residence were shown to
have been received after they arrived; they claimed as personal gifts things
donors specified as designated for the White House itself, etc.
It's this kind of stuff that leaves people feeling that the Clintons
just aren't trustworthy.
1. I did *absolutely nothing wrong*.
2. You can't *prove* I did anything wrong.
3. Technically speaking, no law was actually violated.
4. Well, it's a stupid law anyhow.
5. Everybody does it.
pjd, is a trusted commenter Westford 18 hours ago
"... if that's corrupt then so is our entire campaign finance system."
Yes, it is. It is driven by massive amounts of money. The only "sin"
committed by Ms. Clinton in the case of her speaking fees is to take publicly
traceable money. Meanwhile, the rest of the bunch are taking cash by the
truckload thanks to the Supreme Court-approved Citizens United.
Politics _is_ a dirty business. No one is innocent.
ScottW, is a trusted commenter Chapel Hill, NC 21 hours ago
You and Kristof have joined the growing Democratic chorus that money
is just a fact of politics. It may be true, but wasn't there a time Democrats
advocated for taking money out of politics by overturning Citizens United?
Or is it like Hillary's speaking transcripts, the Dems will agree to getting
money out of politics when the Republicans do.
So, repeat after me--taking hundreds of millions from every special
interest group does not in any way influence Hillary's independent judgment.
Keep repeating and eventually you will believe it. See how easy that is.
Now on to repeating how the neocon foreign policy hawks supporting
Hillary as the best commander in chief is good.
Rima Regas,is a trusted commenter Mission Viejo, CA 22 hours
ago
Mark,
I have no disagreements with you. It is my personal code of ethics
that stops me from going there, for as long as she isn't caught red handed.
People have noticed how assiduously both Clintons have courted money
over the years, whether it is Whitewater and everything else leading up
to the present day fundraising, including the Times' revelatory piece on
Ukrainian money in an energy deal, it all reeks, but as is wont with the
Clintons, stops just shy of actual misdeed.
That is what the trust and favorability stats keep telling us, over and
over again, no matter whether it is conservatives or democrats who are polled
and, now, the Bernie Or Bust movement that is being vilified by the neoliberal
punditry. There comes a time when people have had it up to here and it is
my sense that it may finally be here. That is the topic of my Sunday essay.
Krugman just posted a new blog post on a related topic. See my comment there.
Money and greed are the root of all evil.
RM, is a trusted commenter Vermont 21 hours ago
As for the speeches, you do not have to prove an actual "favor" in return
for millions in payments. Any attorney (and Mrs. Clinton is an attorney)
who has had any exposure to the canons of attorney ethics knows that both
actual impropriety, and APPEARANCES of impropriety are to be avoided. "Appearance"
requires no proof of an actual quid pro quo. Besides, the payments can be
interpreted as payments in hope of future considerations. should she be
in a position to provide such considerations.
And if she is elected President and never gives them a break, as she
says she won't, that is maybe even worse. Is there anything as dishonest
as a public official who takes a bribe, and then does not deliver for the
briber?
With the proliferation of small digital sound recording devices,
someone out there made a recording. And when it winds up public (probably
during the general election campaign when it would do the most damage),
it will be Mrs. Clinton's "47% moment".
AC, Astoria, NY 6 hours ago
People find her dishonest and untrustworthy because she is. It doesn't
take an advanced degree to see that she's a self-interested political animal
through and through. She has a long, well-documented history of taking whatever
position is most politically expedient and changing it when the polling
changes.
Furthermore her and her husband's well-documented history of taking
money from everybody from Wall St. banksters to foreign autocrats for everything
from private speeches the proceeds of which go directly into their pockets
to their "foundation" suggests at the minimum a clueless recklessness about
the appearance or corruption and at worst outright contempt for the intelligence
of American voters.
Again, it doesn't take membership in Mensa to apply a little critical
thought and personal experience to the issue of her honesty or trustworthiness.
Anybody who's ever done anything they felt even the tiniest bit ethically
or morally uncomfortable about in order to keep their job or anybody who's
observed this behavior in even the smallest or least significant way from
colleagues knows Wall St. banksters and the Saudis princes don't give millions
of dollars to people who aren't minimally receptive to their interests and
people who take those millions don't do so with the intention of turning
off that spigot down the line.
Ronald Cohen, is a trusted commenter Wilmington, N.C. 19 hours ago
Nicholas Kristoff blames the media for the view that Hillary Clinton
is dishonest and untrustworthy. I agree that the media as a blameworthy
record in this election cycle of pushing Donald J. Trump by trumpeting his
antics until he became a real danger while ignoring Bernard Sanders because
he didn't suit the coronation of HRC in an effort, ongoing, of shoving Clinton
down the National throat.
What if decades of facially shady conduct is true? What if Bill Safire
is right that HRC is a congenital liar? Why doesn't HRC give all this the
lie by releasing her speech transcripts? Since leaving office the Clintons
and the Foundation have amassed millions. Can we not think, as did Honore
de Balzac that "behind every great fortune is a great crime"? How Mrs. Clinton
must actually hate Barack Obama, Bernard Sanders and those under 40 who
have or may yet deny her the crown.
ScottW, is a trusted commenter Chapel Hill, NC 21 hours ago
Even if you support Hillary, it is good to know who is paying her what.
RM, is a trusted commenter Vermont 21 hours ago
Often, the corruption is in the form of compensation after the public
official leaves office. I used to work in NJ State Government. I can cite
numerous examples of regulators who left public service, and were rewarded
with lucrative contracts by the firms they formerly regulated. This would
sometimes be laundered. For example, the former public official would join
a law firm or consulting firm, and suddenly that firm would get a big contract
from the firm they formerly regulated.
In the case of Mrs Clinton, she was a "private citizen" only temporarily.
She resigned as Secretary of State, but it was public knowledge that she
was going to announce a Presidential run. A lot different than, say,
Janet Reno giving a speech.
ScottW, is a trusted commenter Chapel Hill, NC 21 hours ago
@RM--you raise an excellent point. If you outlined a political couple who
did what the Clintons have done making money from special interests, but did
not reveal their identities, everyone would agree they would be unduly influenced
by special interest money. Reveal their identities and suddenly Hillary's supporters
suspend previous beliefs that money corrupts politicians. And that is why nothing
ever changes.
Ronald Cohen, is a trusted commenter Wilmington, N.C. 19 hours ago
"The others are worse" argument should be addressed to the DNC and the
party mandarins who won't field an honest candidate. If we don't vote for
HRC then the party that ran her is to blame. Where are "the best and the
brightest"? Why is our choice always between the dregs?
ScottW, is a trusted commenter Chapel Hill, NC 21 hours ago
Remember when you could say that money in politics was a corrupting influence
and democrats did not challenge you to show a quid pro quo? Democrats have
suddenly adopted the conservative majority's reasoning in Citizens United
there must be a quid pro quo for money to be bad.
We need to tell all of the lobbyists and special interests funneling
money to the Clintons they are wasting their money because unlike other
politicians, they can never be influenced by that money.
organic farmer, NY 6 hours ago
If 50% of Kristof's statements were true or 'mostly true', would he be
still employed by the NYT? If I told the truth half the time, I doubt my
family and co-workers would be impressed! If 50% of what my employees say
were lies, they would get fired.
As a female middle-aged Democrat, I will vote for Clinton in November
if I have to, but it won't be with any enthusiasm or confidence, and certainly
I will not be voting for a leader I believe in. As a woman, I admire her
intelligence, ambition, and determination, and I'm fairly convinced her
integrity is probably somewhat better than many in politics, but we desperately
need a President with a different vision for our future. We don't need a
divisive leader beholden to Big Banks, Big Ag, Big Business, Big Military
- this will not serve the United States well.
RM, is a trusted commenter Vermont 19 hours ago
It would not be my fault that the Democratic party chose to force upon
the voting public a candidate with high negatives. Such high negatives,
that even Ted Cruz could defeat her.
Janice Badger Nelson, is a trusted commenter Park City, Utah, from
Boston 15 hours ago
She may not be dishonest, but boy is she greedy.
You have got to hand it to her though, she has been through the mill
and still stands there. I cannot imagine the humiliation she must have felt
over the Lewinsky debacle. That alone would have done most of us in. But
she ran for Senate and then President, became the Secretary of State and
now is leading as the democratic candidate for President.
In her 60's. Quite remarkable, if you think about it. I do not know how
she does it other than the fact she has supportive people surrounding her
and that must help. I also think that she feels entitled somehow, and that
is troubling to me. I also think her opponent, Senator Bernie Sanders, is
a "what you see is what you get" kind of guy. I like that so much. Hillary
is less transparent. She hides a lot. Does that make her dishonest? Maybe
not. But unlikeable for sure.
RM, is a trusted commenter Vermont 20 hours ago
I won't. A decision to support the lesser of two evils is a decision
to support an evil. Maybe if you sat it out, or voted third party, it would
be a message to the major parties to nominate better candidates.
Perhaps, to record that you came to vote, and found both candidates unsupportable,
you could write in "none of the above"
But vote the rest of the ticket.
ScottW, is a trusted commenter Chapel Hill, NC 18 hours ago
@Christine--you got me. You are right. Those special interests just gave
Hillary and Bill hundreds of millions because they oppose everything the
special interests want. None of the policies Hillary advocates are favored
by any of those special interests. They are wasting their money!
Sorry--the burden is squarely on Hillary to explain how money corrupts
politicians, but she, Bill, the foundation and campaign taking hundreds
of millions from special interests does not. Or, is a politician free to
take all of the money her heart desires, unless there is iron clad proof
of quid pro quo corruption? And if you believe that. you agree with the
right wing majority in Citizens United.
Of course you can believe that, but never again state that money corrupts
politicians, nor ever state lobbyist spending tens of millions to influence
policy is bad.
amboycharlie, Nagoya, Japan 9 hours ago
So the whitewashing of Hillary by the nominal Progressives begins.
Whether or not she is "fundamentally" honest, as Jill Abrahamson has written,
means what exactly? That she won't rob a bank, or pick your pocket? Yet
she will defend bankers who rob their own banks and brokers who pick their
investors' pockets every trading day by skimming others' potential profits
with their high speed trades. Her husband's candidacy was rescued by winning
the New York primary after his loss in New Hampshire and as President he
deregulated the banks, and once he was in private life again, he became
a centa millionaire by speaking in front of bankers. One would be naive
to believe the Clintons did not make a deal the the banks put out the word.
Perhaps there was no quid pro quo, but there certainly was some quo pro
quid. Ditto for Hillary.
The Clinton Foundation took huge donations from dictatorial regimes worldwide
and Hillary as SecState, rewarded them with arms deals they would otherwise
not have gotten, due to their human rights violations. The list of apparent
crimes by the Clintons goes on and on. Why a "Progressive" would paper
over the record of Goldwater girl turned "NeoLiberal," which is pretty much
the same thing, who is fundamentally against everything real Progressives
stand for boggles the imagination.
Thomas Zaslavsky, is a trusted commenter Binghamton, N.Y. 16 hours
ago
Wcdessert Girl, you are straining so hard to smear Bernie Sanders that
you deserve to have a busted gut. (No that I'm wishing it upon you.) He
got the normal Congressional salary (not all that large; barely upper middle
class, these days) and the normal Congressional benefits (sure, we should
all get them), and you question his financial integrity? Be ashamed.
Now, try to defend Hillary without a baseless smear against anyone else.
Liberty Apples, Providence 9 hours ago
``One basic test of a politician's honesty is whether that person
tells the truth when on the campaign trail, and by that standard Clinton
does well.''
Excuse me?
She lied about Sanders support for the auto bailout.
She lied about Sanders support for the Paris climate accord.
She was in knots trying to explain her position on the $15 minimum wage.
You get the idea. The truth has always been an inconvenience for the
Clintons.
Barry, Minneapolis 10 hours ago
She lies about little things. Hot sauce. Medium sized things. Coming
under fire; she only wanted to carry one cell; the papers that turned up
in a parlor. Big things. "If I had known then." That was as bad as Nixon's
"secret plan."
"What is frightening is the desperation. It's like the [US neoliberal] elite
are afraid of something terrible. " -- that a very asute observation,
" Globalization is unraveling before their eyes from negative interest rates
to Brexit. Turning their world upside down. " -- also true, although
neoliberalism still successfully counterattack in selected countries and
recently scored two wins in Latin America (Argentina and Brazil)
Notable quotes:
"... The atmosphere feels like 1974 just before Richard Nixon resigned. Except, it is completely reversed. The establishment is protecting Hillary Clinton. They are spinning up a whirlwind. What is frightening is the desperation. It's like the elite are afraid of something terrible. ..."
"... I presume it has to be that millions of incorrigibles are recognizing the oligarchs' scams. Globalization is unraveling before their eyes from negative interest rates to Brexit. Turning their world upside down. ..."
"... Ms. Clinton and/or whichever member of her staff decided to use The Clinton Rules for Obfuscation and Avoidance as a way to address what was clearly some kind of medical event. ..."
"... Given that she wasn't whisked away in an ambulance, and didn't spend any time in an emergency room, whatever it was that happened must not have been entirely unanticipated or unusual – it may just be that she had the great misfortune of exhibiting these symptoms in public and not in the privacy of her own home. ..."
"... But let's recap, shall we? First, she was constructively absent from the campaign trail for the entire month of August. She did few events and not as much traveling. She also was not spending any time with the media, giving no pressers for months. Criticism mounted, so – wonder of wonders – when she got her spiffy new plane, the invites went out to the media to join her on the plane, and she held her first presser in months just this past Thursday. ..."
"... She looked fine. Her color was good, she looked rested. The next night, she did a high-dollar fundraiser hosted by Barbra Streisand. Again, she looked and sounded fine. Yet, it was that day that her physician says she was diagnosed with pneumonia and given antibiotics. ..."
"... Then, on Sunday, with temps in the low 80's and low humidity, she falls ill. She looked okay walking to her car, but she leaned on the post for support and then appeared to collapse getting into the van. Did she lose her footing on the curb? ..."
"... She sustained a serious concussion in 2012, when she fainted as a complication of a stomach virus that caused her to be dehydrated. The concussion gave her double vision, for which she wore special lenses for a time. She was not allowed to fly. A follow up visit to the doctor revealed that she had a blood clot in a vein between her brain and her skull so she was put on blood thinners. Her husband says it took every bit of six months for her to recover from the concussion. ..."
"... She's also had DVTs in her legs, and has an underactive thyroid for which I presume she takes medication. ..."
"... no matter how infrequent – post-concussion symptoms will call into question her mental abilities, which would be the death knell for her candidacy. ..."
"... she and her people spoon feed us one somewhat-plausible explanation after another, apparently in the hope they will hit on one that makes people stop asking questions about it ..."
"... This is how the Clintons – both of them – handle everything, and it's exactly why Hillary finds herself the topic of conversation and speculation everywhere. ..."
"... Also, not sure I believe the pneumonia story. Wouldn't put it past them to fabricate that. How is taking about health issues w/o talking about her concussion, blood clots, and rat poison meds …. an honest talk about her health? ..."
"... If Hillary Clinton has Parkinson's -- or some other neurological impairment leading to her frequent "spells" and falls -- the Democratic Party should ask her to step aside and allow someone in better health to run. ..."
"... As they move her away from that post she was leaning against, her arms stay rigid behind her back. My friend used to call this "offing", as in on or off, which was different from his freezing of gait, and happened to him when he was under stress. ..."
"... the coughing, even the pneumonia could be caused by difficulty swallowing. ..."
"... It could be Vascular Parkinsonism. I just wish she would be strong enough to admit she is weak. ..."
"... Ah, thanks for explaining why her arms were like that behind her back. At first I thought she was handcuffed. ..."
"... Noel's How to Prove Me Wrong about Hillary's Parkinson's Disease is worth a look. ..."
"... Forget Parkinson's, what about MS. ..."
"... after the DVT Hillary would have been placed on an anticoagulant, especially with all those plane trips. Then there is that fall she had last year. If she were on Coumadin at that time with a fall & head trauma can cause a bleed. Also MDs are nervous about putting someone on a blood thinner that is at risk for frequent falls. This whole situation is crazy. ..."
"... I'd bet that Clinton shopped around until she found a doctor willing to work with a minimal paper trail and certainly zero electronic trail. ..."
"... It isn't logical to believe a sudden press release used as a distraction. With past episodes of fainting, falling, concussion and ongoing treatment, this qualifier is put out to run up the flagpole. Please note the moment the handlers suddenly jump to surround and hide the candidate from the cameras. ..."
"... Daily Mail even goes as far as to say the candidate was "thrown into the seat like a sack of beef" (paraphrasing) ..."
"... Was that doctor EpiPen that opened the door to the van? ..."
"... So she has what could be very contagious? And she rests at Chelsea's home and plays with the kids? Anyone want some real cheap swamp land in the Everglades? ..."
"... my guess is at Chelsea's they could give her a quick shot of amphetamines so we could then get the "look, the candidate can actually walk unaided!" photo op when she emerged. ..."
"... So that's how low we've sunk, we're supposed to vote for the elderly, sickly, serial war criminal, pathological liar old lady because she can actually walk. Oh, and "because she's a woman". ..."
"... I'd just like to point out how annoying it is that the media stenographers on many sites today are slavishly repeating the Hillary campaign's pneumonia story without a single speck of actually checking, either through logic or investigation, whether any of it makes sense. Though admittedly there is a tiny bit doubt starting to creep through the media narrative; maybe they're thinking that this is the fig leaf they need to feel like they still have credibility–which is just them fooling themselves. ..."
"... Since stuff coming from the mainstream media is provably guaranteed to be just some sht they made up, or passing along some sht someone else made up without questioning it, I don't think there's anything wrong with just ignoring the msm and believing whatever you feel like believing from the internet; unlike with the msm there is at least a decent chance that that stuff might be true. ..."
"... Policies? Pay no attention to what emerges from the candidates mouths, as Obama said in 2008 "Hilary will say anything, and change nothing", she can be at a rally and yell "I'm fighting for you!" and 15 minutes later she is meeting with a Wall St CEO on new ways to rip people off. I'm not saying her opponent is any better ..."
"... Focus on the candidate's health is always appropriate. Particularly so when the ability of the candidate to serve out their term is a legitimate question. It is the height of arrogance for a candidate to accept the nomination without the full expectation that they will be ready to serve the full term at stake. For a candidate to attempt to proceed through concealment of substantive health issues is an expression of complete unaccountability. ..."
"... If Hillary had been more honest about her physical condition, folks wouldn't be stooping to armchair diagnoses, which is normal human behavior for those to whom the truth has not been forthcoming. ..."
"... Not a one-time diagnosis. She apparently has had a deep venous thrombosis and more recently cavernous sinus thrombosis. I suspect because of this (two discrete episodes) a decision has been made for chronic continuing use of coumadin. Like all medications, a decision is made as to whether the benefits of treatment using that medication outweigh the projected risks of the medication. Properly managed, the risks are fairly small. But the key is proper management, which may be difficult given the demands of the position as POTUS. ..."
"... I also believe her travel did and would put her at greater risk. https://www.stoptheclot.org/learn_more/air_travel_and_thrombosis.htm ..."
"... This just in: Hillary Clinton to Release More Medical Records After Pneumonia Diagnosis http://www.wsj.com/articles/hillary-clinton-plans-to-rest-amid-health-concerns-1473694474 ..."
"... More"? Like how many more? ..."
"... How many more? As many as it takes, one dollop at a time, until she hits the sweet spot where the questions stop. It was always destined to take the same path as the e-mails and every other questionable thing Clinton's been associated with – that's how they roll! ..."
"... "One-shoe" Hillary is now the butt of visual jokes, as her signature red arrow is repurposed into a stretcher: http://tinyurl.com/zbza8ph ..."
"... At this point, Clinton would have as much success convincing the public that she's released all the medical records that are relevant to her run for president as she would convincing us that she was part of a grand experiment whereby an entire medical team has been shrunk to Fantastic Voyage size, and injected into her bloodstream so that she can be under constant care. ..."
"... If she became spastic, and collapsed (unexpectedly) just trying to get into an SUV, what kind of risk is she going to be under during the first debate? ..."
"... Everyone is going to be watching for any slight, "unnatural," twitch, or, movement for the whole episode. ..."
"... The question really is: Is a vote for Clinton a vote for Tim Kaine??? ..."
"... Here's why. If humans were rational creatures, the time and place of Clinton's "overheating" wouldn't matter at all. But when it comes to American psychology, there is no more powerful symbol of terrorism and fear than 9-11 . When a would-be Commander-in-Chief withers – literally – in front of our most emotional reminder of an attack on the homeland, we feel unsafe. And safety is our first priority. ..."
"... Hillary Clinton just became unelectable. The mainstream media might not interpret today's events as a big deal. After all, it was only a little episode of overheating. And they will continue covering the play-by-play action until election day. But unless Trump actually does shoot someone on 5th Avenue, he's running unopposed." ..."
"... seems to me that Hillary could likely be suffering from subcortical vascular dementia. ..."
"... If diagnosed in 2012-13, which seems likely given her concussion and brain clot diagnoses, she would now begin to experience a severe physical decline and pneumonia is a frequent cause of death for those suffering from subcortical vascular dementia. ..."
I agree with all of Anne's great comments above on Hillary Clinton's
9-11 fainting episode.
The atmosphere feels like 1974 just before Richard Nixon resigned.
Except, it is completely reversed. The establishment is protecting Hillary
Clinton. They are spinning up a whirlwind. What is frightening is the desperation.
It's like the elite are afraid of something terrible.
It can't be Donald Trump; he is one them. Instead, I presume it has
to be that millions of incorrigibles are recognizing the oligarchs' scams.
Globalization is unraveling before their eyes from negative interest rates
to Brexit. Turning their world upside down.
If you want to blame anyone for all this armchair medical discussion,
look no further than Ms. Clinton and/or whichever member of her staff decided
to use The Clinton Rules for Obfuscation and Avoidance as a way to address
what was clearly some kind of medical event.
Given that she wasn't whisked away in an ambulance, and didn't spend
any time in an emergency room, whatever it was that happened must not have
been entirely unanticipated or unusual – it may just be that she had the
great misfortune of exhibiting these symptoms in public and not in the privacy
of her own home.
Whatever this is or was, it is how she chose to handle it that has led
to all this discussion.
But let's recap, shall we? First, she was constructively absent from
the campaign trail for the entire month of August. She did few events and
not as much traveling. She also was not spending any time with the media,
giving no pressers for months. Criticism mounted, so – wonder of wonders
– when she got her spiffy new plane, the invites went out to the media to
join her on the plane, and she held her first presser in months just this
past Thursday.
She looked fine. Her color was good, she looked rested. The next
night, she did a high-dollar fundraiser hosted by Barbra Streisand. Again,
she looked and sounded fine. Yet, it was that day that her physician says
she was diagnosed with pneumonia and given antibiotics.
Then, on Sunday, with temps in the low 80's and low humidity, she
falls ill. She looked okay walking to her car, but she leaned on the post
for support and then appeared to collapse getting into the van. Did she
lose her footing on the curb?
So, first we heard she wasn't feeling well. Then we heard she was overheated
and dehydrated. Some hours later, we were told of the pneumonia diagnosis,
and then – like a miracle – she comes walking out of her daughter's apartment
building looking quite chipper. Did she get IV fluids? Who knows?
She sustained a serious concussion in 2012, when she fainted as a complication
of a stomach virus that caused her to be dehydrated. The concussion gave
her double vision, for which she wore special lenses for a time. She was
not allowed to fly. A follow up visit to the doctor revealed that she had
a blood clot in a vein between her brain and her skull so she was put on
blood thinners. Her husband says it took every bit of six months for her
to recover from the concussion.
She's also had DVTs in her legs, and has an underactive thyroid for which
I presume she takes medication.
Could she be having periodic bouts of vertigo as a result of the concussion?
Other effects that linger, or pop up from time to time? Doesn't seem unreasonable,
but here's the thing: we are never going to know if that's the case, because
unlike pneumonia for which you can take an antibiotic and be done with,
ongoing – no matter how infrequent – post-concussion symptoms will call
into question her mental abilities, which would be the death knell for her
candidacy.
So, she and her people spoon feed us one somewhat-plausible explanation
after another, apparently in the hope they will hit on one that makes people
stop asking questions about it – but the problem is that this method just
adds to the sense people have that she's still hiding something and so the
speculation goes on.
This is how the Clintons – both of them – handle everything, and it's
exactly why Hillary finds herself the topic of conversation and speculation
everywhere.
Yes to this (Anne. September 12, 2016 at 9:57 am):
My real issue with this whole event is that, had Clinton not collapsed,
we wouldn't know anything about the alleged pneumonia. It's the same
old story: she does what she wants until events conspire to force her
to make public whatever it was she wanted to remain private.
And even
then, she continues to hold close as much information as possible for
as long as possible, before being more or less forced to get it all
out there.
Also, not sure I believe the pneumonia story. Wouldn't put it past
them to fabricate that. How is taking about health issues w/o talking about
her concussion, blood clots, and rat poison meds …. an honest talk about
her health?
It's probably a lot worse than a case of walking pneumonia. The video
below was posted to yootoobs three days before Hillary Clinton collapsed
into her own footprint like a world tower of trade:
A) Parkinson's Disease has several stages. Hillary appears to be ten
years into the progression at least and somewhere in the disease's middle
stages. Also,
B) the medication used to treat Parkinson's has its own serious side
motor effects, which she seems to exhibit.
C) And finally C, not only does Parkinson's debilitate its victim randomly
and episodically, and ultimately in its latter stages will make keeping
up a daily schedule of activities impossible, it also is typically accompanied
by non-motor symptoms of delusions and hard mood swings: eg, anxiety/depression
and rage.
If Hillary Clinton has Parkinson's -- or some other neurological impairment
leading to her frequent "spells" and falls -- the Democratic Party should
ask her to step aside and allow someone in better health to run. Naturally
being Hillary Clinton she would hotly refuse and retreat to her bunker with
Eva Braun to lean on, but the certain ferocity of her reaction doesn't relieve
the party leadership of this responsibility.
I long ago abandoned any hope for that party, but in an alternate universe
where they had not become mobbed-up and corrupt to the core, Clinton would
get a public call from party elders now to do the right thing for the country
and endorse a substitute candidate.
Having lived with someone who had Parkinson's, and after looking closely
at the video of her on 9/11, I think she has Parkinson's.
As they move her away from that post she was leaning against, her arms
stay rigid behind her back. My friend used to call this
"offing", as in on or off, which was different from his freezing of gait,
and happened to him when he was under stress.
Just too many things, the coughing, the blue sunglasses, the falling,
the coughing, even the pneumonia could be caused by difficulty swallowing.
It could be Vascular Parkinsonism. I just wish she would be strong enough
to admit she is weak.
What is concerning is that after the DVT Hillary would have been placed
on an anticoagulant, especially with all those plane trips. Then there is
that fall she had last year. If she were on Coumadin at that time with a
fall & head trauma can cause a bleed. Also MDs are nervous about putting
someone on a blood thinner that is at risk for frequent falls. This whole
situation is crazy. Feel bad, don't like her, adios-time to take all that
foundation money and retire.
It isn't logical to believe a sudden press release used as a distraction.
With past episodes of fainting, falling, concussion and ongoing treatment,
this qualifier is put out to run up the flagpole. Please note the moment
the handlers suddenly jump to surround and hide the candidate from the cameras.
Daily Mail even goes as far as to say the candidate was "thrown into
the seat like a sack of beef" (paraphrasing) If this is so, that isn't a
response for someone fainting as much as perhaps the attempt to hide symptoms
from observers. Was that doctor EpiPen that opened the door to the van?
Was this an attempt to divert attention from the real issue?
As a great philosopher once said; "Hey Rocky, watch me pull a rabbit
out of my hat"
So she has what could be very contagious? And she rests at Chelsea's
home and plays with the kids? Anyone want some real cheap swamp land in
the Everglades?
This is the tell, if she actually had pneumonia they would not just have
hustled her off to Chelsea's place, my guess is at Chelsea's they could
give her a quick shot of amphetamines so we could then get the "look, the
candidate can actually walk unaided!" photo op when she emerged.
So that's how low we've sunk, we're supposed to vote for the elderly,
sickly, serial war criminal, pathological liar old lady because she can
actually walk. Oh, and "because she's a woman". (So we got the last
8 years of disaster because of the candidate's dermis, and we"ll get the
next 4 years of disaster because of the candidate's pubis).
I'd just like to point out how annoying it is that the media stenographers
on many sites today are slavishly repeating the Hillary campaign's pneumonia
story without a single speck of actually checking, either through logic
or investigation, whether any of it makes sense. Though admittedly there
is a tiny bit doubt starting to creep through the media narrative; maybe
they're thinking that this is the fig leaf they need to feel like they still
have credibility–which is just them fooling themselves.
Since stuff coming from the mainstream media is provably guaranteed
to be just some sht they made up, or passing along some sht someone else
made up without questioning it, I don't think there's anything wrong with
just ignoring the msm and believing whatever you feel like believing from
the internet; unlike with the msm there is at least a decent chance that
that stuff might be true.
Policies? Pay no attention to what emerges from the candidates mouths,
as Obama said in 2008 "Hilary will say anything, and change nothing", she
can be at a rally and yell "I'm fighting for you!" and 15 minutes later
she is meeting with a Wall St CEO on new ways to rip people off. I'm not
saying her opponent is any better
Focus on the candidate's health is always appropriate. Particularly
so when the ability of the candidate to serve out their term is a legitimate
question. It is the height of arrogance for a candidate to accept the nomination
without the full expectation that they will be ready to serve the full term
at stake. For a candidate to attempt to proceed through concealment of substantive
health issues is an expression of complete unaccountability.
It's not the candidate's prerogative to decide upon what information
the voters will make their choice.
If Hillary had been more honest about her physical condition, folks
wouldn't be stooping to armchair diagnoses, which is normal human behavior
for those to whom the truth has not been forthcoming.
Not a one-time diagnosis. She apparently has had a deep venous thrombosis
and more recently cavernous sinus thrombosis. I suspect because of this
(two discrete episodes) a decision has been made for chronic continuing
use of coumadin. Like all medications, a decision is made as to whether
the benefits of treatment using that medication outweigh the projected risks
of the medication. Properly managed, the risks are fairly small. But the
key is proper management, which may be difficult given the demands of the
position as POTUS.
"More"? Like how many more? If this is more opining by her Chappaqua
MD, that does not qualify as "records". This is beginning to resemble the
forced drip of e-mails…..
How many more? As many as it takes, one dollop at a time, until she hits
the sweet spot where the questions stop. It was always destined to take
the same path as the e-mails and every other questionable thing Clinton's
been associated with – that's how they roll!
What continues to boggle my mind is why she doesn't seem to understand
that THIS is why such a significant segment of the electorate doesn't trust
her; it's so obvious, and yet she continues to employ this strategy and
it could cost her the election.
Assuming she is healthy enough to participate in the first debate, it
should be a doozy.
At this point, Clinton would have as much success convincing the public
that she's released all the medical records that are relevant to her run
for president as she would convincing us that she was part of a grand experiment
whereby an entire medical team has been shrunk to Fantastic Voyage size,
and injected into her bloodstream so that she can be under constant care.
The Fantastic Voyage scenario might actually be more believable.
In other words, it's just one more thing that doesn't really matter because
only those in her basket of adorables believe anything she says – and they
believe everything, no matter how the story shifts and changes.
If she became spastic, and collapsed (unexpectedly) just trying to get
into an SUV, what kind of risk is she going to be under during the first
debate?
The stress of being thrust into the biggest "fishbowl" imaginable
( largest TV audience ever being predicted) with all the "marbles" on the
table would freak out the healthiest human alive.
Everyone is going to be
watching for any slight, "unnatural," twitch, or, movement for the whole
episode.
What drama! I wouldn't be surprised if some pretext is found to nix the
debate. The risk for her is just too great, IMO, of course.
Each time she releases medical records, it gives her chorus another chance
to sing (in harmony) that she has clearly demonstrated that she
is healthy. After a few of these, the corporate press will feign impatience,
and any talk about Hillary's health will be cast aside as coming from conspiracy
theorists. No one will ever question why the issue wasn't resolved up front
with a full disclosure.
All of this is fine (I guess) except if she is hiding Parkinson's, which
is completely debilitating as far as the Presidency is concerned.
The question really is: Is a vote for Clinton a vote for Tim Kaine???
Now, the REALLY cynical might conjecture that Clintoon is thinking the
BEST meme to save the election for herself is that she spins it that she
pulls a William Henry Harrison – don't worry about voting for Clintoon!!!
I'll only be president for 30 or so days!
Hey, your not really voting for me Your really voting for Kaine!
Only decades later is the Clinton tomb excavated and it is revealed that
she was a Disney animatronic programmed by Goldman Sachs – those "speeches"
were really charades to allow the cables to be plugged in so the updated
software could be downloaded…
If the media is in the pocket of the Clintons, why now are we finding
out about her "illness" ….hmmmmm….
"If you are following breaking news, Hillary Clinton abruptly left the
9-11 memorial today because she was reportedly "overheated." Her campaign
says she is fine now. You probably wonder if the "overheated" explanation
is true – and a non-issue as reported – or an indication of a larger medical
condition. I'm blogging to tell you it doesn't matter. The result is the
same.
Here's why. If humans were rational creatures, the time and place
of Clinton's "overheating" wouldn't matter at all. But when it comes to
American psychology, there is no more powerful symbol of terrorism and fear
than 9-11 . When a would-be Commander-in-Chief withers – literally – in
front of our most emotional reminder of an attack on the homeland, we feel
unsafe. And safety is our first priority.
Hillary Clinton just became unelectable. The mainstream media might
not interpret today's events as a big deal. After all, it was only a little
episode of overheating. And they will continue covering the play-by-play
action until election day. But unless Trump actually does shoot someone
on 5th Avenue, he's running unopposed."
Teh Guardian is running reports and every accompanying image is of some
other event with Killary stepping, smiling, unassisted into a car. What
a disgrace that shill sheet is.
robnume September 12, 2016 at 9:58 pm
Having worked in an emergency/trauma center for years, no, I won't say what
I did as I like anonymity, it seems to me that Hillary could likely
be suffering from subcortical vascular dementia. Upon a diagnoses of
this kind, one can expect to live from 3 to 5 years. If diagnosed in
2012-13, which seems likely given her concussion and brain clot diagnoses,
she would now begin to experience a severe physical decline and pneumonia
is a frequent cause of death for those suffering from subcortical vascular
dementia.
Rosario September 13, 2016 at 3:03 am
I used to think all the health speculation with Hillary was sexist and bogus
until her ordeal Sunday. The pneumonia diagnosis is absolutely bizarre and
doesn't quite line up with her visual symptoms at the 9/11 memorial. Pneumonia
was the best her staff could come up with? I guess they think we live in
a world without the internet and Youtube. Hillary doesn't look like she
had pneumonia Friday at the fundraiser. The same day she was apparently
diagnosed, which implies the first day of treatment when symptoms for bacterial
infections are at their absolute worst. She actually looked like she was
in her element, bright as rain. In addition, how in the hell do you have
a "pneumonia episode"? Apparently it came on real hard Sunday morning (ironically,
the time of day when the body is most capable during illness) then magically
went away an hour later for her to have a chipper, non-coughing, non-fatigued
photo op with a little girl (it was so identity politics staged it was comical)...
"... It is not wise to demonize foreign leaders or worship them. Foreign policy needs sometimes to work with even some of the worst actors. ..."
"... We need to support institutions that work to guarantee and protect human rights for all. A personality cult that worships leaders promotes intolerance and the abuse of human rights. ..."
"... Krooogman is jus a useful moralistic idiot aiding and abetting [hillary compaigh] with humanist [neo]liberal anathemas. A policy of Russia constriction by uncle S and his posse ..."
"... [It would be better if] Current neocon democrats "display an ounce of statesmanship" and use any before they send out the aircraft carriers, bombers, drones and CIA arms for the next ISIL. ..."
"... Yes, Kerry talks while the DoD and CIA do the murdering. ..."
"... You are just a political writer, paid to reflect your bosses views. A proper journalist would at least provide a minimally balanced view. In your case we know your answer before we open the newspaper. ..."
"... No leftist calls krooogman a leftist. He is a a status quo elitist. An enlightenment humanist [interventionist neo]liberal. A convinced self-deluded neo-classical economist. A major political ignoramus... And a very decent little tabby cat. All rolled up into one pint sized ambitious. Self assured. Nassau county bright boy now aged but undaunted anne : , Monday, September 12, 2016 at 04:38 AM http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/23/opinion/david-brooks-snap-out-of-it.html September 22, 2014 Snap Out of It By David Brooks President Vladimir Putin of Russia, a lone thug sitting atop a failing regime.... http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/22/opinion/thomas-friedman-putin-and-the-pope.html October 21, 2014 Putin and the Pope By Thomas L. Friedman One keeps surprising us with his capacity for empathy, the other by how much he has become a first-class jerk and thug.... http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/opinion/sunday/thomas-l-friedman-whos-playing-marbles-now.html December 20, 2014 Who's Playing Marbles Now? By Thomas L. Friedman Let us not mince words: Vladimir Putin is a delusional thug.... http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/22/opinion/paul-krugman-putin-neocons-and-the-great-illusion.html December 21, 2014 Conquest Is for Losers: Putin, Neocons and the Great Illusion By Paul Krugman Remember, he's an ex-K.G.B. man - which is to say, he spent his formative years as a professional thug.... http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/28/opinion/thomas-friedman-czar-putins-next-moves.html January 27, 2015 Czar Putin's Next Moves By Thomas L. Friedman ZURICH - If Putin the Thug gets away with crushing Ukraine's new democratic experiment and unilaterally redrawing the borders of Europe, every pro-Western country around Russia will be in danger.... anne : , Monday, September 12, 2016 at 04:38 AM http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/16/world/middleeast/white-house-split-on-opening-talks-with-putin.html September 15, 2015 Obama Weighing Talks With Putin on Syrian Crisis By PETER BAKER and ANDREW E. KRAMER WASHINGTON - Mr. Obama views Mr. Putin as a thug, according to advisers and analysts.... http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/21/opinion/mr-putins-mixed-messages-on-syria.html September 20, 2015 Mr. Putin's Mixed Messages on Syria Mr. Obama considers Mr. Putin a thug, his advisers say.... ilsm -> anne... , Monday, September 12, 2016 at 03:18 PM Putin might ask why us army jihadis fought with cia jihadis in Assad's country? a subject one thug can raise with a bigger thug. ..."
"... Thug. I wonder if these bright liberals consider the word they like to use so much ? u can feel their thrill every time they hurl it at a target. Long live the self righteous [neo]Liberal goon squad ..."
"... thugs -- A target of colonial masters ..."
"... if your candidate cannot go to a hospital.... looks like a serious neurolgic issue to me. Let the spin begin is trump's Putin or Clinton neuopathy? ..."
"... I remember reading John Kenneth Galbraith describe how when he was being threatened by the original McCarthy, the strategy he chose was to name McCarthy using every name he could think of. The strategy worked, and Galbraith was forgotten by McCarthy. I suspect the strategy will work again. ..."
"... In the name of plain old fashion reasonable ness let's not turn krooogman the self righteous [neo] liberal " crusader" into a new kold war reactionary liberal just yet ..."
"... innuendo see as much deplorable assassination in moscow as folks dying at Clinton hands. And those 250k killed in 5 years of CIA blundering in Syria are Obama Clinton not Putin. ..."
"... Ok, so on your planet the civil war in Syria was caused entirely by CIA intervention? That's what you're going with? ..."
"... No of course not! The CIA is 'playing' 1300 year old schism in Islam. It is Sunni versus Shiite, the rest in funding, equipping, cheerleading by GCC royal, US and Israel. ..."
"... Official Washington's "group think" on the Ukraine crisis now has a totalitarian feel to it as "everyone who matters" joins in the ritualistic stoning of Russian President Putin and takes joy in Russia's economic pain, with liberal economist Paul Krugman the latest to hoist a rock. ..."
"... The anti-war left sees the demonization of foreign leaders as clearing the way for war and invasion. ..."
"... Hillary Clinton's National Security Advisers Are a "Who's Who" of the Warfare State ..."
"... The list of key advisers - which includes the general who executed the troop surge in Iraq and a former Bush homeland security chief turned terror profiteer - is a strong indicator that Clinton's national security policy will not threaten the post-9/11 national-security status quo that includes active use of military power abroad and heightened security measures at home. ..."
It is not wise to demonize foreign leaders or worship them.
Foreign policy needs sometimes to work with even some of the worst actors.
For example, Russia is in Syria and can either promote more violence or
work to end the civil war. Right now, they have agreed with the US to support
a cease fire.
Demonization of Russia led directly to the Vietnam War, the Cambodian horror,
the Taliban and a lot of bad outcomes.
We need to support institutions that work to guarantee and protect human
rights for all. A personality cult that worships leaders promotes intolerance
and the abuse of human rights. We need a strategy of building and strengthening
institutions that are committed to protecting ethnic minorities and offer
a change alternative to violent acting out.
Well said. One can debate the virtues and vices of Vladimir Putin indefinitely,
and historians will do so, but throwing the lives and security of young
Americans into the mill of short term political opportunism, at the service
of the campaign meme of the week, is not responsible.
Of course, Trump has
also behaved like a nincompoop in discussing Putin and Russia in ways that
do no display an ounce of statesmanship.
Who is "throwing the lives and security of young Americans into the mill
of short term political opportunism"?
I'm guessing you are saying Hillary is doing that by criticizing Putin
or something, but I can't fathom how you connect those dots.
Dan Kervick -> sanjait...
No, Krugman.
Krugman obediently parrots and amplifies whatever attack theme the campaign
decides to promote on any given week, and is clearly coordinating with a
number of other hyper-partisan "journalists" and apparatchiks, who sing
in harmony from the same hymn books. The man is a certifiable political
hack.
I'm surprised that Team D had not yet floated the charge that Putin gave
Clinton pneumonia with some infected umbrella pellet gun.
Paine -> sanjait...
No no
Krooogman is jus a useful moralistic idiot aiding and abetting [hillary
compaigh] with humanist [neo]liberal anathemas.
A policy of Russia constriction by uncle S and his posse
Paine -> Paine ...
Will Hillary take a forward policy stance on mother Russia.
Out do Barry- Kerry. I'm still hoping she's capable of evolution to good POTUS.
My best friends ardent fury at her bloody pals.
Has tempered me some. Nothing ever confirms convictions grounded in personal loathing
I've learned to love her since Bernie burned out over Pennsylvania or
was it Ohio ?
Paine -> Paine ...
However nothing about loving her requires me to support her legacy or her
entourage
Or like too many thin skinned compromises here. Attack those who can not find in their heart. Any love for such a compromised
saint
As dear Hill
ilsm -> Dan Kervick...
[It would be better if]
Current neocon democrats "display an ounce of statesmanship" and use any
before they send out the aircraft carriers, bombers, drones and CIA arms
for the next ISIL.
ilsm -> Dan Kervick...
Yes, Kerry talks while the DoD and CIA do the murdering.
gh : ,
Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize winner. How is it possible that you remain so
leftist, in spite of all the evidence ? You are just a political writer,
paid to reflect your bosses views. A proper journalist would at least provide
a minimally balanced view. In your case we know your answer before we open
the newspaper.
What a shame.
Paine -> djb...
Tempest in a tea pot. No leftist calls krooogman a leftist. He is a a status quo
elitist.
An enlightenment humanist [interventionist neo]liberal.
A convinced self-deluded neo-classical economist.
A major political ignoramus...
And a very decent little tabby cat.
All rolled up into one pint sized ambitious.
Self assured. Nassau county bright boy
now aged but undaunted
ZURICH - If Putin the Thug gets away with crushing Ukraine's new democratic
experiment and unilaterally redrawing the borders of Europe, every pro-Western
country around Russia will be in danger....
First of all, let's get this straight: The Russian Federation of 2016
is not the Soviet Union of 1986. True, it covers most of the same territory
and is run by some of the same thugs....
Thug. I wonder if these bright liberals consider the word they like to use
so much ? u can feel their thrill every time they hurl it at a target. Long live the self righteous
[neo]Liberal goon squad
" historical --
a member of a religious organization of robbers and assassins in India.
Devotees of the goddess Kali, the Thugs waylaid and strangled their victims,
usually travelers, in a ritually prescribed manner. They were suppressed
by the British in the 1830s."
Dat is about as much heavy liftin as the lettered folk can handle: hurling
insults. Take dat. "Geeves, send them a message!" Message: Thugs! Mission accomplished and now we must rest.
ilsm -> Paine ...
if your candidate cannot go to a hospital....
looks like a serious neurolgic issue to me. Let the spin begin is trump's
Putin or Clinton neuopathy?
anne :
Paul Krugman terrifies me, simply terrifies me. A pusher of a Cold War,
a pusher of McCarthyism, a person who is obviously collecting a list of
names and only waiting to name names. I however will be no Krugman martyr
and am also collecting names and will name names even before being ordered
to and I have already decided who I will be naming first.
[ I remember reading John Kenneth Galbraith describe how when he was
being threatened by the original McCarthy, the strategy he chose was to
name McCarthy using every name he could think of. The strategy worked, and
Galbraith was forgotten by McCarthy. I suspect the strategy will work again.
]
anne -> anne...
I need to find the Galbraith reference, and I also remember that Krugman
was attacking Galbraith before, well, "the line forms on the right."
Paine -> anne...
Anne,
In the name of plain old fashion reasonable ness let's not turn krooogman the self righteous
[neo] liberal " crusader" into a new kold war reactionary liberal just yet
The conversion of one section of new dealers into
that rumpus of uncle hegomony.'s Dupes
Was awful enough.
Not to contemplate yet another wholesale herd like.
Transduction of their "liberal values"
In the name of individual liberty and the rights of humanity
What Economists Can Learn From Evolutionary Theorists
By Paul Krugman - European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy
I guess it is no secret that even John Kenneth Galbraith, still the public's
idea of a great economist, looks to most serious economists like an intellectual
dilettante who lacks the patience for hard thinking....
ilsm -> Pinkybum...
innuendo see as much deplorable assassination in moscow as folks dying at
Clinton hands. And those 250k killed in 5 years of CIA blundering in Syria are Obama
Clinton not Putin.
Ok, so on your planet the civil war in Syria was caused entirely by CIA
intervention? That's what you're going with?
So, not the tyranny of the Assad regime, supported by Russia. And not
the emergence of ISIS. Those, by your accounting, are not primary causes
of the conflict, but instead it was the meager support the CIA offered the
FSA alliance, according to you. Pfft.
ilsm -> sanjait...
No of course not!
The CIA is 'playing' 1300 year old schism in Islam. It is Sunni versus
Shiite, the rest in funding, equipping, cheerleading by GCC royal, US and
Israel.
Official Washington's "group think" on the Ukraine crisis now has a totalitarian
feel to it as "everyone who matters" joins in the ritualistic stoning of
Russian President Putin and takes joy in Russia's economic pain, with liberal
economist Paul Krugman the latest to hoist a rock.
China's Market Crash Means Chinese Supergrowth Could Have Only 5 More
Years to Run
By Brad DeLong
Ever since I became an adult in 1980, I have been a stopped clock with
respect to the Chinese economy. I have said -- always -- that at most, Chinese
supergrowth likely has five more years to run.
Then there will come a crash -- in asset values and expectations, if
not in production and employment. After the crash, China will revert to
the standard pattern of an emerging market economy without successful institutions
that duplicate or somehow mimic those of the North Atlantic. Its productivity
rate will be little more than the 2 percent per year of emerging markets
as a whole; catch-up and convergence to the North Atlantic growth-path norm
will be slow if at all; and political risks that cause war, revolution or
merely economic stagnation rather than unexpected booms will become the
most likely surprises.
I was wrong for 25 years straight -- and the jury is still out on the
period since 2005. Thus, I'm very hesitant to count out China and its supergrowth
miracle. But now "a" crash -- even if, perhaps, not "the" crash I was predicting
-- is at hand....
[ Twenty-five years of wrongness, why not another 25? Never ever ask
why such wrongness, however. ]
Peter K. -> sanjait...
"The weird existence of people who somehow loved Bernie Sanders while also
being apologists for Putin continues to defy the notion of cognitive dissonance."
The anti-war left sees the demonization of foreign leaders as clearing
the way for war and invasion.
The center-left Demcocrats' anti-democratic practices during the primary
were hypocritical. At leas Debbie Wasserman-Shultz was ousted as chair of
the DNC.
Dan Kervick -> sanjait...
The context is that a murderers row of 2002/3 vintage neocons has now adopted
the Clinton campaign as its preferred vehicle for its further murderous
adventures and interventionist follies. Apparently only the (very) elder
neocon leader Norman Podhoretz is not in yet.
ilsm -> sanjait...
Somehow Putin is weak on plundering his country.
Bush and Obama are $4,000B in WAR waste on Iraghistan and Yemen.
McCarthyism is the practice of making accusations of subversion or treason
without proper regard for evidence. It also means "the practice of making
unfair allegations or using unfair investigative techniques, especially
in order to restrict dissent or political criticism." The term has its origins
in the period in the United States known as the Second Red Scare, lasting
roughly from 1950 to 1956 and characterized by heightened political repression
against supposed communists, as well as a campaign spreading fear of their
influence on American institutions and of espionage by Soviet agents. Originally
coined to criticize the anti-communist pursuits of Republican U.S. Senator
Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, "McCarthyism" soon took on a broader meaning,
describing the excesses of similar efforts. The term is also now used more
generally to describe reckless, unsubstantiated accusations, as well as
demagogic attacks on the character or patriotism of political adversaries.
Hillary Clinton's National Security Advisers Are a "Who's Who" of the
Warfare State
By Zaid Jilani, Alex Emmons, and Naomi LaChance
HILLARY CLINTON IS meeting with a new national security "working group"
that is filled with an elite "who's who" of the military-industrial complex
and the security deep state.
The list of key advisers - which includes the general who executed the
troop surge in Iraq and a former Bush homeland security chief turned terror
profiteer - is a strong indicator that Clinton's national security policy
will not threaten the post-9/11 national-security status quo that includes
active use of military power abroad and heightened security measures at
home.
It's a story we've seen before in President Obama's early appointments.
In retrospect, analysts have pointed to the continuity in national security
and intelligence advisers as an early sign that despite his campaign rhetoric
Obama would end up building on - rather than tearing down - the often-extralegal,
Bush-Cheney counterterror regime. For instance, while Obama promised in
2008 to reform the NSA, its director was kept on and its reach continued
to grow.
Obama's most fateful decision may have been choosing former National
Counterterrorism Center Director John Brennan to be national security adviser,
despite Brennan's support of Bush's torture program. Brennan would go on
to run the president's drone program, lead the CIA, fight the Senate's torture
investigation, and then lie about searching Senate computers.
That backdrop is what makes Clinton's new list of advisers so significant.
It includes Gen. David Petraeus, the major architect of the 2007 Iraq
War troop surge, which brought 30,000 more troops to Iraq. Picking him indicates
at partiality to combative ideology. It also represents a return to good
standing for the general after he pled guilty to leaking notebooks full
of classified information to his lover, Paula Broadwell, and got off with
two years of probation and a fine. Petraeus currently works at the investment
firm KKR & Co.
Another notable member of Clinton's group is Michael Chertoff, a hardliner
who served as President George W. Bush's last secretary of the Department
of Homeland Security, and who since leaving government in 2009 has helmed
a corporate consulting firm called the Chertoff Group that promotes security-industry
priorities. For example, in 2010, he gave dozens of media interviews touting
full-body scanners at airports while his firm was employed by a company
that produced body scanning machines. His firmalso employs a number of other
ex-security state officials, such as former CIA and NSA Director Michael
Hayden. It does not disclose a complete list of its clients - all of whom
now have a line of access to Clinton.
Many others on the list are open advocates of military escalation overseas.
Mike Morell, the former acting director of the CIA, endorsed Clinton last
month in a New York Times opinion piece that accused Trump of being an "unwitting
agent of the Russian Federation." The Times was criticized for not disclosing
his current employment by Beacon Global Strategies, a politically powerful
national-security consulting firm with strong links to Clinton. Three days
later, Morell told Charlie Rose in a PBS interview that the CIA should actively
assassinate Russians and Iranians in Syria.
During his time at the CIA, Morell was connected to some of the worst
scandals and intelligence failures of the Bush administration. In his book,
he apologizes for giving flawed intelligence to Colin Powell about Iraq's
supposed weapons of mass destruction, but defends the CIA torture program
as legal and ethical.
Jim Stavridis, a former NATO supreme allied commander Europe on Clinton's
advisory group, told Fox News Radio in July, when he was being vetted by
Clinton as a possible vice presidential nominee, that "we have got to get
more aggressive going into Syria and Iraq and go after [ISIS] because if
we don't they're going to come to us. It's a pretty simple equation." He
said he would "encourage the president to take a more aggressive stance
against Iran, to increase our military forces in Iraq and Syria, and to
confront Vladmir Putin" over his moves in Crimea.
The New York Times reported in 2011 that Michael Vickers, a former Pentagon
official on Clinton's new list, led the use of drone strikes. He would grin
and tell his colleagues at meetings, "I just want to kill those guys."
Others on the list played a role in the targeted killing policies of
the Obama administration, including Chris Fussell, a top aide to Gen. Stanley
McChrystal, and now a partner with him at his lucrative consulting firm,
the McChrystal Group....
"... I want to throw a chair at the elitist propaganda coming from the radio. ..."
"... Their political coverage is truly awful - horse race analysis cheerleading for HRC, no substantive talk about issues just a constant human interest sideshow anecdotal. ..."
"... They also seem to have exactly the same stories as same day's NYT - makes one wonder who's actually disseminating all the talking points. ..."
"... Yah I know but I also learned from NPR Trump is bad because he likes Putin who keeps invading nations and killing a bunch of folks and gives govt contracts to his friends – unlike good USA. All stated matter of factly by NPR analysts. ..."
"... It's amazing how everything has to get sloppy around Clinton. People, news papers, news shows, whatever. As soon as they decide to sign on with Camp Clinton, they all have to start making excuses for her. Sloppy excuses. Excuses with a smell of skunk to them. ..."
"... They should loose those donors, it would be a cleansing act that might result in more creative and honest programming. ..."
Used to have NPR going from wakey until bedtime. Now, I read about roses
and meditate. Much more serenity. Now, my agitation comes from NC. And it's
because world affairs are agitating, not because I want to throw a chair
at the elitist propaganda coming from the radio.
Their political coverage is truly awful - horse race analysis cheerleading
for HRC, no substantive talk about issues just a constant human interest
sideshow anecdotal. The Bernie coverage was a disgrace. I was raised
on a steady diet of NPR, and realized the headlines are all the same as
when I was a kid: Middle East "violence," Israeli politics, poor person
suffering anecdote, refugee porn.
I tune in from time to time just to make sure it hasn't changed. What
change there has been seems to be ever more shrill neoliberal pablum spoon-fed
with small words as though to eight-graders. They also seem to have
exactly the same stories as same day's NYT - makes one wonder who's actually
disseminating all the talking points.
I stopped listening to them after they did a long, sympathetic piece
on how Israeli soldiers were traumatized by the injuries they inflicted
on Palestinian kids during the first Intifada. The idea that they should
suffer from implacable guilt was not not discussed.
Yah I know but I also learned from NPR Trump is bad because he likes
Putin who keeps invading nations and killing a bunch of folks and gives
govt contracts to his friends – unlike good USA. All stated matter of factly
by NPR analysts.
Yes, "hold on for the ride." Now even the MSM is split on whether to
all of a sudden be skeptical of the stuff Camp Clinton puts out re Hill's
health. If she quits due to ill health, can she keep her campaign contributions?
She's got Parkinson's disease, or at least severe aftershocks from her earlier
brain trouble. She's not gonna get better.
It's amazing how everything has to get sloppy around Clinton. People,
news papers, news shows, whatever. As soon as they decide to sign on with
Camp Clinton, they all have to start making excuses for her. Sloppy excuses.
Excuses with a smell of skunk to them.
And once they give in, it sticks to them. They can no longer be trusted.
Whatever you thought of them before is now forever clouded. They are ruined.
I don't know about Democracy Now - haven't listened lately. But Krugman
went from a columnist I respected to idiotic Clinton shill starting this
year. His attacks on Sanders and his supporters and his excuse making for
Clinton's Iraq vote totally destroyed his credibility for me. Maybe he is
worth reading if he stays far away from the subject of Clinton, but I no
longer care enough to find out.
And, all this on top of the constant, daily, weekly, and monthly, never
ending, stream of rancid revelations being unearthed regarding her shady
public/private financial juggling act. Like, simply running for President
isn't stressful enough.
I stopped listening after Bush, Jr. was elected and immediately cut-off
aid to foreign family planning orgs that mentioned mentioned abortion as
an option to their patients. Ol' Cokie assured NPR listeners it was no big
thing, nothing to see here, move along people. I tore the radio out of the
dash and threw it out the window…
I gave up on NPR when I got sick and tired of Cokie Roberts condescending
republican talking points. It is very much a megaphone for center right
elites.
I've read that people who work there say that if they did not do the
center right slant, they would lose a vast majority of their big donor funding.
They should loose those donors, it would be a cleansing act that might
result in more creative and honest programming.
I only listen to local public radio and tune away if there is NPR news
content.
Chicago Public Radio (WBEZ) is an exception on local public radio. It
is awful and I will not listen to it, their programming has devolved to
whining elitist **** talk radio. It is insufferable.
"... She was a horrible secretary of state. Explain to me why the US had to ruin a harmless country like Libya. ..."
"... "Among the principal concerns in Washington, London and Paris were the increasing Chinese and Russian economic interests in Libya and more generally Africa as a whole. China had developed $6.6 billion in bilateral trade, mainly in oil, while some 30,000 Chinese workers were employed in a wide range of infrastructure projects. Russia, meanwhile, had developed extensive oil deals, billions of dollars in arms sales and a $3 billion project to link Sirte and Benghazi by rail. There were also discussions on providing the Russian navy with a Mediterranean port near Benghazi. ..."
"... Gaddafi had provoked the ire of the government of Nicolas Sarkozy in France with his hostility to its scheme for creating a Mediterranean Union, aimed at refurbishing French influence in the country's former colonies and beyond. ..."
"... Moreover, major US and Western European energy conglomerates increasingly chafed at what they saw as tough contract terms demanded by the Gaddafi government, as well as the threat that the Russian oil company Gazprom would be given a big stake in the exploitation of the country's reserves" ..."
"... History shows that what flows in Hillary's political veins is new Democrat, Rubinite, Peterson, Wall Street dominated blood. ..."
"... Clinton, then Bush, and now Obama have increasingly shielded their official actions from the public. And what should be obvious to anyone paying attention is that they are doing so to hide their actions from a public that would object, because at a minimum, they are unethical, or because they are illegal. ..."
"... Nothing, absolutely nothing, in Hillary's past offers any a glimmer of anything different. Democracy requires transparency so that the public is properly informed and has oversight with which to hold people accountable. Obama promised to have the most transparent administration in history. He lied. Nothing she says today suggests Hillary would change this, and her past points to her making it worse. ..."
"... I do not know how old you are but younger Bernie supporters will not vote for Killary Clinton. I do not know any people under 30 that will vote for Clinton. ..."
"... Clinton's only path to victory in the General is to carry southern states that the Democrats always lose. She is going to get killed in the Rust Belt. Trump knows how to talk to disgruntled white voters. The only one who will stop him is Bernie since they are going after the same voter. ..."
Secretary Hillary Clinton is asking Democratic voters to believe that she
has experienced a "Road to Damascus" conversion from her roots as a leader of
the "New Democrats" – the Wall Street wing of the Democratic Party.
... ... ...
Hillary and Obama made sure that they did not even have to risk their "lap
dog" developing a spine. No IG was their ideal world.
...The idea that the State Department IG, appointed by President Obama, is
"partisan" in the sense of being "anti-Clinton" is facially bizarre in that
Obama is a strong supporter of Hillary.
HRC is, and always has been, bad news. She shouldn't have even run for
prez the first time. She was a horrible secretary of state. Explain
to me why the US had to ruin a harmless country like Libya. I hope
the indictment comes down very soon, so Bernie can just be presumed the
Democratic nominee.
"Among the principal concerns in Washington, London and Paris were
the increasing Chinese and Russian economic interests in Libya and more
generally Africa as a whole. China had developed $6.6 billion in bilateral
trade, mainly in oil, while some 30,000 Chinese workers were employed in
a wide range of infrastructure projects. Russia, meanwhile, had developed
extensive oil deals, billions of dollars in arms sales and a $3 billion
project to link Sirte and Benghazi by rail. There were also discussions
on providing the Russian navy with a Mediterranean port near Benghazi.
Gaddafi had provoked the ire of the government of Nicolas Sarkozy
in France with his hostility to its scheme for creating a Mediterranean
Union, aimed at refurbishing French influence in the country's former colonies
and beyond.
Moreover, major US and Western European energy conglomerates increasingly
chafed at what they saw as tough contract terms demanded by the Gaddafi
government, as well as the threat that the Russian oil company Gazprom would
be given a big stake in the exploitation of the country's reserves"
The past is prologue. History shows that what flows in Hillary's
political veins is new Democrat, Rubinite, Peterson, Wall Street dominated
blood. I agreed with her when she spoke of a vast right wing conspiracy,
as it was obvious to anyone paying attention, and I could understand the
Clinton's defensive secrecy given the relentlessly personal assaults they
were under. But I object to the epidemic of secrecy that has infested what
should be the public sphere of our government.
Clinton, then Bush, and now Obama have increasingly shielded their
official actions from the public. And what should be obvious to anyone paying
attention is that they are doing so to hide their actions from a public
that would object, because at a minimum, they are unethical, or because
they are illegal.
Nothing, absolutely nothing, in Hillary's past offers any a glimmer
of anything different. Democracy requires transparency so that the public
is properly informed and has oversight with which to hold people accountable.
Obama promised to have the most transparent administration in history. He
lied. Nothing she says today suggests Hillary would change this, and her
past points to her making it worse.
The "unlikeability" factor of Hillary Clinton, and her husband Bill,
grows ever deeper in the American public. She drips with a uncouth and meglomaniacal
drive to be president. I am not sure she can win an election, even with
many voters pulling the lever for her in fear of the greater evil. I am
not sure she is the lesser evil, and I think others may feel the same way
election time.
Mmmmmf it's hard not to think she's the lesser of two evils when she's
running against a candidate who's openly deranged–and I can guarantee she
will be running against such a one, even before the Republicans pick one
to nominate. All of theirs are deranged. They had a "deep bench," and they
were all deranged. If Hillary inspires a large number of voters–and I'm
a Sanders fan, but apparently she does–maybe they'll all come out and vote
a straight D ticket, which might help us in that Home for
the Deranged which is our Congress. And I doubt that Hillary would nominate
another Scalia, Alito or Thomas. She probably wouldn't know where to look,
for one thing. Did I mention that I'm a Sanders fan?
care to list all of Trumps left wing positions? single payer – nope he's
not for that anymore, read his actual healthcare proposals. a few social
issues like abortion? oh maybe but he keeps changing positions there as
well (truthfully I don't' see these issues as really being right or left
at all, but in the American political system they usually are seen that
way) opposition to trade deals? … ok maybe that.
I'm not sure Kasich is deranged, but he is a warmonger for sure, then
so is Hillary. Rubio might not be deranged but he's a neocon and a neophyte.
I do not know how old you are but younger Bernie supporters will
not vote for Killary Clinton. I do not know any people under 30 that will
vote for Clinton. I attend a local community college (prepping for
grad school) outside of Philadelphia in an area that Killary will easily
carry thanks to a lot of older feminists that still use the feminist card
to justify their vote.
Clinton's only path to victory in the General is to carry southern
states that the Democrats always lose. She is going to get killed in the
Rust Belt. Trump knows how to talk to disgruntled white voters. The only
one who will stop him is Bernie since they are going after the same voter.
The Libertarians have their convention in July, and they might put up
an interesting nominee. Could be Jesse Ventura or McAffee of net security
and Belize escape fame. Ventura would be a good prez, in my opinion.
That's where Bernie can really do some good. He can't snap his fingers
and have medicare for all, but he can put in SEC heads, SecTreasury, and
economic advisers that make sense, like Bill Black, yes, who put some bankers
in jail after the S&L debacle under Reagan. Iceland put 13 bankers in jail
recently. Here in the cowardly US they just pay a fine amounting to a small
percentage of what they stole. No problem for them at all. Just a cost of
doing business.
"... In fact, HRC may be a better prospect for neocons, because they can distract the Dem base with how cool it is for a "strong woman" to send men into battle. Anyone opposed must be a misogynist/sexist pig. By contrast Jeb would be too obvious. ..."
"... "There is no prospect of a non-interventionist president." ..."
"... Exactly. Obama has certainly proved this to be true, for those who might've thought otherwise. And since it is true, if one is going to vote anyway, then the decision won't be made on the basis of not "wanting more wars with terrible outcomes." There will have to be another, different, deciding factor, since that factor would rule out Ms. Clinton AND every other candidate. ..."
"... Yes, I have to second Lysander's view. People - both in and outside the US - must first disabuse themselves of ANY notion that the US is a democratic state, that "changes" in leadership will actually bring about ANY difference in foreign/domestic policy and that the American war criminal ship can be righted by the people utilizing the "democratic" mechanisms at their disposal. ..."
"... Furthermore, after the Obama debacle and his utter betrayal etc of his supporters if anyone thinks someone in the American Establishment is looking out for their peon asses why then they probably also believe that the US was "surprised/caught off guard" - yet again - by ISIS et al in Iraq. ..."
"... I wish Rand Paul had his fathers balls, but he doesnt. Ron was a Libertarian pretending to be a Republican, while Rand is a Republican pretending to be a Libertarian... Rand would be no different than any other Republican or Democratic establishment schmuck. ..."
"... I never did like Ron Pauls economic policy, being left leaning, and I'm doubtful whether he would have actually accomplished anything useful as President, but his NonInterventionism was admirable and I was happy to put his name in in the Rethug primary in 2012 for that reason alone. ..."
"... Mr. Kristol said he, too, sensed "more willingness to rethink" neoconservatism, which he called "vindicated to some degree" by the fruits of Mr. Obama's detached approach to Syria and Eastern Europe. Mr. Kagan, he said, gives historical heft to arguments "that are very consistent with the arguments I made, and he made, 20 years ago, 10 years ago." ..."
"... After all the slaughter these people feel like crowing. They are clearly, as JSorrentine often reminds us, pyschopath butchers. ..."
"... Incidentally, where is the outrage from Samantha Powers about the ISIS massacre in Tikrit? ..."
"... Well, I guess the world just can't talk about how the amazingly rapid rise of ISIS/L and fall of Iraq completely continues the plans of the apartheid genocidal state of Israel's - and their traitorous Zionist partners in the American Establishment - as set out in the Yinon Plan and Clean Break strategies because - HOW FORTUITOUS...I mean, terribly sad and unexpected, sorry - some unlucky Israeli teenagers just happened to be "kidnapped" by "Hamas" just as the ISIS show was kicking off or so that's what the apartheid genocidal state of Israel is telling the world. ..."
"... Shrillary wouldn't be where she is today if she wasn't criminally insane. I want her to become President. She'll redefine the meaning of Eerily Inept (a label coined by Gore Vidal and attached to G Dubya Bush). Her greatest moment was when Lavrov called her out on her RESET button and pointed out, with a chuckle, "You got it wrong. It doesn't say RESET it says SHORT CIRCUIT." ..."
"... Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who argued in favor of arming Syrian rebels, said last week at an event in New York hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations, "this is not just a Syrian problem anymore. I never thought it was just a Syrian problem. I thought it was a regional problem. ..."
"... Why, even HILLARY is just SOOOO SURPRISED about people trying to erase boundaries, huh? Funny, she should have read further into yesterday's times where it seems that the Zionist mouthpiece of record was desperately trying to get "out in front" of anyone mentioning that the fracturing of Iraq and the ME was all part of long-time Israeli strategy: ..."
"... In 2006, it was Ralph Peters, the retired lieutenant colonel turned columnist, who sketched a map that subdivided Saudi Arabia and Pakistan and envisioned Kurdish, Sunni and Shiite republics emerging from a no-longer-united Iraq. Two years later, The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg imagined similar partings-of-the-ways, with new microstates -- an Alawite Republic, an Islamic Emirate of Gaza -- taking shape and Afghanistan splitting up as well. Last year, it was Robin Wright's turn in this newspaper, in a map that (keeping up with events) subdivided Libya as well. ..."
"... As president she's da bomb! ..."
"... Hillary is a loathsome war mongering bitch. She almost had a public orgasm when Libyan leader Quadaffi was tortured and murdered by US supported Libyan rebels. The muder of Chris Stevens was a case of what goes around comes around. ..."
"... A point which nobody else has made as far as I know. To wit there is a big overlap between the banking and Israel lobbies since wealthy Jews account for a hugely disproportionate number of top financial movers and shakers. Anything that helps the financial industry also helps the war mongering Israel and neo con lobbies. The heavily Jewish Fed is another enabler of all that is wrong with America today. ..."
"... I, also agree, with the possible exception of replacing the word "Zionist", with the word "Corporatist", although both can be rightly used. We'll still get the person the 1%ers want us to have. Ain't Oligarchies grand? ..."
"... Hillary's election depends on two things still unknown: her health and whether the Republicans can manage to choose someone sufficiently batshit crazy to make her the best of abysmal alternatives. ..."
"... HRH is a Neo Liberal of Arianne 'Sniff Sniff' Huffington's type, the 'Third Way Up Your Ass' of Globalist NAFTA/TPP Free Trade Neonazi destruction of labor and environmental protections, and in your face with NOOOOO apologies. ..."
"... And Victoria Nuland indicates that she agrees with her husband Robert Kagan's criticism of Obama's foreign policy. ..."
"... Would it be safe to say Hillary's White Trash ? ..."
"... There are some really nice photographs of Hillary being very friendly with bearded famous Libyan Islamists (Gaddafi was still alive then). In combination with Benghazi - I think you probably can connect the people greeting Hillary with what happened there (and today's Iraq) I would not think she has a chance to convince with foreign policy. ..."
"... 'You have a schism between Sunni and Shia throughout the region that is profound. Some of it is directed or abetted by states who are in contests for power there.'" Now, if only he had mentioned the states included and featured the (United) States and Israel. Obama...usually a day late and a dollar short and leading or retreating from behind. ..."
"... I would rank Obama as the most cynical one. He is doing the dark colonial art. You can berate Bush for bombing Iraq (Obama did that with Libya, just as bad), but he did sink American manpower and treasure for all this futile nation building stuff, ie he tried to repair it. ..."
"... Obama tried to double down on the nation building stuff in Afghanistan, even copying the "surge". He is still not out of Afghanistan. ..."
"... He then tried to continue Bush's policy on the cheap, scrapping the nation building stuff and concentrating on shock and awe in Libya. When Russia put a stop to that in Syria he doubled down on the subversion supporting guerilla groups. He is now back in Iraq with allies supporting a "Sunni" insurrection by proxy. After a "color revolution" in Ukraine. ..."
"... It is not "US foreign policy" but the policy of the british empire. If he was running a US foreign policy, he would at least sometimes do something positive for Americans, by accident if nothing more. ..."
"... Economic policy to vote on? Are you joking? Whichever party we elect we get Neoliberalism anyway. ..."
"... "That smile and her gloating about his death made me feel she was some sort of sociopath." Massinissa, you meant psychopath, didn't you? ..."
Here is the reason why Hillary Clinton should never ever become President
of the United States.
A (sympathetic) New York Times profile of neocon Robert Kagan has
this on Clinton II:
But Exhibit A for what Robert Kagan describes as his "mainstream" view of
American force is his relationship with former Secretary of State
Hillary Rodham Clinton, who remains the vessel into which many interventionists
are pouring their hopes. Mr. Kagan pointed out that he had recently
attended a dinner of foreign-policy experts at which Mrs. Clinton was the
guest of honor, and that he had served on her bipartisan group of foreign-policy
heavy hitters at the State Department, where his wife worked as her spokeswoman.
"I feel comfortable with her on foreign policy," Mr. Kagan said,
adding that the next step after Mr. Obama's more realist approach "could
theoretically be whatever Hillary brings to the table" if elected president.
"If she pursues a policy which we think she will pursue," he added,
"it's something that might have been called neocon, but clearly
her supporters are not going to call it that; they are going to call it
something else."
Want more wars with terrible outcomes and no winner at all? Vote the neocon's
vessel, Hillary Clinton.
Clinton, by the way, is also
a coward,
unprincipled and
greedy. Her achievements as Secretary of State were about zero. Why would
anyone vote for her?
Posted by b on June 16, 2014 at 09:09 AM |
Permalink
I'm afraid you focus too much on elections that have no meaning. It seems
we may be cornered into choosing between HR Clinton and Jeb Bush. The latter,
I'm sure, would earn equal praise from the Kagan clan. There is no prospect
of a non-interventionist president. There is no prospect of a president
that is not a Zionist stooge.
In fact, HRC may be a better prospect for neocons, because they can
distract the Dem base with how cool it is for a "strong woman" to send men
into battle. Anyone opposed must be a misogynist/sexist pig. By contrast
Jeb would be too obvious.
Personally, I don't think she is anyone to worry about gaining the office.
Too much hatred of her by most Americans, from her serial lying to her terrible
foreign policy, to her standing by bent dick, in her lust for power. She
will be backed by feminazis,homonazis and zionazis(Kagan).
Not enough devil worshippers in America,at least not yet,and I believe
Americans,from current events that our traitor MSM will be unable to counter
with their usual BS,that we are down the rabbit hole of idiotic intervention,and
we will end this nonsense,and return to worrying about America,not foreign
malevolent monsters like Israel.
Well,I can at least hope,it springs eternal.
"There is no prospect of a non-interventionist president."
Exactly. Obama has certainly proved this to be true, for those who
might've thought otherwise. And since it is true, if one is going to vote
anyway, then the decision won't be made on the basis of not "wanting more
wars with terrible outcomes." There will have to be another, different,
deciding factor, since that factor would rule out Ms. Clinton AND every
other candidate.
Yes, I have to second Lysander's view. People - both in and outside
the US - must first disabuse themselves of ANY notion that the US is a democratic
state, that "changes" in leadership will actually bring about ANY difference
in foreign/domestic policy and that the American war criminal ship can be
righted by the people utilizing the "democratic" mechanisms at their disposal.
I understand that some speak to how corrupt our institutions are but
there always seems to be a "feel-goodiness" - i.e., we can still fix it
all, boys and girls, if you all just clap your hands LOUDER!! - implicit
in their analyses/prescriptions when there should be nothing but anger,
fear and revulsion towards the fascist war criminal state that we live within.
Furthermore, after the Obama debacle and his utter betrayal etc of
his supporters if anyone thinks someone in the American Establishment is
looking out for their peon asses why then they probably also believe that
the US was "surprised/caught off guard" - yet again - by ISIS et al in Iraq.
"There is no chance of a non-interventionist president"
I wish Rand Paul had his fathers balls, but he doesnt. Ron was a
Libertarian pretending to be a Republican, while Rand is a Republican pretending
to be a Libertarian... Rand would be no different than any other Republican
or Democratic establishment schmuck.
I never did like Ron Pauls economic policy, being left leaning, and
I'm doubtful whether he would have actually accomplished anything useful
as President, but his NonInterventionism was admirable and I was happy to
put his name in in the Rethug primary in 2012 for that reason alone.
Great post, b. I saw the article and felt the same thing. While commentators
are right to say that the foreign policy of the U.S. remains largely untouched
regardless of which candidate or party wins the White House (which the NYT
piece does a fine job illustrating), I do think Hillary is the worst the
Democrats have to offer.
What I found amazing about the story is how neocons are now preening
about as if they have been vindicated:
Mr. Kristol said he, too, sensed "more willingness to rethink" neoconservatism,
which he called "vindicated to some degree" by the fruits of Mr. Obama's
detached approach to Syria and Eastern Europe. Mr. Kagan, he said, gives
historical heft to arguments "that are very consistent with the arguments
I made, and he made, 20 years ago, 10 years ago."
After all the slaughter these people feel like crowing. They are clearly,
as JSorrentine often reminds us, pyschopath butchers.
Incidentally,
where is the outrage from Samantha Powers about the ISIS massacre in Tikrit?
Well, I guess the world just can't talk about how the amazingly rapid
rise of ISIS/L and fall of Iraq completely continues the plans of the apartheid
genocidal state of Israel's - and their traitorous Zionist partners in the
American Establishment - as set out in the
Yinon Plan and Clean Break strategies because - HOW FORTUITOUS...I mean,
terribly sad and unexpected, sorry - some unlucky Israeli teenagers just
happened to be "kidnapped" by "Hamas" just as the ISIS show was kicking
off or so that's what the apartheid genocidal state of Israel is telling
the world.
Yeah, I bet the apartheid genocidal state of Israel probably has just
NO IDEA about what's going on in Iraq what with their harrowing search -
read: collective punishment for the residents of the
illegally occupied territories - for the 3 missing boys who haven't
been ransomed or claimed to have been taken by anyone.
Wait a second...what if it was ISIS/L and NOT Hamas that "kidnapped"
the boys!!!Holy tie-in, Bat-Man!!!!
Then there would be NO WAY that what we're witnessing is the furthering
of the Yinon Plan because the apartheid genocidal Israelis would never instigate
false flag terror to further/distract from their own ends/agenda, would
they?
Nah.
A Qaeda-inspired group calling itself the Islamic State in Iraq and
Syria - Palestine, West Bank claimed responsibility for the kidnappings,
saying it wanted to avenge Israel's killing of three of its group in
the Hebron area late last year and to try to free prisoners from Israeli
jails. The credibility of the claim was not immediately clear.
But clear enough for the Zionist mouthpiece of the NYT to print it, right?
Shrillary wouldn't be where she is today if she wasn't criminally
insane. I want her to become President. She'll redefine the meaning of Eerily
Inept (a label coined by Gore Vidal and attached to G Dubya Bush). Her greatest
moment was when Lavrov called her out on her RESET button and pointed out,
with a chuckle, "You got it wrong. It doesn't say RESET it says SHORT CIRCUIT."
Then he laughed. At her, not with her. She's a sick, intellectually lazy,
dumb, joke. America deserves her.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who argued in
favor of arming Syrian rebels, said last week at an event in New York
hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations, "this is not just a Syrian
problem anymore. I never thought it was just a Syrian problem. I thought
it was a regional problem. I could not have predicted, however,
the extent to which ISIS could be effective in seizing cities in Iraq
and trying to erase boundaries to create an Islamic state."
Why, even HILLARY is just SOOOO SURPRISED about people trying to
erase boundaries, huh? Funny, she should have read further into yesterday's
times where it seems that the Zionist mouthpiece of record was desperately
trying to get "out in front" of anyone mentioning that the fracturing of
Iraq and the ME was all part of long-time Israeli strategy:
In 2006, it was Ralph Peters, the retired lieutenant colonel turned
columnist, who sketched a map that subdivided Saudi Arabia and Pakistan
and envisioned Kurdish, Sunni and Shiite republics emerging from a no-longer-united
Iraq. Two years later, The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg imagined similar
partings-of-the-ways, with new microstates -- an Alawite Republic, an
Islamic Emirate of Gaza -- taking shape and Afghanistan splitting up
as well. Last year, it was Robin Wright's turn in this newspaper, in
a map that (keeping up with events) subdivided Libya as well.
Peters's map, which ran in Armed Forces Journal, inspired conspiracy
theories about how this was America's real plan for remaking the Middle
East. But the reality is entirely different: One reason these maps have
remained strictly hypothetical, even amid regional turmoil, is that
the United States has a powerful interest in preserving the Sykes-Picot
status quo.
This is not because the existing borders are in any way ideal. Indeed,
there's a very good chance that a Middle East that was more politically
segregated by ethnicity and faith might become a more stable and harmonious
region in the long run.
My favorite part of the above column is that it references a previous
column from the Zionist NYT from last year in which a war criminal even
drew up the
new map of the ME!!
Oh, but that war criminal thought SYRIA was going to be the trigger that
allowed for the culmination of the Yinon Plan. Oops!
And then ALSO YESTERDAY in the
NYT everyone's favorite little war Establishment mouthpiece Nicholas
Kristoff had this to say:
The crucial step, and the one we should apply diplomatic pressure to
try to achieve, is for Maliki to step back and share power with Sunnis
while accepting decentralization of government.
If Maliki does all that, it may still be possible to save Iraq. Without
that, airstrikes would be a further waste in a land in which we've already
squandered far, far too much.
DECENTRALIZATION, huh? Why, Nicky, that sounds like what Putin has suggested
for Ukraine, huh? Shhhhhhhh
And of course Mr. Fuckhead Tom Friedman weighs in ALSO YESTERDAY in the
NYT with this:
THE disintegration of Iraq and Syria is upending an order that has defined
the Middle East for a century. It is a huge event, and we as a country
need to think very carefully about how to respond. Having just returned
from Iraq two weeks ago, my own thinking is guided by five principles,
and the first is that, in Iraq today, my enemy's enemy is my enemy.
Other than the Kurds, we have no friends in this fight. Neither Sunni
nor Shiite leaders spearheading the war in Iraq today share our values.
The ME is going to be split up inevitably: check
The US/Israel are JUST NOWHERE to be found: check
Thanks, Tom, you fucking war criminal scum!!!
To review:
Everyone in the Establishment - fake left, right, center, dove, hawk,
blah blah - says that it's just inevitable now that Iraq and the ME will
probably be broken up.
Everyone in the Establishment also agrees that NO ONE could see this
whole ISIS etc shitpile coming, right?
Anyone else get the feeling that this is a coordinated continuation of
the Zionist Plan for the Middle East?
Naahh. Nothing to see here, fuckers!!! Move along!!!!
She ties right in with the whole pink power agenda. She is the woMAN
version and can also be useful for the women=victims, but, no way for the
women/whore
women/victim/whore is quintessentially Pussy Riot
And if you criticize HC you are just a woman hater!
(you know like antisemitic)
Same as Obama- criticize him, you are just a racist
Shuts the complaints right off!
Hillary is a loathsome war mongering bitch. She almost had a public
orgasm when Libyan leader Quadaffi was tortured and murdered by US supported
Libyan rebels. The muder of Chris Stevens was a case of what goes around
comes around.
A point which nobody else has made as far as I know. To wit there
is a big overlap between the banking and Israel lobbies since wealthy Jews
account for a hugely disproportionate number of top financial movers and
shakers. Anything that helps the financial industry also helps the war mongering
Israel and neo con lobbies. The heavily Jewish Fed is another enabler of
all that is wrong with America today.
lysander @ 4: "There is no prospect of a president that is not a Zionist
stooge."
I, also agree, with the possible exception of replacing the word
"Zionist", with the word "Corporatist", although both can be rightly used.
We'll still get the person the 1%ers want us to have. Ain't Oligarchies
grand?
Hillary's election depends on two things still unknown: her health
and whether the Republicans can manage to choose someone sufficiently batshit
crazy to make her the best of abysmal alternatives. I think her health
is the critical variable, as the PTB are going to make sure that the Republican
candidate will come out strongly for privatization of social security and
reversing the 19th amendment. Vote-rigging and gerrymandering will maintain
a sufficiently close election to preserve the simulacrum of a free election.
HRH is a Neo Liberal of Arianne 'Sniff Sniff' Huffington's type,
the 'Third Way Up Your
Ass' of Globalist NAFTA/TPP Free Trade Neonazi destruction of labor and
environmental
protections, and in your face with NOOOOO apologies.
That she is a totally-disjointed Royal is clear in her 'dead broke' claim.
That she is a famous Hectorian, constantly checking which way public opinion
is flowing, then crafting
her confabulated dialogue as screed to her real intents, is well known.
Der Prevaricator.
What should be equally well known, if news got around, Hillary (and UKs
Milliband) grifted
Hamid Karzai $5 BILLION of Americans' last life savings, stolen from US
Humanitarian Aid
to Afghanistan, then made five trips to Kabul for no apparent purpose, before
announcing
that her $-35 MILLION 'dead broke' presidential campaign had been paid off
by 'anonymous
donors'. This is all public record; in the 2009 International Conference
on Afghanistan in
London, right in the conference speeches, framed as 'Karzai's demand', but
in fact, that
speech of Karzai's was written by US State Department. I read the drafts.
'Bicycling'.
Hillary soon had to fly back one more time and grift Karzai an emergency
$3.5 BILLION
theft, after he lost Americans' $5 BILLION while speculating in Dubai R/E
by looting
his Bank of Kabul. Her 'injection of capital' saved the bank from being
audited, and
no doubt saved all the Kaganites from an embarrassing and public episiotomy.
In the end, Hillary retired with a fortune of $50 MILLION, again announced
publicly, which
together with the $-35 MILLION campaign payoff in violation of all US election
regulations,
is exactly 1% of the $8.5 BILLION she grifted to Karzai. She's in the 'One
Percent Club'.
"It's a Great Big Club, ...and you ain't in it!" George 'The Man' Carlin
But who cares? I'll tell you. The Russian know about this grift, certainly
the Israelis
know about this grift, the Millibandits know, the London Karzais know, and
if G-d forbid,
Hillary became HRHOTUS, Americans will be blackmailed down to their underdrawers.
There are some really nice photographs of Hillary being very friendly
with bearded famous Libyan Islamists (Gaddafi was still alive then). In
combination with Benghazi - I think you probably can connect the people
greeting Hillary with what happened there (and today's Iraq) I would not
think she has a chance to convince with foreign policy.
"Well at the risk of being a smartass her achievements were negative,
the American hegemony is in worse condition because of her."
Because of her and it.
Dubhaltach gets it right, and as applied to events inclusive of and after
9-11-2001. The purported masterful seamless garment of conspiracy,
yet it weakened the US and helped get Israel whacked good by Hezbollah.
As for the unmentioned Saudi, it is of course impossible that Saudi could
outplay longterm both the US and Israel longterm.
Just as it was impossible Chalabi could outplay the neocons and help
win Iran the Iraq War. Who is playing catch up and who is
playing masterfully cohesive and unbeatable conspiracy?
Dubhaltach gets it right, the US will be pushed out of the Mideast and
Israel is longterm DOOMED.
Here is Obama in the very recent Remnick interview
"Obama said:
'You have a schism between Sunni and Shia throughout the region
that is profound. Some of it is directed or abetted by states who are in
contests for power there.'" Now, if only he had mentioned the states
included and featured the (United) States and Israel. Obama...usually a
day late and a dollar short and leading or retreating from behind.
I would rank Obama as the most cynical one. He is doing the dark
colonial art. You can berate Bush for bombing Iraq (Obama did that with
Libya, just as bad), but he did sink American manpower and treasure for
all this futile nation building stuff, ie he tried to repair it.
Obama tried to double down on the nation building stuff in Afghanistan,
even copying the "surge". He is still not out of Afghanistan.
He then tried to continue Bush's policy on the cheap, scrapping the
nation building stuff and concentrating on shock and awe in Libya. When
Russia put a stop to that in Syria he doubled down on the subversion supporting
guerilla groups. He is now back in Iraq with allies supporting a "Sunni"
insurrection by proxy. After a "color revolution" in Ukraine.
He just "sold" US foreign policy in a different target group, Hillary
will sell it to her target group, Jeb Bush to his.
It is not "US foreign policy" but the policy of the british empire.
If he was running a US foreign policy, he would at least sometimes do something
positive for Americans, by accident if nothing more.
"That smile and her gloating about his death made me feel she was
some sort of sociopath." Massinissa, you meant psychopath, didn't you?
the following is an excerpt from essay written by James at Winter Patriot:
"... Psychopaths are people without a conscience; without compassion
for others; without a sense of shame or guilt. The majority of people carry
within them the concern for others that evolution has instilled in us to
allow us to survive as groups. This is the evolutionary basis of the quality
of compassion. Compassion is not just a matter of virtue; it is a matter
of survival. Psychopaths do not have this concern for others and so are
a danger to the survival of the rest of us.
Psychopaths, as a homogeneous group, would not survive one or two generations
by themselves. They are motivated only by self interest and would exploit
each other till they ended up killing each other. Which gives one pause
for thought! They are parasites and need the rest of us to survive. In doing
so they compromise the survival of the whole species.
Psychopaths represent approximately between 1% and 20% of the population
in western countries depending on whose research you go by and also depending
on how broad a definition of the condition you adopt. It is generally held,
though, that there is a hard core of between 4-6% or so and maybe another
10 -15% of the population that is functionally psychopathic in that they
will exploit their fellow human being without hesitation.
The hard core are untreatable. They see nothing wrong with who or what
they are. The other 10-15% group may be persuaded to act differently in
a different environment or a different society. The second group act out
of a misguided strategy of survival. I'll concentrate on the hard core 5%
and the singular fact that must be borne in mind with them is that they
are incapable of change for the better. They cannot reform or be reformed.
And you can take that to the bank in every case! They must never be trusted.
Documented liars like those that populate the current Kiev regime
can be confidently assumed to be psychopaths from their behaviour and so
will never negotiate in good faith and will always renege on any deals they
make. The same can be said for the governments of the US and UK who back
them. Historically, they have never made a treaty that they did not subsequently
break."
James' essay is extremely informative wrt group psychopathy... some of
you may want to give it a read:
psychopath: a person suffering from chronic mental disorder with abnormal
or violent social behavior.
an unstable and aggressive person. "schoolyard psychopaths will gather around
a fight to encourage the combatants"
Mina, now that I've looked up these links for you, I am confused myself!
Since a sociopath is less of a danger to the rest of us, I prefer to call
TPTB and their puppets psychopaths. Not your bad at all, apparently the
two are so similar as to there being difficulty telling them apart.
btw, I always enjoy your posts ~ not only do I get new info, but often
new sources... which is great. Thanks!
"... Yemen is another war the US is involved in thanks to the "peace" Pres. Obama. He has tried to keep this war hidden from the public. His few mentions of this war have been limited to shallow statements about his concern of the civilian casualty. ..."
"... Moreover, by selling the Saudis cluster bombs and other arms being used on civilians, Obama has enabled the Saudis in the last 8 moths to kill and destruct in Yemen more than WW2, as evidence shows. According to Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, the US is complicit in international war crimes in Yemen. ..."
"... After Obama's election, he went to Cairo to make a peace speech to the Arab world aiming to diffuse the deep hatred towards the US created during the Bush era. Yet since then, Obama's foolish alliances with despotic Arab rulers infesting ISIS and Al-Qaeda in the region, his drone warfare, and warped war policies in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen, have only expanded and strengthened ISIS and Al-Qaeda, and increased Arab citizens anger and hatred towards the US. This is Obama's legacy! ..."
"... I always think there are similarities in Clinton and Obama s upbringing that created the anormic sociopathic shape shifting personalities they demonstrate. ..."
"... amiable even charismatic enough to sell it to a stupid audience. ..."
"... Why do we maintain the myth that the Obama brand is in anyway his personal contribution. Anymore than Bush or Clinton. The only difference is the republicans are ideologues where's as the puppets offered by the democrats are just psychotic shape shifters. In either way on a clear day you can see the strings hanging from their wrists like ribbons. ..."
"... The US is Allied with Saudi Arabia and Israel, that makes Saudi Arabia's and Israel's enemies US enemies. ..."
"... The notion that Obama makes his own decisions is laughable except it aint funny.. ..."
"... There is no 'Obama legacy' in the ME. It is a US legacy of blown attempts to control unwilling countries and populations by coercion, and by military and economic warfare. ..."
"... With all due respects to M. Obama, this is another clear indication that the US President is just a figure head. He is a front for the corporations that run the US behind the scene - the so-called US military-industrial complex. ..."
"... Perhaps you intentionally miss out the fact that it is the west that has Israel and the Saudis as their best allies, considering their actions ( one with the largest/longest time concentration camp in history, the other the exporter of the horror show of ISIL , both an abomination of their respective religions . The west attempt to seek the moral high ground is more than a farce ... all the world can see and know the game being played, but the mass media wishes to assume everyone has half a brain... they are allergic to the truth , like the vampires to the light. ..."
"... The stick I'm talking about is the total capacity of the US, military and economic, to have things its way or make the opposition very unhappy. ..."
"... What has it gotten us? Nothing good. What has it gotten the top 1 percent? All the money we don't have. ..."
"... Obama is being an absolute idiot in sending special forces to fight with rebels who are fighting the legitimate government of Syria. This is stupidity of the highest order. What will he do when any of these special forces operatives are captured by IS or killed by Russian or Syrian airstrikes? ..."
"... That is a valid point: Syria is a sovereign nation recognized by the U.N., and any foreign troops within without permission would be considered invaders. Of course, the U.S. ignores international law all the time. ..."
"... Anyway, foreign troops in Syria who are there without an invitation by Syrian government or authorisation by UNSC are there illegally and can be tried for war crimes if captured. Why is Obama putting his soldiers in this situation? ..."
"... The U.S. strategy in Syria is in tatters as Obama lamely tries to patch it up. The U.S. was determined to overthrow the Assad regime in Syria in service of the Saudis, Turkey, and Israel, while pretending to go after ISIS, who the Saudis and Turks were covertly funding. The U.S. were arming jihadists to oust Assad. That game is up, thanks to the Russians. Putin decided he wasn't going to stand by while the U.S. and its proxies created another Libya jihadist disaster in Syria. The forceful Russian intervention in going after ISIS showed the U.S. to be a faker, and caused a sea-change in U.S. policy. Now the U.S. can't pretend to go after ISIS while really trying to oust Assad. The Emporer has no clothes. ..."
"... Israel is an ally of KSA who is funding IS, Al Nusra, Al-Qaida and Al-Shabab. They are also partners with KSA in trying to prevent Iran's reintegration into global society following the nuclear deal, and the lifting of sanctions. ..."
"... I suspect that Israel wants to annex the Syrian Golan Heights permanently, and to extend their illegal settlements into the area. That can only happen if Assad is defeated. ..."
"... Wow, you make a lot of sense. I always thought the US military heavy foreign policy became insane because of Reagan. Maybe it was the loss of the USSR? ..."
"... Everyone here grew up being taught that the US is the champion of all that is good (sounds corny today). When the USSR dissolved, everyone imagined huge military cuts with the savings being invested in social benefits. If someone had predicted that, instead, we would grow our military, throw our civil rights away, embrace empire, assasinate US citizens without a trial, create total surveillance, create secret one sided star-chamber FISA courts that control a third of our economy, and choose a Dept. name heard previously only in Nazi movies (Homeland Security) --- we'd have laughed and dismissed the warning as delusion. ..."
"... You are correct. Obama is breaking UN international law, the US has no right to invade Syria. Russia, though, has been asked by the Syrian government for help, a government fully recognized by the UN. Russia has full UN sanctioned rights to help Syria. US news media will never explain this to the public, sadly. ..."
"... Obama's presidency lost its credibility a long time ago. He made so many rash promises and statements which one by one he has broken, that no free thinking person believes anything he says anymore. ..."
"... There's a world of difference between Russia taking steps to protect its immediate geographic and political interests (which were largely the wishes of the resident populations - something critics tend to overlook) and the USA invading Iraq (2003) in a blatant act of war, based on bullshit and then aiding and abetting mercenary terrorists in Syria in defiance of any declaration of war, UN resolution or invitation from the Syrian government to intervene. ..."
"... You might have also noticed that Syria is a long, long way from the USA. Rhetorically, WTF is the US doing in the Middle East? Propping up Saudi or Israel? Or both? ..."
"... ISIS == Mercenaries sponsored by the US, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. Does a strategy against our own mercenaries make sense??? ..."
"... Think about, when's the last time Saudi Arabia did anything progressive or humane in its foreign policy? Now remember this very same country is on the same side as the Americans. This is the country that invaded Bahrain and Yemen and labelled the civil rights movements in those countries as 'Iranian interference.' The Saudis who have been seeking to turn civil rights movements with rather nationalistic demands into religious and sectarian conflicts by playing different groups against each other are allied with the U.S. and sitting at the table in Vienna talking about peace in Syria. Nonsense upon stilts! ..."
"... ISIS poses no threat to the Americans and vice versa. The Americans therefore do not have an interest in making sure that ISIS is wiped out. On the contrary they want regional foes to suffer. ..."
"... The American attempt at negotiating peace in Syria without Syrian representation is nothing short of ridiculous and best illustrates the convoluted state of American foreign policy. America lost any claim to 'leadership' by now. ..."
"... Unfortunately American policy and that eu have at time added fuel to the fire. ..."
"... Russian Iranian and hezbollah boots are invited boots by the legitimate government according to the UN Charter they are all acting legally and according to the Geneva Conventions etc. ..."
"... The US led coalition in bombing Syria were not, and the admitted introduction of troops into Syria is a an ACT OF WAR by the USA, and it is the AGRESSOR here, not doubt about it. It's a War Crime by every standard ..."
"... See the NATO creep into Eastern Europe against all agreements made with USSR. ..."
"... But their real agenda is to carve up Syria. In the deep recesses of their, the Corporate corrupt White House's, mind ISIS is not their immediate problem. ISIS is a means to an end - carve up Syria a sovereign country. ..."
"... Remember, only months ago, Kerry and Tory William Hague, was handing out cash to Syrian rebels who later turned out to be ISIS rebels. We must never forget, Syria, right or wrong, is a sovereign country. ..."
"... Look at the mess they made in, Ukraine, with their friends a bunch of, Kiev, murdering neo-Nazi's. ..."
"... Just out of curiosity...how will the US keep the DoD and CIA from duking it out at the opposite fronts on the Syrian soil? ..."
"... Washington has clearly chosen to break International Law. ..."
"... Westphalian sovereignty is the principle of international law that each nation state has sovereignty over its territory and domestic affairs, to the exclusion of all external powers, on the principle of non-interference in another country's domestic affairs, and that each state (no matter how large or small) is equal in international law ..."
"... As the administration in Washington is firmly in the grasp of special interest groups such as Big Pharma, The Banksters, Big Agrobusiness, Big oil, the MIC and Israel there is no chance of getting good policy decisions out of there until there is a regime change. ..."
"... You might think that having criticized Assad for shooting demonstrators who demonstrated against the corruption and inefficiency of his regime, and having said that as a result his regime had lost its legitimacy, they would apply the same yardstick to President Poroshenko when he shot up two provinces of his country for asking for federation, killing thousands in the process, but on the contrary they sent "advisers" to train his military and his Fascist helpers to use their weapons better, to shoot them up more effectively. ..."
"... However, one cannot really expect people who are exceptional to behave like ordinary (unexceptional) human beings. ..."
"... What is the official US line on the legality of these deployments in terms of international law? ..."
NATO and its allies in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Syria .... they make a desert and call
it peace.
ID7582903 1 Nov 2015 06:19
"Credibility"? Beware and be aware folks. This isn't a monopoly game being played here; it's
for real.
2015 Valdai conference is Societies Between War and Peace: Overcoming the Logic of Conflict
in Tomorrow's World. In the period between October 19 and 22, experts from 30 countries have been
considering various aspects of the perception of war and peace both in the public consciousness
and in international relations, religion and economic interaction between states. Videos w live
translations and english transcripts (a keeper imho)
http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/50548
30 Oct, 2015 - The day US announces Ground troops into Syria, and the day before the downing/crash
of the Russian Airbus 321 in the Sinai, this happened:
Russia has conducted a major test of its strategic missile forces, firing numerous ballistic and
cruise missiles from various training areas across the country, videos
uploaded by the Ministry of Defense have shown.
A routine exercise, possibly the largest of its kind this year, was intended to test the command
system of transmitting orders among departments and involved launches
from military ranges on the ground, at sea and in the air, the ministry said Friday.
30.10.2015
Since the beginning of its operation in Syria on September 30, Russian Aerospace Forces have carried
out 1,391 sorties in Syria, destroying a total of 1,623 terrorist targets, the Russian General
Staff said Friday.
In particular, Russian warplanes destroyed 249 Islamic State command posts, 51 training camps,
and 131 depots, Andrey Kartapolov, head of the Russian General Staff Main Operations Directorate
said.
"In Hanshih, a suburb of Damascus, 17 militants of the Al-Ghuraba group were executed in public
after they tried to leave the combat area and flee to Jordan," he specified. "The whole scene
was filmed in order to disseminate the footage among the other groups operating in the vicinity
of Damascus and other areas", the General Staff spokesman said. In the central regions of the
country, the Syrian Army managed to liberate 12 cities in the Hama province, Kartapolov said.
"The Syrian armed forces continue their advance to the north," the general added.
Yemen is another war the US is involved in thanks to the "peace" Pres. Obama. He has tried
to keep this war hidden from the public. His few mentions of this war have been limited to shallow
statements about his concern of the civilian casualty. What an insult to our intelligence! We
are well aware that the US provides the logistical and technical support, and refuelling of warplanes
to the Saudi coalition illegal war in Yemen. Moreover, by selling the Saudis cluster bombs and
other arms being used on civilians, Obama has enabled the Saudis in the last 8 moths to kill and
destruct in Yemen more than WW2, as evidence shows. According to Amnesty International and Human
Rights Watch, the US is complicit in international war crimes in Yemen.
After Obama's election, he went to Cairo to make a peace speech to the Arab world aiming to
diffuse the deep hatred towards the US created during the Bush era. Yet since then, Obama's foolish
alliances with despotic Arab rulers infesting ISIS and Al-Qaeda in the region, his drone warfare,
and warped war policies in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen, have only expanded and strengthened
ISIS and Al-Qaeda, and increased Arab citizens anger and hatred towards the US. This is Obama's
legacy!
Barmaidfromhell -> WSCrips 1 Nov 2015 03:52
Well said.
I always think there are similarities in Clinton and Obama s upbringing that created the
anormic sociopathic shape shifting personalities they demonstrate. Obviously carefully selected
to follow any line given them and amiable even charismatic enough to sell it to a stupid audience.
Why do we maintain the myth that the Obama brand is in anyway his personal contribution.
Anymore than Bush or Clinton. The only difference is the republicans are ideologues where's as
the puppets offered by the democrats are just psychotic shape shifters. In either way on a clear
day you can see the strings hanging from their wrists like ribbons.
Michael Imanual Christos -> Pete Piper 1 Nov 2015 00:28
Pete Piper
In brief;
The US is Allied with Saudi Arabia and Israel, that makes Saudi Arabia's and Israel's enemies
US enemies.
... ... ...
midnightschild10 31 Oct 2015 21:35
When Obama denounced Russia's actions in Syria, and blamed them for massive loss of civilian
lives, Russia responded by asking them to show their proof. The Administration spokesperson said
they got their information from social media. No one in the Administration seems to realize how
utterly stupid that sounds. Marie Harf is happily developing the Administration's foreign policy
via Twitter. As the CIA and NSA read Facebook for their daily planning, Obama reads the comments
section of newspapers to prepare for his speech to the American public in regard to putting boots
on the ground in Syria, and adding to the boots in Iraq. If it didn't result in putting soldiers
lives in jeopardy, it would be considered silly. Putin makes his move and watches as the Obama
Administration makes the only move they know, after minimal success in bombing, Obama does send
in the troops. Putin is the one running the game. Obama's response is so predictable. No wonder
the Russians are laughing. In his quest to outdo Cheyney, Obama has added to the number of wars
the US is currently involved in. His original claim to fame was to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,
which then resulted in starting Iraq and Afghanistan Wars 2.0. Since helping to depose the existing
governments in the Middle East, leading not only to the resurgence of AlQuaeda, and giving birth
to ISIS, and leaving chaos and destruction in his wake, he decided to take down the last standing
ruler, hoping that if he does the same thing over and over, he will get a different result. Obama's
foreign policy legacy had been considered impotent at best, now its considered ridiculous.
SomersetApples 31 Oct 2015 20:03
We bombed them, we sent armies of terrorist in to kill them, we destroyed their hospitals and
power plants and cities, we put sanctions on them and we did everything in our power to cut off
their trading with the outside world, and yet they are still standing.
The only thing left to do, lets send in some special military operatives.
This is so out of character, or our perceived character of Obama. It must be that deranged
idiot John McCain pulling the strings.
Rafiqac01 31 Oct 2015 16:58
The notion that Obama makes his own decisions is laughable except it aint funny....having
just watched CNNs Long Road to Hell in Iraq....and the idiots advising Bush and Blair you have
to wonder the extent to which these are almighty balls ups or very sophisticated planning followed
up by post disaster rationalisation....
whatever the conclusion it proves that the intervention or non interventions prove their is
little the USA has done that has added any good value to the situation...indeed it is an unmitigated
disaster strewn around the world! Trump is the next generation frothing at the mouth ready to
show what a big John Wayne he is!!
DavidFCanada 31 Oct 2015 13:56
There is no 'Obama legacy' in the ME. It is a US legacy of blown attempts to control unwilling
countries and populations by coercion, and by military and economic warfare. That US legacy
will forever remain, burnt into skins and bodies of the living and dead, together with a virtually
unanimous recognition in the ME of the laughable US pretexts of supporting democracy, the rule
of law, religious freedom and, best of all, peace. Obama is merely the chief functionary of a
nation of lies.
Informed17 -> WSCrips 31 Oct 2015 13:47
Are you saying that there was no illegal invasion of Iraq? No vial of laundry detergent was
presented at the UN as "proof" that Iraq has WMDs? No hue and cry from "independent" media supported
that deception campaign? Were you in a deep coma at the time?
Informed17 -> somethingbrite 31 Oct 2015 13:36
No. But the US trampled on the international law for quite a while now, starting with totally
illegal interference in Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
WSCrips 31 Oct 2015 13:18
Hey Guardian Editors.....and all those who worshipped Obama....In America, there were folks
from the older generation that warned us that this Community Organizer was not ready for the Job
of President of the United States....it had nothing to do with his color, he just was not ready.....he
was a young, inexperienced Senator, who never, ever had a real job, never had a street fight growing
up pampered in Hawaii, was given a pass to great universities because his parents had money, and
was the dream Affirmative Action poster boy for the liberal left. Obama has not disappointed anyone
who tried to warn us......and now we will reap what he has sowed:
1. 8 Trillion to our debt
2. Nightmare in the Middleast (how is that Arab Spring)
3. Polarized America....Dems and Republicans hate each other....hate each other like the Irish
and English...10 x over.
4. War on Cops
5. War with China
6. Invasion from Central America
I see a great depression and World War IV on the horizon....and I am being positive!
SaveRMiddle 31 Oct 2015 12:47
Nothing Obama says has any value. We've watched the man lie with a grin and a chuckle.
Forever Gone is all trust.
His continued abuse of Red Line threats spoke volumes about the lawyer who Reactively micromanages
that which required and deserved an expert Proactive plan.
Let History reflect the horrific death CIA meddling Regime Change/Divide and Conquer creates.
HeadInSand2013 31 Oct 2015 12:45
Liberal activists were in little doubt that Obama has failed to live up to his commitment
to avoid getting dragged directly into the war.
With all due respects to M. Obama, this is another clear indication that the US President
is just a figure head. He is a front for the corporations that run the US behind the scene - the
so-called US military-industrial complex.
Liberal activists are stupid enough to think that M. Obama is actually in charge of the US
military or the US foreign policy. Just go back and count how many times during the last 6 years
M. Obama has made a declaration and then - sometimes the next day - US military has over-ruled
him.
Mediaking 31 Oct 2015 10:00
Perhaps you intentionally miss out the fact that it is the west that has Israel and the
Saudis as their best allies, considering their actions ( one with the largest/longest time concentration
camp in history, the other the exporter of the horror show of ISIL , both an abomination of their
respective religions . The west attempt to seek the moral high ground is more than a farce ...
all the world can see and know the game being played, but the mass media wishes to assume everyone
has half a brain... they are allergic to the truth , like the vampires to the light.
USA forces coming to the aid of their 5 individuals... yes 1,2,3,4,5 ( stated by US command-
there are only that amount of FSA fighters left - the rest have gone over to ISIL with their equipment -- ) the local population all speak of ISIL/Daesh being American/Israeli ,they say if this is a
civil war how come all the opposition are foreigners -- I think perhaps it's like the Ukraine affair...
a bunch of CIA paid Nazi thugs instigating a coup ... or like Venezuela agents on roof tops shooting
at both sides in demonstrations to get things going. The usual business of CIA/Mossad stuff in
tune with the mass media with their engineered narratives -- Followed by the trolls on cyber space...
no doubt we shall see them here too.
All note that an Intervention in Syria would be "ILLEGAL" by Int. law and sooner than later
will be sued in billions for it...on top of the billions spent on having a 5 person strong force
of FSA...spent from the American tax payers money . Syria has a government and is considered a
state at the UN . Iran and Russia are there at the request and permission of Syria .
Russia and Iran have been methodically wiping out Washington's mercenaries on the ground while
recapturing large swathes of land that had been lost to the terrorists. Now that the terrorists
are getting wiped out the west and the Saudis are are screaming blue murder !
I for one would have Assad stay , as he himself suggests , till his country is completely free
of terrorists, then have free elections . I would add , to have the Saudis and the ones in the
west/Turkey/Jordan charged for crimes against humanity for supplying and creating Daesh/ISIS .
This element cannot be ignored . Also Kurdistan can form their new country in the regions they
occupy as of this moment and Mosul to come. Iran,Russia,Iraq, Syria and the new Kurdistan will
sign up to this deal . Millions of Syrian refugees can then come back home and rebuild their broken
lives with Iranian help and cash damages from the mentioned instigators $400 billion . The cash
must be paid into the Syrian central bank before any elections take place ... Solved...
My consultancy fee - 200ml pounds sterling... I know ... you wish I ruled the world (who knows
!) - no scams please or else -- ( the else would be an Apocalypse upon the western equity markets
via the Illuminati i.e a 49% crash )... a week to pay , no worries since better to pay for a just
solution than to have million descend upon EU as refugees . It is either this or God's revenge
with no mercy .
amacd2 31 Oct 2015 09:52
Obama, being more honest but also more dangerous than Flip Wilson says, "The Empire made me
do it",
Bernie, having "reservations" about what Obama has done, says nothing against Empire, but continues
to pretend, against all evidence, that this is a democracy.
Hillary, delighting in more war, says "We came, we bombed, they all died, but the Empire won."
Talk about 'The Issue' to debate for the candidates in 2016?
"What's your position on the Empire?"
"Oh, what Empire, you ask?"
"The friggin Empire that you are auditioning to pose as the president of --- you lying tools
of both the neocon 'R' Vichy party and you smoother lying neoliberal-cons of the 'D' Vichy party!"
lightstroke -> Pete Piper 31 Oct 2015 09:41
Nukes are not on the table. Mutually Assured Destruction.
The stick I'm talking about is the total capacity of the US, military and economic, to
have things its way or make the opposition very unhappy.
It's not necessary to win wars to exercise that power. All they have to do is start them and
keep them going until the arms industry makes as much dough from them as possible. That's the
only win they care about.
What has it gotten us? Nothing good. What has it gotten the top 1 percent? All the money
we don't have.
Taku2 31 Oct 2015 09:26
Obama is being an absolute idiot in sending special forces to fight with rebels who are
fighting the legitimate government of Syria. This is stupidity of the highest order. What will
he do when any of these special forces operatives are captured by IS or killed by Russian or Syrian
airstrikes?
How stupid can a President get?
Obama does need to pull back on this one, even though it will make his stupid and erroneous
policy towards the Syrian tragedy seem completely headless. If this stupid and brainless policy
is meant to be symbolic, its potential for future catastrophic consequences is immeasurable.
phillharmonic -> nishville 31 Oct 2015 08:56
That is a valid point: Syria is a sovereign nation recognized by the U.N., and any foreign
troops within without permission would be considered invaders. Of course, the U.S. ignores international
law all the time.
nishville 31 Oct 2015 08:35
Syrian rebels fighting the Islamic State
And who are those then? Do they exist, do we have any reliable source confirming they are really
simultaneously fighting IS and Syrian Army or is it yet another US fairy tale?
Anyway, foreign troops in Syria who are there without an invitation by Syrian government
or authorisation by UNSC are there illegally and can be tried for war crimes if captured. Why
is Obama putting his soldiers in this situation?
phillharmonic 31 Oct 2015 08:33
The U.S. strategy in Syria is in tatters as Obama lamely tries to patch it up. The U.S.
was determined to overthrow the Assad regime in Syria in service of the Saudis, Turkey, and Israel,
while pretending to go after ISIS, who the Saudis and Turks were covertly funding. The U.S. were
arming jihadists to oust Assad. That game is up, thanks to the Russians. Putin decided he wasn't
going to stand by while the U.S. and its proxies created another Libya jihadist disaster in Syria.
The forceful Russian intervention in going after ISIS showed the U.S. to be a faker, and caused
a sea-change in U.S. policy. Now the U.S. can't pretend to go after ISIS while really trying to
oust Assad. The Emporer has no clothes.
amacd2 -> Woody Treasure 31 Oct 2015 08:31
Woody, did you mean "Obama is a foil (for the Disguised Global Crony-Capitalist Empire--- which
he certainly is), or did you mean to say "fool" (which he certainly is not, both because he is
a well paid puppet/poodle for this Global Empire merely HQed in, and 'posing' as, America ---
as Blair and Camron are for the same singular Global Empire --- and because Obama didn't end his
role as Faux/Emperor-president like JFK), eh?
Nena Cassol -> TonyBlunt 31 Oct 2015 06:48
Assad's father seized power with a military coup and ruled the country for 30 years, before
dying he appointed his son, who immediately established marshal law, prompting discontent even
among his father's die-hard loyalists ...this is plain history, is this what you call a legitimate
leader?
Cycles 31 Oct 2015 06:41
Forced to go in otherwise the Russians and Iranians get full control. Welcome to the divided
Syria a la Germany after WW2.
TonyBlunt -> Nena Cassol 31 Oct 2015 06:36
"It does not take much research to find out that Assad is not legitimate at all"
Please share your source with us Nena. But remember Langley Publications don't count.
TonyBlunt -> oldholbornian 31 Oct 2015 06:29
The Americans do not recognise international law. They do not sign up to any of it and proclaim
the right to break it with their "exceptionalism".
Katrin3 -> herrmaya 31 Oct 2015 05:27
The Russians, US, Iran etc are all meeting right now in Vienna. The Russians and the US military
do communicate with each other, to avoid attacking each other by mistake.
The Russians are in the West and N.West of Syria. The US is going into the N. East, near IS
headquarters in Raqqa, to support the Kurdish YPG, who are only a few kilometers from the city.
Katrin3 -> ID6693806 31 Oct 2015 05:15
Israel is an ally of KSA who is funding IS, Al Nusra, Al-Qaida and Al-Shabab. They are
also partners with KSA in trying to prevent Iran's reintegration into global society following
the nuclear deal, and the lifting of sanctions.
I suspect that Israel wants to annex the Syrian Golan Heights permanently, and to extend
their illegal settlements into the area. That can only happen if Assad is defeated.
centerline ChristineH 31 Oct 2015 04:48
The Kurds are the fabled moderate opposition who are willing to negotiate, and who have also
fought with the Syrian government against US backed ISIS and al Nusra so called moderate opposition.
Pete Piper -> Verbum 31 Oct 2015 04:47
@Verbum Wow, you make a lot of sense. I always thought the US military heavy foreign policy became
insane because of Reagan. Maybe it was the loss of the USSR?
Everyone here grew up being taught that the US is the champion of all that is good (sounds
corny today). When the USSR dissolved, everyone imagined huge military cuts with the savings being
invested in social benefits. If someone had predicted that, instead, we would grow our military,
throw our civil rights away, embrace empire, assasinate US citizens without a trial, create total
surveillance, create secret one sided star-chamber FISA courts that control a third of our economy,
and choose a Dept. name heard previously only in Nazi movies (Homeland Security) --- we'd have
laughed and dismissed the warning as delusion.
gabriel90 -> confettifoot 31 Oct 2015 04:46
ISiS is destroying Syria thanks to the US and Saudi Arabia; its an instrument to spread chaos
in the Middle East and attack Iran and Russia...
ChristineH 31 Oct 2015 04:21
So, on the day peace talks open, the US unilaterally announces advice boots on the ground to
support one of the many sides in the Syrian War, who will undoubtedly want self determination,
right on Turkey's border, as they always have, and as has always been opposed by the majority
of the Syrian population. What part of that isn't completely mad?
Great sympathy for the situation of the Kurds in Syria under Assad, but their nationalism issue
and inability to work together with the Sunni rebels, was a major factor in the non formation
of a functioning opposition in Syria, and will be a block to peace, not its cause. It's also part
of a larger plan to have parts of Turkey and Iraq under Kurdish control to create a contingent
kingdom. Whatever the merits of that, the US deciding to support them at this stage is completely
irrational, and with Russia and Iran supporting Assad will lengthen the war, not shorten it.
MissSarajevo 31 Oct 2015 04:21
Just a couple of things here. How does the US know who the moderates are?!? Is this another
occasion that the US is going to use International law as toilet paper? The US will enter (as
if they weren't already there, illegally. They were not invited in by the legitimate leader of
Syria.
gabriel90 31 Oct 2015 04:19
Warbama is just trying to save his saudi/qatari/turk/emirati dogs of war... they will be wiped
out by Russia and the axis of resistance...
Pete Piper -> Michael Imanual Christos 31 Oct 2015 04:08
Does anyone see anything rational in US foreign policy? When I hear attempts to explain, they
vary around .. "it's about oil". But no one ever shows evidence continuous wars produced more
oil for anyone. So, are we deliberately creating chaos and misery? Why? To make new enemies we
can use to justify more war? We've now classified the number of countries we are bombing. Why?
The countries being bombed surely know.
Pete Piper -> oldholbornian 31 Oct 2015 03:50
You are correct. Obama is breaking UN international law, the US has no right to invade
Syria. Russia, though, has been asked by the Syrian government for help, a government fully recognized
by the UN. Russia has full UN sanctioned rights to help Syria. US news media will never explain
this to the public, sadly.
Only the US routinely violates other nations' sovergnity. Since Korea, the only nation that
has ever used military force against a nation not on its border is the US.
Can anyone find rationality in US foreign policy? We are supposed to be fighting ISIL, but
Saudi Arabia and Israel appear to be helping ISIL to force Syrian regime change. And the US is
supplying weapons to Saudi Arabia that are routed to ISIL. Supposedly because eliminating President
Asad is more important than fighting ISIL? The US public is being misled into thinking we are
NOW fighting ISIL. After Asad is killed, then we will genuinely fight ISIL? Russia, Iran, and
more(?) will fight to keep Asad in power and then fight ISIL? THIS IS OBVIOUS BS, AND ALSO FUBAR.
By all means, get everyone together for some diplomacy.
oldholbornian -> lesmandalasdeniki 31 Oct 2015 03:36
Well lets look at Germany the centre of christian culture and the EU
reminds me of emporer franz josef in europe about 100 years ago .. meant well but led to ruination
..i dont think that there has been an american president involved in more wars than obama
obama by his cairo speech kicked of the arab spring ..shows that words can kill
however.. the experience he now has gained may lead to an avoidance of a greater sunni shia
war in syria if the present vienna talks can offer something tangible and preserve honour to the
sunnis .. in the mid east honour and macho are key elements in negotiations
iran however is a shia caliphate based regime and unless it has learnt the lesson from yemen
on the limitations of force may push for further success via army and diplomacy and control in
syria and iraq
oldholbornian 31 Oct 2015 02:42
But Obama's latest broken promise to avoid an "open-ended action" in Syria could lead to a
full-blown war with Russia considering that Russian military has been operating in Syria for weeks.
" For the first time ever, the American strategists have developed an illusion that they
may defeat a nuclear power in a non-nuclear war," Russian deputy prime minister Dmitry Rogozin
told AP. "It's nonsense, and it will never happen."
Any US / terrorist engagement with the Syrian security forces will include engaging with its
allies Russia
Once the firing starts Russia will include the US as terrorists with no rights to be in Syrian
and under the UN RULES have the right to defend themselves against the US
HollyOldDog -> foolisholdman 31 Oct 2015 02:32
Hmm Foreign snipers on rooftops ( not in the control of the government) how many times is this
scenario going to be played out before the 'press' twigs it than something is not making sense.
HollyOldDog -> foolisholdman 31 Oct 2015 02:29
Though in one demonstration there was snipers on rooftops shooting both deconstratirs and the
police - far more police were killed than demonstrators - what does this reming you of? Was these
actions seemingly out of the control of the government a preliminary to what happened in Kiev
during the maidan - practices get the technics right I suppose. - outside forces were obviously
at work ' stirring the pot.
Anna Eriksson 31 Oct 2015 02:24
Let's hope that the US will help out with taking in some refugees as well! In Germany, and
Sweden locals are becoming so frustrated and angry that they set refugee shelters on fire. This
is a trend in both Sweden and Germany, as shown in the maps in the links. There have almost been
90 arsons in Germany so far this year, almost 30 in Sweden.
Nobody tells the American people and nobody else really cares, but these 40-something guys
being sent to Syria are possibly there as:
cannon fodder: to deter the Russians from bombing and Iranians from attacking on the ground
the American friendly anti-Assad militant groups;
to collect and report more accurate intel from the front line (again about the Russian/Iranian
troops deployment/movement).
The Russian and Iranian troops on the ground will soon engage and sweep anti-Assad forces in
key regions in Western Syria. This will be slightly impeded if Americans are among them. But accidents
do happen, hence the term "cannon fodder".
The Russians and Iranians will likely take a step back militarily though for the duration of
talks, so the American plan to protect Saudi backed fighters is likely to work.
I never involved or mentioned ISIS because this is NOT about fighting ISIS. It's about counteracting
the Russian/Irania sweep in the area, and ultimately keeping the Americans in the game (sorry,
war).
petervietnam 31 Oct 2015 01:13
The world's policeman or the world's trouble maker?
Austin Young -> Will D 31 Oct 2015 00:34
But he's the "change we can believe in" guy! Oh right... Dem or republican, they spew anything
and everything their voters want to hear but when it comes time to walk the walk the only voice
in their head is Cash Money.
lesmandalasdeniki -> Bardhyl Cenolli 30 Oct 2015 23:34
It frustrates me, anyone who will be the problem-solver will be labeled as dangerous by the
Western political and business leaders if the said person or group of people can not be totally
controlled for their agenda.
This will be the first time I will be speaking about the Indonesian forest fires that started
from June this year until now. During the period I was not on-line, I watched the local news and
all channels were featuring the same problem every day during the last two-weeks.
US is also silent about it during Obama - Jokowi meeting, even praising Jokowi being on the
right track. After Jokowi came back, his PR spin is in the force again, he went directly to Palembang,
he held office and trying to put up an image of a President that cared for his people. He couldn't
solve the Indonesian forest fires from June - October, is it probably because Jusuf Kalla has
investment in it?
My point is, US and the Feds, World Bank and IMF are appointing their puppets on each country
they have put up an investment on terms of sovereign debt and corporate debt/bonds.
And Obama is their puppet.
Will D 30 Oct 2015 23:30
Obama's presidency lost its credibility a long time ago. He made so many rash promises
and statements which one by one he has broken, that no free thinking person believes anything
he says anymore.
He has turned out to be a massive disappointment to all those who had such high hopes that
he really would make the world a better place. His failure and his abysmal track record will cause
him to be remembered as the Nobel Peace prize wining president who did exactly the opposite of
what he promised, and failed to further the cause of peace.
Greg_Samsa -> Greenacres2002 30 Oct 2015 23:07
Consistency is at the heart of logic, all mathematics, and hard sciences.
Even the legal systems strive to be free of contradictions.
I'd rather live in world with consistency of thought and action as represented by the Russian
Federation, then be mired in shit created by the US who have shed all the hobgoblins pestering
the consistency of their thoughts and actions.
Never truly understood the value of this stupid quote really...
Phil Atkinson -> PaulF77 30 Oct 2015 22:28
There's a world of difference between Russia taking steps to protect its immediate geographic
and political interests (which were largely the wishes of the resident populations - something
critics tend to overlook) and the USA invading Iraq (2003) in a blatant act of war, based on bullshit
and then aiding and abetting mercenary terrorists in Syria in defiance of any declaration of war,
UN resolution or invitation from the Syrian government to intervene.
You might have also noticed that Syria is a long, long way from the USA. Rhetorically,
WTF is the US doing in the Middle East? Propping up Saudi or Israel? Or both?
MainstreamMedia Propaganda 30 Oct 2015 22:03
ISIS == Mercenaries sponsored by the US, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. Does a strategy against
our own mercenaries make sense???
I think blatant policy changes like this show just how ineffectual the US president actually
is. The hand over between Bush and Obama has been seamless. Gitmo still going, patriot act renewed,
Libya a smoldering ruin (4 years down the line), no progress on gun control, troops in Afganistan
and Iraq... it goes on...
HowSicklySeemAll 30 Oct 2015 21:58
"It's really hard to see how this tiny number of troops embedded on the ground is going
to turn the tide in any way."
Or the U.S. could carry out air strikes against Hezbollah which has been fighting ISIS for
a while now. They could also supply weapons to ISIS (who are dubbed 'moderates') to counter Russian
airstrikes and Iranian man power.
Think about, when's the last time Saudi Arabia did anything progressive or humane in its
foreign policy? Now remember this very same country is on the same side as the Americans. This
is the country that invaded Bahrain and Yemen and labelled the civil rights movements in those
countries as 'Iranian interference.' The Saudis who have been seeking to turn civil rights movements
with rather nationalistic demands into religious and sectarian conflicts by playing different
groups against each other are allied with the U.S. and sitting at the table in Vienna talking
about peace in Syria. Nonsense upon stilts!
Phil Atkinson -> Harry Bhai 30 Oct 2015 21:57
Fuck the al-Sauds and their oil. If the US wants their oil (and there's plenty of other oil
sellers in the world) then just take it. Why not be consistent?
templeforjerusalem 30 Oct 2015 21:51
IS has shown itself to be deeply hateful of anything that conflicts with their narrow religious
interpretations. Destroying Palmyra, murdering indiscriminately, without any clear international
agenda other than the formation of a new Sunni Sharia State, makes them essentially enemies of
everybody. Although I do agree that belligerent secular Netanyahu's Israel sets a bad example
in the area, Israel does not tend to murder over the same primitive values that IS uses, although
there's not much difference in reality.
IS uses extermination tactics, Israel used forced land clearance and concentration camp bombing
(Gaza et al), while the US in Iraq used brutal force. None of this is good but nothing justifies
the shear barbarism of IS. Is there hope in any of this? No. Is Russian and US involvement a major
escalation? Yes.
Ultimately, this is about religious identities refusing to share and demand peace. Sunni vs
Shia, Judeo/Catholic/Protestant West vs Russian Orthodox, secular vs orthodox Israel. No wonder
people are saying Armageddon.
HowSicklySeemAll 30 Oct 2015 21:50
ISIS poses no threat to the Americans and vice versa. The Americans therefore do not have
an interest in making sure that ISIS is wiped out. On the contrary they want regional foes to
suffer. The only countries and groups that have been successfully fighting ISIS - Assad's
forces, Iranians, Hezbollah, Russians, and Kurds are in fact enemies of either the U.S., Saudis,
Israelis, or Turks. Isn't that strange? The countries and peoples that have suffered the most
and that have actually fought against ISIS effectively are seen as the enemy. Do the powers that
be really want to wipe out ISIS at all costs? No, especially if it involves the Iranians and Russians.
How are Russian boots on the ground - of which there have been many for some time - ok
and American boots bad?
The difference is that of a poison and the antidotum. The American/NATO meddling in Iraq, Libya
and Syria created a truly sick situation which needs to be fixed. That's what the Russians are
doing. Obviously, they have their own objectives and motives for that and are protecting their
own interests, but nevertheless this is the surest way to re-establish semblance of stability
in the Middle East, rebuilt Syria and Iraq, stop the exodus of the refugees, and mend relations
in the region.
The American attempt at negotiating peace in Syria without Syrian representation is nothing
short of ridiculous and best illustrates the convoluted state of American foreign policy. America
lost any claim to 'leadership' by now.
I feel sorry for Mr Obama, and indeed America, because he is a decent person, yet most of us
are unaware what forces he has to reckon with behind the scenes. It is clear by now that interests
of corporations and rich individuals, as well as a couple of seemingly insignificant foreign states,
beat the national interest of America all time, anytime. It is astonishing how a powerful, hard
working and talented nation can become beholden to such forces, to its own detriment.
In the end, I do not think the situation is uniquely American. Russia or China given a chance
of total hegemony would behave the same. That's why we need a field of powers/superpowers to keep
one another in check and negotiate rather than enforce solutions.
ID9309755 -> pegasusrose2011 30 Oct 2015 21:02
Unfortunately American policy and that eu have at time added fuel to the fire. Yes,
the me has its own problems, including rival versions of Islam and fundamentalism as well as truly
megalomaniac leaders. But in instances (Libya for example) they did truly contribute to the country's
destruction (and I am not excusing Gaddafi, but for the people there sometimes having these leaders
and waiting for generational transformations may be a better solution than instant democracy pills.)
ID7582903 -> pegasusrose2011 30 Oct 2015 21:00
Russian Iranian and hezbollah boots are invited boots by the legitimate government according
to the UN Charter they are all acting legally and according to the Geneva Conventions etc.
The US led coalition in bombing Syria were not, and the admitted introduction of troops
into Syria is a an ACT OF WAR by the USA, and it is the AGRESSOR here, not doubt about it. It's
a War Crime by every standard
Obama and the "regime" that rules the United Snakes of America have all gone over the edge
into insanity writ large.
ID9309755 -> pegasusrose2011 30 Oct 2015 20:55
To clarify, I meant that all these groups are funded by these Arabic sheikhdoms and it increasingly
appears that th us of a is not as serious in eradicating all of them in the illusion that the
so called softer ones will over through Assad and then it will be democracy, the much misused
and fetishised term. Meanwhile we can carve up the country, Turkey gets a bite and our naughty
bloated allies in Arabia will be happy with their influence. Only if it happened that way...
There is much more than this short and simplified scenario, and yes Russia played its hand
rather well taking the west off guard. And I am not trying to portray Putin as some liberation
prophet either. So perhaps you could say that yes, maybe I have looked into it deep...
BlooperMario -> RedEyedOverlord 30 Oct 2015 20:52
China and Russia are only responding to NY World Bank and IMF cheats and also standing up to
an evil empire that has ruined the middle east.
Time you had a rethink old chap and stopped worshipping Blair; Bush; Rumsfeld etc as your heros.
See the NATO creep into Eastern Europe against all agreements made with USSR.
Silly Sailors provoking Chinese Lighthouse keepers.
RoyRoger 30 Oct 2015 19:30
Their Plan B is fucked !!
But their real agenda is to carve up Syria. In the deep recesses of their, the Corporate
corrupt White House's, mind ISIS is not their immediate problem. ISIS is a means to an end - carve
up Syria a sovereign country.
Remember, only months ago, Kerry and Tory William Hague, was handing out cash to Syrian
rebels who later turned out to be ISIS rebels. We must never forget, Syria, right or wrong, is
a sovereign country.
The real battle/plan for the Corporate corrupt White House is to try and get a foothold in
Syria and establish a military dictator after a coup d'etat'. As we know it's what they, the West,
do best.
Look at the mess they made in, Ukraine, with their friends a bunch of, Kiev, murdering
neo-Nazi's.
In the interest of right is right; Good Luck Mr Putin !! I'm with you all the way.
weematt 30 Oct 2015 19:25
War (and poverty too) a consequence, concomitant, of competing for markets, raw materials and
trade routes or areas of geo-political dominance, come to be seen as 'natural' outcomes of society,
but are merely concomitants of a changeable social system.
... ... ...
Greg_Samsa 30 Oct 2015 19:21
Just out of curiosity...how will the US keep the DoD and CIA from duking it out at the
opposite fronts on the Syrian soil?
This gives a whole new dimension to the term 'blue-on-blue'.
Kevin Donegan 30 Oct 2015 18:59
Washington has clearly chosen to break International Law.
"Westphalian sovereignty is the principle of international law that each nation state has sovereignty
over its territory and domestic affairs, to the exclusion of all external powers, on the principle
of non-interference in another country's domestic affairs, and that each state (no matter how
large or small) is equal in international law. The doctrine is named after the Peace of Westphalia,
signed in 1648, which ended the Thirty Years' War, in which the major continental European states
– the Holy Roman Empire, Spain, France, Sweden and the Dutch Republic – agreed to respect one
another's territorial integrity. As European influence spread across the globe, the Westphalian
principles, especially the concept of sovereign states, became central to international law and
to the prevailing world order.[1]"
foolisholdman 30 Oct 2015 18:41
As the administration in Washington is firmly in the grasp of special interest groups such
as Big Pharma, The Banksters, Big Agrobusiness, Big oil, the MIC and Israel there is no chance
of getting good policy decisions out of there until there is a regime change.
If ever there was a government hat had lost its legitimacy the present US government is it.
foolisholdman -> Johnny Kent 30 Oct 2015 18:31
Johnny Kent
The slight question of legality in placing troops in a sovereign country without permission
or UN approval is obviously of no importance to the US...and yet they criticise Russia for
'annexing Crimea...
Yes, but you see: the two cases are not comparable because the USA is exceptional.
You might think that having criticized Assad for shooting
demonstrators who demonstrated
against the corruption and inefficiency of his regime, and having said that as a result his regime
had lost its legitimacy, they would apply the same yardstick to President Poroshenko when he shot
up two provinces of his country for asking for federation, killing thousands in the process, but
on the contrary they sent "advisers" to train his military and his Fascist helpers to use their
weapons better, to shoot them up more effectively.
However, one cannot really expect people who are exceptional to behave like ordinary (unexceptional)
human beings.
WalterCronkiteBot 30 Oct 2015 17:11
What is the official US line on the legality of these deployments in terms of international
law?
Noone seems to even raise it as an issue, its all about congressional approval. Just like the
UK drone strikes.
"... Rile the masses up against the Commie Threat, as it worked so well in the 50's - 60's. Save us the expense of rewriting the playbook. Sure. Duck and cover. ..."
"... But the first place I would look is inside the DNC, if I were in charge. Russian intel releasing to wikileaks? Not much profit in that. ..."
"... By the way, whatever became of dearest FBI frontman Comey? ..."
"It might have well been an insider who copied the material and handed them to Wikileaks for publication"
Why this idea gets no traction, obviously -- without an admission of authenticity from DNC,
they have it both ways, the ability to ascribe guilt to Russia, and plausible deniability vis
a vis Sanders. Let's not rule out a purposeful leak as a gloating advertisement for DNC sponsors/donors,
or just as likely as a forgery using wikileaks as conduit for disinformation by anti-DNC ops.
The Guccifer blip is just as believable valid as any of these theories, upo.
Rile the masses up against the Commie Threat, as it worked so well in the 50's - 60's.
Save us the expense of rewriting the playbook. Sure. Duck and cover.
But the first place I would look is inside the DNC, if I were in charge. Russian intel
releasing to wikileaks? Not much profit in that.
By the way, whatever became of dearest FBI frontman Comey?
"... Look over there! Putin is all over the place these days, he is doing Brexit, supporting Trump, and Corbyn I think, he is hacking Hillary, wow. ..."
Look over there! Putin is all over the place these days, he is doing Brexit, supporting Trump,
and Corbyn I think, he is hacking Hillary, wow. And he still has time to ride horses and
play with tigers and invade Europe. I see why he is popular.
But it's nice to be Russian, I like Russia, it's a beautiful country. Until now the Bernie
people were all sexists, racists, privileged homeless idiots who lived in basements, but now we
are Russians. Much better. See that's the Hillary outreach to the bros.
Now in view of recent Hillary health problems actions of Wasserman Schultz need
to be revisited. She somehow avoided criminal prosecution for interfering with the
election process under Obama administration. That's clearly wrong. The court
should investigate and determine the level of her guilt.
Moor did his duty, moor can go. This is fully applicable to Wasserman Schultz.
BTW it was king of "bait and switch" Obama who installed her in this position. And
after that some try to say that Obama is not a neocon. Essentially leaks mean is
that Sander's run was defeated by the Democratic Party's establishment dirty tricks
and Hillary is not a legitimate candidate. It's Mission Accomplished, once again.
"Clinton is a life-long Republican. She grew up in an all-white Republican suburb,
she supported Goldwater, and she supported Wall Street banking, then became a DINO
dildo to ride her husband's coattails to WH, until the NYC Mob traded her a NY Senator
seat for her husband's perfidy. She never said one word about re-regulating the
banks."
How could this anti-Russian hysteria/bashing go on in a normal country -- the
level of paranoia and disinformation about Russia and Putin is plain crazy even
for proto-fascist regimes.
Notable quotes:
"... Wasserman Schultz reluctantly agreed to relinquish her speaking role at the convention here, a sign of her politically fragile standing. ..."
"... Democratic leaders are scrambling to keep the party united, but two officials familiar with the discussions said Wasserman Schultz was digging in and not eager to vacate her post after the November elections. ..."
"... Sanders on Sunday told CNN's Jake Tapper the release of DNC emails that show its staffers working against him underscore the position he's held for months: Party Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz needs to go. ..."
"... "I don't think she is qualified to be the chair of the DNC not only for these awful emails, which revealed the prejudice of the DNC, but also because we need a party that reaches out to working people and young people, and I don't think her leadership style is doing that," Sanders told Tapper ..."
"... But again, we discussed this many, many months ago, on this show, so what is revealed now is not a shock to me." ..."
Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz will not
have a major speaking role or preside over daily convention proceedings this
week, a decision reached by party officials Saturday after emails surfaced raising
questions about the committee's impartiality during the Democratic primary.
The DNC Rules Committee on Saturday named Rep. Marcia Fudge, D-Ohio, as permanent
chair of the convention, according to a DNC source. She will gavel each session
to order and will gavel each session closed.
"She's been quarantined," another top Democrat said of Wasserman Schultz,
following a meeting Saturday night. Wasserman Schultz faced intense pressure
Sunday to resign her post as head of the Democratic National Committee, several
party leaders told CNN, urging her to quell a growing controversy threatening
to disrupt Hillary Clinton's nominating convention.
Wasserman Schultz reluctantly agreed to relinquish her speaking role
at the convention here, a sign of her politically fragile standing. But
party leaders are now urging the Florida congresswoman to vacate her position
as head of the party entirely in the wake of leaked emails suggesting the DNC
favored Clinton during the primary and tried to take down Bernie Sanders by
questioning his religion. Democratic leaders are scrambling to keep the
party united, but two officials familiar with the discussions said Wasserman
Schultz was digging in and not eager to vacate her post after the November elections.
... ... ...
One email appears to show DNC staffers asking how they can reference Bernie
Sanders' faith to weaken him in the eyes of Southern voters. Another seems to
depict an attorney advising the committee on how to defend Hillary Clinton against
an accusation by the Sanders campaign of not living up to a joint fundraising
agreement.
Sanders on Sunday told CNN's Jake Tapper the release of DNC emails that
show its staffers working against him underscore the position he's held for
months: Party Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz needs to go.
"I don't think she is qualified to be the chair of the DNC not only for
these awful emails, which revealed the prejudice of the DNC, but also because
we need a party that reaches out to working people and young people, and I don't
think her leadership style is doing that," Sanders told Tapper on "State
of the Union," on the eve of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.
"I am not an atheist," he said. "But aside from all of that, it is an outrage
and sad that you would have people in important positions in the DNC trying
to undermine my campaign. It goes without saying, the function of the DNC is
to represent all of the candidates -- to be fair and even-minded."
He added: "But again, we discussed this many, many months ago, on this
show, so what is revealed now is not a shock to me."
... ... ...
Several Democratic sources told CNN that the leaked emails are a big source
of contention and may incite tensions between the Clinton and Sanders camps
heading into the Democratic convention's Rules Committee meeting this weekend.
"It could threaten their agreement," one Democrat said, referring to the
deal reached between Clinton and Sanders about the convention, delegates and
the DNC. The party had agreed to include more progressive principles in its
official platform, and as part of the agreement, Sanders dropped his fight to
contest Wasserman Schultz as the head of the DNC.
"It's gas meets flame," the Democrat said.
Michael Briggs, a Sanders spokesman, had no comment Friday.
The issue surfaced on Saturday at Clinton's first campaign event with Tim
Kaine as her running mate, when a protester was escorted out of Florida International
University in Miami. The protester shouted "DNC leaks" soon after Clinton thanked
Wasserman Schultz for her leadership at the DNC.
This is Christopher Hitchens biting analysis from previous Presidential elections,
but still relevant
Notable quotes:
"... The last time that Clinton foreign-policy associations came up for congressional review, the investigations ended in a cloud of murk that still has not been dispelled. ..."
"... the real problem is otherwise. Both President and Sen. Clinton, while in office, made it obvious to foreign powers that they and their relatives were wide open to suggestions from lobbyists and middlemen. ..."
"... If you recall the names John Huang, James Riady, Johnny Chung, Charlie Trie, and others, you will remember the pattern of acquired amnesia syndrome and stubborn reluctance to testify, followed by sudden willingness on the part of the Democratic National Committee to return quite large sums of money from foreign sources. Much of this cash had been raised at political events held in the public rooms of the White House, the sort of events that featured the adorable Roger Tamraz , for another example. ..."
"... It found that the Clinton administration's attitude toward Chinese penetration had been abysmally lax (as lax, I would say, as its attitude toward easy money from businessmen with Chinese military-industrial associations). ..."
"... Many quids and many quos were mooted by these investigations (still incomplete at the time of writing) though perhaps not enough un-ambivalent pros . You can't say that about the Marc Rich and other pardons-the vulgar bonanza with which the last Clinton era came to an end. Rich's ex-wife, Denise Rich, gave large sums to Hillary Clinton's re-election campaign and to Bill Clinton's library, and Marc Rich got a pardon. ..."
"... Edgar and Vonna Jo Gregory, convicted of bank fraud, hired Hillary Clinton's brother Tony and paid him $250,000, and they got a pardon. Carlos Vignali Jr. and Almon Glenn Braswell paid $400,000 to Hillary Clinton's other brother, Hugh , and, hey, they , respectively, got a presidential commutation and a presidential pardon, too. ..."
"... Does this sibling and fraternal squalor have foreign-policy implications, too? Yes. Until late 1999, the fabulous Rodham boys were toiling on another scheme to get the hazelnut concession from the newly independent republic of Georgia. There was something quixotically awful about this scheme-something simultaneously too small-time and too big-time-but it also involved a partnership with the main political foe of the then-Georgian president (who may conceivably have had political aspirations), so once again the United States was made to look as if its extended first family were operating like a banana republic. ..."
"... In matters of foreign policy, it has been proved time and again, the Clintons are devoted to no interest other than their own. ..."
"... Who can say with a straight face that this is true of a woman whose personal ambition is without limit; whose second loyalty is to an impeached and disbarred and discredited former president; and who is ready at any moment, and on government time, to take a wheedling call from either of her bulbous brothers? This is also the unscrupulous female who until recently was willing to play the race card on President-elect Obama and (in spite of her own complete want of any foreign-policy qualifications) to ridicule him for lacking what she only knew about by way of sordid backstairs dealing. What may look like wound-healing and magnanimity to some looks like foolhardiness and masochism to me. ..."
It was apt in a small way that the first
endorser of Hillary Rodham Clinton for secretary of state should have been
Henry Kissinger. The last time he was nominated for any position of responsibility-the
chairmanship of the 9/11 commission-he accepted with many florid words about
the great honor and responsibility, and then he withdrew when it became clear
that he would have to disclose the client list of Kissinger Associates. (See,
for the article that began this embarrassing process for him, my Slate
column "The
Latest Kissinger Outrage.")
It is possible that the Senate will be as much of a club as the undistinguished
fraternity/sorority of our ex-secretaries of state, but even so, it's difficult
to see Sen. Clinton achieving confirmation unless our elected representatives
are ready to ask a few questions about conflict of interest along similar lines.
And how can they not? The last time that Clinton foreign-policy associations
came up for congressional review, the investigations ended in a cloud of murk
that still has not been dispelled. Former President Bill Clinton has recently
and rather disingenuously offered to submit his own foundation to scrutiny (see
the
work of my Vanity Fair colleague Todd Purdum on the delightful friends
and associates that Clinton has acquired since he left office), but
the real problem is otherwise. Both President and Sen. Clinton, while in
office, made it obvious to foreign powers that they and their relatives were
wide open to suggestions from lobbyists and middlemen.
Just to give the most salient examples from the Clinton fundraising scandals
of the late 1990s: The House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight published
a list of witnesses called before it who had either "fled
or pled"-in other words, who had left the country to avoid testifying or
invoked the Fifth Amendment to avoid self-incrimination. Some Democratic members
of the committee said that this was unfair to, say, the Buddhist nuns who raised
the unlawful California temple dough for then-Vice President
Al Gore, but however fair you want to be, the number of those who found
it highly inconvenient to testify fluctuates between 94 and 120. If you
recall the names John Huang, James Riady, Johnny Chung, Charlie Trie, and others,
you will remember the pattern of acquired amnesia syndrome and stubborn reluctance
to testify, followed by sudden willingness on the part of the Democratic National
Committee to return quite large sums of money from foreign sources. Much of
this cash had been raised at political events held in the public rooms of the
White House, the sort of events that featured the adorable
Roger Tamraz, for another example.
Related was the result of a House select
committee
on Chinese espionage in the United States and the illegal transfer to China
of advanced military technology. Chaired by Christopher Cox, R-Calif., the committee
issued a
report
in 1999 with no dissenting or "minority" signature. It found that the Clinton
administration's attitude toward Chinese penetration had been abysmally lax
(as lax, I would say, as its attitude toward easy money from businessmen with
Chinese military-industrial associations).
Many quids and many quos were mooted by these investigations
(still incomplete at the time of writing) though perhaps not enough un-ambivalent
pros. You can't say that about the Marc Rich and other pardons-the vulgar
bonanza with which the last Clinton era came to an end. Rich's ex-wife, Denise
Rich, gave large sums to Hillary Clinton's re-election campaign and to Bill
Clinton's library, and Marc Rich got a pardon.
Edgar and Vonna Jo Gregory, convicted of bank fraud,
hired Hillary Clinton's brother Tony and paid him $250,000, and they
got a pardon. Carlos Vignali Jr. and Almon Glenn Braswell paid $400,000 to Hillary
Clinton's other brother,
Hugh, and, hey, they, respectively, got a presidential commutation
and a presidential pardon, too. In the Hugh case, the money was returned
as being too embarrassing for words (and as though following the hallowed custom,
when busted or flustered, of the Clinton-era DNC). But I would say that it was
more embarrassing to realize that a former first lady, and a candidate for secretary
of state, was a full partner in years of seedy overseas money-grubbing and has
two greedy brothers to whom she cannot say no.
Does this sibling and fraternal squalor have foreign-policy implications,
too? Yes. Until late 1999, the fabulous Rodham boys were toiling on another
scheme to get the hazelnut concession from the newly independent republic of
Georgia. There was something quixotically awful about this scheme-something
simultaneously too small-time and too big-time-but it also involved a partnership
with the main political foe of the then-Georgian president (who may conceivably
have had political aspirations), so once again the United States was made to
look as if its extended first family were operating like a banana republic.
China, Indonesia, Georgia-these are not exactly negligible countries on our
defense and financial and ideological peripheries. In each country, there are
important special interests that equate the name Clinton with the word pushover.
And did I forget to add what President Clinton pleaded when the revulsion at
the Rich pardons became too acute? He claimed that he had concerted the deal
with the government of Israel in the intervals of the Camp David "agreement"!
So anyone who criticized the pardons had better have been careful if they didn't
want to hear from the Anti-Defamation League. Another splendid way of showing
that all is aboveboard and of convincing the Muslim world of our evenhandedness.
In matters of foreign policy, it has been proved time and again, the
Clintons are devoted to no interest other than their own. A president absolutely
has to know of his chief foreign-policy executive that he or she has no other
agenda than the one he has set. Who can say with a straight face that this
is true of a woman whose personal ambition is without limit; whose second loyalty
is to an impeached and disbarred and discredited former president; and who is
ready at any moment, and on government time, to take a wheedling call from either
of her bulbous brothers? This is also the unscrupulous female who until recently
was willing to play the race card on President-elect Obama and (in spite of
her own complete want of any foreign-policy qualifications) to ridicule him
for lacking what she only knew about by way of sordid backstairs dealing. What
may look like wound-healing and magnanimity to some looks like foolhardiness
and masochism to me.
Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011) was a columnist for Vanity Fair and
the author, most recently, of
Arguably, a collection of essays.
"... To hear the mainstream news media retell the story of the contentious 2000 presidential election, one would think that it all boils down to Bush v. Gore. The Supreme Court decision created huge controversy and poisons public life to this day. But this focus on the decision serves to obscure an act of great duplicity on the part of the media that dwarfs the impact of that case: namely, that if it hadn't been for actions they took on television on Election Night, November 7, 2000, there never would have been a Bush v. Gore or a Florida recount in the first place. ..."
"... by 8 p.m. Eastern Time on Election Night, a cover-up had already begun. ..."
To hear the mainstream news media retell the story of the contentious
2000 presidential election, one would think that it all boils down to Bush v.
Gore. The Supreme Court decision created huge controversy and poisons public
life to this day. But this focus on the decision serves to obscure an act of
great duplicity on the part of the media that dwarfs the impact of that case:
namely, that if it hadn't been for actions they took on television on Election
Night, November 7, 2000, there never would have been a Bush v. Gore or a Florida
recount in the first place.
It is a story of voter suppression. As it turns out, most of what we think
was important about that election-hanging chads, butterfly ballots, 36 days
of legal jousting-is unimportant. And by 8 p.m. Eastern Time on Election
Night, a cover-up had already begun.
In view of the recent events the old question arise again: Was Hillary Clinton already on warafin when she suffered her latest fall?
Notable quotes:
"... Secretary Clinton was started on Coumadin, also known as warfarin. This medication significantly reduces - though it does not eliminate - the chance of a future blood clot. ..."
"... This extends to other facets of life; a simple fall that would be shook off by anyone else can give a patient on blood thinners a lethal brain bleed. The risks and benefits of anticoagulation must be weighed against the risk of a stroke if one does not use blood thinners; and is a choice for every patient to make with their physician. ..."
"... This does not include the possibility of an intracranial bleed, which could cause major cognitive disabilities without being lethal. ..."
"... There is a non-trivial possibility that Secretary Clinton will suffer a major bleed of some kind. ..."
"... Vamsi Aribindi is a medical student who blogs at the Medical Intellectual . ..."
Her
medical history includes two deep vein thromboses (DVTs) in 1998 and 2009,
as well as a cerebral venous sinus thrombosis in 2012. A thromboses is a clot;
basically, the formation of a solid plug inside a vein, a misfire of the body's
ability to plug holes and stop bleeding. While I could not find news articles
discussing the 2009 incident in further detail, the
1998 incident was a proximal DVT - one that had ascended into the popliteal
vein - an especially dangerous form of DVT that is most likely to cause a condition
called pulmonary embolus which can be fatal. A cerebral venous sinus thrombosis
is also a deadly condition, with a mortality of
approximately
10 percent and negative cognitive effects, though survivors make a good
recovery.
When anyone has multiple unprovoked clots, meaning there was no obvious reason
for the body to misfire it's clot formation system such as surgery or active
cancer, and especially when someone has a clot in an unusual location such as
the brain, an extensive workup is indicated to look for causes. Some such causes
include previously undetected cancers, inherited or random genetic disorders,
and autoimmune disorders. That workup was negative in Secretary Clinton's case,
per her doctor's letter. This is not unusual; there are many disorders that
we have not yet discovered, and in all likelihood Secretary Clinton's particular
clotting disorder happens to be one that has not yet been discovered.
When someone has such a clotting disorder, as a precaution patients are often
started on a medication to prevent the formation of clots. These medications
are known as anticoagulants or blood thinners. Secretary Clinton was started
on Coumadin, also known as warfarin. This medication significantly reduces -
though it does not eliminate - the chance of a future blood clot.
What is the side effect of blood thinners? A greater chance of bleeding and
greater difficulty stopping a bleed once it happens. An elderly patient on blood
thinners who is subsequently injured in a car crash is a nightmare for a trauma
team. This extends to other facets of life; a simple fall that would be
shook off by anyone else can give a patient on blood thinners a lethal brain
bleed. The risks and benefits of anticoagulation must be weighed against the
risk of a stroke if one does not use blood thinners; and is a choice for every
patient to make with their physician.
In Secretary Clinton's case, what is her risk of bleeding? Secretary Clinton
is over 65, and she has had multiple falls (in
2005, 2009, and 2011, and 2012); the 2009 fall resulting in a broken elbow
and the last one resulting in a concussion. According to
guidelines
put out by the American College of Chest Physicians, two risk factors puts her
in the category of high-risk patients, meaning her risk of bleeding while on
long-term anticoagulation is 6.5 percent per year. The mortality from a major
bleed is
approximately
10 percent. This does not include the possibility of an intracranial
bleed, which could cause major cognitive disabilities without being lethal.
What is Secretary Clinton's precise risk? It is difficult to say. She does
receive excellent medical care, and presumably has her dose of warfarin closely
monitored by many professionals. In addition, she may soon switch to newer anticoagulants
which are easier to take and dose than warfarin, though it is unclear if they
are truly any safer.
Ultimately, all that can be said is this: There is a non-trivial possibility
that Secretary Clinton will suffer a major bleed of some kind. The worst
possible scenario? Trump and Clinton are nominated, and Clinton suddenly suffers
a devastating bleed in the middle of the campaign, leaving a likely underqualified
vice presidential pick to try and fight Donald Trump. However, the risk of this
is likely small; and it is not as if 74-year-old Senator Bernie Sanders is free
of health risks either. Patients and doctors both hate uncertainty, and yet
we deal with it every day. I don't believe Secretary Clinton's increased risks
are anything that should disqualify her from the presidency, but they are certainly
something to ponder.
DNC is just a cesspool of neocon sharks. No decency whatsoever. What a bottom
feeders. Will Sanders supporters walk out ?
Notable quotes:
"... They made Craigslist posts on fake Trump jobs talking about women needing to be hot for the job and "maintain hotness" https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/12803 ..."
"... DNC and Hillary moles inside the Bernie campaign https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/4776 ..."
"Hey Josh, since the Sanders camp keeps pushing stories about the money
laundering, we're prepping a Medium post from either our CFO or our CEO
we want to run by you. It will sharply state that the criticisms are wrong,
etc.. basically our talking points in a Medium post format with some extra
detail."
https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/4091
DWS on Bernie staying in the race in April: "Spoken like someone who
has never been a member of the Democratic Party and has no understanding
of what to do"
https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/5477 )
Calling someone a Bernie Bro for wanting to interview DWS about money
laundering, which they call "a shit topic". Asks for an interview next week
on another topic.
https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/13319
Media Collaboration
"I think the best reporter to give the news to ahead of time is Greg
Sargent at the Washington Post. But, the specific reporter is not as important
as getting it to an outlet before the news breaks so we can help control
the narrative on the front"
https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/11242
More media collusion (Politico) "Vogel gave me his story ahead of time/before
it goes to his editors as long as I didn't share it. Let me know if you
see anything that's missing and I'll push back." Thanks to
/u/PM_ME_OR_PM_ME
"-- Last night, Hillary attended two high-dollar fundraisers in New
York City. The first, from 6:15 p.m. to 7:45 p.m., was at the home of Maureen
White and Steven Rattner. Approximately 15 attendees contributed $100,000+
to attend. Then, from 8:15 p.m. to 9:45 p.m., she went to the home of Lynn
Forester de Rothschild. Another 15 people ponied up more than 100K to attend."
https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/1238
"less than 1 percent of the $61 million raised by that effort has stayed
in the state parties' coffers, according to a POLITICO analysis of the latest
Federal Election Commission filing"
https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/1724
Targeting Wall Street donors. Thanks
/u/Cygnus_X
https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/998
More info: "One big Clinton donor on Wall Street said that Bush donors
are prime targets and that 'we're a big tent.' Potential sources of support
for Clinton could include people like Jack Oliver, who also served as a
top fundraiser for Jeb Bush. Both Johnson and Oliver did not respond to
requests for comment.The race for Wall Street cash will be intense."-
/u/Cygnus_X
Personal note: honestly this feels like browsing a bunch of high school
girls' emails. "Is there a fuck you emoji", "bahahaha", someone links to
round of applause by lady gaga.
Tons of media manipulation.
Also, kinda feel bad for Bernie supporters now. The system, like trump
mentioned in his speech, was against you completely.
The real question is whether the email are authentic or not. They are.
Neoliberal propaganda honchos just decided to use a smoke screen to conceal this
fact using Russia as a bogeyman.
Russian might be guilty of many things, but in no way it is
responsible for corruption of DNC and this subversive actions/covert operations
used for installing Hillary Clinton as a candidate from the Democratic Party. .
Notable quotes:
"... Is it OK to cheat, lie and deceive - as Clintons and DNC did - and then defend themselves by saying that "nobody would know, if it wasn't for those damn Russians"? Even the idea is preposterous: how we find out about this corruption is irrelevant, the point is there was corruption and cheating. ..."
"... So the DNC is trying to Blame Russia for their own corrupt actions. ..."
"... [Under Clintons] democracy has become conspiracy ..."
"... Are you constipated? Blame it on Russia. ..."
"... Oh and blaming Russia for revealing the truth. The truth was not attacked, but who revealed the truth is suddenly the bad guy. So desperate and out of sorts. :) ..."
"... There's no proof, besides an unsourced article in the Washington Post form 'security experts', that Russia had anything to do with this. What we do know is that immediately after the leaks became public various news outlets produced obviously planted hit pieces claiming some kind of collusion between the Trump campaign and Putin, and again with precisely zero evidence as back up. It's gob smacking that the Clinton campaign would risk an international incident with a nuclear power to cover for their shitty behaviour, but then again it's Hillary Clinton so perhaps not. ..."
"... It may indeed be Russian hackers who gained access to the emails which confirm the DNC was all along in the tank for Clinton, and was actively placing a thumb on the scale from day one in the primary process. ..."
"... But the bottom line here is that if the DNC had not so conspired, there would be no emails to leak, now would there? For Mook and others to now be placing blame on the hackers, rather than on those who produced the embarrassing material that the hackers exposed, is diversionary and inexcusable. ..."
"... The funniest thing is, they don't even deny the authenticity of the emails. Basically, DNC says that someone is guilty of revealing the truth. You can hardly stoop any lower. Blaming Russia is just a cherry on the cake. ..."
"... How nice to have an eternal scapegoat: TheRussiansAreComing!TheRussiansAreComing! This will obviously be RodHam's theme as President. Perhaps to the point of annihilation. Neo-Conne! ..."
"... My biggest issue with Hillary from the start has been her continued nonchalance when it comes to matters of national security. She acts as if she is above the need to keep sensitive information safe from potential enemies, both foreign and domestic. That's a pretty scary attitude coming from someone who is likely to be this nation's next leader. ..."
"... It's amazing. Caught red handed and still deflecting. Take responsibility for Christ sak ..."
"... ".....Several of the emails released indicate that the officials, including Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, grew increasingly agitated with Clinton's rival, Bernie Sanders, and his campaign as the primary season advanced, in one instance even floating bringing up Sanders' religion to try and minimize his support. ..."
"... The more interesting part is that this blame is just a distraction from the larger issue, that the entire political system is corrupted and broken. This is just business as usual, only this instance was revealed. ..."
I honestly can't wait for when the pro-clinron commentors arrive. I can
see it now "this doesn't matter if you vote 3rd party you're voting for
trump." It won't matter that this is all the fault of the DNC, it will be
on us. I'm calling it now ;)
Is it OK to cheat, lie and deceive - as Clintons and DNC did - and then
defend themselves by saying that "nobody would know, if it wasn't for those
damn Russians"? Even the idea is preposterous: how we find out about this
corruption is irrelevant, the point is there was corruption and cheating.
Interestingly, this is a favorite defense of all authoritarians. They
always claim that if it benefits the "enemy", it is ok to suppress it. Stalin
had a concept of "objectively aiding the enemy" - it meant that maybe the
person was not a conscious traitor, but his/her actions helped the enemy
- and that was enough. Is Guardian and Clintons now marching down this road
of extreme "us versus them" ideology?
What's is next? Will Clintons ban Bernie from speaking because it would
"aid Trump"? (and by extension in their paranoid thinking, it would aid
Russia).
"Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook said on Sunday that "experts are telling
us that Russian state actors broke into the DNC, stole these emails, [and
are] releasing these emails for the purpose of helping Donald Trump."
So the DNC is trying to Blame Russia for their own corrupt actions.
Another reason on the list as to why I won't be voting for Hillary. Why
did DNC act very anti-democratic?
A vote for Hillary is a vote for continued corruption.
Rather than blaming they ought to be taking responsibility for their own
words. But they'd have to be adults with integrity to do that. The tragedy
and travesty of it is the willful, routine, nonchalant effort to subvert
the Constitution and the will of the people. These kinds of machinations
have always gone on within both parties and should always be exposed. The
SuperPACS, the dark money, the secret maneuverings, the totally broken primary
system, all designed to stop our having our say. People elsewhere often
wonder about "our" choices for the White House. Now they can see how much
of that free choice has been wrested away over time, and how imperative
it is that we ordinary people start working on positive change within the
elective system. In my opinion all the DNC participants should lose their
jobs and be made to cool their heels in jail a while, because without consequences
we may as well just burn the Constitution and Bill of Rights right now and
be done with it, for all the respect these documents are given by our politicians.
What a revolting mess it all is on both sides, with ordinary people the
losers, as always.
Oh and blaming Russia for revealing the truth. The truth was not attacked,
but who revealed the truth is suddenly the bad guy. So desperate and out
of sorts. :)
There's no proof, besides an unsourced article in the Washington Post form
'security experts', that Russia had anything to do with this. What we do
know is that immediately after the leaks became public various news outlets
produced obviously planted hit pieces claiming some kind of collusion between
the Trump campaign and Putin, and again with precisely zero evidence as
back up. It's gob smacking that the Clinton campaign would risk an international
incident with a nuclear power to cover for their shitty behaviour, but then
again it's Hillary Clinton so perhaps not.
A big part of the problem is that Debbie Wasserman Schultz (DWS) is still
in her position. If the Democratic Party place a value on performance, she
should have been fired after the 2014 mid-terms.
Part of the problem is that the DNC is too closely aligned with the interests
of one political family. Competence and other considerations count for a
lot less than loyalty. DWS kept her position because of the ties to Clinton
and Clintons donors, not because she did a good job and grew the party.
The opposite has happened.
Frankly, Obama bears some degree of responsibility for this because he's
the one who canned Howard Dean, who actually had a track record of success
at winning elections and growing the party through two election cycles.
Instead Obama replaced him with a guy like Tim Kaine, who wasn't up to the
task either. Dean also did a good job of navigating the very difficult 2008
election. Kaine and DWS did poorly in the capacity as DNC Chair.
As president, Obama has done a lot right. But his neglect of the DNC
is part of his legacy, and it isn't a good one.
That's nice that those damn Russians 'stole' their email. However, those
damn Russians didn't write them. I dislike and distrust Hillary and DWS
more now that I did a week ago, and that takes some doing. Hillary is Nixon.
Paranoid. Dishonest. Devious.
how in the name of god can the overly compensated chairwoman of the democratic
party conspire against a candidate supported by nearly half of democratic
primary voters ???
Kaine is in the same boat as Clinton on the TPP - the Good Ship Hypocrite.
Both hope like hell that TPP gets passed in the lame duck so they can make
a show of being against it to gain some progressive cred. If Obama and his
colleagues Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan can't get TPP done before his term
ends, Clinton and Kaine's reservations re TPP will disappear faster than
a snowflake in July. It's like Clinton's about face on the Keystone pipeline
- she got a heads up from Obama that he wasn't going to approve it anyway,
so she came out against it.
I love the irony of the comment from the Clinton Campaign..... '' This is
further evidence the Russian Government is trying to influence the outcome
of an election ''.
Heavens forbid that the USA would ever stoop so low as to try and influence
the outcome of other Countries elections !!!
It of course being totally above Americians to indulge such devious behaviour
.
Very true, and Hillary was happy to support the violent Honduras coup of
an elected government and still very much supports that new violent regime.
And the new regime is very friendly to western big corporate 'interests'.
Of course. Hillary is old-school.
Doesn't matter who did it, the Russians, Anonymous, Edward Snowden. The
point is that the DNC is revealed as partisan and rigged. In addition to
minimizing her role at the convention, I believe Wasserman Schultz should
be dumped from any position of leadership, along with other DNC leaders.
No wonder people are fed up with politics as usual.
"Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook said on Sunday that "experts are telling
us that Russian state actors broke into the DNC, stole these emails, [and
are] releasing these emails for the purpose of helping Donald Trump."
And Mook is the expert who whispered that lie in his own ear.
Great photo, Mook the Spook, her lover, a few bigtime aids. They got
caught like Nixon's plumbers at Watergate. So they would like to blame the
Russians for their writing calumnies and antiSemitic slanders against Sanders.
They look pretty stupid!
Mook said on Sunday that "experts are telling us that Russian state
actors broke into the DNC, stole these emails, [and are] releasing these
emails for the purpose of helping Donald Trump."
It may indeed be Russian hackers who gained access to the emails which confirm
the DNC was all along in the tank for Clinton, and was actively placing
a thumb on the scale from day one in the primary process.
Sanders knew it, and we as his supporters also knew it and made reference
to that very issue repeatedly in countless comment threads here at the Guardian
and elsewhere.
But the bottom line here is that if the DNC had not so conspired,
there would be no emails to leak, now would there?
For Mook and others to now be placing blame on the hackers, rather than
on those who produced the embarrassing material that the hackers exposed,
is diversionary and inexcusable.
The Clinton campaign is moving closer and closer to blowing this election
completely and allowing the most dangerous candidacy I've ever seen in my
lifetime actually win this thing.
They've already selected a VP pick which effectively thumbs their nose
at the very progressives whose enthusiasm they will need at the voting booths,
and now here they are trying to deflect blame for unconscionable skullduggery
in the primary process onto foreign actors.
Debbie Wassermann Schultz should have been fired long ago, so blatant and
obvious were her shenanigans.
This kind of tone-deaf ineptitude could see all of us paying an unimaginable
price in November. All it will take at this point is a few more mass shootings
(at which we here in the US have a particular talent) to feed into Trump's
narrative and we'll all be waking up in January in a country we don't even
recognize.
The funniest thing is, they don't even deny the authenticity of the
emails. Basically, DNC says that someone is guilty of revealing the truth.
You can hardly stoop any lower. Blaming Russia is just a cherry on the cake.
Just saw Bernie on CNN basically saying the Nr1 priority is to defeat D.
Trump, then keep fighting the good fight from within the Democratic Party
trying to reform it from within.
A big thing he misses here that the top honcho Mrs Hillary Clinton is one
of the main reasons of what the Democratic Party has become. She will be
a huge obstruction to anything resembling reform. You might as well pack
up and go 3rd party and show the Dems that way what American voters want.
4 years of Trump might actually be a lot better to shake up the corrupt
DNC then 4-8 years of Hillary and who knows how many years of Republicans
2 follow (and believe me, Hillary will do a lot of damage to the democratic
brand!)
Clinton is desperate to lurk voters by anything, then let it be those Russians
that hacked her mail. A Russian proverb to the point - "A bad dancer always
blames his balls that hamper him".
If they'd backed off, allowed their MSM protectors to bury the story, this
whole thing would have died down in a week. A few angry Bernie Bros notwithstanding
there's nothing in the emails that we didn't know already. Yes the DNC and
the Hillary Clinton campaign were one and the same....shock! Yes sections
of the corporate owned media are colluding with the Democratic Party....wowsers!!
But no, they couldn't help themselves. Now we've got the Democratic nominee
for the Presidency alleging, with zero proof, that her opponent is engaged
in a conspiracy to commit criminal acts with a foreign power! Seriously
who thought this was a good idea?
How nice to have an eternal scapegoat: TheRussiansAreComing!TheRussiansAreComing!
This will obviously be RodHam's theme as President. Perhaps to the point
of annihilation. Neo-Conne!
My biggest issue with Hillary from the start has been her continued nonchalance
when it comes to matters of national security. She acts as if she is above
the need to keep sensitive information safe from potential enemies, both
foreign and domestic. That's a pretty scary attitude coming from someone
who is likely to be this nation's next leader.
Putin ate my homework (TM). What Debbie and the gang did is worse, much worse than this sorry article
tries to portray. For example, what sort of Democratic Party tries to use Bearnie's religion
agsinst him ?!?
".....Several of the emails released indicate that the officials, including
Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, grew increasingly agitated with Clinton's
rival, Bernie Sanders, and his campaign as the primary season advanced,
in one instance even floating bringing up Sanders' religion to try and minimize
his support.
****"It might may [sic] no difference, but for KY and WA can we get someone
to ask his belief," Brad Marshall, CFO of DNC, wrote in an email on May
5, 2016. "Does he believe in God. He had skated on saying he has a Jewish
heritage.
I read he is an atheist. This could make several points difference with
my peeps. My southern baptist peeps woudl draw a big difference between
a Jew and an atheist."****
"Amy Dacey, CEO of the DNC, subsequently responded "AMEN," according
to the email"
The more interesting part is that this blame is just a distraction from
the larger issue, that the entire political system is corrupted and broken.
This is just business as usual, only this instance was revealed.
Has anyone here worked, I mean truly worked in the pre-election process,
behind the scenes, witnessing the dirty business that is gathering electoral
votes during caucuses and primaries? It is a total sham. It is where under-the-table
deals are made for promised loyalties to certain candidates, where those
that have the most, bribe others to vote a certain way, where quid pro quo
rules over democracy or a candidates stance on issues and/or policies. It
is where future cabinet positions are secured, based on allegiance to party
hierarchy and strong-arming. Your vote means nothing, only a small select
group determines candidates, and ultimately the president.
DNC Chair Wasserman is just one cog in a massive political machine, one
run rampantly out of control. And this happens on both sides, among both
parties. It is where the personal selfish love of money, power, and fame
outstrip the will of the people.
Long live hackers for keeping a check on an obviously corrupted system.
The mainstream media isn't doing their jobs anymore, someone has to. The
media have merely become the pretorian band for the super class, those elite
that truly control this country from behind the scenes, pulling the puppet
strings attached to the soulless politicians.
We are again presented with two candidates whom have each proven their
desire to negate the will of the nation, for purely selfish reasons. Neither
is truly qualified for this office.
"There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought
to trust no [hu]man living with the power to endanger the public liberty".
-John Adams-
"Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become more
corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters"
-Ben Franklin-
This short article contains several very deep observations. Highly
recommended...
Notable quotes:
"... There is no way to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs or ExxonMobil or Raytheon. We've lost our privacy. We've seen, under Obama, an assault against civil liberties that has outstripped what George W. Bush carried out. ..."
"... This has been a bipartisan effort, because they've both been captured by corporate power. We have undergone what John Ralston Saul correctly calls a corporate coup d'état in slow motion, and it's over. ..."
"... First, it dislocated the working class, deindustrialized the country. Then, in the name of austerity, it destroyed public institutions, education, public broadcasting. And then it poisoned the political system. And we are now watching, in Poland, they created a 30,000 to 40,000 armed militia. You know, they have an army. The Parliament, nothing works. And I think that this political system in the United States has seized up in exactly the same form. ..."
"... So, is Trump a repugnant personality? Yes. Although I would argue that in terms of megalomania and narcissism, Hillary Clinton is not far behind. But the point is, we've got to break away from-which is exactly the narrative they want us to focus on. ..."
"... I mean, this whole debate over the WikiLeaks is insane. Did Russia? I've printed classified material that was given to me by the Mossad. But I never exposed that Mossad gave it to me. Is what was published true or untrue? And the fact is, you know, in those long emails -- you should read them. They're appalling, including calling Dr. Cornel West "trash." It is-the whole-it exposes the way the system was rigged, within-I'm talking about the Democratic Party -- the denial of independents, the superdelegates, the stealing of the caucus in Nevada, the huge amounts of corporate money and super PACs that flowed into the Clinton campaign. ..."
"... Clinton has a track record, and it's one that has abandoned children. I mean, she and her husband destroyed welfare as we know it, and 70 percent of the original recipients were children. ..."
"... Trump is not the phenomenon. Trump is responding to a phenomenon created by neoliberalism. And we may get rid of Trump, but we will get something even more vile ..."
CHRIS HEDGES : Well, reducing the election to personalities
is kind of infantile at this point. The fact is, we live in a system that Sheldon
Wolin calls inverted totalitarianism. It's a system where corporate power has
seized all of the levers of control. There is no way to vote against the interests
of Goldman Sachs or ExxonMobil or Raytheon. We've lost our privacy. We've seen,
under Obama, an assault against civil liberties that has outstripped what George
W. Bush carried out. We've seen the executive branch misinterpret the 2001 Authorization
to Use Military Force Act as giving itself the right to assassinate American
citizens, including children. I speak of Anwar al-Awlaki's 16-year-old son.
We have bailed out the banks, pushed through programs of austerity. This
has been a bipartisan effort, because they've both been captured by corporate
power. We have undergone what John Ralston Saul correctly calls a corporate
coup d'état in slow motion, and it's over.
I just came back from Poland, which is a kind of case study of how
neoliberal poison destroys a society and creates figures like Trump. Poland
has gone, I think we can argue, into a neofascism.
First, it dislocated the working class, deindustrialized the country.
Then, in the name of austerity, it destroyed public institutions, education,
public broadcasting. And then it poisoned the political system. And we are now
watching, in Poland, they created a 30,000 to 40,000 armed militia. You know,
they have an army. The Parliament, nothing works. And I think that this political
system in the United States has seized up in exactly the same form.
So, is Trump a repugnant personality? Yes. Although I would argue that
in terms of megalomania and narcissism, Hillary Clinton is not far behind. But
the point is, we've got to break away from-which is exactly the narrative they
want us to focus on. We've got to break away from political personalities
and understand and examine and critique the structures of power. And, in fact,
the Democratic Party, especially beginning under Bill Clinton, has carried water
for corporate entities as assiduously as the Republican Party. This is something
that Ralph Nader understood long before the rest of us, and stepped out very
courageously in 2000. And I think we will look back on that period and find
Ralph to be an amazingly prophetic figure. Nobody understands corporate power
better than Ralph. And I think now people have caught up with Ralph.
And this is, of course, why I support Dr. Stein and the Green Party. We have
to remember that 10 years ago, Syriza, which controls the Greek government,
was polling at exactly the same spot that the Green Party is polling now-about
4 percent. We've got to break out of this idea that we can create systematic
change within a particular election cycle. We've got to be willing to step out
into the political wilderness, perhaps, for a decade. But on the issues of climate
change, on the issue of the destruction of civil liberties, including our right
to privacy-and I speak as a former investigative journalist, which doesn't exist
anymore because of wholesale government surveillance-we have no ability, except
for hackers.
I mean, this whole debate over the WikiLeaks is insane. Did Russia? I've
printed classified material that was given to me by the Mossad. But I never
exposed that Mossad gave it to me. Is what was published true or untrue? And
the fact is, you know, in those long emails -- you should read them. They're
appalling, including calling Dr. Cornel West "trash." It is-the whole-it exposes
the way the system was rigged, within-I'm talking about the Democratic Party
-- the denial of independents, the superdelegates, the stealing of the caucus
in Nevada, the huge amounts of corporate money and super PACs that flowed into
the Clinton campaign.
The fact is, Clinton has a track record, and it's one that has abandoned
children. I mean, she and her husband destroyed welfare as we know it, and 70
percent of the original recipients were children.
This debate over -- I don't like Trump, but Trump is not the phenomenon.
Trump is responding to a phenomenon created by neoliberalism. And we may get
rid of Trump, but we will get something even more vile, maybe Ted Cruz.
Looks like from this point Hillary is an underdog. Attempt to swipe under the
carpet her health problems failed. Version about pneumonia as fake as it sound
only made matters worse. Now she is officially a person with
"unidentified serious health problem" in this race. Does she
have an immunodeficiency ? For some reason Clinton Foundation put a lot of
efforts in helping AIDS patients.
She now will face perfectly reasonable questions about whether she's
physically up to serving as president. There are also strong doubts if this is
really 's pneumonia. And even pneumonia is a dangerous condition at her age.
Notable quotes:
"... the risk was enormous - and it's blown up in their faces. Because now the story isn't just that Clinton is ill. It's that, once again, she's untrustworthy - and this time about her own health. ..."
"... Both of these candidates are too old to realistically carry out the responsibilities associated with arguably the most difficult, demanding job in the world. There is a minimum age for the Senate, and there should be a maximum allowable age to seek and serve in the executive branch. ..."
"... Why was the Friday diagnosis not made public, particularly in light of rampant speculation? Why did it take the candidate literally collapsing for the disclosure to be made? ..."
"... I'm a Democrat, a Medical Doctor, and will never vote for Trump. Now that I've made that clear, let me say that there's something wrong with this story. A patient of her age would never be diagnosed at home with pneumonia, much less a presidential candidate. A 68 year old with suspected pneumonia would be sent to the hospital for X RAYS. It doesn't make sense. ..."
"... In the video, it appears that she was suffering a seizure. She has no control of her movements and has to carried to the van. If it was dehydration or symptoms of pneumonia, she would not have appeared perfectly normal less than 2 hours later. You cannot rehydrate someone from collapse in 90 minutes. Her physician is hiding her condition which is fine, but the voters have a right to know her true health status. ..."
"... Something about all this just doesn't ring true. A diagnosis of pneumonia, made at home and not mentioned until after a serious public incident. A presidential candidate collapses at a public event and is not rushed to a hospital, but to her daughter's apartment. Looks like another attempt to control the flow of information and manage what the public knows. That is Hillary Clinton's stock in trade. ..."
"... It's kind of amusing to watch the story change. She's not sick. Well, allergies. Well allergies and today, just overheating. No actually, pneumonia. Las Vegas should offer odds in the various possibilities of the next iteration if the story. ..."
"... If her stumble hadn't been caught on camera, we wouldn't know that she had any health issues at all. ..."
"... Well, if this is a cover-up of some sort, it has gone too far. Whatever the outcome, the public will not forgive or forget. ..."
"... Mrs. Clinton, who I once hoped to see elected, has spent the summer cozying the elites in very rarified airs and walking away with sacks of cash for it, while the very few public events she has recently and briefly attended, it is apparent that she is barely able to function. ..."
"... What I saw on film today from many different angles has me horrified and disturbed. That was not walking pneumonia. She should have been to the hospital, not an hour of rest at home, after that episode. Something it not right about this, and there will be a reckoning if the truth is not forthcoming. ..."
"... I think it is a mistake for Hillary and her campaign to try to blow this pneumonia diagnosis as no big thing. Pneumonia can be spread via breathing and coughing. Hillary has had at least two coughing fits, she has been in crowds, she hugged a little girl today and spent an hour or so in Chelsea's apartment (presumably Chelsea's infant was at home). ..."
"... So many commenters are worried what Trump will say but the video of Hillary buckling and being hauled into the van head- first is as bad as it gets, no one has to say anything. ..."
"... Alright. Let's buy the party line from Hillary's people about the pneumonia shtick, which was generated after multi-hours of secrecy into a PR disaster while holding her own press people - many sympathetic to her - in the dark. ..."
"... But at best it makes the unspoken party line that as her people were calling talk of Hillary health issues last week a 'conspiracy' she was being diagnosed with respiratory infections a the same time, unannounced and under the table. ..."
"... So she knew she had pneumonia, then hugged that little girl? After going to her daughter's apartment, who has very young children? That someone would have pneumonia is perfectly reasonable. That it's being spun like this is not. ..."
"... Unfortunately, it looks like Secretary Clinton is propped up against a stanchion, semi-conscious, and then proceeds to collapse as she is helped to the vehicle and lifted inside. ..."
"... Nonsense! First it was total denial. Then it was 'overheating' (on a pleasant NYC day.) And then when a pedestrian's video came out on Twitter, its 'a little pneumonia'. Nonsense. I've had pneumonia, your lungs get filled with fluid and you can barely breathe. And by the way, if she did have pneumonia, it was massively irresponsible of her to be in a crowd or to hug that little girl. No more lies. We have a right to know ..."
"... Once again team Hillary covered up the facts - until a viral video ruined the cover story - and the press lapped up the spin unquestioningly (even lying about the temperature at the event). Information about the health of the candidates is extremely important to the public but the press wont break ranks and act like real journalists. Makes one wonder about Hillary's one month absence from the campaign trial that the Times reported was unprecedented but was to raise money from fat cats. ..."
"... This is getting stranger and stranger by the day. Strange times call for strange outcomes: Get Sanders back on the wagon and trump the Trumpster as we all well know only he can. ..."
"... My theory, and the word is theory, is she knows she's quite ill but wants to cement her legacy as the first female President of the United States no matter how short lived it might be. ..."
"... The conspiracy of the Clinton campaign and the mainstream media, e.g. the New York Times and the Washington Post to cover up news about Hillary's health is what all Americans should worry about. ..."
"... It wasn't until the story got so big that the campaign, the New York Times, and the Washington Post could no longer ignore it that we learned about a diagnosis. ..."
"... I jogged today in NJ, 40 minutes from NYC, on a beautiful "cool" day unlike the hot days before. Was NYC really hot as described that caused her to become dehydrated/overcome by heat? Something ain't kosher here... ..."
"... Mrs. Clinton lost consciousness, called a syncope episode. She should have been brought to a hospital by ambulance. She needed to have full blood work, an EKG, a chest X-ray, a CT of the head, a neuro and cardiac consult. She needs to be on a cardiac monitor for 24 hours. Especially since she is on Coumadin a powerful blood thinner for previous blood clots which has significant complications. ..."
"... One more attempt to deceive the public for political purposes. I do not believe the pneumonia story. And why didn't they tell us about it in Friday when the diagnosis was made? Her physician should be careful, she should be deposed. Mrs. Clinton put herself out there and we have a right to know her health problems now that she collapsed in public at a routine low stress event. I am a licensed practicing Emergency Medicine physician for 35 years, Board Certified. ..."
"... Clinton didn't lose her balance, as the NYT put it, she collapsed and had to be carried to her car. My God, is the NYT, in its mission to relentlessly push Clinton's candidacy, now refusing to report simple facts? Have we reached a new low in journalism now? Clinton collapsed! I hope Mrs. Clinton the best in regards to her own health, but for the NYT to purposely refuse to report what everyone saw is outrageously dishonest. ..."
"... So, the focus group came back with pneumonia, eh? I can't think of any reason they'd lie about this. Btw, the weather service reported late morning Manhattan temp of 77F and humidity of 42% The media have led us to believe that the heat index was nearing 9.47 Trillion F...But they've never misled me before...sarc/off ..."
"... Pneumonia diagnosed on Friday, really? A dozen reporters follow Mrs. Clinton all day, did they visit the Mt. Kisco Medical Group? This isn't a condition you can diagnose over the phone, and someone as important as a Presidential candidate ought to have a proper diagnosis which would include x-rays and blood tests. ..."
"... Many of the comments are support Mrs. Clinton and claim a little pneumonia is not a problem. It may not be. The big issue here is TRUST. Can we believe what she or her camp says about her health issues? Anybody her takes her word on face value is a fool. She has lied to us so many times. ..."
"... NY I don't believe the campaign explanation. I think it is a fib. My sense is that Mrs. Clinton has had underlying health issues which have and will continue to be aggravated by the rigors of a Presidential campaign. To me, an undecided voter, she does not seem healthy and age has caught up with her in startling fashion. ..."
"... Did any of the commenters here actually see the video...?!? She passed out while standing up..! Is our president, the president of the United States going to need babysitting so she doesn't pass out on here feet, fall and hit her head again? It's like the Seven Plagues with you people... ..."
"... Ehhh, she fainted and was then carried the last couple of feet inside the van by 2 or 3 people; she also visibly loses one of her shoes in the process. How is she "fine" again? ..."
After Clinton was diagnosed with pneumonia and put on antibiotics,
she did not, as her physician recommended, take time out to rest.
Instead, she attended a fundraiser featuring Barbra Streisand.
Then on Sunday morning, she attended the 9/11 commemoration,
became "overheated," and woozily wobbled rather dramatically. Ninety
minutes later she exited her daughter Chelsea's apartment building to
tell the press she was "feeling great." The Secret Service permitted
a young girl to come over to give the candidate a hug.
It was only a few hours later when her campaign finally announced
that she has pneumonia and is recovering.
So the campaign chose to lie. The potential reward was considerable:
namely, an absence of politically damaging news stories about Clinton's
medical condition. But the risk was enormous - and it's blown up in
their faces. Because now the story isn't just that Clinton is ill. It's
that, once again, she's untrustworthy - and this time about her own
health.
That's why the announcement that she has pneumonia will only fuel
more speculation about Clinton's physical condition, with potentially no
end in sight. The world saw her collapse, and 90 minutes later, the
candidate looked America in the eye and proclaimed that she was feeling
great. Except now we know that she wasn't.
Both of these candidates are too
old to realistically carry out the responsibilities
associated with arguably the most difficult, demanding
job in the world. There is a minimum age for the Senate,
and there should be a maximum allowable age to seek and
serve in the executive branch.
The presidency ages
everyone who assumes the duties; when it comes to the
White House, 50 is the new 70, not vice versa.
riclys, Brooklyn, New York
I sincerely hope Mrs Clinton's health improves . But why do I get the
feeling that this is not over? Why was the Friday diagnosis not made public,
particularly in light of rampant speculation? Why did it take the candidate
literally collapsing for the disclosure to be made?
What else are we not
being told, and what further public health-related episodes might we have to
witness? As with so many things Clinton, even answers lead to more
questions. Bottom-line though, let us all fervently hope that Mrs Clinton's
health is as good as we are being told it is.
Gladys Vazquez, Miami
I'm a Democrat, a Medical Doctor, and will never vote for Trump. Now
that I've made that clear, let me say that there's something wrong with this
story. A patient of her age would never be diagnosed at home with pneumonia,
much less a presidential candidate. A 68 year old with suspected pneumonia
would be sent to the hospital for X RAYS. It doesn't make sense.
Melissa Los Angeles
It wasn't a "stumble" - the way her head flailed it looked like
fainting or even a seizure.
@PISonny Manhattan, NYC
Pneumonia cannot be confirmed without an
X-Ray. She had a full day on Friday, what with her 'basket of deplorables'
speech, and then interviews to the press, followed by interview with Cuomo. When
did she have the X-Ray done?
Something does not add up here. More lies, more cover-up, more unfit.
Thomas, Corey 7 hours ago
In the video, it appears that she was suffering a seizure. She has no
control of her movements and has to carried to the van. If it was
dehydration or symptoms of pneumonia, she would not have appeared perfectly
normal less than 2 hours later. You cannot rehydrate someone from collapse
in 90 minutes. Her physician is hiding her condition which is fine, but the
voters have a right to know her true health status.
Mark Markarian, Pleasantville, NY
Yeah, Hillary's being treated for pneumonia and I'm Captain James Tiberius Kirk.
Larry NY,
Something about all this just doesn't ring true. A
diagnosis of pneumonia, made at home and not mentioned until after a serious
public incident. A presidential candidate collapses at a public event and is not
rushed to a hospital, but to her daughter's apartment. Looks like another
attempt to control the flow of information and manage what the public knows.
That is Hillary Clinton's stock in trade.
Michael Pasadena, CA
It's kind of amusing to watch the story
change. She's not sick. Well, allergies. Well allergies and today, just
overheating. No actually, pneumonia. Las Vegas should offer odds in the various
possibilities of the next iteration if the story.
OldNYCGirl, Boston, MA
If her stumble hadn't been caught on camera, we wouldn't know
that she had any health issues at all. Why did it take more than 8
hours for her campaign to disclose this after she left the ceremony? If
there is nothing to hide, why didn't they say something immediately
about the illness that was diagnosed several days ago?
Jack NY, NY
The problem with Clinton is that you have no way of
knowing what the truth is. A woman who would lie so easily and often about her
email debacle, not to mention her Benghazi testimony and her lies about some
video causing the attack in Benghazi, would find it also easy to lie about her
health.
As a former Obama voter, I'm going with Trump. He's not the greatest
candidate but at least he gives the impression of being honest -- sometimes too
honest. His faults are those of a non-politician and that's refreshing after
decades of phoniness n Washington.
Le Sigh Murrakuh
Looking over this timeline, how many hours
passed before this penumonia announcement, that should have been released as
soon as it became a diagnosis, not after a horrible episode of goodness knows
what that was we all saw?
As one of the reviled lefties who are on the outside
of either party, I want to see the lung x-ray. I was horrified to see the left dorso-lateral view that a citizen filmed today, as it was a terrible and real
medical emergency.
To learn she recovered for a short time at Chelsea's
apartment and then left again, all chipper in the public eye as if a hair was
never out of place. Well, if this is a cover-up of some sort, it has gone too
far. Whatever the outcome, the public will not forgive or forget.
Mrs. Clinton,
who I once hoped to see elected, has spent the summer cozying the elites in very
rarified airs and walking away with sacks of cash for it, while the very few
public events she has recently and briefly attended, it is apparent that she is
barely able to function.
What I saw on film today from many different angles has
me horrified and disturbed. That was not walking pneumonia. She should have been
to the hospital, not an hour of rest at home, after that episode. Something it
not right about this, and there will be a reckoning if the truth is not
forthcoming. This is a candidate for the presidency of the United States of
America, not a run of the mill celebrity entitled to their wall of privacy.
Lynn in DC um, DC
I think it is a mistake for Hillary and her
campaign to try to blow this pneumonia diagnosis as no big thing. Pneumonia can
be spread via breathing and coughing. Hillary has had at least two coughing
fits, she has been in crowds, she hugged a little girl today and spent an hour
or so in Chelsea's apartment (presumably Chelsea's infant was at home). Either
someone is being very irresponsible or we are hearing lies again.
It is
great that Hillary is on antibiotics and has been rehydrated but perhaps she
should stay home for the sake of her own health and let Tim Kaine do the heavy
lifting.
So many commenters are worried what Trump will say but the video of Hillary
buckling and being hauled into the van head- first is as bad as it gets, no one
has to say anything.
TheZeitgeist Santa Monica, CA
Alright. Let's buy the party line
from Hillary's people about the pneumonia shtick, which was generated after
multi-hours of secrecy into a PR disaster while holding her own press people -
many sympathetic to her - in the dark.
But at best it makes the unspoken party line that as her people
were calling talk of Hillary health issues last week a 'conspiracy' she
was being diagnosed with respiratory infections a the same time,
unannounced and under the table.
The woman either has the worst PR flacks or worst intrinsic PR instinct of
any public figure I've ever seen. I just can't figure out who's the more hapless
in the Big Hillary operation.
Jonathan Colorado
So she knew she had pneumonia, then hugged
that little girl? After going to her daughter's apartment, who has very young
children? That someone would have pneumonia is perfectly reasonable. That it's being
spun like this is not.
John Murray Midland Park, NJ
Unfortunately, it looks like
Secretary Clinton is propped up against a stanchion, semi-conscious, and then
proceeds to collapse as she is helped to the vehicle and lifted inside.
Oakwood New York
Nonsense! First it was total denial. Then it was
'overheating' (on a pleasant NYC day.) And then when a pedestrian's video came
out on Twitter, its 'a little pneumonia'. Nonsense. I've had pneumonia, your
lungs get filled with fluid and you can barely breathe. And by the way, if she
did have pneumonia, it was massively irresponsible of her to be in a crowd or to
hug that little girl. No more lies. We have a right to know
Michael S is a trusted commenter Wappingers Falls, NY
Once again
team Hillary covered up the facts - until a viral video ruined the cover story -
and the press lapped up the spin unquestioningly (even lying about the
temperature at the event). Information about the health of the candidates is
extremely important to the public but the press wont break ranks and act like
real journalists. Makes one wonder about Hillary's one month absence from the
campaign trial that the Times reported was unprecedented but was to raise money
from fat cats.
will w CT
This is getting stranger and stranger by the day.
Strange times call for strange outcomes: Get Sanders back on the wagon and trump
the Trumpster as we all well know only he can.
Said Ordaz Manhattan
Dear apologists of the NYT, stop denying it,
she's really really sick, and you know it. Do us all a favor, start doing your
job and investigate the true extent of her illness, and actual state of health.
JEFF S is a trusted commenter Brooklyn, NY 10 hours ago
Reporters were with
her all day Friday and she had that national security briefing, a press
conference, did an interview with CNN which aired today, did the fund raiser and
opened up about half of the Trump supporters. When was there time for her to be
examined for pneumonia? And wouldn't it be necessary to have a chest x-ray in a
hospital to rule out something else. And then she attended today's memorial at
Ground Zero? Something is very fishy.
I don't think there's any question she will have a stroke sooner or later
although obviously it could be tomorrow, it could be next year, it could be a
decade from now. Who knows? It seems to me if I were her doctor, I would highly
recommend against running for President. My theory, and the word is theory, is
she knows she's quite ill but wants to cement her legacy as the first female
President of the United States no matter how short lived it might be.
Of course, the Hillary crowd here who have been in denial about her health
all along will remain in denial. If she is indeed ill, for the sake of the
country, she should just give it up and still give the democrats time to put up
somebody less contenteous than she is.
S. Austin Los Angeles
The conspiracy of the Clinton campaign and
the mainstream media, e.g. the New York Times and the Washington Post to cover
up news about Hillary's health is what all Americans should worry about. When
she had her coughing fit last week, why did she blame it on allergies and keep
the real reason quiet when she knew on FRIDAY she has pneumonia? Even after we
saw the video of her semi-collapsing today, the "real" story was not told.
It
wasn't until the story got so big that the campaign, the New York Times, and the
Washington Post could no longer ignore it that we learned about a diagnosis.
Her health is a real concern and not the conspiracy theory all the Liberal
elites want to apply to anyone who questions her health.
dlglobal N.J. 11 hours ago
I jogged today in NJ, 40 minutes from NYC, on a
beautiful "cool" day unlike the hot days before. Was NYC really hot as described
that caused her to become dehydrated/overcome by heat? Something ain't kosher
here...
rich williams long island ny 8 hours ago
Mrs. Clinton lost consciousness,
called a syncope episode. She should have been brought to a hospital by
ambulance. She needed to have full blood work, an EKG, a chest X-ray, a CT of
the head, a neuro and cardiac consult. She needs to be on a cardiac monitor for
24 hours. Especially since she is on Coumadin a powerful blood thinner for
previous blood clots which has significant complications.
One more attempt to
deceive the public for political purposes. I do not believe the pneumonia story.
And why didn't they tell us about it in Friday when the diagnosis was made? Her
physician should be careful, she should be deposed. Mrs. Clinton put herself out
there and we have a right to know her health problems now that she collapsed in
public at a routine low stress event. I am a licensed practicing Emergency
Medicine physician for 35 years, Board Certified.
in disbelief Manhattan 8 hours ago
Clinton didn't lose her balance, as the
NYT put it, she collapsed and had to be carried to her car. My God, is the NYT,
in its mission to relentlessly push Clinton's candidacy, now refusing to report
simple facts? Have we reached a new low in journalism now? Clinton collapsed! I
hope Mrs. Clinton the best in regards to her own health, but for the NYT to
purposely refuse to report what everyone saw is outrageously dishonest.
Z USA 10 hours ago
As a medical resident, I am perplexed by the pneumonia
diagnosis. Pneumonia is diagnosed with a chest x-ray. Did she undergo a chest
x-ray on Friday? Also, pneumonia can be quite a serious illness - it doesn't
seem wise for her campaign to allow her to interact with young children
(apparently she hugged a child?) given the diagnosis. I don't want to say it but
as Trump likes to say, "something is going on here." I don't want to stoke the
conspiracy theorists, but I think it's time we get some more information about
her health...
Michel Santa Barbara 11 hours ago
All of a sudden NYT is no longer able to
bury the story about her fainting and stumbling as it has done so far today,
much to the shame of people who call themselves journalists and are in fact
nothing more than shameful surrogates for a hugely failing candidates
Sue Cleveland
If she was told she had pneumonia on Friday, why
did they not release that information then?
Dr.J Atlanta
I have had pneumonia myself. She will get better.
With all the plane flights and her grueling schedule, I am not surprised she got
sick. That said, even if she were gravely ill, why would that make Trump a more
appealing candidate? She has chosen a vice presidential candidate who reflects
her values and the values of our country. I fully expect Secretary Clinton to be
fine, but if heaven forbid she is not, Tim Kaine is a far better choice than
Donald Trump or Mike Pence.
Steve New York 5 hours ago
I know, it's the fault of the Sander's supporters
that her health is now an issue. It's always the fault of the Sander's
supporters for any of the problems that Clinton has. The DNC is not at all at
fault for saddling Democrats with a candidate whom few trust and now has the
additional question of health. Thanks a lot DNC.
Sarah Minneapolis 10 hours ago
The commenter who is a medical doctor is
right: The current state of medicine requires an x-ray to be diagnosed with
pneumonia. One safe bet is that Chelsea doesn't have an x-ray machine in her
swank NYC apartment.
I don't know what's more pathetic: The NYT "news" coverage of Clinton's
health issues or the fact that all the NYT Picks comments are pro-Hillary.
The storied NYT has become a caricature of a liberal rag. MSM has completely
failed to do its job, as far as Clinton is concerned. Doesn't any journalist
there have any semblance of a professional conscience left?
Jon Dama Charleston, SC 10 hours ago
Gee - so Giuliani was right after all.
He's been commenting that Hillary doesn't look good for the past weeks - and
gathering much savage criticism from the liberal press for saying so. No wonder
he was a great mayor - he can spot a problem from a New York mile. Now let's
learn if this is just a bout of pneumonia; or something worse - perhaps related
to that fall. Hmm - don't count on the truth from her headquarters - we'll have
to wait and see.
Gagg Door County, WI 10 hours ago
So, the focus group came back with
pneumonia, eh? I can't think of any reason they'd lie about this. Btw, the
weather service reported late morning Manhattan temp of 77F and humidity of 42%
The media have led us to believe that the heat index was nearing 9.47 Trillion
F...But they've never misled me before...sarc/off
Here There 10 hours ago Today was the nicest weather in weeks, the humidity
was about 35 percent, and at 9 am the sunlight isn't a major issue.
In other words, not buying.
Chicklet is a trusted commenter Douglaston, NY 5 hours ago
Pneumonia
diagnosed on Friday, really? A dozen reporters follow Mrs. Clinton all day, did
they visit the Mt. Kisco Medical Group? This isn't a condition you can diagnose
over the phone, and someone as important as a Presidential candidate ought to
have a proper diagnosis which would include x-rays and blood tests.
Hopefully it's a simple bacterial pneumonia that readily responds to
antibiotics. I hope her physician picked a modern medication, more modern than
her obsolete thyroid medicine and blood thinners. One would think she could get
the best care in the world instantly- this doesn't seem right...
Steve Dimick Las Vegas
Many of the comments are support Mrs.
Clinton and claim a little pneumonia is not a problem. It may not be. The big
issue here is TRUST. Can we believe what she or her camp says about her health
issues? Anybody her takes her word on face value is a fool. She has lied to us
so many times.
Peter Albany.
NY I don't believe the campaign explanation. I
think it is a fib. My sense is that Mrs. Clinton has had underlying health
issues which have and will continue to be aggravated by the rigors of a
Presidential campaign. To me, an undecided voter, she does not seem healthy and
age has caught up with her in startling fashion.
TB NY 6 hours ago
The video of Mrs. Clinton as she "loses balance" at an
event where a very large number of professional "reporters" were in attendance,
including some accompanied by people with expensive video cameras on their
shoulders, was attributed to "Twitter user Zdenek Gazda".
What a stunning indictment of the media, particularly those who were assigned
to cover the Democratic nominee for President; the one who was diagnosed with
pneumonia two days ago. But they didn't know that, to be fair, otherwise they
might have actually kept an eye on her at the ceremony.
It took one guy with a smartphone to change the whole dynamic of the story.
Not a journalist, it should be noted. Just some guy with a smartphone, and some
curiosity.
Too bad he wasn't around on Friday. We might have learned about the pneumonia
diagnosis.
Disgraceful.
seniordem Arizona
Pneumonia can be quite a surprising event. I
am a bit older than Hillary and last year, I suddenly without any warning, found
my self on the floor and unable to get up by myself. The medical technicians
told us that it would be OK for my spouse to drive me to the hospital where it
came as much as a surprise as my fall to find out that I had Pneumonia. The next
day I came home and was on my feet a day later. Antibiotics certainly are a
wonder of our time. To sum up my experience In the jargon of New York "Who
knew"? We wish Hillary well and look for her to be able to resume her campaign
soon.
Seb Williams Orlando, FL
It says so much about the Clintons that
even something like this is difficult to trust. Pneumonia -- fine. Nobody's
going to begrudge her that, it happens. Why the compulsive secrecy, obfuscation,
press-dodging? At her age, why on earth was she not sent for x-rays?
I'm really baffled by the sycophancy in these comments. Here's a woman who
employs a personal physician and aspires to be President of the United States
being utterly reckless with *her own health*. That is not "strength", that's
scary.
Mike B Tampa, FL 10 hours ago
Did any of the commenters here actually see the
video...?!? She passed out while standing up..! Is our president, the president
of the United States going to need babysitting so she doesn't pass out on here
feet, fall and hit her head again? It's like the Seven Plagues with you
people... What in the name of humanity is it going to take to make you
understand that she is not well.... She is in no way capable to serve, no
possible way!
Frank E AK 11 hours ago
Ehhh, she fainted and was then carried the last
couple of feet inside the van by 2 or 3 people; she also visibly loses one of
her shoes in the process. How is she "fine" again?
Pol Pont California 7 hours ago
Hillary is surrounded by either a bunch of
liars or incompetents. If she had a pneumonia why not say so last Friday and
take her to ground zero for 30 minutes which was well enough under the
circumstances and not let her stand there until she fainted knowing that she was
unwell. We all have a colds and other passing illnesses at the worst possible
time. Are they trying to make her really ill?
Cryptapocalypse USA 7 hours ago
NYT- this development is exactly why all
these pieces in the Times poo-pooing health concerns were ill-advised and even
suggested complicity on the Time's part to minimize what are obviously multiple
strange behaviors by Mrs. Clinton. Even a person without medical training can
recognize that she has some problems, whatever they may be. I am sick of the
attempts by the Times and other mainstream publications to convince the public
that a common sense observation that Mrs. Clinton has frail health is wrong. The
fact that you also question Mr. Trumps health does not lessen the sting of
attempts to minimize concerns about Mrs. Clinton. What will you do if she has an
epileptic fit during the debates? You may be eating more and more proverbial
crow as time goes on. Please start doing your job as journalists and not as
apologists for either candidate.
Hey Joe Somewhere In The US 7 hours ago
The Clintons lie and hold back on the
most ridiculous things. Pneumonia is treatable, and carries no shame. But the
poor handling of this makes ya wonder if it isn't something worse. They've brought this on themselves. I hope she is well. And if she isn't,
stop everything and deal with it. And if she does get well, don't do stupid
things like this, or do them off camera.
Baron95 Westport, CT 9 hours ago
Anyone living in the NYC area knows that
this morning 8-9AM during the ceremony, the weather was neither hot, nor humid.
Instead it was a perfect 70s with low humidity (35%).
Why does the NYT insist on calling it "hot and humid"? Is it to fit the
Clinton narrative?
Also there were hundreds of reports throughout the day of Mrs. Clinton near
fainted, being carried out is a hurry.
Yet, the NYT only reports on it after it gets the proper "narrative" from the
official Clinton campaign release.
Is that what journalism is supposed to be?
Joe Schuler Norwalk, CT 10 hours ago
Stonewalling, followed by suspect cover
stories, has been a constantly recurring theme during Mrs. Clinton's campaign.
Large media sources, including my once-trusted NY Times, have been shockingly
complicit in abetting these attempts at deceit. What has happened to you guys?
ADCM Many Places 10 hours ago
As a preliminary matter let me say that Trump
is a disaster.
That said, I've grown so weary of the secrecy, minimizing and misdirection
from the Clintons and this campaign. And I don't want to hear any of the
'vast-right-wing-conspiracy' or 'Trump-is-a-whole-lot-worse' tripe! Voters
deserve honesty and respect from candidates and we aren't getting it.
I'm just sick at the choice of a Nixonian-like presidency from Clinton or a
dictatorship from Trumpolini.
Thanks a lot republican and democratic parties!
Shines66 Florida 7 hours ago
Is it time for the DNC to select an alternative
to Clinton? She is not well and will not be able to perform duties of the
presidency. Her health condition is going to get Mr. Trump elected.
...the dystopia of the Wachowski Brothers' Matrix trilogy is already here: the
technological-industrial 'machine' is already running the world, a world where individual
humans are but insignificant little cogs with barely any autonomy. No single human
being - neither the most powerful politician, nor the most powerful businessman
- has the power to rein in the system. They necessarily have to follow the inexorable
logic of what has been unleashed.
~ G Sampath on John Zerzan
Neo: I can't go back, can I?
Morpheus: No. But if you could, would you really want to? ...We never free a mind
once it's reached a certain age. It's dangerous, the mind has trouble letting go...
As long as the Matrix exists, the human race will never be free.
~ The Matrix
Notable quotes:
"... And if they (Pentagon, DoD, etc…) resist new guidance, what is going to be done about it? ..."
"... It seems to me like the major sovereignty-violating actions of the US Gov't happen with the approval of the executive branch. The military and intelligence services generally don't speak out or publicly act against the president's policies. They do leak a bunch of shit everywhere (the mysterious "high-ranking anonymous Obama official" who seems to pop up whenever the president's policies need to be opposed), but that you can live with. ..."
Are we assuming that the Pentagon, DoD, etc… are just going to accept
new guidance from the top? (That sounds like wishful thinking to me.)
And if they (Pentagon, DoD, etc…) resist new guidance, what is going
to be done about it? Currently more Americans trust the military than any
institution or politician. I highly doubt anyone could swing public opinion
against the Deep State at this point in time.
Daryl
It seems to me like the major sovereignty-violating actions of the US
Gov't happen with the approval of the executive branch. The military and
intelligence services generally don't speak out or publicly act against
the president's policies. They do leak a bunch of shit everywhere (the mysterious
"high-ranking anonymous Obama official" who seems to pop up whenever the
president's policies need to be opposed), but that you can live with.
JKF? I didn't know that the historian John King Fairbank was assassinated.
roadrider
Then I guess you have solid evidence to account for the actions of Allen
Dulles, David Atlee Phillips, William Harvey, David Morales, E. Howard Hunt,
Richard Helms, James Angleton and other CIA personnel and assets who had
perhaps the strongest motives to murder Kennedy
the means to carry out the crime, namely, their executive action
(assassination) capability and blackmail the government into aiding their
cover up and
the opportunity to carry out such a plan given their complete
lack of accountability to the rest of the government and their unmatched
expertise in lying, deceit, secrecy, fraud.
Because if you actually took the time to research or at least read about
their actions in this matter instead of just spouting bald assertions that
you decline to back up with any facts you would find their behavior nearly
impossible to explain other than having at, the very least, guilty knowledge
of the crime.
Krugman: "Last summer,... when Mr. Trump ... promised not to cut Social Security,... insiders like
William Kristol gleefully declared that he was "willing to lose the primary to win the general."
In reality, however, Republican voters don't at all share the elite's enthusiasm for entitlement cuts...
"
"G.O.P. establishment was also sure that Mr. Trump would pay a heavy price for asserting that we
were misled into Iraq - evidently unaware just how widespread that (correct) belief is among Americans
of all political persuasions."
Trade, Trump, and Downward Class Warfare, by Mark Kleim an: A conversation with my Marron
Institute colleague Paul Romer yesterday crystallized an idea I'd been toying with for some time.
In a nutshell: opponents of taxing the rich have destroyed, on a practical level, the theoretical
basis for believing that free trade benefits everyone.
The Econ-101 case for free trade is straightforward: Trade benefits those who produce exports
and those who consume imports (including producers who use imported goods as inputs). It hurts
the producers of goods which can be made better or more cheaply abroad. But the gains to the winners
exceed the gains to the losers: that is, the winners could make the losers whole and still come
out ahead themselves. Therefore, trade passes the Pareto test.
[Yes, this elides a number of issues, including path-dependency in increasing-returns and learning-by-doing
markets on the pure-economics side and the salting of actual agreements with provisions that create
or protect economic rents on the political-economy side. It also ignores the biggest gainers from
trade: workers in low-wage countries, most notably the Chinese factory workers whose parents were
barefoot peasants.]
So when the modern Republican Party (R.I.P), in the name of "small government" and opposition
to "class warfare," set its face against policies to redistribute the gains from economic growth,
it destroyed the theoretical basis for thinking that a rising tide would lift all the boats, rather
than lifting the yachts and swamping the trawlers. Free trade without redistribution (especially
the corrupt version of "free trade" with corporate rent-seeking written into it) is basically
class warfare waged downwards. ...
"... I think Trump is afraid the imperial global order presided by the US is about to crash and thinks he will be able to steer the country into a soft landing by accepting that other world powers have interests, by disengaging from costly and humiliating military interventions, by re-negotiating trade deals, and by stopping the mass immigration of poor people. Plus a few well-placed bombs ..."
"... Much has been written about the internet revolution, about the impact of people having access to much more information than before. The elite does not recognize this and is still organizing political and media campaigns as if it were 1990, relying on elder statesmen like Blair, Bush, Mitterrand, Clinton, and Obama to influence public opinion. They are failing miserably, to the point of being counterproductive. ..."
"... I don't think something as parochial as racism is sustaining Trump, but rather the fear of the loss of empire by a population with several orders of magnitude more information and communication than in 2008, even 2012. ..."
"... No one has literally argued that people should be glad to lose employment: that part was hyperbole. But the basic argument is often made quite seriously. See e.g. outsource Brad DeLong . ..."
"... The same thing has happened in Mexico with neoliberal government after neoliberal government being elected. There are many democratically elected neoliberal governments around the world. ..."
"... In the case of Mexico, because Peńa Nieto's wife is a telenovela star. How cool is that? It places Mexico in the same league as 1st world countries, such as France, with Carla Bruni. ..."
"... To the guy who asked- poor white people keep voting Republican even though it screws them because they genuinely believe that the country is best off when it encourages a culture of "by the bootstraps" self improvement, hard work, and personal responsibility. They view taxing people in order to give the money to the supposedly less fortunate as the anti thesis of this, because it gives people an easy out that let's them avoid having to engage in the hard work needed to live independently. ..."
"... The extent to which "poor white people" vote against their alleged economic interests is overblown. To a large extent, they do not vote at all nor is anyone or anything on the ballot to represent their interests. And, yes, they are misinformed systematically by elites out to screw them and they know this, but cannot do much to either clear up their own confusion or fight back. ..."
"... The mirror image problem - of elites manipulating the system to screw the poor and merely middle-class - is daily in the news. Both Presidential candidates have been implicated. So, who do you recommend they vote for? ..."
"... I think you're missing Patrick's point. These voters are switching from one Republican to another. They've jettisoned Bush et. al. for Trump. These guys despise Bush. ..."
"... They've figured out that the mainstream party is basically 30 years of affinity fraud. ..."
"... My understanding is trumps support disproportionately comes from the small business owning classes, Ie a demographic similar to the petite bourgeoisie who have often been heavily involved in reactionary movements. This gets oversold as "working class" when class is defined by education level rather than income. ..."
"... Layman - Why are these voters switching from Bush et al to Trump? Once again, Corey's whole point is that there is very little difference between the racism of Trump and the mainstream party since Nixon. Is Trump just more racist? Or are the policies of Trump resonating differently than Bush for reasons other than race? ..."
"... Eric Berne, in The Structures and Dynamics of Organizations and Groups, proposed that among the defining characteristics of a coherent group is an explicit boundary which determines whether an individual is a member of the group or not. (If there is no boundary, nothing binds the assemblage together; it is a crowd.) The boundary helps provide social cohesion and is so important that groups will create one if necessary. Clearly, boundaries exclude as well as include, and someone must play the role of outsider. ..."
"... For a time, the balkanization of American political communities by race, religion and ethnicity was an effective means to the dominance of an tiny elite with ties to an hegemonic community, but it backfired. Dismantling that balkanization has left the country with a very low level of social affiliation and thus a low capacity to organize resistance to elite depredations. ..."
I think Trump is afraid the imperial global order presided by the US is about to crash
and thinks he will be able to steer the country into a soft landing by accepting that other world
powers have interests, by disengaging from costly and humiliating military interventions, by re-negotiating
trade deals, and by stopping the mass immigration of poor people. Plus a few well-placed bombs
.
Much has been written about the internet revolution, about the impact of people having
access to much more information than before. The elite does not recognize this and is still organizing
political and media campaigns as if it were 1990, relying on elder statesmen like Blair, Bush,
Mitterrand, Clinton, and Obama to influence public opinion. They are failing miserably, to the
point of being counterproductive.
I don't think something as parochial as racism is sustaining Trump, but rather the fear
of the loss of empire by a population with several orders of magnitude more information and communication
than in 2008, even 2012.
Layman 08.04.16 at 11:59 am
Rich P: "Neoliberals often argue that people should be glad to lose employment at 50 so
that people from other countries can have higher incomes "
I doubt this most sincerely. While this may be the effect of some neoliberal policies, I can't
recall any particular instance where someone made this argument.
Rich Puchalsky 08.04.16 at 12:03 pm
"I can't recall any particular instance where someone made this argument."
No one has literally argued that people should be glad to lose employment: that part was
hyperbole. But the basic argument is often made quite seriously. See e.g.
outsource
Brad DeLong .
engels 08.04.16 at 12:25 pm
While this may be the effect of some neoliberal policies, I can't recall any particular instance
where someone made this argument
Maybe this kind of thing rom Henry Farrell? (There may well be better examples.)
Is some dilution of the traditional European welfare state acceptable, if it substantially
increases the wellbeing of current outsiders (i.e. for example, by bringing Turkey into the club).
My answer is yes, if European leftwingers are to stick to their core principles on justice, fairness,
egalitarianism etc
Large numbers of low-income white southern Americans consistently vote against their
own economic interests. They vote to award tax breaks to wealthy people and corporations, to
cut unemployment benefits, to bust unions, to reward companies for outsourcing jobs, to resist
wage increases, to cut funding for health care for the poor, to cut Social Security and Medicare,
etc.
The same thing has happened in Mexico with neoliberal government after neoliberal government
being elected. There are many democratically elected neoliberal governments around the world.
Why might this be?
In the case of Mexico, because Peńa Nieto's wife is a telenovela star. How cool is that?
It places Mexico in the same league as 1st world countries, such as France, with Carla Bruni.
Patrick 08.04.16 at 4:32 pm
To the guy who asked- poor white people keep voting Republican even though it screws them
because they genuinely believe that the country is best off when it encourages a culture of "by
the bootstraps" self improvement, hard work, and personal responsibility. They view taxing people
in order to give the money to the supposedly less fortunate as the anti thesis of this, because
it gives people an easy out that let's them avoid having to engage in the hard work needed to
live independently.
They see it as little different from letting your kid move back on after college and smoke
weed in your basement. They don't generally mind people being on unemployment transitionally,
but they're supposed to be a little embarrassed about it and get it over with as soon as possible.
They not only worry that increased government social spending will incentivize bad behavior, they
worry it will destroy the cultural values they see as vital to Americas past prosperity. They
tend to view claims about historic or systemic injustice necessitating collective remedy because
they view the world as one in which the vagaries of fate decree that some are born rich or poor,
and that success is in improving ones station relative to where one starts. Attempts at repairing
historical racial inequity read as cheating in that paradigm, and even as hostile since they can
easily observe white people who are just as poor or poorer than those who racial politics focuses
upon. Left wing insistence on borrowing the nastiest rhetoric of libertarians ("this guy is poor
because his ancestors couldn't get ahead because of historical racial injustice so we must help
him; your family couldn't get ahead either but that must have been your fault so you deserve it")
comes across as both antithetical to their values and as downright hostile within the values they
see around them.
All of this can be easily learned by just talking to them.
It's not a great world view. It fails to explain quite a lot. For example, they have literally
no way of explaining increased unemployment without positing either that everyone is getting too
lazy to work, or that the government screwed up the system somehow, possibly by making it too
expensive to do business in the US relative to other countries. and given their faith in the power
of hard work, they don't even blame sweatshops- they blame taxes and foreign subsidies.
I don't know exactly how to reach out to them, except that I can point to some things people
do that repulse them and say "stop doing that."
bruce wilder 08.04.16 at 5:50 pm
The extent to which "poor white people" vote against their alleged economic interests is
overblown. To a large extent, they do not vote at all nor is anyone or anything on the ballot
to represent their interests. And, yes, they are misinformed systematically by elites out to screw
them and they know this, but cannot do much to either clear up their own confusion or fight back.
The mirror image problem - of elites manipulating the system to screw the poor and merely
middle-class - is daily in the news. Both Presidential candidates have been implicated. So, who
do you recommend they vote for?
There is serious deficit of both trust and information among the poor. Poor whites hardly have
a monopoly; black misleadership is epidemic in our era of Cory Booker socialism.
bruce wilder 08.04.16 at 7:05 pm
Politics is founded on the complex social psychology of humans as social animals. We elevate
it from its irrational base in emotion to rationalized calculation or philosophy at our peril.
T 08.04.16 at 9:17 pm
@Layman
I think you're missing Patrick's point. These voters are switching from one Republican
to another. They've jettisoned Bush et. al. for Trump. These guys despise Bush.
They've figured out that the mainstream party is basically 30 years of affinity fraud.
So, is your argument is that Trump even more racist? That kind of goes against the whole point
of the OP. Not saying that race doesn't matter. Of course it does. But Trump has a 34% advantage
in non-college educated white men. It just isn't the South. Why does it have to be just race or
just class?
Ronan(rf) 08.04.16 at 10:35 pm
"I generally don't give a shit about polls so I have no "data" to evidence this claim, but
my guess is the majority of Trump's support comes from this broad middle"
My understanding is trumps support disproportionately comes from the small business owning
classes, Ie a demographic similar to the petite bourgeoisie who have often been heavily involved
in reactionary movements. This gets oversold as "working class" when class is defined by education
level rather than income.
This would make some sense as they are generally in economically unstable jobs, they tend to
be hostile to both big govt (regulations, freeloaders) and big business (unfair competition),
and while they (rhetorically at least) tend to value personal autonomy and self sufficiency ,
they generally sell into smaller, local markets, and so are particularly affected by local demographic
and cultural change , and decline. That's my speculation anyway.
T 08.05.16 at 3:12 pm
@patrick @layman
Patrick, you're right about the Trump demographic. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-mythology-of-trumps-working-class-support/
Layman - Why are these voters switching from Bush et al to Trump? Once again, Corey's whole
point is that there is very little difference between the racism of Trump and the mainstream party
since Nixon. Is Trump just more racist? Or are the policies of Trump resonating differently than
Bush for reasons other than race?
Are the folks that voted for the other candidates in the primary less racist so Trump supporters
are just the most racist among Republicans? Cruz less racist? You have to explain the shift within
the Republican party because that's what happened.
Anarcissie 08.06.16 at 3:00 pm
Faustusnotes 08.06.16 at 1:50 pm @ 270 -
Eric Berne, in The Structures and Dynamics of Organizations and Groups, proposed that among
the defining characteristics of a coherent group is an explicit boundary which determines whether
an individual is a member of the group or not. (If there is no boundary, nothing binds the assemblage
together; it is a crowd.) The boundary helps provide social cohesion and is so important that
groups will create one if necessary. Clearly, boundaries exclude as well as include, and someone
must play the role of outsider. While Berne's theories are a bit too nifty for me to love
them, I have observed a lot of the behaviors he predicts. If one wanted to be sociobiological,
it is not hard to hypothesize evolutionary pressures which could lead to this sort of behavior
being genetically programmed. If a group of humans, a notably combative primate, does not have
strong social cohesion, the war of all against all ensues and everybody dies. Common affections
alone do not seem to provide enough cohesion.
In an earlier but related theory, in the United States, immigrants from diverse European communities
which fought each other for centuries in Europe arrived and managed to now get along because they
had a major Other, the Negro, against whom to define themselves (as the White Race) and thus to
cohere sufficiently to get on with business. The Negro had the additional advantage of being at
first a powerless slave and later, although theoretically freed, was legally, politically, and
economically disabled - an outsider who could not fight back very effectively, nor run away. Even
so, the US almost split apart and there continue to be important class, ethnic, religious, and
regional conflicts. You can see how these two theories resonate.
It may be that we can't have communities without this dark side, although we might be able
to mitigate some of its destructive effects.
bruce wilde r 08.06.16 at 4:28 pm
I am somewhat suspicious of leaving dominating elites out of these stories of racism as an
organizing principle for political economy or (cultural) community.
Racism served the purposes of a slaveholding elite that organized political communities to
serve their own interests. (Or, vis a vis the Indians a land-grab or genocide.)
Racism serves as an organizing principle. Politically, in an oppressive and stultifying hierarchy
like the plantation South, racism not incidentally buys the loyalty of subalterns with ersatz
status. The ugly prejudices and resentful arrogance of working class whites is thus a component
of how racism works to organize a political community to serve a hegemonic master class. The business
end of racism, though, is the autarkic poverty imposed on the working communities: slaves, sharecroppers,
poor blacks, poor whites - bad schools, bad roads, politically disabled communities, predatory
institutions and authoritarian governments.
For a time, the balkanization of American political communities by race, religion and ethnicity
was an effective means to the dominance of an tiny elite with ties to an hegemonic community,
but it backfired. Dismantling that balkanization has left the country with a very low level of
social affiliation and thus a low capacity to organize resistance to elite depredations.
engels 08.07.16 at 1:02 am
But how did that slavery happen
Possible short answer: the level of technological development made slavery an efficient way
of exploiting labour. At a certain point those conditions changed and slavery became a drag on
further development and it was abolished, along with much of the racist ideology that legitimated
it.
Lupita 08.07.16 at 3:40 am
But how did that slavery happen
In Mesoamerica, all the natives were enslaved because they were conquered by the Spaniards.
Then, Fray Bartolomé de las Casas successfully argued before the Crown that the natives had souls
and, therefore, should be Christianized rather than enslaved. As Bruce Wilder states, this did
not serve the interests of the slaveholding elite, so the African slave trade began and there
was no Fray Bartolomé to argue their case.
It is interesting that while natives were enslaved, the Aztec aristocracy was shipped to Spain
to be presented in court and study Latin. This would not have happened if the Mesoamericans were
considered inferior (soulless) as a race. Furthermore, the Spaniards needed the local elite to
help them out with their empire and the Aztecs were used to slavery and worse. This whole story
can be understood without recurring to racism. The logic of empire suffices.
"... On the morning following the Austrian presidential election, when it became certain that the neo-nationalist candidate had not won the Austrian presidency (thanks to a few thousand overseas votes, mostly belonging to the middle class), there was a great sigh of relief from the Transnational Elite, (TE), i.e. the network of economic and political elites running the New World Order of Neoliberal Globalization (NWO), mainly based in the G7 countries. ..."
"... The elites are not used to "no" votes, and whenever the European peoples did not vote the 'correct' way in their plebiscites they were forced to vote again until they did so, or they were simply smashed – as was the case with the Greek plebiscite a year ago. ..."
"... In other words, the peoples' need for self-determination, in the NWO, had no other outlet but the nation-state, as, up to a few years ago, the world was dominated by nation–states, within which communities with a common culture, language, customs etc. could express themselves. ..."
"... The nation-state became again a means of self-determination, as it used to be in the 20th century for peoples under colonial rule struggling for their national liberation. The national culture is of course in clear contradiction with a globalist culture like the one imposed now 'from above' by the Transnational and national elites. ..."
"... In fact, the Transnational Elite launched several criminal wars in the last thirty years or so to "protect" human rights (Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and indirectly Syria) leading to millions of deaths and dislocations of populations. ..."
"... Nationalism's emphasis was on the nation-state (or the aspiration for one), whereas neo-nationalism's emphasis is not so much on the nation but rather on sovereignty at the economic but also at the political and cultural levels, which has been phased out in the globalization process; ..."
"... Unlike old nationalism, neo-nationalism raises also demands that in the past were an essential part of the Left agenda, such as the demand for greater equality (within the nation-state and between nation-states), the demand to minimize the power of the elites, even anti-war demands. ..."
"... The neo-nationalist movement had already created strong roots all over the EU, from its Western part (France, UK) up to its Eastern part (Hungary, Poland) and now Austria. Even in the USA itself Donald Trump, who has called on Americans to resist "the false song of globalism", expresses to a significant extent neo-nationalist trends and may be tomorrow the next President of the "Free World". ..."
"... by the strong informal patriotic movement in Russia, which encompasses all those opposing the integration of the country into the NWO ––from neo-nationalists to communists and from orthodox Christians to secularists, while the leadership under Putin is trying to accommodate the very powerful globalist part of the elite (oligarchs, mass media, social media etc.) with this patriotic movement. ..."
"... it is mainly Le Pen's National Front party, more than any other neo-nationalist party in the West, that realized that globalization and membership in the NWΟ's institutions are incompatible with national sovereignty. ..."
"... "Globalization is a barbarity, it is the country which should limit its abuses and regulate it [globalization]." Today the world is in the hands of multinational corporations and large international finance" Immigration "weighs down on wages," while the minimum wage is now becoming the maximum wage" ..."
"... It is therefore obvious that the globalization process has already had devastating economic and social consequences on the majority of the world population. At the same time, the same process has also resulted in tremendous changes at the political and the cultural levels, in the past three decades or so. Last, but not least, it has led to a series of major wars by the Transnational Elite in its attempt to integrate any country resisting integration into the New World Order (NWO) defined by neoliberal globalization (Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria) ..."
"... The neo-nationalist movement is embraced by most of the victims of globalization all over Europe, particularly the working class that used to support the Left ..."
"... the only kind of 'fascism' still possible today is the one directly or indirectly supported by the TE (what we may call 'Euro-fascism'), which is therefore a kind of pseudo-fascism––although in terms of the bestial practices it uses, it may be even more genuine than the 'real thing' of the inter-war period. This is, for instance, the case of the Ukrainian Euro-fascists who are the closest thing to historical Nazism available today, not only in terms of their practices but also in terms of their history. ..."
"... The neo-nationalist parties are embraced by most of the victims of globalization all over Europe, particularly the working class which used to support the Left,[xxvii] whilst the latter has effectively embraced all aspects of globalization (economic, political, ideological and cultural) and has been fully integrated into the NWO––a defining moment in its present intellectual and political bankruptcy. ..."
On the morning following the Austrian presidential election, when it became certain that the
neo-nationalist candidate had not won the Austrian presidency (thanks to a few thousand overseas
votes, mostly belonging to the middle class), there was a great sigh of relief from the Transnational
Elite, (TE), i.e. the network of economic and political elites running the New World Order of Neoliberal
Globalization (NWO), mainly based in the G7 countries.
The huge expansion of the anti-globalization movement over the past few years was under control,
for the time being, and the EU elites would not have to resort to sanctions against a country at
the core of the Union – such as those which may soon be imposed against Poland.
In fact, the only reason they have not as yet been imposed is, presumably, the fear of Brexit,
but as soon as the British people finally submit to the huge campaign of intimidation ("Project Fear")
launched against them by the entire transnational elite, Poland's – and later Hungary's – turn will
come in earnest.
The elites are not used to "no" votes, and whenever the European peoples did not vote the
'correct' way in their plebiscites they were forced to vote again until they did so, or they were
simply smashed – as was the case with the Greek plebiscite a year ago. The interesting thing,
however, is that in the Greek case it was the so-called "NewLeft" represented by SYRIZA, which not
only accepted the worst package of measures imposed on Greece (and perhaps any other country) ever,[ii]
but which is also currently busy conducting a huge propaganda campaign (using the state media, which
it absolutely controls, as its main propaganda tool) to deceive the exhausted Greek people that the
government has even achieved some sort of victory in the negotiations! At the same time, the working
class – the traditional supporters of the Left – are deserting the Left en masse and heading towards
the neo-nationalist parties: from Britain and France to Austria. So how can we explain these seemingly
inexplicable phenomena?
Nationalism vs. neo-nationalism
As I tried to show in the past,[iii] the emergence of the modern nation-state in the 17th-18th
centuries played an important role in the development of the system of the market economy and vice
versa. However, whereas the 'nationalization' of the market was necessary for the development of
the 'market system' out of the markets of the past, once capital was internationalized and therefore
the market system itself was internationalized, the nation state became an impediment to further
'progress' of the market system. This is how the NWO emerged, which involved a radical restructuring
not only of the economy, with the rise of Transnational Corporations, but also of polity, with the
present phasing out of nation-states and national sovereignty.
Inevitably, the phasing out of the nation-state and national sovereignty led to the flourishing
of neo-nationalism, as a movement for self-determination. Yet, this development became inevitable
only because the alternative form of social organization, confederalism, which was alive even up
to the time of the Paris Commune had in the meantime disappeared.
In other words, the peoples' need for self-determination, in the NWO, had no other outlet
but the nation-state, as, up to a few years ago, the world was dominated by nation–states, within
which communities with a common culture, language, customs etc. could express themselves.
The nation-state became again a means of self-determination, as it used to be in the 20th
century for peoples under colonial rule struggling for their national liberation. The national culture
is of course in clear contradiction with a globalist culture like the one imposed now 'from above'
by the Transnational and national elites.
This globalist culture is based on the globalization ideology of multiculturalism, protection
of human rights etc., which in fact is an extension of the classical liberal ideology to the NWO.
In fact, the Transnational Elite launched several criminal wars in the last thirty years or so
to "protect" human rights (Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and indirectly Syria) leading to
millions of deaths and dislocations of populations. It is not therefore accidental that globalist
ideologists characterize the present flourishing of what I called neo-nationalism, as the rise of
'illiberalism'.'[iv] It is therefore clear that we have to distinguish between old (or classical)
nationalism and the new phenomenon of neo-nationalism. To my mind, the main differences between them
are as follows:
a) Nationalism developed in the era of nation-states as a movement for uniting
communities with a common history, culture and usually language under the common roof of nation-states
that were emerging at the time but also even in the 20th century when national liberation movements
against colonialist empires were fighting for their own nation states. On the other hand, neo-nationalism
developed in the era of globalization with the aim of protecting the national sovereignty of nations
which was under extinction because of the integration of their states into the NWO;
b) Nationalism's emphasis was on the nation-state (or the aspiration for
one), whereas neo-nationalism's emphasis is not so much on the nation but rather on sovereignty at
the economic but also at the political and cultural levels, which has been phased out in the globalization
process;
c) Unlike old nationalism, neo-nationalism raises also demands that in the
past were an essential part of the Left agenda, such as the demand for greater equality (within the
nation-state and between nation-states), the demand to minimize the power of the elites, even anti-war
demands.
Naturally, given the origin of many neo-nationalist parties and their supporters, elements of
the old nationalist ideology may penetrate them, such as the Islamophobic and anti-immigration trends,
which provide the excuse to the elites to dismiss all these movements as 'far right'. However, such
demands are by no means the main reasons why such movements expand. Particularly so, as it can easily
be shown that the refugee problem is also part and parcel of globalization and the '4 freedoms' (capital,
labor, goods and services) its ideology preaches.
The rise of the neo-nationalist movement
Therefore, neo-nationalism is basically a movement that arose out of the effects of globalization,
particularly as far as the continuous squeezing of employees' real incomes is concerned––as a result
of liberalizing labor markets, so that labor could become more competitive. The present 'job miracle',
for instance, in Britain, (which is characterized as "the job creation capital of the western economies"),
hides the fact that, as an analyst pointed out, "unemployment is low, largely because British workers
have been willing to stomach the biggest real-terms pay cut since the Victorian era".[v]
The neo-nationalist movement had already created strong roots all over the EU, from its Western
part (France, UK) up to its Eastern part (Hungary, Poland) and now Austria. Even in the USA itself
Donald Trump, who has called on Americans to resist "the false song of globalism", expresses to a
significant extent neo-nationalist trends and may be tomorrow the next President of the "Free World".Of course, given the political and economic power that the elites have concentrated against these
neo-nationalist movements, it is possible that neither Brexit nor any of these movements may take
over, but this will not stop of course social dissent against the phasing out of national sovereignty.
The same process is repeated almost everywhere in Europe today, inevitably leading many people
(and particularly working class people) to turn to the rising neo-nationalist Right. This is not
of course because they suddenly became "nationalists" let alone "fascists", as the globalist "NewLeft"
(that is the kind of Left which is fully integrated into the NWO and does not question its institutions,
e.g. the EU) accuses them in order to ostracize them. It is simply because the present globalist
"NewLeft" does not wish to lead the struggle against globalization, while, at the same time, the
popular strata have realized that national and economic sovereignty is incompatible with globalization.
This is a fact fully realized, for example, by the strong informal patriotic movement in Russia,
which encompasses all those opposing the integration of the country into the NWO ––from neo-nationalists
to communists and from orthodox Christians to secularists, while the leadership under Putin is trying
to accommodate the very powerful globalist part of the elite (oligarchs, mass media, social media
etc.) with this patriotic movement.
But, it is mainly Le Pen's National Front party, more than any other neo-nationalist party
in the West, that realized that globalization and membership in the NWΟ's institutions are incompatible
with national sovereignty. As Le Pen stressed, (in a way that the "NewLeft" has abandoned long
ago!):
"Globalization is a barbarity, it is the country which should limit its abuses and regulate
it [globalization]." Today the world is in the hands of multinational corporations and large international
finance" Immigration "weighs down on wages," while the minimum wage is now becoming the maximum
wage".[vi]
In fact, the French National Front is the most important neo-nationalist party in Europe and may
well be in power following the next Presidential elections in 2017, unless of course a united front
of all globalist parties (including the "NewLeft" and the Greens), supported by the entire TE and
particularly the Euro-elites and the mass media controlled by them, prevents it from doing so (exactly
as it happens at present in Britain with respect to Brexit). This is how Florian Philippot the FN's
vice-president and chief strategist aptly put its case in a FT interview:
"The people who always voted for the left, who believed in the left and who thought that it
represented an improvement in salaries and pensions, social and economic progress, industrial
policies . these people have realized that they were misled."[vii]
As the same FT report points out, to some observers of French politics, the FN's economic policies,
which include exiting the euro and throwing up trade barriers to protect industry, read like something
copied from a 1930s political manifesto, while Christian Saint-Étienne, an economist for Le Figaro
newspaper, recently described this vision as "Peronist Marxism".[viii] In fact, in a more recent
FT interview, Marine Le Pen, the FN president went a step further in the same direction and she called,
apart from exiting from the Euro––that she expects to lead to the collapse of the Euro, if not of
the EU itself, (which she-rightly–welcomes)––for the nationalization of banks. At the same time she
championed public services and presented herself as the protector of workers and farmers in the face
of "wild and anarchic globalization which has brought more pain than happiness ".[ix]
For comparison, it never even occurred to SYRIZA (and Varoufakis who now wears his "radical" hat)
to use such slogans before the elections (let alone after them!) Needless to add that her foreign
policy is also very different from that of the French establishment, as she wants a radical overhaul
of French foreign policy in which relations with the regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad would
be restored and those with the likes of Qatar and Turkey, which she alleges support terrorism, reviewed.
At the same time, Le Pen sees the US as a purveyor of dangerous policies and Russia as a more suitable
friend.
Furthermore, as it was also stressed in the same FT report, "the FN is not the only supposedly
rightwing European populist party seeking to draw support from disaffected voters on the left. Nigel
Farage, the leader of the UK Independence party has adopted a similar approach and has been discussing
plans "to ring-fence the National Health Service budget and lower taxes for low earners, among a
host of measures geared to economically vulnerable voters who would typically support Labor".[x]
Similar trends are noticed in other European countries like Finland, where the anti-NATO and pro-independence
from the EU parties had effectively won the last elections,[xi] as well as in Hungary, where neo-nationalist
forces are continuously rising,[xii] and Orban's government has done more than any other EU leader
in protecting his country's sovereignty, being as a result, in constant conflict with the Euro-elites.
Finally, the rise of a neo-nationalist party in Poland enraged Martin Schulz, the loudmouthed gatekeeper
of the TE in the European Parliament, who accused the new government as attempting a "dangerous 'Putinization'
of European politics."[xiii]
However, what Eurocrats like Martin Schulz "forget" is that since Poland joined the EU
in 2004, at least two million Poles have emigrated, many of them to the UK. The victory of the Law
and Justice Party (Prawo i Sprawiedliwosc, PiS) in October 2015 was due not just to a backlash by
traditional Polish voters to the bulldozing of their values by the ideology of globalization but
also to the fact, as Cédric Gouverneur pointed out, that "the nationalist, pro-religion, protectionist,
xenophobic PiS has attracted these disappointed people with an ambitious welfare programme: a family
allowance of 500 zloty ($130) a month per child, funded through a tax on banks and big business;
a minimum wage; and a return to a retirement age of 60 for women and 65 for men (PO had planned to
raise it to 67 for both).[xiv] In fact, PiS used to be a conservative pro-EU party when they were
in power between 2005 and 2007, following faithfully the neoliberal program, and since then they
have become increasingly populist and Eurosceptic. As a result, in the last elections they won the
parliamentary elections in both the lower house (Sejm) and the Senate, with 37.6% of the vote, against
24.1% for the neoliberals and 8.8% for the populist Kukiz while the "progressive" camp failed to
clear the threshold (5% for parties, 8% for coalitions) and have no parliamentary representation
at all!
The bankruptcy of the Left
It is therefore obvious that the globalization process has already had devastating economic
and social consequences on the majority of the world population. At the same time, the same process
has also resulted in tremendous changes at the political and the cultural levels, in the past three
decades or so. Last, but not least, it has led to a series of major wars by the Transnational Elite
in its attempt to integrate any country resisting integration into the New World Order (NWO) defined
by neoliberal globalization (Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria).
Furthermore, there is little doubt anymore that it was the intellectual failure of the Left to
grasp the real significance of a new systemic phenomenon, (i.e. the rise of the Transnational Corporation
that has led to the emergence of the globalization era) and its consequent political bankruptcy,
which were the ultimate causes of the rise of a neo-nationalist movement in Europe. This movement
is embraced by most of the victims of globalization all over Europe, particularly the working class
that used to support the Left, whilst the latter has effectively embraced not just economic globalization
but also political, ideological and cultural globalization and has therefore been fully integrated
into the New World Order. In fact, today, following the successful emasculation of the antisystemic
movement against globalization, thanks mainly to the activities of the globalist Left, it was left
to the neo-nationalist movement to fight against globalization in general and against the EU in particular.
Almost inevitably, in view of the campaigns of the TE against Muslim countries (Iraq, Afghanistan,
Libya, Syria), worrying Islamophobic trends have developed within several of these neo-nationalist
movements, some of them turning their old anti-Semitism to Islamophobia, supported on this by Zionists
themselves![xv] Even Marine Le Pen did not avoid the temptation to lie about Islamophobia and anti-Semitism,
stressing that "there is no Islamophobia in France but there is a rise in anti-Semitism".
Yet, she is well aware of the fact that Islamophobia was growing in France well before Charlie
Hebdo,[xvi] with racial attacks against Islamic immigrants, (most of whom live under squalid conditions
in virtual ghettos) being very frequent. At the same time, it is well known that the Jewish community
is mostly well off and shares a very disproportionate part of political and economic power in the
country to its actual size, as it happens of course also––and to an even larger extent–– in UK and
USA. This is one more reason why Popular Fronts for National and Social Liberation have to be built
in every country of the world to fight not only Eurofascism and the NWO-which is of course the main
enemy––but also any racist trends developing within these new anti-globalization movements, which
today take the form of neo-nationalism. This would also prevent the elites from using the historically
well-tested 'divide and rule' practice to divide the victims of globalization.
Similarly, the point implicitly raised by the stand of the British "NewLeft" in general on the
issue of Brexit cannot just be discussed in terms of the free trade vs. protectionism debate, as
the liberal (or globalist) "NewLeft" does (see for instance Jean Bricmont[xvii] and Larry Elliott[xviii]
of the Guardian). Yet, the point is whether it is globalization itself, which has led to the present
mass economic violence against the vast majority of the world population and the accompanying it
military violence. In other words, what all these "NewLeft" trends hide is that globalization is
a class issue. But, this is the essence of the bankruptcy of the "NewLeft" , which is reflected in
the fact that, today, it is the neo-nationalist Right which has replaced the Left in its role of
representing the victims of the system in its globalized form , while the Left mainly
represents those in the middle class or the petty bourgeoisie who benefit from globalization. Needless
to add that today's bankrupt "NewLeft" promptly characterized the rising neo-nationalist parties
as racist, if not fascist and neo-Nazis, fully siding with the EU's black propaganda campaign against
the rising movement for national sovereignty.
This is obviously another nail in the coffin of this kind of "NewLeft" , as the millions of European
voters who turn their back towards this degraded "NewLeft" are far from racists or fascists but simply
want to control their way of life rather than letting it to be determined by the free movement of
capital, labor and commodities, as the various Soroses of this world demand!
The neo-nationalist movement is embraced by most of the victims of globalization all over
Europe, particularly the working class that used to support the Left,[xix] whilst the latter
has effectively embraced not just economic globalization but also political, ideological and cultural
globalization and has therefore been fully integrated into the New World Order––a defining moment
in its present intellectual and political bankruptcy. In the Austrian elections, it became once more
clear that the Left expresses now the middle class, while the neo-nationalists the working class.
As the super-globalist BBC presented the results:
Support for Mr Hofer was exceptionally strong among manual workers – nearly 90%. The vote for
Mr Van der Bellen was much stronger among people with a university degree or other higher education
qualifications. In nine out of Austria's 10 main cities Mr Van der Bellen came top, whereas Mr Hofer
dominated the rural areas, the Austrian broadcaster ORF reported (in German).[xx]
The process of the NewLeft's bankruptcy has been further enhanced by the fact that, faced with
political collapse in the May 2014 Euro-parliamentary elections, it allied itself with the elites
in condemning the neo-nationalist parties as fascist and neo-Nazi. However, today, following the
successful emasculation of the antisystemic movement against globalization (mainly through the World
Social Forum, thanks to the activities of the globalist "NewLeft" ),[xxi] it is up to the neo-nationalist
movement to fight globalization in general and the EU in particular. It is therefore clear that the
neo-nationalist parties which are, in fact, all under attack by the TE, constitute cases of movements
that have simply filled the huge gap created by the globalist "NewLeft" . Thus, this "NewLeft" ,
Instead of placing itself in the front line among all those peoples fighting globalization and the
phasing out of their economic and national sovereignty, it has indirectly promoted globalization,
using arguments based on an anachronistic internationalism, supposedly founded on Marxism.
On the other side, as one might expect, most members of the Globalist "NewLeft" have joined the
new 'movement' by Varoufakis to democratize Europe, "forgetting" in the process that 'Democracy'
was also the West's propaganda excuse for destroying Iraq, Libya and now Syria. Today, it seems that
the Soros circus is aiming to use exactly the same excuse to destroy Europe, in the sense of securing
the perpetuation of the EU elites' domination of the European peoples and therefore the continuation
of the consequent economic violence involved. The most prominent members of the globalist "NewLeft"
who have already joined this new DIEM 'movement' range from Noam Chomsky and Julian Assange to Suzan
George and Toni Negri, and from Hillary Wainwright of Red Pepper to CounterPunch and
other globalist "NewLeft" newspapers and journals all over the world. In this context, it is particularly
interesting to refer to Slavoj Žižek's commentary on the 'Manifesto' that was presented at the inaugural
meeting of Varoufakis's new movement in Berlin on February 2016.[xxii]
Neo-nationalism and immigration
So, the unifying element of neo-nationalists is their struggle for national sovereignty, which
they (rightly), see as disappearing in the era of globalization. Even when their main immediate motive
is the fight against immigration, indirectly their fight is against globalization, as they realize
that it is the opening of all markets, including the labor markets, particularly within economic
unions like the EU, which is the direct cause of their own unemployment or low-wage employment, as
well as of the deterioration of the welfare state, given that the elites are not prepared to expand
social expenditure to accommodate the influx of immigrants. Yet, this is not a racist movement but
a purely economic movement, although the TE and the Zionist elites, with the help of the globalist
"NewLeft" , try hard to convert it into an Islamophobic movement––as the Charlie Hebdo case
clearly showed[xxiii]–––so that they could use it in any way they see fit in the support of the NWO.
But, what is the relationship of both neo-nationalists and Euro-fascists to historical fascism
and Nazism? As I tried to show elsewhere,[xxiv] fascism, as well as National Socialism, presuppose
a nation-state, therefore this kind of phenomenon is impossible to develop in any country fully integrated
into the NWO, which, by definition, cannot have any significant degree of national sovereignty. The
only kind of sovereignty available in the NWO of neoliberal globalization is transnational sovereignty,
which, in fact, is exclusively shared by members of the TE. In other words, fascism and Nazism were
historical phenomena of the era of nation-state before the ascent of the NWO of neoliberal globalization,
when states still had a significant degree of national and economic sovereignty.
However, in the globalization era, it is exactly this sovereignty that is being phased out for
any country fully integrated into the NWO. Therefore, the only kind of 'fascism' still possible
today is the one directly or indirectly supported by the TE (what we may call 'Euro-fascism'), which
is therefore a kind of pseudo-fascism––although in terms of the bestial practices it uses, it may
be even more genuine than the 'real thing' of the inter-war period. This is, for instance, the case
of the Ukrainian Euro-fascists who are the closest thing to historical Nazism available today, not
only in terms of their practices but also in terms of their history. However, as there is overwhelming
evidence of the full support they have enjoyed by the Transnational Elite and (paradoxically?) even
by the Zionist elite,[xxv] they should more accurately be called Euro-fascists.
It is therefore clear that the neo-nationalist parties, which are all under attack by the TE,
constitute cases of movements that simply filled the huge gap left by the globalist Left, which,
instead of placing itself in the front line of all those peoples fighting globalization and the phasing
out of their economic and national sovereignty,[xxvi] indirectly promoted globalization, using arguments
based on an anachronistic internationalism, developed a hundred years ago or so. The neo-nationalist
parties are embraced by most of the victims of globalization all over Europe, particularly the working
class which used to support the Left,[xxvii] whilst the latter has effectively embraced all aspects
of globalization (economic, political, ideological and cultural) and has been fully integrated into
the NWO––a defining moment in its present intellectual and political bankruptcy.
National and Social Liberation Fronts everywhere!
So, at this crucial historical juncture that will determine whether we shall all become subservient
to neoliberal globalization and the transnational elite (as the DIEM25 Manifesto implies through
our subordination to the EU) or not, it is imperative that we create a Popular Front in each country
which will include all the victims of globalization among the popular strata, regardless of their
current political affiliations.
In Europe, in particular, where the popular strata are facing economic disaster, what is urgently
needed is not an "antifascist" Front within the EU, as proposed by the 'parliamentary juntas' in
power and the Euro-elites, also supported by the globalist "NewLeft" (such as Diem25, Plan B in Europe,
Die Linke, the Socialist Workers' Party in the UK, SYRIZA in Greece and so on), which would, in fact,
unite aggressors and victims. An 'antifascist' front would simply disorient the masses and make them
incapable of facing the real fascism being imposed on them[xxviii] by the political and economic
elites, which constitute the transnational and local elites. Instead, what is needed is a Popular
Front for National and Social Liberation, which that could attract the vast majority of the people
who would fight for immediate unilateral withdrawal from the EU – which is managed by the European
part of the transnational elite – as well as for economic self- reliance, thus breaking with globalization.
To my mind, it is only the creation of broad Popular Fronts that could effect each country's exit
from the EU, NAFTA and similar economic unions, with the aim of achieving economic self-reliance.
Re-development based on self-reliance is the only way in which peoples breaking away from globalization
and its institutions (like the EU) could rebuild their productive structures, which have been dismantled
by globalization. This could also, objectively, lay the ground for future systemic change, decided
upon democratically by the peoples themselves. Therefore, the fundamental aim of the social struggle
today should be a complete break with the present NWO and the building of a new global democratic
community, in which economic and national sovereignty have been restored, so that peoples could then
fight for the ideal society, as they see it.
Takis Fotopoulos is a political philosopher, editor of Society & Nature/
Democracy and Nature/The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy. He has also been a columnist
for the Athens Daily Eleftherotypia since 1990. Between 1969 and 1989 he was Senior Lecturer in Economics
at the University of North London (formerly Polytechnic of North London). He is the author of over
25 books and over 1,500 articles, many of which have been translated into various languages.
This article is based on Ch. 4 of the book to be published next month by Progressive Press,
The New World Order in Action, vol. 1: The NWO, the Left and Neo-Nationalism. This is a major three-volume
project aiming to cover all aspects of the New World Order (NWO) of neoliberal globalization
http://www.progressivepress.com/book-listing/new-world-order-action
Notes:
Bruno Waterfield, "Juncker vows to use new powers to block the far-right", [i]The Times,
24/5/2016
[xviii] see for instance Larry Elliott, "How free trade became the hot topic vexing voters
and politicians in Europe and the US" , The Guardian , 28/3/2016
[xix] Francis Elliott et al. 'Working class prefers Ukip to Labour", The Times , 25/11/2014
"... Not only are "[v]ulnerable Senate Republicans are starting to side with Donald Trump (and Democrats) by opposing President Obama's signature trade deal," as the Washington Post ..."
As the White House prepares for its final "
all-out push " to pass the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) during the upcoming
lame-duck session of Congress, lawmakers on both sides of the political aisle
are being made vulnerable due to growing opposition to the controversial, corporate-friendly
trade deal.
"[I]n 2016," the Guardian
reported on Saturday, "America's faltering faith in free trade has become
the most sensitive controversy in D.C."
Yet President Barack Obama "has refused to give up," wrote Guardian
journalists Dan Roberts and Ryan Felton, despite the fact that the 12-nation
TPP "suddenly faces a wall of political opposition among lawmakers who had,
not long ago, nearly set the giant deal in stone."
... ... ...
Not only are "[v]ulnerable Senate Republicans are starting to side with
Donald Trump (and Democrats) by opposing President Obama's signature trade deal,"
as the Washington Post
reported Thursday, but once-supportive Dems are also poised to jump ship.
To that end, in a column this week, Campaign for America's Future blogger
Dave Johnson
listed for readers "28 House Democrat targets...who-in spite of opposition
from most Democrats and hundreds of labor, consumer, LGBT, health, human rights,
faith, democracy and other civil organizations-voted for the 'fast-track' trade
promotion authority (TPA) bill that 'greased the skids' for the TPP by setting
up rigged rules that will help TPP pass."
Of the list that includes Reps. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (Fla.), Jared Polis
(Colo.), and Ron Kind (Wis.), Johnson wrote: "Let's get them on the record before
the election about whether they will vote for TPP after the election."
"... Sanders is a touchy subject with me. The man was offered a spot on the Green party ticket, and obviously didn't take it. Considering the public disgust with the two slimeballs we're stuck with now, I believe he'd have had a real shot at the presidency. Despite my rating him as a C- at best, I'd have voted for the man. It's my opinion he'd have gotten a whole lot of Trump's base too. The poorer members of the GOP know they're getting the shaft, and I suspect a great many of them would have defected too. ..."
"... There was a theory early-on that Sanders never was really serious, but instead was running as a "sheepdog" to lead the dirty hippy lefties to Clinton. ..."
Sanders is a touchy subject with me. The man was offered a spot on
the Green party ticket, and obviously didn't take it. Considering the public
disgust with the two slimeballs we're stuck with now, I believe he'd have
had a real shot at the presidency. Despite my rating him as a C- at best,
I'd have voted for the man. It's my opinion he'd have gotten a whole lot
of Trump's base too. The poorer members of the GOP know they're getting
the shaft, and I suspect a great many of them would have defected too.
There was a theory early-on that Sanders never was really serious,
but instead was running as a "sheepdog" to lead the dirty hippy lefties
to Clinton. That theory looks more plausible now than it did earlier.
Buying iPhone is mistake in itself. but as for neocon propaganda machine do
you thing that Google or Yahoo are better? they are not.
Notable quotes:
"... Anyone else notice that their apple iphone has turned into a raging anti-trump propaganda machine? I'm talking about the news headlines apple pushes to you when you slide your home screen all the way to the right. ..."
"... I didn't pay $700 for my iphone 6 to get a neocon propaganda machine. ..."
"... I have never actually read the anti trump stories that apple feeds my iphone because i didn't want to set up a preference for such things. I just see the headlines and they are quite negative. This is not the phone responding to my preference. It is content that is being deliberately pushed by Apple to my phone sans any info suggesting that i want it. ..."
"... Paying $700 for a $200 phone says unflattering things about i-Phone owners. ..."
Anyone else notice that their apple iphone has turned into a raging anti-trump propaganda machine?
I'm talking about the news headlines apple pushes to you when you slide your home screen all the
way to the right.
I didn't pay $700 for my iphone 6 to get a neocon propaganda machine.
Piotr Berman | Aug 6, 2016 4:22:11 PM | 6
Sometimes you get something extra with no additional cost. For 700 bucks you should get hourly
updates from the Lord of the Universe, so neocon urgent news are perhaps a step in this direction
:-)
More seriously, this is the fault of the browser and evil business model. Some click is cheerfully
interpreted as your request to get bombarded from some source, and sometimes it is clear how to
undo it, sometimes not.
Browsers should not have such features, but this is what makes them profitable.
Coming in near future: discount versions of cars that are steered by a computer. Every
few minutes the car stops and restarts only after you confirmed with clicks that you have seen
another ad.
alaric | Aug 6, 2016 5:13:45 PM | 14
"More seriously, this is the fault of the browser and evil business model. Some click is cheerfully
interpreted as your request to get bombarded from some source"
I have never actually read the anti trump stories that apple feeds my iphone because i didn't
want to set up a preference for such things. I just see the headlines and they are quite negative.
This is not the phone responding to my preference. It is content that is being deliberately pushed
by Apple to my phone sans any info suggesting that i want it.
Hoarsewhisperer | Aug 6, 2016 11:26:13 PM | 30
I didn't pay $700 for my iphone 6 to get a neocon propaganda machine.
alaric | Aug 6, 2016 2:41:59 PM | 3
Paying $700 for a $200 phone says unflattering things about i-Phone owners.
"... It's gonna be so strong, nobody's gonna mess with us. But you know what? We can do it for a lot less. ..."
"... U.S. military spending is out of control. The Defense Department budget for 2016 is $573 billion. President Barack Obama's 2017 proposal ups it to $582 billion. By comparison, China spent around $145 billion and Russia around $40 billion in 2015. Moscow would have spent more, but the falling price of oil, sanctions and the ensuing economic crisis stayed its hand ..."
"... As Trump has pointed out many times, Washington can build and maintain an amazing military arsenal for a fraction of what it's paying now. He's also right about one of the causes of the bloated budget: expensive prestige weapons systems such as the Littoral Combat Ship and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. ..."
"... "I hear stories," Trump said in a speech before the New Hampshire primary, "like they're ordering missiles they don't want because of politics, because of special interests, because the company that makes the missiles is a contributor." ..."
"... America's defense is crucial. But something is wrong when Washington is spending almost five times as much as its rivals and throwing away billions on untested weapon systems. Most of the other presidential hopefuls agree. "We can't just pour vast sums back into the Pentagon," Senator Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) said during a campaign stop in South Carolina. ..."
"... Cruz promised to rein in the military, audit the Pentagon and figure out why it's spending so much cash. Then he promised to add 125,000 troops to the Army, 177 ships to the Navy and expand the Air Force by 20 percent. ..."
"... Cruz wouldn't put a price tag on these additions. But his plan would likely up the annual defense budget by tens of billions of dollars – if not hundreds of billions. One military expert, Benjamin Friedman of the CATO Institute, estimated that the Cruz plan would cost roughly $2.6 trillion over the next eight years. ..."
"... He's not alone. Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) wants to revitalize the Navy, double down on the troubled F-35 and develop a new amphibious assault vehicle. Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, like Cruz, wanted to reform military spending while increasing the Pentagon budget by $1 trillion over the next 10 years. ..."
"... The Super PAC that backed Bush funded a string of attack ads accusing Kasich of going soft on defense. Not wanting to appear weak, the governor now talks about increasing defense spending by $102 billion a year. ..."
"... Even the Democrats are in on the game. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has yet to propose a military budget, but she has long pledged strong support for the troops. Meanwhile, she is calling for an independent commissioner to audit the Pentagon for waste, fraud and abuse – the usual suspects. ..."
"... Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is one candidate who has a clear record in terms of the Pentagon budget. He wants to reduce the U.S. nuclear arsenal and has long supported a 50 percent cut in defense spending. ..."
"... At the same time, however, Sanders seems to tolerate the $1.5-trillion albatross, the F-35. Which makes sense if you consider that Vermont could lose a lot of jobs if the F-35 disappeared. Sanders persuaded the jet's manufacturer to put a research center in Vermont and bring 18 jets to the state National Guard. ..."
"... Sanders has a history of protecting military contractors - if they bring jobs to his state. When he was mayor of Burlington in the 1980s, he pushed its police force to arrest nonviolent protesters at a local General Electric plant. The factory produced Gatling guns and also was one of the largest employers in the area. ..."
"... During a radio program last October, for example, Trump called out the trouble-ridden F-35. "[Test pilots are] saying it doesn't perform as well as our existing equipment, which is much less expensive," Trump said. "So when I hear that, immediately I say we have to do something, because you know, they're spending billions." ..."
"... Like so many Trump plans, the specifics are hazy. But on this issue, he's got the right idea. ..."
"... In a political climate full of fear of foreign threats and gung-ho about the military, it could take a populist strongman like Trump to deliver the harsh truth: When it comes to the military, the United States can do so much more with so much less. ..."
Donald Trump could be the only presidential candidate talking sense about
for the American military's budget. That should scare everyone.
"I'm gonna build a military that's gonna be much stronger than it is right
now," the real- estate-mogul-turned-tautological-demagogue said on Meet the
Press. "It's gonna be so strong, nobody's gonna mess with us. But you
know what? We can do it for a lot less."
He's right.
U.S. military spending is out of control. The Defense Department budget
for 2016 is $573 billion. President Barack Obama's 2017 proposal ups it to $582
billion. By comparison, China spent around $145 billion and Russia around $40
billion in 2015. Moscow would have spent more, but the falling price of oil,
sanctions and the ensuing economic crisis stayed its hand
As Trump has pointed out many times, Washington can build and maintain
an amazing military arsenal for a fraction of what it's paying now. He's also
right about one of the causes of the bloated budget: expensive prestige weapons
systems such as the Littoral Combat Ship and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.
The much-maligned F-35 will cost at least $1.5 trillion during the 55 years
that its manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, expects it to be flying. That number
is up $500 billion from the original high estimate. But with a long list of
problems plaguing the stealth fighter, that price will most likely grow.
"I hear stories," Trump said in a speech before the New Hampshire primary,
"like they're ordering missiles they don't want because of politics, because
of special interests, because the company that makes the missiles is a contributor."
America's defense is crucial. But something is wrong when Washington
is spending almost five times as much as its rivals and throwing away billions
on untested weapon systems. Most of the other presidential hopefuls agree. "We
can't just pour vast sums back into the Pentagon," Senator Ted Cruz (R-Tex.)
said during a campaign stop in South Carolina.
Cruz promised to rein in the military, audit the Pentagon and figure
out why it's spending so much cash. Then he promised to add 125,000 troops to
the Army, 177 ships to the Navy and expand the Air Force by 20 percent.
Cruz wouldn't put a price tag on these additions. But his plan would
likely up the annual defense budget by tens of billions of dollars – if not
hundreds of billions. One military expert, Benjamin Friedman of the CATO Institute,
estimated that the Cruz plan would cost roughly $2.6 trillion over the next
eight years.
Ballistic-missile-launching submarines aren't cheap, for example, and Cruz
wants 12 of them. "If you think it's too expensive to defend this nation," Cruz
said, "try not defending it."
He's not alone. Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) wants to revitalize the
Navy, double down on the troubled F-35 and develop a new amphibious assault
vehicle. Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, like Cruz, wanted to reform military
spending while increasing the Pentagon budget by $1 trillion over the next 10
years.
Ohio Governor John Kasich might be expected to have a more reasonable stance.
After all, he sat on the House Armed Services Committee for almost 18 years,
where he slashed budgets and challenged wasteful Pentagon projects.
But that past is a liability for him. The Super PAC that backed Bush
funded a string of attack ads accusing Kasich of going soft on defense. Not
wanting to appear weak, the governor now talks about increasing defense spending
by $102 billion a year.
Even the Democrats are in on the game. Former Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton has yet to propose a military budget, but she has long pledged strong
support for the troops. Meanwhile, she is calling for an independent commissioner
to
audit the Pentagon for waste, fraud and abuse – the usual suspects.
Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is one candidate who has a clear record
in terms of the Pentagon budget. He wants to
reduce the U.S. nuclear arsenal and has long supported a 50 percent cut
in defense spending.
A Lockheed Martin F-35B Lightning II joint strike
fighter flies toward its new home at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, January
11, 2011. REUTERS/U.S. Air Force/Staff Sgt. Joely Santiago/Handout
At the same time, however, Sanders seems to tolerate the $1.5-trillion
albatross, the F-35. Which makes sense if you consider that Vermont could lose
a lot of jobs if the F-35 disappeared. Sanders persuaded the jet's manufacturer
to put a research center in Vermont and bring 18 jets to the state National
Guard.
Sanders has a history of protecting military contractors - if they bring
jobs to his state. When he was mayor of Burlington in the 1980s, he
pushed its police force to arrest nonviolent protesters at a local General
Electric plant. The factory produced Gatling guns and also was one of the largest
employers in the area.
Yet, Sanders ideological beliefs can sometimes
color his views. He was chairman of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee
in 2014 as scandal swept the Department of Veterans Affairs. Even as many VA
supporters called for reforms, Sanders defended the hospital system because
he felt conservatives were attacking a major government social-welfare agency.
He still defends his stewardship of the committee. "When I was chairman,
what we did is pass a $15-billion piece of legislation,"
Sanders
said during a recent debate with Clinton. "We went further than any time
in recent history in improving the healthcare of the men and women in this country
who put their lives on the line to defend us."
In the age of terrorism and Islamic State bombers, the prevailing political
wisdom holds that appearing soft on defense can lose a candidate the general
election. For many of the 2016 presidential candidates, looking strong means
spending a ton of cash. Even if you're from the party that holds fiscal responsibility
as its cornerstone.
But Trump doesn't care about any of that. In speech after speech, he has
called out politicians and defense contractors for colluding to build costly
weapons systems at the price of national security.
During a radio program last October, for example, Trump called out the
trouble-ridden F-35. "[Test pilots are] saying it doesn't perform as well as
our existing equipment, which is much less expensive," Trump said. "So when
I hear that, immediately I say we have to do something, because you know, they're
spending billions."
Like so many Trump plans, the specifics are hazy. But on this issue,
he's got the right idea.
In a political climate full of fear of foreign threats and gung-ho about
the military, it could take a populist strongman like Trump to deliver the harsh
truth: When it comes to the military, the United States can do so much more
with so much less.
Imagine if the people of the Soviet Union had never heard of communism. The
ideology that dominates our lives has, for most of us, no name. Mention it in
conversation and you'll be rewarded with a shrug. Even if your listeners have
heard the term before, they will struggle to define it. Neoliberalism: do you
know what it is?
Its anonymity is both a symptom and cause of its power. It has played a major
role in a remarkable variety of crises: the
financial meltdown of 2007‑8, the offshoring of wealth and power, of which
the
Panama Papers offer us merely a glimpse, the slow collapse of public health
and education, resurgent child poverty,
the epidemic of loneliness, the collapse of ecosystems, the rise of
Donald
Trump. But we respond to these crises as if they emerge in isolation, apparently
unaware that they have all been either catalysed or exacerbated by the same
coherent philosophy; a philosophy that has – or had – a name. What greater power
can there be than to operate namelessly?
Inequality is recast as virtuous. The market ensures that everyone gets
what they deserve.
So pervasive has neoliberalism become that we seldom even recognise it as
an ideology. We appear to accept the proposition that this utopian, millenarian
faith describes a neutral force; a kind of biological law, like Darwin's theory
of evolution. But the philosophy arose as a conscious attempt to reshape human
life and shift the locus of power.
Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations.
It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised
by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency.
It maintains that "the market" delivers benefits that could never be achieved
by planning.
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Attempts to limit competition are treated as inimical to liberty. Tax and
regulation should be minimised, public services should be privatised. The organisation
of labour and collective bargaining by
trade
unions are portrayed as market distortions that impede the formation of
a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Inequality is recast as virtuous:
a reward for utility and a generator of wealth, which trickles down to enrich
everyone. Efforts to create a more equal society are both counterproductive
and morally corrosive. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve.
We internalise and reproduce its creeds.
The rich persuade themselves that they acquired their wealth through merit,
ignoring the advantages – such as education, inheritance and class – that may
have helped to secure it. The poor begin to blame themselves for their failures,
even when they can do little to change their circumstances.
Never mind structural unemployment: if you don't have a job it's because
you are unenterprising. Never mind the impossible costs of housing: if your
credit card is maxed out, you're feckless and improvident. Never mind that your
children no longer have a school playing field: if they get fat, it's your fault.
In a world governed by competition, those who fall behind become defined and
self-defined as losers.
Paul Verhaeghe: An economic system that rewards psychopathic
personality traits has changed our ethics and our personalities
Read more
Among the results, as Paul Verhaeghe documents in his book What About
Me? are epidemics of self-harm, eating disorders, depression, loneliness,
performance anxiety and social phobia. Perhaps it's unsurprising that Britain,
in which neoliberal ideology has been most rigorously applied, is
the loneliness capital of Europe. We are all neoliberals now.
***
The term neoliberalism was coined at a meeting in Paris in 1938. Among the
delegates were two men who came to define the ideology, Ludwig von Mises and
Friedrich Hayek. Both exiles from Austria, they saw social democracy, exemplified
by Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and the gradual development of Britain's welfare
state, as manifestations of a collectivism that occupied the same spectrum as
nazism and communism.
In The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944, Hayek argued that government
planning, by crushing individualism, would lead inexorably to totalitarian control.
Like Mises's book Bureaucracy, The Road to Serfdom was widely
read. It came to the attention of some very wealthy people, who saw in the philosophy
an opportunity to free themselves from regulation and tax. When, in 1947, Hayek
founded the first organisation that would spread the doctrine of neoliberalism
– the Mont Pelerin Society
– it was supported financially by millionaires and their foundations.
As it evolved, neoliberalism became more strident. Hayek's view that governments
should regulate competition to prevent monopolies from forming gave way – among
American apostles such as
Milton Friedman – to the belief that monopoly power could be seen as a reward
for efficiency.
Something else happened during this transition: the movement lost its name.
In 1951, Friedman was happy to
describe himself as a neoliberal. But soon after that, the term began to
disappear. Stranger still, even as the ideology became crisper and the movement
more coherent, the lost name was not replaced by any common alternative.
At first, despite its lavish funding, neoliberalism remained at the margins.
The postwar consensus was almost universal:
John Maynard Keynes's economic prescriptions were widely applied, full employment
and the relief of poverty were common goals in the US and much of western Europe,
top rates of tax were high and governments sought social outcomes without embarrassment,
developing new public services and safety nets.
But in the 1970s, when Keynesian policies began to fall apart and economic
crises struck on both sides of the Atlantic, neoliberal ideas began to enter
the mainstream. As Friedman remarked, "when the time came that you had to change
... there was an alternative ready there to be picked up". With the help of
sympathetic journalists and political advisers, elements of neoliberalism, especially
its prescriptions for monetary policy, were adopted by Jimmy Carter's administration
in the US and Jim Callaghan's government in Britain.
It may seem strange that a doctrine promising choice should have been
promoted with the slogan 'there is no alternative'
After Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan took power, the rest of the package
soon followed: massive tax cuts for the rich, the crushing of trade unions,
deregulation, privatisation, outsourcing and competition in public services.
Through the IMF, the World Bank, the Maastricht treaty and the World Trade Organisation,
neoliberal policies were imposed – often without democratic consent – on much
of the world. Most remarkable was its adoption among parties that once belonged
to the left: Labour and the Democrats, for example. As Stedman Jones notes,
"it is hard to think of another utopia to have been as fully realised."
***
It may seem strange that a doctrine promising choice and freedom should have
been promoted with the slogan "there is no alternative". But,
as Hayek remarked on a visit to Pinochet's Chile – one of the first nations
in which the programme was comprehensively applied – "my personal preference
leans toward a liberal dictatorship rather than toward a democratic government
devoid of liberalism". The freedom that neoliberalism offers, which sounds so
beguiling when expressed in general terms, turns out to mean freedom for the
pike, not for the minnows.
Freedom from trade unions and collective bargaining means the freedom to
suppress wages. Freedom from regulation means the
freedom to poison rivers, endanger workers, charge iniquitous rates of interest
and design exotic financial instruments. Freedom from tax means freedom from
the distribution of wealth that lifts people out of poverty.
Naomi Klein documented that neoliberals
advocated the use of crises to impose unpopular policies while people were
distracted. Photograph: Anya Chibis for the Guardian
As Naomi Klein documents in
The Shock Doctrine, neoliberal theorists advocated the use of crises
to impose unpopular policies while people were distracted: for example, in the
aftermath of Pinochet's coup, the Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina, which Friedman
described as "an opportunity to radically reform the educational system" in
New Orleans.
Where neoliberal policies cannot be imposed domestically, they are imposed
internationally, through trade treaties incorporating "investor-state
dispute settlement": offshore tribunals in which corporations can press
for the removal of social and environmental protections. When parliaments have
voted to restrict sales of
cigarettes, protect water supplies from mining companies, freeze energy
bills or prevent pharmaceutical firms from ripping off the state, corporations
have sued, often successfully. Democracy is reduced to theatre.
Neoliberalism was not conceived as a self-serving racket, but it rapidly
became one
Another paradox of neoliberalism is that universal competition relies upon
universal quantification and comparison. The result is that workers, job-seekers
and public services of every kind are subject to a pettifogging, stifling regime
of assessment and monitoring, designed to identify the winners and punish the
losers. The doctrine that Von Mises proposed would free us from the bureaucratic
nightmare of central planning has instead created one.
Neoliberalism was not conceived as a self-serving racket, but it rapidly
became one. Economic growth has been markedly slower in the neoliberal era (since
1980 in Britain and the US) than it was in the preceding decades; but not for
the very rich. Inequality in the distribution of both income and wealth, after
60 years of decline, rose rapidly in this era, due to the smashing of trade
unions, tax reductions, rising rents, privatisation and deregulation.
The privatisation or marketisation of public services such as energy, water,
trains, health, education, roads and prisons has enabled corporations to set
up tollbooths in front of essential assets and charge rent, either to citizens
or to government, for their use. Rent is another term for unearned income. When
you pay an inflated price for a train ticket, only part of the fare compensates
the operators for the money they spend on fuel, wages, rolling stock and other
outlays. The rest reflects the fact that
they have you over a barrel.
Those who own and run the UK's privatised or semi-privatised services make
stupendous fortunes by investing little and charging much. In Russia and India,
oligarchs acquired state assets through firesales. In Mexico,
Carlos Slim was granted control of almost all landline and mobile phone
services and soon became the world's richest man.
Financialisation, as Andrew Sayer notes in
Why We Can't Afford the Rich, has had a similar impact. "Like rent,"
he argues, "interest is ... unearned income that accrues without any effort".
As the poor become poorer and the rich become richer, the rich acquire increasing
control over another crucial asset: money. Interest payments, overwhelmingly,
are a transfer of money from the poor to the rich. As property prices and the
withdrawal of state funding load people with debt (think of the switch from
student grants to student loans), the banks and their executives clean up.
Sayer argues that the past four decades have been characterised by a transfer
of wealth not only from the poor to the rich, but within the ranks of the wealthy:
from those who make their money by producing new goods or services to those
who make their money by controlling existing assets and harvesting rent, interest
or capital gains. Earned income has been supplanted by unearned income.
Neoliberal policies are everywhere beset by market failures. Not only are
the banks too big to fail, but so are the corporations now charged with delivering
public services. As Tony Judt pointed out in
Ill Fares the Land, Hayek forgot that vital national services cannot
be allowed to collapse, which means that competition cannot run its course.
Business takes the profits, the state keeps the risk.
The greater the failure, the more extreme the ideology becomes. Governments
use neoliberal crises as both excuse and opportunity to cut taxes, privatise
remaining public services, rip holes in the social safety net, deregulate corporations
and re-regulate citizens. The self-hating state now sinks its teeth into every
organ of the public sector.
Perhaps the most dangerous impact of neoliberalism is not the economic crises
it has caused, but the political crisis. As the domain of the state is reduced,
our ability to change the course of our lives through voting also contracts.
Instead, neoliberal theory asserts, people can exercise choice through spending.
But some have more to spend than others: in the great consumer or shareholder
democracy, votes are not equally distributed. The result is a disempowerment
of the poor and middle. As parties of the right and
former left adopt similar neoliberal policies, disempowerment turns to disenfranchisement.
Large numbers of people have been shed from politics.
Chris Hedges
remarks that "fascist movements build their base not from the politically
active but the politically inactive, the 'losers' who feel, often correctly,
they have no voice or role to play in the political establishment". When political
debate no longer speaks to us, people become responsive
instead to slogans, symbols and sensation. To the admirers of Trump, for
example, facts and arguments appear irrelevant.
Judt explained that when the thick mesh of interactions between people and
the state has been reduced to nothing but authority and obedience, the only
remaining force that binds us is state power. The totalitarianism Hayek feared
is more likely to emerge when governments, having lost the moral authority that
arises from the delivery of public services, are reduced to "cajoling, threatening
and ultimately coercing people to obey them".
***
Like communism, neoliberalism is the God that failed. But the zombie doctrine
staggers on, and one of the reasons is its anonymity. Or rather, a cluster of
anonymities.
The invisible doctrine of the invisible hand is promoted by invisible backers.
Slowly, very slowly, we have begun to discover the names of a few of them. We
find that the Institute of Economic Affairs, which has argued forcefully in
the media against the further regulation of the tobacco industry,
has been secretly funded by British American Tobacco since 1963. We discover
that
Charles and David Koch, two of the richest men in the world, founded the
institute that set up the
Tea Party movement. We find that Charles Koch, in establishing one of his
thinktanks,
noted that "in order to avoid undesirable criticism, how the organisation
is controlled and directed should not be widely advertised".
The nouveau riche were once disparaged by those who had inherited their
money. Today, the relationship has been reversed
The words used by neoliberalism often conceal more than they elucidate. "The
market" sounds like a natural system that might bear upon us equally, like gravity
or atmospheric pressure. But it is fraught with power relations. What "the market
wants" tends to mean what corporations and their bosses want. "Investment",
as Sayer notes, means two quite different things. One is the funding of productive
and socially useful activities, the other is the purchase of existing assets
to milk them for rent, interest, dividends and capital gains. Using the same
word for different activities "camouflages the sources of wealth", leading us
to confuse wealth extraction with wealth creation.
A century ago, the nouveau riche were disparaged by those who had inherited
their money. Entrepreneurs sought social acceptance by passing themselves off
as rentiers. Today, the relationship has been reversed: the rentiers and inheritors
style themselves entre preneurs. They claim to have earned their unearned income.
These anonymities and confusions mesh with the namelessness and placelessness
of modern capitalism: the franchise model which ensures that workers
do not know for whom they toil; the companies registered through a network
of offshore secrecy regimes so complex that
even the
police cannot discover the beneficial owners; the tax arrangements that
bamboozle governments; the financial products no one understands.
The anonymity of neoliberalism is fiercely guarded. Those who are influenced
by Hayek, Mises and Friedman tend to reject the term, maintaining – with some
justice – that it is used today
only pejoratively. But they offer us no substitute. Some describe themselves
as classical liberals or libertarians, but these descriptions are both misleading
and curiously self-effacing, as they suggest that there is nothing novel about
The Road to Serfdom, Bureaucracy or Friedman's classic work,
Capitalism and Freedom.
***
For all that, there is something admirable about the neoliberal project,
at least in its early stages. It was a distinctive, innovative philosophy promoted
by a coherent network of thinkers and activists with a clear plan of action.
It was patient and persistent. The Road to Serfdom became the path to
power.
Letters: For neoliberals to claim that their view supports
the current distribution of property and power is almost as bonkers as the Lockean
theory of property itself
Read more
Neoliberalism's triumph also reflects the failure of the left. When laissez-faire
economics led to catastrophe in 1929, Keynes devised a comprehensive economic
theory to replace it. When Keynesian demand management hit the buffers in the
70s, there was an alternative ready. But when neoliberalism fell apart in 2008
there was ... nothing. This is why the zombie walks. The left and centre have
produced no new general framework of economic thought for 80 years.
Every invocation of Lord Keynes is an admission of failure. To propose Keynesian
solutions to the crises of the 21st century is to ignore three obvious problems.
It is hard to mobilise people around old ideas; the flaws exposed in the 70s
have not gone away; and, most importantly, they have nothing to say about our
gravest predicament: the environmental crisis. Keynesianism works by stimulating
consumer demand to promote economic growth. Consumer demand and economic growth
are the motors of environmental destruction.
What the history of both Keynesianism and neoliberalism show is that it's
not enough to oppose a broken system. A coherent alternative has to be proposed.
For Labour, the Democrats and the wider left, the central task should be to
develop an economic Apollo programme, a conscious attempt to design a new system,
tailored to the demands of the 21st century.
George Monbiot's How Did We Get into This Mess? is published this month
by Verso. To order a copy for Ł12.99 (RRP Ł16.99) ) go to
bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over Ł10, online
orders only. Phone orders min p&p of Ł1.99.
All this discussion missed the most important point: Obama is neocon and neoliberal
and he did what he was supposed to do. "Change we can believe is" was a masterful
"bait and switch" operation to full the gullible electorate. he was just a useful
puppet for globalist. They used him and they will threw him to the dust bin of history
sweetened with $200k speeches.
Notable quotes:
"... The article is a waste of time! The real winners are the neoconservative corporate world with a one party corporate state! It is time for a third party in the United States that represents ordinary American people! ..."
"... So the best of Obama is ground troops in Iraq and Syria ? More drone strikes? ..."
"... Trump is more of an isolationist, he would do less against foreign countries than the Obama/Clinton government. Syria and Libya would never had happened under a Trump presidency. ..."
"... Clinton helped the distabilize Syria arming rebels who some joined IS: https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/18328 ..."
"... 'The best of Barack Obama'? You mean he can commit mass murder by drone in even greater numbers and in more than the seven countries the US is not at war with???? ..."
"... Murder by Presidential decree - what a guy! ..."
"... Wow, that should really scare Trump! After 8 years, most of us -- even those who twice voted for him -- know there is no best in Barack. He has fumbled and bumbled all the way; Putin has run circles around him. He has destabilized the entire Mideast. He could not even close Guantanamo. He was elected on the promise of hope and leaves a legacy of despair and a horde of innocent drone victims. He calls it collateral damage; I call it murder. ..."
"... Obama's presidency: 1. Added 10T to national debt that future generations will be taxed to pay it up. 2. Record # of people living on food stamps. 3. Steady drop of labor participation rate (so he had to rig Job stats to hide it) 4. Stagnant income for average family 5. Driving living cost (such health insurance bills / student loans) up despite stagnant income. 6. Promised public an "affordable" health care plan only to drive insurance cost up. 7. Letting ISIS grow under his watch and calling it just "JV team" until its threat is too big to ignore. ... ... Incompetence and dishonesty are what people will remember Obama as. He is now shaping up to be worse than GWBush, which was unthinkable right after Bush's term was over. ..."
"... Wake up, we are the United States of America and our business is; has been and will be war and weapons. Eisenhower knew it in the 50's and nothing has changed. ..."
"... Well, Trump was against the Iraq war, the war in Libya and against intervention with the resulting war in Syria. That honours him. Compared that with Hillarys approach regarding these conflicts. ..."
"... Pity Obama wasn't so ruthless in preventing the massive theft of taxpayers money to bail out Wall Street. In fact didn't he appoint all those Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and Citigroup executives to run his economic policy? He has always known where his bread was best buttered just like Bill and Hillary? Anyone out there willing to take on a few 30 minute speaking engagements for $100-200,000 a pop? Nice retirement. ..."
"... "This hyper-competitive president..."??? Surely you jest. This is the guy who tucked tail and ran every time the GOP threatened a filibuster as opposed to making them actually do it...who put zero banksters in prison for crashing the economy with fraudulent scams...who didn't close Gitmo...who gave us a healthcare reform that was a gift to the insurance and pharma industries. ..."
"... "Obama is a statesman"...then why he is the man who stutters endlessly when taken off a teleprompter? ..."
"... Attacked seven different countries with drones, killing around 2,600 innocent civilians. ..."
"... Prosecuted more whistleblowers than all other Presidents combined. ..."
"... Continued the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. ..."
"... Expanded our National Security State (Look up his new Patriot Act.) ..."
"... Appointed more corporate lobbyists to high government positions than Bush ever did. ..."
"... Destroyed Libya as a functioning state, with dozens of competing terrorist militias (many of whom we armed). ..."
"... Recognized the new Honduran right-wing government, which made it the most violent country in the world. And now he's decided to deport thousands of children who came here to escape the violence. ..."
"... Signed two more trade (corporate investment) agreements and pushed the TPP - granting corporations more legal rights than states. ..."
"... Gave trillions to the Banks and Wall Street. ..."
"... Carried out economic policies that actually increased inequality here, especially in communities of color, ..."
"... Replenished Israel's weapons - while they were bombing Gaza - and now plans to add a billion dollars a year in military aid to the right-wingers in control of that state. ..."
"... Arranged a $32 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia and sent them cluster bombs for their attack on Yemen ..."
"... Added a trillion dollars to "upgrade" our nuclear weapons. ..."
"... Which of these things make you "so proud?" ..."
"... You left out Obama's caving in on single-payer universal health care (Medicare could easily have provided a point of departure) instead of fighting for it. ..."
"... To him getting rid of Asad who poses no terrorism threat to US is more important than fighting ISIS, which is basically the same ol' GWBush neocon regime change strategy and absurd. ..."
"... This commentator nor the paper for which he writes will never in a million years ever even suggest the disdain Obama and the US government has for the rule of law - his lieutenants have been caught out lying to congress - no charges for the key apparatchiks of evil - hope that phrase catches on. ..."
"... Does Obama go after Mexican drug cartels, every bit as destructive as Isil but with a direct impact on the US? No. Does he go after other militant groups across the globe? No. He feeds the 'terrible Muslim' narrative by continuing to singularly pursue them as if they were the only problem in the world. ..."
"... Obama's predecessor was arguably the most manipulated, most moronic, completely un-qualified and utterly reckless war mongering shill ever put into the white house. Barack inherited a friggin mess of biblical proportions, created by treasonous ne-cons intent on fomenting war and destruction for no better reason than to forward the agenda of the military-industrial complex. ..."
"... I'm confident that Hillary Clinton will continue his work, because she recognizes the critical role played by diplomacy :-). She's not the hawk that Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders would have you believe ;-). ..."
"... TPP is all you need to know. Obama is just a puppet of this oligarchy. ..."
The article is a waste of time! The real winners are the neoconservative
corporate world with a one party corporate state! It is time for a third
party in the United States that represents ordinary American people!
kittehpavolvski
So, if we're about to see the best of Obama, what have we been seeing
hitherto?
waitforme
So the best of Obama is ground troops in Iraq and Syria ? More drone
strikes?
ForestTrees
Trump is more of an isolationist, he would do less against foreign
countries than the Obama/Clinton government. Syria and Libya would never
had happened under a Trump presidency.
'The best of Barack Obama'? You mean he can commit mass murder by
drone in even greater numbers and in more than the seven countries the US
is not at war with????
What a fatuous article about the world's leading terrorist.
And of course we shouldn't forget that he had prosecuted more whistleblowers
than all other presidents combined.
Let's not forget that he claims and has exercised his 'right' to murder
his own citizens on the basis of secret evidence - one being a 16 year old
boy. And when the White House spokesman was asked why the boy was murdered
by drone, he said 'He should have had a more responsible father'.
He sings off on his 'Kill List' of domestic and foreign nationals every
Tuesday, dubbed 'Terror Tuesday' by his staff.
Murder by Presidential decree - what a guy!
ID7715785
Wow, that should really scare Trump! After 8 years, most of us --
even those who twice voted for him -- know there is no best in Barack. He
has fumbled and bumbled all the way; Putin has run circles around him. He
has destabilized the entire Mideast. He could not even close Guantanamo.
He was elected on the promise of hope and leaves a legacy of despair and
a horde of innocent drone victims. He calls it collateral damage; I call
it murder.
ninjamia
Oh, I know. He'll repeat the snide and nasty remarks about Trump that
he gave at the Press Club dinner. Such style and grace - not.
Casting Donald Trump as the Big Bad Wolf doesn't bring about real change.
And sadly, in his almost 8 years in office (2 years with absolute control
over the Congress) Barack Obama has brought about little real change. For
him it is a slogan.
Larry Robinson
Obama's presidency:
1. Added 10T to national debt that future generations will be taxed to pay
it up.
2. Record # of people living on food stamps.
3. Steady drop of labor participation rate (so he had to rig Job stats to
hide it)
4. Stagnant income for average family
5. Driving living cost (such health insurance bills / student loans) up
despite stagnant income.
6. Promised public an "affordable" health care plan only to drive insurance
cost up.
7. Letting ISIS grow under his watch and calling it just "JV team" until
its threat is too big to ignore.
... ...
Incompetence and dishonesty are what people will remember Obama as. He
is now shaping up to be worse than GWBush, which was unthinkable right after
Bush's term was over.
shinNeMIN -> Larry Robinson
$500 million worth of arm supply?
hadeze242 -> Major MajorMajor
while Obama's messy military interventions become more and more confused,
chaotic and tragic his personal appearance gets ever more Hollywood: perfect
attire, smile and just the right words. I would prefer the inverse, less
tailoring and neat haircuts, but more honesty and transparency. e.g., Obama
lied about the NSA for how long in this first term. Answer: all four years
long and beyond into the 2nd term.
BostonCeltics
Six more months until he goes into the dustbin of history. Small minded
people in positions of power who take things personally are the epitome
of incompetence.
Mats Almgren
Obama became a worse president than Bush. Endless moneyprinting, bombing
nine countries, created a operation Condor 2.0 with interventions in Venezuela,
Brazil and Argentina, didn't withdraw any troops from Afghanistan, lifted
the weapon embargo on Vietnam to sell US weapons and at the same time forcing
Vietnam to not do trade deals with China, intimidating the Phillipines from
doing trade with China, restarted the cold war which had led to biggest
military ramp up in Eastern Europe since 1941, drone bombed weddings and
hospitals and what not, supported islam militants in Libya, Syria and Iraq
which has led to total devastation in these countries. And there has been
an increase in the constant US interventionism regarding European elections
and referendums. And has continuously protected the dollar hegemony causing
death and destruction thoughout the world.
With that track record it's easy to say that Obama might be worst US
president ever. And there has been hardly any critism and critical thinking
in the more and more propagandistic and agenda driven western media.
It's like living in the twilight zone reading the media in Sweden and
Britain.
Jose Sanchez -> Mats Almgren
Blame a president for trying to sell what we still manufacture are you?
Wake up, we are the United States of America and our business is;
has been and will be war and weapons. Eisenhower knew it in the 50's and
nothing has changed.
NewWorldWatcher
The new leader of the Republican party thinks that that it was stupid
to go into Iraq and Afghanistan but it would be good to carpet bomb ISIS.
He IS a great Republican. No wonder this party is on the fringe of extinction.
Mats Almgren -> NewWorldWatcher
Well, Trump was against the Iraq war, the war in Libya and against
intervention with the resulting war in Syria. That honours him. Compared
that with Hillarys approach regarding these conflicts.
trundlesome1
Pity Obama wasn't so ruthless in preventing the massive theft of
taxpayers money to bail out Wall Street. In fact didn't he appoint all those
Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and Citigroup executives to run his economic
policy? He has always known where his bread was best buttered just like
Bill and Hillary?
Anyone out there willing to take on a few 30 minute speaking engagements
for $100-200,000 a pop? Nice retirement.
zootsuitbeatnick
"This hyper-competitive president..."??? Surely you jest. This is
the guy who tucked tail and ran every time the GOP threatened a filibuster
as opposed to making them actually do it...who put zero banksters in prison
for crashing the economy with fraudulent scams...who didn't close Gitmo...who
gave us a healthcare reform that was a gift to the insurance and pharma
industries.
That's as hyper-competitive as Trump is selfless.
Try to be at least a little reality-based.
hadeze242
the best of Pres. Obama? Perhaps only someone living a life in the UK
could dream this strange dream? Great, compared to whom, to what? Never
since WW2 has the US & world seen such a weak, openly-prejudiced, non-performing
Pres. Remember O's plan to save Afghanistan? Lybia? Then, working (bombing)
with Putin's Russia to collaterally bomb the beautiful, developed, cultural
nation of Syria. To what end I ask? To create refugees? Obama has never
been at his best, always only at his worst. Ah, yes, his smooth-lawyered
sentences come with commas & periods and all that, but there is no feeling
inside the man. This man is a great, oratory actor. His promises are well-written
& endless, but delivery is never coming. Yes, we can .. was his electoral
phrase. No, we can't ... after 8 long, wasted yrs was his result.
NewWorldWatcher
In Las Vegas they are gaming on how many votes will Trump lose by not
who will win. A Trump loss will be in excess of 10 Million votes.......5to2
odds. The worse loss in recent history!
Janet Re Johnson -> NewWorldWatcher
From your mouth to God's ears. But I'm a big baseball fan, so I know
it ain't over till it's over.
Larry Robinson
Also it's when Obama talks out of outburst rather than from a teleprompter
that you can tell his true capability as a leader or lack thereof.
Notice that Obama said ... not once has an advisor tells him to use the
term "radical Islam" ... . Well Mr Obama, it's your own call to decide what
term to use on this issue so why are you bringing your advisors out for
credence. Right or wrong that's your own decision so you should stand behind
it. When you bring advisors in to defend what should be your own call it
shows WEAKNESS.
Obama basically tells everyone that he needs his advisors to tell him
what do b/c he does NOT know how to handle it by himself. So who's the leader
here, Obama or his advisors? Is Obama just a puppet that needs his advisors
to pull the string constantly? Ouch.
It's the prompter-free moment like this that the truth about Obama comes
out. I wonder why Trump has not picked this clear hole up yet.
raffine
The POTUS will crush Mr Trump like a 200 year old peanut.
Carolyn Walas Libbey -> raffine
The POTUS is about as useful as an old condom.
PortalooMassacre
Exposed to the toxic smugness of Richard Wolffe, I'm beginning to see
what people find attractive about Donald Trump's refreshing barbarism.
guy ventner -> synechdoche
"Obama is a statesman"...then why he is the man who stutters endlessly
when taken off a teleprompter?
Ron Shuffler
"Greatest President since Lincoln" "I am proud - so proud! - to say that
this man is MY President! Personally, I am ashamed that this man is my President.
But anyway, here's what Richard Wolffe and y'all are so proud of:
Here's what your favorite President actually did:
Attacked seven different countries with drones, killing around
2,600 innocent civilians.
Prosecuted more whistleblowers than all other Presidents combined.
Continued the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Deported at least 2.8 million "illegal" immigrants
Expanded our National Security State (Look up his new Patriot
Act.)
Appointed more corporate lobbyists to high government positions
than Bush ever did.
Destroyed Libya as a functioning state, with dozens of competing
terrorist militias (many of whom we armed).
Recognized the new Honduran right-wing government, which made
it the most violent country in the world. And now he's decided to deport
thousands of children who came here to escape the violence.
Signed two more trade (corporate investment) agreements and
pushed the TPP - granting corporations more legal rights than states.
Gave trillions to the Banks and Wall Street.
Carried out economic policies that actually increased inequality
here, especially in communities of color,
Left Guantanamo open (though as Commander-in-Chief he could have
closed it down with a phone call).
Replenished Israel's weapons - while they were bombing Gaza
- and now plans to add a billion dollars a year in military aid to the
right-wingers in control of that state.
Arranged a $32 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia and sent them
cluster bombs for their attack on Yemen
Sent billions of dollars to the new military rulers of Egypt
Added a trillion dollars to "upgrade" our nuclear weapons.
Which of these things make you "so proud?"
BG Davis -> Ron Shuffler
You left out Obama's caving in on single-payer universal health care
(Medicare could easily have provided a point of departure) instead of fighting
for it.
At the same time, you overestimate the simplicity of just closing Guantanamo
prison with "a phone call." So he makes the phone call; then what happens
to the prisoners? They aren't all innocent non-entities who just happened
to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Larry Robinson
It's only in the mind of die hard liberals that Obama has been strong
against terrorists. Just look at how he handles Syria situation. Asad -
a Shiite govt - is a sworn enemy to ISIS - a Sunni organization so if you
are serious about ISIS you should utilize Asad, right? Well no, Obama is
so hell-bent on unseating Asad that he supports those rebels that are also
Sunni-based and cozy with ISIS. To him getting rid of Asad who poses
no terrorism threat to US is more important than fighting ISIS, which is
basically the same ol' GWBush neocon regime change strategy and absurd.
Lafcadio1944
What part of Obama's criminal acts in office do think are the best? For
me the very best of Obama is how he can project power so suavely while standing
before the world as a prima facia criminal. TORTURE IS ILLEGAL!! Under the
law those who order and/or carry out torture MUST be prosecuted. THAT IS
INTERNATIONAL, TREATY AND DOMESTIC US LAW.
The oh so great and powerful Obama he of such dignity in office has SHOWN
UTTER CONTEMPT FOR THE RULE OF LAW!!!
But that's OK he will say bad things about Trump.
This commentator nor the paper for which he writes will never in
a million years ever even suggest the disdain Obama and the US government
has for the rule of law - his lieutenants have been caught out lying to
congress - no charges for the key apparatchiks of evil - hope that phrase
catches on.
I want to vomit when the press acts so hypocritically ready to jump all
over Putin or China in a heart beat - but challenge US officials who openly
violate the law - not a chance.
babymamaboy
Does Obama go after Mexican drug cartels, every bit as destructive
as Isil but with a direct impact on the US? No. Does he go after other militant
groups across the globe? No. He feeds the 'terrible Muslim' narrative by
continuing to singularly pursue them as if they were the only problem in
the world.
It would be really easy for him to call it like it is -- we don't care
who you worship, just don't mess with our oil. But he actively feeds the
narrative while chiding Trump for being too enthusiastic about it. I guess
that's what passes for US leadership these days.
urgonnatrip
Obama's predecessor was arguably the most manipulated, most moronic,
completely un-qualified and utterly reckless war mongering shill ever put
into the white house. Barack inherited a friggin mess of biblical proportions,
created by treasonous ne-cons intent on fomenting war and destruction for
no better reason than to forward the agenda of the military-industrial complex.
How has Barack done? He's held them in check and avoided an escalation
to WW3. I wish I could say the next president was going to continue the
trend but somehow I doubt it.
KerryB -> urgonnatrip
You had me right up until the last line. I'm confident that Hillary
Clinton will continue his work, because she recognizes the critical role
played by diplomacy :-). She's not the hawk that Donald Trump and Bernie
Sanders would have you believe ;-).
zolotoy -> KerryB
Yeah, just ignore Hillary Clinton's actual record, right?
AgnosticKen
TPP is all you need to know. Obama is just a puppet of this oligarchy.
Pathological Liar – All About PATHOLOGICAL LYING, Lying, Self-Deception, Types,
Classification, from Pseudologia Fantastica to Habitual Lying.
Pathological Liar – Definition
Pathological liar refers to a liar that is compulsive
or impulsive, lies on a regular basis and is unable to control their lying
despite of foreseeing inevitable negative consequences or ultimate disclosure
of the lie. Generally lies told by a pathological liar have self-defeating
quality to them and don't serve the long term material needs of the person.
Therefore pathological lying is lying that is caused by a pathology, occurs
on a regular basis, is compulsive or impulsive & uncontrolled, and has self-defeating,
self-trapping quality to it.
Lying or self-deception is a part of everyday human interactions. In
many cases lying can be beneficial for those who lie and those who are being
lied to. Most of this type of lying with positive consequences occurs in
a controlled way, thoughtfully, with careful weighting of beneficial consequences.
Unlike these, the lies told by a pathological liar are uncontrolled and
are likely to have damaging consequences.
Pathological lying covers a wide range of lying behavior, from pseudologia
fantastica to habitual lying. Lying is a commonly found clinical component
with people who suffer from impulse control disorders such as gambling,
compulsive shopping, substance abuse, kleptomania etc. Pathological lying
is generally caused by a combination of factors, which may include genetic
components, dysfunctional or insecure childhood, dyslexia or other type
of cerebral dysfunction. Such conditions may host environment that is likely
to emerge chronic or pathological lying as an adaptive defense mechanism.
Dysfunctional family, parental overprotection, sibling rivalry, mental retardation
are among many causes of pathological lying.
Low Self-Esteem And Pathological Lying
Low self-esteem is a commonly found feature in pathological liars. The
lie maybe an attempt to feel good about themselves, generally for a short
period of time, similar to the effect of drugs & alcohol. The same lie or
deceit repeated over and over may create a myth of personal well-being or
success or displacement of faults of own failures on others, thus creating
an imaginary fantasy protection bubble, which may reinforce self-esteem.
Pathological liars repeatedly use deceit as an ego defense mechanism, which
is primarily caused by the lack of ability to cope with everyday problems
in more mature ways (Selling 1942).
Pathological Liar – Causes
Causes of development of pathological lying can be, but are not limited
to, one or more of the factors mentioned below:
A dysfunctional family;
Sexual or physical abuse in childhood;
Neuropsychological abnormalities; such as borderline mental retardation,
learning disabilities etc.
Impulse control disorders; such as kleptomania, pathological gambling,
compulsive shopping.
Accommodating or suggestible personality traits;
Personality disorders such as Sociopathic, Narcissistic, Borderline,
Histrionic and more;
Some of the more extreme forms of pathological lying is Pseudologia
Fantastica. This is a matrix of facts & fiction, mixed together in a
way that makes the reality and fantasy almost indistinguishable. The
pseudologue type pathological liar makes up stories that seem possible
on the surface, but over time things start falling apart. Pseudologues
have dynamic approach to their lies, they are likely to change the story
if confronted or faced with disbelief, they have excessive anxiety of
being caught and they desperately try to modify their story to something
that would seem plausible to create or preserve a sense of self that
is something they wish they were or at least something better than they
fear others would find out they are. The excessive anxiety is driven
by unusually low self-esteem, the person tries to hide reality by creating
a fake reality, and once the story has enduring quality to it, he/she
is likely to repeat it and if repeated enough times he/she might start
believing in it as well. This reality escape can be triggered of a past
incident or of an unbearable present for the pseudologue.
About 30% of daydreaming pathological liars have brain dysfunction.
For some it may take the form of learning disabilities, ex. dyslexia.
Often those with cerebral dysfunction have greater verbal production
& lower developed logical, analytical parts of the brain, thus they
often fail to control verbal output.
Habitual Liar
Habitual pathological lying is, as the name suggest, habitual. Habitual
liar lies so frequently, that it becomes a habit, as a result, he/she
puts very little effort in giving a thought about what the output is
going to be, nor does he/she care much to process whether it's a lie
or not, it's simply a reflex & very often can be completely unnecessary
or even opposite to his/her own needs. If he/she stops & thinks about
it, he/she knows clearly it's a lie.
Habitual liars lie for a variety of reasons, which include, but are
not limited to:
Take advantage of the situation or misguide a rival
Avoid confrontation or punishment
Cover up lack of knowledge
Cover up embarrassment
To entertain oneself or others
Reinforce self-esteem, because of failing own expectation
Receive unearned praise or avoid disappointment or disproval
For no reason whatsoever
Habitual liars gives very few if any psychical or vocal signs of
lying, due to the effortless nature of lying. That said, since he/she
gives a very little thought to his/her lies, they are usually inconsistent
& obvious.
Fear is a major contributor in developing habitual lying in a child
& further advancement into adulthood, more so in conditions when the
child finds truth telling results in more frequent or more severe punishment.
Lack of appreciating and likelihood of unwanted consequences of telling
the truth may result in frequent opting out for lying, which often involves
less punishment & therefore becomes more desirable.
Impulsive Pathological Liar – Impulse Control Disorders & Lying
Impulsive pathological liar lies due to impulse control problem,
he/she lies to fulfill his/her present (in the moment) needs, without
thinking of future negative effects that can be caused because of the
lie. Impulsive pathological liar generally suffers from impulse control
disorders, such as kleptomania, pathological gambling, compulsive shopping
etc. Those suffering from impulse control disorders fail to learn from
past negative experiences, frequently suffer from depression, likely
to have history of substance abuse in family or have substance abuse
problems themselves, likely to have deficiency in brain serotonin. Increase
in brain serotonin may have positive effect in decreasing impulsiveness,
such medication may have positive effects, however there hasn't been
clinical research performed to confirm or deny this theory.
Substance Abuse Associated Pathological Liar
Self-Deception is an undeniable part of addictive process. People
abuse alcohol or other drugs constantly lie to themselves & others to
avoid embarrassment, conflict, as well as to obtain the substance. Getting
off substance requires learning to distance oneself from the deceit,
therefore learning to be truthful is generally a part of any Alcoholics
Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous program.
Signs of Lying
Human detection of deceit can be summarized by the following seven signs.
7 Signs of Lying
Disguised smiling
Lack of head movement
Increased rate of self-adapters (eg., movements such playing with
an object in hands, scratching one's head etc.)
Increased/Heightened pitch of voice
Reduced rate of speech
Pause fillers ("uh", "hm", "er")
Less corresponding, matching nonverbal behavior from the other communication
methods (ex. the movement of hands doesn't match the substance of the
lie that is being told orally)
This is an article from 2008 campaign. Still relevant.
Notable quotes:
"... Dr. Robert Hare, a pioneer in forensic psychology, tells us that many sociopaths are successful, even celebrated. I don't propose to diagnose Hillary Clinton by diary, but more modestly, to examine one characteristic Dr. Hare finds sociopaths have in common. From CEO to small-time swindler, the sociopath lies. Hillary lies, repeatedly and recklessly. ..."
"... In her run against Obama, Hillary has lied to show she's got the right stuff to be Commander-in-Chief. Before the Bosnian Bruhaha, she lied to pump up her senatorial role and to finesse positions she once held that could lose her the nomination. In turn, her lies substantiate two sides of the beautifully constructed Election 08 Hillary: courageous but caring. No one is as tough. No one cares as much. In Hillary's lies, Clara Barton meets Audie Murphy. ..."
"... Hillary does have more experience manipulating the interface of MSM and the American public. She knows that both are rapid cyclers. She knows that what's headlines one day is yesterday's onions the next. ..."
"... Surely, when she cast her vote to authorize Bush to skirt global consensus and wage a unilateral war against Iraq, she knew she'd have some 'splaining to do. But like Scarlett O'hara, she'd think about it tomorrow. I'm talking about her vote on the war in Iraq. ..."
"... In 2002, Hillary voted for war with her eye on the prize. Within a few days of the 9/11 attack on WTC, she knew if she was ever to have a shot at the U.S. presidency, she'd have to beat the drums for war. As Manhattan lay still burning, Hillary, the former war protester, formed a strategic political stance that would kill two birds with one stone. ..."
Dr. Robert Hare, a pioneer in forensic psychology, tells us that many sociopaths
are successful, even celebrated. I don't propose to diagnose Hillary Clinton
by diary, but more modestly, to examine one characteristic Dr. Hare finds sociopaths
have in common. From CEO to small-time swindler, the sociopath lies. Hillary
lies, repeatedly and recklessly.
She lies when she doesn't need to. And she lies as much for self-aggrandizement
as for political gain.
Sociopaths, driven by an unnatural appetite to get what they want NOW–a t.v.
set or the presidency– can't suffer the patience it takes to craft a lie
carefully. And their narcissism, coupled with a complete lack of morality,
enables them to advance the most outrageous lies. Lies that make you shake your
head in disbelief. Lies that end up on "Meet the Press."
What me worry Hillary. By the time she's busted, the lie has done its work.
Confronted, she's cool as a sociopath:"So, I made a mistake." Or I'm a victim
of someone else who lies. I voted for the Iraq war because Bush bamboozled
me.
In her run against Obama, Hillary has lied to show she's got the right
stuff to be Commander-in-Chief. Before the Bosnian Bruhaha, she lied to pump
up her senatorial role and to finesse positions she once held that could lose
her the nomination. In turn, her lies substantiate two sides of the beautifully
constructed Election 08 Hillary: courageous but caring. No one is as tough.
No one cares as much. In Hillary's lies, Clara Barton meets Audie Murphy.
Lies to show she's got CIC and foreign policy credentials claim she
"landed under sniper fire" in Bosnia.
"helped bring peace to Ireland"
"negotiated open borders to let fleeing refugees into Kosovo"
The historical record, various eye-witnesses, and contemporaneous sources
prove all three claims false "beyond a reasonable doubt."
Further, Hillary has taken the lion's share of credit for SCHIP. Orrin Hatch,
with the disclaimer that he likes her, felt honor-bound to answer this claim
honestly: "…does she deserve credit for SCHIP? No – Teddy does, but she doesn't."
It is clear from HRC's First Lady records, recently released by The National
Archives and President Clinton's Library, as well as numerous eye-witness and
Press reports that whatever her private thoughts, HRC was head cheerleader on
Bill's NAFTA team. Ironically, just days before the Ohio and Texas primaries,
Hillary exploited a timely but inaccurate AP report to raise doubts about Obama's
NAFTA stance. She succeeded in shifting the contest's outcome.
Days after AP was contradicted by its own sources within the Canadian government
and Press, she continued to hector her rival with yesterday's news until the
clock ran out. Though no longer news, latest developments point to Clinton as
the NAFTA waffler.
Hillary does have more experience manipulating the interface of MSM and
the American public. She knows that both are rapid cyclers. She knows that what's
headlines one day is yesterday's onions the next.
Surely, when she cast her vote to authorize Bush to skirt global consensus
and wage a unilateral war against Iraq, she knew she'd have some 'splaining
to do. But like Scarlett O'hara, she'd think about it tomorrow. I'm talking
about her vote on the war in Iraq.
Let's not mince words. I'm talking about her vote FOR the war in Iraq.
In 2002, Hillary voted for war with her eye on the prize. Within a few
days of the 9/11 attack on WTC, she knew if she was ever to have a shot at the
U.S. presidency, she'd have to beat the drums for war. As Manhattan lay still
burning, Hillary, the former war protester, formed a strategic political stance
that would kill two birds with one stone.
More next diary: From the ashes of 9/11, a new Hillary rises
Crooked Hillary will never release transcripts, but they might be leaked...
Politic is pro Clinton media, more like a part of her campaign staff, then independent
media. So it's surprising that they can't hide this skeleton in the closet under
the veil of silence. Looks like Hillary now is on hot stove with that. It's not
just lack of judgment and "make money fast" mentality on her part. This is plain
vanilla corruption.
Notable quotes:
"... Surrogates for both Democratic candidates sniped back and forth on the cable shows Friday over whether Hillary Clinton should release the transcripts of her paid speeches to financial institutions, as Bernie Sanders again suggested during the previous night's debate that the lack of disclosure bespeaks a lack of judgment. ..."
"... Speaking earlier in the day on CNN, Clinton supporter and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) appeared to break with the campaign line in remarking of the candidate's decision-making behind the release of transcripts, "I think she will. I think she's been clear that she's going to, and yes I would." ..."
"... Clinton has long maintained that she will release the transcripts of her paid speeches when every other candidate in both parties does the same. Asked whether that should be the standard, Gillibrand demurred. ..."
"... "I think everyone makes their own judgment," remarked Gillibrand, who like Finney, suggested tax returns as a better standard by which voters should judge the candidates. ..."
Surrogates for both Democratic candidates sniped back and forth on the cable
shows Friday over whether Hillary Clinton should release the transcripts of
her paid speeches to financial institutions, as Bernie Sanders again suggested
during the previous night's debate that the lack of disclosure bespeaks a lack
of judgment.
A senior adviser to Clinton's campaign on Friday decried the Sanders' campaign's
insinuation.
"This is what the Sanders campaign wants, right? The insinuation that there
is something nefarious," Karen Finney said during an interview on MSNBC, remarking
that when Sanders was asked directly about whether the speeches changed Clinton's
policies, he "had no answer."
Finney added, "I wish that on that stage, Sen. Sanders would have looked
Hillary Clinton in the eye and just said directly what he has insinuated time
and time again, that there is, you know, some connection, perhaps because she
got paid for making a speech, that somehow influenced any activity or action
she has ever taken. And that's what's really what's at the heart of this."
Chief pollster and strategist Joel Benenson insisted that Sanders himself
had put the issue to rest by failing to point to a specific instance.
The Sanders campaign, meanwhile, conceded that its candidate could have been
more direct in addressing whether money from Wall Street and other interests
has tainted Clinton's judgment and credibility.
"Well, I suppose he could have," senior adviser Tad Devine told MSNBC's "Andrea
Mitchell Reports." "There's a lot of issues he hasn't really gone nearly as
hard as he could."
In particular, Devine pointed to Clinton's 2001 vote as a senator for
the Bankruptcy Reform Act as one possible instance, after she opposed it as
first lady.
Clinton has explained the vote as one she changed at the insistence of then-Sen.
Joe Biden. When Mitchell made that point, Devine mused, "She also received enormous
contributions from the financial industry, too."
"Our argument is not that Hillary Clinton is corrupt," Devine said. "OK,
and I know everybody's looking for that argument. Bernie's argument is that
the system is corrupt, and if you're going to participate in it, you're not
going to be able to change things."
Finney, as other members of Clinton campaign have done, rejected the notion
that Clinton's paid speech transcripts are important to undecided voters.
"Well again, Sen. Sanders is trying to use this to make an allegation to
which he has absolutely no response when asked where is the proof. So I think
a lot of voters also find that very offensive," Finney said. "And moreover,
I have to tell you that if you are trying to figure out how to send your kid
to college, if you are trying to figure out how to take care of a sick parent
or wanting your child's schools to be improved, this is not something you care
about."
"I mean, I understand, I think we understand the sort of media fascination
with this," Finney said. "But I'm just telling you, I mean, I have been out
there on the road talking to voters. This never comes up."
Clinton's surrogates, meanwhile, continued to press Sanders to release his
tax returns. Sanders himself said he would release the 2014 returns at some
point later Friday.
Speaking earlier in the day on CNN, Clinton supporter and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand
(D-N.Y.) appeared to break with the campaign line in remarking of the candidate's
decision-making behind the release of transcripts, "I think she will. I think
she's been clear that she's going to, and yes I would."
Clinton has long maintained that she will release the transcripts of her
paid speeches when every other candidate in both parties does the same. Asked
whether that should be the standard, Gillibrand demurred.
"I think everyone makes their own judgment," remarked Gillibrand, who like
Finney, suggested tax returns as a better standard by which voters should judge
the candidates.
"... Often described as "drama queens" or "abusive," they too frequently create chaos in situations where others would smoothly deal with the normal differences and disappointments that arise from time to time for all of us. ..."
"... These habits now would suggest to me comorbid diagnoses, that is, a combination of borderline personality emotional hyper-reactivity with narcissistic and/or psychopathic (conning) patterns. ..."
"... manipulation is defined as deception used for personal gain, without concern for victims." ..."
Women, and men, with borderline personality disorder seem not to know how
to stop arguing (link is external).
Often described as "drama queens" or "abusive,"
they too frequently create chaos in situations where others would smoothly deal
with the normal differences and disappointments that arise from time to time
for all of us.
... ... ...
There may well be some individuals with BPD who are genuinely manipulative
or sadistic.
These habits now would suggest to me comorbid diagnoses, that is, a combination
of borderline personality emotional hyper-reactivity with narcissistic and/or
psychopathic (conning) patterns.
In the Hare Psychopathy Checklist (cited in Bowers,
2002) ... manipulation is defined as deception used for personal gain, without
concern for victims."
"... At the same time that people like you and me are thriving beyond the dreams of any plutocrats in history, the rest of the country-the 99.99 percent-is lagging far behind. The divide between the haves and have-nots is getting worse really, really fast. In 1980, the top 1 percent controlled about 8 percent of U.S. national income. The bottom 50 percent shared about 18 percent. Today the top 1 percent share about 20 percent; the bottom 50 percent, just 12 percent. ..."
"... The model for us rich guys here should be Henry Ford, who realized that all his autoworkers in Michigan weren't only cheap labor to be exploited; they were consumers, too. Ford figured that if he raised their wages, to a then-exorbitant $5 a day, they'd be able to afford his Model Ts. ..."
Memo: From Nick Hanauer To: My Fellow Zillionaires
You probably don't know me, but like you I am one of those .01%ers, a proud
and unapologetic capitalist. I have founded, co-founded and funded more than
30 companies across a range of industries-from itsy-bitsy ones like the night
club I started in my 20s to giant ones like Amazon.com, for which I was the
first nonfamily investor. Then I founded aQuantive, an Internet advertising
company that was
sold to Microsoft in 2007 for $6.4 billion. In cash. My friends and I own
a bank. I tell you all this to demonstrate that in many ways I'm no different
from you. Like you, I have a broad perspective on business and capitalism. And
also like you, I have been rewarded obscenely for my success, with a life that
the other 99.99 percent of Americans can't even imagine. Multiple homes, my
own plane, etc., etc. You know what I'm talking about. In 1992, I was selling
pillows made by my family's business, Pacific Coast Feather Co., to retail stores
across the country, and the Internet was a clunky novelty to which one hooked
up with a loud squawk at 300 baud. But I saw pretty quickly, even back then,
that many of my customers, the big department store chains, were already doomed.
I knew that as soon as the Internet became fast and trustworthy enough-and that
time wasn't far off-people were going to shop online like crazy. Goodbye, Caldor.
And Filene's. And Borders. And on and on.
Realizing that, seeing over the horizon a little faster than the next guy,
was the strategic part of my success. The lucky part was that I had two friends,
both immensely talented, who also saw a lot of potential in the web. One was
a guy you've probably never heard of named Jeff Tauber, and the other was a
fellow named Jeff Bezos. I was so excited by the potential of the web that I
told both Jeffs that I wanted to invest in whatever they launched, big time.
It just happened that the second Jeff-Bezos-called me back first to take up
my investment offer. So I helped underwrite his tiny start-up bookseller. The
other Jeff started a web department store called Cybershop, but at a time when
trust in Internet sales was still low, it was too early for his high-end online
idea; people just weren't yet ready to buy expensive goods without personally
checking them out (unlike a basic commodity like books, which don't vary in
quality-Bezos' great insight). Cybershop didn't make it, just another dot-com
bust. Amazon did somewhat better. Now I own a very large yacht.
But let's speak frankly to each other. I'm not the smartest guy you've ever
met, or the hardest-working. I was a mediocre student. I'm not technical at
all-I can't write a word of code. What sets me apart, I think, is a tolerance
for risk and an intuition about what will happen in the future. Seeing where
things are headed is the essence of entrepreneurship. And what do I see in our
future now?
I see pitchforks.
At the same time that people like you and me are thriving beyond the
dreams of any plutocrats in history, the rest of the country-the 99.99 percent-is
lagging far behind. The divide between the haves and have-nots is getting worse
really, really fast. In 1980, the top 1 percent
controlled about 8 percent of U.S. national income. The bottom 50 percent
shared about 18 percent. Today the top 1 percent share about 20 percent;
the bottom 50 percent,
just 12 percent.
But the problem isn't that we have inequality. Some inequality is intrinsic
to any high-functioning capitalist economy. The problem is that inequality is
at historically high levels and getting worse every day. Our country is rapidly
becoming less a capitalist society and more a feudal society. Unless our policies
change dramatically, the middle class will disappear, and we will be back to
late 18th-century France. Before the revolution.
Memo: From Nick Hanauer To: My Fellow Zillionaires
You probably don't know me, but like you I am one of those .01%ers, a proud
and unapologetic capitalist. I have founded, co-founded and funded more than
30 companies across a range of industries-from itsy-bitsy ones like the night
club I started in my 20s to giant ones like Amazon.com, for which I was the
first nonfamily investor. Then I founded aQuantive, an Internet advertising
company that was
sold to Microsoft in 2007 for $6.4 billion. In cash. My friends and I own
a bank. I tell you all this to demonstrate that in many ways I'm no different
from you. Like you, I have a broad perspective on business and capitalism. And
also like you, I have been rewarded obscenely for my success, with a life that
the other 99.99 percent of Americans can't even imagine. Multiple homes, my
own plane, etc., etc. You know what I'm talking about. In 1992, I was selling
pillows made by my family's business, Pacific Coast Feather Co., to retail stores
across the country, and the Internet was a clunky novelty to which one hooked
up with a loud squawk at 300 baud. But I saw pretty quickly, even back then,
that many of my customers, the big department store chains, were already doomed.
I knew that as soon as the Internet became fast and trustworthy enough-and that
time wasn't far off-people were going to shop online like crazy. Goodbye, Caldor.
And Filene's. And Borders. And on and on.
Realizing that, seeing over the horizon a little faster than the next guy,
was the strategic part of my success. The lucky part was that I had two friends,
both immensely talented, who also saw a lot of potential in the web. One was
a guy you've probably never heard of named Jeff Tauber, and the other was a
fellow named Jeff Bezos. I was so excited by the potential of the web that I
told both Jeffs that I wanted to invest in whatever they launched, big time.
It just happened that the second Jeff-Bezos-called me back first to take up
my investment offer. So I helped underwrite his tiny start-up bookseller. The
other Jeff started a web department store called Cybershop, but at a time when
trust in Internet sales was still low, it was too early for his high-end online
idea; people just weren't yet ready to buy expensive goods without personally
checking them out (unlike a basic commodity like books, which don't vary in
quality-Bezos' great insight). Cybershop didn't make it, just another dot-com
bust. Amazon did somewhat better. Now I own a very large yacht.
But let's speak frankly to each other. I'm not the smartest guy you've ever
met, or the hardest-working. I was a mediocre student. I'm not technical at
all-I can't write a word of code. What sets me apart, I think, is a tolerance
for risk and an intuition about what will happen in the future. Seeing where
things are headed is the essence of entrepreneurship. And what do I see in our
future now?
I see pitchforks.
At the same time that people like you and me are thriving beyond the dreams
of any plutocrats in history, the rest of the country-the 99.99 percent-is lagging
far behind. The divide between the haves and have-nots is getting worse really,
really fast. In 1980, the top 1 percent
controlled about 8 percent of U.S. national income. The bottom 50 percent
shared about 18 percent. Today the top 1 percent share about 20 percent;
the bottom 50 percent,
just 12 percent.
But the problem isn't that we have inequality. Some inequality is intrinsic
to any high-functioning capitalist economy. The problem is that inequality is
at historically high levels and getting worse every day. Our country is rapidly
becoming less a capitalist society and more a feudal society. Unless our policies
change dramatically, the middle class will disappear, and we will be back to
late 18th-century France. Before the revolution.
And so I have a message for my fellow filthy rich, for all of us who live
in our gated bubble worlds: Wake up, people. It won't last.
If we don't do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the
pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising
inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated
like this and the pitchforks didn't eventually come out. You show me a highly
unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are
no counterexamples. None. It's not if, it's when.
Many of us think we're special because "this is America." We think we're
immune to the same forces that started the Arab Spring-or the French and Russian
revolutions, for that matter. I know you fellow .01%ers tend to dismiss this
kind of argument; I've had many of you tell me to my face I'm completely bonkers.
And yes, I know there are many of you who are convinced that because you saw
a poor kid with an iPhone that one time, inequality is a fiction.
Here's what I say to you: You're living in a dream world. What everyone wants
to believe is that when things reach a tipping point and go from being merely
crappy for the masses to dangerous and socially destabilizing, that we're somehow
going to know about that shift ahead of time. Any student of history knows that's
not the way it happens. Revolutions, like bankruptcies, come gradually, and
then suddenly. One day, somebody sets himself on fire, then thousands of people
are in the streets, and before you know it, the country is burning. And then
there's no time for us to get to the airport and jump on our Gulfstream Vs and
fly to New Zealand. That's the way it always happens. If inequality keeps rising
as it has been, eventually it will happen. We will not be able to predict when,
and it will be terrible-for everybody. But especially for us.
***
The most ironic thing about rising inequality is how completely unnecessary
and self-defeating it is. If we do something about it, if we adjust our policies
in the way that, say, Franklin D. Roosevelt did during the Great Depression-so
that we help the 99 percent and preempt the revolutionaries and crazies, the
ones with the pitchforks-that will be the best thing possible for us rich folks,
too. It's not just that we'll escape with our lives; it's that we'll most certainly
get even richer.
The model for us rich guys here should be Henry Ford, who realized that
all his autoworkers in Michigan weren't only cheap labor to be exploited; they
were consumers, too. Ford figured that if he
raised their wages, to a then-exorbitant $5 a day, they'd be able to afford
his Model Ts.
What a great idea. My suggestion to you is: Let's do it all over again. We've
got to try something. These idiotic trickle-down policies are destroying my
customer base. And yours too.
It's when I realized this that I decided I had to leave my insulated world
of the super-rich and get involved in politics. Not directly, by running for
office or becoming one of the big-money billionaires who back candidates in
an election. Instead, I wanted to try to change the conversation with ideas-by
advancing what my co-author, Eric Liu, and I call "middle-out" economics. It's
the long-overdue rebuttal to the trickle-down economics worldview that has become
economic orthodoxy across party lines-and has so screwed the American middle
class and our economy generally. Middle-out economics rejects the old misconception
that an economy is a perfectly efficient, mechanistic system and embraces the
much more accurate idea of an economy as a complex ecosystem made up of real
people who are dependent on one another.
Which is why the fundamental law of capitalism must be: If workers have more
money, businesses have more customers. Which makes middle-class consumers, not
rich businesspeople like us, the true job creators. Which means a thriving middle
class is the source of American prosperity, not a consequence of it. The middle
class creates us rich people, not the other way around.
On June 19, 2013, Bloomberg published an
article I wrote called "The Capitalist's Case for a $15 Minimum Wage."
Forbes
labeled it "Nick Hanauer's near insane" proposal. And yet, just weeks after
it was published, my friend David Rolf, a Service Employees International Union
organizer, roused fast-food workers to go on strike around the country for a
$15 living wage. Nearly a year later, the city of Seattle
passed a $15 minimum wage. And just 350 days after my article was published,
Seattle Mayor Ed Murray signed that ordinance into law. How could this happen,
you ask?
It happened because we reminded the masses that they are the source of growth
and prosperity, not us rich guys. We reminded them that when workers have more
money, businesses have more customers-and need more employees. We reminded them
that if businesses paid workers a living wage rather than poverty wages, taxpayers
wouldn't have to make up the difference. And when we got done, 74 percent of
likely Seattle voters in a
recent poll agreed that a $15 minimum wage was a swell idea.
The standard response in the minimum-wage debate, made by Republicans and
their business backers and plenty of Democrats as well, is that raising the
minimum wage costs jobs. Businesses will have to lay off workers. This argument
reflects the orthodox economics that most people had in college. If you took
Econ 101, then you literally were taught that if wages go up, employment must
go down. The law of supply and demand and all that. That's why you've got John
Boehner and other Republicans in Congress insisting that if you price employment
higher, you get less of it. Really?
The thing about us businesspeople is that we love our customers rich
and our employees poor.
Because here's an odd thing. During the past three decades, compensation
for CEOs grew 127 times faster than it did for workers. Since 1950, the CEO-to-worker
pay ratio has increased 1,000 percent, and that is not a typo. CEOs
used to earn 30 times the median wage; now they rake in 500 times. Yet no
company I know of has eliminated its senior managers, or outsourced them to
China or automated their jobs. Instead, we now have more CEOs and senior executives
than ever before. So, too, for financial services workers and technology workers.
These folks earn multiples of the median wage, yet we somehow have more and
more of them.
The thing about us businesspeople is that we love our customers rich and
our employees poor. So for as long as there has been capitalism, capitalists
have said the same thing about any effort to raise wages. We've had 75 years
of complaints from big business-when the minimum wage was instituted, when women
had to be paid equitable amounts, when child labor laws were created. Every
time the capitalists said exactly the same thing in the same way: We're all
going to go bankrupt. I'll have to close. I'll have to lay everyone off. It
hasn't happened. In fact, the data show that when workers are better treated,
business gets better. The naysayers are just wrong.
Most of you probably think that the $15 minimum wage in Seattle is an insane
departure from rational policy that puts our economy at great risk. But in Seattle,
our current minimum wage of $9.32 is already nearly 30 percent higher than the
federal minimum wage. And has it ruined our economy yet? Well, trickle-downers,
look at the data here: The two cities in the nation with the highest rate of
job growth by small businesses
are
San Francisco and Seattle. Guess which cities have the highest minimum wage?
San Francisco and Seattle. The
fastest-growing big city in America? Seattle. Fifteen dollars isn't a risky
untried policy for us. It's doubling down on the strategy that's already allowing
our city to kick your city's ass.
It makes perfect sense if you think about it: If a worker earns $7.25 an
hour, which is
now
the national minimum wage, what proportion of that person's income do you
think ends up in the cash registers of local small businesses? Hardly any. That
person is paying rent, ideally going out to get subsistence groceries at Safeway,
and, if really lucky, has a bus pass. But she's not going out to eat at restaurants.
Not browsing for new clothes. Not buying flowers on Mother's Day.
Is this issue more complicated than I'm making out? Of course. Are there
many factors at play determining the dynamics of employment? Yup. But please,
please stop insisting that if we pay low-wage workers more, unemployment will
skyrocket and it will destroy the economy. It's utter nonsense. The most insidious
thing about trickle-down economics isn't believing that if the rich get richer,
it's good for the economy. It's believing that if the poor get richer, it's
bad for the economy.
I know that virtually all of you feel that compelling our businesses to pay
workers more is somehow unfair, or is too much government interference. Most
of you think that we should just let good examples like Costco or Gap lead the
way. Or let the market set the price. But here's the thing. When those who set
bad examples, like the owners of Wal-Mart or McDonald's, pay their workers close
to the minimum wage, what they're really saying is that they'd pay even less
if it weren't illegal. (Thankfully both companies have recently said they would
not oppose a hike in the minimum wage.) In any large group, some people absolutely
will not do the right thing. That's why our economy can only be safe and effective
if it is governed by the same kinds of rules as, say, the transportation system,
with its speed limits and stop signs.
Wal-Mart is our nation's largest employer with some 1.4 million employees
in the United States and more than
$25 billion in pre-tax profit. So why are Wal-Mart employees the largest
group of Medicaid recipients in many states? Wal-Mart could, say, pay each of
its 1 million lowest-paid workers an extra $10,000 per year, raise them all
out of poverty and enable them to, of all things, afford to shop at Wal-Mart.
Not only would this also save us all the expense of the food stamps, Medicaid
and rent assistance that they currently require, but Wal-Mart would still earn
more than $15 billion pre-tax per year. Wal-Mart won't (and shouldn't) volunteer
to pay its workers more than their competitors. In order for us to have an economy
that works for everyone, we should compel all retailers to pay living wages-not
just ask politely.
We rich people have been falsely persuaded by our schooling and the affirmation
of society, and have convinced ourselves, that we are the main job creators.
It's simply not true. There can never be enough super-rich Americans to power
a great economy. I earn about 1,000 times the median American annually, but
I don't buy thousands of times more stuff. My family purchased three cars over
the past few years, not 3,000. I buy a few pairs of pants and a few shirts a
year, just like most American men. I bought two pairs of the fancy wool pants
I am wearing as I write, what my partner Mike calls my "manager pants." I guess
I could have bought 1,000 pairs. But why would I? Instead, I sock my extra money
away in savings, where it doesn't do the country much good.
So forget all that rhetoric about how America is great because of people
like you and me and Steve Jobs. You know the truth even if you won't admit it:
If any of us had been born in Somalia or the Congo, all we'd be is some guy
standing barefoot next to a dirt road selling fruit. It's not that Somalia and
Congo don't have good entrepreneurs. It's just that the best ones are selling
their wares off crates by the side of the road because that's all their customers
can afford.
So why not talk about a different kind of New Deal for the American people,
one that could appeal to the right as well as left-to libertarians as well as
liberals? First, I'd ask my Republican friends to get real about reducing the
size of government. Yes, yes and yes, you guys are all correct: The federal
government is too big in some ways. But no way can you cut government substantially,
not the way things are now. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush each had eight
years to do it, and they failed miserably.
Republicans and Democrats in Congress can't shrink government with wishful
thinking. The only way to slash government for real is to go back to basic economic
principles: You have to reduce the demand for government. If people are getting
$15 an hour or more, they don't need food stamps. They don't need rent assistance.
They don't need you and me to pay for their medical care. If the consumer middle
class is back, buying and shopping, then it stands to reason you won't need
as large a welfare state. And at the same time, revenues from payroll and sales
taxes would rise, reducing the deficit.
This is, in other words, an economic approach that can unite left and right.
Perhaps that's one reason the right is beginning, inexorably, to wake up to
this reality as well. Even Republicans as diverse as Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum
recently came out in favor of raising the minimum wage, in defiance of the Republicans
in Congress.
***
One thing we can agree on-I'm sure of this-is that the change isn't
going to start in Washington. Thinking is stale, arguments even more so. On
both sides.
But the way I see it, that's all right. Most major social movements have
seen their earliest victories at the state and municipal levels. The fight over
the eight-hour workday, which ended in Washington, D.C., in 1938, began in places
like Illinois and Massachusetts in the late 1800s. The movement for social security
began in California in the 1930s. Even the Affordable Health Care Act-Obamacare-would
have been hard to imagine without Mitt Romney's model in Massachusetts to lead
the way.
Sadly, no Republicans and few Democrats get this. President Obama doesn't
seem to either, though his heart is in the right place. In his State of the
Union speech this year, he mentioned the need for a higher minimum wage but
failed to make the case that less inequality and a renewed middle class would
promote faster economic growth. Instead, the arguments we hear from most Democrats
are the same old social-justice claims. The only reason to help workers is because
we feel sorry for them. These fairness arguments feed right into every stereotype
of Obama and the Democrats as bleeding hearts. Republicans say growth. Democrats
say fairness-and lose every time.
But just because the two parties in Washington haven't figured it out yet
doesn't mean we rich folks can just keep going. The conversation is already
changing, even if the billionaires aren't onto it. I know what you think: You
think that Occupy Wall Street and all the other capitalism-is-the-problem protesters
disappeared without a trace. But that's not true. Of course, it's hard to get
people to sleep in a park in the cause of social justice. But the protests we
had in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis really did help to change the debate
in this country from death panels and debt ceilings to inequality.
It's just that so many of you plutocrats didn't get the message.
Dear 1%ers, many of our fellow citizens are starting to believe that capitalism
itself is the problem. I disagree, and I'm sure you do too. Capitalism, when
well managed, is the greatest social technology ever invented to create prosperity
in human societies. But capitalism left unchecked tends toward concentration
and collapse. It can be managed either to benefit the few in the near term or
the many in the long term. The work of democracies is to bend it to the latter.
That is why investments in the middle class work. And tax breaks for rich people
like us don't. Balancing the power of workers and billionaires by raising the
minimum wage isn't bad for capitalism. It's an indispensable tool smart capitalists
use to make capitalism stable and sustainable. And no one has a bigger stake
in that than zillionaires like us.
The oldest and most important conflict in human societies is the battle over
the concentration of wealth and power. The folks like us at the top have always
told those at the bottom that our respective positions are righteous and good
for all. Historically, we called that divine right. Today we have trickle-down
economics.
What nonsense this is. Am I really such a superior person? Do I belong at
the center of the moral as well as economic universe? Do you?
My family, the Hanauers, started in Germany selling feathers and pillows.
They got chased out of Germany by Hitler and ended up in Seattle owning another
pillow company. Three generations later, I benefited from that. Then I got as
lucky as a person could possibly get in the Internet age by having a buddy in
Seattle named Bezos. I look at the average Joe on the street, and I say, "There
but for the grace of Jeff go I." Even the best of us, in the worst of circumstances,
are barefoot, standing by a dirt road, selling fruit. We should never forget
that, or forget that the United States of America and its middle class made
us, rather than the other way around.
Or we could sit back, do nothing, enjoy our yachts. And wait for the pitchforks.
"... Sanders was clearly the sheep-dog, and I won't be surprised if an e-mail showing that reality appears. ..."
"... spitting in the face of the latest generation of suckers who thought that the elite plutocracy of the USA could be 'reformed' from within. ..."
"... sheepdog is accurate. I have been calling him a sheepdog since 2014 and predicting, correctly, that he would both lose the nomination and endorse Hillary. This was inevitable since he SAID he would endorse her from the start of his so-called campaign. ..."
Sanders was clearly the sheep-dog, and I won't be surprised if an
e-mail showing that reality appears. He is, in fact, with his total
and immediate roll-over, even as the corruption of the process was categorically
exposed by the e-mails, making no pretense otherwise, spitting in the
face of the latest generation of suckers who thought that the elite plutocracy
of the USA could be 'reformed' from within. He was the geriatric Obama,
dispensing more Hopium for the dopes. And when Clinton feigns adoption of
Sanders policy, like not signing the TPP, she is LYING.
Diana, July 28, 2016
Sanders' own campaign called him the "youth whisperer", but sheepdog
is accurate. I have been calling him a sheepdog since 2014 and predicting,
correctly, that he would both lose the nomination and endorse Hillary. This
was inevitable since he SAID he would endorse her from the start of his
so-called campaign. Perhaps he did so hoping that the DNC would play
fair, but that goes to show you he's no socialist. A real socialist would
have been able to size up the opposition, not made any gentleman's agreements
with them and waged a real campaign.
rtj1211, July 26, 2016
So far as I'm aware, there must be a mechanism for an Independent to
put their name on the ballot.
If the majority of people in the USA are really thinking that voting
for either Hillary or the Donald is worse than having unprotected sex with
an HIV+ hooker, then the Independent would barely need any publicity. They'd
just need to be on the ballot.
Course, the Establishment might get cute and put a far-right nutcase
up as 'another Independent' so as they would have someone who'd do as they
were told no matter what.
But until the US public say 'da nada! Pasta! Finito! To hell with the
Democrats and the GOP!', you'll still get the choice of 'let's invade Iran'
or 'let's nuke Russia'. You'll get the choice of giving Israel a blowjob
or agreeing to be tied up and have kinky sex with Israel. You'll get the
choice of bailing out Wall Street or bailing out Wall Street AND cutting
social security for the poorest Americans. You'll get the choice of running
the USA for the bankers or running the USA for the bankers and a few multinational
corporations.
Oh, they'll have to fight for it, just as Martin Luther King et al had
to fight for civil rights. They may have the odd candidate shot by the CIA,
the oil men or the weapons men. Because that's how US politics works.
But if they don't want a Republican or a Republican-lite, they need to
select an independent and vote for them.
The rest of us? We have to use whatever influence we have to try and
limit what they try to do overseas…….because we are affected by what America
does overseas…….
Sanders as a pupil of the king of "bait and switch" Obama
Notable quotes:
"... I think he will come to deeply regret what he has done. He has betrayed these people who believed in this political revolution. We heard this same kind of rhetoric, by the way, in 2008 around Obama. ..."
CHRIS HEDGES : Well, I didn't back Bernie Sanders because-and
Kshama Sawant and I had had a discussion with him before-because he said that
he would work within the Democratic structures and support the nominee.
And
I think we have now watched Bernie Sanders walk away from his political moment.
You know, he - I think he will come to deeply regret what he has done. He
has betrayed these people who believed in this political revolution. We heard
this same kind of rhetoric, by the way, in 2008 around Obama.
"... That means backing Wall Street, the neocons and the TPP. Shame on him! He told his followers to think of pie in the sky in the decades it will take to take over the Democratic Party from below, from school boards, etc. ..."
"... What on earth is revolution if it doesn't include either remove the rot in the Democratic Party, the Wall Street control, or start another party? It had to be one or the other. Here was his chance. I think he missed it. ..."
"... He did miss his chance. Some people were suggesting that he should walk and form his own party. Particularly how the party treated him. ..."
"... The Democrats and the Republicans together have made it almost impossible for a third party to get registered in every state. To run in every state. To get just all of the mechanics you need because of all the lawsuits against them. The Green Party is the only party that had already solved that. Apart from the Libertarian Party. ..."
"... The oligarchs have joined the Republicans and the Democrats are now seen to be the same party, called the Democratic Party. Here was his chance to make an alternative. ..."
"... I believe Hillary's the greater evil, not Trump, because Trump is incompetent and doesn't have the staff around him, or the political support that Hilary has. ..."
"... I have known Hillary Clinton for 25 years. I remember her, as you do, as a great first lady who broke precedent in terms of the role that a first lady was supposed to play as she helped lead the fight for universal health care. ..."
"... I served with her in the United States Senate and know her as a fierce advocate for the rights of children, for women and for the disabled. ..."
"... Hillary Clinton will make an outstanding president and I am proud to stand with her tonight! ..."
"... Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life. ..."
"... I agree with Hudson that HRC is the greater threat. I also agree with him that Bernie makes no sense. What the hell did Bernie have to lose? He could have accepted the prez nomination with the Greens. In fact, he should have run third party from the git-go. By sucking up to the dems that politically raped him, Bernie is exhibiting a variation of Stockholm syndrome. ..."
"... Bernie's problem in the end is that he couldn't see that in order to gain power in the Democratic Party (i.e., in order to dislodge the Clintons), the Left might (probably would) have to lose an election. ..."
"... The Democratic PoC (Party of Clinton) had to be shown as a party that could not win an election without its left half. He wrongly saw the powerless Trump as the greater threat, something that could only be done if he still at least marginally trusted Hillary to ever keep her word on anything. He will come to see that as his greatest mistake of all. ..."
"... Bernie reminds me of Gorbachev. Both clearly saw what the problem was with their respective societies, but still thought that things could be fixed by changing their respective parties. Bernie it seems, like Gorbachev before him, can not intellectually accept that effective reforms require radical action on the existing power structures. Gorbachev could not break with the Communist system and Bernie can not break with the Democratic party. ..."
"... I have known Hillary Clinton for 25 years. I remember her, as you do, as a great first lady who broke precedent in terms of the role that a first lady was supposed to play as she helped lead the fight for universal health care. ..."
"... I served with her in the United States Senate and know her as a fierce advocate for the rights of children, for women and for the disabled. ..."
"... Hillary Clinton will make an outstanding president and I am proud to stand with her tonight! ..."
"... Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life. ..."
PERIES: Let's turn to Sanders's strategy here. Now, Sanders is, of course,
asking people to support Hillary. And if you buy into the idea that she is the
lesser of two evils candidate, then we also have to look at Bernie's other strategy
– which is to vote as many people as we possibly can at various other levels
of the elections that are going on at congressional levels, Senate level, at
municipal levels. Is that the way to go, so that we can avoid some of these
choices we are offered?
HUDSON: Well, this is what I don't understand about Sanders's strategy. He
says we need a revolution. He's absolutely right. But then, everything he said
in terms of the election is about Trump. I can guarantee you that the revolution
isn't really about Trump. The way Sanders has described things, you have to
take over the Democratic Party and pry away the leadership, away from Wall Street,
away from the corporations.
Democrats pretend to be a party of the working class, a party of the people.
But it's teetering with Hillary as it's candidate. If ever there was a time
to split it, this was the year. But Bernie missed his chance. He knuckled under
and said okay, the election's going to be about Trump. Forget the revolution
that I've talked about. Forget reforming the Democratic Party, I'm sorry. Forget
that I said Hillary is not fit to be President. I'm sorry, she is fit to be
President. We've got to back her.
That means backing Wall Street, the neocons and the TPP. Shame on him!
He told his followers to think of pie in the sky in the decades it will take
to take over the Democratic Party from below, from school boards, etc.
Labor unions said this half a century ago. It didn't work. Bernie gave up
on everything to back the TPP candidate, the neocon candidate.
What on earth is revolution if it doesn't include either remove the rot
in the Democratic Party, the Wall Street control, or start another party? It
had to be one or the other. Here was his chance. I think he missed it.
PERIES: I think there's a lot of people out there that agree with
that analysis, Michael. He did miss his chance. Some people were suggesting
that he should walk and form his own party. Particularly how the party treated
him. But there is another choice out there. In fact, we at the Real News
is out there covering the Green Party election as we are speaking here, Michael.
Is that an option?
HUDSON: It would have been the only option for him. He had decided
that you can't really mount a third party, because it's so hard. The Democrats
and the Republicans together have made it almost impossible for a third party
to get registered in every state. To run in every state. To get just all of
the mechanics you need because of all the lawsuits against them. The Green Party
is the only party that had already solved that. Apart from the Libertarian Party.
So here you have the only possible third party he could have run on this
time, and he avoided it. I'm sure he must of thought about it. He was offered
the presidency on it. He could of used that and brought his revolution into
that party and then expanded it as a real alternative to both the Democrats
and the Republicans. Because the Republican Party is already split, by the fact
that the Tea Party's pretty much destroyed it. The oligarchs have joined
the Republicans and the Democrats are now seen to be the same party, called
the Democratic Party. Here was his chance to make an alternative.
I don't think there will be a chance like this again soon. I believe
Hillary's the greater evil, not Trump, because Trump is incompetent and doesn't
have the staff around him, or the political support that Hilary has. I
think Bernie missed his chance to take this party and develop it very quickly,
just like George Wallace could have done back in the 1960s when he had a chance.
I think Chris Hedges and other people have made this point with you. I have
no idea what Bernie's idea of a revolution is, if he's going to try to do it
within the Democratic Party that's just stamped on him again and again, you're
simply not going to have a revolution within the Democratic party.
I have known Hillary Clinton for 25 years. I remember her, as
you do, as a great first lady who broke precedent in terms of the role
that a first lady was supposed to play as she helped lead the fight
for universal health care.
I served with her in the United States Senate and know her as a fierce
advocate for the rights of children, for women and for the disabled.
Hillary Clinton will make an outstanding president and I am proud
to stand with her tonight!
Sanders' campaign was premised on exactly the opposite. How can anyone
now take Bernie seriously?
Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful
human being I've ever known in my life.
Okay. I know this comment will bring forth much backlash, but I'm gonna
put it out there anyway since my 'give-a-shitter' was severely cracked over
4 yrs ago (when 2 sheriff's deputies evicted me from my home while I had
been current on my pymts when the bank foreclosed and the response from
EVERY govt agency I contacted told me to "hire a lawyer", which I couldn't
afford, with one costing much more than I owed on my home of 20 yrs). I
had bought my first house by the time I graduated h.s. and had owned one
ever since until now.
My 'give-a-shitter' completely shattered this year with the election,
so here goes:
So it seems we are offered 3 choices when we vote. Trump, Hillary or
Green.
To someone who is among the 8-10 MILLION (depending on whose figures
you believe) whose home was illegally taken from them by the banksters,
I would welcome a 4th choice since none of the 3 offered will improve my
life before I die.
The consensus seems to be that it'll take decades to create change through
voting.
I'm a divorced woman turning 65. I don't feel I have decades to wait,
while I am forced to live in a place that doesn't even have a flush toilet
because it's all I can afford. To someone my age with no degrees or special
skills, the job market is nonexistent, even if I lived in a big city (where
I couldn't afford the rent).
When I see reports of an increase in new homes being built, I'd love
to see a breakdown showing exactly how many of those homes will be primary
residences and how many are second (or third, or fourth) homes.
There are 4 new custom homes being built within a half mile of me.
None will be primary residences. All will be 'vacation' homes.
Yet if we're to believe the latest figures, "the housing market is improving!"
For whom?
Yes, I'm extremely disappointed that Bernie bailed on us. I doubt either
of us will live long enough to see the change required to change this govt
and save the planet with our current choices this election.
I fear the only thing that this election has given me was initially great
hope for my future, before being plunged into the darkness of the same ol',
same ol' as my only choices.
I was never radical or oppositional in my life but I would now welcome
a revolution. I don't see me living long enough to welcome that change by
voting. Especially with the blatant voter suppression and all else that
transpired this election.
While the govt and political oligarchs may fear Russia & ISIS, if they
met 8-10 million of us victims of the banksters, they would come to realize
real fear, from those within their homeland.
Most are horrified when I offer this view, saying I'd be thrown in prison.
Hmmm…considering that…I'd be fed, clothed, housed-and I'd have a flush toilet!
Gads, I'd love to see millions of us march on Washington & literally
throw those in power out of their seats onto the lawn, saying "enough is
enough"!
So I guess my question is, does anyone else feel as 'at the end of their
rope' as I do?
Can you even truly imagine being in my position and what you would do or
how you would feel?
Yes. I screamed, cried, and wrote Bernie's campaign before his endorsement
speech was even completed, expressing my disappointment, after foregoing
meals to send him my meager contributions.
My hopes were shattered and I'm growing impatient for change.
crittermom/Bullwinkle – here's one of the articles by Chris Hedges on
Bernie Sanders:
"Because the party is completely captive to corporate power," Hedges
said. "And Bernie has cut a Faustian deal with the Democrats. And that's
not even speculation. I did an event with him and Bill McKibben, Naomi Klein
and Kshama Sawant in New York the day before the Climate March. And Kshama
Sawant ,the Socialist City Councilwoman from Seattle and I asked Sanders
why he wanted to run as a Democrat. And he said - because I don't want to
end up like Nader."
"He didn't want to end up pushed out of the establishment," Hedges said.
"He wanted to keep his committee chairmanships, he wanted to keep his Senate
seat. And he knew the forms of retribution, punishment that would be visited
upon him if he applied his critique to the Democratic establishment. So
he won't."
Fair enough. I don't know enough about Nader to care. To me, it was just
the about-face that Bernie did, going from denouncing Hillary (albeit not
very strongly) to embracing her. I think if I had been one of his supporters
who cheered him on, sent him money, got my hopes raised that he would go
all the way, I would have been very disappointed. Almost like a tease.
I'd wanted Bernie to run as an Independent more than anything, but I
can understand him wanting to keep his Senate seat and chairs. Without them,
he has no power to bring change.
I had believed he had a good chance to win, whipping a big Bernie Bird to
both parties and changing things in my lifetime, running Independent.
I now realize just how completely corrupt our political system is. Far
worse than I ever could have imagined. Wow, have my eyes been opened!
I'm beginning to think this election may just come down to who has the
bigger thugs, Trump or HRC.
I agree with Hudson that HRC is the greater threat. I also agree
with him that Bernie makes no sense. What the hell did Bernie have to lose?
He could have accepted the prez nomination with the Greens. In fact, he
should have run third party from the git-go. By sucking up to the dems that
politically raped him, Bernie is exhibiting a variation of Stockholm syndrome.
Bernie's problem in the end is that he couldn't see that in order
to gain power in the Democratic Party (i.e., in order to dislodge the Clintons),
the Left might (probably would) have to lose an election.
The Democratic PoC (Party of Clinton) had to be shown as a party
that could not win an election without its left half. He wrongly saw the
powerless Trump as the greater threat, something that could only be done
if he still at least marginally trusted Hillary to ever keep her word on
anything. He will come to see that as his greatest mistake of all.
Bernie reminds me of Gorbachev. Both clearly saw what the problem
was with their respective societies, but still thought that things could
be fixed by changing their respective parties. Bernie it seems, like Gorbachev
before him, can not intellectually accept that effective reforms require
radical action on the existing power structures. Gorbachev could not break
with the Communist system and Bernie can not break with the Democratic party.
Bernie is too nice for his own good. He should have used the DNC machinations
as an excuse to go back on his promise to endorse. "I made that promise
on the assumption that we would all be acting in good faith. Sadly, that
has proved not to be the case."
But no, he's too much of a politician, or too nice, or has too much sense
of personal pride…or had his life and his family threatened if he didn't
toe the line (not that I'm foily). Whatever his motivations, we don't get
a "Get out of Responsibility Free" card just because one dude
made some mis-steps. If that's all it takes to derail us, we're
so, so screwed.
I also agree with Hudson and EndOfTheWorld that HRC is the greater threat
and that Sanders makes no sense.
Sure, the Dems probably threatened to kick him off of Congressional Committees
and to back a rival in Vermont.
So what! With his tenure and at his age, what's really to lose? If he
couldn't face off someone in his home state, it's probably time to retire
anyway. And it's not like he was ever in it for the money.
The best he gets now is mild tolerance from his masters. "Give me your
followers and lick my boots." What a coward, could have made history, now
he's a goat.
It's actually not so surprising given his long history of working within
the mainstream system, simply along its fringes. I think many may have been
falling into the '08 Obama trap of seeing what they wanted to see in him.
As a senator he's had plenty of opportunities to grandstand, gum up the
works, etc, and he really never does. Even his "filibuster" a few years
back wasn't all that disruptive.
EndOfTheWorld- totally agree with you. I just shake my head at Bernie.
Diametrically opposed to Clinton, he suddenly turns around and embraces
her! What? I will never understand that.
"America needs an ineffective president. That's much better than an effective
president that's going to go to war with Russia, that's going to push for
the Trans-Pacific Partnership, that's going to protect Wall Street, and
that's going to oppose neoliberal austerity."
He's right too. I am absolutely terrified of Hillary Clinton becoming
President. She strikes me as having psychopathic tendencies. I mean, just
look at the scandals she and Bill have been involved in, and then when she
gets caught, she lies, feigns ignorance, deflects, blames others, lies some
more. Power and money are her goals.
She has called Putin "Hitler", said she wants to expand NATO, and again
said she wants to take out Assad. Well, how is she going to do that when
Russia is in there? God, she is scary. I just hope that there's a big Clinton
Foundation email leak to finish her off.
Trump is out there, but at least he wants to try to negotiate peace (of
course, if war wasn't making so many people rich, it would be stopped tomorrow).
He's questioning why NATO is necessary, never mind its continual expansion,
and he wants to stop the TPP.
God, I'd be happy with even one of the above. Hillary will give us TPP,
more NATO, more war, and a cackle. Please, if anyone has some loose emails
hanging around, now is the time!
I have known Hillary Clinton for 25 years. I remember her, as
you do, as a great first lady who broke precedent in terms of the role
that a first lady was supposed to play as she helped lead the fight
for universal health care.
I served with her in the United States Senate and know her as a fierce
advocate for the rights of children, for women and for the disabled.
Hillary Clinton will make an outstanding president and I am proud
to stand with her tonight!
Sanders' campaign was premised on exactly the opposite. How can anyone
now take Bernie seriously?
Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful
human being I've ever known in my life.
Butch – "…she helped lead the fight for universal health care." Did she
now? Here's a good quote on how she felt about universal health care:
"Hillary took the lead role in the White House's efforts to pass a corporate-friendly
version of "health reform." Along with the big insurance companies the Clintons
deceptively railed against, the "co-presidents" decided from the start to
exclude the popular health care alternative – single payer – from the national
health care "discussion." (Obama would do the same thing in 2009.)
"David, tell me something interesting." That was then First Lady Hillary
Clinton's weary and exasperated response – as head of the White House's
health reform initiative – to Harvard medical professor David Himmelstein
in 1993. Himmelstein was head of Physicians for a National Health Program.
He had just told her about the remarkable possibilities of a comprehensive,
single-payer "Canadian style" health plan, supported by more than two-thirds
of the U.S. public. Beyond backing by a citizen super-majority, Himmelstein
noted, single-payer would provide comprehensive coverage to the nation's
40 million uninsured while retaining free choice in doctor selection and
being certified by the Congressional Budget Office as "the most cost-effective
plan on offer."
"... Bernie had cashed in on the Revolution that he had betrayed, citing as evidence the purchase of a third ..."
"... I said there might be more to the story, like the fact that Bernie had signed a book deal (ala the Clintons) where he would tell the story of his Glorious Revolution (which ended up with him dumping his foot soldiers into the vaults of the very machine they were warring against.) And guess what? I was right. ..."
On Tuesday afternoon, my friend Michael Colby, the fearless environmental
activist in Vermont,
sent me news that Bernie Sanders had just purchased a new waterfront house
on in North Hero, Vermont. I linked to the story on my Facebook page, quipping
that Bernie had cashed in on the Revolution that he had betrayed, citing
as evidence the purchase of a third house for the Sanders family, a
lakefront summer dacha for $600,000.
This ignited a firestorm on Zuckerburg's internet playpen. People noted that
Bernie and Jane lived a penurious existence, surviving on coupons and the kindness
of strangers, and the house was just a cramped four-bedroom fishing shack on
a cold icy lake with hardly any heat–a place so forsaken even the Iroquois of
old wouldn't camp there–which they were only able to afford because Jane sold
her dead parents' house.
I said there might be more to the story, like the fact that Bernie had
signed a book deal (ala the Clintons) where he would tell the story of his Glorious
Revolution (which ended up with him dumping his foot soldiers into the vaults
of the very machine they were warring against.) And guess what? I was right.
Coming in November to a bookstore near you….Our
Revolution by Thomas Dunne Books.
The love for Bernie is truly blind. It's also touching. I've never seen Leftists
defend the purchase of $600,000 lakefront summer homes with such tenacity!
... ... ...
By the way, the median cost of homes sold in North Hero, Vermont so far this
year is $189,000.
... ... ...
Fulfilling his pledge to Hillary, Bernie Sanders took to the pages of the
Los Angeles Times to plead with his followers to get behind Clinton
as the one person who could "unite the country" against Trump.
In the wake
of this pathetic capitulation to the Queen of Chaos, our Australian Shepard,
Boomer, drafted an Open Letter on behalf of all sheepdogs renouncing any association
with Bernie Sanders. One of the signatories (a Blue Healer from Brentwood) swore,
however, that she saw Sander's head popping out of Paris Hilton's handbag…
A friend lamented the fact that all of the fun and spirit had gone out of
the election campaign since Sanders was "neutralized." Was Bernie neutralized?
I thought that Bernie neutralized himself. And it was hard to watch. Like an
x-rated episode of Nip/Tuck.
vice presidential pick is a proxy for what we can expect from her administration.
Now we know the result.
Notable quotes:
"... "The super delegate vote will determine the healthy survival or possible death of the Democratic party! Hillary or Trump are both unacceptable candidates and would be disasters for the country! We should not be forced to choose between them! ..."
"... Are you high?!?! She has NO record of achieving ANYTHING of consequence, other than have a road and a post office named. And her "experience" includes things like supporting (and receiving money from) violent third-world dictators, peddling fracking all over the world, selling political favors in exchange for donations to the Clinton Foundation Money-Laundering Operation, and leaving a trail of bodies composed of people who "accidentally" died when they knew too much about her and her criminal/sexual predator husband. ..."
"... The article references tpp as a deal breaker for progressives, which of course it should be. The writer should have mentioned that Obama is pushing hard for the tpp - corporate sellout that he is. ..."
"... That's a pretty small consolation to struggling people and why they gravitate to a guy like Trump. Trump is successfully attacking from the left. I had a Trump supporter arguing TPP to me the other day. Democrats claim to be the "unity" party, but still tell those of us on the left to shut up and put up with their corporate policy. I have yet to have a Democrat argue anything but Trump fear in support of their candidate. ..."
"... Just a heads up. Trump is AGAINST TPP. Trump is AGAINST Super PAC's & ridiculous money in politics. Trump is AGAINST foreign interventionist wars. On the flip side, Hillary WILL sign TPP into law if elected. She will NEVER fight against Super PAC's or campaign finance because she IS the problem in that arena. Hillary is also a war hawk who not only supported the Iraq War, but also delivered us Libya, Syria, ISIS, and so on. ..."
"... The Guardian seemingly could care less about Hillary's crimes! They want to shove her cluelessness down everyones throats. She was a disaster as Secretary of State, and would be an even worse President. People are starting to wise up about the agenda of left-wing media. Hillary is a criminal, and the Guardian supports her totally... It speaks to the lack of integrity at the Guardian! ..."
"... And for the record, Hillary is NOT a progressive, will NEVER be a progressive, and has NO interest in progressives after they vote for her. THAT IS THE TRUTH. ..."
"... I won't vote for a party that rigged the primaries from Sanders by committing election fraud against his supporters. ..."
"For many progressives, and Democrats in general, it's a wait-and-see moment
around [Clinton's] vice presidential pick," said Stephanie Taylor of the Progressive
Change Campaign Committee (PCCC), who called the imminent decision "a proxy
for what we can expect from her administration".
"If she picks someone like [Massachusetts senator] Elizabeth Warren who has
this track record of fighting for the issues that people care about ... that
will be a signal that will energise greatly the Democratic base," Taylor told
the Guardian in an interview. Picking the moderate Virginia governor, Tim Kaine,
or the US agriculture secretary, Tom Vilsack, would do the opposite, she warned.
Despite some recent gestures toward the Warren and Sanders wing of the party,
progressives are nervous due to Clinton's refusal to budge on trade, where the
Obama administration has been trying to fast-track the Trans-Pacific Partnership
(TPP) agreement through Congress.
"There are very powerful corporate interests who are very strongly opposed
to blocking TPP," said Taylor. "It's the ugly reality of corporate capture that
we are seeing.
"If Clinton picks someone like Tim Kaine who voted for fast-track, that –
combined with the glaring omission of TPP from the Democratic platform – will
depress energy and will be an anaemic choice," she added.
... ... ...
"For many progressives, and Democrats in general, it's a wait-and-see moment
around [Clinton's] vice presidential pick," said Stephanie Taylor of the Progressive
Change Campaign Committee (PCCC), who called the imminent decision "a proxy
for what we can expect from her administration".
"If she picks someone like [Massachusetts senator] Elizabeth Warren who has
this track record of fighting for the issues that people care about ... that
will be a signal that will energise greatly the Democratic base," Taylor told
the Guardian in an interview. Picking the moderate Virginia governor, Tim Kaine,
or the US agriculture secretary, Tom Vilsack, would do the opposite, she warned.
Despite some recent gestures toward the Warren and Sanders wing of the party,
progressives are nervous due to Clinton's refusal to budge on trade, where the
Obama administration has been trying to fast-track the Trans-Pacific Partnership
(TPP) agreement through Congress.
"There are very powerful corporate interests who are very strongly opposed
to blocking TPP," said Taylor. "It's the ugly reality of corporate capture that
we are seeing.
"If Clinton picks someone like Tim Kaine who voted for fast-track, that –
combined with the glaring omission of TPP from the Democratic platform – will
depress energy and will be an anaemic choice," she added.
Rachman Cantrell
Trying to change the minds of Hillary fans is not productive at this
point in time. None of our votes matter until after the convention. Only
the super delegates can decide what happens with the Democratic nominee!
We need to put our efforts into changing their minds! The following is a
letter I sent to my state super delegates. Please use the following link
to write to your own delegates and feel free to copy or modify what I wrote.
"The super delegate vote will determine the healthy survival
or possible death of the Democratic party! Hillary or Trump are both
unacceptable candidates and would be disasters for the country! We should
not be forced to choose between them! Polls show that most Bernie
supporters will not vote for Hillary under any circumstances and I am
one of them! Hillary may survive her legal woes past the primary but
Trump will use them to win if she is the candidate. To avoid that probability
please vote for Bernie Sanders as the Democratic nominee for president!
Super delegates have a serious decision to make. Vote for Hillary with
the likelihood of a Trump presidency and a drastically shrinking party
or vote for Bernie and open the doors to millions of new Democrats with
a revitalized and growing party! I hope you make the right decision!
Thank you"
Use the link below to send to all super delegates. Copy my message, modify
or write your own. It only takes about fifteen minutes to send to all delegates
state by state but leave your zip code blank in the form. This may be our
last chance to get Bernie in the White House! http://www.lobbydelegates.com/engage.php
Eileen Kerrigan -> aguy777
Are you high?!?! She has NO record of achieving ANYTHING of consequence,
other than have a road and a post office named. And her "experience" includes
things like supporting (and receiving money from) violent third-world dictators,
peddling fracking all over the world, selling political favors in exchange
for donations to the Clinton Foundation Money-Laundering Operation, and
leaving a trail of bodies composed of people who "accidentally" died when
they knew too much about her and her criminal/sexual predator husband.
As for continuing in Obama's footsteps, that would mean more war, more
fracking, passing the TPP, more pollution, more corruption, more income
inequality, more offshore tax havens ... yeah, that sounds like a GREAT
plan!!
Vote for Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate. Bernie should have endorsed
her, but took the safe route (for him to remain in the thick of the Dem
party).
toosinbeymen
The article references tpp as a deal breaker for progressives, which
of course it should be. The writer should have mentioned that Obama is pushing
hard for the tpp - corporate sellout that he is.
DrRoss555
I just watched Mrs. Clinton speak in Ohio. She is such a nasty, pandering
fear monger....I guess the other side is too, but this woman takes it to
unprecedented levels.
Nasty...no wonder black people are on the hunt for cops....just listen
to this woman
dougtheavenger -> DrRoss555
THE WAGES OF MOST BLACK AMERICANS ARE KEPT ARTIFICIALLY LOW BY POLICIES
ENDORSED BY HILLARY.
The influx of cheap, immigrant labor keeps wages low, but this is NOT
the result of free market forces. Cheap immigrant labor is subsidized by
the government. Without government subsidy 50% of immigrants would not come
and 100% of those earning less than $15/hour would not come. Lacking certain
advantages that natives have, immigrants cannot live on the wages half of
them earn. Only governmenT subsidy of low wages EITC, etc. make immigration
(at the cost of $7,000 for a family of 4) a rational choice for them.
SagiGirl -> DrRoss555
Jill Stein is such a contrast to Hillary. She's calm and cool, well spoken,
and has human-based values along with a mighty strength and intellect. I
can't wait to vote for her.
mjclarity
Clinton is the Blair of the Democratic party, a Republican/Tory in progressive
clothing. So emulating the failed politics of laying opposition cuckoos
in the progressive nest seems like a bad tactic to me.
dougtheavenger -> mjclarity
Hillary is mainly a crook. Yes, she supports TPP and NAFTA and other
policies that keep wages artificially low, but she does it for money, not
ideology.
ID704291
When Ann O'Leary says, "We are not going to get there unless we elect
Hillary Clinton to be president," she sounds pretty tone deaf. Kossacks
have banned all discussion of concerns about Clinton on their blog, basically
telling the left to get lost.
Democracy for America is toothless and leaderless, and its unattended
locals tend to go off the rails attracting neo Nazis and other extremists.
DNC is pushing education as they have since the 1980s, but that really only
means that if you cannot afford it, or aren't among the highest in your
class, you don't matter, and it's your fault you are doing better.
That's a pretty small consolation to struggling people and why they
gravitate to a guy like Trump. Trump is successfully attacking from the
left. I had a Trump supporter arguing TPP to me the other day. Democrats
claim to be the "unity" party, but still tell those of us on the left to
shut up and put up with their corporate policy. I have yet to have a Democrat
argue anything but Trump fear in support of their candidate.
Otterboxman Yep
Hillary will never get my vote. I've voted democrat in the past but will
not vote democrat this year. I can barely stand it when Trump opens his
mouth, but it is even worse when Hillary does. The current POTUS has taken
us so far off course that Hillary's plan will never bring us back on course.
It is about jobs, our productivity, and our pursuit of happiness. The two
parties don't get it. They want to make it about race, gender, abortion,
guns, citizenship...They should make it about the good things that the USA
had going for it and quit picking out which group got trampled to get there.
We were great but now we just sit across from each other pointing fingers
and calling names.
Stephen Mitchell 11h ago
1. Sanders: Clinton has backed "virtually every trade agreement that
has cost the workers of this country millions of jobs"
2. Sanders: Clinton is in the pocket of Wall Street
3. Sanders: Hillary Clinton = D.C. Establishment
4. Sanders: Democrat Establishment immigration policies would drive down
Americans' wages, create open borders
5. Sanders: Clinton supports nation-building in Middle East through war
and invasion
Sanders: "And now, I support her 100%."
DurbanPoisonWillBurn
Anyone who believes Hillary is progressive deserves the horrible outcome
a Hillary presidency will bring. How ANYONE can still support Hillary is
beyond me. The woman has accomplished NOTHING except chaos & failure. Wake
up folks. Hillary does NOT care about you. She cares about power, money,
and making deals that benefit HER. Vote Jill Stein
DurbanPoisonWillBurn JimJayuu
Just a heads up. Trump is AGAINST TPP. Trump is AGAINST Super PAC's
& ridiculous money in politics. Trump is AGAINST foreign interventionist
wars. On the flip side, Hillary WILL sign TPP into law if elected. She will
NEVER fight against Super PAC's or campaign finance because she IS the problem
in that arena. Hillary is also a war hawk who not only supported the Iraq
War, but also delivered us Libya, Syria, ISIS, and so on.
Daniel Staggers
"If she picks someone like [Massachusetts senator] Elizabeth Warren who
has this track record of fighting for the issues that people care about
... that will be a signal that will energise greatly the Democratic base,"
All that would mean is she knows that's all she'd have to do to get the
stupid people to vote for her. You know, like the person who wrote this
article? Never mind committing treason hundreds of times over, just get
Warren, right?
clicker2 -> Daniel Staggers
The Guardian seemingly could care less about Hillary's crimes! They
want to shove her cluelessness down everyones throats. She was a disaster
as Secretary of State, and would be an even worse President. People are
starting to wise up about the agenda of left-wing media. Hillary is a criminal,
and the Guardian supports her totally... It speaks to the lack of integrity
at the Guardian!
DurbanPoisonWillBurn -> Daniel Staggers
Pocahontas is a sellout just like Bernie. Elizabeth Warren is a fraud.
She claims progressive but lives like a neo-liberal war hawk. Just the sight
of Warren disgusts progressives the world over. And for the record,
Hillary is NOT a progressive, will NEVER be a progressive, and has NO interest
in progressives after they vote for her. THAT IS THE TRUTH.
Steve Connor
Hillary (and Bernie) shows just how low the Democrat party has become
in terms of true leadership and ideas for making America great again. They
have none. Bernie's popularity was with young voters looking for a free
ride and typical idealistic view of the world, Hillary was the embodiment
of corruption in politics and she rose to power on that, not what she did
for her adopted State of NY, or the country. Her ideas (not her's) are of
failed Democrat policy and ideas over the past 10 years and especially the
last 25.
Ezajur -> Steve Connor
Bernie was not about a free ride. He was about reprioritisation. His
ideas to make America great again are excellent.
eastbayradical
Wall Street's Warmongering Madame is the perfect foil for Donald Trump's
huckster-populism: a pseudo-progressive stooge whose contempt for the average
person and their intelligence is palpable.
She's an arch-environmentalist who has worked tirelessly to spread fracking
globally.
She supports fortifying Social Security but won't commit to raising the
cap on taxes to do so.
She's a humanitarian who has supported every imperial slaughter the US
has waged in the past 25 years.
She cares deeply about the plight of the Palestinians but supported the
starvation blockade and blitzkrieg of Gaza and couldn't bother to mention
them but in passing in a recent speech before AIPAC.
She's a stalwart civil libertarian, but voted for Patriot Acts 1 and
2 and believes Edward Snowden should be sent to federal prison for decades.
She stands with the working class but has supported virtually every international
pact granting increased mobility and power to the corporate sector at its
expense in the past 25 years.
She cares with all her heart about African-Americans but supports the
objectively-racist death penalty and the private prison industry.
She will go to bat for the poor but supported gutting welfare in the
'90s, making them easier prey to exploiters, many of whom supported her
husband and her financially.
She worries about the conditions of the poor globally, but while Sec.
of State actively campaigned against raising the minimum wage in Haiti to
60 cents an hour, thinking 31 cents an hour sounded better for the investor
class whose interests are paramount to her.
She's not a bought-and-paid-for hack, oh no, no, no, but she won't ever
release the Wall Street speeches for which she was paid so handsomely.
She's a true-blue progressive, just ask her most zealous supporters,
who aren't.
Missy Saugus
I won't vote for a party that rigged the primaries from Sanders by
committing election fraud against his supporters. Why is this being
ignored and shoved under the rug? The nomination rightfully belongs to Sanders.
It is the ultimate insult to expect people to vote for the ones who stole
this from Sanders. The ones who, now that the precedent has been set, will
be sure that the next Bernie Sanders has no chance. The Dems are dirty.
They are criminal. And apparently untouchable.
Bernie should have walked. #FreeBernie
ID550456
If Clinton picks a Clintonite neoliberal VP: pro TPP, pro GMO, pro banker,
pro oil, etc. I think it's a safe bet that most of Sanders' supporters will
either sit out the election or vote Green Party, however revolting the prospect
of Trump/Pence may be. I know I will.
Fear4Freedom
"A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll indicates one third of Bernie Sanders'
supporters cannot see themselves voting for Hillary Clinton in November.
This could spell trouble for Clinton who will likely need Sanders' backers
in order to win the White House." Hillary has a way with "everyday Americans",
it's just not a good way...no one wants to vote for someone they think is
"UNTRUSTWORTHY".
eastbayradical
The new talking point being put forward by Clinton's hapless supporters
is that she'll push to overturn Citizens United.
They know this because she said so in passing at a $20,000 a plate soiree
she had recently in Dollarsville County, USA.
Ezajur -> Rich Fairbanks
Her hapless supporters won primaries with media, establishment, DNC and
big money entirely for her and against Bernie. And he went from 3 to 46%
in 12 months. Now that's worth bragging about.
I suppose getting 54% for such a lousy candidate as Hillary is something
to brag about.
Ezajur -> markdman
I'm a Bernie supporter.
Killary. Drillary. Billary. Shillary.
Its all good.
I also hate Trump.
eastbayradical -> Joe Smith
"The Clinton platform is pretty good for any progressive..."
Clinton has shown a willingness to say whatever she feels needs to be
said to further her political career. She speaks in different dialects depending
the audience. She's a principle combatant against racism when speaking to
African-American audience. She's an ardent feminist when in front of liberal
women's groups. She's not one to spare a laudatory word for corporate America
and Wall Street when speaking before bankers.
What we can and should go on is her record going back to her time as
First Lady during the presidency of Bill Clinton (whom she never differed
with on policy and whom she says will manage the economy if elected).
Here are policies, initiatives, and actions that Hillary Clinton has
supported over the years:
--Deregulation of the investment banks (and against reinstatement of
Glass-Steagall)
--The destruction of welfare (which has caused the numbers living in extreme
poverty to double since its passage)
--NAFTA
--The Defense of Marriage Act
--TPP
--Fracking
--The objectively-racist death penalty
--The private prison industry
--Patriot Acts 1 and 2
--The Iraq War
--The bombing of Libya
--Military intervention in Syria
--The Saudi dictatorship
--Israel's starvation blockade and blitzkrieg against Gaza
--The right-wing coup in Honduras
--Investor-friendly repression and cronyism in Haiti
--A 31 cents/hour minimum wage in Haiti (and against attempts to raise it)
--The fight against free public university tuition
--The fight against single-payer health care
--Acceptance of tens of millions of dollars of corporate money
--Credit-card industry favored bankruptcy laws
--The bail-out of Wall Street
Her record is "pretty good for any progressive" whose head is lodged
in their ass.
eastbayradical
The bankers' buddy and spittle-flecked Clinton surrogate Barney Frank
just the other day declared contemptuously that party platforms are "irrelevant."
You know, party platforms--like the Democratic Party platform that's
being larded with Sanders-friendly "policy goals" that Wall Street's Warmongering
Madame will feel no obligation to fulfill if she's elected president.
With his coming endorsement, Sanders makes himself not simply useless
to the fight against the capitalist status quo; no--he has become a direct
impediment to it.
Whenever people on the left side of the political spectrum, whatever
their reasoning, vote for servants of Wall Street, the Pentagon, and the
national security apparatus, the political center of gravity moves another
notch decisively to the right.
We're constantly told that if we don't vote for the latest pseudo-progressive
stooge the Dems put forward that we're effectively voting for the Republicans.
In other words, if we don't vote for stooges who in many respects are
indistinguishable from Republicans, that systematically cede the political
initiative to Republicans, that it is we who might as well be Republicans!
Meanwhile, these same "progressives" are nowhere to be seen when a fight
kicks off in the streets against imperial war or austerity or police brutality
or lay-offs. No, of course not: they're too busy doing nothing waiting for
the next opportunity to vote for another crop of corporate liberals who'll
save us from the Republicans.
It's fair to ask what all this voting for corporate liberals has gotten
us over the past 25 years. Here's a list of signature policies supported
and/or enacted by the last two Democratic Party presidents, Bill Clinton
and Barack Obama:
--Deregulation of investment banks and telecommunications
--The Omnibus Crime Bill (mass incarceration)
--The destruction of welfare (which caused extreme poverty to double in
the 15 years after its passage)
--The sanctions regime against Iraq (which killed 500,000 Iraqi children)
--NAFTA
--CAFTA
--TPP
--Fracking
--The objectively-racist death penalty
--The Defense of Marriage Act
--Historic levels of repression against whistle-blowers
--Preservation of Bush-era tax cuts on the rich
--Patriots Acts 1 and 2
--Massive expansion of NSA spying
--Years of foot-dragging on climate change
--Support for Israeli atrocities
--Support for the right-wing coup in Honduras
--Support for fraudulent election in Haiti
--Support for the Saudi dictatorship
--Support for a 31 cents/hour minimum wage in Haiti and against attempts
to raise it
--Oil drilling on the Atlantic seaboard, Gulf of Mexico, and the Arctic
--A $1 trillion 20-year "modernization" of the US's nuclear weapons arsenal
--Historically high numbers of deportations
--Drone missile strikes that have killed large numbers of civilians and
inflamed anti-US hatred
--Health care reform that has fortified the power of the insurance cartel
not weakened or obliterated it
--Industry-approved bankruptcy "reform"
--The bail-out of Wall Street
ClearItUp
Her reflexive warmongering attitude is what majority of progressives
have problems with. There is absolutely nothing in this article about it.
Elizabeth Warren won't solve Hillary's problem, but a foreign policy, total
opposite of her last speech, that was reviewed by neocon talking heads,
as a sober analysis, is what is wrong. What people want to hear is: "We
made a mistake in Iraq, Libya, and Syria. We will do our best and resolve
them without machinations, and never engage in regime change." No ifs and
buts, we will defend out friends and allies, nonsense she constantly says,
no annihilating threat to any country, for any reason. Bring someone like
Phyllis Bennis on board as an adviser. Maybe she can teach Hillary a few
things. Only, then if she clearly shows she has changed course, she may
start getting a little ahead.
"... If undertaken in earnest, the exercise will prove uncomfortable. The establishment centrists who oppose Trump worry, as they should, that he will violate the civil liberties of Muslim Americans, yet few spoke up when Michael Bloomberg presided over a secret program that profiled and spied on Muslim American students, sowing mistrust while generating zero counterterrorism leads. ..."
"... The establishment centrists who denounced Edward Snowden would have to admit that, if Trump is half as bad as they fear, Americans will be better served knowing the scope and capabilities of NSA surveillance than living in ignorance of it. Some will be forced to admit to themselves that they hope the military remains sprinkled with whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning to speak out against serious abuses. ..."
"... For 16 years or more, establishment centrists have been complicit in a historically reckless trend. Come 2017, it may place Donald Trump at a big table, much like the one on The Apprentice ..."
Wake up, establishment centrists: Donald Trump is coming!
After the Vietnam War and Watergate and the spying scandals uncovered by
the Church Committee and the Nixon Administration cronies who nearly firebombed
the Brookings Institution, Americans were briefly inclined to rein in executive
power-a rebuke to Richard Nixon's claim that "if the president does it, that
means it's not illegal." Powerful committees were created to oversee misconduct-prone
spy agencies. The War Powers Resolution revived a legislative check on warmaking.
"In 34 years," Vice President Dick Cheney would lament to ABC News in a January
2002 interview, "I have repeatedly seen an erosion of the powers and the ability
of the president of the United States to do his job. I feel an obligation...
to pass on our offices in better shape than we found them to our successors."
The Bush Administration aggressively moved to expand executive power, drawing
on the dubious legal maneuvering of David Addington, John Yoo, and their enablers.
Starting in 2005, the junior senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, would repeatedly
insist that Bush's assertions of executive power violated the Constitution.
Nonetheless, Obama inherited a newly powerful executive branch, just as Cheney
had hoped. And rather than dismantle it, Obama spent two terms lending the imprimatur
of centrist, establishment bipartisanship to Cheney's vision.
Now, Donald Trump is coming.
Civil libertarians have long warned the partisans who trusted Bush and Obama,
and the establishment centrists who couldn't imagine anyone in the White House
besides an Al Gore or John Kerry or John McCain or Mitt Romney, that they were
underestimating both the seriousness of civil liberties abuses under Bush and
Obama and the likelihood of even less responsible leaders wreaking havoc in
the White House.
Three years ago, in "
All the Infrastructure a Tyrant Would Need, Courtesy of Bush and Obama ,"
I warned that "more and more, we're counting on having angels in office and
making ourselves vulnerable to devils," and that come January, 2017, an unknown
person would enter the Oval Office and inherit all of these precedents:
The president can order American citizens killed, in secret, without
any judicial or legislative review, by declaring them terrorists posing
an imminent threat.
The president can detain prisoners indefinitely without charges or trial.
The president can start a torture program with impunity.
The president can conduct warrantless surveillance on tens of millions
of Americans and tap a database that allows metadata archived in 2007 to
be accessed in 2017.
The federal government can
collect and store DNA swabs of people who have been arrested even if
they are released and never convicted of any crime.
Now, Donald Trump is coming. And many establishment centrists are professing
alarm. There is nothing more establishment than Robert Kagan, a fellow at the
Brookings Institution, writing an op-ed in the Washington Post. He
begins by observing that if Trump wins, his coalition will include tens of millions
of Americans.
"Imagine the power he would wield then," Kagan
wrote . "In addition to all that comes from being the leader of a mass following,
he would also have the immense powers of the American presidency at his command:
the Justice Department, the FBI, the intelligence services, the military. Who
would dare to oppose him then? Certainly not a Republican Party that laid down
before him even when he was comparatively weak. And is a man like Trump, with
infinitely greater power in his hands, likely to become more humble, more judicious,
more generous, less vengeful than he is today, than he has been his whole life?
Does vast power un-corrupt?"
Kagan's article seemed well-received and widely shared among establishment
centrists.
Yet neither he nor most others who share his fears have yet acknowledged
their bygone failures of imagination, or granted that civil libertarians were
right: The establishment has permitted the American presidency to get dangerously
powerful.
While writing or sharing articles that compare Trump to Hitler, Mussolini,
and Franco, few if any have called on Obama or Congress to act now "
to tyrant-proof the White House ." However much they fear Trump, however
rhetorically maximalist they are in warning against his elevation, even the
prospect of him controlling the entire apparatus of the national security state
is not enough to cause them to rethink their reckless embrace of what Gene Healy
calls "
The Cult of the Presidency ," a centrist religion that persisted across
the Bush administration's torture chambers and the Obama administration's unlawful
War in Libya.
With a reality-TV bully is on the doorstep of the White House, still they
hesitate to urge reform to a branch of government they've long regarded as more
than co-equal.
They needn't wait for the Nixon-era abuses to replay themselves as farce
or worse to change course. Their inaction is irresponsible. Just as the conservative
movement is duty bound to grapple with its role in a populist demagogue seizing
control of the Republican Party, establishment centrists ought to grapple with
the implicit blessing they've given to the extraordinary powers Trump would
inherit, and that even the less-risky choice, Hillary Clinton, would likely
abuse.
If undertaken in earnest, the exercise will prove uncomfortable. The
establishment centrists who oppose Trump worry, as they should, that he will
violate the civil liberties of Muslim Americans, yet few spoke up when Michael
Bloomberg presided over a secret program that profiled and spied on Muslim American
students, sowing mistrust while generating zero counterterrorism leads.
The establishment centrists who denounced Edward Snowden would have to
admit that, if Trump is half as bad as they fear, Americans will be better served
knowing the scope and capabilities of NSA surveillance than living in ignorance
of it. Some will be forced to admit to themselves that they hope the military
remains sprinkled with whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning to speak out against
serious abuses.
For 16 years or more, establishment centrists have been complicit in a historically
reckless trend. Come 2017, it may place Donald Trump at a big table, much like
the one on The Apprentice , where he'll decide not which B-list celebrity
to fire, but which humans to kill. Establishment centrists could work to strip
the presidency of that power.
"... The two lead families of the Democratic Party hate each other. ..."
"... Barack Obama comes off as narcissistic, lazy, and shielded from reality by advisor Valerie Jarrett, effectively the shadow president since 2009. ..."
"... I get the feeling the Clintons shrewdly used this book to get their version of events into play. ..."
"... The new news is the medical stuff. Hillary's health problems have been more serious than generally noted. And Bill's heart condition is serious; Klein quotes his doctor, by name, telling him the disease is progressive, i.e. it will continue to get steadily worse. Bill's obsession with sealing his own legacy by putting Hillary in the White House has become single-minded. It's suggested this is the primary thing he wants to get done before he dies. ..."
"... You see Obama good at campaigning and manipulating, but not much else. ..."
"... There's lots of dirt about both couples. Bill still womanizes intensively; you wonder if he'll die `in the saddle' like Nelson Rockefeller did. A guy with a bad heart condition? ..."
"... He and Hillary lead separate lives, talking daily on the phone but rarely in each other's presence, and Hillary tells friends he'll have little presence in her White House should she be elected. ..."
"... some presidential couples become closer in the White House, where they finally have physical proximity after years of separation on the campaign trail, but this didn't happen with the Obamas, who are effectively estranged. ..."
"... The same day, the Wall Street Journal had a front page story about Hillary distancing herself from the Obama administration. This is exactly what the book says she would do - it's half revenge, and half good politics, as seen by Bill Clinton, with the Obama administration in a tailspin on any number of fronts. ..."
The two lead families of the Democratic Party hate each other.
Edward Klein documents why and how in this entertaining and fast moving
book. It's a good political beach read.
It's mostly about three elections: that of 2008, where Barack Obama came
from behind to knock off front-runner Hillary Clinton for the nomination,
with charges and countercharges of race-card-playing in the South Carolina
primary; 2012, where Bill Clinton made a whizbang nominating speech for
someone he can't stand and Hillary drank the Kool-Aid in agreeing to lie
about Benghazi - `it was a spontaneous riot caused by a video' - to seal
Obama's reelection; and the 2016 election, where Obama promised Clinton
he'd support Hillary in exchange for their carrying his water, then reneged
on it.
There are tons of details and fly-on-the-wall accounts of conversations.
The Clintons come off much better than the Obamas do. We know most of the
Clintons' dirt already and, as a nation, don't seem to care too much, but
meanwhile they seem to have a clue about how to run the country, while the
Obamas don't. Barack Obama comes off as narcissistic, lazy, and shielded
from reality by advisor Valerie Jarrett, effectively the shadow president
since 2009.
I get the feeling the Clintons shrewdly used this book to get their
version of events into play. Klein found leakers near the Obamas who
are unhappy with them, but many Clinton sources appear to be lifelong friends
seemingly given the green light to talk for this book - people who wouldn't
jeopardize their relationship to do so. And for many of the quotations,
there would be no question in the Clintons' minds who had given them - people
party to conversations where only one or two others were present. So it
stands to reason the anonymous sources don't mind the Clintons knowing.
The Clintons, heavily covered for over 20 years, may realize there isn't
much that can hurt them that hasn't already been printed. We all know about
Monica, Clinton's womanizing, the financial scandals dating back to Arkansas
days, Hillary's temper and so on. And a lot of the inside poop here is either
flattering - Bill Clinton as political mastermind, say - or humanizing.
It's remarkable that the Clintons stay together after all they've been through,
but they seem politically fascinated with each other. And it's remarkable
how many times Hillary initially tells Bill off about something, only to
agree later that he's right and go ahead with it. Quite cute, say, is the
anecdote about how Bill convinced Hillary to "have some work done" on her
face after leaving the State Department, by first doing it himself.
The new news is the medical stuff. Hillary's health problems have
been more serious than generally noted. And Bill's heart condition is serious;
Klein quotes his doctor, by name, telling him the disease is progressive,
i.e. it will continue to get steadily worse. Bill's obsession with sealing
his own legacy by putting Hillary in the White House has become single-minded.
It's suggested this is the primary thing he wants to get done before he
dies.
The Obamas seem more on the defensive and more paranoid. You don't get
any sense of Klein's sources spinning the narrative back in their direction.
Barack comes across as a narcissist stemming from a deepset insecurity about
his lack of experience pre-presidency. He's someone who doesn't read much
beyond popular novels but thinks he's brilliant. He's visibly bored with
the dull business of running the country. He doesn't prepare in advance
for big international conferences, who he'll meet and what they'll talk
about; he figures he'll just wing it. Detractors (like Hillary) call his
administration "rudderless".
He's threatened by Bill Clinton, who not only isn't intimidated by him
but tries to lecture him. (There's a priceless account of a dinner between
the two couples - the strained conversations, Obama ignoring Clinton by
reading his Blackberry under the table, Obama sneaking out and coming back
a while later smelling of cigarettes.) He's shielded from much by Valerie
Jarrett, who surrounds him with sycophants and upon whom he relies too much.
She has her own room in the presidential quarters and is the only outsider
who eats with the family. He thinks he can move the world with his speeches.
You see Obama good at campaigning and manipulating, but not much
else. Michelle more or less invites herself and friends to Oprah Winfrey's
Hawaii estate for a joint birthday party, in part to draw her back into
the Obamas' camp and keep her out of Hillary's. The weeklong stay goes fine,
but Oprah resists any political rapprochement, and even starts promoting
Hillary not long afterwards.
Obama picks Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg (a third Democratic family as
powerful as the Obamas or Clintons) as ambassador to Japan, a way-too-late
thanks for Kennedy family support in 2008 - and, apparently, just to get
her halfway around the world from Hillary's candidacy.
It amazes me that the Obamas would work this hard to undermine their
own party's frontrunner for the 2016 nomination. The Clintons will have
raised a billion dollars for the run.
There's lots of dirt about both couples. Bill still womanizes intensively;
you wonder if he'll die `in the saddle' like Nelson Rockefeller did. A guy
with a bad heart condition?
His penthouse over the Clinton Library in Little Rock is his bachelor
pad - Hillary avoids Little Rock - and effectively the Playboy Mansion South,
the scene of many swinging parties. Klein suggests that the town not only
shields its favorite son from scrutiny, but that its women, married and
single alike, line up to sleep with him. Klein quotes one person saying
Clinton will hit on married women even in front of their own husbands. (You'd
think in Arkansas this would get a man shot, but then most other men there
don't enjoy lifelong Secret Service protection.) He and Hillary lead
separate lives, talking daily on the phone but rarely in each other's presence,
and Hillary tells friends he'll have little presence in her White House
should she be elected.
Klein notes some presidential couples become closer in the White
House, where they finally have physical proximity after years of separation
on the campaign trail, but this didn't happen with the Obamas, who are effectively
estranged. Michelle Obama, of whom White House staffers are terrified,
will burst in suddenly on her husband if he's in a room with other women;
she's suspicious of him, believing he'd like to emulate Clinton's ways.
Her post-White House plans, according to this book, don't include him. She
and Valerie Jarrett, who plans to follow her, envision a high life of globetrotting
funded by wealthy donors where they sit on corporate boards and don't have
to do much work.
Barack Obama wants to retain control of the party, but Bill Clinton already
sees him losing his clout and political capital.
The real question mark goes back to Bill Clinton's health. If he dies
- a guy with this bad a heart condition? Waitresses and Little Rock matrons,
think about it - some think Hillary, relying upon his advice forever, may
not go ahead with a presidential run. It often sounds like more his obsession
than hers, other than the first-woman-president thing. The family foundation's
reins have been handed to Chelsea, in part to take pressure off Bill, and
she is being positioned as his replacement as Mom's closest advisor and
confidante. Others think Chelsea would encourage her mother to run if Bill
dies because it's what he would have wanted. You get the feeling that Hillary,
for all her ambition, doesn't have all that much fire in the belly - that
it's Bill who's given her the vision, encouraged her, pushed her, made her
see a path through obstacles, and been willing to fight battles large and
small where she would have been more inclined to go along, get along and
acquiesce.
Truly surreal is the ending. Bill tells an appalled Hillary, in front
of friends, exactly how to stage his funeral if he dies before the election:
what to wear (widow's weeds), where to do it (Arlington, he's a former commander
in chief.) If properly done, he said, the video footage will be worth a
couple of million votes." Not for nothing do they call him the smartest
political mind of his time.
PS The day before I filed this, I saw a story online at Business Insider
quoting an unnamed Clinton confidante attacking this book as lies, all lies,
nothing but lies. The story didn't specifically rebut anything or cite any
specific error in the book; it reprised a finding of an error in one of
Klein's previous books. It suggests to me, though, this book is right, if
the attack against it is as unspecific as "lies, lies, nothing but lies."
Perhaps the Clinton camp is doing some preventive public fulminating so
that they can deny the unflattering or unfavorable parts of it. I still
think they planted a lot of this.
The same day, the Wall Street Journal had a front page story about
Hillary distancing herself from the Obama administration. This is exactly
what the book says she would do - it's half revenge, and half good politics,
as seen by Bill Clinton, with the Obama administration in a tailspin on
any number of fronts.
"... Valerie Jarrett is the third partner in the Obama marriage. She is the mother figure Obama turns to for solace while she is Michelle';s closet confidant. This tiger lady calls the shots influencing the POTUS and his power spouse. ..."
"... Both Hillary and Bill Clinton have serious health problems they seek to disguise. Hillary and Bill have both had extensive cosmetic surgery. ..."
Blood Feud is a political hardball slammed into the guts of the two most powerful
couples in the Democratic Party. Ed Klein who won fame for his earlier ":The
Amateur": book about the Obama dysfunctional White House has returned with another
blockbuster rich with gossip and political junkie insider poop.
Among the
revelations of Mr Klein":
The Clintons and Obamas loathe one another.
The Clintons worked hard for Obama to be re-elected in 2008. They anticipated
that this support would result in Obama';s support for Hillary in her anticipated
2016 quest for the POTUS. This deal has not seen fruition. The Clintons
accuse Obama of lying and a lack of loyalty to the Clintons.
Michelle Obama wears the pants in the family as Barack is an uxorious
husband. Michelle has considered a run for the Illinois Senate seat but
is wary of this political race due to the hard work it would entail.
Valerie Jarrett is the third partner in the Obama marriage. She
is the mother figure Obama turns to for solace while she is Michelle';s
closet confidant. This tiger lady calls the shots influencing the POTUS
and his power spouse.
Both Hillary and Bill Clinton have serious health problems they
seek to disguise. Hillary and Bill have both had extensive cosmetic surgery.
Bill Clinton continues his adulterous ways.
Look for a Hillary run for president in 2016 in a campaign masterminded
by Bill. Both Clintons are eager to return to the White House.
Oprah Winfrey feels betrayed by the Obamas and has little to do with
them. She will probably support Hillary in 2016 as will Caroline and the
Kennedy family.
Hillary and the State Department screwed up the Benghazi terrorist attack
and covered up to protect their butts.
Obama has proven to be a weak chief executive who is unable to work
well with congressional leaders. Obama is not well respected in the Democratic
Party.
Edward Klein has done yeoman-like work in presenting this short but very
revealing look into the lives of the Clintons and Obamas.
All readers who want to learn more about the kind of people leading our nation
should read this book and have their eyes opened.
Recommended and controversial. Read it and decide what you think!
"... Fink has also promoted the privatization of Social Security, while mocking the idea of retiring at 65, which is easy for a business executive who sits at a desk all day to say, rather than working on an assembly line or as a waiter. ..."
"... Well it's dog eat dog and I gotta think about my own needs at this stage. Ergo, here I stay. And someone younger will have to wait. Not great. If I felt more secure about SS & Medicare, I would be more willing to retire sooner, rather than later. But not the way things look now. ..."
"... He was more than mildly successful in his own landscaping business after being forced out, but the way he was treated will forever remind me of what advantage some corporations will try to get away with, and has always persuaded me not to invest in my own company's, less protected 401(k) selections ..."
"... Never heard of this parasite, so thanks for the heads up. I'm sure HRC will find some very useful role for him in her admin. ..."
"... BlackRock is a blight. Ugh. Just gets worse by the day. ..."
"... Don't count out Jamie, nor Victoria Nuland as Secretary of State. ..."
"... Some role too for Samantha Powers. Ugh. ..."
"... The reason I will never ever vote for HRC is that every single thing that comes out of her mouth is horse manure. It's so easy for her to say, "I will raise taxes on the rich", for example, knowing full well that later she can just say "we tried, but it was not politically possible" due to any of a hundred reasons. ..."
"... Her campaign promises now are totally meaningless. I'm interested in possible third party candidates McAffee and Jesse Ventura, who could actually win the election, but if I have a choice between the Donald and the Hildabeast, I will choose Trump. ..."
Fink has also promoted the privatization of Social Security,
while mocking the idea of retiring at 65, which is easy for a business
executive who sits at a desk all day to say, rather than working on
an assembly line or as a waiter.
Yes, I know this is Dayen's quote and not Yves'.
But I'm disturbed every time I see this argument about "desk work" vs
"manual labor" WRT working longer. Its true of course but fails to recognize
that many who sit behind desks are also being forced out of their jobs (and
yes, this includes "business executives" too) well before 65, have little
chance of being hired for anything else and thus don't really have a choice
to work longer. Unless you're part of the super elite you're not much better
off than the manual laborer when it comes to staying employed past your
mid to late fifties, let alone your mid to late sixties.
I'm extremely lucky (and know it and am grateful) to have what is viewed
as a "desk job" as I approach my golden years. I am able to and plan to
keep working possibly into my early '70s. Why? Well for one thing: because
I can. For another, to save as much as possible just in case. Child of Depression
Era parents, yadda yadda. And if I can pass on something to my nieces and
nephews… well good.
The problem as I see it is not so much that I am able to continue working
into my 70s but that my ability to do so, combined with that sinking feeling
that I really should and need to due to current circumstances, is that I
am preventing someone younger from ascending the ladder. And at this time,
someone would definitely be hired or promoted to take my place.
Well it's dog eat dog and I gotta think about my own needs at this
stage. Ergo, here I stay. And someone younger will have to wait. Not great.
If I felt more secure about SS & Medicare, I would be more willing to retire
sooner, rather than later. But not the way things look now.
Can't find the details but I think I recall some startling tid bits about
W.T. Grant advising Reagan's commission on overhauling military retirement
pay (part of which was greatly increasing allowances for food clothing and
housing that were not included in retirement pay calculations). We had the
odd situations of retirees that retired early enough (grandfathered, I think),
that got higher retirement pay (based on 50% of base pay which, for them,
was a far higher percentage of their total pay) than those of us who retired
later, at higher total pay, but a lower percentage of base pay, such that
the earlier retirees cost of living raises outpaced our keeping up with
inflation).
After the deed was done, I thought I heard that only four or five W.T.
Grant employees that had built up substantial seniority that would have
provided healthy retirement pay were able to remain employed until they
reached 65 years of age (and that they were essentially senior executives
at or near the top).
The more common case seemed to be like my friend's father, a master of
many trades, seemingly a most effective employee in any position assigned,
as well as being a well regarded President of the Lions Club and active
in other civic minded organizations, promoted into a management position
at Uniroyal, seemingly to exempt him from union protection. They found his
capabilities "inadequate" at 17.5 years, just when he would have started
accumulating substantial retirement benefits.
He was more than mildly successful in his own landscaping business
after being forced out, but the way he was treated will forever remind me
of what advantage some corporations will try to get away with, and has always
persuaded me not to invest in my own company's, less protected 401(k) selections
(in my case, the once great Kodak).
The reason I will never ever vote for HRC is that every single thing
that comes out of her mouth is horse manure. It's so easy for her to say,
"I will raise taxes on the rich", for example, knowing full well that later
she can just say "we tried, but it was not politically possible" due to
any of a hundred reasons.
Her campaign promises now are totally meaningless. I'm interested
in possible third party candidates McAffee and Jesse Ventura, who could
actually win the election, but if I have a choice between the Donald and
the Hildabeast, I will choose Trump.
"... ...Bill Clinton was not just being entertained by prostitutes with his brother Roger ... he, Roger and Dan Lasater were partying with HIGH SCHOOL GIRLS when Clinton was a married governor in his early 30's. I don't know what the age of consent is in Arkansas, but Clinton and Co. were getting pretty damn close... ..."
"... The sleaziest pair to lie, cheat, and steal their way to political power. Sad to realize this country has turned stupid and apathetic while ignoring the current Bonnie and Clyde ruining our country. I approve of the Ceaucescu method of removing evil. ..."
"... And it's critical that ANYONE who votes in our next election read this book. Because Hillary Clinton is one of the most evil players on the world state today, and this book proves it. Just google 'mena arkansas clinton bush', or 'hillary rape lawyer'...there's so much info here in this book and on the web from court documents, newspaper reports that are never mentioned in the mainstream more than once (they got quashed), FOIA results. ..."
"... Wow. This book is just incredible. The Oklahoma City bombing, Waco, Vince Foster, Jerry Parks, Barry Seal, an international Cocaine trade, the airport at Mena - the list of Bill Clinton's acts of corruption and criminality goes on and on. ..."
"... And don't get the wrong idea: Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is not some tabloid sensationalist; he's a legitimate and well-respected journalist for London's Daily Telegraph and every charge here is substantiated by facts: photographs, declassified FBI documents, interviews with eyewitnesses, and so on and so on, an avalanche of facts. ..."
"... This book is best read in conjunction with Terry Reed's book " Compromised: Clinton, Bush and the CIA " to get the full picture of just how much Bill Clinton was willing to sell his soul for a shot at the White House. ..."
"... Here's this Brit's take on America's ruling class: "The American Elite, I am afraid to say, is almost beyond redemption. Moral relativism has set in so deeply that the gilded classes have become incapable of discerning right from wrong." That was back in 1997. It's only gotten worse since. The day the "almost" in that sentence disappears, that's the day a second American Revolution will start. And when it does, justice will finally catch up with Bill and Hillary. ..."
...Bill Clinton was not just being entertained by prostitutes with
his brother Roger ... he, Roger and Dan Lasater were partying with HIGH
SCHOOL GIRLS when Clinton was a married governor in his early 30's. I don't
know what the age of consent is in Arkansas, but Clinton and Co. were getting
pretty damn close...
The sleaziest pair to lie, cheat, and steal their way to political power.
Sad to realize this country has turned stupid and apathetic while ignoring
the current Bonnie and Clyde ruining our country. I approve of the Ceaucescu
method of removing evil.
This one is dated but
not the conduct of the Clintons. It seems whatever they do, nothing seems
to stick. Both being lawyers, they know the law and politics and how to
avoid arrest.
To say I loved
this book would be completely amiss. I hated the info I read in this book,
but I'm not that stupid that I would ignore it either. Because anyone who
has done any research into these two characters, realizes that everything
in this book is unfortunately, true.
And it's critical that ANYONE who votes in our next election read
this book. Because Hillary Clinton is one of the most evil players on the
world state today, and this book proves it. Just google 'mena arkansas clinton
bush', or 'hillary rape lawyer'...there's so much info here in this book
and on the web from court documents, newspaper reports that are never mentioned
in the mainstream more than once (they got quashed), FOIA results.
Folks, we are in serious trouble if this woman gets elected. If you thought
it was bad with George Bush 1 and 2, or Clinton 1. Just wait. Because if
Hillary or Jeb get elected, you might as well get out of this country while
you've got the chance. They will put the final nail in the coffin of what
was the great United States of America.
Do something about it! Vote for ANYONE OTHER THAN DEMOCRAT OR REPUBLICAN.
Wow. This book is just incredible. The Oklahoma City bombing, Waco,
Vince Foster, Jerry Parks, Barry Seal, an international Cocaine trade, the
airport at Mena - the list of Bill Clinton's acts of corruption and criminality
goes on and on.
And don't get the wrong idea: Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is not some
tabloid sensationalist; he's a legitimate and well-respected journalist
for London's Daily Telegraph and every charge here is substantiated by facts:
photographs, declassified FBI documents, interviews with eyewitnesses, and
so on and so on, an avalanche of facts.
Ultimately, there is no smoking gun here. Evans-Pritchard got as close
as he could with the available facts out there. The evidence here is mostly
circumstantial. But circumstantial as it is, the cumulative effect is devastating.
Yes, the federal government knew about the Oklahoma City Bombing in advance.
Yes, Vince Foster was murdered and his body subsequently placed in Fort
Marcy Park in an amateurish attempt to make it look like a suicide. Yes,
Bill Clinton knew all about the international drug trade going on out of
the airport in Mena, Arkanasas and looked the other way (for a price). And
so on and so on.
This book is best read in conjunction with Terry Reed's book "Compromised:
Clinton, Bush and the CIA" to get the full picture of just how much
Bill Clinton was willing to sell his soul for a shot at the White House.
And one of the truly disquieting things this book drives home to the
reader is that the very institutions we look to to prosecute crimes and
expose injustices - the Department of Justice, the FBI, the mainstream media
- seem all to have been co-opted long ago by the White House and corrupted
in the process. Read this book and, at times, you'll think you're living
in the old Soviet Union - and, in a sense, you are.
Here's this Brit's take on America's ruling class: "The American
Elite, I am afraid to say, is almost beyond redemption. Moral relativism
has set in so deeply that the gilded classes have become incapable of discerning
right from wrong." That was back in 1997. It's only gotten worse since.
The day the "almost" in that sentence disappears, that's the day a second
American Revolution will start. And when it does, justice will finally catch
up with Bill and Hillary.
All candidates with the possible exception of Trump, are either neocons or neocon stooges: "Most revealing are their policies concerning
war and peace. Despite minor differences, all three (and those to come) want more military spending.
Each thinks the United States can and should manage stability in the Middle East, on Russia's border,
etc. All three demonize Russia and Iran, countries that do not threaten us. Thus they would risk war,
which would bolster government power while harming the American people and others."
Notable quotes:
"... "Government is not reason, it is not eloquence-it is force! Like fire, it is a dangerous servant, and a fearful master." ..."
"... "The state - or, to make matters more concrete, the government - consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can't get, and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time it is made good by looting 'A' to satisfy 'B'. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is a sort of advanced auction on stolen goods." ..."
"... Do the four declared candidates really fit this picture? You can judge for yourself. Hillary Clinton, the sole Democrat so far, is long associated with activist government across the range of issues domestic and foreign. Her newfound rhetorical populism can't obscure her association with elitist social engineering. ..."
"... What about Republicans Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio? Are they "men of system"? Despite their talk about reining in government, I think the answer is yes. ..."
"... Most revealing are their policies concerning war and peace. Despite minor differences, all three (and those to come) want more military spending. Each thinks the United States can and should manage stability in the Middle East, on Russia's border, etc. All three demonize Russia and Iran, countries that do not threaten us. Thus they would risk war, which would bolster government power while harming the American people and others. ..."
Posted to Politics
As you may have heard, the 2016 presidential campaign is underway. Let's not miss the forest for
the trees. While the candidates will make promises to help the middle class or this or that subgroup,
remember this: each aspirant wants to govern, that is, rule, you – even those whose rhetoric
might suggest otherwise.
George Washington supposedly said:
"Government is not reason, it is not eloquence-it is force! Like fire, it is a dangerous
servant, and a fearful master."
Although no evidence links the quotation to the first president, its truth is indisputable. Like
it or not, government's distinguishing feature, beginning with its power to tax, is its legal authority
to use force against even peaceful individuals minding their own business. Ultimately, that's what
rule means, even in a democratic republic, where each adult gets a vote in choosing who
will rule.
As that keen observer of the American political scene, H. L. Mencken, put it years ago,
"The state - or, to make matters more concrete, the government - consists of a gang of
men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business
of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device
to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can't get, and to promise
to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time it is
made good by looting 'A' to satisfy 'B'. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and
every election is a sort of advanced auction on stolen goods."
If you keep that perspective during the coming campaign, you'll be in a much better position to
judge the candidates than if you take their solemn pronouncements at face value.
Do the four declared candidates really fit this picture? You can judge for yourself. Hillary Clinton,
the sole Democrat so far, is long associated with activist government across the range of issues
domestic and foreign. Her newfound rhetorical populism can't obscure her association with elitist
social engineering.
In The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Adam Smith described such a politician as
"the man of system [who] seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great
society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does
not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that
which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every
single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature
might choose to impress upon it."
Has Clinton ever considered that we're not chess pieces in her grand schemes? We might like to
make our own decisions.
What about Republicans Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio? Are they "men of system"? Despite
their talk about reining in government, I think the answer is yes. At best they propose only
to tinker with the welfare-regulatory-warfare state without challenging the institutional privileges
that enrich the well-connected or the institutional barriers that impede the marginalized in improving
their lives.
One can see their obeisance toward government power in their support for the "war on drugs," the
presumption that government should monitor what we ingest and punish us for violating its prohibitions.
Another sign is the candidates' views on immigration. If people have natural rights, why do they
need the government's permission to live and work here? A third indicator is their position on world
trade. Can you imagine any of them advocating a laissez-faire trade policy with no role for government?
Most revealing are their policies concerning war and peace. Despite minor differences, all three
(and those to come) want more military spending. Each thinks the United States can and should manage
stability in the Middle East, on Russia's border, etc. All three demonize Russia and Iran, countries
that do not threaten us. Thus they would risk war, which would bolster government power while harming
the American people and others.
Appearances can deceive: they're persons of system all.
"... In January, the New York Times finally reported on a secret 2013 Presidential order to the CIA to arm Syrian rebels. As the account explained, Saudi Arabia provides substantial financing of the armaments, while the CIA, under Obama's orders, provides organizational support and training. ..."
"... What kinds of arms are the US, Saudis, Turks, Qataris, and others supplying to the Syrian rebels? Which groups are receiving the arms? What is the role of US troops, air cover, and other personnel in the war? The US government isn't answering these questions, and mainstream media aren't pursuing them, either. ..."
"... Through occasional leaks, investigative reports, statements by other governments, and rare statements by US officials, we know that America is engaged in an active, ongoing, CIA-coordinated war both to overthrow Assad and to fight ISIS. America's allies in the anti-Assad effort include Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, and other countries in the region. The US has spent billions of dollars on arms, training, special operations forces, air strikes, and logistical support for the rebel forces, including international mercenaries. American allies have spent billions of dollars more. The precise sums are not reported. ..."
"... To those at the center of the US military-industrial complex, this secrecy is as it should be. Their position is that a vote by Congress 15 years ago authorizing the use of armed force against those culpable for the 9/11 attack gives the president and military carte blanche to fight secret wars in the Middle East and Africa. Why should the US explain publicly what it is doing? That would only jeopardize the operations and strengthen the enemy. The public does not need to know. ..."
"... I subscribe to a different view: wars should be a last resort and should be constrained by democratic scrutiny. This view holds that America's secret war in Syria is illegal both under the US Constitution (which gives Congress the sole power to declare war) and under the United Nations Charter, and that America's two-sided war in Syria is a cynical and reckless gamble. The US-led efforts to topple Assad are not aimed at protecting the Syrian people, as Obama and Clinton have suggested from time to time, but are a US proxy war against Iran and Russia, in which Syria happens to be the battleground. ..."
"... The stakes of this war are much higher and much more dangerous than America's proxy warriors imagine. As the US has prosecuted its war against Assad, Russia has stepped up its military support to his government. In the US mainstream media, Russia's behavior is an affront: how dare the Kremlin block the US from overthrowing the Syrian government? The result is a widening diplomatic clash with Russia, one that could escalate and lead – perhaps inadvertently – to the point of military conflict. ..."
"... This is the main reason why the US security state refuses to tell the truth. The American people would call for peace rather than perpetual war. Obama has a few months left in office to repair his broken legacy. He should start by leveling with the American people. ..."
Syria's civil war is the most dangerous and destructive crisis on the planet. Since early 2011,
hundreds of thousands have died; around ten million Syrians have been displaced; Europe has been
convulsed with Islamic State (ISIS) terror and the political fallout of refugees; and the United
States and its NATO allies have more than once come perilously close to direct confrontation with
Russia.
Unfortunately, President Barack Obama has greatly compounded the dangers by hiding the US role
in Syria from the American people and from world opinion. An end to the Syrian war requires an honest
accounting by the US of its ongoing, often secretive role in the Syrian conflict since 2011, including
who is funding, arming, training, and abetting the various sides. Such exposure would help bring
to an end many countries' reckless actions.
A widespread – and false – perception is that Obama has kept the US out of the Syrian war. Indeed,
the US right wing routinely criticizes him for having drawn a line in the sand for Syrian President
Bashar al-Assad over chemical weapons, and then backing off when Assad allegedly crossed it (the
issue remains murky and disputed, like so much else in Syria). A leading columnist for the Financial
Times, repeating the erroneous idea that the US has remained on the sidelines,
recently implied that Obama had rejected the advice of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
to arm the Syrian rebels fighting Assad.
Yet the curtain gets lifted from time to time. In January, the New York Times
finally reported on a secret 2013 Presidential order to the CIA to arm Syrian rebels. As the
account explained, Saudi Arabia provides substantial financing of the armaments, while the CIA, under
Obama's orders, provides organizational support and training.
Unfortunately, the story came and went without further elaboration by the US government or follow
up by the New York Times. The public was left in the dark: How big are the ongoing CIA-Saudi
operations? How much is the US spending on Syria per year? What kinds of arms are the US, Saudis,
Turks, Qataris, and others supplying to the Syrian rebels? Which groups are receiving the arms? What
is the role of US troops, air cover, and other personnel in the war? The US government isn't answering
these questions, and mainstream media aren't pursuing them, either.
On
more than a dozen occasions, Obama has told the American people that there would be "no US boots
on the ground." Yet every few months, the public is also notified in a brief government statement
that US special operations forces are being deployed to Syria. The Pentagon
routinely denies that they are in the front lines. But when Russia and the Assad government recently
carried out bombing runs and artillery fire against rebel strongholds in northern Syria, the US notified
the Kremlin that the attacks were threatening American troops on the ground. The public has been
given no explanation about their mission, its costs, or counterparties in Syria.
Through occasional leaks, investigative reports, statements by other governments, and rare
statements by US officials, we know that America is engaged in an active, ongoing, CIA-coordinated
war both to overthrow Assad and to fight ISIS. America's allies in the anti-Assad effort include
Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, and other countries in the region. The US has spent billions of dollars
on arms, training, special operations forces, air strikes, and logistical support for the rebel forces,
including international mercenaries. American allies have spent billions of dollars more. The precise
sums are not reported.
The US public has had no say in these decisions. There has been no authorizing vote or budget
approval by the US Congress. The CIA's role has never been explained or justified. The domestic and
international legality of US actions has never been defended to the American people or the world.
To those at the center of the US military-industrial complex, this secrecy is as it should
be. Their position is that a vote by Congress 15 years ago authorizing the use of armed force against
those culpable for the 9/11 attack gives the president and military carte blanche to fight secret
wars in the Middle East and Africa. Why should the US explain publicly what it is doing? That would
only jeopardize the operations and strengthen the enemy. The public does not need to know.
I subscribe to a different view: wars should be a last resort and should be constrained by
democratic scrutiny. This view holds that America's secret war in Syria is illegal both under the
US Constitution (which gives Congress the sole power to declare war) and under the United Nations
Charter, and that America's two-sided war in Syria is a cynical and reckless gamble. The US-led efforts
to topple Assad are not aimed at protecting the Syrian people, as Obama and Clinton have suggested
from time to time, but are a US proxy war against Iran and Russia, in which Syria happens to be the
battleground.
The stakes of this war are much higher and much more dangerous than America's proxy warriors
imagine. As the US has prosecuted its war against Assad, Russia has stepped up its military support
to his government. In the US mainstream media, Russia's behavior is an affront: how dare the Kremlin
block the US from overthrowing the Syrian government? The result is a widening diplomatic clash with
Russia, one that could escalate and lead – perhaps inadvertently – to the point of military conflict.
These are issues that should be subject to legal scrutiny and democratic control. I am confident
that the American people would respond with a resounding "no" to the ongoing US-led war of regime
change in Syria. The American people want security – including the defeat of ISIS – but they also
recognize the long and disastrous history of US-led regime-change efforts, including in Afghanistan,
Iraq, Libya, Syria, Central America, Africa, and Southeast Asia.
This is the main reason why the US security state refuses to tell the truth. The American
people would call for peace rather than perpetual war. Obama has a few months left in office to repair
his broken legacy. He should start by leveling with the American people.
"... The Ambassador's urging to her said: "The actions of June 28 can only be considered a coup d'etat. ... It bears mentioning that, whereas the resolution [by the junta] adopted June 28 refers only to Zelaya, its effect was to remove the entire executive branch. ... His forced removal by the military was clearly illegal, and [puppett-leader Roberto] Micheletti's ascendance as 'interim president' was totally illegitimate." ..."
"... However, instead, she joined with then-Senator Jim DeMint (now head of the Heritage Foundation and the chief sponsor of the political career of Texas U.S. Senator Ted Cruz) in propping up the fascist regime. ..."
When a fascist putsch, a coup d'etat, overthrew at gunpoint the popular progressive
democratic President of Honduras on 28 June 2009, and all countries of the world
except Israel and the United States promptly declared the junta-installed government
illegitimate, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton refused to join all other nations
in rejecting the fascist regime. As I previously
reported this matter in detail, the U.S. Ambassador to Honduras told her
in a cable, that President Manuel Zelaya had been illegally replaced by the
junta-appointed stooge Roberto Michelettti, yet she still refused.
The Ambassador's urging to her said: "The actions of June 28 can only
be considered a coup d'etat. ... It bears mentioning that, whereas the resolution
[by the junta] adopted June 28 refers only to Zelaya, its effect was to remove
the entire executive branch. ... His forced removal by the military was clearly
illegal, and [puppett-leader Roberto] Micheletti's ascendance as 'interim president'
was totally illegitimate."
However, instead, she joined with then-Senator Jim DeMint (now head of
the Heritage Foundation and the chief sponsor of the political career of Texas
U.S. Senator Ted Cruz) in propping up the fascist regime.
Promptly Honduras descended into hell, suddenly having the world's highest
murder-rate, and becoming a haven of narco-trafficking. What was Hillary thinking?
She expressed contempt for Zelaya, but what was really happening here was that
American international companies liked paying their Honduran contractors sub-human
wages to workers at their plants in Honduras. The Honduran aristocrats owned
those factories, and the U.S. aristocrats shared with them the profits from
this "free-market" slavery. What did Hillary care about the ongoing terror,
murders, and soaring narco-trafficking?
"... Under longstanding and clear-cut US law, all US aid to Honduras - except democracy assistance - including all military aid, should have been immediately suspended following the coup. ..."
"... Why wasn't US aid to Honduras suspended following the coup? The justification given by Clinton's State Department on August 25 for not suspending US aid to Honduras was that events in Honduras were murky and it was not clear whether a coup had taken place. Clinton's State Department claimed that State Department lawyers were studying the murky question of whether a coup had taken place. ..."
"... This justification was a lie, and Clinton's State Department knew it was a lie. By July 24, 2009, the State Department, including Secretary Clinton, knew clearly that the action of the Honduran military to remove President Zelaya on June 28, 2009, constituted a coup. On July 24, US Ambassador to Honduras Hugo Llorens sent a cable to top US officials, including Secretary of State Clinton, with subject: "Open and Shut: The Case of the Honduran Coup," thoroughly documenting the assertion that "there is no doubt" that the events of June 28 "constituted an illegal and unconstitutional coup." ..."
On June 28, 2009, when Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, democratically
elected Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was overthrown by a military coup.
The United Nations, the European Union and the Organization of American States
(OAS) condemned the coup, and on July 5, Honduras was suspended from the OAS.
Under longstanding and clear-cut US law, all US aid to Honduras - except
democracy assistance - including all military aid, should have been immediately
suspended following the coup.
On August 7, 15 House
Democrats, led by Rep. Raúl Grijalva, sent a letter to the administration
which began, "As you know, on June 28th, 2009, a military coup took place in
Honduras," and said: "The State Department should fully acknowledge that a military
coup has taken place and follow through with the total suspension of non-humanitarian
aid, as required by law."
Why wasn't US aid to Honduras suspended following the coup? The
justification given
by Clinton's State Department on August 25 for not suspending US aid to Honduras
was that events in Honduras were murky and it was not clear whether a coup had
taken place. Clinton's State Department
claimed that State
Department lawyers were studying the murky question of whether a coup had taken
place.
This justification was a lie, and Clinton's State Department knew it
was a lie. By July 24, 2009, the State Department, including Secretary Clinton,
knew clearly that the action of the Honduran military to remove President Zelaya
on June 28, 2009, constituted a coup. On July 24, US Ambassador to Honduras
Hugo Llorens
sent a cable to top US officials, including Secretary of State Clinton,
with subject: "Open and Shut: The Case of the Honduran Coup," thoroughly documenting
the assertion that "there is no doubt" that the events of June 28 "constituted
an illegal and unconstitutional coup."
"... The Democrats' Athena only differs from Bush on the details. ..."
"... Her bellicose interventionism has a history: it was Hillary, you'll recall, who berated her husband for not bombing Belgrade soon enough and hard enough. As Gail Sheehy relates in Hillary's Choice: ..."
"... Hillary would have occupied Iraq a decade earlier, riding into Baghdad at the head of her troops like Pallas Athena descending on the Trojans, striding boldly into what Gen. William E. Odom has described as "the greatest strategic disaster in our history." ..."
"... Hillary, however, didn't let any inconvenient facts get in her way. She boasted that it was under a Democratic administration that the U.S. "changed its underlying policy toward Iraq from containment to regime change" and took credit for the bright idea of putting Ahmad Chalabi, convicted embezzler and known liar, on the U.S. payroll. Her speech reads like a Weekly Standard editorial, reiterating each of the War Party's talking points-the bio-weapons fantasy, the links to al-Qaeda gambit, the phantom nuclear arsenal: "This much," she maintaind, "is undisputed." ..."
"... When it comes to Iran, however, she is just as belligerent as the next neocon: Pelosi co-sponsored legislation imposing draconian economic sanctions on Iran and stops just short of calling another war. ..."
The Democrats' Athena only differs from Bush on the details.
Hillary's newfound centrism isn't completely insincere. Her bellicose
interventionism has a history: it was Hillary, you'll recall, who berated her
husband for not bombing Belgrade soon enough and hard enough. As Gail Sheehy
relates in Hillary's Choice:
Hillary expressed her views by phone to the President: 'I urged him to bomb.'
The Clintons argued the issue over the next few days. [The president expressed]
what-ifs: What if bombing promoted more executions? What if it took apart the
NATO alliance? Hillary responded, 'You cannot let this go on at the end of a
century that has seen the major holocaust of our time. What do we have NATO
for if not to defend our way of life?' The next day the President declared that
force was necessary.
Together with Madeleine Albright-who famously complained to Colin Powell,
"What good is it having this superb military you're always talking about if
we can't use it?"-Hillary constituted the Amazonian wing of the Democratic Party
during the years of her husband's presidency. Her effort to outflank the Republicans
on the right when it comes to the Iran issue is a logical extension of her natural
bellicosity.
Hillary is nothing if not consistent: in her floor speech to the Senate during
the debate over the resolution authorizing the use of force in Iraq, she declared,
"the facts that have brought us to this fateful vote are not in doubt"-a statement
she has never acknowledged regretting. Particularly endearing to the War Party,
she framed her "aye" vote in terms of the classic neoconservative myth of Bush
I's betrayal:
The first President Bush assembled a global coalition, including many Arab
states, and threw Saddam out after forty-three days of bombing and a hundred
hours of ground operations. The U.S.-led coalition then withdrew, leaving the
Kurds and the Shiites, who had risen against Saddam Hussein at our urging, to
Saddam's revenge.
Hillary would have occupied Iraq a decade earlier, riding into Baghdad
at the head of her troops like Pallas Athena descending on the Trojans, striding
boldly into what Gen. William E. Odom has described as "the greatest strategic
disaster in our history."
Hillary hails the 1998 bombing of Iraq, ordered by her husband, which killed
thousands of Iraqi civilians, and recounts the official mythology promulgated
by the Bush administration: "[T]he so-called presidential palaces in reality
were huge compounds well suited to hold weapons labs, stocks, and records which
Saddam Hussein was required by UN resolution to turn over. When Saddam blocked
the inspection process, the inspectors left." As we now know, there was nothing
even approaching WMD in those palaces, and Iraq had been effectively disarmed
at that point. In late February or early March, Scott Ritter, then a UN arms
inspector, met with then-U.S. ambassador to the UN Bill Richardson. Ritter was
told to provoke an incident so the U.S. could finish bombing by the start of
the Islamic New Year holiday.
Hillary, however, didn't let any inconvenient facts get in her way. She
boasted that it was under a Democratic administration that the U.S. "changed
its underlying policy toward Iraq from containment to regime change" and took
credit for the bright idea of putting Ahmad Chalabi, convicted embezzler and
known liar, on the U.S. payroll. Her speech reads like a Weekly Standard editorial,
reiterating each of the War Party's talking points-the bio-weapons fantasy,
the links to al-Qaeda gambit, the phantom nuclear arsenal: "This much," she
maintaind, "is undisputed."
What is undisputed these days is that the entire rationale for war was based
on trumped-up evidence of Iraq's alleged transgressions, but Hillary is unrepentant:
"No, I don't regret giving the president authority because at the time it was
in the context of weapons of mass destruction, grave threats to the United States,
and clearly, Saddam Hussein had been a real problem for the international community
for more than a decade."
But there was no threat to the U.S. and Hillary knows it. What's more, her
hardcore constituency knows it, and they are becoming increasingly alienated
from-even actively hostile to-their putative presidential frontrunner over this
issue. Their anger is stoked by evidence that Hillary has imbibed the same neocon
Kool-Aid that has intoxicated the Bush administration and blinded it to the
failure of its policies in Iraq.
On a trip to Iraq during which 55 people-including one American soldier -were
killed by suicide bombers, Hillary was merrily chirping that the occupation
was "functioning quite well" and that the surge of suicide attacks indicated
that the insurgency was failing. Security was so bad that the road to the airport
was impassable, and the Senate delegation had to be transported to the Green
Zone by military helicopter. They dared not venture out into the streets of
Baghdad.
The disconnect between rhetoric and reality, between the antiwar views of
Hillary's left-wing base and the militant interventionism of Wittmann and the
DLC crowd, finally forced her to come to grips with the contradiction-or at
least to appear to do so. This occurred not in a public speech but in an e-mail
sent to her supporters in which the trouble she is in is acknowledged in the
first sentence: "The war in Iraq is on the minds of many of you who have written
or who have called my office asking questions and expressing frustration." Chances
are, these callers were expressing frustration not only with the policies of
the Bush administration but with her own complicity with Bush's Middle Eastern
agenda of seemingly endless aggression.
She falls back on the old "there are no quick and easy answers" ploy to give
an aura of thoughtfulness to a dishonest and constantly shifting position on
the war. While insisting that we should not "allow this to be an open-ended
commitment without limits or end," she reassures the War Party by distancing
herself from John Murtha and others who want an orderly withdrawal in a relatively
short time: "Nor do I believe that we can or should pull out of Iraq immediately."
She hails the elections as the signal that we can start the withdrawal process
sometime "in the coming year," but not completely: we must leave behind "a smaller
contingent in safer areas with greater intelligence and quick strike capabilities"-a
tripwire, in short, in the form of permanent bases.
... ... ...
What does Hillary want? A smarter, smoother, better-planned interventionism,
one that our allies find more amenable and yet is, in many ways, more militant
than the Republican version-one that "levels with the American people" about
the costs of empire and yet doesn't dispute the alleged necessity of American
hegemony. As she finds her voice as a would-be commander in chief, it isn't
one the traditional Left in this country will recognize.
... ... ...
If the Democratic establishment's stance on the war is at odds with the party's
antiwar activist base, then their outright warmongering on the Iranian issue
puts the two factions on a collision course. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi-who
effectively quashed fellow California Democrat Lynn Woolsey's resolution calling
for a withdrawal timetable -has followed the Hillary-Emanuel-DLC party line,
while managing somehow to assuage her constituents with plenty of pork and partisan
rhetoric. When it comes to Iran, however, she is just as belligerent as
the next neocon: Pelosi co-sponsored legislation imposing draconian economic
sanctions on Iran and stops just short of calling another war.
"... the Benghazi attack, for all its shock and tragedy, is but one detail in a panorama of misadventure, an in many ways unsurprising consequence of the hubris of liberal interventionism's false conviction that the American military can casually pop in and out of the whole world's problems without suffering cost or consequence ..."
"... as Tim Carney rightly argues at The Washington Examiner , and the "useful lesson from Benghazi isn't about a White House lying (shocking!), but about the inherent messiness of regime change and the impossibility of a quick, clean war." ..."
"... And the foreign policy establishment on the other side of the aisle must not be left without its due share of blame should that possibility come to pass. Though Benghazi committee chairman Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) was right to attempt to widen the report's focus past Clinton specifically, neoconservatives' all-too-convenient attention to the errors of Benghazi make it all easy for them to gloss over the bigger issue at hand: that none of this would have happened had America stuck to a foreign policy of realism and restraint, minding our own business and defending our own interests instead of gallivanting off to play revolutionary in one more country with no vital connection to our own. ..."
"... Benghazi is a symptom-a serious one, at that-but the disease is interventionism. ..."
And the Benghazi attack, for all its shock and tragedy, is but one detail
in a panorama of misadventure, an in many ways unsurprising consequence of the
hubris of liberal interventionism's false conviction that the American military
can casually pop in and out of the whole world's problems without suffering
cost or consequence.
Indeed, the "2012 attack that killed four Americans was a consequence of
the disorder and violence the administration left in the wake of its drive-by
war," as Tim Carney
rightly argues at The Washington Examiner, and the "useful lesson
from Benghazi isn't about a White House lying (shocking!), but about the inherent
messiness of regime change and the impossibility of a quick, clean war."
Unfortunately, that is a lesson too few in Washington are willing to learn.
Clinton herself maintains in the face of overwhelming evidence that
her handiwork in Libya is an
example of "smart power at its best"-a phrase whose
blatant inaccuracy should haunt her for the rest of her political career.
With arguments in favor of Libya, round two already
swirling and Clinton's poll numbers holding strong, it is not difficult
to imagine a Clinton White House dragging America back to fiddle with a country
it was
never particularly interested in fixing by this time next year.
And the foreign policy establishment on the other side of the aisle must
not be left without its due share of blame should that possibility come to pass.
Though Benghazi committee chairman Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) was right
to attempt to widen the report's focus past Clinton specifically, neoconservatives'
all-too-convenient attention to the errors of Benghazi make it all
easy for them to gloss over the bigger issue at hand: that none of this would
have happened had America stuck to a foreign policy of realism and restraint,
minding our own business and defending our own interests instead of gallivanting
off to play revolutionary in one more country with no vital connection to our
own.
Benghazi is a symptom-a serious one, at that-but the disease is interventionism.
That's the real story here, and it's a bipartisan failure of judgment which
shows all the signs of running on repeat.
"... Cybersecurity company FireEye first discovered APT 29 in 2014 and was quick to point out a clear Kremlin connection. "We suspect the Russian government sponsors the group because of the organizations it targets and the data it steals. because of evidence from FireEye." ..."
"... FireEye is also interesting as it, along with the US Department of Defense, funds the CEPA (publishers of Ed Lucas's and Pomerantsev's screed on fighting Kremlin influence): ..."
"... I recall the FireEye story well – they used the exact same logic; the code was written on Cyrillic-keyboard machines and during Moscow working hours. Their conclusion was "It just looks so much like something the Russians would do that it must be them". No allowance for the possibility that someone else did it who wanted the USA to arrive at exactly that conclusion. Someone who has done it before, lots of times, and who makes a science out of picking fights on Uncle Sam's behalf. ..."
"... Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear? Is there proof that they actually exist? I mean real proof, not WADA proof. ..."
"... They are just code names given by a particular security outfit. Different outfits will use different names for the same entities, much in the same way that a given virus/trojan/etc will be given different names by different AV corporations. The names reflect observable characteristics such as threat type, coding style, code structure, distribution network, similar earlier threats, etc rather than a specific single person. ..."
"On June 14, cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, under contract with the DNC, announced in a
blog post that two separate Russian intelligence groups had gained access to the DNC network.
One group, FANCY BEAR or APT 28, gained access in April. The other, COZY BEAR, (also called Cozy
Duke and APT 29) first breached the network in the summer of 2015. Cybersecurity company FireEye
first discovered APT 29 in 2014 and was quick to point out a clear Kremlin connection. "We suspect
the Russian government sponsors the group because of the organizations it targets and the data
it steals. because of evidence from FireEye."
Crowdstrike – their Co-Founder, Alperovitch, is an Atlantic Council fellow. The other firm,
FireEye, has the CIA as a stakeholder:
Should give pause to thought that the intelligence services are interfering in US democracy?
No?
FireEye is also interesting as it, along with the US Department of Defense, funds the CEPA
(publishers of Ed Lucas's and Pomerantsev's screed on fighting Kremlin influence):
I recall the FireEye story well – they used the exact same logic; the code was written on
Cyrillic-keyboard machines and during Moscow working hours. Their conclusion was "It just looks
so much like something the Russians would do that it must be them". No allowance for the possibility
that someone else did it who wanted the USA to arrive at exactly that conclusion. Someone who
has done it before, lots of times, and who makes a science out of picking fights on Uncle Sam's
behalf.
In the case of both FireEye and Crowdstrike, they would stop looking as soon as they arrived
upon a conclusion which suited them anyway.
They are just code names given by a particular security outfit. Different outfits will use
different names for the same entities, much in the same way that a given virus/trojan/etc will
be given different names by different AV corporations. The names reflect observable characteristics
such as threat type, coding style, code structure, distribution network, similar earlier threats,
etc rather than a specific single person.
"... Clearly Sidney Blumenthal was someone that Hillary Clinton trusted. Two months earlier, Secretary Clinton found his insights valuable enough to share with the entire State Department. But two weeks after her job as Secretary of State ends, she receives an e-mail from him claiming Saudi Arabia financed the assassination of an American ambassador and apparently did nothing with this information. Even if she didn't have to turn over this e-mail to the commission investigating the Benghazi attacks, wouldn't it be relevant? Shouldn't this be information she volunteers? And why didn't the Republicans who were supposedly so concerned about the Benghazi attacks ask any questions about Saudi involvement? ..."
"... Did Secretary Clinton not tell anyone what she knew about alleged Saudi involvement in the attacks because she didn't want to endanger the millions of dollars of Saudi donations coming in to the Clinton Foundation? These are exactly the kind of conflicts that ethical standards are designed to prevent. ..."
"... Do you really expect Obama's DOJ will do anything against Hitlery Clinton? It is one criminal gangster racket. ..."
"... The NeoCons and NeoLibs - McCain, Graham, Schumer, Feinstein and many others were totally involved with Iraq, the other endless wars and Benghazi. McCain was in Ukraine doing Nudelman/Soros zio bidding too. ..."
"... The Clintons came to power in to poor state of Arkansas, where Ollie North financed Iran-Contra running drugs through Mena AK while Bill was Gov. , of course with the sophisticated set-up of money laundering schemes and front businesses done by the CIA The CIA drug running through Mena continued after Iran-Contra, with George H.W. Bush's blessing and full knowledge. BCCI bank was one of the money laundering banks for the drug money and helped finance Clinton's first presidential campaign. Bush and Clinton's happy bromance is no surprise, and just the tip of the iceberg. It should be no surprise with the Bush family background that the Clintons have been so dirty and corrupt, yet so immune from serious pursuit of prosecution. ..."
"... Hillary Rodham Clinton is a lying, sleazy whore and is totally loyal to the Oligarchs and Sunni Moslems who've paid her billions of dollars in bribes. Like the pedophile pervert William Jefferson Clinton she would "rather climb a tree to tell a lie than tell the truth standing on the ground." ..."
"... Unless Blumenthal's emails contained information obtained from the US government, they would not have been classified when he sent them. So I don't see how he would be in trouble for sending them or Hillary for receiving them. If the government decided afterwards to make the information classified, then wouldn't he and Hillary have been obliged to delete them from their private servers? To me, the information seems more like gossip and I can't see either one of them getting into over these particular emails. ..."
"... If Hillary Clinton really cares about the future of this country and the Democratic party, she will step down now while there is still time to nominate another candidate. Hillary Clinton is the Democratic Party, and the Democratic Party is Hillary Clinton. She will burn it to the ground before she gives up her dream. ..."
"... It's difficult to estimate if the Democrat lumpenproletariat will ever blame Hillary for anything, but objectively, if the lumpens realize that Hillary KNEW this was coming down and did NOTHING to prepare the Democrat Party to have a PLAN B (Joe Biden) ready, the lumpens should be mightily pissed. ..."
"... Look at the complexity of the emails and their concepts and compare that with the banal dumbed down soup which is served upp at each campaign speech. ..."
Something that has gone unnoticed in all the talk about the investigation
into Hillary Clinton's e-mails is the content of the original leak that started
the entire investigation to begin with. In March of 2013, a Romanian
hacker calling himself Guccifer hacked into the AOL account of Sidney Blumenthal
and leaked to Russia Today
four e-mails containing intelligence on Libya that Blumenthal sent to Hillary
Clinton.
For those who haven't been following this story, Sidney Blumenthal
is a long time friend and adviser of the Clinton family who in an unofficial
capacity sent many "intelligence memos" to Hillary Clinton during her tenure
as Secretary of State . Originally displayed on RT.com in Comic Sans
font on a pink background with the letter "G" clumsily drawn as a watermark,
no one took these leaked e-mails particularly seriously when they came out in
2013. Now, however, we can cross reference this leak with
the
e-mails the State Department released to the public .
The first three e-mails in the Russia Today leak from Blumenthal
to Clinton all appear word for word in the State Department release.
The
first e-mail Clinton
asks to have printed and she also
forwards it to her deputy chief of staff, Jake Sullivan. The
second e-mail Clinton describes as "useful insight" and
forwards it to Jake Sullivan asking him to circulate it. The
third e-mail is also
forwarded to Jake Sullivan . The fourth e-mail is missing from the State
Department record completely.
This missing e-mail
from February 16, 2013 only exists in the
original leak and states that French and Libyan intelligence agencies had
evidence that the
In Amenas and
Benghazi attacks were funded by "Sunni Islamists in Saudi Arabia."
This seems like a rather outlandish claim on the surface, and as such
was only reported by conspiracy types and fringe media outlets. Now, however,
we have proof that the other three e-mails in the leak were real correspondence
from Blumenthal to Clinton that she not only read, but thought highly enough
of to send around to others in the State Department. Guccifer speaks English
as a second language and most of his writing consists of rambling conspiracies,
it's unlikely he would be able to craft such a convincing fake intelligence
briefing. This means we have an e-mail from a trusted Clinton adviser
that claims the Saudis funded the Benghazi attack, and not only was this not
followed up on, but there is not any record of this e-mail ever existing except
for the Russia Today leak.
Why is this e-mail missing? At first I assumed it must be
due to some sort of cover up, but it's much simpler than that. The e-mail in
question was sent after February 1st, 2013, when John Kerry took over as Secretary
of State, so it was not part of the time period being investigated. No one is
trying to find a copy of this e-mail. Since Clinton wasn't Secretary of State
on February 16th, it wasn't her job to follow up on it.
So let's forget for a minute about the larger legal implications of the e-mail
investigation. How can it be that such a revelation about Saudi Arabia
was made public in a leak that turned out to be real and no one looked into
it? Clearly Sidney Blumenthal was someone that Hillary Clinton
trusted. Two months earlier, Secretary Clinton found his insights valuable enough
to share with the entire State Department. But two weeks after her job as Secretary
of State ends, she receives an e-mail from him claiming Saudi Arabia financed
the assassination of an American ambassador and apparently did nothing with
this information. Even if she didn't have to turn over this e-mail to the commission
investigating the Benghazi attacks, wouldn't it be relevant? Shouldn't this
be information she volunteers? And why didn't the Republicans who were supposedly
so concerned about the Benghazi attacks ask any questions about Saudi involvement?
Did Secretary Clinton not tell anyone what she knew about alleged Saudi
involvement in the attacks because she didn't want to endanger the
millions of dollars of Saudi donations coming in to the Clinton Foundation?
These are exactly the kind of conflicts that ethical standards are designed
to prevent.
Another E-Mail Turns Up Missing
Guccifer uncovered something else in his hack that could not be verified
until the last of the e-mails were released by the State Department last week.
In addition to the four full e-mails he released, he also
leaked a screenshot of Sidney Blumenthal's AOL inbox. If we cross reference
this screenshot with the Blumenthal e-mails in the State Department release,
we can see that the e-mail with the subject "H: Libya security latest.
Sid" is missing from the State Department e-mails.
This missing e-mail is certainly something that would have been requested
as part of the investigation as it was sent before February 1st and clearly
relates to Libya. The fact that it is missing suggests one of two possibilities:
The State Department does have a copy of this e-mail but deemed
it top secret and too sensitive to release, even in redacted form.
This would indicate that Sidney Blumenthal was sending highly classified
information from his AOL account to Secretary Clinton's private e-mail server
despite the fact that he never even had a security clearance to deal with
such sensitive information in the first place. If this scenario explains
why the e-mail is missing, classified materials were mishandled.
The State Department does not have a copy, and this e-mail was
deleted by both Clinton and Blumenthal before turning over their subpoenaed
e-mails to investigators, which would be considered destruction of evidence
and lying to federal officials. This also speaks to the reason
why the private clintonemail.com server may have been established in the
first place. If Blumenthal were to regularly send highly sensitive yet technically
"unclassified" information from his AOL account to Clinton's official government
e-mail account, it could have been revealed with a FOIA request. It has
already been established that Hillary Clinton deleted 15 of Sidney Blumenthal's
e-mails to her, this discrepancy was discovered when Blumenthal's e-mails
were subpoenaed, although
a State Department official claims that none of these 15 e-mails have
any information about the Benghazi attack. It would seem from the subject
line that this e-mail does. And it is missing from the public record.
In either of these scenarios, Clinton and her close associates are
in violation of federal law. In the most generous interpretation where
this e-mail is simply a collection of rumors that Blumenthal heard and forwarded
unsolicited to Clinton, it would make no sense for it to be missing. It would
not be classified if it was a bunch of hot air, and it certainly wouldn't be
deleted by both Blumenthal and Clinton at the risk of committing a felony.
In the least generous interpretation of these facts, Sidney Blumenthal
and Hillary Clinton conspired to cover up an ally of the United States funding
the assassination of one of our diplomats in Libya.
Why A Grand Jury Is Likely Already Convened
After the final e-mails were released by the State Department on February
29th, it has been reported in the last week that:
Clinton's IT staff member who managed the e-mail server, Bryan
Pagliano, has been
given immunity by a federal judge which suggests that he will be giving
testimony to a grand jury about evidence that relates to this investigation
and implicates himself in a crime. Until now, Pagliano has been pleading
the fifth and refusing to cooperate with the investigation.
The hacker Guccifer (Marcel Lazar Lehel) just had an 18-month temporary
extradition order to the United States
granted by a Romanian court , despite being indicted by the US back
in 2014. Is Guccifer being extradited now in order to testify to
the grand jury that the screengrab with the missing e-mail is real?
Attorney General Loretta Lynch was
interviewed by Bret Baier and she would not answer whether or not a
grand jury has been convened in this case. If there was no grand
jury she could have said so, but if a grand jury is meeting to discuss evidence
she would not legally be allowed to comment on it.
This scandal has the potential to completely derail the Clinton campaign
in the general election . If Hillary Clinton really cares about the
future of this country and the Democratic party, she will step down now while
there is still time to nominate another candidate. This is not a right wing
conspiracy, it is a failure by one of our highest government officials to uphold
the laws that preserve government transparency and national security. It's time
for us to ask Secretary Clinton to tell us the truth and do the right thing.
If the United States government is really preparing a case against Hillary
Clinton, we can't wait until it's too late.
Mrs. Clinton, and let's call her by her proper name Hillary Clinton -
not the familiar "Hillary" that even the most right-of-the-aisle commentators
use - is a compulsive liar.
Rhetorically: how can anyone give even a shred of credence to anything
that she might utter? She lies so much that the only conclusion that an
objectively observant informed person can reach is that she has permanently
lost touch with reality. Given that fact, she therefore is a psychotic personality.
I am amazed that no one in the medical profession, assuming that there are
independent minds within that group, has spoken out about this psychological
affliction of Mrs. Clinton's.
Mrs. Clinton is a blight upon the Nation. Seriously, I work and associate
with people who whole-heartedly support her candidacy for president. After
all that has been revealed since 2014 I can only conclude that continuing
political support for Mrs. Clinton can only stem from a profound anti-intellectualist
philosophy.
so let me get this straight....the saudis took down the twin towers on
911 2001 and then paid for the benghazi attacks and ambassador murders on
911 2012 and the Bush and Clinton families knew about this but made up stories
to protect their saudi pals?
BUSH killed 2 million people in Iraq for WMD he never found, but this
piece of brilliant journalism focuses on "missing" emails that "somehow"
should prove that the Saudis did it and hypothetically crucifies Hillary
who was just Secretary of State taking orders from Obama who's not mentioned
in this again brilliant piece. I guess the Saudis financed the American
Iraq invasion too.
The Bushes and Clintons have been best friends and See Eye Aye drug runners
going back to Mena, Arkansas.
The Romneys are also Bush best buddies. The Romneys and Bushes are best
friends with the Mormon hinckley family very well connected to Mormon Church
and their John Jr. tried to kill Reagan.
The NeoCons and NeoLibs - McCain, Graham, Schumer, Feinstein and
many others were totally involved with Iraq, the other endless wars and
Benghazi. McCain was in Ukraine doing Nudelman/Soros zio bidding too.
We're a Banana Republic pure and simple. Yes, we're the most powerful
Banana Republic to ever exist in the history of the world too.
The Clintons came to power in to poor state of Arkansas, where Ollie
North financed Iran-Contra running drugs through Mena AK while Bill was
Gov. , of course with the sophisticated set-up of money laundering schemes
and front businesses done by the CIA The CIA drug running through Mena
continued after Iran-Contra, with George H.W. Bush's blessing and full knowledge.
BCCI bank was one of the money laundering banks for the drug money and helped
finance Clinton's first presidential campaign. Bush and Clinton's happy
bromance is no surprise, and just the tip of the iceberg. It should be no
surprise with the Bush family background that the Clintons have been so
dirty and corrupt, yet so immune from serious pursuit of prosecution.
And yes, there is so much more. it's deep, dark and dirty.
Hillary Rodham Clinton is a lying, sleazy whore and is totally loyal
to the Oligarchs and Sunni Moslems who've paid her billions of dollars in
bribes. Like the pedophile pervert William Jefferson Clinton she would "rather
climb a tree to tell a lie than tell the truth standing on the ground."
That said, there is zero probability that the United States Department
of Injustice will indict her. Anyone expecting the Feral Bureau of Intimidation
and Department of Injustice to enforce equal application of the Law are
going to be disappointed. Again. The Rule of Law doesn't apply to the Oligarchs
who own the Feral government and their LOYAL political parasites.
I wouldn't be so sure about that dude. Have you seen Bill lately? He
looks beaten to a pulp. The dark side tends to eat their own when it benefits
their ultimate goals. Hillary might be that one, of many to (yet) come.
Hillary Rodham Clinton was bribed by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabian to
cover up their role in the assassination of Ambassador Stevens. All United
States Secretary's of State take bribes to cover up attacks by foreign governments
on United States diplomatic and Armed Forces personnel. At this point what
difference does it make?
Why would the Saudis fund that? Stevens was CIA working on arming the
jihadis in Syria against Assad. Some of which the US Army screwed up with
obsolete shit weapons, I think.
So lovely, the largest Israeli-Neocon ally being responsible for the
loss of Clinton, their main candidate other than Jeb.
God does work in mysterious way, explained by the great Discordian religious
principle : "Imposing order creates disorder". The greeks grokked it first.
Unless Blumenthal's emails contained information obtained from the
US government, they would not have been classified when he sent them. So
I don't see how he would be in trouble for sending them or Hillary for receiving
them. If the government decided afterwards to make the information classified,
then wouldn't he and Hillary have been obliged to delete them from their
private servers? To me, the information seems more like gossip and I can't
see either one of them getting into over these particular emails.
As server-gate progresses it will be interesting to see whether Hillary
learned anything from Watergate where Nixon got in trouble not because he
ordered the Watergate breakins, but because he tried to cover them up.
If Hillary Clinton really cares about the future of this country
and the Democratic party, she will step down now while there is still time
to nominate another candidate. Hillary Clinton is the Democratic Party,
and the Democratic Party is Hillary Clinton. She will burn it to the ground
before she gives up her dream.
No, there are many political interests in the Democratic party, just
like the Republican Party. Same interests, in most cases, overlapping sets
of funding. That must be what the parties so contend over, more contributions?
Contending power centers, mafia rules, courtier rules, an ecosystem of
parasites specialized in their evolution for extracting carbon and energy
from the government. Parasites divert metabolic energy to their own uses,
and the host may die as a result.
If Hillary Clinton really cares about the future of this country
and the Democratic party, she will step down now while there is still
time to nominate another candidate.
It's difficult to estimate if the Democrat lumpenproletariat will
ever blame Hillary for anything, but objectively, if the lumpens realize
that Hillary KNEW this was coming down and did NOTHING to prepare the Democrat
Party to have a PLAN B (Joe Biden) ready, the lumpens should be mightily
pissed.
Anyone notice how the email says "Islamists in Saudi Arabia" but the
article hints that "The Saudis" funded it? I'm not an HRC fan, but I think
she gets a pass on this one. Like if David Duke gave a bunch of money to
Hezbollah and the papers said "The Americans are funding Hezbollah"...
BLumenthal and Killary need to be waterboarded until they give up their
sources. Look at the complexity of the emails and their concepts and
compare that with the banal dumbed down soup which is served upp at each
campaign speech.
They are living in the real world, we are their slaves.
"... The fact that interventionists "want to believe" what they're told by opposition figures in other countries reflects their general naivete about the politics of the countries where they want to intervene and their absurd overconfidence in the efficacy of U.S. action in general. ..."
"... Interventionists usually can't imagine any "far-reaching" consequences that aren't good, and they are predisposed to ignore all the many ways that a country and an entire region can be harmed by destabilizing military action. That failure of imagination repeatedly produces poor decisions that result in ghastly policies that wreck the lives of millions of people. ..."
"... This captures exactly what's wrong with Clinton on foreign policy, and why she so often ends up on the wrong, hawkish side of foreign policy debates. First, she is biased in favor of action and meddling, and second she often identifies action with military intervention or some other aggressive, militarized measures. Clinton doesn't need to be argued into an interventionist policy, because she already "wants to believe" that is the proper course of action. That guarantees that she frequently backs reckless and unnecessary U.S. actions that cause far more misery and suffering than they remedy. ..."
"... This is revealing in a few ways. First, it shows how resistant the administration initially was and how important Clinton's support for the war was in getting the U.S. involved. ..."
"... It was already well-known that Clinton owns the Libyan intervention more than any U.S. official besides the president, and this week we're being reminded once more just how crucial her support for the war was in making it happen. ..."
The New York Times
reports on
Hillary Clinton's role in the Libyan war. This passage sums up much of what's wrong with how
Clinton and her supporters think about how the U.S. should respond to foreign conflicts:
Mrs. Clinton was won over. Opposition leaders "said all the right things about supporting democracy
and inclusivity and building Libyan institutions, providing some hope that we might be able to
pull this off," said Philip H. Gordon, one of her assistant secretaries. "They gave us
what we wanted to hear. And you do want to believe." [bold mine-DL]
It's not surprising that rebels seeking outside support against their government tell representatives
of that government things they want to hear, but it is deeply disturbing that our officials are frequently
so eager to believe that what they are being told was true. Our officials shouldn't "want to believe"
the self-serving propaganda of spokesmen for a foreign insurgency, especially when that leads to
U.S. military intervention on their behalf. They should be more cautious than normal when they are
hearing "all the right things." Not only should our officials know from previous episodes that the
people saying "all the right things" are typically conning Washington in the hopes of receiving support,
but they should assume that anyone saying "all the right things" either doesn't represent the forces
on the ground that the U.S. will be called on to support or is deliberately misrepresenting the conditions
on the ground to make U.S. involvement more attractive.
"Wanting to believe" in dubious or obviously bad causes in other countries is one of the biggest
problems with ideologically-driven interventionists from both parties. They aren't just willing to
take sides in foreign conflicts, but they are looking for an excuse to join them. As long as they
can get representatives of the opposition to repeat the required phrases and pay lip service to the
"right things," they will do their best to drag the U.S. into a conflict in which it has nothing
at stake. If that means pretending that terrorist groups are democrats and liberals, that is what
they'll do. If it means whitewashing the records of fanatics, that is what they'll do. Even if it
means inventing a "moderate" opposition out of thin air, they'll do it. This satisfies their desire
to meddle in other countries' affairs, it provides intervention with a superficial justification
that credulous pundits and talking heads will be only too happy to repeat, and it frees them from
having to come up with plans for what comes after the intervention on the grounds that the locals
will take care of it for them later on.
The fact that interventionists "want to believe" what they're told by opposition figures in
other countries reflects their general naivete about the politics of the countries where they want
to intervene and their absurd overconfidence in the efficacy of U.S. action in general. If one
takes for granted that there must be sympathetic liberals-in-waiting in another country that will
take over once a regime is toppled, one isn't going to worry about the negative and unintended consequences
of regime change. Because interventionists have difficulty imagining how U.S. intervention can go
awry or make things worse, they are also unlikely to be suspicious of the motives or goals of the
"good guys" they want the U.S. to support. They tend to assume the best about their would-be proxies
and allies, and they assume that the country will be in good hands once they are empowered. The fact
that this frequently backfires doesn't trouble these interventionists, who will have already moved
on to the next country in "need" of their special attentions.
The article continues:
The consequences would be more far-reaching than anyone imagined, leaving
Libya a failed state and a terrorist haven, a place where the direst answers to Mrs. Clinton's
questions have come to pass.
If the article is referring to anyone in the administration, this might be true, but as a general
statement it couldn't be more wrong. Many skeptics and opponents of the intervention in Libya warned
about many of the things that the Libyan war and regime change have produced, and they issued these
warnings before and during the beginning of U.S. and allied bombing. Interventionists usually
can't imagine any "far-reaching" consequences that aren't good, and they are predisposed to ignore
all the many ways that a country and an entire region can be harmed by destabilizing military action.
That failure of imagination repeatedly produces poor decisions that result in ghastly policies that
wreck the lives of millions of people.
The report goes on to quote Anne-Marie Slaughter referring to Clinton's foreign policy inclinations:
"But when the choice is between action and inaction, and you've got risks in either direction,
which you often do, she'd rather be caught trying."
This captures exactly what's wrong with Clinton on foreign policy, and why she so often ends
up on the wrong, hawkish side of foreign policy debates. First, she is biased in favor of action
and meddling, and second she often identifies action with military intervention or some other aggressive,
militarized measures. Clinton doesn't need to be argued into an interventionist policy, because she
already "wants to believe" that is the proper course of action. That guarantees that she frequently
backs reckless and unnecessary U.S. actions that cause far more misery and suffering than they remedy.
Maybe the most striking section of the report was the description of the administration's initial
reluctance to intervene, which Clinton then successfully overcame:
France and Britain were pushing hard for a Security Council vote on a resolution supporting
a no-fly zone in Libya to prevent Colonel Qaddafi from slaughtering his opponents. Ms. Rice was
calling to push back, in characteristically salty language.
"She says, and I quote, 'You are not going to drag us into your shitty war,'" said Mr. Araud,
now France's ambassador in Washington. "She said, 'We'll be obliged to follow and support you,
and we don't want to.'
This is revealing in a few ways. First, it shows how resistant the administration initially
was and how important Clinton's support for the war was in getting the U.S. involved. It also
shows how confused everyone in the administration was about the obligations the U.S. owed to its
allies. The U.S. isn't obliged to indulge its allies' wars of choice, and it certainly doesn't have
to join them, but the administration was already conceding that the U.S. would "follow and support"
France and Britain in what they chose to do. As we know, in the end France and Britain definitely
could and did drag the U.S. into their "shitty war," and in that effort they received a huge assist
from Clinton.
It was already well-known that Clinton owns the Libyan intervention more than any U.S. official
besides the president, and this week we're being reminded once more just how crucial her support
for the war was in making it happen.
"... ...Ironically, even as U.S. officials confront defiance from the rival Libyan leaders in Tripoli and Tobruk, they have won cooperation from Abdelhakim Belhadj, who was the leader of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, a jihadist militia whose members were once driven out of Libya by Col Muammar Gaddafi and developed close ties to Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. ..."
"... After Gaddafi fled Tripoli and was captured in his home town of Sirte, U.S.-backed rebels sodomized him with a knife and murdered him. Upon hearing of Gaddafi's demise, Secretary of State Clinton clapped her hands in obvious glee and declared , "we came, we saw, he died." ..."
"... Now, Belhadj, who has since branched off into various business ventures including an airline, is viewed as a key American ally with his militia helping to protect Sirraj and other GNA officials operating from the Tripoli naval base. (Gee, how could an Al Qaeda-connected jihadist with an airline present a problem?) ..."
"... America's Stolen Narrative, ..."
"... Since the Cold War, we've been run by the Neo-Cons - Bill Clinton was a Neo-Con poorly disguised and his wife is an outright Neo-con and a very very dangerous woman. ..."
"... Bush/bin Laden family relationships, linked them to the Bush/CIA recruitment and launching of the CIA asset "al Qaeda" during the Russo/Afghan campaign, Al Qaeda, operating under CIA/Mossad aegis and control has been correctly identified ever since then as the manpower provider and major executor of most if not all of the "terrorism which has gone down in the past twenty years, thus making bin Laden and al Qaeda the much sought after black hats, the "boogeymen" behind and justifying all of this stuff. ..."
"... In any case, these people who were living in Libya had a strikingly different story to report re the standard of living that obtained in that country, Gaddafi's rule, etc., from what we were learning from the HRC-run US State Department. Moreover, for their trouble, for their wish to report their experience and tell their fellow Americans the real truth about Libya, they were muzzled and threatened, and from what I remember, soon found out that when you cross the US government and its foreign policy representatives by reporting truths they don't want the world to hear, the price will be very high. Very high indeed. I believe they soon found themselves unable to find gainful employment and had to subsist on hand-outs from interested and sympathetic listeners. ..."
"... It used to be a point of honor in Old Europe for a politician or a public servant who committed a monumental blunder or dishonorable act to resign from his office. If the act was sufficiently serious then suicide might have been called for. In Japan seppuku was a form of self-inflicted capital punishment for samurai and politicians who had committed serious offenses because they had brought shame to themselves and others with whom they were associated. ..."
"... Libya, Flight MH17, the corruption in Ukraine, missile sites being installed in Poland and Romania are never or hardly ever mentioned, and that's not because any of those subjects are not news worthy. It's good against evil. ..."
"... My worry is that Hillary will make a move to bring home the biggest prize of all, and that will be the conquering of Russia. This doesn't have anything to do with gender, it's what is inside ones soul, and of course their agenda. ..."
"... Authoritarians with a lust for power and/or wealth will seek to become autocrats ruling their fiefs according to their personal desires and ambitions without regard for and total indifference towards their subjects. If there is anyone among the tired, the poor, and huddled masses yearning to breathe free there will always be a need for people with courage to speak truth to power. ..."
"... The mass media are truly enemies of the people of the United States, and with the economic concentrations that support them, have waged economic and propaganda war upon the United States. They are thereby traitors, engaged in a right-wing revolution, and should be utterly destroyed in their ability to do ..."
The Obama administration is hoping that it can yet salvage Hillary Clinton's
signature project as Secretary of State, the "regime change" in Libya, via a
strategy of funneling Libya's fractious politicians and militias – referred
to by one U.S. official as chaotic water "droplets" – into a U.S.-constructed
"channel" built out of rewards and punishments.
...In recent days, competing militias, supporting elements of the three governments,
have converged on Sirte, where the Islamic State jihadists have established
a foothold, but the schisms among the various Libyan factions have prevented
anything approaching a coordinated attack. Indeed, resistance to the U.S.-backed
Government of National Accord (GNA) appears to be growing amid doubts about
the political competence of the hand-picked prime minister, Fayez Sirraj.
...Thus far, however, many Libyan political figures have been unwilling to
jump into the "channel," which has led the Obama administration to both impose
and threaten punishments against these rogue water "droplets," such as financial
sanctions and even criminal charges.
...Ironically, even as U.S. officials confront defiance from the rival
Libyan leaders in Tripoli and Tobruk, they have won cooperation from Abdelhakim
Belhadj, who was the leader of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, a jihadist
militia whose members were once driven out of Libya by Col Muammar Gaddafi and
developed close ties to Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan.
After the 9/11 attacks and the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Belhadj was
tracked by the CIA and captured in Malaysia in 2004 before being renditioned
back to Libya, where he was imprisoned until 2010. In 2011, after Secretary
of State Clinton convinced President Obama to join an air war against the Gaddafi
regime on "humanitarian" grounds, Belhadj pulled together a jihadist force that
helped spearhead the decisive attack on Tripoli.
After Gaddafi fled Tripoli and was captured in his home town of Sirte,
U.S.-backed rebels sodomized him with a knife and murdered him. Upon hearing
of Gaddafi's demise, Secretary of State Clinton clapped her hands in obvious
glee and
declared,
"we came, we saw, he died."
Now, Belhadj, who has since branched off into various business ventures
including an airline, is viewed as a key American ally with his militia helping
to protect Sirraj and other GNA officials operating from the Tripoli naval base.
(Gee, how could an Al Qaeda-connected jihadist with an airline present a problem?)
... ... ...
Summing up the confusing situation, The New York Times reported on June 2,
"One Western official who recently visited the country said the political mood
in Libya had become increasingly confrontational during recent months as the
United Nations, acting under pressure from the United States and its allies,
has struggled to win acceptance for the unity government."
... ... ...
Now, the Obama administration is trying to re-impose order in the country
via a hand-picked group of new Libyan officials and by building a "channel"
to direct the flow of the nation's politics in the direction favored by Washington.
But many Libyan water "droplets" are refusing to climb in.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra
stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his
latest book, America's Stolen Narrative, either in
print here or as an e-book (from
Amazon and
barnesandnoble.com).
Debbie Menon, June 4, 2016 at 4:07 pm
American Foreign Policy: Dumbed Down
Since the Cold War there has been a narrowing of foreign policy debate.
Does this explain why Washington blunders from one fiasco to another?
Since the Cold War, we've been run by the Neo-Cons - Bill Clinton
was a Neo-Con poorly disguised and his wife is an outright Neo-con and a
very very dangerous woman.
Erik, June 5, 2016 at 7:17 am
While the narrowing of debate may be attributed to control by economic
concentrations of the elections and mass media tools of democracy, it is
also due to a poorly structured government. Congress has never been able
to debate meaningfully due to politics, and the executive has stolen almost
all power of Congress over wars, and runs them continually to get campaign
contributions from military industry.
For example, Congress utterly failed to debate the Civil War issues from
1820 to 1860, producing nothing but tactical compromises, never bringing
the sides to common terms and recognition of the rights and interests of
each other. It never seriously debated the issues of Vietnam, nor the wars
since.
This is why I advocate a College of policy analysis as a fourth branch
of the federal government, to both analyze and debate the issues of each
region, preserving the minority viewpoint and the inconvenient solution.
It would make available commented summaries of history and fact, analyses
of current situations by each discipline and functional area, and debated
syntheses of anticipated developments, potential changes due to events human
or natural, and the impact of policy alternatives, with comments reflecting
the various viewpoints or possibilities. Not many of the uneducated would
read the results, but politicians and vocal citizens could more readily
be shown to violate what the experts generally agree is workable,
The College would be conducted largely by internet with experts at the
universities, applying expert analysis of every region with a broad range
of skills and disciplines, and moderated textual debate with the broadest
range of viewpoints.
Debbie Menon, June 4, 2016 at 5:02 pm
Robert has done a good job, and made the point again, which needs repeating
until it becomes common gospel.
Bush/bin Laden family relationships, linked them to the Bush/CIA
recruitment and launching of the CIA asset "al Qaeda" during the Russo/Afghan
campaign, Al Qaeda, operating under CIA/Mossad aegis and control has been
correctly identified ever since then as the manpower provider and major
executor of most if not all of the "terrorism which has gone down in the
past twenty years, thus making bin Laden and al Qaeda the much sought after
black hats, the "boogeymen" behind and justifying all of this stuff.
The fact that the spinmeisters were directed to tell us that Osama bin
Laden and al Qaeda are dead only tells us that they have some other means
of "justifying" the wars and what is going to happen next, which will lead
the sheeple into following them right over the edge of the cliff, and when
the time is right, run out the new and bigger version to carry the lie onward
to…. what?
One of the reasons I find it so difficult to write lately, is that I
feel I am repeating the same thing again, and again. Which does not inspire
the best of efforts.
Bill Bodden, June 4, 2016 at 5:53 pm
The theme of Hillary's blunders may be addressed constantly, but for
many of us the variations almost always reveal an aspect or element of which
we were not aware and another nail that should be driven into HRC's "coffin."
This person and her enablers and accomplices are a threat to countless people
around the world justifying a constant chorus of criticism until the polls
close on November 8th. The great tragedy is that her Republican opponent
is probably as perilous as she is.
Zachary Smith, June 4, 2016 at 9:22 pm
Publishing variations and new information and/or conclusions is useful
to interested current readers as well as those who are new to the site.
If an essay title doesn't appeal to me I don't always examine it at all.
After Gaddafi fled Tripoli and was captured in his home town of Sirte,
U.S.-backed rebels sodomized him with a knife and murdered him. Upon
hearing of Gaddafi's demise, Secretary of State Clinton clapped her
hands in obvious glee and declared, "we came, we saw, he died."
In any event, this one just can't be republished too often. The murderous
***** Hillary will – if allowed to become POTUS – be a disaster beating
out Bush the Dumber.
Obama had a job when he entered the White House – coddling and greasing
the skids for the lawless Bankers. He has done that very, very well. So
far as I can tell he merely outsourced the rest of the Presidency to the
neocons and neoliberals. How else can you explain Hillary and Victoria Nuland
and the TPP?
SFOMARCO, June 4, 2016 at 4:42 pm
"So what we're doing with the Government of National Accord is we're
trying to create a channel, for national unity and reconciliation, and for
building the institutions Libya needs, for building enough stability so
the economy can come back, so they can pump oil, which Libya needs for Libyans,
distribute the wealth fairly, equitably, in a way that brings people in,
and take advantage of Libya's natural resources to rebuild the country.
…" Seems like the status quo ante, sans Ghaddafi. Another expectation a
la "topple Saddam and the people will throw flowers and sweets at the liberators"?
And now a fluid mechanics metaphor to put Libya back to where it was in
2011?
Bob Van Noy, June 4, 2016 at 7:46 pm
I totally agree with your thought SFOMARCO. As I read this I was thinking,
so now it's a channel. It seems that coming up with a good metaphor is the
basis of American Foreign Policy. This is a hang-up of mine. Back in the
Vietnam War all we heard was about dominoes falling which makes such an
impressive mental "image." Several years ago I was stunned when I watched
Errol Morris' "Fog of War." When Morris sat Robert McNamara down with a
North Vietnamese contingent, and he was asked what the War was all about,
he started to explain The Domino Theory, and the Vietnamese became agitated
and basically told him that that was poor theory, and that he hadn't bothered
to educate himself on Vietnamese history or he would know better. I was
dumbfounded by that insight. 58,000 casualties because McNamara apparently
didn't have the time to understand Vietnamese History!
How many wars do we have going on now? What do we know of the countries
we're dealing with? We really need to get out of the Empire business once
and for all. I've watched Hillary enough to realize that regardless of her
Wellesley education; she's not that bright.
dahoit, June 5, 2016 at 11:18 am
Totally agree;She is an idiot,who just follows the current memes of her
Zionist masters. Not one damn evidence of critical thinking ever emanating
from her crooked mouth. Imagine if the moron hadn't gotten on the crazy
train of Iraq, and shown astute thinking, as every other astute thinker
realized (Zionists and toads excluded of course)that its destabilization
would bring chaos throughout the region.
Of course,this might have been purposeful, but only her Ziomasters knew
that, she is incapable.
Susan Raikes Sugar, June 4, 2016 at 5:38 pm
Yes, Debbie, you're probably right about the hands pulling the strings
in this devastating - and also demented - picture. The latter because I've
listened to people who were in Libya before we pulled our shenanigans there
a la Saddam and Iraq. It seems to be very very difficult for anyone in US
governing circles to learn lessons from an incident gone horribly wrong.
Could it be arrogance?
In any case, these people who were living in Libya had a strikingly
different story to report re the standard of living that obtained in that
country, Gaddafi's rule, etc., from what we were learning from the HRC-run
US State Department. Moreover, for their trouble, for their wish to report
their experience and tell their fellow Americans the real truth about Libya,
they were muzzled and threatened, and from what I remember, soon found out
that when you cross the US government and its foreign policy representatives
by reporting truths they don't want the world to hear, the price will be
very high. Very high indeed. I believe they soon found themselves unable
to find gainful employment and had to subsist on hand-outs from interested
and sympathetic listeners.
Bill Bodden, June 4, 2016 at 6:21 pm
It seems to be very very difficult for anyone in US governing
circles to learn lessons from an incident gone horribly wrong. Could
it be arrogance?
It used to be a point of honor in Old Europe for a politician or
a public servant who committed a monumental blunder or dishonorable act
to resign from his office. If the act was sufficiently serious then suicide
might have been called for. In Japan seppuku was a form of self-inflicted
capital punishment for samurai and politicians who had committed serious
offenses because they had brought shame to themselves and others with whom
they were associated.
In the United States and its satrapies, miscreants are much more "pragmatic."
They enlist public relations fabricators to hoodwink the people into believing
their naked emperor or empress is dressed in the finest of raiments so they
can continue to commit more travesties.
Abe, June 4, 2016 at 5:54 pm
What started out as an attempt to divide and destroy Iran's arc of influence
across the region has galvanized it instead.
Moving the mercenary forces
of IS out of the region is instrumental in ensuring they "live to fight
another day." By placing them in Libya, Washington and its allies hope they
will be far out of reach of the growing coalition truly fighting them across
the Levant. Further more, placing them in Libya allows other leftover "projects"
from the "Arab Spring" to be revisited, such as the destabilization and
destruction of Algeria, Tunisia and perhaps even another attempt to destabilize
and destroy Egypt.
IS' presence in Libya could also be used as a pretext for open-ended
and much broader military intervention throughout all of Africa by US forces
and their European and Persian Gulf allies. As the US has done in Syria,
where it has conducted operations for now over a year and a half to absolutely
no avail, but has managed to prop up proxy forces and continue undermining
and threatening targeted nations, it will likewise do so regarding IS in
Libya and its inevitable and predictable spread beyond.
Despite endless pledges by the US and Europe to take on IS in Libya,
neither has admitted they themselves and their actions in 2011 predictably
precipitated IS' rise there in the first place. Despite the predictable
danger destabilizing and destroying Libya posed to Europe, including a deluge
of refugees fleeing North Africa to escape the war in Libya, predicted by
many prominent analysts at the time even before the first of NATO's bombs
fell on the country, the US and Europe continued forward with military intervention
anyway.
One can only surmise from this that the US and Europe sought to intentionally
create this chaos, planning to fully exploit it both at home and abroad
to continue its campaign to geopolitically reorder MENA.
Of note is that the unity government is not of Libya nor of the Libyan
people. It is imposed by the US and is simply yet another example of US
Corpocracy (read control of democracy by US corps and banks). That the UN
gives it support demonstrates yet again that the UN has become an extension
of the 0.01%
rosemerry, June 5, 2016 at 3:25 pm
All those years of Gaddaffi being a friend, an enemy, a friend once more,
and all the time he worked effectively for Libyans and other Africans, building
giant works for water and agriculture in Libya, providing services, listening
to the people (!!!! who would do that in the USA?) and working to extend
communications to all Africa. Removing him, with all the other destruction,
was completely unforgivable and as we see has ruined yet another country.
Hillary's sins are many-no need to repeat it.
Zahid Kramet, June 5, 2016 at 4:06 am
Regime change, as envisaged by the US, will not survive.And neither will
capitalism in its present unregulated form.This is what the Arab Spring
was and is all about.The US 'plants' in the Middle East have no future,
thus the Clinton doctrine is doomed to fail.Trump, for all his inane ways
of expressing it, has the better idea:he wants to compete on the consumer
products front with an American label.The option is proxy wars led by the
Pentagon and military industrial complexes of the world's three great powers,
which will eventually lead to World War 111and the destruction of all mankind.
Susan Raikes Sugar, June 5, 2016 at 4:17 am
Here is a YouTube video from a series on Hillary's uncharmed life. Relevant
here because it treats the subject of Libya Before, and Libya After. That
we purposefully targeted this country in the same way we have targeted Syria,
Iraq, Yemen, Ukraine, Honduras, Iran (multiple pointless and unfounded threats),
as well as most recently Argentina, planted unrest and then pointed to our
dirty deeds as the reason our vaunted Secretary of State was compelled to
carry out regime-change - that's the story here. But for what reason? She's
an egomaniac whose rationale rests mostly on: Because we can, could, will
- and no one will dare stop us.
Evil? Wicked? It's hard to know how best to characterize someone like
this, but the repelling revelations are endless… If she becomes President
of the United States, the tragic end may be that there will be no more stories.
Someone with an incriminating past like Hillary's may not care about just
blowing the entire Earth away one day. I suspect she could be just that
selfish. She seems to be endowed with the mindset of a serial killer.
Channeling drops and running psy-ops, the machine Clinton helped set
in motion,
Is digging a ditch, the drainage from which, will accumulate sooner or later.
All will work out, though Republicans pout, and the pundits refute attribution-
The "A Team" is ready to lend a hand steady, and Clinton will calm this
commotion!
Now that Ukraine has become the refrain for successful destabilized mayhem,
The mission complete is a model replete with the fruits of a policy triumph.
The same in Brazil was achieved with good will, and the populace has been
preempted,
Chaos resulting through lack of consulting has adequately served to co-opt
them.
Those financial vultures and big-banking cultures will send in their
thieves for a banquet-
Behind those closed doors, the corporate whores are assembling cohorts adapted:
They'll get Saakashvili, he's touchy and feely, Jaresko will also be drafted-
They'll subvert with abandon inserted to stand-in, and as government puppets
they'll crank it.
Now that Brazil's got some corporate shills, and those cronies avoided
indictment,
Michel Temer may serve, because we observe, he's been banned for his acts
of corruption.
He'll now volunteer, and Wall Street will cheer, because Roussef got no
help from Clinton,
Touting motives progressive she's quite the obsessive 'til real women garner
excitement!
If Haftar gets sloppy, some bin Laden copy will step in to the fray and
replace him.
The margin of error for counterfeit terror is large, so there's no need
to worry,
The engineered fraud of a threat from abroad will be stoked by those waves
of migration.
If they run out of boats they'll use rubber tube floats, the Atlantic is
such a quick swim!
The only thing left, and the choice must be deft, is a foreign-born finance
advisor.
They're in ready supply, though Heaven knows why, and their provenance seems
quite consistent-
Like the one in Brazil, who gave banksters a thrill, he'll insure that the
Dinar will prosper.
Austerity measures will save all those treasures Gadaffi retained like a
miser!
Yes, that Neocon panel is digging a channel, that seems more akin to
a ditch,
But the "A Team" will fix it, and Haftar won't nix it, a Jihadi safe-zone
will emerge,
They'll be launching more strikes, we ain't seen the likes, that excrescence
will flow unabated.
The channel will capture to Neocon rapture all that spume and there won't
be a hitch.
But they'll need a Team Leader, a channeling seeder, with clandestine
skills leaner and meaner,
He'll have to have guts, not some amateur klutz, because courage will make
him or break him,
He'll be thrown in that ditch on behalf of the witch whose nefarious schemes
spew that stench:
A shadowy stranger they call "Carlos Danger", they can't trust just any
old wiener!
His fedora pulled low, and that trench-coat bestow a clandestine and
camouflaged perch.
He'll emerge from the mist, a cell phone in his fist, standing by to tweet
classified selfies,
If he opens that coat anywhere near the moat, it won't matter if boxers
or briefs,
The whole White House staff will get a good laugh, but he's got no image
to smirch.
He'll monitor droplets insuring the witch gets real-time situation reports.
As the channel gets filled with that sewage distilled from another R2P disaster,
She'll be watching the screen with her friend Abba Dean as intelligence
analysts squirm,
Classified pictures could compromise strictures if emails were found in
his shorts.
As drops coalesce, she'll rely on the press to obscure any overflow drama.
Suave Carlos Danger will make like a stranger, awaiting his next big assignment.
If the press were to ask us, that could be Damascus, but secrecy rules must
prevail.
There's no need to flaunt, he'll remain nonchalant, to prevent any legacy
trauma.
The Syrian gambit might be just a scam, but the Russians could really
get spooked.
Then something could drop with an ominous flop, and it won't be a laugh
or a cackle.
Engaged on that spectrum twixt knife and the the rectum may arise an indelible
quote:
"We spoke with a voice, but you gave us no choice. We came, and we saw,
and we nuked."
Joe Tedesky, June 5, 2016 at 1:23 pm
Muammar Gaddafi's biggest mistake was his believing he could govern a
sovereign nation. I use to think that it was all about oil. I believe that
the U.S. is largely carrying out Israel's Yinon plan, but there is more.
It's not so much a U.S. plan, as it is a U.S./London/Zionist conquest for
world hegemony. I realize how most of you who frequent this site, already
know this, but the majority of Americans I'm afraid don't have a clue. The
western media has promoted the narrative that America is fighting against
radical Muslims, and that by winning this war in the Middle East democracy
will soon follow. By Robert Parry keeping this Libyian story alive is a
good thing. Our MSM is papering over the real reason for all this war, by
reporting as much as they can the childish antics of our presidential candidates.
Libya, Flight MH17, the corruption in Ukraine, missile sites being
installed in Poland and Romania are never or hardly ever mentioned, and
that's not because any of those subjects are not news worthy. It's good
against evil.
My worry is that Hillary will make a move to bring home the biggest
prize of all, and that will be the conquering of Russia. This doesn't have
anything to do with gender, it's what is inside ones soul, and of course
their agenda.
Bill Bodden, June 5, 2016 at 2:00 pm
Beyond death and taxes there are two constants. Authoritarians with
a lust for power and/or wealth will seek to become autocrats ruling their
fiefs according to their personal desires and ambitions without regard for
and total indifference towards their subjects. If there is anyone among
the tired, the poor, and huddled masses yearning to breathe free there will
always be a need for people with courage to speak truth to power.
This nation has always been fortunate to have courageous people rise to
oppose malicious power – Thomas Paine, Eugene Debs, Emma Goldman, Mother
Jones, Muhammad Ali, Bradley/Chelsea Manning, Robert Parry, Daniel Ellsberg,
Edward Snowden, etc. – but they have had limited success against the plutocrats
and their puppets in the political oligarchies. That failure is due, in
part, to an ill-informed and apathetic populace.
Joe B, June 6, 2016 at 8:00 am
Very true and well said. The mass media are truly enemies of the
people of the United States, and with the economic concentrations that support
them, have waged economic and propaganda war upon the United States. They
are thereby traitors, engaged in a right-wing revolution, and should be
utterly destroyed in their ability to do so.
The failed Libyan policy was one of the key sources of hundred of thousand refugees in Europe now.
As well as Syrian events (where all this hired for overthrowing Gaddafi fighters went next)
Notable quotes:
"... a proper tally of the ideological culprits who have never been held to account should make special reference to Hillary Clinton's actions in Libya ..."
"... Specifically, her misstatements ought to have been corrected along these lines: Gaddafi didn't have "more blood on his hands of Americans than anybody else," unless you discount the Saudi support for Al Qaeda. He did not threaten "genocide," no matter how slack your definition of genocide. He threatened to kill the rebels in Benghazi; the threat was dismissed by US army intelligence as improbable and poorly sourced. But Hillary Clinton overrode US intelligence, outmaneuvered the Pentagon (the secretary of defense, Robert Gates, had opposed the NATO bombing unreservedly), mobilized liberal-humanitarian and conservative pro-war opinion in the media, and talked Obama into committing the US to effect regime change in a third Middle East country. ..."
"... Gaddafi was not "deposed." He was tortured and murdered, very likely by Islamists allied with NATO forces. The "radical elements" that are causing "a lot of turmoil and trouble" in "this arc of instability" are, in fact, Islamists whom Clinton picked as allies in the region, and she has pressed to supply them with arms in Syria as well as Libya. She really rates mention as an American mover of the "instability" in the region second only to Bush and Cheney. ..."
"... Hillary says she made a "mistake" on the Bush era Iraq invasion vote. She did not make a mistake she engaged in an deliberate act of political expediency and cowardice. Everyone with a brain knew Bush was cooking up the Iraq invasion based on nothing. She knew but took the political choice not an intelligent one. ..."
"... She has been a failure at just about every position she has held. She was fired from Watergate. A miserable failure leading healthcare reform (in the 90's- for those of you millienials that missed it). She did nothing as a Senator, having her eyes on the oval office. ..."
"... Dickerson to Clinton: "Let me ask you. So, Libya is a country in which ISIS has taken hold in part, because of chaos after Muammar Gaddafi. That was an operation you championed. President Obama says this is the lesson he took from that operation. In an interview he said, the lesson was, do we have an answer for the day after? Wasn't that supposed to be one of the lessons that we learned after the Iraq war? And how did you get it wrong with Libya if the key lesson of the Iraq war is to have a plan for after?" ..."
"... A day after assuming office as secretary of state, Clinton signed a Sensitive Compartmented Information Nondisclosure Agreement that laid out criminal penalties for "any unauthorized disclosure" of classified information. ..."
"... She is either lying or totally incompetent to perform any job in the United States Government. ..."
"... This article spotlights the failed Libyan policy which will gain importance as violence is exported beyond Syria and Mali and millions more refugees are created. ..."
"... Sanders or bust. No neolibs, no Dinos for me. This is not a Ralph Nader situation. I simply will not support any more fake Democrats. Bill neolibbed us. Obama neolibbed us. Hillary did and will neolib us. ..."
"... The Empire lies through its teeth, we all know that. The Colonel had actually been cleaning up his act to the point he was getting cautious praise from Washington ..."
Some of the better-informed commentators on the recent terrorist attacks by ISIS have noticed
the reassertion of the 2002-2003 understanding of the Middle East: that all-out war is the only sensible
policy and Israel is our most faithful ally in the region. It is an opportunist line, and it is being
pushed hardest by opportunists on the far right. But a proper tally of the ideological culprits
who have never been held to account should make special reference to Hillary Clinton's actions in
Libya. In the Democratic debate on November 14, Clinton got away with saying this unchallenged:
CLINTON: Well, we did have a plan, and I think it's fair to say that of all of the Arab
leaders, Gaddafi probably had more blood on his hands of Americans than anybody else. And when
he moved on his own people, threatening a massacre, genocide, the Europeans and the Arabs, our
allies and partners, did ask for American help and we provided it. And we didn't put a single
boot on the ground, and Gaddafi was deposed. The Libyans turned out for one of the most successful,
fairest elections that any Arab country has had. They elected moderate leaders. Now, there has
been a lot of turmoil and trouble as they have tried to deal with these radical elements which
you find in this arc of instability, from north Africa to Afghanistan. And it is imperative that
we do more not only to help our friends and partners protect themselves and protect our own homeland,
but also to work to try to deal with this arc of instability, which does have a lot of impact
on what happens in a country like Libya.
In response, Martin O'Malley said that Libya was "a mess" and Bernie Sanders said that Iraq had
produced half a million PTSD casualties among Americans who served there. Neither showed the slightest
indication of having mastered what happened in Libya: the centrality of Clinton's influence in the
catastrophic decision to overthrow the government, and the proven consequences -- civil war in Libya
itself and the opening of an Islamist pipeline from Libya to Syria and beyond.
Specifically, her misstatements ought to have been corrected along these lines: Gaddafi didn't
have "more blood on his hands of Americans than anybody else," unless you discount the Saudi support
for Al Qaeda. He did not threaten "genocide," no matter how slack your definition of genocide. He
threatened to kill the rebels in Benghazi; the threat was dismissed by US army intelligence as improbable
and poorly sourced. But Hillary Clinton overrode US intelligence, outmaneuvered the Pentagon (the
secretary of defense, Robert Gates, had opposed the NATO bombing unreservedly), mobilized liberal-humanitarian
and conservative pro-war opinion in the media, and talked Obama into committing the US to effect
regime change in a third Middle East country.
Gaddafi was not "deposed." He was tortured and murdered, very likely by Islamists allied with
NATO forces. The "radical elements" that are causing "a lot of turmoil and trouble" in "this arc
of instability" are, in fact, Islamists whom Clinton picked as allies in the region, and she has
pressed to supply them with arms in Syria as well as Libya. She really rates mention as an American
mover of the "instability" in the region second only to Bush and Cheney.
... ... ...
David Bromwich is a Professor of Literature, Yale University
Mike Rodriguez · Jacksonville, Florida
Hillary no. Sanders yes. The US political establishment of both parties no.
Lybia is the least of these "mistakes" . Bush and Obama and Congress never had a clue what
they were doing in the Middle East. We are paying a price for a weak and spiritless political
system characterized by voter apathy and ignorance.
Hillary? Why is she running? Why are the Republicans all running? Man alive we have got little
or nothing really. But one of these is going to win no matter how small the voter turnout.
Hillary says she made a "mistake" on the Bush era Iraq invasion vote. She did not make
a mistake she engaged in an deliberate act of political expediency and cowardice. Everyone with
a brain knew Bush was cooking up the Iraq invasion based on nothing. She knew but took the political
choice not an intelligent one.
Goethe Gunther · Las Cruces, New Mexico
Thank you for this piece. Hillary Clinton and Richard Perle drink from the same neo-con/neo-liberal
global political well. I CAN NOT vote for this person. Gaddafi was murdered as a matter of personal
vendetta to avoid exposing allege monies he offered Sarkozy's campaign, amongst other issues that
will take too much space to elucidate.
But Obama and Hillary, because of their actions in Libya, made the world a more dangerous place.
And herer is Hillary on the brutal murder of Gadaffi:
https://youtu.be/mlz3-OzcExI
Gero Lubovnik · Belarus Polyteknik University
How does Hillary continually escape the truth and proper vetting? She has been a failure
at just about every position she has held. She was fired from Watergate. A miserable failure leading
healthcare reform (in the 90's- for those of you millienials that missed it). She did nothing
as a Senator, having her eyes on the oval office. Libya and the rest of the middle east,
her "Reset Button" with Russia (how's that workin' out?) who blitzkreiged Crimea and screwed Ukraine
entirely, working toward parity of trade with China (who is building a military base in the South
China Sea). Abject failure. And then one has to wonder how she and Bill amassed a personal fortune,
providing no goods or products, nor services of meaningful value? [Answer: Clinton Foundation
money laundering machine- where magic happens in past, present and future quid pro quo]?
AND YOU WANT TO CORONATE HER AS PRESIDENT [EMPRESS], completel with pen and phone??? And then
you wonder why America is becoming a second or third world nation.
Charles Hill · Clifton High School
This was a HUGE error. Gaddafi used to say "the West would never overthrow him because they
did not want a Somalia on the Mediterranean coast". I guess Hillary and Obama did.
And you can not blame this on Bush. Bush got Gaddafi to give up his WMD and Gaddafi was causing
no trouble. He was only fighting the Islamists inside his country that Hillary and Obama decided
to support. Now ISIS is running things there.
Brian Donahue · New York, New York
The US has a habit of destabilizing these countries (Iraq and Libya). Chaos results. Hillary
will be very dangerous as president. She is too quick to use force with no end strategy at all.
Clarc King · Bronx, New York
A fair representation of the reality of American foreign policy taken over by the satanic,
elitist, neoliberal mob. Libya, once an ally and most progressive state in Africa, was destroyed
and is now governed, if you can call it that, by a CIA asset. No wonder people resist American
Regime Change. Hillary, a warmonger for Imperialism, cannot possibly be considered for the US
presidency. The US citizenry must act quickly and form a new presidential platform.
Linda LaRoque · Odessa College
If you're under 50 you really need to read this. If you're over 50, you lived through it, so
share it with those under 50.
Amazing to me how much I had forgotten! When Bill Clinton was president, he allowed Hillary
to assume authority over a health care reform. Even after threats and intimidation, she couldn't
even get a vote in a democratic controlled congress. This fiasco cost the American taxpayers about
$13 million in cost for studies, promotion, and other efforts.
Then President Clinton gave Hillary authority over selecting a female attorney general. Her
first two selections were Zoe Baird and Kimba Wood - both were forced to withdraw their names
from consideration.
Next she chose Janet Reno - husband Bill described her selection as "my worst mistake." Some
may not remember that Reno made the decision to gas David Koresh and the Branch Davidian religious
sect in Waco , Texas resulting in dozens of deaths of women and children.
Husband Bill allowed Hillary to make recommendations for the head of the Civil Rights Commission.
Lani Guanier was her selection. When a little probing led to the discovery of Ms. Guanier's radical
views, her name had to be withdrawn from consideration.
Apparently a slow learner, husband Bill allowed Hillary to make some more recommendations.
She chose former law partners Web Hubbel for the Justice Department, Vince Foster for the White
House staff, and William Kennedy for the Treasury Department.
Her selections went well: Hubbel went to prison, Foster (presumably) committed suicide, and
Kennedy was forced to resign.
Many younger votes will have no knowledge of "Travelgate." Hillary wanted to award unfettered
travel contracts to Clinton friend Harry Thompson - and the White House Travel Office refused
to comply. She managed to have them reported to the FBI and fired. This ruined their reputations,
cost them their jobs, and caused a thirty-six month investigation. Only one employee, Billy Dale
was charged with a crime, and that of the enormous crime of mixing personal and White House funds.
A jury acquitted him of any crime in less than two hours.
Still not convinced of her ineptness, Hillary was allowed to recommend a close Clinton friend,
Craig Livingstone, for the position of Director of White House security. When Livingstone was
investigated for the improper access of about 900 FBI files of Clinton enemies (Filegate) and
the widespread use of drugs by White House staff, suddenly Hillary and the president denied even
knowing Livingstone, and of course, denied knowledge of drug use in the White House.
Following this debacle, the FBI closed its White House Liaison Office after more than thirty years
of service to seven presidents.
Next, when women started coming forward with allegations of sexual harassment and rape by Bill
Clinton, Hillary was put in charge of the "bimbo eruption" and scandal defense. Some of her more
notable decisions in the debacle were:
She urged her husband not to settle the Paula Jones lawsuit. After the Starr investigation
they settled with Ms. Jones.
She refused to release the Whitewater documents, which led to the appointment of Ken Starr
as Special Prosecutor. After $80 million dollars of taxpayer money was spent, Starr's investigation
led to Monica Lewinsky, which led to Bill lying about and later admitting his affairs. Hillary's
devious game plan resulted in Bill losing his license to practice law for 'lying under oath'
to a grand jury and then his subsequent impeachment by the House of Representatives. Hillary
avoided indictment for perjury and obstruction of justice during the Starr investigation by
repeating, "I do not recall," "I have no recollection," and "I don't know" a total of 56 times
while under oath.
After leaving the White House, Hillary was forced to return an estimated $200,000 in White
House furniture, china, and artwork that she had stolen.
Now we are exposed to the destruction of possibly incriminating emails while Hillary was Secretary
of State and the "pay to play" schemes of the Clinton Foundation - we have no idea what shoe
will fall next.
That's all well and good, and probably all true and then some, but the candidates running against
her, even with all their clearance for viewing information, have NO IDEA what Clinton and her
State Depertment were doing then. Only she and MAYBE Obama does. It has become clear that the
State Department was running rogue, just like the IRS and the AG's office were.
Terry Lee · Telgar
The State Department was running rogue?! Only she and MAYBE Obama knows what was going on?
It seems that you know what was going on, too. LOL!
Elizabeth Fichtl
The country is waking up.
Question put to HRC during the debate.
Dickerson to Clinton: "Let me ask you. So, Libya is a country in which ISIS has taken hold
in part, because of chaos after Muammar Gaddafi. That was an operation you championed. President
Obama says this is the lesson he took from that operation. In an interview he said, the lesson
was, do we have an answer for the day after? Wasn't that supposed to be one of the lessons that
we learned after the Iraq war? And how did you get it wrong with Libya if the key lesson of the
Iraq war is to have a plan for after?"
Leslie Ware · Preston High School
Just a few reasons to take Clinton to trial:
1.Under 18 USC 793 subsection F, the information does not have to be classified to count as
a violation. The intelligence source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity citing the sensitivity
of the ongoing probe, said the subsection requires the "lawful possession" of national defense
information by a security clearance holder who "through gross negligence," such as the use of
an unsecure computer network, permits the material to be removed or abstracted from its proper,
secure location.
Subsection F also requires the clearance holder "to make prompt report of such loss, theft,
abstraction, or destruction to his superior officer. "A failure to do so "shall be fined under
this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both."
The source said investigators are also focused on possible obstruction of justice. "If someone
knows there is an ongoing investigation and takes action to impede an investigation, for example
destruction of documents or threatening of witnesses, that could be a separate charge but still
remain under a single case," the source said. Currently, the ongoing investigation is led by the
Washington Field Office of the FBI.
2. A day after assuming office as secretary of state, Clinton signed a Sensitive Compartmented
Information Nondisclosure Agreement that laid out criminal penalties for "any unauthorized disclosure"
of classified information. … "I have been advised that the unauthorized disclosure, unauthorized
retention, or negligent handling of SCI by me could cause irreparable injury to the United States
or be used to advantage by a foreign nation," the agreement states.
Moreover, the agreement covers information of lesser sensitivity. ("In addition to her SCI
agreement, Clinton signed a separate NDA for all other classified information. It contains similar
language, including prohibiting 'negligent handling of classified information,' requiring her
to ascertain whether information is classified and laying out criminal penalties.") Well, that
is awkward, as the FBI continues its investigation into potential negligent handling of classified
information.
3. 18 U.S. Code § 1001
(a) Except as otherwise provided in this section, whoever, in any matter within the jurisdiction
of the executive, legislative, or judicial branch of the Government of the United States, knowingly
and willfully-
(1) falsifies, conceals, or covers up by any trick, scheme, or device a material fact;
(2) makes any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation; or
(3) makes or uses any false writing or document knowing the same to contain any materially false,
fictitious, or fraudulent statement or entry;
shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 5 years or, if the offense involves
international or domestic terrorism (as defined in section 2331), imprisoned not more than 8 years,
or both. If the matter relates to an offense under chapter 109A, 109B, 110, or 117, or section
1591, then the term of imprisonment imposed under this section shall be not more than 8 years.
(b) Subsection (a) does not apply to a party to a judicial proceeding, or that party's counsel,
for statements, representations, writings or documents submitted by such party or counsel to a
judge or magistrate in that proceeding.
(c) With respect to any matter within the jurisdiction of the legislative branch, subsection (a)
shall apply only to-
(1) administrative matters, including a claim for payment, a matter related to the procurement
of property or services, personnel or employment practices, or support services, or a document
required by law, rule, or regulation to be submitted to the Congress or any office or officer
within the legislative branch; or
(2) any investigation or review, conducted pursuant to the authority of any committee, subcommittee,
commission or office of the Congress, consistent with applicable rules of the House or Senate.
Its time to escalate this investigation and show the Country how unethical and criminal this
pretender to the presidency really is.
Clinton also should be totally disqualified from a Security Clearance, simply because of her
previous behavior and nonchalant lack of safeguarding of classified information. All the while
saying she did not recognize the information was CLASSIFIED. She is either lying or totally
incompetent to perform any job in the United States Government.
Clinton for Trial 2016.
Mike Kelly
OK, we get it. You don't like HRC.
The rest of this is a crock. There's simply no evidence that HRC Actually did any of the dire
things you are claiming in your long and tiresome post. Virtually all of the classified information
was classified by the State Department or CIA AFTER it was received and sent by HRC. As a result,
your allegations do not hold water. Certainly much different from outing a CIA agent for political
purposes, as was done during the previous administration.
David Auner · Springfield, Missouri
This article spotlights the failed Libyan policy which will gain importance as violence
is exported beyond Syria and Mali and millions more refugees are created. The point about
repubs being sharper is just wrong - they have honed absurd talking points with Luntz while wasting
tax dollars on Benghazi. O'Malley's mess comment was adequate - debate prep can not prepare for
every oddly crafted rewrite of history. Rebutting Clinton's narrative would involve hours of pointing
out the failures of State's and Obama's narratives in most of their tenure. Sanders knows more
than what this article has put forward but a vigorous debate would touch on classified information
about the CIA station in Benghazi and their disastrous activities - which candidates must avoid
for now. Debates fail easily - the author of this article fails with adequate time for a deeper
analysis.
Elvin B. Ross · University of Idaho
Sanders or bust. No neolibs, no Dinos for me. This is not a Ralph Nader situation. I simply
will not support any more fake Democrats. Bill neolibbed us. Obama neolibbed us. Hillary did and
will neolib us.
Paul Mountain · Works at Love_Unlimited
US politicians aren't paid to think, they're paid to follow the leader, and when it comes to
Middle Eastern policy that's Israel, the Bible, and the Congressional Military Industrial Complex.
Michael Rinella · Works at State University of New York Press
The Empire lies through its teeth, we all know that. The Colonel had actually been cleaning
up his act to the point he was getting cautious praise from Washington - and then when globalization
destablized his economy (foreign workers in eastern Libya taking jobs from the locals) they fell
over themselves to put a knife in his back.
James Charles O'Donnell III
Why is the institutional American left so frantic to nominate Sec. Clinton, the candidate who
is A) unquestionably THE LEAST PROGRESSIVE choice; and B) by far THE LEAST VIABLE contender in
a general election, with a cornucopia of baggage, not all of which is imaginary?
Hillary Clinton has managed DECADES of poor polling, with consistently high negative favorability
ratings, especially among independents -- and a huge "trustability" problem. That "dodging sniper
fire" fabrication she repeatedly told ON VIDEO will probably be exploited in the general election
to cement the American people's (accurate) perception that Ms. Clinton is dishonest, and that
will sink her electoral chances for good -- and the LEFT, too, unfortunately (so much for those
SCOTUS seats!).
With Bernie Sanders, AN ACTUAL PROGRESSIVE, looking for all the world like a national winner,
inspiring record-breaking crowds and grass-roots donations, the liberal establishment is bizarrely
(corruptly) pushing for the coronation of the ONLY Democrat who could possibly lose in 2016 --
and the one who, on policy, is an open neoconservative war hawk and Wall Street champion, a career
enemy of the 99%... UNBELIEVABLE.
Before the revolution, Libya was a secure, prospering, secular Islamic country
and a critical ally providing intelligence on terrorist activity post–September
11, 2001. Qaddafi was no longer a threat to the United States. Yet Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton strongly advocated and succeeded in convincing the
administration to support the Libyan rebels with a no-fly zone, intended to
prevent a possible humanitarian disaster that turned quickly into all-out war.
... ... ...
Despite valid ceasefire opportunities to prevent "bloodshed in Benghazi"
at the onset of hostilities, Secretary Clinton intervened and quickly pushed
her foreign policy in support of a revolution led by the Muslim Brotherhood
and known terrorists in the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group. One of the Libyan
Rebel Brigade commanders, Ahmed Abu Khattala, would later be involved in the
terrorist attack in Benghazi on September 11, 2012. Articulating her indifference
to the chaos brought by war, Secretary Clinton
stated on May 18, 2013, to the House Oversight Committee and the American
public, "Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk
one night and decided they'd go kill some Americans? What difference, at this
point, does it make?"
... ... ...
U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Charles R. Kubic served worldwide for over 32 years
as a Navy Seabee, and retired in 2005. He served as a senior policy analyst
in the Reagan White House, and was appointed in March 2016 as a National Security
Policy Advisor to Donald Trump.
"... Kessler points out that Clinton's protestations that the material under investigation was not marked classified is immaterial, writing, "The pertinent laws make no distinction between classified material that is marked as such or not. If material is classified and is handled improperly, that is a violation of criminal laws." ..."
"... The FBI investigation has been galvanized further by recent revelations involving emails sent by Abedin and Clinton aide Cheryl Mills, as well as the fact that State Department BlackBerry devices belonging to Abedin and Mills have likely been liquidated or sold. ..."
"... There's not an agent in the service who wants to be in Hillary's detail. If agents get the nod to go to her detail, that's considered a form of punishment among the agents. ..."
"... The most egregious example of Clinton's arrogance was evidenced in one particularly nasty incident when she was First Lady. One former agent related, "The first lady steps out of the limo, and another uniformed officer says to her, 'Good morning, ma'am.' Her response to him was 'F-- off.' I couldn't believe I heard it." ..."
Ronald Kessler, writing for The Daily Mail, testifies that Hillary Clinton and her
long-time aide Huma Abedin were detested by members of the Secret Service because
the two women arrogantly treated the Secret Service agents like dirt.
Kessler, the author of
The Secrets of the FBI and The First Family Detail: Secret Service Agents Reveal
the Hidden Lives of the Presidents, dismisses claims by members
of the media that the current FBI investigation of Clinton is restricted to
a "security investigation." He attests that the investigation of Clinton means
that she violated criminal laws, as the FBI will not launch an investigation
unless laws have been violated. Kessler points out that Clinton's protestations
that the material under investigation was not marked classified is immaterial,
writing, "The pertinent laws make no distinction between classified material
that is marked as such or not. If material is classified and is handled improperly,
that is a violation of criminal laws."
The FBI investigation has been galvanized further by recent revelations
involving emails sent by
Abedin and Clinton aide
Cheryl Mills, as well as the fact that State Department BlackBerry devices
belonging to Abedin and Mills have likely been
liquidated or sold.
Some of the anecdotes involving the imperiousness and haughtiness of Clinton
and Abedin include:
In 2008, Abedin lost her way driving Chelsea Clinton to the February 2008
Democrat presidential debate in Los Angeles. One agent who tried to help Abedin
recalled, "She was belligerent and angry about being late for the event, no
appreciation for any of it, not a thank-you or anything. That was common for
her people to be rude."
Another Los Angeles imbroglio occurred when Abedin, who was not wearing a
pin certifying her identity, tried to bluster past a female Secret Service agent.
The agent, unaware of Abedin's identity, said, "You don't have the proper identification
to go beyond this point." Another agent told Kessler, "Huma basically tried
to throw her weight around. She tried to just force her way through and said
belligerently, 'Do you know who I am?''"
Kessler noted that Secret Service Agents are not required to carry luggage
for their protectees, but they will if they like them. One agent recollected
that, in Abedin's case, "The agents were just like, 'Hey, you're going to be
like that? Well, you get your own luggage to the car. Oh, and by the way, you
can carry the first lady's luggage to the car, too. She'd have four bags, and
we'd stand there and watch her and say, 'Oh, can we hold the door open for you?'"
The agent added, "When it's convenient for them, they'll utilize the service
for whatever favor they need, but otherwise, they look down upon the agents,
kind of like servants."
An agent who still works for the Secret Service asserted:
There's not an agent in the service who wants to be in Hillary's
detail. If agents get the nod to go to her detail, that's considered a form
of punishment among the agents. She's hard to work around, she's known
to snap at agents and yell at agents and dress them down to their faces,
and they just have to be humble and say, "Yes ma'am," and walk away. Agents
don't deserve that. They're there to do a job, they're there to protect
her, they'll lay their life down for hers, and there's absolutely no respect
for that. And that's why agents do not want to go to her detail.
The most egregious example of Clinton's arrogance was evidenced in one
particularly nasty incident when she was First Lady. One former agent related,
"The first lady steps out of the limo, and another uniformed officer says to
her, 'Good morning, ma'am.' Her response to him was 'F-- off.' I couldn't believe
I heard it."
Hillary was famous for wanting the Secret Service to be invisible; one former
agent said, "We were basically told, the Clintons don't want to see you, they
don't want to hear you, get out of the way. Hillary was walking down a hall,
you were supposed to hide behind drapes used as partitions. Supervisors would
tell us, 'Listen, stand behind this curtain. They're coming,' or 'Just stand
out of the way, don't be seen.'"
Hillary berated a White House electrician changing a light bulb, screaming
that he should have waited until the First Family was gone. Franette McCulloch,
the assistant White House pastry chief at the time, remembered, "He was a basket
case."
FBI agent Coy Copeland told Kessler that Hillary had a "standing rule that
no one spoke to her when she was going from one location to another."
One agent was abused by Hillary during the Kenneth Starr investigation of
the Whitewater scandal; he said, "Good morning, Mrs. Clinton," and she ranted,
"How dare you? You people are just destroying my husband… And where do you buy
your suits? Penney's?"
Weeks later, the agent confessed to Copeland, "I was wearing the best suit
I owned."
"... Michele Flournoy, formerly the third-ranking civilian in the Pentagon under President Barack Obama, called for "limited military coercion" to help remove Assad from power in Syria, including a "no bombing" zone over parts of Syria held by U.S.-backed rebels. ..."
"Information Clearing House" - "Defense One" - The woman expected to run
the Pentagon under Hillary Clinton said she would direct U.S. troops to push
President Bashar al-Assad's forces out of southern Syria and would send more
American boots to fight the Islamic State in the region.
Michele Flournoy, formerly the third-ranking civilian in the Pentagon under
President Barack Obama, called for "limited military coercion" to help remove
Assad from power in Syria, including a "no bombing" zone over parts of Syria
held by U.S.-backed rebels.
A weak president with jingoistic and incompetent Secretary of State is a pretty
explosive mix. A sociopathic female president with neocons inspired jingoistic foreign
policy can be a disaster for the country.
Notable quotes:
"... Her conviction would be critical in persuading Mr. Obama to join allies in bombing Colonel Qaddafi's forces. In fact, Mr. Obama's defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, would later say that in a "51-49" decision, it was Mrs. Clinton's support that put the ambivalent president over the line. ..."
"... Anne-Marie Slaughter, her director of policy planning at the State Department, notes that in conversation and in her memoir, Mrs. Clinton repeatedly speaks of wanting to be "caught trying." In other words, she would rather be criticized for what she has done than for having done nothing at all. ..."
"... Libya's descent into chaos began with a rushed decision to go to war, made in what one top official called a "shadow of uncertainty" as to Colonel Qaddafi's intentions. ..."
"... She pressed for a secret American program that supplied arms to rebel militias, an effort never before confirmed. ..."
"... Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, has seized on her role in the larger narrative of the Libyan intervention; during a recent debate, he said he feared that "Secretary Clinton is too much into regime change." ..."
"... ...aftermath of the 2011 intervention: the Islamic State only "300 miles from Europe," a refugee crisis that "is a human tragedy as well as a political one" and the destabilization of much of West Africa. ..."
"... "She says, and I quote, 'You are not going to drag us into your shitty war,'" said Mr. Araud, now France's ambassador in Washington. "She said, 'We'll be obliged to follow and support you, and we don't want to.' The conversation got tense. I answered, 'France isn't a U.S. subsidiary.' It was the Obama policy at the time that they didn't want a new Arab war." ..."
"... "We don't want another war," she told Mr. Lavrov, stressing that the mission was limited to protecting civilians. "I take your point about not seeking another war," she recalled him responding. "But that doesn't mean that you won't get one." ..."
The president was wary. The secretary
of state was persuasive. But the ouster
of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi left Libya
a failed state and a terrorist haven.
Mrs. Clinton was won over. Opposition leaders "said all the right things
about supporting democracy and inclusivity and building Libyan institutions,
providing some hope that we might be able to pull this off," said Philip H.
Gordon, one of her assistant secretaries. "They gave us what we wanted to hear.
And you do want to believe."
Her conviction would be critical in persuading Mr. Obama to join allies
in bombing Colonel Qaddafi's forces. In fact, Mr. Obama's defense secretary,
Robert M. Gates, would later say that in a "51-49" decision, it was Mrs. Clinton's
support that put the ambivalent president over the line.
The consequences would be more far-reaching than anyone imagined, leaving
Libya a failed state and a terrorist haven, a place where the direst answers
to Mrs. Clinton's questions have come to pass.
This is the story of how a woman whose Senate vote for the Iraq war may have
doomed her first presidential campaign nonetheless doubled down and pushed for
military action in another Muslim country. As she once again seeks the White
House, campaigning in part on her experience as the nation's chief diplomat,
an examination of the intervention she championed shows her at what was arguably
her moment of greatest influence as secretary of state. It is a working portrait
rich with evidence of what kind of president she might be, and especially of
her expansive approach to the signal foreign-policy conundrum of today: whether,
when and how the United States should wield its military power in Syria and
elsewhere in the Middle East.
... ... ...
Anne-Marie Slaughter, her director of policy planning at the State Department,
notes that in conversation and in her memoir, Mrs. Clinton repeatedly speaks
of wanting to be "caught trying." In other words, she would rather be criticized
for what she has done than for having done nothing at all.
... ... ...
Libya's descent into chaos began with a rushed decision to go to war,
made in what one top official called a "shadow of uncertainty" as to Colonel
Qaddafi's intentions. The mission inexorably evolved even as Mrs. Clinton
foresaw some of the hazards of toppling another Middle Eastern strongman.
She pressed for a secret American program that supplied arms to rebel militias,
an effort never before confirmed.
... ... ...
Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, has seized on her role in the larger
narrative of the Libyan intervention; during a recent debate, he said he feared
that "Secretary Clinton is too much into regime change."
... ... ...
...aftermath of the 2011 intervention: the Islamic State only "300 miles
from Europe," a refugee crisis that "is a human tragedy as well as a political
one" and the destabilization of much of West Africa.
... ... ...
France and Britain were pushing hard for a Security Council vote on a resolution
supporting a no-fly zone in Libya to prevent Colonel Qaddafi from slaughtering
his opponents. Ms. Rice was calling to push back, in characteristically salty
language.
"She says, and I quote, 'You are not going to drag us into your
shitty war,'" said Mr. Araud, now France's ambassador in Washington. "She said,
'We'll be obliged to follow and support you, and we don't want to.' The conversation
got tense. I answered, 'France isn't a U.S. subsidiary.' It was the Obama policy
at the time that they didn't want a new Arab war."
... ... ...
"We don't want another war," she told Mr. Lavrov, stressing that the
mission was limited to protecting civilians. "I take your point about not seeking
another war," she recalled him responding. "But that doesn't mean that you won't
get one."
"... "There never was, at any time, data belonging to the Clintons stored in Denver. Ever," said Dovetail Solutions CEO Andy Boian, who added that Clinton's server was always in a New Jersey data center. "We do not store data in any bathrooms." ..."
"... Private e-mail servers are unusual because they carry greater risks of getting hacked, said Scott W. Burt, president and CEO of Integro, a Denver e-mail management company. ..."
"... Platte River, which submitted a bid for the e-mail job, stepped in four months after Clinton left the secretary job on Feb. 1, 2013, and three months after Sidney Blumenthal , a former Clinton White House staffer, reported that his e-mail account had been hacked, exposing messages sent to Clinton. ..."
"... "We were literally hired in June 2013," Boian said, "and because we use industry best practices, we had (Clinton's) server moved to a data center in New Jersey. It remained in that spot until last week," when the FBI picked it up Aug. 12. ..."
"... "The role of Platte River Networks was to upgrade, secure and manage the e-mail server for both the Clintons and their staff beginning June 2013. Platte River Networks is not under investigation. We were never under investigation. And we will fully comply with the FBI," he said. ..."
"... Platte River Networks opened in September 2002, offering information technology services to small businesses. Services included computer maintenance, virus and malware control, and emergency technical support, according to an archive of its old website. ..."
"... Two years later, the company moved into a condo owned by company co-founder Treve Suazo at Ajax Lofts, 2955 Inca St., a few blocks from the South Platte River. ..."
"... A year later, the company began offering cloud-based services, which makes company data available online so employees can access software and services from any device. ..."
"... Platte River continues to win awards and has grown. Last week, it was named, for the fourth consecutive year, to CRN's Next-Gen 250 . The list highlights companies that are " ahead of the curve " in their IT offerings. ..."
And when Platte River became the latest name to emerge in the Clinton e-mail
controversy, the company maintained its silence - until last week, when it hired
a crisis-communications expert to defend against political innuendo, death threats
and allegations that it stored her e-mail in the bathroom of a downtown Denver
loft.
"There never was, at any time, data belonging to the Clintons stored
in Denver. Ever," said Dovetail Solutions CEO Andy Boian, who added that Clinton's
server was always in a New Jersey data center. "We do not store data in any
bathrooms."
Hillary Clinton's decision to have an employee set up a
private e-mail server in her New York home in 2008 has plagued the former
secretary of state's presidential campaign.
The FBI is investigating whether any of her private e-mails contained sensitive
information and should have been classified - and not stored on a computer inside
her house.
Private e-mail servers are unusual because they carry greater risks of getting
hacked, said Scott W. Burt, president and CEO of Integro, a Denver e-mail management
company.
"There are a lot of people you could hire, and they would set up (an e-mail
server) and run it. That's not hard. But there's no real reason to do that,"
Burt said. "The main motivator is you're nervous about what is in your e-mail.
It's a control thing."
Boian said Platte River had nothing to do with Clinton's private home server.
Platte River, which submitted a bid for the e-mail job, stepped in four months
after Clinton left the secretary job on Feb. 1, 2013, and three months after
Sidney Blumenthal, a former Clinton White House staffer, reported that his
e-mail account had been hacked, exposing messages sent to Clinton.
"We were literally hired in June 2013," Boian said, "and because we use
industry best practices, we had (Clinton's) server moved to a data center in
New Jersey. It remained in that spot until last week," when the FBI picked it
up Aug. 12.
Platte River also is not in possession of any Clinton e-mail backups, he
said.
"The role of Platte River Networks was to upgrade, secure and manage
the e-mail server for both the Clintons and their staff beginning June 2013.
Platte River Networks is not under investigation. We were never under investigation.
And we will fully comply with the FBI," he said.
Platte River Networks opened in September 2002, offering information
technology services to small businesses. Services included computer maintenance,
virus and malware control, and emergency technical support, according to an
archive of its old website.
Two years later, the company moved into a condo owned by company co-founder
Treve Suazo at Ajax Lofts, 2955 Inca St., a few blocks from the South Platte
River.
A year later, the company began offering cloud-based services, which
makes company data available online so employees can access software and services
from any device.
Today, Platte touts itself as a full-service IT management firm.
It also lists Suazo, its CEO, and Brent Allshouse, its chief financial officer,
as co-founders. According to
industry publication CRN, Platte River expected to grow to $6 million in
sales in 2014, from $4.7 million a year earlier.
But as early as 2006, Tom Welch was listed as a partner, the same title given
to Suazo and Allshouse.
Before the Clinton scandal blew up, Platte River Networks welcomed attention.
David DeCamillis joined the company in 2008 and, as its director of business
development, became its public face, using news releases to promote industry
awards and appearing on
Fox31 Denver's
"Good Day Colorado" as a tech expert.
In 2012, Platte River was
named Ingram Micro's Rainmaker of the Western Region, an honor that California
technology distributor gives its fastest-growing business partners based on
revenue, peer-to-peer leadership and use of Ingram Micro's cloud services.
That same year, the company won the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce's
Small Business of the Year award. The award is vetted by the chamber and
independent judges, said Abram Sloss, executive director of the chamber's small-business
development center.
"We really look for companies that have a good chance for a strong uptick
and have solid growth," Sloss said. While the chamber can offer advice to members
who suddenly are thrown into the media spotlight - for good or bad - Sloss said
he has not heard from the company.
"Gosh, if I was the company who the Clintons hired, it'd be hard not to say,
'We are a trusted provider that one of the influential families in the United
States hired,' " Sloss said.
Platte River continues to win awards and has grown. Last week, it was
named, for the fourth consecutive year, to
CRN's Next-Gen 250 . The list highlights companies that are "
ahead of the curve" in their IT offerings.
In June, it moved to a 12,000-square-foot building at 5700 Washington St.
A photo on Platte River's
blog shows 30 people posing in the new building.
Platte River did not make DeCamillis, now its vice president of sales and
marketing, available for comment.
But DeCamillis
told The Washington Post that no one at the company had expected this kind
of attention, which he said included death threats that caused the company to
pull employee information from its website.
If they had, he said, "we would never have taken it on."
Platte River Networks timeline
2002: Platte River Networks founded
2004: Moves to 2955 Inca St., Unit 2K
Feb. 1, 2013: Hillary Clinton's last day as secretary of state
June 2013: Hired to manage Clinton-family e-mail server, which
is moved from their Chappaqua, N.Y., home to a secure data center in New
Jersey
June 18, 2015: Hosts
open house for new headquarters at 4700 Washington St.
Aug. 11, 2015: FBI asks for Clinton's e-mail server
Aug. 12, 2015: Delivers Clinton's server to the FBI from New
Jersey
"... Which means she broke the law. Being "cleared to see it" doesn't mean you can see it anywhere you want, any time you want. There are requirements for handling the information. And a server in her basement that did not use encrypted connections for months, and then had the default VPN keys on the VPN appliance once they started using encryption, and an Internet-connected printer on the same network is nowhere near close to meeting those requirements. ..."
"... His journalist girlfriend had a clearance. According to your gross misunderstanding of our classification system, what crime did Petraeus commit? He had a clearance, and his girlfriend had a clearance. If "had a clearance" is good enough to excuse Clinton, then why was it not good enough to excuse Patraeus? ..."
"... Here's the problem -- Clinton deleted these emails AFTER they were requested from the House as part of an official investigation. She chose to print out everything she claimed was relevant (probably to avoid giving away metadata in headers, etc.) ..."
"... Being that Clinton didn't give a damn about securing the physical server and didn't give a damn about securing the messages sent through the server, it seems strange that she suddenly cares about security practices when deleting e-mail messages about yoga classes. ..."
"... Oh, did I mention that deleting the e-mail messages would be considered an obstruction of justice if it were done by a typical citizen? ..."
All indications are she wasn't very careful while actively using the
server. However, once she started getting requests to produce data from
it, then she suddenly got very careful. Even if she did do nothing wrong,
that is a very stark change in behavior that just happened to coincide with
legal requests to hand over data.
The FBI found the "key piece(s)". Comey then said "No prosecutor would
pursue this case" and dropped it. He was probably right--but only because
of her last name. If I did that, I might get out after 5 years or so. Heck,
one of my counterparts got in trouble for a single line in a controlled
document which had the same info in the public domain. I'm sick of these
"Nothing to see here" claims--just look at any security briefing and it's
spelled out. We just had another one, and according to it I would be required
to report her if she was in my office.
That whole 'we little people would be in prison if we did this' meme
is such bullshit.
You used the wrong tense. It's not "would be". It's "are". There are
"little people" currently in prison for negligent handling of classified.
Right now. Actually in prison.
She didn't do anything, beyond send and receive stuff she was cleared
to see.
Which means she broke the law. Being "cleared to see it" doesn't mean
you can see it anywhere you want, any time you want. There are requirements
for handling the information. And a server in her basement that did not
use encrypted connections for months, and then had the default VPN keys
on the VPN appliance once they started using encryption, and an Internet-connected
printer on the same network is nowhere near close to meeting those requirements.
Petreus is brought up endlessly. Y'know, the guy who gave classified
stuff to his journalist girlfriend
His journalist girlfriend had a clearance. According to your gross misunderstanding
of our classification system, what crime did Petraeus commit? He had a clearance,
and his girlfriend had a clearance. If "had a clearance" is good enough
to excuse Clinton, then why was it not good enough to excuse Patraeus?
but you ought to at least acknowledge that it was a tiny percentage
of the traffic
Please cite where the statute states the percentage of allowable leaks.
and that stuff probably would've been sent on the unclassified DOS
server had she been using that
First, government servers are regularly scanned for classified, so it
would have been caught long before there were thousands of classified in
her email. Second, the unclassified DoS server is far, far, far more secure
than her basement server. For example, they don't have default VPN keys
installed.
What we have here is a witch hunt for something - anything - about
Benghazi that could paint Clinton in a politically unfavorable light.
No, this has absolutely nothing to do with Benghazi. But shouting "Benghazi!!!!"
does a great job getting people like you to turn off their critical thinking
and accept this week's excuse.
Anonymous Coward writes: on Friday August 26, 2016 @06:31PM (
#52778125 )
Yes it does, read the laws. There is a Navy person who facing 20 years
to life for disposing of a phone which had his picture while inside the
sub. That is one of the more extreme cases, but it's literally a Web Search
to prove you are wrong (shill?) Intent comes in to play _only_ for the penalty.
Comey spent hours in front of Congress explaining, very patiently,
over and over, that the reason he could not recommend prosecution against
Clinton is because all of the suspected crimes required proof of intent,
which the FBI did not have.
Transcript of Gowdy questioning Comey. Lots of context, but note the
bolded section :
Gowdy : Secretary Clinton said "I did not e-mail any classified
information to anyone on my e-mail there was no classified material." That
is true?
Comey : There was classified information emailed.
Gowdy : Secretary Clinton used one device, was that true?
Comey : She used multiple devices during the four years of her
term as Secretary of State.
Gowdy : Secretary Clinton said all work related emails were returned
to the State Department. Was that true?
Comey : No. We found work related email, thousands, that were
not returned.
Gowdy : Secretary Clinton said neither she or anyone else deleted
work related emails from her personal account.
Comey : That's a harder one to answer. We found traces of work
related emails in - on devices or in space. Whether they were deleted or
when a server was changed out something happened to them, there's no doubt
that the work related emails that were removed electronically from the email
system.
Gowdy : Secretary Clinton said her lawyers read every one of the
emails and were overly inclusive. Did her lawyers read the email content
individually?
Comey : No.
Gowdy : Well, in the interest of time and because I have a
plane to catch tomorrow afternoon, I'm not going to go through any more
of the false statements but I am going to ask you to put on your old hat.
False exculpatory statements are used for what?
Comey : Well, either for a substantive prosecution or evidence
of intent in a criminal prosecution.
Gowdy : Exactly. Intent and consciousness of guilt, right?
Comey : That is right?
Gowdy : Consciousness of guilt and intent? In your old job
you would prove intent as you referenced by showing the jury evidence of
a complex scheme that was designed for the very purpose of concealing the
public record and you would be arguing in addition to concealment the destruction
that you and i just talked about or certainly the failure to preserve. You
would argue all of that under the heading of content. You would also - intent.
You would also be arguing the pervasiveness of the scheme when it started,
when it ended and the number of emails whether They were originally classified
or of classified under the heading of intent. You would also, probably,
under common scheme or plan, argue the burn bags of daily calendar entries
or the missing daily calendar entries as a common scheme or plan to conceal.
Two days ago, Director, you said a reasonable person in her position should
have known a private email was no place to send and receive classified information.
You're right. An average person does know not to do that.
This is no average person. This is a former First Lady, a former United
States senator, and a former Secretary of State that the president now contends
is the most competent, qualified person to be president since Jefferson.
He didn't say that in '08 but says it now.
She affirmatively rejected efforts to give her a state.gov account, kept
the private emails for almost two years and only turned them over to Congress
because we found out she had a private email account.
So you have a rogue email system set up before she took the oath of office,
thousands of what we now know to be classified emails, some of which were
classified at the time. One of her more frequent email comrades was hacked
and you don't know whether or not she was.
And this scheme took place over a long period of time and resulted in the
destruction of public records and yet you say there is insufficient evidence
of intent. You say she was extremely careless, but not intentionally so.
You and I both know intent is really difficult to prove. Very rarely
do defendants announce 'On this date I intend to break this criminal code
section. Just to put everyone on notice, I am going to break the law on
this date.' It never happens that way. You have to do it with circumstantial
evidence or if you're Congress and you realize how difficult it is prove,
specific intent, you will formulate a statute that allows for gross negligence.
My time is out but this is really important. You mentioned there's no precedent
for criminal prosecution. My fear is there still isn't. There's nothing
to keep a future Secretary of State or President from this exact same email
scheme or their staff.
And my real fear is this, what the chairman touched upon, this double track
justice system that is rightly or wrongly perceived in this country. That
if you are a private in the Army and email yourself classified information
you will be kicked out. But if you are Hillary Clinton, and you seek a promotion
to Commander in Chief, you will not be. So what I hope you can do today
is help the average person, the reasonable person you made reference to,
the reasonable person understand why she appears to be treated differently
than the rest of us would be. With that I would yield back.
Anonymous Coward writes: on Friday August 26, 2016 @05:50PM (
#52777831 )
Powell used an aol account. He did NOT put a private server in his house!
Same for Rice. Powell used it for non-state NON-classified business.
Hillary has lied so many times about this server, is is clear to any
hones observer that she was hiding activities of corruption with the Clinton
foundation and did not want FOIA to discover her activities.
Hillary was supposed to have government archivists sort through the mails,
not her personal attorneys. That was a violation of the federal records
act.
She had classified information on the server, despite assertions that
she did not- caught in another lie. She said all work related mails were
turned over. Another lie- the FBI found thousands of work related mails
not turned over, including classified.
Sure, Clinton sucks, but the big knock against her and her email
server was that she wasn't secure enough with it.
My quibble was the blatant arrogance of the act. That private server
was clearly a move to preserve final editing rights of her tenure at the
State Department and evade any future FOIA requests that may crop up during
her next run for the presidency; and was there ever any doubt that she would
run again? The fact that she thought she could get away with it after experiencing
the fallout from the exact same move by members of the Bush administration
while she was a sitting Senator in Washington reinforces the feeling that
her arrogance knows no bounds. She took a page out of the neocon playbook
and figured she would show them how it's done.
Anonymous Coward writes: on Friday August 26, 2016 @08:13PM (
#52778643 )
1. She put classified info on a private unsecured server where it was
vulnerable, contrary to the law which she was fully advised of upon taking
office.
2. She did all her work through that server, hiding it from all 3 government
branches (congressional oversight, executive oversight, and the courts)
and public FOIA requests.
3. When the material was sought by the courts and congress, she and the
state department people lied under oath claiming the material did not exist
(perhaps Nixon cronies should have all lied about tapes existing).
4. After her people knew the material was being sought, the server's files
were transferred (by private IT people w/o clearances) to her lawyers (no
clearances).
5. She and her lawyers deleted over 30000 e-mails, claiming they were only
about yoga and her daughter's wedding dress (Nixon cut a few minutes of
tape).
6. They then wiped the files with bit bleach (a step not needed for yoga
or wedding dress e-mails). (Nixon did not degauss all his tapes)
7. They handed the wiped server to the FBI, and hillary publicly played
ignorant with her "with a CLOTH?" comment (absolute iin-you-face arrogance
against the rule of law) (Nixon did not hand tape recorders with erased
tapes to the FBI)
Prove you are sincere, and not a total unprincipled partisan hack:
Are you a Nixon supporter?
Would you accept this behavior from Donald Trump or Dick Cheney?
Anonymous Coward writes: on Friday August 26, 2016 @08:24PM (
#52778703 )
Hillary Clinton's IT guy purchased an MS Exchange hosting contract from
Platte River. The standard package came with a periodic backup to a Datto
appliance, which takes snapshots of the Windows disk image several times
a day. The appliance copies the snapshot to Datto's data center in real
time. You can erase or even destroy the Windows machine drives and still
use the snapshots to restore the disks to the snapshot of the time and date
of your chosing.
The FBI confiscated the appliance from Platte River and seized the server
from Datto. They have all the emails she sent and received since the start
of her State Department tenure.
Hillary Clinton co-mingled personal and official government communications
on her private email server. All of those communications are subject to
the Federal Records Act and the Freedom of Information Act.
Her personal emails ceased to be personal when she co-mingled them with
official government communications. HRC and her lawyers were not authorized
to decide what is relevant to FRA and FOIA and what is not.
HRC and her lawyers deleted 30,000 or so emails that are not recoverable
- therefore she is in violation of both the FRA and FOIA.
HRC should be, at the very least, in front of a jury to answer for her
actions.
I guess the people that are making accusations over that are either
ignorant, or disingenuous.
Here's the problem -- Clinton deleted these emails AFTER they were requested
from the House as part of an official investigation. She chose to print
out everything she claimed was relevant (probably to avoid giving away
metadata in headers, etc.) and then effectively "burned" the server, including
(by her lawyer's own admission) tens of thousands of messages.
FBI investigations have now come up with thousands of emails which were
NOT turned over in that paper dump. How many could have been part of those
that were deleted and then lost when the server was wiped? We'll never know.
Many of them were likely deleted in error, with her lawyers not realizing
which ones should have been retained as they were going through tens of
thousands of documents. But were ALL of these official state department
emails recovered by the FBI (now 15,000+) deleted "in error"?
That's what's troubling about all of this. We have no way of knowing
whether there may have been significant spoliation of evidence here (that's
the legal term for intentionally, recklessly, or negligently destroying
evidence). If this were a corporation who had been issued a subpoena and
they acted in this manner, and it was later proven that they "lost" over
ten thousand relevant documents in the process of their destruction of "irrelevant"
documents, they would likely face significant legal sanctions, perhaps even
criminal charges.
Legally, the safe course in this instance would have been to put the
server in a secure location with legal supervision by Clinton's counsel
until the matter could be resolved. Clinton's use of BleachBit is not surprising
here -- not because it's proper protocol to delete secure information, but
because it's the only reasonable way to delete potentially incriminating
evidence of spoliation (even if most of it was accidental or whatever).
If they hadn't used a very secure deletion protocol, then Clinton's attorneys
would have been doing a VERY poor job at protecting her legally.
Personally, I'm not sure it's likely there was any "evil memo" buried
among the State Department correspondence that could prove anything. (And
if there were, I'm not convinced Clinton realized it.) On the other hand,
I'm sure she had a bunch of private email dealings that she wouldn't want
to get out -- if for nothing else then for bad public relations. Hence the
destruction of everything on the server -- it's in line with the privacy
paranoia that likely caused her to set up the server in the first place.
But could there have been worse stuff there too? Maybe. Doesn't seem like
we'll ever know, though, does it?
Here's the problem -- Clinton deleted these emails AFTER they
were requested from the House as part of an official investigation.
She chose to print out everything she claimed was relevant (probably
to avoid giving away metadata in headers, etc.)
In other words, she willingly destroyed information she was required
to hand over.
The full Headers and all Metadata are part of the Record and part of
the E-mail; If you are requested to hand over the e-mails: you have no right
to exclude or remove headers, even if your standard e-mail software does
not normally display the headers when you are reading the message.
Anonymous Coward writes: on Friday August 26, 2016 @09:10PM (
#52778941 )
A: "But anyone could hack in and see her emails, it's totally unsecure!"
B: "She used BleachBit."
A: "That proves she had something to hide!"
Being that Clinton didn't give a damn about securing the physical server
and didn't give a damn about securing the messages sent through the server,
it seems strange that she suddenly cares about security practices when deleting
e-mail messages about yoga classes.
Oh, did I mention that deleting the e-mail messages would be considered
an obstruction of justice if it were done by a typical citizen?
Congress committees have a couple really tough prosecutors as chairs and that
created a ground for Hillary impeachment if she is elected. Also "August
break" due to Hillary deteriorating health creates a problem for Hillary campaign
as the candidate now is considered by many voters as too frail to hold a POTUS position.
This negative impression is supported now by so many facts that it can 't be changed
by rabid attacks on Trump. Some Clinton actions in "bathroom server" scandal now
can be attributed to her senility.
Notable quotes:
"... Campaign spokesman Brian Fallon is calling the FBI's move to give the notes to Congress "an extraordinarily rare step that was sought solely by Republicans for the purposes of further second-guessing the career professionals at the FBI." ..."
Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign says it wants FBI documents on the
investigation into Clinton's use of a private email server to be shared publicly
and not just with members of Congress.
Campaign spokesman Brian Fallon is calling the FBI's move to give the
notes to Congress "an extraordinarily rare step that was sought solely by Republicans
for the purposes of further second-guessing the career professionals at the
FBI."
Fallon says if the material is going to be shared outside the Justice Department,
it "should be released widely so that the public can see them for themselves."
He says Republicans should not be allowed to "mischaracterize" the information
"through selective, partisan leaks."
A Republican-led House oversight panel is reviewing the documents that have
been classified as secret.
According to Gowdy, "the committee immediately subpoenaed Clinton personally
after learning the full extent of her unusual email arrangement with herself, and
would have done so earlier if the State Department or Clinton had been forthcoming
that State did not maintain custody of her records and only Secretary Clinton herself
had her records when Congress first requested them."
Notable quotes:
"... According to Gowdy, "the committee immediately subpoenaed Clinton personally after learning the full extent of her unusual email arrangement with herself, and would have done so earlier if the State Department or Clinton had been forthcoming that State did not maintain custody of her records and only Secretary Clinton herself had her records when Congress first requested them." ..."
"... Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi. The Republicans chant while Rome burns. How about Iraq, Iraq, Iraq, Iraq.... ..."
"... Did Clinton say she's never had a subpoena? Yes. Did a subpoena get issued? Yes. Was the whole interview at that point discussing a point in time months before the subpoena got issued? Yes. ..."
"... Karl Rove has so often said that it is who DOES NOT vote that determines the outcome, and now we have the Tea Party. ..."
"... The Clintons ARE very close personal family friends with the entire Bush clan. When the TV cameras are off and the reporters are gone, they are a very tight group who see the world thru like greedy eyes. Check this out. ..."
"... Having someone who is the brother of one former president and the son of another run against the wife of still another former president would be sweetly illustrative of all sorts of degraded and illusory aspects of American life, from meritocracy to class mobility. ..."
"... Wall Street has long been unable to contain its collective glee over a likely Hillary Clinton presidency. ..."
"... the matriarch of the Bush family (former First Lady Barbara) has described the Clinton patriarch (former President Bill) as a virtual family member, noting that her son, George W., affectionately calls his predecessor "my brother by another mother." ..."
"... If this happens, the 2016 election would vividly underscore how the American political class functions: by dynasty, plutocracy, fundamental alignment of interests masquerading as deep ideological divisions, and political power translating into vast private wealth and back again. ..."
"... Most of our presidents were horn dogs. Their wives know about it in many cases, but they knew that it was part of the package. The only difference was that before Clinton, the press would never think of reporting about sexual dalliances. ..."
"... Clinton is not materially different to many GOP candidates outside the loons. ..."
"... She has stiff competition: Madeleine Albright, Samantha Power, Carly Fiorina, etc. She might win the title, though. ..."
"... So after years of trying to turn Benghazi into a scandal, the email thing is mostly meaningless to Democrats. So congratulations Republicans, you blew your chance. ..."
In a statement on Wednesday, Republican congressman Trey Gowdy accused the
former secretary of state of making an "inaccurate claim" during an interview
on Tuesday. Responding to a question about the controversy surrounding her email
server while at the US state department, Clinton had told CNN: "I've never had
a subpoena."
But Gowdy said: "The committee has issued several subpoenas, but I have not
sought to make them public. I would not make this one public now, but after
Secretary Clinton falsely claimed the committee did not subpoena her, I have
no choice in order to correct the inaccuracy."
Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill told the Guardian that Gowdy's accusation
itself was inaccurate, insisting that the congressman had not issued a subpoena
until March.
"She was asked about her decision to not to retain her personal emails after
providing all those that were work-related, and the suggestion was made that
a subpoena was pending at that time. That was not accurate," Merrill wrote in
an email.
Gowdy also posted a copy of the subpoena on the Benghazi committee's website.
According to Gowdy, "the committee immediately subpoenaed Clinton personally
after learning the full extent of her unusual email arrangement with herself,
and would have done so earlier if the State Department or Clinton had been forthcoming
that State did not maintain custody of her records and only Secretary Clinton
herself had her records when Congress first requested them."
Lester Smithson 9 Jul 2015 16:00
Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi. The Republicans chant while
Rome burns. How about Iraq, Iraq, Iraq, Iraq....
kattw 9 Jul 2015 12:41
Gotta love when people say they have no choice but to do something absurd,
then choose to do something absurd rather than not.
Did Clinton say she's never had a subpoena? Yes. Did a subpoena get
issued? Yes. Was the whole interview at that point discussing a point in
time months before the subpoena got issued? Yes.
Yes, Mr. Legislator: you DID subpoena Clinton. Several months AFTER she
did the thing in question, which the interviewer wanted to know why she
did in light of subpoenas. And really, what was she thinking? After all,
a subpoena had already been issued, ummm, 3 months into the future! Why
was she not psychic? Why did she not alter her actions based on something
that congress would do eventually? How DARE she not know what the fates
had decried!
Mr. Legislator, you were given the opportunity to not spin this as a
political issue, and to be honest about the committee's actions. You chose
to do otherwise. Nobody forced you to do so. You had plenty of choices -
you made one. Don't try to shift that onto a lie Clinton never told. She's
got plenty of lies in her closet, many stupidly obvious - calling one of
her truths a lie just shows how much of an ideological buffoon you really
are.
ExcaliburDefender -> Dan Wipper 8 Jul 2015 23:47
Whatever. Dick Cheney should have been tried in the Hague and incarcerated
for 50 lifetimes. Most voters have decided to vote party lines, the next
16 months is for the 10% undecided and a few that can be swayed.
Karl Rove has so often said that it is who DOES NOT vote that determines
the outcome, and now we have the Tea Party.
Plenty of time for outrage, faux or real. We haven't had a single debate
yet. Still get to hear from Chafee on the metric system and whether evolution
is real or not from the GOP.
Jill Stein for President <-------|) Paid for by David Koch and Friends
Herr_Settembrini 8 Jul 2015 23:25
Quite frankly, I've long since passed the point of caring about Benghazi,
and the reason why is extremely simple: this has been a nakedly partisan
investigation, stretching on for years now, that has tried to manufacture
a scandal and fake outrage in order to deny Obama re-election in 2012, and
now (since that didn't work) to deny Clinton the election in 2016.
The GOP doesn't have one shred of credibility left about this issue--
to the point that if they were able to produce photographs of Obama and
Clinton personally storming the embassy, America would collectively shrug
(except of course for the AM talk radio crowd, who are perpetually angry
anyway, so nobody would notice).
TET68HUE -> StevePrimus 8 Jul 2015 23:08
The Clintons ARE very close personal family friends with the entire
Bush clan. When the TV cameras are off and the reporters are gone, they
are a very tight group who see the world thru like greedy eyes. Check this
out.
JEB BUSH V. HILLARY CLINTON: THE PERFECTLY ILLUSTRATIVE ELECTION
BY GLENN GREENWALD
@ggreenwald
12/17/2014
Jeb Bush yesterday strongly suggested he was running for President in
2016. If he wins the GOP nomination, it is highly likely that his opponent
for the presidency would be Hillary Clinton. Having someone who is the
brother of one former president and the son of another run against the wife
of still another former president would be sweetly illustrative of all sorts
of degraded and illusory aspects of American life, from meritocracy to class
mobility. That one of those two families exploited its vast wealth
to obtain political power, while the other exploited its political power
to obtain vast wealth, makes it more illustrative still: of the virtually
complete merger between political and economic power, of the fundamentally
oligarchical framework that drives American political life.
Then there are their similar constituencies: what Politico termed "money
men" instantly celebrated Jeb Bush's likely candidacy, while the same publication
noted just last month how Wall Street has long been unable to contain
its collective glee over a likely Hillary Clinton presidency. The two
ruling families have, unsurprisingly, developed a movingly warm relationship
befitting their position: the matriarch of the Bush family (former First
Lady Barbara) has described the Clinton patriarch (former President Bill)
as a virtual family member, noting that her son, George W., affectionately
calls his predecessor "my brother by another mother."
If this happens, the 2016 election would vividly underscore how the
American political class functions: by dynasty, plutocracy, fundamental
alignment of interests masquerading as deep ideological divisions, and political
power translating into vast private wealth and back again. The educative
value would be undeniable: somewhat like how the torture report did, it
would rub everyone's noses in exactly those truths they are most eager to
avoid acknowledge. Email the author:
[email protected]
StevePrimus 8 Jul 2015 22:33
Clinton's nomination as a democratic candidate for president is a fait
accompli, as is Bush's nomination on the GOP card. The amusing side show
with Rubio, Trump, Sanders, Paul, Walker, Perry, Cruz, et al can be entertaining,
but note that Clinton and Bush seem much closer aligned with each other
than either sueems to be to Sanders on the left and Graham on the right.
MtnClimber -> CitizenCarrier 8 Jul 2015 20:41
Read some history books and learn.
Most of our presidents were horn dogs. Their wives know about it
in many cases, but they knew that it was part of the package. The only difference
was that before Clinton, the press would never think of reporting about
sexual dalliances.
Among those that cheated are:
Washington
Jefferson
Lincoln
Harding
FDR
Eisenhower
JFK
LBJ
Clinton
Not bad company, but they all cheated. It seems like greater sexual drive
is part of the package for people that choose to be president.
RossBest 8 Jul 2015 20:24
There is an obvious possible explanation here. She was talking about
things in the past and ineptly shifted in effect into the "historical present"
or "dramatic present" and didn't realize she was creating an ambiguity.
That is, she was talking about the times when she set up the email system
and used it and later deleted personal emails and she intended to deny having
received any relevant subpoenas AT THOSE TIMES.
I'm not a Clinton supporter but this seems plausible. But inept.
zchabj6 8 Jul 2015 20:10
The state of US politics...
Clinton is not materially different to many GOP candidates outside
the loons.
CitizenCarrier -> Carambaman 8 Jul 2015 17:54
My personal favorite was when as 1st Lady during a trip to New Zealand
she told reporters she'd been named in honor of Sir Edmund Hillary.
She was born before he climbed Everest. He was at that time an obscure
chicken farmer.
BorninUkraine -> duncandunnit 8 Jul 2015 17:44
You mean, she lies, like Bill? But as snakes go, she is a lot more dangerous
than him.
BorninUkraine -> Barry_Seal 8 Jul 2015 17:40
She has stiff competition: Madeleine Albright, Samantha Power, Carly
Fiorina, etc. She might win the title, though.
Dennis Myers 8 Jul 2015 16:30
This sort of thing is exactly why anything they throw at her won't stick.
Like the boy who cried wolf, when the wolf actually came, no one was listening
anymore. So after years of trying to turn Benghazi into a scandal, the
email thing is mostly meaningless to Democrats. So congratulations Republicans,
you blew your chance.
"... Guciffer found top secret E-mail on Blumenthal's (I think that is the guy) account according to the agents who studied Guciffer's computer. ..."
"... The legality of her choice has yet to be determined and will likely hinge on the degree to which classified government documents were exposed or disseminated. It was - and still is - against the rules published by the State Department. ..."
"... It is also an amazingly arrogant act by a politician who often attacked previous administrations for their use of "private emails" and overall lack of transparency. ..."
"... Hillary Clinton has been insecure for years and for many reasons. ..."
"... A person is insecure, a network is unsecured. No? ..."
"... I saw a video where Alabama State troopers are talking about how Hillary and Bill used to swap women. She also apparently has a big affinity for cocaine..though I guess in all fairness that's most of Hollywood and liberal Washington. ..."
Guciffer found top secret E-mail on Blumenthal's (I think that is
the guy) account according to the agents who studied Guciffer's computer.
You can always tell when a politician lies; their lips are moving.
DLivesInTexas
"The arrangement, while it appears unusual, was and is acceptable
and legal, according to the State Department."
The legality of her choice has yet to be determined and will likely
hinge on the degree to which classified government documents were exposed
or disseminated. It was - and still is - against the rules published by
the State Department.
It is also an amazingly arrogant act by a politician who often attacked
previous administrations for their use of "private emails" and overall lack
of transparency.
Genny G
Hillary Clinton has been insecure for years and for many reasons.
StrongHarm
A person is insecure, a network is unsecured. No? Author should
correct title.
I saw a video where Alabama State troopers are talking about how
Hillary and Bill used to swap women. She also apparently has a big affinity
for cocaine..though I guess in all fairness that's most of Hollywood and
liberal Washington. As a conservative myself, what I detest about the
woman most is not how she affects republicans, but how she affects her own
supporters. She claims to be 'looking out for the little guy' and minorities
so she can get votes, but when the cameras aren't rolling, she's doing business
with corrupt corporations and trying to live like a queen. A lot of politicians
are dishonest, but she really takes the cake.
"... ...Bill Clinton was not just being entertained by prostitutes with his brother Roger ... he, Roger and Dan Lasater were partying with HIGH SCHOOL GIRLS when Clinton was a married governor in his early 30's. I don't know what the age of consent is in Arkansas, but Clinton and Co. were getting pretty damn close... ..."
"... The sleaziest pair to lie, cheat, and steal their way to political power. Sad to realize this country has turned stupid and apathetic while ignoring the current Bonnie and Clyde ruining our country. I approve of the Ceaucescu method of removing evil. ..."
"... And it's critical that ANYONE who votes in our next election read this book. Because Hillary Clinton is one of the most evil players on the world state today, and this book proves it. Just google 'mena arkansas clinton bush', or 'hillary rape lawyer'...there's so much info here in this book and on the web from court documents, newspaper reports that are never mentioned in the mainstream more than once (they got quashed), FOIA results. ..."
"... Wow. This book is just incredible. The Oklahoma City bombing, Waco, Vince Foster, Jerry Parks, Barry Seal, an international Cocaine trade, the airport at Mena - the list of Bill Clinton's acts of corruption and criminality goes on and on. ..."
"... And don't get the wrong idea: Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is not some tabloid sensationalist; he's a legitimate and well-respected journalist for London's Daily Telegraph and every charge here is substantiated by facts: photographs, declassified FBI documents, interviews with eyewitnesses, and so on and so on, an avalanche of facts. ..."
"... This book is best read in conjunction with Terry Reed's book " Compromised: Clinton, Bush and the CIA " to get the full picture of just how much Bill Clinton was willing to sell his soul for a shot at the White House. ..."
"... Here's this Brit's take on America's ruling class: "The American Elite, I am afraid to say, is almost beyond redemption. Moral relativism has set in so deeply that the gilded classes have become incapable of discerning right from wrong." That was back in 1997. It's only gotten worse since. The day the "almost" in that sentence disappears, that's the day a second American Revolution will start. And when it does, justice will finally catch up with Bill and Hillary. ..."
...Bill Clinton was not just being entertained by prostitutes with
his brother Roger ... he, Roger and Dan Lasater were partying with HIGH
SCHOOL GIRLS when Clinton was a married governor in his early 30's. I don't
know what the age of consent is in Arkansas, but Clinton and Co. were getting
pretty damn close...
The sleaziest pair to lie, cheat, and steal their way to political power.
Sad to realize this country has turned stupid and apathetic while ignoring
the current Bonnie and Clyde ruining our country. I approve of the Ceaucescu
method of removing evil.
This one is dated but
not the conduct of the Clintons. It seems whatever they do, nothing seems
to stick. Both being lawyers, they know the law and politics and how to
avoid arrest.
To say I loved
this book would be completely amiss. I hated the info I read in this book,
but I'm not that stupid that I would ignore it either. Because anyone who
has done any research into these two characters, realizes that everything
in this book is unfortunately, true.
And it's critical that ANYONE who votes in our next election read
this book. Because Hillary Clinton is one of the most evil players on the
world state today, and this book proves it. Just google 'mena arkansas clinton
bush', or 'hillary rape lawyer'...there's so much info here in this book
and on the web from court documents, newspaper reports that are never mentioned
in the mainstream more than once (they got quashed), FOIA results.
Folks, we are in serious trouble if this woman gets elected. If you thought
it was bad with George Bush 1 and 2, or Clinton 1. Just wait. Because if
Hillary or Jeb get elected, you might as well get out of this country while
you've got the chance. They will put the final nail in the coffin of what
was the great United States of America.
Do something about it! Vote for ANYONE OTHER THAN DEMOCRAT OR REPUBLICAN.
Wow. This book is just incredible. The Oklahoma City bombing, Waco,
Vince Foster, Jerry Parks, Barry Seal, an international Cocaine trade, the
airport at Mena - the list of Bill Clinton's acts of corruption and criminality
goes on and on.
And don't get the wrong idea: Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is not some
tabloid sensationalist; he's a legitimate and well-respected journalist
for London's Daily Telegraph and every charge here is substantiated by facts:
photographs, declassified FBI documents, interviews with eyewitnesses, and
so on and so on, an avalanche of facts.
Ultimately, there is no smoking gun here. Evans-Pritchard got as close
as he could with the available facts out there. The evidence here is mostly
circumstantial. But circumstantial as it is, the cumulative effect is devastating.
Yes, the federal government knew about the Oklahoma City Bombing in advance.
Yes, Vince Foster was murdered and his body subsequently placed in Fort
Marcy Park in an amateurish attempt to make it look like a suicide. Yes,
Bill Clinton knew all about the international drug trade going on out of
the airport in Mena, Arkanasas and looked the other way (for a price). And
so on and so on.
This book is best read in conjunction with Terry Reed's book "Compromised:
Clinton, Bush and the CIA" to get the full picture of just how much
Bill Clinton was willing to sell his soul for a shot at the White House.
And one of the truly disquieting things this book drives home to the
reader is that the very institutions we look to to prosecute crimes and
expose injustices - the Department of Justice, the FBI, the mainstream media
- seem all to have been co-opted long ago by the White House and corrupted
in the process. Read this book and, at times, you'll think you're living
in the old Soviet Union - and, in a sense, you are.
Here's this Brit's take on America's ruling class: "The American
Elite, I am afraid to say, is almost beyond redemption. Moral relativism
has set in so deeply that the gilded classes have become incapable of discerning
right from wrong." That was back in 1997. It's only gotten worse since.
The day the "almost" in that sentence disappears, that's the day a second
American Revolution will start. And when it does, justice will finally catch
up with Bill and Hillary.
This is an important summary of symptom that are known from open sources...
Notable quotes:
"... Road to Recovery from Parkinson's Disease ..."
"... This situation with Hillary is like the sickly, mentally deficient child of a recently deceased monarch being installed as a puppet ruler who is completely under the control of shadowy advisers. ..."
"... Not just other countries, Doomberg. Mrs. Wilson did a great job of hiding her husband's stroke which left him in a coma as she ran the country. It has happened here before, as well. ..."
"... e psychopaths are selected never elected ..."
Hillary's health is declining, as anyone who has looked at her can see. The
question is: What condition does she have? A board certified Anesthesiologist
has written a memo of Hillary's health. Feel free to pass it along to doctors
and to analytics and criticize it.
Hillary Clinton (HRC) has suffered a variety of health issues. Unfortunately,
she has declined to make her medical records public. In July of 2015 her personal
physician released a letter asserting her "excellent physical condition." Unfortunately,
multiple later episodes recorded on video strongly suggest that the content
of the letter is incorrect. This discussion is designed to sort through the
known facts and propose a possible medical explanation for these events. In
keeping with Occam's Razor, a single explanation that covers everything is preferred.
In 2009, HRC fell and broke her elbow . Little else
was made public.
[i]
On December 17, 2012, while Secretary of State, HRC fell and suffered
a concussion.
[ii] Later, a transverse sinus thrombosis was diagnosed, resulting in
chronic anticoagulation therapy.
[iii] Her post-concussion syndrome was declared "recovered" in about
six months.
[iv] The original fall was publicly attributed to dehydration following
gastroenteritis.
An email from Huma Abedin (HRC's closest advisor) on January
26, 2013, says that HRC "is often confused."
[v]
Photos show being assisted up what appears to be the steps of a residential
porch. This apparently happened in February of 2016. On August 4, 2016,
Reuters and Getty published the photos.
[vi]
At a rally on May 2, 2016, HRC demonstrates classic PD hand
posturing .
[vii] She has
no lectern in front, so she starts with her right hand pressed against her
chest. At the 18:02 mark, she starts gesturing with her right hand, which
is in a very unnatural position that is common in PD.
On July 21, 2016 HRC was filmed talking to reporters at close range
when several spoke at once. Without warning, she started a bizarre
head-bobbing episode that must be seen rather than described. After
several cycles, she regained control and declared that the reporters "must
try the iced chai."
[viii]
On July 28, 2016, during the balloon drop, HRC suddenly looks
up with a frozen wide-mouth and wide-eyed stare . After a couple
of seconds she regains control and a more normal expression.
[ix]
On August 5, HRC declared that she had "short circuited"
[x] a response to Chris Wallace in an interview that aired July 31 on
Fox News Sunday.
[xi]
August 6, 2016, at a campaign rally, HRC freezes with wide eyes
in response to protestors . A large black male who commonly accompanies
her leans in and tells her "It's OK. We're not going anywhere. Keep talking…"
Shortly after, she laughs strangely and then says "OK. Here we are. We'll
keep talking."
[xii]
Several recent photos show HRC with an inappropriately exaggerated
wide-mouthed smile and extreme wide-open eyes . Several videos
show her laughing inappropriately and for extended periods. Numerous events
have been interrupted by prolonged episodes of coughing unrelated to any
infectious cause.
This discussion will not argue that the black male is carrying
a diazepam injector, since there is a plausible argument that it is actually
a small flashlight, and is seen in other video to be such. We will also
not discuss the circular area on her tongue. It appears to be the site of
a mass excision. Benign explanations that do not bear on chronic health
issues may easily be proffered.
Discussion:
The HRC campaign meme is that "there's nothing to see here."
But numerous trained observers have noted multiple other, more subtle bits that
strongly support the argument below.
After the 2012 fall, HRC had post-concussion syndrome (PCS). She should have
declared herself unable to fulfill her duties as Secretary of State. Her resignation
from the position shortly thereafter may have satisfied this need without public
medical discussion. If no other questionable medical signs had appeared, this
discussion would end here. But the other events and signs point to a single
cause for the fall, and it is not the public explanation. Further, HRC's statement
early in her tenure as Secretary of State that she would serve only four years
can be read in the context of a progressive disease that was known as she assumed
the post.
It is the premise of this discussion the HRC is most likely suffering from
Parkinson's Disease (PD).
It explains every one of the items listed above. Further, since it is a diagnosis
primarily made by observation, the video record is sufficient to create a high
degree of certainty.
The 2009 fall where HRC broke her elbow suggests that she had working protective
reflexes, and her arm took the brunt of the fall. But three years later, she
had a catastrophic fall where her reflexes were unable to help her. It is notable
that this fall took place at home, where she would have been unstressed and
in a familiar setting. Failing reflexes are common in PD. Poor balance is also
common in PD, and a fall without working protective reflexes is a prescription
for head injury. Her subsequent concerns with transverse sinus thrombosis are
plausibly related to the fall. Her need for fresnel lens glasses also fits with
post-concussion syndrome.
Huma Abedin's email comment can be referring to PCS as well, since it was
during the six-month period of rehab. One must, however, be cautious not to
overlook persistent cognitive problems that PCS can have. (Editorial note: The
reader will note that this discussion is giving the benefit of the doubt to
as many HRC memes as can reasonably earn it.)
2016 starts a spate of new data. The photos of HRC being helped up the steps
is consistent with a fall similar to 2012, but with a security detail close
enough to catch her before she fell to the ground. This matches the loss of
reflexes and balance with PD.
On July 21 a video of HRC is posted that has many observers calling a "seizure."
We should note the setting. She is answering questions, and then multiple
reporters call out at the same time. Such a shock is often too much stress for
a PD patient, and the patient suffers an "on/off" episode. Higher control turns
off and an unpredictable dyskinesia takes over. Shortly she switches back "on"
and regains control. Her mind froze during the "off" state, but was aware, so
she is able to speak again, but inappropriately.
It should be noted that such dyskinesias are sufficiently common with long
term treatment that they have a name: Parkinson's Disease LevoDopa Induced Dyskinesia
(PD LID).
A week later, during the balloon drop at the Convention, HRC suddenly "freezes."
This is an "off" moment manifested by bradykinesia, another PD problem. The
particular form is a brief oculogyric crisis, complete with head arched back,
fixed gaze, and wide open mouth. Again, this is common in PD. We should compare
it to HRC's facial expressions on "Live with Kelly and Michael" on November
19, 2015. [xiii]
At 6:30 in that video, we also see a PD tremor and posture in her left hand
when it comes to rest momentarily. In most videos her hands are in constant
motion or clasped against some object. These are strategies to suppress a tremor.
HRC's description of her false answers to Chris Wallace as a "short circuit"
is extremely unusual.
It comes from the field of electronics, in which HRC has never been involved.
The Urban Dictionary definition is electrical, and there is no popular or slang
usage. But one semi-technical description of PD calls it "short-circuiting"
brain circuits.
[xiv] Did she hear this during a doctor's explanation of her disease? It
would not be unusual to parrot such a phrase if she has PD.
Days later, HRC "freezes" again at a campaign rally. This "off" state is
like the others, triggered by a startle/stress reaction. But what is more telling
is that the security detail gives her specific instructions in an attempt to
get her to turn "on" again. She then parrots those exact words as she restarts.
This is another PD sign.
The numerous episodes of prolonged coughing are another tell. Swallowing
disorders are very common in PD. They can lead to aspiration pneumonia, the
most common cause of death in PD. But before that they lead to chronic difficulty
swallowing saliva. It gets onto the vocal cords, leading to coughing in an attempt
to clear them. The high frequency of these episodes strongly suggests a major
swallowing disorder.
Multiple episodes of inappropriate and extended laughter have also been documented.
This, again, is common in PD.
We do not have video evidence of the "pill rolling" tremor that is common
in PD. But that is not a major concern for our thesis. Treatment with levodopa
can reduce it. Also, PD sufferers develop a variety of techniques to hide it.
Since it is a tremor at rest, keeping the hands in motion suppresses it. Grasping
objects such as a lectern can also hide it. As long as the hands are busy, it
is usually not visible.
Summary:
HRC probably has PD.
She has had clinical symptoms for a minimum of 4 years, and probably much
longer, given that the fall leading to her head injury required a significant
progression of the disease. All of her bizarre physical actions since that time
fit nicely into the spectrum of signs that we expect in PD. And since PD explains
all of them, we have a high probability of a correct diagnosis. It has almost
certainly been treated with levodopa. Some of her symptoms may be related to
this drug treatment.
It is most curious that all of the bizarre physical signs seem to be in 2016
videos. HRC was a public figure in 2015, with a lot of campaign work underway.
Yet all of the oddities seem to be within the last several months. This suggests
a significant progression of her PD. We also know that her contact with the
public has been rigidly controlled. She has not done news conferences during
the campaign. These would be highly stressful to a PD sufferer and would elicit
many PD signs.
PD is a chronic disease with a downhill prognosis. HRC's instability and
frequent cough suggest that her PD is advanced. This is not a good outlook for
someone running for the Presidency. The office of the President is one of the
highest stress jobs in the world. Stress sets off PD episodes, which render
the sufferer incapable of proper response.
At this point, a bit of speculation seems appropriate. HRC talks about her
yoga sessions. But no one we know of has ever documented one. It is possible
that this is cover for sessions designed to teach her coping mechanisms for
PD or for rest breaks. Exhaustion makes PD worse.
HRC's coughing suggests that her swallowing disorder is advanced, placing
her closer to an aspiration pneumonia that would disable or kill her. That's
bad enough, but PD has one more, even more dangerous step in its progression.
As PD continues, cognitive problems can develop. In time, they become full-blown
dementia. The United States cannot survive if its President is mentally impaired.
Conclusion:
It is not appropriate for a physician to make a diagnosis at a distance.
But since the evidence in the public record so strongly suggests that HRC has
moderate to advanced PD, it is imperative that HRC release her complete
medical record to an impartial panel of physicians for review. It is not
necessary for the public at large to see them. Such a panel should be secure
in its deliberations and should present a summary to the public. If she has
PD, the panel would know and it would be made public. If not, then the air would
clear.
Note on authorship:
The author of this document is a board-certified Anesthesiologist with 36
years of experience. That brings with it the ability to understand medical discussions,
but not the expertise to evaluate PD signs and symptoms.
The first subject matter expert is a close friend of the author. This person
is a brilliant businessman who was forced to sell his interest in eight successful
businesses because early onset PD made him unable to continue in the daily duties
of business. He is well versed in PD and sees its ravages in himself.
The second subject matter expert is the author's brother. He is an RN who
spent two years working 12-hour shifts caring for PD patients in a nursing home.
This saturation experience allows him to pick up PD signs automatically. He
notes that he called HRC's PD and levodopa therapy when he watched the famous
"What difference does it make?" exchange. Her mannerisms and behavior were classic
and stereotypical.
Of interest is that during a teleconference, the author called the others
to look at HRC's left hand during the "Live With Kelly and Michael" video. The
clip was played, and neither of the others even saw her hand. They
were both riveted to her eyes, and both exclaimed that her eyes were "classic
PD." The clip had to be played a second and third time before they could even
take their gaze away from her eyes. They did finally see her hand and agree
that it was also demonstrating PD.
Very thorough observations. If this turns out to be true it's beyond
me that the Democrats would continue to back her as a candidate for president.
Poor judgment in my opinion.
If this turns out to be true it's beyond me that the Democrats would
continue to back her as a candidate for president. Poor judgment in
my opinion.
This situation with Hillary is like the sickly, mentally deficient
child of a recently deceased monarch being installed as a puppet ruler who
is completely under the control of shadowy advisers.
This is the kind of thing that used to happen in places like Imperial
China or Egypt during the time of the pharaohs... this should not be happening
in the United States of America!
Not just other countries, Doomberg. Mrs. Wilson did a great job of
hiding her husband's stroke which left him in a coma as she ran the country.
It has happened here before, as well.
Mrs. Wilson didn't live in today's technical world. Mrs. Wilson didn't
have deployed forces at play carrying massive weapons of war. Neither did
she have nuclear armaments at her disposal. Mrs. Wilson wasn't involved
in a war with an enemy army that America had imported onto it's own soil.
Mrs. Wilson didn't use the most childish judgement ever by conducting
government business on her own basement servers leaving the entire country
open to malicious mismanagement. Mrs. Wilson didn't abandon American citizens
in Benghazi and leave them to be mutilated and murdered because she wanted
to take a nap.
Even without dementia, she's proven that she is an inept government worker
and is not qualified for the position and will place America in jeopardy.
The fact that the democratic party hires people to make comments like
yours on the internet is further proof that corruption is part and parcel
of weak and greedy people who put the well being of their own country low
on their list of priorities. Unless the democrats are forwarding your payment
for that comment to Saudi Arabia, you'd be a traitor.
Don't forget Ronald and Nancy. Yes, dementia happens to Republicans too,
and Donald Trump clearly has cognitive issues that prevent him from staying
on script or exhibiting the smallest shred of empathy for others.
Dimentia came much later, after he had served his two terms. Nice try
though. But, I suppose that since he wore hearing aids, this only helped
him really, he could turn the volume down when idiots began talking too
much.
The psychopaths are selected never elected, 'tis a game of charades,
whilst Obummer and Michael await in The Dark House wings, martial law shall
be what the 'happy couple' sings.
FDR had already been diagnosed with terminal congestive heart failure
and was periodically mentally incompetent before he ran for re-election
in November of 1944. He probably should have resigned prior to finishing
his third term, and DEFINITELY should not have run for a fourth, but the
truth about his health had been kept from the American people.
the majority of the democrats backing her are doing it not because they
like her but because they stupidly fear Trump more than her.
i expect they will put their head in the sand about this news and hope
it doesn't get any traction. yes that's right, they'd rather have a sickly
ill president, then one that is tee total, clean and healthy as an ox
While Bill was President, the Clintons were found to have, illegally,
of course, a number of FBI files on the "enemies". Sorry, I can't recall
the whole story.
The RINO and Democrat establishments both fear that Donald Trump will
free U.S. policy from the control of globalist interests, cutting off the
gravy train for the vast majority of professional politicians who have been
in the pay of the globalist cabal for the past 30 years.
Lynch: How is your granddaughter Chelsea? Bubba: She's fine. How are your grandkids? Lynch: They're doing great too. Bubba: Too bad if anything were to happen to them
I understand she said something about being a steady hand at the time
of reckoning. Funny always thought of the anti Christ would be a man.
Does this make me sexist?
"... Applebaum's column title refers to "disastrous nonintervention," but the U.S. has been meddling in Syria's conflict to some degree for many years. Indeed, Syria is in such a miserable state because multiple outside states have been interfering and taking sides in the war. There may be no better example of how outside intervention prolongs and intensifies a civil war than Syria, and yet Syria hawks always conclude that the real problem is that Western governments haven't done more to add to the misery. The "consequences of nonintervention" are not, in fact, the consequences of the U.S. decision not to bomb in 2013, but rather they are the consequences of the actions that many actors (including the U.S.) have taken in Syria in their destructive efforts to "shape" the conflict. ..."
"... The backlash against proposed military action in Syria in 2013 was a remarkable moment in the U.S. and Britain. It was the first time that the U.S. and U.K. governments had their plan to attack another country effectively overruled by the people's elected representatives. As it turns out, it was a fleeting moment, and it doesn't seem likely to be repeated anytime soon. Popular resistance to the next war was virtually non-existent, and both the U.S. and British governments have returned to their old ways of starting and backing unnecessary wars. Obama has unfortunately learned the lesson that he should avoid consulting those representatives on these matters in the future, and so he has gone back to starting and waging wars without authorization. The foreign policy elite in the U.S. have similarly learned all the wrong things from this episode. Instead of recognizing how unpopular their preferred policies were/are and respecting what the public wanted, most have concluded that public opinion should simply be ignored from now on. ..."
"... The U.S. could have been more deeply involved in the conflict than it is for many years, but all that would have meant was that the U.S. was doing more to inflict death and destruction on a suffering country. When interventionists "mourn" a decision not to bomb, they are regretting the decision not to kill people in another country that posed no threat to the U.S. or any of our allies. That's a horrible position, and it's no wonder that most Americans still recoil from it. ..."
Anne Applebaum
bemoans the decision not to bomb Syria three years ago:
I repeat: Maybe a U.S.-British-French intervention would have ended in
disaster. If so, we would today be mourning the consequences. But sometimes
it's important to mourn the consequences of nonintervention too. Three years
on, we do know, after all, exactly what nonintervention has produced.
One of the more frustrating things about the debate over Syria policy is
the widely-circulated idea that refraining from military action makes a government
responsible for any or all of the things that happen in a foreign conflict later
on. Somehow our government is responsible for the effects of a war when it
isn't directly contributing to the conflict by dropping bombs, but
doesn't receive any blame when it is helping to stoke the same conflict by other
means. Many pundits lament the failure to bomb Syria, but far fewer object to
the harm done by sending weapons to rebels that have contributed to the overall
mayhem in Syria.
Applebaum's column title refers to "disastrous nonintervention," but
the U.S. has been meddling in Syria's conflict to some degree for many years.
Indeed, Syria is in such a miserable state because multiple outside states have
been interfering and taking sides in the war. There may be no better example
of how outside intervention prolongs and intensifies a civil war than Syria,
and yet Syria hawks always conclude that the real problem is that Western governments
haven't done more to add to the misery. The "consequences of nonintervention"
are not, in fact, the consequences of the U.S. decision not to bomb in 2013,
but rather they are the consequences of the actions that many actors (including
the U.S.) have taken in Syria in their destructive efforts to "shape" the conflict.
Let's remember what the Obama administration proposed doing in August 2013.
Obama was going to order attacks on the Syrian government to punish it for the
use of chemical weapons, but his officials insisted this would be an "unbelievably
small" action in order to placate skeptics worried about an open-ended war.
If the attack had been as "unbelievably small" as promised, it would have weakened
the Syrian government's forces but likely wouldn't have changed anything about
the overall conflict. Even judged solely by how much of the Syrian government's
chemical weapons arsenal it eliminated, it would have been less successful than
the disarmament agreement that was reached.
If the intervention had expanded and turned into a much more ambitious campaign,
as opponents of the proposed bombing feared it could, it would have almost certainly
redounded to the benefit of jihadist groups because it was attacking their enemies.
It seems fair to assume that a "successful" bombing campaign in 2013 would have
exposed more of Syria to the depredations of ISIS and other jihadists. It would
not have hurt ISIS or other jihadists in the least since they were not going
to be targeted by it, so it is particularly absurd to try to blame ISIS's later
actions on the decision not to attack. If the bombing campaign was perceived
to be "not working" quickly enough, that would have prompted demands for an
even larger U.S. military role in Syria in the months and years that followed.
Bombing Syria in 2013 would not have ended the war earlier, but would have made
the U.S. a more involved party to it than it is today. I fail to see how that
would have been a better outcome for the U.S. or the people of Syria. It is
doubtful that fewer Syrians overall would have been killed and displaced in
the wake of such a bombing campaign. It is tendentious in the extreme to assert
that the decision not to bomb is responsible for the war's later victims and
effects.
The backlash against proposed military action in Syria in 2013 was a remarkable
moment in the U.S. and Britain. It was the first time that the U.S. and U.K.
governments had their plan to attack another country effectively overruled by
the people's elected representatives. As it turns out, it was a fleeting moment,
and it doesn't seem likely to be repeated anytime soon. Popular resistance to
the next war was virtually non-existent, and both the U.S. and British governments
have returned to their old ways of starting and backing unnecessary wars. Obama
has unfortunately learned the lesson that he should avoid consulting those representatives
on these matters in the future, and so he has gone back to starting and waging
wars without authorization. The foreign policy elite in the U.S. have similarly
learned all the wrong things from this episode. Instead of recognizing how unpopular
their preferred policies were/are and respecting what the public wanted, most
have concluded that public opinion should simply be ignored from now on.
Perhaps the biggest flaw in the Applebaum's interventionist lament is the
complete failure to acknowledge that other states and groups have their own
agency and would have continued to do harm in Syria regardless of what the U.S.
did or didn't do. Bombing Syria in 2013 wouldn't have made the conflict any
easier to resolve, nor would it have altered the interests of the warring parties.
It would have been an exercise in blowing things up and killing people to show
that we were taking "action." It would have been the most senseless sort of
intervening for the sake of being seen to intervene.
The U.S. could have been
more deeply involved in the conflict than it is for many years, but all that
would have meant was that the U.S. was doing more to inflict death and destruction
on a suffering country. When interventionists "mourn" a decision not to bomb,
they are regretting the decision not to kill people in another country that
posed no threat to the U.S. or any of our allies. That's a horrible position,
and it's no wonder that most Americans still recoil from it.
"... A lot of commenters here do not understand the danger of yet another neocon warmonger as POTUS. A person who never has a war she did not like. They never experienced the horrors of wars in their lives. Only highly sanitized coverage from MSM. ..."
"... Demonizing of Trump went way too far in this forum. And a lot of commenters like most Web hamsters enjoy denigrating him, forgetting the fact that a vote for Hillary is the vote for a war criminal. ..."
"... Moreover, lesser evilism considerations are not working for war criminals. They are like absolute zero in Kelvin scale. You just can't go lower. ..."
"... But again those are secondary considerations. "War vs peace" question in the one that matters most. Another reckless warmongers and all bets might be off for the country (with an unexpected solution for global warming problem) ..."
Obama and Hill Clinton are Saudi tools same as W. Keeping AUMF going the
past 8 years lets W off a lot of the Iraq/WMD and Afghanistan hooks!
Bill's adventures included firing a general for commenting on the craziness
of losing people over Serbia.
Bill's evolutionary adventures in the Balkans are anti Russian neocon
trials. Their exceptionalism pushed Russia around and moved NATO eastward
reneging on deals Bush Sr. had with the Russians.
Hillary, extending Bill's neocon meme* over Ukraine and Libya are nearing
W level insanity.
Nuland (married to the neocon Kagan family) came with Strobe Talbot in
1993.
We really facing a vote for a person who would probably be convicted
by Nuremberg tribunal.
All those factors that are often discussed like Supreme court nominations,
estate tax, etc, are of secondary importance to the cardinal question --
"war vs peace" question.
A lot of commenters here do not understand the danger of yet another
neocon warmonger as POTUS. A person who never has a war she did not like.
They never experienced the horrors of wars in their lives. Only highly sanitized
coverage from MSM.
Demonizing of Trump went way too far in this forum. And a lot of commenters
like most Web hamsters enjoy denigrating him, forgetting the fact that a
vote for Hillary is the vote for a war criminal.
"Trump this and Trump that" blabbing can't hide this important consideration.
Moreover, lesser evilism considerations are not working for war criminals.
They are like absolute zero in Kelvin scale. You just can't go lower.
Moreover, after Bush II there is a consensus that are very few people
in the USA who are unqualified to the run the country. From this point of
view Trump is extremely qualified (and actually managed to master English
language unlike Bush II with his famous Bushisms ).
But again those are secondary considerations. "War vs peace" question
in the one that matters most. Another reckless warmongers and all bets might
be off for the country (with an unexpected solution for global warming problem)
"... But potentially opening an important view on the US diplomatic correspondence for four years to any state with the desire to read it is something really special. A unique achievement of Secretary Clinton. ..."
"... for any specialist with even superficial knowledge of computer security the level of incompetence and arrogance demonstrated is simply unreal. Especially after the latest FBI documents. ..."
And here's a pro tip: the best ways to judge a candidate's character are
to look at what he or she has actually done, and what policies he or she
is proposing.
... ... ...
In other words, focus on the facts. America and the world can't afford another
election tipped by innuendo.
After Bush II administration it is generally unclear what should be the
level of crime committed to be arrested.
But potentially opening an important view on the US diplomatic correspondence
for four years to any state with the desire to read it is something really
special. A unique achievement of Secretary Clinton.
Now I am not so sure that the level of incompetence of Hillary and her
aides in this sordid saga is less it was for the key figures of Bush II
administration (who also used a private email server for a while with impunity,
although not for State Department activities).
But for any specialist with even superficial knowledge of computer
security the level of incompetence and arrogance demonstrated is simply
unreal. Especially after the latest FBI documents.
Can you imagine that they have no technical knowledge of how to create
the archive of emails in Windows Server directly and used Apple laptop and
then Gmail account and then intermediaries to achieve the necessary result.
This is something so stupid and reckless that there is no words for it.
Also wiping out this "bathroom" mail server with BleachKit is a very
suspicious activity for any person under investigation.
All indications are she wasn't very careful while actively using the
server. However, once she started getting requests to produce data from
it, then she suddenly got very careful. Even if she did do nothing wrong,
that is a very stark change in behavior that just happened to coincide with
legal requests to hand over data.
...The FBI found the "key piece(s)". Comey then said "No prosecutor would
pursue this case" and dropped it. He was probably right--but only because
of her last name. If I did that, I might get out after 5 years or so. Heck,
one of my counterparts got in trouble for a single line in a controlled
document which had the same info in the public domain. I'm sick of these
"Nothing to see here" claims--just look at any security briefing and it's
spelled out. We just had another one, and according to it I would be required
to report her if she was in my office.
...Yes it does, read the laws. There is a Navy person who facing 20 years
to life for disposing of a phone which had his picture while inside the
sub. That is one of the more extreme cases, but it's literally a Web Search
to prove you are wrong (shill?) Intent comes in to play _only_ for the penalty.
...I like how the argument has devolved here to "If Bush did it, then
it's ok". PopeRatzo, is Dubya really your moral compass? Your guiding light?
...Except ALL 22 MILLION Bush administrative emails were recovered from
tape backups. Clinton wiped the data AFTER the FOIA request. I don't know
of a single person that has decided one day to delete ALL their personal
emails, except Clinton.
https://www.wired.com/2009/12/...
[wired.com] another source
http://www.npr.org/templates/s...
[npr.org] , another
http://www.npr.org/templates/s...
[npr.org] . Yep you're idiot.
...My quibble was the blatant arrogance of the act. That private server
was clearly a move to preserve final editing rights of her tenure at the
State Department and evade any future FOIA requests that may crop up during
her next run for the presidency; and was there ever any doubt that she would
run again? The fact that she thought she could get away with it after experiencing
the fallout from the exact same move by members of the Bush administration
while she was a sitting Senator in Washington reinforces the feeling that
her arrogance knows no bounds. She took a page out of the neocon playbook
and figured she would show them how it's done.
...1. She put classified info on a private unsecured server where it
was vulnerable, contrary to the law which she was fully advised of upon
taking office.
2. She did all her work through that server, hiding it from all 3 government
branches (congressional oversight, executive oversight, and the courts)
and public FOIA requests.
3. When the material was sought by the courts and congress, she and the
state department people lied under oath claiming the material did not exist
(perhaps Nixon cronies should have all lied about tapes existing).
4. After her people knew the material was being sought, the server's
files were transferred (by private IT people w/o clearances) to her lawyers
(no clearances).
5. She and her lawyers deleted over 30000 e-mails, claiming they were
only about yoga and her daughter's wedding dress (Nixon cut a few minutes
of tape).
6. They then wiped the files with bit bleach (a step not needed for yoga
or wedding dress e-mails). (Nixon did not degauss all his tapes)
7. They handed the wiped server to the FBI, and hillary publicly played
ignorant with her "with a CLOTH?" comment (absolute iin-you-face arrogance
against the rule of law) (Nixon did not hand tape recorders with erased
tapes to the FBI)
Prove you are sincere, and not a total unprincipled partisan hack: Are
you a Nixon supporter? Would you accept this behavior from Donald Trump
or Dick Cheney?
"... Clintons crimes with national security leaks and destruction of federal records investigators got no prosecution. The democrat camp has no convictions. The curve Hillary is on is the same one any tin pot dictator enjoys. ..."
"... False equivalence. The world was different in 2008-2012 , Powell had far fewer hackers when he was lying about Iraq. The tech world was much less threatening. Powell learned from his training, knew better than to go past secure networks for sensitive information. He also knew about federal records act and penalties. ..."
"... Clinton crimes are called scandals. She got no convictions. ..."
"... Should Trump take the brass ring, let us hope he isn't really as brash or inept as Bush Jr, but that's asking a LOT ..."
"... And if Hillary does win (as expected), let's look forward to having that charming rogue in the White House at her side. Let's manage to bring the wars to an end & have peace rule the planet, mostly. ..."
"... That last sentence is certainly something we can and should hope for. However, given her somewhat hawkish disposition and likely need to demonstrate that she has the balls to be commander in Chief, I would not preclude the possibility of a little fighting somewhere. However, the consolation is that she did not ask the generals "if we have nukes why don't we use them"? Turns out there are worser things than bad. ..."
"... As someone who has been involved in the national security system for more than four decades, I can't help but nearly vomit when I read Hillary's answers to the FBI's questions. Had I or any other cleared employee of lesser stature given the same answers, we would have been fired if not prosecuted for our behavior. Here irresponsible behavior was dangerous to our security and disgusting. ..."
"... You think Clinton is going to turn out to be bolder and more progressive than her elite and plutocratic backers suspect. Maybe. Time will tell. But I'm just saying that if part of the Democrats' goal was to generate the kind of electoral groundswell that would sweep a whole new progressive House into power, you don't get that kind of result by nominating party royalty and an old guard representative of the national establishment and the administrations of the last century. ..."
"... Not once has an indictment, no arrests, how do people keep holding on to some belief that there must be something to it? I know people will say the euphemism, where there is smoke there is fire, but come on. Mind you the secrecy the Clintons exhibit does their cause no good, but just because you are paranoid does not mean they are not out to get you! ..."
"... If any of the scandals went to a jury instead of being swept under the rug, we might have judgements. If I did what Clinton did with information security I would be in jail. If I did that with federal records I would do time as well! ..."
And here's a pro tip: the best ways to judge a candidate's character are
to look at what he or she has actually done, and what policies he or she
is proposing.
... ... ...
In other words, focus on the facts. America and the world can't afford another
election tipped by innuendo.
"True, there aren't many efforts to pretend that Donald Trump is a paragon
of honesty. But it's hard to escape the impression that he's being graded
on a curve."
Trump supporters would have you believe his immigration policy is the
same as that of Jeb! and little Marco. Never mind what he told that white
audience. They would also have you believe he is all for equal rights for
black people. Never mind what he told that white audience.
Krugman is saying that Bush was the most dishonest candidate ever in
2000. Well - that was so 16 years ago. Romney 2012 was much worse. And Trump
2016 is reminding me of Romney 2012.
A curve! while Clintons crimes with national security leaks and destruction
of federal records investigators got no prosecution. The democrat camp has
no convictions. The curve Hillary is on is the same one any tin pot dictator
enjoys.
It's actually the same one Colin Powell enjoyed, except Hillary's private
email system was far more secured and, unlike Powell's janky use of an AOL
account that got hacked, there's no evidence HRC's was compromised.
False equivalence. The world was different in 2008-2012 , Powell had
far fewer hackers when he was lying about Iraq. The tech world was much
less threatening. Powell learned from his training, knew better than to
go past secure networks for sensitive information. He also knew about federal
records act and penalties.
Yes isn't it remarkable how Trump can say opposite things within the same
month, week or even in the same speech - and just be considered to have
"evolved" rather than being chastised for trying to pander to all sides.
Again if he were judged by a standard even half as critical as a Clinton
he would have evaporated long time ago.
George Bush Jr (particularly with 9/11, Hurricane Katrina and the financial
crash) was a spectacularly inept president and considered one of the worst
ever.
His predecessor was a largely successful yet quite 'colorful' president,
who had great economic success with the internet boom, which VP Al Gore
did have a minor legislative hand in dontchaknow. Barely fought a war. Got
impeached.
Both fellows were loved or hated by a lot of people, who don't talk to
one another much.
It has now come to pass that a guy who reminds us of the former is running
against the spouse of the latter. Complications ensue. Go figure.
Should Trump take the brass ring, let us hope he isn't really as
brash or inept as Bush Jr, but that's asking a LOT, so don't chance
it, please.
And if Hillary does win (as expected), let's look forward to having
that charming rogue in the White House at her side. Let's manage to bring
the wars to an end & have peace rule the planet, mostly.
That last sentence is certainly something we can and should hope for.
However, given her somewhat hawkish disposition and likely need to demonstrate
that she has the balls to be commander in Chief, I would not preclude the
possibility of a little fighting somewhere. However, the consolation is
that she did not ask the generals "if we have nukes why don't we use them"?
Turns out there are worser things than bad.
And which Clinton robots are running around like tailgunner Joe screaming
that Putin is trying to out do AIPAC?
The democrat peace movement steps aside for spreading organized murder
from expensive weapons system to do "civilian protective operations" and
the Saudi's bidding against Shiites.
Keep the money flowing and the drones causing justifiable at lest to
Lockheed and Boeing shareholders "militarily proportional collateral damage".
"Barely fought a war." Bill's little wars in the Balkans rubber the Tsar's
nose in it, broke up a several small countries, bombed the Chinese embassy
at great profit from a B-2 (it did not rain that day) and US still pays
NATO for a huge military base there.
Obama and Hill Clinton are Saudi tools same as W. Keeping AUMF going the
past 8 years lets W off a lot of the Iraq/WMD and Afghanistan hooks!
Bill's adventures included firing a general for commenting on the craziness
of losing people over Serbia.
Bill's evolutionary adventures in the Balkans are anti Russian neocon
trials. Their exceptionalism pushed Russia around and moved NATO eastward
reneging on deals Bush Sr. had with the Russians.
Hillary, extending Bill's neocon meme* over Ukraine and Libya are nearing
W level insanity.
Nuland (married to the neocon Kagan family) came with Strobe Talbot in
1993.
We really facing a vote for a person who would probably be convicted
by Nuremberg tribunal. All those factors that are often discussed like Supreme
court nominations, estate tax, etc, are of secondary importance to the cardinal
question -- "war vs peace" question.
A lot of commenters here do not understand the danger of yet another
neocon warmonger as POTUS. A person who never have a war she did not like.
They never experienced the horrors of wars in their lives. Only highly sanitized
coverage from MSM.
Demonizing of Trump went way too far in this forum. And a lot of commenters
like most Web hamsters enjoy denigrating him, forgetting the fact that a
vote for Hillary is the vote for a war criminal. "Trump this and Trump that"
blabbing can't hide this important consideration.
Moreover, lesser evilism considerations are not working for war criminals.
They are like absolute zero in Kelvin scale. You just can't go lower.
Moreover, after Bush II there is a consensus that are very few people
in the USA who are unqualified to the run the country. From this point of
view Trump is extremely qualified (and actually managed to master English
language unlike Bush II with his famous Bushisms ).
But again those are secondary considerations. "War vs peace" question
in the one that matters most. Another reckless warmonger and all bets might
be off for the country (with an unexpected solution for global warming problem)
W been out for over 7 years and the body bag strategy is the same. Obama
ran on ending Iraq and he did NOT vote for AUMF!
I suggest the collateral damage caused by Obama and Clinton is surging
past W, who had only 6 years to do it.
Clinton and Obama will be at it 8 years and for Libya and Syria are [related
to percent of population] past Iraq. Syria has military appropriate collateral
damage more than Iraq since 1993.
You cannot call someone nut so you can ignore facts.
As someone who has been involved in the national security system for
more than four decades, I can't help but nearly vomit when I read Hillary's
answers to the FBI's questions. Had I or any other cleared employee of lesser
stature given the same answers, we would have been fired if not prosecuted
for our behavior. Here irresponsible behavior was dangerous to our security
and disgusting.
Hillary is every bit as honest as her husband was when he answered "I
have not had sex with that woman." The two of them deserve each other. The
rest of the country deserves neither of them.
As someone who also knows a little about network security and the umpteen
bazillion ways most people violate stated policies, including Secretaries
Rice and Powell who established the precedent at State for Hillary's use
of a private email system ...
I think you're overreacting, and myopic, and possibly concern trolling.
I agree the 2nd trolly paragraph the commenter paints himself as a kook
still luridly fascinated with Bill Clinton's sex life. haha
But I think it's worth pointing out that people who work or have worked
for the government in less illustrious (non political) positions are subject
to a lot of what seems like nit-picky draconian rules, under threat of having
one's work life made miserable, at least for a time, for breaking any little
one of them.
It's just the nature of the beast of that type of govt employment. It's
a lot of stress. And politically appointed & elected government workers
at least seem to get away with a lot comparatively.
So I think it's worth acknowledging, when seen from that position, the
attitude, and feelings, are understandable, even if you don't agree with
it.
I would drop the 2nd paragraph in future if you want to be heard. Because
otherwise people don't think about what you said before it because you've
just come across as one of those kind of people who were telling lame old
tired monica jokes a decade after the fact. *sigh*
The key question is whether that will be better or worse for the country.
I think Hillary is a more dangerous war criminal, then just corrupt businessman
like Trump. Trump university is less important then the vote for Iraq war,
IMHO.
You think Clinton is going to turn out to be bolder and more progressive
than her elite and plutocratic backers suspect. Maybe. Time will tell. But
I'm just saying that if part of the Democrats' goal was to generate the
kind of electoral groundswell that would sweep a whole new progressive House
into power, you don't get that kind of result by nominating party royalty
and an old guard representative of the national establishment and the administrations
of the last century.
That would be more (arguably) true if Hillary weren't drawing votes from
such Republicans. Which naturally concerns progressive Dems. This is perhaps
a wave that alters the GOP for a long time.
According to the Clinton Rules, the appearance of the possibility of
impropriety, no matter how trivial or technical in nature, is to be deemed
prima facie as credible evidence of guilt, and any and all innuendo brought
forth is to be treated as serious.
Thus, Whitewater. And Vince Foster. And Benghazi. And "Wall Street speeches."
And everything related to the word "emails." And State Dept "access". And
whatever else is the manufact-roversy of the day.
Meanwhile, the media and the public widely regard both Hillary and Trump
as "dishonest", as if there were any semblance of equivalence.
It's clear why this happens ... there is a confluence of interest, among
Republicans, Bernie Busters, and the media, in manufacturing controversy
surrounding Hillary Clinton. The GOP wants to weaken her. The Busters resent
her. And the media desperately wants a horse race and to be able to create
"both sides do it" equivalence in order to bolster their own reputations
for objectivity. The sad thing is that so many Americans are gullible enough
to buy it.
This whole thing is amazing. For thirty years, the republicans discover
a scandal on average about twice a year, starting I think with White Water.
Oh sure all official and all, Congressional Hearings, investigators and
in the end nada. Not once has an indictment, no arrests, how do people
keep holding on to some belief that there must be something to it? I know
people will say the euphemism, where there is smoke there is fire, but come
on. Mind you the secrecy the Clintons exhibit does their cause no good,
but just because you are paranoid does not mean they are not out to get
you!
After Bush II administration it is generally unclear what should be the
level of crime committed to be arrested.
But potentially opening an important view on the US diplomatic correspondence
for four years to any state with the desire to read it is something really
special. A unique achievement of Secretary Hillary.
Now I am not so sure that the level of incompetence of Hillary and her
aides in this sordid saga is less it was for the key figures of Bush II
administration (who also used a private email server for a while with impunity,
although not for State Department activities).
But for any specialist with even superficial knowledge of computer security
the level of incompetence and arrogance demonstrated is simply unreal. Especially
after the latest FBI documents.
Can you imagine that they have no technical knowledge of how to create
the archive of emails in Windows Server directly and used Apple laptop and
then Gmail account and intermediaries to achieve the necessary result. This
is something so stupid and reckless that there is no words for it.
Also wiping out this "bathroom" mail server with BleachKit is a very
suspicious activity for any person under investigation.
All indications are she wasn't very careful while actively using the
server. However, once she started getting requests to produce data from
it, then she suddenly got very careful. Even if she did do nothing wrong,
that is a very stark change in behavior that just happened to coincide with
legal requests to hand over data.
...The FBI found the "key piece(s)". Comey then said "No prosecutor would
pursue this case" and dropped it. He was probably right--but only because
of her last name. If I did that, I might get out after 5 years or so. Heck,
one of my counterparts got in trouble for a single line in a controlled
document which had the same info in the public domain. I'm sick of these
"Nothing to see here" claims--just look at any security briefing and it's
spelled out. We just had another one, and according to it I would be required
to report her if she was in my office.
...Yes it does, read the laws. There is a Navy person who facing 20 years
to life for disposing of a phone which had his picture while inside the
sub. That is one of the more extreme cases, but it's literally a Web Search
to prove you are wrong (shill?) Intent comes in to play _only_ for the penalty.
...I like how the argument has devolved here to "If Bush did it, then
it's ok". PopeRatzo, is Dubya really your moral compass? Your guiding light?
...Except ALL 22 MILLION Bush administrative emails were recovered from
tape backups. Clinton wiped the data AFTER the FOIA request. I don't know
of a single person that has decided one day to delete ALL their personal
emails, except Clinton.
https://www.wired.com/2009/12/...
[wired.com] another source
http://www.npr.org/templates/s...
[npr.org] , another
http://www.npr.org/templates/s...
[npr.org] . Yep you're idiot.
...My quibble was the blatant arrogance of the act. That private server
was clearly a move to preserve final editing rights of her tenure at the
State Department and evade any future FOIA requests that may crop up during
her next run for the presidency; and was there ever any doubt that she would
run again? The fact that she thought she could get away with it after experiencing
the fallout from the exact same move by members of the Bush administration
while she was a sitting Senator in Washington reinforces the feeling that
her arrogance knows no bounds. She took a page out of the neocon playbook
and figured she would show them how it's done.
...1. She put classified info on a private unsecured server where it
was vulnerable, contrary to the law which she was fully advised of upon
taking office.
2. She did all her work through that server, hiding it from all 3 government
branches (congressional oversight, executive oversight, and the courts)
and public FOIA requests.
3. When the material was sought by the courts and congress, she and the
state department people lied under oath claiming the material did not exist
(perhaps Nixon cronies should have all lied about tapes existing).
4. After her people knew the material was being sought, the server's files
were transferred (by private IT people w/o clearances) to her lawyers (no
clearances).
5. She and her lawyers deleted over 30000 e-mails, claiming they were only
about yoga and her daughter's wedding dress (Nixon cut a few minutes of
tape).
6. They then wiped the files with bit bleach (a step not needed for yoga
or wedding dress e-mails). (Nixon did not degauss all his tapes)
7. They handed the wiped server to the FBI, and hillary publicly played
ignorant with her "with a CLOTH?" comment (absolute iin-you-face arrogance
against the rule of law) (Nixon did not hand tape recorders with erased
tapes to the FBI)
Prove you are sincere, and not a total unprincipled partisan hack:
Are you a Nixon supporter?
Would you accept this behavior from Donald Trump or Dick Cheney?
One law for the king another for me. If any of the scandals went to
a jury instead of being swept under the rug, we might have judgements. If
I did what Clinton did with information security I would be in jail. If
I did that with federal records I would do time as well!
Bill Clinton was a regular neoliberal bottom feeder (in essence not that different from drunkard
Yeltsin) without any strategical vision or political courage, He destroyed the golden possibility of
rapprochement of the USA and Russia (which would require something like Marshall plan to help Russia).
Instead he decided to plunder the country. It's sad that now Hillary will continue his policies, only
in more jingoistic, dangerous fashion. She learn nothing.
Notable quotes:
"... However, according to Simes in the years immediately following the dissolution of the USSR, Washington has made perhaps the greatest error of a winner: sold for complacency. ..."
"... Russia simply ceased to be a U.S. geopolitical variable in the equation, Moscow was irrevocably excluded from the strategic horizon. ..."
"... The result was that the former Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott called at the time the policy of "eat and shut up": the Russian economy was collapsing, the Red Army reduced the ghost of the past and Yeltsin's entourage welcomed with open arms of the IMF aid. In short, Russia is a power failure and as such was treated by administering liberal economic recipes and submitting its projection to a geopolitical drastic weight loss. Everything apart from the feeling of the Russian leadership. ..."
"... This approach found its full realization, between 1999 and 2004, the expansion of NATO eastward: they were including Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Romania, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Together with the U.S. intervention in Serbia during the Kosovo war (1999), this move Russia convinced that the cost of the American loans -- a dramatic and permanent reduction of the area of security and its own geopolitical ambitions - was too high . ..."
America won the Cold War. But in addition to the USSR, has it defeated Russia? This question,
which is still in the nineties sounded absurd to most people, began to appear in the last decade,
thanks to the work of historians such as Dimitri Simes, John Lewis Gaddis, or in Italy, Adriano Roccucci.
In the United States is widely believed that the collapse of the Soviet Union was caused in large
part by strategic decisions of the Reagan administration. Surely the military and economic pressure
exerted by these contributed to the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact and then the final crisis of
the Soviet system. However, according to Simes in the years immediately following the dissolution
of the USSR, Washington has made perhaps the greatest error of a winner: sold for complacency.
This has resulted, in retrospect, in an overestimation of U.S. policy choices in the mid-eighties
onwards, and in a parallel underestimation of the role played by the Soviet leadership. Gorbachev
came to power in 1985 determined to solve the problems left behind by Brezhnev: overexposure military
in Afghanistan and subsequent explosion of spending on defense, imposed on an economy tremendously
inefficient. But if Reagan pushed the USSR on the edge of the precipice, Gorbachev was disposable,
albeit unwittingly, triggering reforms that escaped the hands of his own theorist.
That fact has been largely removed from public debate and U.S. historiography which has led America
in the second mistake: underestimating the enemy defeated, confusing the defunct Soviet Union with
what was left of his heart - Russia.
In fact, Reagan and Bush Sr. after him fully understand the dangers inherent in the collapse of
the superpower enemy, dealing with Gorbachev touch, even without discounts: the Soviet leader was
refused the pressing demands for economic aid, incompatible with the military escalation Reagan once
to crush the Soviet Union under the weight of war spending.
Even the first Gulf War (1990-91), who saw the massive American intervention in a country (Iraq)
at the time near the borders of the USSR, did not provoke a diplomatic rupture between the two superpowers.
This Soviet weakness undoubtedly was the result of an empire in decline, but remember that even in
1990 no one - least of all, the leadership in Moscow - the Soviet Union finally gave up on us yet.
Despite an election campaign played on the charge to GH Bush to focus too much on foreign policy,
ignoring the economics (It's the economy, stupid), newly installed in the White House Bill Clinton
was not spared aid to Russia, agreeing to this line of credit to be logged on to the International
Monetary Fund (IMF), from June 1992. Clinton's support was directed mainly toward the figure of Yeltsin
and his policies, with the exception of waging war against Chechen separatism, in 1994.
If Clinton with these moves proved to understand, like its two predecessors, the importance of
"accompany" the Russian transition, avoiding - or at least contain - the chaos following the collapse
of a continental empire, the other part of his administration demonstrated sinful paternalism and,
above all, acquired the illusion of omnipotence that he saw in the "unipolar moment" end not only
the U.S. opposed the US-USSR, but also of any power ambitions of Russia. Russia simply ceased
to be a U.S. geopolitical variable in the equation, Moscow was irrevocably excluded from the strategic
horizon.
The result was that the former Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott called at the time
the policy of "eat and shut up": the Russian economy was collapsing, the Red Army reduced the ghost
of the past and Yeltsin's entourage welcomed with open arms of the IMF aid. In short, Russia is a
power failure and as such was treated by administering liberal economic recipes and submitting its
projection to a geopolitical drastic weight loss. Everything apart from the feeling of the Russian
leadership.
This went hand in hand with growing resentment for the permanent position of inferiority which
they were relegated by Washington. To the point that even the then Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev,
known by the nickname "Yes sir" for his acquiescence to the dictates of Americans, showed growing
impatience with the brutal Russian downgrading by America.
Indeed, the United States administration did not lack critics: former President Nixon, a number
of businessmen and experts of Russia expressed skepticism or opposition to the Clinton administration
attitude that did not seem to pay particular attention to wounded pride and the strategic interests
of a nation that continued to think of itself as empire. However, these positions does not affect
the dominant view in the administration of the establishment and much of the U.S., where consencus
was that Russia in no longer entitled to have an independent foreign policy.
This approach found its full realization, between 1999 and 2004, the expansion of NATO eastward:
they were including Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Romania, Estonia,
Latvia and Lithuania. Together with the U.S. intervention in Serbia during the Kosovo war (1999),
this move Russia convinced that the cost of the American loans -- a dramatic and permanent reduction
of the area of security and its own geopolitical ambitions - was too high .
Everything, absolutely everything demonstrates really terrifying level of incompetence: the transfer of emails to Apple laptop,
to Gmail account, then transfer back to window system, handing of USB drive. Amazing level of incompetence. This is really devastating
level of incompetence for the organization that took over a lot of CIA functions. Essentially Hillary kept the position which is close
to the role of the director of CIA What a tragedy for the country...
Notable quotes:
"... It is painfully clear that she traded access and favors for money and reciprocal favors. It is painfully clear that she made little distinction between working for the State Department, the Clinton foundation and her family and tried to keep the records of what was going on inaccessible. The more honest defense would be, all politicians do it, and you have to suck it up because Trump is worse. Which is true. But trying to downplay this and explain it away is offensive, not all of the public are complete idiots. ..."
"... Her brazen air of arrogance and entitlement is about to fade as she comes to realise, that albeit Comey having been got at, he has still succeeded in striking a severe blow against her, and in addition, at the not-so-tin-hat conspiracy of inappropriate, and increasingly overt, institutional support. ..."
"... All this in the face of documented lies, in your face hypocrisy, and unbridled corruption, oozing from every orifice of a maverick administration. ..."
"... Clinton is the one waging war in the middle east. She is the one being bullish and provocative with Russia. Trump has only been conciliatory with these issues, he has been against the war on Iraq ..."
"... HRC is still likely to be the next President, but this scandal does have legs. She put herself in a corner by claiming lack of recall due to a medical condition (i.e., the concussion). This leaves two possibilities, neither of which is helpful to her cause, to wit: either she was being dishonest or she was (and could still be) cognitively impaired. ..."
"... Reagan was certainly not someone I admired but at least he tried to reduce the chance of nuclear war. Clinton is an out and out Hawke with the blood of many innocent people on her hands in both Syria and Libya. She is hiding her communications because she does not want to be exposed for the role she played in The destruction of Libya and the gun running of weapons to terrorists in Syria. That is to Al Qaeda and ISIS. World War 3 is more likely under Clinton than any other world leader. Even Trump. ..."
"... Not forgetting that she was key in making sure the US didn't side with Assad. Had the US done at the beginning, instead of being at the behest of the Saudis and the petrodollar, then the whole thing would have been over in 6 months and IS would never have got more than a dusty district of northern Iraq. ..."
"... So the applicant to the US presidency does not know what (c) stands for in her emails, archives high security data on a laptop and then losses it for years, uploads same emails on Google's gmail account and then losses devices again. She does not recall many things, not even the training she received on handling the confidential and secure communication. She couldn't recall the procces of drone strikes. (Will she be killing people at a whim, without an accountable protocol?) She is either demented or dangerously reckless or lying. All of these conditions disbar her form her candidacy. ..."
"... If she could only manage a couple of hours a day because of concussion and a blood clot she should have temporarily stood down until she recovered fully, and had a senior official take over her duties until she was well. You can't have a brain-damaged person in charge of the US's affairs - even though there is a long history of nutters the State Dept. ( ie the Military Industrial Complex HQ). ..."
"... the clinton foundation does not pay taxes..and dont forget that slick willie has been on the paedophile plane more times than the pilot ..."
"... She failed to keep up with recordkeeping she agreed to, then when asked to turn over records, somebody destroyed them, but Clinton did not order destruction, or does not remember having done so. Turned over all records-oops I thought WE did! She either lied or has alzheimers ..."
"... Political baggage is a bitch. If this election cycle has demonstrated anything it is that the leadership of both parties is totally out of touch with the voters and really has no interest except supporting the Neoliberal tenet of fiscal nonintervention. This laissez-faire attitude toward corporate interests is paralysing the American government. ..."
"... I cannot believe Clinton has got this far in the election, I believe Obama wants her in to hide many of his embarrassing warmongering mistakes. ..."
"... Today of all days Hillary Clinton puts out a tweet with the following: 'America needs leadership in the White House, not a liability' -- As we have to assume she's not referring to herself it confirms people's suspicion that the person who writes Hillary's tweets is a hostile to her campaign. The tweets are often completely off the mark. ..."
"... Either Comey is on their payroll, or they have threatened his family. Either way it is business as usual. The NWO decided a long time ago that Hillary was their next puppet PONTUS. ..."
"... I was a low-level officer at US Embassies and Consulates in various foreign countries. Clinton's claim that she didn't know what (C) was, or that she "she did not pay attention to the difference between top secret, secret and confidential" and "could not recall any briefing or training by state related to the retention of federal records or handling of classified information." Are beyond ridiculous. Any fool knows enough to be aware of different levels of classified info, and the obvious fact that you don't get sloppy with classified info. ..."
"... to paraphrase Leona Helmsley's comment about paying taxes, "security is for little people." So in that respect Hillary is no different from the rest of them. ..."
"... You'd better hope she's lying, because if the incompetence is genuine she shouldn't be allowed near any confidential information ever again. I hate to admit it but Trump is right on this one. Jesus wept. ..."
"... The fact that the Sec State could have an email server built at her home and operate with such laughable gross negligence when it comes to national security is surreal and appalling. ..."
"... If the FBI were not themselves co-conspirators and hopelessly corrupt, they would indict some of the lower level actors and offer them immunity. They could start with the imbecile who put that laptop in the mail and couldn't remember if it was UPS or USPS. ..."
"... Caddell has voiced an interesting concern that others are beginning to share: that the news media has crawled so far in bed with Hillary Clinton they won't be able to get back out. That the news media in America has lost its soul. Even Jake Tapper started asking this question several weeks ago in the middle of his own show. ..."
"... The pyramid scheme of created debt has destroyed capitalism and democracy within 40 years of full operation. Captured Govt has bailed out incompetence and failure at every turn, and in so doing, inverted the yield curve and destroyed the future. It is for this reason alone I cannot respect these financial paedophiles or support anything they do. In this contest for the White House, Clinton is the manifestation of the establishment. ..."
"... "The documents provided a number of new details about Mrs. Clinton's private server, including what appeared to be a frantic effort by a computer specialist to delete an archive of her emails even after a congressional committee had requested they be preserved." -NY Times ..."
"... Hillary's treatment of top-secret US documents was willful and uncorrected. If she had done the same thing with medical records, the individuals whose medical records had been mishandled could have filed charges and Hillary would have been personally liable for up to $50,000 fine per incident. ..."
"... Clinton is an absolute liability. Apart from this scandal she's a status quo candidate for a status quo that no longer exists. She stands for neo-liberalism, US hegemony and capitalist globalization all of which are deader than the dodo. That makes her very dangerous in terms of world peace and of course she will do absolutely nothing for the millions of Americans facing joblessness, hunger, bankruptcy and homelessness except make things worse ..."
"... The entire corrupt establishment want Clinton at all cost, so that they can continue fleecing the future and enslaving the entire world in created debt. All right minded individuals should this as a flashing red light to turn round and vote the other way. ..."
A Clinton Foundation laptop and a thumb drive used to archive
Hillary
Clinton's emails from her time as secretary of state are missing, according to FBI notes released on Friday.
The phrase "Clinton could not recall" litters the summary of the FBI's investigation, which concluded in July
that
she should not face charges. Amid fierce Republican criticism of the Democratic presidential candidate, the party's nominee,
Donald Trump released a statement which said "Hillary Clinton's answers to the FBI about her private email server defy belief" and
added that he did not "understand how she was able to get away from prosecution".
he FBI documents describe how Monica Hanley, a former Clinton aide, received assistance in spring 2013 from Justin Cooper, a former
aide to Bill Clinton, in creating an archive of Hillary Clinton's emails. Cooper provided Hanley with an Apple MacBook laptop from
the Clinton Foundation – the family organisation currently
embroiled in controversy – and talked her through the process of transferring emails from Clinton's private server to the laptop
and a thumb drive.
"Hanley completed this task from her personal residence," the notes record. The devices were intended to be stored at Clinton's
homes in New York and Washington. However, Hanley "forgot" to provide the archive laptop and thumb drive to Clinton's staff.
In early 2014, Hanley located the laptop at her home and tried to transfer the email archive to an IT company, apparently without
success. It appears the emails were then transferred to an unnamed person's personal Gmail account and there were problems around
Apple software not being compatible with that of Microsoft.
The unnamed person "told the FBI that, after the transfer was complete, he deleted the emails from the archive laptop but did
not wipe the laptop. The laptop was then put in the mail, only to go missing. [Redacted] told the FBI that she never received the
laptop from [redacted]; however, she advised that Clinton's staff was moving offices at the time, and it would have been easy for
the package to get lost during the transition period.
"Neither Hanley nor [redacted] could identify the current whereabouts of the archive laptop or thumb drive containing the archive,
and the FBI does not have either item in its possession."
... ... ...
The FBI identified a total of 13 mobile devices associated with Clinton's two known phone numbers that potentially were used to
send emails using clintonemail.com addresses.
The 58 pages of notes released on Friday, several of which were redacted, also related that Hanley often purchased replacement
BlackBerry devices for Clinton during Clinton's time at the state department. Hanley recalled buying most of them at AT&T stores
in the Washington area. Cooper was usually responsible for setting them up and synching them to the server.
Clinton's closest aide, Huma Abedin, and Hanley "indicated the whereabouts of Clinton's devices would frequently become unknown
once she transitioned to a new device", the documents state. "Cooper did recall two instances where he destroyed Clinton's old mobile
devices by breaking them in half or hitting them with a hammer."
The notes also contain a string of admissions by Clinton about points she did not know or could not recall: "When asked about
the email chain containing '(C)' portion markings that state determined to currently contain CONFIDENTIAL information, Clinton stated
that she did not know what the '(C)' meant at the beginning of the paragraphs and speculated it was referencing paragraphs marked
in alphabetical order."
Clinton said she did not pay attention to the difference between top secret, secret and confidential but "took all classified
information seriously". She did not recall receiving any emails she thought should not have been on an unclassified system. She also
stated she received no particular guidance as to how she should use the president's email address.
In addition, the notes say: "Clinton could not recall when she first received her security clearance and if she carried it with
her to state via reciprocity from her time in the Senate. Clinton could not recall any briefing or training by state related to the
retention of federal records or handling of classified information."
Clinton was aware she was an original classification authority at the state department, but again "could not recall how often
she used this authority or any training or guidance provided by state. Clinton could not give an example of how classification of
a document was determined."
... ... ...
The House speaker, Paul Ryan, said: "These documents demonstrate Hillary Clinton's reckless and downright dangerous handling of
classified information during her tenure as secretary of state. They also cast further doubt on the justice department's decision
to avoid prosecuting what is a clear violation of the law. This is exactly why I have called for her to be denied access to classified
information."
Reince Priebus, chair of the Republican National Committee, said: "The FBI's summary of their interview with Hillary Clinton is
a devastating indictment of her judgment, honesty and basic competency. Clinton's answers either show she is completely incompetent
or blatantly lied to the FBI or the public.
"Either way it's clear that, through her own actions, she has disqualified herself from the presidency."
The Clinton campaign insisted that it was pleased the notes had been made public. Spokesman Brian Fallon said: "While her use
of a single email account was clearly a mistake and she has taken responsibility for it, these materials make clear why the justice
department believed there was no basis to move forward with this case."
Terrence James 3h ago
This is the equivalent of the dog ate my homework. This woman could not utter an honest sentence if her life depended on it.
She is a corrupt and evil person, I cannot stand Trump but I think I hate her more. Trump is just crazy and cannot help himself
but she is calculatingly evil. We are doomed either way, but he would be more darkly entertaining.
Smallworld5 3h ago
Has any of Clinton's state department employees purposely built their own server in their basement on which to conduct official
government business, in gross violation of department policy, protocols, and regulations, they would have been summarily fired
at a minimum and, yes, quite possibly prosecuted. That's a fact.
The issue at hand is why Clinton sycophants are so agreeable to the Clinton Double Standard.
The presumptive next president of the U.S. being held to a lower standard than the average U.S. civil servant. Sickening.
Laurence Johnson 8h ago
Hillary's use of gender has no place in politics. When it comes to the top job, the people need the best person for the job,
not someone who is given a GO because they represent a group that are encouraged to feel discriminated against.
foggy2 9h ago
For the FBI's (or Comey's) this is also a devastating indictment of their or his judgment, honesty and basic competency.
YANKSOPINION 10h ago
Perhaps she has early onset of Alzheimers and should not be considered for the job of POTUS. Or maybe she is just a liar.
AlexLeo 10h ago
It is painfully clear that she traded access and favors for money and reciprocal favors. It is painfully clear that she
made little distinction between working for the State Department, the Clinton foundation and her family and tried to keep the
records of what was going on inaccessible. The more honest defense would be, all politicians do it, and you have to suck it up
because Trump is worse. Which is true. But trying to downplay this and explain it away is offensive, not all of the public are
complete idiots.
KaleidoscopeWars
Actually, after you get over all of the baffooning around Trump has done, he actually would make an ideal president. He loves
his country, he delegates jobs well to people who show the best results, he's good at building stuff and he wants to do a good
job. I'm sure after he purges the terribly corrupted system that he'll be given, he'll have the very best advisors around him
to make good decisions for the American people. I'm sure Theresa May and her cabinet will be quick to welcome him and re-solidify
the relationship that has affected British politics so much in the past decade. Boris Johnson is perfect for our relations with
America under a Trump administration. Shame on you Barack and Hillary. Hopefully Trump will say ''I came, I saw, they died!''
Ullu001 12h ago
Ah, The Clintons. They have done it all: destruction of evidence, witness tampering, fraud, lying under oath, murder, witness
disappearance. Did I leave anything? Yet, they go unpunished. Too clever, I guess too clever for their own good!
samwoods77 12h ago
Hillary wants to be the most powerful person on earth yet claims she doesn't understand the classification system that even
the most most junior secretary can....deeply troubling.
Mistaron 13h ago
The 'masters' in the shadows are about to throw the harridan under the bus. Her brazen air of arrogance and entitlement
is about to fade as she comes to realise, that albeit Comey having been got at, he has still succeeded in striking a severe blow
against her, and in addition, at the not-so-tin-hat conspiracy of inappropriate, and increasingly overt, institutional support.
All this in the face of documented lies, in your face hypocrisy, and unbridled corruption, oozing from every orifice of
a maverick administration.
The seeds have been planted for a defense of diminished responsibility. Don't fall for it! Hillary, (and her illustrious spouse),
deserve not a smidgen of pity.
''We came, we saw, he died'', she enthusiastically and unempathically cackled.
Just about sums her up.
wtfbollos 14h ago
hiliary clinton beheaded libya and created a hell on earth. here is the proof:
Again, total misunderstanding about what is going on. Clinton is the one waging war in the middle east. She is the one
being bullish and provocative with Russia. Trump has only been conciliatory with these issues, he has been against the war on
Iraq. So far all evidences point to the fact that the Clintons want another big war and all evidence points to the fact that
Trump wants co operation. This has totally escape your analysis. It is a choice between the Plague and the Cholera, I agree, but
FGS try to be a little less biased.
ungruntled 15h ago
The best case for HC looks pretty grim.
She has no recollection of......??
Laptops and Thumb drives laying about unattended
Total lack of understanding about even the most basic of Data Securit arrangements
All of these things giver her the benefit of the doubt....That she wasnt a liar and a corrupted politician manipulating events
and people to suit her own ends.
So, with the benefit of the doubt given, ask yourself if this level of incompetance and unreliabilty makes a suitable candidate
for office?
In both cases, with and without BOTD, she shouldnt be allowed anywhere near the corridors of power, let alone the White House.
IAtheist 17h ago
Mrs Clinton is deeply divisive. Bought out since her husbands presidency by vested interests in Wall Street and the HMO's (private
healthcare insurance management businesses) and having shown lamentable judgement, Benghazi, private Email server used for classified
documents and material.
She has failed to motivate the Democrats white and blue collar working voters male and female. These are the voting demographic
who have turned to Trump is significant numbers as he does address their concerns, iniquitous tax rules meaning multi millionaires
pay less tax on capital gains and share dividends than employees do on their basic wages, immigration and high levels of drug
and gun crime in working class communities Black, White and Hispanic, funding illegal immigrants and failed American youth living
on a black economy in the absence of affordable healthcare or a basic welfare system.
Trump may very well win and is likely to be better for the US than Hilary Clinton.
digamey 18h ago
I sympathize with the American electorate - they have to choose between the Devil and the deep blue sea. Given their situation,
however, I would definitely choose the Devil I know over the Devil I don't! And that Devil is - - - ?
MoneyCircus -> digamey 10h ago
That willful ignorance is your choice! A public businessman can be examined more closely than most.
Besides, there is a long history of "placemen" presidents whose performance is determined by those they appoint to do the work.
Just look in the White House right now.
As for the Clinton record (they come, incontrovertibly, as a package) from Mena, Arkansas, to her husband's deregulation of
the banks which heralded the financial crash that devastated millions of lives... the same banks that are currently HRC's most
enthusiastic funders... is something that any genuine Democrat should not be able to stomach...
ID9761679 19h ago
My feeling is that she had more to worry about than the location of a thumb drive (I can't recall how many of those I've lost)
or even a laptop. When a Secretary of State moves around, I doubt that look after their own appliances. Has anyone asked her where
the fan is?
Karega ID9761679 18h ago
Problem is she handled top secret and classified information which would endanger her country's security and strategic interests.
She was then US Secretary of State. That is why how she handled her thumb drive, laptop nd desktops matter. And there lies the
difference between your numerous lost thumb drives and hers. I thought this was obvious?
EightEyedSpy 23h ago
HRC is still likely to be the next President, but this scandal does have legs. She put herself in a corner by claiming
lack of recall due to a medical condition (i.e., the concussion). This leaves two possibilities, neither of which is helpful to
her cause, to wit: either she was being dishonest or she was (and could still be) cognitively impaired.
1iJack -> EightEyedSpy 22h ago
either she was being dishonest or she was (and could still be) cognitively impaired.
Its entirely possible its both.
Dick York 24h ago
California survived Arnold Schwarzenegger, the U.S. survived Ronald Reagan, Minnesota survived Jesse "The Body" Ventura and
I believe that we will survive Donald Trump. He's only one more celebrity on the road.
providenciales -> Dick York 23h ago
You forgot Al Franken.
antipodes -> Dick York 21h ago
Reagan was certainly not someone I admired but at least he tried to reduce the chance of nuclear war. Clinton is an out
and out Hawke with the blood of many innocent people on her hands in both Syria and Libya. She is hiding her communications because
she does not want to be exposed for the role she played in The destruction of Libya and the gun running of weapons to terrorists
in Syria. That is to Al Qaeda and ISIS. World War 3 is more likely under Clinton than any other world leader. Even Trump.
The Democrats must disendorse her because the details of her criminality are now becoming available and unless she can stop it
Trump will win. Get rid of her Democrats and bring back Bernie Sanders.
Sam3456 1d ago
We cannot afford a lying, neo-liberal who is more than willing to make her role in government a for profit endeavor.
Four years of anyone else is preferable to someone who is more than willing for the right contribution to her foundation, sell
out the American worker and middle class.
MakeBeerNotWar 1d ago
I'm more interested $250k a pop speeches HRC gave to the unindicted Wall St bankster felon scum who nearly took down their
country and the global economy yet received a taxpayer bailout and their bonuses paid for being greedy incompetent crooks. How
soon we forget....
Its seems there is just one scandal after another with this women but she seems to be bullet proof mainly because the msm media
will not go after her for reasons best known to themselves this is causing them to lose credibility and readers who are deserting
them for alternative media .
bashh1 1d ago
Finally today in an article in The NY Times we learn where Clinton has been for a good part of the summer. In the Hamptons
and elsewhere at receptions for celebrities and her biggest donors like Calvin Klein and Harvey Weinstein, raking in the millions
for her campaign. Trump on the other hand has appeared in towns in Pennsylvania like Scranton, Erie and Altoona where job are
disappearing and times can be tough. Coronations cost money I guess.
chiefwiley -> bashh1 1d ago
She is doing what she does best --- raise money.
ksenak 1d ago
Not forgetting that she was key in making sure the US didn't side with Assad. Had the US done at the beginning, instead
of being at the behest of the Saudis and the petrodollar, then the whole thing would have been over in 6 months and IS would never
have got more than a dusty district of northern Iraq.
ksenak 1d ago
Hillary is humiliated woman. Humiliated to the core by her cheating hubby she would rather kill than let him go. She is paying
her evil revenge to the whole world. As a president of USA Hillary Clinton would destabilise the world and lead it to conflicts
that threaten to be very heavy.
As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was part of the "Arab Spring" (also part of the "Jasmine Revolution), which overthrew
leaders such as Gaddafi to Mubarak. Before Gaddafi was overthrown he told the US that without him IS will take over Libya. They
did.
-Benghazi Scandal which ended up killing a US Ambassador Christopher Stevens and other Americans.
The Arab Spring destabilized the Middle East, contributed to the Syrian civil war, the rise of ISIS and the exodus of Middle Eastern
Muslims.
Sam3456 OXIOXI20 1d ago
Meh. Obama characterized ISIS as the "JV Team" and refused to acknowledge the threat. I assume he was acting on information
provided by his Secretary of State, Clinton.
Michael109 1d ago
It's quite possible that Clinton, because she had a fall in 2012 and bonked her head, believes she is telling the truth when
she is lying, except that it is not lying when you believe you are telling the truth even though you are lying.
She said she did not recall 30 times in her interviews with the FBI. She could be suffering from some sort of early degeneration
disease. Either way, between her health and the lying and corruption she should be withdrawn as the Dem frontrunner.
1iJack -> LakumbaDaGreat 1d ago
She's going to blow it.
I think she already did. Its like all the shit in her life is coming back on her at once.
Early on, when it was announced she would run again, I remember one Democrat pundit in particular that didn't think she could
survive the existence of the Internet in the general election (I can't remember who it was, though). But it has turned out to
be a pretty astute prediction.
When asked what he meant by that remark, he went on to say "the staying power of the Internet will overwhelm Clinton with her
dirty laundry once she gets to the general election. The Clintons were made for the 24 hour news cycles of the past and not the
permanent unmanaged exposure of the digital world. Everything is new again on the internet. Its Groundhog Day forever on the Internet."
That's my best paraphrase of his thoughts. He felt Clinton was the last of the "old school" politicians bringing too much baggage
to an election. That with digital "bread crumbs" of some kind or another (email, microphones and cameras in phones, etc) the new
generation of politicians will be a cleaner lot, not through virtue, but out of necessity.
I've often thought back to his remarks while watching Hillary head into the general.
ImperialAhmed 1d ago
So the applicant to the US presidency does not know what (c) stands for in her emails, archives high security data on a
laptop and then losses it for years, uploads same emails on Google's gmail account and then losses devices again.
She does not recall many things, not even the training she received on handling the confidential and secure communication.
She couldn't recall the procces of drone strikes. (Will she be killing people at a whim, without an accountable protocol?)
She is either demented or dangerously reckless or lying. All of these conditions disbar her form her candidacy.
AudieTer 1d ago
If she could only manage a couple of hours a day because of concussion and a blood clot she should have temporarily stood
down until she recovered fully, and had a senior official take over her duties until she was well. You can't have a brain-damaged
person in charge of the US's affairs - even though there is a long history of nutters the State Dept. ( ie the Military Industrial
Complex HQ). And in the White House for that matter ...Nurse -- nurse -- Dubya needs his meds!
thedingo8 -> Lenthelurker 1d ago
the clinton foundation does not pay taxes..and dont forget that slick willie has been on the paedophile plane more times
than the pilot
Littlefella 1d ago
She destroyed devices and emails after they were told that all evidence had to be preserved. There are then two issues and
the FBI and DOJ have not taken any action on either.
It's no longer just about the emails, it's the corruption.
DaveG123 1d ago
Clinton's closest aide, Huma Abedin, and Hanley "indicated the whereabouts of Clinton's devices would frequently become unknown
once she transitioned to a new device"
-------------
Probably in the hands of a foreign government. Pretty careless behaviour. Incompetent. Part of a pattern of incompetance that
includes bad foreign policy decisions (Libya) and disrespect for rules surrounding conflict of interest (Clinton Foundation).
YANKSOPINION -> HansB09 1d ago
She failed to keep up with recordkeeping she agreed to, then when asked to turn over records, somebody destroyed them,
but Clinton did not order destruction, or does not remember having done so. Turned over all records-oops I thought WE did! She
either lied or has alzheimers
Andy White 1d ago
In addition, the notes say:
"Clinton could not recall when she first received her security clearance and if she carried it with her to state via reciprocity
from her time in the Senate. Clinton could not recall any briefing or training by state related to the retention of federal
records or handling of classified information."
Clinton was aware she was an original classification authority at the state department, but again "could not recall how often
she used this authority or any training or guidance provided by state. Clinton could not give an example of how classification
of a document was determined." ...................secretary of state and could not recall basic security protocols???
....and people complain about trump....this basic security was mentioned in the bloody west wing series for god's sake.....in
comparison even trump is a f'ing genius.......love him or hate him trump has to win over clinton,there is something very,very
wrong with her....she should NEVER be in charge of a till at asda......and she is a clinton so we all know a very practised liar
but this beggers belief,i can see why trump is angry if that was him he would have been publicly burnt at the stake.....this clinton
crap just stink's of the political elite....a total joke cover up and a terrible obvious one to....clinton is just a liar and
mentally i think she is very unstable....makes the DON look like hawking lol.....
namora 1d ago
Political baggage is a bitch. If this election cycle has demonstrated anything it is that the leadership of both parties
is totally out of touch with the voters and really has no interest except supporting the Neoliberal tenet of fiscal nonintervention.
This laissez-faire attitude toward corporate interests is paralysing the American government.
duncandunnit 1d ago
I cannot believe Clinton has got this far in the election, I believe Obama wants her in to hide many of his embarrassing
warmongering mistakes.
fedback 1d ago
Today of all days Hillary Clinton puts out a tweet with the following: 'America needs leadership in the White House, not
a liability' -- As we have to assume she's not referring to herself it confirms people's suspicion that the person who writes
Hillary's tweets is a hostile to her campaign. The tweets are often completely off the mark.
Hercolubus 1d ago
Either Comey is on their payroll, or they have threatened his family. Either way it is business as usual. The NWO decided
a long time ago that Hillary was their next puppet PONTUS.
BG Davis 2d ago
Clinton has always been a devious weasel, but this reveals a new low. I was a low-level officer at US Embassies and Consulates
in various foreign countries. Clinton's claim that she didn't know what (C) was, or that she "she did not pay attention to the
difference between top secret, secret and confidential" and "could not recall any briefing or training by state related to the
retention of federal records or handling of classified information." Are beyond ridiculous. Any fool knows enough to be aware
of different levels of classified info, and the obvious fact that you don't get sloppy with classified info.
That said, over the past few years the entire handling of classified info has become beyond sloppy - laptops left in taxis,
General Petraeus was sharing classified info with his mistress, etc. I guess nowadays, to paraphrase Leona Helmsley's comment
about paying taxes, "security is for little people." So in that respect Hillary is no different from the rest of them.
Scaff1 2d ago
You'd better hope she's lying, because if the incompetence is genuine she shouldn't be allowed near any confidential information
ever again. I hate to admit it but Trump is right on this one. Jesus wept. I said it before: Clinton is the only candidate
who could possibly make a tyrant like Trump electable.
charlieblue -> gizadog 2d ago
Where are you getting "looses 13 devices"? (Try loses, nobody is accusing Sec.Clinton of making things loose) I actually read
the article, so my information might not be as exciting as yours, but this article states that from the 13 devices that had access
to the Clinton server, two (a laptop and a thumb drive) used by one of her aids, are missing. This article doesn't specify whether
any "classified" information was on either of them. The FBI doesn't know, because, well... they are missing.
What the fuck is it with you people and your loose relationship with actual facts? Do you realize that just making shit up
undermines whatever point you imagine you are trying to make?
gizadog 2d ago
Also: Clinton told FBI she thought classified markings were alphabetical paragraphs
"When asked what the parenthetical 'C' meant before a paragraph ... Clinton stated she did not know and could only speculate
it was referencing paragraphs marked in alphabetical order," the FBI wrote in notes from its interview with her."
Wow...and there are people that want her to be president.
Casey13 2d ago
In my job as a government contractor we are extremely vigilant about not connecting removable devices to work computers, no
work email access outside of work, software algorithms that scan our work mails for any sensitive information, and regular required
training on information security. The fact that the Sec State could have an email server built at her home and operate with
such laughable gross negligence when it comes to national security is surreal and appalling. I could never vote for her and
neither could I vote for Trump.
MonotonousLanguor 2d ago
>>> A Clinton Foundation laptop and a thumb drive used to archive Hillary Clinton's emails from her time as secretary of state
are missing, according to FBI notes released on Friday.<<<
Oh golly gee, what a surprise. Should we offer a reward??? Maybe Amelia Earhart has the laptop and thumb drive. Were these
missing items taken by the Great Right Wing Conspiracy???
Dani Jenkins 2d ago
Wtf, from the sublime to the ridiculous, springs to mind..
Time to get a grip of the gravity involved, here at the Guardian.. This is a total whitewash of the absurd kind.. That leaves
people laughing in pure unadultered astonishment..
SHE lost not just a MacBook & thumb drive with such BS..
So Trump it is then , like many of us have stated ALL ALONG. Sanders was the only serious contender.. A complete mockery of
democracy & the so called Democrats have made the way for Trump to cruise all the way to the Whitewash House..
Well done Debbie , did the Don pay you?
chiefwiley -> Lenthelurker 2d ago
Because the revelations are essentially contradicting all of Hillary's defenses regarding her handling of highly classified
information. None of the requirements of the State Department mattered to her or her personal staff. It won't go away --- it will
get worse as information trickles out.
Casey13 2d ago
Being President of the USA used to be about communicating a vision and inspiring Americans to get behind that dream . Think
Lincoln abolishing slavery or JFK setting a goal to put man on the moon. Hillary is boring,has no charisma,and no vision for her
Presidency beyond using corruption and intimidation to secure greater power for her and her cronies . Nobody wants to listen to
her speeches because she is boring, uninspiring, and has no wit beyond tired cliches. Trump has a vision but that vision is a
nightmare for many Americans.
imperfetto 2d ago
Clinton is a dangerous warmonger. She is a danger to us Europeans, as she might drag us into a conflict with Russia. We must
get rid of her, politically, and re-educate the Americas to respect other nations, and give up exporting their corrupting values.
"After reading these documents, I really don't understand how she was able to get away from prosecution."
If the FBI were not themselves co-conspirators and hopelessly corrupt, they would indict some of the lower level actors
and offer them immunity. They could start with the imbecile who put that laptop in the mail and couldn't remember if it was UPS
or USPS. Or did he actually send it to the Ecuadorian embassy in the UK by accident?
1iJack 2d ago
"The job of the media historically, in terms of the First Amendment – what I call the unspoken compact in the First Amendment
– is that the free press, without restraint, without checks and balances, is there in order to protect the people from power.
Its job is to be a check on government, and those who rule the country, and not to be their lapdogs, and their support system.
That's what we're seeing in this election.
There is an argument to make that the major news media in this country, the mainstream media, is essentially serving against
the people's interest. They have made themselves an open ally of protecting a political order that the American people are
rejecting, by three quarters or more of the American people. That makes them a legitimate issue, in a sense they never have
been before, if Trump takes advantage of it."
Pat Caddell, 2 Sept 2016
Caddell has voiced an interesting concern that others are beginning to share: that the news media has crawled so far in
bed with Hillary Clinton they won't be able to get back out. That the news media in America has lost its soul. Even Jake Tapper
started asking this question several weeks ago in the middle of his own show.
Will the American press ever have credibility with Americans again? Even Democrats see it and will remember this the next time
the press turns against them. There was a new and overt power grab in this election that is still being processed by the American
people: the American press "saving" America from Donald Trump. They may never recover from this.
It even scares my Democrat friends.
ConBrio 2d ago
"An unknown individual using the encrypted privacy tool Tor to hide their tracks accessed an email account on a Clinton family
server, the FBI revealed Friday.
"The incident appears to be the first confirmed intrusion into a piece of hardware associated with Hillary Clinton's private
email system, which originated with a server established for her husband, former President Bill Clinton.
The FBI disclosed the event in its newly released report on the former secretary of state's handling of classified information.
Clinton is a very dodgy character and cannot be trusted.
Boris Johnson, UK Foreign Secretary on Clinton: "She's got dyed blonde hair and pouty lips, and a steely blue stare, like a
sadistic nurse in a mental hospital"
CleanPool330 2d ago
The collective mind of the establishment is mentally ill and spinning out of control. In all rites they should be removed but
their arrogance, corruption and self-entitlement mean they are incapable of admitting guilt. They have corrupted the weak minds
of the majority and will take everybody down with them.
The pyramid scheme of created debt has destroyed capitalism and democracy within 40 years of full operation. Captured Govt
has bailed out incompetence and failure at every turn, and in so doing, inverted the yield curve and destroyed the future. It
is for this reason alone I cannot respect these financial paedophiles or support anything they do. In this contest for the White
House, Clinton is the manifestation of the establishment.
unusedusername 2d ago
If I understand this correctly a laptop and a flashdrive full of classified emails was put in a jiffy bag and stuck in the
post and now they're missing and this is, apparently, just one of those things? Amazing!
Blair Hess 2d ago
I'm in the military. Not a high rank mind you. It defies all common logic that HRC has never had a briefing, training, or just
side conversation about classified information handling when i have about 50 trainings a year on it and i barely handle it. Sheeple
wake up and stop drinking the kool aid
Ullu001 2d ago
The Clintons have always operated on the edge of the law: extremely clever and dangerous lawyers they are.
USADanny -> Ullu001
Hillary may be criminally clever but legally: not so much. You do know that she failed the Washington DC bar exam and all of
her legal "success" after that was a result of being very spouse of a powerful politician.
calderonparalapaz 2d ago
"The documents provided a number of new details about Mrs. Clinton's private server, including what appeared to be a frantic
effort by a computer specialist to delete an archive of her emails even after a congressional committee had requested they be
preserved." -NY Times
Virtually every American healthcare worker has to take annual HIPAA training, pass a multiple-choice test and signed a document
attesting that they have taken the training and are fully aware of the serious consequences of inadvertent and willful violations
of HIPAA. Oh the irony – HIPAA is a Clinton era law.
Hillary's treatment of top-secret US documents was willful and uncorrected. If she had done the same thing with medical
records, the individuals whose medical records had been mishandled could have filed charges and Hillary would have been personally
liable for up to $50,000 fine per incident.
Other than Hillary negligently handling top-secret documents, having a head injury that by her own admission has impaired her
memory and using her relationship with the Clinton foundation when she was Secretary of State to extort hundreds of millions of
dollars, she is an excellent candidate for the president.
oeparty 2d ago
Clinton is an absolute liability. Apart from this scandal she's a status quo candidate for a status quo that no longer
exists. She stands for neo-liberalism, US hegemony and capitalist globalization all of which are deader than the dodo. That makes
her very dangerous in terms of world peace and of course she will do absolutely nothing for the millions of Americans facing joblessness,
hunger, bankruptcy and homelessness except make things worse.
And yet, and yet, we must vote Clinton simply to Stop Trump. He is a proto-fascist determined to smash resistance to the 1%
in America and abroad via military means. He is a realist who realises capitalism is over and only the purest and most overwhelming
violence can save the super rich and the elites now. Certainly their economy gives them nothing any more. The American Dream is
toast. The Green Stein will simply draw a few votes from Clinton and give Trump the victory and it is not like she is a genuinely
progressive candidate herself being something of a Putin fan just like Trump. No, vote Clinton to Stop Trump but only so that
we can use the next four years to build the revolutionary socialist alternative. To build the future.
dongerdo 2d ago
The Americans are screwed anyways because both easily are the most despicable and awful front runners I can think of in any
election of a western democracy in decades (and that is quite an achievement in itself to be honest), the only thing left to hope
for is a winner not outright horrible for the rest of the world on which front Clinton loses big time: electing her equals pouring
gasoline over half the world, she is up for finishing the disastrous job in the Middle East and North Africa started by her as
Secretary of State. Her stance on relations with Russia and China are utterly horrific, listening to her makes even the die-hard
GOP neo-cons faction sound like peace corps ambassadors.
If the choice is between that and some isolationist dimwit busy with making America great again I truly hope for the latter.
Who would have thought that one day world peace would depend on the vote of the American redneck.....
Michael109 2d ago
Clinton's "dog ate my server", I can't (30 times) remember, didn't know what C meant on top of emails - why it means Coventry
City, M'amm - excuses are the Dems trying to stagger over the line, everyone holding their noses. But even if she is elected,
which is doubtful, this is not going away and she could be arrested as USA President.
The FBI will rue the day they did not recommend charges against her when they had the chance. She's make Tony Soprano look
like the Dalia Lama.
CleanPool330 2d ago
The entire corrupt establishment want Clinton at all cost, so that they can continue fleecing the future and enslaving
the entire world in created debt. All right minded individuals should this as a flashing red light to turn round and vote the
other way.
"You're living in poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs, 58% of your youth is unemployed.
What the hell do you have to lose" by voting for Trump? the candidate asked. "At the end of four
years, I guarantee I will get over 95% of the African American vote."
The statement – highly unlikely given how poorly Republicans fare among black voters – continues
a theme the GOP presidential nominee has pounded this week as he courted African American voters.
He said Democrats take black voters for granted and have ignored their needs while governing cities
with large African American populations.
"America must reject the bigotry of Hillary Clinton, who sees communities of color only as votes,
not as human beings worthy of a better future," he said of his Democratic opponent.
... ... ...
Trump argued that Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton's policies on issues such as
immigration and refugee resettlement harm African Americans.
=== quote ===
It has recently become commonplace to argue that globalization can leave people behind, and that
this can have severe political consequences. Since 23 June, this has even become conventional
wisdom. While I welcome this belated acceptance of the blindingly obvious, I can't but help feeling
a little frustrated, since this has been self-evident for many years now. What we are seeing,
in part, is what happens to conventional wisdom when, all of a sudden, it finds that it can no
longer dismiss as irrelevant something that had been staring it in the face for a long time.
=== end of quote ==
This is not about "conventional wisdom". This is about the power of neoliberal propaganda,
the power of brainwashing and indoctrination of population via MSM, schools and universities.
And "all of a sudden, it finds that it can no longer dismiss as irrelevant something that had
been staring it in the face for a long time." also has nothing to do with conventional wisdom.
This is about the crisis of neoliberal ideology and especially Trotskyism part of it (neoliberalism
can be viewed as Trotskyism for the rich). The following integral elements of this ideology no
longer work well and are starting to cause the backlash:
1. High level of inequality as the explicit, desirable goal (which raises the productivity).
"Greed is good" or "Trickle down economics" -- redistribution of wealth up will create (via higher
productivity) enough scrapes for the lower classes, lifting all boats.
2. "Neoliberal rationality" when everything is a commodity that should be traded at specific
market. Human beings also are viewed as market actors with every field of activity seen as a specialized
market. Every entity (public or private, person, business, state) should be governed as a firm.
"Neoliberalism construes even non-wealth generating spheres-such as learning, dating, or exercising-in
market terms, submits them to market metrics, and governs them with market techniques and practices."
People are just " human capital" who must constantly tend to their own present and future market
value.
3. Extreme financialization or converting the economy into "casino capitalism" (under neoliberalism
everything is a marketable good, that is traded on explicit or implicit exchanges.
4. The idea of the global, USA dominated neoliberal empire and related "Permanent war for permanent
peace" -- wars for enlarging global neoliberal empire via crushing non-compliant regimes either
via color revolutions or via open military intervention.
5. Downgrading ordinary people to the role of commodity and creating three classes of citizens
(moochers, or Untermensch, "creative class" and top 0.1%), with the upper class (0.1% or "Masters
of the Universe") being above the law like the top level of "nomenklatura" was in the USSR.
6. "Downsizing" sovereignty of nations via international treaties like TPP, and making transnational
corporations the key political players, "the deciders" as W aptly said. Who decide about level
of immigration flows, minimal wages, tariffs, and other matters that previously were prerogative
of the state.
So after 36 (or more) years of dominance (which started with triumphal march of neoliberalism
in early 90th) the ideology entered "zombie state". That does not make it less dangerous but its
power over minds of the population started to evaporate. Far right ideologies now are filling
the vacuum, as with the discreditation of socialist ideology and decimation of "enlightened corporatism"
of the New Deal in the USA there is no other viable alternatives.
The same happened in late 1960th with the Communist ideology. It took 20 years for the USSR
to crash after that with the resulting splash of nationalism (which was the force that blow up
the USSR) and far right ideologies.
It remains to be seen whether the neoliberal US elite will fare better then Soviet nomenklatura
as challenges facing the USA are now far greater then challenges which the USSR faced at the time.
Among them is oil depletion which might be the final nail into the coffin of neoliberalism and,
specifically, the neoliberal globalization.
At least three of Hillary Clinton's top aides – including one with ties to the Muslim
Brotherhood – used emails hosted on Clinton's private server while she was secretary of state,
according to several reports.
At a news conference Tuesday at the U.N., Clinton directly addressed media about the
revelation that she conducted her business as secretary of state using a private email account
instead of the secure and archived government system.
She
acknowledged she deleted thousands of personal emails and said she turned over hard copies of
messages to the State Department that she deemed to be work related.
But Clinton apparently wasn't the only one at the State Department using private email.
Weekly Standard senior writer Stephen Hayes told Fox News, "Two of Hillary Clinton's top
aides used personal email while they were employed at the State Department."
Hayes specifically named Clinton Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin, who served as
Clinton's longtime deputy chief of staff. Abedin and Clinton worked closely together for
nearly 20 years.
"The State Department has evidence of this," he said.
In another report, the gossip website Gawker claimed both Abedin and Phillippe Reines,
Clinton's communications strategist, used the private email addresses.
Abedin's emails would be of particular interest because she has known ties to the Muslim
Brotherhood – a group that's bent on "destroying Western civilization from within" – and other
Islamic supremacists.
Hayes said, "The question, I think becomes: Were they emailing with Hillary Clinton from
their personal email addresses to her personal email address about State Department business,
about Benghazi, including sensitive classified information?
"Those are questions that I think (Rep.) Trey Gowdy and the House Benghazi Committee is
going to want to look at very carefully."
Government watchdog Judicial Watch has filed a lawsuit against the State Department seeking
all emails from 2009 to 2013 between Clinton, Abedin and Nagla Mahmoud, wife of Muslim
Brotherhood leader Mohammed Morsi.
"Now we know why the State Department didn't want to respond to our specific request for
Hillary Clinton's and Huma Abedin's communications," Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said
in a statement. "The State Department violated FOIA law rather than admit that it couldn't and
wouldn't search the secret accounts that the agency has known about for years. This lawsuit
shows how the latest Obama administration cover-up isn't just about domestic politics but has
significant foreign policy implications."
Abedin and Clinton worked closely together for nearly 20 years.
As WND has
extensively reported
, the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic supremacist connections not only
extend to Abedin's mother and father, who are both deeply tied to al-Qaida fronts, but to
Abedin herself.
Major news media profiles of Abedin report she was born of Pakistani and Indian parents,
without delving much further into her family's history.
As
WND
reported
, a manifesto commissioned by the ruling Saudi Arabian monarchy places the work of
an institute that employed Abedin at the forefront of a grand plan to mobilize U.S. Muslim
minorities to transform America into a Saudi-style Islamic state, according to Arabic-language
researcher Walid Shoebat.
Abedin
was an assistant editor for a dozen years for the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs for the
Institute for Muslim Minority Affairs. The institute – founded by her late father and
currently directed by her mother – is backed by the Muslim World League, an Islamic
organization in the Saudi holy city of Mecca that was founded by Muslim Brotherhood leaders.
The 2002 Saudi manifesto shows that "Muslim Minority Affairs" – the mobilizing of Muslim
communities in the U.S. to spread Islam instead of assimilating into the population – is a key
strategy in an ongoing effort to establish Islamic rule in America and a global Shariah, or
Islamic law, "in our modern times."
WND reported
Abedin also was a member of the executive board of the Muslim Student Association, which was
identified as a Muslim Brotherhood front group in a 1991 document introduced into evidence
during the terror-financing trial of the Texas-based Holy Land Foundation.
At
her father's Saudi-financed Islamic think tank,
WND
reported
, Abedin worked alongside Abdullah Omar Naseef, who is accused of financing
al-Qaida fronts.
Naseef is deeply connected to the Abedin family.
WND was first to report
Huma's mother,
Saleha Abedin, was the official representative of Naseef's terror-stained Muslim World League
in the 1990s.
Shoebat previously reported that as one of 63 leaders of the Muslim Sisterhood, the de
facto female version of the Muslim Brotherhood, Saleha Abedin served alongside Nagla Ali
Mahmoud, the wife of Muslim Brotherhood figure Mohammed Morsi, Egypt's now ousted president.
Saleha Abedin and Morsi's wife both were members of the Sisterhood's Guidance Bureau,
Shoebat found
.
Huma worked with al-Qaida front man
Abdullah Omar Naseef is secretary-general of the Muslim World League, an Islamic charity
known to have spawned terrorist groups, including one declared by the U.S. government to be an
official al-Qaida front.
The institute founded by Huma Abedin's father reportedly was a quiet, but active, supporter
of Naseef.
The institute bills itself as "the only scholarly institution dedicated to the systematic
study of Muslim communities in non-Muslim societies around the world."
Huma
served on the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs's editorial board from 2002 to 2008.
Documents obtained by Shoebat revealed that Naseef served on the board with Huma from at
least December 2002 to December 2003.
Naseef's sudden departure from the board in December 2003 coincides with the time at which
various charities led by Naseef's Muslim World League were declared illegal terrorism fronts
worldwide, including by the U.S. and U.N.
The MWL, founded in Mecca in 1962, bills itself as one of the largest Islamic
non-governmental organizations.
But according to U.S. government documents and testimony from the charity's own officials,
it is heavily financed by the Saudi government.
The MWL has been accused of terrorist ties, as have its various offshoots, including the
International Islamic Relief Organization, or IIRO, and Al Haramain, which was declared by the
U.S. and U.N. as a terror financing front.
Indeed, the Treasury Department, in a September 2004 press release, alleged Al Haramain had
"direct links" with Osama bin Laden. The group is now banned worldwide by U.N. Security
Council Committee resolution 1267.
There long have been accusations that the IIRO and MWL also repeatedly funded al-Qaida.
In 1993, bin Laden reportedly told an associate that the MWL was one of his three most
important charity fronts.
An Anti-Defamation League profile of the MWL accuses the group of promulgating a
"fundamentalist interpretation of Islam around the world through a large network of charities
and affiliated organizations."
"Its ideological backbone is based on an extremist interpretation of Islam," the profile
states, "and several of its affiliated groups and individuals have been linked to
terror-related activity."
In
2003, U.S. News and World Report documented that accompanying the MWL's donations, invariably,
are "a blizzard of Wahhabist literature."
"Critics argue that Wahhabism's more extreme preachings – mistrust of infidels, branding of
rival sects as apostates and emphasis on violent jihad –laid the groundwork for terrorist
groups around the world," the report continued.
An Egyptian-American cab driver, Ihab Mohamed Ali Nawawi, was arrested in Florida in 1990
on accusations he was an al-Qaida sleeper agent and a former personal pilot to bin Laden. At
the time he was accused of serving bin Laden, he also reportedly worked for the Pakistani
branch of the MWL.
The MWL in 1988 founded the Al Haramain Islamic Foundation, developing chapters in about 50
countries, including for a time in Oregon until it was designated a terrorist organization.
In
the early 1990s, evidence began to grow that the foundation was funding Islamist militants in
Somalia and Bosnia, and a 1996 CIA report detailed its Bosnian militant ties.
The U.S. Treasury designated Al Haramain's offices in Kenya and Tanzania as sponsors of
terrorism for their role in planning and funding the 1998 bombings of two American embassies
in East Africa. The Comoros Islands office was also designated because it "was used as a
staging area and exfiltration route for the perpetrators of the 1998 bombings."
The New York Times reported in 2003 that Al Haramain had provided funds to the Indonesian
terrorist group Jemaah Islamiyah, which was responsible for the 2002 Bali bombings that killed
202 people. The Indonesia office was later designated a terrorist entity by the Treasury.
In February 2004, the U.S. Treasury Department froze all Al Haramain's financial assets
pending an investigation, leading the Saudi government to disband the charity and fold it into
another group, the Saudi National Commission for Relief and Charity Work Abroad.
In September 2004, the U.S. designated Al-Haramain a terrorist organization.
In June 2008, the Treasury Department applied the terrorist designation to the entire
Al-Haramain organization worldwide
Bin Laden's brother-in-law
In August 2006, the Treasury Department also designated the Philippine and Indonesian
branch offices of the MWL-founded IIRO as terrorist entities "for facilitating fundraising for
al-Qaida and affiliated terrorist groups."
The Treasury Department added: "Abd Al Hamid Sulaiman Al-Mujil, a high-ranking IIRO
official [executive director of its Eastern Province Branch] in Saudi Arabia, has used his
position to bankroll the al-Qaida network in Southeast Asia. Al-Mujil has a long record of
supporting Islamic militant groups, and he has maintained a cell of regular financial donors
in the Middle East who support extremist causes."
In the 1980s, Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, Osama bin Laden's brother-in-law, ran the Philippines
offices of the IIRO. Khalifa has been linked to Manila-based plots to target the pope and U.S.
airlines.
The IIRO has also been accused of funding Hamas, Algerian radicals, Afghanistan militant
bases and the Egyptian terror group Al-Gamaa al-Islamiyya.
The New York Post reported the families of the 9/11 victims filed a lawsuit against IIRO
and other Muslim organizations for having "played key roles in laundering of funds to the
terrorists in the 1998 African embassy bombings" and for having been involved in the
"financing and 'aiding and abetting' of terrorists in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing."
'Saudi government front'
In a court case in Canada, Arafat El-Asahi, the Canadian director of both the IIRO and the
MWL, admitted the charities are near entities of the Saudi government.
Stated El-Asahi: "The Muslim World League, which is the mother of IIRO, is a fully
government-funded organization. In other words, I work for the government of Saudi Arabia. I
am an employee of that government.
"Second, the IIRO is the relief branch of that organization, which means that we are
controlled in all our activities and plans by the government of Saudi Arabia. Keep that in
mind, please," he said.
Despite its offshoots being implicated in terror financing, the U.S. government never
designated the MWL itself as a terror-financing charity. Many have speculated the U.S. has
been trying to not embarrass the Saudi government.
Saleha Abedin has been quoted in numerous press accounts as both representing the MWL and
serving as a delegate for the charity.
In 1995, for example, the Washington Times reported on a United Nations-arranged women's
conference in Beijing that called on governments throughout the world to give women
statistical equality with men in the workplace.
The report quoted Saleha Abedin, who attended the conference as a delegate, as "also
representing the Muslim World League based in Saudi Arabia and the Muslim NGO Caucus."
The U.N.'s website references a report in the run-up to the Beijing conference that also
lists Abedin as representing the MWL at the event.
The website posted an article from the now defunct United States Information Agency quoting
Abedin and reporting she attended the Beijing conference as "a delegate of the Muslim World
League and member of the Muslim Women's NGO caucus."
In the article, Abedin was listed under a shorter name, "Dr. Saleha Mahmoud, director of
the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs."
WND confirmed the individual listed is Huma Abedin's mother. The reports misspelled part of
Abedin's name. Her full professional name is at times listed as Saleha Mahmood Abedin S.
Saleha Mahmood formerly directed the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs in the U.K. and
served as a delegate for the Muslim World League, an Islamic fundamentalist group Osama bin
Laden reportedly told an associate was one of his most important charity fronts.
In February 2010, Clinton spoke at Dar Al-Hekma College in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where
Abedin was an associate professor of sociology at the time.
Clinton, after she was introduced by Abedin, praised the work of the terror-tied professor.
"I have to say a special word about Dr. Saleha Abedin," Clinton said. "You heard her
present the very exciting partnerships that have been pioneered between colleges and
universities in the United States and this college. And it is pioneering work to create these
kinds of relationships.
"But I have to confess something that Dr. Abedin did not," Clinton continued, "and that is
that I have almost a familial bond with this college. Dr. Abedin's daughter, one of her three
daughters, is my deputy chief of staff, Huma Abedin, who started to work for me when she was a
student at George Washington University in Washington, D.C."
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2015/03/muslim-brotherhood-princess-used-clinton-email-server/#jU3DUhHxWVbOpRBH.99
"... As part of the murder process of Muammar Gaddafi, he was sodomized with a bayonet. Out of respect for any children reading this blog, I'm not going to spell that out any further. What was Hillary's RECORDED reaction? ..."
"... "We came, we saw, he died," followed by a laugh and gleeful hand clap. ..."
"... Finally, using Richard Cohen as an source for anything is beyond the pale. This shill for Israel was all-in for the destruction of Iraq. He was a big fan of the destruction of Libya. He's a huge booster for the destruction of Syria. And he most definitely wants somebody in the White House who will finish off Iran. That person is Hillary Clinton. ..."
As part of the murder process of Muammar Gaddafi, he was sodomized with a
bayonet. Out of respect for any children reading this blog, I'm not going to
spell that out any further. What was Hillary's RECORDED reaction?
"We came, we saw, he died," followed by a laugh and gleeful hand clap.
Under my definiton of "sociopath", Hillary Clinton qualifies on that one
alone. Of course there are others….
*** My father, too, turned bribes into gifts. ***
I know some saintly people myself, and have no difficulty accepting this
claim at face value. Stretching the analogy to the Clinton Foundation is, in
my opinion, a stretch too far. If Hillary was as pure as the driven snow, why
did she work so hard to ensure her communications were beyond the reach of the
Freedom Of Information Act? Why has the State department refused to release
her meeting schedules until after the election?
Finally, using Richard Cohen as an source for anything is beyond the pale.
This shill for Israel was all-in for the destruction of Iraq. He was a big fan
of the destruction of Libya. He's a huge booster for the destruction of Syria.
And he most definitely wants somebody in the White House who will finish off
Iran. That person is Hillary Clinton.
"... Bernie disgraced himself and drove a dagger through the heart of youth involvement in the democratic process. Millions of kids believd in him. He's is even more repellent that Clinton. Faced with evidence that the DNC had rigged the nomination process in favour of Clinton, what did he do? He backed her. Beyond shame. ..."
Bernie sold out. If not that, then he was simply in it as faux opposition
from the start. Having unified the militant and disgruntled outliers, he
then readily doffed his cap and sheperded his gullible followers towards
the only practical Democratic alternative available.
Wasted effort. The 'masters' in the shadows are about to throw the harridan
under the bus. Her brazen air of arrogance and entitlement is about to fade
as she comes to realise, that albeit Comey having been got at, he's still
succeeded in striking a severe blow against her, and also at the not-so-tin-hat
conspiracy of inappropriate, and increasingly overt, institutional support,
in the face of documented lies, in your face hypocrisy, and corruption oozing
from every orifice of a maverick administration.
The seeds have been planted for a defense of diminished responsibility.
Don't fall for it! Hillary, (and her illustrious spouse), deserve not a
smidgen of pity.
''We came, we saw, he died'', she enthusiastically and unempathically
cackled.
Just about sums it up
Michael109 fflambeau 2d ago
Bernie disgraced himself and drove a dagger through the heart of
youth involvement in the democratic process. Millions of kids believd in
him. He's is even more repellent that Clinton. Faced with evidence that
the DNC had rigged the nomination process in favour of Clinton, what did
he do? He backed her. Beyond shame.
"... This who Hillary Clinton is. It's all about money and access. You know I'm not a Trump supporter, but I absolutely can see why people would vote for him to throw a rock through these people's collective window. ..."
What do Cher, Leonardo DiCaprio, Magic Johnson and Jimmy Buffett all
have in common? They're with her.
Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine, buoyed by rising poll numbers and a sputtering
Donald Trump campaign, are using August to raise tens of millions of dollars
in cash before the fall sprint.
Clinton will embark on a three-day, eight-fundraiser trip to California
next week, headlining a mix of star studded events with tech icons, athletes
and movie stars.
On Monday, August 22, Clinton will headline a top dollar fundraiser at
the Beverly Hills home of Cheryl and Haim Saban, the billionaire owner of
Univision and one of Clinton's wealthiest backers.
Clinton and her aides will then head down the street to another fundraiser
at the Beverly Hills home of Hall of Fame basketball player and businessman
Magic Johnson. That event, which according to Clinton donors in California
is expected to raise millions of dollars, will also be hosted by Willow
Bay and Bob Iger, the CEO of The Walt Disney Company, and Marilyn and Jeffrey
Katzenberg, the CEO of DreamWorks Animation.
The next day, Clinton will headline two events in Laguna Beach, including
a $33,400-per-person event hosted by Stephen Cloobeck, the CEO of Diamond
Resorts.
Later in the day, according to invites obtained by CNN, Clinton will
headline a fundraiser at the home of Leonardo DiCaprio, the Oscar-winning
actor known for his roles in Titanic, The Revenant and The Wolf of Wall
Street.
Scooter Braun, the agent that discovered Justin Beiber, and Tobey Maguire,
the actor known for his roles in the Spider-Man series, will also host the
star-studded event.
Sounds like fun for those celebrities and rich people, flooding the Democratic
Party nominee's coffers with campaign cash. Meanwhile, here in flood-ravaged
Louisiana, preliminary estimates claim that as many as 110,000 people lost their
homes (or at least suffered enormous damage to them),
suffering nearly $21 billion in losses.
Obama golfs with celebrities, Hillary parties with them and takes their cash.
This should not be forgotten. These are the oligarchs who rule us. It's despicable.
Do not believe for one second that there's any reason why Hillary Clinton cannot
get here. Donald Trump got here, spent a few hours, then left. So could she,
if she wanted to. But she would di$appoint her donor$.
This who Hillary Clinton is. It's all about money and access. You know
I'm not a Trump supporter, but I absolutely can see why people would vote for
him to throw a rock through these people's collective window.
You might want to study up. (Actually, that could be said to you on many,
many issues.) Perjury is lying on a point that is "material" to the case.
The judge in the Paula Jones lawsuit ruled that Bill's relationship with
Monica was not material to it, hence, no perjury.
But yeah, if it had been perjury, of course it's every bit as
bad as a president ordering federal agencies to break the law and obstruct
a criminal investigation in order to cover up his subordinates' illegal
eavesdropping on political opponents. Yep. Sure is.
Re: Bill Clinton was clearly guilty of both. That, not 'sex with an intern'
is why he was impeached.
In what way was Bill Clinton guilty of "Obstruction of justice"? I am
unaware of any criminal investigation he interfered in.
Also, Clinton was not even guilty of perjury in a the purely legal sense
of the term, since the lies he told (yes, they were lies) were not germane
to the matter on which he was testifying. A perjury charge requires that
to be true.
Sorry, should have acknowledged @Chris 1 on this as well:
And the denial continues in denying that there's anything anyone
can do, so let's do nothing. If you lived your moral life this way you'd
be a wreck.
It's a classic example of the "Futility" argument. Seriously, Albert
O. Hirschman's book explains a vast amount of conservative rhetoric. Here's
the Amazon link:
Another of his books, Exit, Voice and Loyalty (see further link
on that Amazon page), is also important and could helpfully explain, for
instance, different responses to the Catholic abuse scandals.
I agree that "political pundits, talk radio hosts, blog writers and blog
commenters who are complaining about a lack of tweets and visits" are "pathetic,
whiny, insecure, self-absorbed and a host of other bad things." I also agree
that nobody should be questioning the motives of people who are in the midst
of mucking out their homes, no matter what they are saying.
If President Obama is smart, he will give very little in the way of speeches,
or impromptu talks. He will simply ask as many people as possible, what
do you need, what is still lacking, what can we do to help you? If he talks
to the press, he will begin by saying "There are times when a visit from
the President of the United States is not going to make things better, and
might even distract from essential work. I came as soon as people on the
ground told me it would be acceptable, and would do more good than harm."
The perjury for which Clinton was had nothing to do with the Paula Jones
suit (a civil case in a state court, presided over by a former Clinton student).
He was impeached for lying to a federal grand jury. Same goes for the obstruction
of justice charge, nothing to do with Paula Jones or civil cases, everything
to do with the Federal investigation of Clinton's doings.
I was out of the country, in Bosnia in fact, at the time, so my ignorance
is excusable. My failing to check up the 'facts' presented by a Lefty isn't.
"... Near the start of the speech, Clinton said, "We are an exceptional nation because we are an
indispensable nation. In fact, we are the indispensable nation." That isn't true, but Clinton's acceptance
of this claim confirms that she understands "American exceptionalism" in a particularly warped way that
justifies interfering all over the globe. That is what Albright's "indispensable nation" rhetoric meant
twenty years ago, and it's what Clinton's rhetoric means today. ..."
"... Cozying up to authoritarian rulers has been and continues to be a significant part of U.S.
"leadership," and if you are in favor of the latter you are going to be stuck with the former. This
rhetoric is especially absurd coming from someone who has repeatedly stressed the importance of supporting
U.S. clients in the Gulf. ..."
"... Overall, Clinton's speech could have been given by a conventional Republican hawk, and some
of the lines could have been lifted from the speeches of some of this year's Republican presidential
contenders. ..."
"... That's exactly what Clinton believes, unfortunately. When she unveiled her "stronger together"
slogan, one of the points she made was that we should have "a bipartisan, even non-partisan foreign
policy." She is basically a Scoop Jackson Democrat. ..."
"... Bill Kristol used to call himself a Scoop Jackson Democrat, too. Maybe he will again. Hillary
must be the only person left who actually thinks embracing the neocons is a way to win votes. But if
that were true, Rubio would be the GOP nominee, rather than the guy who, for all his many faults, didn't
pander to them. ..."
"... Cozying up to dictators is bad, unless they donate large amounts of money to the Clinton Foundation.
In that case, you're not "cozying up" to the dictators - you're "reassuring allies" and "protecting
America's credibility." ..."
"... Would the mushroom cloud campaign ad that obliterated the Goldwater candidacy have the same
effect today upon a neocon candidate? Is the ad even copyrighted or otherwise available? ..."
"... Has the American Legion given any Democrat running for president a warm response? Muted sounds
about right to me. Clinton was speaking to many more people than the audience in front of her. She won't
get very many votes from those in the military. No Democrat ever does. Undecided voters (all 2 or 3%
of them), especially Republicans are her real target audience. She looks to sound suitably strong more
important, calm and measured. A safe if not perfect choice for President. Old World Order , August 31,
2016 at 4:32 pm She has learned nothing. Nothing at all. Indeed, she just doubled down on permanent
war. Not surprising, but deeply depressing all the same. ..."
"... If our foreign policy wasn't so obviously failed, I wouldn't mind bipartisan consensus but
since it is FUBAR, I want something new. I just wish I had the ear of any of my fellow Republicans who
consider themselves Religious Conservatives. I just can't get over their blind faith in U.S. hegemony,
especially when they screech at the thought of U.S. politicians doing something as benign as running
a Transportation Fund. Yet they have no problem inflicting these imbeciles with life and death decisions
on the rest of the world. ..."
"... When I see Ted Cruz or a Rubio gaze into the camera about how vital it is for the U.S. to suppress
Russia and China and run the M.E. (they use different words), it astounds me since it contradicts the
Protestant tradition so much where one should be suspicious of human nature. ..."
"... Indispensable to what? Wholesale destabilization of the Middle East? ..."
"... I don't want Trump to win, but neither do I want Clinton to think she has a mandate for this
kind of militarism. Sadly, when it comes foreign policy, it appears not to matter which party has the
presidency anymore. ..."
"... Meanwhile, over at the WaPo, neocon cheerleader Jennifer Rubin loves the same speech: Hillary
Clinton is a responsible centrist .. . ..."
"... If she gets elected I see a high probability of a hot war with Russia. She wouldn't start it
intentionally, it would be the pinnacle of our foreign policy establishment living in their own reality.
I actually have a scenario in mind, when I read Russian sourced sites it strengthens my convictions.
To bad our 'Russian experts' use Ouija boards and entrails instead of actually studying the Russians.
..."
"... Don't be surprised if Clinton pushes Russia to the edge or the US gets mired in a proxy war
with Russia. Everything is a Russian hack/conspiracy these days. They will find a reason to start something.
Smells like yellow cake to me. ..."
"... Hilary should figure out that she is losing votes to Johnson and Stein and perhaps tone back
the rhetoric. Granted she was probably trying to look all Commander in Chiefy but she is so tone deaf
on this stuff. ..."
"... The problem is that the cult that passes for Conservatives in this country values strength
over all. Clinton cannot afford to come across as weak to these people. She is aiming exactly for the
Jennifer Rubins of the world. In America, we do the strong thing, even if it is the wrong thing, because
we will go to hell if we appear to be weak. ..."
Hillary Clinton's
speech to the American Legion in Cincinnati didn't contain anything new or surprising. It was
billed as an endorsement of "American exceptionalism" defined as support for activist foreign policy
and global "leadership," and that is what Clinton delivered. One thing that struck me while listening
to it was the muted response from the audience. Despite Clinton's fairly heavy-handed efforts to
present herself as a friend of veterans and champion of the military, the crowd didn't seem very
impressed. The delivery of the speech was typically wooden, but then no one expects stirring oratory
from Clinton. Either the audience wasn't interested in what they were hearing, or they found Clinton
to be a poor messenger, or both.
The substance was mostly boilerplate cheerleading for the status quo in foreign policy, but a
few particularly jarring lines stood out. Near the start of the speech, Clinton said, "We are
an exceptional nation because we are an indispensable nation. In fact, we are the indispensable
nation." That isn't true, but Clinton's acceptance of this claim confirms that she understands "American
exceptionalism" in a particularly warped way that justifies interfering all over the globe. That
is what Albright's "indispensable nation" rhetoric meant twenty years ago, and it's what Clinton's
rhetoric means today.
Clinton thought that she was dinging Trump when she said, "We can't cozy up to dictators." That
would be all right if it were true, but it is hard to take seriously from a committed supporter of
U.S. "leadership." Cozying up to authoritarian rulers has been and continues to be a significant
part of U.S. "leadership," and if you are in favor of the latter you are going to be stuck with the
former. This rhetoric is especially absurd coming from someone who has repeatedly stressed the importance
of supporting U.S. clients in the Gulf. Clinton has made a point of promising that the U.S.
will stay quite cozy with our despotic clients when she is president, and it is likely that the U.S.
will probably get even cozier still if she has anything to say about it.
Overall, Clinton's speech could have been given by a conventional Republican hawk, and some
of the lines could have been lifted from the speeches of some of this year's Republican presidential
contenders. There were brief nods to the nuclear deal with Iran and New START that a Republican
wouldn't have made, but they were only mentioned in passing. Clinton insisted that "America must
lead" and conjured up a vision of the vacuums that would be created if the U.S. did not do this.
This is a standard hawkish line that implies that the U.S. always has to be involved in conflict
and crises no matter how little the U.S. has at stake in them.
At one point, Clinton asserted, "Defending American exceptionalism should always be above politics."
That amounts to saying that our foreign policy debates should always be narrowly circumscribed and
most of our current policies should always remain beyond challenge or major revision. That's not
healthy for the quality of our foreign policy debates or our foreign policy as a whole, and it shows
the degree to which Clinton is out of touch with much of the country that she thinks this is a credible
thing to say.
"At one point, Clinton asserted, 'Defending American exceptionalism should always be above politics.'
That amounts to saying that our foreign policy debates should always be narrowly circumscribed
and most of our current policies should always remain beyond challenge or major revision."
That's exactly what Clinton believes, unfortunately. When she unveiled her "stronger together"
slogan, one of the points she made was that we should have "a bipartisan, even non-partisan foreign
policy." She is basically a Scoop Jackson Democrat.
Broad consensus is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, I'd argue that some degree of consensus
is necessary in order for a democratic system to function. But any such consensus should emerge
from vigorous debate, which does not exist in Washington or in the mainstream media. It should
not be simply imposed on the country by an unchallenged, ossified elite that is either stuck in
the Cold War past or has a vested interest in renewing the Cold War.
Bill Kristol used to call himself a Scoop Jackson Democrat, too. Maybe he will again. Hillary
must be the only person left who actually thinks embracing the neocons is a way to win votes.
But if that were true, Rubio would be the GOP nominee, rather than the guy who, for all his many
faults, didn't pander to them.
Cozying up to dictators is bad, unless they donate large amounts of money to the Clinton Foundation.
In that case, you're not "cozying up" to the dictators - you're "reassuring allies" and "protecting
America's credibility."
Would the mushroom cloud campaign ad that obliterated the Goldwater candidacy have the same
effect today upon a neocon candidate? Is the ad even copyrighted or otherwise available?
Has the American Legion given any Democrat running for president a warm response? Muted sounds
about right to me. Clinton was speaking to many more people than the audience in front of her.
She won't get very many votes from those in the military. No Democrat ever does.
Undecided voters (all 2 or 3% of them), especially Republicans are her real target audience.
She looks to sound suitably strong more important, calm and measured. A safe if not perfect choice
for President.
She has learned nothing. Nothing at all. Indeed, she just doubled down on permanent war. Not
surprising, but deeply depressing all the same.
Here's hoping that someone – anyone, really – keeps this loathsome throwback to the worst aspects
of US foreign policy of the past 20 years out of the White House.
If our foreign policy wasn't so obviously failed, I wouldn't mind bipartisan consensus but
since it is FUBAR, I want something new. I just wish I had the ear of any of my fellow Republicans
who consider themselves Religious Conservatives. I just can't get over their blind faith in U.S.
hegemony, especially when they screech at the thought of U.S. politicians doing something as benign
as running a Transportation Fund. Yet they have no problem inflicting these imbeciles with life
and death decisions on the rest of the world.
When I see Ted Cruz or a Rubio gaze into the camera about how vital it is for the U.S.
to suppress Russia and China and run the M.E. (they use different words), it astounds me since
it contradicts the Protestant tradition so much where one should be suspicious of human nature.
Do these people believe that corrupt politicians in the U.S. are suddenly anointed by God and
transformed into world leaders in a sudden act of Grace? Sorry for the rant but I would seriously
love to ask someone this question. This is not a troll at all. I have pondered this many times.
How would Huckabee respond to this? He wrote a lucid essay on Iran about 10yrs ago before he went
full Neocon.
What a choice we face in November – give full executive authority to either:
1. The volatile vulgarian who is smart enough to reject the tired nation-building, Democracy
Evangelization, Responsibility-to-Protect, and other dangerous establishment policies. But who
doesn't think much at all about foreign policy and could even blunder into a big war out of personal
pique.
OR
2. The champion of mindless and discredited bellicosity. Who is - probably - smart enough to
avoid a new large ground war or nuclear despite her dangerous anti-Russian rhetoric, but who will
CERTAINLY initiate one or more new unnecessary, unjust and futile military interventions.
I wish she would stop putting out this nonsense. I really don't want to skip my vote for president,
but this sort of nonsense leaves me cold. I don't want Trump to win, but neither do I want
Clinton to think she has a mandate for this kind of militarism. Sadly, when it comes foreign policy,
it appears not to matter which party has the presidency anymore.
We are an Exceptional nation because we are an Indispensable nation
This is a tautology. You can swap the words exceptional and indispensable and have the exact
same sentence.
Commenter Man, yet another example of how people will create their own reality. I am certain
I will read the same tripe tomorrow when I peruse the links on 'realclearpolitics.com'. It is
the only Neocon portal that I bother with.
If she gets elected I see a high probability of a hot war with Russia. She wouldn't start
it intentionally, it would be the pinnacle of our foreign policy establishment living in their
own reality. I actually have a scenario in mind, when I read Russian sourced sites it strengthens
my convictions. To bad our 'Russian experts' use Ouija boards and entrails instead of actually
studying the Russians.
Don't be surprised if Clinton pushes Russia to the edge or the US gets mired in a proxy war
with Russia. Everything is a Russian hack/conspiracy these days. They will find a reason to start
something. Smells like yellow cake to me.
Hilary should figure out that she is losing votes to Johnson and Stein and perhaps tone back
the rhetoric. Granted she was probably trying to look all Commander in Chiefy but she is so tone
deaf on this stuff.
The problem is that the cult that passes for Conservatives in this country values strength
over all. Clinton cannot afford to come across as weak to these people. She is aiming exactly
for the Jennifer Rubins of the world. In America, we do the strong thing, even if it is the wrong
thing, because we will go to hell if we appear to be weak.
"... "the prosecutor has all the power. The Supreme Court's suggestion that a plea bargain is a fair and voluntary contractual arrangement between two relatively equal parties is a total myth… What really puts the prosecutor in the driver's seat is the fact that he - because of mandatory minimums, sentencing guidelines (which, though no longer mandatory in the federal system, are still widely followed by most judges), and simply his ability to shape whatever charges are brought - can effectively dictate the sentence by how he publicly describes the offense". ..."
"... Prosecutorial discretion is now practically unlimited in the United States. This discretion is an essential feature of any dictatorship . It's the essence of any system that separates people into aristocrats, who are above the law, versus the public, upon whom their 'law' is enforced. It's the essence of "a nation of men, not of laws". ..."
"... Clinton did not recall receiving any emails she thought should not be on an unclassified system" ..."
"... Clinton stated she did not remember the email specifically. Clinton stated a 'nonpaper' was a document with no official heading, or identifying marks of any kind, that can not be attributed to the US Government. Clinton thought a 'nonpaper' was a way to convey the unofficial stance of the US Government to a foreign government and believed this practice went back '200 years.' When viewing the displayed email, Clinton believed she was asking Sullivan to remove the State letterhead and provide unclassified talking points. Clinton stated she had no intention to remove classification markings" ..."
"... issues sending secure fax" ..."
"... They say they've had issues sending secure fax. They're working on it" ..."
"... "If they can't, turn into nonpaper w no identifying heading and send nonsecure". So: she knew that it was classified information but wanted to receive it so that she would be able to say, "I didn't know that it was classified information". ..."
"... The FBI avoided using the standard means to investigate a suspect higher-up ..."
"... That alone proves the Obama Administration's 'investigation' of Clinton's email system to have been a farce ..."
"... the prosecutor in Hillary's case (the Obama Administration) clearly didn't want her in the big house; they wanted her in the White House. ..."
The famous judge Jed Rakoff
has accurately and succinctly
said that, in the American criminal 'justice' system, since 1980 and especially after 2000, and
most especially after 2010, "the prosecutor has all the power. The Supreme Court's suggestion
that a plea bargain is a fair and voluntary contractual arrangement between two relatively equal
parties is a total myth… What really puts the prosecutor in the driver's seat is the fact that he
- because of mandatory minimums, sentencing guidelines (which, though no longer mandatory in the
federal system, are still widely followed by most judges), and simply his ability to shape whatever
charges are brought - can effectively dictate the sentence by how he publicly describes the offense".
If an Administration wants to be merely pretending an 'investigation', it's easy: identify, as
the topic for the alleged 'investigation', not the criminal laws that indisputably describe what
the suspect can clearly be proven to have done, but instead criminal laws that don't. Prosecutorial
discretion is now practically unlimited in the United States. This discretion is an essential feature
of any
dictatorship . It's the essence of any system that separates people into aristocrats, who are
above the law, versus the public, upon whom their 'law' is enforced. It's the essence of
"a nation
of men, not of laws".
But, different people focus on different aspects of it.
Conservatives notice it in Clinton's case because she was not prosecuted.
Progressives notice it in Clinton's case because other people (ones without the clout) who did
what she did (but only less of it), have been prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced for it. The result,
either way, is
dictatorship , regardless of anyone's particular perspective on the matter. Calling a nation
like that a 'democracy' is to strip "democracy" of its basic meaning - it is foolishness. Such a
nation is
an aristocracy, otherwise called an "oligarchy". That's the opposite of a democracy (even if
it's set up so as to pretend to be a democracy).
2: The FBI chose to believe her allegations, instead of to investigate or challenge them.
For example: On page 4 of
the FBI's record of their interview with Hillary dated 2 July 2016 , they noted: " Clinton did not recall receiving any emails she thought should not be on an unclassified system"
. But they already had seen
this email . So,
they asked her about that specific one: " Clinton stated she did not remember the email
specifically. Clinton stated a 'nonpaper' was a document with no official heading, or identifying
marks of any kind, that can not be attributed to the US Government. Clinton thought a 'nonpaper'
was a way to convey the unofficial stance of the US Government to a foreign government and believed
this practice went back '200 years.' When viewing the displayed email, Clinton believed she was asking
Sullivan to remove the State letterhead and provide unclassified talking points. Clinton stated she
had no intention to remove classification markings" .
Look at the email
: is her statement about it - that " issues sending secure fax" had nothing
to do with the illegality of sending classified U.S. Government information over a non-secured, even
privatized, system - even credible? Is the implication by Clinton's remark, that changing the letterhead
and removing the document'a classified stamp, would solve the problem that Jake Sullivan - a highly
skilled attorney himself - had brought to her attention, even credible? Well, if so, then wouldn't
the FBI have asked Sullivan what he was referring to when his email to Clinton said " They say they've had issues sending secure fax. They're working on it" .
The FBI provided no indication that there was any such follow-up, at all. They could have plea-bargained
with Sullivan, to get him to testify first, so that his testimony could be used in questioning of
her, but they seem not to have been interested in doing any such thing. They believed what she said
(even though it made no sense as a response to the problem that Sullivan had just brought to her
attention: the problem that emailing to her this information would violate several federal criminal
statutes.
Clinton, in other words, didn't really care about the legality. And, apparently, neither did the
FBI. Her email in response to Sullivan's said simply: "If they can't, turn into nonpaper
w no identifying heading and send nonsecure". So: she knew that it was classified information but
wanted to receive it so that she would be able to say, "I didn't know that it was classified information".
In other words: she was instructing her advisor: hide the fact that it's classified information,
so that when I receive it, there will be no indication on it that what was sent to me is classified
information.
3:
The FBI avoided using the standard means to investigate a suspect higher-up:
obtaining plea-deals with subordinates, requiring them to cooperate, answer questions and
not to plead the Fifth Amendment (not to refuse to answer) . (In Hillary's case, the Obama Administration
actually did plea-deals in which they allowed the person who was supposed to answer all questions,
to plea the Fifth Amendment to all questions instead. This is allowed only when the government doesn't
want to prosecute the higher-up - which in this case was Clinton. That alone proves the Obama Administration's
'investigation' of Clinton's email system to have been a farce.)
A plea-deal isn't a Constitutional process:
Jed Rakoff's article explained why it's not. The process is informal, but nowadays it's used
in more than 97% of cases in which charges are brought, and in more than 99% of all cases (including
the 92% of cases that are simply dropped without any charges being brought). That's the main reason
why nowadays "the prosecutor has all the power". Well, the prosecutor in Hillary's case (the Obama
Administration) clearly didn't want her in the big house; they wanted her in the White House.
"... It is fascinating that younger US neoliberals (e.g. Matthew Yglesias) are totally sold on the the positives of 'metrics', statistics, testing, etc, to the point where they ignore all the negatives of those approaches, but absolutely and utterly loathe being tracked, having the performance of their preferred policies and predictions analyzed, and called out on the failures thereof. Is sure seems to me that the campaign to quash the use of the US, Charles Peters version of neoliberal is part of the effort to avoid accountability for their actions. ..."
"... If "conservative" is to be a third way to the opposition of "reactionary" and "revolutionary", the "liberals" are a species of conservative - like all conservatives, seeking to preserve the existing order as far as this is possible, but appealing to reason, reason's high principles, and a practical politics of incremental reform and "inevitable" progress. The liberals disguise their affection for social and political hierarchy as a preference for "meritocracy" and place their faith in the powers of Reason and Science to discover Truth. ..."
"... Liberalism adopts nationalism as a vehicle for popular mobilization which conservatives can share and as an ideal of governance, the self-governing democratic nation-state with a liberal constitution. ..."
"... It wasn't Liberalism Triumphant that faced a challenge from fascism; it was the abject failures of Liberalism that created fascism. ..."
"... he Liberal projects to create liberal democratic nation-states ran aground in Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia between 1870 and 1910 and instead of gradual reform of the old order, Europe experienced catastrophic collapse, and Liberalism was ill-prepared to devise working governments and politics in the crisis that followed. ..."
"... What is called neoliberalism in American politics has a lot to do with New Deal liberalism running out of steam and simply not having a program after 1970. Some of that is circumstantial in a way - the first Oil Crisis, the breakup of Bretton Woods - but even those circumstances were arguably results of the earlier program's success. ..."
= = = I am actually honestly suggesting an intellectual exercise which, I think, might
be worth your (extremely valuable) time. I propose you rewrite this post without using the
word "neoliberalism" (or a synonym). = = =
It is fascinating that younger US neoliberals (e.g. Matthew Yglesias) are totally sold
on the the positives of 'metrics', statistics, testing, etc, to the point where they ignore all
the negatives of those approaches, but absolutely and utterly loathe being tracked, having the
performance of their preferred policies and predictions analyzed, and called out on the failures
thereof. Is sure seems to me that the campaign to quash the use of the US, Charles Peters version
of neoliberal is part of the effort to avoid accountability for their actions.
bruce wilder 09.03.16 at 7:47 pm
In the politics of antonyms, I suppose we are always going get ourselves confused.
Perhaps because of American usage of the root, liberal, to mean the mildly social democratic
New Deal liberal Democrat, with its traces of American Populism and American Progressivism, we
seem to want "liberal" to designate an ideology of the left, or at least, the centre-left. Maybe,
it is the tendency of historical liberals to embrace idealistic high principles in their contest
with reactionary claims for hereditary aristocracy and arbitrary authority.
If "conservative" is to be a third way to the opposition of "reactionary" and "revolutionary",
the "liberals" are a species of conservative - like all conservatives, seeking to preserve the
existing order as far as this is possible, but appealing to reason, reason's high principles,
and a practical politics of incremental reform and "inevitable" progress. The liberals disguise
their affection for social and political hierarchy as a preference for "meritocracy" and place
their faith in the powers of Reason and Science to discover Truth.
All of that is by way of preface to a thumbnail history of modern political ideology different
from the one presented by Will G-R.
Modern political ideology is a by-product of the Enlightenment and the resulting imperative
to find a basis and purpose for political Authority in Reason, and apply Reason to the design
of political and social institutions.
Liberalism doesn't so much defeat conservatism as invent conservatism as an alternative to
purely reactionary politics. The notion of an "inevitable progress" allows liberals to reconcile
both themselves and their reactionary opponents to practical reality with incremental reform.
Political paranoia and rhetoric are turned toward thinking about constitutional design.
Mobilizing mass support and channeling popular discontents is a source of deep ambivalence
and risk for liberals and liberalism. Popular democracy can quickly become noisy and vulgar, the
proliferation of ideas and conflicting interests paralyzing. Inventing a conservatism that competes
with the liberals, but also mobilizes mass support and channels popular discontent, puts bounds
on "normal" politics.
Liberalism adopts nationalism as a vehicle for popular mobilization which conservatives
can share and as an ideal of governance, the self-governing democratic nation-state with a liberal
constitution.
I would put the challenges to liberalism from the left and right well behind in precedence
the critical failures and near-failures of liberalism in actual governance.
Liberalism failed abjectly to bring about a constitutional monarchy in France during the first
decade of the French Revolution, or a functioning deliberative assembly or religious toleration
or even to resolve the problems of state finance and legal administration that destroyed the ancient
regime. In the end, the solution was found in Napoleon Bonaparte, a precedent that would arguably
inspire the fascism of dictators and vulgar nationalism, beginning with Napoleon's nephew fifty
years later.
It wasn't Liberalism Triumphant that faced a challenge from fascism; it was the abject
failures of Liberalism that created fascism. And, this was especially true in the wake of
World War I, which many have argued persuasively was Liberalism's greatest and most catastrophic
failure. T he Liberal projects to create liberal democratic nation-states ran aground in Germany,
Austria-Hungary and Russia between 1870 and 1910 and instead of gradual reform of the old order,
Europe experienced catastrophic collapse, and Liberalism was ill-prepared to devise working governments
and politics in the crisis that followed.
If liberals invented conservatism, it seems to me that would-be socialists were at pains to
re-invent liberalism, and they did it several times going in radically different directions, but
always from a base in the basic liberal idea of rationalizing authority. A significant thread
in socialism adopted incremental progress and socialist ideas became liberal and conservative
means for taming popular discontent in an increasingly urban society.
Where and when liberalism actually was triumphant, both the range of liberal views and the
range of interests presenting a liberal front became too broad for a stable politics. Think about
the Liberal Party landslide of 1906, which eventually gave rise to the Labour Party in its role
of Left Party in the British two-party system. Or FDR's landslide in 1936, which played a pivotal
role in the march of the Southern Democrats to the Right. Or the emergence of the Liberal Consensus
in American politics in the late 1950s.
What is called neoliberalism in American politics has a lot to do with New Deal liberalism
running out of steam and simply not having a program after 1970. Some of that is circumstantial
in a way - the first Oil Crisis, the breakup of Bretton Woods - but even those circumstances were
arguably results of the earlier program's success.
It is almost a rote reaction to talk about the Republican's Southern Strategy, but they didn't
invent the crime wave that enveloped the country in the late 1960s or the riots that followed
the enactment of Civil Rights legislation.
Will G-R's "As soon [as] liberalism feels it can plausibly claim to have . . .overcome the
socialist and fascist challenges [liberals] are empowered to act as if liberalism's adaptive response
to the socialist and fascist challenges was never necessary in the first place - bye bye welfare
state, hello neoliberalism" doesn't seem to me to concede enough to Clinton and Blair entrepreneurially
inventing a popular politics in response to Reagan and Thatcher, after the actual failures
of an older model of social democratic programs and populist politics on its behalf.
I write more about this
over at
my blog (in a somewhat different context).
John Quiggin 09.04.16 at 6:57 am
RW @113 I wrote a whole book using "market liberalism" instead of "neoliberalism", since I wanted
a term more neutral and less pejorative. So, going back to "neoliberalism" was something I did
advisedly. You say
The word is abstract and has completely different meanings west and east of the Atlantic. In
the USA it refers to weak tea center leftisms. In Europe to hard core liberalism.
Well, yes. That's precisely why I've used the term, introduced the hard/soft distinction and explained
the history. The core point is that, despite their differences soft (US meaning) and hard (European
meaning) neoliberalism share crucial aspects of their history, theoretical foundations and policy
implications.
=== quote ===
Neoliberalism is an ideology of market fundamentalism based on deception that promotes "markets"
as a universal solution for all human problems in order to hide establishment of neo-fascist regime
(pioneered by Pinochet in Chile), where militarized government functions are limited to external
aggression and suppression of population within the country (often via establishing National Security
State using "terrorists" threat) and corporations are the only "first class" political players.
Like in classic corporatism, corporations are above the law and can rule the country as they see
fit, using political parties for the legitimatization of the regime.
The key difference with classic fascism is that instead of political dominance of the corporations
of particular nation, those corporations are now transnational and states, including the USA are
just enforcers of the will of transnational corporations on the population. Economic or "soft"
methods of enforcement such as debt slavery and control of employment are preferred to brute force
enforcement. At the same time police is militarized and due to technological achievements the
level of surveillance surpasses the level achieved in Eastern Germany.
Like with bolshevism in the USSR before, high, almost always hysterical, level of neoliberal
propaganda and scapegoating of "enemies" as well as the concept of "permanent war for permanent
peace" are used to suppress the protest against the wealth redistribution up (which is the key
principle of neoliberalism) and to decimate organized labor.
Multiple definitions of neoliberalism were proposed. Three major attempts to define this social
system were made:
Definitions stemming from the concept of "casino capitalism"
Definitions stemming from the concept of Washington consensus
Definitions stemming from the idea that Neoliberalism is Trotskyism for the rich. This
idea has two major variations:
Definitions stemming from Professor Wendy Brown's concept of Neoliberal rationality
which developed the concept of Inverted Totalitarism of Sheldon Wolin
Definitions stemming Professor Sheldon Wolin's older concept of Inverted Totalitarism
- "the heavy statism forging the novel fusions of economic with political power that he
took to be poisoning democracy at its root." (Sheldon Wolin and Inverted Totalitarianism
Common Dreams )
The first two are the most popular.
likbez 09.04.16 at 5:03 pm
bruce,
@117
Thanks for your post. It contains several important ideas:
"It wasn't Liberalism Triumphant that faced a challenge from fascism; it was the abject failures
of Liberalism that created fascism."
"What is called neoliberalism in American politics has a lot to do with New Deal liberalism
running out of steam and simply not having a program after 1970. Some of that is circumstantial
in a way - the first Oil Crisis, the breakup of Bretton Woods - but even those circumstances were
arguably results of the earlier program's success."
Moreover as Will G-R noted:
"neoliberalism will be every bit the wellspring of fascism that old-school liberalism was."
Failure of neoliberalism revives neofascist, far right movements. That's what the rise of far
right movements in Europe now demonstrates pretty vividly.
"... As soon liberalism feels it can plausibly claim to have moved overcome the socialist and fascist challenges (the Fukuyamaist "end of history" and/or "end of ideology") these ideologues are empowered to act as if liberalism's adaptive response to the socialist and fascist challenges was never necessary in the first place - bye bye welfare state, hello neoliberalism ..."
"... I'm thinking more of local governments like the ones stereotypically predominant in the Southeast, or even the legendarily corrupt history of "machine" politics in cities like Chicago. ..."
"... So in order to uphold the legitimacy of the system as such we acknowledge that sure, someone in rural Louisiana might not always be able to get rid of their corrupt local mayors/sheriffs/judges/etc. through the ballot box directly, but at least they can vote in federal elections for the people and institutions that will ..."
"... Accordingly, to treat the federal system as itself no more inherently legitimate than the local ones - to treat the government in Washington as fundamentally the same kind of racket as the government in Ferguson - is to argue that it needs fundamentally the same kind of external oversight, and barring a foreign invasion or a world government, the only potentially equivalent overseer for the US federal government is a mass revolt. ..."
"... The elite project of putting neoliberalism into practice and of selling it to the masses has failed ..."
"... the elites were telling us that Brexit wouldn't happen. They also assured us Trump wouldn't win the primary. The fact that he did shows in part how neoliberalism has failed. ..."
"... Neoliberalism is all about markets and the free flow of capital, not political interference from unions or government. From democracy or citizens. ..."
"... Neoliberalism has failed both in practice and as a means to indoctrinate the voters. ..."
"... That's why you have all of these Trump voters or Brexit voters or other tribalists who no longer believe what the center-right is selling them about lower taxes and less regulation delivering prosperity. About immigration and internationalism being a good thing. ..."
"... The elite project of putting neoliberalism into practice and of selling it to the masses has failed ..."
"... the elites were telling us that Brexit wouldn't happen. They also assured us Trump wouldn't win the primary. The fact that he did shows in part how neoliberalism has failed. ..."
"... I do think it is helpful to see the deregulation of finance beginning in the Carter and Reagan Administrations leading eventually to the GFC of 2008 as an historical project and a political whole, in which there have been deviations between the stated intentions of advocates, the reasonable anticipation of consequences by experts and the self-interested pursuit of short-term advantage in regulatory evasion and reform. ..."
As far as a definition, at least on the level of ideology I'd go with the following simplified-to-the-utmost
historical overview…
1. Liberalism (the 18th- and 19th-century bourgeois ideology of capitalism) defeats conservatism
(the 18th- and 19th-century aristocratic ideology of anti-capitalism)
2. Triumphant liberalism faces insurgent ideological challenges from its left and right (i.e.
Quiggin's "three-party system" model, except the three parties are clearly understood to be socialism,
liberalism, and fascism)
3. Liberalism is forced to respond to these challenges, in particular responding to the socialist
critique with the ideology of Keynesian interventionist "welfare liberalism" - ideologues of older
liberalism consider this response itself a taint of corruption
4. As soon liberalism feels it can plausibly claim to have moved overcome the socialist
and fascist challenges (the Fukuyamaist "end of history" and/or "end of ideology") these ideologues
are empowered to act as if liberalism's adaptive response to the socialist and fascist challenges
was never necessary in the first place - bye bye welfare state, hello neoliberalism
In any case, it's utterly bizarre to see people object so stridently to "neoliberalism" who
simultaneously don't seem to have a problem with the imperialist, anti-intellectual, and quite
frankly racist connotations of the term "tribalism".
Will G-R 09.02.16 at 4:19 pm
Bruce @ 104, I'm not clued into the SoCal-specific issues (so I don't know exactly how much a
Chinatown -esque narrative should be raised in contrast to your description of LA water
infrastructure as "the best of civic boosterism") but I'm thinking more of local governments
like the ones stereotypically predominant in the Southeast, or even the legendarily corrupt history
of "machine" politics in cities like Chicago.
he fact that these sorts of governments exist and have existed in the US is why every American,
even those of us who are well aware of McCarthyism and COINTELPRO and so on, can breathe a sigh
of relief when we see the words "the Justice Department today announced a probe aimed at local
government officials in…" because it means that the legitimate parts of our system are
asserting their predominance over the potentially illegitimate parts.
So in order to uphold the legitimacy of the system as such we acknowledge that sure, someone
in rural Louisiana might not always be able to get rid of their corrupt local mayors/sheriffs/judges/etc.
through the ballot box directly, but at least they can vote in federal elections for the people
and institutions that will get rid of these officials if they overstep the bounds of
what we as a nation consider acceptable. (This also extends to more informal institutions
like the media: the local paper might not be shining the light on local corruption, but the media
as such can fulfill its function and redeem its institutional legitimacy if something too egregious
falls into the national spotlight.)
Accordingly, to treat the federal system as itself no more inherently legitimate than the
local ones - to treat the government in Washington as fundamentally the same kind of racket as
the government in Ferguson - is to argue that it needs fundamentally the same kind of external
oversight, and barring a foreign invasion or a world government, the only potentially equivalent
overseer for the US federal government is a mass revolt.
The center-right hasn't really delivered and neither has the center-left. The elite project
of putting neoliberalism into practice and of selling it to the masses has failed . This
is an opportunity for the left but also a time fraught with danger should the tribalists somehow
get the upperhand. I feel the U.S. is too diverse for this to happen but it might in other nations.
I am hoping that Trump suffers a sound beating but then the elites were telling us that Brexit
wouldn't happen. They also assured us Trump wouldn't win the primary. The fact that he did shows
in part how neoliberalism has failed.
" American liberalism has always been internationalist and mildly pro-free-trade. It's also
been pro-union…"
Then why are unions in such bad shape? Neoliberalism is all about markets and the free
flow of capital, not political interference from unions or government. From democracy or citizens.
Think about the TPP where corporate arbitration courts can be used by corporations to sue
governments without regard to those nations' legislation. I'd be more in favor of international
courts if they weren't used merely to further corporate interests and profits. Neoliberals argue
that what benefits these multinational corporations benefits their home country.
I pretty much agree with what Quiggin is saying here. Neoliberalism has failed both in
practice and as a means to indoctrinate the voters. The soft neoliberals have been putting
neoliberalism into practice over the objections of their electoral coalition partners. It hasn't
delivered.
That's why you have all of these Trump voters or Brexit voters or other tribalists who
no longer believe what the center-right is selling them about lower taxes and less regulation
delivering prosperity. About immigration and internationalism being a good thing.
The center-right hasn't really delivered and neither has the center-left. The elite project
of putting neoliberalism into practice and of selling it to the masses has failed. This is
an opportunity for the left but also a time fraught with danger should the tribalists somehow
get the upperhand. I feel the U.S. is too diverse for this to happen but it might in other nations.
I am hoping that Trump suffers a sound beating but then the elites were telling us that Brexit
wouldn't happen. They also assured us Trump wouldn't win the primary. The fact that he did shows
in part how neoliberalism has failed.
... I do think it is helpful to see the deregulation of finance beginning in the Carter and
Reagan Administrations leading eventually to the GFC of 2008 as an historical project and a political
whole, in which there have been deviations between the stated intentions of advocates, the reasonable
anticipation of consequences by experts and the self-interested pursuit of short-term advantage
in regulatory evasion and reform.
"... Lesse evilism that Bill Clinton used for moving Democratic Party into neoliberal camp (as in "those f*ckers from trade unions will vote for Dems anyway, they have nowhere to go") no longer works. ..."
@111 The obvious explanation for union endorsements of Clinton is that they expected her to win
the Democratic nomination, as she did. And of course they would endorse her against any Republican.
What else could they do>
The most obvious test case is the teachers unions. Obama's administration was clearly hostile
to the (think of Rahm Emanuel!), but they nonetheless endorsed him, as the lesser evil.
likbez 09.04.16 at 7:29 pm
Your comment is awaiting moderation.
John,
@112
"The most obvious test case is the teachers unions. Obama's administration was clearly hostile
to the (think of Rahm Emanuel!), but they nonetheless endorsed him, as the lesser evil."
Lesse evilism that Bill Clinton used for moving Democratic Party into neoliberal camp (as in
"those f*ckers from trade unions will vote for Dems anyway, they have nowhere to go") no longer
works.
Far right will absorb those working class and lower white collar votes. And they became a political
force to recon with, which disposed neocons from the Republican establishment (all those Jeb!,
Kasich, Cruz, and Rubio crowd ) despite all efforts of the party brass. Welcome to the second
reincarnation of Weimar republic.
Trade union management, which endorsed Hillary, now expects that more than half of union members
will probably vote against Hillary. In some cases up to 2/3.
So Dem neolibs became a party that is not supported by the working class and if identity politics
tricks fail to work, they might get a a blowback in November. They can rely only on a few voting
blocks that benefitted from globalization, such as "network hamsters" (programmers, system administrators,
some part of FIRE low level staff, and such) and few other mass professionals. That's it.
The whole thing smells to high heaven. The only reason to trust that there are no direct quid
pro quos is, perversely, that there are so many donations and so many speeches and interactions
that they all begin to seem normal.
Yes, there may be smoke and no fire, in the legal sense, but let us not pretend there are no
issues here.
I don't know if relying on the same people over time is bad or loopy or what. I know that old
friends are the best friends, so this does not bother me so much.
I will add, which is almost never pointed out, that while the Clintons really are money grubbers
(see them stealing White House silverware and HRC unbelievably stupidly giving all those Goldman
Sachs talks for money she did not need and for which she should have known she would be criticized
while running, which Bernie certainly did plenty, although somehow Trump has so far laid off that),
the Clintons have in fact publicly released 33 years of their tax returns right up to the latest
ones. They may be money grubbers, but it is pretty much all out there to see.
... ...
Beverly Mann
August 30, 2016 5:05 pm
What bothers me–what strikes me as weird–is the extent to which she relies on Abedin, especially,
but also Mills and a few others. They're like human security blanket, without which she can't
function, it appears.
And: Oooooh, yeah, Trump's hiding not just something but a lot of things. Believe me.
Gage Skidmore / Flickr
In accepting the invitation of President Enrique Pena Nieto to fly to Mexico City, the
Donald was taking a major risk.
Yet it was a bold and decisive move, and it paid off in
what was the best day of Donald Trump's campaign.
Standing beside Nieto, graciously complimenting him and speaking warmly of Mexico and
its people, Trump looked like a president. And the Mexican president treated him like one,
even as Trump restated the basic elements of his immigration policy, including the border
wall.
The gnashing of teeth up at the
New York Times
testifies to Trump's triumph:
"Mr. Trump has spent his entire campaign painting Mexico as a nation of rapists, drug
smugglers, and trade hustlers. … But instead of chastising Mr. Trump, Mr. Pena Nieto
treated him like a visiting head of state … with side-by-side lecterns and words of
deferential mush."
As I wrote in August, Trump "must convince the nation … he is an acceptable, indeed, a
preferable alternative" to Hillary Clinton, whom the nation does not want.
In Mexico City, Trump did that.
He reassured
voters who are leaning toward him that he can be president. As for those who are
apprehensive about his temperament, they saw reassurance.
For validation, one need not rely on supporters of Trump. Even Mexicans who loathe Trump
are conceding his diplomatic coup.
"Trump achieved his purpose," said journalism professor Carlos Bravo Regidor. "He looked
serene, firm, presidential." Our "humiliation is now complete," tweeted an anchorman at
Televisa.
President Nieto's invitation to Trump "was the biggest stupidity in the history of the
Mexican presidency," said academic Jesus Silva-Herzog.
Not since Gen. Winfield Scott arrived for a visit in 1847 have Mexican elites been this
upset with an American.
Jorge Ramos of Univision almost required sedation.
When Trump got back to the States, he affirmed that Mexico will be paying for the wall,
even if "they don't know it yet."
Indeed, back on American soil, in Phoenix, the Donald doubled down. Deportations will
accelerate when he takes office, beginning with felons. Sanctuary cities for illegal
immigrants will face U.S. sanctions. There will be no amnesty, no legalization, no path to
citizenship for those who have broken into our country. All laws will be enforced.
Trump's stance in Mexico City and Phoenix reveals that there is no turning back. The die
is cast. He is betting the election on his belief that the American people prefer his
stands to Clinton's call for amnesty.
A core principle enunciated by Trump in Phoenix appears to be a guiding light behind his
immigration policy.
"Anyone who tells you that the core issue is the needs of those living here illegally
has simply spent too much time Washington. … There is only one core issue in the
immigration debate, and that issue is the well-being of the American people. … Nothing even
comes a close second."
The "well-being of the American people" may be the yardstick by which U.S. policies will
be measured in a Trump presidency. This is also applicable to Trump's stand on trade and
foreign policy.
Do NAFTA, the WTO, MFN for China, the South Korea deal, and TPP advance the "well-being
of the American people"? Or do they serve more the interests of foreign regimes and
corporate elites?
Some $12 trillion in trade deficits since George H.W. Bush gives you the answer.
Which of the military interventions and foreign wars from Serbia to Afghanistan to Iraq
to Libya to Yemen to Syria served the "well-being of the American people"?
Are the American people well-served by commitments in perpetuity to 60- and 65-year-old
treaties to wage war on Russia and China on behalf of scores of nations across Eurasia,
most of which have been free riders on U.S. defense for decades?
Trump's "core issue" might be called
Americanism.
Whatever the outcome of this election, these concerns are not going away. For they have
arisen out of a deeply dissatisfied and angry electorate that is alienated from the elites
both parties.
Indeed, alienation explains the endurance of Trump, despite his recent difficulties.
Americans want change, and he alone offers it.
In the last two weeks, Trump has seen a slow rise in the polls, matched by a perceptible
decline in support for Clinton. The latest Rasmussen poll now has Trump at 40, with Clinton
slipping to 39.
This race is now Trump's to win or lose. For he alone brings a fresh perspective to
policies that have stood stagnant under both parties.
And Hillary Clinton? Whatever her attributes, she is uncharismatic, unexciting, greedy,
wonkish, scripted, and devious, an individual you can neither fully believe nor fully
trust.
Which is why the country seems to be looking, again, to Trump, to show them that they
will not be making a big mistake if they elect him.
If Donald Trump can continue to show America what he did in Mexico City, that he can be
presidential, he may just become president.
"... Yet still we cannot bring ourselves to look the thing in the eyes. We cannot admit that we liberals bear some of the blame for its emergence, for the frustration of the working-class millions, for their blighted cities and their downward spiraling lives. So much easier to scold them for their twisted racist souls, to close our eyes to the obvious reality of which Trump_vs_deep_state is just a crude and ugly expression: that neoliberalism has well and truly failed. ..."
"... The only thing more ludicrous than voting for Donald Trump would be to vote for Hilary Clinton. Whilst Trump is evidently crude, vulgar, bombastic, xenophobic, racist and misogynistic, his manifest personality flaws pale into insignificance when compared to the the meglomaniacal, prevaricating, misandristic, puff adder, who is likely to oppose him! ..."
"... Clinton is the archetypal political parasite, who has spent a lifetime with her arrogant snout wedged firmly in the public trough. Like Obama, Bush, et al, Clinton is just another elitist Bilderberger sock puppet, a conniving conspirator in the venal kleptocracy, located in Washington D.C, otherwise known as the U.S. federal government. ..."
"... Trump at least is not in thrall to the system and thus, by default, can be perceived by the average blue-collar American as being an outsider to the systemic corruption that pervades the whole American political process. A horrible choice, but the lesser of two evils. ..."
"... Trump was always a Democrat, before now and so were a lot of other Americans. America is watching how the Democrat Party is destroying America. The race card is a low blow to Trump supporters. Illegal immigration is a legitimate issue in the US. It has nothing to do with racism. ..."
"... British capitalism grew because of two things cheap coal that made using the new steam engine and the protected monopoly markets offered by the empire which also provided monopoly access to the resources of those countries. American capitalism grew up behind high tariff walls, ditto Chinese capitalism now. ..."
"... TTIP will be used by big capital both here in Europe and in the US to drive down the wages and working conditions of workers in Europe and the US, and that is why the EU is solely a bosses agenda and workers here in Britain have more to gain by leaving the EU, an EU that has crucified workers in Greece just so German bankers don't lose. ..."
"... Politicians in the U.S. are inherently corrupt, both figuratively and literally (they just hide it better as perks and campaign contributions). Politicians in the U.S. make promises, but ultimately it is just rhetoric and nothing ever gets delivered on. Once elected, they revert to the Status Quo of doing nothing – or they vote for the bills of the interest groups that supported them during the election. ..."
"... It seems noone wants to talk about anything other than vilifying Trump supporters because their vested interests are all about grind working people into the dust so the high end of town can make every more money. No wonder Trump is cutting through. The whole world has been watching our leaders sell us down the river in these deals. ..."
"... The working class tens of millions have the votes and if need be, the guns. Thank you, second amendment. Essentially they're presented with the prospect of their kids spending their working lives slaving at $10-$20 an hour, or to die trying to alter the future of that elite-orchestrated course of events. What would an American choose? ..."
"... All Clinton has to offer is more of the same lying and "free trade" deals, and subterfuge and killing. Trump says he's gonna step up, bring the jobs back to America, get the mass of people moving forward again, so Trumps is gonna win this thing. ..."
"... Free trade isn't free. It has cost millions of Americans their jobs, even their homes and hopes for the future. Both parties have taken American workers for granted even worse than the Democrats have taken Blacks for granted lately. ..."
"... What we need is a Labor party to represent those of US who have to work to earn a living, as opposed to those who were born wealthy, or gained their wealth through stock manipulation/dividends and fraud. It is the working people who actually create new wealth. Trump's bigotry does not bother white blue collar workers because they mostly agree and hate and fear Blacks. The Venn diagram of bigots, white laborers and the south overlap almost 100%. ..."
"... Taibbi in the latest Rolling Stone says the same thing. Taibbi went to listen to Trump's speeches. Trump pillories Big Pharma, unemployment and trade deals and Wall Street. He's less warlike than Clinton. ..."
"... So it is very possible Clinton will be hit from the LEFT by Trump. That is how bad the Democratis really are. ..."
"... And 'change' – I.e more globalism, means less and less job security: economic security slipping away at a unprecedented rate. Transnational interests basically rule America, not to mention the mainstream media, whose job it is to attack Trump. Many millions have seen through this facade. Democrat or Republican, the incestuous political establishment is being exposed like never before. ..."
"... Trump is revealing what other candidates refuse to admit: that they are owned before they even step foot into Washington. I mean - Clinton is Goldman and Sachs, TTIP, Monsanto approved! And this is who the Guardian are siding with? Go figure... ..."
"... I think his denouncing trade deals is what made the Republicans, (aka, Corporatist Party of which Hillary should clearly be a part of-but save for another day) go bonkers. They cannot control this guy and he's making sense in the trade department. It's not as if suddenly the Republican party has grown a set of morals. ..."
"... Because Sanders will support Hillary as he promised to do -- does that sound like a revolutionary? Bill Clinton invented NAFTA. Get it? ..."
"... They abandoned the working classes in favour of grabbing middle class votes and relied on working class voters continuing to support them, because they had "nowhere else to go". ..."
"... This reminded me of something I heard on NPR this weekend: Charles Evers, Medgar Evers' brother and a prominent civil rights activist since the 50's, is endorsing Trump. ..."
"... Interestingly you have raised issues that are all very complex -- and that is just the problem. We have become a society that promotes complexity and then does not want to discuss and analyze those complex issues, but wants to oversimplify and fight and make the "other side" be a devil. Are we all getting dumbed down to slogans and cliches? ..."
"... The working people that the party used to care about, Democrats figured, had nowhere else to go, in the famous Clinton-era expression. The party just didn't need to listen to them any longer. ..."
"... Frank offers insights that Clintonites can ignore at their peril. As the widow of a hardworking man who was twice the victim of "outsourcing" to Malaysia and India, and whose prolonged illness brought with it savings-decimating drug costs, I can well see how Trump's appeal goes beyond xenophobia and racism. ..."
"... Trump is saying that NAFTA and neo-liberalism have failed the American people. ..."
"... You could be describing Hillary and Bill the fraudulent guy who "feels your pain". Liars and in the pockets of bankers, that couple is not your friend. ..."
"... I don't see a true value to trade if it involves loss of jobs and lowered pay. I do see value in fair trade where we receive somewhat equal return ..."
"... The Guardian's incessant Trump bashing disguises, unfortunately, how similarly repugnant Cruz(particularly) and Rubio are. Clinton is better, not by far, and Sanders though wonderfully idealist and full of integrity, will be able to accomplish nothing with the Republicans controlling Congress. ..."
"... I'm living in Japan, where in the past decade they have taken in 11 refugees. That's not 11 million or even 11 thousand. I mean 11. ..."
"... And guess what, they are not racist. They have borders and they are not racist. I know this is a hard concept for progressives to get their heads around, but believe it or not it is possible. ..."
"... The Guardian's incessant Trump bashing disguises, unfortunately, how similarly repugnant Cruz(particularly) and Rubio are. Clinton is better, not by far, and Sanders though wonderfully idealist and full of integrity, will be able to accomplish nothing with the Republicans controlling Congress. ..."
...the Republican frontrunner is hammering home a powerful message about free trade and its victims
....because the working-class white people who make up the bulk of Trump's fan base show up in
amazing numbers for the candidate, filling stadiums and airport hangars, but their views, by and
large, do not appear in our prestige newspapers. On their opinion pages, these publications take
care to represent demographic categories of nearly every kind, but "blue-collar" is one they persistently
overlook. The views of working-class people are so foreign to that universe that when New York Times
columnist Nick Kristof wanted to "engage" a Trump supporter last week, he made one up, along with
this imaginary person's responses to his questions.
When members of the professional class wish to understand the working-class Other, they traditionally
consult experts on the subject. And when these authorities are asked to explain the Trump movement,
they always seem to zero in on one main accusation: bigotry. Only racism, they tell us, is capable
of powering a movement like Trump's, which is blowing through the inherited structure of the Republican
party like a tornado through a cluster of McMansions.
... ... ...
Yes, Donald Trump talked about trade. In fact, to judge by how much time he spent talking about
it, trade may be his single biggest concern – not white supremacy. Not even his plan to build a wall
along the Mexican border, the issue that first won him political fame. He did it again during the
debate on 3 March: asked about his
political excommunication by Mitt Romney, he chose to pivot and talk about ... trade.
It seems to obsess him: the destructive free-trade deals our leaders have made, the many companies
that have moved their production facilities to other lands, the phone calls he will make to those
companies' CEOs in order to threaten them with steep tariffs unless they move back to the US.
Trump embellished this vision with another favorite left-wing idea: under his leadership, the
government would "start competitive bidding in the drug industry." ("We don't competitively bid!"
he marveled – another true fact, a
legendary boondoggle brought to you by the George W Bush administration.) Trump extended the
critique to the military-industrial complex, describing how the government is forced to buy
lousy but expensive airplanes thanks to the power of industry lobbyists.
... ... ...
Trade is an issue that polarizes Americans by socio-economic status. To the professional class,
which encompasses the vast majority of our media figures, economists, Washington officials and Democratic
power brokers, what they call "free trade" is something so obviously good and noble it doesn't require
explanation or inquiry or even thought. Republican and Democratic leaders alike agree on this, and
no amount of facts can move them from their Econ 101 dream.
To the remaining 80 or 90% of America, trade means something very different. There's a video going
around on the internet these days that shows a room full of workers at a Carrier air conditioning
plant in Indiana being told by an officer of the company that the factory is being moved to Monterrey,
Mexico and that they're all going to lose their jobs.
As I watched it, I thought of all the arguments over trade that we've had in this country since
the early 1990s, all the sweet words from our economists about the scientifically proven benevolence
of free trade, all the ways in which our newspapers mock people who say that treaties like the North
Atlantic Free Trade Agreement allow companies to move jobs to Mexico.
Well, here is a video of a company moving its jobs to Mexico, courtesy of Nafta. This is what
it looks like. The Carrier executive talks in that familiar and highly professional HR language about
the need to "stay competitive" and "the extremely price-sensitive marketplace." A worker shouts "Fuck
you!" at the executive. The executive asks people to please be quiet so he can "share" his "information".
His information about all of them losing their jobs.
But there is another way to interpret the Trump phenomenon. A map of his support may coordinate
with racist Google searches, but it coordinates even better with deindustrialization and despair,
with the zones of economic misery that 30 years of Washington's free-market consensus have brought
the rest of America.
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It is worth noting that Trump is making a point of assailing that Indiana air conditioning company
from the video in his speeches. What this suggests is that he's telling a tale as much about economic
outrage as it is tale of racism on the march. Many of Trump's followers are bigots, no doubt, but
many more are probably excited by the prospect of a president who seems to mean it when he denounces
our trade agreements and promises to bring the hammer down on the CEO that fired you and wrecked
your town, unlike Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
Here is the most salient supporting fact: when people talk to white, working-class Trump supporters,
instead of simply imagining what they might say, they find that what most concerns these people is
the economy and their place in it. I am referring to a study just published by Working America, a
political-action auxiliary of the AFL-CIO, which interviewed some 1,600 white working-class voters
in the suburbs of Cleveland and Pittsburgh in December and January.
Support for Donald Trump, the group found, ran strong among these people, even among self-identified
Democrats, but not because they are all pining for a racist in the White House. Their favorite aspect
of Trump was his "attitude," the blunt and forthright way he talks. As far as issues are concerned,
"immigration" placed third among the matters such voters care about, far behind their number one
concern: "good jobs / the economy."
"People are much more frightened than they are bigoted," is how the findings were described to
me by Karen Nussbaum, the executive director of Working America. The survey "confirmed what we heard
all the time: people are fed up, people are hurting, they are very distressed about the fact that
their kids don't have a future" and that "there still hasn't been a recovery from the recession,
that every family still suffers from it in one way or another."
Tom Lewandowski, the president of the Northeast Indiana Central Labor Council in Fort Wayne, puts
it even more bluntly when I asked him about working-class Trump fans. "These people aren't racist,
not any more than anybody else is," he says of Trump supporters he knows. "When Trump talks about
trade, we think about the Clinton administration, first with Nafta and then with [Permanent Normal
Trade Relations] China, and here in Northeast Indiana, we hemorrhaged jobs."
"They look at that, and here's Trump talking about trade, in a ham-handed way, but at least he's
representing emotionally. We've had all the political establishment standing behind every trade deal,
and we endorsed some of these people, and then we've had to fight them to get them to represent us."
Now, let us stop and smell the perversity. Left parties the world over were founded to advance
the fortunes of working people. But our left party in America – one of our two monopoly parties –
chose long ago to turn its back on these people's concerns, making itself instead into the tribune
of the enlightened professional class, a "creative class" that makes innovative things like derivative
securities and smartphone apps. The working people that the party used to care about, Democrats figured,
had nowhere else to go, in the famous Clinton-era expression. The party just didn't need to listen
to them any longer.
What Lewandowski and Nussbaum are saying, then, should be obvious to anyone who's dipped a toe
outside the prosperous enclaves on the two coasts. Ill-considered trade deals and generous bank bailouts
and guaranteed profits for insurance companies but no recovery for average people, ever – these policies
have taken their toll. As Trump says, "we have rebuilt China and yet our country is falling apart.
Our infrastructure is falling apart. . . . Our airports are, like, Third World."
Trump's words articulate the populist backlash against [neo]liberalism that has been building
slowly for decades and may very well occupy the White House itself, whereupon the entire world will
be required to take seriously its demented ideas.
Yet still we cannot bring ourselves to look the thing in the eyes. We cannot admit that we
liberals bear some of the blame for its emergence, for the frustration of the working-class millions,
for their blighted cities and their downward spiraling lives. So much easier to scold them for their
twisted racist souls, to close our eyes to the obvious reality of which Trump_vs_deep_state is just a crude
and ugly expression: that neoliberalism has well and truly failed.
Below is a letter that General Jonathan Wainwright sent to Soldiers discharged from the military,
following their service in World War II. As our military downsizes and many choose to leave the
service, I think this letter reminds us of the charge to continue to reflect the values of our
individual services and be examples within our communities.
To: All Personnel being Discharged from the Army of the United States.
You are being discharged from the Army today- from your Army. It is your Army because your
skill, patriotism, labor, courage and devotion have been some of the factors which make it
great. You have been a member of the finest military team in history. You have accomplished
miracles in battle and supply. Your country is proud of you and you have every right to be
proud of yourselves.
You have seen, in the lands where you worked and fought and where many of your comrades
died, what happens when the people of a nation lose interest in their government. You have
seen what happens when they follow false leaders. You have seen what happens when a nation
accepts hate and intolerance.
We are all determined that what happened in Europe and in Asia must not happen to our country.
Back in civilian life you will find that your generation will be called upon to guide our country's
destiny. Opportunity for leadership is yours. The responsibility is yours. The nation which
depended on your courage and stamina to protect it from its enemies now expects you as individuals
to claim your right to leadership, a right you earned honorably and which is well deserved.
Start being a leader as soon as you put on your civilian clothes. If you see intolerance
and hate, speak out against them. Make your individual voices heard, not for selfish things,
but for honor and decency among men, for the rights of all people.
Remember too, that No American can afford to be disinterested in any part of his government,
whether it is county, city, state or nation.
Choose your leaders wisely- that is the way to keep ours the country for which you fought.
Make sure that those leaders are determined to maintain peace throughout the world. You know
what war is. You know that we must not have another. As individuals you can prevent it if you
give to the task which lies ahead the same spirit which you displayed in uniform.
Accept and trust the challenge which it carries. I know that the people of American are
counting on you. I know that you will not let them down.
Goodbye to each an every one of you and to each and every one of you, good luck!
J.M. WAINWRIGHT
General, U.S. Army
Commanding
Albert Matchett
Why Americans are supporting him begins to make sense. A lot like here in the UK, our politicians
have reduced amount of money that people have available to spent And can not understand why sales
turnovers keeps going down.
No money, No sale. Companies say made abroad equals higher profits but Not if the goods made
can not be sold, Because we have to many unemployed or minimum hours contracts or low income people.
matt88008
The only thing more ludicrous than voting for Donald Trump would be to vote for Hilary
Clinton. Whilst Trump is evidently crude, vulgar, bombastic, xenophobic, racist and misogynistic,
his manifest personality flaws pale into insignificance when compared to the the meglomaniacal,
prevaricating, misandristic, puff adder, who is likely to oppose him!
Clinton is the archetypal political parasite, who has spent a lifetime with her arrogant
snout wedged firmly in the public trough. Like Obama, Bush, et al, Clinton is just another elitist
Bilderberger sock puppet, a conniving conspirator in the venal kleptocracy, located in Washington
D.C, otherwise known as the U.S. federal government.
Trump at least is not in thrall to the system and thus, by default, can be perceived by
the average blue-collar American as being an outsider to the systemic corruption that pervades
the whole American political process. A horrible choice, but the lesser of two evils.
Trump was always a Democrat, before now and so were a lot of other Americans. America is watching
how the Democrat Party is destroying America. The race card is a low blow to Trump supporters.
Illegal immigration is a legitimate issue in the US. It has nothing to do with racism.
Protecting America from potential terrorists entering the county is a real issue. We can look
what happened in Paris and Cologne. These are concerns of the people of America and they want
protection and solutions. It has nothing to do with racism.
The biggest reason people support Trump is because they trust his financial aptitude. They
honestly feel he can bring America back to greatness.
I personally don't care for his personality and don't completely trust him but I may have to
vote for him, considering my other choices. As soon as Rubio and Kasich drop out, Cruz will take
off. Rubio, if he truly hates Trump, as he acts, may want to drop out sooner than later.
British capitalism grew because of two things cheap coal that made using the new steam engine
and the protected monopoly markets offered by the empire which also provided monopoly access to
the resources of those countries. American capitalism grew up behind high tariff walls, ditto
Chinese capitalism now.
British capitalism went into relative decline from the mid nineteenth century because of the
opening up those monopoly markets to overseas competition.
TTIP will be used by big capital both here in Europe and in the US to drive down the wages
and working conditions of workers in Europe and the US, and that is why the EU is solely a bosses
agenda and workers here in Britain have more to gain by leaving the EU, an EU that has crucified
workers in Greece just so German bankers don't lose.
If the soft left and that includes much of what passes for the left in the PLP continues to
pander to the interests of big capital then the working classes will continue to be alienated
from the Labour party.
To the middle class soft left choose a side, there are only two, labour or capital
. If you choose capital you personally maybe ok for a while, but capitalist expansion is now
threatening the environment and with it food and water security. Capitalism rests on continuous
expansion but is now pushing against natural limits and when capitalist states come under too
many restrictions to their expansion you have the perfect recipe for war and in 2016 a war between
the largest capitalist states has the risk of going nuclear.
I'll just bet that if you were to look a little closer, you might find that there are a lot of
different races voting for Trump, so stop trying to brand him as racist. That is just another
trick the opposition wants you to fall for. The corporations are fearful that they might have
to actually give a high paying job to an American, tsk, tsk.
It's ironic that a billionaire is leading the inter-class revolution.
I don't completely buy into the premise (last paragraph) that most liberals are well educated
and well off and that it's liberals -- speaking of the electorate -- that have turned their backs
on blue collar workers. There are many working-class Democrats -- that's part of Bernie Sanders'
base, the youth of America is very liberal and very under-employed, non-Evangelical Black people
tend to vote liberal/Democrat -- at least according to the GOP, the Clinton campaign & the polls
-- so to state that it's liberals who've turned their backs on the blue collar class is folly.
Now, the statement that liberal politicians have turned their backs on their working-class
base, as well as the working-class Republicans, is very true, and that's a result of too much
money in politics. Pandering to lobbyists while ignoring the electorate.
What I don't understand about the liberal electorate is why so freakin' many low-income voters
choose Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders. Why so many, supposed, educated people (at least smarter
than the rank-&-file Republican voter, goes the legend) would vote against their best interests
and support a lying, flip-flopping, war-mongering, say-anything-get-elected, establishment crony
is beyond comprehension.
If it comes down to it, at least with Trump you know where his money came from. How, exactly,
is it that the Clintons went from being broke as hell after leaving the White House to having
a net worth of over $111M in just 16 years? Since Slick Willy left office, except for the past
four years, hasn't Hillary always been a government employee? Except, you know, when she's campaigning.
She's worth $35M, herself, is there that much money in selling books? If not, then she got paid
-- bribed -- quite handsomely to speak at private functions.
Both Clintons exemplify Democratic politicians who've utterly ignored the working class while
pander to and serving only the executive class of America. Ronald Reagan would be proud of both
Bill and Hillary Clinton's devotion to the 'trickle down' theory of economics.
One thing that's important to consider, too, is how voting for politicians who claim to have
your back on wedge issues is really shooting yourself in the foot economically. Wedge issues are
the crumbs the Establishment allows the electorate to feast on while they (the Establishment)
rob the Treasury blind, have their crimes decriminalized, start wars to profiteer from, write
policy, off-shore jobs, suppress wedges, evade taxes, degrade the environment, monopolize markets,
bankrupt emerging markets, and generally hoard all the economic growth for themselves.
Friends don't let friends vote for neo-liberalists!
Politicians in the U.S. are inherently corrupt, both figuratively and literally (they just
hide it better as perks and campaign contributions). Politicians in the U.S. make promises, but
ultimately it is just rhetoric and nothing ever gets delivered on. Once elected, they revert to
the Status Quo of doing nothing – or they vote for the bills of the interest groups that supported
them during the election.
As far as racism is concerned, why is it racist to want to send undocumented people out of
a country that they entered illegally in the first place?
This seems to be the general accusation levied against Europeans and Americans (i.e. whites).
We seem to have the obligation to take in refugees from all over the world otherwise we are seen
as racists. Yet, I see no effort by the Gulf States, Saudi or any other Muslim country taking
some of the Syrians. This would make a lot more sense since they have the commonality of language,
religion and culture. But nobody deems them to be racists.
What a brilliant article. It seems noone wants to talk about anything other than vilifying
Trump supporters because their vested interests are all about grind working people into the dust
so the high end of town can make every more money. No wonder Trump is cutting through. The whole
world has been watching our leaders sell us down the river in these deals.
This is probably the first article I've read that gives a clear-eyed account of exactly why Trump
is gaining so much support. More of this and less of the sneery pieces would be much more enlightening
to those of us who have been baffled by his continuing success.
People had the opportunity to elect Ross Perot who focused on Trade without using racism, back
in 92. Perot, also a billionaire predicted all the catastrophic impact due to free trade and kept
warning everybody. The majority decided otherwise...
Correct! Even Obama won't use the words "working class"...they are now ' dirty words'.. The working
class are fed up being ignored, patronized, lied to, and manipulated with words by politicians
in both the US and Australia.
Politicians think that all they have to do is 'look good' and say the right thing. Then wait
a bit, change the words and continue to manipulate things from backrooms.
Trump doesn't do that-and that is why people are voting for him...
However, if he got into power he would have to do exactly the same as the others to survive
The working class tens of millions have the votes and if need be, the guns. Thank you, second
amendment. Essentially they're presented with the prospect of their kids spending their working
lives slaving at $10-$20 an hour, or to die trying to alter the future of that elite-orchestrated
course of events. What would an American choose?
The Guardian openly abuses blue collar workers on a daily basis and is at a loss to understand
why they can't connect with them. This is another non-story.
All Clinton has to offer is more of the same lying and "free trade" deals, and subterfuge
and killing. Trump says he's gonna step up, bring the jobs back to America, get the mass of people
moving forward again, so Trumps is gonna win this thing.
Almost all of Trump's proposals, as well as those of other candidates, cannot be implemented without
the concurrence of Congress. Tariffs must pass both houses, while ratification of treaties requires
a 2/3 supermajority in the Senate. A question for each of the so-called debates ought to concern
how each candidate intends to convince congress to pass his/her most contentious proposal.
Trump is awful but he taps into passion, fear and real concerns. If these corrupt phony political
parties can't help real people then this is what we get -- Trump, Hillary Clinton and fake revolutionary
Bernie Sanders who promised to support the evil Clinton when she wins the rigged nomination. Trump
is no worse than the other fake chumps pretending to be our friends.
"We liberals..." You disgust me. While you defend Trumps supporters as not entirely consumed with
racism as much as fear, as people who actually may have interests in the economy and in trade,
as workers who, just maybe, SHOULD have the right to work in an airconditioning factory that ISN'T
in Mexico, or China, or Indonesia.... while you defend these not-really-not-totally-racist working
class people you excoriate them and continue on your merry little way trashing Trump. Staying
safe, staying disgusted with the man, and walking the Party Line like a good little establishment
"liberal." The true liberal doesn't exist anymore. Your article sucks. If anyone other than Crass
Mr. Trump gets elected to the presidency of this country we will continue down the same road of
useless wars for the MIC and Banking Scum, the 1%, whatever you wish to call them and it will
be more painful than it is now. Because what's really important is the correct opinion on everything.
Not that things change radically and that the working classes of all colors and creeds begin to
see some fair shakes, which would happen under Trump.
I happen to know someone who worked in his company, who didn't even know the man but was on his
payroll. It got around to him that this employee had exhausted his health benefits with the company
he chose (he had leukemia) and he was hitting up other employees for money to pay his cancer care
bills so he could continue treatment. Trump got word of this and didn't even know this person
only that he worked for his company - and sent word to the hospital that he guaranteed payment
and that the hospital should take care of him as well as possible and he would be responsible.
He told the family to keep it a secret, but of course a few people got wind of it. THAT is exactly
the opposite of what Mr. Clean Romney did letting an employee drop dead for lack of health insurance,
but he'd be SUCH a better president, sooooo caring. Trump is the only one who isn't bought and
paid for on the Hill of Vipers and that's what attracts us racist, white, gun-toting, immigrant-hating,
blah blah blah fill-in-the-blanks-you-liberal-twit people towards Trump. And those pulling out
all the stops to "Stop Trump" are just making it more clear than ever that the presidency is and
has been hand picked and cleared as willing to dance on the puppeteer's strings and do the insiders
and oligarchy's bidding.
Thomas Frank is often right, but not this time. If working class white Americans of a certain
type wanted to support a candidate who is against all this neo-liberal free-trade nonsense, they
could easily support Bernie Sanders. He's an outsider like Trump as far as the American political
class goes, but has actually done good things as a Senator and stands up for workers. It's interesting
that it's not just NAFTA and job losses that these Trump supporters are interested in, it's the
xenophobia as well, the anti-Muslim hysteria, and the thuggish behavior of beating down protesters
at the Trump rallies. Frank just can't blame the media class for all that...it exists and happens
and Trump fans the flames. Trump could care LESS about working class Americans, he cares ONLY
about himself - the classic demagogue.
Free trade has undoubted winners and losers, but historically attempts to 'protect' or 'control'
a nation's economy have ended badly in stagnation and political authoritarianism. Obvious case
in point, the Soviet Union in the latter half of the twentieth century. Conversely opening up
the economy to competition seems to do exactly the opposite, eg the Chinese 'economic miracle'.
A controlled economy might count as 'left-wing' but its the kind of example of Socialism gone
bad that socialists feel embarrassed about.
As for racism, its not hard to pick up the racist signals from Trump, genuine or not, so anyone
supporting him has a nose-holding ability which those with moral sensibilities will find difficult.
Perhaps 'he/she's a racist but ...' is not such an uncommon stance, yet when it comes to the head
of state, its that much harder to turn a blind eye. Of course lots of Germans did it very successfully
in the 1930s and 40s.
Bullshit. Europe is doing better than both America and China. Free trade plus corruption does
not equal prosperity. A little less "free trade" and a little less corrupt elites goes a long
way towards prosperity.
Free trade isn't free. It has cost millions of Americans their jobs, even their homes and
hopes for the future. Both parties have taken American workers for granted even worse than the
Democrats have taken Blacks for granted lately.
The Republicans have kept most blue collar laborers in their party because they appeal to their
bigotry and their religious snobbery. Republicans have made few offers to even attempts to help
US because they don't have to and they don't want to.
Current Democrats are almost as bad, but at least they have a past track record of helping
create a vibrant middle class.
What we need is a Labor party to represent those of US who have to work to earn a living,
as opposed to those who were born wealthy, or gained their wealth through stock manipulation/dividends
and fraud. It is the working people who actually create new wealth. Trump's bigotry does not bother
white blue collar workers because they mostly agree and hate and fear Blacks. The Venn diagram
of bigots, white laborers and the south overlap almost 100%.
I believe the KISS principle is popular in America, is that why things go so well for Trump?
Have I applied the KISS principle Keep It Simple, Stupid. Don't be afraid to ask questions,
relax yourself and all else by calling yourself a simple, stupid, snail; I'll try to get there,
but you'll have to be pedagogic and it will take enough time, preferably I want to sleep a night
on the matter (sound judgement depends (but not only necessary but not sufficient) on considering
and weighing the significantly complete set of related aspects, and this complete set may take
considerable time to bring to the table another tip; in strong or new intellectual or emotional
states keep calm and imagine filter words with your palms covering your ears). Prestige and vanity
of own relative worth can be very expensive. If you do a wrong, more or less, try to neutralize
the wrong, rather than have the prestigious attitude that direct or implied admittance of wrong
is hurting your vain surface, since with accountability and a degree of transparency will ultimately
have consequences of the wrong, and by not swiftly correcting them you are accountable for this
reluctance too.
Part of the KISS principle is to remind you of assumptions, explicit and emotional, as well
as remind you of what's hidden. To be aware of what you do not know is a way of making emotional
assumptions explicit which help in explicit risk assessment. An emotional assumption such as "everything
feels fine" can turn into "I assume there is no hidden nearby hostile crocodiles in the Zambezi
river we're about to pass into."
So Trump's success is all about trade imbalance and its negative impact on the American working
class, which the author perceives as predominantly white. This is far from the truth: many if
not most workers in agricultural, custodial, fast food, landscaping, road maintenance...are Africa-American,
Hispanics, or undocumented workers.
Does Trump also speak for those people who work in jobs that have been turned down by the white
working class? Would he stand up for them by, for example, calling to raise the minimum wage to
$14 an hour?
Taibbi in the latest Rolling Stone says the same thing. Taibbi went to listen to Trump's speeches.
Trump pillories Big Pharma, unemployment and trade deals and Wall Street. He's less warlike than
Clinton.
So it is very possible Clinton will be hit from the LEFT by Trump. That is how bad the
Democratis really are.
And blah blah blah... Actually, Trump's is a very optimistic picture of the USA.
And 'change' – I.e more globalism, means less and less job security: economic security
slipping away at a unprecedented rate. Transnational interests basically rule America, not to
mention the mainstream media, whose job it is to attack Trump. Many millions have seen through
this facade. Democrat or Republican, the incestuous political establishment is being exposed like
never before.
Trump is revealing what other candidates refuse to admit: that they are owned before they
even step foot into Washington. I mean - Clinton is Goldman and Sachs, TTIP, Monsanto approved!
And this is who the Guardian are siding with? Go figure...
I think his denouncing trade deals is what made the Republicans, (aka, Corporatist Party of
which Hillary should clearly be a part of-but save for another day) go bonkers. They cannot control
this guy and he's making sense in the trade department. It's not as if suddenly the Republican
party has grown a set of morals.
The question of course is how serious is he? Is he true or co-opting Bernie's message? One
thing's for certain, he's against increasing the minimum wage.
"But, taxes too high, wages too high, we're not going to be able to compete against the
world. I hate to say it, but we have to leave it the way it is," he told debate moderator Neil
Cavuto when asked if he would raise wages. "People have to go out, they have to work really
hard and have to get into that upper stratum. But we cannot do this if we are going to compete
with the rest of the world. We just can't do it." Politico, 11/12/15
Brilliant, brilliant column! I will add, because no one else calls him on these things, that Obama
is still pushing TPP, has increased the number of H1B Visa holders in the US, and is now giving
the spouses of H1B Visa holders the right to work, meaning they, too can take a job that might
have gone to a US citizen, and Obama has essentially cut the retirement benefits working class
seniors have paid for all their lives. Yet no one calls him on these things, except Trump.
Where did this general theme of insulting voters come from? Calling Trump supporters racists idiots
is no way to win their votes. You can not win an election by being an insulting troller.
The same people who attack Trump engage in even worse behavior. No wonder Trump will win the
election.
What is your take on free trade? What is your take on protectionism? Well the real question
is "What is best for our country?" Work, services and manufacturing of goods, is a dynamic thing.
At some times there is lots of work for most people, at some times hardly any work is available.
The amount of work available is a factor of 3 things, 1. Initiatives to work. 2. Financing
of these initiatives. 3 Law and order. Either individuals start their own business through an
initiative and if people with money believe in that individual and initiative they get financed
as long as there is law and order so that the financing gives a return of investment. Or existing
business start their own initiatives with their own money, investors' money or loans.
When people sit on their money out of fear, lack of quality initiatives or qualified abilities,
the economy hurts and people are going to be out of work. It works like a downward spiral, when
people have no income, they cannot buy services and goods, and the business can therefore not
sell, more people lose their jobs, less people buy and so on.
On the other hand, if people are hired, more people get money and purchase things from businesses,
demand increases, businesses hire more people to meet demand, more people get money, and purchase
more things from the businesses. The economy goes in a thriving upward spiral.
What about trade between nations? Well as you have understood, there is a dynamic component
of the economy of a nation. There is an infrastructure, not only roads, electric grids, water
and sewage piping, but a business infrastructure. Institutions such as schools, universities,
private companies providing education to train the workforce. A network of companies that provide
tools, knowledge, material, so that a boss simply can purchase a turn-key solution from the market,
after minimal organising, after the financing has been made. These turn-key solutions to provide
goods and services to the market and thus make money for the initiative makers and provide both
jobs and functions as an equalising of resources. Equalising if the initiative makers take patents,
keep business secrets and have abilities that are more competitive than the rich AND do not sell
their money-making opportunity to the rich but fight in the market.
In other words, if you sit on a good initiative and notice you are expanding in the market
(and thus other players are declining in their market share, including the rich), don't be stupid.
Now a hostile nation to your nation, knows about this infrastructure. This infrastructure takes
time to build up. One way to fight nations is to destroy their infrastructure by outcompeting
them with low prices. All businesses in a sector is out-sourced. But the thing is, if a nation
tries to do this, and if you have floating currencies (and thus you have your own currency, which
is very important to a nation), your own currency will fall in relative value. (e.g. businesses
in China gets dollars for sold goods to USA, sell them (the dollars they got) and buy yuan (the
currency in China), this increased sell pressure will cause the dollar to drop in value) If you
import more than you export. Therefore your nation's business will have an easier time to sell
and export. Thus there is a natural balance.
But, if your nation borrows money from the hostile nation, then this correction of currency
value will not occur. The difference in export and import will be balanced by borrowing money
and the currency value will stay the same.
Thus all your manufacturing businesses and thus the infrastructure can be destroyed within
a nation because of imports are more than exports and the nation borrows money.
Then when the nation is weak and dependent on the industry of the hostile nation a decisive
stab in can occur and your nation will be destroyed and taken over by the hostile nation.
Free trade naturally includes the purchasing of land and property. Thus while we exchange perishable
goods for hard land and property, there is a slow over taking of the nation's long term resources,
all masked off under the parole of free trade. Like a drug addict we crave for the easy way out
buying cheap perishable goods while the land is taken over by foreign owners protected by our
own ownership laws. The only way out of this is replacing free trade with regulated trade. In
our nation's own interest.
Thus free trade can be very destructive. It really is a wolf in sheep's clothing.
Trump is a disruptor -- and this moribund political economic system deserves disruption. The feeble
Democrats could only come up with Sanders (who cringingly promised to support Hillary once she
overwhelms him in the rigged system) is not in the same class. Bigoted clown in some ways he expresses
the anger millions feel. Get used to it.
Im sorry. No matter how smart you like to appear when you commenting on the Guardian after saying
things like "Trump is far and away the smartest, brainiest, most intelligent candidate running
on either side" how can anyone take your views serious?
Yeah maybe not all voters are racists. Sure. But most of them still are. Most Trump voters
are also extremely uneducated, ignorant and filled with right wing media false fact anger. "To
make America great again" I have never laughed so hard in my life before. America isn't in bad
shape right now. There are always problems but building a wall (which is hysterical) to save us
from immigrants for example is just plain crazy.
Trump of course inserts real issues like Veterans. Trade. Ok. Its easy to say one thing but
when you look at his past, he's ruined various businesses and is currently under investigation
for fraud.
To say that that DT is smart is crazy. The guy cannot articulate anything to save his life
and when you look at how protesters get (mis)handled at his rallies how can you even come on here
and say the things you do. YOu should be ashamed of yourself. But sure have a President that's
ignoring Climate change and you will see where Florida will be in a few years. Ironically they
vote for Trump so the joke in the end will be on them.
This article may have some good points but still, Donald Trump is nothing more but
an opportunist. He doesn't really give a shit about you, the little white class. He's not intelligent
or even capable to LEAD a country like ours. Europe is laughing at us already. The circus was
fun for a while but I think its time to get realistic and stop this monkey show for good.
Trump/Cruz are monsters who have plans for the take-over of the US. Trump will be like his friend
Carl Icahn. He will take all he can in profit. Sell off parts cheap off-shore. Ignore the ex-workers
living under a bridge. Cruz the Domionionist Evangelical will say Armageddon is in the Bible as
he creates it in the Middle East. Neither man should be running for President, but the system
has been captured by the likes of Rupert Murdoch who is drilling for oil in Syria with his friends
Cheney and the Rothschilds. The Koch Brothers Father set up the John Birch Society. Jeb Bush from
a family of many generations who supported Hitler too. We are seeing the bad karma of the West
in bright lights including the poor whites who thought being a white male meant something. They
flock to any help they think they can get from the master-con-man Trump or the Bible man Cruz.
Yes. The US was systematically gutted by people like Romney and friends who made fortunes for
themselves. One of Trump's best friends, Carl Icahn, the hostile take-over artist, knows exactly
how the game is run. It begins by doing and saying anything to get control. Americans are now
chum for the sharks and they know it. Following a cheap imitation of Hitler is not the answer.
Nor is the Evangelical Armageddon Cruz promised his Father.
What this article fails to understand is that racism was always an essential feature of Reaganomics.
Reagan told the mostly poorer white voters of the south and midwest to vote tax cuts for the 1%
on the theory this would increase general prosperity. When that prosperity failed to materialize,
the Republicans always blamed minorities: welfare queens, mexican rapists, etc. Racism was essentially
a feature of their economic model.
Now look at Trump's economic model. It's a neoliberal's dream. He doesn't have a meaningful
critique of the system - that's Bernie Sanders. Instead, Trump picks fights with the Chinese and
Mexicans, to further stoke the racism of his base under the guise of an economic critique. That's
just more of the same. It's what Republicans have been doing for three decades.
The only way in which any of this is new is that Trump fronts the racism instead of hiding
it. That has less to do with Trump than with the slightly deranged mindset of white Republicans
after 7 years of a black President. You think it's a coincidence these people are lining up for
King Birther?
Sorry, Thomas Frank - this is all about race. There are many flavors of neoliberal critique;
Trump has chosen the most flagrantly racist one. His entire appeal begins and largely ends with
race. It's the RACISM, stupid. That and little else.
You don't know what you are talking about. You are the one who is stupid. Obama is pushing bills
that destroy US jobs. Maybe you don't depend on a paycheck to live, but millions of people do.
Too bad you are so removed from reality that you can't empathize.
'Neoliberalism' is a tired cliche , a revanchist term designed to help pseudo-intellectual millenials
sound and feel quasi-intelligent about themselves as they grope, blindly towards a worldview they
feel safe about endorsing.
One must also look at the anti-Trump brigade to find many of his audience. Below in no particular
order are major reasons why he has millions of supporters.
The Anti-Trump Brigade
GOP
Tea Party
Politicians, elected officials in DC all parties.
DC media from TV to internet
Romney, Gingrich, Scarborough, Beck and other assorted losers.
One thing in common they all have very high negatives, particularly the politicians and media
outlets.
Yes! I got on the Trump train after seeing Fox News CEO Ailes' horrible press release insulting
Trump the day before Fox News was to moderate a GOP debate.
The lack of journalistic ethics was so egregious... and then when not one other media outlet
called Fox on their bullshit, not even NPR... I said hey, it is essential to democracy to treat
candidates fairly. they are not treating him fairly! The media hates democracy!?
Good article focusing in on what should really concern us - trade. In particular our inability
to make goods rather than provide services. This is one of the reasons for the slide in lower
middle class lifestyles which is fueling support for Trump
Protectionism can be very destructive. Japan forced Detroit to improve the quality of its cars.
Before Toyota and Honda did it, why would GM and Ford want to make a car that lasted 200,000 miles?
Cheap foreign labor was only one of the reasons for the decline of US manufacturing.
Redonfire,
When I tell one of my sons that globalisation has shafted the european working an d middle class,
he says" yes, but what about its creation of a Chinese and Indian middle class"
I reply that I care as much about them as they care about me.
And "service industry" jobs are also being offshored to call centers and the like. When was the
last time you heard a US accent when you called tech support or any other call center?
because ultimately, I feel based upon listening to my family members who are working class white
folks, they feel that Bernie is a communist, not a socialist, and they don't trust that (or likely
really know the difference). So unfortunately for Da Bern, he will never be able to attract most
of these votes, even though he and The great Hair have (in general) some of the same policies.
The real question is why will the left not turn to the Hair, and get 70% of what they want, having
to listen to bragado and Trump_vs_deep_states as the trade off?
He wants to deport millions upon millions of undocumented immigrants.
I have to say this doesn't seem wildly outrageous - many of them will be working in the black
economy, and helping to further undercut wages in the US. Actually seems quite reasonable. Trump
is still a buffoon, but why throw this at him, when there is soo much else to go at?
The weakness of Labour under Blair has caused the same problems. They abandoned the working
classes in favour of grabbing middle class votes and relied on working class voters continuing
to support them, because they had "nowhere else to go". It worked for "New Labour" for a
while, then us peasants got fed up with the Hampstead Set running the show for their own class
and we started voting UKIP or, as in my case, despairing and not voting at all.
Thank God Jeremy Corbyn has put Labour back on track & pushed the snobbish elements of the
people's party back to the margins!
This reminded me of something I heard on NPR this weekend: Charles Evers, Medgar Evers' brother
and a prominent civil rights activist since the 50's, is endorsing Trump.
The reason is because the media and most of the people are involved in character debates about
him and that's just a game. You support "your guy" and try to denigrate "their guy". It's a game
of insults and no-one ever won an argument by insulting their opponent.
Trump policies show that he wants a trade war, that he wants to build a wall, which will do
little or nothing, at great cost, and he wants to exclude Muslims, when Americans have experienced
more attacks from Christian Terrorists, and American civilians are still 25 times more likely
to die falling out of bed than in a terrorist attack.
He wants to abolish corporate tax entirely, without saying where the money will come from
instead (that means you).
He wants to cut spending on education. But hasn't said if that's because he wants someone
else to do the job, or because he wants a stupid electorate. The Federal Government spends
1.3% of it's budget on education - how much can actually be saved and doesn't the 4.3% spent
on national debt interest indicate somewhere where more can be saved ?
He opposes democracy in the Middle East & prefers the stability of dictators (despite the
chaos that existed in the US, right after independence).
He wants more sanctions on Iran - proving his detachment from reality. The Iran nuclear
deal was pragmatic. It was agreed when we knew Russia, China and India were preparing to lift
their own sanctions, leaving the world with no real leverage to get a better deal.
He supports gun rights, saying they save lives, even though more people die from accidental
shootings, than are saved when used defensively. I am a gun owner in favor of more gun control,
because I want to see the balance shifted to give law-abiding citizens a greater advantage
over criminals. (at this point, the gun nuts jump in saying "criminals don't obey the law".
Yes they do when in jail. If we abolished any law that was ever broken....we would have NO
LAWS).
He wants fewer vaccinations for children, to avoid the (discredited) problems with autism.
He wants a more isolationist diplomatic approach & more military.
He focuses on the criminal activity of illegal aliens, even though crime rates are lower
in their communities than in the general population.
He doesn't want the minimum wage raised, he wants more minimum wage jobs - even though
people on minimum wage often require state and federal financial assistance, just to live.
Interestingly you have raised issues that are all very complex -- and that is just the problem.
We have become a society that promotes complexity and then does not want to discuss and analyze
those complex issues, but wants to oversimplify and fight and make the "other side" be a devil.
Are we all getting dumbed down to slogans and cliches?
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and who signed the job-crushing NAFTA legislation that allowed companies to move jobs offshore?
Bill Clinton........ the Republican in Democrat clothing.
The working people that the party used to care about, Democrats figured, had nowhere
else to go, in the famous Clinton-era expression. The party just didn't need to listen to them
any longer.
"Neo-Liberalism" was given an impetus push with the waning days of the Carter administration when
de-regulation became a policy.....escalated tremendously during Reagan and the rest is history......participated
in by both major US political parties.
They never looked back and never looked deep into the consequences for the average folk. Famously
said, "You can't put the toothpaste back into the tube", applies to global trade also. The toothpaste
is out of the tube. Any real change will be regressive, brutal and probably bring about more wars
around the globe.
What has to change and can is the political attitude of the upcoming political leaders and
the publics willingness to focus more on what a, "progressive" society should be.
To totally eliminate the abject greed inherent in the "free economies" (an oxymoron if ever) that
is crushing most of the working classes around the world under "global free trade (agreements)"
will be impossible.
A re-focus on what is meant by the "commons" would help enormously. And an explanation that
would appeal to the common folk by pointing out the natural opportunities to all of us (with the
exception of the true elites) by developed intellectuals and common folk leaders would also benefit
all.
By the "commons" I mean:
General benefit to most common working class people which would include the "class" definition
of "middle classes"....which are in too many cases floundering in the current economic climate.
Universal health care.
An expansion of production "co-ops".
Universal education through at least 2-4 years of "college".
A general overhaul of our Military/Industrial/Intelligence etc./Complex.
A re-allocation of our collected tax priorities (applies to the above).
A "commons" focus on a total rebuilding of our rusted, commercially destroyed environments
all across this country (and across the world).
Capitalism is a game.
There needs to be a firewall between the free flows of rabid global capital and the true needs
of a progressive society.
The game of capitalism needs rules and referees to back up those rules.
There has to be political/public will to back up those rules and referees with force of law.
We need a total new vision for the globe.
Without it we will succumb to total social/economic chaos.
We here in the US have no true progressive vision exhibited by any candidate.
Bernie Sanders comes close but no cigar.
Hillary C. is trying to exert the vision of seeking the presidency as a kind of, "family business."
Trump is appealing to many who have been trashed by globalization.......
Continuous warfare is not a foreign policy. Greed and narcissism is not a national one. We
continue to fail in history lessons.
As I would expect, Thomas (The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule; What's the Matter With Kansas?)
Frank offers insights that Clintonites can ignore at their peril. As the widow of a hardworking
man who was twice the victim of "outsourcing" to Malaysia and India, and whose prolonged illness
brought with it savings-decimating drug costs, I can well see how Trump's appeal goes beyond xenophobia
and racism.
Everybody knows that Trump sends jobs overseas and employs illegals, even his devotees. This destroys
Frank's argument that people adore Trump because he sympathizes with their pain and actively wants
to help them.
Frank did not write that "people adore Trump because he sympathizes with their pain and actively
wants to help them." As Tom Lewandowski, the president of the Northeast Indiana Central Labor
Council in Fort Wayne, said, "We've had all the political establishment standing behind every
trade deal, and we endorsed some of these people, and then we've had to fight them to get them
to represent us."
Ill-considered trade deals (NAFTA ended a million jobs) and generous bank
bailouts and guaranteed profits for insurance companies but no recovery for average people, ever
– these policies have taken their toll.
Trump is saying that NAFTA and neo-liberalism have failed the American people.
You could be describing Hillary and Bill the fraudulent guy who "feels your pain". Liars and
in the pockets of bankers, that couple is not your friend.
Frank's argument is on what his followers believe to be true. Frank admits that their beliefs
may be naive. He is writing on the reasons for Trump's popularity.
Beyond who or what i vote for, It is nice to see a news article focusing on issues and platforms
instead of one of the many attacks or other issues seperating politics from legislation. I want
news on candidates positions, ideas, plans. This circus of he said she said and the other junk
used to sway votes or up ratings is beyond dumb.
Free trade is like all other good ideas, it only works if it is kept in balance.
Understanding the internal structure of the Atom is a good idea. Proliferating Hydrogen bombs,
the same idea taken way too far..
And as for bad human ideas, well just the worst thing on the planet.
People support Trump and the very different Corbyn because they can see that that our current
version of Free trade is hopelessly inefficient and screws everybody except the very rich.
They care about power. Progressives don't give a sod about the minorities or supposedly oppressed
groups they bang on about. They want power and they are getting lots of it. When the West burns,
those progressives who acquired enough power will be safe inside their walled fortresses with
their bodyguards.
Its' a sad truth that corporations have used trade deals to increase profits by shipping jobs
to areas where pay is sometimes 1/10 of pay in US. Sanders is the only other politician voicing
concern. In fact Sanders is responsible for the stall on the next trade deal with China and Japan.
Japan and China uses devaluation s a trade barrier and World Trade does nothing. we are constrained
in our ability to devalue our currency because of the effect on the stock market. many Americans
rely on money invested into stocks and bonds.
I don't see a true value to trade if it involves loss of jobs and lowered pay. I do see
value in fair trade where we receive somewhat equal return , like 60/40, like in China and
Japan where the return is more like 80 for them 20 for us.
Yes, Trump does talk about jobs/economy but let us not forget that the Third Reich also promised
to end runaway inflation and unemployment. To a large extent, they did low unemployment levels.
However, racism was an important galvanizing factor.
In the Middle Ages, racism was a galvanizing factor in the Crusades. Muslims dominated Mediterranean
trade and stop it, European monarchy used racism against Moors/Saracens/Turks to garner support
against the Muslims at that time.
So, for history,s sake, let,s just call a spade a spade..........Trump is racist and so are
his supporters (among other things).
While I'm no fan of big corporations or NAFTA (which was negotiated by Bush #1 and Brian Mulroney,
both conservatives), no one seems to be talking about the other side of the equation - demand.
Perhaps jobs are going to Mexico, China etc. in part because consumers won't pay the cost of a
product manufactured in rich nations. Small example - a big outdoors co-op here in Canada used
to sell paniers and other bike bags made by a company in Canada. Consumers would not buy them
because they cost more, so the firm closed down and that co-op's bike equipment now comes from
Viet Nam.
If Trump forces Apple or Ford to return jobs to the US, will the products they make
be too expensive for the consumers? If a tariff wall goes up around the US, will the notoriously
frugal American shoppers start to get annoyed because, while they have t-shirt factories in wherever
state, the products they want cost more than what they want (or can) pay for?
I don't have any special insight into the effects on consumer prices of tariffs, but I do think
it's at least prudent to include that in the discussion before starting a trade war.
Hilarious.. talk about "I love the uneducated!" Yeah because everything he rants about with free
trade he has benefited from.. let us not forget MADE IN CHINA Trump suits.
The Guardian's incessant Trump bashing disguises, unfortunately, how similarly repugnant Cruz(particularly)
and Rubio are. Clinton is better, not by far, and Sanders though wonderfully idealist and full
of integrity, will be able to accomplish nothing with the Republicans controlling Congress.
I'm living in Japan, where in the past decade they have taken in 11 refugees. That's not 11
million or even 11 thousand. I mean 11.
Progressives may be surprised to hear that Japan is a wonderful country, not only free from
imported terrorism but also mind-boggling safe. I mean "leave your laptop on the street all day
and it won't get stolen" safe. They also have cool anime and Pokemon and toilets which are like
the Space Shuttle.
And guess what, they are not racist. They have borders and they are not racist. I know
this is a hard concept for progressives to get their heads around, but believe it or not it is
possible.
By the way, they think Europeans are absolute INSANE to let in these touchy-feely economic
migrants. They're right, and Europe is going to pay one hell of a pric
Neil24
The Guardian's incessant Trump bashing disguises, unfortunately, how similarly repugnant
Cruz(particularly) and Rubio are. Clinton is better, not by far, and Sanders though wonderfully
idealist and full of integrity, will be able to accomplish nothing with the Republicans controlling
Congress.
FBI officials failed to aggressively question Hillary Clinton about her intentions in setting up a private email system, Rep.
Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) claimed this week, exposing a potential key vulnerability in the bureau's investigation.
"I didn't see that many questions on that issue," Gowdy told Fox News's "The Kelly File" on Wednesday evening.
The detail could be crucial for Republican critics of the FBI's decision not to recommend charges be filed against the former
secretary of State for mishandling classified information.
... ... ...
"I looked to see what witnesses were questioned on the issue of intent, including her," he said on Fox News. "I didn't see that
many questions on that issue."
House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz(R-Utah) has called for the FBI to create unclassified versions of the Clinton
case file that it gave to Congress, so that the material can be released publicly. Gowdy reiterated the call on Fox News.
"There's no reason in the world you could not and should not be able to look at the same witness interviews that I had to go to
Washington and look at in a classified setting," he said.
"... So "Carthago delenda est" is the official policy. With heavy brainwashing from MSM to justify such a course as well as the demonization of Putin. ..."
"... The USA actions in Ukraine speak for themselves. Any reasonable researcher after this "color revolution" should print his/her anti-Russian comments, shred them and eat with borsch. Because the fingerprints of the USA neoliberal imperial policy were everywhere and can't be ignored. And Victoria Nuland was Hillary Clinton appointee. Not that Russia in this case was flawless, but just the fact that opposition decided not to wait till the elections was the direct result of the orders from Washington. ..."
All this anti-Russian warmongering from esteemed commenters here is suspect. And should be
taken with a grain of salt.
The USA neoliberal elite considers Russia to be an obstacle in the creation of the USA led
global neoliberal empire (with EU and Japan as major vassals),
So "Carthago delenda est" is the official policy. With heavy brainwashing from MSM to justify
such a course as well as the demonization of Putin.
The USA actions in Ukraine speak for themselves. Any reasonable researcher after this "color
revolution" should print his/her anti-Russian comments, shred them and eat with borsch. Because
the fingerprints of the USA neoliberal imperial policy were everywhere and can't be ignored. And
Victoria Nuland was Hillary Clinton appointee. Not that Russia in this case was flawless, but
just the fact that opposition decided not to wait till the elections was the direct result of
the orders from Washington.
That means that as bad as Trump is, he is a safer bet than Hillary, because the latter is a
neocon warmonger, which can get us in the hot war with Russia. And this is the most principal,
cardinal issue of the November elections.
All other issues like climate change record (although nuclear winter will definitely reverse
global warming), Supreme Court appointments, etc. are of secondary importance.
As John Kenneth Galbraith said, "Politics is the art of choosing between the disastrous and
the unpalatable."
It is amazing how partisan and brainwashed commenters are. Reminds me "letter of workers and peasants
to Pravda" type of mails.
Notable quotes:
"... "There's no need to distract the public's attention from the essence of the problem by raising some minor issues connected with the search for who did it," Putin said in an interview with Bloomberg . ..."
"... The DNC is desperate to put the focus on who hacked their email rather than on the email's content. The story is in what the Democrats really think and how it's different then their public persona. ..."
"... I hate to admit it but .... Putin Dropped The Truth Bomb! ..Look at the content ..."
"... Who cares where the TRUTH comes from? as long as it is the truth! The real SHAME is that our own press has been out to lunch on finding the truth. Putin , Assage, Snowden...I'll take truth from them over HRC lies any day! ..."
"... It doesn't matter either way. There's no law anyone's willing to prosecute and no law enforcement agency who will investigate. This is all for nothing more than archival purposes. But it won't change anything. Hillary could be caught trading Cartel drugs for sex slaves in order to generate cash to give to Iran to pay the US government secretly to procure an atomic weapon and it would make no difference. ..."
"... The US politicos always need a bogeyman to blame. Today, it's Russia. ..."
"... It was Russia yesterday too. ..."
"... Yea, we are familiar with using Russia. It's an old playbook. ..."
"... To quote the democratic nominee ... 'what difference, at this point, does it make?" ..."
Russian leader Vladimir Putin denied that his country had any involvement in the email hacks and
WikiLeaks releases that led to the resignations of several Democratic Party officials.
"There's no need to distract the public's attention from the essence of the problem by raising
some minor issues connected with the search for who did it," Putin said in an interview with
Bloomberg.
"But I want to tell you again, I don't know anything about it, and on a state level Russia has
never done this."
Addison Jacobs
The DNC is desperate to put the focus on who hacked their email rather than on the email's
content. The story is in what the Democrats really think and how it's different then their public
persona.
Hard Little Machine • a day ago
Perfect retort to Hillary's Retards.
only1j > Hard Little Machine • a day ago
I hate to admit it but .... Putin Dropped The Truth Bomb! ..Look at the content
lostinnm > Hard Little Machine • a day ago
Who cares where the TRUTH comes from? as long as it is the truth! The real SHAME is that our
own press has been out to lunch on finding the truth. Putin , Assage, Snowden...I'll take truth
from them over HRC lies any day!
Hard Little Machine > lostinnm • a day ago
It doesn't matter either way. There's no law anyone's willing to prosecute and no law enforcement
agency who will investigate. This is all for nothing more than archival purposes. But it won't
change anything. Hillary could be caught trading Cartel drugs for sex slaves in order to generate
cash to give to Iran to pay the US government secretly to procure an atomic weapon and it would
make no difference.
Depending on how old you are - this is not the country or A country
you're familiar with. That one was shot in the head and buried in a shallow grave.
KhadijahMuhammad • a day ago
The US politicos always need a bogeyman to blame. Today, it's Russia.
BecauseReasons > KhadijahMuhammad • a day ago
It was Russia yesterday too.
KhadijahMuhammad > BecauseReasons • a day ago
Yea, we are familiar with using Russia. It's an old playbook.
Rich Dudley
To quote the democratic nominee ... 'what difference, at this point, does it make?"
When Donald Trump, Ben Carson and other political outsiders first denounced
political correctness, they instantly struck a nerve. They were promising to
peel back the mushy language that government and so-called sophisticates use
to conceal simple truths.
That urge came over me as I watched Sens. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, along
with Jeb Bush, argue over each other's immigration flip-flops during last week's
GOP debate. Because Fox moderators used videos to demonstrate the differences
between where the candidates once stood and where they stand, the truth was
obvious, yet none of the three rivals dared say it.
Why couldn't even one acknowledge that he changed his position and explain
why? And if none would, why didn't the others just say, "You're lying"?
These are three men I admire, yet each lacked the courage to be honest on
a crucial point during a televised job interview. When did the truth become
so toxic and untruths so acceptable?
Spin and puffery have a long history in politics, but something has snapped
in our culture that we no longer even expect our leaders to talk straight. We
have become immune to lies and the liars who tell them.
I blame it on the Clintons. Their survival despite a quarter-century of shameful
dishonesty has led the way in lowering the bar for integrity in public life.
The lost in mail laptop and disappear thumb drive with archived emails story is incredibly fishy.
The whole story in incredible. Both Hillary and her close aides (especially Huma ) come out as completely
incompetent idiots, who can't be trusted any sensitive information. This level of incompetence combined
with recklessness is pretty typical for female sociopath
Notable quotes:
"... The Donald Trump campaign has already called for Clinton to be "locked up" for her carelessness handling sensitive information. The missing laptop and thumb drive raise a new possibility that Clinton's emails could have been obtained by people for whom they weren't intended. ..."
"... The archives on the laptop and thumbdrive were constructed by Clinton aides in 2013, using a convoluted process, before her emails were turned over to State Department officials and later scrubbed to determine which ones had classified information and should either be withheld from public view or could be released with redactions. The archive of messages would contain none of those safeguards, potentially exposing classified information if it were ever opened and its contents read. ..."
"... The archive was created nearly a year before the State Department contacted former secretaries of state and asked them to turn over any emails that they had sent using private accounts that pertained to official business. A senior Clinton aide, Huma Abedin, told the FBI that the archive on the laptop and thumb drive were meant to be "a reference for the future production of a book," according to the FBI report. ..."
"... Whatever the rationale, the transfer of Clinton's emails onto two new storage devices, one of which was shipped twice, created new opportunities for messages to be lost or exposed to people who weren't authorized to see them, according to the FBI report. (The Clinton campaign didn't immediately respond to a request to comment for this story.) ..."
"... The disappearing laptop and thumb drive story is incredibly fishy. Either Team Hillary is lying about it, or they are spectacularly incompetent and reckless with national security information. ..."
"... Hillary Clinton: Incompetent, Or Criminal? Both. ..."
"... Dear God, from the Daily Beast article, apparently they were using one of the laptops as a way to transfer the emails to a contractor they had hired. Since no one knew how to do it, they effected the transfer by sending the entire archive to a personal gmail account, then transfering it again to the contractor. So we have a massive store containing quite classified information going to a major tech company, entirely over the internet with only ssl protection I can only presume, because they could not figure out how to transfer a file system. The incompetence here is astonishing. Even a Google employee who forwards sensitive information to a personal gmail account would risk being fired. ..."
"... Of course the most important detail to come out of this is the use of BleachBit. You don't use that software to delete emails about yoga classes. ..."
"... The employee "transferred all of the Clinton e-mail content to a personal Google e-mail (Gmail) address he created," the FBI found. From that Gmail address, he downloaded the emails into a mailbox named "HRC Archive" on the Platte River server. ..."
"... Honestly, Rod you should highlight this. I can assure you that if something this mindbogglingly reckless were ever done at a major tech company the employee would either be fired or told to find work elsewhere but never enter the office again (because severance is expensive and bad pr). I assume the same is true of the government as well. ..."
Why, exactly, did the FBI wait until Labor Day Weekend to dump
this startling news about Hillary Clinton's e-mail scandal? Hard to believe it was a coincidence
that official Washington wanted this story to have the best chance of going away. From the Daily
Beast:
A laptop containing a copy, or "archive," of the emails on Hillary Clinton's
private server was apparently lost-in the postal mail-according to an FBI report released
Friday. Along with it, a thumb drive that also contained an archive of Clinton's emails has been
lost and is not in the FBI's possession.
The Donald Trump campaign has already called for Clinton to be "locked up" for her carelessness
handling sensitive information. The missing laptop and thumb drive raise a new possibility that
Clinton's emails could have been obtained by people for whom they weren't intended. The FBI
director has already said it's possible Clinton's email system could have been
remotely accessed by foreign hackers.
The revelation of the two archives is contained in a detailed
report about the FBI's investigation of Clinton's private email account. The report contained
new information about how the archives were handled, as well as how a private company deleted
emails in its possession, at the same time that congressional investigators were demanding copies.
More:
The archives on the laptop and thumbdrive were constructed by Clinton aides in 2013, using
a convoluted process, before her emails were turned over to State Department officials and later
scrubbed to determine which ones had classified information and should either be withheld from
public view or could be released with redactions. The archive of messages would contain none of
those safeguards, potentially exposing classified information if it were ever opened and its contents
read.
The FBI has found that Clinton's emails contained classified information, including information
derived from U.S. intelligence. Her campaign has disputed the classification of some of the emails.
The archive was created nearly a year before the State Department contacted former secretaries
of state and asked them to turn over any emails that they had sent using private accounts that
pertained to official business. A senior Clinton aide, Huma Abedin, told the FBI that the archive
on the laptop and thumb drive were meant to be "a reference for the future production of a book,"
according to the FBI report. Another aide, however, said that the archive was set up after
the email account of a Clinton confidante and longtime adviser, Sidney Blumenthal, was compromised
by a Romanian hacker.
Whatever the rationale, the transfer of Clinton's emails onto two new storage devices,
one of which was shipped twice, created new opportunities for messages to be lost or exposed to
people who weren't authorized to see them, according to the FBI report. (The Clinton campaign
didn't immediately respond to a request to comment for this story.)
Read it all. The disappearing laptop and thumb drive story is incredibly fishy. Either
Team Hillary is lying about it, or they are spectacularly incompetent and reckless with national
security information.
It is like going through a red light because you weren't paying close enough attention as
opposed to consciously choosing to run a red light
Lousy analogy. Running a red is a momentary lapse, not a years-long, well-thought-out conspiracy,
with considerable effort given to covering tracks (BleachBit).
No one in the media wants to say it, but this report almost entirely exonerates Clinton. Yes,
she's lawyerly and is inclined to walk too close to the line, but no – she didn't do anything
immoral or unethical. If at some point it turns out that she's actually done something wrong then
we revisit, but the obsession with this 'crimeless coverup' prevents us from stating the obvious
– Clinton is a solid candidate for President, intelligent, diligent and serious enough to guide
the nation through difficult times. Trump is uncontroversially not.
The moral equivalence games the media plays with the two candidates amounts to a cancer in
our civic fiber that allows us not to put away our childish things.
We could have had Carly Fiorina dealing with the challenge of cyber warfare in the 21st century.
Voters are choosing a woman who put an insecure server containing national security communications
in her basement, and sold our intention and opportunities to do good in the world to rich people
for her own financial gain.
(I lean toward voting for Trump. My issue is the immense paperwork drag on health care delivery
and the increase in cost caused by the "affordable" care act. I expect more of the same with Clinton.
)
Dear God, from the Daily Beast article, apparently they were using one of the laptops as a
way to transfer the emails to a contractor they had hired. Since no one knew how to do it, they
effected the transfer by sending the entire archive to a personal gmail account, then transfering
it again to the contractor. So we have a massive store containing quite classified information
going to a major tech company, entirely over the internet with only ssl protection I can only
presume, because they could not figure out how to transfer a file system. The incompetence here
is astonishing. Even a Google employee who forwards sensitive information to a personal gmail
account would risk being fired.
This sort of astonishing incompetence is exactly why I originally thought this was a big deal.
The reason you don't want HRC running her own server is because she plainly doesn't know how to
manage, or even hire for, all the inane details of information security.
Of course the most important detail to come out of this is the use of BleachBit. You don't
use that software to delete emails about yoga classes.
Jay, or, and hear me out, like the other Bill, there has to come a point in time where the shear
amount of claims of criminal behavior has to be considered. The other Bill got away with rape
for years, maybe its time to consider that this Bill and his wife lack credibility in the face
of accusers that HRC has denigrated and called Bimbos.
Leftists make me sick in this. They will cry that we should always believe the victim unless
one of their political leaders are accused. You want to take out a conservative? Give credible
evidence that he is guilty of rape or sexual harassment. We quit voting for them. Your side, deny,
deny, deny….and ultimately demand we move on, just like a previous poster's five stages of a Clinton
scandal.
The only exception to this I can think of is Weiner, not because he did something that is horrible.
No, you guys abandoned him because he was pathetic and embarrassing.
This is the direct quote from the Daily Beast article:
After trying unsuccessfully to remotely transfer the emails to a Platte River server, Hanley
shipped the laptop to the employee's home in February 2014. He then "migrated Clinton's emails"
from the laptop to a Platte River server.
That task was hardly straightforward, however, and ended up exposing the email archive yet
again, this time to another commercial email service.
The employee "transferred all of the Clinton e-mail content to a personal Google e-mail
(Gmail) address he created," the FBI found. From that Gmail address, he downloaded the emails
into a mailbox named "HRC Archive" on the Platte River server.
Honestly, Rod you should highlight this. I can assure you that if something this mindbogglingly
reckless were ever done at a major tech company the employee would either be fired or told to
find work elsewhere but never enter the office again (because severance is expensive and bad pr).
I assume the same is true of the government as well.
It really makes the Nixon comparisons seem apt, except she has an out for her supporters in
simply claiming that she is a bumbling idiot.
The good liberals here who are starting the writing on the wall with Crooked Hillary should begin
considering the fact that Trump isn't that bad and is actually pretty good in many ways. Come
on over, you will be welcomed warmly.
"... Does it get money because of the Clintons involvement in raising money? Undoubtedly, without their participation it can't raise anywhere near that amount of money, and the reason is that their high public profile means that people believe that by giving to them they can influence policy, ..."
Low level personnel in the US government are expected to reject gifts, or if culturally they cannot,
then they turn them over to their agency, unless it is something like a coffee or a sandwich.
There is an expectation that people are going to not just not actually corrupt their job by doing
favors for people who give them gifts or do them favors, but that they will avoid the appearance of
corruption that is generated by accepting gifts.
The supreme court doesn't agree with that anymore. Anyone can accept any kind of bribe as long as
they don't let it influence their actions. You can't see the desk for the treasure that's being dumped
onto political tables to fund campaigns and line their personal pockets.
This is a foreign practice, one that is corrupt and should be rooted out nationally. Accepting gifts
creates a corrupting environment, no matter what the recipient does, because EVERYONE understands that
the gift is intended to influence policy or gain access so that the person can influence policy. The
person giving the gift knows it, or they wouldn't give it, the person receiving the gift knows it, but
"deep down in their honest hearts" they're not going to allow it to influence their work and decisions?
No of course not. Buying access is the same as putting a stack of cash into someone's pocket to get
them to vote one way or another on a bill of interest.
Does the Clinton foundation do good work? Sure. Does it get money because of the Clintons involvement
in raising money? Undoubtedly, without their participation it can't raise anywhere near that amount
of money, and the reason is that their high public profile means that people believe that by giving
to them they can influence policy, even if those people are not in office (through backchannels
and whispers and introductions).
Does every person donating to the Clinton foundation want to influence policy, or are they primarily
motivated by wanting to fund it's good works? This is impossible to tell. Even someone as prominent
and perhaps morally blameless Elie Wiesel isn't there to eat cookies and have tea and talk about the
weather if he's in Hillary Clinton's office. That is not what he is there for. That kind of meeting
is not purely a social call, it's an effort to influence policy, whether it is related to statements
on the Armenian genocide or the Sudan or god knows what.
Is he a person that she should meet with, whether he gives a donation to her foundation or not? Maybe
that is her job. Probably most of these meetings are that way. That's why public officials are expected
to put investments and charities into trusts and blinds and under separate management when they're in
office, to help establish the boundary between their public responsibilities and their private interests
including their charitable interests.
It doesn't matter to me whether she did anything that she shouldn't have done, legally. The letter
of the law is insufficient to dictate the actions of moral people. Is it disqualifying? She's already
been disqualified in my mind, this is just another thing.
Is it disturbing and annoying to me to see the double standard where promoters are willing to weasel
and explain away whatever the Clintons have done that for any person on the other side of the aisle
would be moral issues that disqualify them from office?
If you are still on the fence in the Democratic primary, or still
persuadable, you should know that Vox interviewed a number of political
scientists about the electability of Bernie Sanders, and got responses
ranging from warnings about a steep uphill climb to predictions of a
McGovern-Nixon style blowout defeat. …
On electability, by all means consider the evidence and reach your
own conclusions. But do consider the evidence - don't decide what you
want to believe and then make up justifications. The stakes are too
high for that, and history will not forgive you.
Well ok then obviously Putin is now hacking the Reuters polls now, too.
From the always apocalyptic ZeroHedge:
Trump's rise in popularity began when he started reaching out
to the black and hispanic communities and Hillary's slide began as more
and more disturbing facts were exposed of Hillary's time as Secretary of
State.
– "Murdoch told Ailes he wanted Fox's debate moderators - Kelly, Bret
Baier, and Chris Wallace - to hammer Trump on a variety of issues. Ailes,
understanding the GOP electorate better than most at that point, likely
thought it was a bad idea. "Donald Trump is going to be the Republican nominee,"
Ailes told a colleague around this time. But he didn't fight Murdoch on
the debate directive.
On the night of August 6, in front of 24 million people, the Fox moderators
peppered Trump with harder-hitting questions." [Roger's Angels]
Fascinating article, including tactics on taking down the powerful. "It
took 15 days to end the mighty 20-year reign of Roger Ailes at Fox News,
one of the most storied runs in media and political history."
"Making things look worse for Ailes, three days after Carlson's suit
was filed, New York published the accounts of six other women who claimed
to have been harassed by Ailes over the course of three decades. "
6 More Women Allege That Roger Ailes Sexually Harassed Them
So, who had that story cooking and ready to serve? Call me a conspiracy
nut, but one of Hillary's big problems is (or was) her husband's womanizing.
Now right wingers are worse!
My comment is in moderation limbo – how similar to Catholic limbo, I
have no idea…
Anyway, the point I always make is that Murdoch is not ideologically and/or
repub conservative – other than he believes he should be able to make as
much money as possible. His interest in Ailes was always primarily the ability
of Ailes to bring in great profits for Fox.
"... The prospect of Trump TV is a source of real anxiety for some inside Fox.
The candidate took the wedge issues that Ailes used to build a loyal audience at
Fox News - especially race and class - and used them to stoke barely containable
outrage among a downtrodden faction of conservatives. ..."
Also, Ailes has made the Murdochs a lot of money - Fox News generates
more than $1 billion annually, which accounts for 20 percent of 21st Century
Fox's profits - and Rupert worried that perhaps only Ailes could run the
network so successfully. "Rupert is in the clouds; he didn't appreciate
how toxic an environment it was that Ailes created," a person close to the
Murdochs said. "If the money hadn't been so good, then maybe they would
have asked questions."
…
What NBC considered fireable offenses, Murdoch saw as competitive advantages.
He hired Ailes to help achieve a goal that had eluded Murdoch for a decade:
busting CNN's cable news monopoly. Back in the mid-'90s, no one thought
it could be done. "I'm looking forward to squishing Rupert like a bug,"
CNN founder Ted Turner boasted at an industry conference. But Ailes recognized
how key wedge issues - race, religion, class - could turn conservative voters
into loyal viewers.
…. The prospect of Trump TV is a source of real anxiety for some inside
Fox. The candidate took the wedge issues that Ailes used to build a loyal
audience at Fox News - especially race and class - and used them to stoke
barely containable outrage among a downtrodden faction of conservatives.
Where that outrage is channeled after the election - assuming, as polls
now suggest, Trump doesn't make it to the White House - is a big question
for the Republican Party and for Fox News. Trump had a complicated relationship
with Fox even when his good friend Ailes was in charge; without Ailes, it's
plausible that he will try to monetize the movement he has galvanized in
competition with the network rather than in concert with it. Trump's appointment
of Steve Bannon, chairman of Breitbart, the digital-media upstart that has
by some measures already surpassed Fox News as the locus of conservative
energy, to run his campaign suggests a new right-wing news network of some
kind is a real possibility. One prominent media executive told me that if
Trump loses, Fox will need to try to damage him in the eyes of its viewers
by blaming him for the defeat.
=======================================
Just to reiterate a point I have made time and again, with Murdoch it is
all about the money.
It will indeed be ironic if Fox news collapses because the ultimate outcome
of their brand of "conservatism" failed to become president.
I can see the new "network" questioning whether that Australian, an internationalist,
really wants whats best for America…
Yeah. the first image I got when I read that headline was the scene in Breaking Bad when a
phone rings, Walter opens a drawer and has to look through about a dozen phones to find the one
that is ringing.
The most significant thing we learn is that "The employee "transferred all of the Clinton e-mail
content to a personal Google e-mail (Gmail) address he created," the FBI found. From that Gmail
address, he downloaded the emails into a mailbox named "HRC Archive" on the Platte River server."
Americans must be (or are at least expected to be) the most schizophrenic of all people on
the earth. They are not only supposed to believe that the FBI/NSA (the former Marcy Wheeler, I
believe, thinks is also spying on Americans' emails) cannot locate a copy of the deleted emails,
but that the FBI can't get a warrant to get the 'deleted' emails from Google. Who on earth, on
any other day, or in reference to anything else, actually believes that an email deleted from
a Gmail account is simultaneously deleted from Google's servers & archives?
Even the Hardy Boys would have conducted a harder hitting investigation. What ever happened
to the vaunted tough-as-nails FBI? Talk about pulling your punches. Yeesh!
Add to this Iraq, Yemen, Syria and Libya sex slaves to get a fuller picture. Looks like she is a
worthy descendant of south slave owners.
Notable quotes:
"... I would say we have a major election campaign going on right now where one candidate's campaign strategy with a mostly in the bag press seem to be all about 'hot button' secondary issues. Not that their opponent is so hot on the primary issues either, although I'd say they find a nut every couple of weeks. ..."
"... I'm encouraging everyone to watch the documentary Restrepo ..."
"... See that woman crying over her dead child, killed by an American bomb, dropped with impunity?…why don't you go tell her how much better off she is, now that she doesn't have to wear a burka….go on, tell her… ..."
Navy analysis found that a Marine's case would draw attention to Afghan 'sex slaves'
WaPo
The Martland case opened a dialogue in which numerous veterans of the war in Afghanistan said
they were told to ignore instances of child sex abuse by their Afghan colleagues. The Defense
Department's inspector general then opened an investigation into the sexual assault reports and
how they were handled by U.S. military officials who knew about them.
==========================================
US values in action – protecting the powerful and screwing the helpless…..
"This is a serious turning point for all the people of Afghanistan, but in particular for
the hard-fought gains women and girls have been able to enjoy." - Hillary Clinton, Nov 15,
2013
Found myself in a discussion with a recent ex-senator about invading Iraq. I had been attacking
the premise that we needed to attack Iraq because terrorism, AND military capabilities and that
it was based on lies and misinformation and doing pretty well, when the Senator said but think
about Afghanistan – women no longer have to wear the Burka, and girls are going to school. This
was after a report in the foreign press about attacks on schools with female students and how
women were choosing to wear the burka because the harassment of women wearing western clothing
being ignored. The utter ignorance of that statement floored me. I fully admit I was so gobsmacked
I was speechless, and he moved on. I ended up sending him the link to a very good series in Newsday
about how badly things were going in Afghanistan less than six months later. Already too late.
Funny how the women get mentioned at the most interesting times.
Your comment illuminates how politics focuses on "hot button" secondary issues to distract
attention from dismal primary issues.
When gross insecurity rules in a war zone, all other aspects of life (including gender equality)
take a back seat to survival. Indeed, war is correlated with social conservatism, so the cultural
climate is not receptive to change, and may even backslide.
Here's a glimpse into the lost world of Kabul University in the 1980s (complete with a dandy
in the left background who resembles an Afghan Tom Wolfe):
I would say we have a major election campaign going on right now where one candidate's campaign
strategy with a mostly in the bag press seem to be all about 'hot button' secondary issues. Not
that their opponent is so hot on the primary issues either, although I'd say they find a nut every
couple of weeks.
So much of the run up to the AUMF vote and the invasion reminds me of the current climate surrounding
the election.
I'm encouraging everyone to watch the documentary Restrepo , which
is available on both Netflix and Youtube (at present). The realities of what we're doing in Afghanistan
are indefensible.
See that woman crying over her dead child, killed by an American bomb, dropped with impunity?…why
don't you go tell her how much better off she is, now that she doesn't have to wear a burka….go
on, tell her…
My spouse, bless his heart, works for a company embedded in the military-industrial complex.
Three years ago, I accompanied him to the company Christmas bash (one of those compromises in
a marriage and besides I am living well on his paycheck) where the new CEO spoke to the 'troops.'
He ended his talk with a paean to the marvelous gains in freedom for Afghan women and girls
that the US's invasion (sorry, liberation) of Afghanistan has produced). The employees cheered
and I refrained from vomiting only by incredible force of will . And, I would have ruined my new
dress specially purchased at GoodWill for the occasion.
"They are dead, but thanks to us, they can be buried in a bikini…….."
The old "we had to destroy the village to save it" plan.
Somehow, I don't think we'd have gone to war in the Middle East, if "Fighting for Women's Rights"
was the justification.
"Personally, I don't think……..they don't really want to be involved in this war…….they took
our freedom away and gave it to the g##kers. But they don't want it. They would rather be alive
than free, I guess. Poor dumb bastards."
RE: Marine's case: Be sure to read two of the comments attached to this link - they're both
recent and show on the first page of comments:
From - Buckley Family: "… Bear in mind when Maj. Brezler wrote his report he had no Classified
Networks in his area. He used his personal computer to write that report and other reports many
which were Classified by the Higher Command once they received them. They failed to let Maj. Brezler
know that they had classified his reports. He was trying to do his job with the resources that
he had available to him."
From - tsn100: " … Afghans hide behind Islam, this is not at all what Islam teaches, this is
a cultural thing, Afghan culture allows this, the Taliban movement started when a young boy was
raped and the family came to Mullah Omar who was just an unknown preacher and asked him to help,
this was at the height of the Afghan civil war, Mullah Omar went and caught the culprit and had
him shot, or hanged cant remember, that
I just found this via Hacker News… perhaps it was in yesterday's links and I missed it. Truly
scary in the Orwellian sense and yet another reason not to use a smartphone. Chilling read.
SAN FRANCISCO - Want to invisibly spy on 10 iPhone owners without their knowledge? Gather their
every keystroke, sound, message and location? That will cost you $650,000, plus a $500,000 setup
fee with an Israeli outfit called the NSO Group. You can spy on more people if you would like
- just check out the company's price list.
The NSO Group is one of a number of companies that sell surveillance tools that can capture
all the activity on a smartphone, like a user's location and personal contacts. These tools can
even turn the phone into a secret recording device.
Since its founding six years ago, the NSO Group has kept a low profile. But last month, security
researchers caught its spyware trying to gain access to the iPhone of a human rights activist
in the United Arab Emirates. They also discovered a second target, a Mexican journalist who wrote
about corruption in the Mexican government.
Now, internal NSO Group emails, contracts and commercial proposals obtained by The New York
Times offer insight into how companies in this secretive digital surveillance industry operate.
The emails and documents were provided by two people who have had dealings with the NSO Group
but would not be named for fear of reprisals.
I could be wrong, but the promos for Sixty Minutes on the local news make it seem they might
be about this subject. Either way it is another scare you about what your cell phone can do story,
possibly justified this time.
An anecdote which I cannot support with links or other evidence:
A friend of mine used to work for a (non USA) security intelligence service. I was bouncing
ideas off him for a book I'm working on, specifically ideas about how monitoring/electronics/spying
can be used to measure and manipulate societies. He was useful for telling if my ideas (for a
Science Fiction novel) were plausible without ever getting into details. Always very careful to
keep his replies in the "white" world of what any computer security person would know, without
delving into anything classified.
One day we were way out in the back blocks, and I laid out one scenario for him to see if it
would be plausible. All he did was small cryptically, and point at a cell phone lying on a table
10 meters away. He wouldn't say a word on the subject.
It wasn't his cellphone, and we were in a relatively remote region with no cell phone coverage.
It told me that my book idea was far too plausible. It also told me that every cellphone is
likely recording everything all the time, for later upload when back in signal range. (Or at least
there was the inescapable possibility that the cell phones were doing so, and that he had to assume
foreign (or domestic?) agencies could be following him through monitoring of cell phones of friends
and neighbors.)
It was a clarifying moment for me.
Every cellphone has a monumental amount of storage space (especially for audio files). Almost
every cellphone only has a software "switch" for turning it off, not a hardware interlock where
you can be sure off is off. So how can you ever really be sure it is "off"? Answer- you can't
Sobering thought. Especially when you consider the Bluffdale facility in the USA.
"... Clinton has gone days between events in some cases and hasn't given a press conference in more than 270 days, a fact that Republicans have been eager to highlight. ..."
"... The press has badgered Clinton's running mate Tim Kaine and other top surrogates, Vice President Biden among them, about Clinton's whereabouts and why she has kept such a low profile with the election only two months away. ..."
"... The only running Hillary is doing is AWAY from truth and accountability. ..."
"... Leading the lambs to slaughter. There's Syria. There's Iran. There's Russia. And boom! boom!! There's China. They'll all fall in a week. Just like Afghanistan. Just like Libya. Just like Iraq. Just like Yemen. Just like Egypt. Just like the Ukraine. And just like Syria. ..."
"... But it was Hillary, Biden, Kerry and the Democrats who voted for the war. Man up and take responsibility for a change. A vote for Hillary is a vote for war ..."
"... Hillary does not know a Classified Message or that she exposed secrets to enemies? By the way an Iranian nuclear scientist who was spying for the U.S. was exposed by Hillary's emails. He was just executed. ..."
"... And as for the University find out why Bill Clinton made 17 million from an on line University that gave donations to the Clinton foundation for favorable treatment overseas. Then get back to me. ..."
"... 50 old guard internationalists that need their old school ideas swept into the dust bin of history. I thought democrats hated Neocons? Now you love them? ..."
In that time, controversy has exploded over Clinton Foundation ties to the State Department. A
steady drip of developments surrounding Clinton's use of a private email server also persists, punctuated
by Friday's release by the FBI of documents pertaining to its investigation into her email set-up.
Those controversies have dragged Clinton's already-dismal approval rating to new lows and have
kept her from slamming the door shut on Trump.
"It used to look like Clinton should just spend the fall at the International Space Station watching
Trump implode, but it raises the question of whether you can disappear from the campaign trail without
it having some effect," said Marquette University pollster Charles Franklin, whose Wisconsin survey
found Clinton's favorability declining across every metric.
Clinton has gone days between events in some cases and hasn't given a press conference in
more than 270 days, a fact that Republicans have been eager to highlight.
The press has badgered Clinton's running mate Tim Kaine and other top surrogates, Vice President
Biden among them, about Clinton's whereabouts and why she has kept such a low profile with the election
only two months away.
"I don't think anyone can tell her story as well as she can, so she needs to be out there telling
it," said Democrat Nina Turner, a former top spokesperson for Bernie Sanders. "You have to face the
voters if you want them to vote for you. You have to be out there talking to them and engaging with
them and having real conversations and dialogue."
Leading the lambs to slaughter.
There's Syria.
There's Iran.
There's Russia.
And boom! boom!! There's China. They'll all fall in a week.
Just like Afghanistan.
Just like Libya. Just like Iraq.
Just like Yemen.
Just like Egypt.
Just like the Ukraine.
And just like Syria.
Hillary told the FBI that she had a massive brain injury and blood clot due to a concussion, so
she can't remember anything.
You give her too much credit. And you lie.
Hillary did not broker a peace agreement between Israel and Hamas regarding GAZA.
There is no agreement.
Israel has built a big wall along the GAZA strip to assist their security..
2) As US Senator, Hillary Clinton was a member of the highly classified -
Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities
Subcommittee on Readiness and Management Support
3) As Sec of State - Clinton was the boss of the entire US State Dept.
And she signed the following
"CLASSIFIED INFORMATION NON-DISCLOSURE AGREEMENT",
that she had received the "security indoctrination" etc.,
. . but she clung to her precious Blackberry like a life preserver. She demanded to be able to
use her Blackberry. After all, the President of the United States used HIS Blackberry ( a specially
altered, secure Blackberry ) all the time! It's Ssoooo cool! Why can't she have a special Blackberry
too?
"Saddam has weapons of mass destruction." Turned out all that was found were leaky canisters left
over from the Iran/Iraq war in 1983. For that Bush and all who voted for him set the mid-east
on fire. That's so far up the stupid scale it doesn't ever register.
But it was Hillary, Biden, Kerry and the Democrats who voted for the war. Man up and take responsibility
for a change. A vote for Hillary is a vote for war
Hillary does not know a Classified Message or that she exposed secrets to enemies? By the way
an Iranian nuclear scientist who was spying for the U.S. was exposed by Hillary's emails. He was
just executed.
And Shrillary has no concept of how to handle classified information and left her unsecured server
containing above Top-Secret information open to hostile intelligence services. She should be prosecuted.
Others have for much less.
Tim Kaine graduated from Harvard, did missionary work in Central America, and then was mayor
of Richmond, Lt. Governor, Governor of Virginia, and a U.S. Senator. Trump is a lying, racist,
casino owner with four bankruptcies, three marriages. and a phony "university.".
Obama went Harvard and is an idiot. Missionary work-who cares? He was bad in every office he held
proving Democrats will elect idiots. As for Trump -- you clearly don't know squat about starting
or running a big business. Every Bank that got stuck in a BK is still with Trump because ALL banks
play the odds. Trump as made them billions.
And as for the University find out why Bill Clinton
made 17 million from an on line University that gave donations to the Clinton foundation for favorable
treatment overseas. Then get back to me.
50 old guard internationalists that need their old school ideas swept into the dust bin of history.
I thought democrats hated Neocons? Now you love them?
"... The Triad is the United States, Western and Central Europe, and Japan. This group of countries has become a single imperialist power, the leader of which is the US. This has led to the deepening of the depth of the crisis. The crisis is in the shape of an "L". The normal crisis is in the shape of a "U", the economy rises up after the decline. But this crisis is different. There is no way out of the crisis; the only way to get out is to move out of capitalism. There is no other possible solution. Capitalism should be considered as a moribund system. In order to survive it is moving to destruction and to wars. ..."
"... Maybe Russia is moving in this direction, but not as much as China, because it has paid a very big price for the destruction of the shock therapy from Gorbachev and Yeltsin. Those leaders have led Russia to a private oligarchy, closely related to the international financial capitalism of the US, Germany and others. This has reduced Russian capacity of control. But now Russia is moving gradually towards reestablishing control of the state over its own economy. ..."
"... The world now is in serious danger. The collective imperialism of the US, Western Europe and Japan are run by US leadership. In order to keep their exclusive control over the whole planet, they do not accept independence of other countries. They do not respect the independence if China and Russia. That is why we are about to face continuous wars all over the world. The radical Islamists are the allies of imperialism, because they are supported by the US in order to carry out destabilization. This is permanent war. I do believe that the best response to it is the Eurasian project. Russia should unite with China, Central Asian countries, Iran and Syria. This alliance could be also very attractive for Africa and good parts of Latin America. In such a case, imperialism would be isolated. ..."
Samir Amin, world-known economist, explains the reason of decadent condition of the modern
economy and gives the recipe of the salvation from global imperialism. An exclusive
interview for Katehon
I can sum my point of view on the situation over the modern economy in the following way. We have
been in a long systemic crisis of capitalism, which has started in 1975 with the end of the convertibility
of the Dollar in gold. It is not a like the famous financial crisis in 2008. No, it is a long systematic
crisis of monopoly capitalism which started forty years ago and it continues. The capitalists reacted
to the crisis with the sets of measures. The first one was to strengthen centralization of control
over the economy by the monopolies. An oligarchy is ruling all capitalist countries – the United
States, Germany, France, Great Britain and Russia as well. The second measure was to convert all
economic activity productions into subcontractors of monopoly capital. I mean, they have not even
a hint of freedom. Competition is just rhetoric, there is no competition. There is an oligarchy which
is controlling the whole economic system. Now, we are facing a united front of imperialist powers,
which are forming a Collective imperialism of the Triad.
The Triad is the United States, Western and Central Europe, and Japan. This group of countries
has become a single imperialist power, the leader of which is the US. This has led to the deepening
of the depth of the crisis. The crisis is in the shape of an "L". The normal crisis is in the shape
of a "U", the economy rises up after the decline. But this crisis is different. There is no way out
of the crisis; the only way to get out is to move out of capitalism. There is no other possible solution.
Capitalism should be considered as a moribund system. In order to survive it is moving to destruction
and to wars.
We have an alternative which is the socialism. I know that it is not very popular to say, but
the only solution is socialism. It is a long road which starts from reducing the power of the oligarchy,
reinforcing the state control and establish a state-capitalism, which should replace private capitalism.
It doesn't mean that private capitalism will not survive, but it should be subordinated to state
control. The state control should be used also in order to support a social progressive policy. This
should guarantee good full-employment, social services, education, transport, infrastructure, security
etc.
The role of China is very big, because it is, perhaps, the only country in the world today, which
has a sovereign project. That means that it is trying to establish a pattern of modern industry,
in which of course, private capital has a wide place, but it is under the strict control of the state.
Simultaneously it gives a view of the present to the culture. The other pattern of Chinese economy
culture is based on family producers. China is walking on two legs: following the traditions and
participating globalization. They accept foreign investments, but keep independence of their financial
system. The Chinese bank system is exclusively state-controlled. The Yuan is convertible only to
a certain extent, but under the control of the bank of China. That is the best model that we have
today to respond to the challenge of globalists imperialism.
Maybe Russia is moving in this direction, but not as much as China, because it has paid a
very big price for the destruction of the shock therapy from Gorbachev and Yeltsin. Those leaders
have led Russia to a private oligarchy, closely related to the international financial capitalism
of the US, Germany and others. This has reduced Russian capacity of control. But now Russia is moving
gradually towards reestablishing control of the state over its own economy.
The world now is in serious danger. The collective imperialism of the US, Western Europe and
Japan are run by US leadership. In order to keep their exclusive control over the whole planet, they
do not accept independence of other countries. They do not respect the independence if China and
Russia. That is why we are about to face continuous wars all over the world. The radical Islamists
are the allies of imperialism, because they are supported by the US in order to carry out destabilization.
This is permanent war. I do believe that the best response to it is the Eurasian project. Russia
should unite with China, Central Asian countries, Iran and Syria. This alliance could be also very
attractive for Africa and good parts of Latin America. In such a case, imperialism would be isolated.
Years ago, Seinfeld royalties freed Steve Bannon, the new CEO of Trump's
presidential campaign, from needing to work for a living, allowing him to throw
himself into extremist and racist alt-right politics.
Working in the film business, I briefly met the Donald Trump Republican presidential
campaign's new CEO, Steve Bannon, during the 1990s when he was a Hollywood investment
banker. As one producer whom Bannon helped raise capital for told me, even back
then he was an angry, racist, egregiously aggressive, and inappropriately temperamental
character.
Bannon was also whip smart with a sophisticated understanding of how the
media works.
Inside the liberal bubble, Democrats may be taking Bannon's appointment to
help run Trump's campaign as a something of a joke. But, at their peril, they
underestimate Bannon's ability to harm Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential
nominee.
Bannon was one of the early Harvard MBA-type financial pirates who realized
that Wall Street money could be tapped to finance film and television, often
with disastrous results for the investors but with great results for the Hollywood
studios and the financial engineers like Bannon who brokered the deals.
In the late '80s-early '90s, Wall Street discovered that intellectual property
like movies and television and the companies that owned them could be bought,
sold and traded just like hard assets such as real estate and commodities. Bannon
engineered some of those transactions, first as a specialist at Goldman Sachs,
then at his own boutique investment bank Bannon & Co., and briefly in partnership
with a volatile manager Jeff Kwatinetz (whose first claim to fame was discovering
the heavy metal band Korn and managing The Backstreet Boys).
Bannon was tough and merciless. It was Bannon who personally stuck the shiv
in the heart of former superagent and Disney President Michael Ovitz, effectively
ending the career of the man who had been known as the most powerful person
in Hollywood.
After being fired by Disney, Ovitz set out to create a powerful new entertainment
company called the American Management Group, with clients like Leonardo DiCaprio
and Cameron Diaz, in which Ovitz invested over $100 million of his own money.
(I remember visiting AMG's new offices, the most expensive and lavish in Beverly
Hills, with millions of dollars in art by the likes of Mark Rothko and Jasper
Johns adorning the walls.) But AMG was an abject failure, bleeding millions
of dollars a month, while Ovitz desperately sought a buyer. Finally, the only
available buyer was Kwatinetz and Bannon.
According to
Vanity Fair , Bannon went alone to see Ovitz and offered him $5 million,
none in cash. After a moment of silence, Ovitz told Bannon, "If I didn't know
you personally, I'd throw you out of the room." But out of options, Ovitz ended
up selling to Kwatinetz and Bannon's company, effectively ending Ovitz's legendary
Hollywood career. (Remember that, Hillary.)
Bannon's smartest (or luckiest) deal was brokering the sale of Rob Reiner's
company, Castle Rock Entertainment, to Ted Turner. In lieu of part of its brokerage
fee, Bannon & Co. agreed to take a piece of the future syndication revenues
from five TV shows, one of which turned out to be "Seinfeld." The rest is history.
The Seinfeld royalties freed Bannon (with a
reported
net worth of $41 million) from needing to work for a living, allowing him
to try his hand at producing (including the Sean Penn-directed "Indian Runner"
and a number of right-wing documentaries) and then to throw himself into extremist
and racist alt-right politics.
He invested $1 million in a laudatory film about Sarah Palin and became a
close confidante. He then attached himself to Andrew Breitbart and took over
Breitbart News after Andrew Breitbart's sudden death at 43, moving the already
far-right website closer to the openly white nationalist alt-right. There he
became a major advocate for Trump before being tapped to help run his campaign.
But Bannon's real danger doesn't come so much from his work with Breitbart
News, which plays mostly to the angry, racist white base. It comes more from
the Bannon-funded Government Accountability Institute, a research institute
staffed with some very smart and talented investigative journalists, data scientists
and lawyers.
GAI's staff does intensive and deep investigative research digging up hard-to-find,
but well-documented dirt on major politicians and then feeding it to the mainstream
media to disseminate to the general public.
Among other things, its staff has developed protocols to access the so-called
"deep web," which consists of a lot of old or useless information and information
in foreign languages which don't show up in traditional web searches, but often
contains otherwise undiscoverable and sometimes scandalous information which
Bannon then feeds to the mainstream media.
For example, Bannon is responsible for uncovering former liberal New York
congressman Anthony Weiner (husband of Hillary Clinton's personal aide Huma
Abedin) tweeting photos of his crotch to various women. Bannon hired trackers
to follow Weiner's Twitter account 24 hours a day until they eventually uncovered
the infamous crotch shots. They released them to the mass media, effectively
ending Weiner's political career. (Remember that, Hillary.)
Bannon's mantra for GAI is "Facts get shares, opinions get shrugs." GAI's
strategy is to feed damaging, fact-based stories that will get headlines in
the mainstream media and change mass perceptions. According to
Bloomberg , "GAI has collaborated with such mainstream media outlets as
Newsweek, ABC News, and CBS's "60 Minutes" on stories ranging from insider trading
in Congress to credit card fraud among presidential campaigns. It's essentially
a mining operation for political scoops."
One of Bannon's key insights is that economic imperatives have caused mainstream
media outlets to drastically cut back budgets for investigative reporting. "The
modern economics of the newsroom don't support big investigative reporting staffs,"
says Bannon. "You wouldn't get a Watergate, a Pentagon Papers today, because
nobody can afford to let a reporter spend seven months on a story. We can. We're
working as a support function."
So GAI's strategy is to spend weeks and months doing the fact-based research
that investigative reporters in the mainstream media no longer have the resources
to do, creating a compelling story line, and then feeding the story to investigative
reporters who, whatever their personal political views, are anxious in their
professional capacity to jump on. As a key GAI staffer says, "We're not going
public until we have something so tantalizing that any editor at a serious publication
would be an idiot to pass it up and give a competitor a scoop."
It's likely no accident that in the week since Bannon officially joined the
Trump campaign, media attention has shifted from focusing primarily on Trump's
gaffes to potential corrupting contributions to the Clinton Foundation in exchange
for access to Secretary of State Clinton.
GAI's biggest, and most effective project has been to uncover the nexus between
Bill and Hillary's paid speeches, contributions to the Clinton Foundation by
corrupt oligarchs and billionaires, and access to the State Department by donors.
The research culminated in the book "Clinton Cash" by Peter Schweitzer, president
of GAI, and published by mainstream publisher Harpers.
The back cover of "Clinton Cash" summarizes its premise:
"The Clintons typically blur the lines between politics, philanthropy,
and business. Consider the following: Bill flies into a Third World country
where he spends time in the company of a businessman. A deal is struck.
Soon after, enormous contributions are made to the Clinton Foundation, while
Bill is commissioned to deliver a series of highly paid speeches. Some of
these deals require approval or review by the US government and fall within
the purview of a powerful senator and secretary of state. Often the people
involved are characters of the kind that an American ex-president (or the
spouse of a sitting senator, secretary of state, or presidential candidate)
should have nothing to do with."
Bannon and Schweitzer have so far failed to prove any explicit quid pro quo.
But they're highly successful at making the nexus between the Clinton Foundation,
Bill and Hillary Clinton's paid speeches, and special access for donors feel
dirty and unseemly.
Before and after its publication, "Clinton Cash" got considerable play in
the mainstream media.
The New York Times ran a front-page story with the headline, "Cash Flowed
to Clinton Foundation Amid Russian Uranium Deal," drawing on research from "Clinton
Cash."
In an
op-ed piece in The Washington Post, Larry Lessig, Harvard Law professor
and progressive crusader against money in politics concluded, "On any fair reading,
the pattern that Schweitzer has charged is corruption." And it seems that Bannon
and Schweitzer have more damaging research on the Clintons that they will drip
out through the campaign. Schweitzer has
warned that more emails are coming showing Clinton's State Department doing
favors for foreign oligarchs.
Bannon's strategy may not be enough to win the White House for Trump. But
it will almost certainly do further damage to Clinton. Voters already think
Clinton is less trustworthy than Trump. According to a recent
Quinnipiac poll, 53 percent of likely voters say Trump is not honest (with
42 percent saying he is honest). But a huge 66 percent of voters say Clinton
is not honest, compared to 29 percent who say she is.
Bannon's work for Trump could drive Clinton's honesty score even lower. Clinton's
core strategy has been to disqualify Trump as a potential president and commander-in-chief
among a majority of voters. Bannon's strategy is to do the same for Clinton.
Faced with a choice between two presidential candidates whom a large swath
of voters find untrustworthy and distasteful, Trump's outrageousness may still
enable Clinton to grind out a victory from a sullen electorate. But it's going
to get even uglier. And even if Clinton wins, popular distrust could harm her
ability to govern.
In that context, it would be a huge mistake for Democrats and the Clinton
campaign to underestimate Steve Bannon. This piece was reprinted by Truthout
with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission
or license from the source.
Miles Mogulescu Miles Mogulescu is an entertainment attorney/business affairs
executive, producer, political activist and writer. Professionally, he is a
former senior vice president at MGM. He has been a lifelong progressive since
the age of 12 when his father helped raise money for Dr. Martin Luther King,
who was a guest in his home several times. More recently, he organized a program
on single-payer health care at the Take Back America Conference, a two-day conference
on Money in Politics at UCLA Law School, and "Made in Cuba," the largest exhibition
of contemporary Cuban art ever held in Southern California. He co-produced and
co-directed Union Maids , a film about three women union organizers in Chicago
in the 1930s and '40s, which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Feature
Documentary.
"... The deletion took place between March 25 and March 31, the FBI learned in a May 3 interview. The name of the person who deleted the emails was redacted from the FBI's notes. ..."
"... The Times story was published on March 2. ..."
"... I am unsympathetic to any person involved in such a discussion that circumvents state secrets protocol because they don't have access to a secure computer. That is an excuse not acceptable. That is saying "I didn't know any better" to folks who are sitting at the highest levels of state secrets! That is plain B.S. in my opinion. ..."
"... A urinating contest between State and CIA operatives who really didn't need State permission to pull the trigger on drone strikes is not an excuse for Hillary to have 22-SAP running loose on her email un-secure un-authorized servers/storage units. I remain unsympathetic to Hillary or anyone else who compromises state secrets at that level because it is inconvenient to find a secure means to communicate. ..."
The deletion took place between March 25 and March 31, the FBI learned in a May 3 interview.
The name of the person who deleted the emails was redacted from the FBI's notes.
"In a follow-up FBI interview on May 3, 2016, ------ Indicated he believed he had an 'oh s--t'
moment and sometime between March 25-31, 2015 deleted the Clinton archive mailbox from PRN server
and used BleachBit to delete the exported .PST files he had created on the server system
containing Clinton;s e-mails," the FBI notes released on Friday stated.
This is crazy. 3 weeks after NYT publish Clinton email
server story, there was a big wipe of her emails conducted
BleachBit is a special computer software that is designed to "prevent recovery" of files so
that, as House Select Committee on Benghazi Chairman
Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) said last week, "even God can't read them."
After the conclusion of the investigation in July, the FBI Director James Comey recommended no
charges against Clinton but added that the Democratic presidential nominee was "extremely
careless" in handling classified material.
The fact that the FBI had this info but excluded it from their deliberations on whether or not to
indict, then did a Labor Day weekend dump when most Americans won't be paying attention, is pretty
conclusive evidence that the FBI under Comey & Lynch is actively working to shield Clinton.
..painfull to realize we have all be played for years by the democrats and yes republicans and large
corporate businesses. Time to take back our control of ourselves and choices, real choices, and not
sell our votes for a freaking free cell phone or promises of free this, free that.....
Actually if you dig deeper you will find that both parties are VERY corrupt. The only way to get
things done is to make deals and cover for each other. Our political system has totally gone amuck.
Actually, I have... and the RNC is fairly clean. The party learned a lesson with Nixon. Sure people
may not have liked the Bush's, but at least they were fairly honest. And Reagan was an awesome President.
Also, Trump can't be bought and is a political outsider.
The DNC and DemocRATs, haven't learned their lesson yet... Slick Willy was almost fully impeached
(House not Senate impeached)... but DemocRATs played party politics and let him go. We ALL know he
was guilty and repeatedly lied under oath (perjury and obstruction)... something you or I would go
to prison for.
Well said. And it fact, as someone commented above, this entire political process & "election" is
little more than a charade. (A bad one at that.)
...Don't be too surprised if/when, sometime in the few weeks, some sort of (manufactured/contrived)
'national emergency' develops, necessitating the 'temporary suspension' of: a) the election process;
b) the Bill of Rights; or c) the entire US Constitution -- and imposition of martial law -- 'Just
until Order can be Restored.' (Or some such bunch of gibberish.)
Given what we've seen over the
last 7+ years, it's darn near predictable: Americans should anticipate an "October Surprise" the
likes of which the world has never seen.
IMPORTANT: when writing "HiLlARy" be sure to use a lowercase L (l), not an uppercase i (I), so it
appears as "hillary" to internet search engines and won't be censored. All corporate media, including
Google, Facebook, and Twitter are filtering the unique word "hiliary." You must spell "hillary" correctly,
so that means using a lowercase L in place of the uppercase i in HiLlARy.
The twitter screen cap clearly shows, "PRN held a conference call
with President Clinton's staff"??
Then, the person who's name is redacted, who was evidently interviewed by the FBI, "deleted the
Clinton archive mailbox from the PRN server...
... and used BleachBit to delete the exported .PST files he had created on the server system containing
Clinton's e-mails"
Kind of unclear, since the conference call was with PRESIDENT Clinton's staff, is this PRESIDENT
Clinton's archive mailbox, on the PRN server containing PRESIDENT Clinton's emails???
Thanks, so in Dec of 2014, Cheryl Mills told 'him' to make changes to email retention setting for
Clinton's emails, and after the PRN conference call, 3/25/15, 'he' realized that 'he' didn't do what
Cheryl told 'him' to do in Dec of 2014, so 'he' did what Cheryl told 'him' to do, 3+ months late,
and wiped 'his' butt with BleachBit on some exported .PST files 'he' created??
Somehow it doesn't
look very much like the headline of this story makes it out to be??
Oh and there is the small minor point that on Nov. 26, 2014 President Obama signs into law an updated
Federal Records Act requiring public officials to forward all work-related email to their government
address. Then comes the Cheryl Mills directive to change retention settings. THEN he/she remembers
didn't follow orders ("the Oh S***" moment) so deletes all pst files plus back ups. NOTHING TO SEE
HERE!!!! /sarcasm
A reminder, the data this firm had in its possession had state secrets including 22-Top Secret-Special
Access Programs. None of these firms had clearance for such. Wonder if everyone whose fingerprints
were on these files got vetted by the FBI and or Intel to determine if they read what they had in
their hands if for no other reason than curiosity?
We are assuming that the server in PRN's management had 'all' Hillary's emails on it, but has there
been proof shown to the public that the server in New Jersey had 'all' Hillary's emails?
The 7
email chains, with 22 TS/SAP information containing emails seem to be from 2011 and 2012, with the
2012 very likely being the New Years Holliday.
Back in June, WSJ reported that the majority seemed to be discussions about a planned CIA drone
strike in Pakistan, that did not end up happening, and it started because the CIA let the US diplomat
in Islamabad know, a day or so before Christmas, so State could weigh in.
Well said. We, the People, may very well never know the details on this batch of state secrets...nothing
new about the Intel folks being tight-lipped. Nothing I've read on-line has given any info on what
the SAP email contained...but, T.S./SAP is the most rigidly controlled/guarded state secret and I
doubt any will become public knowledge. Any way this Hillary state secrets compromise is sliced,
it is a violation of state secrets protocol in my opinion. From the gist of the FBI notes provided
so far, there was little or no effort by the FBI personnel to 'dig' into 'intent,' thus glossing
over a specific state secret statutes. Nor did the FBI team devote much time to 'chasing' the means
by which these 22-T.S./SAP jumped the gap from State's closed-loop secure email system to Hillary's
rogue system...why not?
Lastly, I wonder if anyone from the Intel folks sat-in and or participated
in Hillary's 'walk-in-the-park soft-ball' not under oath chat with the FBI...the Intel folks got
'hurt' badly with Hillary's compromise of the 22 SAP in my opinion.
Many of today's cable news talking heads are mentioning the planned Pakistan drone strike discussions
as if it is now a forgone conclusion. Those of us who don't pay WSJ can read the story from other
sources...
"Some of those emails were then sent by Clinton's aides to her personal email account, officials
told the Journal.
The vaguely worded messages didn't mention the "CIA," "drones" or details about the targets, the
Journal reported.
The emails were written within the often-narrow time frame in which State Department officials
had to decide whether or not to object to drone strikes before the CIA pulled the trigger, officials
told the newspaper. The still-secret emails are still a part of the ongoing FBI investigation.
One exchange reported by the Journal came before Christmas in 2011 when the U.S. ambassador sent
a note about a planned strike that sparked an email chain between Clinton's senior advisers. Officials
said the exchange was clear those involved in the email were having discussions because they were
away from their offices and didn't have access to a classified computer."
I am unsympathetic to any person involved in such a discussion that circumvents state secrets protocol
because they don't have access to a secure computer. That is an excuse not acceptable. That is saying
"I didn't know any better" to folks who are sitting at the highest levels of state secrets! That
is plain B.S. in my opinion.
And, yet, Hillary's fawning faithful followers are buying the ruse.
Such rationalization of compromising state secrets infuriates men and women in the field who can
die (Amb. Stevens and the men who rushed to their own deaths to help protect Stevens) because of
such bureaucratic idiocy in my opinion beginning with Hillary and her immediate minions merits the
wrath of We, the People not admiration...some of whom questioned Hillary's email mess early-on such
as Amadin who believed Hillary's email stuff was 'outrageous!"
"Outrageous" is an understatement on steroids in my opinion that would get anyone else prison time.
Our Amb. to Pakistan initiated these 'chains', because CIA 'requested input'; those requests seems
to have been off the secure system. The drone operators were not in danger.
If the CIA had pulled
the trigger, it would have before State gave the input CIA asked for, if they traveled to secure
lines.
This is one of the reasons the CIA is dropping out of drone strikes; moving forwards the Defense
Dept. will pull the trigger.
The argument between State and CIA over these discussions does not seem to have started because
of Hillary, and it doesn't seem to have ended because of Hillary. It is only because of the FOIA
disclosures that we know they seem to have agreed to disagree on this subject.
A urinating contest between State and CIA operatives who really didn't need State permission to pull
the trigger on drone strikes is not an excuse for Hillary to have 22-SAP running loose on her email
un-secure un-authorized servers/storage units. I remain unsympathetic to Hillary or anyone else who
compromises state secrets at that level because it is inconvenient to find a secure means to communicate.
Did you read the ViceNews article about the Vaughn Index they received on the 7 'chains' that contain
the 22 emails? You do realize that in at least one chain, a news agency article link, and possible
quote, is being forwarded, and the article is likely the source of the TS/SAP information, don't
you? Even after it is leaked to someone like the NYT or Guardian, a TS/SAP document is still considered
TS/SAP by the NSA, right? Even after everyone on the planet who is interested has read the information,
discussing it on the non-secure system is considered against procedures, right?
"A large number of emails at the center of the Clinton FBI probe appear to have been between U.S.
diplomats in Pakistan and the State Department in Washington D.C. discussing planned drone strikes."
http://www.inquisitr.com/31881... ... "The emails were sent in 2011 and 2012 through a private
server and contained information that allowed the State Department input into a potential drone strike,
where they had the opportunity to voice either opposition or support for the planned strike."
Based on the The Inquisitor article, and the ViceNews article, 8 emails seem to be regarding the
CIA drone strike, and one of the remaining 3 chains was about the news article.
I still remain unsympathetic to anyone caught-up in this compromise of state secrets. Too many lessor
mortals have been severely punished for a lot less and the powerful escape any consequences for Hillary's
mess. The RULE OF LAW is being 'shaded' if not outright lost in this mess!
William Card > iRon Madden
Hillary is a walking psyop. NOTHING about her is real.
Chez Kiva > Chez Kiva • 20 hours ago
A memory lapse? I don't think so. Careless? Yes, careless to a fault. People died. Agents
were outed.
And, the entire thing is a ruse to keep we the Americans from discussing the real infraction,
which is that these CIA players were involved in destroying Libya and simultaneously causing
the Syrian civil war. It wasn't an 'embassy' it was a safe house for all the lettered covert
operatives and arms dealers. That's why she believes here role as 'guardian of State secrets'
is safe.
Mark this "Classified:" We are deliberately involved in destroying 7 countries mid-east in a
row. Iran (read nuclear) comes next!- General Wesley Clark.
CheeseEatingSurrenderMonkey > Fred_Shrinka
"Accidently" used BLEACHBIT "guaranteed unrecoverable" Secure Data Erase program?
"... A top aide to Hillary Clinton at the State Department agreed to try to obtain a special diplomatic passport for an adviser to former President Bill Clinton in 2009, according to emails released Thursday, raising new questions about whether people tied to the Clinton Foundation received special access at the department. ..."
"... The exchange about the passport, between Mr. Band and Huma Abedin, who was then a top State Department aide to Mrs. Clinton, was included in a set of more than 500 pages of emails made public by Judicial Watch, a conservative legal group that sued for their release. ..."
"... "Need get me/justy and jd dip passports," Mr. Band wrote to Ms. Abedin on July 27, 2009, referring to passports for himself and two other aides to Mr. Clinton, Justin Cooper and John Davidson. ..."
"... Traveling with a former president does not convey any special diplomatic status, the State Department indicated in a statement regarding the emails. "Diplomatic passports are issued to Foreign Service officers or a person having diplomatic or comparable status," the statement said. ..."
"... "Any individuals who do not have this status are not issued diplomatic passports," it said, adding that "the staff of former presidents are not included among those eligible to be issued a diplomatic passport." ..."
A top aide to Hillary Clinton at the State Department agreed to try to obtain a special diplomatic
passport for an adviser to former President Bill Clinton in 2009, according to emails released Thursday,
raising new questions about whether people tied to the Clinton Foundation received special access
at the department.
The request by the adviser, Douglas J. Band, who started one arm of the Clintons' charitable foundation,
was unusual, and the State Department never issued the passport. Only department employees and others
with diplomatic status are eligible for the special passports, which help envoys facilitate travel,
officials said.
... ... ...
The exchange about the passport, between Mr. Band and Huma Abedin, who was then a top State Department
aide to Mrs. Clinton, was included in a set of more than 500 pages of emails made public by Judicial
Watch, a conservative legal group that sued for their release.
"Need get me/justy and jd dip passports," Mr. Band wrote to Ms. Abedin on July 27, 2009, referring
to passports for himself and two other aides to Mr. Clinton, Justin Cooper and John Davidson.
... ... ...
But a person with knowledge of the issue, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that the
three men were arranging to travel with Mr. Clinton to Pyongyang less than a week later for the former
president's secret negotiations. Mr. Clinton already had a diplomatic passport as a former president.
... ... ...
Traveling with a former president does not convey any special diplomatic status, the State Department
indicated in a statement regarding the emails. "Diplomatic passports are issued to Foreign Service officers or a person having diplomatic or
comparable status," the statement said.
"Any individuals who do not have this status are not issued diplomatic passports," it said, adding
that "the staff of former presidents are not included among those eligible to be issued a diplomatic
passport."
The emails released by Judicial Watch also include discussions about meetings between Mrs. Clinton
and a number of people involved in major donations to the Clinton Foundation.
In one exchange in July 2009, Ms. Abedin told Mrs. Clinton's scheduler that Mr. Clinton "wants
to be sure" that Mrs. Clinton would be able to see Andrew Liveris, the chief executive of Dow Chemical,
at an event the next night. Dow Chemical has been one of the biggest donors to the Clinton Foundation,
giving $1 million to $5 million, records show.
Ms. Abedin arranged what she called "a pull-aside" for Mr. Liveris to speak with Mrs. Clinton
in a private room after she arrived to give a speech, according to the emails, which did not explain
the reason for the meeting.
The person with knowledge of the issue said that this email chain also related to Mr. Clinton's
North Korea trip because Mr. Liveris had offered to let Mr. Clinton use his private plane.
A separate batch of State Department documents
released by Judicial Watch last month also revealed contacts between the State Department and Clinton
Foundation donors. In one such exchange, Mr. Band sought to put a billionaire donor in touch with
the department's former ambassador to Lebanon.
Donald J. Trump, Mrs. Clinton's Republican opponent, has seized on the documents, saying they
revealed a "pay to play" operation.
"... The only way Russia can be acceptable to the West is to accept vassal status. ..."
"... Russia can end the Ukraine crisis by simply accepting the requests of the former Russian territories to reunite with Russia. Once the breakaway republics are again part of Russia, the crisis is over. Ukraine is not going to attack Russia. ..."
"... Russia doesn't end the crisis, because Russia thinks it would be provocative and upset Europe. Actually, that is what Russia needs to do-upset Europe. Russia needs to make Europe aware that being Washington's tool against Russia is risky and has costs for Europe. ..."
"... Instead, Russia shields Europe from the costs that Washington imposes on Europe and imposes little cost on Europe for acting against Russia in Washington's interest. Russia still supplies its declared enemies, whose air forces fly provocative flights along Russia's borders, with the energy to put their war planes into the air. ..."
"... Washington and only Washington determines "international norms." America is the "exceptional, indispensable" country. No other country has this rank ..."
"... A country with an independent foreign policy is a threat to Washington. The neoconservative Wolfowitz Doctrine makes this completely clear. The Wolfowitz Doctrine, the basis of US foreign and military policy, defines as a threat any country with sufficient power to act as a constraint on Washington's unilateral action. The Wolfowitz Doctrine states unambiguously that any country with sufficient power to block Washington's purposes in the world is a threat and that "our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of" any such country. ..."
"... If the Russian government thinks that Washington's word means anything, the Russian government is out to lunch. ..."
"... Iran is well led, and Vladimir Putin has rescued Russia from US and Israeli control, but both governments continue to act as if they are taking some drug that makes them think that Washington can be a partner. ..."
"... These delusions are dangerous, not only to Russia and Iran, but to the entire world. If Russia and Iran let their guard down, they will be nuked, and so will China. Washington stands for one thing and one thing only: World Hegemony. ..."
"... Just ask the Neoconservatives or read their documents. The neoconservatives control Washington. No one else in the government has a voice. For the neoconservatives, Armageddon is a tolerable risk to achieve the goal of American World Hegemony ..."
Russia so desperately desires to be part of the disreputable and collapsing West that Russia is
losing its grip on reality.
Despite hard lesson piled upon hard lesson, Russia cannot give up its hope of being acceptable
to the West. The only way Russia can be acceptable to the West is to accept vassal status.
Russia miscalculated that diplomacy could solve the crisis that Washington created in Ukraine and
placed its hopes on the Minsk Agreement, which has no Western support whatsoever, neither in Kiev
nor in Washington, London, and NATO.
Russia can end the Ukraine crisis by simply accepting the requests of the former Russian territories
to reunite with Russia. Once the breakaway republics are again part of Russia, the crisis is over.
Ukraine is not going to attack Russia.
Russia doesn't end the crisis, because Russia thinks it would be provocative and upset Europe.
Actually, that is what Russia needs to do-upset Europe. Russia needs to make Europe aware that being
Washington's tool against Russia is risky and has costs for Europe.
Instead, Russia shields Europe from the costs that Washington imposes on Europe and imposes little
cost on Europe for acting against Russia in Washington's interest. Russia still supplies its declared
enemies, whose air forces fly provocative flights along Russia's borders, with the energy to put
their war planes into the air.
This is the failure of diplomacy, not its success. Diplomacy cannot succeed when only one side
believes in diplomacy and the other side believes in force.
Russia needs to understand that diplomacy cannot work with Washington and its NATO vassals who
do not believe in diplomacy, but rely instead on force. Russia needs to understand that when Washington
declares that Russia is an outlaw state that "does not act in accordance with international norms,"
Washington means that Russia is not following Washington's orders. By "international norms," Washington
means Washington's will. Countries that are not in compliance with Washington's will are not acting
in accordance with "international norms."
Washington and only Washington determines "international norms." America is the "exceptional,
indispensable" country. No other country has this rank.
A country with an independent foreign policy is a threat to Washington. The neoconservative Wolfowitz
Doctrine makes this completely clear. The Wolfowitz Doctrine, the basis of US foreign and military
policy, defines as a threat any country with sufficient power to act as a constraint on Washington's
unilateral action. The Wolfowitz Doctrine states unambiguously that any country with sufficient power
to block Washington's purposes in the world is a threat and that "our first objective is to prevent
the re-emergence of" any such country.
Russia, China, and Iran are in Washington's crosshairs. Treaties and "cooperation" mean nothing.
Cooperation only causes Washington's targets to lose focus and to forget that they are targets. Russia's
foreign minister Lavrov seems to believe that now with the failure of Washington's policy of war
and destruction in the Middle East, Washington and Russia can work together to contain the ISIS jihadists
in Iraq and Syria. This is a pipe dream. Russia and Washington cannot work together in Syria and
Iraq, because the two governments have conflicting goals. Russia wants peace, respect for international
law, and the containment of radical jihadists elements. Washington wants war, no legal constraints,
and is funding radical jihadist elements in the interest of Middle East instability and overthrow
of Assad in Syria. Even if Washington desired the same goals as Russia, for Washington to work with
Russia would undermine the picture of Russia as a threat and enemy.
Russia, China, and Iran are the three countries that can constrain Washington's unilateral action.
Consequently, the three countries are in danger of a pre-emptive nuclear strike. If these countries
are so naive as to believe that they can now work with Washington, given the failure of Washington's
14-year old policy of coercion and violence in the Middle East, by rescuing Washington from the quagmire
it created that gave rise to the Islamic State, they are deluded sitting ducks for a pre-emptive
nuclear strike.
Washington created the Islamic State. Washington used these jihadists to overthrow Gaddafi in
Libya and then sent them to overthrow Assad in Syria. The American neoconservatives, everyone of
whom is allied with Zionist Israel, do not want any cohesive state in the Middle East capable of
interfering with a "Greater Israel from the Nile to the Euphrates."
The ISIS jihadists learned that Washington's policy of murdering and displacing millions of Muslims
in seven countries had created an anti-Western constituency for them among the peoples of the Middle
East and have begun acting independently of their Washington creators.
The consequence is more chaos in the Middle East and Washington's loss of control.
Instead of leaving Washington to suffer at the hands of its own works, Russia and Iran, the two
most hated and demonized countries in the West, have rushed to rescue Washington from its Middle
East follies. This is the failure of Russian and Iranian strategic thinking. Countries that cannot
think strategically do not survive.
The Iranians need to understand that their treaty with Washington means nothing. Washington has
never honored any treaty. Just ask the Plains Indians or the last Soviet President Gorbachev.
If the Russian government thinks that Washington's word means anything, the Russian government
is out to lunch.
Iran is well led, and Vladimir Putin has rescued Russia from US and Israeli control, but both
governments continue to act as if they are taking some drug that makes them think that Washington
can be a partner.
These delusions are dangerous, not only to Russia and Iran, but to the entire world. If Russia and Iran let their guard down, they will be nuked, and so will China. Washington stands for one thing and one thing only: World Hegemony.
Just ask the Neoconservatives or read their documents. The neoconservatives control Washington. No one else in the government has a voice. For the neoconservatives, Armageddon is a tolerable risk to achieve the goal of American World
Hegemony.
Only Russia and China can save the world from Armageddon, but are they too deluded and worshipful
of the West to save Planet Earth?
If you are implying that Hillary Clinton supports the center left, you have
clearly not been paying attention her entire career, or to the careers of those
with whom she has surrounded herself. Even with today's ridiculously shifted
Overton window, there is nothing "left" about being an oligarch or a war criminal.
Can't speak for NC as a whole, but in my opinion, NC writers are criticizing
the person likely to win the election. These issues of corruption need to be
hashed out and handled well before inauguration.
Perhaps NC is providing a bit of balance, given the rest of the MSM has about
11 anti-Trump pieces for every 2 anti-HRC ones?
And having browsed through the FBI interview notes with Clinton, her defence against serious wrongdoing
is that she is a mixture of forgetful and incompetent. Is this really the best the Dems can do?
Good question, this NC reader is just pretty fed up with the status quo (maybe
others want to chime in):
– Unlimited immunity from prosecution for banking executive criminals
– More shiny new undeclared "nation-building" and "RTP" wars
– Globalist trade deals that enshrine unaccountable corporate tribunals over
national sovereignty, environmental and worker protection, and self-determination
– America's national business conducted in secrecy at the behest of corporate
donors to tax-exempt foundations
– Paid-for quid-pro-quo media manipulation of candidate and election coverage
– Health care system reform designed to benefit entrenched insurance providers
over providing access to reasonable-cost basic care.
Based on the above I'd say the 11:2 ratio looks about right.
Hillary lied again claiming that the existence of her bathroom mail server was a common knoleadge.
Some of Mrs. Clinton's closest aides were unaware of the server
Notable quotes:
"... some State Department employees interviewed by the F.B.I. explained that emails by Clinton
only contained the letter 'H' in the sender field and did not display her email address ..."
"... The F.B.I. said that some of Mrs. Clinton's closest aides were aware she used a private email
address but did not know she had set up a private server. The aides said they were "unaware of the existence
of the private server until after Clinton's tenure at State or when it became public knowledge." ..."
Mrs. Clinton said in her interview it was "common knowledge" that she had a private email address
because it was "displayed to anyone with whom she exchanged emails." But the F.B.I. said in a summary
of its findings that "some State Department employees interviewed by the F.B.I. explained that
emails by Clinton only contained the letter 'H' in the sender field and did not display her email
address."
The F.B.I. said that some of Mrs. Clinton's closest aides were aware she used a private email
address but did not know she had set up a private server. The aides said they were "unaware of the
existence of the private server until after Clinton's tenure at State or when it became public knowledge."
"some State Department employees interviewed by the F.B.I. explained that emails by Clinton
only contained the letter 'H' in the sender field and did not display her email address." I have
no idea what kind of email client would hide the contents of the from/reply-to field. How does
their spam filter work if it doesn't reveal who sent it? Why do they read stuff when they don't
have any idea who sent it? Did the F.B.I. really simply accept these statements as facts? Maybe
they all just use cell phones and could care less who else is in the loop.
"Three weeks later, a Platte River employee realized he had not deleted the emails as instructed.
The employee said he then used a special program called BleachBit to delete the files." He was
told to delete files that any nitwit knows shouldn't be deleted and delete only means delete if
they can't be found again but now it turns out he was supposed to shred them after removing the
staples.
The clear signal is that if you are going to break laws, hide information from future legal
discovery and generally stonewall investigators with easily disproven statements be very certain
that it at the behest of your liege lord. Laws are for the peasants. Justice is blind for the
elite because no one dares look.
fresno dan
Now we find out a laptop was "lost" in the mail.
Damn, this is gonna be really bad….for the post office.
Of course, it will be hard to spin when it turns out it was addressed to Putin in Hillary's handwriting…
Bunk McNulty, September 3, 2016 at 9:57 am
"The sh!t has hit the fan."
Higgs Boson
What sh!t? What fan? Remember, the FBI gave HRC a pass. Nothing to see. It was all a big "nothingburger".
The only people that keep harping on this are right-wing rubes who get their marching orders from
Putin's army of hackers. It's been assimilated into the Clinton Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy mythos.
Now go vote for Her, because "love [of what, they don't specify] Trumps hate."
"During [Sysadmin's] December 22, 2015 FBI interview, Pagliano recalled a conversation with
[Redacted] at the beginning of Clinton's tenure, in which [Redacted] advised he would not be
surprised if classified information was being transmitted to Clinton's personal server." (Page
28)
Clinton could not give an example of how the classification of a document was determined;
rather she stated there was a process in place at State before her tenure, and she relied on
career foreign service professionals to appropriately mark and handle classified information.
Clinton believed information should be classified when it relates to [Redacted] the use of
sensitive sources, or sensitive deliberations." (Page 26)
She relied on State officials to use their judgment when e-mailing her and could not recall
anyone raising concerns with her regarding the sensitivity of the information she received
at her e-mail address. The FBI provided Clinton with copies of her classified e-mails ranging
from CONFIDENTIAL to TOP SECRET/SAP and Clinton said she did not believe the e-mails contained
classified information." (Page 26)
"State employees interviewed by the FBI explained that emails from Clinton only contained
the letter "H" in the sender field and did not display their e-mail address. The majority of
the State employees interviewed by the FBI who were in e-mail contact with Clinton indicated
they had no knowledge of the private server in her Chappaqua residence. Clinton's immediate
aides, to include Mills, Abedin, Jacob Sullivan, and [Redacted] told the FBI they were unaware
of the existence of the private server until after Clinton's tenure at the State or when it
became public knowledge.
Possible Censorship
There were no e-mails provided by Williams & Connolly to State or the FBI dated from January
21, 2009 to March 18, 2009. FBI investigation identified an additional 18 days where Clinton
did not provide State any responsive e-mail. FBI investigation determined 14 of the 18 days
where Clinton did not provide State any responsive e-mail correspond with e-mail outages affecting
Clinton's personal server systems as a result of both Hurricane Irene and Hurricane Sandy.
FBI investigation indicated other explanations for gaps in Clinton's e-mail production could
include user deletion prior to PRN's transfer of Clinton's e-mails for review…" (Page 27)
Security Threats
"Forensic analysis noted that on January 5, 2013, three IP addresses matching known Tor
exit nodes were observed accessing a user e-mail account on the Pagliano Server believe to
belong to President Clinton staffer [Redacted] FBI investigation indicated the Tor user logged
in to [Redacted] email account and browsed e-mail folders and attachments. When asked during
her interview, [Redacted] stated to the FBI she is not familiar with nor has she ever used
Tor Software" (Page 29)
"The FBI does not have in its possession any of Clinton's 13 mobile devices which potentially
were used to send e-mails using Clinton's clintonemail.com e-mail addresses. As a result, the
FBI could not make a determination as to whether any of the devices were subject to compromise.
Similarly, the FBI does not have in its possession two of the five iPad devices which potentially
were used by Clinton to send and receive e-mails during her tenure… (Page 30)
"Investigation identified multiple occurrences of phishing and/or spear-phishing e-mails
sent to Clinton's account during her tenure as Secretary of State. [Paragraph Redacted]…
Clinton received another phishing e-mail, purportedly sent from the personal e-mail account
of State official [Redacted]. The email contained a potentially malicious link. Clinton replied
to the email [Redacted] stating, "Is this really from you? I was worried about opening it!"
… Open source information indicated, if opened the targeted user's device may have been infected,
and information would have been sent to at least three computers overseas, including one in
Russia." (page 31)
Pages 33 – 47 are redacted. About one third of the entire review is redacted.
However email tag data works, her name appears as "H" because she isn't using her typical
address. The address I have seen H appear in is [email protected].
Something about the contact data shows her as H.
There is an exchange between her and mega donor Ms. Rothschild that I saw this in. In the
email Clinton apologizes for inconveniencing her and literally says, "Let me know what penance
I owe you."
I have no idea what kind of email client would hide the contents of the from/reply-to
field.
"Friendly" ones, like, say, Outlook. Some people just don't care for all that gobbledygook,
and Microsoft aims to please. Of course, the sender can put whatever they want in the comment
field.
If this is not obstruction of justice then what is: " ...Representative
Jason Chaffetz, Republican of Utah and the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform
Committee, said that the deletion of the emails violated an order his committee issued to Mrs.
Clinton in 2012 and a subpoena issued by the Benghazi committee in 2015."
Notable quotes:
"... These were not Hillary Clinton's emails - they were government records, and this was potentially one of the largest security breaches at the State Department because they had all these years of security records that just went out the door, ..."
"... Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, called the F.B.I. documents "a devastating indictment of her judgment, honesty and basic competency."\ ..."
According to the F.B.I., in December 2014 a top aide to Mrs. Clinton told the company that
housed her server to delete an archive of emails from her account. The company, Platte River
Networks, apparently never followed those instructions. On March 2, 2015, The New York Times
reported that Mrs. Clinton had exclusively used a personal email account when she was secretary
of state. Two days later, the congressional committee investigating the 2012 attacks in Benghazi,
Libya, and Mrs. Clinton's response to them, told the technology firms associated with the email
account that they had to retain "all relevant documents" related to its inquiry.
Three weeks later, a Platte River employee realized he had not deleted the emails as instructed.
The employee said he then used a special program called BleachBit to delete the files. The F.B.I.
said Mrs. Clinton was unaware of the deletions.
The F.B.I. said it was later able to find some of the emails, but did not say how many emails
were deleted, or whether they were included in the 60,000 emails that Mrs. Clinton said she sent
and received while secretary of state from 2009 to 2013.
But Representative Jason Chaffetz, Republican of Utah and the chairman of the House Oversight
and Government Reform Committee, said that the deletion of the emails violated an order his
committee issued to Mrs. Clinton in 2012 and a subpoena issued by the Benghazi committee in 2015.
He said he planned to seek answers from Mrs. Clinton about the deletions. "These were not
Hillary Clinton's emails - they were government records, and this was potentially one of the
largest security breaches at the State Department because they had all these years of security
records that just went out the door," Mr. Chaffetz said. "It's a very black-and-white order.
There's no wiggle room."
Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, called the F.B.I.
documents "a devastating indictment of her judgment, honesty and basic competency."\
The F.B.I. released only small portions of its thick files on the Clinton investigation, and
Senator Charles E. Grassley, the Iowa Republican who leads the Senate Judiciary Committee,
accused the F.B.I. of withholding key documents - including many unclassified ones - from public
view.
The selective release, he said, produced "an incomplete and possibly misleading picture of the
facts without the other unclassified information that is still locked away from the public and
even most congressional staff."
"... "When I was the chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush," You knew exactly where this article was going once you read the first 14 words. ..."
"... The author was chief ethics lawyer for the George W. Bush Administration. Why does that bother me? I realize this guy's term was from 2005 to 2007 and the Abu Ghraib story pretty much broke in early 2005, ..."
"... How much did the Clinton campaign pay for this Op-Ed? 'Every one does it' and 'it's not illegal'. 'It's how business is done.' How about doing a real in-depth investigation on the Clinton Foundation and perceived favors to donors NYT, instead of more opinion? ..."
"... Clearly a planted article. Nice try. Is everyone aware that the Foundation paid off Clinton's '08 campaign debt? They gave $400,000 and considered "payment for the campaign's mailing lists" ..."
"... According to former Justice Department Deputy Assistant Attorney General Shannen Coffin, there are at least three different categories of federal laws which may be implicated. ..."
"... One, the ethics and government act, which says you can't use a public office for private gain for yourself or even for a charity. So in giving special access to the donors for the Clinton Foundation, the ethics and government act is implicated. So perhaps Mr. Painter is a bit hasty dismissing such claims. ..."
"... If it was only about getting a government post or an arranged meeting, I would agree. But this seems different because significant amounts of money changed hands as a result of State Department intervention. And a lot of that money ended up at the Foundation or as speaking fees to Bill Clinton. How is this not seen as foreign donations effecting an American election - which I believe is illegal. ..."
"... Mr. Painter: You say "There is little if any evidence that federal ethics laws were broken by Mrs. Clinton". So if there is even "little" evidence that the laws were broken, then shouldn't American electorate consider it when making their election day decisions? ..."
"... You did not mention that there was no independent investigation on this subject, so there is no way to know whether there was "little" or "significant" or "overwhelming" evidence that the laws were broken. ..."
"... And finally, even if the written laws were not broken, what about the immorality of what Clintons did? Has morality been completely removed from the public square in this once great country? ..."
"... If there was no evidence of corruption at the Clinton Foundation, then why did Bill Clinton's speaking fees increase astronomically (from roughly $100,000 to $850,000) during Hillary's tenure at the State Department? ..."
"... as the neocons and neolibs in power withdraw from the govt's former "general welfare" Constitutional role and concentrate on enriching themselves and their friends - it would pay for citizens to become more aware of how the sector works. ..."
"... the system they devised inevitably empowers some groups more than others. Since democratic theory defines government officials as representatives of the voters, it encourages constituents to influence the decisions of those agents. Ideally, politicians should not favor the interests of some groups over others, but reality dictates otherwise. ..."
"... In the contest for influence, money inevitably plays a major, although not always decisive, role. In an effort to limit this role, we have developed both formal and informal methods to constrain human greed. The law prohibits bribery, for example. To discourage subtler forms of influence-buying, we have developed codes of ethics that pressure officials to limit financial connections with groups or individuals who might seek their help. ..."
"... Public opinion can serve as a powerful tool to enforce these codes. This explains the informal requirement that a president divest herself of financial connections that might affect her decisions. If Clinton rejects this tradition, she will undermine an important method of limiting the influence of moneyed interests in government. We have too few such tools as it is. ..."
"... Our laws are relatively stringent and prevent the crassest forms of corruption, and our culture makes lesser but legal offenses dangerous politically. But to imagine that any government, anywhere, could function without either those sorts of alliances or some equally corruptible strongman central oversight is is as naive and dangerously idealistic. ..."
"... How would someone feel if they found out that a doctor who prescribed them a medication is also paid large sums by a pharmaceutical company to promote the drug? Or, if the doctors owns substantial amount of stock in the company? Appearances do matter and it is likely that such conflicts do impact judgement. These kinds of allowances are being cleaned up across the country, at least in medicine. ..."
"... I am fine if they get higher salaries, but it is time to clean up the political corruption and crony capitalism. It is a shame that we hold our politicians to such incredible low standards and it is not a surprise that so many people don't bother to vote. ..."
"... It doesn't matter how good or bad the work of the Clinton Foundation is. That is not the question. The question is the motivation of many who contribute to the foundation. Are they motivated by altruism or is donating in a big way a ploy to gain access to Mrs. Clinton. ..."
"... I doubt that Clinton breached a fundamental legal boundary. However, the Clinton's have always seen the bright line and have decided to test the boundaries. From using police to secure women while governor to taking money from Walmart to major financial institutions to the email scandal, the Clinton's do it again and again and blame a vast right wing conspiracy. The Clinton foundation used Doug Band as a bag man securing commercial contracts for Bill and Hilary while he had a senior role at the foundation (flashing red lights). Huma took money off the state department books as did other Clinton confidants (flashing red lights), etc. They can't help themselves. Are these actives illegal? Probably not. However, we seek to be inspired by our leaders, we want leaders who are better than the average, better than us. ..."
"... When Bill can trot off to Russia, get 750k for a speech at the same time that business interests of the donor is before the State Department, it smells. The crux of the matter is the rotten judgement. ..."
"... You want a POTUS who has good judgement. The relentless chasing of a buck mixed with the appearance of impropriety, real or imagined, is the problem. When mixed with her poor judgement on the emails and her poor judgement on invading Iraq and disrupting Libya, you have a problem which explains her low approval rating. She is just fortunate that she has Trump to run against. ..."
"... If we look back to the Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky scandal, those that were screaming the loudest for justice were having extramarital affairs during the "investigation". Newt Gingrich, Bob Livingston, Henry Hyde. And then there was Dennis Hastert. ..."
"... You bring up yet another problem with Hilary. She has covered for her sexual predator husband for decades, including harassing and publicly shaming her husband's sexual assault victims. And there are many going back to his Oxford days. How is that ok? ..."
"... The Trumpster won the Republican nomination precisely because of voter disgust over the in-crowd culture of politicians and donors. Bernie Sanders came close to winning the Democratic nomination for much of the same reason. Hilary and her entire family need to wake up fast if she has any hope or desire to get elected. We all know where Hilary's money is coming from. Does Hilary know where her voters are coming from and where they are now? ..."
"... To put this in a nutshell, The Clinton's self-enriching behavior- and use of public office for private gain - is troubling in the extreme ..."
"... During her tenure as Secretary of State (as reported by the AP) of the 154 non-official meetings at least 85 of those individuals were private-sector donors who contributed up to $156 million to Clinton Foundation initiatives. ..."
"... The report comes on top of other far more incriminating investigations revealing the appearance of quid pro quo with foreign donors to the Clinton Foundation. Perhaps the worst example was when investors who profited from the Clinton State Department's approval of a deal for Russia's atomic energy agency's acquisition of a fifth of America's uranium mining rights subsequently pumped money into the Clinton Foundation. ..."
"... I hate to say this but the Clintons are America's version of Russian Oligarchs - and their Foundation almost a glorified form of money laundering. I can only pray that in 2020, us Dems may find a better president ,and that the Clintons be soon forgotten. ..."
"... Without seeing the 30,000 deleted emails, how is anyone qualified to say no laws were broken? Besides, who cares what the chief ethics lawyer for a president who authorized torture thinks? ..."
This is not the typical foundation funded by family wealth earned by
an industrialist or financier. This foundation was funded almost entirely by donors, and to the
extent anyone in the Clinton family "earned" the money, it was largely through speaking fees for
former President Bill Clinton or Hillary Clinton when she was not secretary of state. This
dependence on donations - a scenario remarkably similar to that of many political campaigns -
means that the motivations of every single donor will be questioned whenever a President Clinton
does anything that could conceivably benefit such donors.
... ... ...
This kind of access is the most corrupting brand of favoritism and
pervades the entire government. Under both Republican and Democratic presidents, top
ambassadorial posts routinely go to campaign contributors. Yet more campaign contributors hound
these and other State Department employees for introductions abroad, preferred access and
advancement of trade and other policy agendas. More often than not the State Department does
their bidding.
... ... ...
The problem is that it does not matter that no laws were broken, or
that the Clinton Foundation is principally about doing good deeds. It does not matter that
favoritism is inescapable in the federal government and that the Clinton Foundation stories are
really nothing new. The appearances surrounding the foundation are problematic, and it is and
will be an albatross around Mrs. Clinton's neck.
... ... ...
As for Chelsea Clinton, anti-nepotism laws, strengthened after
President Kennedy appointed his brother Robert as attorney general, could prevent her mother from
appointing her to some of the highest government positions. But she could give her mother
informal advice, and there are a great many government jobs for which she would be eligible. She
does not need the Clinton Foundation to succeed in life.
Richard W. Painter, a professor of law at the University of
Minnesota, was the chief White House ethics lawyer from 2005 to 2007.
Majortrout, is a trusted commenter Montreal 2 days ago
"When I was the chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush," You knew
exactly where this article was going once you read the first 14 words.
chichimax, albany, ny 2 days ago
I have a hard time focusing on this article. The author was chief ethics lawyer for the
George W. Bush Administration. Why does that bother me? I realize this guy's term was from
2005 to 2007 and the Abu Ghraib story pretty much broke in early 2005, but, thinking
about those other lawyers for that Bush and what they said was okay, it really gives me the
creeps to think about focusing on anything this guy might say about ethics. Just sayin'.
Lori, San Francisco 2 days ago
How much did the Clinton campaign pay for this Op-Ed? 'Every
one does it' and 'it's not illegal'. 'It's how business is done.' How about doing a real
in-depth investigation on the Clinton Foundation and perceived favors to donors NYT, instead
of more opinion?
If the foundation is so squeaky clean there should be no problem.
Or has Hilary made it clear you won't get a front row seat at her next mythical press
conference? Or has she threatened to stop sending you the press releases from her campaign you
report as news?
Ange, Boston 2 days ago
Clearly a planted article. Nice try. Is everyone aware that
the Foundation paid off Clinton's '08 campaign debt? They gave $400,000 and considered
"payment for the campaign's mailing lists"
Crabby Hayes, Virginia 2 days ago
According to former Justice Department Deputy Assistant
Attorney General Shannen Coffin, there are at least three different categories of federal laws
which may be implicated.
One, the ethics and government act, which says you can't use
a public office for private gain for yourself or even for a charity. So in giving special
access to the donors for the Clinton Foundation, the ethics and government act is implicated.
So perhaps Mr. Painter is a bit hasty dismissing such claims.
Randy, Largent 2 days ago
If it was only about getting a government post or an arranged
meeting, I would agree. But this seems different because significant amounts of money changed
hands as a result of State Department intervention. And a lot of that money ended up at the
Foundation or as speaking fees to Bill Clinton. How is this not seen as foreign donations
effecting an American election - which I believe is illegal.
Isa Ten, CA 2 days ago
Mr. Painter: You say "There is little if any evidence that
federal ethics laws were broken by Mrs. Clinton". So if there is even "little" evidence that
the laws were broken, then shouldn't American electorate consider it when making their
election day decisions?
You did not mention that there was no independent
investigation on this subject, so there is no way to know whether there was "little" or
"significant" or "overwhelming" evidence that the laws were broken.
Your main argument is that "everyone" does that. Perhaps, it is
time to change that and Trump is the man who can do it. Is it fear of this kind of change that
frightens so many NeverTrumpsters into rejecting him?
And finally, even if the written laws were not broken, what
about the immorality of what Clintons did? Has morality been completely removed from the
public square in this once great country?
David Keltz, Brooklyn 2 days ago
If there was no evidence of corruption at the Clinton Foundation, then why did Bill
Clinton's speaking fees increase astronomically (from roughly $100,000 to $850,000) during
Hillary's tenure at the State Department?
Did he suddenly become more sought after, nearly 8 or 9 years after his presidency? If
there was no evidence of corruption, then why did Hillary Clinton use her authority to appoint
herself onto the Haiti Relief Fund Board, where her sole relief efforts entailed asking people
not to donate to the Red Cross, but to the Clinton Foundation?
John D., Out West 2 days ago
One thing that comes through loud & clear in the comments: a lot
of people don't have a clue how non-profit organizations work. For a sector that's responsible
for most of the good things in this country these days - as the neocons and neolibs in
power withdraw from the govt's former "general welfare" Constitutional role and concentrate on
enriching themselves and their friends - it would pay for citizens to become more aware of how
the sector works.
James Lee, Arlington, Texas August 31, 2016
The framers of our Constitution had no illusions about the weaknesses of human nature. They
carefully crafted our charter of government to pit the officials of each branch against each
other, to obstruct the kind of collusion that could undermine the foundations of a free
society.
Despite their best efforts, however, the system they devised inevitably empowers some
groups more than others. Since democratic theory defines government officials as
representatives of the voters, it encourages constituents to influence the decisions of those
agents. Ideally, politicians should not favor the interests of some groups over others, but
reality dictates otherwise.
In the contest for influence, money inevitably plays a major, although not always
decisive, role. In an effort to limit this role, we have developed both formal and informal
methods to constrain human greed. The law prohibits bribery, for example. To discourage
subtler forms of influence-buying, we have developed codes of ethics that pressure officials
to limit financial connections with groups or individuals who might seek their help.
Public opinion can serve as a powerful tool to enforce these codes. This explains the
informal requirement that a president divest herself of financial connections that might
affect her decisions. If Clinton rejects this tradition, she will undermine an important
method of limiting the influence of moneyed interests in government. We have too few such
tools as it is.
confetti, MD August 31, 2016
I don't think that favoritism in political life will ever go
away, for the simple reason that political power isn't attained in a vacuum. It requires
sturdy alliances by definition, and those are forged via exchange of valued items - material
goods, policy compromises, position, status, assistance and other durable support. Our
laws are relatively stringent and prevent the crassest forms of corruption, and our culture
makes lesser but legal offenses dangerous politically. But to imagine that any government,
anywhere, could function without either those sorts of alliances or some equally corruptible
strongman central oversight is is as naive and dangerously idealistic.
Of course the Clintons wheeled and dealed - but well within the
law.
I'm more interested in what end that served and the real
consequences than the fact that it occurred. In their case, an effective charity that aided
many very vulnerable people was sustained, and no demonstrable compromises that negatively
affected global policies occurred.
It's the Republicans and truly sold out Democrats, who have
forever been deep in the pocket of big money and whose 'deals' in that department cause
tangible harm to the populace, that I'm more concerned with. This is their smoke and mirrors
show.
Alexander K., Minnesota August 31, 2016
How would someone feel if they found out that a doctor who prescribed them a medication
is also paid large sums by a pharmaceutical company to promote the drug? Or, if the doctors
owns substantial amount of stock in the company? Appearances do matter and it is likely that
such conflicts do impact judgement. These kinds of allowances are being cleaned up across the
country, at least in medicine.
It is time that conflict of interest for politicians at all levels is taken seriously by
the public. I am fine if they get higher salaries, but it is time to clean up the
political corruption and crony capitalism. It is a shame that we hold our politicians to such
incredible low standards and it is not a surprise that so many people don't bother to vote.
Great editorial.
Michael Belmont, Hewitt, New Jersey 2 days ago
It doesn't matter how good or bad the work of the Clinton
Foundation is. That is not the question. The question is the motivation of many who contribute
to the foundation. Are they motivated by altruism or is donating in a big way a ploy to gain
access to Mrs. Clinton. The AP analysis suggests that is just what went on. At the very
least it looks bad. Appearances are everything in politics.
Hillary doesn't need to appear to be unethical should she
be elected. Bad enough she has Bill by her side. She doesn't need a special prosecutor
investigator distracting her presidency with an influence peddling scandal. Like it or not,
Republicans will be hunting for her political hide. Hillary doesn't need to paint a bulls-eye
for them.
Chris, 10013 2 days ago
I doubt that Clinton breached a fundamental legal boundary. However, the Clinton's have
always seen the bright line and have decided to test the boundaries. From using police to
secure women while governor to taking money from Walmart to major financial institutions to
the email scandal, the Clinton's do it again and again and blame a vast right wing conspiracy.
The Clinton foundation used Doug Band as a bag man securing commercial contracts for Bill and
Hilary while he had a senior role at the foundation (flashing red lights). Huma took money off
the state department books as did other Clinton confidants (flashing red lights), etc. They
can't help themselves. Are these actives illegal? Probably not. However, we seek to be
inspired by our leaders, we want leaders who are better than the average, better than us.
In the Clintons, we have highly competent, experienced, politicians who have repeated
shown deep ethical problems. She is the best candidate by far. It's unfortunate that our
future President never learned what ethics are.
Robert, Minneapolis 2 days ago
An interesting article. It is probably true that many, if not most, politicians are
influence sellers to a degree. I suspect that the Clintons are just better at it. It is fair
to say that we do not know if laws have been broken. But it is also fair to say that
appearances matter, and that the Clintons are very good at lining their own pockets at the
same time the foundation does it's good work.
When Bill can trot off to Russia, get 750k for a speech at the same time that business
interests of the donor is before the State Department, it smells. The crux of the matter is
the rotten judgement.
You want a POTUS who has good judgement. The relentless chasing of a buck mixed with
the appearance of impropriety, real or imagined, is the problem. When mixed with her poor
judgement on the emails and her poor judgement on invading Iraq and disrupting Libya, you have
a problem which explains her low approval rating. She is just fortunate that she has Trump to
run against.
Madelyn Harris, Portland, OR 2 days ago
So glad to see many NYT readers here recognize the hypocrisy in this opinion piece. The
message is "All of them do it, it's mostly legal, though it's distasteful and problematic.
However, Hillary is the only one who should stop doing it because it looks bad."
The loudest voices of this partisan attack should be under the same scrutiny and be
compelled to practice what they preach. If we look back to the Bill Clinton and Monica
Lewinsky scandal, those that were screaming the loudest for justice were having extramarital
affairs during the "investigation". Newt Gingrich, Bob Livingston, Henry Hyde. And then there
was Dennis Hastert.
Let's start looking into the personal emails of Paul Ryan, Jason Chaffetz, Donald Trump,
Trey Gowdy, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz. Imagine what we would find! Legal, but ethically
problematic exchanges and clearly illegal exchanges that would justify imprisonment. If they
ask for justice, we should provide it.
Lori, San Francisco 2 days ago
You bring up yet another problem with Hilary. She has covered for her sexual predator
husband for decades, including harassing and publicly shaming her husband's sexual assault
victims. And there are many going back to his Oxford days. How is that ok?
John D., Out West 2 days ago
An excellent piece, actually tethered to reality and non-profit law and practice ...
finally! Yes, all the Clinton clan needs to divorce themselves from the foundation, and I'm
not sure why they would wait until after the election to do so.
It seems the loudest critics are of the tribe that created campaign finance law as it
stands today, with the CU case having created a legal system of bribery across the board in
government. C'mon guys, be consistent, or it's the big H word for you!
RNW, Albany, CA 2 days ago
When it comes to ethics and public officials, appearances do in indeed MATTER! Cronyism and
conflicts of interest might elicit a big yawn from the political class, their fellow travelers
and camp followers but arouse anger and indignation from voters. Remember those guys?
We're the ones that politicians suddenly remember every few years with they come. hats in
hand, begging for donations and, most of all, our votes. (The plea for donations is a farce.
Except for a few outliers, they don't really need or want OUR donations.)
The Trumpster won the Republican nomination precisely because of voter disgust over the
in-crowd culture of politicians and donors. Bernie Sanders came close to winning the
Democratic nomination for much of the same reason. Hilary and her entire family need to wake
up fast if she has any hope or desire to get elected. We all know where Hilary's money is
coming from. Does Hilary know where her voters are coming from and where they are now?
Tembrach, Connecticut 2 days ago
I preface this by saying that I am proud Democrat & will vote for Mrs. Clinton, as Mr.
Trump is beyond the pale of decency
To put this in a nutshell, The Clinton's self-enriching behavior- and use of public
office for private gain - is troubling in the extreme
During her tenure as Secretary of State (as reported by the AP) of the 154 non-official
meetings at least 85 of those individuals were private-sector donors who contributed up to
$156 million to Clinton Foundation initiatives.
The report comes on top of other far more incriminating investigations revealing the
appearance of quid pro quo with foreign donors to the Clinton Foundation. Perhaps the worst
example was when investors who profited from the Clinton State Department's approval of a deal
for Russia's atomic energy agency's acquisition of a fifth of America's uranium mining rights
subsequently pumped money into the Clinton Foundation.
Mrs Clinton rightly condemns Trump for playing footsy with Putin. But pray tell, what
exactly was this?
I hate to say this but the Clintons are America's version of Russian Oligarchs - and
their Foundation almost a glorified form of money laundering. I can only pray that in 2020, us
Dems may find a better president ,and that the Clintons be soon forgotten.
Thought Bubble, New Jersey 2 days ago
Without seeing the 30,000 deleted emails, how is anyone qualified to say no laws were
broken? Besides, who cares what the chief ethics lawyer for a president who authorized torture
thinks?
More than half of the people who managed to score a personal one on one meeting with Hillary Clinton
while she was Secretary of State donated money to the Clinton Foundation, either as an individual
or through a company where they worked. "Combined, the 85 donors contributed as much as $156 million.
At least 40 donated more than $100,000 each, and 20 gave more than $1 million," the Associated Press
reported.
Does that make Hillary corrupt? Yes. It does.
At this writing, there is
no evidence that anyone received any special favors as a result of their special access to Clinton.
Not that treats were not requested. They were. (The most amusing was Bono's
request to stream his band's music into the international space station, which was mercifully
rejected.)
That's irrelevant. She's still corrupt.
Clinton's defenders like to point out that neither she nor her husband
draw a salary from their foundation. But that's a technicality.
The Clintons
extract millions of dollars in travel expenditures, including luxurious airplane accommodations
and hotel suites, from their purported do-gooder outfit. They exploit the foundation as a patronage
mill, arranging for it to hire their loyalists at extravagant six-figure salaries. Charity Navigator,
the Yelp of non-profits, doesn't bother to issue a rating for the Clinton foundation due to the pathetically
low portion of money
($9 million out of $140 million in 2013) that makes its way to someone who needs it.
"It seems like the Clinton Foundation operates as a
slush fund for the Clintons," says Bill Allison of the Sunlight Foundation, a government watchdog
group.
As a measure of how institutionally bankrupt American politics is, all this
crap is technically
legal. But that doesn't mean it's not corrupt.
Public relations experts
caution politicians like the Clintons that the
appearance of impropriety is almost as bad as its actuality. If it looks
bad, it will hurt you with the polls. True, but that's not really the point.
The point is: access is corruption.
It doesn't matter that the lead singer of U2 didn't get to live out his rocker
astronaut fantasy. It's disgusting that he was ever in a position to have it
considered. To put a finer point on it, ethics require that someone in Hillary
Clinton's position never, ever take a meeting or correspond by email or offer a
job to someone who donated money to her and her husband's foundation. Failure
to build an unscalable wall between government and money necessarily creates a
corrupt quid pro quo:
"Just got a call from the Clinton Foundation. They're
shaking us down for a donation. Should we cough up a few bucks?"
"Hillary could be president someday. Chelsea could end up in the Senate. It
couldn't hurt to be remembered as someone who threw them some money when they
asked."
This, I 100% guarantee you, was the calculus when Wall Street firms like Goldman Sachs paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to Hillary for a one- or two-hour speech. She doesn't have anything new to say that everyone hasn't already heard million times before. It's not like she shared any valuable stock tips during those talks. Wealthy individuals and corporations pay politicians for one thing: access.
Ted Rall, syndicated writer and the cartoonist for ANewDomain.net, is the author of the
book "Snowden," the biography of the NSA whistleblower.
I am getting those "living a past life" feelings; swimming with a school of
my fellow fish, and sensing that a huge fishing net is being drawn in, with my
group in it. Feeling the slack noose around my horse-neck, slowly begin to
tighten; Seeing a hardening in the faces of the formerly "friendly" occupying
soldiers of my little town.
Google is Censoring Hillary's Health Problems Search Results
There are dozens of digital spying companies that can
track everything a target does on a smartphone.
Credit
Spencer Platt/Getty Images
SAN FRANCISCO - Want to invisibly spy on 10
iPhone
owners without their knowledge? Gather their every keystroke, sound,
message and location? That will cost you $650,000, plus a $500,000 setup fee with an
Israeli outfit called the NSO Group. You can spy on more people if you would like -
just check out the company's price list.
The NSO Group is one of a number of companies that
sell surveillance tools
that can capture all the activity on a smartphone, like a
user's location and personal contacts. These tools can even turn the phone into a
secret recording device.
Since its founding six years ago, the NSO Group has kept a low profile. But last
month, security researchers
caught its spyware trying to gain access
to the iPhone of a human rights activist
in the United Arab Emirates. They also discovered a second target, a Mexican
journalist who wrote about corruption in the Mexican government.
Now, internal NSO Group emails, contracts and commercial proposals obtained by The
New York Times offer insight into how companies in this secretive digital
surveillance industry operate. The emails and documents were provided by two people
who have had dealings with the NSO Group but would not be named for fear of
reprisals.
The company is one of dozens of digital spying outfits that track everything a target
does on a smartphone. They aggressively market their services to governments and law
enforcement agencies around the world. The industry argues that this spying is
necessary to track terrorists, kidnappers and drug lords. The NSO Group's corporate
mission statement is "Make the world a safe place."
Ten people familiar with the company's sales, who refused to be identified, said that
the NSO Group has a strict internal vetting process to determine who it will sell to.
An ethics committee made up of employees and external counsel vets potential
customers based on human rights rankings set by the World Bank and other global
bodies. And to date, these people all said, NSO has yet to be denied an export
license.
But critics note that the company's spyware has also been used to track journalists
and human rights activists.
"There's no check on this," said Bill Marczak, a senior fellow at the Citizen Lab at
the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs. "Once NSO's systems are
sold, governments can essentially use them however they want. NSO can say they're
trying to make the world a safer place, but they are also making the world a more
surveilled place."
The NSO Group's capabilities are in higher demand now that companies like Apple,
Facebook and Google are using stronger encryption to protect data in their systems,
in the process making it harder for government agencies to track suspects.
The NSO Group's spyware finds ways around encryption by baiting targets to click
unwittingly on texts containing malicious links or by exploiting previously
undiscovered software flaws. It was taking advantage of
three such flaws in Apple software
- since fixed - when it was discovered by
researchers last month.
The cyberarms industry typified by the NSO Group operates in a legal gray area, and
it is often left to the companies to decide how far they are willing to dig into a
target's personal life and what governments they will do business with. Israel has
strict export controls for digital weaponry, but the country has never barred the
sale of NSO Group technology.
Since it is privately held, not much is known about the NSO Group's finances, but its
business is clearly growing. Two years ago, the NSO Group sold a controlling stake in
its business to Francisco Partners, a
private equity
firm based in San Francisco, for $120 million. Nearly a year
later, Francisco Partners was exploring a sale of the company for 10 times that
amount, according to two people approached by the firm but forbidden to speak about
the discussions.
The company's internal documents detail pitches to countries throughout Europe and
multimillion-dollar contracts with Mexico, which paid the NSO Group more than $15
million for three projects over three years, according to internal NSO Group emails
dated in 2013.
"Our intelligence systems are subject to Mexico's relevant legislation and have legal
authorization," Ricardo Alday, a spokesman for the Mexican embassy in Washington,
said in an emailed statement. "They are not used against journalists or activists.
All contracts with the federal government are done in accordance with the law."
Zamir Dahbash, an NSO Group spokesman, said that the sale of its spyware was
restricted to authorized governments and that it was used solely for criminal and
terrorist investigations. He declined to comment on whether the company would cease
selling to the U.A.E. and Mexico after last week's disclosures.
For the last six years, the NSO Group's main product, a tracking system called
Pegasus, has been used by a growing number of government agencies to target a range
of smartphones - including iPhones, Androids, and BlackBerry and Symbian systems -
without leaving a trace.
Among the Pegasus system's capabilities, NSO Group contracts assert, are the
abilities to extract text messages, contact lists, calendar records, emails, instant
messages and GPS locations. One capability that the NSO Group calls "room tap" can
gather sounds in and around the room, using the phone's own microphone.
Pegasus can use the camera to take snapshots or screen grabs. It can deny the phone
access to certain websites and applications, and it can grab search histories or
anything viewed with the phone's web browser. And all of the data can be sent back to
the agency's server in real time.
In its commercial proposals, the NSO Group asserts that its tracking software and
hardware can install itself in any number of ways, including "over the air stealth
installation," tailored text messages and emails, through public Wi-Fi hot spots
rigged to secretly install NSO Group software, or the old-fashioned way, by spies in
person.
Much like a traditional software company, the NSO Group prices its surveillance tools
by the number of targets, starting with a flat $500,000 installation fee. To spy on
10 iPhone users, NSO charges government agencies $650,000; $650,000 for 10 Android
users; $500,000 for five BlackBerry users; or $300,000 for five Symbian users - on
top of the setup fee, according to one commercial proposal.
You can pay for more targets. One hundred additional targets will cost $800,000, 50
extra targets cost $500,000, 20 extra will cost $250,000 and 10 extra costs $150,000,
according to an NSO Group commercial proposal. There is an annual system maintenance
fee of 17 percent of the total price every year thereafter.
What that gets you, NSO Group documents say, is "unlimited access to a target's
mobile devices." In short, the company says: You can "remotely and covertly collect
information about your target's relationships, location, phone calls, plans and
activities - whenever and wherever they are."
And, its proposal adds, "It leaves no traces whatsoever."
The bizarre thing is that any elected politician dumb enough to take
Kissenger's advice has not prospered. Nixon was impeached, Ford defeated, and
when Carter was dumb enough to take Kissenger's advice about letting the Shah
of Iran into the US, his presidency went into meltdown. Why would anyone listen
to him? putting aside the question that he is a war criminal.
Yes, since we know that for Clinton, his war criminal credentials fall
into the "feature not a bug" category, the question is why the smartest,
most qualified candidate
evuh
would not see pattern of failure
attendant on those who tie their wagon to his star.
Like so many Clinton failures (from both), it wasn't the fault of the
advisor, but those taking the advice didn't do it exactly the way Henry K
told them to do it. Think Welfare Reform, Libya, etc. All the fault of
those putting the plans into operation.
Smartest people in the room, gravitating toward each other understand
how their brilliance can be misunderstood.
"Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign raised an eye-popping $143 million
in August for her candidacy and the Democratic Party, the best showing of her
campaign, her team said Thursday"
And yet my spam folder yesterday contained 46 (count 'em) pleas for
donations from HillaryClinton.com, sent over the last ten days, including the
one I read that said "Just send us a dollar."
And yes, since there was absolutely NO "unsubscribe" link on the emails I
initially received from the Clinton Cult, I did consign all further
communication to spam, thank you very much.
I'm sure they were just trying to make sure that 'eye-popping' amount
isn't from the fewest donors in history. By about the fourth one of those I
finally determined they really didn't need me to donate money they just
needed to be able to count me as a donor
Following right after that link is the withdrawal of $$$ for airtime from
Ted Strickland's campaign. Not some House race, not even a unlikely Senate
attempt, but they don't have enough money to hammer on somebody who not only
is chasing a big prize but actually already
won
the damn race once
already.
And you can convince me that it is 100% likely Strickland will lose. But
if you don't support him, you don't allow an alternative view to be
developed and used to hammer the winner during his term. Isn't that how you
play politics? You don't just show up around election, play nice, and if
polls – yeech, polls – don't go your way you just go home.
But the Democrats don't even want those kinds of victories. They want
1) The Executive Branch
2) No other branch of government so they can
blame what they don't (or worse, do) do – haha, if you read that right you
get "dodo" – on the other side.
Ms Clinton has an insane amount of money. And what she spends it on
(herself) and what she doesn't (anybody else) is what tells you what you
need to know.
The article on the difficulty of taking over the Democratic Party hits the
nail on the head, but it misses the Michels-ian problem: organizations have a
tendency (but not this is a tendency, not a rule or fate) towards increasing
oligarchy over time, and organizational members are socialized to trust and
obey party leadership. Factional dissidents within the Dems have to contend not
only with the party oligarchy and its formidable resources, the decentralized
and sprawling nature of the organization, but with a membership that barely
participates but, when it does, turns out when and how the leadership wants.
The Militant Labour tendency example isn't perfect – entryism into a
Parliamentary party is easier than our party system – but it speaks volumes. To
get a hearing from the party membership you can only criticize so much of the
organization itself; if you and a faction entered and created a "Destroy the
Dems" faction you'd be ignored or hunted out of the party, especially if you
pointedly attacked the Dems oligarchy and were openly hostile to their
officials, platform and the president – though I would argue you'd need exactly
a "Destroy the Dems" faction to succeed in smashing the party oligarchy and
changing the culture.
Keep in mind I do say this as a Green and a person who did his PhD on
inner-party democracy (or lack thereof). Lack of democracy is a persistent
theme in studies of parties for the last century.
It would make more sense to really unite the left around electoral reform in
the long run and push for proportional representation at the state/local level
for legislatures and city councils. While it would probably be preferable for
democracy's sake to have one big district elected with an open-list vote, in
the US context we'd probably go the German route of mixed-member proportional
that combines geographical single-member districts with proportional voting.
Speculating very freely: Could there be a flow of goods we don't know
about? Like containers full of opioids? Or is there a capital flow that
shouldn't exist, but does? Money laundering from those same opioids? Money
laundering generally? The Bezzle? Readers?
There's an enormous amount of people in the USA who are working on some kind
of black market. You don't have ten million unemployed men who are simply
sitting idle all the time.
Those people will never report that they are making money on the black
market.
For instance, there's going to be an enormous amount of weed leaving
Colorado and Washington and transported to other states. Whatever used to be
traveling over the border, we can now produce domestically. Which is great,
don't get me wrong, but until it's legalized in all fifty states, it doesn't
show up on the books. Doing this is as easy as staying in CO for a few weeks,
buying your maximum each day, then going a few states over and selling.
If you are implying that Hillary Clinton supports the center left, you
have clearly not been paying attention her entire career, or to the careers
of those with whom she has surrounded herself. Even with today's
ridiculously shifted Overton window, there is nothing "left" about being an
oligarch or a war criminal.
Can't speak for NC as a whole, but in my opinion, NC writers are
criticizing the person likely to win the election. These issues of
corruption need to be hashed out and handled well before inauguration.
Perhaps NC is providing a bit of balance, given the rest of the MSM has
about 11 anti-Trump pieces for every 2 anti-HRC ones?
And having browsed through the FBI interview notes with Clinton, her
defence against serious wrongdoing is that she is a mixture of forgetful and
incompetent. Is this really the best the Dems can do?
Good question, this NC reader is just pretty fed up with the status quo
(maybe others want to chime in):
– Unlimited immunity from prosecution
for banking executive criminals
– More shiny new undeclared
"nation-building" and "RTP" wars
– Globalist trade deals that enshrine
unaccountable corporate tribunals over national sovereignty, environmental
and worker protection, and self-determination
– America's national
business conducted in secrecy at the behest of corporate donors to
tax-exempt foundations
– Paid-for quid-pro-quo media manipulation of
candidate and election coverage
– Health care system reform designed to
benefit entrenched insurance providers over providing access to
reasonable-cost basic care.
Based on the above I'd say the 11:2 ratio
looks about right.
In reality we have a center leans extreme right Democratic candidate and
a left, right and center Republican candidate. One has a clear record of
supporting and increasing conservative policies in American and the other
has given speeches that have been all over the spectrum.
But hey, you keep trying to shame people who don't give a fig about
useless and false labels but are vastly interested in the normalization of
corruption.
I personally would like to see the reform/ takeover the Democratic party
squad concede that third parties don't have a level playing field(which may
indeed be why they consistently fail) and then help work to fix the problem.
A starting point would be opening every single primary to every voting age
individual or forcing the private parties to pay for their own darn soiree.
It's the democratic way to settle the debate on whether or not it will be
easier to reform the DNC or use a third party to enact progressive policy.
(Sigh ."Exhibit "A" for "why I'm not a Republican" anymore .)
A law mandating that AG workers get paid overtime just like about everyone
else is not a "tax".
The excuses they come up with for justifying the status quo are also a
treat:
-No O/T pay because it's "Seasonal Work", and farmers can't spread their
harvest labor over the whole year? (But nothing said about the months when the
labor is making zero bucks, when the seasonal workers aren't on the payroll)
– Can't find additional help because of "labor shortages"? Easy enough to
fix. PAY MORE MONEY. Why don't "free market" principles ever apply to labor?
-A "regressive tax on poor people"? Maybe they wouldn't be so poor, if they
were paid for their O/T.
-Encouraging automation because "labor costs too much". Au contraire. It's
the other way around. Development of automation (and the skills/jobs needed to
design build and support these machines) is slowed, because labor is too cheap.
And finally, "a $1Billion tax" ..assuming their calculations are correct (a
big if, figures don't lie but liars figure):
.a billion dollar nationwide tax amounts to ( ..one billion divvied by
300 million, carry the one .) .about four bucks a year per person. OMG, I
might have to skip that McNuggets Value Meal (that will also be made by robots
instead of "overpaid" labor) once a year.
People like this are so full of s##t, their eyes are brown.
I'm actually thankful to the folks running ZH some months ago they made
a (likely mobile-driven) change to their site layout, with result that it no
longer renders readably in my default browser, a legacy FF version, dating
from just before the Mozilla weenies decided to remove the 'image display'
toggle from the user preferences menu (disabling bandwidth-hogging image
rendering is really useful in a shared-WiFi context and when you want to
focus on textual content). So now I'm not even tempted to quick-scan the
site's inane alarmist headlines for yuks.
Whether Clinton's strategy of trying to peel off a small percentage of Republicans to win the
presidency will actually work remains to be seen. There seems to be scant evidence in the polls that
a significant amount of Republicans will support her; Clinton's advantage mostly stems from the fact
that black and Hispanic Americans understandably oppose Trump in historic numbers. But if the strategy
hinders Democrats from retaking Congress, the damage is going to be seen for years.
Just as we predicted on a sleepy Friday afternoon ahead of a long weekend, The FBI has released a detailed report on its
investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server while she was secretary of state, as well as a
summary of her interview with agents, providing, what The Washington Post says is the most thorough look yet at
the probe that has dogged the campaign of the Democratic presidential nominee.
Today the FBI is releasing a summary of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's July 2, 2016 interview with the
FBI concerning allegations that classified information was improperly stored or transmitted on a personal e-mail server she used
during her tenure .
We also are releasing a factual summary of the FBI's investigation into this matter. We are making these materials
available to the public in the interest of transparency and in response to numerous Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.
Appropriate redactions have been made for classified information or other material exempt from disclosure under FOIA.
Additional information related to this investigation that the FBI releases in the future will be placed on The Vault,
the FBI's electronic FOIA library.
As The Washington Post adds, the documents released total 58 pages, though large portions and sometimes entire pages are
redacted.
FBI Director James B. Comey announced in July that his agency would not recommend criminal charges against Clinton for her
use of a private email server. Comey said that Clinton and her staffers were "extremely careless" in how they treated
classified information, but investigators did not find they intended to mishandle such material. Nor did investigators
uncover exacerbating factors - like efforts to obstruct justice - that often lead to charges in similar cases, Comey said.
The FBI turned over to several Congressional committees documents related to the probe and required they only be viewed
by those with appropriate security clearances, even though not all of the material was classified, legislators and their staffers
have said.
Those documents included an investigative report and summaries of interviews with more than a dozen senior Clinton staffers,
other State Department officials, former secretary of state Colin Powell and at least one other person. The documents released
Friday appear to be but a fraction of those.
...
Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon has said turning over the documents was "an extraordinarily rare step that
was sought solely by Republicans for the purposes of further second-guessing the career professionals at the FBI."
But he has said if the material were going to be shared outside the Justice Department, "they should be released widely
so that the public can see them for themselves, rather than allow Republicans to mischaracterize them through selective, partisan
leaks."
Though Fallon seems to have gotten his wish, the public release of the documents will undoubtedly draw more attention
to a topic that seems to have fueled negative perceptions of Clinton . A recent Washington Post-ABC News poll found 41
percent of Americans had a favorable impression of Clinton, while 56 percent had an unfavorable one.
Key Excerpts...
*CLINTON DENIED USING PRIVATE EMAIL TO AVOID FEDERAL RECORDS ACT
*CLINTON KNEW SHE HAD DUTY TO PRESERVE FEDERAL RECORDS: FBI
*COLIN POWELL WARNED CLINTON PRIVATE E-MAILS COULD BE PUBLIC:FBI
*FBI SAYS CLINTON LAWYERS UNABLE TO LOCATE ANY OF 13 DEVICES
*AT LEAST 100 STATE DEPT. WORKERS HAD CLINTON'S E-MAIL ADDRESS
CLINTON SAID SHE NEVER DELETED, NOR INSTRUCTED ANYONE TO DELETE, HER EMAIL TO AVOID COMPLYING WITH FEDERAL RECORDS LAWS OR FBI
OR STATE REQUESTS FOR INFORMATION
CLINTON AIDES SAID SHE FREQUENTLY REPLACED HER BLACKBERRY PHONE AND THE WHEREABOUTS OF THE OLD DEVICE WOULD "FREQUENTLY
BECOME UNKOWN"
CLINTON CONTACTED POWELL IN JANUARY 2009 TO INQUIRE ABOUT HIS USE OF A BLACKBERRY WHILE IN OFFICE; POWELL ADVISED CLINTON
TO 'BE VERY CAREFUL
Hillary Clinton used 13 mobile devices and 5 iPads to access clintonemail.com. The FBI only had access to 2 of
the iPads and The FBI found no evidence of hacking on those 2...
And here is the email from Colin Powell telling her that emails would need to be part of the "government records"
...
And here is Clinton denying that she used a private server to "avoid [the] Federal Records Act" as she just assumed
that "based on her practice of emailing staff on their state.gov accounts, [that] communications were captured by State systems."
Yes, well what about the "official" communications had with people outside of the State Department? Did retention
of those emails ever cross Hillary's mind? * * * Full Report below...
"... The era of unchallenged neoliberal dominance is clearly over. Hopefully, it will prove to have been a relatively brief interruption in a long term trend towards a more humane and egalitarian society. Whether that is true depends on the success of the left in putting forward a positive alternative. ..."
"... Third, the "individualist" thingies work as long as people believe that they are on the winning side; but there is evidence enough today that most people are on the losing side of increasing inequality, so most people have reason to be pro leftish policies both in "moralistic" terms and in "crude self interest" terms. In the past this wasn't obvious, but today it is, and this drum should be banged more. ..."
"... Bob Zanelli @ 10, your comment perfectly embodies an ideological trap to be avoided at all costs. What Quiggin calls tribalism is precisely not ..."
"... I can't speak for other industrialized democracies, but in the US, there is essentially no ability for the left to engage in structural change. Every avenue has been either blocked by the 18th century political structures of the US (sometimes exploited in extraordinary ways by the monied powers that those structures enable) or subsumed by the neoliberal individualist marketification of everything. ..."
"... To just discount the reality of our evolutionary baggage by calling it sociobiology is an example of classic Marxist ideology which seems to require the perfectibility of human nature. ..."
"... I just think we should call what he calls "tribalism" by its proper name - fascism - instead of deliberately tainting our theories with overtones of an "enlightened civilized wisdom versus backwards tribal savages" narrative that itself is central to fascist/"tribalist" ideology and therefore belongs in the dustbin of history. Surely flouting Godwin's Law is a lesser sin than knowingly perpetuating the discourses of racism. ..."
"... Marxism isn't evil and Nazism is evil. So political ideology can be evil or just wrong and accomplish evil. We are indebted to Marx for describing the nature of class warfare and the natural trends of accumulation based economics , but we now know his solution is a failure. So either we learn from this or we cling on to outmoded ideas and remain irrelevant. ..."
"... It seems pretty hardwired, at least enough that not planning around it would be foolish. ..."
"... It turns out that you can't say things like "globalism is great for the UK GDP" and expect citizens of the 'UK' to be excited about it if they feel too alienated from the people who are making all of the money. ..."
"... Punching "globalism" into Google returns the following definition from Merriam-Webster: "a national policy of treating the whole world as a proper sphere for political influence - compare imperialism, internationalism." ..."
"... I agree with bob mcm that Trump_vs_deep_state isn't fascism. It's not a serious analysis to say that it is. ..."
"... I take note of the Florida primary results, just in: Debbie Wasserman-Schultz did just fine, as did her hand-picked Democratic Senate candidate, the horrible Patrick Murphy. ..."
"... Oh, and Rubio is back. Notice of the death of neoliberalism might be premature. ..."
"... I mean Judas Iscariot, I mean Bill Clinton, you can make a case that he did his best to salvage something from the wreckage. To repeat what I've said here before, when he was elected the Democrats had lost five of the last six elections, most by landslides. The one exception was the most conservative of the Democratic candidates, who was despised by the left. The American people had decisively rejected what the Democrats were selling. False consciousness, no doubt. ..."
"... The obscurity and complexity of, say, Obamacare or the Greek bailout is a cover story for the looting. ..."
"... The problem is not that the experts do not understand consequences. The problem is that a broken system pays the top better, so the system has to be broken, but not so broken that the top falls off in collapse. ..."
"... Very well said. Resource limits shadow the falling apart of the global order that the American Interest link Peter T points to. If the billionaires are looting from the top and the response is a criminal scramble at the bottom, the unnecessariat will be spit out uncomprehending into the void between. ..."
"... So much concern about the term tribalism. Well what is fascism? The use of tribalism to grasp political power and establish a totalitarian political order. Sound reasonable? Pick any fascism you like, the Nazis ( master race) the theocratic fascists in the US ( Christian rule ) Catholic Fascism ( Franco's Spain) , you name it. It walks and talks like tribalism. Trump-ism is the not so new face of American fascism. It's race based, it xenophobic, it's embraces violence, has a disdain for civil liberties and human rights, and it features the great leader. Doesn't seem to difficult to make the connection. ..."
"... Neoliberalism is the politics of controlled dismantling of the institutions of a society that formerly worked for a larger portion of its participants. Like a landlord realizing increased cash flow from a decision to forego maintenance and hire gangsters to handle rent collection, neoliberalism seeks to divert the dividends from disinvestment to the top ..."
"... The cadre managing this technically and politically difficult task - it is not easy to take things apart without critical failures exemplified by system collapse prompting insurrection or revolution - are rewarded as are society's owners, the 1/10th of 1%. Everybody else is screwed - either directly, or by the consequences of the social disintegration used to feed a parasitic elite. ..."
"... "Lesser evil" is a story told to herd the masses. If there are two neoliberal politicians, both are corrupt. Neither intends to deliver anything to you on net; they are competing to deliver you. ..."
"... I am not enthusiastic about this proposed distinction between "hard" and "soft" neoliberalism. Ideologically, conservative libertarians have been locked in a dialectic with the Clintonite / Blairite neoliberals - that's an old story, maybe an obsolete story, but apparently not one those insist on seeing neoliberalism as a monolithic lump fixed in time can quite grasp, but never mind. ..."
"... Good cop, bad cop. Only, the electorate is carefully divided so that one side's good cop is the other side's bad cop, and vice versa. ..."
"... In fact, there was a powerful fascist movement in many Allied states as well. Vichy France had deep, strong domestic roots in particular, but the South African Broederbond and Jim Crow USA with its lynchings show how fascism and democracy (as understood by anti-Communists) are not separate things, but conjunctural developments of the capitalist states, which are not organized as business firms. ..."
"... "an obligation to vote in a democracy" ..."
"... orders you to consent ..."
"... if the US government was ever thrown it would be by the far right ..."
"... Not voting is routinely interpreted as tacit consent. ..."
The failure of neoliberalism poses both challenges and opportunities for the
left. The greatest challenge is the need to confront rightwing tribalism as
a powerful political force in itself, rather than as a source of political support
for hard neoliberalism. Given the dangers posed by tribalism this is an urgent
task. One part of this task is that of articulating an explanation of the failure
of neoliberalism and explaining why the simplistic policy responses of tribalist
politicians will do nothing to resolve the problems. The other is to appeal
to the positive elements of the appeal of tribalism, such as solidarity and
affection for long-standing institutions and to counterpose them to the
self-seeking individualism central to neoliberalism, particularly in the hard
version with which political tribalism has long been aligned.
The great opportunity is to present a progressive alternative to the accommodations
of soft neoliberalism. The core of such an alternative must be a revival of
the egalitarian and activist politics of the postwar social democratic moment,
updated to take account of the radically different technological and social
structures of the 21st century. In technological terms, the most important development
is undoubtedly the rise of the Internet. Thinking about the relationship between
the Internet economy and public policy remains embryonic at best. But as a massive
public good created, in very large measure, by the public sector, the Internet
ought to present opportunities for a radically remodeled progressive policy
agenda.
In political terms, the breakdown of neoliberalism implies the need for a
political realignment. This is now taking place on the right, as tribalists
assert their dominance over hard neoliberals. The most promising strategy for
the left is to achieve a similar shift in power within the centre-left coalition
of leftists and soft neoliberals.
This might seem a hopeless task, but there are positive signs, notably in
the United States. Although Hillary Clinton, an archetypal soft neoliberal,
has won the Democratic nomination for the Presidency and seems likely to win,
her policy proposals have been driven, in large measure by the need to compete
with the progressive left. There is reason to hope that, whereas the first Clinton
presidency symbolised the capture of the Democratic Party by soft neoliberalism,
the second will symbolise the resurgence of social liberalism.
The era of unchallenged neoliberal dominance is clearly over. Hopefully,
it will prove to have been a relatively brief interruption in a long term trend
towards a more humane and egalitarian society. Whether that is true depends
on the success of the left in putting forward a positive alternative.
Brett 08.30.16 at 5:49 am
I don't know. I think for a true triumph over the existing order, we'd need
true international institutions designed to enhance other kinds of protections,
like environmental and labor standards world-wide. That doesn't seem to
be in the wings right now, versus a light version of protectionism coupled
with perhaps some restoration of the welfare state (outside of the US –
inside the US we're going to get deadlock mildly alleviated by the Supreme
Court and whatever types of executive orders Clinton comes up with for the
next eight years).
Andrew Bartlett 08.30.16 at 6:15 am
"The other is to appeal to the positive elements of the appeal of
tribalism, such as solidarity and affection for long-standing institutions"
My only worry with that is the strong overlap between tribalism and racism,
at least in it's political forms. Harking to the myth of a monocultural
past could be seen by some as 'affection for long-standing institutions'.
(I know that's not what the author is thinking, but left has had it's racism
and pro-discrimination elements, and I am wary of giving too much opportunity
for those to align with that of the right)
bruce wilder 08.30.16 at 7:29 am
I wonder, how do you envision this failure of neoliberalism?
It seems like an effective response would depend somewhat on how you
think this anticipated political failure of neoliberalism plays out over
the next few years. And, it is an anticipated failure, yes? or do you see
an actual political failure as an accomplished fact?
And, if it is still an anticipated failure, do you see it as a political
failure - the inability to marshall electoral support or a legislative coalition?
Or, an ideological style that's worn out its credibility?
Or, do you anticipate manifest policy failure to play a role in the dynamics?
MisterMr 08.30.16 at 9:31 am
"The other is to appeal to the positive elements of the appeal of tribalism,
such as solidarity and affection for long-standing institutions and to counterpose
them to the self-seeking individualism central to neoliberalism"
I don't agree with this. First, appealing to tribalism without actually
believing in it is a dick move. Second, actually existing tribalists are
arseholes, or rather everyone when is taken by the tribalist demon becomes
an arsehole.
Third, the "individualist" thingie work as long as people believe that
they are on the winning side; but there is evidence enough today that most
people are on the losing side of increasing inequality, so most people have
reason to be pro lftish policies both in "moralistic" terms and in "crude
self interest" terms. In the past this wasn't obvious, but today it is,
and this drum should be banged more.
PS: about increasing inequality, there are two different trends that
usually are mixed up:
1) When we look at inequality at an international level, the main determinant
is differential "productivity" among nations. The productivity of developing
nations (mostly China) went up a lot, and this causes a fall in international
inequality.
2) When we look at inequalityinside a nation, it depends mostly on how
exploitative the economic system is, and I think that the main indicator
of this is the wage share of total income; as the wage share fell, income
inequality increased. This happened both in developed and developing countries.
These two determinants of inequality are mixed up and this creates the
impression that, say, the fall in wages of American workers is caused by
the ascent of Chinese workers, whereas instead both American and Chinese
workes lost in proportion, but the increase in productivity more than compensated
the fall in relative wages.
Mixing up these two determinants causes the rise in nationalism, as workers
in developed nations believe that they have been sacrificed to help workers
in developing nations (which isn't true). This is my argument against nationalism
and the reason I'm skeptic of stuff like brexit, and this makes me sort
of allergic to tribalism.
Bob Zannelli 08.30.16 at 11:43 am
This analysis by Quiggin is spot on. Clearly the way forward holds both
promise and great peril, especially in the nuclear age. The notion that
Trump is just more of the same from the GOP is deluded. He represents a
dangerous insurgency of radical rightists , who can be quite fairly be called
racist and religious extremist based fascists. A Trump win could well close
the curtain on democracy in America. Neo liberalism is being repudiated
, will the elite now turn to the fascists to hold their ground, as happened
in Germany? It's a troubling question.
casmilus 08.30.16 at 11:46 am
"The great opportunity is to present a progressive alternative to the
accommodations of soft neoliberalism. The core of such an alternative
must be a revival of the egalitarian and activist politics of the postwar
social democratic moment, updated to take account of the radically different
technological and social structures of the 21st century. In technological
terms, the most important development is undoubtedly the rise of the
Internet."
Why is that any more important than the invention of digital computers,
starting from the 1940s? Just a further evolution. The real challenge is
from robotics, 3D printing and AI drivers for such processes. That really
will liquidate a lot of skilled labour; computing created a new industry
of jobs and manufacturing.
bob mcmanus 08.30.16 at 11:59 am
4: From my point of view, neoliberalism…long supply chains and logistics;
downward pressure on wages and the social wage; the growth of finance to
supply consumer credit to prop up effective demand; the culture of self-improvement
and self-management to reduce overhead and reproduction costs…no longer
supports accumulation of capital or reproduction of political legitimacy.
IOW, an economic failure.
(Anwar Shaikh's new book is definitive)
Martin 08.30.16 at 1:21 pm
Is there any knowledge of who supports tribalism? The analysis so far seems
to be in terms of tribalist policies, emotions etc, but not of who the tribalists
are, and why they support tribalist 'solutions' rather than say socialism.
Bob Zannelli 08.30.16 at 1:36 pm
Is there any knowledge of who supports tribalism? The analysis so far seems
to be in terms of tribalist policies, emotions etc, but not of who the tribalists
are, and why they support tribalist 'solutions' rather than say socialism.
Tribalism is hard wired in our genes. It can be over come with education
but too few voters ever get beyond an emotional response to what they perceive.
It's no accident that conservatives do anything they can to undermine education
and promote religious based ignorance. That's how they win elections. But
this is a dangerous game, sometimes a Hitler or a Trump shows up and steals
the show.
Will G-R 08.30.16 at 2:00 pm
MisterMr @ 5: Third, the "individualist" thingies work as long as
people believe that they are on the winning side; but there is evidence
enough today that most people are on the losing side of increasing inequality,
so most people have reason to be pro leftish policies both in "moralistic"
terms and in "crude self interest" terms. In the past this wasn't obvious,
but today it is, and this drum should be banged more.
This is where it becomes problematic that so much of this conversation
happens within individual First-World nation-states, because the inequalities
"tribalists" are interested in maintaining are precisely the inequalities
between nations on a global scale. If the "most people" you're
talking about includes the masses of recently-proletarianized working people
in the Third World, then sure "most people" have reason to be pro-left.
But when we have this conversation in a setting like this, we all implicitly
know that "most people" refers at best to the working classes of countries
like Australia and the US, and these people still perceive a decided
interest in maintaining the global economic hierarchies for which "tribalism"
serves this conversation as a signifier.
For the working classes of the First World wrapped up in their "tribalist"
defense of a global aristocracy of nations, to truly believe they're on
the losing side would mean to accept that the defense of national sovereignty
from neoliberal globalization is an inherently lost cause. If they're to
defect from the cause of "tribalism" and join the Left, this would mean
accepting a critique of the "long-standing institutions" of First-World
social democracy that appears to go much farther left even than John Quiggin
appears willing to go. (As in, the implementation of social-democratic institutions
in First-World capitalist societies is inherently a tool for enabling the
economic domination of the First World over the Third World, by empowering
a racialized labor aristocracy to serve as foot soldiers of global imperialism,
and so on and so on ŕ la Lenin.)
Will G-R 08.30.16 at 2:09 pm
Bob Zanelli @ 10, your comment perfectly embodies an ideological trap
to be avoided at all costs. What Quiggin calls tribalism is precisely
not "hard-wired in our genes", it's an inherently modern creation
of the inherently modern political and economic forces that first created
the "imagined community" of the modern nation-state and continue to put
incredible amounts of energy into indoctrinating various populations in
its various national mythologies.
Far from being an inherent solution to this problem, education - within
the context of a national education system, educating its pupils as Americans/Australians/etc.
- is an utterly indispensable mechanism by which this process is accomplished.
Interestingly, I share all the premises, and yet none of the optimistic
conclusions. Because soft neoliberalism (and in fact even hard neoliberalism)
is much closer sociologically, politically and ideologically to the left
than tribalism is, I see the end of the hegemonic neoliberal ideology and
the correlative rise of tribalism as (somewhat paradoxically) the guarantee
for perpetual neoliberal power in the short and middle term, at least for
two reasons.
First of all, left-inclined citizens will most likely always vote for
neoliberal candidates if the alternative is a tribalist candidate (case
in point: in 9 months or so, I will in all likelihood be offered a choice
between a hard neoliberal and Marine Le Pen; what then?).
Moreover, even if/when tribalist parties gain power, their relative sociological
estrangement from the elite sand correlative relative lack of political
power all but guarantees in my mind that they will govern along the path
of least resistance for them; that is to say hard neoliberalism (with a
sprinkle of tribalist cultural moves). This is how the FPO ruled Carinthia,
for instance, and how I would expect Trump to govern in the (unlikely) eventuality
he reached power.
Finally, mass migration are bound to intensify because of climate change
(if for no other reason) and the trend internationally in advanced democratic
countries seems to be towards national divergence and hence national reversion.
I don't see how an ideologically coherent left-oriented force can emerge
in this context, but of course I would love to be proved wrong on all counts.
Lupita 08.30.16 at 2:22 pm
Bravo, Will G-R!
Bob Zannelli 08.30.16 at 2:37 pm
Will G-R 08.30.16 at 2:09 pm
Bob Zanelli @ 10, your comment perfectly embodies an ideological trap to
be avoided at all costs. What Quiggin calls tribalism is precisely not "hard-wired
in our genes", it's an inherently modern creation of the inherently modern
political and economic forces that first created the "imagined community"
of the modern nation-state and continue to put incredible amounts of energy
into indoctrinating various populations in its various national mythologies.
Far from being an inherent solution to this problem, education - within
the context of a national education system, educating its pupils as Americans/Australians/etc.
- is an utterly indispensable mechanism by which this process is accomplished.
)))))))))))))))
I don't agree. It's true that tribalism has morphed into what you call
national mythologies , but the basis for this is our evolutionary heritage
which divides the world into them and us. This no doubt had survival benefits
for hunter gatherer social units but it's dangerous baggage in today's world.
I find your comments about education curious. Are you advocating ignorance?
I think you confuse education with indoctrination , they are not the same
thing.
The question of what ideology an ideologically coherent left-oriented force
would come together around is indeed an important question, but I'll try
not to dwell on my hobbyhorses too much.
For now I'll add a slightly different area to consider this through:
current First World "left" populations (especially in the U.S.) want to
turn everything into individual moral questions through which a false solidarity
can be expressed and through which opposing people can be shamed. For instance,
I've thought a good deal about how environmental problems are the most important
problems in general at the moment, and how it's clear that they require
a redesign of our infrastructure. This is not an individual problem - no
amount of volunteer action will work. Yet people on the left continually
exert pressure to turn this into a conflict of morally good renouncers vs
wasters, something that the right is quite ready to enhance with their own
ridiculous tribal boundary markers (google "rolling coal").
You see this with appeals to racism. Racism is a real problem and destroys
real people's lives. But treating it as an individual moral problem rather
than a social, structural one is a way of setting boundaries around an elite.
The challenge for the left is going to be developing a left that, no matter
what it's based around, doesn't fall back into this individualist new-class
status preservation.
Will G-R 08.30.16 at 3:15 pm
@ Bob Zannelli, you're continuing to draw on the language of sociobiology
and evolutionary psychology without the social-scientific rigor to justify
it. (Of course, to many if not most social scientists, the very fields of
sociobiology and evopsych are largely premised on a lack of such rigor to
begin with, but that's another story.) In particular, the term doing the
heavy lifting to provide your get-out-of-rigor-free card is "morphed". What
has been the historical trajectory of this "morphing"? What social and political
institutions have been involved? With what political interests, and what
economic ones? If you think about those kinds of questions, you might make
some headway toward understanding why social scientists generally interpret
the sociocultural aspects of racism and fascism as essential, and the biological
aspects as essentially arbitrary.
To be fair, a large part of the fault here is John Quiggin's for using
a word with as much fraught ideological baggage as "tribalism" to do so
much of his own heavy lifting. The ironic thing is, the polemical power
that probably motivated Quiggin to use that word in the first place comes
from the very same set of ideological associations (e.g. "barbaric", "savage",
"uncivilized", etc.) whose application to modern political issues of race
and nationality he would probably characterize as "tribalist" in the first
place!
Holden Pattern 08.30.16 at 3:20 pm
@ comment 16:
I can't speak for other industrialized democracies, but in the US,
there is essentially no ability for the left to engage in structural change.
Every avenue has been either blocked by the 18th century political structures
of the US (sometimes exploited in extraordinary ways by the monied powers
that those structures enable) or subsumed by the neoliberal individualist
marketification of everything.
So what remains, especially given the latter, is marketing and individual
action - persuasion, shame, public expressions of virtue. That's all that
is available to the left in the United States, especially on issues like
racism and environmental problems.
So while it's good fun to bash the lefty elites in their tony coastal
enclaves and recount their clueless dinner party conversations, it's shooting
fish in a barrel. Easy for you and probably satisfying in a cheap way, but
the fish probably didn't put themselves in the barrel, and blaming them
for swimming in circles is… problematic.
Bob Zannelli 08.30.16 at 3:26 pm
@ Bob Zannelli, you're continuing to draw on the language of sociobiology
and evolutionary psychology without the social-scientific rigor to justify
it. (Of course, to many if not most social scientists, the very fields of
sociobiology and evopsych are largely premised on a lack of such rigor to
begin with, but that's another story.) In particular, the term doing the
heavy lifting to provide your get-out-of-rigor-free card is "morphed". What
has been the historical trajectory of this "morphing"? What social and political
institutions have been involved? With what political interests, and what
economic ones? If you think about those kinds of questions, you might make
some headway toward understanding why social scientists generally interpret
the sociocultural aspects of racism and fascism as essential, and the biological
aspects as essentially arbitrary.
)))))))))))
I hope it's clear that I do not discount the assertion that nationalism
and racism are part of social constructs that favor class interest. My point
is that political agendas have to work with the clay they start with. To
just discount the reality of our evolutionary baggage by calling it sociobiology
is an example of classic Marxist ideology which seems to require the perfectibility
of human nature. This is a dangerous illusion, it leads right to the gulags.
))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))
To be fair, a large part of the fault here is John Quiggin's for using
a word with as much fraught ideological baggage as "tribalism" to do so
much of his own heavy lifting. The ironic thing is, the polemical power
that probably motivated Quiggin to use that word in the first place comes
from the very same set of ideological associations (e.g. "barbaric", "savage",
"uncivilized", etc.) whose application to modern political issues of race
and nationality he would probably characterize as "tribalist" in the first
place!
"Easy for you and probably satisfying in a cheap way, but the fish probably
didn't put themselves in the barrel, and blaming them for swimming in
circles is… problematic."
I come out of the same milieu, so I don't see why it's problematic to
call attention to this. I
helped to change JQ's opinion on part of it (as he wrote later, the
facts were the largest influence on his change of opinion, but apparently
what I wrote helped) and he's an actual public intellectual in Australia.
As intellectuals our personal actions don't matter but sometimes our ideas
might.
Activism and social movements can help, even in the U.S. (I think that
350.org has had a measurable effect) so I wouldn't say that a structural
approach means that nothing is possible.
Will G-R 08.30.16 at 4:06 pm
@ Bob Zannelli: To just discount the reality of our evolutionary
baggage by calling it sociobiology is an example of classic Marxist
ideology which seems to require the perfectibility of human nature.
As hesitant as I am to play the
"Fallacy
Man" game, this is a common strawman about Marxism. In the words of
Mao Tse-Tung, as quoted by the eminent evolutionary biologist and Marxist
Richard Lewontin: "In a suitable temperature an egg changes into a chicken,
but no temperature can change a stone into a chicken, because each has a
different basis." As far as human biological capacities, it's perfectly
clear from any number of everyday examples that we're able to ignore all
sorts of outward phenotypic differences in determining which sorts of people
to consider more and less worthy of our ethical consideration, as long as
the ideological structure of our culture and society permits it - so the
problem is how to build the sort of culture and society we want to see,
and telling wildly speculative "Just-So stories" about how the hairless
ape got its concentration camps doesn't necessarily help in solving this
problem.
On the contrary, the desire to root social phenomena like what Quiggin
calls "tribalism" in our genes is itself an ideological fetish object of
our own particular culture, utilizing our modern reverence for science to
characterize social phenomena allegedly dictated by "biology" as therefore
natural, inevitable, or even desirable. Here, have a
reading /
listening recommendation.
RobinM 08.30.16 at 4:20 pm
Like Will G-R at 17 and Bob Zannelli at 19, I, too, found the use of the
term "tribalism" in the original post a bit disturbing. It's almost always
used as a pejorative. And it suggests that the "tribalists" require no deeper
analysis. I'm sure it's been around for much longer, but I think I first
took note of it when the Scottish National Party was shallowly dismissed
as a mere expression of tribalism. That the SNP (which, by the way, I do
not support) was raising questions about the deep failures of the British
system of politics and government long before these failures became widely
acknowledged was thus disregarded. Currently, an aspect of that deep failure,
the British Labour Party seems to be in the process of destroying itself,
again in part, in my estimation, because one side, among whom the 'experts'
must be numbered, seem to think that those who are challenging them can
be dismissed as "tribalists." There are surely a lot more examples.
More generally, the resort to "tribalism" as an explanation of what is
now transpiring is also, perhaps, neoliberalism's misunderstanding of its
own present predicaments even while it is part of the arsenal of weapons
neoliberals direct against their critics?
But in short, the evocation of "tribalism" is not only disturbing, it's
dangerously misleading. Those seeking to understand what may now be unfolding
should avoid using it, not least because there are also almost certainly
a whole lot of different "tribes."
awy 08.30.16 at 5:06 pm
so what's the neoliberal strategy for preserving good governance in the
face of insurgencies on the left and right?
Yankee 08.30.16 at 5:08 pm
This just in , about good tribalism (locality-based) vs bad tribalism
("race"-based, ie perceived or assumed common ancestry). It's about cultural
recognition; nationalism, based on shared allegiance to a power structure,
is different, although related (sadly)
"But as a massive public good created, in very large measure, by the public
sector .." With a large assist from non-profit-making community movements,
as with Wikipedia and Linux. (IIRC the majority of Internet servers run
on variants of the noncommercial Linux operating system, as do almost all
smartphones and tablets.) CT, with unpaid bloggers and commenters, is part
of a much bigger trend. Maybe one lesson for the state-oriented left is
to take communitarianism more seriously.
The Internet, with minimal state regulation after the vital initial pump-priming,
technical self-government by a meritocratic cooptative technocracy, an oligopolistic
commercial physical substructure, and large volumes of non-commercial as
well as commercial content, is an interesting paradigm of coexistence for
the future. Of course there are three-way tensions and ongoing battles,
but it's still working.
Will G-R 08.30.16 at 5:42 pm
RobinM, to clarify, I do think that what Quiggin calls tribalism is worth
opposing in pretty absolute terms, and I even largely agree with the meat
of his broader "three-party system" analysis. I just think we should
call what he calls "tribalism" by its proper name - fascism - instead of
deliberately tainting our theories with overtones of an "enlightened civilized
wisdom versus backwards tribal savages" narrative that itself is central
to fascist/"tribalist" ideology and therefore belongs in the dustbin of
history. Surely flouting Godwin's Law is a lesser sin than knowingly perpetuating
the discourses of racism.
Bob Zannelli 08.30.16 at 6:18 pm
In the words of Mao Tse-Tung, as quoted by the eminent evolutionary biologist
and Marxist Richard Lewontin:
Now Mao Tse-Tung, there's role model to be quoted. The thing about science
is that's it true whether you believe it not, the thing about Marxism is
that it's pseudo science and
it gave us Stalin , the failed Soviet Union, Pol Pot,, Mao Tse Tung and
the dear leader in North Korea to name the most obvious. I know, I know
, maybe someone will get it right some day.
A realist politics doesn't ignore science , this doesn't mean that socialism
is somehow precluded, in fact the exact opposite. We have to extend democracy
into the economic sphere, until we do this, we don't have a democratically
based society. It's because of human nature we need to democratize every
center of power, no elite or vanguard if you prefer can be ever be trusted.
But democracy isn't easy, you have to defeat ignorance , a useful trait
to game the system , by the elite, and create a political structure that
takes account of human nature , not try to perfect it. One would hope leftists
would learn something from history, but dogmas die hard.
Igor Belanov 08.30.16 at 6:50 pm
Bob Zannelli @27
"about Marxism is that it's pseudo science and it gave us Stalin
, the failed Soviet Union, Pol Pot,, Mao Tse Tung and the dear leader
in North Korea to name the most obvious."
To claim that Marxism 'gave us' all those wicked people must be one of
the least Marxist statements ever written! No doubt if Stalin and Pol Pot
hadn't come across the works of a 19th century German émigré then they would
have had jobs working in a florists and spending all the rest of their time
helping old ladies over the road.
Good to see Bob being consistent though. A few comments back he was suggesting
that humans are biologically 'tribalist', but now he's blaming all evil
on political ideology.
"I conceive, therefore, that a somewhat comprehensive socialisation of investment
will prove the only means of securing an approximation to full employment;
though this need not exclude all manner of compromises and of devices by
which public authority will co-operate with private initiative."
Sebastian_H 08.30.16 at 7:26 pm
'Tribalism' is giving members of what you perceive as your tribe more leeway
than you give others. (Or negatively being much more critical of others
than you would be of your tribe). It seems pretty hardwired, at least enough
that not planning around it would be foolish. Lots of 'civilization' is
about lubricating the rough spots created by tribalism while trying to leverage
the good sides.
One of the failures of neo-liberalism is in assuming that it can count
on the good side of tribalism while ignoring the perceived responsibilities
to one's own tribe. It turns out that you can't say things like "globalism
is great for the UK GDP" and expect citizens of the 'UK' to be excited about
it if they feel too alienated from the people who are making all of the
money. So then when it comes time to say "for the good of the UK we need
you to do X" lots of people won't listen to you. John asks a good question
in exploring what comes next, but it isn't clear.
Bob Zannelli 08.30.16 at 7:30 pm
about Marxism is that it's pseudo science and
it gave us Stalin , the failed Soviet Union, Pol Pot,, Mao Tse Tung and
the dear leader in North Korea to name the most obvious."
To claim that Marxism 'gave us' all those wicked people must be one of
the least Marxist statements ever written! No doubt if Stalin and Pol Pot
hadn't come across the works of a 19th century German émigré then they would
have had jobs working in a florists and spending all the rest of their time
helping old ladies over the road.
Good to see Bob being consistent though. A few comments back he was suggesting
that humans are biologically 'tribalist', but now he's blaming all evil
on political ideology.
)))))))))))))
Marxism isn't evil and Nazism is evil. So political ideology can
be evil or just wrong and accomplish evil. We are indebted to Marx for describing
the nature of class warfare and the natural trends of accumulation based
economics , but we now know his solution is a failure. So either we learn
from this or we cling on to outmoded ideas and remain irrelevant.
In the Soviet Union , science, art and literature were under assault,
with scientists, artist and writers sent to the gulag or murdered for not
conforming to strict Marxist Leninist ideology. Evolution, quantum mechanics,
and relativity were all attacked as bourgeois science. ( The need for nuclear
weapons forced Stalin later to allow this science to be sanctioned) These
days, like the Catholic Church which can no longer burn people at the stake
, old Marxists can just castigate opinions that don't meet Marxist orthodoxy.
Will G-R 08.30.16 at 8:53 pm
@ Sebastian_H: It seems pretty hardwired, at least enough that not
planning around it would be foolish.
But again, when we're talking about "tribalism" not in terms of some
vague quasi-sociobiological force of eternal undying human nature, but in
terms of the very modern historical phenomena of racism and nationalism,
we have to consider the way any well-functioning modern nation-state has
a whole host of institutions devoted to indoctrinating citizens in whatever
ideological mythology is supposed to underpin a shared sense of national
and/or racial identity. It should go without saying that whatever we think
about general ingroup/outgroup tendencies innately hardwired into human
nature or whatever, this way of relating our identities to historically
contingent social institutions and their symbols is only as innate or hardwired
as the institutions themselves.
It turns out that you can't say things like "globalism is great for
the UK GDP" and expect citizens of the 'UK' to be excited about it if they
feel too alienated from the people who are making all of the money.
At least in my view, economists are usually slipperier than that. The
arguments I've seen for neoliberal free trade (I'm not quite sure what to
make of the term "globalism") generally involve it being good for "the economy"
in a much more abstract sense, carefully worded to avoid specifying whether
the growth and prosperity takes place in Manchester or Mumbai. And there's
even something worth preserving in this tendency, in the sense that ideally
the workers of the world would have no less international/interracial solidarity
than global capital already seems to achieved.
To me the possibility that neoliberal free trade and its degradation
of national sovereignty might ultimately undermine the effectiveness of
all nationalist myths, forging a sense of global solidarity among the collective
masses of humanity ground under capital's boot, is the greatest hope or
maybe even the only real hope we have in the face of the neoliberal onslaught.
Certainly if there's any lesson from the fact that the hardest-neoliberal
political leaders are often simultaneously the greatest supporters or enablers
of chauvinistic ethnonationalism, it's that this kind of solidarity is also
one of global capital's greatest nightmares.
Will G-R 08.30.16 at 9:05 pm
Punching "globalism" into Google returns the following definition from
Merriam-Webster: "a national policy of treating the whole world as a proper
sphere for political influence - compare imperialism, internationalism."
I find it fascinating, and indicative of the ideological tension immanent
in fascist reactionaries' use of the term, that the two terms listed as
comparable to it are traditionally understood in modern political theory
as diametrically opposed to each other.
bob mcmanus 08.30.16 at 9:17 pm
Recommending Joshua Clover's new book. Riot -Strike – Riot Prime
The strike, the organized disruption at the point of production, is no
longer really available. Late capitalism, neoliberalism is now extracting
surplus from distribution, as it did before industrialism, and is at the
transport and communication streams that disruption will occur. And this
will be riot, and there won't be much organization, centralization, hierarchy
or solidarity. I am ok with "tribalism" although still looking for a better
expression, and recognizing that a tribe is 15-50 people, and absolutely
not scalable. Tribes can network, and people can have multiple and transient
affiliations.
Clover's model is the Paris Commune.
(PS: If you don't like "tribe" come up with a word or expression that
usefully describes the sociality of Black Lives Matter (movement, maybe)
or even better Crooked Timber.)
Almost all people are primarily led by emotions and use reason only secondarily,
to justify the emotions.
There is a rude set of socio-economic "principles" which they call upon
to buttress these arguments. You can hear these principles at any blue-collar
job site, and you can hear them in a college lecture on economics, too:
–nature is selfish
–resources are scarce
–money measures real value
–wants are infinite
–there ain't no such thing as a free lunch (TANSTAAFL)
–you have to work for your daily bread
–incentives matter
–people want to keep up with the Joneses
–labor should be geographically mobile
–government is inefficient
–welfare destroys families
–printing money causes inflation
–the economy is a Darwinian mechanism
These are either false, or else secondary and ephemeral, and/or becoming
inopportune and obsolete. None of them survives inspection by pure reason.
Yet this is an aggregate that buzzes around in almost everyone's head,
is INTERNALIZED as true, for expectations both personal and social. And
which causes most of our problems.
Consider TANSTAAFL: "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch." Yet
obviously there is such a thing as a cheaper lunch, or else there would
be no such thing as the improvement in the standard of living. …Okay, you
say, but "resources are scarce." …Well no, we are quickly proceeding to
the point where technological change and substitution will end real scarcity,
and without ecological degradation. Therefore: can cheaper lunches proceed
to the point where they are effectively free for the purposes of meeting
human need, "your daily bread"? …Well no, you say, because people are greedy,
and beyond their needs, they have wants: "wants are infinite." …But wait,
wants really cannot be infinite, because a "want" takes mental time to have,
and you only have so many hours in every day, and so many days in your life.
In fact your wants are finite, and quite boring, and the Joneses' wants
are finite sand boring too. (Though why you want to keep up with those boneheads
the Joneses is a bit beyond me.) …Okay, you say, but "incentives matter":
if you give people stuff, they will just slack off: "welfare destroys families."
…But wait a minute. If we have insisted that people must work to feel self-worth,
yet capitalism puts people out of work until there are no jobs available,
and there are no business opportunities to provide ever-cheaper lunches,
isn't welfare the least of our problems, isn't welfare a problem that gets
solved when we solve the real problem?
But what is the real problem? Is the real problem that we don't know
how to interact with strangers without the use of money, and so we think
that money is a real thing? Is the real problem your certain feeling that
we need to work for our self-worth? Is the real problem that capitalism
is putting itself out of business, and showing that these so-called principles
are just a bunch of bad excuses? Is the real problem that we are all caught
in a huge emotional loop of bad thinking, now becoming an evident disaster?
bob mcmanus 08.30.16 at 9:26 pm
And also of course, people looking at Trump and his followers (or their
enemies and opponents in the Democratic Party) and seeing "tribalism" are
simply modernists engaging in nostalgia and reactionary analysis.
Trump_vs_deep_state is not fascism, and a Trump Rally is not Nuremberg. Much closer
to Carnival
Wiki: "Interpretations of Carnival present it as a social institution
that degrades or "uncrowns" the higher functions of thought, speech, and
the soul by translating them into the grotesque body, which serves to renew
society and the world,[37] as a release for impulses that threaten the
social order that ultimately reinforces social norms ,[38] as a social
transformation[39] or as a tool for different groups to focus attention
on conflicts and incongruities by embodying them in "senseless" acts."
I agree with bob mcm that Trump_vs_deep_state isn't fascism. It's not a serious
analysis to say that it is.
"Tribalism" was coined as a kind of shorthand for what Michael Berube
used to refer to "I used to consider myself a Democrat, but thanks to 9/11,
I'm outraged by Chappaquiddick." It's the wholesale adoption of what at
first looks like a value or belief system but is actually a social signaling
system that one belongs to a group. People on the left refer to this signaling
package as "tribal" primarily out of envy (I write somewhat jokingly) because
the left no longer has a similarly strong package on its side.
Greg McKenzie 08.30.16 at 11:47 pm
"Tribalism" feeds into the factionalism of parties. The left has a strong
faction both inside the ALP and the Liberal Party. The Right faction, in
the NLP, is currently in ascendancy but this will not last. Just as the
Right faction (in the ALP) was sidelined by clever ALP faction battles,
the current members of the NLP's Right faction are on borrowed time. But
all politicians are "mugs" as Henry Lawson pointed out over a hundred years
ago. Politicians can be talked into anything, if it gives them an illusion
of power. So "tribalism" is more powerful than "factionalism" simply because
it has more staying power. Left faction and Right faction merely obey the
demands of their tribal masters.
bruce wilder 08.31.16 at 1:47 am
. . . the left no longer has a similarly strong package on its side
honestly, I do not think "tribalism" is a "strong package" on Right or
Left. Part of the point of tribalism in politics is just how superficial
and media driven it is. The "signaling package" is put together and distributed
like cigarette or perfume samples: everybody gets their talking points.
Pretending to care dominates actually caring. On the right - as Rich
points out with the reference to "rolling coal", some people on the Right
who have donned their tribal sweatshirts get their kicks out of supposing
that somebody on the Left actually cares and they can tweak those foolishly
caring Lefties.
bruce wilder 08.31.16 at 1:57 am
I take note of the Florida primary results, just in: Debbie Wasserman-Schultz
did just fine, as did her hand-picked Democratic Senate candidate, the horrible
Patrick Murphy.
Oh, and Rubio is back. Notice of the death of neoliberalism might
be premature.
Martin 08.31.16 at 2:11 am
@ Bob Zannelli 10: To describe something as "hard wired" is to give up:
what course of action could we take? But, then, why isn't everyone a member
of the tribalist party? Has everyone, always, been of the tribalist party?
(I know someone could argue, 'everyone is racist' or 'all these white liberals
are just as racist really', but even if that is somehow true, most are members
of the socialist party or the neoliberal party).
Rather than deciding it is all too hard, we can at least find out who
supports tribalism, why it makes sense to them, whether it benefits them,
how it benefits them, if it does, and why they support it anyway, if it
does not benefit them.
I suppose (I am guessing here), some tribalists are benefiting from differential
government support, such as immigration policies that keep out rival potential
employees, or tariff policies that keep out competitors; or at least, that
they used to benefit like that. But Crooked Timber should have readers
who can answer this kind of question from their expertise.
I suppose it's too late to try to convince people here that the term "neoliberalism"
is a virus that devastates the analytic functions of the brain, but I'll
try. The term is based on a European use of the word "liberal" that has
never had any currency in the US. It's a wholly pejorative term based on
a misunderstanding of Hayek (who did *not* believe in laissez-faire), but
may be a reasonable approximation of the beliefs of , say, Thatcher. Then
that term was confounded with a totally unconnected term invented by Peters,
who was using the word "liberal" in the American sense. And presto, we have
a seamless worlwide philosophy with "hard" and "soft" variants.
As far as, say, H. Clinton is concerned, I can see no respect in which
it would be wrong to describe her as just a "liberal" in the American sense.
American liberalism has always been internationalist and mildly pro-free-trade.
It's also been pro-union– so we can just say that's *soft* neoliberalism
and preserve our sense that we are part of a world-wide struggle. Or not.
Bernie Sanders was celebrated by the left for supporting a tax on carbon
(without mentioning, of course, what price of gasoline he was contemplating),
but this is an excellent illustration of what Peters would have considered
a neoliberal policy. The term now just seems to mean anything I don't like.
As for Benedict Arnold, I mean Judas Iscariot, I mean Bill Clinton,
you can make a case that he did his best to salvage something from the wreckage.
To repeat what I've said here before, when he was elected the Democrats
had lost five of the last six elections, most by landslides. The one exception
was the most conservative of the Democratic candidates, who was despised
by the left. The American people had decisively rejected what the Democrats
were selling. False consciousness, no doubt.
So rather than spending a lot of time celebrating victory over this hegemonic
ideology, perhaps people should be talking about liberalism and whatever
we're calling the left alternative to it.
Peter T 08.31.16 at 10:54 am
"Tribalism" is unhelpful here, because it obscures the contribution "tribalism"
has made and can make to effective social democracy. It was on the basis
of class and national tribalisms (solidarities is a better word) that social
democracy was built, and its those solidarities that give it what strength
it still has. That others preferred, and still prefer, other forms of solidarity
– built around region or religion or language – should neither come as a
surprise nor be seen as basis for opposition. It's the content, not the
form, that matters.
Self-interest is too vague and shifting, international links too weak,
to make an effective politics. Our single most pressing problem – climate
change – can clearly only be dealt with internationally. Yet the environmental
and social problems that loom almost as large are clearly ones that can
best be dealt with on national or sub-national scales. As this becomes clearer
I expect the pressure to downsize and de-link from the global economy will
intensify (there are already signs in this direction). The social democrat
challenge is then to guide local solidarities towards democracy, not decry
them.
If we're really looking for a general word that works across national boundaries,
it's a well-used one: conservatism. People sometimes object that conservatives
in one country are not the same as conservatives in another country, but
really the differences are not much greater than in liberalism across countries,
socialism, etc. Conservatism includes the characteristics of authoritarianism
and nationalism. U.S. "tribalism" is its local manifestation: the use of
"tribalism" to denote a global style of conservatism denotes a particular,
contemporary type of conservatism, just as neoliberalism is a type of liberalism.
You could divide JQ's three groups into left, liberal, conservative but
since you're using neoliberal as the middle one (e.g. a contemporary mode)
then "tribalism" or something like it seems appropriate for the last.
Note that there is no word for a contemporary mode of leftism, because
there isn't one. The closest is the acephalous or consensus style of many
recent movements and groups, but that mode hasn't won elections or taken
power.
John Quiggin,
What I see as the missing point here, and perhaps we disagree upon it's
significance, is resource limitations. We can't avoid the violent reversion
to zero sum games unless we address the problem (exactly when it has or
will reach crisis point is perhaps a point of disagreement) of expanding
population meets finite resources (or even meets already fully owned resources).
I don't buy the argument that there a technological solution, or the
argument that population will stabilize before it gets too bad (I don't
see what will drive it – because Malthus was partly right).
If people are unable to survive where they are, they will try to move,
and people already living where they are moving to won't like it. Perhaps
we are already seeing some of this, perhaps not. But it will drive tribalism
(joining together to keep the "invaders" out) and won't drive the left.
I have a feeling that the "left" should be replaced by a "green" view of
the world, but for one thing, that will need a new economics – perhaps on
the lines sketched out by Herman Daly. Maybe the term "left" is too associated
with a Marxist view of the world to be useful any more.
Will G-R 08.31.16 at 2:00 pm
Apart from the obvious advantages "fascism" brings to the table - the sense
of describing "Trump_vs_deep_state" in terms of what it seeks to develop into and not
in terms of its current and clearly underdeveloped form, as well as the
sense of tying our current state of poorly grasped ideological confusion
back to WWII as the last clear three-way "battlefield of ideologies" pitting
liberalism against fascism against socialism - the term is broadly symbolically
appropriate for the same reasons it was originally adopted by Mussolini.
The sense of national solidarity and "strength through unity" (i.e. the
socialist element of National Socialism) is exactly what John Quiggin is
characterizing as "the positive elements of the appeal of tribalism", and
the direct invocation of the Roman fasces as a symbol of pure authority
is exactly what Z is getting at with the term "archism". Sure our latter-day
manifestation of fascism hasn't (yet) led to an honest-to-God fascist
regime in any Western country, but to kid ourselves that this isn't
what it seeks or that it couldn't potentially get there would be, well,
a bit too uncomfortably Weimar-ish of us.
Besides which, I get that pooh-poohing about Godwin's Law and "everybody
I don't like is Hitler" and so on is a nearly irresistible tic in today's
liberal discourse, but c'mon people… we're all comfortable using the term
"neoliberalism", which means we're all willing to risk having the same Poli
Sci 101 conversations over and over again in the mainstream ("yes, Virginia,
Hillary Clinton and Paul Ryan are both liberals!") for the sake
of our own theoretical clarity. At the very least "fascism" would have fewer
problematic discursive connotations than "tribalism", which I absolutely
refuse to use in this conversation without putting it in sneer quotes.
bruce wilder 08.31.16 at 2:17 pm
The problem with neoliberalism is that it isn't really compatible
with a modern free market economy. Simply because that system isn't
well enough understood to allow experts, let alone informed amateurs,
to reach a consensus on what a particular change will actually do. .
. . It is the inability of the neoliberal communication style to credibly
promise control that lost it.
You seem to be dancing around the elite corruption that is motivating
the rationales provided by neoliberalism. We are going to improve efficiency
by privatizing education, health care, pensions, prisons, transport. Innovation
is the goal of deregulating finance, electricity. That is what they say.
The obscurity and complexity of, say, Obamacare or the Greek bailout
is a cover story for the looting.
The problem is not that the experts do not understand consequences.
The problem is that a broken system pays the top better, so the system has
to be broken, but not so broken that the top falls off in collapse.
bruce wilder 08.31.16 at 2:35 pm
Will G-R @ 55
So you know what Trump_vs_deep_state wants to become, so we should call it that,
rather than describe what it is, because the ideological conflicts of 80
years ago were so much clearer.
We live in the age of inverted totalitarianism. Trump isn't Mussolini,
he's an American version of Berlusconi, a farcical rhyme in echo of a dead
past. We probably are on the verge of an unprecedented authoritarian surveillance
state, but Hillary Clinton doesn't need an army of blackshirts. The historical
fascism demanded everything in the state. Our time wants everything in an
iPhone app.
bruce wilder 08.31.16 at 2:54 pm
reason @ 54
Very well said. Resource limits shadow the falling apart of the global
order that the American Interest link Peter T points to. If the billionaires
are looting from the top and the response is a criminal scramble at the
bottom, the unnecessariat will be spit out uncomprehending into the void
between.
It is hard to see optimism as a growth stock. But, an effective left
would need something to reintroduce mass action into politics against an
elite that is groping toward a solution that entails replacing the masses
with robots.
Will G-R 08.31.16 at 3:38 pm
"Trump_vs_deep_state" may be the term du jour in the US, but let's try to kick our
stiflingly banal American habit of framing everything around our little
quadrennial electoral freak shows. After all, the US and our rigid two-party
system have always been an outlier in the vigor with which real political
currents have been forced to conform to the narrow partisan vocabulary of
either a left-liberal or a right-liberal major party. If hewing religiously
to a patriotic sense of US institutionalism is supposed to ultimately save
the liberal political sphere from the underlying political-economic forces
that threaten it, we might as well take a page from the Tea Party and start
marching around in powdered wigs and tricorn hats for all the good it'll
do us.
In the rest of the Western world, particularly in Central and Eastern
Europe, the "fascist" parties (Golden Dawn in Greece, Jobbik in Hungary,
Ataka in Bulgaria, etc.) are generally less euphemistic about their role
as fascist parties, and what forced sense of euphemism does exist
seems to provide little more than a rhetorical opportunity for mockingly
transparent coyness . To be fair, the predominant far-right parties
in richer Western European countries (the FN, AfD, UKIP, etc.) are a bit
more earnestly vague about their ambitions, so maybe a good compromise would
be to call them (along with Trump) "soft fascists" in contrast to the "hard
fascists" of Golden Dawn or Ataka. But fascism still makes much more sense
than any other existing "-ism" I've seen, unless we want to just make one
up.
Marc 08.31.16 at 3:48 pm
Analogies can obscure more than they illuminate.
RichardM 08.31.16 at 4:11 pm
> You seem to be dancing around the elite corruption that is motivating
the rationales provided by neoliberalism.
Fair point. On the other hand, if neoliberalism rule, then neoliberals
will be the rulers. And if not, not. Whatever the nature of the rulers,
they rarely starve. Worldwide, average corruption is almost certainly lower
in mostly-neoliberal countries than in less-neoliberal places like China,
Zimbabwe, North Korea, …
The key thing is, take two neoliberal politicians, only one of whom is
(unusually) corrupt. One entirely intends to deliver what you ask for, admittedly
while ensuring they personally have a nice life being well-fed, warm and
listened-to. The other plans to take it all and deliver nothing.
Given that nobody trustworthy knows anything, at least in a form they
can explain, you can't get useful information as to which is which. 300
hours of reading reports of their rhetoric in newspapers, blogs, etc. leaves
you none the wiser. And by the time you have a professional-level of knowledge
of what's going on, you are part of the problem.
Might as well just stick to looking at who has which label next to their
name, or who has good hair.
Will G-R 08.31.16 at 4:16 pm
Marc, the discourse of Godwin's Law has done a wonderful job solidifying
the delusion that what '20s-through-'40s-era fascists once represented is
categorically dead and buried, which is why it seems like the word can't
be used as anything other than an obtuse historical analogy. But it's not
an analogy - it's a direct insinuation that what these people currently
represent is a clear descendant of what those people once represented, however
mystified by its conditioned aversion to the word "fascism" itself. On the
contrary, if we surrender to the Godwin's Law discourse and accept that
fascism can never mean anything in contemporary discourse except
as an all-purpose "everything I don't like is Hitler" analogy or whatever,
it means we've forgotten what it means to actually be anti-fascist.
BTW, the link from the last comment isn't working for whatever reason,
so
here's Take 2 .
Bob Zannelli 08.31.16 at 5:27 pm
So much concern about the term tribalism. Well what is fascism? The
use of tribalism to grasp political power and establish a totalitarian political
order. Sound reasonable? Pick any fascism you like, the Nazis ( master race)
the theocratic fascists in the US ( Christian rule ) Catholic Fascism (
Franco's Spain) , you name it. It walks and talks like tribalism. Trump-ism
is the not so new face of American fascism. It's race based, it xenophobic,
it's embraces violence, has a disdain for civil liberties and human rights,
and it features the great leader. Doesn't seem to difficult to make the
connection.
bruce wilder 08.31.16 at 6:14 pm
RichardM: Whatever the nature of the rulers, they rarely starve.
Still not getting it. The operative question is whether the rulers feast
because the society works or because the society fails.
Neoliberalism is the politics of controlled dismantling of the institutions
of a society that formerly worked for a larger portion of its participants.
Like a landlord realizing increased cash flow from a decision to forego
maintenance and hire gangsters to handle rent collection, neoliberalism
seeks to divert the dividends from disinvestment to the top
The cadre managing this technically and politically difficult task
- it is not easy to take things apart without critical failures exemplified
by system collapse prompting insurrection or revolution - are rewarded as
are society's owners, the 1/10th of 1%. Everybody else is screwed - either
directly, or by the consequences of the social disintegration used to feed
a parasitic elite.
The key thing is, take two neoliberal politicians, only one of
whom is (unusually) corrupt. One entirely intends to deliver what you
ask for, admittedly while ensuring they personally have a nice life
being well-fed, warm and listened-to. The other plans to take it all
and deliver nothing.
Again, you are not getting it. This isn't about lesser evil. "Lesser
evil" is a story told to herd the masses. If there are two neoliberal politicians,
both are corrupt. Neither intends to deliver anything to you on net;
they are competing to deliver you.
Any apparent choice offered to you is just part of the b.s. The "300
hours of reading" is available if you need a hobby or the equivalent of
a frontal lobotomy.
I am not enthusiastic about this proposed distinction between "hard"
and "soft" neoliberalism. Ideologically, conservative libertarians have
been locked in a dialectic with the Clintonite / Blairite neoliberals -
that's an old story, maybe an obsolete story, but apparently not one those
insist on seeing neoliberalism as a monolithic lump fixed in time can quite
grasp, but never mind.
Good cop, bad cop. Only, the electorate is carefully divided so that
one side's good cop is the other side's bad cop, and vice versa.
Hillary Clinton is running the Democratic Party in such a way that she
wins the Presidency, but the Party continues to be excluded from power in
Congress and in most of the States. This is by design. This is the neoliberal
design. She cannot deliver on her corrupt promises to the Big Donors if
she cannot play the game Obama has played so superbly of being hapless in
the face of Republican intransigence.
In the meantime, those aspiring to be part of the credentialed managerial
classes that conduct this controlled demolition while elaborating the surveillance
state that is expected to hold things together in the neo-feudal future
are instructed in claiming and nurturing their individual political identity
against the day of transformation of consciousness, when feminism will triumph
even in a world where we never got around to regulating banks.
bruce wilder 08.31.16 at 6:33 pm
Will G-R, Bob Zannelli
Actual, historical fascism required the would-be fascists to get busy,
en masse . Trump (and Clinton) will be streamed on demand so you
can stay home and check Facebook. Hitler giving a two-hour 15000 word speech
and Trump, Master of the Twitterverse, belong to completely different political
categories, if not universes.
There are so many differences and those differences are so deep and pervasive
that the conversation hardly seems worth having.
stevenjohnson 08.31.16 at 7:54 pm
Historical fascism included not just Hitler's Germany, but Mussolini's Italy,
Franco's Spain, Salazar/Caetano's Portugal, Ionescu's Romania, the Ustase
in Croatia, Tiso's Slovakia, Petliura's movement in Ukraine, and, arguably,
Dollfuss' Austria, Horthy's Hungary, Imperial Japan, Peronist Argentina,
the Poland of the post Pilsudski junta (read Beck on the diplomatics of
a Jewish state in Uganda, which is I think symptomatic wishful thinking.)
There is a strong correlation between the nations whose rulers accepted
fascists into the government and losing WWI. The rest were new, insecure
states that could profit their masters by expansion. At the time, the so-called
Allies, except for the USSR, were essentially the official "winners" of
WWI and therefore united against the would be revisionists like Germany.
Therefore it was desirable to propagandize against the Axis as uniquely
fascist.
In fact, there was a powerful fascist movement in many Allied states
as well. Vichy France had deep, strong domestic roots in particular, but
the South African Broederbond and Jim Crow USA with its lynchings show how
fascism and democracy (as understood by anti-Communists) are not separate
things, but conjunctural developments of the capitalist states, which are
not organized as business firms.
Democracy is associated even with genocide, enslavement of peoples and
mass population transfers to colonists. It began with democracy itself,
with the Spartans turning Messenians into Helots and Athenians expropriating
Euboeans and massacring Melians. Russian Cossacks on the Caucasian steppes
or Paxton Boys in the US continued the process. When democracy came to the
Ottoman empire, making Turkey required the horrific expulsion of the Armenians.
(Their Trail of Tears was better publicized than the Cherokee's.) But the
structural need to unify a nation by excluding Others led to the bloody
expulsion of Greeks as well. The confirmation of national identity by a
mix of ethnic, religious and racial markers required mass violence and war,
as seen in the emergence of the international system of mercantilist capitalist
states.
The wide variations in historical fascism conclusively demonstrate every
notion of fascism is somehow something essentially, metaphysically, antithetical
is wrong. Fascism and democracy are not an antinomy. Particular doctrines
that assert this, like the non-concept of "totalitarianism," serve as a
kind of skeleton for political movements and parties. Since the triumph
of what we in the US call McCarthyism all mainstream and all acceptable
alternative politics share this same skeleton. It is unsurprising that such
a beast is somehow not organically equipped to be an effective left. It's
SYRIZA in Greece defining itself by the rejection of the KKE. There is no
such thing as repudiation of revolution that doesn't imply accepting counter-revolution.
Evan Neely 08.31.16 at 8:03 pm
The problem I have with attempts to appeal to the supposedly "positive"
aspects of tribalism, solidarity and the affection for longstanding institutions,
is that it's presuming these aren't just our abstractions of something that's
felt at a much more primal level. Tribalists don't love solidarity for the
sake of the principle of solidarity: they feel solidarity because they love
the specific people like them that they love and hate others.
One set of tribalists doesn't look at another and say "hey, we respect
the same principles." It says "they're not our tribe!!!" Point being, you're
never going to get them on your side with appeals to abstractions. You're
almost certainly never going to get them on your side no matter what you
do.
bruce wilder 08.31.16 at 9:07 pm
There is no vast neoliberal conspiracy . . .
There obviously is a vast political movement, coordinated in ideology
and the social processes of partisan politics and propaganda. Creating a
strawperson "conspiracy" does not erase actual Clinton fundraising practices
and campaign tactics, which exist independent of whatever narrative I weave
them into.
There are no corrupt promises from Clinton to big donors . . .
Calling our present-day GOP as led by Trump "fascism" is calling it a break
with the past GOP. Corey Robin has been over this quite a bit here, but
in many important respects there is no break. GWB, for instance, sometimes
required attendees at his rallies to take a personal loyalty oath. And GWB
is hailed by some people here as being the good conservative because he
said that not all Muslims were bad, while, of course, killing a million
Muslims. The contemporary GOP is an outgrowth of GOP tradition, and while
some leftists may find calling all conservatism fascism convincing, I think
that it's only convincing for the tiny number of people who adhere to their
ideology.
But conservatism and fascism are both right-wing and people can argue
indefinitely about where the boundary is. So rather than talk about ideal
types, let's look at how the rhetoric of calling it fascism works. Calling
Trump_vs_deep_state fascism is primarily the rhetoric of HRC supporters, because functionally,
what everyone pretty much agrees on is that when fascists appear, people
on the left through moderate right are supposed to drop everything and unite
in a Popular Front to oppose them.
I don't think that people should drop everything. I think that HRC is
going to win and that forming the mental habit of supporting the Democratic
Party is easy to do and hard to break, and I think that the people who become
Democratic Party supporters because of the threat of Trump / "fascism" are
going to spend the next four years working directly against actual left
interests.
Will G-R 08.31.16 at 10:06 pm
Rich, I think it would be a mistake to consider this as a question of "our
present-day GOP as led by Trump". First because Trump isn't "leading" the
GOP in any meaningful sense;
as Jay Rosen's recent Tweet-storm encapsulates nicely , the GOP's institutional
leadership is still liberal through and through, even if its ideological
organs pander in some ideally implicit sense to what might otherwise be
a fascist constituency. And second because Trump isn't really "leading"
his own constituents either; if he were to make a high-profile about-face
on the issues his voters care about, they'd likely be just as eager to dump
him as Bernie Sanders' most passionate leftist supporters were to ignore
his pro-Clinton appeals at the DNC.
What's interesting about Trump isn't really anything to do with Trump
per se, so much as what Trump's constituency would do if the normal functioning
of the liberal institutions constraining it were to be disrupted in a serious
way. Europe in the 1910s through 1940s was full of such disruptions, and
should such an era return, the ideological currents we're now viewing through
a heavily tinted institutional window would become much clearer.
Ragweed 08.31.16 at 10:23 pm
Val etc.
I think that John's use of the word "tribalist" here means a world-view
that explicitly values members of an in-group more than members not of the
in-group. It is different from racism because it may be over other factors
than race – religion, citizenship, nationalism, or even region. And the
key word is explicitly. The big difference between tribalist and both neoliberal
and left positions is that the other two are generally universalist.
Neoliberals profess that everyone will be better off with deregulation,
free markets, and technocratic solutions, and often explicitly reject the
idea of something benefitting one racial, religious, or national group over
another (though not the educated or wealthy, because these are allegedly
meritocratic outcomes of the neoliberal order).
The left likewise generally argues for an increase in equality and equal
distribution of resources for all, whether that be class-based or based
on some sort of gender, race, or sexual equality.
So on an issue like a free trade deal, a neoliberal argument would support
it, because gains of trade and various other reasons why it would make everyone
better off; a leftist argument would oppose it on the grounds that it would
make everyone worse off; and a tribalist argument would oppose it on the
grounds that it took jobs away from American citizens, but wouldn't worry
too much about the other guys.
Of course, the lines are not always clear and distinct, they often overlap,
mix, and borrow arguments from each other, and there are often hypocrisies'
and inconsistencies (and John's point anyway is that the neoliberals tend
to draw on coalitions with the other two factions), but I think it is a
good general description of the distinction.
And it is different from the more sociological use of tribal to mean
any in-group/out-group distinction and social solidarity formation. Everyone
is tribal in the sociological sense, but the tribalist that John is referring
explicitly approves of that tribalism. A left intellectual may look down
on "ignorant, racist, blue-collar Trump supporters", with as much bias as
any tribalist, but would generally want them to have better education and
a guarantee income so they were no longer ignorant and racist, whereas the
tribalist generally thinks the other guy is less deserving.
Sam Bradford 09.01.16 at 9:20 am
What I wonder/worry about is whether tribalism, nationalism, call it what
you will, is a necessity.
It's very difficult for me to imagine an internationalist order that
provides the kind of benefits to citizens that I'd want a state to provide.
It's much easier to imagine nation states operating as enclaves of solidarity
and mutual aid in an amorphous, anarchic and ruthless globalised environment.
Yet the creation of a nation requires the creation of an in-group and an
out-group, citizens and non-citizens.
To put it more concretely: in my own country, New Zealand, the traditional
Maori form of social organisation – a kind of communitarianism – currently
appeals to me as offering more social solidarity and opportunity for human
flourishing than our limp lesser-of-three-evils democracy. It is a society
in which there is genuine solidarity and common purpose. Yet it is, literally,
tribal; it admits no more than a few thousand people to each circle of mutual
aid. I am sometimes tempted to believe that it is the correct way for human
beings to live, despite my general dislike for biological determinism. I
think I would rather abandon my obligations to the greater mass of humanity
(not act against them, of course, just accept an inability to influence
events) and be a member of a small society than be a helpless and hopeless
atom in a sea of similar, utterly disenfranchised atoms.
Will G-R 09.01.16 at 4:32 pm
Bob Zannelli: Gee what a concept, an obligation to vote in a democracy.
As flawed as the US political process is, voting still matters and can affect
change. It's not easy , but then it's never easy to reform anything.
Just to give voice to
the
contrary perspective , voter turnout appears to play at least some role
in the ideological process by which the US electoral system claims legitimacy:
even though in purely procedural terms an election could work just fine
if the total number of ballots was an infinitesimal fraction of the number
of eligible voters ("Bill Clinton casts ballot, Hillary defeats Trump by
2 votes to 1!") low voter turnout is nonetheless depicted as a crisis not
just for any particular candidate or party but for the entire electoral
process. Accordingly, if I decide not to vote and thereby to decrease voter
turnout by a small-but-nonzero amount, I'm adding a small-but-nonzero contribution
to the public argument that the electoral process as presently institutionalized
is illegitimate, so unless we propose to add a "none of the above" option
to every single race and question on the ballot, to argue that citizens
have an obligation to vote is to argue that they are obliged not to "vote"
for the illegitimacy of the system as such. And plenty of ethical and political
stances could be consistent with such a "vote", not the least of which is
a certain historical stance whose proponents argued that "whenever any Form
of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the
People to alter or to abolish it…"
Will G-R 09.01.16 at 5:05 pm
I mean that just as people who believe the US government is legitimate should
have the right to express their political preference at the ballot box,
people who believe the US government is illegitimate should have the right
to express their political preference at (the abstention from) the ballot
box, and that it's at least possible for this to be a consistent political
and ethical stance. Do you disagree? Is the legitimacy of your government
a first premise for you? If so, Thomas Jefferson would like a word.
(Not to imply that I hold any particular fealty to the US nationalist
mythology of the "Founding Fathers" and so on, but hey, they articulated
a certain liberal political philosophy whose present-day adherents should
at least be consistent about it.)
Bob Zannelli 09.01.16 at 5:14 pm
I mean that just as people who believe the US government is legitimate should
have the right to express their political preference at the ballot box,
people who believe the US government is illegitimate should have the right
to express their political preference at (the abstention from) the ballot
box, and that it's at least possible for this to be a consistent political
and ethical stance. Do you disagree? Is the legitimacy of your government
a first premise for you? If so, Thomas Jefferson would like a word.
(Not to imply that I hold any particular fealty to the US nationalist
mythology of the "Founding Fathers" and so on, but hey, they articulated
a certain liberal political philosophy whose present-day adherents should
at least be consistent about it.) {}
Jefferson has never impressed me very much ( except for his church state
separation advocacy) His ideal of a democratic agrarian slave society I
find not too appealing. He talked about the blood of tyrants but he spent
his time drinking fine wines and being waiting on by his slaves during the
revolutionary war. You're entitled to any views you want, but you're not
entitled to be respected if you're views are nonsensical. Good luck on the
revolution, I hope that works out for you.
Will G-R 09.01.16 at 5:15 pm
Also, not to get personal, but the smarm here is so thick you could cut
it with a knife…
"Did I get you right? Is your response to an argument you find uncomfortable
to simply intone 'holy shit'? Holy shit…"
Will G-R 09.01.16 at 5:20 pm
So wait, did you not recognize the quote from the Declaration of Independence,
or what? Your argument invoked "an obligation to vote in a democracy"
. My counterargument is that if government is supposed to be premised
on the consent of the governed, there can never be "an obligation to vote
in a democracy", because not voting is a way of expressing one's lack of
consent. As Žižek might put it, your ideal appears to be a democratic system
that orders you to consent .
Bob Zannelli 09.01.16 at 5:37 pm
So wait, did you not recognize the quote from the Declaration of Independence,
or what? Your argument invoked "an obligation to vote in a democracy". My
counterargument is that if government is supposed to be premised on the
consent of the governed, there can never be "an obligation to vote in a
democracy", because not voting is a way of expressing one's lack of consent.
As Žižek might put it, your ideal appears to be a democratic system that
orders you to consent.{}
I think anyone who expects to move the country away from Neo Liberalism
to a more progressive direction without voting is a fool. What's the alternative
, over throwing the government? If this is the plan we better not discuss
it on social media. Of course it's all nonsense, if the US government was
ever thrown it would be by the far right as almost happened under FDR during
the hey day of fascism around the world. I think too many here are still
living in a Marxist fantasy world , no one here is going to establish the
dictatorship of the proletarians. Let's get real.
Will G-R 09.01.16 at 6:09 pm
if the US government was ever thrown it would be by the far right
So let's get this straight… the only choice we have is between the center
and the far right, yet it's far leftists' fault for not being centrists
that the politics of centrism itself keeps drifting farther and farther
to the right. Screw eating from the trashcan, it's like you're mainlining
pure grade-A Colombian ideology.
stevenjohnson 09.01.16 at 6:24 pm
Will G-R@86 "… because not voting is a way of expressing one's lack of consent."
Incorrect. Not voting is routinely interpreted as tacit consent. Not voting
is meaningless, and will be interpreted as suited.
Bob Zannelli@87 "Let's get real."
Okay. What's real is, the game is rigged but you insist on making everyone
ante up and play by the rules anyhow. What's real, is you have nothing to
do with the left, except by defining the Democratic Party as the left. What's
real is that the parties could just as well be labeled the "Ins" and the
"Outs," and that would have just as much to do with the left, which is to
repeat, nothing.
bruce wilder 09.01.16 at 6:59 pm
Bob Zannelli: What's the alternative?
There is no alternative.
Bob Zannelli 09.01.16 at 7:01 pm
So let's get this straight… the only choice we have is between the center
and the far right, yet it's far leftists' fault for not being centrists
that the politics of centrism itself keeps drifting farther and farther
to the right. Screw eating from the trashcan, it's like you're mainlining
pure grade-A Colombian ideology{}
Right because the left is too busy plotting the revolution to engage
in politics.
bruce wilder 09.01.16 at 7:09 pm
Hillary Clinton is engaging in politics and she's teh most librul librul
evah! Why isn't that enough? It is not her fault, surely, that the devil
makes her do unlibrul things - you have to be practical and practically,
there is no alternative. We have to clap louder. That's the ticket!
Will G-R 09.01.16 at 7:25 pm
stevenjohnson: Not voting is routinely interpreted as tacit consent.
So why then is low voter turnout interpreted as a problem for democracy?
Why wouldn't it be a cause for celebration if a large majority of the population
was so happy with the system that they'd be happy with whoever won? On the
contrary, a helpless person's tacit refusal to respond to a provocation
can be the exact opposite of consent if whoever has them at their mercy
actually needs a reaction: think of a torture victim who sits in
silence instead of pleading for mercy or giving up the information the torturer
is after. Whether or not it truly does need it, the ideology of liberal
democracy at least acts as if it needs the legitimating idea that its leaders
are freely and actively chosen by those they govern, and refusing to participate
in this choice can be interpreted as an effort to deprive this ideology
of its legitimating idea.
bruce wilder 09.01.16 at 7:45 pm
Will G-R @ 94
Low voter turnout is interpreted as a problem by some people on
some occasions. Why generalize to official "ideology" from their idiosyncratic
and opportunistic pieties?
Why are the concerns of, say, North Carolina's legislature that only
the right people vote not official ideology? Or, the election officials
in my own Los Angeles County, where we regularly have nearly secret elections
with hard-to-find-polling-places - we got down to 8.6% in one election in
2015.
Obama's DHS wants to designate the state election apparatus, critical
infrastructure. Won't that be great? I guess Putin may not be able to vote,
after all!
Will G-R 09.01.16 at 8:12 pm
Bob, my impression is that CT is supposed to be a philosophy-oriented discussion
space (or it wouldn't be named after a line from Kant for chrissake) and
in philosophy one is supposed to subject one's premises to ruthless and
unsparing criticism, or at least be able to fathom the possibility of doing
so - including in this case premises like the legitimacy of the US government
or the desirability of capitalism. Especially in today's neoliberal society
there are precious few spaces where a truly philosophical outlook is supposed
to be the norm, and honestly I'm offended that you seem to want to turn
CT into yet another space where it isn't.
stevenjohnson 09.01.16 at 8:27 pm
Bob Zannelli@95 Don't worry, your left credentials are quite in order. I'm
not a regular, I post here occasionally for the same reason I occasionally
post at BHL, sheer amazement at the insanity of it all. My views are quite
beyond the pale.
Nonetheless your views, even though they pass for left at CT, are nonsense.
Corey Robin's project to amalgamate all conservatism into a single psychopathology
of individual minds (characters? souls?) is not useful for real politics.
His shilling for Jacobinrag.com, etc., acquits SYRIZA for its total failure
in real politics because it accomplished the most important task…making
sure KKE couldn't use a major state crisis. Similarly OWS and the Battle
of Seattle are acceptable because they are pure, untainted by anything save
failure.
As for your dismissal of Marxist fantasies, I take it you do not believe
economic crisis is endemic to the capitalist world economy, nor that imperialism
leads to war to redivide the world. And despite your alleged interest in
the location of proletarian hordes you can't see any in other countries,
unlike this country where everybody is middle class.
Delusions like that are killing us all. This country doesn't need reform,
it needs regime change. That's happening. Nixon failed, Trump might fail,
but the long slow march of the owners through the institutions of power,
gentrifying as they go, continues.
Will G-R 09.01.16 at 8:46 pm
Bruce @ 95, correct me if I'm wrong but I feel that state and (especially)
local governments in the US typically are viewed as highly prone
to borderline-illegitimizing levels of corruption - imagine how we'd characterize
the legitimacy of a City-State of Ferguson, or a Republic of Illinois under
President Blagojevich - and part of what maintains the impression of legitimacy
is the possibility of federal intervention on the people's behalf if things
at the lower levels get out of hand. Where the federal government hasn't
done so, notably in the case of African-American communities before the
mid to late 20th century, is precisely where arguments for the illegitimacy
of the entire system have gained serious traction. So IMO there could actually
be quite a bit of subversive potential if the population at large were to
openly reject the elected officials in Washington, DC as no more inherently
legitimate than those in Raleigh, NC or Los Angeles County. (I briefly tried
to look up the location within LA of its county seat and found that
Wikipedia's article "Politics of Los Angeles County" was entirely about
its citizens' voting record in federal politics, which itself illustrates
the point.)
Delusions like that are killing us all. This country doesn't need reform, it needs regime change.
Notable quotes:
"... Neoliberalism is all about markets and the free flow of capital, not political interference from unions or government. ..."
"... Neoliberalism has failed both in practice and as a means to indoctrinate the voters. The soft neoliberals have been putting neoliberalism into practice over the objections of their electoral coalition partners. It hasn't delivered. ..."
"... I am hoping that Trump suffers a sound beating but then the elites were telling us that Brexit wouldn't happen. They also assured us Trump wouldn't win the primary. The fact that he did shows in part how neoliberalism has failed. ..."
"... The fact that these sorts of governments exist and have existed in the US is why every American, even those of us who are well aware of McCarthyism and COINTELPRO and so on, can breathe a sigh of relief when we see the words "the Justice Department today announced a probe aimed at local government officials in…" because it means that the legitimate parts of our system are asserting their predominance over the potentially illegitimate parts. ..."
"... Accordingly, to treat the federal system as itself no more inherently legitimate than the local ones - to treat the government in Washington as fundamentally the same kind of racket as the government in Ferguson - is to argue that it needs fundamentally the same kind of external oversight, and barring a foreign invasion or a world government, the only potentially equivalent overseer for the US federal government is a mass revolt. ..."
"... Corey Robin's project to amalgamate all conservatism into a single psychopathology of individual minds (characters? souls?) is not useful for real politics. His shilling for Jacobinrag.com, etc., acquits SYRIZA for its total failure in real politics because it accomplished the most important task…making sure KKE couldn't use a major state crisis. Similarly OWS and the Battle of Seattle are acceptable because they are pure, untainted by anything save failure. ..."
"... I take it you do not believe economic crisis is endemic to the capitalist world economy, nor that imperialism leads to war to redivide the world. And despite your alleged interest in the location of proletarian hordes you can't see any in other countries, unlike this country where everybody is middle class. ..."
"... Delusions like that are killing us all. This country doesn't need reform, it needs regime change. ..."
" American liberalism has always been internationalist and mildly pro-free-trade. It's also
been pro-union…"
Then why are unions in such bad shape? Neoliberalism is all about markets and the free
flow of capital, not political interference from unions or government. From democracy or
citizens. Think about the TPP where corporate arbitration courts can be used by corporations to
sue governments without regard to those nations' legislation. I'd be more in favor of international
courts if they weren't used merely to further corporate interests and profits. Neoliberals argue
that what benefits these multinational corporations benefits their home country.
I pretty much agree with what Quiggin is saying here. Neoliberalism has failed both in
practice and as a means to indoctrinate the voters. The soft neoliberals have been putting neoliberalism
into practice over the objections of their electoral coalition partners. It hasn't delivered.
That's why you have all of these Trump voters or Brexit voters or other tribalists who no longer
believe what the center-right is selling them about lower taxes and less regulation delivering
prosperity. About immigration and internationalism being a good thing.
The center-right hasn't really delivered and neither has the center-left.
The elite project of putting neoliberalism into practice and of selling it to the masses has
failed. This is an opportunity for the left but also a time fraught with danger should the tribalists
somehow get the upperhand.
I feel the U.S. is too diverse for this to happen but it might in other nations. I am hoping
that Trump suffers a sound beating but then the elites were telling us that Brexit wouldn't happen.
They also assured us Trump wouldn't win the primary. The fact that he did shows in part how neoliberalism
has failed.
Will G-R 09.02.16 at 4:19 pm
Bruce @ 104, I'm not clued into the SoCal-specific issues (so I don't know exactly how much a
Chinatown-esque narrative should be raised in contrast to your description of LA water
infrastructure as "the best of civic boosterism") but I'm thinking more of local governments like
the ones stereotypically predominant in the Southeast, or even the legendarily corrupt history
of "machine" politics in cities like Chicago.
The fact that these sorts of governments exist and have existed in the US is why every
American, even those of us who are well aware of McCarthyism and COINTELPRO and so on, can breathe
a sigh of relief when we see the words "the Justice Department today announced a probe aimed at
local government officials in…" because it means that the legitimate parts of our system are asserting
their predominance over the potentially illegitimate parts.
So in order to uphold the legitimacy of the system as such we acknowledge that sure, someone
in rural Louisiana might not always be able to get rid of their corrupt local mayors/sheriffs/judges/etc.
through the ballot box directly, but at least they can vote in federal elections for the people
and institutions that will get rid of these officials if they overstep the bounds of
what we as a nation consider acceptable. (This also extends to more informal institutions like
the media: the local paper might not be shining the light on local corruption, but the media as
such can fulfill its function and redeem its institutional legitimacy if something too egregious
falls into the national spotlight.)
Accordingly, to treat the federal system as itself no more inherently legitimate than the
local ones - to treat the government in Washington as fundamentally the same kind of racket as
the government in Ferguson - is to argue that it needs fundamentally the same kind of external
oversight, and barring a foreign invasion or a world government, the only potentially equivalent
overseer for the US federal government is a mass revolt.
stevenjohnson 09.01.16 at 8:27 pm
Bob Zannelli@95 Don't worry, your left credentials are quite in order. I'm not a regular, I post
here occasionally for the same reason I occasionally post at BHL, sheer amazement at the insanity
of it all. My views are quite beyond the pale.
Nonetheless your views, even though they pass for left at CT, are nonsense. Corey Robin's
project to amalgamate all conservatism into a single psychopathology of individual minds (characters?
souls?) is not useful for real politics. His shilling for Jacobinrag.com, etc., acquits SYRIZA
for its total failure in real politics because it accomplished the most important task…making
sure KKE couldn't use a major state crisis. Similarly OWS and the Battle of Seattle are acceptable
because they are pure, untainted by anything save failure.
As for your dismissal of Marxist fantasies, I take it you do not believe economic crisis
is endemic to the capitalist world economy, nor that imperialism leads to war to redivide the
world. And despite your alleged interest in the location of proletarian hordes you can't see any
in other countries, unlike this country where everybody is middle class.
Delusions like that are killing us all. This country doesn't need reform, it needs regime
change. That's happening. Nixon failed, Trump might fail, but the long slow march of the
owners through the institutions of power, gentrifying as they go, continues.
"... Neoliberalism is all about markets and the free flow of capital, not political interference from unions or government. From democracy or citizens. Think about the TPP where corporate arbitration courts can be used by corporations to sue governments without regard to those nations' legislation. I'd be more in favor of international courts if they weren't used merely to further corporate interests and profits. Neoliberals argue that what benefits these multinational corporations benefits their home country. ..."
"... Neoliberalism has failed both in practice and as a means to indoctrinate the voters. ..."
"... the elites were telling us that Brexit wouldn't happen. They also assured us Trump wouldn't win the primary. The fact that he did shows in part how neoliberalism has failed. ..."
" American liberalism has always been internationalist and mildly pro-free-trade. It's also
been pro-union…"
Then why are unions in such bad shape? Neoliberalism is all about markets and the free
flow of capital, not political interference from unions or government. From democracy or citizens.
Think about the TPP where corporate arbitration courts can be used by corporations to sue governments
without regard to those nations' legislation. I'd be more in favor of international courts if
they weren't used merely to further corporate interests and profits. Neoliberals argue that what
benefits these multinational corporations benefits their home country.
I pretty much agree with what Quiggin is saying here. Neoliberalism has failed both in
practice and as a means to indoctrinate the voters. The soft neoliberals have been putting
neoliberalism into practice over the objections of their electoral coalition partners. It hasn't
delivered.
That's why you have all of these Trump voters or Brexit voters or other tribalists who no longer
believe what the center-right is selling them about lower taxes and less regulation delivering
prosperity. About immigration and internationalism being a good thing. The center-right hasn't
really delivered and neither has the center-left. The elite project of putting neoliberalism into
practice and of selling it to the masses has failed. This is an opportunity for the left but also
a time fraught with danger should the tribalists somehow get the upperhand. I feel the U.S. is
too diverse for this to happen but it might in other nations.
I am hoping that Trump suffers a sound beating but then the elites were telling us
that Brexit wouldn't happen. They also assured us Trump wouldn't win the primary. The fact that
he did shows in part how neoliberalism has failed.
"... Clinton cannot recall, or chooses not to recall, a briefing she received on January 22, 2009. Either one implicates her as incompetent or a liar. I say both... ..."
"... "she could only work at State for a few hours a day" So her paycheck was cut to reflect her shorter hours like everybody else, right? ..."
"... That's why she invaded Libya which had nothing to do with anything. She was only half conscious. ..."
"... She bombed Libya because she forgot Soweto Obama had already won the Nobel Peace Prize. ..."
"... When someone with severe anti-social personality disorder tells you "I don't recall," especially when 'recalling' would result in negative consequences for a particular action or actions, it is usually not a problem with memory. ..."
"... So she get the Nuclear Key and forgets about when to use it or if she actually did. Very convenient setup. ..."
"... Clinton said she never sent classified data from her server. Turned out to be false. Using BleachBit shows she was trying to destroy evidence. ..."
With much of the recent discussion focusing on Hillary Clinton's general health condition, and
mental acuity in particular, we wonder if the FBI just threw her under the bus with the following
statement which links Hillary's "inability" to remember her transition instructions with her 2012
concussion and blood clot:
CLINTON stated she received no instructions or direction regarding the preservation or production
of records from State during the transition out of her role as Secretary of State in early 2013.
However, in December of 2012, CLINTON suffered a concussion and then around the New Year had a
blood clot. Based on her doctor's advice, she could only work at State for a few hours a day and
could not recall every briefing she received . CLINTON did not have any discussions with aides
about turning over her email records, nor did anyone from State request them. She believed her
work-related emails were captured by her practice of sending email to the state.gov email address
of her staff. CLINTON was unaware of the requirement to turn over printed records at that time.
Her physical records were boxed up and handled by aides.
The original, on page 9 of 11:
CLINTON stated she received no instructions or direction regarding the preservation
or production of records from State during the transition out of her role as Secretary of State
in early
2013, However, in December of 2012, CLINTON suffered a concussion and then around the New Year
had a blood clot. Based on her doctor's advice, she could only work at State lor a few hours a
day and
could not recall every briefing she received. CLINTON did not have airy discussions with aides
about
turning over her email records, nor did anyone from State request them. She believed her work-related
emails were captured by her practice of sending email to the state.gov email addresses of her
staff.
CLINTON was unaware of the requirement to turn over printed records at that time. Her physical
records
were boxed up and handled by aides.
Clinton cannot recall, or chooses not to recall, a briefing she received on January 22,
2009. Either one implicates her as incompetent or a liar. I say both...
Clinton's sole briefing occurred on January 22, the day after the Senate confirmed
her to the post. On that date, as the nation's top diplomat, Clinton signed a document acknowledging
she received a security briefing.
"I hereby acknowledge that I have received a security indoctrination concerning the nature
and protection of SCI," or the nation's highest classified materials, was part of the pledge
in the document.
It amazes me how Alex Jones, Julian Assange and Vladimir Putin have such an extensive network
they can now plant their CONSPIRACY THEORIES in FBI reports.
Clearly the Russians are behind it. Better for vote Clinton.
Here is the definitive video on the true state of Hillary's health and why she should not be elected
president of the USA. Hillary is quite ill and the media is doing a masterful job of covering
it up.
When someone with severe
anti-social personality disorder tells you "I don't recall," especially when 'recalling' would
result in negative consequences for a particular action or actions, it is usually not a problem
with memory.
Here is an idea: The govt needs to build a senior care facility just outside DC, perhaps on the
grouds of Langley. Top drawer care and facilities for , for, for , elderly prior elected or appointed
officials. It woudl be a safe zone for them, nothing they say is recorded but then again limited
visitors.For recreation thay woudl have conference rooms and board rooms, even a copy of the Oval
Office-those deemed messed up go live there and have the make believe meetings and conversations
thay always wanted to have without creating problems.
Newly elected or appointed officials woudl be taken out there for field trips to be shown what
happens when you lose your effectiveness.
The cost woudl be offset by not having to pay for secret service, not paying their retirement
(that goes to the facility) or pay for private planes to travel.
Put Reid, Pelosi, McCain, mcConnell there to start. Bush , both of them, Cheney--add enough
of these folks they can hold make beleve meetings. Then add Hillary --they can hold make beleve
cabinet meetings, authorize huge spendng programs, start wars without declarign them--
it wodl be a make believe garden of eden.
we could build on this and make is a offer they cannot refuse.
This is frgiin priceless as her health is not a concern.....until she needs an excuse for treaon
- LOCK HER UP: Hillary Clinton told the FBI she did not recall all the briefings she received
on handling sensitive information as she made the transition from her post as U.S. secretary of
state, due to a concussion suffered in 2012.
Wait. Time out. Don't you see the chess move? She's going to use the "I had a brain clot" to escape
doing Federal jail time. Kind of like when your girlfriend tells you "not tonight, honey, I've
got a headache." Except we're all going to end up with headaches if she beats the rap and gets
elected.
"CLINTON stated she received no instructions or direction regarding the preservation or
production of records from State during the transition out of her role as Secretary of State
in early 2013."
Clinton said she never sent classified data from her server. Turned out to be false. Using
BleachBit shows she was trying to destroy evidence.
"... Is Donald Trump really as stupid as the press seems to think? And if not, how do we explain the press's version of countless Trumpian controversies lately? ..."
"... What is not in doubt is that if the election were to revolve around fundamental policy proposals (what an innovation!), it would be Trump's to lose. As Patrick Buchanan has observed, "on the mega-issue, America's desire for change, and on specific issues, Trump holds something close to a full house." ..."
"... On out-of-control immigration and gratuitously counterproductive foreign military adventures, he has seriously wrong-footed Hillary Clinton. He has moreover made remarkable progress in focusing attention on America's trade disaster. Thanks in large measure to his plain talk, the Clintons have finally been forced into ignominious retreat on their previous commitment to blue-sky globalism. For more on Hillary Clinton's trade woes, click here . ..."
"... Trump's hawkish stance not only packs wide popular appeal but, as I know from more than two decades covering the global economy from a vantage point in Tokyo, it addresses disastrous American policy-making misconceptions going back generations. ..."
"... Smith based his intellectual edifice on the rather pedestrian observation that rainy England was good at raising sheep, while sunny Portugal excelled in growing grapes. What could be more reasonable than for England to trade its wool for Portugal's wine? But, while Smith's case is a charming insight into eighteenth century simplicities, the fact is that climate-based agricultural endowments have long since ceased to play a decisive role in First World trade. Today the key factor is advanced manufacturing. By comparison, not only is agriculture a negligible force but, as I documented in a book some years ago, even such advanced service industries as computer software are disappointing exporters. ..."
"... In theory China should be a great market for, for instance, the U.S. auto industry – and it is, sort of. The Detroit companies have been told that while their American-made products are not welcome, they can still make money in China provided only they manufacture there AND bring their most advanced production know-how. ..."
"... Corporate America's Chinese subsidiaries moreover are expected almost from the get-go to export. In the early days they sell mainly to Africa and Southern Asia but then, as they approach state-of-the-art quality control, they come under increasing pressure to export even to the United States – with all that that implies for the job security of the very American workers and engineers who developed the advanced production know-how in the first place. ..."
"... Naturally all this has gone unnoticed in such reflexively anti-Trump media as the Washington Post . (A good account , however, is available at the pro-Trump website, Breitbart.com.) ..."
Is Donald Trump really as stupid as the press seems to think? And if not, how do we explain
the press's version of countless Trumpian controversies lately?
Take, for instance, the Kovaleski affair. According to a recent Bloomberg survey, no controversy
has proven more costly to Trump.
The episode began when, in substantiating his erstwhile widely ridiculed allegation that Arabs
in New Jersey had publicly celebrated the Twin Towers attacks, Trump unearthed a 2001 newspaper account
in which law enforcement authorities were stated to have detained "a number of people who were allegedly
seen celebrating the attacks and holding tailgate-style parties on rooftops while they watched the
devastation on the other side of the river." This seemed to settle the matter. But the report's author,
Serge Kovaleski, demurred. Trump's talk of "thousands" of Arabs, he alleged, was an exaggeration.
Trump fired back. Flailing his arms wildly in an impersonation of an embarrassed, backtracking
reporter, he implied that Kovaleski had bowed to political correctness.
So far, so normal for this election cycle. But it turned out that Kovaleski is no ordinary Trump-dissing
media liberal. He suffers from arthrogryposis, a malady in which the joints are malformed.
For Trump's critics, this was manna from heaven. Instead of merely accusing the New York real
estate magnate of exaggerating a minor, if disturbing, sideshow in U.S.-Arab relations, they could
now arraign him on the vastly more damaging charge of mocking a disabled person.
Trump pleaded that he hadn't known Kovaleski was handicapped. This was undermined, however, when
it emerged that in the 1980s the two had not only met but Kovaleski had even interviewed Trump in
Trump Tower. Trump was reduced to pleading a fading memory, something that those of us of a certain
age can sympathize with, but, of course, it didn't wash with Trump's accusers.
In responding directly to the charge of mocking a disabled person, Trump commented: "I would never
do that. Number one, I have a good heart; number two, I'm a smart person." Setting aside point one
(although to the press's chagrin, many of Trump's acquaintances have testified that a streak of considerable
private generosity underlies his tough-guy public image), it is hard to see how anyone can question
point two. Even if he really is the sort of unspeakable buffoon who might mock someone's disability,
he surely has enough political smarts to know that there is no profit in doing so in a public forum.
There has to be something else here, and, as we will see, there is. Key details have been swept
under the rug. We will get to them in a moment but first let's review the wider context. Candidate
Trump's weaknesses are well-known. He is unusually thin-skinned and can readily be lured into tilting
at windmills. His reality-television persona is sometimes remarkably abrasive. His penchant for speaking
off-the-cuff has resulted in a series of exaggerations and outright gaffes.
All that said, if he ends up losing in November, it will probably be less because of his own shortcomings
than the amazing lengths to which the press has gone in misrepresenting him – painting him by turns
weird, erratic, and downright sinister.
What is not in doubt is that if the election were to revolve around fundamental policy proposals
(what an innovation!), it would be Trump's to lose. As Patrick Buchanan has observed, "on the mega-issue,
America's desire for change, and on specific issues, Trump holds something close to a full house."
On out-of-control immigration and gratuitously counterproductive foreign military adventures,
he has seriously wrong-footed Hillary Clinton. He has moreover made remarkable progress in focusing
attention on America's trade disaster. Thanks in large measure to his plain talk, the Clintons have
finally been forced into ignominious retreat on their previous commitment to blue-sky globalism.
For more on Hillary Clinton's trade woes, click
here
.
Trump's hawkish stance not only packs wide popular appeal but, as I know from more than two
decades covering the global economy from a vantage point in Tokyo, it addresses disastrous American
policy-making misconceptions going back generations.
The standard Adam Smith/David Ricardo case for free trade, long considered holy writ in Washington,
has in the last half century become ludicrously anachronistic.
Smith based his intellectual edifice on the rather pedestrian observation that rainy England
was good at raising sheep, while sunny Portugal excelled in growing grapes. What could be more reasonable
than for England to trade its wool for Portugal's wine? But, while Smith's case is a charming insight
into eighteenth century simplicities, the fact is that climate-based agricultural endowments have
long since ceased to play a decisive role in First World trade. Today the key factor is advanced
manufacturing. By comparison, not only is agriculture a negligible force but, as I documented in
a book some years ago, even such advanced service industries as computer software are disappointing
exporters.
For nations intent on improving their manufacturing prowess (and, by extension, their standing
in the world incomes league table), a key gambit is to manipulate the global trading system. Japan
and Germany were the early leaders in intelligent mercantilism but in recent years the most consequential
exemplar has been China.
In theory China should be a great market for, for instance, the U.S. auto industry – and it
is, sort of. The Detroit companies have been told that while their American-made products are not
welcome, they can still make money in China provided only they manufacture there AND bring their
most advanced production know-how.
While such an arrangement may promise good short-term profits (nicely fattening up those notorious
executive stock options), the trade-deficit-plagued American economy is immediately deprived of badly
needed exports. Meanwhile the long-term implications are devastating. In industry after industry,
leading American corporations have been induced not only to move jobs to China but to transfer their
most advanced production technology. In many cases moreover, almost as soon as a U.S. company has
transferred its production secrets to a Chinese subsidiary, these "migrate" to rising Chinese competitors.
Precisely the sort of competitively crucial technology that in an earlier era ensured that American
workers were not only by far the world's most productive but the world's best paid have been served
up on a silver salver to America's most formidable power rival.
Corporate America's Chinese subsidiaries moreover are expected almost from the get-go to export.
In the early days they sell mainly to Africa and Southern Asia but then, as they approach state-of-the-art
quality control, they come under increasing pressure to export even to the United States – with all
that that implies for the job security of the very American workers and engineers who developed the
advanced production know-how in the first place.
Almost alone in corporate America, the Detroit companies have hitherto baulked at shipping their
Chinese-made products back to the United States but their resolve is weakening. Already General Motors
has announced that later this year it will begin selling Chinese-made Buicks in the American, European,
and Canadian markets. It is the thin end of what may prove to be a very large wedge.
Naturally all this has gone unnoticed in such reflexively anti-Trump media as the Washington
Post . (A good
account , however, is available at the pro-Trump website, Breitbart.com.)
For the mainstream press, the big nation-defining issues count as nothing compared to Trump's
personal peccadillos, real or, far too often, imagined.
This brings us back to Kovaleski. Did Trump really mean to mock a handicapped person's disability?
On any fair assessment, the answer is clearly No. As the Catholics 4 Trump website has documented,
the media have suppressed vital exonerating evidence.
The truth is that Trump's frenetic performance bore no resemblance to the rigid look of arthrogryposis
victims. Pointing out that Kovaleski conducted no on-camera interviews in the immediate wake of the
Trump performance, Catholics 4 Trump has commented:
Shouldn't the media have been chomping at the bit to get Kovaleski in front of their cameras
to embarrass Trump and prove to the world Trump was clearly mocking his disability? If the media
had a legitimate story, that is exactly what they would have done and we all know it. But the
media couldn't put Kovaleski in front of a camera or they'd have no story…..But, if they showed
video of Trump labeled "Trump Mocks Disabled Reporter," then put up a still shot of Kovaleski,
they knew you, the viewer, would assume Kovaleski's disability must make his arms move without
control.
According to Catholics 4 Trump, in the same speech in which he presented his Kovaleski cameo,
Trump acted out similar histrionics to portray a flustered U.S. general. Meanwhile, on another occasion,
he used the same wildly flapping hand motions to lampoon Ted Cruz's rationalizations on waterboarding.
Thus as neither the flustered general nor Ted Cruz are known to be physically handicapped, we have
little reason to assume that Trump's Kovaleski routine represented anything other than an admittedly
eccentric portrayal of someone prevaricating under political pressure.
Perhaps the ultimate smoking gun in all this is the behavior of the Washington Post .
On August 10, it published a particularly one-sided account by Callum Borchers. When someone used
the reader comments section to reference the alternative Catholics 4 Trump explanation, the links
were deleted almost immediately. As Catholics 4 Trump pointed out, the Post 's hidden agenda
suddenly stood revealed for all to see:
This demonstrates that the Washington Post is aware of evidence existing that contradicts
their conclusions, and that they are willfully attempting to conceal it from their readers. If
Borchers and WaPo were honest and truly wanted to report ALL of the evidence for and against and
let the readers decide, they would have to include the video of Kovaleski and the video of Trump
impersonating a flustered General and a flustered Cruz. Any objective report would include both
evidence for and against a certain interpretation of the Trump video.
What are we to make of the various other press controversies that have increasingly dogged the
Trumpmobile? For the most part, not much.
One recurring controversy concerns how rich Trump really is. The suggestion is that his net worth
is way short of the $10 billion he claims.
He has come in for particular flak from the author Timothy O'Brien, who a decade ago pronounced
him worth "$250 million tops." Although O'Brien continues to pop up regularly in places like the
Washington Post and Bloomberg, his methodology has been faulted by Forbes magazine,
which, of course, has long been the ultimate authority in such matters.
What can be said for sure is that even the best informed and most impartial calculation can only
be tentative. The fact is that the Trump business is private and thus not subject to daily stock
market assessment.
There is moreover a special complication almost unique to the Trump business - the value of his
brand. In Trump's own mind, he seems to think of himself as a latter-day Cesar Ritz – albeit he projects
less an image of five-star discretion as high-rolling hedonism. That the brand is a considerable
asset, however, is obvious from the fact that he franchises it to, among others, independent real-estate
developers. That said, it is an intangible whose value moves up and down in the same elevator as
The Donald's personal standing in global esteem.
All that said, in a major assessment last year, Forbes editor Randall Lane put Trump's
net worth at $4.5 billion. Although that is way short of Trump's own estimate, it still bespeaks
world class business acumen.
Another controversy concerns the country of origin of Trump campaign paraphernalia. After he disclosed
that his ties were made in China, his criticism of America's huge bilateral trade deficit with China
was denounced as hypocrisy.
Again there is less here than meets the eye. It is surely not unprincipled for someone to argue
for laws to be changed even while in the meantime he or she continues to benefit from the status
quo.
Warren Buffett, for instance, has often suggested that tax rates should be raised for plutocrats
like himself. In the meantime, however, he continues to pay lower rates than many of his junior staff
and nobody calls him a hypocrite. By the same token, many Ivy League-educated journalists privately
criticize the legacy system under which their children and the children of other graduates of top
universities enjoy preferential treatment in admissions. Few if any such parents, however, would
stand in the way of their own children cashing in on the system. Should they?
Perhaps Trump's most egregious experience of press misrepresentation was sparked when he archly
urged Russia to hack into Clinton's personal server to discover her missing emails. "Russia, if you're
listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing," he said. "I think you
will probably be rewarded mightily by our press!"
This was sarcasm laid on with a trowel but the press, of course, wasn't buying it. Yet it is not
as if sarcasm is new to American politics. No less a figure than Abraham Lincoln had a famously sarcastic
tongue and the press laughed along with him. When someone complained of Ulysses Grant's drinking,
for instance, Lincoln rushed to the defense of the Union's most successful general. "Can you tell
me where he gets his whiskey," Lincoln asked. "Because, if I can only find out, I will send a barrel
of this wonderful whiskey to every general in the army."
Then there was Harry Truman, the man who declared himself in search of a one-handed economist.
When he was not making fun of dismal scientists, he found plenty of other opportunities for caustic
wit. After he was presented with the Chicago Tribune 's front page saying "Dewey Defeats
Truman," for instance, he commented: "I knew I should have campaigned harder!"
As for Trump, his wit is clearly a major draw with the ordinary voters who flock to his meetings.
Yet little of it is ever recycled in the press. In the case of the Russia hacking joke indeed, many
commentators were so humorless as to mutter darkly about a threat to national security. At Slate,
Osita Nwanevu interviewed a lawyer to see what could be done to arraign Trump on treason charges.
(The answer was nothing.) Meanwhile at Politico, Nahal Toosi and Seung Min Kim reported that Trump's
crack had "shocked, flabbergasted, and appalled lawmakers and national security experts across the
political spectrum." They quoted Philip Reiner, a former national security official in the Obama
administration, describing Trump as a "scumbag animal." Reiner went on to comment: "Hacking email
is a criminal activity. And he's asked a foreign government – a murderous, repressive regime – to
attack not just one of our citizens but the Democratic presidential candidate? Of course it's a national
security threat."
Countless other examples could be cited of how the press has piled on in ways that clearly make
a mockery of claims to fairness. All this is not to suggest that Trump hasn't made many unforced
errors. His handling of the Khizr Khan affair in particular played right into the press's agenda.
As Khan had lost a son in Iraq, his taunts should have been ignored. By challenging Khan, Trump was
charging the cape, not the matador. The matador, of course, was Hillary, and she was actually highly
exposed. Trump, after all, could have simply confined his riposte to the fact that but for her vote,
and the votes of other Senators, the United States would never have entered Iraq, and Khan's unfortunate
son would still be alive.
Where does Trump go from here? Although it is probably too late to get the press to fall into
line in observing traditional standards of fairness, Trump can make it harder for the press to deliver
cheap shots.
He needs to stake out the high ground and get a serious policy discussion going. The debates should
help but the first one is still more than a month away. In the meantime one strategy would be to
compile detailed, authoritative reports on trade, immigration, and other key issues. While such reports
would not reach everyone, in these days of the internet they would find a useful readership among
an influential, if no doubt relatively small, cadre of thoughtful constituents. They could thus work
indirectly but powerfully to change the tone of the campaign. Certainly such an initiative would
be hard for the mainstream press simply to ignore – and even harder completely to misrepresent.
Eamonn Fingleton is the author of In the Jaws of the Dragon: America's Fate in the Coming
Era of Chinese Hegemony . He interviewed Trump for Forbes magazine in 1982.
"... Donald Trump once denounced his Republican primary opponents as being "totally in cahoots" with the unlimited-money super PACs supporting their campaigns. But that was then, and this is now. This week, Trump announced he hired the man whose activism literally led to the creation of super PACs , and whose most recent gig was leading a pro-Trump super PAC. ..."
Donald Trump once denounced his Republican primary opponents as being "totally in cahoots" with
the unlimited-money super PACs supporting their campaigns. But that was then, and this is now. This
week, Trump announced he hired
the man whose activism literally led to the creation of super PACs , and whose most recent gig
was leading a pro-Trump super PAC.
That man is David Bossie. The longtime head of the conservative nonprofit Citizens United is now
Trump's deputy campaign manager. Yes, that Citizens United.
The conservative nonprofit group filed a lawsuit in 2007 against the Federal Election Commission.
The case eventually snowballed into a 2010 Supreme Court decision that legalized unlimited corporate
and union spending in elections, so long as it remained independent from candidates and political
parties. A subsequent lower court decision based entirely on the Citizens United ruling opened the
door to unlimited giving by wealthy individuals and, in turn, the FEC created super PACs to allow
for this money to flow.
Trump was once the candidate who denounced big money and declared his independence from donor
influence through his self-financing. Now, he's schmoozing with big donors and asking for their advice
as he prods them for money, while employing supporters of further campaign finance deregulation.
"It does paint Donald Trump's campaign as not being friendly to campaign finance reform," said
Craig Holman, a government affairs lobbyist for the pro-campaign finance reform group Public Citizen.
That may be of little surprise, considering the Republican Party platform calls for the elimination
of all campaign contribution limits
"Commentary: Who is hacking U.S. election databases and why are they so difficult to identify?"
[
Reuters ]. "This summer has been rife with news of election-related hacking. Last month it was
the Democratic National Committee; this week, voter election databases in Illinois and Arizona…
The
FBI has said that government-affiliated Russian hackers are responsible for both intrusions. Yet
the hackers' motivation is unclear. We don't know whether the hackers were engaging in espionage,
attempting to manipulate the election, or just harvesting low-hanging cyber-fruit for their own financial
gain." Well, the FBI is totes apolitical, so that settles that. There are brave Russkis out there.
Let's go kill them!
So much for keeping the military out of politics:
In a joint statement, two Four Star Generals, Bob Sennewald and David Maddox are endorsing
Hillary Clinton for President. Sennewald is the former Commanding General, U.S. Army Forces Command,
and Maddox was formerly Commander in Chief, U.S. Army- Europe. Clinton spoke at the American Legion
on Wednesday:
"Having each served over 34 years and retired as an Army 4- star general, we each have worked
closely with America's strongest allies, both in NATO and throughout Asia. Our votes have always
been private, and neither of us has ever previously lent his name or voice to a presidential candidate.
Having studied what is at stake for this country and the alternatives we have now, we see only
one viable leader, and will be voting this November for Secretary Hillary Clinton."
That means that Justin Cooper has full access to all Hillary email information, which is illegal.
Notable quotes:
"... Longtime Bill Clinton aide Justin Cooper, who helped set up the private email account that Hillary Clinton used as secretary of state, was the person "usually responsible" for setting up her new devices and syncing them to the server. ..."
"... another person whose name is redacted, also helped Clinton set up her BlackBerry. ..."
Longtime Bill Clinton aide Justin Cooper, who helped set up the private email account that Hillary
Clinton used as secretary of state, was the person "usually responsible" for setting up her new devices
and syncing them to the server.Top aides Huma Abedin and Monica Hanley, as well as
another person
whose name is redacted, also helped Clinton set up her BlackBerry.
According to Abedin and Hanley, Clinton's old devices would often disappear to parts "unknown
once she transitioned to a new device."
Cooper, according to the report, "did recall two instances where he destroyed Clinton's old mobile
devices by breaking them in half or hitting them with a hammer."
The FBI said it uncovered multiple instances
of phishing or spear-phishing emails sent to Clinton's account, including one
that appeared to be sent from another State official's account. Clinton
responded to the email by trying to confirm that the person actually sent it,
adding, "I was worried about opening it!"
But in another incident, the FBI noted that Abedin emailed someone (whose
name is redacted) conveying Clinton's concern that "someone [was] hacking into
her email" after receiving an email from a "known [redacted] associate
containing a link to a website with pornographic material."
"There is no additional information as to why Clinton was concerned about
someone hacking into her e-mail account, or if the specific link referenced by
Abedin was used as a vector to infect Clinton's device," the FBI's report
states, and after roughly two lines of redacted text goes on to note that "open
source information indicated, if opened, the targeted user's device may have
been infected, and information would have been sent to at least three computers
overseas, including one in Russia."
The former secretary of state's email server was in fact a series of three servers used over a
period of time from approximately 2007 to 2015, beginning with an Apple server installed by a
former aide to her husband.
That server was replaced in 2009 with a server installed by a former
IT specialist for Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign, which was then supplanted in 2013 by a
server installed by a vendor, Denver-based Platte River Networks.
That server, housed in a data
center in New Jersey, was voluntarily handed over to the FBI in 2015.
The report said there was "no additional information" about the email or more about why Clinton was
concerned about the hack, or whether the link Abedin referred to in her email was "used as a vector
to infect Clinton's device."
Following roughly two lines of redacted text, the report states, "Open
source information indicated, if opened, the targeted user's device may have been infected, and information
would have been sent to at least three computers overseas, including one in Russia."
In its investigation, the FBI turned up 13 total mobile devices connected to two different phone
numbers that had potentially been used to send emails from Clinton's personal account, including
eight email-capable BlackBerrys that she used during her tenure as secretary of state. Lawyers for
Clinton said in late February of 2016 that they were unable to find any of the 13 devices identified
by the bureau.
The FBI also identified five iPads "associated with Clinton" that were potentially used to send
emails from Clinton's private system. The bureau managed to obtain three of those iPads, none of
which contained any potentially classified information.
As she transitioned between mobile devices, two people interviewed by the FBI said the whereabouts
of Clinton's previous devices would "frequently become unknown." One aide to former President Bill
Clinton who also helped the family set up the initial personal email server in their Chappaqua, New
York, home said that on two occasions he "destroyed Clinton's old mobile devices by breaking them
in half or hitting them with a hammer."
"... The unnamed staffer deleted the files after remembering an earlier request from longtime Clinton aide Cheryl Mills that changed "email retention policies" for Clinton's server. ..."
But weeks after the Times published its story, the FBI's investigation found that an individual,
whose name was redacted, used an online program called BleachBit to delete a file on the server containing
Clinton's emails.
The unnamed staffer deleted the files after remembering an earlier request from
longtime Clinton aide Cheryl Mills that changed "email retention policies" for Clinton's server.
Speaking to the FBI on May 3, 2016, "[redacted] indicated he believed he had an 'oh shit'
moment and sometime between March 25-31, 2015 deleted the Clinton archive mailbox from the PRN
server and used BleachBit to delete the exported .PST files he had created on the server
system containing Clinton's e-mails."
"... Hillary Clinton lost several mobile telephones carrying e-mails from her private server during her time in office ..."
"... "[Huma] Abedin and [former Clinton aide Monica] Hanley indicated the whereabouts of Clinton's [mobile] devices would frequently become unknown once she transitioned to a new device," one report indicates. ..."
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lost several mobile telephones carrying e-mails from
her private server during her time in office, according to newly-released FBI documents on the investigation
into her mishandling of classified information.
"[Huma] Abedin and [former Clinton aide Monica] Hanley indicated the whereabouts of Clinton's
[mobile] devices would frequently become unknown once she transitioned to a new device," one report
indicates.
On other occasions, a staffer would destroy Clinton's old mobile phones "by breaking them in half
or hitting them with a hammer," the FBI documents reveal.
Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) won her primary Tuesday, a positive development for the
congresswoman after a tumultuous past few months.
Wasserman Schultz beat progressive law professor Tim Canova, who
drew on the same anti-corporate momentum that fueled the presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie
Sanders (I-Vt.), earning him national attention and
significant contributions from Sanders supporters. The political novice was even
raising more money than Wasserman Schultz during the campaign.
With
98 percent of the votes counted, Wasserman Schultz had 57 percent, to Canova's 43 percent, according
to The Associated Press.
Not that long ago, even talking about a possible Wasserman Schultz defeat would have been outlandish.
She ran the Democratic National Committee, held a
safe blue seat and had never had a competitive primary.
But
furor at Wasserman Schultz grew during the presidential primary as many progressives criticized
her for seeming to tip the scales in favor of Hillary Clinton, and lingering frustrations over her
management of the party spilled into the open. Canova campaigned against her as the "quintessential
corporate machine politician." In March, President Barack Obama
endorsed Wasserman Schultz, an early indication that the congresswoman needed some help in retaining
her seat.
Wasserman Schultz
resigned as DNC chair on the eve of the convention last month as Sanders supporters gathered
in Philadelphia
took to the streets and protested her. The catalyst was
a leak of DNC staffers' emails that seemed to show the party working to help get Clinton elected
― even though it was supposed to be neutral in the primary. The congresswoman wanted to keep her
speaking spot at the convention, but ultimately, she was
forced to give that up as well.
Wasserman Schultz also faced
outrage from progressives for co-sponsoring legislation to
gut new rules put forward by the Obama administration intended to rein in predatory payday lending.
The activist group Allied Progressive
released an ad in Florida, hitting the DNC chair for teaming up with Republicans to defeat the
policy.
For Sanders supporters, the race became a fight against corporate interests and a way to eke out
a victory after the senator's loss in the Democratic presidential primary.
Yet despite this dissatisfaction, Canova's candidacy lagged. Sanders sent out
fundraising emails on his behalf, but he never went to Florida and campaigned in person.
"There are a lot of people who
feel disappointed," Canova told The Atlantic. "There are a lot of people in South Florida who
wanted Bernie Sanders to come down."
Clinton, meanwhile,
paid a surprise visit to a Wasserman Schultz field office and praised the congresswoman when
she was in Miami last month. She also
won the district against Sanders by a landslide.
Being tied to Sanders could also have been a double-edged sword, as Canova told NBC News.
"Bernie ran
a lousy campaign in Florida," he said. "Bernie had his problems with certain constituencies that
I don't have problems with."
The 23rd district is heavily Democratic, and Wasserman Schultz is expected to win in November.
There is a simpler explanation: Trump is hated and constantly vilified by neoliberal
MSM because he threatens neoliberal establishment and imperial bureaucracy. Especially
neocons. That's why they changed party affiliation and will vote for Hillary. They
have found a new friend.
Notable quotes:
"... he is often mocked for having small hands and goofy orange hair; he eats
profane food like McDonald's; ..."
"... But Trump is a monster! Yes, but given the right circumstance, so are you.
His ugliness is simply more apparent than that of other managers of the state's
sacred violence. ..."
"... Think his call to deport illegally undocumented workers is fascist? The
Obama administration, garbed as it is with the shimmering rhetoric of victimhood,
has already deported over 2,500,000 human beings-23 percent more than Bush. ..."
"... How about his pledge to torture suspected terrorists? Clinton-Bush-Obama
beat him to it. They just don't talk about it like he does. And let's not limit
it to foreigners; Obama didn't bat an eye as elderly tax protester Irwin Schiff
died of cancer chained to a prison bed far away from his family for breaking the
sacred taboo against being too stingy in sharing his resources with the collective.
..."
"... How about the time Trump promised to target terrorists' families? Obama,
the great defender of Islam, already trumped that when he murdered people like U.S.
citizen Anwar al-Awlaki's 16-year-old son Abdulrahman, who hadn't seen his father
for two years. This teen and his friends were blown apart by the Nobel prize winner
while having a campfire dinner, apparently for the sinful dreams of his father.
..."
"... From Buzzfeed to Vanity Fair , CNN, the New York Times , broadcast networks,
Wall Street, Fortune 500 companies, academia, Hollywood, music stars, Silicon valley,
and NPR, to both party establishments, everyone's united in this orgy of outrage.
It's almost like the scapegoat purgings of yesteryear, but again, because of the
cross of Christ scrambling people's tribal unity, there is always a counter-factional
push-back. ..."
"... Still, scapegoating partially unifies. Just why is it that old enemies
like Romney, the DNC, and the media unite to expose Trump's shady timeshare-like
university gimmick but offer deafening crickets for Hillary's use of the Haiti earthquake
to secure an exclusive gold-mining contract for her brother? Trump's shamelessness
reveals the banality of the establishment's passe violence. ..."
"... The thing that drives this outrage mob mad is the mirror Trump's vulgar
speech holds up to the state's violence-based unity. ..."
"... In the popular imagination inspired by the mainstream media, Trump is a
wolf whose fangs will bring violent chaos from which the lamb herd must unite to
protect us. ..."
"... But peel off the wool skins and you'll see the [neoliberal] herd is itself
a wolf pack that wants to eat you too. Just in a way that gets them crooned about
on late-night comedy and earns them Nobel prizes while they quietly blow up kids.
..."
"... When Trump says the U.S. should have taken the oil in Iraq, he gets universal
sneers from the established imperial class the way a drunken wingman is eliminated
from the bar for loudly telling his friend to close the deal and "nail" the girl
he's chatting up. ..."
Reading René Girard helped me understand why so many hate the Donald.
•
Donald Trump is the scapegoat supreme of our time.
Don't kill the messenger. See, to have a scapegoat is to not know you have
one. It is to unite in common cause with other actors in your community to purge
a common monster to preserve peace and order. Trump, more than any other figure
in our present culture, fits that bill. (Yes, Trump and his supporters scapegoat
other groups as well.)
Having dedicated his life to the study of scapegoating as the origin of culture,
the late anthropologist René Girard is someone who should join every conservative's
pantheon. He argues that human beings unconsciously stumbled upon a circuit
breaker that kept violence from virally overwhelming our ancient communities:
the common identification and expulsion of a common enemy. The catharsis and
solidarity scapegoating provides led early people to mythologize their victims
into gods.
.... ... ...
Trump even viscerally looks the part of the old scapegoat kings who would
be ceremonially paraded before being sacrificed: he is often mocked for
having small hands and goofy orange hair; he eats profane food like McDonald's;
he loves gaudy decoration in an age of "shabby chic"; he calls himself a winner
in a culture where people must offer faux humility to gain status. Trump, who
has repeatedly said that were he not her father he would be dating his daughter,
is even accused of breaking the age-old taboo against incestual lust.
... ... ...
But Trump is a monster! Yes, but given the right circumstance, so are
you. His ugliness is simply more apparent than that of other managers of the
state's sacred violence. Let's be frank here: though his speech is scarily
vulgar, the violence he promises is already occurring.
Think his call to deport illegally undocumented workers is fascist? The
Obama administration, garbed as it is with the shimmering rhetoric of victimhood,
has already deported over 2,500,000 human beings-23 percent more than Bush.
How about his pledge to torture suspected terrorists? Clinton-Bush-Obama
beat him to it. They just don't talk about it like he does. And let's not limit
it to foreigners; Obama didn't bat an eye as elderly tax protester Irwin Schiff
died of cancer chained to a prison bed far away from his family for breaking
the sacred taboo against being too stingy in sharing his resources with the
collective.
How about the time Trump promised to target terrorists' families? Obama,
the great defender of Islam, already trumped that when he murdered people like
U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki's 16-year-old son Abdulrahman, who hadn't seen
his father for two years. This teen and his friends were blown apart by the
Nobel prize winner while having a campfire dinner, apparently for the sinful
dreams of his father.
Let's not pretend it is avant-garde to vilify Trump. Everyone's doing it,
especially the cool people, the ones, like us, preoccupied with social status
but hiding it in speech always patronizingly preening about victims. From
Buzzfeed to Vanity Fair, CNN, the New York Times, broadcast
networks, Wall Street, Fortune 500 companies, academia, Hollywood, music stars,
Silicon valley, and NPR, to both party establishments, everyone's united in
this orgy of outrage. It's almost like the scapegoat purgings of yesteryear,
but again, because of the cross of Christ scrambling people's tribal unity,
there is always a counter-factional push-back.
Still, scapegoating partially unifies. Just why is it that old enemies
like Romney, the DNC, and the media unite to expose Trump's shady timeshare-like
university gimmick but offer deafening crickets for Hillary's use of the Haiti
earthquake to secure an exclusive gold-mining contract for her brother? Trump's
shamelessness reveals the banality of the establishment's passe violence.
The thing that drives this outrage mob mad is the mirror Trump's vulgar
speech holds up to the state's violence-based unity. The one thing the
crowd can't stand is a scapegoat's refusal to apologize for its sins. Look at
how the old victors of history wrote of their witch hunts, with the victims
admitting guilt.
In the popular imagination inspired by the mainstream media, Trump is
a wolf whose fangs will bring violent chaos from which the lamb herd must unite
to protect us. He just needs to flinch and admit he's a wolf! But peel
off the wool skins and you'll see the [neoliberal] herd is itself a wolf pack
that wants to eat you too. Just in a way that gets them
crooned
about on late-night comedy and earns them Nobel prizes while they quietly
blow up kids. Trump refuses to apologize for his rhetoric, and so there
is no blood for the wolves to complete their feast.
I'm not saying he hasn't promised to make grave violence. But look who writes
history: the winning crowd. In the pagan world, Oedipus was cast as the scapegoat
who accepts all guilt for his community's woes. Yet behind the mythic veil,
it takes two to tango in the deadly dance of violent rivalry. Today's myth is
being written by people who use victimism to hide the continuance of sacred
violence. Watch out for the false catharsis they're trying to create in purging
Trump. It will not satisfy.
When Trump says the U.S. should have taken the oil in Iraq, he gets universal
sneers from the established imperial class the way a drunken wingman is eliminated
from the bar for loudly telling his friend to close the deal and "nail" the
girl he's chatting up.
... ... ...
David Gornoski is your
neighbor-as
well as an entrepreneur, speaker and writer. He recently launched a project
called A Neighbor's Choice, which seeks to introduce Jesus' culture of nonviolence
to both Christians and the broader public. A Florida promoter of local agriculture,
he also writes for WND.com, FEE.org, AffluentInvestor.com, and AltarandThrone.com.
TPP: "'It's very challenging to get people
to commit the political capital to move forward when the doubts are so
significant about what the United States will do," [Eric Altbach, a senior
vice president at the Albright Stonebridge Group] said" [
Politico
].
"Organizations including the Communications Workers of America, CREDO
Action, Democracy for America and several others sent a letter to Clinton on
Thursday asking her to make a 'clear, public and unequivocal statement'
opposing any vote on TPP" [
Politico
].
It will be interesting to parse Clinton's next statement, if any. (Remember
that Clinton's 10% base is cosmopolitan, and supports trade. She won't be
punished for remaining "equivocal.")
James Carville: "Whatever weaknesses Clinton has, Trump constantly covers
them up" [
Vanity
Fair
]. Hmm. I'd love to see a timeline that combines Clinton corruption
eruptions and Trump gaffes, if anybody knows of one. Although creating a
timeline like that would be an awful lot of work.
Ready4Hillary
: Think of it this way. If you asked someone,
"Would you like to climb into an old scow full of garbage?" most people
would say "No." But if you say, "Would you like to be saved at any cost
from the apocalyptic flood that is rising to destroy your city?" most
people would say "Yes." The trick is to focus on the second thing and not
be too specific about the first thing. OK?
Hillary
: am I the garbage scow in that analogy?
Ready4Hillary
: the point is, less is more. OK?
"Clinton's advisers tell her to prep for a landslide" [
Politico
].
"Revealing a level of confidence Clinton's inner circle has been eager to
squash for weeks, outside advisers have now identified victories in
Pennsylvania and New Hampshire as the path of least resistance, delivering
for the Democratic nominee more than the 270 electoral votes needed to take
the White House. And they are projecting increased confidence about her
chances in Republican-leaning North Carolina, a state that could prove as
critical as Ohio or Pennsylvania." I'd add a few grains of salt to this:
First, Clinton is notoriously surrounded by sycophants. Second, I think this
is messaging, and not reporting: The Clinton campaign wants early voters to
go with a winner. Third, a massive electoral win doesn't necessarily
translate to a popular vote landslide. Hence, an electoral landslide
combined with a much closer popular vote will do nothing to help Clinton in
a coming legitimacy crisis (and could even exacerbate it).
"There's almost no chance our elections can get hacked by the Russians.
Here's why" [
WaPo
].
War Drums
Putin on 2016: "All this should be more dignified" [
Bloomberg
].
Gotchyer
casus belli
right here…
Realignment
"So you think you can take over the Democrat Party?" [
South
Lawn
]. Cogent points. On the other hand, what's sauce for the sheepdog
is sauce for a century-long record of third-party #FAIL. Past results are no
guarantee of future performance.
"Downballot Republicans and top GOP leaders are dumping Trump" [
NBC
].
"[Y]esterday came this campaign video from John McCain, who's engaged in a
tough re-election fight: "If Hillary Clinton is elected, Arizona will need a
senator who will act as a check," he said, all but admitting that Trump is
unlikely to win in November. And McCain won't be the last GOPer making this
'check on Hillary' argument.
"Kissinger, George Schultz mull Clinton endorsement" [
The
Hill
]. Can't we just be open about this and set up a war criminals PAC?
Clinton's 2009 ethics agreement: "I currently hold and will continue
to hold my position with The Clinton Family Foundation, which maintains
all its assets in cash. If confirmed as Secretary of State, I will not participate
personally and substantially in any particular matter that has a direct
and predictable effect upon this foundation, unless I first obtain a written
waiver or qualify for a regulatory exemption" (pdf) [
Cryptome ]. First, "will not participate" sets a much higher bar than
the ludicrously low "quid pro quo" standard set by Clinton's operatives
and supporters. Second, is it really usual for charitable foundation to
keep "all its assets in cash"? Why would Foundation do that? And why even
say it does? (I'm resisting a joke about "maintains all its assets in Bitcoin"….)
"On the campaign trail, Hillary Clinton is a big critic of for-profit
universities, attacking them for charging high prices but offering students
little support and delivering degrees of questionable value. Her administration,
she says, would crack down 'on for-profit colleges and loan servicers who
have too often taken advantage of borrowers'" [
USA Today ]. "What Clinton doesn't mention are her close family connections
to for-profit Laureate Education and the hefty $9.8 billion in loans accumulated
just by students at Laureate's Walden University in Minnesota… If Clinton
wonders why so many voters consider her to be graspy and question her trustworthiness,
she need look no further than the tangled, lucrative ties among Laureate,
its owners, the Clinton family and the Clinton Foundation." Graspy.
"Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has run an unusually cheap
campaign in part by not paying at least 10 top staffers, consultants and
advisers, some of whom are no longer with the campaign, according to a
review of federal campaign finance filings" [
Reuters
].
"[N]ot compensating top people in a presidential campaign is a departure
from campaign finance norms." Hirohito Award candidate, there.
"Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign raised an eye-popping $143
million in August for her candidacy and the Democratic Party, the best
showing of her campaign, her team said Thursday" [
Agence
France Presse
]. Ka-ching. And not doubling down. Squaring down.
When reviewing an email from October of 2012, for example, Clinton said that
while she did not recall the message specifically, she described an individual
involved with the communication as "someone who was well acquainted with
handling classified information" and "described him as someone she held in high
regard."
She said she "relied on" the individual, whose name is redacted in
the FBI notes, and she had "no concern over his judgement and ability to handle
classified information."
"... In addition, Clinton said she did not remember a State email going out in late June 2011 informing employees of the importance of securing their personal email accounts in correlation with the upgrading of her clintonemail.com server. ..."
Clinton "did recall the frustration over State's information technology systems," the FBI said in
its notes from the interview.
In addition, Clinton said she did not remember a State email
going out in late June 2011 informing employees of the importance of securing their personal email
accounts in correlation with the upgrading of her clintonemail.com server.
Clinton said she did not consider switching over to a State.gov account, as she, according to
the report, "understood the email system used by her husband's personal staff had an excellent track
record with respect to security and had never been breached."
Any reasonable investigator would instantly understand that she is trying to sell him the
Brooklyn bridge. In no way with her career she can be unaware of such things.
Clinton told the FBI that she did not know what the
"(C)" portion markings on an email chain signified, explaining that she thought
it meant the paragraphs were marked in alphabetical order.
As far as her knowledge of the various classification levels of U.S.
government information, Clinton responded that she took all classified material
seriously regardless of the "level," be it "TOP SECRET," "SECRET" or
"CONFIDENTIAL."
"... Clinton "had no knowledge of the reasons for selecting it to install it in the basement" of her Chappaqua, New York, home. ..."
"... Clinton also denied using the server to avoid the Federal Records Act, and did not have any conversations about using the server to avoid the Freedom of Information Act, according to the FBI's investigation notes. ..."
Clinton was not part of the decision to move from the Apple server managed by Cooper to a [windows]
server built by Bryan Pagliano, according to the report, which stated that Clinton "had no knowledge
of the reasons for selecting it to install it in the basement" of her Chappaqua, New York, home.
Clinton also denied using the server to avoid the Federal Records Act, and did not have
any conversations about using the server to avoid the Freedom of Information Act, according to
the FBI's investigation notes.
NYT comments are just overflowing from neoliberal supported of this neocon warmonger Hillary.
Amazing !!!
Notable quotes:
"... The fact that Hillary or any senior elected official can operate outside of a secure system without automated detection/correction is the real issue here. I expect many more govt' officials are doing the same, but in a less politically charged atmosphere. No investigations in their cases as there is no trophy at the end. ..."
"... So who is minding the computer farm? Government computer systems/policies need to be reviewed, training reinforced, and automatic incident tracking of activity to and from undocumented server IP addresses. Automated systems should prevent government officials through their lack of knowledge from using systems that do not comply. ..."
"... There is something fishy about her desire to maintain a private email server at her home at the same time she is working as a public official in the role of secretary of state. There is also the perceived conflict of interest between this role as the nation's top diplomat and her connection with the Clinton foundation. ..."
"... If she exchanged favors for contributions to the foundation, which many suspect she did, the smoking guns have probably been deleted by now. She was given plenty of time to sort through her emails to cover her tracks before turning them over to investigators. ..."
"... Her evasiveness and attempt to avoid FOIA requests have certainly earned her the nickname crooked Hillary. ..."
"... The fact that so many people support Clinton, in the face of her egregious and arguably criminal behavior, speaks to the fact that a large number of people vote strictly party line. ..."
"... The bottom line is that we are a very partisan nation whose voters support their candidate no matter how flawed is that person. ..."
"... IF HRC played by the rules like everyone must, and simply used the State Department email, all of this could have been avoided. Yet she refused to use her State email even though it was offered to her. ..."
"... ultimately, this shows the incompetence of the IT people in the government agencies handling her communications. ..."
"... Hillary Clinton is ultimately responsible for making sure her classified communications are secure, and she should have been asking people questions to make sure this was the case. I am a Democrat but I have grave misgivings regarding her judgement and handling of this matter. ..."
"... The most important finding is that the federal government is woefully incompetent in designing, implementing, and maintaining large information systems. ..."
"... These are plainly false statements to the FBI, and so crimes. She did not do it "out of convenience" but to avoid public records act, and to get more privacy. Huma admitted that much, as have others. She got repeated warnings. We've heard that from those who warned her, who were told not to say it again. "I don't recall" any of them is just not credible. She is supposed to recall being warned. ..."
"... She did not think those things were classified? She's Sec of State. She knows which subjects are classified, and many of those were. She knew that. She got the most classified stuff there is, because she was Sec of State. ..."
"... The biggest concern of all is that she did this in deliberate defiance of the requirements of law, the public records requirements, for the express purpose of violating that law. The FBI just decided that it was not investigating THAT law, and so ignored it. Yet those are felonies, not just little things. ..."
"... I am not concerned by Hillary's emails. I am very upset by the refusal of the media and politicians to address the real issues of our classification system. We have known since at least the Pentagon Papers, and probably earlier, that the purpose of classifying information is to keep it from the American people more than from our adversaries. ..."
"... "But Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, which has used the email issue as one of its main weapons against Mrs. Clinton, called the documents "a devastating indictment of her judgment, honesty and basic competency." ..."
"... Clinton apparently didn't know an email server from a jar of mayonnaise. I can understand that -- not sure I would either. ..."
"... But if I were starting out on a 4-year stint as US Secretary of State, it would occur to me that I'd probably send or receive a sensitive email or two somewhere along the way, and I'd wonder whether sending and receiving those emails over a private server located in my home might be a good idea. ..."
"... Lame very lame Hillary excuses . But the problem comes from both sides Democrat or Republican and there lame excuses . From the deficit from the Trickle down economy , deregulation to Trade-deal and the lost of jobs . Tax cut to tax inversion .. If we want change , Then why are voter still voting in Incumbents . The ones that made the problems we have . Shame us who do.. Vote the incumbents out of office .. ..."
"... With over 75% of the country stating Hillary cannot be trusted, it's important to also consider the severe lack of accountability and level of arrogance displayed. If she's willing to take the lowest road possible, voting her into office will be a huge mistake. ..."
"... You gotta be kidding me. All we get each day, all day is more breathless Trump 'News'. On the front page no less. Each smirk and foible is covered ad nauseum as if it were actually new worthy. You rarely hear about the other candidate. No policy comparisons for pete's sake. Until today. ..."
Among the other key findings in the F.B.I. documents:
■ Mrs. Clinton regarded emails containing classified discussions about planned drone strikes as
"routine."
■ She said she was either unaware of or misunderstood some classification procedures.
■ Colin L. Powell, a former secretary of state, had advised her to "be very careful" in how she
used email.
Scot, Seattle 7 hours ago
Until I hear crowds chanting "lock him up" in relation to George Bush or Dick Cheney and
the Iraq war, I'm going to have a hard time taking this gross witch hunt seriously. The
contrast between Clinton's email administration screw-up and the unbroken daisy-chain of
once-in-a-century global catastrophes committed by the Bush administration is so huge as to be
hard to grasp.
Paul, Canada 6 hours ago
Sorry folks, but time to point out what has been missed by everyone as they attempt to make
this a political election issue.
There is no way Hillary or any elected official should be given the opportunity to use a
private email server. Any technology org worth its salt will have its systems and computer
usage policies locked down tight.
Any action by a user that falls outside these policies must be automatically detected and
investigated by the systems teams. Wrongs identified, computer users advised on proper usage,
and corrective action taken to prevent reoccurrence.
The fact that Hillary or any senior elected official can operate outside of a secure
system without automated detection/correction is the real issue here. I expect many more govt'
officials are doing the same, but in a less politically charged atmosphere. No investigations
in their cases as there is no trophy at the end.
So who is minding the computer farm? Government computer systems/policies need to be
reviewed, training reinforced, and automatic incident tracking of activity to and from
undocumented server IP addresses. Automated systems should prevent government officials
through their lack of knowledge from using systems that do not comply.
Hillary nor other officials are computer experts. They should not be expected to be
responsible for this. I would say there is a greater risk in how these systems are being
currently managed.
Peter, New York 6 hours ago
Sadly this supports the Donald's charge about Hillary's questionable judgment. There is
something fishy about her desire to maintain a private email server at her home at the same
time she is working as a public official in the role of secretary of state. There is also the
perceived conflict of interest between this role as the nation's top diplomat and her
connection with the Clinton foundation.
If she exchanged favors for contributions to the foundation, which many suspect she
did, the smoking guns have probably been deleted by now. She was given plenty of time to sort
through her emails to cover her tracks before turning them over to investigators.
Her evasiveness and attempt to avoid FOIA requests have certainly earned her the
nickname crooked Hillary. Even if you don't like Trump, it is very difficult to make the
case that Clinton is a better alternative.
Lois Brenneman, New Milford, PA 3 hours ago
The fact that so many people support Clinton, in the face of her egregious and arguably
criminal behavior, speaks to the fact that a large number of people vote strictly party line.
In their view, no matter what Clinton has done, she is still better than having a
Republican in the White House and, most esp, better than Donald Trump. I am hardly one who can
complain, however, as I basically do the same thing. I'd probably vote for my dog before I
would a Democrat even if it means voting for a flawed candidate. I find Clinton to be the very
pits of all possible candidates, much like the Dems view of Trump.
The bottom line is that we are a very partisan nation whose voters support their
candidate no matter how flawed is that person. If anyone else was heading the Dem ticket,
I suspect that person would win by a landslide in 2016. With Clinton heading up the party,
Trump just may win. Choosing her as the candidate was arguably the stupidest thing the Dems
could have possibly done
Wally Wolf, Texas 6 hours ago
ENOUGH!! Compared to what G.W. Bush did (the facts are known to all) while president and
what Donald Trump did as a business man (Trump University, numerous bankruptcies, tax evasion
and/or avoidance, questionable modeling agency practices, and on and on), Hillary Clinton's
emails are small potatoes. If people allow this ridiculous email situation to cripple Hillary
and allow Trump to become president then they will have to live with the fallout and, believe
me, it will be disastrous.
Joseph, NYC 4 hours ago
IF HRC played by the rules like everyone must, and simply used the State Department
email, all of this could have been avoided. Yet she refused to use her State email even though
it was offered to her.
If she did not do this to cover up her activities then she really bad judgement, and if she
did it to cover up her activities, why did she do so? Either way, she is not a person to be
entrusted with the Presidency. This is what is causing the nightmare Trump to still be
competitive and to be catching up with her in the polls. If he wins HRC and the DNC have noone
to blame but themselves.
gary, Washington state 6 hours ago
Congress asked Bush-Cheney in 2007 for emails surrounding the firing of eight U.S.
attorneys. AG Gonzales could not produce the email because it was sent on a non-government
email server, gwb43.com, which was run by the RNC. No smoking gun--sorry about that.
Over time it was revealed that 22 White House officials including Karl Rove used private RNC
email accounts for government business. In April 2007, Dana Perino admitted that approximately
5 million messages may have been deleted from that server. In 2009, watchdog groups announced
that technicians had recovered 22 million emails that were deleted somehow from gwb43.com.
Many of these messages were recovered from other government email servers.
Clearly gwb43.com was under the legal obligations of the Presidential Records Act, which each
of these 22 million deletions violated. Republican leaders (like Chris Christie, Karl Rove,
etc.) who are now enraged by Hillary Clinton's email server were then uncritical of the Bush
administration and its behavior.
Is this American exceptionalism--hypocrisy, political pretense, and selective enforcement of
laws?
Sam Crow, SF Bay Area 3 hours ago
ultimately, this shows the incompetence of the IT people in the government agencies
handling her communications. As the Secretary of State, how can they not have procedures
in place which would prevent this from happening? Hillary Clinton is ultimately
responsible for making sure her classified communications are secure, and she should have been
asking people questions to make sure this was the case. I am a Democrat but I have grave
misgivings regarding her judgement and handling of this matter.
Thomas MacLachlan, Highland Moors, Scotland 5 hours ago
Having read through these 58 pages, it's clear that all they say is that Hillary is not a
savvy technologist. She made her decision to use a private email system without understanding
the implications of it regarding security, access control, data integrity, or retention. Also,
none of her staff was competent in the technology involved, either. At a low level, perhaps.
But not at a high level, where the architecture defines how all these pieces of the system
work together. It was that area that fell apart and has caused her the myriad of political
problems she now faces with this.
The most important finding is that the federal government is woefully incompetent in
designing, implementing, and maintaining large information systems. At State back then,
the system was full of holes and was very hackable. By comparison, Hillary's system was more
secure, though unauthorized. But you can't have a parade of different administrators or
consultants go stomping through the implementation and expect it to hold together, either.
The government needs to get their act together to provide systems which are actually secure
and globally available. This isn't just a technology statement. The workflows involved and
usage processes need to be well defined, and users need to be trained on them. And the
technical staff needs to show some leadership so that they can help guide senior staff to the
right solutions.
The buck stops with Hillary, but she is certainly not the guilty party in this.
Mark Thomason, is a trusted commenter Clawson, Mich 8 hours ago
These are plainly false statements to the FBI, and so crimes. She did not do it "out of
convenience" but to avoid public records act, and to get more privacy. Huma admitted that
much, as have others. She got repeated warnings. We've heard that from those who warned her,
who were told not to say it again. "I don't recall" any of them is just not credible. She is
supposed to recall being warned.
She did not think those things were classified? She's Sec of State. She knows which
subjects are classified, and many of those were. She knew that. She got the most classified
stuff there is, because she was Sec of State.
The biggest concern of all is that she did this in deliberate defiance of the requirements
of law, the public records requirements, for the express purpose of violating that law. The
FBI just decided that it was not investigating THAT law, and so ignored it. Yet those are
felonies, not just little things.
This is an outrage. It has grown far beyond just a few emails.
EdBx, Bronx, NY 7 hours ago
I am not concerned by Hillary's emails. I am very upset by the refusal of the media and
politicians to address the real issues of our classification system. We have known since at
least the Pentagon Papers, and probably earlier, that the purpose of classifying information
is to keep it from the American people more than from our adversaries.
There is no conclusive evidence that our nation has been harmed by the classified
information released by Daniel Ellsburg, Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden. On the other hand
it is certainly known that great harm was done by the misuse and abuse of classified
information by duly authorized government officials in getting us into the war in Iraq. The
lesson is that it is more important who we choose as president than how they maintained their
email accounts several years ago.
Also, while we may not have known it in 2008, we should know now that government officials
should operate under the assumption that anything on a computer is subject to hacking, no
matter how secure we think the system is.
chichimax, albany, ny 7 hours ago
It is amazing how much scrutiny this and the Clinton Foundation have gotten and how little
George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Alberto Gonzales, John Yoo and the "torture memos" got. Not to
mention the whole sum of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo episodes. Scrutiny of Hillary Clinton, thy
name is petty. Lack of scrutiny of the entire Bush Administration's misdeeds, thy name is
HUGE.
DCC, NYC 4 hours ago
"But Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, which has used
the email issue as one of its main weapons against Mrs. Clinton, called the documents "a
devastating indictment of her judgment, honesty and basic competency."
Wow, the head of the RNC finds that Hillary has a lack of judgment and honesty and is
incompetent. And we value his assessment because
he..........helped.............nominate......... Trump. Yep, his opinion really matters!
MyThreeCents, San Francisco 4 hours ago
Clinton apparently didn't know an email server from a jar of mayonnaise. I can
understand that -- not sure I would either.
But if I were starting out on a 4-year stint as US Secretary of State, it would occur
to me that I'd probably send or receive a sensitive email or two somewhere along the way, and
I'd wonder whether sending and receiving those emails over a private server located in my home
might be a good idea.
I'd probably conclude that it was advisable to get myself a State Department email address,
and use it every now and then. True, US enemies reportedly hacked the State Department server,
along with the personal emails of several top Clinton aides, which may make one think it's
pointless even to try to keep one's emails secure. But it's much easier to hack a private
server located in someone's home than it is to hack a State Department email server.
A bored 14-year old kid probably could have hacked Clinton's private server in 15 minutes.
Kathryn Horvat, Salt Lake City 57 minutes ago
More and more I find myself upset with the poor judgment of the leaders of the Democratic
Party, who allowed and encouraged her to run for president. She already was encumbered by a
lot of baggage, not to mention her loss to Obama in 2008. I also wonder about the judgment of
the New York Times , which engaged in the most openly biased reporting and opinion pieces I
have ever seen.
How could so many seasoned politicians have been so blind?
David Howell, 33541 57 minutes ago
Lame very lame Hillary excuses . But the problem comes from both sides Democrat or
Republican and there lame excuses . From the deficit from the Trickle down economy ,
deregulation to Trade-deal and the lost of jobs . Tax cut to tax inversion .. If we want
change , Then why are voter still voting in Incumbents . The ones that made the problems we
have . Shame us who do.. Vote the incumbents out of office ..
fmofcali, orange county 1 hour ago
With over 75% of the country stating Hillary cannot be trusted, it's important to also
consider the severe lack of accountability and level of arrogance displayed. If she's willing
to take the lowest road possible, voting her into office will be a huge mistake. How can
you have a commander in chief that refuses to simply take accountability and always blames her
staff for the issues she clearly creates?!
moviebuff, Los Angeles 1 hour ago
If this were Nixon - a man I detested, mind you - we'd have empowered Senate and House
committees to look into disqualifying him as a candidate. Did those who still support Hillary
Milhous Clinton even read the article on which they're commenting? Sending the emails
privately, the order to delete, the use of Bleach bit after she was ordered to preserve the
emails, throwing her aides under the bus… her behavior makes RMN look like Abe Lincoln.
J.D., USA 1 hour ago
I've worked as a tech consultant for years and I've seen this same ignorance from so many
people, that it's not surprising. E-mail is something most people use, but it's not something
most people understand, so they don't really get how unsecured it is. Was it a potentially
dangerous mistake to make? Yes. Was it surprising? Absolutely not. But, more because most
people don't understand e-mail, than because of any lapse in reasoning or malicious intent on
her part.
... ... ..
Malebranchem, Ontario, NY 1 hour ago
You gotta be kidding me. All we get each day, all day is more breathless Trump 'News'.
On the front page no less. Each smirk and foible is covered ad nauseum as if it were actually
new worthy. You rarely hear about the other candidate. No policy comparisons for pete's sake.
Until today.
"The newly disclosed documents, while largely reinforcing what had already been known
about the F.B.I. investigation, provided a number of new details about Mrs. Clinton's use
of a private email system, which has shadowed her presidential campaign for more than a
year."
As another commenter said, "There's no there there." It is the NYT that is casting a shadow
over Secretary Clinton's campaign. Wake me when you actually start covering this Presidential
race.
"... The FBI that conducted a criminal investigation into Clinton's email server is serving under a Democratic administration. The director, appointed by Barack Obama, said Clinton was "Extremely careless" in handling classified material. The State Dept's Inspector General found that Clinton lied when she said she had permission to use a private server. ..."
"... she definitely had poor email practice. but so did 3 of her four immediate predecessors at state, who used private email; at least 2 of their inboxes also contained material later classified. so did Karl Rove, who used private servers while running two wars as presidential chief of staff. 3 million of the last administration's emails are missing, rather tnan 30,000. so yes, she continued past poor email practices, but nothing that was illegal or even unusual. So why is only her email under investigation. ..."
"... Anybody remember Valerie Plame? You want to talk about compromising national security? How about the Bush Administration revealing the secret identity of a covert CIA operative working on Iran's Nuclear Program capabilities?? ..."
"... After she gets elected they will start the impeachment process along with a complete cold shoulder to all her attempts at getting anything accomplished. We could have had Bernie. ..."
"... So, she's in great health for opening pickle jars, but not so great when it comes to her memory. And on top of her failing memory, Colin Powell essentially went public to say her camp is lying and using him as a defense for using a private server. ..."
"... She didn't recall "all the briefings she received on handling gov documents"? Well maybe she wasn't fit for the job of handling gov documents then. ..."
"... It's called mishandling classified documents, and it is a crime. She's not facing consequences because of who she is and the influence she has. Had it been random Jane Doe however, there'd be serious repercussions. ..."
"... I am stunned by reading the responses to this article. It doesn't matter what Hillary does, most of you will simply defend her or ignore her issues ..."
"... Hillary could drive through a soccer field in a drunken stupor, killing dozens of kids and you sheep would blame the car or the booze! ..."
"... The fact that not a single person who originated any of these emails, nor anyone else who were on the email distribution lists, have ever received so much as an administrative rebuke about any of these, and Comey testified that there were no plans at all to investigate ANYONE who were responsible for actually writing and sending these emails. ..."
"... James Constantino What do you not comprehend about "classified at the time" you just proved Tom Johnson correct when he stated " It doesn't matter what Hillary does, most of you will simply defend her or ignore her issues" ..."
"... She set up a private server in her house, used that server to exchange classified materials and then claims a loss of memory of briefings to safeguard those materials after her term was over at State to explain the erasure of thousands of emails. I'm no Trump fan but this is just as bad as Nixon's white house tapes. This is why I voted for Bernie. ..."
"... So Hillary couldn't remember security briefings she received in 2009 because of a concussion she received in 2012? This doesn't pass the laugh test. Nothing is every her responsibility and she has never ever done anything wrong. Is the concussion still impacting her memory? ..."
"... If the globalist media wasn't bought, they would have such information in a few days from deciding to find such information which should be available. I have worked for government departments before not only are policies and procedures issued to you and/or read out to you, you are also required to sign on the dotted line that you have understood them. Whats happening around HRC is just a shameful cover-up and surely the people know it by now? ..."
"... Yes, this is someone we want to be President. Someone who can't rememeber security breifings. "The extraordinary disclosure was made as the FBI published details of its agents' interview with the former secretary of state which was conducted days before the agency's director ruled out any charges against her. ..."
"... Queue health rumors again(Re: concussion). Also, I like how the I don't recall defense worked just fine for regean and Iran contra, but republicans don't apply the same standard when concerning Clinton ..."
"... Awww. I see.. She's in perfect health but when it is convenient she will use her illnesses to her advantage. Got it. ..."
"... Our records show that Clinton sent & received thousands of cables with "(C)" paragraph classification markings. The FBI report, although not fatal for Democratic loyalists but I think it is devastating to average Americans. ..."
"... So, what about the bit where she claimed she turned over ALL work-related e-mails, yet we keep finding ones that weren't turned over, and even more that were deleted with specialty wiping software? ..."
"... Wow! this is so damaging! cant' remember anything , lost so many phones and didn't know how to read a classified documents! She is unfit to run a lemonde stand! With all her handlers and executive assistance and Huma for 24/7, you would think she will know more! ..."
"... You can all sleep good tonight. Once all your children die in the wars she wants to continue she will say, "in hindsight, I regretted using bombs on all those innocent kids while president." Kudos DNC. ..."
"... Hillary's new defense: If you've had a FALL you can't RECALL ..."
"... Holy crap, - Clinton was also asked about the (C) markings within several documents that FBI Director James Comey testified before Congress represented classified information. Clinton told the FBI she was unaware of what the marking meant. "Clinton stated she did not know and could only speculate it was referencing paragraphs marked in alphabetical order," the interview notes stated. Hillary Clinton told the FBI she did not recall all of the briefings she received due to a concussion she suffered in 2012. This woman is unfit period. http://www.cnn.com/.../hillary-clinton-fbi-interview-notes/ ..."
"... Kat Hathaway - Clinton repeatedly told the FBI she lacked recollection of key events. She said she "could not recall any briefing or training by State related to the retention of federal records or handling classified information," according to the FBI's notes of their July 2 interview with Clinton. The notes revealed that Clinton relied heavily on her staff and aides determining what was classified information and how it should be handled. ..."
"... So bringing up her health issues us an "unfounded attack" but then she uses those very same health issues to cover her ass? ..."
"... We invaded Iraq in 2003 GWB was reelected in 2004, this peanuts compared to that. ..."
Clinton told investigators she could not recall getting any briefings on how to handle classified
information or comply with laws governing the preservation of federal records, the summary of her
interview shows.
"However, in December of 2012, Clinton suffered a concussion and then around the
New Year had a blood clot," the FBI's summary said. "Based on her doctor's advice, she could only
work at State for a few hours a day and could not recall every briefing she received."
A Clinton campaign aide said Clinton only referenced her concussion to explain she was not at
work but for a few hours a day at that time, not that she did not remember things from that period.
The concussion was widely reported then, and Republicans have since used it to attack the 68-year-old
candidate's health in a way her staff have said is unfounded.
The FBI report, which does not quote Clinton directly, is ambiguous about whether it was her concussion
that affected her ability to recall briefings.
- SEPTEMBER 02 2016 -
DONALD J. TRUMP
STATEMENT ON FBI
RELEASING CLINTON
INTERVIEW NOTES
★ ★ ★
"Hillary Clinton's answers to the FBI about
her private email server defy belief. I was
absolutely shocked to see that her answers
to the FBI stood in direct contradiction to
what she told the American people. After
reading these documents, I really don't
understand how she was able to get away
from prosecution." - Donald J. Trump
The FBI that conducted a criminal investigation into Clinton's email server is serving under
a Democratic administration. The director, appointed by Barack Obama, said Clinton was "Extremely
careless" in handling classified material. The State Dept's Inspector General found that Clinton
lied when she said she had permission to use a private server.
These are departments in a Democratic administration, not a vast right wing conspiracy. The
fact that Republicans try to make hay out of the facts in this case do not change the fact that
Clinton, according to a Democrat's STate Dept and FBI, acted carelessly and was less than truthful.
Anthony Zenkus she definitely had poor email practice. but so did 3 of her four immediate
predecessors at state, who used private email; at least 2 of their inboxes also contained material
later classified. so did Karl Rove, who used private servers while running two wars as presidential
chief of staff. 3 million of the last administration's emails are missing, rather tnan 30,000.
so yes, she continued past poor email practices, but nothing that was illegal or even unusual.
So why is only her email under investigation.
Anybody remember Valerie Plame? You want to talk about compromising national security? How
about the Bush Administration revealing the secret identity of a covert CIA operative working
on Iran's Nuclear Program capabilities??
How about Bush commuting the sentence of Scooter Libby who obstructed and derailed the investigation??
How about the way Republicans attacked Plame who was a loyal employee of the CIA for over 20
years??
Republicans are the true threats to our national security,not Hillary Clinton.
The attacks on Hillary will only get worse over the next month, then they break out the big one,
the October surprise. Everyone that chose her over Bernie should have seen this. After she
gets elected they will start the impeachment process along with a complete cold shoulder to all
her attempts at getting anything accomplished. We could have had Bernie.
Michelle Becker Wrong. The Stamford Study shows without question that the states without paper
trails had her way outperforming the exit polls where it wasn't statistically possible without
some kind of tampering. Add to that the placebo ballots in California, the voter purge in AZ,
IL, NY, and it would have been a much different result. Could she have won legitimately? We'll
never know thanks to the DNC leaks of collusion with the HRC camp, the media, and others. But
hey, enjoy the status quo, your fracking, your endless wars, your corporate influence in Congress.
This is what you wanted. Knock yourself out. USA. USA.
So, she's in great health for opening pickle jars, but not so great when it comes to her memory.
And on top of her failing memory, Colin Powell essentially went public to say her camp is lying
and using him as a defense for using a private server. I simply don't know how establishment
Dems keep trying to cover this obviously nagging problem they have with their candidate. What
a horrible choice between these two awful major party nominees.
It's called mishandling classified documents, and it is a crime. She's not facing consequences
because of who she is and the influence she has. Had it been random Jane Doe however, there'd
be serious repercussions.
Here is a question for all the angry white male Trump supporters.
Republicans control the Senate
and the House. Republicans control 31 states as governors including the rust belt states. So if
republicans are in control why haven't they created high wage jobs that you whine about? Why has
the economy slowed with republicans running government? Why haven't they fixed the immigration
problem? The republican congress can pass a bill tomorrow to build Trump's wall and hire a deportation
force. The republican congress can pass a balanced budget anytime the want? Taxes too high? Republicans
can cut the tax rate to zero if they want. My point is why do republicans want to blame the president
and Hillary for every problem known to man while their republican leaders sit on their butts doing
nothing to solve a single problem. Maybe you need to tell congress to stop investigating and pass
a Jobs Bill.
I am stunned by reading the responses to this article. It doesn't matter what Hillary does,
most of you will simply defend her or ignore her issues. The article clearly states:
The
FBI has concluded Clinton was wrong: At least 81 email threads contained information that was
classified at the time, although the final number may be more than 2,000, the report says. Some
of the emails appear to include discussion of planned future attacks by unmanned US Military drones,
the FBI report says.
Hillary could drive through a soccer field in a drunken stupor, killing dozens of kids
and you sheep would blame the car or the booze!
Here's the thing... all 81 email chains that the FBI claims were "classified" didn't originate
with Clinton. All were sent to her... none were marked as classified... and no one who actually
composed and sent these emails thought that they should have been classified at the time.
The fact that not a single person who originated any of these emails, nor anyone else who
were on the email distribution lists, have ever received so much as an administrative rebuke about
any of these, and Comey testified that there were no plans at all to investigate ANYONE who were
responsible for actually writing and sending these emails.
If you really expect me to take this seriously as anything other than a republican fever dream,
please show me ANY wrongdoing on Clinton's part that involves more than being copied on someone
else's email chain... because as evil master plans go, that's kind of reaching.
James Constantino What do you not comprehend about "classified at the time" you just proved
Tom Johnson correct when he stated " It doesn't matter what Hillary does, most of you will simply
defend her or ignore her issues"
She set up a private server in her house, used that server to exchange classified materials
and then claims a loss of memory of briefings to safeguard those materials after her term was
over at State to explain the erasure of thousands of emails. I'm no Trump fan but this is just
as bad as Nixon's white house tapes. This is why I voted for Bernie.
So Hillary couldn't remember security briefings she received in 2009 because of a concussion
she received in 2012? This doesn't pass the laugh test. Nothing is every her responsibility and
she has never ever done anything wrong. Is the concussion still impacting her memory?
Since I'm sure you won't believe me from over in your fact free world, here is the exact quote
from the Reuter's article: "Clinton said she received no instructions or direction regarding the
preservation or production of records from (the) State (Department) during the transition out
of her role as Secretary of State in 2013.
"However, in December of 2012, Clinton suffered a
concussion and then around the New Year had a blood clot (in her head). Based on her doctor's
advice, she could only work at State for a few hours a day and could not recall every briefing
she received," the report said.
Whether she intended to use a private server and/or was briefed about the Department's policies
and procedures is one thing. Surely the State Department has records of whether HRC was briefed
or not and the main question is whether she then decided not to comply.
If the globalist media wasn't bought, they would have such information in a few days from
deciding to find such information which should be available. I have worked for government departments
before not only are policies and procedures issued to you and/or read out to you, you are also
required to sign on the dotted line that you have understood them. Whats happening around HRC
is just a shameful cover-up and surely the people know it by now?
Actually she should have been briefed when she was the FIrst Lady..and then again when she was
a senator..and then again when she was secretary of state.
Yes, this is someone we want to be President. Someone who can't rememeber security breifings.
"The extraordinary disclosure was made as the FBI published details of its agents' interview with
the former secretary of state which was conducted days before the agency's director ruled out
any charges against her.
Agents noted that Clinton could not recall being trained to handle classified materials as
secretary of state, and had no memory of anyone raising concerns about the sensitive information
she received at her private address.
The Democratic presidential nominee also 'did not recall receiving any emails she thought should
not be on an unclassified system,' the FBI's report declared.
She did not recall all of the briefings she received on handling sensitive information as she
made the transition from her post as secretary of state, due to a concussion she suffered in 2012."
Nodens Caedmon
"Couldn't recall all briefings on preserving documents."
Who needs to remember security briefings
definitely not someone running for president.
Why even mention the concussion? She can't remember more than 10% of her briefings even if she
is far above average, she would have to review the notes to jog her memory for even partial recall
as everyone must do when asked to testify about events like this.
With the number of briefings
and variety of subjects, her memory is the least useful way to recreate those meetings, with or
without a concussion, if ten people at the meetings recounted their memories, it would sound like
ten different meetings, the notes and minutes are the only reliable sources.
For some important decisions, she might remember quite a bit but there are natural limits to
memory that are quite severe unless you have unique innate skills.
Queue health rumors again(Re: concussion). Also, I like how the I don't recall defense worked
just fine for regean and Iran contra, but republicans don't apply the same standard when concerning
Clinton
Nancy Gilbert
Awww. I see.. She's in perfect health but when it is convenient she will use her illnesses
to her advantage. Got it.
Obviously the powers that be want Hillary. That's why we've got a choice between her and trump.
As bad as she is, she looks like a saint next that madman. Ha! For now on I will be sitting next
to the overweight peeps. That way I will look slim.
From Wikileaks: Note on Clinton FBI report: Our records show that Clinton sent & received
thousands of cables with "(C)" paragraph classification markings.
The FBI report, although not fatal for Democratic loyalists but I think it is devastating to average
Americans.
So, what about the bit where she claimed she turned over ALL work-related e-mails, yet we
keep finding ones that weren't turned over, and even more that were deleted with specialty wiping
software?
Mani Rand
Wow! this is so damaging! cant' remember anything , lost so many phones and didn't know how
to read a classified documents! She is unfit to run a lemonde stand! With all her handlers and
executive assistance and Huma for 24/7, you would think she will know more!
Now let's watch all the Libs quantify all of this LOL. She could run naked through Times Square
and the Huffpos would somehow justify her actions as bold and showing off her leadership capabilities
You can all sleep good tonight. Once all your children die in the wars she wants to continue
she will say, "in hindsight, I regretted using bombs on all those innocent kids while president."
Kudos DNC.
Holy crap, - Clinton was also asked about the (C) markings within several documents that FBI
Director James Comey testified before Congress represented classified information. Clinton told
the FBI she was unaware of what the marking meant. "Clinton stated she did not know and could
only speculate it was referencing paragraphs marked in alphabetical order," the interview notes
stated. Hillary Clinton told the FBI she did not recall all of the briefings she received due
to a concussion she suffered in 2012. This woman is unfit period.
http://www.cnn.com/.../hillary-clinton-fbi-interview-notes/
Kat Hathaway - Clinton repeatedly told the FBI she lacked recollection of key events. She
said she "could not recall any briefing or training by State related to the retention of federal
records or handling classified information," according to the FBI's notes of their July 2 interview
with Clinton. The notes revealed that Clinton relied heavily on her staff and aides determining
what was classified information and how it should be handled.
"We are also reminded that Clinton repeatedly vowed she'd surrendered
every single government business-related email upon the State Department's
request" [
New
York Post
].
This was an extraordinary lie: She hoarded and attempted to destroy
thousands of emails which, like the one The Post describes, involved
government business - some of it highly sensitive and significant (such
as the 30 emails related to the Benghazi massacre that the FBI recovered
but the State Department has yet to disclose). Converting government
records to one's own use and destroying them are serious crimes, even if
no classified information is involved.
I rarely find myself agreeing with a
National Reviewcolumnist
writing in the New York Post, but "converting government records to one's
own use and destroying them":
Yes, exactly
.
Just scanned through the report – there's a whole lot that Clinton didn't
recall. She also said that she relied on the judgment of the people that sent
her emails, when it came to the proper handling of classified material. So, in
other words, this detail-oriented policy wonk couldn't remember anything about
this and besides, it's somebody else's fault if classified information was
handled improperly.
I still have a hard time understanding why people find her dishonest.
CLINTON was not involved in the decision to move from the Apple server
managed by JUSTIN COOPER to a server built by BRYAN PAGLIANO. Therefore,
CLINTON had no knowledge of the reasons for selecting to install it in
the basement of CLINTON's New York residence.
When Clinton had technical issues with her email account, she
contacted COOPER to resolve the issues. She could not recall ever
contacting PAGLIANO for technical support.
Brazen, brazen lies. Compare:
Bryan Pagliano, the former State Department IT specialist who managed
Hillary Clinton's private email server, was hired by the State Department
as a political appointee. Pagliano had previously worked as an IT
director for Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign.
[Pagliano] was ultimately involved in setting up Clinton's email
server at her home in Chappaqua, New York, and maintained it while
working at the State Department.
The Clinton campaign says he was paid
separately by the Clintons for all work on the server during that time.
Pagliano was a former Clinton campaign staffer, shoehorned into State as
a Clinton political appointee, separately paid
by the Clintons
to set
up a server
in their house
… but
Hillary never even talked to him
,
so she claims. Here is a photo of Pagliano posing with Hillary, as she
remained mute:
Needless to say, given Pagliano's immunized testimony to the FBI, plenty
of evidence is available to indict Hillary for lying to the FBI, totally
aside from her premeditated federal records crimes.
There is a perfectly reasonable explanation for the picture of
Pagliano and Clinton. He must have attended one of those $5,000 a plate
dinners which entitles you to a quick photo in the reception line. You
can't possibly expect her to remember all of the people who have anted up
for one of those!
I just want to point out that the release of this on a Friday before a 3
day weekend is simply a coincidence and has absolutely nothing to do with
trying to "throw shade" or diminish the impact of the release. I mean there
are people who posit that things are released on Friday for news management
purposes. Poppycock says I – PURE COINCIDENCE. When have the Clintoons ever
done something like that????
I just do this because there are a lot of cynical people at NC who might
ponder if the FBI is in cahoots with Hillary and does this to in some way to
try and lessen the newsworthiness of this release, or simply out of a
bureaucratic self protection instinct because it might show the
investigation of the FBI was less than stellar…
I am so glad I'm not cynical…
"... According to the bureau's review of server logs, someone accessed an email account on Jan. 5, 2013, using three IP addresses known to serve as Tor "exit nodes" - jumping-off points from the anonymity network to the public internet. ..."
An unknown individual using the encrypted privacy tool Tor to hide their tracks
accessed an email account on a Clinton family server, the FBI revealed Friday.
The incident appears to be the first confirmed intrusion into a piece of
hardware associated with Hillary Clinton's private email system, which
originated with a server established for her husband, former President Bill
Clinton.
The FBI disclosed the event in its newly released
report
on the former secretary of state's handling of classified information.
According to the bureau's review of server logs, someone accessed an
email account on Jan. 5, 2013, using three IP addresses known to serve as Tor
"exit nodes" - jumping-off points from the anonymity network to the public
internet.
The owner of the account, whose name is redacted in the report, said she was
"not familiar with nor [had] she ever used Tor software."
Good question, this NC reader is just pretty fed up with the status quo (maybe others want
to chime in):
– Unlimited immunity from prosecution for banking executive criminals
–
More shiny new undeclared "nation-building" and "RTP" wars
– Globalist trade deals that
enshrine unaccountable corporate tribunals over national sovereignty, environmental and worker
protection, and self-determination
– America's national business conducted in secrecy at
the behest of corporate donors to tax-exempt foundations
– Paid-for quid-pro-quo media
manipulation of candidate and election coverage
– Health care system reform designed to
benefit entrenched insurance providers over providing access to reasonable-cost basic care.
Based on the above I'd say the 11:2 ratio looks about right.
Really enjoyed Atrios easy-breezy
summation
of Clinton Foundation / State Department skullduggery…
"…a bit unseemly in that way that the sausage factory is a bit gross, but it
basically seems to fall in 'this is how things work' territory as far as I can
tell…"
Breezy is right. It does lead me to ask if this were not the Clinton
Foundation but was the Bush Foundation or the Rubio Foundation or…would this
still be just be the way things work? I do not think so.
Don't get me wrong I have great admiration for Atrios (he is right on the
money regarding Social Security and self-driving cars), but the double
standard where both Obama and Clinton are concerned is strong at Eschaton,
and I'm sorry to say with him as well.
Accepting this as the way things work is just accepting that corruption
is the norm and there is nothing to be done about it. So unless you are
willing to shut up about supposed misdeeds of all elected officials and
political candidates because this is the way it is done, you need to get the
f*ck over the idea that this is NORMAL and ACCEPTABLE.
And I don't see that happening over there, or at Daily Kos, or… once the
subject is out is out of the tribe.
I can understand the "it's OK when
our people
do it" double
standard. Family/tribe/team, we are all trained to do that. What I don't
understand is how one could ever arrive at Clinton Foundation = our
people prerequisite to applying it in this instance. WT actual F?
I think you are coming at this from far too realistic a point of
view. You aren't looking at this as the Foundation is a tool, like a
speech or a fundraiser, in order to provide
wealthy
worthy
individuals/groups/corporations/nations a means to expedite access to
the government official, in this case Clinton. You think of it as a
false charity. But for the greasing the wheels is normal operating
procedure, what this was was a gift to open more avenues for the
wheels to be greased. It's up to you…or me…or even the people of Flint
among others to use that opportunity.
Breezy is right. It does lead me to ask if this were not the
Clinton War With Russia
but was the
Bush War With Iraq
or the
Rubio War With Syria
or…would this still be just
be the way things work? I do not think so.
Don't get me wrong I have great admiration for Atrios (he is right on
the money regarding Social Security and self-driving cars), but the
double standard where both Obama and Clinton are concerned is strong at
Eschaton, and I'm sorry to say with him as well.
Accepting this as the way things work is just accepting that
endless and new wars
is the norm and there is nothing to be done
about it. So unless you are willing to shut up about supposed
endless new wars
of all elected officials and political
candidates because this is the way it is done, you need to get the f*ck
over the idea that this is NORMAL and ACCEPTABLE.
And I don't see that happening over there, or at Daily Kos, or… once
the subject is out is out of the tribe.
Excellent interview. I've bookmarked Ortel's website and am looking
forward to his forthcoming writings. I was not aware of the differences
between laws regulating charities versus other forms of organizations, so
the interview as a starting point was very useful for me.
It has now been 271 days since Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton held a press
conference.
#HidingHillary is a campaign strategy to prevent Clinton from making public gaffes. By
avoiding unscripted questions and public appearances that are not carefully controlled by the
campaign, the tactic is designed to allow Clinton's opponent, Republican presidential nominee
Donald Trump, to hand her the presidency through his own self-inflicted wounds.
#HidingHillary might minimize the risk of mistakes for Clinton, but it bolsters Trump's
ability to set the narrative. Under the leadership of Kellyanne Conway and Steve Bannon, Trump's
campaign is taking full advantage of #HidingHillary, focusing on Clinton's many scandals and more
recently on Trump's immigration policy in an attempt to redirect the political conversation.
"... For much of the last century the illusion of social progress sold through the New Deal, the Great Society and more recently through capitalist enterprise 'freed' from the bind of social accountability, ..."
"... The Clinton's special gift to the people -- citizens, workers; the human condition as conceived through a filter of manufactured wants to serve the interests of an intellectually, morally and spiritually bankrupt 'leadership' class, lies in the social truths revealed by their actions. ..."
"... Hillary Clinton versus Donald Trump, poses the greater-evilism of an ossified political class against the facts of its own creation now in dire need of resolution- wars to end wars, environmental crisis to end environmental crises, economic predation to end economic predation and manufactured social misery to end social misery. Hillary Clinton's roster of donors is the neoliberal innovation on Richard Nixon's enemies list- government as a shakedown racket where friend or foe and policies promoted or buried, are determined by 'donation' status rather than personal animus. ..."
"... That is most ways conservative Republican Richard Nixon's actual policies were far Left of those of contemporary Democrats, including Mrs. Clinton, is testament to the ideological mobility of political pragmatism freed from principle. ..."
"... That Hillary Clinton is the candidate of officialdom links her service to Wall Street to America's wars of choice to dedicated environmental irresolution as the candidate who 'gets things done.' ..."
"... As historical analog, the West has seen recurrent episodes of economic imperialism backed by state power; in the parlance, neoliberal globalization, over the last several centuries. ..."
"... Left unstated in the competitive lesser-evilism of Party politics is the incapacity for political resolution in any relevant dimension. Donald Trump is 'dangerous' only by overlooking how dangerous the American political leadership has been for the last one and one-half centuries. So the question becomes: dangerous to whom? Without the most murderous military in the world, public institutions like the IMF dedicated to economic subjugation and predatory corporations that wield the 'free-choices' of mandated consumption, how dangerous would any politicians really be? And with them, how not-dangerous have liberal Democrats actually been? Candidates for political office are but manifestations of class interests put forward as systemic intent. ..."
"... The liberals and progressives in the managerial class who support the status quo and are acting as enforcers to elect Hillary Clinton are but one recession away from being tossed overboard by those they serve within the existing economic order. ..."
into political power. The structure of economic distribution seen through Foundation 'contributors;'
oil and gas magnates, pharmaceutical and technology entrepreneurs of public largesse, the murder-for-hire
industry (military) and various and sundry managers of social decline, makes evident the dissociation
of social production from those that produced it.
For much of the last century the illusion of social progress sold through the New Deal, the
Great Society and more recently through capitalist enterprise 'freed' from the bind of social accountability,
if not exactly from the need for regular and robust public support, served to hold at bay the perpetual
tomorrow of lives lived for the theorized greater good of accumulated self-interest. The Clinton's
special gift to the people -- citizens, workers; the human condition as conceived through a filter
of manufactured wants to serve the interests of an intellectually, morally and spiritually bankrupt
'leadership' class, lies in the social truths revealed by their actions.
Being three or more decades in the making, the current political season was never about the candidates
except inasmuch as they embody the grotesquely disfigured and depraved condition of the body politic.
The 'consumer choice' politics of Democrat versus Republican, Hillary Clinton versus Donald Trump,
poses the greater-evilism of an ossified political class against the facts of its own creation now
in dire need of resolution- wars to end wars, environmental crisis to end environmental crises, economic
predation to end economic predation and manufactured social misery to end social misery. Hillary
Clinton's roster of donors is the neoliberal innovation on Richard Nixon's enemies list- government
as a shakedown racket where friend or foe and policies promoted or buried, are determined by 'donation'
status rather than personal animus.
That is most ways conservative Republican Richard Nixon's actual policies were far Left of
those of contemporary Democrats, including Mrs. Clinton, is testament to the ideological mobility
of political pragmatism freed from principle. The absurd misdirection that we, the people, are
driving this migration is belied by the economic power that correlates 1:1 with the policies put
forward and enacted by 'the people's representatives', by the answers that actual human beings give
to pollsters when asked and by the ever more conspicuous hold that economic power has over political
considerations as evidenced by the roster of pleaders and opportunists granted official sees by the
political class in Washington.
To state the obvious, dysfunctional ideology- principles that don't 'work' in the sense of promoting
broadly conceived public wellbeing, should be dispensable. But this very formulation takes at face
value the implausible conceits of unfettered intentions mediated through functional political representation
that are so well disproved by entities like the Clinton Foundation. Political 'pragmatism' as it
is put forward by national Democrats quite closely resembles the principled opposition of Conservative
Republicans through unified service to the economic powers-that-be. That Hillary Clinton is the
candidate of officialdom links her service to Wall Street to America's wars of choice to dedicated
environmental irresolution as the candidate who 'gets things done.'
As historical analog, the West has seen recurrent episodes of economic imperialism backed
by state power; in the parlance, neoliberal globalization, over the last several centuries.
The result, in addition to making connected insiders rich as they wield social power over less existentially
alienated peoples, has been the not-so-great wars, devastations, impositions and crimes-against-humanity
that were the regular occurrences of the twentieth century. The 'innovation' of corporatized militarization
to this proud tradition is as old as Western imperialism in its conception and as new as nuclear
and robotic weapons, mass surveillance and apparently unstoppable environmental devastation in its
facts.
Left unstated in the competitive lesser-evilism of Party politics is the incapacity for political
resolution in any relevant dimension. Donald Trump is 'dangerous' only by overlooking how dangerous
the American political leadership has been for the last one and one-half centuries. So the question
becomes: dangerous to whom? Without the most murderous military in the world, public institutions
like the IMF dedicated to economic subjugation and predatory corporations that wield the 'free-choices'
of mandated consumption, how dangerous would any politicians really be? And with them, how not-dangerous
have liberal Democrats actually been? Candidates for political office are but manifestations of class
interests put forward as systemic intent.
The complaint that the Greens- Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka, don't have an effective political
program approximates the claim that existing political and economic arrangements are open to challenge
through the electoral process when the process exists to assure that effective challenges don't arise.
The Democrats could have precluded the likelihood of a revolutionary movement, Left or Right, for
the next half-century by electing Bernie Sanders and then undermining him to 'prove' that challenges
to prevailing political economy don't work. The lack of imagination in running 'dirty Hillary' is
testament to how large- and fragile, the perceived stakes are. But as how unviable Hillary Clinton
and Donald Trump are as political leaders becomes apparent- think George W. Bush had he run for office
after the economic collapse of 2009 and without the cover of '9/11,' the political possibilities
begin to open up.
The liberals and progressives in the managerial class who support the status quo and are acting
as enforcers to elect Hillary Clinton are but one recession away from being tossed overboard by those
they serve within the existing economic order. The premise that the ruling class will always
need dedicated servants grants coherent logic and aggregated self-interest that history has disproven
time and again. A crude metaphor would be the unintended consequences of capitalist production now
aggregating to environmental crisis.
Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are both such conspicuously corrupt tools of an intellectually
and spiritually bankrupt social order that granting tactical brilliance to their ascendance, or even
pragmatism given the point in history and available choices, seems wildly generous. For those looking
for a political moment, one is on the way.
"... The Democratic presidential nominee called the United States an "exceptional nation," and said the country has a "unique and unparalleled ability to be a force for peace and progress." ..."
"... Recalling in their fevered minds the legendary Reagan Democrats who took the bait approved of a "walking tall" pitch, the Clintons believe millions of silent majority, Dick Cheney Democrats will cross the aisle to keep America great. ..."
"... Like Rome, we make a waste land and call it peace. ..."
"... It's very similar to the whole entire democracy at the end of a rifle thing we've been doing now for over a decade. Our exceptionally unique brand of freedom to choose as long as you choose as we wish if you will. Go America! ..."
"... "unique and unparalleled ability to be a force for peace and progress." LOL! ……Wha!/! she was serious!? Your sh*tting me! ..."
Hillary, liberator of Libya, preaches to the American Legion choir in Ohio:
The Democratic presidential nominee called the United States an "exceptional nation,"
and said the country has a "unique and unparalleled ability to be a force for peace and progress."
Recalling in their fevered minds the legendary Reagan Democrats who took the bait
approved of a "walking tall" pitch, the Clintons believe millions of silent majority,
Dick Cheney Democrats will cross the aisle to keep America great.
It's very similar to the whole entire democracy at the end of a rifle thing we've been
doing now for over a decade. Our exceptionally unique brand of freedom to choose as long as you
choose as we wish if you will. Go America!
Heh, maybe some of us figure the wrath beats the alternative to sitting
through another presidential cycle of sternly worded letters and petitions
from the left.
*sigh*
It would be so much easier if I could get an HMO approved frontal lobotomy
than I could either join the GOp lynch mob who thinks everything is some
liberal plot or be hunky dory with representation that tells you to your
face that they've rigged the system to thwart you ever actually having an
individual that you actually want representing you.
They lost... Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz was re-elected.
Notable quotes:
"... Tad Devine, Mark Longabaugh, and Julian Mulvey, who helped lead Sanders' campaign and drove his highly acclaimed media presence, will help Democrat Tim Canova's campaign in the closing days of his race against Wasserman Schultz in South Florida, where congressional primaries will be held Aug. 30. ..."
"... While Wasserman Schultz is still the favorite in her race, people aligned with Sanders have seized on Canova's candidacy as a proxy for their disapproval of Wasserman Schultz's stewardship of the DNC, pouring money into his effort. The addition of DML signals an increasing professionalization of the anti-Wasserman Schultz effort. ..."
The consulting firm that made Bernie Sanders' ads in the 2016 presidential race
is going to work for Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz's primary challenger.
Tad Devine, Mark Longabaugh, and Julian Mulvey, who helped lead Sanders'
campaign and drove his highly acclaimed media presence, will help Democrat Tim
Canova's campaign in the closing days of his race against Wasserman Schultz
in South Florida, where congressional primaries will be held Aug. 30.
It's the latest move from Sanders supporters to go after Wasserman Schultz,
after their outrage stemming from leaked emails drove her to resign as chairman
of the Democratic National Committee this week.
The move is a concrete step forward in Sanders' attempt to spread his "political
revolution" after the end of his presidential campaign and another boost to
Canova, a previously little-known law professor who has raised millions of dollars
for his run against Wasserman Schultz. It's also the first tangible sign of
heavier involvement from his political circles in down-ballot races between
now and November. Sanders had previously endorsed Canova and raised money online
for him and a selection of other congressional candidates.
While Wasserman Schultz is still the favorite in her race, people aligned
with Sanders have seized on Canova's candidacy as a proxy for their disapproval
of Wasserman Schultz's stewardship of the DNC, pouring money into his effort.
The addition of DML signals an increasing professionalization of the anti-Wasserman
Schultz effort.
The consultants' firm, Devine Mulvey Longabaugh, was behind spots like the
famous "America" ad that helped define Sanders' campaign as he rose to prominence
against Hillary Clinton, and it has worked for a wide range of down-ballot campaigns
this cycle. Canova's campaign was already working with Revolution Messaging,
Sanders' digital firm, as well.
. Rivals and challengers of
the past whether it be the British Empire, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan or the Soviet Union have
all fall by the way side in the titanic struggle of nation states and Great Powers.
So I asked Ms Rivlin, hypothetically, how she thought Americans would react if in a couple of
decades to come a significant and visible economic gap opened up between the USA and China.\
... She
failed to see, whether intentionally or not, that whatever one thinks about the merits of
seriousness or silliness of such talk and concerns, a lot of people in America believe it is
happening as encapsulated in Mr Trump's campaign slogan: "Make America Great Again". Clearly, a
great deal of people in America think the country is in terminal decline and want something
radical to reverse such decline. Hence their messenger Donald Trump and his rhetoric of America
First.
...Part of what Trump
represents is not only a deep seated anxiety that America is on a downward trajectory this
century, hence his China
bashing and protectionist rhetoric, his candidacy also represents a white backlash against
the increasing and rapid demographic changes in America society. America is on course by the
2050s to no longer be a white majority country. The population growth of non-white ethnic
minorities is over taking that of white Americans. Thus Trump's dog whistle racism with lines
such as: "We speak English in this country, not Spanish!"
Hillary Clinton's favorability among women has suddenly reversed itself.
Last month, women had a largely favorable view of the Democratic presidential candidate, with 54
percent viewing her positively and 43 percent viewing her negatively. But those numbers have flipped
in the last few weeks, according to
a new ABC News/Washington Post poll.
Women now dislike Clinton, with 52 percent holding a negative view and 45 percent holding a positive
view. This is the first time in year that more women have disliked Clinton than liked her.
Women were probably never as pro-Clinton as Democrats and liberal writers had hoped. They certainly
were never as pro-Clinton as most of the African-American community was pro-Obama. Earlier this year,
polls found Clinton's lead among women
collapsing, as
young women in particular favored her then-rival Bernie Sanders.
As Clinton has fallen in popularity among women, her rival, GOP nominee Donald Trump, has gained.
Trump has gained 7 points in favorability among women, from 26 percent in early August to a better-but-still-not-great
33 percent now.
Obviously, that doesn't mean Trump is going to end up winning women in the general election, or
that the gap between him and Clinton among women will be close. But it is interesting to see that
the changes Trump has made in his campaign - most notably his softer rhetoric - might have resulted
in this small boost.
Ashe Schow is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
At the rally in Everett, Guiliani asked rally-goers to get out their phone & text $$ to a certain
address.
I was shocked, what about "I'm funding my own campaign, I don't want your money." Guiliani
said something about how it is about gaining a big number of people who are donating. Donate $1,
if you want to, but just do it.
I was trying to think of the reasoning behind this. It was certainly counter-messaging. I would
suppose it is data-mining. Many people have multiple email addresses … it is easy to create an
anonymous email address just to get a Trump rally ticket. I thought of it myself, to avoid spam.
But most people only have one cell-phone number. Trump thanked Susan Hutchinson, head of the the
state Republican Party. I would imagine she was asking the Trump campaign to get as much info
about attendees as possible. That would explain why Guiliani and not Trump said this.
There may be another explanation. Clinton and the DNC have been running pretty insistent fund
raising campaign over the last couple of weeks as focused on number of donors as on money. Clearly
this was another version of Clinton's popularity over Trump.
As they are asking for $1 on the last day of this reporting period there could be a desire to
head that one off at the pass.
Or they could want your info, and to head that off at the pass.
If defeating Clinton is becoming more important, then voting for Trump
becomes more necessary.
I am getting more inclined all the time to vote for Trump. A vote FOR
Trump counts twice as hard aGAINST Clinton as a vote for some beautiful
Third Party.
Every ballot is a bullet on the field of political combat.
2020? To pick over the dry bones left by Bush Term 5?
Some people say a Trump presidency would be a disaster. No. We
already have a disaster.
Trump is a ridiculous blowhard buffoon. He's also against more
nation-building, questions NATO/Putin war mongering, thinks the
mainstream media is completely corrupt, wants to put the ACA out of
its misery, and actually opposes globalist trade deals. I couldn't
care less if he said mean things about Rosie O'Donnell.
You know the Republicans could have picked a better
candidate.
Oh wait they didn't do that because their intent was to hand
this to Hillary.
I'm so tired of hearing how "I have to" do things after a
small band of oligarchs chose the candidates I have to choose
from.
I don't have to vote for Trump the buffoon and I don't have
to vote for Clinton the corrupt and I can continue to not vote
for either of the duopoly. As long as you continue to play the
lesser evil game you can be assured the oligarchy is going to
continue to pick bad and worse for you.
I'm opting out of the sick and twisted game the GOP and
Democratic Party have going on and those of you who continually
vote for the bad choices you are given can blame yourselves for
the outcome(instead of projecting the outcome onto everyone who
refuses to eat the oligarchy's dog food.)
The 8-year partisan alternation pattern structurally
imposed by Amendment XXII indicates that it was the R party's
"turn."
Their intent was to hand this to Jeb! or Ted! or some
other vetted insider to claim the R party's 8 years of
spoils.
As the howls of protest and invective from Ted! made
clear, Trump's nomination was totally unplanned. Trump punked
the R party. And they still haven't gotten over their
butthurt.
Oh they left him in place because he is the perfect
buffoon to run against Queen Hillary(after all they sat
and debated whether or not to make him the nominee ad
nauseaum) and he gives the double bonus of once he loses
being able to allow them to wail, gnash their teeth and
fundraise against the Democrats and Hillary Clinton. Don't
kid yourself Clinton is interposable and will serve her
purpose just as well as Ted! or Jeb! for the oligarchy.
It's Her turn.
This is a game and the electorate are chumps that just
keep playing it.
No matter who you vote for, or don't, the US will end up with
either Clinton or Trump as prez, barring a catastrophic event, eg,
death of one or t'other.
So, you not only have to decide how you can live with who you
vote for, but you have to think about how you will live with who
you get. Maybe it won't be good enough to say, "Not the president
of me."
They're both horrible choices and I intend to prepare myself
to have to live with either of them.
I also intend to remind people that vote for team bad or team
worse that THEY are the ones who force this game to continue by
insisting that only a Democrat or Republican can win.
It won't matter if we don't live that long due to World War
Clinton with Russia. If you think Clinton poses no more danger of
nuclear annihilation than Trump would, then your logic is
impeccable.
But if you think a President Clinton poses a real and
non-trivial risk of global nuclear extermination in a way that a
President Trump just simply would not, then you might decide to
defer "vote your dreams" for now, and "vote your survival" for
Trump so you can live long enough to collect the Big Jackpot in
2024.
Both Trump and Hillary are frightening alternatives for President -
though Trump seems "the lesser of two evils". Hillary is starting to
appear like a female anti-Christ - Damiena Thorn or Nicole Carpathia -
the more I learn about her. Regardless which one wins I tend to agree
with the commenter here who suggested one of the two VP candidates
would be the acting executive.
I am tempted to vote Green just on the possibility the Green Party
might become a viable second party - especially if matching funds
become available. But I can't get past viewing the Green Party as a
clueless amalgam of underemployed ex-philosophy students.
Writing-in Sanders is tempting - but I don't trust write-ins will
be counted or reported in any meaningful way. As a last resort I can
leave President an undercount and register a "No!" vote in what seems
the best possible way to do that.
I will vote. None of the relatively good choices choices offer much
to realistically hope for and the bad choices are scary bad and
horrifyingly bad.
"But I can't get past viewing the Green Party as a clueless
amalgam of underemployed ex-philosophy students."
This made me chuckle, since many of my very best friends are
actually underemployed Phil majors, along with a healthy cohort of
underemployed art historians, medievalists etc.
"... The "Global War on Terror" ™ is now a member of the standard vocabulary of Hucksterism. Joining phrases like "Welfare Moms", "Illegal Aliens" "FreeSh#tArmy", etc. ..."
"... She cares so much about the veterans, she is going to make sure to create more of them! ..."
"... Someone should remind Hillary that presidents don't get to declare war. It's so nice to know though that she intends to carry on her proud tradition of foreign nationals having to buy their influence instead of getting it for free by way of hacking. ..."
"... I believe the Patriot Act views hacks by persons or non-governmental agencies as acts of terrorism. I'm sure I'll be corrected if this is wrong. I also had the impression the Patriot Act treats some of the kinds of sabotage commonly used in the labor movements of the last century as acts of terrorism. ..."
"... Obama's beefing up of our atomic arsenals and Hillary's push to out-hawk Obama mixed with the footsie our military and diplomacy seem inclined to play with Russia and China is extremely frightening. ..."
"... Hillary is exceptionally stupid apparently. She's been itching for a fight with Russia. There is no other explanation for Ukraine or Syria. The big ol moneypot that they can collect from war is just too tempting. ..."
It was extremely eerie
watching
Clinton deliver neo-fascist rhetoric in Ohio while an alert
flashed across the screen announcing Brazil's Senate's official removal of
Dilma Rousseff.
C-Span claims to offer transcripts, but they do not always work.
Some highlights:
– Hacks will be viewed as acts of war
– the VA will not be privatized (healthcare and education… meh those are okay)
– Quoted Reagan within the first 5-10 minutes
– We need to reevaluate our nuclear presence… to make it stronger. (!#$*)
– We are the best #MERica
Rather evilly brilliant, in the
Report From Iron Mountain
vein.
Terrorism as a permanent, amorphous threat is producing some cultural
fatigue. Good to have a War on Hackery on the back burner, since that will
never end either, and blame can be attributed freely (as the evil Russians
have already learnt to their sorrow).
The "Global War on Terror" ™ is now a member of the standard
vocabulary of Hucksterism. Joining phrases like "Welfare Moms", "Illegal
Aliens" "FreeSh#tArmy", etc.
Someone should remind Hillary that presidents don't get to declare
war. It's so nice to know though that she intends to carry on her proud
tradition of foreign nationals having to buy their influence instead of
getting it for free by way of hacking.
I believe the Patriot Act views hacks by persons or non-governmental
agencies as acts of terrorism. I'm sure I'll be corrected if this is wrong.
I also had the impression the Patriot Act treats some of the kinds of
sabotage commonly used in the labor movements of the last century as acts of
terrorism.
Obama's beefing up of our atomic arsenals and Hillary's push to
out-hawk Obama mixed with the footsie our military and diplomacy seem
inclined to play with Russia and China is extremely frightening.
This
27th of October I'll drink a shot to Vasili Arkhipov and make a little
prayer he didn't save the world in vain.
How inspiring and uplifting but than there's "Putin is Hitler" and other
masterful strokes from America's top diplomat Sect of State Clinton. She's
already earned her Noble Peace prize in Obama's tradition so let's
preemptively give it to her now and continue that precedent.
What will Clinton do when she realizes she's picking on someone who can
fight back?
BTW very interesting analysis from MoonofAlabama regarding Turkey's
invasion into Syria is not so good for US regime change in Syrian with hints
this is calculated btwn Russia/Turkey/Syria. Had assumed Turkey's invasion
was quite bad for Syria/Russia now I'm not sure.
The GWOT and Russia are meant to focus the rubes attention away from
the fact that:
-We are rapidly turning into a Banana Republic
-We have no Bananas. Or that 95% of the bananas we do have are owned
by 1% of the population, who use the money and influence generated by
having all the bananas to make sure the government doesn't interfere with
the goal of getting 100% of the remaining 5%.
– Our half-azzed GWOT has totally fooked things up in the Middle East.
Turkey, Iran and Russia are closer to the problem than we are. Doesn't
surprise me that they might cooperate in order to straighten out the
mess.
And if they can make our doofuses in Washington look like ineffectual
idiots while doing it, so much the better.
Looking back…….for a long time, even here in the USA, the US has
always backed the landowners/business owners/oligarchs/kleptocrats, when
confronted by any opposition wanting a more even "distribution of the
pie".
And since they can't say "We are going to war so US Multi-Nationals
can keep their stuff/increase their market share/gain access to raw
materials", the talk is all about "Liberating the (fill in the blank)
people from the (name of opposition dictator) regime.
Dictators turning machine guns on striking coal miners = "Repression
of worker rights"
US law enforcement/US Army turning machine guns on striking coal
miners = Suppressing Commie-inspired domestic unrest.
"Picking on someone who can fight back"
Um, America doesn't do that, we just smash the defenseless ones. And we
still lose, contrary to the Hollywood, media, and MIC myth-making. In the
main theater Putin would smash NATO in an afternoon, everywhere else it's
CIA Keystone cops, own goals, and drone bombs on kids in hospitals.
Hillary is exceptionally stupid apparently. She's been itching
for a fight with Russia. There is no other explanation for Ukraine or
Syria. The big ol moneypot that they can collect from war is just too
tempting.
Because we never misattribute hacks (see below)… I was afraid when Ronny
had access to the button, but I'm starting to get really fearful of HRC's
possible access. Saner heads in the DoD (if that can even be believed) might
have throw water on her.
It was saner heads in the DoD who restrained Obama from starting a war
against Syria. I realize many leftists are bigoted anti-militaritic anti-militarites.
That bigotry causes such left wing anti-militaritic bigots to miss some
events and trends of opinion within the military.
I am well aware of the fact the DoD already constrained Obama on
Syria. I actually am a fan of the Department of DEFENSE, yet the fact
that we have a $700B war budget shows there are many in the military
and Pentagon who are far from sane.
So we will now go to war with individuals? Or do we just declare war on
whatever country they're operating out of?
Does it count who's getting hacked? Or what? I know Hillary thinks her
private e-mails are best kept private, but do we go to war if someone hacks
them? Or do we only go to war because she mixed some state secrets in with
them? It quickly gets confusing. Or what if Hillary hacks Bill to see if
he's still messing around with Monica? Does who we go to war against depend
of whether he is or not?
And I know Hillary is pretty pissed that the DNC got hacked, but do they
count? Because a political party is more like a club, and is certainly not a
part of the government. And what about corporations? You know they're going
to want to get in on this fun. Corporate espionage? We'll declare war on
Microsoft at the request of Apple?
We're going to need a whole branch of government to figure this all out.
I was going to suggest Homeland Security, but they're pretty busy right now
bugging the reporters' interviews at the DNC lawsuit.
In the absence of strong Water Cooler leadership, we'll self-organize!!! :)
It's one poll, but ouch…..that's substantial losses among core groups of
support…
"Notably, Clinton's popularity among women has flipped from 54-43 percent
favorable-unfavorable last month to 45-52 percent now; it's the first time in a
year that most women have viewed her unfavorably. Clinton's
favorable-unfavorable rating has also flipped among those with postgraduate
degrees, from 60-39 percent in early August to 47-51 percent now. She's now
back to about where she was among postgrads in July. She has gone from about an
even split among moderates, 50-48 percent favorable-unfavorable, to a more
lopsided 41-56 percent now. Among liberals, she's dropped from 76 favorable to
63 percent favorable. And among nonwhites she's fallen from 73 to 62 percent
favorable, largely due to a 16-point drop, to 55 percent, among Hispanics."
It seems the public views Trump as a screwball and Clinton as some
inevitable vile slagheap that's slowly oozing its way to town. She'll still
probably win but I suspect her poll numbers will continue south.
"... compulsive lying can be associated with dementia or brain injury ..."
"... compulsive lying can be associated with a range of diagnoses, such as antisocial, borderline and narcissistic personality disorders. ..."
"... "This might explain Hillary's consistent unlikability factor, along with her consistent denial of lies, even in her lying about FBI Director Comey pointing out that she lied multiple times. Most of America believes her to be a liar, and yet she seems to have zero remorse, even and up to the point of costing American lives." ..."
"... In addition to pathological lying, Clinton's temper has reportedly been a problem in the past. A former military K9 handler described how then-Secretary of State Clinton once flew into a blind rage, yelling "get that f**king dog away from me." She then berated her security detail for the next 20 minutes about why the dog was in her quarters. After Clinton left after slamming the door in their faces, the leader of the detail explained to the K9 handler, "Happens every day, brother." ..."
"... "Hillary's been having screaming, child-like tantrums that have left staff members in tears and unable to work. She thought the nomination was hers for the asking, but her mounting problems have been getting to her and she's become shrill and, at times, even violent." ..."
Hillary Clinton has indeed become well known as a serial liar, as fully two-thirds
of Americans,
68 percent in a recent poll, said she was neither honest nor trustworthy.
Not only does Clinton lie to protect herself, as she has regarding Benghazi
and her private email server, but she lies when there appears to be no benefit
to doing so.
For example, she famously claimed she was named after Sir Edmund Hillary
for his conquering of Mt. Everest, even though that didn't happen until six
years after Clinton was born. She also notoriously claim she landed under sniper
fire in Bosnia in 1996, when newspaper and video accounts revealed exactly the
opposite.
"Robert Reich, M.D., a New York City psychiatrist and expert in psychopathology,
says compulsive lying can be associated with dementia or brain injury,"
Dr. Gina Loudon, a political psychology and behavior expert, told WND. "Otherwise,
compulsive lying can be associated with a range of diagnoses, such as antisocial,
borderline and narcissistic personality disorders.
"This might explain Hillary's consistent unlikability factor, along with
her consistent denial of lies, even in her lying about FBI Director Comey pointing
out that she lied multiple times. Most of America believes her to be a liar,
and yet she seems to have zero remorse, even and up to the point of costing
American lives."
In addition to pathological lying, Clinton's temper has reportedly been
a problem in the past. A former military K9 handler described how then-Secretary
of State Clinton once flew into a blind rage, yelling
"get that f**king dog away from me." She then berated her security detail
for the next 20 minutes about why the dog was in her quarters. After Clinton
left after slamming the door in their faces, the leader of the detail explained
to the K9 handler, "Happens every day, brother."
These types of outbursts continued after Hillary left her office as secretary
of state. An aide on her presidential campaign
told the New York Post last October: "Hillary's been having screaming, child-like
tantrums that have left staff members in tears and unable to work. She thought
the nomination was hers for the asking, but her mounting problems have been
getting to her and she's become shrill and, at times, even violent."
How Hillary can defend herself from two major and intermixed scandals: emailgate and Clinton cash
is unclear to me. Also her strong reputation of a neocon warmonger represents serious weakness
on any foreign policy discussion. Essentially she can be buried just with the list of her ;achievements".
So Trump is deeply right when he said "It can be dangerous. You can sound scripted or phony - like you're
trying to be someone you're not." Cards are on the table. They just need to be played.
"I believe you can prep too much for those things," Mr. Trump said in an interview last week.
"It can be dangerous. You can sound scripted or phony - like you're trying to be someone you're not."
she is searching for ways to bait him into making blunders. Mr. Trump, a supremely confident communicator,
wants viewers to see him as a truth-telling political outsider and trusts that he can box in Mrs.
Clinton on her ethics and honesty.
He has been especially resistant to his advisers' suggestions that he take part in mock debates with
a Clinton stand-in. At their first session devoted to the debate, on Aug. 21 at Mr. Trump's club
in Bedminster, N.J., the conservative radio host Laura Ingraham was on hand to offer counsel and,
if Mr. Trump was game, to play Mrs. Clinton, said Trump advisers who spoke on the condition of anonymity
because the debate preparations were supposed to be kept private. He declined.
Instead, Mr. Trump asked a battery of questions about debate topics, Mrs. Clinton's skills and possible
moderators, but people close to him said relatively little had been accomplished.
...
"I know who I am, and it got me here," Mr. Trump said, boasting of success in his 11 primary debate
appearances and in capturing the Republican nomination over veteran politicians and polished debaters.
"I don't want to present a false front. I mean, it's possible we'll do a mock debate, but I don't
see a real need."
Mr. Trump is certain that he holds advantages here, saying Mrs. Clinton is likely to come across
as a typical politician spouting rehearsed lines.
"... the person who set up her email should have set up "filters and alerts that said any email that came with a classified header." ..."
"... You know, create an alert that says this shouldn't be on this system and deal with it so that you don't, you know, consume it in this way. But the administrator didn't do it and she didn't know to do it because the whole time she had a very specific process in place. If it is classified, print it out and let me deal with it in hard copy, which is why she had complete confidence to say, 'I never dealt with anything marked classified.'" ..."
Monday night on "CNN Tonight," supporter of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, billionaire
Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, said Clinton did nothing wrong because the person who set up her
email should have set up "filters and alerts that said any email that came with a classified header."
...
And so you go - look, I was in this business. My first career, my first company, all I did was install
local area networks and messaging and email systems and I had my own personal server in my office
until about 2010, and so I've been through this whole process. And so she talks to the admin who
is responsible, she doesn't know any better, and takes his or her advice."
"I think it was a he,"
he continued. "And it just so happens that he was given immunity by the Justice Department so we
haven't had a chance to hear any of this. But for that personal server, if that admin had done his
job like I had done my job doing the same thing, I would have set up filters and alerts that said
any email that came with a classified header or any of the determined classified markings like the
little 'c' Director Comey mentioned, pop it out, right?
You know, create an alert that says this shouldn't be on this system and deal with it so that
you don't, you know, consume it in this way. But the administrator didn't do it and she didn't know
to do it because the whole time she had a very specific process in place. If it is classified, print
it out and let me deal with it in hard copy, which is why she had complete confidence to say, 'I
never dealt with anything marked classified.'"
Agreeing with the 50 former Republican security officials who have called Trump "dangerous," Wolfowitz
ultimately admitted that he has no choice but to vote for Clinton.
"I wish there were somebody I could be comfortable voting for," he continued. "I might have to
vote for Hillary Clinton, even though I have big reservations about her."
Wolfowitz served as deputy secretary leading up to and during the Iraq war, a regime Trump has
been highly critical of since it began. Clinton, on the other hand. voted for the war, a point that
has been widely criticized by her opponents
"... Referring to Clinton again, Miller tells The American Mirror, "She is a Gloria Steinem kind of feminist. If you've ever seen picture or heard Gloria Steinem, just a cold, conniving bitch. That's just it. ..."
"... "Hillary could never had made it to Washington, DC without Bill. He was the song and dance routine. He's the one that played the sax and he could laugh and joke and talk and Hillary can't do that. ..."
... "They've gotta see her as a human. They have to see her - I think in society they always say,
'If you were a mother, you can't be half bad. There has to be some love or gentleness or compassion
within in you birth a child,' but that's not true.
"There's some pretty bad mothers. I had one,"
Miller says. She said her mother had abused her for years.
Referring to Clinton again, Miller tells The American Mirror, "She is a Gloria Steinem
kind of feminist. If you've ever seen picture or heard Gloria Steinem, just a cold, conniving bitch.
That's just it.
"And they don't care about anyone but themselves. That's what most feminists are all about. It's
about themselves," according to Miller.
"And most of them don't link men, incidentally. They only use men for income (and) appearance.
"Hillary could never had made it to Washington, DC without Bill. He was the song and dance routine.
He's the one that played the sax and he could laugh and joke and talk and Hillary can't do that.
"She can't put on her black nightie and run around and she can't play the sax," Miller says, referring
to her previous claim that, during their trysts, Bill Clinton would wear Miller's nightie and play
his instrument.
All you women who think you can climb the ladder of success, Hillary did by sleeping with the
Partners of the Rose Law firm. Chelsea is the byproduct of that so called feminist, Hillary Rotten
Clinton....
I prefer /dev/random and three passes, if I have any intention of using the drive later. If
I were involved in anything seriously malfeasant where using the drive later were not a consideration,
I'd be following the
established procedures of the masters of the art. (NSA)
The Senate minority leader,
Harry Reid of Nevada, asked the
F.B.I. on Monday to investigate evidence suggesting that Russia may try to manipulate voting
results in November.
In a letter to the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey Jr., Mr. Reid wrote that the threat of Russian
interference "is more extensive than is widely known and may include the intent to falsify official
election results." Recent classified briefings from senior intelligence officials, Mr. Reid said
in an interview, have left him fearful that President Vladimir V. Putin's "goal is tampering with
this election."
News reports on Monday said the F.B.I. warned state election officials several weeks ago that
foreign hackers had exported voter registration data from computer systems in at least one state,
and had pierced the systems of a second one.
The bureau did not name the states, but
Yahoo News , which first reported the confidential F.B.I. warning, said they were Arizona and
Illinois. Matt Roberts, a spokesman for Arizona's secretary of state, said the F.B.I. had told state
officials that Russians were behind the Arizona attack.
After the F.B.I. warning, Arizona took its voter registration database offline from June 28 to
July 8 to allow for a forensic exam of its systems, Mr. Roberts said.
The F.B.I., in its notice to states, said the voter information had been "exfiltrated," which
means that it was shipped out of the state systems to another computer. But it does not mean that
the data itself was tampered with.
It is unclear whether the hackers intended to affect the election or pursued the data for other
purposes, like gaining personal identifying information about voters. The F.B.I. warning referred
to "targeting activity" against state boards of elections, but did not discuss the intent of the
hackers.
"... As you note, its not clear that we in the US need ANY immigration; it's hard to claim that 300 million people is not enough. If we choose to allow immigration, it should be few and strongly selective, i.e. the cream of the crop and selected to benefit the US. ..."
"... But it benefits the Mandarin class, so opposition or even debate been defined by them as heresy. It appears that the non-Mandarin class, who has to live with the downsides, is staring to reject this orthodoxy. ..."
"... We import, legally, 50,000 people (plus families IIRC) via a random visa lottery. This verges on insanity. ..."
"... H1-B applicants require a BA or equivalent, but are then selected by lottery. Hardly selected specifically for the needs of the country. In 2015, 6 of the top 10 firms by number of applications approved were Indian IT firms (i.e. outsourcing. I'm sure you are aware of the long term and recent complaints concerning direct replacement of US citizens by these workers. ..."
"... I find the system you describe which relies, by design, on perpetually importing new waves of a helot underclass to be both immoral and unsustainable. ..."
It's remarkable how rarely the immigration debate is prefaced with an explicit
prior that we should give absolute priority to what is best for the receiving
county and their citizens.
As you note, its not clear that we in the US need ANY immigration;
it's hard to claim that 300 million people is not enough. If we choose to
allow immigration, it should be few and strongly selective, i.e. the cream
of the crop and selected to benefit the US.
Its not credible to complain about low employment/population ratios,
limited wage pressures, high poverty rates, overburdened social safety nets,
limited prospects for those on the left side of the bell curve, and inequality,
and simultaneously support more immigration of the poor, unskilled, or difficult
to assimilate.
But it benefits the Mandarin class, so opposition or even debate
been defined by them as heresy. It appears that the non-Mandarin class,
who has to live with the downsides, is staring to reject this orthodoxy.
We import, legally, 50,000 people (plus families IIRC) via a random
visa lottery. This verges on insanity.
H1-B applicants require a BA or equivalent, but are then selected
by lottery. Hardly selected specifically for the needs of the country. In
2015, 6 of the top 10 firms by number of applications approved were Indian
IT firms (i.e. outsourcing. I'm sure you are aware of the long term and
recent complaints concerning direct replacement of US citizens by these
workers.
I'm in favor of significant penalties for employing illegal workers.
Yes lets debate who is going to take care of washing and changing adult
diapers on 80 million baby boomers as they deteriorate towards their final
resting place, and who is going to dig the holes if we have deported all
those who know which end of a shovel is the business end.
"... Neoliberals use the term "alt-right" as shorthand for those who don't drink the Clinton neocon Kool-Aid. ..."
"... The bigotry of warmongering neoliberals against anyone who disagrees. ..."
"... The alt.* hierarchy is a major class of newsgroups in Usenet, containing all newsgroups whose name begins with "alt.", organized hierarchically. The alt.* hierarchy is not confined to newsgroups of any specific subject or type, although in practice more formally organized groups tend not to occur in alt.*. ... (Wikipedia) ..."
"... It basically was like snorting a line of Cocaine. We keep on going back and it is getting less and less pleasurable. ..."
"... The final stage will probably be the stripping of all national function with the economy. Much like the free market intellectuals want. This will finally expose it. White's will know. The government they were taught to hate, liquidated, instead a new market state replaced. Their democracy decayed and Capitalists running international slave states instead pushing less product for their indentured servitude. Then we are right back to Bismark and Wells. ..."
The burgeoning neolib dog whistle "alt-right" is short for "a$$hole
who thinks Clinton should go to jail for 1000 times the misconduct that
would get that a$$hole 10 years hard time".
Neoliberals use the term "alt-right" as shorthand for those who don't
drink the Clinton neocon Kool-Aid.
The bigotry of warmongering neoliberals against anyone who disagrees.
Fred C. Dobbs -> anne...
(So-called 'alt groups' have been around
since the earliest days of the internet.)
The alt.* hierarchy is a major class of newsgroups in Usenet, containing
all newsgroups whose name begins with "alt.", organized hierarchically.
The alt.* hierarchy is not confined to newsgroups of any specific subject
or type, although in practice more formally organized groups tend not to
occur in alt.*. ... (Wikipedia)
Ben Groves :
There are a lot of Jews in the "Alt-Right"(aka, a Spencer invented term,
that they need to at least admit). Most have ties to neo-conservatism in
their past outside the desperate paleo types hanging on. To me, they are
"racist", but lets face it, the gentile left can just be as racist and historically,
more dangerous. Trying to be reactionary is just not a neo-liberal thing.
Fabians were quite racist as HG Wells outright said he was. Their vision
of globalism was a Eurocentric world of socialism and those 3rd world "brownies"
were setting socialism back and needed it to be enforced on them. The Nazi's
took Fabian economics and that dream to the nadir.
The problem is, the 'Alt-Right' is so upfront about it with a typical
neo-liberal economic plan. Even their "nationalism" has a * by it. Economic
Nationalism isn't just about trade deals, but a organic, cohesive flow to
the nation. Being in business isn't about stuffing your pockets, it is about
serving your country and indeed, stuff like the Epi-pen price hikes would
be considered treason. You would lower your prices or off with your head.
This, is a area where the "Alt-Right" doesn't want to do. They are not true
connies in the Bismark-ian sense. They want a nominal judeo-christianity
inside a classically liberal mindset of market expansion where white's pull
the strings. That is simply dialectical conflict. Who invented capitalism?
It was Sephardic Jews(say, unlike Communism which attracted Ashkenazi much
to Herr Weitling chagrin). Modern materialism is all things like Trump really
care about. So do his handlers like Spencer. Without the Jews, there is
no capitalism period. They financed it through several different methods
since the 1600's. Even the American Revolution was financed by them and
the founders absolutely knew where the bread was buttered. The Great Depression
was really the death rattle of the House of Rothschild and its British Empire(with
the Federal Reserve pushing on the string to completely destroy them, but
that is another post for another time). Capitalism as a system does not
work and never has worked.
It basically was like snorting a line of Cocaine. We keep on going
back and it is getting less and less pleasurable.
The final stage will probably be the stripping of all national function
with the economy. Much like the free market intellectuals want. This will
finally expose it. White's will know. The government they were taught to
hate, liquidated, instead a new market state replaced. Their democracy decayed
and Capitalists running international slave states instead pushing less
product for their indentured servitude. Then we are right back to Bismark
and Wells.
ilsm -> Ben Groves, -1
"gentile left" bigotry is founded against po' white folk who are not as
educated in the logical fallacies the limo libruls use to continue plundering
them.
Everyone is so busy calling out Trumpistas they do not see their own
"inclusive frailty".
The immigration issue is the democrats' effort to distract Donald Trump's
outreach to the black community . . .
Mr. Trump has provided enough information on immigration. He has to put
the press and everyone else on notice: "He said enough for now!!!" The "flip-flop"
issue is minor at this point.
What's important is the "black vote" as his only logical road to the
White House. Mr. Trump must make it clear to the black community that he
needs their help.
He has little time and should immediately apologize for the Republican
Party's mistake of accepting the democrats' decades of influence over the
black community.
He must confront the Democratic Party's decades of neglect of minorities
(and the poor). What's "historical" about Donald Trump" campaign is he actually
represents "racial unity."
Those supporting Trump have the common bond of "poverty." Like President
Johnson he needs to use "poverty" to overcome a preceding president's popularity.
He has as his political base "poor whites." His efforts now must focus on
"winning" the support of "poor blacks."
He has "ONE JOB" as this point if he wants to be president . . . He must
make the black community understand "the opportunity presented."
Mr. Trump must go directly to the black community (not the black establishment
political brokers) and make things "clear" that a "VOTE" for Trump is the
black community's only available opportunity for racial equality.
Likewise, Mr. Trump needs to have his "poor white" political base understand
the importance of "moving past" those things that have separated us. Mr.
Trump needs "racial unity" rallies from this point forward.
The immigration issue is how he won the primaries and it is the issue that
has made him popular with his fans. It is typically the focus of his speeches.
How can you suggest that the democrats are attempting to distract anyone
on immigration? Trump is the one who talks about it constantly.
"... Your article fails to make a clear enough distinction between legal and illegal immigration. It suggests Trump is anti-immigration and anti-immigrants - which is not the case. This is a common error in the debate. ..."
"... You are so silly. How many times has Hillary changed her mind on immigration? In fact, I am sure all of you recall a time when she suggested a fence and deportation. ..."
"... Here's Hillary in favor of a wall and deportations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DckY2dRFtxc ..."
"... Hungary and Norway way are building walls..Israel has several ..Mexico put up one for the Guatemalen exodus..in the mean time Hillarys plan for improving Jobs for Black youth is importing tens of thousand more ..."
"... One of the prime reasons for the increase in illegal immigration from Mexico was NAFTA, which ended up displacing hundreds of thousands of farm owners and millions of farm workers due to NAFTA regulations. ..."
The immigration issue is the democrats' effort to distract Donald Trump's
outreach to the black community . . .
Mr. Trump has provided enough information on immigration. He has to put
the press and everyone else on notice: "He said enough for now!!!" The "flip-flop"
issue is minor at this point.
What's important is the "black vote" as his only logical road to the
White House. Mr. Trump must make it clear to the black community that he
needs their help.
He has little time and should immediately apologize for the Republican
Party's mistake of accepting the democrats' decades of influence over the
black community.
He must confront the Democratic Party's decades of neglect of minorities
(and the poor). What's "historical" about Donald Trump" campaign is he actually
represents "racial unity."
Those supporting Trump have the common bond of "poverty." Like President
Johnson he needs to use "poverty" to overcome a preceding president's popularity.
He has as his political base "poor whites." His efforts now must focus on
"winning" the support of "poor blacks."
He has "ONE JOB" as this point if he wants to be president . . . He must
make the black community understand "the opportunity presented."
Mr. Trump must go directly to the black community (not the black establishment
political brokers) and make things "clear" that a "VOTE" for Trump is the
black community's only available opportunity for racial equality.
Likewise, Mr. Trump needs to have his "poor white" political base understand
the importance of "moving past" those things that have separated us. Mr.
Trump needs "racial unity" rallies from this point forward.
Your article fails to make a clear enough distinction between legal
and illegal immigration. It suggests Trump is anti-immigration and
anti-immigrants - which is not the case. This is a common error in the
debate.
You are so silly.
How many times has Hillary changed her mind on immigration? In fact, I am sure all of you recall a time when she suggested a fence
and deportation.
Hungary and Norway way are building walls..Israel has several ..Mexico put
up one for the Guatemalen exodus..in the mean time Hillarys plan for improving
Jobs for Black youth is importing tens of thousand more .
If they are so good why doesn't Europe take them for us..
What gets lost in all of this how the USA allowed Mexico to spiral into
the corrupt, poor country they currently are.
It's time for the US to get firm with Mexico and help them get on their
feet - which their corrupt leaders will hate, but tough shit. There is no
excuse to border the United States of America and have such poor living
standards for their people.
Although not ideal, a wall is a very direct message to Mexico's govt
that the US will not tolerate their corrupt government and drug cartels.
What's wrong with Trump changing his stance? He listened to his supporters
(most of whom think some type of amnesty is appropriate) and tweaked his
immigration plan.. *gasp*
It seems like a mature, reasonable move from an intelligent strong leader
- which Trump is.
He will be an excellent President.
One of the prime reasons for the increase in illegal immigration from Mexico
was NAFTA, which ended up displacing hundreds of thousands of farm owners
and millions of farm workers due to NAFTA regulations.
The trouble with both candidates is the Believability Factor. No mater
what they may say, it's doubtful they will do what they say. There needs
to be election laws that make ignoring campaign 'promises' once in office
impeachable.
Trump's original platform of deporting 11 million illegals isn't doable.
That would involve round-ups and incarcerations last seen in Nazi Germany.
I don't think the American people at large would stand for that.
So the spiel has been morphing into something more palatable to Joe Average.
He keeps trying to placate his base by having his surrogates assure them
that nothing has changed but it obviously has.
"... the one thing about intelligence is we should stand for truth to power-meaning we should always say what we believe, and lay the facts out, lay the tough right facts out and then you let the policymakers make the decisions that they have to make. What has happened in the last 10 years, frankly in the last 8 years, is we have seen a level of dishonesty coming out of both the policy and the decision making structure with the American people." ..."
"... Because of the President's and the Secretary of State's-among other officials in the Obama administration-unwillingness to hear all the facts, including ones they needed to but didn't want to hear, Flynn says the President has presented a narrative to the American people about the war on terrorism and radical Islamism that is simply inaccurate. ..."
"... The intelligence process starts really at the ground level, but the priorities-the priorities, Matt, for an intelligence system and the intelligence community in our country and that's the President of the United States. ..."
"... "That means infiltrating into refugee populations, that means conducting of smart information operations," Flynn said. "Most people don't know but these guys have very sophisticated information operations going on, with publications of magazines and websites. They have leaders in their groups that have thousands and thousands-I'm talking tens of thousands of followers on social media and Instagram and Twitter. ..."
"... Then I call for in the book a new 21st century alliance. This is where we really come to how we take the Arab community to task on how they plan to fix this cancerous disease inside of their own body that has metastasized and grown exponentially over the last five or six years and certainly actually over the last eight to 10 years. So it's one thing to go after the ideology, just like we went after Communism for 40 years ..."
"... He is a street savvy strategic leader type person who has a vision for this country, and he's turned it into this phrase of 'Make America Great Again.'" ..."
NEW YORK CITY, New York - Retired Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, who served for more than two years as
the director of President Barack Obama's Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), leveled explosive charges
against the President and his former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in an exclusive hour-long
interview with Breitbart News Daily on Friday.
Specifically, during an exclusive interview about his book
The Field of Fight , Flynn said that Obama and Clinton were not interested in hearing
intelligence that did not fit their "happy talk" narrative about the Middle East. In fact, he alleged
the administration actively scrubbed training manuals and purged from the military ranks any thinking
about the concept of radical Islamism. Flynn argued that this effort by Obama, Clinton and others
to reduce the intelligence community to gathering only facts that the senior administration officials
wanted to hear-rather than what they needed to hear-helped the enemy fester and grow, while weakening
the United States on the world stage.
"The administration has basically denied the fact that we have this problem with 'Radical Islamists,'"
Flynn said during the interview. "And this is a very vicious, barbaric enemy and I recognize in the
book that there is an alliance of countries that are dedicated basically against our way of life
and they support different groups in the Islamic movement, principally the Islamic State and formerly
Al Qaeda-although Al Qaeda still exists. The administration denied the fact that this even existed
and then told those of us in the government to basically excise the phrase 'radical Islamism' out
of our entire culture, out of our training manuals, everything. That was a big argument I had internally
and I talked a little bit about it in the Senate testimony that I gave two years back."
Later in the interview, Flynn was even more specific, calling out Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama
for not wanting to hear all the facts about what was happening in the Middle East-only some of them.
"There's a narrative that the President and his team, including Hillary Clinton, wanted to
hear-instead of having the tough news or the bad news if you will that they needed to hear," Flynn
said. "Now, there's a big difference. And the one thing about intelligence is we should stand
for truth to power-meaning we should always say what we believe, and lay the facts out, lay the
tough right facts out and then you let the policymakers make the decisions that they have to make.
What has happened in the last 10 years, frankly in the last 8 years, is we have seen a level of
dishonesty coming out of both the policy and the decision making structure with the American people."
Because of the President's and the Secretary of State's-among other officials in the Obama
administration-unwillingness to hear all the facts, including ones they needed to but didn't want
to hear, Flynn says the President has presented a narrative to the American people about the war
on terrorism and radical Islamism that is simply inaccurate.
"The President has said they're jayvee, they're on the run, they're not that strong, what difference
does it make what we call-that's being totally dishonest with the American public," Flynn said.
"There's one thing that Americans are, and we're tough, resilient people but we have to be told
the truth. I think what a lot of this is, in fact what I know a lot of it is. It's a lot of happy
talk from a President who did not meet the narrative of his political ideology or his political
decision-making process to take our country in a completely different direction and frankly that's
why I'm sitting here talking to you here today, Matt. The intelligence process starts really
at the ground level, but the priorities-the priorities, Matt, for an intelligence system and the
intelligence community in our country and that's the President of the United States. "
The Obama administration's refusal to take these threats seriously and his, Flynn said, "has allowed
an enemy that is using very smart, savvy means to impact our way of life."
"That means infiltrating into refugee populations, that means conducting of smart information
operations," Flynn said. "Most people don't know but these guys have very sophisticated information
operations going on, with publications of magazines and websites. They have leaders in their groups
that have thousands and thousands-I'm talking tens of thousands of followers on social media and
Instagram and Twitter. So we are not even allowed to go after these kinds of things right
now. This is the problem-it's a big problem. In fact, if we don't change this we're going to see
this strengthening in our homeland."
Flynn also laid out how to defeat radical Islamism, a plan he has stated repeatedly that the Obama
Administration has ignored.
"The very first thing is we have to clearly define the enemy and we have to get our own house
in order, which this administration has not done," Flynn said. "We have to figure out how are
we going to organize ourselves. Then I call for in the book a new 21st century alliance. This
is where we really come to how we take the Arab community to task on how they plan to fix this
cancerous disease inside of their own body that has metastasized and grown exponentially over
the last five or six years and certainly actually over the last eight to 10 years. So it's one
thing to go after the ideology, just like we went after Communism for 40 years , but I also
say in the book we have to crush this enemy wherever they exist. We cannot allow them to have
any safe haven. We are dancing around the sort of head of a pin, when we know these guys are in
certain places around the world and our military is not allowed to go in there and get them. The
'mother may I' has to go all the way back up to the White House."
He said the fight has to be very similar to how the United States, over decades, thoroughly degraded
Communism on the world stage.
"There's no enemy that's unbeatable," Flynn said. "We can beat any enemy. We put our minds
to it, we decide to do that, we can beat any enemy. And there's no ideology in the world that's
better than the American ideology. We should not allow, because they mask themselves behind the
religion of Islam, we should not allow our ideology, our way of life, our system of principles,
our values that are based on a Judeo-Christian set that comes right out of our Constitution-we
should not fear that. In fact, we should fight those that try to impose a different way of life
on us. That's what we did against the Nazis, that's what we did against the Communists for the
better part of a half a century-in fact, more than half a century. Now we are dealing with another
Ism, and that's radical Islamism, and we're going to have to fight it-and we're going to be fighting
it for some time. But tactically we can defeat this enemy quickly. Then what we have to do is
we have to fight the ideology, and we can do that diplomatically, politically, informationally
and we can do that in very, very smart ways much greater than we're doing right now."
Flynn is a lifelong Democrat, and again served in this senior Obama administration position for
more than two years, but is now publicly supporting Republican nominee Donald Trump for president.
He spoke at the Republican National Convention in support of Trump, and has been publicly speaking
out in favor of the GOP nominee for some time now.
"My role as Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency-that's almost a 20,000 person organization
in 140 plus countries around the world," Flynn said. "I was also the senior military and intelligence
officer not only for the Defense Department but for the country. So I mean I was basically told
'hey, you know what, what you're saying we don't like. So you're out.' To Donald Trump, though,
and I haven't known him that long but I met him a year ago-in fact a year ago this month. The
conversation that we had, which was an amazing conversation, I found a guy that like I to say,
'he gets it.' He gets it. He is a street savvy strategic leader type person who has a vision
for this country, and he's turned it into this phrase of 'Make America Great Again.'"
... ... ...
LISTEN TO LT. GEN. MICHAEL FLYNN ON BREITBART NEWS DAILY ON SIRIUSXM 125 THE PATRIOT CHANNEL:
"... With Huma becoming a lightening rod of the whole access issue, the cynical part of me figures this is not an ill timed, but well timed family tragedy with a sympathetic hard working mistreated wife… ..."
"... It isn't that it happened. It is the timing. ..."
"... Oh for heaven's sake! Clearly the man is compulsive, he will never stop. And he is willing to risk job, career and family for his addiction. Kudos to Huma for putting the well-being of her child first and leaving him sort out his addiction by himself .! ..."
"... "I think it's a little – it's often a little more challenging when you're in politics because your private life, and I think everybody craves their own privacy, and so I think your private life is displayed to the world in a way that you otherwise wouldn't have to deal with if one spouse is a private person and the other person's in politics as was the case certainly in my marriage," Abedin said. ..."
"... "But I think it works if you fully support each other." During the podcast, she mentioned she is on out on the campaign trail a lot of the time and her husband helps to care for her son. " I have a four-year-old son and I don't think I could do this if I didn't have the support of a spouse who is willing to basically be a stay-at- home dad as much as he possibly can so I'm able to be on the road," Abedin said. ..."
"... "I miss my son but I don't worry about him because I know between this little village we've created between Anthony and my in-laws and my mom and our families and this wonderful woman who we have helping us I can go out and be the best professional woman that I can be because I have that support." ..."
With Huma becoming a lightening rod of the whole access issue, the cynical part of me figures
this is not an ill timed, but well timed family tragedy with a sympathetic hard working mistreated
wife…
I mean if the mayoral campaign blowup of his career comeback for the same issues… (done on
camera no less).
No, it isn't beyond credulity. I never said he didn't do it. But apparently this has been going
on since last year with a woman he has never met. And unless I missed something, she leaked this.
Why out this now? Other times he goofed and it was public, OR was done to upset his comeback weak
though it might have been. But why now? At some point in the next few days some advantage for
the woman may change my mind, but otherwise it is very convenient.
Read the comments on the little Abedin story, and one has to conclude that our species is mostly
Fokked. I particularly like this one:
Oh for heaven's sake! Clearly the man is compulsive, he will never stop. And he is willing
to risk job, career and family for his addiction. Kudos to Huma for putting the well-being
of her child first and leaving him sort out his addiction by himself .!
Which follows this text from the article:
"I think it's a little – it's often a little more challenging when you're in politics
because your private life, and I think everybody craves their own privacy, and so I think your
private life is displayed to the world in a way that you otherwise wouldn't have to deal with
if one spouse is a private person and the other person's in politics as was the case certainly
in my marriage," Abedin said.
"But I think it works if you fully support each other."
During the podcast, she mentioned she is on out on the campaign trail a lot of the time
and her husband helps to care for her son.
" I have a four-year-old son and I don't think I could do this if I didn't have
the support of a spouse who is willing to basically be a stay-at- home dad as much as he possibly
can so I'm able to be on the road," Abedin said.
"I miss my son but I don't worry about him because I know between this little village
we've created between Anthony and my in-laws and my mom and our families and this wonderful
woman who we have helping us I can go out and be the best professional woman that I can be
because I have that support."
Big Jim Thompson, former US Attorney in Chicago and former Governor of Illinois, got married
to a former assistant US attorney and a child was somehow produced. Little Samantha was, like
the marriage from the gossip I heard and pontificating in the papers, just popped out to scotch
rumors about Thompson's polarity.
The salient part of the tale is that while Thompson was out campaigning with his spouse, with
Baby Samantha in tow, neither parent noticed that the kid was, like, seriously sick, fever as
I recall of over 104 degrees, and some brave campaign worker had to do the parenting thing and
see the kid got medical attention.
Reported that Thompson et ux were irked that this threw the campaign schedule off. Did not
keep him from getting elected… This guy was also on the "9/11 Commission," and has lots of other
notable corruption connection credentials:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_R._Thompson
One claim to fame was obtaining conviction of former Governor Otto Kerner for public corruption,
taking race track stock for helping the track owners get more racing dates. Chief witness was
Marge Everett, attorney for the racetrack corporation. She got disbarred in IL, so Thompson flew
her personally to CA and testified on her behalf before the "fitness committee" of the CA bar,
that she was an upright moral person fit to be admitted to the CA bar. Shortly after, as I recall,
ol' Marge got in trouble for peddling stock and other valuables to the CA officials who oversaw
the doling out of racing dates (ka-ching!) to her new client, a CA racetrack corporation…
"I have a four-year-old son and I don't think I could do this if I didn't have the support
of a spouse who is willing to basically be a stay-at- home dad as much as he possibly can so
I'm able to be on the road," Abedin said.
With Basic Income, maybe she can stay home as well…
"... If we believe the mainstream media and the Establishment it protects and promotes, Trump has no chance of winning the presidential election. For starters, Trump supporters are all Confederate-flag waving hillbillies, bigots, fascists and misogynists. In other words. "good people" can't possibly vote for Trump. Even cartoon character Mike Doonesbury is fleeing to Vancouver to escape Trump_vs_deep_state. (Memo to the Doonesbury family: selling your Seattle home will barely net the down payment on a decent crib in Vancouver.). For another, Trump alienates the entire planet every time he speaks. The list goes on, of course, continuing with his lack of qualifications. ..."
"... But suppose this election isn't about Trump or Hillary at all. Suppose, as political scientists Allan J. Lichtman and Ken DeCell claimed in their 1988 book, Thirteen Keys to the Presidency , that all presidential elections from 1860 to the present are referendums on the sitting president and his party. ..."
"... Author/historian Robert W. Merry sorts through the 13 analytic keys in the current issue of The American Conservative magazine and concludes they "could pose bad news for Clinton." ..."
Based on this analytic structure, Trump may not just win the election in November--he might
win by a landslide.
If we believe the mainstream media and the Establishment it protects and promotes, Trump has
no chance of winning the presidential election. For starters, Trump supporters are all Confederate-flag
waving hillbillies, bigots, fascists and misogynists. In other words. "good people" can't possibly
vote for Trump. Even cartoon character Mike Doonesbury is fleeing to Vancouver to escape Trump_vs_deep_state. (Memo to the
Doonesbury family: selling your Seattle home will barely net the down payment on a decent crib in
Vancouver.). For another, Trump alienates the entire planet every time he speaks. The list goes on, of course, continuing with his lack of qualifications.
But suppose this election isn't about Trump or Hillary at all. Suppose, as political scientists
Allan J. Lichtman and Ken DeCell claimed in their 1988 book,
Thirteen Keys to the Presidency , that all presidential elections from 1860 to the present are
referendums on the sitting president and his party.
If the public views the sitting president's second term favorably, the candidate from his party
will win the election. If the public views the sitting president's second term unfavorably, the candidate
from the other party will win the election.
Author/historian Robert W. Merry sorts through the 13 analytic keys in the current issue of
The American
Conservative magazine and concludes they "could pose bad news for Clinton."
If five or fewer are negative for the incumbent, the incumbent party will win the election. If
six or more are negative, the incumbent party loses the election. Merry counts eight negatives for
President Obama's second term, which if true spells defeat for the Clinton ticket.
"... The Clinton campaign has deliberately positioned its response as an offensive boomerang rather than a rebuttal: Don't defend against the attacks, just redirect fire at the messenger ..."
"... But the politics are made harder amid the drip-drip revelations from the newly released emails demonstrating the messy overlap between the Clinton Foundation and the State Department, which leave even many Clinton-inclined voters wondering what she was really up to and why it's so hard for her to explain it. ..."
The Clinton campaign has deliberately positioned its response as an offensive boomerang rather
than a rebuttal: Don't defend against the attacks, just redirect fire at the messenger. "It holds
up a mirror to Donald Trump and what his campaign is about, and says everything you need to know
about Donald Trump and where these kinds of crazy conspiracy theories are coming from," as one
campaign aide put it.
... ... ...
But the politics are made harder amid the drip-drip revelations from the newly released emails
demonstrating the messy overlap between the Clinton Foundation and the State Department, which
leave even many Clinton-inclined voters wondering what she was really up to and why it's so hard
for her to explain it.
"... The media's obsession with reporting every drop of saliva to emerge from Donald Trump's mouth for the last year and a half, accompanied by requisite pearl clutching and gasps of offense, wasn't done by accident. Instead, it was a carefully planned campaign to set the bulk of the American populace up to automatically discard any criticism of the Clinton Cult without question ..."
"... What all that does accomplish, however, is generate the mindset that is now terrifying in its willingness to completely ignore any and all facts that the Clinton Foundation is a huge money-laundering organization. ..."
The media's obsession with reporting every drop of saliva to emerge from
Donald Trump's mouth for the last year and a half, accompanied by requisite
pearl clutching and gasps of offense, wasn't done by accident. Instead, it was
a carefully planned campaign to set the bulk of the American populace up to
automatically discard any criticism of the Clinton Cult without question
,
because the Cultists use the language and connections that have been inserted
into the national psyche as being Trump-related.
So, having made a great fuss over how Trump admires Putin, and spreading the
theme that Putin would love to have Trump in the Oval Office, they then embrace
with enthusiasm the contention of the DNC that their databases were "hacked by
Russians, probably at the behest of government agencies," even though there was
no possible way that could have been determined if, as they contend, they
weren't aware of the hack until just a few months ago. Oh, and it helps if you
believe Russian intelligence agencies are going to hire hackers stupid enough
to all but leave their names and addresses around to be "discovered."
What all that does accomplish, however, is generate the mindset that is
now terrifying in its willingness to completely ignore any and all facts that
the Clinton Foundation is a huge money-laundering organization.
I have
seen people who take great pride in their skepticism dismiss the multiple
articles exposing the corruption as "unfounded rubbish." I've been told the AP
article is "a farce." Point them to articles by qualified professionals showing
the utter absence of any proof the Clinton Foundation is a philanthropic
organization for anyone but the people it's named for, and the dismissal is
abrupt and total.
I don't know if it's cultism or just that people know she's going to be
elected and don't want to think about the consequences, but the vast number of
those who won't even consider shenanigans is appalling. It's all part of that
Republican conspiracy, and that's all they care to know.
Hillary Clinton's pay-for-play scandal is threatening to derail her campaign.
Public outrage follows revelations that the Foundation took foreign cash during
Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State, that Clinton aide Huma Abedin was
helping Foundation donors get favors and access from the State Department, and
that Clinton aide Cheryl Mills was doing assignments for the Clinton Foundation
while on the State Department payroll.
In a letter Monday to Foundation president Donna Shalala, Priebus demands
transparency.
"I am writing to you to call on the Clinton Foundation and all of the entities
under its umbrella to release all correspondence its officials had with the State
Department during Hillary Clinton's tenure as secretary of state," Priebus added.
As I am sure you are well aware, a spate of recent news reports involving
the Clinton Foundation's relationship with the Clinton State Department has
renewed serious concerns about conflicts of interest and whether donors to the
foundation benefitted from official acts under then-Secretary Clinton.
"It isn't just "suspicious." It's influence peddling, which is corrupt
by definition. And there's a whole infrastructure, institutional and technical, to support it." Lambert Strether of
Corrente.
Notable quotes:
"... here you have Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton having this Clinton Foundation, with billions of dollars pouring into it from some of the world's worst tyrannies ..."
"... Bill and Hillary Clinton are being personally enriched by those same people, doing speeches, for many hundreds of thousands of dollars, in front of them, at the same time that she's running the State Department, getting ready to run for president, and soon will be running the executive branch. ..."
"... the problem here is that the Clintons have essentially become the pioneers of eliminating all of these lines, of amassing massive wealth from around the world, and using that to boost their own political power, and then using that political power to boost the interests of the people who are enriching them in all kinds of ways. ..."
[W]hat Donna Brazile said in that video that you played is nothing short of laughable. It's not
questioned when Republicans do favors for their donors? Of course it is. In fact, it's been a core,
central critique of the Democratic Party, both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, for years, that
Republicans are corrupt because they serve the interest of their big donors. One of the primary positions
of the Democratic Party is that the Citizens United decision of the Supreme Court has corrupted politics
because it allows huge money to flow into the political process in a way that ensures, or at least
creates the appearance, that people are doing favors for donors.
And so, here you have Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton having this Clinton Foundation, with billions
of dollars pouring into it from some of the world's worst tyrannies, like Saudi Arabia and the United
Arab Emirates and Qatar and other Gulf states, other people who have all kinds of vested interests
in the policies of the United States government. And at the same time, in many cases, both Bill and
Hillary Clinton are being personally enriched by those same people, doing speeches, for many hundreds
of thousands of dollars, in front of them, at the same time that she's running the State Department,
getting ready to run for president, and soon will be running the executive branch. …
And so, the problem here is that the Clintons have essentially become the pioneers of eliminating
all of these lines, of amassing massive wealth from around the world, and using that to boost their
own political power, and then using that political power to boost the interests of the people who
are enriching them in all kinds of ways. And of course questions need to be asked, and suspicions
are necessarily raised, because this kind of behavior is inherently suspicious. And it needs a lot
of media scrutiny and a lot of attention, and I'm glad it's getting that.
Huffington Post reporter David Seaman terminated for questioning Hillary's
health
David Seaman says he was terminated by Huffington Post late Sunday night for
submitting an article that questioned Hillary's health and for linking to a
Paul Joseph Watson video that's been watched by over 3.5 million people.
In the following video, it's obvious the reporter fears for his life, as he
mentions several times that he's not suicidal or depressed or clumsy in any
way.
It looks like he made this video in case he disappears or has "an accident"
some time in the near future:
Josef Stalin speech, March 3, 1937; In its confidential letter of July
29, 1936, on the espionage-terrorist activities of the
Trotskyist-Zinovievist bloc, the Central Committee of the RKP once again
called upon Party organizations to display the utmost vigilance, the ability
to discern enemies of the people, no matter how well masked they may be. The
confidential letter stated:
"Now that it has been proved that the Trotskyist-Zinovievist fiends are
uniting in the struggle against Soviet power, all the most infuriated and
vicious enemies of the toilers of our country-the spies, provocateurs,
diversionists, whiteguards, kulaks, and so on; when all boundaries have been
obliterated between these elements on the one hand and the Trotskyists and
Zinovievists on the other; all of our Party organizations and all members of
the Party must understand that vigilance on the part of Communists is
imperative on every sector and under all circumstances. The inalienable
quality of every Bolshevik under present conditions must be the ability to
discern an enemy of the Party, no matter how well masked he may be."
Dr. Drew was fired from CNN for questioning her healthcare into question.
Deep vein thrombosis and hypothyroidism are a concern for a presidential
candidate of her age. DVT is a concern since managing clots is difficult. NC
covered this issue recently so I'll be on my way.
"... people need to realize what they read is not the truth.. words can and are used to deceive... propaganda seems to be one of the central roles of all media at this point in time... folks need to beware of this.. ..."
"... Mark Twain said that if you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're misinformed. ..."
"... Do not pay attention to the fact the emperor has no clothes. Just look at this other guy!" ..."
"... Will we USAians ever wake up to 9/11 => Afghanistan => Iraq => Libya => Syria => Ukraine => Yemen ... ..."
"... How many innocents have 'our' emperors - Bush XLI, Clinton XLII, Bush XLIII, Obama XLIV, coming soon? Clinton XLV - killed in the runup to and execution of series of criminal aggressions post-9/11? Two million? If Clinton sets the world on fire the numbers will rise by two orders of magnitude. ..."
"... There have been rumours that the US government was helping to bankroll certain social media companies in return for access. I would say that the US government will step in and potentially rescue NYT and the like from being closed down. They serve an intrinsic and important service to the elite. They will not abandon it. ..."
"... The CIA has bankrolled many startups ... maybe they could take out ads for Raytheon and General Atomic products, run US military/CIA recruitment ads? Pay for placement of articles like Mark Sleboda 's, 'The Turkish Invasion Of Syria As Path To "Regime Change"'? ..."
"... The NYTimes going bellyup ... happened to the Washington Post and the WSJ. Maybe Eric Schmidt will buy it? Or Rupert Murdoch. ..."
"... I wonder if the CIA bankrolled Rupert Murdoch? The CIA took out a $500 million data storage contract with Amazon just before Bezos bought the WaPo. Come to think of it, having control of the WaPo, WSJ, and NYTimes archives would be just what Dr. Orwell ordered. Mark Sleboda could then work for the MiniTrue, revising the past as required. ..."
"... Like all psychopaths, they have a one-track mind that doesn't allow an effective strategy when it comes to bipedal meat units. Their answer to convincing you of their lies is to proffer more outrageous lies. It's kind of like the newspapers fighting declining advertising revenue by making the print smaller, stuffing the paper with more ads at higher rates and raising the price for a printed newspaper. Damn it, why won't you monkeys OBEY! ..."
"... That's an excellent point, b. I don't even remember the last time I've read anything truthful in any western MSM outlet. Almost everything is a spin of various degree. NYT is one of worst offenders, so another lying piece is not at all surprising. ..."
"... From the Wikipedia article Factoid : The term was coined in 1973 by American writer Norman Mailer to mean a "piece of information that becomes accepted as a fact even though it's not actually true, or an invented fact believed to be true because it appears in print." ..."
"... This is a basic tool of Western mainstream propaganda. Sprinkle every article full of "factoids" or small lies. These lies are not about the core topic of article, so they are unlikely to be challenged. Their only purpose is to enforce the narrative and demonize the enemy. When small lies or "lielets" are repeated often enough, they become factoids, meaning that they are no longer recognized as lies. ..."
The New York Times is desperate for new readers and therefore tries to branch into the
realm of The Onion and other satirical sites. It attempts to show that allegedly Russia
controlled media spread false stories for political purpose - by providing a false media story. The
purpose of the NYT doing such is yours to guess.
The sourcing of
that Page 1 story is as weak as its content. It starts with claiming that opponents of Sweden
joining NATO must be somehow Russia related and are spreading false stories:
As often happens in such cases, Swedish officials were never able to pin down the source of the
false reports.
Duh! But it must have been Russia. Because Swedish internal opposition to joining NATO would be
incapable of opining against it. Right? Likewise anti-EU reports and opposition to the EU within
the Czech Republic MUST be caused by Russian disinformation and can in now way be related to mismanagement
of the EU project itself.
The sourcing for the whole long pamphlet is extremely weak:
But they, numerous analysts and experts in American and European intelligence
point to Russia as the prime suspect, noting that preventing NATO expansion is a centerpiece of
the foreign policy of President Vladimir V. Putin, who invaded Georgia in 2008
largely to forestall that possibility.
Whoa! "Experts in American and European intelligence" can of course be trusted not to ever spread
false stories or rumors about Russia influencing "news". Such truth tellers they are and have always
been.
Then follows, in a claim about false stories(!) spread by Russia, that factually false claim that
Russia "invaded Georgia in 2008". It was obvious in the very first hours of the Georgia war,
as we then noted
, that Georgia started it. A European Union commission later
confirmed that it was
Georgia, incited by the Bush government, that started the war. The NYT itself
found
the same . All Russia did was to protect the areas of South Ossetia and Abchazia that it was
officially designated to protect by the United Nations! No invasion of Georgia took place.
And what was the alleged reason that Russia "invaded" Georgia for? "Largely to forestall".."NATO
expansion"? But it was NATO that
rejected Georgia's membership
in April 2008. Why then would Russia "invade" Georgia in August 2008 to prevent a membership
that was surely not gonna happen?
Utter a-historic nonsense.
The who tale, written by Neil MacFarquhar
, is a long list of hearsay where Russia is claimed to have influenced news but without
ever showing any evidence.
the extensive cooperation between the New York Times and the CIA with spying as well as with
manipulating foreign news
the acknowledged spreading of false stories about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq an behalf
of the Bush administration by the NY Times itself.
As Carl Bernstein
described in his
book about the CIA and the media:
Among the executives who lent their cooperation to the [Central Intelligence] Agency were
Williarn Paley of the Columbia Broadcasting System, Henry Luce of Tirne Inc., Arthur Hays Sulzberger of the New York Times
, Barry Bingham Sr. of the LouisviIle Courier‑Journal,
and James Copley of the Copley News Service. Other organizations which cooperated with the CIA
include the American Broadcasting Company, the National Broadcasting Company, the Associated Press,
United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps‑Howard, Newsweek magazine, the
Mutual Broadcasting System, the Miami Herald and the old Saturday Evening Post and New York Herald‑Tribune.
By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been
with the New York Times , CBS and Time Inc.
Bernstein shows that the NYT cooperation with the U.S. government and its intelligence agencies
was very extensive and continues uninterrupted up to today.
To lament about alleged Russian influence on some news outlets while writing a disinformation
filled piece, based on "experts in American and European intelligence", for an outlet with proven
CIA cooperation in faking news, is way beyond hypocrisy.
Through this piece the NYT becomes its own parody. Did the author and editors recognize that?
Or are they too self-unconscious for even such simple insight?
Posted by b on August 29, 2016 at 11:04 AM |
Permalink
thanks b... people need to realize what they read is not the truth.. words can and are used
to deceive... propaganda seems to be one of the central roles of all media at this point in time...
folks need to beware of this..
Although, NYT, is bleeding and is losing audience, I am amazed that it is still in print. The
Guardian is posting loss in millions of pounds, and that is what I expect NYT to be doing.
"Do not pay attention to the fact the emperor has no clothes. Just look at this other guy!" That
seems to be the official US opinion on Russia as expressed by the Clinton campaign, the NYT, and
the other usual suspects purveying official US propaganda.
An amusing thing about the NYT's is the most-emailed/read lists, which are almost always well
represented by articles such as "what to cook this weekend" and "48hrs in Tulsa." This is often
despite the steady stream of heady world events. My take is that most readers of the Times want
to be seen/known as Times readers, but would really prefer to be reading tabloids. The difference
is becoming less obvious by the day.
One small quibble with this: But it was NATO that rejected Georgia's membership in April 2008.
. That April meeting did not really reject Georgia's membership. The discussion was just postponed
to a later meeting. It wasn't until after Russia thrashed Georgia in August that the US took the
membership issue off the table.
@3 wbl, "Do not pay attention to the fact the emperor has no clothes. Just look at this other
guy!"
That's the answer isn't it?
Will we USAians ever wake up to 9/11 => Afghanistan => Iraq => Libya => Syria => Ukraine
=> Yemen ...
How many innocents have 'our' emperors - Bush XLI, Clinton XLII, Bush XLIII, Obama XLIV,
coming soon? Clinton XLV - killed in the runup to and execution of series of criminal aggressions
post-9/11? Two million? If Clinton sets the world on fire the numbers will rise by two orders
of magnitude.
Don't look at Trump! Don't look at Me! Look at Vladimir, behind the tree!
Ya gotta wanna believe. How many USAians still wanna believe?
There have been rumours that the US government was helping to bankroll certain social media
companies in return for access. I would say that the US government will step in and potentially
rescue NYT and the like from being closed down. They serve an intrinsic and important service
to the elite. They will not abandon it.
It's been amusing to watch this electoral season as the Times has dropped all pretense of objectivity.
While actual news accounts continue to lightly pepper the broadsheet, the headlines, article placement
and, most importantly, what falls before and after the fold is so transparently partisan one is
increasingly startled to find well reported and honest journalism.
I remember back in the first Intifada when Abe Rosenthal had Palestinian youth throwing soviet
made rocks while he glossed Sabra and Shatila massacres. The Times was pretty "Onion"y then, but
the political coverage this year makes me weep for my country as what little good left in it chokes
on growing torrents of BS, obfuscation, prevarication and bombast.
The CIA has bankrolled many startups ... maybe they could take out ads for Raytheon and
General Atomic products, run US military/CIA recruitment ads? Pay for placement of articles like
Mark Sleboda 's, 'The Turkish Invasion Of Syria As Path To "Regime Change"'?
The NYTimes going bellyup ... happened to the Washington Post and the WSJ. Maybe Eric Schmidt
will buy it? Or Rupert Murdoch.
I wonder if the CIA bankrolled Rupert Murdoch? The CIA took out a $500 million data storage
contract with Amazon just before Bezos bought the WaPo. Come to think of it, having control of
the WaPo, WSJ, and NYTimes archives would be just what Dr. Orwell ordered. Mark Sleboda could
then work for the MiniTrue, revising the past as required.
jsn@12: do you really think that objectivity of NYT exhibits seasonal variation? Like neutral
to positive stories about Russia between Easter and Passover, and a more usual dreck for the rest
of the year?
There is still difference between NYT and tabloids. This is the most recent article in NY Post
about Russia in NY Post:
Putin is gobbling up whatever he can – while Obama does nothing
By Benny Avni August 17, 2016 | 8:22pm.
As Americans focus on who'll replace President Obama, Russian strongman Vladimir Putin marches
around the globe unabated, rushing to gobble up anything and everything he can before the new
president...
Are we already in the second of the four stages to victory?
I don't know much about the MSM, and even less about H. Clinton, but what was that all about
with the speech she made concerning the "alt-right"? Who in their right mind would bring to the
mainstream attention the existence of a body of contradictory writing?
Is it the same thing here with NYT? Is the sheer prevalence of opposing opinion from its readers
forcing the MSM - led by flagship NYT - to turn and address the phenomenon?
I could not have dared to hope we could already be at stage 2:
First they ignore you.
Then they ridicule you.
Then they fight you.
Then you win.
--Gandhi
Grieved@17 - I'm going to argue we're at stage 2.5, Grieved. DDOS attacks on RT and Sputnik, 'managed'
Google search rankings, censored tweets, NSA on your desktop/cellphone. The powers that be and
western MSM are having a conniption fit and they are very angry.
Like all psychopaths, they have a one-track mind that doesn't allow an effective strategy
when it comes to bipedal meat units. Their answer to convincing you of their lies is to proffer
more outrageous lies. It's kind of like the newspapers fighting declining advertising revenue
by making the print smaller, stuffing the paper with more ads at higher rates and raising the
price for a printed newspaper. Damn it, why won't you monkeys OBEY!
Piotr@14,
The season to which I refer is, as I said, the electoral one!
The Times blows (or is it sucks?) very much with the political weather, though regretfully
our elections now blow for long enough to constitute multiple seasons proper.
I've long suspected that light seasoning of truth they sprinkle beneath the fold or deep inside
is there so that when the bogosity of one of their major narratives periodically explodes they
can scrape thin truths from the back pages and later paragraphs to claim the've been reporting
the truth all along!
That's an excellent point, b. I don't even remember the last time I've read anything truthful
in any western MSM outlet. Almost everything is a spin of various degree. NYT is one of worst
offenders, so another lying piece is not at all surprising.
Russia invading Georgia in 2008 fits the definition of factoid , as defined by Norman Mailer
in 1973:
From the Wikipedia article
Factoid : The term was coined in 1973 by American writer Norman Mailer to mean a "piece
of information that becomes accepted as a fact even though it's not actually true, or an invented
fact believed to be true because it appears in print."
This is a basic tool of Western mainstream propaganda. Sprinkle every article full of "factoids"
or small lies. These lies are not about the core topic of article, so they are unlikely to be
challenged. Their only purpose is to enforce the narrative and demonize the enemy. When small
lies or "lielets" are repeated often enough, they become factoids, meaning that they are no longer
recognized as lies.
"... We, as black people, have to reexamine the relationship. We're being pimped like prostitutes
and they're the big pimps pimping us politically… promising us everything and we get nothing in return.
We gotta step back now as black people and we gotta look at all the parties and vote our best interests.
..."
"... Barack Obama, our president, served two terms… the first black president ever… but did our
condition get better? Did financially, politically, academically with education in our community… did
things get better? Are our young people working more? ..."
"... If having the Black working community start totally hammering the Dems becomes "cool" the Dem's
are screwed for a long time. ..."
"... Obama trashed all of America, blacks and whites, while transferring millions of jobs overseas
to Bangladesh, China, Mexico, etc. ..."
... following interview with New Black Panther Quanell X requires no further commentary – he breaks
it down quite succinctly:
Let me say this to the brothers and sisters who listened and watched that speech… We may not
like the vessel [Donald Trump] that said what he said, but I ask us to truly examine what he said.
Because it is a fact that for 54 years we have been voting for the Democratic Party like no
other race in America. And they have not given us the same loyalty and love that we have given
them. We, as black people, have to reexamine the relationship. We're being pimped like prostitutes
and they're the big pimps pimping us politically… promising us everything and we get nothing in
return. We gotta step back now as black people and we gotta look at all the parties and vote our
best interests.
...
I want to say and encourage the brothers and sisters… Barack Obama, our president, served
two terms… the first black president ever… but did our condition get better? Did financially,
politically, academically with education in our community… did things get better? Are our young
people working more?
I've said that repeatedly. The question for hillary isn't what does the survey show, but how many
will actually be motivated enough to go vote. They may not show up and pull the lever for trump
this go round, but they may be curious enough to see what happens to just stay home and let things
work themselves out to see what the result will be
"... Mo Elleithee, who did tours separately as a top aide to Clinton and Tim Kaine and is now executive director of the Georgetown Institute of Politics and Public Service, is nervous that the impact will be much deeper and long lasting. ..."
"... In addition to the health questions and rigged election talk, Elleithee cited Trump's encouragement of Second Amendment voters to do something about a Clinton presidency's court appointments ..."
"... Huma Abedin should be arrested, charged with espionage, and mis-handling of classified material, and imprisoned for a long long time, according to recent email releases. ..."
"... It's deflection because she doesn't want to explain why her family foundation takes money from Saudi Arabia and Qatar. ..."
"... The Saudis are buying access--not funding Clinton Foundation initiatives to help women and children. ..."
"... Horatio N. Fisk Are you saying she didn't delete e-mails and use bleaching software to try to hide her tracks? ..."
"... Classic Clinton propaganda. Are you HONESTLY trying to say she did NOTHING wrong? Then WHY is she stopping doing what she is doing IF she steals the presidency. All along Clinton has denied everything and EVERY SINGLE TIME she has been PROVEN to be a liar! She claimed she NEVER sent a classified email - you called those that said she did lunatic conspiracy theorists - turns out YOU WERE LYING! ..."
"... If ever a person was so obviously unfit to hold the office of POTUS - it's Clinton. Indeed James Comey said anyone else who did what she did would NEVER be able to hols ANY government office, and would either be in jail or minimum sacked. ..."
"... SHAME ON YOU for doing your Josepg Goebbels act. The innocent blood she is GUARANTEED to spill will be on the hands of every single person who votes for that war criminal ..."
"... Hillary is fit to be president? Based on what? Her accomplishments? Her ability to properly handle classified data? Her ability to lie? Being beholden to her big donors from Wall Street, Foreign Countries, shady sources, who made her a 1%er? ..."
"... No one has to de-legitimize Clinton. She's done a fine job all by herself! She lied to the faces of geiving parents, infront of the coffins containing the remains of their loved ones. She lied to the American people, over and over, about her server and the emails she "turned over". She lied to Congress about those same subjects ..."
"... She refuses to give a press conference where the questions are not scripted for her. She used her "Charitable Foundation" to sell access to the State Dep, let people like Bloomenthal decide what decisions she made as Sec State. She panders to blacks, treating them like children. You Go Hillary! Keep making the case for how unfit for office you are! ..."
"... Sure, Mr Trump is not a polished highly trained politician, and ends up very often with foot in mouth disease. But Donald J Trump single-handedly defeated the totally corrupt Republican establishment, and ripped the nomination out of their hands. ..."
"... Those treasonous RINO (especially the warmonger NeoCons) political hacks are still screaming, and the GOP is self-destructing before our eyes. They are fleeing in panic to the sinking, burning SS Clinton, as the establishment newsmedia desperately tries to hide the self-destructing, dying Hillary from the public. Good riddance; ..."
"... Too funny...Hillary hides from the press and the only thing she has got is to make Trump look like a deranged psychopath. That's all she has. She has already waffled on TPP because of Trump. She has not been forced to reckon with her own immigration policies or how she will deal with the refugee crisis. ..."
"... I'm an Independent, I march to my own beat. That said, as a US militay veteran and having served honorably in the United States Marine Corps, in a term I'm sure fellow veterans can understand... "Hillary Rodham Clinton is a scumbag." I'm voting for Dr. Jill Stein on November 8, 2016. ..."
"... Donald Trump really doesn't have to do very much at this point to impune Hillary Clinton 's reputation. She has already done that to herself. Her actions are indefensible and all he has to do is remind people of it and convince the idiots who keep defending her and can't see her crimes that are right in front of their faces. She has lied to us and Congress, concealed her crimes and sold us out time and time again for her own personal gain. ..."
The Clinton delegitimization project is now central to Donald Trump's campaign and such a prime
component of right-wing media that it's already seeped beyond extremist chat rooms into "lock her
up" chants on the convention floor, national news stories debating whether polls actually can be
rigged, and voters puzzling over that photo they think they saw of her needing to be carried up the
stairs.
The Clinton campaign has deliberately positioned its response as an offensive boomerang rather
than a rebuttal: Don't defend against the attacks, just redirect fire at the messenger. "It holds
up a mirror to Donald Trump and what his campaign is about, and says everything you need to know
about Donald Trump and where these kinds of crazy conspiracy theories are coming from," as one campaign
aide put it.
But the Democrat's team is aware of how this might factor in beyond November.
"Some of the campaign and allies' conspiracies are designed to delegitimize her personally. Most
are simply designed to spread fear and mistrust. And I am sure if she wins, the right wing will continue
to spread these theories," said Clinton senior adviser Jennifer Palmieri. Palmieri is in favor of
ignoring most of the wackiness but warned: "Just because they may have zero basis in truth doesn't
mean they can't be corrosive. So in this cycle I believe you have to call out the truly destructive
theories calmly, but aggressively, and in real time."
... ... ...
For days, Clinton campaign officials purposefully ignored questions coming at them from the Trump-intertwined
Breitbart News about her health, according to an aide. But after Fox News host Sean Hannity devoted
an episode of his show to a Clinton rumor medical panel, complete with an eager-to-please urologist
in a white coat, they shifted gears: a long release emailed to reporters two weeks ago with sourced
debunkings of all the rumors and a statement from her doctor attesting that supposedly leaked medical
records were forged.
... ... ...
Mo Elleithee, who did tours separately as a top aide to Clinton and Tim Kaine and is now executive
director of the Georgetown Institute of Politics and Public Service, is nervous that the impact will
be much deeper and long lasting.
... ... ...
In addition to the health questions and rigged election talk, Elleithee cited Trump's encouragement
of Second Amendment voters to do something about a Clinton presidency's court appointments and
Trump adviser Roger Stone's suggestion of bloodshed if Trump loses.
Original unedited comments. Red bold/italic emphasis is mine
Mike
Davis
How does one poison a black widow spider? Hillary Clinton is already poison.
She and Slick have been poison for four decades.
It is Obama and Clinton wanting to bring radical Islam jihadists here to America. There is no
possible way to screen them at present. Even HS has no clue how to screen terrorists out and admit
so. Huma Abedin should be arrested, charged with espionage, and mis-handling of classified material,
and imprisoned for a long long time, according to recent email releases. Of course, losing her
radical Islam lover, might be too much for the sickened Hillary to withstand.
Donald J Trump wants to keep radical Islam sharia law jihadists out, along with other criminals,
drug dealers, who would endanger the innocent Americans. You liberals support the criminal dying
Clinton; therefore you support her policies, including the middle-class wrecking ball TPP and
NAFTA.
It's deflection because she doesn't want to explain why her family foundation
takes money from Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Doing so would weaken her credibility as a human
rights champion. The Saudis are buying access--not funding Clinton Foundation initiatives
to help women and children. We should be scrutinizing our arms sales to oppressive regimes
like Saudi Arabia and standing up for human rights. Not taking money when it is convenient, selling
our best weapons to dictatorships, and then pretending the rest of the world believes we are some
City on a Hill human rights champions.
Thus the dilemma for the gutless Dems, attack the character of Trump while
defending the 100% lack of character of the email deleting, ambassador murdering money laundering
lying under oath criminal piece of shit..
Good luck with that..
Horatio N. Fisk · Works at Writer, Gadfly
Good luck with proving any of what you said;. You can't
David J. Lekse · Indianapolis, Indiana
Horatio N. Fisk Are you saying she didn't delete e-mails and use bleaching software to
try to hide her tracks?
Paul Marston · Works at Self-Employed
Classic Clinton propaganda. Are you HONESTLY trying to say she did NOTHING wrong? Then
WHY is she stopping doing what she is doing IF she steals the presidency. All along Clinton has
denied everything and EVERY SINGLE TIME she has been PROVEN to be a liar! She claimed she NEVER
sent a classified email - you called those that said she did lunatic conspiracy theorists - turns
out YOU WERE LYING!
The sheer contempt you and all the other Clinton drones have for the American public is genuinely
sickening. It has been PROVEN she rigged the primaries - and had to sack 5 staff for it, yet Clinton
claims she did nothing wrong.
If ever a person was so obviously unfit to hold the office of POTUS - it's Clinton. Indeed
James Comey said anyone else who did what she did would NEVER be able to hols ANY government office,
and would either be in jail or minimum sacked.
SHAME ON YOU for doing your Josepg Goebbels act. The innocent blood she is GUARANTEED to spill
will be on the hands of every single person who votes for that war criminal
Bob Rousseau
Pretty pathetic when the do nothing, low IQ Republicans have to resort to conspiracy theories
and lies to win elected office. If their voters werent so stupid and toxic, conspiracy theories
would be immediately identified for what they are; right wing garbage.
Marlin Johnson
Hillary is fit to be president? Based on what? Her accomplishments? Her ability to properly
handle classified data? Her ability to lie? Being beholden to her big donors from Wall Street,
Foreign Countries, shady sources, who made her a 1%er?
Not securing the Mexican border so illegal aliens can continue to flood in to be exploited
with low paying jobs, burdening social service budgets and taking American jobs? By allowing 550,000
unvetted Syrian refugees enter our country risking that some may be ISIS? Or having Bill back
in the White House seeking sexual favors from young interns? Of course you would mind if it were
your daughter working as an intern. And Hillary can launch vicious personal character attacks
against the victims of Bill's sexual assaults.
Wayne Barron
No one has to de-legitimize Clinton. She's done a fine job all by herself! She lied to
the faces of geiving parents, infront of the coffins containing the remains of their loved ones.
She lied to the American people, over and over, about her server and the emails she "turned over".
She lied to Congress about those same subjects.
She refuses to give a press conference where the questions are not scripted for her. She
used her "Charitable Foundation" to sell access to the State Dep, let people like Bloomenthal
decide what decisions she made as Sec State. She panders to blacks, treating them like children.
You Go Hillary! Keep making the case for how unfit for office you are!
Mike Davis
Sure, Mr Trump is not a polished highly trained politician, and ends up very often with
foot in mouth disease. But Donald J Trump single-handedly defeated the totally corrupt Republican
establishment, and ripped the nomination out of their hands.
Those treasonous RINO (especially the warmonger NeoCons) political hacks are still screaming,
and the GOP is self-destructing before our eyes. They are fleeing in panic to the sinking, burning
SS Clinton, as the establishment newsmedia desperately tries to hide the self-destructing, dying
Hillary from the public. Good riddance; thank you Mr Trump.
Tammy McKinnon · Florida State University
Too funny...Hillary hides from the press and the only thing she has got is to make Trump
look like a deranged psychopath. That's all she has. She has already waffled on TPP because of
Trump. She has not been forced to reckon with her own immigration policies or how she will deal
with the refugee crisis.
Not much about terror either. She released a tax plan but that is meaningless piece of paper
that all candidates put out there..you must get Congress on your side and Republicans will not
go for increases.
Then there is her free public college plan. Obamacare is collapsing and voters are going to
see it firsthand Nov 1st (if Obama doesn't delay it until after the election)
Yeah, the wind is behind her(and the MSM)....it wasn't rosy for her at the end of July. We
were told that didn't matter ...but now it does?
Tammy McKinnon · Florida State University
Bethsabe David,
Dems have perfected unsubstantiated attacks in elections. Remember Reid saying that Romney's
tax returns showed he had paid no taxes? Remember the commercial accusing Romney of murder and
the crying husband? (big lie) Oh and the Hillary camp started the birther movement. All 'lies'
are not created equal. Hillary is dangerous.
Trump is not "loosing" (spell check is your friend Bethsabe) He was doing very well the end
on July and we still have a ways to go.
Benjamin Andrew Marine · American University
Doug Perry,
I'm an Independent, I march to my own beat. That said, as a US militay veteran and
having served honorably in the United States Marine Corps, in a term I'm sure fellow veterans
can understand... "Hillary Rodham Clinton is a scumbag." I'm voting for Dr. Jill Stein on November
8, 2016.
Michael Iger
Republicans demonize opponents its in their nature and the Clinton's have been on that long
list of enemies now for decades. We see it too with Obama and Trump's birther charges and McConnell
talking about not cooperating with the President at a price of hurting the country. Hilary, both
as a Clinton and a Democrat, is going to get a double dose in her term of office. The real loser
is the country that becomes stalemated and dysfunctional at the top which then permeates the society.
We have a dysfunction group in this country with some power and until it changes must deal with
it. With Trump's campaign of bigotry and racism that may change sooner than later as the country
wakes up to reality of the mess and its done. With stalemate very little gets done and problems
don't get solved.
Michael Welby · Owner at Self-Employed
Yeah, it is Republicans that demonize. That is why, in Reno, Hillary draped the KKK all over
trump. YOu do it too: bigot, racist.
With such warm greetings and suggesting of cooperation, what the hell do you expect. She may win
the office. She will accomplish nothing. Nothing.
Donald Trump really doesn't have to do very much at this point to impune Hillary Clinton 's reputation.
She has already done that to herself. Her actions are indefensible and all he has to do is remind
people of it and convince the idiots who keep defending her and can't see her crimes that are
right in front of their faces. She has lied to us and Congress, concealed her crimes and sold
us out time and time again for her own personal gain.
"... there's an opportunity for Trump to draw a sharp contrast with Clinton, who also has issues engaging with the press as a whole. ..."
"... "If Trump were to more broadly engage the broader media landscape, he can provide a clear contrast to Hillary Clinton, who is clearly playing a 'run out the clock' strategy with regard to the press," McCall said. ..."
Jeff McCall, a professor of media studies at Depauw University, agrees there's an opportunity
for Trump to draw a sharp contrast with Clinton, who also has issues engaging with the press as a
whole.
"If Trump were to more broadly engage the broader media landscape, he can provide a clear
contrast to Hillary Clinton, who is clearly playing a 'run out the clock' strategy with regard to
the press," McCall said.
"Trump should speak to any and all news outlets and mention during each of those interviews that
he is there to speak to the electorate while Hillary ducks the tough questioning and won't even hold
a press conference."
But a more exposed Trump, McCall said, only works if he stays on the narrative the campaign wishes
to articulate.
"If he expands his media range, but has flimsy or off-target messages, he will just contribute to
the perception that his messaging and campaign are rather untethered," he said.
"... On numerous occasions we have recognized Congress' legitimate interest in preventing the money that is spent on elections from exerting an "'undue influence on an officeholder's judgment"' and from creating "4he appearance of such influence,"' beyond the sphere of quid pro quo relationships. I ..."
"... Corruption can take many forms. Bribery may be the paradigm case. But the difference between selling a vote and selling access is a matter of degree, not kind. And selling access is not qualitatively different from giving special preference to those who spent money on one's behalf. ..."
"... Corruption operates along a spectrum, and the majority's apparent belief that quid pro quo arrangements can be neatly demarcated from other improper influences docs not accord with the theory or reality of politics. ..."
On numerous occasions we have recognized Congress' legitimate interest in preventing the money that
is spent on elections from exerting an "'undue influence on an officeholder's judgment"' and from
creating "4he appearance of such influence,"' beyond the sphere of quid pro quo relationships. Id.,
at 150; see also. e.g., id., at 143-144. 152-154; Colorado II, 533 U. S.. at 441; Shrink Missouri.
528 U. S., at 389.
Corruption can take many forms. Bribery may be the paradigm case. But the difference
between selling a vote and selling access is a matter of degree, not kind. And selling access is
not qualitatively different from giving special preference to those who spent money on one's behalf.
Corruption operates along a spectrum, and the majority's apparent belief that quid pro quo arrangements
can be neatly demarcated from other improper influences docs not accord with the theory or reality
of politics.
It certainly does not accord with the record Congress developed in passing BCRA. a record
that stands as a remarkable testament to the energy and ingenuity with which corporations, unions,
lobbyists, and politicians may go about scratching each other's backs - and which amply supported
Congress' determination to target a limited set of especially destructive
"... With polling data being quantized and plugged into sophisticated computer models allowing Clinton
to tailor her message for each region and for each venue. ..."
"... As I said before, this is likely something that is being fed to her by her no doubt well paid
consultants. ..."
"... Still, I have made an interesting observation that I wonder if you noticed. You presented two
charts, one with holding corporations accountable placed at the top, and the other placing decline in
manufacturing jobs at the top in the same position. ..."
"... They are the same network; point by point. I even compared them using paint and found them
to be a perfect match. The only difference is that one is negative and the other is positive. ..."
"... This completely misunderstand Clinton's approach to the Vulgar people of the United States,
which is: Insectionality, not intersectionality, that is the Vulgar People are treated as Insects. ..."
"... The only Intersection understood by Hilarity Clinton is the one between herself, money and
power. All else is irrelevant. ..."
"... Hillary is an intersectional feminist? ..."
"... As another untrained clown in intersectional feminism, I'm skeptical about Clinton, especially
reading Thomas Frank's description of the International Women's Day event at the Clinton Foundation
one year ago: ..."
"... Microlending is a perfect expression of Clintonism, since it brings together wealthy financial
interests with rhetoric that sounds outrageously idealistic. Microlending permits all manner of networking,
posturing, and profit taking among the lenders while doing nothing to change actual power relations-the
ultimate win-win." ..."
"... Wait a minute that tangle of buzz phrases connected helter-skelter by lines is a REAL post
from the Clinton campaign? Until I read the whole piece I thought it was well done satire. I guess The
Onion being bought out doesn't really matter much. In modern American politics satire now seems roughly
as difficult a task as exceeding the speed of light in a vacuum or measuring the position and velocity
of an electron simultaneously. ..."
DFA = Democracy for America. This was Howard Dean's organization and part of his 50 state strategies.
During non-campaign seasons, he sent campaign organizers touring the country giving short classes
on how to organize and manage a political campaign. They came to Wichita and it was something
to see, a lot of local Democratic office holders, some even in the State House had signed up.
One guy had held his house seat for 8 years and much of the information they were bringing was
completely new to him. Yes, a state level Democrat had won 4 election cycles without even knowing
the basics. This was the state of the Democratic Party back then – and is largely that way now.
Now I am going from memory here, but Clinton's "intersectional" was covered in these classes,
with at least the basic idea. The idea was to consider how different elements within your campaign
plank are connected. And where those connections are poor, to build up a rhetorical foundation
on how to address the contradictions. As I said, the idea is not to build connections between
different parts of the planks, but how to present separate planks to the voter as being relevant.
It's a good exercise, a way of organizing your issues and thinking how they all might fit together.
Now Clintion's hairball – good word by the way – likely takes it to the absurd degree.
With polling data being quantized and plugged into sophisticated computer models allowing Clinton
to tailor her message for each region and for each venue.
–KACHING- As I said before, this is likely something that is being fed to her by her no
doubt well paid consultants.
Still, I have made an interesting observation that I wonder if you noticed. You presented
two charts, one with holding corporations accountable placed at the top, and the other placing
decline in manufacturing jobs at the top in the same position.
They are the same network; point by point. I even compared them using paint and found them
to be a perfect match. The only difference is that one is negative and the other is positive.
This completely misunderstand Clinton's approach to the Vulgar people of the United States,
which is: Insectionality, not intersectionality, that is the Vulgar People are treated as Insects.
The only Intersection understood by Hilarity Clinton is the one between herself, money
and power. All else is irrelevant.
As another untrained clown in intersectional feminism, I'm skeptical about Clinton, especially
reading Thomas Frank's description of the International Women's Day event at the Clinton Foundation
one year ago:
"What this lineup suggested is that there is a kind of naturally occurring solidarity between
the millions of women at the bottom of the world's pyramid and the tiny handful of women at its
very top The mystic bond between high-achieving American professionals and the planet's most victimized
people is a recurring theme in [Hillary Clinton's] life and work What the spectacle had to offer
ordinary working American women was another story.
She enshrined a version of feminism in which liberation is, in part, a matter of taking out
loans from banks in order to become an entrepreneur the theology of microfinance Merely by providing
impoverished individuals with a tiny loan of fifty or a hundred dollars, it was thought, you could
put them on the road to entrepreneurial self-sufficiency, you could make entire countries prosper,
you could bring about economic development itself What was most attractive about microlending
was what it was not, what it made unnecessary: any sort of collective action by poor people coming
together in governments or unions The key to development was not doing something to limit the
grasp of Western banks, in other words; it was extending Western banking methods to encompass
every last individual on earth.
Microlending is a perfect expression of Clintonism, since it brings together wealthy financial
interests with rhetoric that sounds outrageously idealistic. Microlending permits all manner of
networking, posturing, and profit taking among the lenders while doing nothing to change actual
power relations-the ultimate win-win."
I'm too confused with all of this, but it sounds to me like a concept called "interlocking
systems of oppression" and your figure two seems to provide useful diagrammatic example.
The diagram offers no understanding of the intersectional dynamics of oppression, carefully
cropping out the oppressors - most of whom are Hillary backers - along with the oppressed, who
are all affected differently in their lived experiences by their particular relationship
to oppressive conditions.
Lumping these focus-tested ill conditions together with a rat's nest of undistinguished connections
misleadingly equates the interests of persons with their set of group memberships (Fascism is
Italian for bundle-ism) and sets the stage for those conditions to be traded off and weighed against
each other on net in the future. I believe this is the essence of what is called "triangulation".
Wait a minute that tangle of buzz phrases connected helter-skelter by lines is a REAL post
from the Clinton campaign? Until I read the whole piece I thought it was well done satire. I guess
The Onion being bought out doesn't really matter much. In modern American politics satire now
seems roughly as difficult a task as exceeding the speed of light in a vacuum or measuring the
position and velocity of an electron simultaneously.
ilsm ->
Chris G
...
Obama certainly did nothing to put US into the nightmare of
peace and prosperity, while Killary will threw the US into
perpetual war with bigger adversaries than Sunni goatherds.
Obama certainly did nothing to put US into the nightmare of
peace and prosperity, while Killary will threw the US into
perpetual war with bigger adversaries than Sunni goatherds.
What are US "agents" doing on the ground in Syria?
Looks like they are trying to elect Hillary.
=== quote ===
It is almost as if some journalists believe that deliberately
damaging relations with Russia is a price worth paying to
embarrass and defeat Trump. If that is so, they are
delusional.
Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer, is executive director
of the Council for the National Interest.
Trump, Russia, and the Washington Post: Reader Beware
There's more hype than evidence in the paper's claims that
Moscow orchestrates politics in Europe and America.
By PHILIP GIRALDI
"... Hillary Clinton, a neoliberal, neocon, corporatist PACster politician, is unlikely to inspire millennials or progressives ..."
"... Hillary Clinton is a sitting duck. And her vulnerability has nothing to do with the manufactured hype ..."
"... This on top of charges by the FBI that she was reckless, make her uniquely vulnerable ..."
"... Then there's her numerous "sniper fire in Bosnia" type gaffs, and a record of flip-flops on the issues that is virtually unprecedented in modern politics. And if the flip-flops in the primary weren't enough, her personnel appointments so far show she's going to try to go from corporate centrist to progressive to corporate centrist in the space of a year. You'd almost have to be an idiot to lose to her. ..."
Hillary Clinton, a neoliberal, neocon, corporatist
PACster politician, is unlikely to inspire millennials or progressives,
and some version of 2014 could easily play out again. As I've said all
along, Hillary Clinton is a sitting duck. And her vulnerability has
nothing to do with the manufactured hype or the …er… trumped up charges
Republicans have been ginning up for years now. In fact, in some strange
way, they may help Clinton, by discrediting some of the legitimate issues
that could yet dog her.
The emails – a self-inflicted tragedy of almost
Shakespearean proportions – won't go away, and now they suggest a pattern of
appointments with supporters of the Clinton Foundation while Secretary of
State that was, at best, inappropriate, at worst, illegal. This on top
of charges by the FBI that she was reckless, make her uniquely vulnerable
to attack ads.
Then there's her numerous "sniper fire in Bosnia"
type gaffs, and a record of flip-flops on the issues that is virtually
unprecedented in modern politics. And if the flip-flops in the primary
weren't enough, her personnel appointments so far show she's going to try to
go from corporate centrist to progressive to corporate centrist in the space
of a year. You'd almost have to be an idiot to lose to her.
... ... ...
But if Trumps' new team manages to reel him in, and
formulate a coherent attack on Clinton, all bets are off.
"... Hillary will win, and it will be more than business as usual. Influence peddling and pay to play will accelerate. The neocon money will flow into the system and foreign policy will be a debacle. We may very well be approaching WWIII. ..."
"... Under a Clinton II presidency, long-term international turmoil and confrontation lie ahead no matter what their family foundation may attempt to achieve. ..."
If Clinton gets elected, she will be under investigation prior to the inauguration. The Republicans
will use their hold on the house to start several investigations on November 9.
However, the GOP (continuing a party tradition) will cruise right past several true issues,
and lock onto the one thing they believe will hold the most shock value. This will turn out to
not be provable, or not be all that interesting to anyone but die-hard GOP supporters, and she
will exit the investigations as powerful, if not more so, than before.
There are plenty of reasons to investigate the Clinton machine, but if you expect this clown
show to do it competently I have a bridge to sell you…
No this one is backfiring already as most of the donors were people HRC would have met anyway,
including Nobel Peace winners! and the 89 out of 154 people has not been released. And the article
does not note any mischief but that there were meetings!
Or that there are a ton of other government officials have spouses that run well run charities.
Matt Yglesias has de-bunked this one a lot and my guess disappears relatively quickly.
This is as worthless evidence as Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11.
Hillary will win, and it will be more than business as usual. Influence peddling and pay to
play will accelerate. The neocon money will flow into the system and foreign policy will be a
debacle. We may very well be approaching WWIII.
The economy will continue to hollow out due to central bank hubris, government stimulus, and
non-free trade deals. Income inequality will get worse. The middle class will continue to shrink.
After leaving office, Bill Clinton could have devoted his energies to Habitat for Humanity (like
Jimmy Carter) or thrown his energies into helping an existing organisation (like the Bill & Melinda
Gates foundation). He didn't, because he wanted the "fruits" of his philanthropic work to accrue
to him and his family. And so it is not unreasonable to ask exactly what those fruits are, especially
those gained while Hillary Clinton was serving as the nation's chief diplomat.
Under a Clinton II presidency, long-term international turmoil and confrontation lie ahead
no matter what their family foundation may attempt to achieve.
Problems are undeniable, but severity of the condition can be assessed only by qualified doctors
after studying all medical record. Which should be a requred stp for all US presidential candidates.
CNN presstitutes do disservice to the nation downplaying the concerns.
Notable quotes:
"... So, will Hillary accept Trump's challenge to release her medical records? I think we all know the answer to that... ..."
... reminds Americans about Trump's self-professed medical disability, which allowed him to avoid
serving in the Vietnam War Second, this baseless attack on Clinton's health reeks of the same conspiracy
theory junk we have heard before from him
...Even the way Trump's cheerleader-in-chief Rudy Giuliani
recently tried to support his claim that Clinton was very ill smacked of typical conspiracy fare:
...
CNN User
So, will Hillary accept Trump's challenge to release her medical records? I think we all
know the answer to that...
Just like showing up for a press conference, she just has too much to lose by being open with
voters.;
...prominent medical practitioners who have expressed sincere concern. The most prominent of which
is Dr. Bob Lahita, the Chairman of the Department of Medicine at Newark Beth Israel Medical Center
who has frequently been called on to opine for health on CBS, MSNBC, ABC, Fox, and local news outlets.
"This
is a very unusual story with Hillary," said Lahita, pointing to the two blood clots that Hillary's
been diagnosed with in the past. "The fact that she's having these clots and she's had two bouts
of thrombosis is disconcerting to say the least."
"I don't think it's a conspiracy," said Lahita when asked if questions about Hillary's health
are the musings of far-right agitators or a legitimate question. "You go back to the history of our
presidents and we've had many presidents up until Lyndon Johnson who've concealed their health during
their campaigns." "It had dire effects for our country, going from Kennedy to Roosevelt, to Woodrow
Wilson, whose wife ran the White House for some time," he continued. "So we have issues here and
I think both candidates should be very forthcoming and perhaps have an impartial panel of physicians
review the data and make that kind of decision before Americans go to the poll."
Donald Trump is challenging Hillary Clinton to release her "detailed" medical records and put
the questions surrounding her health status to rest. "I think that both candidates, Crooked Hillary
and myself, should release detailed medical records," Trump tweeted Sunday evening.
"I have no problem in doing so! Hillary?" he said.
Clinton so far has refused to release her detailed medical history.
It is unclear to what extent Trump represents a threat to Washington establishment and how easily
or difficult it would be to co-opt him. In any case "deep state" will stay in place, so the capabilities
of POTUS are limited by the fact of its existence. But comments to the article are great !
Notable quotes:
"... It goes all the way back to the collapse of the old Soviet Union and the elder Bush's historically foolish decision to invade the Persian Gulf in February 1991. The latter stopped dead in its tracks the first genuine opportunity for peace the people of the world had been afforded since August 1914. ..."
"... Instead, it reprieved the fading remnants of the military-industrial-congressional complex, the neocon interventionist camp and Washington's legions of cold war apparatchiks. All of the foregoing would have been otherwise consigned to the dust bin of history. ..."
"... And most certainly, this lamentable turn to the War Party's disastrous reign had nothing to do with oil security or economic prosperity in America. The cure for high oil is always and everywhere high oil prices, not the Fifth Fleet. ..."
"... It is the bombs, drones, cruise missiles and brutal occupations of Muslim lands unleashed by the War Party that has actually fostered the massive blowback and radical jidhadism rampant today in the middle east and beyond. ..."
"... Indeed, prior to 1991 Bin Laden and his mujahedeen, who had been trained and armed by the CIA and heralded in the west for their help in defeating purportedly godless communism in Afghanistan, had not declaimed against American liberty, opulence and decadence. They did not come to attack our way of life as the neocon propagandists have so speciously claimed. Misguided and despicable as their attack was, it was motivated by revenge and religious fanaticism that had never previously been directed against the American people. That is, not until the Washington War Party decided to intervene in the Persian Gulf in 1991. ..."
"... Not long thereafter in 1996, these same neocon warmongers produced for newly elected Israeli prime minister, Bibi Netanyahu, the infamous document called "A Clean Break: A New Strategy For Securing The Realm". ..."
"... There were several crucial moments along the way-–the first being the sacking of Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill by the White House praetorian guard led by Karl Rove. His sin was having the audacity to say that the Afghan and Iraqi wars were going to cost trillions, and that stiff tax increases and painful entitlements cuts were the only way to make ends meet. ..."
"... The great Dwight Eisenhower left office at the height of the cold war in 1961, warning the American public about the insatiable appetites for budgets and war of the military industrial complex. At the same time, however, his final budget attested to his conviction that $450 billion in today's purchasing power (2015 $) was enough to fund the Pentagon, foreign aid and security assistance and the needs of veterans of past wars. ..."
"... Thanks to the GOP War Party and neocons we are spending more than double that amount-upwards of $900 billion-–for those same purposes today. Yet unlike the nuclear threat posed by the Soviet Union at the peak of its industrial vigor, we no longer have any industrial state enemy left on the planet; we have appropriately been fired as the world's policeman and have no need for Washington's far flung imperium of bases and naval and air power projection; and would not even be confronted with the domestic policing challenges posed by highly limited and episodic homeland terrorist tempests had Washington not turned Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and others into failed states and economic rubble. ..."
"... But here's the thing. While spending a lifetime as a real estate speculator and self-created celebrity, The Donald apparently did not have time to get mis-educated by the Council On Foreign Relations or to hob knob with the GOP inner circle in Washington and the special interest group racketeers they coddle. ..."
"... But a nation tumbling into financial and fiscal crisis will welcome the War Party purge that Trump would surely undertake. He didn't allow the self-serving busy-bodies and fools who inhabit the Council on Foreign Relations to dupe him into believing that Putin is a horrible threat; or that the real estate on the eastern edge of the non-state of the Ukraine, which has always been either a de jure or de facto part of Russia, was any of our business. Likewise, he has gotten it totally right with respect to the sectarian and tribal wars of Syria and Iraq and Hillary's feckless destruction of a stable regime in Libya. ..."
"... Besides, unlike the boy Senator from Florida who wants to be President so he can play with guns, tanks, ships and bombs, The Donald has indicated no intention of tearing up the agreement on day one in office. ..."
"... Most importantly, The Donald has essentially proclaimed the obvious. Namely, that the cold war is over and that the American taxpayers have no business subsidizing obsolete relics like NATO and ground forces in South Korea and Japan. ..."
"... At the end of the day, the reason that the neocons are apoplectic is that Trump would restore the 1991 status quo ante. The nation's self-proclaimed greatest deal-maker might even take a leaf out of Warren G. Harding's playbook and negotiate sweeping disarmament agreements in a world where governments everywhere are on the verge of fiscal bankruptcy. ..."
"... Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.... A man full of faith is simply one who has lost (or never had) the capacity for clear and realistic thought. He is not a mere ass: he is actually ill. H. L. Mencken ..."
"... Great read Mr. Stockman, and I can only hope you are right, that Super Tuesday really triggers the demise of the Military Industrial Complex, although I seriously doubt it can be removed, replaced or dismantled that easily. ..."
"... The roots of the neocons and neolibs go so deep - multi-generational, multi-faceted, and removing their control will require Open Regime Surgery, something I don't see anyone capable of performing quite yet. Surely they are going to want their shot at being the first rulers to control the entire earth - just before the energy runs out and the planet collapses in on itself due to being hollowed out :) ..."
"... David, you are missing some fairly strong evidence that 911 was an inside job. ..."
"... As an engineer, I find it impossible to fathom that building 7, not hit by any planes and only suffering minor fires, would fall straight into its own footprint at FREEFALL SPEED. This is exactly the sort of thing you would expect ONLY from a controlled demolition. ..."
"... I think that the neocons, in their meetings regarding the "Project for a New American Century" (PNAC), needed 911 to foment, foster and facilitate a push of patriotic pathos of the American people to go to war. ..."
"... So so true. Of course this is an abridged version of history. You speak the truth to power. This never makes the news or any of the debate tables with any of the mainstream media. Why...because the media is owned by the corporations that profit from war. ..."
"... There is no more liberal media unless you watch the Young Turks. With regards to Iran. There is more to their history than...CIA's coup of 1953. From my memory the British controlled the Iranian oilfields up until 1951 when they were nationalized. Why...because the British BP oil company was cheating Iran on the profit sharing deal. So the British are out. It is 1953 and the Americans want in. 1953 the Anglo-American Coup happened and the the profit sharing began again with American oil companies with the Shaw (Shell-mobil-Exxon..I can't remember which one) Of course the American oil companies breached the deal and shorted the POS Shah who then shorted his nation. Rulers forget, poor people are pissed off people. So all this "it was the CIA" crap is baloney...They were tools for corporate America. Don't kid yourself, it was about the oil. IMO ..."
"... As Stockman points out, it seems that Washington was set on then neocon automatic pilot. The policy of the Democrats was basically a continuation of a policy started prior to Reagan presidency. Both Obama and Hillary Clinton are involved in regime change plans when we thought that Neo-cons has been shown to be a band of idiots that worked for the military industrial complex. ..."
"... In the seventies, Brzezinski advocated support for the Islamic belt with fundamentalist regimes in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey. These Islamo-fascist were supposed to control the perceived enemies of Capitalism. ..."
"... Thank you Mr. Stockman for fearlessly stating the facts. As to the 1st Iraq War, and the lies on which it was based, the only other significant detail I would have mentioned is that Saddam was suckered into invading Kuwait by the bitch, April Gillespie who, at the time, was serving as his special envoy to the middle east. ..."
"... @lloydholiday Billionaire "businessman" Glen Taylor owns the influential Minneapolis newspaper. He and his idiotic neocon editorial board ENDORSED RUBIO just before the Minnesota caucuses. Rubio may have made secret promises to Taylor, whose cannot possibly separate his many business interests from Minnesota and national politics. This explanation is as likely any, how the Little Napoleon won the ONLY state he is going to win, unless Floridians are somehow swayed to raise up a man toward the Presidency who isn't qualified to be dog catcher. ..."
"... As usual concise, accurate. Bush and Shrub were phonies in thrall to the Carlyle Group and their buddies the 'Kingdom' (source and supporter of al-Quaeda) plus the pro-Israeli neocons who wanted US boots on the ground to protect Israel. The Bush duumvirate played along in this duplicitous game, which Trump called them on. Enron also played a role: Shrub let them set policy in the Stans as their consortium sought pipeline rights from the Taliban. Crooks at play in the garden of evil. ..."
"... It is the bombs, drones, cruise missiles and brutal occupations of Muslim lands unleashed by the War Party that has actually fostered the massive blowback and radical jidhadism rampant today in the middle east and beyond. ..."
"... Mr Stockman apparently has the bad manners to speak the truth. Washington is going to be PO'd at the blatant disrespect for their BS. ..."
"... @FreeOregon It will shocked me beyond words if he survives the primaries. Far too much is at stake. In fact, 100 years of lying, cheating, and thieving, and the wealth it has produced is at stake. The Rothschild Establishment, centered in London and Tel Aviv, will not sit idly by and watch as their lucrative racket is dismantled by an up-start politician that cannot be purchased and put under their control. ..."
"... All true....finally the politicians that have run our country into the ground are exposed for the puppets of oligarchs they are...it is obvious....both parties, phony conservatives and liberals alike, are waging war on Trump because he truly threatens the status quo......it's going to get real ugly now that the powers that be are threatened.....I wouldn't fly to much if I was Trump from here on in! ..."
Wow. Super Tuesday was an earthquake, and not just because Donald Trump ran the tables. The best
thing was the complete drubbing and humiliation that voters all over America handed to the little
Napoleon from Florida, Marco Rubio.
So doing, the voters began the process of ridding the nation of the GOP War Party and its neocon
claque of rabid interventionists. They have held sway for nearly three decades in the Imperial City
and the consequences have been deplorable.
It goes all the way back to the collapse of the old Soviet Union and the elder Bush's historically
foolish decision to invade the Persian Gulf in February 1991. The latter stopped dead in its tracks
the first genuine opportunity for peace the people of the world had been afforded since August 1914.
Instead, it reprieved the fading remnants of the military-industrial-congressional complex, the
neocon interventionist camp and Washington's legions of cold war apparatchiks. All of the foregoing
would have been otherwise consigned to the dust bin of history.
Yet at that crucial inflection point there was absolutely nothing at stake with respect to the
safety and security of the American people in the petty quarrel between Saddam Hussein and the Emir
of Kuwait.
The spate, in fact, was over directional drilling rights in the Rumaila oilfield which straddled
their respective borders. Yet these disputed borders had no historical legitimacy whatsoever. Kuwait
was a just a bank account with a seat in the UN, which had been created by the British only in 1899
for obscure reasons of imperial maneuver. Likewise, the boundaries of Iraq had been drawn with a
straight ruler in 1916 by British and French diplomats in the process of splitting up the loot from
the fall of the Ottoman Empire.
As it happened, Saddam claimed that the Emir of Kuwait, who could never stop stuffing his unspeakably
opulent royal domain with more petro dollars, had stolen $10 billion worth of oil from Iraq's side
of the field while Saddam was savaging the Iranians during his unprovoked but Washington supported
1980s invasion. At the same time, Hussein had borrowed upwards of $50 billion from Kuwait, the Saudis
and the UAE to fund his barbaric attacks on the Iranians and now the sheiks wanted it back.
At the end of the day, Washington sent 500,000 US troops to the Gulf in order to function as bad
debt collectors for three regimes that are the very embodiment of tyranny, corruption, greed and
religious fanaticism.
They have been the fount and exporter of Wahhabi fanaticism and have thereby fostered the scourge
of jihadi violence throughout the region. And it was the monumental stupidity of putting American
(crusader) boots on the ground in Saudi Arabia that actually gave rise to Bin Laden, al-Qaeda, the
tragedy of 9/11, the invasion and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Patriot Act and domestic
surveillance state and all the rest of the War Party follies which have followed.
Worse still, George H.W. Bush's stupid little war corrupted the very political soul and modus
operandi of Washington. What should have been a political contest over which party and prospective
leader could best lead a revived 1920s style campaign for world disarmament was mutated into a wave
of exceptionalist jingoism about how best to impose American hegemony on any nation or force on the
planet that refused compliance with Washington's designs and dictates.
And most certainly, this lamentable turn to the War Party's disastrous reign had nothing to do
with oil security or economic prosperity in America. The cure for high oil is always and everywhere
high oil prices, not the Fifth Fleet.
Indeed, as the so-called OPEC cartel crumbles into pitiful impotence and cacophony and as the
world oil glut drives prices eventually back into the teens, there can no longer be any dispute.
The blazing oilfields of Kuwait in 1991 had nothing to do with domestic oil security and prosperity,
and everything to do with the rise of a virulent militarism and imperialism that has drastically
undermined national security.
It is the bombs, drones, cruise missiles and brutal occupations of Muslim lands unleashed by the
War Party that has actually fostered the massive blowback and radical jidhadism rampant today in
the middle east and beyond.
Indeed, prior to 1991 Bin Laden and his mujahedeen, who had been trained and armed by the CIA
and heralded in the west for their help in defeating purportedly godless communism in Afghanistan,
had not declaimed against American liberty, opulence and decadence. They did not come to attack our
way of life as the neocon propagandists have so speciously claimed. Misguided and despicable as their
attack was, it was motivated by revenge and religious fanaticism that had never previously been directed
against the American people. That is, not until the Washington War Party decided to intervene in
the Persian Gulf in 1991.
Yes, the wholly different Shiite branch of Islam centered in Iran had a grievance, too. But that
wasn't about America's liberties and libertine ways of life, either. It was about the left over liability
from Washington's misguided cold war interventions and, specifically, the 1953 CIA coup that installed
the brutal and larcenous Shah on the Peacock Throne.
The whole Persian nation had deep grievances about that colossal injustice--a grievance that was
wantonly amplified in the 1980s by Washington's overt assistance to Saddam Hussein. Via the CIA's
satellite reconnaissance, Washington had actually helped him unleash heinous chemical warfare attacks
on Iranian forces, including essentially unarmed young boys who had been sent to the battle front
as cannon fodder.
Still, with the election of Rafsanjani in 1989 there was every opportunity to repair this historical
transgression and normalize relations with Tehran. In fact, in the early days the Bush state department
was well on the way to exactly that. But once the CNN war games in the gulf put the neocons back
in the saddle the door was slammed shut by Washington, not the Iranians.
Indeed at that very time, the re-ascendant neocons explicitly choose to demonize the Iranian regime
as a surrogate enemy to replace the defunct Kremlin commissars. Two of the most despicable actors
in the post-1991 neocon takeover of the GOP--Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz--actually penned a secret
document outlining the spurious anti-Iranian campaign which soon congealed into a full-blown war
myth.
To wit, that the Iranian's were hell bent on obtaining nuclear weapons and had become an implacable
foe of America and fountain of state sponsored terrorism.
Not long thereafter in 1996, these same neocon warmongers produced for newly elected Israeli prime
minister, Bibi Netanyahu, the infamous document called "A Clean Break: A New Strategy For Securing
The Realm".
Whether he immediately signed off an all of its sweeping plans for junking the Oslo Accords and
launching regime change initiatives against the Baathist regimes in Iraq and Syria is a matter of
historical debate. But there can be no doubt that shortly thereafter this manifesto became the operative
policy of the Netanyahu government and especially its virulent campaign to demonize Iran as an existential
threat to Israel. And that when the younger Bush took office and brought the whole posse of neocons
back into power, it became Washington's official policy, as well.
After 9/11 the dual War Party of Washington and Tel Aviv was off to the races and the US government
began its tumble toward $19 trillion of national debt and an eventual fiscal calamity. That's because
the neocon War Party sucked the old time religion of fiscal rectitude and monetary orthodoxy right
out of the GOP in the name of funding what has in truth become a trillion dollar per year Warfare
State.
There were several crucial moments along the way-–the first being the sacking of Treasury Secretary
Paul O'Neill by the White House praetorian guard led by Karl Rove. His sin was having the audacity
to say that the Afghan and Iraqi wars were going to cost trillions, and that stiff tax increases
and painful entitlements cuts were the only way to make ends meet.
Right then and there the GOP was stripped of any fiscal virginity that had survived the Reagan
era of triple digit deficits. Right on cue the contemptible Dick Cheney was quick to claim that Reagan
proved "deficits don't matter", meaning from that point forward whatever it took to fund the war
machine trumped any flickering Republican folk memories of fiscal prudence.
The great Dwight Eisenhower left office at the height of the cold war in 1961, warning the
American public about the insatiable appetites for budgets and war of the military industrial complex.
At the same time, however, his final budget attested to his conviction that $450 billion in today's
purchasing power (2015 $) was enough to fund the Pentagon, foreign aid and security assistance and
the needs of veterans of past wars.
Thanks to the GOP War Party and neocons we are spending more than double that amount-upwards
of $900 billion-–for those same purposes today. Yet unlike the nuclear threat posed by the Soviet
Union at the peak of its industrial vigor, we no longer have any industrial state enemy left on the
planet; we have appropriately been fired as the world's policeman and have no need for Washington's
far flung imperium of bases and naval and air power projection; and would not even be confronted
with the domestic policing challenges posed by highly limited and episodic homeland terrorist tempests
had Washington not turned Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and others into failed
states and economic rubble.
The Bush era War Party also committed an even more lamentable error in the midst of all of its
foreign policy triumphalism and its utter neglect of the GOP's actual purpose to function as an advocate
for sound money and free markets in the governance process of our two party democracy. Namely, it
appointed Ben Bernanke, an avowed Keynesian and big government statist who had loudly proclaimed
in favor of "helicopter money", to a Federal Reserve system that was already on the verge of an economic
coup d'état led by the unfaithful Alan Greenspan.
That coup was made complete by the loathsome bailout of Wall Street during the 2008 financial
crisis. And the latter had, in turn, been a consequence of the massive speculation and debt build-up
that had been enabled by the Fed's own policies during the prior decade and one-half.
Now after $3.5 trillion of heedless money printing and 86 months of ZIRP, Wall Street has been
transformed into an unstable, dangerous casino. Honest price discovery in the capital and money markets
no longer exists, nor has productive capital been flowing into real investments in efficiency and
growth.
Instead, the C-suites of corporate America have been transformed into stock trading rooms where
business balance sheets have been hocked to the tune of trillions in cheap debt in order to fund
stock buybacks, LBOs and M&A deals designed to goose stock prices and the value of top executive
options.
Indeed, the Fed's unconscionable inflation of the third massive financial bubble of this century
has showered speculators and the 1% with unspeakable financial windfalls that are fast creating not
only an inevitable thundering financial meltdown, but, also, a virulent populist backlash. The Eccles
Building was where the "Bern" that is roiling the electorate was actually midwifed.
And probably even the far greater political tremblor represented by The Donald, as well.
Yes, as a libertarian I shudder at the prospect of a man on a white horse heading for the White
House, as Donald Trump surely is. His rank demoguery and poisonous rhetoric about immigrants, Muslims,
refugees, women, domestic victims of police repression and the spy state and countless more are flat-out
contemptible. And the idea of building a horizontal version of Trump Towers on the Rio Grande is
just plain nuts.
But here's the thing. While spending a lifetime as a real estate speculator and self-created
celebrity, The Donald apparently did not have time to get mis-educated by the Council On Foreign
Relations or to hob knob with the GOP inner circle in Washington and the special interest group racketeers
they coddle.
So even as The Donald's election would bring on a thundering financial crash on Wall Street and
political upheaval in Washington-–the truth is that's going to happen anyway. Look at the hideous
mess that US policy has created in Syria or the incendiary corner into which the Fed has backed itself
or the fiscal projections that show we will be back into trillion dollar annual deficits as the recession
already underway reaches full force. The jig is well and truly up.
But a nation tumbling into financial and fiscal crisis will welcome the War Party purge that
Trump would surely undertake. He didn't allow the self-serving busy-bodies and fools who inhabit
the Council on Foreign Relations to dupe him into believing that Putin is a horrible threat; or that
the real estate on the eastern edge of the non-state of the Ukraine, which has always been either
a de jure or de facto part of Russia, was any of our business. Likewise, he has gotten it totally
right with respect to the sectarian and tribal wars of Syria and Iraq and Hillary's feckless destruction
of a stable regime in Libya.
Even his bombast about Obama's bad deal with Iran doesn't go much beyond Trump's ridiculous claim
that they are getting a $150 billion reward. In fact, it was their money; we stole it, and by the
time of the next election they will have it released anyway.
Besides, unlike the boy Senator from Florida who wants to be President so he can play with
guns, tanks, ships and bombs, The Donald has indicated no intention of tearing up the agreement on
day one in office.
Most importantly, The Donald has essentially proclaimed the obvious. Namely, that the cold
war is over and that the American taxpayers have no business subsidizing obsolete relics like NATO
and ground forces in South Korea and Japan.
At the end of the day, the reason that the neocons are apoplectic is that Trump would restore
the 1991 status quo ante. The nation's self-proclaimed greatest deal-maker might even take a leaf
out of Warren G. Harding's playbook and negotiate sweeping disarmament agreements in a world where
governments everywhere are on the verge of fiscal bankruptcy.
He might also come down with wrathful indignation on the Fed if its dares push toward the criminal
zone of negative interest rates. As far as I know, The Donald was never mis-educated by the Keynesian
swells at Brookings, either. No plain old businessman would ever fall for the sophistry and crank
monetary theories that are now ascendant in the Eccles Building.
When it comes to the nation's current economy wreckers-in-chief, Janet Yellen and Stanley Fischer,
he might even dust off on day one the skills he honed during 10-years on the Apprentice.
Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable....
A man full of faith is simply one who has lost (or never had) the capacity for clear and realistic
thought. He is not a mere ass: he is actually ill. H. L. Mencken
The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live is the one to the effect
that religious opinions should be respected. Its evil effects must be plain enough to everyone.
... There is, in fact, nothing about religious opinions that entitles them to any more respect
than other opinions get. On the contrary, they tend to be noticeably silly. ... No, there is nothing
notably dignified about religious ideas. They run, rather, to a peculiarly puerile and tedious
kind of nonsense. At their best, they are borrowed from metaphysicians, which is to say, from
men who devote their lives to proving that twice two is not always or necessarily four. At their
worst, they smell of spiritualism and fortune telling. Nor is there any visible virtue in the
men who merchant them professionally. Few theologians know anything that is worth knowing, even
about theology, and not many of them are honest. ... But the average theologian is a hearty, red-faced,
well-fed fellow with no discernible excuse in pathology. He disseminates his blather, not innocently,
like a philosopher, but maliciously, like a politician. In a well-organized world he would be
on the stone-pile. But in the world as it exists we are asked to listen to him, not only politely,
but even reverently, and with our mouths open. H. L. Mencken
Great read Mr. Stockman, and I can only hope you are right, that Super Tuesday really triggers
the demise of the Military Industrial Complex, although I seriously doubt it can be removed, replaced
or dismantled that easily.
The roots of the neocons and neolibs go so deep - multi-generational, multi-faceted, and
removing their control will require Open Regime Surgery, something I don't see anyone capable
of performing quite yet. Surely they are going to want their shot at being the first rulers to
control the entire earth - just before the energy runs out and the planet collapses in on itself
due to being hollowed out :)
As an engineer, I find it impossible to fathom that building 7, not hit by any planes and
only suffering minor fires, would fall straight into its own footprint at FREEFALL SPEED. This
is exactly the sort of thing you would expect ONLY from a controlled demolition.
I think that the neocons, in their meetings regarding the "Project for a New American Century"
(PNAC), needed 911 to foment, foster and facilitate a push of patriotic pathos of the American
people to go to war.
So so true. Of course this is an abridged version of history. You speak the truth to power.
This never makes the news or any of the debate tables with any of the mainstream media. Why...because
the media is owned by the corporations that profit from war.
There is no more liberal media unless you watch the Young Turks. With regards to Iran.
There is more to their history than...CIA's coup of 1953. From my memory the British controlled
the Iranian oilfields up until 1951 when they were nationalized. Why...because the British BP
oil company was cheating Iran on the profit sharing deal. So the British are out. It is 1953 and
the Americans want in. 1953 the Anglo-American Coup happened and the the profit sharing began
again with American oil companies with the Shaw (Shell-mobil-Exxon..I can't remember which one)
Of course the American oil companies breached the deal and shorted the POS Shah who then shorted
his nation. Rulers forget, poor people are pissed off people. So all this "it was the CIA" crap
is baloney...They were tools for corporate America. Don't kid yourself, it was about the oil.
IMO
BTW the Kuwaiti Royalty were friends of the Bushes.
We also did Israel a favor as Saddam was funding suicide bombers in Palestine ($20,000.00 to
the family for every suicide bomber) Arab mothers were happy to have their kids blown up for that
Saddam "reward." Ever notice how the suicide bombs ended/slowed in Israel after Saddam was deposed.
I did. Also Saddam was amassing his military on the Saudi's border at that time (Saddam wanted
Saudi oil to pay off his war debt) and so as a favor the the Saudi King (Bush's buddy) we ended
that threat. Yipee for us. This is never brought out in serious debate or news coverage. So if
someone says it was not about the oil...It was about the oil and always has been. It is all about
the oil. Oil is short for corporate cash cow money.
SD is right, Osama hated the fact that Bush's infidels were in the land of Mecca, and that
was one of the major instigators for the 9/11 attacks. Efing arrogant, ignorant Bush keeping "Merica"
safe. Clinton could have done a much better job cleaning up those King George the 1st's foreign
policy blunders, so I fault him to a degree too.
There are some good web sites that talk about this..I don't have them handy.
You are absolutely right. As Chas Freeman, who was our ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the
1991 Gulf War, has recounted, the stationing of American troops on Saudi soil in response to Saddam's
invasion of Kuwait presented a serious issue given that "[m]any Saudis interpret their religious
tradition as banning the presence of non-Muslims, especially the armed forces of nonbelievers,
on the Kingdom's soil." Shortly after the invasion, Freeman was present at a meeting between King
Fahd and Vice-President Cheney at which the King, overruling most of the Saudi royal family, agreed
to allow U.S. troops to be stationed in his country. This decision was premised on the clear understanding,
stressed by Cheney, that the American forces would be removed from Saudi Arabia once the immediate
threat from Saddam was over.
When that did not happen, Fahd faced serious domestic problems. Several prominent Muslim clerics
who objected to his policies were sent into exile, further inflaming the religious community.
More significantly for us, Osama Bin Laden began to call for the overthrow of the monarchy and
elevated his jihadist fight against the U.S. His Saudi passport was revoked for his anti-government
rhetoric, and in April 1991, threatened with arrest, he secretly departed Saudi Arabia for the
Afghanistan-Pakistan border region, never to return. The result, ten years later, was 9-11.
As Stockman points out, it seems that Washington was set on then neocon automatic pilot.
The policy of the Democrats was basically a continuation of a policy started prior to Reagan presidency.
Both Obama and Hillary Clinton are involved in regime change plans when we thought that Neo-cons
has been shown to be a band of idiots that worked for the military industrial complex.
In the seventies, Brzezinski advocated support for the Islamic belt with fundamentalist
regimes in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey. These Islamo-fascist were supposed to control
the perceived enemies of Capitalism.
Now, we talk 24/7 about the Islamic threat, while the Islamists are being supported by our
closest allies and elements in the deep state in Washington.
We rarely hear about the Shah of Iran and OUR CIA back in 1953. Nor about OBL and his stated reason's
for 9/11. Including the vengeful and childish bombardment of highlands behind Beirut by our terribly
expensive recommissioned Battle Ship -- Imagine the thinking behind taking that 'thing' out of
mothballs to Scare the A - rabs. Invading Grenada was Ollie North's idea to save face.
Thank you Mr. Stockman for fearlessly stating the facts. As to the 1st Iraq War, and the lies
on which it was based, the only other significant detail I would have mentioned is that Saddam
was suckered into invading Kuwait by the bitch, April Gillespie who, at the time, was serving
as his special envoy to the middle east.
@lloydholiday I lived
in MPLS. You would be amazed at how sacrificially 'liberal' they are, much like Merkel and the
deluded Germans. Minn let in thousands of Ethiopians and other Muslims who are now giving natives
a major headache, much like Europe.
The women over 30 are nearly fanatic over Black oppression, voted for Obama in droves, and
appear to be willing to sacrifice the interests of their own children in favor of aliens and minorities
(my own niece raised in Minn is a fanatic in this regard). Rubbero is a loser with a wind up tongue.
They are easily impressed by patter however inarticulate.
@lloydholiday
Billionaire "businessman" Glen Taylor owns the influential Minneapolis newspaper. He and his
idiotic neocon editorial board ENDORSED RUBIO just before the Minnesota caucuses. Rubio may
have made secret promises to Taylor, whose cannot possibly separate his many business interests
from Minnesota and national politics. This explanation is as likely any, how the Little Napoleon
won the ONLY state he is going to win, unless Floridians are somehow swayed to raise up a man
toward the Presidency who isn't qualified to be dog catcher.
As usual concise, accurate. Bush and Shrub were phonies in thrall to the Carlyle Group and
their buddies the 'Kingdom' (source and supporter of al-Quaeda) plus the pro-Israeli neocons who
wanted US boots on the ground to protect Israel. The Bush duumvirate played along in this duplicitous
game, which Trump called them on. Enron also played a role: Shrub let them set policy in the Stans
as their consortium sought pipeline rights from the Taliban. Crooks at play in the garden of evil.
It is the bombs, drones, cruise missiles and brutal occupations of Muslim lands unleashed
by the War Party that has actually fostered the massive blowback and radical jidhadism rampant
today in the middle east and beyond.
Mr Stockman apparently has the bad manners to speak the truth. Washington is going to be
PO'd at the blatant disrespect for their BS.
If the GOP disappears, there's always the brain dead Democrats. What we need is an end to both
parties. The best way to accomplish that is to cancel the entirety of the Fed Gov. Just get rid
of all of it. Let the states become countries and compete on the world stage. Let all those holding
Federal paper (the national debt) use it in their bathroom as toilet paper. Cancel the debt -
ignore it - lets start fresh with no central bank and real money based on something that the politicians
can't conjure into existence. I suggest gold and silver as history has shown that they work well.
@bill5 What I never
hear anyone state is that if we had let the Russians alone in Afghanistan this whole mess would
have never happened. Isn't that what originally allowed the Taliban and Obama bin Laden rise to
power? I though Reagan was a great president but made a catastrophic error in aligning with the
islamic insurgents against Russia . The Russians knew a radical Islamic state on their border
would be a problem and the existing Afghan government, an ally of Russia, asked them to help quell
the islamist civil war. The Russians would have ruthlessly eliminated the islamists without worrying
about causing any greenhouse gas emissions or hurting anyones feelings.
@FreeOregon It will
shocked me beyond words if he survives the primaries. Far too much is at stake. In fact, 100 years
of lying, cheating, and thieving, and the wealth it has produced is at stake. The Rothschild Establishment,
centered in London and Tel Aviv, will not sit idly by and watch as their lucrative racket is dismantled
by an up-start politician that cannot be purchased and put under their control.
All true....finally the politicians that have run our country into the ground are exposed
for the puppets of oligarchs they are...it is obvious....both parties, phony conservatives and
liberals alike, are waging war on Trump because he truly threatens the status quo......it's going
to get real ugly now that the powers that be are threatened.....I wouldn't fly to much if I was
Trump from here on in!
What is amazing is that such column was published is such a sycophantic for Hillary and openly anti-Trump
rag as NYT. In foreign policy Hillary is the second incarnation of Cheney... Neocons rules NYT coverage
of Presidential race and, of course, they all favor Hillary. Of course chances that some on neocons
who so enthusiastically support her, crossing Party lines are drafted, get M16 and send to kill brown
people for Wall Street interests now is close to zero. Everything is outsourced now. But still, it is
simply amazing that even a lonely voice against neocon campaign of demonization of Trump got published
in NYT ...
MSM shilling for Hillary is simply overwhelming, so why this was in NYT is a mystery to me. But
this article of Maureen Dowd in on spot. Simply amazing how she manage to publish it !!!
Notable quotes:
"... Hillary will keep the establishment safe. Who is more of an establishment figure, after all? Her husband was president, and he repealed Glass-Steagall, signed the Defense of Marriage Act and got rid of those pesky welfare queens. ..."
"... Hillary often seems more Republican than the Gotham bling king, who used to be a Democrat and donor to Democratic candidates before he jumped the turnstile. ..."
"... Hillary is a reliable creature of Wall Street. Her tax return showed the Clintons made $10.6 million last year, and like other superrich families, they incorporated with the Clinton Executive Services Corporation (which was billed for the infamous server). Trump has started holding up goofy charts at rallies showing Hillary has gotten $48,500,000 in contributions from hedge funders, compared to his $19,000. ..."
"... Unlike Trump, she hasn't been trashing leading Republicans. You know that her pals John McCain and Lindsey Graham are secretly rooting for her. There is a cascade of prominent Republicans endorsing Hillary, donating to Hillary, appearing in Hillary ads, talking up Hillary's charms. ..."
"... Robert Kagan, a former Reagan State Department aide, adviser to the McCain and Mitt Romney campaigns and Iraq war booster, headlined a Hillary fund-raiser this summer. Another neocon, James Kirchick, keened in The Daily Beast , "Hillary Clinton is the one person standing between America and the abyss." ..."
"... The Democratic nominee put out an ad featuring Trump-bashing Michael Hayden, an N.S.A. and CIA chief under W. who was deemed "incongruent" by the Senate when he testified about torture methods. And she earned an endorsement from John Negroponte, a Reagan hand linked to American-trained death squads in Latin America. ..."
"... Politico reports that the Clinton team sent out feelers to see if Kissinger, the Voldemort of Vietnam, and Condi Rice, the conjurer of Saddam's apocalyptic mushroom cloud, would back Hillary. ..."
"... The Hillary team seems giddy over its windfall of Republicans and neocons running from the Trump sharknado. But as David Weigel wrote in The Washington Post, the specter of Kissinger, the man who advised Nixon to prolong the Vietnam War to help with his re-election, fed a perception that "the Democratic nominee has returned to her old, hawkish ways and is again taking progressives for granted." ..."
"... Hillary is a safer bet in many ways for conservatives. Trump likes to say he is flexible. What if he returns to his liberal New York positions on gun control and abortion rights? ..."
"... Trump is far too incendiary in his manner of speaking, throwing around dangerous and self-destructive taunts about "Second Amendment people" taking out Hillary, or President Obama and Hillary being the founders of ISIS ..."
"... Hillary, on the other hand, understands her way around political language and Washington rituals. Of course you do favors for wealthy donors. And if you want to do something incredibly damaging to the country, like enabling George W. Bush to make the worst foreign policy blunder in U.S. history, don't shout inflammatory and fabricated taunts from a microphone. ..."
"... You must walk up to the microphone calmly, as Hillary did on the Senate floor the day of the Iraq war vote, and accuse Saddam of giving "aid, comfort and sanctuary to terrorists, including Al Qaeda," repeating the Bush administration's phony case for war. If you want to carry the GOP banner, your fabrications have to be more sneaky. ..."
"... "You must walk up to the microphone calmly, as Hillary did on the Senate floor the day of the Iraq war vote, and accuse Saddam of giving "aid, comfort and sanctuary to terrorists, including Al Qaeda," repeating the Bush administration's phony case for war." ..."
"... Anyone who believes Bill Clinton didn't know exactly what was going on is just kidding themselves. One clue, for example. They moved the WMD 'intelligence" investigation to the DOD under Paul Wolfowitz. LOL! ..."
"... Thomas Frank, the author of "What's the Matter with Kansas?" and "Listen Liberal: Or What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?" echoes Ms. Dowd's sentiments. In a recent column Frank says that with Trump certain to lose, you can forget about a progressive Clinton. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/13/trump-clinton-elec... ..."
"... "America's two-party system itself has temporarily become a one-party system. And within that one party, the political process bears a striking resemblance to dynastic succession. Come November, Clinton will have won her great victory – not as a champion of working people's concerns, but as the greatest moderate of them all." ..."
"... We've also managed to select one of biggest dissemblers, enablers, war hawks, fungible flip-floppers, pay for play con artists, scandal mongerers candidates since Tricky Dicky. Congratulations America! We did it. As Alexis de Tocqueville said, "Wet get the government we deserve." ..."
"... The reaction by many to Ms Dowd's column clearly shows that the "save the world" "lesser evil" argument only works is one is willing to suspend belief on the demonstrated evil of Hillary Clinton. ..."
"... Clinton could well take us to war against Russia. In Syria, Clinton is spoiling to give Russia a punch in the nose, on the theory that Russia will back down and the US will have a free hand there. She advocates a a no-fly zone for Russian jets in Syria. The idea there is to create a confrontation, shoot down a couple of Russian jets and teach them a lesson. There is also the CIA and Pentagon "Plan B" for the Syrian negotiations. ..."
"... It's always wonderful to see when the truth comes out in the end: Hillary is the perfect Repulican candidate and this is also prove of the fact that on finance and economic issues Democrats and old mainstream Republicans have been in in the same pocket...even under Obama. ..."
"... One night after the election on the Carson show Goldwater quipped that he didn't know how unpopular a president he would have been until Johnson adopted his policies... ..."
"... All the things you say about Hillary are true. She is an establishment favorite. She did indeed vote to support Bush and his insane desire to invade Iraq. ..."
"... Did we all forget the millions who went for Bernie and his direct and aggressive confrontation of Hillary's Wall Street/corporate ties? That was a contest between what used to be the Dem party of the people and the corporate friendly Dem party of today. We understood then that Hillary represented the Right; why the surprise now? (The right pointing arrow on the "H" logo is so appropriate.) ..."
"... There are reasons Hillary is disliked and distrusted by nearly a majority of us. My reasons are she is of and for the oligarchs and deceitful enough to run as a populist. ..."
"... America tried to liberalize in the 1960's and the response was swift and violent as three of the greatest liberal lions and voices the country has ever known - JFK, MLK and RFK - were gunned down. ..."
"... While one can endlessly argue the specific details of those ghastly assassinations of America's liberal superstars, in my view, all three of those murders rest on the violent, nefarious right-wing shoulders and fumes of moneyed American 'conservatism' that couldn't stand to share the profits of their economic parasitism with society. ..."
"... I truly believe that Congressional Republicans in the House are already drafting articles of impeachment should Hillary become President. Dowd may claim that Republicans are in lock step with her, but don't be surprised when the talk of impeachment starts soon after Jan 20, 2017. ..."
"... We need a multi party system. With 2 parties dominating the politics, its like having a monopoly of liberalism or conservatism which just does not represent the width and depth of views our citizens resonate with. Having voted democrat all my life, to me Hillary does not represent my choice (Bernie does). ..."
"... This annoys me..."like enabling George W. Bush to make the worst foreign policy blunder in U.S. history" Maureen is talking about Hillary, but she might as well be talking about her own newspaper. Hillary got it wrong, but so did the New York Times editorial board. ..."
"... The Bush Administration hinted that the anti-war people were traitors and terrorist sympathizers and everybody got steamrolled. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/22/opinion/culture-war-with-b-2-s.html ..."
"... HRC couldn't have asked for a better opponent if she'd constructed him out of a six-foot pile of mildewed straw. By running against Trump, the whole Trump and nothing but the Trump, and openly courting neocon war criminals and "establishment" Republicans, she's outrageously giving CPR to what should have been a rotting corpse of a political party by now. ..."
"... By giving new life to the pathocrats who made Trump possible, Clinton is only making her own party weaker and more right-wing, only making it easier for down-ticket Republicans to slither their way back into power.... the better to triangulate with during the Clinton restoration. Grand Bargain, here we come. TPP, (just waiting for that fig leaf of meager aid for displaced American workers) here we come. Bombs away. ..."
"... She'll have to stop hoarding her campaign cash and share it with the down-ticket Democrats running against the same well-heeled GOPers she is now courting with such naked abandon. ..."
"... The Empress needs some new clothes to hide that inner Goldwater Girl. ..."
All these woebegone Republicans whining that they can't rally behind their flawed candidate is
crazy. The G.O.P. angst, the gnashing and wailing and searching for last-minute substitutes and exit
strategies, is getting old. They already have a 1-percenter who will be totally fine in the Oval
Office, someone they can trust to help Wall Street, boost the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, cuddle with
hedge funds, secure the trade deals beloved by corporate America, seek guidance from Henry Kissinger
and hawk it up - unleashing hell on Syria and heaven knows where else.
The Republicans have their candidate: It's Hillary. They can't go with Donald Trump. He's too
volatile and unhinged. The erstwhile Goldwater Girl and Goldman Sachs busker can be counted on to
do the normal political things, not the abnormal haywire things. Trump's propounding could drag us
into war, plunge us into a recession and shatter Washington into a thousand tiny bits.
Hillary will keep the establishment safe. Who is more of an establishment figure, after all?
Her husband was president, and he repealed Glass-Steagall, signed the Defense of Marriage Act and
got rid of those pesky welfare queens.
Pushing her Midwestern Methodist roots, taking advantage of primogeniture, Hillary often seems
more Republican than the Gotham bling king, who used to be a Democrat and donor to Democratic candidates
before he jumped the turnstile.
Hillary is a reliable creature of Wall Street. Her tax return showed the Clintons made $10.6
million last year, and like other superrich families, they incorporated with the Clinton Executive
Services Corporation (which was billed for the infamous server). Trump has started holding up goofy
charts at rallies showing Hillary has gotten $48,500,000 in contributions from hedge funders, compared
to his $19,000.
Unlike Trump, she hasn't been trashing leading Republicans. You know that her pals John McCain
and Lindsey Graham are secretly rooting for her. There is a cascade of prominent Republicans endorsing
Hillary, donating to Hillary, appearing in Hillary ads, talking up Hillary's charms.
Robert Kagan, a former Reagan State Department aide, adviser to the McCain and Mitt Romney
campaigns and Iraq war booster, headlined a Hillary fund-raiser this summer. Another neocon, James
Kirchick,
keened in The Daily Beast , "Hillary Clinton is the one person standing between America and the
abyss."
She has finally stirred up some emotion in women, even if it is just moderate suburban Republican
women palpitating to leave their own nominee, who has the retro air of a guy who just left the dim
recesses of a Playboy bunny club.
The Democratic nominee put out an ad featuring Trump-bashing Michael Hayden, an N.S.A. and
CIA chief under W. who was deemed "incongruent" by the Senate when he testified about torture
methods. And she earned an endorsement from John Negroponte, a Reagan hand linked to American-trained
death squads in Latin America.
Politico reports that the Clinton team sent out feelers to see if Kissinger, the Voldemort
of Vietnam, and Condi Rice, the conjurer of Saddam's apocalyptic mushroom cloud, would back Hillary.
Hillary has written that Kissinger is an "idealistic" friend whose counsel she valued as secretary
of state, drawing a rebuke from Bernie Sanders during the primaries: "I'm proud to say Henry Kissinger
is not my friend."
The Hillary team seems giddy over its windfall of Republicans and neocons running from the
Trump sharknado. But as
David Weigel wrote in The Washington Post, the specter of Kissinger, the man who advised Nixon
to prolong the Vietnam War to help with his re-election, fed a perception that "the Democratic nominee
has returned to her old, hawkish ways and is again taking progressives for granted."
And
Isaac Chotiner wrote in Slate, "The prospect of Kissinger having influence in a Clinton White
House is downright scary."
Hillary is a safer bet in many ways for conservatives. Trump likes to say he is flexible.
What if he returns to his liberal New York positions on gun control and abortion rights?
Trump is far too incendiary in his manner of speaking, throwing around dangerous and self-destructive
taunts about "Second Amendment people" taking out Hillary, or President Obama and Hillary being the
founders of ISIS. And he still blindly follows his ego, failing to understand the fundamentals
of a campaign. "I don't know that we need to get out the vote," he told Fox News Thursday. "I think
people that really wanna vote are gonna get out and they're gonna vote for Trump."
Hillary, on the other hand, understands her way around political language and Washington rituals.
Of course you do favors for wealthy donors. And if you want to do something incredibly damaging to
the country, like enabling George W. Bush to make the worst foreign policy blunder in U.S. history,
don't shout inflammatory and fabricated taunts from a microphone.
You must walk up to the microphone calmly, as Hillary did on the Senate floor the day of the
Iraq war vote, and accuse Saddam of giving "aid, comfort and sanctuary to terrorists, including Al
Qaeda," repeating the Bush administration's phony case for war. If you want to carry the GOP banner,
your fabrications have to be more sneaky.
As
Republican strategist Steve Schmidt noted on MSNBC, "the candidate in the race most like George
W. Bush and Dick Cheney from a foreign policy perspective is in fact Hillary Clinton, not the Republican
nominee."
And that's how Republicans prefer their crazy - not like Trump, but like Cheney.
JohnNJ, New jersey August 14, 2016
For me, this is her strongest point:
"You must walk up to the microphone calmly, as Hillary did on the Senate floor the day
of the Iraq war vote, and accuse Saddam of giving "aid, comfort and sanctuary to terrorists, including
Al Qaeda," repeating the Bush administration's phony case for war."
There are still people who believe her excuse that she only voted for authorization, blah,
blah, blah.
Anyone who believes Bill Clinton didn't know exactly what was going on is just kidding
themselves. One clue, for example. They moved the WMD 'intelligence" investigation to the DOD
under Paul Wolfowitz. LOL!
Red_Dog , Denver CO August 14, 2016
Thomas Frank, the author of "What's the Matter with Kansas?" and "Listen Liberal: Or What
Ever Happened to the Party of the People?" echoes Ms. Dowd's sentiments. In a recent column Frank
says that with Trump certain to lose, you can forget about a progressive Clinton.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/13/trump-clinton-elec...
"America's two-party system itself has temporarily become a one-party system. And within
that one party, the political process bears a striking resemblance to dynastic succession. Come
November, Clinton will have won her great victory – not as a champion of working people's concerns,
but as the greatest moderate of them all."
And great populist uprising of our times will be gone --- probably for many years.
FDR Liberal , Sparks, NV August 14, 2016
Spot on column Ms. Dowd.
As Americans we are to blame that these two major party candidates are the only viable ones
seeking the presidency. Yes, fellow citizens we are to blame because in the end we are the ones
that voted for them in various primaries and caucuses. And if you didn't attend a caucus or vote
in a primary, you are also part of problem.
In short, it is not the media's fault, nor is it the top .1%, 1% or 10% fault, nor your kids'
fault, nor your parents' fault, nor your neighbors' fault, etc.
It is our fault because we did this together. Yes, we managed y to select a narcissist, xenophobe,
anti-Muslim, racist, misogynist, and dare I say buffoon to the GOP ticket.
We've also managed to select one of biggest dissemblers, enablers, war hawks, fungible
flip-floppers, pay for play con artists, scandal mongerers candidates since Tricky Dicky. Congratulations
America! We did it. As Alexis de Tocqueville said, "Wet get the government we deserve."
Martin Brod, NYC August 14, 2016
The reaction by many to Ms Dowd's column clearly shows that the "save the world" "lesser
evil" argument only works is one is willing to suspend belief on the demonstrated evil of Hillary
Clinton.
The Green Party and Libertarian parties provide sane alternatives to the two most distrusted
candidates of the major parties. As debate participants they
would offer an alternative to evil at a time when the planets count-down clock is racing to mid-night.
pathenry, berkeley August 14, 2016
Clinton could well take us to war against Russia. In Syria, Clinton is spoiling to give
Russia a punch in the nose, on the theory that Russia will back down and the US will have a free
hand there. She advocates a a no-fly zone for Russian jets in Syria. The idea there is to create
a confrontation, shoot down a couple of Russian jets and teach them a lesson. There is also the
CIA and Pentagon "Plan B" for the Syrian negotiations.
If the negotiations fail, give stingers to our "vetted allies". Who will those stingers be
used against? Russia. At least the ones not smuggled to Brussels. And then there is the plan being
bandied about by our best and brightest to organize, arm and lead our "vetted allies" in attacks
on Russian bases in Syria. A Bay of Pigs in the desert. A dime to a dollar, Clinton is supportive
of these plans.
All of this is dangerous brinksmanship which is how you go to war.
Mike A. , East Providence, RI August 14, 2016
The second Pulitzer quality piece from the NYT op-ed columnists in less than a month (see Charles
Blow's "Incandescent With Rage" for the first).
heinrich zwahlen , brooklyn August 14, 2016
It's always wonderful to see when the truth comes out in the end: Hillary is the perfect
Repulican candidate and this is also prove of the fact that on finance and economic issues Democrats
and old mainstream Republicans have been in in the same pocket...even under Obama.
For real progressives it's useless to vote for her and high time to start a new party. Cultural
issues are not the main issues that pain America, it's all about the money stupid.
JohnD, New York August 14, 2016
... One night after the election on the Carson show Goldwater quipped that he didn't know
how unpopular a president he would have been until Johnson adopted his policies...
Lee Elliott , Rochester August 14, 2016
You've written the most depressing column I've read lately. All the things you say about
Hillary are true. She is an establishment favorite. She did indeed vote to support Bush and his
insane desire to invade Iraq. But it was that vote kept her from being president in 2008.
Perhaps that will convince her to keep the establishment a little more at arm's length. When there
is no other behind for them to kiss, then you can afford to be a little hard to get.
As for Trump, he is proving to be too much like Ross Perot. He looks great at first but begins
to fade when his underlying lunacy begins to bubble to the surface.
Speaking of Perot, I find it an interesting coincidence that Bill Clinton and now Hillary Clinton
will depend on the ravings of an apparent lunatic in order to get elected.
citizen vox, San Francisco August 14, 2016
Why the vitriol against Dowd? Did we all forget the millions who went for Bernie and his
direct and aggressive confrontation of Hillary's Wall Street/corporate ties? That was a contest
between what used to be the Dem party of the people and the corporate friendly Dem party of today.
We understood then that Hillary represented the Right; why the surprise now? (The right pointing
arrow on the "H" logo is so appropriate.)
Last week's article on how Hillary came to love money was horrifying; because Bill lost a Governor's
race, Hillary felt so insecure she called all her wealthy friends for donations. Huh?! Two Harvard
trained lawyers asking for financial help?! And never getting enough money to feel secure?! GIVE
ME A BREAK (to coin a phrase).
There are reasons Hillary is disliked and distrusted by nearly a majority of us. My reasons
are she is of and for the oligarchs and deceitful enough to run as a populist.
If readers bemoan anything, let it be that the populist movement of the Dem party was put down
by the Dem establishment. We have a choice between a crazy candidate of no particular persuasion
and a cold, calculating Republican. How discouraging.
Thanks, Maureen Dowd.
Chris, Louisville August 14, 2016
Maureen please don't ever give up on Hillary bashing. It needs to be done before someone accidentally
elects her as President. She is most like Angela Merkel of Germany. Take a look what's happening
there. That is enough never to vote for Hillary.
Susan e, AZ August 14, 2016
I recall the outrage I, a peace loving liberal who despised W and Cheney, felt while watching
the made for TV "shock and awe" invasion of Iraq. I recall how the"liberal Democrats" who supported
that disaster with a vote for the IRW could never quite bring themselves to admit their mistake
- and I realized that many, like Hillary, didn't feel it was a mistake. Not really. It was necessary
for their political careers.
For me, its not a vote for Hillary, its a vote for a candidate that sees killing innocent people
in Syria (or Libya, or Gaza, etc.) as the only way to be viewed as a serious candidate for CIC.
I'm old enough to remember another endless war, as the old Vietnam anti-war ballad went: "I ain't
gonna vote for war no more."
John, Switzerland August 14, 2016
Maureen Dowd is not being nasty, but rather accurate. It is nasty to support and start wars
throughout the ME. It is nasty to say (on mic) "We came, we saw, he died" referring to the gruesome
torture-murder of Qaddafi.
Will Hillary start a war against Syria? Yes or no? That is the the "six trillion dollar" question.
Socrates , is a trusted commenter Downtown Verona, NJ August 13, 2016
It's hard to a find a good liberal in these United States, not because there's anything wrong
with liberalism or progressivism, but because Americans have been taught, hypnotized and beaten
by a powerfully insidious and filthy rich right-wing to think that liberalism, progressivism and
socialism is a form of fatal cancer.
America tried to liberalize in the 1960's and the response was swift and violent as three
of the greatest liberal lions and voices the country has ever known - JFK, MLK and RFK - were
gunned down.
While one can endlessly argue the specific details of those ghastly assassinations of America's
liberal superstars, in my view, all three of those murders rest on the violent, nefarious right-wing
shoulders and fumes of moneyed American 'conservatism' that couldn't stand to share the profits
of their economic parasitism with society.
The end result is that political liberals are forced to triangulate for their survival in right-wing
America, and you wind up with Presidents like Bill Clinton and (soon) Hillary Clinton who know
how to survive in a pool of right-wing knives, assassins and psychopaths lurking everywhere representing
Grand Old Profit.
... ... ...
Dotconnector, New York August 14, 2016
The trickery deep within the dark art of Clintonism is triangulation. By breeding a nominal
Democratic donkey with a de facto Republican elephant, what you get is a corporatist chameleon.
There's precious little solace in knowing that this cynical political hybrid is only slightly
less risky than Trumpenstein.
And the fact that Henry Kissinger still has a seat at the table ought to chill the spine of
anyone who considers human lives -- those of U.S. service members and foreign noncombatants alike
-- to have greater value than pawns in a global chess game.
Bj, is a trusted commenter Washington,dc August 13, 2016
I truly believe that Congressional Republicans in the House are already drafting articles
of impeachment should Hillary become President. Dowd may claim that Republicans are in lock step
with her, but don't be surprised when the talk of impeachment starts soon after Jan 20, 2017.
They didn't succeed with Bill. And they were chomping at the bit to try to impeach Obama
over his use of executive orders and his decision not to defend an early same sex marriage case.
They are just waiting for inauguration to start this process all over again - another circus and
waste of taxpayer money.
petey tonei, Massachusetts August 14, 2016
Two party system is not enough for a country this big, with such a wide spectrum of political
beliefs. We need a multi party system. With 2 parties dominating the politics, its like having
a monopoly of liberalism or conservatism which just does not represent the width and depth of
views our citizens resonate with. Having voted democrat all my life, to me Hillary does not represent
my choice (Bernie does). Heard on NPR just today from on the ground reporters in Terre Haute,
Indiana, the bellwether of presidential elections, the 2 names that were most heard were Trump
and Bernie Sanders, not Hillary. Sadly, Bernie is not even the nominee but he truly represents
the guts, soul of mid America
Schrodinger, is a trusted commenter Northern California August 14, 2016
This annoys me..."like enabling George W. Bush to make the worst foreign policy blunder
in U.S. history" Maureen is talking about Hillary, but she might as well be talking about her
own newspaper. Hillary got it wrong, but so did the New York Times editorial board.
What about Ms Dowd herself? Of the four columns she wrote before the vote on October 11th,
2002, only two mentioned the war vote, and one of those was mostly about Hillary. Dowd said of
Hillary that, "Whatever doubts she may have privately about the war, she is not articulating her
angst as loudly as some of her Democratic colleagues. She knows that any woman who hopes to be
elected president cannot have love beads in her jewelry case."
In her column 'Culture war with B-2's', Dowd comes out as mildly anti-war. "Don't feel bad
if you have the uneasy feeling that you're being steamrolled", Dowd writes, "You are not alone."
Fourteen years later that column still looks good, and I link to it at the bottom. However, Dowd
could and should have done a lot more. I don't think that anybody who draws a paycheck from the
New York Times has a right to get on their high horse and lecture Hillary about her vote. They
ignored the antiwar protests just like they ignored Bernie Sanders' large crowds.
Karen Garcia , is a trusted commenter New Paltz, NY August 13, 2016
HRC couldn't have asked for a better opponent if she'd constructed him out of a six-foot
pile of mildewed straw. By running against Trump, the whole Trump and nothing but the Trump, and
openly courting neocon war criminals and "establishment" Republicans, she's outrageously giving
CPR to what should have been a rotting corpse of a political party by now.
By giving new life to the pathocrats who made Trump possible, Clinton is only making her
own party weaker and more right-wing, only making it easier for down-ticket Republicans to slither
their way back into power.... the better to triangulate with during the Clinton restoration. Grand
Bargain, here we come. TPP, (just waiting for that fig leaf of meager aid for displaced American
workers) here we come. Bombs away.
With three months to go before this grotesque circus ends, Trump is giving every indication
that he wants out, getting more reckless by the day. And that's a good thing, because with her
rise in the polls, Hillary will now have to do more on the stump than inform us she is not Trump.
She'll have to ditch the fear factor. She'll have to start sending emails and Tweets with something
other than "OMG! Did you hear what Trump just said?!?" on them to convince voters.
She'll have to stop hoarding her campaign cash and share it with the down-ticket Democrats
running against the same well-heeled GOPers she is now courting with such naked abandon.
The Empress needs some new clothes to hide that inner Goldwater Girl.
The two sources of her problems are beginning to merge much as two weather depressions might
collide and become a hurricane. One is the already well-trodden matter of her use of a private
email server while Secretary of State. The other relates to the Clinton Foundation and whether
donors received preferential access to her while she served in that post.
Two bombs dropped on the Clinton campaign at once on Monday. First it emerged that the FBI has
collected and delivered to the State Department almost 15,000 new emails not previously seen and
a federal judge ordered the department to accelerate their release to the public. Meanwhile, a
conservative group called Judicial Watch released details of still more emails detailing exactly
how donors to the foundation set about trying to get Ms Clinton's attention.
... ... ...
Questions have been swirling for weeks about whether or not Ms Clinton was drawn into giving
special favours to some of her husband's pals in return for their giving generously to the
charitable foundation he set up after leaving the presidency – a pay and play arrangement. On
Monday, Judicial Watch unveiled details that showed exactly how that might have happened thanks
to emails it had accessed through the courts sent to and from Huma Abedin, a close Clinton
confidante and her deputy chief of staff during her four years at the State Department.
... ... ...
In attempt to forestall the trouble that is already upon his wife, Mr Clinton announced this
week that should she win the presidency, several things will change at his Foundation. First and
foremost it would cease to take money from any foreign governments and donors and only from
US-based charities and individuals. He would also step down from the foundation entirely and
cease personally to raise funds for it.
...many voters are simply afraid that with Ms Clinton in the White House the whole tawdry
cycle will just start all over again and nothing else with get done in Washington
It was only one in a long parade of late-August fundraisers Ms Clinton has attended, but it
stands out for the generosity required of those who attended. The price of admission for the
20-odd guests who obliged was a stunning $200,000. That was double the $100,000 charged for
guests who mingled recently with Ms Clinton in Omaha at the home of Susan Buffett, the daughter
of Warren Buffett, the veteran investment oracle.
... ... ...
As of Monday, she and Mr Kaine had harvested no less than $32 million for the Hillary Victory
Fund, which will be distributed to her campaign, the Democratic National Committee and state
parties. A lot of was raised in last week as Ms Clinton hopscotched from party to party on
Martha's Vineyard and Cape Code in Massachusetts.
On August 5th, Michael Morell, a former acting Director of the CIA, pilloried GOP presidential
candidate Donald Trump, concluding that he was an "unwitting agent of Russia." Morell, who entitled
his New York Times op-ed "I Ran the CIA and now I'm endorsing Hillary Clinton," described the
process whereby Trump had been so corrupted. According to Morell, Putin, it seems, as a wily ex-career
intelligence officer, is "trained to identify vulnerabilities in an individual and to exploit
them. That is exactly what he did early in the primaries. Mr. Putin played upon Mr. Trump's vulnerabilities
In the intelligence business, we would say that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting
agent of the Russian Federation."
So who is guilty of putting the interests of a foreign government ahead of those of the United
States? I know there are advocates for any number of foreign states running around loose in Washington
but the friends of Israel in government and the media come immediately to mind largely because
there are so many of them, they are very much in-your-face and they are both extremely well-funded
and very successful. Now deceased former Congressman Tom Lantos and Senator Frank Lautenberg were,
respectively, often referred to as the congressman and senator from Israel. And there are many
more: Chuck Schumer, Chuck Grassley, Ben Cardin, Bob Menendez, Tom Cotton, Mark Kirk, Nita Lowey,
Ted Deutch, Brad Sherman, Ileana-Ros Lehtinen and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz to name only a few
in the Congress. All are
major recipients
of Israel related PAC money and all are reliable defenders of Israel no matter
what Benjamin Netanyahu does and no matter how it effects the United States.
And then there are the Clintons.
One only has to go back to Bill's
one-sided pro-Israeli
diplomacy
at Camp David in 2000 to discern how the game was played. And then there was the
widely condemned January 2001
last minute pardon
of
Mossad agent Marc Rich, whose wife Denise was a major contributor to the Clintons, to realize
that there was always a deference to Israeli interests particularly when money was involved. The
only problem is that the Clintons, relying on Morell's formulation, might more reasonably be described
as witting agents of Israel rather than unwitting as they have certainly known what they have
been doing and have been actively supporting Israeli policies even when damaging to U.S. interests
since they first emerged from the primordial political swamps in Arkansas. If one were completely
cynical it might be possible to suggest that they understood from the beginning that pandering
to Israel and gaining access to Jewish power and money would be a major component in their rise
to political prominence. It certainly has worked out that way.
=====
So who is guilty of putting the interests of a foreign government ahead of those of the United
States? I know there are advocates for any number of foreign states running around loose in Washington
but the friends of Israel in government and the media come immediately to mind largely because
there are so many of them, they are very much in-your-face and they are both extremely well-funded
and very successful. Now deceased former Congressman Tom Lantos and Senator Frank Lautenberg were,
respectively, often referred to as the congressman and senator from Israel. And there are many
more: Chuck Schumer, Chuck Grassley, Ben Cardin, Bob Menendez, Tom Cotton, Mark Kirk, Nita Lowey,
Ted Deutch, Brad Sherman, Ileana-Ros Lehtinen and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz to name only a few
in the Congress. All are
major recipients
of Israel related PAC money and all are reliable defenders of Israel no matter
what Benjamin Netanyahu does and no matter how it effects the United States.
And then there are the Clintons. One only has to go back to Bill's
one-sided pro-Israeli
diplomacy
at Camp David in 2000 to discern how the game was played. And then there was the
widely condemned January 2001
last minute pardon
of
Mossad agent Marc Rich, whose wife Denise was a major contributor to the Clintons, to realize
that there was always a deference to Israeli interests particularly when money was involved. The
only problem is that the Clintons, relying on Morell's formulation, might more reasonably be described
as witting agents of Israel rather than unwitting as they have certainly known what they have
been doing and have been actively supporting Israeli policies even when damaging to U.S. interests
since they first emerged from the primordial political swamps in Arkansas. If one were completely
cynical it might be possible to suggest that they understood from the beginning that pandering
to Israel and gaining access to Jewish power and money would be a major component in their rise
to political prominence. It certainly has worked out that way.
"... Clinton bigotry against working with inconvenient facts. Read applicable US code one for security, one for federal records, Clinton gets away with calling law that protect security as 'spin'. ..."
The burgeoning neolib dog whistle "alt-right" is short for "a$$hole who thinks Clinton should
go to jail for 1000 times the misconduct that would get that a$$hole 10 years hard time".
Neoliberals use the term "alt-right" as shorthand for those who don't drink the Clinton neocon
Kool-Aid.
The bigotry of warmongering neoliberals against anyone who disagrees. There isn't enough fascism
going around?
Clinton bigotry against working with inconvenient facts. Read applicable US code one for security,
one for federal records, Clinton gets away with calling law that protect security as 'spin'.
ilsm -> Paine... , -1
The 'soft bigotry of GLBT and war for fascist allies' types criticizing racists' morals.
ilsm -> anne... , -1
In the same category as Brooks and Friedman. I regard Dowd better!
"... vote for Clinton is vote for globalization, while vote for Trump is vote for anti-globalization ..."
"... Recall that the Obomber passed the legislation that legalized propaganda (lying to the public) and permits no remedy other than the ability to protest in fenced in free speech zones until the cops show up as head knockers or agents provocateurs. ..."
"... You say that Trump's economic policies as U.S. president would be catastrophic for those most likely to vote for him. Anyone's economic policies will be catastrophic for those most likely to vote for Trump. That's baked into the political and economic structure of things. It is part of the natural order. ..."
"... The difference with Trump is that after the economic catastrophe that will happen--is now happening , it may be possible under a Trump administration to pick things up and rebuild. Under any other likely regime, the aftermath of economic catastrophe will be limitless debt peonage and unlimited oligarchy. ..."
"... The shooting down of an Israeli warplane by Syria has not been reported by Western and Israeli media sources. According to Sputnik, on August 21, "the Israeli Air Force resumed airstrikes on Western Syria, targeting a government army base at Khan Al-Sheih in Damascus province and another in the al-Quneitra province after a six-hour halt in attacks that followed their multiple air raids over the Golan Heights." ..."
Some real beauties in there alright. Kerry giving himself yet another uppercut.
"...U.S. officials say it is imperative that Russia use its influence with Syrian President
Bashar Assad to halt all attacks on moderate opposition forces, ..."
Not Assad must go. Not close. Yet, still blissfully ignorant of the fact their more extreme
moderates are getting their jollies out of hacking sick 12 year old kids heads off with fishing
knive. I wonder at what point does 'moderate' become a dirty word...?
@Noirette Pt1
Big crowds scare Hillary these days. Best not to shake her up too much. I wonder though,
how she expects to compete with Trumps fervour... must be pretty happy that they can do a nice
back door job on election day. When opening act Rudy G is getting pummelled with calls of 'does
Rudy have Alzheimer's...?' you know you're doing something right - really, just...awesome political
theatre.
The ZioMedia is in the tank for Hillary. Impossible for a candidate who cannot draw a crowd to
be "ahead in the polls". And a candidate who packs 10K ppl into any given space at will to be
"behind in the polls". Humiliatingly low turnout for the HBomb is stage-crafted by all ziomedia
outlets to hide this embarrassing fact.
Recall that Billy Blowjob ushered in Media Consolidation which gave 5 ziomedia corporations
carte blanche to bullshit the public.
Recall that the Obomber passed the legislation that legalized propaganda (lying to the
public) and permits no remedy other than the ability to protest in fenced in free speech zones
until the cops show up as head knockers or agents provocateurs.
I was reading articles on the Turkish attack into Syria and there is no mention of the Syrian
government nor whether/when/if Turkey will engage the Syrian Army. But then I found this chart
from CNN:
For one thing, they pretend ISIS has no support. We all know differently. Also, it looks like
every one is fighting ISIS except ..... Free Syrian Army and Saudi Arabia and Gulf Allies.
You say that Trump's economic policies as U.S. president would be catastrophic for those most
likely to vote for him. Anyone's economic policies will be catastrophic for those most likely
to vote for Trump. That's baked into the political and economic structure of things. It is part
of the natural order.
The difference with Trump is that after the economic catastrophe that will happen--is now
happening , it may be possible under a Trump administration to pick things up and rebuild. Under
any other likely regime, the aftermath of economic catastrophe will be limitless debt peonage
and unlimited oligarchy.
The shooting down of an Israeli warplane by Syria has not been reported by Western and Israeli
media sources. According to Sputnik, on August 21, "the Israeli Air Force resumed airstrikes on
Western Syria, targeting a government army base at Khan Al-Sheih in Damascus province and another
in the al-Quneitra province after a six-hour halt in attacks that followed their multiple air
raids over the Golan Heights."
It was struck. An SA-9 from the Iftiraas Air Defense Base and an SA-2 near the Khalkhaala AB
were fired. But, the technical wizardry was most on display when an S-300 (SA-10 "Grumble) super-air-defense
missile was fired from the Republican Guard base near the Mazza AB at the foot of Qaasiyoon Mountain
west of Damascus. This was done so that the F-16's electronic countermeasures would first fix
on the SA-2 and SA-9 while the S-300 plowed forward to exterminate the vermin inside the Israeli
aircraft. The S-300 vaporized the Israeli bomber. No evidence was seen of the pilot ejecting.
Instead, eyewitness accounts described a ball of fire over the Golan and the remains scattering
into the air over the Huleh Valley in Palestine.
Also, the Israelis lost 2 helicopters while flying missions over the Golan Heights in an effort
to bolster the sagging morale of the Takfiri rats of Nusra/Alqaeda and Al-Ittihaad Al-Islaami
li-Ajnaad Al-Shaam. The 2 helicopters went down over the area near Qunaytra City and were reportedly
shot down by shoulder fired, heat-seeking missiles deployed throughout the Syrian Army.
The punishment visited on Sen. Hillary Clinton for her flagrant, hysterical, repetitive, pathological
lying about her visit to Bosnia should be much heavier than it has yet been and should be exacted
for much more than just the lying itself. There are two kinds of deliberate and premeditated deceit,
commonly known as suggestio falsi and suppressio veri. (Neither of them is covered by the additionally
lying claim of having "misspoken.") The first involves what seems to be most obvious in the present
case: the putting forward of a bogus or misleading account of events. But the second, and often
the more serious, means that the liar in question has also attempted to bury or to obscure something
that actually is true. Let us examine how Sen. Clinton has managed to commit both of these offenses
to veracity and decency and how in doing so she has rivaled, if not indeed surpassed, the disbarred
and perjured hack who is her husband and tutor.
Hitchens is outraged, and eloquently so as always--it's definitely worth reading through. Still,
I'm surprised that anyone can be surprised by the Clinton's lies anymore. Frankly, I find them rather
comforting in comparison to Obama's new kind of politics, which best I can tell seems to be the same
old politics in a new self-righteous package. All politicians lie, and the Clintons more than most.
I can't imagine that voters haven't already internalized this reality--which is why I tend to think
the explanation for Hillary's plummeting poll numbers must lie elsewhere. Samantha says it's the
whining, which is as good an explanation as any.
These definitions are selected from a longer list of terms (compiled from a feminism news
group) at http://www.landfield.com/faqs/feminism/.
The initials in parenthesis are the people who contributed the definition to the news group.
Liberal Feminism
This is the variety of feminism that works within the structure of mainstream society to integrate
women into that structure. Its roots stretch back to the social contract theory of government
instituted by the American Revolution. Abigail Adams and Mary Wollstonecraft were there from
the start, proposing equality for women. As is often the case with liberals, they slog along
inside the system, getting little done amongst the compromises until some radical movement shows
up and pulls those compromises left of center. This is how it operated in the days of the suffragist
movement and again with the emergence of the radical feminists. [JD]
[See Daring to be Bad, by Alice Echols (1989) for more detail on this contrast.]
Radical Feminism
Provides the bulwark of theoretical thought in feminism. Radical feminism provides an important
foundation for the rest of "feminist flavors". Seen by many as the "undesirable" element of
feminism, Radical feminism is actually the breeding ground for many of the ideas arising from feminism;
ideas which get shaped and pounded out in various ways by other (but not all) branches of feminism.
[CTM]
Radical feminism was the cutting edge of feminist theory from approximately 1967-1975. It
is no longer as universally accepted as it was then, nor does it provide a foundation for, for example,
cultural feminism. [EE]
This term refers to the feminist movement that sprung out of the civil rights and peace movements
in 1967-1968. The reason this group gets the "radical" label is that they view the oppression
of women as the most fundamental form of oppression, one that cuts across boundaries of race, culture,
and economic class. This is a movement intent on social change, change of rather revolutionary
proportions, in fact. [JD]
The best history of this movement is a book called Daring to be Bad, by Alice Echols (1989).
I consider that book a must! [JD] Another excellent book is simply titled Radical Feminism
and is an anthology edited by Anne Koedt, a well-known radical feminist [EE].
Marxist and Socialist Feminism
Marxism recognizes that women are oppressed, and attributes the oppression to the capitalist/private
property system. Thus they insist that the only way to end the oppression of women is to overthrow
the capitalist system. Socialist feminism is the result of Marxism meeting radical feminism.
Jaggar and Rothenberg [Feminist Frameworks: Alternative Theoretical Accounts of the Relations
Between Women and Men by Alison M. Jaggar and Paula S. Rothenberg, 1993] point to
significant differences between socialist feminism and Marxism, but for our purposes I'll present
the two together. Echols offers a description of socialist feminism as a marriage between Marxism
and radical feminism, with Marxism the dominant partner. Marxists and socialists often call
themselves "radical," but they use the term to refer to a completely different "root" of society:
the economic system. [JD]
Cultural Feminism
As radical feminism died out as a movement, cultural feminism got rolling. In fact, many
of the same people moved from the former to the latter. They carried the name "radical feminism"
with them, and some cultural feminists use that name still. (Jaggar and Rothenberg [Feminist
Frameworks] don't even list cultural feminism as a framework separate from radical feminism,
but Echols spells out the distinctions in great detail.) The difference between the two is
quite striking: whereas radical feminism was a movement to transform society, cultural feminism retreated
to vanguardism, working instead to build a women's culture. Some of this effort has had some
social benefit: rape crisis centers, for example; and of course many cultural feminists have been
active in social issues (but as individuals, not as part of a movement). [JD]
As various 1960s movements for social change fell apart or got co-opted, folks got pessimistic
about the very possibility of social change. Many of then turned their attention to building
alternatives, so that if they couldn't change the dominant society, they could avoid it as much as
possible. That, in a nutshell, is what the shift from radical feminism to cultural feminism
was about. These alternative-building efforts were accompanied with reasons explaining (perhaps
justifying) the abandonment of working for social change. Notions that women are "inherently
kinder and gentler" are one of the foundations of cultural feminism, and remain a major part of it.
A similar concept held by some cultural feminists is that while various sex differences might not
be biologically determined, they are still so thoroughly ingrained as to be intractable.
Eco-Feminism
This branch of feminism is much more spiritual than political or theoretical
in nature. It may or may not be wrapped up with Goddess worship and vegetarianism. Its
basic tenet is that a patriarchal society will exploit its resources without regard to long term
consequences as a direct result of the attitudes fostered in a patriarchal/hierarchical society.
Parallels are often drawn between society's treatment of the environment, animals, or resources and
its treatment of women. In resisting patriarchal culture, eco-feminists feel that they are
also resisting plundering and destroying the Earth. And vice-versa. [CTM]
(End of news group quotations.)
1990sDefinitions of Feminism
Barbara Smith, interviewed in off our backs (October 1998, pp. 1 and 16-17) describes her
contribution to a new book called A Reader�s Companion to Women�s History, a new book of which
she was a co-editor, along with Gwendolyn Mink, Gloria Steinem, Marysa Navarro, and Wilma Mankiller
. The liberal feminists among the book�s editors so disagreed with the definition of feminism
that Smith and Mink wrote in an early chapter that they collectively co-authored an essay that responds
to it. Smith says there is nothing in the book to indicate that the essay by Steinem,
Navarro, and Mankiller (which follows Smith and Mink�s chapter) is a response to it.
Steinem et al. clearly take a �liberal feminist� approach. Smith and Mink�s might
best be called �radical feminist,� although Smith says in the interview that she defines herself
as a feminist who is radical rather than a radical feminist, meaning �leftist, socialist . . . someone
who believes in revolution as opposed to reform� (p. 1). Later in the interview, Smith says
she prefers the label �Black feminist,� where �Black� refers to a particular politics rather than
to color (p. 16).
Here are the two definitions of feminism:
Steinem et al.:
"The belief in full economic political and social equality of males and females . . . usually
seen as a modern movement to transform the male-dominant past and create an egalitarian future.
On this and other continents, however, feminism is also history and even memory"
Smith and Mink:
"Feminism articulates political opposition to the subordination of women as women, whether that
subordination is ascribed by law, imposed by social convention, or inflicted by individual men and
women. Feminism also offers alternatives to existing unequal relations of gender power, and
these alternatives have formed the agenda for feminism movements"
Ifeminists, or individualist feminists, say that the feminist slogan "a woman's body, a woman's
right" should extend to every peaceful choice a woman can make. Ifeminists believe that freedom
and diversity benefit women, whether or not the choices that particular women make are politically
correct. They respect all sexual choices, from motherhood to porn. As the cost of freedom,
ifeminists accept personal responsibility for their own lives. They do not look to government for
privileges any more than they would accept government abuse. Ifeminists want legal equality, and
they offer the same respect to men. In short, ifeminism calls for freedom, choice, and personal responsibility.
"I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people
call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat, or a prostitute."
--
Rebecca West, 1913
"... "Of course Julian Assange is right. Hillary Clinton's harangue depicting Donald Trump as the enabler of some insidious 'Alt Right' movement whose Grand Dragon is Vladimir Putin is too absurd for words," Jatras said on Friday. "It would be just silly if it weren't so dangerous." ..."
"... She and her surrogates have been banging the 'Kremlin agent' drum for some time. But when Trump asks rock-ribbed GOP [Republican] crowds if it wouldn't be a great thing to get along with Russia and team up with Moscow to fight ISIS [Islamic State], he gets thunderous approval, ..."
"... Jatras suggested that Clinton's latest attacks on Trump as an alleged racist were meant to distract attention from the latest WikiLeaks documents exposing the leaked information related to "pay to play" between the Clinton Foundation and the State Department. ..."
"... He also argued that Clinton's attacks were meant to distract pubic attention from her own record of controversy and alleged corruption. "Any American worthy of the name hates her and the whole rotten Deep State she fronts for: the profiteers on endless wars, the globalist corporations that dump their American workers to import their foreign-made goods duty free and the driving down of wages due to a glut of imported foreign labor," he said. ..."
"... Jatras suggested that these policies that Clinton as secretary of state and her husband, President Bill Clinton had implemented and supported were far more worthy of hate than the false accusations she was throwing against Trump. "Those are things all Americans, whether white, black, brown, red, or yellow should hate, and Hillary right along with them," he concluded. Jatras also formerly served as adviser to the Senate Republican leadership. ..."
US Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's attempt to falsely portray her Republican
opponent Donald Trump as a racist extremist is absurd, silly and dangerous, former US Department
of State diplomat Jim Jatras told Sputnik.
On Thursday, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange
told Fox News in an interview that Clinton's campaign was full of anti-Russia hysteria as the Democrats
were trying to undermine the campaign of their opponent, Republican nominee Donald Trump.
"Of course Julian Assange is right. Hillary Clinton's harangue depicting Donald Trump as
the enabler of some insidious 'Alt Right' movement whose Grand Dragon is Vladimir Putin is too
absurd for words," Jatras said on Friday. "It would be just silly if it weren't so dangerous."
Jatras said he agreed with Assange's assessment that Clinton's increasingly wild charges against
Trump were not based on any reality. "She should get some kind of tinfoil hat award for the finest
piece of political paranoia totally divorced from facts in all of American history," Jatras said.
Hillary Clinton's Anti-Russian Campaign May BackfireJatras also pointed out the falsity of Clinton's
related claim that former UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage, who endorsed Trump this week
was a racist. "Take her attack on Nigel Farage. Evidently now it is now 'racist' to believe citizens
are shareholders of their own country and have a right to decide who gets in and who doesn't, and
that dangerous people should be excluded," Jatras argued.
However, Jatras expressed skepticism as to how effective Clinton's racist and Russophobic attacks
would prove to be.
"She and her surrogates have been banging the 'Kremlin agent' drum for some time. But when
Trump asks rock-ribbed GOP [Republican] crowds if it wouldn't be a great thing to get along with
Russia and team up with Moscow to fight ISIS [Islamic State], he gets thunderous approval,"
Jatras observed.
Jatras suggested that Clinton's latest attacks on Trump as an alleged racist were meant to
distract attention from the latest WikiLeaks documents exposing the leaked information related to
"pay to play" between the Clinton Foundation and the State Department.
He also argued that Clinton's attacks were meant to distract pubic attention from her own
record of controversy and alleged corruption. "Any American worthy of the name hates her and the
whole rotten Deep State she fronts for: the profiteers on endless wars, the globalist corporations
that dump their American workers to import their foreign-made goods duty free and the driving down
of wages due to a glut of imported foreign labor," he said.
Jatras suggested that these policies that Clinton as secretary of state and her husband, President
Bill Clinton had implemented and supported were far more worthy of hate than the false accusations
she was throwing against Trump. "Those are things all Americans, whether white, black, brown, red,
or yellow should hate, and Hillary right along with them," he concluded. Jatras also formerly served
as adviser to the Senate Republican leadership.
Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., argued on Thursday that the FBI failed to asked Hillary
Clinton the right questions during its interview last month, if it was truly
trying to decide her intent in using a private, unsecured, unauthorized email
server.
Appearing on Fox's
America's Newsroom
, Gowdy said he thoroughly
reviewed the FBI's notes from the interview and was surprised there were no
questions addressing the former secretary of state's intent.
"Remember [FBI director] James Comey said she
was not indicted because he didn't have sufficient evidence on the issue of
intent? I didn't see any questions on the issue of intent," the congressman said.
While on the campaign trail in Iowa, giving a speech for wife Hillary Clinton, Bill's hands were noticeably trembling–and not from being in hot water with Hillary.
Kaposi's sarcoma lesions appear on Clinton's forehead. (depicted)
On CNN 12/6/13 Wolf Blitzer interviewed Clinton in regards to the death of Nelson Mandela. He
was sporting a nice big lesion on his forehead. There have been scandalous reports about him having
a secret HIV test in April of this year and though I don't follow the Star, Globe or any Murdoch
rag, I figure they are probably as right as any news these days.
I'll leave it to you to see the interview later once CNN posts it to their blogs. I had
to watch the jobless figures fraud once again. The 7% figure is fantasy and if it were to be 7% it
would mean three percent are underemployed or have just left the planet.
I find it appropriate that Bill Clinton would be on considering he signed off on NAFTA and the
sucking sound that were US jobs going across the borders and oceans. Maybe harsh justice has
come. I assume Clinton knows where he contracted it though as we all know he DID NOT
HAVE SEX WITH THAT WOMAN, but he did with all the others.
Neocons will support Hillary breaking the ranks of Republican Party, as she is one of them:
"The only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton," Kagan warned. "The party cannot be saved, but
the country still can be."
Notable quotes:
"... Donald Trump calls the Iraq War a lie-fueled fiasco, admires Vladimir Putin and says he would be a "neutral" arbiter between Israel and the Palestinians. When it comes to America's global role he asks, "Why are we always at the forefront of everything?" ..."
"... Even more than his economic positions, Trump's foreign policy views challenge GOP orthodoxy in fundamental ways. But while parts of the party establishment are resigning themselves or even backing Trump's runaway train, one group is bitterly digging in against him: the hawkish foreign policy elites known as neoconservatives. ..."
"... In interviews with POLITICO, leading neocons - people who promoted the Iraq War, detest Putin and consider Israel's security non-negotiable - said Trump would be a disaster for U.S. foreign policy and vowed never to support him. So deep is their revulsion that several even say they could vote for Hillary Clinton over Trump in November. ..."
"... "Hillary is the lesser evil, by a large margin," said Eliot Cohen, a former top State Department official under George W. Bush and a strategic theorist who argues for a muscular U.S. role abroad. Trump's election would be "an unmitigated disaster for American foreign policy," Cohen said, adding that "he has already damaged it considerably." ..."
"... In a March 1 interview with Vox, Max Boot, a military historian at the Council on Foreign Relations who backed the Iraq War and often advocates a hawkish foreign policy, said that he, too, would vote for Clinton over Trump. "I'm literally losing sleep over Donald Trump," he said. "She would be vastly preferable to Trump." ..."
"... The letter was signed by dozens of Republican foreign policy experts, including Boot; Peter Feaver, a former senior national security aide in George W. Bush's White House; Robert Zoellick, a former deputy to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice; and Dov Zakheim, a former Bush Pentagon official; and Kori Schake, a fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and a former Bush State Department official. ..."
"... Kristol and Abrams have advised Florida senator Marco Rubio, the preferred choice of several neoconservatives, who admire his call for "moral clarity" in foreign policy and strong emphasis on human rights and democracy. ..."
"... Alarm brewing for months in GOP foreign policy circles burst into public view last week, when Robert Kagan, a key backer of the Iraq War and American global might, wrote in the Washington Post that a Trump nomination would force him to cross party lines. ..."
"... "The only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton," Kagan warned. "The party cannot be saved, but the country still can be." ..."
Donald Trump calls the Iraq War a lie-fueled fiasco, admires Vladimir Putin and says he would
be a "neutral" arbiter between Israel and the Palestinians. When it comes to America's global role
he asks, "Why are we always at the forefront of everything?"
Even more than his economic
positions, Trump's foreign policy views challenge GOP orthodoxy in fundamental ways. But while parts
of the party establishment are resigning themselves or even backing Trump's runaway train, one group
is bitterly digging in against him: the hawkish foreign policy elites known as neoconservatives.
In interviews with POLITICO, leading neocons - people who promoted the Iraq War, detest Putin
and consider Israel's security non-negotiable - said Trump would be a disaster for U.S. foreign policy
and vowed never to support him. So deep is their revulsion that several even say they could vote
for Hillary Clinton over Trump in November.
"Hillary is the lesser evil, by a large margin," said Eliot Cohen, a former top State Department
official under George W. Bush and a strategic theorist who argues for a muscular U.S. role abroad.
Trump's election would be "an unmitigated disaster for American foreign policy," Cohen said, adding
that "he has already damaged it considerably."
Cohen, an Iraq war backer who is often called a neoconservative but said he does not identify
himself that way, said he would "strongly prefer a third party candidate" to Trump, but added: "Probably
if absolutely no alternative: Hillary."
In a March 1
interview with Vox, Max Boot, a military historian at the Council on Foreign Relations who backed
the Iraq War and often advocates a hawkish foreign policy, said that he, too, would vote for Clinton
over Trump. "I'm literally losing sleep over Donald Trump," he said. "She would be vastly preferable
to Trump."
Cohen helped to organize an open letter signed by several dozen GOP foreign policy insiders -
many of whom are not considered neocons - that
was published Wednesday night by the military blog War on the Rocks. "[W]e are unable to support
a Party ticket with Mr. Trump at its head," the letter declared. It cited everything from Trump's
"admiration for foreign dictators" to his "inexcusable" support for "the expansive use of torture."
The letter was signed by dozens of Republican foreign policy experts, including Boot; Peter
Feaver, a former senior national security aide in George W. Bush's White House; Robert Zoellick,
a former deputy to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice; and Dov Zakheim, a former Bush Pentagon official;
and Kori Schake, a fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and a former Bush State Department
official.
Several other neocons said they find themselves in an impossible position, constitutionally incapable
of voting for Clinton but repelled by a Republican whose foreign policy views they consider somewhere
between nonexistent and dangerous - and disconnected from their views about American power and values
abroad.
"1972 was the first time I was old enough to vote for president, and I did not vote. Couldn't
vote for McGovern for foreign policy reasons, nor for Nixon because of Watergate," said Elliott Abrams,
a former national security council aide to George W. Bush who specializes in democracy and the Middle
East. "I may be in the same boat in 2016, unable to vote for Trump or Clinton."
Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol, something of a dean of Washington neoconservatives,
said he would seek out a third option before choosing between Trump and Clinton.
"If it's Trump-Clinton, I'd work with others to recruit a strong conservative third party candidate,
and do my best to help him win (which by the way would be more possible than people think, especially
when people - finally - realize Trump shouldn't be president and Hillary is indicted)," Kristol wrote
in an email.
Kristol and Abrams have advised Florida senator Marco Rubio, the preferred choice of several
neoconservatives, who admire his call for "moral clarity" in foreign policy and strong emphasis on
human rights and democracy.
Alarm brewing for months in GOP foreign policy circles burst into public view last week, when
Robert Kagan, a key backer of the Iraq War and American global might,
wrote in the Washington Post that a Trump nomination would force him to cross party lines.
"The only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton," Kagan warned. "The party cannot be
saved, but the country still can be."
In an interview, Kagan said his opposition to Trump "has nothing to do with foreign policy."
"... russia sees this bs crap about 'moderate' for what it is... just another shell game to play hide and seek, switch flags, etc, etc... until the 'moderate' opposition drop their military arms, it ain't 'moderate'... would 'moderate' opposition to the usa leadership be allowed to use weapons? that's the answer to that bs... ..."
OT GENEVA - The United States and Russia say they have resolved a number of issues standing in the
way of restoring a nationwide truce to Syria and opening up aid deliveries, but were unable once
again to forge a comprehensive agreement on stepping up cooperation to end the brutal war that
has killed hundreds of thousands.
After meeting off-and-on for nearly 10 hours in Geneva on Friday, U.S. Secretary of State John
Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov could point to only incremental progress in filling
in details of a broad understanding to boost joint efforts that was reached last month in Moscow.
Their failure to reach an overall deal highlighted the increasingly complex situation on the
ground in Syria - including new Russian-backed Syrian government attacks on opposition forces,
the intermingling of some of those opposition forces with an al-Qaida affiliate not covered by
the truce and the surrender of a rebel-held suburb of Damascus - as well as deep divisions and
mistrust dividing Washington and Moscow.
The complexities have also grown with the increasing internationalization of what has largely
become a proxy war between regional and world powers, highlighted by a move by Turkish troops
across the Syrian border against Islamic State fighters this week.
Kerry said he and Lavrov had agreed on the "vast majority" of technical discussions on steps
to reinstate a cease-fire and improve humanitarian access. But critical sticking points remain
unresolved and experts will remain in Geneva with an eye toward finalizing those in the coming
days, he said. ``` Lavrov echoed that, saying "we still need to finalize a few issues" and pointed to the need to
separate fighters from the al-Nusra Front, which has ties to al-Qaida, from U.S.-backed fighters
who hold parts of northwest Syria.
"We have continued our efforts to reduce the areas where we lack understanding and trust, which
is an achievement," Lavrov said. "The mutual trust is growing with every meeting."
Yet, it was clear that neither side believes an overall agreement is imminent or even achievable
after numerous previous disappointments shattered a brief period of relative calm earlier this
year.
The inability to wrest an agreement between Russia and the U.S. - as the major sponsors of
the opposing sides in the stalled Syria peace talks - all but spells another missed deadline for
the U.N. Syria envoy to get the Syrian government and "moderate" opposition back to the table.
``` In a nod to previous failed attempts to resurrect the cessation of hostilities, Kerry stressed
the importance of keeping the details secret. ``` And, underscoring deep differences over developments on the ground, Kerry noted that Russia disputes
the U.S. "narrative" of recent attacks on heavily populated areas being conducted by Syrian forces,
Russia itself and the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia. Russia maintains the attacks it has been
involved in have targeted legitimate terrorist targets, while the U.S. says they have hit moderate
opposition forces. ~~~ At the same time, the Obama administration is not of one mind regarding the Russians. The Pentagon
has publicly complained about getting drawn into greater cooperation with Russia even though it
has been forced recently to expand communication with Moscow. Last week, the U.S. had to call
for Russian help when Syrian warplanes struck an area not far from where U.S. troops were operating.
U.S. officials say it is imperative that Russia use its influence with Syrian President Bashar
Assad to halt all attacks on moderate opposition forces, open humanitarian aid corridors, and
concentrate any offensive action on the Islamic State group and other extremists not covered by
what has become a largely ignored truce.
For their part, U.S. officials say they are willing to press rebels groups they support harder
on separating themselves from the Islamic State and al-Nusra, which despite a recent name change
is still viewed as al-Qaida's affiliate in Syria.
Those goals are not new, but recent developments have made achieving them even more urgent
and important, according to U.S. officials. Recent developments include military operations around
the city of Aleppo, the entry of Turkey into the ground war, Turkish hostility toward U.S.-backed
Kurdish rebel groups and the presence of American military advisers in widening conflict zones.
Meanwhile, in a blow to the opposition, rebel forces and civilians in the besieged Damascus
suburb of Daraya were to be evacuated on Friday after agreeing to surrender the town late Thursday
after four years of grueling bombardment and a crippling siege that left the sprawling area in
ruins.
The surrender of Daraya, which became an early symbol of the nascent uprising against Assad,
marks a success for his government, removing a persistent threat only a few miles from his seat
of power.
Posted by: okie farmer | Aug 27, 2016 8:23:27 AM | 80
Re: Geneva negotiations...
Love the goto clause:
"In a nod to previous failed attempts to resurrect the cessation of hostilities, Kerry stressed
the importance of keeping the details secret."
Yeah, keeping the details secret so that next time the Yankees backstab Russia, observers won't
immediately realise that they were, in fact, just shooting themselves in the foot. Again.
russia sees this bs crap about 'moderate' for what it is... just another shell game to play
hide and seek, switch flags, etc, etc... until the 'moderate' opposition drop their military arms,
it ain't 'moderate'... would 'moderate' opposition to the usa leadership be allowed to use weapons?
that's the answer to that bs...
as for turkey, clearly the apk has a 'get rid of the kurds' agenda.. works well in their alliance
with isis up to a point.. as for turkish/usa alliance and a no fly zone - if russia goes along
with this, they better get a hell of a trade off out of it.. i can't see it, although i see the
usa continuing on in their support of saudi arabia etc, using their mercenary isis army and saudi
arabia to continue to funnel arms sales and weaponry... it is what they do best, bullshite artists
that they are...
Wait a minute! They ID'd the hacker and it's a business in Israel? And it forced Apple to an
emergency software upgrade. But I thought all the evil hackers were Russians working for the government.
"... I know it is a bit picky of me, but I am getting really tired of Democrats trying to take the high road on immigration. It ignores that our current Democratic President has deported more 'illegal' immigrants than any previous President before him. ..."
"... With all their concern, couldn't the Democrats have made some token stab at immigration reform? Instead there has been a huge gift to the for profit prison operators who now count their immigration detention centers as their biggest profit centers. ..."
"... The Dems want to have their cake and eat it too. They want cheap labor and they want virtue. They sell out my friends and neighbors and think themselves noble for empowering foreign nationals. ..."
I know it is a bit picky of me, but I am getting really tired of Democrats
trying to take the high road on immigration. It ignores that our current
Democratic President has deported more 'illegal' immigrants than any previous
President before him.
In 2014 he deported nine times more people than had
been deported twenty years earlier. Some years it was nearly double the
numbers under George W. Bush. And yes, I know it was not strict fillibuster
proof majority in the Senate for his first two years, but damn close and
the only thing we got was a half assed stimulus made up largely of tax stimulus
AND that gift to for profit medicine and insurance, the ACA.
With all their
concern, couldn't the Democrats have made some token stab at immigration
reform? Instead there has been a huge gift to the for profit prison operators
who now count their immigration detention centers as their biggest profit
centers.
Trump says mean things, but the Democrats, well once again actions should
speak louder than words but it isn't happening.
The Dems want to have their cake and eat it too. They want cheap labor
and they want virtue. They sell out my friends and neighbors and think themselves
noble for empowering foreign nationals.
I guess this is one way for a supposedly pro-labor party to liquidate
its working class elements.
"When the Democratic National Committee announced its $32 million fundraising
haul last month, it touted the result as evidence of 'energy and excitement'
for Hillary Clinton's nomination for the White House and other races down the
ballot. The influx of money, however, also owes in part to an unprecedented
workaround of political spending limits that lets the party tap into millions
of dollars more from Clinton's wealthiest donors" [
Bloomberg ]. "At least $7.3 million of the DNC's July total originated with
payments from hundreds of major donors who had already contributed the maximum
$33,400 to the national committee, a review of Federal Election Commission filings
shows. The contributions, many of which were made months earlier, were first
bundled by the Hillary Victory Fund and then transferred to the state Democratic
parties, which effectively stripped the donors' names and sent the money to
the DNC as a lump sum. Of the transfers that state parties made to the DNC for
which donor information was available, an overwhelming proportion came from
contributions from maxed-out donors."
Lovely. Doubling down on the Victory Fund scam. Word of the day: Effrontery.
Re: Clintons campaign possible strategy of making a vote for Clinton
'a vote for a winner'.
I know its conventional opinion that when in doubt, people prefer to
vote for who they perceive to be a 'winner', but I wonder if this really
applies with two such disliked candidates. I've a theory that one reason
Brexit won is that the polls beforehand saying it would be a narrow 'no',
gave 'permission' for people to vote with their conscience rather than their
pragmatism. In other words, presented with a 'pragmatic, but dirty' vote
for X, but a 'fun, but risky' vote for Y', people will vote X if its very
close or it looks like Y will win, but may be tempted to vote Y if they
are pretty sure X will win.
Part of me thinks the Clinton campaign would have tested the theory to
the limit before going for a strategy like this, but the evidence from the
nomination campaign is that they are all tactics, no strategy. It seems
to me to be a very risky game to play, not least because promoting Clinton
as a sure winner may make wavering progressives simply opt to stay at home.
I don't even think you have to be a progressive for that to be a concern
if you are the Clinton campaign.
They know the public is not enthusiastic about voting for her for the most
part, and yet they are setting up a meme where she is unbeatable. It isn't
necessarily going to just keep Trump voters home. But how many people who
don't want Clinton but really don't want Trump will be able to convince
themselves that there is no need to go hold their nose and vote for her.
Republicans who think she is too far left, but he is crazy for instance
will be just as likely to stay home as the lefties who know she is lying
Neoliberal War Criminal, but not fascist like Trump. (And I know the real
fascism signs are all with Clinton, but some may have missed it).
On fascism I had the exact same thought after reading Adolph Reeds "Vote
For the Lying, NeoLiberal War-Monger, It's Important" link last week.
Reed's critique was that communist leader Thallman failed to anticipate
Hitler's liquidation of all opposition, but frankly with Hillary's and Donald's
respective histories its hard for me to see how Trump is more dangerous
on this: Hillary has a deep and proven lethal track record and wherever
she could justify violent action in the past she has, she keeps an enemies
list, holds grudges and acts on them, all thoroughly documented.
I certainly won't speculate that Trump couldn't do the same or worse,
given the state of our propaganda and lawlessness amongst the elite, but
like all the other negatives in this campaign its hard to ascertain who
really will be worse. Lambert's bet on gridlock in a Trump administration
has the further advantage of re-activating the simulation of "anti-war,
anti-violence" amongst Dem nomenklatura.
We have collectively known Donald Trump and much of his family for the
last 30 or 40 years. Over the years, he has evoked different emotions in
me. (Usually being appalled by his big-city, realestate tycoon posturing
etc). However, I have never been frightened by him. To
me, he is more like a bombastic, well loved, show-off uncle.
Today I see Trump as a modern day prophet (spiritual teacher). A bringer
of light (clarity) to the masses. We live in a rigged system that gives
Nobel Peace Prizes to mass murderers; that charges a poor child $600 for
a $1 lifesaving Epipen. Trump is waking up The People. Finalllyyyyyy!!
In my experience, people usually do not change for the better as they
age. However, it does happen!; peasant girl (Joan of Arc), patent inspector
(Einstein)
It's not about what Trump will or won't do. It's about not handing all
three branches of government over to the GOP, which has the Libertarian
agenda of eliminating said government altogether. I find it interesting
that so many people scornful of identity politics nevertheless seem to be
as addicted as anyone to making this a horse race between two candidates
that has no real far-reaching consequences beyond with each will or won't
do in the Oval Office.
So true: "My view is that triumphalism from the Clinton campaign - which
now includes most of the political class, including the press and both party
establishments, and ignores event risk - is engineered to get early voters
to "go with the winner."–Lambert
I have noticed on Google News several "Clinton weighing cabinet choices"
articles, to me there is whistling past the graveyard quality to all this.
They want the election over now-the votes are just a formality.
They really really do not have any short term memory do they? I mean
it took sticking both thumbs on the scale and some handy dandy shenanigans
with voters to get her past the Primary finish line. And her opponent there
was much nicer about pointing out her flaws than her current opponent. It
is true they won't have any obvious elections that disprove their position
out there, but when you are spending millions and your opponent nothing
and he is still within the margin of error with you in the states that people
are watching the closest…
Although that isn't considering the fears of what other shoes have to
drop both in the world and in the news that could derail her victory parade,
they may have more to fear from that.
One of the problems Democrats have and the 50 state strategy addressed
is voting in very Democratic precincts. Without constant pressure, many
proud Democrats won't vote because they don't know any Republicans. It's
in the bag. College kids are the worst voters alive. They will forget come
election day or not be registered because they moved. Dean squeezed these
districts. These districts are where Democrats , out in 2010 and 2014 and
even a little in 2012. Mittens is a robber baron.
If Democratic turnout is low and Hillary wins with crossover votes, what
happens? It's very likely those Republicans vote for down ticket Republicans.
Even for the people who have to vote against Trump, if they believe he is
a special kind of super fascist will they bother to vote for the allies
of a crook such as Hillary? It's possible Hillary wins and drops a seat
in the Senate depending on turnout.
I think it's clear Hillary isn't going to bring out any kind of voter
activism. Judging from photos in Virginia where one would hope a commanding
Hillary victory could jump start the Democrats for next year's governors
and legislative races, the Democratic Party is dead or very close to it.
What if Hillary wins but does the unthinkable and delivers a Republican
pickup in the Senate? She needs to keep Republicans from coming out because
she isn't going to drive Democratic turnout to a spot where that can win
on its own.
Hillary needs to win to keep the never Trump crowd in the GOP from voting
because she knows the Democratic side which relies on very Democratic districts
and transient voters will not impress. An emboldened GOP congress will be
a tough environment for Hillary, and GOP voters won't tolerate bipartisanship
especially for anyone suspected of not helping the party 100%. Those House
Republicans have to face 2018 and the smaller but arguably more motivated
electorate. They will come down hard on Hillary if she can't win the Senate
which a literal donkey could do.
Hell I don't want Clinton to win by any margin. But if anyone thinks
that the bipartisan nature of her possible victory will mean anything but
Republicans hunting her scalp, and dare I say getting it, they are not paying
attention. As much as both the Benghazi and the email thing has them all
flummoxed because the real crimes involved with both are crimes they either
agree with or want to use. The Foundation on the other hand, not so much,
they will make the case that this is a global slush fund because it is.
And the McDonnell decision is not going to save her Presidency, much as
it would if she were indicted in a Court.
I should add, that is with or without winning the Senate. Much of the
loyalty any Dems there have towards her will disappear when it is obvious
that she keeps most of the money AND has no coattails. Oh, they might not
vote to impeach her, but that is about it.
Hillary's only defense is to win the Senate and to be able to stifle
investigations through the appearance of a mandate. 2018 is the 2012 cycle,
and that is 2006 which should be a good year for the Republicans (a credit
to Howard Dean). It's a tough map for Team Blue. If they don't win the Senate
in November, they won't win it in 2018.
With 2018 on its way, a weak Democratic situation will make the Democrats
very jumpy as Hillary is clearly not delivering the coattails they imagined.
She isn't going to have a mandate. Oh, the electoral college count might
look good. But regardless of who wins this sucker, I'm betting this is going
to be one of the lowest, if not the lowest, voter turnout for any Presidential
election in the last century. I would not be surpised if more people stay
home than vote. And that is not a mandate.
The Senate isn't going to stifle investigations. She doesn't even have
to help the Dems get a majority for that problem of conviction if impeached
to rear its ugly head. No way is there going to be 2/3 of the Senate in
one party or the other. That still won't stop the House. Just as it didn't
for her husband.
I know it is a bit picky of me, but I am getting really tired of Democrats
trying to take the high road on immigration. It ignores that our current
Democratic President has deported more 'illegal' immigrants than any previous
President before him. In 2014 he deported nine times more people than had
been deported twenty years earlier. Some years it was nearly double the
numbers under George W. Bush. And yes, I know it was not strict fillibuster
proof majority in the Senate for his first two years, but damn close and
the only thing we got was a half assed stimulus made up largely of tax stimulus
AND that gift to for profit medicine and insurance, the ACA. With all their
concern, couldn't the Democrats have made some token stab at immigration
reform? Instead there has been a huge gift to the for profit prison operators
who now count their immigration detention centers as their biggest profit
centers.
Trump says mean things, but the Democrats, well once again actions should
speak louder than words but it isn't happening.
The Dems want to have their cake and eat it too. They want cheap labor
and they want virtue. They sell out my friends and neighbors and think themselves
noble for empowering foreign nationals.
I guess this is one way for a supposedly pro-labor party to liquidate
its working class elements.
Is that Huma in a blue dress under the Resolute desk?
Pairadimes d Here2Go •Aug 27, 2016 9:14 PM
Ramirez is a genius.
zeronetwork d debtor of last resort •Aug 27, 2016 8:15 PM
The thought process Donald has started is not going to fade very soon. Still
few weeks before election. I am sure Donald got some more cards in his sleeve.
are we there yet •Aug 27, 2016 8:36 PM
I have a solution for Hillary's in-continuance and mobility declining problems.
The chair behind the presidents desk should be a wheelchair with a bedpan.
Otherwise the term 'campaign trail' will take on a whole new meaning.
Fox News' Shepard Smith appeared intent on having a guest on his program Thursday say that Republican
presidential nominee Donald Trump is a racist.
Wall Street Journal investigative reporter James Grimaldi joined Smith on Fox Reports immediately
after Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton's speech in Reno, Nev., during which she charged that Trump
will "make America hate again."
"He is taking hate groups mainstream and helping a radical fringe take over the Republican Party,"
she said.
Smith said that "the problem with any attempt to rebut her" was that "she used Donald Trump's own
words, what's historically accurate on his policies on all reviewed points."
He turned to Grimaldi and said, "Where do you begin with this?"
"I don't know. It was pretty extraordinary and pretty hard-hitting," the reporter replied.
Grimaldi went on to explain that Trump "trades in hyperbole," giving Clinton more fodder to
work with.
Smith interjected: "He trades in racism, doesn't he?"
The Wall Street Journal reporter was not willing to go that far. "Well, I'll leave that up
to the commentators. … I'm not one to generally label people like that, so I would pass on that
question."
"... Here is the 'furthest back' shot. TV coverage did not show these. ..."
"... Bizzaro event. Minuscule, there is almost nobody there. It was deliberatly set up in 'small space' for the cams. The only other important ppl present are one man (Head of the college or? idk) and the Mayor of Reno. The only signs shown say *USA* are not appropriate and are whipped out only when Killary comes onstage. Doesn't even look like a Democrat event! Never mind an important campaign rally for *drum rolls* the person anointed to become Prez. of the most powerful country on Earth, the World Queen or Hegemon. ..."
"... The US is fracturing...Moreover the speech was perhaps the weakest from any pol I have ever heard. ..."
Part 1. ;) Got dragged into Killary's alt-right speech at Truckee Meadows Community College, Reno,
Nevada, Aug 2016. Only content: 100% against Trump , as sidebars, Alex Jones, Nigel Farage,
Putin, David Duke.
The official MSM version is 31 mins - the frame is just her with a fixed cam centered nothing
around. Sparse occasional clapping (real, one can see the clappers in other vids).. She speaks
as one would to a parterre of 30-50 ppl, not as in a campaign rally. A longer version (MSM) is
45 mins and shows some of the preliminaries, some guy, then the Mayor of Reno, youngish blondine,
introducing her. Killary was apparently hours late. (> youtube.) Killary is dressed in green.
To the interesting part. She spoke at the same College in Feb. 2015. Note: red dress, the brick
pillars typical of the college, and the big windows behind. A big hall…
link This shot shows the other direction, see the small windows at the side and back
link The event has all the hallmarks of a 'proper' pol show, no need to list. Note the Hall, quite
large, is not full. The signs are blue and are for Hillary, for Women, for Nevada and so on.
Part 2. The Aug. 2016 event took place at the College but either in a small part of the back of
the big hall or another locale (similar in architecture obviously)
link The widest shot Aug. 2016. AFGE (men with black Ts) = American Federation of Gvmt. Employees.
link Here is the 'furthest back' shot. TV coverage did not show these.
link The only shot I could find showing the audience facing her. Note the ppl behind her facing
out, i.e. the cams (shown on TV etc.) are not identifiable.
link Bizzaro event. Minuscule, there is almost nobody there. It was deliberatly set up in 'small
space' for the cams. The only other important ppl present are one man (Head of the college or?
idk) and the Mayor of Reno. The only signs shown say *USA* are not appropriate and are whipped
out only when Killary comes onstage. Doesn't even look like a Democrat event! Never mind an important
campaign rally for *drum rolls* the person anointed to become Prez. of the most powerful country
on Earth, the World Queen or Hegemon.
After the speech, vids show H.C. talking to a very few ppl, 25 at most, not answering "reporters"
questions, two tiny trays of confections were offered. Bwwahhh. She ate one choc. There was also
a stop at a Reno Coffee shop (10 ppl?) which made no sense. On these occasions she is accompanied
by the Mayor in a cosy girly coffee thingie. (> youtube.)
The US is fracturing...Moreover the speech was perhaps the weakest from any pol I have
ever heard.
okie farmer@80 Lavrov is on a loser if he accepts this "moderate terrorist" BS from Kerry. Those
"moderates" have replaced Islamic state in Jerablus, soon to be expanded to cover that huge area
between Jerablus, Azaz and Al-bab,all without a fight and apparent agreement with IS. Next could
be the area is controlled by Turkish and US "moderate" head choppers, which of course nobody will
be allowed to attack. They should only be called moderate if they oppose Assad and do not carry
arms, otherwise its just a case of changing labels, in which case the terrorists could never lose.
I find it hard to believe that so soon after the so called normalization of ties and trade deals
between Russia and Turkey, Turkey could do what they have threatened to do for years, invade Syria
and set up prospective no fly zones. I suppose we must wait and see, but in my opinion, it does
not look good.
I agree. Russia has been stabbed in the back by Turkey, and the US is backing Turkey ... of
course they were backing the Kurds, too, until they weren't.
Erdogan is utterly unreliable ... or he is utterly reliable if you're relying on duplicity
and betrayal.
"... But the party's latest generation of "New Democrats" - self-described "moderates" who are funded by Wall Street and are aggressively trying to steer the party to the right - have noticed this trend and are now fighting back. Third Way, a "centrist" think tank that serves as the hub for contemporary New Democrats, has recently published a sizable policy paper, " Ready for the New Economy ," urging the Democratic Party to avoid focusing on economic inequality. Former Obama chief of staff Bill Daley, a Third Way trustee, recently argued that Sanders' influence on the primary "is a recipe for disaster" for Democrats. ..."
"... The DLC's goal was to advance "a message that was less tilted toward minorities and welfare, less radical on social issues like abortion and gays, more pro-defense, and more conservative on economic issues," wrote Robert Dreyfuss in a 2001 article in The American Prospect . "The DLC thundered against the 'liberal fundamentalism' of the party's base - unionists, blacks, feminists, Greens, and cause groups generally." ..."
"... Within the DLC, populism was not merely out of favor; it was militantly opposed. The organization had virtually no grassroots supporters; it was funded almost entirely by corporate donors. Its executive council, Dreyfuss reported , was made up of companies that donated at least $25,000 and included Enron and Koch Industries. A list of its known donors includes scores of the United States' most powerful corporations, all of whom benefit from a Democratic Party that embraces big business and is less reliant on labor unions and the grassroots for support. ..."
"... The height of the DLC's triumph may well have been in the 1990s, when it claimed President Bill Clinton as its most prominent advocate, celebrating his disastrous welfare cuts (which were supported by Hillary Clinton as the first lady), his support for the North American Free Trade Agreement and his speech declaring that the "era of big government is over." These initiatives had the DLC's footprint all over them. ..."
"... The DLC's prescribed Third Way also found a home on Downing Street in England. Tony Blair, a major Clinton ally, was a staunch advocate of the DLC, adopted its strategies and lent his name to its website. According to the book Clinton and Blair: The Political Economy of the Third Way , he said in 1998 that it "is a third way because it moves decisively beyond an Old Left preoccupied by state control, high taxation and producer interests." ..."
"... When Bill Clinton left the White House, Hillary Clinton entered the Senate. She quickly became a major player for the DLC, serving as a prominent member of the New Democratic Caucus in the Senate, speaking at conferences on multiple occasions and serving as chair of a key initiative for the 2006 and 2008 elections. ..."
"... She also adopted the DLC's hawkish military stance. The DLC was feverishly in favor of Bush's "war on terror" and his invasion of Iraq. Will Marshall, one of the group's founders, was a signatory of many of the now infamous documents from the Project for the New American Century, which urged the United States to radically increase its use of force in Iraq and beyond. ..."
"... The DLC led efforts to take down Howard Dean's 2004 presidential campaign, citing his opposition to the war in Iraq as an example of his weakness. Two years later, the organization played a similar role against Ned Lamont's antiwar challenge to Sen. Joe Lieberman, which the DLC decried as "The Return of Liberal Fundamentalism." ..."
"... However, the DLC's influence eventually waned . A formal affiliation with the organization became something of a deal breaker for some progressive voters. When Barack Obama first ran for the Senate in 2004, he had no affiliation with the DLC. So, when they wrongly included him in their directory of New Democrats, he asked the DLC to remove his name. In explaining this, he also publicly shunned the organization in an interview with Black Commentator. "You are undoubtedly correct that these positions make me an unlikely candidate for membership in the DLC," he wrote when pressed by the magazine . "That is why I am not currently, nor have I ever been, a member of the DLC." ..."
"... When the DLC closed, it records were acquired by the Clinton Foundation, which DLC founder Al From called an "appropriate and fitting repository." To this day, the Clinton Foundation continues to promote the work of the DLC's founding members. In September 2015, the foundation hosted an event to promote From's book The New Democrats and the Return to Power ..."
"... Citizens United ..."
"... So while the DLC may be a dirty word among many progressives, this didn't stop Obama from appointing New Democrats to key posts in his White House. The same Bill Daley who works for a hedge fund and is on the board of trustees for Third Way was also President Obama's White House chief of staff . And, as was noted above, he is now actively trying to influence the Democratic Party's direction in the 2016 election. ..."
"... The remaining champions of the DLC agenda have been increasingly active in trying to push back against populism. On October 28, 2015, Third Way published an ambitious paper, "Ready for the New Economy," that aims to do just that. The paper falsely argues that "the narrative of fairness and inequality has, to put it mildly, failed to excite voters," and says "these trends should compel the party to rigorously question the electoral value of today's populist agenda." ..."
"... When Clinton announced her tax plan, Dow Jones quoted Jim Kessler, a Third Way staffer, praising the plan. On social media , Third Way staffers are routinely cheering on Clinton and attacking Sanders and O'Malley . ..."
"... and where she will be ..."
"... Consider the case of Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor and presidential candidate, who has endorsed Hillary Clinton for president . Dean's reputation as a fiery progressive has always been wildly overstated , but there was a rich irony about Dean's endorsement. His centrist record aside, Dean was once the face of the party's progressive base. During his campaign for the Democratic nomination in 2003 and 2004, Dean used his opposition to the war in Iraq to garner progressive support. He attracted a large group of partisan liberal bloggers, who coined the term "Netroots" in support of his candidacy . For a time, Dean was leading in the polls during the primary. ..."
"... Remember: The Dean campaign was taken down by the DLC, who attacked him for running a campaign from the "McGovern-Mondale wing" of the Democratic Party, "defined principally by weakness abroad and elitist, interest-group liberalism at home." The rift between the DLC and Dean's supporters was so intense that Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas described it as a "civil war" between Democrats. Of course, when Dean announced his support for Clinton, he made no mention of the fact that she was the leader of the same group that ambushed his candidacy precisely because it appealed to the party's left-leaning base. ..."
"... The tendency of some progressives to downplay, ignore or deflect populist critiques of Clinton's record was observed by Doug Henwood in his 2014 Harper's piece "Stop Hillary." ..."
"... In the article, he describes the "widespread liberal fantasy of [Clinton] as a progressive paragon" as misguided. "In fact, a close look at her life and career is perhaps the best antidote to all these great expectations," Henwood writes. "The historical record, such as it is, may also be the only antidote, since most progressives are unwilling to discuss Hillary in anything but the most general, flattering terms." ..."
A discussion about how the Democrats could be compromised by their relationship with the
financial institutions that fund their campaigns was unthinkable in past presidential debates.
Such a discussion falls way outside the narrow parameters of debate that have dominated political
discourse in the mainstream media for decades. But at the
Democratic
debate in Iowa this November, this issue was front and center: Hillary Clinton was forced to
defend her financial relationship with Wall Street
numerous times on network television.
Within the DLC, populism was not merely out of favor; it was militantly opposed.
Clinton's response to populist attacks on her Wall Street connections has largely been to adopt
similar language and policy positions as her primary opponent, Bernie Sanders. In many ways she is
trying to minimize the differences between her and Sanders, rather than emphasize them. "The differences
among us," she said of her opponents at the
Iowa debate , "pale in comparison to what's happening on the Republican [side]."
But the party's latest generation of
"New Democrats" - self-described
"moderates" who
are funded by Wall Street and are aggressively trying to steer the party to the right - have
noticed this trend and are now fighting back. Third Way, a "centrist" think tank that serves as the
hub for contemporary New Democrats, has recently published a sizable policy paper, "
Ready for the
New Economy ," urging the Democratic Party to avoid focusing on economic inequality. Former Obama
chief of staff Bill Daley, a Third Way trustee, recently
argued that Sanders' influence on the primary "is a recipe for disaster" for Democrats.
This "ideological gulf" inside the party, as The Washington Post's
Ruth Marcus describes it , is not a new phenomenon. Before there was Third Way, there was the
Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). And before there was Bill Daley, there was Hillary Clinton -
a key member of the
DLC's leadership team during her entire tenure in the US Senate (2000-2008). As Clinton seeks
progressive support, it is important to consider her role in the influential movement to, as
The American Prospect describes
it , "reinvent the [Democratic] party as one pledged to fiscal restraint, less government, and
a pro-business, pro-free market outlook." This fairly recent history is an important part of Clinton's
record, and she owes it to primary voters to answer for it.
But before all of these events shaped public opinion, the party was largely guided by the ideas
of the Democratic Leadership Council.
Founded by Southern Democrats in 1985 , the group sought to transform the party by pushing it
to embrace more conservative positions and win support from big business.
Clinton adopted the DLC strategy in the way she governed.
The DLC's goal was to advance "a message that was less tilted toward minorities and welfare, less
radical on social issues like abortion and gays, more pro-defense, and more conservative on economic
issues," wrote Robert Dreyfuss in a 2001
article in The American Prospect
. "The DLC thundered against the 'liberal fundamentalism' of the party's base - unionists, blacks,
feminists, Greens, and cause groups generally."
Within the DLC, populism was not merely out of favor; it was militantly opposed. The organization
had virtually no grassroots supporters; it was funded almost entirely by corporate donors. Its executive
council, Dreyfuss reported
, was made up of companies that donated at least $25,000 and included Enron and Koch Industries.
A list of its known donors includes scores of the United States' most powerful corporations, all
of whom benefit from a Democratic Party that embraces big business and is less reliant on labor unions
and the grassroots for support.
The organization's influence was significant, especially in the 1990s. The New York Times
reported
that during that era "the Democratic Leadership Council was a maker of presidents." Its influence
continued into the post-Clinton years. Al Gore, Joe Lieberman, John Kerry, John Edwards, Dick Gephardt
and countless others all
lent their names in support of the organization. The DLC and its think tank, the
Progressive Policy Institute (PPI),
were well financed and published a seemingly endless barrage of
policy papers , op-eds
and declarations
in their numerous publications.
"It is almost hard to find anyone who wasn't involved with [the DLC]" said Mark Schmitt, a staffer
for the nonpartisan New America Foundation think tank, in an interview with Truthout. "This was before
there were a lot of organizations, and the DLC provided a way for politicians to get involved and
to be in the same room with important people."
The DLC's prescribed Third Way also
found a home on Downing
Street in England. Tony Blair, a major Clinton ally, was a staunch advocate of the DLC,
adopted its strategies and lent
his name to its website. According to the book Clinton and Blair: The Political Economy of the
Third Way ,
he said in 1998 that it "is a third way because it moves decisively beyond an Old Left preoccupied
by state control, high taxation and producer interests."
As recently as 2014, Blair has continued to urge the UK's Labour Party to remain committed to
these ideals. "Former UK prime minister Tony Blair has urged Labour leader Ed Miliband to stick to
the political centre ground, warning that the public has not 'fallen back in love with the state'
despite the global financial crisis,"
according to the Financial Times , which noted that the left-wing base of his party has rejected
his centrist leanings. "His decision as prime minister to join the US in its invasion of Iraq - as
well as his free-market leanings - have made him a
hate figure among the most leftwing Labour activists."
Hillary Clinton as a New Democrat
When Bill Clinton left the White House, Hillary Clinton entered the Senate. She quickly became
a major player for the DLC, serving as a
prominent member of
the New Democratic Caucus in the Senate, speaking at
conferences
on multiple occasions
and serving as
chair of a key initiative for the 2006 and 2008 elections.
New Democrats were never really about popular support; they were about bringing together big
business and the Democrats.
More importantly, Clinton adopted the DLC strategy in the way she governed. She tried to portray
herself as a crusader for family values when she
introduced legislation to ban violent video games and
flag burning in 2005.
She also
adopted the DLC's hawkish military stance. The DLC was feverishly in favor of Bush's "war on
terror" and his invasion of Iraq. Will Marshall, one of the group's founders, was a signatory of
many of the now infamous
documents from the Project for the New American Century, which urged the United States to radically
increase its use of force in Iraq and beyond.
The DLC led efforts to take down Howard Dean's 2004 presidential campaign, citing his opposition
to the war in Iraq as an example of his weakness. Two years later, the organization played a
similar role against
Ned Lamont's antiwar challenge to Sen. Joe Lieberman, which the DLC decried as
"The Return of Liberal Fundamentalism."
However, the DLC's influence eventually
waned
. A formal affiliation with the organization became something of a deal breaker for some progressive
voters. When Barack Obama first ran for the Senate in 2004, he had no affiliation with the DLC. So,
when they wrongly included him in their directory of New Democrats, he asked the DLC to remove his
name. In explaining this, he also publicly shunned the organization in an interview with Black Commentator.
"You are undoubtedly correct that these positions make me an unlikely candidate for membership in
the DLC," he wrote when
pressed by the magazine
. "That is why I am not currently, nor have I ever been, a member of the DLC."
The DLC's decline continued: A growing sense of discontent among progressives, Clinton's loss
in 2008 and the economic crisis that followed turned the DLC into something of a political liability.
And in 2011, the Democratic Leadership Council
shuttered
its doors .
When the DLC closed, it records were
acquired by the Clinton Foundation, which DLC founder Al From called an "appropriate and fitting
repository." To this day, the Clinton Foundation continues to promote the work of the DLC's founding
members. In September 2015, the foundation
hosted an event to promote From's book The New Democrats and the Return to Power . Amazingly,
O'Malley provided a
favorable
blurb for the book, praising it as a "reminder of the core principles that still drive Democratic
success today."
The 2016 Election and New Democrats
The DLC's demise was seen as a victory by many progressives, and the populist tone of the 2016
primary is being celebrated as a sign of rising progressivism as well. But it is probably too soon
to declare that the "battle for the soul of the Democratic Party is coming to an end," as Adam Green,
cofounder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, recently
told the Guardian .
Consider the way Marshall spun the closing of the DLC. "With President Obama consciously reconstructing
a winning coalition by reconnecting with the progressive center, the pragmatic ideas of PPI and other
organizations are more vital than ever," he said in an
interview with Politico .
His reference to "PPI and other organizations" refers to the still-existing Progressive Policy
Institute and Third Way. These institutions have the same
Wall Street support and continue to push the same agenda that their predecessor did.
New Democrats' guns are aimed firmly at Sanders, and they are quick to defend Clinton.
Many of these "centrist" ideas lack popular support these days. But New Democrats were never really
about popular support; they were about bringing together big business and the Democrats. The group's
board of trustees is almost
entirely made up of Wall Street executives. Further, in the aftermath of the 2010 Citizens
United Supreme Court decision, these same moneyed interests
have more influence over the political process than ever before.
"These organizations now are basically just corporate lobbyists today," Schmitt said.
So while the DLC may be a dirty word among many progressives, this didn't stop Obama from appointing
New Democrats to key posts in his White House. The same Bill Daley who
works for a hedge fund and is on the
board of trustees for Third Way
was also President Obama's
White House chief of
staff . And, as was noted above, he is now actively trying to influence the Democratic Party's
direction in the 2016 election.
The remaining champions of the DLC agenda have been increasingly active in trying to push back
against populism. On October 28, 2015, Third Way published an ambitious paper,
"Ready for the
New Economy," that aims to do just that. The paper
falsely
argues that "the narrative of fairness and inequality has, to put it mildly, failed to excite
voters," and says "these trends should compel the party to rigorously question the electoral value
of today's populist agenda."
The report attacks Sanders' proposals for expanding Social Security and implementing a single-payer
health-care system directly, making
faulty
claims about both proposals. It also advises Democrats to avoid the "singular focus on income
inequality" because its "actual impact on the middle class may be small."
"Third Way and its allies are gravely misreading the economic and political moment," said Richard
Eskow, a writer for Campaign for America's Future, in a
rebuttal
to the paper. "If their influence continues to wane, perhaps one day Americans can stop paying
the price for their ill-conceived, corporation- and billionaire-friendly agenda."
Eskow is right to use the word "if" instead of "when." Progressives ignore these efforts at their
own peril. Despite their archaic and flawed ideas, Third Way's reports and speakers still get undue
attention in the mainstream media. For instance, The Washington Post
devoted 913 words to Third Way's new paper, describing it as part of a "big economic fight in
the Democratic Party." The article provided a platform for Third Way's president Jonathan Cowan to
attack Sanders. "We propose that Democrats be Democrats, not socialists," he said. This tone is the
status quo for New Democrats in the media. Their guns are aimed firmly at Sanders, and they are quick
to defend Clinton.
When Clinton was attacked for working with former Wall Street executives, The Wall Street Journal
quoted PPI president Will Marshall, defending her. "The idea that you have to excommunicate anybody
who ever worked in the financial sector is ridiculous,"
he said .
"The Necessities of the Moment": Will Clinton Run Back to the Right?
Of course, the New Democrats' preference for Clinton shouldn't surprise anyone. She has been an
ally for years. And while they have expressed concern over her leftward tilt, they are confident,
as
the Post reported , that "she'll tack back their way in a general election." For instance,
her recent opposition to the
Trans-Pacific Partnership - which Third Way is
supporting aggressively - has centrists "disappointed" but not worried.
"Everyone knew where she was on that and where she will be , but given the necessities
of the moment and a tough Democratic primary, she felt she needed to go there initially," New Democratic
Coalition chairman Rep. Ron Kind (D-Wisconsin)
told the Guardian (emphasis added).
Politics isn't a sporting event. It is important to be critical, even of candidates for whom
you will likely vote.
If New Democrats aren't worried that Clinton's populist rhetoric is sincere, progressives probably
should be worried that it isn't. As DLC founder Al From
told the Guardian : "Hillary will bend a little bit but not so much that she can't get herself
back on course in the general [election] and when she is governing."
Some, however, are confident that if elected, Clinton will have to spend political capital on
the very populist ideas she is now embracing.
"When you make these kind of promises it will be difficult to just go back on them," said the
New America Foundation's Mark Schmitt. "She will have to work on many of these issues if she is elected."
Adam Green, cofounder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, told Truthout that his group's
emphasis is to make any Democratic candidate responsive to the issues important to what he calls
the
"Warren wing" of the party, which espouses the more populist economic beliefs of Sen. Elizabeth
Warren (D-Massachusetts). Like Warren, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee hasn't endorsed
a candidate in the race as of now.
"It is not about one candidate; it is about trying to make all the candidates address the issues
we care about," Green said, citing debt-free education, expanding Social Security benefits and supporting
Black Lives Matter as key issues.
Liberals, Clinton and Partisan Amnesia
It is understandable why some progressives are hesitant to be critical of Clinton: They fully
expect that soon she will be the only thing standing between them and some candidate from the "Republican
clown car," as Green described the GOP field.
But voting pragmatically in a general election is one thing. Ignoring or apologizing for Clinton's
very recent and troubling record is another. Too many progressives are engaged in a sort of willful
partisan amnesia and are accepting the false narrative that Clinton is "a populist fighter who for
decades has been an advocate for families and children," as some unnamed
Clinton advisers told The New York Times.
Consider the case of Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor and presidential candidate, who
has
endorsed Hillary Clinton for president . Dean's reputation as a fiery progressive has always
been
wildly overstated , but there was a rich irony about Dean's endorsement. His centrist record
aside, Dean was once the face of the party's progressive base. During his campaign for the Democratic
nomination in 2003 and 2004, Dean used his opposition to the war in Iraq to garner progressive support.
He attracted a large group of partisan liberal bloggers, who coined the term
"Netroots" in
support of his candidacy . For a time, Dean was
leading in the polls during the primary.
Remember: The Dean campaign was taken down by the DLC, who
attacked him
for running a campaign from the "McGovern-Mondale wing" of the Democratic Party, "defined principally
by weakness abroad and elitist, interest-group liberalism at home." The rift between the DLC and
Dean's supporters was so intense that Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas
described it as a "civil war" between Democrats. Of course, when Dean announced his support for
Clinton, he made no mention of the fact that she was the leader of the same group that ambushed his
candidacy precisely because it appealed to the party's left-leaning base.
Once the primary is over, the chance to force Clinton to respond to left critiques will likely
not come again soon.
Yet Moulitsas recently
endorsed Clinton in a column for The Hill. Moulitsas was one of the key bloggers who supported
Dean in 2004 and helped create the Netroots in its infancy. His goal, he said often, was
"crashing the gate" of the Democratic establishment. But his uncritical support for Clinton,
the quintessential establishment candidate, has turned much of
his own blog into evidence of how some progressives are dismissing recent history for partisan
reasons. In the last contested Democratic primary, Moulitsas was extremely
critical
of Clinton. Now, he is helping her
do to Sanders what the DLC did to Dean.
Why are the likes of Dean and Moulitsas so quick to embrace Clinton after years of battling with
her and her allies in the so-called "vital center?" Only they know for sure. In the case of Dean,
it may well be because he was never a real populist to begin with. In 2003, Bloomberg did a story
asking Vermonters to talk about Dean's ideology. "Howard is not a liberal. He's a pro-business, Rockefeller
Republican,"
said Garrison Nelson, a political science professor at the University of Vermont. This sentiment
is shared by many Vermonters, on both the
left
and
right .
But for other self-identified progressives who have embraced the establishment candidate, such
as Moulitsas, the answers may be simpler: partisan loyalty and ambition. The fact is the odds of
Clinton winning the nomination are very good. And for the likes of Moulitsas - who now writes columns
for an establishment
DC paper and is a
major fundraiser for Democrats - being on the side of the winner will certainly make him more
friends in DC than supporting the self-identified socialist that opposes her.
Moulitsas argues that Clinton has dismissed "her husband's ideological baggage" and is "aiming
for a truly progressive presidency." He is now a true believer, he claims. It is up to readers to
decide if they find his argument to be credible, especially compared to the conflicting statements
he has made for many years. Many on
his own blog are skeptical.
But, lastly, the main reason many progressives are willing to overlook Clinton's record is simply
fear. They are afraid of a Republican president, and it is hard to blame them. The idea of a President
Trump - or Carson or Cruz - is extremely frightening for many people. This is entirely understandable.
But even if one feels obligated to vote for Clinton in the general election, should she win the nomination,
that does not mean her record ought to be ignored. Politics isn't a sporting event. It is important
to be critical, even of candidates for whom you will likely vote.
The Historical Record: "The Only Antidote"
The tendency of some progressives to downplay, ignore or deflect populist critiques of Clinton's
record was observed by Doug Henwood in his 2014 Harper's piece
"Stop Hillary."
In the article, he describes the "widespread liberal fantasy of [Clinton] as a progressive paragon"
as misguided. "In fact, a close look at her life and career is perhaps the best antidote to all these
great expectations," Henwood writes. "The historical record, such as it is, may also be the only
antidote, since most progressives are unwilling to discuss Hillary in anything but the most general,
flattering terms."
Cleary, Clinton's historical record reveals much to be concerned about, including her long career
as a New Democrat. For the first time in recent memory, however, progressives actually have some
leverage to make her answer for this record.
Clinton has a reasonably competitive opponent who has challenged her on her record of Wall Street
support, her
dismissal of the Glass-Steagall Act and her
vote for war in Iraq . She should also be challenged vigorously on her role with the DLC.
Circumstances have created a unique moment where Clinton has to answer these tough questions.
But it may be a fleeting moment. Once the primary is over, the chance to force Clinton - or any major
establishment politician - to respond to left critiques will likely not come again soon. Copyright,
Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission .
Michael Corcoran
is a journalist based in Boston. He has written for The Boston Globe, The Nation,
The Christian Science Monitor, Extra!, NACLA Report on the Americas and other publications. Follow
him on Twitter: @mcorcoran3 .
"... The issue we've always asked ourselves here is, why was she hiding this in the first place? Why did she have a private server? Obviously it was concealing, what was she concealing? And the most obvious possible answer was the [Clinton] Foundation. ..."
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: Look, we've been speculating for a year about what the email scandal was
all about and I think we were diverted for a year about the classification. It's a real issue, serious
issue, but that was never the issue.
The issue we've always asked ourselves here is, why was she
hiding this in the first place? Why did she have a private server? Obviously it was concealing, what
was she concealing? And the most obvious possible answer was the [Clinton] Foundation.
"... The clearest evidence that Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had something to hide in her emails is the way she made sure their contents stayed hidden, Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C. said Thursday. ..."
"... Clinton famously laughed off a question about whether she had wiped her private email server. ..."
The clearest evidence that Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had something to
hide in her emails is the way she made sure their contents stayed hidden, Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C.
said Thursday.
Clinton famously laughed off a question about whether she had wiped her private email server.
"What?
Like with a cloth or something?" she asked. "I don't know how it works digitally at all."
"... The department has so far released about half of the schedules. Its lawyers said in a phone conference with the AP's lawyers that the department now expects to release the last of the detailed schedules around Dec. 30, weeks before the next president is inaugurated. ..."
(Associated Press) Seven months after a federal judge ordered the State Department to begin releasing
monthly batches of the detailed daily schedules showing meetings by Hillary Clinton during her time
as secretary of state, the government told The Associated Press it won't finish the job before Election
Day.
The department has so far released about half of the schedules. Its lawyers said in a phone conference
with the AP's lawyers that the department now expects to release the last of the detailed schedules
around Dec. 30, weeks before the next president is inaugurated.
The AP's lawyers late Friday formally asked the State Department to hasten that effort so that
the department could provide all Clinton's minute-by-minute schedules by Oct. 15. The agency did
not immediately respond.
vote for Clinton is vote for globalization, while vote for Trump is vote for anti-globalization
Notable quotes:
"... "As for the petty little world of journalism, the media demonstrates how it, more than anyone, is careful to traffic only in authorized ideas and waves; while at the same time it fosters, through its antics, the illusion of a free circulation of ideas and opinions – not unlike jesters in a tyrant's court " - ..."
"... In the 18th century, Edmund Burke described the role of the press as a Fourth Estate checking the powerful. Was that ever true? It certainly doesn't wash any more. What we need is a Fifth Estate: a journalism that monitors, deconstructs and counters propaganda and teaches the young to be agents of people, not power. We need what the Russians called perestroika – an insurrection of subjugated knowledge. I would call it real journalism. ..."
"... Add the pollsters in this deception. If polling samples are heavily weighted with yellow-dog Democrats the result is a Clinton lead. One only has to look at crowd draw: Trump = 7,000-10,000; Hiltery can't fill a kindergarten play-pen. ..."
"... Suggest the Trump campaign deploy IT personnel to inspect all Diebold software seconds before voting commences. ..."
"... In 8 years $Hillary was a US Senator (D-NY) she accomplished nothing of note. I actually went to one of her public appearances thinking I would hear something positive. She appeared to be an idiot when speaking extemporaneously. Clueless and incapable of expressing empathy with mere mortals. If there are debates with 'The Donald' I would expect that Her Highness will be reading a teleprompter. Her handlers do not allow her to speak off the cuff lest she reveal her total lack of human empathy and a state of perpetual clueless detachment from reality. $hill and 'The Donald.' Sad days for the Republic. ..."
"... US has to move away from its current hyper-financialized FIRE-based economy toward one based more on making things. There's only a chance to do that under Trump, since HRC is totally owned by Wall Street and the Perpetual War lobby. ..."
"... The US presidential election this November will tell whether a majority of the US population is irredeemably stupid. If voters elect Hillary, we will know that Americans are stupid beyond redemption. http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2016/08/25/trump-vs-hillary-a-summation-paul-craig-roberts/ ..."
"... Paul Joseph Watson responds to Hillary's racism speech - The Truth About Hillary's 'Alt-Right' Speech - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufkHt8dgG8I ..."
"... But I started to doubt once I understood the gist of the song of Escamillo. After some generalities, he tells the events at the bull fight. Among the shouts of the spectators, a big bull is released from the corral. A picador woulds his back, then he is further wounded with banderillas. Bleeding, the bull retreats, only to wheel back and charge once more. Then the torero, with cape and sword, waits for him, fully alert (toreador, en guard!) to misdirect the bull a few times and deliver the final stab. Is Trump the torero or the bull? ..."
"... All the Trump bashing just reinforces the Propaganda System's utter lack of credibility and imagination. The underlying nature of numerous political websites is also exposed thanks to their shilling for HRC--particularly those calling themselves Progressive: No Genuine Progressive would support HRC ..."
"... ...Hillary is a one woman criminal enterprise and she's the monster's mother. [a comment from the intercept] ..."
"... It is called 'Psychological Projection' and seems to be successful for the good reason of being widespread inherent in the population itself. To project one's own shortcomings, flaws and crimes onto somebody else is as common, as it is based on the lack of real intelligence ..."
"... Even if Hillary is elected, her mandate will be haunted by her email stupidity and the Clinton foundation cupidity. She will be paralyzed and may not even finish her mandate. To avoid the looming shame, I think she should work NOT to be elected, so she can leave the political scene with till some dignity. ..."
"... Regarding voting against one's own interests, the Republican majority leader of the senate just said no to TPP for the time being... Draw your own conclusions; I'm more bemused by the parallels to eastern Europe under Soviet vs NATO occupation. ..."
"... "MoA-readers, who are left/progressive/intellectual/democratic/anti-Trump, are warmongering idiots." No, the true idiocy is with those who still buy into this concocted left/right, liberal/conservative, D/R scheme to oppress the masses. Divide and conquer at its very best. The Romans would cry tears of joy how their principle is so successfully implemented - since over 200 years. ..."
"... [Full Text Of Hillary Clinton's Speech On The Alt-Right ...] ..."
"... Outside the two traditional parties, there is no effective national political party. ..."
"... It is actually not stupid. First, raising his support among the Blacks from 1% to 2% may help. More importantly, he has to work on the vote of educated whites, especially suburban female Republicans where he lags. ..."
"... it makes the msm look like what it actually is - propaganda tool for the 1% with jackass journalists in tow.. ..."
"... As a long time observer of elections and history, it seems that this time both parties have figured out the value of identity politics and are using that instead of any intelligent discussion of issues to sway voters. ..."
"... It's probably the total ownership of the media by the oligarchs that allows them to do this, as it appears that no issues such as TPP or the wasteful MIC are ever discussed. Identity politics allows everything to be emotional and not rational, and it appears to be working for anyone who does not have the time or volition to read with care. ..."
"... Make no mistake: Hillary Clinton is on record as calling for funding of Islamist groups in Syria and overthrowing Assad. If she is elected, we're very likely to see a full-scale US intervention, with US forces openly and aggressively confronting not only Syrian government forces but also facing off with the Russians. ..."
"... Anyone calling for people to support Hilary Clinton, irrespective of whatever dishonest reasoning they use to try and con people into thinking it is a good idea, is calling for more war, more murder of brown-skinned middle eastern muslims and christians etc., and most importantly: more profits for the US/Zionist Death Machine. ..."
"... It may be that, despite his rethoric, and like Oboma before him, Trump will bring all those things too, should he win, but we DO know for sure what Killary intends, because we have already seen her handywork, and she has promised more of the same ..."
"... The proper question is : after Obama, why do people like you still think that voting is of any use? ..."
"... "What Hillary ought to do is very simple: Resign" I don't think she can, she's just a puppet, and her handlers would never let that happen. Her only chance is with her body finally giving in overwhelmed with guilt, stress, medication, her only way out... ..."
"... Shillary! Such refined thinking. Face it, the US has always been corrupt. ..."
"... If the US is to cease being an empire, the average American is going to go through hard times for a bit. If the US continues as a declining empire, the average American citizen will go through hard times plus another lot of harder times when the declining empire crashes and burns. ..."
"... The foreign policy of the American ruling class, in addition to the impoverishment of American society to fund the vast military apparatus, has had the most horrifying consequences for the peoples of the countries targeted. The war fomented by the United States in Syria has reduced the population of that country from 23 million to about 17 million, killed up to half a million people, and displaced over 13 million. ..."
"... Returning to protectionism and fair trade will lift all American boats, not just the Wall Street Zionists ..."
"... America, despite glowing MSM BS, is on the ropes of neoliberalism. As an older American,I remember a land of plenty, with good jobs for all, instead of fast food retail hell. ..."
"... What is unbelievable is the fact that she corruptly stole the primary with the help of the DNC and the ziomedia, but no one cares. ..."
"... For clear light on the positive relationship between a Trump presidency and the US economy, David Stockman offers wisdom. Take a look from time to time at his website to educate yourself: http://davidstockmanscontracorner.com/ ..."
"... Now it is time for people to start saying Roberts is a shill for Trump. If you've read what he has written about Trump, he's highly critical. His point is simple: Do you support those who are so blatantly against Trump? Or, put the other way around, are you in favor of continued oligarchic rule. ..."
This pic comparing a young Donald Trump with a child figure in some old
Nazi propaganda was
posted by Doug
Saunders , supposedly a serious international-affairs columnist
at the Canadian Globe
and Mail.
It is illogical, childish nonsense. But Saunders is by far the only one disqualifying himself
as serious commentator by posting such bullshit. Indeed, the villain-ification of Donald Trump is
a regular feature which runs through U.S. and international media from the left to the right.
Is there any villain in U.S. (political) culture Donald Trump has not been compare to? Let me
know what to search for.
I doubt that this assault on Trump's character is effective. (Hillary Clinton is a
more fitting
object .) Potential Trump voters will at best ignore it. More likely they will feel confirmed
in their belief that all media and media people are anti-Trump and pro-Clinton.
The onslaught only validates what himself Trump claims: that all media are again him, independent
of whatever policies he may promote or commit to.
The jokes on them. Older voters, smarter voters are voting for Trump. If he remains on message
and points out those things that do matter then he can win. He has to stop the joking around and
being nasty. Be serious and get to the point.
Trump can joke and talk all the nonsense he want, still it won't change my mind. I know Hillary
including Bernie Sanders - they're from the same pot of shit.
The only question remain, should I vote for Jill Stein to bring her Green Party percentage
up? Jill Stein spoke repeatedly she will stop all aids to any country and NOT only Israel if
human right are abuse - not exact words.
Further she is a strong support of BDS even as Canada Green Party leader not in favor "Canadian
MP Elizabeth May told reporters on Monday that she will stay on as leader of Canada's Green Party
after saying she was considering stepping down because of her opposition to the party's recently-adopted
policy of endorsing the strategy of Boycott Divest and Sanction against Israel. "
For decades, at least 40 years, it was a whisper that the international medias have been sitting
in the lap of a certain 3 letter agency. The mission: Manufacturing Consent by Deception.
Globalism, War & Chaos
brought by The Establishment owners of Deep Shadow Government. This quote from Robert Faurisson who is tagged a Halocaust denier may offend those who cannot
be criticized:
"As for the petty little world of journalism, the media demonstrates how it, more than anyone,
is careful to traffic only in authorized ideas and waves; while at the same time it fosters, through
its antics, the illusion of a free circulation of ideas and opinions – not unlike jesters in a
tyrant's court " -
In the 18th century, Edmund Burke described the role of the press as a Fourth Estate checking
the powerful. Was that ever true? It certainly doesn't wash any more. What we need is a Fifth
Estate: a journalism that monitors, deconstructs and counters propaganda and teaches the young
to be agents of people, not power. We need what the Russians called perestroika – an insurrection
of subjugated knowledge. I would call it real journalism.
~ ~ ~
Add the pollsters in this deception. If polling samples are heavily weighted with yellow-dog
Democrats the result is a Clinton lead. One only has to look at crowd draw: Trump = 7,000-10,000;
Hiltery can't fill a kindergarten play-pen.
Suggest the Trump campaign deploy IT personnel to inspect all Diebold software seconds before
voting commences.
In 8 years $Hillary was a US Senator (D-NY) she accomplished nothing of note. I actually went
to one of her public appearances thinking I would hear something positive. She appeared to be
an idiot when speaking extemporaneously. Clueless and incapable of expressing empathy with mere
mortals. If there are debates with 'The Donald' I would expect that Her Highness will be reading
a teleprompter. Her handlers do not allow her to speak off the cuff lest she reveal her total
lack of human empathy and a state of perpetual clueless detachment from reality. $hill and 'The
Donald.' Sad days for the Republic.
People vote against their own self interests only because bought-and-paid-for MSM and political
pundits SAY that a third-party can't win.
If everyone would simply turn off toxic media and simply vote for their best interest the establishment
would stop taking us all for granted.
What is better: Trump is elected but Obama-Hillary Democratic "Third-Way" back-stabbing sell-outs are replaced
by a real left opposition led by Greens? - OR -
Obama-Hillary fake left squashes real opposition for another 8 years while extending and deepening
the soul-crushing neolib/neocon disaster?
"Trump's economic policies as U.S. president would be catastrophic for those most likely to vote
for him."
US has to move away from its current hyper-financialized FIRE-based economy toward one based
more on making things. There's only a chance to do that under Trump, since HRC is totally owned
by Wall Street and the Perpetual War lobby.
Carter (D) = 39%
Reagan (R) = 32%
Anderson (I) = 21%
Who took it? Polls are still unreliable. The poll sampling is key.
I don't have a vote. On November 08, the real problem is one of the two will be (s)elected.
Your decision does weigh heavily and guarantees the selection. Can you support another 4-8 years
of the certified corrupt Clinton couple?
There is a third way to effectively cast a ballot outside the two main party's candidates and
that is not to vote at all. This is effective as a historical fact that some fraction of eligible
voters did not participate (whatever the cause) and the winning candidate was enabled by some
plurality rather than a majority of the eligible electorate. Throwing away one's vote in a fit
of moral superiority is an effective way to throw away one's voting rights, but then the 'moral
majority' that wrecked the Republic never realised their culpability and still haven't. Not one
of the minority candidates became anything more than a sad footnote to history - not one.
I guess instead of violating Goodwin law, or complain one-sidedly, we should eschew "Hitlery"
and "fascist Trump", and find some high-brow metaphors. My proposals:
Hillary and Trump
But I started to doubt once I understood the gist of the song of Escamillo. After some generalities,
he tells the events at the bull fight. Among the shouts of the spectators, a big bull is released
from the corral. A picador woulds his back, then he is further wounded with banderillas. Bleeding,
the bull retreats, only to wheel back and charge once more. Then the torero, with cape and sword,
waits for him, fully alert (toreador, en guard!) to misdirect the bull a few times and deliver
the final stab. Is Trump the torero or the bull?
All the Trump bashing just reinforces the Propaganda System's utter lack of credibility and imagination.
The underlying nature of numerous political websites is also exposed thanks to their shilling
for HRC--particularly those calling themselves Progressive: No Genuine Progressive would support
HRC, or Sanders now that he's exposed himself for what he is, a Chevrolet Liberal. The launching
of the self-proclaimed "Our Revolution" website/organization is yet another DNC-based sham that
studiously avoids any mention of the military or foreign policy on its "Issues" page, which again
belies its nature since the #1 issue for all Genuine Progressives is War and being against it.
Still have 10 weeks to go. Stein has earned all the votes within my household.
I'm not a big fan of Trump's but I find that people don't argue about his politics, but insult
him and his wife on a personal basis.
This makes me think that it's the turn of the 'Left' in the USA to become immature and resort
to name calling. Remember when it was the 'Right' that made fun of Kerry's Purple Heart?
Which also exposes the problem with politics worldwide - the Left and the Right have met at
the extremes and we now see progressives arguing for burkinis and the right arguing for workers'
rights by trying to prevent the TPP, etc.
It is called 'Psychological Projection' and seems to be successful for the good reason of being
widespread inherent in the population itself. To project one's own shortcomings, flaws and crimes
onto somebody else is as common, as it is based on the lack of real intelligence - no, not the
one that is derived from fancy questionnaires, or adding numbers.
Real intelligence includes the understanding that sitting in a glasshouse throwing rocks does
not qualify to be such. It also includes the understanding to be inseparable part of one's environment
- a shared environment indicating that there is only interdependence, not separation.
Furthermore, real intelligence includes compassion, kindness and the will to walk in somebody
else's shoes.
This intelligence is sorely missing in the majority of people that are entrusted with 'journalistic'
work, or working in public offices. The stench of being "holier that thou" is covering the U.S.A.
and wafts to Europe were it is now also modus operandi.
The best course of action would be to punish those who engage in this kind of demagoguery with
nonobservance.
It won't be Trump who brings us fascism as the images implies, but more likely Clinton if she
wins and if the Democrats can win over one of the Houses of Congress. As the campaign goes on,
these comparisons add up and create in the minds of anybody anti-Trump an actual equivalency to
in particular Hitler. This is one half of the combustion needed to go down the road to fascism.
There is something else that Trump given the Russian hysteria is being called--a traitor. The
thing is, Hillary supports believe this to be true in a criminal sense. It is not just some throw
away smear normal for any election. I have seen way too way postings in major democratic party
sites calls for basically the resurrection of the House Un-American Activities Committee. These
supporters are historically clueless on what they are asking for, and I would imagine the same
with much of the democratic party lawmakers in Congress.
I can see if Hillary wins, witch hunts against anti-war protesters, or people who believe we
should have rapprochement with Russia and China. The goal will be to criminalize and punish dissenting
views on foreign and war policies because the constant Putin/Trump/Hitler/Stalin/etc comparisons
created the foundation for actual criminal accusations.
And the witch hunts will spread beyond war and foreign policy. Look at what is going on in
Europe. Literally, and I do mean literally, every problem is being attributed to Putin "weaponizing"
some issue. Serious politicians accused Putin of using drunken Russian fans during the Euro futbol
championships of starting fights to support Brexit. The Polish minister for internal security
accused Putin of master minding the Paris terrorist attacks. And these guys get away with the
most outlandish accusations. As the real Nazis understood, repetition of lies is the foundation
of propaganda to move people into action.
The underlying nature of numerous political websites is also exposed thanks to their shilling
for HRC--particularly those calling themselves Progressive: No Genuine Progressive would support
HRC, or Sanders now that he's exposed himself for what he is, a Chevrolet Liberal.
Well the resident Zio-Racist Hill-shill (rufus magister | Aug 26, 2016 11:47:38 AM | 5) likes
to pretend he is some sort of progressive, but still can't keep from outing himself by banging
on non-stop about the Zio-Racists favourite talking points (Heil hillary and "holocaustholocaustholocaut!!")
She appeared to be an idiot when speaking extemporaneously. Clueless and incapable of expressing
empathy with mere mortals. If there are debates with 'The Donald' I would expect that Her Highness
will be reading a teleprompter. Her handlers do not allow her to speak off the cuff [.]
Very interesting because I have been discussing with colleagues here the Don should be honing
his debating skill sets as Hillary is a trained lawyer/politician.
Even if Hillary is elected, her mandate will be haunted by her email stupidity and the Clinton
foundation cupidity. She will be paralyzed and may not even finish her mandate. To avoid the looming
shame, I think she should work NOT to be elected, so she can leave the political scene with till
some dignity.
Regarding voting against one's own interests, the Republican majority leader of the senate
just said no
to TPP for the time being... Draw your own conclusions; I'm more bemused by the parallels
to eastern Europe under Soviet vs NATO occupation.
. . .Clinton's use of BleachBit undermines her claims that she only deleted innocuous "personal"
emails from her private server
"If she considered them to be personal, then she and her lawyers had those emails deleted.
They didn't just push the delete button, they had them deleted where even God can't read
them.
"They were using something called BleachBit You don't use BleachBit for yoga emails."
"When you're using BleachBit, it is something you really do not want the world to see."
Vitriol galore! If the arguments made above ... either way ... are the best we can do then
maybe electing Hillary and hoping for WW3 is the lessor of evils. As I've said before, not a bad
idea.
Posted by: From The Hague | Aug 26, 2016 2:22:04 PM | 34
"MoA-readers, who are left/progressive/intellectual/democratic/anti-Trump, are warmongering
idiots." No, the true idiocy is with those who still buy into this concocted left/right, liberal/conservative,
D/R scheme to oppress the masses. Divide and conquer at its very best. The Romans would cry tears
of joy how their principle is so successfully implemented - since over 200 years.
To be bold here: a 'left' mother loves her child as much as a 'right' mother and even more
so the grandparents. Any grandparent here that denies their grandchildren their love based on
the fact that their children cling on to a different belief? And that it is in its entirety -
made believe by the Plutocrats and the sheople throw shit at each other instead of UPWARDS
.
[Full Text Of Hillary Clinton's Speech On The Alt-Right ...]
Just yesterday, one of Britain's most prominent right-wing leaders, Nigel Farage, who stoked
anti-immigrant sentiments to win the referendum on leaving the European Union, campaigned with
Donald Trump in Mississippi. Farage has called for a ban on the children of legal immigrants from public schools and
health services, has said women are quote "worth less" than men, and supports scrapping laws
that prevent employers from discriminating based on race ― that's who Trump wants by his side.
The godfather of this global brand of extreme nationalism is Russian President Vladimir
Putin.
In fact, Farage has appeared regularly on Russian propaganda programs. Now he's standing
on the same stage as the Republican nominee.
Hatred of Trump is nothing more than cloaked Jewish hatred of white Christians. Go ahead and take
my comment down, but you are too smart to not know the truth deep down in your heart. This above
all else, lie to yourself to protect the Jewish lies.
About the most successful 'breakaway political movement' ever was probably the Dixiecrats in the
1948 election which actually garnered a small fraction of the electoral college, but that was
using the apparatus of an organised national political party existent regionally. Outside the
two traditional parties, there is no effective national political party. ...Next time keep your idiot elections to yourselves - Please.
On August 5th, Michael Morell, a former acting Director of the CIA, pilloried GOP presidential
candidate Donald Trump, concluding that he was an "unwitting agent of Russia." Morell, who entitled
his New York Times op-ed "I Ran the CIA and now I'm endorsing Hillary Clinton," described the
process whereby Trump had been so corrupted. According to Morell, Putin, it seems, as a wily ex-career
intelligence officer, is "trained to identify vulnerabilities in an individual and to exploit
them. That is exactly what he did early in the primaries. Mr. Putin played upon Mr. Trump's vulnerabilities…
In the intelligence business, we would say that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting
agent of the Russian Federation."
So who is guilty of putting the interests of a foreign government ahead of those of the United
States? I know there are advocates for any number of foreign states running around loose in Washington
but the friends of Israel in government and the media come immediately to mind largely because
there are so many of them, they are very much in-your-face and they are both extremely well-funded
and very successful. Now deceased former Congressman Tom Lantos and Senator Frank Lautenberg were,
respectively, often referred to as the congressman and senator from Israel. And there are many
more: Chuck Schumer, Chuck Grassley, Ben Cardin, Bob Menendez, Tom Cotton, Mark Kirk, Nita Lowey,
Ted Deutch, Brad Sherman, Ileana-Ros Lehtinen and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz to name only a few
in the Congress. All are
major recipients of Israel related PAC money and all are reliable defenders of Israel no matter
what Benjamin Netanyahu does and no matter how it effects the United States.
And then there are the Clintons. One only has to go back to Bill's
one-sided pro-Israeli
diplomacy at Camp David in 2000 to discern how the game was played. And then there was the
widely condemned January 2001
last minute pardon of
Mossad agent Marc Rich, whose wife Denise was a major contributor to the Clintons, to realize
that there was always a deference to Israeli interests particularly when money was involved. The
only problem is that the Clintons, relying on Morell's formulation, might more reasonably be described
as witting agents of Israel rather than unwitting as they have certainly known what they have
been doing and have been actively supporting Israeli policies even when damaging to U.S. interests
since they first emerged from the primordial political swamps in Arkansas. If one were completely
cynical it might be possible to suggest that they understood from the beginning that pandering
to Israel and gaining access to Jewish power and money would be a major component in their rise
to political prominence. It certainly has worked out that way.
=====
So who is guilty of putting the interests of a foreign government ahead of those of the United
States? I know there are advocates for any number of foreign states running around loose in Washington
but the friends of Israel in government and the media come immediately to mind largely because
there are so many of them, they are very much in-your-face and they are both extremely well-funded
and very successful. Now deceased former Congressman Tom Lantos and Senator Frank Lautenberg were,
respectively, often referred to as the congressman and senator from Israel. And there are many
more: Chuck Schumer, Chuck Grassley, Ben Cardin, Bob Menendez, Tom Cotton, Mark Kirk, Nita Lowey,
Ted Deutch, Brad Sherman, Ileana-Ros Lehtinen and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz to name only a few
in the Congress. All are
major recipients of Israel related PAC money and all are reliable defenders of Israel no matter
what Benjamin Netanyahu does and no matter how it effects the United States.
And then there are the Clintons. One only has to go back to Bill's
one-sided pro-Israeli
diplomacy at Camp David in 2000 to discern how the game was played. And then there was the
widely condemned January 2001
last minute pardon of
Mossad agent Marc Rich, whose wife Denise was a major contributor to the Clintons, to realize
that there was always a deference to Israeli interests particularly when money was involved. The
only problem is that the Clintons, relying on Morell's formulation, might more reasonably be described
as witting agents of Israel rather than unwitting as they have certainly known what they have
been doing and have been actively supporting Israeli policies even when damaging to U.S. interests
since they first emerged from the primordial political swamps in Arkansas. If one were completely
cynical it might be possible to suggest that they understood from the beginning that pandering
to Israel and gaining access to Jewish power and money would be a major component in their rise
to political prominence. It certainly has worked out that way.
Tom @38: "Trump the racist Appealing to African-Americans was just a demented and sick desperate
joke. "
It is actually not stupid. First, raising his support among the Blacks from 1% to 2% may help.
More importantly, he has to work on the vote of educated whites, especially suburban female Republicans
where he lags.
As a long time observer of elections and history, it seems that this time both parties have figured
out the value of identity politics and are using that instead of any intelligent discussion of
issues to sway voters.
It's probably the total ownership of the media by the oligarchs that allows them to do this,
as it appears that no issues such as TPP or the wasteful MIC are ever discussed. Identity politics allows everything to be emotional and not rational, and it appears to be
working for anyone who does not have the time or volition to read with care.
Make no mistake: Hillary Clinton is on record as calling for funding of Islamist groups in Syria
and overthrowing Assad. If she is elected, we're very likely to see a full-scale US intervention,
with US forces openly and aggressively confronting not only Syrian government forces but also
facing off with the Russians.
Anyone calling for people to support Hilary Clinton, irrespective of whatever dishonest reasoning
they use to try and con people into thinking it is a good idea, is calling for more war, more
murder of brown-skinned middle eastern muslims and christians etc., and most importantly: more
profits for the US/Zionist Death Machine.
Make no mistake about that, these shitty Hillary-supporting people cannot claim that they do
not know what that that is what they are doing, because she has been quite vocal in her support
for more war and more murder (on behalf of Isreal naturally)
It may be that, despite his rethoric, and like Oboma before him, Trump will bring all those
things too, should he win, but we DO know for sure what Killary intends, because we have already
seen her handywork, and she has promised more of the same
The proper question is : after Obama, why do people like you still think that voting is of any
use?
When did it ever change anything? You going to have to come up with something a tad more effective than mere voting if you want
it to change. Personally I think the US deserves a Trump presidency.
"What Hillary ought to do is very simple: Resign" I don't think she can, she's just a puppet, and her handlers would never let that happen. Her
only chance is with her body finally giving in overwhelmed with guilt, stress, medication, her
only way out...
Look what they did to Reagan and the pope JP2 - GHWB failed with his assassins, but after the
attempts, both these puppets were basically doing what told, with only little freedom left to
do some good things (served well for maintaining appearances).
Which brings again that question to my mind - why did they let Hinckley the patsy out recently,
what's he's being set up for..?
Oooo! Shillary! Such refined thinking. Face it, the US has always been corrupt. "The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding
Industry" reviewed here:
http://www.chicagoreviewpress.com/american-slave-coast--the-products-9781613748206.php says it all. Thomas Jefferson, a hero? What about George Washington, the land owner? Trump and Clinton are only unusual in that most Duhmericans have finally no choice but to admit
they are venal. Stein, who could NEVER win, seems honorable. Johnson may be a wacked out libertarian, but he
is a well meaning wacko.
Great choices for the great democracy, light of the world, exceptional nation! I agree, Duhmerican politics are stupid ... the dumbest people in the world make it so. Then
again, is any place humans habitate NOT idiotically insane stupid?
"Trump's economic policies as U.S. president would be catastrophic for those most likely to vote
for him."
If the US is to cease being an empire, the average American is going to go through hard times
for a bit. If the US continues as a declining empire, the average American citizen will go through
hard times plus another lot of harder times when the declining empire crashes and burns.
The Godfather image is a popular one these days. The Godmother use it to deflect attention
from her own role as cackling harridan, wailing banshee of DDD&D ... others note that
"Godfather"
Biden visits Turkey
The foreign policy of the American ruling class, in addition to the impoverishment of American
society to fund the vast military apparatus, has had the most horrifying consequences for the
peoples of the countries targeted. The war fomented by the United States in Syria has reduced
the population of that country from 23 million to about 17 million, killed up to half a million
people, and displaced over 13 million.
Thirteen years after the invasion of Iraq, which resulted in the deaths of at least a million
people, some 4.4 million Iraqis are internally displaced, with over a quarter million forced
to flee the country.
Questions of foreign policy are not decided, much less deliberated, within the framework
of elections. Nowhere in the 2016 presidential race is there a serious debate, for instance,
on the character of the US alliance with Turkey or the consequences of launching a de facto
NATO invasion of Syria. Congress holds no hearings or votes. It neither seeks nor desires to
play a serious role.
As for the people, they simply have no say.
The press plays a key role in the deception and disenfranchisement of the population. One
tactic employed by the corporate-controlled media is simply to exclude "minor" developments
such as a US-backed invasion of Syria from the so-called "news." The most remarkable feature
of the media coverage to date of the Turkish incursion is its virtual non-existence. It is
a good bet, due to the media's corrupt silence, that the percentage of the US population that
is even aware of the invasion is in the single digits.
Returning to protectionism and fair trade will lift all American boats, not just the Wall Street
Zionists, so I am perplexed at b's comment.
America, despite glowing MSM BS, is on the ropes of neoliberalism. As an older American,I remember
a land of plenty, with good jobs for all, instead of fast food retail hell.
I don't think b has any
idea of the realities being endured by US, as the media refuses to give US reality ,instead rosy
economic garbage where not once in Obombas terrible reign have they created enough jobs to keep
up with the expanding population, and as DT says ,the inner cities are hellholes, witness the NBA
star Dwayne Wades cousin shot in Chicago pushing a baby stroller.
I had a nurse from Hempstead NY, when i had the big C, who said an old man in a wheelchair had a
pit bull tied to it to ward off potential crooks. WTF?
And now the antisemitism card is played by the serial liars, Bannon is accused of calling Jews
whiny. Well ,as a longtime observer, he is spot on there.
And the lying times says 90% chance for Hell bitch victory.
What is unbelievable is the fact that she corruptly stole the primary with the help of the DNC
and the ziomedia, but no one cares.(her supporters) If not emblematic of the depravity of liberals, those
who wish the death of others so they live in safety (which of course is poppycock) what is?
And when Trump gets her in the debates, he'll destroy the MSM narrative of BS.
There is one villain Trump has not been compared to: Hillary Clinton.
And don't be the kettle calling the pot black, whoever the author of this ill-researched piece
is. Your own journalism strikes me as irresponsible when you claim, "Trump's economic policies
as U.S. president would be catastrophic for those most likely to vote for him." Catastrophic?
Really? Who exactly is "most likely to vote for him" that would not benefit from better trade
deals and more corporate incentives for domestic business? The global elite? They're the ones
who definitely won't benefit, but they also definitely won't vote for him. Get your thinking straight.
For clear light on the positive relationship between a Trump presidency and the US economy,
David Stockman offers wisdom. Take a look from time to time at his website to educate yourself:
http://davidstockmanscontracorner.com/
Now it is time for people to start saying Roberts is a shill for Trump. If you've read what
he has written about Trump, he's highly critical. His point is simple: Do you support those who
are so blatantly against Trump? Or, put the other way around, are you in favor of continued oligarchic
rule.
Like Roberts, I am so opposed to Clinton that Trump seems (even ever so slightly) the lessor
of evils.
"... video of Bill Clinton clearly shows Kaposi Sarcoma on the forehead and inside the left eyelid. ..."
"... There is a long list of adverse neurological after-effects of coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) surgery, some of them short term and others that are long term. Surgeons who deal with these issues refer to the long term and permanent loss of cognitive function as "pump head", so named because the patient was kept alive by a heart-lung machine during surgery. ..."
"... It's very likely that Bill Clinton has been dealing with a form of "pump head" since he underwent bypass surgery in February 2010. ..."
"... Absolutely looks like HIV to me. I have seen it, believe me, working in a hospital as a PA for over 20 years. ..."
"... To be honest..I had thought that maybe Bill Clinton was HIV positive back a year ago or so. I managed to see him on TV and was shocked at how totally wasted away he looked. Just my 2 cents though. ..."
"... If he has HIV it should be known to many sex partners as he has had. ..."
In their new
book, Bill & Hillary: So This is That Thing Called Love, the authors interview Clinton
insiders who claim that Bill slept with so many women that Hillary Clinton has repeatedly forced
him to get an HIV test from the doctor. This is because the former President "favored unprotected
sex."
And while the first tests came back negative, HIV and AIDS might explain an ongoing mystery.
Over the years, both Clintons have kept their medical records a secret. Clinton has explained his
rapidly changing appearance to his heart surgery and "new diet" but he has looked increasingly thin
and weak at Hillary campaign rallies.
As Rush Limbaugh opined, looking at Bill Clinton on the campaign trail, Rush only sees Preparation
H, Geritol, Fixodent, and Depends. Bill Clinton looks like his health is on a rapid recline.
The Dec 6 2013 video of Bill Clinton clearly shows Kaposi Sarcoma on the forehead and inside
the left eyelid. Hillary's neurological problems are probably from:
PRIMARY CENTRAL NERVOUS SYSTEM (CNS) LYMPHOMA
Your central nervous system consists of your brain, spinal cord, and spinal nerves. This
system controls all the workings of your body. HIV can infect and damage parts of it.
Primary CNS lymphoma is a type of cancer that typically occurs in people with CD4 counts
less than 50 cells/mm3. This type of cancer affects the lymph system in your brain and spinal
cord. Symptoms of this type of cancer can include:
Headache
Memory loss
Confusion
Other neurological changes
(Other conditions may cause the same symptoms. Consult your healthcare provider if you have
any of these symptoms.)
Diagnosis includes many of the same types of tests as those for Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma-but
because CNS lymphoma affects the brain directly, your healthcare provider may want to do a
brain biopsy as well. Radiation therapy is the most common treatment for AIDS-related CNS lymphoma.
For more information, see the National Cancer Institute's General Information About Primary
CNS Lymphoma.
Pierce, June 16, 2016 at 1:03 am
this is a stupid article, first of all HIV doesn't cause neurological signs unless you have
crytococcous neoformans, PML, HIV dementia which will only happen if he is not taking medications
which as a doctor i'm 100 percent sure,
NEXT people forgot that BILL CLINTON had a CABG(cornary artery bypass procedure) this procedure
which has a side effect of NEUROTOXICITY. Even though he might of had side effects from this procedure
his IQ is not affected.
DONT LISTEN TO THIS GARBAGE ARTICLE
Gunnar, July 2, 2016 at 7:04 pm
Your response sounds emotional, Pierce. There is a long list of adverse neurological after-effects
of coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) surgery, some of them short term and others that are
long term. Surgeons who deal with these issues refer to the long term and permanent loss of cognitive
function as "pump head", so named because the patient was kept alive by a heart-lung machine during
surgery.
It's very likely that Bill Clinton has been dealing with a form of "pump head" since he
underwent bypass surgery in February 2010.
Laura, May 17, 2016 at 4:42 pm
Absolutely looks like HIV to me. I have seen it, believe me, working in a hospital as a PA
for over 20 years. This is what happens to humans when they live a degenerative lifestyle.
Not everyone gets HIV but something else gets them. You can't fool Mother Nature. She will get
you in the end.
Robert says: February 25, 2016 at 9:59 pm
To be honest..I had thought that maybe Bill Clinton was HIV positive back a year ago or so.
I managed to see him on TV and was shocked at how totally wasted away he looked. Just my 2 cents
though. I wouldn't wish that disease on any body.
Debbie says: February 25, 2016 at 5:23 pm
If he has HIV it should be known to many sex partners as he has had. How many are at
risk? Even Hillary may be at risk..Is that where her cough has come from ???? Does she have it?
Is thatwhat Obama has had on them?
"... "As for the petty little world of journalism, the media demonstrates how it, more than anyone, is careful to traffic only in authorized ideas and waves; while at the same time it fosters, through its antics, the illusion of a free circulation of ideas and opinions – not unlike jesters in a tyrant's court " - ..."
"... In the 18th century, Edmund Burke described the role of the press as a Fourth Estate checking the powerful. Was that ever true? It certainly doesn't wash any more. What we need is a Fifth Estate: a journalism that monitors, deconstructs and counters propaganda and teaches the young to be agents of people, not power. We need what the Russians called perestroika – an insurrection of subjugated knowledge. I would call it real journalism. ..."
"... Add the pollsters in this deception. If polling samples are heavily weighted with yellow-dog Democrats the result is a Clinton lead. One only has to look at crowd draw: Trump = 7,000-10,000; Hiltery can't fill a kindergarten play-pen. ..."
"... Suggest the Trump campaign deploy IT personnel to inspect all Diebold software seconds before voting commences. ..."
"... In 8 years $Hillary was a US Senator (D-NY) she accomplished nothing of note. I actually went to one of her public appearances thinking I would hear something positive. She appeared to be an idiot when speaking extemporaneously. Clueless and incapable of expressing empathy with mere mortals. If there are debates with 'The Donald' I would expect that Her Highness will be reading a teleprompter. Her handlers do not allow her to speak off the cuff lest she reveal her total lack of human empathy and a state of perpetual clueless detachment from reality. $hill and 'The Donald.' Sad days for the Republic. ..."
"... US has to move away from its current hyper-financialized FIRE-based economy toward one based more on making things. There's only a chance to do that under Trump, since HRC is totally owned by Wall Street and the Perpetual War lobby. ..."
"... The US presidential election this November will tell whether a majority of the US population is irredeemably stupid. If voters elect Hillary, we will know that Americans are stupid beyond redemption. http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2016/08/25/trump-vs-hillary-a-summation-paul-craig-roberts/ ..."
"... Paul Joseph Watson responds to Hillary's racism speech - The Truth About Hillary's 'Alt-Right' Speech - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufkHt8dgG8I ..."
"... But I started to doubt once I understood the gist of the song of Escamillo. After some generalities, he tells the events at the bull fight. Among the shouts of the spectators, a big bull is released from the corral. A picador woulds his back, then he is further wounded with banderillas. Bleeding, the bull retreats, only to wheel back and charge once more. Then the torero, with cape and sword, waits for him, fully alert (toreador, en guard!) to misdirect the bull a few times and deliver the final stab. Is Trump the torero or the bull? ..."
"... All the Trump bashing just reinforces the Propaganda System's utter lack of credibility and imagination. The underlying nature of numerous political websites is also exposed thanks to their shilling for HRC--particularly those calling themselves Progressive: No Genuine Progressive would support HRC ..."
"... ...Hillary is a one woman criminal enterprise and she's the monster's mother. [a comment from the intercept] ..."
"... It is called 'Psychological Projection' and seems to be successful for the good reason of being widespread inherent in the population itself. To project one's own shortcomings, flaws and crimes onto somebody else is as common, as it is based on the lack of real intelligence ..."
"... Even if Hillary is elected, her mandate will be haunted by her email stupidity and the Clinton foundation cupidity. She will be paralyzed and may not even finish her mandate. To avoid the looming shame, I think she should work NOT to be elected, so she can leave the political scene with till some dignity. ..."
"... Regarding voting against one's own interests, the Republican majority leader of the senate just said no to TPP for the time being... Draw your own conclusions; I'm more bemused by the parallels to eastern Europe under Soviet vs NATO occupation. ..."
"... "MoA-readers, who are left/progressive/intellectual/democratic/anti-Trump, are warmongering idiots." No, the true idiocy is with those who still buy into this concocted left/right, liberal/conservative, D/R scheme to oppress the masses. Divide and conquer at its very best. The Romans would cry tears of joy how their principle is so successfully implemented - since over 200 years. ..."
"... [Full Text Of Hillary Clinton's Speech On The Alt-Right ...] ..."
"... Outside the two traditional parties, there is no effective national political party. ..."
"... It is actually not stupid. First, raising his support among the Blacks from 1% to 2% may help. More importantly, he has to work on the vote of educated whites, especially suburban female Republicans where he lags. ..."
"... it makes the msm look like what it actually is - propaganda tool for the 1% with jackass journalists in tow.. ..."
"... As a long time observer of elections and history, it seems that this time both parties have figured out the value of identity politics and are using that instead of any intelligent discussion of issues to sway voters. ..."
"... It's probably the total ownership of the media by the oligarchs that allows them to do this, as it appears that no issues such as TPP or the wasteful MIC are ever discussed. Identity politics allows everything to be emotional and not rational, and it appears to be working for anyone who does not have the time or volition to read with care. ..."
"... Make no mistake: Hillary Clinton is on record as calling for funding of Islamist groups in Syria and overthrowing Assad. If she is elected, we're very likely to see a full-scale US intervention, with US forces openly and aggressively confronting not only Syrian government forces but also facing off with the Russians. ..."
"... Anyone calling for people to support Hilary Clinton, irrespective of whatever dishonest reasoning they use to try and con people into thinking it is a good idea, is calling for more war, more murder of brown-skinned middle eastern muslims and christians etc., and most importantly: more profits for the US/Zionist Death Machine. ..."
"... The proper question is : after Obama, why do people like you still think that voting is of any use? ..."
"... "What Hillary ought to do is very simple: Resign" I don't think she can, she's just a puppet, and her handlers would never let that happen. Her only chance is with her body finally giving in overwhelmed with guilt, stress, medication, her only way out... ..."
"... If the US is to cease being an empire, the average American is going to go through hard times for a bit. If the US continues as a declining empire, the average American citizen will go through hard times plus another lot of harder times when the declining empire crashes and burns. ..."
This pic comparing a young Donald Trump with a child figure in some old
Nazi propaganda was
posted by Doug
Saunders , supposedly a serious international-affairs columnist
at the Canadian Globe
and Mail.
It is illogical, childish nonsense. But Saunders is by far the only one disqualifying himself
as serious commentator by posting such bullshit. Indeed, the villain-ification of Donald Trump is
a regular feature which runs through U.S. and international media from the left to the right.
Is there any villain in U.S. (political) culture Donald Trump has not been compare to? Let me
know what to search for.
I doubt that this assault on Trump's character is effective. (Hillary Clinton is a
more fitting
object .) Potential Trump voters will at best ignore it. More likely they will feel confirmed
in their belief that all media and media people are anti-Trump and pro-Clinton.
The onslaught only validates what himself Trump claims: that all media are again him, independent
of whatever policies he may promote or commit to.
The jokes on them. Older voters, smarter voters are voting for Trump. If he remains on message
and points out those things that do matter then he can win. He has to stop the joking around and
being nasty. Be serious and get to the point.
Trump can joke and talk all the nonsense he want, still it won't change my mind. I know Hillary
including Bernie Sanders - they're from the same pot of shit.
The only question remain, should I vote for Jill Stein to bring her Green Party percentage
up? Jill Stein spoke repeatedly she will stop all aids to any country and NOT only Israel if
human right are abuse - not exact words.
Further she is a strong support of BDS even as Canada Green Party leader not in favor "Canadian
MP Elizabeth May told reporters on Monday that she will stay on as leader of Canada's Green Party
after saying she was considering stepping down because of her opposition to the party's recently-adopted
policy of endorsing the strategy of Boycott Divest and Sanction against Israel. "
For decades, at least 40 years, it was a whisper that the international medias have been sitting
in the lap of a certain 3 letter agency. The mission: Manufacturing Consent by Deception.
Globalism, War & Chaos
brought by The Establishment owners of Deep Shadow Government. This quote from Robert Faurisson who is tagged a Halocaust denier may offend those who cannot
be criticized:
"As for the petty little world of journalism, the media demonstrates how it, more than anyone,
is careful to traffic only in authorized ideas and waves; while at the same time it fosters, through
its antics, the illusion of a free circulation of ideas and opinions – not unlike jesters in a
tyrant's court " -
In the 18th century, Edmund Burke described the role of the press as a Fourth Estate checking
the powerful. Was that ever true? It certainly doesn't wash any more. What we need is a Fifth
Estate: a journalism that monitors, deconstructs and counters propaganda and teaches the young
to be agents of people, not power. We need what the Russians called perestroika – an insurrection
of subjugated knowledge. I would call it real journalism.
~ ~ ~
Add the pollsters in this deception. If polling samples are heavily weighted with yellow-dog
Democrats the result is a Clinton lead. One only has to look at crowd draw: Trump = 7,000-10,000;
Hiltery can't fill a kindergarten play-pen.
Suggest the Trump campaign deploy IT personnel to inspect all Diebold software seconds before
voting commences.
In 8 years $Hillary was a US Senator (D-NY) she accomplished nothing of note. I actually went
to one of her public appearances thinking I would hear something positive. She appeared to be
an idiot when speaking extemporaneously. Clueless and incapable of expressing empathy with mere
mortals. If there are debates with 'The Donald' I would expect that Her Highness will be reading
a teleprompter. Her handlers do not allow her to speak off the cuff lest she reveal her total
lack of human empathy and a state of perpetual clueless detachment from reality. $hill and 'The
Donald.' Sad days for the Republic.
People vote against their own self interests only because bought-and-paid-for MSM and political
pundits SAY that a third-party can't win.
If everyone would simply turn off toxic media and simply vote for their best interest the establishment
would stop taking us all for granted.
What is better: Trump is elected but Obama-Hillary Democratic "Third-Way" back-stabbing sell-outs are replaced
by a real left opposition led by Greens? - OR -
Obama-Hillary fake left squashes real opposition for another 8 years while extending and deepening
the soul-crushing neolib/neocon disaster?
"Trump's economic policies as U.S. president would be catastrophic for those most likely to vote
for him."
US has to move away from its current hyper-financialized FIRE-based economy toward one based
more on making things. There's only a chance to do that under Trump, since HRC is totally owned
by Wall Street and the Perpetual War lobby.
Carter (D) = 39%
Reagan (R) = 32%
Anderson (I) = 21%
Who took it? Polls are still unreliable. The poll sampling is key.
I don't have a vote. On November 08, the real problem is one of the two will be (s)elected.
Your decision does weigh heavily and guarantees the selection. Can you support another 4-8 years
of the certified corrupt Clinton couple?
There is a third way to effectively cast a ballot outside the two main party's candidates and
that is not to vote at all. This is effective as a historical fact that some fraction of eligible
voters did not participate (whatever the cause) and the winning candidate was enabled by some
plurality rather than a majority of the eligible electorate. Throwing away one's vote in a fit
of moral superiority is an effective way to throw away one's voting rights, but then the 'moral
majority' that wrecked the Republic never realised their culpability and still haven't. Not one
of the minority candidates became anything more than a sad footnote to history - not one.
I guess instead of violating Goodwin law, or complain one-sidedly, we should eschew "Hitlery"
and "fascist Trump", and find some high-brow metaphors. My proposals:
Hillary and Trump
But I started to doubt once I understood the gist of the song of Escamillo. After some generalities,
he tells the events at the bull fight. Among the shouts of the spectators, a big bull is released
from the corral. A picador woulds his back, then he is further wounded with banderillas. Bleeding,
the bull retreats, only to wheel back and charge once more. Then the torero, with cape and sword,
waits for him, fully alert (toreador, en guard!) to misdirect the bull a few times and deliver
the final stab. Is Trump the torero or the bull?
All the Trump bashing just reinforces the Propaganda System's utter lack of credibility and imagination.
The underlying nature of numerous political websites is also exposed thanks to their shilling
for HRC--particularly those calling themselves Progressive: No Genuine Progressive would support
HRC, or Sanders now that he's exposed himself for what he is, a Chevrolet Liberal. The launching
of the self-proclaimed "Our Revolution" website/organization is yet another DNC-based sham that
studiously avoids any mention of the military or foreign policy on its "Issues" page, which again
belies its nature since the #1 issue for all Genuine Progressives is War and being against it.
Still have 10 weeks to go. Stein has earned all the votes within my household.
I'm not a big fan of Trump's but I find that people don't argue about his politics, but insult
him and his wife on a personal basis.
This makes me think that it's the turn of the 'Left' in the USA to become immature and resort
to name calling. Remember when it was the 'Right' that made fun of Kerry's Purple Heart?
Which also exposes the problem with politics worldwide - the Left and the Right have met at
the extremes and we now see progressives arguing for burkinis and the right arguing for workers'
rights by trying to prevent the TPP, etc.
It is called 'Psychological Projection' and seems to be successful for the good reason of being
widespread inherent in the population itself. To project one's own shortcomings, flaws and crimes
onto somebody else is as common, as it is based on the lack of real intelligence - no, not the
one that is derived from fancy questionnaires, or adding numbers.
Real intelligence includes the understanding that sitting in a glasshouse throwing rocks does
not qualify to be such. It also includes the understanding to be inseparable part of one's environment
- a shared environment indicating that there is only interdependence, not separation.
Furthermore, real intelligence includes compassion, kindness and the will to walk in somebody
else's shoes.
This intelligence is sorely missing in the majority of people that are entrusted with 'journalistic'
work, or working in public offices. The stench of being "holier that thou" is covering the U.S.A.
and wafts to Europe were it is now also modus operandi.
The best course of action would be to punish those who engage in this kind of demagoguery with
nonobservance.
It won't be Trump who brings us fascism as the images implies, but more likely Clinton if she
wins and if the Democrats can win over one of the Houses of Congress. As the campaign goes on,
these comparisons add up and create in the minds of anybody anti-Trump an actual equivalency to
in particular Hitler. This is one half of the combustion needed to go down the road to fascism.
There is something else that Trump given the Russian hysteria is being called--a traitor. The
thing is, Hillary supports believe this to be true in a criminal sense. It is not just some throw
away smear normal for any election. I have seen way too way postings in major democratic party
sites calls for basically the resurrection of the House Un-American Activities Committee. These
supporters are historically clueless on what they are asking for, and I would imagine the same
with much of the democratic party lawmakers in Congress.
I can see if Hillary wins, witch hunts against anti-war protesters, or people who believe we
should have rapprochement with Russia and China. The goal will be to criminalize and punish dissenting
views on foreign and war policies because the constant Putin/Trump/Hitler/Stalin/etc comparisons
created the foundation for actual criminal accusations.
And the witch hunts will spread beyond war and foreign policy. Look at what is going on in
Europe. Literally, and I do mean literally, every problem is being attributed to Putin "weaponizing"
some issue. Serious politicians accused Putin of using drunken Russian fans during the Euro futbol
championships of starting fights to support Brexit. The Polish minister for internal security
accused Putin of master minding the Paris terrorist attacks. And these guys get away with the
most outlandish accusations. As the real Nazis understood, repetition of lies is the foundation
of propaganda to move people into action.
The underlying nature of numerous political websites is also exposed thanks to their shilling
for HRC--particularly those calling themselves Progressive: No Genuine Progressive would support
HRC, or Sanders now that he's exposed himself for what he is, a Chevrolet Liberal.
Well the resident Zio-Racist Hill-shill (rufus magister | Aug 26, 2016 11:47:38 AM | 5) likes
to pretend he is some sort of progressive, but still can't keep from outing himself by banging
on non-stop about the Zio-Racists favourite talking points (Heil hillary and "holocaustholocaustholocaut!!")
She appeared to be an idiot when speaking extemporaneously. Clueless and incapable of expressing
empathy with mere mortals. If there are debates with 'The Donald' I would expect that Her Highness
will be reading a teleprompter. Her handlers do not allow her to speak off the cuff [.]
Very interesting because I have been discussing with colleagues here the Don should be honing
his debating skill sets as Hillary is a trained lawyer/politician.
Even if Hillary is elected, her mandate will be haunted by her email stupidity and the Clinton
foundation cupidity. She will be paralyzed and may not even finish her mandate. To avoid the looming
shame, I think she should work NOT to be elected, so she can leave the political scene with till
some dignity.
Regarding voting against one's own interests, the Republican majority leader of the senate
just said no
to TPP for the time being... Draw your own conclusions; I'm more bemused by the parallels
to eastern Europe under Soviet vs NATO occupation.
. . .Clinton's use of BleachBit undermines her claims that she only deleted innocuous "personal"
emails from her private server
"If she considered them to be personal, then she and her lawyers had those emails deleted.
They didn't just push the delete button, they had them deleted where even God can't read
them.
"They were using something called BleachBit You don't use BleachBit for yoga emails."
"When you're using BleachBit, it is something you really do not want the world to see."
Vitriol galore! If the arguments made above ... either way ... are the best we can do then
maybe electing Hillary and hoping for WW3 is the lessor of evils. As I've said before, not a bad
idea.
Posted by: From The Hague | Aug 26, 2016 2:22:04 PM | 34
"MoA-readers, who are left/progressive/intellectual/democratic/anti-Trump, are warmongering
idiots." No, the true idiocy is with those who still buy into this concocted left/right, liberal/conservative,
D/R scheme to oppress the masses. Divide and conquer at its very best. The Romans would cry tears
of joy how their principle is so successfully implemented - since over 200 years.
To be bold here: a 'left' mother loves her child as much as a 'right' mother and even more
so the grandparents. Any grandparent here that denies their grandchildren their love based on
the fact that their children cling on to a different belief? And that it is in its entirety -
made believe by the Plutocrats and the sheople throw shit at each other instead of UPWARDS
.
[Full Text Of Hillary Clinton's Speech On The Alt-Right ...]
Just yesterday, one of Britain's most prominent right-wing leaders, Nigel Farage, who stoked
anti-immigrant sentiments to win the referendum on leaving the European Union, campaigned with
Donald Trump in Mississippi. Farage has called for a ban on the children of legal immigrants from public schools and
health services, has said women are quote "worth less" than men, and supports scrapping laws
that prevent employers from discriminating based on race ― that's who Trump wants by his side.
The godfather of this global brand of extreme nationalism is Russian President Vladimir
Putin.
In fact, Farage has appeared regularly on Russian propaganda programs. Now he's standing
on the same stage as the Republican nominee.
During a campaign rally in Nevada, US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton spoke about the
dangers of right-wing forces in power, as well as about problems of racism. "Clinton noted that her rival Donald Trump supported the policies of Russian President Vladimir
Putin. As for relations with Russia, the views of Donald Trump come contrary to the views of all
American presidents, from "Truman to Reagan."
"He talks casually of abandoning our NATO allies, recognizing Russia's annexation of Crimea,
giving the Kremlin a free hand in eastern Europe. American presidents from Truman, to Reagan,
to Bush, to Clinton, to Obama have rejected the kind of approach Trump is taking on Russia. And
we should, too," Clinton said.
Hatred of Trump is nothing more than cloaked Jewish hatred of white Christians. Go ahead and take
my comment down, but you are too smart to not know the truth deep down in your heart. This above
all else, lie to yourself to protect the Jewish lies.
About the most successful 'breakaway political movement' ever was probably the Dixiecrats in the
1948 election which actually garnered a small fraction of the electoral college, but that was
using the apparatus of an organised national political party existent regionally. Outside the
two traditional parties, there is no effective national political party. ...Next time keep your idiot elections to yourselves - Please.
On August 5th, Michael Morell, a former acting Director of the CIA, pilloried GOP presidential
candidate Donald Trump, concluding that he was an "unwitting agent of Russia." Morell, who entitled
his New York Times op-ed "I Ran the CIA and now I'm endorsing Hillary Clinton," described the
process whereby Trump had been so corrupted. According to Morell, Putin, it seems, as a wily ex-career
intelligence officer, is "trained to identify vulnerabilities in an individual and to exploit
them. That is exactly what he did early in the primaries. Mr. Putin played upon Mr. Trump's vulnerabilities…
In the intelligence business, we would say that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting
agent of the Russian Federation."
So who is guilty of putting the interests of a foreign government ahead of those of the United
States? I know there are advocates for any number of foreign states running around loose in Washington
but the friends of Israel in government and the media come immediately to mind largely because
there are so many of them, they are very much in-your-face and they are both extremely well-funded
and very successful. Now deceased former Congressman Tom Lantos and Senator Frank Lautenberg were,
respectively, often referred to as the congressman and senator from Israel. And there are many
more: Chuck Schumer, Chuck Grassley, Ben Cardin, Bob Menendez, Tom Cotton, Mark Kirk, Nita Lowey,
Ted Deutch, Brad Sherman, Ileana-Ros Lehtinen and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz to name only a few
in the Congress. All are
major recipients of Israel related PAC money and all are reliable defenders of Israel no matter
what Benjamin Netanyahu does and no matter how it effects the United States.
And then there are the Clintons. One only has to go back to Bill's
one-sided pro-Israeli
diplomacy at Camp David in 2000 to discern how the game was played. And then there was the
widely condemned January 2001
last minute pardon of
Mossad agent Marc Rich, whose wife Denise was a major contributor to the Clintons, to realize
that there was always a deference to Israeli interests particularly when money was involved. The
only problem is that the Clintons, relying on Morell's formulation, might more reasonably be described
as witting agents of Israel rather than unwitting as they have certainly known what they have
been doing and have been actively supporting Israeli policies even when damaging to U.S. interests
since they first emerged from the primordial political swamps in Arkansas. If one were completely
cynical it might be possible to suggest that they understood from the beginning that pandering
to Israel and gaining access to Jewish power and money would be a major component in their rise
to political prominence. It certainly has worked out that way.
=====
So who is guilty of putting the interests of a foreign government ahead of those of the United
States? I know there are advocates for any number of foreign states running around loose in Washington
but the friends of Israel in government and the media come immediately to mind largely because
there are so many of them, they are very much in-your-face and they are both extremely well-funded
and very successful. Now deceased former Congressman Tom Lantos and Senator Frank Lautenberg were,
respectively, often referred to as the congressman and senator from Israel. And there are many
more: Chuck Schumer, Chuck Grassley, Ben Cardin, Bob Menendez, Tom Cotton, Mark Kirk, Nita Lowey,
Ted Deutch, Brad Sherman, Ileana-Ros Lehtinen and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz to name only a few
in the Congress. All are
major recipients of Israel related PAC money and all are reliable defenders of Israel no matter
what Benjamin Netanyahu does and no matter how it effects the United States.
And then there are the Clintons. One only has to go back to Bill's
one-sided pro-Israeli
diplomacy at Camp David in 2000 to discern how the game was played. And then there was the
widely condemned January 2001
last minute pardon of
Mossad agent Marc Rich, whose wife Denise was a major contributor to the Clintons, to realize
that there was always a deference to Israeli interests particularly when money was involved. The
only problem is that the Clintons, relying on Morell's formulation, might more reasonably be described
as witting agents of Israel rather than unwitting as they have certainly known what they have
been doing and have been actively supporting Israeli policies even when damaging to U.S. interests
since they first emerged from the primordial political swamps in Arkansas. If one were completely
cynical it might be possible to suggest that they understood from the beginning that pandering
to Israel and gaining access to Jewish power and money would be a major component in their rise
to political prominence. It certainly has worked out that way.
Tom @38: "Trump the racist Appealing to African-Americans was just a demented and sick desperate
joke. "
It is actually not stupid. First, raising his support among the Blacks from 1% to 2% may help.
More importantly, he has to work on the vote of educated whites, especially suburban female Republicans
where he lags.
However, a position that he is not racist is ... misguided, say. Through most of his life,
Trump simply donated to all elected politicians in areas where he was doing business, as it is
apparently necessary for every serious developer. But in recent years he became sort of Republican
activists, and his premiere issue was "birthism". A conspiracy theory alleging that Obama was
born abroad. Incidentally, Ted Cruz was born abroad, in Canada, of non-citizen father and American
citizen mother, and, surprise, surprise, he is perfectly eligible to run for President, but simple
legal arguments like that, not to mention actual documents from a hospital in Hawaii did not satisfy
the insane crowd. The only motivation that is non-insane is ugly: harping on "otherness" of mix-race
President with Muslim first name and African last name.
Or Trump harping that he would be more successful in foreign policy because he would be "more
respected" than a women or a Black boy.
Trump supports police brutality, down to gunning down unarmed poor folks (to err on the side
of caution) and death penalty, for innocently accused as it turned later. Somehow a white person
killing poor women and refrigerating the corpses does not lead to conniptions and full page newspaper
ads, unlike black youth accused of rape. This is really harking to good old time of lynch mobs.
LITERALLY.
And this: "Trump blamed financial difficulties partly on African American accountants.
"I've got black accountants at Trump Castle and at Trump Plaza - black guys counting my money!"
O'Donnell's book quoted Trump as saying. "I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my
money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day. Those are the kind of people I want counting
my money. Nobody else. . . . Besides that, I've got to tell you something else. I think that the
guy is lazy. And it's probably not his fault because laziness is a trait in blacks. It really
is; I believe that. It's not anything they can control."
As a long time observer of elections and history, it seems that this time both parties have figured
out the value of identity politics and are using that instead of any intelligent discussion of
issues to sway voters.
It's probably the total ownership of the media by the oligarchs that allows them to do this,
as it appears that no issues such as TPP or the wasteful MIC are ever discussed. Identity politics allows everything to be emotional and not rational, and it appears to be
working for anyone who does not have the time or volition to read with care.
Make no mistake: Hillary Clinton is on record as calling for funding of Islamist groups in Syria
and overthrowing Assad. If she is elected, we're very likely to see a full-scale US intervention,
with US forces openly and aggressively confronting not only Syrian government forces but also
facing off with the Russians.
Anyone calling for people to support Hilary Clinton, irrespective of whatever dishonest reasoning
they use to try and con people into thinking it is a good idea, is calling for more war, more
murder of brown-skinned middle eastern muslims and christians etc., and most importantly: more
profits for the US/Zionist Death Machine.
Make no mistake about that, these shitty Hillary-supporting people cannot claim that they do
not know what that that is what they are doing, because she has been quite vocal in her support
for more war and more murder (on behalf of Isreal naturally)
It may be that, despite his rethoric, and like Oboma before him, Trump will bring all those
things too, should he win, but we DO know for sure what Killary intends, because we have already
seen her handywork, and she has promised more of the same
There's Hillary, whose delusion is that she has any political game. Certainly not enough to
get elected President, even against a reality TV host. Then there's Donald, whose delusion is
that he actually _is_ the person he plays on TV.
In the midst of the insanity is Jill. JIILLLLLLL people!
OT, but did Bill marry Hill as a firewall against any possibility he might act on his more
than occasional human/humane instincts? She certainly would have none of that, he must've known.
NOTHING must stand in the way of ambition.
What Hillary ought to do is very simple: Resign (or whatever verb works for this
presidential nominee situation), Apologize to all the voters who chose her. Explain that she would
probably be impeached and would be essentially neutered. She should then tell the public that Bernie Sanders would do the best for all the people of
this nation.
"What Hillary ought to do is very simple: Resign" I don't think she can, she's just a puppet, and her handlers would never let that happen. Her
only chance is with her body finally giving in overwhelmed with guilt, stress, medication, her
only way out...
Look what they did to Reagan and the pope JP2 - GHWB failed with his assassins, but after the
attempts, both these puppets were basically doing what told, with only little freedom left to
do some good things (served well for maintaining appearances).
Which brings again that question to my mind - why did they let Hinckley the patsy out recently,
what's he's being set up for..?
Oooo! Shillary! Such refined thinking. Face it, the US has always been corrupt. "The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding
Industry" reviewed here:
http://www.chicagoreviewpress.com/american-slave-coast--the-products-9781613748206.php says it all. Thomas Jefferson, a hero? What about George Washington, the land owner? Trump and Clinton are only unusual in that most Duhmericans have finally no choice but to admit
they are venal. Stein, who could NEVER win, seems honorable. Johnson may be a wacked out libertarian, but he
is a well meaning wacko.
Great choices for the great democracy, light of the world, exceptional nation!
I agree, Duhmerican politics are stupid ... the dumbest people in the world make it so. Then
again, is any place humans habitate NOT idiotically insane stupid?
"Trump's economic policies as U.S. president would be catastrophic for those most likely to vote
for him."
If the US is to cease being an empire, the average American is going to go through hard times
for a bit. If the US continues as a declining empire, the average American citizen will go through
hard times plus another lot of harder times when the declining empire crashes and burns.
Peter at 68: No, that's conventional economic thinking. Americans or any people will have good
economic times if the government stimulates the economy in ways that grow high-paying jobs, restructures
economic power toward workers, and massively redistributes income to the middle and working classes.
Empire or no Empire.
...
"Vladimir Putin is the grand-godfather of this global brand of extreme nationalism.", Hillary
Clinton said, (while standing in front of a gigantic American Flag, without a trace of Irony detectable
in her voice).
Posted by: Shillary | Aug 26, 2016 5:22:34 PM | 50
Yep. Dangerously stupid.
Superficial and self-absorbed Hollywoodishness; the polar opposite of self-aware.
The Godfather image is a popular one these days. The Godmother use it to deflect attention
from her own role as cackling harridan, wailing banshee of DDD&D ... others note that
"Godfather"
Biden visits Turkey
The foreign policy of the American ruling class, in addition to the impoverishment of American
society to fund the vast military apparatus, has had the most horrifying consequences for the
peoples of the countries targeted. The war fomented by the United States in Syria has reduced
the population of that country from 23 million to about 17 million, killed up to half a million
people, and displaced over 13 million.
Thirteen years after the invasion of Iraq, which resulted in the deaths of at least a million
people, some 4.4 million Iraqis are internally displaced, with over a quarter million forced
to flee the country.
Questions of foreign policy are not decided, much less deliberated, within the framework
of elections. Nowhere in the 2016 presidential race is there a serious debate, for instance,
on the character of the US alliance with Turkey or the consequences of launching a de facto
NATO invasion of Syria. Congress holds no hearings or votes. It neither seeks nor desires to
play a serious role.
As for the people, they simply have no say.
The press plays a key role in the deception and disenfranchisement of the population. One
tactic employed by the corporate-controlled media is simply to exclude "minor" developments
such as a US-backed invasion of Syria from the so-called "news." The most remarkable feature
of the media coverage to date of the Turkish incursion is its virtual non-existence. It is
a good bet, due to the media's corrupt silence, that the percentage of the US population that
is even aware of the invasion is in the single digits.
You forgot to add: "anyone who willfully votes for either Red Donald or Blue Hillary is a moral
leper, ...one who will still have to cough up a $4.5 TRILLION King's Ransom on April 15th for
Mil.Gov.Fed metastasizing Technocracy, regardless, and still have to pay $650 BILLION a year of
that YUUGE ransom in interest-only debt (sic) tithes to The Chosen."
Shillary @50 -- Hillary Clinton is completely devoid of any sense of irony or humour. She's a complete
emotional and, I would add, intellectual dud. She seems to be a good lawyer, though --- in the US
lawyers as far as the eye can see.
Shillary @50 -- Hillary Clinton is completely devoid of any sense of irony or humour. She's a
complete emotional and, I would add, intellectual dud. She seems to be a good lawyer, though ---
in the US lawyers as far as the eye can see.
OT
GENEVA - The United States and Russia say they have resolved a number of issues standing in the
way of restoring a nationwide truce to Syria and opening up aid deliveries, but were unable once
again to forge a comprehensive agreement on stepping up cooperation to end the brutal war that
has killed hundreds of thousands.
After meeting off-and-on for nearly 10 hours in Geneva on Friday, U.S. Secretary of State John
Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov could point to only incremental progress in filling
in details of a broad understanding to boost joint efforts that was reached last month in Moscow.
Their failure to reach an overall deal highlighted the increasingly complex situation on the
ground in Syria - including new Russian-backed Syrian government attacks on opposition forces,
the intermingling of some of those opposition forces with an al-Qaida affiliate not covered by
the truce and the surrender of a rebel-held suburb of Damascus - as well as deep divisions and
mistrust dividing Washington and Moscow.
The complexities have also grown with the increasing internationalization of what has largely
become a proxy war between regional and world powers, highlighted by a move by Turkish troops
across the Syrian border against Islamic State fighters this week.
Kerry said he and Lavrov had agreed on the "vast majority" of technical discussions on steps
to reinstate a cease-fire and improve humanitarian access. But critical sticking points remain
unresolved and experts will remain in Geneva with an eye toward finalizing those in the coming
days, he said.
```
Lavrov echoed that, saying "we still need to finalize a few issues" and pointed to the need to
separate fighters from the al-Nusra Front, which has ties to al-Qaida, from U.S.-backed fighters
who hold parts of northwest Syria.
"We have continued our efforts to reduce the areas where we lack understanding and trust, which
is an achievement," Lavrov said. "The mutual trust is growing with every meeting."
Yet, it was clear that neither side believes an overall agreement is imminent or even achievable
after numerous previous disappointments shattered a brief period of relative calm earlier this
year.
The inability to wrest an agreement between Russia and the U.S. - as the major sponsors of
the opposing sides in the stalled Syria peace talks - all but spells another missed deadline for
the U.N. Syria envoy to get the Syrian government and "moderate" opposition back to the table.
```
In a nod to previous failed attempts to resurrect the cessation of hostilities, Kerry stressed
the importance of keeping the details secret.
```
And, underscoring deep differences over developments on the ground, Kerry noted that Russia disputes
the U.S. "narrative" of recent attacks on heavily populated areas being conducted by Syrian forces,
Russia itself and the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia. Russia maintains the attacks it has been
involved in have targeted legitimate terrorist targets, while the U.S. says they have hit moderate
opposition forces.
~~~
At the same time, the Obama administration is not of one mind regarding the Russians. The Pentagon
has publicly complained about getting drawn into greater cooperation with Russia even though it
has been forced recently to expand communication with Moscow. Last week, the U.S. had to call
for Russian help when Syrian warplanes struck an area not far from where U.S. troops were operating.
U.S. officials say it is imperative that Russia use its influence with Syrian President Bashar
Assad to halt all attacks on moderate opposition forces, open humanitarian aid corridors, and
concentrate any offensive action on the Islamic State group and other extremists not covered by
what has become a largely ignored truce.
For their part, U.S. officials say they are willing to press rebels groups they support harder
on separating themselves from the Islamic State and al-Nusra, which despite a recent name change
is still viewed as al-Qaida's affiliate in Syria.
Those goals are not new, but recent developments have made achieving them even more urgent
and important, according to U.S. officials. Recent developments include military operations around
the city of Aleppo, the entry of Turkey into the ground war, Turkish hostility toward U.S.-backed
Kurdish rebel groups and the presence of American military advisers in widening conflict zones.
Meanwhile, in a blow to the opposition, rebel forces and civilians in the besieged Damascus
suburb of Daraya were to be evacuated on Friday after agreeing to surrender the town late Thursday
after four years of grueling bombardment and a crippling siege that left the sprawling area in
ruins.
The surrender of Daraya, which became an early symbol of the nascent uprising against Assad,
marks a success for his government, removing a persistent threat only a few miles from his seat
of power.
Returning to protectionism and fair trade will lift all American boats,not just the Wall Street
Zionists,so I am perplexed at b's comment.
America,despite glowing MSM BS,is on the ropes of neoliberalism.As an older American,I remember
a land of plenty,with good jobs for all,instead of fast food retail hell.I don't think b has any
idea of the realities being endured by US,as the media refuses to give US reality,instead rosy
economic garbage where not once in Obombas terrible reign have they created enough jobs to keep
up with the expanding population,and as DT says,the inner cities are hellholes,witness the NBA
star Dwayne Wades cousin shot in Chicago pushing a baby stroller.
I had a nurse from Hempstead NY,when i had the big C,who said an old man in a wheelchair had a
pit bull tied to it to ward off potential crooks.WTF?
And now the antisemitism card is played by the serial liars,Bannon is accused of calling Jews
whiny.Well,as a longtime observer,he is spot on there.
And the lying times says 90% chance for Hell bitch victory.
Will saying it so often make it so?Nah.
What is unbelievable is the fact that she corruptly stole the primary with the help of the DNC
and the ziomedia,but no one cares.(her supporters)If not emblematic of the depravity of liberals,those
who wish the death of others so they live in safety(which of course is poppycock)what is?
And when Trump gets her in the debates,he'll destroy the MSM narrative of BS.
Part 1. ;) Got dragged into Killary's alt-right speech at Truckee Meadows Community College, Reno,
Nevada, Aug 2016. Only content: 100% against Trump , as sidebars, Alex Jones, Nigel Farage,
Putin, David Duke.
The official MSM version is 31 mins - the frame is just her with a fixed cam centered nothing
around. Sparse occasional clapping (real, one can see the clappers in other vids).. She speaks
as one would to a parterre of 30-50 ppl, not as in a campaign rally. A longer version (MSM) is
45 mins and shows some of the preliminaries, some guy, then the Mayor of Reno, youngish blondine,
introducing her. Killary was apparently hours late. (> youtube.) Killary is dressed in green.
To the interesting part. She spoke at the same College in Feb. 2015. Note: red dress, the brick
pillars typical of the college, and the big windows behind. A big hall…
The event has all the hallmarks of a 'proper' pol show, no need to list. Note the Hall, quite
large, is not full. The signs are blue and are for Hillary, for Women, for Nevada and so on.
Posted by: okie farmer | Aug 27, 2016 8:23:27 AM | 80
Re: Geneva negotiations...
Love the goto clause:
"In a nod to previous failed attempts to resurrect the cessation of hostilities, Kerry stressed
the importance of keeping the details secret."
Yeah, keeping the details secret so that next time the Yankees backstab Russia, observers won't
immediately realise that they were, in fact, just shooting themselves in the foot. Again.
Part 2. The Aug. 2016 event took place at the College but either in a small part of the back of
the big hall or another locale (similar in architecture obviously)
Bizzaro event. Minuscule, there is almost nobody there. It was deliberatly set up in 'small
space' for the cams. The only other important ppl present are one man (Head of the college or?
idk) and the Mayor of Reno. The only signs shown say *USA* are not appropriate and are whipped
out only when Killary comes onstage. Doesn't even look like a Democrat event! Never mind an important
campaign rally for *drum rolls* the person anointed to become Prez. of the most powerful country
on Earth, the World Queen or Hegemon.
After the speech, vids show H.C. talking to a very few ppl, 25 at most, not answering "reporters"
questions, two tiny trays of confections were offered. Bwwahhh. She ate one choc. There was also
a stop at a Reno Coffee shop (10 ppl?) which made no sense. On these occasions she is accompanied
by the Mayor in a cosy girly coffee thingie. (> youtube.)
The US is fracturing...Moreover the speech was perhaps the weakest from any pol I have ever
heard.
Wait a minute! They ID'd the hacker and it's a business in Israel? And it forced Apple to an
emergency software upgrade. But I thought all the evil hackers were Russians working for the government.
There is one villain Trump has not been compared to: Hillary Clinton.
And don't be the kettle calling the pot black, whoever the author of this ill-researched piece
is. Your own journalism strikes me as irresponsible when you claim, "Trump's economic policies
as U.S. president would be catastrophic for those most likely to vote for him." Catastrophic?
Really? Who exactly is "most likely to vote for him" that would not benefit from better trade
deals and more corporate incentives for domestic business? The global elite? They're the ones
who definitely won't benefit, but they also definitely won't vote for him. Get your thinking straight.
For clear light on the positive relationship between a Trump presidency and the US economy,
David Stockman offers wisdom. Take a look from time to time at his website to educate yourself:
okie farmer@80 Lavrov is on a loser if he accepts this "moderate terrorist" BS from Kerry. Those
"moderates" have replaced Islamic state in Jerablus, soon to be expanded to cover that huge area
between Jerablus, Azaz and Al-bab,all without a fight and apparent agreement with IS. Next could
be the area is controlled by Turkish and US "moderate" head choppers, which of course nobody will
be allowed to attack. They should only be called moderate if they oppose Assad and do not carry
arms, otherwise its just a case of changing labels, in which case the terrorists could never lose.
I find it hard to believe that so soon after the so called normalization of ties and trade deals
between Russia and Turkey, Turkey could do what they have threatened to do for years, invade Syria
and set up prospective no fly zones. I suppose we must wait and see, but in my opinion, it does
not look good.
@88, curtis, 'But I thought all the evil hackers were Russians working for the government'
Maybe they are ... Russian emigre hackers working for the Israeli government?
@92 hl,
I agree. Russia has been stabbed in the back by Turkey, and the US is backing Turkey ... of
course they were backing the Kurds, too, until they weren't.
Erdogan is utterly unreliable ... or he is utterly reliable if you're relying on duplicity
and betrayal.
Now it is time for people to start saying Roberts is a shill for Trump. If you've read what
he has written about Trump, he's highly critical. His point is simple: Do you support those who
are so blatantly against Trump? Or, put the other way around, are you in favor of continued oligarchic
rule.
Like Roberts, I am so opposed to Clinton that Trump seems (even ever so slightly) the lessor
of evils.
1 "Donald Trump is worse than Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad"
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/donald-trump/12182955/Donald-Trump-is-worse-than-Irans-Mahmoud-Ahmadinejad.html
2 "Donald Trump Is America's Gift To Bin Laden"
www.huffpost.com/us/entry/10445156
Gesine Hammerling@89 - "...What would happen if Trump won the majority of the members of the
Electoral College but they voted for Clinton?..."
The Electoral College vote is absolute - the candidate that gets 270 of the 538 votes wins,
so Clinton would be elected. If neither candidate gets that many, then an immediate vote by the
House of Representatives decides. The popular vote that takes place at the same time is utterly
meaningless other than to chose one of two bribe-funneling political parties who, in turn, chose
their typically party-loyal electors. There's a bit more to it than that, but that sums it up.
And, yes, the state political parties could chose electors who would jump ship and vote for the
other party. That will be the way they will ensure Clinton is elected in November regardless of
who the little people think they're voting for. Anyone who is familiar with the process knows
this will happen, including the Republican Party. Trump obviously knows the fix is in.
The paradox comes about because the political parties at the state level have slowly taken
over the process of choosing who goes to the electoral college. The founders' original intent
was to have (presumably) the best and the brightest citizens representing each state, making an
informed decision that would produce the 'best' choice. There were no political parties to speak
of when the Constitution was penned. In fact, the founders were rather suspicious of them in general
but did not go so far as to prohibit them (to our eventual ruin). They never intended the rigged,
two-party freak show popularity contest masquerading as an election that we have today.
For a bit more nuance in the choice of state electors, their vote pledge and 'jumping ship' (if
it's allowed by law in that state, see
faithless electors
.
I check the CPI every now and then looking for the US to drop. The Corruption Perception Index
depends on the perception which can be molded by the media. But as more people wake up, I expect
the US ranking to drop. Our 2015 ranking is 16 (behind countries in north-east Europe and Canada
and New Zealand). http://www.transparency.org/cpi2015
russia sees this bs crap about 'moderate' for what it is... just another shell game to play
hide and seek, switch flags, etc, etc... until the 'moderate' opposition drop their military arms,
it ain't 'moderate'... would 'moderate' opposition to the usa leadership be allowed to use weapons?
that's the answer to that bs...
as for turkey, clearly the apk has a 'get rid of the kurds' agenda.. works well in their alliance
with isis up to a point.. as for turkish/usa alliance and a no fly zone - if russia goes along
with this, they better get a hell of a trade off out of it.. i can't see it, although i see the
usa continuing on in their support of saudi arabia etc, using their mercenary isis army and saudi
arabia to continue to funnel arms sales and weaponry... it is what they do best, bullshite artists
that they are...
"... Bill & Hillary: So This is That Thing Called Love ..."
"... video of Bill Clinton clearly shows Kaposi Sarcoma on the forehead and inside the left eyelid. ..."
"... There is a long list of adverse neurological after-effects of coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) surgery, some of them short term and others that are long term. Surgeons who deal with these issues refer to the long term and permanent loss of cognitive function as "pump head", so named because the patient was kept alive by a heart-lung machine during surgery. ..."
"... It's very likely that Bill Clinton has been dealing with a form of "pump head" since he underwent bypass surgery in February 2010. ..."
"... Absolutely looks like HIV to me. I have seen it, believe me, working in a hospital as a PA for over 20 years. ..."
"... To be honest..I had thought that maybe Bill Clinton was HIV positive back a year ago or so. I managed to see him on TV and was shocked at how totally wasted away he looked. Just my 2 cents though. ..."
"... If he has HIV it should be known to many sex partners as he has had. ..."
In their new
book, Bill & Hillary: So This is That Thing Called Love, the authors interview Clinton
insiders who claim that Bill slept with so many women that Hillary Clinton has repeatedly forced
him to get an HIV test from the doctor. This is because the former President "favored unprotected
sex."
And while the first tests came back negative, HIV and AIDS might explain an ongoing mystery.
Over the years, both Clintons have kept their medical records a secret. Clinton has explained his
rapidly changing appearance to his heart surgery and "new diet" but he has looked increasingly thin
and weak at Hillary campaign rallies.
As Rush Limbaugh opined, looking at Bill Clinton on the campaign trail, Rush only sees Preparation
H, Geritol, Fixodent, and Depends. Bill Clinton looks like his health is on a rapid recline.
The Dec 6 2013 video of Bill Clinton clearly shows Kaposi Sarcoma on the forehead and inside
the left eyelid. Hillary's neurological problems are probably from:
PRIMARY CENTRAL NERVOUS SYSTEM (CNS) LYMPHOMA
Your central nervous system consists of your brain, spinal cord, and spinal nerves. This
system controls all the workings of your body. HIV can infect and damage parts of it.
Primary CNS lymphoma is a type of cancer that typically occurs in people with CD4 counts
less than 50 cells/mm3. This type of cancer affects the lymph system in your brain and spinal
cord. Symptoms of this type of cancer can include:
Headache
Memory loss
Confusion
Other neurological changes
(Other conditions may cause the same symptoms. Consult your healthcare provider if you have
any of these symptoms.)
Diagnosis includes many of the same types of tests as those for Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma-but
because CNS lymphoma affects the brain directly, your healthcare provider may want to do a
brain biopsy as well. Radiation therapy is the most common treatment for AIDS-related CNS lymphoma.
For more information, see the National Cancer Institute's General Information About Primary
CNS Lymphoma.
Pierce, June 16, 2016 at 1:03 am
this is a stupid article, first of all HIV doesn't cause neurological signs unless you have
crytococcous neoformans, PML, HIV dementia which will only happen if he is not taking medications
which as a doctor i'm 100 percent sure,
NEXT people forgot that BILL CLINTON had a CABG(cornary artery bypass procedure) this procedure
which has a side effect of NEUROTOXICITY. Even though he might of had side effects from this procedure
his IQ is not affected.
DONT LISTEN TO THIS GARBAGE ARTICLE
Gunnar, July 2, 2016 at 7:04 pm
Your response sounds emotional, Pierce. There is a long list of adverse neurological after-effects
of coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) surgery, some of them short term and others that are
long term. Surgeons who deal with these issues refer to the long term and permanent loss of cognitive
function as "pump head", so named because the patient was kept alive by a heart-lung machine during
surgery.
It's very likely that Bill Clinton has been dealing with a form of "pump head" since he
underwent bypass surgery in February 2010.
Laura, May 17, 2016 at 4:42 pm
Absolutely looks like HIV to me. I have seen it, believe me, working in a hospital as a PA for
over 20 years. This is what happens to humans when they live a degenerative lifestyle. Not everyone
gets HIV but something else gets them. You can't fool Mother Nature. She will get you in the end.
Robert says: February 25, 2016 at 9:59 pm
To be honest..I had thought that maybe Bill Clinton was HIV positive back a year ago or so. I
managed to see him on TV and was shocked at how totally wasted away he looked. Just my 2 cents
though. I wouldn't wish that disease on any body.
Debbie says: February 25, 2016 at 5:23 pm
If he has HIV it should be known to many sex partners as he has had. How many are at risk? Even
Hillary may be at risk..Is that where her cough has come from ???? Does she have it? Is thatwhat
Obama has had on them?
In this gif the thumb of his right hand has a lot going on independently of the rest of his
fingers. Take a look at his left hand, and you will see the less noticeable tremor in his index
and middle fingers.
Clinton has a reasonably competitive opponent who has challenged her on her
record of Wall Street support, her dismissal
of the Glass-Steagall Act and her
vote for war in Iraq. She should also be challenged vigorously on her role
with the DLC.
Circumstances have created a unique moment where Clinton has to answer these
tough questions.
POLITICO) Donald Trump dug deeper into the archives Friday to point out Hillary Clinton's
complicated history of racially divisive politics, including her infamous "super-predators"
comment from the 1990s.
"The Clinton's are the real predators…" Trump wrote in a tweet
linking to an Instagram video.
The video begins with Hillary Clinton in 1996, defending her husband's controversial crime
bill, which has long been criticized for its impact on minority communities with respect to
mass incarceration.
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2016/08/trump-clintons-are-the-real-predators/#hCaMDGFQDlFMqhZS.99
"... her way of life has marinated for a long time now in the culture of wealth, influence, and power - and a way of thinking engrained deeply in our political ethos, one in which one's own power in democracy is more important than democracy itself. ..."
...She is, after all, a favorite of the giant banks, the CEOs and hedge funds she now was castigating.
Between 2009 and 2014, Clinton's list of top 20 donors starts out with Citigroup and includes JPMorgan
Chase, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, whose chief Lloyd Blankfein has
invested in Clinton's son-in-law's boutique hedge
fund. These donors are, as the website Truthout's
William Rivers Pitt notes, "the ones who gamed the
system by buying politicians like her and then proceeded to burn the economy down to dust and ash
while making a financial killing in the process."
They're also among the deep-pocket outfits that paid
for speeches and appearances by Hillary or Bill Clinton to the tune of more than $125 million
since they left the White House in 2001. It could hardly escape some in that crowd on Roosevelt Island,
catching a glimpse of the towers of power and might across the river: Can we really expect someone
so deeply tethered to the financial and business class – who moves so often and so easily among its
swells – to fight hard to check their predatory appetites, dismantle their control of Congress, and
stand up for the working people who are their prey?
Consider the two Canadian banks with financial
ties to the Keystone XL pipeline that fully or partially paid for eight speeches by Hillary Clinton.
Or her $3.2 million in lecture fees from the tech
sector. Or the
more than $2.5 million in paid speeches for companies and groups lobbying for fast-track trade.
According to TIME magazine and the Center for
Responsive Politics, in 2014, "Almost half of the money from Hillary Clinton's speaking engagements
came from corporations and advocacy groups that were lobbying Congress at the same time… In all,
the corporations and trade groups that Clinton spoke to in 2014 spent $72.5 million lobbying Congress
that same year."
Then look at
David Sirota's recent reporting for the International Business Times, especially the
revelation that while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, her department "approved $165 billion
worth of commercial arms sales to 20 nations whose governments have given money to the Clinton Foundation,
according to an IBTimes analysis of State Department and foundation data… nearly double
the value of American arms sales made to the those countries and approved by the State Department
during the same period of President George W. Bush's second term."
Those nations include Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Algeria, the United Arab Emirates, Oman and Qatar,
each of which "gained State Department clearance to buy caches of American-made weapons even as the
department singled them out for a range of alleged ills, from corruption to restrictions on civil
liberties to violent crackdowns against political opponents."
Further, American defense contractors like Boeing and Lockheed who sold those arms and their delivery
systems also shelled out heavily to the $2 billion Clinton
Foundation and the Clinton family. According to Sirota, "In all, governments and corporations
involved in the arms deals approved by Clinton's State Department have delivered between $54 million
and $141 million to the Clinton Foundation as well as hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments
to the Clinton family, according to foundation and State Department records. The Clinton Foundation
publishes only a rough range of individual contributors' donations, making a more precise accounting
impossible."
The Washington Postreports that among the approximately 200,000 contributors there have
also been donations from many other countries and corporations, overseas and domestic business leaders,
the odious Blackwater Training Center, and even Rupert Murdoch of celebrity phone hacking fame.
Meredith McGehee, policy director of the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, told David Sirota:
"The word was out to these groups that one of the best ways to gain access and influence with the
Clintons was to give to this foundation."
We pause here to note: All of these donations were apparently legal, and as others have written,
at least we know who was doling out the cash, in contrast to those anonymous sources secretly channeling
millions in "dark money" to the chosen candidates of the super rich.
... ... ..
We see "exactly Washington's problem" in how, during the 1990s, Bill Clinton became the willing
agent of Wall Street's push to deregulate, a collaboration that enriched the bankers but eventually
cost millions of Americans their homes, jobs, and pensions.
Thanks to documents that came to light last year
(one even has a handwritten note attached that reads: "Please eat this paper after you have read
this."), we understand more clearly how a small coterie of insiders maneuvered to get President Clinton
to support repeal of the New Deal-era Glass-Steagall Act that had long protected depositors from
being victimized by bank speculators gambling with their savings. Repeal led to a wave of Wall Street
mergers.
As you can read in stories by Dan Roberts in
The Guardianand
Pam and Russ Martens online, the ringleader of the effort was Secretary of the Treasury Robert
Rubin, who breathlessly persuaded the president to sign the repeal and soon left office to join Citigroup,
the bank that turned out to be the primary beneficiary of the deal. When it overreached and collapsed,
Citigroup received the largest taxpayer bailout in the history of U.S. finance. Rubin, meanwhile,
earned $126 million from the bank over ten years.
According to
The New York Times, Rubin "remains a crucial kingmaker in Democratic policy circles" and,
as an adviser to the Clintons, "will play an essential role in Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign
for president…"
Hillary Clinton, as a young Methodist growing up in Park Ridge, Illinois, was weaned on the social
ethics of John Wesley, a founder of Methodism and a courageous champion of the poor and needy; we
have her word for it and the witness of others. "Do all the good you can," the Methodist saying goes,
"in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever
you can."
But over time, Hillary Clinton achieved superstar status among Washington's acculturated class
– that swollen colony of permanent denizens of our capital who may have come from the hinterlands
but can hardly resist the seductive ways of a new and different culture in which the prevailing mindset
is: It's important to do good but more important to do well.
Lawrence Lessig believes she is an unlikely reformer – "which is precisely why she might be a
particularly effective one." But her way of life has marinated for a long time now in the culture
of wealth, influence, and power - and a way of thinking engrained deeply in our political ethos,
one in which one's own power in democracy is more important than democracy itself.
... ... ...
Sep_Arch • 9 months ago
The Clinton foundation is basically a money-laundering operation for an influence-peddling scam.
When Hillary is President, just as when she was Senator and Secretary of State, she will base
her decisions mostly on what will put more money into her family's pockets. After all, they are
hobnobbing with billionaires now. She will tell herself she is "pro-business" and being "realistic"
as she guts the middle class and puts all of her power behind the TPP, big corporations, and Wall
Street. And too many liberals will remain deaf, dumb and blind....
Guest Reader • a year ago
I will not be supporting Clinton either because of the financial interests behind her. Also because
of the record of the Democrats on many issues over the years, a group she has been deeply with
... so this is not entirely about Clinton herself, but even Obama, you could say, since the two
were fairly similar policy-wise, and now we've had eight years of this already.
I don't want more of the same. Plus, her campaign is based on this mythology that the country
is doing so much better, economically, and nothing could be further from the truth. This mythology
being pushed, because she running for office following a Democrat's administration, and one in
which she has been part of.
Again, to me, this is about domestic economics. I am deeply disappointed and exhausted by the
health care dispute. We should have an improved expanded Medicare for all, and, with dental and
vision, like any other developed nation.
We should NOT be going into more of these so-called "free" trade agreements. They are destroying
the standard of living for Americans, hitting people at the bottom the hardest.
vallehombre • a year ago
The current system allows a range of only two possibilities in electoral choices - between the
far right and the farther right.
HRC is channeling Goldwater via PNAC and then some while Sanders is Eisenhower light at best,
trying to catch some Huey Long soundbites on the way by. Yet we are supposed to act as if any
of this is news.
The allowed candidates are products of the state of our disappearing Republic and citizens
have been so effectively conditioned to accept our situation that we stumble to our destruction
as meekly compliant as the folks of an earlier generation shuiffled weeping into gas chambers.
There is no perspective presented here or anywhere other than that of our self identified elites
for the simple reason it has become the sole ethos of our existence. To fault a single person,
HRC in this case, for promoting arms sales and profiting personally from them ignores the structure
of the entire system, the anticipated "benefits" almost every citizens has come to expect as a
natural right (if not divinely ordained) and a "good life" that in real terms resembles little
more than a long, drawn out narcissistic display of communal suicide.
If it is true people create the government they deserve, or maybe accept, then the choice between
the far right and the farther right more accurately reflect the state of our nation than we care
or dare to admit.
oneski > vallehombre • a year ago
... and a "good life" that in real terms resembles little more than a long, drawn out narcissistic
display of communal suicide.
Quite the diagnosis! And there's the added bonus of enriching the lives of others whilst attempting
to postpone the inevitable.
The Swiss own one of the world's largest food companies and the world's largest elevator company.
It's a safe bet both their customers are easy to identify.
falken751 • a year ago
This is what is coming in this country politicians, better get ready for it, especially Clinton
and her Republican buddies. We don't need or want and millionaire politicians like her and her
husband.
"A massive and growing anti-austerity movement will take to the streets of London on Saturday,
June 20, with demonstrators demanding "an alternative to austerity and to policies that only benefit
those at the top."
Tens of thousands are expected to march from the Bank of England to Parliament Square on Saturday,
protesting the conservative government's "nasty, destructive cuts to the things ordinary people
care about-the [National Health Service], the welfare state, education and public services."
Organized by The People's Assembly-a politically unaffiliated national campaign against austerity-the
demonstration comes in the wake of UK elections in early May that saw the Conservative (Tory)
Party seizing the majority of Parliamentary seats and Prime Minister David Cameron sweeping back
to power."
Get ready politicians, and watch your backs.
Bassy Kims of Yesteryear • a year ago
The utter sellout of the Democratic Party over these last decades is entirely responsible for
the harrowing slide of the USA to the Right. The Republican flavor of bacon isn't even worth mentioning,
as those meatpuppets sold their souls many decades ago.
The rape of the poor and the middle class, the Neocon wars, the offshoring... all the worst
things in this nation stem directly from our betrayal by the Democratic Party. The upcoming passage
of the TPP, blacked out all across the MSM and across most of the alternative media, is proof
positive of this.
The sellout of the Democratic Party, and how we must respond to that sellout, must be the root
of any article on our oppression, and any article on how to respond to our national rape. Step
One is raising the consciousness of the DNC's rubes. They must understand their betrayal in order
to rise above it, and to consider alternatives such as Jill Stein, alternatives such as work stoppages
and demonstrations. Otherwise, there is no hope for America - none at all.
Fool_me_twice_shame_on_ME • a year ago
All this is blatantly obvious and yet there are still so many Americans who remain clueless and
believe she has their interests at heart because they are gullible enough to believe her incredibly
empty campaign rhetoric. Well, there's the willful ignorance, coupled with the unbelievable shallowness
of basing her single qualification for the Oval Office on the type of genitalia she has, or on
name recognition alone, or the very telling amount of favoritism she gets in the CORPORATE media
and their need to vote for "the winning candidate," regardless of values and priorities. If a
voter wants genuine effort and concern in championing middle class causes, there is Bernie Sanders.
His voting record and history go back 30 years and it didn't just get completely revamped by focus
groups for the up-coming election. Simple logic should alert voters to Hillary, Inc.'s loyalties.
Why is it that in spite of all of Hillary's new-found list of concerns in her "populist" rhetoric
(which seem to only come about after Bernie Sanders speaks to them) her long list of Wall Street
campaign financiers still choose her as their favorite choice in the election? Could it be she
is only saying these things to pander for votes, with no intention of keeping any promises after
the election (just like Obama did)? To the corporate funders of her campaign it's just the cost
of doing business. They spend a few million on her and get billions back when she wins the White
House. It's a great return on investment, but just like Obama, the voters will always come a distant
second to Wall Street demands. This is NOT how you fix things in Washington. This is how you guarantee
"business as usual."
Avatar Ken • a year ago
"Can she really stand above the cesspool that is Washington - filled not with criminals but with
decent people inside a corrupted system trying to do what they think is good"
What a fcuking load of shite! They´re predominantly a load of rapacious, venal sociopaths who
should be in one of the prisions they love to build to house the poor. And Killary´s at the top
of the heap.
Popillius > pgathome1 • a year ago
I have no illusions about HRC - I loathe some of her positions. As for you boyz who fell for BHO
(in spite of his neoliberalism being on full display) - you haven't learned a thing. You are going
to honestly swallow that somebody heard that somebody heard from somebody in their "inner circle"
that Bill Clinton said that about his wife? What evidence do you have that is true? Do you not
see the mountains of ratfucking garbage out there about the Clintons? Their policies aside - which
can absolutely be loathesome - you are going to go online and breathlessly assert that you heard
someone heard that someone close to the Clintons said that? No wonder you fell for BHO so hard.
Sarah Jackson • a year ago
Democrats are in a lying frenzy, just as much so as the other faithful party. Moyers doesn't really
have anything left to say of any value unless it too is a lie of sorts. As an example, he revises
the obliteration of New Deal regulation by implying the President was mislead into doing so. No,
that's not what happened. And we don't have a Democracy. But when we don't live in a Democracy,
it is the news media's role to produce something less than honest. We're supposed to forget Sirota
was a part of AIPAC, and Moyers was part of an administration that served corporations dedicated
to genocide.
"Since I follow this year's presidential primaries very closely, I have
recently noticed the same physical characteristics of AIDS patients being
exhibited by Bill Clinton's appearance and persona. At first, anyone may
think he is getting up in age and the deteriorating features are natural.
However, on further examination, one has to conclude Bill Clinton is a very
ill man suffering from advanced stages of AIDS.
Like Charlie Sheen, Bill Clinton has lived a sexually promiscuous lifestyle
and has contracted AIDS. Hillary Clinton is doing everything she can to keep
it quiet. It is very apparent at almost all Hillary Clinton campaign rallies
and speeches where Bill is in attendance that he is a very sick man."
In Darwin Porter and Danforth Prince's new book, Bill & Hillary: So This is
That Thing Called Love, Clinton insiders claim that Bill slept with so many
women that Hillary Clinton has repeatedly forced him to get an AIDS test
from the doctor. This is because the former President "favored unprotected
sex."
No doubt neither of them are running on full health. Bill has been listless,
had a drastic weight loss, trembling hands, red blotches on his face and a
number of other definite signs of ill health, many which are common AIDS
symptoms.
Re: Clintons campaign possible strategy of making a vote for Clinton 'a vote
for a winner'.
I know its conventional opinion that when in doubt, people prefer to vote
for who they perceive to be a 'winner', but I wonder if this really applies
with two such disliked candidates. I've a theory that one reason Brexit won is
that the polls beforehand saying it would be a narrow 'no', gave 'permission'
for people to vote with their conscience rather than their pragmatism. In other
words, presented with a 'pragmatic, but dirty' vote for X, but a 'fun, but
risky' vote for Y', people will vote X if its very close or it looks like Y
will win, but may be tempted to vote Y if they are pretty sure X will win.
Part of me thinks the Clinton campaign would have tested the theory to the
limit before going for a strategy like this, but the evidence from the
nomination campaign is that they are all tactics, no strategy. It seems to me
to be a very risky game to play, not least because promoting Clinton as a sure
winner may make wavering progressives simply opt to stay at home.
I don't even think you have to be a progressive for that to be a concern
if you are the Clinton campaign.
They know the public is not enthusiastic about voting for her for the most
part, and yet they are setting up a meme where she is unbeatable. It isn't
necessarily going to just keep Trump voters home. But how many people who
don't want Clinton but really don't want Trump will be able to convince
themselves that there is no need to go hold their nose and vote for her.
Republicans who think she is too far left, but he is crazy for instance will
be just as likely to stay home as the lefties who know she is lying
Neoliberal War Criminal, but not fascist like Trump. (And I know the real
fascism signs are all with Clinton, but some may have missed it).
On fascism I had the exact same thought after reading Adolph Reeds
"Vote For the Lying, NeoLiberal War-Monger, It's Important" link last
week.
Reed's critique was that communist leader Thallman failed to
anticipate Hitler's liquidation of all opposition, but frankly with
Hillary's and Donald's respective histories its hard for me to see how
Trump is more dangerous on this: Hillary has a deep and proven lethal
track record and wherever she could justify violent action in the past
she has, she keeps an enemies list, holds grudges and acts on them, all
thoroughly documented.
I certainly won't speculate that Trump couldn't do the same or worse,
given the state of our propaganda and lawlessness amongst the elite, but
like all the other negatives in this campaign its hard to ascertain who
really will be worse. Lambert's bet on gridlock in a Trump administration
has the further advantage of re-activating the simulation of "anti-war,
anti-violence" amongst Dem nomenklatura.
We have collectively known Donald Trump and much of his family
for the last 30 or 40 years. Over the years, he has evoked
different emotions in me. (Usually being appalled by his big-city,
realestate tycoon posturing etc). However, I have
never
been frightened by him. To me, he is more like a bombastic, well
loved, show-off uncle.
Today I see Trump as a modern day prophet (spiritual teacher). A
bringer of light (clarity) to the masses. We live in a rigged
system that gives Nobel Peace Prizes to mass murderers; that
charges a poor child $600 for a $1 lifesaving Epipen. Trump is
waking up The People. Finalllyyyyyy!!
In my experience, people usually do not change for the better
as they age. However, it does happen!; peasant girl (Joan of
Arc), patent inspector (Einstein)
It's not about what Trump will or won't do. It's about not handing
all three branches of government over to the GOP, which has the
Libertarian agenda of eliminating said government altogether. I find
it interesting that so many people scornful of identity politics
nevertheless seem to be as addicted as anyone to making this a horse
race between two candidates that has no real far-reaching consequences
beyond with each will or won't do in the Oval Office.
The Republican elite is clearly and strongly aligned with
Clinton, which reflects the status quo consensus.
It is certainly possible that the elected Republicans in the
House and the Senate will follow Trump or Trump will follow them.
But right now, that seems no more possible than that elected
Republican leadership (the ones most indebted to and aligned with
the donors/rest of the elite) will rebel at Trump and his takeover
of the party. Moreover, IF Trump's in, the Democrats will be forced
to enact the roll of "Democrat," thus guaranteeing some obstacle
somewhere.
Clinton is a Republican. Claiming she won't govern like a
Republican basically means relying on the Freedom Caucus to stop
her. I would just as soon not have to count on those guys to keep
throwing poop at the neoliberal walls - especially since they're
all being directly targeted in this election.
So true: "My view is that triumphalism from the Clinton campaign - which
now includes most of the political class, including the press and both party
establishments, and ignores event risk - is engineered to get early voters
to "go with the winner."–Lambert
I have noticed on Google News several "Clinton weighing cabinet choices"
articles, to me there is whistling past the graveyard quality to all this.
They want the election over now-the votes are just a formality.
They really really do not have any short term memory do they? I mean
it took sticking both thumbs on the scale and some handy dandy
shenanigans with voters to get her past the Primary finish line. And her
opponent there was much nicer about pointing out her flaws than her
current opponent. It is true they won't have any obvious elections that
disprove their position out there, but when you are spending millions and
your opponent nothing and he is still within the margin of error with you
in the states that people are watching the closest…
Although that isn't considering the fears of what other shoes have to
drop both in the world and in the news that could derail her victory
parade, they may have more to fear from that.
One of the problems Democrats have and the 50 state strategy
addressed is voting in very Democratic precincts. Without constant
pressure, many proud Democrats won't vote because they don't know any
Republicans. It's in the bag. College kids are the worst voters alive.
They will forget come election day or not be registered because they
moved. Dean squeezed these districts. These districts are where
Democrats , out in 2010 and 2014 and even a little in 2012. Mittens is
a robber baron.
If Democratic turnout is low and Hillary wins with crossover votes,
what happens? It's very likely those Republicans vote for down ticket
Republicans. Even for the people who have to vote against Trump, if
they believe he is a special kind of super fascist will they bother to
vote for the allies of a crook such as Hillary? It's possible Hillary
wins and drops a seat in the Senate depending on turnout.
I think it's clear Hillary isn't going to bring out any kind of
voter activism. Judging from photos in Virginia where one would hope a
commanding Hillary victory could jump start the Democrats for next
year's governors and legislative races, the Democratic Party is dead
or very close to it.
What if Hillary wins but does the unthinkable and delivers a
Republican pickup in the Senate? She needs to keep Republicans from
coming out because she isn't going to drive Democratic turnout to a
spot where that can win on its own.
Hillary needs to win to keep the never Trump crowd in the GOP from
voting because she knows the Democratic side which relies on very
Democratic districts and transient voters will not impress. An
emboldened GOP congress will be a tough environment for Hillary, and
GOP voters won't tolerate bipartisanship especially for anyone
suspected of not helping the party 100%. Those House Republicans have
to face 2018 and the smaller but arguably more motivated electorate.
They will come down hard on Hillary if she can't win the Senate which
a literal donkey could do.
Hell I don't want Clinton to win by any margin. But if anyone
thinks that the bipartisan nature of her possible victory will mean
anything but Republicans hunting her scalp, and dare I say getting
it, they are not paying attention. As much as both the Benghazi and
the email thing has them all flummoxed because the real crimes
involved with both are crimes they either agree with or want to
use. The Foundation on the other hand, not so much, they will make
the case that this is a global slush fund because it is. And the
McDonnell decision is not going to save her Presidency, much as it
would if she were indicted in a Court.
I should add, that is with or without winning the Senate. Much
of the loyalty any Dems there have towards her will disappear when
it is obvious that she keeps most of the money AND has no
coattails. Oh, they might not vote to impeach her, but that is
about it.
Hillary's only defense is to win the Senate and to be able to
stifle investigations through the appearance of a mandate. 2018
is the 2012 cycle, and that is 2006 which should be a good year
for the Republicans (a credit to Howard Dean). It's a tough map
for Team Blue. If they don't win the Senate in November, they
won't win it in 2018.
With 2018 on its way, a weak Democratic situation will make
the Democrats very jumpy as Hillary is clearly not delivering
the coattails they imagined.
She isn't going to have a mandate. Oh, the electoral
college count might look good. But regardless of who wins
this sucker, I'm betting this is going to be one of the
lowest, if not the lowest, voter turnout for any Presidential
election in the last century. I would not be surpised if more
people stay home than vote. And that is not a mandate.
The Senate isn't going to stifle investigations. She
doesn't even have to help the Dems get a majority for that
problem of conviction if impeached to rear its ugly head. No
way is there going to be 2/3 of the Senate in one party or
the other. That still won't stop the House. Just as it didn't
for her husband.
"... Trump's presidential campaign had seized on the news of Clinton's briefing to label her an "insider threat." The Trump campaign emailed reporters to point out the news that an Army training presentation previously identified Clinton as a threat ..."
Trump's presidential campaign had seized on the news of Clinton's
briefing to label her an "insider threat." The Trump campaign emailed reporters to
point out the news that an Army training presentation previously identified
Clinton as a threat, as the Washington Examiner previously
reported.
Clinton was investigated by the FBI for mishandling
classified information that appeared on a private email server she had set up, but
agency chief James Comey decided not to recommend charges.
Trump is attractive precisely because the Establishment fears and loathes him because 1) they
didn't pick him and 2) he might upset the neoconservative Empire that the Establishment elites view
as their global entitlement.
The Establishment is freaking out about Donald Trump for one reason: they didn't pick him.
The Establishment is freaking out because the natural order of things is that we pick the presidential
candidates and we run the country to serve ourselves, i.e. the financial-political elites.
Donald Trump's candidacy upsets this neofeudal natural order, and thus he (and everyone
who supports him) is anathema to the Establishment, heretics who must be silenced, cowed, marginalized,
mocked and ultimately put back in their place as subservient debt-serfs.
... ... ...
The utter cluelessness of the professional apologists and punditry would be laughable if it
wasn't so pathetic: the more you fume and rage that Trump is unqualified, narcissistic, singularly
inappropriate, etc. etc. etc., the more appealing he becomes to everyone who isn't inside the protective
walls of your neofeudal castle.
The people outside the cozy walls of the protected elites don't care if he is unqualified (by
the standards of those who get to pick our presidents for us) narcissistic, singularly inappropriate,
and so on--they are cheering him on because you, the multitudes of water-carriers for the Imperial
elites, the teeming hordes of well-paid, I-got-mine-so-shut-the-heck-up pundits, flacks, hacks, sycophants,
apparatchiks, toadies, lackeys, functionaries, leeches and apologists, are so visibly afraid that
your perks, wealth, influence and power might drain away if the 80% actually get a say.
Dear pundits, flacks, hacks, sycophants, apparatchiks, toadies, lackeys, functionaries, leeches
and apologists: we're sick of you, every one of you, and the neofeudal Empire you support. We
want you cashiered, pushed outside the walls with the rest of us, scraping by on well-earned and
richly deserved unemployment.
"... from my perspective the history of the last forty five years of senior economic advisors to U.S. Presidents seems mostly a competition to see who could piss on Great Society and New Deal remedies in favor of "market-based incentives" fast enough. ..."
"... This bunch has taken our economy and so our country from its position in 1976 to its position in 2016. If you have been among the educated 20% you have benefited from their policy prescriptions over the past 40 years. The rest not so much. This kind of WSJ establishment worship does not travel well outside of NYC, DC, SF, LA, and Boston. ..."
"Economists Who've Advised Presidents Are No Fans of Donald
Trump"
Okay I am a guy that wouldn't piss on Trump if he
was on fire but this lead gets a little too close to "Praising
with Faint Damns" for my taste. I mean who on this list is
supposed to impress?
Okay Stiglitz. And I think Christine Romer had a medium
level role as did maybe her husband. But
from my perspective
the history of the last forty five years of senior economic
advisors to U.S. Presidents seems mostly a competition to
see who could piss on Great Society and New Deal remedies
in favor of "market-based incentives" fast enough.
I am not saying that this unanimity doesn't mean something
important. Just that as phrased we are talking kind of a low
bar.
mrrunangun :
, -1
This bunch has taken our economy and so our country from
its position in 1976 to its position in 2016. If you have
been among the educated 20% you have benefited from their
policy prescriptions over the past 40 years. The rest not
so much. This kind of WSJ establishment worship does not travel
well outside of NYC, DC, SF, LA, and Boston.
"Donald Trump now needs a swing of only 3 to 4 percentage points in key battleground states
to win this election" [
MarketWatch ]. "according to a new poll in Michigan, one of the key states in play, as well
as the latest polls in other key states… Meanwhile, Trump faces even smaller deficits in other
key battleground states. According to the polling averages calculated by Real Clear Politics,
Trump trails by just 5 points in Ohio, 4 points in Florida and 2 points in North Carolina. Recent
polls have also put him level with Clinton in Nevada and Iowa." Lambert here: My view is that
triumphalism from the Clinton campaign - which now includes most of the political class, including
the press and both party establishments, and ignores event risk - is engineered to get early voters
to "go with the winner."
Our Revolution: "The senator hailed as a major accomplishment his delegates' work crafting
what he called the "strongest and most progressive" platform in the Democratic Party's history.
And he vowed to implement many of its planks" [
Seven Days ]. Sanders: "'If anybody thinks that that document and what is in that platform
is simply going to be resting on a shelf somewhere accumulating dust, they are very mistaken,'
he said. 'We are going to bring the platform alive and make it the blueprint for moving the Democrats
forward in Congress and all across this country." So, more than "values." However, where there's
less to hate in the Dem platform than usual, it's hardly adequate for the challenges facing the
country. Now, if the operational definition of "bring the platform alive" means "incorporate all
the Sanders planks the Dem establishment voted down," I'd be a lot happier. I haven't heard that
yet.
The conference spawned books by both Brzezinski and Peccei: Technetronic Era and The Chasm Ahead,
respectively. In calling for the establishment of a post-industrial dictatorship, Brzezinski wrote:
"..new forms of social control may be needed to limit the indiscriminate exercise by individuals
of their new powers." He went on to suggest bio-chemical means to control the populace and stated:
"It will soon be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and to maintain
up-to-date complete files..."
In his later book Between Two Ages, he called for the establishment of a global government,
and, in the manner of a thug working a protection racket, indicated what the global elite would
do to punish the masses if they resisted. ....
"... The genius of the corporate coup that has overtaken US democracy is not that it dominates the GOP - the party that has long favored corporate power anyway - but that it has maneuvered even the opposition party into submission as well. The brightest minds on Wall Street are experts at hedging bets, and they play politics just as they play finance. Such dynamics are key to understanding not only the role of the Clinton candidacy in the eyes of corporate America, but the perceived threat posed by the Sanders campaign with its persistent advocacy for people over corporations. ..."
"... a leading banking executive called Clinton's tough talk about Wall Street "theatrics" made necessary in response to the Sanders campaign, adding that he predicts she'll be known as "Mrs. Wall Street" if elected. ..."
"... These realities show that the "rigged system" concerns of ordinary voters are not overblown. In a stroke of strategic brilliance, corporate power has created a playing field where even its perceived opponents are advancing its agenda. ..."
"... "The smart way to keep people passive and obedient," says noted activist and author Noam Chomsky , "is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum." ..."
"... Defined as a liberal, she is in fact a consummate establishment Democrat: a hawkish corporate apologist who happens to be pro-choice. Yes, she is to the left of the GOP candidates - she doesn't deny climate change, wants to preserve Obamacare and won't entertain outlandish ideas like privatizing Social Security - but she's still well within the bounds of acceptability to the US corporate oligarchy that does not want fundamental, systemic change. Rest assured, under her watch the system will stay rigged. ..."
The genius of the corporate coup that has overtaken US democracy is not
that it dominates the GOP - the party that has long favored corporate power
anyway - but that it has maneuvered even the opposition party into submission
as well. The brightest minds on Wall Street are experts at hedging bets, and
they play politics just as they play finance. Such dynamics are key to
understanding not only the role of the Clinton candidacy in the eyes of
corporate America, but the perceived threat posed by the Sanders campaign with
its persistent advocacy for people over corporations.
Clinton, who once
served on the board of Walmart, the gold standard of predatory corporatism,
is so tight with corporate power that she's now making efforts to downplay her
relationships.
CNBC reports that she is postponing fundraisers with Wall Street
executives, no doubt concerned that voters are awakening to the toxic influence
of corporations on politics and government. Already in the awkward position of
explaining
six-figure checks from Wall Street firms for speaking engagements and
large charitable donations from major banks, Clinton realizes that she must
try to distance herself from her corporate benefactors.
And the fat cats fully understand. "Don't expect folks on Wall Street to be
offended that Clinton is distancing herself from them,"
CNBC reports. "In fact, they see it as smart politics and they understand
that Wall Street banks are deeply unpopular."
Indeed, everyone knows the game, and few are worried that Clinton - whose
son-in-law is a former Goldman Sachs executive who now runs a hedge fund -
is any kind of threat to the power structure. This explains why a
leading banking executive called Clinton's tough talk about Wall Street
"theatrics" made necessary in response to the Sanders campaign, adding that he
predicts she'll be known as
"Mrs. Wall Street" if elected.
These realities show that the "rigged system" concerns of ordinary
voters are not overblown. In a stroke of strategic brilliance, corporate power
has created a playing field where even its perceived opponents are advancing
its agenda. And the fiction is propagated with impressive expertise, as
moderate, corporate-friendly Democrats are portrayed in the mainstream media as
"flaming liberals." Even though Barack Obama, for example, filled his
administration with Wall Street veterans and stalwarts after his election in
2008 - including Tim Geithner, Michael Froman, Larry Summers and a host of
others - he is frequently described as a liberal not just by those
on the right, but even in
mainstream media.
"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient," says noted activist
and author
Noam Chomsky, "is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but
allow very lively debate within that spectrum."...
This is what has happened during the centrist Obama administration, which
bailed out Wall Street without prosecuting even one executive responsible for
bringing about the 2008 economic collapse. It also happened in the centrist
administration of Bill Clinton, who was attacked by conservatives as an
"extreme liberal" while doing little to earn the designation. The Clinton
administration, with vocal support from the first lady, deregulated
telecommunications and the financial sector, pushed hard for passage of the
North American Free Trade Agreement - a tremendous gift to corporate interests
and a major blow to the working class - and passed legislation on
crime and welfare that was anything but liberal.
Such is the role that corporate America wants Hillary Clinton to play today.
Defined as a liberal, she is in fact a consummate establishment Democrat: a
hawkish corporate apologist who happens to be pro-choice. Yes, she is to the
left of the GOP candidates - she doesn't deny climate change, wants to preserve
Obamacare and won't entertain outlandish ideas like privatizing Social Security
- but she's still well within the bounds of acceptability to the US corporate
oligarchy that does not want fundamental, systemic change. Rest assured, under
her watch the system will stay rigged.<
Digging deep into Hillary's connections to Wall Street, Abby Martin reveals how the Clintons' multi-million-dollar
political machine operates.
This episode chronicles the Clintons' rise to power in the '90s on
a right-wing agenda; the Clinton Foundation's revolving door with Gulf state monarchies, corporations
and the world's biggest financial institutions; and the establishment of the hyper-aggressive "Hillary
Doctrine" while secretary of state.
Learn the essential facts about the great danger she poses, and why she's the US Empire's choice
for its next CEO.
"... You're confusing the left with Democrats. One of the clarifying things about this year is how clear it is that's not true. ..."
"... There is ample evidence that a solid majority of those identifying as or tending to generally vote Democratic (not quite the same as party registration, but in less openly corrupt and weird times, that was how polling defined D voters) rejected Hillary Clinton as a candidate, but were prevented from knowing about her opponent, being able to vote in the primary, or having their completed ballot counted as they had marked it. ..."
"... Bernie's endorsement should have been tied to the release of those speeches. After all, he made quite a big deal about those speeches during his campaign appearances. ..."
And again, everyone is just pretending that the monumental election fraud that just occurred
is completely irrelevant. I'm mystified as to why. To me, it's a national catastrophe that a party
can simply suspend democracy completely, flip machine counts, deregister or reregister hundreds
of thousands of Bernie voters (and yes, it was very specifically Bernie voters), subtract votes
during the count and add them to Clinton in real time–and everyone accepts this as entirely legitimate?
Doesn't the complete cancellation of democracy by a dynastic family bother anyone??? Why even
vote?
Today's reminder that the Democratic Party (which, as Lambert points out below, is NOT the
same as "the left") did not nominate an Iraq War supporter through any kind of democratic process.
There is ample evidence that a solid majority of those identifying as or tending to generally
vote Democratic (not quite the same as party registration, but in less openly corrupt and weird
times, that was how polling defined D voters) rejected Hillary Clinton as a candidate, but were
prevented from knowing about her opponent, being able to vote in the primary, or having their
completed ballot counted as they had marked it.
My question is why should a progressive vote for Hillary Clinton?
If a progressive wants to show the strength of her movement and also the number of folks who
represent her values, a progressive would vote for Stein.
Perhaps it could be argued that if a certain progressive lives in a swing state, she should
consider voting for Clinton to prevent Trump from taking office, but that is no most progressive
voters.
But, in general, a progressive voting for a candidate such as Clinton who is so actively courting
big money and establishment Republicans. . .that would dilute and weaken the progressive presence
in my view.
Now that HRC released her taxes can we expect the transcripts, too? Hillary Clinton has been looking into releasing her transcripts for paid speeches to Wall St.
and other special interests for 189 days http://iwilllookintoit.com/
Bernie's endorsement should have been tied to the release of those speeches. After all, he
made quite a big deal about those speeches during his campaign appearances.
They got to Bernie somehow. Cf the scene in Godfather II where the mobster sees his Sicilian relative sitting in the back
of the room and changes his story.
That's very good. We're getting a lot of stories like this, including from our own #SlayTheSmaugs.
At some point, I'd like to aggregate them. Readers, do you know of any other field reports from Philly?
"... Everyone knows the expression "a wolf in sheep's clothing." Now, it seems the United States will invent the macho Republican in feminist, Democratic clothing. ..."
"... Bill Clinton had triangulated his presidency to Republican-hood. He had demolished Aid to Families With Dependent Children and bought into the bash-the-poor rhetoric of the right wing. He had passed a crime bill that targeted people of color; he had destroyed FDR's legacy, notably by abolishing the Glass-Steagall Act. ..."
"... Bill Clinton might not have inhaled marijuana, but he certainly had inhaled the poison of right-wing ideas. ..."
"... Hillary Clinton openly supported many of Bill Clinton's political measures. She used the terrible expression "superpredators," supported the crime bill and made a hash of health insurance reform . Liza Featherstone talks about Hillary Clinton's faux feminism , and she links her critique to class themes, which is as it should be. Feminists cannot be elite feminists or 1% feminists if they want to defend the rights of all women. ..."
"... Hillary Clinton's track record on issues of poverty, racial justice and justice for women is appalling. As a former member of the board of Walmart, she sided with the rich and powerful , which she also does when she gives speeches for Wall Street. ..."
"... On foreign policy issues, Hillary Clinton is not even an Eisenhower Republican, but a war hawk whose philosophy and shortsightedness is evidenced by the flippant way in which she advocated for war in Libya and the way in which she celebrated. "We came, we saw, he died," she said and laughed loudly. ..."
"... Hillary Clinton, like true neoliberals in the GOP, supported the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), so as Bill had said she supported the bond market and free trade. Now, she claims she did not, but, of course, she is lying. Her lies also have to do with Wall Street (she has not released the text of her speeches), support for people of color and her feminism. ..."
"... Feminism cannot be only about the equality of CEO compensations. Equality in CEO compensations in general should exist at a much-reduced level. ..."
"... Hillary Clinton is a 1% millionaire who now talks the progressive talk, but never really walked the progressive walk. ..."
"... Hillary Clinton is actually to the right of President Dwight D. Eisenhower -- "Ike." He refused to use the atom bomb in Asia, showing more geopolitical prudence than Hillary "we came and he died" Clinton. He also wanted to preserve the FDR advances that the Clintons have done so much to cancel or erase. ..."
"... the Republicans -- starting with Hillary Clinton's youth idol Barry Goldwater -- and the Democrats calling themselves "New Democrats" vied with each other to dismantle the New Deal ..."
"... GOP is not a political party any longer, but a radical insurgency ..."
"... The Democrats have become the Old Republicans and Hillary Clinton is more neocon than traditional conservative of the Eisenhower type. ..."
"... She is a pro-business, Koch-compatible lover of Wall Street who uses feminism like some pinkwashers or greenwashers use progressive agendas to sell regressive policies. Author Diana Johnstone calls her the " Queen of Chaos ." Clinton is the queen of deception, faux feminism and faux progressivism ..."
"... Charles Koch (whose hatred of progressivism is well documented by Jane Meyer in her book, Dark Money ) expressed some admiration for Bill and Hillary Clinton and said he could vote for Hillary this time around. ..."
...Everyone knows the expression "a wolf in sheep's clothing." Now, it seems the United States
will invent the macho Republican in feminist, Democratic clothing.
We're all Eisenhower Republicans here, and we are fighting the Reagan Republicans. We stand
for lower deficits and free trade and the bond market. Isn't that great?
Eisenhower Republicans were, by today's standards, quite moderate. The quote refers to the 1990s,
and already Bill Clinton had triangulated his presidency to Republican-hood. He had demolished
Aid to Families With Dependent Children and bought into the bash-the-poor rhetoric of the right wing.
He had passed a crime bill that targeted people of color; he had destroyed FDR's legacy, notably
by abolishing the Glass-Steagall Act. And he was so "tough on crime" that during the 1992 presidential
campaign season, he had gone back to his home state of Arkansas to witness the execution of Ricky
Ray Rector, who was "mentally deficient." Bill Clinton might not have inhaled marijuana, but
he certainly had inhaled the poison of right-wing ideas.
As we all know, Hillary Clinton openly supported many of Bill Clinton's political measures.
She used the terrible expression
"superpredators," supported
the crime bill and made a
hash of health
insurance reform. Liza Featherstone
talks about Hillary Clinton's faux feminism, and she links her critique to class themes, which
is as it should be. Feminists cannot be elite feminists or 1% feminists if they want to defend the
rights of all women.
Hillary Clinton's track record on issues of poverty, racial justice and justice for women
is appalling. As a former member of the board of Walmart, she
sided with the rich and powerful, which she also does when she gives speeches for Wall Street.
The really important question is how someone who has constantly sided with the rich can campaign
as a progressive, as a friend of people of color and even as a feminist? Michelle Alexander exposed
the hypocrisy of the situation in arguing that "Hillary
Clinton doesn't deserve the black vote."
On foreign policy issues, Hillary Clinton is not even an Eisenhower Republican, but a war
hawk whose philosophy and shortsightedness is evidenced by the flippant way in which she advocated
for war in Libya and the way in which she celebrated. "We came, we saw, he died,"
she said and laughed loudly.
This cruel statement does not take into account the mess and mayhem left behind after the intervention,
something President Obama calls a "shit
show" and his worst mistake. But it is the companion piece to her major fellow elite "feminist"
Madeleine Albright
declaring that killing half a million Iraqis is worth it.
Hillary Clinton, like true neoliberals in the GOP, supported the North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA), so as Bill had said she supported the bond market and free trade. Now, she claims
she did not, but, of course, she is lying. Her lies also have to do with Wall Street (she has not
released the text of her speeches), support for people of color and her feminism.
... ... ...
Feminism cannot be only about the equality of CEO compensations. Equality in CEO compensations
in general should exist at a much-reduced level. In his book Listen, Liberal,
Thomas Frank tells the story of a Clinton convention meeting he attended and what he witnessed was
Hillary Clinton as "Ms. Walmart," pretending she cares about all women. Frank, who is genuinely worried
about rising inequality in the United States and racial justice, suggests that elite feminism
is worried about the glass ceiling for CEOs, but does not even worry about working-class women who
have "no floors" under them. Hillary Clinton is a 1% millionaire who now talks the progressive
talk, but never really walked the progressive walk.
It would indeed be a symbolic change if the US elected a woman president, but for the symbol
not to be empty, something more is needed. If a woman president does not improve the lot of the majority
of women, then what is the good of a symbol?
Hillary Clinton is actually to the right of President Dwight D. Eisenhower -- "Ike." He refused
to use the atom bomb in Asia, showing more geopolitical prudence than Hillary "we came and he died"
Clinton. He also wanted to preserve the FDR advances that the Clintons have done so much to cancel
or erase.
...the Republicans -- starting with Hillary Clinton's youth
idol Barry Goldwater -- and the Democrats calling themselves "New Democrats" vied with each other
to dismantle the New Deal and the Great Society programs that Democrats had set up.
Noam Chomsky argues that the GOP is not a political party any longer, but a radical insurgency,
for it has gone off the political cliff. The Democrats have become the Old Republicans and Hillary
Clinton is more neocon than traditional conservative of the Eisenhower type.
So Hillary Clinton, the Republican, is poised to win in November, but her Republicanism is
closer to George W. Bush's and even more conservative than Ronald Reagan's -- except on the societal
issues that have now reached a kind of quasi-consensus like same-sex marriage. She is a pro-business,
Koch-compatible lover of Wall Street who uses feminism like some pinkwashers or greenwashers use
progressive agendas to sell regressive policies. Author Diana Johnstone calls her the "Queen
of Chaos." Clinton is the queen of deception, faux feminism and faux progressivism, whose election
will be made easier by her loutish, vulgar, sexist loudmouth of an opponent.
In his book The Deep State, Mike Lofgren
quotes H.L. Mencken,
who gave away what explains the success of the political circus: "The whole aim of practical politics
is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an
endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and the neoconservatives were past masters at this creation of
hobgoblins, but now Hillary Clinton, the opportunist, can outdo them and out-Republicanize them.
I think Ike would not like her; she might now be even more reactionary than Goldwater. Indeed,
Charles Koch (whose hatred of progressivism is well documented by Jane Meyer in her book,
Dark Money) expressed some admiration for Bill and Hillary Clinton and said he could vote
for Hillary this time around.
... ... ...
Pierre Guerlain is a professor
of American studies at Université Paris Ouest, Nanterre, France.
"... the Clintons separated claims on economic production from that-which-was-produced. The claims went to one group- connected financiers, as the task of economic production remained with a freshly diminished working class. This politicized money system can be seen most clearly in the distance between those who received 'free' money in the Wall Street bailouts and those who didn't. ..."
"... Graph: the liberal economists who support Clinton-Obama-Clinton-omics have long claimed that job losses in 'low value-added' occupations like manufacturing would be made up for in the high value-added industries. In fact, employment for the prime-age workers who must work to live has plummeted since NAFTA was passed as low-wage and increasingly contingent service sector jobs have replaced manufacturing employment. This has required the robots-stole-their-jobs fallacy as productivity (the 'benefit' of automation) has fallen to five-decade lows. Source: St. Louis Federal Reserve. ..."
"... As the Wall Street bailouts demonstrated, the public purse is virtually bottomless when social emergencies require rectification. The problem is that Hillary Clinton has spent her career poisoning the well for public expenditures in the public interest through both the misdirection that taxes are a binding constraint on public expenditures and by corrupting the public realm to the point where nothing works as advertised. ..."
"... Graph: The Clinton's state-capitalism works for their Wall Street patrons by transferring a larger piece of an economy in decline to it while using identity politics to divide working class interests. Liberal economists understood that resurgent capitalism would redistribute income and wealth upward but argued that 'we all benefit' from the rich being made richer. This was derided as 'trickle-down' economics when Ronald Reagan re-introduced the concept. As history has it, the actual result is broad economic decline where the already wealthy use state power to immiserate the 'bottom' 80% – 90% of the population. Source: St. Louis Federal Reserve. ..."
"... Jay Gould once speculated that he "could hire one-half of the working class to kill the other half." Rising liberal vitriol directed against working class supporters of Donald Trump pits the near-precariat with 'private' health insurance, pensions and recovered home equity against those without them with little apparent understanding of the broadly declining circumstances for all but the very rich (graph above). Democrats sold trade agreements, deregulation, privatization and balanced budgets as ways to 'grow the economic pie.' ..."
Those frightened at the prospect of Donald Trump being elected need to explain precisely where they
were when Democrats launched their three-decade-long class war against the great majority of the
American people. The Clintons passed NAFTA in 1994 after Republicans had been unable to get it passed
because of (righteous) opposition from organized labor. They 'freed' Wall Street from social accountability
while making it more dependent than ever on government bailouts. They cut social spending while increasing
the economic vulnerability of the poor. Both the dotcom stock bubble and the housing bubble began
under the Clintons and were caused by their finance-friendly policies. The Clintons are singularly
responsible for the Democrats' turn toward finance capitalism that has dispossessed the middle class,
immiserated the working class and left the poor to fight over the crumbs that fall to them.
In
the abstract, but never-the-less relevant, terms of economic theory the Clintons separated claims
on economic production from that-which-was-produced. The claims went to one group- connected financiers,
as the task of economic production remained with a freshly diminished working class. This politicized
money system can be seen most clearly in the distance between those who received 'free' money in
the Wall Street bailouts and those who didn't.
Bankers, hedge funds and private equity received billions
in low interest 'non-recourse' loans while the American political establishment urged austerity as
the moral antidote appropriate for the rest of us. The spectacle of bankers, with the support of
leading figures in the Obama administration, claiming that their clearly defrauded borrowers presented
a 'moral hazard' to them would be as implausible in fiction as it was true in fact.
Graph: the liberal economists who support Clinton-Obama-Clinton-omics have long claimed that
job losses in 'low value-added' occupations like manufacturing would be made up for in the high value-added
industries. In fact, employment for the prime-age workers who must work to live has plummeted since
NAFTA was passed as low-wage and increasingly contingent service sector jobs have replaced manufacturing
employment. This has required the robots-stole-their-jobs fallacy as productivity (the 'benefit'
of automation) has fallen to five-decade lows. Source: St. Louis Federal Reserve.
The political establishment now circling the wagons around Hillary Clinton feeds at the trough
of money creation and depends on the misdirection that in 'normal' circumstances nature ties its
distribution to economic product produced. Upon his election in 1992 Bill Clinton claimed to have
inherited an 'unexpectedly' large budget deficit that tied his hands with respect to social spending.
The result was that Mr. Clinton abandoned his political program except inasmuch as the 'private'
economy that included Wall Street, arms manufacturers, pharmaceutical and telecommunications companies
and the insurance industry were 'freed' from social accountability as government funds and privileges
continued to be directed to them. The money was somewhere 'found' to bomb Iraq for eight years but
that needed to keep the poor living indoors and eating regular meals had to be cut because the Federal
budget deficit required it.
Upon election Barack Obama did essentially the same thing claiming a fiscal emergency in 2010
that required cutting Social Security and Medicare as he spent
$6 trillion – $14 trillion to save
Wall Street. That unlimited funds were found for Wall Street but none could be found to restore the
fortunes of the victims of Democratic 'trade' agreements and the predatory finance of Wall Street
renders evident the class-war being perpetrated by the Democrats. Liberal economists- court jesters
dressed in the garb of storied academics, prattled on about the 'zero-lower bound' (cartoon monetary
economics) as the Clintons and Barack Obama forewent the power of the public purse that FDR used
to create the Federal jobs programs that brought tens of thousands of desperate citizens out of the
misery of the Great Depression.
When Hillary Clinton outlined her 'economic' program she claimed that upon election she would
direct Congress to create ten million jobs rebuilding infrastructure without explaining how this
jibed with her public career as a deficit hawk, how rebuilding infrastructure would create ten million
jobs when Mr. Obama's program created at best a few thousand and why this wouldn't be just one more
Clinton scam to shove public resources to their cronies? As the Wall Street bailouts demonstrated,
the public purse is virtually bottomless when social emergencies require rectification. The problem
is that Hillary Clinton has spent her career poisoning the well for public expenditures in the public
interest through both the misdirection that taxes are a binding constraint on public expenditures
and by corrupting the public realm to the point where nothing works as advertised.
Graph: The Clinton's state-capitalism works for their Wall Street patrons by transferring
a larger piece of an economy in decline to it while using identity politics to divide working class
interests. Liberal economists understood that resurgent capitalism would redistribute income and
wealth upward but argued that 'we all benefit' from the rich being made richer. This was derided
as 'trickle-down' economics when Ronald Reagan re-introduced the concept. As history has it, the
actual result is broad economic decline where the already wealthy use state power to immiserate the
'bottom' 80% – 90% of the population. Source: St. Louis Federal Reserve.
Bill Clinton and / or Barack Obama could have created government jobs programs to employ dispossessed
workers at living wages just like FDR did. They could have even claimed the economic emergencies
they helped create as reasons for doing so. Mainstream economic theory has 'free-trade' beneficiaries
compensating those displaced by it. However, the Clintons and Mr. Obama chose instead to promote
the right-wing lie of a binding budget constraint to limit and / or preclude increased social spending
more effectively than the old-line Republican misery squad could have ever imagined possible. So
the question for Hillary Clinton is: will she prove her husband and Barack Obama to be ruling class
tools for lying about Federal budget constraints on social spending or will she maintain the lie
to renege on her promise of creating ten million jobs?
Jay Gould once speculated that he "could hire one-half of the working class to kill the other
half." Rising liberal vitriol directed against working class supporters of Donald Trump pits the
near-precariat with 'private' health insurance, pensions and recovered home equity against those
without them with little apparent understanding of the broadly declining circumstances for all but
the very rich (graph above). Democrats sold trade agreements, deregulation, privatization and balanced
budgets as ways to 'grow the economic pie.' With history having demonstrated otherwise, the Party
leadership now wants to change the subject. Barack Obama is selling the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership)
'trade' agreement as a geopolitical endeavor. Hillary Clinton now claims she will recover the ghost
of FDR that national Democrats spent the last forty-years exorcising. In the parlance: whatever.
The day after Election Day will be like any other in the sense that the problems of looming environmental
catastrophe, gratuitous wars and long-term economic decline will remain profit-generating 'opportunities'
in the realm of official concern. The American political establishment is calcified and out of ideas.
The problem is that the residual rationales and institutional tendencies lean toward catastrophe
generation. Democrats saved Wall Street in particular, and finance capitalism more generally, to
kill again. The most destructive militarists in modern history have attached themselves to Hillary
Clinton and the American war machine. Unless functional politics are recovered and asserted outside
the electoral system more of the same is the outcome that Western political economy is designed to
produce.
Rob Urie is an artist and political economist. His book
Zen Economics
is published by CounterPunch Books.
Krauthammer is probably the most gifted neocon propagandist. Kind of
Joseph
Goebbels of neocons (I know, I know). But despite his considerable and undisputable gifts as a propagandist,
I can't read him without a shoot of Stoli. He is so predictably jingoistic that sometimes I think he
was hired by Putin to destroy any semblance of rational thinking in Washington establishment. An interesting
question is what he drinks to write such articles.
Notable quotes:
"... In Syria, the minds of the 7th century are doing their 7th century thing. Krauthammer's answer? Bomb them (read: assassinate Assad). ..."
"... In the Ukraine, another group of mid 18th Century thinking is doing their 18th century thing. Krauthammer's answer? Bomb them. ..."
"... These right wing neocon chickenhawks like Krauthammer and the politicians who ascribe to the "Just bomb 'em, invade 'em, and disband their military" school of thought are precisely the reason the world is in such "disarray". The sooner these blood thirsty miscreants are no longer influential, the sooner things might turn around. Certainly the security of the civilized world is at stake but bombing the heck out of everything (especially if they have brown skin) is not the answer. And given the damage the GHWB/Cheney and li'l bush/Cheney catastrophe CAUSED, the "sooner" part of the equation is likely to take another 100 years. Thanks neocons. Thanks for nothing but fear, blood, destruction, and grief. ..."
In the South China Sea, China is doing it's China thing. Krauthammer's answer? Bomb them.
In Syria, the minds of the 7th century are doing their 7th century thing. Krauthammer's
answer? Bomb them (read: assassinate Assad).
In the Ukraine, another group of mid 18th Century thinking is doing their 18th century
thing. Krauthammer's answer? Bomb them.
In Iran, the Iranians are doing what any sovereign nation would do when threatened by outside
forces (i.e. Israel and the US)- arm themselves in order to create a deterrent to invasion or
worse. Krauthammer's answer? Bomb them, destroy the deterrent, and invade.
As far as Cuba is concerned, bomb them too (I guess).
These right wing neocon chickenhawks like Krauthammer and the politicians who ascribe to
the "Just bomb 'em, invade 'em, and disband their military" school of thought are precisely the
reason the world is in such "disarray". The sooner these blood thirsty miscreants are no longer
influential, the sooner things might turn around. Certainly the security of the civilized world
is at stake but bombing the heck out of everything (especially if they have brown skin) is not
the answer. And given the damage the GHWB/Cheney and li'l bush/Cheney catastrophe CAUSED, the
"sooner" part of the equation is likely to take another 100 years. Thanks neocons. Thanks for
nothing but fear, blood, destruction, and grief.
"... The clear signals of Clinton's readiness to go to war appears to be aimed at influencing the course of the war in Syria as well as US policy over the remaining six months of the Obama administration ..."
"... Last month, the think tank run by Michele Flournoy, the former Defense Department official considered to be most likely to be Clinton's choice to be Secretary of Defense, explicitly called for "limited military strikes" against the Assad regime. ..."
"... earlier this month Leon Panetta, former Defense Secretary and CIA Director, who has been advising candidate Clinton, declared in an interview that the next president would have to increase the number of Special Forces and carry out air strikes to help "moderate" groups against President Bashal al-Assad. ..."
"... When Panetta gave a belligerent speech at the Democratic National Convention on Wednesday night, he was interrupted by chants from the delegates on the floor of "no more war!" ..."
The clear signals of Clinton's readiness to go to war appears to be aimed at influencing
the course of the war in Syria as well as US policy over the remaining six months of the Obama
administration. (She also may be hoping to corral the votes of Republican neoconservatives
concerned about Donald Trump's "America First" foreign policy.)
Last month, the think tank run by Michele Flournoy, the former Defense Department official
considered to be most likely to be Clinton's choice to be Secretary of Defense, explicitly called
for "limited military strikes" against the Assad regime.
And earlier this month Leon Panetta, former Defense Secretary and CIA Director, who has been
advising candidate Clinton, declared in an interview that the next president would have to
increase the number of Special Forces and carry out air strikes to help "moderate" groups against
President Bashal al-Assad.
When Panetta gave a belligerent speech at the Democratic National Convention on Wednesday
night, he was interrupted by chants from the delegates on the floor of "no more war!"
"... You know, here's somebody who actually pushed Obama to go into the Libyan operation. You know, Obama was reticent to enter the operation in Libya. The French were very eager. And Hillary Clinton led the charge against Libya. ..."
"... This shows, to my mind, a profound dangerous tendency to go into wars overseas, you know, damn the consequences. And I think, therefore, if you're looking at this from outside the United States, there's a real reason to be terrified that whoever becomes president -- as Medea Benjamin put it to me in an interview, whoever wins the president, there will be a hawk in the White House. ..."
You know, here's somebody who actually pushed Obama to go into the Libyan operation. You
know, Obama was reticent to enter the operation in Libya. The French were very eager. And Hillary
Clinton led the charge against Libya.
This shows, to my mind, a profound dangerous tendency to go into wars overseas, you know,
damn the consequences. And I think, therefore, if you're looking at this from outside the United
States, there's a real reason to be terrified that whoever becomes president -- as Medea Benjamin
put it to me in an interview, whoever wins the president, there will be a hawk in the White
House.
"... Q.-beyond that, do you still feel that if that information on those American servicemen who are missing in action is forthcoming from the Vietnamese, that then this country has a moral obligation to help rebuild that country, if that information is forthcoming? ..."
"... THE PRESIDENT [Carter]. Well, the destruction was mutual . You know, we went to Vietnam without any desire to capture territory or to impose American will on other people. We went there to defend the freedom of the South Vietnamese. And I don't feel that we ought to apologize or to castigate ourselves or to assume the status of culpability. ..."
"... Carter did when Brzezinski said the Shah of Iran was a friend of ours. ..."
When dealing with foreign policy it's important to think on at least 3
levels:
Grand Structure
State
Domestic
Will a Clinton presidency be hawkish?
A. Grand Structure: No clear successor to the United States as hegemon
has emerged to stymie hawkish ambitions. China and Russia exist, of course,
but can do little to stop US ambitions. Verdict, yes, hawkish.
B. State: though US hegemony is in a period of decline, clearly the
United States' ruling class is still very much interested and capable of
using the Middle East as a demented sandbox to cause other nations to
continue to need its security services. China looms as a potential rising
hegemon. Verdict: yes, still hawkish.
C. Domestic: the ruling class investor coalitions backing Clinton are
very, very interested in a robust foreign economic policy that favor an
interventionist foreign policy. The segments of US society that are opposed
to this will not be represented or listened to in Clinton's domestic
coalition, either: declining industries, the working class/labor. The
professional 10% that Thomas Frank identifies as the broader Dem base tends
to acquiesce to Democratic-led wars. Without a reborn, and far more
militant, anti-war movement, the verdict has to be: yes, Hawkish.
The professional 10% and much of middle class america, by and large,
doesn't serve in the military and doesn't encourage or let their kids
serve either, so they're ok with war. It also seems that the PTB through
a combination of corporate media marginalization, robust police state
repression, and the lack of conscription has minimized the impact of any
anti-war movement.
longer term movement politics to take power, at least before the PTB
blow us all up?
"[W]e should expect Clinton to shape her foreign policy to neutralise the
threat to her nomination in 2020 from the left of her party. So forget
Hillary the hawk. To consolidate her Democrat base she will be even more
cautious abroad than Barack Obama has been"
For the moment ignoring Obama's nuclear weapons policy and NATO
belligerence, don't I wish!
But this sounds very voluntaristic to me, as though the US doesn't face a
problem with its empire that might appear to oblige belligerence. For example,
if the case is valid that the US has much reason to fear economic consolidation
between Europe and Asia, then Clinton/Kagan/Nuland et al are servants of
empire, not mad dogs. If, as some say, such a consolidation would undermine
dollar hegemony, maybe they feel the script is written. That doesn't mean I
don't oppose them, it just means opposing them involves a lot more than being
for peace, nonviolent resolution of disputes and such.
Mike Whitney over at Counterpunch has an interesting article reviewing
Brzezinski's new book, The Broken Chessboard, with Brzezinski explaining that
the US has lost its ability to be the indispensable nation. Maybe HRC will
listen. Carter did when Brzezinski said the Shah of Iran was a friend of ours.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/08/25/the-broken-chessboard-brzezinski-gives-up-on-empire/
When has Clinton ever listened to anyone who wasn't promoting war, war,
and more war? Expecting Clinton to respond like Carter in respect to foreign
policy is as fruitless as expecting her foundation's "charitable works" to
be comparable to Carter's work with Habitat for Humanity.
Carter: 4 years in office without a single shot fired in anger,
imagine the moral and political fortitude required to keep the
Military-Monster-That-Must-Be-Fed at bay like that for so long. Yes
Carter played lots of footsie with special ops but perhaps we awarded the
recent Peace Prize to the wrong guy.
so it was the least bloody of any president? and carter did
pressure latin american dictators on human rights, unlike
presidents before and after him. east timor was the worst, no
defense of him there. we sent money to support the indonesian
regime. but carter was no clinton.
Clinton and Reagan didn't just appear fully formed. Carter
started trashing unions before they abandoned the Democrats in
1980. Carter created the Carter doctrine.
Bill is just a personally immoral version of Carter who is
capable of self reflection, but Jimmy was building those houses
to atone.
Carter still came in a strong post Vietnam Era. Sending
soldiers abroad wouldn't be too popular.
So many Carter favs (Timor, the Shah is an island of
stability, defending Samoza…) but this has to be
one of the best
:
Q.-beyond that, do you still feel that if that
information on those American servicemen who are missing
in action is forthcoming from the Vietnamese, that then
this country has a moral obligation to help rebuild that
country, if that information is forthcoming?
THE PRESIDENT [Carter].
Well, the
destruction was mutual
. You know, we went to
Vietnam without any desire to capture territory or to
impose American will on other people. We went there to
defend the freedom of the South Vietnamese. And I don't
feel that we ought to apologize or to castigate ourselves
or to assume the status of culpability.
My opinion: we went to Vietnam to keep the Golden
Triangle open for heroin trafficking to fund all the
covert CIA ops in the rest of the world. It shut down when
we lost. US then opened up Afghanistan route, thanks to
Jimmy Carter and Brezinski. Which is why we are where we
are today in Afghanistan. Just can't shake the poppy
monkey.
The problem with your theory is that the shift in
heroin production to the Golden Triangle didn't occur
until after the US involvement. Same as in Afghanistan.
And in Nicaragua. I.e., the pattern is the US invades
for other reasons, then the CIA starts running dope to
funnel guns to "freedom fighters", then drug use spikes
in the US.
Read Alfred McCoy, The Politics of Heroin in
Southeast Asia.
– The Obama administration's reckless foreign policy, particularly the
toppling of governments in Libya and Ukraine, has greatly accelerated the
rate at which these anti-American coalitions have formed. In other words,
Washington's enemies have emerged in response to Washington's behavior.
Obama can only blame himself.
was editorial or a quote from Brz himself, and the top headline was from
2012:
Zbigniew Brzezinski: The man behind Obama's foreign policy
Posty Masters
1
day ago
Good job. If every one can just get one
person to change, you will not have to put
up with more of the same. Lies, cheating
and selling out the American People.
Munchmá Fuzi Qüchi
5
days ago
She is straight up evil as fuck. If you can't see
that something is wrong with you.
John Henke
2
days ago
She has no soul.
cougar351
1
hour ago
She a trail of destruction. Imagine a state
official stealing money from the Haitians they
sorely needed for survival after the devastation
created by the massive earthquake. Very crooked
Verbatim reenactment of highlights
of the deposition transcript. For more information and to
support this project, please go to
www.ClintonEmailsOnFilm.com
Neocons will support Hillary breaking the ranks of Republican Party, as she is one of them:
"The only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton," Kagan warned. "The party cannot be saved, but
the country still can be."
Notable quotes:
"... Donald Trump calls the Iraq War a lie-fueled fiasco, admires Vladimir Putin and says he would be a "neutral" arbiter between Israel and the Palestinians. When it comes to America's global role he asks, "Why are we always at the forefront of everything?" ..."
"... Even more than his economic positions, Trump's foreign policy views challenge GOP orthodoxy in fundamental ways. But while parts of the party establishment are resigning themselves or even backing Trump's runaway train, one group is bitterly digging in against him: the hawkish foreign policy elites known as neoconservatives. ..."
"... In interviews with POLITICO, leading neocons - people who promoted the Iraq War, detest Putin and consider Israel's security non-negotiable - said Trump would be a disaster for U.S. foreign policy and vowed never to support him. So deep is their revulsion that several even say they could vote for Hillary Clinton over Trump in November. ..."
"... "Hillary is the lesser evil, by a large margin," said Eliot Cohen, a former top State Department official under George W. Bush and a strategic theorist who argues for a muscular U.S. role abroad. Trump's election would be "an unmitigated disaster for American foreign policy," Cohen said, adding that "he has already damaged it considerably." ..."
"... In a March 1 interview with Vox, Max Boot, a military historian at the Council on Foreign Relations who backed the Iraq War and often advocates a hawkish foreign policy, said that he, too, would vote for Clinton over Trump. "I'm literally losing sleep over Donald Trump," he said. "She would be vastly preferable to Trump." ..."
"... The letter was signed by dozens of Republican foreign policy experts, including Boot; Peter Feaver, a former senior national security aide in George W. Bush's White House; Robert Zoellick, a former deputy to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice; and Dov Zakheim, a former Bush Pentagon official; and Kori Schake, a fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and a former Bush State Department official. ..."
"... Kristol and Abrams have advised Florida senator Marco Rubio, the preferred choice of several neoconservatives, who admire his call for "moral clarity" in foreign policy and strong emphasis on human rights and democracy. ..."
"... Alarm brewing for months in GOP foreign policy circles burst into public view last week, when Robert Kagan, a key backer of the Iraq War and American global might, wrote in the Washington Post that a Trump nomination would force him to cross party lines. ..."
"... "The only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton," Kagan warned. "The party cannot be saved, but the country still can be." ..."
Donald Trump calls the Iraq War a lie-fueled fiasco, admires Vladimir Putin and says he would
be a "neutral" arbiter between Israel and the Palestinians. When it comes to America's global role
he asks, "Why are we always at the forefront of everything?"
Even more than his economic
positions, Trump's foreign policy views challenge GOP orthodoxy in fundamental ways. But while parts
of the party establishment are resigning themselves or even backing Trump's runaway train, one group
is bitterly digging in against him: the hawkish foreign policy elites known as neoconservatives.
In interviews with POLITICO, leading neocons - people who promoted the Iraq War, detest Putin
and consider Israel's security non-negotiable - said Trump would be a disaster for U.S. foreign policy
and vowed never to support him. So deep is their revulsion that several even say they could vote
for Hillary Clinton over Trump in November.
"Hillary is the lesser evil, by a large margin," said Eliot Cohen, a former top State Department
official under George W. Bush and a strategic theorist who argues for a muscular U.S. role abroad.
Trump's election would be "an unmitigated disaster for American foreign policy," Cohen said, adding
that "he has already damaged it considerably."
Cohen, an Iraq war backer who is often called a neoconservative but said he does not identify
himself that way, said he would "strongly prefer a third party candidate" to Trump, but added: "Probably
if absolutely no alternative: Hillary."
In a March 1
interview with Vox, Max Boot, a military historian at the Council on Foreign Relations who backed
the Iraq War and often advocates a hawkish foreign policy, said that he, too, would vote for Clinton
over Trump. "I'm literally losing sleep over Donald Trump," he said. "She would be vastly preferable
to Trump."
Cohen helped to organize an open letter signed by several dozen GOP foreign policy insiders -
many of whom are not considered neocons - that
was published Wednesday night by the military blog War on the Rocks. "[W]e are unable to support
a Party ticket with Mr. Trump at its head," the letter declared. It cited everything from Trump's
"admiration for foreign dictators" to his "inexcusable" support for "the expansive use of torture."
The letter was signed by dozens of Republican foreign policy experts, including Boot; Peter
Feaver, a former senior national security aide in George W. Bush's White House; Robert Zoellick,
a former deputy to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice; and Dov Zakheim, a former Bush Pentagon official;
and Kori Schake, a fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and a former Bush State Department
official.
Several other neocons said they find themselves in an impossible position, constitutionally incapable
of voting for Clinton but repelled by a Republican whose foreign policy views they consider somewhere
between nonexistent and dangerous - and disconnected from their views about American power and values
abroad.
"1972 was the first time I was old enough to vote for president, and I did not vote. Couldn't
vote for McGovern for foreign policy reasons, nor for Nixon because of Watergate," said Elliott Abrams,
a former national security council aide to George W. Bush who specializes in democracy and the Middle
East. "I may be in the same boat in 2016, unable to vote for Trump or Clinton."
Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol, something of a dean of Washington neoconservatives,
said he would seek out a third option before choosing between Trump and Clinton.
"If it's Trump-Clinton, I'd work with others to recruit a strong conservative third party candidate,
and do my best to help him win (which by the way would be more possible than people think, especially
when people - finally - realize Trump shouldn't be president and Hillary is indicted)," Kristol wrote
in an email.
Kristol and Abrams have advised Florida senator Marco Rubio, the preferred choice of several
neoconservatives, who admire his call for "moral clarity" in foreign policy and strong emphasis on
human rights and democracy.
Alarm brewing for months in GOP foreign policy circles burst into public view last week, when
Robert Kagan, a key backer of the Iraq War and American global might,
wrote in the Washington Post that a Trump nomination would force him to cross party lines.
"The only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton," Kagan warned. "The party cannot be
saved, but the country still can be."
In an interview, Kagan said his opposition to Trump "has nothing to do with foreign policy."
Since my video went viral and
catapulted Hillary's health back into the national
spotlight, we've seen more examples of Clinton behaving
bizarrely, while the establishment has launched a
cover-up.
Excerpted from McIntyre In The Morning | KABC-AM (8/16/2016)
The controversy surrounding Democratic Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton's health continues
to swirl. KABC's Dr. Drew Pinsky says the former Secretary of State may be receiving inadequate health
care that is not optimal for her condition.
Drew told some tall tales about what medicines are used, especially about treating blood clots.
Coumadin is still much widely used, but it's only fault is the needed blood testing weekly or
bi-weekly. The medicine he pushed is very expensive, (Eliquis), when compared to Coumadin, though
it doesn't require the blood testing that Coumadin does. However, Coumadin does the same thing
as the more expensive medicine.
Here, Coumadin is the standard go-to medicine for blood clots,
after the blood has been thinned with Lovenox injections, and this is still taught in all major
medical schools. I have to agree that this was nothing but an interview to set up Trump, from
a non-psychiatric physician, who is trying to psychoanalyze him as being hypermanic.
However, physicians have stated that Hillary is sociopathic, which is much much worse, since
they are the type that constantly lie, and become cold-blooded killers. Drew did admit that Trump
did not have a narcissistic personality disorder. Trump has a personality born from the boroughs
of New York. New Yorkers are tough, and do not care to tell it like it is.
+Bri G.
True, but new medicines are always expensive in their patent phase, until generic forms are out.
Eliquis is one of the most ridiculously overpriced drugs that there are, for what it does.
"... A letter from Clintons' top advisor Sidney Blumenthal to Hillary Clinton in 2011, proves that the West was losing control of the situation in Libya, very fast, already since 2011. Dangerous weapons were going to wrong hands through the black market. ..."
"... (Source Comment: According to very sensitive sources, the Libyan rebels are concerned that AQIM may also obtain SPIGOTT wire-guided anti-tank missiles and an unspecified number of Russian anti-tank mines made of plastic and undetectable by anti-mine equipment. This equipment again was coming through Niger and Mali, and was intended for the rebels in Libya. They note that AQIM is very strong in this region of Northwest Africa.) ..."
"... Yet, despite the absolute mess, the Western vultures are racing above the Libyan corpse to take as much as they can. ..."
"... Their primary goal was probably to overthrow the Chinese economic influence and prevent Russia to expand its sphere of influence. Apparently, preventing the destruction of a whole country is not a top priority issue for them. ..."
On March 16, 2016 WikiLeaks launched a searchable archive for 30,322 emails & email attachments
sent to and from Hillary Clinton's private email server while she was Secretary of State. The 50,547
pages of documents span from 30 June 2010 to 12 August 2014. 7,570 of the documents were sent by
Hillary Clinton.
The emails were made available in the form of thousands of PDFs by the US State Department as
a result of a Freedom of Information Act request. The final PDFs were made available on February
29, 2016.
A letter from
Clintons' top advisor Sidney Blumenthal to Hillary Clinton in 2011, proves that the West was
losing control of the situation in Libya, very fast, already since 2011. Dangerous weapons were going
to wrong hands through the black market.
The Western clowns have failed, one more time, to bring stability and led another country to absolute
chaos and destruction. Waves of desperate people are now trying to reach European shores to save
themselves from the hell in Libya, as it happens in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere.
Key parts:
During the early morning of May 2, 2011 sources with access to the leadership of the Libyan
rebellion's ruling Transitional National Council (TNC) stated in confidence that they are concerned
that the death of al Qa'ida leader Osama Bin Laden will inspire al Qa'ida in the Islamic Maghreb
(AQIM) to use weapons they have obtained, which were originally intended for the rebels in Libya,
to retaliate against the United States and its allies for this attack in Pakistan. These individuals
fear that the use of the weapons in this manner will complicate the TNC's relationship with NATO
and the United States, whose support is vital to them in their struggle with the forces of Muammar
al Qaddafi.
These individuals note that the TNC officials are reacting to reports received during the
week of April 25 from their own sources of information, the French General Directorate for External
Security (DGSE), and British external intelligence service (MI-6), stating that AQIM has acquired
about 10 SAM 7- Grail/Streela man-portable air-defense systems (MANPADS or MPADS) from illegal
weapons markets in Western Niger and Northern Mali. These weapons were originally intended for
sale to the rebel forces in Libya, but AQIM operatives were able to meet secretly with these arms
dealers and purchase the equipment. The acquisition of these sophisticated weapons creates a serious
threat to air traffic in Southern Morocco, Algeria, Northern Mali, Western Niger, and Eastern
Mauritania.
(Source Comment: According to very sensitive sources, the Libyan rebels are concerned
that AQIM may also obtain SPIGOTT wire-guided anti-tank missiles and an unspecified number of
Russian anti-tank mines made of plastic and undetectable by anti-mine equipment. This equipment
again was coming through Niger and Mali, and was intended for the rebels in Libya. They note that
AQIM is very strong in this region of Northwest Africa.)
... Libyan rebel commanders are also concerned that the death of Bin Laden comes at a time
when sensitive information indicates that the leaders of AQIM are planning to launch attacks across
North Africa and Europe in an effort to reassert their relevance during the ongoing upheavals
in Libya, as well as the rest of North Africa and the Middle East. They believe the first step
in this campaign was the April 30 bombing of a café in Marrakesh, Morocco that is frequented by
Western tourists.
Their primary goal was probably to overthrow the Chinese economic influence and prevent Russia
to expand its sphere of influence. Apparently, preventing the destruction of a whole country is not
a top priority issue for them.
Hillary election means new wars and death of the US servicemen/servicewomen. So Khan gambit is
much more dangerous that it looks as it implicitly promoted militarism and endless "permanent war
for permanent peace".
Notable quotes:
"... Information warfare uses disinformation and propaganda to condition a population to hate a foreign nation or population with the intent to foment a war, which is the routine "business" of the best known U.S. think tanks. ..."
"... There are two levels to this information war. The first level is by the primary provocateur, such as the Rand Corporation, the American Enterprise Institute and the smaller war instigators found wherever a Kagan family member lurks. They use psychological "suggestiveness" to create a false narrative of danger from some foreign entity with the objective being to create paranoia within the U.S. population that it is under imminent threat of attack or takeover. ..."
"... Once that fear and paranoia is instilled in much of the population, it can then be manipulated to foment a readiness or eagerness for war, in the manner that Joseph Goebbels understood well. ..."
"... Nevertheless, showing the success that our primary war provocateurs have had in fomenting hostility and possibly war is that less militaristic and bellicose Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), ostensibly working for "peace," have adopted this false propaganda theme uncritically. ..."
"... The Carnegie Moscow Center Foundation, which includes Russians on its staff, is a prime example. Lately, it has routinely echoed the more provocative and facially false accusations made against Russia by the outright militaristic and war instigating U.S. think tanks. An example is in a recent article of Carnegie, entitled: " Russia and NATO Must Communicate Better. " ..."
"... So fanatics like the U.S. Generals whom we've seen at the recent political conventions and even worse, General Breedlove, are encouraged to be ever more threatening to the world's populations. ..."
"... Recognizing that must then be coupled with recognition of a U.S. law passed in 2012 providing for military detention of journalists and social activists as the Justice Department conceded in Hedges v. Obama. Add to that what the ACLU recently compelled the U.S. government to reveal in the "Presidential Policy Guidance" and it is plain to see which nation has become most "authoritarian, nationalistic, and assertive." It is the United States. ..."
"... As this was when the Politburo was allegedly at its height in subverting and subjugating foreign countries as foreign policy, it should be exactly on point in describing current U.S. foreign policy. ..."
"... That U.S. think tanks, such as Rand and the American Enterprise Institute, put so much effort into promoting war should not come as a surprise when it is considered their funding is provided by the Military Industrial Complex (MIC) which President Eisenhower warned us about. ..."
U.S. "think tanks" rile up the American public against an ever-shifting roster of foreign "enemies"
to justify wars which line the pockets of military contractors who kick back some profits to the
"think tanks," explains retired JAG Major Todd E. Pierce.
The New York Times took notice recently of the role that so-called "think tanks" play in corrupting
U.S. government policy. Their review of think tanks "identified dozens of examples of scholars
conducting research at think tanks while corporations were paying them to help shape government policy."
Unfortunately, and perhaps predictably, while the Times investigation demonstrates well that the
U.S. is even more corrupt – albeit the corruption is better disguised – than the many foreign countries
which we routinely accuse of corruption, the Times failed to identify the most egregious form of
corruption in our system. That is, those think tanks are constantly engaged in the sort of activities
which the Defense Department identifies as "Information War" when conducted by foreign countries
that are designated by the U.S. as an enemy at any given moment.
Information warfare uses disinformation and propaganda to condition a population to hate a foreign
nation or population with the intent to foment a war, which is the routine "business" of the best
known U.S. think tanks.
There are two levels to this information war. The first level is by the primary provocateur, such
as the Rand Corporation, the American Enterprise Institute and the smaller war instigators found
wherever a Kagan family member lurks. They use psychological "suggestiveness" to create a false
narrative of danger from some foreign entity with the objective being to create paranoia within the
U.S. population that it is under imminent threat of attack or takeover.
Once that fear and paranoia is instilled in much of the population, it can then be manipulated
to foment a readiness or eagerness for war, in the manner that Joseph Goebbels understood well.
The measure of success from such a disinformation and propaganda effort can be seen when the narrative
is adopted by secondary communicators who are perhaps the most important target audience. That is
because they are "key communicators" in PsyOp terms, who in turn become provocateurs in propagating
the false narrative even more broadly and to its own audiences, and becoming "combat multipliers"
in military terms.
It is readily apparent now that Russia has taken its place as the primary target within U.S. sights.
One doesn't have to see the U.S. military buildup on Russia's borders to understand that but only
see the propaganda themes of our "think tanks."
The Role of Rand
A prime example of an act of waging information war to incite actual military attack is the Rand
Corporation, which, incidentally, published a guide to information war and the need to condition
the U.S. population for war back in the 1990s.
A
scene from "Dr. Strangelove," in which the bomber pilot (played by actor Slim Pickens) rides a
nuclear bomb to its target in the Soviet Union.
Rand was founded by, among others, the war enthusiast, Air Force General Curtis LeMay, who was
the model for the character of Gen. Buck Turgidson in the movie "Dr. Strangelove." LeMay once stated
that he would not be afraid to start a nuclear war with Russia and that spirit would seem to be alive
and well at Rand today as they project on to Vladimir Putin our own eagerness for inciting a war.
The particular act of information warfare by Rand is shown in a recent Rand article: "How to
Counter Putin's Subversive War on the West." The title suggests by its presupposition that Putin
is acting in the offensive form of war rather than the defensive form of war. But it is plain to
see he is in the defensive form of war when one looks at the numerous provocations and acts of aggression
carried out by American officials, such as Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and General
Philip Breedlove, and the U.S. and NATO military buildup on Russia's borders.
Within this Rand article however can be found no better example of psychological projection than
this propagandistic pablum that too many commentators, some witless, some not, will predictably repeat:
"Moscow's provocative active measures cause foreign investors and international lenders to see
higher risks in doing business with Russia. Iran is learning a similar, painful lesson as it persists
with harsh anti-Western policies even as nuclear-related sanctions fade. Russia will decide its own
priorities. But it should not be surprised if disregard for others' interests diminishes the international
regard it seeks as an influential great power."
In fact, an objective, dispassionate observation of U.S./Russian policies would show it has been
the U.S. carrying out these "provocative active measures" as the instigator, not Russia.
Nevertheless, showing the success that our primary war provocateurs have had in fomenting hostility
and possibly war is that less militaristic and bellicose Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), ostensibly
working for "peace," have adopted this false propaganda theme uncritically.
The Carnegie Moscow Center Foundation, which includes Russians on its staff, is a prime example.
Lately, it has routinely echoed the more provocative and facially false accusations made against
Russia by the outright militaristic and war instigating U.S. think tanks. An example is in a recent
article of Carnegie, entitled: "Russia and NATO Must Communicate Better."
It begins: "The risk of outright conflict in Europe is higher than it has been for years and the
confrontation between Russia and the West shows no sign of ending. To prevent misunderstandings and
dangerous incidents, the two sides must improve their methods of communication."
Unfortunately, that is now true. But the article's author suggests throughout that each party,
Russia and the U.S./NATO, had an equal hand in the deterioration of relations. He wrote: "The West
needs to acknowledge that the standoff with Russia is not merely the result of Russia turning authoritarian,
nationalistic, and assertive," as if Western officials don't already know that that accusation was
only a propaganda theme for their own populations to cover up the West's aggressiveness.
Blaming Russia
So Americans, such as myself, must acknowledge and confront that the standoff with Russia is not
only not "merely the result of Russia turning authoritarian, nationalistic, and assertive,"
but it is rather, that the U.S. is "turning authoritarian, nationalistic," and even more "assertive,"
i.e., aggressive, toward the world.
Suz Tzu wrote that a "sovereign" must know oneself and the enemy. In the case of the U.S. sovereign,
the people and their elected, so-called representatives, there is probably no "sovereign" in human
history more lacking in self-awareness of their own nation's behavior toward other nations.
So fanatics like the U.S. Generals whom we've seen at the recent political conventions and even
worse, General Breedlove, are encouraged to be ever more threatening to the world's populations.
When that then generates a response from some nation with a tin-pot military relative to our own,
with ours paid for by the privileged financial position we've put ourselves into post-WWII, our politicians
urgently call for even more military spending from the American people to support even more aggression,
all in the guise of "national defense."
Recognizing that must then be coupled with recognition of a U.S. law passed in 2012 providing
for military detention of journalists and social activists as the Justice Department conceded in
Hedges v. Obama. Add to that what the ACLU recently compelled the U.S. government to reveal in the
"Presidential Policy Guidance" and it is plain to see which nation has become most "authoritarian,
nationalistic, and assertive." It is the United States.
The Presidential Policy Guidance "establishes the standard operating procedures for when the United
States takes direct action, which refers to lethal and non-lethal uses of force, including capture
operations against terrorist targets outside the United States and areas of active hostilities."
What other nation, besides Israel probably, has a governmental "Regulation" providing for assassinations
outside "areas of active hostilities?"
It should readily be evident that it is the U.S. now carrying out the vast majority of provocative
active measures and has the disregard for others complained of here. At least for the moment, however,
the U.S. can still hide much of its aggression using the vast financial resources provided by the
American people to the Defense Department to produce sophisticated propaganda and to bribe foreign
officials with foreign aid to look the other way from U.S. provocations.
It is ironic that today, one can learn more about the U.S. military and foreign policy from the
Rand Corporation only by reading at least one of its historical documents, "The Operational Code
of the Politburo." This is described as "part of a major effort at RAND to provide insight into
the political leadership and foreign policy in the Soviet Union and other communist states; the development
of Soviet military strategy and doctrine."
As this was when the Politburo was allegedly at its height in subverting and subjugating foreign
countries as foreign policy, it should be exactly on point in describing current U.S. foreign policy.
That U.S. think tanks, such as Rand and the American Enterprise Institute, put so much effort
into promoting war should not come as a surprise when it is considered their funding is provided
by the Military Industrial Complex (MIC) which President Eisenhower warned us about. That this U.S.
MIC would turn against its own people, the American public, by waging perpetual information war against
this domestic target just to enrich their investors, might have been even more than Eisenhower could
imagine however.
Todd E. Pierce retired as a Major in the US Army Judge Advocate General (JAG) Corps in
November 2012. His most recent assignment was defense counsel in the Office of Chief Defense Counsel,
Office of Military Commissions. [This article first appeared at
http://original.antiwar.com/Todd_Pierce/2016/08/14/inciting-wars-american-way/]
"... an article loaded with innuendo has appeared on the front page of a major U.S. newspaper, located in Washington, DC, stating that Russia is engaged in widespread subversion in Europe and is trying to do the same on behalf of Donald Trump in the United States. But the evidence presented in the story does not support what is being suggested, and spreading tales about foreign-government misbehavior can have unintended consequences. It is particularly shortsighted and even dangerous in this case, as a stable relationship with a nuclear-armed and militarily very capable Moscow should rightly be regarded as critical. ..."
"... It is almost as if some journalists believe that deliberately damaging relations with Russia is a price worth paying to embarrass and defeat Trump. If that is so, they are delusional. ..."
But there is a certain danger inherent in the media's slanting its coverage to such an extent
as to be making the news rather than just reporting it. And when it comes to Russia, the way the
stories are reported becomes critically important, as there is a real risk that
media hostility toward Putin, even if deployed as a way to get at Trump, could produce a conflict
no one actually wants-just as the Hearst and Pulitzer newspapers' yellow journalism,
rife with "melodrama,
romance, and hyperbole," more or less brought about the Spanish-American War.
... ... ...
So an article loaded with innuendo has appeared on the front page of a major U.S. newspaper, located
in Washington, DC, stating that Russia is engaged in widespread subversion in Europe and is trying
to do the same on behalf of Donald Trump in the United States. But the evidence presented in the
story does not support what is being suggested, and spreading tales about foreign-government misbehavior
can have unintended consequences. It is particularly shortsighted and even dangerous in this case,
as a stable relationship with a nuclear-armed and militarily very capable Moscow should rightly be
regarded as critical.
It is almost as if some journalists believe that deliberately damaging relations with Russia is
a price worth paying to embarrass and defeat Trump. If that is so, they are delusional.
Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer, is executive director of the Council for the National
Interest.
"... If Hillary Clinton wins, within a year of her inauguration, she will be under investigation by a special prosecutor on charges of political corruption, thereby continuing a family tradition. ..."
"... Of 154 outsiders whom Clinton phoned or met with in her first two years at State, 85 had made contributions to the Clinton Foundation, and their contributions, taken together, totaled $156 million. ..."
"... Conclusion: access to Secretary of State Clinton could be bought, but it was not cheap. Forty of the 85 donors gave $100,000 or more. Twenty of those whom Clinton met with or phoned dumped in $1 million or more. ..."
"... On his last day in office, January 20, 2001, Bill Clinton issued a presidential pardon to financier-crook and fugitive from justice Marc Rich, whose wife, Denise, had contributed $450,000 to the Clinton Library. ..."
Prediction: If Hillary Clinton wins, within a year of her inauguration, she will be under
investigation by a special prosecutor on charges of political corruption, thereby continuing a family
tradition.
... ... ...
Of 154 outsiders whom Clinton phoned or met with in her first two years at State, 85 had made
contributions to the Clinton Foundation, and their contributions, taken together, totaled $156 million.
Conclusion: access to Secretary of State Clinton could be bought, but it was not cheap. Forty
of the 85 donors gave $100,000 or more. Twenty of those whom Clinton met with or phoned dumped in
$1 million or more.
To get to the seventh floor of the Clinton State Department for a hearing for one's plea, the
cover charge was high. Among those who got face time with Hillary Clinton were a Ukrainian oligarch
and steel magnate who shipped oil pipe to Iran in violation of U.S. sanctions and a Bangladeshi economist
who was under investigation by his government and was eventually pressured to leave his own bank.
The stench is familiar, and all too Clintonian in character.
Recall. On his last day in office, January 20, 2001, Bill Clinton issued a presidential pardon
to financier-crook and fugitive from justice Marc Rich, whose wife, Denise, had contributed $450,000
to the Clinton Library.
The Clintons appear belatedly to have recognized their political peril.
Bill has promised that, if Hillary is elected, he will end his big-dog days at the foundation
and stop taking checks from foreign regimes and entities, and corporate donors. Cash contributions
from wealthy Americans will still be gratefully accepted.
One wonders: will Bill be writing thank-you notes for the millions that will roll in to the family
foundation-on White House stationery?
"... The Clinton approach from hereon in is one of masquerade: appropriate the Bernie Sanders aura, give the impression that the party has somehow miraculously moved leftward, and snap up a stash of votes come November. ..."
"... clinging to the fiction that the Clintons are somehow progressive. This ignores the fundamental fact that Bill Clinton, during his presidential tenure through the 1990s, made parts of the GOP strategy plan relatively progressive by way of comparison. Stunned by this embrace of hard right ideas, the Republicans would be kept out of the White House till 2000. ..."
The reality is that millions were readying themselves to vote for him come November precisely because
he was Sanders, meshed with the ideas of basic social democracy. He betrayed them.
The Clinton approach from hereon in is one of masquerade: appropriate the Bernie Sanders aura,
give the impression that the party has somehow miraculously moved leftward, and snap up a stash of
votes come November.
The approach of the Republicans will be self-defeating, clinging to the fiction that the Clintons
are somehow progressive. This ignores the fundamental fact that Bill Clinton, during his presidential
tenure through the 1990s, made parts of the GOP strategy plan relatively progressive by way of comparison.
Stunned by this embrace of hard right ideas, the Republicans would be kept out of the White House
till 2000.
Be wary of any language of change that is merely the language of promise. Keep in mind that US
politics remains a "binary" choice, an effective non-choice bankrolled by financial power.
"... He's no more a progressive revolutionary than any other member of Congress, nor Washington's bipartisan criminal class, bureaucrats included – Sanders a card-carrying member throughout his deplorable political career. ..."
"... A major concern is the group's tax status as a 501(c)(4) organization able to get large donations from anonymous sources – meaning the usual ones buying influence, letting Sanders pretend to be progressive and revolutionary while operating otherwise. ..."
"... Claire Sandberg was the initiative's organizing director. "I left and others left because we were alarmed that Jeff (Weaver) would mismanage this organization as he mismanaged the campaign," she explained. ..."
"... She fears Weaver will "betray its core purpose by accepting money from billionaires and not remaining grassroots funded and plowing that billionaire cash into TV instead of investing it in building a genuine movement." ..."
"... Vermont GOP vice chairman Brady Toensing blasted Sanders for "preach(ing) transparency and then tr(ying) to set up the most shadowy of shadowy fund-raising organization to support" what he claims to endorse. ..."
"... Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected] . ..."
"... His new book as editor and contributor is titled "Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III." ..."
He's no more a progressive revolutionary than any other member of Congress, nor Washington's
bipartisan criminal class, bureaucrats included – Sanders a card-carrying member throughout his deplorable
political career.
Endorsing Hillary Clinton after rhetorically campaigning against what she represents exposed his
duplicity – a progressive in name only. An opportunist for his own self-interest, he wants his extended
15 minutes of fame made more long-lasting.
Claiming his new initiative "will fight to transform America and advance the progressive agenda
(he) believe(s) in" belies his deplorable House and Senate voting records, on the wrong side of most
major issues, especially supporting most US wars of aggression.
A separate Sanders Institute intends operating like his Our Revolution initiative. Maybe his real
aim is cashing in on his high-profile persona – including a new book due out in mid-November titled
"Our Revolution: A Future To Believe In."
Save your money. Its contents are clear without reading it – the same mumbo jumbo he used while
campaigning.
It excludes his deplorable history of promising one thing, doing another, going along with Washington
scoundrels like Hillary to get along, betraying his loyal supporters – the real Sanders he wants
concealed.
On August 24, The
New York Times said his Our Revolution initiative "has been met with criticism and controversy
over its financing and management."
It's "draw(ing) from the same pool of 'dark money' (he) condemned" while campaigning. After
his former campaign manager Jeff Weaver was hired to lead the group, "the majority of its staff
resigned," said The Times – described as "eight core staff members…"
"The group's entire organizing department quit this week, along with people working in digital
and data positions." They refused to reconsider after Sanders urged them to stay on.
A major concern is the group's tax status as a 501(c)(4) organization able to get large donations
from anonymous sources – meaning the usual ones buying influence, letting Sanders pretend to be progressive
and revolutionary while operating otherwise.
Claire Sandberg was the initiative's organizing director. "I left and others left because we were
alarmed that Jeff (Weaver) would mismanage this organization as he mismanaged the campaign," she
explained.
She fears Weaver will "betray its core purpose by accepting money from billionaires and not remaining
grassroots funded and plowing that billionaire cash into TV instead of investing it in building a
genuine movement."
Vermont GOP vice chairman Brady Toensing blasted Sanders for "preach(ing) transparency and then
tr(ying) to set up the most shadowy of shadowy fund-raising organization to support" what he claims
to endorse.
"What I'm seeing here is a senator who is against big money in politics, but only when" it applies
to others, not himself, Toensing added.
Campaign Legal Center's Paul S. Ryan said "(t)here are definitely some red flags with respect
to the formation of this group…We're in a murky area."
Is Sanders' real aim self-promotion and enrichment? Is his Our Revolution more a scheme than an
honest initiative?
Is it sort of like the Clinton Foundation, Sanders wanting to grab all he can – only much less
able to match the kind of super-wealth Bill and Hillary amassed?
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at
[email protected].
His new book as editor and contributor is titled "Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive
for Hegemony Risks WW III."
After Obama Victory, Shrieking White-Hot Sphere Of Pure Rage Early GOP Front-Runner For 2016
Sources say the screaming orb might be the only potential candidate that would tap into Republicans'
deep-seated, seething fury after this election.
Friday, August 26, 2016 at 03:49
PM
Obama certainly did nothing to put US into the nightmare of peace and prosperity, while Killary
will threw the US into perpetual war with bigger adversaries than Sunni goatherds.
What are
US "agents" doing on the ground in Syria?
"... Her dismal trustworthiness ratings strongly suggest the people want to see stricter ethical standards from her. She ignores that at her own peril ..."
"... the Clinton Foundation (private) was selling access to the Secretary of State (public). ..."
"... That's called influence peddling, and if you follow Zephyr Teachout on corruption (and not the majority in Citizens United ) that's a textbook case of corruption. The Clinton Foundation enables as capital in the form of wealth to be converted into social capital in the form of access (and reputation laundering). Which is how the Beltway works, and how an oligarchy works. As we have seen, liberals accept this completely, as do conservatives, although the left does not. ..."
"... On the AP story about the Clinton Foundation, the State Department refused AP access to all visitor logs. Then Clinton campaign surrogates complained that AP based its story on incomplete visitor logs. And so it goes in HillaryLand [ The Intercept ]. Lots more detail in this story, well worth a read. ..."
"Watchdogs warn of 'serious' conflicts of interest for Clinton Foundation" [The
Hill]. "Chelsea Clinton's role on the board will only perpetuate the 'pay to play' perceptions
and accusations, the watchdogs said. 'As long as the Clinton Foundation is tied to the family,'
[Craig Holman, government affairs lobbyist at Public Citizen] said, 'very wealthy' people and
special interests 'will try to find a way to throw money at the feet' of the Clinton family. And
if Chelsea Clinton remains on the board - especially if she retains a fundraising roll - 'she
would be the avenue.'" This is so wrong. How else is Chelsea supposed to raise money for her Senate
run? Answer me that!
UPDATE "Chelsea Clinton would remain on the board of her family's foundation even if her mother
is elected president, a spokeswoman said Thursday" [AP].
"Editorial: Clintons should end ties to charity " [Charlotte
Observer]. "[Clinton] seems not to recognize that while a good lawyer focuses on what the
law allows, a good politician focuses on what the people want. Her dismal trustworthiness ratings
strongly suggest the people want to see stricter ethical standards from her. She ignores that
at her own peril."
UPDATE "The key to understanding why good government advocates are upset about the new revelations
is to first get past the argument that Clinton Foundation donors were transactionally rewarded
for their gifts" [Vox].
"This is not what my sources argued. Instead, the heart of their complaint was that the foundation's
contributors appear to have gained a greater ability to make their voices heard by Clinton's State
Department by virtue of donating to her husband's private foundation."
In other words, the Clinton Foundation (private) was selling access to the Secretary of State
(public).
That's called influence peddling, and if you follow
Zephyr Teachout on corruption (and not the majority in
Citizens United)
that's a textbook case of corruption. The Clinton Foundation enables as capital in the form of
wealth to be converted into social capital in the form of access (and reputation laundering).
Which is how the Beltway works, and how an oligarchy works. As we have seen, liberals accept this
completely, as do conservatives, although the left does not.
"Democrats embrace the logic of 'Citizens United'" [Lawrence Lessig,
WaPo]. 2015, even more true today.
See also Sirota from 2015.
UPDATE What liberals and Democrats used to believe, before the giant sucking pit of need that
is the Clinton campaign made them lose their minds [image of tiny little hands waving, faint screams,
as they circle downward in the vortex]. The dissenting opinion from Citizens United: (Twitter)
Justice Stevens' dissent in Citizens United (via @ggreenwald ) shreds the central argument of Hillary's
defenders
On numerous occasions we have recognized Congress' legitimate interest in preventing the money that
is spent on elections from exerting an "'undue influence on an officeholder's judgment"' and from
creating "4he appearance of such influence,"' beyond the sphere of quid pro quo relationships. Id.,
at 150; see also. e.g., id., at 143-144. 152-154; Colorado II, 533 U. S.. at 441; Shrink Missouri.
528 U. S., at 389. Corruption can take many forms. Bribery may be the paradigm case. But the difference
between selling a vote and selling access is a matter of degree, not kind. And selling access is
not qualitatively different from giving special preference to those who spent money on one's behalf.
Corruption operates along a spectrum, and the majority's apparent belief that quid pro quo arrangements
can be neatly demarcated from other improper influences docs not accord with the theory or reality
of politics. It certainly does not accord with the record Congress developed in passing BCRA. a record
that stands as a remarkable testament to the energy and ingenuity with which corporations, unions,
lobbyists, and politicians may go about scratching each other's backs - and which amply supported
Congress' determination to target a limited set of especially destructive
UPDATE From The Blogger Formerly KnownAs Who Is IOZ?
On the AP story about the Clinton Foundation, the State Department refused AP access to all
visitor logs. Then Clinton campaign surrogates complained that AP based its story on incomplete
visitor logs. And so it goes in HillaryLand [The
Intercept]. Lots more detail in this story, well worth a read.
UPDATE "Clinton Foundation Investigation Update: Key Details About Financial And Political
Dealings" [David Sirota,
International Business Times]. Good wrap-up from Sirota, who's been all over this.
UPDATE "On the campaign trial, Clinton is using a private airplane owned by a Wall Street banker
and donor to get to fund-raisers this week on the West Coast" [New
York Post]. How cozy.
"There is no evidence she's a crook". "There's no evidence that she gave favors for money….."
"A vote against Hillary is a vote for Trump".
There were similar people in Germany 70 years ago who were saying "Hitler did some really good
things, before he started killing Jews and invading other countries……."
This stuff makes me want to pull my hair out.
That's not the way it works, dammit. There isn't going to be a "smoking gun" most of the time.
Unless they do something by being arrogant or stupid, and even then there will be apologists/head
in the sand types.
A million dollar gift to the Clinton Foundation, gives you things that won't be in any written
contract. It goes without saying, like Kabuki theater.
Like her book advances and speaking fees. Absolutely nothing Hillary Clinton has to say is
worth $250,000. It's a cover to pay for future services rendered.
The burgeoning neolib dog whistle "alt-right" is short for "a$$hole who thinks Clinton should
go to jail for 1000 times the misconduct that would get that a$$hole 10 years hard time".
Neoliberals
use the term "alt-right" as shorthand for those who don't drink the Clinton neocon Kool-Aid.
The bigotry of warmongering neoliberals against anyone who disagrees. There isn't enough fascism going around?
"... FBI Admits Clinton Used Software Designed To "Prevent Recovery" And "Hide Traces Of" Deleted Emails ..."
"... Assange: Clinton's Campaign is Full of 'Disturbing' Anti-Russia 'Hysteria' http://sputniknews.com/us/20160826/1044654512/assange-clinton-russia-hysteria.html ..."
AUGUST 25, 2016
State Admits Benghazi Material in New Cache of Emails Clinton Failed to Produce
(Washington DC) – Judicial Watch today announced that a federal court has ordered the
State Department to review newly found Clinton emails and turn over responsive records
by September 13. And, in two other Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits, the State
Department is scheduled to release additional emails from former Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton's non-state.gov email system beginning September 30. In a court filing
this week, the State Department admitted it had found Benghazi-related documents among
the 14,900 Clinton emails and attachments uncovered by the FBI that Mrs. Clinton deleted
and withheld from the State Department.
~ ~ ~ ~
Is this not a reminder of the missing 18 minutes in the Nixon tapes that helped to put
him down?
74 days ahead; so breathe normally. They could use the same route as those FBI Vince
Foster investigation docs – vanished, disappeared from the National Archives.
"... Soon after the correspondence about a meeting, Clinton's State Department significantly increased arms export authorizations to the country's autocratic government, even as that nation moved to crush pro-democracy protests . ..."
Emails just released by the State Department appear to show Clinton Foundation officials brokering
a meeting between then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and a top military leader of Bahrain
- a Middle Eastern country that is a major foundation
donor
.
Soon after the correspondence about a meeting, Clinton's State Department significantly
increased arms export authorizations to the country's autocratic government, even as that nation
moved to crush pro-democracy
protests
.
Those who already think Clinton is too sleazy won't be voting for her, but those who
think she is too sick, or that she will be impeached, might
Notable quotes:
"... I would like to vote for Hillary because she's already harmless and looks friendly with her mild seizures, it's like nehi-nehi Indian dance. But I am so afraid of her corporate backers that they will exploit Hillary and Bill's weakness as ageing senior illuminati couple, how can you unite the Fed with CIA, FBI and US military, not too mention Wall Street. ..."
"... Are you talking about Hillary and Bill Clinton? Your are describing Hillary and her politics of corruption, bad judgment; incompetence, job outsourcing and total disregard for American people. if anyone is remotely suitable to become POTUS it is her. Only those who really hate America will be happy with its further decline and will vote for Hillary. However, Trump will become America's next President. ..."
"... After 40 years of EU lies they are more than imbued to being lied to by politicians - no wonder the people are utterly and totally disillusioned with the established parties who show such appalling contempt for the people and democracy. Nothing better explains the growing success of mavericks like Trump and Farage: frankly the people need them as a safety valve for their frustrations. ..."
"... Ok, let's forget that Farage was the only major political party leader to stand up for democracy. We also should forget that, despite all the horrific personal abuse he suffered, he carried on year after year against the almighty power of the establishment and managed to win us our sovereignty back. We definitely must forget that he is a libertarian and his party is the ONLY major political party that bans all previous members of racist parties from applying. ..."
"... Her beliefs change with her lobbyist's wishes, she lies openly on camera and in office, puts donors and enormous backhanders before the electorate that voted for her, uses her Clinton Foundation as a cream skimming perk where all cash is welcome and Gov policy a Clinton Foundation sellable asset and entertains despots, juntas and murderous thugs using State Dept as a gun-for-hire. ..."
"... Neocons seek power through creating social division so can never win more than a small majority and only for a short time. Exhibit A: Tony Useless Abbott, worst PM in Australia's history. ..."
"... Quote: "For the duration of my appointment as Secretary if I am confirmed, I will not participate personally and substantially in any particular matter involving specific parties in which The William J. Clinton Foundation (or the Clinton Global Initiative) is a party or represents a party, unless I am first authorized to participate," -- Hillary Clinton. ..."
"... The ethics pledge Hillary violated at least 85 times, but go ahead and believe that she won't ever do it again... ..."
I would like to vote for Hillary because she's already harmless and looks friendly with her
mild seizures, it's like nehi-nehi Indian dance. But I am so afraid of her corporate backers
that they will exploit Hillary and Bill's weakness as ageing senior illuminati couple, how
can you unite the Fed with CIA, FBI and US military, not too mention Wall Street.
The real problem here is a political vacuum so huge you could fit trump's ego inside it. Just
a guess but from what I've seen this last year about half of trump supporters are wwhat could
be called die-hard racists. The one major failing of the workers movement that Sanders started
in the US was an inability to pull off the 50% of trump supporters who are not fundamentally
racist. T
here was no major appeal to the more rural agricultural communities by Sanders that
I ever heard. They may only represent 20% of the population but they are the backbone of the
US as they are unable to compete with large scale corporate farming they suffer the same ideological
loss that the rest of the working class suffer from. If the progressive movement cannot or
will not appeal to this group through small farming and organic farming subsidies then they
will go with someone like trump even though he promises them nothing. T
hey will, in the absence
of an alternative political path just choose 'f**k you' for their candidate. Probably too late
this time around but in the future the progressive movement needs to include these people or
they will be the 'third rail' the left dies on.
My husband is a liar and a cheat. He has cheated on me from the beginning and when I confront
him, he denies everything. What's worse, everyone knows he cheats on me. It's so humiliating.
Also, since he lost his job 14 years ago, he hasn't even looked for a new one. All he does
all day is smoke cigars, play golf, cruise around and shoot ball with his buddies and has sex
with hookers, while I work so hard to pay our bills.
Since our daughter went away to college and then got married; he doesn't even pretend to like
me, and hints that I may be a lesbian. What should I do?
Signed:
Confused
Answer..
Dear Confused:
Grow up and dump him.
You don't need him anymore!
Good grief woman, you're running for President of the United States!
Are you talking about Hillary and Bill Clinton? Your are describing Hillary and her politics
of corruption, bad judgment; incompetence, job outsourcing and total disregard for American
people. if anyone is remotely suitable to become POTUS it is her. Only those who really hate
America will be happy with its further decline and will vote for Hillary. However, Trump will
become America's next President.
Listen to his peaches - that would be time better spent than to spend time of defending
Hillary, who soon be either behind the bars or forgotten.
After 40 years of EU lies they are more than imbued to being lied to by politicians -
no wonder the people are utterly and totally disillusioned with the established parties who show
such appalling contempt for the people and democracy. Nothing better explains the growing success
of mavericks like Trump and Farage: frankly the people need them as a safety valve for their frustrations.
Nigel is not making any threats to USA as Obama did in UK (you'll be in back of the queue).
It was not Nigel who spoke about obama's ancestry. America has a tough choice Trump/Clinton. My brother
lives in Florida - he says he wouldn't vote for Clinton.
I voted UKIP and for LEAVE and think Nigel
Farage will go down in history as one of the most important men in politics for a very long time.
We supported him because he spoke for us and the other politicians stopped listening to us. These
snidey nasty comments are typical of leftie guardian readers. After all - they're probably going
to vote for Corby who hasn't a cat in hells chance of ever being PM!
Yes, you're right. It's this sentiment that has pushed the proletariat into the arms of Trump and
Farage. Funnily enough, during my time working with the EU there was a very strong push towards less
democracy and more population management. Most of it is being done via education and other soft power
platforms - reforming children's attitudes, self-awareness training, behavioral feedback and gender
confusion. This is being done under the guise of tolerance, diversity and identity politics. It keeps
the masses fighting amongst themselves while those in charge of them steal everything.
Ok, let's forget that Farage was the only major political party leader to stand up for democracy. We also should forget that, despite all the horrific personal abuse he suffered, he carried on year
after year against the almighty power of the establishment and managed to win us our sovereignty
back. We definitely must forget that he is a libertarian and his party is the ONLY major political party
that bans all previous members of racist parties from applying.
Now hand me some of that racism juice and point me to the bandwagon!
Her beliefs change with her lobbyist's wishes, she lies openly on camera and in office, puts donors
and enormous backhanders before the electorate that voted for her, uses her Clinton Foundation as
a cream skimming perk where all cash is welcome and Gov policy a Clinton Foundation sellable asset
and entertains despots, juntas and murderous thugs using State Dept as a gun-for-hire.
I see the Bremain crowd still out for some revenge. And who would Hillary invite from "Brits?"
Let's face it most Americans have no clue about other foreign leaders unless they are being splashed
across their TV screens as some evil incarnates ready to be bombed by American bombs. Thus Guardian
cheap shot at Farage as unknown is just cheap.
Indeed the whole reporting of that meeting between Farage and Trump is distasteful for a newsmedia
like Guardian. Purely designed to belittle Farage and, of course, portray Trump as a non-starter
in the race for White House.
Btw, i was going through list of media giants that have contributed and donated to the Clinton
Foundation. Let me confirm whether Guardian or its associates/affiliates are on the list!
The MSM is trying to make Hillary look popular at the few rallies she conducts when the reality is
her crowds are tiny.
You then have Trump doing multiple rallies a day where he regularly fills large sports stadiums.
It just goes to show how corrupt the MSM is and how they manipulate footage to create false impressions.
Neocons seek power through creating social division so can never win more than a small majority
and only for a short time. Exhibit A: Tony Useless Abbott, worst PM in Australia's history.
Isn't it strange to see so much bile and bitterness being directed towards Mr Farage? We've had
the referendum and Brexit won. Please can the many complainers here show some respect to the millions
who voted and who did so of the own volition (and without the nonsense of being under some spell
cast by imaginary bogeymen!). Can those complaining not accept that after 40 years of effort to
make the EU work people are entitled to say - sorry, its over - but hopefully we can still be
friends.
Farage was a good choice for a support speaker. He is the one person in Europe who has produced
a stunning electoral upset and then quit the scene. All the pollsters got it wrong.
It's distressing that some members of the audience knew nothing about the Brexit, despite efforts
by The Guardian and many others to relieve their ignorance. However, might not the same criticism
be applied to most American voters, of whatever ilk?
Quote: "For the duration of my appointment as Secretary if I am confirmed, I will not participate
personally and substantially in any particular matter involving specific parties in which The
William J. Clinton Foundation (or the Clinton Global Initiative) is a party or represents a party,
unless I am first authorized to participate," -- Hillary Clinton.
The ethics pledge Hillary
violated at least 85 times, but go ahead and believe that she won't ever do it again...
"... And Mankiw was the economic adviser to Mitt Romney, the elitist Nazi who said 47% of the American people were his enemies and who was in favour of economic policies that would stripmine the country to put all its wealth in the offshore bank accounts of the kleptocrats. ..."
"... Which btw makes you wonder how anyone can call Mankiw an "economist". The guy's a Republican buttboy and that's all he is. ..."
"... Mankiw didn't enable the Republicans alone. Every two-bit intro macro prof who teaches from Mankiw has aided him. ..."
"... Real Time whatever at wsj are looking for reasons to keep the GOPster/free trade type progress going! A reason to oppose Trump and vote for Hillary? ..."
"... Trump is a very controversial figure, but he can be viewed as a disruptive politician and might put some pressure on neoliberal, and especially neocons, before they coopt him. Think of him as a proponent of Brexit II. Making the elections essentially a referendum on neoliberal globalization. ..."
"who has broken with many of the GOP's traditional positions on economic policy"
Not seeing much to like in "the GOP's traditional positions" where does this leave me? The
truth is all 45 surviving former members of the CEA can be wrong without making Trump right.
Indeed, see how far the US has "progressed" with these guys' advising since Nixon!
Decision Overload
When the deeply established insider "advisers" are against him, you can bet that he is an angry
outsider same as the rest of us. Look!
The most inefficient thing in our taxation system is the taxing of poor folks. Do you recognize
what that accomplishes? Poor folk taxation takes money away from the poor person's landlord, his
power company, his telephone company and more much more -- just slows down the economy plus administrative
overhead that is the cost of slamming on the brakes.
The Donald has proposed a $25,000 standard deduction which will protect the low-rollers who
have no deductions from tax-shelters. $50,000 for married couples! What a savings! What a relief
from the churning that has evolved from smoke and mirror politics.
"Harvard University economist Gregory Mankiw, who chaired the council under George W. Bush and
has been mentioned as a possible future Fed chairman, said recently on his blog that he would
not support Mr. Trump.
"I have Republican friends who think that things couldn't be worse than doubling down on Obama
policies under Hillary Clinton. And, like them, I am no fan of the left's agenda of large government
and high taxes," Mr. Mankiw wrote. "But they are wrong: Things could be worse. And I fear they
would be under Mr. Trump.""
Mankiw and Krugman mini-me Pro Growth Liberal agree on something.
And Mankiw was the economic adviser to Mitt Romney, the elitist Nazi who said 47% of the American
people were his enemies and who was in favour of economic policies that would stripmine the country
to put all its wealth in the offshore bank accounts of the kleptocrats.
Which btw makes you wonder how anyone can call Mankiw an "economist". The guy's a Republican
buttboy and that's all he is.
Mankiw didn't enable the Republicans alone. Every two-bit intro macro prof who teaches from
Mankiw has aided him.
I laugh when I imagine undergrad econ ten years from now: the textbooks will be full of Murray
Rothbard and Ayn Rand, and undergrad sessional lecturers will be drowning in cognitive dissonance
as they try to remain straight-faced while lecturing on the benefits of the gold standard and
eliminating the Federal Reserve.
pgl :
Stiglitz supports Clinton over Trump. No surprise but this is:
"I have known personally every Republican president since Richard Nixon," said Harvard University
economist Martin Feldstein, who chaired the council under President Ronald Reagan. "They all
showed a real understanding of economics and international affairs".
OK - Reagan did get a degree in economics but Krugman - who worked for Feldstein a the CEA
- tells a different story about this White House when it comes to macroeconomics, the role of
monetary policy, and in particular what was happening with the international aspects of our economy
during Reagan's first term. Volcker - once he was done with his damaging tight monetary policy
- tried to make a deal where he would lower interest rates in exchange for a reversal of that
1981 tax cut. The Reagan White House had no clue what the FED chair was even proposing even though
it would have been a very good idea.
ilsm :
Real Time whatever at wsj are looking for reasons to keep the GOPster/free trade type progress
going! A reason to oppose Trump and vote for Hillary?
Dowd is right! The best thuglican is a democrat.
likbez :
Hillary Clinton is dyed-in-wool neoliberal. So all she can do is to kick the can down the road.
All her elections promises are not worth the cost of the electrical energy that is used to depict
them on our screens.
Trump is a very controversial figure, but he can be viewed as a disruptive politician and
might put some pressure on neoliberal, and especially neocons, before they coopt him. Think of
him as a proponent of Brexit II. Making the elections essentially a referendum on neoliberal globalization.
If he wins, a lot of Washington neocon parasites might lose jobs (the cash for the neocons
comes mostly from defense contractors), that's why they crossed the party lines and that's why
neoliberal propaganda campaign against him is so vicious. Khan gambit was a nasty attempt to speedboat
him. It failed.
While Hillary gets a free pass from neoliberal press (ABC, CBS and NBC). Neoliberal presstitutes
(like George Stephanopoulos ) are especially vicious, behave like rabid dogs. Just listen to his
interview of Trump about Khan gambit at Democratic convention.
There is another view on Trump that deserves attention:
=== quote ===
Lupita 08.04.16 at 4:23 am 167
I think Trump is afraid the imperial global order presided by the US is about to crash
and thinks he will be able to steer the country into a soft landing by accepting that other
world powers have interests, by disengaging from costly and humiliating military interventions,
by re-negotiating trade deals, and by stopping the mass immigration of poor people. Plus
a few well-placed bombs .
Much has been written about the internet revolution, about the impact of people having
access to much more information than before. The elite does not recognize this and is still
organizing political and media campaigns as if it were 1990, relying on elder statesmen
like Blair, Bush, Mitterrand, Clinton, and Obama to influence public opinion. They are failing
miserably, to the point of being counterproductive.
I don't think something as parochial as racism is sustaining Trump, but rather the fear
of the loss of empire by a population with several orders of magnitude more information
and communication than in 2008, even 2012.
=== end of quote ===
But it is the deep state that dictates the course of the US, both in foreign policy and domestically,
probably from 1963, so the president now is more of a ceremonial figure that adds legitimacy to
the actual rule of deep state.
In any case discussion Hillary vs. Trump and questions of economics (neoliberalism vs. some
retrenchment in the direction of the New Deal) we should not miss the key, defining this election
fact that Hillary is a war criminal (crimes against peace are war crimes). See
http://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/nuremberg-trials
From this point of view voting for Hillary is highly undesirable as this is an implicit cooperation
with the war criminal. That does not mean that people should vote for Trump. Who has his own set
of warts.
It has been suggested the appropriators owned by the war profiteers won't allocate money to fuel
the transports that take America's Soldiers and Marines home.
The lesser evil killed no one with a vote believing in fake WMD's. The lesser evil is not experienced
in keeping the neocons happy.
The lesser evil may decide body bags forever is not strategy.
Trump is the lesser evil.
Imagine what happens if the commander in chief says: stand down and steam for Pearl Harbor,
San Diego and Alameda.
What would all those US retirees do if the commander in chief shuttered those brigades in Germany?
If the crooked DNC cared about families of US' slain.....
The Khan con angered 5990 Gold Star families who are not Muslim and whose star are the result
of Hillary voting for AUMF righteously and acting out since 2003.
As well as veterans!
Gold star families why not pick 1/5999 rather than 1/14 Muslims?
'My view is Hillary is far more aligned with the types of issues that are important to the
defense industry than Trump is'
Employees of 25 of the nation's largest defense companies-such as Lockheed
Martin, General Dynamics, and Raytheon-are choosing to fill the coffers of
Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton over those of her rival, GOP
nominee Donald Trump.
That's
according to a new analysis by Politico, published Wednesday
and based on federal campaign finance filings.
Indeed, Politico found that Clinton-whose
hawkish tendencies have been
front-and-center during the
2016 campaign-is leading Trump "by a ratio of 2-to-1 in campaign
donations from employees working for defense giants like Lockheed Martin and
General Dynamics. That's a sharp turnaround from 2012, when defense
contractors gave more to then-Republican nominee Mitt Romney than to
President Barack Obama."
Specifically, employees of those 25 firms have donated $93,000 to
Clinton, compared with $46,000 for Trump. "Clinton's donor rolls also
include more than two dozen top defense executives, while Trump's show just
two," Politico adds.
It's no wonder why defense giants prefer Clinton.
"My view is Hillary is
far more aligned with the types of issues that are important to the defense
industry than Trump is," Linda Hudson-who ran the U.S. branch of British
defense firm BAE Systems, the Pentagon's eighth largest contractor, from
2009 to 2014-told Politico.
And an anonymous lobbyist told the publication: "With Hillary Clinton we
have some sense of where she would go, and with Trump we have none."
Signs abound
pointing to "where she would go." As commentator JP Sottile
wrote earlier this month of Clinton, "she's weaponized the
State Department. She really
likes regime change. And her nominating convention not only embraced the
military, but it sanctified the very Gold Star families that neocon-style
interventionism creates."
Or, as investigative journalist Robert Parry
declared in June: "Clinton is an unabashed war hawk who has shown no
inclination to rethink her pro-war attitudes."
Parry quoted the New York Times as
calling Clinton "the vessel into which many interventionists are pouring
their hopes."
And defense contractors, too, it seems.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share
Alike 3.0 License
"... Early in her term, the State Department called one arms deal for a Clinton Foundation donor, Saudi Arabia, a "top priority" for Clinton. ..."
"... The Associated Press on Tuesday reported that a review of calendar items shows "more than half the people outside the government who met with Hillary Clinton while she was secretary of state gave money - either personally or through companies or groups - to the Clinton Foundation." Those 85 donors - which did not include foreign government contributors - gave up to $156 million, according to the news service. ..."
"... The Washington Post in 2014 reported that in 2010, Clinton pushed Russia to approve a $3.7 billion purchase from Boeing. Two months after the deal was solidified, reported the newspaper, Boeing announced a $900,000 contribution to the Clinton Foundation. ..."
As the rhetoric about the Clintons' public and private financial dealings intensifies, here is a
brief review of the major investigative reporting that has been done about the Clinton Foundation.
Arms exports: Last year, an
International Business Times
series documented the ways in which many major foreign governments that had donated to the Clinton
Foundation ended up receiving a boost in arms export authorizations from the Clinton-led State Department.
Federal law explicitly
designates the secretary of state as "responsible for the continuous supervision and general direction
of sales" of arms, and the State Department itself
says it "is responsible for
managing all government-to-government transfers of military equipment to other countries." Early
in her term, the State Department
called one arms deal for
a Clinton Foundation donor, Saudi Arabia, a "top priority" for Clinton.
Many of the donor countries that benefited were those that the State Department criticized on
human rights grounds, including Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. Some of the same countries received boosts
in arms classified as "toxicological agents" as they worked to crush pro-democracy protests during
the Arab Spring uprisings.
Donor access: The
Associated Press on Tuesday reported that a review of calendar items shows "more than half the
people outside the government who met with Hillary Clinton while she was secretary of state gave
money - either personally or through companies or groups - to the Clinton Foundation." Those 85 donors
- which did not include foreign government contributors - gave up to $156 million, according to the
news service. The AP story followed the release of
emails this week that appeared to show Clinton Foundation officials working with State Department
officials to broker meetings between foundation donors and Hillary Clinton. It also followed an
ABC News report on a Clinton Foundation donor being appointed by the State Department to an intelligence
advisory panel "even though he had no obvious experience in the field."
Business dealings: In May, the
Wall Street Journal reported that the Clinton Foundation "set up a financial commitment that
benefited a for-profit company part-owned by people with ties to the Clintons." The newspaper noted
that former President Bill Clinton "personally endorsed the company, Energy Pioneer Solutions Inc.,
to then-Energy Secretary Steven Chu for a federal grant that year" - and that the company ultimately
received an $812,000 grant. While the Clinton Foundation openly works with corporations and governments
on its philanthropic projects, the Journal notes that "under federal law, tax-exempt charitable organizations
aren't supposed to act in anyone's private interest but instead in the public interest."
Promoting corporate donors: In 2015, IBT
reported that while Clinton Foundation donor Cisco faced criticism over its work with China's
autocratic government, Clinton's State Department honored the company for "outstanding corporate
citizenship, innovation and democratic principles." Her department also delivered government contracts
to the company. The
Washington Post in 2014 reported that in 2010, Clinton pushed Russia to approve a $3.7 billion
purchase from Boeing. Two months after the deal was solidified, reported the newspaper, Boeing announced
a $900,000 contribution to the Clinton Foundation.
Already, however, the whole enterprise is in turmoil, thanks to the resignations of several of its
top staff members even before it was off the ground, who were angered by the decision of Senator
Sanders and his wife, Jane Sanders, to appoint his former campaign manager, John Weaver, as its top
officer over their very clearly expressed objections.
Among those heading to the exits was Claire
Sandberg, who was the digital organising director of the campaign and the organising director of
Our Revolution. Her entire department of four people quit, in fact.
She and the others who joined the revolt, including Kenneth Pennington, who was to be the digital
director of Our Revolution, were opposed to Mr Weaver's involvement both for reasons of personality
clashes and because they felt he mismanaged the Senator's campaign in part by spending too much money
on television advertising and failing to harness grassroots support.
They also contended that Mr Weaver would only exacerbate an additional concern they had with the
new entity namely that it has been set up as a so-called 501(c)(4) organisation, which, because of
its charitable status, is in theory not allowed to work directly with the election of political candidates
and is able to receive large sums from anonymous donors.
A large part of the premise of Mr Sanders's campaign for president had been precisely to wean
political campaigns from the flood of dark money that flows into them. That the Our Revolution entity
has been set up precisely to take such money looked to them like a betrayal.
According to several reports a majority of the staff appointed to run the new outfit resigned
as soon as the appointment of Mr Weaver was confirmed on Monday
"... Some Stooges have expressed a preference for Trump over Killary ..."
"... Bannon, personally, has not been accused of anti-Semitism, however. ..."
"... He's just less likely to touch off a global war than Clinton is. What happens to the United States of America is not my concern, and if a series of catastrophic national-leadership decisions cause it to collapse, that is America's business. I'm not saying it would not affect me, because it most certainly would – the collapse of the world's largest (or second-largest) single economy would affect everyone. ..."
Some Stooges have expressed a preference for Trump over Killary,…BUt iF–and I say IF -Trump
embraces these "alt-right' vermin…then he is just as unfit to be POTUS as Killary..
"There are, of course, many strains of thinking under the "alt-right" umbrella. Some factions
are preoccupied with a return to "traditional values," while others espouse a philosophy called
"Human Biodiversity": the belief that there are significant biological differences between people
of different races, which justifies treating them differently. (The other name for this is "scientific
racism.") Anti-Semitism is common, in various forms, ranging from Holocaust denial to full-bore
denunciations of Jews as agents of the collapse of white Christian society. Bannon, personally,
has not been accused of anti-Semitism, however.
The common thread, however, that connects members of these different factions is a shared desire
to protect Western civilization from what many refer to as "white genocide." This manifests in
opposition to things like immigration and multiculturalism, as well as a steadfast aversion to
political correctness and to establishment politics of all kinds, including Republican."
The 'alt-right' need to be exterminated every bit as much as fascist warmonger vermin.
Absolutely. Trump would make a terrible president. He's just less likely to touch off a global
war than Clinton is. What happens to the United States of America is not my concern, and if a
series of catastrophic national-leadership decisions cause it to collapse, that is America's business.
I'm not saying it would not affect me, because it most certainly would – the collapse of the world's
largest (or second-largest) single economy would affect everyone.
But it is up to Americans to
determine their nation's course, and I'm sure they do not welcome meddling any more than any other
country does. I will say their political crisis is appalling, and that their choice has come down
to Trump or Clinton is beyond appalling, but in the end it is Americans who must take responsibility
for that. That is America's business, and all of my disagreements with America stem from its activities
outside its own borders.
Also, all those rabbiting on about Russia showing a clear preference for Trump should take
note of Europe's oft-expressed and extremely public endorsement of Clinton.
Yes…this is a **real ** dilemma….super corrupt pathological lying (barking) warmonger psycho….OR….prone
to be manipulated by white supremacist ideology nutjob…
Needa Shreerangath
3
days ago
i can't believe this crooked woman run for
president!
Bungis Albondigas
2
days ago
When the BBC reporters broke news of Gaddafis
murder, they kind of all did it with a little glee,
and the tone of their voice was one of excitement
and bemusement, more so than one that would be
typically used when reporting on a statesmen's
death. But it was quite obvious to the public that
the whole thing stunk worse than a rotten tomato
covered in ghost queef. Sure, it's not like Gaddafi
was a particularly nice man to those who wanted to
ruin his country. But he didn't kill them because he
wanted to be Evil, he killed them because he was
protecting his country from both the meddling of
money-motivated foreign powers, and filthy terrorist
scum, the kind that has been blowing up the EU and
US recently. He was loved, in a country where on any
hill at any given time, some kid could have shot his
head off with an old gun. But that never happened.
He didn't need no pope mobile. In the end, he was
gutted alive in the sewers. Would the news reporters
sound happy if Hilary or Donald suffered the same
fate? Would you make a home invader who killed a
family member a cup of tea, or lock them in the
basement and kill them?
fire5479
1
day ago
Liar, liar her pantsuits are on fire.
MICKEY MARQUEZ
2
days ago
pinokio seems as a innocent boy comparing with this
demonic creation Hillary
The State Department must start releasing the additional 15,000 emails uncovered during the
FBI's investigation into
Hillary
Clinton 's private server starting on Sept. 13.
...
As she faces increasing scrutiny, allies acknowledge it highlights the larger problem that
looms over her campaign: Trust.
...the foundation and email controversies are both problems for Clinton.
Pomkiwi
GreatUncle
Aug 25, 2016 7:02 PM
As a matter of habit I run CC Cleaner after I close my browser. Imagine
my surprise when I get a message 'Firefox is still running - needs to be
closed to continue cleaning'. I click ok close it then get a message '
not closing would you like to force it to close?' That works - perhaps I
should disconnect my router to be sure lol.
GreatUncle
css1971
Aug 25, 2016 6:21 PM
Got to admit I use CC cleaner and leave it to always destructively clean.
Then by the time more data is overewritten hundreds of times you exceed the
20 layer or so limit of being able to peal bakc the layer.
Microsoft is
lazy or more to the point it intentionally leaves you exposed for failing to
do this as standard.
Makes the spooks job alot harder.
Dre4dwolf
Aug 25, 2016 5:53 PM
All the emails are out there on the internet, the server had no encryption, out
there somewhere is some nerd with all of Hillary Clintons Emails hanging on his
wall as a testament to his great conquest over " the server ".
Hillary
Clintons emails are like pokemon, they are all over the place, you just gota
"catch um all " by finding people willing to "trade".
Also, there are always two copies on an email chain
1 copy on Hillary Clintons Server
and
1 copy on the recipient/sending server, you need two servers to have a "
back and forth" conversation on the internet between two different email
domains.
So one way to get all the emails would be:
1) Compile a list of known email contacts from the pool of emails you
already have
2) Get a judge to sign a warrant to force the domains / hosting companies of
those email contacts to turn over their data
3) ? Profit as 90% of the missing emails are recovered?
There is a very small chance that the 30,000 emails missing were each from
30,000 unique people.
Most likeley its less than 1000 contacts and most of them will have benign
emails associated with them that were not deleted (so they are in the contact
list pool).
The NSA has all this data, everyone knows the NSA has all this data, thus
far most of the leaked emails PROBABLY COME FROM NSA AGENTS who are concerned
about the future of the country.
asierguti
Aug 25, 2016 5:48 PM
I worked for a big data recovery company, and there is more effective and
easier way to destoy de data. Just take out the hard drive, open it and scratch
every platter. That's it, the data is now gone forever, unless you (insert the
NSA here) have a copy.
I rembeber we had a law enforcement agency coming with a hard drive from a
guy they wanted to prosecute. That bastard opened the hard drive, scratched
every platter, even bent them, and smashed every single chip.
Rubicon727
Aug 25, 2016 5:57 PM
Here's what one website questioning WHO can call for and "Independent Counsels,
Special Prosecutors, Special Counsels, and the Role of Congress
| By Jack Maskell | Legislative Attorney | June 20, 2013 |
.. Congress may
also have a legislative role in designing a statutory mechanism for the
appointment of "independent counsels" or "special prosecutors," as it did in
title VI of the Ethics in Government Act of 1978. Under the provisions of that
law relating to the appointment of "independent counsels" (called "special
prosecutors" until 1983), the Attorney General was directed to petition a
special three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals to name an independent
counsel upon the receipt of credible allegations of criminal misconduct by
certain high-level personnel in the executive branch of the federal government
whose prosecution by the Administration might give rise to an appearance of a
conflict of interest. In 1999, Congress allowed the "independent counsel"
provisions of law to expire. Upon the expiration of the law in June of 1999, no
new "independent counsels" or "special prosecutors" may be appointed by a
three-judge panel upon the application of the Attorney General.
The Attorney General retains the general authority to designate or name
individuals as "special counsels" to conduct investigations or prosecutions of
particular matters or individuals on behalf of the United States. Under
regulations issued by the Attorney General in 1999, the Attorney General may
appoint a "special counsel" from outside of the Department of Justice who acts
as a special employee of the Department of Justice under the direction of the
Attorney General.
The NSA has all of Killary's Emails in triplicate. .. If they were encrypted in transit
they can have them cracked and broken in about 10 minutes apiece.
They can search them and have them and all metadata that goes with them in a
few clicks of a mouse. .. They know what routers the Emails went through on
their way to China and Soros.
Hackers, my ass, that's what the NSA does and it has a budget of billions
and billions. ... What do people not understand about spying on the web?
Live Hard, If The FBI Wants Emails They Dial NSA-2001 And Ask For Alex, Die
Free
~ DC v2.0
smacker
Aug 25, 2016 6:20 PM
I've had BleachBit running on my system for a fair while and never been that
impressed with it, although all of these programs delete some stuff.
A far
better one that actually works well to clean stuff up is:
(Nirsoft have a huge range of small free progs for doing all sorts of
things)
Still, if the Clintonista had BleachBit running, she had
intent
.
LN
Aug 25, 2016 6:22 PM
"
FBI Admits Clinton Used Software Designed To "Prevent Recovery"
"
"Beyond simply deleting files, BleachBit includes advanced features such as
shredding files to prevent recovery
, wiping free disk space to
hide traces of files deleted by other applications, and vacuuming Firefox to
make it faster. Better than free, BleachBit is open source."
Besides for nefarious reasons, why else would someone use this type of
software? And to top it off, this software is open source shareware... in her
world that means free.....
"... Admittedly, Mr. Trump does seem very open to the idea of negotiating with Russia, and even partnering with Moscow to tackle some of the greatest challenges facing the world today, including radical Islamist terrorism. In that sense, he may really be the most 'Russia friendly' presidential candidate the US has seen since 1945, not counting the early 1990s, when Washington's friendly overtures toward Russia were based on the condition that Moscow does everything US officials tell it to. ..."
"... Does that make him a puppet to the Russians, the Kremlin and to Vladimir Putin personally? Not likely. Despite all the media investigations and even more accusations, no substantiated evidence has been presented demonstrating that Trump has any significant business or personal interests in Russia which would create a conflict of interest. ..."
"... The Times' piece reported on the fact that the Clinton Foundation has accepted tens of millions of dollars from countries that the US State Department has repeatedly criticized for human rights abuses and discrimination against women. The offending countries purportedly include Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, and Brunei, along with Algeria. Riyadh, the paper noted, was "a particularly generous benefactor," giving between $10 and $25 million to the Clinton Foundation, with at least another $1 million donated by the 'Friends of Saudi Arabia' organization. ..."
"... Abedin has long been accused by independent media in the US and elsewhere of having connections with Islamic organizations, including the Muslim Brotherhood, charges which have long been labeled as nothing more than a conspiracy theory. But Sunday's story seems to have ruffled a few feathers in some high places, with a Clinton campaign spokesperson explaining (rather unconvincingly) to the New York Post that Abedin played no formal role in the radical journal. "My understanding is that her name was simply listed on the masthead in that periodical," the spokesman said. ..."
"... And so the question stands: If the media feels justified in crucifying 'Kremlin agent' Donald Trump for a Moscow beauty pageant and some nice words about Vladimir Putin, will it provide the same level of scrutiny for Mrs. Clinton, given the knowledge that her Foundation has taken in tens of millions of dollars from the Saudis, and that her top advisor seems to have been a supporter of hardcore Islamist ideology? ..."
The media has had a field day commenting on Donald Trump's words
about cooperation with Russia against ISIS, labeling him a 'Kremlin agent' and a danger to the Western
security order. But what about Hillary Clinton and her foundation's ties to the Saudis? If Trump
is 'Moscow's man', does that make Clinton the candidate of Middle Eastern sheikdoms?
The US media has been relentless in its efforts to sink Republican presidential candidate Donald
Trump's campaign, in part due to the candidate's string of friendly remarks and gestures toward Russia
and President Vladimir Putin. The media have accused Moscow of every sin imaginable, from
meddling in America's elections, to using Trump advisor Paul Manafort, who was
called 'the Kremlin's man in Ukraine', to outright calling Trump himself a
'Russian agent'.
Former NATO chief Anders Rasmussen joined the party bashing Trump recently,
slamming him for having "his own views on the Ukrainian conflict," and adding that to top it
all off, "he praises President Putin!"
Admittedly, Mr. Trump does seem very open to the idea of negotiating with Russia, and even partnering
with Moscow to tackle some of the greatest challenges facing the world today, including radical Islamist
terrorism. In that sense, he may really be the most 'Russia friendly' presidential candidate the
US has seen since 1945, not counting the early 1990s, when Washington's friendly overtures toward
Russia were based on the condition that Moscow does everything US officials tell it to.
Does that make him a puppet to the Russians, the Kremlin and to Vladimir Putin personally? Not
likely. Despite all the media investigations and even more accusations, no substantiated evidence
has been presented demonstrating that Trump has any significant business or personal interests in
Russia which would create a conflict of interest. The businessman held a Miss Universe Pageant
in Moscow a few years ago, and tried, unsuccessfully, to build a Trump tower in the Russian capital.
But he also has assets around the world, in Scotland, Dubai, and in over a dozen other countries.
Does that make him the agent of these countries, too?
Amid the endless suspicions surrounding 'Kremlin Agent Trump', a story in the New York Times unassumingly
titled 'Foundation Ties Bedevil Hillary Clinton's Presidential Campaign' almost slipped through
the cracks, before blowing up on national television.
The Times' piece reported on the fact that the Clinton Foundation has
accepted tens of millions of dollars from countries that the US State Department has repeatedly criticized
for human rights abuses and discrimination against women. The offending countries purportedly include
Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, and Brunei, along with Algeria. Riyadh,
the paper noted, was "a particularly generous benefactor," giving between $10 and $25 million to
the Clinton Foundation, with at least another $1 million donated by the 'Friends of Saudi Arabia'
organization.
The scandal didn't end there. Speaking to CNN reporter Dana Bash, Clinton Campaign manager Robby
Mook
could not coherently explain why the Clintons weren't willing to stop accepting donations from
foreign 'investors' unless Clinton became president of the United States. Instead, Mook tried to
divert the question to Donald Trump, saying the candidate has never revealed his financials, and
adding that Mrs. Clinton had taken "unprecedented" steps to being "transparent."
And the plot thickens. On Sunday, conservative US and British media
revealed that Huma Abedin, a longtime friend and top aid to Clinton, had worked as an assistant
editor for a radical Islamic Saudi journal for over a decade. The publication, called the Journal
of Muslim Minority Affairs, featured everything from pieces opposed to women's rights, to articles
blaming the US for the September 11 terror attacks.
In one article in January 1996, Abedin's own mother wrote a piece for the journal, where she complained
that Clinton, who was First Lady at the time, was advancing a "very aggressive and radically feminist"
agenda which was un-Islamic and dangerous for empowering women.
Abedin has long been accused by independent media in the US and elsewhere of having connections
with Islamic organizations, including the Muslim Brotherhood, charges which have long been labeled
as nothing more than a conspiracy theory. But Sunday's story seems to have ruffled a few feathers
in some high places, with a Clinton campaign spokesperson
explaining (rather unconvincingly) to the New York Post that Abedin played no formal role in
the radical journal. "My understanding is that her name was simply listed on the masthead in that
periodical," the spokesman said.
These two stories, the first offering new details including dollar estimates about the money received
by the Clinton Foundation from the Saudis, and the second shedding light on her top advisor's apparent
ties to a Saudi journal propagating Islamist ideas, should lead the media to look for answers to
some very troubling questions. These should be the same kinds of questions asked earlier this summer,
when a formerly classified 28 page chapter of the 9/11 Commission Report was finally released, revealing
that Saudi officials had supported the hijackers who carried out the terrorist attacks against the
United States in 2001.
And so the question stands: If the media feels
justified in crucifying 'Kremlin agent' Donald Trump for a Moscow beauty pageant and some nice words
about Vladimir Putin, will it provide the same level of scrutiny for Mrs. Clinton, given the knowledge
that her Foundation has taken in tens of millions of dollars from the Saudis, and that her top advisor
seems to have been a supporter of hardcore Islamist ideology?
"... Trump's Northern Virginia and Maryland state director, asked why Mrs Clinton was dressed for winter during a recent campaign t. ..."
"... "How many of you would wear a wool coat in August?" he said, according to The Louden Times ..."
"... "The woman who seeks to be the first female president of the United States wears a wool coat at every single thing. Have you ever stopped to wonder why? ..."
"... "It's a big deal, folks. This woman is very, very sick and they're covering it up. ..."
Addressing a gathering of Women4Trump in the town of Middleburg, John Jaggers, Trump's Northern Virginia
and Maryland state director, asked why Mrs Clinton was dressed for winter during a recent campaign
t.
"The woman who seeks to be the first female president of the United States wears a wool coat at
every single thing. Have you ever stopped to wonder why?
"It's a big deal, folks. This woman is very, very sick and they're covering it up.
"You're not so much talking about
Hillary Clinton being
president for eight years, you're talking about
Tim Kaine being president for eight years. Because that's what we're dealing with here."
It' sad that Trump campaign does not exploit this weakness of Hillary to the fullest extent...
Actually the author is wrong about "Clinton, a verb, emails." more correct is "Clinton,
a verb, to jail"
That headline is Hillary Clinton's biggest current problem. At this point, it has become akin to
how Rudy Giuliani's presidential campaign used to be described: "a noun, a verb, 9/11."
Clinton has
entered similar linguistic territory, because any headline using the word "Clinton" and the word
"emails" now triggers a consistent reaction from the public. Details, even fresh new ones, don't
even really matter all that much at this point - all people are really hearing now is: "Clinton,
a verb, emails."
"... The clintons are a terminally vulgar and unethical couple ..."
"... Mr. Clinton always had an easy, breezy relationship with wrongdoing. But the Democratic Party overlooked the ethical red flags and made a pact with Mr. Clinton that was the equivalent of a pact with the devil. And he delivered. With Mr. Clinton at the controls, the party won the White House twice. But in the process it lost its bearings and maybe even its soul. ..."
The clintons are a terminally vulgar and unethical couple
Out of order quotes:
Mr. Clinton always had an easy, breezy relationship with wrongdoing. But the Democratic
Party overlooked the ethical red flags and made a pact with Mr. Clinton that was the equivalent
of a pact with the devil. And he delivered. With Mr. Clinton at the controls, the party won
the White House twice. But in the process it lost its bearings and maybe even its soul.
"... Washington Post, Salon, Slate, Think Progress ..."
"... Trump never overtly used the word "assassinate." He says he was just suggesting that advocates of the Second Amendment vote, and was being sarcastic. A sarcastic invocation to vote would sound very different. A sarcastic invocation to vote might be, "The American way to change things is to vote. But maybe you care so much about shooting, you won't be able to organize to vote." ..."
This piece is a follow-up of a Lakoff's article, Understanding
Trump , published by Common Dreams last month.
Responsible reporters in the media normally transcribe political speeches so that they can accurately
report them. But Donald Trump's discourse style has stumped a number of reporters. Dan Libit, CNBC's
excellent analyst is one of them. Libit writes:
His unscripted speaking style, with its spasmodic, self-interrupting sentence structure, has
increasingly come to overwhelm the human brains and tape recorders attempting to quote him.
Trump is, simply put, a transcriptionist's worst nightmare: severely unintelligible, and yet,
incredibly important to understand.
Given how dramatically
recent polls have turned on his controversial public utterances, it is not hyperbolic to say
that the very fate of the nation, indeed human civilization, appears destined to come down to
one man's application of the English language - and the public's comprehension of it. It has turned
the rote job of transcribing into a high-stakes calling. […]
Trump's crimes against clarity are multifarious: He often speaks in long, run-on sentences,
with frequent asides. He pauses after subordinate clauses. He frequently quotes people saying
things that aren't actual quotes. And he repeats words and phrases, sometimes with slight variations,
in the same sentence.
Some in the media ( Washington Post, Salon, Slate, Think Progress , etc.) have called
Trump's speeches "word salad." Some commentators have even attributed his language use to "early
Alzheimer's," citing "erratic behavior" and "little regards for social conventions." I don't believe
it.
I have been repeatedly asked in media interviews about such use of language by Trump. So far as
I can tell, he is simply using effective discourse mechanisms to communicate what his wants to communicate
to his audience. I have found that he is very careful and very strategic in his use of language.
The only way I know to show this is to function as a linguist and cognitive scientist and go through
details.
Let's start with sentence fragments. It is common and natural in New York discourse for friends
to finish one another's sentences. And throughout the country, if you don't actually say the rest
of a friend's sentence out loud, there is nevertheless a point at which you can finish it in your
head. When this happens in cooperative discourse, it can show empathy and intimacy with a friend,
that you know the context of the narrative, and that you understand and accept your friend's framing
of the situation so well that you can even finish what they have started to say. Of course, you can
be bored with, or antagonistic to, someone and be able to finish their sentences with anything but
a feeling of empathy and intimacy. But Trump prefers to talk to a friendly crowd.
Trump often starts a sentence and leaves off where his followers can finish in their minds what
he has started to say. That is, they commonly feel empathy and intimacy, an acceptance of what is
being said, and good feeling toward the speaker. This is an unconscious, automatic reaction, especially
when words are flying by quickly. It is a means for Trump to connect with his audience.
The Second Amendment Incident
Here is the classic case, the Second Amendment Incident. The thing to be aware of is that his
words are carefully chosen. They go by quickly when people hear them. But they are processed unconsciously
first by neural circuitry - and neurons operate on a thousandth-of-a-second time scale. Your neural
circuitry has plenty of time to engage in complex forms of understanding, based on what you already
know.
Trump begins by saying, "Hillary wants to abolish, essentially abolish the Second Amendment."
He first just says "abolish," and then hedges by adding "essentially abolish." But having said "abolish"
twice, he has gotten across the message that she wants to, and is able to, change the Constitution
in that way.
Now, at the time the Second Amendment was written, the "arms" in "bear arms" were long rifles
that fired one bullet at a time. The "well-regulated militia" was a local group, like a contemporary
National Guard unit, regulated by a local government with military command structure. They were protecting
American freedoms against the British.
The Second Amendment has been reinterpreted by contemporary ultra-conservatives as the right of
individual citizens to bear contemporary arms (e.g., AK-47's), either to protect their families against
invaders or to change a government by armed rebellion if that government threatens what they see
as their freedoms. The term "Second Amendment" activates the contemporary usage by ultra-conservatives.
It is a dog-whistle term, understood in that way by many conservatives.
Now, no president or Supreme Court could literally abolish any constitutional amendment alone.
But a Supreme Court could judge that that certain laws concerning gun ownership could be unconstitutional.
That is what Trump meant by "essentially abolish."
Thus, the election of Hillary Clinton threatens the contemporary advocates of the 'Second Amendment.'
Trump goes on:
"By the way, and if she gets to pick [loud boos] - if she gets to pick her judges, nothing
you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don't know."
Here are the details.
" By the way ," marks a parallel utterance, one that does not linearly follow from what
was just said, but that has information relevant to what was just said.
"And" here marks information that follows from what was just said.
"If she gets to pick …" When said the first time, it was followed immediately by loud boos. The
audience could finish the if-clause for themselves, since the word "pick" in context could only be
about Hillary picking liberal judges. Trump goes on making this explicit, "if she gets to pick her
judges…"
"Gets to" is important. The metaphor here with "to" is that Achieving a Purpose Is Reaching a
Destination" with the object of "to" marking the pick. The "get" in "get to" is from a related metaphor,
namely, that Achieving a Purpose Is Getting a Desired Object. In both Purpose metaphors, the Achievement
of the Purpose can be stopped by an opponent. The "if" indicates that the achievement of the purpose
is still uncertain, which raises the question of whether it can be stopped.
"Her judges" indicates that the judges are not your judges, from which it follows that they will
not rule the way you want them to, namely, for keeping your guns. The if-clause thus has a consequence:
unless Hillary is prevented from becoming president, "her judges" will change the laws to take away
your guns and your Constitutional right to bear arms. This would be a governmental infringement on
your freedom, which would justify the armed intervention of ultra-conservatives, what Sharon Angle
in Nevada has called the "Second Amendment solution." In short, a lot is entailed - in little time
on a human timescale, but with lots of time on a neural timescale.
Having set this up, Trump follows the if-clause with "Nothing you can do, folks." This is a shortened
version in everyday colloquial English of "There will be nothing you can do, folks." That is, if
you let Hillary take office, you will be so weak that you will be unable to stop her. The "folks,"
suggests that he and the audience members are socially part of the same social group - as opposed
to a distant billionaire with his own agenda.
Immediately after "nothing you can do," Trump goes on: "Although the Second Amendment people,
maybe there is."
"Although" is a word used to contrast one possible course of events with an opposite possibility.
Trump has just presented a possible course of events that is threatening to ultra-conservative Second
Amendment advocates. "Although the Second Amendment people" calls up the alternative for those who
would act violently to protect their Second Amendment right.
"Maybe" brings up a suggestion. "Maybe there is" suggests that there is something the "Second
Amendment People" can do to prevent Hillary from taking office and appointing liberal judges who
would take away what they see as their Constitutional rights.
"I don't know" is intended to remove Trump from any blame. But it acts unconsciously in the opposite
way. It is like the title of the book I wrote, "Don't Think of an Elephant." The way the brain works
is that negating a frame activates the frame. The relevant frame for "Second Amendment people" is
use of arms to protect their rights against a government threatening to take away their rights. This
is about the right to shoot, not about the right to vote. Second Amendment conservative discourse
is about shooting, not about voting.
The point here is that Trump's use of language is anything but "word salad." His words and his
use of grammar are carefully chosen, and put together artfully, automatically, and quickly.
Trump never overtly used the word "assassinate." He says he was just suggesting that advocates
of the Second Amendment vote, and was being sarcastic. A sarcastic invocation to vote would sound
very different. A sarcastic invocation to vote might be, "The American way to change things is to
vote. But maybe you care so much about shooting, you won't be able to organize to vote."
He didn't say anything like that. And he chose his words very, very carefully.
Believe Me! Some People Say…
People in the media have asked me about Trump's use of "Believe me!" and "Many people say" followed
by a statement that is not true, but that he wants he audience to believe. Why does he use such expressions
and how do they work in discourse? To understand this, one needs to look at the concept of lying.
Most people will say that a lie is a false statement. But a study by linguists Linda Coleman and
Paul Kay pointed out more than 30 years ago that the situation is more complex.
If a statement happens to be false, but you sincerely believe that it is true, you are not lying
in stating it. Lying involves a hierarchy of conditions defining worse and worse lies. Here is the
hierarchy:
You don't believe it.
You are trying to deceive.
You are trying to gain advantage for yourself.
You are trying to harm.
As you add conditions in the hierarchy, the lies get worse and worse.
Though this is the usual hierarchy for lies, there are variations: A white lie is one that is
harmless. A social lie is one where deceit is general helpful, as in, "Aunt Susie, that was such
a delicious Jello mold that you made." Other variations include exaggeration, flattery, kidding,
joking , etc.
Lying is a form of uncooperative discourse. But most discourse is cooperative, and there are rules
governing it that the philosopher Paul Grice called "maxims" in his Harvard Lectures in 1967. Grice
observed that uncooperative discourse is created when the maxims are violated. Grice's maxims were
extended in the 1970's by Eve Sweetser in a paper on lying.
Sweetser postulated a Maxim of Helpfulness:
In Cooperative Discourse, people intend to help to help one another.
She then observed that there were two models used in helpful communication.
Ordinary Communication
If people say something, they are intending to help if and only if they believe it.
People intend to deceive, if and only if they don't intend to help.
Justified Belief
People have adequate reasons for their beliefs.
What people have adequate reason to believe is true.
Though this model does not hold for all situations (e.g., kidding), they are models that are used
by virtually everyone unconsciously all day every day. If I tell my wife that I saw my cousin this
morning, there is no reason to deceive, so I believe it (Ordinary Communication). And since I know
my cousin well, if I believe I saw him, then I did see him (Justified Belief). Such principles are
part of our unconsciously functioning neural systems. They work automatically, unless they become
conscious and we can attend to them and control them.
Trump uses these communication models that are in your brain. When he says "Believe me!" he is
using the principle of Justified Belief, suggesting that he has the requisite experience for his
belief to be true. When those in Trump's audience hear "Believe me!", they will mostly understand
it automatically and, unconsciously and via Justified Belief, will take it to be true.
When Trump says, "Many people say that …" both principles are unconsciously activated. If many
people say it, they are unlikely to all or mostly be deceiving, which means they believe it, and
by Justified Belief, it is taken to be true.
You have to be on your toes, listening carefully and ready to disbelieve Trump, to avoid the use
of these ordinary cognitive mechanisms in your brain that Trump uses for his purposes.
Is He "On Topic?"
Political reporters are used to hearing speeches with significant sections on a single policy
issue. Trump often goes from policy to policy to policy in a single sentence. Is he going off topic?
So far as I can discern, he always on topic, but you have to understand what his topic is. As
I observed in my Understanding Trump paper, Trump is deeply, personally committed to his version
of Strict Father Morality. He wants it to dominate the country and the world, and he wants to be
the ultimate authority in this authoritarian model of the family that is applied in conservative
politics in virtually every issue area.
Every particular issue, from building the wall, to using our nukes, to getting rid of inheritance
taxes (on those making $10.9 million or more), to eliminating the minimum wage - every issue is an
instance of his version of Strict Father Morality over all areas of life, with him as ultimately
in charge.
As he shifts from particular issue to particular issue, each of them activates his version of
Strict Father Morality and strengthens it in the brains of his audience. So far as I can tell, he
is always on topic - where this is the topic.
Always Selling
For five decades, Trump has been using all these techniques of selling and trying to make deals
to his advantage. It seems to have become second nature for him to use these devices. And he uses
them carefully and well. He is a talented charlatan. Keeping you off balance is part of his game.
As is appealing to ordinary thought mechanisms in the people he is addressing.
It is vital that the media, and ordinary voters, learn to recognize his techniques. When the media
fails to grasp what he is doing, it gives him an advantage. Every time someone in the media claims
his discourse is "word salad, " it helps Trump by hiding what he is really doing.
"Regret" or Excuse
One day after the above was written, Trump made a well-publicized statement of "regret."
"Sometimes, in the heat of debate and speaking on a multitude of issues, you don't choose the
right words or you say the wrong thing.
I have done that.
And believe it or not, I regret it.
And I do regret it, particularly where it may have caused personal pain.
Too much is at stake for us to be consumed with these issues. …"
He did not give any specifics.
What we have just seen is that he chooses his words VERY carefully. And he has done that here.
He starts out with "sometimes," which suggests that it is a rare occurrence on no particular occasions
- a relatively rare accident. He continues with a general, inescapable fact about being a presidential
candidate, namely, that he is always "in the heat of debate and speaking on a multitude of issues."
The words "heat" and "multitude" suggest that normal attention to details like word choice cannot
operate in presidential campaign. In short, it is nothing that he could possibly be responsible for,
and is a rare occurrence anyway.
Then he uses the word "you." This shifts perspective from him to "you," a member of the audience.
You too, if you were running for president, would naturally be in such uncontrollable situations
all the time, when "you don't choose the right words or you say the wrong thing." It's just a matter
of choosing "the right words." This means that he had the right ideas, but under natural, and inevitable
attentional stress, an unavoidable mistake happens and could happen to you: "you" have the right
ideas, but mess up on the "right words."
He then admits to "sometimes" making an unavoidable, natural mistake, not in choosing the right
ideas, but in word choice and, putting yourself in his shoes, "you say the wrong thing" - that is,
you are thinking the right thing, but you just say it wrong - "sometimes."
His admission is straightforward - "I have done that" - as if he had just admitted to something
immoral, but which he has carefully described as anything but immoral.
"And believe it or not, I regret it." What he is communicating with "believe it or not," is that
you, in the audience, may not believe that I am a sensitive soul, but I really am, as shown by my
statement of regret. He then emphasizes his statement of personal sensitivity: "And I do regret it,
particularly where it may have caused personal pain." Note the "may have caused." No admission that
he definitely DID "cause personal pain." And no specifics given. After all, they don't have to be
given, because it is natural, unavoidable, accidental, and so rare as to not matter. He states this:
"Too much is at stake for us to be consumed with these issues." In short, it's a trivial matter to
be ignored - because it is a natural, unavoidable, accidental mistake, only in the words not the
thoughts, and is so rare as to be unimportant. All that in five well-crafted sentences!
Note how carefully he has chosen his words. And what is the intended effect? He should be excused
because inaccurate word choice is so natural that it will inevitably occur again, and he should not
be criticized when the stress of the campaign leads inevitably to mistakes in trivial word choice.
But there is a larger effect. Words have meanings. The words he carefully uses, often over and
over, get across his values and ideas, which are all too often lies or promotions of racist, sexist,
and other un-American invocations. When these backfire mightily, as with the Khans, there can be
no hiding behind a nonspecific "regret" that they were just rare, accidental word choice mistakes
too trivial for the public to be "consumed with." This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License
Better late then never. That's bold attack we all need. After Khna gabmit, you need to nail Hillary
who is trying to drive on anti-Russian sentiment and demonization by neoliberal press of the opponent.
Bravo Trump !!!
Notable quotes:
"... "Hillary Clinton is a bigot who sees people of color only as votes, not as human beings worthy of a better future," the GOP presidential nominee declared at a rally here Wednesday night. "She's going to do nothing for African-Americans. She's going to do nothing for the Hispanics. She's only going to take care of herself, her husband, her consultants, her donors. These are the people she cares about." ..."
"... he likened his own campaign against the European establishment to the brash developer's insurgent bid for the White House. ..."
"Hillary Clinton is a bigot who sees people of color only as votes, not as human beings worthy
of a better future," the GOP presidential nominee declared at a rally here Wednesday night. "She's
going to do nothing for African-Americans. She's going to do nothing for the Hispanics. She's only
going to take care of herself, her husband, her consultants, her donors. These are the people she
cares about."
... ... ...
Trump has repeatedly likened his own campaign to Brexit in arguing for "peaceful regime change"
in the U.S. on Election Day. The mogul recently predicted that he would soon be known by the moniker
"Mr. Brexit."
Inviting the British politician to the stage at his Wednesday rally, the GOP nominee called it
an "honor" to stand with Farage, who all but endorsed Trump as he likened his own campaign against
the European establishment to the brash developer's insurgent bid for the White House.
Speaking to audience members who appeared somewhat baffled at his presence, Farage spoke of how
he and allies overcame opposition from the political establishment and even a set of foreign leaders
that included U.S. President Obama. As the crowd here booed, Farage pointedly accused Obama of talking
down to the British. "He treated us as if we were nothing," Farage said. "One of the oldest functioning
democracies in the world, and here he was telling us to 'vote remain.'"
As Trump stood over his shoulder, a smile on his face, Farage pointedly did not endorse Trump
- but he came very, very close. "I could not possibly tell you how you should vote in this election,"
he said. "But I will say this, if I was an American citizen, I wouldn't vote for Hillary Clinton
if you paid me!"
Farage urged Trump supporters to take advantage of the "fantastic opportunity" they face in November.
"You can go out. You can beat the pollsters. You can beat the commentators. You can beat Washington.
And you'll do it by doing what we did for Brexit in Britain. We had our own people's army of ordinary
citizens," he said. "Anything is possible if enough people are prepared to stand up against the establishment."
Walking back to the podium, Trump nodded, calling Election Day a chance for the country to "re-declare"
its independence. "It's time to recapture our destiny," he said.
Signpost 5
minutes ago
Words mean very little really. The proof is in
the pudding. These democrats are very skilled at
saying slick words and calling others racists.
That's basically a democrats main campaign
slogan. "You're a racist!"
But let's look for a moment at what they have
accomplished. After 8 years of a democrat
President black people are suffering. Look at the
inner cities. Detroit, Milwaukee, ect. We see the
anger and hopelessness. 58% of black youth are
unemployed. Illegal aliens get treated better
that black Americans. And the Hispanics only help
their own once they get control of anything.
Diversity isn't a Hispanic employers strong suit.
95 million Americans are out of work. But Obama
says the economy is thriving. The democrats know
how to say the slick words. But it is only their
elite who make any money. The rest of you are on
food stamps. So, do we want 4 more years like the
last 8? Someone like Clinton who will talk the bs
while your families go without? Or do you want
someone who can create jobs. As we can see by
looking at the Clinton foundation emails, she got
hers already. Wow. She was selling a possible
future presidency while she was Secretary of
State. She figured the American people would be
too dumb to find out.
Out with the democrats. Time to change the
batter.
Greg Collins 5
minutes ago
Where is Hillary Clinton can't give a press
conference answer real question American can tell
truth and you want to vote for a liar
misstatements YouTube video and email poor
judgment policy open border bring Syria Muslims
terrorist will come in and attack kill your
family this is what you are vote for and corrupt
foundation no thanks
crosswalkuser 4
minutes ago
With Hillary blatant corruption record it looks
as though its Hillary who could shoot someone and
still be elected as Americans are bent on having
a new Pantygon where they see have the generals
being women and the other half being gay men
matching the current media.
still rockin' 7
minutes ago
While Trump is a idiot, he is correct that the
only thing Hillary cares about with Blacks and
Hispanics are their votes. After that she will
keep them on the Democratic treadmill with no
possible chance of advancement for the masses.
For decades the Democrats have promised them
prosperity and given them just enough to live a
meager existence while lining their own pockets.
Some of the wealthiest Congressional politicians
are Democrats!
Ghassanids 1
hour ago
As someone who is branded as "Hispanic" by the
government, I am not looking to be taken care of
by Clinton nor Trump. Where is all this language
coming from? I'm just a normal citizen trying to
live out my term on Earth. What's the deal?
James D 3
hours ago
Any politician who talks about citizens as
belonging to some biologically defined group, as
if they all should think and vote alike based on
that biological similarity, is a shallow bigot.
It doesn't matter what biological feature they
decide to focus on at the moment, whether it be
gender, age, skin color, ethnicity, sexuality,
...... putting people into a box and stereotyping
them is disgusting bigotry.
Richard 3
hours ago
We have Nero and Caligula running for the
American presidency. The question is which one is
which?
"... recently, the paper's former Washington bureau chief, the veteran journalist Hedrick Smith, asked an important question: ..."
"... Smith, who traveled the country to write his latest book ..."
"... also serves as the executive editor of the Reclaim the American Dream website, where he keeps a keen eye on efforts to revitalize politics closest to where people live. In his op-ed essay he answered his own question by reporting that "a broad array of state-level citizen movements are pressing for reforms… to give average voters more voice, make elections more competitive and ease gridlock in Congress." ..."
"... There's a lot of energy stirring in the states, including efforts to create a fairer economy. Unlike our paralyzed and polarized Congress, state legislators - those with eyes to see and ears to hear - know the walking-wounded casualties from the long campaign against working people conducted by Big Business and rabid free-marketeers over the past three decades. Among the stunned and shell-shocked are millions of survivors barely hanging on after the financial crash of 2008 and the Great Recession that followed. They live down the street and around the corner, a mere few blocks from the state capitol. ..."
"... Here at BillMoyers.com , just as Hedrick Smith's essay appeared last weekend, we were finishing a small book - 95 pages - by one of those state legislators: Minnesota's David Bly. After teaching in the public schools for 30 years he retired and ran for the Minnesota House of Representatives, where he is now serving his fourth term. What he's seen close-up prompted him to write ..."
"... You can order a copy from the publisher's website . It is short in length but not of passion. Here, with permission, is an excerpt: ..."
"... The Spirit Level ..."
"... Capital in the 21 st Century ..."
"... Invisible Hands: The Businessmen's Crusade Against the New Deal ..."
"... Winner-Take-All Politics ..."
"... Who Stole the American Dream? ..."
"... Citizen's United ..."
"... The Minneapolis Star Tribune ..."
"... Excerpted with permission from Levins Publishing. All rights reserved. ..."
"... Moyers & Company ..."
"... Bill Moyers Journal: The Conversation Continues , ..."
Our collapse from an "opportunity for all" middle-class economy to a "winner-take-all," dog-eat-dog
system is behind many problems we face as a society.
18 Comments
An ice sculpture reading Middle Class is displayed as people gather to protest before the beginning
of the Republican National Convention on August 26, 2012 in Tampa, Florida. (Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty
Images)
In The New York Times recently, the paper's former Washington bureau chief,
the veteran journalist Hedrick Smith, asked an important question: "Can
the States Save American Democracy?" Smith, who traveled the country to write his latest
book, Who Stole the American
Dream?, also serves as the executive editor of the
Reclaim the American Dream website, where he keeps
a keen eye on efforts to revitalize politics closest to where people live. In his op-ed essay he
answered his own question by reporting that "a broad array of state-level citizen movements are pressing
for reforms… to give average voters more voice, make elections more competitive and ease gridlock
in Congress."
There's a lot of energy stirring in the states, including efforts to create a fairer economy.
Unlike our paralyzed and polarized Congress, state legislators - those with eyes to see and ears
to hear - know the walking-wounded casualties from the long campaign against working people conducted
by Big Business and rabid free-marketeers over the past three decades. Among the stunned and shell-shocked
are millions of survivors barely hanging on after the financial crash of 2008 and the Great Recession
that followed. They live down the street and around the corner, a mere few blocks from the
state capitol.
Here at BillMoyers.com, just as Hedrick Smith's essay
appeared last weekend, we were finishing a small book - 95 pages - by one of those state legislators:
Minnesota's David Bly. After teaching in the public schools for 30 years he retired and ran for the
Minnesota House of Representatives, where he is now serving his fourth term. What he's seen close-up
prompted him to write We All Do Better: Economic Priorities for a Land of Opportunity. You
can order a copy from the publisher's
website. It is short in length but not of passion. Here, with permission, is an excerpt:
Not so long ago, the words "Land of Opportunity" really meant something for all Americans. We
pretty much took it for granted that each and every one of us should have the opportunity to develop
our God-given talents to reach our greatest potential. This didn't mean that everyone would choose
to use that opportunity, or that anyone would be forced to use it. It did, however, mean that everyone
had that opportunity…. As the late Sen. Paul Wellstone once said, "We all do better when we all do
better."
Things are changing, and not for the better. All too often, we hear stories of families evicted
from their homes when unemployment runs out, or senior citizens who must choose between buying groceries
and life-sustaining medications, or the single mother who can't get a job because she must spend
her time nursing her invalid son. We open the paper to read yet another story about the achievement
gap in our schools. We watch the news and are shocked to learn that the United States is the world's
leader in putting its citizens behind bars.
These kinds of thing don't happen, or at least shouldn't, when there is a nationwide commitment
for everyone to have what they need to develop their potential. This commitment goes beyond lip service
and political speeches. It involves deliberate policies that maintain what I call a "middle-class
economy." A middle-class economy is not one in which every single person makes a certain amount of
money. Even in a middle-class economy, some are rich and some are poor. But most of the people have
most of the money. Most of the people can take care of themselves and fully develop their potential.
Those that can't take care of themselves for any number of understandable reasons can count on the
rest of us to get them through the rough spots.
Right now we are in the process of losing our middle-class economy. We know this from news stories,
and far too many of us know it from bitter personal experience. This loss of our middle-class economy
and the resultant shift to a "winner-take-all" economy of rich and poor are behind most of the problems
with which we struggle as a society.
The Spirit Level by
Richard Wilkinson
and Kate Pickett helped me see how and why this is so. The authors demonstrate in powerful terms
how growing inequality is crippling both our society and our economy in ways that will make it harder
to address critical problems we face as a nation. Page after page of graphs illustrate how we have
fallen behind other developed nations in the things a well-functioning economy must provide. Wilkinson
and Pickett make a solid case that it is not so much the average income of a society that matters.
More important is how that income is distributed. Countries that have the most equal income distribution
do best on health and social indicators.
According to Wilkinson and Pickett, who are epidemiologists, income inequality is related to "lower
life expectancy, higher rates of infant mortality, shorter height, poor self-reported health, low
birth weight, AIDS and depression." They collected data from dozens of other rich countries on health,
level of trust, mental illness, drug and alcohol addiction, life expectancy, infant mortality, teenage
birth rates, obesity, children's educational performance, homicides, imprisonment and social mobility.
"What is most exciting about our research is that it shows that reducing inequality would increase
the well-being and quality of life for all of us," the authors say. Today we have a choice: use public
investment to reduce inequality or pay for the social harm caused by inequality.
Right now we are in the process of losing our middle-class economy.
Wilkinson and Pickett also
believe: "Modern societies will depend increasingly on being creative, adaptable, inventive, well-informed
and flexible, able to respond generously to each other and to needs wherever they arise. Those are
societies not in hock to the rich, in which people are driven by status insecurities, but of populations
used to working together and respecting each other as equals." Any search for economic salvation
that is motivated and driven by the greed of its individual participants is bound to fail.
Ours is the oldest modern democracy, but present-day policies and court decisions are undermining
our basic democratic principles. Immense power has been ceded to a cadre of financial elites who
have figured out how to buy their way into control of our government. The past 30 years have seen
two related trends: (1) an unraveling of benefits and opportunities for the vast majority of Americans,
and (2) a massive increase in wealth for a relative handful of people. Leading economists assure
us that if we don't take decisive action, we can expect more of the same. Economist Emmanuel Saez
has carefully analyzed the shift toward a rich-and-poor economy. He says, "The market itself doesn't
impose a limit on inequality, especially for those at the top." His partner in research, Thomas Piketty,
has further documented and explained income inequality in his book Capital
in the 21st Century. As I write this, the very wealthy are enjoying a good recovery
from the recession of 2008 while the vast majority of Americans fall further behind.
Our descent from an economy that provided for all of us to one that provides for only the few
has been no accident. Nor was it inevitable. The story of how government has gone from limiting greed
to encouraging it is chronicled in several recent books. Kim Phillips-Fein in Invisible Hands: The Businessmen's Crusade
Against the New Deal; Paul Pierson and Jacob S. Hacker in
Winner-Take-All Politics; and Hedrick Smith in Who Stole the American Dream?
tell much the same story in different ways. When the Supreme Court determined that money was speech
in 1976, things began to change quickly. The super-rich suddenly gained an advantage in their campaign
to silence the power of people and weaken our democracy. Today, with the Supreme Court decision on
the Citizen's United case, corporations are "people," and even misinformation and lies spread
by these strange new "people" are protected speech.
Economic value is created by law. We often use the words "free market" to describe our current
economic system, but that system, as much as any other, rests on a set of legal rules and a system
to enforce those rules. So it matters who writes the laws or what interests those laws serve. Similarly,
the distribution of wealth and the flow of capital can flow one way or the other with the stroke
of an official pen. Property rights and the distribution of wealth can deny liberty to some just
as easily as they bestow it on others. Amartya Sen, a Nobel Award-winning economist, argues that
hunger is not a product of the shortage of food. Instead, hungry people lack rights (the entitlement)
to eat. The law decides, or as Sen puts it, "The law stands between food availability and food entitlement.
Starvation deaths can reflect legality with a vengeance."
Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, who served 1930-41, argued that the Constitution protects
"liberty in a social organization which requires the protection of law against the evils which menace
the health, safety, morals and welfare of the people." Beginning with the founding of our nation,
we have a rich tradition of concern for equality and protection from the abuses that wealth, poorly
distributed, can bring about. As America waged war with Britain for independence over 200 years ago,
the revolutionary patriot and journalist super-patriot Tom Paine advocated that public employment
be utilized to assist those needing work, that a system of social security should provide for retirement
at age 60, and that the state should provide funds so that poor families could educate and care for
their children. In another example, the end of the Civil War saw the passage of amendments to the
Constitution that banned slavery and limited the degree to which states could discriminate against
their citizens. These amendments, in turn, broadened democracy and set us on a path that eventually
resulted in the establishment of voting rights for blacks and women.
So, how do we build and maintain an enduring middle-class economy? In my judgment, every middle-class
economy must be built on these five foundations:
Quality education for everyone
Health care for everyone
A world-class transportation system
Energy systems that maintain a clean and safe environment
Living wages for working people
Each of these is being challenged today by anti-democratic forces. Budget cuts are wreaking havoc
at all levels of education. College is harder to afford, increasingly results in crippling debt and
does not guarantee job prospects
The last 30 years have seen a corporate war against American workers.
We hear that we have the
best health care in the world, but the numbers tell us differently. Our health outcomes do not measure
up to the rest of the developed world because our system, even with the advances made with the Affordable
Care Act, does not assure universal access.
Prosperous economies require that goods and people can move around easily. Investment in transportation
infrastructure is essential. We all feel the cost as roads, bridges and public transportation are
neglected.
Environment, energy and land use go hand-in-hand in a middle-class economy. A clean, safe environment
supports good health and quality of life for everyone. Instead of moving forward on clean energy
and correcting harmful practices, we continue to rely on fossil fuels and to live with the economic
and environmental consequences.
The fifth foundation of a middle-class economy is living-wage jobs. Generations before us took
for granted that hard-working Americans would share in our prosperity. We have abandoned that understanding.
Wages for most Americans have flatlined in spite of continuing pressure from rising costs of life's
essentials. In a 2014 survey by the Pew Foundation, over 10 times as many respondents said their
incomes were falling behind the cost of living than said they were getting ahead.
The last 30 years have seen a corporate war against American workers. Corporation after corporation
shipped middle-class jobs to Third-World countries. Now, politicians across the country invariably
meet out-of-work industrial workers who ask them what they can do about the sell-off of jobs in America.
All too often, the politician has no response and no idea what to do. Some extreme free-market ideologues
even say that what is happening to so many works is actually a good thing, something that in the
long run will make our economy better off. Of course, many of those making such claims have high-paying
jobs, stable jobs representing the interests of the financial elite.
Here in Minnesota wages for new hires, adjusted for inflation, have been heading downward since
2006 and fell to $ll.64 in 2011. The minimum wage went from one of the lowest in the country to $9.50.
A family three (the average family size in Minnesota) would need an hourly wage of $l6.34 to make
it. How can anyone feel secure and support a family with that kind of discrepancy? People working
full-time deserve the dignity of a living wage, but our policies are moving us in the opposite direction.
The Minneapolis Star Tribune, for example, tells of a 59-year-old truck driver who lived
well on the 4l-cents-a-mile he made 16 years ago, but now he is making the exact same amount in the
face of much higher living costs. He works six days a week instead of the five he used to and still
can barely make ends meet.
These are by no means isolated cases in my home state or elsewhere. Economist Robert Reich wrote
this about the battered middle class: "Having been roughed up, they face years of catch-up to get
to where the once were. They feel poorer because they are poorer. They feel less secure because they
are less secure. The crisis's severity - and the fact that it surprised most 'experts' - shocked
them. The large income and wealth losses compounded their sense of vulnerability."
How do those of us in public office respond?
Former Sen. Byron Dorgan of North Dakota tells the story of the working man who was standing in
line to pay his last respects to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. "Did you know the president?" a
reporter asked him. "No," the man said through tears, "but he knew me."
That is our obligation today - to close the distance between the governed and the governing by
rebuilding a middle-class economy. The five foundations of that economy have this in common: they
are all "we" concepts. We all benefit when they are in place, and we all suffer when they crumble.
When we work together toward our common good, we grow a middle-class economy. When we work against
each other as individuals, we are on the road to becoming a Third World economy. As much as I hate
to say it, this is exactly the path we are on.
Much of my book is concerned with my home state of Minnesota, where I serve in the state legislature.
But I'm sure you will also see that much of what I say about my home state applies just as much to
yours. We are all in this together. We all need to get our state and federal spending priorities
focused in a way that will make a difference. That way is the way of rebuilding our middle-class
economy and opportunity for all.
Excerpted with permission from Levins Publishing. All rights reserved.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 License.
Bill Moyers is the
managing editor of Moyers & Company and BillMoyers.com. His previous shows on PBS included
NOW with Bill Moyers and Bill Moyers Journal. Over the past three
decades he has become an icon of American journalism and is the author of many books, including
Bill Moyers Journal: The Conversation Continues,
Moyers on Democracy, and
Bill Moyers: On Faith & Reason. He was one of the organizers of the Peace Corps, a special
assistant for Lyndon B. Johnson, a publisher of Newsday, senior correspondent for CBS News and a
producer of many groundbreaking series on public television. He is the winner of more than 30 Emmys,
nine Peabodys, three George Polk awards.
David Bly is serving his fourth term in the Minnesota House of Representatives. He is the author
of We All Do Better.
He retired after teaching for 30 years in the Minnesota public school system. David Bly and his wife
Dominique live in Northfield, Minnesota.
"... Behind the private jet journey of Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin" [ Yahoo News ]. The article explains why wearing one hat from Abedin's massive collection of headgear makes this all legal. ..."
"... "After Hillary Clinton became secretary of state, Bill Clinton received $17.6 million in payments from a for-profit university. Since that time, another organization with a connection to that university received almost $90 million in grants from an agency that's part of the State Department" [ CNN ]. Clinton was paid for "inspiring people." Oh. OK. ..."
"... UPDATE "Donald Trump appears to have donated $100,000 to the Clinton Foundation" [ Business Insider ]. As Trump said: "I gave to many people before this - before two months ago I was a businessman. I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And you know what, when I need something from them two years later, three years later, I call them. They are there for me. That's a broken system." I hate it when Trump's right. ..."
"Behind the private jet journey of Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin" [
Yahoo News ]. The article explains why wearing one hat from Abedin's massive collection of
headgear makes this all legal. Musical
interlude --
"Clinton Foundation: World Class Slacktivists" [
Medium ]. "I think this could be called a 'charity bubble' since at some point, there won't
be any more cash to take. And then what will people do? What will happen when the hospital where
future doctors and nurses will work closes due to lack of funds?"
"After Hillary Clinton became secretary of state, Bill Clinton received $17.6 million in payments
from a for-profit university. Since that time, another organization with a connection to that
university received almost $90 million in grants from an agency that's part of the State Department"
[
CNN ]. Clinton was paid for "inspiring people." Oh. OK.
UPDATE "Donald Trump appears to have donated $100,000 to the Clinton Foundation" [
Business Insider ]. As Trump said: "I gave to many people before this - before two months
ago I was a businessman. I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And you know what, when
I need something from them two years later, three years later, I call them. They are there for
me. That's a broken system." I hate it when Trump's right.
Money
UPDATE "Hillary Clinton Continues Fundraising Swing at Home of Justin Timberlake, Jessica Biel"
[
Variety ]. "Jamie Foxx, Jennifer Aniston, Shonda Rhimes, Tobey Maguire and former HBO programming
president Michael Lombardo were among those at the event, according to a source who was there,
with tickets priced at $33,400 per person. About 55 people attended….
The Democratic presidential candidate is fundraising in the weeks before her first debate with
Republican rival Donald Trump [on September 26]." And definitely not holding press conferences.
UPDATE "Justin Timberlake, Jessica Biel & Hillary Clinton Pose for Adorable Photobooth Pics
at Star-Studded Fundraiser" [
ET ]. " "Look who came over for lunch… #imwithher," Biel wrote on Instagram." Quite a lunch.
"... And, pardon me for being a tinfoil-hatted conspiracy theorist, I wonder if this was the dirt that the Clinton campaign was planning to use against Bernie before he endorsed you-know-who on July 12. ..."
"... President Sanders was not to last long at BC and she left for still unknown circumstances soon after the purchase of the property. ..."
"... The next Presidents, Cjristine Plunkett, Mike Smith and Carol Moore then sold off large portions of the property to real estate developers and then, when the ship finally sank under increasingly hopeless and clueless leadership, all of whom could not increase enrollment or or raise any funds (in fact we were eventually told that the school had given up fund raising), Burlington College went into a relentless downward spiral which tragically and painfully closed its doors in May, 20016. ..."
"... It may ultimately have been the straw that broke the camel's back, and it looks terrible that Jane Sanders was at the helm and instrumental in making the decision, but it also sounds like it was a bold effort – that the Board of Directors signed off on – to change the school's fortunes, and one that unfortunately could not overcome years of struggle and financial instability. ..."
My comments on this link: Jane Sanders used to be president of Burlington
College.
And, pardon me for being a tinfoil-hatted conspiracy theorist, I wonder if this was the dirt
that the Clinton campaign was planning to use against Bernie before he endorsed you-know-who on
July 12.
But if she left five years ago, it is difficult to see how she could be blamed for this specific
problem. Whatever her role in the financial problems may have been (and I admit I don't understand
that well), her successors were responsible for what was done subsequently, and if they knew they
might have to close down should have taken steps to protect student records and ensure their future
accessibility.
This was a comment left on that article by someone named Sandy Baird:
Thank you for this reporting. The demise of Burlington College was not caused by Jane Sanders.
The Board of trustees and the then President Jane Sanders bought the property from the Catholic
diocese. President Sanders was an ambitious President and sought to increase the enrollment
by creating substantial, innovative and effective programs, which included the Burlington College/Cuba
Semester abroad and by increasing the profile of the school in the community and state. Jane's
plan always was to create a thriving campus for a growing student body and for a unique college
which had as its mission the "building of sustainable, just, humane and beautiful communities."
However, President Sanders was not to last long at BC and she left for still unknown circumstances
soon after the purchase of the property.
The next Presidents, Cjristine Plunkett, Mike Smith and Carol Moore then sold off large
portions of the property to real estate developers and then, when the ship finally sank under
increasingly hopeless and clueless leadership, all of whom could not increase enrollment or
or raise any funds (in fact we were eventually told that the school had given up fund raising),
Burlington College went into a relentless downward spiral which tragically and painfully closed
its doors in May, 20016.
The school, the property and the beach will now be picked up by the
developer, Eric Farrell and the beach goes to the City. In a final irony, Eric Farrell was
awarded an honorary doctorate degree at the final graduation of the school in May when its founder, Stu Lacase gave the graduation address.
Burlington College was always a fragile concern. Its website notes that in the early days,
it "had no financial backing, paid its bills when they came due, and paid its President when
it could." Jane Sanders's plan to place a big bet on expansion in order to put the school on
a more solid long-term footing was similar to decisions made by other college presidents, and
sometimes those bets simply don't work out.
On the last quote, that's how I read it. Owning real estate on the Lake Champlain waterfront
is not, ipso facto , a crazy thing to do. It sounds like the college just couldn't outrun
trouble. I still don't think it's a good look, though.
It may ultimately have been the straw that broke the camel's back, and it looks terrible that
Jane Sanders was at the helm and instrumental in making the decision, but it also sounds like
it was a bold effort – that the Board of Directors signed off on – to change the school's fortunes,
and one that unfortunately could not overcome years of struggle and financial instability.
The college should have provided the transcripts before it locked the doors, but it looks to
me like they wouldn't have been able to do it even then without the state's financial assistance.
If Jane had only known, she could have gotten the Board to approve a donation to the Clinton
Foundation, right?
Looks terrible? Seriously? I'm sorry, but I can't raise my pulse at all because someone took
a rational chance her successors were unable to carry through successfully.
As for providing the transcripts before locking the doors, that would have been problematic,
as so many places want original transcripts from the institution and won't accept something that
has come through the hands of the student. Those alumni are going to be dogged by that as long
as they need transcripts unless the state or somebody funds permanent access.
Amen, did anyone hear the screaming about this same scenario when small college had Ben Sasse
as President of College? He left, others followed and undid some of his actions and eventually
the small college suffered.
Apparently it is fine for some people to have these behaviors overlooked and not so for others.
I believe there is a word for that – hmmm, I'm sure it will come to me eventually.
"... This needs more play. I am a blue-collar refugee, and most of my circle are same. They all seem to be captive to the messaging of the business press, and Trump, that we have lost some "competition" with China, India, etc. for the manufacturing business. The corporations and their minions in gov. are guilty of the real "un-patriotic" acts. ..."
"... The entire logic of how great globalization is is flawed at its heart. A. We have a much higher standard of living than other countries; so B. Let's "level the playing field" with those other countries. So A + B = a reversion of our country's standard of living to the global mean. ..."
"... Cue globalists who insist the citizens benefit anyway because they get to buy cheap stuff…now that they're unemployed. Oops ..."
"…the administration is absolutely right that America needs tools to counter China's growing
influence in Asia and around the world…"
So US industry with tacit blessing of US industrial policy spends 2 decades transferring our
manufacturing capabilities to a communist state…so…now we need "tools" to cage the dragon we created?
Not saying I would ever vote for Trump but this circular bullshit boggles the mind and sends me
screaming into the night.
This needs more play. I am a blue-collar refugee, and most of my circle are same. They
all seem to be captive to the messaging of the business press, and Trump, that we have lost some
"competition" with China, India, etc. for the manufacturing business. The corporations and their
minions in gov. are guilty of the real "un-patriotic" acts.
I don't know that "communist" really is a qualifier, though. If an ostensibly "commie" country
is "winning" at capitalism, what does that say about capitalism as a belief system? If a person
thinks that a free market sorts all these issues, they would have to be willing to just not buy
the goods produced in the cheap labor/dirty environment country, in order to make "losers" out
of them…how feasible is this?
The entire logic of how great globalization is is flawed at its heart.
A. We have a much higher standard of living than other countries; so
B. Let's "level the playing field" with those other countries.
So A + B = a reversion of our country's standard of living to the global mean.
Quick question: who thinks that is a good idea (pick one):
1. The owners of the means of production since they get to dramatically lower their costs;
or
2. The citizens of the country.
(Cue globalists who insist the citizens benefit anyway because they get to buy cheap stuff…now
that they're unemployed. Oops.)
From the Financial Times article 8/14/16, "during the first decade of this century" Trump worked
with Bayrock. That was a shift away from his Real Estate business, the last? being his Trump Soho
that failed. The point being that he hasn't been active in real estate for nearly a decade and
his 'Trump labeling" may be enhancing his wealth, but it certainly isn't a sign of good business
acumen.
He is relying on people forgetting when he got out of the business that made him wealthy. Relying
on him, IMO is risky business.
We need China more than they need us? Why? For what purpose? We are the customer. They are
a provider of labor. We have unutilized labor here. ???
I really am curious as to why you said that.
"China National Chemical Corp. received approval from U.S. national security officials for
its takeover of Swiss agrochemical and seeds company Syngenta AG, seen as the biggest regulatory
hurdle that the $43 billion acquisition faces.
The Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. has cleared the transaction, the companies
said in a statement Monday. The deal, expected to be completed by the end of the year, is still
subject to antitrust review by regulators worldwide, according to the statement."
I'll say one thing about Farage – I wish our members of congress could give speeches that were
half as entertaining as some of his are. He has some absolute classics on youtube, including the
'who the hell are you?' speech in the European Parliament.
"The People" (as in We The People), standing in line, want Hillary Clinton charged and tried
by a USA Court of Law.
The population, as a whole, is realizing that the Grifters have been lying to us about almost
everything.
It is that moment when it suddenly dawns on a person (they grok) that their wife/husband/boss/friend/mother/father……
is a sociopath . Suddenly ALL the chaos in their lives makes perfect sense. The
light goes on!
Former leader of the UK Independent Party Nigel Farage, credited for Brexit, addressed the
audience at a Trump campaign rally in Jackson, Mississippi on Wednesday night.
"You can beat the pollsters, you can beat the commentators, you can beat Washington," Farage
said to cheers. "If you want change, you better get your walking boots on."
"Anything is possible if enough decent people want to fight the establishment," Farage said.
"... Donald Trump keeps saying, "I think we have a movement here" to his audiences. At the Akron speech, he said "I am fighting for a peaceful regime change in our own country." ..."
"... I suspect that Donald Trump has awoken from The Great Slumber . ( Māyā means illusion, fraud, deception, magic that misleads and creates disorder) ..."
Re, "Donald Trump's road show has detoured this month to states with no political value to
a Republican nominee in a general election."
Donald Trump keeps saying, "I think we have a movement here" to his audiences. At the Akron
speech, he said "I am fighting for a peaceful regime change in our own country."
I suspect that Donald Trump has awoken from The Great Slumber . ( Māyā means illusion, fraud, deception, magic that misleads and creates disorder)
"... She knows a little about a lot and that is very dangerous. Let's see who
her cabinet is. Friends or real players in the office they hold. Oh, she is the
biggest liar I have personally ever seen nominated for President of any party ever.
..."
"... She is more crooked than a dog's hind leg! ..."
"... Clinton, a self-absorbed pathological liar, has an excuse for just about
everything, and if elected president, the only policy to recieve any priority must
come attached with a multi-millon dollar 'donation' to ever see the light of day.
..."
"... She'll promise the world to the world. And deliver nothing, all she cares
about is your vote on her quest for power.. ..."
"... The main problem I have with any Clinton proposal is, "who's going to believe
anything she says". That's the bi-product of getting away with everything, no one
forgets. ..."
She knows a little about a lot and that is very dangerous. Let's see
who her cabinet is. Friends or real players in the office they hold. Oh,
she is the biggest liar I have personally ever seen nominated for President
of any party ever.
So guess what, the BITCHAAA will say anything for your vote. Doesn't
matter if you are a legal resident or a pigmie from Guinea she will blow
smoke up your #$%$ while trying to find a way for you to vote. I think she
should give every burried dead person last rights a minimum of once a week
for their vote too.
She is more crooked than a dog's hind leg!
F 6 hours ago
How can nearly every comment on this, and most other articles as a matter
of fact, be so anti-Hillary, yet the 'polls' have her in the lead? How can
this be?
Tulane 6 hours ago
Not journalism. Propaganda.
David 2 hours ago
Clinton, a self-absorbed pathological liar, has an excuse for just
about everything, and if elected president, the only policy to recieve any
priority must come attached with a multi-millon dollar 'donation' to ever
see the light of day.
Boot 2 hours ago
She'll promise the world to the world. And deliver nothing, all she
cares about is your vote on her quest for power..
Stanley 2 hours ago
The main problem I have with any Clinton proposal is, "who's going to
believe anything she says". That's the bi-product of getting away with everything,
no one forgets. With Obama emptying the prisons onto the streets, fighting
against law enforcement, and giving all our biggest enemies nuclear weapons,
Hillary should offer to drop-out and let someone run with judgment skills.
Even then, they would still have to run on Obama's record.
One of the worst kept secrets in Washington circles is that Hillary Clinton
is a lesbian. Rumors have swirled in the past about the former First Lady's
gay ways, and with a potential presidential run coming in 2016, they have come
back to haunt her.
Back in 2004, a Washington Times columnist reviewing Bill Clinton's
memoir My Life concluded that Hillary and Bill, "have had a pact for
decades. Their sexy, sexy pact is this: "He gets to fool around with
women and she gets to fool around with women (plus the occasional man) yes,
she's bisexual."
The lesbian rumors resurfaced a year later in Edward Klein's book The
Truth About Hillary: What She Knew, When She Knew It, And How Far She'll Go
To Become President. In it, Klein claimed that Hillary "wasn't maternal"
"had no wifely instincts," and "many of her closest friends were lesbians."
Klein asserted that Hillary was obsessed with lesbianism, but not in a normal
way. Instead, she was "much more interested in lesbianism as a political statement
than a sexual practice Hillary talked about it a lot, read lesbian literature,
and embraced it as a revolutionary concept."
In the end, Klein concluded that though she has experimented with lesbianism,
Hillary is ultimately asexual.
The rumors were fired up once again in 2007, when Huma Abedin, Hillary's
top aide, stumbled into the national spotlight with her husband Anthony Wiener's
sex scandal. Many accused Hillary and Huma of being lesbian lovers, with Hillary
hiding her "in plain sight" by hiring her as her top aide.
The lesbian rumors got so bad that year that Hillary addressed them personally.
"It's not true, but it is something that I have no control over. People will
say what they want to say," she told top gay magazine Advocate.
In 2013, when Hillary came out as pro-gay to the country, American Family
Association radio host Sandy Rios claimed to know for a fact that Hillary is
a lesbian:
"[Hillary] has always, as far as I know back to college, endorsed and
embraced all things lesbian and gay, that is her history on this so that
shouldn't be too shocking. She has played the role of wife and cookie-making
mother, I'm sorry but this is just the reality of things. We are being caught
in this vortex of homosexual advocacy, it's just amazing."
Finally, Bill Clinton's former mistress Gennifer Flowers spoke out last year
about the former first couple's sex life, and what she had to say was shocking.
Flowers claimed that Bill told her repeatedly that Hillary was "bisexual,"
and that he was fine with it. He also told her that Hillary had "eaten more
p*ssy than he had," a statement which shocked the nation.
In the end, if God-forbid Hillary becomes President in 2016, she will not
only be the first female President, but also the first gay President.
Is America really ready for a lesbian to be running the free world? What
do you think about all this? Sound off in the comments below!
The latest ad from Hillary Clinton's campaign suggests that, if elected,
Donald Trump might launch nuclear weapons because he lacks the experience and
temperament to be president.
"In times of crisis, America depends
on steady leadership, clear thinking, and calm judgement," the narrator says.
"Because all it takes is one wrong move."
... ... ...
The strategy from the Clinton campaign is familiar. During the 2008 Democratic
primary fight with President Obama, Clinton released an ad questioning whether
the young senator would have the experience necessary to keep the country safe
when the
phone rang at 3 a.m.
"... links to Russia were one of the most consistent messages of the 'Remain' campaign's 'Project Fear' strategy to keep Britain in the European Union. Even the Prime Minister at the time, David Cameron, invoked the threat of Russia to try and convince Britons to stay in. ..."
"... The Clinton campaign's briefings on how Donald Trump is " Helping Putin Consolidate Control of Ukraine ", and how Russia is " meddling in U.S. election " (there's that word again) are Project Fear 101. The journalists willfully writing up these stories are ignoring critical points; such as how Secretary of State Clinton's connections with the Kremlin and Russian oligarchs helped Russia buy up U.S. uranium interests . The New York Times reported in April 2015: ..."
Aug 23, 2016 | www.breitbart.com
The Clinton campaign alongside the establishment media have begun blowing the Vladimir Putin
dog-whistle, just as their European counterparts did during the United Kingdom's referendum on its
membership of the European Union (EU).
Almost as if on cue, news outlets have begun parroting the same old lines used by Britain's political
establishment before June of this year, when they accused anti-establishment 'Leave' campaigners
of doing the bidding for, if not being directly linked to, the Russian president and the Kremlin.
From questioning
the marriage of one of the key donors to the Leave campaign , to using
Britain's public broadcaster
to float conspiracy theories about Russian influence, the Cold War-esque scare tactics of 'Reds
Under the Bed' not only reveals the lack of originality in the Clinton camp, it reveals hypocrisy,
foreign policy flippancy , and perhaps even a serious misestimation of where the
public stands on the issue.
In the run up to the Brexit referendum, U.S. outlets even went as far as to call Mr. Putin's (lack
of) interventions "
meddling ". The same charge was never levelled by the media at U.S. President Barack Obama when
he flew to the United Kingdom and lectured Britons on how they should vote. In fact,
he
threatened the country's economy and
trade position in the world if they refused to follow his advice. But this was deemed appropriate.
Meanwhile, the Kremlin and Mr. Putin were broadly absent from the debate, possibly because they
knew full well the 'Remain' camp would use any public pronouncements against the Leave camp, but
also because they are unlikely to have had a clear-cut position on the issue. Mr Putin is a grand
strategist and could have dealt with either outcome. The U.S. establishment, however, has all of
its eggs in the globalism basket.
In March a Kremlin spokesman
said
: "Russia is being dragged into the domestic debate on Brexit. Why is the wicked Russia thesis
used to explain a Government policy?"
"We'd like the British people to know that those pronouncements have nothing to do with Russia's
policy," the embassy said. "As a matter of fact, our Government doesn't have an opinion on Britain's
place in the EU."
Despite this far less "meddling" tactic, links to Russia were one of the most consistent messages
of the 'Remain' campaign's 'Project Fear' strategy to keep Britain in the European Union. Even the
Prime Minister at the time, David Cameron, invoked the threat of Russia to try and convince Britons
to stay in.
"At the heart of the tale are several men, leaders of the Canadian mining industry, who have
been major donors to the charitable endeavors of former President
Bill Clinton and his family. Members of that group built, financed and eventually sold off
to the Russians a company that would become known as Uranium One."
This is barely scratching the surface, as Clinton
Cash author Peter Schweizer
wrote in the Wall Street Journal in July:
"In May 2010, the State Department
facilitated a Moscow visit by 22 of the biggest names in U.S. venture capital-and weeks later
the first memorandums of understanding were signed by Skolkovo and American companies.
"By 2012 the vice president of the Skolkovo Foundation, Conor Lenihan-who had
previously partnered with the Clinton Foundation-recorded that Skolkovo had assembled 28 Russian,
American and European
"Key Partners." Of the 28 "partners," 17, or 60%, have made financial commitments to the Clinton
Foundation, totaling tens of millions of dollars, or sponsored speeches by Bill Clinton."
Nevertheless, you will likely find more references to Putin and Trump in the past week alone than
you will to these dubious affairs in their totality.
Indeed arch-establishment mouthpiece, Legatum Institute
leader, and all-round George Soros activist Anne Applebaum went so far as to declare Donald Trump
"a Russian oligarch" in the Washington Post
this week.
And perhaps far worse than her connections to the Kremlin – a relationship which has evidently
soured in recent months – are her connections to the fascist, authoritarian, pseudo-monarchical,
Islamist dictatorship in Saudi Arabia. In 2015 the WSJ
reported :
" the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, has given between $10 million and $25 million since the foundation
was created in 1999. Part of that came in 2014, although the database doesn't specify how much."
But few column inches or broadcast air minutes are used to discuss these matters.
FOREIGN POLICY FLIPPANCY
In drafting in Russia as a talking point, Mrs. Clinton makes it very difficult for her to deal
with President Putin and the Kremlin should she find herself in the Oval Office in 2017.
Her campaign's claims that Mr. Trump is somehow untrustworthy because he wants to work with Mr.
Putin, not against him, is difficult to take seriously given her lauding of Russia as "an ally" in
2012:
She said, in an attempt to mock then-GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who called the country
America's greatest geopolitical foe:
"Russia has been an ally. They're in the P-5+1 talks with us, they have worked with us in Afghanistan
and have been very helpful in the Northern Distribution Network and in other ways. So I think
it's somewhat dated to be looking backwards instead of being realistic about where we agree, where
we don't agree, but looking for ways to bridge the disagreements and then to maximize the cooperation".
In March 2010 she said:
"One of the fears that I hear from Russia is that somehow the United States wants Russia to
be weak. That could not be farther from the truth. Our goal is to help strengthen Russia."
Even in Ukraine the picture is less clear than U.S. journalists would have you think. Pew (2015)
showed :
"Western Ukrainians are much more likely to say Russia is the sole culprit (56%), while those
in the east see the problem as more complicated. A third of Ukrainians in the east think Russia
is primarily to blame, but 36% fault more than one of the groups.
"Roughly half of Ukrainians (47%) believe Russia is a major military threat to other neighboring
countries. Another 34% say the former Cold War power is a minor threat. Western Ukrainians are
much more concerned about Russia's territorial ambitions (61% major threat) than those in the
east (30%)."
This is a drastically different scenario from the one portrayed in the U.S. media, which usually
comes down to "Russia bad. Everywhere else good". But even the American people are growing weary
of this slant.
Pew (2016)
demonstrated that while U.S. public opinion towards Russia slumped in 2014 around the time of
the Crimea annexation, those numbers have now halved. People don't view Russia as an outright adversary,
though they are perhaps rightly wary of its status as a geopolitical competitor.
Most of anti-russian hysteria is directed toward instilling fear and increasing solidarity, with
neoliberals trying to scare low-information dumb voters away from Trump
Notable quotes:
"... The FBI is investigating whether Russian hackers have carried out a series of cyber attacks on the New York Times, officials have told US media. ..."
"... New York Times was whinging that Chinese hackers had breached and infiltrated their servers a few years ago. NYT is always bitching about something. ..."
"... Isn't it cute, the way the Americans have lost their minds, and they don't even notice? Here's the Washington Post , blatting about how Putin's meddling in the American elections has backfired on him . Just as if that were actually happening. It's a good thing they have focused on another actual country which is part of this planet, I guess, rather than aliens from another world, because then we would have to lock them up. ..."
"... Some of it is just agitating for Hillary, trying to scare low-information dumb voters away from Trump. But there is a definite tendency to blame even routine American problems on Russia. They don't seem to get how crazy it makes them look, it's like actual national mental illness. The whole election process should be frozen right here until the country comes to its senses. ..."
Yes, the Chinese in chinked-out China would be very likely to want to tap into a newspaper that
doesn't report anything which is true except for the Catholic Bean Supper at St. Patrick's. China
can hear US government propaganda along with everyone else, while it is valuable to have advance
notice of news only if what is being reported is actually true.
Isn't it cute, the way the Americans have lost their minds, and they don't even notice? Here's
the Washington Post , blatting about how
Putin's meddling in the American elections has backfired on him . Just as if that were actually
happening. It's a good thing they have focused on another actual country which is part of this
planet, I guess, rather than aliens from another world, because then we would have to lock them
up.
Not even during the coldest depths of the Cold War did the United States so crazily blame all
of its problems on the Russians. If America can't have global war against Russia, it is going
to be so disappointed.
Some of it is just agitating for Hillary, trying to scare low-information dumb voters away
from Trump. But there is a definite tendency to blame even routine American problems on Russia.
They don't seem to get how crazy it makes them look, it's like actual national mental illness.
The whole election process should be frozen right here until the country comes to its senses.
Under neoliberalism like under communism political parties to become far more ideologically uniform
than they used to be. So we have hard neoliberal party and soft neoliberal party and voters are limited
between choosing Pepsi or Cola. And press became just presstitutes for political machine of the parties,
especially during election. Those despicable presstitutes now are afraid to talk about the issue facing
the country and denigrate to discussion personalities exclusively.
"Trump has laid bare journalism's [ pressitutes ]contradictions - reporters' desire to be critical
of politicians without criticizing anything they stand for "
Notable quotes:
"... The dems brand themselves as old time liberal to some constituencies. The repubs brand themselves as conservative to some constituencies. This works for dems and it works for repubs. The straw man arguments fill the boob tube and pass for democracy and self government. ..."
"... But this year, after so many years, standard baloney like "Bush kept us safe" did not placate the repub base, which is in a serious world of hurt (death rates of poorer middle aged white people are going up!). And the dems faced the most ground shaking challenge to the orthodoxy since Gene McCarthy, as millennials working 2 or 3 jobs saw that the "highest standard of living in the world" had the same relation to reality as pancake syrup has to …maple trees. ..."
"... We're at the beginning of the beginning – where the 99% is catching on that the vampire squid's gain is our loss. Its gonna be a bumpy ride… ..."
Hillary Clinton enjoys about a five-point polling lead over Donald Trump. One way to look at
this is that it's a margin, at this stage of a presidential race, that is rarely reversed.
Here's another way. The Democrats had a successful convention, the Republicans didn't. Clinton's
campaign has been smooth; Trump's has careened between disasters. She has reached out to independents
and Republicans; he has insulted the family of a soldier killed in Iraq, along with people with
disabilities, Latinos and women. Clinton has outspent him 3 to 1.
And she's only ahead by five percentage points.
I keep saying the Clinton campaign is like a hot air balloon with a tear in it. They have to keep
frantically pumping more hot air into it, simply to stay aloft.
Trump hasn't spent a dime on TV, either. (I'm sure that he isn't filling up Republican consultants'
rice bowls is one reason they hate him.)
Policy
UPDATE "No Need to Build The Donald's Wall, It's Built" [Tom
Dispatch]. Wait, wait. Obama's policy now is what Trump's would be? And Democrats >and Trump
are frothing and stamping over nothing? Is the problem that the wall's not beautiful? What?
fresno dan
UPDATE "No Need to Build The Donald's Wall, It's Built" [Tom Dispatch]. Wait, wait. Obama's
policy now is what Trump's would be? And Democrats and Trump are frothing and stamping over nothing?
Is the problem that the wall's not beautiful? What?
====================================== The dems brand themselves as old time liberal to some constituencies. The repubs brand themselves
as conservative to some constituencies. This works for dems and it works for repubs. The straw
man arguments fill the boob tube and pass for democracy and self government.
But it makes for a politics that is completely and totally irrelevant to most people. It is
designed not to address issues, and reality is its enemy.
But this year, after so many years, standard baloney like "Bush kept us safe" did not placate
the repub base, which is in a serious world of hurt (death rates of poorer middle aged white people
are going up!). And the dems faced the most ground shaking challenge to the orthodoxy since Gene
McCarthy, as millennials working 2 or 3 jobs saw that the "highest standard of living in the world"
had the same relation to reality as pancake syrup has to …maple trees.
We're at the beginning of the beginning – where the 99% is catching on that the vampire squid's
gain is our loss. Its gonna be a bumpy ride…
"... Hillary made the huge mistake of mixing public and private messages while using her personalized email server – before risking a massive scandal by refusing to make the documents public. ..."
"... Hillary is particularly concerned about intimate emails to longtime aide Huma Abedin – who married U.S. Representative Anthony Weiner in a ceremony that many ridiculed as a political arrangement. ..."
Hillary Clinton isn't just caught in a political scandal over her missing emails from her stint
as secretary of state – she's also terrified of personal revelations about a secret lesbian lifestyle!
Now a world-exclusive investigation by The National ENQUIRER reveals that some of the presidential
candidate's famously "deleted" emails are packed full of lesbian references and her lovers' names.
"I don't think she's so concerned about emails referring to her as secretly gay," said a Clinton
insider. "That's been out for years – her real fear is that the names of some of her lovers would
be made public!"
The ENQUIRER learned the list of Hillary's lesbian lovers includes a beauty in her early 30s who
has often traveled with Hillary; a popular TV and movie star; the daughter of a top government official;
and a stunning model who got a career boost after allegedly sleeping with Hillary. Hillary made
the huge mistake of mixing public and private messages while using her personalized email server
– before risking a massive scandal by refusing to make the documents public.
"That's clearly why she went to the extraordinary step of deleting everything," the high-ranking
source told The ENQUIRER .
Hillary is particularly concerned about intimate emails to longtime aide Huma Abedin – who
married U.S. Representative Anthony Weiner in a ceremony that many ridiculed as a political arrangement.
"... That said, what I believe is needed in the USA is a doubling down on Corporate Boards of Directors and CEOs to create a crisis, an American intervention, if you will, that demands companies bring back the idea that Profits alone are not all that matters. Serving the Nation you are born in, raised in, educated in, and then making a profitable income from certainly needs to be focused in on. ..."
"... An additional factor in the financial woes of the falling middle class is the changing demographics here in the US - the growing numbers of single mothers, who are far more likely to struggle financially than a two income household. I make no judgment regarding how people form their family units, but life is especially hard for single mothers. ..."
"... Its even more difficult for journalists in Guardian. They have to destroy chances of only candidate addressing inequality and climate change (Bernie), completely surrender their integrity to corporations, lament over those issues post factum, and yet be paid miserably only in hundreds of thousands for such colossal betrayal of humanity. Its worth at billions to actively participate in destroying future of your kids. Or is it? ..."
"... We need a new Federal Minimum Wage, and the wealthiest need to start paying up. Trump claims that business in the US pay the highest tax rate. That's just not true. I'm not talking about putting the burden on small business, but the multi-nationals and Wall Street. ..."
"... And we can blame Billary and Hussein for it. Their "free-trade" decisions, along with their shameful endorsement of open-borders, have lowered wages for everyone, except for financiers. Interestingly, it was those who've suffered the brunt of the elites' decisions who voted for Britain to leave the EU. Ironically, those who professed to stand for the middle and lower classes, revealed their hypocrisy when they joined the Mandarins in opposing for Britain to leave the totalitarian EU. ..."
"... Like the Trojans fearing present-giving presents, so should the working man loath the elites who promised to have their best interests at heart. That is the same promise communism gave the workers, only to turn on and enslave them. Today the workers don't stand a chance: the Marxists and bankers are on the same side sneering at the working classes who are demeaned as being racist, jingoistic xenophobes. ..."
"... An article in Forbes that explains why Obamacare is a scam. ObamaCare Enriches Only The Health Insurance Giants and Their Shareholders ..."
"... I agree with you that he never did. Obama is a corporatist and globalist. If you think Obamacare is bad wait until his trade deals are past. He sold Americans out for the profits of multinational corporations. Hillary will continue his work. I understand the true meaning of his words now. ..."
"... The US middle class has been disintegrating for decades as inequity grows ..."
"... Clinton is in hiding. I can't find her in the Guardian today. She is a habitual liar and the whole world has all the evidence it needs. All of her promises are bullshit. Bernie has been right the whole time and he is smart not to endorse. Bernie has always known what she is and Bernie's supporters have no reason to support her. ..."
"... It means she is corrupt, dishonest, and unqualified to be anything but an inmate. ..."
"... the middle class has been decimated.. This financial category is only about 35% of was it was in the early 70's.. additionally the definition of middle class has changed drastically as well.. believe it or not your middle class if your earn more than 50k a year!.. this is part of the reason we are as a nation borrowing a trillion dollars a year.. when will the silenced majority wake up and start voting and stop spending on products that are vastly over priced. ..."
"... My kid had a persistent tummy ache. Doc said intestinal blockage; take him to the ER immediately. Seven hours and one inconclusive CAT scan later, he's home again with symptoms unchanged. Two days later the pain went away. Cost: $12,000 with about $10,000 covered by union health insurance. So that's at least $2,000 out of pocket to me for seven hours in hospital, zero diagnosis and zero relief from symptoms. Medicine as a criminal enterprise? So what? Who's gonna stop it? The press? The law? ..."
"... I sympathize. I also agree with you. The US medical system is criminal. It is cruel, discriminatory, ruthless, often ineffective, and often incompetent. The only reason the administrators ("health" maintenance corporations) aren't in jail is because they use some of their obscene profits to buy Congress -- which passes laws like Obama's ACA or Bush's big Pharma swindle. I have no idea what to do about it though -- maybe if everyone refused to pay their premiums and medical bills, the money managers would notice. A sort of strike. ..."
"... SIngle-payer is the answer. Of course, the insurance companies and big pharma use scare tactics to stop that from happening. They talk about government waste, completely ignoring their own waste. They ignore the billions of dollars that they skim off of the top each year before applying any money for actual medical care. Wake up, people. Medical care should be run by the government or non-profit organizations, not by for-profit corporations. ..."
"... Despite the financial situation in middle-and lower income families that has been steadily declining under the past 8 years of the Obama administration, most in that group will support Hillary and propagate the Same problems for 4 more years. They stand no hope unless they break from the knee-jerk support of the "Democratic" Party. ..."
"... So they should support Donald Trump and the conservative party? Last time I checked raising taxes on the middle class while lowering taxes on the rich didn't really help anyone but the rich. The Republican party never gave two shits about middle and lower class, and there's no point believing they will start now. ..."
"... Isn't choosing to have three children very selfish if you cannot support them financially. People always find someone else to blame. ..."
"... "Race" card!!?? Where the hell did I mention anything about race or are you really as dumb as your reply suggests. Plus, you don't require a test to decide if you can afford children or not. It basic family planning. It's people like you in society that has the place in a mess with your "blame anyone but meself attitude" If I'm considered horrible, at least I'm not totally dumb and irrisponsible like you. ..."
"... Bill Maher recently (July 1, 2016; Overtime) editorialized about the state "laboratories" where new ideas are tested and evaluated. Maher compared the divergent fates of California and Kansas plus Louisiana. ..."
"... It's interesting. According to my household income I'm in the "upper" tier for the DC-metro region. But it really doesn't feel that way. Even those of us who make a good income are more and more stretched. In comparison to most of the country, I am well off. I own a car, just bought a house, I can afford to go out to eat a couple times a week. But, I even get to the end of the month with only $100 in the bank. That's because other downward pressures on pay aren't taken into account, such as student debt. My expensive undergraduate and graduate education didn't come cheap, and while that education affords people higher pay, if you end up taking less of it home. It kinda equals out. ..."
"... Sometimes my husband and I think about having kids, and then we realise that even with our good paying jobs, we can't afford day care in our area. I get paid the most, so I can't quit my job but if my husband quit to care for a child, we would really be strapped. Can I really be considered an upper tier household if I can't afford to have kids? If I can't afford to go on vacation once a year? If I haven't bought new clothes in two years? If I have no savings and a freak medical bill might just tip me over the edge? ..."
"... Suggest you give Andrew Tobias' book a read to think outside the box a good education often constructs for us: https://www.amazon.com/Only-Investment-Guide-Youll-Ever/dp/0544781937?ie=UTF8&ref_=asap_bc ..."
"... You can cut student debt in the U.S. by attending a good community college for two years and then transferring to a state university. Most kids are unwilling to do this--no frats or prestige in community colleges! ..."
"... Beginning in the 1970s, a majority of the middle class began to resent the taxation needed to continue support for these liberal policies, and they began to vote for conservative politicians who promised to remove them as they "only helped the undeserving poor." White racism played a role in this as the lower class was invariably portrayed in political speeches and advertising as group of lazy black people. ..."
"... No, it was created in response to the Bolshevik revolution, in particular, to that genius who said "Let's just shoot the royal family and be done with this." ..."
"... All of these things have come under attack since the USSR fell apart, probably on that exact day. And who overthrew the USSR? Overeducated middle class, not the poor or the rich. Who was Occupy Wall Street, Arab Spring... the recent protests against the French labor law tightenings, ALL the middle class. ..."
"... The greatest threat to governments has, and always will be, from within. And this threat is from the middle class, almost exclusively. Therefore, we are to be crushed and controlled tightly ..."
"... funny how this media outlet didn't publish these types of reports while the primary was hot. It was all "Hilary is inevitable and supporting Bernie is supporting Trump" type garbage. ..."
"... Probably he means to say Americans habitually ask new acquaintances, "What do you do for a living?" That's absolutely a query about income and personal worth, though slightly disguised, and it's a question I have never widely encountered anywhere else in the world, nor while living overseas the last ten years. ..."
"... This article is extremely dishonest. First, it claims that she has 'three other jobs'. Second, she has children, for whom she presumably gets child support. So what's her *real* income? ..."
"... When those in poverty or on the verge of it are single mothers, you tend to wonder if there are some other issues as well. I don't recall a time in American history where a single mother of several children could take care of herself when completely on her own. ..."
"... I teach in inner city schools. There are so many problems, money is one of them but all the money won't solve the problem of poor learning attitudes, disaffection, poor discipline and nonexistent work ethic . ..."
"... A lot of the students get no discipline at home and their parents don't expect them to learn anything. They are resistant to the whole process of focus on new knowledge , absorb, drill, recall , deploy newly learned thing. ..."
"... I don't know what solution there is to this. My nieces and nephews did well in school, studied hard, and went on to university. They didn't do drugs, rape or be raped, and stayed away from unsavory kids. BUT--they went home to two parents every night, a father and mother, which I think would have made them successful at school no matter what their income. ..."
"... The US economy isn't competitive anymore. It started with the labor cost being too high, so factories moved out. Then the entire supply chain moved out. Now the main consumer market is also moving out. Once that is gone, we will have no more leverage. ..."
"... The US education is good, but students are lazy, undisciplined, and incurious. In silicon valley, more than 75% of highly paid technical personnel are foreign born. Corporations making money with foreign workers here and abroad, on foreign markets. Taking these away and you will see the economy crash. ..."
"... Labor costs were too high. Have some more kool-aid. The elite didn't want labor to have any bargaining power whatsoever . They wanted to dictate the terms to labor believing that they were the only ones who should have any say in matters. The elite wanted to maximize their profits at the expense of their own citizens. They wanted slave labor . They wanted powerless people to dance to their tune. How could an advanced nation's labor possibly compete with slave labor . ..."
"... Sadly ..... thee isn't any hope for these people in the foreseeable future . Their economic decline has been happening for quite some time now and shows no sign of abating whatsoever . The economic foundations of their lives have been steadily pulled out from under them by the financial elite and their subservient political cultures , the Republican and Democratic Parties . The Republicans have never really given a damn about them and the Democrats have long abandoned them . These poor people of North Carolina are adrift on a sinking raft on easy ocean of indifference by the political cultures of America . To those in power , they don't exist . They don't count . They don't matter . ..."
"... The trend in the U.S, along with almost every other major nation in the world over the past 35 years has been to exclusively serve the interests of the financial elite and only their needs . All sense of fairness , justice and decency have been totally discarded . ..."
"... Tax breaks after tax breaks , tax shelters , free movement of capital , etc., etc. would sum up the experience of the financial elite over the past 35 years . They have become incredibly wealthy now and are still not satisfied . They want more . They want it all . They want what little you have and their political servants which help them get . ..."
"... Political discourse pertaining to the plight of those like these folks in North Carolina is all window dressing . In the end , you can be certain that it will amount to nothing . Just like it has for decades now . The financial elite are in control and they are not going to give any of that control up . As a matter of fact , they are going to tighten their grip . They will invent crisis to have their agendas imposed upon an increasingly powerless and bewildered public . They will take advantage of every naturally occurring crisis to advance their agenda . ..."
"... The problem is the job exporting American elite class. NAFTA was an economics, political, and social experiment with all the downside on the former, mostly lower middle class. Non-aligned examination of the available data shows how disastrous NAFTA has been to America's bubbas. Thanks to Bush 41 and Bill Clinton. WTO was all Bill. Of the mistakes Obama has made TPP would be the worst. The question is, really, do we favor global fairness (an even playing field for all earth's peoples) and a climate-killing consumerist world, or our own disadvantaged (courtesy of our financial and political elite) citizens. Not an easy choice. Death by poison or hanging. No treaty can benegotiated fairly in secret. ..."
"... The tragic irony is that the anger against rule by the 1% manifests in things like support for Trump, a typical example of the greed and excess of the 1%. Americans need to question outside their desperately constrained paradigms more. It will help focus their anger more strategically, and possibly lead to solutions. Don't hold your breath, the inequality gap is accelerating the wrong way. ..."
"... I think the US is heDing for trouble. It is the middle class that maintains civil society and gives a sense of hope. This is an interesting open letter by a zillionaire to his peers warning them what happens without a string middle class. A thought provoking read. http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchforks-are-coming-for-us-plutocrats-108014 ..."
"... The elite of the USA have done exactly what the Romans did and what the Pre-Revolutionary French did.... drain the lower classes while enriching themselves. "Taxes are for little people" is not just a pithy quote, it has become the reality as the elite rig the system so they benefit and the lower classes pay. They need to wake up or they will get exactly what the Romans Got (collapsed empire) or the French got (Violent Revolution). Wake up America! It is time to choose your side in the class war the elite continue to execute while telling us there is no "Class War" - you can't pull yourself up by your boot straps while they are pulling the rug out from under you! ..."
"... My wife used to employ recent graduates from Georgetown University with poli. sci., psychology, sociology degrees, to stack books for $10/hr. It took them on average 2-3 years, before finding work in their field. ..."
"... Education is NOT about finding a job! It's about learning ways to seek wisdom and rationality, and to assimilate (not deny) new knowledge throughout your life--and that's exactly what's lacking in the US! Our schools are factories to turn out standard robots to be used by the owners of this country, whether they practice law or flip burgers. ..."
I was stumped by the very idea that someone has the $money, the time, the energy to
go out and study for 3 bachelor degrees. This woman doesn't look old enough to have had time to get
3 degrees.
That said, what I believe is needed in the USA is a doubling down on Corporate Boards
of Directors and CEOs to create a crisis, an American intervention, if you will, that demands companies
bring back the idea that Profits alone are not all that matters. Serving the Nation you are born
in, raised in, educated in, and then making a profitable income from certainly needs to be focused
in on.
Why on earth isn't Main Stream Media doing this, along with all of CONGRESS and the President?
What is their excuse? Even if you brought back all the robotic jobs to US soil, you would also end
up bringing a large number of administrative jobs back here, too, just to keep up with the business
at hand. It is critical that we rebuild our infrastructure, yet we see NO immediate or Long-term
plans to do so. How can we, without the support of the Business Class to support the whole nation
through Paying their Taxes to the US Tax System? There is no excuse that will do, in my book. Profits
to the top tier need to be STOPPED so long as businesses are going outside of the United States Borders.
Period.
Typical of what's happening around the world. The trillions of dollars lurking in tax havens is
the reason why economies are stagnating. Money makes the world go round, however detouring to
the Cayman Islands, the flow stops and the poverty begins. Spend locally and reject multi national
corporations. Give your local communities a chance to prosper,
An additional factor in the financial woes of the falling middle class is the changing demographics
here in the US - the growing numbers of single mothers, who are far more likely to struggle financially
than a two income household. I make no judgment regarding how people form their family units,
but life is especially hard for single mothers.
"The 2016 presidential race has superficially been dominated by talk of this declining middle.
First from Bernie Sanders, then Hillary Clinton and even Donald Trump's promise to Make America
Great Again"
"And even"??? What a laugh. Even if you hate Trump its clear The Guardian has written every
article possible to prevent his rise and they have failed miserably. Hillary amd Sanders are dominating
conversatiin. Trump is by far.
One thing us for sure. 15 million illegals and thousands more every month is not making the
middle class more secure.
They are shrinking, and you expect them to tolerate "Make America Mexico Again"? In these times?
Donor money is ruining the country. They hate Trump because he doesnt need these arrogant donors
who have never heard "no" their whole lives.
Its even more difficult for journalists in Guardian. They have to destroy chances of only candidate
addressing inequality and climate change (Bernie), completely surrender their integrity to corporations,
lament over those issues post factum, and yet be paid miserably only in hundreds of thousands
for such colossal betrayal of humanity. Its worth at billions to actively participate in destroying
future of your kids. Or is it?
It isn't immigration that costing jobs - it's employers who know they can pay these people
less for their work. We need a new Federal Minimum Wage, and the wealthiest need to start
paying up. Trump claims that business in the US pay the highest tax rate. That's just not
true. I'm not talking about putting the burden on small business, but the multi-nationals and
Wall Street.
You can see in western Europe at the moment that a minimum wage desn't work without a whole host
of other protective legislation. A minimum wage doesn't reach to the self employed, and it doesn't
prevent the use of flexible or non-guaranteed hours contracts making use of a larger than is required
labour pool. Not to mention the black market / cash in hand trade.
And we can blame Billary and Hussein for it.
Their "free-trade" decisions, along with their shameful endorsement of open-borders, have lowered
wages for everyone, except for financiers.
Interestingly, it was those who've suffered the brunt of the elites' decisions who voted for Britain
to leave the EU.
Ironically, those who professed to stand for the middle and lower classes, revealed their hypocrisy
when they joined the Mandarins in opposing for Britain to leave the totalitarian EU.
Like the Trojans fearing present-giving presents, so should the working man loath the elites
who promised to have their best interests at heart.
That is the same promise communism gave the workers, only to turn on and enslave them.
Today the workers don't stand a chance: the Marxists and bankers are on the same side sneering
at the working classes who are demeaned as being racist, jingoistic xenophobes.
You realize most of the votes in favor of NAFTA were Republican and most against were Democratic,
right? You know that "free trade" has been an item in the Republican platform (and increasingly
the Democratic one) for years before Clinton and Obama were ever in office, right? Know some elementary
facts about U.S, politics before posting nonsense.
Ed Thurmann: it's not teacher-bashing, it's just the old recycled "black family values" spiel
that was introduced into the poverty debate in the '60s by Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Moynihan,
not so BTW, is Hillary Clinton's intellectual hero. So you can expect a hell of a lot more of
these cliches after January of next year.
An article in Forbes that explains why Obamacare is a scam. ObamaCare Enriches Only The Health Insurance Giants and Their Shareholders
Robert Lenzner , CONTRIBUTOR
I'm trying to wise up 300 million people about money & finance
So far in 2013 the value of the S& P health insurance index has gained 43%. Thats more than
double the gains made in the broad stock market index, the S & P 500. The shares of CIGNA are
up 63%, Wellpoint 47% and United Healthcare 28%. And if you go back to the early 2010 passage
of ObamaCare, you will find that Obama's sellout of the public interest has allowed the public
companies the ability to raise their premiums, especially on small business, dramatically multiply
their profits and send the value of their common stocks up by 200%-300%. This is bloody scandalous
and should be a cause for concern even as the Republican opponents of the bill threaten the close-down
of the government.
We warned you back on December4, 2009 in my blog " The Horrendous Truth About Health Care Reform"
that the Obama White House was handing a " free ride for the health insurance industry" that would
allow premium hikes of 8%-10% a year by CIGNA, Humana HUM +1.56%, Aetna AET +0.45%, UnitedHealth
Group UNH +0.58% and Wellpoint, and as well a $500 billion taxpayer subsidy, a half trillion dollars
without any requirement that the health insurers had to spend the subsidy on medical care. Several
US Senators including Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia spoke to me openly of the outrageous sellout
being foisted on the nation's uninsured citizens.
At the time I wrote, Goldman Sachs research operation estimated that the 5 giants would increase
profits by 10% a year from 2010 to 2019, sending their shares up an average of 59%. In truth,
the shares of CIGNA and some others are up a multiple of several times since the contest was resolved
by a very tight vote in early 2010. One startling reason for this amazing performance was that
Obama took off the table "proposals to significantly reduce health care costs" as the giveaway
in getting the bill through, according to Ron Susskind's best-selling book ,"Confidence Men,"
which I wrote about in a blog on September 24, 2011. ( "Obama's Incoherent Policy-Making") Some
3 years later, UnitedHealthCare Group(UNH) was rewarded by being added to the elite list of the
Dow 30 industrials.
I understood belatedly that there would have been no Affordable Care Act of 2010 if the White
House had not given into demands from the giant profit-making health insurance companies. Had
he not done so, I am being assured that there would have been no bill passed, a priority goal
that Obama promised in his 2008 Presidential campaign. How the profits have risen so impressively
requires further investigation as the bill is meant to limit the profits earned to 20% of the
revenues.
One of the other downsides to the supposed reform bill was the surprisingly unfair treatment
of small business owners who faced even larger potential premiums for their employees. It has
been the fear of these higher health costs that has resulted in the overwhelming trend toward
hiring part-time employees whom the employers need not offer healthcare insurance.
So much for the reforms embedded in the mis-labeled Affordable Care Act of 2010. It may not
die a bloody demise this month, but it is certain to be reformed itself, let's hope for the benefit
of the 300 million, not just the millions of lucky shareholders who may have understood the ramification
of ObamaCare, which was to multiply the profits of five giant insurance companies, just as the
major bank oligopoly was rewarded by the federal bailouts and Fed monetary policy.
I agree with you that he never did. Obama is a corporatist and globalist. If you think Obamacare
is bad wait until his trade deals are past. He sold Americans out for the profits of multinational
corporations. Hillary will continue his work. I understand the true meaning of his words now.
"We are a nation of immigrants" meaning he prefers cheap illegal labor when 46 million Americans
live in poverty. Soon cheap foriegn will be unlimited and legal in the US with worker mobility.
Even for professional jobs. Can you imagine competing with foreigners in the US who make 30 cents
an hour? It's depressing really. Here are some of the highlights of the TPP that will throw Americans
further into poverty.
My heart goes out to these beleaguered families. In the late 1970s/80s I held down a full-time
job in DC and freelanced feverishly to make ends meet. I lived below the official poverty line
in an expensive, yet thoroughly crappy, flat. That recession-riddled era of energy chaos, leading
into Reagan's 'voodoo' economics regime (the risible idea of 'trickle-down', the US becoming the
world's largest debtor), was another hot mess.
The US middle class has been disintegrating for
decades as inequity grows, thanks in large part to the poor governance of Republican presidents
(Nixon's stagflation, the disastrous shifts under GW Bush).
Clinton is in hiding.
I can't find her in the Guardian today.
She is a habitual liar and the whole world has all the evidence it needs.
All of her promises are bullshit.
Bernie has been right the whole time and he is smart not to endorse.
Bernie has always known what she is and Bernie's supporters have no reason to support her.
Her disapproval ratings will top Trump now.
The voters are now going to show her what the meaning of is, really is.
It means she is corrupt, dishonest, and unqualified to be anything but an inmate.
Her disapproval ratings are high, but not up with Trump's and they never will be. You can vote
for Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, in November. Or Gary Johnson, the Libertarian. But
Bernie will not be a candidate, and he will eventually endorse Clinton -- after he is sure he's
won certain concessions in the Democratic platform. That's your reality in July 2016, not in February.
the middle class has been decimated.. This financial category is only about 35% of was it was
in the early 70's.. additionally the definition of middle class has changed drastically as well..
believe it or not your middle class if your earn more than 50k a year!.. this is part of the reason
we are as a nation borrowing a trillion dollars a year.. when will the silenced majority wake
up and start voting and stop spending on products that are vastly over priced..Turn off your phone,
stop buying all but essentials.. we need to force prices down until we complain and start voting
with our dollars little will change
What about the millions of married couples with kids..when the parents lose their jobs? That happens
very frequently. Should we take the kids away? Are you suggesting that poor people not be allowed to have children?
Then we have the religious nutcases that are against contraception and abortion, yet demonize
poor women for having children.
My kid had a persistent tummy ache. Doc said intestinal blockage; take him to the ER immediately.
Seven hours and one inconclusive CAT scan later, he's home again with symptoms unchanged. Two
days later the pain went away. Cost: $12,000 with about $10,000 covered by union health insurance. So that's at least $2,000 out of pocket to me for seven hours in hospital, zero diagnosis and
zero relief from symptoms. Medicine as a criminal enterprise? So what?
Who's gonna stop it? The press? The law?
Medicine as a criminal enterprise? So what?
Who's gonna stop it? The press? The law?
I sympathize. I also agree with you. The US medical system is criminal. It is cruel, discriminatory, ruthless, often ineffective, and often incompetent. The only reason the administrators ("health" maintenance corporations) aren't in jail is because
they use some of their obscene profits to buy Congress -- which passes laws like Obama's ACA or
Bush's big Pharma swindle. I have no idea what to do about it though -- maybe if everyone refused to pay their premiums
and medical bills, the money managers would notice. A sort of strike.
SIngle-payer is the answer. Of course, the insurance companies and big pharma use scare tactics to stop that from happening.
They talk about government waste, completely ignoring their own waste. They ignore the billions
of dollars that they skim off of the top each year before applying any money for actual medical
care. Wake up, people. Medical care should be run by the government or non-profit organizations,
not by for-profit corporations.
Corporations have only one goal...to make as much money as possible for themselves. Health
care is just a necessary nuisance.
Despite the financial situation in middle-and lower income families that has been steadily declining
under the past 8 years of the Obama administration, most in that group will support Hillary and
propagate the Same problems for 4 more years. They stand no hope unless they break from the knee-jerk
support of the "Democratic" Party.
So they should support Donald Trump and the conservative party? Last time I checked raising taxes
on the middle class while lowering taxes on the rich didn't really help anyone but the rich. The
Republican party never gave two shits about middle and lower class, and there's no point believing
they will start now.
This article mentions Latonia Best and her three children.
Is there a Mr Best around? It has always been tough to raise a family on the salary of a single parent.
The breakdown of the American family is a probably the biggest reason for the supposed struggles
of the middle class. People have to take responsibility for their lives.
traditionally, the middle class had the guy going out to work, and his wife staying at home to
look after the kids. Once children are in school and childcare is reduced, I don't see how a
woman working and raising her kids alone, is any more expensive than a man supporting himself,
his wife and their kids.
It used to be possible. It used to be doable. wealth disparity ind income inequality mean that
is no longer the case, at least certainly not for the average middle class. In the UK anyway,
it's now a sign of wealth. This has nothing top do with the family and everything to do with income
disparity.
Ah. I was waiting for some "bubba" to pull the race card. Congratulations.
Maybe we should make everyone take a test to prove that they can afford children. No children for poor people. Nice.
"Race" card!!?? Where the hell did I mention anything about race or are you really as dumb as
your reply suggests.
Plus, you don't require a test to decide if you can afford children or not. It basic family planning.
It's people like you in society that has the place in a mess with your "blame anyone but meself
attitude" If I'm considered horrible, at least I'm not totally dumb and irrisponsible like you.
$3,333.33 is actually not a lot of money to raise a family of four on. Let's do some math, shall
we?!
Taxes: $800 (rough estimate)
Health Insurance: I'm going to estimate $300 because she probably has dependents on her coverage
and that's what I paid one dependent a while back.
Car: I'm going to estimate $150. My car payment is $300, but let's say she got a cheaper, used
car.
Rent: Let's say $1,000/month (I did a quick search and found that this seemed like a good price
for a two bedroom)
Bills: Let's round up to $150/month for gas, electricity, water, sewage
Food: Let's say she spends $80/week, so roughly $320 a month (you know, she's a thrifty shopper)
All of that leaves about $313 left for gas, phone, college tuition, maybe internet and cable
at home. I don't know how she does it.
Worst of all was the town of Goldsboro – one of three metropolitan areas in North Carolina
at the bottom of the national league table.
North Carolina, Michigan, Kansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma ... more ...
Sad stories in states run by Republicans. Toxic rivers, shootings, poisoned tap water, bankruptcy,
daily earthquakes ...
Bill Maher recently (July 1, 2016; Overtime) editorialized about the state "laboratories"
where new ideas are tested and evaluated. Maher compared the divergent fates of California and
Kansas plus Louisiana.
Only five countries produced more last year than California: the U.S., China, Japan, Germany
and the United Kingdom.
So -- North Carolina with fouled rivers, a collapsing middle class, discriminatory laws --
or a thriving California?
Goldsboro remains far from the sort of economic catastrophe seen in parts of the rust belt,
but these are signs of financial stress that are hard to ignore. The strain on the middle class
across much of the country may not have gone unnoticed by politicians, but locals here fear
there is little talk of the investment in skills, high-paying jobs and civic infrastructure
needed to arrest the slide.
Republican shills will have to admit -- finally that Republican policies ruin lives, ruin the
economy and ruin the environment. Truth appears more powerful than slogans and slanders. Who knows?
They might even acknowledge climate change.
I believe it is the wars and needs of the military-industrial-banking complex that sap far too
much from the economy. Both parties are guilty of supporting them.
North Carolina with fouled rivers, a collapsing middle class, discriminatory laws -- or a thriving
California?
Since 2013, North Carolina has the fastest GDP growth of any state. The NC economy is not in bad
shape. This lady lives in one of the poorest areas in the state, she should move 45 minutes north
to thriving Raleigh or Durham - the population in that area is booming, they need teachers.
The dumping of coal ash into the Dan river was a corporate crime, not a policy decision. Neither
party is responsible for criminal actions by individuals or corporations, that's just silly. (The
republicans have been too lax in holding Duke Energy to account but the damage done is not a political
issue)
HB2 is a disgrace but the legislature is in the process of correcting it and the Governor is likely
to lose the election in the fall which bodes well for anti-HB2 people. Don't forget that California
voters voted to ban gay marriage not even 10 years ago. It's not a paradise of wealth and enlightenment,
no place is.
Why should we feel sorry for the American middle class they have elected for all the misery that
has befallen them!
If America was a fascist state I could sympathise but it's not. Americans have let their social
rights being eroded by a mendacious and cunning establishment.
One good example of how Americans don't give a shit is the very expensive wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan which have cost gazillions to the US taxpayer and not a whimper from the US population.
If one can compare that to the Vietnam war which created its own critical cinema genre, protest
songs, large demonstrations etc...you know that todays average Americans responsibility for the
mess they find themselves in is non existent. They just bend over and take it and have little
whine about it from time to time.
What about the people that didn't vote for the "misery" as you call it?
What about the fact that whichever way you vote in the US you're screwed?
And I don't know about you, but you must not know many Americans. The number of my friends
who have been tear gassed during marches against the Iraq war flies in the face of your argument.
Have you, yourself, even uttered a whimper against it?
I will support proper child-support and healthcare and everything that can be done to make this
woman's life easier and secure her kids' futures BUT
Three kids is a LOT for two people to handle, let alone one.
To paraphrase Lady Bracknell, to raise one child alone may be regarded as a misfortune; to
attempt to raise three looks like carelessness. To try to raise three alone in the United States
is MADNESS.
I live in the USA. I'm in a stable long-term relationship. I don't make much money. I can't
afford kids.
2 + 2 = 4
Poor me. I don't say I have a right to kids because I need them or I have so much love to give
or blah, blah, blah. I just can't. Not here. This is a cruelly individualistic country. It is
built to serve those who serve themselves. Namely, the young, healthy, smart, motivated and single.
There is no political foundation or tradition of altruism here. Maybe back in Ireland where there's
a system to support me and some healthcare and family. Not here. Madness.
But she's got the kids now. What is she supposed to do? Hand them back to someone? If she and
the childrens' father had them when life was looking more stable and she didn't have to work 4
jobs to make ends meet, she can hardly be blamed now for their existence.
You are living in the now and choose not to have children because you feel you can't afford
them. However, in the future, you may find that you can afford them, and therefore choose to conceive.
If your circumstances change after that and you are no longer able to afford to care for them
without working excessive hours and living in poverty, there's not a lot you can do other than
get on with it. No point blaming her for something that is irreversible.
It's interesting. According to my household income I'm in the "upper" tier for the DC-metro region.
But it really doesn't feel that way. Even those of us who make a good income are more and more
stretched. In comparison to most of the country, I am well off. I own a car, just bought a house,
I can afford to go out to eat a couple times a week. But, I even get to the end of the month with
only $100 in the bank. That's because other downward pressures on pay aren't taken into account,
such as student debt. My expensive undergraduate and graduate education didn't come cheap, and
while that education affords people higher pay, if you end up taking less of it home. It kinda
equals out.
Sometimes my husband and I think about having kids, and then we realise that even with our
good paying jobs, we can't afford day care in our area. I get paid the most, so I can't quit my
job but if my husband quit to care for a child, we would really be strapped. Can I really be considered
an upper tier household if I can't afford to have kids? If I can't afford to go on vacation once
a year? If I haven't bought new clothes in two years? If I have no savings and a freak medical
bill might just tip me over the edge?
There's something very, very wrong. How rich do you need to be before you don't feel like you're
struggling?
You can cut student debt in the U.S. by attending a good community college for two years and then
transferring to a state university. Most kids are unwilling to do this--no frats or prestige in
community colleges!
The huge middle class in the USA was created by the liberal economic polices of the 1930s, which
were designed to help the lower class.
Beginning in the 1970s, a majority of the middle class began to resent the taxation needed
to continue support for these liberal policies, and they began to vote for conservative politicians
who promised to remove them as they "only helped the undeserving poor." White racism played a
role in this as the lower class was invariably portrayed in political speeches and advertising
as group of lazy black people.
What the middle class did not understand was that their continued existence depended on these
liberal programs, as most of the benefits went to the middle class, not the lower class as they
assumed. As the liberal programs began to disappear, so did the economic security of the middle
class.
One would think they would have figured all of this out by now, but they have not, and they
continue to vote for conservatives.
No, it was created in response to the Bolshevik revolution, in particular, to that genius who
said "Let's just shoot the royal family and be done with this."
When that happened, the ruling class got scared, and said "OK, minimum wage, vacation, sick
pay, 40 hr work week, no child labor, great schooling, etc"
All of these things have come under attack since the USSR fell apart, probably on that exact
day. And who overthrew the USSR? Overeducated middle class, not the poor or the rich. Who was
Occupy Wall Street, Arab Spring... the recent protests against the French labor law tightenings,
ALL the middle class.
The greatest threat to governments has, and always will be, from within. And this threat is
from the middle class, almost exclusively. Therefore, we are to be crushed and controlled tightly.
" squeezed middle class tell tales of struggle " Too bad they voted for the big squeeze herself -- Bernie
could have set them free from the path of exploitation she has planned for them immediately after
her election by imposing the TPP upon the very fools who will elect her. Stop watching
the Kartrashians and read about actual policy implications for your family and especially your
children, if you had, none of you would have supported Clinton.
funny how this media outlet didn't publish these types of reports while the primary was hot. It
was all "Hilary is inevitable and supporting Bernie is supporting Trump" type garbage.
I lived in Pittsburgh for 8 years, being European I sent them to public school...well, after a
year in which my six years old son was suspended twice for running around at lunchtime when he
shouldn't (six years old tend to do that), numerous recesses where they were put in front of a
TV (we cannot send them outside, insurance doesn't cover if they get hurt and we got sued before),
and notes from teachers full of spelling mistakes......I had to send them to private school perpetuating
a cycle of poor people in public system and rich people (or middle class as i was at the time)
to private schools....
i don't know what needs to be done to fix the issue but it's the whole society that is really
divided along money lines and race lines and inequality is getting worse. But money trumps everything,
the US is the only place int he world where it's not considered unpolite to ask people :"what's
your worth?" meaning how much you make, what are your assets, etc.....instilling in people a mentality
of self worth based on money and consequentially a cutthroat environment where the more you have
the more you are worth, so at the top they squeeze the lower end, to make more money but also
because they think they are really not that worthy....its a perverse cycle that history taught
us doesn't bring any good because at a certain point the poor reach a critical mass that will
just revolt......I'm waiting for that, good luck...
I'm afraid my friend we disagree on that, excellent public schools are exceptions, there are some
but they are a minority (International statistics on education quality validate that), I don't
live in the US anymore but travel a lot there for business (at least 20 times a year). As for
the worth question I had it asked to me quite a few times and kind of everywhere, maybe it's unpolite,
I believe it's unpolite, but it happens regularly and only in the US (let me rephrase, in the
rest of the world it wouldn't be considered unpolite, that's too mild of a term, it would be considered
inconceivable). Said that I hope the US makes it and the "American Values" that you talk about
prevail, but i am afraid those values have changed and being substituted by less noble ones...
Probably he means to say Americans habitually ask new acquaintances, "What do you do for a living?"
That's absolutely a query about income and personal worth, though slightly disguised, and it's
a question I have never widely encountered anywhere else in the world, nor while living overseas
the last ten years. The question is so ingrained, though, that Americans who ask it don't think
of it as a query about net worth. They do, however, react with overflowing respect toward those
who answer in certain ways, and something akin to sympathy to those who answer in other ways.
All my foreign friends have noticed it, and all think it's weird.
This article is extremely dishonest. First, it claims that she has 'three other jobs'. Second,
she has children, for whom she presumably gets child support. So what's her *real* income?
Agree, I did my last year of high school in the US, in North Carolina of all places, in a top
private school, i was a middling student in Europe with flashes of brilliance in some subjects
but definitely far from the top of the class. When I arrived (it was in the 80s) I didn't speak
English. Well, I graduated with high honors int he top 5% and got my high school diploma, honestly
without having to study that much, school was not totally comparable but definitely way less challenging.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, a lot of private schools in the United States are severely lacking
in the rigor department. This is even true for many--not all--private schools that cater to well-to-do
families.
When those in poverty or on the verge of it are single mothers, you tend to wonder if there are
some other issues as well. I don't recall a time in American history where a single mother of
several children could take care of herself when completely on her own.
I know of single mothers
who are doing fine, but they employed and are also being helped by siblings and parents who already
have some wealth and free time to take care of the child. Maybe the issue is the fact that these
people are having kids at the wrong time or without enough thought. Divorce rates are incredibly
high in the US, and the percentage of children who have non-birth parents is very high as well.
What this all means is that the USA isn't teaching its citizens about having kids and the responsibility.
The USA is also not teaching men and women about birth control, or about being holding potential
partners to higher standards (and I don't mean looks). A lot of people in the USA are too shallow
and focus too much on aesthetics over reliability and now we have single mothers with fathers
who refuse to pay child support at all costs. There are too many problems with the USA, but I
feel that personal hygiene and responsibility with sexual partners should be on the top.
I teach in inner city schools. There are so many problems, money is one of them but all the money
won't solve the problem of poor learning attitudes, disaffection, poor discipline and nonexistent
work ethic .
A lot of the students get no discipline at home and their parents don't expect them
to learn anything. They are resistant to the whole process of focus on new knowledge , absorb,
drill, recall , deploy newly learned thing.
Americans have a religious reverence for individualism
and learning new things is a humbling experience and many people don't like it. Sure the adults
bang on about education but they aren't serious about it. They think all you need is to spend
more money , not do any actual work.
The problems in the inner city are so intransigent that I doubt anything can fix it. I have three
friends, all dedicated teachers, who taught in inner city schools in New Jersey and the stories
they have told me make my mind reel: a mother who punched a teacher (and gave her a concussion)
who "disrespected" her kid (by failing him, deservedly, in algebra), 15-year-olds who had pagers
so their pimps could call them, children who had five brothers and sisters--all with different
fathers. You couldn't make this stuff up.
I don't know what solution there is to this. My nieces and nephews did well in school, studied
hard, and went on to university. They didn't do drugs, rape or be raped, and stayed away from
unsavory kids. BUT--they went home to two parents every night, a father and mother, which I think
would have made them successful at school no matter what their income.
The Pew survey you cited noted that "...the share living in middle-income households fell from
55% in 2000 to 51% in 2014. Reflecting the accumulation of changes at the metropolitan level,
the nationwide share of adults in lower-income households increased from 28% to 29% and the share
in upper-income households rose from 17% to 20% during the period." In other words, most of the
decline in the middle class was due to their moving into the upper class.
The article was mostly about a declining rural area. The Guardian grinding its usual axes and
reaching the conclusion it intended to reach?
Middle class job death inflicted by cronie capitalism entertained by the political establishment
(examples): Private equity is not scrutinized by anti-trust legislation, buys any company and
sends jobs overseas. Cronie supporters of politicians get help in that some industry gets indicted
(e.g. more or less entire coal industry) or regulated into oblivion, for fake reasons, so that
cronie (solar panel) company gets subsidies. Of course, the latter goes under, no company on IV
survives without IV. Banks get bailed out, others not. GM gets bailed out, to maintain jobs, then
outsources.
The old members of middle class are not tolerated by our government and the cronies. Who is tolerated
as middle class is any kind of civil servant, and new immigrants. Revenge from 2 sides. Or call
it cultural revolution Mao style: Take their habitat.
Growing up in the SF Bay Area during the 70's there was a large disparity in academics between
schools even in the same district. At 11 years old the school district was rezoned and the new
school that I attended had much lower standards. So much so, that I came home the very first day
and complained to my mother that I had been assigned to a class for slow learners. Being so bored,
my grades started to drop. At 13 years, I tested out of mathematics and eventually tested out
of high school altogether and joined the military.
There my intelligence was appreciated (believe
it or not). The military provided a valuable work ethic and training in technology that have provided
a decent career and lifestyle since. It's too bad that America can't seem to provide adequate learning to the vast majority.
The US economy isn't competitive anymore. It started with the labor cost being too high, so factories
moved out. Then the entire supply chain moved out. Now the main consumer market is also moving
out. Once that is gone, we will have no more leverage.
The US education is good, but students are lazy, undisciplined, and incurious. In silicon valley,
more than 75% of highly paid technical personnel are foreign born. Corporations making money with
foreign workers here and abroad, on foreign markets. Taking these away and you will see the economy
crash.
Then you have Hillary wanting to sub divide a rapidly diminishing pie, and Trump wanting to
return to 1946. Good luck to them both.
Labor costs were too high. Have some more kool-aid. The elite didn't want labor to have any bargaining power whatsoever . They wanted to dictate
the terms to labor believing that they were the only ones who should have any say in matters. The elite wanted to maximize their profits at the expense of their own citizens. They wanted slave labor . They wanted powerless people to dance to their tune. How could an advanced nation's labor possibly compete with slave labor .
This is the same argument that slave owning , southern plantation owners used to fight against
the freeing of slaves . They to said that they would not longer be competitive and the overall
economy would suffer .
Are you telling us that an economy needs slave labor to exist ?
Sadly ..... thee isn't any hope for these people in the foreseeable future .
Their economic decline has been happening for quite some time now and shows no sign of abating
whatsoever . The economic foundations of their lives have been steadily pulled out from under them by the
financial elite and their subservient political cultures , the Republican and Democratic Parties
. The Republicans have never really given a damn about them and the Democrats have long abandoned
them . These poor people of North Carolina are adrift on a sinking raft on easy ocean of indifference
by the political cultures of America . To those in power , they don't exist . They don't count . They don't matter .
The trend in the U.S, along with almost every other major nation in the world over the past
35 years has been to exclusively serve the interests of the financial elite and only their needs
. All sense of fairness , justice and decency have been totally discarded .
Tax breaks after tax breaks , tax shelters , free movement of capital , etc., etc. would sum
up the experience of the financial elite over the past 35 years . They have become incredibly wealthy now and are still not satisfied . They want more . They
want it all . They want what little you have and their political servants which help them get
.
Political discourse pertaining to the plight of those like these folks in North Carolina is
all window dressing . In the end , you can be certain that it will amount to nothing . Just like
it has for decades now . The financial elite are in control and they are not going to give any of that control up .
As a matter of fact , they are going to tighten their grip . They will invent crisis to have their
agendas imposed upon an increasingly powerless and bewildered public . They will take advantage
of every naturally occurring crisis to advance their agenda .
There will be an end to their abuse , greed and domination until one day when everything changes
. The day when people have had enough . When people can't take it any more . History has demonstrated
this fact so often before . The mighty do fall . They always fall ..... but their fall is nowhere
to be seen at this time .
There is going to a great deal more pain for average folk before things get better .
A Presidential election featuring Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton is clear evidence of this
fact.
Hopefully , these two bottom feeding , utter human failures represent the bottom of the barrel
but I doubt if they do .
Good luck to the good folks of North Carolina and countless others like them .... they / we
/ myself are going to need it .
On the contrary .... it's money that the elite have not paid out in wages .
It's money that the elite have illegally hidden from the taxman . It's money the the elite need to pay for the infrastructure that makes it possible to do business
in the first place . It's money that has been made from insider trading and backroom deals . It's money from the wealth that labour has basically created in the first place .
It's money that contributes to the social maintenance on a safe , civil society . It's money that the wealthy do not need .... they have all they could ever need now .
It is money that when distributed fairly keeps money in motion creating it's transfer into
additional hands which further circulates that money creating even more spending by people and
the consumption of goods and services which result in the creation of even more wealth .
Static capital kills economies .
I know that the elite like to think that they are the exclusive ones to create wealth but wealth
creation is the marriage between capital and labour . You can have all of the capital in the world
but without labour transforming it into greater wealth it can not possibly grow .
If anyone is guilty of stealing money it is the elite who steal from the economy causing the
economy's ill health .
The last 35 years are more than testimony to this fact .
Economies are dying wherever the elite have gotten their way .
The elite are the real killers of wealth and economies . Just look at any economy in the world
throughout history where the elite had all of the wealth to themselves . Their economies are highly
dysfunctional and their societies are full of social problems and crime .
This is an indisputable fact .
Greed kills wealth development .
Wealth development is directly tied to the well being of labour which allows for mass consumption
of goods and services .
You would have to be a complete idiot not to see this fact .
So my good doctor .... the money in any given economy really belongs to everyone , not just
the greedy elite .
You need to get a real perspective instead of constantly eyeing you own pile of wealth .
so the woman chose to have 3 daughters, is now choosing to foot the bill for their college education,
and wants me to feel sorry because she has to work her ass off to do all these things? how about
this.... don't have children you can't afford. a little personal responsibility in one's life
goes a long, long way.
We need to redefine middle class. I grew up middle class. We had one TV. Not a lot of clothes.
Took short, cheap vacations. Had no credit cards. Our lives were perfectly enjoyable. Many people
here in the US live way beyond their means.
We piled into the station wagon and headed out on short trips in the region. We visited historic
sites and were enriched by the experience. None of this $1000s on the trip to Disneyland. We didn't
feel deprived or entitled.
The key is not money but optimism. America is still richer, cleaner, and better run than most
other places. But the gap is rapidly closing. Scaling back the spending would not help here. It
would only further reduce the drive.
As a North Carolinian, there are two major issues. One, the right to bear arms and also, teacher
tenure and working conditions. Republicans have already taken away tenure from my younger colleagues,
but as an older teacher, I still have mine. Secondly, democrats want to take away gun rights on
the federal level, but state dems are usually more pro-gun in the conservative state.
SO for me, I will vote for a democratic state government and a republican federal government.
I will be proudly putting a Roy Cooper bumper sticker on my car. But due to the peaceful liberals,
I would be afraid to put a TRUMP sticker on my car because of recent violence against Trump supporters.
The problem is the job exporting American elite class. NAFTA was an economics, political, and
social experiment with all the downside on the former, mostly lower middle class. Non-aligned
examination of the available data shows how disastrous NAFTA has been to America's bubbas. Thanks
to Bush 41 and Bill Clinton. WTO was all Bill. Of the mistakes Obama has made TPP would be the
worst. The question is, really, do we favor global fairness (an even playing field for all earth's
peoples) and a climate-killing consumerist world, or our own disadvantaged (courtesy of our financial
and political elite) citizens. Not an easy choice. Death by poison or hanging. No treaty can benegotiated
fairly in secret.
The tragic irony is that the anger against rule by the 1% manifests in things like support for
Trump, a typical example of the greed and excess of the 1%.
Americans need to question outside their desperately constrained paradigms more. It will help
focus their anger more strategically, and possibly lead to solutions. Don't hold your breath, the inequality gap is accelerating the wrong way.
Fake, fake fake.
A woman with $40k and three children would *not* be paying 1/3 of her income in tax.
This woman does *not* live on $40k net or gross - she has three other jobs.
And her name looks *very* made up.
The elite of the USA have done exactly what the Romans did and what the Pre-Revolutionary French
did.... drain the lower classes while enriching themselves. "Taxes are for little people" is not
just a pithy quote, it has become the reality as the elite rig the system so they benefit and
the lower classes pay. They need to wake up or they will get exactly what the Romans Got (collapsed
empire) or the French got (Violent Revolution). Wake up America! It is time to choose your side
in the class war the elite continue to execute while telling us there is no "Class War" - you
can't pull yourself up by your boot straps while they are pulling the rug out from under you!
My wife used to employ recent graduates from Georgetown University with poli. sci., psychology,
sociology degrees, to stack books for $10/hr. It took them on average 2-3 years, before finding
work in their field. I keep telling my kids you need to earn a degree that has a skill for life
and will always be in demand, i.e. doctor, dentist, vet, engineer, scientist. Additionally, include
work oversees in your career.
Education is NOT about finding a job! It's about learning ways to seek wisdom and rationality,
and to assimilate (not deny) new knowledge throughout your life--and that's exactly what's lacking
in the US! Our schools are factories to turn out standard robots to be used by the owners of this
country, whether they practice law or flip burgers.
I was lucky that my parents were born and
raised before that happened. They went to what used to be called "country schools"--my dad to
a 1-room schoolhouse. Some of the so-called "knowledge" was patriotic trash, serving only the
rich elites, but they learned to be sturdy and to think for themselves, so I was lucky and learned
a lot at home. Without parents who practice the empathetic, rational morality needed in a democracy,
all the jobs in the world--especially if most are for flipping burgers--won't save this dreary
country.
You make an excellent point. Thinking about your life rather than just going for a crip major
in college would be an excellent way NOT to wind up stacking books for $10 an hour with a degree.
I can't count the number of my kids friends who select communications majors, or sociology or
women's studies and then are completely surprised when there are no jobs demanding their educational
background. What is it that they think they will be qualified to do after college?
From the article....
"Some lucky families saw themselves promoted to the upper income bracket." Here in a nutshell we see the author's underlying worldview. Getting to the upper income bracket has nothing to do with effort. Rather it's the result of
luck. It's something that is done to you by an outside force.
She can not offer anything as she is "kick the can down the road" neoliberal candidate serving financial
oligarchy, so playing fear card is her the only chance...
UPDATE "'You can get rid of Manafort, but that doesn't end the odd bromance Trump has with Putin,'
Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook said in a statement" [Washington
Post]. That's our Democrats; gin up a war scare all to win Eastern Europeans in a swing state
(Ohio). That's what this article, read closely, boils down to, read carefully. (I love Mook's "bromance,"
so reminiscent of the Clinton campaign's vile BernieBro smear.)
UPDATE "Republicans in North Carolina are pulling out all the stops to suppress the state's reliably
Democratic black vote. After the Fourth Circuit court reinstated a week of early voting, GOP-controlled
county elections boards are now trying to cut early-voting hours across the state. By virtue of holding
the governor's office, Republicans control a majority of votes on all county election boards and
yesterday they voted to cut 238 hours of early voting in Charlotte's Mecklenburg County, the largest
in the state. 'I'm not a big fan of early voting,' said GOP board chair Mary Potter Summa, brazenly
disregarding the federal appeals court's opinion. 'The more [early voting] sites we have, the more
opportunities exist for violations'" [The
Nation]. Bad Republicans. On the other hand, if the Democrats treated voter registration like
a 365/24/7 party function, including purchasing IDs in ID states for those who can't afford them,
none of this would be happening.
One of the worst kept secrets in Washington circles is that Hillary Clinton
is a lesbian. Rumors have swirled in the past about the former First Lady's
gay ways, and with a potential presidential run coming in 2016, they have come
back to haunt her.
Back in 2004, a Washington Times columnist reviewing Bill Clinton's
memoir My Life concluded that Hillary and Bill, "have had a pact for
decades. Their sexy, sexy pact is this: "He gets to fool around with
women and she gets to fool around with women (plus the occasional man) yes,
she's bisexual."
The lesbian rumors resurfaced a year later in Edward Klein's book The
Truth About Hillary: What She Knew, When She Knew It, And How Far She'll Go
To Become President. In it, Klein claimed that Hillary "wasn't maternal"
"had no wifely instincts," and "many of her closest friends were lesbians."
Klein asserted that Hillary was obsessed with lesbianism, but not in a normal
way. Instead, she was "much more interested in lesbianism as a political statement
than a sexual practice Hillary talked about it a lot, read lesbian literature,
and embraced it as a revolutionary concept."
In the end, Klein concluded that though she has experimented with lesbianism,
Hillary is ultimately asexual.
The rumors were fired up once again in 2007, when Huma Abedin, Hillary's
top aide, stumbled into the national spotlight with her husband Anthony Wiener's
sex scandal. Many accused Hillary and Huma of being lesbian lovers, with Hillary
hiding her "in plain sight" by hiring her as her top aide.
The lesbian rumors got so bad that year that Hillary addressed them personally.
"It's not true, but it is something that I have no control over. People will
say what they want to say," she told top gay magazine Advocate.
In 2013, when Hillary came out as pro-gay to the country, American Family
Association radio host Sandy Rios claimed to know for a fact that Hillary is
a lesbian:
"[Hillary] has always, as far as I know back to college, endorsed and
embraced all things lesbian and gay, that is her history on this so that
shouldn't be too shocking. She has played the role of wife and cookie-making
mother, I'm sorry but this is just the reality of things. We are being caught
in this vortex of homosexual advocacy, it's just amazing."
Finally, Bill Clinton's former mistress Gennifer Flowers spoke out last year
about the former first couple's sex life, and what she had to say was shocking.
Flowers claimed that Bill told her repeatedly that Hillary was "bisexual,"
and that he was fine with it. He also told her that Hillary had "eaten more
p*ssy than he had," a statement which shocked the nation.
In the end, if God-forbid Hillary becomes President in 2016, she will not
only be the first female President, but also the first gay President.
Is America really ready for a lesbian to be running the free world? What
do you think about all this? Sound off in the comments below!
"... "Companies like Lockheed Martin and Boeing have pledged to increase the share of exports in their overall revenues, and they have been seeking major deals in East and Central Europe since the 1990s, when NATO expansion began," said William Hartung, director of the Arms & Security Project at the Center for International Policy. Hartung noted that as some nations ramp up spending, U.S. firms will be "knocking at the door, looking to sell everything from fighter planes to missile defense systems." ..."
Some good links here. How arms merchants benefit from tensions with Russia:
"Companies like Lockheed Martin and Boeing have pledged to increase the share of exports in
their overall revenues, and they have been seeking major deals in East and Central Europe since
the 1990s, when NATO expansion began," said William Hartung, director of the Arms & Security Project
at the Center for International Policy. Hartung noted that as some nations ramp up spending, U.S.
firms will be "knocking at the door, looking to sell everything from fighter planes to missile
defense systems."
Anti-Russian hysteria and demonization of Trump is the key strategies for neoliberal media to secure
Hillary victory in November.
Anti-Russian hysteria is also a tool to maintain solidarity and suppress dissent against neoliberal
globalization. Those presstitutes will stop at nothing, even provocations and swiftboating are OK for them (See Khan
Gambit)
Notable quotes:
"... Oh, and I suppose Elizabeth Warren and Hillary Clinton's vitriol is okay, right? Typical [neo]liberal ranting. Point the finger at someone else, but do the same thing and it's okay. ..."
"... When candidates wish to distinguish themselves or appeal to various segments of the electorate, there is nothing like a lot of demagoguery and fear mongering to bring attention to a candidate and his issues. ..."
"... It then becomes all the more necessary to drive hysteria and to rely on fear and the hyped common threat to maintain solidarity. While some may fantasize about a society run by women, what we know from experience is that women in power act and speak just like men, that is, they also act solely in their own parochial personal political interest and say whatever is necessary to win their next election. ..."
"... I think the divisions are easier to exploit in part because the society has become so greatly divided based of income inequality. ..."
"... WWII's impact on media tended to paper over many of the differences and tensions that have been present in American life. Aside from the period during WWII and in the few decades after, vitriol has been the norm in U.S. media going back to the 1790s. ..."
"... The media became more fragmented as well. Broadcast media also used to be seen as a public service. But in the 1970s the major networks started to understand that it could also be a profit center -- and you had another shift in values, where the public function took a back-seat to profit maximization. The market also has become more cut-throat as the media environment has become more fragmented. ..."
"... [Neo]Liberals are largely to blame - they regarded their opponents as "uneducated" "swivel-eyed" etc. They ruthlessly played "identity politics" for all it was worth. They shut down meaningful debate. ..."
"... This is very true. Screaming racist at anyone challenging the liberal orthodoxy of black = victim and white = oppressor . ..."
"... The same is true of ignoring the many black lives that are ended by the type of people the police frequently come into contact with - other young black men. ..."
"... Politics: policies are never discussed in detail in ANY election. The WHAT, HOW, WHERE, WHEN, WHY and COST is never provided in detail by the politicians. ..."
"... That is the disaster that what current politicians totally fail. That needs to change. Will such, I doubt it. The current so called political platforms or manifestos, are basically useless and used only for propaganda. ..."
"... You left out WHO does the dirty work of the politicians. ..."
"... I largely blame the media (sorry Guardian) for what's happening... the endless need for attention and eyeballs creates an ever louder echo chamber of increasingly extreme opinions masquerading as news, which simply creates a similarly extreme public discourse. ..."
"... I have always wondered if "spin" is taught in journalism schools, or if it is taught by newspapers after graduation from journalism school. ..."
"... I largely blame the media (sorry Guardian) for what's happening... the endless need for attention and eyeballs creates an ever louder echo chamber of increasingly extreme opinions masquerading as news, which simply creates a similarly extreme public discourse. ..."
"... Politically, the Reagan/Thatcher period broke the socially-democratic post-WWII consensus in favour of economic neo-liberalism, which became the new consensus... and once the Cold War was over, there was no real 'peace dividend' and the agreements for global free-trade/globalisation were struck. ..."
"... That lead to the banking crisis/collapse in 2008, and to the 'solution' whereby most governments imposed 'austerity' and debt on ordinary people to keep most of the bankers 'functional' and 'solvent' ...and not only were the bankers not adequately regulated to curtail their activities, but they carried on paying themselves mega-currency bonuses for using taxpayer guarantees to rescue their dysfunctional businesses. ..."
"... I agree, its an entirely artificial construct. And the globalists are in a position to punish countries like Britain for its Brexit decision. But they cannot destroy Britain. Rather, it is the globalists who may be destroyed by the nationalism spreading across the globe. Many globalists are actually terrified by all this. General Electric has read the tea leaves and is already reacting: ..."
"... GE's Immelt Signals End to 7 Decades of Globalization http://fortune.com/2016/05/20/ge-immelt-globalization/ ..."
"... Fascinating link. The global corporate overlords only respond to sustained political pressure. Brexit was a wakeup call for them and the November election in the U.S. may be another... ..."
Oh, and I suppose Elizabeth Warren and Hillary Clinton's vitriol is okay, right? Typical
[neo]liberal ranting. Point the finger at someone else, but do the same thing and it's okay.
The only difference today is that Donald Trump doesn't take the finger pointing and Democratic
vitriol laying down, he fires it right back at them and guess what, he keeps winning!
Vitriolic and polemical speech has been a ubiquitous ritual since the earliest democracies.
When candidates wish to distinguish themselves or appeal to various segments of the electorate,
there is nothing like a lot of demagoguery and fear mongering to bring attention to a candidate
and his issues. In the end, self-interest motivates voters, and fear is the biggest self-interest
of all. Using the specter of the opposition to scare small children and those who think like them
is a time honored tradition and well alive today. Further, as groups begin to prosper and start
being assimilated into the broader society, the individual self-interests diverge and it becomes
harder to hold them together as a cohesive group whose votes can be counted on. It then becomes
all the more necessary to drive hysteria and to rely on fear and the hyped common threat to maintain
solidarity. While some may fantasize about a society run by women, what we know from experience
is that women in power act and speak just like men, that is, they also act solely in their own
parochial personal political interest and say whatever is necessary to win their next election.
Noam Chomsky talked about this in "The Corporation." Our division and increased level of emotional
isolation is a direct result of marketing attacks on the human psyche designed to get us to buy
more products and services. I'm not sure how much of it is Machiavellian and how much is just
pure greed reaping it's inevitable harvest.
A smart comment. Greed and fear are indeed the primary drivers of behaviour in many arenas now,
and it's partly driven by corporations. This-or-that, black-and-white thinking is largely a product
of high emotion, which essentially makes us 'stupid' and unable to reason.
The impact of viewing - consciously or unconsciously - dozens of ads a day on the Internet,
or hours of tranced staring at screens, may be shown to be a major factor in the increasingly
mesmerised state of the populace.
That and, as these venerable politicos point out, the demise of political nous generally.
Many excellent points. I think the divisions are easier to exploit in part because the society
has become so greatly divided based of income inequality. People have completely different
frames of reference in terms of their experience, and anxieties, and so it becomes easier to dismiss
the concerns of others out-of-hand as illegitimate. You can also overlay racism as part of the
equation, which has always been present with varying degrees of intensity in the U.S.
WWII's impact on media tended to paper over many of the differences and tensions that have
been present in American life. Aside from the period during WWII and in the few decades after,
vitriol has been the norm in U.S. media going back to the 1790s.
The idea of a media culture that was objective and bipartisan is a newer idea. It was codified
by things like the Fairness Doctrine as well, which tended to moderate, and censor, public discussion
through broadcast media. When the Fairness Doctrine fell apart you had people like Limbaugh go
national with a highly partisan infotainment model.
The media became more fragmented as well. Broadcast media also used to be seen as a public
service. But in the 1970s the major networks started to understand that it could also be a profit
center -- and you had another shift in values, where the public function took a back-seat to profit
maximization. The market also has become more cut-throat as the media environment has become more
fragmented.
[Neo]Liberals are largely to blame - they regarded their opponents as "uneducated" "swivel-eyed"
etc. They ruthlessly played "identity politics" for all it was worth. They shut down meaningful
debate. Now it's come back to bite them in the form of Donald Trump. They don't like it now
they are on the receiving end.
This is the type of over-stating a position that they are prone to. But saying that "liberals"
are largely to blame is no different to them pointing the finger at "the right" for all the issues.
There's plenty of blame to go around, and it's evenly spread.
They ruthlessly played "identity politics" for all it was worth. They shut down meaningful
debate.
This is very true. Screaming racist at anyone challenging the liberal orthodoxy
of black = victim and white = oppressor .
A prime example of one of the issues is BLM. Pushing the view that any black person killed
by the police as dying at the hand of a racist cop.
Using whole population stats to compare the chances of being shot by the police, instead of
comparing socio-economic groups. It's not exactly unbiased to compare the chances of a poor black
man, and a white lawyer, of being stopped or shot by the police.
The same is true of ignoring the many black lives that are ended by the type of people
the police frequently come into contact with - other young black men.
Until both sides are truthful about what's happening, nothing is going to change. Both sides
- police and young black men - currently approach an interaction with each other fearful of the
other. This is made worse on both sides by the rhetoric.
If you listen to BLM and its supporters, then every cop is racist and wamnts to kill them.
Why would you do what the police officer tells you if you think you're just opening yourself up
to a racist cop killing you?
On the other side, the police apparently often assume that every young black man they encounter
both has a gun, and thinks they're racist, and therefore operates on that assumption and goes
for a shoot first and be safe option.
Neither of these will get any better while there is this lying and entrenched positions on
either side. You could also ask why anyone who's white would support an organization which doesn't
appear to care about the white victims of the police (of which AIUI there are an equal number).
Or the black murder victims who aren't killed by the police.
Politics: policies are never discussed in detail in ANY election. The WHAT, HOW, WHERE, WHEN,
WHY and COST is never provided in detail by the politicians. Every thing in the politicians
mind is open ended, and may or may not be adopted, considered, or maybe a totally different thing
than what they were elected for.
That is the disaster that what current politicians totally fail. That needs to change.
Will such, I doubt it. The current so called political platforms or manifestos, are basically
useless and used only for propaganda.
I largely blame the media (sorry Guardian) for what's happening... the endless need for attention
and eyeballs creates an ever louder echo chamber of increasingly extreme opinions masquerading
as news, which simply creates a similarly extreme public discourse.
Even my beloved Guardian is succumbing, publishing more and more pointless newsy opinion pieces
and less and less fact-based, hard news. I don't want to read five takes on a single world event.
I'd rather read the facts about five different world events and feel more informed at the end
of the day.
I have always wondered if "spin" is taught in journalism schools, or if it is taught by newspapers
after graduation from journalism school.
It gets so far out, you wonder what journalists think the readers think. It would be great
to be in on a backroom discussion about headlines and all paraphrasing in articles at the Washington
Post and Guardian.
I'll bet they sit around and chuckle as they try to cook up positive or negative spins. Its
more than facts.
I largely blame the media (sorry Guardian) for what's happening... the endless need for attention
and eyeballs creates an ever louder echo chamber of increasingly extreme opinions masquerading
as news, which simply creates a similarly extreme public discourse.
Even my beloved Guardian is succumbing, publishing more and more pointless newsy opinion pieces
and less and less fact-based, hard news. I don't want to read five takes on a single world event.
I'd rather read the facts about five different world events and feel more informed at the end
of the day.
I suspect we're seeing the consequences of two events... one political, the other financial (heavily
determined by the political, which happened first).
Politically, the Reagan/Thatcher period broke the socially-democratic post-WWII consensus
in favour of economic neo-liberalism, which became the new consensus... and once the Cold War
was over, there was no real 'peace dividend' and the agreements for global free-trade/globalisation
were struck.
That lead to the banking crisis/collapse in 2008, and to the 'solution' whereby most governments
imposed 'austerity' and debt on ordinary people to keep most of the bankers 'functional' and 'solvent'
...and not only were the bankers not adequately regulated to curtail their activities, but they
carried on paying themselves mega-currency bonuses for using taxpayer guarantees to rescue their
dysfunctional businesses.
As the UK-EU Referendum result has proved, populist politicians spouting bullsh*t can succeed
in this environment; especially when 'decent politicians' abdicate their responsibilities.
I agree, its an entirely artificial construct. And the globalists are in a position to punish
countries like Britain for its Brexit decision. But they cannot destroy Britain. Rather, it is
the globalists who may be destroyed by the nationalism spreading across the globe. Many globalists
are actually terrified by all this. General Electric has read the tea leaves and is already reacting:
Fascinating link. The global corporate overlords only respond to sustained political pressure.
Brexit was a wakeup call for them and the November election in the U.S. may be another...
"... I believe in the two founding principles of Jacksonian Democracy, social justice and economic fairness. Right now, I think that the Democratic Party-my great party-has got away from some of this ..."
"... If Hillary Clinton is elected, and not Donald Trump, Rickers says that income inequality-and particularly the "gap" between "the rich and the poor" will get worse. Clinton's refusal to focus on issues that matter to middle class Americans of all political stripes-including Democrats-is why Rickers is calling on Democrats nationwide to join him in a push to elect Donald Trump president of the United States. ..."
"... his party "used to stand for working people," but "Hillary Clinton's record-NAFTA, SHAFTA, favored nation status for China, Glass-Steagall, I mean we could go on and on and on-she's not been a friend of rural America and rural America knows that and it's shining in the primaries and caucuses. It's a huge ABC feeling out here, Anybody But Clinton." ..."
"... Bova added that Trump's support for protecting Americans' hard earned benefits like Social Security and Medicare-things that Americans, he says, can't trust Hillary Clinton with-is why his fellow Democrats should back him for president ..."
"... These same folks, I believe, have been assured that Trump will also protect and seek to strengthen their Social Security and Medicare benefits, and finally, after 20 to 30 years, put their lives back on a level playing field by undoing the very so called free-trade, world-trade, global-trade agreements that that hollowed-out their jobs, their families, their communities, their businesses. That is a powerful reason, a survival reason, for them to want to vote to elect Trump President. ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... When asked about Clinton's supposed opposition to the Trans Pacific Partnership-she previously supported it more than 40 times, but now claims to be against it as voters rebel against the deal-Rickers laughed. "That's just ridiculous," Rickers said. "She is one of the architects of the complete opposite position. This woman will say anything if she thinks she'll get a vote or money for it." ..."
On the Trumpocrats PAC website is
a video of David "Mudcat" Saunders, another lifelong Democrat, talking with Fox News.
I'm a Democrat," Saunders, who worked for many prominent national Democrats over his career, says
in the interview video. "I believe in the two founding principles of Jacksonian Democracy, social
justice and economic fairness. Right now, I think that the Democratic Party-my great party-has got
away from some of this."
If Hillary Clinton is elected, and not Donald Trump, Rickers says that income inequality-and
particularly the "gap" between "the rich and the poor" will get worse. Clinton's refusal to focus
on issues that matter to middle class Americans of all political stripes-including Democrats-is why
Rickers is calling on Democrats nationwide to join him in a push to elect Donald Trump president
of the United States. Rickers said:
Otherwise, the gap is going to continue to increase between the rich and the poor because a
lot of people don't have the ability now to rise up whether they're underemployed or facing hard
times. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton is talking about Planned Parenthood or whatever-which is all
great, but that's not what we need. We need people to be self-sufficient and feed their families.
Trump speaks to that, and there are people all across this country who are fed up with it-obviously,
that's what this election is kind of all about. You have party registrations switching by the
tens of thousands in Ohio and Pennsylvania and elsewhere, and there's a lot of people-they don't
want to be Republicans, but they don't like either party anymore. We're going to give them a place
or organize out of, you know? A home, if you will.
Saunders said in the Fox interview that his party "used to stand for working people," but
"Hillary Clinton's record-NAFTA, SHAFTA, favored nation status for China, Glass-Steagall, I mean
we could go on and on and on-she's not been a friend of rural America and rural America knows that
and it's shining in the primaries and caucuses. It's a huge ABC feeling out here, Anybody But Clinton."
Billy Bova, another lifelong Democratic operative from Mississippi who is supportive of the effort,
told Breitbart News that the answer for Democrats who feel Hillary Clinton does not support them
is to back Donald Trump for president. Bova said in an email:
If you have historically been a working class, middle class person in areas of America that
produced good paying, blue collar factory jobs, white collar factory related jobs, small business
jobs in your towns around the plants and factories, it would be hard not to support a Trumpocrats
effort in electing Donald Trump! Historically, many regular-working Democratic voters have always
been most interested in a candidate that supports economic issues, not so much social issues,
but bottom-line pocketbook, kitchen table money issues that can pay their bills and help their
children. Trump shoots directly at their pocketbooks, gives them hope for a better future.
Bova added that Trump's support for protecting Americans' hard earned benefits like Social
Security and Medicare-things that Americans, he says, can't trust Hillary Clinton with-is why his
fellow Democrats should back him for president. He said:
These same folks, I believe, have been assured that Trump will also protect and seek to
strengthen their Social Security and Medicare benefits, and finally, after 20 to 30 years, put
their lives back on a level playing field by undoing the very so called free-trade, world-trade,
global-trade agreements that that hollowed-out their jobs, their families, their communities,
their businesses. That is a powerful reason, a survival reason, for them to want to vote to elect
Trump President.
... ... ...
"I think there's a pretty sour taste in a lot of guys' mouths about Iraq and about what happened
there," Jim Webb Jr., a Marine veteran and Webb's son-who is also a Trump supporter-told the
Washington Post. "You pour time and effort and blood into something, and you see it pissed away,
and you think, 'How did I spend my twenties?'"
The Post cast Webb's son's comments in the light of him praising Trump's vow to end nation-building
type of foreign policy that Republicans drove under the Bush administration. While Trump's vows to
steer clear of establishment status quo type foreign policy has cost him a handful of votes among
GOP elites in Washington, D.C., so the thinking goes, it has won him many more actual voters across
America in places like Pennsylvania, Virginia, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and North Carolina-and
potentially even New York state.
... ... ...
JOBS, JOBS, JOBS: IT'S THE ECONOMY STUPID
When asked about Clinton's supposed opposition to the Trans Pacific Partnership-she previously
supported it more than 40 times, but now claims to be against it as voters rebel against the deal-Rickers
laughed. "That's just ridiculous," Rickers said. "She is one of the architects of the complete opposite
position. This woman will say anything if she thinks she'll get a vote or money for it."
And he said "hell no, absolutely no" he does not believe that Hillary Clinton is against the TPP.
"No way," Rickers said. "And she'll say something different when she's in front of another group.
Do you think she was saying that when she was being paid $250,000 a speech on Wall Street? No. And
she doesn't want anybody to know what she said there."
As for Trump, Rickers said he believes Trump on the issue of trade.
"At least during this campaign-I know he's said a lot of things in a lot of different directions,
but he's been pretty consistent that that is the foundation of his campaign, to rebuild the infrastructure
of the country," Rickers said. "I just wish he wouldn't get distracted all the time and just talk
about the main issue of his campaign, which is the rebuilding of the country."
On the Trumpocrats PAC website are videos of many other Democrats switching parties to vote for
Trump. David Abbott, a lifelong Democratic Party member and former local councilman from Kentucky,
switched parties to vote for Trump.
Psychologist Dr. Kevin Dutton has ranked the psychopathic traits of the Republican candidate
and various historical figures using a standard psychometric tool – the Psychopathic Personality
Inventory. Experts suggested likely scores against a series of questions. Trump scored 171, two points
more than Hitler.
Saddam Hussein topped the list, scoring 189, while Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton
received a score of 152, putting her in the top 20 percent.
Margaret Thatcher scored 136 points, and Elizabeth I was put at 130.
Dutton says the test scores people on eight traits that contribute to a psychopathic character.
They are fearlessness, cold-heartedness, egocentricity, ruthlessness, self-confidence, charisma,
dishonesty and deficits in empathy and conscience.
I find it surprising that Hilary did not peg the needle. Obama who, in candid moments, brags about
being "really good at killing people" should be way up there as well (the article did not mention
him which seems surprising). Or, is being good at killing people more of a sociopath thing? Anyway,
here are what sociopaths do:
Glibness and Superficial Charm.
Manipulative and Conning. They never recognize the rights of others and see their self-serving behaviors
as permissible. …
Grandiose Sense of Self. …
Pathological Lying. …
Lack of Remorse, Shame or Guilt. …
Shallow Emotions. …
Incapacity for Love.
Need for Stimulation
OMG, that describes American leaders and foreign policy to perfection! The only item missing is
exceptionalism
Hillary Clinton spent the weekend fundraising in affluent New England
communities, speaking to more than 2,200 donors at private brunches and
gatherings in Nantucket and Cape Cod-but what she told them "remains a
mystery," the Associated Press
reported Monday.
The fundraising effort-which follows her campaign's
most lucrative month so far with a
$63 million gain in July-underscores Clinton's continued evasion of
transparency over her ties to wealthy elites. In fact, of the roughly 300
fundraising events she has held since announcing her White House run in
April 2015, only five have allowed any press coverage, and Clinton has
attempted to ban the use of social media among guests, according to the
AP.
..."Why wouldn't Hillary tell the American people, whose votes she wants, what she told
corporations in private for almost two years?" Nader wrote. "Is it that she doesn't want to be
accused of doubletalk, of 'gushing' (as one insider told the Wall Street Journal) when addressing
bankers, stock traders or corporate bosses?"
These speeches are so controversial in part because of the high price tag they came with.
Clinton would charge an average of $5,000 per minute for her speeches.
"We know she has such transcripts. Her contract with these numerous business groups, prepared by
the Harry Walker Lecture Agency, stipulated that the sponsor pay $1000 for a stenographer to take
down a verbatim record, exclusively for her possession."
According to Nader, "Where Trump's White House is seen as utterly unpredictable, Hillary's
White House is utterly predictable: more Wall Street, more military adventures." Nader continued,
"As Senator and Secretary of State she has never seen a weapons system or a war that she didn't
support."
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License
Donald Trump said lots (and lots) of thing during his hour-long town hall with Fox News's Sean Hannity
on Wednesday night.
This one - Trump talking about Hillary Clinton - stood out to me:
She is so protected. They are so protecting her. She hasn't had a news conference in, like, 250
days.
...Jokes aside, it's beyond ridiculous that one of the two people who will be elected president
in 80 or so days continues to refuse to engage with the press in this way.
But she does sit-down interviews! And she did a "press conference" with a moderator, um, moderating
the questions!
...
Clinton, who looked tired and had bags under her eyes, made a quick appearance before cameras in
New York today to show the opening to her meeting with several police chiefs from around the country.
Notice how not one single photographer used a camera FLASH while taking probably hundreds if not
even thousands of photos of Hillary Clinton. As we previously reported
Hillary is sensible to camera flashes and it may trigger some seizures in her:
This means that she has noticeable problems already in 2011, so her "serious neurological
disease" has been already evident at this time.
Notable quotes:
"... Emails released by Wikileaks show that Hillary Clinton looked into a drug used to treat sleepiness and Parkinson's disease after she apparently began suffering from "decision fatigue" back in 2011. ..."
"... The article also explains how "decision fatigue" could explain why "ordinarily sensible people get angry at colleagues," which is possibly a nod to Clinton's infamous temper tantrums that have left her staffers in tears. "Wow that is spooky descriptive," wrote Hillary in response to the article. ..."
"... In a separate email sent two months later, Hillary received information from her top foreign policy advisor Jacob Sullivan about a drug called Provigil (Modafinil), which is used to treat "excessive sleepiness in patients with Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, and multiple sclerosis," as well as "excessive sleepiness caused by narcolepsy". ..."
"... The fact that the drug is used to treat Parkinson's is interesting in light of what we were told by a Secret Service whistleblower earlier this month, that Hillary has a serious neurological disease. ..."
"... The date of the emails is significant because Hillary's apparent problems with "decision fatigue" were evident before she fell and hit her head in 2012. ..."
Emails released by Wikileaks show that Hillary Clinton looked into a drug used to treat sleepiness
and Parkinson's disease after she apparently began suffering from "decision fatigue" back in 2011.
Clinton sent an
email to close confidante and advisor Cheryl D. Mills on August 19, 2011 featuring the text of
an article entitled Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue?
The article talks about how people in positions of power and influence can suffer from "decision
fatigue" that causes them to be "low on mental energy" and prompts the sufferer to "become reckless"
and "act impulsively".
The article also explains how "decision fatigue" could explain why "ordinarily sensible people
get angry at colleagues," which is possibly a nod to
Clinton's infamous temper tantrums that have left her staffers in tears. "Wow that is spooky
descriptive," wrote Hillary in response to the article.
In a separate
email sent two months later, Hillary received information from her top foreign policy advisor
Jacob Sullivan about a drug called Provigil (Modafinil), which is used to treat "excessive sleepiness
in patients with Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, and multiple sclerosis," as well as "excessive sleepiness
caused by narcolepsy".
The fact that the drug is used to treat Parkinson's is interesting in light of what we were
told by a
Secret Service whistleblower earlier this month, that Hillary has a serious neurological disease.
The date of the emails is significant because Hillary's apparent problems with "decision fatigue"
were evident before she fell and hit her head in 2012.
While the mainstream media continues to dismiss questions over Hillary's health as a "conspiracy
theory," more prominent voices are beginning to express the same concerns.
Yesterday we
reported on top doctor and Rutgers University Professor of Medicine Bob Lahita's call for Hillary
to be assessed by an impartial panel of physicians to ensure she is fit for office.
Hillary attempted to deflect suspicions over her health during an appearance on the Jimmy Kimmel
Live last night… by opening an already opened jar of pickles.
"... Trump is right to accuse the Bush administration of creating the mess, and also right to blame Obama for withdrawing American forces in 2011. Once the mess was made, the worst possible response was to do nothing about it (except, of course, to covertly arm "moderate Syrian rebels" with weapons from Libyan stockpiles, most of which found their way to al-Qaeda or ISIS). ..."
The first step to finding a solution is to know that there's a problem. Donald Trump
understands that the Washington foreign-policy establishment caused the whole Middle Eastern
mess. I will review the problem and speculate about what a Trump administration might do about it.
For the thousand years before 2007, when the Bush administration hand-picked Nouri al-Maliki to
head Iraq's first Shia-dominated government, Sunni Muslims had ruled Iraq. Maliki was vetted both
by the CIA and by the head of Iran's Revolutionary Guards.
With Iraq in the hands of an Iranian ally, the Sunnis–disarmed and marginalized by the dismissal
of the Iraqi army–were caught between pro-Iranian regimes in both Iraq and Syria. Maliki, as Ken
Silverstein reports in the
New Republic, ran one of history's most corrupt regimes, demanding among other things a 45% cut
in foreign investment in Iraq. The Sunnis had no state to protect them, and it was a matter of simple
logic that a Sunni leader eventually would propose a new state including the Sunni regions of Syria
as well as Iraq. Sadly, the mantle of Sunni statehood fell on Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who projected
not only an Islamic State but a new Caliphate as well. America had a dozen opportunities to preempt
this but failed to do so.
From a fascinating defector's account in the
Foreign Policy
website, we learn that the region's jihadists debated the merits of remaining non-state actors on
the al-Qaeda model versus attempting to form a state prior to the launch of ISIS. The defector reports
a 2013 meeting in which al-Baghdadi demanded the allegiance of al-Qaeda (that is, al-Nusra Front)
fighters in Syria:
Baghdadi also spoke about the creation of an Islamic state in Syria. It was important, he said,
because Muslims needed to have a dawla, or state. Baghdadi wanted Muslims to have their
own territory, from where they could work and eventually conquer the world….The participants differed
greatly about the idea of creating a state in Syria. Throughout its existence, al-Qaeda had worked
in the shadows as a non-state actor. It did not openly control any territory, instead committed
acts of violence from undisclosed locations. Remaining a clandestine organization had a huge advantage:
It was very difficult for the enemy to find, attack, or destroy them. But by creating a state,
the jihadi leaders argued during the meeting, it would be extremely easy for the enemy to find
and attack them….
Despite the hesitation of many, Baghdadi persisted. Creating and running a state was of paramount
importance to him. Up to this point, jihadis ran around without controlling their own territory.
Baghdadi argued for borders, a citizenry, institutions, and a functioning bureaucracy. Abu Ahmad
summed up Baghdadi's pitch: "If such an Islamic state could survive its initial phase, it was
there to stay forever."
Baghdadi prevailed, however, not only because he persuaded the al-Qaeda ragtag of his project,
but because he won over a
large number of officers from Saddam Hussein's disbanded army. America had the opportunity to
"de-Ba'athify" the Sunni-dominated Iraqi Army after the 2003 invasion, the way it de-Nazified the
German Army after World War II. Instead, it hung them out to dry. Gen. Petraeus' "surge" policy of
2007-2008 bought the Sunni's temporary forbearance with hundreds of millions of dollars in handouts,
but set the stage for a future Sunni insurgency, as I
warned in 2010.
Trump is right to accuse the Bush administration of creating the mess, and also right to blame
Obama for withdrawing American forces in 2011. Once the mess was made, the worst possible response
was to do nothing about it (except, of course, to covertly arm "moderate Syrian rebels" with weapons
from Libyan stockpiles, most of which found their way to al-Qaeda or ISIS).
Now the region is a self-perpetuating war of each against all. Iraq's Shia militias, which replaced
the feckless Iraqi army in fighting ISIS, are in reorganization under Iranian command on the model
of
Iran's Revolutionary Guards. The Kurds are fighting both ISIS and the Syrian government. ISIS
is attacking both the Kurds, who field the most effective force opposing them in Syria, as well as
the Turks, who are trying to limit the power of the Kurds. Saudi Arabia and Qatar continue to support
the Sunnis of Iraq and Syria, which means in effect funding either ISIS or the al-Nusra Front.
Russia, meanwhile, is flying bombing missions in Syria from Iranian air bases. Apart from its
inclination to bedevil the floundering United States, Russia has a dog in the fight: as a number
of foreign officials who have spoken with the Russian president have told me, Putin has told anyone
who asks that he backs the Iranian Shi'ites because all of Russia's Muslims are Sunni. Russia fears
that a jihadist regime in Iraq or Syria would metastasize into a strategic threat to Russia. That
is just what al-Baghdadi had in mind, as the Foreign Policy defector story made clear:
Baghdadi had another persuasive argument: A state would offer a home to Muslims from all over
the world. Because al-Qaeda had always lurked in the shadows, it was difficult for ordinary Muslims
to sign up. But an Islamic state, Baghdadi argued, could attract thousands, even millions, of
like-minded jihadis. It would be a magnet.
What Trump might do
What's needed is a deal, and a deal-maker. I have no information about Trump's thinking other
than news reports, but here is a rough sketch of what he might do:
Iraq's Sunnis require the right combination of incentives and disincentives. The disincentive
is just what Trump has proposed, an "extreme" and "vicious" campaign against the terrorist gang.
The United States and whoever wants to join it (perhaps the French Foreign Legion?) should exterminate
ISIS. That requires a combination of ruthless employment of air power with less squeamishness about
collateral damage as well as a division or two on the ground. America doesn't necessarily need to
deploy the kind of soldier who joined the National Guard to get a subsidy for college tuition. As
Erik Prince has suggested, private contractors could do the job cheaper, along with judicious
use of special forces.
While the US grinds up ISIS, it should find a former Iraqi general to lead a Sunni zone in Iraq,
and enlist former Iraqi army officers to join the war against ISIS. Gen. Petraeus no doubt still
has the payroll list for the "Sunni Awakening" and "Sons of Iraq." The Sunnis would get the incentive
of an eventual Sunni state, provided that they help crush the terrorists.
The US would give quiet support to the Kurds' aspirations for their own state, and encourage them
to take control of northern Syria along the Turkish border. If the US doesn't stand godfather to
a Kurdish state, the Russians will. The Turks won't like that, and it must be explained to them that
it is in their own best interests: the Kurds have twice as many children as ethnic Turks, and by
2045 will have more military-age men than do the Turks.
Possibly the US should propose a UN-supervised referendum to allow the Kurdish-majority provinces
of southeastern Turkey to secede and join the Iraqi and Syrian Kurds in a new state. That would be
good for Turkey. Those who vote "yes" are better off outside Turkey, and those who vote to stay in
Turkey have no excuse to support separatists in the future. There are several million Iranian Kurds,
and the US should encourage them to break away as well.
'Look, Vladimir, here's the deal'
The next conversation between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin might go something like this: "Look,
Vladimir, you say you're worried about Sunni terrorists destabilizing Russia. We're going to kill
all the terrorists or hire people to kill them for us. We're not going to arm jihadists to make trouble
for you like we did in Afghanistan during the Cold War. We leave you alone, and you get out of our
hair. You get to keep your naval station in Syria, and the Alawites get to have their own state in
the northwest. Give Basher Assad a villa in Crimea and put in someone else to replace him–anyone
you like. The Sunni areas of Syria will become a separate enclave, along with enclaves for
the Druze."
And Trump might add: "We're taking care of the Sunni terrorists. Now you help us take care of
the Iranians, or we'll do it ourselves, and you won't like that. You can either work together with
us and we tell the Iranians to shut down their centrifuges and their ballistic missile program, or
we'll bomb it. You don't want us to make the S-300 missiles you sold Iran look like junk–that's bad
for your arms business.
"As for Ukraine: let them vote on partition. If the eastern half votes to join Russia, you got
it. If not, you stay the hell out of it."
As Trump knows, everyone in a deal doesn't have to walk away happy. Only the biggest stakeholders
have to walk away happy. Everyone else can go suck eggs.
Russia can walk away with its Syrian naval station and some assurance that the Middle East jihad
won't spill over into its own territory. Syria's Alawites and Sunnis both can declare victory. The
Kurds, who provide the region's most effective boots on the ground, will be big winners. Iraq's Shi'ites
will be able to rule themselves but not over the Sunnis and Kurds, which is a better situation than
they had during the thousand years when the Sunnis ruled over them. Turkey won't like the prospect
of losing a chunk of its territory, even though it will be better off for it. Iran will lose its
aspirations to a regional empire, and won't like it at all, but no-one else will care.
Rebuilding America's military, one of Trump's campaign planks, is a sine qua non for
success. Russia as well as China should fear America's technological prowess today as much as Gorbachev
feared Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative in the 1980s. Russia and China are closing the
technology gap with the United States, and if the United States does not reverse that, not much else
it does will matter.
I think to the extent Israel elite interests are congruent with interests of the US neocons Clinton
is pro-Israel. If they stray, she can change. The key here are interests of global corporations and
neoliberal globalization. As such Israel is just a pawn in a big game.
Notable quotes:
"... So who is guilty of putting the interests of a foreign government ahead of those of the United States? I know there are advocates for any number of foreign states running around loose in Washington but the friends of Israel in government and the media come immediately to mind largely because there are so many of them, they are very much in-your-face and they are both extremely well-funded and very successful. Now deceased former Congressman Tom Lantos and Senator Frank Lautenberg were, respectively, often referred to as the congressman and senator from Israel. And there are many more: Chuck Schumer, Chuck Grassley, Ben Cardin, Bob Menendez, Tom Cotton, Mark Kirk, Nita Lowey, Ted Deutch, Brad Sherman, Ileana-Ros Lehtinen and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz to name only a few in the Congress. All are major recipients of Israel related PAC money and all are reliable defenders of Israel no matter what Benjamin Netanyahu does and no matter how it effects the United States. ..."
"... And then there are the Clintons. One only has to go back to Bill's one-sided pro-Israeli diplomacy at Camp David in 2000 to discern how the game was played. And then there was the widely condemned January 2001 last minute pardon of Mossad agent Marc Rich, whose wife Denise was a major contributor to the Clintons, to realize that there was always a deference to Israeli interests particularly when money was involved ..."
"... Trump's crime, per Morell, is that he is disloyal to the United States because he is not sufficiently hostile to the evil Vladimir Putin, which somehow means that he is being manipulated by the clever Russian. Trump has indeed called for a positive working relationship with Putin to accomplish, among other objectives, the crushing of ISIS. And he is otherwise in favor of leaving Bashar al-Assad of Syria alone while also being disinclined to get involved in any additional military interventions in the Middle East or elsewhere, which pretty much makes him the antithesis of the Clintonian foreign policy promoted by Morell. ..."
"... The leading individual foreign donor to the Clinton Foundation between 1999 and 2014 was Ukrainian Viktor Pinchuk, who "directed between $10 and $25 million" to its Global Initiative, has let the Clintons use his private jet, attended Bill's Hollywood 65 th birthday celebration and hosted daughter Chelsea and her husband on a trip to Ukraine. Pinchuk is a Jewish oligarch married to the daughter of notoriously corrupt former Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma. He is very closely tied to Israel, a supporter of regime change in his country, who was simultaneously donating money and also lobbying in Washington while Hillary was Secretary of State and promoting a similar agenda as part of her $5 billion program to "democratize" Ukraine. Clinton arranged a dozen meetings with substantive State Department officers for Pinchuk. ..."
"... Clinton supported Israel's actions in the 2014 Gaza War, which killed more than 500 children, describing them as an appropriate response to a situation that was provoked by Hamas. On the campaign trail recently husband Bill disingenuously defended Hillary's position on Gaza, saying that "Hamas is really smart. When they decide to rocket Israel they insinuate themselves in the hospitals, in the schools " placing all the blame for the large number of civilian casualties on the Palestinians, not on the Israelis. When the media began to report on the plight of the civilians trapped in Gaza Hillary dismissed the impending humanitarian catastrophe, saying "They're trapped by their leadership, unfortunately." ..."
"... Earlier, as a Senator from New York, Hillary supported Israel's building of the separation barrier on Palestinian land and cheer-led a crowd at a pro-Israel rally that praised Israel's 2006 devastation of Lebanon and Gaza. She nonsensically characterized and justified the bombing campaign as "efforts to send messages to Hamas, Hezbollah, to the Syrians, to the Iranians – to all who seek death and domination instead of life and freedom " More than nine hundred civilians died in the onslaught and when a vote came up subsequently in Congress to stop the supply of cluster bombs to countries that use them on civilians Hillary voted against the bill together with 69 other pro-Israel senators. ..."
"... Hillary enjoys a particularly close relationship with Netanyahu, writing in November , "I would also invite the Israeli prime minister to the White House in my first month in office." She has worked diligently to "reaffirm the unbreakable bond with Israel – and Benjamin Netanyahu." She has boasted of her being one of the promoters of annual increases in aid to Israel while she was in the Senate and Secretary of State and takes credit for repeatedly using America's Security Council veto to defend it in the United Nations. ..."
"... o you know how Prince Bandar was coaching G.W. Bush to circumvent the enmity of neocons towards his father? ..."
"... It looks very much like the US public is starting to mirror the Eastern European public under Communism by automatically disregarding government media + there's the added feature of the internet as a new kind of high-powered Samizdat, that clearly worries the Establishment. ..."
On August 5th, Michael Morell, a former acting Director of the CIA, pilloried GOP presidential
candidate Donald Trump, concluding that he was an "unwitting agent of Russia." Morell, who entitled
his New York Times
op-ed "I Ran the CIA and now I'm endorsing Hillary Clinton," described the process whereby Trump
had been so corrupted. According to Morell, Putin, it seems, as a wily ex-career intelligence officer,
is "trained to identify vulnerabilities in an individual and to exploit them. That is exactly what
he did early in the primaries. Mr. Putin played upon Mr. Trump's vulnerabilities In the intelligence
business, we would say that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian
Federation."
I have previously
observed
how incomprehensible the designation of "unwitting agent" used in a sentence together with "recruited"
is, but perhaps I should add something more about Morell that might not be clear to the casual reader.
Morell was an Agency analyst, not a spy, who spent nearly his entire career in and around Washington.
The high point of his CIA experience consisted of briefing George W. Bush on the President's Daily
Brief (PDB).
Morell was not trained in the arduous CIA operational tradecraft course which agent recruiters
and handlers go through. This means that his understanding of intelligence operations and agents
is, to put it politely, derivative. If he had gone through the course he would understand that when
you recruit an agent you control him and tell him what to do. The agent might not know whom exactly
he is really answering to as in a false flag operation, but he cannot be unwitting.
Morell appears to have a tendency to make promises that others will have to deliver on, but perhaps
that's what delegation by senior U.S. government officials is all about. He was also not trained
in CIA paramilitary operations, which perhaps should be considered when he drops comments about the
desirability of "covertly" killing Russians and Iranians to make a point that they should not oppose
U.S. policies in Syria, as he did in a
softball interview with Charlie Rose on August 6th.
Morell appears to be oblivious to the possibility that going around assassinating foreigners might
be regarded as state sponsored terrorism and could well ignite World War 3. And, as is characteristic
of chickenhawks, it is highly unlikely that he was intending that either he or his immediate family
should go out and cut the throats or blow the heads off of those foreign devils who seek to derail
the Pax Americana. Nor would he expect to be in the firing line when the relatives of those victims
seek revenge. Someone else with the proper training would be found to do all that messy stuff and
take the consequences.
Be that as it may, Morell was a very senior officer and perhaps we should accept that he might
know something that the rest of us have missed, so let's just assume that he kind of misspoke and
give him a pass on the "recruited unwitting agent" expression. Instead let's look for other American
political figures who just might be either deliberately or inadvertently serving the interests of
a foreign government, which is presumably actually what Michael Morell meant to convey regarding
Trump. To be sure a well-run McCarthy-esque ferreting out of individuals who just might be disloyal
provides an excellent opportunity to undertake a purge of those who either by thought, word or deed
might be guilty of unacceptable levels of coziness with foreign interests.
So who is guilty of putting the interests of a foreign government ahead of those of the United
States? I know there are advocates for any number of foreign states running around loose in Washington
but the friends of Israel in government and the media come immediately to mind largely because there
are so many of them, they are very much in-your-face and they are both extremely well-funded and
very successful. Now deceased former Congressman Tom Lantos and Senator Frank Lautenberg were, respectively,
often referred to as the congressman and senator from Israel. And there are many more: Chuck Schumer,
Chuck Grassley, Ben Cardin, Bob Menendez, Tom Cotton, Mark Kirk, Nita Lowey, Ted Deutch, Brad Sherman,
Ileana-Ros Lehtinen and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz to name only a few in the Congress. All are
major recipients of Israel related PAC money and all are reliable defenders of Israel no matter
what Benjamin Netanyahu does and no matter how it effects the United States.
And then there are the Clintons. One only has to go back to Bill's
one-sided pro-Israeli
diplomacy at Camp David in 2000 to discern how the game was played. And then there was the widely
condemned January 2001 last minute
pardon of Mossad agent Marc Rich, whose wife Denise was a major contributor to the Clintons,
to realize that there was always a deference to Israeli interests particularly when money was involved.
The only problem is that the Clintons, relying on Morell's formulation, might more reasonably be
described as witting agents of Israel rather than unwitting as they have certainly known what they
have been doing and have been actively supporting Israeli policies even when damaging to U.S. interests
since they first emerged from the primordial political swamps in Arkansas. If one were completely
cynical it might be possible to suggest that they understood from the beginning that pandering to
Israel and gaining access to Jewish power and money would be a major component in their rise to political
prominence. It certainly has worked out that way.
Trump's crime, per Morell, is that he is disloyal to the United States because he is not sufficiently
hostile to the evil Vladimir Putin, which somehow means that he is being manipulated by the clever
Russian. Trump has indeed called for a positive working relationship with Putin to accomplish, among
other objectives, the crushing of ISIS. And he is otherwise in favor of leaving Bashar al-Assad of
Syria alone while also being disinclined to get involved in any additional military interventions
in the Middle East or elsewhere, which pretty much makes him the antithesis of the Clintonian foreign
policy promoted by Morell.
In comparison with the deeply and profoundly corrupt Clintons, Trump's alleged foreign policy
perfidy makes him appear to be pretty much a boy scout. To understand the Clintons one might consider
the hundreds of millions of dollars, much of it from foreign sources, that have flowed into the Clinton
Foundation while Hillary was Secretary of State. And there is the clear
email evidence that Hillary exploited her government position to favor both foreign and domestic
financial supporters.
The leading
individual foreign donor to the Clinton Foundation between 1999 and 2014 was Ukrainian Viktor
Pinchuk,
who "directed between $10 and $25 million" to its Global Initiative, has let the Clintons use
his private jet, attended Bill's Hollywood 65th birthday celebration and hosted daughter
Chelsea and her husband on a trip to Ukraine. Pinchuk is a Jewish oligarch married to the daughter
of notoriously corrupt former Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma. He is very closely tied to Israel,
a supporter of regime change in his country, who was simultaneously
donating money and also lobbying in Washington while Hillary was Secretary of State and promoting
a similar agenda as part of her $5 billion program to "democratize" Ukraine. Clinton arranged a dozen
meetings with substantive State Department officers for Pinchuk.
Hillary and Bill's predilection for all things Israeli and her promise to do even more in the
future is a matter of public record. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz asserted
that of all the political candidates in the primaries "Clinton had the longest public record of engagement
with Israel, and has spent decades diligently defending the Jewish state." In a speech to AIPAC in
March
she promised to take the "U.S.-Israel alliance to the next level." Hillary's current principal
financial supporter in her presidential run is Haim Saban, an Israeli who has described himself as
a "one issue" guy and that issue is Israel.
Hillary Clinton boasts of having "stood with Israel my entire career." Her website
promises to maintain "Israel's qualitative military edge to ensure the IDF is equipped to deter
and defeat aggression from the full spectrum of threats," "stand up against the boycott, divestment
and sanctions movement (BDS)," and "cut off efforts to unilaterally recognize Palestinian statehood
outside of the context of negotiations with Israel." In a letter to Haim Saban, Hillary
declared that "we need to make countering BDS a priority," which means she is prepared to support
laws limiting First Amendment rights in the U.S. in defense of perceived Israeli interests.
As part of the Obama Administration Hillary Clinton at first supported his attempts to pressure
Israel over its illegal settlements but has now backed off from that position, only rarely criticizing
them as a "problem" but never advocating any steps to persuade Netanyahu to reverse his policy. Notably,
she has repeatedly decried terroristic attacks on Israelis but has never acknowledged the brutality
of the Israeli occupation of much of the West Bank in spite of the fact that ten Palestinians are
killed for each Jewish victim of the ongoing violence.
Clinton supported Israel's actions in the 2014 Gaza War, which killed more than 500 children,
describing them as an appropriate response to a situation that was provoked by Hamas. On the campaign
trail recently husband Bill disingenuously
defended Hillary's position on Gaza, saying that "Hamas is really smart. When they decide to
rocket Israel they insinuate themselves in the hospitals, in the schools " placing all the blame
for the large number of civilian casualties on the Palestinians, not on the Israelis. When the media
began to report on the plight of the civilians trapped in Gaza Hillary dismissed the impending humanitarian
catastrophe, saying "They're trapped by their leadership, unfortunately."
Earlier, as a Senator from New York, Hillary supported Israel's building of the separation
barrier on Palestinian land and cheer-led a crowd at a pro-Israel rally that praised Israel's 2006
devastation of Lebanon and Gaza. She nonsensically
characterized and justified the bombing campaign as "efforts to send messages to Hamas, Hezbollah,
to the Syrians, to the Iranians – to all who seek death and domination instead of life and freedom "
More than nine hundred civilians died in the onslaught and when a vote came up subsequently in Congress
to stop the supply of cluster bombs to countries that use them on civilians Hillary voted against
the bill together with 69 other pro-Israel senators.
Hillary enjoys a particularly close relationship with Netanyahu,
writing in November, "I would also invite the Israeli prime minister to the White House in my
first month in office." She has worked diligently to "reaffirm the unbreakable bond with Israel –
and Benjamin Netanyahu." She has boasted of her being one of the promoters of annual increases in
aid to Israel while she was in the Senate and Secretary of State and takes credit for repeatedly
using America's Security Council veto to defend it in the United Nations.
So I think it is pretty clear who is the presidential candidate promoting the interests of a foreign
country and it ain't Trump. Hillary would no doubt argue that Israel is a friend and Russia is not,
an interesting point of view as Israel is not in fact an ally and has spied on us and copied our
military technology
to re-export to countries like China. Indeed, the most damaging spy in U.S. history Jonathan
Pollard worked for Israel. In spite of all that Israel continues to tap our treasury for billions
of dollars a year while still ignoring Washington when requests are made to moderate policies that
damage American interests. Against that, what exactly has Moscow done to harm us since the Cold War
ended? And who is advocating even more pressure on Russia and increasing the rewards for Israel,
presumably in the completely illogical belief that to do so will somehow bring some benefit to the
American people? Hillary Clinton.
utu, August 23, 2016 at 4:29 am GMT • 100 Words
Find the true reason why G.H. Bush was not allowed to get the 2nd term. Do you remember his
attempt to reign in Yitzhak Shamir when GHB was riding high popularity wave after the Desert Storm?
Do you remember anti-Bush Safire and Friedman columns in NYT week after week? Why Ross Perrot
was called in? Don't you see similarity with Teddy Rosevelt's run to prevent Taft's reelection
and securing Wilson's win? Do you know how Prince Bandar was coaching G.W. Bush to circumvent
the enmity of neocons towards his father? Answer these questions and you will know for whom
Bill Clinton worked. One more thing, Clinton did not touch Palestinian issue until last several
months of his presidency. He did not make G.H. Bush's mistake.
Miro23, August 23, 2016 at 5:45 am GMT • 100 Words
This a straightforward factual article about the Clinton sellout to Israel. So the question
may come down to the effectiveness of MSM propaganda.
It looks very much like the US public is starting to mirror the Eastern European public
under Communism by automatically disregarding government media + there's the added feature of
the internet as a new kind of high-powered Samizdat, that clearly worries the Establishment.
If the script follows through, then there's a good likelihood that the Establishment and their
façade players (Clintons, Bush, Romney, McCain etc) are reaching the end of the line, since like
in E.Europe, there's a background problem of economic failure and extreme élite/public inequality
that can no longer be hidden.
Philip Giraldi, August 23, 2016 at 10:32 am GMT • 100 Words
@hbm
hbm – the FBI concluded that someone working in the White House was MEGA but they decided that
they did not necessarily have enough evidence to convince a jury. He is still around and appears
in the media. As I would prefer not to get sued I will not name him but he is not a Clinton (though
he worked for them as well as for the two Bushes).
"... congressional Republicans subpoenaed three technology companies involved in her unusual home server setup. ..."
"... The subpoenas were issued after the companies did not cooperate with a House committee's investigation into the issue, said House Science panel Chairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas. ..."
Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill Monday, congressional Republicans subpoenaed
three technology companies involved in her unusual home server setup.
The subpoenas were issued after the companies did not cooperate with
a House committee's investigation into the issue, said House Science panel Chairman
Lamar Smith, R-Texas.
I think to the extent Israel elite interests are congruent with interests of the US neocons Clinton
is pro-Israel. If they stray, she can change. The key here are interests of global corporations and
neoliberal globalization. As such Israel is just a pawn in a big game.
Notable quotes:
"... So who is guilty of putting the interests of a foreign government ahead of those of the United States? I know there are advocates for any number of foreign states running around loose in Washington but the friends of Israel in government and the media come immediately to mind largely because there are so many of them, they are very much in-your-face and they are both extremely well-funded and very successful. Now deceased former Congressman Tom Lantos and Senator Frank Lautenberg were, respectively, often referred to as the congressman and senator from Israel. And there are many more: Chuck Schumer, Chuck Grassley, Ben Cardin, Bob Menendez, Tom Cotton, Mark Kirk, Nita Lowey, Ted Deutch, Brad Sherman, Ileana-Ros Lehtinen and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz to name only a few in the Congress. All are major recipients of Israel related PAC money and all are reliable defenders of Israel no matter what Benjamin Netanyahu does and no matter how it effects the United States. ..."
"... And then there are the Clintons. One only has to go back to Bill's one-sided pro-Israeli diplomacy at Camp David in 2000 to discern how the game was played. And then there was the widely condemned January 2001 last minute pardon of Mossad agent Marc Rich, whose wife Denise was a major contributor to the Clintons, to realize that there was always a deference to Israeli interests particularly when money was involved ..."
"... Trump's crime, per Morell, is that he is disloyal to the United States because he is not sufficiently hostile to the evil Vladimir Putin, which somehow means that he is being manipulated by the clever Russian. Trump has indeed called for a positive working relationship with Putin to accomplish, among other objectives, the crushing of ISIS. And he is otherwise in favor of leaving Bashar al-Assad of Syria alone while also being disinclined to get involved in any additional military interventions in the Middle East or elsewhere, which pretty much makes him the antithesis of the Clintonian foreign policy promoted by Morell. ..."
"... The leading individual foreign donor to the Clinton Foundation between 1999 and 2014 was Ukrainian Viktor Pinchuk, who "directed between $10 and $25 million" to its Global Initiative, has let the Clintons use his private jet, attended Bill's Hollywood 65 th birthday celebration and hosted daughter Chelsea and her husband on a trip to Ukraine. Pinchuk is a Jewish oligarch married to the daughter of notoriously corrupt former Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma. He is very closely tied to Israel, a supporter of regime change in his country, who was simultaneously donating money and also lobbying in Washington while Hillary was Secretary of State and promoting a similar agenda as part of her $5 billion program to "democratize" Ukraine. Clinton arranged a dozen meetings with substantive State Department officers for Pinchuk. ..."
"... Clinton supported Israel's actions in the 2014 Gaza War, which killed more than 500 children, describing them as an appropriate response to a situation that was provoked by Hamas. On the campaign trail recently husband Bill disingenuously defended Hillary's position on Gaza, saying that "Hamas is really smart. When they decide to rocket Israel they insinuate themselves in the hospitals, in the schools " placing all the blame for the large number of civilian casualties on the Palestinians, not on the Israelis. When the media began to report on the plight of the civilians trapped in Gaza Hillary dismissed the impending humanitarian catastrophe, saying "They're trapped by their leadership, unfortunately." ..."
"... Earlier, as a Senator from New York, Hillary supported Israel's building of the separation barrier on Palestinian land and cheer-led a crowd at a pro-Israel rally that praised Israel's 2006 devastation of Lebanon and Gaza. She nonsensically characterized and justified the bombing campaign as "efforts to send messages to Hamas, Hezbollah, to the Syrians, to the Iranians – to all who seek death and domination instead of life and freedom " More than nine hundred civilians died in the onslaught and when a vote came up subsequently in Congress to stop the supply of cluster bombs to countries that use them on civilians Hillary voted against the bill together with 69 other pro-Israel senators. ..."
"... Hillary enjoys a particularly close relationship with Netanyahu, writing in November , "I would also invite the Israeli prime minister to the White House in my first month in office." She has worked diligently to "reaffirm the unbreakable bond with Israel – and Benjamin Netanyahu." She has boasted of her being one of the promoters of annual increases in aid to Israel while she was in the Senate and Secretary of State and takes credit for repeatedly using America's Security Council veto to defend it in the United Nations. ..."
"... o you know how Prince Bandar was coaching G.W. Bush to circumvent the enmity of neocons towards his father? ..."
"... It looks very much like the US public is starting to mirror the Eastern European public under Communism by automatically disregarding government media + there's the added feature of the internet as a new kind of high-powered Samizdat, that clearly worries the Establishment. ..."
On August 5th, Michael Morell, a former acting Director of the CIA, pilloried GOP presidential
candidate Donald Trump, concluding that he was an "unwitting agent of Russia." Morell, who entitled
his New York Times
op-ed "I Ran the CIA and now I'm endorsing Hillary Clinton," described the process whereby Trump
had been so corrupted. According to Morell, Putin, it seems, as a wily ex-career intelligence officer,
is "trained to identify vulnerabilities in an individual and to exploit them. That is exactly what
he did early in the primaries. Mr. Putin played upon Mr. Trump's vulnerabilities In the intelligence
business, we would say that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian
Federation."
I have previously
observed
how incomprehensible the designation of "unwitting agent" used in a sentence together with "recruited"
is, but perhaps I should add something more about Morell that might not be clear to the casual reader.
Morell was an Agency analyst, not a spy, who spent nearly his entire career in and around Washington.
The high point of his CIA experience consisted of briefing George W. Bush on the President's Daily
Brief (PDB).
Morell was not trained in the arduous CIA operational tradecraft course which agent recruiters
and handlers go through. This means that his understanding of intelligence operations and agents
is, to put it politely, derivative. If he had gone through the course he would understand that when
you recruit an agent you control him and tell him what to do. The agent might not know whom exactly
he is really answering to as in a false flag operation, but he cannot be unwitting.
Morell appears to have a tendency to make promises that others will have to deliver on, but perhaps
that's what delegation by senior U.S. government officials is all about. He was also not trained
in CIA paramilitary operations, which perhaps should be considered when he drops comments about the
desirability of "covertly" killing Russians and Iranians to make a point that they should not oppose
U.S. policies in Syria, as he did in a
softball interview with Charlie Rose on August 6th.
Morell appears to be oblivious to the possibility that going around assassinating foreigners might
be regarded as state sponsored terrorism and could well ignite World War 3. And, as is characteristic
of chickenhawks, it is highly unlikely that he was intending that either he or his immediate family
should go out and cut the throats or blow the heads off of those foreign devils who seek to derail
the Pax Americana. Nor would he expect to be in the firing line when the relatives of those victims
seek revenge. Someone else with the proper training would be found to do all that messy stuff and
take the consequences.
Be that as it may, Morell was a very senior officer and perhaps we should accept that he might
know something that the rest of us have missed, so let's just assume that he kind of misspoke and
give him a pass on the "recruited unwitting agent" expression. Instead let's look for other American
political figures who just might be either deliberately or inadvertently serving the interests of
a foreign government, which is presumably actually what Michael Morell meant to convey regarding
Trump. To be sure a well-run McCarthy-esque ferreting out of individuals who just might be disloyal
provides an excellent opportunity to undertake a purge of those who either by thought, word or deed
might be guilty of unacceptable levels of coziness with foreign interests.
So who is guilty of putting the interests of a foreign government ahead of those of the United
States? I know there are advocates for any number of foreign states running around loose in Washington
but the friends of Israel in government and the media come immediately to mind largely because there
are so many of them, they are very much in-your-face and they are both extremely well-funded and
very successful. Now deceased former Congressman Tom Lantos and Senator Frank Lautenberg were, respectively,
often referred to as the congressman and senator from Israel. And there are many more: Chuck Schumer,
Chuck Grassley, Ben Cardin, Bob Menendez, Tom Cotton, Mark Kirk, Nita Lowey, Ted Deutch, Brad Sherman,
Ileana-Ros Lehtinen and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz to name only a few in the Congress. All are
major recipients of Israel related PAC money and all are reliable defenders of Israel no matter
what Benjamin Netanyahu does and no matter how it effects the United States.
And then there are the Clintons. One only has to go back to Bill's
one-sided pro-Israeli
diplomacy at Camp David in 2000 to discern how the game was played. And then there was the widely
condemned January 2001 last minute
pardon of Mossad agent Marc Rich, whose wife Denise was a major contributor to the Clintons,
to realize that there was always a deference to Israeli interests particularly when money was involved.
The only problem is that the Clintons, relying on Morell's formulation, might more reasonably be
described as witting agents of Israel rather than unwitting as they have certainly known what they
have been doing and have been actively supporting Israeli policies even when damaging to U.S. interests
since they first emerged from the primordial political swamps in Arkansas. If one were completely
cynical it might be possible to suggest that they understood from the beginning that pandering to
Israel and gaining access to Jewish power and money would be a major component in their rise to political
prominence. It certainly has worked out that way.
Trump's crime, per Morell, is that he is disloyal to the United States because he is not sufficiently
hostile to the evil Vladimir Putin, which somehow means that he is being manipulated by the clever
Russian. Trump has indeed called for a positive working relationship with Putin to accomplish, among
other objectives, the crushing of ISIS. And he is otherwise in favor of leaving Bashar al-Assad of
Syria alone while also being disinclined to get involved in any additional military interventions
in the Middle East or elsewhere, which pretty much makes him the antithesis of the Clintonian foreign
policy promoted by Morell.
In comparison with the deeply and profoundly corrupt Clintons, Trump's alleged foreign policy
perfidy makes him appear to be pretty much a boy scout. To understand the Clintons one might consider
the hundreds of millions of dollars, much of it from foreign sources, that have flowed into the Clinton
Foundation while Hillary was Secretary of State. And there is the clear
email evidence that Hillary exploited her government position to favor both foreign and domestic
financial supporters.
The leading
individual foreign donor to the Clinton Foundation between 1999 and 2014 was Ukrainian Viktor
Pinchuk,
who "directed between $10 and $25 million" to its Global Initiative, has let the Clintons use
his private jet, attended Bill's Hollywood 65th birthday celebration and hosted daughter
Chelsea and her husband on a trip to Ukraine. Pinchuk is a Jewish oligarch married to the daughter
of notoriously corrupt former Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma. He is very closely tied to Israel,
a supporter of regime change in his country, who was simultaneously
donating money and also lobbying in Washington while Hillary was Secretary of State and promoting
a similar agenda as part of her $5 billion program to "democratize" Ukraine. Clinton arranged a dozen
meetings with substantive State Department officers for Pinchuk.
Hillary and Bill's predilection for all things Israeli and her promise to do even more in the
future is a matter of public record. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz asserted
that of all the political candidates in the primaries "Clinton had the longest public record of engagement
with Israel, and has spent decades diligently defending the Jewish state." In a speech to AIPAC in
March
she promised to take the "U.S.-Israel alliance to the next level." Hillary's current principal
financial supporter in her presidential run is Haim Saban, an Israeli who has described himself as
a "one issue" guy and that issue is Israel.
Hillary Clinton boasts of having "stood with Israel my entire career." Her website
promises to maintain "Israel's qualitative military edge to ensure the IDF is equipped to deter
and defeat aggression from the full spectrum of threats," "stand up against the boycott, divestment
and sanctions movement (BDS)," and "cut off efforts to unilaterally recognize Palestinian statehood
outside of the context of negotiations with Israel." In a letter to Haim Saban, Hillary
declared that "we need to make countering BDS a priority," which means she is prepared to support
laws limiting First Amendment rights in the U.S. in defense of perceived Israeli interests.
As part of the Obama Administration Hillary Clinton at first supported his attempts to pressure
Israel over its illegal settlements but has now backed off from that position, only rarely criticizing
them as a "problem" but never advocating any steps to persuade Netanyahu to reverse his policy. Notably,
she has repeatedly decried terroristic attacks on Israelis but has never acknowledged the brutality
of the Israeli occupation of much of the West Bank in spite of the fact that ten Palestinians are
killed for each Jewish victim of the ongoing violence.
Clinton supported Israel's actions in the 2014 Gaza War, which killed more than 500 children,
describing them as an appropriate response to a situation that was provoked by Hamas. On the campaign
trail recently husband Bill disingenuously
defended Hillary's position on Gaza, saying that "Hamas is really smart. When they decide to
rocket Israel they insinuate themselves in the hospitals, in the schools " placing all the blame
for the large number of civilian casualties on the Palestinians, not on the Israelis. When the media
began to report on the plight of the civilians trapped in Gaza Hillary dismissed the impending humanitarian
catastrophe, saying "They're trapped by their leadership, unfortunately."
Earlier, as a Senator from New York, Hillary supported Israel's building of the separation
barrier on Palestinian land and cheer-led a crowd at a pro-Israel rally that praised Israel's 2006
devastation of Lebanon and Gaza. She nonsensically
characterized and justified the bombing campaign as "efforts to send messages to Hamas, Hezbollah,
to the Syrians, to the Iranians – to all who seek death and domination instead of life and freedom "
More than nine hundred civilians died in the onslaught and when a vote came up subsequently in Congress
to stop the supply of cluster bombs to countries that use them on civilians Hillary voted against
the bill together with 69 other pro-Israel senators.
Hillary enjoys a particularly close relationship with Netanyahu,
writing in November, "I would also invite the Israeli prime minister to the White House in my
first month in office." She has worked diligently to "reaffirm the unbreakable bond with Israel –
and Benjamin Netanyahu." She has boasted of her being one of the promoters of annual increases in
aid to Israel while she was in the Senate and Secretary of State and takes credit for repeatedly
using America's Security Council veto to defend it in the United Nations.
So I think it is pretty clear who is the presidential candidate promoting the interests of a foreign
country and it ain't Trump. Hillary would no doubt argue that Israel is a friend and Russia is not,
an interesting point of view as Israel is not in fact an ally and has spied on us and copied our
military technology
to re-export to countries like China. Indeed, the most damaging spy in U.S. history Jonathan
Pollard worked for Israel. In spite of all that Israel continues to tap our treasury for billions
of dollars a year while still ignoring Washington when requests are made to moderate policies that
damage American interests. Against that, what exactly has Moscow done to harm us since the Cold War
ended? And who is advocating even more pressure on Russia and increasing the rewards for Israel,
presumably in the completely illogical belief that to do so will somehow bring some benefit to the
American people? Hillary Clinton.
utu, August 23, 2016 at 4:29 am GMT • 100 Words
Find the true reason why G.H. Bush was not allowed to get the 2nd term. Do you remember his
attempt to reign in Yitzhak Shamir when GHB was riding high popularity wave after the Desert Storm?
Do you remember anti-Bush Safire and Friedman columns in NYT week after week? Why Ross Perrot
was called in? Don't you see similarity with Teddy Rosevelt's run to prevent Taft's reelection
and securing Wilson's win? Do you know how Prince Bandar was coaching G.W. Bush to circumvent
the enmity of neocons towards his father? Answer these questions and you will know for whom
Bill Clinton worked. One more thing, Clinton did not touch Palestinian issue until last several
months of his presidency. He did not make G.H. Bush's mistake.
Miro23, August 23, 2016 at 5:45 am GMT • 100 Words
This a straightforward factual article about the Clinton sellout to Israel. So the question
may come down to the effectiveness of MSM propaganda.
It looks very much like the US public is starting to mirror the Eastern European public
under Communism by automatically disregarding government media + there's the added feature of
the internet as a new kind of high-powered Samizdat, that clearly worries the Establishment.
If the script follows through, then there's a good likelihood that the Establishment and their
façade players (Clintons, Bush, Romney, McCain etc) are reaching the end of the line, since like
in E.Europe, there's a background problem of economic failure and extreme élite/public inequality
that can no longer be hidden.
Philip Giraldi, August 23, 2016 at 10:32 am GMT • 100 Words
@hbm
hbm – the FBI concluded that someone working in the White House was MEGA but they decided that
they did not necessarily have enough evidence to convince a jury. He is still around and appears
in the media. As I would prefer not to get sued I will not name him but he is not a Clinton (though
he worked for them as well as for the two Bushes).
"... Yet after all this, Trump remains around 40% in the polls or better - and only about five points behind Hillary Clinton" [Brent Arends, MarketWatch ]. "n other words, in presidential election terms, it's still either party's race. ..."
"... Most elections see swings of several points between August and early November. Some see even bigger ones - at this point in 1988 Vice President George H.W. Bush looked like a no-hoper against Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis. Bush went on to win by seven points. ..."
"... "Three of the top four nonfiction hardcover best sellers in the New York Times Book Review on Sunday were anti-Hillary Clinton screeds ('Hillary's America' by Dinesh D'Souza, 'Crisis of Character' by Gary Byrne, and 'Armageddon' by Dick Morris), and the fourth, 'Liars' by Glenn Beck, was a more general assault on the liberal agenda that certainly has no kind words for Clinton" [ MarketWatch ]. And they say people don't read books any more… ..."
"... Joyce was still keeping her vote a secret, but she thought she knew why people were so angry. 'I think it's more that we don't trust politicians, period,' she said. 'We've gotten to a point in the United States where they're all liars or they're all cheaters or they've all done something wrong and we're gonna blow that up. And so we don't trust any of them.' The other women were nodding. 'And I think," Joyce said, 'that's where Trump's power came from." Joyce is a volatility voter, then. ..."
"... Clinton and "welfare reform": "Having abandoned the maternalists' sentimental defense of motherhood as a sacred calling, most second-wave feminists had no terms in which to mount a convincing justification for income support to poor mothers. ..."
"... Hillary's support for the bill reveals the deep fault lines of class and race that fractured the second-wave feminist movement, as white middle-class women purchased their independence from domestic labor by shifting the burden to working-class women of color " [ N+1 ]. Remember Nannygate ? There you have it. ..."
"Yet after all this, Trump remains around 40% in the polls or better - and only about five
points behind Hillary Clinton" [Brent Arends,
MarketWatch ]. "n other words, in presidential election terms, it's still either party's race.
Most elections see swings of several points between August and early November. Some see even bigger
ones - at this point in 1988 Vice President George H.W. Bush looked like a no-hoper against Massachusetts
Gov. Michael Dukakis. Bush went on to win by seven points.
There is no reason to think this election
will be less volatile than the norm…. Right now the bookmakers give Trump about a 25% chance of
winning. That's high enough to be alarming. But what's worse: If I had to take a wager at these
levels, I'd take the over rather than the under. This race, terrifyingly, is still open."
"That remarkable fact underscores how virtually unchallenged Clinton has been on the advertising
airwaves, as Democratic and Republican strategists alike say she has gone deeper into the election
calendar than any non-incumbent president they can remember in the modern era without sustained,
paid opposition on television" [
Politico ]. So, if election 2016 were a WWF match, the [good|bad] guy would be fighting with
one hand behind his back, and getting pounded, for sure, but….
"Three of the top four nonfiction hardcover best sellers in the New York Times Book Review
on Sunday were anti-Hillary Clinton screeds ('Hillary's America' by Dinesh D'Souza, 'Crisis of
Character' by Gary Byrne, and 'Armageddon' by Dick Morris), and the fourth, 'Liars' by Glenn Beck,
was a more general assault on the liberal agenda that certainly has no kind words for Clinton"
[
MarketWatch ]. And they say people don't read books any more…
"Our research suggests yet another reason not to overreact to news stories about the newest
poll: Media outlets tend to cover the surveys with the most "newsworthy" results, which can distort
the picture of where the race stands" [
WaPo ]. Look! Over there! Another fluctuation well inside the margin of error!
UPDATE "Despite frequent claims of the 'women's vote' working in Democrats' favor, much depends
on which women. Individually, these women's views vary widely, just as the county they live in.
Lake County [Ohio] has been nearly evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. Collectively,
they make up a demographic that has reliably voted, and reliably voted Republican, in nearly every
election since 1972: Married women, especially white married women" [
NBC ]. Joyce was still keeping her vote a secret, but she thought she knew why people were
so angry. 'I think it's more that we don't trust politicians, period,' she said. 'We've gotten
to a point in the United States where they're all liars or they're all cheaters or they've all
done something wrong and we're gonna blow that up. And so we don't trust any of them.' The other
women were nodding. 'And I think," Joyce said, 'that's where Trump's power came from." Joyce is
a volatility voter, then.
UPDATE Re: Clinton and "welfare reform": "Having abandoned the maternalists' sentimental
defense of motherhood as a sacred calling, most second-wave feminists had no terms in which to
mount a convincing justification for income support to poor mothers. Other women were working;
why shouldn't they work too? But for middle-class women, work meant public recognition, self-determination,
the right to be seen as autonomous individuals and to participate in civic life. For welfare mothers,
especially black women, who made up two-thirds of all domestic workers by 1960, it meant watching
other women's children, preparing their food, and scrubbing their floors, services that professional
women increasingly relied on as they entered the workforce in greater numbers. The version of
welfare reform Bill Clinton envisioned was much more generous than the bill eventually passed
by the Republican Congress in 1996. It would have included child-care and job-placement programs - but
it would still have required welfare recipients to work. Hillary's support for the bill reveals
the deep fault lines of class and race that fractured the second-wave feminist movement, as
white middle-class women purchased their independence from domestic labor by shifting the
burden to working-class women of color " [
N+1 ]. Remember
Nannygate ? There you have it.
"... A congressional source confirmed to Fox News Tuesday that the House Government Oversight Committee had received a heavily redacted FBI summary of Hillary Clinton's session last month with FBI agents who interviewed her about her use of a private server for government business. The agents' notes were provided as well. ..."
"... Separately, the Republican chairman of the House Government Oversight Committee confirmed that even he does not have a high enough security clearance to read the documents in full. ..."
"... "As the chairman of the chief investigative body in the House, it is significant I can't even read these documents in their entirety," Rep. Jason Chaffetz of Utah told Fox News."This shows how dangerous it was to have this intelligence, highly classified to this day, on the former Secretary's unsecured personal server where it was vulnerable." ..."
"... The fact that portions of the FBI investigative file are heavily redacted and must be held and read by lawmakers in a secure facility on Capitol Hill shows how classified the material remains, despite claims made by the Clinton campaign. ..."
"... The campaign's call to release the FBI agents' notes appears suspect because the material is too highly classified to make public.The FBI told the committee that the documents cannot be released in part or in full without prior agency approval. ..."
"... "This information being highly classified according to the FBI is in direct conflict with what the State Department and Ms. Clinton have said is on the server. You could not have it both ways," former military intelligence officer Tony Shaffer said. "You cannot say one day this is unclassified 'nothing to see here' and the next day, only certain people can see this and you must not be able to take it outside of a secure facility." ..."
Republicans in Congress demanded the FBI turn over their notes from the
agency's interview with Hillary regarding her private email server.
The
agency dragged their feet.
But when the documents were turned over, most of the information was
hidden.
Hillary's emails contained so much classified information that the
notes were heavily redacted.
Not even members of Congress possessed the appropriate security
clearance to view the notes.
Fox News reports:
A congressional source confirmed to Fox News Tuesday that the
House Government Oversight Committee had received a heavily redacted
FBI summary of Hillary Clinton's session last month with FBI agents
who interviewed her about her use of a private server for government
business. The agents' notes were provided as well.
Separately, the Republican chairman of the House Government
Oversight Committee confirmed that even he does not have a high enough
security clearance to read the documents in full.
"As the chairman of the chief investigative body in the House,
it is significant I can't even read these documents in their
entirety," Rep. Jason Chaffetz of Utah told Fox News."This shows how
dangerous it was to have this intelligence, highly classified to this
day, on the former Secretary's unsecured personal server where it was
vulnerable."
The fact that portions of the FBI investigative file are
heavily redacted and must be held and read by lawmakers in a secure
facility on Capitol Hill shows how classified the material remains,
despite claims made by the Clinton campaign.
The campaign's call to release the FBI agents' notes appears
suspect because the material is too highly classified to make
public.The FBI told the committee that the documents cannot be
released in part or in full without prior agency approval.
"This information being highly classified according to the FBI
is in direct conflict with what the State Department and Ms. Clinton
have said is on the server. You could not have it both ways," former
military intelligence officer Tony Shaffer said. "You cannot say one
day this is unclassified 'nothing to see here' and the next day, only
certain people can see this and you must not be able to take it
outside of a secure facility."
This just proves Hillary Clinton is a liar.
She claimed she never sent or received any information that was marked
classified.
But the redacted notes - clearly hiding information that was so
classified not even a committee chair could read it - indicate Hillary
should have known classified intelligence was on her server.
The redacted notes also call into question FBI Director Comey's
decision not to recommend criminal charges be brought against Hillary.
As more details emerge, critics are convinced Director Comey failed to
recommend charges because Obama endorsed Hillary for President.
Announcing Hillary should be charged just weeks before she was to
accept the Democrat Party's nomination for president would have thrown
the race into chaos.
It also may have handed the nomination to Bernie Sanders, a candidate
many believe because of his socialist views was too extreme to win a
presidential election.
If Hillary was indicted and lost to Trump, Republicans could dismantle
Obama's entire agenda.
Protecting his achievements - namely ObamaCare - is a central reason
Obama endorsed Hillary and has fiercely attacked Donald Trump.
And many believe the FBI took a dive on the investigation because the
Director got cold feet about involving the Bureau during a presidential
election.
"Other donors got action via direct appeal to Abedin: For example, 75-grand-giver Maureen White
wrote, 'I am going to be in DC on Thursday. Would she have any time to spare?' Huma's reply: "Yes
I'll make it work'" [New
York Post]. Wait, all I need to buy access to Clinton is a grand? That's all? Really?
UPDATE "'Huma, I need your help now to intervene please. We need this meeting with Secretary Clinton,
who has been there now for nearly six months,' Aboussie wrote. 'It should go without saying that
the Peabody folks came to Dick and I because of our relationship with the Clinton's [sic],' she added"
[The Intercept].
"'We are working on it and I hope we can make something work,' Abedin replied, noting 'we have to
work through the beauracracy [sic] here.' Obviously, as the example above shows, that's not always
true, and Abedin seems to be the arbiter of which donors go to Happyville, and which to Pain City.
UPDATE "The emails do not show that Clinton Foundation donors received any policy favors from
Hillary Clinton or other elected officials. What they show is that people who donated to the foundation
believed they were owed favors by Clinton's staffers, and at least one of those staffers - the odious
Doug Band - shared this belief" [Jonathon Chait,
New York Magazine]. Yes, selling access is called "influence peddling." It's corrupt in itself,
regardless of policy outcomes. The headline: "Clinton Foundation Still Not Criminal, Still Not Great
for Hillary." So, if "not criminal" is the baseline…
UPDATE "Bill Clinton says he will leave Clinton Foundation if Hillary is elected president" [Los
Angeles Times]. From the Department of How Stupid Do They Think We Are? Even if you accept that
quid pro quo is the only form of corruption, which I don't, consider the possibility that
Bill closed the deal on the quid before the election, and Hillz will deliver the pro
quo after the election. Surely, that is, a quid pro quo can be asynchronous? Or are
we now to believe that the only form of corruption is when cash in an envelope is transferred from
one hand to another? That's even worse than Citizens United!
This is a real "Hillary for jail" type of news ;-)
Notable quotes:
"... While the boxes contained "dozens of FBI reports concerning Foster's death - including interviews with the medical examiner, U.S. Park Police officers, and White House aides about the contents of Foster's office" it was mysteriously missing the reports of Copeland and Clemente. ..."
"... "He examined all eight boxes but found no interviews by any investigator that detail either a meeting between Hillary Clinton and Vince Foster or the effects of a meeting between Hillary Clinton and Vince Foster on Vince Foster's state of mind. We did not limit ourselves to interviews by the two individuals [FBI agents] you mention." ..."
Aug 23, 2016 | www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-08-23/fbi-reports-linking-hillary-vince-foster-suicide-go-missing-national-archives"
Vince Foster was a mentor to
Hillary when they worked together at the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, Arkansas. When Bill was confirmed
as the 42nd President of the United States on January 20, 1993, Foster took a role as his Deputy
White House Counsel. 6 months later, to the day, Foster was found dead in Fort Marcy Park, along
the Potomac River, of an apparent "suicide" resulting from a gun shot from a .38 caliber revolver.
Like a lot of things surrounding the Clintons, Foster's "suicide" has always been shrouded
in mystery. A few months ago,
The Daily Mail interviewed former FBI agents Coy Copeland and Jim Clemente who claimed
that Hillary "triggered" Foster's "suicide" by "humiliating" him in front of colleagues just a few
days before
' Hillary put him down really, really bad in a pretty good-size meeting,
' Copeland says. ' She told him he didn't get the picture, and he would always
be a little hick town lawyer who was obviously not ready for the big time.'
Indeed, Hillary went so far as to blame Foster for all the Clintons' problems and
to accuse him of failing them , according to Clemente, who was also assigned by the
FBI to the Starr investigation and who probed the circumstances surrounding Foster's suicide.
'Foster was profoundly depressed, but Hillary lambasting him was the final straw because
she publicly embarrassed him in front of others,' says Clemente.
' Hillary blamed him for failed nominations, claimed he had not vetted them properly
, and said in front of his White House colleagues, ' You're not protecting
us ' and ' You have failed us ,' Clemente says. 'That was the final
blow.'
After the White House meeting, Foster's behavior changed dramatically ,
the FBI agents found. Those who knew him said his voice sounded strained, he became withdrawn
and preoccupied, and his sense of humor vanished. At times, Foster teared up. He talked of
feeling trapped.
On Tuesday, July 13, 1993, while having dinner with his wife Lisa, Foster broke down and
began to cry. He said he was considering resigning.
That weekend, Foster and his wife drove to the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where they saw
their friends, Michael Cardoza and Webster Hubbell, and their wives.
'They played tennis, they swam, and they said he sat in a lawn chair, just kind of sat there
in the lawn chair,' Copeland says. 'They said that just was not Vince.
He loved to play tennis, and he was always sociable, but he just sat over in the corner
by himself and stared off into space, reading a book.'
Two days later, Foster left the White House parking lot at 1:10 p.m. The precise time when
he shot himself could not be pinpointed. After Park Police found his body, they notified the
U.S. Secret Service at 8:30 p.m.
Based on what 'dozens' of others who had contact with Foster after that meeting told the
agents, while Foster was already depressed, 'The put-down that she gave him in that
big meeting just pushed him over the edge, ' Copeland says. 'It was the final straw
that broke the camel's back.'
No one can explain a suicide in rational terms. But the FBI investigation concluded
that it was Hillary's vilification of Foster in front of other White House aides, coming on
top of his depression, that triggered his suicide about a week later , Copeland and
Clemente both say.
The Daily Mail is now reporting that an "extensive investigation" has found that FBI reports
filed by those former agents have "gone missing" from records stored at the National Archives
and Records Service in College Park, MD. On two occasions, reporters went to the National
Archives to review boxes of evidence related to Vince Foster's death. While the boxes contained
"dozens of FBI reports concerning Foster's death - including interviews with the medical examiner,
U.S. Park Police officers, and White House aides about the contents of Foster's office" it was
mysteriously missing the reports of Copeland and Clemente.
Growing suspicious of the missing reports, The Daily Mail filed a FOIA request with Martha Murphy of the National Archives who subsequently reviewed all of the "
relevant FBI files, including those that had not been previously made public.
" An emailed response from Martha Murphy reported that the FBI files requested could still not
be found:
"He examined all eight boxes but found no interviews by any investigator that detail
either a meeting between Hillary Clinton and Vince Foster or the effects of a meeting between
Hillary Clinton and Vince Foster on Vince Foster's state of mind. We did not limit
ourselves to interviews by the two individuals [FBI agents] you mention."
But to be clear, according the Director of Communications and Marketing at the National
Archives, John Valceanu, just because the FBI agents' reports could not be located doesn't mean
they've been vanished :
'We do not agree with your conclusion that the records you requested are missing from the
National Archives simply because we were unable to locate any responsive records in response
to your request.'
Instead, Valceanu suggested the files might just be misplaced among the other 3,000 boxes of
records related to the FBI's investigation into the Clinton's Whitewater scandal.
Certainly, we can understand how difficult it must be to keep track of all the boxes of FBI
evidence related to past Clinton investigations but it does seem suspicious that this specific
report would be the one to go missing.
VegasBob -> Government needs you to pay taxes •Aug 23, 2016 4:05 PM
These wouldn't be the first documents Sidney Blumenthal stole from the National Archives.
Blankenstein -> Government needs you to pay taxes •Aug 23, 2016 4:23 PM
And they have a history with "missing" documents
" After nearly two years of searches and subpoenas, the White House said this evening that
it had unexpectedly discovered copies of missing documents from Hillary Rodham Clinton's law
firm that describe her work for a failing savings and loan association in the 1980's."
"The mysterious appearance of the billing records, which had been the specific subject of
various investigative subpoenas for two years, sparked intense interest about how they
surfaced and where they had been"
"But Whitewater investigators believe that the billing records show significant
representation. They argue that the records prove that Ms. Clinton was not only directly
involved in the representation of Madison, but more specifically, in providing legal work on
the fraudulent Castle Grande land deal."
"Investigators believe this suggests that, at some point, this copy was passed from Vince
Foster to Hillary Clinton for her review.
In addition, investigators had the FBI conduct fingerprint analysis of the billing records.
Of significance, the prints of Vince Foster and Hillary Clinton were found."
The problem is most psychopaths tend to seek political power.
Mena Arkansas •Aug 23, 2016 4:10 PM
This is a great interview with Patrick Knowlton who was taking a leak in Fort Marcy Park
and saw a brown Honda - not the grey Honda Vince Foster drove.
According to him, the FBI actively covered up the whole crime.
They also attempted to intimidate the witnesses through gang stalking and other methods.
And the FBI "investigation" of JFK's death was really a cover up. J Edgar Hoover and the
Kennedy brothers hated each other. They were going to make Hoover retire when he reached the
mandatory retirement age of 70 in 1965. So he had no real interest in hunting for JFK's real
killers. The members of the Warren commission were probably picked because Hoover had
blackmail information on them and could control them to prevent them from reaching conclusions
that contradicted the FBI's report (which he leaked before the commission was even formed.)
Herdee •Aug 23, 2016 4:54 PM
There are highly trained people in what is called "Document Management."Oil Companies and
all major corporations and Government use these people in their operations every day. The
paper documents are stored separately in warehouses that specialize in this part of the
operation. The paper documents are scanned and stored. Many use sophisticated and highly
secure server farms to store electronic data on the paper version. Nothing just goes missing,
there are checks and balances throughout the process and everything is coded and recorded
whenever anything is accessed either electronically or through paper. At the server farm the
security is very tight everything is videotaped, security guards watch every single movement.
Sandy Berger the former Clinton Administration National Security Advisor, said he made a
"mistake" and was just "sloppy" when an FBI investigation revealed that he had stolen Top
Secret memos and documents from the National Archives relating to the events surrounding
al-Qaida attacks on America during the 1990s and in the year 2000. Archive security notified
the FBI when they discovered documents missing, and saw Berger stuffing papers into his pants,
socks, and a leather briefcase.
Democrats are defending Mr. Berger by attacking the "timing" of the revelation that he was,
ah, "sloppy." They stand behind his contention that he didn't really commit a crime, by
stuffing Top Secret material in his pants and removing them from Federal custody. The Democrat
spinmasters say that the revelation that Mr. Berger had "mistakenly" stuffed certain documents
in his pants relating to how Clinton handled terrorism prior to 9/11 is just Republican
trickery and an attempt by Bush to divert American's attention from his failures in the unjust
war in Iraq.
The likelihood is that the Clinton presidency will be tumultuous.
No Honeymoon: On the left, there are fewer hopes about Clinton than about
Barack Obama. The pressure will begin even before she takes office in what is likely to be a battle
royal in the lame duck session of Congress as Obama tries to force through his TPP trade deal.
New Energy: If the Sanders supporters stay engaged, there could be an organizational
form – his OurRevolution and his institute – that can do what a political party should do: educate
and mobilize around progressive issues; recruit and support truly progressive candidates. This
insurgency may continue to grow.
New Generation: It can't be forgotten how overwhelmingly Sanders won young
voters. He not only won 3 of 4 millennial voters in the Democratic primaries, he won a majority
of young people of color voting. Some of this was his message. Much of it was the integrity of
someone consistent in his views spurning the big money corruptions of our politics. These young
people are going to keep moving. They won't find answers in a Clinton administration. We're going
to see more movements, more disruptions, and more mobilizations – around jobs, around student
debt, about inequality, around criminal justice, immigration, globalization, and climate and more.
New Coalitions: Sanders and Trump clearly have shaken the coalitions of their
parties. Trump combined populism with bigotry and xenophobia to break up the Republican establishment's
ability to use the latter to support their neoliberal economics. Sanders attracted support of
the young across lines of race, challenging the Democratic establishment's ability to use liberal
identity politics to fuse minorities and upper middle class professionals into a majority coalition.
Clinton fended off the challenge, but the shakeup has only begun.
New Ideas: The Davos era has failed. There is no way it can continue down
the road without producing more and more opposition. This is now the second straight "recovery"
in which most Americans will lose ground. Already the elite is embattled intellectually on key
elements of the neo-liberal agenda: corporate globalization, privatization, austerity, "small
government," even global policing. Joe Stiglitz suggests that the Davos era is over, but that
is premature. What is clear is that it has failed and the struggle to replace it has just begun.
And that waving the white flag because Trump is besmirching populism mistakes today's farce for
history's drama.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.
Assange also pointed to Hillary Clinton's relations with Saudi Arabia that have led to great
angst among Israel, a country that now worries where her allegiances fall in the region. "[Her
connection to Saudi Arabia] is extensive. The relations between Hillary and Saudi Arabia. The
Clinton Foundation and Saudi Arabia," opined Assange. "Saudi Arabia is probably the single
largest donor to the Clinton Foundation. You can see Hillary's arms export policies where she was
Secretary of State favoring Saudi Arabia extensively."
The whistleblower also blasted Clinton for her allegations that Trump is a secret Russian
agent saying that "there is a much deeper connection between Hillary Clinton and Russia on record
than there is with Donald Trump." Assange pointed to the fact that her top strategic consultant
John Podesta sits on the board of a Russian connected fund and her pay-to-play activities
with Moscow businessmen who would make donations to the Clinton Foundation and then miraculously
receive State Department clearance to undertake business in the US.
Perhaps his most damning statements were Clinton's financial links to radical Jihadist groups
in the Middle East and the State Department's policy of using Libya as conduit to get arms
to Syria.
"The US government, at the time that Hillary Clinton was in charge of US foreign policy, did
use Libya as a conduit to get arms to Jihadists in Syria," said Assange. "That is well
established not just by a range of our materials, but also by the investigative work of Sy Hersh."
Assange also called into question links between Hillary Clinton's former employer LaFarge, a
cement company that the presidential candidate served on the board of directors for, which is now
under investigation for contracting with the Daesh (known colloquially as ISIS) terror network in
Syria.
"La Monde found that [LaFarge] paid ISIS/Daesh money, taxes if you will, for their operations in
certain areas and they engaged in a variety of business deals," said Assange. "Hillary Clinton's
involvement is that money from LaFarge in 2015 and 2016 went to the Clinton Foundation. Why did
it go to that foundation? There is a long-time connection between Hillary Clinton and La Farge
because she used to be on the board."
The idea that Hillary Clinton can be viewed as Saudi candidate is not as crazy as it looks.
She feels the smell of money and that's the most important thing in life for her.
Notable quotes:
"... The [neoliberal] media has had a field day commenting on Donald Trump's words about cooperation with Russia against ISIS, labeling him a 'Kremlin agent' and a danger to the Western security order. But what about Hillary Clinton and her foundation's ties to the Saudis? If Trump is 'Moscow's man', does that make Clinton the candidate of Middle Eastern sheikdoms? ..."
"... The media have accused Moscow of every sin imaginable, from meddling in America's elections, to using Trump advisor Paul Manafort, who was called 'the Kremlin's man in Ukraine', to outright calling Trump himself a 'Russian agent' . ..."
"... Former NATO chief Anders Rasmussen joined the party bashing Trump recently, slamming him for having "his own views on the Ukrainian conflict," and adding that to top it all off, "he praises President Putin!" ..."
"... The Times' piece reported on the fact that the Clinton Foundation has accepted tens of millions of dollars from countries that the US State Department has repeatedly criticized for human rights abuses and discrimination against women. The offending countries purportedly include Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, and Brunei, along with Algeria. Riyadh, the paper noted, was "a particularly generous benefactor," giving between $10 and $25 million to the Clinton Foundation, with at least another $1 million donated by the 'Friends of Saudi Arabia' organization. ..."
"... the plot thickens. On Sunday, conservative US and British media revealed that Huma Abedin, a longtime friend and top aid to Clinton, had worked as an assistant editor for a radical Islamic Saudi journal for over a decade. The publication, called the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, featured everything from pieces opposed to women's rights, to articles blaming the US for the September 11 terror attacks. ..."
"... Abedin has long been accused by independent media in the US and elsewhere of having connections with Islamic organizations, including the Muslim Brotherhood, charges which have long been labeled as nothing more than a conspiracy theory. ..."
The [neoliberal] media has had a field day commenting on Donald Trump's words about cooperation
with Russia against ISIS, labeling him a 'Kremlin agent' and a danger to the Western security order.
But what about Hillary Clinton and her foundation's ties to the Saudis? If Trump is 'Moscow's man',
does that make Clinton the candidate of Middle Eastern sheikdoms?
The US media has been relentless in its efforts to sink Republican presidential candidate Donald
Trump's campaign, in part due to the candidate's string of friendly remarks and gestures toward Russia
and President Vladimir Putin. The media have accused Moscow of every sin imaginable, from
meddling in America's elections, to using Trump advisor Paul Manafort, who was
called 'the Kremlin's man in Ukraine', to outright calling Trump himself a
'Russian agent'.
Former NATO chief Anders Rasmussen joined the party bashing Trump recently,
slamming him for having "his own views on the Ukrainian conflict," and adding that to top it
all off, "he praises President Putin!"
Admittedly, Mr. Trump does seem very open to the idea of negotiating with Russia, and even partnering
with Moscow to tackle some of the greatest challenges facing the world today, including radical Islamist
terrorism. In that sense, he may really be the most 'Russia friendly' presidential candidate the
US has seen since 1945, not counting the early 1990s, when Washington's friendly overtures toward
Russia were based on the condition that Moscow does everything US officials tell it to.
Does that
make him a puppet to the Russians, the Kremlin and to Vladimir Putin personally? Not likely. Despite
all the media investigations and even more accusations, no substantiated evidence has been presented
demonstrating that Trump has any significant business or personal interests in Russia which would
create a conflict of interest. The businessman held a Miss Universe Pageant in Moscow a few years
ago, and tried, unsuccessfully, to build a Trump tower in the Russian capital. But he also has assets
around the world, in Scotland, Dubai, and in over a dozen other countries. Does that make him the
agent of these countries, too?
Amid the endless suspicions surrounding 'Kremlin Agent Trump', a story in the New York Times unassumingly
titled'Foundation Ties Bedevil Hillary Clinton's Presidential Campaign' almost slipped through
the cracks, before blowing up on national television.
The Times' piece reported on the fact that the Clinton Foundation has accepted tens of millions
of dollars from countries that the US State Department has repeatedly criticized for human rights
abuses and discrimination against women. The offending countries purportedly include Saudi Arabia,
the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, and Brunei, along with Algeria. Riyadh, the paper
noted, was "a particularly generous benefactor," giving between $10 and $25 million to the Clinton
Foundation, with at least another $1 million donated by the 'Friends of Saudi Arabia' organization.
The scandal didn't end there. Speaking to CNN reporter Dana Bash, Clinton Campaign manager Robby
Mook
could not coherently explain why the Clintons weren't willing to stop accepting donations from
foreign 'investors' unless Clinton became president of the United States. Instead, Mook tried to
divert the question to Donald Trump, saying the candidate has never revealed his financials, and
adding that Mrs. Clinton had taken "unprecedented" steps to being "transparent."
And the plot
thickens. On Sunday, conservative US and British media
revealed that Huma Abedin, a longtime friend and top aid to Clinton, had worked as an assistant
editor for a radical Islamic Saudi journal for over a decade. The publication, called the Journal
of Muslim Minority Affairs, featured everything from pieces opposed to women's rights, to articles
blaming the US for the September 11 terror attacks.
In one article in January 1996, Abedin's own mother wrote a piece for the journal, where she complained
that Clinton, who was First Lady at the time, was advancing a "very aggressive and radically feminist"
agenda which was un-Islamic and dangerous for empowering women.
Abedin has long been accused by independent media in the US and elsewhere of having connections
with Islamic organizations, including the Muslim Brotherhood, charges which have long been labeled
as nothing more than a conspiracy theory. But Sunday's story seems to have ruffled a few feathers
in some high places, with a Clinton campaign spokesperson
explaining (rather unconvincingly) to the New York Post that Abedin played no formal role in
the radical journal. "My understanding is that her name was simply listed on the masthead in that
periodical," the spokesman said.
These two stories, the first offering new details including dollar estimates about the money received
by the Clinton Foundation from the Saudis, and the second shedding light on her top advisor's apparent
ties to a Saudi journal propagating Islamist ideas, should lead the media to look for answers to
some very troubling questions. These should be the same kinds of questions asked earlier this summer,
when a formerly classified 28 page chapter of the 9/11 Commission Report was finally released, revealing
that Saudi officials had supported the hijackers who carried out the terrorist attacks against the
United States in 2001.
Donald Trump retweeted the video of Hillary Clinton referring to black gang members as
"super-predators" who need to be "brought to heel" in support of criminal sentencing reforms in
1996.
During the heat of the Democratic primary she was interrupted by Black Lives Matter activists
demanding an apology for her use of the term. "Do you want to hear the facts or do you just
want to talk?" she asked the protesters before they were removed from the building.
Hillary Clinton leads in the polls nationally and in key battleground states, but the flood of
stories regarding her private email server and donations to the Clinton Foundation demonstrate
the former secretary of state won't be able to completely outrun voter skepticism -- or Donald
Trump.
... ... ...
Trump supporter Sen. Jeff Sessions suggested that the Democratic presidential candidate used
her high position to "extort" from international governments for her family's foundation.
"The fundamental thing is you can not be Secretary of State of the United States of America and
use that position to extort or seek contributions to your private foundation," he told CNN's
Alisyn Camerota on "New Day" Tuesday. "That is a fundamental violation of law and that does
appear to have happened."
... ... ...
A
Washington Post/ABC News poll from earlier this month showed that 59% of voters believe that
Clinton is not honest and trustworthy.
So the campaign turned its attention on Clinton, the Clinton Foundation and her emails. That
was readily apparent Monday, as both Trump and vice presidential nominee Mike Pence brought up
the issue.
"It's time for Hillary Clinton to come clean about the Clinton Foundation," Pence said at a rally
in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
The Clinton Foundation last week accounced it would ban donations to from corporations and
foreign countries if Hillary Clinton is elected. Pence rhetorically asked why there wasn't a
conflict of interest when she was Secretary of State.
"Apparently she'll have a conflict of interest with the Clinton Foundation if she becomes
President but I guess she didn't have a conflict of interest taking foreign donations while she
was secretary of state of the United States of America," Pence said
This foundation gives Clintons the ability to finance travel, equipment and staff for political
campaigns of Hillary Clinton. Note the level of interconnection between Hillary Clinton staff and
Clinton foundation in email scandal. Hume Abedin often called the system administrator from Clinton
foundation to fix the "bathroom" mail server. Also spending by foundation "on charoty"
are very questionable both in scope and targets. Compare with Gates foundation and you will
see that Clinton foundation is essentially Clinton family slush fund disguised as a charity.
Notable quotes:
"... Since its founding in 2001, the Clinton Foundation served as a bridge between Bill Clinton's administration and Hillary Clinton's drive to conquer the White House again. ..."
"... But beyond the Republican bluster, there is a substantial critique of the Clinton Foundation: At its core, it fuses fundraising, influence-peddling, Washington networking, "humanitarian" causes and an endless grasp for power and money. ..."
"... Though taking care to adhere to the letter of the law, the foundation comes close to the line in many cases ..."
The stated mission of the Clinton Foundation, set up at the end of Bill Clinton's second term in
the White House, is to "alleviate poverty, improve global health, strengthen economies, and protect
the environment."
But far more important to its operations is the Clinton Foundation's unstated
mission: to further entrench the already formidable power of the Clinton family.
For more than two decades, both Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton have lived very public lives
ensconced in the upper echelons of America's political establishment. Since its founding in 2001,
the Clinton Foundation served as a bridge between Bill Clinton's administration and Hillary Clinton's
drive to conquer the White House again.
... ... ...
But beyond the Republican bluster, there is a substantial critique of the Clinton Foundation:
At its core, it fuses fundraising, influence-peddling, Washington networking, "humanitarian" causes
and an endless grasp for power and money.
Though taking care to adhere to the letter of the law, the foundation comes close to the
line in many cases -- for example, soliciting donations by offering face time with the
Clintons in ways that seem suspiciously like a political campaign for elected office, but not
exactly like that, because that would be a violation of the law.
"... The Foundation donors included corporations and individuals with significant matters before the State Department. And then either Hillary Clinton herself or one of her closest aides took action favorable to the donor. ..."
"... The Clintons' made the State Department into the same kind of Pay-to-Play operations as the Arkansas Government was: pay the Clinton Foundation huge sums of money and throw in some big speaking fees for Bill Clinton and you got to play with the State Department. ..."
"... The amounts involved, the favors done and the significant numbers of times it was done require an expedited investigation by a Special Prosecutor. After the FBI and Department of Justice whitewash of the Clinton email crimes, they certainly cannot be trusted to quickly or impartially investigate Hillary Clinton's crimes. ..."
"... Some former prosecutors have even suggested that the coordination between the pay-for-play State Department and the corrupt Clinton Foundation constitute a clear example of a RICO (Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organization) enterprise. ..."
Donald Trump called for an independent special protector to investigate the Clinton
Foundation at a rally in Akron, Ohio Monday night. Trump said the Justice Department
is a "political arm" of the White House and can not be trusted to investigate
properly.
TRUMP: The Foundation donors included corporations and individuals with
significant matters before the State Department. And then either Hillary Clinton
herself or one of her closest aides took action favorable to the donor.
Her actions corrupted and disgraced one of the most important Departments of
government, indeed one of only four established by the United States Constitution
itself.
The Clintons' made the State Department into the same kind of Pay-to-Play
operations as the Arkansas Government was: pay the Clinton Foundation huge sums of
money and throw in some big speaking fees for Bill Clinton and you got to play
with the State Department.
The amounts involved, the favors done and the significant numbers of times it
was done require an expedited investigation by a Special Prosecutor. After the FBI
and Department of Justice whitewash of the Clinton email crimes, they certainly
cannot be trusted to quickly or impartially investigate Hillary Clinton's crimes.
Some former prosecutors have even suggested that the coordination between the
pay-for-play State Department and the corrupt Clinton Foundation constitute a
clear example of a RICO (Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organization) enterprise.
The Justice Department is required to appoint an independent Special Prosecutor
because it has proven itself to be a political arm of the White House.
Two weeks ago at the Republican National Convention (RNC) a grieving mother blasted Hillary
Clinton for the debacle of the 2012 Benghazi attack. Last Thursday, at the Democratic National
Convention (DNC), grieving parents gave a speech criticizing Donald Trump for his statements
against Muslims.
While all the grieving parents deserve sympathy, the Big Three (ABC, CBS, NBC) network evening
and morning shows seemed to only care about the parents that showed up at the Democratic
Convention. Khizr Khan and his wife Ghazla's DNC appearance earned 55 minutes, 13 seconds of Big
Three network coverage, nearly 50 times more than Pat Smith, whose RNC speech honoring her son
earned just 70 seconds of airtime.
In the days (July 19 to August 1) that followed Smith's indictment of Clinton from the RNC
podium, CBS (3 seconds) ABC (13 seconds) and NBC (54 seconds) gave her speech a total of just
70 seconds of coverage.
In the four days (July 29 to August 1) following Khizr Khan and his wife Ghazala's speech
NBC (31 minutes, 39 seconds), offered the most amount of time followed by ABC (14 minutes, 21
seconds) and then CBS (9 minutes, 13 seconds).
This is a textbook case of bias-by-agenda: One of these stories (the Khan story) matched the
Democratic agenda, and the partisan media couldn't push it hard enough. The other (the Smith
story) reflected poorly on the Democratic nominee, so it was barely mentioned.
... ... ...
While Smith's emotional pleas were downplayed by the networks, Khan's speech and subsequent
back and forth with Trump were played up. On the July 29 edition of CBS This Morning co-anchor
Norah O'Donnell noted "One of the most powerful convention moments last night came from the
father of a Muslim-American soldier who was killed in Iraq in 2004. Khizir Khan criticized Donald
Trump for singling out Muslims during the campaign." Her CBS colleague Gayle King added: "That
appearance by the Khans is being described as one of the most powerful of the night. People were
moved to tears by the two of them standing there."
On the August 1Today show, substitute host Tamron Hall reported "Republican presidential nominee
Donald Trump campaigns in the battleground states of Ohio and Pennsylvania today, but controversy
will follow him after his remarks about the parents of a Muslim-American soldier killed in Iraq."
Her colleague Andrea Mitchell added "Hillary Clinton is calling on Republicans to abandon Donald
Trump, and in her words, 'put country before party' because of his controversial comments about
Captain Khan and his family."
Earlier in the show, co-anchor Savannah Guthrie interviewed the Khans. But so far Pat Smith,
shamefully, has yet to be extended the same courtesy on any of the Big Three evening or morning
shows.
"... Let's start with the last bit: "the leader of the free world." That's what journalists used to call the U.S. president, and occasionally the country as a whole, during the Cold War. Between the end of World War II and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the "free world" included all the English-speaking countries outside Africa, along with western Europe, North America, some South American dictatorships, and nations like the Philippines that had a neocolonial relationship with the United States. ..."
"... I have absolutely no doubt that he and his eastern European countrymen were far from free. I do wonder, however, how free his counterparts in the American-backed Brazilian, Argentinian, Chilean, and Philippine dictatorships felt. ..."
"... Some countries in the Third World refused to be pawns in the superpower game, and created a non-aligned movement , which sought to thread a way between the Scylla and Charybdis of the U.S. and the Soviet Union. ..."
"... Among its founders were some of the great Third World nationalists: Sukarno of Indonesia, Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, and Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, along with Yugoslavia's President Josip Broz Tito. ..."
Posted on
August 22, 2016 by
Yves Smith Yves here. This article by Rebecca Gordon does a fine job of calling out the recklessness
and disregard for the law of a group of foreign policy "experts" who signed a letter calling Trump
unfit for office. But it's disconcerting to see Rebecca Gordon document how these individuals have engaged in the same sort of unacceptable behavior that they Trump would undertake, and then argue that Trump is obviously dangerous, and by implication,
Clinton is not. Clinton is fully on board with the policies that these experts represent, so how
exactly is she better? Gordon needs to make a case, not just assert superiority in the face of facts
she presents that indicate otherwise. Gordon tries arguing for Manafort as proof that Trump is tainted.
But Manafort was a recent hire and has just been dispatched, while long-term Clinton key player John
Podesta's firm
also appears to have advised pro-Russia parties in Ukraine .
It's not every day that Republicans publish an
open letter announcing that their presidential candidate is unfit for office. But lately this
sort of thing has been
happening more and more
frequently . The most recent example: we just
heard from 50 representatives of the national security apparatus, men - and a few women - who
served under Republican presidents from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush. All of them are very worried
about Donald Trump.
They think we should be alerted to the fact that the Republican standard-bearer "lacks the character,
values, and experience to be president."
That's true of course, but it's also pretty rich, coming from this bunch. The letter's signers
include, among others, the man who was Condoleezza Rice's
legal advisor when
she ran the National Security Council (John Bellinger III); one of George W. Bush's
CIA directors
who also ran the National Security Agency (Michael Hayden); a Bush administration
ambassador to the United
Nations and Iraq (John Negroponte); an
architect of the neoconservative
policy in the Middle East adopted by the Bush administration that led to the invasion of Iraq, who
has since served as president of the World Bank (Robert Zoellick). In short, given the history
of the "global war on terror," this is your basic list of potential American war
criminals.
Their letter continues, "He weakens U.S. moral authority as the leader of the free world."
There's a sentence that could use some unpacking.
What Is The "Free World"?
Let's start with the last bit: "the leader of the free world." That's what journalists used to
call the U.S. president, and occasionally the country as a whole, during the Cold War. Between the
end of World War II and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the "free world" included all the English-speaking
countries outside Africa, along with western Europe, North America, some South American dictatorships,
and nations like the Philippines that had a neocolonial relationship with the United States.
The U.S.S.R. led what, by this logic, was the un-free world, including the
Warsaw Pact countries in
eastern Europe, the "captive" Baltic nations of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, the People's Republic
of China (for part of the period), North Korea, and of course Cuba. Americans who grew up in these
years knew that the people living behind the "
Iron Curtain " were not
free. We'd seen the bus ads and public service announcements on television requesting donations for
Radio Free Europe , sometimes illustrated with
footage of a pale adolescent
man, his head crowned with chains.
I have absolutely no doubt that he and his eastern European countrymen were far from free. I do
wonder, however, how free his counterparts in the American-backed Brazilian, Argentinian, Chilean,
and Philippine dictatorships felt.
The two great adversaries, together with the countries in their spheres of influence, were often
called the First and Second Worlds. Their rulers treated the rest of the planet - the Third World
- as a chessboard across which they moved their proxy armies and onto which they sometimes targeted
their missiles. Some countries in the Third World refused to be pawns in the superpower game, and
created a non-aligned
movement , which sought to thread a way between the
Scylla and Charybdis
of the U.S. and the Soviet Union.
Among its founders were some of the great Third World nationalists: Sukarno of Indonesia, Jawaharlal
Nehru of India, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, and Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, along with Yugoslavia's
President Josip Broz Tito.
Other countries weren't so lucky. When the United States took over from France the (unsuccessful)
project of defeating Vietnam's anti-colonial struggle, people in the U.S. were assured that the war
that followed with its massive bombing, napalming, and Agent-Oranging of a peasant society represented
the advance of freedom against the forces of communist enslavement. Central America also served as
a Cold War battlefield, with Washington fighting proxy wars during the 1980s in Guatemala, El Salvador,
and Nicaragua, where poor campesinos had insisted on being treated as human beings and were
often brutally murdered for their trouble. In addition, the U.S. funded, trained, and armed a military
dictatorship in Honduras, where John Negroponte - one of the anti-Trump letter signers - was the
U.S. ambassador from 1981 to 1985.
The Soviet Union is, of course, long gone, but the "free world," it seems, remains, and so American
officials still sometimes refer to us as its leader - an expression that only makes sense, of course,
in the context of dual (and dueling) worlds. On a post-Soviet planet, however, it's hard to know
just what national or geographic configuration constitutes today's "un-free world." Is it (as Donald
Trump might have it) everyone living under Arab or Muslim rule? Or could it be that amorphous phenomenon
we call "terrorism" or "Islamic terrorism" that can sometimes reach into the "free world" and slaughter
innocents as in
San Bernardino
, California,
Orlando
, Florida, or Nice
, France? Or could it be the old Soviet Union reincarnated in Vladimir Putin's Russia or even
a rising capitalist China still controlled by a Communist Party?
Faced with the loss of a primary antagonist and the confusion on our planet, George W. Bush was
forced to downsize the perennial enemy of freedom from Reagan's old "
evil empire " (the Soviet
Union) to three "rogue states," Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, which in an address to Congress he so
memorably labeled the " axis
of evil ." The first of these lies in near ruins; the second we've recently signed a nuclear
treaty with; and the third seems incapable of even feeding its own population. Fortunately for the
free world, the Bush administration also had some second-string enemies to draw on. In 2002, John
Bolton, then an undersecretary of state (and later ambassador to the U.N.), added another group "beyond
the axis of evil" - Libya, Syria, and Cuba. Of the three, only Cuba is still a functioning nation.
And by the way, the 50 Republican national security stars who denounced Donald Trump in Cold War
terms turn out to be in remarkably good company - that of Donald Trump himself (who recently gave
a speech
invoking American Cold War practices as the basis for his future foreign policy).
"He Weakens U.S. Moral Authority "
After its
twenty-first century wars , its "
black sites
," and
Guantánamo
, among other developments of the age, it's hard to imagine a much weaker "moral authority" than
what's presently left to the United States. First, we gave the world eight years of George W. Bush's
illegal invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as CIA torture sites, "enhanced
interrogation techniques," and a program of quite illegal
global kidnappings of terror suspects (
some of whom proved
innocent
of anything). Under President Obama, it seems we've traded enhanced interrogation techniques for
an "enhanced" use of
assassination by drone (again outside any "law" of war, other than the
legal documents that the Justice Department has produced to justify such acts).
When Barack Obama took office in January 2009 his first
executive order outlawed the CIA's torture program and closed those black sites. It then looked
as if the country's moral fiber might be stiffening. But when it came to holding the torturers accountable,
Obama insisted
that the country should "look forward as opposed to looking backwards" and the Justice Department
declined to prosecute any of them. It's hard for a country to maintain its moral authority in
the world when it refuses to exert that authority at home.
Two of the letter signers who are so concerned about Trump's effect on U.S. moral authority themselves
played special roles in "weakening" U.S. moral authority through their involvement with the CIA torture
program: John Bellinger III and Michael Hayden.
June 26th is the U.N.'s International Day in Support of Victims of Torture. To mark that day in
2003, President Bush issued a statement declaring, "Torture anywhere is an affront to human dignity
everywhere. The United States is committed to the world-wide elimination of torture, and we are leading
this fight by example."
The Washington Post story on the president's
speech also carried a quote from Deputy White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan to the effect
that all prisoners being held by the U.S. government were being treated "humanely." John Rizzo, who
was then the CIA's deputy general counsel, called John Bellinger, Condoleezza Rice's legal counsel
at the National Security Council, to express his concern about what both the president and McClellan
had said.
The problem was that - as Rizzo and his boss, CIA director George Tenet, well knew - many detainees
then held by the CIA were not being treated humanely. They were being tortured or mistreated
in various ways. The CIA wanted to be sure that they still had White House backing and approval for
their "enhanced interrogation" program, because they didn't want to be left holding the bag if the
truth came out. They also wanted the White House to stop talking about the humane treatment of prisoners.
According to an internal CIA
memo , George Tenet convened a July 29, 2003, meeting in Condoleezza Rice's office to get the
necessary reassurance that the CIA would be covered if the truth about torture came out. There, Bellinger
reportedly apologized on behalf of the administration, explaining that the White House press secretary
had "gone off script," mistakenly reverting to "old talking points." He also "undertook to [e]nsure
that the White House press office ceases to make statements on the subject other than [to say] that
the U.S. is complying with its obligations under U.S. law."
At that same meeting, Tenet's chief counsel, Scott Muller, passed out packets of printed PowerPoint
slides detailing those enhanced interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, so that Bellinger
and the others present, including Rice, would understand exactly what he was covering up.
So much for the "moral authority" of John Bellinger III.
As for Michael Hayden (who has held several offices in the national security apparatus), one
of his signature acts as CIA Director was to approve in 2005 the destruction of videotapes of the
agency's waterboarding sessions. In a
letter to CIA employees,
he wrote that the tapes were destroyed "only after it was determined they were no longer of intelligence
value and not relevant to any internal, legislative, or judicial inquiries."
Of course destroying those tapes also meant that they'd never be available for any future legislative
or judicial inquiry. The letter continued,
"Beyond their lack of intelligence value the tapes posed a serious security risk. Were they ever
to leak, they would permit identification of your CIA colleagues who had served in the program, exposing
them and their families to retaliation from al-Qaeda and its sympathizers."
One has to wonder whether Hayden was more concerned with his CIA colleagues' "security" from al-Qaeda
or from prosecution. In any case, he deprived the public - and any hypothetical future prosecutor
- of crucial evidence of wrongdoing.
Hayden also perpetuated the
lie that the Agency's first waterboarding victim, Abu Zubaydah - waterboarded a staggering 83
times - was a crucial al-Qaeda operative and had provided a quarter of all the information that the
CIA gathered from human subjects about al-Qaeda. He was, in fact, never a member of al-Qaeda at all.
In the 1980s, he ran a training camp in Afghanistan for the mujahedin , the force the U.S.
supported against the Soviet occupation of that country; he was, that is, one of Ronald Reagan's
"
freedom fighters ."
Bellinger later chimed in, keeping the Abu Zubaydah lie alive by arguing in 2007 on behalf of
his boss Condoleezza Rice that Guantánamo should remain open. That prison, he said, "serves a very
important purpose, to hold and detain individuals who are extremely dangerous [like] Abu Zubaydah,
people who have been planners of 9/11."
"He Appears to Lack Basic Knowledge About and Belief in the U.S. Constitution, U.S. Laws,
and U.S. Institutions "
That's the next line of the open letter, and it's certainly a fair assessment of Donald Trump.
But it's more than a little ironic that it was signed by Michael Hayden who, in addition to supporting
CIA's torture project,
oversaw the
National Security Agency's post-9/11 secret surveillance program. Under that
program
, the government recorded the phone, text, and Internet communications of an unknown number of
people inside and outside of the United States - all without warrants .
Perhaps Hayden believes in the Constitution, but at best it's a selective belief. There's that
pesky 4th Amendment, for example, which guarantees that
"[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against
unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon
probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched,
and the persons or things to be seized."
Nor does Hayden appear to believe in U.S. laws and institutions, at least when it comes to the
1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which established the secret courts that are supposed
to issue exactly the sort of warrant Hayden's program never requested.
John Negroponte is another of the signers who has a history of skirting U.S. laws and the congress
that passes them. While ambassador to Honduras, he helped develop a
murderous
" contra" army, which the United States armed and trained to overthrow the government
of neighboring Nicaragua. During those years, however, aid to the contras was actually illegal
under U.S. law. It was explicitly prohibited under the so-called
Boland Amendments to
various appropriations bills, but no matter. "National security" was at stake.
Speaking of the Constitution, it's instructive to take a look at Article 6, which states in part
that "all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall
be the supreme law of the land." Such treaties include, for example, the 1928 Kellogg-Briand non-aggression
pact (whose violation was the first charge brought against the Nazi officials tried at
Nuremberg ) and Article
51 of the U.N. charter, which permits military action only "if an armed attack occurs against a Member
of the United Nations."
In 1998, Robert Zoellick, another of those 50 Republicans openly denouncing Trump, signed a
different letter
, which advocated abrogating those treaties. As an associate of the
Project
for a New American Century , he was among those who urged then-President Bill Clinton to direct
"a full complement of diplomatic, political, and military efforts" to "remove Saddam Hussein from
power." This was to be just the first step in a larger campaign to create a Pax Americana
in the Middle East. The letter specifically urged Clinton not to worry about getting a Security Council
resolution, arguing that "American policy cannot continue to be crippled by a misguided insistence
on unanimity in the UN Security Council."
At least give us some lesser evilism, Prof. Gordon. No? But really, Clinton's endorsement
of Kissinger and the lack of political and MSM response to that endorsement is perhaps the most
shocking thing. My introduction to Kissinger's crimes was via Hitchens, who then promptly backed
the Bush regime's interventionism. I shouldn't be surprised anymore at establishment Three-Card
Monte.
Next homework assignment for Gordon: Hillary on Kissinger. What it means, why it matters.
(1) The Republican Party is ALSO the Party of the Great Redeemer, Abraham Lincoln.
(2) Word(s) are not Things, they are change, change, changing signifiers of nothing.
(3) The divide (spectrum) is NOT, left to right! The Neo-Bolsheviks (cons/libs) have used money
and influence to appropriate (own) BOTH the "Left" and the "Right". They own (as in bought and
sold "own") the discussion.
(4) The true spectrum is up and down. The 99% vs the 1%.
(5) 1%ers, aspiring 1%ers, the service staff of the 1% (managers etc) should definitely vote
for Hillary Clinton. She is the candidate (voice for) The Unique.
(6) Donald Trump is seeking to be a voice for the 99%. IMO, this make him The Progressive.(The
Walt Whitman Progressive) People who see themselves as members of the Masses, The People, The
Crowd, The Gaia, The 99%, EveryMan/EveryWoman/EveryGender
(7) Trump does not look or sound the way most of us imagine, The Redeemer
should look. (Obama was a perfectly looking redeemer, IMO, except, he was a false messiah
). IMO, Trump is the Redeemer, the real McCoy .
(8) " Inattentional blindness, also known as perceptual blindness , is a psychological
lack of attention that is not associated with any vision defects or deficits. It may be further
defined as the event in which an individual fails to recognize an unexpected stimulus that is
in plain sight. When it simply becomes impossible for one to attend to all the stimuli in a given
situation, a temporary blindness effect can take place as a result; that is, individuals fail
to see objects or stimuli that are unexpected and quite often salient." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inattentional_blindness
Trump is right in front of us. Stop listening to all the bullshit and open your eyes and ears
to what is going on. (IMO, of course!)
No matter how bad Trump is, Hillary is worse. Hell I wouldn't be voting for Trump if Hillary
weren't in the race, that's for damn sure.
So just go ahead and keep doing more oppo research on Trump. Please–I beg you. Because no matter
what you manage to pull out of your butt I'm just nodding my head and saying to myself, "yep.
Probably true, but still far better than Hillary."
" But it's disconcerting to see Rebecca Gordon document how these individuals have engaged
in the same sort of unacceptable behavior that they Trump would undertake, and then argue that
Trump is obviously dangerous, and by implication, Clinton is not. Clinton is fully on board with
the policies that these experts represent, so how exactly is she better? Gordon needs to make
a case, not just assert superiority. "
Isn't this just another good example of why we shouldn't be afraid of the truth and
plain talk? When we finally start using words like "liar", "cheater", "thief" "murderer" "assassin"
to describe those (politicians) guilty of such crimes, we might be able to get rid of them. PC
is too often a trap for the one practicing it. It dims the bright lights we want to shine on the
wrong-doer and robs us of our ability to debate . There's a reason why plain-talking demagogues
like Trump are so successful. Instead of wrapping ourselves even more tightly in the saran wrap
of genteel good manners (sometimes just another way of showing superiority?) we should be honing
our language skills and engaging with the enemy.
Here's to using the right words. "War" (or, nowadays, military intervention or (ha!)
humanitarian intervention - what's "humanitarian" about dropping bombs and destroying infrastructure
and causing environmental devastation?) is murder .
Bill Clinton, George Bush, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton - all mass murderers. The latter two
who weep public tears every time there is a mass shooting in the US that kills a dozen or so victims.
Hillary is all about "arms control" in the US and slammed Bernie because he was too "lenient"
on guns, while she razed Libya and caused the spread of masses of weapons from Libya to Syria.
There is mass murder going on in Yemen as I type, aided and abetted by the US military, using
weapons sold by Obama and HRC to the Saudis.
Trump is a bloviating idiot (at best) but a simple question: how many people has he actually
killed compared to Bush, Obama, and the two Clintons? And never forget Albright's "it was worth
it" comment regarding 500,000 Iraqi children killed as a result of Bill Clinton's sanctions.
If Hill actually shows up for the debates, this is one thing Donald can hammer her about without
people screaming at him for being mean to the little lady--which is what they will do if he rips
into her on some of the other stuff he will rip into her on. HRC will hide behind her skirts,
like the phony "feminist" she is.
I just stumbled on a new post at CounterPunch regarding Hillary's fake "feminism", including
the following 'grafs:
During her husband's presidency, Hillary was a vocal advocate for the barbaric sanctions
regime, as well as the No-Fly Zone and other belligerent actions taken by her husband against
the Iraqi Government of Saddam Hussein. In fact, many experts have noted that the Clinton Iraq
policy essentially laid the groundwork for George W. Bush's invasion and occupation of Iraq
in 2003. In particular, Hillary was a leading proponent of the sanctions which, according
to the UN, killed roughly 500,000 children.
And, of course, there's Hillary's infamous support for Bush's Iraq War when she was a Senator
from New York. Clinton explained to the Council on Foreign Relations in December 2003, "I was
one who supported giving President Bush the authority, if necessary, to use force against Saddam
Hussein. I believe that that was the right vote .I stand by the vote." Of course this was in
the immediate aftermath of the invasion of Iraq and subsequent capture of Saddam Hussein, a
time when one could still justify support for a war that, just a few years later, proved to
be politically unpalatable, to say nothing of it being an egregious war crime, as we all knew
from the beginning.
And Hillary was not perturbed in the slightest at the hundreds of thousands of women and
children whose lives were irrevocably destroyed by the war and its aftermath, one which is
still being reckoned with today.
Hillary and Bill – the power couple tag team of Washington – also led the charge
to bomb Serbia in 1999. During the 78 days of "Operation Allied Force" more than 2,000 civilians
were killed, including 88 children. Naturally, this was of little consequence to the
great feminist heroine Hillary who, according to biographer Gail Sheehy, proudly proclaimed
"I urged [Bill Clinton] to bomb [Serbia]." The barbarism and sheer viciousness of someone who
gleefully takes credit for the deaths of scores of children and countless thousands of women
should give anyone who believes in the Hillary the feminist mythos serious pause.
Who could forget Libya? In the war championed by Hillary Clinton, who is regarded
by experts as being the loudest voice in favor of regime change against Gaddafi and the destruction
of the country, tens of thousands of women were raped, lynched, and murdered by the glorious
"rebels" (read terrorists) backed by Clinton and her imperial coterie . Perhaps the
great feminist hero could speak to the children of Misrata, Sirte, and Bani Walid who have
now grown up without their mothers and fathers, and explain to them just how "worth it" the
war was. Maybe Clinton could look mothers in the eyes and tell them how the deaths
of their children from war, disease, and terrorism is a small price to pay for the foreign
policy objectives of Washington.
The failure of so many partisans to recognize what is going on is startling. This is really
one of the most remarkable political seasons in my memory, and I go back to Stevenson/Eisenhower
days. (Criminy.)
We're watching what amounts to a reversal of political polarities, with the Democrats led by
Hillary becoming sort of hopped-up post-modern high-end Republicans (what the Republicans would
have become if they hadn't gone insane with power during and following the Reagan regime) and
the Republicans becoming the party of a hopped-up and angry rabble. Their spokesman is Trump,
but he's not their leader by any means. For the moment, there isn't one, but if this reversal/realignment
is sustained - and I think it will be - there will be a Leader of the Rabble. It's too juicy an
opportunity to resist.
Hillary is signaling in every way possible that she will govern as a hot-dog Republican, fully
on board with the War Party which has been the driving force of the Republican and a significant
part of the Democratic establishment since Bush the Old. Hillary is become what Jeb! was supposed
to be.
The Establishment's War Party is fully on board with Herself as well.
This could turn ugly very quickly. They have been telling us very loudly that they want a confrontation
with Russia and then with China to establish once and for all the dominance of the American Empire
over the entire globe. They are prepared - and apparently eager - to crush any resistance with
whatever force they choose, whenever they choose. Moscow and Beijing to be turned to seas of glowing
glass if they do not yield sufficiently and in a timely fashion.
That's the threat this War Party under Mrs. Clinton holds out.
That is the threat the Republicans and their Party would have held out if the War Party had
continued to hold sway within it. Trump has short-circuited that by insisting that glassing the
"terrorists" is the right course of action, leaving the Russians and Chinese pretty much alone.
Except that's not what the War Party wants. The "terrorists" in fact are their allies in the quest
for ultimate power.
Instead, the goal seems to be to dismember/destroy Russia and to contain and control China,
exploiting both for whatever resources can be extracted, ultimately leaving both as empty husks.
Trump says he has other goals, but they amount to a similar program with somewhat different
victims.
Partisans see one as ultimate Evil, the other as Less Evil and therefore Good.
But it's a goon show. The War Party is determined to have its way again. Clinton will follow
their lead; Trump would try to lead it. Neither we nor they can escape it.
When somebody comes up with a way to disable the War Party within the permanent government,
I'll listen. Until then, we are as they say, f**ked.
"... Despite all efforts by the media to distort Trump's position about "banning" Muslims, he has made perfectly clear time and again that he does not want to ban all Muslims. He wants to simply perform thorough and complete background checks on all immigrants coming from countries presently in the grips of violent Islamic terrorism. ..."
"... To her, Capt. Khan is not a just soldier who died defending his country in a foreign land. First and foremost, to her, he is a Muslim of Pakistani heritage and therefore is a perfect political pawn for just the right situation. ..."
"... For just about every American alive, Capt. Khan is an inspiring and unifying figure. To Hillary Clinton, he is a tool to be used to divide people. In her false promise of unifying America, she creates a national political Babylon. Her avaricious greed for more and more power knows no bounds. ..."
"... Politicians like Hillary Clinton slice and dice people into racial and gender groups. Then they toot on all their little "dog whistles" to send all their little demographic pawns scurrying in various directions. That is how you wind up with Khizr Khan standing on stage beside his head-scarved wife, waving around the U.S. Constitution and distorting Donald Trump's position on keeping radical Islamic terrorism at bay. ..."
"... Perhaps a better testimony from Khizr Khan would have been for him to talk about how Hillary Clinton was in the U.S. Senate when she voted to invade Iraq. Years later, after that position became politically unpopular, she changed her mind and joined new political forces to vacate all the land across Iraq that so many great American patriots like Capt. Humayun Khan had died for. ..."
"... It was her vote that sent Capt. Khan to his death. And then it was her decisions later to render that sacrifice worthless. ..."
Khizr Khan is a fine American and the father of a true American patriot. But now he is also everything
that is wrong with American politics today.
It is not entirely his fault, though he has only himself to blame for allowing his dead son to
be used for the most hideous of purposes and dragged through the gutter of nasty and dishonest partisan
politics.
Khan and his wife took to the stage at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia last week
to deliver an impassioned rebuke of Donald J.Trump that was universally celebrated by the media.
Even Republican politicos swooned at the gambit. The Clinton campaign trotted out the Muslim couple
because their son, Captain Humayun Khan, was killed by a car bomb in 2004 while guarding a base in
Iraq.
"If it was up to
Donald
Trump
, he never would have been in America," said Khan, sliding easily into the political tradition
of lying and distorting the position of one's opponent.
"Donald Trump consistently smears the character of Muslims," he went on. "He disrespects other
minorities, women, judges, even his own party leadership. He vows to build walls and ban us from
this country."
Despite all efforts by the media to distort Trump's position about "banning" Muslims, he has
made perfectly clear time and again that he does not want to ban all Muslims. He wants to simply
perform thorough and complete background checks on all immigrants coming from countries presently
in the grips of violent Islamic terrorism.
Yes, that means if you are a Muslim who wants to immigrate from Syria or Afghanistan, you are
going to get a lot more scrutiny than if you are a Jew trying to immigrate from Canada. That is most
unfortunate, but not nearly as unfortunate as innocents getting slaughtered by 10th Century savages
killing in the name of Allah.
Anyway, this higher scrutiny should be no obstacle for the likes of Khizr Khan and his family,
except for the additional hassle.
So, why would Khizr Khan choose to insert himself into politics and demean his son's sacrifice
by lying at a political convention on national television? The answer is simple: He allowed himself
to be tricked into it. And the Clinton campaign was all too eager to take advantage of him and his
family and Capt. Khan and use them for their own political partisan purposes.
Stop for a moment and ask yourself how exactly the Clinton campaign arrived at the decision to
trot out the Khan family in the middle of their highly-choreographed, exhaustively produced convention?
Were they just looking to give voice to the parents of a soldier? That would be a first. Did they
want parents of anyone who had died abroad in the defense of their country? Gee, why not pick the
parents of one of the fallen warriors who died defending the U.S. consulate in Benghazi? Oh, that's
right. They would have called
Hillary Clinton
a liar. Can't have that.
No. Politicians like Hillary Clinton do not see people like Capt. Humayun Khan as a soldier who
made the ultimate sacrifice on a foreign battlefield in defense of his country. Politicians like
Hillary Clinton see him only a demographic, a dispensable political pawn to be scooted around an
electoral map, the way generals used to move armies across giant maps of the lands they were invading.
But instead of liberating Europe from evil fascists, politicians like Hillary Clinton use their
long, worn croupier rakes to move their pawns about with the singular goal of advancing their own
personal political careers.
To her, Capt. Khan is not a just soldier who died defending his country in a foreign land.
First and foremost, to her, he is a Muslim of Pakistani heritage and therefore is a perfect political
pawn for just the right situation.
For just about every American alive, Capt. Khan is an inspiring and unifying figure. To Hillary
Clinton, he is a tool to be used to divide people. In her false promise of unifying America, she
creates a national political Babylon. Her avaricious greed for more and more power knows no bounds.
It is an open secret in Washington that politics is the last bastion of rampant racial profiling.
Both parties do it, but Democrats have taken it to a whole new scientific level.
Politicians like Hillary Clinton slice and dice people into racial and gender groups. Then
they toot on all their little "dog whistles" to send all their little demographic pawns scurrying
in various directions. That is how you wind up with Khizr Khan standing on stage beside his head-scarved
wife, waving around the U.S. Constitution and distorting Donald Trump's position on keeping radical
Islamic terrorism at bay.
Perhaps a better testimony from Khizr Khan would have been for him to talk about how Hillary
Clinton was in the U.S. Senate when she voted to invade Iraq. Years later, after that position became
politically unpopular, she changed her mind and joined new political forces to vacate all the land
across Iraq that so many great American patriots like Capt. Humayun Khan had died for.
It was her vote that sent Capt. Khan to his death. And then it was her decisions later to
render that sacrifice worthless.
Try sticking that into your dog whistle and blowing it.
Hurt writes the "Nuclear Option" column for The Washington Times. A former D.C. bureau chief
for the New York Post, he has covered the White House, Congress and presidential campaigns since
2001. Follow him on Twitter @charleshurt.
"... "The truth is, she was using it for a year before I sent her a memo telling her what I did." (Powell added, "It doesn't bother me. But it's okay; I'm free.") ..."
"... The Clintons' blatantly dishonest attempts to cover-up and deny their scandals are almost always worse than the scandals themselves. They are shameless and believe they are above reproach ..."
"... Ha. You realize that the first time that Hillary Clinton used the term "vast right wing conspiracy" was regarding the Monica Lewinsky scandal? How did the GOP force Bill to take advantage of a subordinate? ..."
When People spoke with Powell Sunday night in the Hamptons, he was
blunter. "Her people have been trying to pin it on me,"
he said. "The truth is, she was using it for a year before I sent her a memo telling her
what I did." (Powell added, "It doesn't bother me. But it's okay; I'm free.")
JerseyCowboy > xplosneer
The Clintons' blatantly dishonest attempts to cover-up and deny their
scandals are almost always worse than the scandals themselves. They are shameless and believe
they are above reproach.
spudwhisperer > JerseyCowboy
I disagree - I think the scandals would be disqualifying and liable for prosecution even if
there were no cover-up.
mtbr1975 > xplosneer
I think a lot of that developed because of all the attempts to pin scandals on her... Can
you really blame her? Look at all the garbage she's been accused of... Everything from murder
to enabling Bill Clinton to cheat on her.
Uncle Luie > mtbr1975
100% true! From her lawyer billings in the early 80s, to Whitewater to Vince Foster,
Travel-gate and on and on. The most accurate thing she ever said was about the "vast right
wing conspiracy", also 100% true, just like Mconnell's plan to oppose and obstruct everything
Obama tries to accomplish. These people are dirt
oracle > Uncle Luie
"The most accurate thing she ever said was about the "vast right wing conspiracy", also
100% true"
Ha. You realize that the first time that Hillary Clinton used the term "vast right wing
conspiracy" was regarding the Monica Lewinsky scandal? How did the GOP force Bill to take
advantage of a subordinate?
Disqus 30 > qaz zaq
Don't forget she's the devil and founded ISIS. Those are the best ones.
Lexi > Disqus
It's true trolly. Proof is all over the place. Wow- you are defending her like she's a
saint. Nobody is doing that. You seem full of morality (Not) to defend a serial liar who
corrupted our country in the worst possible ways. Sad you.
bookish1 > mtbr1975
Sorry, but it was Hillary who decided to set up her own email server, send classified
material, refuse to authorize a Benghazi rescue mission, make millions off the Russian uranium
deal, and "mistakenly" delete 30,000 emails. If she wasn't so inept and corrupt, she wouldn't
be hit with all these "scandals."
See how that works?
jar > xplosneer
This one is particularly mendacious as she has previously publicly stated that she chose
the private server so she would only have to carry one device. Of what relevance is Powell's
prior practice if this was her motivation? The fact is that she will throw up as many excuses
and deflections as she can, without any regard for the consistency of her arguments. This is
why over 60% of the American people find her dishonest and untrustworthy (or, as a recent poll
indicated, only 11% of the public finds her honest and trustworthy).
Yoch Man > Lew
The world has NOT changed much in 25 years and being young has nothing to do with it. I
have worked in IT for 26 years at a state level. If I had done what Clinton did back in 1989 I
would have been fired and gone to jail for several reasons. aside from top secret or
classified information. FERPA and the Federal records act are just two reasons. The Federal
records act is as old as 1950. Every single document that is compiled on work computers OR
work hours belongs to the state or Federal government. I also have an obligation to protect
emails addresses, employees that I work with. I must keep their personal information
confidential. Add on top of that a nations secrets.
In 1995 Bill Clinton passed legislation and clarified the Federal records act and classified
information. See state department manual "5 FAM". It has been there for 21 years. Hillary
Clinton is lying to you.
DB > Lew • 7 hours ago
Clinton hired her own IT boy. He was not in his 60s. You can make excuses for her age all
you like..... but it doesn't work. Btw, I have friends in their 60s who run major IT depts.
Being old yourself, you should know people can stay sharp barring some physical/cognitive
issues.
Lew > bookish1
How would you grant control of 1/5 of Americas Uranium? You believe if you owned 20% of
Berkshire Hathaway you'd start pushing Buffets buttons?
You think you'd be telling the board; I'll be taking home six tractor trailer loads of wrigley
gum for my son's birthday party?
You think you'd be telling "fruit of the loom" how to put a better cheaper elastic on their
underwear?...
This company will share in Corp. profit, little more...
Tyfereth > Admiral Nelson
Loathing Donald Trump and finding Hillary Clinton's serial mendaciousness and corruption
upsetting are not mutually exclusive propositions. There is literally no one who Hillary
Clinton won't blame to avoid personal responsibility for her actions, and while it may not
matter to her supporters that she's throwing General Powell under the bus, its a sign that we
are in for 8 years of Hillary Clinton making poor decisions, and deflecting blame onto others.
Raubüberfall
Hillary's reason for using a private email server was so she could control that source of
information, which the public and other State Dept. officials would now have access to only
through her. A shadow Secretary of State, that is, unaccountable to president, public, and law
enforcement alike.
This is from 2008. An interesting mention of Rove playbook that says, "Attack your opponent's
perceived strength."
Notable quotes:
"... Rove playbook that says, "Attack your opponent's perceived strength." If that strength is merely "perceived" and not real, it's a legitimate tactic, but Rove attacks even when the perception is justified, and the Clintons are now doing the same. ..."
"... Bill did this in New Hampshire when he contended that Obama was not really a consistent war opponent. Hillary put this tactic way out front on Meet the Press today. She said that Obama's campaign is premised entirely on his October 2002 speech, and she said that Obama did nothing after that speech. ..."
"... A key point that has not been made is, if Hillary Clinton is telling the truth that she secretly opposed the invasion on March 20, 2003, then she cannot possibly claim the mantle of a leader, because she did not speak out against the prospect of invasion, even though she, due to her celebrity status, had one of the loudest megaphones to do so. ..."
Many of your
recent posts on the Obama-Clinton contest are missing the forest for the trees. They are focusing
on
small annoyances from Camp Clinton. The big story of the last week is that the Clintons are
trying to strip Obama of his rightful advantage on the Iraq war "judgment" issue and carry out
the tactic from the Rove playbook that says, "Attack your opponent's perceived strength." If that
strength is merely "perceived" and not real, it's a legitimate tactic, but Rove attacks even when
the perception is justified, and the Clintons are now doing the same.
Bill did this in New Hampshire when he contended that Obama was not really a consistent war
opponent. Hillary put this tactic way out front on Meet the Press today. She said that Obama's
campaign is premised entirely on his October 2002 speech, and she said that Obama did nothing
after that speech. This is just an out and out lie; there are no shades of gray here. Here are
two examples of what Obama did after his October 2002 speech that I was able to find through a
simple Nexis search:
On March 4, 2003, an AP story picked up by an Illinois newspaper, the Belleville News Democrat,
states as follows:
"Barack Obama is criticizing the idea of war against Iraq and challenging his Democratic
opponents in the U.S. Senate race to take a stand on the question....'What's tempting is to
take the path of least resistance and keep quiet on the issue, knowing that maybe in two or
three or six months, at least the fighting will be over and you can see how it plays itself
out,' said Obama, a state senator from Chicago."
On March 17, 2003, the Chicago Sun Times reported this:
"Thousands of demonstrators packed Daley Center Plaza for a two- hour rally Sunday [two
days before Bush issued his ultimatum against Saddam and four days before the invasion], then
marched through downtown in Chicago's largest protest to date against an Iraq war. Crowd
estimates from police and organizers ranged from 5,000 to 10,000.... State
Sen. Barack Obama (D-Chicago) told the crowd, 'It's not too late' to stop the war."
All of this is highly relevant, because Hillary's account of her own actions in the October
2002 - March 20, 2003 period (March 20 being the day of the invasion) is that she voted, not to
authorize war, but inspections, and that when the inspectors were there in March 2003, she, in
her own mind, opposed the invasion and would not have carried it out had she been President.
A key point that has not been made is, if Hillary Clinton is telling the truth that she secretly
opposed the invasion on March 20, 2003, then she cannot possibly claim the mantle of a leader,
because she did not speak out against the prospect of invasion, even though she, due to her celebrity
status, had one of the loudest megaphones to do so.
"... Eliot Cohen, or any member of the PNAC, calling Trump or anyone else 'fundamentally dishonest' is simply beyond the pale. It takes some serious nerve and arrogance for traitorous liars of this magnitude to be calling out Trump regardless of the veracity of their claims. ..."
"... Nothing pleases me more than the careerist parasites and wannabe czars of DC feeling compelled to justify their proven incompetence by slagging the guy who seems increasingly likely to be their boss. Now if only the other half of the DC cesspool can do the same, maybe something good can actually happen for the rest of the country. ..."
"... How terrific that the neocons are freaking out. Wait until the pharmaceuticals start hitting his healthcare proposals for bargaining down the cost of drugs. Good to have an outsider in the game. ..."
"... Instead of calling these opponents Neocons, we should be calling them the Israel Lobby. They will wage war against any politician who doesn't agree to make America's Middle East policy coextensive with that of Israel. They don't care if their attacks destroy the Republican Party, because their loyalties lie elsewhere. Their motto is rule or ruin. ..."
"... Whatever! There is one and only one reason why Bush-era foreign policy people are attacking Trump: He has rejected their extreme neocon warmongering. They want a president who will start whatever wars Netanyahu orders, and they think Trump will tell Netanyahu to go screw himself. ..."
The neocons in full revolt (or is it full revolting)!
God, I have not seen such unity within the neocon cabal since they were ginning up support for
the Iraq disaster. Trump does show how badly needed a full house cleaning and a serious
revamping of the foreign policy establishment is required. However, in this case, with Trump
being the complete wild card, I think a plan B is needed, whatever that might be.
It certainly is not Hillary! She has been embraced by high and mighty poobahs of the neocon
cabal so nothing changes with her in charge-more wars, more interventions, more regime
changes. We would keep trying until we get one right, as unlikely that might be.
PDXing, 3/3/2016 4:15 PM EST
Eliot Cohen, or any member of the PNAC, calling Trump or anyone else 'fundamentally
dishonest' is simply beyond the pale. It takes some serious nerve and arrogance for traitorous
liars of this magnitude to be calling out Trump regardless of the veracity of their claims.
David_Lloyd-Jones, 3/3/2016 3:41 PM EST [Edited]
Wey-yull, I'm no Republican, but FWIW I would think having Michael Chertoff and Robert
Zoellick against me would be winning the daily double.
All this and being condemned by The Mittens? Pure gravy. And people wonder why Trump is doing
so well? Seems pretty obvious to me.
There's only one hope for Rubio: where's Darth Cheney when you need him?
yibberat, 3/3/2016 3:23 PM EST
Nothing pleases me more than the careerist parasites and wannabe czars of DC feeling
compelled to justify their proven incompetence by slagging the guy who seems increasingly
likely to be their boss. Now if only the other half of the DC cesspool can do the same, maybe
something good can actually happen for the rest of the country.
And I hate Trump. But man this show is worth MANY buckets of popcorn.
Janine, 3/3/2016 12:58 PM EST
How terrific that the neocons are freaking out. Wait until the pharmaceuticals start
hitting his healthcare proposals for bargaining down the cost of drugs. Good to have an
outsider in the game.
JDavis, 3/3/2016 1:01 PM EST
The neocons will be quite happy in a Hillary administration. She's an even bigger warmonger
than Obama.
technokim, 3/3/2016 12:22 PM EST
Please tell me how any of these 50 self-purported national security and foreign policy
experts have done? Seems the world is less safe and increasingly more messed up as a direct
result of these "experts" actions and policies.
Uselessboy, 3/3/2016 12:37 PM EST
Conservatives certainly loved them when they were backing their unjustified Iraq invasion
and demanding respect for Bush even by those who thought he was breaking laws.
johng4, 3/3/2016 11:47 AM EST
Instead of calling these opponents Neocons, we should be calling them the Israel Lobby.
They will wage war against any politician who doesn't agree to make America's Middle East
policy coextensive with that of Israel. They don't care if their attacks destroy the
Republican Party, because their loyalties lie elsewhere. Their motto is rule or ruin.
JohnMIII, 3/3/2016 11:41 AM EST
Aren't these the same Necons that swore up and down that Iraq had weapons of mass
destruction and was such a serious threat we needed to launch an invasion costing thousands of
lives and trillions of dollars? They have zero credibility anymore. Who cares what they say?
DirtyConSanchez, 3/3/2016 7:32 AM EST
Poor little neocon warmongers squealing like stuck war pigs. Too bad, no more war
profiteering for you little piggies. The big bad orange furred wolf Donald is coming to eat
your bacon. And he has a 150 million strong wolfpack coming along to assist him.
Trump '16
JDavis, 3/3/2016 5:55 AM EST
Michael Hayden suggesting insubordination isn't surprising. He and Cheney have been mucking
up this country for years with the dirt they collected when Hayden was director of the NSA.
They don't respect the presidency. They want all power for themselves.
Jason Oneil, 3/3/2016 4:53 AM EST
Conservative???
What a joke. The neocons and the Israel Lobby are in total panic....Trump is not their puppet
who will let them hijack our country into endless wars based on lies.
Expose these traitors.
ObjectiveReader1, 3/3/2016 4:26 AM EST [Edited]
Doc Zakheim and Bob Zoellick?! I oppose Trump but these two dolts have no credibility.
Zakheim was Undersecretary of Defense and Pentagon Comptroller under Bush Jr. He worked on the
disastrous funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, both of which were debt financed. In
the run up to the Iraq invasion, Zakheim publicly stated that Saddam was working on a nuclear
bomb. Why doesn't Zakheim send a Letter to the American people apologizing for his role in not
telling American taxpayers the truth about how much the Iraq war was going to cost.
Bob Zoellick was US Trade Rep under Bush Jr. He worked on Cafta. He's an open borders guy.
Free trade agreements like Nafta have hurt American workers. Bernie Sanders and Trump both
openly criticize nafta and the TPP.
Open Borders Zoellick and Iraq War neocon Zakheim have no credibility.
pamfah_99, 3/3/2016 3:34 AM EST
Don't these people realize that no one listens to them. They are the people who got us into
Bush's mess in the mid-East that we are still paying for. Never mind all our vets who were
killed and injured. They just don't understand what Trump represents. They think we are stupid
and we are not. Go ahead and try to run Trump - see what happens to you. And Romney - that
moron - remember that comment about the 47% or whatever it was. Talk about the establishment
and the absolute disregard we had for us. Who listens to him either. About time the
Republicans let democracy take its course and stop trying to act like Nazis. We, as Americans,
have to right to vote for whomever we please.
Miro23, 3/3/2016 2:27 AM EST [Edited]
Their problem with Trump always comes back to the same point:
He said, "We've spent $4 trillion trying to topple various people that, frankly, if they were
there and if we could have spent that $4 trillion in the United States to fix our roads, our
bridges, and all of the other problems - our airports and all the other problems we have - we
would have been a lot better off, I can tell you that right now.
We have done a tremendous disservice not only to the Middle East - we've done a tremendous
disservice to humanity. The people that have been killed, the people that have been wiped away
- and for what? It's not like we had victory. It's a mess. The Middle East is totally
destabilized, a total and complete mess. I wish we had the 4 trillion dollars or 5 trillion
dollars. I wish it were spent right here in the United States on schools, hospitals, roads,
airports, and everything else that are all falling apart!"
They've smashed up Iraq and Libya, want to do the same to Syria and get on with bombing
Iran using US blood and money. They're more AINO's (Americans In Name Only) than
"Neo-Conservative" and couldn't care less about parties, Republicans, Democrats. They just
want a President who will shut up and do what they want – like Bush, Rubio or Clinton or
Romney(?) or some other Muppet.
PoliticallyIncorrect4, 3/3/2016 1:53 AM EST
Guess what, nobody gives a damned sh$%#$%# about what these think.
The people who developed GW Bush's national security agenda of international interventionism
-with the Iraq war as the prime example of the perils of such approach- are in no position to
lecture anyone on national security or international issues.
We have tried the professional politicians and their advisers. It didn't work. Time to move
ahead with a completely new approach.
dbi, 3/3/2016 12:39 AM EST
The Washington Post is calling Frances Townsend "a foreign policy expert"? Give it up. The
woman pretends to know the smallest tidbit of information in the Pentagon and White House but
the fact is, she doesn't have a security clearance and is not in any of the special briefings
or secret meetings. She isn't cleared for anything and talks in gibberish. Michael Hayden was
fired and he, too, has no security clearance and no access to confidential and secret material
and meetings in the DoD. More gibberish. These people, like others mentioned, are bitter and
basically unemployed under President Obama. They just can't get over it and move on.
Manray9, 3/3/2016 12:11 AM EST [Edited]
This collection of so-called "Republican foreign policy experts" are all hip-deep in
complicity for the Iraq fiasco. Maybe Trump is on to something in calling out Republican
"leaders" on the nation's greatest national security and foreign policy disaster since
Vietnam? Many people in America, and especially Trump supporters, are disgusted with the
course of events created and managed by the same malefactors now attacking Trump. The GOP big
shots just don't get it.
FedEx Sect 120, 3/3/2016 5:16 AM EST
It is amazing to me how all of these war hawks are complaining now about being lied to
about weapons of mass destruction. Those of us who called it a lie then were being told that
they were being unpatriotic or better yet un-American. Wake up folk every time a Republican is
in office we go to war. Then the Democrats have to clean up their mess. Then get blamed for
not doing the cleanup fast enough while Republicans stand in the way and hinder the Democrats
for cleaning it up properly. If the Republican get in office get ready to see our children in
another war. Get ready to go back to high unemployment , high foreclosures, high losses in
your retirement plan, and high bank failures. Don't forget who propped up Bin Laden and Saddam
Hussein,; yeah your great Republican leader Ronald Reagan. War War War War War
Swift301, 3/3/2016 12:09 AM EST
Eliot Cohen? Trump is totally nuts on many levels but Eliot Cohen is well, just follow his
career path, an endless wimp for war whose policy views have resulted in the largest increase
of influence in the Middle East of Iran ever:
"Cohen has referred to the War on Terrorism as "World War IV".[6] In the run-up to the 2003
Invasion of Iraq, he was a member of Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, a group of
prominent persons who pressed for an invasion."
These are the mouthbreathers who brought us the Iraq War, supported Libyan intervention,
and support Syrian intervention. Our foreign policy would be better if directed by a statue.
Are these idiots going to realize that they're making us all want to vote for him more and
more? It's like PNAC founders Kagan and Cohen endorsing Hillary - pretty sure it's having the
opposite effect of what they want.
Stephen Clark, 3/2/2016 10:58 PM EST
Whatever! There is one and only one reason why Bush-era foreign policy people are
attacking Trump: He has rejected their extreme neocon warmongering. They want a president who
will start whatever wars Netanyahu orders, and they think Trump will tell Netanyahu to go
screw himself.
The State Department has announced that all work-related emails recovered from Hillary Clinton's
private servers will be released. In response to a lawsuit brought by Judicial Watch, State said
it will disclose the FBI-recovered messages. Thousands will be released to the conservative watchdog
group, which has routinely released documents obtained through open-records lawsuits. The department
stated that it had "voluntarily agreed to produce non-exempt agency records responsive to plaintiff's
[Freedom of Information Act] request."
The State Department has not set a timeline for releasing the emails, although Reince Priebus,
chairman of the Republican National Committee, has implored the department to release the emails
prior to the election in November. A court conference to discuss the case is scheduled for Aug. 22.
... the revelation that investigators found a cache of information perhaps half the size of what
Clinton initially disclosed raised questions about how she and her lawyers determined which emails
they wanted to disclose or keep private, and how extensive a search they mounted.
... ... ...
David Kendall, Clinton's attorney, didn't respond to a request for comment on the methodology,
search terms, or other techniques that he and his colleagues used.
But in July, Comey gave some insight into the process, noting that unlike FBI investigators, Clinton's
attorneys didn't actually read all her emails.
..."Is it possible because of what her lawyers did that they were erasing things that were incriminating,
maybe involving items that you were not particularly investigating but these have now been destroyed
forever?" Rep. Glenn Grothman asked the FBI director.
...In another matter related to Clinton's email server, Judicial Watch released a series of emails
to and from top Clinton aide Huma Abedin that the group said showed Clinton had offered special favors
and access to top donors to the Clinton Foundation.
The emails show that Abedin fielded requests for meetings with Clinton, which came from big donors
via other intermediaries, including a top foundation official.
This article raises two interesting questions: "Did Pagliano committed a tax fraud by not
reporting his income from Clinton foundation?" and "What information his yet unreleased emails
to Clinton and her Huma Abedin contain? Also the article does not mention that there was a
second sysadmin, which was not granted immunity from prosecution by FBI and who probably know even
more the Pagliano about the setup of the server.
Notable quotes:
"... Pagliano also had an unusual employment arrangement. He was pulling down a six-figure salary at the State Department, which put him at the high-end of the pay scale for what appeared to be an ordinary tech support job. ..."
"... Paliano was also being paid on the side in cash by the Clinton family, something his immediate supervisors didn't know ..."
"... they were never clear on precisely what his job was and didn't know that during office hours, Pagliano was working for Clinton personally to maintain her private email system ..."
"... The only statement he has given on the record was to the FBI, which has never released a transcript of the interview. ..."
"... What started out as a dream job more than a decade ago has landed Pagliano a most unenviable role-a key witness in an election year scandal. ..."
"... Pagliano first came to work for Clinton in 2006, as part of her first presidential campaign, having worked as a systems engineer for a company that provides technical support and advice to nonprofits. ..."
"... Pagliano was responsible for the campaign headquarters' data center, oversight of other technology staff in the field, and working with contractors. ..."
"... Pagliano was paid, among other sources, by Clinton's Senate leadership PAC, according to campaign finance records. A leadership PAC is used for expenses that can't be paid out of campaign or committee funds. Clinton's was set up in part to help fund other Democratic races. But an investigation by The Intercept found that money from the PAC was used more to benefit Clinton's own campaign and her staff than other candidates. ..."
"... In the first four months of 2009-just before Pagliano took a job at the State Department working for the newly installed secretary-he was paid a total of $27,850 from the leadership PAC and two other campaign funds. ..."
"... In May 2009, Pagliano was hired at the State Department, as a "Schedule C" employee, a political appointee. ..."
"... Pagliano's job came with a handsome salary-around $140,000 per year, according to personnel information compiled by FedSmith, an analysis company. That put him on the very high end of State Department earners. For example, Pagliano was making about $13,000 more than the highest base salary allowed for Foreign Service employees, which includes career diplomats who serve in overseas posts, sometimes dangerous ones ..."
"... Hiring Pagliano, a technology specialist, was itself unusual since the department is filled with similarly skilled personnel. ..."
"... Pagliano was also hired at the highest "grade," 15, on the government pay scale. Career employees spend years climbing the pay ladder. ..."
"... What exactly Pagliano did at the department, however, wasn't clear to his bosses. And later, they would question whether his employment arrangement was above board. ..."
"... That's because while earning that hefty salary as a State Department employee, Pagliano was also being paid to perform "technology services for the Clinton family," ..."
"... Between 2009 and 2013, Pagliano was paid "by check or wire transfer in varying amounts and various times," the State IG found. He worked out of State Department headquarters but also made trips to New York to check on the server and maintain it. ..."
"... he top technology officials who oversaw Pagliano and wrote his performance evaluations-told investigators that during the four years Pagliano worked there, they didn't even know he was working on Clinton's email system ..."
"... What's more, Pagliano failed to list his outside income on a required personal financial disclosure that he filed each year, The Washington Post reported. ..."
"... The government gave Pagliano what's known as "use" immunity, which means that anything he told the FBI in the course of its investigation of Clinton's email system cannot be used to bring charges against him. (If evidence of a crime emerges from other sources, the government could still prosecute Pagliano.) ..."
"... "It's hard to believe that an IT staffer who set up Hillary Clinton's reckless email server never sent or received a single work-related email in the four years he worked at the State Department," Raj Shah, the deputy communications director for the RNC, told The Daily Beast at the time. ..."
"... For him, the biggest question of all may be, "How long can you stay quiet?" ..."
...Of all the characters in the political drama of Hillary Clinton's private email server,
none has been more mysterious-and potentially more important-than a 40-year-old technology
specialist named Bryan Pagliano.
... ... ...
But Pagliano also had an unusual employment arrangement. He was pulling down a six-figure
salary at the State Department, which put him at the high-end of the pay scale for what appeared
to be an ordinary tech support job. But Paliano was also being paid on the side in cash
by the Clinton family, something his immediate supervisors didn't know. In fact, they
were never clear on precisely what his job was and didn't know that during office hours, Pagliano
was working for Clinton personally to maintain her private email system.
...Congressional Republicans have seized on the FBI's findings of multiple devices as evidence
that Clinton is lying, and they have now asked the bureau to investigate whether she perjured
herself in testimony last year that touched on the email system.
... ... ...
... a federal judge in Washington is weighing whether Clinton should be deposed under
oath by a conservative watchdog group that has been one of the Clinton family's tireless
political foes.
... ... ...
...Pagliano has remained almost entirely silent in the face of his inquisitors. He has
rebuffed congressional requests. When he was ordered to give a deposition to the conservative
watchdog group, Judicial Watch, he declined to answer every question posed to him, invoking his
Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself 125 times. The only statement he has given
on the record was to the FBI, which has never released a transcript of the interview.
For Pagliano, working for Clinton was a major career booster, and personally enriching. But it
has come at a cost. What started out as a dream job more than a decade ago has landed
Pagliano a most unenviable role-a key witness in an election year scandal.
... ... ...
Pagliano first came to work for Clinton in 2006, as part of her first presidential
campaign, having worked as a systems engineer for a company that provides technical support and
advice to nonprofits. With Clinton, he started out as a kind of assistant, "providing
technical engineering and support," but worked his way up to leading the campaign's information
technology operations, according to his LinkedIn profile. The two were friendly. On his Facebook
page, Pagliano posted photos of him posing with the secretary, as well as her husband. They have
since been removed.
Pagliano was responsible for the campaign headquarters' data center, oversight of other
technology staff in the field, and working with contractors. When Clinton accepted Barack
Obama's nomination to become secretary of state, Pagliano set up the server in the Clintons' home
in Chappaqua, New York. Bill Clinton had already been using a server for his emails, but it was
deemed too small for the workload of a cabinet secretary.
Pagliano was paid, among other sources, by Clinton's Senate leadership PAC, according to
campaign finance records. A leadership PAC is used for expenses that can't be paid out of
campaign or committee funds. Clinton's was set up in part to help fund other Democratic races.
But an investigation by The Intercept found that money from the PAC was used more to benefit
Clinton's own campaign and her staff than other candidates.
Pagliano was well compensated. In the first four months of 2009-just before Pagliano took
a job at the State Department working for the newly installed secretary-he was paid a total of
$27,850 from the leadership PAC and two other campaign funds.
In May 2009, Pagliano was hired at the State Department, as a "Schedule C" employee, a
political appointee. It's easier to hire and fire such employees than it is career
government workers, but they're also subject to strict ethics rules. Pagliano's job came with
a handsome salary-around $140,000 per year, according to personnel information compiled by
FedSmith, an analysis company. That put him on the very high end of State Department earners. For
example, Pagliano was making about $13,000 more than the highest base salary allowed for Foreign
Service employees, which includes career diplomats who serve in overseas posts, sometimes
dangerous ones.
Hiring Pagliano, a technology specialist, was itself unusual since the department is
filled with similarly skilled personnel. But Schedule C employees also have a "confidential
or policy-determining relationship to their supervisor and agency head," according to the Office
of Personnel Management. The agency head in this case was Clinton. Schedule C authorities let a
cabinet official hire whomever she thinks is best suited for the job, even if that person doesn't
meet the on-paper requirements or is creating a redundant position.
Pagliano was also hired at the highest "grade," 15, on the government pay scale. Career
employees spend years climbing the pay ladder. Pagliano had no prior government service. And
while Schedule C employees may earn higher salaries than their career counterparts-indeed, the
authorities are sometimes used to attract highly paid, skilled workers from the private
sector-Pagliano appears to have been exceptionally well compensated for someone with his
background, which aside from working for the non-profit was limited to being Clinton's technology
director.
What exactly Pagliano did at the department, however, wasn't clear to his bosses. And
later, they would question whether his employment arrangement was above board.
That's because while earning that hefty salary as a State Department employee, Pagliano
was also being paid to perform "technology services for the Clinton family," Hillary
Clinton's lawyer told the State Department inspector general (PDF), which issued a blistering
report in May on Clinton's unorthodox use of a private email server-the one Pagliano installed
and maintained for her while she was the secretary.
Between 2009 and 2013, Pagliano was paid "by check or wire transfer in varying amounts and
various times," the State IG found. He worked out of State Department headquarters but also made
trips to New York to check on the server and maintain it.
Pagliano's arrangement raised many questions for his direct supervisors at the department when
it was revealed by the IG investigation. The State Department's chief information officer and the
deputy chief information officer-the top technology officials who oversaw Pagliano and wrote
his performance evaluations-told investigators that during the four years Pagliano worked there,
they didn't even know he was working on Clinton's email system. The impression at Foggy
Bottom was that Pagliano had been brought on to support "mobile computing issues across the
entire department." His bosses thought he was at State to work for everyone, not exclusively for
Clinton.
The officials told the IG that they "questioned whether [Pagliano] could support a private
client during work hours, given his capacity as a full-time employee."
***
What's more, Pagliano failed to list his outside income on a required personal financial
disclosure that he filed each year, The Washington Post reported. Government personnel rules
don't prohibit a political appointee like Pagliano also earning a side income, but there are
limits on how much he could earn, and the amounts must be disclosed. He would also have to report
the income on his tax returns.
How much the Clintons paid Pagliano while he worked at the State Department is unclear. He
declined to grant an interview to the State Department inspector general, as did Clinton and five
of her top aides.
Neither his lawyer nor the FBI have said whether Pagliano's immunity agreement covers his
employment arrangement and any violations that could have occurred as a result of his collecting
outside income or failing to report it. But immunity agreements can be fashioned to cover any
manner of subjects.
The government gave Pagliano what's known as "use" immunity, which means that anything he
told the FBI in the course of its investigation of Clinton's email system cannot be used to bring
charges against him. (If evidence of a crime emerges from other sources, the government could
still prosecute Pagliano.)
The full details of the immunity deal haven't been revealed publicly. But some key aspects
were revealed in a lawsuit brought by Judicial Watch, which is seeking information on another
unusual employment arrangement-that of Huma Abedin, Clinton's senior aide. She was allowed to
hold multiple outside jobs, including for the Clinton Foundation, while also serving as Clinton's
deputy chief of staff at the State Department.
"The mere fact that the government was willing to offer Pagliano 'use' immunity here in
exchange for his testimony indicates that his fear of prosecution is more than fanciful or
speculative," Pagliano's lawyer, Mark MacDougall, wrote in a legal filing with the court hearing
Judicial Watch's case. The watchdog group also wanted to depose Pagliano. But his lawyer argued
that would put him at risk.
"Mr. Pagliano's prospective deposition will inevitably cover matters that might 'furnish a
link in the chain of evidence needed to prosecute,'" MacDougall wrote. "The Court has authorized
Judicial Watch to obtain discovery relating to 'the creation and operation of clintonemail.com
for State Department business."
That subject was also the focus of the FBI investigation. So, Pagliano had reason to believe
that what he might say to Judicial Watch could put him at risk for prosecution, MacDougall
argued. As a result, Pagliano intended to assert his Fifth Amendment privilege and not answer any
of Judicial Watch's questions. The group didn't try to force him. But they wanted to videotape
the deposition. Pagliano would be captured on film, declining to answer dozens of questions about
his old boss and her complicated, careless email system. The judge ultimately ruled the
deposition would be recorded. He also required Pagliano to hand over a copy of his immunity
agreement, which was placed under seal. Judicial Watch isn't the only Clinton adversary that has
locked on Pagliano and what he knows.
Earlier this month, members of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform
questioned FBI Director James Comey about the findings of the bureau's investigation. Comey, who
had by then already said that Clinton was "extremely careless," left little doubt that Pagliano
was a key witness.
"What about Bryan Pagliano?… Do you know if he knew that she [Clinton] was not following
proper protocol here?" asked Rep. Buddy Carter, a Republican from Georgia, in regards to using a
private email system, which the inspector general had determined was at odds with department
rules.
"He helped set it up," Comey replied.
"He helped set it up? So obviously he knew," Carter said.
"Yeah. Obviously he knew that," Comey said.
... Comey said that the FBI had spent "thousands of hours" figuring out the architecture of
Clinton's email system, which was far more complex than the public had realized.
"Piecing all of that back together-to gain as full an understanding as possible of the ways in
which personal email was used for government work-has been a painstaking undertaking," Comey
said, made harder by the complex way in which the system was maintained.
"For example, when one of Secretary Clinton's original personal servers was decommissioned in
2013, the email software was removed," Comey said. "Doing that didn't remove the email content,
but it was like removing the frame from a huge finished jigsaw puzzle and dumping the pieces on
the floor. The effect was that millions of email fragments end up unsorted in the server's
unused-or 'slack'-space. We searched through all of it to see what was there, and what parts of
the puzzle could be put back together."
Clinton's emails weren't the only ones that have been hard to piece back together. Pagliano's
have also been difficult to find.
***
In the many lawsuits brought under the Freedom of Information Act to force the release of
Clinton's emails and those of her aides-including one filed by The Daily Beast-Pagliano's emails
have been the hardest for State Department officials to locate. Initially, the State Department
claimed that there were no Pagliano emails-at least none that its investigators could discover. A
State Department official explained to The Daily Beast in May that the department had searched
for copies of Pagliano's emails in a backup known as a .pst file, but that officials couldn't
locate one for the period of time that covers Clinton's tenure as secretary. The Republican
National Committee, which had filed a lawsuit seeking copies of Pagliano's emails, was
incredulous. "It's hard to believe that an IT staffer who set up Hillary Clinton's reckless
email server never sent or received a single work-related email in the four years he worked at
the State Department," Raj Shah, the deputy communications director for the RNC, told The Daily
Beast at the time.
Also curious was that while the department found no .pst file for Pagliano's work during
Clinton's tenure, officials did find one for his work as a contractor-after Clinton had left
office. In order to reconstruct Pagliano's email record, the State Department looked for emails
of people who were likely to have corresponded with him or about him. (One such message actually
turned up in a batch of Clinton's own emails, which have been released for months now on a
rolling basis. Pagliano wrote to his boss to wish her a happy birthday. "To many more!" he wrote.
Clinton forwarded the message to an aide with a request to "Pls respond.")
...just this month, State came back with new information. Somehow, it had managed to narrow
down that giant universe of emails to just 1,300 that were either to or from Pagliano or "cc'd"
to him. The department was now confident that it could locate Pagliano's emails and turn them
over to the RNC. What may appear to some to be a willful effort to keep Pagliano's emails from
the public could also be sheer incompetence in record keeping. The inspector general criticized
the department's archiving system, and department officials have acknowledged that they need to
do a better job keeping track of officials' emails. But Republicans have seized on the missing
emails as an indication of a possible coverup, meant to protect the Democratic nominee. "Such
records might shed light on [Pagliano's] role in setting up Clinton's server, and why he was
granted immunity by the FBI," Shah told The Daily Beast. "But it seems that his emails were
either destroyed or never turned over, adding yet another layer to the secrecy surrounding his
role."
... Two technology employees told the inspector general that in late 2010 they "discussed
their concerns about Secretary Clinton's use of a personal email account" with John Bentel, who
was then the director of Information Resource Management in the office of the Executive
Secretariat, where Pagliano worked.
"In one meeting, one staff member raised concerns that information sent and received on
Secretary Clinton's account could contain Federal records that needed to be preserved in order to
satisfy Federal recordkeeping requirements," the IG found. "According to the staff member, the
Director [Bentel] stated that the Secretary's personal system had been reviewed and approved by
Department legal staff and that the matter was not to be discussed any further."
But that review didn't happen. Judicial Watch now wants to depose Bentel under oath, too. The
judge hearing the case, Emmet Sullivan, said this month that he thought the deposition should
proceed... ...Sens. Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson, respectively the powerful chairmen of the
committees on the Judiciary and Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, have been after
Pagliano since last year to testify about the email system. Given that he has a immunity
protection, the senators have questioned why he won't speak.
... Refusing to answer questions doesn't constitute any admission of guilt on Pagliano's part.
But his silence has only fanned the flames of intrigue surrounding his role in the email scandal
and what more he may know about it.
...For him, the biggest question of all may be, "How long can you stay quiet?"
"... There are a number of problems with this article. 1) it posits Clinton as a center-left liberal. She is a right warhawk fossil fuel conservative. 2) the sexism card is obsolete in this case. Clinton's very real ethical, moral, and legal problems have nothing to do with her gender. It's time to stop trotting that out as if it were relevant, it isn't. 3) you say that Sanders' supporters are on the whole less liberal than Clinton supporters. Clinton supporters are NEOliberal, not Liberal. That is a RIGHT of center position ..."
"... Then she selected Tim Kaine, a very strong promoter of TPP, had her surrogates on the Platform Committee prevent addition of an anti-TPP plank, and generally indicated she's going to do what President Obama wants. ..."
"... Much worse, in my opinion, is her seeking out and then trumpeting the endorsements of people like John Negroponte and Robert Kagan. Kagan is the architect of the policies that have led to the current ongoing disasters in the Middle East and advocates policies that will likely lead to much worse. Hillary apparently approved the conduct of the coup in the Ukraine -- how else to explain why she promoted Victoria Nuland? And she certainly approved the provocation of Russia, which Nuland continues despite Kerry's public claims of wanting cooperation. ..."
"... The Clinton's are the only political family that has created a charitable foundation that employs dozens of friends and family members and receives billions in donations, and speaking fees from foreign and domestic governments seeking access and or favors from a charter board member when she Secretary of State and later when she was a Presidential candidate. There were virtually no boundaries between Clintons State Department and the foundation; Clinton's top aide at State, Human Abedin was simultaneous a State Department employee, a contract employee with the Clinton Foundation and a consultant to the Teneo group, a consulting group deeply interwoven with the Foundation. ..."
"... thats despicable. she's a terrible, corrupt candidate with a dead center platform who preaches left but governs right and is a straight up neocon when it comes to foreign policy. kissinger is her hero? give me a break. ..."
"... Democrats who are not bothered by primary rigging, the obvious collusion between Corporate Democrats and the corporate media, endless war, influence peddling by the Clintons, and the take-over of the Democratic Party by Corporate America are the real problem. ..."
"... That poor dear. It seems she suffers from the same financial burden that Bernie has: too many houses. ..."
"... @DFrancis NO ONE got more free handouts than the hundreds of BILLIONS of dollars given away to Wall St kingpins like Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Citigroup as well as oil behemoth, ExxonMobil to name a select few of the actual, real life "Welfare Queens" sucking up resources to piss away that could do exponentially more to create jobs and fix crumbling infrastructure problems than this group of jokers have been promising but not delivering for years now. ..."
"Give a man a reputation as an early riser," said Mark Twain, "and he can sleep 'til noon."
Hillary Clinton finds herself in the opposite situation: She has a reputation for venality - the
merits of which we can set aside momentarily - that forces her to a higher ethical standard. Her
inadequate response to the conflicts of interest inherent in the Clinton Foundation show that she
is not meeting that standard, and has not fully grasped the severity of her reputational problem.
The purpose of the Clinton Foundation is to leverage Clinton fame into charitable donations. That
purpose has important positive effects - shaking loose donations for AIDS prevention and training
African farmers and other worthy causes. But it also has the unavoidable side effect of giving
rich people a way to curry favor with a powerful elected official. The Clinton Foundation has
announced that, should Hillary Clinton win, it will stop accepting donations from corporations or
foreign entities, which mitigates the problem without dispelling it altogether. Wealthy
individuals, or corporations passing their money through foundations, can still use Clinton
Foundation grants as chits.
Ultimately, there is no way around this problem without closing down the Clinton Foundation
altogether. Passing off management of the foundation to non-relatives or other third parties
doesn't do the trick, either. If the Clinton Foundation is not leveraging the Clinton name, it
has no purpose.
... ... ...
The Clinton Foundation is a stand-in for the Clintons' sloppy ethics in general. In the eyes
of their enemies, the Clintons are criminals on a world-historic scale;
... ... ...
For Sanders, and his most philosophical adherents, his campaign represented a revolt not only
against Clinton but against the entire center-left orientation of the party, including Barack
Obama and his compromising, neoliberal ways.
... ... ...
The risk that Clinton's tainted image will defeat her is small but real enough to merit
concern. The much larger risk is that her lax approach to rule-following and ethical conflicts
will sink her presidency.
alesh, 6 hours ago
Stop it. Clintonistas were kind enough to carry Vince Foster into a lovely park so that he
might be found in a pretty place immaculate down to his shoes. Very respectful of the dead.
Of course it could have been that 'vast right-wing conspiracy' behind his death, hoping to
frame the Clintons with the obvious, blundering murder of a Clinton liability... but darn!
Everyone important bought into the suicide story.
Thanks to Trump's errancy, Hillary remains the safe pick for the USA regardless of herself
or her foundation... in 2016. To quote Tony Kornheiser, "we'll try to do better the next
time".
baruchzed, 7 hours ago
There are a number of problems with this article. 1) it posits Clinton as a center-left
liberal. She is a right warhawk fossil fuel conservative. 2) the sexism card is obsolete in
this case. Clinton's very real ethical, moral, and legal problems have nothing to do with her
gender. It's time to stop trotting that out as if it were relevant, it isn't. 3) you say that
Sanders' supporters are on the whole less liberal than Clinton supporters. Clinton supporters
are NEOliberal, not Liberal. That is a RIGHT of center position, while Sanders supporters
are actually liberal thinkers, decidedly left of center. The two are very different.
Bottom line, this is a pro Clinton puff piece pretending to be critical but in fact
presenting falsehoods predicated upon falsehoods. Shoddy work, not journalism.
asher2789, 7 hours ago
@baruchzed "Bottom line, this is a pro Clinton puff piece pretending to be critical but in
fact presenting falsehoods predicated upon falsehoods. Shoddy work, not journalism." like
almost every piece about clinton published by the "left wing" media who's actually not left
wing as fox claims, but pro corporate democrat.
Procopius, 20 hours ago
I think you're mistaken when you say, "If anything, Clinton has positioned herself slightly
to the president's left, even opposing the Trans-Pacific Partnership he continues to tout."
The problem is that nobody believes she means her words when she (reluctantly) said she would
not vote for a free trade agreement that did not protect jobs and the environment. She already
left herself an out there, because the TPP is not a "free trade agreement." It's an agreement
to increase protectionism on some products and force governments to submit to an arbitration
scheme which is likely to favor private investors. There are other weasel words in there that
allow her multiple outs.
Then she selected Tim Kaine, a very strong promoter of TPP, had her surrogates on the
Platform Committee prevent addition of an anti-TPP plank, and generally indicated she's going
to do what President Obama wants.
Much worse, in my opinion, is her seeking out and then trumpeting the endorsements of
people like John Negroponte and Robert Kagan. Kagan is the architect of the policies that have
led to the current ongoing disasters in the Middle East and advocates policies that will
likely lead to much worse. Hillary apparently approved the conduct of the coup in the Ukraine
-- how else to explain why she promoted Victoria Nuland? And she certainly approved the
provocation of Russia, which Nuland continues despite Kerry's public claims of wanting
cooperation.
I see (and I hope I'm just paranoid) an intention there to provoke a shooting war with
Russia, even though both Russia and Ukraine have stocks of nuclear weapons.
jkk1943, 23 hours ago
Decent article but it fails when it offers the every body does it defense to suggest that
Clinton's venality is no better or worse than most politicians. The Clinton's are the only
political family that has created a charitable foundation that employs dozens of friends and
family members and receives billions in donations, and speaking fees from foreign and domestic
governments seeking access and or favors from a charter board member when she Secretary of
State and later when she was a Presidential candidate. There were virtually no boundaries
between Clintons State Department and the foundation; Clinton's top aide at State, Human
Abedin was simultaneous a State Department employee, a contract employee with the Clinton
Foundation and a consultant to the Teneo group, a consulting group deeply interwoven with the
Foundation.
If a GOP presidential Secretary of State who later became a Presidential candidate had so
many potential conflicts of interest not only would he or she not receive their parties
nomination there would have been incessant and unceasing demands from every media outlet tin
the country for the appointment of a special prosecutor.
asher2789, 8 hours ago
@ConejoBlanco clintons appeal is based on hate against trump and his supporters
(understandable) and the fact that she has a vagina and is married to a man credited with
overseeing one of the biggest economic booms in memory (wrongly credited, bill's timing was
just lucky - he was president when PCs and then the internet became a consumer item).
i can't find a single person to answer me why the support clinton other than 1. she's not
trump / stop trump / trump is scary and 2. they want a woman president and 3. well the economy
was good under bill clinton...
not a SINGLE ANSWER about her foreign or domestic policies. not one. and id say about 90%
of her support is solely from those terrified of trump and are voting for the lesser evil.
thats despicable. she's a terrible, corrupt candidate with a dead center platform who
preaches left but governs right and is a straight up neocon when it comes to foreign policy.
kissinger is her hero? give me a break. i guess hillary forgot to poll test the public
and the democrat base's opinion about foreign policy because kissinger is literally the
antithesis to all of whats good and right in the world of left thought. "liberals" need to
grow a spine and hold this woman accountable for her ethics, her morals, and her actions, not
just give her a pass because they are so scared of trump that they might wet their bed at
night over it.
nikki33161, 1 day ago
Democrats who are not bothered by primary rigging, the obvious collusion between
Corporate Democrats and the corporate media, endless war, influence peddling by the Clintons,
and the take-over of the Democratic Party by Corporate America are the real problem.
Hillary and Trump are just the symptoms of our political malaise.
capitalist.roader, 1 day ago
Last year The Federalist did a nice story on the B, H, & C Clinton Foundation:
In 2013, for example, only 10 percent of the Clinton Foundation's expenditures were for
direct charitable grants. The amount it spent on charitable grants–$8.8 million–was dwarfed
by the $17.2 million it cumulatively spent on travel, rent, and office supplies. Between
2011 and 2013, the organization spent only 9.9 percent of the $252 million it collected on
direct charitable grants.
Sean Davis, 27 Apr '15
It seems as if the Foundation exists solely to allow the Clintons to travel in the
comfort and style to which they became accustomed during Bill's tenure as POTUS. The
Foundation fixed their money problems:
We came out of the White House not only dead broke, but in debt. We had no money when we
got there and we struggled to, you know, piece together the resources for mortgages, for
houses, for Chelsea's education. You know, it was not easy.
Hillary Clinton, June 2014
That poor dear. It seems she suffers from the same financial burden that Bernie has:
too many houses.
brian.taylor, 11 hours ago
@DFrancis NO ONE got more free handouts than the hundreds of BILLIONS of dollars given
away to Wall St kingpins like Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Citigroup as well as oil behemoth,
ExxonMobil to name a select few of the actual, real life "Welfare Queens" sucking up resources
to piss away that could do exponentially more to create jobs and fix crumbling infrastructure
problems than this group of jokers have been promising but not delivering for years now.
***News Flash***
When the CIA is responsible for the largest portion of the contraband smuggling and illegal
border crossings, nothing short of their discontinuation of that practice to fund their "off
the books", black ops operations will have any kind of impact on volume of illegal border
crossings. By no means will a wall do any bit of good. The second best plan would be to
heavily punish the people and companies that hire illegal aliens and are the MAIN cause of
encouraging them to come here illegally. Paying cheaper wages with no benefits while having
the leverage of reporting them at any time assures employers that they can treat them as
shabbily as they wish while pocketing the increased profit. THAT is the true cause of the
problem, not so much people doing looking to get a gob wherever they can. No money or job
prospect equals no reason to go anyways.
cleo50, 1 day ago
What Hilary understands about her problems are unclear and moot at best. A sociopath does
not self analyze. The only important thing is how much the electorate understands about her.
See also
http://www.msnbc.com/mtp-daily/watch/trump-campaign-clinton-has-dysphasia-747294275911 Attempt
to dismiss problem with health from Hillary campaign are misdirected. Hiding Hillary continues to
dodge open questions events in favor of heavily staged and controlled media interviews. The Clinton
campaign is doing everything they can to hide Hillary from unscripted questions.
Appearing on MSNBC on Thursday, Trump spokesperson Katrina Pierson
claimed that Clinton suffers from dysphasia, a brain dysfunction that affects a person's ability
to comprehend and formulate language.
"What's new are the other reports of the observations of Hillary Clinton's behavior and
mannerisms," Pierson said before mentioning "her dysphasia, the fact that she's fallen, she has
had a concussion."
Since a complete lack of evidence has never proven sufficient to put a Clinton conspiracy theory
to rest, the Clinton campaign has
pushed back forcibly against these rumors, releasing a statement from her longtime physician
Dr. Lisa Bardack reaffirming that "Secretary Clinton is in excellent health and fit to serve as President
of the United States."
"... alternative media source Counter Punch would use a hash tag #NeverHillary, while giving the recent Democrats' champion the following evaluation: "She's sleazy – a cheater and a liar" ..."
"... The Baltimore Sun did not hesitate to accuse Clinton of the deliberate concealment of facts from Congress and the American people either, noting that the State Department's inspector general released a report last week concluding that Hillary Clinton is a breathtakingly brazen and consistent liar. ..."
"... So what behavior one can expect from most American citizens, including these "hero-swimmers", when even at the highest levels, officials are lying blatantly, while displaying no fear whatsoever of any potential consequences? ..."
"... In lies we trust here, it is our symbol and our flag, because we are the Empire of Lies ..."
But honestly, what does one expect from the likes of Hillary Clinton if even the Washington
Post wouldn't hesitate to present a video filled with her lies and "shifting positions?" Her
ideas on Bosnia, healthcare, Wall Street, NAFTA are ever-shifting, since she's convinced that
Americans are unable to memorize basic facts or recall even recent American history.
Accusing Hillary Clinton of blatant hypocrisy, alternative media source Counter Punch
would use a hash tag #NeverHillary, while giving the recent Democrats' champion the following
evaluation: "She's sleazy – a cheater and a liar", noting that she wanted to set the minimum
wage at the level of 12 dollars per hour, but since Bernie's 15 dollars per hour was more
popular, she claimed she wanted to introduce precisely the same wage. When pressed, she conceded
she'd "like" 15 dollars per hour, but would not lift a finger to make it happen federally.
Incredibly, she still conducts herself in this same manner.
The Baltimore Sun did not hesitate to accuse Clinton of the deliberate concealment of facts
from Congress and the American people either, noting that the State Department's inspector
general released a report last week concluding that Hillary Clinton is a breathtakingly brazen
and consistent liar. What's infuriating about all of this is that it is not, in fact, news.
Over a year ago, Hillary Clinton held a press conference at the United Nations with the intent to
put the whole controversy around her released emails to rest, yet, nearly every significant
statement she made was a lie, The Baltimore Sun would note, adding that we have known it for a
year now, that from the earliest days of this scandal, Clinton was lying.
So what behavior one can expect from most American citizens, including these "hero-swimmers",
when even at the highest levels, officials are lying blatantly, while displaying no fear
whatsoever of any potential consequences? What's even more striking is that those liars are
being promoted and encouraged in the US political establishment, and they are being allowed to
occupy the highest political positions in the state, as if we are being told: "In lies we
trust here, it is our symbol and our flag, because we are the Empire of Lies."
Martin Berger is a freelance journalist and geopolitical analyst, exclusively for the
online magazine "New Eastern Outlook."
http://journal-neo.org/2016/08/20/modern-america-the-empire-of-lies-2/
"... about lesser-evil politics and what impact the election could have on the future of progressive politics. ..."
"... Ford quoted writer Steven Salait, who wrote recently, "Lesser evilism is possible only because we're so accustomed to seeing certain people as lesser human beings." ..."
"... Dr. Monteiro believes that Republican support for Clinton could signal the beginning of a "new Mccarthyism." ..."
"... "Now we've always known that the two-party system was essentially a one party system with two wings." he said, "But now, so many of the Republicans and the neocons and the liberals are gravitating to this big umbrella. But at the same time they're saying to anyone who would oppose their policy in Russia, or towards Korea or Syria, that somehow you are unpatriotic, you are on the payroll of Russia or some external force. So I would suggest that there's nothing more lethal than a Cold War liberal. They go beyond the conservatives." ..."
"... That's a real concern. When we look at Hillary Clinton, when we look at her support for surveillance, her lack of support for civil liberties…It's very important that we're not distracted by this issue of who people vote for, is it this party or that party ..."
"... "That's not to say that elections aren't important, they definitely are a gauge of where people are at, at any given point, but that's not where social change comes from. And we need to stand strong, we need to stand united, we need to be prepared to get out into the streets to continue to struggle around the issues, including issues that are to the left of the articulated position of Bernie Sanders himself, which are issues of peace and social justice that the Bernie movement resonated with." ..."
With election season in full swing, Democrats and defecting Republicans
have ramped up a campaign against the open bigotry of bombastic real estate magnate Donald Trump.
Radio Sputnik's Loud & Clear spoke with Jane Cutter, editor of Liberationnews.org; Dr. Anthony
Monteiro, W.E.B. DuBois scholar and member of the Black Radical Organizing Collective; and Derek
Ford, Assistant Professor of Education Studies at DePauw University, about lesser-evil politics
and what impact the election could have on the future of progressive politics.
Cutter
explained that, historically, "Who's sitting in the White House is ultimately not the determining
factor" of a movement's vitality, and points to the presidency of Richard Nixon, considered to
be one of America's most conservative presidents. Cutter noted the many progressive measures passed
under the Nixon Administration due to pressure from the Civil Rights, Black Power, feminist and
LGBTQ movements.
"At that time, people were organized, people were mobilized, people were militant and in the
streets and, as a result, the Nixon Administration and other elements of the ruling class were
forced to give up numerous concessions that were in fact quite beneficial to the working class
of this country," she said.
Ford quoted writer Steven Salait, who wrote recently, "Lesser evilism is possible only
because we're so accustomed to seeing certain people as lesser human beings."
"By that he was saying that to call Hillary Clinton the lesser evil is to call the people of
Palestine, in Syria, Libya and Iraq, as lesser human beings, because her actions and her policies
have been so steadfastly hawkish there. It also disarms the movement and any potential for popular
uprising."
Dr. Monteiro believes that Republican support for Clinton could signal the beginning of
a "new Mccarthyism."
"Now we've always known that the two-party system was essentially
a one party system with two wings." he said, "But now, so many of the Republicans and the neocons
and the liberals are gravitating to this big umbrella. But at the same time they're saying to
anyone who would oppose their policy in Russia, or towards Korea or Syria, that somehow you are
unpatriotic, you are on the payroll of Russia or some external force. So I would suggest that
there's nothing more lethal than a Cold War liberal. They go beyond the conservatives."
He added, "I think Hillary represents something that we have to be very frightened of and we
really have to mobilize and steel ourselves for a really intense struggle against what she represents."
Cutter agreed, saying, "That's a real concern. When we look at Hillary Clinton, when we
look at her support for surveillance, her lack of support for civil liberties…It's very important
that we're not distracted by this issue of who people vote for, is it this party or that
party."
"That's not to say that elections aren't important, they definitely are a gauge of where
people are at, at any given point, but that's not where social change comes from. And we need
to stand strong, we need to stand united, we need to be prepared to get out into the streets to
continue to struggle around the issues, including issues that are to the left of the articulated
position of Bernie Sanders himself, which are issues of peace and social justice that the Bernie
movement resonated with."
Yet his real foreign policy record is closer to Hillary's than he likes to admit. Yes, he
opposed the Iraq war – and then proceeded to routinely vote to fund that war: ditto Afghanistan.
In 2003, at the height of the Iraq war hysteria, then Congressman Sanders
voted for a
congressional resolution hailing Bush:
"Congress expresses the unequivocal support and appreciation of the nation to the President
as Commander-in-Chief for his firm leadership and decisive action in the conduct of military
operations in Iraq as part of the ongoing Global War on Terrorism."
As the drumbeat for war with Iran got louder, Rep. Sanders voted for the
Iran Freedom
Support Act, which codified sanctions imposed since the fall of the Shah and handed out
millions to "pro-freedom" groups seeking the overthrow of the Tehran regime. The Bush
administration, you'll
recall, was running a regime change operation at that point which gave covert support to
Jundullah, a terrorist group responsible for murdering
scores of
Iranian civilians. Bush was also
canoodling with the
Mujahideen-e-Khalq, a weirdo cult group once designated as a terrorist organization (a label
lifted by Hillary Clinton's State Department after a
well-oiled public relations campaign).
Sanders fulsomely supported the Kosovo war: when shocked antiwar activists visited his Senate
office in Burlington, Vermont, he
called the cops
on them. At a Montpelier public meeting featuring a debate on the war, Bernie
argued
passionately in favor of Bill Clinton's "humanitarian" intervention, and pointedly told hecklers
to leave if they didn't like what he had to say.
As a Senator, his votes on civil liberties issues show a distinct pattern. While he voted
against the Patriot Act, in 2006 he voted
in favor of
making fourteen provisions of the Act permanent, including those that codified the FBI's
authority to seize business records and carry out roving wiretaps. Sanders voted no on the
legislation establishing the Department of Homeland Security, but by the time he was in the
Senate he was regularly voting for that agency's ever-expanding budget.
The evolution of Bernie Sanders – from his days as a Liberty Unionist radical and Trotskyist
fellow-traveler, to his first political success as Mayor of Burlington, his election to Congress
and then on to the Senate – limns the course of the post-Sixties American left. Although birthed
in the turmoil of the Vietnam war, the
vaunted anti-interventionism of this crowd soon fell by the wayside as domestic political
tradeoffs trumped ideology. Nothing exemplifies this process of incremental betrayal better than
Sanders'
support for the troubled F-35 fighter jet, the classic case of a military program that exists
only to enrich the military-industrial complex. Although the plane has been plagued with
technical difficulties, and has toted up hundreds of billions of dollars in cost overruns,
Sanders has stubbornly defended and voted for it because Lockheed-Martin manufactures it in
Vermont.
"... Turns out, the Podesta Group founded by none other than John Podesta, Hillary's campaign chair and chief strategies, was retained by the Russian-owned firm UraniumOne in 2012, 2014, and 2015 to lobby Hillary Clinton's State Department based on John Podesta's longstanding relations with the Clinton family – he was the White House Chief of Staff under Bill Clinton. ..."
The FBI and Department of Justice have launched an investigation into whether the Podesta
Group has any connections to alleged corruption that occurred in the administration of former Ukrainian
President Viktor Yanukovych.
It seems like just yesterday that the top campaign official for Donald Trump found himself caught
in the middle of a political dragnet for his work as a lobbyist on behalf of Viktor Yanukovych with
the media clamoring about his purported ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin as a reason why
the Republican nominee was a less desirable candidate than Hillary Clinton. Wait, that was just yesterday?
It turns out that Hillary Clinton's campaign guru, head of the lobbying firm the
Podesta Group, has found himself smack dab in the middle of the same
criminal investigation spawned when devious political operatives decide to merge
international relations with campaign politics. For weeks, the pages of the
Washington Post, the Daily Beast, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal
have chimed that Trump is a "Putin pawn" as part of some maniacal plot by the Kremlin
to interfere with the US election.
Turns out, the Podesta Group founded by none
other than John Podesta, Hillary's campaign chair and chief strategies, was retained
by the Russian-owned firm UraniumOne in 2012, 2014, and 2015 to lobby Hillary
Clinton's State Department based on John Podesta's longstanding relations with the
Clinton family – he was the White House Chief of Staff under Bill Clinton.
Interestingly, UraniumOne's chairman used his family foundation to make four donations
totaling $2.35 million to the Clinton Foundation from 2009 to 2013. Perhaps a more blatant
evidence of allegations that Hillary Clinton's State Department operated on a pay-to-play basis
is the fact that, as the New York Times reported last April, "shortly after the Russians
announced their intention to acquire a majority stake in Uranium One, Mr. Clinton received
$500,000 for a Moscow speech from a Russian investment bank with links to the Kremlin that was
promoting UraniumOne stock.
Not only are investigators wondering whether there was any impropriety in the lobbying
arrangement such as the provision of beneficial treatment by the State Department to an old
friend, but they are also probing the work that Viktor Yanukovych's regime paid the Podesta Group
to do while he was the head of the Ukrainian government.
The controversy for Podesta links to
his work for the Centre for a Modern Ukraine, a Brussels based organization that describes itself
as "an advocate for enhancing EU-Ukraine relations." Unfortunately for Mr. Podesta, the
organization has been described as "an operation controlled by Yanukovych" and tied to the former
leader's Party of Regions suggesting the Podesta Group may have been, like has been said of Paul
Manafort, tasked with greater reporting requirements pursuant to US law.
The Podesta Group quickly hired the white-shoe law firm Caplin & Drysdale as "independent,
outside legal counsel to determine if we were misled by the Centre for a Modern Ukraine or any
other individuals with regard to the Centre's potential ties to foreign governments or political
parties."
And the plot of the 2016 presidential election thickens.
"... You haven't heard much from the Democrats lately about foreign policy or global agendas – indeed virtually nothing at the Philadelphia convention and little worthy of mention along the campaign trail. ..."
"... But no one should be fooled: a Clinton presidency, which seems more likely by the day, can be expected to stoke a resurgent U.S. imperialism, bringing new cycles of militarism and war. The silence is illusory: Clintonites, now as before, are truly obsessed with international politics. ..."
"... A triumphant Hillary, more "rational" and "savvy" than the looney and unpredictable Donald Trump, could well have a freer path to emboldened superpower moves not only in Europe but the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Pacific. While the candidate has not revealed much lately, she is on record as vowing to "stand up" to Russia and China, face off against Russian "aggression", escalate the war on terror, and militarily annihilate Iran the moment it steps out of line (or is determined by "U.S. intelligence" to have stepped out of line) in its nuclear agreement with global powers. ..."
"... A new Clinton presidency can be expected to further boost the U.S./NATO drive to strangle and isolate Russia, which means aggravated "crises" in Ukraine and worrisome encounters with a rival military power in a region saturated with (tactical, "usable") nuclear weapons. Regime change in Syria? Hillary has indeed strongly pushed for that self-defeating act of war, combined with an illegal and provocative no-fly zone - having learned nothing from the extreme chaos and violence she did so much to unleash in Libya as Secretary of State. ..."
"... Democratic elites say little publicly about these and other imperial priorities, preferring familiar homilies such as "bringing jobs back" (not going to happen) and "healing the country" (not going to happen). Silence appears to function exquisitely in a political culture where open and vigorous debate on foreign-policy is largely taboo and elite discourse rarely surpasses the level of banal platitudes. And Hillary's worshipful liberal and progressive backers routinely follow the script (or non-script) while fear-mongering about how a Trump presidency will destroy the country (now that the Sanders threat has vanished). ..."
"... Who needs to be reminded that Hillary's domestic promises, such as they are, will become null and void once urgent global "crises" take precedence? The Pentagon, after all, always comes first. ..."
"... There is a special logic to the Clintonites' explosive mixture of neoliberalism and militarism. They, like all corporate Democrats, are fully aligned with some of the most powerful interests in the world: Wall Street, the war economy, fossil fuels, Big Pharma, the Israel Lobby. They also have intimate ties to reactionary global forces – the neofascist regime in Ukraine, Israel, Saudi Arabia, other Gulf states. ..."
"... Predictably, Trump's "unreliability" to oversee American global objectives has been an ongoing motif at CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. ..."
"... Jackie was reported as saying "that what worried President Kennedy during that very dangerous time was that a war might be started – not by men with self-control and restraint, but by little men, the ones moved by fear and pride." ..."
You haven't heard much from the Democrats lately about foreign policy or global agendas – indeed
virtually nothing at the Philadelphia convention and little worthy of mention along the campaign
trail. Hillary Clinton's many liberal (and sadly, progressive) supporters routinely steer away
from anything related to foreign policy, talk, talk, talking instead about the candidate's "experience",
with obligatory nods toward her enlightened social programs. There is only the ritual
demonization of that fearsome dictator, Vladimir Putin, reputedly on the verge of invading some hapless
European country. Even Bernie Sanders' sorry endorsement of his erstwhile enemy, not
long ago denounced as a tool of Wall Street, had nothing to say about global issues.
But no one should be fooled: a Clinton presidency, which seems more likely by the day, can be
expected to stoke a resurgent U.S. imperialism, bringing new cycles of militarism and war. The silence
is illusory: Clintonites, now as before, are truly obsessed with international politics.
A triumphant Hillary, more "rational" and "savvy" than the looney and unpredictable Donald Trump,
could well have a freer path to emboldened superpower moves not only in Europe but the Middle East,
Central Asia, and the Pacific. While the candidate has not revealed much lately, she is on record
as vowing to "stand up" to Russia and China, face off against Russian "aggression", escalate the
war on terror, and militarily annihilate Iran the moment it steps out of line (or is determined by
"U.S. intelligence" to have stepped out of line) in its nuclear agreement with global powers.
Under Clinton, the Democrats might well be better positioned to recharge their historical
legacy as War Party. One of the great political myths (and there are many) is that American liberals
are inclined toward a less belligerent foreign policy than Republicans, are less militaristic and
more favorable toward "diplomacy". References to Woodrow Wilson in World War I and Mexico, Harry
Truman in Korea, JFK and LBJ in Indochina, Bill Clinton in the Balkans, and of course Barack Obama
in Afghanistan (eight years of futile warfare), Libya (also "Hillary's War"), and scattered operations
across the Middle East and North Africa should be enough to dispel such nonsense. (As for FDR and
World War II, I have written extensively that the Pearl Harbor attacks were deliberately provoked
by U.S. actions in the Pacific – but that is a more complicated story.)
... ... ...
A new Clinton presidency can be expected to further boost the U.S./NATO drive to strangle
and isolate Russia, which means aggravated "crises" in Ukraine and worrisome encounters with a rival
military power in a region saturated with (tactical, "usable") nuclear weapons. Regime
change in Syria? Hillary has indeed strongly pushed for that self-defeating act of war,
combined with an illegal and provocative no-fly zone - having learned nothing from the extreme chaos
and violence she did so much to unleash in Libya as Secretary of State. There are currently
no visible signs she would exit the protracted and criminal war in Afghanistan, a rich source of
blowback (alongside Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, and Israel). Increased aerial bombardments against
ISIS in Iraq, Syria, Libya, and elsewhere? More deployments of American troops on the ground?
Such ventures, with potentially others on the horizon, amount to elaborate recipes for more
blowback, followed by more anti-terror hysteria, followed by more interventions.
Uncompromising economic, diplomatic, and military support of Israeli atrocities in Palestine?
Aggressive pursuit of the seriously mistaken "Asian Pivot", strategy, a revitalized effort to subvert
Chinese economic and military power – one of Clinton's own special crusades? No wonder the Paul Wolfowitzes
and Robert Kagans are delighted to join the Hillary camp.
No wonder, too, that billionaire super-hawk Haim Saban has pledged to spend whatever is needed
to get the Clintons back into the White House, convinced her presidency will do anything to maintain
Palestinian colonial subjugation. Meeting with Saban in July, Hillary again promised to "oppose any
effort to delegitimate Israel, including at the United Nations or through the Boycott, Divestment,
and Sanctions movement." She backs legislative efforts begun in several states to silence and blacklist
people working on behalf of Palestinian rights. For this her celebrated "pragmatism" could work quite
effectively.
Democratic elites say little publicly about these and other imperial priorities, preferring
familiar homilies such as "bringing jobs back" (not going to happen) and "healing the country" (not
going to happen). Silence appears to function exquisitely in a political culture where
open and vigorous debate on foreign-policy is largely taboo and elite discourse rarely surpasses
the level of banal platitudes. And Hillary's worshipful liberal and progressive backers
routinely follow the script (or non-script) while fear-mongering about how a Trump presidency will
destroy the country (now that the Sanders threat has vanished).
Amidst the turmoil Trump has oddly surfaced to the left of Clinton on several key global
issues: cooperating instead of fighting with the Russians, keeping alive a sharp criticism of the
Iraq war and the sustained regional chaos and blowback it generated, ramping down enthusiasm for
more wars in the Middle East, junking "free trade" agreements, willingness to rethink the outmoded
NATO alliance. If Trump, however haphazardly, manages to grasp the historical dynamics of blowback,
the Clinton camp remains either indifferent or clueless, still ready for new armed ventures – cynically
marketed, as in the Balkans, Iraq, and Libya, on the moral imperative of defeating some unspeakable
evil, usually a "new Hitler" waging a "new genocide". Who needs to be reminded that Hillary's
domestic promises, such as they are, will become null and void once urgent global "crises" take precedence?
The Pentagon, after all, always comes first.
... ... ...
...At the other extreme, Clinton emerges in the media as the most "rational" and "even-tempered"
of candidates, ideally suited to carry out the necessary imperial agendas. A tiresome mainstream
narrative is that Hillary is "one of the best prepared and most knowledgeable candidates ever to
seek the presidency." And she is smart, very smart – whatever her flaws. All the better
to follow in the long history of Democrats proficient at showing the world who is boss. The
media, for its part, adores these Democrats, another reason Trump appears to have diminished chances
of winning. Further, the well-funded and tightly-organized Clinton machine can count on somewhat
large majorities of women, blacks, and Hispanics, not only for the march to the White House but,
more ominously, to go along with the War Party's imperial spectacle of the day. Most anything – war,
regime change, bombing raids, drone strikes, treaty violations, JFK-style "standoffs" – can escape
political scrutiny if carried out by "humanitarian", peace-loving Democrats. Bill Clinton's
war to fight "genocide" and "ethnic cleansing" in the Balkans, cover for just another U.S./NATO geopolitical
maneuver, constitutes the perfect template here.
There is a special logic to the Clintonites' explosive mixture of neoliberalism and militarism.
They, like all corporate Democrats, are fully aligned with some of the most powerful interests in
the world: Wall Street, the war economy, fossil fuels, Big Pharma, the Israel Lobby. They also have
intimate ties to reactionary global forces – the neofascist regime in Ukraine, Israel, Saudi Arabia,
other Gulf states.
... In March 121 members of the Republican "national security community", including the warmongers
Wolfowitz, Robert Kagan, and Brent Scowcroft, signed a public letter condemning Trump for not being
sufficiently dedicated to American (also Israeli?) interests. Trump compounded his predicament by
stubbornly refusing to pay homage to the "experts" – the same foreign-policy geniuses who helped
orchestrate the Iraq debacle. A more recent (and more urgent) letter with roughly the same message
has made its way into the public sphere. Predictably, Trump's "unreliability" to oversee
American global objectives has been an ongoing motif at CNN, the New York Times, the
Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal.
Returning to the political carneval that was the Democratic convention, amidst all the non-stop
flag-waving and shouts of "USA!" Hillary made what she thought would be an inspiring reference to
Jackie Kennedy, speaking on the eve of her husband's (1961) ascent to the White House. Jackie was
reported as saying "that what worried President Kennedy during that very dangerous time was that
a war might be started – not by men with self-control and restraint, but by little men, the ones
moved by fear and pride."
We can surmise that JFK was one of those "big men" governed
by "restraint". History shows, however, that Jackie's esteemed husband was architect
of probably the worst episode of international barbarism in U.S. history – the Vietnam War, with
its unfathomable death and destruction – coming at a time of the Big Man's botched CIA-led invasion
of Cuba and followed closely by the Cuban Missile Crisis, where the Big Man's "restraint" brought
the world frighteningly close to nuclear catastrophe. As for "fear" and "pride" – nothing permeates
JFK's biography of that period more than those two psychological obsessions.
Could it be that Hillary Clinton, however unwittingly, was at this epic moment – her breakthrough
nomination – revealing nothing so much as her own deeply-imperialist mind-set?
Carl Boggs is the author of The Hollywood War Machine, with
Tom Pollard (second edition, forthcoming), and Drugs, Power, and Politics, both published by
Paradigm.
What a bunch of neoliberal piranha, devouring the poorest country in Europe, where pernneers exist
on $1 a day or less, with the help of installed by Washington corrupt oligarchs (Yanukovich was installed
with Washington blessing and was controlled by Washington, who was fully aware about the level of corruption
of its government; especially his big friend vice-president Biden).
Notable quotes:
"... Mr. Kalyuzhny was also a founding board member of a Brussels-based nongovernmental organization, the European Center for a Modern Ukraine, that hired the Podesta Group, a Washington lobbying firm that received $1.02 million to promote an agenda generally aligned with the Party of Regions. ..."
"... Because the payment was made through a nongovernmental organization, the Podesta Group did not register as a lobbyist for a foreign entity. A co-founder of the Podesta Group, John D. Podesta, is chairman of Hillary Clinton's campaign, and his brother, Tony Podesta, runs the firm now. ..."
"... The Podesta Group, in a statement, said its in-house counsel determined the company had no obligation to register as a representative of a foreign entity in part because the nonprofit offered assurances it was not "directly or indirectly supervised, directed, controlled, financed or subsidized in whole or in part by a government of a foreign country or a foreign political party." ..."
"... On Monday, Mr. Manafort issued a heated statement in response to an article in The New York Times that first disclosed that the ledgers - a document described by Ukrainian investigators as an under-the-table payment system for the Party of Regions - referenced a total of $12.7 million in cash payments to him over a five-year period. ..."
"... In that statement, Mr. Manafort, who was removed from day-to-day management of the Trump campaign on Wednesday though he retained his title, denied that he had personally received any off-the-books cash payments. "The suggestion that I accepted cash payments is unfounded, silly and nonsensical," he said. ..."
MOSCOW - The Ukrainian authorities, under pressure to bolster their assertion that once-secret
accounting documents show cash payments from a pro-Russian political party earmarked for Donald J.
Trump's campaign chairman, on Thursday released line-item entries, some for millions of dollars.
The revelations also point to an outsize role for a former senior member of the pro-Russian political
party, the Party of Regions, in directing money to both Republican and Democratic advisers and lobbyists
from the United States as the party tried to burnish its image in Washington.
The former party member, Vitaly A. Kalyuzhny, for a time chairman of the Ukraine Parliament's
International Relations Committee, had signed nine times for receipt of payments designated for the
Trump campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, according to Serhiy A. Leshchenko, a member of Parliament
who has studied the documents. The ledger covered payments from 2007 to 2012, when Mr. Manafort worked
for the party and its leader, Viktor F. Yanukovych, Ukraine's former president who was deposed.
Mr. Kalyuzhny was also a founding board member of a Brussels-based nongovernmental organization,
the European Center for a Modern Ukraine, that hired the Podesta Group, a Washington lobbying firm
that received $1.02 million to promote an agenda generally aligned with the Party of Regions.
Because the payment was made through a nongovernmental organization, the Podesta Group did
not register as a lobbyist for a foreign entity. A co-founder of the Podesta Group, John D. Podesta,
is chairman of Hillary Clinton's campaign, and his brother, Tony Podesta, runs the firm now.
The role of Mr. Kalyuzhny, a onetime computer programmer from the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk,
in directing funds to the companies of the chairmen of both presidential campaigns, had not previously
been reported. Mr. Kalyuzhny was one of three Party of Regions members of Parliament who founded
the nonprofit.
The Associated Press, citing emails it had obtained, also reported Thursday that Mr. Manafort's
work for Ukraine included a secret lobbying effort in Washington that he operated with an associate,
Rick Gates, and that was aimed at influencing American news organizations and government officials.
Mr. Gates noted in the emails that he conducted the work through two lobbying firms, including
the Podesta Group, because Ukraine's foreign minister did not want the country's embassy involved.
The A.P. said one of Mr. Gates's campaigns sought to turn public opinion in the West against Yulia
Tymoshenko, a former Ukrainian prime minister who was imprisoned during Mr. Yanukovych's administration.
The Podesta Group, in a statement, said its in-house counsel determined the company had no
obligation to register as a representative of a foreign entity in part because the nonprofit offered
assurances it was not "directly or indirectly supervised, directed, controlled, financed or subsidized
in whole or in part by a government of a foreign country or a foreign political party."
Reached by phone on Thursday, a former aide to Mr. Kalyuzhny said he had lost contact with the
politician and was unsure whether he remained in Kiev or had returned to Donetsk, now the capital
of a Russian-backed separatist enclave.
Ukrainian officials emphasized that they did not know as yet if the cash payments reflected in
the ledgers were actually made. In all 22 instances, people other than Mr. Manafort appear to have
signed for the money. But the ledger entries are highly specific with funds earmarked for services
such as exit polling, equipment and other services.
On Monday, Mr. Manafort issued a heated statement in response to an article in The New York
Times that first disclosed that the ledgers - a document described by Ukrainian investigators as
an under-the-table payment system for the Party of Regions - referenced a total of $12.7 million
in cash payments to him over a five-year period.
In that statement, Mr. Manafort, who was removed from day-to-day management of the Trump campaign
on Wednesday though he retained his title, denied that he had personally received any off-the-books
cash payments. "The suggestion that I accepted cash payments is unfounded, silly and nonsensical,"
he said.
Mr. Manafort's statement, however, left open the possibility that cash payments had been made
to his firm or associates. And details from the ledgers released Thursday by anticorruption investigators
suggest that may have occurred. Three separate payments, for example, totaling nearly $5.7 million
are earmarked for Mr. Manafort's "contract."
Another, from October 2012, suggests a payment to Mr. Manafort of $400,000 for exit polling, a
legitimate campaign outlay.
Two smaller entries, for $4,632 and $854, show payments for seven personal computers and a computer
server.
The payments do not appear to have been reported by the Party of Regions in campaign finance disclosures
in Ukraine. The party's 2012 filing indicates outlays for expenses other than advertising of just
under $2 million, at the exchange rate at the time. This is less than a single payment in the black
ledger designated for "Paul Manafort contract" in June of that year for $3.4 million.
Ukrainian investigators say they consider any under-the-table payments illegal, and that the ledger
also describes disbursements to members of the central election committee, the group that counts
votes.
Correction: August 20, 2016
Because of an editing error, an article on Friday about the political activities in Ukraine of
Donald J. Trump's former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, misidentified the office once held by
Yulia V. Tymoshenko, a rival of Mr. Manafort's client, the former president Viktor F. Yanukovych.
Ms. Tymoshenko served as prime minister of Ukraine, not its president.
"... The evidence that ties the ShadowBrokers dump to the NSA comes in an agency manual for implanting
malware, classified top secret, provided by Snowden, and not previously available to the public. The
draft manual instructs NSA operators to track their use of one malware program using a specific 16-character
string, "ace02468bdf13579." That exact same string appears throughout the ShadowBrokers leak in code
associated with the same program, SECONDDATE. ..."
On Monday, a hacking group calling itself the "ShadowBrokers" announced an auction for what it claimed
were "cyber weapons" made by the NSA. Based on never-before-published documents provided by the whistleblower
Edward Snowden, The Intercept can confirm that the arsenal contains authentic NSA software,
part of a powerful constellation of tools used to covertly infect computers worldwide.
The provenance
of the code has been a matter of heated debate this week among cybersecurity experts, and while it
remains unclear how the software leaked, one thing is now beyond speculation: The malware is covered
with the NSA's virtual fingerprints and clearly originates from the agency.
The evidence that ties the ShadowBrokers dump to the NSA comes in an agency manual for implanting
malware, classified top secret, provided by Snowden, and not previously available to the public.
The draft manual instructs NSA operators to track their use of one malware program using a specific
16-character string, "ace02468bdf13579." That exact same string appears throughout the ShadowBrokers
leak in code associated with the same program, SECONDDATE.
SECONDDATE plays a specialized role inside a complex global system built by the U.S. government
to infect and monitor what one document
estimated to be millions of computers around the world. Its release by ShadowBrokers, alongside
dozens of other malicious tools, marks the first time any full copies of the NSA's offensive software
have been available to the public, providing a glimpse at how an elaborate system outlined in the
Snowden documents looks when deployed in the real world, as well as concrete evidence that NSA hackers
don't always have the last word when it comes to computer exploitation.
But malicious software of this sophistication doesn't just pose a threat to foreign governments,
Johns Hopkins University cryptographer Matthew Green told The Intercept:
The danger of these exploits is that they can be used to target anyone who is using a vulnerable
router. This is the equivalent of leaving lockpicking tools lying around a high school cafeteria.
It's worse, in fact, because many of these exploits are not available through any other means,
so they're just now coming to the attention of the firewall and router manufacturers that need
to fix them, as well as the customers that are vulnerable.
So the risk is twofold: first, that the person or persons who stole this information might
have used them against us. If this is indeed Russia, then one assumes that they probably have
their own exploits, but there's no need to give them any more. And now that the exploits have
been released, we run the risk that ordinary criminals will use them against corporate targets.
The NSA did not respond to questions concerning ShadowBrokers, the Snowden documents, or its malware.
A Memorable SECONDDATE
The offensive tools released by ShadowBrokers are organized under a litany of code names such
as POLARSNEEZE and ELIGIBLE BOMBSHELL, and their exact purpose is still being assessed. But we do
know more about one of the weapons: SECONDDATE.
SECONDDATE is a tool designed to intercept web requests and redirect browsers on target computers
to an NSA web server. That server, in turn, is designed to infect them with malware. SECONDDATE's
existence was
first reported by The Intercept in 2014, as part of a look at a global computer exploitation
effort code-named TURBINE. The malware server, known as FOXACID, has also been
described in previously released Snowden documents.
Other documents released by The Intercept today not only tie SECONDDATE to the ShadowBrokers
leak but also provide new detail on how it fits into the NSA's broader surveillance and infection
network. They also show how SECONDDATE has been used, including to spy on Pakistan and a computer
system in Lebanon.
The top-secret manual that authenticates the SECONDDATE found in the wild as the same one used
within the NSA is a 31-page document titled "FOXACID
SOP for Operational Management" and marked as a draft. It dates to no earlier than 2010. A section
within the manual describes administrative tools for tracking how victims are funneled into FOXACID,
including a set of tags used to catalogue servers. When such a tag is created in relation to a SECONDDATE-related
infection, the document says, a certain distinctive identifier must be used:
The same SECONDDATE MSGID string appears in 14 different files throughout the ShadowBrokers leak,
including in a file titled SecondDate-3021.exe. Viewed through a code-editing program (screenshot
below), the NSA's secret number can be found hiding in plain sight:
All told, throughout many of the folders contained in the ShadowBrokers' package (screenshot below),
there are 47 files with SECONDDATE-related names, including different versions of the raw code required
to execute a SECONDDATE attack, instructions for how to use it, and other related files.
.
After viewing the code, Green told The Intercept the MSGID string's occurrence in both
an NSA training document and this week's leak is "unlikely to be a coincidence." Computer security
researcher Matt Suiche, founder of UAE-based cybersecurity startup Comae Technologies, who has been
particularly vocal in his analysis of the ShadowBrokers this week, told The Intercept "there
is no way" the MSGID string's appearance in both places is a coincidence.
Where SECONDDATE Fits In
This overview jibes with previously unpublished classified files provided by Snowden that illustrate
how SECONDDATE is a component of BADDECISION, a broader NSA infiltration tool. SECONDDATE helps the
NSA pull off a "man in the middle" attack against users on a wireless network, tricking them into
thinking they're talking to a safe website when in reality they've been sent a malicious payload
from an NSA server.
According to one December 2010 PowerPoint presentation titled "Introduction
to BADDECISION," that tool is also designed to send users of a wireless network, sometimes referred
to as an 802.11 network, to FOXACID malware servers. Or, as the presentation puts it, BADDECISION
is an "802.11 CNE [computer network exploitation] tool that uses a true man-in-the-middle attack
and a frame injection technique to redirect a target client to a FOXACID server." As another
top-secret slide puts it, the attack homes in on "the greatest vulnerability to your computer:
your web browser."
One slide points out that the attack works on users with an encrypted wireless connection to the
internet.
That trick, it seems, often involves BADDECISION and SECONDDATE, with the latter described as
a "component" for the former. A series of diagrams in the "Introduction to BADDECISION" presentation
show how an NSA operator "uses SECONDDATE to inject a redirection payload at [a] Target Client,"
invisibly hijacking a user's web browser as the user attempts to visit a benign website (in the example
given, it's CNN.com). Executed correctly, the file explains, a "Target Client continues normal webpage
browsing, completely unaware," lands on a malware-filled NSA server, and becomes infected with as
much of that malware as possible - or as the presentation puts it, the user will be left "WHACKED!"
In the other top-secret presentations, it's put plainly: "How
do we redirect the target to the FOXACID server without being noticed"? Simple: "Use NIGHTSTAND
or BADDECISION."
The sheer number of interlocking tools available to crack a computer is dizzying. In the
FOXACID manual, government hackers are told an NSA hacker ought to be familiar with using SECONDDATE
along with similar man-in-the-middle wi-fi attacks code-named MAGIC SQUIRREL and MAGICBEAN. A top-secret
presentation on FOXACID lists further ways to redirect targets to the malware server system.
To position themselves within range of a vulnerable wireless network, NSA operators can use a
mobile antenna system running software code-named BLINDDATE, depicted in the field in what appears
to be Kabul. The software can even be attached to a drone. BLINDDATE in turn can run BADDECISION,
which allows for a SECONDDATE attack:
Elsewhere in these files, there are at least two documented cases of SECONDDATE being used to
successfully infect computers overseas: An April 2013
presentation boasts of successful attacks against computer systems in both Pakistan and Lebanon.
In the first, NSA hackers used SECONDDATE to breach "targets in Pakistan's National Telecommunications
Corporation's (NTC) VIP Division," which contained documents pertaining to "the backbone of Pakistan's
Green Line communications network" used by "civilian and military leadership."
In the latter, the NSA used SECONDDATE to pull off a man-in-the-middle attack in Lebanon "for
the first time ever," infecting a Lebanese ISP to extract "100+ MB of Hizballah Unit 1800 data,"
a special subset of the terrorist group dedicated to aiding Palestinian militants.
SECONDDATE is just one method that the NSA uses to get its target's browser pointed at a FOXACID
server. Other methods include sending spam that attempts to exploit bugs in popular web-based email
providers or entices targets to click on malicious links that lead to a FOXACID server. One
document, a newsletter for the NSA's Special Source Operations division, describes how NSA software
other than SECONDDATE was used to repeatedly direct targets in Pakistan to FOXACID malware web servers,
eventually infecting the targets' computers.
A Potentially Mundane Hack
Snowden, who worked for NSA contractors Dell and Booz Allen Hamilton, has offered some context
and a relatively mundane possible explanation for the leak: that the NSA headquarters was not hacked,
but rather one of the computers the agency uses to plan and execute attacks was compromised. In a
series of tweets,
he pointed out that the NSA often lurks on systems that are supposed to be controlled by others,
and it's possible someone at the agency took control of a server and failed to clean up after themselves.
A regime, hacker group, or intelligence agency could have seized the files and the opportunity to
embarrass the agency.
No progressives worth their name would vote for Hillary. Betrayal of Sanders made the choice
more difficult, but still there no alternative. Clinton "No passaran!". Also "Clinton proved capable
of coming to an agreement with Sanders. He received good money,
bought a new house, published a book, and joined with Clinton, calling on his supporters to vote
for her"...
Crappy slogans like "hold
her feet to the fire" are lies. Has there ever been serious detail about that? I've seen this line over
and over. Hillary is dyed-in-the-wool neoliberal and will behave as such as soon as she get
into office. You can view her iether as (more jingoistic) Obama II or (equally reckless) Bush III.
If she wins, the next opportunity to check her neoliberal leaning will
be only during the next Persidential election.
Notable quotes:
"... ...was Clinton the better progressive choice against Sanders? Almost no Sanders-supporting Democratic voter would say yes to that. Not on trade, not on climate, not on breaking up too-big Wall Street banks, not on criminally prosecuting (finally) "too big to jail" members of the elite - not on any number of issues that touch core progressives values. ..."
"... It's time for progressives who helped Hillary Clinton beat Bernie Sanders in the primary to take the lead on holding her accountable. ..."
"... She's now appointed two pro-TPP politicians to key positions on her campaign - Tim Kaine as her Vice President and Ken Salazar to lead her presidential transition team. It's time for progressives who helped Clinton beat Bernie Sanders in the primary to take the lead on holding her accountable. ..."
"... The choice of Salazar is a pretty good sign that as expected we'll be seeing the 'revolving door' in full force in a Clinton administration. As head of the transition he'll have enormous influence on who fills thousands of jobs at the White House and federal agencies. ..."
"... It is really important to stop referring to "job-killing trade deals" and point out every single time they are mentioned that the TPP, TTIP and TISA are about GOVERNANCE, not about "trade" in any sense that a normal person understands it. ..."
"... TPP & its ilk, like NAFTA and CAFTA before them, are about world government by multinational corporations via their Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) provisions. ..."
"... Regulatory arb, slice of corruption, and like shareholder value memes an equity burnishing tool… ..."
"... One thing I liked about Thom Hartmann was he relentlessly drove home the point that the US succeeded, grew, and became the dominant economic power in the world through the use of TARIFFS. Tariffs are necessary. ..."
"... The nafta-shafta deals relinquish the right to even think about tariffs. You don't have a sovereign nation any more. ..."
"... You can visit the prosperous Samsung-suburb of Suwon, Korea and see all the abandoned manufacturing space (where Korea was just a step on the path to Vietnam and Bangladesh). ..."
"... Information revolution automation is substituting machines for human intelligence. Here the race to the bottom is a single step, and these "trade" deals are all about rules of governance that will apply when people have been stripped of all economic power. ..."
"... merely infinite wealth and power for a thin oligarchy of robot/machine owners? ..."
"... Globalization and Technologization is a canard they use to explain the impoverishment and death of the working class. ..."
"... The fact that auto manufactures moved plants to low wage, nonunion, right to work states actually highlights the fact that labor costs drive the decision where to locate manufacturing plants. ..."
...was Clinton the better progressive choice against Sanders? Almost no Sanders-supporting Democratic
voter would say yes to that. Not on trade, not on climate, not on breaking up too-big Wall Street
banks, not on criminally prosecuting (finally) "too big to jail" members of the elite - not on any
number of issues that touch core progressives values.
... ... ...
Becky Bond on the Challenge to Clinton Supporters
...Bond looks at what the primary has wrought, and issues this challenge to activists who helped
defeat Sanders: You broke it, you bought it. Will you now take charge in the fight to hold Clinton
accountable? Or will you hang back (enjoying the fruits) and let others take the lead? ("Enjoying
the fruits" is my addition. As one attendee noted, the Democratic Convention this year seemed very
much like "a jobs fair.")
Bond says this, writing in
The Hill (my emphasis):
Progressive Clinton supporters: You broke it, you bought it
It's time for progressives who helped Hillary Clinton beat Bernie Sanders in the primary to
take the lead on holding her accountable.
With Donald Trump tanking in the polls, there's room for progressives to simultaneously
crush his bid for the presidency while holding Hillary Clinton's feet to the fire on the TPP
.
And yet:
She's now appointed two pro-TPP politicians to key positions on her campaign - Tim Kaine as her Vice President and Ken Salazar to lead her presidential transition team. It's
time for progressives who helped Clinton beat Bernie Sanders in the primary to take the lead on
holding her accountable.
... ... ...
Bond has more on Salazar and why both he and Tim Kaine are a "tell," a signal of things to come
from Hillary Clinton: "The choice of Salazar is a pretty good sign that as expected we'll be seeing
the 'revolving door' in full force in a Clinton administration. As head of the transition he'll have
enormous influence on who fills thousands of jobs at the White House and federal agencies."
It is really important to stop referring to "job-killing trade deals" and point out every single
time they are mentioned that the TPP, TTIP and TISA are about GOVERNANCE, not about "trade" in
any sense that a normal person understands it.
This is the evil behind the lie of calling these
"trade" agreements and putting the focus on "jobs." TPP & its ilk, like NAFTA and CAFTA before
them, are about world government by multinational corporations via their Investor State Dispute
Settlement (ISDS) provisions.
That's what's at stake; not jobs. The jobs will be lost to automation
anyway; they are never coming back. The TPP et al legal straight jackets do not sell out jobs,
that's already been done. No, what these phony trade agreements do is foreclose any hope of achieving
functioning democracies. Please start saying so!
I miss-typed above. Of course I meant TPP and not ttp.
Yes, WTO, NAFTA, CAFTA, etc., certainly killed jobs. However, those jobs are not coming back
to these shores. In the higher wage countries, "good" jobs - in manufacturing and in many "knowledge"
and "service" sectors - as well as unskilled jobs, are being or have been replaced with automated
means and methods.
Just a few examples: automobile assemblers; retail cashiers; secretaries; steelworkers; highway
toll collectors; gas station attendants. ETC. Here's what's happened so far just in terms of Great
Lakes freighters:
"The wheelman stood behind Captain Ross, clutching a surprisingly tiny, computerized steering
wheel. He wore driving gloves and turned the Equinox every few seconds in whatever direction the
captain told him to. The wheel, computer monitors and what looked like a server farm filling the
wheelhouse are indicative of changes in the shipping industry. Twenty years ago, it took 35 crew
members to run a laker. The Equinox operates with 16, only a handful of whom are on duty at once."
TPP, TTIP and TISA are about GOVERNANCE, not trade, and only very incidentally, jobs. The rulers
of the universe vastly prefer paying no wages to paying low wages, and whatever can be automated,
will be, eventually in low-wage countries as well as here and in Europe. A great deal of this
has already happened and it will continue. Only 5 sections of the TPP even deal with trade–that's
out of 29. Don't take this on my authority; Public Citizen is the gold standard of analysis regarding
these so-called "trade" agreements.
It took the OverClass several decades to send all those jobs away from our shores. It would
take several decades to bring those jobs back to our shores. But it could be done within a context
of militant belligerent protectionism.
Americans are smart enough to make spoons, knives and forks. We used to make them. We could
make them again. The only obstacles are contrived and artificial political-economic and policy
obstacles. Apply a different Market Forcefield to the American Market, and the actors within that
market would act differently over the several decades to come.
One thing I liked about Thom Hartmann was he relentlessly drove home the point that the US
succeeded, grew, and became the dominant economic power in the world through the use of TARIFFS.
Tariffs are necessary. They protect your industries while at the same time bringing in a lot of
revenue.
The nafta-shafta deals relinquish the right to even think about tariffs. You don't have a
sovereign
nation any more.
The first round of industrial revolution automation substituted machines for human/horse mechanical
exertion. We reached "peak horse" around 1900, and the move to low-wage/low-regulation states
was just a step on the global race to the bottom. You can visit the prosperous Samsung-suburb
of Suwon, Korea and see all the abandoned manufacturing space (where Korea was just a step on
the path to Vietnam and Bangladesh).
Information revolution automation is substituting machines for human intelligence. Here the
race to the bottom is a single step, and these "trade" deals are all about rules of governance
that will apply when people have been stripped of all economic power.
Will the rise of the machines lead to abundance for all, or merely infinite wealth and power
for a thin oligarchy of robot/machine owners? TPP and it's ilk may be the last chance for we the
people to have any say in it.
Manufacturing
is in decline due to Reagan's tax cuts and low investment. Globalization and Technologization
is a canard they use to explain the impoverishment and death of the working class.
@Squirrel – Labor costs, as you say, are a driving force; they are not the only one.
Notice that the products you mentioned are all large heavy items. In these cases the transportation
costs are high enough that the companies want their production to be close to their final market.
The lower cost of labor elsewhere is not enough to compensate for the higher shipping costs from
those locations. In addition, the wage gap between the US and other places has narrowed over the
past 20 years, mostly due to the ongoing suppression of wage gains in the US. Your examples are
exceptions that do not falsify the original premise that a huge amount of manufacturing has moved
to lower wage locations. And those moves are still ongoing, e.g., Carrier moving to Mexico.
The cost of manufactured goods has not fallen because the labor savings is going to profit
and executive compensation, not reduced prices.
The fact that auto manufactures moved plants to low wage, nonunion, right to work states actually
highlights the fact that labor costs drive the decision where to locate manufacturing plants.
"... Buchanan: "The Czechs had their Prague Spring. The Tunisians and Egyptians their Arab Spring. When do we have our American Spring? The Brits had their 'Brexit' and declared independence of an arrogant superstate in Brussels. How do we liberate ourselves from a Beltway superstate that is more powerful and resistant to democratic change? Our CIA, NGOs and National Endowment for Democracy all beaver away for 'regime change' in faraway lands whose rulers displease us. How do we effect 'regime change' here at home?" ..."
"... He goes on to quote John F. Kennedy saying, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable," and closes with a reference to Credence Clearwater, "But if Hillary Clinton takes power, and continues America on her present course, which a majority of Americans rejected in the primaries, there is going to a bad moon rising." ..."
"... though both stood against the conservative mainstream to champion economic nationalism, the two men couldn't be further apart in their intellectual sophistication and their sense of poetry ..."
"... "Putin may be seeing the future with more clarity than Americans still caught up in a Cold War paradigm," Buchanan wrote. He also reassured readers that "Putin says his mother had him secretly baptized as a baby and professes to be a Christian." ..."
Straining for relevance, Buchanan attaches himself to Trump, expresses admiration for Vladimir
Putin.
... Buchanan, a senior advisor to Presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan, and who was
once considered the go-to guy for paleoconservatives, seemed to have faded in importance from those
heady days when he co-hosted CNN's Crossfire, and gave the rousing and incendiary culture war speech
at the 1992 Republican Party convention.
As The Australian's Nikki Savva recently wrote, Buchanan "ran against the first George Bush for
the Republican nomination, promising to build a wall or dig a giant ditch along the border between
the US and Mexico. So it's not a new idea. The same people cheering Trump now applauded Buchanan
then - it's just their numbers have grown." Now, thanks to Donald Trump's candidacy, and the band
of white nationalists supporting him, Buchanan is in full pundefocating mode.
According to People for the American Way's Right Wing Watch, Buchanan, the author of the new book
"The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose From Defeat to Create the New Majority," is all in
with Trump's claim that if he loses it will be because the election is rigged. And, furthermore,
according to Buchanan, Trump's loss could signal the beginning of a revolution in America.
In a WND column headlined "Yes, The System Is Rigged," Buchanan – whose column is syndicated in
a number of mainstream newspapers -- maintains that if the election "ends with a Clintonite restoration
and a ratification of the same old Beltway policies, would that not suggest there is something fraudulent
about American democracy, something rotten in the state?"
Buchanan: "The Czechs had their Prague Spring. The Tunisians and Egyptians their Arab Spring.
When do we have our American Spring? The Brits had their 'Brexit' and declared independence of an
arrogant superstate in Brussels. How do we liberate ourselves from a Beltway superstate that is more
powerful and resistant to democratic change? Our CIA, NGOs and National Endowment for Democracy all
beaver away for 'regime change' in faraway lands whose rulers displease us. How do we effect 'regime
change' here at home?"
He goes on to quote John F. Kennedy saying, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible
will make violent revolution inevitable," and closes with a reference to Credence Clearwater, "But
if Hillary Clinton takes power, and continues America on her present course, which a majority of
Americans rejected in the primaries, there is going to a bad moon rising."
... ... ...
Interestingly, in a post-GOP convention column, Slate's Reihan Salam argued that Trump missed
a golden opportunity to soften his image: "He should have taken a page from Pat Buchanan, a man who
is in many ways Trump's spiritual predecessor. Though both Buchanan and Trump have indulged in inflammatory
racial rhetoric, and though both stood against the conservative mainstream to champion economic
nationalism, the two men couldn't be further apart in their intellectual sophistication and their
sense of poetry. And while Buchanan came to his blend of traditionalism and nationalism honestly,
one still gets the sense that Trump simply saw an opportunity to exploit the GOP's working-class
primary electorate and went for it."
In addition to his "inflammatory racial rhetoric," in recent years, Buchanan has not been shy
in expressing his admiration for Russia's Vladimir Putin. As Boulder Weekly's Dave Anderson recently
pointed out, in a 2013 column titled "Is Putin One of Us?" Buchanan "noted that while a 'de-Christianized'
United States has been embracing 'homosexual marriage, pornography, promiscuity, and the whole panoply
of Hollywood values,' the Russian president has stood up for traditional values. He praised Putin's
disparaging of homosexuals, feminists and immigrants."
"Putin may be seeing the future with more clarity than Americans still caught up in a Cold
War paradigm," Buchanan wrote. He also reassured readers that "Putin says his mother had him secretly
baptized as a baby and professes to be a Christian."
"... All these elections are equally fake. At some point you're going to have to stop pecking B.F. Skinner's levers, because the pellets have stopped coming out. But there's no point reasoning with you till your extinction burst finally subsides. ..."
"... This is not a very good piece for several reasons, one being only in the nonsense universe of US mainstream discourse can Clinton be termed a 'centrist' or can someone be depicted as a bona fide 'progressive' and also be a supporter of Clinton. I wouldn't waste a moment trying to pressure 'Clinton progressives' on anything – there is no historical evidence she or Bill have ever had the slightest interest in the public interest. At best a 'Clinton progressive' might claim to be 'defending' some existing public good, but good luck there as well – as Trump is not the source of any real 'threat', that distinction belonging to the existing power elites (military, financial, corporate, legal, media etc.) Clinton serves. ..."
"... The idea that Clinton ever was 'open' to progressives reminds me of why the putrid Rahm Emmanuel could dismiss the left as a 'bunch of retards'. Time to make them eat those words by taking ourselves and our values and our thinking seriously enough we stop fearing not being taken 'seriously' by so loathsome a crew as the Clintons. ..."
Here in Temple Grandin's touchy-feely slaughterhouse, Sanders gets 45% of the vote and leads
them down Hillary's cattle chute for slaughter – not cooption, not marginalization, but the bolt
gun to the head, with lots of sadistic poleaxing straight out of an illegal PETA video. The surviving
livestock are auctioned off for flensing through gleeful trading in influence. This we learn,
is not beyond redemption. In some demented psycho-Quaker sense, perhaps. What the fuck WON'T you
put up with?
In this psychotic mindset, Kim Jong Un's 99.97% victory proves he's like twice as worthwhile
as any Dem. Write him in. Nursultan Nazarbayev, too, his 98% success speaks for itself. Write
him in. All these elections are equally fake. At some point you're going to have to stop pecking
B.F. Skinner's levers, because the pellets have stopped coming out. But there's no point reasoning
with you till your extinction burst finally subsides.
Then we can talk about how you knock over moribund regimes.
This is not a very good piece for several reasons, one being only in the nonsense universe
of US mainstream discourse can Clinton be termed a 'centrist' or can someone be depicted as a
bona fide 'progressive' and also be a supporter of Clinton. I wouldn't waste a moment trying to
pressure 'Clinton progressives' on anything – there is no historical evidence she or Bill have
ever had the slightest interest in the public interest. At best a 'Clinton progressive' might
claim to be 'defending' some existing public good, but good luck there as well – as Trump is not
the source of any real 'threat', that distinction belonging to the existing power elites (military,
financial, corporate, legal, media etc.) Clinton serves.
There are 3 critical issues 'progressives', Greens, lefties, libertarians and others must come
together en masse to resist: TPP immediately, US foreign policy of permanent wars of aggression
now involving the entire Muslim world and fossil fuels. Don't waste any time hoping to influence
Clinton (you won't) or fretting about Trump. First TPP, then anti-War/anti-fossil fuels.
I am convinced TPP can be beaten – not with 'Clinton activists', but with a broad coalition
of interests. And once it has been beaten, the supremely idiotic 'war on terror' is next up. Americans'
votes and electoral desires have been ignored and suppressed. Other legitimate means therefore
must be taken up and utilized to change critical policy failures directly.
The idea that Clinton ever was 'open' to progressives reminds me of why the putrid Rahm Emmanuel
could dismiss the left as a 'bunch of retards'. Time to make them eat those words by taking ourselves
and our values and our thinking seriously enough we stop fearing not being taken 'seriously' by
so loathsome a crew as the Clintons.
"... Until she demonstrated her vile nature as Secretary of State, the problem with Hillary has been the cast of miscreants she surrounds herself with such as John Podesta. Obama might have actually at least not surrounded herself with such vile people, but Hillary's 2007 henchmen were a sign she was unfit for any office. Trying to grab an empty suit, Obama, before he made connections just made sense. ..."
"... Other than that, she was First Lady and an unremarkable Senator. The line about Mos Eisley from Star Wars accurately describes the Senate. ..."
"... I think "progressive" is a such a mushy term it's hard to fit anybody into it on any criteria other than that they identify themselves as such. ..."
"... That's why there's never a real answer to "Progress in what direction?" And the progressives of today have no historical "bloodline" connection to the Progressives of the late 19th and early 20th century (except maybe some vague technocratic leanings, the 10% of that day). ..."
"... But if Hillary Clinton and Ezra Klein at al. get to call themselves progressive, it's a useless term ..."
"... All I ever hear from Clinton supporters (even those newly aligned former Bernie supporters), is 'because Trump'. They appear starry-eyed and brainwashed because she's 'not Trump'. I don't predict any of 'em pushing Clinton on any issues. ..."
"... Even if they tried, Clinton has already shown, IMO, that unless you have millions of dollars to throw at her feet you'll never get her attention, let alone force any change in her policies. ..."
"... 2020 starts on November 9. Even if Clinton seems legitimate on election day, she'll delegitimize herself in short order. She won't be able to help herself. ..."
"... IMO she already did that at the end of the campaign trail by choosing Kaine as her running mate, Salazar for her transition team (& suggesting Bill as economic advisor?). http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/hillary_clintons_choice_of_ken_salazar_comes_under_fire_video_20160818 ..."
"... Kaine, along with IIRC Rahm, purged the Democrats of activists from Howard Dean's 50-state strategy post-2006. ..."
"... Hillary is a lying war hawk. ..."
"... Too bad Sanders turned out to be a sheepdog for the D party. He really should get the best actor in a political campaign award. After he endorsed Clinton it was clear as day it was ALL one big performance. ..."
"... Young Sanders voters had a damned clear idea of the limits of what he was offering. They voted for him anyway, because he just sucked so much less than the jowly pair of creeps who stand before us now. ..."
"... Can anyone doubt that Hillary will pull a super-Obama once elected, rejecting all her promises and implementing their opposites once elected? It amazes me that many people do, that they think they will have some ability to control policy. If things get too hot in the kitchen politically speaking, isn't it OBVIOUS that a 2-pronged propaganda effort will be unleashed, to hide blatantly unpopular moves on the one hand, and/or talk them up as if they were falsely maligned and in the TINA category on the other. ..."
"... "This really matters. That Clinton is a better progressive choice than Trump is not much contested." Really? Reeeeaaaaa lly? Perhaps, as others have said way upthread, that is part of the problem right there. ..."
"... Reading the article at this link should help progressives get over their fear of a President Trump. That fear is the only thing preventing them from voting for someone other than Clinton. Maybe the progressives should consider the possibility that they have nothing to fear but fear itself. ..."
"... Because when he focuses on the last few-couple decades and especially the last few years, including CLINTON'S last few years, he makes serious sense. As well as his discussion of who has what military capabilities nowadays, and what a mistaken estimation of who has what military capabilities nowadays can lead the mistakers to lead their country into, box-canyon-of-no-return speaking-wise. ..."
Until she demonstrated her vile nature as Secretary of State, the problem with Hillary has
been the cast of miscreants she surrounds herself with such as John Podesta. Obama might have
actually at least not surrounded herself with such vile people, but Hillary's 2007 henchmen were
a sign she was unfit for any office. Trying to grab an empty suit, Obama, before he made connections
just made sense.
Other than that, she was First Lady and an unremarkable Senator. The line about Mos Eisley
from Star Wars accurately describes the Senate.
I think "progressive" is a such a mushy term it's hard to fit anybody into it on any criteria
other than that they identify themselves as such. I was there for the creation of the term, and
there was a lot of discussion about it in the blogosphere at the time. Basically, the conservatives
had managed, by dint of repetition, in making "liberal" a dirty word, so they needed rebranding.
That's all "progressive" is; a rebranding.
That's why there's never a real answer to "Progress
in what direction?" And the progressives of today have no historical "bloodline" connection to
the Progressives of the late 19th and early 20th century (except maybe some vague technocratic
leanings, the 10% of that day).
I never liked the word liberal and never self-identified as such. Even as a kid, I think I
intuited its connection back to Locke and classical liberalism. I had been calling myself progressive
for a while, as it seemed like a nice connection to the earlier progressive movement pushing back
against the first Gilded Age and a way of talking about the left that wasn't too scary for people
trapped in the liberal paradigm.
But if Hillary Clinton and Ezra Klein at al. get to call themselves progressive, it's a useless
term. I've reverted back to "leftist". I strongly doubt Hill and Ezra will want that. We'll see.
Sorry, but I saw this article as little more than wishful thinking.
"It's time for progressives who helped Hillary Clinton beat Bernie Sanders in the primary to
take the lead on holding her accountable."
Not gonna happen.
Even if those supporting her were to 'make a little noise' over things they're opposed to, what
makes Bond think she'd listen? Wasn't the Dem convention revealing enough?
All I ever hear from Clinton supporters (even those newly aligned former Bernie supporters), is
'because Trump'.
They appear starry-eyed and brainwashed because she's 'not Trump'. I don't predict any of 'em
pushing Clinton on any issues.
Even if they tried, Clinton has already shown, IMO, that unless you have millions of dollars
to throw at her feet you'll never get her attention, let alone force any change in her policies.
2020 starts on November 9. Even if Clinton seems legitimate on election day, she'll delegitimize
herself in short order. She won't be able to help herself.
She also confirmed it at the convention by silencing those there to push for platform reform.
(I really had no idea just how much weight the head of a transition team carries until I watched
this video).
I'd like to add that although I will be in the voting booth come November, none of the presidential
candidates will get my vote. Trump is an ignorant egomaniac. Hillary is a lying war hawk. Johnson
is another right-wing looney. And Stein, while she has some really good stances, lied during the
CNN town hall (and I know because I actually read the Green Platform). I'm not even sure I will
vote for the Dem challenger to my lousy Repub senator because the challenger is just another party
hack who, like Hillary, only says what we want to hear.
Sanders did not "come out of nowhere".
I and others followed and heard him for years on the Tom Hartman show.
But I had gotten sick of hearing the talk but seeing no action and had stopped listening for at
least the past two years.
Also, the reason the "kids" took to him like wild was him calling for student loan cancellation.
And that's the god's truth.
Though his other messages about the rich looting us clean and needing to be stopped were what
any sane person in the country longed to hear and have changed.
Too bad Sanders turned out to be a sheepdog for the D party. He really should get the best actor in a political campaign award. After he endorsed Clinton it was clear as day it was ALL one big performance.
In my experience (6 years of pursuing a PhD late in life) young educated people today are so
much more savvy, less self-indulgent and broadly "grown up" than the peeved, aging boomers who
haunt this board…….. that this assertion is laugh-inducing.
Young Sanders voters had a damned clear idea of the limits of what he was offering. They voted
for him anyway, because he just sucked so much less than the jowly pair of creeps who stand before
us now.
Voting for someone who "sucked so much less" than the other candidates is not how a movement
gets started. If your assertion is correct, than things are not only looking dim for any reform
in the near future, but look equally bad for long range reform. Hate is too self consuming to
maintain constantly without renouncing ones humanity. Hope, as the histories of religions show,
can keep chugging along for millennia. "True believers" did start in the religious sphere and
transfer to other spheres of human endeavour.
I think what people have forgotten, or have no current experience with, is the actual radical,
and destructive nature of Capitalism as a social organizing structure. It is the ocean in which
we all swim or the air we all breathe, so take for granted – unreflectively. Commoners cannot
connect the misery they experience daily with the system they live under. Capitalists can only
double down on their life strategy. The second they hesitate, the game is up. It is an all or
nothing strategy. In America, you are given no breathing space. No tolerance for dissent.
A reformed capitalism ceases to be capitalism. Just as the divine right of Kings falls away
when individual liberty takes hold in the mind. The two thoughts are incompatible.
What is the capitalist goal? To control all- to exploit all? Don't capitalists already possess
that power in disguised form already? What is it that they want anyway? Power over individual
lives? Materially, the ruling elite have everything already, they have won the struggle of Owners
over Labor. We have come full circle to where the elite now require our public displays of affection
for their greatness once again. Freedom and liberty of the individual be dammed if not the right
individual.
If forced to express their vision for the human future, the ruling elite would be exposed as
the shallow frauds that they are. They have no vision other than the ceaseless striving for material
personal wealth. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are a logical result of an unrelenting capitalist
system. They are its products.
What is the logical end for capitalism? It is an ideology that needs competition to survive.
But what happens when there are no more foes to conquer? No more resources to exploit for profit?.
America is a nation of chaos because it is the leader of the capitalist world. It is not a
nation of diverse strength and stability. It is a teetering behemoth, struggling not to fall over
from neglect and self inflicted wounds perpetrated by sociopathic ideologues.
Hopefully, the con game has lost it's effectiveness as harsh reality sinks in. As always, its
having a plan ready to go and implement when the crash finally occurs. If the left does't have
that plan ready, we all deserve what comes.
I'm really baffled at the surprise felt at Hillary's choice of associates, and at the policy
decisions likely to follow. It reminds me of Condoleeza Rice statement that no one could have
seen 911 coming, when drills had been ongoing to handle exactly this eventuality.
Can anyone doubt that Hillary will pull a super-Obama once elected, rejecting all her promises
and implementing their opposites once elected? It amazes me that many people do, that they think
they will have some ability to control policy. If things get too hot in the kitchen politically
speaking, isn't it OBVIOUS that a 2-pronged propaganda effort will be unleashed, to hide blatantly
unpopular moves on the one hand, and/or talk them up as if they were falsely maligned and in the
TINA category on the other.
I state these opinions feeling on the one hand, as if I have 2 heads because this view seems
so marginal among the populace, but on the other feeling eerily vindicated, as if I've been seeing
a train coming down the track and striking a crowd of people, none of whom apparently saw or did
anything during its approach. Is not the political outcome obvious? Hasn't anyone else seen through
the level of propaganda diminishing her crimes as either nonexistent or unprosecutable?
Well, I can entertain myself watching the propaganda, and watching how far political and ethical
opinions can be twisted. Like the train metaphor, there's a certain macabre fascination to be
savored. This is undoubtedly corrosive to my ethical and moral sensibilities, but trivially compared
to all else.
God I hate the phony framing of "hold her feet to the fire". After she's elected there is simply
no way to do that. The only way her desired policies could be thwarted is by forcing enough members
of Congress not to vote for certain bills like the TPP. But even then, nothing we can do can force
her to change executive orders and executive branch policies or priorities.
Bond is not even going to do the feet-to-fire holding herself. She's assigning it to someone
else based on a standard she's devised. You broke it, you bought it. Give me a break.
If you want to send the democrat party a message, you deny them the win. Period. It's how elections
work. You don't get the job if your performance is piss poor.
All this wishy-washiness over giving an unsuitable candidate a job and then assigning someone
to stand guard over them to make sure they do it to your satisfaction when you've known from the
beginning that s/he won't is just a weak excuse for taking the easy way out.
You want to send a message to the democrat party that they better shape up now, you vote for
Trump. And hold HIS feet to the fire. Two birds, one stone
"Progressives who supported Clinton in the primary should use their leverage to ensure Clinton
makes good on her vow to stop TPP and keep other promises she made on the campaign trail to win
progressive votes. "
This is crapified politics that we've heard before, over and over. HOW are they going to "hold
her feet to the fire?" Has there ever been serious detail about that? I've seen this line over
and over, but it's NEVER operational, and more important, it can't be. The next opportunity is
4 long years off; she could be dead by then, so could they, and the Republicans will nominate
Cruz.
All that leaves is insurrectionary street action; anything else is easy to ignore, and they
know they have progressives hog-tied – hell, the progs did it to themselves.
This hogswill is nothing but the same lesser-evilism that got us here. I suspect GP agrees;
I'm responding to the quote.
I think "hold her feet to the fire" means progressives will get on all fours and act as an
Ottoman for Her Grace during a cold D.C winter's night. They seem to be doing it now.
"This really matters. That Clinton is a better progressive choice than Trump is not much contested."
Really? Reeeeaaaaa lly? Perhaps, as others have said way upthread, that is part of the problem
right there.
Perhaps people should consider the possibility that Clinton is the More Effective evil. Perhaps
a Trump Administration would be a bunch of sound and fury and clown car fire drills signifying
nothing. Whereas a Clinton Administration would be staffed and powered by Decromatic and Third
Way Cheneys who know where all the knobs, levers and buttons of power are. And they are determined
that what they want . . . they will get.
One of Ian Welsh's favorite commenters brought this link to his blog.
markfromireland PERMALINK
August 19, 2016
There are lots of reasons not to vote for Clinton and the suppurating corruption she represents.
Not letting her owners play with matches rates high among them
Some of the insulting language is harsh on the tender eyeballs of sensitive leftists. I would
suggest gritting one's teeth and powering through the relatively few insulting words and phrases.
Most of it is fact-based and evidence-supported reasoned reasons to prevent Clinton from getting
elected. Reading the article at this link should help progressives get over their fear of a President
Trump. That fear is the only thing preventing them from voting for someone other than Clinton.
Maybe the progressives should consider the possibility that they have nothing to fear but fear
itself.
Yes, one's eyeballs could be pretty tough and still find that one difficult. Still, it pays
to grind one's teeth and power through.
Because when he focuses on the last few-couple decades
and especially the last few years, including CLINTON'S last few years, he makes serious sense.
As well as his discussion of who has what military capabilities nowadays, and what a mistaken
estimation of who has what military capabilities nowadays can lead the mistakers to lead their
country into, box-canyon-of-no-return speaking-wise.
"... That means that out of all the TV channels we watch, the radio stations we listen to and the movies we see are owned by one of these six main corporations. ..."
"... People are almost "forced" to wonder if the media controls as well our public taste and interest. They control the information we receive, but not only that, they control exactly what we receive and the way we do, therefore they control what we think. Media companies do not care about how they can be more objective and provide people news and information with a neutral point of view (even thought it sounds contradictory). We could say that they "unintentionally" or "indirectly" tell us what to think and what to believe. ..."
"... The media's duty is to provide objective information to the public through newspapers, television and radio, in order for the public to make public as well as personal decisions in the diverse fields. ..."
Media ownership is becoming more and more concentrated these days as multi-billion dollar companies
such as News corporation, Time warner and Disney company control almost all the shares of the mass
media.
A total of six corporations control almost 90% of the mainstream media nowadays. That means that
out of all the TV channels we watch, the radio stations we listen to and the movies we see are owned
by one of these six main corporations. Is this a good or a bad situation? Is the fact that almost
the whole media is owned by a very few a positive or a negative aspect? Some argue that this brings
benefits to the free market, the multi-billion companies and ultimately, the viewers. On the other
hand, others say that this concentration of media ownership has a negative effect on the market and
on society as a whole (articleworld.org).
People are almost "forced" to wonder if the media controls as well our public taste and interest.
They control the information we receive, but not only that, they control exactly what we receive
and the way we do, therefore they control what we think. Media companies do not care about how they
can be more objective and provide people news and information with a neutral point of view
(even thought it sounds contradictory). We could say that they "unintentionally" or "indirectly"
tell us what to think and what to believe. A newspaper finds some news and automatically interprets
them, even though journalists try to focus on the facts, as many claim, they subconsciously have
and opinion about whatever subject they are reporting about. This takes us to the point of "lack
of diversity" that is a reality nowadays and that so many criticize. Danny Schechter, a television
producer, independent filmmaker, blogger, and media critic states that "we have many channels and
a tremendous lack of diversity." It wouldn't be strange to think that a news broadcast would withhold
information if it had a negative effect on the company.
From an international perspective, this situation of media merging is also beneficial for the
big conglomerates. For instance, News Corporation owns the top newspaper on 3 continents, that is
the Wall Street Journal in the U.S, The Sun in Europe and The Australian in Australia (Lutz, Jason,
2012). The positive aspect of this, is that the spreading of this "influence" is good for the company,
and at the same time, readers get what they want, which is reading that newspaper. However, the bad
aspect is that big conglomerates are big companies, and big companies main priority is always money,
above everything else. Getting more readers, viewers and listeners is for the one and only purpose
that matters to them: Money. That is what brings bad or "controversial" consequences, and one of
them is that in 2012, they avoided $875 million in U.S taxes (Lutz, Jason, 2012). That would have
been enough to double FEMA's budget, or to fund NPR for 40 years. Nonetheless, technically this cannot
be criticized since they are a private corporation after all. Another issue that is a big concern
in the European Union is the media transparency and plurality.
Transparency is an essential component
of pluralism (Stolte & Smith, 2010). Although the Council of Europe and the European Parliament have
brought out recommendations regarding media transparency in the last few years, these have not been
acted on. It is left to Member States to implement legislation regarding media ownership transparency,
and there is by no means a unified or standard approach to be found across Europe (Stolte & Smith,
2010). This is a big issue in the European Union. The media's duty is to provide objective information
to the public through newspapers, television and radio, in order for the public to make public as
well as personal decisions in the diverse fields.
It may sound scary -and it does to a lot of people- the fact that all our media is controlled
by a few big conglomerates, forming an oligopoly, with the power of doing -almost- whatever they
want. Also, it is true that this situation implies a very few and personal points of view, and the
opportunity for those big conglomerates to "control" in a way what goes out, and how it does. Making
the audience think in a certain way. This Infographic shows the media ownsership in the U.S currently.
This is a serious hit. And timing is perfect. Ukrainian government has connections to Hillary.
If this is not interference n US election, I do not know what is. And
Clinton Foundation ties to Ukraine are not investigated. Podesta firm (run by his brother) is
involved by this involvement is hashed down. There is an interesting implicit hypothesis
voiced in this article: the regime that replaced Yanukovich is less corrupt and less beholder to impoverishing
Ukraine for the benefit of neoliberals like Soros. But the truth is that the country is now is much
poor then it was under Yanukovich with his thieves. The best way to convert the country into debt slave
is to wage a war. That's exactly what new leaders immediately did. See
Ukraine denouement Michael Hudson.
Of course FBI will not be investigating that. Like they refuse to investigate things about Hillary.
Neoliberals are above the law, other people not so much.
Isicoff said that Trump is attempting to delegitimize the current political establishment. I
think he is correct if he means neoliberals (which MSM are afraid to call by name; imagine the same
situation with communists when members of communist party were prohibited to call themselves
communist; that would make communism closer to neoliberalism (which is essentially Trotskyism for
rich)
Notable quotes:
"... Another firm, the Podesta Group, headed by Tony Podesta, brother of Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta, was also recruited by a Manafort deputy and lobbied for the European Centre. In a lengthy statement Friday, the Podesta Group said it had retained another Washington law firm, Caplin & Drysdale,"to determine if we were misled by the Centre for a Modern Ukraine or any other individuals with regard to the Centre's potential ties to foreign governments or political parties." ..."
"... The lobbyists, political operators and former politicians are allowed to play all three roles interchangeably and that has (and continues) to lead to US foreign policies that consistently work AGAINST the best interests of the American people and the future well being of the country BUT in the in financial best interests of the special interests who own our elected officials and the mainstream media and thus call the shots. ..."
"... This current case is a very close parallel to the case presidential candidate John McCains' chief foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann, who was a paid lobbyist for for the former Soviet republic of Georgia which explains McCain's insistent that the US should intervene in the Russian/Geogian conflict of 2008 by bombing the pass thru which Russian troops were streaming into Georgia following Georgia attempt to claim South Ossetia and Abkhazia by force of arms. Yes, contrary to US media reports that was was started by the Georgians when they decided to invade and take back by force a couple of disputed regions and killed a number of Russian peacekeeper in the process. ..."
"... So I guess this means that the FBI will give the Clinton Foundation similar scrutiny since Manafort's $12 million is chump change compared to the hundreds of millions the Clintons got from shady foreign governments in exchange for special favors. Yeah, right! Funny, I didn't know Manafort had more power in the US than the Clintons and so was more dangerous to national security. ..."
"... Typical Clinton Machine deflection and distraction from their own worse crimes. Typical pro Hillary Yahoo 'news.' Read Breitbart and the Daily Caller, folks if you want real investigative reporting. ..."
"... The FBI and Department of Justice have launched an investigation into whether the Podesta Group has any connections to alleged corruption that occurred in the administration of former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. ..."
"... It turns out that Hillary Clinton's campaign guru, head of the lobbying firm the Podesta Group, has found himself smack dab in the middle of the same criminal investigation spawned when devious political operatives decide to merge international relations with campaign politics. For weeks, the pages of the Washington Post, the Daily Beast, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal have chimed that Trump is a "Putin pawn" as part of some maniacal plot by the Kremlin to interfere with the US election. ..."
"... The controversy for Podesta links to his work for the Centre for a Modern Ukraine, a Brussels based organization that describes itself as "an advocate for enhancing EU-Ukraine relations." Unfortunately for Mr. Podesta, the organization has been described as "an operation controlled by Yanukovych" and tied to the former leader's Party of Regions suggesting the Podesta Group may have been, like has been said of Paul Manafort, tasked with greater reporting requirements pursuant to US law. ..."
The Justice Department and the FBI are conducting a wide-ranging investigation into allegations
of corrupt dealings by the government of former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, including
the hiring of Washington lobbyists for the regime by former Donald Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort,
a senior law enforcement official confirmed to Yahoo News.
The investigation, which was first reported by CNN, began two years ago after Yanukovych fled
Kiev to Moscow and was replaced by the current government of Petro Poroshenko, the official said.
But the inquiry has expanded in recent weeks in the wake of the discovery of documents showing $12.7
million in payments to Manafort by Yanukovych's Party of Regions political party. Investigators are
also looking into reports that Manafort recruited two top Washington lobbying firms to advocate on
behalf of a Belgian nonprofit that investigators now believe may have served as a front for Yanukovych's
party. Neither of the firms, the Mercury Group and the Podesta Group, registered with the U.S. Justice
Department as foreign agents - a requirement if they represented a foreign government or political
party.
The disclosure of the Justice Department investigation came on the same day that Manafort stepped
down as Trump's campaign chairman - news that sent new shockwaves through Republican circles. Manafort,
who served for years as a campaign consultant to Yanukovych, declined requests for comment. But a
close associate of his who asked not to be identified explained his resignation this way: Manafort
"is not going to take orders or relinquish power to people like" Kellyanne Conway, the new Trump
campaign manager, and Steve Bannon, the newly named CEO of the campaign. The Manafort associate also
blamed the rapidly unfolding Ukraine allegations on "oppo research" being spread by Corey Lewandowski,
Trump's former campaign manager and a bitter foe of Manafort
Ken Gross, a lawyer at Skadden Arps, which represents the Mercury Group, one of the lobbying firms
recruited by Manafort, told Yahoo News that his firm has been "engaged to look into the matter" of
whether Mercury was required to register as a foreign agent with the Justice Department when, at
Manafort's request, it agreed to represent the Brussels-based European Centre for a Modern Ukraine
in 2012. Lobbying reports reviewed by Yahoo News show that the firms sought to burnish Yanokovych's
reputation and lobbied against congressional resolutions condemning the regime's treatment of political
opponents and opposing Russian aggression in Ukraine.
Another firm, the Podesta Group, headed by Tony Podesta, brother of Hillary Clinton's campaign
chairman, John Podesta, was also recruited by a Manafort deputy and lobbied for the European Centre.
In a lengthy statement Friday, the Podesta Group said it had retained another Washington law firm,
Caplin & Drysdale,"to determine if we were misled by the Centre for a Modern Ukraine or any other
individuals with regard to the Centre's potential ties to foreign governments or political parties."
The statement added: "When the Centre became a client, it certified in writing that 'none of the
activities of the Centre are directly or indirectly supervised, directed, controlled, financed or
subsidized in whole or in part by a government of a foreign country or a foreign political party.'
We relied on that certification and advice from counsel in registering and reporting under the Lobbying
Disclosure Act rather than the Foreign Agents Registration Act. We will take whatever measures are
necessary to address this situation based on Caplin & Drysdale's review, including possible legal
action against the Centre."
Sevgil Musaieva, editor of Ukrainskaye Pravda, a newspaper that has conducted multiple investigations
into corruption under the Yanukovych regime, told Yahoo News that she first met with a team of FBI
agents at the U.S. Embassy in Kiev two years ago. At the time, the new government headed by Poroshenko
had asked the FBI for assistance in tracking down millions of dollars that it believed had been stolen
by Yanukovych and his associates before they fled Kiev. "The FBI came to Kiev and started an investigation,"
she said. They asked her detailed questions about what she knew about allegations of corrupt dealings
by the Yanukovych regime.
But sources familiar with the probe say it expanded after a Ukrainian anticorruption bureau discovered
a "black book" said to show "off-the-books" cash payments from the party to Manafort totaling $12.7
million between 2007 and 2012. Entries show that some of the payments were signed by a former member
of the Ukrainian Parliament who was also a board member of the European Centre. Documents also purportedly
show payments to the executive director of the center, according to a source familiar with the probe,
reinforcing suspicions that the group was fronting for Yanukovych's political party.
Sage
The lobbyists, political operators and former politicians are allowed to play all three
roles interchangeably and that has (and continues) to lead to US foreign policies that
consistently work AGAINST the best interests of the American people and the future well being
of the country BUT in the in financial best interests of the special interests who own our
elected officials and the mainstream media and thus call the shots.
Manafort is getting all this negative publicity only now, years AFTER the fact, because of two
reasons---1) the political/special interests are deathly afraid that a Trump victory because
they may not be able to control him and thus he might upset their lucrative apple cart that
has made them obscenely wealthy at the expense of the rest of the country; and 2)secondly
because that Manafort was backing the wrong horse in a race in which the special interests are
actively trying to isolate and surround Russian militarily in order to remove a potential
obstacle to their goal of global domination thru bought and paid for US politicians.
However, this incestuous and obscene criminal behavior involving lobbyist/political operator
has been going on for a long time and it much wider spread than is normally reported because
the special interest owed media usually has no reason to expose it; in fact they usually have
reason NOT to expose it.
This current case is a very close parallel to the case presidential candidate John McCains'
chief foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann, who was a paid lobbyist for for the former
Soviet republic of Georgia which explains McCain's insistent that the US should intervene in
the Russian/Geogian conflict of 2008 by bombing the pass thru which Russian troops were
streaming into Georgia following Georgia attempt to claim South Ossetia and Abkhazia by force
of arms. Yes, contrary to US media reports that was was started by the Georgians when they
decided to invade and take back by force a couple of disputed regions and killed a number of
Russian peacekeeper in the process.
Of course Scheunemann, unlike Manafort, came out completely unscathed and totally untouched by
the media because war lover McCain supported the special interests' agenda because unlike
Manafort, he was aiding and abetting the same "horse" the neo-con State Dept and the CIA had
their bets on.
A Mcp
So I guess this means that the FBI will give the Clinton Foundation similar scrutiny since Manafort's
$12 million is chump change compared to the hundreds of millions the Clintons got from shady foreign
governments in exchange for special favors. Yeah, right! Funny, I didn't know Manafort had more power
in the US than the Clintons and so was more dangerous to national security.
Typical Clinton Machine deflection and distraction from their own worse crimes. Typical pro Hillary
Yahoo 'news.' Read Breitbart and the Daily Caller, folks if you want real investigative reporting.
Billy Willy
So you biased Hillary asslickers think we don;t know about her SAME issues? So report on this
you morons:
The FBI and Department of Justice have launched an investigation into whether the Podesta Group
has any connections to alleged corruption that occurred in the administration of former Ukrainian
President Viktor Yanukovych.
It seems like just yesterday that the top campaign official for Donald Trump found himself caught
in the middle of a political dragnet for his work as a lobbyist on behalf of Viktor Yanukovych with
the media clamoring about his purported ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin as a reason why
the Republican nominee was a less desirable candidate than Hillary Clinton. Wait, that was just yesterday?
It turns out that Hillary Clinton's campaign guru, head of the lobbying firm the Podesta Group,
has found himself smack dab in the middle of the same criminal investigation spawned when devious
political operatives decide to merge international relations with campaign politics. For weeks, the
pages of the Washington Post, the Daily Beast, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal have
chimed that Trump is a "Putin pawn" as part of some maniacal plot by the Kremlin to interfere with
the US election.
Turns out, the Podesta Group founded by none other than John Podesta, Hillary's campaign chair
and chief strategies, was retained by the Russian-owned firm UraniumOne in 2012, 2014, and 2015 to
lobby Hillary Clinton's State Department based on John Podesta's longstanding relations with the
Clinton family – he was the White House Chief of Staff under Bill Clinton.
Interestingly, UraniumOne's chairman used his family foundation to make four donations totaling
$2.35 million to the Clinton Foundation from 2009 to 2013. Perhaps a more blatant evidence of allegations
that Hillary Clinton's State Department operated on a pay-to-play basis is the fact that, as the
New York Times reported last April, "shortly after the Russians announced their intention to acquire
a majority stake in Uranium One, Mr. Clinton received $500,000 for a Moscow speech from a Russian
investment bank with links to the Kremlin that was promoting UraniumOne stock.
Not only are investigators wondering whether there was any impropriety in the lobbying arrangement
such as the provision of beneficial treatment by the State Department to an old friend, but they
are also probing the work that Viktor Yanukovych's regime paid the Podesta Group to do while he was
the head of the Ukrainian government.
The controversy for Podesta links to his work for the Centre for a Modern Ukraine, a Brussels
based organization that describes itself as "an advocate for enhancing EU-Ukraine relations." Unfortunately
for Mr. Podesta, the organization has been described as "an operation controlled by Yanukovych" and
tied to the former leader's Party of Regions suggesting the Podesta Group may have been, like has
been said of Paul Manafort, tasked with greater reporting requirements pursuant to US law.
The Podesta Group quickly hired the white-shoe law firm Caplin & Drysdale as "independent, outside
legal counsel to determine if we were misled by the Centre for a Modern Ukraine or any other individuals
with regard to the Centre's potential ties to foreign governments or political parties."
Alan
The bummers FBI who just let off Hillary who should have been indicted and imprisoned? What a
shock that they are involved.
This
Maureen Dowd
column reminds me writing about Western capitalist society by some not too brainwashed Soviet
propagandists. She managed to put into anti-trump diatibe (which is a requirement for
NYT writers; to writing such column is a must; this is just a survival skill) some really damning
things about Hillary.
Notable quotes:
"... She's like Lyin' Lochte, just sorry she got caught. Hearing her apologize is as likely as seeing those 33,000 yoga emails. ..."
"... I'm sorry the Clintons didn't realize until now how bad it was to be using the State Department as a favor factory for big donors to the foundation. I'm all for pay-for-play, but only at my golf courses. ..."
"... I'm sorry Hillary had to besmirch poor Colin Powell by claiming he gave her the idea for private emails. Hasn't his reputation suffered enough pushing that phony war at the U.N.? ..."
I hated to ship Paul off to Siberia. But Jared and Corey told me I couldn't get swept up in an
international money-laundering scandal while I was accusing Hillary of doing favors at State for
a money launderer and Clinton Foundation donor.
... ... ...
I'm sorry Huma is posing for Vogue instead of keeping her husband, the pervert, from
sexting online again.
... ... ...
I'm sorry that while I'm being too honest, Crooked Hillary is never really sorry for all her
lies and illegal operations. She's like Lyin' Lochte, just sorry she got caught. Hearing her
apologize is as likely as seeing those 33,000 yoga emails.
I'm sorry the Clintons didn't realize until now how bad it was to be using the State
Department as a favor factory for big donors to the foundation. I'm all for pay-for-play, but
only at my golf courses.
I'm sorry Hillary had to besmirch poor Colin Powell by claiming he gave her the idea for
private emails. Hasn't his reputation suffered enough pushing that phony war at the U.N.?
"... Carla, you are right about the main focus of these trade deals. Sure, it's about degrading labor and avoiding sensible regulation. More importantly, it's about making an end run around democracy and enscouncing the profiteers above governments. The Clinton's, along with Obama, have consistently sided with these elites. ..."
"... Trump is against globalistion, bad trade deals, interminable foreign wars and wants to fix America by bringing back jobs, etc. The standard line is that Trump is - oh horror – "racist" because he wants to stop immigation. Therefore, etc. ..."
"... FedupPleb – My thought exactly. Trump has personality issues but many of his positions, sketchy as they are, are in the right ballpark. Clinton by contrast seems to be rated "progressive" mainly because of surprisingly enduring loyalty to the Democrat brand. ..."
"... The Clintonites are selling First Woman President as an Identity-Progressive goal and achievement. Just as the Obamazoids sold First Black President as an Identity-Progressive goal and achievement. ..."
"... No, he has called for a $10 minimum wage. http://www.cnn.com/2016/07/27/politics/donald-trump-minimum-wage Not great but not nuthin'. ..."
"... the bible thumping crowd. Those constituents are not internationalist or pro trade deals. They have been afraid of 'world government' as opposed to nationalism; they have wanted even more local control for decades. ..."
"... These 'allies' will move the ball. They will shake up the existing coalitions vs the stagnation and corruption we have now. Even as a switch between sets of oligarchs, if they keep Trump's promises, they will give the populace some breathing room. ..."
"... When a republican candidate, Trump, can push Hillary to the left on such major issues as on war and trade deals, is she really the progressive here? A true progressive would not need to be dragged or pushed to the left. These are MAJOR issues. ..."
"... Her warmonging and TPP support count against her. Her history in Haiti, etc., count against her. That's not to defend Trump as progressive in any meaningful sense. Just that Clinton is no improvement. ..."
"... Agreed. This is a joke and Becky Bond, whoever she is, is living in a fantasy world if she thinks these faux progressive careerists will do anything to jeopardize their cush positions (or chance at cush positions, pathetic as that is). ..."
"... I visit their blogs and watch them: its either outright Stockholm Syndrome (for those who had or have an ethical bone in their bodies) or insincere and dishonest posturing as "progressives" all around. They will hold Clinton as accountable as they held Obama. ..."
"... The Clinton supporters that live in her bubble are insiders will never betray her because they benefit from the jobs they hope/will have in her administration. ..."
"... "The narrative that it was the big bad obstructionist Republicans that stopped Obama's change is mostly false." I think it's totally false. If Obama had been who he portrayed on TV pre-election, the democrats would not have lost their seats in the next election. He gave the 2010 elections to the Republicans, so any obstruction from then on was his own creation. ..."
"... "The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence." ..."
"... Average voters are a group to be messaged/pandered to on a 2/4/6 year cycle and then ignored between election cycles. ..."
"... When a politician says he cares about the common man, see who he golfs with, see who he has dinner with, it's not the common man ..."
"... Y'all can hold her feet to the fire all you want. She has asbestos feet. She'll never know the difference. She'll never even feel it. ..."
"... Yea hard to say who is even being addressed. Nobodies voting for Clinton with voting as their main act of political participation? ..."
"... Left activists? Let's be realistic how many left activist support Clinton? ..."
"... This post greatly diminishes my esteem for the opinions of Gaius Publius. "Hold her accountable" as proposed? While we're at it we can bell the cat. Both major parties and government in this country at all levels National, State, and Local are captured beyond any accountability to the public. Our government is no longer interested in the Public Interest and as for the Public Good the term "Good" is only a synonym for a Commodity - as in goods and services. ..."
"... The spectacle of Sanders kneeling and kissing the Clinton ring, even though reasonably 'spun' as a necessity for political 'survival' by Sanders, has left a bitter taste in the mouths of the "true believers" who flocked to Sanders. ..."
"... The Democratic Party has shown the depths to which the Clinton cabal will sink in the pursuit of power. Wresting that power out of the hands of the Despicable Duo will perhaps be more trouble than splitting the Party would be. Thus, if "we broke it," why not carry on as one part of the 'new normal' Democratic Party Spectrum. ..."
"... I have always asked who would win an election if we voted by policy instead of by name in an election? Of course I am assuming that a candidate would tell the truth about their positions from the beginning and not change after they won. Trump, Stein and Johnson have been honest about their positions but Clinton changes with the wind. ..."
"... The ridicule is a badge of honor. It is the "laughter of fools". Both candidates of the major parties are unacceptable in their own way. To vote for either is to accept subjugation with a smile. Don't be fooled. Whatever happens in the election will be blamed on minor parties by the losing side. Vote your conscience and know that if you were to vote for either major party candidate you would be complicit in the destruction that will follow. ..."
"... She will be in office for eight years and all the Trumpers will fortify their positions and mobilize on an even greater scale when she is done reigning whatever hell she brings with her. I'm seeing Weimar Republic politics here, and I don't like it. ..."
"... I have seen it argued that the biggest benefit of sticking with one of the mainstream parties is the 'ground game,' or organizational templates already in place. ..."
"... The corollary of the earlier assertion of mine about "true believers" is that, except for insular or separatist movements, true believers act as cadres around which larger aggregates coalesce to form an effective party. Trump is effecting this with his courting of the 'second division' level of Republican operatives. The outpouring of negative propaganda from the 'top tier' Republicans suggests a semi panic mind set. The virulence of the anti Trump screeching reinforces the perception that the senior Republicans fear that they can lose to Trump in the power struggle. ..."
"... All very true, ambrit. The Greens have been on the margins for longer than they should have been because the myth of Nader spoiling the 2000 election has had lasting effect. Hell, I believed it myself until I took the time to take a second look this year. ..."
"... I'd like to think that I'm not particularly in the vanguard here, and that many other people have recognized that the Democratic party is beyond redemption. The only option for progressives is to start filling in the ranks, to be vocal and to be active. To find talented candidates for down ticket races. ..."
"... tradeunions in the UK are both stronger and more radical in their leadership and membership than in the USA ..."
"... voting rule in the usa are state-by-state and filled with various opportunities for suppressing votes. ..."
Carla, you are right about the main focus of these trade deals. Sure, it's about degrading
labor and avoiding sensible regulation. More importantly, it's about making an end run around
democracy and enscouncing the profiteers above governments. The Clinton's, along with Obama, have
consistently sided with these elites.
. That Clinton is a better progressive choice than Trump is not much contested.
But shouldn't it be?
Trump is against globalistion, bad trade deals, interminable foreign wars and wants to
fix America by bringing back jobs, etc. The standard line is that Trump is - oh horror – "racist"
because he wants to stop immigation. Therefore, etc.
But don't workers have a genuine interest in protecting the bargaining power of labour? If
a capitalist declares that he will import workers from Mexico or India or Russia, or just export
his entire production chain to China, because US labour is too expensive. Is it more "progressive"
to declare these worried workers racist, or backward, or too intellectual challenged to see the
benefits of a global supply chain and its cheap ipads for all still in salaried (i.e. unoutsourced)
employment.
But no matter. Hillary says nice things about hispanic-americans and has long ties to the black
community over the last few decades as their standard of living has stagnated with everyone else.
She supports LGBT rights and Trump probably doesn't even though I can't think of any negative
statements he may have made but OK Hillary is the more Progressive candidate OK. Obviously.
"Our nation stands together in solidarity with the members of Orlando's LGBT community."
This is a very dark moment in America's history. A radical Islamic terrorist targeted the nightclub
not only because he wanted to kill Americans, but in order to execute gay and lesbian citizens
because of their sexual orientation."
"It is a strike at the heart and soul of who we are as a nation. It is an assault on the
ability of free people to live their lives, love who they want and express their identity."
"I refuse to allow America to become a place where gay people, Christian people, and Jewish
people, are the targets of persecution and intimidation by radical Islamic preachers of hate
and violence, it's a "quality-of-life issue."
"If we want to protect the quality of life for all Americans – women and children, gay and
straight, Jews and Christians and all people – then we need to tell the truth about radical
Islam," he said.
FedupPleb – My thought exactly. Trump has personality issues but many of his positions,
sketchy as they are, are in the right ballpark. Clinton by contrast seems to be rated "progressive"
mainly because of surprisingly enduring loyalty to the Democrat brand.
The best definition of a brand I ever came across is "a compelling promise, reliably honoured".
How's that been working out for Dems in recent years?
The Clintonites are selling First Woman President as an Identity-Progressive goal and achievement.
Just as the Obamazoids sold First Black President as an Identity-Progressive goal and achievement.
Trump is of course against the minimum wage. Trump is interested in the power of labor, man
they can not pass legalized marijuana fast enough, and maybe I can pretend it all makes sense.
What Trump says doesn't matter (just like Clinton). Take a look at his VP and his advisors.
Pence is a dominionist nutjob and the rest of Trump's team are ultra-right-wing bible thumpers.
He may say he's against the TPP but his team is for it. As for the Constitution the Republicans
are always waving about, they really don't care what's in it unless they can use it to their advantage.
"take a look at his vp"-that selection was a bone he HAD to throw to the GOP bigwigs so he
could make it through the GOP convention. The VP will have no power in the Trump presidency, as
even the venerable Yves has pointed out. The only one who took control was Richard "the Bruce"
Cheney, and that was a special case.
The only way Pence will have power is if Trump gets whacked, which is indeed a possibility.
I'm not part of, but I have some direct personal experience with the bible thumping crowd.
Those constituents are not internationalist or pro trade deals. They have been afraid of 'world
government' as opposed to nationalism; they have wanted even more local control for decades.
These 'allies' will move the ball. They will shake up the existing coalitions vs the stagnation
and corruption we have now. Even as a switch between sets of oligarchs, if they keep Trump's promises,
they will give the populace some breathing room.
As I said to a coworker in a political discussion yesterday, there are very few issues
I would weigh above the Supreme Court, but Clinton's pro corporate, pro war stance has taken me
to that place.
I dispute that as a given also – When a republican candidate, Trump, can push Hillary to
the left on such major issues as on war and trade deals, is she really the progressive here? A
true progressive would not need to be dragged or pushed to the left. These are MAJOR issues.
Actually, there's evidence in her private speech (leaked emails, etc.) that Hillary is pretty
hostile to LGBT rights. Her public speech, of course, should be discounted as performative and
dishonest. I think Trump has made some very positive statements about the LGBT community, but
I can't point to a reference offhand. That could certainly be equally dishonest and performative.
But he doesn't have the same documented history of pandering that way, and unlike Hillary, he's
not an evangelical Christian. There's also evidence that in reality Hillary is quite racist, as
well.
I will step up and dispute that she's more progressive. I don't think she is. Her warmonging
and TPP support count against her. Her history in Haiti, etc., count against her. That's not to
defend Trump as progressive in any meaningful sense. Just that Clinton is no improvement.
How on earth does ANYONE [other than the FIRE industry, her neo-con pals and the climate killers]
"hold her accountable" or have any influence on her?
She's got the nomination, there's little doubt she'll win the election, she's got 100% of DNC
Dems behind her. WTF are folks supposed to do to have any sort of weight in a Clinton administration?
And if Ms. Bond is speaking to those close to Clinton, what makes her think they WANT to have
any influence for good?
Agreed. This is a joke and Becky Bond, whoever she is, is living in a fantasy world if
she thinks these faux progressive careerists will do anything to jeopardize their cush positions
(or chance at cush positions, pathetic as that is).
I visit their blogs and watch them: its either outright Stockholm Syndrome (for those who had
or have an ethical bone in their bodies) or insincere and dishonest posturing as "progressives"
all around. They will hold Clinton as accountable as they held Obama.
The Clinton supporters that live in her bubble are insiders will never betray her
because they benefit from the jobs they hope/will have in her administration. It is the mass
of voters who believed what she said are the ones that have to get out and hold her feet to the
fire. Most rolled over and said nothing as Obama's "change we can believe in" was only a slogan
to fool us. The narrative that it was the big bad obstructionist Republicans that stopped Obama's
change is mostly false. Obama never ever fought for real change. He talked a good game but did
nothing. The best way to make politicians listen to us is that we show up in mass (millions) in
DC and demand that government act in our behalf.
"The narrative that it was the big bad obstructionist Republicans that stopped Obama's
change is mostly false." I think it's totally false. If Obama had been who he portrayed on TV
pre-election, the democrats would not have lost their seats in the next election. He gave the
2010 elections to the Republicans, so any obstruction from then on was his own creation.
"The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized
groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government
policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence."
Average voters are a group to be messaged/pandered to on a 2/4/6 year cycle and then ignored
between election cycles.
My high school civics teacher (Los Angeles County public school) made a statement 30+ years
ago I still remember. "When a politician says he cares about the common man, see who he golfs
with, see who he has dinner with, it's not the common man"
About the only thing that needs to be updated in the statement is the "he" needs to be revised
to "he/she"
Perhaps the best the average citizen can hope for is that there are interest groups on both
sides on an issue, but a profitable business group with a rich source of funding vs a public interest
group depending on contributions seems mismatched.
Even when there are powerful business groups that differ on current policy, change is difficult,
for example US government price support for domestic sugar producers is opposed by the large sugar
industry consumers (candy makers, soft drink producers), but the TPP specifically leaves this
USA government subsidy in place.
Yea hard to say who is even being addressed. Nobodies voting for Clinton with voting as
their main act of political participation? Sometimes they might just be uninformed, or they
may have voted for her thinking she would fare better against Trump, or if better off they might
have voted their privilege, etc.. But they have no real power.
Left activists? Let's be realistic how many left activist support Clinton? I have no doubt
many supported Bernie while some may only support Stein etc. but Clinton? I have my doubts there
are almost ANY actual left activists who supported Clinton over Sanders (over Trump maybe, but
not over Sanders). But he means some talking head somewhere who isn't even an activist but has
a public platform? Those people have been bought and paid for.
This post greatly diminishes my esteem for the opinions of Gaius Publius. "Hold her accountable"
as proposed? While we're at it we can bell the cat. Both major parties and government in this
country at all levels National, State, and Local are captured beyond any accountability to the
public. Our government is no longer interested in the Public Interest and as for the Public Good
the term "Good" is only a synonym for a Commodity - as in goods and services.
I supported Sanders. The primary and convention made it clear that making change within the
system is no longer a real option. In the best of all possible worlds I feel it's time to tend
my garden - far away from the action and with my head held low.
The spectacle of Sanders kneeling and kissing the Clinton ring, even though reasonably
'spun' as a necessity for political 'survival' by Sanders, has left a bitter taste in the mouths
of the "true believers" who flocked to Sanders.
There should be little hope of those who embraced the cognitive dissonance that is the Clinton
campaign suddenly 'seeing the light' and pivoting to an internally activist position in the Democratic
Party. Far from righting the 'progressive' course of the Ship of State, many will conclude that
this is just another 'Ship of Fools.'
Any prospective transformative political movement needs a cadre of "true believers" to energize
and channel that energy in the "proper" direction. The Democratic Party has shown the depths
to which the Clinton cabal will sink in the pursuit of power. Wresting that power out of the hands
of the Despicable Duo will perhaps be more trouble than splitting the Party would be. Thus, if
"we broke it," why not carry on as one part of the 'new normal' Democratic Party Spectrum.
"True believers" respond to appeals to their better nature more readily than appeals to their
fear of 'others.' Real 'progressives' would rather live in a New Jerusalem than the White House
Outhouse.
The 'hostile takeover' of any political party requires a full housecleaning. Half measures will
not suffice.
I have always asked who would win an election if we voted by policy instead of by name
in an election? Of course I am assuming that a candidate would tell the truth about their positions
from the beginning and not change after they won. Trump, Stein and Johnson have been honest about
their positions but Clinton changes with the wind.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/1/25/443287/-
You'll want to scroll down, but Edwards won the debate focus groups and polled "undecideds"
in 2007 and 2008. Edwards was well to the left of Obama and Hillary from his campaign positions.
The ridicule is a badge of honor. It is the "laughter of fools". Both candidates of the
major parties are unacceptable in their own way. To vote for either is to accept subjugation with
a smile. Don't be fooled. Whatever happens in the election will be blamed on minor parties by
the losing side. Vote your conscience and know that if you were to vote for either major party
candidate you would be complicit in the destruction that will follow.
I would rather vote for what I want and not get it than to vote for what I don't want and get
it. –Eugene Debs. Sanders, you should have remembered the words of your hero whose picture hangs
on your office wall.
And on to the doom of a Trump presidency. The supposed logic that Hillary will "stop" Trump.
I guess people forget that all the right-wing populists that support Trump are not going anywhere.
They are having kids and they are rearing them in their toxic worldview. Hillary has done and
will do nothing to build an ideology that counters the Trump crowd. Cover our ears and our eyes
and it will all go away is the strategy. She will be in office for eight years and all the
Trumpers will fortify their positions and mobilize on an even greater scale when she is done reigning
whatever hell she brings with her. I'm seeing Weimar Republic politics here, and I don't like
it.
I have seen it argued that the biggest benefit of sticking with one of the mainstream parties
is the 'ground game,' or organizational templates already in place. The Greens are chided
for organizational weakness. Whether true or not, this "branding" of the Greens as feckless is
a major impediment to popular acceptance of the party. The marginalization of the Green Party
in the media magnifies whatever true weaknesses there are within the party.
The corollary of the earlier assertion of mine about "true believers" is that, except for
insular or separatist movements, true believers act as cadres around which larger aggregates coalesce
to form an effective party. Trump is effecting this with his courting of the 'second division'
level of Republican operatives. The outpouring of negative propaganda from the 'top tier' Republicans
suggests a semi panic mind set. The virulence of the anti Trump screeching reinforces the perception
that the senior Republicans fear that they can lose to Trump in the power struggle.
Even though the Sanders supporters have been 'schooled' in hard ball politics by the Clinton
camp, they still need a hope for success to motivate them to continue the struggle. The above
comments anet the Greens show a perception that the Greens cannot supply that success. It may
be all smoke and mirrors, but, absent some serious counter propaganda from the Green Party, the
ginned up MSM portrayal of the Greens as irrelevant is pretty much all the information the Sanders
supporters have to base a decision on. Get a Green governor, or some Green congresspeople, and
the Greens gain inestimable status. It may look like a chicken or egg puzzle, but better propaganda
is a good place to start.
It's time for the Greens to stop looking like victims and to start looking and acting like
victors.
Carla, you are right about the main focus of these trade deals. Sure, it's about degrading
labor and avoiding sensible regulation. More importantly, it's about rimning sn end rin around
democracy and ensconcing the profiteers above governments.
All very true, ambrit. The Greens have been on the margins for longer than they should have
been because the myth of Nader spoiling the 2000 election has had lasting effect. Hell, I believed
it myself until I took the time to take a second look this year.
I'd like to think that I'm not particularly in the vanguard here, and that many other people
have recognized that the Democratic party is beyond redemption. The only option for progressives
is to start filling in the ranks, to be vocal and to be active. To find talented candidates for
down ticket races.
Unfortunately, one of the ironies of the current Democratic party is that it still does have
some room for progressives in state and local office. That's why Zephyr Teachout is still a Democrat.
She can win without the full backing of the party. And, I suspect equally unfortunately, she reckons
that she would have a harder time running as a Green due to voter bias.
That's what needs to change. Voters need to see the Green party as a viable alternative. It
is indeed a chicken and egg problem. And that's why I see the Stein campaign as an important step
in helping rehabilitate the Green party in the minds of voters.
It is also critically important for progressives to not relent on our critique of neoliberalism
and the Democratic party. The so-called progressives like Adolph Reed and others who have already
capitulated need to be vigorously rejected.
If Stein can get enough support this year it may convince candidates of Teachout's caliber
that they can run successfully as Green party members and that will start the necessary momentum
to building the party from the local and state level upward.
Anyway, I've donated money to the Stein campaign and I've got my yard sign in front of my house
and my "none of the above" sticker on my truck. I'm doing what I can in my own way.
I'd like to make a couple of points to add to this little side discussion of the Sanders vs.
Corbyn compare and contrast.
tradeunions in the UK are both stronger and more radical in their leadership and membership
than in the USA. Union leadership in the usa is still wedded to the dem elite, sometimes against
the wishes of their members. There have been splits where some unions like nat nurses united and
chicago teachers unions have supported sanders and opposed elite dems, but imagine if uaw and
afscme had flipped on clinton. That would have really shaken things up. Insurgency plus institutional
support is much tougher for the elites to control.
voting rule in the usa are state-by-state and filled with various opportunities for
suppressing votes. Imagine if the rules were that anyone could join and vote if they paid
$5 and no 'purges' of voters or ridiculous rules like ny where you have to join 6 months in advance.
In fact the blairites/plp in england seem to be trying to recreate some of the same tricks and
traps that the dems used here.
Hillary Clinton's temperament, her "terrified staff," her mental symptom are all cause of concern.
Dangerous, abusive and paranoid
Cocaine addition amplifies in person pre-existing sociopathic traits.
Notable quotes:
"... Byrne talks drug use in the White House: ..."
"... But there was one particular staff member that they had come in in the morning, and they'd be so beat up and exhausted looking, worn out, exhausted to the point where they couldn't be seen saying good morning. And they'd go in their office and go the bathroom and come out of the bathroom completely elevated and happy and smiling. ..."
"... It was obvious you thought coke was being used? ..."
"... I'M a FEMALE and I CAN tell you that a woman, ESPECIALLY Clinton, is not fit to be the leader of the Free World. She's a hysterical and angry woman who's been cheated on her entire life. It's the truism: Hell hath NO fury such as a woman scorned". Be careful what you vote for America! ..."
"... Here in Arkansas it's pretty much common knowledge that she is evil as hell itself. If this woman is elected we're so terribly screwed. ..."
"... I wish people would stop calling it 'crazy'. Let's call it what it is -psychopathy! Look it up - pathological lying, glib charm, lack of empathy, anger if challenged, lack of remorse, blaming others for their own actions, etc. It's a loveless marriage, a sham, and poor Chelsea was probably born for appearances - she didn't have a chance. We need to address psychopathy as a country - these people need to be tested and kept out of important positions and certain vocations like law enforcement, military, doctors, etc. or we are doomed as a society. ..."
Former Secret Service officer Gary Byrne, author of the new book Crisis of Character, which examines
Hillary Clinton's conduct under his watch, appeared on Monday's broadcast of FOX News Channel's Hannity.
Byrne talked Hillary Clinton's temperament, her "terrified staff," Bill Clinton carrying on affairs,
drug use in the White House and more with host Sean Hannity. Byrne said Clinton was feared by her
staff and was notorious for her yelling. Byrne told Hannity that she has "blown up" at him and other
Secret Service agents.
"She gets angry at things that are policy issues that, you know, take time to fix, and she's got
this attitude where she wants things fixed right now, immediately. She screams and yells at people,"
Byrne said in an interview aired on Fox News.
"There's many examples that I site in my book where she blows up at people," Byrne said. "Like
I've said, she has blown up at me before, and agents, and her staff. At one time, I saw her staff
so afraid to tell her about a mistake that was made. They weren't upset about the waste of the mistake,
ordering the wrong invitations, they were terrified that someone was going to have to tell Hillary
Clinton that there was a mistake made."
Byrne says Clinton's behavior during his tenure in the Secret Service proved to him that she does
not have the temperament for the Oval office.
BYRNE: I feel so strongly that people need to know the real Hillary Clinton and how dangerous
she is in her behavior. She is not a leader. She is not a leader.
SEAN: She does not have the temperament?
BYRNE: She doesn't have the temperament. She didn't have the temperament to handle the social
office when she was First Lady, she does not have the temperament.
SEAN: She's dishonest.
BYRNE: She's dishonest, she habitually lies, anybody that can separate themselves from their
politics and review her behavior over the past 15 years…
SEAN: You're going to be accused of being political.
BYRNE: Absolutely I'm sure I will be, I have already and it's not.
SEAN: And what's your answer? Byrne: It's got nothing to do as politics.
Byrne talked wrote about then-President Bill Clinton's behavior, accusing him of carrying on multiple
affairs and gave his perspective on the Monica Lewinsky affair and the scandal as it was happening.
Byrne talked about several different affairs and how the Secret Service was expected to clean up
after him.
HANNITY: How many women do you know, for sure, that he had affairs with in the Oval Office?
BYRNE: In the White House complex? I'd say easily three, maybe four, that I know of.
HANNITY: And you could see Monica Lewinsky from a mile away?
BYRNE: Sure. Sure.
HANNITY: You knew she wanted to be near him.
BYRNE: She was certainly manipulated some of the staff, other officers, myself to find out
where he was-
HANNITY: She wasn't manipulating if you saw through it.
BYRNE: Yeah, I agree. But I saw through it right away, but she was trying to place herself
in his path, as he would move throughout the complex.
Byrne talks drug use in the White House:
HANNITY: Before I get into all the issues involving Bill and Hillary and what she knew and
didn't know and covering up and lying and you being put in the middle of all this. People use
drugs the at the White House?
BYRNE: There were some issues. One of the ones I comment in my book, and I'm very careful not
to tell too much about it because I don't want -- hopefully this person got on with their lives
and lived a healthy life. But there was one particular staff member that they had come in in the
morning, and they'd be so beat up and exhausted looking, worn out, exhausted to the point where
they couldn't be seen saying good morning. And they'd go in their office and go the bathroom and
come out of the bathroom completely elevated and happy and smiling.
HANNITY: It was obvious you thought coke was being used?
BYRNE: I did. And later on, I was
told that this particular person actually, they did something similar to an intervention and got
her help and got her to a clinic, and I never did see her again. But I understand she did all
right.
Kia Sophia
I'M a FEMALE and I CAN tell you that a woman, ESPECIALLY Clinton, is not fit to be the leader
of the Free World. She's a hysterical and angry woman who's been cheated on her entire life. It's
the truism: Hell hath NO fury such as a woman scorned". Be careful what you vote for America!
Trunks800
Where is the video that she is acting like Trump? Show me the proof or else it just all talk.
Too bad Trump is displaying his behavior like a man with dementia on tape and live on TV.
Sunny Skye
Here in Arkansas it's pretty much common knowledge that she is evil as hell itself. If this
woman is elected we're so terribly screwed.
Brian Brachel
She's a bipolar lunatic
Trish Dempsey
psychopaths!!!!
Donna Kurpaska
I wish people would stop calling it 'crazy'. Let's call it what it is -psychopathy! Look
it up - pathological lying, glib charm, lack of empathy, anger if challenged, lack of remorse,
blaming others for their own actions, etc. It's a loveless marriage, a sham, and poor Chelsea
was probably born for appearances - she didn't have a chance. We need to address psychopathy as
a country - these people need to be tested and kept out of important positions and certain vocations
like law enforcement, military, doctors, etc. or we are doomed as a society.
Lu Martinez
Hillary Clinton is definitely bipolar!
Debbie Shenton
I am Australian and I want this woman to disappear...for the safety of the western world ....she
is dangerous and insane and we don't want her leading not only the USA into despair but all off
us in the future ....god help us all !!!!!
"... You know, the light bulb over my head went on when Hillary said she was against the TPP "as currently written." Political speak for: she'll fiddle with some words, pronounce it fixed, and pass it ..."
"... her surrogates extol her penchant for "free trade" and are sure she will support it. ..."
You know, the light bulb over my head went on when Hillary said she was against the TPP
"as currently written." Political speak for: she'll fiddle with some words, pronounce it fixed,
and pass it.
And while she and Kaine claim now to be against the TPP, her surrogates extol her penchant
for "free trade" and are sure she will support it.
Manipulation of definitions is the most insidious type of lying...
Today's democrats are indeed neoliberals and twist the language like all neoliberals do.
George Orwell
probably is spinning in his grave looking to what extent they implemented his 1984 utopia NewSpeak as for
destruction of meaning of words and manipulation of language.
Notable quotes:
"... Hilary likes to redefine terms. 'We are the most progressive platform ever' she likes to say but, in one of her debates with Bernie she redefined "progressive" She said that we are making lots of progress on different issues. Therefore, her logic goes, she is 'progressive' ..."
"... So, instead of universal healthcare being progressive, we are mandated to pay for health insurance (not healthcare) in order to insure corporate healthcare insurance profits (the rentier fire sector) --………..this is Hilary's definition of progressive and, it is how she uses it when speaking and policy making. ..."
Hilary likes to redefine terms. 'We are the most progressive platform ever' she likes to say
but, in one of her debates with Bernie she redefined "progressive"
She said that we are making lots of progress on different issues. Therefore, her logic goes, she
is 'progressive'
So, instead of universal healthcare being progressive, we are mandated to pay for health insurance
(not healthcare) in order to insure corporate healthcare insurance profits (the rentier fire sector)
--………..this is Hilary's definition of progressive and, it is how she uses it when speaking and
policy making.
Beware her definitions… a re-working of the definition of is
"... Clinton publicly promoted the pact 45 separate times - but with her Democratic presidential rivals making opposition to the deal a centerpiece of their campaigns, Clinton now asserts she was never involved in the initiative. ..."
"... "I did not work on TPP," she said after a meeting with leaders of labor unions who oppose the pact. "I advocated for a multinational trade agreement that would 'be the gold standard.' But that was the responsibility of the United States Trade Representative…State Department cables… show that her agency - including her top aides - were deeply involved in the diplomatic deliberations over the trade deal. The cables from 2009 and 2010, which were among a trove of documents disclosed by the website WikiLeaks, also show that the Clinton-run State Department advised the U.S. Trade Representative's office on how to negotiate the deal with foreign government officials." ..."
"... HRC has been trying to convince the gullible (and there are clearly a few here) that the donor class paid her 225K a pop because she's committed to working against the deals favored by globalists. ..."
"... The 'Trump is a racist who will deport 11 million undocumented foreign nationals' fiction must, at the very least, explain why 1/5 Hispanics support the candidate. ..."
"... evidently 1/5 Hispanics separate rhetoric from reality. ..."
"... Sanders offered the prospect of real change to voters sick of the same old. HRC is offering fables ..."
"... Trump will not be able to produce the solutions he's promising, but he's promising solutions that people do want, which is why HRC is suddenly making Trump/Sanders themes a centerpiece of her campaign. There will be no holding HRC to account. We know this. T above is entirely correct. HRC is a known factor. ..."
"... With Trump as president there will be intense scrutiny of his every action and he'll be hammered on all sides daily. This seems to me far, far better than handing a blank check to a highly secretive career client of the donor class who enjoys the full protection of a self-censoring (for the most part) fifth estate and indulged by zombies ready to scream 'racist' or 'atheist' at any candidate who might actually challenge her authority. ..."
Aug 13, 2015 from David Sirota rabid Republican spin-meister
"Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton on Thursday attempted to distance herself
from the controversial 12-nation trade deal known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership. During her
tenure as U.S. secretary of state, Clinton publicly promoted the pact 45 separate times - but
with her Democratic presidential rivals making opposition to the deal a centerpiece of their campaigns,
Clinton now asserts she was never involved in the initiative.
"I did not work on TPP," she said after a meeting with leaders of labor unions who oppose
the pact. "I advocated for a multinational trade agreement that would 'be the gold standard.'
But that was the responsibility of the United States Trade Representative…State Department cables…
show that her agency - including her top aides - were deeply involved in the diplomatic deliberations
over the trade deal. The cables from 2009 and 2010, which were among a trove of documents disclosed
by the website WikiLeaks, also show that the Clinton-run State Department advised the U.S. Trade
Representative's office on how to negotiate the deal with foreign government officials."
The donor class invest immense sums to write laws and regulations, not just in the US, but
in many nations. The list of examples is endless and includes big pharma and the banks participating
in the crafting of the Affordable Care Act and the bank bailout. Both Sanders and Trump agree
on this point, whatever their other differences may be.
HRC has been trying to convince the gullible (and there are clearly a few here) that the
donor class paid her 225K a pop because she's committed to working against the deals favored by
globalists.
Every moment wasted on 'did I tell you about my racist daddy, racist relatives, racist co-workers?
' is time and energy wasted. That would be bad enough, but the level of discourse is frankly so
base and lacking in nuance as to be both worthless and corrosive.
The 'Trump is a racist who will deport 11 million undocumented foreign nationals' fiction
must, at the very least, explain why 1/5 Hispanics support the candidate. Trump is a race-baiting
vulgarian buffoon who routinely uses offensive slurs to control the news cycle. Some supporters
believe he goes too far, others are delighted to watch liberal heads explode. But evidently 1/5
Hispanics separate rhetoric from reality.
To the outside observer, Detroit and Chicago do not look like success stories. I visited both
cities in the 70's and they weren't exactly shining cities on the hill, then. In the four decades
since, conditions for many have actually declined. Large parts of large cities and states controlled
by Democrats fail entirely to provide basic education and safety to the people who need both most.
Sanders offered the prospect of real change to voters sick of the same old. HRC is offering
fables, in much the same way Trump is. As I've stated repeatedly, Trump will not be able
to produce the solutions he's promising, but he's promising solutions that people do want, which
is why HRC is suddenly making Trump/Sanders themes a centerpiece of her campaign. There will be
no holding HRC to account. We know this. T above is entirely correct. HRC is a known factor.
With Trump as president there will be intense scrutiny of his every action and he'll be
hammered on all sides daily. This seems to me far, far better than handing a blank check to a
highly secretive career client of the donor class who enjoys the full protection of a self-censoring
(for the most part) fifth estate and indulged by zombies ready to scream 'racist' or 'atheist'
at any candidate who might actually challenge her authority.
"... Investigators believe that damning records from the Rose Law Firm, wrongfully kept in Vincent Foster's White House office, were spirited out in the dead of night and hidden from the law for two years -- in Hillary's closet, in Web Hubbell's basement before his felony conviction, in the President's secretary's personal files -- before some were forced out last week. ..."
"... Why the White House concealment? For good reason: The records show Hillary Clinton was lying when she denied actively representing a criminal enterprise known as the Madison S.& L., and indicate she may have conspired with Web Hubbell's father-in-law to make a sham land deal that cost taxpayers $3 million. ..."
"... By concealing the Madison billing records two days beyond the statute of limitations, Hillary evaded a civil suit by bamboozled bank regulators. ..."
"... Another reason for recent revelations is the imminent turning of former aides and partners of Hillary against her; they were willing to cover her lying when it advanced their careers, but are inclined to listen to their own lawyers when faced with perjury indictments. ..."
"... Therefore, ask not "Why didn't she just come clean at the beginning?" She had good reasons to lie; she is in the longtime habit of lying; and she has never been called to account for lying herself or in suborning lying in her aides and friends. ..."
Americans of all political persuasions are coming to the sad realization that our First Lady --
a woman of undoubted talents who was a role model for many in her generation -- is a congenital liar.
Drip by drip, like Whitewater torture, the case is being made that she is compelled to mislead,
and to ensnare her subordinates and friends in a web of deceit.
Remember the story she told about studying The Wall Street Journal to explain her 10,000 percent
profit in 1979 commodity trading? We now know that was a lie told to turn aside accusations that
as the Governor's wife she profited corruptly, her account being run by a lawyer for state poultry
interests through a disreputable broker.
She lied for good reason: To admit otherwise would
be to confess taking, and paying taxes on, what some think amounted to a $100,000 bribe.
The abuse of Presidential power known as Travelgate elicited another series of lies. She induced
a White House lawyer to assert flatly to investigators that Mrs. Clinton did not order the firing
of White House travel aides, who were then harassed by the F.B.I. and Justice Department to justify
patronage replacement by Mrs. Clinton's cronies.
Now we know, from a memo long concealed from investigators, that there would be "hell to pay"
if the furious First Lady's desires were scorned. The career of the lawyer who transmitted Hillary's
lie to authorities is now in jeopardy. Again, she lied with good reason: to avoid being identified
as a vindictive political power player who used the F.B.I. to ruin the lives of people standing
in the way of juicy patronage.
In the aftermath of the apparent suicide of her former partner and closest confidant, White
House Deputy Counsel Vincent Foster, she ordered the overturn of an agreement to allow the Justice
Department to examine the files in the dead man's office. Her closest friends and aides, under
oath, have been blatantly disremembering this likely obstruction of justice, and may have to pay
for supporting Hillary's lie with jail terms.
Again, the lying was not irrational. Investigators believe that damning records from the Rose
Law Firm, wrongfully kept in Vincent Foster's White House office, were spirited out in the dead of
night and hidden from the law for two years -- in Hillary's closet, in Web Hubbell's basement before
his felony conviction, in the President's secretary's personal files -- before some were forced out
last week.
Why the White House concealment? For good reason: The records show Hillary Clinton was lying
when she denied actively representing a criminal enterprise known as the Madison S.& L., and indicate
she may have conspired with Web Hubbell's father-in-law to make a sham land deal that cost taxpayers
$3 million.
Why the belated release of some of the incriminating evidence? Not because it mysteriously turned
up in offices previously searched. Certainly not because Hillary Clinton and her new hang-tough White
House counsel want to respond fully to lawful subpoenas.
One reason for the Friday-night dribble of evidence from the White House is the discovery by the
F.B.I. of copies of some of those records elsewhere. When Clinton witnesses are asked about specific
items in "lost" records -- which investigators have -- the White House "finds" its copy and releases
it. By concealing the Madison billing records two days beyond the statute of limitations, Hillary
evaded a civil suit by bamboozled bank regulators.
Another reason for recent revelations is the imminent turning of former aides and partners
of Hillary against her; they were willing to cover her lying when it advanced their careers, but
are inclined to listen to their own lawyers when faced with perjury indictments.
Therefore, ask not "Why didn't she just come clean at the beginning?" She had good reasons
to lie; she is in the longtime habit of lying; and she has never been called to account for lying
herself or in suborning lying in her aides and friends.
No wonder the President is fearful of holding a prime-time press conference. Having been separately
deposed by the independent counsel at least twice, the President and First Lady would be well advised
to retain separate defense counsel.
"... Edward G. Rendell, a former Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, said the foundation should be disbanded if Mrs. Clinton wins, and he added that it would make sense for the charity to stop taking foreign donations immediately. ..."
"... Begun in 1997, the foundation has raised roughly $2 billion and is overseen by a board that includes Mr. Clinton and the couple's daughter, Chelsea. ..."
"... This foundation made the Clinton's very rich. When a foundation only gives ten to fifteen percent of their proceeds to the ones they are helping one should know there is something wrong. ..."
"... Large sums of money from powerful foreign entities given to powerful political entities are never given for "free." Even if they come without specific stipulations, they instill within the recipient a sense of reciprocity and empathy that may not have existed before. ..."
"... The Clintons are highly manipulative career politicians who continually display that they believe they are above the law of the proletariat. They will do whatever they believe benefits them without regard for the rest of us. ..."
"... Regarding the foundation, I would love to see a report on what percentage of these funds are actually being used for "good causes" versus supporting the Clinton lifestyle.. ..."
"... I am sorry, there is absolutely nothing anyone can say that will make me believe for even a nano second, that someone from the kingdom of Saudi Arabia simply decided out of the goodness of their heart, to donate 10 million bucks to an American charity. ..."
"... After her stint at State Department, Hillary completely misread the sentiment of American voters when she returned to campaign. She thought America was going to wrap her in a big "Welcome Back" snugly blanket. What she found were unexpected insurgencies in Bernie and Trump- and a public who wasn't so eager to greet her- especially when they realized she didn't have a message, platform or offer a simple reason as to WHY she wants to become President. Throw in the foundation and her establishment ties to Wall Street and Big Pharma- She suddenly isn't so appealing. ..."
"... Mr. Trump, who the Times always castigates for his shady business practices, is a cheap street corner hustler compared to the Clintons. ..."
"... Trump and Hillary show the total bankruptcy of our major political parties and the ruling political establishment. I'm voting Green, there may be a chance of saving our democracy yet. ..."
"... The presence or absence of "direct" connections between either Clinton and their donors suggests a touching naivete. Being at dinner at the Clinton's home, seeing someone at dinner there ... this is how connections are made and made to work, not through "direct orders from the boss!" This is a web of shameless corruption in which an ex-president parlays his reputation to boost him and his wife into the ranks of the 1%. ..."
"... The donors have given to gain access or future favors of or through the Clintons. That's clear. These nations/individuals don't do anything charitable in their own nations. They want something in return and the Clintons' being the politicians that they are as well as being hawks about money, have always known that. They chose the money. It's the basis for many foundations run by people that have already accomplished their goals and who next expect to get paid or who desire more power by association than even money can buy. ..."
"... The money raking Foundation and the Goldman Sachs speeches, all while they must have absolutely certain that Hillary would be running for President, speak the delusional sense of entitlement usually reserved for royalty. ..."
"... the clinton hire their political team via these donations and pay for there expenses including huge travel expenses...not bad for public service. ..."
"... That is untrue. They can travel, live in luxury, pay their daughter and friends, and use trust assets for all kinds of personal stuff in the name of charity. Who do you think paid for Bill and Chelsea's trip to Africa? They aren't know for giving any away either! ..."
"... Bribery is corporatized these days ..."
"... Makes no sense. After a certain number, simple greed seems like insufficient motivation. You can't live long enough to spend it all! So what do the Clinton's want -- and more directly, why do they insist on sabotaging any good that comes their way? The country doesn't need their drama ..."
"... It's a charity. The Clintons got very rich while running it. That's an issue. Then the fact that Hillary was Secretary of State while the Clintons were raking in the foreign contributions. That was a clear conflict of interest and it should never have been allowed. And if it wasn't a conflict then why are the Clintons backing away from the idea now? ..."
"... Just because Trump is a kook it doesn't mean the Clintons aren't crooked and they too should be nowhere near another term in the White House. Newsflash: Hillary and Bill Clinton are not trustworthy ..."
"... They have always sought money and power where ever it was, and foundations are an excellent tax dodge for wealthy people to pay their relatives and friends tax free salaries while wielding enormous power through grants. ..."
"... Sure, their foundation has theoretically been devoted to "good works" but it also gives the founders a very cushy life style, access to the highest levels of government (and graft) around the world, and a ready source of donors for Hillary's political campaigns. ..."
"... Hillary has operated with such conflicts of interest since she was First Lady of Arkansas, working for a law firm which handled services for the largest financial services firm in the state. Don't feel sorry for these "maligned" victims. ..."
"... It's deja vu all over again! ..."
"... The "foundation" spends about 10% on actual "charity" work. Watch "Heist" and "Clinton Cash" and so many other printed sources to see what true pay-to-play self-enrichment on a mammoth scale looks like. ..."
"... They are CROOKS with ZERO concern for anyone but themselves. Look at Haiti for openers. A country still in ruin, but Hillary's brother has a first-ever seat on a Gold Mining operation in Haiti... and as Sec. of State, she pushed back a raise for workers from 61Cents back to 31Cents per hour. How can anyone with a heart vote for these carpetbaggers? ..."
"... The article fails to mention that almost none of the money actually goes to charity. Nonprofits like this are excellent vehicles for avoiding taxes since the money can be spent on salaries and "business expenses" like travel. ..."
"... This particular nonprofit looks too much like a money laundering operation for the benefit of the Clintons. Either the donors were expecting some sort of payback or they thought they were donating to charity. In either case, something is wrong with this. ..."
The kingdom of Saudi Arabia donated more than $10 million. Through a foundation, so did the
son-in-law of a former Ukrainian president whose government was widely criticized for corruption
and the murder of journalists. A Lebanese-Nigerian developer with vast business interests
contributed as much as $5 million.
... ... ...
The Clinton Foundation has accepted tens of millions of dollars from countries that the State
Department - before, during and after Mrs. Clinton's time as secretary - criticized for their
records on sex discrimination and other human-rights issues. The countries include Saudi Arabia,
the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, Brunei and Algeria.
... ... ...
...Tom Fitton, the president of Judicial Watch, a conservative group that has sued to obtain
records from Mrs. Clinton's time at the State Department, said that "the damage is done."
"The conflicts of interest are cast in stone, and it is something that the Clinton administration
is going to have to grapple with," Mr. Fitton said. "It will cast a shadow over their policies."
... ... ...
Edward G. Rendell, a former Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, said the foundation
should be disbanded if Mrs. Clinton wins, and he added that it would make sense for the charity
to stop taking foreign donations immediately.
Begun in 1997, the foundation has raised roughly $2 billion and is overseen by a board
that includes Mr. Clinton and the couple's daughter, Chelsea.
... ... ...
Victor Pinchuk
, a steel magnate whose father-in-law, Leonid Kuchma, was president of Ukraine
from 1994 to 2005, has directed between $10 million and $25 million to the foundation. He has
lent his private plane to the Clintons and traveled to Los Angeles in 2011 to attend Mr.
Clinton's star-studded 65th birthday celebration.
... ... ...
In July 2013, the Commerce Department began investigating complaints that Ukraine - and by
extension Mr. Pinchuk's company, Interpipe - and eight other countries had illegally dumped a
type of steel tube on the American market at artificially low prices.
A representative for Mr. Pinchuk said the investigation had nothing to do with the State
Department, had started after Mrs. Clinton's tenure and been suspended in July 2014. He added
that at least 100 other people had attended the dinner party at Mrs. Clinton's house and that she
and Mr. Pinchuk had spoken briefly about democracy in Ukraine.
C Tracy,
WV
This foundation made the Clinton's very rich. When a foundation only gives ten to
fifteen percent of their proceeds to the ones they are helping one should know there is
something wrong.
The foundation should bedevil the Clinton's, it is a sham. Money and power is the driving
force behind the Clintons' to say they are in favor of helping women and gays while at the
same time taking money from countries that treat women as no more than property and kill or
imprison gays is at least immoral. This is just another millstone around Hillary's political
neck.
JW,
Shanghai 1 hour ago
Large sums of money from powerful foreign entities given to powerful political entities
are never given for "free." Even if they come without specific stipulations, they instill
within the recipient a sense of reciprocity and empathy that may not have existed before.
It is impossible for Clinton to have taken so much money from these groups and to not feel
somewhat beholden to them.
The Clintons are highly manipulative career politicians who continually display that they
believe they are above the law of the proletariat. They will do whatever they believe benefits
them without regard for the rest of us.
I am ashamed that this is the best we have to choose from.
Regarding the foundation, I would love to see a report on what percentage of these funds
are actually being used for "good causes" versus supporting the Clinton lifestyle..
.
#Election2016 #RaceToTheBottom
karenpk,
Chicago 1 hour ago
I am sorry, there is absolutely nothing anyone can say that will make me believe for
even a nano second, that someone from the kingdom of Saudi Arabia simply decided out of the
goodness of their heart, to donate 10 million bucks to an American charity.
Ditto for the others. I really have a problem with how brazen these
politicians are, and how we simply turn a blind eye to them, as well as the wealthy investors
that own them. Oh, that's how politicians are. Well, if we acted like that, we would be
unemployed, then thrown in jail. What makes them special, other than their own self
proclamation? Nothing.
Aaron,
Ladera Ranch, CA 1 hour ago
After her stint at State Department, Hillary completely misread the sentiment of
American voters when she returned to campaign. She thought America was going to wrap her in a
big "Welcome Back" snugly blanket. What she found were unexpected insurgencies in Bernie and
Trump- and a public who wasn't so eager to greet her- especially when they realized she didn't
have a message, platform or offer a simple reason as to WHY she wants to become President.
Throw in the foundation and her establishment ties to Wall Street and Big Pharma- She suddenly
isn't so appealing.
The U.S. does not control the prices on prescription drugs they way other nations do and we
pay 50% more than other developed nations. This is what Hillary will fight to maintain, that
along with a huge defense budget, perpetual warfare and global conflict. It's the status quo
and it's disgusting. I'll vote for Trump just to spite Hillary.
Roy Brophy,
Minneapolis, MN 1 hour ago
" American officials have long worried about Saudi Arabia's suspected role in promoting a
hard-line strain of Islam, which has some adherents who have been linked to violence."
Like the Saudis who planed and carried out the attack on the World Trade Center on 9/11?
Mr. Trump, who the Times always castigates for his shady business practices, is a cheap
street corner hustler compared to the Clintons.
The only reason Trump sounds crazier than Hillary is that she is a more practiced liar.
After the utter failure of Afghanistan and Iraq, which she and the Times supported, she went
blazing into Libya and did the same thing with the same results.
Trump and Hillary show the total bankruptcy of our major political parties and the
ruling political establishment. I'm voting Green, there may be a chance of saving our
democracy yet.
JO,
CO 1 hour ago
The presence or absence of "direct" connections between either Clinton and their donors
suggests a touching naivete. Being at dinner at the Clinton's home, seeing someone at dinner
there ... this is how connections are made and made to work, not through "direct orders from
the boss!" This is a web of shameless corruption in which an ex-president parlays his
reputation to boost him and his wife into the ranks of the 1%.
Does this mean Donald would make an acceptable president? No. But neither does Hillary.
Maybe better that we consider going the route of SCOTUS-1 and leave the Oval (almost typed
Offal) Office empty for four years!
Hanan,
New York City 2 hours ago
The donors have given to gain access or future favors of or through the Clintons.
That's clear. These nations/individuals don't do anything charitable in their own nations.
They want something in return and the Clintons' being the politicians that they are as well as
being hawks about money, have always known that. They chose the money. It's the basis for many
foundations run by people that have already accomplished their goals and who next expect to
get paid or who desire more power by association than even money can buy.
There will be no way around this for Clinton. Trump has a similar problem with monied
interests all over the world. In both instances, not good choices nor good odds that whomever
succeeds will not be plagued by unending issues due to conflicts that will be posed. exposed
and/or links to their money and debts. Trump calls it "pay for play" regarding Clinton. As for
Trump and all his huge deals, its called getting played while Trump gets paid.
Fred McTaggart,
Kalamazoo, MI 2 hours ago
The actions that Bill Clinton is promising after the election are a tacit admission that
the Foundation represents an enormous conflict of interest. But by now such actions are
meaningless. They should have been taken before Hillary Clinton started campaigning for U.S.
Senator and certainly before she accepted a position as Secretary of State.
Stan Continople
, Brooklyn 4 hours ago
The money raking Foundation and the Goldman Sachs speeches, all while they must have
absolutely certain that Hillary would be running for President, speak the delusional sense of
entitlement usually reserved for royalty.
Just because she's also a "policy wonk" does
not make her any less deranged than Trump. Who knows when her last remaining ties to reality
may finally snap - along with that macabre smile?
Majortrout,
is a trusted commenter Montreal 4 hours ago
I'm amazed that the NYTimes has written this article. When Mrs. Clinton was running for the
top spot for the DNC, all we read was negativity against Bernie Sanders, with very little
written about Benghazi,her private e-mail server, and other "suggested improprieties". When
she finally won the nomination for POTUS, all we read in the NYTimes was negativity against
Donald Trump, and again hardly anything negative news against Mrs. Clinton.
How about that?
Now with have this issue, and it isn't going to go away so fast.
"If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a
duck"
Elephant lover, is a trusted commenter New Mexico 5 hours ago
The donations are to a trust. The trust does not benefit the Clintons. It benefits the
poor. How is this corrupt?
Just Sayin,
New York 13 minutes ago
the clinton hire their political team via these donations and pay for there expenses
including huge travel expenses...not bad for public service.
retiredseal83
, Coronado, CA 13 minutes ago
That is untrue. They can travel, live in luxury, pay their daughter and friends, and
use trust assets for all kinds of personal stuff in the name of charity. Who do you think paid
for Bill and Chelsea's trip to Africa? They aren't know for giving any away either!
ExPeterC,
is a trusted commenter Bear Territory 6 hours ago
Bribery is corporatized these days
paula,
is a trusted commenter new york 6 hours ago
Makes no sense. After a certain number, simple greed seems like insufficient
motivation. You can't live long enough to spend it all! So what do the Clinton's want -- and
more directly, why do they insist on sabotaging any good that comes their way? The country
doesn't need their drama
-- but Trump is simply too horrible to contemplate.
Billy,
up in the woods down by the river 7 hours ago
It's a charity. The Clintons got very rich while running it. That's an issue. Then the
fact that Hillary was Secretary of State while the Clintons were raking in the foreign
contributions. That was a clear conflict of interest and it should never have been allowed.
And if it wasn't a conflict then why are the Clintons backing away from the idea now?
Just because Trump is a kook it doesn't mean the Clintons aren't crooked and they too
should be nowhere near another term in the White House. Newsflash: Hillary and Bill Clinton
are not trustworthy
SAK,
New Jersey 7 hours ago
The donations to the foundation has bad appearance.
Saudis or Qataris desiring to be charitable to Africans
could send the money to African charities rather than
route through Clinton foundation. It is very typical of
Saudis. They donated generously to the favorite charity
of Bush family. The results are obvious. Despite their
bad human rights record and discrimination against
women, beheadings and disseminating extremist
version of Islam though their funding of mosques and
madressas in Muslim world, Saudi Arabia remains a
strategic partner. US continues to supply arms,
intelligence and advice on military operations in Yemen.
There is no doubt Saudis have bought influence through
donations.
Deus02,
Toronto 5 hours ago
Not fear, but considerable and continuing concern about her credibility going forward.
While Hillary continually touts herself as a progressive democrat, it would seem neither
yourself nor the NYT got the memo about her recent four person presidential transition team
headed up by Russ Salazar, former Secretary of the Interior AND Washington corporate lobbyist
whom coincidentally is a profracking, fossil fuel AND supporter of the TPP. You couldn't ask
for a more establishment pro corporate type than him.
He will also, as part of a Clinton administration, head the team that is responsible for the
hiring of up to 4000 new employees and one can only guess where they will come from? Any
wonder why many Sanders supporters and Independents STILL do not find her trustworthy and are
reluctant to vote for her?
The fact remains, that any other democratic candidate without Clinton's baggage, at this
juncture, would be beating Trump by at least 20 points, a landslide.
susan,
California 7 hours ago
???? Their foundation ties bedevil her? That make it seem like she is being treated
unfairly by circumstances beyond their control. Nothing could be further from the truth - the
Clintons brought all of these problems on themselves.
They have always sought money and
power where ever it was, and foundations are an excellent tax dodge for wealthy people to pay
their relatives and friends tax free salaries while wielding enormous power through grants.
Sure, their foundation has theoretically been devoted to "good works" but it also gives
the founders a very cushy life style, access to the highest levels of government (and graft)
around the world, and a ready source of donors for Hillary's political campaigns.
Hillary has operated with such conflicts of interest since she was First Lady of
Arkansas, working for a law firm which handled services for the largest financial services
firm in the state. Don't feel sorry for these "maligned" victims.
They created the
situation(s) which invited all the criticism, and, incredibly, continue to do so. It takes a
long time to raise billions of dollars for their closely held foundation - they are not about
to let it go until they have another source of revenue and means of attracting wealthy donors
- the Presidency of the United States.
It's deja vu all over again!
Deus02,
Toronto 1 hour ago
Yep, the Saudis are going to implement a significant human rights program in the Kingdom
and the 500K that Trans Canada donated to the Clinton Foundation are going to announce they no
longer wish to build the Keystone XL pipeline.
Yeah right!
Pier Pezzi
, Orlando 41 minutes ago
The "foundation" spends about 10% on actual "charity" work. Watch "Heist" and "Clinton
Cash" and so many other printed sources to see what true pay-to-play self-enrichment on a
mammoth scale looks like.
Then vote for anyone but Clinton.
They are CROOKS with ZERO concern for anyone but themselves. Look at Haiti for openers.
A country still in ruin, but Hillary's brother has a first-ever seat on a Gold Mining
operation in Haiti... and as Sec. of State, she pushed back a raise for workers from 61Cents
back to 31Cents per hour. How can anyone with a heart vote for these carpetbaggers?
Don B
, Massachusetts 8 hours ago
The article fails to mention that almost none of the money actually goes to charity.
Nonprofits like this are excellent vehicles for avoiding taxes since the money can be spent on
salaries and "business expenses" like travel.
That isn't always objectionable: The Monterey Aquarium was set up that way but it was
funded by a rich man to provide a career for his daughter.
This particular nonprofit looks
too much like a money laundering operation for the benefit of the Clintons. Either the donors
were expecting some sort of payback or they thought they were donating to charity. In either
case, something is wrong with this.
Donald Trump says he'll implement tough new restrictions on administration officials and their
spouses giving paid speeches if he's elected to the White House.
The GOP nominee is telling a rally crowd in Wisconsin that he wants to ban the spouses of senior
government officials from collecting speaking fees as they serve.
He says he'll insist senior officials sign an agreement barring them from collecting speaking
fees from corporations with a registered lobbyist or any entity tied to a foreign government for
five years after leaving office.
Trump has criticized rival Hillary Clinton for the speaking fees she collected after leaving
her position as secretary of state and called on her to release the transcripts.
"... Pressed by the F.B.I. about her email practices at the State Department, Hillary Clinton told investigators that former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell had advised her to use a personal email account. ..."
"... Separately, in a 2009 email exchange that also emerged during the F.B.I. questioning, Mrs. Clinton, who had already decided to use private email, asked Mr. Powell about his email practices when he was the nation's top diplomat under George W. Bush, according to a person with direct knowledge of Mr. Powell's appearance in the documents, who would not speak for attribution. ..."
After months of "short circuiting" on her excuses for and defense of her use of a private
email server, Hillary Clinton has finally "revealed" why she used one in the first place. ... ...
...
Now, it turns out Hillary's trying to push blame for the whole fiasco on someone else entirely:
Colin Powell. As the
New York Times writes:
Pressed by the F.B.I. about her email practices at the State Department, Hillary
Clinton told investigators that former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell had advised her to
use a personal email account.
The account is included in the notes the Federal Bureau of Investigation handed over to
Congress on Tuesday, relaying in detail the three-and-a-half-hour interview with Mrs. Clinton
in early July that led to the decision by James B. Comey, the bureau's director, not to pursue
criminal charges against her.
Separately, in a 2009 email exchange that also emerged during the F.B.I. questioning,
Mrs. Clinton, who had already decided to use private email, asked Mr. Powell about his email
practices when he was the nation's top diplomat under George W. Bush, according to a person
with direct knowledge of Mr. Powell's appearance in the documents, who would not speak for
attribution.
The journalist Joe Conason first reported the conversation between Mrs. Clinton and Mr.
Powell in his coming book about Bill Clinton's postpresidency, "Man of the World: The Further
Endeavors of Bill Clinton," which The Times received an advanced copy of.
... Powell's office released a statement Friday saying the former secretary "has no
recollection of the dinner conversation." The statement did admit, however, that Powell "did
write former Secretary Clinton an email memo describing his use of a personal AOL email
account for unclassified messages and how it vastly improved communications within the State
Department."
The statement emphasized, however, that "at the time, there was no equivalent system within
the department." Also, Powell "used a secure state computer on his desk to manage classified
information."
As Townhall's Guy Benson explained in February, there are two key distinctions: Powell did
not set up a "recklessly unsecure private emails server" and conduct all official business on
it, and Powell only received two emails which were retroactively classified (at the lowest
level of classification!).
Clinton's email was not through a company like AOL, but on her own private server, which
was likely hacked by foreign powers like the Russians and the Chinese, according to former
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. Even the Times admitted that "Powell did not have a server
at his house or rely on outside contractors, as Mrs. Clinton did at her home in Chappaqua,
N.Y."
"... Now the former first lady is refusing to even take blame for the use of the server, saying that the practice has been around for decades and that another former secretary of state. ..."
"... Hillary Clinton has been an expert at bobbing and weaving around controversy during this election cycle, but the sheer magnitude of her recent scandals may end up blindsiding her with excuses this sloppy. ..."
Hillary Clinton has insisted from day one that her illegal use of a private email server was
no big deal at all, even if it put many Americans' lives at risk.
Now the former first lady is refusing to even take blame for the use of the server, saying
that the practice has been around for decades and that another former secretary of state.
"Now, it turns out Hillary's trying to push blame for the whole fiasco on someone else
entirely: Colin Powell. As the New York Times writes: Pressed by the F.B.I.about her email
practices at the State Department, Hillary Clinton told investigators that former Secretary of
State Colin L. Powell had advised her to use a personal email account."
Colin Powell has denied using a private email account for anything other than non-classified
material.
"And as we know, Hillary did use that email server for sending and receiving classified
information, while Powell did not. This is yet another case of Hillary trying to push her poor
judgement onto someone else. Unfortunately for her, Colin Powell isn't willing to quietly take
the fall for her."
Hillary Clinton has been an expert at bobbing and weaving around controversy during this
election cycle, but the sheer magnitude of her recent scandals may end up blindsiding her with
excuses this sloppy.
"... But beyond the Republican bluster, there is a substantial critique of the Clinton Foundation: At its core, it fuses fundraising, influence-peddling, Washington networking, "humanitarian" causes and an endless grasp for power and money. ..."
"... Though taking care to adhere to the letter of the law, the foundation comes close to the line in many cases -- for example, soliciting donations by offering face time with the Clintons in ways that seem suspiciously like a political campaign for elected office, but not exactly like that, because that would be a violation of the law. ..."
"... Using methods like this, the Clinton Foundation raised some $2 billion since its inception 15 years ago. ..."
"... "Nearly half of the major donors who are backing Ready for Hillary, a group promoting her 2016 presidential bid, as well as nearly half of the bundlers from her 2008 campaign, have given at least $10,000 to the foundation, either on their own or through foundations or companies they run," according to the Post . ..."
"... As part of that agreement, the Clinton Foundation reported that prior to 2008, Saudi Arabia had contributed between $10 million and $25 million to its coffers -- a strange patron of a foundation that promotes itself as a fierce advocate for women's rights. But as should be obvious, how the money is used isn't generally as important to the governments, corporations and corporate executives contributing as the influence they buy. ..."
"... Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy ..."
"... The Clinton Foundation has staffers and programs in dozens of countries working on countless issues. But it's perhaps best known for its high-profile role in the reconstruction of Haiti after a devastating earthquake struck there in January 2010 . ..."
"... In this respect, the Clinton Foundation's operations in Haiti bore a striking resemblance to the Bush administration's arrogant colonial posture toward the occupation of Iraq -- right down to the way the Bush administration deployed recent Ivy League graduates to carry out central elements of the U.S. empire's plans for occupation and reconstruction. ..."
"... First, they had no background in development -- they didn't know what they were talking about in aid or humanitarianism. Second, they didn't even realize it. They had come to Haiti in their suits convinced they were going to fix the place, and then they looked really confused when we would try to explain to them why the ideas they came up with on the back of an envelope on the plane over wouldn't work. ..."
"... Indeed, the iconic accomplishments of the Clinton Foundation in Haiti today are an industrial park built to help foreign-owned clothing manufacturers exploit low-wage Haitian labor; trailers to house schools for Haiti's next generation of workers; and a luxury hotel for wealthy corporate executives who need a place to rest their weary heads as they seek out new business opportunities. ..."
"... But a year after its opening, the park had only produced 1,500 jobs. "Hundreds of smallholder farmers were coaxed into giving up more than 600 acres of land for the complex, yet nearly 95 percent of that land remains unused," according to an Al Jazeera report published in September 2013 . ..."
"... But the Clinton Foundation did see at least one project through to completion, under the auspices of the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund. The fund invested $2 million to complete the construction of a luxury hotel in Pétionville. ..."
Bill Clinton looks on as Hillary Clinton campaigns at the Broad Street Market in Harrisburg,
Pennsylvania, July 29, 2016. (Photo: Ruth Fremson / The New York Times)
The stated mission of the Clinton Foundation, set up at the end of Bill Clinton's second term
in the White House, is to "alleviate poverty, improve global health, strengthen economies, and protect
the environment."
But far more important to its operations is the Clinton Foundation's unstated mission: to further
entrench the already formidable power of the Clinton family.
For more than two decades, both Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton have lived very public lives
ensconced in the upper echelons of America's political establishment. Since its founding in 2001,
the Clinton Foundation served as a bridge between Bill Clinton's administration and Hillary Clinton's
drive to conquer the White House again.
The foundation itself has been the subject of countless Republican-inspired inquiries and attacks,
including a
new
IRS investigation of its finances announced in the midst of the Democratic National Convention,
though it was overshadowed by Donald Trump's nonstop buffoonery.
But beyond the Republican bluster, there is a substantial critique of the Clinton Foundation:
At its core, it fuses fundraising, influence-peddling, Washington networking, "humanitarian" causes
and an endless grasp for power and money.
Though taking care to adhere to the letter of the law, the foundation comes close to the line
in many cases -- for example, soliciting donations by offering face time with the Clintons in ways
that seem suspiciously like a political campaign for elected office, but not exactly like that, because
that would be a violation of the law.
After Hillary Clinton stepped down as Secretary of State in 2013 to focus her attention on campaigning
for the White House, she officially rejoined the Clinton Foundation.
As theWashington Post reported in 2015:
[T]he organization has stepped up its solicitation efforts in anticipation of soon losing one
of its chief fundraisers [Hillary] to the campaign trail -- building a $250 million endowment
designed to provide some long-term stability.
The recent efforts have at times looked like a political campaign. A contest offered foundation
donors the chance to win a free trip to New York to attend a Clinton gala and have a photo taken
with the former first couple. Hillary and Chelsea Clinton hosted a "Millennium Network" event
in 2013 aimed at cultivating a younger generation of philanthropists. According to an invitation,
there were six tiers of donations, ranging from $150 for individuals to $15,000 for a couple seeking
a photograph with Hillary Clinton.
***
Using methods like this, the Clinton Foundation raised some $2 billion since its inception 15
years ago.
"Nearly half of the major donors who are backing Ready for Hillary, a group promoting her 2016
presidential bid, as well as nearly half of the bundlers from her 2008 campaign, have given at least
$10,000 to the foundation, either on their own or through foundations or companies they run,"
according to the Post.
The list of Clinton Foundation donors includes blue-chip corporations such as Coca Cola and Verizon,
Wall Street players like Goldman Sachs and American military contractors.
Federal law designates the Secretary of State as "responsible for the continuous supervision
and general direction of sales" of arms, military hardware and services to foreign countries.
In practice, that meant that Clinton was charged with rejecting or approving weapons deals --
and when it came to Clinton Foundation donors, Hillary Clinton's State Department did a whole
lot of approving.
While Clinton was Secretary of State, her department approved $165 billion worth of commercial
arms sales to Clinton Foundation donors. That figure from Clinton's three full fiscal years in
office is almost double the value of arms sales to those countries during the same period of President
George W. Bush's second term.
Fully one-third of foundation donors giving more than $1 million at a time are foreign governments.
When the Obama administration vetted Clinton for the post of Secretary of State in 2008, it barred
foreign governments that had previously given to the foundation from increasing their donations,
in order to deflect accusations about purchasing influence from America's highest-ranking diplomat.
As part of that agreement, the Clinton Foundation reported that prior to 2008, Saudi Arabia had
contributed between $10 million and $25 million to its coffers -- a strange patron of a foundation
that promotes itself as a fierce advocate for women's rights. But as should be obvious, how the money
is used isn't generally as important to the governments, corporations and corporate executives contributing
as the influence they buy.
Nobody, I think, in American history has merged their public service as Secretary of State
or president with their private gains to the extent that Hillary really has. And by that I mean
the Clinton Foundation, overall.
Here's the problem, you can imagine. She's going to Saudi Arabia, she's going to Europe, she's
going to the Near Eastern countries. Saudi Arabia has asked her -- and this is all very public
-- we want more arms. We want to buy arms in America...
Hillary's in a position to go to Raytheon, to Boeing, and say, look, do I have a customer for
you. Saudi Arabia would love to buy your arms. Maybe we can arrange something. I'm going to do
my best. By the way, you know, my foundation is -- you know, I'm a public-spirited person and
I'm trying to help the world. Would you like to make a contribution to my foundation?
Well, lo and behold, the military-industrial complex is one of the big contributors to the
Clinton Foundation, as is Saudi Arabia, and many of the parties who are directly affected by her
decisions.
***
The Clinton Foundation has staffers and programs in dozens of countries working on countless issues.
But it's perhaps best known for its high-profile role in the reconstruction of Haiti after
a devastating
earthquake struck there in January 2010.
The foundation's Haitian initiatives, like similar operations elsewhere, are distinguished by
an allegiance to the free market and a corporation-centric solution to social problems.
In this respect, the Clinton Foundation's operations in Haiti bore a striking resemblance to the
Bush administration's arrogant colonial posture toward the occupation of Iraq -- right down to the
way the Bush administration deployed
recent Ivy League graduates to carry out central elements of the U.S. empire's plans for occupation
and reconstruction.
First, they had no background in development -- they didn't know what they were talking about
in aid or humanitarianism. Second, they didn't even realize it. They had come to Haiti in their
suits convinced they were going to fix the place, and then they looked really confused when we
would try to explain to them why the ideas they came up with on the back of an envelope on the
plane over wouldn't work.
Indeed, the iconic accomplishments of the Clinton Foundation in Haiti today are an industrial
park built to help foreign-owned clothing manufacturers exploit low-wage Haitian labor; trailers
to house schools for Haiti's next generation of workers; and a luxury hotel for wealthy corporate
executives who need a place to rest their weary heads as they seek out new business opportunities.
***
In 2012, Bill and Hillary Clinton personally attended the opening ceremony of the Caracol Industrial
Park, which was supposed to create some 60,000 jobs for Haitians longing for decent employment. Among
the celebrities who attended the opening were Sean Penn and Ben Stiller,
according to the Washington Examiner.
But a year after its opening, the park had only produced 1,500 jobs. "Hundreds of smallholder
farmers were coaxed into giving up more than 600 acres of land for the complex, yet nearly 95 percent
of that land remains unused,"
according to an Al Jazeera report published in September 2013.
The Clinton Foundation disgracefully contracted with Clayton Homes -- the same firm sued by the
U.S. government for supplying trailers reeking of formaldehyde fumes to Hurricane Katrina refugees
-- to provide trailers to serve as schools for the children of the town of Léogâne,
according to
a report in the Nation by Isabel Macdonald and Isabeau Doucet.
Warren Buffet, owner of the investment firm Berkshire Hathway, which in turns owns Clayton Homes,
was a prominent supporter of Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign. Buffet co-hosted a fundraiser
that raked in more than $1 million for her campaign.
But the Clinton Foundation did see at least one project through to completion, under the auspices
of the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund. The fund invested $2 million to complete the construction of a luxury
hotel in Pétionville.
The Oasis Hotel "symbolizes Haiti 'building back better' and sends a message to the world that
Haiti is open for business,"
according to Paul Altidor, vice president of the Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund. "For Haiti's recovery
to be sustainable, it must attract investors, businesses and donors, all of whom will need a business-class,
seismically safe hotel."
But these trickle-down visions of development are precisely what angers Haitians about the colonial
arrogance of the West's reconstruction efforts. "All the money that went to pay the salaries of foreigners
and to rent expensive apartments and cars for foreigners while the situation of the country was degrading
-- there was something revolting about it,"
former Prime Minister Michčle Pierre-Louis told the New York Times in 2012:
The practices of the Clinton Foundation illustrate the total embrace of neoliberalism and the
free market by the Clinton clan -- to the family's enormous financial benefit.
Remember that the next time you hear another liberal blowhard complain about how anyone who says
you're acting out of "privilege" if you aren't ready to vote for Hillary Clinton. In reality, the
Clintons themselves represent the pinnacle of privilege, fused with the power of the U.S. government
and its foreign policy agenda.
Challenging the Clinton establishment is part and parcel of challenging the privileges of those
who stand atop the global capitalist system.
Eric Ruder is in the editorial
board of the International Socialist Review. He is also a frequent contributor to Socialist Worker.
"... "People, who argue Trump might start a nuclear war out of personal pique because he insults people on teevee might want to examine Clinton's bellicose foreign policy record and positions on, say, Israel, Iran, Ukraine, NATO expansion or the South China Sea." ..."
"... Or, as Ian Welsh points out, her position on Syria. She seems to have advocated for a no-fly zone in Syria after Russia came in, which would presumably put us in the position of shooting down Russian warplanes or having a good chance of doing so. Maybe if she does take on Kissinger as an advisor he'll tell her that superpower conflicts have to be done through proxies or they're too dangerous. ..."
"... Gen. Wesley Clark standing off against Russians at Belgrade and the missile attack on the Chinese embassy and the bombing of Bulgaria. ..."
"... Under Obama, support for fascists in Ukraine, near war over chemical weapons in Syria, gunboat diplomacy in South China Sea, shift to preemptive war plans against North Korea, ground troops in Libya and other parts of Africa, and last but not least, blind support for the psychotic Saudi attack on Yemen. ..."
"... Democrat or Republican, it is the US system of government which is militarist and adventurist. It will not change if either Clinton or Trump is elected, the delusions of Putin et al. notwithstanding. It wouldn't change if Bernie or the rational libertarian of the month was elected either because they do not, didn't and never will stand for real change. Criticizing Clinton and Trump from the right will make sure there is not even a chance of political realignment. At this point, the question is whether that's the point? ..."
BW: "People, who argue Trump might start a nuclear war out of personal
pique because he insults people on teevee might want to examine Clinton's
bellicose foreign policy record and positions on, say, Israel, Iran, Ukraine,
NATO expansion or the South China Sea."
Or, as Ian Welsh points out, her position on Syria. She seems to
have advocated for a no-fly zone in Syria after Russia came in, which would
presumably put us in the position of shooting down Russian warplanes or
having a good chance of doing so. Maybe if she does take on Kissinger as
an advisor he'll tell her that superpower conflicts have to be done through
proxies or they're too dangerous.
For the larger question of whether these comment threads are a good place
to campaign or advocate, I sort of come down in a different place than you
do. If these comment threads were about good-faith argument, then sure this
kind of advocacy might be bad, but I don't think that most people here are
capable of good-faith argument even if they were attempting it (most of
the time they aren't attempting it). In that case the comment threads serve
an alternate purpose of seeing what kinds of beliefs are out there, at least
among the limited group of people likely to comment on CT threads. Of course
people can be kicked out if they habitually make the threads too difficult
to moderate (or really, for whatever other reason an OP decides on), but
the well has long since been poisoned and one more drop isn't really going
to do much more damage.
Gen. Wesley Clark standing off against Russians at Belgrade and the
missile attack on the Chinese embassy and the bombing of Bulgaria.
Under Obama, support for fascists in Ukraine, near war over chemical
weapons in Syria, gunboat diplomacy in South China Sea, shift to preemptive
war plans against North Korea, ground troops in Libya and other parts of
Africa, and last but not least, blind support for the psychotic Saudi attack
on Yemen.
None of which was unilaterally determined by Clinton who was nothing
but Secretary of State, who does not determine foreign policy anyhow, or
took place after her tenure. Renovation of the nuclear weapons stockpile
isn't her doing either.
Democrat or Republican, it is the US system of government which is
militarist and adventurist. It will not change if either Clinton or Trump
is elected, the delusions of Putin et al. notwithstanding. It wouldn't change
if Bernie or the rational libertarian of the month was elected either because
they do not, didn't and never will stand for real change. Criticizing Clinton
and Trump from the right will make sure there is not even a chance of political
realignment. At this point, the question is whether that's the point?
"... Perhaps the most surreal point of the night is when a military leader speaks to how much butt we're going to kick once Hillary is elected, the Sanders delegates start the chant, "Peace, Not War", and the rest of the arena drowns this out with chants of 'U.S.A ..."
"... We discussed how it felt Orwellian, like the two minutes of hate in 1984. "Having chants of 'No More War' attempted to be drowned out by chants of 'USA' was baffling," Alan Doucette, Bernie delegate from Las Vegas, said. "To me, USA is a symbol of justice and equality and not warmongering and looking for excuses to go to war. That's what I want it to be and what it should be." ..."
"... "The most dislocating experience was General Allen's speech, with so many military brass on display, and the 'fight' between No More War and USA. That was chilling. Note, No More War is not: War Criminal! Or similarly 'disrespectful' stuff; it's simply a demand not to make our present worse with more 'hawkish' 'interventionist' 'regime change' wars and war-actions." ..."
"... The US 2016 election is different. You actually have a huge choice to make. Do you vote(or not vote) to support the Washington establishment, which is clearly pushing for war with Russia, or do you vote Trump who doesn't want such a war? Your choice. ..."
"... why would you even contemplate gambling that we can survive 4 years of Clinton without a nuclear war? ..."
Mark Lasser (CO): "Perhaps the most surreal point of the night is when a military leader
speaks to how much butt we're going to kick once Hillary is elected, the Sanders delegates start
the chant, "Peace, Not War", and the rest of the arena drowns this out with chants of 'U.S.A.'"
Carole Levers (CA): " I was harassed by five Hillary delegates who got in my face while I was
sitting in my seat. They told me that we needed to quit chanting, go home, and that we did not belong
there. They added that by chanting "No More Wars" we were disrespecting the veterans. I replied that
none of us were disrespecting the veterans. We were honoring them by NOT WANTING ANY MORE DEAD VETERANS,
killed in illegal wars for the profits of the wealthy. I reiterated that we were exercising our first
amendment rights to which one replied that WE (Bernie delegates) had no rights. I was later shoved
by a Hillary delegate into the metal frame of the seats."
Carol
Cizauskas (NV): "We heard other Bernie delegates chanting "No more war" and then the "opposing
team" of Hillary delegates thundering over those chants with "USA." It was darkly eerie. We discussed
how it felt Orwellian, like the two minutes of hate in 1984. "Having chants of 'No More War' attempted
to be drowned out by chants of 'USA' was baffling," Alan Doucette, Bernie delegate from Las Vegas,
said. "To me, USA is a symbol of justice and equality and not warmongering and looking for excuses
to go to war. That's what I want it to be and what it should be."
#SlayTheSmaugs (NY): "The most dislocating experience was General Allen's speech, with so
many military brass on display, and the 'fight' between No More War and USA. That was chilling. Note,
No More War is not: War Criminal! Or similarly 'disrespectful' stuff; it's simply a demand not to
make our present worse with more 'hawkish' 'interventionist' 'regime change' wars and war-actions."
Lauren Steiner (CA): "[Clinton supporters] decided to chant with us when we chanted 'Black Lives
Matter.' But for some reason, they found 'No More War' to be offensive and shouted "USA" right after.
At first, I was puzzled by the fact that they were shouting exactly what Trump supporters shout at
his rallies. Then, after all the bellicose speeches and the fact that they had so many Republicans
endorsing Clinton, it hit me that perhaps it was because they were courting Republicans now. They
didn't care about our support anymore."
Ike, August 18, 2016 at 1:02 pm
I am reading Primary Colors by Anonymous. It is entertaining as well as reaffirming a suspected
baseline of conduct.
Lambert Strether, August 18, 2016 at 1:11 pm
Primary Colors (by Joke Line (Joe Klein)) is terrific. The movie is good too. I am so happy
and amazed that I live in a world where John Travolta plays Bill Clinton in a movie.
Jeremy Grimm, August 18, 2016 at 1:31 pm
The harassment and dirty tricks pulled against the Sanders people - as described in these collected
reports - leaves me wondering whether Sanders actually won the nomination. It would have been
much more politic for the Hillary people to let the Sanders delegates blow off steam and wait
until the nomination and end of the convention to circle the wagons in "unity". If Hillary clearly
won the nomination then the stupidity and arrogance in team Hillary's treatment of the Sanders
people speaks to a new level of disdain for the 99%. The business about the $700 hotels and the
misinformation and lack of information provided from team Sanders raises other questions.
trent, August 18, 2016 at 2:17 pm
Wow, all those testimonials from the democrat convention are an eye opener, for some. Hillary's
soft Nazism on full display for any of the still true believers. Yet the press calls trump the
Nazi. Trump is crazy, but its almost an honest craziness compared to Hillary. She's nuts, but
manipulates everything she can to hide it. I'll take out in the open crazy, easier to plan for.
EoinW, August 19, 2016 at 8:51 am
I haven't voted in years. In Canada, however, we've never been given a choice on anything.
Doesn't matter if the election is federal, provincial or municipal, no issues just personalities.
The US 2016 election is different. You actually have a huge choice to make. Do you vote(or
not vote) to support the Washington establishment, which is clearly pushing for war with Russia,
or do you vote Trump who doesn't want such a war? Your choice.
But why would you even contemplate gambling that we can survive 4 years of Clinton without
a nuclear war? Speculating on global warming or third party movements kind of lose their
significance during a nuclear winter.
Patricia
This young woman turned it into a tale, "The Bullshittery of the DNC":
"... Congrats! The author discovered the obvious: Hillary is a warmongering neocon willing to pursue totally suicidal policy with Russia. She is not called "Mrs. WWIII" for nothing. If we are to survive, this monster should be nowhere near the White House. ..."
"... Hillary just follows the money, preferring the consensus between AIPAC and Saudis. The buyers and the goods they buy are all disgusting. ..."
"... While Russia (and this author) may (correctly) believe that fighting terrorism is a common interest of Russia and the US, the fact is, the US has no interest in fighting terrorism. Long ago Bush openly declared that he is not concerned about Osama bin Laden, and Obama continues to arm the so-called moderates, who are really a faction of al Qaeda. These neocon regime change wars are not about terrorism -- except in the sense that the US uses terrorist factions to attempt to overthrow legitimate leaders like Assad and Gaddafi. Rather than fighting terrorism, the US uses it as a weapon. The Russians are playing by one set of rules, but the US is using another. ..."
"... Hillary Clinton was instrumental in pushing for the Invasion of Iraq, which turned what was essentially a functional state into an ISIS hellhole. As Secretary of State, she was THE personality behind the destruction of Libya, now another Islamist breeding machine with a ruined economy & brutalized population. She has done everything in her power to destabilize Syria & has succeeded beyond her wildest dreams. Now millions of economic migrants are flooding into Europe, which will likely become a Caliphate under Sharia law within 100 years. Clinton's hands are soaked in blood of tens of thousands of men, women, & children. Her thirst for more is unquenchable. She is as much of a war criminal as her hero & good friend Henry Kissinger. All the media can do is scream endless unfounded accusations of Trump being a racist, yet they never mention a whisper of what Clinton has done & intends to do. ..."
"... Trump has shown he is not a captive to the foreign policy consensus of the economic, social, and political elite of the New York-Wash DC beltway. He does not believe in intervention anywhere and everywhere. That I heartily endorse. ..."
One especially disturbing trend in global affairs is the marked deterioration in relations between
the United States and Russia. Much will depend on the outcome of the upcoming U.S. presidential election.
Donald Trump has staked out a reasonably conciliatory policy toward Moscow. And in the highly improbable
event that Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson emerged victorious, the United States would certainly
pursue a less interventionist, confrontational
foreign policy toward Russia as well as other countries.
But
Trump and a handful of
otherdissenters
have triggered the
wrath of the foreign-policy establishment by daring to suggest that Washington's Russia policy
may be unwise and that the two countries have important
mutual interests. Most anti-Russian hawks are backing Hillary Clinton, and the implications of
a Clinton victory are extremely ominous. When Russia annexed Crimea, Clinton
compared Russian president Vladimir Putin to Adolf Hitler-a comparison so extreme that it drew
dissents even from some usual
supporters. Yet there is no doubt that she would take a very hard line toward Moscow. Among other
things, Clinton recommended that the United States impose a
no-fly
zone in Syria despite the risk that it could mean shooting down Russian military aircraft that were
operating at the request of the Syrian government. Anyone who is that reckless is not likely to retreat
from confrontations in eastern Europe or other arenas. Indeed, she has already called for not only
more financial assistance but more
military aid to Ukraine.
... ... ...
Ted Galen Carpenter, a senior fellow in defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato
Institute and a contributing editor at the National Interest, is the author of 10 books and more
than 600 articles on international affairs.
Informed • 2 days ago
Congrats! The author discovered the obvious: Hillary is a warmongering neocon willing
to pursue totally suicidal policy with Russia. She is not called "Mrs. WWIII" for nothing. If
we are to survive, this monster should be nowhere near the White House.
Anthony Informed • 2 days ago
It's not her it's George Soros he's funding her and Merkel two of the most pathetic
politicians I've seen especially dopey Merkel. Soros is also funding blm and a Arab version in
israel look at the leaked emails. If you don't know sata... I mean soros then you should just
type his name into Google he sold his own people out to Hitler and said it was the best thing
he ever did enough said
Informed Anthony • 2 days ago
You might be right. Soros looks like he had died already, but he is as greedy as ever.
Looks like he plans to bribe God almighty: otherwise why would he need so much money so late
in his life? Soros or CIA must have something really damning on Merkel: she is consistently
working against her own country for more than two years now. Hillary just follows the
money, preferring the consensus between AIPAC and Saudis. The buyers and the goods they buy
are all disgusting.
donnasaggia • 7 hours ago
We need to shift the analysis somewhat. While Russia (and this author) may (correctly)
believe that fighting terrorism is a common interest of Russia and the US, the fact is, the US
has no interest in fighting terrorism. Long ago Bush openly declared that he is not concerned
about Osama bin Laden, and Obama continues to arm the so-called moderates, who are really a
faction of al Qaeda. These neocon regime change wars are not about terrorism -- except in the
sense that the US uses terrorist factions to attempt to overthrow legitimate leaders like
Assad and Gaddafi. Rather than fighting terrorism, the US uses it as a weapon. The Russians
are playing by one set of rules, but the US is using another.
Frank Blangeard • a day ago
There will be no 'second Cold War' because the United States never ended the first Cold War.
alan Frank Blangeard • a day ago
Amen, brother!
alan • a day ago
No other country on earth, save Israel, has legitimate interests or security concerns other than
the United States. No spheres other than the western hemispheric one under the control of the US
are ever to be considered acceptable. This arrogant hegemon is headed for a fall. Preferably,
since I am an American I hope it will be a long slow peaceful one. Athens was as arrogant as the
American empire. Athens was defeated by a coalition led by Sparta.
Joe Stevens alan • a day ago
Pride always comes before the fall. In this case, it will be a big fall!
ApqIA • 2 days ago
A needed countermeasure, a difficult one, even unlikely -- but it would stand a chance of
deterring the US' insane ambitions.
A full military alliance between Russia and China, with integrated conventional and nuclear
forces, that would consider an attack on one an attack on both, and a two-nation nuclear
retaliation for any nuclear attack. The alliance could also offer membership to other threatened
nations, such as Iran.
Would include technology transfers between the two partners, which among other things would
assure China of adequate engines for its aircraft. Perhaps joint business ventures would ease
Russian unease at losing business: they can sell armaments together.
The US points nuclear warheads at both nations, so the US constitutes a credible existential
threat to both nations.
Its depraved, aggressive idea of global "leadership" is a threat to all humanity, and any and all
measures to deter it are worth the effort.
Want evidence? Here's its OWN map of the world, divided into American military provinces.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...
This development would confront Washington with something like Hitchcock's "Birds" scenario --
how many "fronts" can the US fight in at once? scenario. The Eurasian land mass is a vast,
impregnable fortress and US military planners already despair at Russian mobile nukes.
Unfortunately, only even greater insanity can really hope to deter the American lunatics and
self-absordbed interventionists like Hillary.
ApqIA -> Duane • a day ago
Georgia was a US-sponsored comic opera.
Syria was an attempt to use terrorists to get rid of Assad. Failing.
Ukraine was an attempt to get Ukraine in NATO, taking Crimea was a step to avoid a NATO
base in the Black Sea.
Since before Pearl Harbor, the US has employed the tactic of creating a situation where an
opponent has to choose an unacceptable outcome or use force.
What's the rate for a US-salaried troll?
Bilguun Khurelbaatar -> ApqIA • 12 hours ago
Actually I believe that all those who call others as "Russian troll" are mostly Ukrainian
trolls. It's easy to find them, they call everyone, even neutral minded people as putin troll,
and all they demand is to arm Ukraine, nuke Russia etc...
Robert Willis • 18 hours ago
Excellent article. Hillary Clinton was instrumental in pushing for the Invasion of
Iraq, which turned what was essentially a functional state into an ISIS hellhole. As Secretary
of State, she was THE personality behind the destruction of Libya, now another Islamist
breeding machine with a ruined economy & brutalized population. She has done everything in her
power to destabilize Syria & has succeeded beyond her wildest dreams. Now millions of economic
migrants are flooding into Europe, which will likely become a Caliphate under Sharia law
within 100 years. Clinton's hands are soaked in blood of tens of thousands of men, women, &
children. Her thirst for more is unquenchable. She is as much of a war criminal as her hero &
good friend Henry Kissinger. All the media can do is scream endless unfounded accusations of
Trump being a racist, yet they never mention a whisper of what Clinton has done & intends to
do.
deliaruhe • 19 hours ago
"Unfortunately, given the growing probability of a Clinton victory in November,
U.S.-Russian relations, already in bad shape, are likely to deteriorate further."
Hillary isn't exactly known for her wisdom and judgement (especially in her choice of role
models and mentors--i.e., Albright and Kissinger), and she's very good at shooting herself in
the foot on a regular basis (e.g., her Putin-as-Hitler hyperbole). She will soon become the
imperial president of an empire in decline, and empires in decline are at their most
dangerous.
I think this will end up being the saddest American election ever.
(Excellent article, by the way.)
Dank Lastname • 2 days ago
If Hillary dragged NATO into a war with Russia her incompetent leadership would see the
collapse of the US and the Russian occupation of Eastern Europe.
Mikhailovich • 15 hours ago
When the money is your god and financial elite employs politicians to run the country, what
else we can expect? It looks the American militarism can be tamed by efficient nuclear
deterrent or other major power and there are no other way to avoid big war.
alan -> JPH • a day ago
That's the tragedy of the situation. Trump has shown he is not a captive to the foreign
policy consensus of the economic, social, and political elite of the New York-Wash DC beltway.
He does not believe in intervention anywhere and everywhere. That I heartily endorse. On
all other points he is totally unqualified and unacceptable. We are left with a war-mongering
Neo-Con thug. When She takes office, begin the countdown---war is coming, a very big war
"... "Trump is a racist and his followers are racist and that's all you need to know" is a narrative thesis, like the narrative thesis that Trump is Putin's stooge, very convenient to Clinton's candidacy, but ultimately corrosive to American politics and political discourse. ..."
"... The Clinton campaign has whipped up a high dudgeon about racism and Putin and how unsuited Trump is, to be President. I don't disagree about the core conclusion: Trump does not seem to me to be suited to be President. That's hardly a difficult judgment: an impulsive, self-promoting reality teevee star with no experience of public office - hmmm, let me think about that for two seconds. But, the high dudgeon serves other purposes, to which I object strongly. ..."
"... People, who argue Trump might start a nuclear war out of personal pique because he insults people on teevee might want to examine Clinton's bellicose foreign policy record and positions on, say, Israel, Iran, Ukraine, NATO expansion or the South China Sea. ..."
"... Everything should not be about electing Clinton. ..."
"... Pundits like Josh Marshall of TPM or Ezra Klein of Vox are betraying their public trust by carrying Clinton's water so slavishly. ..."
"... People, who argue Trump might start a nuclear war out of personal pique because he insults people on teevee might want to examine Clinton's bellicose foreign policy record and positions on, say, Israel, Iran, Ukraine, NATO expansion or the South China Sea ..."
"... Or, as Ian Welsh points out, her position on Syria. She seems to have advocated for a no-fly zone in Syria after Russia came in, which would presumably put us in the position of shooting down Russian warplanes or having a good chance of doing so. Maybe if she does take on Kissinger as an advisor he'll tell her that superpower conflicts have to be done through proxies or they're too dangerous. ..."
"... This is what 40 years of two-party neoliberalism gives us: an unhinged demagogue or the point person for Democratic policies that have systematically gutted the middle class, screwed the poor, increase inequality, slowed productivity, caused multiple wars, and made them personally rich. ..."
"... The moral righteousness of identity politics adds in an element that goes way beyond the lazy failure to hold politicians accountable or the tendency to explain away their more Machiavellian maneuvers. There's both an actual blindness to the reactionary conservatism of equal opportunity exploitation and a peremptory challenge to any other claim or analysis. If police practices and procedures are trending in an authoritarian direction, they can only be challenged on grounds of racist effect or intent. The authoritarianism cannot be challenged on its own merit, so the building of the authoritarian state goes on unimpeded, since the principle that is challenged is not authoritarianism, but a particular claim of racism or sexism. ..."
"... As for LFC, he finished up his not a counter with "Assad and Putin are authoritarians (plus in Assad's case especially being a murderous thug), but I don't recall b.w. being too exercised about their authoritarianism." That's perfectly familiar [line] too: I well remember it from the GWB Iraq War days. Do you oppose the Iraq War? Well I never heard of you being very exercised about Saddam Hussein being a murderous thug. You must really support Saddam, or not really care about authoritarianism. The people who liked to say this were called the "Decents", a word like many other political words that was perfect because it meant exactly the opposite of what it sounded like. ..."
"... What's being critiqued is the idea that nothing but racism matters. What's being critiqued is the idea that it's useful or even correct to do mind-reading and to confidently pronounce that people who disagree with you do so because they're stupid and evil – excuse me, because they're racists. What I find illuminating here is the graphic evidence of why this approach is so toxic. People get furious and hostile when you call them bigots. It's an insult, not an invitation to dialog – because it doubles as a character judgment and as a personal attack. ..."
"... I am also saying, worry that the charge of racism may be all we have left that is capable of getting reforms. And, worry that charges of racism, without useful nuance, may not get the political reaction and reform one ought to desire. ..."
"... Police misconduct is not a problem solely and originally about race and racism ..."
I think all you've really shown is that blue-collar, less-educated people tend
to not know much about politics and to have the political attitudes of authoritarian followers
and Trump is willing to be demagogic enough to attract their attention as an alternative to the
status quo candidacy of Hillary Clinton.
"Trump is a racist and his followers are racist and that's all you need to know" is a narrative
thesis, like the narrative thesis that Trump is Putin's stooge, very convenient to Clinton's candidacy,
but ultimately corrosive to American politics and political discourse. It isn't a question
of whether statistics suggest racism is an efficient instrumental variable. It is a question of
whether this politics of invective and distraction is going anywhere good, could go anywhere good.
No one in these comment threads has been defending Trump or the political ignorance and resentments
of his supporters. Some of us have questioned the wisdom of a political tactic of treating them
as pariahs and dismissing their concerns and economic distress as fake or illegitimate.
The Clinton campaign has whipped up a high dudgeon about racism and Putin and how unsuited
Trump is, to be President. I don't disagree about the core conclusion: Trump does not seem to
me to be suited to be President. That's hardly a difficult judgment: an impulsive, self-promoting
reality teevee star with no experience of public office - hmmm, let me think about that for two
seconds. But, the high dudgeon serves other purposes, to which I object strongly.
Even though, and especially because Clinton is very likely to become President, her suitability
ought to be scrutinized. Not just boxed away as, "well, she is obviously better than Trump
so let's not even trouble our beautiful minds", when by the way it is not so obvious as
all that, as several commenters have tried to point out. People, who argue Trump might start
a nuclear war out of personal pique because he insults people on teevee might want to examine
Clinton's bellicose foreign policy record and positions on, say, Israel, Iran, Ukraine, NATO expansion
or the South China Sea.
Everything should not be about electing Clinton. Clinton's election is pretty much
assured, despite her deep flaws as a candidate of the center-left (to wit, her war-mongering and
epic corruption and economic conservatism). Pundits like Josh Marshall of TPM or Ezra Klein
of Vox are betraying their public trust by carrying Clinton's water so slavishly. Ezra may
be gaining all important access to the Clinton White House comparable to what he had in Obama's
White House, but he spent his credibility with his readers to get it. And, he's deprived his readers
of the opportunity to learn about issues of vital importance, like the TPP and corporate business
power, or NATO expansion and the relationship with Russia, or the swirling vortex forming in the
Middle East where American Empire is going down the drain of failed invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan
and ill-conceived "alliances" with fundamentally hostile powers like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.
I don't think these comment threads are a good place to campaign or advocate on the behalf
of any candidate. A modicum of advocacy might be welcome for the fodder it provides for reflective
rumination, but mirroring the Clinton campaign's themes seems to require systematic misreadings
of counter-argument and that has become disruptive. (RNB's volume and habitual tendentiousness
puts RNB into a special category in this regard.)
There ought to be room in this discussions to move the conversation to more of a meta-level,
where we consider trends and dynamics without the partisan's hyper-narrow focus.
BW: "People, who argue Trump might start a nuclear war out of personal pique because he
insults people on teevee might want to examine Clinton's bellicose foreign policy record and
positions on, say, Israel, Iran, Ukraine, NATO expansion or the South China Sea."
Or, as Ian Welsh points out, her position on Syria. She seems to have advocated for a no-fly
zone in Syria after Russia came in, which would presumably put us in the position of shooting
down Russian warplanes or having a good chance of doing so. Maybe if she does take on Kissinger
as an advisor he'll tell her that superpower conflicts have to be done through proxies or they're
too dangerous.
For the larger question of whether these comment threads are a good place to campaign or advocate,
I sort of come down in a different place than you do. If these comment threads were about good-faith
argument, then sure this kind of advocacy might be bad, but I don't think that most people here
are capable of good-faith argument even if they were attempting it (most of the time they aren't
attempting it). In that case the comment threads serve an alternate purpose of seeing what kinds
of beliefs are out there, at least among the limited group of people likely to comment on CT threads.
Of course people can be kicked out if they habitually make the threads too difficult to moderate
(or really, for whatever other reason an OP decides on), but the well has long since been poisoned
and one more drop isn't really going to do much more damage.
There's a reason the electorate hates both Trump and Clinton. This is what 40 years of
two-party neoliberalism gives us: an unhinged demagogue or the point person for Democratic policies
that have systematically gutted the middle class, screwed the poor, increase inequality, slowed
productivity, caused multiple wars, and made them personally rich.
Let's not forget the Clintons were the Democratic Party point people in causing the vast incarceration
of black men while simultaneously gutting welfare for black mothers and their children. (Yay 3rd
Way!) They were the point people for letting 300 million Chinese workers compete with American
workers. They deregulated the banks. And was there a war she didn't like?
So Layman finds that the 80% of the Evangelicals that support Trump are racist. And so are
the white voters in manufacturing regions. (Excuse me. "Principally" racist.) And Layman's exact
counterpart on some unnamed right-wing site thinks all the blacks voting for HRC are in it for
the welfare and affirmative action. (Yes, your exact counterpart. Oh, and they, like you, would
say blacks are "principally" scammers cause, you know, there are other minor reasons to vote HRC.)
I take a different view. I think most voters are going to have the taste of vomit in the their
mouths when they pull the lever.
If there's a populist politics in our future, it will have to have a
much sharper edge. It can talk about growth, but it has to mean smashing the rich and taking their
stuff. There's very rapidly going to come a point where there's no other option, other than just
accepting cramdown by the authoritarian surveillance state built by the neoliberals. that's a
much taller order than Sanders or Trump have been offering.
Fit for inscription (keeps me smashingly awake after hundreds of comments :-))
The moral righteousness of identity politics adds in an element that goes way beyond
the lazy failure to hold politicians accountable or the tendency to explain away their more
Machiavellian maneuvers. There's both an actual blindness to the reactionary conservatism of
equal opportunity exploitation and a peremptory challenge to any other claim or analysis. If
police practices and procedures are trending in an authoritarian direction, they can only be
challenged on grounds of racist effect or intent. The authoritarianism cannot be challenged
on its own merit, so the building of the authoritarian state goes on unimpeded, since the principle
that is challenged is not authoritarianism, but a particular claim of racism or sexism.
So in the same week that the Justice Department report on the Baltimore police force comes
out, showing systematic police discrimination - e.g. lots of people stopped in black neighborhoods,
esp. two in particular, for petty reasons or no reason, versus very few people stopped in other
neighborhoods - bruce wilder informs us that identity politics somehow prevents us from criticizing
police behavior on grounds of authoritarianism, that it can only be criticized on grounds of racism
(or subconscious racial bias) - of course, that wd appear to be a main problem w police behavior
in Baltimore and some other places.
"Rich where is the evidence people can no longer criticize police for broad authoritarianism?"
The last time I talked about this with faustusnotes, he told me that it was entirely understandable
and indeed good that Obama and the Democratic Party were passing laws to make non-violent protestors
even more likely to be arrested, because Obama was black and there was a scary white protestor
holding an assault rifle at a town meeting somewhere.
As for LFC, he finished up his not a counter with "Assad and Putin are authoritarians (plus
in Assad's case especially being a murderous thug), but I don't recall b.w. being too exercised
about their authoritarianism." That's perfectly familiar [line] too: I well remember it from the
GWB Iraq War days. Do you oppose the Iraq War? Well I never heard of you being very exercised
about Saddam Hussein being a murderous thug. You must really support Saddam, or not really care
about authoritarianism. The people who liked to say this were called the "Decents", a word like
many other political words that was perfect because it meant exactly the opposite of what it sounded
like.
Marc 08.14.16 at 2:09 am
What's being critiqued is the idea that nothing but racism matters. What's being critiqued
is the idea that it's useful or even correct to do mind-reading and to confidently pronounce that
people who disagree with you do so because they're stupid and evil – excuse me, because they're
racists.
What I find illuminating here is the graphic evidence of why this approach is so toxic. People
get furious and hostile when you call them bigots. It's an insult, not an invitation to dialog
– because it doubles as a character judgment and as a personal attack.
Now, when someone actually says something bigoted that's one thing. But that's not what's going
on, and that's why the pushback is so serious.
And – faustnotes – you're minimizing the real suffering of people by claiming that the mortality
rise in lower income US whites isn't real, and it certainly isn't important to you. I'm getting
zero sense of empathy from you towards the plight of these people – the real important thing is
to tell them why they're racist scum.
I think that the left has a moral obligation to try and build a decent society even for people
that don't like the left much. I think that working class voters across the Western world are
susceptible to racial appeals not because they're scum, but because they've been screwed by the
system and the left has nothing to offer them but moral lectures. And that's a failure that we
can address, and it starts with listening to people with respect. You can stand for your principles
without assuming bad faith, without mind-reading, and without the stereotyping.
For me at least, those are the grounds of debate, and they're very different in kind from pretending
that there is no such thing as racism.
I am aware that the claim of racism is potent and where it can be made to effect reform,
I am all in favor. Take what you can get, I say.
I am also saying, worry that the charge of racism may be all we have left that is capable
of getting reforms. And, worry that charges of racism, without useful nuance, may not get the
political reaction and reform one ought to desire.
Police misconduct is not a problem solely and originally about race and racism. I
hope Baltimore gets useful and effective reform.
"... Former US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul penned a scathing piece in the Washington Post accusing the Kremlin of intervening in the American election, based solely on the evidence of a harsh article regarding Clinton published by Sputnik News. Boy, was he wrong! ..."
"... On Wednesday night, Michael McFaul took to the Washington Post to opine that the article was part of a Kremlin-led conspiracy to subvert the American election, referring to the person running the Sputnik Twitter account (that particular day being me) as a "Russian official," before warning (threatening) that we "might want to think about what we plan to do" if Clinton becomes president. ..."
"... Pursuant to 18 US Code Chapter 115, I'd be writing this article to you from prison, if not awaiting a death sentence, if I were writing content ordered down to me by the Kremlin with a view towards subverting the American election. I am instead writing this piece from my favorite coffeeshop in downtown DC. I am not a Russian official. Our staff members are not Russian officials. We are not Kremlin controlled. We do not speak with Vladimir Putin over our morning coffee. ..."
"... In fact, the Atlantic Council's Ben Nimmo leveled a completely different view on Friday morning, calling our coverage "uncharacteristically balanced," but arguing that, because we report generally negative stories on both candidates, our real target is American democracy itself. ..."
"... It may surprise Mr. McFaul and Mr. Nimmo to learn that, in my previous work on political campaigns, I actually helped fundraise for Hillary Clinton - the candidate whose inner circle is now labelling my colleagues and I as foreign saboteurs. It is neither my fault nor Sputnik's fault that Secretary Clinton's campaign has devolved into one predicated upon fear and conspiracy, where the two primary lines are "the Russians did it" and that she is not Trump. ..."
"... The fact that more than 50% of the country dislikes both presidential candidates is not a Kremlin conspiracy. Would it be appropriate for us to present to our readers an alternate universe a la MSNBC, which defended Clinton's trustworthiness by saying she only perjured herself three times? ..."
"... Returning to the substance of the article to which Mr. McFaul took exception. This piece was written because it was newsworthy - it informed our readers and forced them to think. The provocative headline of the story was based on a statement by Trump that is a bit of a stretch (notice the air quotes on the title), but which highlights a major policy decision made by this administration that has not been properly scrutinized by the mainstream media. In the article, for those who actually read it, I refer to the 2012 DNI report that correctly calculated that Obama's policy in Syria would lead to the development of a Salafist entity controlling territory and that this outcome was "wanted." Hence, the title. ..."
"... Today, the Obama Administration grapples with a similar debate over whether to continue to support the "moderate rebels" in Syria, despite the fact that they have now melded with al-Nusra (an al-Qaeda affiliate until they rebranded), under the banner of the Army of Conquest in Syria. ..."
Former US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul penned a scathing piece in the Washington Post
accusing the Kremlin of intervening in the American election, based solely on the evidence of a harsh
article regarding Clinton published by Sputnik News. Boy, was he wrong!
My name is Bill Moran. A native Arizonan, I have worked on dozens of Democratic Party campaigns,
and am more recently a proud writer for Sputnik's Washington, DC bureau.
It also seems, as of Thursday morning, that I am the source of controversy between the United
States and Russia - something I never quite could have imagined - for writing an article that was
critical of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with a stinging headline and a harsh hashtag.
So, what is this controversy all about? This weekend I published a piece with the headline, "Secret
File Confirms Trump Claim: Obama, Hillary 'Founded ISIS' to Oust Assad." I also tweeted out this
story from our platform with the hashtag #CrookedHillary. Guilty as charged.
On Wednesday night,
Michael McFaul took to the Washington Post to opine that the article was part of a Kremlin-led
conspiracy to subvert the American election, referring to the person running the Sputnik Twitter
account (that particular day being me) as a "Russian official," before warning (threatening) that
we "might want to think about what we plan to do" if Clinton becomes president.
I feel it is necessary to pause, here, before having a substantive argument about the article's
merits and purpose within the public discourse, to address the severity of the accusation leveled
against me and Sputnik's staff (not by name until now), and its disturbing implications on freedom
of speech, dissent, and American democracy - implications that I hope Mr. McFaul, other public proponents
of the Hillary campaign, and the cadre of Russian critics consider.
Pursuant to 18 US Code Chapter 115, I'd be writing this article to you from prison, if not
awaiting a death sentence, if I were writing content ordered down to me by the Kremlin with a view
towards subverting the American election. I am instead writing this piece from my favorite coffeeshop
in downtown DC. I am not a Russian official. Our staff members are not Russian officials. We are
not Kremlin controlled. We do not speak with Vladimir Putin over our morning coffee.
Mr. McFaul worked side-by-side with the former Secretary of State in the Obama Administration, and
his routine accusations that Trump supporters are siding with Putin leaves me to imagine that he
is a Clinton insider if not a direct campaign surrogate. That such a public official would suggest
reprisals against those with differing viewpoints in the event that she wins is disturbing.
Our
outlet does not endorse or support any particular US presidential candidate, but rather reports news
and views for the day in as diligent a manner as we possibly can. This is evident in our very harsh
headlines on Trump, which Mr. McFaul failed to review before making his attack.
In fact, the Atlantic Council's Ben Nimmo leveled a completely different view on Friday morning,
calling our coverage "uncharacteristically balanced," but arguing that, because we report generally
negative stories on both candidates, our real target is American democracy itself.
It may surprise Mr. McFaul and Mr. Nimmo to learn that, in my previous work on political campaigns,
I actually helped fundraise for Hillary Clinton - the candidate whose inner circle is now labelling
my colleagues and I as foreign saboteurs. It is neither my fault nor Sputnik's fault that Secretary
Clinton's campaign has devolved into one predicated upon fear and conspiracy, where the two primary
lines are "the Russians did it" and that she is not Trump.
Donald Trump has the lowest approval rating since presidential polling began. Until recently,
Clinton had the second lowest approval rating since presidential polling began. Their numbers are
worse than even Barry Goldwater and George Wallace, in fact.
The fact that more than 50% of the country dislikes both presidential candidates is not a
Kremlin conspiracy. Would it be appropriate for us to present to our readers an alternate universe
a la MSNBC, which defended Clinton's trustworthiness by saying she only perjured herself three times?
There is a reason why both presidential candidates have received less than fawning coverage from
our outlet: they have not done anything to warrant positive coverage. My colleagues, also Americans,
like so many others in this country, wish they would.
Returning to the substance of the article to which Mr. McFaul took exception. This piece was
written because it was newsworthy - it informed our readers and forced them to think.
The provocative headline of the story was based on a statement by Trump that is a bit of a stretch
(notice the air quotes on the title), but which highlights a major policy decision made by this administration
that has not been properly scrutinized by the mainstream media.
In the article, for those who actually read it, I refer to the 2012 DNI report that correctly calculated
that Obama's policy in Syria would lead to the development of a Salafist entity controlling territory
and that this outcome was "wanted." Hence, the title.
Today, the Obama Administration
grapples with a similar debate over whether to continue to support the "moderate rebels" in Syria,
despite the fact that they have now melded with al-Nusra (an al-Qaeda affiliate until they rebranded),
under the banner of the Army of Conquest in Syria.
We do not pretend that these decisions exist in a vacuum with a clear right and wrong answer upon
which no two intelligent people differ, but this is a matter worthy of public discourse.
And what about that hashtag? Why would I use #CrookedHillary? I mean, I could have put #Imwithher,
but I wasn't trying to be ironic. When a hashtag is featured at the end of a sentence, its purpose
is for cataloging. Some people, usually non-millennials, use hashtags as text to convey a particular
opinion. I was not doing that. I also used #NeverTrump in a separate article.
But Mr. McFaul lazily cherry-picked, and then labeled (maybe unwittingly) Sputnik's American writers
traitors to this country.
Her embrace of hawks is more than an electoral strategy.
The Hillary Clinton campaign has recently been trumpeting endorsements from
neoconservatives. The candidate's embrace of figures such as Robert Kagan, Max
Boot, and Eliot Cohen-all once regarded as anathema to the contemporary left-has
engendered a wave of pushback from progressive critics.
Jane Sanders, wife
of Bernie, is the most recent high-profile objector,
publicly expressing queasiness about Clinton's perceived allying with "architects
of regime change." Now, predictably, the pushback has been met with its own
pushback,
including from Brian Beutler of The New Republic, who cautions progressives
not to fret.
... ... ...
Kagan, who not so long ago was denounced by liberal Iraq War opponents,
co-signed a June report with Michčle Flournoy-the likely candidate for defense
secretary under Clinton-calling for escalated U.S. military presence in Syria,
a policy that could lead to all-out ground war or direct confrontation with
Russia. So it seems he may already be on Clinton's hawkish team in waiting.
Few reputable critics would argue that Hillary is herself a neoconservative.
Far more plausible is that she'll enable the implementation of a neoconservative
foreign-policy agenda by casting the neoconservatives' goals in liberal-interventionist
terms, thus garnering Democratic support for initiatives that would face widespread
opposition were they spearheaded by a Republican president. Lobe has
written that Hillary represents "the point of convergence between liberal
interventionism … and neoconservatism," and Hillary's willingness to empower
a foreign-policy establishment featuring neoconservatives shows that they have
in fact received concrete reputational benefit from lining up behind her.
Hillary may operate on the premise that anything that might conceivably garner
her additional votes is justified on that basis alone. Yet even on that premise,
heralding neoconservative ideologues doesn't make sense. Again, neoconservatives
have virtually no support in the electorate, as the recent Republican primary
contest indicated. Their base is mostly among elites. Beyond that, there's a
serious chance that continuing to tout these people will actually damage
her electoral fortunes by alienating left-wing voters who might be cajoled into
voting for the Democratic ticket, but can't countenance the possibility of ushering
the Iraq-invasion architects of the George W. Bush era back into power.
So if there's no obvious electoral upside, the most likely reason why Hillary
is reaching out to such characters is a deceptively simple one: she shares common
interests with them, respects their supposed expertise, and wants to bring them
into her governing coalition. For that, anyone interested in a sane foreign
policy over the next eight years should be exceedingly worried.
Michael Tracey is a journalist based in New York City.
"... "I want our party to be the home of the African-American voter once again. I want a totally inclusive country and I want an inclusive party," he said in a speech at the Fredericksburg Expo and Conference Center. ..."
US presidential candidate Donald Trump promised on Saturday to make
the Republican party inclusive and reach out to black voters, at a campaign rally in Fredericksburg,
Virginia.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) - Opinion polls regularly give Trump less than 10 percent of the vote of the
40 million-strong African-American community. Speaking in the key battleground state, Trump said
that the GOP "must do better and will do better."
"I want our party
to be the home of the African-American voter once again. I want a totally inclusive country and
I want an inclusive party," he said in a speech at the Fredericksburg Expo and Conference Center.
The real-estate mogul promised earlier that if elected, his policies would restore African-American
fortunes so dramatically that they would overwhelmingly vote for his reelection in 2020.
"... The host also criticized attempts by Hillary's campaign to downplay the damage wrought by FBI Director James Comey's detailed examination of Clinton's "homebrew" server that many intelligence professionals worry compromised US state secrets. "It's not like he gave her a stellar review and an A+" said Ruhle. ..."
"... only three of them had any markings whatsoever suggesting a possible classification, and I – there's a clip from that I wish you guys would run -." Ruhle jumped in and hammered the Congressman saying, "But only three is not zero… You either did it or you didn't do it. No?" ..."
Speaking on "MSNBC Live" Congressman Matt Cartwright (D-PA) was grilled
by host Stephanie Ruhle who demanded the Clinton surrogate who was appealing to Hillary's trustworthiness
explain how the former Secretary of State did not commit perjury.
... ... ...
Laying out a montage of Hillary Clinton's statements before the Benghazi Select Committee,
host Stephanie Ruhle couldn't help but ask her guest, Clinton surrogate and Pennsylvania Congressman
Matt Cartwright, "How is that not perjury?"
The host also criticized attempts by Hillary's campaign to downplay the damage wrought by
FBI Director James Comey's detailed examination of Clinton's "homebrew" server that many intelligence
professionals worry compromised US state secrets. "It's not like he gave her a stellar review and
an A+" said Ruhle.
The Congressman responded, "Here's what we established, when I questioned Director Comey. The
Question was, well, were there things marked classified that she sent or received? And out of tens
of thousands of emails that they were reviewing, only three of them had any markings whatsoever
suggesting a possible classification, and I – there's a clip from that I wish you guys would run
-."
Ruhle jumped in and hammered the Congressman saying, "But only three is not zero… You either did
it or you didn't do it. No?"
"... Judicial Watch wanted Clinton to answer questions in person about whether she used the server to avoid Freedom of Information Act requests. But U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan ruled her written responses would be sufficient. ..."
"... The lawsuit already has obtained several previously unreleased emails that suggested some of Clinton's aides had sought to help the Clinton Foundation, a charity run by her husband and daughter, while she was still secretary of State. ..."
"... Clinton faces several civil lawsuits stemming from her use of a private server, and damaging new emails could yet surface before election day. ..."
Judicial Watch wanted Clinton to answer questions in person about whether she used the
server to avoid Freedom of Information Act requests. But U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan ruled
her written responses would be sufficient.
The group has until Oct. 14 to submit the questions, and Clinton must respond within 30 days.
... ... ...
The lawsuit already has obtained several previously unreleased emails that suggested some
of Clinton's aides had sought to help the Clinton Foundation, a charity run by her husband and
daughter, while she was still secretary of State.
In one message, a top Clinton aide appeared to try to help a wealthy donor get a meeting with
the U.S. ambassador to Lebanon, after a Clinton Foundation executive had requested it.
Clinton faces several civil lawsuits stemming from her use of a private server, and
damaging new emails could yet surface before election day.
Here are some headlines, This is a textbook example of demonization. Persistent attempt
not to discuss issues important for Americans and concentrate on personalities, making a show out of
election. Out of a hundred that I analyzed only one was positive, around a dozen were
neutral. Everything else were brazen, rabid dog style attack of neoliberals on Trump.
Donald Trump has made the 2016 presidential race potentially the most important of the last century.
The Constitution repudiates presidential wars: they impoverish the people and undermine the rule
of law. Trump, if he heeds our advice, can make the Constitution's foreign policy the battleground
of the campaign.
He did a masterful job of exposing the folly of the war in Iraq. He correctly denounced Hillary
Clinton's Senate vote for that war and her later use of her position as secretary of state to wage
congressionally unauthorized war against Libya. Rather than learn from her mistakes, which gave birth
to ISIS, Clinton is redoubling her efforts to drag our nation into another unconstitutional war in
Syria.
The cornerstone of the Constitution's foreign policy is the exclusive entrustment of the war power
to Congress. We made an unprecedented break with history by making Congress the sentinel against
gratuitous wars. This was the most important decision we made in Philadelphia. We understood that
from the beginning of all government, the Executive has chronically concocted excuses to go to war
for power and fame. While Congress is not infallible, the institution has everything to lose and
nothing to gain from going to war.
We recognized that these features of the Executive and Legislative branches were timeless because
they reflected personalities of the respective institutions that are as constant as the force of
gravity. We examined every prior system of government for thousands of years. Regardless of their
state of technology, Egyptian pharaohs, Israel's kings, Genghis Khan, and King George III were indistinguishable
in their gravitation toward needless wars.
The proof of our timeless wisdom is in the results. Less than a century after the ratification
of the Constitution, by avoiding presidential wars the United States became the world's largest economy.
We attracted the best and the brightest from everywhere to make America the workshop of the world.
Trump's goal of regaining our former prosperity will be stillborn without restoring the Constitution's
foreign policy. We were present at the creation of the Constitution, and we left no room for ambiguity
about why we gave the war power to Congress. We call on Donald Trump to establish a precedent for
every presidential candidate: an unequivocal pledge in writing never to initiate war without a congressional
declaration. He should lead, and ask Hillary Clinton to follow. The pledges will make America great
again.
Trump is to be complimented for questioning alliance commitments that conflict with the pledge.
He has asked why we would protect the borders of other countries when we don't protect our own. At
present, the United States is obligated through treaties or executive promises to go to war to protect
69 countries. During our many years of public service, we rejected the idea of permanent friends
or enemies and warned against the danger of entangling alliances. Trump's "No Presidential Wars"
pledge will give him justification to extricate the United States from these military entanglements.
Why should we safeguard the borders of almost half of the world's countries, who will betray us whenever
their interests diverge from ours?
In his first foreign-policy address, Trump alluded to John Quincy Adams's signature statement
about the inseparability of foreign and domestic policy:
[The United States has] abstained from interference in the concerns of others. … Wherever the
standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her
benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. …
She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners
of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the
wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors
and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change
from liberty to force. … she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit. … [America's] glory
is not dominion, but liberty.
The United States is the safest country in history. All the armies of the world couldn't take
a drink from the Colorado or make a track in the Rockies. We now possess more than 7,000 nuclear
warheads and the biggest, most technologically advanced Navy and Air Force ever seen. By contrast,
when we wrote the Constitution in 1787, the world confronted six empires armed to the teeth: the
Chinese Empire, the Russian Empire, the British Empire, the French Empire, the Spanish Empire, and
the Ottoman Empire. Despite massive superiority in manpower, ships, and weaponry, the British Empire
was unable to defeat us in our Revolutionary War and the War of 1812.
By avoiding standing
armies and entangling alliances, our foreign policy of self-defense unleashed the nation's resources
and focused our human capital on making us the richest nation in history. Our greatest entrepreneurs
did not squander their genius on warfare. But then our nation's leaders became seduced by the lure
of the limitless executive power that comes with war. Presidents of both parties replaced invincible
self-defense with a global military establishment in the false hope of dictating the affairs of other
nations. Presidents concocted pretexts to justify wars against Spain, Vietnam, Serbia, Iraq, and
Libya. American jobs were traded away to attract professed foreign allies. The Democratic and Republican
nominees have not given the American electorate a choice against unconstitutional presidential wars
for more than half a century.
Now is the time for Trump to end overseas adventurism and trumpet the invincible self-defense
that made us the envy of the world. We have lost our way in abandoning the Constitution's foreign
policy. A "No Presidential Wars" pledge is the first step to refocusing the genius of our people
on production at home rather than destruction abroad. This is the way to make America great again.
We are the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. We are the champion and vindicator
only of our own.
George Washington and James Madison are a Virginia businessman and lawyer.
"... Trump is such a menace and defeating him is so important that I think freedom of speech should be limited temporarily (through informal ostracism and prudent editorial judgment, of course) and only pure HRC bots should be allowed to speak. But that is just my opinion, not my call. ..."
"... This is how I understand the Clintonbots. ..."
"... It is not enough to just vote for Clinton or support voting for Clinton against Trump. Let us also *pretend* that Clinton isn't more evil than her liberal supporters recognise, let us *pretend* that Donald Trump is unprecedented among Republicans, let us stop thinking and speaking what we think, let us do anything and say anything, use each and every conceivable argument, sacrifice all of our principles, honesty and future credibility in order to convince our followers and anyone still stupid enough to take our words seriously that Clinton is an angel of light and the difference between her and Trump is in no way less than the one between Heaven and Hell. ..."
> I do not think Crooked Timber should be featuring this hugely irresponsible line of thought
in their OP's. But that is my opinion, not my call.
Trump is such a menace and defeating him is so important that I think freedom of speech
should be limited temporarily (through informal ostracism and prudent editorial judgment, of
course) and only pure HRC bots should be allowed to speak. But that is just my opinion, not my
call.
> 1,2,3,4,5,6
This is how I understand the Clintonbots.It is not enough to just vote for Clinton or support voting for Clinton against Trump.
Let us also *pretend* that Clinton isn't more evil than her liberal supporters recognise, let
us *pretend* that Donald Trump is unprecedented among Republicans, let us stop thinking and speaking
what we think, let us do anything and say anything, use each and every conceivable argument, sacrifice
all of our principles, honesty and future credibility in order to convince our followers and anyone
still stupid enough to take our words seriously that Clinton is an angel of light and the difference
between her and Trump is in no way less than the one between Heaven and Hell.
Let us be completely uncritical of everything that she and her allies have ever done or
are doing at the moment, until the elections are over. Then, when she uses this free pass we have
given her to do the same things as President, we can be happy that at least we have saved the
world. And maybe, just maybe our absolute loyalty to the tribe and the establishment will be rewarded.
Amazon review of Thomas Frank's The Wrecking Crew... the word "conservative" was replaced by "neoliberal" as it more correctly
reflect the concept behind this social process.
Notable quotes:
"... Neoliberal ideology is championed on behalf of corporate elites who have now secured total control, even ownership, of the federal government. ..."
"... Elites need federal government revenue transferred to their realm via fat government contracts and juicy subsidies. They want government without regulation, and they want taxation imposed on the masses without real representation, but not on them. ..."
"... Neoliberals drew up a long term strategy to sabotage and disrupt the liberal apparatus. There ensued a vast selling-off of government assets (and favors) to those willing to fund the neoliberal movement. The strategy was concocted as a long term plan - the master blueprint for a wholesale transfer of government responsibilities to private-sector contractors unaccountable to Congress or anyone else. An entire industry sprung up to support conservatism - the great god market (corporate globalism) replaced anti-communism as the new inspiration. (page 93) ..."
"... But capitalism is not loyal to people or anything once having lost its usefulness, not even the nation state or the flag ..."
"... According to Frank, what makes a place a free-market paradise is not the absence of governments; it is the capture of government by business interests. ..."
"... Neoliberals don't want efficient government, they want less competition and more profits - especially for defense contractors. Under Reagan, civil servants were out, loyalists were in. ..."
"... Contractors are now a fourth branch of government with more people working under contracts than are directly employed by government - making it difficult to determine where government stops and the contractors start in a system of privatized government where private contractors are shielded from oversight or accountability ..."
"... The first general rule of neoliberal administration: cronies in, experts out. ..."
"... Under Reagan, a philosophy of government blossomed that regarded business as its only constituent. ..."
"... Watergate poisoned attitudes toward government - helping sweep in Ronald Reagan with his anti-government cynicism. Lobbying and influence peddling proliferated in a privatized government. Lobbying is how money casts its vote. It is the signature activity of neoliberal governance - the mechanism that translates market forces into political action. ..."
"... Neoliberalism speaks of not compromise but of removing adversaries from the field altogether. ..."
"... One should never forget that it was Roosevelt's New Deal that saved capitalism from itself. Also, one should not forget that capitalism came out of the classical liberal tradition. Capitalists had to wrest power away from the landowning nobility, the arch neoliberal tradition of its time. ..."
Thomas Frank's The Wrecking Crew is another classic. This work, along with his more notable What's
The Matter With Kansas?, is another ground breaking examination into a major phenomenon of American
politics by one of America's foremost social analysts and critics. While What's The Matter With
Kansas? looked more at cultural behavior in explaining why Red State Americans have embraced corporate
elitist ideology and ballot casting that militates against their own economic self-interest, even
their very survival, this title deals more with structural changes in the government, economy,
and society that have come about as a result of a Republican right wing agenda. It is a perplexing
and sorry phenomenon that deserves the attention of a first rate pundit like Frank.
Neoliberal ideology is championed on behalf of corporate elites who have now secured total
control, even ownership, of the federal government. The Wrecking Crew is about a Republican
agenda to totally eliminate the last vestiges of the New Deal and Great Society, which have provided
social safety nets for ordinary working class Americans through programs such as Social Security
and Medicare. Corporate elites want to demolish only that part of government that doesn't benefit
the corporation. Thus, a huge military budget and intrusive national security and police apparatus
is revered, while education, health, welfare, infrastructure, etc. are of less utility for the
corporate state. High taxes on the corporations and wealthy are abhorred, while the middle class
is expected to shoulder a huge tax burden. Although Republicans rail against federal deficits,
when in office they balloon the federal deficits in a plan for government-by-sabotage. (Page 261)
Elites need federal government revenue transferred to their realm via fat government contracts
and juicy subsidies. They want government without regulation, and they want taxation imposed on
the masses without real representation, but not on them. The big government they rail at
is the same government they own and benefit from. They certainly do not want the national security
state (the largest part of government) or the national police system to go away, not even the
IRS. How can they fight wars without a revenue collection system? The wellspring of conservatism
in America today -- preserving connections between the present and past -- is a destroyer of tradition,
not a preserver. (Page 267)
Neoliberals drew up a long term strategy to sabotage and disrupt the liberal apparatus.
There ensued a vast selling-off of government assets (and favors) to those willing to fund the
neoliberal movement. The strategy was concocted as a long term plan - the master blueprint for
a wholesale transfer of government responsibilities to private-sector contractors unaccountable
to Congress or anyone else. An entire industry sprung up to support conservatism - the great god
market (corporate globalism) replaced anti-communism as the new inspiration. (page 93)
Market populism arose as business was supposed to empower the noble common people. But
capitalism is not loyal to people or anything once having lost its usefulness, not even the nation
state or the flag. (page 100) While the New Deal replaced rule by wealthy with its brain
trust, conservatism, at war with intellectuals, fills the bureaucracy with cronies, hacks, partisans,
and creationists. The democracy, or what existed of it, was to be gradually made over into a plutocracy
- rule by the wealthy. (Page 252) Starting with Reagan and Thatcher, the program was to hack open
the liberal state in order to reward business with the loot. (Page 258) The ultimate neoliberal
goal is to marketize the nation's politics so that financial markets can be elevated over vague
liberalisms like the common good and the public interest. (Page 260)
According to Frank, what makes a place a free-market paradise is not the absence of governments;
it is the capture of government by business interests. The game of corporatism is to see
how much public resources the private interest can seize for itself before public government can
stop them. A proper slogan for this mentality would be: more business in government, less government
in business. And, there are market based solutions to every problem. Government should be market
based. George W. Bush grabbed more power for the executive branch than anyone since Nixon. The
ultra-rights' fortunes depend on public cynicism toward government. With the U.S. having been
set up as a merchant state, the idea of small government is now a canard - mass privatization
and outsourcing is preferred. Building cynicism toward government is the objective. Neoliberals
don't want efficient government, they want less competition and more profits - especially for
defense contractors. Under Reagan, civil servants were out, loyalists were in.
While the Clinton team spoke of entrepreneurial government - of reinventing government - the
wrecking crew under Republicans has made the state the tool of money as a market-based system
replaced civil service by a government-by-contractor (outsourcing). Page 137 This has been an
enduring trend, many of the great robber barons got their start as crooked contractors during
the Civil War. Contractors are now a fourth branch of government with more people working under
contracts than are directly employed by government - making it difficult to determine where government
stops and the contractors start in a system of privatized government where private contractors
are shielded from oversight or accountability. (Page 138)
The first general rule of neoliberal
administration: cronies in, experts out. The Bush team did away with EPA's office of enforcement
- turning enforcement power over to the states. (Page 159) In an effort to demolish the regulatory
state, Reagan, immediately after taking office, suspended hundreds of regulations that federal
agencies had developed during the Carter Administration. Under Reagan, a philosophy of government
blossomed that regarded business as its only constituent. In recent years, neoliberals have
deliberately piled up debt to force government into crisis.
Watergate poisoned attitudes toward government - helping sweep in Ronald Reagan with his
anti-government cynicism. Lobbying and influence peddling proliferated in a privatized government.
Lobbying is how money casts its vote. It is the signature activity of neoliberal governance -
the mechanism that translates market forces into political action. (Page 175)
It is the goal of the neoliberal agenda to smash the liberal state. Deficits are one means
to accomplish that end.- to persuade voters to part with programs like Social Security and Medicare
so these funds can be transferred to corporate contractors or used to finance wars or deficit
reduction.. Uncle Sam can raise money by selling off public assets.
Since liberalism depends on fair play by its sworn enemies, it is vulnerable to sabotage by
those not playing by liberalism's rules/ (Page 265) The Liberal State, a vast machinery built
for our protection has been reengineered into a device for our exploitation. (Page 8) Liberalism
arose out of a long-ago compromise between left-wing social movements and business interests.
(Page 266) Neoliberalism speaks of not compromise but of removing adversaries from the field altogether.
(Page 266) No one dreams of eliminating the branches of state that protect Neoliberalism's constituents
such as the military, police, or legal privileges granted to corporations, neoliberals openly
scheme to do away with liberal bits of big government. (Page 266)
Liberalism is a philosophy of
compromise, without a force on the Left to neutralize the magneticism exerted by money, liberalism
will be drawn to the right. (Page 274)
Through corporate media and right wing talk show, liberalism has become a dirty word. However,
liberalism may not be dead yet. It will have to be resurrected from the trash bin of history when
the next capitalist crisis hits. One should never forget that it was Roosevelt's New Deal
that saved capitalism from itself. Also, one should not forget that capitalism came out of the
classical liberal tradition. Capitalists had to wrest power away from the landowning nobility,
the arch neoliberal tradition of its time.
This is a very important article and I strongly recommend to read it in full to understand how neoliberal
propaganda works.
This is nice example of how difficult is for ordinary person to cut threw media lies and get to
the truth. So some level of brainwashing is inevitable unless you use only alternative media. Neoliberal
MSM are disgusting and are lying all the time, but unless you use WWW and foreign sources (like people
in the in the USSR did -- substitute radio for WWW, as it did not existed yet) that is not much else.
Notable quotes:
"... Donald Trump did something downright shocking for a debate a few days before an important Republican primary. He went after the country's last Republican president, George W. Bush. Hard. He went after the Republican Party's general foreign policy approach. Hard. ..."
"... Obviously, the war in Iraq was a big, fat mistake. All right? The war in Iraq, we spent $2 trillion, thousands of lives, we don't even have it. Iran has taken over Iraq with the second-largest oil reserves in the world. Obviously, it was a mistake. George Bush made a mistake. We can make mistakes. But that one was a beauty. We should have never been in Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East. I want to tell you. They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction, there were none. And they knew there were none. There were no weapons of mass destruction. ..."
"... Trump said, "The World Trade Center came down during your brother's reign, remember that That's not keeping us safe." ..."
"... Compare that little vignette with this week, when Donald Trump repeatedly said that President Obama and Hillary Clinton were founders/co-founders/MVPs of ISIS. ..."
"... Washington Examiner ..."
"... DT: I don't care. He was the founder. His, the way he got out of Iraq was that that was the founding of ISIS, okay? ..."
Back in February, candidates for the Republican nomination for president debated each other in
South Carolina. The Saturday evening discussion was raucous. Donald Trump did something downright
shocking for a debate a few days before an important Republican primary. He went after the country's
last Republican president, George W. Bush. Hard. He went after the Republican Party's general foreign
policy approach. Hard.
Moderator John Dickerson asked him about his 2008 comments in favor of impeaching George W. Bush.
He had said that year that Bush had "lied" to get the United States into a war in Iraq.
Trump said to Dickerson:
Obviously, the war in Iraq was a big, fat mistake. All right? The war in Iraq, we spent
$2 trillion, thousands of lives, we don't even have it. Iran has taken over Iraq with the second-largest
oil reserves in the world. Obviously, it was a mistake. George Bush made a mistake. We can make
mistakes. But that one was a beauty. We should have never been in Iraq. We have destabilized the
Middle East. I want to tell you. They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction,
there were none. And they knew there were none. There were no weapons of mass destruction.
Jeb Bush attempted to defend his brother's honor, saying, "And while Donald Trump was building
a reality TV show, my brother was building a security apparatus to keep us safe. And I'm proud of
what he did."
Trump said, "The World Trade Center came down during your brother's reign, remember that
That's not keeping us safe."
And on it went. Yes, many in the crowd booed. Yes, many Republicans opposed his conspiracy theories
about George W. Bush. The media were able to report Trump's challenges to Republican foreign policy
without weighing in on the veracity of his claims. The most interesting thing of all? Trump
easily won the
South Carolina primary a week later with 33 percent of the vote.
Compare that little vignette with this week, when Donald Trump repeatedly said that President
Obama and Hillary Clinton were founders/co-founders/MVPs of ISIS. Even though the media had
more than shot their outrage wad for the week, the media doubled, tripled, even quadrupled down on
their outrage for the Wednesday night-Thursday news cycle. Here are six problems with the media's
complete meltdown over the remarks.
Why Did This Become an Issue Now and Not 7 Months Ago?
Republicans who oppose Trump
claim the media encouraged Trump when he was setting fire to Republican opponents but have fought
him tooth and nail in the general. Ammunition for that claim includes the distinct ways the media
have reacted to his long-standing claim that Obama and Clinton founded ISIS.
As the Washington
Examiner notes, Trump said this three times in January alone:
'They've created ISIS. Hillary Clinton created ISIS with Obama,' he said during a campaign
rally in Mississippi.
Trump restated the claim in an interview on CBS in July. 'Hillary Clinton invented ISIS
with her stupid policies,' he said. 'She is responsible for ISIS.'
He said it again during a rally in Florida one month later. 'It was Hillary Clinton – she
should take an award from them as the founder of ISIS.'
Needless to say, the media response to these comments was more bemused enabling than the abject
horror they reserved for this week. The full media meltdown over something Trump has been saying
all year long is at best odd and unbecoming. At worst, it suggests deep media corruption.
Hyperliteralism
Listen, Trump might be an effective communicator with his core audience,
but others have trouble understanding him. His speaking style couldn't be more removed from the
anodyne and cautious political rhetoric of our era. This can be a challenge for political journalists
in particular. His sentences run on into paragraphs. He avoids specificity or contradicts himself
when he doesn't. His sentences trail into other sentences before they finish. He doesn't play
the usual games that the media are used to. It's frustrating.
So the media immediately decided Trump was claiming that Obama had literally incorporated ISIS
a few years back. And they treated this literal claim as a fact that needed to be debunked.
Politifact gave the claim one of their vaunted "pants on fire" rulings: ... ... ...
The "fact" "check" admits that both President Barack Obama's leadership in Iraq and Hillary
Clinton's push to change regimes in Libya led to the explosion of ISIS but says that since Trump
said he really, totally, no-joke meant Obama and Clinton were co-founders, that they must give
him a Pants On Fire rating.
As for the CNN chyron which appears to be deployed never in the case of Hillary Clinton's many
serious troubles with truth-telling, or when Joe Biden told black voters that Republicans were
going to "put y'all back in chains," but repeatedly in the case of Donald Trump speaking hyperbolically,
this tweet is worth considering:
Failure to Do Due Diligence
On Thursday morning, Trump did a radio interview with
Hugh Hewitt. The media clipped one part of his answer and used it to push a narrative that Donald
Trump was super serial
about Obama literally going to Baghdad, attending organizational meetings, and holding bake sales
to launch his new organization ISIS.
Kapur's tweet went viral but so did about eleventy billion other reporter tweets making the
same point. The Guardian headline was "Trump reiterates he literally believes Barack Obama is
the 'founder of Isis'."
You really need to listen to the interview to get the full flavor of how unjournalistic this
narrative is.
Yes, Trump does reiterate over and over that Obama is the founder of ISIS. And yes, he says
he really meant to say Obama founded ISIS. But that's definitely not all. How hard is it to listen
for an additional minute or read an additional few words? The relevant portion of the interview
is from 15:25 to 16:53. So this is not a huge investment of your time.
First off, let's note for our hyperliteral media that Trump says "I'm a person that doesn't
like insulting people" a few seconds before Hewitt asks about the ISIS comments. (Fact check:
Pants on fire, amiright?) In this minute and a half, Trump says "I meant he's the founder of ISIS.
I do. He was the most valuable player. I give him the most valuable player award. I give her,
too, by the way, Hillary Clinton." Hewitt pushes back, saying that Obama is trying to kill ISIS.
Trump says:
DT: I don't care. He was the founder. His, the way he got out of Iraq was that that
was the founding of ISIS, okay?
Here, journalists and pundits, is your first slap across the face that maybe, just maybe, Trump
is not talking about articles of incorporation but, rather, something else entirely.
Hewitt says, yeah, but the way you're saying it is opening you up to criticism. Was it a mistake?
Trump says not at all. Obama is ISIS's most valuable player. Then Trump asks Hewitt if he doesn't
like the way he's phrasing all this! And here's where journalists might want to put on their thinking
caps and pay attention. Hewitt says he'd say that Obama and Hillary lost the peace and created
a vacuum for ISIS, but he wouldn't say they created it:
HH: I don't. I think I would say they created, they lost the peace. They created the Libyan
vacuum, they created the vacuum into which ISIS came, but they didn't create ISIS. That's what
I would say.
DT: Well, I disagree.
HH: All right, that's okay.
DT: I mean, with his bad policies, that's why ISIS came about.
HH: That's
DT: If he would have done things properly, you wouldn't have had ISIS.
HH: That's true.
DT: Therefore, he was the founder of ISIS.
HH: And that's, I'd just use different language to communicate it, but let me close with
this, because I know I'm keeping you long, and Hope's going to kill me.
DT: But they wouldn't talk about your language, and they do talk about my language, right?
Now, this is undoubtedly true. When people critique Obama's policies as Hewitt did, the media
either call the critic racist or ignore him. When Trump critiques Obama's policies, they do talk
about the way he does it. Maybe this means the message gets through to people.
No matter what, though, the media should have stuck through all 90 seconds of the discussion
to avoid the idiotic claim that Trump was saying Obama was literally on the ground in Iraq running
ISIS' operations. He flat-out admits he's speaking hyperbolically to force the media to cover
it.
Pretending This Rhetoric Is Abnormal
People accuse their political opponents of being
responsible for bad things all the time.
Clinton accused Trump of being ISIS' top recruiter. Bush's CIA and NSA chief said Trump was
a "recruiting
sergeant" for ISIS. Former NYC mayor Rudy Guiliani said Hillary Clinton could be considered
a
founding member of ISIS. Here was Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-MA, just a few weeks ago, making
a completely false claim of Republican's literal ties to ISIS:
Carly Fiorina and Rick Santorum placed blame for ISIS on Obama and Clinton. Sen. John McCain
said Obama was "directly responsible" for the Orlando ISIS attack due to his failure to deal with
the terror group. President Obama said
he couldn't think of a more potent recruiting tool for ISIS than Republican rhetoric in support
of prioritizing help for Christians who had been targeted by the group. Last year, Vanity Fair
published a piece blaming George W. Bush for ISIS. Heck,
so did President
Obama. There are many other examples. This type of rhetoric may not be exemplary, but we shouldn't
pretend it's unique to Trump.
Missing Actual Problems with His Comments
Huge kudos to BuzzFeed's Andrew Kaczynski
for avoiding the feigned outrage/fainting couch in favor of an important critique of Trump's comments.
He didn't pretend to be confused by what Trump was saying. By avoiding that silliness, he noticed
something much more problematic with Trump's comments.
Trump has cited the conservative critique of President Obama's Iraq policy - that the withdrawal
of troops in 2011 led to a power vacuum that allowed ISIS to flourish - in making the claim.
'He was the founder of ISIS, absolutely,' Trump said on CNBC on Thursday. 'The way he removed
our troops - you shouldn't have gone in. I was against the war in Iraq. Totally against it.'
(Trump was not against the war as he has repeatedly claimed.) 'The way he got out of Iraq was
that that was the founding of ISIS, OK?' Trump later said.
But lost in Trump's immediate comments is that, for years, he pushed passionately and forcefully
for the same immediate troop withdrawal from Iraq. In interview after interview in the later
2000s, Trump said American forces should be removed from Iraq.
Read the whole (brief) thing. One of the Trump quotes in the piece specifically has him acknowledging
the civil unrest in Iraq that led to ISIS flourishing. It's a devastating critique and a far smarter
one than the silly hysteria on display elsewhere.
We're Still Not Talking about Widespread Dissatisfaction with Our Foreign Policy
Let's think back to the opening vignette. Trump went into the South in the middle of the Republican
primary and ostentatiously micturated over George W. Bush's Iraq policy. The voters of South Carolina
rewarded him with a victory.
Here's the real scandal in this outrage-du-jour: by pretending to think that Trump was claiming
Obama had operational control over ISIS' day-to-day decision making, the media failed to cover
widespread dissatisfaction with this country's foreign policy, whether it's coming from George
W. Bush or Barack Obama.
Many Americans are rather sick of this country's way of fighting wars, where enemies receive
decades of nation-building instead of crushing defeats, and where threats are pooh-poohed or poorly
managed instead of actually dealt with.
Trump may be an uneven and erratic communicator who is unable to force that discussion in a
way that a more traditional candidate might, but the media shouldn't have to be forced into it.
Crowds are cheering Trump's hard statements about Obama and Clinton's policies in the Middle East
because they are sick and tired of losing men, women, treasure and time with impotent, misguided,
aimless efforts there.
The vast majority of Americans supported invading Iraq, even if
many of them deny they supported it now. Americans have lost confidence in both Republican
and Democratic foreign policy approaches. No amount of media hysteria will hide that reality.
Mollie Ziegler Hemingway is a senior editor at The Federalist. Follow her on Twitter at @mzhemingway
"... "Trump is a racist and his followers are racist and that's all you need to know" is a narrative thesis, like the narrative thesis that Trump is Putin's stooge, very convenient to Clinton's candidacy, but ultimately corrosive to American politics and political discourse. ..."
"... Not just boxed away as, "well, she is obviously better than Trump so let's not even trouble our beautiful minds", when by the way it is not so obvious as all that, as several commenters have tried to point out. People, who argue Trump might start a nuclear war out of personal pique because he insults people on teevee might want to examine Clinton's bellicose foreign policy record and positions on, say, Israel, Iran, Ukraine, NATO expansion or the South China Sea. ..."
"... Everything should not be about electing Clinton. Clinton's election is pretty much assured, despite her deep flaws as a candidate of the center-left (to wit, her war-mongering and epic corruption and economic conservatism). Pundits like Josh Marshall of TPM or Ezra Klein of Vox are betraying their public trust by carrying Clinton's water so slavishly. ..."
"... People, who argue Trump might start a nuclear war out of personal pique because he insults people on teevee might want to examine Clinton's bellicose foreign policy record and positions on, say, Israel, Iran, Ukraine, NATO expansion or the South China Sea ..."
"... Let's not forget the Clintons were the Democratic Party point people in causing the vast incarceration of black men while simultaneously gutting welfare for black mothers and their children. (Yay 3rd Way!) They were the point people for letting 300 million Chinese workers compete with American workers. They deregulated the banks. And was there a war she didn't like? ..."
"... If there's a populist politics in our future, it will have to have a much sharper edge. It can talk about growth, but it has to mean smashing the rich and taking their stuff. There's very rapidly going to come a point where there's no other option, other than just accepting cramdown by the authoritarian surveillance state built by the neoliberals. that's a much taller order than Sanders or Trump have been offering. ..."
I think all you've really shown is that blue-collar, less-educated people tend
to not know much about politics and to have the political attitudes of authoritarian followers
and Trump is willing to be demagogic enough to attract their attention as an alternative to the
status quo candidacy of Hillary Clinton.
"Trump is a racist and his followers are racist and that's all you need to know" is a narrative
thesis, like the narrative thesis that Trump is Putin's stooge, very convenient to Clinton's candidacy,
but ultimately corrosive to American politics and political discourse. It isn't a question
of whether statistics suggest racism is an efficient instrumental variable. It is a question of
whether this politics of invective and distraction is going anywhere good, could go anywhere good.
No one in these comment threads has been defending Trump or the political ignorance and resentments
of his supporters. Some of us have questioned the wisdom of a political tactic of treating them
as pariahs and dismissing their concerns and economic distress as fake or illegitimate.
The Clinton campaign has whipped up a high dudgeon about racism and Putin and how unsuited
Trump is, to be President. I don't disagree about the core conclusion: Trump does not seem to
me to be suited to be President. That's hardly a difficult judgment: an impulsive, self-promoting
reality teevee star with no experience of public office - hmmm, let me think about that for two
seconds. But, the high dudgeon serves other purposes, to which I object strongly.
Even though, and especially because Clinton is very likely to become President, her suitability
ought to be scrutinized. Not just boxed away as, "well, she is obviously better than
Trump so let's not even trouble our beautiful minds", when by the way it is not so obvious
as all that, as several commenters have tried to point out. People, who argue Trump might start
a nuclear war out of personal pique because he insults people on teevee might want to examine
Clinton's bellicose foreign policy record and positions on, say, Israel, Iran, Ukraine, NATO expansion
or the South China Sea.
Everything should not be about electing Clinton. Clinton's election is pretty much assured,
despite her deep flaws as a candidate of the center-left (to wit, her war-mongering and epic corruption
and economic conservatism). Pundits like Josh Marshall of TPM or Ezra Klein of Vox are betraying
their public trust by carrying Clinton's water so slavishly. Ezra may be gaining all important
access to the Clinton White House comparable to what he had in Obama's White House, but he spent
his credibility with his readers to get it. And, he's deprived his readers of the opportunity
to learn about issues of vital importance, like the TPP and corporate business power, or NATO
expansion and the relationship with Russia, or the swirling vortex forming in the Middle East
where American Empire is going down the drain of failed invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and
ill-conceived "alliances" with fundamentally hostile powers like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.
I don't think these comment threads are a good place to campaign or advocate on the behalf
of any candidate. A modicum of advocacy might be welcome for the fodder it provides for reflective
rumination, but mirroring the Clinton campaign's themes seems to require systematic misreadings
of counter-argument and that has become disruptive. (RNB's volume and habitual tendentiousness
puts RNB into a special category in this regard.) There ought to be room in this discussions to
move the conversation to more of a meta-level, where we consider trends and dynamics without the
partisan's hyper-narrow focus.
@ 793 Hi Rich, that's a fair question. If memory serves, there were several very close calls under
Nixon more from errors in the 'fail safe' system. Nixon is a complicated amoral actor fairly obviously
guilty of some extremely serious crimes. He was not the only nasty actor at the time, however.
In the specific case you're describing, I don't think any president would have handled things
much differently. Russian missiles 90 miles from US soil during the cold war was unacceptable.
Many of our students have absolutely no idea of what life was like during the 20th century.
It's literally another world. The one we share today seems infinitely safer and more tolerant.
Cheers.
BW: "People, who argue Trump might start a nuclear war out of personal pique because he insults
people on teevee might want to examine Clinton's bellicose foreign policy record and positions
on, say, Israel, Iran, Ukraine, NATO expansion or the South China Sea."
Or, as Ian Welsh
points out, her position on Syria. She seems to have advocated for a no-fly zone in Syria after
Russia came in, which would presumably put us in the position of shooting down Russian warplanes
or having a good chance of doing so. Maybe if she does take on Kissinger as an advisor he'll tell
her that superpower conflicts have to be done through proxies or they're too dangerous.
For the larger question of whether these comment threads are a good place to campaign or advocate,
I sort of come down in a different place than you do. If these comment threads were about good-faith
argument, then sure this kind of advocacy might be bad, but I don't think that most people here
are capable of good-faith argument even if they were attempting it (most of the time they aren't
attempting it). In that case the comment threads serve an alternate purpose of seeing what kinds
of beliefs are out there, at least among the limited group of people likely to comment on CT threads.
Of course people can be kicked out if they habitually make the threads too difficult to moderate
(or really, for whatever other reason an OP decides on), but the well has long since been poisoned
and one more drop isn't really going to do much more damage.
T 08.13.16 at 9:13 pm
BW@798
Amen.
There's a reason the electorate hates both Trump and Clinton. This is what 40 years of two-party
neoliberism gives us: an unhinged demagogue or the point person for Democratic policies that have
systematically gutted the middle class, screwed the poor, increase inequality, slowed productivity,
caused multiple wars, and made them personally rich.
Let's not forget the Clintons were the Democratic Party point people in causing the vast
incarceration of black men while simultaneously gutting welfare for black mothers and their children.
(Yay 3rd Way!) They were the point people for letting 300 million Chinese workers compete with
American workers. They deregulated the banks. And was there a war she didn't like?
So Layman finds that the 80% of the Evangelicals that support Trump are racist. And so are
the white voters in manufacturing regions. (Excuse me. "Principally" racist.) And Layman's exact
counterpart on some unnamed right-wing site thinks all the blacks voting for HRC are in it for
the welfare and affirmative action. (Yes, your exact counterpart. Oh, and they, like you, would
say blacks are "principally" scammers cause, you know, there are other minor reasons to vote HRC.)
I take a different view. I think most voters are going to have the taste of vomit in the their
mouths when they pull the lever.
If there's a populist politics in our future, it will have to have a much sharper edge.
It can talk about growth, but it has to mean smashing the rich and taking their stuff. There's
very rapidly going to come a point where there's no other option, other than just accepting cramdown
by the authoritarian surveillance state built by the neoliberals. that's a much taller order than
Sanders or Trump have been offering.
Fit for inscription (keeps me smashingly awake after hundreds of comments :-))
The moral righteousness of identity politics adds in an element that goes
way beyond the lazy failure to hold politicians accountable or the tendency to explain away their
more Machiavellian maneuvers. There's both an actual blindness to the reactionary conservatism
of equal opportunity exploitation and a peremptory challenge to any other claim or analysis. If
police practices and procedures are trending in an authoritarian direction, they can only be challenged
on grounds of racist effect or intent. The authoritarianism cannot be challenged on its own merit,
so the building of the authoritarian state goes on unimpeded, since the principle that is challenged
is not authoritarianism, but a particular claim of racism or sexism.
So in the same week that the Justice Department report on the Baltimore police force comes
out, showing systematic police discrimination - e.g. lots of people stopped in black neighborhoods,
esp. two in particular, for petty reasons or no reason, versus very few people stopped in other
neighborhoods - bruce wilder informs us that identity politics somehow prevents us from criticizing
police behavior on grounds of authoritarianism, that it can only be criticized on grounds of racism
(or subconscious racial bias) - of course, that wd appear to be a main problem w police behavior
in Baltimore and some other places.
"... We here in CT comments lead a quiet, parochial life. In the larger world, the disclosure of the DNC emails required a preposterous story of Russian hacking, followed by a gotcha accusing Trump of asking Putin to become a latter day Watergate burglar. ..."
We here in CT comments lead a quiet, parochial life. In the larger world, the disclosure
of the DNC emails required a preposterous story of Russian hacking, followed by a gotcha accusing
Trump of asking Putin to become a latter day Watergate burglar.
I have no sympathy for Trump, who made his bones as birther-in-chief. Live by the sword, die
by the sword.
But, I do have some sympathy for the rest of us, who are the objects of these manipulations.
The email discussing whether they can push the atheist hot-button or the Jew hot-button and get
a predictable response from voters disturbs me because it seems that the propaganda has drowned
out everything else.
It is one thing when they're wearing out the gay hot-button or the xenophobia hot-button or
trying to get the anti-semite hot-button to work again, but I get the idea that there's only hot-buttons,
only manipulation. There's no considered, deliberate purpose behind any of it. Hillary Clinton
is so pre-occupied affirming support for Israel and condemning Iran or ISIS or Russia, that there's
no room left for formulating reality-based policy or explaining such a policy to the American
people.
Moreover story about the Russkies carrying out a plot to influence the US election is so much juicier
than a real story about Clinton's minions doing the humdrum work of influencing US elections by unethical
means. It is somewhat similar to "Romney dog" story.
Notable quotes:
"... It is a story offered without proof for the purposes of creating a distraction, since it becomes an excuse for pundits engaging in groundless speculation and poses of outrage. Because a far-fetched story about the Russkies carrying out an 11-dimensional plot to influence the U.S. election is so much juicier than a pedestrian story about Clinton's minions doing the humdrum work of . . . influencing U.S. elections by unethical means. ..."
"... The convoluted and imaginative stories about Guccifer and so on are just that, stories. The U.S. has an enormous and expensive surveillance state apparatus in place. So proof is, presumably, readily available if someone in authority wants to offer it. In the meantime, we have self-styled consultants blowing smoke ..."
Lanny Davis, longtime Clinton ally and DNC hack, explaining in great detail ( on Fox no less)
why the Romney dog story makes the Republican candidate (is a Mormon the same as an atheist, Debbie?)
unfit for the office of the President.
awy @ 389: why is russian hacking of the dnc a preposterous story?
It is a story offered without proof for the purposes of creating a distraction, since it
becomes an excuse for pundits engaging in groundless speculation and poses of outrage.
Because a far-fetched story about the Russkies carrying out an 11-dimensional plot to influence
the U.S. election is so much juicier than a pedestrian story about Clinton's minions doing the
humdrum work of . . . influencing U.S. elections by unethical means.
The convoluted and imaginative stories about Guccifer and so on are just that, stories.
The U.S. has an enormous and expensive surveillance state apparatus in place. So proof is, presumably,
readily available if someone in authority wants to offer it. In the meantime, we have self-styled
consultants blowing smoke.
But, hey, the Democrat's Platform promises: "Democrats will protect our industry, infrastructure,
and government from cyberattacks." Hillary is going to get on that real soon now.
"... The violation of norms was similar, but Tom DeLay invented his scheme as a way of strengthening his Party and making it more
powerful in Congress, which was kinda his job, and he was quite successful in adding Republicans to the Texas delegation. ..."
"... Debbie Wasserman Schultz wasn't just violating the norms; she was trying to weaken her Party, draining away resources to the
Clinton campaign that they had no legitimate claim to from parts of the Party that needed those resources. And, it is part of a pattern
of leadership action to weaken the Party. (Patrick Murphy, her hand-picked candidate for U.S. Senate from Florida is exhibit one.) ..."
"... I think it is fair and accurate to describe the HVF transfer arrangements as a means of circumventing campaign financing limits
and using the State parties to subsidize the Clinton campaign. ..."
"... Between the creation of the victory fund in September and the end of [June], the fund had brought in $142 million, . . . 44
percent [to] DNC ($24.4 million) and Hillary for America ($37.6 million), . . . state parties have kept less than $800,000 of all the
cash brought in by the committee - or only 0.56 percent. ..."
"... Beyond the transfers, much of the fund's $42 million in direct spending also appears to have been done to directly benefit
the Clinton campaign, as opposed to the state parties ..."
"... The fund has paid $4.1 million to the Clinton campaign for "salary and overhead expenses" to reimburse it for fundraising efforts.
And it has directed $38 million to vendors such as direct marketing company Chapman Cubine Adams + Hussey and digital consultant Bully
Pulpit Interactive - both of which also serve the Clinton campaign - for mailings and online ads that sometimes closely resemble Clinton
campaign materials. ..."
Wasn't Tom DeLay indicted and driven from Congress over a similar sort of money shuffle?
The violation of norms was similar, but Tom DeLay invented his scheme as a way of strengthening his Party and making it
more powerful in Congress, which was kinda his job, and he was quite successful in adding Republicans to the Texas delegation.
Debbie Wasserman Schultz wasn't just violating the norms; she was trying to weaken her Party, draining away resources to
the Clinton campaign that they had no legitimate claim to from parts of the Party that needed those resources. And, it is part
of a pattern of leadership action to weaken the Party. (Patrick Murphy, her hand-picked candidate for U.S. Senate from Florida
is exhibit one.)
bruce wilder 08.03.16 at 1:08 am
Layman @ 79
I am not interested in a prolonged back and forth, but I will lay out a bare outline of facts. I do not find much support for
your characterization of these arrangements, which give new meaning to the fungibility of funds. I think it is fair and accurate
to describe the HVF transfer arrangements as a means of circumventing campaign financing limits and using the State parties to
subsidize the Clinton campaign. Court rulings have made aggregate fund raising legal and invites this means of circumventing
the $2700 limit on individual Presidential campaign donations. Whether the circumvention is legal - whether it violates the law
to invite nominal contributions to State Parties of $10,000 and channel those contributions wholly to operations in support of
Clinton, while leaving nothing in State Party coffers is actually illegal, I couldn't say; it certainly violates the norms of
a putative joint fundraising effort. It wasn't hard for POLITICO to find State officials who said as much. The rest of this comment
quotes POLITICO reports dated July 2016.
Hillary Victory Fund, which now includes 40 state Democratic Party committees, theoretically could accept checks as large as
$436,100 - based on the individual limits of $10,000 per state party, $33,400 for the DNC, and $2,700 for Clinton's campaign.
Between the creation of the victory fund in September and the end of [June], the fund had brought in $142 million, . .
. 44 percent [to] DNC ($24.4 million) and Hillary for America ($37.6 million), . . . state parties have kept less than $800,000
of all the cash brought in by the committee - or only 0.56 percent.
. . . state parties have received $7.7 million in transfers, but within a few days of most transfers, almost all of the cash
- $6.9 million - was transferred to the DNC . . .
The only date on which most state parties received money from the victory fund and didn't pass any of it on to the DNC was
May 2, the same day that POLITICO published an article exposing the arrangement.
Beyond the transfers, much of the fund's $42 million in direct spending also appears to have been done to directly benefit
the Clinton campaign, as opposed to the state parties.
The fund has paid $4.1 million to the Clinton campaign for "salary and overhead expenses" to reimburse it for fundraising
efforts. And it has directed $38 million to vendors such as direct marketing company Chapman Cubine Adams + Hussey and digital
consultant Bully Pulpit Interactive - both of which also serve the Clinton campaign - for mailings and online ads that sometimes
closely resemble Clinton campaign materials.
"... The problem with just sitting back and let you invade any country you like is that we all have to live in the world you make. You're certainly correct to point out that there are many things 'we foreigners' don't understand about America. ..."
"... What we do know is that whatever you tell yourself about the sacrifices US soldiers are making in your peacemaking wars in the ME, the overwhelming majority of those killed and wounded in modern US led military actions are not Americans. I fully believe that many Americans are intensely patriotic and love their country. I also believe that there are many subcultures within America that 'we foreigners' cannot understand. ..."
"... You believe your nation's commitment to its military is somehow special? Prove it. Instead we get American exceptionalism proudly on display. ..."
84@ The problem with just sitting back and let you invade any country you like is that
we all have to live in the world you make. You're certainly correct to point out that there are
many things 'we foreigners' don't understand about America.
What we do know is that whatever you tell yourself about the sacrifices US soldiers are
making in your peacemaking wars in the ME, the overwhelming majority of those killed and wounded
in modern US led military actions are not Americans. I fully believe that many Americans are intensely
patriotic and love their country. I also believe that there are many subcultures within America
that 'we foreigners' cannot understand.
What is also clear from your comment is that you, and perhaps some others, believe that this
love of country and rich tapestry of subcultures somehow makes Americans very, very special and
beyond criticism.
We understand this much: Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor – 68 civilian casualties.
The US response: "..on the night of March 9-10, 1945…LeMay sent 334 B-29s low over Tokyo from
the Marianas. Their mission was to reduce the city to rubble, kill its citizens, and instill terror
in the survivors, with jellied gasoline and napalm that would create a sea of flames. Stripped
of their guns to make more room for bombs, and flying at altitudes averaging 7,000 feet to evade
detection, the bombers, which had been designed for high-altitude precision attacks, carried two
kinds of incendiaries: M47s, 100-pound oil gel bombs, 182 per aircraft, each capable of starting
a major fire, followed by M69s, 6-pound gelled-gasoline bombs, 1,520 per aircraft in addition
to a few high explosives to deter firefighters. [25] The attack on an area that the US Strategic
Bombing Survey estimated to be 84.7 percent residential succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of
air force planners…
The Strategic Bombing Survey, whose formation a few months earlier provided an important signal
of Roosevelt's support for strategic bombing, provided a technical description of the firestorm
and its effects on Tokyo: The chief characteristic of the conflagration . . . was the presence
of a fire front, an extended wall of fire moving to leeward, preceded by a mass of pre-heated,
turbid, burning vapors . . . . The 28-mile-per-hour wind, measured a mile from the fire, increased
to an estimated 55 miles at the perimeter, and probably more within. An extended fire swept over
15 square miles in 6 hours . . . . The area of the fire was nearly 100 percent burned; no structure
or its contents escaped damage."
The survey concluded-plausibly, but only for events prior to August 6, 1945-that
"probably more persons lost their lives by fire at Tokyo in a 6-hour period than at any time
in the history of man. People died from extreme heat, from oxygen deficiency, from carbon monoxide
asphyxiation, from being trampled beneath the feet of stampeding crowds, and from drowning. The
largest number of victims were the most vulnerable: women, children and the elderly."
The raids continue for all the 'best' military reasons…
"In July, US planes blanketed the few remaining Japanese cities that had been spared firebombing
with an "Appeal to the People." "As you know," it read, "America which stands for humanity, does
not wish to injure the innocent people, so you had better evacuate these cities." Half the leafleted
cities were firebombed within days of the warning. US planes ruled the skies. Overall, by one
calculation, the US firebombing campaign destroyed 180 square miles of 67 cities, killed more
than 300,000 people and injured an additional 400,000, figures that exclude the atomic bombing
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki." (My italics)
http://apjjf.org/-Mark-Selden/2414/article.html
kidneystones 08.03.16 at 12:59 am
@ 86 Both my parents served. My grand-fathers served, and most of my uncles and great-uncles
served – you know, the whole mess from being shot to dying in hospitals years after the war from
gas attacks. And I served, nothing special about any of this.
You believe your nation's commitment to its military is somehow special? Prove it. Instead
we get American exceptionalism proudly on display.
Should all the foreigners in your debt salute, or simply prostrate ourselves in awe?
Obama is a neocon and is fully dedicated to expansion and maintenance of the US global neoliberal
empire, at any cost for the US population. Racism card play against Trump, who opposes neoliberal interventionism,
is a variant of the classic " Divide et impera" strategy
Notable quotes:
"... Incidentally, historical amnesia also includes forgetting Barack Obama was the boss when Clinton was secretary and forgetting Barack Obama is still president pursuing insane war-mongering policies long after Clinton is gone ..."
"... Historical amnesia means forgetting the Democratic Party isn't socialist or leftist ..."
"... Historical amnesia means forgetting all foundations are ways for the wealthy to shelter money and exercise influence, Koch's, Rockefeller's, Carnegie's, Ford's, Soros', not just Clintons'. Historical amnesia means forgetting this government has always conducted foreign policy at the behest of special interests. ..."
"... Vilifying millions of people in preference to even asking if Trump hasn't got massive elite support is deeply, profoundly reactionary. Divide et impera has been the rulers' game for centuries. ..."
Incidentally, historical amnesia also includes forgetting Barack Obama was the boss when Clinton
was secretary and forgetting Barack Obama is still president pursuing insane war-mongering policies
long after Clinton is gone and forgetting Barack Obama is still president, and won't even
be a lame duck till November.
Historical amnesia means forgetting the Democratic Party isn't
socialist or leftist, despite Bernie Sanders' long career as a sort of socialist (only informally
a Democrat.)
Historical amnesia means forgetting to even ask what "Watergate" was, and if or how it mattered
(or didn't.)
Historical amnesia means forgetting all foundations are ways for the wealthy to shelter
money and exercise influence, Koch's, Rockefeller's, Carnegie's, Ford's, Soros', not just Clintons'.
Historical amnesia means forgetting this government has always conducted foreign policy at the
behest of special interests.
(Yes, Lupita believes that imperialism actually pays off for the whole country, which
presumably is why when her preferred rich people try to get their own she'll be for that. Nonetheless,
the idea is bullshit. At this point, I can only imagine people don't call her out on that because
they actually agree that "we" are all in it together with our owners.)
Historical amnesia includes forgetting Trump has run for president before, with the same personality
and the same tactics and the same party base. It is unclear how the essentially racist nature
of the vile masses has changed so much in four years.
Vilifying millions of people in preference to even asking if Trump hasn't got massive elite
support is deeply, profoundly reactionary. Divide et impera has been the rulers' game for centuries.
After stealing money from states to help Hillary, Politburo of democratic Party (aka DNC) now it
trying to sink trump is the ocean of lies and distortions. That also helps to hide Hillary helath
problems and emailgate fiasco. Attack is the best form of defense.
Notable quotes:
"... A vote for Trump is a middle-finger vote [ to neoliberal world globalization] . A Trump voter does not have to believe that Trump will do anything for him, only that Trump breaking the system won't be worse for the voter than for the system. ..."
"... Obama had a very easy time of it in 2012. He had an opponent highly vulnerable to easily formulated populist attacks and with only muted appeal within the ranks of his own Party. It enabled Obama to run a very highly controlled and modulated campaign, aiming at a very narrow margin, but highly certain victory, a strategy that served Obama's neoliberal policy agenda well, since he neither had to attack the predatory wealth Romney the tax-dodging vampire capitalist symbolized, nor did he have to make extravagant populist promises to bring out additional electoral support. ..."
"... Clinton has to worry about low voter turnout. Democrats lose low turnout elections and the Democratic Party apparatus is weak in many States, including North Carolina, Ohio and Florida, which are usually considered battlegrounds. If Democratic turnout is low enough, Trump can put unusual states like New York in play. ..."
"... these things may cause a pivot with Trump standing in place. It would be a pivot to Trump attacking a broader range of establishment elites on a broader range of issues. ..."
"... Ian Welsh notes that the story of the Trump meltdown is also a ready-made story of "a stab-in-the-back" by elites stealing the election. Trump is the past Teflon Master on these kinds of gotcha fests, but if the Media pivots away from playing gotcha with Trump saying hateful and alarming things about immigration and race to Trump saying arguably true things about foreign policy or economic policy that are kept in an undiscussed box by the perverted norms of conventional wisdom, that might be enough of a broadening pivot. Unlikely, but maybe. ..."
"... Trump's candidacy is an attack on the legitimacy of elites and elite discourse. The news Media is as much an opponent as Clinton. If he baits them, even inadvertently, into doing a pivot for him, that's worrisome. ..."
"... even if the attacks on the legitimacy of Clinton, the Media, the Republican establishment won't get far enough to win the election for Trump, they portend badly for Clinton's Administration. ..."
A vote for Trump is a middle-finger vote [ to neoliberal world
globalization]. A Trump voter does not have to believe that Trump will do anything
for him, only that Trump breaking the system won't be worse for the voter than for the system.
bruce wilder 08.03.16 at 4:57 pm
Romney was in every respect a conventional candidate, one that protected the Republican brand
and, more importantly, protected the Democratic brand and the Obama brand.
Obama had a very easy time of it in 2012. He had an opponent highly vulnerable to easily
formulated populist attacks and with only muted appeal within the ranks of his own Party. It enabled
Obama to run a very highly controlled and modulated campaign, aiming at a very narrow margin,
but highly certain victory, a strategy that served Obama's neoliberal policy agenda well, since
he neither had to attack the predatory wealth Romney the tax-dodging vampire capitalist symbolized,
nor did he have to make extravagant populist promises to bring out additional electoral support.
Clinton, ironically and even paradoxically, has a harder task because Trump is a "worse" candidate
than Romney.
Laying down markers for governance, as RP puts it, poses challenges Obama did not face in 2012.
Carefully calibrating her campaign to get predictable responses and turnout will be much harder.
bruce wilder 08.03.16 at 9:51 pm
Layman @ 143
Yours seems to me like a sound if conventional analysis.
Clinton has to worry about low voter turnout. Democrats lose low turnout elections and
the Democratic Party apparatus is weak in many States, including North Carolina, Ohio and Florida,
which are usually considered battlegrounds. If Democratic turnout is low enough, Trump can put
unusual states like New York in play.
Also, attacks on Trump by establishment Republicans, who are worried about his violation of
norms and by the Media Wurlitzer staging a gotcha ("oh my gosh, Trump didn't know about Crimea!")
- these things may cause a pivot with Trump standing in place. It would be a pivot to Trump attacking
a broader range of establishment elites on a broader range of issues.
Ian Welsh notes that the story of the Trump meltdown is also a ready-made story of "a stab-in-the-back"
by elites stealing the election. Trump is the past Teflon Master on these kinds of gotcha fests,
but if the Media pivots away from playing gotcha with Trump saying hateful and alarming things
about immigration and race to Trump saying arguably true things about foreign policy or economic
policy that are kept in an undiscussed box by the perverted norms of conventional wisdom, that
might be enough of a broadening pivot. Unlikely, but maybe.
Trump's candidacy is an attack on the legitimacy of elites and elite discourse. The news
Media is as much an opponent as Clinton. If he baits them, even inadvertently, into doing a pivot
for him, that's worrisome.
Again, I am firmly in the camp that thinks he has little chance in the election, but like Ian
Welsh and others, I tend to think he's a proof of concept for a more disciplined demagogue and
that he's accelerating the loss of legitimacy for the whole political system, and even if the
attacks on the legitimacy of Clinton, the Media, the Republican establishment won't get far enough
to win the election for Trump, they portend badly for Clinton's Administration.
They feel danger for their cushy positions and military industrial complex profits. Of course
they are concerned and denounce the irresponsibility of Trump.
Notable quotes:
"... I think we reached peak "Trump is not like anything we've seen before" today when 50 top GOP national security officials, many of them veterans of the George W. Bush administration, actually came out and said, Trump "would put at risk our country's national security." ..."
"... just go back and read some of Jane Mayer's reporting on Mr. "we must live on the edge" Hayden ..."
"... my personal favorite, John Negroponte, the man who thought Kissinger was too soft on the North Vietnamese, a Reaganite veteran of the Central America wars who Stephen Kinzer famously described as "a great fabulist." ..."
"... Even by the Reagan Administration's standards of fantasy and duplicity -- I know this will come as news to some, but Donald Trump didn't make up the practice of constructing an alternative reality; remember that Ron Suskind interview with Karl "we create our own reality" Rove? -- Negroponte stood out, completely devising a Honduras of his imagination, which not only helped it become a staging ground for the devastation of the Contra war but also turned that country into a hellscape. ..."
"... Anyway, these are the people who are now being trotted out to denounce the irresponsibility of Trump. ..."
I think we reached peak "Trump is not like anything we've seen before" today when 50 top GOP
national security officials, many of them veterans of the George W. Bush administration, actually
came out and said, Trump "would put at risk our country's national security."
Among the signatories to this statement:
Michael Hayden (just go back and read some of Jane
Mayer's reporting on Mr. "we must live on the edge" Hayden),
my personal favorite, John Negroponte, the man who thought Kissinger was too soft on the North Vietnamese, a Reaganite
veteran of the Central America wars who Stephen Kinzer famously described as "a great fabulist."
Even by the Reagan Administration's standards of fantasy and duplicity -- I know this will come as
news to some, but Donald Trump didn't make up the practice of constructing an alternative reality;
remember that Ron Suskind interview with Karl "we create our own reality" Rove? -- Negroponte stood
out, completely devising a Honduras of his imagination, which not only helped it become a staging
ground for the devastation of the Contra war but also turned that country into a hellscape.
Anyway, these are the people who are now being trotted out to denounce the irresponsibility
of Trump.
As neocons are neoliberals with the gun, no wonder they switched the party and became Hillary
cheerleaders.
Robert Kagan
is dyed-in-the-wool neocon, one of the founders of
PNAC (which
promoted the idea of global neoliberal empire led by the USA and the use of 9/11 style event as
vital for converting the USA into national security state) and cheerleader of Iraq war. He is
also the husband of
Victoria Nuland, who was
instrumental in bringing into power
neo-Nazis in Ukraine. In
this WaPo column he conveniently forget about his own track record and the track record of his wife,
openly accused Trump of fascist tendencies while being unable to use the words "neocons wars" and
"neoliberal globalization" in the whole article even once
Notable quotes:
"... What he off ers is an attitude, an aura of crude strength and machismo, a boasting disrespect for the niceties of the democratic culture that he claims, and his followers believe, has produced national weakness and incompetence. ..."
"... His public discourse consists of attacking or ridiculing a wide range of "others" - Muslims, Hispanics, women, Chinese, Mexicans, Europeans, Arabs, immigrants, refugees - whom he depicts either as threats or as objects of derision. ..."
"... Trump is a negotiator. A fascist is a dictator. They have absolutely nothing in common. The neocon who wrote this propaganda is far more a fascist than Trump could ever be...demonstrated right here with his utilizing his media platform to spread propagandist lies...which is what Hitler did. ..."
"... You have no distaste for the strong man, Kagan. You have a distaste for not being in power. ..."
"... What does that say about those whose interests are served? What is your net worth Robert? How much did you make in the Bush administration, and how did you make it? What was the soldier cost? ..."
"... A Robert Kagan article lambasting the upcoming Reich in Israel will be forthcoming I assume. ..."
"... 'What these people do not or will not see is that, once in power, Trump will owe them and their party nothing". Just like GWB in 2000 and 2004? Where were your warnings then? ..."
But of course the entire Trump phenomenon has nothing to do with policy or ideology. It has
nothing to do with the Republican Party, either, except in its historic role as incubator of this
singular threat to our democracy. Trump has transcended the party that produced him. His growing
army of supporters no longer cares about the party. Because it did not immediately and fully
embrace Trump, because a dwindling number of its political and intellectual leaders still resist
him, the party is regarded with suspicion and even hostility by his followers. Their allegiance
is to him and him alone.
And the source of allegiance? We're supposed to believe that Trump's support stems from economic
stagnation or dislocation. Maybe some of it does. But what Trump offers his followers are not
economic remedies - his proposals change daily. What he off ers is an attitude, an aura of
crude strength and machismo, a boasting disrespect for the niceties of the democratic culture
that he claims, and his followers believe, has produced national weakness and incompetence.
His incoherent and contradictory utterances have one thing in common: They provoke and play on
feelings of resentment and disdain, intermingled with bits of fear, hatred and anger. His
public discourse consists of attacking or ridiculing a wide range of "others" - Muslims,
Hispanics, women, Chinese, Mexicans, Europeans, Arabs, immigrants, refugees - whom he depicts
either as threats or as objects of derision. His program, such as it is, consists chiefly of
promises to get tough with foreigners and people of nonwhite complexion. He will deport them, bar
them, get them to knuckle under, make them pay up or make them shut up.
... ... ...
This phenomenon has arisen in other democratic and quasi-democratic countries over the past
century, and it has generally been called "fascism." Fascist movements, too, had no coherent
ideology, no clear set of prescriptions for what ailed society. "National socialism" was a bundle
of contradictions, united chiefly by what, and who, it opposed; fascism in Italy was
anti-liberal, anti-democratic, anti-Marxist, anti-capitalist and anti-clerical. Successful
fascism was not about policies but about the strongman, the leader (Il Duce, Der Führer), in whom
could be entrusted the fate of the nation. Whatever the problem, he could fix it. Whatever the
threat, internal or external, he could vanquish it, and it was unnecessary for him to explain
how. Today, there is Putinism, which also has nothing to do with belief or policy but is about
the tough man who single-handedly defends his people against all threats, foreign and domestic.
Richard Elkind, 6/1/2016 4:06 PM EDT
Trump is a negotiator. A fascist is a dictator. They have absolutely nothing in common.
The neocon who wrote this propaganda is far more a fascist than Trump could ever
be...demonstrated right here with his utilizing his media platform to spread propagandist
lies...which is what Hitler did.
Faustfaust, 6/1/2016 3:57 PM EDT
Kagan,
A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm. Excerpts:
"Rather than pursuing a comprehensive peace with the entire Arab world, Israel should
work jointly with Jordan and Turkey to contain, destabilize, and roll-back those entities
that are threats to all three".
"Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by
weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing
Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq - an important Israeli strategic objective in its own
right - as a means of foiling Syria's regional ambition"
"Most important, it is understandable that Israel has an interest supporting
diplomatically, militarily and operationally Turkey's and Jordan's actions against Syria,
such as securing tribal alliances with Arab tribes that cross into Syrian territory and are
hostile to the Syrian ruling elite".
"Syrian territory is not immune to attacks emanating from Lebanon by Israeli proxy forces".
Who are those proxy forces? ISIS? It seems so. These statements put you and your ilk in the
pot as corroborators for what has happened in the Middle East since it was written, and
foremost for Syria and its fallout.
Faustfaust, 6/1/2016 3:23 PM EDT
Robert Kagan,
You aren't afraid of strongmen. You prefer them as long as they are working for your interests
and those who you see as your group. Do you remember these excerpts in this letter to George
Bush that you signed in 2002?:
"As a liberal democracy under repeated attack by murderers who target civilians, Israel now
needs and deserves steadfast support.... We are both targets of what you have correctly called
an "Axis of Evil"... Israel is targeted... in part because it is an island of liberal,
democratic principles ...in a sea of tyranny, intolerance, and hatred... the United States
should lend its full support to Israel as it seeks to root out the terrorist network that
daily threatens the lives of Israeli citizens... Furthermore...we urge you to accelerate plans
for removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq... every day that Saddam Hussein remains in
power brings closer the day when terrorists will have not just airplanes... but chemical,
biological, or nuclear weapons"
In this letter you:
1. Are concerned about Israel and its citizens, and are willing to take extreme action on
their behalf, in a manner that is not reflected in your concern for American citizens.
You were willing to destroy nations in the Levant while you call "nazi" when Trump wants to
temporarily reduce travel for a group that has been prone to terrorism in the U.S. on a scale
that not even Israel as experienced.
Meanwhile, you have no issue with Israel's walls, population segregation, and ethnocentrism as
symbols of a strong man fascist government. While you spin language to paint Trump's
relatively mild suggestions as a sign of fascism, you have no issue cosigning the use of
liberal superlatives for Israel. Simply, your writing is disingenuous.
2. Have admitted to your support for the lie that the Iraq invasion was predicated upon, and
for Syria's destruction that is now occurring.
You have no distaste for the strong man, Kagan. You have a distaste for not being in
power.
JMater, 6/1/2016 8:47 AM EDT
Robert Kagan and the rest of the Israel firsters brought fascism to the US. They have used
the CUFI type of organizations and AIPaC and Wall Street money to brainwash Americans and
corrupt Washington to the core.
Faustfaust, 5/31/2016 7:45 PM EDT
"This is how fascism comes to America, not with jackboots and salutes (although there
have been salutes, and a whiff of violence) but with a television huckster, a phony
billionaire, a textbook egomaniac "tapping into" popular resentments and insecurities, and
with an entire national political party - out of ambition or blind party loyalty, or simply
out of fear - falling into line behind him".
Robert Kagan, the brave patriot sounding the alarm from his entrenched and curiously
across-the-aisle regular columnist position at the Washington Post.
Curiously, all of the mainstream writers in solidarity with the concerns of Trump supporters
in this democracy are silent.
What does that say about those whose interests are served? What is your net worth Robert?
How much did you make in the Bush administration, and how did you make it? What was the
soldier cost?
Has anyone in your immediate family ever served in the U.S. military?
Your World War II abuse is in bad taste Robert, and excessively disrespectful to the
population of this nation who your political class has asked to make an unconscionable regular
sacrifice for as long as this nation has existed. For shame.
Faustfaust, 5/31/2016 7:35 PM EDT
"Get right with the leader and his mass following or get run over".
Are you more comfortable with the Neocons running over the base? The number of people that
benefit in either situation seems skewed toward a small minority in your preference. Is this a
country of the politics of the minority?
"They praise the leader's incoherent speeches as the beginning of wisdom, hoping he will
reward them with a plum post in the new order. There are those who merely hope to survive.
Their consciences won't let them curry favor so shamelessly, so they mumble their pledges of
support, like the victims in Stalin's show trials, perhaps not realizing that the leader and
his followers will get them in the end anyway".
You are awfully bold with the allusions to genocidal regimes when addressing a population
whose families gave up hundreds of thousands of soldiers to save your people, while at the
same time Israel won't move a muscle to stop ISIS while they ethnically cleanse its region.
Private Subscriber, 5/31/2016 7:37 AM EDT
Mr. Kagan is a regular columnist for The Post whose biography is readily available. Every
column of his, including this one, is followed by a note that he served in President Reagan's
State Department.
The Post isn't remotely pathetic, but having little faith in the intelligence of other readers
and using the fourth-grade term "Shillary" is -- and I say that as a Sen. Sanders voter.
You seem awfully bold with the allusions to genocidal regimes as an argument against people
who want to reduce terrorism and have their immigration laws enforced, in light of your
support for a regime that is rabidly more ethno-nationalist in Israel.
You seem to be taking advantage of the emotions of people whom you obviously do not respect
nor appreciate. Perhaps you'll soon resort to drawing overly-simplistic illustrations of
political timelines embedded in cartoon explosives.
"A great number will simply kid themselves, refusing to admit that something very different
from the usual politics is afoot".
Well, let's be honest. It would not be unusual for Israel. These politics would be extremely
mild in Israel. A Robert Kagan article lambasting the upcoming Reich in Israel will be
forthcoming I assume.
'What these people do not or will not see is that, once in power, Trump will owe them and
their party nothing". Just like GWB in 2000 and 2004? Where were your warnings then?
Dodgers1, 5/31/2016 7:32 PM EDT
Before we talk about Trump, we should take a look at Obama, America's version of President
Snow in the movie "Hunger Games".
Edward Snowden, if he was ever kidnapped back to the United States, would most certainly be
persecuted by the State. If not for Snowden, we would have never have known about Obama's use
of technology to create and move forward with his version of a police state.
The folks voting for Trump know what they're getting. Media reports of Trump transgressions fall
upon deaf ears because the folks supporting Trump have no reason to have any faith whatsoever
in the neutrality of the press.
The GOP and Trump are still negotiating terms. HRC is trying to stay vertical.
kidneystones 08.08.16 at 6:55 am
News photographers cooperated in concealing Roosevelt's disability, and those who did not found
their camera views blocked by Secret Service agents, according to the FDR Presidential Museum
and Library's website.
Roosevelt's mastered the art of radio. Visual representations were tightly controlled. HRC's press
corps self-censors, much as they did for Obama.
First press conference in 240 days and the media show-up to applaud.
kidneystones 08.08.16 at 9:09 am
Head injuries, vertigo, memory loss, 'short-circuiting brains', are very different from polio.
Unless you believe all injuries/illnesses are the same. Of course, you never said you did, any
more than I 'stated' head injuries, vertigo, and memory loss disqualified you
You raise claims that you alone make, and then expect others to respond. Collapsing in a six-mile
race no more disqualified Carter to be re-elected as president.
It was you, not I who equated FDR and HRC. You sidestep entirely the question of press bias,
and FDR's concern with allowing the press to publicized images suggesting weakness.
But you and the few reading the thread see all this for themselves.
I don't expect, however, you understand and appreciate that your double standards re: gold
star families, etc, and those of the press, make the possibility of a Trump presidency more likely.
The WAPO is one of the few HRC organs to understand the dynamic. There are several good WAPO
articles on HRC's real failures as a senator.
Tilting the playing field in favor of HRC created most of her problems with the Dem base. Continuing
to tile the playing field may cost Dems the election.
"... People don't yet understand that this is just how neoliberals are. The two fundamental loyalties in a state party system have nothing to do with solidarity: they're loyalty up, and loyalty down. Neoliberals are happy to accept whatever loyalty up they are given by fools and suckers: they have no loyalty down at all and will never do the elementary political operations of repaying their base ..."
"... On solidarity: solidarity isn't about the (hierarchy of) relationships among politicians or political operatives. Solidarity is about membership, not leadership. ..."
"... Solidarity is the means to great common, coordinated efforts, that is to trust in leadership and that great solvent of political stalemate: sacrifice to the common good. ..."
"... Solidarity is a powerful force, sometimes historically an eruptive force, and though not by itself intelligent, not necessarily hostile to intelligent direction, but it calls on the individual's narcissism and anger not rational understanding or calculation. It is present as a flash in riots and a fire in insurrections and a great raging furnace in national wars of total mobilization. Elites can fear it or be enveloped by it or manipulate it cynically or with cruel callousness. Though it is a means to common effort and common sacrifice, it demands wages for its efforts and must be fed prodigious resources if it is long at work. ..."
"... What we've got here is a distorted or atrophied sense of the relationship between solidarity and the consent of the governed, between democracy and legitimacy, or more generally, between the individual and the collective ..."
"... If so, maybe we ought to try being a little more honest about what we're willing to pay as individuals for what we get as members of a group. Otherwise, it's hard to see how we can come to terms with our confusion, or survive the malignancies that being confused has introduced into all our group dynamics, not just the overtly political ones. ..."
CR: "that strategy actually runs the risk of harming down-ballot Democrats
running for office in Congress and state legislatures. It may help Clinton,
but it's not good for the party."
It's Obama redux. Remember how he wanted
to work with his friends across the aisle in a Grand Bargain that would
bring moderation and centrist agreement to all things? He validated budget-balance
mania during austerity and would have bargained away Social Security if
he could have. He predictably lost the Congress in the first mid-term election
and did nothing to build the party back up.
People don't yet understand that this is just how neoliberals are.
The two fundamental loyalties in a state party system have nothing to do
with solidarity: they're loyalty up, and loyalty down. Neoliberals are happy
to accept whatever loyalty up they are given by fools and suckers: they
have no loyalty down at all and will never do the elementary political operations
of repaying their base or creating a party that will work for anyone
else. This goes beyond ordinary political selfishness to the fact that they
don't really want a populist party: that would push them to harm the interests
of their real base.
And people don't react to this, fundamentally, because they don't really
do politics outside of 4-year scareathons. Look at LFC's description above
about how people should march if candidates don't follow through on their
promises. Why aren't they marching now: why haven't they in the Obama years?
I am with you on your main thesis, but I thought
I would offer this sidenote.
On solidarity: solidarity isn't about the (hierarchy of) relationships
among politicians or political operatives. Solidarity is about membership,
not leadership.
Solidarity can feel good. "We are all in this together, united."
Or, it can feel constricting, as it demands conformity and senseless uniformity,
obeisance to unnecessary authority. Resentments are its solvent and
its boundary-keepers. Social affiliation and common rituals are its nurturers
in its fallow times, which can be historically frequent and long. Solidarity
is the means to great common, coordinated efforts, that is to trust in leadership
and that great solvent of political stalemate: sacrifice to the common good.
Solidarity is a powerful force, sometimes historically an eruptive
force, and though not by itself intelligent, not necessarily hostile to
intelligent direction, but it calls on the individual's narcissism and anger
not rational understanding or calculation. It is present as a flash in riots
and a fire in insurrections and a great raging furnace in national wars
of total mobilization. Elites can fear it or be enveloped by it or manipulate
it cynically or with cruel callousness. Though it is a means to common effort
and common sacrifice, it demands wages for its efforts and must be fed prodigious
resources if it is long at work.
As American Party politics have degenerated, solidarity has come to have
a fraught relationship with identity politics. In both Parties.
I don't see anything in the conceptual logic driving things forward.
I see this state of affairs as the playing out of historical processes,
one step after another. But, this year's "scareathon" puts identity politics
squarely against the economic claims of class or even national solidarity.
The identity politics frame of equal opportunity exploitation has Paul Krugman
talking up "horizontal inequality". Memes float about suggesting that free
trade is aiding global equality even if it is at the expense of increasing
domestic inequality. Or, suggesting that labor unions were the implacable
enemy of racial equality back in the day or that FDR's New Deal was only
for white people. Hillary Clinton's stump speech, for a while, had her asking,
"If we broke up the big banks tomorrow, . . . would that end racism? would
that end sexism?"
It is convenient politics in several ways. First, no one can hold Clinton
responsible for not ending racism and sexism any more than GWB could be
held responsible for not winning the war on terrorism. These are perpetual
struggles by definition.
Second, it combines the display of righteous do-good ism with a promise
of social progress that might actually benefit directly the most ambitious,
even if it leaves most people without support. People who have done well
in the system, or who might expect to, can feel good about themselves. And,
ignore the system or rationalize away the system's manifest shortcomings.
The people who are complaining are racists! BernieBros! It is all about
the loss of status being experienced by white men, and they shouldn't be
heard anyway.
The moral righteousness of identity politics adds in an element that
goes way beyond the lazy failure to hold politicians accountable or the
tendency to explain away their more Machiavellian maneuvers. There's both
an actual blindness to the reactionary conservatism of equal opportunity
exploitation and a peremptory challenge to any other claim or analysis.
If police practices and procedures are trending in an authoritarian direction,
they can only be challenged on grounds of racist effect or intent. The authoritarianism
cannot be challenged on its own merit, so the building of the authoritarian
state goes on unimpeded, since the principle that is challenged is not authoritarianism,
but a particular claim of racism or sexism.
What we've got here is a distorted or atrophied sense of the relationship
between solidarity and the consent of the governed, between democracy and
legitimacy, or more generally, between the individual and the collective.
I suppose you could argue that we've evolved beyond what we were when we
first came to understand these relationships in the abstract (in the 18th
century?), and that, accordingly, they can no longer be understood in the
way we once thought we understood them.
If so, maybe we ought to try
being a little more honest about what we're willing to pay as individuals
for what we get as members of a group. Otherwise, it's hard to see how we
can come to terms with our confusion, or survive the malignancies that being
confused has introduced into all our group dynamics, not just the overtly
political ones.
"... Hillary Clinton's respect for Kissinger has been noted before I think, and it's awful. Even if she were free of that shithead, though, her current goal is to demolish Trump. Voices on the GOP side really are important to erode his support not just among voters but within the party and the donor base. This could be a historic walloping. If monsters can help the effort to flip the senate, court the monsters. ..."
Ah, it's official: Clinton is actively seeking Henry Kissinger's endorsement. The man who helped
scuttle the peace talks in 1968, prolonging the Vietnam War by seven years, at the cost of hundreds
of thousands of lives. Who was at the heart of the secret bombing of Cambodia and Laos-personally
selecting targets for bomber runs-which led to the destabilization of Cambodia and ultimately the
Khmer Rouge and the Cambodian genocide. Who firmly backed the Pakistani military in its genocidal
slaughter in Bangladesh. As Greg Grandin, whose book about Kissinger is must-reading, wrote not so
long ago, "The full tally hasn't been done, but a back-of-the-envelope count would attribute 3, maybe
4 million deaths to Kissinger's actions, but that number probably undercounts his victims in southern
Africa."
This is the man whose support Hillary wants. Because Kissinger sways so many votes in Ohio or
Georgia? No, because he's prudential, realistic, respectable, unlike that irresponsible reckless
madman Donald Trump.
A glance at the Politico piece reveals it's a bit vague on the details, saying that, according
to an unnamed source, the Clinton campaign has "sent out feelers" to Kissinger, Baker, Schultz,
and Rice. But yeah, that's a mistake. Her campaign doesn't need them, and why HRC does not do
everything to keep her distance from Kissinger - I mean as a political matter (if they want to
be on friendly terms in private life, I guess that's their business) - is mystifying. Maybe Bill
Clinton, who attended anti-Vietnam War protests in London while a student at Oxford, shd have
a long talk w/ HRC about the period. Since, though she lived through it, it apparently did not
make that much of an impact. Anyway, I'd be surprised if Kissinger ends up publicly endorsing
her.
This is the man whose support Hillary wants. Because Kissinger sways so many votes in Ohio
or Georgia? No, because he's prudential, realistic, respectable, unlike that irresponsible
reckless madman Donald Trump.
Hillary Clinton's respect for Kissinger has been noted before I think, and it's awful. Even
if she were free of that shithead, though, her current goal is to demolish Trump. Voices on the
GOP side really are important to erode his support not just among voters but within the party
and the donor base. This could be a historic walloping. If monsters can help the effort to flip
the senate, court the monsters.
It's really not mystifying. Clinton has long courted that imprimatur of foreign policy mainstream
respectability, and while the origins of that courting may have been instrumental and strategic,
pure political calculation, it has since become a part of her political identity. I don't this
is cynicism anymore; she believes it.
Meanwhile, the poll numbers keep climbing for her. Virtually every mainstream journalist now
recognizes what some of us have been saying for months. Absent a "miracle," as Rothenberg says
here, Trump will be squashed.
"... Dem hacks are promoting the fiction that Sanders, again an Independent, will magically become the most powerful voice in the senate and a strong check (cough, cough) on the worst excesses of HRC and her many neocon friends and admirers. ..."
"... Given that the 'security establishment' consists almost entirely of quasi-fascists and grifters looking to get richer acting as agents for defense manufacturers and private security companies, these folks clearly see which candidate is likely to provide more of the filthy lucre. Wall st. and the Kochs both want a Clinton-Ryan partnership for 2016. ..."
Do you expect Philip Zelikow, John Negroponte, Eliot Cohen and the other 'natl security' signatories
of the letter, and now Susan Collins, to behave other than as they are behaving?
Is Negroponte
going to sign a letter saying "I am a right-wing jerk w blood on my hands who worked for, among
others, that idiot Reagan and by the way I can't vote for Trump who is also a jerk, very much
in line w the jerk I worked for"?
Is Susan Collins going to write an oped saying "I am a (supposedly) moderate Repub Senator
from Maine who supported McCain and now I'm going to be inconsistent and not vote for Trump even
though he's basically not too different from McCain. Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds."?
[I think Trump is somewhat worse than McCain, but I'm accepting the premise for the sake of argument.]
As for Alter, maybe he shd know better than to tweet the Collins oped, but I'm not going to
get into that.
kidneystones 08.09.16 at 2:28 am
Perhaps the best part of supporting Trump is that he's almost universally loathed by virtually
all the 'right people' elites on both sides of the aisle, and the 'morally-minded' billionaires.
I've argued before that I expect he'll accomplish less than 1/10th of what he wants to do.
Dem hacks are promoting the fiction that Sanders, again an Independent, will magically
become the most powerful voice in the senate and a strong check (cough, cough) on the worst excesses
of HRC and her many neocon friends and admirers.
Given that the 'security establishment' consists almost entirely of quasi-fascists and
grifters looking to get richer acting as agents for defense manufacturers and private security
companies, these folks clearly see which candidate is likely to provide more of the filthy lucre.
Wall st. and the Kochs both want a Clinton-Ryan partnership for 2016.
So, take your chances with Trump, or be prepared for another 4-8 years of no press conferences,
no transparency, and the same screw everyone but the rich policies that have brought us all to
this unhappy pass. Safer with Hillary?
You betcha!
Keith 08.09.16 at 3:20 am
RNB, our military-intelligence sector is so dedicated to spending their whole budget every
year, even to the detriment of our national defense, that any idiot could see through them.
And any idiot clearly has.
Donald 08.09.16 at 11:57 am
I suspect the reason that neocons hate Trump is not because he is a dangerous maniac, but became
he isn't the precise type of dangerous maniac they prefer. He shows contempt for the establishment
idiots that favored the Iraq War, not that Trump opposed it himself. That by itself would be unforgivable
for them.
Sanders was hated by many Democrats for the same reason–he pointed out that Clinton
supported the Iraq War and therefore had bad judgment, which undercuts the whole argument based
on her expertise in foreign policy. I am in no way saying that Sanders is the same as Trump. I
voted for Sanders and would vote for almost anyone against Trump.
It's possible to be terrified by the possibility of a Trump presidency and also be cynical
about the motives of the torture apologists and warmongers who criticize him.
Donald: "I suspect the reason that neocons hate Trump is not because he is a dangerous maniac,
but became he isn't the precise type of dangerous maniac they prefer."
The whole concept of
"recklessness" doesn't really have much meaning in this context. The foreign policy establishment
failed to actually reduce the number of nuclear weapons when it was possible to do so, for no
better reason than because it would have harmed the military-industrial complex. They have signally
failed to do anything to restrain the ability of the President to declare war at will, instead
preferring convenience in carrying out whatever ad hoc goal is current. They are steadily in the
process of converting alliances from deterrents to war to possible triggers for war. They did
not take any steps to sanction or put on trial war criminals who committed aggressive war and
torture. And the establishment candidate, HRC, just accused (through surrogates) of carrying out
an act of war against the U.S. (the supposed hacking incident) and declared Russia to be our enemy.
And if and when all of this falls into the hands of a demagogue, it will supposedly be the demagogue
that is reckless, not the establishment. Therefore we must always vote for the establishment,
because they've made the machine so dangerous to run that supposedly if they step away from the
controls for a moment it will blow up. That's nonsense. If they continue doing that for long enough,
eventually people will vote for a demagogue as the only other choice - and Trump won't be the
last one.
Another bit of nonsense is the whole constellation of ideas around unity, solidarity, allyship,
"we must work together", "no circular firing squad" etc. There is no unity or solidarity and the
whole idea that there is is manipulative - the people who call on it are not anyone's allies.
People have different goals. If the reason we're supposed to work together despite having different
goals is to defeat Trump, then we are not allies. We're each just going to do the minimum needed
to defeat Trump, and then we're enemies.
For all the talk of how Trump is endangering Republican Party candidates down ballot, Clinton
is working hard to take no advantage for the Democratic Party or progressive ideas. The "minimum
needed to defeat Trump" is conspicuously not anything likely to discredit or drive from office
the corrupt war mongers. Clinton seems determined to leave the Republican Party strong and progressive
Democrats weak and marginalized.
"... Khizr Khan's sound bite makes for good free political advertising, following the lead of Trump himself, but I don't believe he has read the Constitution, or if he has read it he didn't understand it. ..."
"... Obama taught constitutional law and a generation of his students will not understand that only Congress can declare war. ..."
"... The conditions that produced and enabled Trump are the Democratic Party policies in its fake posture as an opposition party serving the interests of working people. A vote for Hillary is a vote for more of the same-increasing disparity in wealth and income. ..."
"... The Democratic Party is bully enough to shut me and my chosen candidates down; and I don't like Trump, but I really like it when I see him kicking some lying elitist Democratic Party ass. ..."
"... Consider then the partisan nature of worthiness determined by Democrats in their vilification of Cindy Sheehan for daring to effect a change in the system that murdered her son, whose death was more recent, the same sorrow that Khizr Khan now deals with from a position of ignorance so common to Democrats, but so much more worthy of respect when the sorrow strikes out in their political favor, unlike with Cindy Sheehan, who struck out in opposition to the Democratic Party in electorally challenging Nancy Pelosi. ..."
"... It's absolutely not about the money. Pocket Constitution waving grieving father at DNC denouncing temporary ban on Muslim immigration coincidentally runs 'pay-to-play' US immigration visa procurement business. Deletes law firm website and 'wipes' web server clean. ..."
"... Love of freedom? Love of cash? Grieving Parent? How about all three? Neutral observer? That's a harder sell. ..."
"... Khizr M. Khan's website notes that he works to help clients with the E-2 and EB-5 programs that let overseas investors buy into U.S. companies and also provides green cards for family members. ..."
"... As a media-manipulation exercise, it just confirms that the Dems know how to deploy media resources of their own. The stunt was well-executed and achieved its purpose. ..."
"... The problem with just sitting back and let you invade any country you like is that we all have to live in the world you make. You're certainly correct to point out that there are many things 'we foreigners' don't understand about America. ..."
"... What we do know is that whatever you tell yourself about the sacrifices US soldiers are making in your peacemaking wars in the ME, the overwhelming majority of those killed and wounded in modern US led military actions are not Americans. I fully believe that many Americans are intensely patriotic and love their country. I also believe that there are many subcultures within America that 'we foreigners' cannot understand. ..."
"... You believe your nation's commitment to its military is somehow special? Prove it. Instead we get American exceptionalism proudly on display. ..."
"... Unlike Trump, Bush did it the right way. His team assassinated the character of his bereaved critic through the normal, respectable political channels. Meanwhile the man of the moment enjoyed plausible deniability and the praise of future journalists. ..."
"... Meanwhile, journalists, liberals, and Democrats are kvelling over John McCain's denunciation of Trump's comments about the Khans. They love this nearly annual morality tale, in which McCain is dutifully trotted out (or trots himself out) to clean up the mess of last night's frat party. ..."
"... In 2002, after Saxby Chambliss ran that disgusting ad against Max Cleland (which I talk about in the OP), John McCain said, "I'd never seen anything like that ad. Putting pictures of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden next to the picture of a man who left three limbs on the battlefield - it's worse than disgraceful. It's reprehensible." Six years later, McCain campaigned for Chambliss's reelection. ..."
Khizr Khan's sound bite makes for good free political advertising, following the lead of
Trump himself, but I don't believe he has read the Constitution, or if he has read it he didn't
understand it.
That should not trouble him overly much; Obama taught constitutional law and a generation
of his students will not understand that only Congress can declare war.
... ... ...
The conditions that produced and enabled Trump are the Democratic Party policies in its
fake posture as an opposition party serving the interests of working people. A vote for Hillary
is a vote for more of the same-increasing disparity in wealth and income.
To quote from "The Big Short", which the Clintons played no small part in bringing about by
the repeal of Glass-Steagall and passing NAFTA: "Truth is like poetry. And most people fucking
hate poetry."
The Democratic Party is bully enough to shut me and my chosen candidates down; and I don't
like Trump, but I really like it when I see him kicking some lying elitist Democratic Party ass.
I want to see if Democrats have it in them to stop being weasels.
Glenn 08.02.16 at 4:23 pm
Consider then the partisan nature of worthiness determined by Democrats in their vilification
of Cindy Sheehan for daring to effect a change in the system that murdered her son, whose death
was more recent, the same sorrow that Khizr Khan now deals with from a position of ignorance so
common to Democrats, but so much more worthy of respect when the sorrow strikes out in their political
favor, unlike with Cindy Sheehan, who struck out in opposition to the Democratic Party in electorally
challenging Nancy Pelosi.
kidneystones 08.02.16 at 9:57 pm
It's absolutely not about the money. Pocket Constitution waving grieving father at DNC
denouncing temporary ban on Muslim immigration coincidentally runs 'pay-to-play' US immigration
visa procurement business. Deletes law firm website and 'wipes' web server clean.
Trump has already seized on the 'If I were president, Captain Khan would be alive meme.'
How long till the Khan grieving father looking to profit from selling visas access scam blows
up the media narrative? What about Khan's business tax returns? Follow the money?
The media loves building the narrative of the hero almost as much as they love tearing it apart.
Think Trump will ignore Khan's entirely legitimate immigration business scam? I mean the one
he just deleted? Think the media won't give Trumps comments on that story any airtime?
Love of freedom? Love of cash? Grieving Parent? How about all three? Neutral observer?
That's a harder sell.
Pointing to any or all of Khan's deleted business activities/interests is a 'McCarthyite' slur
on the memory of a Gold Star mother and all others who so gloriously serve.
Going dark. What's the bet the Gold Star father goes off the radar because of 'family' issues?
"…
Khizr M. Khan's website notes that he works to help clients with the E-2 and EB-5 programs
that let overseas investors buy into U.S. companies and also provides green cards for family members.
It also said that he helps in the purchase of U.S. real estate and businesses. The website
lists his ability to practice in New York, though it gives a Washington phone number for the lawyer
who lives in Virginia. A man who answered the phone said the website was correct, though he would
not identify himself."
Mr. Khan evidently deleted his website after the Examiner story broke. Needless to say, the
facts clearly indicate a highly reputable individual specializing in helping foreign businesses
in the Middle East and elsewhere buy/invest in undervalued (we assume) US assets and provide green
cards for their families, all according to law.
There's clearly nothing in this account for Trump to make a fuss about.
So, why is Mr.Khan suddenly going to such lengths to conceal a business he clearly has no reason
to hide?
kidneystones 08.02.16 at 11:05 pm
TPM has pretty much dumped the Khan story, making it part of the past. No mention at all of stories
of Khan's financial incentives for opposing Trump, naturally. Josh does insert a 'distractor'
link to nutcase scare stories. As a media-manipulation exercise, it just confirms that the
Dems know how to deploy media resources of their own. The stunt was well-executed and achieved
its purpose. So, I fully expect the media and HRC supporters to recommend 'we all just move
on.'
Trump is doubling down on his beefs with the GOP establishment. No doubt, this is a full out
attack on the globalist-Koch branch of the GOP. The Kochs gave TPP-loving Ryan a standing ovation.
Good thing Dems are backing a candidate firmly in favor of TPP.
Obama, another TPP fan, jumped on the bandwagon – so it's unanimous.
Trump is the only major political candidate firmly opposed to ending the TPP. But don't support
him because Trump hates all Muslims. Just ask Capt. Khan's dad.
kidneystones 08.03.16 at 12:37 am
84@ The problem with just sitting back and let you invade any country you like is that
we all have to live in the world you make. You're certainly correct to point out that there are
many things 'we foreigners' don't understand about America.
What we do know is that whatever you tell yourself about the sacrifices US soldiers are
making in your peacemaking wars in the ME, the overwhelming majority of those killed and wounded
in modern US led military actions are not Americans. I fully believe that many Americans are intensely
patriotic and love their country. I also believe that there are many subcultures within America
that 'we foreigners' cannot understand.
What is also clear from your comment is that you, and perhaps some others, believe that this
love of country and rich tapestry of subcultures somehow makes Americans very, very special and
beyond criticism.
We understand this much: Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor – 68 civilian casualties.
The US response: "..on the night of March 9-10, 1945…LeMay sent 334 B-29s low over Tokyo from
the Marianas. Their mission was to reduce the city to rubble, kill its citizens, and instill terror
in the survivors, with jellied gasoline and napalm that would create a sea of flames. Stripped
of their guns to make more room for bombs, and flying at altitudes averaging 7,000 feet to evade
detection, the bombers, which had been designed for high-altitude precision attacks, carried two
kinds of incendiaries: M47s, 100-pound oil gel bombs, 182 per aircraft, each capable of starting
a major fire, followed by M69s, 6-pound gelled-gasoline bombs, 1,520 per aircraft in addition
to a few high explosives to deter firefighters. [25] The attack on an area that the US Strategic
Bombing Survey estimated to be 84.7 percent residential succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of
air force planners…
The Strategic Bombing Survey, whose formation a few months earlier provided an important signal
of Roosevelt's support for strategic bombing, provided a technical description of the firestorm
and its effects on Tokyo: The chief characteristic of the conflagration . . . was the presence
of a fire front, an extended wall of fire moving to leeward, preceded by a mass of pre-heated,
turbid, burning vapors . . . . The 28-mile-per-hour wind, measured a mile from the fire, increased
to an estimated 55 miles at the perimeter, and probably more within. An extended fire swept over
15 square miles in 6 hours . . . . The area of the fire was nearly 100 percent burned; no structure
or its contents escaped damage."
The survey concluded-plausibly, but only for events prior to August 6, 1945-that
"probably more persons lost their lives by fire at Tokyo in a 6-hour period than at any time
in the history of man. People died from extreme heat, from oxygen deficiency, from carbon monoxide
asphyxiation, from being trampled beneath the feet of stampeding crowds, and from drowning. The
largest number of victims were the most vulnerable: women, children and the elderly."
The raids continue for all the 'best' military reasons…
"In July, US planes blanketed the few remaining Japanese cities that had been spared firebombing
with an "Appeal to the People." "As you know," it read, "America which stands for humanity, does
not wish to injure the innocent people, so you had better evacuate these cities." Half the leafleted
cities were firebombed within days of the warning. US planes ruled the skies. Overall, by one
calculation, the US firebombing campaign destroyed 180 square miles of 67 cities, killed more
than 300,000 people and injured an additional 400,000, figures that exclude the atomic bombing
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki." (My italics)
http://apjjf.org/-Mark-Selden/2414/article.html
kidneystones 08.03.16 at 12:59 am
@ 86 Both my parents served. My grand-fathers served, and most of my uncles and great-uncles
served – you know, the whole mess from being shot to dying in hospitals years after the war from
gas attacks. And I served, nothing special about any of this.
You believe your nation's commitment to its military is somehow special? Prove it. Instead
we get American exceptionalism proudly on display.
Should all the foreigners in your debt salute, or simply prostrate ourselves in awe?
We're done.
JM Hatch 08.03.16 at 2:23 am
@41 Lee Arnold: Are you referring to the Warren Buffet who owns Fruit-of-the-Loom? The same
company which had Hillary's State Dept bust up a minimum wage law for Haiti's textile industry?
The same company which then donated to the Clinton Foundation for aid that never arrived to Haiti?
If not, then who is this Warren Buffet?
oldster 08.03.16 at 5:28 am
Still, there was one upside to Bush's minions attacks on Sheehan. Way back in those antediluvian
times, John Cole was still a supporter of Bush and the Iraq War. (Bless his heart, he soon learned
better) He defended the wing-nuts who were calling Sheehan a prostitute by saying that this was
metaphorical. This inspired The Editors writing at The Poor Man to write a response that featured
the phrase "enormous mendacious disembodied anus", which has passed into internet legend.
And probably passed out of internet legend once again, since of the people who were alive in
those days to be amused, very few are still alive to recall it. It was the heyday of war-blogging,
and anti-(war-blog)-blogging. We really sacrificed in those days, let me tell you–it was our own
personal Vietnam.
Corey Robin 08.03.16 at 4:53 am
The record of George W. Bush-the man who Ezra Klein claims would never have treated the Khans
the way Trump has-with regard to Cindy Sheehan, whose son was also killed in Iraq, is even worse
than I realized. As Brendan James reports in Slate:
It's true, as the people tipping their hats to Bush have pointed out, that the president
himself did not attack Sheehan the way Trump has gone after the Khans. But he didn't have to.
He let his underlings do it.
"Cindy Sheehan is a clown," said Bush's senior adviser and dirty trickster Karl Rove, whose
management of the media ecosystem was unparalleled. The Washington Post reported at the time
that Sheehan was a frequent topic of conversation between the president and his advisers. And
somehow, some way, Rove's sentiment trickled down into every pore of the conservative press.
Bill O'Reilly called Sheehan "dumb enough" to get "in bed" with the radical left. Glenn Beck
called Sheehan a "tragedy pimp" who was "prostituting her son's death." Rush Limbaugh said
she was somehow lying about having lost her son.
…
Unlike Trump, Bush did it the right way. His team assassinated the character of his bereaved
critic through the normal, respectable political channels. Meanwhile the man of the moment enjoyed
plausible deniability and the praise of future journalists.
Corey Robin 08.03.16 at 4:59 am
Meanwhile, journalists, liberals, and Democrats are kvelling over John McCain's denunciation
of Trump's comments about the Khans. They love this nearly annual morality tale, in which McCain
is dutifully trotted out (or trots himself out) to clean up the mess of last night's frat party.
Again, a little memory is helpful.
In 2002, after Saxby Chambliss ran that disgusting ad against Max Cleland (which I talk
about in the OP), John McCain said, "I'd never seen anything like that ad. Putting pictures of
Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden next to the picture of a man who left three limbs on the battlefield
- it's worse than disgraceful. It's reprehensible." Six years later, McCain campaigned for Chambliss's
reelection.
"... So, taking up CR's Nixon-McGovern analogy: Clinton risks coming into office as a thoroughly disliked President from day one. The level of suspicion and cynicism of expectation is very high. And, though Trump won't ever have a chance in the campaign, his way of attacking opponents is likely to intensify a broad spectrum of opinion that calls into question Clinton's legitimacy and real commitments. ..."
"... Nixon did experience pressure from the Republican Right, but he was also constrained by a Democratic Congress. If Nixon continued to govern as if the New Deal remained in place, it is because he faced a New Deal Congress. ..."
"... Clinton will face a similar problem, but it will be more of her own making, because her politics and her hold over the Democratic Party, depend on not challenging the Republican base of power in the States and in Congress. ..."
"... Trump might withhold an endorsement of Speaker Ryan for a few days, but the Democratic establishment isn't going to unseat Ryan, even though Ryan's district is one Obama won. ..."
"... One path to this whole thing coming apart is a new generation of much younger Democrats trying to gain power in States where the Republicans have been showing their true colors. They will have to fight the Democratic Establishment in Washington to do so, and fight very hard. ..."
"... The other is path is crisis. This is a politics of nominal stalemate, enabling a politics of sclerosis and corruption. ..."
"... These paths are far from mutually exclusive, but there's a very real risk that a fractured and weakened polity turns to authoritarianism. If your politics does not permit reasoned discussion and deliberation, authoritarianism is the alternative when some kind of adaptive reform is required by events. ..."
"... "Symbiosis" means the two sides work together, feed off each other. And, no I am not saying the Democrats in general feed off the Republicans, though obviously any two-party system locks the two Parties into a waltz in which one Party leads the other, with every step forward by one, a step back by the other. ..."
"... What I mean by "symbiosis" in this case is a more specific dynamic by which the Clintonites, who are corrupt centrists at best and reactionary conservatives at worst, keep control of the nominally progressive Party. ..."
"Anything can happen" is one of those things that people say and I suppose it is trivially true.
Certainly, if you are trying to sell click-thru's with alleged political news, you at the very
least want to preserve the possibility of (new) news. At this point, though, I fear that the affirmation,
"Trump could win this" suggests the opposite.
Clinton's campaign now faces the problem that
they have won . . . in August, but the election is in November.
Do they keep up the campaign, organized around "dangerous Donald"? Is there a risk of wearing
out its themes? Trump is in a box assigned to him by the Media. The Media have their canned narrative
thru which anything Trump says will be filtered. He's been neutered. The Media Publishers await
the spending of campaign cash, while the Editors have their orders.
Even Scott Adams has conceded that the Donald may have been bested by Clinton's "dangerous
Donald" propaganda and may be too inflexible in his personality to take any of the practical options
to come back.
What I would notice is that Clinton's campaign to get people to like her - "I'm with her" -
did not win. Clinton will win in November, certainly. But, she will take office as one of the
most seriously disliked politicians to win the Presidency in memory. I say this as someone who
voted for Tricky Dick Nixon over McGovern. Usually, the seriously disliked Presidents get elected
as Vice-President first. But, maybe she did - sorta. Maybe that's what her career as Secretary
of State did for her.
So, taking up CR's Nixon-McGovern analogy: Clinton risks coming into office as a thoroughly
disliked President from day one. The level of suspicion and cynicism of expectation is very high.
And, though Trump won't ever have a chance in the campaign, his way of attacking opponents is
likely to intensify a broad spectrum of opinion that calls into question Clinton's legitimacy
and real commitments.
Nixon did experience pressure from the Republican Right, but he was also constrained by a Democratic
Congress. If Nixon continued to govern as if the New Deal remained in place, it is because he
faced a New Deal Congress. Not just Democratic majorities, but long-standing majorities and committee
chairman who knew where the bodies were buried and how to pull the levers of power. That would
change only gradually with the seniority system scrapped in the mid-1970s and the New Deal politics
by which Congress critters played interests off against one another to maintain their own power
eroded decisively only in Reagan's second term, as trade liberalization and deregulation and other
policies took hold and the corporate executive class began their rise, driving changes in the
lobbyist culture and dynamic.
Clinton will face a similar problem, but it will be more of her own making, because her politics
and her hold over the Democratic Party, depend on not challenging the Republican base of power
in the States and in Congress. Clinton is not going to say to her minions, "OK, we've got this
won, let's funnel all the campaign money and effort into winning the House so we have opportunities
to govern effectively. Let's get Democratic Governors in place, so we can get Obamacare's Medicaid
expansion working properly without privatization."
Trump might withhold an endorsement of Speaker Ryan for a few days, but the Democratic establishment
isn't going to unseat Ryan, even though Ryan's district is one Obama won.
The Democratic Party - the rank and file and even the general run of Congress people - have
become much more "socialist" for lack of a better term, but they have no experience of power.
Few have served long in the Obama Administration. Most States are dominated by Republicans. In
some States, like Kansas and North Carolina, "dominated" really does mean dominated. Democrats
are a minority in Congress and the old leadership is retiring.
One path to this whole thing coming apart is a new generation of much younger Democrats trying
to gain power in States where the Republicans have been showing their true colors. They will have
to fight the Democratic Establishment in Washington to do so, and fight very hard.
The other is path is crisis. This is a politics of nominal stalemate, enabling a politics of
sclerosis and corruption.
These paths are far from mutually exclusive, but there's a very real risk that a fractured
and weakened polity turns to authoritarianism. If your politics does not permit reasoned discussion
and deliberation, authoritarianism is the alternative when some kind of adaptive reform is required
by events.
bruce wilder 08.10.16 at 5:00
pm
Faustusnotes misreads me on Benghazi. (What else is new?) I was not saying, "both sides do
it". That's not my point. My point is that the Right's obsessions with Benghazi (and with the
email server) are gifts to Clinton. They take issues where Clinton's bad judgment is on display,
and they transform them into a circus where what is on display instead is the Right's lunacy.
The Benghazi hearings made Clinton look good, if that were possible; embattled, persecuted
unwarrantedly. No sane person would want to pay much attention and the superficial takeaway
impression is that there is no there, there in Rightwing accusations and fantasizing.
"Symbiosis"
means the two sides work together, feed off each other. And, no I am not saying the Democrats
in general feed off the Republicans, though obviously any two-party system locks the two Parties
into a waltz in which one Party leads the other, with every step forward by one, a step back
by the other.
What I mean by "symbiosis" in this case is a more specific dynamic by which the Clintonites,
who are corrupt centrists at best and reactionary conservatives at worst, keep control of the
nominally progressive Party.
"... What I see is a Reagan, or a Bush, cheerfully admitting to American exceptionalism and in the need to kill at will. What frightens me is the inability of Americans to realize outsiders see pretty much the same willingness to kill at will from a Clinton, or Obama. ..."
"... And the truly frightening part is where team blue supporters insist that everyone pretend every 4 years that a Clinton, or Obama, is somehow less willing to kill at will than a Romney, or a Trump. ..."
"... We have a video of one political candidate laughing at murder, who 'never' holds press conferences, running to replace a president who expanded and entrenched the Bush-Cheney security state and who suppresses dissent and whistle-blowing with the vigor of a Nixon. Outsiders have learned to survive every 'too crazy to be true' you people elect. Of course, that's not as easy if one happens to live in the wrong part of the world. ..."
@491 This is very good, Corey. I think you are precisely right about how (ahem) informed outsiders
view the 'enormous' differences between the two political parties. What I see is a Reagan, or
a Bush, cheerfully admitting to American exceptionalism and in the need to kill at will. What
frightens me is the inability of Americans to realize outsiders see pretty much the same willingness
to kill at will from a Clinton, or Obama.
And the truly frightening part is where team blue supporters insist that everyone pretend every
4 years that a Clinton, or Obama, is somehow less willing to kill at will than a Romney, or a
Trump.
We have a video of one political candidate laughing at murder, who 'never' holds press conferences,
running to replace a president who expanded and entrenched the Bush-Cheney security state and
who suppresses dissent and whistle-blowing with the vigor of a Nixon. Outsiders have learned to
survive every 'too crazy to be true' you people elect. Of course, that's not as easy if one happens
to live in the wrong part of the world.
Re: Republican weakness. That's sure to be a much-studied topic. At the state level Republicans
are very strong. As 'racist' and 'sexist' as it is to say, the uniqueness of electing an African-American
and then, perhaps, the woman he defeated speak very positively about the US in general. This stuff
matters to you and that's nothing to be ashamed of.
"... We're seeing right now in real time exactly the same denunciations of one candidate by virtually all media outlets, all elite Dems, and many elite Republicans. When there were a number of candidates and two races and two outsiders, much of the press bias may have slipped beneath the radar. ..."
"... At some point probably very soon Trump is going to be the real underdog. Not the underdog of imagination, no longer a billionaire whining about not being treated fairly. But the target of an unrelenting series of negative news stories and TV and radio commercials that leave no doubt in the minds of most voters that Trump has much less of a chance of winning than Hillary. ..."
"... The anti-Trump stories are probably white noise already to many neutrals. Trump supporters stopped listening to the media long ago. ..."
"... When the NYT, MSNBC, Bill Mahr, and on and on and on all tell people they can't possibly vote for Trump, how do you think folks are going to respond? I mean, about being told they don't actually have a choice. Cause that's what's happening now. ..."
"... And the same people telling folks they don't have a choice are precisely the same people who predicted/promised that Trump would never win the nomination. Trump just needs to stay in the game. If he's within five points in October, I still say he edges it. ..."
We're seeing right now in real time exactly the same denunciations of one candidate by virtually
all media outlets, all elite Dems, and many elite Republicans. When there were a number of candidates
and two races and two outsiders, much of the press bias may have slipped beneath the radar.
At
some point probably very soon Trump is going to be the real underdog. Not the underdog of imagination,
no longer a billionaire whining about not being treated fairly. But the target of an unrelenting
series of negative news stories and TV and radio commercials that leave no doubt in the minds
of most voters that Trump has much less of a chance of winning than Hillary.
The anti-Trump stories
are probably white noise already to many neutrals. Trump supporters stopped listening to the media
long ago.
When the NYT, MSNBC, Bill Mahr, and on and on and on all tell people they can't possibly vote
for Trump, how do you think folks are going to respond? I mean, about being told they don't actually
have a choice. Cause that's what's happening now.
And the same people telling folks they don't have a choice are precisely the same people who
predicted/promised that Trump would never win the nomination. Trump just needs to stay in the
game. If he's within five points in October, I still say he edges it.
"... The difference is the media and the elites are openly producing elite narratives in a manner that really do make Trump the underdog. Trump won the nomination by claiming the media elites and most of the politicians in both parties are in the pockets of the rich. That's an argument that continues to resonate. ..."
"... The fact is that Trump and Sanders are both the result of a system that works precisely the way Trump and Saunders describe it. A significant block of voters understand that. ..."
"... These voters are extremely unlikely to be distracted by any stories on any topic. Their focus is on jobs and the indifference of the media and politicians of both political parties to the need for jobs. ..."
"... Trump's experience in the construction trades matters to voters because infrastructure construction provides short-terms and long-term jobs and training programs. Trump went to Detroit and described the city as HRC's blueprint for America. ..."
"... The problem for the media, the Democrats, and their supporters is that practically nobody sees HRC as anything but the ultimate insider agent of the rich, who happens to wear a dress. She first got to the WH as a political wife. She was parachuted into a safe Senate seat to start her 'run for office.' She was awarded a plum position in the administration in large part to placate her followers and heal some of the 'Clintons and their supporters are all racists' wounds. After leaving the administration, she and her husband earned millions which poured into a private foundation. The DNC and the Dems colluded to keep her only opponent from winning. The DOJ just ruled the Clintion Cash Cow to be beyond investigation. And now, this ultimate insider is re-packaging herself as 'the best darn change-agent' president 'women as tissues' has ever seen. And then there are the drones. ..."
"... The media can't cover the issues fairly because the issues confirm their chosen candidate can't be trusted on the issues that most Americans care about most. Most voters, including HRC voters, understand the difference between scare stories and solutions. ..."
"... Suffice to say a counter-narrative exists: one in which Trump has committed very few of the crimes which the gullible routinely swallow as fact ..."
"... Minds are made up, truth has to be sacrificed in order to 'prevent the end of mankind.' Rest assured, we'd be hearing precisely the same 'end of the world' spew were Bush, or any other placeholder the candidate ..."
"... The choice between HRC and Bush is essentially no choice ..."
"... The choice between HRC and Trump may actually be less of a choice than many believe ..."
"... Take a chance with Trump, or settle in for 4-8 more years of Obama, only worse ..."
"... Voters decide in November. I still say Trump edges it, at least ..."
Trump won the nomination by claiming the media and the elites rig the system against outsiders
like Bernie and him and that the media and elites of both parties are indifferent to the
problems and concerns of many, many voters.
The same thing is occurring in real-time now. The difference is the media and the elites are
openly producing elite narratives in a manner that really do make Trump the underdog. Trump won
the nomination by claiming the media elites and most of the politicians in both
parties are in the pockets of the rich. That's an argument that continues to resonate.
The fact is that Trump and Sanders are both the result of a system that works precisely the
way Trump and Saunders describe it. A significant block of voters understand that.
Voters also understand that HRC/Bush are simply the current/past iterations of a system that
denies any voice to ordinary voters. There will be no real change, except on the periphery and
that's the function of the elections – in a very real sense we're living the living, breathing
embodiment of Burke's conservatism.
Yes, LGBT rights are a good thing. After that, what?
kidneystones 08.10.16 at 11:28 pm
The fact is that a great many voters have seen their wages go down, or remain stagnant, over the
past two decades as they read stories day to day of a soaring stock market and all kinds of economic
good times.
These voters are extremely unlikely to be distracted by any stories on any topic. Their focus
is on jobs and the indifference of the media and politicians of both political parties to the
need for jobs.
Trump's experience in the construction trades matters to voters because infrastructure construction
provides short-terms and long-term jobs and training programs. Trump went to Detroit and described
the city as HRC's blueprint for America.
The problem for the media, the Democrats, and their supporters is that practically nobody sees
HRC as anything but the ultimate insider agent of the rich, who happens to wear a dress. She first
got to the WH as a political wife. She was parachuted into a safe Senate seat to start her 'run
for office.' She was awarded a plum position in the administration in large part to placate her
followers and heal some of the 'Clintons and their supporters are all racists' wounds. After leaving
the administration, she and her husband earned millions which poured into a private foundation.
The DNC and the Dems colluded to keep her only opponent from winning. The DOJ just ruled the Clintion
Cash Cow to be beyond investigation. And now, this ultimate insider is re-packaging herself as
'the best darn change-agent' president 'women as tissues' has ever seen. And then there are the
drones.
The media can't cover the issues fairly because the issues confirm their chosen candidate can't
be trusted on the issues that most Americans care about most. Most voters, including HRC voters,
understand the difference between scare stories and solutions.
Both candidates traffic in scare stories. Only one offers solutions that resonate with voters.
That candidate wins.
kidneystones 08.11.16 at 12:32 am
Actually, as we can see now. An awful lot of people are betting the farm that enough voters buy
into that narrative. As I mentioned above, the people promulgating precisely this myth have been
doing just that ever since he began running for office to no great effect.
Suffice to say a counter-narrative exists: one in which Trump has committed very few of the
crimes which the gullible routinely swallow as fact. Unless, of course, you and the vast majority
here are about to assert a complete lack of confirmation bias on this matter.
Minds are made up, truth has to be sacrificed in order to 'prevent the end of mankind.' Rest
assured, we'd be hearing precisely the same 'end of the world' spew were Bush, or any other placeholder
the candidate.
The choice between HRC and Bush is essentially no choice.
The choice between HRC and Trump may actually be less of a choice than many believe. We're
unlikely to get to that discussion any time soon.
No jobs, shitty schools and roads mean more votes for Trump.
Take a chance with Trump, or settle in for 4-8 more years of Obama, only worse. Many voters
have already decided. As we can see, the swing states are indeed swinging.
Voters decide in November. I still say Trump edges it, at least.
"... I don't see Trump as fascist in any workable, or historically grounded use of the term. ..."
"... The US government is an enormous cash-cow for an immense number of special interests. The notion that the PACs and special interests will just pack-up shop and write off the money they plan to make with a Bush/HRC in power is absurd. They'll hobble Trump they same way they handcuffed Carter, and start playing the same sorts of games. ..."
@ 592 'With Trump, X is fascism (roughly) which is why I'm against Trump in spite of the very
real possibility that a lot of his threats will turn out to be just empty talk.'
Recognizing
this is a blog comments section and that a certain degree of rhetorical excess is expected, I'd
be very curious to learn which 'threats' make Trump a 'fascist.'
I don't see Trump as fascist in any workable, or historically grounded use of the term.
I'm not at all confident in Trump's ability to pull the levers of government, hence my own
skepticism that he'll actually be able to rebuild the US economy in the way he's promising, or
achieve many, any of his foreign policy goals. However, I see no evidence whatsoever to support
the notion that any of his most fervent supporters would support abrogating any, or even some
parts of the constitution. He is absolutely running as some kind of 'time to clean up Washington'
populist. I'm certain, however, that those currently wielding power through their stooges in both
parties are entirely willing to make defying Trump a wise and enriching decision.
The US government is an enormous cash-cow for an immense number of special interests. The
notion that the PACs and special interests will just pack-up shop and write off the money they
plan to make with a Bush/HRC in power is absurd. They'll hobble Trump they same way they handcuffed
Carter, and start playing the same sorts of games.
If anyone does plan on seriously trying to make the case Trump is a fascist to me, at
least, they'll need to cite policy positions from Trump's web site. And we know how few are willing
to endure that....
"... In particular, criticizing Clinton by falsely assigning her responsibility for Obama's policies fails because it's so transparently dishonest. The notion that Clinton made Libya policy for the UN ambassador Power is dubious enough. ..."
"... The further implication that she manipulated Obama is silly on the face of it. It was Obama who dealt with Cameron and Sarkozy, who were above her pay grade. The Syrian policies continued after she was gone, nearly coming to open war entirely without her. ..."
"... Also, the insistence on using the years of nonsense dispensed by rabid right wingers spouting all sorts of crazed BS about how crooked Billary is, is endorsing the Mighty Wurlitzer. Jerry Falwell was speaking truth to power when he ranted about Vince Foster? ..."
"... It is of course true that Trump isn't unprecedented. His great precedent is of course Richard Nixon, who also had a plan. ..."
"... Whether Trump or Clinton, the next president is very likely to be impeached and convicted ..."
"... The infunny thing is, either Pence (a Ted Cruz without testicles,) or Kaine (an Obama DNC chair and thoroughly vetted Armed Service committeeman,) are nightmares. ..."
Criticizing Clinton from the right is just as reactionary as criticizing Trump from the right.
Further, assigning an individual such personal responsibility denies the reality of a bipartisan
system that administers an imperialist government with only a formal simulacrum of popular support.
That is, this "criticism" is fundamentally from the right.
In particular, criticizing Clinton by falsely assigning her responsibility for Obama's
policies fails because it's so transparently dishonest. The notion that Clinton made Libya policy
for the UN ambassador Power is dubious enough. The careers of Stevenson and Bolton alone
show that the potential importance of security council veto means the President reserves direct
supervision for himself, no matter what an organizational chart may say.
The further implication that she manipulated Obama is silly on the face of it. It was Obama
who dealt with Cameron and Sarkozy, who were above her pay grade. The Syrian policies continued
after she was gone, nearly coming to open war entirely without her. The implication that
for a Secretary of State to sell weapons to foreign nations isn't constituent service borders
on the silly. Besides, isolationism is not left win, never has been, never was.
And the implication that the any US government would ever favor supporting a leftish president
in Latin America because of its commitment to democracy thoroughly falsifies the nature of the
US government. Disappearing left criticism of Obama is thoroughly reactionary.
Also, the insistence on using the years of nonsense dispensed by rabid right wingers spouting
all sorts of crazed BS about how crooked Billary is, is endorsing the Mighty Wurlitzer. Jerry
Falwell was speaking truth to power when he ranted about Vince Foster? Buying into this is
buying decades of reactionary propaganda. I suppose this is mindlessness enough to satisfy people
who alleged that SYRIZA was going to save Greece (the rock that should by the way have sunk Jacobin
magazines credibility, leaving next to the Titanic,) or Bernie Sanders was starting a revolution.
It is of course true that Trump isn't unprecedented. His great precedent is of course Richard
Nixon, who also had a plan. I suppose F. Foundling eager awaits Trump's great "Nixon goes
to China" moment. I have no idea why.
Whether Trump or Clinton, the next president is very likely to be impeached and convicted.
As to which one it is, there has really never been much doubt that Clinton in the end will gain
enough minority support to carry the big cities. But if the reactionaries depress the turnout
enough, Trump has a shot at an electoral college victory, especially given the precedents on how
votes are counted.
The infunny thing is, either Pence (a Ted Cruz without testicles,) or Kaine
(an Obama DNC chair and thoroughly vetted Armed Service committeeman,) are nightmares.
"... You raise the Children's Defense Fund in her defense? HRC betrayed Marian Edelman, the CDF founder by supporting the catastrophic welfare bill. Peter Edelman was so disgusted that he resigned from HHS and the Clinton administration. Between the crime bill and and the welfare bill Clinton did an enormous amount of damage to black families. HRC conservative? Yes. You probably call it the Third Way. Democratic neoliberlism at its finest. ..."
You raise the Children's Defense Fund in her defense? HRC betrayed Marian Edelman, the CDF
founder by supporting the catastrophic welfare bill. Peter Edelman was so disgusted that he resigned
from HHS and the Clinton administration. Between the crime bill and and the welfare bill Clinton
did an enormous amount of damage to black families. HRC conservative? Yes. You probably call it
the Third Way. Democratic neoliberlism at its finest.
"... Between the creation of the victory fund in September and the end of [June], the fund had brought in $142 million, . . . 44 percent [to] DNC ($24.4 million) and Hillary for America ($37.6 million), . . . state parties have kept less than $800,000 of all the cash brought in by the committee - or only 0.56 percent. ..."
"... Beyond the transfers, much of the fund's $42 million in direct spending also appears to have been done to directly benefit the Clinton campaign, as opposed to the state parties ..."
"... The fund has paid $4.1 million to the Clinton campaign for "salary and overhead expenses" to reimburse it for fundraising efforts. And it has directed $38 million to vendors such as direct marketing company Chapman Cubine Adams + Hussey and digital consultant Bully Pulpit Interactive - both of which also serve the Clinton campaign - for mailings and online ads that sometimes closely resemble Clinton campaign materials. ..."
I am not interested in a prolonged back and forth, but I will lay out a bare outline of facts.
I do not find much support for your characterization of these arrangements, which give new meaning
to the fungibility of funds. I think it is fair and accurate to describe the HVF transfer arrangements
as a means of circumventing campaign financing limits and using the State parties to subsidize
the Clinton campaign. Court rulings have made aggregate fund raising legal and invites this means
of circumventing the $2700 limit on individual Presidential campaign donations. Whether the circumvention
is legal - whether it violates the law to invite nominal contributions to State Parties of $10,000
and channel those contributions wholly to operations in support of Clinton, while leaving nothing
in State Party coffers is actually illegal, I couldn't say; it certainly violates the norms of
a putative joint fundraising effort. It wasn't hard for POLITICO to find State officials who said
as much. The rest of this comment quotes POLITICO reports dated July 2016.
Hillary Victory Fund, which now includes 40 state Democratic Party committees, theoretically could
accept checks as large as $436,100 - based on the individual limits of $10,000 per state party,
$33,400 for the DNC, and $2,700 for Clinton's campaign.
Between the creation of the victory fund in September and the end of [June], the fund had
brought in $142 million, . . . 44 percent [to] DNC ($24.4 million) and Hillary for America ($37.6
million), . . . state parties have kept less than $800,000 of all the cash brought in by the committee
- or only 0.56 percent.
. . . state parties have received $7.7 million in transfers, but within a few days of most
transfers, almost all of the cash - $6.9 million - was transferred to the DNC . . .
The only date on which most state parties received money from the victory fund and didn't pass
any of it on to the DNC was May 2, the same day that POLITICO published an article exposing the
arrangement.
Beyond the transfers, much of the fund's $42 million in direct spending also appears to
have been done to directly benefit the Clinton campaign, as opposed to the state parties.
The fund has paid $4.1 million to the Clinton campaign for "salary and overhead expenses"
to reimburse it for fundraising efforts. And it has directed $38 million to vendors such as direct
marketing company Chapman Cubine Adams + Hussey and digital consultant Bully Pulpit Interactive
- both of which also serve the Clinton campaign - for mailings and online ads that sometimes closely
resemble Clinton campaign materials.
JM Hatch 08.03.16 at 2:23 am
@41 Lee Arnold: Are you referring to the Warren Buffet who owns Fruit-of-the-Loom? The same
company which had Hillary's State Dept bust up a minimum wage law for Haiti's textile industry?
The same company which then donated to the Clinton Foundation for aid that never arrived to Haiti?
If not, then who is this Warren Buffet?
A leaked email from a top DNC official in May shows that Democratic insiders were really leery
of Clinton's strategy of trying to claim Trump is completely different from Republicans past and
present. As this official points out, that strategy actually runs the risk of harming down-ballot
Democrats running for office in Congress and state legislatures. It may help Clinton, but it's
not good for the party. It also shows that the line that so many have swallowed about Trump being
so different was actually a deliberate meme cultivated by Clinton's people, which then trickled
down the food chain of the media and so on down the line, and that it ran in the face of how other
DNC officials (and heavy-hitting members of Congress) wanted to frame the debate.
Here's the text of the email from Luis Miranda, the DNC official:
Hi Amy, the Clinton rapid response operation we deal with have been asking us to disaggregate
Trump from down ballot Republicans. They basically want to make the case that you either stand
with Ryan or with Trump, that Trump is much worse than regular Republicans and they don't want
us to tie Trump to other Republicans because they think it makes him look normal.
They wanted us to basically praise Ryan when Trump was meeting Ryan, or at a minimum to
hold him up as an example. So they want to embrace the "Republicans fleeing Trump" side, but
not hold down ballot GOPers accountable.
That's a problem. I pushed back that we cannot have our state parties hold up Paul Ryan
as a good example of anything. And that we can't give down ballot Republicans such an easy
out. We can force them to own Trump and damage them more by pointing out that they're just
as bad on specific policies, make them uncomfortable where he's particularly egregious, but
asking state Parties to praise House Republicans like Ryan would be damaging for the Party
down ballot.
Can you help us navigate this with Charlie? We would basically have to throw out our entire
frame that the GOP made Trump through years of divisive and ugly politics. We would have to
say that Republicans are reasonable and that the good ones will shun Trump. It just doesn't
work from the Party side. Let me know what you think.
Thanks, – Luis.
P.S. – – that strategy would ALSO put us at odds with Schumer, Lujan, Pelosi, Reid, basically
all of our Congressional Democrats who have embraced our talking points and have been using
them beautifully over the last couple of weeks to point out that GOPers in Congress have been
pushing these ugly policies for years. Trying to dump this approach would probably not work
with Members of Congress, it's worse than turning an aircraft carrier, we would lose 3/4 of
the fleet. Let me know what you think. It might be a good strategy ONLY for Clinton (which
I don't believe), I think instead she needs as many voices as possible on the same page.
Here's Trump's actual position on immigration and the deportations. Needless to say, some will
find it plenty offensive. But it's radically different from what you've described. Were Hayden
and company trashing a Dem, they'd be roundly and rightly condemned as precisely the same a-holes
who've done so much damage over the years. But with Trump as the target, GOP clowns speak with
the authority of god. Perfect.
"... ...As for the neocons, I'm quite sure that the real reason they hate him is because they think he actually might make peace with Russia and possibly deviate from the imperial agenda in other ways. In this, I have no sympathy for them.... ..."
"... The similarities between the ways the vox crowd and vulgar Marxists view politics is really striking." ..."
"... But 50 neocons some of them war criminals did issue a statement against.. ..."
> F Foundling @ 705: In any case, [solidarity] doesn't need to be irrational or to have to
do with narcissism (as suggested in 687) any more than acting in your own personal interests needs
to be irrational or to have to do with narcissism.
Thank you for thoughtful remarks @ 705
and @694.
"Rational" and "irrational" can be a cause of great confusion. It is not some virtue I wish
to ascribe, but, rather, to my mind, a matter of gamesmanship. As a strategy, not an ethic, solidarity
is a way of committing one's self irrationally to not reconsider one's interests.
The rat, betraying solidarity, is rational and selfish and calculating. Upholding solidarity
requires an irrational ethic to trump strategic reconsideration.
There can certainly be an element of enlightened self-interest in a commitment to solidarity.
We hope this gift of the self to the community is not done stupidly or without some deliberate
consideration of consequences.
But, in the game, in the political contest where solidarity matters, where elite power is confronted,
solidarity entails a degree of passionate commitment and even self-sacrifice. Whether expressed
as an individual act of "altruistic punishment" or the common unwillingness to cooperate with
the powers-that-be in a labor strike, there has to be a willingness to bear costs and forego opportunities.
People have to be a bit mad to want justice.
bruce wilder 08.13.16 at 12:47
am
engels and others may appreciate Michael Pettis on the Trump phenomenon.
He wrote this piece
back in March and for reasons I cannot quite fathom he tried to tie in the Jacksonians - as if
Donald Trump is some faded reprint of Andrew Jackson. But, ignore the part about the Jacksonians
in American history and pay attention to what he says about his friend who is a supporter of Trump.
It will complement Doug Henwood nicely, I suspect. And, Pettis has nothing nice to say about Trump - so no fear!
...As for the neocons, I'm quite sure that the real reason they hate him is because they
think he actually might make peace with Russia and possibly deviate from the imperial agenda in
other ways. In this, I have no sympathy for them....
The reason so many foreign policy pundits ... are opposed to trump is not because of the possibility
of making peace with Russia, but because they're liberal internationalists. They support the US
led international order, think US hegemony is generally a force for good, and oppose powers and
actors which will undermine the [neo]liberal order...
Reasons someone on a middle income from an economically declining region might support trump(that
aren't racism)
Ronan(rf),
"Reasons someone on a middle income from an economically declining region might support
trump(that aren't racism)
(1) support for other institutions (military , family, religion) mentioned above.
(2) people don't vote individually but as a member of a group. Being a relatively prosperous
member of a declining demographic has psychological consequences and perceived collective responsibilities.
(3) middle income business owners are not a stable group.(socially or economically)
(4) who do you think Is voting in these regions ? The poor in the US are less likely to
vote.
The similarities between the ways the vox crowd and vulgar Marxists view politics is really
striking."
Bruce thinks narcissism can be healthy, F. Foundling thinks it is excessive by definition. I understand
it in what I think is the classical sense as a relation which is properly directed at others turned
in on the individual. 'Narcissistic solidarity' would mean something like 'standing with oneself'-a
conceptual absurdity. (I agree with the broader point that solidarity isn't inherently altruistic
and doesn't preclude self-interest though.)
"... How many ordinary Americans under the age of 40 can look in the mirror and find the stuff of not one, but two autobiographies? That certainly speaks a remarkable level of – what shall we call it? Well, probably not modesty. ..."
"... 'if you don't support O, you're David Duke in a dress' stuff. No need to dredge up the practical politics of Hope and Change at this late date. ..."
@ 668 "Mr. Obama told Patrick Gaspard, his political director, at the start of the 2008 campaign,
according to The New Yorker. "I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy
directors."
"But there's more evidence that he's batshit crazy. He declaimed that he knew more
about ISIS than all the generals. He will trust no one's judgment but his own."
So, your argument is that Obama (your Muslim socialist) should never have been trusted to be
in the Oval Office.
And that by these, your standards, Trump is no crazier than the current Democratic president.
Oh, you don't need to. That boat sailed the moment you decided to make Obama level hubris grounds
for ineligibility. Obama's 'accomplishments prior to entering the Senate in 2004 are the stuff
of legend to the clueless, of course.
How many ordinary Americans under the age of 40 can look in the mirror and find the stuff
of not one, but two autobiographies? That certainly speaks a remarkable level of – what shall
we call it? Well, probably not modesty.
My life twice – plenty for everyone like to learn from! The perfect preparation for
a great presidency. That and my love of basketball. That's what makes me so smart! Did anyone
notice I'm young, black and handsome? Ignore that, please.
And we are where we are. I've elided the 'if you don't support O, you're David Duke in
a dress' stuff. No need to dredge up the practical politics of Hope and Change at this late date.
"... "You have to start off by saying, 'I want to thank the American people, especially Monica and Gennifer Flowers," anticipated a top Clinton ally with close ties to the campaign. "Nobody who is a friend of hers is going to want to say that in debate prep." ..."
This year in particular, it's a job that nobody close to Clinton is particularly eager to take
on. "You have to start off by saying, 'I want to thank the American people, especially Monica
and Gennifer Flowers," anticipated a top Clinton ally with close ties to the campaign. "Nobody who
is a friend of hers is going to want to say that in debate prep."
... ... ...
"It's a complicated debate prep," agreed Shrum. "The Clinton challenge is to prepare for the crazy
Trump who will probably show up, some kind of toned-down Trump, and the somewhere-in-between Trump."
Trump could spend 90 minutes berating Clinton for helping to found ISIS, Democrats said, or he could
turn on the moderator and the media so that Clinton simply becomes a bystander rather than a participant.
He could even devote real time to preparation and surprise Clinton by his substance on the issues.
This is a huge danger for Hillary... Now all those materials got into the hand of hostile and
very competent prosecutors.
Notable quotes:
"... "The FBI has turned over a 'number of documents' related to their investigation of former Secretary Clinton's use of a personal email server. Committee staff is currently reviewing the information that is classified SECRET. There are no further details at this time," a spokesperson for the House Oversight Committee said on Tuesday afternoon. ..."
"... The handover of the records all but guarantees the email issue will continue to dog Clinton this election cycle, although it is unclear what Republicans can do with them, given that they are classified materials. Still, her decision to set up a private server at the State Department, and the subsequent fallout, remains a sizable self-inflicted wound for Clinton, even as Donald Trump's various missteps have found him lagging behind the Democrat in national and battleground state polls. ..."
The FBI on Tuesday handed over to Congress classified records from its investigation into Hillary
Clinton's use of a private email server, the latest development in the scandal that the Democratic
nominee just can't shake.
Among the materials turned over to Capitol Hill was an FBI summary of
the 3˝-hour interview Clinton submitted to at FBI headquarters early last month, according to the
ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Adam Schiff of California.
The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee also confirmed receiving a package of records
from the FBI about the Clinton email probe.
"The FBI has turned over a 'number of documents' related to their investigation of former Secretary
Clinton's use of a personal email server. Committee staff is currently reviewing the information
that is classified SECRET. There are no further details at this time," a spokesperson for the House
Oversight Committee said on Tuesday afternoon.
The handover of the records all but guarantees the email issue will continue to dog Clinton this
election cycle, although it is unclear what Republicans can do with them, given that they are classified
materials. Still, her decision to set up a private server at the State Department, and the subsequent
fallout, remains a sizable self-inflicted wound for Clinton, even as Donald Trump's various missteps
have found him lagging behind the Democrat in national and battleground state polls.
As it sent the materials up on Tuesday, the FBI warned publicly against leaking the documents.
"The material contains classified and other sensitive information and is being provided with the
expectation it will not be disseminated or disclosed without FBI concurrence," an FBI spokesperson
said in a statement.
But top Republicans are already pushing back, urging the FBI to publicly release of some of the
information.
"On initial review, it seems that much of the material given to the Senate today, other than copies
of the large number of emails on Secretary Clinton's server containing classified information, is
marked 'unclassified/for official use.' The FBI should make as much of the material available as
possible," said Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) in a statement. "The public's business
ought to be public, with few exceptions. The people's interest would be served in seeing the documents
that are unclassified. The FBI has made public statements in describing its handling of the case,
so sharing documents in support of those statements wherever appropriate would make sense."
Trust the crooks in Ukraine to come up with
'documentary evidence' which can be used to show Trump is really Putin's man. I wonder how
big an IMF package Hillary had to promise them? Or did she strike a deal with Porky to get Crimea
back?
In the New York Times , of course; the Democrats' FOX News. They'd like to see a home
girl win.
I disagree. And not only regarding his extraordinarily dubious periodization of US political history.
This baloney about Republicanism does not make much sense. Also since the 1963 deep state became
the dominant political force and parties and elections became more of a legitimization show. .
I see Trump more like a reaction on hardships inflicted by neoliberal globalization on the
USA common folk. So he is standard bearer of the strata of population hit by globalization, the
strata which standard of living was dropping for the last two-three decades. Professional classes
and financial oligarchy support Hillary, but blue color workers switched to Trump by large numbers.
Trade union bosses expect that 50% or more of membership will vote for Trump. That's their way
to say "f*ck you" to neoliberal establishment and so far they are saying it pretty politely, if
we do not count several recent riots (which mainly involved black population). Now the neoliberal
elite is afraid that even the slightest trigger can produce uncontrollable situation.
That's why Hillary adopted a part of Sanders platform and is now against TPP (only until November:-)
A lot of people are just fed up.
That's why neocons such as Cruze and, especially, Rubio and Jeb! were defeated by Trump, and
why only machinations of DNC allowed Hillary to be crowned over Sanders (Sanders betrayal also
played a role).
This is a situation perfect for "color revolution" (what we miss is just a capable and well
financed three letter agency of some foreign power
In other words the US elite partially lost the control of ordinary people and MSM no longer can
brainwash them with previous efficiency because after 2008 the key idea of "trickle down economy"
- that dramatically rising inequality will provide Untermensch with enough crumps from the table
of Masters of the Universe (financial oligarchy) were proven to be false.
Financial oligarchy does not want to share even crumps and decent job almost totally disappeared.
Switch to contractor jobs and outsourcing means a significant drop in standard of living for,
probably, 80-90% of population. Unemployment after university graduation is now pretty common.
While neoliberalism managed to survive the crisis of 2008 the next crisis of neoliberalism
is probably close (let's, say, can happen within the current decade). The economic plunder of
the xUSSR economic space helped to delay this crisis for a decade or more, but now this process
is by-and-large over (although Russia still is a piece of economic space to fight for - so its
dismembering or color revolution is always in cards and not only for geopolitical reasons) . Secular
stagnation does not play well with neoliberal globalization, so nationalistic movements are on
the rise in different parts of the globe, including Europe. The "plato oil" situation does not
help either. So here all bets are off.
Note an unprecedented campaign of demonization of Trump in neoliberal media and attempt to
link him to Putin, playing on pre-existing Russophobia of the population. I especially like "Khan
gambit" (essentially swiftboating of Trump) and recent campaign salivating over the "assassination
attempt" on Hillary by inflating one (unfortunate) Trump remark completely our of proportion.
And that's only the beginning.
While the MSM has gone out of its way to question every plausible unintended consequence(s)
of Donald Trump's new
"extreme" vetting for immigrants, perhaps it is worth looking at some of the current
questions the US Immigration Services asks and compare those to Trump's proposals. They may not be
that far off.
To recap, Trump proposed an ideological test of "Islamic sympathizers" to be admitted,
focusing on issues including religious freedom, gender equality and gay rights.
And while some have
questioned
the validity of a test, and whether a presumed terrorist would even be honest in said test, the
experts and political pundits should take a look at what the US currently asks individuals.
Have you ever been involved in, or do you seek to engage in, money laundering?
Are you coming to the United States to engage in prostitution or unlawful commercialized vice
or have you been engaged in prostitution or procuring prostitutes within the past 10 years?
Have you ever committed or conspired to commit a human trafficking offense in the United States
or outside the United States?
Do you seek to engage in terrorist activities while in the United States or have you ever
engaged in terrorist activities?
Are you a member or representative of a terrorist organization?
Have you ever ordered, incited, committed, assisted, or otherwise participated in genocide?
Have you ever committed, ordered, incited, assisted or otherwise participated in torture?
Have you, while serving as a government official, been responsible for or directly carried
out, at any time, particularly severe violations of religious freedom?
Have you ever been directly involved in the coercive transplantation of human organs or bodily
tissue?
Evidently, if any of the US allies (e.g. Saudi Arabia) answered these questions honestly, they
would not be admitted to the US. But, perhaps the best question still being asked to all
immigrants is as follows:
Have you ever been or are you now involved in espionage or sabotage; or in terrorist
activities; or genocide; or between 1933 and 1945 were involved, in any way, in persecutions associated
with Nazi Germany or its allies?
If the US government currently engages in these and other questionings, is it that far off to
ask if you are anti gay rights, anti Semitic or pro sharia law?
The Hidden Subtext Behind Putin's Third Slovenia Visit
Putin is no stranger to the ex-Yugoslav republic of Slovenia. In fact, in June 2001, when Slovenia
was still neither an EU nor a NATO member state, it was chosen as a neutral meeting place for the
first official meeting between him and the U.S. president George W. Bush. Ironically, the meeting
took place in the Brdo Castle near Kranj, one of the long-time Communist leader Tito's summer residences.
At that time, the U.S. high level officials did everything they could to flatter Putin and get him
to accept their hegemonic geopolitical agenda for Eastern Europe, Russia, and Eurasia in general.
For instance, during the press conference that followed their two-hour long discussions, Bush stated
that he could fully trust Putin in international matters because "he's an honest, straight-forward
man who loves his country. He loves his family. We share a lot of values. I view him as a remarkable
leader. I believe his leadership will serve Russia well."[1]
But, when Putin, unlike Yeltsin, whose hand-picked successor he was, proved unwilling to play
along with the U.S. plans, his stature in the U.S. foreign policy discourse quickly deteriorated
from that of "a remarkable leader" and an honest patriot to that of a brutal dictator and even "a
thug"…
####
Read on, read on!
The UNSG bid certainly looks like part of it though I doubt anyone from the Western blocs inc.
asia would be favorable, let alone balanced towards Russia. I'm not sure that Washington is stupid
enough to pick a fight with Europe over the Balkans, but then again Washington has a long record
of their actions causing blowback to their 'allies' and saying "Tough. That's the price for riding
on our coattails."
Must only be a matter of time then, when the US government discovers that Vladimir Putin might
have met Melania Trump (even if they just brushed past each other in a matter of seconds with
both of them looking away from each other) and BINGO! – the connection between Lord Sauron
and his robot Donald Trump is finally revealed.
Thos pressitute now talking not stop and ties of Trump and Russia. I wonder when rumors about
connections of Putin and Melania surface...
Notable quotes:
"... The article, very tendentious and rambling in the Post's normal diffuse style, short on facts, continues on page A10, half page above the fold, with the banner headline across the top "Russian meddling in European politics similar to DNC hack." ..."
"... Then in the Outlook section, page B4, in the continuation of an article about conspiracy theories, there is a large, very unflattering picture of a frowning Mr. Putin, captioned "Is Russian President Vladimir Putin controlling Donald Trump ? That's one conspiracy theory floating around the 2016 campaign." ..."
"... No doubt much of this is campaign related. Russia/Putin have been elected the sticks to beat Mr. Trunp with. If it continues until the election, however, it's likely public opinion, manufactured though it is, will be receptive to military action against Russia, as Hillary and her likely advisors have hinted openly, in Syria and the Ukraine. ..."
"... WAPO's anti-Russia/Putin articles are part of this agenda: The New Cold War but this time it's different. ..."
"... "The new Cold War is even more pointless than the first. Russia was cooperating with the West, and the Russian economy was integrated into the West as a supplier of raw materials. The neoliberal economic policy that Washington convinced the Russian government to implement was designed to keep the Russian economy in the role of supplier of raw materials to the West. Russia expressed no territorial ambitions and spent very little on its military. ..."
"... The new Cold War is the work of a handful of neoconservative fanatics who believe that History has chosen the US to wield hegemonic power over the world. Some of the neocons are sons of former Trotskyists and have the same romantic notion of world revolution, only this time it is "democratic-capitalist" and not communist. The new Cold War is far more dangerous than the old, because the respective war doctrines of the nuclear powers have changed. The function of nuclear weapons is no longer retaliatory. Mutually Assured Destruction was a guarantee that the weapons would not be used. In the new war doctrine nuclear weapons have been elevated to first-use in a preemptive nuclear attack. Washington first took this step, forcing Russia and China to follow. ..."
"... Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama regimes have raised tensions dramatically ..."
"... William Perry, Secretary of Defense in the Clinton regime, recently spoke of the danger of nuclear war being launched by false alarms resulting from such things as faulty computer chips. Fortunately, when such instances occurred in the past, the absence of tension in the relationship between the nuclear powers caused authorities on both sides to disbelieve the false alarms. Today, however, with constant allegations of pending Russian invasions, Putin demonized as "the new Hitler," and the buildup of US and NATO military forces on Russia's borders, a false alarm becomes believable ..."
For those that haven't seen it, this morning's Sunday Washington Post features several prominent
anti-Russia/Putin articles. One page A1, above the fold, is the headline "Russia's tactic's roil
Europe", with subordinate headlines "INTERVENTION IN NEIGHBOR'S POLITIC'S" (all caps) and "Kremlin's
alleged role in DNC hack is similar. The article, very tendentious and rambling in the Post's normal
diffuse style, short on facts, continues on page A10, half page above the fold, with the banner headline
across the top "Russian meddling in European politics similar to DNC hack."
A large picture of Red
Square is labeled "The Kremlin is visible to the right of a women looking at her smartphone in Red
Square. Russia has tried hard in recent years tout European countries to its side bankrolling the
countries extremist political parties and working to fuel a backlash against migrants."
Below that there's a small picture of Mr. Putin, looking very worried, captioned ""President Vladimir
Putin sought to build support for his vision, favoring authoritarian leaders over democratically
elected ones." The article says essentially the same thing, in a diffuse, very rambling manner.
Then in the Outlook section, page B4, in the continuation of an article about conspiracy theories,
there is a large, very unflattering picture of a frowning Mr. Putin, captioned "Is Russian President
Vladimir Putin controlling Donald Trump ? That's one conspiracy theory floating around the 2016 campaign."
No doubt much of this is campaign related. Russia/Putin have been elected the sticks to beat
Mr. Trunp with. If it continues until the election, however, it's likely public opinion, manufactured
though it is, will be receptive to military action against Russia, as Hillary and her likely advisors
have hinted openly, in Syria and the Ukraine.
Latest Seymour Hersh on Syria and other White House lies
Can you summarize what is Turkey's role in the ceaseless clash and bloodletting in Syria?
The Erdogan government was a covert supporter of the ISIS war against the Bashar al-Assad
government in Syria for years, rearming ISIS fighters, buying seized Syrian oil from the ISIS
at discount prices, and keeping the borders between Turkey and Syria, especially in Hakkari
province, open for a steady stream of anti-Assad jihadists from around the world who wanted
to join in the war against Syria. There also is evidence that some anti-Syrian factors in the
United States have welcomed the Erdogan support or, at the least, looked away when necessary.
Erdogan's constantly expanding extremism and grab for power was ignored, more or less, by many
in the mainstream US media until early this year, and President Obama, for reasons not known,
has yet to fully share the intelligence about Erdogan's political and religious obligations
with the nation.
The irony, or tragedy, of Erdogan's move to extremism is that throughout much of the last
decade he was seen as being fully in the Ataturk tradition in Turkey -- that of a strong leader
with strong religious beliefs who made sure that his nation remained secular. That is no longer
true, as the recent coup, and Erdogan's extremist response to it, has made clear. Those called
by Erdogan to go to the street and attack the army when the coup began to fail were not fighting
in support of democracy, as widely reported at first, but as Islamists fighting a secular military.
[.] "The new Cold War is even more pointless than the first. Russia was cooperating with the
West, and the Russian economy was integrated into the West as a supplier of raw materials.
The neoliberal economic policy that Washington convinced the Russian government to implement
was designed to keep the Russian economy in the role of supplier of raw materials to the West.
Russia expressed no territorial ambitions and spent very little on its military.
The new Cold War is the work of a handful of neoconservative fanatics who believe that
History has chosen the US to wield hegemonic power over the world. Some of the neocons are
sons of former Trotskyists and have the same romantic notion of world revolution, only this
time it is "democratic-capitalist" and not communist.
The new Cold War is far more dangerous than the old, because the respective war doctrines
of the nuclear powers have changed. The function of nuclear weapons is no longer retaliatory.
Mutually Assured Destruction was a guarantee that the weapons would not be used. In the new
war doctrine nuclear weapons have been elevated to first-use in a preemptive nuclear attack.
Washington first took this step, forcing Russia and China to follow.
The new Cold War is more dangerous for a second reason. During the first Cold War American
presidents focused on reducing tensions between nuclear powers. But the Clinton, George
W. Bush, and Obama regimes have raised tensions dramatically .
William Perry, Secretary of Defense in the Clinton regime, recently spoke of the danger
of nuclear war being launched by false alarms resulting from such things as faulty computer
chips. Fortunately, when such instances occurred in the past, the absence of tension in the
relationship between the nuclear powers caused authorities on both sides to disbelieve the
false alarms. Today, however, with constant allegations of pending Russian invasions, Putin
demonized as "the new Hitler," and the buildup of US and NATO military forces on Russia's borders,
a false alarm becomes believable ."[.]
~ ~ ~ ~
It has a great deal to do with keeping the greedy MISC fed and NATO relevant. {MISC -> military
industrial surveillance companies}
Emphasis mine.
What about Hillary Clinton my friend ? What a presstitute...
Notable quotes:
"... The media are completely biased...And spread utter lies about Trump, while Hillary immediately hires Debbie wasserman Schultz after she resigned in disgrace when exposed by DNC leaks/Europeans as cheating and colluding against another candidate. ..."
"The media is like an extension of the DNC at this point. They'll intentionally misinterpret
or exaggerate anything Trump says to try to help Hillary win the election," said a 50-year-old
college professor from California.
Of all the risible, most easily shucked off charges, this one takes the toupee. You cannot misinterpret
or exaggerate this:
"Barack Hussein Obama is the creator of ISIS. I mean...he's the literal inventor of ISIS."
Let that treasonous libel stand for the innumerable times Trump has demonstrated that he's a mental
dwarf, a vicious idiot, an unhinged loon. And that's calling it like it is, on his
express terms.
This man belongs in one of two cells: a padded one where he can be safe from his own mental
illnesses or a prison one for his financial shenanigans, death threats against others, incitement
to violence, "cruel and inhumane" abuse of his first wife (the actual charges that stuck, the
rape ones were retracted) and treason. I guess money really can buy anything.
But hell, I'd settle for seeing him safely ensconced in his own Towers. Anywhere but the White
House.
Thete's a certain sort of university-educated, somewhat cosmopolitan person, who probably places
a premium on rationality and an expectation that the world works in reasonably orderly manner.
And they're not just on the left. They read the newspaper - the Guardian or the Telegraph or the
New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. They plan their careers and their retirements.
And they cannot CONCEIVE of how Trump supporters (or many Brexit supporters) see the world.
They don't get it; they can't wrap their heads around the anger and resentment. And they can't
believe that that there are tens of MILLIONS of people like that. All of whom will vote.
Just as we've seen with recent mass shootings, the rational cannot process the IRrational.
'. . . he was trying to be distasteful/politically incorrect as usual, which is why I will
vote for the man. PC has ventured into thought policing on things, and along with the ultra
surveillance state we have moved towards, I don't want to be answering questions by the Gestapo
after I text a tacky joke to someone.'
This amazes me. It shouldn't, as it seems to be a commonly-held sentiment even here, but it
amazes me that people like this feel they have such a strong need to say "tacky" - or, more realistically,
racist, misogynistic, and xenophobic - things that somehow they stand no chance of being able
to continue saying unless an unhinged 70-year old man who is widely denounced for being
disreputable is elected to represent them. It just does not add up as a pile of emotions, let
alone as part of a political platform. This guy also seems to have such a poor grasp of history
and a hysteric sense of melodrama as to believe that someone who criticizes him for making "a
tacky joke" (or possibly just makes him feel awkward for having done so?) is the equivalent of
"the Gestapo." He's more melodramatic about the reception his jokes might receive than a maladjusted
teen who acts out in class.
I'm a former Democrat...And I'm voting for trump. Hillary Clinton is one of the most blatantly
corrupt politician I have ever seen.
The media are completely biased...And spread utter lies about Trump, while Hillary immediately
hires Debbie wasserman Schultz after she resigned in disgrace when exposed by DNC leaks/Europeans
as cheating and colluding against another candidate.
Hillary didn't address this disgusting, illegal, unethical behavior , but she rewards and condones
cheating voters with a JOB.
A good reason to vote for Trump, a very good reason whatever his other
intentions, is that he
does not want a war with Russia.
Hillary and her elite ventriloquists
threaten just that. Note the anti-Russian hysteria coming from her and her
remoras.
Such a war would be yet another example of the utter control of
America by rich insiders. No normal American has anything at all to gain by
such a war. And no normal American has the slightest influence over whether
such a war takes place, except by voting for Trump. The military has become
entirely the plaything of unaccountable elites.
A martial principle of great wisdom says that military stupidity comes in
three grades: Ordinarily stupid; really, really,
really
stupid; and
fighting Russia. Think Charles XII at Poltava, Napoleon after Borodino, Adolf
and Kursk.
Letting dilettantes, grifters, con men, pasty Neocons, bottle-blonde ruins,
and corporations decide on war is insane. We have pseudo-masculine dwarves
playing with things they do not understand. So far as I am aware, none of these
fern-bar Clausewitzes has worn boots, been in a war, seen a war, or faces any
chance of being in a war started by themselves. They brought us Iraq,
Afghanistan, and Isis, and can't win wars against goatherds with AKs. They are
going to fight…Russia?
A point that the tofu ferocities of New York might bear in mind is that wars
seldom turn out as expected, usually with godawful results. We do not know what
would happen in a war with Russia. Permit me a tedious catalog to make this
point. It is very worth making.
When Washington pushed the South into the Civil War, it expected a conflict
that might be over in twenty-four hours, not four years with as least 650,000
dead. When Germany began WWI, it expected a swift lunge into Paris, not four
years of hideously bloody static war followed by unconditional surrender. When
the Japanese Army pushed for attacking Pearl, it did not foresee GIs marching
in Tokyo and a couple of cities glowing at night. When Hitler invaded Poland,
utter defeat and occupation of Germany was not among his war aims. When the US
invaded Vietnam, it did not expect to be outfought and outsmarted by a
bush-world country. When Russia invaded Afghanistan it did not expect…nor when
America invaded Afghanistan, nor when it attacked Iraq, nor….
Is there a pattern here?
The standard American approach to war is to underestimate the enemy,
overestimate American capacities, and misunderstand the kind of war it enters.
This is particularly true when the war is a manhood ritual for masculine
inadequates–think Kristol, Podhoretz, Sanders, the whole Neocon milk bar, and
that mendacious wreck, Hillary, who has the military grasp of a Shetland pony.
If you don't think weak egos and perpetual adolescence have a part in deciding
policy, read up on Kaiser Wilhelm.
Now, if Washington accidentally or otherwise provoked a war with Russia in,
say, the Baltics or the Ukraine, and actually used its own forces, where might
this lead, given the Pentagon's customary delusional optimism? A very serious
possibility is a humiliating American defeat. The US has not faced a real enemy
in a long time. In that time the armed forces have been feminized and
social-justice warriorified, with countless officials having been appointed by
Obama for reasons of race and sex. Training has been watered down to benefit
girl soldiers, physical standards lowered, and the ranks of general officers
filled with perfumed political princes. Russia is right there at the Baltic
borders: location, location, location. Somebody said, "Amateurs think strategy,
professionals think logistics." Uh-huh. The Russians are not pansies and they
are not primitive.
What would Washington do, what would New York make Washington do, having
been handed its ass in a very public defeat? Huge egos would be in play, the
credibility of the whole American empire. Could little Hillary Dillary Pumpkin
Pie force NATO into a general war with Russia, or would the Neocons try to go
it alone–with other people's lives? (Russia also has borders with Eastern
Europe, which connects to Western Europe. Do you suppose the Europeans would
think of this?) Would Washington undertake, or try to undertake, the national
mobilization that would be necessary to fight Russia in its backyard? Naval
war? Nukes in desperation?
And, since Russia is not going to invade anybody unprovoked, Washington
would have to attack. See above, the three forms of military stupidity.
The same danger exists incidentally with regard to a war with China in the
South China Sea. The American Navy hasn't fought a war in seventy years. It
doesn't know how well its armament works. The Chinese, who are not fools, have
invested in weaponry specifically designed to defeat carrier battle groups. A
carrier in smoking ruins would force Washington to start a wider war to save
face, with unpredictable results. Can you name one American, other than the
elites, who has anything to gain from war with China?
What has
any
normal American, as distinct from the elites and
various lobbies, gained from any of our wars post Nine-Eleven? Hillary and her
Neocon pack have backed all of them.
It is easy to regard countries as suprahuman beings that think and take
decisions and do things. Practically speaking, countries consist of a small
number of people, usually men, who make decisions for reasons often selfish,
pathologically aggressive, pecuniary, delusional, misinformed, or actually
psychopathic in the psychiatric sense. For example, the invasion of Iraq, a
disaster, was pushed by the petroleum lobbies to get the oil, the arms lobbies
to get contracts, the Jewish lobbies to get bombs dropped on Israel's enemies,
the imperialists for empire, and the congenitally combative because that is how
they think. Do you see anything in the foregoing that would matter to a normal
American? These do not add up to a well-conceived policy. Considerations no
better drive the desire to fight Russia or to force it to back down.
I note, pointlessly, that probably none of America's recent
martial catastrophes would have occurred if we still had
constitutional government. How many congressmen do you think
would vote for a declaration of war if they had to tell their
voters that they had just launched, for no reason of
importance to Americans, an attack on the homeland of a
nuclear power?
There are lots of reasons not to vote for
Clinton and the suppurating corruption she represents. Not
letting her owners play with matches rates high among them
"... After Clinton recognized that even her strongest supporters doubted her statement, she attempted to walk it back. In doing so, she repeatedly lied again, but offered as an excuse a bizarre claim that she had "short-circuited" her answer. ..."
"... Who knows what that means? She claimed that she and Wallace were talking over each other and her answer had been misunderstood and misconstrued. Yet, Clinton said that Comey exonerated her as being "truthful" to the public when in fact he stated that she had been truthful during her three-hour, closed-door, unrecorded interview with the FBI. ..."
"... Could Clinton have legally received, opened, stored or sent a secret or top secret email without knowing it, as she has claimed? In a word: NO. ..."
"... That's because, on her first day in office, Clinton swore under oath that she recognized her legal obligation to recognize state secrets and treat them according to law - that is, to keep them in a secure government venue - whether they are marked as secrets or not. ..."
"... Last Sunday, Iran executed a scientist who sold Iranian nuclear secrets to the U.S. The secrets were eventually passed on to Secretary of State John Kerry for his use during the negotiations that led to the recent U.S.-Iran nuclear accord. But the sale of the secrets and the U.S.'s payments for them (several million dollars) were consummated under then-Secretary Clinton's watch. The scientist was lured back to Iran, fearing harm to his family. Upon his return, he was arrested, tried and convicted of treason. ..."
When former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was asked last week if she has misled the American
people on the issue of her failure to safeguard state secrets contained in her emails, she told my
Fox News colleague, Chris Wallace, that the FBI had exonerated her. When pressed by Wallace, she
argued that FBI Director James Comey said that her answers to the American people were truthful.
After Clinton recognized that even her strongest supporters doubted her statement, she attempted
to walk it back. In doing so, she repeatedly lied again, but offered as an excuse a bizarre claim
that she had "short-circuited" her answer.
Who knows what that means? She claimed that she and Wallace were talking over each other and her
answer had been misunderstood and misconstrued. Yet, Clinton said that Comey exonerated her as being
"truthful" to the public when in fact he stated that she had been truthful during her three-hour,
closed-door, unrecorded interview with the FBI.
Clinton told a group of largely pro-Clinton journalists that she had short-circuited her remarks.
Then, she acknowledged that Comey had only referred to whatever she told the FBI as being truthful.
Then, she lied again, by insisting that she told the FBI the same things she has told the press and
the public since this scandal erupted in March 2015.
But that cannot be so, because she has issued a litany of lies to the press and to the public,
which the FBI would have caught. In her so-called clarifying remarks, she again told journalists
her oft-stated lie about returning all work-related emails to the State Department. She could not
have told that to the FBI because Director Comey revealed in July that the FBI found "thousands"
of unreturned work-related emails on her servers, some of which she attempted to destroy.
On the state secrets issue, she has told the public countless times that she never sent or received
anything marked classified. She could not have said that to the FBI, because even a novice FBI agent
would have recognized such a statement as a trick answer. Nothing is marked "classified." The markings
used by the federal government are "confidential" or "secret" or "top secret." When Director Comey
announced last month that the FBI was recommending against indictment, he revealed nevertheless that
his agents found 110 emails in 52 email threads containing materials that were confidential, secret
or top secret.
The agents also found seven email chains on her servers that were select access privilege, or
SAP. SAP emails cannot be received, opened or sent without knowing what they are, as a special alphanumeric
code, one that changes continually, must be requested and employed in order to do so. SAP is so secret
that the FBI agents investigating Clinton lacked access to the code.
Could Clinton have legally received, opened, stored or sent a secret or top secret email without
knowing it, as she has claimed? In a word: NO.
That's because, on her first day in office, Clinton swore under oath that she recognized her
legal obligation to recognize state secrets and treat them according to law - that is, to keep them
in a secure government venue - whether they are marked as secrets or not.
This past weekend, we learned how deadly the consequences of Clinton's failure to secure secrets
can be.
Last Sunday, Iran executed a scientist who sold Iranian nuclear secrets to the U.S. The secrets
were eventually passed on to Secretary of State John Kerry for his use during the negotiations that
led to the recent U.S.-Iran nuclear accord. But the sale of the secrets and the U.S.'s payments for
them (several million dollars) were consummated under then-Secretary Clinton's watch. The scientist
was lured back to Iran, fearing harm to his family. Upon his return, he was arrested, tried and convicted
of treason.
One email sent to Clinton, from Richard Morningstar, a former State Department special envoy for
Eurasian energy, referred to this scientist as "our friend." The fact that Clinton's aides referenced
this spying scientist as "our friend" shows a conscious awareness of their duty to hide and secure
state secrets - his name and what he had done for the U.S. Yet, at the same time, Clinton put these
state secrets at risk by having them sent to her via her nonsecure home servers. This "our friend"
email was a top-secret email, which Clinton failed to keep secure. It was either one of the 110 that
the FBI found on her servers or one of the work-related emails she did surrender.
Could this email have been used as evidence in the treason trial of the now-executed scientist?
That is not an academic question. Most of the intelligence community seriously mistrusts Clinton,
as her recklessness has jeopardized their work. Some feared that many of their undercover colleagues
were compromised or even killed due to Clinton's emails.
Hillary Rodham Clinton has established a clear and unambiguous record of deception. Her deceptions
are not about the time of day or the day of the week; they are about matters material to her former
job as Secretary of State and material to national security.
Do you know any rational person who continues to trust her?
Copyright 2016 Andrew P. Napolitano.
Distributed by Creators.com.
If the lamestream media were not fully in the bag for the harpy,
questions would be being asked about the mysterious death of the man whom
Assange says was the leaker to wikileaks of the Democratic National
Committee emails. Others have noted that several other people have died
mysteriously during the last few weeks including a UN figure who died from a
suspicous home weightlifting accident and an anti-Clinton researcher who
unexpectedly committed "suicide."
The Libya thing is still on record as a war crime and the fact is
indisputable that Clinton was the spearhead who convinced Obama, who has
indicated it was against his better judgment, to carry through on the
overthrow. Meanwhile, we have on record Clinton's barbaric gloat, "we came,
we saw, he died" with a horror movie type cackle. Also on record is the fact
that the jihadi element Clinton sponsored in the overthrow effort committed
a crime against humanity, a mass liquidation of Sub-saharan Africans
Khaddafi had settled in the city of Sirte in the wake of their seizure of
that city. It has been documented again in an article in this week's
blackagendareport by their regular reporter, Danny Haiphong.
Of course Trump is accused based on an ambiguous off-the-cuff comment he
made about 2nd amendment rights that he suggested violence against the
harpy. The media's cashing in on this issues makes relevant the harpy's own
statement in July, 2008 when she had been beaten by Obama but before the
convention which would confirm that defeat, that she was staying in the race
in case a "Robert Kennedy" incident occurs. This is a much more unambiguous
statement which could be construed as hoping for something favorable. Her
status as a major party candidate is a disgrace, particularly now that the
wikileaks disclosures have revealed the fraud engaged in to secure it.
Sanders, meanwhile, appears craven in light of these new disclosures. If she
triumphs, the last shreds of legitimacy will be gone from the yankee
imperium.
state secrets – just the words give me the creeps. reminds of police
states. state secrets keep the people, the employers of the united states
government, in the dark. criminal regimes everywhere flourish without
sunlight. states secrets are used as a cya tactic, as well. if the citizens
don't know what their government does, they can't object. we, the people,
are kept ignorant, which allows corruption to proliferate and produce people
like bill & hillary clinton.
hillary lied to congress, didn't she? why isn't she prosecuted?
donald trump is a braggart who lies so often and so much, the mind reels.
hillary clinton is a serial prevaricator, part-time criminal, thoroughly
corrupt, massively entitled, political hack who should have been yesterday's
news 25 years ago.
trump or clinton.
try not to cry.
"... Fractured Lands in the NYT Magazine: this is getting the full MSM `serious journalism' treatment. Strangely, in 40,000 words it mentions Saudi Arabia essentially once, Bahrain once, in the phrase, `an arc across the Arab world from Mauritania to Bahrain', and Qatar not at all. ..."
"... So the three MENA countries most responsible for supporting extremism in their own neighborhood (and underwriting it elsewhere as well) are left off the hook. ..."
Fractured Lands in the NYT Magazine: this is getting the full MSM `serious journalism' treatment. Strangely, in 40,000 words it mentions Saudi Arabia essentially once,
Bahrain once, in the phrase, `an arc across the Arab world from Mauritania to Bahrain',
and Qatar not at all.
So the three MENA countries most responsible for supporting extremism in their own neighborhood
(and underwriting it elsewhere as well) are left off the hook.
He stated in the beginning that he's only dealing with six countries and Saudi Arabia wasn't
one of them. I started to read it but didn't get very far.
had to ck that out too…" Although definitions, names, and borders can vary, generally the regions
of Asia include West Asia (which is part of the Middle East), the Caucasus (sometimes also considered
as part of the Middle East), Central Asia, East Asia, South Asia (also called the Indian Subcontinent),
and Southeast Asia. West Asia is sometimes referred to as the Middle East, with is actually a
misnomer since the cultural region we define as the Middle East often included countries outside
of Asia, such as Egypt in Africa and Cyprus in Europe. West Asia specifically includes the countries
within the region of Asia bordered by the Mediterranean and Red Seas to the West and the Persian
Gulf, the Gulfs of Aden and Oman, and the Arabian Sea to the South.
Countries within West Asia include Afghanistan, Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait,
Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. Just northeast
of Turkey lies the Caucasus, a mountainous region wedged between the Black Sea to the West and
the Caspian Sea to the East. The Caucasus includes Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and parts of
Russia. Central Asia is located just north of Iran and Afghanistan and south of Russia, consisting
of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. East Asia defines the region
between Central Asia, Russia, and the Pacific Ocean roughly up to the beginning of the Tropic
of Cancer."…and i'm still confused.
"For Michael Morell, as with many other CIA careerists, his strongest suit seemed to be pleasing
his boss and not antagonizing the White House" His loyalty is to qhoewver occupies White House, not
necessarily to the truth. "Morell [was] at the center of two key fiascoes: he "coordinated the
CIA review" of Secretary of State Colin Powell's infamous Feb. 5, 2003 address to the United Nations
and he served as the regular CIA briefer to President George W. Bush. Putting Access Before Honesty"
Rise of Another CIA Yes Man – Consortiumnews
Notable quotes:
"... Let the bizarreness of that claim sink in, since it is professionally impossible to recruit an agent who is unwitting of being an agent, since an agent is someone who follows instructions from a control officer. ..."
"... However, since Morell apparently has no evidence that Trump was "recruited," which would make the Republican presidential nominee essentially a traitor, he throws in the caveat "unwitting." Such an ugly charge is on par with Trump's recent hyperbolic claim that President Obama was the "founder" of ISIS. ..."
"... Looking back at Morell's record, it was not hard to see all this coming, as Morell rose higher and higher in a system that rewards deserving sycophants. I addressed this five years ago in an article titled "Rise of Another CIA Yes Man." That piece elicited many interesting comments from senior intelligence officers who knew Morell personally; some of those comments are tucked into the end of the article. ..."
As for Morell's claim that Russian President Vladimir Putin is somehow controlling Donald Trump,
well, even Charlie Rose had stomach problems with that and with Morell's "explanation." In the Times
op-ed, Morell wrote: "In the intelligence business, we would say that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr.
Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation."
Let the bizarreness of that claim sink in, since it is professionally impossible to recruit an
agent who is unwitting of being an agent, since an agent is someone who follows instructions from
a control officer.
However, since Morell apparently has no evidence that Trump was "recruited," which would make
the Republican presidential nominee essentially a traitor, he throws in the caveat "unwitting." Such
an ugly charge is on par with Trump's recent hyperbolic claim that President Obama was the "founder"
of ISIS.
Looking back at Morell's record, it was not hard to see all this coming, as Morell rose higher
and higher in a system that rewards deserving sycophants. I addressed this five years ago in
an article
titled "Rise of Another CIA Yes Man." That piece elicited many interesting comments from senior intelligence
officers who knew Morell personally; some of those comments are tucked into the end of the article.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour
in inner-city Washington. He is a 30-year veteran of the CIA and Army intelligence and co-founder
of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). McGovern served for considerable periods
in all four of CIA's main directorates.
"... "She is the one that caused all this problem with her stupid policies," Trump said, referring to Hillary Clinton. "You look at what she did with Libya, what she did with Syria. Look at Egypt, what happened with Egypt, a total mess. She was truly - if not the - one of the worst secretaries of state in the history of the country. She talks about me being dangerous. She's killed hundreds of thousands of people with her stupidity." ..."
"... Trump is absolutely right. Hillary voted for the invasion of Iraq, which killed a million people. As I've pointed out , it wasn't just an immoral decision - it was a stupid one ..."
"... As secretary of state, Clinton never met a war she didn't love. Under her watch and following her counsel, the United States armed radical jihadis who are now terrorists , helped topple Moammar Gaddafi , expanded a civil war that has killed hundreds of thousands of Libyans and reduced one of the most advanced nations in Africa into a failed state . Then she turned around and did the same exact thing to Syria. ..."
"... Psychology Today ..."
"... Ted Rall , syndicated writer and the cartoonist for ANewDomain.net ..."
"... is the author of the book " Snowden ," the biography of the NSA whistleblower. ..."
There is, on the other hand, something wonderfully refreshing about Donald Trump's gleeful deployment
of the S-word.
"She is the one that caused all this problem with her stupid policies," Trump said,
referring
to Hillary Clinton. "You look at what she did with Libya, what she did with Syria. Look at Egypt,
what happened with Egypt, a total mess. She was truly - if not the - one of the worst secretaries
of state in the history of the country. She talks about me being dangerous. She's killed hundreds
of thousands of people with her stupidity."
Trump is absolutely right. Hillary voted for the invasion of Iraq, which killed a million
people. As I've pointed out,
it wasn't just an immoral decision - it was a stupid one, since anyone with a half a brain could
see at the time that Saddam probably didn't have WMDs, and that Bush's war would be a disaster.
Let Hillary's supporters take offense. How is unfair, wrong or intemperate to call out a foreign
policy record that fits the dictionary definition of "stupid" - doing the same thing over and over,
even though it never works? Stupid is as stupid
does. Hillary is stupid, especially on foreign policy, and Trump is right to say so.
Winner or loser, Trump has done political debate in America a huge favor by freeing "stupid" from
the rhetorical prison of words and phrases polite people aren't allowed to use.
Interestingly, stupid people aren't all losers and losers aren't always stupid in Trumpworld.
Hillary Clinton has one hell of a resume, which she has parlayed into a
big pile of cash. She is, by Trump standards, a winner (albeit a stupid one). If I met Trump,
I'd ask him if a smart person can be a loser (possible example: he
called the obviously smart Russell Brand a loser, but also a "dummy").
Pre-Trump, American politics and culture suffered from a lack of stupid-calling. I am serious.
"There has been a long tradition of anti-intellectualism in America, unlike most other Western
countries," Ray Williams
wrote last year in Psychology Today. Insults reflect a society's values. Americans value
macho masculinity, good looks and youth, so our top slurs accuse their victims of being effeminate,
weak, ugly, fat, old and outdated. In France, where the life of the mind is prized so much that one
of the nation's
top-rated
TV shows featured philosophers and auteurs discussing politics and culture over cigarettes, there
are few things worse than being called stupid and having it stick. A society that ranks "stupid"
as of its worst insults lets it be known that being smart is at least as important as being tough
or hot or buff.
So, Donald Trump, thanks for dropping those S-bombs.
Ted Rall, syndicated writer and the cartoonist for
ANewDomain.net, is the author of the book "Snowden,"
the biography of the NSA whistleblower.
After disappearing for a couple of weeks, the hacker "Guccifer 2.0" returned late this afternoon to provide a new headache
for Democrats.
In a post to his WordPress blog, the vandal–who previously provided nearly 20,000 Democratic National Committee e-mails
to Wikileaks–uploaded an Excel file that includes the cell phone numbers and private e-mail addresses of nearly every Democratic
member of the House of Representatives.
The Excel file also includes similar contact information for hundreds of congressional staff members (chiefs of staff, press
secretaries, legislative directors, schedulers) and campaign personnel.
In announcing the leak of the document, "Guccifer 2.0" reported that the spreadsheet was stolen during a hack of the Democratic
Congressional Campaign Committee. " As you see I wasn't wasting my time! It was even easier than in the case of the DNC breach,"
the hacker wrote.
"... What struck me in the article was a conflict between attributing the DNC hack and a possible Clinton hack that the authors didn't even attempt to address. They claim analysts are very confident that Russian hackers, working for the government, hacked the DNC. But as to the possibility that anyone hacked Clinton's private server; well, if they did, they would have been way to savvy to leave any traces that they'd done so. A DNC hack; those sloppy Russian government hackers did it. A personal server; a real pro job. ..."
What struck me in the article was a conflict between attributing the DNC hack and a possible
Clinton hack that the authors didn't even attempt to address. They claim analysts are very confident
that Russian hackers, working for the government, hacked the DNC. But as to the possibility that
anyone hacked Clinton's private server; well, if they did, they would have been way to savvy to
leave any traces that they'd done so. A DNC hack; those sloppy Russian government hackers did
it. A personal server; a real pro job.
IhaveLittleToAdd | Aug 11, 2016 12:00:03 PM | 2
I actually find it possible, namely that the firewall in DNC was sloppy, and paranoid Hillary
had best computer security consultants she could find. Moreover, hers was a small operation and
easier to keep secure, unlike DNC with many employees and many interactive activities. I speculate
here, but this is plausible.
========
More importantly, was there a public opprobrium, "How did they dare!" about the putative Russian
hack? This is actually an interesting angle. Sometimes public suspects that the government is
doing illegal stuff in other countries, it is thinly denied (or "our policy is no to comment"),
and most of the citizens are glad that our leaders are so resourceful. But the side effect is
that this type of activity becomes "normal", and detecting or convincingly suspecting it exits
yawning response.
For example, there were two assassination or "near assassination" attempts on Israeli diplomatic
personal and Iran was suspected. "Sure, didn't they have a string of assassination of nuclear
assassinations in Tehran? By the way, what is the weather this weekend?" If I recall, Tehran assassinations
stopped.
Similarly, after American cyber-successes, cyber attacks became a new normal.
"... WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on Tuesday floated a theory that the Democratic National Committee staffer who was shot dead in the streets of Washington last month had been targeted because the operative was an informant. ..."
"... In an interview on Dutch television, the Australian cyberactivist invoked the unsolved killing of Seth Rich, 27, earlier this summer to illustrate the risks of being a source for his organization. Citing WikiLeaks protocol, Assange refused to confirm whether or not Rich was in fact a source for WikiLeaks, which has released thousands of internal DNC emails, some of them politically embarrassing. Experts and U.S. government officials reportedly believe that hackers linked to the Russian government infiltrated the DNC and gave the email trove to WikiLeaks. ..."
"... The Metropolitan Police Department in Washington has not established a motive for the killing but reportedly told the young man's family that he likely died during a robbery attempt turned tragic. His father, however, told Omaha CBS-affiliate KMTV he did not think it was a robbery because nothing was stolen: his watch, money, credit cards and phone were still with him. ..."
"... The WikiLeaks founder said that others have suggested that Rich was killed for political reasons and that his organization is investigating the incident. ..."
"... "I think it is a concerning situation. There isn't a conclusion yet. We wouldn't be able to state a conclusion, but we are concerned about it," he continued. "More importantly, a variety of WikiLeaks sources are concerned when that kind of thing happens." ..."
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on Tuesday floated a theory that the
Democratic National Committee staffer who was shot dead in the streets of Washington
last month had been targeted because the operative was an informant.
In an interview on Dutch television, the Australian cyberactivist invoked
the unsolved killing of Seth Rich, 27, earlier this summer to illustrate the
risks of being a source for his organization.
Citing WikiLeaks protocol, Assange refused to confirm whether or not Rich
was in fact a source for WikiLeaks, which has released thousands of internal
DNC emails, some of them politically embarrassing. Experts and U.S. government
officials reportedly believe that hackers linked to the Russian government infiltrated
the DNC and gave the email trove to WikiLeaks.
But Assange was apparently interested in hinting about an even darker theory.
"Whistleblowers go to significant efforts to get us material, and often very
significant risks. There's a 27-year-old, works for the DNC, who was shot in
the back, murdered just a few weeks ago for unknown reasons as he was walking
down the street in Washington," Assange said on Nieuwsuur. BuzzFeed drew more
attention to the interview in the U.S.
Somewhat startled, news anchor Eelco Bosch van Rosenthal said, "That was
just a robbery, I believe - wasn't it?"
"No, there's no finding," Assange responded. "I'm suggesting that our sources
take risks, and they become concerned to see things occurring like that."
"Why make the suggestion about a young guy being shot in the streets of Washington?"
van Rosenthal asked.
"Because we have to understand how high the stakes are in the United States,"
Assange said, "and that our sources face serious risks. That's why they come
to us, so we can protect their anonymity."
The Metropolitan Police Department in Washington has not established a motive
for the killing but reportedly told the young man's family that he likely died
during a robbery attempt turned tragic. His father, however, told Omaha CBS-affiliate
KMTV he did not think it was a robbery because nothing was stolen: his watch,
money, credit cards and phone were still with him.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on Tuesday floated a theory that the Democratic
National Committee staffer who was shot dead in the streets of Washington last
month had been targeted because the operative was an informant.
In an interview on Dutch television, the Australian cyberactivist invoked
the unsolved killing of Seth Rich, 27, earlier this summer to illustrate the
risks of being a source for his organization.
Citing WikiLeaks protocol, Assange refused to confirm whether or not Rich
was in fact a source for WikiLeaks, which has released thousands of internal
DNC emails, some of them politically embarrassing. Experts and U.S. government
officials reportedly believe that hackers linked to the Russian government infiltrated
the DNC and gave the email trove to WikiLeaks.
But Assange was apparently interested in hinting about an even darker theory.
"Whistleblowers go to significant efforts to get us material, and often very
significant risks. There's a 27-year-old, works for the DNC, who was shot in
the back, murdered just a few weeks ago for unknown reasons as he was walking
down the street in Washington," Assange said on Nieuwsuur. BuzzFeed drew more
attention to the interview in the U.S.
Somewhat startled, news anchor Eelco Bosch van Rosenthal said, "That was
just a robbery, I believe - wasn't it?"
"No, there's no finding," Assange responded. "I'm suggesting that our sources
take risks, and they become concerned to see things occurring like that."
"Why make the suggestion about a young guy being shot in the streets of Washington?"
van Rosenthal asked.
"Because we have to understand how high the stakes are in the United States,"
Assange said, "and that our sources face serious risks. That's why they come
to us, so we can protect their anonymity."
The Metropolitan Police Department in Washington has not established
a motive for the killing but reportedly told the young man's family that he
likely died during a robbery attempt turned tragic. His father, however, told
Omaha CBS-affiliate KMTV he did not think it was a robbery because nothing was
stolen: his watch, money, credit cards and phone were still with him.
The WikiLeaks founder said that others have suggested that Rich was killed
for political reasons and that his organization is investigating the incident.
"I think it is a concerning situation. There isn't a conclusion yet.
We wouldn't be able to state a conclusion, but we are concerned about it," he
continued. "More importantly, a variety of WikiLeaks sources are concerned when
that kind of thing happens."
WikiLeaks further fanned the flames of conspiracy by offering a $20,000 reward
for anyone with information leading to the conviction of the person responsible
for killing Rich.
"... As prospects for peace appear dim in places like the Ukraine, Syria, Yemen, Iraq and Afghanistan and now with a renewed bombing of Libya, the President of the United States (and his heiress apparent) continue to display an alarming lack of understanding of the responsibilities as the nation's highest elected officer. As has been unsuccessfully litigated, Article II of the Constitution does not give the President right to start war; only Congress is granted that authority (See Article I, Section 8). ..."
"... Renee Parsons has been a member of the ACLU's Florida State Board of Directors and president of the ACLU Treasure Coast Chapter. She has been an elected public official in Colorado, an environmental lobbyist and staff member of the US House of Representatives in Washington DC. ..."
As prospects for peace appear dim in places like the Ukraine, Syria, Yemen,
Iraq and Afghanistan and now with a renewed bombing of Libya, the President
of the United States (and his heiress apparent) continue to display an alarming
lack of understanding of the responsibilities as the nation's highest elected
officer. As has been unsuccessfully litigated, Article II of the Constitution
does not give the President right to start war; only Congress is granted
that authority (See Article I, Section 8).
So for the nation's Chief
Executive Officer to willy-nilly arbitrarily decide to bomb here and bomb there
and bomb everywhere in violation of the Constitution might be sufficient standard
for that CEO to be regarded as a war criminal.
Surely, consistently upping
the stakes with a strong US/NATO military presence in the Baltics with the US
Navy regularly cruising the Black and Baltic Seas, accompanied by a steady stream
of confrontational language and picking a fight with a nuclear-armed Russia
may not be the best way to achieve peace.
In 1980, there was strong opinion among liberals that Ronald Reagan was close
to, if not a direct descendant of the Neanderthals and that he stood for everything
that Democrats opposed – and his eight years in office confirmed much of that
sentiment. In those days, many lefties believed that the Democrats were still
the party of FDR and JFK but today, the undeniable illusion is that the Dems
are now the party of war and big money and not the political party some of us
signed up for as new voters.
Ronald Reagan (R) was elected President as an ardent anti-communist who routinely
referred to Russia as the 'evil empire', a fierce free market proponent of balanced
budgets who in two terms in office never balanced a budget, a President who
dramatically slashed domestic social programs even though his family benefited
from FDR's New Deal and whose foreign policy strategy was to 'build-up to
build-down' (a $44 billion.20% increase in one year , 1982-1983) so as to
force the Russians to the table. Reagan, who was ready to engage in extensive
personal diplomacy, was an unlikely peacemaker yet he achieved an historic accomplishment
in the nuclear arms race that is especially relevant today as NATO/US are reintroducing
nuclear weapons into eastern Europe.
After having ascended to the USSR's top leadership position in March, 1985,
an intelligent and assertive Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev was
eager to improve relations with the United States but thought Reagan a "political
dinosaur" who was regarded by much of the American public as a 'trigger-happy
cowboy".
Even before the American President and Russian leader met, NATO ministers
in 1979 had unanimously adopted a strategy that included arms control
negotiations and a modernization of its current missile system as Russia deployed
its updated, most lethal generation of the
SS 20 Saber missiles. With an improved maximum range, an increased area
covered by multiple warheads and a more improved accuracy than earlier versions,
it was a missile that could easily reach western Europe with terrifying results.
As formal talks began between the US, Russia and NATO in 1981, massive anti
nuclear weapon demonstrations were taking place in the US and Europe adding
a political urgency for both countries to initiate discussions.
At that time, Reagan announced a proposal to abandon the Pershing I missiles
in exchange for elimination of the SS 20 which Gorbachev rejected.
By 1983,
the Soviets walked out and there were no talks in 1984 until a resumption in
March, 1985. US Secretary of State George Shultz had continued to meet with
Russian Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin since 1983. Shultz suggested that the
President meet with Dobrynin who had expressed his frustration to Shultz that
they were not dealing with the 'big
issues" and was rumored to be leaving his diplomatic post due to the Americans
unwillingness to negotiate. Two weeks earlier Russian Foreign Minister Andrei
Gromyko had publicly suggested a summit between the two nuclear power countries.
According to published reports at the time, while most of the White House
staff opposed the Dobrynin meeting, Reagan gave Shultz the green light.
By the time Reagan first met Gorbachev in
1985 in Geneva, the President was already driven by a deep instinctive fear
that modern civilization was on the brink of a biblical nuclear Armageddon that
could end the human race.
According to Jack Matlock who served as Reagan's senior policy coordinator
for Russia and later US Ambassador to Russia in his book, "Reagan
and Gorbachev: How the Cold War Ended,"one of Reagan's pre-meeting
notes to himself read "avoid any demand for regime change." From the beginning,
one of Reagan's goals was to establish a relationship that would be able to
overcome whatever obstacles or conflicts may arise with the goal of preventing
a thermonuclear war.
The meeting began with a traditional oval table diplomatic dialogue with
Reagan, who had no foreign policy experience, lecturing on the failings of the
"despised" Russian system and support for the SDI (Star Wars) program. Gorbachev,
who arrived looking like a spy complete with KGB-issue hat and overcoat, responded
by standing up to Reagan ("you are not a prosecutor and I am not the accused")
and was visibly irritated "why do you repeat the same thing (on the SDI); stop
this rubbish."
After a lengthy personal, private conversation, it became obvious that the
two men had struck a
cord of mutual respect with Reagan recognizing that the youthful articulate
Gorbachev was not the out- moded Politburo politician of his predecessors. At
the conclusion of Geneva, a shared trust necessary to begin sober negotiations
to ban nuclear weapons had been established. Both were well aware that the consequences
of nuclear war would be a devastation to mankind, the world's greatest environmental
disaster. At the end of their Geneva meeting, Reagan and Gorbachev agreed that
"nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought."
During their October, 1986
Reykjavik meeting, the real possibility of a permanent, forever ban on all
nuclear weapons appeared possible until Gorbachev insisted on the elimination
of SDI's (Star Wars) from the final agreement and Reagan walked away. Gorbachev
relented; saving the potential long range treaty from failure and ultimately,
the SDI sunk under the weight of its own impossibility. While the summit ended
with measured progress, Reagan's stubbornness on SDI represented a significant
lost opportunity that would never come again.
In April, 1987 with Secretary Shultz in Moscow, Gorbachev proposed the elimination
of U.S. and Soviet shorter-range missiles and by June, NATO foreign ministers
announced support for the global elimination of all U.S. and Soviet intermediate-range
and shorter-range missile systems. In June, all the participating parties were
in agreement as Reagan agreed to eliminate all U.S. and Soviet shorter-range
missile systems.
As high level negotiations continued, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl added
icing to the cake, in August, 1987 by announcing that Germany, on its own, would
dismantle all of its 72
Pershing I missiles that Reagan-Gorbachev had earlier been unable to eliminate.
In December of 1987, Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev arrived in
Washington DC to sign the bilateral
Intermediate-Range
Nuclear Forces (including Short Range Missiles) known as the INF Treaty.
The Treaty eliminated 2,611 ground launched ballistic and cruise missile systems
with a range of between 500 and 5500 kilometers (310 -3,400 miles). Paris is
2,837 (1,762 miles) kilometers from Moscow.
In May 1988, the INF Treaty was
ratified by the US Senate in a surprising vote of 93 – 5 (four Republicans
and one Democrat opposed) and by May, 1991, all Pershing I missiles in Europe
had been dismantled. Verification of Compliance of the INF Treaty, delayed because
of the USSR breakup, was completed in December, 2001.
At an outdoor press briefing during their last meeting together and after
the INF was implemented, Reagan put his arm around Gorbachev. A reporter asked
if he still believed in the 'evil empire' and Reagan answered 'no." When asked
why, he replied "I was talking about another time, another era."
After the INF Treaty was implemented,
right wing opponents and columnists like George Will attacked Reagan as
a pawn for "Soviet propaganda" and being an "apologist for Gorbachev."
Some things never change.
Whether the Treaty could have been more far-reaching is questionable given
what we now know of Reagan's mental deterioration and yet despite their differences,
there is no indication that during the six year effort the two men treated each
other with anything other than esteem and courtesy.
In 1990, Secretary General Mikhail Gorbachev won the Nobel Peace Prize while
President Reagan, largely credited with ending the Cold War and bringing nuclear
stability to the world and back from a nuclear confrontation, was not nominated.
As the current US President and Nobel Peace Prize winner prepares to leave
office with a record of a Tuesday morning kill list, unconscionable drone attacks
on civilians, initiating bombing campaigns where there were none prior to his
election and, of course, taunting Russian President Vladimir Putin with unsubstantiated
allegations, the US-backed NATO has scheduled
AEGIS
anti ballistic missile shields to be constructed in Romania and Poland, challenging
the integrity of
INF Treaty for the first time in almost thirty years.
In what may shed new light on NATO/US build-up in eastern Europe, Russian
Foreign Secretary Sergei Lavrov
denied US charges in June, 2015 that Russia had violated the Treaty and
that the US had "failed to provide evidence of Russian breaches." Commenting
on US plans to deploy land-based missiles in Europe as a possible response to
the alleged "Russian aggression" in the Ukraine, Lavrov warned that ''building
up militarist rhetoric is absolutely counterproductive and harmful.' Russian
Deputy Defense Minister Anatoly Antonov suggested the United States was leveling
accusations against Russia in order to justify its own military plans.
In early August, the US Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security
Administration authorized the final development phase (prior to actual production
in 2020) of the
B61-21 nuclear bomb at a cost of $350 – $450 billion. A
thermonuclear weapon with the capability of reaching Europe and Moscow,
the B61-21 is part of President Obama's
$1 trillion request for modernizing the US aging and outdated nuclear weapon
arsenal.
Renee Parsons has been a
member of the ACLU's Florida State Board of Directors and president of the ACLU
Treasure Coast Chapter. She has been an elected public official in Colorado,
an environmental lobbyist and staff member of the US House of Representatives
in Washington DC.
This is the first class analysis. Bravo Ted !!! It's sad that I found it only today. Deep insights
into what Khan gambit means. Bravo !
Notable quotes:
"... A week ago corporate media gatekeepers managed to transform the Democratic National Committee
internal emails released by WikiLeaks from what it really was – scandalous proof that Bernie Sanders
and his supporters were right when they said the Democratic leadership was biased and had rigged the
primaries against them ..."
"... Hillary's vote for an illegal war of choice that was sold with lies, was a major contributing
factor to the death of Captain Khan, thousands of his comrades, and over a million Iraqis. Iraq should
be a major issue in this campaign - against her. ..."
"... Instead, it's being used by his parents and the Democratic Party to bait Donald Trump into
a retro-post-9/11 "Support Our Troops" militaristic trap. Khan, you see, was " defending his country
." ..."
"... (How anyone can say U.S. soldiers in Iraq, part of an invasion force thousands of miles away
where no one threatens the United States, are "defending" the U.S. remains a long-running linguistic
mystery.) ..."
"... "Hillary Clinton was right when she called my son 'the best of America,'" Khizr Khan told the
convention. Unfortunately, the moniker can't apply to once-and-possible-future-first-daughter Chelsea
Clinton, who never considered a military career before collecting $600,000 a year from NBC News for
essentially a no-show job. But anyway… ..."
"... "If it was up to Donald Trump, he never would have been in America," Khizr Khan continued.
The cognitive dissonance makes my head spin. ..."
"... "Let me ask you: Have you even read the U.S. Constitution?" asked Khizr, who is originally
from Pakistan ..."
"... A good question. While we're at it, however, where does it say in the U.S. Constitution that
the president can send troops overseas for years at a time without a formal congressional declaration
of war? Where does it say that the United States can attack foreign countries that have done it no harm
and have never threatened it? ..."
"... As you'd expect Trump, he of little impulse control, has handled this about as poorly as possible.
Asked about Khizr Khan's remark that Trump hasn't made any sacrifices, he idiotically attempted to compare
his business dealings with the death of a son. Still, you have to grudgingly admire Trump for fighting
back against a guy you are officially not allowed to say anything mean about. ..."
"... Democrats have successfully appropriated images of patriotism and "optimism" – scare quotes
because this is not the kind of actual optimism in which you think things are going to actually get
better, but the bizarro variety in which you accept that things will really never get better so you'd
might as well accept the status quo – from the Republicans. This is part of Hillary Clinton's strategy
of taking liberal Democrats for granted while trying to seduce Republicans away from Trump. ..."
"... The Khan episode marks a high water mark for post-9/11 knee-jerk militarism. Even the "liberal"
party whose sitting incumbent two-term president captured the White House by running against the Iraq
war demands that everyone fall to their knees in order to pay homage to the "good" Muslims - those willing
to go to the Middle East to kill bad ones. ..."
"... Next time you see a panel of experts discussing a foreign crisis, pay attention: does anyone
argue against intervention? No. The debate is always between going in light and going in hard: bombs,
or "boots on the ground." Not getting involved is never an option. As long as this militaristic approach
to the world continues, the United States will never have enough money to take care of its problems
here at home, and it will always be hated around the world. ..."
"... Most Americans believe the Iraq war was a mistake . Who speaks for us? No one in the media.
And no one in mainstream politics. ..."
"... Trump's proposal to ban Muslims can't possibly be racist because Muslims are not a race. If
the US were to ban European devotees of a white supremacist pagan cult - such cults do exist, and the
US has every right to ban its devotees if it so chooses - nobody would bat an eye. ..."
"... The vote to authorize the war in Iraq was in 2002. Khan's DNC speech was 14 years later (and
12 years after his son was killed), not 8 years later. ..."
"... "The rest of us who makes heroes of our dead…" "Perpetuate war by exalting sacrifice…" ..."
"... "Most Americans believe the Iraq war was a mistake. Who speaks for us? No one in the media.
And no one in mainstream politics." The last sentence is incorrect. Donald Trump repeatedly said the
war was a mistake, even at times when it could have landed him in serious trouble. ..."
A week ago corporate media gatekeepers managed to transform the Democratic National Committee
internal emails released by WikiLeaks from what it really was – scandalous proof that Bernie Sanders
and his supporters were right when they said the Democratic leadership was biased and had rigged
the primaries against them, and that the system is corrupt – into a trivial side issue over
who might be responsible for hiking the DNC computers. Who cares if it was Russia? It's the content
that matters, not that it was ever seriously discussed.
Now here we go again.
Hillary's vote for an illegal war of choice that was sold with lies, was a major contributing
factor to the death of Captain Khan, thousands of his comrades, and over a million Iraqis. Iraq should
be a major issue in this campaign - against her.
Instead, it's being used by his parents and the Democratic Party to bait Donald Trump into
a retro-post-9/11 "Support Our Troops" militaristic trap. Khan, you see, was "defending
his country."(How anyone can say U.S. soldiers in Iraq, part of an invasion force thousands
of miles away where no one threatens the United States, are "defending" the U.S. remains a long-running
linguistic mystery.)
"Hillary Clinton was right when she called my son 'the best of America,'" Khizr Khan
told the convention. Unfortunately, the moniker can't apply to once-and-possible-future-first-daughter
Chelsea Clinton, who never considered a military career before collecting
$600,000 a year from NBC News for essentially a no-show job. But anyway…
"If it was up to Donald Trump, he never would have been in America," Khizr Khan continued.
The cognitive dissonance makes my head spin. Obviously, Trump's proposal to ban Muslims is racist
and disgusting. Ironically, however, it would have saved at least one life. If it was up to Donald
Trump, the Khans would still be in the United Arab Emirates. Humayan would still be alive. As would
any Iraqis he killed.
"Let me ask you: Have you even read the US Constitution?" asked Khizr, who is originally from
Pakistan. "I will gladly lend you my copy. In this document, look for the words 'liberty' and
'equal protection of law." A good question. While we're at it, however, where does it say in
the U.S. Constitution that the president can send troops overseas for years at a time without a formal
congressional declaration of war? Where does it say that the United States can attack foreign countries
that have done it no harm and have never threatened it?
As you'd expect Trump, he of little impulse control, has handled this about as poorly as possible.
Asked about Khizr Khan's remark that Trump hasn't made any sacrifices, he
idiotically attempted to compare his business dealings with the death of a son. Still, you have
to grudgingly admire Trump for fighting back against a guy you are officially not allowed to say
anything mean about.
It has been widely remarked, always approvingly, that this year's Democrats have successfully
appropriated images of patriotism and "optimism" – scare quotes because this is not the kind
of actual optimism in which you think things are going to actually get better, but the bizarro variety
in which you accept that things will really never get better so you'd might as well accept the status
quo – from the Republicans. This is part of
Hillary Clinton's strategy of taking liberal Democrats for granted while trying to seduce Republicans
away from Trump.
The Khan episode marks a high water mark for post-9/11 knee-jerk militarism. Even the "liberal"
party whose sitting incumbent two-term president captured the White House by running against the
Iraq war demands that everyone fall to their knees in order to pay homage to the "good" Muslims -
those willing to go to the Middle East to kill bad ones.
Next time you see a panel of experts discussing a foreign crisis, pay attention: does anyone
argue against intervention? No. The debate is always between going in light and going in hard: bombs,
or "boots on the ground." Not getting involved is never an option. As long as this militaristic approach
to the world continues, the United States will never have enough money to take care of its problems
here at home, and it will always be
hated around the world.
Ted Rall, syndicated writer and the cartoonist for
ANewDomain.net,is the author of the book "Snowden,"
the biography of the NSA whistleblower.
Fidelios Automata, August 3, 2016 at 7:24
pm GMT • 100 Words
Trump's proposal to ban Muslims can't possibly be racist because Muslims are not a race.
If the US were to ban European devotees of a white supremacist pagan cult - such cults do exist,
and the US has every right to ban its devotees if it so chooses - nobody would bat an eye.
The First Amendment says that the government may not infringe in Americans' religious choices;
it says nothing about foreigners. If it did, it would be illegal for the US to give aid to Israel,
Saudi Arabia, and any other nation that discriminates by religion.
Dave Pinsen, August 5, 2016 at 4:12 am GMT
The vote to authorize the war in Iraq was in 2002. Khan's DNC speech was 14 years later
(and 12 years after his son was killed), not 8 years later.
utu, August 5, 2016 at 6:35 am GMT
"The rest of us who makes heroes of our dead…" "Perpetuate war by exalting sacrifice…"
Parsifal, August 5, 2016 at 7:39 am GMT • 100 Words
"Most Americans believe the Iraq war was a mistake. Who speaks for us? No one in the media.
And no one in mainstream politics." The last sentence is incorrect. Donald Trump repeatedly said
the war was a mistake, even at times when it could have landed him in serious trouble.
On Thursday, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump
apologized for comments that have been widely construed as calling for the assassination of Hillary
Clinton. "I apologize," Mr. Trump said, clearly struggling with the second word as he addressed supporters
at a campaign event in Philadelphia. "I misspoke, okay? It happens. Get over it."
On Tuesday, Mr. Trump had warned supporters, "If she gets to pick her judges-nothing you can do,
folks. Although, the Second Amendment people-maybe there is, I don't know."
Speaking on CNN later that day, campaign spokesperson Katrina Pierson insisted that Trump meant
"that people that support their Second Amendment rights need to come together and get out and stop
Hillary Clinton from winning in November." When it was pointed out that Trump was referring to what
might happen after the election, Ms. Pierson explained, "He was saying what could happen. He doesn't
want that to happen."
The Clinton campaign, many in the media, and even prominent Republicans rejected this interpretation.
Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook said, "This is simple-what Trump is saying is dangerous. A person
seeking to be the president of the United States should not suggest violence in any way."
Clinton's running mate, Tim Kaine, told reporters after an event in Texas, "Nobody who is seeking
a leadership position, especially the presidency, the leadership of the country, should do anything
to countenance violence."
Dan Rather, the former CBS news anchor, posted in Facebook that Trump "crossed a line with dangerous
potential. By any objective analysis, this is a new low and unprecedented in the history of American
presidential politics."
Writing in the Washington Post, Joe Scarborough, former Republican congressman and current
host of the MSNBC show "Morning Joe," called for "every Republican leader" to denounce Trump's assassination
suggestion and revoke their endorsement of the controversial candidate.
Regarding Trump's comment on the Second Amendment, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) said, "I don't believe
this to be a serious statement." But Sessions added, "You absolutely shouldn't joke about it. It's
contrary to what we believe in."
Former CIA director Michael Hayden chimed in, "You aren't just responsible for what you say; you're
responsible for what people hear."
With his poll numbers plummeting, Trump was in full damage-control mode in Philadelphia. After
apologizing for his misstatement, he went on to say, "I'm a truth-teller. All I do is tell the truth.
But some people-some people misinterpret me. On purpose, on accident, I don't know. I was not calling
for the assassination of Hillary. Please. I'm not a violent person. Never. Never violent. My friends
can tell you. What I meant to call for was the assassination of terrorists or potential terrorists,
okay? And there are lots of them, people, I'm telling you, in Afghanistan and Iraq and wherever.
Men, women, and children. Guns, not guns. Wedding parties. Doesn't matter. Drones would work fine,
right?"
The response was immediate and overwhelmingly positive. President Barack Obama said, "Contrary
to my early statement, I now believe that Donald Trump is, indeed, fit to be president of the United
States."
Fifty prominent Republican foreign policy and national security experts-among them Hayden and
other veterans of George W. Bush's administration-signed a letter endorsing Trump's candidacy. "Donald
Trump is the answer to America's daunting challenges," the letter began, and went on to note that
"without a doubt, he possesses the single most important quality required of an individual who aspires
to be President and Commander-in-Chief, with command of the U.S. nuclear arsenal."
Leon Panetta, Obama's former CIA director and Defense Secretary, told the Washington Post, "As
I have said on numerous occasions, we need a leader who is strong and decisive, who has the respect
of our generals and admirals, and the trust of our troops, especially our Special Forces, who maintain
U.S. credibility around the world. I now am comfortable with either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton
winning the presidency." At the Democratic National Convention, in July, Panetta had condemned Trump
because he "asks our troops to commit war crimes, endorses torture…and praises dictators."
On his morning show, Scarborough appeared to be reconciling with the Trump campaign. He said,
"I've been telling people for years that torture works. I know it works. You know it works. Donald
Trump knows it works. This is going to make members of the mainstream media and Democratic Party
uncomfortable, but you can make the argument, can't you, that shooting a member of al-Qaeda or ISIS,
even a U.S. citizen, causes less pain than waterboarding."
Nancy Lindborg, president of the U.S. Institute of Peace, issued a statement that said, "While
we applaud Mr. Trump's support for measured counterterrorism, we contend that diplomacy, reconciliation,
and no-fly zones are also necessary to achieve the U.S. goal of peace in the Middle East and remove
Assad from power in Syria."
Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), who has received criticism for refusing to withdraw his endorsement of
Trump, was heard joyfully singing his favorite campaign song, "Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran."
The Clinton campaign, though, remained skeptical of Trump's correction. Mook stated, "Trump has
zero foreign policy experience. Only one candidate in this race has the experience, knowledge, temperament,
and judgment to call for assassination. Only one of the candidates was in the room when the decision
was made to take out Osama bin Laden. Only one candidate has been privy to the president's kill list.
And that's Hillary Clinton. The track record is there."
On his FiveThirtyEight blog, Pollster Nate Silver wrote, "We now anticipate seeing a bump in Trump's
numbers, especially among college-educated voters."
David said...
For the demented people that say that Trump and Hillary
are the same thing, two things:
1. You're clearly not
rational and observing reality, you're reacting out of
some sense of immature pique.
2. Remember Nader and W. Bush. Tell me why Nader giving
W. Bush the White was a good thing.
But the real reason to fear Trump is not Trump. Trump
is the Republican base, but he has little skills as a
politician. The next Trump will be more to right, more
resentful, more white nationalist, and possibly more
dangerous.
The real danger to our democracy, sadly enough, is the
Republican bigoted base.
Don't believe me? Check the comments of right wing
websites. It's there in plain sight.
Reply
Friday, August 12, 2016 at 01:11 PM
likbez said in reply to David ...
The vote will be not "for" Hillary or Trump.
The vote will be against Hillary or Trump.
As Hillary is a war criminal by Nuremberg trial
standards she is like Kelvin absolute zero in evilness.
You just can't be more evil.
Can any intelligent person vote for her ?
Reply
Sunday, August 14, 2016 at 03:59 PM
Peter K. said...
The neoliberal totebaggers have given us a world of slow
growth and increasing anger and unrest.
Brexit. Trump.
Sanders. Corbyn. Etc.
I think they somehow feel if they can just make to the
finish line and elect Hillary things will be fine.
I am hoping Trump loses by a record margin. I hope the
GOP suffers badly.
Then the totebaggers will gloat but their problems will
just have started. The DNC email leaks show the problem.
It wasn't just a a few bad apples. They were doing their
job. It's who the totebaggers are. Like PGL. Like Sanjait.
It's like the Blairites trying unsuccessfully to limit the
vote in the Labour leadership election.
Hillary was bragging about how she received an average
donation of $44 in recent months.
She's just copying Sanders, stealing his mojo.
I dont' think Sanjait is going to enjoy the coming
revolution.
Nor will totebagger trash like PGL. He'll try to divert
the discussion with stuff like Gerald Friedman whose
analysis the Sanders campaign didn't even commission.
But it's easy to see through his BS. It's sad, really.
"... I have trouble believing that the GOP elite and pundit's horror regarding Trump is really about what he says or what policies he proposes. These are the same people who embraced Palin (and many other conspicuously terrible candidates) after all. I suspect their real problem with him is that he got the nomination without having to successfully pass through their approval process. ..."
"... They simply become apoplectic at the prospect of the great unwashed succeeding in getting the candidate they want rather than the one that's the overlord's choice ..."
I have trouble believing that the GOP elite and pundit's horror regarding
Trump is really about what he says or what policies he proposes. These are the
same people who embraced Palin (and many other conspicuously terrible
candidates) after all. I suspect their real problem with him is that he got the
nomination without having to successfully pass through their approval process.
They simply become apoplectic at the prospect of the great unwashed succeeding
in getting the candidate they want rather than the one that's the overlord's
choice.
Same thing probably goes for Sanders and Corbyn. Sure they really do
hate some of their policy positions (fuzzy as they are in Trump's case) but
that would seem like it would be of lesser concern to them than anything which
would reduce the power they've had to decide who the voters get to choose from.
This week we also published
a terrific
piece
by John LaForge, which demolishes once and for one of America's most cherished lies: that
the US simply
had
to drop two nuclear bombs on Japanese cities to end the war and save hundreds
of thousands of US and Japanese lies. Even Curtis "Mad Bomber" LeMay knew this was bullshit. So did
Ike, who sent word to Truman that he thought the plan was insane. You can see why the myth took root.
What nation that sees itself a force of goodness and virtue and humanity could live with itself after
incinerating two cities and unleashing nuclear terror upon the world?
It has been said that you can fool some of the people all of the time, and all
of the people some of the time. Apparently, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders
wishes to fool all of the people, at least those who were once his loyal
devotees, all of the time. This writer received an enthusiastic email from some
organization talking about the next steps in Mr. Sanders 'revolution', and
requesting that this writer hold a house party to watch a speech to be given by
the senator, as part of the initiation of a new organization called 'Our
Revolution'.
Well, there is certainly something revolting about all this, but
it has nothing to do with a social change.
Mr. Sanders, that avowed socialist with a long and undistinguished career in
what passes in the U.S. for public service (well-paid 'service', that is), lost
all credibility with any but his most blindly loyal followers when, after
months of railing against everything that Hillary Clinton stands for, even to
the point of calling her unfit to be president, he put on a happy face and gave
her a glowing endorsement at the Democratic Convention. Does this sound to the
reader like a man of integrity? Does endorsing Miss Wall Street 2016 have that
ring of revolutionary fervor? Does such glowing support of the Princess of
Israel sound like part of revolutionary change
Methinks not. No, his support for Mrs. Clinton, and his forthcoming address
about 'Our Revolution', seem to be the work of a career politician who wants to
bask in whatever remains of the adulation of his naive and enthusiastic
youthful followers, while at the same time enjoying all the perquisites of 'the
good old boys' club'. The only thing he sacrifices along the way (in addition,
of course, to self-respect, but who in elected office has that anyway?), is
credibility. Oh, and integrity. And honesty. Well, maybe he does make many
sacrifices to enjoy both the prestige of change agent and maintainer of the
status quo. But really, does anyone do it better than he?
"... In his latest interview with Chris Hayes, Khizr Khan reveals that he was close friends with Lee Atwater, the racist GOP strategist. It looks like all of the old Reaganites are now snugly inside of Hillary's Big Tent. ..."
In his latest interview with Chris
Hayes, Khizr Khan reveals that he was close friends with Lee Atwater, the racist GOP strategist.
It looks like all of the old Reaganites are now snugly inside of Hillary's Big Tent.
For those of you too young to recall Atwater's demonic brand of politics. He's the guy who taught
the Republicans how to court the vote of white supremacists without "appearing" racists themselves.
(Hayes, of course, being "All In With Her," didn't pause to ask Khan about the nature of his relationship
to the architect of Reagan's "Southern Strategy.")
Here is Atwater unfiltered, bragging to Alexander Lamis, a political scientist at Case Western
Reserve University. At the time, Atwater was working in the Reagan White House:
You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger"-that
hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states' rights, and all that stuff,
and you're getting so abstract. Now, you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things
you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse
than whites.… "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and
a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."
Lamis taped the interview. You can listen to the racist rant of Khan's pal, the man who constructed
the Big Tent theory of politics here.
"... One good thing that might come out of the fractious primaries, conventions and final election is that the two-party structure that controls the U.S. political system might fracture, if not fragment, into something unanticipated. If so, a new multi-party system might emerge and change the nation's political landscape. ..."
"... the whole world was watching ..."
"... David Rosen is the author of Sex, Sin & Subversion: The Transformation of 1950s New York's Forbidden into America's New Normal (Skyhorse, 2015). He can be reached at [email protected] ; check out www.DavidRosenWrites.com . ..."
The 2016 presidential election has been a roller-coaster ride with the last two
establishment-party candidates, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, shoving and
pushing, snapping, slapping and snarling their way to the finish line. How the
November election turns out is an open question.
One good thing that might come out of the fractious primaries,
conventions and final election is that the two-party structure that controls
the U.S. political system might fracture, if not fragment, into something
unanticipated. If so, a new multi-party system might emerge and change the
nation's political landscape.
The election's winner, whether Democrat or Republican, is likely to usher in
a period of unexpected instability, even disruption, as the parties seek to
regain control over the electoral system, the American voter. They may fail.
Both parties are poised for possible break-up, but along very different
ideological lines.
The Republicans have been splintering since the 2010 election when the
rightwing Tea Party insurgency captured a significant slice of the
Congressional delegation. They ushered in a period of legislative gridlock
that has soured the American public on the do-nothing Washington.
Trump's presidential run has further fragmented traditional Republicans, but
in unanticipated ways. Conventional party "moderates" and "conservatives,"
like Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz, respectively, have been jettisoned. An
opportunistic huckster, a 21st century P.T. Barnum, is reconfiguring
the party's identity. Many mainstream stalwarts are jumping ship, refusing to
support the candidate. Nevertheless, he is appealing to an apparently large
and receptive segment of dissatisfied white working- and middle-class males,
let alone some of the 1 percent. Whether Trump wins or loses, a very different
Republican Party is likely to emerge.
The Democrats were destabilized by the disruptive 1968 Chicago convention,
when the whole world was watching; in the race of the two VPs, Richard
Nixon defeated Hubert Humphrey. It collapsed following the '72 election when
Nixon routed Sen. George McGovern (SD). Mr. Clinton's victory in '92
reconstituted the party, establishing the formative neo-liberal period of
globalization when the U.S. flourished; a Mrs. Clinton victory in 2016 might
codify economic and social stagnation, furthering Pres. Obama's new normal to
nowhere.
Bernie Sanders unexpected popular appeal, especially among younger voters,
disrupted the Clinton machine's well-scripted plan. The WikiLeak revelations
as to the complicity of party officials in attempting to suppress Sanders
campaign only confirmed what most people already knew - the game is rigged. In
2016 election's new-speak, all Democrats are "progressives." How long after
the truce between Clinton "liberals" and Sanders "radicals" will the
progressive fiction of unity prevail?
Pres. Obama's 2008 campaign was based on the promise of "hope" and, over the
last eight years, hope has dissipated from American politics and life. Trump,
a masterful fear monger, has caught the spirit of this disillusionment,
proclaiming that he alone can "Make American Great America." Clinton champions
unity among the nation's divergent populace - whether in terms of racial, class
and gender sectors - and has called for a program to stay the course.
Both candidates - and their respective parties - are sitting on ticking time
bombs, of profound economic instability and social insecurity. No one knows
what's coming. Most threatening, incipient movements threaten to disrupt the
political order. Something altogether new might be in the works.
* * *
Today's U.S. political system was fashioned out of numerous incidents of
disruption that occurred over the last two centuries. Three factors have
driven this disruption - internal party splits, third-party alternatives and
charismatic insurgents. Each disruptive episode is uniquely distinct and
offers valuable insight into the formation of the nation's political culture.
The fragmentation that might follow from the 2016 presidential election could
prefigure a fundamental realignment of political power in U.S. politics.
Two of the most consequential political disruptions in U.S. history set the
parameters of modern American life. The first involved the collapse of the
Whig Party and the rise of the (original) Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln,
defining the Civil War era. The second involved Theodore Roosevelt's break
with the (modern) Robber-Baron Republicans in the pre-WW-I era that set the
stage for the rise of the Progressive movement, followed by the Great
Depression, F. D. Roosevelt's New Deal and rise of modern state capitalism.
Among third-party threats, two stand out. In 1856, the Know-Nothing's
American Party backed Millard Fillmore for president and secured nearly 1
million votes, a quarter of all votes cast. A century later, in 1948, racists
Southern Democrats launched the "Dixiecrat" that, a quarter-century later,
would become part of Nixon's "Southern Strategy" and remake the Republican
Party.
With regard to party fragmentation, two campaign splits stand out. In 1964,
many moderate Republicans, including Governors Nelson Rockefeller (NY) and
George Romney (MI), opposed conservative Sen. Barry Goldwater's presidential
run. In 1972, McGovern's electoral defeat marked the party's near collapse
until Clinton's '92 neo-liberal resuscitation.
Finally, the insurgent Eugene Debs, the nation's leading socialist at the
turn of the 20th century, challenged the corporatist political
system. He ran for president five times and was sentenced to a 10 years prison
term for opposing U. S. entry into WW-I. Ralph Nader continued this tradition,
but never – including the 2000 presidential election – achieved the level of
support that Debs received.
* * *
A possible break-up of the traditional two-party system might involve, for
example, the two parties morphing into four parties. In this scenario, each
major party would split into two factions, establishment and radical, whether
of the left for Democrats or right for Republicans – whatever left and right
might mean. These parties will likely include Libertarian and Green parties,
but also a host of single-issue, far-left groupings as well as white, Christian
nationalist.
A clock is ticking; the current political system is being squeezed by the
demands of a new capitalist global order. In the U.S., how this possible
political realignment works out – or if it doesn't – depends on changes in
demographics and economics. The changing composition of the American people,
of ethnic makeup, age-cohort and social class, is one axis of tension; and the
social economy, of wages and growing inequality, is a second.
The U.S. might well be a "better" - more politically representative -
country if it fragments along lines suggested by European democracies. At
least more voices would be added to the political mix, thus giving expression
to the complexity of the social and economic realignment remaking the nation.
The great tyranny of American democracy is that the 1 percent continues to
rule. The 1 percent wrote the Constitution and, as two leading
economists of the colonial economy, Jeffrey Williamson and Peter Lindert,
report, "Around 1774, the top one percent of free wealthholders in the
thirteen colonies held 12.6 percent of total assets, while the richest ten
percent held a little less than half of total assets." Two-centuries later, in
2010, the 1 percent still controls Congress as well as 35 percent of the
nation's wealth. It's time for change.
Join
the debate on Facebook
David Rosen is the author of
Sex, Sin & Subversion: The Transformation of 1950s New York's Forbidden into
America's New Normal (Skyhorse, 2015). He can be reached at [email protected];
check out www.DavidRosenWrites.com.
More articles by: David
Rosen
"... I am surprised a that so many commenters leave out the elephant in the root - the fact that by standards of Nuremberg trials Hillary Clinton is a war criminal. ..."
"... I'll briefly sum up the case by noting again Hillary Clinton, like Bill before her, is a creation of the former Democratic Leadership Council. When the Republicans started their journey to the far right the DLC captured the right of center people. That's the moderate Republican base. That was the answer to the southern strategy. Keep some social progressiveness. Remember GBW's compassionate Republicanism? We're going to get a Republican President, but we're going to make believe that she's a progressive Democrat. ..."
"... You are absolutely right that Hillary is a moderate Republican in a sheep skin of Democrat. That was Bill Clinton "Third Way" strategy from the very beginning. Essentially selling the Party to Wall Street. This "neoliberalization" of Democratic Party worked extremely well for Democratic brass for almost three decades. ..."
"... Professor Bacevich had shown that the main driver of the US militarism is neocons domination of the US foreign policy, and, especially, neocons domination in State Department regardless of whether Republicans or Democrats are in power. They profess that the US that is uniquely qualified to take on the worldwide foes of peace and democracy, forgetting, revising, or ignoring the painful lessons of World War II, Vietnam, and Iraq. And that establishing and maintaining the neoliberal empire is worth the price we pay as it will take the USA into the period of unprecedented peace. ..."
I am surprised a that so many commenters leave out the elephant in the root - the fact that
by standards of Nuremberg trials Hillary Clinton is a war criminal.
Hillary Clinton is certainly not the only one, but she is the only one running for president.
Equally credible cases can be made against W, Cheney, Rice, and Rumsfeld.
Each supported an illegal war in which thousands of American lives were sacrificed for Big
Oil, and in which hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were murdered.
Each subscribes to belligerent, interventionist military policy. Each supports an American
Empire foreign policy.
Each supports arming the world. Each supports Israel's occupation and war against the Palestinian
people.
Each supports regime change, by force or stealth, where such will benefit US corporate or military
interests. Even at the expense of democratically elected governments.
== end of quote ===
How can any intelligent person vote for a war criminal ?
Jack August 14, 2016 6:27 pm
Oh no, not another HRC the criminal posts. War criminal in this case. Email fraud previously.
Failure of duty in Libya. Oh, remember Vincent Foster. Murder no less.
Trump is a sociopath and HRC has her delusional detractors. What good do they do? Well they
draw attention away from HRC's real worst traits.
I'll briefly sum up the case by noting again Hillary Clinton, like Bill before her, is
a creation of the former Democratic Leadership Council. When the Republicans started their journey
to the far right the DLC captured the right of center people. That's the moderate Republican base.
That was the answer to the southern strategy. Keep some social progressiveness. Remember GBW's
compassionate Republicanism? We're going to get a Republican President, but we're going to make
believe that she's a progressive Democrat.
All the definitions have changed since the '60s. She not a criminal. She's just put on a different
colored cloak to demonstrate her flexibility. Americans are apparently not yet ready for a good
old fashioned New Deal Democrat. Workers are afraid of unions. Americans never could stay out
of a good fight. And Democrats since the '70s have learned to love bankers and recognize that
if you let bankers have yet more money they'll shed some your way. Roosevelt didn't need their
cash. He had his family's banking empire. And he had real compassion. He was an old style Keynesian.
He understood the importance of the government spending money on the nation, and that the nation
would return that money to the wealthy as they spent it to stay alive.
Beverly Mann August 14, 2016 7:08 pm
Bingo.
Zachary Smith August 14, 2016 8:02 pm
To likbez August 14, 2016 5:44 pm
I agree that Hillary Clinton is many kinds of criminal. I also agree with the others that it no
longer matters in the US.
Nixon = unprosecuted treason. Reagan = unprosecuted treason. Bush Sr. = unprosecuted criminal in Iran Contra and more.
(Clinton 1 is a black hole for me in terms of information – I just don't know enough to say.)
Bush Jr. = unprosecuted torturer and war crimes in Iraq. Obama = unprosecuted drone killer and war crimes in Libya & Syria.
That's the Leaders. On down the ladder US policemen routinely kill people. Many are cold-blooded
executions. Very seldom is there any prosecution. Even rarer than that is a conviction.
Big Bankers plundered the US in 2008. Not a single prosecution that I know about.
... ... ...
US citizens are becoming numbed to violence by the sheer frequency frequency. And increasingly
have their noses in their handheld devices tuning out all the news. Having learned almost no history,
they're suckers for nearly any glib line from very talented propagandists.
A very nasty piece of work is about to become President of the US of A. She has done many things
for which better humans than her are in prison. If the email hackers produce actual evidence of actual
crimes, she will NOT be prosecuted. At the very worst the TPP-loving Neocon Kaine will become president.
This is the US in 2016.
likbez, August 14, 2016 10:23 pm
Jack,
You are absolutely right that Hillary is a moderate Republican in a sheep skin of Democrat. That
was Bill Clinton "Third Way" strategy from the very beginning. Essentially selling the Party to
Wall Street. This "neoliberalization" of Democratic Party worked extremely well for Democratic
brass for almost three decades.
You are probably wrong in your underestimation of the danger of the "new American militarism"
(Professor Bacevich coined the term) factor in the US foreign policy -- the desire to subdue all
other countries and establish global neoliberal empire. Which as Zachary Smith observed makes
each and every President since Clinton a war criminal, unless we adopt the Roman dictum "Winners
[in a war] are never sent to the court of law".
Professor Bacevich had shown that the main driver of the US militarism is neocons domination
of the US foreign policy, and, especially, neocons domination in State Department regardless of
whether Republicans or Democrats are in power. They profess that the US that is uniquely qualified
to take on the worldwide foes of peace and democracy, forgetting, revising, or ignoring the painful
lessons of World War II, Vietnam, and Iraq. And that establishing and maintaining the neoliberal
empire is worth the price we pay as it will take the USA into the period of unprecedented peace.
Bacevich scored a direct hit on the foundations of the American national security state with
this scathing critique, and demolishes the unspoken assumptions that he believes have led the
United States into a senseless, wasteful, and counter-productive perpetual war for perpetual peace.
These assumptions clearly visible in "Khan gambit" are as following: the USA has the unique
responsibility to intervene wherever it wants, for whatever purpose it wants, by whatever means
it wants -- and the supporting "trinity" of requirements for the USA to maintain a global military
presence, to configure its military forces for global power projection, and to counter threats
by relying on a policy of global interventionism.
The driving force in all recent wars is the desire to protect and enlarge the neoliberal empire.
That means that election of Hillary means war.
It seems like I've known Nicholas
Schou forever, though we just pressed flesh for the first time last year in the LBC. His ground-breaking
reporting on the Contra-Cocaine network in southern California was crucial source material for a
book that Cockburn and I wrote called Whiteout. Nick's own book on Gary Webb is excellent and it
was turned into a fine movie,
Kill the Messenger. Now Nick has published a new book, Spooked,
a terrific and timely history of how the CIA manipulates the media and Hollywood (both useful idiots
of the Agency). And, speaking of the devil, here Nick is telling us all about it in the latest installment
of CounterPunch
Radio with the indefatigable Eric Draitser.
"... About Hillary's cute lawerly language–just to be clear, isn't it neoliberal dogma that by definition all "trade deals" increase jobs and wages. ..."
"... In effect this statement can be accurately summed up as "I support the TPP." I wonder–are a lot of people being taken in by this crap? Wouldn't it be better to just outright lie? I mean it's not like Trump has been letting this language go by unchallenged; he'll be pretty merciless about it in the debates coming up. ..."
"... The problem is, is Trump smart enough to understand that? Is he patient and disciplined enough to make that "parsing problem" a basic part of his message and keep discussing it? ..."
"... I know Trump is shrewd and cunning and educated about high-level money-grubbing and handing off his losses to others. But does he have any higher-order intelligence? Does he think longer and deeper and can he show that in any debates Hillary cannot avoid showing up for? Do they educate for that at Wharton? ..."
"... Bill did usher in the – pay to play – model imo like none before him. ..."
"EXCLUSIVE: Joint FBI-US Attorney Probe Of Clinton Foundation Is Underway" [Daily
Caller]. "Multiple FBI investigations are underway involving potential corruption charges
against the Clinton Foundation, according to a former senior law enforcement official. The investigation
centers on New York City where the Clinton Foundation has its main offices, according to the former
official who has direct knowledge of the activities. The New York-based probe is being led by
Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. Bharara's prosecutorial
aggressiveness has resulted in a large number of convictions of banks, hedge funds and Wall Street
insiders."
Normally, I view the Daily Caller with great skepticism, based on past fabrications (then again,
Judy Miller). That said, this one was vouched for on the Twitter by reporters I have respect for.
And with Clinton owning both political establishments, it's hard to see where else the
(sadly) single source could turn. Interestingly, Bharara hasn't issued a denail as of this writing,
altough they declined comment. Here's a rehash from
LawNewz. So we'll see how this plays out.
"Clinton team tells supporters to dismiss email questions as 'more bark than bite'" [Yahoo
News] (talking points for Brock trolls and reputable allies, if any, attached). Notice there
are two issues with "her damned email." (1) Clinton's privatization of the server as such, with
the associated security issues. (2) Corruption, enabled by the privatization: Clinton's conflation
of the private interests of the Clinton Foundation with the public actions of the State Department
under Clinton's leadership.
The privatized server enables corruption by severing the evidentiary chain between private
communications (said to be yoga lessons and Chelsea's wedding, but, as we now know, more than
that) and putatively public actions. The content of the 40 emails not turned over by
Clinton, and now revealed by Judicial Watch, re-connects the links in the evidentiary chain. Of
course, Clinton's talking points are designed to obfuscate the distinction.
Jim Haygood, August 12, 2016 at 2:14 pm
This just in:
"Of the [Clintons'] $1,042,000 in charitable cash contributions, exactly $1 million went
to, you guessed it, the Clinton Family Foundation."
It takes a Harambe to trample a village.
temporal, August 12, 2016 at 2:56 pm
That is sort of the way it's done for most of the rich that make charitable contributions.
Give presents to friends wait for other presents to return and pay less taxes. The Clintons apparently
decided that honesty was the best policy and skipped all that trusting others to pass the dutchie.
lyman alpha blob
RE: Joint FBI-US Attorney Probe Of Clinton Foundation
This morning I saw an article saying that the DOJ has rebuffed the FBI
request to investigate the Clinton Foundation. Quick search turns up a lot
of articles – here's one
from the Washington Times:
"The Obama administration rejected requests from three FBI field offices
that wanted to open public corruption probes of the Clinton Foundation,
according to a report that added to headaches for Democratic presidential
nominee Hillary Clinton.
Alerted by banks to suspicious transactions, the FBI wanted to
investigate conflicts of interest involving foreign donors to the foundation
while Mrs. Clinton was secretary of state. But the Justice Department put
the kibosh on the it, CNN reported."
So now I'm confused – aren't US Attorneys part of the DOJ? Can anyone
shed some light on this?
My twitter is saying Bharara could claim jurisdiction and the probe is
an end run around DOJ. It is all based on one anonymous source for now,
grain of salt and so forth.
There seems to be a lot of rich people on the board as well as hanging around as employees
at TCFF. That million won't go far. Maybe they'll pass on a couple of bucks to Haiti or send them
some used furniture.
Paid Minion, August 12, 2016 at 3:28 pm
Another example of "charitable donations"– A big chunk of the "Warbird Restoration" business.
-Millionaire buys and restores WWII airplane. (The price of which has been driven into
the millions of dollars by rich guys bidding against each other)
-"Donates" airplane to "charitable/non-profit" organization, dedicated to "honoring the
memory…………"
-The guy that donates gets a tax writeoff, then flies it on the tax-deductible donations.
Yeah, when the guy kicks the bucket, the airplane goes to the charity. But, being dead, and
having received a 10-20 year tax writeoff, why does he care at that point?
It would take twenty years to find and document all of the little scams for rich people that have
been written into the tax code.
Seems like the tax code gives out $100 of "incentives" for every $5 rich people spend.
RMO, August 13, 2016 at 1:49 am
Being an aviation nut I've noticed that many warbirds have gone WAY up in price over the last
decade. They've never been cheap to own (even when they were available as surplus in large quantities
the operating costs could be amazingly high) but now you have to be a multi-millionaire at least
to buy something like a P-51. A lot of classic cars and sailing yachts have gone the same way.
The extremely wealthy seem to have decided these things are desirable and the prices rocket into
the stratosphere. I suppose I can consider myself fortunate that the type of flying that I love
the most (soaring) is also one of the least expensive ways of getting off the ground. It's also
one of the few forms of flying that let one go wingtip-to-wingtip with eagles and hawks on a regular
basis.
fajensen, August 14, 2016 at 1:24 pm
Maybe the purchase of a carefully restored vintage Flakvierling 38 is more appropriate?
If they are flying over your land … you could put some authenticity into the Squillionaire
WWII flyboy experience ;-)
Foppe, August 12, 2016 at 2:34 pm
fwiw, on the topic of elite corruption/pay2play/hillary: When I recently tried to talk about
this with someone who takes himself slightly too seriously, who sees his interests as aligned
with the professional classes, self-identifying as a "pragmatist", and who seems constitutionally
unable to conceive of the notion that highly educated people could be as corrupt as they (often)
are incompetent, I found that it was pretty much impossible to get him to even acknowledge that
Hillary's SoS/CF corruption was problematic.
Because "that's always how it goes/what happens, we shouldn't kid ourselves" and "at least
we know about this" (apparently the fact that quite a bit of effort was being expended to make
it harder for us to find out about this didn't faze him either, perhaps because of ideas he harbors
about how that's necessary because "the masses wouldn't understand" or whatnot).
Utterly bizarre, this unwillingness to engage with the facts, because of beliefs someone holds
about how not doing so is the pragmatic option, in someone who also identifies as a (hard) scientist.
hemeantwell, August 12, 2016 at 2:55 pm
I've been reading around in some of the mid-20th c. lit on the psychology of fascism - "Prophets
of Deceit," "The Inability to Mourn" and others in the genre - and that sort of "realism" was
thought of as a key component in bringing about acceptance of, and then sympathy with, fascism.
Once corruption and related forms of power asymmetries are accepted, there's not much left to
maintain a principled critical standpoint. You're just left with your own narrow self interest
and an openness to appreciating the skill with which the game is played. Hitler was quite a politician
and, wowzers, Mussolini sure had some chutzpah, that March on Rome was awesome!
As an old-style Leninist party in a modern world, the CCP is confronted by two major challenges:
first, how to maintain "ideological discipline" among its almost 89 million members in a globalized
world awash with money, international travel, electronically transmitted information, and heretical
ideas. Second, how to cleanse itself of its chronic corruption, a blight that Xi has himself described
as "a matter of life and death."
The primary reason the Party is so susceptible to graft is that while officials are poorly
paid, they do control valuable national assets. So, for example, when property development deals
come together involving real estate (all land belongs to the government) and banking (all the
major banks also belong to the government), officials vetting the deals find themselves in tempting
positions to supplement their paltry salaries by accepting bribes or covertly raking off a percentage
of the action. Since success without corruption in China is almost a non sequitur,
officials and businessmen (and heads of state-owned enterprises are both) are all easily touched
by what Chinese call "original sin" (yuanzui), namely, some acquaintance with corruption.
The more anti corruption pressure Jinping applies, the greater the flood of loot coming out
of China. Canada is getting swamped.
jgordon
About Hillary's cute lawerly language–just to be clear, isn't it neoliberal dogma that by definition
all "trade deals" increase jobs and wages.
In effect this statement can be accurately summed up as "I support the TPP." I wonder–are a
lot of people being taken in by this crap? Wouldn't it be better to just outright lie? I mean
it's not like Trump has been letting this language go by unchallenged; he'll be pretty merciless
about it in the debates coming up.
MyLessThanPrimeBeef
If she is so far ahead, she should be able to risk embracing the deal openly and not have to
borrow a page from Obama's playbook about privately calming his supporters, back in 2008, about
his public position on NAFTA.
different clue
The problem is, is Trump smart enough to understand that? Is he patient and disciplined enough
to make that "parsing problem" a basic part of his message and keep discussing it?
I know Trump is shrewd and cunning and educated about high-level money-grubbing and handing
off his losses to others. But does he have any higher-order intelligence? Does he think longer
and deeper and can he show that in any debates Hillary cannot avoid showing up for? Do they educate
for that at Wharton?
RE: Clinton's drive to assimilate the Republican establishment
IMNSHO this is the recipe for the gridlock you're looking for Lambert and
may even rid us of both Trump and Clinton. Not sure what the Dems were thinking
they'd accomplish by targeting Repulicans to vote for Clinton. While some might
hold there nose and pull the lever for her out of disgust for Trump, it
certainly does not follow that they will also vote for down-ticket Dems. It
seems asinine to me to expect that they would.
More likely the result is a Clinton presidency backed by a Republican
Congress. I'd say it would be great if they'd then impeach her but one has to
be careful what one wishes for. I don't see a Kaine presidency as much of an
improvement and I suspect repubs would be more likely to cooperate with him
than they would Clinton.
Why would this cause gridlock? Wouldn't this cause Trade Agreements and
Grand Bargains? The elite mainstreamers will get all those done first and
then get around to Impeachment and stuff if they need to amuse themselves.
But they will see to first things first . . . if its Clinton and a Republan
Senate and House.
If Clinton is elected president in November, she'll earn a salary of
$400,000 but forgo any income from speeches (until she leaves office,
anyway). That could cost the Clintons $10 million per year, based on the
speech income Hillary Clinton averaged as a private citizen in 2013 and
2014. That's $40 million during a four-year term.
This is so inspiring! Let's take up a collection fund for Hillary, call it
the 'Pantsuit Fund'. It's the least we can do…
PS No word on what portion of this "lost" income would be funneled into the
Clinton Foundation instead…
But the money paid to her openly after leaving the State Department was
just a down payment for the presidency. So it's really more like she got
$20+ million spread out over eight years (or twelve, if you want to factor
in the depressing possibility of a second term) plus her cumulative White
House salary of $1.6 million (or again, $3.2 over eight presidential years).
And all that money paid to Bill, Chelsea and her husband was ALSO a down
payment on the presidency. How many millions was that?
The violin I am playing for them all is sub-atomic in size.
Bill did usher in the – pay to play – model imo like none before him.
Disheveled Marsupial…. The layers of gate keepers to gain audience
must have been commensurate to hot groupies servicing roadies and
security staff… endless blow jobs and other sex acts committed in pursuit
of entering the inner sanctum… where eternal bliss resides…
The income wouldn't be foregone, only deferred. She would expect anywhere
up to billions of dollars after leaving office if she got enough done for
the OverClass while IN office.
Merely delayed . . . not denied.
Watch how much money Obama harvests in the years ahead. That will be the
template.
I have sinking feeling of horror even contemplating that someone as
bloodthirsty as Hillary actually has a shot of being president. That the
"left" are the ones who let things get this far is incredibly ironic. Or
not. Maybe they've always been bloodthirsty warmonger hungry for chaos and
destruction in their hearts.
"over the last 15 years, have lost two major wars, set the Mediterranean
littoral on fire, created a refugee crisis that's destabilizing our largest
military protectorate, and blown many thousands of far away brown people to
pink mist (but that's not racist, no siree. We have credentials)."
Serious men in suits, sitting around a table, having serious conversations:
who do we bomb today? How much 'collateral damage' do the PR guys deem is
acceptable?
At no point will the idea that not bombing is a genuine option come up. Nor
will the fact that (for some strange reason) people don't like being bombed and
we're actually making more enemies than we're eliminating. I'm reminded of the
South Park episode where the leaders of the Vatican have a meeting about how
they can cover up raping children in the future. Simply not raping children
never occurs to them as a choice.
I was both surprised, and not surprised that 90-some percent of her
charitable donations went to the Clinton Foundation.
Talk about hiding in plain sight.
After Trump's asinine quip about a 2nd amendment "solution" to stopping
Clinton's presidential run, her campaign manager, Robby Mook, had
this
to say:
"What Trump is saying is dangerous. A person seeking to be the President
of the United States should not suggest violence in any way."
A presidential candidate should not suggest violence in
any
way?!?
Really?
This coming from a high-level supporter of a candidate who…
…has supported
every
war during her political career?
…supported the use of civilian-butchering cluster bombs by Israel in Gaza?
…supported the brutal invasions by the Saudi dictatorship of Bahrain and
Yemen?
…enthusiastically pushed for the bombing of Libya that turned it into a
failed state?
…threatened use of nuclear weapons vs. Iran?
…supported the military coups against the elected governments in Honduras
and Egypt, turning both into violence-ridden basket cases?
…adores as her mentor the arch war criminal Henry Kissinger, orchestrator of
the tortures and killings of 10s of thousands?
Tell me, please, Clinton supporters, how is this not "suggest[ing] violence
in any way."
Is it because threats of violence don't count when they're promoted against
human beings who aren't Americans? Go ahead, probe the deeply caustic,
Trump-like racism behind that assumption.
Last Friday, four days before Trump issued his violent threat and a few
weeks after the constitution-waiving stunt at the Democratic convention, the
ACLU and a federal court finally forced the release of the Obama
administration's patently
unconstitutional guidelines
[2]
for killing people with drones (
nearly
90%
of whom were not the intended targets).
And yesterday, while the Republican sociopath was issuing his threat, the
Obama State Department approved the sale of more than
$1
billion in arms to Saudi Arabia
, no doubt to continue its bloody invasion
of Yemen, where the UN recently estimated that
two-thirds of the civilian casualties
are caused by Saudi air strikes.
Where was the Democratic and Republican outrage against those very real,
violent threats?
When Clinton wins the November election, will we stoop ever farther into an
Orwellian world as our first "feminist" president continues to shovel billions
in arms to arguably the most anti-feminist dictatorship on the planet? Where
violence against people doesn't count as violence due to their nationality
and/or the color of their skin?
If you're outraged about Trump's barbarous suggestion of 2
nd
Amendment "solutions" to elections, please don't stop there. Get your blood
boiling and then also, and just as forcefully, challenge Clinton's own
barbarous "solutions."
"A third of the members of the United Nations have felt Washington's
boot, overturning governments, subverting democracy, imposing blockades and
boycotts. Most of the presidents responsible have been liberal – Truman,
Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton, Obama…"
"One of the more violent presidents, Obama gave full reign to the
Pentagon war-making apparatus of his discredited predecessor. He prosecuted
more whistleblowers – truth-tellers – than any president. He pronounced
Chelsea Manning guilty before she was tried. Today, Obama runs an
unprecedented worldwide campaign of terrorism and murder by drone."
"In 2009, Obama promised to help "rid the world of nuclear weapons" and
was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. No American president has built more
nuclear warheads than Obama."
The main factor in rigging the system is pack of rabid gdogs called neoliberal MSM, which attack
Trump 24 x 7, throwing our of the window any pretence about objectivity. They dissect each his
phrase and create face skandals. One after another. They give a pass Hillary without even
analysing her positions and her record (always dismal, often criminal, as in the term "war
criminal"). Bastards...
It would be difficult to imagine a more implausible tribune
of the people than Donald Trump.
It is harder still to
think of him as an elected official of any kind, much less a
President.
But the man does have certain strengths. He is shrewd, for
example; and to be shrewd, he must be at least somewhat in
touch with reality.
To the extent that he is, he has to be wondering what the
hell he was thinking when he threw his hat into the ring.
... ... ...
As it became clear that Trump was doing better in the primaries than anyone
had expected, the Republican establishment did try to derail his campaign - in
league with the plutocrats who back them and Fox News. They failed
spectacularly.
They were unable to rig the election because too many of the people that
used to listen to them finally realized that they were being used, and refused
to go along.
The only candidate who can rightfully claim that the primary elections were
rigged against his candidacy is Bernie Sanders. Circumstantial evidence of
this had been overwhelming from Day One; the DNC emails that Wikileaks
published established the point definitively.
No wonder that Democrats don't want to talk about the content of those
emails; that they'd rather deflect attention to unsubstantiated allegations
about Russian hacking.
After Trump's asinine quip about a 2nd amendment "solution" to stopping
Clinton's presidential run, her campaign manager, Robby Mook, had
this
to say:
"What Trump is saying is dangerous. A person seeking to be the President
of the United States should not suggest violence in any way."
A presidential candidate should not suggest violence in
any
way?!?
Really?
This coming from a high-level supporter of a candidate who…
…has supported
every
war during her political career?
…supported the use of civilian-butchering cluster bombs by Israel in Gaza?
…supported the brutal invasions by the Saudi dictatorship of Bahrain and
Yemen?
…enthusiastically pushed for the bombing of Libya that turned it into a
failed state?
…threatened use of nuclear weapons vs. Iran?
…supported the military coups against the elected governments in Honduras
and Egypt, turning both into violence-ridden basket cases?
…adores as her mentor the arch war criminal Henry Kissinger, orchestrator of
the tortures and killings of 10s of thousands?
Tell me, please, Clinton supporters, how is this not "suggest[ing] violence
in any way."
Is it because threats of violence don't count when they're promoted against
human beings who aren't Americans? Go ahead, probe the deeply caustic,
Trump-like racism behind that assumption.
Last Friday, four days before Trump issued his violent threat and a few
weeks after the constitution-waiving stunt at the Democratic convention, the
ACLU and a federal court finally forced the release of the Obama
administration's patently
unconstitutional guidelines
[2]
for killing people with drones (
nearly
90%
of whom were not the intended targets).
And yesterday, while the Republican sociopath was issuing his threat, the
Obama State Department approved the sale of more than
$1
billion in arms to Saudi Arabia
, no doubt to continue its bloody invasion
of Yemen, where the UN recently estimated that
two-thirds of the civilian casualties
are caused by Saudi air strikes.
Where was the Democratic and Republican outrage against those very real,
violent threats?
When Clinton wins the November election, will we stoop ever farther into an
Orwellian world as our first "feminist" president continues to shovel billions
in arms to arguably the most anti-feminist dictatorship on the planet? Where
violence against people doesn't count as violence due to their nationality
and/or the color of their skin?
If you're outraged about Trump's barbarous suggestion of 2
nd
Amendment "solutions" to elections, please don't stop there. Get your blood
boiling and then also, and just as forcefully, challenge Clinton's own
barbarous "solutions."
"A third of the members of the United Nations have felt Washington's
boot, overturning governments, subverting democracy, imposing blockades and
boycotts. Most of the presidents responsible have been liberal – Truman,
Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton, Obama…"
"One of the more violent presidents, Obama gave full reign to the
Pentagon war-making apparatus of his discredited predecessor. He prosecuted
more whistleblowers – truth-tellers – than any president. He pronounced
Chelsea Manning guilty before she was tried. Today, Obama runs an
unprecedented worldwide campaign of terrorism and murder by drone."
"In 2009, Obama promised to help "rid the world of nuclear weapons" and
was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. No American president has built more
nuclear warheads than Obama."
This is what happens when the Lame Stream Media gets a guest that doesn't fit the narrative and
handily puts the anchor in her place. They deflect and end the interview!
I don't think its bipolar disorder. I think she is incapable of improvising and totally
reliant on her script-writers who cannot agree on a stylistic approach.
Its not insanity, its just that she's completely and utterly fake.
On the subject of Trump, Stone said that "the Trump you see on TV is the only Trump there is,
he doesn't have two personalities, he has one personality."
He contrasted this with Hillary Clinton, who he described as having "two personalities."
"Publicly, she pretends to be the warm, likeable grandmother. But privately she is a foul
mouthed, short-tempered, nasty, vicious, extraordinarily abusive, maniac. I think she has
bipolar, at least."
"... Clinton's top aides' favors for and interactions with the Clinton Foundation seem in violation of the ethics agreements that Hillary Clinton agreed to in order to be appointed and confirmed as Secretary of State. For example, Secretary of State-designate Hillary Clinton on January 5, 2009, wrote in a letter to State Department Designated Agency Ethics Official James H. Thessin: ..."
"... "For the duration of my appointment as Secretary if I am confirmed, I will not participate personally and substantially in any particular matter involving specific parties in which The William J. Clinton Foundation (or the Clinton Global Initiative) is a party or represents a party…." ..."
"... The emails reveal that Clinton campaign adviser and pollster Mark Penn advised Clinton on NATO and piracy. Another major Clinton fundraiser, Lana Moresky, also pushed Clinton to hire someone for a position at State. Clinton directed Abedin to follow up and "help" the applicant and told Abedin to "let me know" about the job issue. ..."
"... The emails show that Hillary Clinton relied on someone named "Justin " (presumably Justin Cooper, a Bill Clinton and Clinton Foundation employee), to set up her cell phone voicemail, rather than having State Department personnel handle it. This was in a February 11, 2009, email from Clinton aide Lauren Jiloty to Clinton, using Clinton's [email protected] address. ..."
Remember how Hillary Clinton repeatedly assured us all that she had turned over all work-related
emails? And that she avoided any conflicts of interest with her Clinton Foundation?
Well, this week we released 296 pages of State Department records containing 44 email exchanges
not previously turned over to the State Department. This brings the known total to 171 of new
Clinton emails that were not part of the 55,000 pages of emails that Clinton turned over. These
records further appear to contradict statements by Clinton that, "as far as she knew," all of
her government emails were turned over to the State Department.
The new documents reveal that in April 2009 controversial Clinton Foundation official Doug
Band pushed for a job for an associate. In the email, Band tells Hillary Clinton's former aides
at the State Department, Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin, that it is "important to take care of [Redacted].
Band is reassured by Abedin that, "Personnel has been sending him options." Band was co-founder
of Teneo Strategy with Bill Clinton and a top official of the Clinton Foundation, including its
Clinton Global Initiative.
Included is a 2009 email in which Band directs Abedin and Mills to put Lebanese-Nigerian billionaire
and Clinton Foundation donor Gilbert Chagoury in touch with the State Department's "substance
person" on Lebanon. Band notes that Chagoury is "key guy there [Lebanon] and to us," and insists
that Abedin call Amb. Jeffrey Feltman to connect him to Chagoury.
Chagoury, a foreign national, is a close friend of former President Bill Clinton and a top
donor to the Clinton Foundation. He has appeared near the top of the Foundation's donor list as
a $1 million to $5 million contributor, according to foundation documents. He also pledged $1
billion to the Clinton Global Initiative. According to a 2010 investigation by PBS Frontline,
Chagoury was convicted in 2000 in Switzerland for laundering money from Nigeria, but agreed to
a plea deal and repaid $66 million to the Nigerian government.
Clinton's top aides' favors for and interactions with the Clinton Foundation seem in violation
of the ethics agreements that Hillary Clinton agreed to in order to be appointed and confirmed
as Secretary of State. For example, Secretary of State-designate Hillary Clinton on January 5,
2009, wrote in a letter to State Department Designated Agency Ethics Official James H. Thessin:
"For the duration of my appointment as Secretary if I am confirmed, I will not participate
personally and substantially in any particular matter involving specific parties in which The
William J. Clinton Foundation (or the Clinton Global Initiative) is a party or represents a party…."
As preparation for Hillary's upcoming visit to Asia, Stephen Roach, chairman of Morgan Stanley
Asia, on Feb. 11, 2009, sends Hillary a copy of his upcomingtestimony before Congress in which
he would condemn any U.S. efforts to criticize Chinese monetary policy or enact trade barriers.
Several days later, Hillary asked Abedin about Roach possibly "connecting" with her while she
was in Beijing: "I forwarded you my email to him about connecting in Beijing. Can he come to the
embassy or other event?" Morgan Stanley is a long-time financial supporter of the Clintons.
The emails also reveal that Abedin left then-Secretary Clinton's daily schedule, a presumably
sensitive document, on a bed in an unlocked hotel room. An email on April 18, 2009, during a conference
in Trinidad and Tobago, from aide Melissa J. Lan to Huma Abedin asks for the Secretary's "day
book binders." Abedin replies: "Yes. It's on the bed in my room. U can take it. My door is open.
I'm in the lobby.Thx." Moreover, the emails show the annoyance of another Clinton aide that the
schedule was sent to an authorized State Department email address and not to an unsecured non-state.gov
account.
The emails reveal that Clinton campaign adviser and pollster Mark Penn advised Clinton on NATO
and piracy. Another major Clinton fundraiser, Lana Moresky, also pushed Clinton to hire someone
for a position at State. Clinton directed Abedin to follow up and "help" the applicant and told
Abedin to "let me know" about the job issue.
The emails show that Hillary Clinton relied on someone named "Justin " (presumably Justin Cooper,
a Bill Clinton and Clinton Foundation employee), to set up her cell phone voicemail, rather than
having State Department personnel handle it. This was in a February 11, 2009, email from Clinton
aide Lauren Jiloty to Clinton, using Clinton's [email protected] address.
This is the ninth set of records produced for Judicial Watch by the State Department from the
non-state.gov email accounts of Huma Abedin.
The documents were produced under a court order in a May 5, 2015, Freedom of Information (FOIA)
lawsuit against the State Department (Judicial Watch, Inc. v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:15-cv-00684))
requiring the agency to produce "all emails of official State Department business received or
sent by former Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin from January 1, 2009 through February 1, 2013,
using a 'non-state'.gov email address."
It's no wonder Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin hid emails from the American people, the courts
and Congress. They show that the Clinton Foundation, Clinton donors, and operatives worked with
Hillary Clinton in potential violation of the law.
These revelations have created a national firestorm in the media, as even the liberal media
grasp the significance of the Clinton Foundation's pay for play relationship with the Clinton
State Department. See these major stories in the New York Post and The New York Times or this
major editorial in the Wall Street Journal.
Hillary Clinton thought Benghazi and her
email scandal
were behind her. Even though the FBI declined to charge her with massive negligence, those affected
by her incompetence aren't gonna let her off so easy.
The families of the Benghazi victims are
going after Hillary Clinton in court! This could be it for her!
The parents of two Americans killed in the 2012 terrorist attacks on U.S. diplomatic facilities
in Benghazi, Libya, filed a wrongful death lawsuit in federal court Monday against Hillary Clinton.
In the suit, Patricia Smith and Charles Woods, the parents of Sean Smith and Tyrone Woods,
claim that Clinton's use of a private e-mail server contributed to the attacks. They also accuse
her of defaming them in public statements.
Smith was an information management officer and Woods was a security officer, both stationed
in Benghazi.
This is lawsuit could be what FINALLY puts Hillary away. The families deserve justice!
Do the Clinton's not realize when they've won something? Bill at least doesn't.
After the
FBI absolved Hillary of any wrong-doing but still chastised her for her
carelessness, you would think that Bill and Hill would want to move away from a
scandal has plagued them, right?
Not according to Bill, who may have just gotten Hillary in more trouble with the
FBI:
Bill Clinton is accusing the FBI director of serving up "the biggest load of
bull I've ever heard" - marking the first significant public comments from the
husband of the Democratic nominee on the scandal that's plagued his wife's
campaign for over a year.
The Clinton's are notorious for holding grudges for decades, so it is safe to say
that FBI Director Comey is in for a bit of trouble if Hillary ever gets into office.
I don't know why you'd even want to bring this up. You won. Do you really want
people to look further into the FBI investigation and Hillary's emails? I don't think
so.
Bill, August 13, 2016 at 9:56 pm
Comey had better watch out. People who cross Bill and Killary have a disturbing habit of
dying mysteriously.
Essentially Rand Paul accused Hillary of perjury before Congress that should
be punished by five year imprisonment. He is the first senator that asked for her
imprisonment.
I love Rand Paul. Sad thing tho is Rand.. we the general public is think
she has the entire government wrapped around her finger.
louis santiago
I know it, and that tells me one thing. The system creates the illusion
that we have a say on who is president, but im starting to believe we don't,
it's all a facade. It's all rigged, I think Hillary will be president, seems
to me that either the democratic party is much more powerful or because
of the fact they are running the administration it gives them leverage to
call all thr shots, even our votes.
Look at what happened with Sander's votes, all rigged.
D Googolize
How obvious does it have to be when all the evidence of corruption is
out there? Director Comey laying out all the evidence of numerous lies and
not being able to prove intent is just obvious signs of bribery, threats
or both. Same thing with the dirtbag Loretta Lynch not answering any questions
in the press conference. How many damning emails will it take??
This transformation of State Department into the branch of CIA started under
Madeleine Albright and reached crescendo during Hillary Clinton.
Notable quotes:
"... I personally have suggested investigating the person of the US Ambassador in Ankara John Bass, who was Ambassador in Republic of Georgia in 2008 and who was involved in dirty business in Iraq, and also seems to be involved in "Color revolution" in Kiev. There are very few "traditional" diplomats in a state department. ..."
The new evidence of the US participation in the coup attempt in Turkey emerged.
Greek press published a photo made a day before the coup. It shows the US ambassador
in Turkey John Basse together with the Turkish senior officer, who looks like
one of the leaders of the coup Col. Ali Yazıcı (former military adviser to President
Erdogan). They had a private meeting in Cengelkoy café the day before the coup.
F. William Engdahl - historian, economic researcher, writer comments this:
The US right now is on a defensive. Erdogan has openly challenged leading
NATO generals. There is investigation of evidences of the US involvement
in the coup. I personally have suggested investigating the person of
the US Ambassador in Ankara John Bass, who was Ambassador in Republic of
Georgia in 2008 and who was involved in dirty business in Iraq, and also
seems to be involved in "Color revolution" in Kiev. There are very few "traditional"
diplomats in a state department.
"... "From Claudia Kash: I know why Seth Rich had to die. There were 2 sets of polling places this primary season -- one set for most of the voters, who went on state websites to find their polling locations -- a second set for Hillary Clinton supporters who looked on Hillary Clinton's website to find their polling location. The Secretary of State for each state had one set of locations on >the record; the other set of locations, the ones listed on Hillary's website, were not on the state record. I know this because I looked on her website to find where a friend should vote -- then double-checked the state >website, which showed a different address. I thought there must be a mistake -- I kept checking, right up to election day. ..."
"... But until they killed Seth Rich, I couldn't figure out why there would be two different polling places. This is how I think the scam worked: While most voters look up their location on their state website, voters who were signed up as Hillary Clinton supporters would be directed to her site to find their polling place. It was set up the same as any other DNC polling place -- with DNC volunteers, regular voting machines, etc. -- and a duplicate voter roster, the same as the roster at the other polling place. Voters would be checked off on the roster, same as at the other polling place... and after the polls closed, the DNC supervisor would pick up the roster and the ballots. ..."
"... Seems a straight Machiavellian operation. Murder the young insider, Seth Rich, that leaked the emails to Assange's Wikileaks and then blame it on an enemy that none can fact check on. DNC= Deep National Control ..."
The media reporting on keeps making the statement from the police 'that nothing was missing from his body or belongings'. The
guy was walking around at 4 AM, and apparently no one but his killers actually saw him. So, I guess he couldn't be carrying anything
outside of his pockets? In has hands?
"From Claudia Kash: I know why Seth Rich had to die. There were 2 sets of polling places this primary season -- one set
for most of the voters, who went on state websites to find their polling locations -- a second set for Hillary Clinton supporters
who looked on Hillary Clinton's website to find their polling location. The Secretary of State for each state had one set of locations
on >the record; the other set of locations, the ones listed on Hillary's website, were not on the state record. I know this because
I looked on her website to find where a friend should vote -- then double-checked the state >website, which showed a different
address. I thought there must be a mistake -- I kept checking, right up to election day.
But until they killed Seth Rich, I couldn't figure out why there would be two different polling places. This is how I think
the scam worked: While most voters look up their location on their state website, voters who were signed up as Hillary Clinton
supporters would be directed to her site to find their polling place. It was set up the same as any other DNC polling place --
with DNC volunteers, regular voting machines, etc. -- and a duplicate voter roster, the same as the roster at the other polling
place. Voters would be checked off on the roster, same as at the other polling place... and after the polls closed, the DNC supervisor
would pick up the roster and the ballots.
The supervisor would then pick up the roster at the legitimate polling place and the ballots there. He(or she) >would
then replace a number of Bernie Sanders ballots with an equal number of the ballots from the Hillary >Clinton voting location.
Then the duplicate roster from the HRC would be shredded and thrown away, along >with all the Bernie Sanders ballots that had
been replaced. That way the number of people who voted (on the >remaining roster) still matches the number of ballots. This is
why so many states reported a "lower than expected voter turnout".
Seth Rich, who was responsible for the app that helped voters find their polling places, did not realize that there were two
sets of polling places until he himself went to vote. He lived in Washington DC, which voted at the end of the primary season,
a week after Clinton had already been declared the winner. I believe he discovered it then, and had started asking questions about
why the polling places on Hillary's website didn't match the ones on the DC website.
But even if he didn't say a word to anybody, it would have been dangerous to let him live. He would have >figured it out sooner
or later -- and he would have reported it when he did."
Seems a straight Machiavellian operation. Murder the young insider, Seth Rich, that leaked the emails to Assange's Wikileaks
and then blame it on an enemy that none can fact check on. DNC= Deep National Control.
It wasn't yesterday but it was determined to be suicide by train...because a brilliant attorney
could not think of any easier way to commit suicide than throw himself in front of a moving train.
I can forsee a number of FBI agents also being hit by trains in the near future."
If they've had the proper training they won't be standing near the track or watching the train
as it approaches. If they've had the proper training, the person who tries to push them will go
under the train.
Martial arts, firearms, pursuit and evasive driving, general situational awareness - all part
of FBI training. Not as easy as bumping a lawyer or journalist.
I've never understood people who stand toes to the line when a train enters the station. You
know it's going to stop, so what's the rush? Situational Awareness demands that you stand well
back from any potential danger, near an exit, facing the entrance, etc.
Police and military are well aware of these principles - even in defensive driving you have
the slogan "where is the present danger?" Walk facing oncoming traffic, step out and away from
dark doorways, back alleys, bridge pillars etc.
Take the stairs sometimes, take the elevator other times - drive to work one route, drive a
different route home - mix them up. Take a taxi, get out at a random location and take a bus the
rest of the way. Eat at different restaurants at different times. Do not establish a pattern.
At all times carry a firearm.
These principles should be part of basic lawyer training, especially when taking on dangerous
cases. Same goes for journalists. There are professional courses that deal with these subjects.
Take one.
Whatever your goals in life, you can't achieve them if you don't survive. Last night I passed
a fatal traffic accident where it was obvious the person turning left was killed by someone running
a red light. Don't move off on the green right away.... pause and look around. That person is
dead because he didn't follow that basic rule. So much for his life goals.
I'm preaching to the choir here, but maybe someone who doesn't know will read this and it will
help them survive. As the Donald said, it's all about winning and you can't win if you don't survive.
"... News Media bias. Excellent Lou Dobbs discussion with Newt Gingrich. Worthy of your time to Watch short Video ..."
"... Newt Gingrich: ..."
"... The elite media is dedicated to defeating Trump .. Trump should pattern his campaign on the model of Truman…media had written him off. ..."
"... And the elite media in newsroom after newsroom is dedicated to defeating Trump and I think every chance they get to try to get him off message, they will, ..."
News Media bias. Excellent Lou Dobbs discussion with Newt Gingrich. Worthy of your time to Watch
short Video
Newt Gingrich:
The elite media is dedicated to defeating Trump .. Trump should pattern his campaign
on the model of Truman…media had written him off.
"The elite media understands that if they allow Donald Trump to communicate directly
to the American people, he's just plain going to beat them. And he's going to win, and Hillary
is going to lose
And the elite media in newsroom after newsroom is dedicated to defeating Trump and I
think every chance they get to try to get him off message, they will," he said. "I
hope that Donald Trump will take, as his model, Harry Truman's campaign in 1948 where the entire
elite media had written Truman off and he came back, he pounded away, and he won the presidency
despite every expectation of the national establishment. I think Trump has the same opportunity
this year."
[more on Vid..Hillary's comment she short-circuited will return to hurt. What else did she
short-circuit? listen]
"... individuals' innate psychological predispositions to intolerance ("authoritarianism") interacting with changing conditions of societal threat. The threatening conditions, particularly resonant in the present political climate, that exacerbate authoritarian attitudes include, most critically, great dissension in public opinion and general loss of confidence in political leaders. Using purpose-built experimental manipulations, cross-national survey data and in-depth personal interviews with extreme authoritarians and libertarians, the book shows that this simple model provides the most complete account of political conflict across the ostensibly distinct domains of race and immigration, civil liberties, morality, crime and punishment, and of when and why those battles will be most heated. ..."
"... But the latent authoritarianism within them is triggered when they perceive a threat to the stable moral order. ..."
"... It's at this point in the talk when Haidt surely began to make his audience squirm. He says that in his work as an academic and social psychologist, he sees colleagues constantly demonizing and mocking conservatives. He warns them to knock it off. "We need political diversity," he says. And: "They are members of our community." ..."
"... The discourse and behavior of the Left, says Haidt, is alienating millions of ordinary people all over the West. It's not just America. We are sliding towards authoritarianism all over the West, and there's really only one way to stop it. ..."
"... we can reduce intolerance and defuse the conflict by focusing on sameness. We need unifying rituals, beliefs, institutions, and practices, he says, drawing on Stenner's research. The romance the Left has long had with multiculturalism and diversity (as the Left defines it) has to end, because it's helping tear us apart. ..."
"... If we don't have a feasible conservative party, we open the way for authoritarianism. ..."
"... I don't think the center can hold anymore. It's too late. The cultural left in this country is very authoritarian, at least as regards orthodox Christians and other social conservatives. On one of the Stenner slides, we see that she defines one characteristic of authoritarians as "punishing out groups." Conservative Christians are the big out group for the cultural left, and have been for a long time. ..."
"... The threat to the moral order is very real, and not really much of a threat anymore; it's a reality. ..."
"... Haidt says that the authoritarian impulse comes when people cease trusting in leaders. Yep, that's where a lot of us are, and not by choice. ..."
If you look back far enough in humankind's history, you will observe that you don't see civilizations
starting without their building temples first. Haidt, who is a secular liberal, is not making a theistic
point, not really. He's saying that the work of civilization can only be accomplished when a people
binds itself together around a shared sense of the sacred. It's what makes a people a people, and
a civilization a civilization. "It doesn't have to be a god," says Haidt. Anything that we hold
sacred, and hold it together, is enough.
The thing is, this force works like an electromagnetic
field: the more tightly it binds us, the more alien others appear to us, and the more we find it
impossible to empathize with them. This is what Haidt means by saying that morality binds and blinds.
Haidt quizzes the 700-800 people in the hall about their Hillary vs. Trump feelings. The group
- all psychologists, therapists, professors of psychology, and so forth - were overwhelmingly pro-Hillary
and anti-Trump. No surprise there. But then he tells them that if they believe that they could treat
without bias a patient who is an open Trump supporter, they're lying to themselves. In the America
of 2016, political bias is the most powerful bias of all - more polarizing by far than race, even.
Haidt turns to the work of social psychologist Karen Stenner, and her 2005 book
The Authoritarian Dynamic. The publisher describes the book like this (boldface emphases
mine):
What are the root causes of intolerance? This book addresses that question by developing a
universal theory of what determines intolerance of difference in general, which includes racism,
political intolerance, moral intolerance and punitiveness. It demonstrates that all these seemingly
disparate attitudes are principally caused by just two factors: individuals' innate psychological
predispositions to intolerance ("authoritarianism") interacting with changing conditions of societal
threat. The threatening conditions, particularly resonant in the present political climate,
that exacerbate authoritarian attitudes include, most critically, great dissension in
public opinion and general loss of confidence in political leaders. Using purpose-built
experimental manipulations, cross-national survey data and in-depth personal interviews with extreme
authoritarians and libertarians, the book shows that this simple model provides the most complete
account of political conflict across the ostensibly distinct domains of race and immigration,
civil liberties, morality, crime and punishment, and of when and why those battles will be most
heated.
Haidt says Stenner discerns three strands of contemporary political conservatism: 1) laissez-faire
libertarians (typically, business Republicans); 2) Burkeans (e.g., social conservatives who value
stability); and 3) authoritarians.
Haidt makes a point of saying that it's simply wrong to call Trump a fascist. He's too individualistic
for that. He's an authoritarian, but that is not a synonym for fascist, no matter how much the Left
wants to say it is.
According to Haidt's reading of Stenner, authoritarianism is not a stable personality trait. Most
people are not naturally authoritarian. But the latent authoritarianism within them is triggered
when they perceive a threat to the stable moral order.
It's at this point in the talk when Haidt surely began to make his audience squirm. He says that
in his work as an academic and social psychologist, he sees colleagues constantly demonizing and
mocking conservatives. He warns them to knock it off. "We need political diversity," he says. And:
"They are members of our community."
The discourse and behavior of the Left, says Haidt, is alienating millions of ordinary people
all over the West. It's not just America. We are sliding towards authoritarianism all over the West,
and there's really only one way to stop it.
At the 41:37 point in the talk, Haidt says that we can reduce intolerance and defuse the conflict
by focusing on sameness. We need unifying rituals, beliefs, institutions, and practices, he says,
drawing on Stenner's research. The romance the Left has long had with multiculturalism and diversity
(as the Left defines it) has to end, because it's helping tear us apart.
This fall, the Democrats are taking Stenner's advice brilliantly, says Haidt, referring to the
convention the Dems just put on, and Hillary's speech about how we're all better off standing together.
Haidt says this is actually good advice, period. "It's not just propaganda you wheel out at election
time," he says. If we don't have a feasible conservative party, we open the way for authoritarianism.
To end the talk, Haidt focuses on what his own very tribe - psychologists and academics - can
do to make things better. They can start by being aware of their own extreme bias. "We lean very
far left," he says, then shows a graph tracking how far from the center the academy has become over
the past 20 years.
Haidt says we don't need "equality" - that is, an equal number of conservatives and liberals in
the academy. We just need to have diversity enough for people to be challenged in their viewpoints,
so an academic community can flourish according to its nature. But this is not what we have. According
to the research Haidt presents, in 1996, liberals in the academy outnumbered conservatives 2:1. Today,
it's 5:1 - and the conservatives are concentrated in engineering and other technical fields. Says
Haidt: "In the core areas of the university - in the humanities and social sciences - it's 10 to
1 and 40 to 1."
The Right has left the university faculties, he said - and a lot of that is because they got tired
of the "hostile climate and discrimination"
"People who are not on the left … are often in the closet," says Haidt. "They can't speak up.
They can't criticize. They hear somebody say something, they believe it's false, but they can't speak
up and say why they believe it's false. And that is a breakdown in our science."
Until they repent (my word, not his), university professors will continue to be part of the problem,
not the solution, says Haidt. He ends by calling on his colleagues to "get our hearts in order."
To stop being moralistic hypocrites. To be humble. To be more forgiving, and more open to hearing
what their opponents have to say. Says Haidt, "If we want to change things, we need to do it more
from the perspective of love, not of hate."
I don't think the center can hold anymore. It's too late. The cultural left in this country is
very authoritarian, at least as regards orthodox Christians and other social conservatives.
On one of the Stenner slides, we see that she defines one characteristic of authoritarians as "punishing
out groups." Conservative Christians are the big out group for the cultural left, and have been for
a long time.
We are the people who defile what they consider most sacred: sexual liberty, including abortion
rights and gay rights. The liberals in control now (as distinct from all liberals, let me be clear)
have made it clear that they will not compromise with what they consider to be evil. We are the Klan
to them. Error has no rights in this world they're building.
If you'll recall my blogging about Hillary Clinton's convention speech, I really liked it in theory
- the unity business. The thing is, I don't believe for one second that it is anything but election
propaganda. I don't believe that the Democratic Party today has any interest in making space for
us. I wish I did believe that. I don't see any evidence for it. They and their supporters will drive
us out of certain professions, and do whatever they can to rub our noses in the dirt.
I know liberal readers of this blog will say, "But we don't!" To which I say: you don't,
maybe, but you're not running the show, alas.
The threat to the moral order is very real, and not really much of a threat anymore; it's a reality.
As I've written in this space many times, this is not something that was done to us; all of
us, Republicans and Democrats, Christians and non-Christians, have done this to ourselves. At this
point, all I want for my tribe is to be left alone. But the crusading Left won't let that happen
anymore.
They don't even want the Mormons to be allowed to play football foe the Big 12, for heaven's
sake. This assault is relentless. Far too many complacent Christians believe it will never hurt them,
that it will never happen where they live. It can and it will.
There is no center anymore. Alasdair MacIntyre was right. I may not be able to vote in good conscience
for Trump (and I certainly will not vote for Hillary Clinton), but I know exactly why a number of
good people have convinced themselves that this is the right thing to do. Haidt says that the authoritarian
impulse comes when people cease trusting in leaders. Yep, that's where a lot of us are, and not by
choice.
This week, I've been interviewing people for the Work chapter of my Benedict Option book. In all
but one case, the interviewees - lawyers, law professors, a doctor, corporate types, academics -
would only share their opinion if I promised that I wouldn't use their name. They know what things
are like where they work. They know that this is going to spread. That fear, that remaining inside
the closet, tells you something about where you are. When professionals feel that to state their
opinion would be to put their careers at risk, we are not in normal times.
The center has not held. I certainly wish Jon Haidt well. He's a good man doing brave, important
work. And I hope he proves me wrong on this. I honestly do. Because if I'm right, there goes America.
On the other hand, reasoning that this must not be true therefore it is not true is a good
way to get run over.
"... What struck me in the article was a conflict between attributing the DNC hack and a possible Clinton hack that the authors didn't even attempt to address. They claim analysts are very confident that Russian hackers, working for the government, hacked the DNC. But as to the possibility that anyone hacked Clinton's private server; well, if they did, they would have been way to savvy to leave any traces that they'd done so. A DNC hack; those sloppy Russian government hackers did it. A personal server; a real pro job. ..."
"... Hillary - if elected - will inherit economy in recession or on the brink of it, and her main preoccupation will be dealing with mounting domestic unrest, as well as with the wars she'll inherit from Obama. However she may want to, she'll be in no position to start another war. ..."
"... The US Dept of State is an equal-opportunity criminal syndicate ..."
"... There is always money for war, just no money for commons. ..."
"... Amazing how even the most obvious facts are denied by the largest margin of people - in spite of the truth being available to the contrary. People believed Goebbels and are now believing the propaganda from the cesspool of the totalitarian establishment, because they WANT TO. ..."
"... Regarding the to Nazi-standards evolving propaganda of the Western establishment, it would be helpful if people would stop 'googling' misinformation from the CIA 'search' engine aka data collection agency. There are other search engines available that will not skew the results. ..."
"... Psychological projection is a theory in psychology in which humans defend themselves against their own unconscious impulses or qualities (both positive and negative) by denying their existence in themselves while attributing them to others.[1] For example, a person who is habitually rude may constantly accuse other people of being rude. It incorporates blame shifting. ..."
"... ...New emails showing ( the worse evil ) Hillarys lies and corruption would be perfect PR to highlight for one of Trump's principle core messages of Washintons and especially Hitlarys corruption. ..."
"... The war monger industries, think tanks, and DOD want a bigger war. They don't have to kill Obama, they are waiting for the Killary and are using every dirty trick to get her elected. ..."
"... We're sort of behind schedule on that DoD memo that Wesley Clark saw after 9/11 that said the US would "take out" seven countries in five years. Iraq, Syria, and Libya are basket cases. Somalia and Sudan aren't much better. That leaves Lebanon and Iran. ..."
"... People know that those aren't true threats to us so following the Brzezinski/PNAC doctrine of not allowing any country to rise in any region leads us to real powers Russia and China. I wonder if Vegas has any odds on which country we'll be at war with next. And will we do it directly or via some sad-sack like Ukraine? ..."
"... Excellent points. The propaganda process to convince the American people to accept war with Russia (Syria and Iran) has been going on for several years now (the military budgets are just beginning their upward ramp due to Russia). The process is nearly identical to what Bush and the neocons did with Saddam and the invasion of Iraq. And propaganda through the mass media is effective--upwards to 70% of the American people supported Bush's invasion. ..."
"... Hillary's brain will not survive the pressure of a presidency when half the country thinks she is liar and untrustworthy. Her health is already suspicious and she may collapse after her election as there would be huge demands on her. The next president of the USA won't be Hillary Clinton for long, it will be Tim Kayne. ..."
"... No doubt there could well be a lot more in what The Don doesn't say. But this election will be about low voter turn out. Record lows. Everyone is nauseous. Trump has his cult following. Hilary disgraced the Bernistas - none of them will vote for Hilary. Hilary has no one except the neocon rats who have jumped ship. ..."
"... Hillary Clinton's Embrace of Kissinger Is Inexcusable. Bernie Sanders should call on her to repudiate him as the war criminal he is. https://www.thenation.com/article/hillary-clintons-embrace-of-kissinger-is-inexcusable/ ..."
"... As for the discussion on running out of money for wars ... well al-CIAduh/IS is much cheaper than the US uniformed armed forces, or the same people through the revolving door fighting as mercenaries. The KSA/GCC have been footing the bill ... because the same forces they're directing outwards will devastate them if and when they turn around and go for them directly. As times get harder for al-CIAduh/IS ... up against the Russians, Syrians, Iranians, Hezbulla ... it's got to occur to them that there's a much easier, much larger paycheck available in turning around and robbing the bank that's been feeding them rations. ..."
"... William Casey-CIA Director "We will know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ..."
"... William Casey-CIA Director "We will know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ..."
"... The New York Times is selling a world-view. You can't sell anyone anything they don't want to buy. The American public, having detected that their leaders have no idea how to bring them safely out of the wood of the "new economics", of the air economy, is begging to be told a story that - if we all close our eyes and believe real hard - will bring magic, fairy princess economy back to life. Life was OK ... nostalgia makes it better ... back when we used to hate the Russians. Let's hate 'em again. It's kind of a cargo cult mentality. ..."
"... Many times, back then, I would confront my comrades with the assertion that the mass produced media outlets (MPMO), such as the New York Times were nothing more than propaganda machines. "Hip" as they might have been, they just could not handle this concept. ..."
"... I also investigated the world of the eleetoids very deeply -- and I had several unique opportunities to do so. They are certainly not at all like us. They are generally quite vain and oddly shallow. Money, power, and organized violence are one and the same to them. Wall Street, Washington D.C., and the pentagon constellation are all on the same page. Crucially, none of these eleetoids is anywhere near what could be deemed sane. Their minds are profoundly warped just because they are what they are. ..."
"... And they are easily capable of setting off Armageddon. War and the proliferation of misery is not their goal in the end, much worse, it is simply a consequence, a symptom if you will, of their insanity. ..."
"... WADC and NYC attract psychopathy, so naturally our two choices for November are Alpha Psychopaths. That doesn't mean that the necrotic American ship of state will alter its course, only settle lower in the water, come to a gradual stop, tip downward at the bow, and then break in half. The psychopaths are The Vampire and will fly away, caww, caww, caww, leaving all the hoi polloi, the Little People, to drink and to drown. ..."
"... In some ways the rules of engagement for Syria are reminiscent of the restrictions placed on U.S. special operators in El Salvador in the 1980s. The U.S. forces in that tiny country helped train the embattled government's counter-insurgency forces. But they were not allowed to go into battle with the forces they trained. ..."
"... The people who have brainwashed the Americans are the problem just like in Hitler's time. Those global plutocratic families have been controlling the narrative for centuries and they seem to have convinced you it is the US citizens who are to blame for falling for the propaganda this time. ..."
Another example that so-called news in U.S. media is often more propaganda than valid
information is this NYT
piece on the "hack" of the Democratic National Committee:
WASHINGTON - A Russian cyberattack that targeted Democratic politicians was bigger than it first
appeared and breached the private email accounts of more than 100 party officials and groups,
officials with knowledge of the case said Wednesday.
...
A "Russian cyberattack"? How can the NYT claim such, in an opening paragraph, when even the Director
of U.S. National Intelligence
is unable to make such a judgement?
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, speaking about the hack of Democratic Party emails,
said on Thursday the U.S. intelligence community was not ready to "make the call on attribution"
as to who was responsible.
All the NYT lays out to backup its claim of a "Russian" hack is an anonymous Intelligence Committee
staffer who claims U.S. intelligence agencies "have virtually no doubt" about it. If that were true
why would the boss of these intelligence agencies publicly point out such doubts?
There is not even any evidence that the publishing of emails incriminating the DNC for manipulating
the Democratic primaries were the result of any "hack". It might have well been an insider who copied
the material and handed them to Wikileaks for publication. After the leak the DNC data analyst Seth
Rich was mutilated and murdered near his home in Washington DC. The case was obviously no robbery.
Julian Assange of Wikileaks pointed out that the circumstances of Rich's death are suspicious. I
first attributed that claim to Assange's typical exaggerations, but
the facts speak for themselves. The case indeed looks very much like a targeted killing. Who
did it and and why?
The "Russia is guilty" claim for whatever happened, without any proof, is becoming a daily diet
fed to the "western" public. A similar theme is the "barrel bombing" of (the
always same ) "hospitals" in Syria which is claimed whenever the Syrian government or its allies
hit some al-Qaeda
headquarter .
What struck me in the article was a conflict between attributing the DNC hack and a possible Clinton
hack that the authors didn't even attempt to address. They claim analysts are very confident that
Russian hackers, working for the government, hacked the DNC. But as to the possibility that anyone
hacked Clinton's private server; well, if they did, they would have been way to savvy to leave
any traces that they'd done so. A DNC hack; those sloppy Russian government hackers did it. A
personal server; a real pro job.
Hillary - if elected - will inherit economy in recession or on the brink of it, and her main preoccupation
will be dealing with mounting domestic unrest, as well as with the wars she'll inherit from Obama.
However she may want to, she'll be in no position to start another war.
America is in severe and accelerating decline, and simply has no resources for more wars.
The Dems and Repubs. always vie to wage the 'best, most just, necessary, wars.' Wars as in merciless
bombing and decimation and installation of a puppet Gvmt, not against and adversary who presents
a threat.
For B. Clinton, that was smashing Yugoslavia (plus various other, Africa etc.), while later
the Repub. Bushies concentrated on Iraq (but see Billy C on that, plus Iran sanctions…) and Afghanistan.
The two join together under Obama-Killary: Lybia and Syria. (Leaving much aside.)
Not of course that IRL the division is clear, it isn't, but that is what is used to bamboozle
the public. One war is baaaad, horrible, another is ee-ssential for security, and so all grinds
on, with one switch after another, year by year, nothing changes, with millions of deaths, maimed,
displaced, landscapes, agriculture, towns, whole countries, destroyed.
6 America is in severe and accelerating decline, and simply has no resources for more wars.
America prints fiat currency at will and posts numbers on computer terminals. The value of
this currency is indicated by its position as the petro-dollar. This arrangement is enforced by
American hegemony and illegitimate partnerships with other despotic governments which support
and maintain it's dominance as the world's most important currency.
There is always money for war, just no money for commons.
Amazing how even the most obvious facts are denied by the largest margin of people - in spite
of the truth being available to the contrary.
People believed Goebbels and are now believing the propaganda from the cesspool of the totalitarian
establishment, because they WANT TO.
Anybody that has ever had, or still has a shred of critical thinking left, will KNOW. The totalitarian,
corporate establishment, that has been inbreeding since thousands of years, is going for the kill.
The kill of 'democracy', the kill of freedom of speech, the killing of the 'pursuit of happiness'
and a new cold war among the different ethnicities on planet earth.
Therefore the so called 'racists' are actually 'Ethnicists' - denying ethnicities differing
from the white man the right to live. The right to exterminate non-white sub-humans at will.
Regarding the to Nazi-standards evolving propaganda of the Western establishment, it would
be helpful if people would stop 'googling' misinformation from the CIA 'search' engine aka data
collection agency. There are other search engines available that will not skew the results.
This is the result in regards to the tactics of the Western establishments' propaganda: It's called 'Psychological Projection' and has worked for millennia. To find out more about
it, one can look at the Wikipedia entry, or search anew for other sources:
Psychological projection is a theory in psychology in which humans defend themselves against
their own unconscious impulses or qualities (both positive and negative) by denying their existence
in themselves while attributing them to others.[1] For example, a person who is habitually rude
may constantly accuse other people of being rude. It incorporates blame shifting.
...New emails showing ( the worse evil ) Hillarys
lies and corruption would be perfect PR to highlight for one of Trump's principle core messages
of Washintons and especially Hitlarys corruption. But no instead of sitting back and letting the
new corruption unfold for himself to take advantage, the moronic narcissistic Trump has to make
it about him self again by saying his idiocies and outrages which diverts from his core message
that got him so much success.
Trump(et) needs to rely on getting fake liberals to be discouraged, apathetic or a vote for
third party, but Trump the King moron himself is driving these people into Hillarys camp.
The transition from Obama to Hillary mirrors the transition from Kennedy to Johnson. The
war monger industries, think tanks, and DOD want a bigger war. They don't have to kill Obama,
they are waiting for the Killary and are using every dirty trick to get her elected. Much
bigger wars are coming after January.
... ethnic cleansing that the modern Israeli's simply copy ...
Here we go with the US-Israel equivalence meme that is being pushed by the usual suspects.
As though nothing was learned in the last 80-120 years or so. If that were so, then Israel
might find itself in an even more precarious position. Actually, some might well say that Israel is turning back the clock to pre-modern
times, and joining with other reactionary forces to do so.
We're sort of behind schedule on that DoD memo that Wesley Clark saw after 9/11 that said the
US would "take out" seven countries in five years. Iraq, Syria, and Libya are basket cases. Somalia
and Sudan aren't much better. That leaves Lebanon and Iran.
People know that those aren't true
threats to us so following the Brzezinski/PNAC doctrine of not allowing any country to rise in
any region leads us to real powers Russia and China. I wonder if Vegas has any odds on which country
we'll be at war with next. And will we do it directly or via some sad-sack like Ukraine?
Excellent points. The propaganda process to convince the American people to accept war with
Russia (Syria and Iran) has been going on for several years now (the military budgets are just
beginning their upward ramp due to Russia). The process is nearly identical to what Bush and the
neocons did with Saddam and the invasion of Iraq. And propaganda through the mass media is effective--upwards
to 70% of the American people supported Bush's invasion.
January is already too late as this process has been going on for several years. The hysteria
is now building to a crescendo and is pretty much impossible to stop with reasoned arguments.
Speaking of influencing elections. The Ukrano-nazis look to be building up troop levels on
the Crimean border to show off horrible Russian/Putin aggression. Looks like the Ukrano-nazis
are willing to kill off a bunch of their own soldiers for propaganda effect.
Hillary's brain will not survive the pressure of a presidency when half the country thinks she
is liar and untrustworthy. Her health is already suspicious and she may collapse after her election
as there would be huge demands on her.
The next president of the USA won't be Hillary Clinton for long, it will be Tim Kayne.
No doubt there could well be a lot more in what The Don doesn't say. But this election will be
about low voter turn out. Record lows. Everyone is nauseous.
Trump has his cult following. Hilary disgraced the Bernistas - none of them will vote for Hilary.
Hilary has no one except the neocon rats who have jumped ship.
Will she be able to excite Obamas #HopeAndChange army...? I don't see them getting out of bed
sorry - and it's why you see #NeverTrump. It doesn't matter what Trump does, dem voter turn out
will be at historic lows.
The Guardian stated yesterday that Putin is ramping up for the 'invasion' (sic) of Crimea, but
went out of their way to leave the impression it was a Russian invasion, and not invasion by NATO,
behind a current World Bank-funded $10Bs looted from US taxpayers to rebuild Eastern Ukraine roads
and bridges to military load capacity, ... just another wholly illegal and pro-war act by the
ZIMF-WB to an unconstitutional dual-Israel junta coup leadership in Kiev, and made in violation
to a non-NATO state, with no expectation the 'loans' would ever be paid back, ...just as $35B
IMF loaned, then Kerry backstopped with US taxpayer savings, will never be repaid. Ever.
The 'War of Crimea' is necessary for many political purposes, but primarily to cover up that
July 2015 looting of $50B from the US Treasury by Kerry and the RINO Congress for war grift to
Ukraine that will never be repaid, stolen from SS and disability funds.
And behind that War of Crimea will come a US Militarized Police State of One Thousand Years,
to cover The Chosen's wholly illegal, usurious, odious, onerous synthetic CDS 'scheme' to transfer
all of WS's Exceptionalist *gambling debts* onto the backs of our grandchildren, when WS should
be tarred and feathered, then beaten with birch switches.
Instead, we get US Congress bleeting for Bibi and clapping at attention until the blood runs
from their fingernails down their arms, afraid to be the first to stop clapping. New America is
Kim Jung Un on steroids in 2017.
Tick tock! What's the plan to protect the US Constitution? Where's the patriot sitrep?
This stuff pervades the corporate media across the board :
A Rush to Judgment on Russian Doping . If war is the continuation of politics by other means,
'news' is the continuation of war by other means.
As for the discussion on running out of money for wars ... well al-CIAduh/IS is much cheaper
than the US uniformed armed forces, or the same people through the revolving door fighting as
mercenaries. The KSA/GCC have been footing the bill ... because the same forces they're directing
outwards will devastate them if and when they turn around and go for them directly.
As times get harder for al-CIAduh/IS ... up against the Russians, Syrians, Iranians, Hezbulla
... it's got to occur to them that there's a much easier, much larger paycheck available in turning
around and robbing the bank that's been feeding them rations.
When the oil-archies go up in smoke the free for all will begin in earnest ... 'protecting
world security'. Then US/Israeli troops will land in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar put out the
fires, grab the checkbooks, reseat their clients under the new dispensation. That'll be their
plan anyway. As Obama said, Hillary's will be his third term ... they hope. Pick the low-hanging
fruit on the way to Moscow and Beijing.
I liked the guy with the videos of no people at the Hillary rally. I liked Newt comparing Trump
to Truman ... they do seem so alike, on more than the Dewey Defeats Truman level. Harry was as
utterly unprepared as Donald is to be POTUS, and was whipsawed by the same old domestic gangsters
oblivious to the consequences of their free-flowing gravy-train at home.
While a good post, I wonder why b. would say "I first attributed that claim to Assange's typical
exaggerations..." I've not found him to exaggerate, typically, but I have found the MSM to want
us to believe that he does... Also, it is Marcy Wheeler (a woman), not Marc (this mistake has
been made here before).
A friend in Silicon Valley - with a seven-member family all voting for B Sanders - reported that
there seemed to be little doubt primaries were stolen. His polling station was managed by guys
with IT background (S. Valley, after all) - who witnessed manipulations, including the purging
of all provisional ballots.
The bottom line on this is ... ya gotta wanna believe. The New York Times is selling a world-view.
You can't sell anyone anything they don't want to buy. The American public, having detected that
their leaders have no idea how to bring them safely out of the wood of the "new economics", of
the air economy, is begging to be told a story that - if we all close our eyes and believe real
hard - will bring magic, fairy princess economy back to life. Life was OK ... nostalgia makes
it better ... back when we used to hate the Russians. Let's hate 'em again. It's kind of a cargo
cult mentality.
A measure of just how disjoint we all are. There's no there there where our
memories of America were, we need a magic spell to bring tinker belle back to life, so we can
fly back to never-never land again, live happily ever after. Things are very, very bad for the
USA.
I was an anti-Vietnam war protester. For the most part we were very loosely organized, or even
not at all organized. We were hippies, doing the whole mid-60s to mid-70s thing. Our city decided
to actually have the fire department stage a pro-war protest -- Strange times indeed!
Many times, back then, I would confront my comrades with the assertion that the mass produced
media outlets (MPMO), such as the New York Times were nothing more than propaganda machines. "Hip"
as they might have been, they just could not handle this concept. They were totally appalled
that I could dare to claim this. I was sort of like their first "conspiracy theorist". The comments
above reveal how times have changed. Even if they are still in psychological thrall to the propaganda
machinery, the seed of dark doubt has now been sewn in their bewildered hearts.
I also investigated the world of the eleetoids very deeply -- and I had several unique
opportunities to do so. They are certainly not at all like us. They are generally quite vain and
oddly shallow. Money, power, and organized violence are one and the same to them. Wall Street,
Washington D.C., and the pentagon constellation are all on the same page. Crucially, none of these
eleetoids is anywhere near what could be deemed sane. Their minds are profoundly warped just because
they are what they are.
And they are easily capable of setting off Armageddon. War and the proliferation of misery
is not their goal in the end, much worse, it is simply a consequence, a symptom if you will, of
their insanity.
@blues | Aug 12, 2016 5:19:22 AM | 54 "I was an anti-Vietnam war protester.
God bless you for that.
I'm still shocked how many people in Israel, Ukraine, ME, the Commonwealth, USA, Poland, are
eager to go to war because of twisted ideologies, money, stupidity, or some inner demons, sinful
desires.
May be we need another war after all, just to get rid of them, since they pose a mortal danger
to their host societies and cannot be restored to humanity in peaceful ways?
39;How does John Bolton fit with Trumps call for better Russian relations?I'd say he's thinking
of him like he thought of Newt, which is not much.
He does have to placate the warmongers a little bit,or else they'll call him soft on terror.
Stop getting hysterical over unknown unknowns.:)
He said he was being sarcastic about Obomba and IsUS,but again,like a jury,the American people
are given info that can't be taken back.Of course its true,and I guarantee it will come up again,as
we are still almost 3 months to the election.
And the propaganda,as someone mentioned,is unbelievable,and yes the word should be stricken
from the rolls.
WADC and NYC attract psychopathy, so naturally our two choices for November are Alpha Psychopaths.
That doesn't mean that the necrotic American ship of state will alter its course, only settle
lower in the water, come to a gradual stop, tip downward at the bow, and then break in half. The
psychopaths are The Vampire and will fly away, caww, caww, caww, leaving all the hoi polloi, the
Little People, to drink and to drown.
In some ways the rules of engagement for Syria are reminiscent of the restrictions placed on U.S.
special operators in El Salvador in the 1980s. The U.S. forces in that tiny country helped train
the embattled government's counter-insurgency forces. But they were not allowed to go into battle
with the forces they trained.
Roger Carstens, a former lieutenant colonel for the Green Berets who trained local forces in
Iraq and Afghanistan, told me there are good battlefield reasons for allowing the adviser to fight
with the forces he trains. "They gain legitimacy and credibility and they show your partner forces
that you share the risk," he said.
Carstens also said that fighting alongside indigenous troops is a kind of vetting process.
"The instructor gets to see whether the forces he is training have absorbed their training," which
he said is important to evaluate how effective they are.
This is debatable and a lot of nuance is absent from the statement. All debt is not the same,
and in fact for a sovereign that has only liabilities in it's own currency the only debt that
matters is that owed by the citizens to private banks. Will wait for an open thread to revisit.
The Americans are the problem.
They're not interested in foreign policy.
So if Trump can give them jobs and safety abroad, he may bomb the rest of the world.
We can't exclude he appoints a person like John Bolton.
@ From the Hague wrote "The Americans are the problem".............
The people who have brainwashed the Americans are the problem just like in Hitler's time. Those
global plutocratic families have been controlling the narrative for centuries and they seem to
have convinced you it is the US citizens who are to blame for falling for the propaganda this
time.
We will never overcome the Western sick form of social organization if we continue to blame
the wrong folks. We need to end private finance and return all those grifted earnings to the global
commons along with neutering inheritance globally so no one individually/family can control social
policy.
And then the media would not be the brainwashing mechanism it is now building credence for
more wars.
Arguments of Sanders supporters against Hillary are not perfectly applicable to Hillary vs Trump
contest.
Notable quotes:
"... If Bernie does not get the nomination it will be the wilderness for the Democrats - no young voters no independents - unless they can conjure a principled candidate somehow from somewhere. ..."
"... You'll then cycle back to the lesser of two evils, that Democrats like Obama and Clinton are needed to help the poor blacks and minorities. To me this is a myth. The poor get fucked no matter what party is in office. ..."
"... What planet African Americans are doing "better off" on is unknown. What is known is that President Obama is about to leave office with African Americans in their worst economic situation since Ronald Reagan . ..."
"... Of course not. But when you have an issue you can continually put bandaids on the symptoms or you can perform a root cause analysis and then proceed to fix these root causes. The fact is that politicians are disinclined to put the needs of voters first, they tend to pay lip service to the needs of voters, while spending 60% of their time interacting with rich donors, who are very good are articulating their needs, as they hand over large sums of money. This system creates a log jam to reform. If we can return the immutable link to the voters interests, and congress them reform of economic distortions that support racism become far far easier. Motive of change and motives of votes become transparent. ..."
"... the world is divided in two, half who are nauseated by the above and the other half who purr in admiration at the clever way Clinton has fucked the public once again. As Mencken said democracy is that system of government in which it is assumed that the common man knows what he wants and deserves to get it good and hard. ..."
"... I don't believe her core statements. Sorry but as a person I just can't buy into the package. Both republicans and democrats on a vague macro level will try to lower unemployment but neither will talk about falling participation. Clinton had already proved she's probably as likely as Trump to get bullets flying. It's her judgement. She's part of the same old we need to intervene yet never understanding the real issues. I despise her unflinching support of Saudi Arabia. That policy is insane!!! Etc etc etc. ..."
"... I believe both parties represent essentially the same with small regional differences . ..."
"... One wonders what makes them call themselves Democrats? ..."
"... Certainly not economic and political justice, peace, democracy, or integrity in governance. ..."
"... Yes, it's been the single most shocking revelation of the entire election year for me as well. Not just the cynicism of the rank-and-file, but the arrogance and isolation of our corrupt Democratic party elite, many of whom still don't seem to grasp that a revolt by progressive Democrats and Independents is already under way. This is one of the forms it may take. ..."
"... Hilary Clinton has various comments that reveals somebody who certainly fits the psychopath spectrum. Among the lowest of the low was "We came, we saw, he died!" Accompanied by a cackle of laughter. This was announced in full view of the media and public when Gadhaffi was overthrown by US assistance. Are some Democrats so brainwashed that they think a woman president is the answer regardless of what kind of person that woman is? Since when do decent people in politics exult in death like this? Libya's murdered leader was no angel but Hitler he was not and as older people have told me, the deaths of Hitler and Stalin and the like were greeted publicly with muted and dignified relief by western representatives. ..."
"... Wake up Democrats. At least read a book called The Unravelling by an American journalist whose name I forget. This heartbreaking book says it all about the realities for the non privileged and non powerful in todays' America. ..."
"... If Clinton is the Dem nominee it does more than give me shivers. Heck, I view Hillary as demonstrably more dangerous with foreign policy. ..."
"... Both their economic/domestic policies do little or worse for the current situation. Both are untrustworthy and any rhetoric on policy is highly questionable (although Clinton is certainly the worst in this regard). About the only good thing between either is that Trump is willing to question our empire abroad, which is well overdue (meanwhile Clinton seems to want to expand it). ..."
"... Uh huh and your supporting a person: That voted for the Iraq War, destabilized Libya, Benghazi, gave tacit approval to a military junta in Honduras as Secretary of State, called black youth super predators, supports trade agreements that destroy our own manufacturing jobs, takes more money from special interests than her constituency, has made millions in speeches from the bank lobby and won't disclose the transcripts......yeah she's real HONEST. ..."
"... Money buys the influence to be selected as a candidate. Normally. 99% of the time. Sometimes a Huey Long populist breaks through the process and scares the fuck out of the power structures. But you know how candidates are selected. Poor smart people never get to run for president unless they build a populist power base. The existing political parties defer to donors. Donors like the Koch Brothers, who happily funded Bill Clinton and the DLC made their preferences clear. They didn't invest in a fit of altruistic progressivism. They wanted the DNC to swing right. And voila it did and Bill was anointed as the "one" to run. Don't be so naive. ..."
Robin is relentless is arguing AGAINST, but he is quite light on arguing for anything. It is an
interesting question as to what he stands for.
His main argument is that zero information from "right wing" press is true. He seems unaware
that at times, actual facts are presented or not presented or suppressed by either media outlet,
depending on their corporate ownership and management slant of what should be reported. Me? I
read everything and decide if something is a fact. It is strange that factual reporting about
the actual many many FOIA lawsuits only gets printed in right wing press. They of course have
an agenda, but does not negate the facts they report. Like Clinton being allowed to be deposed
in a civil FOIA suit. That is a fact, with quotes from the Judge. CNN? I guess they couldn't afford
to report this factual development.
When you only read the press looking for a partisan set of narratives, you end up being partisan
and ill informed. When you read all the flavours of press in an desire to inform yourself, when
your goal is not a narrative but factual accounts of the truth, then you can be better informed.
So we have partisans, who only view Fox and we also have partisans who only view CNN. Both are
as bad as each other. One must be capable of decreeing the motives of each, and discarding the
nonfactual narratives, and then one can be fully informed.
Robin makes the assumption that facts only occur in his selected set of informational partisan
sources. Why? Because he is partisan. This then enables him to argue against a narrative, rather
than support his own narrative. He plays the neat trick of simply discarding any factual reporting
from places like Breibart. One can see interesting lacks of coverage on google search.
"Libel is a method of defamation expressed by print, writing, pictures, signs, effigies, or any
communication embodied in physical form that is injurious to a person's reputation, exposes a
person to public hatred, contempt or ridicule, or injures a person in his/her business or profession."
So surely in America, Clinton with her wealth would take some legal action? I would if I
had her money, and wealth. Interesting that she has not? Perhaps you could write to her and
suggest she defend herself in a real and palpable way?
Yes and a lot of the press are trying to bury the news about another Sanders success. When you
look at how many voting districts he comes out top in, in is a large percentage. Clinton tends
to get closer or take the district if their is a higher population density.
The influence of the super delegates is a scandal in a "democratic process".
First I would be very careful taking what G gives, it is nowadays "fixing" news like Fox. Most
reliable, if speaking about polls the word can be used, is results of metastudies:
If Bernie does not get the nomination it will be the wilderness for the Democrats - no young voters
no independents - unless they can conjure a principled candidate somehow from somewhere.
Clinton won't cut it and she won't beat Trump. Trump will out her on every crooked deal she
has been involved in.
You'll then cycle back to the lesser of two evils, that Democrats like Obama and Clinton are needed
to help the poor blacks and minorities. To me this is a myth. The poor get fucked no matter what
party is in office.
Is this is a Fox News plant article? yeah yeah, let's vote Clinton who promises a continuation
of Obama's policies. Will Trump make this much worse? Maybe. Trump or Clinton will in my opinion
do little to improve these issues quoted below. You have a different opinion. Great.
"Like the rest of America, Black America, in the aggregate, is better off now than it was when
I came into office," said President Obama on December 19, in response to a question by Urban Radio
Networks White House Correspondent April Ryan.
What planet African Americans are doing "better off" on is unknown. What is known is that
President Obama is about to leave office with African Americans in their worst economic situation
since Ronald Reagan . A look at every key stat as President Obama starts his sixth year in
office illustrates that.
Unemployment. The average Black unemployment under President Bush was 10 percent. The average
under President Obama after six years is 14 percent. Black unemployment, "has always been double"
[that of Whites] but it hasn't always been 14 percent. The administration was silent when Black
unemployment hit 16 percent – a 27-year high – in late 2011 .
Poverty. The percentage of Blacks in poverty in 2009 was 25 percent; it is now 27 percent.
The issue of poverty is rarely mentioned by the president or any members of his cabinet. Currently,
more than 45 million people – 1 in 7 Americans – live below the poverty line.
The Black/White Wealth Gap. The wealth gap between Blacks and Whites in America is at a 24-year
high. A December study by PEW Research Center revealed the average White household is worth $141,900,
and the average Black household is worth $11,000. From 2010 to 2013, the median income for Black
households plunged 9 percent.
Income inequality. "Between 2009 and 2012 the top one percent of Americans enjoyed 95 percent
of all income gains, according to research from U.C. Berkeley," reported The Atlantic. It was
the worst since 1928. As income inequality has widened during President Obama's time in office,
the president has endorsed tax policy that has widened inequality, such as the Bush Tax cuts.
Education: The high school dropout rate has improved during the Obama administration. However,
currently 42 percent of Black children attend high poverty schools, compared to only 6 percent
of White students. The Department of Education's change to Parent PLUS loans requirements cost HBCU's more than $150 million and interrupted the educations of 28,000-plus HBCU students.
SBA Loans. In March 2014, the Wall Street Journal reported that only 1.7 percent of $23 billion
in SBA loans went to Black-owned businesses in 2013, the lowest loan of SBA lending to Black businesses
on record. During the Bush presidency, the percentage of SBA loans to Black businesses was 8 percent
– more than four times the Obama rate.
"All the equations showed strikingly uni- form statistical results: racism as we have measured
it was a significantly disequalizing force on the white income distribution, even when other factors
were held constant. A 1 percent increase in the ratio of black to white median incomes (that is,
a 1 percent decrease in racism) was associated with a .2 percent decrease in white inequality,
as measured by the Gini coefficient. The corresponding effect on top 1 percent share of white
income was two and a half times as large, indicating that most of the inequality among whites
generated by racism was associated with increased income for the richest 1 percent of white families.
Further statistical investigation reveals that increases in the racism variable had an insignifi-
cant effect on the. share received by the poorest whites and resulted in a decrease in the income
share of the whites in the middle income brackets."
"What I said, and still maintain, is that the struggle against racism is as important as the struggle
against other forms of oppression, including those with economic and financial causes."
We can agree on this statement. However, do we need to recognise that legislation alone will
not solve racism. A percentage of poor people turn against the "other" and apportion blame for
their issues.
" that campaign finance and banking reform will fix everything"
Of course not. But when you have an issue you can continually put bandaids on the symptoms
or you can perform a root cause analysis and then proceed to fix these root causes. The fact is
that politicians are disinclined to put the needs of voters first, they tend to pay lip service
to the needs of voters, while spending 60% of their time interacting with rich donors, who are
very good are articulating their needs, as they hand over large sums of money. This system creates
a log jam to reform. If we can return the immutable link to the voters interests, and congress
them reform of economic distortions that support racism become far far easier. Motive of change
and motives of votes become transparent.
"The various forms of discrimination are not separable in real life. Employers' hiring and
promotion practices; resource allocation in city schools; the structure of transportation sys-
tems; residential segregation and housing quality; availability of decent health care; be- havior
of policemen and judges; foremen's prejudices; images of blacks presented in the media and the
schools; price gouging in ghetto stores-these and the other forms of social and economic discrimination
interact strongly with each other in determining the occupational status and annual income, and
welfare, of black people. The processes are not simply additive but are mutually reinforcing.
Often, a decrease in one narrow form of discrimination is accompanied by an increase in another
form. Since all aspects of racism interact, an analysis of racism should incorporate all its as-
pects in a unified manner."
My thesis is this: build economic equality and the the pressing toxins of racism diminish.
But yeah dismiss Sanders as a one issue candidate. he is a politician, which I acknowledge. He
has a different approach to clinton who will micro triangulate constantly depending on who she
in front of. I find his approach ore honest. Your mileage may vary.
" money spent on campaigns does not correlate very highly to winning"
No but overall money gets to decide on a narrow set of compliance in the candidates. But it
still correlates to winning. Look at the Greens with no cash. Without the cash, they will never
win. Sanders has proved that 1. We do not need to depend on the rich power brokers to select narrowly
who will be presented as a candidate. 2. He has proved that a voter can donate and compete with
corporate donations. I would rather scads of voter cash financing rather than corporate cash buying
influence. ABSCAM was a brief flash, never repeated to show us what really happens in back rooms
when a wad of cash arrives with a politician. That we cannot PROVE what happens off the grid,
we can and should rely on common sense about the influence of money. 85% of the American people
believe cash buys influence. The only influence on a politician should be the will of the people.
Sure, corporates can speak. Speech is free. Corporate cash as speech is a different matter. It
is a moral corruption.
"most contributions come after electoral success"
Yes part of the implied contract of corporates and people like the Koch Brothers: Look after
us and we will look after you. We will keep you in power, as long as you slant the legislation
to favour us over the voters.
You do realise the Clinton Foundation bought the assets of the DLC, a defunct organisation.
Part of the assets are the documents and records that contain the information about the Koch Brothers
donations and their executives joining the "management" of the DLC. Why would a Charity be interested
in the DLC documents? Ah it is a Clinton Foundation. Yeah yeah, there is no proof of anything
is there. No law was broken. Do I smell something ? Does human nature guide my interpretation
absent a clear statement from the Foundation of this "investment"?? Yes.
We have to start SOMEWHERE. Root causes are the best place to start.
Democrat or Republican, Blacks and Whites at the bottom are thrown in a race for the bottom
and this helps fuel the impoverishment of both. It is fuel to feed racism. My genuine belief.
Why is it wrong for democrats to pick their own party leader? Also Obama beat Hilary last time
so what's Bernies problem now? Also why moan about a system that's been in place for decades now,
surely the onus was on Sanders to attract more middle of the road dem voters? Finally I'm sure
republicans would also love to vote in Sanders, easy to demolish with attack ads before the election
(you'll note they've studiously ignored him so far).
the world is divided in two, half who are nauseated by the above and the other half who purr in
admiration at the clever way Clinton has fucked the public once again. As Mencken said democracy
is that system of government in which it is assumed that the common man knows what he wants and
deserves to get it good and hard.
explain to me why the blacks and Hispanics vote for her because it is a mystery to me. She
stands for everything they have had to fight against. So you have a 1%er-Wall St.-invade
Iraq-subprime-cheat the EU-Goldman Sachs-arms dealing-despot cuddling-fuck the environment
coalition. And blacks and Hispanics too? Are they out of their minds?
BERNIE SANDERS - OR ZIG AGAINST ZAG
.
If the American people don't come to their senses and give Bernie Sanders the Democratic nomination,
we're going to end up with a choice between Zig and Zag. Zig is Donald Trump, and Zag is Hillary
Clinton. To paraphrase Mort Sahl back in the sixties, the only difference between the two is if
Donald 'Zig' Trump sees a Black child lying in the street, he'd simply order his chauffeur to
run over him. If Hillary 'Zag' Clinton saw the kid, she'd also order her chauffeur to run over
him, but she'd weep, and go apologize to the NAACP, after she felt the bump.
.
WAKE UP, BLACK PEOPLE!!!
Giving aid to the Republicans? If you honestly believe that any criticisms I have is worse than
what I discuss, you need to give up politics and get a hobby. Trump will for example use her FOIA/email
issues like a stick to beat her with. This is not Soviet Russia where we all adopt the party line.
I'm not not ever have been a member of the Democratic Party. I COULD have been this year. Now?
Never. The solution to the nations problems will come from outside this party.
I prefer neither. You love fearmongering about how worse it will be under trump. Hmmm. I don't
buy that tale. Take Black family incomes. In the toilet. Under either party it goes south. Abortion?
Like slavery nothing ...... Nothing is going to change. It's too late to change that one. But
it's a useful tool to make us believe ONLY Clinton can protect us. Economically the Democrats
are essentially the same as the Republicans, more of the same corporate welfare. Would Clinton
cut Social Security? Maybe. I don't believe her core statements. Sorry but as a person I just
can't buy into the package. Both republicans and democrats on a vague macro level will try to
lower unemployment but neither will talk about falling participation. Clinton had already proved
she's probably as likely as Trump to get bullets flying. It's her judgement. She's part of the
same old we need to intervene yet never understanding the real issues. I despise her unflinching
support of Saudi Arabia. That policy is insane!!! Etc etc etc.
You believe a black family gays and women will sing Kumbaya under Clinton and all will be well.
I believe both parties represent essentially the same with small regional differences .
It would be perhaps remotely marxist if he said comrades. But even that was used by democrats,
socialists and even fascists and nazists so I would say that no, there is nothing marxist about
it. One of his central messages is that we need to come together and improve our society, that
we are all the same, without race or religion, with the same needs and fears as humans.
I even disagree with people saying that he promotes class struggle, he is talking about
fair share and he is an ardent supporter of following the laws even when they are against his
ideology, which is something that radicals do not tend to do. Radicals do not give a damn
about laws and neither do Marxists or far-right wingers, fascists etc. Those groups believe in
changing the society through struggle into a model that fits their idea of the world whatever
that may be. He simply states his beliefs and suggests laws to adjust the society to human
needs, to eat, to live, to prosper in an equal footing.
It is a rather sad commentary on how the bar of integrity and honesty has been so lowered
that it doesn't even faze them
One wonders what makes them call themselves Democrats? Their stance on gun and abortion issues?
Certainly not economic and political justice, peace, democracy, or integrity in governance.
Yes, it's been the single most shocking revelation of the entire election year for me as well.
Not just the cynicism of the rank-and-file, but the arrogance and isolation of our corrupt Democratic
party elite, many of whom still don't seem to grasp that a revolt by progressive Democrats and
Independents is already under way. This
is one of the forms it may take.
Recharging is always a good idea ... and never more so than in an election year as turbulent,
crazy, uplifting, disillusioning, energizing, maddening and fascinating as this one. I'll also
be away (for weeks) toward the end of this month.
Before you go, here's Carl Bernstein's interview with Don Lemon, in case you missed it:
Hilary Clinton has various comments that reveals somebody who certainly fits the psychopath spectrum.
Among the lowest of the low was "We came, we saw, he died!" Accompanied by a cackle of laughter.
This was announced in full view of the media and public when Gadhaffi was overthrown by US assistance.
Are some Democrats so brainwashed that they think a woman president is the answer regardless of
what kind of person that woman is? Since when do decent people in politics exult in death like
this? Libya's murdered leader was no angel but Hitler he was not and as older people have told
me, the deaths of Hitler and Stalin and the like were greeted publicly with muted and dignified
relief by western representatives.
Add to that the continual lies that are being aired in public and this is why the USA has lost
its way.
Hillary will not see that one criminal in the financial world of the USA will face justice for
their mafia-like actions and destruction of billions of dollars and assets while stealing the
savings of Americans and non Americans. President Obama hasn't done it and he is not the buddy
Hilary is to these people.
And since when does the USA have the ethical superiority to attack countries like Russia for cronyism
etc? This is unbelievable - a presidential nominee candidate is being investigated by the FBI
and she doesn't stand down?
Wake up Democrats. At least read a book called The Unravelling by an American journalist whose
name I forget. This heartbreaking book says it all about the realities for the non privileged
and non powerful in todays' America.
I recall David Bowie's beautiful song This Is Not America. The Bernie supporters understand
that, all power to him, those who think like him, and his supporters.
Please. She lost that race in South Carolina when her husband, along with Geraldine Ferraro,
called Obama being president a fairy tale and an affirmative action candidate, respectively.
You can't win with only minority support, but you can't win without any of it if you are a
Dem. Up until SC, the Clintons had minority support in the bag--most black people had never
heard of Obama. Things changed real fast.
Like its not obvious? There is now no paper trail to enable ensuring computer votes are true.
A man on the moon can now ensure who is going to be President, that was said by a premier computer
security expert.
Along with extensive disenfranchisement, numerous ways its pretty clear these outcomes are
preordained. Guess I am not going to be voting for either of the two appointed runners, its
pointless. I will vote for Bernie when its time in California.
And to branch out a bit, there are so many empty stock phrases to choose from in her 2016 campaign
alone, including "I'm with her" and "Breaking down barriers" courtesy of her 2008 campaign manager,
Mark Penn. Speaking of Penn, there's a hilarious little passage in "Clinton, Inc" (p. 65) which
describes Penn running through possible campaign slogans for 2008. "Penn began to walk through
all the iterations of Hillary slogans: Solutions for America, Ready for a change, Ready to lead,
Big challenges, Real Solutions; Time to pick a President... but then he seem to get a little lost...Working
for change, Working for you. There was silence, then snickers as Penn tried to remember all the
bumper stickers which run together sounded absurd and indistinguishable. The Hillary I know."....
Oy. ^__^
But to pick out my favorite Hillary statement of the week, in honor of her close associate
and fellow gonif, Hillary superdelegate, Sheldon Silver, who recently got 12 years in the slammer:
In 2000, Silver was integral in Clinton's Senate campaign. According to The New York Times,
Silver helped Hillary lobby members of the state assembly for their support
So I guess the former speaker of the NY assembly is just gonna have to vote for Hillary
from behind bars, instead of at the DNC? How "super-inconvenient."
If Clinton is the Dem nominee it does more than give me shivers. Heck, I view Hillary as demonstrably
more dangerous with foreign policy. Both use identity politics as a decisive issue- which only
is a distraction from their lack of policy.
Both their economic/domestic policies do little or
worse for the current situation. Both are untrustworthy and any rhetoric on policy is highly questionable
(although Clinton is certainly the worst in this regard). About the only good thing between either
is that Trump is willing to question our empire abroad, which is well overdue (meanwhile Clinton
seems to want to expand it).
If it's between those two I vote Green and take the 'Jesse Ventura' option: vote anyone not
Dem or Rep. Both parties are two corrupt subsidiaries of their corporate masters.
Most effective senator for the last 35 years and as Mayor or Burlington stopped corporate real
estate developers from turning Burlington into Aspen east coast version.
She voted for the Iraq war, being investigated by the FBI for her emails, there was Benghazi,
turning Libya into a ISIS hotbed, allowed a military junta to assassinate a democratically elected
president in Honduras and said nothing,
takes $675k from Goldman for 3 speeches and refuses to disclose the transcripts because she
KNOWS it'll hurt her, voted for trade deals that's gutted manufacturing in the USA....should I
go on?
So please please explain how Hillary Rodham Clinton is going to wave a wand and fix racism? I
already know she will not fix poverty, she will slap a few ersatz bandaids onto bills that won't
pass and like the spoiled child will seek praise every time mommy gets him to shit on the potty.
You might recall a guy called Martin Luther King. he had some words about economic fairness and
poverty.
"" In the treatment of poverty nationally, one fact stands out: there are twice as many
white poor as Negro poor in the United States. Therefore I will not dwell on the experiences
of poverty that derive from racial discrimination, but will discuss the poverty that affects white
and Negro alike . "
nihilism: the rejection of all religious and moral principles, often in the belief that life
is meaningless. The belief that nothing in the world has a real existence.
You love that word but rejection of the dysfunctional state of DNC politics is NOT
nihilism. Moral corruption around campaign finance is real. Moral corruption around money and
lobbyists is real. The desire to fix this, this is real. Seeking real change is not nihilism.
But yes, if it pleases you to continue in every other post with this word, do so. It's misuse
says more about you than Sanders.
Please tell me exactly how much HRC has done for the U.S.? I'm from NYC and when she brought her
carpet bagging ass here and as a 2 term senator she pushed 3 pieces of legislation thru. If you
look at Bernie Sanders voting record:
He's been one of the most effective senators in Congress and has been able to get things done
with cooperation from both sides of the aisle.
So tell me again, what's she done that's so notable?
Uh huh and your supporting a person:
That voted for the Iraq War, destabilized Libya, Benghazi, gave tacit approval to a military junta
in Honduras as Secretary of State, called black youth super predators, supports trade agreements
that destroy our own manufacturing jobs, takes more money from special interests than her constituency,
has made millions in speeches from the bank lobby and won't disclose the transcripts......yeah
she's real HONEST......riiigggghhhhttttt....
Money buys the influence to be selected as a candidate. Normally. 99% of the time. Sometimes
a Huey Long populist breaks through the process and scares the fuck out of the power structures.
But you know how candidates are selected. Poor smart people never get to run for president unless
they build a populist power base. The existing political parties defer to donors. Donors like
the Koch Brothers, who happily funded Bill Clinton and the DLC made their preferences clear. They
didn't invest in a fit of altruistic progressivism. They wanted the DNC to swing right. And voila
it did and Bill was anointed as the "one" to run. Don't be so naive.
"... At the time, three field offices were in agreement an investigation should be launched after the FBI received notification from a bank of suspicious activity from a foreigner who had donated to the Clinton Foundation , according to the official. ..."
"... The Department of Justice had looked into allegations surrounding the foundation a year earlier after the release of the controversial book "Clinton Cash," but found them to be unsubstantiated and there was insufficient evidence to open a case. ..."
"... Some also expressed concern the request seemed more political than substantive, especially given the timing of it coinciding with the investigation into the private email server and Clinton's presidential campaign. ..."
"... The official said involvement of the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Southern District of New York "would be seen by agents as a positive development as prosecutors there are generally thought to be more aggressive than the career lawyers within the DOJ ." ..."
"... The former official said the investigation is being coordinated between bureau field offices and FBI managers at headquarters in Washington, D.C. The unusual process would ensure senior FBI supervisors, including Director James Comey, would be kept abreast of case progress and of significant developments. ..."
"... What a joke. The FBI already has their statement prepared. "No reasonable prosecutor would prosecute Hillary over these obvious felonies that Hillary committed. Gotta go to a Hillary fundraiser now. Have a great day and keep trusting us!" ..."
"... FBI = F ucked B eyond I magination. Zero credibility these days, and deserving of zero respect with another "nothing to see here" no doubt forthcoming. ..."
"... Give it up already. As much as anyone may want to see Hillary behind bars or even just "lose" the election, it's just wishful thinking. Everyone with eyes to see and ears to hear can clearly tell that the fix is in. Hillary will NOT be prosecuted for anything and Trump will NOT be allowed to win the "election", regardless what the actual "vote" count may be. ..."
"... It is all just political theater and most plebes don't even realize that tbey are simply unwitting pawns in the play. ..."
"... in my years of reading zh, most folks were on board with the assessment that, THERE ARE NOT 2 PARTYS! ..."
"... and to further that, the 'candidates' are chosen well ahead of time, by TPTB. ..."
Having detailed
Clinton-appointee Loretta Lynch's DoJ push-back against the FBI's Clinton Foundation probe, it
seems Director Comey has decided to flex his own muscles and save face as
DailyCaller reports, multiple FBI investigations are underway involving potential corruption
charges against the Clinton Foundation , according to a former senior law enforcement official.
At the time, three field offices were in agreement an investigation should be launched
after the FBI received notification from a bank of suspicious activity from a foreigner who had
donated to the Clinton Foundation , according to the official.
FBI officials wanted to investigate whether there was a criminal conflict of interest
with the State Department and the Clinton Foundation during Clinton's tenure .
But...
The Department of Justice had looked into allegations surrounding the foundation
a year earlier after the release of the controversial book "Clinton Cash," but found them
to be unsubstantiated and there was insufficient evidence to open a case.
As so as a result...
DOJ officials pushed back against opening a case during the meeting earlier this year
.
Some also expressed concern the request seemed more political than substantive,
especially given the timing of it coinciding with the investigation into the private
email server and Clinton's presidential campaign.
However,
as DailyCaller reports, The FBI is undertaking multiple investigations involving potential
corruption changes against The Clinton Foundation...
The investigation centers on New York City where the Clinton Foundation has its main
offices , according to the former official who has direct knowledge of the activities.
Prosecutorial support will come from various U.S. Attorneys Offices - a major departure from
other centralized FBI investigations.
The New York-based probe is being led by Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney
for the Southern District of New York.
The official said involvement of the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Southern District of
New York "would be seen by agents as a positive development as prosecutors there are generally
thought to be more aggressive than the career lawyers within the DOJ ."
...
The former official said the investigation is being coordinated between bureau field offices
and FBI managers at headquarters in Washington, D.C. The unusual process would ensure senior FBI
supervisors, including Director James Comey, would be kept abreast of case progress and of significant
developments.
The reliance on U.S. attorneys would be a significant departure from the centralized manner
in which the FBI managed the investigation of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's use
of a private server and email addresses.
That investigation was conducted with agents at FBI headquarters, who coordinated with the
Department of Justice's National Security Division (NSD).
While Nicholas Biase, a spokesman for Bharara, said he would "decline comment," and FBI spokeswoman
Samantha Shero said, "we do not have a comment on investigative activity," we wonder if the unusual
procedures and the tone of that comment suggests a mutinous FBI standing up to the politicized DoJ?
What a joke. The FBI already has their statement prepared. "No reasonable prosecutor would
prosecute Hillary over these obvious felonies that Hillary committed. Gotta go to a Hillary fundraiser
now. Have a great day and keep trusting us!"
My next paycheck says FBI will find corruption, and some low-ranking assistant at the Clinton
Foundation will be the fall guy. Comey will be unable to prove to a standard that any reasonable
prosecutor would pursue, whether HRC had any knowledge, or intent.
FBI = F ucked B eyond I
magination. Zero credibility these days, and deserving of zero respect with another "nothing to see here"
no doubt forthcoming.
And given Hillary Clinton is the most openly corrupt venal slime ever to crawl the face of
the planet, with a weight of evidence against her in the public domain so overwhelming it makes
OJ look angelic; their inability to make a case makes them look just plain laughable as a law
enforcement organisation.
Give it up already. As much as anyone may want to see Hillary behind bars or even just "lose"
the election, it's just wishful thinking. Everyone with eyes to see and ears to hear can clearly
tell that the fix is in. Hillary will NOT be prosecuted for anything and Trump will NOT be allowed
to win the "election", regardless what the actual "vote" count may be.
It is all just political theater and most plebes don't even realize that tbey are simply unwitting
pawns in the play.
Get used to another 4 (maybe 8) years of the shitshow to continue unabated as Merika circles
the drain.
Hate to say it but it's the reality one must face.
As I see it, Hillary will accelerate a financial and/or social collapse of the US. Trump will
slow it down, at worst, or prevent it altogether if he chooses to outright default.
Either path results in a much-needed reset. Trump's path will be less bloody.
that is a pretty short list of who should be locked up. USA has the jails and hopefully some
day those jails will be full of crimanals instead of weed smokers.
Hillary for the win (and NO, I don't want that. , but it's gonna be.) It's funny , well
..funny sad.. that in my years of reading zh, most folks were on board with the assessment
that, THERE ARE NOT 2 PARTYS!
and to further that, the 'candidates' are chosen well ahead of time, by TPTB. (If
people know what that means)..I think a lot of newcomers just arrow up comments that have arrows
up, without knowing half of the content )
"... Reading Time for the 1st time in decades made me feel better because I could not read it, at least not the way they intended it. It was like trying to compile FORTRAN with a source file written in C. I don't understand their language anymore so the reading experience is like looking for errors in your source code. Kind of liberating in a way. ..."
"... Everyone is recognizing the only way to become a Billionaire for now on is paying off politicians and becoming an extension of the federal government. Write rules in your favor or get the economic mercenaries whether they be the military - CIA - or the state department and take over a country a la Confessions of a Economic Hitman. Hillary is preferred since now you can induce a seizure and she turns into a signature pad with amnesia ..."
"... Circulation around 3 million copies. Probably covers most waiting rooms across the country and a few Grandmas. ..."
"... Here's a TIME magazine cover the day after 9/11/2016 when he gives his memorial dedication to those that perished that day with his unwavering pledge for the only investigation that matters!... ..."
Had to pick up and glance through a copy of Time recently before a dental appt. The other choices
were People, Good Housekeeping and some sales literature for dental equipment and other torture
gear.
Reading Time for the 1st time in decades made me feel better because I could not read it, at
least not the way they intended it. It was like trying to compile FORTRAN with a source file written
in C. I don't understand their language anymore so the reading experience is like looking for
errors in your source code. Kind of liberating in a way.
Everyone is recognizing the only way to become a Billionaire for now on is paying off politicians
and becoming an extension of the federal government. Write rules in your favor or get the economic mercenaries whether they be the military - CIA
- or the state department and take over a country a la Confessions of a Economic Hitman. Hillary is preferred since now you can induce a seizure and she turns into a signature pad
with amnesia
Here's a TIME magazine cover the day after 9/11/2016 when he gives his memorial dedication to those
that perished that day with his
unwavering pledge for the only investigation that matters!...
"... The 90's represent a time of relative economic prosperity and geopolitical dominance in the collective American imagination. Race relations, though briefly inflamed during the Los Angeles riots of 1992, remained relatively placid by the standards of U.S. history, and with the fall of the USSR, the United States became an unquestioned Global Hegemon. ..."
"... In this sense at least, the 90's were high times for the Clintons and their Neo-Liberal fellow travelers. Who had convinced themselves, along with much of the populace of the United States, that they had finally entered Francis Fukuyama's prophesied "End of History." ..."
"... Though Donald Trump promises to "Make America Great Again," his rhetoric recalls, not the beloved 1990s of the Clintons, but rather the decade from 1953 to 1963, the time between the Korean war and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy. An era of middle-class flourishing and industrial expansion, when good paying factory work allowed unskilled laborers to achieve the "American Dream" of Suburban tranquility and economic comfort. An era of low crime and common purpose. An era when a beloved President first dreamt of landing a man on the moon and the covers of magazines like "Popular Mechanics" showcased grand visions of a future dominated by the wonders and comforts of American technology. Though of course profoundly philistine and materialist in nature (and thus genuinely American), it is a vision which remains quite distinct from violent, pathological visions dreamt of by the Clintons and their associates. ..."
"... This universal, imperialist programme of exploitation and domination is the explicit goal of the ideology of Neo-Liberalism, whose cause will seem all the more urgent to a newly elected and empowered Hillary Clinton. She will then have to face the reality of both a divided country at home and a rapidly decaying Neoliberal world order abroad. As Russia, China, Iran, and others begin to push back against the reign of U.S. led cultural Imperialism. ..."
"... A more cautious Trump presidency would likely approach the situation with a good deal of pragmatism by letting the United State's moment of unipolar hegemony naturally fade away as the world slowly drifts into the more organic and sustainable state of Multipolarity. ..."
"... Though derided by her detractors as a dangerous, ideologically driven hawk on foreign policy and praised by her devotees as a steady, experienced hand, possessing considerable analytic acumen. The truth is that, in reality, both assessments are correct. It is important to note, however, that for Hillary Clinton, the latter merely acts as a veneer for the former. Her strategic acumen, however potent it may be, remains merely the servant of the powerful chthonic forces which drive her damaged psyche. Despite any appearances to the contrary, in her purest essence, she remains a genuine fanatic. ..."
"... Regardless of these rumors, it is entirely fair to assert that Clinton, whether or not she is a practicing lesbian, is at least a functional one. Her projected persona, from the androgynous pantsuits to her open contempt for the Traditional female roles of wife and mother coupled with a fanatical devotion to the cause of universal LGBT "human rights," is an almost exact emulation of a butch lesbian aesthetic and sensibility. It is a direct mimicry of Western conceptions of corporate masculinity reconceptualized through the funhouse mirror of 1970's feminist ideology. It is this barely cryptic Lesbianism, which serves as the primary ideological scaffolding for Clinton's thought and action. An ideology that is driven almost purely by a profound ressentiment of all those who do not affirm its tenets. ..."
"... The very first action to be taken by a future Clinton administration will be an immediate reset of the U.S. policy on Syria. This intention has already been explicitly articulated and publicized in the international press and will mark a stark break with the Obama administration's previously more pragmatic approach. Syria was a war Obama was never particularly interested in and which he involved himself in only after intense pressure from his advisors (such as then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Victoria Nuland). Although Obama would, of course, have favored a solution that resulted in the replacement of Assad with a malleable puppet regime which was friendly to both American and Zionist ambitions in the Region. His better instincts led him to avoid the more extreme Anti-Assad approach favored by the most hawkish members of his cabinet. ..."
"... Clinton's stratagem will be the direct inverse of Obama's more tolerant approach to Assad. For Clinton, destroying Assad, and by extension, the millions of innocents which his government protects from Jihadi terror represents a triple opportunity. Enabling her to strike a direct blow simultaneously against Iranian and Russian interests in the region while also appeasing her Zionist backers. Thus, it will become an immediate priority for her administration. ..."
"... The full weight of U.S. power will be used to reignite a conflict in the Donbass region, which will be justified under the pretense of restoring the "territorial integrity" of the Ukrainian Junta. This will enable the U.S. to continue its encirclement of Russia while also bleeding it of resources. This will make it, it is hoped by the U.S., more vulnerable, over the long term, to a hostile, U.S. funded, regime change which will be carried out by Atlanticist Fifth Columnist inside Russia. ..."
"... Clinton's domestic policies will be similarly reckless and aggressive. These will focus primarily upon stamping out any dissent, whether on the Left or the Right, to her rule. This should not be a difficult task, as the vast majority of Media elites in the United States are open supporters of her ideology. These elites will be in a particularly foul mood after the Election, as they have come to view Trump, and especially his supporters, as a mortal threat to their continued hegemony. A Clinton victory would then give them the leverage and pretext they need to begin punishing and marginalizing the Trump electorate that they so deeply despise. ..."
"... Needless to say, dissenters will suffer greatly under a Clinton regime. Those who oppose further aggressive U.S. actions across the globe will be dealt with as borderline traitors. Others who oppose the normalization of Sodomy and other related deviancies, such as Transgenderism, will be labeled bigots and suffer economic consequences as they are forced out of their jobs under the pretext of creating "safe work environmen ..."
The Summer of 2016 is proving to be a decisive one in both the United States and the
rest of the world. The long shadows currently being thrown against the wall by history will soon
morph into their full forms come November when the presidential contest is finally decided. With
the longest and most ominous being the potential ascension of Hillary Rodham Clinton to the office
of President of the United States of America.
Most Americans are instinctively aware of this, and it is this instinct which has seen
Hillary Clinton's unfavorable ratings rise to
historic levels.
This anti-Clinton aversion is born as much from experience as it is from intuition,
as Americans vividly recall her Husband's presidency and assume, correctly, that a second Clinton
presidency would repeat all of the vices of the first but without any of its virtues.
Indeed, the 1990's still loom large in the imagination of most Clintonites.
The 90's
represent a time of relative economic prosperity and geopolitical dominance in the collective American
imagination. Race relations, though briefly inflamed during the Los Angeles riots of 1992, remained
relatively placid by the standards of U.S. history, and with the fall of the USSR, the United States
became an unquestioned Global Hegemon.
A Hegemon which possessed the perfect freedom to strike its
enemies, both real and perceived, with near impunity across the Globe. As the people of Serbia and
Iraq learned, only too well, through horrible experience.
In this sense at least, the 90's were high
times for the Clintons and their Neo-Liberal fellow travelers. Who had convinced themselves, along
with much of the populace of the United States, that they had finally entered Francis Fukuyama's
prophesied "End of History."
Though Donald Trump promises to "Make America Great Again," his rhetoric recalls, not
the beloved 1990s of the Clintons, but rather the decade from 1953 to 1963, the time between the
Korean war and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy. An era of middle-class flourishing and industrial
expansion, when good paying factory work allowed unskilled laborers to achieve the "American Dream"
of Suburban tranquility and economic comfort. An era of low crime and common purpose. An era when
a beloved President first dreamt of landing a man on the moon and the covers of magazines like "Popular
Mechanics" showcased grand visions of a future dominated by the wonders and comforts of American
technology. Though of course profoundly philistine and materialist in nature (and thus genuinely
American), it is a vision which remains quite distinct from violent, pathological visions dreamt
of by the Clintons and their associates.
In contrast, to Trump's inward looking, Populist-Nationalist synthesis, Clinton offers
Americans what is perhaps the most thoroughly pure version of Neo-Liberalism yet put forward on a
national political stage. Consisting of both unapologetic support for international capitalist exploitation
of labor as well as a virulent dedication to the continued unipolar geopolitical dominance of the
United State's burgeoning Imperium. Its explicit goal is not merely to enable its own citizens to
live the good life of uninhibited, rootless hedonism (the American Dream) but also to impose this
concept of "the good life" upon the rest of the world.
This universal, imperialist programme of exploitation and domination is the explicit
goal of the ideology of Neo-Liberalism, whose cause will seem all the more urgent to a newly elected
and empowered Hillary Clinton. She will then have to face the reality of both a divided country at
home and a rapidly decaying Neoliberal world order abroad. As Russia, China, Iran, and others begin
to push back against the reign of U.S. led cultural Imperialism.
A more cautious Trump presidency would likely approach the situation with a good deal
of pragmatism by letting the United State's moment of unipolar hegemony naturally fade away as the
world slowly drifts into the more organic and sustainable state of Multipolarity.
The same cannot be said, of course, for the path a potential Clinton administration
would take, however. Clinton will have no choice but to throw all of her energies behind a shrill,
last-ditch defense of the American Imperium, in both its physical, cultural and psychological manifestations.
Though derided by her detractors as a dangerous, ideologically driven hawk on foreign
policy and praised by her devotees as a steady, experienced hand, possessing considerable analytic
acumen. The truth is that, in reality, both assessments are correct. It is important to note, however,
that for Hillary Clinton, the latter merely acts as a veneer for the former. Her strategic acumen,
however potent it may be, remains merely the servant of the powerful chthonic forces which drive
her damaged psyche. Despite any appearances to the contrary, in her purest essence, she remains a
genuine fanatic.
When one looks back on the trajectory of her political career, it is not difficult to
perceive it as a series of carefully calculated moves which served only to move her continually closer
to capturing the presidency and the ultimate power it offers. While this is not exactly original
analysis, it is still startling and instructive to contemplate the truly bizarre length and breadth
of the ambition which has propelled her this far. Her husband's philandering, which has become the
stuff of legend in the United States and has resulted in at least one serious claim of sexual assault,
was obviously known to her from the beginning of their relationship. Her apparent ambivalence (if
not open approval) regarding her husband's behavior is likewise an open secret and has, at least
in part, contributed to the constant rumors regarding her potential homosexuality.
Regardless of these rumors, it is entirely fair to assert that Clinton, whether or not
she is a practicing lesbian, is at least a functional one. Her projected persona, from the androgynous
pantsuits to her open contempt for the Traditional female roles of wife and mother coupled with a
fanatical devotion to the cause of universal LGBT "human rights," is an almost exact emulation
of a butch lesbian aesthetic and sensibility. It is a direct mimicry of Western conceptions of corporate
masculinity reconceptualized through the funhouse mirror of 1970's feminist ideology. It is this
barely cryptic Lesbianism, which serves as the primary ideological scaffolding for Clinton's thought
and action. An ideology that is driven almost purely by a profound ressentiment of all those who
do not affirm its tenets.
It is this ressentiment which serves as the motivator for all of her endeavors, both
of the past and of the future. Once Clinton secures the full powers of the U.S. presidency, she will
then have the ultimate tool with which to wage war upon her perceived tormentors, i.e. all those
who do not willingly affirm her particularly deviant ideological proclivities.
This campaign of revenge will be waged on two separate fronts, one foreign and one domestic
and will seek an utter subjugation or eradication of her perceived enemies.
On the foreign front Clinton will immediately seek to reestablish U.S. dominance over
the three primary regions of Modern Geopolitical Conflict: The Greater Middle East, the South China
Sea, and Europe with a special focus on subduing the Russian Federation
The very first action to be taken by a future Clinton administration will be an immediate
reset of the U.S. policy on Syria. This intention has already been explicitly articulated and publicized
in the international press
and will mark a stark break with the Obama administration's previously
more pragmatic approach. Syria was a war Obama was never particularly interested in and which he
involved himself in only after intense pressure from his advisors (such as then-Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton and Victoria Nuland). Although Obama would, of course, have favored a solution that
resulted in the replacement of Assad with a malleable puppet regime which was friendly to both American
and Zionist ambitions in the Region. His better instincts led him to avoid the more extreme Anti-Assad
approach favored by the most hawkish members of his cabinet.
Clinton's stratagem will be the direct inverse of Obama's more tolerant approach to
Assad. For Clinton, destroying Assad, and by extension, the millions of innocents which his government
protects from Jihadi terror represents a triple opportunity. Enabling her to strike a direct blow
simultaneously against Iranian and Russian interests in the region while also appeasing her Zionist
backers. Thus, it will become an immediate priority for her administration.
The policy will most likely take the form of a deluge of advanced armaments to the Syrian
Islamists currently at war with the Assad government, potentially including Jabhat Al Nusra whose
recent split with Al-Qaeda proper will make it a tempting potential ally in the new crusade against
Assad.
In addition to this new flow of arms, an attempt to establish a "no-fly zone" over Syria
will be made with the expressed purpose of denigrating the Syrian government's ability to defend
its people from Islamist terrorists. How this will be accomplished is still unclear, with the presence
of the Russian military posing an especially difficult challenge. However, a U.S. provocation to
open war is not entirely out of the question. Especially since a Clinton administration may view
Syria as a theatre which, given U.S. superiority in power projection, would potentially enable a
seemingly easy victory over Russian and Syrian forces.
Everything will depend on the actions of the Russian government, whether it decides
to double down on its ally or surrender to U.S. intimidation, as well as the disposition of Turkey.
In this sense, the recent Coup attempt may serve as a blessing in disguise, as it is well known that,
if not explicitly planned by the CIA, the Coup attempt was at the very least tacitly endorsed by
the Obama administration. These facts will weigh heavily on President Erdogan's mind if and when
a request is made to use Turkish airbases to enforce a no-fly zone in Syria.
The second theatre, which will serve as the medium-term priority, will be a renewed
attempt to further isolate and weaken the Russian Federation. This will involve both new deployments
of American Military forces and equipment to both the Baltic states and Eastern Ukraine.
The full
weight of U.S. power will be used to reignite a conflict in the Donbass region, which will be justified
under the pretense of restoring the "territorial integrity" of the Ukrainian Junta. This will enable
the U.S. to continue its encirclement of Russia while also bleeding it of resources. This will make
it, it is hoped by the U.S., more vulnerable, over the long term, to a hostile, U.S. funded,
regime change which will be carried out by Atlanticist Fifth Columnist inside Russia.
The third theatre, which will serve as the long-term priority, will be attempting to
contain China from asserting its sovereignty in the South China Sea and the island of Taiwan. This
will be by far the most difficult task facing a potential Clinton administration. China will possess
a distinct military advantage over U.S. forces in the region owing to its advanced area-denial capabilities
which will enable it effectively to neutralize the main tool of U.S. power projection: the aircraft
carrier. The exact course a Clinton administration would take in a potential showdown with China
is still unclear but given her past proclivities; it would not be a stretch to assume a choice for
confrontation over compromise would be made.
Clinton's domestic policies will be similarly reckless and aggressive. These will focus
primarily upon stamping out any dissent, whether on the Left or the Right, to her rule. This should
not be a difficult task, as the vast majority of Media elites in the United States are open supporters
of her ideology. These elites will be in a particularly foul mood after the Election, as they have
come to view Trump, and especially his supporters, as a mortal threat to their continued hegemony.
A Clinton victory would then give them the leverage and pretext they need to begin punishing and
marginalizing the Trump electorate that they so deeply despise.
This will involve not only formal purges of journalists and academics (which has already
become a regular occurrence in the U.S.) but also a renewed push to further hollow out what remains
of the American Middle class, as well as continuing to push an intrinsically violent LGBT ideology
further upon America's children.
Needless to say, dissenters will suffer greatly under a Clinton regime. Those who oppose
further aggressive U.S. actions across the globe will be dealt with as borderline traitors. Others
who oppose the normalization of Sodomy and other related deviancies, such as Transgenderism, will
be labeled bigots and suffer economic consequences as they are forced out of their jobs under the
pretext of creating "safe work environmen
ts".
Tax exemption for religiously affiliated schools and nonprofit organizations will be
revoked unless they agree to adhere to anti-discrimination laws which will require the affirmation
of LGBT ideology.
"... No wonder this man at a Trump campaign rally yesterday in Kissimmee, Florida, gave the finger
to CNN producer Noah Gray and other journalists, shouting, "Go home! You are traitors! I am an American
patriot!" ..."
Now we have CNN anchor Chris
Cuomo - former ABC News correspondent and "20/20" co-anchor, son of the late New York governor
Mario Cuomo, and brother of current New York governor Andrew Cuomo - confirming what so many suspect.
In June 2014, Cuomo openly admitted on camera that the media have abandoned all pretenses at journalistic
objectivity, but instead give Hillary Clinton "a free ride" and are her "biggest" promoters. At the
time, although Hillary had not yet declared she would run for the presidency, she was already getting
donations for her then-nonexistent presidential campaign.
Cuomo said:
"It's a problem because she's [Hillary Clinton] doing what they call in politics 'freezing
pockets,' because the donors are giving her money thinking she's going to run, that means they're
not going to have available money for other candidates if she doesn't. And I don't think she's
going to give it to them. We [the media] couldn't help her any more than we have, she's
got just a free ride so far from the media, we're the biggest ones promoting her campaign, so
it had better happen. "
No wonder this man
at a Trump campaign rally yesterday in Kissimmee, Florida, gave the finger to CNN producer Noah
Gray and other journalists, shouting, "Go home! You are traitors! I am an American patriot!"
"... she is living in a glass house funded by Goldman Sachs and should be throwing no stones. ..."
"... Clinton's been courting endorsements from billionaires Meg Whitman, Warren Buffett and Michael Bloomberg. Her own son-in-law is a "hedge fund guy", and the Wall Street Journal reported that "hedge fund money has vastly favored Clinton over Trump" to the tidy sum of $122m. Being bothered by what this portends for our economic future this is not a vote for Trump. ..."
"... She has embraced the endorsement of neocon John Negroponte and is even reportedly courting the endorsement of Henry Kissinger. As secretary of state, Clinton controversially supported not designating the 2009 ouster of Honduran president Manuel Zelaya as a coup ..."
"... turning a critical lens on the presidential candidate who supported the war that killed their son does not equate supporting her opponent. ..."
While she made fun of Trump on the stump for
having "a dozen or so economic advisers he just named: hedge fund guys, billionaire guys, six
guys named Steve, apparently," she is living in a
glass house funded by Goldman Sachs and should be throwing no stones.
They're not named Steve, but Clinton's been courting endorsements from billionaires
Meg Whitman,
Warren Buffett and Michael Bloomberg. Her own son-in-law is a
"hedge fund guy", and the Wall Street Journal
reported that "hedge fund money has vastly favored Clinton over Trump" to the tidy sum of
$122m. Being bothered by what this portends for our economic future this is not a vote for Trump.
And though Trump is hinting to his supporters that they might want to use the second amendment
to possibly assassinate Clinton or justices of the supreme court is disgusting, let's not forget
Clinton saying in May 2008 that she had to stay in that primary
because "Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California" and, ho hum, you never know
what might happen to presumptive nominee Barack Obama.
I bring this all up not to draw parallels between Clinton and Trump. She is clearly the more
capable person suited to preside over this corrupt,
perpetually and criminally violent enterprise known as the United States of America. But
let's not act like Clinton is a dove when it comes to matters of life and death.
She has
embraced the endorsement of neocon John Negroponte and is even reportedly courting the
endorsement of Henry Kissinger. As secretary of state, Clinton controversially supported not
designating the 2009 ouster of Honduran president Manuel Zelaya as a
coup, even though he was woken up by armed soldiers and
forced onto a plane and out of his country in his pajamas. She has since
defended her role in that situation, which has led to hell for women, children and
environmentalists, including the
assassination of indigenous activist Berta Cáceres. And as senator, Clinton
supported the Iraq war, a vote which helped lead to the death of US army captain Humayun
Khan.
Captain Khan's parents have valiantly and admirably taken on Trump and his ugly Islamophobia.
But turning a critical lens on the presidential candidate who supported the war that killed
their son does not equate supporting her opponent.
"Klein's book is an extension of the tabloid-style (but truthful) accounts of Clinton's relationship
with members of her own party. But its significance is it places in higher relief - the antipathy associated
with the expected intra-party "hand-off" - when the Obamas move out - and the Clintons return to their
place of "glory" - where they ruled from January 1993 to January 2001. "
* I received an advance review copy from a friend a few weeks ago and I have to say that whether
or not you're a Hillary fan - "Unlikeable" is as compelling as author Edward Klein's previous
two examinations about the Clintons - or more to the point - his examinations of the Clintons'
RELATIONSHIPS with other big wheels in Washington. Because other readers have already written
summaries about what Hillary - according to Klein - is all about, I'll focus on just two (2) of
the many takeaways I got from this book.
* 1 of 2) - As a journalist, I ask again - how much
of Klein's work is true? However objectionable it is that most of Klein's sources are anonymous
- I reach the inescapable conclusion that the more unflattering assertions against Hillary are
highly placed and credible members of the Democratic Party. Why? Because it's hard to believe
any GOP operative could poach incendiary word-for-word conversations between the Clintons and
others - without being physically in the same rooms. The irony is much of the inflammatory material
in "Unlikeable" appears - to me, anyway - to be coming NOT from right-wing partisans - but from
satellite extensions of the Clintons themselves.
* And the elephant in the room that bolsters Klein's credibility - is that Klein himself, a
self-admitted JFK fan and a former editor at Newsweek, Vanity Fair and the New York Times Magazine
- has never been successfully sued for libel - nor have any of his books been successfully discredited
as being loaded with patent lies. If untrue, there would be more than enough to warrant the Clintons
suing Klein and his publishers for libel. But it hasn't happened (yet), dating back to Klein's
first book about Hillary in 2005. (In Journalism 101 we're taught that Truth is the best defense
against libel - and that public figures like Hillary must prove malice - AND - that blatant untruths
have been printed which have caused irreparable harm.)
* If you're a Hillary fan, you have every right to regard "Unlikeable" as tabloid filth, but
that's an opinion, not a fact, framed by what you bring to the table. When the same type of books
are written about GOP figures, your emotions may provide a better sense of what I'm talking about.
* 2 of 2) - At this snapshot in time - the most "contemporaneously relevant" slice of material
in this more than 250-page book has to do with the controversy over Hillary's decision to install
a private email server when she was U.S. Secretary of State from 2009 to early 2013. Without apology
or qualification, Klein asserts that President Obama - and key members of his administration -
explicitly warned Hillary to not do it, despite her paranoia about snooping enemies resulting
from her many years as a public figure.
* I admit I do get the feeling that the President's closest personal adviser, Valerie Jarrett,
has a key role in campaign and policy strategy, including the release of adverse information against
Hillary. Nothing gets by her and this might explain, 1) why so many "insiders" were willing -
(or got permission) - to air the Clintons' dirty laundry to Edward Klein, and, 2) why the President's
own administration - (and not some right-wing conspiracy) - is more responsible for the FBI's
investigation of the email server issue - to proceed without obstruction. When the heat turned
up against Hillary, she asked the President to help, i.e., to "call off his dogs." According to
Klein, the President turned Hillary down.
* In sum, "Unlikeable" may be a lot of things, but it is not boring, Based on what was revealed
previously about the sour relations between the Clintons and the Obamas in Klein's "Blood Feud"
(2014) - the behind-the-scenes narrative remains unchanged. It's true that millions love and admire
Hillary Clinton outside of Washington. But inside the Beltway, she is feared and resented by enough
people at the highest reaches of the Democratic Party - adding another layer of woe on top of
the antipathy she has long gotten from the GOP. She might still get the White House because of
the fracturing of the GOP, even though Vice President Joseph Biden appeared to have less baggage
being his authentic self, e.g., the same guy in public and private, untouched by scandals, real
or imagined, a loyalist to the President in ways that Hillary was not.
The key assumption is that Valerie Jarrett absolutely hates Hillary and she has authorized
people to speak with Edward Klein on the topic of Hillary. The Obamas are out to destroy the Clintons
because they think the Clintons are about to lose a presidential election and they personally
do not like them anyway. Ed Klein's reporting seems extremely credible to me.
David, I was surprised to read your comment that "most of Klein's sources are anonymous" because
in his book, The Amateur, most of his sources allowed their names to be used. In fact, I was astonished
that Reverend Wright, who was interviewed by Klein for the book, said a member of Obama's team
visited him to ask if he could keep quiet until after the election. When Wright said that would
be impossible because he supports his family with the speaking fees he receives, the team member
offered him $250,000 which he accepted. It must be true because we haven't heard a peep from him
since, and it makes me wonder if they've continued to pay him hush money for the past seven years.
Also interviewed in the book is Obama's personal physician of 20 years, who didn't have very nice
things to say about Obamacare, and people from the Chicago political arena who helped him rise
from little-known senator to president of the United States (none of whom requested anonymity.)
Apparently, he made a lot of promises during that time that were completely disregarded once he
reached the White House. Needless to say, he left behind a plethora of disgruntled supporters
in Chicago. I couldn't put The Amateur down, and if Unlikeable is as well-written as that one,
I can't wait to receive it in the mail. Thanks for your review. I enjoyed reading it.
I wonder for how many of them Slick Willie was a patron ;-).
Notable quotes:
"... According to the National Task Force on Prostitution , it's estimated that well over 1 million people in the U.S. have worked
as prostitutes - or roughly 1 percent of American women. If this campaign is a success, that could translate into some serious voting
power. ..."
"Everyday Americans need a champion," Hillary Clinton proclaimed in her YouTube video. "And I want to be that champion."
Yes, few were surprised when Hilary Clinton announced her campaign for the 2016 U.S. presidential race, but many were surprised
by some of her early supporters. Since that announcement, the lovable ladies of Nevada's renowned Moonlite Bunny Ranch have come
out in support of our former first lady in a serious, potentially large-scale campaign called "Hookers for Hillary." These Everyday
Americans have chosen their candidate.
... ... ...
Bunny Ranch owner Dennis Hof agrees. "With Obamacare the girls were able to buy good health insurance and without it they weren't
able to. Since Day One when I bought the brothel in 1992 no legal prostitute could get health insurance," says Hof.
According to the National Task
Force on Prostitution, it's estimated that well over 1 million people in the U.S. have worked as prostitutes - or roughly
1 percent of American women. If this campaign is a success, that could translate into some serious voting power.
"... "The larger conclusion from the data is that the Trump campaign - both through the support Trump generates among working-class whites and the opposition he generates among better educated, more affluent voters - has accelerated the ongoing transformation of the Democratic Party. ..."
"... Once a class-based coalition, the party has become an alliance between upscale well-educated whites and, importantly, ethnic and racial minorities, many of them low income" ..."
"Democrats' Tactic of Accusing Critics of Kremlin Allegiance Has Long, Ugly History in U.S." [The
Intercept].
The party left me
"The larger conclusion from the data is that the Trump campaign - both through the support
Trump generates among working-class whites and the opposition he generates among better educated,
more affluent voters - has accelerated the ongoing transformation of the Democratic Party.
Once a
class-based coalition, the party has become an alliance between upscale well-educated whites and,
importantly, ethnic and racial minorities, many of them low income"
"In the past three decades, the share of U.S. citizens who think that it would be a 'good' or
'very good' thing for the 'army to rule'-a patently undemocratic stance-has steadily risen. In 1995,
just one in sixteen respondents agreed with that position; today, one in six agree. While those who
hold this view remain in the minority, they can no longer be dismissed as a small fringe, especially
since there have been similar increases in the number of those who favor a 'strong leader who doesn't
have to bother with parliament and elections' and those who want experts rather than the government
to 'take decisions' for the country.
Nor is the United States the only country to exhibit this trend. The proportion agreeing that
it would be better to have the army rule has risen in most mature democracies, including Germany,
Sweden, and the United Kingdom. … Lower support for democracy seems especially high among younger
adults." [
Conversable Economist ] (
original ).
I'm sure that for many Trump will spring to mind, but it's also noteworthy that the Democrat
nomenklatura just spent a solid year stamping out a movement that was struggling for
democratic norms through the electoral process . Not perhaps the best of tactics, if a healthy
democracy, as opposed to a well-funded Democrat Party, is your goal.
This article was written two years ago. Still current...
Notable quotes:
"... She was responding, but seemed a little off. I figured she was just distracted and didn't feel like it was worth her time. ..."
"... I kept going, but was starting to get frustrated. I decided I would ask her something I hadn't really planned on. I said, 'Ms. Clinton, some have suggested that you aren't healthy enough or are too old to pursue the presidency. Do you have a comment on that?' ..."
"... I knew I had crossed a line for her right away. She snapped back, 'It's my turn. I've done my time, and I deserve it.' Then she stormed off. ..."
"... When you consider her history of fainting spells, likely the result of strokes and the verbal gaffes she's made recently, you have to wonder if she isn't losing her mental faculties. ..."
"... Let's face it, she's not a rank amateur when it comes to politics. She's always demonstrated a talent for verbal manipulation and deception. But suddenly it's as if her mask has slipped exposing her ugly, arrogant sense of entitlement. ..."
"... I guarantee there's a lot of hand wringing going on in Democrat circles right now. They have a lot invested in Hillary as their best and only shot at replacing Obama. Between revelations about her health, her age, the gaffes she's made, the failure of her book, her low approval numbers… They're sweating bullets. ..."
The story goes that a freelance journalist Samuel Rosales-Avila was granted a short interview with
Hillary after her LA book signing. He wanted to do a article for a Hispanic publication and was
surprised when Hillary granted him a 20 minute meeting.
He got more than he bargained for…
I started asking Ms. Clinton questions. Mostly policy stuff, really focused on immigration.
She was responding, but seemed a little off. I figured she was just distracted and didn't feel
like it was worth her time.
I kept going, but was starting to get frustrated. I decided I would ask her something I hadn't
really planned on. I said, 'Ms. Clinton, some have suggested that you aren't healthy enough or
are too old to pursue the presidency. Do you have a comment on that?'
I knew I had crossed a line for her right away. She snapped back, 'It's my turn. I've done
my time, and I deserve it.' Then she stormed off.
After she left, one of her handlers came up to me and told me he would need the recording of
our interview and that it was now 'off the record'. I was shocked and disappointed, but it was
clear that it wasn't a negotiation.
Hillary's posse isn't denying that the meeting took place, but without that recording we only
have his version of what transpired.
When you consider her history of fainting spells, likely the result of strokes and the verbal
gaffes she's made recently, you have to wonder if she isn't losing her mental faculties.
Let's face it, she's not a rank amateur when it comes to politics. She's always demonstrated a
talent for verbal manipulation and deception. But suddenly it's as if her mask has slipped exposing
her ugly, arrogant sense of entitlement.
I guarantee there's a lot of hand wringing going on in Democrat circles right now. They
have a lot invested in Hillary as their best and only shot at replacing Obama. Between
revelations about her health, her age, the gaffes she's made, the failure of her book, her low
approval numbers… They're sweating bullets.
I wonder for how many of them Slick Willie was a patron ;-).
Notable quotes:
"... According to the National Task Force on Prostitution , it's estimated that well over 1 million people in the U.S. have worked
as prostitutes - or roughly 1 percent of American women. If this campaign is a success, that could translate into some serious voting
power. ..."
"Everyday Americans need a champion," Hillary Clinton proclaimed in her YouTube video. "And I want to be that champion."
Yes, few were surprised when Hilary Clinton announced her campaign for the 2016 U.S. presidential race, but many were surprised
by some of her early supporters. Since that announcement, the lovable ladies of Nevada's renowned Moonlite Bunny Ranch have come
out in support of our former first lady in a serious, potentially large-scale campaign called "Hookers for Hillary." These Everyday
Americans have chosen their candidate.
... ... ...
Bunny Ranch owner Dennis Hof agrees. "With Obamacare the girls were able to buy good health insurance and without it they weren't
able to. Since Day One when I bought the brothel in 1992 no legal prostitute could get health insurance," says Hof.
According to the National Task
Force on Prostitution, it's estimated that well over 1 million people in the U.S. have worked as prostitutes - or roughly
1 percent of American women. If this campaign is a success, that could translate into some serious voting power.
"... By Kevin O'Rourke, Chichele Professor of Economic History, All Souls College, University of Oxford; and Programme Director, CEPR. Originally published at VoxEU . ..."
"... I completely agree that the backlash has been a long time coming. We are decades into a slow motion train wreck at this point. The evidence is there for any who wish to see it. ..."
Aug 12, 2016 |
By Kevin O'Rourke, Chichele Professor of Economic History, All Souls College,
University of Oxford; and Programme Director, CEPR.
Originally published at VoxEU.
After the Brexit vote, it is obvious to many that globalisation in general, and European integration
in particular, can leave people behind – and that ignoring this for long enough can have severe political
consequences. This column argues that this fact has long been obvious. As the historical record demonstrates
plainly and repeatedly, too much market and too little state invites a backlash. Markets and states
are political complements, not substitutes.
The main point of my 1999 book with Jeff Williamson was that globalisation produces both winners
and losers, and that this can lead to an anti-globalisation backlash (O'Rourke and Williamson 1999).
We argued this based on late-19th century evidence. Then, the main losers from trade were European
landowners, who found themselves competing with an elastic supply of cheap New World land. The
result was that in Germany and France, Italy and Sweden, the move towards ever-freer trade that had
been ongoing for several years was halted, and replaced by a shift towards protection that benefited
not only agricultural interests, but industrial ones as well. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic,
immigration restrictions were gradually tightened, as workers found themselves competing with
European migrants coming from ever-poorer source countries.
...
The globalisation experience of the Atlantic economy prior to the Great War
speaks directly and eloquently to globalisation debates today – and the
political lessons from this are sobering.
"Politicians, journalists, and
market analysts have a tendency to extrapolate the immediate past into the
indefinite future, and such thinking suggests that the world is irreversibly
headed toward ever greater levels of economic integration. The historical
record suggests the contrary."
"Unless politicians worry about who gains and who loses,î we continued,
ěthey may be forced by the electorate to stop efforts to strengthen global
economy links, and perhaps even to dismantle them … We hope that this book will
help them to avoid that mistake – or remedy it."
...If the English want continued Single Market access, they will have to swallow continued labour
mobility. There are complementary domestic policies that could help in making that politically
feasible. We will have to wait and see what the English decide. But there are also lessons for the
27 remaining EU states (28 if, as I hope, Scotland remains a member). Too much market and too little
state invites a backlash. Take the politics into account, and it becomes clear (as Dani Rodrik has
often argued) that markets and states are complements, not substitutes.
UK Toryism today is not so much a political party espousing an ideology as
it is an ideology that has taken over a political party. It is the ideolgy of
exploitation of a tiny clique over an entire society and has become, through
extensive and relentless propoganda, embedded the fabric of UK society. It is a
class ideology that requires a middle classes and poorer apirants to the middle
classes to accept cuts to their influence and hence wealth by creating an
demonising a constructed underclass. The underclass serves as:
1. a frightening lesson to those who do not conform
2. scapegoats for every kind of social and cultural ill
3. a fungible source of wandering labour who can be compelled to exploitation
and discarded at will
It demands the destruction of the state that supports people and replaces it
with a state that supports business interests only. Everything must become a
commodity – especially humans. It is an ideology that decries income
distribution to the less wealthy but in every instance creates laws that ensure
distribution of vast majority of wealth to the wealthiest. It is the insurance
company for the wealthy as well. The taxpayer is the insurer.
The greatest single example of wealth redistribution from the politically
weak is the student loan wheeze. The mob in their greatest exploits could not
have contrived a more elaborate form of extortion. As Tory idoeology
'crapifies' every job in the UK, they goad the young into what have become
school factories, turning out people with certificates but often very little
relevant qualification for a shrinking economy. Meanwhile the governement sells
the loans to "investors" (themselves and their friends) for pence on the pound.
Create the law that create the conditions that create the cash flow, and
never lift a finger to do a real days work.
What's not to like?
Given the over population of the island, that oil is running out, and that
they have gutted any social and cultural cohesive factor, and even if Brexit
evaporates, the long term bodes ill anyway.
paul
So if the EU was completely different in action and intent, we would not
have had brexit?
Is labour mobility a really an expression of individual freedom, or coercive
displacement in the face of the internal devaluation insisted upon by the
technocrats?
Its the former for JC Juncker and the latter for the workers at the
sports direct gulags.
Globalisation is a mechanism to strengthen corporations and the elites that
own them, we would never had heard of the term otherwise.
The europroject has steadfastly committed itself to this end and nothing
will be allowed to interfere with it.
A highly coupled,regionally constrained 'free trade' area is the only way to
achieve this end.
Why is brexit going to be painful? The same reason a chinese finger trap is
difficult to get out of, it's designed that way.
The eurogroup cannot admit that it now only serves as an iron lung for the
financial sector.
Popular reaction against it is to be welcomed, It's the only thing that will
work.
windsock
"It is astonishing in retrospect how few people argued strongly for more
services rather than fewer people."
Well, Jeremy Corbyn did…
"Learning abroad and working abroad, increases the opportunities and skills
of British people and migration brings benefits as well as challenges at home.
But it's only if there is government action to train enough skilled workers
to stop the exploitation of migrant labour to undercut wages and invest in
local services and housing in areas of rapid population growth that they will
be felt across the country.'
And this Government has done nothing of the sort. Instead, its failure to
train enough skilled workers means we have become reliant on migration to keep
our economy functioning."
and
"It is sometimes easier to blame the EU, or worse to blame foreigners, than
to face up to our own problems. At the head of which right now is a
Conservative Government that is failing the people of Britain."
…but the Tories couldn't – they have been demonising the service users as
"scroungers" and "skivers" since Osborne introduced his austerity policies in
2010. Why on earth would he and Cameron – leading the Remain campaign, take the
opinions of such people (like me) into account?
Art Eclectic
I don't believe the lack of skilled workers is the problem. The problem
is the wages that professionals WANT to pay for skills do match up with what
labor needs/wants to make. Tech workers are a perfect example. US tech
companies want more HB1 visas, claiming there is not enough skilled labor.
The part they leave out is the skilled labor wages. A US citizen carrying
six figures in student load dept demands a higher wage than an Indian
immigrant on an HB1.
The professional class and corporations want to pay lower wages for
everything from child care to roofers to junior managers, so of course they
are all in favor of globalization and worker movement. There's bit of
classism there as well. The senior manager is pissed that some random coder
is making almost as much as he is. The professional is offended that a child
care worker can afford their own home and drive a middle class car. Keeping
wages low allows the professionals to maintain distinction of rank and
value.
You can see that impact in every discussion about minimum wages and
people complaining about fast food workers getting $15 a hour for
"low-skill" work.
Ancaeus
Lambert,
The subtext of this article is a fawning acceptance of the desirability of
globalization. Many of us reject globalization outright. We don't believe that
it can, or ever will, be "tamed". Nor do we desire to live in a world where its
pernicious effects must be forever mitigated. We do not want to be the
recipients of such long-term mitigation, with the consequent loss of dignity.
Instead, let us return to local products and services, produced by our
neighbors. The money we spend will stay in our community. What's more, the
social benefits of such local trade and the resulting thriving local economy go
well beyond economic ones.
The destruction of social cohesion is the primary externality that results
from "free trade". And, in my opinion, no amount of money can adequately
compensate for it. Returning to Brexit question, it is not clear to me that
these non-economic costs of free trade are made worthwhile by the supposed
non-economic benefits of the European project. From this side of the Atlantic,
it seems doubtful.
Agreed. I come at it from the other side: I think the (reasonably
controlled) exchange of people, ideas, goods, and services across national
borders is a good thing; however, I respect the right of those who dislike
globalization to do so. This post instead treats them with a thinly veiled
heaping of scorn on top of an implicit claim of calling people both stupid
and racist.
The notion at the end of the article that Brexit specifically, or
opposition to globalization more generally, is about market vs. the state is
nonsensical bordering on purposeful obtuseness. Western society today is not
characterized by too little state. The problem is what the state does.
Sound of the Suburbs
The BoE has taken more action that won't help and its been a long time since
2008.
More and more people have read Richard Koo's book and know fiscal stimulus
is required.
Ben Bernake and Janet Yellen had read Richard Koo's book and ensured the US
didn't impose austerity and go over the fiscal cliff.
Mario hasn't read Richard Koo's book and pushed the Club-Med nations over
the fiscal cliff.
The harsh austerity on Greece, killed the Greek economy altogether.
Reading Richard Koo's book is important, if only Mario would get a copy
before he wipes out the Club-Med economies and banking systems.
Mark Carney is from the Goldman stable and is naturally slow on the uptake
and is set in his old-fashioned banker ways.
Before you make a complete fool of yourself like Mario, here is an essential
video:
The IMF and World Bank spent 50 years imposing austerity, selling off
previously public companies and insisting on lower Government spending. The
trail of wreckage is spread across the world, South America, Africa, Asia and
finally Greece.
Bankers don't take responsibility for anything and so never learn from their
mistakes.
Well, The IMF, after 50 years, has finally realised this doesn't work.
At 15.30 mins. into the video you can see the UK situation.
There are massive bank reserves, adding to them will make no difference.
Comparing the charts, the UK's borrowing has gone down more since 2008 than
the US and the Euro-zone.
We are doing all the wrong things, like austerity.
If we had done the right things straight away the UK might still be
in the EU
(The Euro-zone figures look OK because the strong Northern nations aren't
doing too badly, looking at the Club-Med nations and Greece, it's a very
different story. The chart of Greece shows a nation being run into the ground.)
hotairmail
I voted Brexit not for the 'immigration issue' but for democracy. The EU
bureaucracy has too much power and leverages its Central Bank to keep wayward
states in line such as Greece, deliberately causing deflationary depressions
and mass unemployment in their wake. The disdain with which democratic leaders
are treated is typified by a rather famous video where a drunk Juncker greets
various heads of democratic governments and proceeds to treat them
disgracefully (search "Juncker bitch slap" on Youtube). That is not simply a
video of a drunk man being inappropriate – it shows you where the power lies
and what the bureaucracy routinely believes it can get away with.
Britain decided not to join the Euro bloc. It is well documented that its
design is not sustainable. It will either blow up and the thing will fall
apart, or they will need to implement new fiscal transfers from the rich parts
of the bloc to the less well off, as with an ordinary country. The Euro bloc
will need to make big changes to ensure the Euro stays together which involves
large costs to the richer nations such as Germany and Holland. But as most of
the EU decision making at inter governmental level is majority voting, it is
likely the UK would be outvoted to implement this via the EU – NOT the Euro
bloc. They will want to pick the pockets of the UK even though the reasons for
the transfers is nothing to do with the UK.
Turning to the immigartion issue itself, it seems to me this is just as much
about tax and benefits policy and its effects, as it is for free movement. As
an EU citizen when you come to the UK, you are automatically treated the same
as a UK citizen. This means you instantly have access to free health, free
schools, housing benefit and in work tax credits. These sums really add up. The
effect of these supports is to make labour very cheap to employers in the UK –
people can do very low value work and still make their way. The expansion of
the EU to the east made a vast pool of relatively poor labour available to
employers and we have witnessed an explosion of low value added work from "hand
car washes" to picking fruit (whilst fruit lays unpicked in their home
countries). People wring ther hands about why productivity and tax revenue
isn't growing despite rising employment coupled with an exploding housing
benefit and tax credit bill, pressure on schools and healthcare. Put quite
simply the UK cannot afford the services it has become used to with low value
added work, so something has to give. At the end of the day, a decent welfare
state in fact is NOT compatible with open borders. This is something the left
wing have yet to face properly. And ordinary people, far from being simply
'racist' and xenophobic, are simply exercising their choice at the ballot box
and they basically don't want to to see their lives get worse with lower wages,
fewer opportunities, poorer housing and reduced welfare and services.
A word of warning though about whether Brexit or the EU is protectionist or
left wing etc – there are actually quite well argued opinions on both sides.
For many Brexiteers, the EU actually represents a protectionist bloc that
hinders free trade with the world. Many on the left, coming from the pure
"international socialism" of the proper left wing also believe in fighting for
protections of workers on the international stage such as the EU and therefore
are not necessarily in step with their less well off followers, wondering who
stole their cheese. A free trading nation but with a controlled immigration
policy is actually quite appealing and may help to squeeze out the explosion of
low value added work.
On the democratic front, our politicians for decades have blamed the EU for
why they can't do x or y. Add in that for the ordinary Brit we've only ever
read articles about rules to implement "straight bananas" and the like, whilst
our media spends far more time covering the anglophone American election, you
can see there is no proper functioning "demos". And at the end of the day
although "status quo" was always the position of the Remain side of things,
this was never on the table. First we have the Euro issue and then we always
have the Rome Treaty we signed up to which clearly states "Ever closer union".
One final point about the vote split from the Ashcroft poll. You should note
that only 2 parties voters supported Leave – UKIP (96%) and the Tories (56%).
Labour and SNP were about the same at 62/63% to Remain. The idea that those who
voted Leave are council house dwelling northerners is far from the mark. If you
discount the fact that nationalist issues dominated proceedings in Scotland and
Northern Ireland, the vote was more decisive than at first glance – hence why
the Tories are treating this seemingly marginal result as so decisive – both
amongst their own voters and the prize of the UKIP support in the future.
Sorry for the rambling comment but there are lots of different angles to the
EU issue – I'd just like to leave you with how I feel the split amongst the
electorate occurs. Imagine a 4 box matrix, 2×2, with 'left' and 'right' on the
top and 'nightmare' and 'dream' along the left. Left wingers who voted to
remain have an international socialist dream. Right wingers who voted to Remain
see it as a rampant free trade dream. Those who voted to leave on the right saw
it as a socialist, protectionist nightmare. Those who voted leave on the left
saw it as a neo liberal nightmare. So, you can see the split isn't just about
whether you are left or right, free trade or protectionist – it has to be
overlaid with whether the EU better represents your hopes or is a threat. The
motivations for the vote are even more confusing than the coverage of those
supposed reasons.
sd
Shorter version: the only way
to keep capitalism in check is to pair it with a strong dose of socialism which
the greed of those in power rarely allows. Outcome is always the same: the
peasants revolt and management wonders why.
lyman alpha blob
The only reason globalization works for the meritorious technocrat class
that supports it is because they are able to take advantage of differences in
local currency values.
Funny how you hear all this talk about global trade being necessary and
unavoidable but never a global currency.
And now in France, a so-called Socialist government has weakened labor
protections. A situation where a proletariat forced to swallow this, along with
an easy immigration program, would spell trouble to anyone who has a knowledge
of history and human nature.
Plus, an even more immediate concern is that it appears globalization is an
environmental disaster that we may very well have precious little time to
correct.
dw
globalization isnt even all that popular among professionals since even
their jobs are at risk now. but its extremely popular among executives because
it makes their job easier. until their jobs end up being subject to it too. but
among the among 1% its very popular, at least until it becomes very hard to
make a profit or grow their business, since they all loose customers , and cant
raise prices
Mary Wehrheim
The reason why popular opinion turns toward solutions involving immigration
restriction rather than expansion of services is because….deficits. Watching
the GOP primary ads in the hermetically sealed conservative bubble that passes
for Kansas one would think that was the most pressing problem facing the US …
course they throw in the usual memes of terrorist and Obama care dangers with a
short sop about "more jobs" as rather an aside. The Powell memo propaganda
machine has been very successful in redirecting the popular world view through
the gaze of the 1%. Taxes = theft, just work harder (that one is finally
wearing a bit thin though after the wives got into the work force and people
got into deep debt over the past 40 years in a vain attempt to try and rise
above stagnant salaries), safety net = dependency, poverty = lazy habits,
privatization= efficiency, government and regulation = serfdom, and unions
interfere with the celestial harmony of the spheres that is markets.
Pookah Harvey
These same arguments can be made for the replacement of low skilled jobs by
robots, Closing borders will not help in this situation. Governments need to
start planning for a world where there will be less of what we now consider"
jobs" More services provided by government and lowering hours in the work week
soon have to be on the agenda for forward looking politicians or Dune's
Butlerian Jihad may come sooner than we think.
A guy named Karl Marx had an interesting little theory of value in
capitalism which explains that the more hours a person works = more profit
for the company. As automation deepens and spreads, companies will lay
people off, but they will never willingly reduce the hours worked for the
remaining employees.
Unless capitalism willingly adopts socialistic measures (and it never
will), it will keep herding workers – and eventually, itself – off a cliff.
Ché Pasa
These stories and the studies they're grounded in have been told over and
over again for decades now. They're true, and in some cases they are so
complete and compelling as to demolish once and for all the consensus ideology
of Neo-LibCon rule, and yet…
Our rulers do not listen. Our rulers do not care. They are lost in a
post-modern decoupling of truth and fact from anything they need concern
themselves with.
It's pure religion tangled with power.
The more stories and studies showing just how wrong they and their
ideology/religion are, the more they don't listen, the more they don't care.
Ulysses
"Our rulers do not listen. Our rulers do not care. They are lost in a
post-modern decoupling of truth and fact from anything they need concern
themselves with.
It's pure religion tangled with power.
The more stories and studies showing just how wrong they and their
ideology/religion are, the more they don't listen, the more they don't
care."
Very well said! Here in the U.S. we have enshrined in our fundamental law
the right: "to petition the government for a redress of grievances." This
first right amongst the bill of rights was only granted to us after Shay's
Rebellion showed the elites that the people wouldn't simply roll over and
subject themselves to an authoritarian government.
When this petitioning failed, in the 1770s, to produce satisfactory
results our independent nation was born amidst great tumult. Now we face a
similar crossroads: move forward into a potentially better life, after
toppling the transnational kleptocracy, or guarantee the further degradation
of humanity by failing to do more than meekly petition the kleptocrats to
throw us a few more crumbs.
We need to stop trying to persuade those who benefit from exploiting us
to stop through constructing ever more convincing arguments. The kleptocrats
need to suffer tangible consequences for their crimes, through massive
non-compliance with their wishes and monkey-wrenching of their systems.
Indigenous peoples in Brazil have just shown us how to proceed by halting
the dam.
Zvi Namenwirth. He did a pioneering early study measuring the rhetoric of
wealth transfer in American party platforms. I noticed twenty years ago that
the swings tacked according to Kondratieff curves, which measure shifts between
growth in manufacturing vs. agriculture. That's likely what you're seeing now
with the balance shifting from labor to capital (the 1%) since the early '70s.
It's not as important to look at general inflation as it is to measure the
relative changes in prices among different sectors. Given that parties
represent different interest groups, it's likely these stresses show up in
political speech.
But then that would mean politics drives economics and no economist wants to
admit that.
washunate
I completely agree that the backlash has been a long time coming. We are
decades into a slow motion train wreck at this point. The evidence is there for
any who wish to see it.
I completely disagree, though, with the conclusion. What is going on is not
about an insufficiently large state. Rather, it's that the state has been
entrenching inequality rather than addressing it. Our contemporary experience
with excessive concentration of wealth and power is not an outcome of markets.
It's an outcome of public policy. Implying that Brexit voters specifically, or
anti-globalization advocates more generally, are stupid and racist says a lot
more about the biases and blind spots in our intellectual class than it does
about the victims of globalization as western governments have implemented it
over the past few decades.
Events of 2012 and 2013 now definitely come into forefront. Here is old
National Enquirer speculation that now got new currency.
EconomicPolicyJournal.com " The tabloids often express truth that cannot be expressed for political
reasons in the MSM. 1987 the National Enquirer nailed Gary Hart in the Donna Rice affair. 2007
the National Enquirer nailed John Edwards over the Rielle Hunter and bastard baby affair. 1992
the Globe nailed deadbeat dad Bill Clinton over his affair and baby with black street hooker
Bobbie Ann Williams (that story has been completely confirmed and his son Danny Williams is age 29 today
in year 2014). The tabloids have for decades said the JFK assassination was a high level domestic plot
- again 100% correct with the recent tabloids fingering VP Lyndon Johnson as the primary culprit. The
tabloids also nailed Jesse Jackson with his mistress and love child. Tabloids are very good when it
comes to exposing adultery, medical problems and when a celebrity is dying. Digging up and exposing
personal dirt is the forte of tabloids."
"... Only days after The ENQUIRER exclusively reported that Secretary of State HILLARY CLINTON was at the center of a shocking brain cancer drama and was undergoing extensive secret medical tests, her reps went public with the news on Sunday night Dec. 30 that she was indeed hospitalized in New York City and disclosed that she was battling a blood clot that had formed following her head concussion earlier this month! ..."
"... The 65-year-old former First Lady fainted earlier this month and after an exhaustive investigation by The ENQUIRER, we broke a bombshell cover story that hit newsstands a few days ago that revealed insiders believe Hillary is battling brain cancer, and sources said she was facing a hush-hush battery of medical tests to confirm the diagnosis. ..."
"... "Behind the scenes, Hillary has suffered blinding headaches, problems with her vision and memory, plus terrifying blackouts – and those closest to her say she's hiding a brain cancer secret," a source revealed, according to our bombshell report. ..."
"... "This has been covered up for months, but details of Hillary's cancer situation are beginning to leak out, and it's the real reason she's giving up her position as Secretary of State." ..."
UPDATE : 1/2/13 6:30PM EST - HILLARY CLINTON has been discharged from New York-Presbyterian
Hospital.
UPDATE : 1/2/13 5:30PM EST - HILLARY CLINTON briefly left the hospital building where
she is being treated for a blood clots in order to have tests done at another location on the medical
campus at New York-Presbyterian Hospital on Wednesday afternoon. She was back about an hour later.
Her husband Bill Clinton and daughter Chelsea accompanied her as she was transported in a van with
the Secret Service.
UPDATE : 12/31/12 4:54PM EST - DATELINE NEW YORK - A rep for hospitalized Secretary of
State HILLARY CLINTON confirms the blood clot is lodged near her brain confirming The NATIONAL ENQUIRER's
special reports on her condition.
Doctors said the clot is located in the vein in the space between the brain and the skull
behind the right ear.
Only days after The ENQUIRER exclusively reported that Secretary of State HILLARY CLINTON
was at the center of a shocking brain cancer drama and was undergoing extensive secret medical tests,
her reps went public with the news on Sunday night Dec. 30 that she was indeed hospitalized in New
York City and disclosed that she was battling a blood clot that had formed following her head concussion
earlier this month!
"Her doctors will continue to assess her condition, including other issues associated with her
concussion, " Philippe Reines , a State Department senior advisor said. "They will
determine if any further action is required."
Clinton is being treated with anti-coagulants at New York-Presbyterian Hospital and she will be
monitored there for the next 48 hours, Reines said.
The 65-year-old former First Lady fainted earlier this month and after an exhaustive investigation
by The ENQUIRER, we broke a bombshell cover story that hit newsstands a few days ago that revealed
insiders believe Hillary is battling brain cancer, and sources said she was facing a hush-hush battery
of medical tests to confirm the diagnosis.
"Behind the scenes, Hillary has suffered blinding headaches, problems with her vision and memory,
plus terrifying blackouts – and those closest to her say she's hiding a brain cancer secret," a source
revealed, according to our bombshell report.
"If Hillary is indeed diagnosed with brain cancer, the fear that she could die in a manner of
months has devastated those in her inner circle.
"This has been covered up for months, but details of Hillary's cancer situation are beginning
to leak out, and it's the real reason she's giving up her position as Secretary of State."
This lesser evilness trap is a standard trick inherent in two party system setup, designed to prevent
voting for third party candidate and essentially limiting public discourse to selection between two
oligarchy stooges. Moreover Hillary is definitely greater evil. Invoking of Nader to justify voting
for Hillary is pure neoliberal propaganda designed to get the establishment candidate (who has significant
and dangerous for any politician, to say nothing about POTUS, health problems) into White House. that
why neoliberal MSM are baking non-stop at Trump, trying exaggerate any his misstep to galactic proportions.
...
Notable quotes:
"... Michael, in a recent article that you penned on your website, you argued that Hillary Clinton's campaign is using a very clever strategy in that it is trying to associate criticism of Clinton with support for Trump and therefore support for Russia, which in the end is anti-American ..."
"... Trump opposes the neocon line toward Russia, and because he criticizes NATO, Russia benefits. Therefore Putin must have stolen the leaks and put them out, to make America weaker, not stronger, by helping the Trump campaign by showing the DNC's dirty tricks toward Bernie's followers. ..."
"... Most of all, Hillary is still the war candidate. Trump already has said, "Look at what she did to Libya." By displacing Libya, she turned its arms cache over to terrorist groups that have become ISIS, Al-Nusra, and the other terrorist in the Near East. So she's the Queen of Chaos. Finally, she's the candidate of Wall Street, given the fact even the Koch Brothers have said they're not going to back Trump, they're going to back Hillary because she's on their side. George Soros and most other big moguls and billionaires are now siding with the Democratic Party, not Trump. ..."
"... She is a candidate of Wall Street and she is as you say, now being supported even by the neocons. They're holding fundraisers for her. And the Koch brothers and so on. ..."
"... Trump will win if he can make the election all about Hillary, and Hillary will win if she can make the election all about Trump. ..."
"... "America needs an ineffective president. That's much better than an effective president that's going to go to war with Russia, that's going to push for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, that's going to protect Wall Street, and that's going to oppose neoliberal austerity." ..."
"... I am absolutely terrified of Hillary Clinton becoming President. She strikes me as having psychopathic tendencies. I mean, just look at the scandals she and Bill have been involved in, and then when she gets caught, she lies, feigns ignorance, deflects, blames others, lies some more. Power and money are her goals. ..."
"... I'm sure he will quash TPP, renegotiate nafta and be less belligerent with Russia. But what will happen when he and his non-government-indoctrinated team of advisers finally see every bit of redacted and "confidential" information that has been routinely hidden from the public and lied about for decades? ..."
"... The loss of sovereignty inherent in the "trade" agreements and incoherent Middle East policies, to name a few "strategies" this country is pursuing, have a larger purpose. We private citizens have just not been privy to it. How private citizen Trump will proceed if he is elected and comes to know the government's deepest, darkest secrets is anybody's guess. ..."
"... I think its a safe assumption that if Trump is elected he will be carefully 'minded' to ensure he can't gain access to information that would upset the applecart. ..."
"... As for Donnie taking down TPP and being the peace candidate, I think people should sit down and take a few deep breaths. As a New Yorker who's observed him for his entire public life, and as a 90 second scanning of his career demonstrates, the man cannot be trusted to speak truthfully about anything ..."
"... You're right. He'll make a good court jester. That's about it. as for "the man cannot be trusted to speak truthfully about anything" reminds me of someone who gets on TeeVee and does that well. And he really didn't have any experience but he got himself good handlers and others who ran the country. ..."
"... Exactly right! Trump is dangerous…to the establishment. And the establishment is what we have to get rid of. ..."
"... As flawed a character as Trump is, he still represents our last chance to challenge the establishment. It won't be a pretty presidency – but it will be entertaining – however the alternative is the ultimate horror show. Plus you are gambling that Clinton won't start a nuclear war and end the human race. Why would anyone in their right mind touch that wager? ..."
"... It is unlikely that Trump will be able to deport more people than Obama's record breaking administration. ..."
"... Obama actually ended up rejecting Clinton's continuous advice for more more more military intervention. ..."
"... I agree with you that Trump is not likable, and an unknown. The problem is that the known is despicable. Neither, let me repeat, neither candidate should be anywhere near this close to the White House. ..."
"... You have obviously chosen the despicable hateful war mongering devil you know. Others are willing to roll the dice with the guy who has incoherently at least given a nod to the idea that war with Russia is not a smart plan, and that our current military choices are not effective – not to mention a far more coherent case that our trade policy is screwed up and needs to be changed. ..."
"... Trump wants to stop "illegal" immigration so that poor Americans can have jobs. Illegals lower wages (because American employers pay them less), they increase rents (supply and demand), and they cost a fortune in medical and educational costs. He's for "legal" immigration when the country needs more workers. I don't think that is being racist, although he doesn't have a very nice way of saying things. ..."
"... Muslim immigration stopped until they can be properly vetted? That's just being prudent and careful, but again he could say things in a much kinder way. ..."
"... He's a wild man, but at least he's upfront about it. I see her as being a narcissist that just hides it better than he does. She could get us all killed. ..."
"... While Trump is upfront (yikes, I know), I see Hillary as the secretive, conniving, manipulative, scheming, backstabbing type. When someone slights Trump, out comes his response right back at them. It's over. But I would not want to cross her. I see her as cold, with very, very little conscience. I mean, would you ever have tried to pull off the scandals she has been involved in? No. She seeks power and money, and look out if you ever got in her way. She never says she's sorry, not really. Most you get out of her is she made a "mistake". ..."
"... Her outright aggression towards Russia, Syria, Libya, Ukraine should give you a hint of what lurks inside. And she doesn't attack these countries to better the U.S. She's doing it solely for her own person gain: money into the Clinton Foundation, business for her speech-giving husband, all to further the Clinton's. ..."
"... IMO, a very dangerous person, a very dangerous couple. And she has said, if she's elected, she will put Bill Clinton in charge of "economic affairs"! Can you just imagine what more deregulation will do for the banks? He repealed Glass-Steagall and brought us the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, as well as NAFTA. Get ready to hear a "huge" sucking sound if Hillary is elected. The place will be gutted. ..."
"... Perhaps with a hateful, racist, despicable con man trying to tell them what to do, congress just might re-assert its authority instead of acting as a rubber stamp. Which is the LOTE – Trump antagonizing congress into gridlock or HRC manipulating them into moar war? ..."
"... It sounds like you're talking about HRC when you're talking about Trump. She coined the term "super predators" so they could enrich the private prison industry by filling the jails with black people, she has waged wars against brown people in the middle east for no particular reason except corporate profits and power, no respect for their theocracies or the delicate balance that "supposed" tyrants there accomplished that had enduring peace there (some may argue). Where has Trump exhibited such hatred and racism? His policies? What policies? No one that has worked for him ever described him as hateful, racist or despicable. Stop believing the propaganda on TV. ..."
"... You might think Obama doesn't like us, the 99%, but Hillary probably hates us. Pay attention, the most "effective evil" is the evil to fear. ..."
"... If it's not close in my state, I will vote 3rd party. If it is close, I'll vote for Clinton over Trump. There is a good interview with Chomsky on this on youtube which I'm too lazy to look up right now. ..."
"... "Hillary took the lead role in the White House's efforts to pass a corporate-friendly version of "health reform." Along with the big insurance companies the Clintons deceptively railed against, the "co-presidents" decided from the start to exclude the popular health care alternative – single payer – from the national health care "discussion." (Obama would do the same thing in 2009.) ..."
"... Beyond backing by a citizen super-majority, Himmelstein noted, single-payer would provide comprehensive coverage to the nation's 40 million uninsured while retaining free choice in doctor selection and being certified by the Congressional Budget Office as "the most cost-effective plan on offer." ..."
"... That whole article deals with the "fake liberalism" exhibited by the Clinton's and Obama. It says they only "pretend" to care. ..."
"... clinton is the more effective evil for another reason; she is respected by other neoliberals who rule the world in other countries. even if trump wanted to pass the TPP, TTIP and TISA, the intense dislike of him would make it easier to reject the bills in countries like Canada, Australia, the EU. A Hillary presidency would just about guarantee they'd sign. ..."
"... it's common knowledge that the current "rigged" system, as Donald Trump keeps calling it, has been instrumental in bringing American politics and government to their present state of dysfunction at local, state and national levels. Americans hate and despise this elitist system; everyone is disgusted with the political donor class whose billions of dollars underwrite the election-rigging televised attack ads that dominate it. ..."
"... At the Demo Convention Bernie Sanders neatly pinpointed the topics with which this bogus system is obsessed: "Let me be as clear as I can be. … This election is not about political gossip. It's not about polls. It's not about campaign strategy. It's not about fundraising. It's not about all the things the media spends so much time discussing." ..."
"... Do you see it as possible that empowered citizens will truly be willing to take on big capital, even when big capital goes to war on them? I'm skeptical ..."
"... The evil to fear is the most effective evil. Hillary IS both sides of the aisle and Congress will allow her all her neocon neoliberal desires, Trump is neither side of the aisle and would be ineffective because he doesn't belong to the neoliberal neocons, he's not an insider and obviously won't play their games. ..."
"... Oh heck yes. This is a fight that has been going on for decades with battles like the War Powers Act and Nixon's impeachment. Supposedly the Founding Fathers didn't want an all powerful chief executive and thought that Congress would be the dominant force. But in modern times, even before Clinton v Trump, we already had gone much too far in the direction of a caudillo. Internally one person with a bully pulpit will never be able to change the current course and overseas presidents have a frightening amount of power that they can wield and then dare Congress to do something about it afterwards. ..."
"... HRC has got the big corporate money behind her, the media too. Trump is fighting an uphill battle. If you watch CNN, which I watch very little of, they spend almost the whole time pulling apart what Trump has said, and very, very little press on Hillary's email, the Clinton Foundation, etc. ..."
"... They are going after Trump with all that they have. They want the status quo to remain, and they are very worried that he might change it. Hillary is Wall Street, multinational corporations, arms dealers, weapons manufacturers, the military-industrial complex ..."
"... "When you join the dots to Trump also preaching a policy revolt against the insatiable corporate jaws feeding on trillions of dollars of public budgets in Washington, the meaning becomes clear. But that connected meaning is blacked out. In its place, the corporate media and politicians present an egomaniac blowhard bordering on fascism who preaches hate, racism and sexism. ..."
"... He is on record saying he will cut the Pentagon's budget "by 50%". No winning politician has ever dared to take on the military-industrial complex, with even Eisenhower only naming it in his parting speech. ..."
"... Trump also says that the US "must be neutral, an honest broker" on the Israeli-Palestine conflict – as unspeakable as it gets in US politics ..."
"... Hillary and her team will try to paint Trump as a lover of Putin, as a racist, bigot, bring the narrative down to this only. This way, no one ends up talking about the corporate elites she represents. Good, read some more, crittermom, and open your eyes even more. There's a lot more going on than meets the eye. ..."
"... Recently I asked a wise person I know what historically follows an oligarchy (which is what I believe we have been in for awhile now). He told me that an oligarchy is usually followed by a dictatorship. ..."
"... A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing, always to be followed by a dictatorship, then a monarchy". ..."
"... How could Trump become a dictator? Congress will be hostile. Judiciary will be hostile. Pentagon will be hostile (didn't you see all those generals and admirals, in uniform, literally lining up behind Clinton?) Civil administration will be sullen, uncooperative, and leaking like crazy. ..."
"... Trump does not have his own freestanding parallel state organization, ready to move in and take over the bureaucracy and the armed forces. It would be physically impossible for Trump to attempt a mass purge. ..."
"... Just think: if you elect Trump, you would actually get to see the US Constitution's fabled "checks and balances" come into play for once in your life! ..."
"... How could Trump become a dictator? ..."
"... This is complete rhetorical garbage, the same kind of nonsense displayed when he is shock quoted and only the narrative supporting text is copied (such as the convenient omission that the fabled day in which Clinton could be assassinated would be "horrible"). It also fits well with the Democrats' habit of burying themselves instead of putting up a fight. ..."
"... While Trump is a buffoon who might lead us into bad situations as he stumbles around, Hillary Clinton displays an undeniable and proven malice aforethought that he does not. ..."
PERIES: So Michael, in a recent article that you penned on your website, you argued that Hillary
Clinton's campaign is using a very clever strategy in that it is trying to associate criticism of
Clinton with support for Trump and therefore support for Russia, which in the end is anti-American
. Now, this type of association game, which is supposed to make it difficult for Sanders supporters
to criticize Clinton, what implication does this have on the overall politics in this country?
HUDSON: Well, it certainly changed things in earlier elections. The Republican convention was
as is normal, all about their candidate Trump. But surprisingly, so was the Democratic convention.
That was all about Trump too – as the devil. The platform Hillary's running on is "I'm not Trump.
I'm the lesser evil."
She elaborates that by saying that Trump is Putin's ploy. When the Democratic National Committee
(someone within it, or without) leaked the information to Wikileaks, the Democrats and Hillary asked,
"Who benefits from this"? Ah-ha. Becaue Trump opposes the neocon line toward Russia, and because
he criticizes NATO, Russia benefits. Therefore Putin must have stolen the leaks and put them out,
to make America weaker, not stronger, by helping the Trump campaign by showing the DNC's dirty tricks
toward Bernie's followers.
Then Assange did an Internet interview and implied that it was not a cyberwar attack but a leak
– indicating that it came from an insider inn the DNC. If this is true, then the Democrats are simply
trying to blame it all on Trump – diverting attention from what the leaks' actual content!
This is old-fashioned red baiting. I saw it 60 years ago when I was a teenager. I went to a high
school where teachers used to turn in reports on what we said in class to the FBI every month. The
State Department was emptied out of "realists" and staffed with Alan Dulles-type Cold Warriors. One
couldn't talk about certain subjects. That is what red-baiting does. So the effect at the Democratic
Convention was about Hillary trying to avoid taking about her own policies and herself. Except for
what her husband said about "I met a girl" (not meaning Jennifer Flowers or Monica Lewinski.)
The red baiting succeeded, and the convention wasn't about Hillary – at least, not her economic
policies. It was more about Obama. She tied herself to Obama, and next to Trump = Putin, the convention's
second underlying theme was that Hillary was going to be Obama's third term. That's what Obama himself
said when he came and addressed the convention.
The problem with this strategy is it's exactly the problem the Republicans faced in 2008, when
voters turned against George Bush's administration. Voters wanted change. And they do today. Hillary
did not say "I'm going to have hope and change from the last years of Obama." She said, in effect,
"I'm not going to change anything. I'm going to continue Obama's policies that have made you all
so prosperous." She talked about how employment is rising and everyone is better off.
Well, the problem is that many people aren't better off than the last eight years. Ten million
families have lost their homes, and most peoples' budgets are being squeezed. Obama saved the banks
not the economy. So Trump's line and the Republican line in this election could well be: "Are you
really better off than you were eight years ago? Or, are you actually worse off? Where are all your
gains? You're further in debt. You're having more difficulty meeting your paychecks, you're running
up your student loans. You're really not better off and we're going to be the party of hope and change."
Hillary can't really counter that with the policies she has. Trump and the Republicans can say
that even though she disavowed the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the trade agreement with Europe,
all the Democratic representatives that voted for the TPP have won re-nomination, and it's still
on the burner.
Most of all, Hillary is still the war candidate. Trump already has said, "Look at what she
did to Libya." By displacing Libya, she turned its arms cache over to terrorist groups that have
become ISIS, Al-Nusra, and the other terrorist in the Near East. So she's the Queen of Chaos. Finally,
she's the candidate of Wall Street, given the fact even the Koch Brothers have said they're not going
to back Trump, they're going to back Hillary because she's on their side. George Soros and most other
big moguls and billionaires are now siding with the Democratic Party, not Trump.
What did Hilary actually say at the convention besides "I'm not Trump, Trump is worse." She's
trying to make the whole election over her rival, not over herself.
PERIES: Okay, so everything you say about Hillary Clinton may be true, and it's more in your favor
that it is true. She is a candidate of Wall Street and she is as you say, now being supported
even by the neocons. They're holding fundraisers for her. And the Koch brothers and so on. So
when we opened this interview we were talking about what the Bernie Sanders supporters should now
do, because Trump is starting to appeal like he's the candidate of ordinary people. So what are they
to do?
HUDSON: Well, if the election is between the most unpopular woman candidate in America and the
most unpopular male candidate, the winner is going to be whoever can make the election fought over
the other person. Trump will win if he can make the election all about Hillary, and Hillary will
win if she can make the election all about Trump. It looks like she's able to do this, because
Trump is even more narcissistic than she is.
EndOfTheWorld- totally agree with you. I just shake my head at Bernie. Diametrically opposed
to Clinton, he suddenly turns around and embraces her! What? I will never understand that.
"America needs an ineffective president. That's much better than an effective president
that's going to go to war with Russia, that's going to push for the Trans-Pacific Partnership,
that's going to protect Wall Street, and that's going to oppose neoliberal austerity."
He's right too. I am absolutely terrified of Hillary Clinton becoming President. She strikes
me as having psychopathic tendencies. I mean, just look at the scandals she and Bill have been
involved in, and then when she gets caught, she lies, feigns ignorance, deflects, blames others,
lies some more. Power and money are her goals.
She has called Putin "Hitler", said she wants to expand NATO, and again said she wants to take
out Assad. Well, how is she going to do that when Russia is in there? God, she is scary. I just
hope that there's a big Clinton Foundation email leak to finish her off.
Trump is out there, but at least he wants to try to negotiate peace (of course, if war wasn't
making so many people rich, it would be stopped tomorrow). He's questioning why NATO is necessary,
never mind its continual expansion, and he wants to stop the TPP.
God, I'd be happy with even one of the above. Hillary will give us TPP, more NATO, more war,
and a cackle. Please, if anyone has some loose emails hanging around, now is the time!
I honestly don't think there's any way to predict what Donald Trump will do if elected. He's
effectively a private citizen who, all of a sudden, will have access to every government secret
and lie, and no culpability for any of it. It's almost impossible to imagine what that would be
like.
And it's what makes him so "dangerous."
I'm sure he will quash TPP, renegotiate nafta and be less belligerent with Russia. But
what will happen when he and his non-government-indoctrinated team of advisers finally see every
bit of redacted and "confidential" information that has been routinely hidden from the public
and lied about for decades?
The loss of sovereignty inherent in the "trade" agreements and incoherent Middle East policies,
to name a few "strategies" this country is pursuing, have a larger purpose. We private citizens
have just not been privy to it. How private citizen Trump will proceed if he is elected and comes
to know the government's deepest, darkest secrets is anybody's guess.
I think its a safe assumption that if Trump is elected he will be carefully 'minded' to
ensure he can't gain access to information that would upset the applecart. I doubt he would
be able to get much done as there would be an establishment consensus to keep him firmly under
wraps. He would mostly busy himself with jetting around meeting foreign leaders and he might actually
be quite productive at that.
or he'll pass what he campaigns on which is standard Republican policy (sometimes) through
an entirely Republican legislature duh. So tax cuts, cuts to regulation etc.. Really he's campaigning
on these things and they CAN pass a Republican congress.
Yes, if Donnie is elected, we'll see some form of a Regency; that's what Pence is there for.
Donnie will be Clown Prince, while more traditionally evil Republican/DC technocrats "run" things.
It would be a re-doing of the Reagan/Bush-Baker and Bush/Cheney dynamic, as seen on reality TV.
As for Donnie taking down TPP and being the peace candidate, I think people should sit
down and take a few deep breaths. As a New Yorker who's observed him for his entire public life,
and as a 90 second scanning of his career demonstrates, the man cannot be trusted to speak truthfully
about anything. Does he lie exactly the way Hillary does? Of course not, she's the accomplished
professional, while Donnie spins plates and tries to misdirect by finding someone to insult when
they fall and shatter.
Vote for Hillary or not (I most likely won't, but can't predict much of anything in this all-bets-are-off
opera buffa), but by believing anything Donnie says, you risk being the chump he already thinks
you are.
You're right. He'll make a good court jester. That's about it. as for "the man cannot be
trusted to speak truthfully about anything" reminds me of someone who gets on TeeVee and does
that well. And he really didn't have any experience but he got himself good handlers and others
who ran the country.
Exactly right! Trump is dangerous…to the establishment. And the establishment is what we
have to get rid of.
When was the last time a political candidate in any country was as hated by the establishment
as Trump is? That's all you need to know. As flawed a character as Trump is, he still represents
our last chance to challenge the establishment. It won't be a pretty presidency – but it will
be entertaining – however the alternative is the ultimate horror show. Plus you are gambling that
Clinton won't start a nuclear war and end the human race. Why would anyone in their right mind
touch that wager?
It is unlikely that Trump will be able to deport more people than Obama's record breaking
administration. Something, that for all her rhetoric, there is no reason to believe that
Clinton will change. As for waging war, we have a whole lot of information that for all his massive
drone wars and interventions in the Middle East, Obama actually ended up rejecting Clinton's
continuous advice for more more more military intervention.
I agree with you that Trump is not likable, and an unknown. The problem is that the known
is despicable. Neither, let me repeat, neither candidate should be anywhere near this close to
the White House.
You have obviously chosen the despicable hateful war mongering devil you know. Others are
willing to roll the dice with the guy who has incoherently at least given a nod to the idea that
war with Russia is not a smart plan, and that our current military choices are not effective –
not to mention a far more coherent case that our trade policy is screwed up and needs to be changed.
Once again, people are choosing from known despicable, unknown possibly lesser possibly greater
despicable, and unlikely to win third parties or write ins – everyone can only do that for themselves.
One New York reporter (sorry, I don't have the link) said that he has watched Trump his whole
life and he said, though he could say many bad things about Trump, racism wasn't one of them.
He said he had never in all his years of watching him known Trump to be racist in any way.
Trump wants to stop "illegal" immigration so that poor Americans can have jobs. Illegals
lower wages (because American employers pay them less), they increase rents (supply and demand),
and they cost a fortune in medical and educational costs. He's for "legal" immigration when the
country needs more workers. I don't think that is being racist, although he doesn't have a very
nice way of saying things.
Muslim immigration stopped until they can be properly vetted? That's just being prudent
and careful, but again he could say things in a much kinder way.
He's a wild man, but at least he's upfront about it. I see her as being a narcissist that
just hides it better than he does. She could get us all killed.
While Trump is upfront (yikes, I know), I see Hillary as the secretive, conniving, manipulative,
scheming, backstabbing type. When someone slights Trump, out comes his response right back at
them. It's over. But I would not want to cross her. I see her as cold, with very, very little
conscience. I mean, would you ever have tried to pull off the scandals she has been involved in?
No. She seeks power and money, and look out if you ever got in her way. She never says she's sorry,
not really. Most you get out of her is she made a "mistake".
Her outright aggression towards Russia, Syria, Libya, Ukraine should give you a hint of
what lurks inside. And she doesn't attack these countries to better the U.S. She's doing it solely
for her own person gain: money into the Clinton Foundation, business for her speech-giving husband,
all to further the Clinton's.
IMO, a very dangerous person, a very dangerous couple. And she has said, if she's elected,
she will put Bill Clinton in charge of "economic affairs"! Can you just imagine what more deregulation
will do for the banks? He repealed Glass-Steagall and brought us the Commodity Futures Modernization
Act, as well as NAFTA. Get ready to hear a "huge" sucking sound if Hillary is elected. The place
will be gutted.
That's preposterous about Donnie not being racist. When the Central Park Five (released from
prison and compensated by the state for false impisonment) were arrested, Donnie took out full
page ads for days in the NYC papers, all but calling for those (innocent) boy's lynching. He was
raised in an explicitly racist milieu – his father arrested at a KKK tussle in Queens in the 1920's,
and successfully sued by the Nixon DOJ for his discriminatory rental policies…) and has a long
history of saying ignorant, absurd and racist things about "The Blacks."
"Clinton is awful, but that doesn't mean it's a better idea to elect a hateful, racist,
despicable con man"
Perhaps with a hateful, racist, despicable con man trying to tell them what to do, congress
just might re-assert its authority instead of acting as a rubber stamp. Which is the LOTE – Trump
antagonizing congress into gridlock or HRC manipulating them into moar war?
It sounds like you're talking about HRC when you're talking about Trump. She coined the
term "super predators" so they could enrich the private prison industry by filling the jails with
black people, she has waged wars against brown people in the middle east for no particular reason
except corporate profits and power, no respect for their theocracies or the delicate balance that
"supposed" tyrants there accomplished that had enduring peace there (some may argue). Where has
Trump exhibited such hatred and racism? His policies? What policies? No one that has worked for
him ever described him as hateful, racist or despicable. Stop believing the propaganda on TV.
Hatred and racism is exhibited in leaders by being a war monger and gutting this nation with
the TPP and lousy trade deals that sell off our national sovereignty and democracy. You might
think Obama doesn't like us, the 99%, but Hillary probably hates us. Pay attention, the most "effective
evil" is the evil to fear.
I am with
Noam Chomsky on this. If it's not close in my state, I will vote 3rd party. If it is close,
I'll vote for Clinton over Trump. There is a good interview with Chomsky on this on youtube which
I'm too lazy to look up right now.
But as Pat said above, everyone must make up his or her own mind.
Has there ever been any evidence that this type of strategic voting has ever done any good
whatsoever or ever had its intended result? Just speculation but I'm guessing that only a very
few of the very politically astute would even bother. I say vote your conscience regardless and
let the chips fall where they may.
Not the voters fault that this is the best the two major parties could come up with.
Speaking of revolution, I emailed Chomsky yesterday and he replied. The below is my message
to him.
Professor Chomsky,
In the last years of his life, Martin Luther King, Jr. organized the Poor People's Campaign,
which essentially planned to occupy Capitol Hill. The campaign still happened after his death,
but not enough people showed up for it to have a great impact.
I've begun to advocate what would essentially be a continuation of the Poor People's
Campaign, but with a broader focus on the numerous crises facing humanity: climate change,
poverty, illegal wars, etc.
Would you possibly be interested in providing rhetorical support for this action?
Thank you so much for your efforts to make a better world.
The below is Chomsky's reply.
It was a wonderful and very important initiative, cruelly undermined by his assassination.
I hope you manage to revive it.
Butch – "…she helped lead the fight for universal health care." Did she now? Here's a good
quote on how she felt about universal health care:
"Hillary took the lead role in the White House's efforts to pass a corporate-friendly version
of "health reform." Along with the big insurance companies the Clintons deceptively railed against,
the "co-presidents" decided from the start to exclude the popular health care alternative – single
payer – from the national health care "discussion." (Obama would do the same thing in 2009.)
"David, tell me something interesting." That was then First Lady Hillary Clinton's weary and
exasperated response – as head of the White House's health reform initiative – to Harvard medical
professor David Himmelstein in 1993. Himmelstein was head of Physicians for a National Health
Program. He had just told her about the remarkable possibilities of a comprehensive, single-payer
"Canadian style" health plan, supported by more than two-thirds of the U.S. public. Beyond
backing by a citizen super-majority, Himmelstein noted, single-payer would provide comprehensive
coverage to the nation's 40 million uninsured while retaining free choice in doctor selection
and being certified by the Congressional Budget Office as "the most cost-effective plan on offer."
clinton is the more effective evil for another reason; she is respected by other neoliberals
who rule the world in other countries. even if trump wanted to pass the TPP, TTIP and TISA, the
intense dislike of him would make it easier to reject the bills in countries like Canada, Australia,
the EU. A Hillary presidency would just about guarantee they'd sign.
I love Michael Hudson. But like everyone commenting here he is needlessly thinking inside the
crumbling box of America's existing top-down, money-driven system of political discourse. So what
is it that keeps us from thinking outside this godawful box? I think we're all so deeply and habitually
embedded in the mode of being status quo critics that we're unable to enter the problem-solving
mode of finding alternatives to it. But to make government work in America, we need to think in
both modes.
So let's think outside the box for a minute. After all, it's common knowledge that the
current "rigged" system, as Donald Trump keeps calling it, has been instrumental in bringing American
politics and government to their present state of dysfunction at local, state and national levels.
Americans hate and despise this elitist system; everyone is disgusted with the political donor
class whose billions of dollars underwrite the election-rigging televised attack ads that dominate
it.
At the Demo Convention Bernie Sanders neatly pinpointed the topics with which this bogus
system is obsessed: "Let me be as clear as I can be. … This election is not about political gossip.
It's not about polls. It's not about campaign strategy. It's not about fundraising. It's not about
all the things the media spends so much time discussing." Yet like all presidential candidates
this year Bernie didn't take the next, logical step: he didn't call for the creation of a new
political discourse system. (Note that Hillary alone among the top three candidates never, ever
has a bad word to say against the current system.)
OK, so what might a new system look like? First off, it would be non-partisan, issue-centered
and deliberative. And citizen-participatory. It would make citizens and governments responsive
and accountable to each other in shaping the best futures of their communities. That's its core
principal.
More specifically, the format of a reality TV show like The Voice or American Idol could readily
be adapted to create ongoing, prime-time, issue-centered searches for solutions to any and all
of the issues of the day. And of course problem-solving Reality TV is just of any number of formats
that could work for TV. Other media could develop formats tap their strengths and appeal to their
audiences.
Thanks to the miracle of modern communications technologies, there's nothing to stop Americans
from having a citizen-participatory system of political discourse that gives all Americans an
informed voice in the political and government decisions that affect their lives. Americans will
flock in drove to ongoing, rule-governed problem-solving public forums that earn the respect and
trust of citizens and political leaders alike. When we create them, governments at local, state
and national levels will start working again. If we don't, our politics will continue to sink
deeper into the cesspool we're in now.
Do you see it as possible that empowered citizens will truly be willing to take on big
capital, even when big capital goes to war on them? I'm skeptical, unless there is a real
socialist-ish movement out there educating and politicizing. In other words, while the political
system is indeed broken, the economy is also broken and it is hard to see "empowered" citizens
fixing the economy. What I think would happen is the politicians elected by these empowered citizens
would be opposed by big business and the politicians they own, nothing good would get done, and
there would be a business-financed media drumbeat that more democracy has been "proven" not to
work.
I don't think our political problems can be solved simply be electing better politicians –
though of course we do need better politicians.
The evil to fear is the most effective evil. Hillary IS both sides of
the aisle and Congress will allow her all her neocon neoliberal desires, Trump is neither side
of the aisle and would be ineffective because he doesn't belong to the neoliberal neocons, he's
not an insider and obviously won't play their games.
I have not had nearly the hardship you have had crittermom and I have not lived as long either,
but at 27, and being someone who has been discontent with social structure since middle school,
I have absolutely had enough. Genetics, environment, the combination of internal-external factors,
whatever it was I have always had a very ("annoying" and sarcastic) curiousity or oppositional
approach to things, especially things people do not question and accept as is (religion, government…).
Growing older has only led me to greater understanding of the pit we reside within and how
we probably will not get out. This election season in particular has been ridiculously… indescribable.
The utter incompetence of our selfish administrations is finally coming to a head and people are
completely oblivious, pulling the same stale BS that we have seen every four years since before
I was born.
Bernie totally blew it but, outside your hardship, don't ever think you effort was a waste.
For once an honest candidate appeared who was backed by the policies we need and you supported
that (as I did). That is the most we can do at this point. Bernie the man should absolutely be
criticized because he wanted a "revolution" then sold out to the Junta instead of biting back
when it would have really sent a message to the people and high rollers. He wasn't willing to
sacrifice what was necessary to make a stand. Instead he sided with the people that have made
careers sacrificing citizens like you–and that is terrible. The reality these people live in and
teach to others is such a lie.
Oh heck yes. This is a fight that has been going on for decades with battles like the War
Powers Act and Nixon's impeachment. Supposedly the Founding Fathers didn't want an all powerful
chief executive and thought that Congress would be the dominant force. But in modern times, even
before Clinton v Trump, we already had gone much too far in the direction of a caudillo. Internally
one person with a bully pulpit will never be able to change the current course and overseas presidents
have a frightening amount of power that they can wield and then dare Congress to do something
about it afterwards.
So despite his potty mouth there's something to be said for Mr. Trump Goes to Washington. By
the time he figures out how to be caudillo it may be time for another election.
crittermom – HRC has got the big corporate money behind her, the media too. Trump is fighting
an uphill battle. If you watch CNN, which I watch very little of, they spend almost the whole
time pulling apart what Trump has said, and very, very little press on Hillary's email, the Clinton
Foundation, etc.
They are going after Trump with all that they have. They want the status quo to remain,
and they are very worried that he might change it. Hillary is Wall Street, multinational corporations,
arms dealers, weapons manufacturers, the military-industrial complex. Who would have thought
that the guy running for the right wants to keep jobs in America, wants to stop wars, and the
one on the left is for the monied class! Right is left and left is right. Upside down world.
The following article is old now, from April, but it gives you an idea of "Why the Establishment
Hates Trump" and what he is planning on doing. Watch them go after him; they will vilify him.
"When you join the dots to Trump also preaching a policy revolt against the insatiable
corporate jaws feeding on trillions of dollars of public budgets in Washington, the meaning
becomes clear. But that connected meaning is blacked out. In its place, the corporate media
and politicians present an egomaniac blowhard bordering on fascism who preaches hate, racism
and sexism.
But the silenced policies he advocates are more like jumping into a crocodile pit. He
is on record saying he will cut the Pentagon's budget "by 50%". No winning politician has ever
dared to take on the military-industrial complex, with even Eisenhower only naming it in his
parting speech.
Trump also says that the US "must be neutral, an honest broker" on the Israeli-Palestine
conflict – as unspeakable as it gets in US politics.
Big Pharma is also called out with "$400 billion to be saved by government negotiation of
prices". The even more powerful HMO's are confronted by the possibility of a "one-payer system",
the devil incarnate in America's corporate-welfare state."
Hillary and her team will try to paint Trump as a lover of Putin, as a racist, bigot, bring
the narrative down to this only. This way, no one ends up talking about the corporate elites she
represents. Good, read some more, crittermom, and open your eyes even more. There's a lot more
going on than meets the eye.
So I don't usually post here, just mostly read what other folks have to say.
Recently I asked a wise person I know what historically follows an oligarchy (which is
what I believe we have been in for awhile now). He told me that an oligarchy is usually followed
by a dictatorship.
So if that is the case is Trump going to take us into the land of dictatorship (which I believe
is highly likely) or are any of us going to be able to tread water for a little longer with HRC
(who I agree is ugh a non-choice but hopefully the lesser of the two evils).
Looking this up I found the concept of the Tytler Cycle. Interesting and scary. This is off
wikipedia:
Two centuries ago, a somewhat obscure Scotsman named Tytler made this profound observation:
"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the
majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority
always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses
because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing, always to be followed by a dictatorship, then a
monarchy".
Anyway can someone refute this for me so I can sleep tonight? Thanks, in advance.
How could Trump become a dictator? Congress will be hostile. Judiciary will be hostile.
Pentagon will be hostile (didn't you see all those generals and admirals, in uniform, literally
lining up behind Clinton?) Civil administration will be sullen, uncooperative, and leaking
like crazy.
Trump does not have his own freestanding parallel state organization, ready to move in
and take over the bureaucracy and the armed forces. It would be physically impossible for
Trump to attempt a mass purge.
So exactly how the hell would Trump impose his will on the American masses? Answer: No Way.
President Trump can only be a relatively weak president.
Just think: if you elect Trump, you would actually get to see the US Constitution's fabled
"checks and balances" come into play for once in your life!
Thank you! The same question I have been asking repeatedly throughout this charade. Everyone's
favorite line is "Trump will be a dictator [be afriad]!" The obvious question… how
?!
How is Trump going to have the same or any more power within or over the system than any president
before him?? What is a reasonable strategy with which he could upend and create domination over
this system with? This is complete rhetorical garbage, the same kind of nonsense displayed
when he is shock quoted and only the narrative supporting text is copied (such as the convenient
omission that the fabled day in which Clinton could be assassinated would be "horrible"). It also
fits well with the Democrats' habit of burying themselves instead of putting up a fight.
I have felt for a long time but have struggled to put into words the deep, strong aversion
I have towards Clinton (et al.)and that I feel any time I read about her or see her. There is
a phrase in the song Art War , by the Knack, that caught my ear; what I originally heard as, "malice
of forethought". To me this represents the idea that terrible, harmful, far-reaching, incompetent
decisions are made completely on purpose. After doing some research I discovered that the phrase
is actually "malice aforethought", related to murderous intent in legal definitions. A
second, more appropriate
definition here is "a general evil and depraved state of mind in which the person is unconcerned
for the lives of others". This represents my internal shuddering exactly – a sort of willful, deadly
incompetence.
While Trump is a buffoon who might lead us into bad situations as he stumbles around, Hillary
Clinton displays an undeniable and proven malice aforethought that he does not.
"... CNN exit polls show that only about 47 percent of the Nader voters would have voted for Gore in a two way race, while 21 percent would have voted for Bush and 30 percent would have abstained from voting in the Presidential contest altogether. ..."
Well, a counterfactual: Bush v Gore 2000. I have heard arguments that if Nader had not run,
or if no one voted for him, Gore would have won Florida and hence the election.
Mike, I've no links to provide you with -you can easily find them – but the rebuttal to the
Nader-Gave-Us-Bush line is typically that 1) hundreds of thousands of registered Democrats in
Florida voted for Bush, and 2) Gore could not win his "home" (though he's really a pure product
of Washington, DC) state of Tennessee.
The Blame Nader narrative also ignores the fact that the Dems did little or nothing to contest
the blatant stealing of the election.
Thanks, Michael. They only way I see to disprove it is if they interviewed all 90,000+
Nader voters and > 50% in FL swore they would have voted for Bush - or some such.
It seems tough to disprove such an historical counterfactual hypothetical!
At any rate, I think this is what underlies Chomsky's reasoning.
Thanks for the link. From the Alternet article linked to at the end:
CNN exit polls show that only about 47 percent of the Nader voters would have voted for
Gore in a two way race, while 21 percent would have voted for Bush and 30 percent would have abstained
from voting in the Presidential contest altogether.
This would be the relevant evidence to prove the counterfactual hypothesis. I note that it
seems to be contradicted by the CNN polling data in the Truthdig article; what is unclear to me
is whether they are talking about FL voters, or national voters. It makes a difference if we are
focusing solely on FL (which in itself could be problematic if Nader's elimination swung the result
in other states - which I don't know.)
Anyway, as I said above, I do think it is this example and reasoning that underlies Chomsky's
logic. And mine. But I admit, I am abjectly unenthusiastic about it. I expect and hope that I
shall be able to vote 3rd party - I vote in NY.
Thanks again. And to you and all, I appreciate the civility of tone in this engagement. I realize
my view is probably in the minority here.
Gore got more votes overall than Bush and not all the votes were counted in FL in 2000 thanks
to a corrupt Supreme court. Bush was appointed, not elected, and that isn't Nader's fault.
Nader ran in 2004 too and got ,< 1% of the vote. Of course that election was stolen too but
neither Gore nor Kerry bothered to raise a fuss.
I think we ought to be concentrating more on the integrity of our elections in this country
rather than wringing our hands about who might be a 'spoiler'.
Can't stand the republicans but I haven't heard them whinging about Ross Perot for the last
20 years.
Sooooo tired of this analogy. And I voted for Gore in 2000. First, a couple of differences:
Gore was clearly a much better candidate and would have been a much better president than Bush.
And Gore was great on the environment.
Also, Gore lost primarily because of a tilted "liberal media" that seemed to MUCH prefer Bush.
Secondarily because he (or his people) ran one of the worst presidential campaigns I've ever seen.
Maybe the worst presidential campaign I've ever seen, as far as trying to take advantage of the
candidate's strengths (Trump in this general is working on catching up, though!)
Third was Clinton fatigue, which was very real at the time and did not help at all. Nader and
the cheating in Florida and the horrid Supreme Court decision (complete w/failures to recuse that
were kinda eyebrow raising) were also relevant, but none of this should have even come into play.
Gore had a lot to work with, Bush was a godawful candidate, and a competent campaign combined
with something even vaguely resembling fair media coverage would have made this a slam dunk 5+
% win despite the polarized country and a strong desire on the part of many to get rid of anything
associated with Bill. Even with all that, and Nader, if we hadn't allowed a truly criminal purge
of non-criminals from Florida's voter rolls, Gore wins. This was followed by the count fiasco,
more horribly biased media coverage (they were as desperate for Gore to quit then as they were
for Bernie to quit the last several months of his campaign, gotta give Bernie credit for fighting
harder and longer against worse odds), Gore inexplicably rolling over in a display that still
makes me shake my head in disbelief, and a just plain wrong Supreme Court decision that only happened
because justices w/family members working on Bush's campaign didn't recuse themselves.
But still, biggest difference for me? Neither of these are someone I want in the oval office.
"... Michael, in a recent article that you penned on your website, you argued that Hillary Clinton's campaign is using a very clever strategy in that it is trying to associate criticism of Clinton with support for Trump and therefore support for Russia, which in the end is anti-American ..."
"... Trump opposes the neocon line toward Russia, and because he criticizes NATO, Russia benefits. Therefore Putin must have stolen the leaks and put them out, to make America weaker, not stronger, by helping the Trump campaign by showing the DNC's dirty tricks toward Bernie's followers. ..."
"... Most of all, Hillary is still the war candidate. Trump already has said, "Look at what she did to Libya." By displacing Libya, she turned its arms cache over to terrorist groups that have become ISIS, Al-Nusra, and the other terrorist in the Near East. So she's the Queen of Chaos. Finally, she's the candidate of Wall Street, given the fact even the Koch Brothers have said they're not going to back Trump, they're going to back Hillary because she's on their side. George Soros and most other big moguls and billionaires are now siding with the Democratic Party, not Trump. ..."
"... She is a candidate of Wall Street and she is as you say, now being supported even by the neocons. They're holding fundraisers for her. And the Koch brothers and so on. ..."
"... Trump will win if he can make the election all about Hillary, and Hillary will win if she can make the election all about Trump. ..."
"... "America needs an ineffective president. That's much better than an effective president that's going to go to war with Russia, that's going to push for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, that's going to protect Wall Street, and that's going to oppose neoliberal austerity." ..."
"... I am absolutely terrified of Hillary Clinton becoming President. She strikes me as having psychopathic tendencies. I mean, just look at the scandals she and Bill have been involved in, and then when she gets caught, she lies, feigns ignorance, deflects, blames others, lies some more. Power and money are her goals. ..."
"... I'm sure he will quash TPP, renegotiate nafta and be less belligerent with Russia. But what will happen when he and his non-government-indoctrinated team of advisers finally see every bit of redacted and "confidential" information that has been routinely hidden from the public and lied about for decades? ..."
"... The loss of sovereignty inherent in the "trade" agreements and incoherent Middle East policies, to name a few "strategies" this country is pursuing, have a larger purpose. We private citizens have just not been privy to it. How private citizen Trump will proceed if he is elected and comes to know the government's deepest, darkest secrets is anybody's guess. ..."
"... I think its a safe assumption that if Trump is elected he will be carefully 'minded' to ensure he can't gain access to information that would upset the applecart. ..."
"... As for Donnie taking down TPP and being the peace candidate, I think people should sit down and take a few deep breaths. As a New Yorker who's observed him for his entire public life, and as a 90 second scanning of his career demonstrates, the man cannot be trusted to speak truthfully about anything ..."
"... You're right. He'll make a good court jester. That's about it. as for "the man cannot be trusted to speak truthfully about anything" reminds me of someone who gets on TeeVee and does that well. And he really didn't have any experience but he got himself good handlers and others who ran the country. ..."
"... Exactly right! Trump is dangerous…to the establishment. And the establishment is what we have to get rid of. ..."
"... As flawed a character as Trump is, he still represents our last chance to challenge the establishment. It won't be a pretty presidency – but it will be entertaining – however the alternative is the ultimate horror show. Plus you are gambling that Clinton won't start a nuclear war and end the human race. Why would anyone in their right mind touch that wager? ..."
"... Obama actually ended up rejecting Clinton's continuous advice for more more more military intervention. ..."
"... I agree with you that Trump is not likable, and an unknown. The problem is that the known is despicable. Neither, let me repeat, neither candidate should be anywhere near this close to the White House. ..."
"... You have obviously chosen the despicable hateful war mongering devil you know. Others are willing to roll the dice with the guy who has incoherently at least given a nod to the idea that war with Russia is not a smart plan, and that our current military choices are not effective – not to mention a far more coherent case that our trade policy is screwed up and needs to be changed. ..."
"... Trump wants to stop "illegal" immigration so that poor Americans can have jobs. Illegals lower wages (because American employers pay them less), they increase rents (supply and demand), and they cost a fortune in medical and educational costs. He's for "legal" immigration when the country needs more workers. I don't think that is being racist, although he doesn't have a very nice way of saying things. ..."
"... Muslim immigration stopped until they can be properly vetted? That's just being prudent and careful, but again he could say things in a much kinder way. ..."
"... He's a wild man, but at least he's upfront about it. I see her as being a narcissist that just hides it better than he does. She could get us all killed. ..."
"... Perhaps with a hateful, racist, despicable con man trying to tell them what to do, congress just might re-assert its authority instead of acting as a rubber stamp. Which is the LOTE – Trump antagonizing congress into gridlock or HRC manipulating them into moar war? ..."
"... It sounds like you're talking about HRC when you're talking about Trump. She coined the term "super predators" so they could enrich the private prison industry by filling the jails with black people, she has waged wars against brown people in the middle east for no particular reason except corporate profits and power, no respect for their theocracies or the delicate balance that "supposed" tyrants there accomplished that had enduring peace there (some may argue). Where has Trump exhibited such hatred and racism? His policies? What policies? No one that has worked for him ever described him as hateful, racist or despicable. Stop believing the propaganda on TV. ..."
"... You might think Obama doesn't like us, the 99%, but Hillary probably hates us. Pay attention, the most "effective evil" is the evil to fear. ..."
"... If it's not close in my state, I will vote 3rd party. If it is close, I'll vote for Clinton over Trump. There is a good interview with Chomsky on this on youtube which I'm too lazy to look up right now. ..."
"... Professor Chomsky, ..."
"... In the last years of his life, Martin Luther King, Jr. organized the Poor People's Campaign, which essentially planned to occupy Capitol Hill. The campaign still happened after his death, but not enough people showed up for it to have a great impact. I've begun to advocate what would essentially be a continuation of the Poor People's Campaign, but with a broader focus on the numerous crises facing humanity: climate change, poverty, illegal wars, etc. Would you possibly be interested in providing rhetorical support for this action? ..."
"... Thank you so much for your efforts to make a better world. ..."
"... It was a wonderful and very important initiative, cruelly undermined by his assassination. I hope you manage to revive it. ..."
"... clinton is the more effective evil for another reason; she is respected by other neoliberals who rule the world in other countries. even if trump wanted to pass the TPP, TTIP and TISA, the intense dislike of him would make it easier to reject the bills in countries like Canada, Australia, the EU. A Hillary presidency would just about guarantee they'd sign. ..."
"... Do you see it as possible that empowered citizens will truly be willing to take on big capital, even when big capital goes to war on them? I'm skeptical ..."
"... The evil to fear is the most effective evil. Hillary IS both sides of the aisle and Congress will allow her all her neocon neoliberal desires, Trump is neither side of the aisle and would be ineffective because he doesn't belong to the neoliberal neocons, he's not an insider and obviously won't play their games. ..."
"... All You Zombies" ..."
"... The Snake That Eats Its Own Tail, Forever and Ever. I know where I came from-but where did all you zombies come from? ..."
"... I felt a headache coming on, but a headache powder is one thing I do not take. I did once-and you all went away. So I crawled into bed and whistled out the light. You aren't really there at all. There isn't anybody but me-Jane-here alone in the dark. ..."
"... I miss you dreadfully! ..."
"... Oh heck yes. This is a fight that has been going on for decades with battles like the War Powers Act and Nixon's impeachment. Supposedly the Founding Fathers didn't want an all powerful chief executive and thought that Congress would be the dominant force. But in modern times, even before Clinton v Trump, we already had gone much too far in the direction of a caudillo. Internally one person with a bully pulpit will never be able to change the current course and overseas presidents have a frightening amount of power that they can wield and then dare Congress to do something about it afterwards. ..."
PERIES: So
Michael, in a recent article that you penned on your
website, you argued that Hillary Clinton's campaign is using a very clever
strategy in that it is trying to associate criticism of Clinton with support
for Trump and therefore support for Russia, which in the end is
anti-American
. Now, this type
of association game, which is supposed to make it difficult for Sanders supporters
to criticize Clinton, what implication does this have on the overall politics
in this country?
HUDSON: Well, it certainly changed things in earlier elections. The Republican
convention was as is normal, all about their candidate Trump. But surprisingly,
so was the Democratic convention. That was all about Trump too – as the devil.
The platform Hillary's running on is "I'm not Trump. I'm the lesser evil."
She elaborates that by saying that Trump is Putin's ploy. When the Democratic
National Committee (someone within it, or without) leaked the information to
Wikileaks, the Democrats and Hillary asked, "Who benefits from this"? Ah-ha.
Becaue
Trump opposes the neocon line toward Russia, and because he criticizes
NATO, Russia benefits. Therefore Putin must have stolen the leaks and put them
out, to make America weaker, not stronger, by helping the Trump campaign by
showing the DNC's dirty tricks toward Bernie's followers.
Then Assange did an Internet interview and implied that it was not a cyberwar
attack but a leak – indicating that it came from an insider inn the DNC. If
this is true, then the Democrats are simply trying to blame it all on Trump
– diverting attention from what the leaks' actual content!
This is old-fashioned red baiting. I saw it 60 years ago when I was a teenager.
I went to a high school where teachers used to turn in reports on what we said
in class to the FBI every month. The State Department was emptied out of "realists"
and staffed with Alan Dulles-type Cold Warriors. One couldn't talk about certain
subjects. That is what red-baiting does. So the effect at the Democratic Convention
was about Hillary trying to avoid taking about her own policies and herself.
Except for what her husband said about "I met a girl" (not meaning Jennifer
Flowers or Monica Lewinski.)
The red baiting succeeded, and the convention wasn't about Hillary – at least,
not her economic policies. It was more about Obama. She tied herself to Obama,
and next to Trump = Putin, the convention's second underlying theme was that
Hillary was going to be Obama's third term. That's what Obama himself said when
he came and addressed the convention.
The problem with this strategy is it's exactly the problem the Republicans
faced in 2008, when voters turned against George Bush's administration. Voters
wanted change. And they do today. Hillary did not say "I'm going to have hope
and change from the last years of Obama." She said, in effect, "I'm not going
to change anything. I'm going to continue Obama's policies that have made you
all so prosperous." She talked about how employment is rising and everyone is
better off.
Well, the problem is that many people aren't better off than the last eight
years. Ten million families have lost their homes, and most peoples' budgets
are being squeezed. Obama saved the banks not the economy. So Trump's line and
the Republican line in this election could well be: "Are you really better off
than you were eight years ago? Or, are you actually worse off? Where are all
your gains? You're further in debt. You're having more difficulty meeting your
paychecks, you're running up your student loans. You're really not better off
and we're going to be the party of hope and change."
Hillary can't really counter that with the policies she has. Trump and the
Republicans can say that even though she disavowed the Trans-Pacific Partnership
and the trade agreement with Europe, all the Democratic representatives that
voted for the TPP have won re-nomination, and it's still on the burner.
Most of all, Hillary is still the war candidate. Trump already has said, "Look
at what she did to Libya." By displacing Libya, she turned its arms cache over
to terrorist groups that have become ISIS, Al-Nusra, and the other terrorist
in the Near East. So she's the Queen of Chaos. Finally, she's the candidate
of Wall Street, given the fact even the Koch Brothers have said they're not
going to back Trump, they're going to back Hillary because she's on their side.
George Soros and most other big moguls and billionaires are now siding with
the Democratic Party, not Trump.
What did Hilary actually say at the convention besides "I'm not Trump, Trump
is worse." She's trying to make the whole election over her rival, not over
herself.
PERIES: Okay, so everything you say about Hillary Clinton may be true, and
it's more in your favor that it is true.
She is a candidate of Wall Street and
she is as you say, now being supported even by the neocons. They're holding
fundraisers for her. And the Koch brothers and so on.
So when we opened this
interview we were talking about what the Bernie Sanders supporters should now
do, because Trump is starting to appeal like he's the candidate of ordinary
people. So what are they to do?
HUDSON: Well, if the election is between the most unpopular woman candidate
in America and the most unpopular male candidate, the winner is going to be
whoever can make the election fought over the other person.
Trump will win if
he can make the election all about Hillary, and Hillary will win if she can
make the election all about Trump.
It looks like she's able to do this, because
Trump is even more narcissistic than she is.
EndOfTheWorld- totally agree with you. I just shake my head at Bernie.
Diametrically opposed to Clinton, he suddenly turns around and embraces her!
What? I will never understand that.
"America needs an ineffective president. That's much better than an
effective president that's going to go to war with Russia, that's going to
push for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, that's going to protect Wall Street,
and that's going to oppose neoliberal austerity."
He's right too.
I am absolutely terrified of Hillary Clinton becoming
President. She strikes me as having psychopathic tendencies. I mean, just
look at the scandals she and Bill have been involved in, and then when she
gets caught, she lies, feigns ignorance, deflects, blames others, lies some
more. Power and money are her goals.
She has called Putin "Hitler", said she wants to expand NATO, and again
said she wants to take out Assad. Well, how is she going to do that when
Russia is in there? God, she is scary. I just hope that there's a big
Clinton Foundation email leak to finish her off.
Trump is out there, but at least he wants to try to negotiate peace (of
course, if war wasn't making so many people rich, it would be stopped
tomorrow). He's questioning why NATO is necessary, never mind its continual
expansion, and he wants to stop the TPP.
God, I'd be happy with even one of the above. Hillary will give us TPP,
more NATO, more war, and a cackle. Please, if anyone has some loose emails
hanging around, now is the time!
I honestly don't think there's any way to
predict what Donald Trump will do if elected.
He's effectively a private citizen who, all of a
sudden, will have access to every government
secret and lie, and no culpability for any of
it. It's almost impossible to imagine what that
would be like.
And it's what makes him so "dangerous."
I'm sure he will quash TPP, renegotiate nafta
and be less belligerent with Russia. But what
will happen when he and his
non-government-indoctrinated team of advisers
finally see every bit of redacted and
"confidential" information that has been
routinely hidden from the public and lied about
for decades?
The loss of sovereignty inherent in the
"trade" agreements and incoherent Middle East
policies, to name a few "strategies" this
country is pursuing, have a larger purpose. We
private citizens have just not been privy to it.
How private citizen Trump will proceed if he is
elected and comes to know the government's
deepest, darkest secrets is anybody's guess.
I think its a safe assumption that if
Trump is elected he will be carefully
'minded' to ensure he can't gain access to
information that would upset the applecart.
I doubt he would be able to get much done as
there would be an establishment consensus to
keep him firmly under wraps. He would mostly
busy himself with jetting around meeting
foreign leaders and he might actually be
quite productive at that.
or he'll pass what he campaigns on
which is standard Republican policy
(sometimes) through an entirely
Republican legislature duh. So tax cuts,
cuts to regulation etc.. Really he's
campaigning on these things and they CAN
pass a Republican congress.
Yes, if Donnie is elected, we'll
see some form of a Regency; that's
what Pence is there for.
Donnie will be Clown Prince,
while more traditionally evil
Republican/DC technocrats "run"
things. It would be a re-doing of
the Reagan/Bush-Baker and
Bush/Cheney dynamic, as seen on
reality TV.
As for Donnie taking down TPP and
being the peace candidate, I think
people should sit down and take a
few deep breaths. As a New Yorker
who's observed him for his entire
public life, and as a 90 second
scanning of his career demonstrates,
the man cannot be trusted to speak
truthfully about anything. Does he
lie exactly the way Hillary does? Of
course not, she's the accomplished
professional, while Donnie spins
plates and tries to misdirect by
finding someone to insult when they
fall and shatter.
Vote for Hillary or not (I most
likely won't, but can't predict much
of anything in this all-bets-are-off
opera buffa), but by believing
anything Donnie says, you risk being
the chump he already thinks you are.
You're right. He'll make a
good court jester. That's about
it. as for "the man cannot be
trusted to speak truthfully
about anything" reminds me of
someone who gets on TeeVee and
does that well. And he really
didn't have any experience but
he got himself good handlers and
others who ran the country.
Exactly right! Trump is dangerous…to the
establishment. And the establishment is what
we have to get rid of.
When was the last
time a political candidate in any country
was as hated by the establishment as Trump
is? That's all you need to know. As flawed a
character as Trump is, he still represents
our last chance to challenge the
establishment. It won't be a pretty
presidency – but it will be entertaining –
however the alternative is the ultimate
horror show. Plus you are gambling that
Clinton won't start a nuclear war and end
the human race. Why would anyone in their
right mind touch that wager?
It is unlikely that Trump will be able to deport more people than Obama's record breaking administration. Something, that for all her rhetoric, there is no reason to believe that Clinton will change. As for waging war, we have a whole lot of information that for all his massive drone wars and interventions in the Middle East,
Obama actually ended up rejecting Clinton's continuous advice for more more more military intervention.
I agree with you that Trump is not likable, and an unknown. The problem is that the known is despicable. Neither, let me repeat, neither candidate should be anywhere near this close to the White House.
You have obviously chosen the despicable hateful war mongering devil you know. Others are willing to roll the dice with the guy who has incoherently at least given a nod to the idea that war with Russia is not a smart plan, and that our current military choices are not effective – not to mention a far more coherent case that our trade policy is screwed up and needs to be changed.
Once again, people are choosing from known despicable, unknown possibly lesser possibly greater despicable, and unlikely to win third parties or write ins – everyone can only do that for themselves.
One New York reporter (sorry, I don't have the link) said that he has watched Trump his whole life and he said, though he could say many bad things about Trump, racism wasn't one of them. He said he had never in all his years of watching him known Trump to be racist in any way.
Trump wants to stop "illegal" immigration so that poor Americans can have jobs. Illegals lower wages (because American employers pay them less), they increase rents (supply and demand), and they cost a fortune in medical and educational costs. He's for "legal" immigration when the country needs more workers. I don't think that is being racist, although he doesn't have a very nice way of saying things.
Muslim immigration stopped until they can be properly vetted? That's just being prudent and careful, but again he could say things in a much kinder way.
He's a wild man, but at least he's upfront about it. I see her as being a narcissist that just hides it better than he does. She could get us all killed.
While Trump is upfront (yikes, I know), I see Hillary as the secretive, conniving, manipulative, scheming, backstabbing type. When someone slights Trump, out comes his response right back at them. It's over. But I would not want to cross her. I see her as cold, with very, very little conscience. I mean, would you ever have tried to pull off the scandals she has been involved in? No. She seeks power and money, and look out if you ever got in her way. She never says she's sorry, not really. Most you get out of her is she made a "mistake".
Her outright aggression towards Russia, Syria, Libya, Ukraine should give you a hint of what lurks inside. And she doesn't attack these countries to better the U.S. She's doing it solely for her own person gain: money into the Clinton Foundation, business for her speech-giving husband, all to further the Clinton's.
IMO, a very dangerous person, a very dangerous couple. And she has said, if she's elected, she will put Bill Clinton in charge of "economic affairs"! Can you just imagine what more deregulation will do for the banks? He repealed Glass-Steagall and brought us the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, as well as NAFTA. Get ready to hear a "huge" sucking sound if Hillary is elected. The place will be gutted.
That's preposterous about Donnie not being racist. When the Central Park Five (released from prison and compensated by the state for false impisonment) were arrested, Donnie took out full page ads for days in the NYC papers, all but calling for those (innocent) boy's lynching. He was raised in an explicitly racist milieu – his father arrested at a KKK tussle in Queens in the 1920's, and successfully sued by the Nixon DOJ for his discriminatory rental policies…) and has a long history of saying ignorant, absurd and racist things about "The Blacks."
"Clinton is awful, but that doesn't mean it's a better idea to elect a hateful, racist, despicable con man"
Perhaps with a hateful, racist, despicable con man trying to tell them what to do, congress just might re-assert its authority instead of acting as a rubber stamp.
Which is the LOTE – Trump antagonizing congress into gridlock or HRC manipulating them into moar war?
It sounds like you're talking about HRC when you're talking about Trump. She coined the term "super predators" so they could enrich the private prison industry by filling the jails with black people, she has waged wars against brown people in the middle east for no particular reason except corporate profits and power, no respect for their theocracies or the delicate balance that "supposed" tyrants there accomplished that had enduring peace there (some may argue). Where has Trump exhibited such hatred and racism? His policies? What policies? No one that has worked for him ever described him as hateful, racist or despicable. Stop believing the propaganda on TV.
Hatred and racism is exhibited in leaders by being a war monger and gutting this nation with the TPP and lousy trade deals that sell off our national sovereignty and democracy.
You might think Obama doesn't like us, the 99%, but Hillary probably hates us. Pay attention, the most "effective evil" is the evil to fear.
I am with
Noam Chomsky
on this. If it's not close in my state, I will vote 3rd party. If it is close, I'll vote for Clinton over Trump. There is a good interview with Chomsky on this on youtube which I'm too lazy to look up right now.
But as Pat said above, everyone must make up his or her own mind.
Has there ever been any evidence that this type of strategic voting has ever done any good whatsoever or ever had its intended result?
Just speculation but I'm guessing that only a very few of the very politically astute would even bother.
I say vote your conscience regardless and let the chips fall where they may.
Not the voters fault that this is the best the two major parties could come up with.
Speaking of revolution, I emailed Chomsky yesterday and he replied. The below is my message to him.
Professor Chomsky,
In the last years of his life, Martin Luther King, Jr. organized the Poor People's Campaign, which essentially planned to occupy Capitol Hill. The campaign still happened after his death, but not enough people showed up for it to have a great impact.
I've begun to advocate what would essentially be a continuation of the Poor People's Campaign, but with a broader focus on the numerous crises facing humanity: climate change, poverty, illegal wars, etc.
Would you possibly be interested in providing rhetorical support for this action?
Thank you so much for your efforts to make a better world.
The below is Chomsky's reply.
It was a wonderful and very important initiative, cruelly undermined by his assassination. I hope you manage to revive it.
Butch – "…she helped lead the fight for universal health care." Did she now? Here's a good quote on how she felt about universal health care:
"Hillary took the lead role in the White House's efforts to pass a corporate-friendly version of "health reform." Along with the big insurance companies the Clintons deceptively railed against, the "co-presidents" decided from the start to exclude the popular health care alternative – single payer – from the national health care "discussion." (Obama would do the same thing in 2009.)
"David, tell me something interesting." That was then First Lady Hillary Clinton's weary and exasperated response – as head of the White House's health reform initiative – to Harvard medical professor David Himmelstein in 1993. Himmelstein was head of Physicians for a National Health Program. He had just told her about the remarkable possibilities of a comprehensive, single-payer "Canadian style" health plan, supported by more than two-thirds of the U.S. public. Beyond backing by a citizen super-majority, Himmelstein noted, single-payer would provide comprehensive coverage to the nation's 40 million uninsured while retaining free choice in doctor selection and being certified by the Congressional Budget Office as "the most cost-effective plan on offer."
clinton is the more effective evil for another reason; she is respected by other neoliberals who rule the world in other countries. even if trump wanted to pass the TPP, TTIP and TISA, the intense dislike of him would make it easier to reject the bills in countries like Canada, Australia, the EU. A
Hillary presidency would just about guarantee they'd sign.
I love Michael Hudson. But like everyone commenting here he is needlessly thinking inside the crumbling box of America's existing top-down, money-driven system of political discourse. So what is it that keeps us from thinking outside this godawful box? I think we're all so deeply and habitually embedded in the mode of being status quo critics that we're unable to enter the problem-solving mode of finding alternatives to it. But to make government work in America, we need to think in both modes.
So let's think outside the box for a minute. After all, it's common knowledge that the current "rigged" system, as Donald Trump keeps calling it, has been instrumental in bringing American politics and government to their present state of dysfunction at local, state and national levels. Americans hate and despise this elitist system; everyone is disgusted with the political donor class whose billions of dollars underwrite the election-rigging televised attack ads that dominate it.
At the Demo Convention Bernie Sanders neatly pinpointed the topics with which this bogus system is obsessed: "Let me be as clear as I can be. … This election is not about political gossip. It's not about polls. It's not about campaign strategy. It's not about fundraising. It's not about all the things the media spends so much time discussing." Yet like all presidential candidates this year Bernie didn't take the next, logical step: he didn't call for the creation of a new political discourse system. (Note that Hillary alone among the top three candidates never, ever has a bad word to say against the current system.)
OK, so what might a new system look like? First off, it would be non-partisan, issue-centered and deliberative. And citizen-participatory. It would make citizens and governments
responsive
and
accountable
to each other in shaping the best futures of their communities. That's its core principal.
More specifically, the format of a reality TV show like The Voice or American Idol could readily be adapted to create ongoing, prime-time, issue-centered searches for solutions to any and all of the issues of the day. And of course problem-solving Reality TV is just of any number of formats that could work for TV. Other media could develop formats tap their strengths and appeal to their audiences.
Thanks to the miracle of modern communications technologies, there's nothing to stop Americans from having a citizen-participatory system of political discourse that gives all Americans an informed voice in the political and government decisions that affect their lives. Americans will flock in drove to ongoing, rule-governed problem-solving public forums that earn the respect and trust of citizens and political leaders alike. When we create them, governments at local, state and national levels will start working again. If we don't, our politics will continue to sink deeper into the cesspool we're in now.
Do you see it as possible that empowered citizens will truly be willing to take on big capital, even when big capital goes to war on them? I'm skeptical, unless there is a real socialist-ish movement out there educating and politicizing. In other words, while the political system is indeed broken, the economy is also broken and it is hard to see "empowered" citizens fixing the economy. What I think would happen is the politicians elected by these empowered citizens would be opposed by big business and the politicians they own, nothing good would get done, and there would be a business-financed media drumbeat that more democracy has been "proven" not to work.
I don't think our political problems can be solved simply be electing better politicians – though of course we do need better politicians.
The evil to fear is the most effective evil.
Hillary IS both sides of the aisle and Congress will allow her all her neocon neoliberal desires, Trump is neither side of the aisle and would be ineffective because he doesn't belong to the neoliberal neocons, he's not an insider and obviously won't play their games.
I have not had nearly the hardship you have had crittermom and I have not lived as long either, but at 27, and being someone who has been discontent with social structure since middle school, I have absolutely had enough. Genetics, environment, the combination of internal-external factors, whatever it was I have always had a very ("annoying" and sarcastic) curiousity or oppositional approach to things, especially things people do not question and accept as is (religion, government…).
Growing older has only led me to greater understanding of the pit we reside within and how we probably will not get out. This election season in particular has been ridiculously… indescribable. The utter incompetence of our selfish administrations is finally coming to a head and people are completely oblivious, pulling the same stale BS that we have seen every four years since before I was born.
Bernie totally blew it but, outside your hardship, don't ever think you effort was a waste. For once an honest candidate appeared who was backed by the policies we need and you supported that (as I did). That is the most we can do at this point. Bernie the man should absolutely be criticized because he wanted a "revolution" then sold out to the Junta instead of biting back when it would have really sent a message to the people and high rollers. He wasn't willing to sacrifice what was necessary to make a stand. Instead he sided with the people that have made careers sacrificing citizens like you–and that is terrible. The reality these people live in and teach to others is such a lie.
Oh heck yes. This is a fight that has been going on for decades with battles like the War Powers Act and Nixon's impeachment. Supposedly the Founding Fathers didn't want an all powerful chief executive and thought that Congress would be the dominant force. But in modern times, even before Clinton v Trump, we already had gone much too far in the direction of a caudillo. Internally one person with a bully pulpit will never be able to change the current course and overseas presidents have a frightening amount of power that they can wield and then dare Congress to do something about it afterwards.
So despite his potty mouth there's something to be said for Mr. Trump Goes to Washington. By the time he figures out how to be caudillo it may be time for another election.
crittermom – HRC has got the big corporate money behind her, the media too. Trump is fighting an uphill battle. If you watch CNN, which I watch very little of, they spend almost the whole time pulling apart what Trump has said, and very, very little press on Hillary's email, the Clinton Foundation, etc.
They are going after Trump with all that they have. They want the status quo to remain, and they are very worried that he might change it. Hillary is Wall Street, multinational corporations, arms dealers, weapons manufacturers, the military-industrial complex. Who would have thought that the guy running for the right wants to keep jobs in America, wants to stop wars, and the one on the left is for the monied class! Right is left and left is right. Upside down world.
The following article is old now, from April, but it gives you an idea of "Why the Establishment Hates Trump" and what he is planning on doing. Watch them go after him; they will vilify him.
"When you join the dots to Trump also preaching a policy revolt against the insatiable corporate jaws feeding on trillions of dollars of public budgets in Washington, the meaning becomes clear. But that connected meaning is blacked out. In its place, the corporate media and politicians present an egomaniac blowhard bordering on fascism who preaches hate, racism and sexism. But the silenced policies he advocates are more like jumping into a crocodile pit. He is on record saying he will cut the Pentagon's budget "by 50%". No winning politician has ever dared to take on the military-industrial complex, with even Eisenhower only naming it in his parting speech. Trump also says that the US "must be neutral, an honest broker" on the Israeli-Palestine conflict – as unspeakable as it gets in US politics. Big Pharma is also called out with "$400 billion to be saved by government negotiation of prices". The even more powerful HMO's are confronted by the possibility of a "one-payer system", the devil incarnate in America's corporate-welfare state."
Hillary and her team will try to paint Trump as a lover of Putin, as a racist, bigot, bring the narrative down to this only. This way, no one ends up talking about the corporate elites she represents. Good, read some more, crittermom, and open your eyes even more. There's a lot more going on than meets the eye.
So I don't usually post here, just mostly read what other folks have to say.
Recently I asked a wise person I know what historically follows an oligarchy (which is what I believe we have been in for awhile now). He told me that an oligarchy is usually followed by a dictatorship.
So if that is the case is Trump going to take us into the land of dictatorship (which I believe is highly likely) or are any of us going to be able to tread water for a little longer with HRC (who I agree is ugh a non-choice but hopefully the lesser of the two evils).
Looking this up I found the concept of the Tytler Cycle. Interesting and scary. This is off wikipedia:
Two centuries ago, a somewhat obscure Scotsman named Tytler made this profound observation: "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing, always to be followed by a dictatorship, then a monarchy".
Anyway can someone refute this for me so I can sleep tonight? Thanks, in advance.
Congress will be hostile. Judiciary will be hostile.
Pentagon will be hostile (didn't you see all those generals and admirals, in uniform,
literally
lining up behind Clinton?)
Civil administration will be sullen, uncooperative, and leaking like crazy.
Trump does not have his own freestanding parallel state organization, ready to move in and take over the bureaucracy and the armed forces. It would be
physically impossible
for Trump to attempt a mass purge.
So exactly how the hell would Trump impose his will on the American masses? Answer: No Way.
President Trump can only be a relatively weak president.
Just think: if you elect Trump, you would actually get to see the US Constitution's fabled "checks and balances" come into play for once in your life!
Thank you! The same question I have been asking repeatedly throughout this charade. Everyone's favorite line is "Trump will be a dictator [be afriad]!" The obvious question…
how
?! How is Trump going to have the same or any more power within or over the system than any president before him?? What is a reasonable strategy with which he could upend and create domination over this system with? This is complete rhetorical garbage, the same kind of nonsense displayed when he is shock quoted and only the narrative supporting text is copied (such as the convenient omission that the fabled day in which Clinton could be assassinated would be "horrible"). It also fits well with the Democrats' habit of burying themselves instead of putting up a fight.
I have felt for a long time but have struggled to put into words the deep, strong aversion I have towards Clinton (et al.)and that I feel any time I read about her or see her. There is a phrase in the song
Art War
, by the Knack, that caught my ear; what I originally heard as, "malice of forethought". To me this represents the idea that terrible, harmful, far-reaching, incompetent decisions are made completely on purpose. After doing some research I discovered that the phrase is actually "malice aforethought", related to murderous intent in legal definitions. A
second, more appropriate definition
here is "a general evil and depraved state of mind in which the person is unconcerned for the lives of others". This represents my internal shuddering exactly–a sort of willful, deadly incompetence.
While Trump is a buffoon who might lead us into bad situations as he stumbles around, Hillary Clinton displays an undeniable and proven malice aforethought that he does not.
crittermom – HRC has got the big corporate money behind her, the
media too. Trump is fighting an uphill battle. If you watch CNN, which I
watch very little of, they spend almost the whole time pulling apart
what Trump has said, and very, very little press on Hillary's email, the
Clinton Foundation, etc.
They are going after Trump with all that they have. They want the
status quo to remain, and they are very worried that he might change it.
Hillary is Wall Street, multinational corporations, arms dealers,
weapons manufacturers, the military-industrial complex. Who would have
thought that the guy running for the right wants to keep jobs in
America, wants to stop wars, and the one on the left is for the monied
class! Right is left and left is right. Upside down world.
High level military commanders are more politicians then commanders. And if they belong to
neocons this is a dangerous and potentially explosive combination. Especially if State
Department is fully aligned with Pentagon, like happened under Secretary Clinton tenure.
Notable quotes:
"... He had exaggerated Russian activities in eastern Ukraine with the overt goal of delivering weapons to Kiev. ..."
"... "I think POTUS sees us as a threat that must be minimized,... ie do not get me into a war????" Breedlove wrote in one email, using the acronym for the president of the United States. How could Obama be persuaded to be more "engaged" in the conflict in Ukraine -- read: deliver weapons -- Breedlove had asked former Secretary of State Colin Powell. ..."
"... Breedlove sought counsel from some very prominent people, his emails show. Among them were Wesley Clark, Breedlove's predecessor at NATO, Victoria Nuland, the assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs at the State Department, and Geoffrey Pyatt, the US ambassador to Kiev. ..."
"... One name that kept popping up was Phillip Karber, an adjunct assistant professor at Georgetown University in Washington DC and president of the Potomac Foundation, a conservative think tank founded by the former defense contractor BDM. By its own account, the foundation has helped eastern European countries prepare their accession into NATO. Now the Ukrainian parliament and the government in Kiev were asking Karber for help. ..."
"... According to the email, Pakistan had offered, "under the table," to sell Ukraine 500 portable TOW-II launchers and 8,000 TOW-II missiles. The deliveries could begin within two weeks. Even the Poles were willing to start sending "well maintained T-72 tanks, plus several hundred SP 122mm guns, and SP-122 howitzers (along with copious amounts of artillery ammunition for both)" that they had leftover from the Soviet era. The sales would likely go unnoticed, Karber said, because Poland's old weapons were "virtually undistinguishable from those of Ukraine." ..."
"... Karber noted, however, that Pakistan and Poland would not make any deliveries without informal US approval. Furthermore, Warsaw would only be willing to help if its deliveries to Kiev were replaced with new, state-of-the-art weapons from NATO. Karber concluded his letter with a warning: "Time has run out." Without immediate assistance, the Ukrainian army "could face prospect of collapse within 30 days." ..."
"... In March, Karber traveled again to Warsaw in order to, as he told Breedlove, consult with leading members of the ruling party, on the need to "quietly supply arty ( eds: artillery ) and antitank munitions to Ukraine." ..."
"... In an email to Breedlove, Clark described defense expert Karber as "brilliant." After a first visit, Breedlove indicated he had also been impressed. "GREAT visit," he wrote. Karber, an extremely enterprising man, appeared at first glance to be a valuable informant because he often -- at least a dozen times by his own account -- traveled to the front and spoke with Ukrainian commanders. The US embassy in Kiev also relied on Karber for information because it lacked its own sources. "We're largely blind," the embassy's defense attaché wrote in an email. ..."
"... At times, Karber's missives read like prose. In one, he wrote about the 2014 Christmas celebrations he had spent together with Dnipro-1, the ultranationalist volunteer battalion. "The toasts and vodka flow, the women sing the Ukrainian national anthem -- no one has a dry eye." ..."
"... Karber had only good things to report about the unit, which had already been discredited as a private oligarch army. He wrote that the staff and volunteers were dominated by middle class people and that there was a large professional staff that was even "working on the holiday." Breedlove responded that these insights were "quietly finding their way into the right places." ..."
"... In fact, Karber is a highly controversial figure. During the 1980s, the longtime BDM employee, was counted among the fiercest Cold War hawks. Back in 1985, he warned of an impending Soviet attack on the basis of documents he had translated incorrectly. ..."
"... He also blundered during the Ukraine crisis after sending photos to US Senator James Inhofe, claiming to show Russian units in Ukraine. Inhofe released the photos publicly, but it quickly emerged that one had originated from the 2008 war in Georgia. ..."
"... The reasons that Breedlove continued to rely on Karber despite such false reports remain unclear. Was he willing to pay any price for weapons deliveries? Or did he have other motives? The emails illustrate the degree to which Breedlove and his fellow campaigners feared that Congress might reduce the number of US troops in Europe. ..."
"... General Breedlove's departure from his NATO post in May has done little to placate anyone in the German government. After all, the man Breedlove regarded as an obstacle, President Obama, is nearing the end of his second term. His possible successor, the Democrat Hillary Clinton, is considered a hardliner vis-a-vis Russia. ..."
"... What's more: Nuland, a diplomat who shares many of the same views as Breedlove, could move into an even more important role after the November election -- she's considered a potential candidate for secretary of state. ..."
"... The now famous and appropriate quote from President Eisenhower: ..."
"... In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. ..."
"... The idea of NATO as a defence organisation, following the 2nd World War was quite rational. The history of this organisation however, has shown, how a well meant intention can be misused to force through policies, which have nothing to do with the original purpose. Currently it would appear to have no other role, than to provide high ranking army officers with well paid employment, which can only be justified by way of international conflicts. In the absence of conflict, NATO would have no other cause for existence. ..."
"... The Cold War continues, only the enemy is not the Soviet Union but Russia. Ever since the war against Napoleon Russia has emerged as a threat to certain European interests, at first liberal and nationalist interests. After the Bolshevik Revolution the enemy was still Russia, now revitalized with extreme Bolshevik ideology. Hitler used this effectively to target liberals, leftists and especially Jews. ..."
"... After the fall of Communism nothing has really changed. The West is still urged to resist the Russian threat, a threat invented by Polish, Baltic, and Ukrainian nationalists and perhaps Fascists. Donald Trump alone seems impervious to this propaganda. Let's at least give him credit in this case, if not in many others. NATO has become a permanent anti-Russian phony alliance, financed by America. ..."
"... These people are hell-bent to bring the world to the brink of war, with lies and excuses about fear of Russian attacks. So Poland was willing to step into the conflict with Ukraine and deliver lethal armament? All the while afraid of Russia invading it? ..."
"... Philip Breedlove is a war monger and should be fired from his position. The efforts of the group around him seeking to secure weapons for the Ukraine to intensify the conflict must have happened with Breedlove's knowledge and support. If not, then he is not capable to meet the demands of his job and should be dismissed for incompetence. Either way, this guy is unacceptable. ..."
"... Ms. Nuland is the same us official recorded by Russian intelligence trying to manipulate events in Ukraine before the overthrow of the president and all the tragic events that followed. That she is still working for US state dept. is puzzling to say the least. ..."
"... Very simple, he is attempting to INVENT a NEW ROLE for NATO, as it is well known in the domain of sociology: any organization strives for survival, especially when it becomes OBSOLETE. ..."
"... nato Breedhate? ..."
"... SPON was always parotting him. And SPON member Benjamin Bidder and many other SPON guys were foaming at the mouth with war rhetoric all the time in 2014-15. Shame on those fools. Finally, with this contribution you are approaching your real job. And this is to distribute information instead of propaganda. ..."
The newly leaked emails reveal a clandestine network of Western agitators around the NATO military
chief, whose presence fueled the conflict in Ukraine. Many allies found in Breedlove's alarmist public
statements about alleged large Russian troop movements cause for concern early on. Earlier this year,
the general was assuring the world that US European Command was "deterring Russia now and preparing
to fight and win if necessary."
The emails document for the first time the questionable sources from whom Breedlove was getting
his information. He had exaggerated Russian activities in eastern Ukraine with the overt goal of
delivering weapons to Kiev.
The general and his likeminded colleagues perceived US President Barack Obama, the commander-in-chief
of all American forces, as well as German Chancellor Angela Merkel as obstacles. Obama and Merkel
were being "politically naive & counter-productive" in their calls for de-escalation, according to
Phillip Karber, a central figure in Breedlove's network who was feeding information from Ukraine
to the general.
"I think POTUS sees us as a threat that must be minimized,... ie do not get me into a war????"
Breedlove wrote in one email, using the acronym for the president of the United States. How could
Obama be persuaded to be more "engaged" in the conflict in Ukraine -- read: deliver weapons -- Breedlove
had asked former Secretary of State Colin Powell.
Breedlove sought counsel from some very prominent people, his emails show. Among them were Wesley
Clark, Breedlove's predecessor at NATO, Victoria Nuland, the assistant secretary of state for European
and Eurasian affairs at the State Department, and Geoffrey Pyatt, the US ambassador to Kiev.
One name that kept popping up was Phillip Karber, an adjunct assistant professor at Georgetown
University in Washington DC and president of the Potomac Foundation, a conservative think tank founded
by the former defense contractor BDM. By its own account, the foundation has helped eastern European
countries prepare their accession into NATO. Now the Ukrainian parliament and the government in Kiev
were asking Karber for help.
Surreptitious Channels
On February 16, 2015, when the Ukraine crisis had reached its climax, Karber wrote an email to
Breedlove, Clark, Pyatt and Rose Gottemoeller, the under secretary for arms control and international
security at the State Department, who will be moving to Brussels this fall to take up the post of
deputy secretary general of NATO. Karber was in Warsaw, and he said he had found surreptitious channels
to get weapons to Ukraine -- without the US being directly involved.
According to the email, Pakistan had offered, "under the table," to sell Ukraine 500 portable
TOW-II launchers and 8,000 TOW-II missiles. The deliveries could begin within two weeks. Even the
Poles were willing to start sending "well maintained T-72 tanks, plus several hundred SP 122mm guns,
and SP-122 howitzers (along with copious amounts of artillery ammunition for both)" that they had
leftover from the Soviet era. The sales would likely go unnoticed, Karber said, because Poland's
old weapons were "virtually undistinguishable from those of Ukraine."
AFP
A destroyed airport building in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk : Thousands were killed
in fighting during the Ukraine conflict.
Karber noted, however, that Pakistan and Poland would not make any deliveries without informal
US approval. Furthermore, Warsaw would only be willing to help if its deliveries to Kiev were replaced
with new, state-of-the-art weapons from NATO. Karber concluded his letter with a warning: "Time has run out." Without immediate assistance,
the Ukrainian army "could face prospect of collapse within 30 days."
"Stark," Breedlove replied. "I may share some of this but will thoroughly wipe the fingerprints
off."
In March, Karber traveled again to Warsaw in order to, as he told Breedlove, consult with leading
members of the ruling party, on the need to "quietly supply arty ( eds: artillery ) and antitank
munitions to Ukraine."
Much to the irritation of Breedlove, Clark and Karber, nothing happened. Those responsible were
quickly identified. The National Security Council, Obama's circle of advisors, were "slowing things
down," Karber complained. Clark pointed his finger directly at the White House, writing, "Our problem
is higher than State," a reference to the State Department.
... ... ...
'The Front Is Now Everywhere'
Karber's emails constantly made it sound as though the apocalypse was only a few weeks away. "The
front is now everywhere," he told Breedlove in an email at the beginning of 2015, adding that Russian
agents and their proxies "have begun launching a series of terrorist attacks, assassinations, kidnappings
and infrastructure bombings," in an effort to destabilize Kiev and other Ukrainian cities.
In an email to Breedlove, Clark described defense expert Karber as "brilliant." After a first
visit, Breedlove indicated he had also been impressed. "GREAT visit," he wrote. Karber, an extremely
enterprising man, appeared at first glance to be a valuable informant because he often -- at least
a dozen times by his own account -- traveled to the front and spoke with Ukrainian commanders. The
US embassy in Kiev also relied on Karber for information because it lacked its own sources. "We're
largely blind," the embassy's defense attaché wrote in an email.
At times, Karber's missives read like prose. In one, he wrote about the 2014 Christmas celebrations
he had spent together with Dnipro-1, the ultranationalist volunteer battalion. "The toasts and vodka
flow, the women sing the Ukrainian national anthem -- no one has a dry eye."
Karber had only good things to report about the unit, which had already been discredited as a
private oligarch army. He wrote that the staff and volunteers were dominated by middle class people
and that there was a large professional staff that was even "working on the holiday." Breedlove responded
that these insights were "quietly finding their way into the right places."
Highly Controversial Figure
In fact, Karber is a highly controversial figure. During the 1980s, the longtime BDM employee,
was counted among the fiercest Cold War hawks. Back in 1985, he warned of an impending Soviet attack
on the basis of documents he had translated incorrectly.
He also blundered during the Ukraine crisis after sending photos to US Senator James Inhofe, claiming
to show Russian units in Ukraine. Inhofe released the photos publicly, but it quickly emerged that
one had originated from the 2008 war in Georgia.
By November 10, 2014, at the latest, Breedlove must have recognized that his informant was on
thin ice. That's when Karber reported that the separatists were boasting they had a tactical nuclear
warhead for the 2S4 mortar. Karber himself described the news as "weird," but also added that "there
is a lot of 'crazy' things going on" in Ukraine.
The reasons that Breedlove continued to rely on Karber despite such false reports remain unclear.
Was he willing to pay any price for weapons deliveries? Or did he have other motives? The emails
illustrate the degree to which Breedlove and his fellow campaigners feared that Congress might reduce
the number of US troops in Europe.
Karber confirmed the authenticity of the leaked email correspondence. Regarding the questions
about the accuracy of his reports, he told SPIEGEL that, "like any information derived from direct
observation at the front during the 'fog of war,' it is partial, time sensitive, and perceived through
a personal perspective." Looking back with the advantage of hindsight and a more comprehensive perspective,
"I believe that I was right more than wrong," Karber writes, "but certainly not perfect." He adds
that, "in 170 days at the front, I never once met a German military or official directly observing
the conflict."
Great Interest in Berlin
Breedlove's leaked email correspondences were read in Berlin with great interest. A year ago,
word of the NATO commander's "dangerous propaganda" was circulating around Merkel's Chancellery.
In light of the new information, officials felt vindicated in their assessment. Germany's Federal
Foreign Office has expressed similar sentiment, saying that fortunately "influential voices had continuously
advocated against the delivery of 'lethal weapons.'"
Karber says he finds it "obscene that the most effective sanction of this war is not the economic
limits placed on Russia, but the virtual complete embargo of all lethal aid to the victim. I find
this to be the height of sophistry -- if a woman is being attacked by a group of hooligans and yells
out to the crowd or passersby, 'Give me a can of mace,' is it better to not supply it because the
attackers could have a knife and passively watch her get raped?"
General Breedlove's departure from his NATO post in May has done little to placate anyone in the
German government. After all, the man Breedlove regarded as an obstacle, President Obama, is nearing
the end of his second term. His possible successor, the Democrat Hillary Clinton, is considered a
hardliner vis-a-vis Russia.
What's more: Nuland, a diplomat who shares many of the same views as Breedlove, could move into
an even more important role after the November election -- she's considered a potential candidate
for secretary of state.
bubasan 07/28/2016
Upon reading this article, I am reminded of Dwight D Eisenhowers Farewell speech to the American
Public on January 17, 1961. So long as we continue the PC mentality of NOT Teaching History, as
it really was, we are going to repeat past mistake's. The now famous and appropriate quote
from President Eisenhower:
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted
influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.
Inglenda2 07/28/2016
The idea of NATO as a defence organisation, following the 2nd World War was quite rational.
The history of this organisation however, has shown, how a well meant intention can be misused
to force through policies, which have nothing to do with the original purpose. Currently it would
appear to have no other role, than to provide high ranking army officers with well paid employment,
which can only be justified by way of international conflicts. In the absence of conflict, NATO
would have no other cause for existence.
PeterCT 07/28/2016
Why is Breedlove so fat? He is setting a bad example to his troops. Show all comments
turnipseed 07/29/2016
The Cold War continues, only the enemy is not the Soviet Union but Russia. Ever since the
war against Napoleon Russia has emerged as a threat to certain European interests, at first liberal
and nationalist interests. After the Bolshevik Revolution the enemy was still Russia, now revitalized
with extreme Bolshevik ideology. Hitler used this effectively to target liberals, leftists and
especially Jews.
After the fall of Communism nothing has really changed. The West is still urged to resist
the Russian threat, a threat invented by Polish, Baltic, and Ukrainian nationalists and perhaps
Fascists. Donald Trump alone seems impervious to this propaganda. Let's at least give him credit
in this case, if not in many others. NATO has become a permanent anti-Russian phony alliance,
financed by America.
90-grad 07/31/2016
Quite detailed article. Not being published in the german website. How to describe these people,
basically just trying to ignite bigger conflicts, or even war. Hardliner, hawks, to me not strong
enough. These are criminals of war, and they should be named accordingly. These are exactly the
kind of persons, who helped Bush to invade Irak, basing on false informations to the public. And
their peace endangering activities help politicians like H.Clinton to keep the peoble in fear,
solely to their own benefit. Disgusting!
huguenot1566 07/31/2016
Extremely disturbing
I don't even know here to begin. Breedlove, Karber, Clark all Americans, seemingly on their
own without Obama's permission, trying to exaggerate or fabricate evidence in order to start a
war with Russia and the danger to the world is profoundly terrifying (Iraq 2003). The US Embassy
in Ukraine saying they were in the dark and therefore relying on information from a college professor,
Karber, who still thinks we're in the Cold War along with Clark who was retired & meddling in
an unofficial capacity as far as the story implies tells me they should be brought up on charges.
And Breedlove is supposed to follow orders not make up his own policy & then try & manufacture
evidence supporting that policy to start war. If the US Embassy in Ukraine says they were in the
dark then clearly they were fishing for info to proactively involve themselves in another nation
& region's personal business. Congress & the U.S. military should investigate as these actions
violate the U.S. Constitution. Thankfully, Germany and NATO is able to say no. It tells Americans
that something isn't right on their end of this.
verbatim128 07/31/2016
Look who was crying wolf!
These people are hell-bent to bring the world to the brink of war, with lies and excuses about
fear of Russian attacks. So Poland was willing to step into the conflict with Ukraine and deliver
lethal armament? All the while afraid of Russia invading it? We, public opinion and most Western
peace-loving folk, are played like a fiddle to step into the fray to "protect" and further some
age-old ethnic and nationalistic rivalries. Time to put an end to this.
gerhard38 08/01/2016
Fucking war monger
Philip Breedlove is a war monger and should be fired from his position. The efforts of the
group around him seeking to secure weapons for the Ukraine to intensify the conflict must have
happened with Breedlove's knowledge and support. If not, then he is not capable to meet the demands
of his job and should be dismissed for incompetence. Either way, this guy is unacceptable.
aegiov 08/01/2016
Ms. Nuland is the same us official recorded by Russian intelligence trying to manipulate events
in Ukraine before the overthrow of the president and all the tragic events that followed. That
she is still working for US state dept. is puzzling to say the least. good reporting. thank you.
titus_norberto 08/02/2016
The Front Is Now Everywhere, indeed...
Quote: 'The Front Is Now Everywhere', yes indeed, we can go back to the Wilson administration,
he invented the League of Nations and his nation did not even joined.
There is a folly in American presidents, they believe they can solve worlds problems, especially
in the Middle East, with two invariable results:
1- utter failure plus CHAOS; and
2- utter disregard for DOMESTIC GOVERNANCE.
Now, the fact that the front is NOW 2016 everywhere is the result of failure one. Donald Trump
is the result of failure two. There is another aspect to consider, what is General Breedlove doing
? Very simple, he is attempting to INVENT a NEW ROLE for NATO, as it is well known in the domain
of sociology: any organization strives for survival, especially when it becomes OBSOLETE.
vsepr1975 08/03/2016
nato
Breedhate?
w.schuler 08/09/2016
Fat Bredlove is a war monger
This is true and it was obvious from the very beginning. But SPON was always parotting him.
And SPON member Benjamin Bidder and many other SPON guys were foaming at the mouth with war rhetoric
all the time in 2014-15. Shame on those fools. Finally, with this contribution you are approaching
your real job. And this is to distribute information instead of propaganda.
I'm not a fan of Hillary but strokes work differently depending on their intensity. I had
one in my late 20's from medication. I did not slur words but for a time I forgot words, I
knew what I wanted to say I just couldn't put things to words for a long time. I do believe
she has something serious going on that she is not disclosing but I don't think its Parkinson.
Roger Stone I do believe is showing signs of Parkinson however. Watch his videos and watch his
hands.... I think Hillary is having seizures, what kind?? I don't know I'm not a doctor. The
other weird thing is the abrasion on her tongue...why? again I don't know.
MsPony65
Not all Parkinson's patients have the tremors.
jane25449
You're right. You shouldn't be making diagnoses, but what the hay, it's important to know,
right? The medical records supposedly leaked from Dr. Lisa Bardack, says she has been
diagnosed with subcorticalvascular dementia with complex partial seizures ( Binswanger's
disease.) and she was put on anticonvulsants in 2013.
The big black guy who jumps on stage with her has been identified as Dr. Akunola , a
neurologist with the Neuroscience Group of New Jersey. The guy following behind him is seen
pulling out of his pocket what looks like a injection pen. There are other videos of her
surfacing out there you need to take a look at, especially showing her frequent falls. I think
because you are familiar with Parkinson's, you see a few symptoms that are indicative of it,
and automatically think it's that. You asked what may be the cause of her having to be helped
up the stairs.
Benswanger's causes one to have an unsteady gate, clumsiness and frequent falls and there
are vids showing her falling a lot , especially lately. I agree with you, they should reveal
their medical records, and I think years ago that was a requirement.
Binswanger's Disease
Information Page National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS)
Binswanger's
disease (BD), also called
subcortical vascular dementia
, is a type of dementia caused by
widespread, microscopic areas of damage to the deep layers of white matter in the brain. The damage
is the result of the thickening and narrowing (atherosclerosis) of arteries that feed the
subcortical areas of the brain. Atherosclerosis (commonly known as "hardening of the arteries") is a
systemic process that affects blood vessels throughout the body. It begins late in the fourth decade
of life and increases in severity with age. As the arteries become more and more narrowed, the blood
supplied by those arteries decreases and brain tissue dies. A characteristic pattern of BD-damaged
brain tissue can be seen with modern brain imaging techniques such as CT scans or magnetic resonance
imaging (MRI). The symptoms associated with BD are related to the disruption of subcortical neural
circuits that control what neuroscientists call
executive cognitive functioning
: short-term
memory, organization, mood, the regulation of attention, the ability to act or make decisions, and
appropriate behavior. The most characteristic feature of BD is psychomotor slowness - an increase in
the length of time it takes, for example, for the fingers to turn the thought of a letter into the
shape of a letter on a piece of paper. Other symptoms include forgetfulness (but not as severe as
the forgetfulness of Alzheimer's disease), changes in speech, an unsteady gait, clumsiness or
frequent falls, changes in personality or mood (most likely in the form of apathy, irritability, and
depression), and urinary symptoms that aren't caused by urological disease. Brain imaging, which
reveals the characteristic brain lesions of BD, is essential for a positive diagnosis.
Notable quotes:
"... Collected via e-mail, August 2016 ..."
"... early onset Subcortical Vascular Dementia ..."
"... According to these alleged "medical records," Hillary Clinton was diagnosed with early-onset Subcortical Vascular Dementia in 2013, and subsequent doctor visits suggested the condition was worsening. Additionally, the records noted that Clinton suffered intensified Complex Partial Seizures between 2013 and 2014. ..."
Right after the name of Hillary Clinton's
physician appeared in the news, suspect medical records attributed to that
doctor were "leaked" online.
Claim:
Leaked medical records document that Hillary
Clinton exhibits signs of dementia and serious illness.
unproven
Example:
[
Collected via e-mail, August 2016
]
Hillary Clinton diagnosed with "Complex Partial Seizures" and "
early
onset Subcortical Vascular Dementia
" as per a letter authored by
Lisa R. Bardack, M.D., Chairman of the Department of Medicine, Mount
Kisco Medical Group
Origin:
On 8
August 2016, a new Twitter account titled
@HillsMedRecords
appeared and published what the user behind the account claimed were leaked
medical records attesting to the poor health of Hillary Clinton.
The account was quickly deleted by its owner, but screenshots of the
purported records continued circulating on Twitter, allegedly showing
documents prepared by Dr. Lisa Bardack on 5 February and 20 March 2014:
According to these alleged "medical records," Hillary Clinton was
diagnosed with early-onset Subcortical Vascular Dementia in 2013, and
subsequent doctor visits suggested the condition was worsening.
Additionally, the records noted that Clinton suffered intensified Complex
Partial Seizures between 2013 and 2014.
One suspect aspect of the "leak" was that just days earlier, Dr. Bardack
was widely named in real press reports as having attested to Clinton's
medical fitness to serve as president. On 31 July 2016,
TIME
mentioned Bardack by name in an article about a letter she had released
documenting Clinton's physical health:
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is in "excellent
physical condition," her doctor said in a letter.
According to Dr. Lisa Bardack, her physician, Clinton, is in good
health, currently diagnosed with only hypothyroidism and seasonal pollen
allergies. The letter is the first of its kind to be released in the 2016
cycle, and comes as Clinton, 67, has come under scrutiny from some
Republicans for her age and questions about her health stemming from a
2012 incident in which she suffered from a blood clot and concussion.
Quite conveniently (and suspiciously), Bardack's name wasn't prominent in
the news as Clinton's physician prior to the release of that
letter, and just over a week later her name was used to give credibility
to "leaked" records (unusually coincidental timing, to say the least):
The "leaked" documents exhibited some obvious formatting differences from
the official letter issued by Dr, Bardack. In the "leaked" documents Bardack
is listed as "Chairman of the Department of Medicine, Mount Kisco Medical
Group," while the letterhead of the verified document referenced her as
"Chair of Internal Medicine[,] Diplomate of the American Board of Internal
Medicine." The official letter used real letterhead, whereas the purportedly
"leaked" documents were printed on plain paper. The "leaked" documents also
don't look like medical records, but rather like a report provided for
purposes extrinsic to a standard medical charting (with no indication to
whom or for what purpose such a report might have been provided).
We contacted the Mount Kisco Medical Group to ask whether the displayed
documents matched internal formatting of medical records or reports but were
unable to immediately reach anyone there who could answer that question. In
addition to contacting the practice, we've also asked doctors to review the
"leaked" records to determine whether they contained obvious signs of
fabrication visible to physicians (but not necessarily laymen).
Last month Seth Rich, a data analyst who worked for the DNC, was shot near his home in Washington DC. He was on the
phone to his girlfriend when it happened. Police were called to the scene and discovered the young man's body at roughly
4.20am. It was reported that Rich was "covered in bruises", shot "several times" and "at least once in the back".
[Rich's] hands were bruised, his knees are bruised, his face is bruised, and yet he had two shots to his back, and
yet they never took anything."
On August 9th Julian Assange gave an interview on Dutch television in which he seemed to imply that Rich's death was
politically motivated, and perhaps suggest he had been a source for the DNC e-mail leak:
That same day wikileaks tweeted that they were offering a $20,000 dollar reward for information on the killing of Mr
Rich.
These are the facts of the case, so far. And they are undisputed.
I'm not going to take a position on the motive for Mr Rich's killing, or possible suspects. But I do want to point
out the general level of media silence. Take these facts and change the names – imagine Trump's email had been hacked,
and then a staffer with possible ties to wikileaks was inexplicably shot dead. Imagine this poor young man had been a
Kremlin whistleblower, or a Chinese hacker, or an Iranian blogger.
If this, as yet unsolved, murder had ties to anyone other than Hillary Clinton, would it be being so ritually and
rigourously ignored by the MSM?
Seth was bruised, and shot twice in the back; there was no robbery. Former Clinton partner James MacDougall was
separated from his heart medication by prison guards; he died in solitary confinement.
And these suspicious deaths aren't connected? Who do they think they're kidding? We weren't all born stupid! Is
this a massive cover up? You bet it is, and we're eventually going to find out who ordered those killings!
The Washington Post said, "Nothing was taken, but robbery has not been ruled out????"
What does that mean? If
nothing was taken, then there is no robbery. Who wrote this for the Washington Post? Is English their native
language?
Julian Assange did not say Rich was a source. It is highly unlikely Rich was a source, I can't see Wikileaks
revealing a source regardless of circumstance. Wikileaks obviously have information pointing to the idea that this
was a politically motivated killing. He is concerned that this, in turn will lead to all dissidents being
frightened to stand up and speak out.
Maybe wikileaks doesn't know who their source was. The DNC authenticated the e-mails by their response, then
they float the "Russia influencing US elections narrative" to distract from Seth's murder.
Has there be ANY
evidence that Russia was behind the hack? Where did that rumer start?? WikiLeaks has a vested interest in
Seth's murder being solved because they don't want people being afraid to give them information, so I
understand them offering a reward, even if he wasn't their source, once the rumors started, they wouldn't want
to scare off the real source, or futur sources.
http://www.prosewestand.org
Don't be afraid! The "Problem" will not come after you because True Americans are watching every political
detail and the Problem knows that! If common people start dying for their free speech–many American's are
waiting for a reason to make a stand against the Problem, their constituency and their conspiracies! If you
think about it, some of the press is helping the Problem take away your free speech as well! This is not going
unnoticed. CNN is the worst conspirator out there!!
The Problem is afraid of Donald Trump because he will
shake up their house! Mrs. Clinton and the press want to put you in politically-correct bondage experienced in
much of the world. Those countries are ruled by their Problem and worse. The only way to maintain the balance
of powers in America is that True Americans exercise their constitutional leverage with free speech! Exercise
it freely every day!
In this day and age any unprotected informant should have a concealed carry permit and a gun! I will refrain
from getting into the 2nd Amendment discussion–may not be appropriate for this discussion ..
No matter how it turns out, my condolences to the family of Seth Rich
Also, around the same time of Rich Seth and Shawn Lucas deaths, Victor Thorn, who wrote at least 20
anti-Clinton books, supposedly committed suicide. Makes one wonder what is really going on
So many theories and those, who appear to want to profit. This young man is dead with an on going investigation.
Given his connection whatever verdict is reached will be a whitewash, can we blame those who disbelieve? A history
of victims with throats cut, gunshot wounds to the back, judged as suicides or bizarrely as natural causes? We are
surrounded by the most callous whose trade is 'the good of society', are we to be a part of that? Whatever the
motive a lost life and decimated family cannot be used for gain, whether it be ratings, publicity or a
confirmation of ones own theories.
the road to the clinton power regime is littered with bodies. vince foster and ron brown. and more recently john
ashe and shawn lucas. add seth rich to the list. good luck if you work for the dnc or in her campaign. the
clintons are completely corrupt and morally bankrupt.
The Clinton rumors have been around for over 20 years. Clintons had nothing to do with this. He was probably
involved in something deeper. There are no missing bodies. Monica Lewinsky, Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones and
Ken Starr are all still around and they would be the ones to go. Get a clue. No one's missing and Foster
suffered from severe depression. Do some research.
The lead investigator, Manuel Rodriguez, resigned from the case because when he followed the leads that
clearly showed MURDER he found HIMSELF investigated! Here, read his resignation letter:
http://www.dcdave.com/article5/MiguelRodriguezLetter.htm
Quick quote (USPP stands for US Park Police. THAT is who had jurisdiction on the possible murder of a United
States politician. The Park Police):
(10) the existing FBI interview reports and USPP interview reports do not accurately reflect witness
statements; (11) four emergency medical personnel identified, having refreshed their recollection with
new photographic evidence, trauma each had observed on Foster's right neck area; and (12) blurred and
obscured blow-ups of copies of (polaroid [sic] and 35mm) photographs have been offered and utilized.
After uncovering this information, among other facts, my own conduct was questioned and I was internally
investigated.
All of those people you mentioned were constantly in yhe public eye. In fact, they've been household names
for over 20 years. If they were to die "mysteriously," it would shoot up too many red flags and would make
it a lot easier to connect the dots to the Clintons. They might have wanted these people to disappear, but
it would have been way too risky to make that happen. .. which is why some of them went out of their ways to
remain relevant. As far as the murdered individuals are concerned I think you should consider this fact.
During the course of a very lengthy political career, it's entirely possible for one or two people to die of
unnatural, non disease related causes, but when the death toll surpasses 50 and is still counting, that just
might be the smoke from a fire raging out of control. Hence, the so called conspiracy theories.
Please keep this brutal murder in the spotlight. Julian isn't offering $20.000 without an inkling it's tied to
the Clinton's campaign.
The press are too busy destroying trump.
It's rather scary.
Is Ecuador some kind of Shangri La anarchist freedom republic or
"The administration of President Rafael Correa has expanded state control over media and civil society and
abused its power to harass, intimidate, and punish critics. In 2015, thousands of people participated in public
demonstrations against government policies, and security forces on multiple occasions responded with excessive
force. Abuses against protesters, including arbitrary arrests, have not been adequately investigated."
I was being sarcastic. Assange was supposed to be some way out there anarchist, anti capitalist hacker. He
might have been before he was busted and 'pardoned' from a 10 year prison sentence in Australia.
"In 1991,
at the age of 20, Assange and some fellow hackers broke into the master terminal of Nortel, the Canadian
telecom company. He was caught and pleaded guilty to 25 charges; six other charges were dropped. Citing
Assange's "intelligent inquisitiveness," the judge sentenced him only to pay the Australian state a small
sum in damages".
A crazy hasbaranik has landed! 'Human Rights Watch, in my very firm opinion, are a rabble of mostly
Judeofascist hypocrites who work hand in glove with the US regime to blackguard and vilify states targeted for
regime change for attempting to create decent societies for their people. I wouldn't cross the street to piss
on them if they were on fire.
"But the group ran in to problems even before WikiLeaks was launched. The organisers approached John Young, who
ran another website that posted leaked documents, Cryptome, and asked him to register the WikiLeaks website in his
name. Young obliged and was initially an enthusiastic supporter but when the organisers announced their intention
to try and raise $5m he questioned their motives, saying that kind of money could only come from the CIA or George
Soros. Then he walked away.
"WikiLeaks is a fraud," he wrote in an email when he quit. "Fuck your cute hustle and disinformation campaign
against legitimate dissent. Same old shit, working for the enemy." Young then leaked all of his email
correspondence with WikiLeak's founders, including the messages to Ellsberg."
Wikileaks pretty plainly started as a US tool to attack the likes of China, but then Assange may or may not
have gone 'off reservation', so he was set up by US stooge regime Sweden, in the usual blatant fashion. And
Assange's little buddies at the Guardian cess-pool turned against him with Old Testament fury, in particular
unleashing their pack of feminazi Harpies to vilify him. I wouldn't trust him as far as I could throw him.
Wikileaks was created to foment internal trouble in the Middle East states and trigger the Arab Spring. It's
basically the NSA's own conspiracy generator.
elenits:
Tried to "like" your post, but for some reason I can only reply, and face the login screen when I try
to "like." Loved the comment. Twang! (I'm using that!)
Killing it! It seems more and more like Trump's the plant, huh? A true know-nothing that can ONLY do what his
advisors tell him to. And the Trump election is likely to bring whatever Americans can muster up as a race war
into being (comment directed at the fact everybody's fluoridated to the gills these days and likely UNABLE to
really riot). I think the controllers really, really, really want that.
My GUT told me all this about Assange
when he first appeared. Same thing with "please-employ-encryption-so-we-know-who-to-watch" Snowden.
Encryption's just about the FIRST thing I was interested in when I bought my first laptop, so the LAW barring
encryption past a certain strength on the open market was one of the first things I found out about! Whatever
encryption you can get is hacked. Period.
Ambrose Evans Pritchard is in the forefront of the Clinton exposure:
Wikipedia:
"During his time as the Sunday Telegraph's Washington, D.C. bureau chief in the early 1990s, Evans-Pritchard
became known for his controversial stories about President Bill Clinton, the 1993 death of Vincent Foster, and
the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
He is the author of The Secret Life of Bill Clinton: The Unreported Stories
(1997) which was published by conservative publishing firm Regnery Publishing.[1] In this book, he elaborates
on assertions that the Oklahoma City bombing was a sting operation by the FBI that went horribly wrong, that
ATF agents were warned against reporting to work in the Murrah Building the morning of the attack, and that the
Justice Department subsequently engaged in a cover-up.[2]
Coverage of US politics
During his time in Washington, his stories often attracted the ire of the Clinton administration, and on
Evans-Pritchard's departure from Washington in 1997, a White House aide was quoted in George saying, "That's
another British invasion we're glad is over. The guy was nothing but a pain in the ass". His efforts in
ferreting out the witness, Patrick Knowlton, whose last name had been spelled "Nolton" in the Park Police
report on Foster's death, resulted eventually in a lawsuit by Knowlton against the FBI and the inclusion of
Knowlton's lawyer's letter as an appendix to Kenneth Starr's report on Foster's death.[3] In his book,
Evans-Pritchard responded vigorously to White House charges against him.
It's hard to overstate the amount of caution we should all display with this story, but it's too newsworthy to ignore.
It starts
with this interview with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange where he brings up
murdered DNC staffer,
Seth Rich, unprompted.
Here's the juicy part:
ASSANGE: Our whistleblowers go to significant efforts to get us material and often very significant risks. There's a 27 year
old that works for the DNC, he was shot in the back. Murdered, uh just a few weeks ago, uh, for unknown reasons as he was walking
down the street in Washington. So...
INTERVIEWER: That was, that was just a robbery I believe. Wasn't it?
ASSANGE: No. There's no finding. So...
INTERVIEWER: What are you suggesting? What are you suggesting?
ASSANGE: I'm suggesting our sources take risks and they uh, become concerned, uh to see things occurring, like that.
INTERVIEWER: Was he one of your sources then? I mean...
ASSANGE: We don't comment on who our sources are.
INTERVIEWER: Then why make the suggestion about a young guy being shot in the streets of Washington?
ASSANGE: Because we have to understand how high the stakes are in the United States. And our sources are ... you know... our
sources face serious risks. That's why they come to us, so we can protect their anonymity.
Then comes the news that Wikileaks is offering a $25,000 reward for any information leading to the capture of Rich's murderer.
Dr. Holland also gets the endocrinology wrong (hope she's got it right in
her book) when she refers to estrogen a "stress hormone that helps a woman be
resilient during her fertile years."
Stress hormones are part of the "flight or fight" response, and the major
stress hormones include
cortisol and epinephrine. Stress hormones can be released rapidly by the
body in response to a threat of some kind (running the gamut from a broken toe
to reading an article on how hormones make or break a woman's ability to be
president). This is not estrogen. Estrogen thickens the lining of the uterus,
affects breast tissue, and of course (like most hormones) has a multitude of
effects everywhere in the body. It is not, however, a stress hormone. It may
be able to counteract oxidative stress in some tissues, but that doesn't make
it a stress hormone).
The major source of estrogen before menopause is the developing egg and how
far the egg is in the cycle is what governs the release of estrogen, not stress.
The female endocrine system is just not built to churn out large amounts of
estrogen in response to stress. Also, girls don't have estrogen before puberty
so it would be a pretty poor evolutionary design for a stress hormones to only
kick in at puberty. Bad luck if you get chased by a saber-toothed tiger at the
age of eight!
... ... ...
Postmenopausal women are not biologically primed to handle stress any more
or less than premenopausal women. Hillary Clinton's hormones have nothing to
do with her qualifications, and I find any connection between the two, whether
well-intentioned or simply a book plug, an insult.
To say a woman's hormones are in some way related to her fitness to be president
then also means at some time you think she is less fit to be president. You
can't have it both ways.
There is no wisdom in menopause. There is wisdom, and then there is menopause.
All I care about is Ms. Clinton's wisdom, and that's all you should care about
too.
Jennifer Gunter is an obstetrician-gynecologist and author of
The Preemie Primer. She blogs at her self-titled site,
Dr. Jen Gunter.
Hillary Clinton reportedly has chronic health issues that may interfere with
the presidency, according to one political insider. The 68-year-old presumptive
Democratic nominee has never been too open about her medical history, but the
coughing fits alone may be enough to indicate that Clinton has some
serious health problems. Radar Online issued a report on Wednesday
that has an insider close to Hillary Clinton saying the presidential hopeful
is facing "mounting health issues."
Several coughing fits have been caught on camera as Hillary Clinton has campaigned
across the nation for the 2016 primary elections and caucuses. The Washington
Post reported in April that Clinton had
two public coughing fits in one week, leaving Democratic constituents wondering
if she's even healthy enough to become president. Actress Susan Sarandon even
said in May during an interview with Larry King that she won't endorse Hillary
Clinton as a presidential candidate because "she may have health issues."
... ... ...
In April, an article published on
KevinMD.com outlined some concerns about Hillary Clinton's health records,
but said that Clinton's health risks aren't anything that should disqualify
her from being president. However, "they are certainly something to ponder."
Was not WaPo a cheerleader of Iraq war? What a despicable hypocrites... Judging from comments it
is more and more difficult for them to deceive and brainwash the readers... The Trump campaign is a
movement MSM and neocons will never embrace. The media bias against Trump has reached unprecedented
proportions.
Notable quotes:
"... My other thought on this is that the Wahabbi theology, which the Saudis have spread so aggressively, is likely to poison the minds of fighting age Muslim males for many many generations to come. And if the House of Saud falls, the country will most likely fall to those under the sway of the Wahabbi clerics, with whom the Saudi monarchs have a tenuous alliance. IMO, if the House of Saud falls, the country is most likely to become an even more brutal theocracy than it already is. It's much more likely to turn into another ISIS state than a western style democracy. ..."
"... Among other things, it is highly doubtful that any other religion will ever be allowed on the Arabian peninsula, which speaks volumes about what will happen "free speech" or freedom of conscience in general in Saudi Arabia for the foreseeable future. ..."
"... As I've said before, ISIS Islam is indistinguishable from Saudi (Wahabbi) Islam. If ISIS is perverting Islam, then the Saudis, the Vatican of Islam are likewise perverting Islam. ..."
"... Insisting ISIS is not Islamic probably is intellectually dishonest and an example of the No true Scotsman fallacy, but what do you expect our leaders and Muslims who abhor Islamist violence to do? Its in the world's interests to repudiate Islamic State and disconnect it from mainstream Islam. It's simple pragmatism. ..."
"... I don't see what positive purpose it serves constantly to parrot that Islamic State are "true" Muslims. Where exactly does that lead us? We know what IS wants, and what its methods are. These individuals are thugs, not deep thinkers; their motive for doing what they are doesn't need to be overthought. There isn't anyone in the world who thinks Islamic State is composed of Episcopalians. ..."
"... Not saying they are "true" Muslims; that's certainly not for me to say. I am saying the Saudis are undeniably a "mainstream" sect, not a fringe sect. That's pretty hard to deny where the holiest sites in all of Islam are in Mecca and Medina, and the Saudis exert a huge influence over Mosque construction and Islamic education. ..."
"... But when I hear someone like this soldier's poor father say "Islam has nothing to do with terrorism" I just want to throw up my hands because it so clearly does. ..."
"... That's one of big problems with Islam: the immutable word of God as expressed in the Koran is pretty consistently hateful. And "the Bible is just as bad" is not persuasive-- for Christians there's that whole "New Testament" thing and the Jews are busy winning Nobel Peace Prizes while their neighbors are refining the art of the suicide vest. ..."
"... We are at war with an ideology that is embedded in a religion. That's an inescapable fact. ..."
"... Capt. Humayun Khan was killed in combat in 2004, over 12 yrs ago. Yet Hillary & DNC brought his parents to be on the podium of the convention. Democrats and Hillary Clinton wanted to EXPLOIT HIS DEATH to hilt. And media bought it whole, hook, line & sinker. Then Trump opened his mouth (it does not matter what he says. The media will pulverize it). Trump became a punching bag of the media yet again. ..."
"... "Islamophobia" is a term meant to conflate all criticism of Islam with xenophobia and racism. It's intended to stifle thought shut down conversation. I reject it as a label; it's a nonsense term. ..."
"... Here's the reasons I'm afraid of Islam: 9/11, Mumbai, Boston, Paris, Brussels, Madrid, San Bernandino, Orlando etc etc, etc., death penalty for apostasy, death penalty for blasphemy, death penalty for homosexuality, death penalty for adultery, honor killings, female genital mutilation, misogyny etc etc. etc. ..."
"... I understand that here in the US, people are free to believe as they choose. As I've said before, I don't care if you worship a stone, as long as you don't throw it at me. The reality is that some mainstream sects of Islam (e.g. Wababbis) are spiritual Nazis, and I give them the same "respect" I would give to any other totalitarian ideology; that is, none. If I'm an "Islamophobe" for that, I'll wear it as badge of honor. ..."
"... The son of Mr Khan was an AMERICAN SOLDIER -- Are the Khans American Citizens? If so why are you calling them and their son Muslims .. Muslim is their religion. I don't hear anyone be called a Baptist Soldier was killed, His Baptist Parents are grieving. ..."
"... Mr. Khan and Democrats were attacking Donald Trump with false narratives, Mr. Khan made his son a Muslim Martyr on national television, to compare legal immigrants from middle east with so called refugees from countries of terror who are not vetted is like apples and oranges. Khans need to be angry with Terrorists no Mr Trump who wants to protect all Americans even them from the Jihadists. ..."
"... Their son was killed by Muslims who I am certain would not hesitate for one second to kill them also, yet Mr. Trump is the object of their ire, not the kind of Muslim that would blow up their son. The pocket Constitution Mr. Khan produced was a cheap theatrical prop, the Khan's have every right to have a political opinion and support Mrs. Clinton and even bad mouth Trump as much as they like; I find Trump quite indefensible however in my opinion the Khan's use of their son's sacrifice for a political commercial did only one thing, cheapened and diminished their son's memory. ..."
"... "Who wrote that? Did Hillary's scriptwriters write it?" ..."
"... First, thank you for your service. Second Trump is indefensible. However do not for one second believe that the Khan's were there to pay homage to the memory of their son, they were a commercial for Hillary Clinton plain and simple. By mixing their son's sacrifice with a political commercial in my eyes they cheapened their son's memory. ..."
"... Trump has no filter though. Although I agree with much of what he says about Islam ("Islam hates us" is more accurate than he knows-- Google "al wara wal bara") he's a loose cannon. Don't like him or Hillary, although on Islam Hillary is unquestionably worse. Bought and paid for by the Saudis, among the worst enemies America has ever known. ..."
"... They want Muslim prayer in our schools, but they do not want Christian prayer anywhere near them. ..."
"... My point is that Islamic thuggery has its roots in the religion itself. It's not at all the same as soccer hoologanism. Muhammed is the supreme example for all Muslims; the world's most perfect human. I'm sure you know the word "Sunni" essentially means example (of Muhammed). ISIS essentially claims that the prophet Muhammed was the original ISIS member. ..."
"... So who dug up this lawyer to speak at a democrate convention and why? What's so special about him? ..."
"... And what have Hillary and the Clinton's sacrificed? An ambassador and diplomat and others in Benghazi? The Dems and their racist elitist owners have a knack for chastising all average Americans (typically white Christians) as always wrong, while they search far and wide for an example that they can use to expand their multi-culturalism agenda. ..."
"... Your son served as a legal American. All Trump wants is proper vetting of people who as a group contain a small minority might do us severe harm. Since you were at the Democrat convention, may I inform you of a couple of things. First, our current president, Obama, never served in the military. Bill, the husband of the nominee you support, Hillary Clinton, never served; ..."
"... But it is worse. Bill Clinton (obviously I am reading reports and would be very unlikely to have first hand knowledge of all of these things) had an educational deferment for college during the VietNam "war." He then had an additional deferment during his two year Rhodes scholarship at Oxford. He joined a National Guard unit in Arkansas but did not report. ..."
"... You are very confused. The Clinton running for President is Hillary. The Republican opponent is Trump with 4 military deferments for his bad foot BUT he bragged he did his national patriotic service avoiding VD in New York. ..."
"... When Mr. Khan asked the question: what have you sacrificed? he opened the door to comparisons. Mr Obama is a current president, Mr Clinton a former president. The comparisons were perfectly legitimate. You consider it irrelevant I consider it relevant. That is called a difference of opinions. ..."
"If it was up to Donald Trump, [Humayun] never would have been in America," Khan said. "Donald
Trump consistently smears the character of Muslims. He disrespects other minorities, women, judges,
even his own party leadership. He vows to build walls and ban us from this country.
Muslim American Khizr Khan, whose son Humayun was killed while serving in the U.S. Army, offered
Republican candidate Donald Trump his copy of the Constitution during a speech at the Democratic
convention. (The Washington Post)
"Donald Trump," he said, "you are asking Americans to trust you with our future. Let me ask you:
Have you even read the U.S. Constitution? I will gladly lend you my copy." He pulled a copy of the
Constitution from his pocket. "In this document, look for the words 'liberty' and 'equal protection
of law.' " Earlier this month, Trump promised congressional Republicans that he would
defend "Article XII" of the Constitution, which doesn't exist.
"Have you ever been to Arlington Cemetery?" Khan asked. "Go look at the graves of the brave patriots
who died defending America - you will see all faiths, genders, and ethnicities.
"You have sacrificed nothing. And no one."
Norger, 8/3/2016
My other thought on this is that the Wahabbi theology, which the Saudis have spread so
aggressively, is likely to poison the minds of fighting age Muslim males for many many generations
to come. And if the House of Saud falls, the country will most likely fall to those under the
sway of the Wahabbi clerics, with whom the Saudi monarchs have a tenuous alliance. IMO, if the
House of Saud falls, the country is most likely to become an even more brutal theocracy than it
already is. It's much more likely to turn into another ISIS state than a western style democracy.
Among other things, it is highly doubtful that any other religion will ever be allowed
on the Arabian peninsula, which speaks volumes about what will happen "free speech" or freedom
of conscience in general in Saudi Arabia for the foreseeable future.
Katy Cordeth, 8/2/2016
@Katy.
As I've said before, ISIS Islam is indistinguishable from Saudi (Wahabbi) Islam. If
ISIS is perverting Islam, then the Saudis, the Vatican of Islam are likewise perverting Islam.
To say that "ISIS is not Islamic" is deception and complete intellectual dishonesty not
from you, but from our leaders. They literally think we must be lied to, that we can't handle
the truth. ISIS is very Islamic, in the sense that they are ultra orthodox.
Not if they ignore the parts of the Qur'an which promote peace and respect for all people,
Norger, and such passages do exist despite what your Mr. Spencer might tell you. Being orthodox
means not being able to cherry-pick the parts of one's holy texts one wishes and ignoring the
rest. It depends which definition of "orthodox" one is employing, but if this were the case the
Phelps clan could be described as orthodox.
Insisting ISIS is not Islamic probably is intellectually dishonest and an example of the
No true Scotsman fallacy, but what do you expect our leaders and Muslims who abhor Islamist violence
to do? Its in the world's interests to repudiate Islamic State and disconnect it from mainstream
Islam. It's simple pragmatism. It reminds non-Muslims that, in direct contravention of IS
(and Donald Trump's) goal, the majority do not support the kind of violence Islamists use; and
it stops impressionable Muslims such as those three British schoolgirls from viewing terrorists
as legitimate followers of their faith.
I don't see what positive purpose it serves constantly to parrot that Islamic State are
"true" Muslims. Where exactly does that lead us? We know what IS wants, and what its methods are.
These individuals are thugs, not deep thinkers; their motive for doing what they are doesn't need
to be overthought. There isn't anyone in the world who thinks Islamic State is composed of Episcopalians.
Norger, 8/2/2016
Not saying they are "true" Muslims; that's certainly not for me to say. I am saying the
Saudis are undeniably a "mainstream" sect, not a fringe sect. That's pretty hard to deny where
the holiest sites in all of Islam are in Mecca and Medina, and the Saudis exert a huge influence
over Mosque construction and Islamic education. It's not our leaders' job (and certainly
not mine)to decide which interpretation of Islam is "proper" or true. It is their job to recognize
threats to our national security and deal with them appropriately. As Sam Harris says, the Taliban,
Al Quaeda etc. offer up an entirely plausible interpretation of the faith. And there is no clear
dividing line between their "bad" Islam and "good" Islam.
Anwar al-Awlaki was supposedly a good or "moderate" Muslim until we found out he wasn't and
killed him in a drone strike. I wish I were as optimistic as you about the power of moderate Muslims
to transform the faith. But the threat of being labeled an apostate can be seriously hazardous
to one's health, even here in the US. But when I hear someone like this soldier's poor father
say "Islam has nothing to do with terrorism" I just want to throw up my hands because it so clearly
does.
Norger, 8/3/2016
Tell me about those parts of the Koran that promote respect for all people if you can -- but
I will tell you they are far outnumbered by the hateful verses, which I could spend all day quoting,
And if you are going to quote that "whosoever kills another person it's as though he killed all
mankind verse" I suggest you quit the entire verse (including the always omitted language about
when it IS OK to kill another person) and the verse which follows, which describes the manner
in which such transgressors are to be killed.
That's one of big problems with Islam: the immutable word of God as expressed in the Koran
is pretty consistently hateful. And "the Bible is just as bad" is not persuasive-- for Christians
there's that whole "New Testament" thing and the Jews are busy winning Nobel Peace Prizes while
their neighbors are refining the art of the suicide vest.
BigPicture , 8/1/2016
Something worth repeating. Below, I quote from @Norger's comment. Mr. Norger said:
"We are at war with an ideology that is embedded in a religion. That's an inescapable
fact. Are we at war with all Muslims? I sure hope not. But if, in your words, the jihadis
represent "the worst," then we (particularly military and law enforcement) need to be able
to take a hard and unflinching look at our enemies' self-stated motivating ideology in order
to defeat it. That necessarily means developing a deep understanding of the most extreme Islamic
ideologies. The fact is that some Muslims will inevitably not find this "insulting" or "offensive."
It is noteworthy that in Sharia law, "slander" is not necessarily a false statement; it's any
discussion of something which the aggrieved party does not wish to be known. Unless we have
a death wish, "cultural sensitivity" should take a back seat to national security when lives
are at stake. We knew this after 9/11, the body count must rise once again before we learn
it again.
Don't know if Andrew McCarthy (federal prosecutor of the "Blind Sheik," Omar Abdel Rahman)
is also "beneath contempt" in your circles, but I would alsorecommend his book, "Willful Blindness."
(yes Ted Cruz ripped this off).
BigPicture View, 8/1/2016 8:02 AM EST
Capt. Humayun Khan was killed in combat in 2004, over 12 yrs ago. Yet Hillary & DNC brought
his parents to be on the podium of the convention. Democrats and Hillary Clinton wanted to EXPLOIT
HIS DEATH to hilt. And media bought it whole, hook, line & sinker. Then Trump opened his mouth
(it does not matter what he says. The media will pulverize it). Trump became a punching bag of
the media yet again.
Hillary exploited the death of Capt, Khan. The media had something to report besides zero.
Trump became the media punching bag, yet again Trump got free ads and voters' sympathy.
Every one got something out of it. Who is the loser??? Mr. & Mrs. Khan became suckers.
Norger, 8/1/2016 7:44 AM EST
"Islamophobia" is a term meant to conflate all criticism of Islam with xenophobia and racism.
It's intended to stifle thought shut down conversation. I reject it as a label; it's a nonsense
term.
Here's the reasons I'm afraid of Islam: 9/11, Mumbai, Boston, Paris, Brussels, Madrid,
San Bernandino, Orlando etc etc, etc., death penalty for apostasy, death penalty for blasphemy,
death penalty for homosexuality, death penalty for adultery, honor killings, female genital mutilation,
misogyny etc etc. etc.
To you, I'm a borderline racist for being concerned about these things. To me, you are a blind
apologist. Jihad is different in kind from anything the US military does. It's quite literally
murder as a sacrament, in the name of spreading or defending the faith. Afraid of Islam? You bet.
Among other things, "mutually assured destruction" means nothing to a country in possession of
nuclear weapons whose leaders are of this mindset (Iran, anyone?)
I understand that here in the US, people are free to believe as they choose. As I've said
before, I don't care if you worship a stone, as long as you don't throw it at me. The reality
is that some mainstream sects of Islam (e.g. Wababbis) are spiritual Nazis, and I give them the
same "respect" I would give to any other totalitarian ideology; that is, none. If I'm an "Islamophobe"
for that, I'll wear it as badge of honor.
"ISIS is not Islamic." Riiiight.
Michelle Ann, 7/31/2016 12:58 PM EST
The son of Mr Khan was an AMERICAN SOLDIER -- Are the Khans American Citizens? If so why
are you calling them and their son Muslims .. Muslim is their religion. I don't hear anyone be
called a Baptist Soldier was killed, His Baptist Parents are grieving.
Mr. Khan and Democrats were attacking Donald Trump with false narratives, Mr. Khan made
his son a Muslim Martyr on national television, to compare legal immigrants from middle east with
so called refugees from countries of terror who are not vetted is like apples and oranges. Khans
need to be angry with Terrorists no Mr Trump who wants to protect all Americans even them from
the Jihadists.
American, 7/31/2016 8:45 AM EST [Edited]
Any parent who has to bury a child is worthy of compassion, I cannot imagine a greater pain.
Captain Khan is a hero, there is nothing more noble than to lay down your life so another may
live. Mr. and Mrs. Khan used their son's memory to attack Mr. Trump, they politicized the death
of their son, they went on TV in front of an audience of millions with only one purpose: to attack
Mr. Trump.
Their son was killed by Muslims who I am certain would not hesitate for one second to kill
them also, yet Mr. Trump is the object of their ire, not the kind of Muslim that would blow up
their son. The pocket Constitution Mr. Khan produced was a cheap theatrical prop, the Khan's have
every right to have a political opinion and support Mrs. Clinton and even bad mouth Trump as much
as they like; I find Trump quite indefensible however in my opinion the Khan's use of their son's
sacrifice for a political commercial did only one thing, cheapened and diminished their son's
memory.
G_Minde, 7/31/2016 4:04 AM EST
"Who wrote that? Did Hillary's scriptwriters write it?"
For shame.
A father who has lost a son in our nation's service calls out The Donald – and his lame response
is to question whether or not the father wrote his own words?
The Donald can't believe that someone born in a country that had English as an official language,
trained as a lawyer, and with over 20 years in the United States can not make his own speech?
The Donald can't believe that someone with a darker skin tone than his can be eloquent?
The Donald can't handle that a family who has lost a son in our nation's service would disagree
with his proposed policy that would have kept them from coming to this country in the first place.
And when questioned about it, instead of being compassionate, or non-committal, or at least
*respectful* of the father of one of our fallen soldiers, questions whether or not those were
even his words.
Contrast that with former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, talking about how "Virtually every
night for four and a half years, writing condolence letters and reading about these mostly young
men and women, I wept."
Donald, when the father of a fallen solder says ""You have sacrificed nothing and no one, "
I don't think that staying that you have 'worked hard' to make money is really quite…sacrifice.
It's not like you have been one of the 'dollar a year' men like served under FDR in World War
Two. I can't think of anyone who wouldn't expect to 'work hard' in the course of making billions
of dollars.
You claim 'creating jobs' in the process of making money as a sacrifice you have made.
So how many jobs is the life of a son worth?
The Donald wants to be the Commander-in-Chief, but this is how he talks about the Families
of the Fallen. Such character. Such temperament.
Here's one Afghan veteran whose vote he will not be getting.
American, 7/31/2016 8:58 AM EST
First, thank you for your service. Second Trump is indefensible. However do not for one
second believe that the Khan's were there to pay homage to the memory of their son, they were
a commercial for Hillary Clinton plain and simple. By mixing their son's sacrifice with a political
commercial in my eyes they cheapened their son's memory.
Norger, 8/7/2016 10:08 AM EST
Yes, and the Republicans tried the same thing with a mother of one of soldiers killed in Benghazi;
she was ripped by many in the MSM, essentially for these same reasons. Not that there's any double
standard.
Trump has no filter though. Although I agree with much of what he says about Islam ("Islam
hates us" is more accurate than he knows-- Google "al wara wal bara") he's a loose cannon. Don't
like him or Hillary, although on Islam Hillary is unquestionably worse. Bought and paid for by
the Saudis, among the worst enemies America has ever known.
GeorgeVreelandHill1, 7/30/2016 10:37 PM EST
I agree with Trump on banning Muslims.
Far too many of them have killed innocent people around the world including in the United States.
Far too many of them chant "Death To America" in their streets and few have real respect for America.
I see Muslims all over Los Angeles and they want to do things their way according to their own
customs.
You say no to them and they sue.
A Christmas tree is an insult to them. They want Muslim prayer in our schools, but they do not want Christian prayer anywhere near
them.
They try to take over any space they are in.
On 9/11, there were two Arab boys pointing to the smoldering ruins of the Twin Towers.
They were laughing.
That is typical Muslim behavior towards America.
The United States is THE land of freedom, but Muslims are trying to take away as much of the freedom
as they can.
Their agenda is the Middle East agenda and they dare others to stop.
Well, stop them we must.
In America, you do what is according to the laws of this land and not the laws of other places.
Don't like it, then get out.
Or be banned.
George Vreeland Hill
Norger, 7/30/2016 10:50 PM EST
OK, so it appears you now agree you said that many Muslims are in fact intimidated into silence
even though you were outraged in your last post that I would suggest you said such a thing.
I don't doubt that political grievances play some part in this but there are many other groups
throughout the world (e.g. Christians in the Middle East, Tibetan Buddhists) who suffer oppression
equal or greater than that of Muslims, but don't resort to terroristic violence. (where are those
Tibetan suicide bombers). And sorry no, I don't think that western imperialism is responsible
for the second (or more) generation Islamist violence we are seeing in France, Belgium and Germany.
Islam reliably breeds a certain percentage of terrorists.
My point is that Islamic thuggery has its roots in the religion itself. It's not at all
the same as soccer hoologanism. Muhammed is the supreme example for all Muslims; the world's most
perfect human. I'm sure you know the word "Sunni" essentially means example (of Muhammed). ISIS
essentially claims that the prophet Muhammed was the original ISIS member. They emulate his
behavior in every way and (accurately) cite Islamic scripture in support of virtually every atrocity
they commit. It's not just "human nature;" it's an ideology of conquest, cloaked in a veneer of
religion.And ther is little or no difference between ISIS Islam and Saudi Islam. That fact alone
should terrify us.
I say that jihad terror is going to continue until we recognize it for what it is--religiously
motivated warfare. I'm supposed to be flattened by you telling me that "sounds like Trump?" Here's
my question to you: how can we possibly fight jihad terror effectively if we refuse to recognize,
name and study our enemies' self-stated motivating ideology? How can that possibly be helpful?
If we are "at war" with "violent extremism" then intentionally refusing to "come to grips" with
our enemies' self-stated motivating ideology is beyond foolish.
DPMP, 7/30/2016 9:24 PM EST
So who dug up this lawyer to speak at a democrate convention and why? What's so special
about him?
anagitator, 7/30/2016 8:45 PM EST
And what have Hillary and the Clinton's sacrificed? An ambassador and diplomat and others
in Benghazi? The Dems and their racist elitist owners have a knack for chastising all average
Americans (typically white Christians) as always wrong, while they search far and wide for an
example that they can use to expand their multi-culturalism agenda.
How many such average Americans also were killed in action and Hillary could care less because
it doesn't fit her or the elites agenda? The Clinton family will drag us into more wars to advance
the bankster interests.
Jake55, 7/30/2016 4:39 PM EST
For the, 70 plus years, Hillary has been destroying America. She in her term as the Governor's
wife was snorting so much cocaine that she drifted through that term. She had a good start with
Watergate, where she was fired for dishonesty and trying to manufacture evidence. Then during
her husband's vie for the presidential seat, she was a master at covering up his affairs and picadillos.
Rape, indiscretions...all covered up by Hillary. She has ruined many lives protecting her errant
husband and his sex crazed impulses.
... ... ...
Katy Cordeth, 7/30/2016 5:07 PM EST
Everything else in your comment was too asinine, hysterical (God help us indeed) and borderline-libellous
to respond to, but this Watergate calumny should be addressed.
OK, let's talk about your son, who gave his life AS AN AMERICAN soldier, and your Trump insult
by your rhetorical question of whether Trump has ever been to Arlington (where, BTW, my parents
are also buried...so it is a powerful image associated with this WaPo article).
Your son served as a legal American. All Trump wants is proper vetting of people who as a group
contain a small minority might do us severe harm.
Since you were at the Democrat convention, may I inform you of a couple of things. First, our
current president, Obama, never served in the military. Bill, the husband of the nominee you support,
Hillary Clinton, never served;
But it is worse. Bill Clinton (obviously I am reading reports and would be very unlikely to
have first hand knowledge of all of these things) had an educational deferment for college during
the VietNam "war." He then had an additional deferment during his two year Rhodes scholarship
at Oxford. He joined a National Guard unit in Arkansas but did not report. He picketed against
America while overseas. When he did not report to his Guard unit, he was, in June, sent a draft
notice. But he did not go. In August, two months later, the draft was changed to a lottery system
and he received a high number, meaning he would not go into the military. BUT...those who had
already received a draft note, as Bill, were not eligible for the lottery. How did he escape that??
And how can you therefore support Hillary?
What have you done personally to stop Muslim terrorists from striking us here in America?
BobSanderson, 7/30/2016 2:24 PM EST
You are very confused. The Clinton running for President is Hillary. The Republican opponent
is Trump with 4 military deferments for his bad foot BUT he bragged he did his national patriotic
service avoiding VD in New York.
How did you miss the revelant parties and facts on service?
American, 7/30/2016 2:39 PM EST
When Mr. Khan asked the question: what have you sacrificed? he opened the door to comparisons.
Mr Obama is a current president, Mr Clinton a former president. The comparisons were perfectly
legitimate. You consider it irrelevant I consider it relevant. That is called a difference of
opinions.
"... the U.S. system never has been democratic. It is a show–a very expensive one–that the capitalist class puts on every two years in order to control the citizenry and to provide a justification for U.S. imperialism. ..."
"... Now, the capitalist class that controls Rome is no longer national, but transnational, being based on the transnational corporations and financial institutions and enjoying the full support of the transnational capitalist media. ..."
"... new poles: Globaliists vs. Antiglobalists. ..."
"... Donald Trump is an antiglobalist. That's the reason he deserves the full support of all those who oppose the transnational capitalist class and its institutions, including the EU, NATO, the WTO, the IMF, the World Bank and the OECD, to name just a few. ..."
"... However, the election should not be about appearances but about policies. Obama sounded intelligent, but his policies all come out of the globalist think tanks, the CIA (his mum's former employer) and the neocon asylum in Washington. So chose: someone who sounds like a television personality with great positions, or… well we all know what Clinton stands for. ..."
"... submissives to the atomisation of all systems that might afford self-sufficiency to societies, that makes everybody absolutely dependent on and therefore subservient to international finance and it's program of enslavement. ..."
"... Sanders was clearly the sheep-dog, and I won't be surprised if an e-mail showing that reality appears. ..."
"... spitting in the face of the latest generation of suckers who thought that the elite plutocracy of the USA could be 'reformed' from within. ..."
"... sheepdog is accurate. I have been calling him a sheepdog since 2014 and predicting, correctly, that he would both lose the nomination and endorse Hillary. This was inevitable since he SAID he would endorse her from the start of his so-called campaign. ..."
"... If the majority of people in the USA are really thinking that voting for either Hillary or the Donald is worse than having unprotected sex with an HIV+ hooker, then the Independent would barely need any publicity. They'd just need to be on the ballot. ..."
"... Course, the Establishment might get cute and put a far-right nutcase up as 'another Independent' so as they would have someone who'd do as they were told no matter what. ..."
"... The Boy Wonder's credentials as a card-carrying New World Order shill haven't really been in question since January this year – when he penned this fact-free Russophobic screed: ..."
"... Owen Jones has lost all credibility with his quest for publicity at any price. He'd sell his granny for whatever he could get if it served his interests. He's a hypocrite and a propagandist opportunist. He doesn't give a fig about the Syrians, the Palestinians, the Yemeni or anyone else but himself. At best he is a worthless egocentric loser who wants to be heard, whatever drivel he is spouting and is a traitor to the socialist/centrist movement, his only loyalty is to himself. Nothing he writes or says can be taken seriously anymore. ..."
So, even though Clinton also isn't progressive, or honest, or sane, and even though she has no
interest in helping the disadvantaged or rebuilding social infrastructure, and even though she
conducted state business on a private email server so no one would be able to tell what nefarious
and illegal, and potentially insanely dangerous things she was doing, and even though she
presided over the Honduras debacle, and even though she authorised and gloated over the illegal
murder of a foreign head of state, and even though she has threatened to "obliterate" Iran and
take the confrontations with Russia and China to new heights that really might result in WW3, we
absolutely have to get behind her because – hello – she isn't Trump. And anyhow if we
get her to be POTUS and make sure there are lots of lovely Democrats in Congress, maybe we can
ask them to please do some of the socialist things Bernie talked about. They will probably say
yes, of course And anyhow, Owen's not sure if he mentioned this but Hillary isn't Trump…
Yes, this is what passes for political analysis when the neolibs are slipping you wads of cash
to endorse the unendorsable, the discredited and the morally broken.
The likes of Jones are paid to surrender their dignity and ethics and pretend this macabre farce
is something called "democracy", and to sell the decaying relics offered up for candidacy as if
they were real choices. That doesn't mean we have to pretend to believe them. If I were a US
citizen I'd take the only truly free choice left and decline to play this game of fake reality
any longer. And if we all did that, the game would be over, wouldn't it.
anonymous, July 27, 2016
I am a 57-year-old U.S. citizen. To disabuse those Europeans who both live in smaller
countries and have the blessing of a parliamentary system, the U.S. system never has been
democratic. It is a show–a very expensive one–that the capitalist class puts on every two
years in order to control the citizenry and to provide a justification for U.S. imperialism.
The citizens are convinced that they don't have to do a thing in order to make the "democracy"
work, and that if they don't like the results that either they are to blame or it is useless
to oppose the system. And outside of Rome, people are told that the Roman way is best because
it is legitimized by the vote of the citizens.
Now, the capitalist class that controls Rome is no longer national, but transnational,
being based on the transnational corporations and financial institutions and enjoying the full
support of the transnational capitalist media. And as the rise of the Alt-Right shows,
the old communist vs. far-right poles have become obsolete with the utter defeat and
assimilation of the Marxist left, and have been replaced with new poles: Globaliists vs.
Antiglobalists.
Donald Trump is an antiglobalist. That's the reason he deserves the full support of all
those who oppose the transnational capitalist class and its institutions, including the EU,
NATO, the WTO, the IMF, the World Bank and the OECD, to name just a few. There are not a
few "progressives" and "leftists" who refuse to support Trump because he doesn't sound
intelligent.
However, the election should not be about appearances but about policies. Obama sounded
intelligent, but his policies all come out of the globalist think tanks, the CIA (his mum's
former employer) and the neocon asylum in Washington. So chose: someone who sounds like a
television personality with great positions, or… well we all know what Clinton stands for.
dahoit, August 7, 2016
I agree totally, Trump is the answer for American recovery.
But the zionists want no part of America First and Israel on its own.
And that is why the MSM and web sites everywhere are in full throat propaganda mode for the
Hell Bitch.
I have never seen anything like this before, and the American people can see the fix is in,
but over our dead bodies, if necessary. I'm pissed to shite at this massive mis and
disinformation bliztkrieg.
It will backfire, just like all their attempts to marginalize him during the primaries.
physicsandmathsrevision, July 26, 2016
He's happy to support Clinton's murderous Jewish racist agenda. All perceived threats to
Israel must be destroyed. Iraq, Libya, Syria and (next up) Iran.
This is where leftist centrists think is a good place to stand in this terrifying age during
which we must endure the brain-dead analysis of commentators who, in truth, are most easily
understood as simple submissives to the establishment will … a will that everyone is afraid to
recognise as being dominated by Jewish money and its globalist anti-commutarian agenda….submissives
to the atomisation of all systems that might afford self-sufficiency to societies, that makes
everybody absolutely dependent on and therefore subservient to international finance and it's
program of enslavement. Are 'gays' a new officer class in this operation?
OffG Editor, July 26, 2016
The phrase "a Jewish racists agenda" should qualify for some award for unintended and
self-defeating irony.
If you can tell me how it clarifies, exlains or expands your point then I'll recognise you
have a valid reason for adding it that isn't racist or intentionally self-sabotaging.
proximity1, July 27, 2016
IF YOU can tell me how the remark is not arguably quite true based on a fair and honest
review of facts, then I'll recognise your valid objection to it.
But, as it seems to me, the simple fact that Clinton's policies aren't solely confined* to the
outrages which the writer describes as a "murderous Jewish racist agenda," does not make that
observation any the less true- does it!?
What, other than that, are you objecting to?
Richard Le Sarcophage, July 28, 2016
Sanders was clearly the sheep-dog, and I won't be surprised if an e-mail showing that
reality appears. He is, in fact, with his total and immediate roll-over, even as the
corruption of the process was categorically exposed by the e-mails, making no pretense
otherwise, spitting in the face of the latest generation of suckers who thought that the
elite plutocracy of the USA could be 'reformed' from within. He was the geriatric Obama,
dispensing more Hopium for the dopes. And when Clinton feigns adoption of Sanders policy, like
not signing the TPP, she is LYING.
Diana, July 28, 2016
Sanders' own campaign called him the "youth whisperer", but sheepdog is accurate. I
have been calling him a sheepdog since 2014 and predicting, correctly, that he would both lose
the nomination and endorse Hillary. This was inevitable since he SAID he would endorse her
from the start of his so-called campaign. Perhaps he did so hoping that the DNC would
play fair, but that goes to show you he's no socialist. A real socialist would have been able
to size up the opposition, not made any gentleman's agreements with them and waged a real
campaign.
rtj1211, July 26, 2016
So far as I'm aware, there must be a mechanism for an Independent to put their name on the
ballot.
If the majority of people in the USA are really thinking that voting for either Hillary or
the Donald is worse than having unprotected sex with an HIV+ hooker, then the Independent
would barely need any publicity. They'd just need to be on the ballot.
Course, the Establishment might get cute and put a far-right nutcase up as 'another
Independent' so as they would have someone who'd do as they were told no matter what.
But until the US public say 'da nada! Pasta! Finito! To hell with the Democrats and the GOP!',
you'll still get the choice of 'let's invade Iran' or 'let's nuke Russia'. You'll get the
choice of giving Israel a blowjob or agreeing to be tied up and have kinky sex with Israel.
You'll get the choice of bailing out Wall Street or bailing out Wall Street AND cutting social
security for the poorest Americans. You'll get the choice of running the USA for the bankers
or running the USA for the bankers and a few multinational corporations.
Oh, they'll have to fight for it, just as Martin Luther King et al had to fight for civil
rights. They may have the odd candidate shot by the CIA, the oil men or the weapons men.
Because that's how US politics works.
But if they don't want a Republican or a Republican-lite, they need to select an independent
and vote for them.
The rest of us? We have to use whatever influence we have to try and limit what they try to do
overseas…….because we are affected by what America does overseas…….
reinertorheit, July 26, 2016
Holy Schmoley, Batman!
The Boy Wonder's credentials as a card-carrying New World Order shill haven't really been
in question since January this year – when he penned this fact-free Russophobic screed:
Perhaps the most laughable thing in it is that he claims to be speaking for "the British Left"
mohandeer, July 26, 2016
Owen Jones has lost all credibility with his quest for publicity at any price. He'd
sell his granny for whatever he could get if it served his interests. He's a hypocrite and a
propagandist opportunist. He doesn't give a fig about the Syrians, the Palestinians, the
Yemeni or anyone else but himself. At best he is a worthless egocentric loser who wants to be
heard, whatever drivel he is spouting and is a traitor to the socialist/centrist movement, his
only loyalty is to himself. Nothing he writes or says can be taken seriously anymore.
"Clinton's false assassination outrage" was launched to suppress damaging new emails rulors the
Clinton goons are behind asssainatin of GNC staffer, who may have been the source of email leaks scandal
articles
Notable quotes:
"... I distinctly recall HRC pacing the 2008 DNC stage, furiously red-faced, making a thinly veiled reference to Obama and the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, then later shouting with great exasperation, "Ären't you going to 'do' anything about this (guy)", using 'do' in the full Mafia 'Trail of 50 Bodies' sense. ..."
"... How can one be so blind not to see that it's Hitlary, who is surrounded by the bloodthirsty CIA people pushing openly for world war? ..."
"... Hillary's false 'The Russians are coming!' is having as widespread and as dire results as anything the Trump has said. Her program is institutional, with the guy 'who used to run the CIA' - right - plugging assassinations himself, and Hillary pledging to continue Obama's program of murdering 'suspects' and everyone surrounding them, or just people who seem to be acting like you'd think 'suspects' might - while viewing them through an 8 or 10,000 mile long drinking straw. ..."
"... Actually, that's not the video where she made both those statements, but rather an after-play pre-rehearsed news event to immediately replace in the viewers' minds what was actually said, and the shocking raw horror of her psychopathy. ..."
"... "We came, we saw, he died, caww, caww, caww!" Remember, she'd just watched Ghadaffi be anally raped to death with a bayonet on closed-circuit satellite feed to the War Room. And that was her psychopathic response. ..."
"... Trump has a huge advantage over his opponents and critics. He's not a bribed, corrupt politician. The Dems and Republicans are all in the pockets of the Owners of the Military/ Industrial/ Security/ Trade/ pro-Israel Complex. They, and their followers, aren't allowed to stray from the Handed-down Wisdom script. It's an insurmountable obstacle for the anti-Trump crowd and b's perspective, (their) outrage (and fake sincerity) only helps Trump, and can only get worse. ..."
"... I suspect that Clinton will have some bad news in terms of leaked emails and ties between state department and Clinton foundation so by November when elected she will be embroiled in legal fights. ..."
"... The effect of all that hysterical shouting and screaming of the Hillary-bots: All members and all supporters of the NRA now know exactly what's on stake. ..."
"... the Charlie Rose interview with ex-CIA chief Morrell who is backing Clinton: Kill Russians and Iranians, threaten Assad,' https://www.rt.com/usa/355291-morrell-kill-russians-clinton/ ..."
"... Today's outing at The Wall Street Journal via ZH: Latest Hillary Email Scandal Reveals State Department "Favors" To Clinton Foundation http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-08-10/latest-hillary-email-scandal-shows-state-department-favors-clinton-foundation ..."
"... A TIME magazine cover recently depicted a headline "Can Hillary be Stopped". Were the editors of TIME suggesting she be assassinated? The media is merely a propaganda tool used to influence our every thought from buying toothpaste to voting for one of two candidates who will be "empty suits" (unless someone comes along who will resist the proffered script) called "President of the USA" - ..."
"... The internet has been an efficient tool to awaken the people... TPTB (or TPTA) are not adjusting too well. Rather than falsely present a "close race" as is their usual MO, they have persuaded almost 100% of the media to pile on Trump - they think people are too stupid to realize what is going on - same thing with the "polls" - with the "swing states" etc. People are NOT buying it this go round though. Obama's hope & change and subsequent same ol same ol has done alot to "change" people to no longer hope. Then along comes Trump - definitely not one of the establishment. ..."
"... The more the TPTB pile on Trump's every utterance, and the more they IGNORE the blatant crimes of HRC... imho, the more people will be inclined to vote Anybody But Clinton. Again, in my opinion, many Democrats will stay at home on election day. When in our history of elections has a candidate stolen an election and that fact been verified, and the guilty candidate as much as said to the Party "Deal with It"? ..."
"... Apologize for the tirade, but I have been a Democrat (actually a LEFTY) for almost 7 decades... in this election cycle most democrats are gleeful over what they see as the decline of the Republican Party, totally BLIND to the evaporation of the Democratic Party. I will never again work or vote for a Democrat - local or national. ..."
"... "The election will likely be decided on voter turn-out and get-out-the-vote volunteering efforts." If the primaries had been so decided Hillary would not still be in the race. Elections, no less than primaries, are decided by the (corrupt) vote counting. https://richardcharnin.wordpress.com/2016/06/24/smoking-gun-approximately-15-of-bernies-votes-were-flipped-to-clinton-in-california/ ..."
"... Richard Charnin has documented the mathematical impossibility of the results in quite a few primaries. ..."
"... HAHAHA I think more than half the country understands The Washington Post sells lies, bias and bullshit ..."
"... Killary campaign is unravelling fast imho. Her health problems are all over the net, Assange seems to be hinting at the fact that Seth Rich (goog) was a source, the leaker of DNC mails. (Imho he was a conduit rather than source but who am I.) ..."
"... Who cares if he's clean? What matters is that he's not a war criminal, and can't be bought. That he can't be bought is why the Establishment is so dead-set against him. ..."
"... I can't understand your position, given your interest in Russia. Surely you're aware that Hillary would make Obama's relaunching of the Cold War look like a little skirmish? And she would not rest until Syria is destroyed like Libya. One of her advisers has said that he hopes she will kill Russians and Iranians in Syria; another said that NATO is too concerned about ISIS, and attention should go back to overthrowing the legitimate secular Syrian government. ..."
I distinctly recall HRC pacing the 2008 DNC stage, furiously red-faced, making a thinly veiled
reference to Obama and the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, then later shouting with great exasperation,
"Ären't you going to 'do' anything about this (guy)", using 'do' in the full Mafia 'Trail of 50
Bodies' sense.
The Cgiseb Trotskyist Now has already rewritten that out of history.
Back then HRC was speaking without notes, ...directly from her psychopathic brain. Trump was
clearly reading from a teleprompter, and you can gargle all you want about that, but the intent
was clear, 'crystal', as they say in the halls of Mossad-CIA: 'Do' HRH if she is selected. Who
do?
Then you have to wonder at the cynosure behind the curtain, and their intent, ...which seems
to me to be clearly to foment civil war, resolving the inevitable stall and flat spin death spiral
of QEn 'goosed' and 'juiced' global markets, so the looting can begin.
Chinyowinh made a compelling prediction that Bernie was a ruse to round up the Left and deliver
them with roses and chocolates to Hillary on a silver plate, which he did; and also that Donald
is a ruse to round up Right Wing Rabbinicals, Sovereigntists, Patriots and Crypto-Zionists, and
drive them all off Nut Bar Cliff in a hand basket, which he is.
But that prediction, which seems to have come true, doesn't answer intent. What is the intent
of the Chosen controlling all three houses of government, of course, forming a Holy Zionist Kleptocracy.
Why? What is their goal, besides enslaving all the Earners?
Their Solution is all-out civil war, and killing off all the useless EBC mouths to feed.
Then you have to wonder why nobody has 'done' the cynosures yet, as the bodies pile up.
Why do we let the cynosure control dissent? Why do we let them hector in the arguments?
Why waste a NY nanosecond even talking about this psyop brainwashing stress positioning?
"Those incoherent remarks were certainly off-the-cuff babble without a prepared script. Difficult
to follow even if someone were interested in doing so."
If this is the best that can be said about a candidate, it is not a recommendation. "Vote Trump,
he has most incoherent remarks!"
Most importantly, b correctly observes that Trump, a remarkably successful candidate, uses
highly emotional barely coherent speech (or incoherent, if you are charitably inclined), so to
compete with him one has to use methodical clear arguments and not an ounce of "false outrage".
Just compare with GOP propaganda in the preceding week: there was a deal with Iran allowing access
to "frozen" (de-facto, stolen money that belong to the state of Iran), and as a part of that deal
some money were sent to Iran before restoring banking connections. Clearly, it was a mean trick
on the side of Obama administration, as they are delaying the restoration of normal banking transactions,
but GOP is no in full false outrage about "illegal payment", "treason" and so on.
How about the outrage that Democrats do not use expression "Islamist radical" often enough
(or some other expression).
Emotional and rather base arguments are the specialty of GOP, so it is only fitting to respond
in kind. In a counter-narrative, GOP is bent on supplying every right wing psychopath with a ton
of machine guns and ammo so they can dispatch LGT folks, social workers, abortion clinics, the
public in shopping malls (then and now an armed psychopath is simply, a-politically insane) and
liberal politicians. This is an angle directed at "soccer mom" demographic.
And the situation is a bit scary. American gun nuts are numerous, organized, full of homicidal
fantasies (check what "stopping power" means, one of their favorite phrases) and, quite regrettably,
they have means to realize their fantasies when angry, depressed etc.
The media bias against Trump has reached unprecedented proportions.
I don't know he can be still considered a part of the establishment. Instead of futile speculations about what Trump did not say fueled by the lame-scream media
disinformation people should be talking about this:
How can one be so blind not to see that it's Hitlary, who is surrounded by the bloodthirsty
CIA people pushing openly for world war? Are you high on something bad to claim that Killary will be "slow decline" instead of immediate,
violent confrontation with the anti-empire block?!
Hillary's false 'The Russians are coming!' is having as widespread and as dire results as anything
the Trump has said. Her program is institutional, with the guy 'who used to run the CIA' - right
- plugging assassinations himself, and Hillary pledging to continue Obama's program of murdering
'suspects' and everyone surrounding them, or just people who seem to be acting like you'd think
'suspects' might - while viewing them through an 8 or 10,000 mile long drinking straw.
From the Olympics come the Americans ... booing the silver medal winning Russian, and her American
competitors labeling her a cheater.
There comes also a '
selfie ' from a young South Korean gymnast, with her new friend from North Korea. There is
talk of the USA and its stooges in South Korea making her pay for her 'impure hatred' of the imperially
defined other, her own flesh and blood!
World wide now ... who do love and who do you hate? The Americans? the Koreans? I'm loving
the two young Koreans in their selfie myself. Feel sorry for the twisted American swimmers. Amazing
they can still float with all the thick bile of hatred weighing them down.
Actually, that's not the video where she made both those statements, but rather an after-play
pre-rehearsed news event to immediately replace in the viewers' minds what was actually said,
and the shocking raw horror of her psychopathy.
"We came, we saw, he died, caww, caww, caww!" Remember, she'd just watched Ghadaffi be anally
raped to death with a bayonet on closed-circuit satellite feed to the War Room.
And that was her psychopathic response.
Here is an example. A still shot of Jackie climbing over the back of the limo as a Secret Service
agent rushes up to the limo, and shot from what angle and azimuth, you might ask, since the far
ground was level, except by a telephoto spotting scope.
There are 1000's of examples like this from the 9/11 recasting, that's what the Cgiseb Trotskyist
Now media people are for, to alter reality in real time, or very near to it.
19 Arabs who could not fly a Cessna flew two 757s through fighter jet maneuvers with full tanks
at full payload dropped two skyscrapers for the first time in history, and two other mythical
757s accomplished what Einstein never did: "They just vaporized!"
"Hillary just meant that we need a good Vice President, ...you know, just in case."
Cheney instituted a $5.8B domestic media Black Ops program, that continues to this day, and
both Red Donald and Blue Hillary are owned by the same cartels that control the Ops.
Trump has a huge advantage over his opponents and critics. He's not a bribed, corrupt politician.
The Dems and Republicans are all in the pockets of the Owners of the Military/ Industrial/ Security/
Trade/ pro-Israel Complex. They, and their followers, aren't allowed to stray from the Handed-down
Wisdom script. It's an insurmountable obstacle for the anti-Trump crowd and b's perspective, (their)
outrage (and fake sincerity) only helps Trump, and can only get worse.
He is catering for his core voters who made him win the primary but that group won't get him
elected in the general election.
He needs utter amnesia to change his image till October, and youtube and social media will
make sure he does not get a chance.
I suspect that Clinton will have some bad news in terms of leaked emails and ties between state
department and Clinton foundation so by November when elected she will be embroiled in legal fights.
It would be nice to see the Republican and Democrat Parties split.
Wikipedia on the National Rifle Association of America (NRA):
Membership surpassed 5 million in May 2013.
The effect of all that hysterical shouting and screaming of the Hillary-bots:
All members and all supporters of the NRA now know exactly what's on stake.
Brilliant PR from Trump; simple, effective and costless.
"Clinton's false assassination outrage" has accomplished its intent to suppress damaging emailo
scandal articles on the front pages, and especially viral on the internet is
"The ex-CIA chief, who worked with Clinton while she was secretary of state, told CBS This Morning
co-host Charlie Rose that Iran and Russia should "pay a big price" in Syria – and by that he meant
killing them."
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
MSM global has it in the bag for Clinton but over the next weeks we will read the connections
between her office and pay-for-play Clinton Foundation.
Not surprised. Quite revealing the list of CF Board of Directors. There is a descriptor for
this that escapes one's capacity to spell. SO, HRC's Chief of Staff served on the CF Board, (2004-2009) then to State Department and back
to the Board (2013-present).
"Rudy Giuliani went to bat for Donald Trump during the Republican nominee's campaign rally in
Fayetteville, North Carolina"
I listened to Donald Trump's speech in Wilmington and what he said very clearly was that
if Hillary Clinton were elected president she would get to appoint judges to the Supreme Court
and among the other things that they would do to destroy us would be to do away with the Second
Amendment and your right to bear arms.
In my view, Trump was speaking to the ballot box... those who support the 2nd amendment (some
of whom have probably never voted) turning out in November in enough numbers to "stop Hillary"
A TIME magazine cover recently depicted a headline "Can Hillary be Stopped". Were the editors of TIME suggesting she be assassinated? The media is merely a propaganda tool used to influence our every thought from buying toothpaste
to voting for one of two candidates who will be "empty suits" (unless someone comes along who
will resist the proffered script) called "President of the USA" -
The internet has been an efficient tool to awaken the people... TPTB (or TPTA) are not adjusting
too well. Rather than falsely present a "close race" as is their usual MO, they have persuaded
almost 100% of the media to pile on Trump - they think people are too stupid to realize what is
going on - same thing with the "polls" - with the "swing states" etc. People are NOT buying it
this go round though. Obama's hope & change and subsequent same ol same ol has done alot to "change"
people to no longer hope. Then along comes Trump - definitely not one of the establishment.
The more the TPTB pile on Trump's every utterance, and the more they IGNORE the blatant crimes
of HRC... imho, the more people will be inclined to vote Anybody But Clinton. Again, in my opinion,
many Democrats will stay at home on election day. When in our history of elections has a candidate
stolen an election and that fact been verified, and the guilty candidate as much as said to the
Party "Deal with It"?
Apologize for the tirade, but I have been a Democrat (actually a LEFTY) for almost 7 decades...
in this election cycle most democrats are gleeful over what they see as the decline of the Republican
Party, totally BLIND to the evaporation of the Democratic Party. I will never again work or vote
for a Democrat - local or national.
Did you know that exit polls which document that Candidate B is winning are changed (falsified)
to agree with the corrupt counting that holds Candidate C the winner? It's official, nonsecret
policy of the companies that do exit-polling. Richard Charnin has documented the mathematical
impossibility of the results in quite a few primaries.
Killary campaign is unravelling fast imho. Her health problems are all over the net, Assange seems to be hinting at the fact that Seth
Rich (goog) was a source, the leaker of DNC mails. (Imho he was a conduit rather than source but
who am I.)
What is nuts about the personal-server e-mails is that what is important now, as everyone seems
to have copies, is who releases what when! (Assange, FBI, judiciary, others, possibly Trump …)
Some commentators correctly insist the personal server-classified info. etc. is secondary to
the Clinton Foundation Slush Fund, imho simply a bribery-influence-peddling-dark-deals *criminal*
enterprise. That angle seems to be also slowly coming to the surface.
So someone must be blamed and accused! The only candidate is Putin.
However it is Killary who is tied to 'shady' deals with Russia, the Uranium One matter.
Link from NYT, chosen on purpose as *MSM* o-so-supportive of the PTB, sober and prudent supposedly,
mealy-mouthed + covering up, obfuscating liars, according to others.
The cockamamie is strong in these parts, any ol' codswallop is being bought at full market value.
Has any one stopped long enough in spinning gold out of straw to consider candidate Trump's
remarks as reference to the constitution without waving the bloody flag which such reference usually
entails? A reasonable estimate of the percentage of the public having some sound knowledge of
the constitution is vanishingly small outside their familiarity with the second amendment which
would run upwards to 60% or slightly greater. This is the cost of not teaching civics in school.
Trump's reference can only be understood as such, nothing more, nothing less.
The balderdash suggestion that the intent of liquidation was present is a factor only in the
twisted imaginations of a few media manipulators. To give those manipulations any currency is
at great risk (don't believe), give those enhancing currency wide berth (don't trust), don't be
going selling the family milch cow for a handful of magic beans to that lot (run away as fast
as you can). Interesting times to live in - indeed.
It is interesting to observe that in a highly polarized political landscape, like we see currently
in USA (but also in a number of other countries, like Poland and Turkey), there is a wide belief
that the candidate/president/leader of the other side is so awful that if only the public fully
understood this awfulness he/she would become un-electable.
But, alas, it does not happen. In a milder times this was called "teflon effect", the most
obnoxious dirt goes away after a gentle spray with water. But as the adversaries are perceived
in increasingly demonic turns, perhaps a better metaphor is a vampire swiftly shrugging off any
attempt to wound it and kill.
"Wampira można zabić przebijając jego serce drewnianym kołkiem, najlepiej osinowym, albowiem
osika w wierzeniach Słowian miała moc odpędzania złych duchów." "One can kill a vampire by stabbing
it through the heart with a wooden stake, and best of all, made of aspen, as in the Slavic lore,
aspen had the ability to shun away the evil spirits". Vampires actually come from Slavic folk
lore, I was actually surprised that Americans think that any type of wooden stake could be used.
I guess "silver bullet" is a method closer to the imagination and home arsenal of contemporary
Americans.
Thus we can see the quests for a silver bullet or for a stake made of a proper type of wood.
How many times adversaries were cheered by the news that from now on, nobody could elect a Clinton,
or Mr. Trump? Quite notably, e-mails proved to be worthless. You can make a stake out of e-mails
and then drive it through a witch as many times as you want and she does not even need to regenerate:
no traces of a wound can be observed at all! A more sober analysis would show that there are no
records of e-mails dispelling evil spirits, killing vampires etc.
YouTube videos are perhaps a sterner material. But alas, showing the public that Mrs. Clinton
reports a killing with a maniacal glee is a total non-issue in U.S. of A. As of now, it is inconclusive
if it increased or decreased her popularity. Surely she became a darling of neocons and homicidal
retirees from CIA, and there exists a demographic that detests it, but the pluses and minuses
in electoral sense are so small that no one even tried to measure them.
And here comes sober foreign policy of Mr. Trump. He would pick fights only in American interests,
e.g. he does not overly care about Crimea and Latvia, thus kissing good bye to the vote of ethnic
Latvians and Ukrainians, but promises to shoot down Ruskies if they approach our ships and planes
too closely. So, on the credit side, no proxy wars for dubious reasons, on the debit side, WWIII
for no reason whatsoever. Promises to unleash torture programs above and beyond recent non-negligible
American experience also have a reception that is too mixed to assess.
And indeed, periodically we learned about an exhalation of the Trumpian orifice that should
bury his chances once for all. In general, Madam Secretary played that by the book. Mad dog attacks
are done only by proxy. She can make a declaration of virtue: "You will never see me singing praises
of foreign dictators and strongmen who do not love America". And who would not make little modest
requirement, "praise the strongmen only if they love America"? Trump, apparently, for him it suffices
that Putin calls him a genius (although that can be deconstructed as a love for America, and exquisite
taste to boot.) But her attacks remains proper, grammatical and dignified.
Charles Hugh Smith (blogger) is a nice chap, afaik sincere, consistent, with a big following for
long years. Has this perhaps counter-intuitive post up recently. For interest, plurality of opinion,
etc.:
I think that the linked article is a satire. Look at that passage:
Hillary has exhibited the typical flaw of liberal Democrats: fearful of being accused as being
soft on Russia, Syria, Iran, terrorism, etc. or losing whatever war is currently being prosecuted,
liberal Democrats over-compensate by pursuing overly aggressive and poorly planned policies.
The forward-thinking elements of the Deep State are not averse to aggressive pursuit of what they
perceive as American interests, but they are averse to quagmires and policies that preclude successful
maintenance of the Imperial Project.
"Forward-thinking elements of the Deep State". This is really funny. That really calls for
some definition of the Deep State. In USA, it is not that deep, I mean, denizens do not need to
hide in cellars, abandoned mines etc. although some members could have private bomb shelters and
other measures allowing to survive nuclear war. Instead we have a ruling class that socializes
(mostly) in public, where we can discern money people, power people, media people and intelligentsia,
think tanks and obedient sectors of the academia. The few who are "forward thinking" may be found
among FORMER members or acquaintances of the current members, but those, by definition, have no
decision making capacities.
GOP side of the ruling class is split: some would prefer a serial rapist over anyone who does
not believe in decreasing taxes, regulations etc. and Trump, for all his faults, is not THAT bad.
Additionally, an entire generation grew on hating anything related to Clintons. Other have various
grievances. In particular, the Koch brothers who are close to the center of deep power in GOP
side openly bet against Trump, working to assure that GOP will remain in the majority of both
houses of Congress. In that scenario, Clinton will harmless. Importantly, from Koch perspective,
overly energetic support of Trump may cost the majority in the Senate and dangerously weaken it
in the House.
Democratic side of the ruling class is in the minority (at least, within their class) so it
is more cohesive. Whatever minor foibles may be presented by HRC, there are barbarian at the gates
that have to be repelled. As Trump the Barbarian approaches the capital, they recognize the familiar
annoyance and will the their best to stop him.
"Amid the media-hyped furor over Donald Trump's 2nd Amendment comments and Wikileaks' suggestions
about the untimely death of DNC-staffer Seth Rich, we thought it perhaps of note that Democratic
strategist, and CNN host, has publicly called for the "illegal assassination of that son-of-a-bitch"
Julian Assange...
Meet Bob Beckel - Democratic strategist, CNN host (former Fox host), and clear "treasonous, traitor"
Assange-hater...
This strikes us as very dangerous talk... We wonder if he is being questioned or investigated
for such a public and unquestionable demand for someone to be murdered? Forget due process...
"just kill the son of a bitch."
Hitlary is a known absolute, unspeakable evil, there is a guarantee she'll escalate dramatically
the world tensions. She's has done sbsolutely NOTHING positive during her campaign, zilch, nada.
She's MSM's favorite. We have no chance for safe, normal life if she has presidential powers.
Trump, as many others observed, is an enigma, far less risky. Keeps us guessing but has already
inflicted some real damage to the evil empire. MSM has played some really dirty, biased game against
him. If he forfeits on his promises, his voters will tear him into pieces.
Personally I suggest voting AGAINST Killary, NOT for Trump.
There is absolutely no equivalence between these two alternatives.
While the Clinton campaign tries to make everybody believe that Trump was calling for the assassination
of Hillary, Hillary or someone associated very likely assassinated the DNC Wikileaks leaker Seth
Rich a couple of weeks ago. The Russia did the hack is as bogus as the North Korea hacked Sony
story and the most significant whistleblowing has up till now been done by individuals (Manning
and Snowden). The Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich was shot in the back with no
motives for his murder as all his belongings were still on him.
Strangely silent is the mainstream media about the fitness of the Democrat candidate.
And causes for concern are growing. Without considering any statements she has made or positions
she has taken, and without presuming to speculate on psychiatric diagnoses, one can point to
certain observations. ..
Videos widely circulated on the internet are, if authentic, very concerning. One shows prolonged,
inappropriate laughter; another, strange head movements. In a third, she appeared momentarily
dazed and confused, and lost her train of thought.
Strangely silent indeed. (I found out about that post from a
piece at Breitbart , which mentions that Clinton's top aid said in an email that she is "often
confused".)
As much as I try to ignore the election travesty playing out, I can't help but notice Hillary
is getting sloppy about her murders. What her and Bill could do in their previous roles they can't
do now without drawing unwanted attention. This is why it's so important to own the press/newz.
This is a psychopathic strategy of yesteryear, yet Hillary's handlers cling to it desperately.
I'm not suggesting Hillary herself controls the press. Her masters are the same masters the NYT,
WaPo, CNN and network newz answer to. Whether you buy into the whole psychopath-this and psychopath-that
conspiracy, you have to admit Hillary (and Obama for that matter) go ballistic about 'leakers'.
Far more so than you would expect ANY normal, powerful person to react. Denial and counter-accusations
are 'normal'. Killing (or wishing the death) of leakers is not.
The usual tactic (for psychopaths) is to immediately blame someone else for something they
themselves are guilty of. Funny how Hillary's camp went nuts over Trump's reference to Second
Amemdment people changing the law. Who the hell would interpret this - literally - as Trump suggesting
they assassinate Hillary? You have to have a seriously sick and twisted mind to see that to begin
with, and then wage a futile campaign of outrage about it in the media. Even Hillary supporters
are starting to ask WTF??
Thanks, I missed the fact that Dr. Susan Berry is the author of that piece. I clicked on her
name and found this:
"Dr. Jane Orient, executive director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons,
observes that "strangely silent is the mainstream media about the fitness" for presidential office
of Hillary Clinton. At AAPS' website, Orient summarizes the concerns about Clinton's health that
she says are growing:"
Dr. Orient has a lengthy article there, here are the last three paras:
"... The U.S. has had problems with incompetent leaders in the White House before. Mrs. Woodrow
Wilson (the "First First Lady President") was effectively President for the last year and a
half of her husband's term after he suffered a disabling stroke. She managed to conceal the
seriousness of Wilson's condition for a long time. This was the reason for the 25th amendment
to provide for replacing the President in case of disability.
While the U.S. government knows more and more about our medical histories and other aspects
of our lives, many details about the President are a secret. The press appears to care more
about the tax returns of Republican candidates than the medical records of Democrat Presidents
or candidates. And Secretary Clinton's public appearances have been rather carefully controlled.
Is it conceivable that Hillary supporters would really be voting for Huma Abedin, Clinton's
top aide, or for the First First Husband President, Bill Clinton? The American people are entitled
to know the objective medical facts about Secretary Clinton."
It's proven that Hellary ALREADY STOLE the nomination from Sanders.
Trump has not cheated in the elections so far.
So no, there is no equivalence here.
Indeed. I guess that Western democracy has become so degraded that many people can't grasp
or even notice this difference.
The way the system is rigged has been clear for some time, at least since Bill Clinton's second
term. You have two parties that are more or less identical in terms of the policies they implement,
except on social wedge issues. The candidate of both parties is pre-selected by the establishment.
What was unusual about the current election is that there were insurgencies in both
parties. The Republican insurgency succeeded; the Democratic one failed. That alone is reason
enough to vote for the Republican in this election (something I never even considered doing before).
The Establishment is freaking out about Donald Trump for one reason: they didn't pick him
. The Establishment is freaking out because the natural order of things is that we pick
the presidential candidates and we run the country to serve ourselves, i.e. the financial-political
elites.
Donald Trump's candidacy upsets this neofeudal natural order, and thus he (and everyone
who supports him) is anathema to the Establishment…
Just in case one has forgotten, don't we all know what our "constitutionalist" ammosexuals are
capable of? Who can forget Ammo-on Bundy and all the related fun at
Malheur?
And do you really believe The Donald is clean? What NYC property developer and
builder isn't mobbed up? I'm sure he's slid plenty of envelopes of cash across tables to state
and local politicians. Isn't most of the New York legislature under indictment? Or just the leadership?
Here is Jersey, our official motto is "The Pay-to-Play State."
And of course his penchant for shady business deals and bankruptcies fully vouches for
his undeniable probity.
Yeah, both Hilary and Bill look pretty used up. Spent. For what...? Haha... Great entertainment.
You seppos put on a great show. Would be pretty funny except for the fact you're all holding a
gun to your head and everyone else's.
I enjoy Bill still though. A yank I like. The Secret of Oz and The Money Masters are
essential viewing for those who want to know HOW they rig it. Here is something i posted in the
US Election thread, tho suits here now. Makes a great point about social media figures, the unspoken
polls...(what is the future...or...perhaps the now...?)
@133 Demian
Yeah, Orwellian indeed...
I am in no doubt she is suffering. I remember Trump ripping her a new hole when she failed
to appear with Bernie and O'Malley during a televised debate. Trump questioned her stamina
then, and while Trump draws sell out crowds each day, sometimes twice a day, she is appearing
only 3 times before Oct 9 I think.
You cant hide from what she's got. And she's got it bad.
Haha...Trump, yeah hes a buffoon, but he's more MSM than the MSM itself and is playing it like
a flute... Plus he's causing all sorts of chaos. Destroyed the Republicans already, Dems next.
Who cares if he's clean? What matters is that he's not a war criminal, and can't be bought.
That he can't be bought is why the Establishment is so dead-set against him.
I can't understand your position, given your interest in Russia. Surely you're aware that
Hillary would make Obama's relaunching of the Cold War look like a little skirmish? And she would
not rest until Syria is destroyed like Libya. One of her advisers has said that he hopes she will
kill Russians and Iranians in Syria; another said that NATO is too concerned about ISIS, and attention
should go back to overthrowing the legitimate secular Syrian government.
Doesn't the world have enough instability? It would just get worse under Hillary. Yet you refuse
to acknowledge that Trump is, at the very least, the lesser evil, apparently out of a liberal
smugness and dislike for his populism.
And I don't understand why you can't see this from the Russian point of view. Lavrov keeps
on talking about how the world is becoming multipolar, but that US elites refuse to accept this
new reality. It is obvious that Trump understands and accepts this new reality. That's why US
foreign policy types hate him.
Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign released a letter on Friday from her doctor attesting to
Mrs. Clinton's good health and fitness to serve as president based on a full medical evaluation.
The letter from Dr. Lisa Bardack of Mount Kisco, N.Y., summarized Mrs. Clinton's history of
treatment for a brain concussion, blood clots affecting her legs and brain on separate occasions,
an underactive thyroid gland and a family history of heart disease.
Mrs. Clinton, 67, regularly takes thyroid hormone to bring her levels to normal as well as the
anticoagulant drug Coumadin to help prevent new blood clots, Dr. Bardack wrote. Mrs. Clinton also
takes antihistamine drugs for seasonal pollen allergies and vitamin B-12.
Mrs. Clinton has faced questions about her health since 2012, when, as secretary of state, she
suffered a concussion and a blood clot - known as a transverse sinus venous thrombosis - in her
brain. Those were a result of a series of events caused by a stomach virus Mrs. Clinton acquired
while traveling abroad. While alone in her home after returning, she became dehydrated and then
fell from a faint, striking her head. She subsequently experienced double vision and temporarily
wore glasses with a Fresnel Prism to ease the difficulty with her eyesight.
Mrs. Clinton was treated at George Washington University Hospital in Washington, and then went to
NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia hospital in Manhattan before returning to her home in Chappaqua,
N.Y.
The concussion symptoms and double vision resolved within two months and Mrs. Clinton stopped
using the prism, Dr. Bardack wrote.
But former President Bill Clinton told a reporter that his wife's concussion "required six months
of very serious work to get over" and that she had "never lowballed" the severity of her head
injury.
Follow-up testing in 2013 showed "complete resolution of the effects of the concussion, as well
as total dissolution" of the blood clot, Dr. Bardack wrote. Mrs. Clinton did not release
statements from a neurologist, neurosurgeon or other specialist involved in her medical care in
Washington or New York.
Mrs. Clinton is the first presidential candidate in this cycle to make public a medical history.
But in the past many candidates have released copies of extensive records, agreed to personal
interviews or allowed their doctors to be interviewed.
Nick Merrill, a spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, did not reply to an email request to interview Dr.
Bardack.
While Mrs. Clinton experienced blood clots in 1998, 2009 and 2012, tests showed that she did not
have any underlying disorder that put her at an increased risk of the clots. Tests are performed
to monitor the dose of Coumadin she takes and ensure that she has not experienced side effects,
Dr. Bardack wrote.
Mrs. Clinton's electrocardiogram was reported as normal, as were her blood lipids. Cancer
screening tests, including mammography, breast ultrasound, colonoscopy and gynecological
examination were normal.
Dr. Bardack did not disclose Mrs. Clinton's height and weight, which are standard items in
medical histories.
She said Mrs. Clinton eats a diet rich in lean protein, vegetables and fruits. She exercises
regularly, including yoga, swimming, walking and weight training.
Find out what you need to know about the 2016 presidential race today, and get politics news
updates via Facebook, Twitter and the First Draft newsletter.
"... Videos widely circulated on the internet are, if authentic, very concerning. One shows prolonged, inappropriate laughter; another, strange head movements. In a third, she appeared momentarily dazed and confused, and lost her train of thought. ..."
Strangely silent is the mainstream media about the fitness of the Democrat
candidate. And causes for concern are growing. Without considering any statements she
has made or positions she has taken, and without presuming to speculate on
psychiatric diagnoses, one can point to certain observations. ..
Videos widely circulated on the internet are, if authentic, very concerning. One
shows prolonged, inappropriate laughter; another, strange head movements. In a third,
she appeared momentarily dazed and confused, and lost her train of thought.
Another nice example of swiftboating. What scarifies for illegal and disastrous Iraq war that made
Iran region superpower mean?
Notable quotes:
"... "He says, 'You have sacrificed nothing and no one,'" Stephanopoulos asked. "Who wrote that,
did Hillary's scriptwriters write it?" Trump replied. "How would you answer that father?" Stephanopoulos
asked. "What sacrifice have you made?" ..."
"... In lieu of participating in a debate on Fox News earlier this year, Trump held a fundraiser
at which he said he raised millions of dollars for veterans' charities and given $1 million of his own.
When The Washington Post investigated, we found that he had overstated how much had been raised and
contributed and that Trump himself hadn't made a contribution. ..."
"... Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said during a campaign speech in Iowa on July
28 that he wanted to "hit" some of the speakers at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.
"I was going to hit one guy in particular. A very little guy," Trump said to laughter. (Reuters) ..."
Trump's
response to the New York Times's Maureen Dowd was brief: "I'd like to hear his wife say something."
If your assumption was that Trump was suggesting that, as a Muslim woman, Ghazala Khan may have
been forced into a position of subservience, Trump made that point explicitly in
an interview with ABC News's George Stephanopoulos.
"I saw him," Trump said of the speech. "He was very emotional and probably looked like a nice
guy to me. His wife … if you look at his wife, she was standing there. She had nothing to say."
"She probably, maybe she wasn't allowed to have anything to say. You tell me," Trump continued.
"But a plenty of people have written that. She was extremely quiet, and it looked like she had nothing
to say. A lot of people have said that."
O'DONNELL: You were very nervous about going to the convention and actually were reluctant,
didn't really want to go out on the stage and especially didn't want to speak because you would
not be able to keep your composure and I have to say, I'm just like you. I don't think I would
have been able to do what your husband did out there last night.
How do you feel now about having gone to the convention and gone out on stage and seen what
an impact it's had?
GHAZALA KHAN: First of all, I thank all America who listened from their heart to my husband's
and my heart, and I'm so grateful for that. And it was very nervous because I cannot see my son's
picture, and I cannot even come in the room where his pictures are. That's why when I saw the
picture at my back I couldn't take it, and I controlled myself at that time. So, it is very hard.
While Khizr Khan spoke, a large photo of their son was displayed on the large video screens behind
the couple.
"He says, 'You have sacrificed nothing and no one,'" Stephanopoulos asked.
"Who wrote that, did Hillary's scriptwriters write it?" Trump replied.
"How would you answer that father?" Stephanopoulos asked. "What sacrifice have you made?"
"I think I've made a lot of sacrifices," Trump said. "I've worked very, very hard. I've created
thousands and thousands of jobs, tens of thousands of jobs …"
"Those are sacrifices?" Stephanopoulos asked.
"Sure. I think they're sacrifices. I think when I can employ thousands and thousands of people,
take care of their education, take care of so many things," Trump said. "Even the military. I mean,
I was very responsible along with a group of people for getting the Vietnam Memorial built in downtown
Manhattan, which to this day people thank me for."
"I raised and I have raised millions of dollars for the vets," he added.
In lieu of participating in a debate on Fox News earlier this year, Trump held a fundraiser
at which he said he raised millions of dollars for veterans' charities and given $1 million of his
own. When The Washington Post investigated, we found that
he had overstated how much had been raised and contributed and that Trump himself hadn't made
a contribution.
It was only after that report that Trump wrote a check.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said during a campaign speech in Iowa on July 28
that he wanted to "hit" some of the speakers at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.
"I was going to hit one guy in particular. A very little guy," Trump said to laughter. (Reuters)
I've long respected
Austin Bay
, and
so I found
this article of his
making the case for voting for Trump to be of interest,
and I think it deserves an audience.
Everyone who reads this blog regularly knows I've struggled long and hard with
the question of whether I can stomach voting for Trump, and I expect I'll probably
struggle with it right up to the moment of truth in the voting booth. But I've
long said that I respect those who will vote for him and are convinced it is the
right thing to do, although I also respect those who will not. There are
arguments-good arguments-to be made on either side.
Bay comes down on the pro-Trump side, and reminds us of some of Trump's good
points:
He won the nomination by boldly and relentlessly addressing difficult
political and social issues that his opponents preferred to either avoid or
carefully finesse. He damned political and media hacks who run down America.
When racist fanatics murdered cops Trump demanded law and order.
Bay feels that NeverTrumpers are fooling themselves as to the effects of their
non-support:
NeverTrumpLand's childish Sore Losers don't thwart the ambitions of
America's all-too-real Captain Crook-Hillary Clinton-and her privileged Clinton
Foundation cronies. Quite the opposite. In GetRealLand Sore Losers become
Crooked Hillary's political tools.
That's why I've never been part of the NeverTrump movement-my reluctance to
facilitate the election of Hillary Clinton. But I realize that many NeverTrumpers
are propelled into that camp by their belief that Trump would not necessarily be
better than Clinton-rather, that he and she would
both
be extremely bad,
just in different ways. Weighing a future that features a known and more
predictable type of badness (Clinton) with a more unknown and unpredictable type
of badness (Trump) would be hard enough, but it's compounded in this election by
what Donald Rumsfeld
might
call
the
unknown unknowns
of
both
of these candidates.
An awesome interview. I'm on the left so this is making me feel uncomfortable, but Trump is unapologetic
about wanting to end the cold war with Putin, that's worth voting for. Trump is not a Neocon. Is he
a con artist, or could he have the guts to kick the Neocons out? And he wants NATO to
"... *About the author: Michael Snyder is the founder and publisher of The Economic Collapse Blog and End Of The American Dream. Michael's controversial new book about Bible prophecy entitled "The Rapture Verdict" is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.* ..."
Hillary Clinton's health is starting to become a major political issue, and there are many that believe
that her health problems may force her to drop out before we even get to election day. On Sunday
evening, the Drudge Report ran a photo of Hillary struggling to get up a set of stairs along with
this headline: "2016: Hillary conquers the stairs". Well, it turns out that particular photo was
about six months old, but it sparked a much deeper debate about Hillary Clinton's health. As you
will see below, Clinton has been having seizures even while in public, she has been regularly having
horrible coughing fits, she has a very large hole in her tongue that has not been explained, and
she has been falling down way too often for a woman her age. No matter whether you are for her or
against her, it should be apparent to everyone that this is a woman that has some very serious health
issues.
Let's start with Clinton's very curious behavior during a recent campaign stop. When she
suddenly froze up, she was rapidly approached by a large African-American man that appeared at first
glance to be a Secret Service agent. The following comes from
Gateway Pundit…
In a recent campaign stop in a Union Hall in front of a
sparse crowd, at about the time when some liberal protesters began to protest, Hillary
Clinton suddenly froze. She looked dazed and lost. Seeing this, a group of men rushed to assist
the candidate on the stage. One man however gently pats the candidate's back and then says, "Keep
Talking."
An expert on Secret Service tactics told TGP Secret Service agents would not touch a candidate
in the manner that this individual did and especially Hillary Clinton. It has been
widely reported on Hillary's disdain for the agents who work to protect her. The man who touches
Hillary may be a member of Hillary's close staff – but he is NOT a Secret Service agent.
Since that time, it has been reported that the very large African-American gentleman that was
initially reported to be a Secret Service agent is actually a doctor instead, and
as you can see here it appears that he is carrying with him the kind of auto-injector that is
commonly used to inject someone with Diazepam…
Since that time, it has been reported that the very large African-American gentleman that was initially
reported to be a Secret Service agent is actually a doctor instead, and as you can see here it appears
that he is carrying with him the kind of auto-injector that is commonly used to inject someone with
Diazepam…
Secret Service agent was carrying an auto-injector with Diazepam pic.twitter.com/6d3B5mmaOe
- Azusa (@PositiveInt) August 8, 2016
If you are not familiar with Diazepam, it was originally called Valium. Here is more on this particular
drug from Wikipedia…
Diazepam, first marketed as Valium, is a medication of the benzodiazepine family that typically produces
a calming effect. It is commonly used to treat a range of conditions including anxiety, alcohol withdrawal
syndrome, benzodiazepine withdrawal syndrome, muscle spasms, seizures, trouble sleeping, and restless
legs syndrome.[3]
It may also be used to cause memory loss during certain medical procedures.[4][5]
It can be taken by mouth, inserted into the rectum, injected into muscle, or injected into a vein.[5]When
given into a vein, effects begin in one to five minutes and last up to an hour.[5] By mouth, effects
may take 40 minutes to begin.[6]
It is quite noteworthy that this drug is often used to treat "seizures", because Clinton seems to
be having them with frightening regularity these days. In this video, you can watch Clinton go into
a seizure in public with a bunch of reporters around…
*About the author: Michael Snyder is the founder and publisher of The Economic Collapse
Blog and End Of The American Dream. Michael's controversial new book about Bible prophecy
entitled "The Rapture Verdict" is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.*
"... This is something sometimes caused by stress or overstimulation. At the end of the DNC, I noticed a very odd reaction of Hillary's to all the things happening around her. At the time I played it off as her attempting to look like a normal person surprised by all the great things, but after a while I started to wonder. ..."
"... Her cognitive illness doesn't stop at seizures and facial tics. In an email from Hillary's right hand gal, Huma Abedin, mentioned to staffer Monica Hanley that Hillary is "often confused." ..."
"... It all amounts to a woman who is likely not all there. Someone who is prone to actions not wholly voluntary. No matter how you paint it, Hillary Clinton has some issues we should be very concerned about, and the media should be looking very closely into her health. ..."
"... While speculation about Hillary's health is nothing new, the recent uptick in concern is noticeable. Especially with all the recent footage of Clinton's physical oddities. ..."
Between Hillary's repeated
coughing fits,
incredibly low energy, and very odd reactions that seem more like she's overacting worse than
Jim Carrey, people have begun to question both Hillary's physical and mental health. Some speculate
that these odd behaviors stem from Hillary's concussion suffered in 2012, after having another one
of her fainting spells. Since then, there have been signs that she hasn't been quite right.
One
solid example is her sudden seizure when reporters asked her questions simultaneously. Clinton tries
to play it off, but to little effect.
This is something sometimes caused by stress or overstimulation. At the end of the DNC, I noticed
a very odd reaction of Hillary's to all the things happening around her. At the time I played it
off as her attempting to look like a normal person surprised by all the great things, but after a
while I started to wonder.
Her cognitive illness doesn't stop at seizures and facial tics. In an email from Hillary's right
hand gal, Huma Abedin, mentioned to staffer Monica Hanley that Hillary is "often confused."
It all amounts to a woman who is likely not all there. Someone who is prone to actions not wholly
voluntary. No matter how you paint it, Hillary Clinton has some issues we should be very concerned
about, and the media should be looking very closely into her health. If she isn't well, then we're
going to have a President who will often be MIA, or worse, make decisions that defy logic and reason,
pulling our nation into directions we don't want it going.
While speculation about Hillary's health is nothing new, the recent uptick in concern is noticeable.
Especially with all the recent footage of Clinton's physical oddities.
Paul Joseph Watson of Info Wars (just bear with me) released a video about it as well that covers
much of the concerns people are having about Hillary.
"... All this signs says this is a symptom of a much deeper health problem that she is trying to disguise. (My best guess is that the cough is a side-effect of industrial strength ACE inhibitors she takes to manage the raging hypertension that caused here "minor" strokes.) ..."
Clinton, like Donald Trump, has been very cagey about her medical history.
I noted a while
back that all evidence indicated that she has chronic health problems that are only barely
being held in check.
...We know that Hillary Clinton has suffered from fainting spells since at least 20o5. In
that year
she passed out, presumably sober, while giving a speech. In 2012, she passed out yet again
and suffered a
concussion.
Radar Online has reported that sources close to Hillary Clinton say she has suffered minor
strokes and may have multiple sclerosis. The book on Hillary by Ed Klein says that she
suffers from
depression and migraines.
... ... ...
She has also gained about thirty pounds during the course of the campaign and
is
suffering from mange
Hillary Clinton has had at least six of these public
coughing fits since the campaign started. Most of them did not take place
during "allergy season." And there is never any sneezing that accompanies the
cough which is a good indicator the problem is not allergies. And if allergies
were actually an issue, she'd take a megadose of benadryl or other
antihistamine before these public appearances. All this signs says this is a
symptom of a much deeper health problem that she is trying to disguise. (My
best guess is that the cough is a side-effect of industrial strength ACE
inhibitors she takes to manage the raging hypertension that caused here "minor"
strokes.)
"... While serving as President Barack Obama's secretary of state in mid-2009, Hillary Clinton fell and fractured her right elbow while walking to her car in the basement of the State Department, The New York Times reported . Clinton, 61 at the time, underwent surgery to repair the elbow ..."
"... Secretary Clinton fell again in 2011 while boarding a plane to Oman, but did not sustain injury. ..."
"... Secretary Clinton was hospitalized in December 2012 after doctors discovered a blood clot during a follow-up exam related to her concussion. "Mrs. Clinton's blood clot formed in a large vein along the side of her head, behind her right ear, between the brain and the skull," The New York Times reported , noting that Clinton also had a blood clot in her leg in 1998. She began taking blood thinners around the time of her hospital discharge. The concussion and subsequently discovered blood clot forced Clinton to ultimately take a month-long absence from her role as secretary of state. ..."
"... Prism glasses for double vision - "As she testified about the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Libya, the secretary of state appeared to have tiny vertical lines etched onto the left lens of her new brown specs," the New York Daily News wrote in January 2013. "Clinton's spokesman confirmed Thursday night she is wearing the special glasses as a result of the fall and concussion she suffered last month, but he did not elaborate. Experts told the Daily News that Clinton likely has a Fresnel prism placed on her glasses. The adhesive panel is used to treat double vision." Fresnel prisms can be ground into a lens for longer term use, and the prism is not visible when built into the lens itself. ..."
"... Bill says recovery took six months - Fox News reported in May of 2014 that "Bill Clinton said earlier this week there's 'nothing to' the [Hillary] health questions - though at the same time, he revealed her recovery took about six months, which is much longer than the State Department had indicated." ..."
Hillary Clinton appeared to be wearing her corrective eyeglasses while campaigning Thursday in Las
Vegas, the same ones she used after suffering a fall and concussion a few years ago.
"Hillary Health Drama: Prism Glasses Back on Day After Coughing Seizure,"
the
Drudge Report tweeted Thursday morning, accompanied by a photo from The Associated Press.
The photo, which showed the 68-year-old Clinton meeting with employees at the Caesars Palace casino,
reignited questions about her health as it pertains to her public duties.
Gathered below are 10 times Hillary Clinton's health has been the subject of public discussion.
1. Coughing fits - In February 2016, presidential candidate Clinton suffered
her third public coughing fit during a speech in Harlem. "Clinton had to dig out a lozenge at last
year's Benghazi hearings,"
noted the Daily Mail, and "also suffered a coughing fit in Iowa back in January,
something she attributed to speaking a lot on her campaign tour." The fits prompted many to speculate
as to what could be causing them. Ear, nose, and throat specialist Dr. Jonathan Aviv
told "Inside Edition," "It's not just cough. There's some hoarseness, there's
some throat clearing, in fact there's frequent throat clearing. When you have these trio of symptoms,
you have to think of what I call throat burn reflux, which is acid reflux affecting the throat."
... ... ...
3. Fall fractures elbow - While serving as President Barack Obama's secretary
of state in mid-2009, Hillary Clinton fell and fractured her right elbow while walking to her car
in the basement of the State Department,
The
New York Times reported. Clinton, 61 at the time, underwent surgery to repair the elbow,
and missed at least one meeting with Obama as a result. "Having broken my right arm as secretary
of defense, and had the left arm operated on, I think I can truthfully say, I feel her pain," said
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates at the time. Secretary Clinton fell again in 2011 while boarding
a plane to Oman, but did not sustain injury.
4. Faint causes concussion - In late 2012, Secretary Clinton "sustained a concussion
after fainting,"
The Associated Press reported. The incident came just days before her scheduled
testimony about the Sept. 11 attack against a U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya, before
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Other officials from the department attended in her stead.
The State Department said Clinton was dehydrated because of a stomach virus, which had recently caused
her to back out of a trip to North Africa and the Persian Gulf.
5. Blood clot - Secretary Clinton was hospitalized in December 2012 after doctors
discovered a blood clot during a follow-up exam related to her concussion. "Mrs. Clinton's blood
clot formed in a large vein along the side of her head, behind her right ear, between the brain and
the skull,"
The New York Times reported, noting that Clinton also had a blood clot in her
leg in 1998. She began taking blood thinners around the time of her hospital discharge. The concussion
and subsequently discovered blood clot forced Clinton to ultimately take a month-long absence from
her role as secretary of state.
6. Prism glasses for double vision - "As she testified about the Sept. 11 attack
on the U.S. Consulate in Libya, the secretary of state appeared to have tiny vertical lines etched
onto the left lens of her new brown specs,"
the New York Daily News wrote in January 2013. "Clinton's
spokesman confirmed Thursday night she is wearing the special glasses as a result of the fall and
concussion she suffered last month, but he did not elaborate. Experts told the Daily News that Clinton
likely has a Fresnel prism placed on her glasses. The adhesive panel is used to treat double vision."
Fresnel prisms can be ground into a lens for longer term use, and the prism is not visible when built
into the lens itself.
7. Prescription blood thinner - In August 2015,
The Associated Press reported that Clinton was still taking Coumadin, a blood
thinner used to prevent blood clots. "Her Coumadin dose is monitored regularly and she has experienced
no side-effects from her medications," wrote Dr. Lisa Bardack, an internist who practices near Clinton's
suburban New York home. Previously, in a 2014 interview with ABC's Diane Sawyer, Clinton said she
was "probably" on blood thinners for life.
8. Thyroid - Along with her blood thinner, Clinton takes Armour Thyroid, a thyroid
hormone replacement, antihistamines, and vitamin B12, the AP reported.
9. Brain damage comment - In May 2014,
The Washington Post reported that Republican strategist Karl Rove "distanced
himself from a provocative report in Monday's New York Post, saying he does not believe - as the
newspaper asserted he had said - that Clinton suffered 'brain damage' when she fell and sustained
a head injury in December 2012." Rove had been commenting on Clinton's prism glasses.
10. Bill says recovery took six months -
Fox News reported in May of 2014 that "Bill Clinton said earlier this week there's
'nothing to' the [Hillary] health questions - though at the same time, he revealed her recovery took
about six months, which is much longer than the State Department had indicated."
"... broadly, fascism is an alliance of the state, the corporation, and the military, anyone who doesn't see that today needs to go back to their textbooks. ..."
"... The only way they have avoided complete revolt has been endless borrowing to fund entitlements, once that one-time fix plays out the consequences will be apparent. The funding mechanism itself (The Fed) has even morphed into a neo-liberal tool designed to enrich Capital while enslaving Labor with the consequences. ..."
"... The article I cited above in Vox canvasses the opinion of five serious students of fascism, and none of them believe Trump is a fascist. I'd be most interested in knowing what you have been reading. ..."
"... If anything it is merely a very crude descriptive model of the political process. It doesn't define fascism as a particular set of beliefs that make it a distinct political ideology that can be differentiated from other ideologies ..."
"... Indeed by your standard virtually every state that has ever existed has to a greater or lesser extent been "fascist". ..."
"... My objection to imprecise language here isn't merely pedantic. The leftist dismissal of right wing populists like Trump (or increasingly influential European movements like Ukip, AfD, and the Front national) as "fascist" is a reductionist rhetorical device intended to marginalize them by implying their politics are so far outside of the mainstream that they do not need to be taken seriously. ..."
"Fascism" has become the prefered term of abuse applied indiscriminately by the right thinking
to any person or movement which they want to tar as inherently objectionable, and which can therefore
be dismissed without the tedium of actually engaging with them at the level of ideas.
Most of the people who like to throw this word around couldn't give you a coherant definition
of what exactly they understand it to signify, beyond "yuck!!"
In fairness even students of political ideology have trouble teasing out a cosistent system
of beliefs, to the point where some doubt fascism is even a coherent ideology. That hardly excuses
the intellectual vacuity of those who use it as a term of abuse, however.
Precisely 3,248 angels can fit on the head of a pin. Parsing the true definition of "fascism"
is a waste of time, broadly, fascism is an alliance of the state, the corporation, and the
military, anyone who doesn't see that today needs to go back to their textbooks.
As far as the definition "neo-liberalism" goes, yes it's a useful label. But let's keep it
simple: every society chooses how resources are allocated between Capital and Labor. The needle
has been pegged over on the Capital side for quite some time, my "start date" is when Reagan busted
the air traffic union. The hideous Republicans managed to sell their base that policies that were
designed to let companies be "competitive" were somehow good for them, not just for the owners
of the means of production.
The only way they have avoided complete revolt has been endless borrowing to fund entitlements,
once that one-time fix plays out the consequences will be apparent. The funding mechanism itself
(The Fed) has even morphed into a neo-liberal tool designed to enrich Capital while enslaving
Labor with the consequences.
fascism is an alliance of the state, the corporation, and the military, anyone who doesn't
see that today needs to go back to their textbooks
Which textbooks specifically?
The article I cited above in Vox canvasses the opinion of five serious students of fascism,
and none of them believe Trump is a fascist. I'd be most interested in knowing what you
have been reading.
As for your definition of "fascism", it's obviously so vague and broad that it really doesn't
explain anything. To the extent it contains any insight it is that public institutions (the state),
private businesses (the corporation) and the armed forces all exert significant influence on public
policy. That and a buck and and a half will get you a cup of coffee. If anything it is merely
a very crude descriptive model of the political process. It doesn't define fascism as a particular
set of beliefs that make it a distinct political ideology that can be differentiated from other
ideologies (again, see the Vox article for a discussion of some of the beliefs that are arguably
characteristic of fascist movements). Indeed by your standard virtually every state that has ever
existed has to a greater or lesser extent been "fascist".
My objection to imprecise language here isn't merely pedantic. The leftist dismissal of
right wing populists like Trump (or increasingly influential European movements like Ukip, AfD,
and the Front national) as "fascist" is a reductionist rhetorical device intended to marginalize
them by implying their politics are so far outside of the mainstream that they do not need to
be taken seriously. Given that these movements are only growing in strength as faith in traditional
political movements and elites evaporate this is likely to produce exactly the opposite result.
Right wing populism isn't going to disappear just because the left keeps trying to wish it away.
Refusing to accept this basic political fact risks condemning the left rather than "the fascists"
to political irrelevance.
Even many center-left outlets barely touched on the massive mission creep. To give some
perspective, Slate, Mother Jones, and Buzzfeed News all
ran more stories about Trump's dust-up with an infant than they did on what was effectively
the start of a new war. ABC
World News Tonight mentioned the Libyan air strikes for only 20 seconds, 13 minutes into
the show, and NBC
Nightly News didn't mention the air strikes at all. The president's announcement that
the United States is bombing a new country has become entirely banal.
MRC's Bozell Lashes Out at 'Stupid' Trump Giving Media Excuse
to Not Cover DNC Leaks, Hillary
By
NB Staff |
August 6, 2016 | 10:17 AM EDT
Media Research Center President Brent Bozell was in rare
form on Tuesday night while speaking to Dana Loesch of The
Blaze TV in calling out Donald Trump as "stupid" for
giving the liberal media an endless number of excuses to
not cover the firings and Wikileaks dumps about the
Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Hillary Clinton's
latest problems with the truth.
"... I know a bit about Russian people and one thing I know is this; the U.S. is ignorant of their culture, values and intelligence; a gross miscalculation of an adversary. ..."
"... The neo-cons are crazy (like rabid dogs) but not overtly suicidal, I think (not sure actually). ..."
Stephen Cohen got it. He got shut down. And the talking head at CNN made a note never to have
this guy on again. CNN's just had all the conversation - and then some - that they ever want to
have with this guy. We'll never see Stephen Cohen on TNC TV again.
Yes, both. I'm well aware of the long and somewhat "bumpy" history going back decades (many)
and see this as a mutual joust against a common enemy/hegemon. Russia is well aware of it's vast
area and consequent resources making it a prize like no other on the planet.
It's Russia's curse and wealth at the same time. It's there's to lose if they play badly.
I know a bit about Russian people and one thing I know is this; the U.S. is ignorant of their
culture, values and intelligence; a gross miscalculation of an adversary.
Together they (PRC and Russia) are the perfect foil to the U.S. aggression.
The neo-cons are crazy (like rabid dogs) but not overtly suicidal, I think (not sure actually).
Stiglitz: AUG 5, 2016 8
Globalization and its New Discontents
NEW YORK – Fifteen years ago, I wrote a little book, entitled Globalization
and its Discontents, describing growing opposition in the developing world
to globalizing reforms. It seemed a mystery: people in developing countries
had been told that globalization would increase overall wellbeing. So why
had so many people become so hostile to it?
Now, globalization's opponents in the emerging markets and developing
countries have been joined by tens of millions in the advanced countries.
Opinion polls, including a careful study by Stanley Greenberg and his associates
for the Roosevelt Institute, show that trade is among the major sources
of discontent for a large share of Americans. Similar views are apparent
in Europe.
How can something that our political leaders – and many an economist
– said would make everyone better off be so reviled?
One answer occasionally heard from the neoliberal economists who advocated
for these policies is that people are better off. They just don't know it.
Their discontent is a matter for psychiatrists, not economists.
But income data suggest that it is the neoliberals who may benefit from
therapy. Large segments of the population in advanced countries have not
been doing well: in the US, the bottom 90% has endured income stagnation
for a third of a century. Median income for full-time male workers is actually
lower in real (inflation-adjusted) terms than it was 42 years ago. At the
bottom, real wages are comparable to their level 60 years ago.
The effects of the economic pain and dislocation that many Americans
are experiencing are even showing up in health statistics. For example,
the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton, this year's Nobel laureate, have
shown that life expectancy among segments of white Americans is declining.
Things are a little better in Europe – but only a little better.
Branko Milanovic's new book Global Inequality: A New Approach for the
Age of Globalization provides some vital insights, looking at the big winners
and losers in terms of income over the two decades from 1988 to 2008. Among
the big winners were the global 1%, the world's plutocrats, but also the
middle class in newly emerging economies. Among the big losers – those who
gained little or nothing – were those at the bottom and the middle and working
classes in the advanced countries. Globalization is not the only reason,
but it is one of the reasons.
Under the assumption of perfect markets (which underlies most neoliberal
economic analyses) free trade equalizes the wages of unskilled workers around
the world. Trade in goods is a substitute for the movement of people. Importing
goods from China – goods that require a lot of unskilled workers to produce
– reduces the demand for unskilled workers in Europe and the US.
This force is so strong that if there were no transportation costs, and
if the US and Europe had no other source of competitive advantage, such
as in technology, eventually it would be as if Chinese workers continued
to migrate to the US and Europe until wage differences had been eliminated
entirely. Not surprisingly, the neoliberals never advertised this consequence
of trade liberalization, as they claimed – one could say lied – that all
would benefit.
The failure of globalization to deliver on the promises of mainstream
politicians has surely undermined trust and confidence in the "establishment."
And governments' offers of generous bailouts for the banks that had brought
on the 2008 financial crisis, while leaving ordinary citizens largely to
fend for themselves, reinforced the view that this failure was not merely
a matter of economic misjudgments.
In the US, Congressional Republicans even opposed assistance to those
who were directly hurt by globalization. More generally, neoliberals, apparently
worried about adverse incentive effects, have opposed welfare measures that
would have protected the losers.
But they can't have it both ways: if globalization is to benefit most
members of society, strong social-protection measures must be in place.
The Scandinavians figured this out long ago; it was part of the social contract
that maintained an open society – open to globalization and changes in technology.
Neoliberals elsewhere have not – and now, in elections in the US and Europe,
they are having their comeuppance.
Globalization is, of course, only one part of what is going on; technological
innovation is another part. But all of this openness and disruption were
supposed to make us richer, and the advanced countries could have introduced
policies to ensure that the gains were widely shared.
Instead, they pushed for policies that restructured markets in ways that
increased inequality and undermined overall economic performance; growth
actually slowed as the rules of the game were rewritten to advance the interests
of banks and corporations – the rich and powerful – at the expense of everyone
else. Workers' bargaining power was weakened; in the US, at least, competition
laws didn't keep up with the times; and existing laws were inadequately
enforced. Financialization continued apace and corporate governance worsened.
Now, as I point out in my recent book Rewriting the Rules of the American
Economy, the rules of the game need to be changed again – and this must
include measures to tame globalization. The two new large agreements that
President Barack Obama has been pushing – the Trans-Pacific Partnership
between the US and 11 Pacific Rim countries, and the Transatlantic Trade
and Investment Partnership between the EU and the US – are moves in the
wrong direction.
The main message of Globalization and its Discontents was that the problem
was not globalization, but how the process was being managed. Unfortunately,
the management didn't change. Fifteen years later, the new discontents have
brought that message home to the advanced economies.
His campaign ended with him performing the classic role of shipdog for Hillary,
who shares none of his ideas and economic policies. If this is not Obama style "bait
and switch' I do not know what is...
Bernie Sanders: I support Hillary Clinton. So should everyone
who voted for me http://fw.to/mVDxuLJ
The conventions are over and the general election has officially begun.
In the primaries, I received 1,846 pledged delegates, 46% of the total.
Hillary Clinton received 2,205 pledged delegates, 54%. She received 602
superdelegates. I received 48 superdelegates. Hillary Clinton is the Democratic
nominee and I will vigorously support her.
Donald Trump would be a disaster and an embarrassment for our country
if he were elected president. His campaign is not based on anything of substance
- improving the economy, our education system, healthcare or the environment.
It is based on bigotry. He is attempting to win this election by fomenting
hatred against Mexicans and Muslims. He has crudely insulted women. And
as a leader of the "birther movement," he tried to undermine the legitimacy
of our first African American president. That is not just my point of view.
That's the perspective of a number of conservative Republicans.
In these difficult times, we need a president who will bring our nation
together, not someone who will divide us by race or religion, not someone
who lacks an understanding of what our Constitution is about.
On virtually every major issue facing this country and the needs of working
families, Clinton's positions are far superior to Trump's. Our campaigns
worked together to produce the most progressive platform in the history
of American politics. Trump's campaign wrote one of the most reactionary
documents.
Clinton understands that Citizens United has undermined our democracy.
She will nominate justices who are prepared to overturn that Supreme Court
decision, which made it possible for billionaires to buy elections. Her
court appointees also would protect a woman's right to choose, workers'
rights, the rights of the LGBT community, the needs of minorities and immigrants
and the government's ability to protect the environment.
Trump, on the other hand, has made it clear that his Supreme Court appointees
would preserve the court's right-wing majority.
Clinton understands that in a competitive global economy we need the
best-educated workforce in the world. She and I worked together on a proposal
that will revolutionize higher education in America. It will guarantee that
the children of any family in this country with an annual income of $125,000
a year or less – 83% of our population – will be able to go to a public
college or university tuition free. This proposal also substantially reduces
student debt.
Trump, on the other hand, has barely said a word about higher education.
Clinton understands that at a time of massive income and wealth inequality,
it is absurd to provide huge tax breaks to the very rich.
Trump, on the other hand, wants billionaire families like his to enjoy
hundreds of billions of dollars in new tax breaks.
Clinton understands that climate change is real, is caused by human activity
and is one of the great environmental crises facing our planet. She knows
that we must transform our energy system away from fossil fuels and move
aggressively to energy efficiency and sustainable energy.
Trump, on the other hand, like most Republicans, rejects science and
the conclusions of almost all major researchers in the field. He believes
that climate change is a "hoax," and that there's no need to address it.
Clinton understands that this country must move toward universal healthcare.
She wants to see that all Americans have the right to choose a public option
in their healthcare exchange, that anyone 55 or older should be able to
opt in to Medicare, and that we must greatly improve primary healthcare
through a major expansion of community health centers. She also wants to
lower the outrageously high cost of prescription drugs.
And what is Donald Trump's position on healthcare? He wants to abolish
the Affordable Care Act, throw 20 million people off the health insurance
they currently have and cut Medicaid for lower-income Americans.
During the primaries, my supporters and I began a political revolution
to transform America. That revolution continues as Hillary Clinton seeks
the White House. It will continue after the election. It will continue until
we create a government which represents all of us and not just the 1 percent
– a government based on the principle of economic, social, racial and environmental
justice.
I understand that many of my supporters are disappointed by the final
results of the nominating process, but being despondent and inactive is
not going to improve anything. Going forward and continuing the struggle
is what matters. And, in that struggle, the most immediate task we face
is to defeat Donald
"... Hillary is definitely both a staunch dyed-in-the-wool neocon ("We came, we saw, he died", anti-Russia stance, appointment of Kagan and Nuland, her role in Syria, etc.) and "born again" ( deviating from Goldwater platform after marriage) neoliberal much like Slick Willie was/is. ..."
"... "long ago, conservatives decided to harness racial resentment to sell right-wing economic policies to working-class whites, especially in the South." ..."
"... Isn't the corollary to this that the Clintons harnessed racial resentment to sell neo-lib economic policies to poor blacks, especially in the South? ..."
"... Classist elitism, cultural chauvinism, standing pat in the economic center, bland words about small plans, neoconservative foreign policy & recruiting of capital-class Republicans are back in the driver's seat. This is the Democratic Party once again without a Sanders campaign to worry about. ..."
"... What strikes me as telling and important is that the New York Times was reporting on conservatives or neocons moving to support Hillary Clinton as early as July 2014. The sense being that Clinton was, in particular, a foreign policy conservative: ..."
"... Dismantling of Orthodox hegemony in east Europe.... Hapsburg at the neocon rise. Regime change in Moscow was in the strategy when Strobe Talbot brought in Mrs. Kagan in 1993 and Bill Clinton started arming Croatia and backing separatists in Bosnia and Kosovo. ..."
"... Clinton voted for universal war and then as SecState implemented it bad and hard. ..."
Check out Clintons in Serbia, who is Victoria Nuland, and on whose advisory committee is her husband
Robert Kagan?
You have a very limited and benign view of neocon and neoliberals.
Likbez said in reply to ilsm... , -1
An excellent comment. I am with you ilsm --
Hillary is definitely both a staunch dyed-in-the-wool neocon ("We came, we saw, he died",
anti-Russia stance, appointment of Kagan and Nuland, her role in Syria, etc.) and "born again"
( deviating from Goldwater platform after marriage) neoliberal much like Slick Willie was/is.
Anybody who tried to deny this denies the reality.
Police state?
Wall st sponsors
Debt reduction with stimulus?
Immigration, what demalarkey is that?
Energy is happening with tech.
Neocon, just war is pushing Putin around! She negotiated with Qaddafi! She and Kerry on
Assad, Benghazi shipping point to ISIS in 2012.
Clinton doesn't need to move to the center to beat Trump, since she is already in the center.
She's picking up a number of disaffected Republicans already without doing anything. Trump and
his campaign are a circus. Her advisers are probably recommending that she remain inoffensively
silent and allow Trump to continue eating his own tail.
Meanwhile, every result one would realistically have expected from the Democrats disposing
of the Sanders campaign has indeed come to pass. Classist elitism, cultural chauvinism, standing
pat in the economic center, bland words about small plans, neoconservative foreign policy & recruiting
of capital-class Republicans are back in the driver's seat. This is the Democratic Party once
again without a Sanders campaign to worry about.
ilsm -> Dan Kervick... ,
Yup!
anne : ,
What strikes me as telling and important is that the New York Times was reporting on conservatives
or neocons moving to support Hillary Clinton as early as July 2014. The sense being that Clinton
was, in particular, a foreign policy conservative:
Are they getting ready to ally themselves with Hillary Clinton?
ilsm -> anne... ,
Dismantling of Orthodox hegemony in east Europe.... Hapsburg at the neocon rise. Regime change
in Moscow was in the strategy when Strobe Talbot brought in Mrs. Kagan in 1993 and Bill Clinton
started arming Croatia and backing separatists in Bosnia and Kosovo.
Peggy Noonan: Trump 'doesn't have the skill set needed now' http://washex.am/2aAIwqk via @DCExaminer
- Aug 5
Conservative Wall Street Journal columnist and former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan said
Donald Trump doesn't have what it takes to win the White House.
In her latest column, Noonan wrote that the celebrity businessman has been unable to "take
yes for an answer" from the voters who made him the Republican presidential nominee.
"This is what became obvious, probably fatally so: Mr. Trump is not going to get serious
about running for president," she wrote. "He does not have a second act, there are no hidden
depths, there will be no 'pivot.' It is not that he is willful or stubborn, though he may be,
it's that he doesn't have the skill set needed now - discretion, carefulness, generosity, judgment.
There's a clueless quality about him."
After the GOP convention two weeks ago, Trump enjoyed a slight bump in national and some state-level
polls against Hillary Clinton, only to suffer a series of setbacks caused by his own controversial
comments.
As a result, his numbers have fallen in more recent polls and Clinton's have risen in light
of intense media scrutiny on Trump.
"All the damage done to him this week was self-inflicted," Noonan wrote. "The arrows he's taken
are arrows he shot.
I think this week marked a certain coming to terms with where the election is going. Politics
is about trends and tendencies. The trends for Donald Trump are not good, and he tends not to
change.
All the damage done to him this week was self-inflicted. The arrows he's taken are arrows he
shot. We have in seven days witnessed his undignified and ungrateful reaction to a Gold Star family;
the odd moment with the crying baby; the one-on-one interviews, which are starting to look like
something he does in the grip of a compulsion, in which Mr. Trump expresses himself thoughtlessly,
carelessly, on such issues as Russia, Ukraine and sexual harassment; the relitigating of his vulgar
Megyn Kelly comments from a year ago; and, as his fortunes fell, his statement that he "would
not be surprised" if the November election were "rigged." Subject to an unprecedented assault
by a sitting president who called him intellectually and characterologically unfit for the presidency,
Mr Trump fired back - at Paul Ryan and John McCain.
The mad scatterbrained-ness of it was captured in a Washington Post interview (*) with Philip
Rucker in which five times by my count-again, the compulsion-Mr. Trump departed the meat of the
interview to turn his head and stare at the television. On seeing himself on the screen: "Lot
of energy. We got a lot of energy." Minutes later: "Look at this. It's all Trump all day long.
That's why their ratings are through the roof." He's all about screens, like a toddler hooked
on iPad. ...
*- Donald Trump's Washington Post interview
should make Republicans panic http://wpo.st/Q4gq1
ilsm -> Fred C. Dobbs... , -1
"Skill set" like the "set" that has the US squander $2T in war spending, endure huge casualties,
inflict massive collateral damage and is worse off than when Clinton voted for all of it.
When the Donald calls a general or administration official inept he means the above.
ilsm -> sanjait... , -1
One so easily conned not allowed in Oval Office.
Demalarkey. Crooked Hillary was conned like Colin Powell, the great equivocators.
Her vote was the switch that turned it all on!
Did she ever give a speech anywhere saying the Overseas Contingency Operations appropriation
were bad? Has she ever proposed ending it all? Send links.
But worse she equivocates about marked e-mails which at best show ignorance, and expects ignorance
from the audience.
Which is all right with the administration (DoJ) flying cover for her.
ilsm -> EMichael... , -1
HEH!
Clinton voted for universal war and then as SecState implemented it bad and hard.
"... It's the rigging of our economy – the increasingly tight nexus between wealth and political power. Big money has been buying political clout to get laws and regulations that make big money even bigger." ..."
"... Odds are that Clinton, now worth $100 million due to public service, will milk the system for all its worth, becoming the first to become a billionaire via public service. Reckoning? LOL! ..."
"... Aren't we used to the robber barons running the joint, yet? Clinton endorsed by the in crowd, including water boarders. ..."
"... Hillary is so well qualified to send everything to Wall St and get US into regime change in the former Soviet Union see how well it worked in Iraq, Afghanistan Libya... ..."
"... Logisticians do planning with the ops guys, we are the guys that tell "strategists": "you don't have transport etc to get there..." Been doing a bit of 'thought exercising' on the fighting for Estonia under defending small countries is "just war" meme. I could see the Clintons installing a fascist in Talinn like they did in Kyiv....... ..."
"... All because the democrats went from the party of perpetual small conventional profitable wars against third world guerillas and goatherds to taking on Russia run by evil. ..."
"... Trump did not have Qaddafi or anyone else done! ..."
Robert Reich--Democratic Party needs to start reckoning with reality, too.
"In a Gallup poll taken in mid-July, before the conventions, 82 percent said America was
on the wrong track. In an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll just before that, 56 percent said
they preferred a candidate who would bring sweeping changes to the way the government functioned,
no matter how unpredictable those changes might be.
The major issue the public is reacting to isn't terrorism or racism. We didn't see these
numbers after 9/11. We didn't even get these sorts of responses in the late 1960s, when American
cities were torn by riots and when the Vietnam War was raging.
It's the rigging of our economy – the increasingly tight nexus between wealth and political
power. Big money has been buying political clout to get laws and regulations that make big
money even bigger."
Odds are that Clinton, now worth $100 million due to public service, will milk the system
for all its worth, becoming the first to become a billionaire via public service. Reckoning?
LOL!
ilsm -> JohnH...
Aren't we used to the robber barons running the joint, yet? Clinton endorsed by the in crowd,
including water boarders.
Hillary is so well qualified to send everything to Wall St and get US into regime change in
the former Soviet Union see how well it worked in Iraq, Afghanistan Libya....
I am betting on nuclear winter before climate disaster.
ilsm -> RC AKA Darryl, Ron... , -1
Logisticians do planning with the ops guys, we are the guys that tell "strategists": "you
don't have transport etc to get there..." Been doing a bit of 'thought exercising' on the fighting
for Estonia under defending small countries is "just war" meme. I could see the Clintons installing
a fascist in Talinn like they did in Kyiv.......
Russia moves in to "protect" Russian nationals (the reason for NATO was so Russia would
not move in to West Germany to protect socialists from US puppets).
The US' deployable armor brigade arrives to kasserns smoldering, gets chewed up and the B-61
start falling.
You could model a nuclear exchange that stops with a Red Army tank division irradiated.....
I see it going 99 Red Balloons.
All because the democrats went from the party of perpetual small conventional profitable wars
against third world guerillas and goatherds to taking on Russia run by evil.
ilsm -> ilsm... , -1
Then the demalarkey* comes up with: if US don't start WW III the small countries will get their
own nukes like Israel............
Not much different than US holding on to the button, but throws out a new range of MAD thought
exercises.
*"Oh my!! Trump will let everyone get nukes!"
ilsm -> Fred C. Dobbs... , -1
I do not want crooked Hillary followed by a junior military officer with the "football". What
she knows about operation security and who advises her. Is quite troubling.
Isn't it interesting that the communists of China are seeking a long-term partnership with Russia
– a nominally capitalist country? Of course, Russia is seeking the same with China.
July 1, China marked an important date on July 1. It was the 95th anniversary of the founding
of the Chinese Communist Party. Chairman Xi Jinping addressed the solemn meeting devoted to this
event. In addition to the praises of "Long live!" (And deservedly so, since the CCP has much to
be proud of) there was Chairman Xi's speech which was short, but very important.
"The world is on the verge of radical change. We see how the European Union is gradually
collapsing, as is the US economy - it is all over for the new world order. So, it will never again
be as it was before, in 10 years we will have a new world order in which the key will be the union
of China and Russia. "
If the above translation is accurate I wonder what is meant by …key will be the union of
China and Russia . In any event, it appears that ideology is not at the core of the unity;
its something much deeper and more resilient. I offer that it is a shared view that embraces a
realization that the world can no longer accept global hegemony from the West otherwise catastrophe
is virtually certain in the form of (pick one or two): nuclear war, financial or ecological collapse.
Their mission is basically to save the world from Western insanity which handily trumps anything
that may separate them.
And, I think that the Chinese and Russians are far too wise to seek global hegemony for themselves.
The trick for them will be taking down the Western house of cards without triggering a catastrophic
miscalculation by the West. …Whew, now time for an hot fudge sundae.
I think it's mutual disgust with the USA's blatant and shameless rigging of the playing field
in every contest. If America can't win, then it's a loss for all of mankind. And it blabbers constantly
and loudly about its values, and then does things which completely contradict those supposed values,
and never appears to notice anything unusual or untoward about it.
"... There's no question that the guy was not just picked off a list of "Gold Star Muslim Families." And everyone who spoke at that convention was a Clinton supporter; that's one of the main reasons for the convention. But a better candidate, a candidate with better character and intellect, would never have fallen into such an obvious trap. ..."
"... I hope Trump runs ads that say "Why did Hillary have a guy --with Muslim Brotherhood and Saudi connections, an attorney who specializes in helping Arab Muslims into our country on greencards and visas, ..."
"... What often gets lost in the White Water, Castle Grande real estate kiting scam discussion, is that the original funds AND the monies for multiple inflated resale of those properties came from the Madison Savings and Loan, in cahoots with the State of Arkansas (Clintons cohorts) raiding a Federal fund (HUD) meant for low income housing. ..."
"... After embezzling and laudering hundreds of millions, they never built ANY low income housing for the poor. That's the nature of the Clinton's compassion for the poor. ..."
"... clinton got millions from 'sharia law education group' ..."
"... With the help of republicans demonizing Trump. Instead of talking about Clinton and all the dirt, the lies, the treasonous behavior, the e-mail scandal, her lying to the Benghazi families, etc. etc. Instead they keep harping on what they claim Trump said. In other words republicans going out of their way to help Clinton. ..."
"... More and more Khan is being exposed as a plant and a stooge for Hillary and the Democrat Party. And the Leftist media, an embedded wing of the Democrat Party, will not tolerate us exposing their lies, hypocrisies and false narratives. Which is all the more incentive to keep ON exposing them. ..."
"... We will have to deal with Trump's verbal antics, and take him to task, but we MUST see to it he is elected President. The Republican Party be damned! Our country is at stake. Khan will not be the person to decide this election, and we will not let him have that power. ..."
"... All the media types think "Trump going after the gold star muslim family" is hurting him. I don't think this has any effect on voters at all. The [neo]liberal playbook is to put a little girl in the boxing ring to throw punches, and if she's hit back they scream "how could you hit a little girl???" It's all theater and all very old shtick. I think real voters know this and are unaffected. ..."
"... Ever notice how the truth causes [neo]liberals to go batshit crazy? It's like sunlight to a vampire.... ..."
"... FACTS: A [neo]liberals worst enemy ..."
"... The Clinton Campaign has held up a Muslim Human Shield. You are no longer allowed to criticize them on "refugees" or "immigration". ..."
"... What the f does making sure we vet Syrian refugees have to do with the member of the Muslim brotherhood's losing a son in the first Irag war have to do with anything? The fact is the DNC dragged these poor people out there to try and smear Trump just because he wants to make sure no terrorist get in with these refugees. I believe the Khan's son was a US citizen, so what does this have to do with Syrian refugees, this is how the left lies time and time again. ..."
"... The last sentence says everything you need to know about [neo[liberals. Bravo to Bauer for standing up to this ignorant [neo]liberal Troll from CNN. You can count down 3, 2, 1....until the screaming [neo]liberal goes off after hearing facts. ..."
"... The newest form of ignorance out there Knowing what the Clinton campaign is Deliberately doing and making excuses and steering the viewers away from the reality that comes with common sense. Trump may not be the perfect candidate but sure as the Good lord loves me, Hillary represents Satan And everything wrong Corrupted and evil about humanity. If you vote for that woman (and I don't care if you write in someone else) but if you vote for that woman you are an accomplice to every evil the Democratic party now represents and that is just plain NO BS Common Sense. ..."
"... "You're like he worked for Hillary Clinton like that somehow makes him unqualified to speak about his son-" It simply makes everything he says suspect. ..."
"... I am sick of this. Trump criticized Khan, and it turned out he (Khan) is a Clinton insider, working for a group of lawyers who did the Clinton's frickin' taxes... ..."
"... When you participate in a partisan attack--as the Khan's, Pat Smith and Charles Wood have done -- then you're opening yourself to a partisan counter-attack. Having no defense for the deaths in Benghazi, the Hillary surrogates are reduced to claiming that the Khan's are neutral territory. Sorry, it doesn't work that way. ..."
"... If he cared about the memory of his son, he would shut the f**k up. His son didn't join the Army to support Hillary Clinton. Just another case of a Cindy Sheehan. Hillary voted on the war, because her independent research convinced her that regime change was necessary. ..."
"... Truth and facts are by definition "smears" on the Clintons... After all these years I have a pretty good grasp just exactly who and what they are... What I do not understand is how nearly half of the electorate in this country continues to drink the lemonade... ..."
"... We must distinguish between the son, who died in the service of this country, and the father, who has his own life and agenda. Trump was wrong if he criticized the son. The father is fair game. ..."
Appearing on Tuesday's New Day, liberal Daily Beast contributor and recurring CNN guest Dean Obeidallah
went ballistic after a fellow guest and Donald Trump supporter recalled that Khizr Khan has a history
of ties to the Clintons as the immigration expert was an employee of the law firm Hogan Lovells LLP,
which not only has represented the Clinton Foundation but also worked on immigration cases involving
the controversial EB-5 visa program.
After former South Carolina Lieutenant Governor Andre Bauer recalled Khan's connections to the
Clintons, the two got into a heated debate as Obeidallah incredulously accused the Trump supporter
of "smearing" Khan by merely introducing his links to the Clintons into the political conversation.
At 8:30 a.m. ET, Bauer brought up Khan's ties to the Clintons:
Mr. Khan worked for the Clintons. There is a direct connection. Nobody wants to engage in that
because of the loss of a child, which is a terrible thing, but again, he is continuing to push
this, too. He is making it political, and there is a bigger tie to the Clintons. He's worked for
them. He's worked for the EB-5 program, which is controversial.
The South Carolina Republican added:
Senator Grassley even pointed out there are inconsistencies and really not checks and balances
in a program that's let too many folks in that are questionable, individuals that probably should
never have been allowed in our country.
robert108 > bkeyser
He works for her, then shows up at her convention and lies about her opponent. He smeared himself
by his lack of integrity. Furthermore, papa khan is a sharia advocate, standing there with his
good little hijab wearing sharia wife, and waves the Constitution, as if he believes in it. A
complete crock, designed to serve his employer, Hillary.
bkeyser Mod > robert108
There's no question that the guy was not just picked off a list of "Gold Star Muslim Families."
And everyone who spoke at that convention was a Clinton supporter; that's one of the main reasons
for the convention. But a better candidate, a candidate with better character and intellect, would
never have fallen into such an obvious trap. You can blame Clinton, you can blame the Khan's,
but this is a story only because of Trump.
CruzAmnestiedHortence > bkeyser
I hope it remains a story.
I hope Trump runs ads that say "Why did Hillary have a guy --with Muslim Brotherhood and
Saudi connections, an attorney who specializes in helping Arab Muslims into our country on greencards
and visas, who has written and lectured admiringly of the "superiority" of Sharia law-- in
a prime time slot at her convention? And why is he carrying water for her? Could it be that this
Jihadist in a suit has financial and ideological interests in supporting her policy of importing
millions more Muslims?
Might Mr Khan understand that Trump policy objectives conflict with his professional AND ideological
goals?
Check out Breitbart now before they change it.....ALL the Benghazi mothers and widows are laying
wood to Hillary right now. Ugly. Hillary is going to LOSE this one eventually. Khan has already
said he wants out of the discussion. The Democrats will want out next.
Don Meaker > bkeyser
If you look at what Trump actually said, it was unexceptional. The outrageous part is what
the media shills are saying.
Gary Hall Mod > bkeyser
Certainly the broad electorate should be well aware (and, of course they are not) that many
many friends and associates of the Clinton's have been charged and found guilty - or plead guilty
of crimes. I think that there were 15 in the Whitewater development scam alone (oh, did the Clinton's
ever pay all those that lost all of their investment purchasing lots?). And then there were another
batch in this lot:
And for a little walk down memory lane (and I apologize, looks like the video has been taken
down - perhaps someone can locate it) -- PBS's Frontline production - "The Fixers."
What often gets lost in the White Water, Castle Grande real estate kiting scam discussion,
is that the original funds AND the monies for multiple inflated resale of those properties came
from the Madison Savings and Loan, in cahoots with the State of Arkansas (Clintons cohorts) raiding
a Federal fund (HUD) meant for low income housing.
After embezzling and laudering hundreds of millions, they never built ANY low income housing
for the poor.
That's the nature of the Clinton's compassion for the poor.
FACT: Trump spoke highly of Captain Khan and his scacrifice. But, NOT the outrageous rants
of the dead soldier's father.
FACT: Khizr M. Khan is a very rich Muslim attorney with DEEP ties to Saudi Arabia.
FACT: Khan is an immigration lawyer who specializes in a highly controversial program accused
of letting RICH Muslims buy their way into the U.S.
FACT: The E-2 and EB-5 are two of the most notoriously abused visa categories that essentially
allow wealthy foreigners to buy their way to U.S. residency, and possibly citizenship, with a
relatively modest investment,
FACT: Khan's website notes that he works to help clients with the E-2 and EB-5 programs that
let overseas investors buy into U.S. companies and also provides green cards for family members.
FACT: Khan has now taken his website down coz it exposes his hypocrisy.
FACT: Khan has written extensively about Sharia Law and wants to replace America's Constitution
with it.
FACT: Khan has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.
ohio granny > bill
With the help of republicans demonizing Trump. Instead of talking about Clinton and all
the dirt, the lies, the treasonous behavior, the e-mail scandal, her lying to the Benghazi families,
etc. etc. Instead they keep harping on what they claim Trump said. In other words republicans
going out of their way to help Clinton.
DanB_Tiffin
Who is Khizr Khan, the father of a fallen US soldier?
01Aug2016 by Clarice Feldman
http://www.americanthinker.com...
"a Muslim Cindy Sheehan playing on people's sympathies to foster a Democratic Party political
agenda."
Simon Battle > DanB_Tiffin
The GOPe, rather than point out Khan's radical jihadi connections, are spending their time
to further divide in the Republican party. Who's side is the GOPe on? The Republican party, we
the people, have made our choice. We have chosen Donald Trump because he best represents us, the
Republican party. It's time for the GOPe to coalesce around the Republican party or get the hell
out of the way.
ohio granny > Simon Battle
Yep helping the democRATs slander Trump almost like they want Trump to lose. They are nothing
but hypocrites doing the democRATs dirty work.
CruzAmnestiedHortence > ohio granny
The GOPe went into "vandalize Trump's campaign" mode as soon as they realized they couldn't
steal the nomination 3 weeks ago.
JValjean > DanB_Tiffin
Moslem Americans with compelling personal narratives, i.e. losing a child on the battlefield,
do not have an unassailable right to haughtily lecture other Americans on what's proper Americanism,
that includes presidential candidates. If "Moslem Gold Star Families" are indeed not unicorns,
perhaps there is a better and less controversial avatar in that community to legitimately promote
its political agenda other than the baggage laden Mr. Khan.
ZombieProcesses > JValjean
The Clintonistas were being lazy. No need not to be as the press (and the globalistas in the
GOP) will focus on the prey, not the bait.
twfuller • 5 days ago
More and more Khan is being exposed as a plant and a stooge for Hillary and the
Democrat Party. And the Leftist media, an embedded wing of the Democrat Party, will not
tolerate us exposing their lies, hypocrisies and false narratives. Which is all the more
incentive to keep ON exposing them.
We will have to deal with Trump's verbal antics, and take him to task, but we MUST see
to it he is elected President. The Republican Party be damned! Our country is at stake. Khan
will not be the person to decide this election, and we will not let him have that power.
Never thought that the Clinton News Network would admit that just
being associated with the Clintons was a smear on your character. I
always thought it was but I now see CNN agrees.
PJ1193
What part of Mr Khan calling Trump a racist then wrapping himself in his dead sons memory
to shut off a response to his personal smear of Trump not a sick thing to do. We all know what
this is about and all this faux outrage by the left is pure bull$#!+.....Plus Mr Khan is a
radical Sharia defending Islamist on top of everything else, pure phony.
Kaiser
Khan is a Demorat operative. Get it, Clinton media hacks?
toledofan
The entire Khan event was staged and the made into political fodder. Right or wrong Trump
took it at face value and defended his honor. The Khans should have declined but their is no
doubt they were motivated by politics as well.
Russ Neal
All the media types think "Trump going after the gold star muslim family" is hurting
him. I don't think this has any effect on voters at all. The [neo]liberal playbook is to put a
little girl in the boxing ring to throw punches, and if she's hit back they scream "how could
you hit a little girl???" It's all theater and all very old shtick. I think real voters know
this and are unaffected.
Biff Wellington
Ever notice how the truth causes [neo]liberals to go batshit crazy? It's like sunlight
to a vampire....
Cajunkingkong
FACTS: A [neo]liberals worst enemy
Rob
[Neo]Liberalism is a disease. This so-called journalist just proved it, once again.
Smackalicious
The Clinton Campaign has held up a Muslim Human Shield. You are no longer allowed to
criticize them on "refugees" or "immigration".
fastfood
The mans' parents certainly experienced the great loss of a loved one. No parent should
ever expect to have to bury their child. It's supposed to be the other way around.
But Speaking of "frankly" and "Blunt" and political so-called correctness aside; it was not
the parents who experience the "sacrifice". It was their son who selflessly made that ultimate
sacrifice. He could have chosen any one of a million other professions. Instead, he selflessly
chose to serve to protect his country, his way of life and to help other folks to achieve the
same. And as many before him, it was [he] who made the ultimate sacrifice attempting to
accomplish that noble goal.
But no. The man's parents did not make the "sacrifice". To falsely claim this soldiers sad and
ultimate "sacrifice" in the name of his Country is tantamount to claiming to have [earned] a
Medal of Honor because someone else in the family happened to have earned it. Trump may seemed
to have made light of the soldiers selfless sacrifice, but I see and hear the soldiers' Father
do at least as bad day in and day out, and day after day.
Timothy Riley
What the f does making sure we vet Syrian refugees have to do with the member of the
Muslim brotherhood's losing a son in the first Irag war have to do with anything? The fact is
the DNC dragged these poor people out there to try and smear Trump just because he wants to
make sure no terrorist get in with these refugees. I believe the Khan's son was a US citizen,
so what does this have to do with Syrian refugees, this is how the left lies time and time
again.
BLM=TERRORIST GROUP ✓ᵀᴿᵁᴹᴾ • 4 days ago
"BAUER: Yeah, facts matter, but not to you."
The last sentence says everything you need to know about [neo[liberals. Bravo to Bauer
for standing up to this ignorant [neo]liberal Troll from CNN. You can count down 3, 2,
1....until the screaming [neo]liberal goes off after hearing facts.
HAMMERBOX
The newest form of ignorance out there Knowing what the Clinton campaign is
Deliberately doing and making excuses and steering the viewers away from the reality that
comes with common sense. Trump may not be the perfect candidate but sure as the Good lord
loves me, Hillary represents Satan And everything wrong Corrupted and evil about humanity. If
you vote for that woman (and I don't care if you write in someone else) but if you vote for
that woman you are an accomplice to every evil the Democratic party now represents and that is
just plain NO BS Common Sense.
However if you are a die hard democrat whom has voted in Murderers, KKK Grand Poobah's,
Alcoholics and adulterers in the past I don't forsee you being capable of not doing the same
with Hillary because common sense is lacking. TRUTH
lars1701c • 5 days ago
I am voting for Trump but even i agree its a uphill battle against the rampant corruption
of hillary and the DNC but if Trump does win its going to be so delicious to see the
republicans come crawling back to him. Oh it'll be fun to watch obama give Trump that tour of
the WH that every outgoing president gives. I would pay real money to be a fly on that wall :D
Phil Christensen
"You're like he worked for Hillary Clinton like that somehow makes him unqualified to
speak about his son-" It simply makes everything he says suspect.
bluepeahen
I am sick of this. Trump criticized Khan, and it turned out he (Khan) is a Clinton
insider, working for a group of lawyers who did the Clinton's frickin' taxes...
menloman
When you participate in a partisan attack--as the Khan's, Pat Smith and Charles Wood
have done -- then you're opening yourself to a partisan counter-attack. Having no defense for
the deaths in Benghazi, the Hillary surrogates are reduced to claiming that the Khan's are
neutral territory. Sorry, it doesn't work that way.
Zero Flash
Mr. Khan is a progressive hypocrite. If he cared about the memory of his son, he would
shut the f**k up. His son didn't join the Army to support Hillary Clinton. Just another case
of a Cindy Sheehan. Hillary voted on the war, because her independent research convinced her
that regime change was necessary. Check the record. Mr. Khan is using the death of his
son to pad in bank account and he should be ashamed. Like I always say, "There is no hypocrite
like a progressive hypocrtie."
Mark Merritt
Truth and facts are by definition "smears" on the Clintons... After all these years I
have a pretty good grasp just exactly who and what they are... What I do not understand is how
nearly half of the electorate in this country continues to drink the lemonade...
Pretty clearly, the story of the Pied Piper is true... Or, perhaps, it involves lemmings...
I'm north of 75 and probably will not be around when it all crashes in... I just have great
concern for my children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren... Not in any way comfortable
with the country in which I foresee them living...
jimc
Now that telling the truth about a person is considered a "smear" the [neoliberal] left
proves its intent to sink deeper and deeper into utter depravity.
Bik Fizbyn
Funny how they want to call Trump a bigot and a Nazi yet there's this.
Letter to Lieutenant General Artur Phleps of August 6, 1943,
"I do not wish that through the folly and narrowness of mind of an isolated person, a
single one of the tens of thousands of these brave volunteers and their families should
suffer from ill humor and feel deprived of the rights which have been granted to them. …
Moreover, I forbid the jokes and facetious remarks about the Moslem volunteers which are so
much enjoyed in groups of comrades. There will no longer be the least discussion about the
special rights afforded to the Moslems in these circles." - Heinrich Himmler
Doesn't sound like Trump to me.
Proud Skeptic
We must distinguish between the son, who died in the service of this country, and the
father, who has his own life and agenda. Trump was wrong if he criticized the son. The father
is fair game.
The questionable health condition of Hillary Clinton should be a major issue of the 2016 campaign.
The latest evidence comes in the form of Clinton being helped up a set of stairs by multiple individuals
outside what appears to be a home. The photos, published by Reuters and Getty, show the 68-year-old
candidate with aides holding her arms as she ascends the stairs.
Winchester1300
Literally Unfit For the Presidency!
Can't Walk, Needs Assistance, Can't Think, Often Confused, Can't See, Has Double Vision, Wears
Long Coats to Hide Her Adult Diapers, Has Multiple Seizures On Camera, Left in Middle of Debate
For Unexplained Reason, Called Donald Trump Her Husband, Massive Coughing Fits During Speeches...
rick > Winchester1300
Is she this FEEBLE or just DRUNK AGAIN!!??
John (magnum) > rick
Results of Lyin' Crooked Cankles 'short circuit' !!
The questionable health condition of Hillary Clinton should be a major issue of the 2016
campaign," wrote American Mirror editor, Kyle Olson.
"The latest evidence comes in the form of Clinton being helped up a set of stairs by multiple
individuals outside what appears to be a home.
"The photos, published by Reuters and Getty, show the 68-year-old candidate with aides holding
her arms as she ascends the stairs."
The Trump campaign has yet to offer up any of its own evidence that Clinton is suffering from any
sort of ailment, but the gambit may have been successful nonetheless.
While trying to stay unbiased, there was a response politically by some who doubted the legitimacy
of Clinton's concussion, as she was scheduled to testify about Benghazi in the weeks following. Most,
of course, have focused on the political lean of those people, and what they may or may not stand
to gain by criticizing Clinton, but more than anything, I think their statements underline the continued
misunderstanding of TBI and how dangerous it can be, and I strangely felt parallels to my own concussion.
Because of an absence of any apparent physical ailments, many people believe concussions are non-serious
issues that you can "get over" very quickly. Beyond that, many doubt any non-tangible symptoms you
may have because there is no physical proof. Political opponents to Clinton did exactly that claiming
it was a suspiciously convenient time for Clinton to become injured. My friends and co-workers kept
telling me they thought I was playing up symptoms to get extensions on deadlines or get out of doing
things, because to the plain eye everything was fine.
Hillary's concussion does seem to be as minor as one could hope for; she suffered no brain damage
or any other complications aside from the discovery of the clot. But only Clinton and a few others
know exactly what symptoms she may be dealing with, and public skepticism to the serious nature of
TBI needs to be dealt with.
That isn't the only lesson to be learned from Clinton's concussion, however. As Doctor Ann Engelland
shows, there is more to glean from the recent headlines. While trying to recover from the concussion,
Hillary Clinton was told by doctors to work from home, and to rest. While the Secretary of State
could by no means completely neglect her duties, one of the most important factors in healing from
a concussion is "brain rest" and withdrawal from activities.
Concussions are more common than most people realize, and they aren't just an issue for athletes.
Complications, however, are rare. After being examined by a professional, there is no major need
for multiple scans unless the doctors report finding anything outside the normal.
Noting reports Mrs. Clinton had suffered a blood clot after a fall in December 2012, the New York
Post reported Rove said, "Thirty days in the hospital? And when she reappears, she's wearing glasses
that are only for people who have traumatic brain injury? We need to know what's up with that."
Rove is now distancing himself from the remark, telling the
Washington Post on Tuesday, "Of course she doesn't have brain damage."
But Rove told the Washington Post it's apparent Clinton suffered "a serious health episode," adding
if she jumps in the 2016 presidential race, "she is going to have to be forthcoming" on details of
where, how and when it happened.
"She didn't feign illness," Rove said of Clinton's failure to appear at an early round of congressional
hearings on Benghazi, an absence referred to by some as "Benghazi flu."
A representative for the former first lady was quoted as saying, "Please assure Dr. Rove she's
100 percent."
Limbaugh noted, "The left is fit to be tied over what Rove said about Mrs. Clinton."
The broadcaster suggested, "If you're gonna start going down this road with Mrs. Clinton, you
gotta go back a lot farther than December of 2012. I mean, you remember how Hillary couldn't remember
where she put the Rose Law Firm billing records. She couldn't remember how she got a hold of those
900 FBI files that she and Bill had somewhere."
Listen to Rush Limbaugh's comments by clicking below:
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2014/05/hillarys-brain-damage-what-difference-does-it-make/#5I6etdg6ScTl7WKJ.99
"... Andrew Stewart is a documentary film maker and reporter who lives outside Providence. His film, AARON BRIGGS AND THE HMS GASPEE, about the historical role of Brown University in the slave trade, is available for purchase on Amazon Instant Video or on DVD. ..."
Bill Clinton, who is certainly savvy of the media as an engine of
electioneering, knew exactly what he was doing when he called Donald Trump up
in spring 2015 to tell him he might have a shot as a political candidate.
Clinton knew that the public had as much interest in his wife as a chance for
staph infection. Try as they might since 2012, they never were able to tap into
a public interest in the idea of President Hillary. The book tours were
stilted, boring affairs that would make Tolstoy complain about the length. The
pathetic attempts by David Brock and Media Matters to imitate Alexander
Cockburn's brand of media critique were the internet equivalent of an
inflatable sex toy. Sidney Blumenthal's ridiculous impersonation of Arthur
Schlesinger Jr., going on television to lecture about the implosion of the
Republicans in comparison to the collapse of the Whigs and implying, by
extension, that his candidate was akin to Lincoln, had all the sincerity of
Bugs Bunny planting a kiss on Yosemite Sam.
A lifelong union man and Vietnam vet friend of mine put it best, "It's her
election to lose and she is doing a phenomenal job of it." Hell, an ornery New
Deal-Great Society Pentagon Keynesian with a harsh Brooklyn accent and all the
style of Statler and Waldorf on
The Muppet Show
nearly wiped the floor
of the electoral stage with her upholstered behind! This was National Lampoon's
Presidential Campaign from the start.
... ... ...
Return to the propaganda model provided by Chomsky and Herman:
-How will this impact ownership?
-How will this impact our advertisers?
-How will this impact the willingness of our regular sources, such as the
White House or 10 Downing Street, to provide us with information?
-What sort of 'flak', negative reactions, will we get from our consumers
and particularly those consumers within the established power structure?
-Can the subject(s) of this story be presented in a fashion that would be
broadly described as either anti-Communist or based on notions of fear so to
preserve the credibility and unchallenged authority of the power structure?
The media has been the sole party that is responsible for both the hegemony
of neoliberalism and the rise of Trump. Both are instances of how they serve
their advertisers.
Let us consider the former for a moment. The case of the public pension
heist that was perpetrated in Rhode Island is illustrative. John Arnold, an
Enron alumnus, donated good money to PBS so to get a false-flag "pension
crisis" narrative put on the
NewsHour
broadcasts that everyone thought
were "neutral". The public pension systems in America are simply one of the
largest reserves of capital in America at a value total of $4 trillion. Arnold
then made a series of campaign donations to up-and-coming politicians like
then-Treasurer and now-Governor Gina Raimondo, who in turn "reformed" the
pension system, investing it in high-stakes high-fee hedge funds, effectively
activating a pipeline from the public pocket into Wall Street. Of course this
was not new for PBS, their support of neoliberalism dates back at least to when
they gave that quack Milton Friedman a ten-part television series. It was PBS
in the 1970's that flooded the airwaves with the grammar of seemingly-sane
neoliberalism while the advertisers took up the frontal action of extolling
"markets" and their infinite wisdom. Simultaneously the United States engaged
in a new Cold War, restarted by Carter after the detente policies of Nixon, so
to thoroughly demonize not just "Communism" (though the Soviet system was
everything but that by the end) but anything remotely akin to "central planning
in the economy" (which was called welfare state Keynesian economics when my
grandparents were birthing Baby Boomers). Here, in order to keep funding coming
through major donors, a taxpayer-supported public broadcasting system engaged
in a wholesale fraud that attempted to rob those same taxpayers of literally
multi-trillions of dollars on behalf of a swindler and con man who I have been
unable to discern ever having an actual job. We should understand this media
assault as a frontal attack by capital on our social safety net.
Return to the propaganda model provided by Chomsky and Herman:
-How will this impact ownership?
-How will this impact our advertisers?
-How will this impact the willingness of our regular sources, such as the
White House or 10 Downing Street, to provide us with information?
-What sort of 'flak', negative reactions, will we get from our consumers
and particularly those consumers within the established power structure?
-Can the subject(s) of this story be presented in a fashion that would be
broadly described as either anti-Communist or based on notions of fear so to
preserve the credibility and unchallenged authority of the power structure?
The media has been the sole party that is responsible for both the hegemony
of neoliberalism and the rise of Trump. Both are instances of how they serve
their advertisers.
Let us consider the former for a moment. The case of the public pension
heist that was perpetrated in Rhode Island is illustrative. John Arnold, an
Enron alumnus, donated good money to PBS so to get a false-flag "pension
crisis" narrative put on the
NewsHour
broadcasts that everyone thought
were "neutral". The public pension systems in America are simply one of the
largest reserves of capital in America at a value total of $4 trillion. Arnold
then made a series of campaign donations to up-and-coming politicians like
then-Treasurer and now-Governor Gina Raimondo, who in turn "reformed" the
pension system, investing it in high-stakes high-fee hedge funds, effectively
activating a pipeline from the public pocket into Wall Street. Of course this
was not new for PBS, their support of neoliberalism dates back at least to when
they gave that quack Milton Friedman a ten-part television series. It was PBS
in the 1970's that flooded the airwaves with the grammar of seemingly-sane
neoliberalism while the advertisers took up the frontal action of extolling
"markets" and their infinite wisdom. Simultaneously the United States engaged
in a new Cold War, restarted by Carter after the detente policies of Nixon, so
to thoroughly demonize not just "Communism" (though the Soviet system was
everything but that by the end) but anything remotely akin to "central planning
in the economy" (which was called welfare state Keynesian economics when my
grandparents were birthing Baby Boomers). Here, in order to keep funding coming
through major donors, a taxpayer-supported public broadcasting system engaged
in a wholesale fraud that attempted to rob those same taxpayers of literally
multi-trillions of dollars on behalf of a swindler and con man who I have been
unable to discern ever having an actual job. We should understand this media
assault as a frontal attack by capital on our social safety net.
Return to the propaganda model provided by Chomsky and Herman:
-How will this impact ownership?
-How will this impact our advertisers?
-How will this impact the willingness of our regular sources, such as the
White House or 10 Downing Street, to provide us with information?
-What sort of 'flak', negative reactions, will we get from our consumers
and particularly those consumers within the established power structure?
-Can the subject(s) of this story be presented in a fashion that would be
broadly described as either anti-Communist or based on notions of fear so to
preserve the credibility and unchallenged authority of the power structure?
The media has been the sole party that is responsible for both the hegemony
of neoliberalism and the rise of Trump. Both are instances of how they serve
their advertisers.
Let us consider the former for a moment. The case of the public pension
heist that was perpetrated in Rhode Island is illustrative. John Arnold, an
Enron alumnus, donated good money to PBS so to get a false-flag "pension
crisis" narrative put on the
NewsHour
broadcasts that everyone thought
were "neutral". The public pension systems in America are simply one of the
largest reserves of capital in America at a value total of $4 trillion. Arnold
then made a series of campaign donations to up-and-coming politicians like
then-Treasurer and now-Governor Gina Raimondo, who in turn "reformed" the
pension system, investing it in high-stakes high-fee hedge funds, effectively
activating a pipeline from the public pocket into Wall Street. Of course this
was not new for PBS, their support of neoliberalism dates back at least to when
they gave that quack Milton Friedman a ten-part television series. It was PBS
in the 1970's that flooded the airwaves with the grammar of seemingly-sane
neoliberalism while the advertisers took up the frontal action of extolling
"markets" and their infinite wisdom. Simultaneously the United States engaged
in a new Cold War, restarted by Carter after the detente policies of Nixon, so
to thoroughly demonize not just "Communism" (though the Soviet system was
everything but that by the end) but anything remotely akin to "central planning
in the economy" (which was called welfare state Keynesian economics when my
grandparents were birthing Baby Boomers). Here, in order to keep funding coming
through major donors, a taxpayer-supported public broadcasting system engaged
in a wholesale fraud that attempted to rob those same taxpayers of literally
multi-trillions of dollars on behalf of a swindler and con man who I have been
unable to discern ever having an actual job. We should understand this media
assault as a frontal attack by capital on our social safety net.
Trump is a rear-guard assault, though it seems now with Mike Pence on the
ticket Wall Street feels more comfortable. The media props him up in the way it
propped up "terrorists" to justify the militarizing of the police and the
shredding of the Bill of Rights and habeas corpus. He scares well-intentioned
but still-racist white liberals into a self-aggrandizing pity party wherein
they will say anything and everything about how we just
must
elect
Hillary Clinton. They fail to recognize and accept that Clinton has been
targeting the Social Security system for privatization for decades, best
illustrated in a fantastic essay by
Robin Blackburn
I have been re-reading and circulating on an almost daily
basis this year. The Democratic Party platform plank supporting Social Security
seems as adamantine as wet toilet paper, capital wants that public resource on
Wall Street and Obama himself has been making moves over the last eight years
to actualize that plan. Trump scares the sheep into the wolf's den while Bernie
Sanders barks at them should they go astray. And Trump is only able to do that
with the aid and support of a corporate media that throws up a farcical wall of
integrity and objectivity so to actualize it.
This is the synthesis of Trump
and Clinton in the montage Eisenstein described. Both are pro-war, anti-Social
Security, racist, misogynist, awful people. One and the same in almost every
sense.
Andrew Stewart
is a documentary film maker and reporter who lives outside
Providence. His film, AARON BRIGGS AND THE HMS GASPEE, about the historical role of Brown
University in the slave trade, is available for purchase on
Amazon
Instant Video
or on
DVD.
The subtext is that it was Clinton's carelessness with classified material which got him killed. And the probability that the
reason for his return to Tehran was that his minders had assessed it was now safe for him to go back and be Washington's ear in
Tehran.
Yeah, right! With Gary Johnson, Libertarian, nipping at his
heels, a surge in third party voting is going to help the
Donald! [NOT!] If anything, discouraging people from voting
third party is going to help Trump.
But apparently Fred C. Dobbs doesn't like the idea of
voting third party to vote your conscience and register your
disgust with the two evils...
Monessen, Pennsylvania (CNN)Donald Trump on Tuesday trashed U.S. trade policies that he
said have encouraged globalization and wiped out American manufacturing jobs in a speech in which
he promised to herald a U.S. economic resurgence.
Speaking before a colorful backdrop of crushed aluminum cans, Trump pitched himself at a factory
in Rust Belt Pennsylvania as a change agent who would bring back manufacturing jobs and end the "rigged
system," which he argued presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton represents.
Trump promised sweeping changes if elected -- including killing the Trans-Pacific Partnership
trade deal and renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement -- and urged voters to be wary
of a "campaign of fear and intimidation" aimed at swaying them away from his populist message.
"Our politicians have aggressively pursued a policy of globalization -- moving our jobs, our wealth
and our factories to Mexico and overseas," he said, reading from prepared remarks and using teleprompters.
"Globalization has made the financial elite who donate to politicians very, very wealthy. I used
to be one of them. Hate to say it, but I used to be one of them."
Trump repeatedly slammed Clinton for supporting free trade agreements and argued that under a
Clinton presidency "nothing is going to change."
"The inner cities will remain poor. the factories will remain closed," Trump said at Alumisource,
a raw material producer for the aluminum and steel industries in Monessen, Pennsylvania, an hour
south of Pittsburgh. "The special interests will remain firmly in control."
Echoing Clinton's chief
rival for the Democratic nomination, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, Trump also argued that Clinton
has "voted for virtually every trade agreement" and accused her of supporting trade deals that have
hurt U.S. workers.
Trump's speech drew a swift rebuke Tuesday from opposing ends of the political spectrum.
The Chamber of Commerce, the big business lobby that traditionally backs Republicans, issued a
swift statement warning that Trump's proposed policies would herald another U.S. recession.
"Under Trump's trade plans, we would see higher prices, fewer jobs, and a weaker economy," the
group tweeted, linking to a lengthier article
warning that a recession would hit the U.S. "within the first year" of a Trump presidency.
"I'd love for him to explain how all of that fits with his talk about 'America First,'" Clinton
said in a speech last week.
Trump moved quickly on Tuesday to insulate himself from the criticism from his rival's campaign
and others opposed to his vision of radically changing U.S. economic policies.
Trump repeatedly warned Americans to gird themselves against a "campaign of fear" he argued Clinton
and others are running against him -- a notable criticism given the accusations that several of his
policies, including a ban on Muslims and a plan to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, have
played to voters' fears.
The de facto GOP nominee promised to instruct his treasury secretary to "label China a currency
manipulator" and to order the U.S. trade representative to bring lawsuits against China at the World
Trade Organization and in U.S. courts to combat what he characterized as unfair trade policies.
And he also warned of potentially levying tariffs on imports from China and other countries, reviving
a common theme of his campaign.
Trump has frequently argued on the stump that the U.S. is getting "killed" by other countries on
trade and threatened to raise certain tariffs on China and Mexico up to 35%.
Early on in his yearlong campaign, Trump singled out specific American companies -- notably Ford
and Nabisco -- for plans to move some of their manufacturing plants abroad.
Slamming Nabisco for building a factory in Mexico, Trump has vowed he's "not eating Oreos anymore."
A senior Trump aide told CNN earlier on Tuesday the speech would be "the most detailed economic address
he has given so far."
Trump has frequently lamented the economic slowdown working-class communities in America have faced
as a result of a drop in American manufacturing, particularly in the last decade.
Financial oligarchy now is really afraid of losing power... They have weak neocon stooge Hillary
-- an old woman with frail health, blood clots in the brain and probably other unknown to public
ailments. And will fight back tooth and nail to preserve
it. Like trump said -- expect the elections to be rigged.
In "How
American Politics Went Insane," Brookings Institute Fellow Jonathan Rauch spends
many thousands of words arguing for the reinvigoration of political machines, as a means
of keeping the ape-citizen further from power.
He portrays the public as a gang of
nihilistic loonies determined to play mailbox baseball with the gears of state.
"Neurotic hatred of the political class is the country's last universally acceptable
form of bigotry," he writes, before concluding:
"Our most pressing political problem today is that the country abandoned the
establishment, not the other way around."
Rauch's audacious piece, much like Andrew Sullivan's clarion call for a
less-democratic future in New York magazine ("Democracies
end when they are too democratic"), is not merely a warning about the threat posed
to civilization by demagogues like Donald Trump.
It's a piece that praises Boss Tweed's Tammany Hall (it was good for the
Irish!), the smoke-filled room (good for "brokering complex compromises"), and
pork (it helps "glue Congress together" by giving members "a kind of currency
to trade").
Rauch even chokes multiple times on the word "corruption,"
seeming reluctant to even mention the concept without shrouding it in flurries
of caveats. When he talks about the "ever-present potential for corruption"
that political middlemen pose, he's quick to note the converse also applies
(emphasis mine):
"Overreacting to the threat of corruption is just as harmful. Political
contributions, for example, look unseemly, but they play a vital role as
political bonding agents."
The basic thrust is that
shadowy back-room mechanisms, which Rauch absurdly describes as being relics of a lost
era, have a positive role and must be brought back.
He argues back-room relationships and payoffs at least committed the actors involved to
action. Meanwhile, all the transparency and sunshine and access the public is always
begging for leads mainly to gridlock and frustration.
In one passage, Rauch blames gridlock on the gerrymandering that renders most
congressional elections meaningless. In a scandal that should get more media play,
Democrats and Republicans have divvied up territory to make most House districts "safe"
for one party or another. Only about 10 to 20 percent of races are really contested in
any given year (one estimate in 2014 described an incredible 408 of the 435 races as
"noncompetitive").
As Rauch notes, meaningless general elections make primaries the main battlegrounds.
This puts pressure on party candidates to drift to extremes...
... ... ...
But it's all bull.
Voters in America not only aren't over-empowered, they've for decades now been almost
totally disenfranchised, subjects of one of the more brilliant change-suppressing
systems ever invented.
We have periodic elections, which leave citizens with the
feeling of self-rule. But in reality people are only allowed to choose between
candidates carefully screened by wealthy donors. Nobody without a billion dollars and
the approval of a half-dozen giant media companies has any chance at high office.
People have no other source of influence. Unions have been crushed. Nobody has any job
security. Main Street institutions that once allowed people to walk down the road to
sort things out with other human beings have been phased out. In their place now rest
distant, unfeeling global bureaucracies.
Has a health insurance company wrongly denied your sick child coverage? Good luck even
getting someone on the phone to talk it over, much less get it sorted out. Your
neighborhood bank, once a relatively autonomous mechanism for stimulating the local
economy, is now a glorified ATM machine with limited ability to respond to a community's
most basic financial concerns.
One of the underpublicized revelations of the financial crisis, for instance,
was that millions of Americans found themselves unable to get answers to a
simple questions like, "Who
holds the note to my house?"
People want more power over their own lives.
They want to feel some connection to society. Most particularly, they don't
want to be dictated to by distant bureaucrats who don't seem to care what
they're going through, and think they know what's best for everyone.
These are legitimate concerns. Unfortunately, they came out in this past
year in the campaign of Donald Trump, who'd exposed a tiny flaw in the system.
People are still free to vote, and some peculiarities in the structure of
the commercial media, combined with mountains of public anger, conspired to put
one of the two parties in the hands of a coverage-devouring billionaire running
on a "Purge the Scum" platform.
Donald Trump is dangerous because as president, he'd likely have little respect for
law. But a gang of people whose metaphor for society is "We are the white cells, voters
are the disease" is comparably scary in its own banal, less click-generating way.
These self-congratulating cognoscenti could have looked at the events of the last
year and wondered why people were so angry with them, and what they could do to make
government work better for the population.
Instead, their first instinct is to dismiss voter concerns as baseless, neurotic bigotry
and to assume that the solution is to give Washington bureaucrats even more leeway to
blow off the public. In the absurdist comedy that is American political life, this is
the ultimate anti-solution to the unrest of the last year, the mathematically perfect
wrong ending.
Trump is going to lose this election, then live on as the reason for an emboldened, even
less-responsive oligarchy. And you thought this election season couldn't get any worse.
"... It makes me wonder if we ought not to be discussing Clinton in the frame of "The Ego Candidate". It's tempting to characterize Trump for that label, given his boastfulness which does seem to be part of his character. But for all that, Trump comes across to me as mostly law-abiding, and someone who recognizes and observes limits. Clinton neither recognizes or observes anything of the kind, and she is limited only by what she cannot get away with. ..."
Sayyyyyy…..didn't someone here theorize, right after the news broke that
the DNC's emails had been hacked, and Hillary blamed the Russians so people
would forget what she and the rest of the coven did to Sanders, that the
actual attacker was more likely someone much closer to home?
Enter the
Disgruntled US Intelligence Worker . According to US government whistleblower
William Binney, somebody in the NSA released Hillary's and the DNC's emails,
infuriated at Teflon Hillary's non-stick escape from any accountability
for her hijinks.
The headline suggests he knows, but the body of the story suggests he
is just speculating, though. But it raises a valid point – the NSA probably
has all those emails, including the 30,000 she deleted on the grounds that
they were 'personal'.
At some point between now and November, is anyone in the media going
to put the questions about the likelihood of NSA possession of, and therefore
ease of FBI access thereto, the "missing" emails to Director Comey? Or will
TPTB just smile grimly and pray no further leaks arrive to shatter the Narnian
alternative reality world they inhabit?
What an excellent article, quite a bit more authoritative than the one I
cited although it helpfully offers the same source, and it shapes some more
pieces of the puzzle which now make more sense. The compromising of intelligence
personnels' identities was something that, to the best of my knowledge,
was never discussed in any stories on her email peccadilloes. Intelligence
agencies quite properly despise anyone who casually blows the cover of its
operatives. It makes me wonder if we ought not to be discussing Clinton
in the frame of "The Ego Candidate". It's tempting to characterize Trump
for that label, given his boastfulness which does seem to be part of his
character. But for all that, Trump comes across to me as mostly law-abiding,
and someone who recognizes and observes limits. Clinton neither recognizes
or observes anything of the kind, and she is limited only by what she cannot
get away with.
Thanks for posting that revealing corroborative piece.
From a pro-Russian blog... Applebaum is essentially a tool...
Notable quotes:
"... While Applebaum does not think that Trump has a direct relationship to Putin, the American Presidential Candidate has been using lines from Russian propaganda, which suggests that he is probably getting the information from his staff; ..."
"... I couldn't watch it; as soon as I saw Applebaum's horsey face come up on the screen I felt queasy and had to turn it off. I did stay long enough to hear her characterize Manafort's work for Viktor Yanukovych as perhaps the defining moment in his career, working for Ukrainian oligarchs. ..."
"... Apfelbaum's hatred of Trump, and that of Atlanticists, stems from the fact that Trump does not share the Atlanticists' aggressive foreign policy agenda. The founding tenet and pillar of Atlanticism – is implacable hostility to Russia. Trump deviates from that, hence the reason why Trump is so loathed and viewed as a heretic by Atlanticists. ..."
"... Well, she wrote a book about the gulags which received 'critical acclaim'. She is married to Radislaw Sikorski, onetime Polish Foreign Minister and who was once under consideration for NATO Secretary-General, and who is now a member of Petro Poroshenko's 'Foreign Advisory Council'. She hates Russia as if she were a native Pole. And that's…about it. She loved Georgie Bush enough to bear his children if he had asked, and in general she is a big fan of America kicking sand in everybody's face all around the world and making them eat dirt with its big, powerful military. As I said, she is a diehard conservative – but these are strange times, and the Republican candidate has refused to say how much he loves Israel and hates Russia, while there is by far a better chance that America will return to its ass-kicking ways under Hillary Clinton, so that's the way Annie is leaning this time around. ..."
"... Not to mention the numerous sources of information on how Israel influences US foreign policy and how often Satanyahu flies to Washington to lecture O'Bomber on what he's supposed to do. ..."
"Trump is surrounded by people close to Russia in a way that is very unusual not only
in American politics but in American business as well;"
While Applebaum does not think that Trump has a direct relationship to Putin, the American
Presidential Candidate has been using lines from Russian propaganda, which suggests that he is
probably getting the information from his staff;
Applebaum says that it is rare for another country to influence U.S. politics, and Trump's
campaign was only interested in the Ukraine platform and not much else;
DNC hack: "the use of illicitly stolen information to affect and shape politics is something
that the Kremlin has been working on for a decade."
"He is surrounded by people close to Russia in a way that is very unusual not only in American
politics but in American business as well," says Anne Applebaum, an award-winning author and Washington
Post columnist, when speaking about Donald Trump and his entourage. Paul Manafort and Carter Page
, two individuals who manage and advise Trump, both have ties to Russia.
While Applebaum does not think that Trump has a direct relationship to Putin, the American
Presidential Candidate has been using lines from Russian propaganda, which suggests that he is
probably getting the information from his staff.
"He seems to have a special interest in Russia and Ukraine. I'm guessing because of who's around
him." Applebaum says that it is rare for another country to influence U.S. politics, and Trump's
campaign was only interested in the Ukraine platform and not much else.
Applebaum also touches upon the recent DNC hacks and says that all fingers point at Russia:
"the use of illicitly stolen information to affect and shape politics is something that the Kremlin
has been working on for a decade."
Hromadske's Nataliya Gumenyuk spoke to Anne Applebaum, award-winning author and Washington
Post columnist via Skype on July 31st, 2016.
I couldn't watch it; as soon as I saw Applebaum's horsey face come up on the screen I felt queasy
and had to turn it off. I did stay long enough to hear her characterize Manafort's work for Viktor
Yanukovych as perhaps the defining moment in his career, working for Ukrainian oligarchs.
Somebody better let Tony "shirtfront" Abbott know that he might be establishing the defining
moment in his career. Because that's what he's doing; working for Ukrainian oligarchs. And Applebaum
did not seem to intend it as a compliment. Mustn't forget Tony "War Criminal" Blair, or Anders
"Fogh of War" Fogh Rasmussen.
The Democrats and their supporters – and we should remember there was a time when Annie Applebaum
would not cross the street to spit on Hillary Clinton if she burst into flames, because Annie
is as Republican as they come – have to keep up the noise about Putin hacking the DNC so that
voters do not ask, "Yeah, but is the information that was released true? And why do political
figures have a right to hide that stuff from us? Don't they work for us?"
Apfelbaum is far more restrained in this interview, than she is on her twitter feed and her Washington
Post column. Where she repeatedly insinuates that Trump is a Russian agent, plant, spy or a "Siberian
candidate".
Tony "the Geordie" Abbott, Tony "JP Morgan" Blair and Anders Fogh "cartoons" Rasmussen are
all good and noble Atlanticist, therefore one cannot equate them with Paul Manafort – a professional
influence peddler. This how Apfelbaum would rationalise the difference and draw a distinction.
Whether Apfelbaum is a Republican or Democrat, I don't know. She has worked outside the US
most of her career and adult life, her interests are foreign affairs. And when it comes to foreign
policy, the two US parties pursue exactly the same policies and objectives – that of expanding
US power and maintaining US ascendency.
Apfelbaum's hatred of Trump, and that of Atlanticists, stems from the fact that Trump does
not share the Atlanticists' aggressive foreign policy agenda. The founding tenet and pillar of
Atlanticism – is implacable hostility to Russia. Trump deviates from that, hence the reason why
Trump is so loathed and viewed as a heretic by Atlanticists.
Trump's opinions and statements on Russia, Ukraine, Crimea and NATO has made Atlanticists apoplectic
– as any US-Russia detente or rapprochement would ruin the careers of countless Atlanticist DC
policy wonks, hacks, academics, and propagandists.
Well, she wrote a book about the gulags which received 'critical acclaim'. She is married to Radislaw
Sikorski, onetime Polish Foreign Minister and who was once under consideration for NATO Secretary-General,
and who is now a member of Petro Poroshenko's 'Foreign Advisory Council'. She hates Russia as
if she were a native Pole. And that's…about it. She loved Georgie Bush enough to bear his children
if he had asked, and in general she is a big fan of America kicking sand in everybody's face all
around the world and making them eat dirt with its big, powerful military. As I said, she is a
diehard conservative – but these are strange times, and the Republican candidate has refused to
say how much he loves Israel and hates Russia, while there is by far a better chance that America
will return to its ass-kicking ways under Hillary Clinton, so that's the way Annie is leaning
this time around.
Reformed Judaism = women rabbis, gender equality, women and girls allowed to read Torah, bat mitzvah
celebrations, secular and social justice warrior values, being able to eat food prepared by non-Jews
" … Applebaum says that it is rare for another country to influence U.S. politics, and Trump's
campaign was only interested in the Ukraine platform and not much else …"
I guess Annie Apples doesn't read DailyCaller.com much, does she?
Not to mention the numerous sources of information on how Israel influences US foreign policy
and how often Satanyahu flies to Washington to lecture O'Bomber on what he's supposed to do.
"... Anyone not willing to jump to Hillary is a "Bernie Bro"-not willing to vote for anyone but Bernie. Why? Because, Trump. Forget the will of the people, the democratic process, or "voting one's conscience"-Trump trumps all hesitation. We simply cannot afford to give Trump any chance of winning. ..."
For months now, the Hillary campaign has vigorously argued that Bernie supporters have to fall in
line to support the Democratic National Committee's favorite candidate.
Anyone not willing to jump to
Hillary is a "Bernie Bro"-not willing to vote for anyone but Bernie. Why? Because, Trump. Forget the
will of the people, the democratic process, or "voting one's conscience"-Trump trumps all hesitation.
We simply cannot afford to give Trump any chance of winning.
"... But to read the papers in the last two days is to imagine that we didn't just spend a year witnessing the growth of a massive grassroots movement fueled by loathing of the party establishment, with some correspondingly severe numerical contractions in the turnout department (though she won, for instance, Clinton received 30 percent fewer votes in California this year versus 2008, and 13 percent fewer in New Jersey). ..."
"... The twin insurgencies of Trump and Sanders this year were equally a blistering referendum on Beltway politics. ..."
Hohmann's thesis was that the "scope and scale" of Clinton's wins Tuesday night meant
mainstream Democrats could now safely return to their traditional We won, screw you posture of
"minor concessions" toward the "liberal base."
Hohmann focused on the fact that with Bernie out of the way, Hillary now had a path to victory
that would involve focusing on Trump's negatives. Such a strategy won't require much if any
acquiescence toward the huge masses of Democratic voters who just tried to derail her candidacy.
And not only is the primary scare over, but Clinton and the centrist Democrats in general are in
better shape than ever.
"Big picture," Hohmann wrote, "Clinton is running a much better and more organized campaign than
she did in 2008."
Then there was Jonathan Capehart, also of the Post, whose "This is how Bernie Sanders and Donald
Trump are the same person" piece describes Sanders as a "stubborn outsider" who "shares the same
DNA" as Donald Trump. Capeheart snootily seethes that both men will ultimately pay a karmic price
for not knowing their places.
"In the battle of the outsider egos storming the political establishment, Trump succeeded where
Sanders failed," he wrote. "But the chaos unleashed by Trump's victory could spell doom for the
GOP all over the ballot in November. Pardon me while I dab that single tear trickling down my
cheek."
If they had any brains, Beltway Dems and their clucky sycophants like Capeheart would not be
celebrating this week. They ought to be horrified to their marrow that the all-powerful
Democratic Party ended up having to dig in for a furious rally to stave off a quirky Vermont
socialist almost completely lacking big-dollar donors or institutional support.
They should be freaked out, cowed and relieved, like the Golden State Warriors would be if they
needed a big fourth quarter to pull out a win against Valdosta State.
But to read the papers in the last two days is to imagine that we didn't just spend a year
witnessing the growth of a massive grassroots movement fueled by loathing of the party
establishment, with some correspondingly severe numerical contractions in the turnout department
(though she won, for instance, Clinton received 30 percent fewer votes in California this year
versus 2008, and 13 percent fewer in New Jersey).
The twin insurgencies of Trump and Sanders this year were equally a blistering referendum on
Beltway politics. But the major-party leaders and the media mouthpieces they hang out with
can't see this, because of what that friend of mine talked about over a decade ago: Washington
culture is too far up its own backside to see much of anything at all.
"... Ugh. Hey, Jonathan: Voters don't want candidates who agree with them about everything. They just want one who isn't going to completely take them for granted. If that's become too much to ask, maybe there's something wrong with the Democratic Party, not people like Ralph Nader or Bernie Sanders. ..."
"... As of June 6th, Hillary Clinton had won nearly 13 million primary votes, while Trump had gotten some 11.5 million. ..."
Jonathan Chait of New York magazine
wrote a column about Ralph Nader this morning that uses some interesting language. Noting that
it's now been 16 years since Nader ran for president and garnered enough dissenting votes to help
elect George W. Bush, he wrote (emphasis mine):
Instead of a reality check for the party, it'll be smugness
redoubled
"That isenough time for Nader to confess his role in enabling
one of the most disastrous presidencies in American history, or at least to come up with a better
explanation for his decision. Instead, Nader has repeated his same litany of evasions, most recently
in an interview with
Jeremy Hobson on WBUR, where he dismissed all criticisms of his 2000 campaign as 'fact deprived.'"
It would be foolish to argue that Nader's run in 2000 didn't enable Bush's presidency. Though
there were other factors, Nader's presence on the ballot was surely a big one.
But the career Democrats of the Beltway and their buddies in the press have turned the Nader episode
into something very like the creation story of the Third Way political movement. And like many religious
myths, it's gotten very tiresome.
The Democratic Party leaders have trained their followers to perceive everything in terms of one
single end-game equation: If you don't support us, you're supporting Bush/Rove/Cheney/Palin/Insert
Evil Republican Here.
That the monster of the moment, Donald Trump, is a lot more monstrous than usual will likely make
this argument an even bigger part of the Democratic Party platform going forward.
It's a sound formula for making ballot-box decisions, but the people who push it never seem content
to just use it to win elections. They're continually trying to make an ethical argument out of it,
to prove people who defy The Equation are, whether they know it or not, morally wrong and in league
with the other side.
Beltway Democrats seem increasingly to believe that all people who fall within a certain broad
range of liberal-ish beliefs owe their votes and their loyalty to the Democratic Party.
That's why, as a socially liberal person who probably likes trees and wouldn't want to see
Roe v. Wade overturned, Nader's decision to take votes from the party-blessed candidate Gore
is viewed not as dissent, but as a kind of treason.
The problem with this line of thinking is that there's no end to it. If you think I owe you my
vote because I recycle and enjoyed To Kill a Mockingbird, you're not going to work very
hard to keep it. That's particularly true if the only standard you think you need to worry about
is not being worse than Donald Trump, which is almost the same as no standard at all.
This is why the thinking within the Democratic Party has gotten so flabby over the years. It increasingly
seems to rejoice in its voters' lack of real choices, and relies on a political formula that requires
little input from anyone outside the Beltway.
It's heavily financed by corporate money, and the overwhelming majority of its voters would never
cast a vote for the nut-bar God-and-guns version of Republicanism that's been their sole opposition
for decades.
So the party gets most of its funding without having to beg for it door to door, and it gets many
of its votes by default. Except for campaign-trail photo ops, mainstream Democrats barely need to
leave Washington to stay in business.
Still, the Democratic Leadership Council wing of the Democrats have come to believe they've earned
their status, by being the only plausible bulwark against the Republican menace.
This sounds believable because party officials and pundits like Chait keep describing critics
of the party as far-leftists and extremists, whose platform couldn't win a national election.
Dissenting voices like this year's version of Nader, Bernie Sanders, are inevitably pitched as
quixotic egotists who don't have the guts to do what it takes to win. They're described as just out
for 15 minutes of fame, and maybe a few plaudits from teenagers and hippies who'll gush over their
far-out idealism.
But that characterization isn't accurate. The primary difference between the Nader/Sanders platform
and the Gore/Clinton platform isn't rooted in ideology at all, but money.
The former camp refuses to be funded by the Goldmans and Pfizers of the world, while the latter
camp embraces those donors. That's really all this comes down to. There's nothing particularly radical
about not taking money from companies you think you might need to regulate someday. And there's nothing
particularly centrist or "realistic" about taking that same money.
When I think about the way the Democrats and their friends in the press keep telling me I owe
them my vote, situations like the following come to mind. We're in another financial crisis. The
CEOs of the ten biggest banks in America, fresh from having wrecked the economy with the latest harebrained
bubble scheme, come to the Oval Office begging for a bailout.
In that moment, to whom is my future Democratic president going to listen: those bankers or me?
It's not going to be me, that's for sure. Am I an egotist for being annoyed by that? And how exactly
should I take being told on top of that that I still owe this party my vote, and that I should keep
my mouth shut about my irritation if I don't want to be called a Republican-enabler?
The collapse of the Republican Party and its takeover by the nativist Trump wing poses all sorts
of problems, not the least of which being the high likelihood that the Democrats will now get even
lazier when it comes to responding to their voters' interests. The crazier the Republicans get, the
more reflexive will be the arguments that we can't afford any criticism of Democrats anymore, lest
we invite in the Fourth Reich.
I didn't vote for Nader in 2000, and I don't have a problem with anyone arguing this coming Election
Day that we shouldn't all do whatever we can to keep Donald Trump out of office.
What's problematic is the way Beltway media types are forever turning postmortems on the candidacies
of people like Nader or Sanders into parables about the perils of voting your conscience, when what
we're really talking about is the party's unwillingness to untether itself from easy money. This
is how Chait sums up Nader (again, emphasis mine):
"Nader goes on to defend his idiosyncratic belief that people are under no obligation to consider
real-world impacts in their voting behavior. Vote for a third-party candidate, write in a candidate,
follow your own conscience: 'I think voters in a democracy should vote for anybody
they want, including write in or even themselves. I don't believe in any kind of reprimand of voters
who stray from the two-party tyranny.'
"Why should people vote for candidates at all? Since, by definition, the person we most closely
agree with is ourselves, why not just write your own name in every time?"
Ugh. Hey, Jonathan: Voters don't want candidates who agree with them about everything. They just
want one who isn't going to completely take them for granted. If that's become too much to ask, maybe
there's something wrong with the Democratic Party, not people like Ralph Nader or Bernie Sanders.
As of June 6th, Hillary Clinton had won nearly 13 million primary votes, while Trump had gotten
some 11.5 million.
After a week in which Donald Trump insulted babies and their mothers and war heroes and their
families, and threw in fire marshals for good measure, the scariest thing to come out of his team
of thugs and political mercenaries is this: the suggestion that civil unrest could follow if he's
denied the presidency.
When the Supreme Court handed George W. Bush the White House in 2000 even though he lost the
popular vote, Al Gore graciously conceded and faded away. When Mitt Romney lost to Barack Obama
four years ago although his internal polls showed a Republican triumph, he congratulated the winner
and went off to rediscover his many grandchildren.
Despite party-machine manipulation and considerable voting of the dead, the American institution
that produces a peaceful transfer of power has survived.
But this year, facing a likely trouncing in November, Trump has signaled that he will try to
bring down our democracy with him. His overlooked comment - "I'm afraid the election is going
to be rigged" - is the opening move in a scheme to delegitimize the outcome.
Because Trump is consistently barbaric and such a prolific liar, it's hard to sustain outrage
over any one of his serial scandals. But his pre-emptive attack on the electoral process is very
troubling.
To understand what Trump is up to, listen to his doppelgänger, the veteran political operative
Roger Stone. He will say things that even Trump will not say, usually as a way to allow Trump
to later repeat some variant of them.
It was Stone who called a CNN commentator a "stupid Negro" and accused the Gold Star parents
of Capt. Humayun Khan of being Muslim Brotherhood agents. And it was Stone who threatened to give
out the hotel room numbers of unsupportive Republicans at the party convention, the better for
the Trumpian mob to find them.
He tastes the food for the king to make sure it's not poison. If it doesn't kill Roger Stone,
it will not kill Donald Trump.
Picking up on Trump's rigged-election meme, Stone told a right-wing news outlet that the electoral
fix was already in: "The government will be shut down if they attempt to steal this and swear
Hillary in." The outcome is fair only if Trump wins.
"If there's voter fraud, this election will be illegitimate, the election of the winner will
be illegitimate, we will have a constitutional crisis, widespread civil disobedience," he said.
It would be laughable if the campaign were simply laying down the grand excuse for the label
that will follow the tyrant from Trump Tower after Nov. 8 - loser. But Trump has crossed all barriers
of precedent and civility, from waging an openly racist campaign to loose talk about nuclear weapons.
He has challenged the independence of the judiciary system, and called for a religious test for
entry into this nation. With this latest tactic, he's trying to destabilize the country itself
after he's crushed.
Let's talk about the basis for his sore loser uprising - the gaming of the system. Trump's
casinos were rigged, as are all gambling parlors, in favor of the house. Italian soccer is rigged.
But there is virtually no evidence of modern American elections being fixed.
Studying national elections from 2000 to 2014, and looking at 834 million ballots cast, Justin
Levitt of Loyola Law School found a total of 31 instances of credible voter fraud. Yes, 31. The
Bush administration, after a five-year investigation concluding in 2007, found no evidence of
any organized effort to skew federal elections. A federal judge in Wisconsin found that "virtually
no voter impersonation occurs."
Trump's evidence? "I just hear things and I just feel it." Yeah, he hears things. Like Russia
not actually taking over Crimea. Like President Obama not being an American citizen. Like the
N.F.L. writing him an imaginary letter. "The voter ID situation has turned out to be a very unfair
development," he said this week. "We may have people vote 10 times."
He's right about the unfairness of voter identification, but not in the way he means it. As
a slew of recent court rulings have shown, Republican-led efforts to deny the vote to millions
of citizens has rigged the system against the poor, the disabled, ethnic minorities. A voter-
suppression law in North Carolina targeted blacks "with almost surgical precision," an appeals
court ruled.
Nationwide rigging, though difficult to do in a system with more than 9,000 voting jurisdictions,
is more likely to come from Russian efforts at hacking voting machines, given Vladimir Putin's
apparent attempt to tip things in favor of his fellow authoritarian, the unstable Donald Trump.
With his inability to process basic information, Trump has gone down this road before. After
the 2012 contest, which Romney lost by nearly five million votes, Trump said: "This election is
a total sham and travesty. We are not a democracy." The last statement, judging by the groundwork
he's doing for this November, looks more like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
"Going forward it's like a hundred-to-one advantage, Clinton over Trump...In the current US
presidential race, there is no real contest at all in terms of support by the oligarchs - and
their support tends to be decisive."
But then there's this:
Julian Assange Special: Do Wikileaks Have the Email That'll Put Clinton in Prison?
...From 23rd July - WikiLeaks Just Revealed Mainstream Media Works Directly With Hillary, DNC http://theantimedia.org/wikileaks-media-dnc-hillary/ One of the most damning findings of the leak is the fact Clinton and the DNC have worked closely
with, manipulated, and bullied media outlets.
No doubt the Anti-Trump sentiment is rampant in the MSM and now even a good deal of alternate
media I pick up... but any cursory glance at Hilary vs Trump youtube viewing numbers would give
anyone a fair idea of the state of play. Trumps any publicity is good publicity will eventually
pay dividends.
"... Some powerful figures clearly want any winding down of this 'new' Cold War dead in its tracks. Trump's questioning of the hostilities with Russia, of the purpose of NATO, and of the costs to the US of it being a global hegemon have turned them cold. ..."
"... Especially, if those who reject it, and who opt to stay out of the globalised order, find that they can so do – and emerge empowered and with their influence enhanced? If the political 'rules-based order' does erode, what then will be the future for the inter-connected, and presently shaky, US-led, global financial order and governance?" ..."
""Some powerful figures clearly want any winding down
of this 'new' Cold War dead in its tracks. Trump's questioning of the hostilities with
Russia, of the purpose of NATO, and of the costs to the US of it being a global hegemon
have turned them cold.
Does he (Trump) not understand, (these 'ancien régime' figures seem to say,) that
rapprochement and entente with Putin now, could bring the whole structure tumbling down?
It could collapse America's entire foreign policy? Without a clear Russian 'threat' (the
'threat' being now a constant refrain in the US Beltway), what meaning has NATO? – and
without NATO, why should Europe stay "on side, and [do] the right thing". And if
Damascus, Moscow and Tehran succeed in emerging with political credit and esteem from
the Syria conflict, what price then, the US-led "rules-based" global order?
Especially,
if those who reject it, and who opt to stay out of the globalised order, find that they
can so do – and emerge empowered and with their influence enhanced? If the political
'rules-based order' does erode, what then will be the future for the inter-connected,
and presently shaky, US-led, global financial order and governance?"
"... "The rise and fall of American resistance to organized wealth and power." Simply stated, that mystery was: Why do people rebel at certain moments and acquiesce in others? ..."
"... A "silent majority" would no longer remain conveniently silent. The Tea Party howled about every kind of political establishment in bed with Wall Street, crony capitalists, cultural and sexual deviants, free-traders who scarcely blinked at the jobs they incinerated ..."
"... In the face-off between right-wing populism and neoliberalism, Tea Party legions and Trumpists now find Fortune 500 CEOs morally obnoxious and an economic threat, ..."
"... I couldn't disagree more with this parasite that is attempting to twist history, so as to continue the elitist programming of youth with more distorted understanding of their heritage! ..."
"... If you doubt me then do a little research it what the foundation of 'May Day' is all about! ..."
"... Then check and see how many modern nations all over the world celebrate it as a national holiday (over 100) and then ask why it is not celebrated in America, where it was founded on the blood and sweat of American workers! ..."
"... Yes, there was a socialist system built into this nation and that system was called a society based upon a 'Commonwealth' that translated into todays terminology could be defined as a 'Democratic Socialism'!! ..."
"... "As Chomsky says, 'neoliberalism isn't new and it isn't liberal.' (the 'liberal' refers to the markets, not the politics of its purveyors - Reagan, Thatcher, Clinton were all NLs)" ..."
"... Soon, very soon, Sanders shall do what he keeps promising to do, and endorse the dangerous Warmonger of Wall Street, with whom he pretends to disagree, on so many issues. He might even be her Vice Presidential choice, in order to better neuter his supporters, and to minimize the political contortions that he'll have to go through, to convince his supporters to vote for her. Gird yourselves. ..."
"... If you keep in mind that Capitalism is a Pyramid Scheme, the whole thing makes better sense. ..."
"... The problem today is that the worship of money has taken on such proportions, that even the least among us has thoughts of riches coming their way, at any moment, even if it's the false hope of winning the "Lottery", the big one!! And as long as they have those dreams, the cognition of what is happening around them is dulled. ..."
"... I have neighbors who play the state lottery every week. Now and then I mention to them that buying lotto tickets is a fools bet. They reply like trained parrots "you can't win if you don't play", and mumble something about lotto proceeds and "education". ..."
"... "But Republicans have more than shared in this; they have, in fact, often taken the lead in implanting a market- and finance-driven economic system that has produced a few "winners" and legions of losers. Both parties heralded a deregulated marketplace, global free trade, the outsourcing of manufacturing and other industries, the privatization of public services, and the shrink-wrapping of the social safety net." ..."
"... Yes. Reagan was a neoliberal. Both Bushes too... wanna hear something really crazy? Hillary is both a neoliberal AND a neoconservative... true story. ..."
A year ago, in my book
The
Age of Acquiescence, I attempted to resolve a mystery hinted at in its subtitle: "The
rise and fall of American resistance to organized wealth and power." Simply stated, that mystery
was: Why do people rebel at certain moments and acquiesce in others?
Resisting all the hurts,
insults, threats to material well-being, exclusions, degradations, systematic inequalities, over-lordship,
indignities, and powerlessness that are the essence of everyday life for millions would seem natural
enough, even inescapable, if not inevitable. Why put up with all that?
... ... ...
A "silent majority" would no longer remain conveniently silent. The Tea Party howled about
every kind of political establishment in bed with Wall Street, crony capitalists, cultural and sexual
deviants, free-traders who scarcely blinked at the jobs they incinerated, anti-taxers who had
never met a tax shelter they didn't love, and decriers of big government who lived off state subsidies.
In a zip code far, far away, a privileged sliver of Americans who had gamed the system, who had indeed
made gaming the system into the system, looked down on the mass of the previously credulous, now
outraged, incredulously.
...it was The Donald who magically rode that
Trump Tower escalator down to the ground floor to pick up the pieces. His irreverence for
established authority worked. ...worked for millions who had grown infatuated with all the
celebrated Wall Street conquistadors of the
second Gilded Age.
... .. ..
In the face-off between right-wing populism and neoliberalism, Tea Party legions and Trumpists
now find Fortune 500 CEOs morally obnoxious and an economic threat, grow irate at Federal Reserve
bail-outs, and are fired up by the multiple crises set off by global free trade and the treaties
that go with it.
... ... ...
The Sanders campaign had made its stand against the [neo]iberalism of the Clinton elite. It has
resonated so deeply because the candidate, with all his grandfatherly charisma and integrity, repeatedly
insists that Americans should look beneath the surface of a liberal capitalism that is economically
and ethically bankrupt and running a political confidence game, even as it condescends to "the forgotten
man."
Steve Fraser's new book, "The Limousine Liberal: How an Incendiary Image United the Right and
Fractured America" is being published on May 10 by Basic Books. His other books include Every Man
a Speculator, Wall Street, and Labor Will Rule, which won the Philip Taft Award for the best book
in labor history. He also is the co-editor of The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order. His work has
appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, The Nation, The American Prospect, Raritan,
and the London Review of Books. He has written for the online site Tomdispatch.com, and his work
has appeared on the Huffington Post, Salon, Truthout, and Alternet, among others. He lives in New
York City.
R B, Jun 4, 2016
I truly believe that this author, Steve Fraser through his writings has clearly revealed his
role as that of a member of the elite class or even worse one of the blood sucking hounds that
pit the lower classes against each other!!! He defends the capitalists by indicating that for
anyone to think or speak of any form of socialism is a crime against America and that it is counter
to everything this nation has EVER stood for! I couldn't disagree more with this parasite
that is attempting to twist history, so as to continue the elitist programming of youth with more
distorted understanding of their heritage!
Our Fore Fathers wrapped this society in a specific form of government that encouraged free-enterprise,
not capitalism! Guess what Americans, they are different in goals! These Fore Fathers recognized
that a healthy society included a system of economic stimulation, but more importantly that it
has a sense of unity and equality, that left no one to beg in the streets! They achieved this
even in those early and rugged days of colonialism through a system that the capitalists and republicans
have always hated and have done everything in their power to destroy in the past century!
If you doubt me then do a little research it what the foundation of 'May Day' is all about!
Where it began and what it was based upon, who celebrated the day and how it came to be drowned
out of American society. Then check and see how many modern nations all over the world celebrate
it as a national holiday (over 100) and then ask why it is not celebrated in America, where it
was founded on the blood and sweat of American workers!
Yes, there was a socialist system built into this nation and that system was called a society
based upon a 'Commonwealth' that translated into todays terminology could be defined as a 'Democratic
Socialism'!! So Mr. Fraser, I state that you have been writing not to enlighten the general
citizenry of the reality to their world, but to the continued domination of the 'One Percent'!!!
trt3, Jun 3, 2016
@Blueflash The author does not use the term in its proper context ether. I wish people would
stop using the term at all. It does not mean new liberal as in neoconservative, neo-fascist, or
neo-nazi. History of the term can be found here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism
Over the last year or so many commenters have attempted to paint HRC's economic platform as neoliberalism
as a smear because she takes donations from Wall Street.. Or, that Bill Clinton, because he had
to work with the congress of Newt Gingrich, worked to deregulate investment bankers.
If you want to see the effects of modern day neoliberalism look at Kansas and the devastation
that the Chicago school of economics brings, (as opposed to California with a more Keynesian economic
approach).
Tristero1, Jun 3, 2016
@trt3 @Blueflash From below:
"As Chomsky says, 'neoliberalism isn't new and it isn't liberal.' (the 'liberal' refers
to the markets, not the politics of its purveyors - Reagan, Thatcher, Clinton were all NLs)"
If there are no more conservatives, "They're all the same" rules the day and the artists formerly
known as conservatives rule the planet.
Jayne Cullen, Jun 3, 2016
Soon, very soon, Sanders shall do what he keeps promising to do, and endorse the dangerous
Warmonger of Wall Street, with whom he pretends to disagree, on so many issues. He might even
be her Vice Presidential choice, in order to better neuter his supporters, and to minimize the
political contortions that he'll have to go through, to convince his supporters to vote for her.
Gird yourselves.
Faulkner, Jun 3, 2016
The IMF and German banks of the neoliberal international aristocracy are forcing Greece to
rescind its social safety net and assets in order to keep making interest payments - a scheme
to keep them debt slaves to the new financial imperialism, similar to what is happening to Puerto
Rico and the US.
This is neoliberalism's endgame - to create a modern day feudalism, which is why it must be
stopped.
If you keep in mind that Capitalism is a Pyramid Scheme, the whole thing makes better sense.
Just the same way your older brother or sister beat the snot outta you playing monopoly as a kid,
so are the richest among us, burying us, in debt, and in isolation. Now back in TR's day there
was a little better sense about fair play, and helping your fellow man. That was not an overwhelming
altruistic thought that swept the country, at that time, but rather it grew out of years of degrading
abuse imposed by rich Industrialists. This caused a backlash, and corrections were made.
The problem today is that the worship of money has taken on such proportions, that even
the least among us has thoughts of riches coming their way, at any moment, even if it's the false
hope of winning the "Lottery", the big one!! And as long as they have those dreams, the cognition
of what is happening around them is dulled. There will be riots, I am sure. If this persistent
process of moving money to the top, and appreciably nowhere else, the backlash will be inevitable,
and harsh. The longer it takes, the harsher it will be. And if you think not, you've been watching
too many Disney Movies.
cactusbill, Jun 3, 2016
I have neighbors who play the state lottery every week. Now and then I mention to them
that buying lotto tickets is a fools bet. They reply like trained parrots "you can't win if you
don't play", and mumble something about lotto proceeds and "education".
So when you notice the glazed eyes and fist pumping at a Drumpf rally, remember how many Americans
spend rent and food money on lotto tickets.
It's the same people.
AJS197, Jun 3, 2016
@Joel Graham As Chomsky says, 'neoliberalism isn't new and it isn't liberal.' (the 'liberal'
refers to the markets, not the politics of its purveyors - Reagan, Thatcher, Clinton were all
NLs). A closer read and you will recognize he implicates both parties in the neoliberal ascent:
"But Republicans have more than shared in this; they have, in fact, often taken the
lead in implanting a market- and finance-driven economic system that has produced a few "winners"
and legions of losers. Both parties heralded a deregulated marketplace, global free trade,
the outsourcing of manufacturing and other industries, the privatization of public services,
and the shrink-wrapping of the social safety net."
AJS1972, Jun 3, 2016
Yes. Reagan was a neoliberal. Both Bushes too... wanna hear something really crazy? Hillary
is both a neoliberal AND a neoconservative... true story.
"... The NSA identified Peńa's cellphone and those of his associates using advanced software that can filter out specific phones from the swarm around the candidate. These lines were then targeted. The technology, one NSA analyst noted, "might find a needle in a haystack." The analyst described it as "a repeatable and efficient" process. ..."
"... Another NSA operation, begun in May 2010 and codenamed FLATLIQUID, targeted Pena's predecessor, President Felipe Calderon. The NSA, the documents revealed, was able "to gain first-ever access to President Felipe Calderon's public email account." ..."
"... At the same time, members of a highly secret joint NSA/CIA organization, called the Special Collection Service, are based in the U.S. embassy in Mexico City and other U.S. embassies around the world. It targets local government communications, as well as foreign embassies nearby. For Mexico, additional eavesdropping, and much of the analysis, is conducted by NSA Texas, a large listening post in San Antonio that focuses on the Caribbean, Central America and South America. ..."
"... Unlike the Defense Department's Pentagon, the headquarters of the cyberspies fills an entire secret city. Located in Fort Meade, Maryland, halfway between Washington and Baltimore, Maryland, NSA's headquarters consists of scores of heavily guarded buildings. The site even boasts its own police force and post office. ..."
"... One top-secret operation, code-named TreasureMap, is designed to have a "capability for building a near real-time interactive map of the global Internet. … Any device, anywhere, all the time." Another operation, codenamed Turbine, involves secretly placing "millions of implants" - malware - in computer systems worldwide for either spying or cyberattacks. ..."
"... Yet there can never be a useful discussion on the topic if the Obama administration continues to point fingers at other countries without admitting that Washington is engaged heavily in cyberspying and cyberwarfare. ..."
"... The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA From 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America ..."
National attention is focused on Russian eavesdroppers' possible targeting of U.S. presidential candidates
and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Yet, leaked top-secret National Security Agency
documents show that the Obama administration has long been involved in major bugging operations against
the election campaigns -- and the presidents -- of even its closest allies.
The United States is,
by far, the world's
most aggressive
nation when it comes to cyberspying and cyberwarfare. The National Security Agency has been eavesdropping
on foreign cities, politicians, elections and entire countries since it first turned on its receivers
in 1952. Just as other countries, including Russia, attempt to do to the United States. What is new
is a country leaking the intercepts back to the public of the target nation through a middleperson.
There is a strange irony in this. Russia, if it is actually involved in the hacking of the computers
of the Democratic National Committee, could be attempting to influence a U.S. election by leaking
to the American public the falsehoods of its leaders. This is a tactic Washington used against the
Soviet Union and other countries during the Cold War.
In the 1950s, for example, President Harry S Truman created the Campaign of Truth to reveal to
the Russian people the "Big Lies" of their government. Washington had often discovered these lies
through eavesdropping and other espionage.
Today, the United States has morphed from a Cold War, and in some cases a hot war, into a cyberwar,
with computer coding replacing bullets and bombs. Yet the American public manages to be "shocked,
shocked" that a foreign country would attempt to conduct cyberespionage on the United States.
NSA operations have, for example, recently delved into elections in Mexico, targeting its
last presidential campaign. According to a top-secret PowerPoint presentation leaked by former NSA
contract employee Edward Snowden, the operation involved a "surge effort against one of Mexico's
leading presidential candidates, Enrique Peńa Nieto, and nine of his close associates." Peńa won
that election and is now Mexico's president.
The NSA identified Peńa's cellphone and those of his associates using advanced software that can
filter out specific phones from the swarm around the candidate. These lines were then targeted. The
technology, one NSA analyst noted, "might find a needle in a haystack." The analyst described it
as "a repeatable and efficient" process.
Another NSA operation, begun in May 2010 and codenamed FLATLIQUID, targeted Pena's predecessor,
President Felipe Calderon. The NSA, the documents revealed, was able "to gain first-ever access to
President Felipe Calderon's public email account."
At the same time, members of a highly secret joint NSA/CIA organization, called the Special Collection
Service, are based in the U.S. embassy in Mexico City and other U.S. embassies around the world.
It targets local government communications, as well as foreign embassies nearby. For Mexico, additional
eavesdropping, and much of the analysis, is conducted by NSA Texas, a large listening post in San
Antonio that focuses on the Caribbean, Central America and South America.
Unlike the Defense Department's Pentagon, the headquarters of the cyberspies fills an entire secret
city. Located in Fort Meade, Maryland, halfway between Washington and Baltimore, Maryland, NSA's
headquarters consists of scores of heavily guarded buildings. The site even boasts its own police
force and post office.
And it is about to grow considerably bigger, now that the NSA cyberspies have merged with the
cyberwarriors of U.S. Cyber Command, which controls its own Cyber Army, Cyber Navy, Cyber Air Force
and Cyber Marine Corps, all armed with state-of-the-art cyberweapons. In charge of it all is a four-star
admiral, Michael S. Rogers.
Now under construction inside NSA's secret city, Cyber Command's new $3.2- billion headquarters
is to include 14 buildings, 11 parking garages and an enormous cyberbrain - a 600,000-square-foot,
$896.5-million supercomputer facility that will eat up an enormous amount of power, about 60 megawatts.
This is enough electricity to power a city of more than 40,000 homes.
In 2014, for a cover story in Wired and a PBS documentary, I spent three days in Moscow
with Snowden, whose last NSA job was as a contract cyberwarrior. I was also granted rare access to
his archive of documents. "Cyber Command itself has always been branded in a sort of misleading way
from its very inception," Snowden told me. "It's an attack agency. … It's all about computer-network
attack and computer-network exploitation at Cyber Command."
The idea is to turn the Internet from a worldwide web of information into a global battlefield
for war. "The next major conflict will start in cyberspace," says one of the secret NSA documents.
One key phrase within Cyber Command documents is "Information Dominance."
The Cyber Navy, for example, calls itself the Information Dominance Corps. The Cyber Army is providing
frontline troops with the option of requesting "cyberfire support" from Cyber Command, in much the
same way it requests air and artillery support. And the Cyber Air Force is pledged to "dominate cyberspace"
just as "today we dominate air and space."
Among the tools at their disposal is one called Passionatepolka, designed to "remotely brick network
cards." "Bricking" a computer means destroying it – turning it into a brick.
One such situation took place in war-torn Syria in 2012, according to Snowden, when the NSA attempted
to remotely and secretly install an "exploit," or bug, into the computer system of a major Internet
provider. This was expected to provide access to email and other Internet traffic across much of
Syria. But something went wrong. Instead, the computers were bricked. It
took down the Internet across the country for a period of time.
While Cyber Command executes attacks, the National Security Agency seems more interested in tracking
virtually everyone connected to the Internet, according to the documents.
One top-secret operation, code-named TreasureMap, is designed to have a "capability for building
a near real-time interactive map of the global Internet. … Any device, anywhere, all the time." Another
operation, codenamed Turbine, involves secretly placing "millions of implants" - malware - in computer
systems worldwide for either spying or cyberattacks.
Yet, even as the U.S. government continues building robust eavesdropping and attack systems, it
looks like there has been far less focus on security at home. One benefit of the cyber-theft of the
Democratic National Committee emails might be that it helps open a public dialogue about the dangerous
potential of cyberwarfare. This is long overdue. The
possible security problems for the U.S. presidential election in November are already being discussed.
Yet there can never be a useful discussion on the topic if the Obama administration continues
to point fingers at other countries without admitting that Washington is engaged heavily in cyberspying
and cyberwarfare.
In fact, the United States is the only country ever to launch an actual cyberwar -- when the Obama
administration used a cyberattack to destroy thousands of centrifuges, used for nuclear enrichment,
in Iran. This was an illegal act of war, according to the Defense Department's own definition.
Given the news reports that many more DNC emails are waiting to be leaked as the presidential
election draws closer, there will likely be many more reminders of the need for a public dialogue
on cybersecurity and cyberwarfare before November.
(James Bamford is the author of The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA From 9/11 to the
Eavesdropping on America. He is a columnist for Foreign Policy magazine.)
"... The Sanders' campaign, like the Obama phenomenon before it, does not offer a program or strategic direction for addressing the current crisis and contradictions of Western capitalist societies. Instead, it is an expression of the moral and political crisis of Western radicalism. This crisis – which is reflective of the loss of direction needed to inform vision, and fashion a creative program for radical change – is even more acute in the U.S. than Western Europe. Yet, what unites both radical experiences is a tacit commitment to Eurocentrism and the assumptions of normalized white supremacy. ..."
"... I don't like Trump's shrillness, and I don't like Baraka's either. He's too fast and loose with accusations of white supremacy. ..."
"... As the author of this posts makes clear, against Trump are only his words, but against Hillary are her actions. In that sense, it is no contest: Hillary loses. ..."
"... It's Putin we need to worry about. Putin is in league with Space Aliens and they are plotting to destroy the American 21st Century. The Space Aliens have leased a Weather Control Machine to Putin and Putin has set the thermostat on high! Worse yet, it's a 100 year lease. It will last the entire century! ..."
"... Well written! I grow tired of westerners' talk about how peace loving they are, as if by just saying you are for peace makes it so. It's perfectly clear what Clinton represents and how anti-peace she is. Yet so many westerners, especially outside the USA, would choose Clinton while also believing how much they support peace in the world. Thus Trump becomes a convenient excuse to vote for more endless war. Very easy to turn him into the nuclear bomb Prez as one can then support Clinton and claim to be for peace. ..."
"... As I write this it is clearer to me what a rare gem Bernie coulda been. ..."
"... Jingoism; assertions that the 21st century will be the "American Century"; odes to "American Exceptionalism"; ..."
The Sanders' campaign, like the Obama phenomenon before it,
does not offer a program or strategic direction for addressing the
current crisis and contradictions of Western capitalist societies.
Instead, it is an expression of the moral and political crisis of
Western radicalism. This crisis – which is reflective of the loss
of direction needed to inform vision, and fashion a creative
program for radical change – is even more acute in the U.S. than
Western Europe. Yet, what unites both radical experiences is a
tacit commitment to Eurocentrism and the assumptions of normalized
white supremacy.
In their desperate attempt to defend Sanders and paint his
critics as dogmatists and purists, the Sanders supporters have not
only fallen into the ideological trap of a form of narrow "left"
nativism, but also the white supremacist ethical contradiction that
reinforces racist cynicism in which some lives are disposable for
the greater good of the West.
I don't like Trump's shrillness, and I don't like Baraka's
either. He's too fast and loose with accusations of white supremacy.
As the author of this posts makes clear, against Trump are only his
words, but against Hillary are her actions. In that sense, it is no contest:
Hillary loses.
As Obama's tenure has made abundantly clear, words mean
nothing; only actions and facts do. I think this is why the media hates
Trump so: they make their living off words and so think they matter. But
they do only if they describe actions and facts, not gossip. All the
reporting about Trump consists of repeating what he says. So what? He is a
politician. Apart from his lack of experience he's a big question mark. But
lack of experience didn't stop people from voting for Obama.
It's Putin we need to worry about. Putin is in league with Space
Aliens and they are plotting to destroy the American 21st Century. The Space
Aliens have leased a Weather Control Machine to Putin and Putin has set the
thermostat on high! Worse yet, it's a 100 year lease. It will last the
entire century!
To make matters even worse, the Space Aliens have provided Putin with
alien probiotics. This will extend Putin's life by 100 years. We will never
get regime change in Russia! At least not without nuclear intervention.
The diabolical plan is to roast the western world. This will be the end
of the American Century! The Space Aliens also developed miniaturizing
technology a millennia ago. They can fit more of their kind into space ships
that way. The economic growth plan then is to beam the miniaturizing beam at
China and India. The population will shrink to 2 inches tall, which is
pretty short even for the Chinese. They will have much less resource and
environmental impact on the Earth. But they will not devalue their
currencies, resulting in steady growth and they will become the largest and
second largest economies in the world!
I'm sure you agree this is pretty scary stuff and you, your children, and
grandchildren should be scared to death that these powerful forces are
conspiring against our American Century.
Hillary is the only one that knows how to get things done and save us!
Well written! I grow tired of westerners' talk about how peace loving
they are, as if by just saying you are for peace makes it so. It's perfectly
clear what Clinton represents and how anti-peace she is. Yet so many
westerners, especially outside the USA, would choose Clinton while also
believing how much they support peace in the world. Thus Trump becomes a
convenient excuse to vote for more endless war. Very easy to turn him into
the nuclear bomb Prez as one can then support Clinton and claim to be for
peace.
This exercise of moral shenanagans grows tiresome after 18 years. I'd
like to say we have fair weather ethical values in our Sodom and Gomorrah
society. However i don't even think we rate that highly any longer. Moral
hypocrisy is really all we are now capable of. So bring on all the peace
loving westerners to kiss the ring of the next neocon President!
I posit that there is a gresham dynamic of sorts in politics. If I remember
right, this is where bad behavior goes unpunished in an industry and that leads
to only "cheaters" in the space because all the ethical players in the space
can't compete and need to / elect to drop out.
If this is right, then it should be no surprise that outsiders to politics
(representing ethics) don't have the professional "expertise" held by the
insiders. I see it as a straight up trade between ethics and expertise, and we
have been relying on experts too long.
Said another way, I think an ethical person can learn expertise much better
than an expert person can learn ethics.
As I write this it is clearer to me what a rare gem Bernie coulda been.
Professor Wray wastes a whole lot of column inches arguing against Trump
without really offering anything other than a long list of evidence-based
reasons not to vote for Clinton, while regurgitating the tried-and-true LOTE
argument to not vote for Stein (or Johnson, who for reasons unclear to me has
been deemed to be completely untenable by every thinking critic's estimate).
In a landmark statement this week, our commander-in-chief has deemed Trump
somehow fundamentally unqualified to hold that esteemed office. Really? Those
of us with memories that extend beyond the last news cycle might recall the
exact same arguments levied against Obama eight years ago from his opponents on
the right. "He's a 'community organizer', whatever that is," they would claim
about the first term senator, "What has he ever run besides a canned food
drive?"
The right-wing who feared that somehow Obama would be sworn in on Monday and
on Tuesday take their guns away, close Guantanamo and bring all those captives
to criminal trial here on the mainland (whatever threat that entailed, I'm
still not sure), give free health care to everyone at the expense of all their
friends in the health care and pharma industries, and nationalize flagging
industries and banks like some kind of black Lenin… their list of eventually
unrealized worries went on and on.
What was the left's argument to allay these overblown fears during the 2008
campaign? Checks and balances. "Anything the president does has to go through
both houses of Congress" they would claim, and that, the government wisely laid
down by our founding fathers, would prevent this first-term senator from
turning us into a socialist state. Where are those 'checks and balances'
arguments now?
A brash demeanor isn't enough of a reason to not vote for someone, yet we
are supposed to believe that Trump is going to somehow cast off the shackles of
democracy and crown himself dictator based solely on his demagogic personality.
Claiming that Trump won't be able to conduct himself with the esteem required
for that high office, pundits have become armchair psychologists and labeled
the guy a borderline psychotic while comedians beholden to their major media
paymasters have jumped on this bandwagon to have us thinking the guy is nothing
more than an egotistical loon who, by the way, also secretly wants to screw his
daughter.
He's a racist because he wants to have a better control of the border where
thousands of illegal immigrants cross every year, often at their own peril.
He's beholden to nameless Russian oligarchs, we are led to believe without any
real evidence to support the claim. He secretly doesn't want to be president
and is doing this only to stoke that massive ego, we are told by pundits who
have not been correct in any of their other predictions. Maybe he's a secret
democratic plant, we've been told, placed there by Clinton and the DNC to
guarantee her coronation. I honestly can't believe the level of nonsense this
election has generated.
Anything to deflect attention from the fact that Trump is the only major
party candidate left who is honestly questioning aloud the validity of NATO,
criticizing the effects of globalization, asking what advantage it gives us to
antagonize Russia thirty years after the cold war supposedly ended, wondering
whether regime change is the best option on the table while Iraq, Egypt, Libya,
and Syria offer solid examples to the contrary, and whether massive trade deals
cannot be negotiated in such a way that the middle class American worker
doesn't lose in the end.
Instead we are told to look at his funny hair, marvel at his orange skin,
and to count how many times he uses the words 'huge' and 'great'. He eats KFC
with a fork and knife. He hates Muslims because he thinks all their women are
oppressed and told that it is the man's job to do the talking. The list of
deflections away from his policy plans and how they compare and contrast with
his opponent gets longer by the day.
In the end, Professor Wray adds literally nothing to this discussion–
paragraph after paragraph offer plenty of reasons to distrust and dislike
Clinton, plenty of reasons in his mind that voting for a third party is a
wasted vote, but simply nothing to counter the legitimate arguments offered by
Trump to change the direction this country has been headed for the last two
decades.
With all the fearmongering about Trump potentially having his finger on the
nuclear button, I have yet to see anyone bring up Clinton statements during the
last presidential campaign regarding Iran and 'all options being on the table'
which of course meant nukes and her willingness to use them.
Jingoism; assertions that the 21st century will be the "American
Century"; odes to "American Exceptionalism";
more than an Ode! That is a bromide direct from the Neocon
Project for the
New American Century
(PNAC) Redbook!
Neocons are Political Party agnostics, they migrate opportunistically. HRC
is just the latest Host opportunity. That is a strategic advantage they wield.
No party affiliation inertia. Changelings from the Dark Side
Question for Lambert.
I didnt ask yesterday after you stated that no qualified candidate is slated
for this POTUS general election cycle, (I happen to agree).
So tell me, who do you feel was the last qualified POTUS?
This goes to the strategy voting against perceived greater evils.
"... It's hard not to notice, during the American Presidential election drama, that despite all the debates and speeches, and multiple candidates, the terms "Neoliberalism" and "austerity" have yet to be employed, much less explained, these being the two necessary words to describe the dominant economic "regime" of the past 35 years. And this despite the fact that most observers recognize that a "populist revolt" driven by economic unhappiness is underway via the campaigns of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. With Trump, of course, we are getting much more, the uglier side of American populism: racism, xenophobia and misogyny, at least; the culture wars at a higher pitch. ..."
"... the underlying driver of his supporters' anger is economic distress, not the ugly cultural prejudices. ..."
It's hard not to notice, during the American Presidential election drama, that despite all the
debates and speeches, and multiple candidates, the terms "Neoliberalism" and "austerity" have yet
to be employed, much less explained, these being the two necessary words to describe the dominant
economic "regime" of the past 35 years. And this despite the fact that most observers recognize that
a "populist revolt" driven by economic unhappiness is underway via the campaigns of Donald Trump
and Bernie Sanders. With Trump, of course, we are getting much more, the uglier side of American
populism: racism, xenophobia and misogyny, at least; the culture wars at a higher pitch.
Yet when Trump commented on the violence which canceled his Chicago rally on the evening of March
11th, he stated that the underlying driver of his supporters' anger is economic distress, not
the ugly cultural prejudices. The diagnoses for the root cause of this anger thus lie at the
heart of the proposed solutions. For students of the Great Depression, this will sound very familiar.
That is because, despite many diversions and sub-currents, we are really arguing about a renewed
New Deal versus an ever more purified laissez-faire, the nineteenth century term for keeping government
out of markets – once those markets had been constructed. "Interventions," however, as we will see,
are still required, because no one, left or right, can live with the brutalities of the workings
of "free markets" except as they exist in the fantasyland of the American Right.
"... they make the point that Hillary Clinton is a deeply flawed candidate, notably so in matters related to national security. Clinton is surely correct that allowing Trump to make decisions related to war and peace would be the height of folly . Yet her record in that regard does not exactly inspire confidence. ..."
"... When it comes to foreign policy, Trump's preference for off-the-cuff utterances finds him committing astonishing gaffes with metronomic regularity. ..."
"... By comparison, the carefully scripted Clinton commits few missteps, as she recites with practiced ease the pabulum that passes for right thinking in establishment circles. But fluency does not necessarily connote soundness. Clinton, after all, adheres resolutely to the highly militarized "Washington playbook" that President Obama himself has disparaged - a faith-based belief in American global primacy to be pursued regardless of how the world may be changing and heedless of costs. ..."
"... First, and most important, the evil effects of money: ..."
"... Republic Lost, Version 2.0 ..."
"... Second, the perverse impact of identity politics on policy ..."
"... Third, the substitution of "reality" for reality ..."
"... The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America ..."
"... According to Boorstin, more than five decades ago the American people were already living in a "thicket of unreality." By relentlessly indulging in ever more "extravagant expectations," they were forfeiting their capacity to distinguish between what was real and what was illusory. Indeed, Boorstin wrote, "We have become so accustomed to our illusions that we mistake them for reality." ..."
"... While ad agencies and PR firms had indeed vigorously promoted a world of illusions, Americans themselves had become willing accomplices in the process. ..."
"... "The American citizen lives in a world where fantasy is more real than reality, where the image has more dignity than its original. We hardly dare to face our bewilderment, because our ambiguous experience is so pleasantly iridescent, and the solace of belief in contrived reality is so thoroughly real. We have become eager accessories to the great hoaxes of the age. These are the hoaxes we play on ourselves." ..."
"... Real Housewives of ..."
"... Game of Thrones ..."
"... The Apprentice ..."
"... "The making of the illusions which flood our experience has become the business of America," wrote Boorstin. It's also become the essence of American politics, long since transformed into theater, or rather into some sort of (un)reality show. ..."
"... This emphasis on spectacle has drained national politics of whatever substance it still had back when Ike and Adlai commanded the scene. It hardly need be said that Donald Trump has demonstrated an extraordinary knack - a sort of post-modern genius - for turning this phenomenon to his advantage. ..."
"... The thicket of unreality that is American politics has now become all-enveloping. The problem is not Trump and Clinton, per se. It's an identifiable set of arrangements - laws, habits, cultural predispositions - that have evolved over time and promoted the rot that now pervades American politics. As a direct consequence, the very concept of self-government is increasingly a fantasy, even if surprisingly few Americans seem to mind. ..."
"... I know Clinton is one of this gang. And I am sure that given his personality, Trump will succumb to this madness almost at once. Give a narcissistic jerk that much power and good luck to all of us (of course, give that much power to a rabid insider like Clinton and good luck to all of us). Of course, their partisans will say, "Trump will just ignore the entire vast apparatus of the permanent government and the security state and do whatever he likes" or "Nixon went to China, and Clinton can metaphorically do the same when she realizes she's no longer a cheerleader at State and the buck stops at her desk", but I don't believe either of those assertions. ..."
"... Thanks james, to the annoying chest thumpers the image of dems chanting USA USA to drown out No More Wars really signals an alternate reality. I think AB went way too easy on clinton, ..."
"... It's depressing to see Andrew Bacevich, one of our country's most astute observers of the national security scene and a retired military officer, come down on the side of Hilary Clinton as the lesser evil candidate. He can only do so by totally ignoring her central role in the ignition of Cold War 2.0 in his litany of her liabilities. ..."
"... Hillary Clinton offers more of the same bad news, only worse. Trump scares everybody from the MIC, which includes Bacevich, who after all draws a hefty monthly pension from the Defense Dept., because he indicates he actually wants to be the boss, to call the shots, to shake things up, to rattle some cages. The last prez who actually tried to boss around the MIC was JFK, and he had his brain tissue splattered onto the Dallas street in broad daylight. Trump was kind of a stealth candidate in the primaries, in that the bigwigs were unable to take him seriously, even after he won some primaries. By the time they marshaled enough opposition to stop him, it was too late. ..."
"... The people, in the eyes of miscreants like Obama, are mere pawns to be manipulated, stolen from, etc. He's implying the GOP should have had a superdelegate fix, like the dems, to overcome any spurt of independent thinking from the electorate. ..."
"... Clinton may be a non-introspective narcissist who has an poor understanding of the historical results of policy and current affairs, who never admits mistakes/grievous wrongs ("Libya needs more time") and whose most significant personal decision was to recognize that, after failing the bar exam in Washington DC, it was time to go to Arkansas and hitch her wagon to Bill Clinton's career. ..."
"... Trump is a novice at government, yes, but he has experienced dealing with foreign countries as a businessman. HRC is much scarier-she is capable of rattling off the neocon doctrine as it pertains to a lot of countries. Great. I'd much prefer the novice. I would love to have the neocons and neolibs destroyed. ..."
"... Hillary is scary because I think she and Victory Nuland are going to push us into a war with Putin – Trump is an idiot, but we already know that Hillary has a taste for blood. Libya and Iraq are two prime examples. ..."
Even by Washington standards, Secretary Clinton exudes a striking sense of entitlement combined
with a nearly complete absence of accountability. She shrugs off her
misguided vote in support of invading Iraq back in 2003, while serving as senator from New York.
She neither explains nor apologizes for pressing to depose Libya's Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, her most
notable "
accomplishment " as secretary of state. "We came, we saw, he died," she
bragged back then, somewhat prematurely given that Libya has since fallen into anarchy and become
a haven for ISIS.
She clings to the demonstrably false claim that her use of a private server for State Department
business compromised
no classified information . Now opposed to the Trans Pacific Partnership (TTP) that she
once described as the "gold standard in trade agreements," Clinton rejects charges of political
opportunism. That her change of heart occurred when attacking the TPP was helping Bernie Sanders
win one Democratic primary after another is merely coincidental. Oh, and the big money accepted from
banks and
Wall Street as well as the
tech sector for minimal work and
the bigger money still from leading figures in the Israel lobby? Rest assured that her acceptance
of such largesse won't reduce by one iota her support for "working class families" or her commitment
to a just peace settlement in the Middle East.
Let me be clear: none of these offer the slightest reason to vote for Donald Trump. Yet together
they make the point that Hillary Clinton is a deeply flawed candidate, notably so in matters
related to national security. Clinton is surely correct that allowing Trump to make decisions related
to war and peace would be the
height of folly . Yet her record in that regard does not exactly inspire confidence.
When it comes to foreign policy, Trump's preference for off-the-cuff utterances finds him
committing astonishing gaffes with metronomic regularity. Spontaneity serves chiefly to expose
his staggering ignorance.
By comparison, the carefully scripted Clinton commits few missteps, as she recites with practiced
ease the pabulum that passes for right thinking in establishment circles. But fluency does not necessarily
connote soundness. Clinton, after all, adheres resolutely to the highly militarized "Washington playbook"
that President Obama himself has
disparaged - a faith-based belief in American global primacy to be pursued regardless of how
the world may be changing and heedless of costs.
On the latter point, note that Clinton's acceptance speech in Philadelphia included not a
single mention of Afghanistan. By Election Day, the war there will have passed its 15th anniversary.
One might think that a prospective commander-in-chief would have something to say about the longest
conflict in American history, one that continues with no end in sight. Yet, with the Washington playbook
offering few answers, Mrs. Clinton chooses to remain silent on the subject.
So while a Trump presidency holds the prospect of the United States driving off a cliff, a Clinton
presidency promises to be the equivalent of banging one's head against a brick wall without evident
effect, wondering all the while why it hurts so much.
Pseudo-Politics for an Ersatz Era
But let's not just blame the candidates. Trump and Clinton are also the product of circumstances
that neither created. As candidates, they are merely exploiting a situation - one relying on intuition
and vast stores of brashness, the other putting to work skills gained during a life spent studying
how to acquire and employ power. The success both have achieved in securing the nominations of their
parties is evidence of far more fundamental forces at work.
In the pairing of Trump and Clinton, we confront symptoms of something pathological. Unless Americans
identify the sources of this disease, it will inevitably worsen, with dire consequences in the realm
of national security. After all, back in Eisenhower's day, the IEDs planted thanks to reckless presidential
decisions tended to blow up only years - or even decades - later. For example, between the 1953 U.S.-engineered
coup that restored the Shah to his throne and the 1979 revolution that converted Iran overnight from
ally to adversary, more than a quarter of a century elapsed. In our own day, however, detonation
occurs so much more quickly - witness the almost instantaneous and explosively unhappy consequences
of Washington's post-9/11 military interventions in the Greater Middle East.
So here's a matter worth pondering: How is it that all the months of intensive fundraising, the
debates and speeches, the caucuses and primaries, the avalanche of TV ads and annoying robocalls
have produced two presidential candidates who tend to elicit from a surprisingly large number of
rank-and-file citizens disdain, indifference, or at best hold-your-nose-and-pull-the-lever acquiescence?
Here, then, is a preliminary diagnosis of three of the factors contributing to the erosion of
American politics, offered from the conviction that, for Americans to have better
choices next time around, fundamental change must occur - and soon.
First, and most important, the evil effects of money: Need chapter and verse? For a tutorial,
see this essential 2015 book by Professor Lawrence Lessig of Harvard:
Republic
Lost, Version 2.0 . Those with no time for books might spare 18 minutes for Lessig's brilliant
and deeply disturbing
TED talk . Professor Lessig argues persuasively that unless the United States radically changes
the way it finances political campaigns, we're pretty much doomed to see our democracy wither and
die.
Needless to say, moneyed interests and incumbents who benefit from existing arrangements take
a different view and collaborate to maintain the status quo. As a result, political life has increasingly
become a pursuit reserved for those like Trump who possess vast personal wealth or for those like
Clinton who display an aptitude for persuading the well to do to open their purses, with all that
implies by way of compromise, accommodation, and the subsequent repayment of favors.
Second, the perverse impact of identity politics on policy : Observers make much of the
fact that, in capturing the presidential nomination of a major party, Hillary Clinton has shattered
yet another glass ceiling. They are right to do so. Yet the novelty of her candidacy starts and ends
with gender. When it comes to fresh thinking, Donald Trump has far more to offer than Clinton - even
if his version of "fresh" tends to be synonymous with wacky, off-the-wall, ridiculous, or altogether
hair-raising.
The essential point here is that, in the realm of national security, Hillary Clinton is utterly
conventional. She subscribes to a worldview (and view of America's role in the world) that originated
during the Cold War, reached its zenith in the 1990s when the United States proclaimed itself the
planet's "sole superpower," and persists today remarkably unaffected by actual events.
On the campaign trail, Clinton attests to her bona fides by routinely reaffirming her belief in American
exceptionalism , paying fervent tribute to "
the world's greatest military ," swearing that she'll be "listening to our generals and admirals,"
and vowing to get tough on America's adversaries. These are, of course, the mandatory rituals of
the contemporary Washington stump speech, amplified if anything by the perceived need for the first
female candidate for president to emphasize her pugnacity.
A Clinton presidency, therefore, offers the prospect of more of the same - muscle-flexing and
armed intervention to demonstrate American global leadership - albeit marketed with a garnish of
diversity. Instead of different policies, Clinton will offer an administration that has a different
look, touting this as evidence of positive change.
Yet while diversity may be a good thing, we should not confuse it with effectiveness. A national
security team that "looks like America" (to use the phrase originally coined by Bill Clinton) does
not necessarily govern more effectively than one that looks like President Eisenhower's. What matters
is getting the job done.
Since the 1990s women have found plentiful opportunities to fill positions in the upper echelons
of the national security apparatus. Although we have not yet had a female commander-in-chief, three
women have served as secretary of state and two as national security adviser. Several have filled
Adlai Stevenson's old post at the United Nations. Undersecretaries, deputy undersecretaries, and
assistant secretaries of like gender abound, along with a passel of female admirals and generals.
So the question needs be asked: Has the quality of national security policy improved compared
to the bad old days when men exclusively called the shots? Using as criteria the promotion of stability
and the avoidance of armed conflict (along with the successful prosecution of wars deemed unavoidable),
the answer would, of course, have to be no. Although Madeleine Albright, Condoleezza Rice, Susan
Rice, Samantha Power, and Clinton herself might entertain a different view, actually existing conditions
in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, and other countries across the Greater
Middle East and significant parts of Africa tell a different story.
The abysmal record of American statecraft in recent years is not remotely the
fault of women; yet neither have women made a perceptibly positive difference. It turns out that
identity does not necessarily signify wisdom or assure insight. Allocating positions of influence
in the State Department or the Pentagon based on gender, race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation -
as Clinton will assuredly do - may well gratify previously disenfranchised groups. Little evidence
exists to suggest that doing so will produce more enlightened approaches to statecraft, at least
not so long as adherence to the Washington playbook figures as a precondition to employment. (Should
Clinton win in November, don't expect the redoubtable ladies of
Code Pink to be tapped for
jobs at the Pentagon and State Department.)
In the end, it's not identity that matters but ideas and their implementation. To contemplate
the ideas that might guide a President Trump along with those he will recruit to act on them - Ivanka
as national security adviser? - is enough to elicit shudders from any sane person. Yet the prospect
of Madam President surrounding herself with an impeccably diverse team of advisers who share her
own outmoded views is hardly cause for celebration.
Putting a woman in charge of national security policy will not in itself amend the defects exhibited
in recent years. For that, the obsolete principles with which Clinton along with the rest of Washington
remains enamored will have to be jettisoned. In his own bizarre way (albeit without a clue as to
a plausible alternative), Donald Trump seems to get that; Hillary Clinton does not.
Third, the substitution of "reality" for reality : Back in 1962, a young historian by
the name of Daniel Boorstin published
The
Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America . In an age in which Donald Trump and
Hillary Clinton vie to determine the nation's destiny, it should be mandatory reading. The Image
remains, as when it first appeared, a fire bell ringing in the night.
According to Boorstin, more than five decades ago the American people were already living in a
"thicket of unreality." By relentlessly indulging in ever more "extravagant expectations," they were
forfeiting their capacity to distinguish between what was real and what was illusory. Indeed, Boorstin
wrote, "We have become so accustomed to our illusions that we mistake them for reality."
While ad agencies and PR firms had indeed vigorously promoted a world of illusions, Americans
themselves had become willing accomplices in the process.
"The American citizen lives in a world where fantasy is more real than reality, where the image
has more dignity than its original. We hardly dare to face our bewilderment, because our ambiguous
experience is so pleasantly iridescent, and the solace of belief in contrived reality is so thoroughly
real. We have become eager accessories to the great hoaxes of the age. These are the hoaxes we play
on ourselves."
This, of course, was decades before the nation succumbed to the iridescent allure of Facebook,
Google, fantasy football, " Real Housewives of _________," selfies, smartphone apps,
Game of Thrones , Pokémon GO - and, yes, the vehicle that vaulted Donald Trump to stardom,
The Apprentice .
"The making of the illusions which flood our experience has become the business of America," wrote
Boorstin. It's also become the essence of American politics, long since transformed into theater,
or rather into some sort of (un)reality show.
Presidential campaigns today are themselves, to use Boorstin's famous term, "pseudo-events" that
stretch from months into years. By now, most Americans know better than to take at face value anything
candidates say or promise along the way. We're in on the joke - or at least we think we are. Reinforcing
that perception on a daily basis are media outlets that have abandoned mere reporting in favor of
enhancing the spectacle of the moment. This is especially true of the cable news networks, where
talking heads serve up a snide and cynical complement to the smarmy fakery that is the office-seeker's
stock in trade. And we lap it up. It matters little that we know it's all staged and contrived, as
long as - a preening Megyn Kelly getting under Trump's skin, Trump himself denouncing "lyin' Ted"
Cruz, etc., etc. - it's entertaining.
This emphasis on spectacle has drained national politics of whatever substance it still had back
when Ike and Adlai commanded the scene. It hardly need be said that Donald Trump has demonstrated
an extraordinary knack - a sort of post-modern genius - for turning this phenomenon to his advantage.
Yet in her own way Clinton plays the same game. How else to explain a national convention organized
around the idea of "
reintroducing to the American people" someone who served eight years as First Lady, was elected
to the Senate, failed in a previous high-profile run for the presidency, and completed a term as
secretary of state? The just-ended conclave in Philadelphia was, like the Republican one that preceded
it, a pseudo-event par excellence, the object of the exercise being to fashion a new "image" for
the Democratic candidate.
The thicket of unreality that is American politics has now become all-enveloping. The problem
is not Trump and Clinton, per se. It's an identifiable set of arrangements - laws, habits, cultural
predispositions - that have evolved over time and promoted the rot that now pervades American politics.
As a direct consequence, the very concept of self-government is increasingly a fantasy, even if surprisingly
few Americans seem to mind.
At an earlier juncture back in 1956, out of a population of 168 million, we got Ike and Adlai.
Today, with almost double the population, we get - well, we get what we've got. This does not represent
progress. And don't kid yourself that things really can't get much worse. Unless Americans rouse
themselves to act, count on it, they will.
Americans are annoying chest-thumpers but the average Jane or Joe has no power in their own
lives. In contrast, the Washington foreign policy elite has power, the power of life and death,
over billions across the globe, and they exercise it regularly. This power has utterly corrupted
the elite and gone to their heads. That is why any defiance is met with such rage. They are used
to getting their own way, and woe to the country that acts or even thinks otherwise.
I know Clinton is one of this gang. And I am sure that given his personality, Trump will succumb
to this madness almost at once. Give a narcissistic jerk that much power and good luck to all
of us (of course, give that much power to a rabid insider like Clinton and good luck to all of
us). Of course, their partisans will say, "Trump will just ignore the entire vast apparatus of
the permanent government and the security state and do whatever he likes" or "Nixon went to China,
and Clinton can metaphorically do the same when she realizes she's no longer a cheerleader at
State and the buck stops at her desk", but I don't believe either of those assertions.
Thanks james, to the annoying chest thumpers the image of dems chanting USA USA to drown out
No More Wars really signals an alternate reality. I think AB went way too easy on clinton, and
the misogyny claim was one cheap shot (True, antipathy directed toward Hillary Clinton draws some
of its energy from incorrigible sexists along with the "vast right wing conspiracy" whose members
thoroughly loathe both Clintons. Yet the antipathy is not without basis in fact.) but I think
he retakes that ground when he labels her "utterly conventional", On balance a good article but
as with many prominent figures he can make a laundry list of her downsides and still come out
sounding like a supporter of hers. I share your conclusion, good luck
It's depressing to see Andrew Bacevich, one of our country's most astute observers of the national
security scene and a retired military officer, come down on the side of Hilary Clinton as the
lesser evil candidate. He can only do so by totally ignoring her central role in the ignition
of Cold War 2.0 in his litany of her liabilities.
Hillary Clinton offers more of the same bad news, only worse. Trump scares everybody from the
MIC, which includes Bacevich, who after all draws a hefty monthly pension from the Defense Dept.,
because he indicates he actually wants to be the boss, to call the shots, to shake things up,
to rattle some cages. The last prez who actually tried to boss around the MIC was JFK, and he
had his brain tissue splattered onto the Dallas street in broad daylight. Trump was kind of a
stealth candidate in the primaries, in that the bigwigs were unable to take him seriously, even
after he won some primaries. By the time they marshaled enough opposition to stop him, it was
too late.
Obama, for his part, has indicated the republican party was negligent in its duties
by letting the people vote this guy into the nomination. The people, in the eyes of miscreants
like Obama, are mere pawns to be manipulated, stolen from, etc. He's implying the GOP should have
had a superdelegate fix, like the dems, to overcome any spurt of independent thinking from the
electorate.
Clinton may be a non-introspective narcissist who has an poor understanding of the historical
results of policy and current affairs, who never admits mistakes/grievous wrongs ("Libya needs
more time") and whose most significant personal decision was to recognize that, after failing
the bar exam in Washington DC, it was time to go to Arkansas and hitch her wagon to Bill Clinton's
career.
Trump is a novice at government, yes, but he has experienced dealing with foreign countries
as a businessman. HRC is much scarier-she is capable of rattling off the neocon doctrine as it
pertains to a lot of countries. Great. I'd much prefer the novice. I would love to have the neocons
and neolibs destroyed.
As Bacevich says, Ike was not a bad president, and he had no gov't experience before he was elected.
My dad was a democrat, I guess, but the one thing I remember hearing him utter regarding politics
was praise of Ike: " Things were good in the 50's-we had General Motors, General Electric, and
General Eisenhower!"
Hillary is scary because I think she and Victory Nuland are going to push us into a war with
Putin – Trump is an idiot, but we already know that Hillary has a taste for blood.
Libya and Iraq are two prime examples.
"... Russia is aware of the United States' plans for nuclear hegemony ..."
"... The Russian president also highlighted the fact that although the United States missile system is referred to as an "anti-missile defense system," the systems are just as offensive as they are defensive: ..."
"... Putin further explained the implications of this missile defense system's implementation without any response from Russia. The ability of the missile defense system to render Russia's nuclear capabilities useless would cause an upset in what Putin refers to as the "strategic balance" of the world. Without this balance of power, the U.S. would be free to pursue their policies throughout the world without any tangible threat from Russia. Therefore, this "strategic balance," according to Putin, is what has kept the world safe from large-scale wars and military conflicts. ..."
(ANTIMEDIA)
As the United States continues to
develop and upgrade their nuclear weapons capabilities at an alarming rate,
America's ruling class refuses to heed warnings from President Vladimir Putin
that Russia will respond as necessary.
In his most
recent
attempt to warn his Western counterparts about the impending danger of a
new nuclear arms race, Putin told the heads of large foreign companies and business
associations that Russia is aware of the United States' plans for nuclear
hegemony. He was speaking at the 20th St. Petersburg International Economic
Forum.
"We know year by year what will happen, and they know that we know,"
he said.
Putin argued that the rationale the U.S. previously gave for maintaining
and developing its nuclear weapons system is directed at the so-called "Iranian
threat." But that threat has been drastically reduced since the U.S. proved
instrumental in reaching an
agreement with Iran that should
put to rest any possible Iranian nuclear potential.
The Russian president also highlighted the fact that although the United
States missile system is referred to as an "anti-missile defense system," the
systems are just as offensive as they are defensive:
"They say [the missile systems] are part of their defense capability,
and are not offensive, that these systems are aimed at protecting them from
aggression. It's not true the strategic ballistic missile defense is part
of an offensive strategic capability, [and] functions in conjunction with
an aggressive missile strike system."
This missile system has been launched throughout Europe, and despite
American promises at the end of the Cold War that NATO's expansion would
not move "as much as a thumb's width further to the East," the missile system
has been implemented in many of Russia's neighboring countries, most recently
in Romania.
Russia views this as a direct attack on their security.
"How do we know what's inside those launchers? All one needs to do
is reprogram [the system], which is an absolutely inconspicuous task,"
Putin stated.
Putin further explained the implications of this missile defense system's
implementation without any response from Russia. The ability of the missile
defense system to render Russia's nuclear capabilities useless would cause an
upset in what Putin refers to as the "strategic balance" of the world. Without
this balance of power, the U.S. would be free to pursue their policies throughout
the world without any tangible threat from Russia. Therefore, this "strategic
balance," according to Putin, is what has kept the world safe from large-scale
wars and military conflicts.
Following
George W. Bush's 2001 decision to unilaterally withdraw the U.S. from the
1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty, Russia was, according to Putin, left with
no choice but to upgrade their capabilities in response.
Putin warned:
"Today Russia has reached significant achievements in this field.
We have modernized our missile systems and successfully developed new generations.
Not to mention missile defense systems We must provide security not only
for ourselves. It's important to provide strategic balance in the world,
which guarantees peace on the planet.
Neutralizing Russia's nuclear potential will undo, according to Putin,
"the mutual threat that has provided [mankind] with global security for decades."
It should, therefore, come as no surprise that NASA scientists want to
colonize the moon by 2022 - we may have to if we don't drastically alter
the path we are on. As Albert Einstein
famously stated:
"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World
War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."
"... Whatever the character of America's involvement in the Middle East before 1980, when Bacevich's account begins, it was not a war, at least not in terms of American casualties. "From the end of World War II to 1980, virtually no American soldiers were killed in action while serving in that region," he notes. "Within a decade," however, "a great shift occurred. Since 1990, virtually no American soldiers have been killed in action anywhere except in the Greater Middle East." ..."
"... The sequence of events, lucidly related by Bacevich, would be a dark absurdist comedy if it weren't tragically real. To check Iran, the U.S. supported Saddam Hussein's Iraq in the Iran-Iraq War of 1980–88, whose final phase, the so-called "Tanker War," involved direct U.S. military engagement with Iranian naval forces. (Bacevich calls this the real first Persian Gulf War.) ..."
"... Finally, George W. Bush decided to risk what his father had dared not: invading Iraq with the objective of "regime change," he launched a third Gulf War in 2003. The notion his neoconservative advisers put into Bush's head was that, with only a little help from American occupation and reconstruction, the void left by Saddam Hussein's removal would be filled by a model democracy. ..."
"... Yet the first Bush had been right: Iran, as well as ISIS, reaped the rewards of regime change in Baghdad. And so America is now being drawn into a fourth Gulf War, reintroducing troops-styled as advisors-into Iraq to counter the effects of the previous Gulf War, which was itself an answer to the unfinished business of the wars of 1991 and the late 1980s. Our military interventions in the Persian Gulf have been a self-perpetuating chain reaction for over three decades. ..."
"... "Wolfowitz adhered to an expansive definition of the Persian Gulf," notes Bacevich, which in that young defense intellectual's words extended from "the region between Pakistan and Iran in the northeast to the Yemens in the southwest." Wolfowitz identified two prospective menaces to U.S. interests in the region: the Soviet Union-this was still the Cold War era, after all-and "the emerging Iraqi threat"; to counter these Wolfowitz called for "advisors and counterinsurgency specialists, token combat forces, or a major commitment" of U.S. forces to the Middle East. ..."
"... The military bureaucracy took advantage of the removal of one enemy from the map-Soviet Communism-to redirect resources toward a new region and new threats. As Bacevich observes, "What some at the time were calling a 'peace dividend' offered CENTCOM a way of expanding its portfolio of assets." Operation Desert Storm, and all that came afterward, became possible. ..."
"... The final lesson of this one is simple: "Perpetuating the War for the Greater Middle East is not enhancing American freedom, abundance, and security. If anything, it is having the opposite effect." ..."
Bacevich's latest book, America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History,
is a bookend of sorts to American Empire. The earlier work was heavy on theory and institutional
development, the groundwork for the wars of the early 21st century. The new book covers the history
itself-and argues persuasively that the Afghanistan, Iraq, and other, smaller wars since 9/11 are
parts of a larger conflict that began much earlier, back in the Carter administration.
Whatever the character of America's involvement in the Middle East before 1980, when Bacevich's
account begins, it was not a war, at least not in terms of American casualties. "From the end of
World War II to 1980, virtually no American soldiers were killed in action while serving in that
region," he notes. "Within a decade," however, "a great shift occurred. Since 1990, virtually no
American soldiers have been killed in action anywhere except in the Greater Middle East."
Operation Eagle Claw, Carter's ill-fated mission to rescue Americans held hostage in Iran, was
the first combat engagement in the war. Iran would continue to tempt Washington to military action
throughout the next 36 years-though paradoxically, attempts to contain Iran more often brought the
U.S. into war with the Islamic Republic's hostile neighbor, Iraq.
The sequence of events, lucidly related by Bacevich, would be a dark absurdist comedy if it
weren't tragically real. To check Iran, the U.S. supported Saddam Hussein's Iraq in the Iran-Iraq
War of 1980–88, whose final phase, the so-called "Tanker War," involved direct U.S. military engagement
with Iranian naval forces. (Bacevich calls this the real first Persian Gulf War.)
Weakened and indebted by that war, and thinking the U.S. tolerant of his ambitions, Saddam then
invaded Kuwait, leading to full-scale U.S. military intervention against him: Operation Desert Storm
in 1991. (By Bacevich's count, the second Gulf War.) President George H.W. Bush stopped American
forces from pushing on to Baghdad after liberating Kuwait, however, because-among other things-toppling
Saddam would have created a dangerous vacuum that Iran might fill.
A decade of sanctions, no-fly zones, and intermittent bombing then ensued, as Washington, under
Bush and Clinton, would neither depose Saddam Hussein nor permit him to reassert himself. Finally,
George W. Bush decided to risk what his father had dared not: invading Iraq with the objective of
"regime change," he launched a third Gulf War in 2003. The notion his neoconservative advisers put
into Bush's head was that, with only a little help from American occupation and reconstruction, the
void left by Saddam Hussein's removal would be filled by a model democracy. This would set a
precedent for America to democratize every trouble-making state in the region, including Iran.
Yet the first Bush had been right: Iran, as well as ISIS, reaped the rewards of regime change
in Baghdad. And so America is now being drawn into a fourth Gulf War, reintroducing troops-styled
as advisors-into Iraq to counter the effects of the previous Gulf War, which was itself an answer
to the unfinished business of the wars of 1991 and the late 1980s. Our military interventions in
the Persian Gulf have been a self-perpetuating chain reaction for over three decades.
Iran released its American hostages the day Ronald Reagan was sworn in as president: January 20,
1981. So what accounts for another 35 years of conflict with Iran and Iraq? The answer begins with
oil.
Bacevich takes us back to the Carter years. "By June 1979, a just-completed study by a then-obscure
Defense Department official named Paul Wolfowitz was attracting notice throughout the national security
bureaucracy." This "Limited Contingency Study" described America's "vital and growing stake in the
Persian Gulf," arising from "our need for Persian-Gulf oil and because events in the Persian Gulf
affect the Arab-Israeli conflict."
"Wolfowitz adhered to an expansive definition of the Persian Gulf," notes Bacevich, which
in that young defense intellectual's words extended from "the region between Pakistan and Iran in
the northeast to the Yemens in the southwest." Wolfowitz identified two prospective menaces to U.S.
interests in the region: the Soviet Union-this was still the Cold War era, after all-and "the emerging
Iraqi threat"; to counter these Wolfowitz called for "advisors and counterinsurgency specialists,
token combat forces, or a major commitment" of U.S. forces to the Middle East.
(Bacevich is fair to Wolfowitz, acknowledging that Saddam Hussein was indeed an expansionist,
as the Iraqi dictator would demonstrate by invading Iran in 1980 and seizing Kuwait a decade later.
Whether this meant that Iraq was ever a threat to U.S. interests is, of course, a different question-as
is whether the Soviet Union could really have cut America off from Gulf oil.)
Wolfowitz was not alone in calling for the U.S. to become the guarantor of Middle East security-and
Saudi Arabia's security in particular-and President Carter heeded the advice. In March 1980 he created
the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force (RDJTF), predecessor to what we now know as the U.S. Central
Command (CENTCOM), which has military oversight for the region. The RDJTF's second head, Lt. Gen.
Robert Kingston, described its mission, in admirably frank language, as simply "to ensure the unimpeded
flow of oil from the Arabian Gulf."
Iraq and Iran both posed dangers to the flow of oil and its control by Saudi Arabia and other
Arab allies-to use the term loosely-of the United States. And just as the U.S. was drawn into wars
with Iran and Iraq when it tried to play one against the other, America's defense of Saudi Arabia
would have grave unintended consequences-such as the creation of al-Qaeda. Osama bin Laden was outraged
when, in 1990, Saudi Arabia's King Fahd declined his offer to wage holy war against Saddam Hussein
and instead turned to American protection, even permitting the stationing of American military personnel
in Islam's sacred lands. "To liberate Kuwait," writes Bacevich, bin Laden had "offered to raise an
army of mujahedin. Rejecting his offer and his protest, Saudi authorities sought to silence the impertinent
bin Laden. Not long thereafter, he fled into exile, determined to lead a holy war that would overthrow
the corrupt Saudi royals." The instrument bin Laden forged to accomplish that task, al-Qaeda, would
target Americans as well, seeking to push the U.S. out of Muslim lands.
Bin Laden had reason to hope for success: in the 1980s he had helped mujahedin defeat another
superpower, the Soviet Union, in Afghanistan. That struggle, of course, was supported by the U.S.,
through the CIA's "Operation Cyclone," which funneled arms and money to the Soviets' Muslim opponents.
Bacevich offers a verdict on this program:
Operation Cyclone illustrates one of the central ironies of America's War for the Greater Middle
East-the unwitting tendency, while intently focusing on solving one problem, to exacerbate a second
and plant the seeds of a third. In Afghanistan, this meant fostering the rise of Islamic radicalism
and underwriting Pakistan's transformation into a nuclear-armed quasi-rogue state while attempting
to subvert the Soviet Union.
America's support for the mujahedin succeeded in inflicting defeat on the USSR-but left Afghanistan
a haven and magnet for Islamist radicals, including bin Laden.
Another irony of Bacevich's tale is the way in which the end of the Cold War made escalation of
the War for the Greater Middle East possible. The Carter and Reagan administrations never considered
the Middle East the centerpiece of their foreign policy: Western Europe and the Cold War took precedence.
Carter and Reagan were unsystematic about their engagement with the Middle East and, even as they
expanded America's military presence, remained wary of strategic overcommitment. Operation Eagle
Claw, Reagan's deployment of troops to Lebanon in 1983 and bombing of Libya in 1986, and even the
meddling in Iran and Iraq were all small-scale projects compared to what would be unleashed after
the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The military bureaucracy took advantage of the removal of one enemy from the map-Soviet Communism-to
redirect resources toward a new region and new threats. As Bacevich observes, "What some at the time
were calling a 'peace dividend' offered CENTCOM a way of expanding its portfolio of assets." Operation
Desert Storm, and all that came afterward, became possible.
The
Greater Middle East of Bacevich's title centers strategically, if not geographically, upon Saudi
Arabia, Iraq, and Iran. But its strategic implications and cultural reach are wide, encompassing
Libya, Somalia, and other African states with significant Muslim populations; Afghanistan and Pakistan
(or "AfPak," in the Obama administration's parlance); and even, on the periphery, the Balkans, where
the U.S. intervened militarily in support of Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s. That Clinton-era
intervention is examined in detail by Bacevich: "Today, years after NATO came to their rescue," he
writes, "a steady stream of Bosnians and Kosovars leave their homeland and head off toward Syria
and Iraq, where they enlist as fighters in the ongoing anti-American, anti-Western jihad."
Much as George W. Bush believed that liberal democracy would spring up in Saddam Hussein's wake,
the humanitarian interventionists who demanded that Bill Clinton send peacekeepers to Bosnia and
bomb Serbia on behalf of the Kosovars thought that they were making the world safe for their own
liberal, multicultural values. But as Bacevich notes, the Balkan Muslims joining ISIS today are "waging
war on behalf of an entirely different set of universal values."
Bacevich's many books confront readers with painful but necessary truths. The final lesson
of this one is simple: "Perpetuating the War for the Greater Middle East is not enhancing American
freedom, abundance, and security. If anything, it is having the opposite effect."
Daniel McCarthy is the editor of The American Conservative.
"... "In its struggle against terrorism, the West wages war on one, but shakes hands with the other," Daoud continued. "This is a mechanism of denial, and denial has a price: preserving the famous strategic alliance with Saudi Arabia at the risk of forgetting that the kingdom also relies on an alliance with a religious clergy that produces, legitimizes, spreads, preaches and defends Wahhabism, the ultra-puritanical form of Islam that Daesh feeds on." ..."
"... In the past few decades, the Saudi regime has spent an estimated $100 billion exporting its extremist interpretation of Islam worldwide. It infuses its fundamentalist ideology in the ostensible charity work it performs, often targeting poor Muslim communities in countries like Pakistan or places like refugee camps, where uneducated, indigent, oppressed people are more susceptible to it. ..."
"... What is not contested, on the other hand, is that Saudi elites in the business community and even segments of the royal family support extremist groups like al-Qaida. U.S. government cables leaked by WikiLeaks admit "donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide." ..."
"... Sen. Graham has nevertheless insisted that the possibility that elements of the Saudi royal family supported the 9/11 attackers should not be ruled out. In his 2004 book "Intelligence Matters: The CIA, the FBI, Saudi Arabia, and the Failure of America's War on Terror," Graham further argued these points, from his background within the U.S. government. ..."
"... The independent, non-partisan Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania has detailed the allegations and possible evidence - or lack thereof - of Saudi ties to the 9/11 attacks on its website FactCheck.org. ..."
"... Yet despite its brutality and support for extremism, the U.S. considers the Saudi monarchy a "close ally." The State Department calls Saudi Arabia "a strong partner in regional security and counterterrorism efforts, providing military, diplomatic, and financial cooperation." It stated in September 2015 it "welcomed" the appointment of Saudi Arabia to the head of a U.N. human rights panel. "We're close allies," the State Department remarked. ..."
"... During the Cold War - and particularly during the Soviet war in Afghanistan throughout the 1980s - the U.S., hand-in-hand with Saudi Arabia, actively encouraged religious extremism. They stressed that socialist and communist movements were often atheistic, and pitted far-right religious fundamentalists against the secular leftists. The remnants of this policy are the extremist movements we see throughout the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia today. ..."
"... In order to decimate the left in the Cold War, the U.S. emboldened, armed and trained the extreme-right. The Frankenstein's monsters it created in the pursuit of this policy are the al-Qaedas and ISISes of the world. ..."
"... Saudi Arabia is truly a country that was created through Western imperialism. Before Roosevelt met with King Ibn Saud, Saudi Arabia was a relatively weak country with little global political influence. It was Western, and principally U.S., patronage that turned Saudi Arabia into what it is today. ..."
"... Women are essentially second-class citizens in Saudi Arabia. They are given nowhere near equal rights with men - who basically own their wives and daughters - and cannot travel without men accompanying them. Unemployment rates are skyrocketing among women, even though many are educated, and they were only just granted the right to vote in December 2015 - although they do not have any actual effectual politicians to vote for under an absolute monarchy. ..."
"... The U.S. will realize that there really is an easy way to stop terrorism: It will stop participating in it, and end its alliance with Saudi Arabia. ..."
"... "There was no 'overthrow.'" ..."
"... I've seen for myself the investments that Saudi Arabia has made in Kyrgyzstan to turn their Muslim majority into a destabilizing force. They pay for brand new Mosques with gleaming spires, and these are the locations where the local Muslims become radicalized and where guns, ammunition and explosives are held. ..."
"... one reason the usa government loves saudi is that the government activities enrich the officers of state. dubya not only promoted a war, he enriched his family with munitions contracts. look at the 'carlyle group.' ..."
"... It's no wonder the average Middle Easterner thinks the US is behind ISIS. ..."
"Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating
in it." So advised world-renowned public intellectual Noam Chomsky, one of the most cited thinkers
in human history.
The counsel may sound simple and intuitive - that's because it is. But when it comes to Saudi
Arabia, the U.S. ignores it.
Saudi Arabia is the world's leading sponsor of Islamic extremism. It is also a close U.S. ally.
... ... ...
Saudi Arabia is a theocratic absolute monarchy that governs based on an extreme interpretation of
Sharia (Islamic law). It is so extreme, it has been widely compared to ISIS. Algerian journalist
Kamel Daoud characterized Saudi Arabia in an
op-ed in The New York Times as "an ISIS that has made it."
"Black Daesh, white Daesh," Daoud
wrote, using the Arabic acronym for ISIS. "The former slits throats, kills, stones, cuts off hands,
destroys humanity's common heritage and despises archaeology, women and non-Muslims. The latter is
better dressed and neater but does the same things. The Islamic State; Saudi Arabia."
"In its struggle against terrorism, the West wages war on one, but shakes hands with the other,"
Daoud continued. "This is a mechanism of denial, and denial has a price: preserving the famous strategic
alliance with Saudi Arabia at the risk of forgetting that the kingdom also relies on an alliance
with a religious clergy that produces, legitimizes, spreads, preaches and defends Wahhabism, the
ultra-puritanical form of Islam that Daesh feeds on."
In the past few decades, the Saudi regime has
spent an estimated $100 billion exporting its extremist interpretation of Islam worldwide. It
infuses its fundamentalist ideology in the ostensible charity work it performs, often targeting poor
Muslim communities in countries like Pakistan or places like refugee camps, where uneducated, indigent,
oppressed people are more susceptible to it.
Whether elements within Saudi Arabia support ISIS is contested. Even if Saudi Arabia does not
directly support or fund ISIS, however, Saudi Arabia gives legitimacy to the extremist ideology ISIS
preaches.
What is not contested, on the other hand, is that Saudi elites in the business community and
even segments of the royal family support extremist groups like al-Qaida. U.S. government
cables leaked by WikiLeaks admit "donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source
of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide."
Supporters of the Saudi monarchy resist comparisons to ISIS. The regime itself
threatened
to sue social media users who compared it to ISIS. Apologists point out that ISIS and Saudi Arabia
are enemies. This is indeed true. But this is not necessarily because they are ideologically different
(they are similar) but rather because they threaten each other's power.
There can only be one autocrat in an autocratic system; ISIS' self-proclaimed Caliph Abu Bakr
al-Baghdadi refuses to kowtow to present Saudi King Salman, and vice-versa. After all, the Saudi
absolute monarch partially justifies his rule through claiming that it has been blessed and ordained
by God, and if ISIS' caliph insists the same, they can't both be right.
Some American politicians have criticized the U.S.-Saudi relationship for these very reasons.
Former U.S. Sen. Bob Graham has been perhaps the most outspoken critic. Graham has called extremist
groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda "a product of Saudi ideals, Saudi money and Saudi organizational support."
... ... ...
Sen. Graham has nevertheless insisted that the possibility that elements of the Saudi royal family
supported the 9/11 attackers should not be ruled out. In his 2004 book "Intelligence Matters: The
CIA, the FBI, Saudi Arabia, and the Failure of America's War on Terror," Graham further argued these
points, from his background within the U.S. government.
The independent, non-partisan Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania
has detailed the allegations and possible evidence - or lack thereof - of Saudi ties to the 9/11
attacks on its website FactCheck.org.
Whatever its role, what is clear is that Saudi Arabia's support for violent extremist groups is
well documented. Such support continues to this very day. In Syria, the Saudi monarchy has backed
al-Nusra, al-Qaeda's Syrian affiliate. The U.S. government has bombed al-Nusra, but its ally Saudi
Arabia is funding it.
Yet despite its brutality and support for extremism, the U.S. considers the Saudi monarchy a "close
ally." The State Department calls Saudi Arabia "a strong partner in regional security and counterterrorism
efforts, providing military, diplomatic, and financial cooperation." It stated in September 2015
it "welcomed" the appointment of Saudi Arabia to the head of a U.N. human rights panel. "We're close
allies," the State Department remarked.
... ... ...
During the Cold War - and particularly during the Soviet war in Afghanistan throughout the
1980s - the U.S., hand-in-hand with Saudi Arabia, actively encouraged religious extremism. They stressed
that socialist and communist movements were often atheistic, and pitted far-right religious fundamentalists
against the secular leftists. The remnants of this policy are the extremist movements we see throughout
the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia today.
In order to decimate the left in the Cold War, the U.S. emboldened, armed and trained the
extreme-right. The Frankenstein's monsters it created in the pursuit of this policy are the al-Qaedas
and ISISes of the world.
... ... ...
Saudi Arabia is truly a country that was created through Western imperialism. Before Roosevelt
met with King Ibn Saud, Saudi Arabia was a relatively weak country with little global political influence.
It was Western, and principally U.S., patronage that turned Saudi Arabia into what it is today.
The Saudi monarchy presents itself as modernized, yet it is still feudal in essence. There is
almost no developed civil society in Saudi Arabia, because the regime has made all independent institutionalized
forms of dissent illegal.
Women are essentially second-class citizens in Saudi Arabia. They are given nowhere near equal
rights with men - who basically own their wives and daughters - and cannot travel without men accompanying
them. Unemployment rates are skyrocketing among women, even though many are educated, and they were
only just granted the right to vote in December 2015 - although they do not have any actual effectual
politicians to vote for under an absolute monarchy.
... ... ...
If it is truly interested in stopping terrorism, then, the U.S. and the rest of the West will
heed Chomsky's advice. The U.S. will realize that there really is an easy way to stop terrorism:
It will stop participating in it, and end its alliance with Saudi Arabia.
Ben Norton is a politics staff writer at Salon. You can find him on Twitter at @BenjaminNorton.
Declassified documents describe in detail how US – with British help – engineered coup against
Mohammad Mosaddeq
Monday 19 August 2013
The CIA has publicly admitted for the first time that it was behind the notorious 1953 coup
against Iran's democratically elected prime minister Mohammad Mosaddeq, in documents that also
show how the British government tried to block the release of information about its own involvement
in his overthrow.
On the 60th anniversary of an event often invoked by Iranians as evidence of western meddling,
the US national security archive at George Washington University published a series of declassified
CIA documents.
"The military coup that overthrew Mosaddeq and his National Front cabinet
was carried out under CIA direction as an act of US foreign policy, conceived and approved at
the highest levels of government," reads a previously excised section of an internal CIA history
titled The Battle for Iran.
The documents, published on the archive's website under freedom of information laws, describe
in detail how the US – with British help – engineered the coup, codenamed TPAJAX by the CIA and
Operation Boot by Britain's MI6...
Mosaddeq's overthrow, still given as a reason for the Iranian mistrust of British and American
politicians, consolidated the Shah's rule for the next 26 years until the 1979 Islamic revolution.
It was aimed at making sure the Iranian monarchy would safeguard the west's oil interests in the
country.
The archived CIA documents include a draft internal history of the coup titled "Campaign to
install a pro-western government in Iran", which defines the objective of the campaign as "through
legal, or quasi-legal, methods to effect the fall of the Mosaddeq government; and to replace it
with a pro-western government under the Shah's leadership with Zahedi as its prime minister".
{The Nixon administration created a "Twin
Pillars" Middle East policy, in which the U.S.-backed monarchies in Saudi Arabia and Iran
were considered pillars of stability. In 1953, the CIA backed a coup that overthrew Iran's first
and only democratically elected head of state, Mohammad Mosaddegh}
That is a rather odd correlation -- Mr. Nixon was inaugurated in 1973 -- 20 yrs after the CIA/MI6
(Mossad was likely lurking, too) toppled Mr. Mosaddegh.
The Nixon effect stems from Mr. Kissinger's amorous connection -- he made love to Saudi Arabia,
and they had a child named Petro-$. It was the birth of the greatest financial con in Human history.
If one has a grasp of the nature of the Supreme Power behind that curtain, the events unfolding
in the world right now, make much sense.
I've seen for myself the investments that Saudi Arabia has made in Kyrgyzstan to turn their
Muslim majority into a destabilizing force. They pay for brand new Mosques with gleaming spires,
and these are the locations where the local Muslims become radicalized and where guns, ammunition
and explosives are held.
They were successful in starting an armed revolution against of the Kyrgis government in 2010
in this otherwise peaceful country where Muslims and non-Muslims had coexisted for years in peace
and harmony. (During my visit, I even had a Muslim business owner thank George Bush during my
visit for our USAID support - I was shocked. Muslims are not the enemy. Extremists and authoritarian
governments like SA are. They don't want the two cultures to mix.)
Saudi Arabia is by far the biggest opponent to peace in the Middle East.
one reason the usa government loves saudi is that the government activities enrich the
officers of state. dubya not only promoted a war, he enriched his family with munitions contracts.
look at the 'carlyle group.'
Until the problem of Saudi Arabia is solved, the problems in the Middle East will not be solved.
We thought we could go in the back door by changing Iraq, but we only made things worse. Take
away the oil and we would have invaded after 9/11.
The royal family is basically paying off the radicals to leave them, and their wealth, alone.
Americans have to accept that fact that the U.S. and other western governments prefer fundamentalism
- which sells us oil - to democracy, socialism or Arab nationalism. It loves a good theocracy.
These really are feudal regimes.
In Palestine, in Afghanistan, in Libya, in Iraq and now Syria, the U.S. and its allies have
DIRECTLY funded Al Quada and its offshoots. Much of the weaponry sent from Libya to Syria for
'secular freedom fighters' ended up in the hands of Daesh. The U.S. has worked to crush partially
secular regimes over and over again, even using the early Islamic Hamas fundamentalists in Palestine
against the PLO, DFLP, PFLP etc. Before that they undermined Nasser, Mossedegh, and ANY left nationalists
in sight.
All for oil. It is still the oil barons and the militarists that back the Saudis and this will
not change until the US. government is undermined itself.
Hillary is a warmonger and is very dangerous in any high position in government (look how much damage
she managed to do while being the Secretary of State), to say nothing about being POTUS. Among other
things Hillary and just too old and too sick to be a President.
Notable quotes:
"... A vote for Stein is a vote against empire. It's a vote against the neocons and their plans to bring the entire world under our rule. ..."
"... Look who Hillary picked as her VP! Look who she hired in her campaign. She doesn't give a damn. Instead of demanding the progressive vote to avoid disaster, have her change course and deserve that vote. People have had enough already. ..."
"... Bernie Sanders sold out. Time to forget him and forget his advice, as the worst vote would be a vote for a neocon and the wars she would bring us. ..."
"... I mean if this was a contest between Hitler and Stalin there would still be people asking others to vote for Stalin so that Hitler wasn't elected and arguing that voting for another candidate is wasting your vote. If you want to vote tactically, vote tactically, and if you want to vote for what you believe, vote for what you believe, but understand what you are saying and don't act as if there was any kind of moral obligation to vote for Clinton, because there isn't. ..."
"... Independent studies and reports have proven that the primaries were rigged beyond any doubt. ..."
"... Hillary's biggest supporters spend most of their time on Wall St, in oil companies, or in corrupt foreign governments. ..."
"... There simply isn't any logic to this OMG Trump will be the worst thing ever. So one must then assume that the argument is created and perpetuated simply to manipulate and mislead. ..."
"... Trump, a detestable person, would get very little of his extreme views passed. Clinton, a detestable person, would get very much of her extreme views passed. ..."
"... Because Clinton is to the right of Obama (accurate provided you aren't a rabid partisan) she is far more likely to get every awful military action she wants. Since she's apparently the "pragmatic" one, how quickly do any of these policy proposals get watered down or gutted entirely in the name of compromise and political realities and "politics being the art of the possible"? ..."
"... True. It ends here. A vote for Hillary is a vote that supports and condones the corruption of the DNC and Clinton 's campaign. Clearly, they had handicapped Sanders from the start. Starting with an 'insurmountable 400+ superdelegates before Bernie entered the race which the MSM, who, in collusion with the DNC, pushed as "an impossible lead to overcome" skewed the primaries results in favor of Clinton. ..."
"... I won't vote for someone who has to nuance her answers when it comes to the way in which she's conducted herself during her tenure at the Department of State. This from a former Clinton supporter in 2008. ..."
"... Glad to know that they would rather have a Trump presidency instead of banding together with the Dems. ..."
"... Please see what you will be doing if Trump becomes president. He doesn't stand for ANYTHING that Bernie stands for. ..."
"... Not this election. Certainly not the next election. Or the one after that. At least Hilly is Dem. Best laugh of the day. ..."
"But I am concerned that the DNC elected Hillary in the first place. Because they [Trump and Clinton]
are either tied or she's even losing in some polls. Whereas Bernie consistently beat Trump by double
digits [in hypothetical match-up polls]. We could win the House and the Senate back with those kind
of numbers."
... ... ...
"I've read hundreds of the DNC leaked emails. I feel that our votes were stolen. I don't think
she won the primary fair and square. And if she had to cheat to do it, maybe she shouldn't become
the first woman president."
"I think by me voting for the third-party candidate, along with millions of other Bernie supporters,
it will maybe show that the third party is possible in the future." JCDavis Tom J. Davis
What has Jill Stein ever done that qualifies her to lead a large nation with international
obligations and not just those to it's own citizens?
A vote for Stein is a vote against empire. It's a vote against the neocons and their plans
to bring the entire world under our rule.
pdehaan -> Tom J. Davis
It's quite something for democrats to demand the progressive votes for Hillary and trying to
induce a guilt trip in order to avoid Trump from being elected.
Why don't you demand Hillary Clinton to earn that vote?? For example, by having her guarantee
in no uncertain means that she'll oppose TPP and associated trade deals in any form or fashion
(instead of in it's current form)? Why don't you demand Hillary Clinton to be less hawkish and
dangerous wrt foreign policy instead? Why don't you demand her to work towards a $15 minimum wage,
income equality and social protection instead? It's very easy to demand one's vote just because
the other side is even worse. This issue comes up every election and it's just maintaining the
status quo.
Look who Hillary picked as her VP! Look who she hired in her campaign. She doesn't give
a damn. Instead of demanding the progressive vote to avoid disaster, have her change course and
deserve that vote. People have had enough already.
JCDavis -> palindrom
Bernie Sanders sold out. Time to forget him and forget his advice, as the worst vote would
be a vote for a neocon and the wars she would bring us.
JCDavis -> davshev
Think of it this way--Trump may be a clown, but Hillary is a warmonger who will bring us war
with Russia. and a war with Russia will be a disaster for everyone. So if your vote for Stein
gives us Trump, that is not as bad as it could be.
cynictomato
Oh Please! If you want to vote for Clinton just vote for her but let the rest do whatever they
want. The idea that if you vote for another candidate besides the two main ones you are wasting
your vote is what has turned the USA in a two party democracy and is detrimental for the citizens
because the main parties only have to worry about presenting a better option than their rival,
not about presenting a good candidate.
I mean if this was a contest between Hitler and Stalin there would still be people asking
others to vote for Stalin so that Hitler wasn't elected and arguing that voting for another candidate
is wasting your vote. If you want to vote tactically, vote tactically, and if you want to vote
for what you believe, vote for what you believe, but understand what you are saying and don't
act as if there was any kind of moral obligation to vote for Clinton, because there isn't.
The idea that the Democratic National Committee, and the Clinton campaign, "rigged" the Democratic
primary is fairly widespread
It's not an IDEA it's a FACT.
Independent studies and reports have proven that the primaries were rigged beyond any doubt.
(Guardian please study these reports and write an in depth article on the rigged primaries)
On foreign policy, Clinton is certainly not "the much lesser threat to their ideology". She
has made it clear that aggressive stance on Syria/Ukraine will be taken, increasing the odds of
an uncontained global conflict.
NoOneYouKnowNow -> kevdflb
Hillary's biggest supporters spend most of their time on Wall St, in oil companies, or
in corrupt foreign governments.
mrmetrowest -> Iskierka
Are Nader voters more responsible for Bush than the hundreds of thousands of Democrats that
voted for him? Are they more responsible than the millions who stayed home? The 'Nader cost Gore
the election' canard is one of the least logical pieces of conventional wisdom ever.
Mrs Clinton is on record as supporting a no-fly zone in Syria - an act that will further embroil
us in the Middle East and might get us into a blow-up with Russia. If this happens, are Clinton
supporters willing to be responsible for her actions?
Vote Green, if that's what your conscience says. The anti-Trump voters' moral position is less
pure than they think; in four years they'll be voting against someone else. This goes on forever.
mrmetrowest -> Rolf Erikson
In 1964, voters were presented with a choice between LBJ and Goldwater. Goldwater was considered
to hold extreme political views which caused many to vote for LBJ, who won a landslide victory.
LBJ did great things domestically, however he massively escalated the war in Vietnam, leading
to the deaths on tens of thousands of Americans and millions of Vietnamese. To what extent are
those who voted for LBJ responsible for those deaths? Likewise, if Mrs Clinton gets us into a
war in Syria, or Iran, will you accept responsibility for helping put her in office?
Cue the trolls insisting that you must, must vote for their preferred candidate. If people vote
Green, that is their democratic choice and right. It is also because the Democratic Party saw fit
to foist a terrible candidate on the people.
Bernie has #DemExit and is returning to his roots as an Independent and said he will run in
2018 for the Senate as an Independent! Follow Bernie's lead and exit the corrupt, neoLiberal Democratic
Party! Do you want 4 more War Years? Peace NOW or nothing later!
Vote for peace and prosperity - Dr Jill Stein and the Green Economy!
Sawant is a complete pile-driver of a debater, a devastatingly accurate verbal machine gun,
and she utterly crushed...but, to me, Traister still won. The 'vote your heart' constituency diagnose
the situation near perfectly, and push for political action that isn't beholden to election cycles
but they then just fall short; they then turn on a dime and act like the electoral system isn't
broken, like a General Election is an 'end game' and is meaningful. Whereas L.E.V. adherents don't
close their eyes to what's on offer and it's they, not 'vote your heart' people, who see a General
Election for what it is: a broken democracy offering a "choice" between two types of terrible
but one type of terrible is always going to be less terrible. Underneath Traister's tiresome,
wilfully blind, if well written, Hillary hagiographies, I think that she knows this too.
Of course, the Hillary supporters and media cheerleaders will spin around from beseeching for
a vote against Miller/Barron/Drumpf/von Clownstick to then, if Hillary gets a solid victory, claiming
a great win, after all -"look at the votes *for* Hillary Clinton!" - when she would only win because
of votes *against* the short-fingered hysteric. They'll steal votes cast against Drumpf and disingenuously
claim them as votes *for* Hillary. So what? 'Cynical, dishonest narcissists in cynical, dishonest
narcissism' shock! "Let the baby have its bottle", as they say, and let them stew in their own
juice after progressives perhaps bolt to the formation of a new party or a re-structured Green
party after election day.
Think outside of election cycles and it's precisely *because* one should do so, and treat General
Elections as unimportant towards the big scheme of things, that one should vote for better of
two historically disliked candidates because other days will offer less sickening choices and
huge swathes of the country will gain/be better off even if you don't. It would ironically be
Clintonian to punish Clinton and the DNC for not having a sufficiently collectivist outlook by
personally selling out others and allowing the short-fingered vulgarian to snake oil his tiny-handed
way in. Women seeking to retain the right to choose
http://nymag.com/thecut/2016/07/mike-pence-says-roe-v-wade-will-be-overturned.html Mexican
people, Muslim people, immigrants in general will be just some of those who'll be in your spiritual
debt if you're a swing state voter who'll bite the bullet. You don't have to support someone in
order to give them your vote.
The idea that the Democratic National Committee, and the Clinton campaign, "rigged" the
Democratic primary is fairly widespread among Sanders supporters
This is something that really annoys me. You're implying that this is not an undeniable fact clearly
backed by written evidence fact by calling it an ''idea''.
The thing about Hilary is that she is not by any stretch of imagination a good candidate. She
is deeply unpopular because of who she is as a politician. You cannot expect people to ignore
this. When the DNC willingly and knowingly rigged the election in favour of a bad candidate it
was done based on the partly flawed calculation that the fear of any Republican winning over a
Democrat would suffice to back their candidate no matter what.
And I say partly true, because a lot of the people who would vote for Democrats anyways will
do so even if they backed Bernie.
However Bernie (and to a far smaller extent Trump) energised and brought in people who might
not normally vote at all because they're fed up with the establishment. Once they found their
voice in Bernie and got fired up, they will vote but on for the thing they despise the most (aka
the establishment like Clinton). Nor should they. It was up to the Democratic Party to recognise
the candidate that would have taken advantage of this and they willingly failed in doing so. Even
when picking a VP for Clinton they failed to make even the smallest gesture to these people. So,
no there is no reason good enough for them to switch and vote for someone they despise and know
for sure represents the things they hate.
Now there is also the irony that they're attacking Trump for his fear mongering, while they
themselves are also creating fear mongering amongst voters about what a monster Trump would be.
It's all about fear even when they pretend it's not and that is sickening.
There simply isn't any logic to this OMG Trump will be the worst thing ever. So one must then
assume that the argument is created and perpetuated simply to manipulate and mislead.
Trump, a detestable person, would get very little of his extreme views passed. Clinton,
a detestable person, would get very much of her extreme views passed.
Because Clinton is to the right of Obama (accurate provided you aren't a rabid partisan)
she is far more likely to get every awful military action she wants. Since she's apparently the
"pragmatic" one, how quickly do any of these policy proposals get watered down or gutted entirely
in the name of compromise and political realities and "politics being the art of the possible"?
And of course, the useless, vapid, Democrat partisans will, for the most part, say nothing.
See: 8-years of Obama as Bush 2.0.
Get your facts straight. Those have been labeled FALSE!
However the corruption and neoLiberal war supporter that is hung on Clinton has been proven
by her actions with "regime change" in Libya and coup support in Honduras. And then there is the
corruption of weapons for charitable contributions for the Clinton Foundation!
Do we want peace and prosperity that only ill Stein can bring with her Green Economy or do
we want 4 more years of war and job loss? Simple choice.
Obama was very different to bush on almost every issue, the differences might not be massive but
they have a real impact on people. For example on climate change obama successfully pushed for
polices that will help reduce emissions while bush did literally nothing. It will be the same
for clinton.
You are correct that Obama was different from Bush, you're just wrong about the direction.
Drones/Illegal Wars: Expanded
Wall St/Corporate Corruption: Went unpunished & expanded
Domestic Spying: Expanded
Constitutional Violations: Expanded
War or Whistleblowers: Created
He has done nothing but act like climate change is important. He has not done anything meaningful
except offer more hopeful rhetoric, the only thing the Democratic candidates seem to be good at
lately.
You're being ridiculous. If Trump wins, the republicans win the Senate and the House and he will
sign dozens of Republican bills that will set the progressive movement back a decade or more.
He will also nominate a right wing judge to replace Scalia Anna the SCOTUS will be in conservative
hands for another generation.
If you don't see that, you have a severe case of denial.
You are aware that you can vote for candidates for other positions that are not in the same as
the party as the president you vote for, yes? You can not vote Clinton but still vote Team D everywhere
else.
As an institution, SCOTUS has held back progress almost as often as it has helped it. So no,
i'm not one of those easily swayed by the terrible "but think of the appointments!" argument.
Perhaps it becoming even clearer that it is an anti-democratic institution is the best way to
achieve real justice.
The old worse of two evils logic that guarantees an eternity of bad candidates.
Cliff Olney
True. It ends here. A vote for Hillary is a vote that supports and condones the corruption
of the DNC and Clinton 's campaign. Clearly, they had handicapped Sanders from the start. Starting
with an 'insurmountable 400+ superdelegates before Bernie entered the race which the MSM, who,
in collusion with the DNC, pushed as "an impossible lead to overcome" skewed the primaries results
in favor of Clinton.
What a hollow victory it must be for Hillary, but then, one must have a conscience to feel
such things, and as we can see from her support for the coup in Honduras, she lacks this empathy.
"Give them a good attorney before we deport the children back to Honduras", resonates with those
of us that have a conscience.
Not going to happen.
Sanders was honest. So is Stein. I won't vote for someone who has to nuance her answers
when it comes to the way in which she's conducted herself during her tenure at the Department
of State. This from a former Clinton supporter in 2008.
Clinton or Trump? The duopoly's choice for president is a dry heave.
BradStorch -> Mardak
How will you push Clinton to the left? What leverage will you have after you gave her a pass
on Iraq, Libya, Wall Street etc.? If she runs against Ted Cruz in 2020 you'll vote for her whether
or not she started any wars or did anything from Bernie's platform, right?
brooks303
Glad to know that they would rather have a Trump presidency instead of banding together with
the Dems. I understand the need for a three, or even four party system. We should work toward
that at the ballot box.
But not with this election. Please see what you will be doing if Trump
becomes president. He doesn't stand for ANYTHING that Bernie stands for. At least Hillary is a
Democrat.
Indie60 -> brooks303
Not this election. Certainly not the next election. Or the one after that. At least Hilly
is Dem. Best laugh of the day.
christinaak -> brooks303
We would have to amend the Constitution to have an effective multiparty system, because of
the current requirement of 270 electoral votes to win the Presidency. Under the current system
it would be all but impossible for one candidate to obtain 270 electoral votes in a truly competitive
multiparty system. If one candidate does not obtain the required number then the House of Representatives
gets
Khizr Muazzam Kahn moved from Pakistan to the United Arab Emirates prior
to emigrating into the U.S. Kahn is directly affiliated with the
advancement of Muslim immigration into the United States.
Mr. Kahn runs
a law firm in New York called KM Kahn Law Office:
Kahn's primary area of expertise -as advertised- is legal aide and
legal services for Muslim immigration assistance.
Attorney Khizr Kahn also used to work for Hogan, Hartson and Lovells
law firm within Washington DC which has direct ties to the Clinton
Foundation.
... ... ...
Hogan, Hartson, Lovells are one of the lobbying entities for Saudi
affairs in Washington DC.
[…] Hogan Lovells LLP, another U.S. firm
hired by the Saudis
, is registered to work for the Royal Embassy of
Saudi Arabia through 2016, disclosures show. Robert Kyle, a lobbyist from
the firm, has bundled $50,850 for Clinton's campaign"
"Many lawyers at Hogan Lovells remember the week in 2004 when U.S.
Army Capt. Humayun Khan lost his life to a suicide bomber. Then-Hogan &
Hartson attorneys mourned the death because the soldier's father, Khizr
Khan, a Muslim American immigrant, was among their beloved colleagues"
Mr. Khizr Kahn is not some arbitrary Muslim voice called upon randomly
to speak at the Democrat National Convention on behalf of former
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Attorney Kahn is a well documented, and well compensated, conscript
and activist for the advancement of Islamic interests into the United
States. So it should come as no surprise to see the Clinton Machine use
Kahn to serve both of their interests in this political election season.
–
The Conservative Treehouse
...
But little known
is the fact that Lynch was a litigation partner for eight years at a major Washington law firm
that served the Clintons.
Lynch was with the Washington-headquartered international
law firm
Hogan & Hartson LLP from March 2002 through April 2010.
According to documents Hillary Clinton's first presidential campaign made public in
2008, Hogan & Harrison's New York-based partner Howard Topaz was the tax lawyer who filed
income tax returns for Bill and Hillary Clinton beginning in 2004. –GR
Khizr Muazzam Khan graduated in Punjab University Law College, as the New York Times
confirms. He specialized in International Trade Law in Saudi Arabia. An interest lawyer for
Islamic oil companies Khan wrote a paper, called In Defense of OPEC to defend the Organization of
the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), an intergovernmental oil company consisting of mainly
Islamic countries.
But more than this, Khan is a promoter of Islamic Sharia Law in the U.S. He was a co-founder of
the Journal of Contemporary Issues in Muslim Law (Islamic Sharia). Khan's fascination with
Islamic Sharia stems from his life in Saudi Arabia. During the eighties Khan wrote a paper titled
Juristic Classification of Islamic [Sharia] Law. In it he elucidated on the system of Sharia law
expressing his reverence for "The Sunnah [the works of Muhammad] - authentic tradition of the
Prophet Muhammad (Peace be upon him)." A snapshot of his essay can be seen here:
But Khan's fascination with Islam isn't the only issue. What is more
worrisome is that at the bottom of the intro, Khan shows his appreciation
and the source of his work and gives credit to an icon of the Muslim
Brotherhood:
"The contribution to this article of S. Ramadan's writing is
greatly acknowledged."
This alone speaks volumes. Khan used the works of
S. Ramadan to lay his foundation for his
inspiration regarding the promotion of Sharia. S.
Ramadan is Said Ramadan, head of the Islamic
Center in Geneva and a major icon of the Muslim
Brotherhood, the grandson of Hassan Al-Banna the
founder and hero of the Muslim Brotherhood which
spread terrorism throughout the world.
In
regards to his son and his sacrifice, on the
other side of the coin, many were the 'Muslim
martyrs' who joined the US military. Ali Abdul
Saoud Mohamed, for example, enlisted in the
Special Forces of the US Army; he was a double
agent for Al-Qaeda. How about Hasan K. Akbar, a
Muslim American soldier who murdered and injured
fifteen soldiers. There was Bowe Bergdahl, an
American Muslim soldier who deserted his men to
join the Taliban, a desertion which led to six
American being ambushed and killed while they
were on the search looking for him. And of course
the example of Nidal Malik Hassan, who murdered
fourteen Americans in cold blood in Fort Hood.
What about infiltration into the U.S. military
like Taha Jaber Al-Alwani, a major Muslim thinker
for the Muslim Minority Affairs, an icon of the
Abedin family (Hillary's aid Human) who, while he
served in U.S. military, called on arming Muslims
to fight the U.S? Al-Alwani is an IMMA (Institute
of Muslims Minority Affairs) favorite, Taha Jaber
al-Alwani, whom the Abedins say is the source for
their doctrine (see Abedins-Meii-Kampf) is an
ardent anti-Semite who by the way, runs the
United States Department of Defense program (out
of all places) for training Muslim military
chaplains in the U.S. military. Via:
Shoebat.com
Paul Vallely, a retired Army general turned conservative activist, defended Donald Trump's
attacks on the Muslim-American family of a slain service member yesterday, telling Newsmax host
Ed Berliner that the late soldier's father, Khizr Khan is "a Muslim Brotherhood sympathizer" and
saying that the mother, Ghazala Khan, made herself a "political pawn" when she stood silently by
her husband's side "as most Muslim women do."
Vallely noted that he himself lost a son in the armed forces, saying that Khizr Khan "put himself
out there" and became a "political pawn" when he agreed to speak against Trump at the Democratic
National Convention. He accused Kahn of being "the one that initiated the attack against Trump"
and claimed that Khan is "a Muslim Brotherhood sympathizer," a baseless charge that Berliner
challenged.
When Berliner asked Vallely about Trump's attacks on Ghazala Khan, who, overcome by emotion,
chose not to speak onstage at the convention, Vallely repeated Trump's charge that she had been
silenced by her religion: "Well, she did stand there, as most Muslim women do and they don't say
anything, so there again, when you put yourself up into being a political pawn like that, you've
got to take the heat."
"... I think that we should be looking to create an umbrella of deterrence that goes much further than just Israel. Of course I would make it clear to the Iranians that an attack on Israel would incur massive retaliation from the United States, but I would do the same with other countries in the region. ..."
"... Because it does mean that they have to look very carefully at their society, because whatever stage of development they might be in their nuclear weapons program in the next 10 years during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them. ..."
"... The warmongering neocon woman gets a little careless in the second part of her statement, forgetting "nuclear" and reverting to the 2008 declaration. Worse, she says that even if they don't have nukes quite yet, an attack on Holy Israel means it's "glow-in-the-dark" time in Iran. ..."
"... It really is a tragic thing to be talking about. That's the way the Madeleine Albright ***** – the one who has declared that any woman who doesn't vote for Hillary will go to hell – put it when speaking of 500,000 dead Iraqi kids. Darned shame, but it had to be done. ..."
"... Don't even think about a possibility why Hillary might be so devoted to Israel. When she was in the Senate the woman went to a prayer breakfast with some of the most repulsive of the Conservative Republicans. Nobody at all is talking about Hillary's religion. If she is one of the Rapture types, her access to nukes would mean an End-Timer finally has a chance to force God to get off the pot and start with the Second Coming. ..."
"... Just think of it – the First and the Last woman president. ..."
"... You are right. She is a huge danger. Not only due to her frail health, age and history of blood clots. As Huma Abedin noted in her deposition, she often is "confused". Which means that she does not have "normal" level of situational awareness. ..."
"... After the dissolution of the USSR and the "triumphal march" of neoliberalism, the US elite by-and-large lost the sense of self-preservation. ..."
"... Like sociopaths she has no self-control, no sense of self-preservation, no boundaries. ..."
Hillary 2008: "George Stephanopoulos: "Senator Clinton, would you [extend
our deterrent to Israel]?"
Hillary Clinton: "Well, in fact I think that we should be looking
to create an umbrella of deterrence that goes much further than just Israel.
Of course I would make it clear to the Iranians that an attack on Israel
would incur massive retaliation from the United States, but I would do the
same with other countries in the region."
Massive Retaliation has always had the meaning of a 'massive' nuclear
attack.
Hillary 2016: "MR. CUOMO: Iran: some language recently. You said if Iran
were to strike Israel, there would be a massive retaliation. Scary words.
Does massive retaliation mean you'd go into Iran? You would bomb Iran? Is
that what that's supposed to suggest?
SEN. CLINTON: Well, the question was if Iran were to launch a nuclear
attack on Israel, what would our response be? And I want the Iranians to
know that if I'm the president, we will attack Iran. And I want them to
understand that.
Because it does mean that they have to look very carefully at their
society, because whatever stage of development they might be in their nuclear
weapons program in the next 10 years during which they might foolishly consider
launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them.
That's a terrible thing to say, but those people who run Iran need to
understand that, because that perhaps will deter them from doing something
that would be reckless, foolish, and tragic."
The warmongering neocon woman gets a little careless in the second
part of her statement, forgetting "nuclear" and reverting to the 2008 declaration.
Worse, she says that even if they don't have nukes quite yet, an attack
on Holy Israel means it's "glow-in-the-dark" time in Iran.
It really is a tragic thing to be talking about. That's the way the
Madeleine Albright ***** – the one who has declared that any woman who doesn't
vote for Hillary will go to hell – put it when speaking of 500,000 dead
Iraqi kids. Darned shame, but it had to be done.
But move on – it's the insane Trump who can't be trusted with nukes.
Don't even think about a possibility why Hillary might be so devoted
to Israel. When she was in the Senate the woman went to a prayer breakfast
with some of the most repulsive of the Conservative Republicans. Nobody
at all is talking about Hillary's religion. If she is one of the Rapture
types, her access to nukes would mean an End-Timer finally has a chance
to force God to get off the pot and start with the Second Coming.
Just think of it – the First and the Last woman president.
likbez , August 5, 2016 11:29 pm
Hi Zachary,
> Just think of it – the First and the Last woman president.
You are right. She is a huge danger. Not only due to her frail health,
age and history of blood clots. As Huma Abedin noted in her deposition,
she often is "confused". Which means that she does not have "normal" level
of situational awareness.
For some specialties like airplane pilots this is a death sentence. Unfortunately,
if elected, she can take the country with her.
While the USSR existed, as bad as it was for people within its borders,
it was a blessing for the people of the USA, as it kept the elite in check
and frightful to behave in "natural, greedy and delusional "Masters of the
Universe" way".
After the dissolution of the USSR and the "triumphal march" of neoliberalism,
the US elite by-and-large lost the sense of self-preservation.
If you read what Hillary utters like "no fly zone" in Syria and other
similar staff, to me this looks like a sign of madness, plain and simple.
No reasonable politician should go of the cliff like that, if stakes are
not extremely high.
And MSM try to sell her as a more reasonable politician then Trump. In
reality she is like Kelvin absolute zero. You just can't go lower. The only
hope is that she is a puppet and it does not matter what she utters.
But if we take her statements about Syria and Russia at face value, she
is either dangerously ignorant or (more probably) is a female sociopath.
Like sociopaths she has no self-control, no sense of self-preservation,
no boundaries.
So her arrogant and reckless behavior as for "getting rich quick" and
with the private "bathroom" email server is a sign of more general and more
dangerous tendency.
Neocons are still way too powerful. They dominate MSM and essentially
dictate the agenda.
"... I think that we should be looking to create an umbrella of deterrence that goes much further than just Israel. Of course I would make it clear to the Iranians that an attack on Israel would incur massive retaliation from the United States, but I would do the same with other countries in the region. ..."
"... Because it does mean that they have to look very carefully at their society, because whatever stage of development they might be in their nuclear weapons program in the next 10 years during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them. ..."
"... The warmongering neocon woman gets a little careless in the second part of her statement, forgetting "nuclear" and reverting to the 2008 declaration. Worse, she says that even if they don't have nukes quite yet, an attack on Holy Israel means it's "glow-in-the-dark" time in Iran. ..."
"... It really is a tragic thing to be talking about. That's the way the Madeleine Albright ***** – the one who has declared that any woman who doesn't vote for Hillary will go to hell – put it when speaking of 500,000 dead Iraqi kids. Darned shame, but it had to be done. ..."
"... Don't even think about a possibility why Hillary might be so devoted to Israel. When she was in the Senate the woman went to a prayer breakfast with some of the most repulsive of the Conservative Republicans. Nobody at all is talking about Hillary's religion. If she is one of the Rapture types, her access to nukes would mean an End-Timer finally has a chance to force God to get off the pot and start with the Second Coming. ..."
"... Just think of it – the First and the Last woman president. ..."
"... You are right. She is a huge danger. Not only due to her frail health, age and history of blood clots. As Huma Abedin noted in her deposition, she often is "confused". Which means that she does not have "normal" level of situational awareness. ..."
"... After the dissolution of the USSR and the "triumphal march" of neoliberalism, the US elite by-and-large lost the sense of self-preservation. ..."
"... Like sociopaths she has no self-control, no sense of self-preservation, no boundaries. ..."
Hillary 2008: "George Stephanopoulos: "Senator Clinton, would you [extend
our deterrent to Israel]?"
Hillary Clinton: "Well, in fact I think that we should be looking
to create an umbrella of deterrence that goes much further than just Israel.
Of course I would make it clear to the Iranians that an attack on Israel
would incur massive retaliation from the United States, but I would do the
same with other countries in the region."
Massive Retaliation has always had the meaning of a 'massive' nuclear
attack.
Hillary 2016: "MR. CUOMO: Iran: some language recently. You said if Iran
were to strike Israel, there would be a massive retaliation. Scary words.
Does massive retaliation mean you'd go into Iran? You would bomb Iran? Is
that what that's supposed to suggest?
SEN. CLINTON: Well, the question was if Iran were to launch a nuclear
attack on Israel, what would our response be? And I want the Iranians to
know that if I'm the president, we will attack Iran. And I want them to
understand that.
Because it does mean that they have to look very carefully at their
society, because whatever stage of development they might be in their nuclear
weapons program in the next 10 years during which they might foolishly consider
launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them.
That's a terrible thing to say, but those people who run Iran need to
understand that, because that perhaps will deter them from doing something
that would be reckless, foolish, and tragic."
The warmongering neocon woman gets a little careless in the second
part of her statement, forgetting "nuclear" and reverting to the 2008 declaration.
Worse, she says that even if they don't have nukes quite yet, an attack
on Holy Israel means it's "glow-in-the-dark" time in Iran.
It really is a tragic thing to be talking about. That's the way the
Madeleine Albright ***** – the one who has declared that any woman who doesn't
vote for Hillary will go to hell – put it when speaking of 500,000 dead
Iraqi kids. Darned shame, but it had to be done.
But move on – it's the insane Trump who can't be trusted with nukes.
Don't even think about a possibility why Hillary might be so devoted
to Israel. When she was in the Senate the woman went to a prayer breakfast
with some of the most repulsive of the Conservative Republicans. Nobody
at all is talking about Hillary's religion. If she is one of the Rapture
types, her access to nukes would mean an End-Timer finally has a chance
to force God to get off the pot and start with the Second Coming.
Just think of it – the First and the Last woman president.
likbez , August 5, 2016 11:29 pm
Hi Zachary,
> Just think of it – the First and the Last woman president.
You are right. She is a huge danger. Not only due to her frail health,
age and history of blood clots. As Huma Abedin noted in her deposition,
she often is "confused". Which means that she does not have "normal" level
of situational awareness.
For some specialties like airplane pilots this is a death sentence. Unfortunately,
if elected, she can take the country with her.
While the USSR existed, as bad as it was for people within its borders,
it was a blessing for the people of the USA, as it kept the elite in check
and frightful to behave in "natural, greedy and delusional "Masters of the
Universe" way".
After the dissolution of the USSR and the "triumphal march" of neoliberalism,
the US elite by-and-large lost the sense of self-preservation.
If you read what Hillary utters like "no fly zone" in Syria and other
similar staff, to me this looks like a sign of madness, plain and simple.
No reasonable politician should go of the cliff like that, if stakes are
not extremely high.
And MSM try to sell her as a more reasonable politician then Trump. In
reality she is like Kelvin absolute zero. You just can't go lower. The only
hope is that she is a puppet and it does not matter what she utters.
But if we take her statements about Syria and Russia at face value, she
is either dangerously ignorant or (more probably) is a female sociopath.
Like sociopaths she has no self-control, no sense of self-preservation,
no boundaries.
So her arrogant and reckless behavior as for "getting rich quick" and
with the private "bathroom" email server is a sign of more general and more
dangerous tendency.
Neocons are still way too powerful. They dominate MSM and essentially
dictate the agenda.
This idea of "Khan gambit" gets more and more currency...
Notable quotes:
"... Trump is just about everything everybody has said about him – excepting of course the "insane" business. That said, it remains he is not as risky a prospect as President Hillary. The reason those neocons and neoliberals are so desperate for Hillary is that they desire more wars. More stuff like the TPP treaty. ..."
"... Poking a nuclear Russia is NOT a good idea. Nor is handing our government over to Corporations. ..."
"... I continue to contend that Trump, bad as he very obviously is, would not likely be as terrible has Hillary. ..."
"... If Trump truly is a Manchurian Candidate for the Clintons, we might see much worse from him. Wikileaks probably has some awfully bad dirt on Hillary, and if the election gets close on that account, I'd expect to see Trump do whatever it takes to lose. ..."
"... HP was a disaster by all reckoning, but it's also generally true that women and minorities are more likely to become CEOs of companies that are in trouble ..."
"... Zack Smith I'm with you bro, do not give up the fight against the neocons. Meg Whitman, Michael Bloomberg and many others like them are the oligarchs in their little corporate castles that have betrayed America. HRC and now the DNC, main stream news media and large corporations have flipped and become the main mail carriers of the oligarchs billionaires club. ..."
"... Trump is the outsider now who is being demonized by the elites of the oligarchs. They do not want any change in any meaningful way and are determined to try to undermine and destroy Trump by any means… Scandal after scandal after scandal with a life time of with HRC do you think that the American people would see trough the smoke, mirrors and deception. ..."
"... The American public is very gullible and mis informed today due to the oligarchs determination to stay in control of greed, profit and power…The greatest driving force-mission of Wall St. today is profit above anything and the rule of law is dead. This is what and why they need HRC to be their next president at any cost…. ..."
"... The endorsements of Whitman, Bloomberg, neo-cons, etc. are not endorsements of Clinton but endorsements for the movement to keep Trump out of the White House. They are not pro-HRC, they are anti-Trump. In any other election year and against any other sane Republican candidate they would be opposed to Clinton. ..."
"... Even the neocon Washington Post is getting a little worried about the extent of the DUMP ON TRUMP crusade. As Robert Parry reports in his current essay "The Danger of Excessive Trump Bashing" the momentum of a successful campaign will have serious consequences. "The grave danger from this media behavior is that it will empower the neocons and liberal hawks already nesting inside Hillary Clinton's campaign to prepare for a new series of geopolitical provocations once Clinton takes office." ..."
"... Half the things attributed to Trump were spun from whole cloth and printed as fact. That Joe Sarbourough's sisters ex roomates cousin (apologies to Dark Helmet) thought she heard Trump ask about nukes doesn't impress me much . ..."
"... Of course nukes are meant to be used , otherwise we wasted a lot of money on the 20,000 ++++ that we bought during the last 70 years. ..."
"... But if we take her statements about Syria and Russia at face value she is either dangerously ignorant or (more probably) is a female sociopath. Like sociopaths she has no self-control, no sense of self-preservation, no boundaries. So her arrogant and reckless behavior as for "getting rich quick" and with the private "bathroom" email server is a sign of more general and more dangerous tendency. ..."
"…when it's become undeniable that Trump is not sane."
"Trump is publicly descending into outright madness." Trump is many ugly things, but the
proposition he is clinically insane is "a bridge too far".
"The dam is bursting, and it barely has anything to do with Clinton or whom she asks for
an endorsement." That is true. The neocons and neoliberals have decided that nothing less than
a total assault on Trump will do the job, and that's exactly what they have arranged.
Trump is just about everything everybody has said about him – excepting of course the "insane"
business. That said, it remains he is not as risky a prospect as President Hillary. The reason
those neocons and neoliberals are so desperate for Hillary is that they desire more wars. More
stuff like the TPP treaty.
Poking a nuclear Russia is NOT a good idea. Nor is handing our government over to Corporations.
Zachary Smith August 3, 2016 10:27 pm
To Noni Mausa
August 3, 2016 8:48 pm
I hope you haven't gotten the impression I like Donald Trump. Or that I'll vote for him. The
man lost me when he endorsed torture. He compounded that when he said he would outsource the Supreme
Court to the Heritage Foundation loons. But any chance of redeeming himself was lost with the
selection of Pence as VP. We've had that dingleberry as governor here in Indiana, and the thought
of Pence being one heartbeat from the Oval Office is at least as scary as President Hillary.
In 2016 I'm taking what some will consider to be the coward's way out. Like in 2012, I'm not
voting for either candidate. Yes, somebody else will select who gets to be President because both
of them are too far over the edge of pure evil for me. We're going to have a very bad time ahead
of us, no matter what happens in November. Just as in 2012, I won't be subconsciously in bed with
"my" candidate because I voted for him as a "lesser evil". Though I voted for Obama in 2008, after
I'd learned what a worthless *** he was, never again. In Indiana Jill Stein won't be on the ballot,
so I'll leave the top part of the Computer Voting Device empty, and can only hope the computer
hackers won't turn the empty spot to a vote for Hillary.
But I continue to contend that Trump, bad as he very obviously is, would not likely be
as terrible has Hillary. That's just an educated guess of mine, but that's how I see it.
If Trump truly is a Manchurian Candidate for the Clintons, we might see much worse from
him. Wikileaks probably has some awfully bad dirt on Hillary, and if the election gets close on
that account, I'd expect to see Trump do whatever it takes to lose. Like – "This last mass
gun slaughter was one too many. As President I will work to amend the Second Amendment to restrict
gun ownership." Whatever it takes.
J.Goodwin August 4, 2016 10:28 am
Meg Whitman is not the kind of person you want endorsing you if you're pretending to have
a progressive agenda. She is fundamentally on the side of business over anything like workers
rights, environmental concerns, she in favor of forms of immigration reform that are primarily
aimed at benefiting business over labor.
Like Hillary, she had a long and tight history with Goldman Sachs. She's not even known in
business for her acumen. She had some major acquisition failures particularly Skype when she was
at eBay (you can argue the company had grown beyond her capacity, this happens). HP was a
disaster by all reckoning, but it's also generally true that women and minorities are more likely
to become CEOs of companies that are in trouble (men can always go somewhere else, and decline
the worst roles).
Zack Smith I'm with you bro, do not give up the fight against the neocons. Meg Whitman,
Michael Bloomberg and many others like them are the oligarchs in their little corporate castles
that have betrayed America. HRC and now the DNC, main stream news media and large corporations
have flipped and become the main mail carriers of the oligarchs billionaires club.
Trump is the outsider now who is being demonized by the elites of the oligarchs. They do
not want any change in any meaningful way and are determined to try to undermine and destroy Trump
by any means… Scandal after scandal after scandal with a life time of with HRC do you think that
the American people would see trough the smoke, mirrors and deception.
The American public is very gullible and mis informed today due to the oligarchs determination
to stay in control of greed, profit and power…The greatest driving force-mission of Wall St. today
is profit above anything and the rule of law is dead. This is what and why they need HRC to be
their next president at any cost….
ms 57 August 4, 2016 11:13 am
The endorsements of Whitman, Bloomberg, neo-cons, etc. are not endorsements of Clinton
but endorsements for the movement to keep Trump out of the White House. They are not pro-HRC,
they are anti-Trump. In any other election year and against any other sane Republican candidate
they would be opposed to Clinton.
In this election year, with Trump running for President of the United States, the hostility
toward HRC on this page never takes into account what a Trump victory would look like. It is as
if they see Trump as some benign player "who will "change" when he gets in office. While the criticism
of HRC are right, the support for Trump as President is either wishful thinking, a delusion or
a hallucination. It's like criticizing your left hand while your right hand holds a dagger to
your throat.
Even the neocon Washington Post is getting a little worried about the extent of the DUMP
ON TRUMP crusade. As Robert Parry reports in his current essay "The Danger of Excessive Trump
Bashing" the momentum of a successful campaign will have serious consequences. "The grave danger
from this media behavior is that it will empower the neocons and liberal hawks already nesting
inside Hillary Clinton's campaign to prepare for a new series of geopolitical provocations once
Clinton takes office."
Source: Consortium News site.
Bronco, August 4, 2016 7:13 pm
MS 57 I don't know why you would think I'm a trump supporter , I voted for Sanders in the primary.
You know that thing Team Hillary rigged ? And the media has been deflecting attention from with
all its might?
Half the things attributed to Trump were spun from whole cloth and printed as fact. That
Joe Sarbourough's sisters ex roomates cousin (apologies to Dark Helmet) thought she heard Trump
ask about nukes doesn't impress me much .
Of course nukes are meant to be used , otherwise we wasted a lot of money on the 20,000
++++ that we bought during the last 70 years.
likbez , August 5, 2016 12:01 am
I find "Khan gambit" using Democratic conventions podium to be a well prepared trap.
While the fact that Trump got into in (and this is plain vanilla swift boating, so any normal
politicians would sense the danger immediately) does not characterize him well, the shame IMHO
is on neocons who created this trap.
BTW endorsement by Whitman is nothing to be proud of. She is a regular neoliberal. So what
would you expect? That's simply silly not to expect that some/most of them will not cross the
party line. Neocons like Kagan were the first, now neoliberals follow the suit. The same is even
more true about Bloomberg (with his media empire being essentially propaganda arm of GS)
I think Trump demonstrated courage by opposing well oiled with money propaganda machine of
neocons.
In their zeal to discredit Trump some MSM became pretty disingenuous and that might have the
opposite effect, if "Khan gambit" is overplayed:
While many Republicans have rebuked Donald Trump for attacking Khizr Khan and his wife - who
lost their U.S. Army captain son, Humayun, in the war in Iraq - some of Trump's allies are rallying
to his side and, in the process, attacking Khan.
Trump's longtime ally, political consultant Roger Stone, who has a long history as a controversialist,
set the pattern on Twitter Sunday night by linking to an article that accused Khan, an immigration
lawyer from Virginia, of being an agent of the Muslim Brotherhood, an inflammatory and unproved
charge.
Here is what else you can expect to hear from some of Trump's backers as the controversy builds:
Hillary Clinton, they say, is not being called out adequately for contradicting Pat Smith,
another Gold Star mother, whose son Sean was one of the Americans killed in the attack in 2012
on a diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya. Smith blames Clinton for misrepresenting the cause
of the attack that took her son's death, and ultimately for the death itself.
Khan, they note, once worked for a law firm that represented Saudi Arabia, which has donated
to the Clinton Foundation.
They argue that because Clinton voted for the war in Iraq, she should be called to account
for the death of Humayun Khan, who died 12 years ago in a suicide bomb attack. Trump supported
the Iraq war at the time, although he now claims to have opposed it.
The Khans, some Trump supporters say, opened themselves to criticism by taking the stage
at a political event, thus politicizing their son's death.
Zachary Smith , August 5, 2016 6:55 pm
Hillary 2008: "George Stephanopoulos: "Senator Clinton, would you [extend our deterrent to
Israel]?"
Hillary Clinton: "Well, in fact … I think that we should be looking to create an umbrella of
deterrence that goes much further than just Israel. Of course I would make it clear to the Iranians
that an attack on Israel would incur massive retaliation from the United States, but I would do
the same with other countries in the region."
Massive Retaliation has always had the meaning of a 'massive' nuclear attack.
Hillary 2016: "MR. CUOMO: Iran: some language recently. You said if Iran were to strike Israel,
there would be a massive retaliation. Scary words. Does massive retaliation mean you'd go into
Iran? You would bomb Iran? Is that what that's supposed to suggest?
SEN. CLINTON: Well, the question was if Iran were to launch a nuclear attack on Israel, what
would our response be? And I want the Iranians to know that if I'm the president, we will attack
Iran. And I want them to understand that.
Because it does mean that they have to look very carefully at their society, because whatever
stage of development they might be in their nuclear weapons program in the next 10 years during
which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally
obliterate them.
That's a terrible thing to say, but those people who run Iran need to understand that, because
that perhaps will deter them from doing something that would be reckless, foolish, and tragic."
The warmongering neocon woman gets a little careless in the second part of her statement, forgetting
"nuclear" and reverting to the 2008 declaration. Worse, she says that even if they don't have
nukes quite yet, an attack on Holy Israel means it's "glow-in-the-dark" time in Iran.
It really is a tragic thing to be talking about. That's the way the Madeleine Albright *****
– the one who has declared that any woman who doesn't vote for Hillary will go to hell – put it
when speaking of 500,000 dead Iraqi kids. Darned shame, but it had to be done.
But move on – it's the insane Trump who can't be trusted with nukes.
Don't even think about a possibility why Hillary might be so devoted to Israel. When she was in
the Senate the woman went to a prayer breakfast with some of the most repulsive of the Conservative
Republicans. Nobody at all is talking about Hillary's religion. If she is one of the Rapture types,
her access to nukes would mean an End-Timer finally has a chance to force God to get off the pot
and start with the Second Coming.
Just think of it – the First and the Last woman president.
likbez , August 5, 2016 11:29 pm
Hi Zachary,
> Just think of it – the First and the Last woman president.
You are right. She is a huge danger. Not only due to her frail health, age and history of blood
clots. As Huma Abedin noted in her deposition, she often is "confused". Which means that she does
not have a "normal" level of situational awareness.
For some specialties like airplane pilots this is a death sentence. Unfortunately, if elected,
she can take the country with her.
While the USSR existed, as bad as it was for people within its borders, it was a blessing for
the people of the USA, as it kept the elite in check and frightful to behave in "natural, greedy
and delusional "Masters of the Universe" way".
After the dissolution of the USSR and the "triumphal march" of neoliberalism, the US elite
by-and-large lost the sense of self-preservation.
If you read what Hillary utters like "no fly zone" in Syria and other similar staff, to me
this looks like a sign of madness, plain and simple. No reasonable politician should go off the
cliff like that, if stakes are not extremely high.
And MSM try to sell her as a more reasonable politician then Trump. In reality she is like
Kelvin absolute zero. You just can't go lower. The only hope is that she is a puppet and it does
not matter what she utters.
But if we take her statements about Syria and Russia at face value she is either dangerously
ignorant or (more probably) is a female sociopath. Like sociopaths she has no self-control, no
sense of self-preservation, no boundaries. So her arrogant and reckless behavior as for "getting
rich quick" and with the private "bathroom" email server is a sign of more general and more dangerous
tendency.
Neocons are still way too powerful. They dominate MSM and essentially dictate the agenda. So
we can only pray to God to spare us.
Zachary Smith , August 6, 2016 10:53 am
To likbez August 5, 2016 11:29 pm:
"She is a huge danger. Not only due to her frail health, age and history of blood clots.
As Huma Abedin noted in her deposition, she often is "confused". Which means that she does
not have "normal" level of situational awareness."
At this moment I'm feeling very foolish, for I'd totally forgotten the state of Hillary's health.
As Scott Adams noted: "Clinton's campaign has such strong persuasion going right now that she is
successfully equating her actual misdeeds of the past with Trump's imaginary mental issues and
imaginary future misdeeds".
They use a Rovian strategy: Assault the enemy's strength. You've got to admire the
Chutzpah: Killing your parents, then complaining you're an orphan. The candidate who didn't raise a
voice against the Iraq War and pushed the administration in favor of war with Libya (which we're now
bombing again) paints their opponent as a lunatic warmonger.
Notable quotes:
"... it's hard not to applaud when he pisses off the stuff shirts at the Washington Post. ..."
"... the frustration with Obama's foreign policy - the continuation of wars, the expansion of drone attacks, the failure to reduce nuclear weapons - has prompted some to piece through Donald Trump's sayings in a desperate search for something, anything, that could possibly represent an alternative. ..."
"... The New York Times ..."
"... If we cannot be properly reimbursed for the tremendous cost of our military protecting other countries, and in many cases the countries I'm talking about are extremely rich. Then if we cannot make a deal, which I believe we will be able to, and which I would prefer being able to, but if we cannot make a deal…. I would be absolutely prepared to tell those countries, "Congratulations, you will be defending yourself. ..."
"... We will move the American embassy to the eternal capital of the Jewish people, Jerusalem. And we will send a clear signal that there is no daylight between America and our most reliable ally, the state of Israel. The Palestinians must come to the table knowing that the bond between the United States and Israel is absolutely, totally unbreakable. ..."
"... Hillary Clinton has traditionally adopted foreign policy positions to the right of Barack Obama. As president, she will likely tack in a more hawkish direction. ..."
"... John Feffer is the director of Foreign Policy In Focus. ..."
Trump's foreign policy isn't an alternative to U.S. empire. It's just a cruder rendition of
it. ;
Donald Trump may be a bigot and a bully, but it's hard not to applaud when he pisses off the
stuff shirts at the Washington Post.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has staked out a foreign policy position quite
distinct from his opponent, Hillary Clinton. It is not, however, "isolationist" (contra
Jeb Bush and many others) or "less aggressively militaristic" (economist Mark Weisbrot
in The Hill ) or "a jolt of realpolitik " (journalist Simon Jenkins
in The Guardian ).
With all due respect to these sources, they're all wrong. Ditto John Pilger's
claim that Clinton represents the greater threat to the world, John Walsh's
argument that Trump is "the relative peace candidate," and Justin Raimondo's
assertion
that if Trump wins then "the military-industrial complex is finished, along with the globalists
who dominate foreign policy circles in Washington."
...His comments on foreign policy have frequently been incoherent, inconsistent, and just plain
ignorant. He hasn't exactly rolled out a detailed blueprint of what he would do to the world if elected
(though that old David Levine
cartoon of Henry Kissinger beneath the sheets comes to mind)...
However, over the last year Trump has said enough to pull together a pretty good picture of what
he'd do if suddenly in a position of
nearly unchecked power (thanks to the expansion of executive authority under both Bush and Obama).
President Trump would offer an updated version of Teddy Roosevelt's old dictum: speak loudly and
carry the biggest stick possible.
It's not an alternative to U.S. empire - just a cruder rendition of it.
The Enemy of My Enemy
Both liberals and conservatives in the United States,
as I've written , have embraced
economic policies that have left tens of millions of working people in desperate straits. The desperation
of the "left behind" faction is so acute, in fact, that many of its members are willing to ignore
Donald Trump's obvious disqualifications - his personal wealth, his disdain for "losers," his support
of tax cuts for the rich - in order to back the Republican candidate and stick it to the elite.
A similar story prevails in the foreign policy realm. On the left, the frustration with Obama's
foreign policy - the continuation of wars, the expansion of drone attacks, the failure to reduce
nuclear weapons - has prompted some to piece through Donald Trump's sayings in a desperate search
for something, anything, that could possibly represent an alternative. ... ... ...
Examined more carefully, his positions on war and peace, alliance systems, and human rights break
no new ground. He is old white whine in a new, cracked bottle.
Trump on War
... ... ...
True, Trump has criticized the neoconservative espousal of the use of military force to promote
democracy and build states. But that doesn't mean he has backed off from the use of military force
in general. Trump has
pledged to use the military "if there's a problem going on in the world and you can solve the
problem," a rather open-ended approach to the deployment of U.S. forces. He agreed, for instance,
that the Clinton administration was right to intervene in the Balkans to prevent ethnic cleansing
in Kosovo.
In terms of current conflicts, Trump
has promised to "knock the hell out of ISIS" with airpower and
20,000-30,000 U.S. troops on the ground. He even
reserves the right to use nuclear weapons against the would-be caliphate. By suggesting to allies
and adversaries alike that he is possibly unhinged, Trump has resurrected one of the most terrifying
presidential strategies of all time, Richard Nixon's
"madman" approach to bombing North Vietnam.
This is not isolationism. It's not even discriminate deterrence. As in the business world, Trump
believes in full-spectrum dominance in global affairs. As Zack Beauchamp
points out in Vox , Trump is an ardent believer in colonial wars of conquest to seize oil fields
and pipelines.
About the only place in the world that Trump has apparently ruled out war is with Russia. Yes,
it's a good thing that he's against the new cold war that has descended on U.S.-Russian relations...
... ... ...
Trump on Alliances
Trump has made few friends in Washington with his criticisms of veterans and their families and
his "joke" encouraging Russia to release any emails from Hillary Clinton's account that it might
have acquired in its hacking. Yet it's Trump's statements about NATO that have most unsettled the
U.S. foreign policy elite.
In an interview with The New York Times , Trump said:
If we cannot be properly reimbursed for the tremendous cost of our military protecting
other countries, and in many cases the countries I'm talking about are extremely rich. Then if
we cannot make a deal, which I believe we will be able to, and which I would prefer being able
to, but if we cannot make a deal…. I would be absolutely prepared to tell those countries, "Congratulations,
you will be defending yourself.
... ... ...
Again, I doubt Trump actually believes in abandoning NATO. Rather, he believes that threats enhance
one's bargaining position. In the Trump worldview, there are no allies. There are only competitors
from whom one extracts concessions.
We will move the American embassy to the eternal capital of the Jewish people, Jerusalem.
And we will send a clear signal that there is no daylight between America and our most reliable
ally, the state of Israel. The Palestinians must come to the table knowing that the bond between
the United States and Israel is absolutely, totally unbreakable.
Ultimately President Trump would extend the same reassurances to other allies once he is briefed
on exactly how much they contribute to maintaining U.S. hegemony in the world.
Trump on Pentagon Spending
Critics like Jean Bricmont
rave about Trump's willingness to take on the U.S. military-industrial complex: "He not only
denounces the trillions of dollars spent in wars, deplores the dead and wounded American soldiers,
but also speaks of the Iraqi victims of a war launched by a Republican president."
But Donald Trump, as president, would be the military-industrial complex's best friend. He has
stated on numerous occasions
his intention to "rebuild" the U.S. military: "We're going to make our military so big, so strong
and so great, so powerful that we're never going to have to use it."
More recently, in an interview with conservative
columnist Cal Thomas , he said, "Our military has been so badly depleted. Who would think the
United States is raiding plane graveyards to pick up parts and equipment? That means they're being
held together by a shoestring. Other countries have brand-new stuff they have bought from us." That
the United States already has the most powerful military in the world by every conceivable measure
seems to have escaped Trump. And our allies never get any military hardware that U.S. forces don't
already have.
Well, perhaps Trump will somehow strengthen the U.S. military by cutting waste and investing that
money more effectively. But Trump has promised to
increase
general military spending as well as the resources devoted to fighting the Islamic State. It's
part of an overall incoherent plan that includes large tax cuts and a promise to balance the budget.
An Exceptional Ruler
Let me be clear: Hillary Clinton has traditionally adopted foreign policy positions to the
right of Barack Obama. As president, she will likely tack in a more hawkish direction.
... ... ...
John Feffer is the director of Foreign Policy In Focus.
"... Clinton's campaign has such strong persuasion going right now that she is successfully equating her actual misdeeds of the past with Trump's imaginary mental issues and imaginary future misdeeds ..."
UPDATE "Clinton's campaign has such strong persuasion going right now that she is successfully
equating her actual misdeeds of the past with Trump's imaginary mental
issues and imaginary future misdeeds" [
Scott Adams ].
This is a Rovian strategy: Assault the enemy's strength. You've got to admire
the effrontery: The candidate who didn't raise a voice against the Iraq War and
tipped the administration in favor of war with Libya (which we're now bombing again) paints their
opponent as a lunatic warmonger.
It's heresy in the GOP to question the neoconservative paradigm – just ask Rand Paul. It's
assumed, as an article of faith, that America is the moral leader of the world; that we must not
only defend our values across the world, we must also use force to remake it in our image. This
is the thinking that gave us the Iraq War. It's the prism through which most of the GOP still
views international politics. Trump – and Bernie Sanders – represents a departure from this
paradigm.
Although it's unlikely to happen, a Trump-Sanders general election would have been refreshing for
at least one reason: it would have constituted a total rejection of neoconservatism.
Most Americans understand, intuitively, that the differences between the major parties are often
rhetorical, not substantive. That's not to say substantive differences don't exist – surely they
do, especially on social issues. But the policies from administration to administration overlap
more often than not, regardless of the party in charge. And that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Much of the stability is due to money and the structure of our system, which tends toward dynamic
equilibrium. And there are limits to what the president can do on issues like the economy and
health care.
But one area in which the president does have enormous flexibility is foreign policy. Which is
why, as Politico reported this week, the GOP's national security establishment is "bitterly
digging in against" Trump. Indeed, more than any other wing of the Republican Party, the
neoconservatives are terrified at the prospect of a Trump nomination.
"Hillary is the lesser evil, by a large margin," said Eliot Cohen, a former Bush official with
neoconservative ties. Trump would be "an unmitigated disaster for American foreign policy."
Another neocon, Max Boot, says he'd vote for Clinton over Trump: "She would be vastly preferable
to Trump." Even Bill Kristol, the great champion of the Iraq War, a man who refuses to consider
the hypothesis that he was wrong about anything, is threatening to recruit a third party
candidate to derail Trump for similar reasons.
Just this week, moreover, a group of conservative foreign policy intellectuals, several of whom
are neocons, published an open letter stating that they're "united in our opposition to a Donald
Trump presidency." They offer a host of reasons for their objections, but the bottom line is they
don't trust Trump to continue America's current policy of policing the world on ethical grounds.
Trump isn't constrained by the same ideological conventions as other candidates, and so he
occasionally stumbles upon unpopular truths. His comments about the Iraq War are an obvious
example. But even on an issue like the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, Trump says what any
reasonable observer should: we ought to maintain neutrality and work to solve the dispute with an
eyes towards our national interest. Now, Trump couldn't explain the concept of "realism" to save
his life, but this position is perfectly consistent with that tradition. And if Republicans
weren't blinkered by religious fanaticism, they'd acknowledge it as well. The same is true of
Trump's nebulous critiques of America's soft imperialism, which again are sacrilege in Republican
politics.
Earlier this week, GOP nominee Donald Trump was quick to respond to criticism
by the parents of fallen U.S. Army Capt. Humayun Khan, saying that their son
wouldn't have died if he'd been commander-in-chief.
Now, ex-Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski is saying the exact something
- but this time, it's in a panelist discussion on CNN, the
Daily Beast
reports.
"If Donald Trump was the president, Captain Khan would be alive today because
he never would have engaged in a war that didn't directly benefit this country.
He's been very clear about that fact and said I don't support Iraq and I don't
support Afghanistan," Lewandowski stated.
Then anchorman Chris Berman jumped in, rebutting that Trump supported the war -
he cited a 2002 interview with Howard Stern in his defense.
Instead of the Khan family being a political pawn of Hillary Clinton - who's
using their child's death for political expediency - they should be praising
Trump's anti-Islamic State group, anti-terror policies.
Clinton is an enabler
of unnecessary destruction
, whereas Trump is laser-focused on targeting and
taking out the people who will harm our society the most. The Khan's son was a
freedom fighter of the first order - it's a shame that his own parents are
standing on his grave, promoting a woman who couldn't care less about veterans or
members of the United States' military.
We must
keep America first
and always stand up to terrorism - even if it's not
politically correct.
gross negligence aspect of it, so I was very surprised at the end when he said that there was
a recommendation of no prosecution and also given the fact-based nature of this and the statement
that no reasonable prosecutor would entertain prosecution, I don't think that's the standard.
In essence, in order to give Mrs. Clinton a pass, the FBI rewrote the statute, inserting an
intent element that Congress did not require. The added intent element, moreover, makes no sense:
The point of having a statute that criminalizes gross negligence is to underscore that government
officials have a special obligation to safeguard national defense secrets; when they fail to carry
out that obligation due to gross negligence, they are guilty of serious wrongdoing. The lack of
intent to harm our country is irrelevant. People never intend the bad things that happen due to
gross negligence. I would point out, moreover, that there are other statutes that criminalize
unlawfully removing and transmitting highly classified information with intent to harm the United
States. Being not guilty (and, indeed, not even accused) of Offense B does not absolve a person
of guilt on Offense A, which she has committed. It is a common tactic of defense lawyers in criminal
trials to set up a straw-man for the jury: a crime the defendant has not committed. The idea is
that by knocking down a crime the prosecution does not allege and cannot prove, the defense may
confuse the jury into believing the defendant is not guilty of the crime charged. Judges generally
do not allow such sleight-of-hand because innocence on an uncharged crime is irrelevant to the
consideration of the crimes that actually have been charged. It seems to me that this is what
the FBI has done today. It has told the public that because Mrs. Clinton did not have intent to
harm the United States we should not prosecute her on a felony that does not require proof of
intent to harm the United States. Meanwhile, although there may have been profound harm to national
security caused by her grossly negligent mishandling of classified information, we've decided
she shouldn't be prosecuted for grossly negligent mishandling of classified information. I think
highly of Jim Comey personally and professionally, but this makes no sense to me. Finally, I was
especially unpersuaded by Director Comey's claim that no reasonable prosecutor would bring a case
based on the evidence uncovered by the FBI. To my mind, a reasonable prosecutor would ask: Why
did Congress criminalize the mishandling of classified information through gross negligence? The
answer, obviously, is to prevent harm to national security. So then the reasonable prosecutor
asks: Was the statute clearly violated, and if yes, is it likely that Mrs. Clinton's conduct caused
harm to national security? If those two questions are answered in the affirmative, I believe many,
if not most, reasonable prosecutors would feel obliged to bring the case.
Comey simply ignored - or rewrote - the plain language of § 793(f), which does not require
any showing of criminal intent. There is a reason that Congress did not require a showing of intent
in this provision of the Espionage Act: to protect against even inadvertent disclosure or risk
of disclosure of protected information where the perpetrator demonstrated gross disregard for
the national security. How Comey could conclude that "no reasonable prosecutor" could make this
case is inexplicable in light of his own words.
Even where the statutes prohibiting mishandling of classified information require intent, it
is not exclusively intent to harm the national security (though that does play into some relevant
statutes). Comey noted that his investigation looked at "a second statute, making it a misdemeanor
to knowingly remove classified information from appropriate systems or storage facilities." That
statute is 18 U.S.C. §1924(a), which provides that any federal official who "becomes possessed
of documents or materials containing classified information of the United States, [and] knowingly
removes such documents or materials without authority and with the intent to retain such documents
or materials at an unauthorized location shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for not
more than one year, or both [emphasis added]." Section 1924(a) does not require an intent to profit,
to harm the United States, or otherwise to act in a manner disloyal to the United States. It only
requires "intent to retain" classified documents at an unauthorized location, something Comey's
own comments suggest was the case here. Again, the case for prosecuting in light of these facts
was more than simply fairly debatable it was quite strong.
Diane Roark
– a former top staff member on the House Intelligence Committee – explained to Washington's
Blog why Clinton should be disqualified from serving as president:
Though nothing was found against any of us [high-level whistleblowers on mass surveillance
by the NSA] after an investigation of over four years, and [Pulitzer prize-winning] reporter Risen
even said publicly several times that he had not known any of us, our clearances were never returned.
Obviously one cannot be POTUS without clearances, so Hillary should be disqualified on
that ground alone. Though the President is the chief intel consumer, I would think agencies would
withhold particularly sensitive items given her clear subordination of security to the goal of
keeping her records private so she cannot be criticized and to enhance her political career
.
"... The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) is a United States Federal Law passed in 1970 that was designed to provide a tool for law enforcement agencies to fight organized crime. RICO allows prosecution and punishment for alleged racketeering activity that has been executed as part of an ongoing criminal enterprise. ..."
Will the FBI present a recommendation to the Attorney
General under RICO. According to author Frank Huguenurd "Activity
considered to be racketeering may include bribery,
counterfeiting, money laundering, embezzlement, illegal gambling,
kidnapping, murder, drug trafficking, slavery, and a host of other
nefarious business practices."
.
Will
the FBI be charging Bill and Hillary Clinton as well as the Clinton
Foundation on Racketeering charges under RICO?
.
Highly
unlikely. Hillary is protected by the Attorney General who is a
"protégée" of the Clintons.
.
(M.Ch.
GR Editor, July 6, 2016)
.
.
*
* *
The
Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) is a
United States Federal Law passed in 1970 that was designed to
provide a tool for law enforcement agencies to fight organized
crime. RICO allows prosecution and punishment for alleged
racketeering activity that has been executed as part of an ongoing
criminal enterprise.
.
Activity
considered to be racketeering may include
bribery
,
counterfeiting,
money laundering
,
embezzlement, illegal gambling, kidnapping, murder, drug
trafficking, slavery, and a host of other nefarious business
practices.
James Comey and The FBI will present a recommendation to Loretta
Lynch, Attorney General of the Department of Justice, that includes
a cogent argument that the Clinton Foundation is an ongoing
criminal enterprise engaged in
money
laundering
and soliciting bribes in exchange for political,
policy and legislative favors to individuals, corporations and even
governments both foreign and domestic.
... ... ...
Here's what we do know. Tens of millions of dollars donated to
the Clinton Foundation was funneled to the organization through
a Canadian shell company which has made tracing the donors
nearly impossible. Less than 10% of donations to the Foundation
has actually been released to charitable organizations and $2M
that has been traced back to long time Bill Clinton friend Julie
McMahon (aka
The Energizer
). When
the official investigation into Hillary's email server began,
she instructed her IT professional to delete over 30,000 emails
and cloud backups of her emails older than 30 days at both
Platte
River Networks
and
Datto,
Inc
. The FBI has subsequently recovered the majority, if
not all, of Hillary's deleted emails and are putting together a
strong case against her for attempting to cover up her illegal
and illicit activities.
A conviction under RICO comes when the
Department of Justice proves that the defendant has engaged in
two or more examples of racketeering and that the defendant
maintained an interest in, participated in or invested in a
criminal enterprise affecting interstate or foreign commerce.
There is ample evidence already in the public record that the
Clinton Foundation qualifies as a criminal enterprise and
there's no doubt that the FBI is privy to significantly more
evidence than has already been made public.
Under RICO, the sections most relevant in this case will be
section 1503 (obstruction of justice), section 1510 (obstruction
of criminal investigations) and section 1511 (obstruction of
State or local law enforcement). As in the case with Richard
Nixon after the Watergate Break-in, it's the cover-up of a crime
that will be the Clintons' downfall. Furthermore, under
provisions of title 18, United States Code: Section 201, the
Clinton Foundation can be held accountable for improprieties
relating to bribery. The FBI will be able to prove beyond a
reasonable doubt that through the Clinton Foundation,
international entities were able to commit bribery in exchange
for help in securing business deals, such as the uranium-mining
deal in Kazakhstan.
"... Nuland would survive the controversy over the October 2012 attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission/CIA facility in Benghazi, Libya. Initially, many conservative Republicans criticized Nuland for her role in providing ambassador to the UN Susan Rice with "talking points" explaining away the failure of the U.S. to protect the compound from an attack that killed U.S. ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other U.S. personnel. All it took was a tap on the shoulder from Nuland's husband Kagan and his influential friends in the neo-con hierarchy for the criticism of his wife to stop. And stop it did as Nuland was confirmed, without Republican opposition, to be the new Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, a portfolio that gave her a clear mandate to interfere in the domestic policies of Ukraine and other countries, including Russia itself. ..."
"... Although McCain was defeated by Obama in 2008, Kagan's influence was preserved when his wife became a top foreign policy adviser to Obama. The root of this control by neo-cons of the two major U.S. political parties is the powerful Israel Lobby and is the reason why in excess of 95 percent of neo-cons are also committed Zionists. ..."
"... Kagan's writings and pronouncements from Brookings have had a common thread: anti-Vladimir Putin rhetoric and a strong desire to see Ukraine and Georgia in NATO, Bashar al Assad falling in Syria and thus eliminating a Russian ally, no further expansion of Shanghai Cooperation Organization membership and the eventual collapse of the counter-NATO organization, and the destabilization of Russia's southern border region by radical Salafists and Wahhabists funded by Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Qatar, not coincidentally, hosts a Brookings Institution office that advises the Qatari government. ..."
Nuland would survive the controversy over the October 2012 attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission/CIA
facility in Benghazi, Libya. Initially, many conservative Republicans criticized Nuland for her role
in providing ambassador to the UN Susan Rice with "talking points" explaining away the failure of
the U.S. to protect the compound from an attack that killed U.S. ambassador Christopher Stevens and
three other U.S. personnel. All it took was a tap on the shoulder from Nuland's husband Kagan and
his influential friends in the neo-con hierarchy for the criticism of his wife to stop. And stop
it did as Nuland was confirmed, without Republican opposition, to be the new Assistant Secretary
of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, a portfolio that gave her a clear mandate to interfere
in the domestic policies of Ukraine and other countries, including Russia itself.
Kagan began laying the groundwork for his wife's continued presence in a Democratic administration
when, in 2007, he switched sides from the Republicans and aligned with the Democrats. This was in
the waning days of the Bush administration and, true to form, neo-cons, who politically and family-wise
hail from Trotskyite chameleons, saw the opportunity to continue their influence over U.S. foreign
policy.
With the election of Obama in 2008, Kagan was able to maintain a PNAC presence, through his wife,
inside the State Department. Kagan, a co-founder of PNAC, monitors his wife's activities from his
perch at the influential Brookings Institution. And it was no surprise that McCain followed Nuland
to Maidan Square. Kagan was one of McCain's top foreign policy advisers in the 2008 campaign, even
though he publicly switched to the Democrats the year before. Kagan ensured that he kept a foot in
both parties. Although McCain was defeated by Obama in 2008, Kagan's influence was preserved
when his wife became a top foreign policy adviser to Obama. The root of this control by neo-cons
of the two major U.S. political parties is the powerful Israel Lobby and is the reason why in excess
of 95 percent of neo-cons are also committed Zionists.
Kagan's writings and pronouncements from Brookings have had a common thread: anti-Vladimir
Putin rhetoric and a strong desire to see Ukraine and Georgia in NATO, Bashar al Assad falling in
Syria and thus eliminating a Russian ally, no further expansion of Shanghai Cooperation Organization
membership and the eventual collapse of the counter-NATO organization, and the destabilization of
Russia's southern border region by radical Salafists and Wahhabists funded by Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
Qatar, not coincidentally, hosts a Brookings Institution office that advises the Qatari government.
But dominance of U.S. foreign policy does not end with Nuland and her husband. Kagan's brother,
Fred Kagan, is another neo-con foreign policy launderer. Residing at the American Enterprise Institute,
Fred Kagan was an "anti-corruption" adviser to General David Petraeus. Kagan held this job even as
Petraeus was engaged in an extra-marital affair, which he corruptly covered up. Fred Kagan's wife
is Kimberly Kagan. She has been involved in helping to formulate disastrous U.S. policies for the
military occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Fred and Kimberly have also worked on U.S. covert operations
to overthrow the government of Iran. No family in the history of the United States, with the possible
exception of John Foster and Allen Dulles, has had more blood on its hands than have the Kagans.
And it is this family that is today helping to ratchet up the Cold War on the streets of Kyiv.
Victoria Nuland is, indeed, the proper "Doughnut Dolly" for the paid George Soros, U.S. Agency
for International Development, National Endowment for Democracy, and Freedom House provocateurs on
Maidan Square. Political prostitutes representing so many causes, from nationalistic Ukrainian fascists
to pro-EU globalists, require a symbol. There is no better symbol for the foreign-made "Orange Revolution
II" than the biscuit-distributing Victoria Nuland.
Her unleavened biscuits have found the hungry mouths of America's "Three Stooges" of ex-boxer
and political opportunist Vitaly Klitschko, globalist Arseny Yatsenyuk, and neo-Nazi Oleg
Tyagnibok.
Wayne MADSEN Investigative journalist, author and syndicated columnist. A member of the Society of Professional
Journalists (SPJ) and the National Press Club
US Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Vicrotia Nuland was appointed
by Hillary nu the forigh policy is domain of the President, so she executed policy hatched by "Obama
the neocon", who is great admirer of books by Robert Kagan...
Notable quotes:
"... Nuland is a Democrat? Boy they let anybody in. I only ask because she's supposed to be a Bush holdover but maybe worked for the Clintons before that? ..."
"... Nuland started out with Bill Clinton, then moved on to Dick Cheney . She certainly is nimble! ..."
"... Because of her marriage to Kagan, most Europeans believe she's a Republican, but her hawkish approach to Russia isn't entirely unique within the Obama administration. ..."
"... FP professionals don't need no stinkin' party affiliations. They are the other half of the "Double Government" that most voters have never heard of. You know, the half that makes sure foreign policy is consistent from one administration (and party) to the next. Works great! ..."
"... You start out wherever your opportunity lies. Once established you can follow your heart. Where does her heart lead her when Cheney leaves office? Drum roll… Why, it's Hillary! ..."
Following along with his good friend, Republican Robert Kagan (married, in good bipartisan
power couple fashion, to Victoria Nuland, rumored to be inline for Clinton's Secretary of State,
but I don't think so. Not even Clinton could be that crazy).
I can't find a link that makes her party affiliation explicit.
Foreign
Policy :
Because of her marriage to Kagan, most Europeans believe she's a Republican, but her
hawkish approach to Russia isn't entirely unique within the Obama administration.
But FP does not then go on to clarify. I assumed she was a Democrat because of the Clinton
connection. My bad!
FP professionals don't need no stinkin' party affiliations. They are the other half of
the "Double Government" that most voters have never heard of. You know, the half that makes sure
foreign policy is consistent from one administration (and party) to the next. Works great!
You start out wherever your opportunity lies. Once established you can follow your heart.
Where does her heart lead her when Cheney leaves office? Drum roll… Why, it's Hillary!
Hugoodanode?
It's probably bias, but my sense is Republicans love to parade anyone who is Jewish or not
white in front of cameras who can say, "im a Republican" without drooling or dying a little on
the inside. Since Nuland is Jewish, the GOP would have her on their book tour if she was suspected
Republican especially given the GOP obsession with winning Florida Jewish retirees.
"... Interestingly, in a self-promoting recent review of Henry Kissinger's new book World Order, Clinton both defines her own Kissinger-esque foreign policy strategy and also concedes that it is more-or-less the same as Obama's. Clinton wrote that Kissinger's world view "largely fits with the broad strategy behind the Obama administration's effort over the past six years to build a global architecture of security and cooperation for the 21st century." ..."
"... Clinton inevitably confuses leadership with hegemony, clearly believing as one of her predecessors at State put it, that America is the "indispensable nation." Nor can she discern that few outside the beltway actually believe the hype. It would be difficult to make the case that the United States either stands for justice or is willing to tolerate any kind of international order that challenges American interests. ..."
"... Any plan to "destroy" ISIS without serious consideration of what that might entail means that the U.S. will inevitably assume the leadership role. Because air strikes cannot defeat any insurgency, and the moderate Syrian rebels waiting to be armed are a fiction, the Obama plan invites escalation and will make the Islamist group a poster child for those who want to see Washington fail yet again in the Middle East. ..."
"... Yanukovych, an admittedly corrupt autocrat, nevertheless became Prime Minister after a free election. Nuland, who is the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs at the State Department, provided open support to the Maidan demonstrators opposed to Yanukovych's government, to include media friendly appearances passing out cookies on the square to encourage the protesters. ..."
"... The replacement of the government in Kiev was only the prelude to a sharp break and escalating conflict with Moscow over Russia's attempts to protect its own interests in Ukraine, most particularly in Crimea. ..."
"... And make no mistake about Nuland's broader intention to expand the conflict and directly confront Russia. In Senate testimony in May she cited how the administration is "providing support to other frontline states like Moldova and Georgia." Frontline? Last week Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel seemed to confirm that the continued expansion of NATO is indeed administration policy, saying that Georgia would be next to join in light of "Russia's blatant aggression in Ukraine." ..."
"... The president also reportedly is an admirer of her husband's articles and books which argue that the U.S. must maintain its military power to accommodate its "global responsibilities." So in response to the question "Why does Victoria Nuland still have her job?" the answer must surely be because the White House approves of what she has been doing, which should give everyone pause. ..."
A new administration only gave interventionism a confused, humanitarian face-lift.
President Barack Obama presents something of a dilemma. I voted for him twice in the belief that
he was basically a cautious operator who would not rush into a new war in Asia, unlike his Republican
opponents who virtually promised to attack Iran upon assuming office. Unfortunately, Obama's second
term has revealed that his instinct nevertheless is to rely on America's ability to project military
power overseas as either a complement to or a substitute for diplomacy that differs only from George
W. Bush in its style and its emphasis on humanitarian objectives.
That the president is indeed cautious has made the actual process of engagement different, witness
the ill-fated involvement in Libya and the impending war-without-calling-it-war in Syria and Iraq,
both of which are framed as having limited objectives and manageable risk for Washington even when
that is not the case. Obama's foreign and security policy is an incremental process mired in contradictions
whereby the United States continues to involve itself in conflicts for which it has little understanding,
seemingly doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past thirteen years but without the shock and awe.
Obama's actual intentions might most clearly be discerned by looking at his inner circle. Three
women are prominent in decision making relating to foreign policy: Samantha Power at the United Nations,
Susan Rice heading the National Security Council, and Senior Adviser Valerie Jarrett in the White
House. One might also add Hillary Clinton who, as Secretary of State, operated far more independently
than her successor John Kerry, putting her own stamp on policy much more than he has been able to
do. Where Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel fits into the decision making is unclear, but it is notable
that both he and Kerry frequently appear to be somewhat out of sync with the White House.
What does the Obama team represent? Certain things are obvious. They are hesitant to involve the
United States in long, drawn out military adventures like Iraq and Afghanistan but much more inclined
to intervene than was George W. Bush when there is an apparent humanitarian crisis, operating under
the principle of responsibility to protect or R2P. That R2P is often a pretext for intervention that
actually is driven by other less altruistic motives is certainly a complication but it is nevertheless
the public face of much of American foreign policy, as the nation is currently witnessing regarding
ISIS.
Hillary Clinton has criticized Obama foreign policy because on her view he did not act soon enough
on ISIS and "Great nations need organizing principles, and 'don't do stupid stuff' is not an organizing
principle." Her criticism is odd as she was a formulator of much of what the president has been doing
and one should perhaps assume that her distancing from it might have something to do with her presidential
ambitions. Interestingly, in a self-promoting recent review of Henry Kissinger's new book World Order,
Clinton both defines her own Kissinger-esque foreign policy strategy and also concedes that it is
more-or-less the same as Obama's. Clinton wrote that Kissinger's world view "largely fits with the
broad strategy behind the Obama administration's effort over the past six years to build a global
architecture of security and cooperation for the 21st century."
Now if all of that is true, and it might just be putting lipstick on a pig to create an illusion
of coherency where none exists, then the United States might just be engaging in a sensible reset
of its foreign policy, something like the Nixon Doctrine of old. But the actual policy itself suggests
otherwise, with the tendency to "do stupid stuff" prevailing, perhaps attributable to another Clinton
book review assertion of "a belief in the indispensability of continued American leadership in service
of a just and liberal order."
Clinton inevitably confuses leadership with hegemony, clearly believing as one of her
predecessors at State
put it, that America is the "indispensable nation." Nor can she discern that few outside the beltway
actually believe the hype. It would be difficult to make the case that the United States either stands
for justice or is willing to tolerate any kind of international order that challenges American interests.
And the arrogance that comes with power means that the country's leadership is not often able to
explain what it is doing. Currently, the administration has failed to make any compelling case that
the United States is actually threatened by ISIS beyond purely conjectural "what if" scenarios, suggesting
that the policy is evolving in an ad hoc but risk-averse fashion to create the impression
that something is actually being accomplished. Any plan to "destroy" ISIS without serious consideration
of what that might entail means that the U.S. will inevitably assume the leadership role. Because
air strikes cannot defeat any insurgency, and the moderate Syrian rebels waiting to be armed are
a fiction, the Obama plan invites escalation and will make the Islamist group a poster child for
those who want to see Washington fail yet again in the Middle East.
The tendency to act instead of think might be attributable to fear of appearing weak with
midterm elections approaching, but it might also be due to the persistence of neoconservative national
security views within the administration, which brings us to
Victoria Nuland. Nuland,
many will recall, was the driving force behind efforts to destabilize the Ukrainian government of
President Viktor Yanukovych. Yanukovych, an admittedly corrupt autocrat, nevertheless became
Prime Minister after a free election. Nuland, who is the Assistant Secretary of State for European
and Eurasian Affairs at the State Department, provided open support to the Maidan demonstrators opposed
to Yanukovych's government, to include media friendly appearances
passing out cookies on the square to encourage the protesters.
A Dick Cheney and Hillary
Clinton protégé who is married to leading neocon Robert Kagan, Nuland openly sought regime change
for Ukraine by brazenly supporting
government opponents in spite of the fact that Washington and Kiev had ostensibly friendly relations.
It is hard to imagine that any U.S. administration would tolerate a similar attempt by a foreign
nation to interfere in U.S. domestic politics, particularly if it were backed by a
$5 billion budget,
but Washington has long believed in a global double standard for evaluating its own behavior.
Nuland is most famous for her
foul language when referring to the potential European role in managing the unrest that she and
the National Endowment for Democracy had helped create. To be sure, her aggressive guidance of U.S.
policy in Eurasia is a lot more important than whatever plays out in Syria and Iraq over the remainder
of Obama's time in office in terms of palpable threats to actual American interests. The replacement
of the government in Kiev was only the prelude to a sharp break and escalating conflict with Moscow
over Russia's attempts to protect its own interests in Ukraine, most particularly in Crimea.
Victoria Nuland is playing with fire. Russia, as the only nation with the military capability
to destroy the U.S., is not a sideshow like Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Backing Moscow into a corner with
no way out by using threats and sanctions is not good policy. Washington has many excellent reasons
to maintain a stable relationship with Moscow, including counter-terrorism efforts, and little to
gain from moving in the opposite direction. Russia is not about to reconstitute the Warsaw Pact and
there is no compelling reason to return to a Cold War footing by either arming Ukraine or permitting
it to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
And make no mistake about Nuland's broader intention to expand the conflict and directly confront
Russia. In Senate testimony in May
she cited how
the administration is "providing support to other frontline states like Moldova and Georgia." Frontline?
Last
week Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel seemed to confirm that the continued expansion of NATO
is indeed administration policy, saying that Georgia would be next to join in light of "Russia's
blatant aggression in Ukraine."
In 2009 President Barack Obama received
the Nobel Peace Prize for "his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and
cooperation between peoples." In retrospect it was all hat and no cattle given the ongoing saga in
Afghanistan, the reduction of a relatively stable Libya to chaos, meddling in Ukraine while simultaneously
threatening Russia, failure to restrain Israel and the creation of an Islamic terror state in the
Arab heartland. Not to mention "pivots" and additional developments in Africa and Asia. It is not
a record to brag about and it certainly does not suggest that the administration is as strategically
agile as Hillary Clinton would like to have one believe.
Victoria Nuland is a career civil servant and cannot easily be fired but she could be removed
from her top-level policy position and sent downstairs to head the mailroom at the State Department.
It would send the message that aggressive democracy promotion is not U.S. policy, but President Obama
has kept her on the job. The president also reportedly is an
admirer of her husband's articles and books which argue that the U.S. must maintain its military
power to accommodate its "global responsibilities." So in response to the question "Why does Victoria
Nuland still have her job?" the answer must surely be because the White House approves of what she
has been doing, which should give everyone pause.
Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer, is executive director of the Council for the National
Interest.
If Hillary wins the White House, expect Victoria Nuland to be at her side.
The other day, a question popped up on a Facebook thread I was commenting on: "Where is Victoria
Nuland?" The short answer, of course, is that she is still holding down her position as assistant
secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs.
But a related question begs for a more expansive response: Where will Victoria Nuland be after
January? Nuland is one of Hillary Clinton's protégés at the State Department, and she is also greatly
admired by hardline Republicans. This suggests she would be easily approved by Congress as secretary
of state or maybe even national-security adviser-which in turn suggests that her foreign-policy views
deserve a closer look.
Nuland comes from what might be called the First Family of Military Interventionists. Her husband,
Robert Kagan, is a leading neoconservative who co-founded the Project for the New American Century
in 1998 around a demand for "regime change" in Iraq. He is currently a senior fellow at the Brookings
Institution, an author, and a regular contributor to the op-ed pages of a number of national newspapers.
He has already declared that he will be voting for Hillary Clinton in November, a shift away from
the GOP that many have seen as a clever career-enhancing move for both him and his wife.
Robert's brother, Fred, is with the hawkish American Enterprise Institute, and his sister-in-law,
Kimberly, is the head of the Institute for the Study of War, which is largely funded by defense contractors.
The Kagans work to encourage military action, both through their positions in government and by influencing
the public debate through think-tank reports and op-eds. It is a family enterprise that mirrors the
military-industrial complex as a whole, with think tanks coming up with reasons to increase military
spending and providing "expert" support for the government officials who actually promote and implement
the policies. Defense contractors, meanwhile, benefit from the largesse and kick back some money
to the think tanks, which then develop new reasons to spend still more on military procurement.
The Kagans' underlying belief is that the United States has both the power and the obligation
to replace governments that are considered either uncooperative with Washington (the "Leader of the
Free World") or hostile to American interests. American interests are, of course, mutable, and they
include values like democracy and the rule of law as well as practical considerations such as economic
and political competition. Given the elasticity of the interests, many countries can be and are considered
potential targets for Washington's tender ministrations.
For what it's worth, President Obama is reportedly an
admirer of Robert Kagan's books, which argue that the U.S. must maintain its military power to
accommodate its "global responsibilities." The persistence of neoconservative foreign-policy views
in the Obama administration has often been remarked upon, though Democrats and Republicans embrace
military interventionism for different reasons. The GOP sees it as an international leadership imperative
driven by American "exceptionalism," while the Dems romanticize "liberal intervention" as a sometimes-necessary
evil undertaken most often for humanitarian reasons. But the result is the same, as no administration
wants to be seen as weak when dealing with the outside world. George W. Bush's catastrophic failures
in Afghanistan and Iraq continue to bear fruit under a Democratic administration, while Obama has
added a string of additional "boots on the ground" interventions in Libya, Syria, Yemen, the Philippines,
and Somalia.
And Nuland herself,
many will recall, was the driving force behind efforts to destabilize the Ukrainian government of
President Viktor Yanukovych in 2013-14. Yanukovych, admittedly a corrupt autocrat, nevertheless assumed
office after a free election. In spite of the fact that Washington and Kiev ostensibly had friendly
relations, Nuland provided open support for the Maidan Square demonstrators opposed to Yanukovych's
government,
passing out cookies to protesters on the square and holding photo ops with a beaming Sen. John
McCain.
Nuland started her rapid rise as an adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney. Subsequently, she was
serially promoted by secretaries of state Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, attaining her current position
in September 2013. But it was her behavior in Ukraine that made her a media figure. It is hard to
imagine that any U.S. administration would tolerate a similar attempt by a foreign nation to interfere
in domestic politics, particularly if it were backed by a
$5 billion budget,
but Washington has long adhered to a double standard when evaluating its own behavior.
Nuland is most famous for using
foul language when referring to the potential European role in managing the unrest in Ukraine
that she and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) had helped create. She even discussed with
U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt who the new leader of Ukraine ought to be. "Yats is the guy" she said
(referring to Arseniy Yatsenyuk), while pondering how she would "glue this thing" as Pyatt simultaneously
considered how to "midwife" it. Their insecure phone call was
intercepted and leaked,
possibly by the Russian intelligence service, though anyone equipped with a scanner could have done
the job.
The inevitable replacement of the government in Kiev, actually a coup but sold to the media as
a triumph for "democracy," was only the prelude to a sharp break-and escalating conflict-with Moscow
over Russia's attempts to protect its own interests in Ukraine. The new regime in Kiev, as corrupt
as its predecessor and supported by neo-Nazis and ultra-nationalists, was consistently whitewashed
in the Western media, and the conflict was depicted as "pro-democracy" forces resisting unprovoked
"Russian aggression."
Indeed, the real objective of interfering in Ukraine was, right from the start, to install a regime
hostile to Moscow. Carl Gershman, the head of the taxpayer-funded NED,
called Ukraine "the biggest prize" in the effort to topple Russian President Vladimir Putin,
who "may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself." But
Gershman and Nuland were playing with fire in their assessment, as Russia had vital interests at
stake and is the only nation with the military capability to destroy the U.S.
And make no mistake about Nuland's clear intention to expand the conflict and directly confront
Moscow. In Senate testimony in May of 2014,
she noted how
the Obama administration was "providing support to other frontline states like Moldova and Georgia."
Nuland and her neoconservative allies celebrated their "regime change" in Kiev oblivious to the
fact that Putin would recognize the strategic threat to his own country and would react, particularly
to protect the historic Russian naval base at Sevastopol in Crimea. Barack Obama responded predictably,
initiating what soon became something like a new Cold War against Russia, risking escalation into
a possible nuclear confrontation. It was a crisis that would not have existed but for Nuland and
her allies.
Though there was no evidence that Putin had initiated the Ukraine crisis and much evidence to
the contrary, the U.S. government propaganda machine rolled into action, claiming that Russia's measures
in Ukraine would be the first step in an invasion of Eastern Europe. Former Secretary of State Clinton
dutifully
compared Putin to Adolf Hitler. And Robert Kagan provided the argument for more intervention,
producing a lengthy essay in The New Republic entitled "Superpowers
Don't Get to Retire," in which he criticized President Obama for failing to maintain American
dominance in the world. The New York Times
revealed that the essay was apparently part of a joint project in which Nuland regularly edited
her husband's articles, even though this particular piece attacked the administration she worked
for.
As the situation in Ukraine continued to deteriorate in 2014, Nuland exerted herself to scuttle
several European attempts to arrange a ceasefire. When NATO Commander Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove
was cited as being in favor of sending more weapons to the Ukrainian government to "raise the battlefield
cost for Putin," Nuland
commented, "I'd strongly urge you to use the phrase 'defensive systems' that we would deliver
to oppose Putin's 'offensive systems.'"
To return to the initial question of where Victoria Nuland is, the long answer would be that while
she is not much in the news, she is continuing to provide support for policies that the White House
apparently approves of. Late last month, she was again in Kiev. She criticized Russia for its lack
of press freedom and its "puppets" in the Donbas region
while telling
a Ukrainian audience about a "strong U.S. commitment to stand with Ukraine as it stays on the path
of a clean, democratic, European future. … We remain committed to retaining sanctions that apply
to the situation in Crimea until Crimea is returned to Ukraine." Before that, she was in
Cyprus and France discussing
"a range of regional and global issues with senior government officials."
But one has to suspect that, at this point, she is mainly waiting to see what happens in November.
And wondering where she might be going in January.
Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer, is executive director of the Council for the National
Interest.
"... Anti-Russian hysteria in America reached its apogee this week as Democrats tried to divert attention from embarrassing revelations about how the Democratic Party apparatus had rigged the primaries against Bernie Sanders by claiming Vlad Putin and his KGB had hacked and exposed the Dem's emails. ..."
"... Unnamed US 'intelligence officials' claimed they had 'high confidence' that the Russian KGB or GRU (military intelligence) had hacked the Dem's emails. These were likely the same officials who had 'high confidence' that Iraq had nuclear weapons. ..."
"... And what a joy for the war party that those dastardly Ruskis are now back as Enemy Number One. Much more fun than scruffy Arabs. The word is out: more stealth bombers, more warships, more missiles, more troops for Europe. The wicked Red Chinese will have to wait their turn until Uncle Sam can deal with them. ..."
"... I always find conventions depressing affairs. Rather than the cradle of democracy, they remind me of clownish Shriners Conventions. Or as the witty Democratic advisor Paul Begala said, `Hollywood for ugly people.' What, I kept wondering, is the rest of the world thinking as it watching this tawdry spectacle? ..."
"... One thing that that amazed me was the Convention's lack of attention to America's longest ever war that still rages in the mountains of Afghanistan. For the past thirteen years, America, the world's greatest military and economic power, has been trying to crush the life out of Afghan Pashtun mountain tribesmen whose primary sin is fiercely opposing occupation by the US and its local Afghan opium-growing stooges. ..."
"... But the war was far from being 'almost won.' The US-installed puppet regime in Kabul of President Ashraf Ghani, a former banker, holds on only thanks to the bayonets of US troops and the US Air Force. Without constant air strikes, the US-installed Ghani regime and its drug-dealing would have been swept away by Taliban and its tribal allies. ..."
"... So the US remains stuck in Afghanistan. Obama lacked the courage to pull US troops out. Always weak in military affairs, Obama bent to demands of the Pentagon and CIA to dig in lest the Red Chinese or Pakistan take over this strategic nation. The US oil industry was determined to assure trans-Afghan pipeline routes south from Central Asia. India has its eye on Afghanistan. Muslims could not be allowed to defeat the US military. ..."
"... This longest of wars has cost nearly $1 trillion to date – all of its borrowed money – and caused the deaths of 3,518 US and coalition troops, including 158 Canadians who blundered into a war none of them understood. ..."
"... No one has the courage to end this pointless war. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Afghans are being killed. Too bad no one at the Democratic or Republican Conventions had time to think about the endless war in forgotten Afghanistan. ..."
Anti-Russian hysteria in America reached its apogee this week as Democrats tried to divert
attention from embarrassing revelations about how the Democratic Party apparatus had rigged the primaries
against Bernie Sanders by claiming Vlad Putin and his KGB had hacked and exposed the Dem's emails.
This was rich coming from the US that snoops into everyone's emails and phones across the globe.
Remember German chancellor Angela Merkel's cell phone being bugged by the US National Security Agency?
Unnamed US 'intelligence officials' claimed they had 'high confidence' that the Russian KGB
or GRU (military intelligence) had hacked the Dem's emails. These were likely the same officials
who had 'high confidence' that Iraq had nuclear weapons.
Blaming Putin was a master-stroke of deflection. No more talk of Hillary's slush fund foundation
or her status as a subsidiary of Goldman Sachs and the rest of Wall Street. All attention was focused
on President Putin who has been outrageously demonized by the US media and politicians.
Except for a small faux pas – a montage of warships shown at the end of the Democratic Convention
is a blaze of jingoistic effusion embarrassingly turned out to be Russian warships!
Probably another trick by the awful Putin who has come to replace Satan in the minds of many Americans.
And what a joy for the war party that those dastardly Ruskis are now back as Enemy Number
One. Much more fun than scruffy Arabs. The word is out: more stealth bombers, more warships, more
missiles, more troops for Europe. The wicked Red Chinese will have to wait their turn until Uncle
Sam can deal with them.
I always find conventions depressing affairs. Rather than the cradle of democracy, they remind
me of clownish Shriners Conventions. Or as the witty Democratic advisor Paul Begala said, `Hollywood
for ugly people.' What, I kept wondering, is the rest of the world thinking as it watching this tawdry
spectacle?
One thing that that amazed me was the Convention's lack of attention to America's longest
ever war that still rages in the mountains of Afghanistan. For the past thirteen years, America,
the world's greatest military and economic power, has been trying to crush the life out of Afghan
Pashtun mountain tribesmen whose primary sin is fiercely opposing occupation by the US and its local
Afghan opium-growing stooges.
The saintly President Barack Obama repeatedly proclaimed the Afghan War over and staged phony
troops withdrawals. He must have believed his generals who kept claiming they had just about defeated
the resistance alliance, known as Taliban.
But the war was far from being 'almost won.' The US-installed puppet regime in Kabul of President
Ashraf Ghani, a former banker, holds on only thanks to the bayonets of US troops and the US Air Force.
Without constant air strikes, the US-installed Ghani regime and its drug-dealing would have been
swept away by Taliban and its tribal allies.
So the US remains stuck in Afghanistan. Obama lacked the courage to pull US troops out. Always
weak in military affairs, Obama bent to demands of the Pentagon and CIA to dig in lest the Red Chinese
or Pakistan take over this strategic nation. The US oil industry was determined to assure trans-Afghan
pipeline routes south from Central Asia. India has its eye on Afghanistan. Muslims could not be allowed
to defeat the US military.
Look what happened to the Soviets after they admitted defeat in Afghanistan and pulled out. Why
expose the US Empire to a similar geopolitical risk?
With al-Qaida down to less than 50 members in Afghanistan, according to former US defense chief
Leon Panetta, what was the ostensible reason for Washington to keep garrisoning Afghanistan? The
shadowy ISIS is now being dredged up as the excuse to stay.
This longest of wars has cost nearly $1 trillion to date – all of its borrowed money – and
caused the deaths of 3,518 US and coalition troops, including 158 Canadians who blundered into a
war none of them understood.
No one has the courage to end this pointless war. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Afghans
are being killed. Too bad no one at the Democratic or Republican Conventions had time to think about
the endless war in forgotten Afghanistan.
... leak also revealed anti-gay slurs, mocking African Americans and attempts to con reputable
news outlets with fake Trump videos.
The computer network used by Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's campaign was
hacked as part of a broad cyber attack on Democratic political organizations, people familiar with
the matter told Reuters. The latest attack, which was disclosed to Reuters on Friday, follows reports
of two other hacks on the Democratic National Committee and the party's fundraising committee for
candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives.
The U.S. Department of Justice national security division is investigating whether cyber hacking
attacks on Democratic political organizations threatened U.S. security, sources familiar with the
matter said on Friday.
The [attorney] father of a Muslim-American soldier killed in Iraq who is caught up in a war of
words with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is an
immigration lawyer who specializes in a highly controversial program accused of letting immigrants
buy their way into the U.S. Khizr M. Khan's website notes that he works to help clients with the
E-2 and EB-5 programs that let overseas investors buy into U.S. companies and also provides green
cards for family members...
The EB-5 program has been caught up in multiple scandals and critics are
pressing Congress to kill it.
"... At one point Khan challenged Trump, "You have sacrificed nothing and no one." True. But let
us also remember the Clinton family sent no one to war. Their daughter did not serve any more than any
Trump kid. Bill and Hillary served exactly as many days as Trump and Melania. Khan should have been
more inclusive in his condemnation. ..."
"... I would also like to ask Khan how he reconciles his son's death with the fact that only a few
years later Iraq is still deep in war. ..."
"... I think it was a direct attempt to bait Trump into another racist spectacle and it looks like
it worked. ..."
"... Nailed it. Trump's biggest weakness was exposed in March when he talked about the size of his
hands, and other parts, on a national debate stage. He can't help but lash out after almost any attack,
even when there is clearly nothing to be gained by responding. ..."
"... On a side note, if it was an intentional trap anticipating this reaction, you almost have to
give props to the democrats for being sneaky and clever. ..."
"... It will not change anything at all. The staged circus of putting these parents on display for
political purposes -- is just reinforcing the cynics in all of us. ..."
"... The amusing part is 911 was a false flag operation to make Americans fear and hate Muslims
so Israel could expand The Greater Israel Project. (google it). So 911 set up a sub conscious dislike
of Muslims in the majority of Americans and Donald Trump, being the marketing genius he is, is exploiting
it. Now the MSM screams bloody murder because he brings it to people's conscious minds and they agree
with Trump. So they bash Trump for saying it while they murder Muslims all over the middle east for
Israel. Can we say hypocrites? ..."
"... Damn, I sure do feel more and more that it's a setup. Like that star wars character whose name
I don't remember from a movie I didn't watch, some kind of general (I saw the parody of it on a Family
Guy cartoon with some of the other Seth McFarlane show American Dad) but the line is "it's a trap".
..."
"... If the Kahn's had their way, their son would have deserted. (right click and open in a new
tab) ..."
Last Thursday night, speaking at the Democratic National Convention, Khizr Khan paid tribute to his
son, U.S. Army Captain Humayun Khan, who died in Iraq on June 8, 2004, after he tried to stop a suicide
bomber.
As for every parent, husband, wife, brother, sister and friend who lost someone any war, I grieve
with them. I am sorry for the Khan's loss. I am a parent and can all too easily be sent to thinking
about the loss of a child.
So go ahead and hate on me. But of the almost 7,000 American families who lost sons and daughters
in the last 15 years of American war of terror, why did the Democrats choose a single Muslim family
to highlight?
No one knows how many hundreds of thousands (millions?) of non-American Muslims were killed as
collateral damage along the way in those wars. Who spoke for them at the Convention?
I found the Democrats' message shallow. It was pandering of the most contemptible kind, but not
as some say simple pandering for Muslim votes from those alienated by Trump's rhetoric.
The Democratic pandering was to an America that wants to believe we have good Muslims (who express
their goodness by sending their kids to fight our wars) and "they" have the bad Muslims (who express
their badness by sending their kids to fight their wars.) The pandering was to the cozy narrative
that makes the majority of Americans comfortable with perpetual war in the Middle East and Africa.
MORE: At one point Khan challenged Trump, "You have sacrificed nothing and no one."
True. But let us also remember the Clinton family sent no one to war. Their daughter did not serve
any more than any Trump kid. Bill and Hillary served exactly as many days as Trump and Melania. Khan
should have been more inclusive in his condemnation.
I would also like to ask Khan how he reconciles his son's death with the fact that only a
few years later Iraq is still deep in war.
Trump is an ass and I do not support him in any way. I am particularly troubled by his hate speech
directed at Muslims, and Mexicans, and everyone else he hates.
It is not disrespectful to discuss these things. Khan choose to put himself and his son's death
on television to serve a partisan political purpose. We need to talk about what he talked about.
Nailed it. Trump's biggest weakness was exposed in March when he talked about the size of
his hands, and other parts, on a national debate stage. He can't help but lash out after almost
any attack, even when there is clearly nothing to be gained by responding. There's so much
wrong with Trump, but the Queen of Chaos is just so dangerous, and stumbles like these might just
be devastating to his chances at success.
On a side note, if it was an intentional trap anticipating this reaction, you almost have
to give props to the democrats for being sneaky and clever. Too bad they're success may endangers
all our lives. (Not that Trump would guarantee our safety, but perhaps he might increase the odds)
It will not change anything at all. The staged circus of putting these parents on display
for political purposes -- is just reinforcing the cynics in all of us.
And now everyone is jumping to trash Trump -- and guess what? In the end, he will be the winner
of this.
The stage management around Hillary, the pandering to people of all races, without ever having
done anything human for them -- is her undoing. Trump does not hate anyone, he is just committing
sin after sin against political correctness. And everyone who understands what it means, gets
it. The era of putting people into neat boxes has come to an end. The era when only black people
can talk about problems in black community, or Mexicans in their community, or only women can
criticize a woman -- are gone. Guess what? Hillary is not an inch closer to offering any solutions
to our financial bleeding wound, the "wars" of choice that make the chosen elite, very, very rich.
In fact, she will push spineless Obama into more of those during the months before election.
So, how is it bad to tell that there is an Islamic cult, or "radical Islam" that Trump is talking
about -- or is it better to fluff up the problem, so we can by implication blame all Moslems.
As we arm, finance and provide all the logistics to various fundamentalist cults in the Middle
East, we are pious here about not even mentioning the word "Moslem". Nobody would be happier then
the Moslem community if finally somebody will point out that we have Salafi centers in US, Saudi
schools preaching the Wahhabi Islam, and then, we are shocked and surprised when something like
Boston happens. Somebody needs to talk about this, why not Trump. Or that we have over 100 schools
in US that were privatized by Feds for failing standards, converted into Charter schools, and
run by no other then Gulen Foundation, the "moderate" cleric we give refugee to, and who has with
"his" money caused many a problem in Turkey. Moderate? He is a Salafi, but our wonderful lying
press calls him "Sufi cleric"? Deliberate deception, in order to mix the two. Sufi branch is known
for its peacefulness, for its poetry, twirling Dervishes. Salafis by head chopping. Gulen will
not shake hands with women.
By confusing, mixing unmixable, we are led by the nose. And the wars go on and on, and expand
as we speak. So, have mercy on Moslems of US, and identify the cults -- who is financing them,
and why are our politicians so comfy cozy with them.
Can we say something about Mexicans? Do you think that Mexicans do not know of gangs that endanger
their community in the first place? Who does not know that the descent into hell of Mexican society
is due to the drug trafficking, chiefly with the US, and illegally across the border? Who does
not know that we, the US, have given rights to El-Salvador and Guatemalan people right to apply
for refugee status, and that they are -- once caught at the border, promptly released? How is
destabilizing these two countries by our meddling, and then taking in refugees, helping us or
them?
But the real sin that Trump committed is this -- he wants to pull our forces out of the profit-making
schema that is our foreign policy, and use money to repair our crumbling infrastructure, RETURN
money to Social Security Fund from which the warmongers are borrowing, and punish the corporations
that leave US only to profit from it. Now, these are the sins against the international financial
cartels and their deals. Heavens forbid that people are going to find out how they are ripped
off, and stop the gravy train of the riches at the expense of our soldiers, their families, and
the US citizens.
Please, do not let yourself be bamboozled by the scary woman. When she talks, one gets a fright.
Trump is just human, and is not following the political correctness unwritten rules.
Scary thing is listening to Hillary talking about the hacking of Democratic election e-mails.
She lies, and believes in her lies, as if she is a God, and creates realities. Without flinching,
and against all sense, she goes on an Russia diatribe. She blames Russian hackers -- but that
is not enough for her. She then claims that these were run by the Russian government, that is
under full control of Vladimir Putin. She looked like she was going to continue how he is under
full control by the Martian federation, and they in turn are controlled by the Orion empire. Her
fanaticism is not normal, say what you want. But she would not talk of the e-mails that tell the
story of her campaign, and the questions it raises of the legitimacy of her win over Sanders.
But Sanders has proven to be not much more then her strategy to reel in some young and disaffected
democrats. And they have learned now enough about politics to know -- without a wrecking ball,
this cabal will stay in power. And there is a good sized one in Donald Trump.
Yup. I think the next step will be the Dems trotting out a Downs syndrome teen to reprimand Trump
for whatever. It's like dangling red meat in front of a tiger, he can't possibly resist. No reason
for Dems not to repeat this if it keep working.
The amusing part is 911 was a false flag operation to make Americans fear and hate Muslims
so Israel could expand The Greater Israel Project. (google it). So 911 set up a sub conscious
dislike of Muslims in the majority of Americans and Donald Trump, being the marketing genius he
is, is exploiting it. Now the MSM screams bloody murder because he brings it to people's conscious
minds and they agree with Trump. So they bash Trump for saying it while they murder Muslims all
over the middle east for Israel. Can we say hypocrites?
Damn, I sure do feel more and more that it's a setup. Like that star wars character whose
name I don't remember from a movie I didn't watch, some kind of general (I saw the parody of it
on a Family Guy cartoon with some of the other Seth McFarlane show American Dad) but the line
is "it's a trap".
But as previously overstated by moi meme sui, the Leaders and especially the bureaucrats who
infest our body politic, well, they've got a long history of engineering coups. It's the fastest
way to steal control of territory and enslave cultures, as in "any culture except White Anglo
Saxon Protestants" and some of our favorite regime change targets have consistently been Latin
America. Mostly because of proximity.
So are we suddenly faced with the crap decision of well, you know, in a setup for a coup immediately
following the election? A national state of emergency brought on by post-election brawling?
"... go to 13:30 and listen. Kahn's mom and dad are MAD about their son completing his tour of duty
and then being forced to return via a BACK DOOR DRAFT in a war Hillary voted for and Trump opposed.
..."
"... Let's see how many others have been hatchet jobbed after serving in the military and doing
what they were told to do in war. Max Cleland. The Republicans smeared him ten ways from Sunday in support
of a Plantation Aristocrat named Saxby Chambliss 111. Who was a chickenhawk. The slander against a man
who left half his body weight and three of his limbs in VietNam would be sickening, right? The Wave
The Flag crowd would of course not permit that to be unanswered. So they cheered on the punk Chambliss
and his publicists. That was their answer. Same for Ron Kovic. People who had never gotten their delicate
fingers calloused or fought any of their own battles, far less risked becoming paraplegic, loved him
like a hero until he renounced war. And said some things, wrote some things that enraged the Warmongers.
..."
"... Ploy by the democratic party and their fake patriotism after getting the USA involved in illegal
wars. Hillary Clinton voted to go to war to protect the vested interests of Wall Street and big banks
as well as the military industrial complex. ..."
Democratic Party presidential nominee Hillary Clinton's team invited the parents of Capt.
Humayun Khan, killed in Iraq in 2004, to speak at the convention and criticize Republican nominee
Donald Trump's policy on Muslim immigration. It was a classic trap and Trump bumbled into it.
The ensuing blow-up may have made great ratings for the media, but what is unsaid is that both
sides agreed that Khan's death was a great sacrifice for our liberties and freedoms back home in
the US. The media went along with this view. But being killed in a war started by government
and media lies does not make one a heroic sacrifice. In fact, it makes on a victim. Khan was a victim
of both Republicans and Democrats who supported the war in 2002 and he is victim again today.
Ron Paul's view in today's Ron Paul Liberty Report:
… go to 13:30 and listen. Kahn's mom and dad are MAD about their son completing his tour
of duty and then being forced to return via a BACK DOOR DRAFT in a war Hillary voted for and Trump
opposed. Notice how they terminate the interview as his dad is going off again on his son
being forced to have to go to Iraq.
His mother told him NOT to be hero. There is another side of this story the MSM is not telling
us. I suspect they're only in the USA to take what they can take without giving back. If they
had their way, their son would have deserted.
BrotherJonah
And my nephew, a top-shirt (E8) in the US Army, I wish he would desert. Who needs another killer
in the world? He's been in since just before 9-11. Killed a few folks, and none of them (just
guess the next part, ok?)
not a single one of them was involved with 9-11 or WMDs. Did you guess correctly?? Clever lad.
Forget desertion, maybe what's needed is some good old fashioned mutiny.
Let's see how many others have been hatchet jobbed after serving in the military and doing
what they were told to do in war. Max Cleland. The Republicans smeared him ten ways from Sunday
in support of a Plantation Aristocrat named Saxby Chambliss 111. Who was a chickenhawk. The slander
against a man who left half his body weight and three of his limbs in VietNam would be sickening,
right? The Wave The Flag crowd would of course not permit that to be unanswered. So they cheered
on the punk Chambliss and his publicists. That was their answer. Same for Ron Kovic. People who
had never gotten their delicate fingers calloused or fought any of their own battles, far less
risked becoming paraplegic, loved him like a hero until he renounced war. And said some things,
wrote some things that enraged the Warmongers.
So Hillary and Trump made damned sure this other young American and his family get the same
treatment.
Greg Kenny
Ploy by the democratic party and their fake patriotism after getting the USA involved in
illegal wars. Hillary Clinton voted to go to war to protect the vested interests of Wall Street
and big banks as well as the military industrial complex.
Khizr Khan, the Muslim Gold Star father that the mainstream media and former Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton have been using to criticize Donald J. Trump, has deep ties to the government
of Saudi Arabia-and to international Islamist investors through his own law firm. In addition to
those ties to the wealthy Islamist nation, Khan also has ties to controversial immigration programs
that wealthy foreigners can use to essentially buy their way into the United States-and has deep
ties to the "Clinton Cash" narrative through the Clinton Foundation.
Khan and his wife Ghazala Khan both appeared on stage at the Democratic National Convention
to attack, on Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton's behalf, Donald Trump-the Republican
nominee for president. Their son, U.S. Army Captain Humayun Khan, was killed in Iraq in 2004. Khizr
Khan, in his speech to the DNC, lambasted Donald Trump for wanting to temporarily halt Islamic migration
to America from countries with a proven history of exporting terrorists.
Since then, Clinton operative George Stephanopoulos-who served as a senior adviser
to the president in Bill Clinton's White House and
is a Clinton Foundation donor as well as a host on the ABC network-pushed Trump on the matter
in an interview. Trump's comments in that interview have sparked the same mini-rebellion inside his
party, in the media and across the aisle that has happened many times before. The usual suspects
inside the GOP, from former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush to Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) to House Speaker
Paul Ryan to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to Ohio Gov. John Kasich, have condemned Trump
in one way or another. The media condemnation has been swift and Democrats, as well their friends
throughout media, are driving the train as fast as they can.
But until now, it looked like the Khans were just Gold Star parents who the big bad
Donald Trump attacked. It turns out, however, in addition to being Gold Star parents, the Khans are
financially and legally tied deeply to the industry of Muslim migration–and to the government of
Saudi Arabia and to the Clintons themselves.
Khan,
according to
Intelius as
also reported by Walid Shoebat, used to work at the law firm Hogan Lovells, LLP, a major D.C.
law firm that has been on retainer as the law firm representing the government of Saudi Arabia in
the United States for years. Citing federal government disclosure forms, the Washington Free Beacon
reported the connection between Saudi Arabia and Hogan Lovells a couple weeks ago.
"Hogan Lovells LLP, another U.S. firm hired by the Saudis, is registered to work for
the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia through 2016, disclosures show," Joe Schoffstall of the Free Beacon
reported.
The
federal form filed
with the Department of Justice is a requirement under the Foreign Agents Registration Act of
1938, which makes lobbyists and lawyers working on behalf of foreign governments and other agents
from abroad with interests in the United States register with the federal government.
The government of Saudi Arabia, of course, has donated heavily to the Clinton Foundation.
"The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has given between $10 and $25 million to the foundation
while Friends of Saudi Arabia has contributed between $1 and $5 million," Schoffstall wrote.
Trump, of course, has called on Hillary Clinton to have the Clinton Foundation return
the money.
"Saudi Arabia and many of the countries that gave vast amounts of money to the Clinton
Foundation want women as slaves and to kill gays," Trump wrote in a Facebook post back in June,
according
to Politico. "Hillary must return all money from such countries!"
"Crooked Hillary says we must call on Saudi Arabia and other countries to stop funding
hate," Trump posted in a separate Facebook posting at the time. "I am calling on her to immediately
return the $25 million plus she got from them for the Clinton Foundation!"
Of course, to this day, Hillary Clinton and her Clinton Foundation has kept the money
from the Saudi Arabian government.
Schoffstall's piece in the Washington Free Beacon also notes how Hogan Lovells lobbyist
Robert Kyle,
per Federal Election Commission (FEC) records, has bundled more than $50,000 in donations for
Clinton's campaign this year.
"Many lawyers at Hogan Lovells remember the week in 2004 when U.S. Army Capt. Humayun
Khan lost his life to a suicide bomber," Polantz wrote. "Then-Hogan & Hartson attorneys mourned the
death because the soldier's father, Khizr Khan, a Muslim American immigrant, was among their beloved
colleagues."
Polantz wrote that Khan worked at the mega-D.C. law firm for years.
"Khan spent seven years, from 2000 to 2007, in the Washington, D.C., office of then-Hogan
& Hartson," Polantz wrote. "He served as the firm's manager of litigation technology. Although he
did not practice law while at Hogan, Khan was well versed in understanding the American courts system.
On Thursday night, he described his late son dreaming of becoming a military lawyer."
But representing the Clinton Foundation backing Saudi Arabian government and having
one of its lobbyists bundle $50,000-plus for Clinton's campaign are hardly the only places where
the Khan-connected Hogan Lovells D.C. mega-firm brush elbows with Clinton Cash.
The firm also handles Hillary Clinton's taxes and is deeply connected with the email
scandal whereby when she was Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton set up a home-brew email server
system that jeopardized classified information handling and was "extremely careless" according to
FBI director James Comey.
"A lawyer at Hogan & Hartson [Howard Topaz] has been Bill and Hillary Clinton's go-to
guy for tax advice since 2004, according to documents released Friday by Hillary Clinton's campaign,"
The American Lawyer's Nate Raymond
wrote in 2008, as Hillary Clinton ran for president that year. "The Clintons' tax returns for
2000-07 show combined earnings of $109 million, on which they paid $33 million in taxes. New York-based
tax partner Howard Topaz has a broad tax practice, and also regularly advises corporations on M&A
and executive compensation."
"Topaz was a partner at Hogan & Hartson, which later merged to become known as Hogan
Lovells, where Topaz continues to practice. The firm's lawyers were major donors to Hillary Clinton's
first presidential campaign," Howley wrote.
For her private email system, Clinton used a spam filtering program MX Logic.
"Hogan & Hartson handled the patent for MX Logic's email-filtering program, which McAfee
bought the small company for $140 million in 2009 in order to acquire," Howley wrote. "The MX Logic
company's application for a trademark for its SPAMTRAQ program was filed in 2004 on Hogan & Hartson
stationery and signed by a Hogan & Hartson attorney. Hogan & Hartson has been responsible for MX
Logic annual reports. The email company's Clinton links present more evidence that Clinton's political
and legal establishment was monitoring her private email use."
If that all isn't enough, that same Hogan & Hartson law firm-now Hogan Lovells-employed
Loretta Lynch, the current Attorney General of the United States. Lynch infamously just a few weeks
ago met with Bill Clinton, Hillary's husband and the former president, on her private jet in Phoenix
just before clearing Hillary Clinton of any wrongdoing when it came to her illicit private email
server system.
Sen. Chuck Grassley, the chairman of the U.S. Senate's Judiciary Committee, has detailed
how the EB5 immigration program is "riddled with flaws and corruption."
"Maybe it is only here on Capitol Hill-on this island surrounded by reality-that we
can choose to plug our ears and refuse to listen to commonly accepted facts," Grassley
said in a statement earlier this year. "The Government Accountability Office, the media, industry
experts, members of congress, and federal agency officials, have concurred that the program is a
serious problem with serious vulnerabilities. Allow me to mention a few of the flaws."
From there, Sen. Grassley listed out several of the "flaws" with the EB5 immigration
program that Khan works in:
– Investments can be spent before business plans are approved.
– Regional Center operators can charge exorbitant fees of foreign nationals in addition
to their required investments.
– Jobs created are not "direct" or verifiable jobs but rather are "indirect" and
based on estimates and economic modeling.
– Jobs created by U.S. investors are counted by the foreign national when obtaining
a green card, even if EB-5 money is only a fraction of the total invested.
– Investment funds are not adequately vetted.
– Gifts and loans are acceptable sources of funds from foreign nationals.
– The investment level has been stagnant for nearly 25 years.
– There's no prohibition against foreign governments owning or operating regional
centers or projects.
– Regional centers can be rented or sold without government oversight or approval.
– Regional centers don't have to certify that they comply with securities laws.
– There's no oversight of promoters who work overseas for the regional centers.
– There's no set of sanctions for violations, no recourse for bad actors.
– There are no required background checks on anyone associated with a regional center.
– Regional centers draw Targeted Employment Area boundaries around poor areas in
order to come in at a lower investment level, yet the jobs created are not actually created in
those areas.
– Every Targeted Employment Area designation is rubberstamped by the agency.
– Adjudicators are pressured to get to a yes, especially for those politically connected.
– Visas are not properly scrutinized.
– Visas are pushed through despite security warnings.
– Files and applications lack basic and necessary information to monitor compliance.
– The agency does not do site visits for each and every project.
– There's no transparency on how funds are spent, who is paid, and what investors
are told about the projects they invest in.
That's not to mention the fact that, according to Sen. Grassley, there have been serious
national security violations in connection with the EB5 program that Khan works in and around already.
In fact, the program-according to Grassley-was used by Middle Eastern operatives from Iran to attempt
to illicitly enter the United States.
"There are also classified reports that detail the national security, fraud and abuse.
Our committee has received numerous briefings and classified documents to show this side of the story,"
Grassley said in the early February 2016 statement. "The enforcement arm of the Department of Homeland
Security wrote an internal memo that raises significant concerns about the program. One section of
the memo outlines concerns that it could be used by Iranian operatives to infiltrate the United States.
The memo identifies seven main areas of program vulnerability, including the export of sensitive
technology, economic espionage, use by foreign government agents and terrorists, investment fraud,
illicit finance and money laundering."
Maybe all of this is why–as Breitbart News has previously noted–the Democratic National
Convention made absolutely no mention of the Clinton Foundation or Clinton Global Initiative. Hillary
Clinton's coronation ceremony spent exactly zero minutes of the four nights of official DNC programming
talking about anything to do with perhaps one of the biggest parts of her biography.
Michael Rawlings -> Jeremy Stevens
No wonder Khan is so mad at Trump, Trump is threatening Khan's multi million $ corrupt EB5
immigration business.
jones -> Michael Rawlings
Right. It makes me totally forget the fact that a candidate for the presidency has the temperament
of a seven-year-old bully and can't control his mouth. Good thing we know the truth about this
random guy with a tiny bit of power and a small possibly corrupt business so that we can go ahead
and elect a madman to be the most powerful person in the world.
TechZilla -> jones
We should support the NWO warmonger HRC ....because Trump can be uncouth?
No thanks, I don't want more destabilization of the middle east, my cousin would still be
alive if Trump's foreign policy was in effect circa 2000. O but she's the one that loves vets,
not the guy who disagrees with more aggressive actions against Russia. These elitist promoted
wars are not in the public interest, and they have effected me personally.
Taylor -> jones
This is just a drop in the bucket for what Hillary's campaign is a part of. I'd rather have
someone who can speak their mind and know their crazy rather than having a liar that can't
even own up to their corruption.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is refusing to back House Speaker Paul D. Ryan
[Social Security-cutting, TPP dirt-bag #1
] in his upcoming primary election,
saying in an interview Tuesday that he is "not quite there yet" in endorsing his party's
top-ranking elected official. Trump also said he was not supporting Sen. John McCain [
scum-bag
#2
] in his primary in Arizona, and he singled out Sen. Kelly Ayotte [
fraud #3
]
as a weak and disloyal leader in New Hampshire, a state whose presidential primary Trump won
handily. With Ryan's Wisconsin primary scheduled for next Tuesday, Trump praised the House
speaker's underdog opponent, Paul Nehlen, for running "a very good campaign."
Diplomacy & respect crucial to our relationship with Russia
Q: This week we're going to see a lot of world leaders come to Manhattan. Might you have a
meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin?
TRUMP: Well, I had heard that he wanted to meet
with me. And certainly I am open to it. I don't know that it's going to take place, but I know
that people have been talking. We'll see what happens. But certainly, if he wanted to meet, I
would love to do that. You know, I've been saying relationship is so important in business, that
it's so important in deals, and so important in the country. And if President Obama got along
with Putin, that would be a fabulous thing. But they do not get along. Putin does not respect our
president. And I'm sure that our president does not like him very much.
Putin has no respect for America; I will get along with him
Q: What would you do right now if you were president, to get the Russians out of Syria?
TRUMP:
Number one, they have to respect you. He has absolutely no respect for President Obama. Zero. I
would talk to him. I would get along with him. I believe I would get along with a lot of the
world leaders that this country is not getting along with. I think I will get along with Putin,
and I will get along with others, and we will have a much more stable world.
We must deal with the maniac in North Korea with nukes
[With regards to the Iranian nuclear deal]: Nobody ever mentions North Korea where you have this
maniac sitting there and he actually has nuclear weapons and somebody better start thinking about
North Korea and perhaps a couple of other places. You have somebody right now in North Korea who
has got nuclear weapons and who is saying almost every other week, "I'm ready to use them." And
we don't even mention it.
China is our enemy; they're bilking us for billions
China is bilking us for hundreds of billions of dollars by manipulating and devaluing its
currency. Despite all the happy talk in Washington, the Chinese leaders are not our friends. I've
been criticized for calling them our enemy. But what else do you call the people who are
destroying your children's and grandchildren's future? What name would you prefer me to use for
the people who are hell bent on bankrupting our nation, stealing our jobs, who spy on us to steal
our technology, who are undermining our currency, and who are ruining our way of life? To my
mind, that's an enemy. If we're going to make America number one again, we've got to have a
president who knows how to get tough with China, how to out-negotiate the Chinese, and how to
keep them from screwing us at every turn.
When you love America, you protect it with no apologies
I love America. And when you love something, you protect it passionately--fiercely, even. We are
the greatest country the world has ever known. I make no apologies for this country, my pride in
it, or my desire to see us become strong and rich again. After all, wealth funds our freedom. But
for too long we've been pushed around, used by other countries, and ill-served by politicians in
Washington who measure their success by how rapidly they can expand the federal debt, and your
tax burden, with their favorite government programs.
American can do better. I think we deserve
the best. That's why I decided to write this book. The decisions we face are too monumental, too
consequential, to just let slide. I have answers for the problems that confront us. I know how to
make American rich again.
By 2027, tsunami as China overtakes US as largest economy
There is a lot that Obama and his globalist pals don't want you to know about China's strength.
But no one who knows the truth can sit back and ignore how dangerous this economic powerhouse
will be if our so-called leaders in Washington don't get their acts together and start standing
up for American jobs and stop outsourcing them to China. It's been predicted that by 2027, China
will overtake the United States as the world's biggest economy--much sooner if the Obama
economy's disastrous trends continue. That means in a handful of years, America will be engulfed
by the economic tsunami that is the People's Republic of China--my guess is by 2016 if we don't
act fast.
For the past thirty years, China's economy has grown an average 9 to 10 percent each
year. In the first quarter of 2011 alone, China's economy grew a robust 9.7 percent. America's
first quarter growth rate? An embarrassing and humiliating 1.9 percent. It's a national disgrace.
A lot of life is about survival of the fittest and adaption, as Darwin pointed out. It's not all
there is, but it's an indication of how the world has evolved in historical terms. We've seen
many empires come and go -- the Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire -- there have always been surges
of power. Sometimes they last for centuries. Even so, some of us have never learned of them as of
today. In other words, things change. We have to keep up with the changes and move forward.
Source: Think Like a Champion, by Donald Trump, p. 23-4 , Apr 27,
2010
Criticized Buchanan's view on Hitler as appeasement
In Buchanan's book, he actually said the Western allies were wrong to stop Hitler. He
argued that we should have let Hitler take all of the territories to his east. What of the
systematic annihilation of Jews, Catholics, and Gypsies in those countries? You don't have to be
a genius to know that we were next, that once Hitler seized control of the countries to his east
he would focus on world domination.
Pat Buchanan was actually preaching the same policy of appeasement that had failed for Neville
Chamberlain at Munich. If we used Buchanan's theory on Hitler as a foreign policy strategy, we
would have appeased every world dictator with a screw loose and we'd have a brainwashed
population ready to go postal on command.
After I [wrote an article on this for] Face the Nation, Buchanan accused me of
⌠ignorance." Buchanan, who believes himself an expert, has also called Hitler ⌠a political
organizer of the first rank." Buchanan is a fan.
Post-Cold War: switch from chess player to dealmaker
In the modern world you can't very easily draw up a simple, general foreign policy. I was busy
making deals during the last decade of the cold war. Now the game has changed. The day of the
chess player is over. Foreign policy has to be put in the hands of a dealmaker.
Two dealmakers have served as president-one was Franklin Roosevelt, who got us through WWII,
and the other was Richard Nixon, who forced the Russians to the bargaining table to achieve the
first meaningful reductions in nuclear arms.
A dealmaker can keep many balls in the air, weigh the competing interests of other nations,
and above all, constantly put America's best interests first. The dealmaker knows when to be
tough and when to back off. He knows when to bluff and he knows when to threaten, understanding
that you threaten only when prepared to carry out the threat. The dealmaker is cunning,
secretive, focused, and never settles for less than he wants. It's been a long time since America
had a president like that.
I don't understand why American policymakers are always so timid in dealing with Russia on issues
that directly involve our survival. Kosovo was a perfect case in point: Russia was holding out
its hand for billions of dollars in IMF loans (to go along with billions in aid the U.S. has
given) the same week it was issuing threats and warnings regarding our conduct in the Balkans. We
need to tell Russia and other recipients that if they want our dime they had better do our dance,
at least in matters regarding our national security. These people need us much more than we need
them. We have leverage, and we are crazy not to use it to better advantage.
Few respect
weakness. Ultimately we have to deal with hostile nations in the only language they know:
unshrinking conviction and the military power to back it up if need be. There and in that order
are America's two greatest assets in foreign affairs.
China: lack of human rights prevents consumer development
Why am I concerned with political rights? I'm a good businessman and I can be amazingly
unsentimental when I need to be. I also recognize that when it comes down to it, we can't do much
to change a nation's internal policies. But I'm unwilling to shrug off the mistreatment of
China's citizens by their own government. My reason is simple: These oppressive policies make it
clear that China's current government has contempt for our way of life.
We want to trade with China because of the size of its consumer market. But if the regime
continues to repress individual freedoms, how many consumers will there really be? Isn't it
inconsistent to compromise our principles by negotiating trade with a country that may not want
and cannot afford our goods?
We have to make it absolutely clear that we're willing to trade with China, but not to trade
away our principles, and that under no circumstances will we keep our markets open to countries
that steal from us.
Our biggest long-term challenge will be China. The Chinese people still have few political rights
to speak of. Chinese government leaders, though they concede little, desperately want us to
invest in their country. Though we have the upper hand, we're way to eager to please. We see them
as a potential market and we curry favor with them at the expense of our national interests. Our
China policy under Presidents Clinton and Bush has been aimed at changing the Chinese regime by
incentives both economic and political. The intention has been good, but it's clear that the
Chinese have been getting far too easy a ride.
Despite the opportunity, I think we need to take
a much harder look at China. There are major problems that too many at the highest reaches of
business want to overlook, [primarily] the human-rights situation.
Q: Would you block Syrian refugees from entering the US?
RUBIO: The problem is we can't background check them. You can't pick up the phone and call
Syria. And that's one of the reasons why I said we won't be able to take more refugees. It's not
that we don't want to. The bottom line is that this is not just a threat coming from abroad. What
we need to open up to and realize is that we have a threat here at home, homegrown violent
extremists, individuals who perhaps have not even traveled abroad, who have been radicalized
online. This has become a multi-faceted threat. In the case of what's happening in Europe, this
is a swarm of refugees. And as I've said repeatedly over the last few months, you can have 1,000
people come in and 999 of them are just poor people fleeing oppression and violence but one of
them is an ISIS fighter.
Q: Russia has invaded Ukraine, and has put troops in Syria. You have said you will have a good
relationship with Mr. Putin. So, what does President Trump do in response to Russia's aggression?
TRUMP: As far as Syria, if Putin wants to go and knock the hell out of ISIS, I am all for it,
100%, and I can't understand how anybody would be against it.
Q: They're not doing that.
TRUMP: They blew up a Russian airplane. He cannot be in love with these people. He's going in,
and we can go in, and everybody should go in. As far as the Ukraine is concerned, we have a group
of people, and a group of countries, including Germany--why are we always doing the work? I'm all
for protecting Ukraine--but, we have countries that are surrounding the Ukraine that aren't doing
anything. They say, "Keep going, keep going, you dummies, keep going. Protect us." And we have to
get smart. We can't continue to be the policeman of the world.
Provide economic assistance to create a safe zone in Syria
Q: Where you are on the question of a safe zone or a no-fly zone in Syria?
TRUMP: I love a safe
zone for people. I do not like the migration. I do not like the people coming. What they should
do is, the countries should all get together, including the Gulf states, who have nothing but
money, they should all get together and they should take a big swath of land in Syria and they do
a safe zone for people, where they could to live, and then ultimately go back to their country,
go back to where they came from.
Q: Does the U.S. get involved in making that safe zone?
TRUMP: I would help them economically, even though we owe $19 trillion.
US should not train rebels it does not know or control
Q: The Russians are hitting Assad as well as people we've trained.
TRUMP: Where they're hitting
people, we're talking about people that we don't even know. I was talking to a general two days
ago. He said, "We have no idea who these people are. We're training people. We don't know who
they are. We're giving them billions of dollars to fight Assad." And you know what? I'm not
saying Assad's a good guy, because he's probably a bad guy. But I've watched him interviewed many
times. And you can make the case, if you look at Libya, look at what we did there-- it's a mess--
if you look at Saddam Hussein with Iraq, look what we did there-- it's a mess-- it's going be
same thing.
Q: You came across to me as if you welcomed Putin's involvement in Syria. You said you saw very
little downside. Why?
TRUMP: I want our military to be beyond anything, no contest, and
technologically, most importantly. But we are going to get bogged down in Syria. If you look at
what happened with the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, that's when they went bankrupt.
Q: So, you think Putin's going to get suckered into--
TRUMP: They're going to get bogged down. Everybody that's touched the Middle East, they've
gotten bogged down. Now, Putin wants to go in and I like that Putin is bombing the hell out of
ISIS. Putin has to get rid of ISIS because Putin doesn't want ISIS coming into Russia.
Q: Why do you trust him and nobody else does?
TRUMP: I don't trust him. But the truth is, it's not a question of trust. I don't want to see
the United States get bogged down. We've spent now $2 trillion in Iraq, probably a trillion in
Afghanistan. We're destroying our country.
What does Donald Trump believe? Iran and Israel: Walk away from nuclear talks. Increase
sanctions.
Trump has said that the U.S. is mishandling current Iran negotiations and should
have walked away from the table once Tehran reportedly rejected the idea of sending enriched
uranium to Russia. He would increase sanctions on Iran. Trump has been sharply critical of the
Obama administration's handling of relations with Israel and has called for a closer alliance
with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu.
Source: PBS News Hour "2016 Candidate Stands" series , Jun 16, 2015
Sargent also notes a new poll from New Hampshire showing Clinton up by 15% and Maggie Hassan
ahead of Kelly Ayotte by 10%.
And he points to a fresh poll from Pennsylvania that has Clinton up by 11%.
Ah, but Michigan. Clinton leading in the western and southwestern parts of the state? Awesome.
And btw, Bernie Sanders beat Clinton, big, in those parts of the state in the primary.
Ray LaPan-Love, August 4, 2016 7:38 pm
Terry,
I doubt if the mainstreamers know about Assange's latest bombshell yet. Ironically too,
this story may lead to an odd partnership between 'Democracy Now' and 'Fox News' while MSNBC
viewers are left in the dark. Our politics may be entering the 'Twilight Zone', hehe.
Saudi Arabia and an army of K Street lobbyists are now claiming that several Saudi government
suspects named in the newly released "28 pages" have all been "exonerated" from 9/11 involvement.
The gullible mainstream media are parroting the latest spin, but it's total bull.
Saudi lobbyists are circulating a 38-page "refutation" of the 28 pages on Capitol Hill. This
tissue of lies claims investigators for both the FBI and 9/11 Commission chased down all the
leads in the 28-page section of the earlier congressional inquiry into 9/11 and came up empty.
It maintains that three key Saudi officials implicated in the report- Omar al-Bayoumi, Fahad al-Thumairy
and Osama Basnan - were all cleared of any role in the conspiracy.
"Each of these names was investigated in detail by the 9/11 Commission, by the recent review
commission and by the FBI, and none of them found any real evidence to indicate that they were
agents of Saudi Arabia, that they acted to assist the hijackers or that they knew of the plans to
hijack the planes," the Saudi white paper states. "The time is long overdue to set aside these
speculations and conspiracy theories," it adds.
Aside from the fact that several 9/11 Commission members recently denied exonerating the Saudis,
summaries of interviews between commission investigators and these Saudi suspects concluded they
were "deceptive" and asked them to take lie-detector tests because bank and phone records, along
with the testimony of material witnesses, so wildly contradicted their testimonies. In other
words, they lied through their teeth.
It is important that those committed to peace and social justice take cognizance of this historic
civil law suit directed against a former president of the United States including senior officials
of his administration.
An Iraqi mother against alleged war criminal George W. Bush, et al.
This is a civil suit. It seeks compensation. While it does not contemplate a criminal indictment,
it nonetheless constitutes a far-reaching legal initiative by Californian human rights lawyer Inder
Comar (image right).
The political ramifications are far-reaching.
Forget the ICC and the Hague tribunals, which serve the interests of US-NATO. Within the US legal
system, e.g in California, the State of New York, Nevada, etc. a civil complaint against GWB et al,
Barack Obama and/or a war criminal of your choice (e.g. Hillary Clinton) can be launched at the State
and District level.
We call upon Global Research readers to spread the word.
We are also launching a donation drive in support of the Saleh vs. Bush legal suit. To donate
click here and tag a one time donation to "legal action against Bush"
Global Research will transfer your donation to cover the legal expenses of Sundus Shaker Saleh
Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research Editor, August 2, 2016
* * * In papers filed Monday, August 1, 2016, the Department of Justice opposed the submission of the Chilcot
Report to the United States Court of Appeal for the Ninth Circuit in an ongoing litigation related
to the legality of the Iraq War.
The case, Saleh v. Bush, involves claims by an Iraqi single mother and refugee that six high ranking
members of the Bush Administration - George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld,
Condoleezza Rice, and Paul Wolfowitz - waged a war of aggression against Iraq in 2003, and that they
should be personally responsible for the consequences of the unlawful invasion.
The plaintiff, Sundus Shaker Saleh, alleges that high ranking Bush-Administration officials intentionally
misled the American people by making untrue claims that Iraq was in league with Al Qaida and that
Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. She also alleges that certain of the Defendants, and
in particular, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, publically supported an invasion as early as 1998
and used 9/11 as an excuse to push for an invasion of Iraq, regardless of the consequences.
Ms. Saleh is relying on the judgments made by the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal convened in 1946,
which found German leaders liable for unlawful wars of aggression against neighboring countries.
The Nuremberg judgment held that committing a war of aggression was the "supreme international crime."
The conclusions of the Chilcot Report were submitted to the Ninth Circuit as further evidence
of wrongdoing by the six defendants in the case. Ms. Saleh also provided copies of notes and letters
from former Prime Minister Tony Blair to George W. Bush included in the Chilcot Report, in which
Mr. Blair appeared to commit to the invasion with Mr. Bush as early as October 2001.
In December 2014, the Northern District of California dismissed the lawsuit on the grounds that
the Defendants were immune from further proceedings under the federal Westfall Act (codified in part
at 28 U.S.C. §§ 2671, 2674, 2679).
The Westfall Act provides immunity to former government employees from civil lawsuits if a Court
determines that the employees were acting with the lawful scope of their employment.
Ms. Saleh is urging the Ninth Circuit to overturn the finding of immunity made by the District
Court and to permit her lawsuit to proceed before the District Court.
Inder Comar Esq is a distinguished human rights lawyer based in San Fransisco, Cal. He is Global
Research's Law and Justice Correspondent
* * *
We call upon Global Research readers to spread the word. We are also launching a donation drive in
support of the Saleh vs. Bush legal suit.
Liberals, beware: casting a vote for Clinton is to affirm militarism, economic inequality, and
Wall Street. It is to vote for the ecological meltdown of our planet, duplicity in government, the
control of our institutions by the rich, drone strikes, government surveillance of the people, and
perpetual war. It is to cast a ballot against the interests of the working poor, and for the interests
of Goldman Sachs and Big Pharma.
Clinton's war-mongering is a matter of public record. Just today, the New York Times published
a devastating policy analysis of Clinton's role in the overthrow of Libyan president Muammar el-Qaddafi
and the subsequent descent of Libya into chaos and civil war. "We came, we saw, he died!" Clinton
exclaimed after Qaddafi was captured, tortured, and summarily executed. Afterwards, Hillary's aides
developed a "brag sheet" to showcase her role in Qaddafi's overthrow. Then, Clinton and other Obama
officials stepped back and let the nation disintegrate.
As the Times reporters recount, "Mrs. Clinton would be mostly a bystander as the country dissolved
into chaos, leading to a civil war that would destabilize the region, fueling the refugee crisis
in Europe and allowing the Islamic State to establish a Libyan haven that the United States is now
desperately trying to contain."
Clinton is unrepentant to this day. She is a hard-core militarist and interventionist-a right-wing
wolf in liberal sheep's clothing. Though Clinton has now found it convenient to rue her vote for
the invasion of Iraq in 2003, she in fact fiercely defended Bush's Iraq war policy for years. (At
least 174,000 people died in the conflict, including over 110,000 civilians.)
But Hillary's war-mongering is not the worst thing about her. Under President Obama, the gap between
rich and poor widened to a degree unprecedented in human history. Though few liberals seem aware
of the fact, poverty increased sharply under Obama, with blacks, Latinos, and women suffering disproportionately
from the President's policies. So if Clinton continues down Obama's neoliberal path, as she vows
to, we can expect the ranks of the poor-today, 47 million Americans, with more than one in five children
living in poverty-to swell.
Because Clinton is a close friend of the big banks, big pharma, and "big" everything else that
corresponds to corporate capitalism, millions of Americans already struggling will sink even further
under the waves. Rental and housing prices, already astronomical, will rise to more heights of unaffordability.
Drug prices and health care costs, which soared under Obama, will likely increase. So will homelessness
and the national suicide rate-because those rose dramatically under Obama, too.
Meanwhile, we are plunging over an ecological precipice that is bottomless, and Clinton will do
nothing to slow the fall. Hillary is at best indifferent to the global environmental crisis. Having
thrown in her lot with the wealthiest banks and corporations, she is in no position to advocate for
the kinds of radical changes that would be necessary to avert a planetary meltdown.
On President Obama's watch, the planet's ecology further unravelled: mass species extinctions,
global warming, deforestation, vanishing fresh water, mass die-offs of pollinating insects, increasing
carbon emissions from aircraft and animal agriculture, expansion of the petroleum industry, etc.
Things will only get worse under Clinton, who has supported fracking, deep sea oil drilling, and
minimal regulation of polluting industries.
Iran deal was signed when Hillary was not the Secretary of state (her last month was Feb 2013).
Is Trump delusional or stupid ?
Notable quotes:
"... whatever the 'ransom', both Clinton and Trump are hellbent on undermining the Iranian deal. idiots. ..."
"... The more I think about it, US deserve to have Trump as president. He will screw up the US so royally that may shock American people to start thinking straight. ..."
"... Trump would certainly screw up the US, but if 8 years of Bush couldn't get them to start thinking straight, I am not sure what would. ..."
"... Hillary hates Iran more than Trump does... she's just extremely good in deceiving.. Remember when Sanders said to reach out to Iran about the Syrian conflict? Her reply was exactly this; "asking Iran for cooperation in Syria is like asking a pyromaniac to extinguish a fire" .. when president, I fear she will not only avoid cooperation but will be playing real hardball with Iran, where Trump, as someone who seems to be sympathetic to the Russian regime, might get more friendly with Iran (the friends of your friends...) ..."
"... It's a mess anyways... trump changes like how the wind blows, and Hillary is a snake (understatement of the year) ..."
"... The US has not held up to the term of the nuclear agreement! The banks are still afraid of US to deal with Iran. Congress has stopped the beoing deal, etc. The US congress is acting as bully! Actually not holding itself with the very deal the US signed is very bad! I can see Iran reluctant to negotiate any deal with a bunch of liars ..."
"... There were no bank relations between the US and Iran, so cash was the only option. It was conducted in secret because who's going to announce that a plane full of cash is in route to, well, anywhere? ..."
"... The US owed that money to Iran. The transfer was kept secret for the reason mentioned by bob. ..."
"... Ultimately, Mr. Trump's outrage over the $ (true or not) is yet another dodge avoiding the real question that he needs to be asked: "Do you want a war with Iran?" ..."
"... Course, I think everybody probably already knows the answer. It'd just be nice to have it print (or a tweet as the case may be). ..."
"... If the reports about Trump asking his foreign policy advisers about the utility of using nuclear weapons are accurate, there are probably several nations, including Iran, who'd be wise to acquire nuclear weapons as soon as possible to let him know why they shouldn't be used. ..."
It was Iran's money that Washington froze . Besides, if I recall, the great Republican hero
Ronnie Reagan traded weapons to Iran for hostages.
Joel Marcuson
It probably hasn't dawned on him that Hillary has not been a member of the current Gov't
for about 4 yrs now. How could she possibly be responsible for that decision, the type our
Gov't has made all along for as long as I can remember? What a screwball.
onu labu
whatever the 'ransom', both Clinton and Trump are hellbent on undermining the Iranian
deal. idiots.
trucmat
The gist of reality here is that the US confiscated a bunch of Iranian money and are
decades later starting to give it back. Scandalous!
ViktorZK
They should be attacking Clinton over the DNC resignations and a whole bunch more. But the
entire week has been taken up damping down fires Trump and his surrogates keep lighting. Even
this story (which is a non-event really) will struggle for oxygen. The biggest headline today
is GOP ELDERS PLAN INTERVENTION TO REHABILITATE FAILING CAMPAIGN. Hard to top that.
macmarco 1h
One must remember that Obama early and often said Reagan was his political hero. The same
Reagan who bought hostages freedom with a cake, a bible and a bunch of weapons.
ClearItUp
The more I think about it, US deserve to have Trump as president. He will screw up the
US so royally that may shock American people to start thinking straight.
rberger -> ClearItUp
Trump would certainly screw up the US, but if 8 years of Bush couldn't get them to
start thinking straight, I am not sure what would.
ChangeIranNow
At this point, with tens of billions of dollars in frozen assets already on their way to
Iran and a virtual Tehran gold rush in which Western firms are seeking to profit from the
collapse of sanctions going on, revisiting the way the Iran deal was sold to the nation seems
beside the point. But with Iran already signaling that it will demand even more Western
appeasement to keep complying with the terms of the nuclear pact, an examination into the
cash-for-hostages' aspect of the story is important. Let us hope our next president is willing
to harden its stance on the Iran regime and support an era of domestically-fostered peace and
stability.
doublreed legalimmigrant
DryBack, Voilŕ: Wikileaks recently released documents proving that Hillary Clinton took
$100,000 of cash from a company she ran (and worked for in the 80's and 90's) that also funded
ISIS in Syria. French industrial giant, Lafarge, gave money to the Islamic state to operate
their (Lafarge's) cement plant in Syria, and purchased oil from ISIS. Lafarge are also large
donators to Clinton's election and the Clinton Foundation. More is here: http://yournewswire.com/clinton-was-director-of-company-that-donated-money-to-isis/
Lafarge is a regular donor to the Clinton Foundation – the firm's up to $100,000 donation was
listed in its annual donor list for 2015.
Zepp
Who on Earth would consider Tom Cotton and the Wall Street Journal to be credible sources?
They took the (true, verified) story of the Bush administration flying pallets of $100
bills into Baghdad where they promptly vanished, filed the numbers of, and resurrected it for
this story. The WSJ is a Murdoch organ, and Cotton is a crackpot.
itsmeLucas
Hillary hates Iran more than Trump does... she's just extremely good in deceiving..
Remember when Sanders said to reach out to Iran about the Syrian conflict? Her reply was
exactly this; "asking Iran for cooperation in Syria is like asking a pyromaniac to extinguish
a fire" .. when president, I fear she will not only avoid cooperation but will be playing real
hardball with Iran, where Trump, as someone who seems to be sympathetic to the Russian regime,
might get more friendly with Iran (the friends of your friends...)
It's a mess anyways... trump changes like how the wind blows, and Hillary is a snake
(understatement of the year)
coffeeclutch
Donald Trump and Tom Cotton are the verifying sources for this information? Tom Cotton, who
claimed that Iran needed to be stopped because "[they] already control Tehran?"
The circus act of American politics is really beyond belief. I'm still in awe the Republicans
faced no consequences for issuing a warning letter to a foreign government in the midst of
diplomatic negotiations with the President and the State Department. All while running around
Obama's back and inviting Israel's Prime Minister to address them directly in suggesting how
Americans should approach their foreign policy.
WorkingEU
To shift focus to an Iranian deal seems a good line of attack. But from a historical
perspective it may be a little guileless. The Iranian Revolution was a populist revolt against
globalization, elitism, corruption, foreign treachery and all the other abundant evils.
The clergy promised the earth, and delivered heaven. I confess this is a somewhat superficial
analysis when compared to the profound depth of the Trump campaign.
coffeeclutch -> WorkingEU
If I recall correctly the religious sphere was also one of the areas of social life not
micromanaged and controlled by the Shah (secular authority at that time was rather hands-off
on its approach to the clergy), so the clergy were in a unique position to manipulate a lot of
desperate people by presenting themselves as an "open and freer" alternative to the grossly
exploitative, corrupt, and often violent rule of the secular regime.
Of course once the were able to wrest enough power to shunt aside the various leftist and
student protest groups rising up at the same time, all that concern about anti-corruption and
public welfare was immediately tossed into the bin. Pretty much a Scylla and Charybdis
situation.
jokaz
The US has not held up to the term of the nuclear agreement! The banks are still afraid
of US to deal with Iran. Congress has stopped the beoing deal, etc. The US congress is acting
as bully! Actually not holding itself with the very deal the US signed is very bad! I can see
Iran reluctant to negotiate any deal with a bunch of liars
DBakes
I would like to understand more details about the cash payment and the reason. Was it
really a secret payment? That being said I will never vote for Trump who to me is an imminent
threat to national security.
bobj1156 -> DBakes
There were no bank relations between the US and Iran, so cash was the only option. It
was conducted in secret because who's going to announce that a plane full of cash is in route
to, well, anywhere?
MtnClimber -> DBakes
The US owed that money to Iran. The transfer was kept secret for the reason mentioned
by bob.
MiltonWiltmellow
The US state department has denied this.
The WSJ quoted Tom Cotton, a Republican senator from Arkansas, as accusing the Obama
administration of ...
Does the accusation even matter?
A Murdoch rag prints an unsubstantiated political accusation made a Murdoch political
sympathizer and somehow it becomes credible enough for the Guardian to repeat the smear?
Here's what those of us who live in the Real World™ say.
Where's your fucking proof??
williamdonovan
However, although the cash payment to Iran coincided with the release of a group of Iranian
American prisoners, there is no evidence to suggest any link between the two events.
Evidence maybe not but the read could draw easily make a "inference"
Blacks Law 4th Edition
INFERENCE. In the law of evidence. A truth or proposition drawn from another which is
sup- posed or admitted to be true. A process of reasoning by which a fact or proposition
sought to be established is deduced as a logical consequence from other facts, or a state
of facts, already proved or admitted. Whitehouse v. Bolster, 95 Me. 458, 50 A. 240; Joske
v. Irvine, 91 Tex. 574, 44 S.W. 1059.
A deduction which the reason of the jury makes from the facts proved, without an express
direction of law to that effect. Puget Sound Electric Ry. v. Benson, C.C.A. Wash., 253 F.
710, 714.
A "presumption" and an "inference" are not the same thing, a presumption being a deduction
which the law requires a trier of facts to make, an inference being a deduction which the
trier may or may not make, according to his own conclusions; a presumption is mandatory, an
INFERENCE
eyeinlurk -> williamdonovan
Kind of like the Reagan arms for hostages deal with...uh...Iran. Back in the 80's.
I'm starting to miss the 80's, and I never thought I'd say that.
Ranger4 -> eyeinlurk
And they used the cash to .............fund an insurrection
williamdonovan -> eyeinlurk
I was working at the Pentagon then and found myself having inside knowledge of Iran-Contra
before it unfolded to the rest of the world. Given that the information was highly classified
Top Secret/SRA access. I had been given access to what I thought at the time was two
completely unrelated events moving of the missiles and the training and arming of the contras.
The information was compartmented meaning few people knew about either program and even far
fewer people new both programs where related (it wasn't called Iran-Contra until after much
later) Just weeks before the public new. I was given access to the complete picture. Even then
I couldn't figure how could something like this be legal. Because as we know now it was not.
You could easily draw inference between the these two events.
As I already have!
jrcdmc6670
Ultimately, Mr. Trump's outrage over the $ (true or not) is yet another dodge avoiding
the real question that he needs to be asked: "Do you want a war with Iran?"
Course, I think everybody probably already knows the answer. It'd just be nice to have it
print (or a tweet as the case may be).
jrcdmc6670
If the reports about Trump asking his foreign policy advisers about the utility of
using nuclear weapons are accurate, there are probably several nations, including Iran, who'd
be wise to acquire nuclear weapons as soon as possible to let him know why they shouldn't be
used.
Donald J. Trump unabashedly trumpeted his support for warmer relations with Russia
at a campaign rally here on Monday night, acidly mocking opponents who say he is too
friendly to Vladimir V. Putin, the country's
strongman president. Mr. Trump,
who has been under fire from Democrats and some conservative national security
leaders for his accommodating stance toward Mr. Putin, cast his supportive remarks as
a matter of practical necessity. By aligning itself with Russia, he said, the United
States could more easily take on the Islamic State and other terrorist groups. "If we
could get Russia to help us get rid of ISIS -- if we could actually be friendly with
Russia -- wouldn't that be a good thing?" Mr. Trump, the Republican presidential
nominee, said. Repeating the question moments later, he won loud applause
from the crowd: "If we could get along with Russia, wouldn't that be a good
thing, instead of a bad thing?"
"... The Neoconservatives and the Neoliberals have created madness and mayhem in the world today. Real change will happen only if resources are available for all in a co-operative capitalistic way that raises the standard of living for all rather than the few. We now have socialism of the rich and low productivity with the standard of living becoming more about quantity rather than quality. ..."
Liberals ,conservatives and progressives need to put ideologies behind and form a coalition to
demand change. Just exercising our right to vote will change nothing.
We will continue to get
blow back in the form of terrorism as long as we do not change the foreign policy in the Middle
East which goes back to Sykes -Picot and the aftermath of World War One.
The Neoconservatives and the Neoliberals have created madness and mayhem in the world today.
Real change will happen only if resources are available for all in a co-operative capitalistic
way that raises the standard of living for all rather than the few. We now have socialism of the
rich and low productivity with the standard of living becoming more about quantity rather than
quality.
"... President Obama has been a failed leader who along with Secretary of State Clinton created a foreign policy that has destabilized the world and made it an unsafe place. He is the one who is unfit to be President and Hillary Clinton is equally unfit. ..."
"... Obama-Clinton have single-handedly destabilized the Middle East, handed Iraq, Libya and Syria to ISIS, and allowed our personnel to be slaughtered at Benghazi. ..."
"... They have produced the worst recovery since the Great Depression. They have shipped millions of our best jobs overseas to appease their global special interests. They have betrayed our security and our workers, and Hillary Clinton has proven herself unfit to serve in any government office. ..."
"... She is reckless with her emails, reckless with regime change, and reckless with American lives. Our nation has been humiliated abroad and compromised by radical Islam brought onto our shores. We need change now. ..."
President Obama slams Republican nominee for president Donald Trump at a joint press conference with
the prime minister of Singapore at the White House Tuesday morning. Obama said Trump does not have
the judgment, temperament or understanding to occupy the Oval Office. Obama scolded Trump for his
"attack on a Gold Star family."
The president implored Republicans to un-endorse him and asked what does it say about the Republican
party that Trump is their standard bearer. This isn't an "episodic gaffe," this is daily and weekly,
Obama said. Obama called on Republicans to repudiate and condemn the party's nominee.
"There has to come a point at which you say somebody who makes those kinds of statements doesn't
have the judgment, the temperament, the understanding to occupy the most powerful position in the
world," Obama said at the event with PM Lee Hsien Loong.
"There has to be a point in which you say this is somebody I can't support for president of United
States," the president said. "There has to be a point in which you say 'enough.'"
"I recognize that they all profoundly disagree with myself or Hillary Clinton on tax policy or
on certain elements of foreign policy," Obama said of Republicans. "But you know, there have been
Republican presidents with whom I disagreed with but I didn't have a doubt that they could function
as president."
From President Obama's press conference:
OBAMA: I think the Republican nominee is unfit to serve as president. I said so last week. He
keeps on proving it. The notion that he would attack a Gold Star family, that [General] Hayden
-- had made such extraordinary sacrifices on behalf of our country, the fact that he does not
appear to have basic knowledge around critical issues in Europe, the Middle East, in Asia.
It means that he is woefully unprepared. This is not just my opinion. What's been interesting
has been the repeated denunciations of his statements by leading Republicans. Including the Speaker
of the House, the Senate Majority Leader, prominent Republicans like John McCain.
The question they have to ask themselves is if you are repeatedly having to say in very strong
terms that what he has said is unacceptable, why are you still endorsing him? What does this say
about your party, that this is your standard bearer?
This isn't a situation where you have an episodic gaffe. This is daily, and weekly, where they
are distancing themselves from statements he's making. There has to be a point in which you say,
this is not somebody I can support for president of the United States. Even if he purports to
be a member of my party. And, you know, the fact that that has not yet happened makes some of
these denunciations ring hollow.
I don't doubt their sincerity. I don't doubt that they were outraged about some of the statements
that Mr. Trump and his supporters made about the Khan family. But there has to come a point at
which you say somebody who makes those kinds of statements doesn't have the judgment, the temperament,
the understanding to occupy the most powerful position in the world. Because a lot of people depend
on the White House getting stuff right. And this is different than just having policy disagreements.
I recognize that they all profoundly disagree with myself or Hillary Clinton on tax policy
or on certain elements of foreign policy. But you know, there have been Republican presidents
with whom I disagreed with but I didn't have a doubt that they could function as president...
There has to come a point in which you say, enough. And the alternative is that the entire
party, the Republican party, effectively endorses and validates the positions that are being articulated
by Mr. Trump. And as I said in my speech last week, I don't think that actually represents the
views of a whole lot of Republicans out there.
President Obama has been a failed leader who along with Secretary of State Clinton created
a foreign policy that has destabilized the world and made it an unsafe place. He is the one who
is unfit to be President and Hillary Clinton is equally unfit.
Obama-Clinton have single-handedly destabilized the Middle East, handed Iraq, Libya and
Syria to ISIS, and allowed our personnel to be slaughtered at Benghazi. Then they put Iran
on the path to nuclear weapons. Then they allowed dozens of veterans to die waiting for medical
care that never came. Hillary Clinton put the whole country at risk with her illegal email server,
deleted evidence of her crime, and lied repeatedly about her conduct which endangered us all.
They released criminal aliens into our country who killed one innocent American after another
-- like Sarah Root and Kate Steinle -- and have repeatedly admitted migrants later implicated
in terrorism. They have produced the worst recovery since the Great Depression. They have
shipped millions of our best jobs overseas to appease their global special interests. They have
betrayed our security and our workers, and Hillary Clinton has proven herself unfit to serve in
any government office.
She is reckless with her emails, reckless with regime change, and reckless with American
lives. Our nation has been humiliated abroad and compromised by radical Islam brought onto our
shores. We need change now.
... leak also revealed anti-gay slurs, mocking African
Americans and attempts to con reputable news outlets with fake Trump videos.
The computer network used by Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's campaign was
hacked as part of a broad cyber attack on Democratic political organizations, people familiar with
the matter told Reuters. The latest attack, which was disclosed to Reuters on Friday, follows reports
of two other hacks on the Democratic National Committee and the party's fundraising committee for
candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives.
The U.S. Department of Justice national security division is investigating whether cyber hacking
attacks on Democratic political organizations threatened U.S. security, sources familiar with the
matter said on Friday.
Prolific author, American Free Press writer and seasoned Clinton researcher Victor Thorn was
found at the top of a mountain near his home, the apparent victim of a gunshot wound. Family and
some close friends contend Thorn took his own life on his birthday, August 1. Thorn would have
been 54. At the peak of his writing career, the author of some 20 books and 30 chapbooks, Thorn
had reported for this newspaper for over a decade, writing thousands of articles on myriad
subjects from conspiracy to health-related topics. Best known for his investigate research on the
Clintons, Thorn wrote the Clinton trilogy--three definitive works that delved into the history of
the power couple.
The two men are not so far apart on many policies. Both are millionaires whose worldview is informed
by the realism of having built major businesses, employed scores of workers and survived government
interference. Johnson started a construction company in New Mexico right after college, which became
one of the state's most successful builders. He ultimately sold it in 1999. Trump, of course, is
a significant commercial real estate developer.
Johnson first entered politics in 1994
advocating
a "common sense business approach" and financing his first run for governor with his own money.
He ran on a platform of lower taxes, job creation and law and order. Sound familiar?
Both candidates are socially liberal and are wary of our military entanglements overseas. It's
a start.
Though Trump has embraced GOP orthodoxy opposing abortion, it is clear this is not an important
issue to him personally. Johnson's campaign website says he "believes in the sanctity of the unborn"
but recognizes that legal abortion is the law of the land.
While both men support simplifying our tax system and reducing taxes, Johnson goes further, advocating
getting rid of the IRS.
Asked about Trump's controversial questioning of our NATO commitments, Johnson does not rule out
reassessing our long-standing alliances, including NATO.
The two men are most at odds over immigration, which
Johnson embraces as positive for the economy. He insists that people entering the
country illegally are taking only the jobs that Americans do not want, and notes that the number
of undocumented people crossing the border has dropped. Despite his fiery rhetoric, Trump also endorses
immigration – but only if it is legal.
Other areas of disagreement include Johnson's support for the TPP trade pact, which Trump opposes.
Also, Johnson is on record wanting to slash military spending, while Trump has vowed to reverse recent
declines. At the same time, Johnson has taken a more aggressive posture of late in combatting ISIS,
which may require some retooling of his 2012 enthusiasm for military retrenchment.
Where Johnson and Trump are most in sync is in their dislike for Hillary Clinton. Though he once
extolled her as a "wonderful public servant," Johnson has most recently described Clinton as "beholden"
and decries her "establishment" credentials as well as her hawkish inclinations. In an interview
with the Los Angeles Times, he said that if she is elected, "Nothing's gonna really change, government's
gonna have the answer to everything, and that's gonna mean taxes are gonna go up."
Polls show Johnson now attracting an average of 7.5 percent of a four-way vote (which includes
Green Party nominee Jill Stein). More important,
he is gathering momentum in critical swing states. According to Quinnipiac, Johnson grabs
between 8 percent and 10 percent in Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio, a number that could determine
those contests.
DryBack, Voilŕ: Wikileaks recently released documents proving that Hillary Clinton took $100,000
of cash from a company she ran (and worked for in the 80's and 90's) that also funded ISIS in
Syria. French industrial giant, Lafarge, gave money to the Islamic state to operate their (Lafarge's)
cement plant in Syria, and purchased oil from ISIS. Lafarge are also large donators to Clinton's
election and the Clinton Foundation. More is here: http://yournewswire.com/clinton-was-director-of-company-that-donated-money-to-isis/
Lafarge is a regular donor to the Clinton Foundation – the firm's up to $100,000 donation was
listed in its annual donor list for 2015.
rberger -> doublreed
Lame. When Clinton worked as a lawyer, she did some legal work for Lafarge. She later said
on the board. This was in 1991. The so-called association with ISIS happened in 2014. Clinton
did not take $100,000 from the company. The company donated $100,000 to the Clinton Foundation,
which is a non-profit organization and not a cent goes to Clinton.
In an interview with CNN on Monday, Khan called Trump "ignorant" and "arrogant" and
criticized other Republicans for not doing more to denounce their party's nominee.
"Enough is enough," he said. "Every decent Republican ... has rebuked this behavior,
yet no one has stood up and said, 'Enough, stop it. You will not be our candidate.'"
It was the second time since his convention speech that Khan has directly appealed
to GOP leadership on Capitol Hill to push back against the nominee. Over the weekend,
he singled out Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Speaker Paul Ryan on MSNBC,
saying the "only reason they're not repudiating his behavior, his threat to our
democracy, our decency, our foundation, is just because of political consequences."
"... Journal of Contemporary Issues in Muslim Law ..."
"... The Journal of Contemporary Issues in Muslim Law ..."
"... Virginia continues to provide driver's licenses to terrorists. Mohammad Khweis, a member of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), was captured by Kurdish forces in northern Iraq. Like seven of the 9/11 hijackers, Khweis carried a Virginia license. Khizr Khan's legal advice to followers of Sharia law has allowed them to game the U.S. immigration system and Virginia legal statutes. Khan has some explaining to do about his legal practice. ..."
"... Wayne Madsen is an investigative journalist who consistently exposes cover-ups from deep within the government. Want to be the first to learn the latest scandal? Go to WayneMadsenReport.com subscribe today! ..."
Khizr Khan, the Muslim immigrant lawyer from Pakistan who arrived in America by way of Dubai
and pulled at the heart strings of viewers of the Democratic National Convention by regaling the
audience with the story of the loss of his son in Iraq, Army Captain Humayun Khan, told his son's
story but skipped over his own.
Khizr Khan entered the United States in 1980 from Dubai
to attend Harvard Law School. That year saw the Central Intelligence Agency ramp up its operations
in Pakistan in support of the Afghan mujaheddin against the Soviets.
The Pakistan operation was shepherded by national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, currently
an outspoken opponent of Donald Trump and a bitter foe of Russia.
Khan received his bachelor of law degree from Punjab University Law College in Lahore, Pakistan
in 1974. After entering the United States from Dubai in 1980, Khan received a masters of law degree
from the University of Missouri in 1982.
Khan specializes in international trade law for Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. As anyone familiar
with these countries knows, trade law for both countries involves the traditional Muslim bribe, the
baksheesh, which, depending on the value of the deal, can involve millions of dollars. These deals
are very familiar to Trump, who could have strengthened his argument against Khan by revealing the
"Gold Star father's" specialty in the "art of the bribe."
Khan co-founded the Journal of Contemporary Issues in Muslim Law, an academic periodical
that seeks to defend the arcane Sharia law to a legal system based on Western jurisprudence. Of course,
Sharia law justifies the execution of gays, prostitutes, blasphemers, and Muslim "apostates" who
convert to other religions.
Trying to advance Sharia law in legal systems based on Roman and English Common Law is like forcing
a square peg into a round hole.
... ... ...
Khan is a firm believer that law is based on the Sunnah, the works of the prophet Mohammed.
The Journal of Contemporary Issues in Muslim Law is linked to the Islamic Center of Geneva,
Switzerland, an arm of the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood.
And here we run the circle back to Khan's favorite candidate, Hillary Clinton. Clinton's close
aide and reported lesbian lover, Huma Abedin, has close links to radical Wahhabist Islam through
her mother, the Pakistani-born Saleha Mahmood Abedin. Saleha Abedin resides in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
and teaches sociology at Dar Al-Hekma College in Jeddah.
Although she was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Huma lived in Jeddah from infancy to her college
years before returning to the United States. Dar Al-Hekma College is a women-only college in keeping
with Sharia and Quranic principles of segregation of the sexes.
The college, which was endowed by the Al-Ilm Foundation, is part of a network of Wahhabist colleges
and schools that extend from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan, Malaysia, and southern California.
Khizr Khan practices law in New York and is a member of the New York Bar. Khan's Manhattan law
office is next door to the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, which also happens to house the residence of the
U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power.
Power's husband is Cass Sunstein, President Obama's former information czar who excels in the
art of disinformation, propaganda, and cognitive dissonance. But more interesting is the fact that
Khan and his wife are residents of Charlottesville, Virginia, a home to a number of foreign Muslims,
many of whom are students at the University of Virginia who wish to change their student visa status
to permanent residency, or "green card" status.
Charlottesville is a so-called "sanctuary city" that welcomes those who either enter the United
States illegally or overstay their limited residency visas.
Khan's wife, Ghazala, is a pediatrician in Virginia Beach, which is a three-hour drive from Charlottesville.
The Khans are not attracted to Charlottesville because of a convenient distance to their places of
work.
So why do they reside in the university town? When their son died in Iraq in 2004, the Khans lived
in Bristow, Virginia, a far suburb of Washington, DC in Prince William County. The Khans had also
once lived in Silver Spring, Maryland.
The official notification of Khan's death stated:
"Captain Humayun S. M. Khan, 27, of Bristow, Virginia, died June 8, 2004, in Baquabah, Iraq, after
a vehicle packed with an improvised explosive device drove into the gate of his compound while he
was inspecting soldiers on guard duty. Khan was assigned to Headquarters, Headquarters Company, 201st
Forward Support Battalion, 1st Infantry Division, Vilseck, Germany."
Khan was actually an Army intelligence officer, fluent in Arabic, who worked with Iraqi civilians
in a program called the United States-Iraq Sponsorship Program, which was actually an operation designed
to recruit Iraqis to work as police and in other "capacities" for the Coalition Provisional Authority,
the U.S. occupation government of Iraq.
Khan's home base of Vilseck is a center for U.S. intelligence operations involving units of the
U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command. When Khan was killed, oversight of Iraq "transition"
programs, such as the U.S.-Iraq Sponsorship Program, had just come under the control of General David
Petraeus, the first commander of the Multi-National Security Transition Command – Iraq.
Members of the Pakistani embassy, including deputy chief of mission (DCM) Mohammad Sadiq, attended
Captain Khan's burial at Arlington National Cemetery. The DCM of large embassies are almost always
the embassy intelligence chief of station. In the case of Sadig, this would be the Inter-Services
Intelligence (ISI).
In 2008, Sadiq, who paid his respects to Captain Khan at Arlington, was defending ISI as the Pakistan
Foreign Ministry's chief spokesman. India accused the ISI of bombing its embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan.
The bombing killed four people, including two Indian diplomats.
It was not only India that blamed the ISI for the bombing in Kabul. CIA officials said that intercepts
of communications showed ISI involvement. Pakistan was so incensed by the statements from U.S. intelligence
that it summoned CIA official Stephen Kappes to Islamabad for a chewing out session.
Virginia continues to provide driver's licenses to terrorists. Mohammad Khweis, a member of the
Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), was captured by Kurdish forces in northern Iraq. Like
seven of the 9/11 hijackers, Khweis carried a Virginia license. Khizr Khan's legal advice to followers
of Sharia law has allowed them to game the U.S. immigration system and Virginia legal statutes. Khan
has some explaining to do about his legal practice.
Pakistan was not a member of the U.S. coalition in Iraq, which begs the question of why the Pakistani
embassy's ISI chief attended Captain Humayun Khan's funeral at Arlington? Was Khan working, through
his Saudi- and Pakistani-connected father with the ISI?
If so, was the contact "sanctioned" by the CIA? If not, was Humayun Khan freelancing and feeding
information from Iraq to the ISI, which then passed it to their close allies in the Saudi General
Intelligence Department?
Khizr Khan claims he is a "legal consultant" in Charlottesville, although he is not a member of
the Virginia Bar. Given the nature of Charlotteville's status as a sanctuary city, Khan's legal background
and his work with the Muslim community in Virginia, it is likely that Khan offers help to Muslims
who have overstayed their student visas in the university and sanctuary city to obtain permanent
residence.
It should be recalled that seven of the 9/11 hijackers obtained Virginia driver's licenses, three
of which were used as official identification to check in for flights on September 11, 2001. Perhaps
if Khizr Khan had not been so willing to help dodgy Muslim "students" overstay their visas and seek
workarounds to the law, Virginia might have been able to prevent the hijackers fraudulently obtain
driver's licenses.
And had there been no 9/11, there certainly would have been no U.S. invasion of Iraq and Humayun
Khan would have realized his dream of attending the University of Virginia law school and becoming
a military lawyer. In making it easy for Saudis, Emiratis, and others to game the U.S. immigration
system, Khizr Khan shares in some of the responsibility for his son's death.
Because it is not advisable to attack any Gold Star family, Trump should have merely replied to
Khizr Khan's attack by saying, "I understand the family's loss and although they attacked me, I will
not respond to a grieving family."
Trump could have added that Captain Khan would not have died had it not been for the U.S. invasion
and occupation of Iraq, a war for which Hillary Clinton voted as a senator. Through surrogates, Trump
could have revealed the Khan's connections to the Muslim Brotherhood, Sharia law advocates, the Saudis,
and the ISI.
Wayne Madsen is an investigative journalist who consistently exposes cover-ups
from deep within the government. Want to be the first to learn the latest scandal? Go to
WayneMadsenReport.com subscribe today!
The people will stop this, dirt-bag:
Obama predicts TPP 'trade' deal will be ratified after election | 02 Aug 2016 | President
Barack Obama
dismissed Hillary Clinton's [phony] opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement
corporate takeover Tuesday and suggested that her disapproval of the deal may be politically
motivated. [*Duh.*] "Right now, I'm president, and I'm for it," he said
at a news conference with Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong...While Obama and Lee were speaking,
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump was addressing supporters at a rally in Ashburn, Virginia,
just miles from the capital. In a statement, Trump said a victory by him in November is the only
way to stop a "TPP catastrophe."
Alex Junces consider the Hillary is illegitamete candidate that stole primaries from Sanders and
she intend to steal general elections.
The Alex Jones Channel - YouTube
Former Bush adviser Karl Rove scolds Republican nominee Donald Trump for getting off message
and missing campaign opportunities. In an appearance on the FOX News Channel on Wednesday morning
Rove listed a litany of items Trump could have brought attention to rather than express his
indignation at treatment by the media and the Khan family.
"Let's take last Friday," Rove started. "Rather than engaging in a battle with the Khan family
over the death of their son. What if that day Donald Trump had taken the economic report that
showed 1% GDP growth and excoriated her for having nothing but the same policies as Barack Obama
that put us here. He could have used that Friday and Saturday and beaten her up on the economy
and displayed his expertise, his agenda, his issues and be seen with blue-collared workers and
small business people."
"What if on Sunday rather than starting to talk about how the elections were rigged because the
debates were scheduled on the same day as big NFL football games 18 months ago, incidentally, and
also excoriating the fire marshals in Colorado Springs and Columbus for enforcing the fire codes.
What if he had spent the afternoon and evening of Sunday focused in on
Hillary Clinton's interview with Chris Wallace on FOX News Sunday where she lied again
about the emails and also gave him a big, fat juicy target on the economy saying my answer is
I'm going to set up an infrastructure bank, 'to seed it with taxpayer dollars' and then 'get
investors involved' in order to make money off of using taxpayer dollars for infrastructure
projects. Both of those seem to me to be a much better way to go," Rove said.
Presidential contender Donald Trump is challenging the "pussy generation" manifested by President
Obama and the religion of political correctness, film legend Clint Eastwood recently told Esquire
magazine.
In a father-son interview featured in the
September 2016 issue of the men's magazine, Eastwood explains he prefers Trump's more cut-to-the-chase,
no-nonsense approach of getting his message across.
ESQ: Your characters have become touchstones in the culture, whether it's Reagan invoking
"Make my day" or now Trump … I swear he's even practiced your scowl.
CE: Maybe. But he's onto something, because secretly everybody's getting tired
of political correctness, kissing up. That's the kiss-ass generation we're in right now. We're
really in a pussy generation. Everybody's walking on eggshells. We see people accusing people
of being racist and all kinds of stuff. When I grew up, those things weren't called racist. And
then when I did Gran Torino, even my associate said, "This is a really good script, but
it's politically incorrect." And I said, "Good. Let me read it tonight." The next morning, I came
in and I threw it on his desk and I said, "We're starting this immediately."
ESQ: What is the "pussy generation"?
CE: All these people that say, "Oh, you can't do that, and you can't do this,
and you can't say that." I guess it's just the times.
ESQ: What do you think Trump is onto?
CE: What Trump is onto is he's just saying what's on his mind. And sometimes
it's not so good. And sometimes it's … I mean, I can understand where he's coming from, but I
don't always agree with it.
ESQ: So you're not endorsing him?
CE: I haven't endorsed anybody. I haven't talked to Trump. I haven't talked
to anybody. You know, he's a racist now because he's talked about this judge. And yeah, it's a
dumb thing to say. I mean, to predicate your opinion on the fact that the guy was born to Mexican
parents or something. He's said a lot of dumb things. So have all of them. Both sides. But everybody-the
press and everybody's going, "Oh, well, that's racist," and they're making a big hoodoo out of
it. Just fucking get over it. It's a sad time in history.
Speaking of his stunt at the 2012 RNC in which he spoke to an empty chair intended to represent
Obama, the 86-year-old director stated the president is pretty much the embodiment of the "pussy
generation" due to his lack of efforts to strike deals with Congress throughout his tenure.
CE: It was silly at the time, but I was standing backstage and I'm hearing
everybody say the same thing: "Oh, this guy's a great guy." Great, he's a great guy. I've got
to say something more. And so I'm listening to an old Neil Diamond thing and he's going, "And
no one heard at all / Not even the chair." And I'm thinking, That's Obama. He doesn't
go to work. He doesn't go down to Congress and make a deal. What the hell's he doing sitting in
the White House? If I were in that job, I'd get down there and make a deal. Sure, Congress are
lazy bastards, but so what? You're the top guy. You're the president of the company. It's your
responsibility to make sure everybody does well. It's the same with every company in this country,
whether it's a two-man company or a two-hundred-man company… . And that's the pussy generation-nobody
wants to work.
While Eastwood hasn't formally endorsed Trump, the Million Dollar Baby actor did admit
he would vote for the businessman over Clinton, as she is set to continue Obama's disastrous agenda.
ESQ: But if the choice is between her and Trump, what do you do?
CE: That's a tough one, isn't it? I'd have to go for Trump … you know, 'cause
she's declared that she's gonna follow in Obama's footsteps. There's been just too much funny
business on both sides of the aisle. She's made a lot of dough out of being a politician. I gave
up dough to be a politician. I'm sure that Ronald Reagan gave up dough to be a politician.
Eastwood and his son, Scott, later clarified their positions on being labeled the "anti-pussy
party."
ESQ: Politically, you're the Anti-Pussy party?
SE: That's right. No candy-asses.
CE: Yeah, I'm anti–the pussy generation. Not to be confused with pussy.
SE: All of us are pro-pussy.
Eastwood is just the latest in a growing chorus of voices speaking out against the burgeoning
system of political correctness, which threatens an Orwellian control of language and the population
at large.
If the election was already "in the bag" for Hillary Clinton, President Obama wouldn't be working
overtime to convince the GOP to dump Trump.
Instead, he'd be encouraging Trump to speak out more if his words were helping Hillary – but that's
not the case at all.
Obama is signaling that the globalists are losing and Hillary is falling too far behind for the
technocrats to rig the election in her favor.
"The president implored Republicans to un-endorse him and asked what does it say about the Republican
party that Trump is their standard bearer," Real Clear Politics reported. "Obama called on Republicans
to repudiate and condemn the party's nominee."
In other words, the president is the Wizard of Oz panicking after Trump pulled the curtain to
expose the globalists as the evil they are – and not the saviors of humanity they portray themselves
to be.
It's also revealing that Obama made his desperate declaration right after Trump warned the general
election is being rigged just like the Democratic nomination, which was rigged in favor of Hillary
Clinton – despite the majority of Democrats supporting Bernie Sanders.
"As the leaked DNC emails illustrated, the establishment pre-selected Hillary from the start and
the primary process was a complete charade to give the illusion of democratic choice," Paul Joseph
Watson & Alex Jones stated. "As the Observer's Michael Sainato writes, 'Instead of treating Sanders
as a viable candidate for the Democratic ticket, the DNC worked against him and his campaign to ensure
Clinton received the nomination.' The elite chose Hillary before any of the primary votes came in,
and vowed to select her regardless of the result."
"How in any way is this not a rigged process, as Trump rightly pointed out?"
Did Trump just let the genie out of the bottle the globalists won't be able to put back in? It
appears so.
"Government's been around for as long as history's been around and I think they've exhausted their
experimentation," Ron Paul once said. "We've had some experiments with individual liberty and one
great experiment was here and I think right now we're seeing the fruitions of how we left that experiment
in the last 100 years and it continues yet there's a spirit right now amongst the people who are
starting to realize that."
"... The whole U.S. political and media establishment is right now running a full fledged anti-Trump campaign. ..."
"... rumors or outright lies. ..."
"... Some spat over a dead soldier who the Clinton campaign (ab)used for her campaign gets way overblown. Unfounded rumors that some Republicans are going to replace Trump are just a repetition of the same nonsense that spread a month ago. It only heightens the media's lack of credibility. It is similar to the claims that "the Assad regime will fall any minute now". We have heard for the last five years and no one believes it. Unsourced claims that Trump asked why the U.S. can not use nukes are not credible. Especially when they are transported by a lowlife like MSNBC's Scarborough and immediately denied . If true at all, the issues is likely taken out of context. ..."
"... On the other side, news about Clinton actively lying is so obviously suppressed by the New York Times that even its public editor laments about it. CNN claims that Hillary meets "boisterous crowds" when no-one shows up. ..."
"... This wont work. This imbalance is not sustainable. The Clinton campaign managers who orchestrate this onslaught are shooting their wads prematurely. ..."
"... That's what they've been doing for months now in UK against Corbyn - and there the election is four years away. ..."
"... Mockery, sham, inane, insipid, and other akin words well describe the efforts by the Propaganda System to promote the most immoral candidate ever nominated for president over the second most immoral candidate ever nominated for president all while ignoring the most moral and worthy candidate for president--Dr. Jill Stein. ..."
"... Bernie(the fake candidate) Sanders was used to placate and herd in the mass of youngsters and progressives and folks who are outright sick and tired only to then softly ease them down ,possibly into the Hillary camp; also so said grouping can feel that they were close and actually had a chance and democracy is indeed real. ..."
"... 10,000 expected for Trump Rally in Daytona Beach, Florida. At 1 PM Thousands already jammed in the hallways of the Ocean Center for 3 PM Rally. Meanwhile, Hillary must bring in high school students to fill seats. ..."
"... In fact, I never seen such a politically brave guy in Americas recent history of zionist collaboration. ..."
"... Khizr Khan used to work for a law firm that has the Saudi Arabian regime and apparently the Clintons or the Clinton Foundation as clients. Khizt Khan is a lawyer and his law firm offers to arrange visa for wealthy foreigners and given his previous employment that probably means that his clients include Saudi Arabians. I just can't understand why such a man would feel strongly about a temporary ban on entry into the United States for Muslims. ..."
"... You did not mention the firm Khizr-Khan worked for did Hillary Clinton's taxes.. Khizr Khan has all sorts of financial, legal, and political connections to the Clintons through his old law firm, the mega-D.C. firm Hogan Lovells LLP. That firm did Hillary Clinton's taxes for years, starting when Khan still worked there involved in, according to his own website, matters "firm wide"-back in 2004. ..."
"... The Clinton political machine has rigged the process, against Sanders, and gone to some lengths to conceal the shame of it. At the convention in Philadelphia, they looked most odd; while the Party was showing itself be a some kind of schitzophrenic monster, gulping down the high octane fuel of unreality. They can bear no real resemblance to the Party of Franklin Roosevelt, although they come to the Convention wearing clothes made out of his skin. ..."
"... They have become republicans with a crisis of identity. ..."
"... I read that NBC piece on the plot. The word for the day.; "Irreparable consequences." ..."
"... Does it strike anyone else that the Khan story just sort of vanished all of a sudden. For several days - nothing else in the media. It seemed to drop off sharply yesterday. Normally, I see stories about Khan and his involvement with the Clintons, sharia law, immigration, the disappearing website, etc... and would attribute it to a weak attempt to deflect news coverage but I wonder... ..."
"... And Trumps counter-attack on the Khans. At first I had the knee-jerk response "he's gone too far this time". On reflection, the Democrat MO to attack opponents using some sympathetic figure with a lot of "moral authority" - could be someone who has lost a loved one, or a disabled person, ... - on the theory that the person being attacked can't fight back. In a way, I applaud Trump for having none of that (while at the same time being annoyed that he took the bait). The Khans made an free decision to be at the DNC convention and leverage their tragedy to attack Trump. While I feel for them, they can't have it both ways. ..."
"... How on earth could mainstream media even think anyone would watch their stupid propaganda, I feel sorry for Trump with all this propaganda in ALL western states. And no republicans seems to help him! What the hell!? Are they rooting for democrats? ..."
"... Ukraine renames Moscow Avenue to Bandera Avenue http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=1c4_1470238094 ..."
"... Pat Buchanan examines the fact that Trump's the "Peace Candidate," and notes how that's playing in Peoria, http://www.theamericanconservative.com/buchanan/trump-the-peace-candidate/ ..."
"... "Behind the war guarantees America has issued to scores of nations in Europe, the Mideast and Asia since 1949, the bedrock of public support that existed during the Cold War has crumbled." ..."
"... As I've written elsewhere, myself and others's analysis of Trump vs HRC leads us to conclude that Trump's the lesser evil, and is indeed a peace candidate compared to HRC's nonstop belligerence and warmongering. The Propaganda System will do its best to paint Trump as the greater evil, but that will be a very hard task as most of the public no longer sees that System as credible. ..."
"... I stumbled upon this. Its fun to read. http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/08/02/american-elections-weapons-of-mass-distraction/ ..."
"... Stein deserves far more serious attention and exposure then she's getting here (U.S.). ..."
"... Yesterday someone posted a link to the interview with Bashar al-Assad. (Thnx BTW). He was asked his opinion about the next president several times probably to smear him as a Trump supporter. He kept saying that their campaign talk doesn't matter and that it's their actions. But @17:40 he said this, "We always hope that the next president will be much wiser than the previous one." We hope for the same thing here in the us and we keep being disappointed. ..."
"... Hope isn't going to do the trick, it's time the American people took matters into their own hands. Start marching...against war, against unemployment, homelessness, infrastructure falling apart, prisons everywhere, swindles in the tune of Trillions etc. I could go on... ..."
"... Zioinism is just a manifestation of the problem ..."
"... Problem is, the bludgeoning tool is showing signs of cracking. Trump or Hillary, both will go out of their way to finally break it. That sad, because I love this country. ..."
"... Consider foreign policy, the focus of discussions here. Is it important what and when did Clinton know about the attack on the consulate in Benghazi? Not really. It is important that the entire policy of regime change in Libya is FUBAR. It starts from a simple observation that aging Kaddafi was sufficiently pliable to give the West all (almost all?) benefits of control without the cost. But given the chaotic situation that ensued, indeed it was better to pursue some influence than playing it "risk free" (from Empire perspective, shared by Clinton and her tormentors). ..."
"... Not all Jews are Zionists. Not all Jews agree with Israel's policies. Many Jews are victims as they are preyed upon for their support and vilified for protesting/objecting. ..."
The whole U.S. political and media establishment is right now running a full fledged anti-Trump
campaign. The points this drive brings up are minor issue, rumors or outright lies.
It is premature to run such a campaign now. One can not tell the same story over and over again
for nearly a 100 days. People will either get tired of it or will endorse Trump as the poor small
boy that everyone is bullying and beating up.
Some spat over a dead soldier who the Clinton campaign (ab)used for her campaign gets way
overblown. Unfounded
rumors that some Republicans are going to replace Trump are just a repetition of the same nonsense
that spread a month ago. It only heightens the media's lack of credibility. It is similar to the
claims that "the Assad regime will fall any minute now". We have heard for the last five years and
no one believes it. Unsourced claims that Trump
asked why the U.S. can not use nukes are not credible. Especially when they are transported by
a lowlife like MSNBC's Scarborough and immediately
denied . If true at all, the issues is likely taken out of context.
On the other side, news about Clinton actively lying is so obviously suppressed by the New
York Times that even its public editor
laments about it. CNN
claims
that Hillary meets "boisterous crowds" when no-one shows up.
This wont work. This imbalance is not sustainable. The Clinton campaign managers who orchestrate
this onslaught are shooting their wads prematurely.
It does not matter that Trump
indeed has small hands or that he fibs on every details. The majority of the people hate Clinton.
This media campaign will fall back on her. She will be perceived as the bully increasing her already
strong negatives.
Posted by b on August 3, 2016 at 12:49 PM |
Permalink
Many years ago a lady, who knew from personal experience, mentioned that talumdists (some of whom
run the U.S. government, the U.S. media, the U.S. economy, U.S. academia, etc.) have no sense
of proportion and no sense of timing - except in music. She knew exactly the truth of what she
was stating.
Mockery, sham, inane, insipid, and other akin words well describe the efforts by the Propaganda
System to promote the most immoral candidate ever nominated for president over the second most
immoral candidate ever nominated for president all while ignoring the most moral and worthy candidate
for president--Dr. Jill Stein.
I don't watch mainstream media for years now, too disgusting for my appetite, but I will venture
to say this:
The election years in the U.S have been for decades now carnivals. Now that there are two official
runners, we are now entering the 'Magician Show' phase, fast forward, the 'power' behind the curtain
(Israel-firsters, AIPAC, international talmudists i.e) will/are using Trump as the sleight of
hand, while Hillary will be ushered in as the prestige. Simple as that. Its all orchestrated.
Has been for so long. Power in the U.S is very well protected.
Bernie(the fake candidate) Sanders was used to placate and herd in the mass of youngsters
and progressives and folks who are outright sick and tired only to then softly ease them down
,possibly into the Hillary camp; also so said grouping can feel that they were close and actually
had a chance and democracy is indeed real.
I cant find it anymore, but not long ago I saw a newspaper clipping of a picture on a major
U.S newspaper showing Trump's grandchildren visiting him in his office and lo and behold, among
the many portraits and pictures Trump had hanging on his wall was one that stuck out to me. It
was a portrait of King Solomon's Temple with Hebrew writing on it. The man is a full fledged Zionist
and on the take. Hillary is the same or worse, since the 'powers' have sooo much on here and her
husband she will make a good blackmail abled POTUS.
That's my take, and no, I don't have or need a tin foil hat. Mark my words.
10,000 expected for Trump Rally in Daytona Beach, Florida. At 1 PM Thousands already jammed
in the hallways of the Ocean Center for 3 PM Rally. Meanwhile, Hillary must bring in high school
students to fill seats.
4;Correctamundo; A bunch of wacko ancient anti-religious hypocrites control US, and want no part
of America First. The only nationalism permitted is zionism's.
Can b list Trumps fibs? I haven't seen any, although he has walked back some statements, but that
isn't a fib, its just re-evaluation.
In fact, I never seen such a politically brave guy in Americas recent history of zionist
collaboration.
off topic...but
To my fellow barflies, please take the time to watch this moving and special video. Its kind of
long but well worth it.
It essentially made me proud to be American again, when I see my fellow countrymen engaging
in this sort of thing, especially the Senator. Very moving indeed.
Khizr Khan used to work for a law firm that has the Saudi Arabian regime and apparently the
Clintons or the Clinton Foundation as clients. Khizt Khan is a lawyer and his law firm offers
to arrange visa for wealthy foreigners and given his previous employment that probably means that
his clients include Saudi Arabians. I just can't understand why such a man would feel strongly
about a temporary ban on entry into the United States for Muslims.
What I really can't understand is why Khizr Khan supports HRC, since she voted for the war
that killed his son. That the son might not have come to the United States and jined the military
if Trump's ban had been in place just reinforces that point. I really wonder what his pay-off
is. I really hope it's been worth the loss of a son.
It goes without saying it's nonsense, but I hope a few readers here will take the time, if
they open it for comments, to voice their opposition to his absurd, warmongering narrative.
Much or most of the organized, over the top attacks on Trump [who is, in and of himself, a
buffoon] is coming from Zionist/Neocon interests who fear he won't attack Syria and Iran for Israel,
and to some extent by the organized Jewish community per se who fear he might enforce immigration
law.
You did not mention the firm Khizr-Khan worked for did Hillary Clinton's taxes.. Khizr
Khan has all sorts of financial, legal, and political connections to the Clintons through his
old law firm, the mega-D.C. firm Hogan Lovells LLP. That firm did Hillary Clinton's taxes for
years, starting when Khan still worked there involved in, according to his own website, matters
"firm wide"-back in 2004.
It also has represented, for years, the government of Saudi Arabia in the United States. Saudi
Arabia, of course, is a Clinton Foundation donor which-along with the mega-bundlers of thousands
upon thousands in political donations to both of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaigns in 2008
and 2016-plays right into the "Clinton Cash" narrative.
The electorate in the US will blunder into the new leadership, with no help, -- and much hindrance
-- from the corporate media. Some people will know what they are doing when they cast their vote,
-- while others will feel their way along the walls of uncertainty, like sleepwalkers. As usual,
a huge percent will not vote at all.
The Clinton political machine has rigged the process, against Sanders, and gone to some
lengths to conceal the shame of it. At the convention in Philadelphia, they looked most odd; while
the Party was showing itself be a some kind of schitzophrenic monster, gulping down the high octane
fuel of unreality. They can bear no real resemblance to the Party of Franklin Roosevelt, although
they come to the Convention wearing clothes made out of his skin.
They have become republicans with a crisis of identity.
These pols are all rageaholics who worship the power that comes out of the barrel of a gun,
the broad power of coersion; and they act as if people are fooled by their honey-coated words
and painted smiles. They are vanguards of the empire, the apostles of expansion and exceptionalism.
These candidates all have fancy educations, and have always dwelt near the very top of the power
bubble. Yet their minds contain many vast intellectual deserts.
Yesterday, Pres. Obama told the Republicans they needed disavow Trump or words to that effect.
Struck me as exactly not what a sitting Dem president should say about a Repub nominee, especially
Trump since he seems quite capable of shooting himself in the foot and other areas of his anatomy
(no dirty joke implied, just that he's a loose cannon).
Obama could have made a simple comment about not picking on dead soldiers without trying to
look like he's telling the Repubs what to do.
I'm sure there must be some Repubs who have told the Dems they should not have nominated Hillary...unless
they WANT her impeached. But, if so, it's not getting much attention.
Sen. Warren Simpson was on WNYC today, warning that Obama's attack might well backfire and
hurt Hillary. Hhhmmm, maybe that's a plan?
Who can tell with this horrible choice provided to American voters.
I read that NBC piece on the plot. The word for the day.; "Irreparable consequences."
People will either get tired of it or will endorse Trump as the poor small boy that everyone
is bullying and beating up
Also, there is this being offered - "Trump is running to lose."
The establishment, disconnected from joeandjill's anger, is fighting to maintain the status
quo forgetting the old adage – Americans love and support the underdog."
= = = = = =
@ ben 3
The "electoral college" system will decide"
When that system was envisaged, there were paper ballots. Do not dismiss the popular vote and
the "winner-take-all electors" states. Electors are selected by a two part process. This is the
age of computer rigging. Loading votes to deliver key states and the required 270 votes of the
electors made easy.
Key your eye on GEMS. No, not precious stones.
If this checks out you may no longer have one person-one vote.
A fascinating read:
"US election shocker: is this how the vote will be rigged?"
by Jon Rappoport Votes are being counted as fractions instead of as whole numbers
As we know, there are a number of ways to rig an election. Bev Harris, at blackboxvoting.org,
is exploring a specific "cheat sheet" that has vast implications for the Trump vs. Hillary contest.
It's a vote-counting system called GEMS.
"Our testing [of GEMS] shows that one vote can be counted 25 times, another only one one-thousandth
of a time, effectively converting some votes to zero."
"This report summarizes the results of our review of the GEMS election management system, which
counts approximately 25 percent of all votes in the United States. The results of this study demonstrate
that a fractional vote feature is embedded in each GEMS application which can be used to invisibly,
yet radically, alter election outcomes by pre-setting desired vote percentages to redistribute
votes.
This tampering is not visible to election observers, even if they are standing in the room
and watching the computer. Use of the decimalized vote feature is unlikely to be detected by auditing
or canvass procedures, and can be applied across large jurisdictions in less than 60 seconds."
[..]
I agree that the timing of this onslaught seems wrong - it's too early. An attack like this,
you go for the knockout punch. If that doesn't happen - then what? There's a lot of time between
now and November. I have always thought that this campaign, more than most, will be driven by
events out of the candidates control - terrorist attacks, cop shootings, the markets, etc...
Obama's screed against Trump - what's up with that? Is he hoping to do for Trump what he's
done for gun sales? He might be better off endorsing him.
Does it strike anyone else that the Khan story just sort of vanished all of a sudden. For
several days - nothing else in the media. It seemed to drop off sharply yesterday. Normally, I
see stories about Khan and his involvement with the Clintons, sharia law, immigration, the disappearing
website, etc... and would attribute it to a weak attempt to deflect news coverage but I wonder...
And Trumps counter-attack on the Khans. At first I had the knee-jerk response "he's gone
too far this time". On reflection, the Democrat MO to attack opponents using some sympathetic
figure with a lot of "moral authority" - could be someone who has lost a loved one, or a disabled
person, ... - on the theory that the person being attacked can't fight back. In a way, I applaud
Trump for having none of that (while at the same time being annoyed that he took the bait). The
Khans made an free decision to be at the DNC convention and leverage their tragedy to attack Trump.
While I feel for them, they can't have it both ways.
So Trump saying he has sacrificed as much as someone in the military who was killed, is not insane
ludicrous BS ? Hahaha... I guess that fits in the minor issue category for B because he was still
wants to keep telling a lie the trump is a genius. Oops, at least not in his latest useless piece.
Backtracking much ?
Oh and Trump whoring himself out to the Israeli genocide lobby is a minor issue ?
What is so genius about right wing fucktards who are sick to death of the corrupt political
system and themselves being screwed screwed over by the class war, desperately waiting for a lying
not job piece of shit to say the system is corrupt and rigged, all the while Trump being guilty
of the same in his corporate life.
That really is self lying cowards among the population desperate to hear what they want to
hear and create a self lying loop of endless delusion with deliberate omissions of awfulness from
their baseless chosen cult leader.
Same can be said for the atrociously war loving fake leftists cheering for the most evil woman
on the planet Hitlery Clinton.
How on earth could mainstream media even think anyone would watch their stupid propaganda,
I feel sorry for Trump with all this propaganda in ALL western states. And no republicans seems
to help him! What the hell!? Are they rooting for democrats?
"Trump then told the New York Times that a Russian incursion into Estonia need not trigger
a U.S. military response.
"Even more shocking. By suggesting the U.S. might not honor its NATO commitment, under Article
5, to fight Russia for Estonia, our foreign policy elites declaimed, Trump has undermined the
security architecture that has kept the peace for 65 years.
"More interesting, however, was the reaction of Middle America. Or, to be more exact, the nonreaction.
Americans seem neither shocked nor horrified. What does this suggest?
"Behind the war guarantees America has issued to scores of nations in Europe, the Mideast
and Asia since 1949, the bedrock of public support that existed during the Cold War has crumbled."
As I've written elsewhere, myself and others's analysis of Trump vs HRC leads us to conclude
that Trump's the lesser evil, and is indeed a peace candidate compared to HRC's nonstop belligerence
and warmongering. The Propaganda System will do its best to paint Trump as the greater evil, but
that will be a very hard task as most of the public no longer sees that System as credible.
Another unfortunate faux pas was committed by the intelligent, calm-speaking and otherwise
logical Jill Stein in the selection of a black guy named Barak as her Veep.
The name is: Baraka. You may want to
read a bit on
his views, work history and positions. Baraka has got just about everything right that is expressed
by MoA repeatedly.
Brief discussion of Stein's meeting in Moscow with RT organized Policy experts is
here . At a dinner several days after with Putin (and others) Vlade said:
Putin noted, "What I would like to say, something really unexpected, when I was watching this
material. When I was listening to your comments, politicians from other countries, you know
what I caught myself thinking about? I agree with them, on many issues."
Stein deserves far more serious attention and exposure then she's getting here (U.S.).
I encourage people... especially U.S. voters and Bernie supporters, to now rely on media reports
about her but take a few hours and go through her website. Her positions on just about everything...
and all the BIG ones, are impressive and make more sense then anything I've heard from any candidate
since I can remember. I encourage folks to write letters demanding she be included in the debates.
Jill Stein? You got to be kidding , right? Just like Bernie, she's just another member of the
'tribe/race' that are putting on this charade that is the U.S election. These people are in the
final stages of pulling off the greatest coup in world history and the American people hardly
know it. That's horrifying. This is the Opus Magnum folks. Read the last 2000, or 1000 or 500,
or 200 years of world history and one knows where this will lead. It's going to be dark.
Americans....your children and grandchildren are going to curse at your graves if you don't
wake up.
13 & 17. You're both right. It's a shame Trump didn't go after this fact or that the DEMs/Hillary/Media
complex are playing races against each other. He should have said that yes, he has not sacrificed
a son on an "elective war" as a Pope once called it but that Hillary has not sacrificed either
while voting for and pushing for wars.
Yesterday someone posted a link to the interview with Bashar al-Assad. (Thnx BTW). He was
asked his opinion about the next president several times probably to smear him as a Trump supporter.
He kept saying that their campaign talk doesn't matter and that it's their actions. But @17:40
he said this, "We always hope that the next president will be much wiser than the previous one."
We hope for the same thing here in the us and we keep being disappointed.
Hope isn't going to do the trick, it's time the American people took matters into their
own hands. Start marching...against war, against unemployment, homelessness, infrastructure falling
apart, prisons everywhere, swindles in the tune of Trillions etc. I could go on...
The Democratic NC has turned into an advertisement for more and endless war. Complete with
hoorah's of USA!! USA!!
Less, of course. And it would also stop the insane policy of taking America and using it as
a bludgeoning tool against the Arabic, African, NovoRuss and hell, maybe even the Persian peoples.
Zioinism is just a manifestation of the problem, as Zionism is rather a new thing. Problem
is, the bludgeoning tool is showing signs of cracking. Trump or Hillary, both will go out of their
way to finally break it. That sad, because I love this country.
"The majority of the people hate Clinton. This media campaign will fall back on her. She
will be perceived as the bully increasing her already strong negatives."
This is a stretch. According to recent polls, Clinton has 54% "unfavorable" rating, and Trump
has 64%. And not surprisingly, libertarian and green tickets poll better than usual. Especially
libertarian, which marks dissatisfaction of the right side of the public.
If I were a politician, I would forbid my stuff from reading b without a red pen to underline
all statements to disagree with. Number one, that the opponent should not be attacked over unimportant
details. It defies historical record! Profound nonsense if usually difficult to explain. In particular,
it requires an explanation, so you miss the ever important sector of the public that is immune
to explanations. By the way of contrast, inconsequential details are easy to convey.
Consider foreign policy, the focus of discussions here. Is it important what and when did
Clinton know about the attack on the consulate in Benghazi? Not really. It is important that the
entire policy of regime change in Libya is FUBAR. It starts from a simple observation that aging
Kaddafi was sufficiently pliable to give the West all (almost all?) benefits of control without
the cost. But given the chaotic situation that ensued, indeed it was better to pursue some influence
than playing it "risk free" (from Empire perspective, shared by Clinton and her tormentors).
Another foreign policy example, the issue of Iran and "the deal". Trump promises even worse
approach than executed by Obama. Why? This is fully consistent with the basic plank of his philosophy,
help those that pay their dues. And Saudis and other Gulfies manifestly pay their dues. Unlike
Latvia and Ukraine. In any case, Trump is attacking here on inconsequential details, which shows
that he understands the basics of the political craft.
Finally, "Clinton risks being perceived as a bully". Trump is uniquely positioned to get scant
sympathy. Bullying somewhat frail Sanders would be risky, but Trump?
Not all Jews are Zionists. Not all Jews agree with Israel's policies. Many Jews are victims
as they are preyed upon for their support and vilified for protesting/objecting.
"... If the rabidly pro-Israel Hillary Clinton takes the White House, you can expect that this concession will be re-negotiated: in any case, the Israel lobby will wield its considerable resources to get Congress to pressure the White House. ..."
"... As Glenn Greenwald points out in The Intercept , the Israelis have cradle-to-grave health care. Their life-expectancy is nearly a decade longer than ours. Their infant mortality rate is lower. By any meaningful measure, their standard of living is higher. They should be sending us aid: instead, the opposite is occurring. ..."
"... We made possible the Israeli Sparta : a state armed to the teeth which thrives on the misery and enslavement of its dispossessed Palestinian helots. Furthermore, our policy of unconditional support for Israel has encouraged the growth and development of a polity that is rapidly going fascist. And I don't use the "f"-word lightly. I've been chronicling Israel's slide toward a repulsive ethno-nationalism for years , and today – with the rise of ultra-rightist parties that openly call for the expulsio n of Arabs and the expansion of the Israeli state to its Biblically-ordained borders – my predictions are coming true. ..."
"... The "special relationship" is a parasitic relationship: the Israelis have been feeding off US taxpayers since the Reagan era. This in spite of the numerous insults , slights, and outright sabotage they have directed our way. It's high time to put an end to it. To borrow a phrase from You Know Who: it's time to put America first. ..."
"... What this means in practice is: 1) End aid to Israel, 2) Call out the Israelis for their shameful apartheid policies, and 3) end the power of the Israel lobby by enforcing the Foreign Agents Registration Act and compelling AIPAC and its allied organizations to register as foreign agents. Because that's just what they are. ..."
Washington is preparing to
increase US aid to Israel by billions of dollars, with a ten-year ironclad agreement that couldn't
be altered by President Obama's successor. But that isn't good enough for Bibi Netanyahu. He wants
more. Much more.
Unlike the case with other countries, the US engages in protracted and often difficult negotiations
with Israel over how much free stuff they're going to get come budget time. This year, the talks
are taking on a particularly urgent tone because of … you guessed it, Donald Trump. While Trump is
fervently pro-Israel, he has said that the Israelis, like our NATO allies, are going to have to
start paying for their
own defense (although with him,
you never know what his position is from
one day to the next ). This uncertainty has the two parties racing to sign an agreement before
President Obama's term is up in January. And it also has inspired the inclusion of a novel clause:
a ten-year guarantee that aid will remain at the agreed level, with no possibility that the new President
– whoever that may be – will lower it.
The Israelis
currently receive over half the foreign aid doled out by Uncle Sam annually, most of it in military
assistance with an extra added dollop for "refugee resettlement." That combined with loan guarantees
comes to roughly $3.5 billion per year – with all the money handed to them up front, in the first
weeks of the fiscal year, instead of being released over time like other countries.
So how much is this increase going to amount to? With negotiations still ongoing, the US isn't
releasing any solid figures, although Bibi, we are told, is demanding $5 billion annually. The
New York Times is
reporting the final sum could "top $40 billion." What we do know is that the administration told
Congress in a letter that they are prepared to offer Tel Aviv an aid package "that would constitute
the largest pledge of military assistance to any country in US history." In addition, it would guarantee
US aid for Israel's missile defense, taking it out of the annual appropriations song-and-dance, and
immunizing it from any cuts.
Aside from the "haggling" – as the Times put it – over the amount, there is another issue:
the Israeli exception to a rule that applies to all other recipients of American aid. Other countries
must spend their welfare check in dollars – that is, they must buy American. Not the Israelis. They're
allowed to spend up to 25% of their aid package at home: which means that US taxpayers have been
subsidizing the Israeli military-industrial complex to the tune of multi-billions since the 1980s,
when this special arrangement was legislated. However, in an era where "America First" is now a popular
political slogan – popularized by You Know Who – the Obama administration is trying to end this exception
to the rules. Naturally, the Israelis are resisting, but,
according to Ha'aretz
:
"The Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth said the White House was prepared to let Israel keep
the arrangement for the first five years of the new MOU but it would be gradually phased out in the
second five years, except for joint U.S.-Israeli military projects."
If the rabidly pro-Israel Hillary Clinton takes the White House, you can expect that this
concession will be re-negotiated: in any case, the Israel lobby will wield its considerable resources
to get Congress to pressure the White House.
In their letter to Congress, national security honcho Susan Rice and OMB chief Shaun Donovan evoke
the Iran deal as justification for this new and sweeter aid package. Yet this argument undermines
the administration's contention that the agreement with Iran doesn't endanger Israel – because if
it doesn't, then why do the Israelis need billions more in aid in the first place?
What the letter tiptoes around is the fact that this aid package is extortion, pure and simple.
It's a purely political attempt by the Obama White House to appease the Israelis, and mobilize the
Israel lobby behind the Democrats in a crucial election year. It's important to keep
Haim Saban happy.
As Glenn Greenwald
points out in The Intercept , the Israelis have cradle-to-grave health care. Their life-expectancy
is nearly a decade longer than ours. Their infant mortality rate is lower. By any meaningful measure,
their standard of living is higher. They should be sending us aid: instead, the opposite is
occurring.
What in the heck is going on here?
We made possible the
Israeli Sparta : a state armed to the teeth which thrives on the misery and enslavement of its
dispossessed Palestinian helots. Furthermore, our policy of unconditional support for Israel has
encouraged the growth and development of a polity that is rapidly going fascist. And I don't use
the "f"-word lightly. I've been
chronicling Israel's slide
toward a
repulsive ethno-nationalism
for years , and today –
with the rise of ultra-rightist parties that openly call for the
expulsio n of Arabs and the expansion of the Israeli state to its Biblically-ordained borders
– my predictions are coming true.
The "special relationship" is a parasitic relationship: the Israelis have been feeding off
US taxpayers since the Reagan era. This in spite of the numerous
insults
, slights, and outright
sabotage they have directed our way. It's high time to put an end to it. To borrow a phrase from
You Know Who: it's time to put America first.
What this means in practice is: 1) End aid to Israel, 2) Call out the Israelis for their shameful
apartheid policies, and 3) end the power of the Israel lobby by enforcing the Foreign Agents Registration
Act and compelling AIPAC and its allied organizations to register as foreign agents. Because that's
just what they are.
"... The mass migration of apparently hundreds of nominally GOP neocon apparatchiks to the Hillary Clinton camp has moved Democratic Party foreign policy farther to the right, not that the presidential nominee herself needed much persuading. The Democratic convention platform is a template of the hardline foreign policy positions espoused by Clinton and the convention itself concluded with a prolonged bout of Russian bashing that could have been orchestrated by Hillary protégé Victoria Nuland. ..."
"... The inside the beltway crowd has realized that when in doubt it is always a safe bet to blame Vladimir Putin based on the assumption that Russia is and always will be an enemy of the United States. Wikileaks recently published some thousands of emails that painted the Democratic National Committee, then headed by Hillary loyalist Debbie Wasserman Schultz, in a very bad light. Needing a scapegoat, Russia was blamed for the original hack that obtained the information, even though there is no hard evidence that Moscow had anything to do with it. ..."
"... Another interesting aspect of the Russian scandal is the widespread assertion that Moscow is attempting to interfere in U.S. politics and is both clandestinely and openly supporting Donald Trump. This is presumably a bad thing, if true, because Putin would, according to the pundits, be able to steamroll "Manchurian Candidate" President Trump and subvert U.S. foreign policy in Russia's favor. Alternatively, as the narrative continues, the stalwart Hillary would presumably defend American values and the right to intervene militarily anywhere in the world at any time against all comers including Putin and those rascals in China and North Korea. Professor Inboden might no doubt be able to provide a reference to the part of the Constitution that grants Washington that right as he and his former boss George W. Bush were also partial to that interpretation. ..."
"... And the alleged Russian involvement leads inevitably to some thoughts about interference by other governments in our electoral system. Israel and its Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did so in a rather heavy handed fashion in 2012 on behalf of candidate Mitt Romney but I don't recall even a squeak coming out of Hillary and her friends when that took place. That just might be due to the fact that Netanyahu owns Bill and Hillary, which leads inevitably to consideration of the other big winner now that the two conventions are concluded. The team that one sees doing the victory lap is the state of Israel, which dodged a bigtime bullet when it managed to exploit its bought and paid for friends to eliminate any criticism of its military occupation and settlements policies. Indeed, Israel emerged from the two party platforms as America's best friend and number one ally, a position it has occupied since its Lobby took control of the Congress, White House and the mainstream media around thirty years ago. ..."
"... Donald Trump, who has perversely promised to be an honest broker in negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, has also described himself as the best friend in the White House that Tel Aviv is ever likely to have. In addition to Trump speaking for himself, Israel was mentioned fourteen times in GOP convention speeches, always being described as the greatest ally and friend to the U.S., never as the pain in the ass and drain on the treasury that it actually represents. ..."
"... Team Hillary also ignored chants from the convention floor demanding "No More War" and there are separate reports suggesting that one of her first priorities as president will be to initiate a "full review" of the "murderous" al-Assad regime in Syria with the intention of taking care of him once and for all. "No More War" coming from the Democratic base somehow became "More War Please" for the elites that run the party. ..."
"... If you read through the two party platforms on foreign policy, admittedly a brutal and thankless task, you will rarely find any explanation of actual American interests at play in terms of the involvement of the U.S. in what are essentially other people's quarrels. That is as it should be as our political class has almost nothing to do with reality but instead is consumed with delusions linked solely to acquisition of power and money. That realization on the part of the public has driven both the Trump and Sanders movements and, even if they predictably flame out, there is always the hope that the dissidents will grow stronger with rejection and something might actually happen in 2020. ..."
The mass migration of apparently hundreds of nominally GOP neocon apparatchiks to the Hillary
Clinton camp has moved Democratic Party foreign policy farther to the right, not that the presidential
nominee herself needed much persuading. The Democratic convention platform is a template of the hardline
foreign policy positions espoused by Clinton and the convention itself concluded with a prolonged
bout of Russian bashing that could have been orchestrated by Hillary protégé Victoria Nuland.
The inside the beltway crowd has realized that when in doubt it is always a safe bet to blame
Vladimir Putin based on the assumption that Russia is and always will be an enemy of the United States.
Wikileaks recently published some thousands of emails that painted the Democratic National Committee,
then headed by Hillary loyalist Debbie Wasserman Schultz, in a very bad light. Needing a scapegoat,
Russia was blamed for the original hack that obtained the information, even though there is
no hard evidence that Moscow had anything to do with it.
Those in the media and around Hillary who were baying the loudest about how outraged they were
over the hack curiously appear to have no knowledge of the existence of the National Security Agency,
located at Fort Meade Maryland, which routinely breaks into the government computers of friends and
foes alike worldwide. Apparently what is fair game for American codebreakers is no longer seen so
positively when there is any suggestion that the tables might have been turned.
Republican nominee Donald Trump noted that if the Russians were in truth behind the hack he would
like them to search for the 30,000 emails that Hillary Clinton reportedly deleted from her home server.
The comment, which to my mind was sarcastically making a point about Clinton's mendacity, brought
down the wrath of the media, with the New York Times
reporting that "foreign policy experts," also sometimes known as "carefully selected 'Trump haters,'"
were shocked by The Donald. The paper quoted one William Inboden, allegedly a University of Texas
professor who served on President George W. Bush's National Security Council. Inboden complained
that the comments were "an assault on the Constitution" and "tantamount to treason." Now I have never
heard of Inboden, which might be sheer ignorance on my part, but he really should refresh himself
on what the Constitution
actually says about
treason, tantamount or otherwise. According to Article III of the Constitution of the United States
one can only commit treason if there is a declared war going on and one is actively aiding an enemy,
which as far as I know is not currently the case as applied to the U.S. relationship with Russia.
Another interesting aspect of the Russian scandal is the widespread assertion that Moscow
is attempting to interfere in U.S. politics and is both clandestinely and openly supporting Donald
Trump. This is presumably a bad thing, if true, because Putin would, according to the pundits, be
able to steamroll "Manchurian Candidate" President Trump and subvert U.S. foreign policy in Russia's
favor. Alternatively, as the narrative continues, the stalwart Hillary would presumably defend American
values and the right to intervene militarily anywhere in the world at any time against all comers
including Putin and those rascals in China and North Korea. Professor Inboden might no doubt be able
to provide a reference to the part of the Constitution that grants Washington that right as he and
his former boss George W. Bush were also partial to that interpretation.
And the alleged Russian involvement leads inevitably to some thoughts about interference by
other governments in our electoral system. Israel and its Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did so
in a rather heavy handed fashion in 2012 on behalf of candidate Mitt Romney but I don't recall even
a squeak coming out of Hillary and her friends when that took place. That just might be due to the
fact that Netanyahu owns Bill and Hillary, which leads inevitably to consideration of the other big
winner now that the two conventions are concluded. The team that one sees doing the victory lap is
the state of Israel, which dodged a bigtime bullet when it managed to exploit its bought and paid
for friends to eliminate any criticism of its military occupation and settlements policies. Indeed,
Israel emerged from the two party platforms as America's best friend and number one ally, a position
it has occupied since its Lobby took control of the Congress, White House and the mainstream media
around thirty years ago.
Donald Trump, who has perversely promised to be an honest broker in negotiations between Israel
and the Palestinians, has also described himself as the best friend in the White House that Tel Aviv
is ever likely to have. In addition to Trump speaking for himself, Israel was mentioned fourteen
times in GOP convention speeches, always being described as the greatest ally and friend to the U.S.,
never as the pain in the ass and drain on the treasury that it actually represents.
No other foreign country was mentioned as often as Israel apart from Iran, which was regularly
cited as an enemy of both the U.S. and – you guessed it – Israel. Indeed, the constant thumping of
Iran is a reflection of the overweening affection for Netanyahu and his right wing government. Regarding
Iran, the GOP foreign policy
platform states "We consider the Administration's deal with Iran, to lift international sanctions
and make hundreds of billions of dollars available to the Mullahs, a personal agreement between the
President and his negotiating partners and non-binding on the next president. Without a two-thirds
endorsement by the Senate, it does not have treaty status. Because of it, the defiant and emboldened
regime in Tehran continues to sponsor terrorism across the region, develop a nuclear weapon, test-fire
ballistic missiles inscribed with 'Death to Israel,' and abuse the basic human rights of its citizens."
The final written
Republican platform for 2016 as relating to the Middle East, drawn up
with the input
of two Trump advisors Jason Greenblatt and David Friedman, rather supports the suggestion that Trump
would be pro-Israel rather than the claim of impartiality. The plank entitled "Our Unequivocal Support
of Israel and Jerusalem," promises to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, praises Israel in five
different sections, eulogizing it as a "beacon of democracy and humanity" brimming over with freedom
of speech and religion while concluding that "support for Israel is an expression of Americanism."
It pledges "no daylight" between the two countries, denies that Israel is an "occupier," and slams
the peaceful Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement (BDS), which it describes as anti-Semitic
and seeking to destroy Israel. It calls for legal action to "thwart" BDS. There is no mention of
a Palestinian state or of any Palestinian rights to anything at all.
The
Democratic plank on the Middle East gives lip service to a two state solution for Israel-Palestine
but is mostly notable for what it chose to address. Two Bernie Sanders supporters on the platform
drafting committee James Zogby and Cornel West wanted to remove any illegal under international
law affirmation that Jerusalem is the undivided capital of Israel and also sought to eliminated any
condemnation of BDS. They failed on both issues and then tried to have included mild language criticizing
Israel's occupation of the West Bank and its settlement building. They were outvoted by Hillary supporters
on all the issues they considered important. Indeed, there is no language at all critical in any
way of Israel, instead asserting that "a strong and secure Israel is vital to the United States because
we share overarching strategic interests and the common values of democracy, equality, tolerance,
and pluralism." That none of that was or is true apparently bothered no one in the Hillary camp.
The Democratic platform document explicitly condemns any support for BDS. Hillary Clinton, who
has promised to take the relationship with Israel to a whole new level, has reportedly
agreed to an anti-BDS
pledge to appease her principal financial supporter Haim Saban, an Israeli-American film producer.
Clinton also directly and personally intervened through her surrogate on the committee Wendy Sherman
to make sure that the party platform would remain pro-Israel.
But many Democrats on the floor of the convention hall have, to their credit, promoted a somewhat
different perspective, displaying signs and stickers while calling for support of Palestinian
rights. One demonstrator outside the convention center burned an Israeli flag, producing a
sharp response from Hillary's spokeswoman for Jewish outreach Sarah Bard, "Hillary Clinton has
always stood against efforts to marginalize Israel and incitement, and she strongly condemns this
kind of hatred. Burning the Israeli flag is a reckless act that undermines peace and our values."
Bill meanwhile was
seen in the hall wearing a Hillary button written in Hebrew. It was a full court press pander
and one has to wonder how Hillary would have felt about someone burning a Russian flag or seeing
Bill sport a button in Cyrillic.
Team Hillary also ignored chants from the convention floor demanding "No More War" and there
are separate reports suggesting that one of her
first priorities as president will be to initiate a "full review" of the "murderous" al-Assad
regime in Syria with the intention of taking care of him once and for all. "No More War" coming from
the Democratic base somehow became "More War Please" for the elites that run the party.
The Democratic platform also
beats down on Iran, declaring only tepid support for the nuclear deal while focusing more on
draconian enforcement, asserting that they would "not hesitate to take military action if Iran violates
the agreement." It also cited Iran as "the leading state sponsor of terrorism" and claimed that Tehran
"has its fingerprints on almost every conflict in the Middle East." For what it's worth, neither
assertion about Iran's regional role is true and Tehran reportedly has complied completely with the
multilateral nuclear agreement. It is the U.S. government that is failing to live up to its commitments
by refusing to allow Iranian access to financial markets while the Congress has even blocked an Iranian
bid to buy Made-in-the-U.S.A. civilian jetliners.
So those of us who had hoped for at least a partial abandonment of the hitherto dominant foreign
policy consensus have to be disappointed as they in the pro-war crowd in their various guises as
liberal interventionists or global supremacy warriors continue to control much of the discourse from
left to right. Russia continues to be a popular target to vent Administration frustration over its
inept posturing overseas, though there is some hope that Donald Trump might actually reverse that
tendency. Iran serves as a useful punchline whenever a politician on the make runs out of other things
to vilify. And then there is always Israel, ever the victim, perpetually the greatest ally and friend.
And invariably needing some extra cash, a warplane or two or a little political protection in venues
like the United Nations.
If you read through the two party platforms on foreign policy, admittedly a brutal and thankless
task, you will rarely find any explanation of actual American interests at play in terms of the involvement
of the U.S. in what are essentially other people's quarrels. That is as it should be as our political
class has almost nothing to do with reality but instead is consumed with delusions linked solely
to acquisition of power and money. That realization on the part of the public has driven both the
Trump and Sanders movements and, even if they predictably flame out, there is always the hope that
the dissidents will grow stronger with rejection and something might actually happen in 2020.
In addition, American voters don't trust Hillary Clinton. At what point will critics of Bernie Sanders
realize that American voters will never vote for a candidate they don't trust and don't like? In
October of 2015, I explained in the following
YouTube segment why Clinton
is unelectable, and in another
segment why Clinton must
always evolve on key issues.
53.8% of all American voters have an "unfavorable" view of Hillary Clinton.
67%
of American voters find Hillary Clinton "not honest and trustworthy," compared with
59%
for Donald Trump. Yes, more people trust Donald Trump.
After all, it's difficult to trust a politician who
completely fabricated a story about being fired upon by snipers. Like
POLITIFACT states, "it's hard to understand how she could err on something so significant as
whether she did or didn't dodge sniper bullets."
A very important, informative interview. Outlines complexity of challenges of modern society and
the real power of "alphabet agencies" in the modern societies (not only in the USA) pretty
vividly. You need to listen to it several times to understand better the current environment.
Very sloppy security was the immanent feature both of Hillary "bathroom" server and DNC emails hacks.
So there probably were multiple parties that has access to those data not a single one (anti Russian
hysteria presumes that the only party are Russian and that's silly; what about China, Iran and
Israel?).
Russian government would not use a "known attack" as they would immediately be traced back.
Anything, any communications that goes over the network are totally. 100% exposed to NSA data
collection infrastructure. Clinton email messages are not exception. NSA does have
information on them, including all envelopes (the body of the message might be encrypted and that's
slightly complicate the matter, but there is no signs that Clinton of DNC used encryption of them)
NSA has the technical capabilities to trace the data back and they most probably have most if not
all of deleted mail. The "total surveillance", the total data mailing used by NSA definitely includes
the mail envelopes which makes possible to enumerate all the missing mails.
Notable quotes:
"... The National Security Agency (NSA) has "all" of Hillary Clinton's deleted emails and the FBI could gain access to them if they so desired, William Binney, a former highly placed NSA official, declared in a radio interview broadcast on Sunday. ..."
"... Binney referenced testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in March 2011 by then-FBI Director Robert S. Mueller in which Meuller spoke of the FBI's ability to access various secretive databases "to track down known and suspected terrorists." ..."
"... "Now what he (Mueller) is talking about is going into the NSA database, which is shown of course in the (Edward) Snowden material released, which shows a direct access into the NSA database by the FBI and the CIA Which there is no oversight of by the way. So that means that NSA and a number of agencies in the U.S. government also have those emails." ..."
"... Listen to the full interview here: ... ..."
"... And the other point is that Hillary, according to an article published by the Observer ..."
The National Security Agency (NSA) has "all" of Hillary Clinton's deleted emails and the FBI
could gain access to them if they so desired, William Binney, a former highly placed NSA official,
declared in a radio interview broadcast on Sunday.
Speaking as an analyst, Binney raised the possibility that the hack of the Democratic National
Committee's server was done not by Russia but by a disgruntled U.S. intelligence worker concerned
about Clinton's compromise of national security secrets via her personal email use.
Binney was an architect of the NSA's surveillance program. He became a famed whistleblower when
he resigned on October 31, 2001, after spending more than 30 years with the agency.
He was speaking on this reporter's Sunday radio program, "Aaron
Klein Investigative Radio," broadcast on New York's AM 970 The Answer and Philadelphia's NewsTalk
990 AM.
Binney referenced
testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in March 2011 by then-FBI Director Robert S.
Mueller in which Meuller spoke of the FBI's ability to access various secretive databases "to track
down known and suspected terrorists."
Stated Binney:
"Now what he (Mueller) is talking about is going into the NSA database, which is shown
of course in the (Edward) Snowden material released, which shows a direct access into the NSA
database by the FBI and the CIA Which there is no oversight of by the way. So that means that
NSA and a number of agencies in the U.S. government also have those emails."
"So if the FBI really wanted them they can go into that database and get them right now," he stated
of Clinton's emails as well as DNC emails.
Asked point blank if he believed the NSA has copies of "all" of Clinton's emails, including the
deleted correspondence, Binney replied in the affirmative.
"Yes," he responded. "That would be my point. They have them all and the FBI can get them right
there."
Listen to the full interview here: ...
Binney surmised that the hack of the DNC could have been coordinated by someone inside the U.S.
intelligence community angry over Clinton's compromise of national security data with her email use.
And the other point is that Hillary, according to an
article published
by the Observer in March of this year, has a problem with NSA because she compromised Gamma
material. Now that is the most sensitive material at NSA. And so there were a number of NSA
officials complaining to the press or to the people who wrote the article that she did that. She
lifted the material that was in her emails directly out of Gamma reporting. That is a direct compromise
of the most sensitive material at the NSA. So she's got a real problem there. So there are many
people who have problems with what she has done in the past. So I don't necessarily look at the Russians
as the only one(s) who got into those emails.
The Observer defined the GAMMA classification:
GAMMA compartment, which is an NSA handling caveat that is applied to extraordinarily sensitive
information (for instance, decrypted conversations between top foreign leadership, as this was).
Aaron Klein is Breitbart's Jerusalem bureau chief and senior investigative reporter. He
is a New York Times bestselling author and hosts the popular weekend talk radio program, "Aaron
Klein Investigative Radio." Follow him on
Twitter @AaronKleinShow. Follow
him on Facebook.
Most of us knew this already, but now here's proof.
Is Bernie going down fighting for his political beliefs like a real presidential
candidate would? Is he even being remotely honest with his supporters at this
point? Nope. He's keeping his mouth shut and staying on script for Hillary -
who everyone knows will be the worst kind of tyrannical dictator - saying, "I'm
proud to stand with her".
For those of us who didn't know this, Bernie was like a magical fairy unicorn.
People want so badly to believe it's real... but it just isn't... and it never
was. Feel the burn...
Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance
is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting,
teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright
statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal
use tips the balance in favor of fair use.
Lemmy Fuque
1 day ago
For decades the Clintons have run a criminal organization of fraud, deception,
hypocrisy, conspiracy, bribes, blackmail, espionage, treason, murder, assassination,
money laundering, sex-slaves, pedophilia, etc. that would leave Capone and
Giancana in awe. Leaked DNC emails is your proof that Bernie was just another
Clinton pawn. (Add Seth Rich to the Clinton body count after leaking DNC
emails). Though Bernie attracted a lot of followers, do NOT under estimate
the stupidity of the brainwashed Libtard electorate to vote the skank criminal
cunt for POTUS. Clintons run the $100B criminal Clinton Foundation & Global
initiative and get what they want-or they will take you out. Libtards will
be the easiest and first lead to FEMA camps for NWO depopulation.
You can't blame Bernie for he is a Professional politician after all. To
survive in that game, one has to play ball with party management. Half the
trouble in this country comes from the two parties who make the decisions....Not
the people.
like jessse venture said ..politics is exactly like wrestling - In front
of the cameras they hate each other , but when it's off they eating lunch
together
Bernies reaction that night when Clinton dared to thank him said it all
,sad fact is he refuses to say they fucked him and lied and cheated because
she has offered him something or he is scared.
The Us intervention were dictate by needs of global corporation that control the US foreigh
policy. And they need to open market, press geopolitical rivals (Ukraine, Georgia) and grab
resources (Iraq, Libya). The American people are now hostages in their own country and can do
nothing against the establishement militaristic stance. They will fight and die in unnecessary wars
of neoliberal globalization.
Notable quotes:
"... With Democrats howling that Vladimir Putin hacked into and leaked those 19,000 DNC emails to help Trump, the Donald had a brainstorm: Maybe the Russians can retrieve Hillary Clinton's lost emails. Not funny, and close to "treasonous," came the shocked cry. Trump then told the New York Times that a Russian incursion into Estonia need not trigger a U.S. military response ..."
"... Behind the war guarantees America has issued to scores of nations in Europe, the Mideast and Asia since 1949, the bedrock of public support that existed during the Cold War has crumbled. We got a hint of this in 2013. Barack Obama, claiming his "red line" against any use of poison gas in Syria had been crossed, found he had no public backing for air and missile strikes on the Assad regime. The country rose up as one and told him to forget it. He did. We have been at war since 2001. And as one looks on the ruins of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen, and adds up the thousands dead and wounded and trillions sunk and lost, can anyone say our War Party has served us well? ..."
"... The first NATO supreme commander, General Eisenhower, said that if U.S. troops were still in Europe in 10 years, NATO would be a failure. In 1961, he urged JFK to start pulling U.S. troops out, lest Europeans become military dependencies of the United States. Was Ike not right? Even Barack Obama today riffs about the "free riders" on America's defense. Is it really so outrageous for Trump to ask how long the U.S. is to be responsible for defending rich Europeans who refuse to conscript the soldiers or pay the cost of their own defense, when Eisenhower was asking that same question 55 years ago? ..."
"... In 1997, geostrategist George Kennan warned that moving NATO into Eastern Europe "would be the most fateful error of American policy in the post-Cold War era." He predicted a fierce nationalistic Russian response. Was Kennan not right? ..."
With Democrats howling that Vladimir Putin hacked into and leaked those 19,000 DNC emails
to help Trump, the Donald had a brainstorm: Maybe the Russians can retrieve Hillary Clinton's lost
emails. Not funny, and close to "treasonous," came the shocked cry. Trump then told the New York
Times that a Russian incursion into Estonia need not trigger a U.S. military response.
Even more shocking. By suggesting the U.S. might not honor its NATO commitment, under Article
5, to fight Russia for Estonia, our foreign policy elites declaimed, Trump has undermined the security
architecture that has kept the peace for 65 years. More interesting, however, was the reaction of
Middle America. Or, to be more exact, the nonreaction. Americans seem neither shocked nor horrified.
What does this suggest?
Behind the war guarantees America has issued to scores of nations in Europe, the Mideast and
Asia since 1949, the bedrock of public support that existed during the Cold War has crumbled. We
got a hint of this in 2013. Barack Obama, claiming his "red line" against any use of poison gas in
Syria had been crossed, found he had no public backing for air and missile strikes on the Assad regime.
The country rose up as one and told him to forget it. He did. We have been at war since 2001. And
as one looks on the ruins of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen, and adds up the thousands
dead and wounded and trillions sunk and lost, can anyone say our War Party has served us well?
On bringing Estonia into NATO, no Cold War president would have dreamed of issuing so insane a
war guarantee. Eisenhower refused to intervene to save the Hungarian rebels. JFK refused to halt
the building of the Berlin Wall. LBJ did nothing to impede the Warsaw Pact's crushing of the Prague
Spring. Reagan never considered moving militarily to halt the smashing of Solidarity.
Were all these presidents cringing isolationists? Rather, they were realists who recognized that,
though we prayed the captive nations would one day be free, we were not going to risk a world war,
or a nuclear war, to achieve it. Period. In 1991, President Bush told Ukrainians that any declaration
of independence from Moscow would be an act of "suicidal nationalism."
Today, Beltway hawks want to bring Ukraine into NATO. This would mean that America would go to
war with Russia, if necessary, to preserve an independence Bush I regarded as "suicidal."
Have we lost our minds?
The first NATO supreme commander, General Eisenhower, said that if U.S. troops were still
in Europe in 10 years, NATO would be a failure. In 1961, he urged JFK to start pulling U.S. troops
out, lest Europeans become military dependencies of the United States. Was Ike not right? Even Barack
Obama today riffs about the "free riders" on America's defense. Is it really so outrageous for Trump
to ask how long the U.S. is to be responsible for defending rich Europeans who refuse to conscript
the soldiers or pay the cost of their own defense, when Eisenhower was asking that same question
55 years ago?
In 1997, geostrategist George Kennan warned that moving NATO into Eastern Europe "would be
the most fateful error of American policy in the post-Cold War era." He predicted a fierce nationalistic
Russian response. Was Kennan not right? NATO and Russia are today building up forces in the
eastern Baltic where no vital U.S. interests exist, and where we have never fought before - for that
very reason. There is no evidence Russia intends to march into Estonia, and no reason for her to
do so. But if she did, how would NATO expel Russian troops without air and missile strikes that would
devastate that tiny country? And if we killed Russians inside Russia, are we confident Moscow would
not resort to tactical atomic weapons to prevail? After all, Russia cannot back up any further. We
are right in her face.
On this issue Trump seems to be speaking for the silent majority and certainly raising issues
that need to be debated.
How long are we to be committed to go to war to defend the tiny Baltic republics against a
Russia that could overrun them in 72 hours?
When, if ever, does our obligation end? If it is eternal, is not a clash with a revanchist
and anti-American Russia inevitable?
Are U.S. war guarantees in the Baltic republics even credible?
If the Cold War generations of Americans were unwilling to go to war with a nuclear-armed
Soviet Union over Hungary and Czechoslovakia, are the millennials ready to fight a war with Russia
over Estonia?
Needed now is diplomacy. The trade-off: Russia ensures the independence of the Baltic republics
that she let go. And NATO gets out of Russia's face. Should Russia dishonor its commitment, economic
sanctions are the answer, not another European war.
"... Not a Trump supporter, but Trump was right when he said Democrats wrote Khizr Khan's speech. In the middle of attacking Trump for the Mexican wall and ban on Muslims, he attacked Trump for opposing free trade. (Something only Clintonista weasels would dream up.) ..."
Not a Trump supporter, but Trump was right when he said Democrats wrote Khizr Khan's
speech. In the middle of attacking Trump for the Mexican wall and ban on Muslims, he
attacked Trump for opposing free trade. (Something only Clintonista weasels would dream
up.)
It's ridiculous to suggest that a politician is not allowed to say anything in defense
of attacks leveled by "sacred" parents of slain soldiers. Their point was that they are
Muslim and American and their son died fighting for America. His point: why didn't the
speechwriters give the wife a couple of lines? Is this husband a social-conservative Muslim
who doesn't permit his wife to speak? Those are not American values.
BTW, do people think Trump's ban on Muslims is bad? The fact is, America is at war with
a number of Muslim nations and factions. FDR declared war on Japan. Then put Japanese
Americans in concentration camps. Trump has yet to get FDR on their asses!
ilsm said in reply to
Ron Waller...
I am a Vietnam era
veteran, I earned a pension, with no disability, and I think the 6000 KIA from Clinton's
Universal perpetual war vote are discredited by Clinton using a family of a KIA to rub
Trumps nose in his "screen muslims position".
Reply
Monday, August 01, 2016
at 04:31 PM
Ron Waller said in reply to ilsm...
Ha. Didn't even realize
the hypocrisy.
I did notice it in Hillary's attack on Trump for using outsourcing yet opposing free
trade. She helped put the TPP together and called it the 'gold standard' of trade deals.
(By gold standard I take it she means big on investor protection limiting the scope of
democratic government.)
This is the same as calling Warren Buffet a hypocrite calling for higher taxes on the
rich, but not willing to donate the difference to the government.
Business people operate in the business environment and the existing supply chains.
They have to play by the existing rules or lose out to their competitors. No business
person is a hypocrite calling for reforms to the system. Only government regulations can
change the system.
Trump is putting his money where his mouth is by vowing to tear up terrible trade
deals that could cut into his profits.
Hillary's position on the TPP is don't ask/don't tell. Don't ask if she'll tear up
the agreement and she won't tell she's already taken the bribe money.
Reply
Monday, August 01, 2016
at 05:32 PM
chriss1519 said...
Frankly, I find Paul Ryan
more vile than Trump. Trump says some awful things, but at least his policies come from
a place where he has some concern for the little guy. Ryan is all too happy to see the
poor ground into the dirt. Ideological consistency above all else.
Reply
Monday, August 01, 2016
at 02:30 AM
lilnev said in reply
to chriss1519...
Trump is all too happy to
screw the little guy. That's been his behavior all his life. He has found that applause
lines about the little guy are a great way to promote himself, that's all.
I do find Paul Ryan more heinous, though. The man who wouldn't even let Congress vote on
Zika funding because he knew it would pass. That's a much more calculated evil than the
filth that spews out of Trump.
Reply
Monday, August 01, 2016
at 05:39 AM
Sanjait said in reply
to chriss1519...
If you think Trump cares
about the little guy, I have a degree program from Trump University to sell you ...
But I take your point about Ryan,
RC AKA Darryl, Ron said...
"...But democracy isn't about
making a statement, it's about exercising responsibility. And indulging your feelings at a
time like this amounts to dereliction of your duty as a citizen..."
[Paul Krugman appears to
confuse the way the world actually works with how he thinks the world should work. I guess
that is how voting works in his model, but if it really worked that way in reality then there
is no way to explain the existence of either of our two mainstream political parties. You
don't get to where we are with our political system by exercising responsibility and that has
been true all my life. Politics has been entirely about triangulating demographic groups by
their susceptibility to leveraging their contradictions between their aspirations and their
fears.]
Peter K. said in reply to RC
AKA Darryl, Ron...
They tell you to choose between
Coke and Pepsi and make the responsible choice. Politics is more than that.
It's about that
almighty dollar.
As Obama said in his speech in Philly:
"So if you agree that there's too much inequality in our economy, and too much money in our
politics, we all need to be as vocal and as organized and as persistent as Bernie Sanders'
supporters have been."
The New Democrats like Bill Clinton who triangulate do so in part to attract wealthy
donors. Sanders showed you don't have to with his numerous small contributions.
But when you appeal to the wishes of wealthy donors you demoralize your base and depress
the vote.
If Hillary isn't progressive enough, she'll create more Trump voters. How is that
responsible?
jjhman said in reply to RC
AKA Darryl, Ron...
In these discussions my mind
alwasy turns back to, as said above, how things actually work instead of what we would like or
the constitution may require.
The way things really work is that political elites run the
show. For government to work the elites have to give the voters rational choices that depend
on elites doing thier homework and actually having reasons for why one path or the other would
advance the needs of the society. The system only works when there is some sense of noblesse
oblige in the elites and the voters believe that the elites actually are trying to make things
better.
The success of the Trump and Sanders campaigns show that large numbers of voters don't
believe that the actors in the two parties are working to solve the country's problems. And
there is certainly evidence that the Paul Ryans and Mitch McConnells care more about their own
careers than the good of the country or even of any ideology.
EMichael said in reply
to jjhman...
I love the idea that
somehow, in 2016, there is a change in the feelings of the American people from other
elections.
The first election I paid attention to was in the 60s. Starting then, and
continuing right through today every single election has been about how bad things are
and what can make them better. And either the previous admin paid no attention to those
things or we just need to build on what the previous admin did.
Reply
Monday, August 01, 2016
at 09:45 AM
RC AKA Darryl, Ron
said in reply to jjhman...
I would agree with all of
that if you were to omit the word "rational." Elites give voters choices. It is not
rational to expect that those choices would actually be in the interest of the majority
of voters anywhere near as much in the interest of elites except in those instances that
the electorate is on the verge of rebellion and insurrection. The US Constitution was
never structured to serve a democracy in any egalitarian manner. The Constitution
provided for a system of elite privilege based on property rights and inheritance
instead of bloodline and inheritance. We have been given the means to rebel
democratically within the Constitutional provisions for elections within the republic,
but instead we cling to elites for guidance and are fated to eternally fall to
disappointment and regret. Solidarity can render the existing party system irrelevant.
Don't re-elect anyone until they all do what we want. We just lack solidarity.
Reply
Monday, August 01, 2016
at 10:45 AM
David said...
The more I think about
Trump the less I know what I could rationally think to say about him.
The Republican
party has advantages that are structured in gerrymandering and just demographics, in the
South. As a national party, they are losing these advantages, and will continue to do
so.
But one point: in my youth, the right wing was always paranoid in a weird way about
communism. The Manchurian Candidate, Dr. Strangelove. The Vietnam war. The cold war. So
I honestly thought when the cold war ended that the paranoia and hate would stop.
Then we get Bill Clinton. And the hate and paranoia increased! The point is, hate and
paranoia is right wing oxygen - without it they die, they have no raison d'etre.
But even some of the right wingers have seen hate and paranoia can be twisted,
manipulated by someone who, let's be honest, has no idea of what he's doing, no
self-control, and no understanding global politics. He's like a child who wanders into
the middle of a movIe:
But he's a dangerous child.
Observer said in reply to
David ...
Judging buy the comments here,
there is plenty of "hate and paranoia" on both sides.
ilsm said in reply to pgl...
Kissinger and Albright endorsed
Clinton!
Sanjait said in reply to
Eric377...
There is something weird about
fear of communism *taking over the United States*. It was never going to happen and it was
always obvious it was never going to happen.
It's only less ridiculous by a matter of degree
than people who fear "creeping Sharia law" in the US.
jjhman said in reply to
Sanjait...
The hysterical fear of communism
in the US goes back at least to the Red Scare era following the Russian revolution. I have
always wondered how much effort the industrial magnates of that post-gilded age had to invest
in the media to get that horse running and keep it running for the rest of the 20th century.
It seems that the fear-mongerers of today have abandoned socialism for Islamic terrorism. I
suspect that was one reason why Bernie could slip into a national election with his socialism
barely an issue.
ilsm said in reply to David
...
The bat @*&^ war mongers have
gone blue. Maybe the bat @*&^ GOPsters are going isolation.
The neocons Kagan and so forth
are backing the Clinton war wagon.
Fits with Bill breaking up Serbia, pushing the Kremlin's nose in it and reneging on keeping
NATO in the west.
I love it when the Clinton campaign kids who would never put on a uniform say: "we have to
honor alliances" that have no relation to the common defense.
I am old enough to not worry about nuclear winter, it is faster than climate disaster!
RGC said...
PK has jumped the shark.
He is now pure political hack.
He ignores what those "center-left" policies of the DLC
democrats have done, the Clinton's role in that and the resulting frustration and anger
of the people affected.
A majority of Americans now see no decent future for themselves and their children
and they are frustrated. They are doing what people do in that situation - they are
looking for someone to blame and punish.
PK and the DLC democrats point them to the republicans. The republicans point to the
democrats. But the truth is that they both created the economic malaise that now exists
on behalf of their plutocrat sponsors. The difference between them is cultural - not
economic.
Trump has the advantage of not having participated in creating that malaise. He is
also voicing some truths about US foreign policy that exposes the neocon element in both
parties. He is a terrible choice for president but when you are drowning you grab for
any piece of flotsam that floats by.
PK has played his part in getting us to this point by protecting the left flank of
economic policy from effective but "socialist" answers. But being a neoliberal isn't
enough, now he is a neocon too.
Reply
Monday, August 01, 2016
at 05:46 AM
JF said in reply to
RGC...
And I hope that the
Clinton campaign reads this.
They need to find positioning like the one Sanders had,
imo, or your characterization could end up being true at the polls.
Using PK in the positioning is using the wrong kind of person.
Reply
Monday, August 01, 2016
at 06:16 AM
Pinkybum said in reply to
RGC...
Yeah that's right Paul Krugman
is keeping the working class down in cahoots with the DLC democrats.
Sure the turn to
austerity in 2010 was an economic own-goal but it wasn't Obama who turned down a jobs bill in
2011 worth $447 billion.
RGC said in reply to
Pinkybum...
It was Obama who appointed 'deregulatin
Larry' Summers and 'tax-evading Timmy' Geithner. It was Obama who proposed cutting social
security. It was Obama who proposed austerity by saying we had to live within our means just
like any household.
Etc., etc.
Peter K. said in reply to
RGC...
It's Obama pushing the TPP.
RGC said in reply to
Tmb81...
I think Obama could have gotten
all that and more. I think he disappeared the day after the election.
I think he was bought and paid for just like Hillary is.
ilsm said in reply to RGC...
Obama reneged and acted as if he
supported AUMF from 2002 on!
ilsm said in reply to
Johannes Y O Highness...
UN needs to establish witness
protection for Russian hackers!
Obama calls off the FBI, someone has to look into Clinton
corruption.
IAW the mafia it is a crime to be a stool pigeon.
Bob said...
Just remember that the same
billionaires that employ Hillary also employ Krugman.
My advice: Beware of pollsters bearing forecasts, especially anyone trying to peek
into the future, especially those with money to bet.
Some 20 years ago, I
constructed a formula, The
Primary Model, that has predicted the winner of the popular vote in all five
presidential elections since it was introduced. It is based on elections dating to
1912. The formula was wrong only once: The 1960 election. That one hurt because
John F. Kennedy was my preferred candidate.
The Primary Model consists of two ingredients: The swing of the electoral
pendulum, and the outcomes of primaries.
You can see the pendulum work with the naked eye. After two terms in office,
the presidential party in power loses more often than not. In fact, over the past
65 years, it managed to win a third term only once. In 1988, President George H.W.
Bush extended Ronald Reagan's presidency by one more term. Reagan made this
possible by winning re-election by a bigger margin than when he first got elected.
That spells continuity, a desire for more of the same.
President Barack Obama has not left such a legacy for a Democratic successor.
He did worse in his re-election victory over Mitt Romney in 2012 than when he beat
John McCain in 2008. That spells, "It's Time for a Change!" The pendulum points to
the GOP in 2016, no matter whether the candidate was named Trump, Ted Cruz, Marco
Rubio, John Kasich or whoever.
Now add the outcomes of presidential primaries. Although some experts claim
primary votes have no bearing on general elections, the fact is that primaries
prove uncanny in forecasting the winner in November. Take the first election with
a significant number of primaries, in 1912. In November that year, Woodrow Wilson,
the winner in Democratic primaries, defeated William Howard Taft, the loser in
Republican primaries; Taft was renominated since most states then did not use
primaries. In general, the party with the stronger primary candidate wins the
general election.
This year, Trump has wound up as the stronger of the two presidential nominees.
He won many more primaries than did Clinton. In fact, this was apparent as early
as early March. Trump handily won the first two primaries, New Hampshire and South
Carolina, while Clinton badly lost New Hampshire to Sen. Bernie Sanders before
beating him in South Carolina.
The Primary Model predicts that Trump will defeat Clinton with 87 percent
certainty. He is the candidate of change. When voters demand change, they are
willing to overlook many foibles of the change candidate. At the same time, the
candidate who touts experience will get more intense scrutiny for any missteps and
suspicions of misconduct of the record of experience.
Trump may be lucky to have picked an election in which change trumps experience
and experience may prove to be a mixed blessing.
Helmut Norpoth is the director of undergraduate studies and political
science professor at Stony Brook University.
"... The pedophile scandals among the U.K.'s elite and officialdom are now well know even among the snoozers and comatose. But the snoozers can't connect the dots that infestations of pedophiles and perverts in government is by design. A number of U.K. police investigators have been openly murdered over the years for stumbling onto high-level pedophiles. ..."
"... As I have often mentioned on these pages previously, I do believe pedophiles and various other perverts are actively recruited into positions of power so that they can be compromised and controlled by the criminal cabal. ..."
The case of well-connected Jewish billionaire Jeffrey Epstein made a
splash about a year ago. Convicted of sex with under-aged girls, since
then related news has been largely suppressed. Epstein is in a position
to compromise high level people by providing under-aged girls for the
likes of Prince Andrew and Bill Clinton. Dossiers and lewd photos with
teenyboppers may be called upon as needed.
I actually believe these
activities are a requirement for entrance into the Crime Syndicate inner
circle. In fact, this goes along way in explaining how an obscure Arkansas
governor who can't keep it in his pants can go on to become president
of the United States and his wife the leading presidential candidate
now. According to John Perkins in Confession of an Economic Hitman,
the motives of psychopaths at the top of pyramid are sex, money and
power.
Now it has been revealed that Bill Clinton was in reality a dedicated
regular reveler on Epstein's jet, Lolita Express. The mainstream media
has suddenly "discovered" that instead of being an infrequent "acquaintance"
of Epstein, Clinton was listed on the flight logs 26 times in just three
years. One wonders why such a story wasn't revealed much earlier?
Curiously, faux nationalist Donald Trump also has some Epstein involvement,
including a rape accusation (at an Epstein party) that so far has gotten
little Dominant Media (aka MSM) play. Trump's other friends were described
here.
In addition, another one-two punch story is emerging of Clinton Foundation
slush funds being used for "investments" with Bill's alleged mistress,
and yet another member of the Tribe, Julia Tauber McMahon, known as
"The Energizer." With the sleaze coming in all directions, is the takedown
of the Clintons at hand; and if so, why and by whom? Is somebody else
is in the wings to replace Hillary? Does the Epstein slime blob end
up slurping Trump?
The pedophile scandals among the U.K.'s elite and officialdom
are now well know even among the snoozers and comatose. But the snoozers
can't connect the dots that infestations of pedophiles and perverts
in government is by design. A number of U.K. police investigators have
been openly murdered over the years for stumbling onto high-level pedophiles.
As I have often mentioned on these pages previously, I do believe
pedophiles and various other perverts are actively recruited into positions
of power so that they can be compromised and controlled by the criminal
cabal. For more background on this general topic, see "Belgium's
Dutoux Pedophile and Child Rape Case: A Road Map for Deep-State Criminality,"
"Crime Syndicate Sexual Entrapment Operations" and "Wikispooks: Covert
Blackmail Ops."
In exploring sex offender Epstein's background story, what's particularly
interesting is how out of the blue this former math teacher was given
important positions in the organization of Jewish cabalist multi-billionaire
Ace Greenberg during the 1970s and '80s. As you may recall, the Greenberg
syndicate included Bear Stearns, the firm that nearly brought down the
world economy. Greenberg was the plutocrat who took down Elliott Spitzer
by way of a scandal. As the U.K.'s Independent reports:
Among [Epstein's] pupils was the son of Bear Stearns chairman
Ace Greenberg. In 1976, after a few years teaching the children
of the wealthy, he accepted a job offer from Mr. Greenberg that
allowed him to oversee their money.
Four years later, he was made a partner, but by 1982 he had
left to set up his own boutique investment company, J. Epstein and
Co. He reportedly only accepted clients prepared to invest a minimum
of $1 billion, though many profiles of Epstein admit a lack of hard,
verifiable facts about his business have added to the air of mystery."
Epstein was not just a run-of-the-mill sex offender but someone with
friends in high places that he liked to entertain in a certain manner
and who shared his proclivities.
Also notable and named in a lawsuit involving Epstein is the well-known
Zionist Israeli Hasbara mouthpiece and Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz,
who represented Epstein in his 2007 sex-offender case.
The claim from Jane Doe No. 3 (who joined three others) alleges that
Dershowitz himself participated in sex acts with underage girls. As
Epstein's legal representation, Dershowitz then arranged a secret non-prosecution
agreement (NPA) with the federal government in the cases of JD No. 1
and No. 2. According to the complaint, Dershowitz managed to influence
immunity from prosecution for all co-conspirators, including himself.
Prince Andrew also attempted to influence the U.S. judicial process
in the matter through lobbyist ties. Epstein served 13 months under
State charges.
However, there are a significant number of voters who supported Sen. Bernie
Sanders during the Democratic primary who now say they will either vote for
Dr. Stein, Mr. Trump, former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson or not at all–in that
order.
Below is an interactive chart based on more than 400 responses conducted
last night (7/30/2016) via our Internet panel and live interviews. It provides
cross tab data to determine the presidential preference for primary voters based
on the candidate they voted for in the primaries. While these results are particularly
strong for Dr. Stein–there were also an unusually high number of 18 to 29 year-old
samples–the total results include the 7-day rolling average, are weighted based
on demographics from the U.S. Census Current Population Survey and show Mr.
Trump ahead 46.8% to 42.2%.
The sub-sample shown in the chart paints pretty much the same picture as
the overall result. The polling data indicate Mr. Trump did a better job winning
over those Republicans who did not vote for him in the Republican presidential
primary (88%), as well as maintain those who did (97.8%). Mrs. Clinton is maintaining
94.4% of Democratic voters who cast their primary ballot for her, but less than
half (47.7%) of those who voted for Sen. Sanders say they are certain they will
be on board.
Now to Dr. Stein's bump. Again, we do not believe Mrs. Clinton will only
end up with half of Sen. Sanders' voters. Last night was an unusual response.
But we are saying many, many voters are very, very angry.
Nearly 16% of Sanders supporters say they will vote for Mr. Trump, but more
than a quarter are at least giving Dr. Stein a serious look. Sanders' voters
also have a largely favorable view of Dr. Stein (56%), compared to only 33%
who say the same for Mrs. Clinton. Not surprisingly, these voters are markedly
more likely to say they don't believe the federal government acts in the interest
of the people. Another 5.6% of her support comes from the small pool of voters
who supported another candidate in the Democratic presidential primary.
Whether Dr. Stein can maintain that level of support is uncertain and worth
debating as we collect and digest more polling data in the upcoming days and
weeks. But what isn't up for debate is the fact that a significant number of
Sen. Sanders' voters have extremely negative views of Mrs. Clinton and are not
quite ready to just suck it up and move on.
"... Similar to the styling of the British vote to leave the European Union, they're calling the movement #DemExit. ..."
"... After the Democratic National Convention brought some Sanders supporters into the fold, others are refusing to settle viewing the leaked emails, indicating the DNC's preference for Hillary Clinton over Sanders as the final straw. ..."
There's a push to make green the new blue. As some Bernie Sanders supporters
are jumping ship from the democratic party, opting instead to vote for green
party candidate Jill Stein.
Similar to the styling of the British vote to
leave the European Union, they're calling the movement #DemExit.
Some Sanders supporters see the choice between the Democratic and Republican
presidential nominees as simple: "Whether we get Hillary or we get Trump, we
get just as dangerous on either side just-in different ways," Sanders supporter
Erik Rydberg said.
After the Democratic National Convention brought some Sanders supporters
into the fold, others are refusing to settle viewing the leaked emails, indicating
the DNC's preference for Hillary Clinton over Sanders as the final straw.
Progressives who are fed up with the Democratic leadership's adherence to the status quo are
calling for a major #DemExit on July 29. However, progressive groups, such as Black Men for
Bernie, are urging voters to stay in the party until they have a chance to vote in their states'
primaries, especially if they live in closed or semi-closed primary states.
Abstaining from #DemExit until after state and local primaries is especially important for Florida,
which has a closed primary. On August 30, Professor and legal expert Tim Canova has a chance to unseat
Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, whose tenure as the head of the Democratic
Party has been fraught with controversy and more recently, allegations of election fraud and rigging.
A mass exodus, therefore, could sabotage progressives' own agenda to elect officials who are challenging
incumbents and establishment candidates. As of now, 23 states and territories have local and state
primaries up until September 13, so it is imperative for current members of the Democratic party
to stay until they've voted and then commit to #DemExit.
"... Why do we see such an orchestrated attempt to preemptively accuse Russia of potentially manipulating U.S. voting? This without ANY evidence that Russia ever has or would attempt to do so? Are there already plans for such manipulations that need a plausible foreign culprit as cover up story? Or is there a color revolution in preparation to eventually disenfranchise the election winner? ..."
"... "hacking", or rather, snooping and leaking, is business as usual... remember when the Sanders and Clinton campaigns were fighting over DNC server data? ..."
"... The source of the DNC email leak is irrelevant. The Orwellian chant "Putin bad; US good!" is the point of the whole thing, and the media is just a bullhorn for the party/parties. ..."
"... But I do look forward to the show when the emails Trump referred to are released. What is Hillary afraid of? it's not like nobody knows what she's done... and wants to do next. ..."
"... the United States has been a failed state from the perspective of voting integrity from at least 2000. The lunatics are running the asylum here and we voters are only allowed to participate as a hollow form of placation. ..."
"... Our famous "free press," so totally controlled by Big Corporations. Always looking for a way to try to persuade the public that any political and social actions is bad and of no importance. ACK! ..."
"... My immediate thought was of the White House managed meetings with mayors of cities where Occupy was very much not "crushed," and how they coordinated their attacks by knocking down tents, dumped books into dupsters, which were part of the free lending library in some cities, and forcing people out of sites long occupied with the persuasion of threatened force and physical harm. ..."
"... we know the neocons intend to cheat to get Hillary elected. Sounds like a warning to Russia to keep out of the way or else. ..."
"... This video below shows that the pressure of the Russian hacking lies worked on Trump. What kind of genius is that b ? Trump: Putin has no respect for the US. Starts at 1min 20 sec : https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=riuduXz5Y2I Trump on Russia finding Hillays emails : https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gNa2B5zHfbQ ..."
"... If Trump is such a genius then why would he make so many idiotic and contradictory statements, and then cave it so easily into pressure of lies like this against Russia ? Immediately antagonizing Russia. ..."
"... The problem with the 'Trump as Manchurian Candidate' narrative is that most people (even Democrats) deep down, probably don't really believe it. It runs right into his 'America First' that the same people have been complaining about. In the absence of hard evidence, actually shared with the public, the Putin connection will eventually fall apart. ..."
"... Bruce Schneier has been having a neolibcon bias for years with a blind spot for NSA activities. I stopped reading his stupid blog, with little to no added value regarding security news, when it became too obvious. ..."
"... 'The only reason not to have paper copies is to allow fraud.' ..."
"... Very well and concisely put. Except for the 'copies' bit. The only reason not to have paper ballots ..."
"... To me the answer seems obvious: voters registered and elections administered, ballots tallied and stored at the precinct level. There are about 175,000 precincts in the USA, each composed of 1,000 to 2,000 people. A workable size for real, participatory democracy, the basis for all constituencies - municipal, county, state, federal - erected upon them. First come the people , then come our governments. ..."
"... Russia told the United States on Thursday to get to the bottom of of its own hacking scandal. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said accusations of a Russian hand in hacking Democratic Party emails bordered on "total stupidity" and were motivated by anti-Russian sentiment. ..."
"... Michael Connell - who died at age 45, leaving a wife and four kids - was a computer networking expert who lived near Akron. Last July 17, an attorney who's filed a federal civil rights lawsuit alleging a conspiracy to rig elections in Ohio held a press conference at which he identified Connell as a principal witness. ..."
"... the missing deleted emails would most likely also reveal the innards of the Clinton family Foundation. Not really missing. It would be a great disappointment if copies are not in a few 3 letter agencies. ..."
"... Great George Carlin probably did not know many actual names of the "big owners" when he wrote ..."
"... ...The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice you don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own, and control the corporations. They've long since bought, and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. ..."
"... They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying lobbying, to get what they want Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I'll tell you what they don't want they don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking... ..."
"... The perfidy of Manly is that he does not say how to _prevent_ possible breaches, but creates perception of "Russians having access to everything" instead. So he does not really care about solving the problem, but about maintaining the notion that the problem magically persist. ..."
"... "As regards these (email) batches, that is not our headache. We never poke our noses into others' affairs and we really don't like it when people try to poke their nose into ours," he said. "The Americans needs to get to the bottom of what these emails are themselves and find out what it's all about." ..."
"... The DNC was "hacked "by some of Killary's Israeli chums/clients... Lets look at the proffered "evidence" for a Russian Hack.. The hackers "seem to have been following a schedule of "Russian" holdiays... Half (or more) of the people in Israel follow that same schedule of holdiays... ..."
"... Article on Gen. Breedlove: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/breedlove-network-sought-weapons-deliveries-for-ukraine-a-1104837.html Defense contractors, think tanks, and Breedlove feared Congress would cut U.S. troop levels in Europe. ..."
"... desperate ..."
"... The Americans are beginning to tell themselves another 'real' war will solve their problems ... look at the DNC convention ... and it'll be OK because it will be another war 'over there'. It won't be over there, it'll be right here no matter where that is. ..."
"... Bruce Schneier used to charge the Chinese in every hacking incident, I guess there is now a "pivot" in the propaganda world. ..."
"... It is obvious that our elections are hacked: Florida in 2000, Ohio 2004, and now Brooklyn, Nevada, Arizona, California and other locations this year. They were hacked by our own crooks who would never allow Rooskies to muscle in on the action. Few polling stations in crowded districts, removing names from voter lists, private companies contracted to "count", voter suppression ID laws, jailing of voting populations, gerrymandering, etc. The Rooskies can only bring a rubber chicken to a gun fight. ..."
"... I have said many times: "We must abolish election machines, such as voting computers. If they make casting and tallying 10 times faster, they make organized cheating 10 times easier as well. Which can we truly afford?" ..."
"... I can't for the life of me understand why so many hawks in the State Dept and elsewhere are sooooo afraid of Putin. They still mad he nationalized oil companies? ..."
"... Just suppose the emails of the DNC were released by the Clinton Machine, what a creative tactic, and certainly there is no reason to doubt that...a great media firestorm ensues, DWS had to fall on her sword but quickly gets hoisted on the Clinton petard..as a campaign manager ..."
"... The evil that we face is an alternate philosophical position which rejects all the moral tenets of the world's 7 great religions. The goal is the rule of a tiny sect which imagines itself a godhead over humanity. ..."
The Clinton campaign and some pseudo experts assert that Russia is somehow guilty of hacking the
Democratic National Committee and of revealing DNC emails via Wikileaks. There is
zero hard evidence for that. The Clinton campaign also
claims that Trump asked Russia to hack Clinton's emails. That is also not the case.
But two "liberal" computer experts, who are taken serious in the security scene, now build on
those false assertions to say that Russia might manipulate voting machines in the November 9 elections.
It would do so, presumably, to change the vote count in favor of Trump.
That headline alone is already dumb. ANY hacker could target and manipulate the easy to deceive
voting machines - should those be connected to the Internet. Local administrators of such machines
can manipulate them any time.
Schneier is, untypically for him, in war mongering mode.
If the intelligence community has indeed ascertained that Russia is to blame, our government needs
to decide what to do in response. This is difficult because the attacks are politically partisan,
but it is essential. If foreign governments learn that they can influence our elections with impunity,
this opens the door for future manipulations, both document thefts and dumps like this one that
we see and more subtle manipulations that we don't see.
The U.S. manipulates foreign elections all the time,
according to Bush administration
lawyer Jack Goldsmith. It may not feel nice to suddenly be the target of manipulation attempts instead
of the perpetrator, but manipulation attempts in elections are normal everywhere and no reason to
start a war or other "response" measures.
Schneier:
[W]e need to secure our election systems before autumn. If Putin's government has already used
a cyberattack to attempt to help Trump win, there's no reason to believe he won't do it again
- especially now that Trump is inviting the "help."
What a joke. Trump has not invited Russian "help" to manipulate voting computers. Trump also did
not ask Russia to "hack" the Clinton email sever. That server no longer exists. If the Clinton email-server
was secure, as Clinton asserts, and if the emails in question have been deleted, as Clinton also
asserts, how could Russia "hack" for them?
Trump made a FOIA request for emails that, Hillary Clinton claims, have been deleted. What does
she fear about that? Trump asked Russia to give the deleted Clinton emails to the FBI, should it
by chance have a copy of them. Such a Freedom of Information Act request usually goes to a part of
the U.S. administration. But the Obama administration says it does not have those emails. Trump then
made a joke in directing the request to Russia.
Trump did get the furious media "outrage" response he intended to get. He thereby ruined the PR
effect of the last night of the Democratic Convention. That was likely the sole intention of his
stunt and
again shows his marketing genius.
But back to the Schneier op-ed. That one is now joined
by
a piece at Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow. Doctorow is like Schneier a famous person in the computer
scene. He quotes the Schneier piece and adds:
Voting machines are so notoriously terrible that they'd be a very tempting target for
Russia or other states that want to influence the outcome in 2016 (or merely
destabilize the US by calling into question the outcome in an election).
The Doctorow sentence neglects, like Schneier, that the entities with the most obvious interest
and capabilities to manipulate U.S. voting machines are not foreign countries. U.S. presidential
candidates and their parties have much more at stake. The candidates and the money and interests
behind them have stronger motives as well as more potential to change the voting results.
Why do we see such an orchestrated attempt to preemptively accuse Russia
of potentially manipulating U.S. voting? This without ANY evidence that Russia ever has or would
attempt to do so? Are there already plans for such manipulations that need a plausible foreign culprit
as cover up story? Or is there a color revolution in preparation to eventually disenfranchise the
election winner?
Cory Doctorow also sees destabilization as a possible motive and outcome of voting manipulations.
Already back in March John Robb
warned of a scenario this fall in which election results come into serious doubt and where a
conflict over voting results escalates into a civil war.
I do not foresee such a scenario (yet). But should large scale voting manipulations take place,
and be blamed on Russia, more than a civil war enters the realm of possibilities.
The source of the DNC email leak is irrelevant. The Orwellian chant "Putin bad; US good!"
is the point of the whole thing, and the media is just a bullhorn for the party/parties.
The voting machine rumor is probably aimed at the actual corruption in some places that was designed
to favor republicans in swing states. (ironic!) watch them call for more honest verification this
time around.
But I do look forward to the show when the emails Trump referred to are released. What
is Hillary afraid of? it's not like nobody knows what she's done... and wants to do next.
For all intents and purposes, the United States has been a failed state from the perspective
of voting integrity from at least 2000. The lunatics are running the asylum here and we voters
are only allowed to participate as a hollow form of placation.
Our famous "free press," so totally controlled by Big Corporations. Always looking for a way
to try to persuade the public that any political and social actions is bad and of no importance.
ACK!
On Tuesday night, iirc, but could have been Wednesday, the discussion mentioned Occupy as a
failed political/social movement. PBS's Gwen Ifill said that it was "crushed by its own weight."
It was part of the MCM (Mainstream Corporate Media) declaring the Sanders' promoted political
revolution dead and nearly buried.
My immediate thought was of the White House managed meetings with mayors of cities where
Occupy was very much not "crushed," and how they coordinated their attacks by knocking down tents,
dumped books into dupsters, which were part of the free lending library in some cities, and forcing
people out of sites long occupied with the persuasion of threatened force and physical harm.
But her statement was part and parcel of how the actual left of any type is dismissed and disrespected
by the Corporatist Dems and their Repub allies.
The neo-cons realized how easy it was to rig the election in 2000 after which both sides do it.
Now it's down to who who rigs it best. It's a one-party state anyway, two cheeks on the same ass,
but every politician wants to be the one who does the telling not the told.
I think the neo-cons impeached Clinton to ruin the Democrat run because 9/11 was ready to go,
and they needed to be in power or they risked being uncovered by the security services of a Gore
White House. When the impeachment failed they had no choice but to go in and steal it, because
they'd have gone down for their treason. Look what it did to the world.
US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said that the US intelligence authorities
are not ready to say who is responsible for hacking the Democratic National Committee emails.
I do not think we are quite ready yet to make a call on attribution," Clapper stated
at the Aspen Security Forum.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Why not and when will he be ready? Oh never mind. If Schneier is so concerned the election
voting machines can be hacked -(Notice no mention of pre-programmed votes) - let's return to paper
ballots and pencils. And who counts the votes?
Oh wait... the Supreme Court may issue a decree to stop the count as they did on December 12,
2000.
In a desperate attempt for bs stupid assertion of Trumps genius, b refuses to give a link for
what Trump actually said. B also refuses to give us a sentenced quote from Trump. How weak.
This video below shows that the pressure of the Russian hacking lies worked on Trump. What
kind of genius is that b ?
Trump: Putin has no respect for the US. Starts at 1min 20 sec :
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=riuduXz5Y2I
If Trump is such a genius then why would he make so many idiotic and contradictory statements,
and then cave it so easily into pressure of lies like this against Russia ? Immediately antagonizing
Russia.
Also if trump really understands how corrupt the US voting system is, then what kind of genius
would not hedge himself against that voting corruption surely to be done against Trump and for
Hitlery - by saying insanely incessant stupid moronic things that expose him to attacks.
Wouldn't you hedge yourself by keeping on core message and not dragging yourself back into
the pack with stupidity.
Trump said that Putin called Trump a genius, and pathetically that's all b needs to know.
The problem with the 'Trump as Manchurian Candidate' narrative is that most people (even Democrats)
deep down, probably don't really believe it. It runs right into his 'America First' that the same
people have been complaining about. In the absence of hard evidence, actually shared with the
public, the Putin connection will eventually fall apart.
Trumps MO is to say something that generates a lot of outrage that dominates the news cycle
at opportune moments. He does this when there is something else he doesn't want you to pay attention
to. Remember when Trump University was in the news? He comes back with those statements about
the judge. Last night, you had the president, the vice-president among the heavy hitters - what
better time to pull a stunt like that? For a party that prides themselves as being the 'smart'
one, the Democrats have been remarkably slow in figuring this out.
Trump probably won't pull anything like this with Hillary - the thing with her is that the
more people see her, the less they like her - so let her have her hour of shouting a speech at
us.
For voting machine issues, watch the Stephen Spoonamore series on YouTube. Each segment is about
3-4 minutes. Think there are eight segments. The series is 10 years old but extremely timely.
Velvet Revolution Interviews Stephen Spoonamore (segment 1)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAyEfovA404
THEN watch his 2008 series, search YouTube. Warning: Annoying white noise in background. His
solution to vote fraud specified in the later segments is ingenious. Spoonamore was the guy American
Express and major banks called when they are hacked.
A cyber attack has been given the status of a conventional military attack by NATO on
14th June in a major policy change that increases the likelihood of a world war against Russia.
Bruce Schneier has been having a neolibcon bias for years with a blind spot for NSA activities.
I stopped reading his stupid blog, with little to no added value regarding security news, when
it became too obvious.
PS: when will you remove the embedded links to google, yahoo, ...?
The democrats are warning loud and clear that Russia may hack the voting machines in favor of
Trump. In fact, they are preparing the terrain to use this argument in case Trump is elected.
To make such stupid statements, it shows that the dems are seriously worried that Hillary is quickly
loosing ground.
@27 cresty, 'The only reason not to have paper copies is to allow fraud.'
Very well and concisely put. Except for the 'copies' bit. The only reason not to have paper
ballots is to allow fraud.
To me the answer seems obvious: voters registered and elections administered, ballots tallied
and stored at the precinct level.
There are about
175,000 precincts in the USA, each composed of 1,000 to 2,000 people. A workable size for
real, participatory democracy, the basis for all constituencies - municipal, county, state, federal
- erected upon them. First come
the people , then
come our governments.
2004, not 2008. Obama and Dems won Ohio in 2008. The Republicans' computer expert in Ohio died
afterwards in a fishy small plane accident just as he was about to testify.
from Russia (with Love). Russia To US: "Sort Out Your Own Hacking Scandal; It Is Not Our Headache"
As the silly farce over whether Russia hacked the DNC continues, earlier today the Kremlin had
some harsh words for the US.
Russia told the United States on Thursday to get to the bottom of of its own hacking scandal.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said accusations of a Russian hand in hacking Democratic Party
emails bordered on "total stupidity" and were motivated by anti-Russian sentiment. Suggestions
of Russian involvement riled the Kremlin, which has categorically denied this and accused U.S.
politicians of seeking to play on Cold War-style U.S. fears of Moscow by fabricating stories for
electoral purposes.
"As regards these (email) batches, that is not our headache. We never poke our noses into
others' affairs and we really don't like it when people try to poke their nose into ours,"
he said.
"The Americans needs to get to the bottom of what these emails are themselves and find out
what it's all about."
"... Trump made a FOIA request for emails that, Hillary Clinton claims, have been deleted. What
does she fear about that? Trump asked Russia to give the deleted Clinton emails to the FBI, should
it by chance have a copy of them. Such a Freedom of Information Act request usually goes to a
part of the U.S. administration. But the Obama administration says it does not have those emails.
Trump then made a joke in directing the request to Russia ..."
What Clinton fears is that the deleted emails are emails related to the work she did (or supposedly
did) while she was US Secretary of State and therefore they would be proof that she violated federal
US laws on recordkeeping. Some of these emails might cast light on the 2012 Benghazi consulate
attack and whether she can be held partly responsible for the deaths of four Americans during
that attack.
Jessia @3. Schneier is an insider - Harvard and the US DoD. It is also ironic that he wrote a
book titled: Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive.
If voter fraud is the criterion of a failed state (and why not), the US failed in 1960 when
John Kennedy not only stole the Democratic nomination through voter fraud in West Virginia but
also stole the general election through voter fraud in Illinois.
Tricky Dick Nixon was urged to contest the Illinois vote and contest the outcome of the election.
He pointedly refused to do so saying that a contested election would do more harm to the country
than allowing a fraudulent victory for JFK.
Well, it does appear the U.S. is in full Loon mode (my apologies to the bird). The Clinton campaign
is doing a fantastic job of deflection and distraction and the idiots are falling for it. It would
seem Russia's Pres. Putin is indeed omnipotent.
The missing Hitlary Killton's deleted emails would reveal most probably that the current war against
Libya, Syria, Iraq has been mostly her private endeavor (plus Petreaus, CIA, Raytheon) at the
request of her Bilderberg/City of London Crown Corporation masters, outside Obama's control.
@23 Thank you Noirette for that missing piece of the puzzle.
I forgot abut that in my reply on earlier thread.
The scenario deep state/global criminal cabal has been preparing against the US people and
the world would go like this:
Hitlary looses to Trump
Russia is blamed with fabricated evidence for rigging the election
civil unrest in incited (Israeli snipers shooting civilians at random + police trained
by the Israeli advisors brutalizes protesters)
hot spots in conflict zones (Turkey, Ukraine, Pribaltica) are set on fire - blamed on Russia
(Phillipines blamed on China)
nukes going off in Chicago
NATO considers "Russian cyber attack" as an act of war and responds
In order to avoid this at this point anybody who supports the Hell Bitch should be boycotted
and ostracized, including all the celebrities (who obviously pay their dues for their dark, secret
deals) not only that filth
Sarah Silverman and alike, who lower themselves to such a sewer level, also companies, local
politicians and so on...
Web guru was potential witness in Ohio voting fraud case
Shannon Connell of Madison says her brother Michael rarely talked about work. She knew he
ran an Ohio company called New Media Communications that set up websites for Republicans including
former President George H.W. Bush and Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. But it wasn't until after he died
last December, when the small plane he was piloting crashed, that she learned via the Internet
of his tie to a voter fraud case and to allegations that presidential adviser Karl Rove had
made threats against him.
"At first, it was really hard for me to believe Mike was dead because somebody wanted him
dead," says Shannon, a buyer for a local children's resale shop. "But as time goes on, it's
hard for me not to believe there was something deliberate about it."
A native of Illinois, Shannon moved to Madison in 2002, the same year as her sister, Mary
Jo Walker. Walker, a former Dane County Humane Society employee, has similar concerns about
their brother's death: "It doesn't seem right to me at all."
Michael Connell - who died at age 45, leaving a wife and four kids - was a computer
networking expert who lived near Akron. Last July 17, an attorney who's filed a federal civil
rights lawsuit alleging a conspiracy to rig elections in Ohio held a press conference at which
he identified Connell as a principal witness.
The attorney, Cliff Arnebeck of Columbus, Ohio, tells Isthmus he doesn't believe Connell
was engaged in criminal activity but may have been a "data-processing implementer" for those
who were. "I was told he was at the table when some criminal things were discussed."
A week after the press conference, on July 24, Arnebeck wrote U.S. Attorney General Michael
Mukasey seeking protection for Connell, whom he said had been "threatened" by Rove, a key player
in the campaigns of George W. Bush. Arenebeck says Connell was told through an intermediary
that unless he agreed to "take the fall" for election fraud in Ohio, his wife [and New Media
partner] faced prosecution for lobby law violations. There was no claim of a threat on Connell's
person.
Arnebeck was permitted to depose Connell last Nov. 3. The portion of this deposition that
dealt with the alleged threats was sealed, but Arnebeck is preparing a motion to make it all
public. He affirms that Connell denied any involvement in voter fraud, but thinks Rove still
had reason to regard him as a threat.
"The problem that Mike Connell represented is [he was] a guy of conscience," says Arnebeck.
"If it came right down to it, he would not commit perjury." Arnebeck "absolutely" would have
called Connell as a witness in his lawsuit.
Shannon and Mary Jo both say their brother, a devout Catholic, seemed upset in the weeks
before his death. Mary Jo feels he was "stressed out and depressed" on his birthday last November;
Shannon says he atypically did not respond to an email she'd sent.
On Dec. 19, Connell flew alone in his single-engine Piper Supercub from a small airport
near Washington, D.C. The plane crashed on its final approach to his hometown Akron-Canton
Airport, between two houses. The cause is still under investigation but is presumed accidental.
The blogosphere refuses to accept this. "Mike was getting ready to talk," writes one online
journalist who labels Connell a source. "He was frightened."
Going viral and encouraging disgruntled Democrats to leave the party in all states without
upcoming primaries. This does not mean that a percentage of these people won't still vote Democrat
in the general election but there is also an active effort coming from the Green Party to recruit
these people. Sanders very publicly leaving the Democrat Party to return to Independent was
very significant and a signal to his supporters to give the Demexit go sign. Many states have
a deadline of August 1st for pre-election party switches, so that leaves only a couple days
for many.
The interactive map and Demexit instruction page being circulated is here. As is customary
with the left, alot of work and coordination went into putting this together.
Sanders is an Independent in the Senate but also a member of the Democratic Party, according
to his spokesman, Michael Briggs.
Notice Biggs said member?
= = = =
the missing deleted emails would most likely also reveal the innards of the Clinton family
Foundation. Not really missing. It would be a great disappointment if copies are not in a few
3 letter agencies.
FBI investigates hacking of Democratic congressional group – sources
[.] Jim Manley, a Democratic strategist who once worked for Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid,
said the possibility of the DCCC being hacked was cause for great concern.
"Until proven otherwise, I would suggest that everyone involved with the campaign committee
operate under the assumption Russians have access to everything in their computer systems," Manley
said.
[. ] The disclosure of the DCCC breach is likely to further stoke concerns among Democratic
Party operatives, many of whom have acknowledged they fear further dumps of hacked files that
could harm their candidates. WikiLeaks has said it has more material related to the U.S. election
that it intends to release.[.]
= = = =
"They fear" Wikileaks intends to release the big one?
Great George Carlin probably did not know many actual names of the "big owners" when he wrote
...The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice
you don't.
You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the
important land. They own, and control the corporations. They've long since bought, and paid
for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their
back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the
news and information you get to hear.
They got you by the balls.
They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying lobbying, to get what they want Well,
we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I'll
tell you what they don't want they don't want a population of citizens capable of critical
thinking...
Blackstone is one of them, others being Fidelity, PIMCO, StateStreet...
Blackstone, the giant Wall Street private equity firm, will hold an invitation-only reception
before the final night of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. The event, at
the swanky Barnes Foundation art museum, includes the usual perks for attendees: free food,
drink, and complimentary shuttle buses to the final night of the convention.
What's unusual is that the host is precisely the kind of "shadow banker" that Hillary Clinton
has singled out as needing more regulation in her rhetoric about getting tough on Wall Street.
But Blackstone President and Chief Operating Officer Hamilton "Tony" James doesn't seem
the least bit intimidated...
... The head-scratcher here is that James runs a private equity firm, exactly the kind of
"shadow bank" that Clinton has derided as a scourge to the financial system. Shadow banks are
financial institutions that do bank-like activities (such as lending or investing for clients)
but aren't chartered as banks, existing outside of the traditional regulatory perimeter.
Clinton argued during the primaries with Bernie Sanders that they were more dangerous than
the big banks, because of the lack of scrutiny on their risk-taking. That was the linchpin
of her argument that Sanders's plan was too myopic, and thather plan, which sought to crack
down on shadow banking and deny it sources of funds, was more comprehensive.
James has not only actively engaged in defending the whole concept of shadow banking, he
created the original private equity trade group, formerly known as the Private Equity Council.
The group later quietly changed its name to the more innocuous-sounding American Investment
Council.
In 2014, James penned a Wall Street Journal op-ed where he called shadow banking an "Orwellian
term that can undermine critical thought." It was the regulated entities, not shadow banks,
that were "the source of almost all the systemic risk in the financial crisis," he wrote. James
explicitly sought to steer policymakers away from "regulations that undermine the many thousands
of companies and jobs that need market-based financing to survive and grow."
That term, "market-based financing," is a Tony James original. He prefers it because it
removes the more sinister connotations associated with the shadows. "Private equity sounds
bad, but shadow banking is worse," he told NPR.
Blackstone operates in leveraged buyouts, asset management, and real estate transactions.
It is the largest real estate private equity firm in the world, holding over $103 billion in
assets. After the housing bubble collapsed, Blackstone bought 43,000 single-family homes over
a two-year period, at one point buying more than $100 million worth of homes per week. They
converted most of these into rentals, becoming one of the largest landlords in the world.
Renters have sued Blackstone's real estate unit, Invitation Homes, for renting out homes
in shoddy condition. They've also been accused of jacking up rents to satisfy investors, charging
as high as 180 percent of the market rent value. Nevertheless, Blackstone plans to spin off
Invitation Homes with an initial public offering next year.
James's company also benefits from taking business lines from regulated banks, such as one
of the trading businesses of global firm Credit Suisse. Blackstone then runs that company without
government interference; assets in the Credit Suisse group have doubled since 2013.
So Clapper did not call it, but Manley has already "suggestion" blaming Russia... LOL.
The perfidy of Manly is that he does not say how to _prevent_ possible breaches, but creates perception
of "Russians having access to everything" instead. So he does not really care about solving the
problem, but about maintaining the notion that the problem magically persist.
Obviously to use that notion/perception later for some sinister goals.
This is just agitprop disinformation. Since the 'hanging chad' soft coup, all US voting machines
have backdoors to allow thevotes to be flipped, and since the Patriot Act, an Israeli subcontractor
and AT&T have had an NSA contract to 'hack' all US cell phone and internet traffic, but now there
is no need...GOOG and FB have apps on your tablet, your phone, and your sports band that record
and database all your thoughts and actions.
If you following computing, significant breakthroughs have been made in database manipulation,
to where terabytes of information can now be ground down to streaming focus group metrics on the
entire herd of so-called Little People. They can literally 'read your mind'.
'Russia' is just a Zionist mind-meld 'shiney object' whatever cognitive dissociation memes
they need to blunt-force eye-socket rape we and our children have to endure ... FOREVER
And to further make my point about the emails there is this quote from a Kremlin spokesman
Dmitry Peskov:
"As regards these (email) batches, that is not our headache. We never poke our noses
into others' affairs and we really don't like it when people try to poke their nose into ours,"
he said. "The Americans needs to get to the bottom of what these emails are themselves and
find out what it's all about."
The toxicity of this (2016) election has only been equalled by the election of 1860. Republicans
and Democrats were involved then also though the rôles have substantially changed, the results
are yet to be seen. What will 156 years of experience bring?
The DNC was "hacked "by some of Killary's Israeli chums/clients... Lets look at the proffered
"evidence" for a Russian Hack.. The hackers "seem to have been following a schedule of "Russian"
holdiays... Half (or more) of the people in Israel follow that same schedule of holdiays...
There are "clues" 'suggesting connections" with known Russian hacker groups..right..again,
any Russian hacker group "known" this well and this long, is not an active hacker group any more...
Except when Israelis, or whoever, are gaslighting them....The rest of the evidence, where any
one has even bothered to offer it, is just as weak, or even weaker.
"Nowhere on the intertubes that I frequent are stories about implications of the CONTENT of
the DNC emails. The only angle of the story that is allowed to be covered in excruciating detail
is who done it."
That is the whole point of the 'Putin did it' exercise. It is to distract the people from the
content. Contrast with the Panama Papers release where the target, Putin, was immediately targeted
indirectly in carefully selected releases. There was very little interest in who was behind the
hack. The info was publicly released via a US-government funded entity.
It should also be seen in context of the earlier public declaration that such hacking would
constitute an act of war. Trump has played into USG hands creating a 'reality' that 'Putin did
it' - after saying that "Russia should release the emails, if it has them". Was this done wittingly
or unwittingly?
ian @ 20: The problem with the 'Trump as Manchurian Candidate' narrative is that most people
(even Democrats) deep down, probably don't really believe it.
I agree! .. hogwash. Trump is the Donald and not more. Yet, after thinking about ian's post,
there is an oblique argument to be made: that this election is in fact IS all about Putin. Not
Putin as Vladimir, but Putin as a stand-in for Russia. The central issue, the ginormous elephant
in the room that is not being discussed is foreign policy - it only shows up in some remarks and
many are oblivious to it.
camps
Killary and escalation - the continuation of Bush-Obama foreign policy on speed
+ steroids, which involves destroying places and going for one 'enemy' after another and flailing
about (e.g. Iraq) - now aimed at the higher-stake ones (e.g. weakening Europe, dividing it
from Russia, and attacking Russia with all means at hand.) The backers are neo-cons, neo-libs,
the MIC, Wall Street (gingerly), and others, long list, some/many are criminal enterprises.
Going on strong is the meme.
Trump, with a nationalistic bent (partly calculated and not the most important)
shows at the same time an isolationist stance (as opposed to conquering position)
e.g. walls, anti-globalization on trade (ostensibly), America first of a certain flavor, and
going so far! as to question the existence of NATO and to have a neutral or positive attitude
towards the latest green-clawed fire-breathing devil. Reversing decline is the meme.
Arguably, foreign policy in terms of life/death of its citizens is the most crucial point,
but it is sub rosa. That is partly why all the talk/analysis in terms of ethnicity-race-religious
identities / values in this election (black / brown voters, abortion..), class (economic), tribal
political belonging, has become utterly confused, as these archaic divisions become meaningless,
while upheld in political discourse (with endless switcheroos) by all, to confuse and gather votes
here 'n there.
The US public is left adrift with two despised candidates, who do or might represent
two very different paths forward if one can even contemplate 'the forward' at present.
Your summary is excellent. Reading it, the choice between the two (excluding 3rd choices) is
clear. There exists a chance for peace or the guarantee of perpetual war.
@64 noirette, 'two despised candidates, who do or might represent two very different
paths forward if one can even contemplate 'the forward' at present.'
Yeah. Absolutely. My italics on the might. Hillary has a record. She can lie, but not to me.
Trump has ... a mouth. When he says reasonable things - given Hillary - people are desperate
to believe him. I can't.
I don't think we can, or should. Trump seems far more likely to be another Obama than
not. I think we have wasted far too many of these quadrennial exercises and that the time to do
something different is now. Look what happened in Libya. That could happen in Russia ... and a
lot more people than a US Ambassador will die. The Europeans are mad not to abrogate the US at
this point. The Americans are beginning to tell themselves another 'real' war will solve their
problems ... look at the DNC convention ... and it'll be OK because it will be another war 'over
there'. It won't be over there, it'll be right here no matter where that is.
Concerted action by our atomized selves is the only option left open to us. Let us Americans
envision a different future and simply effect it.
No
to Clinton, not to Trump . Let's
emulate a higher life form
. We can make it we try.
Bruce Schneier used to charge the Chinese in every hacking incident, I guess there is now
a "pivot" in the propaganda world.
It is obvious that our elections are hacked: Florida in 2000, Ohio 2004, and now Brooklyn,
Nevada, Arizona, California and other locations this year. They were hacked by our own crooks
who would never allow Rooskies to muscle in on the action. Few polling stations in crowded districts,
removing names from voter lists, private companies contracted to "count", voter suppression ID
laws, jailing of voting populations, gerrymandering, etc. The Rooskies can only bring a rubber
chicken to a gun fight.
I keep dreaming of a "dream" (or a "nightmare") scenario in which a) Trump wins on the election
night, just, maybe by 10-20 electoral votes; and b) on the day the Electoral College actually
meets, 10-20 electors from "Trump" states, quote, "vote their conscience", end quote, and Hillary
becomes president. Which, legally, they can do - remember the electors aren't formally bound by
anything other than "tradition" (read: what their local party officials would do to them were
they to change their vote).
I know, I know, slim chance. But it would be a thing of beauty to behold were it to actually
happen. For those of us who revel in chaos and anarchy, of course, the types who wished for a
Sarah Palin presidency just for the sheer amount of comedy material involved; the rest of the
population might well differ. In any event, the "Russian voting machine fraud" story would fit
in very well with this particular sequence of events - the electors "voting their conscience"
could then be portrayed as patriotic anti-communists (or whatever), for example.
For those 10-20 electors to vote for Hillary would be regarded as a betrayal of the system and
make her an illegitimate, crippled president.
What those 10-20 electors could do instead is to vote for some third candidate. Say, Gary Johnson
or John Kasich. When no candidate wins a majority of electors, the election is thrown into the
House of Representatives, in which each state's delegation has one vote and the vote must be among
the three candidates who got the greatest number of electoral votes.
He makes a good point: " From inception, America proved itself the cruelest, most ruthless
nation in world history, harming more people over a longer duration than any other. Tens of millions
of corpses attest to its barbarity."
"If elected, Hillary risks committing greater high crimes of state than her predecessors, including
possible nuclear war - why it's crucial to defeat her in November. Humanity's fate hangs in the
balance."
All the rest is just rhetoric ... and the primary reason AmeriKKKans have Clinton as President
in the first place. AmeriKKKans know that their best interests, even when jobless, are with continued
murder, rape and theft!
Proof? You want proof? Each of you AmeriKKKans who post to this site. Not that other are blameless,
they just don't vote.
I have stated here and "everywhere" that automated elections are not really elections at all.
While the USA buys more and more election computers, most of the rest of the (ostensibly democratic)
world has tossed out election computers, and moved to using had counted paper ballots.
I have said many times: "We must abolish election machines, such as voting computers. If
they make casting and tallying 10 times faster, they make organized cheating 10 times easier as
well. Which can we truly afford?"
I read several computer programmer's blogs, and comments almost every day, and I am sure most
of these professionals are aware of the fact that their machines can never be made safe for use
in elections. Yet, they virtually never come out and say that. Job security trumps having democracy
for nearly all of them. Most of these programmers are depressing examples of self-centeredness.
@58 "It is worth to mention that Bruce Schneier is part of the "Tor Project" board of directors
since July 2016."
That's indeed worth mentioning since one of the TOR founders, Jacob Appelbaum, was ejected
from the board in June by a phony sex scandal identical to the one of Julian Assange. There was
also the recent departure in July of one of the major TOR contributors, Lucky Green, who didn't
disclose a lot about his reasons ("I feel that I have no reasonable choice left within the bounds
of ethics")
http://thehackernews.com/2016/07/tor-anonymity-node.html . The departures of Jacob Appelbaum
and Lucky Green and the welcoming of sellout Bruce Schneier who's opinions were always in line
with US foreign policy spell doom and gloom for TOR's security reliability.
A lot of people outside the US are probably unaware of some very important features of federal
elections here. Many of these people may assume that the US has a single presidential election,
run by the federal government, as is the case in their own countries (Australia, for example).
But in reality, there are 51 presidential elections, and only one of them (the one in the District
of Columbia) is run by the federal government.
Each state has its own way of collecting and counting ballots, and its own laws about voter
eligibility, absentee voting, ballot access for third parties, voting procedures, etc. Because
the counties within each state actually run the polling places, these state election laws are
mainly instructions for county election officials. So there are ample opportunities for election
fraud at the county and state levels, but not at the federal level (except for mass media mind
control).
In unusual situations, state election laws can be challenged in federal courts. In my home
state of Tennessee, Republicans and Democrats many years ago passed a law that essentially makes
it impossible for third parties to appear on the ballot. And for all those many years, the Tennessee
Green Party has routinely gone to federal court, claiming that the state law unreasonably restricts
Tennesseans' voting rights, and the court routinely rules in their favor. Thus my ability to vote
for Jill Stein exists only because a federal court has intervened in Tennessee's election system.
But judicial intervention like this is essentially the only power the federal government can exercise
over voting.
I can't for the life of me understand why so many hawks in the State Dept and elsewhere are
sooooo afraid of Putin. They still mad he nationalized oil companies?
Just suppose the emails of the DNC were released by the Clinton Machine, what a creative
tactic, and certainly there is no reason to doubt that...a great media firestorm ensues, DWS had
to fall on her sword but quickly gets hoisted on the Clinton petard..as a campaign manager
It is possible that Schneier and Doctorow may not have an anti-Russia agenda but are using the
Russia angle because then the U.S. press will report on the security problems with electronic
voting. Russia should just tell the U.S. to switch to mechanical voting if they are worried. How
is Russia responsible for our insecure voting?
Thanks for so much intelligent commentary this thread.
Your comment, "As I have often mentioned on these pages previously, I do believe pedophiles
and various other perverts are actively recruited into positions of power so that they can be
compromised and controlled by the criminal cabal." I don't think that the pedophiles are recruited
into power so that they can be controlled by fear of disclosure. In fact nothing happens to them
when they're found out: the records are "lost", evidence is "insufficient", etc. Rather, the explanation
I think is that the secret societies and higher levels of Masonry all use sexual deviancy as a
means of bonding their initiates into a criminal cabal outside of the norms of society. There
is a philosophical embracing of the destruction of innocence just as there is a glorification
of the chaos produced by war.
The evil that we face is an alternate philosophical position which rejects all the moral
tenets of the world's 7 great religions. The goal is the rule of a tiny sect which imagines itself
a godhead over humanity. Their main tools against us are informational and moral. Many of
the novels of the 20s, the 30s and especially the late 19th century reveal by contrast how greatly
they've degraded the very idea of living one's life informed by a moral ideal.
The examined life has been swept away, replaced by the exclusively material and physical. Did
you know that one of the early objectives was to control the appointment of divinity school teachers?
The Rockefellers personally championed Unitarianism, which helped to trivialize religion. Without
religion or an organized system of moral limits and the complete absence of the idealization of
the moral and the possession of moral purpose, that great generational sink of morality once so
vibrant among the American people has long-since sprung a leak now become a torrent. One looks
in vain for that which would nourish the soul of the very young. The moral ideal has vanished
from our culture. How could it not? The Rockefellers alone control over 2,000 domestic NGOs, foundations
and think tanks. Even the culturally trivial is now being replaced by the overtly destructive.
The human eclipsed by the bestial.
Enough people, armed simply with knowledge and the resolution to look for the truth wherever
it leads, can still stop it.
The problem wit this comment is why it was made at all. You do not announce forthcoming explosive
information for several reasons: 1. You may be assassinated. 2. You may be blackmailed. 3. You
allow the people time to respond 4. The information may be stolen. Think about it. When has an
individual promised ahead of time a release of blockbuster info, and then delivered. Perhaps Assange
is waiting to be paid off not to release the information.
The NWO is the only benefiting entity of war. Who owns the companies that manufactures and sells
all armament to both side? the same ones that supplied WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, the American
Civil war, and revolutions all over the world for the last two-hundred years... need I go on.
They have made trillions on weapons, armament, and armored vehicles to lock down America and take
everything. The biggest land grab in history. Who always comes out on top in every Wall Street
crash? They keep pushing for war because its the only means for unending power and profit. Know
one wants a war because no one sees a need. We are all saner than the NWO thugs. You realize,
there are 7.5 billion of us in the world, all manipulated, killed, and blamed for all those thugs
do. They are only a drop in the toilet. WE don't comply, their reality vaporizes over night. Know
where they are right now? under ground. Their scared to death because they've been discovered
and tracked. They should be. Don't believe the network media. Rely on your own best judgement.
Nothing can fall that we can't rebuild stronger and better. Who needs them? Is humanity better
off without the Devil? There's only one answer.
Daly Jones
I randomly found this video and realized that you made one of my favorite documentaries!!!!
I try to get everyone I know to watch it....The Money Masters! It's one of the best/horrifyingly
true documentaries I've ever watched. Thank you sir! You have just earned another subscriber
Rudy Hassen
Question: why do entrenched entities hate dissemination of information? As reference....see
North Korea......or DNC.
Rudy Hassen
BTW....unlikely Russia is behind the leaks. Putin is a much better chess player the Obama,
Clinton and probably Trump as well. Don't he surprised if it's DNC insiders behind this.
Da Guy
How can anyone trust someone that lied, cheated and conned to get the nomination, just because
they now say they won't lie, cheat and con anymore now that they got what they wanted by lying,
cheating and conning & got caught w/evidence proving it, otherwise they would still be denying
it. All I hear and see now is how Hillary and the DNC can spin what they got caught & proven doing
to get votes from the very people they lied to, cheated and conned. I would no longer trust anything
Hillary or the DNC said or promised unless someone like Bernie cleaned it up of corrupt people.
Why isn't the FBI investigating/attacking/prosecuting this coup??? The email leaks, college &
research analysis of elections and results did a lot of their job already.
If a con, lied, cheated and conned you out of your life savings, would you trust them a few
days later w/your kids life savings just because they say: sure that guy exposed our personal
communications that proved we lied, cheated & conned you out of your life saving but were different
now and you can trust us w/your kids life savings, now that we got what we wanted. (note to self):
make sure no one can get a hold of our personal communications in the future so no one can prove
anything we do, this way we can blame anything &/or anyone else for the loss of their kids life
savings. "take Hillary's lead, delete and scrub the memories so nothing is retrievable and all
released info has to go through our lawyers. We can tell them our lawyers are looking out for
their best interest not ours". Once a con, always a con. This is an attempted theft of a country
or a coup.
I would not only feel a traitor to my Country, kids & future generations if I just accepted
this and joined the coup: I WOULD BE A TRAITOR. If this coup fails and Trump gets elected, it's
on you, the collaborators and coup member, not anyone else. Look what the leaders or the head
person of other countries do to the people that attempt a coup in their country. We pretend it's
not happening. And if this coup succeeds, we all live under false pretenses and have allowed our
country to betray what it's supposed to stand for "again", the spiral down from there will be
easy. I've never been so ashamed of my country & worried about the future of this planet as I
am now.
Clinton campaign is trying to hide their very serious domestic allegation tried to play "Russians
are coming" trick... Sanders campaign was sabotages by crooks in DNC.
Also does this presstitute who interviewed Julian Assange any moral right to ask question about
the legitimacy of foreign interference if this interference is the cornerstone of the US foreign policy.
As in color revolutions and similar subversive actions against "not neoliberal enough" government of
countries with natural resources or of some geopolitical value.
This is the situation of "king is naked" -- the state that teaches other countries about democracy
has completely corrupted election process, like a typical banana republic.
Notable quotes:
"... According to the leaked emails, he, Chuck Todd, is part of the rigging process. ..."
"... Their Motive is to tell the truth. Clearly that why they released the information before the convention and delegates still went forward with corruption. That defies the DNC, case closed ..."
"... Because we've never interfered in another government or anything right? what a joke! ..."
Chuck Todd, Establishment Gatekeeper and Chief Presstitute. He proves that the Fourth Estate needs
a total overhaul, and that the MSM needs to be broken-up like the banks & other institutions need
to be in order to become truly competitive rather than in name only. The tightening grip
of oligarchs must be pried apart! Assange is doing his part to expose the powers that oppress
us, and should be commended for his work!
Loki7072
This interviewer is obviously a democrat , trying to blame the Russians for the content of
the emails , so sad the democratic corruption in this country runs so deep
Charles W
According to the leaked emails, he, Chuck Todd, is part of the rigging process.
Anthony Marin
Chuck Todd isn't a journalist, just another government PR person. Corporate media is a joke.
Rafael Reyes
Their Motive is to tell the truth. Clearly that why they released the information before
the convention and delegates still went forward with corruption. That defies the DNC, case closed.
Now do the constituents of that party still have faith in staying with that party? That's totally
up to the ppl. Whether of not it was domestic or foreign info isn't important, due to the fact
that the information was authentic and proven true by our own officials who investigated the digital
encryption of the files.
Frank Rizzo
Because we've never interfered in another government or anything right? what a joke!
Notecrusher
So what if the Russian government was the source? I have gratitude to WHOEVER provided the
leak. Now we know the truth about the DNC's crimes and corruption. I hope they burn.
Guardian presstitutes are trying hard to please their owners...
Notable quotes:
"... Joe Biden's son has major business interests in Ukraine. Is that why Biden is so supportive of Ukraine? Paul Manafort is a rat, like all the major league campaign operatives ..."
"... Under globalism, it is only natural for corporations and their CEOs to have more contact with foreign entities and their leaders. Apple and CEO Tim Cook has made a huge commitment to communist China, one that he told President Obama will not be shaken or reduced. ..."
"... This is all so entertaining for as much as they try they cannot lay a finger on Putin.. the PBS special on Putin wealth ended an hour of innuendo with this.. ''How much is a matter of speculation and some educated guesswork.'' ..."
"... I have family in the military and the last thing we need is Clinton leading us into another cold war. ..."
"... Clinton: corruption you can believe in. ..."
"... Well looks like Hillary has stared the cold war again before she ever got into office. This is worse than anything Trump could do...but very beneficial to her military/security industrial complex backers. ..."
"... Hillary Clinton = Dick Cheney ..."
"... Julian Assange is not a Republican. He's an Australian with no vested interest in the election. I'd be worried if I were a Clinton supporter. ..."
"... The extremely well informed Israeli website Debkafile is confident that the Russians didn't hack the DNC or any aspect of the Democrats. Debka believes the signatures on the hack are so easy to find and so obviously intended to be found that the real culprit lies somewhere within an anti-Clinton faction of the Democrats. ..."
"... This is a fantasy article, pie in the sky stuff. I can't stand Trump and I am sure neither can the Russian government, he's unpredictable, unstable, what he says today he changes his mind on tomorrow and so on. Now, Clinton isn't much better all said. Anyone who would trust either needs to see a psychiatrist urgently. Russia is but a bystander in the US presidential race, except for the conspiracy theorists at The Guardian. ..."
"... So a former official of that russophobic neocon infested State Department which ran both the 2004 Orange Revolution and the 2014 coup in Kiev also member of the US-Ukraine business council is now supposed to have helped Yanokovich in 2010 and be in bed with Putin. How gullible do you think we are? ..."
"... Stop the presses! Trump and people associated with him have had dealings with people from the LARGEST country in the world. If that doesn't prove he's an active Manchurian candidate on The Kremlin payroll, then nothing will. ..."
"... What it really proves is that by going the low road of McCarthyist red-baiting, the Democrats seemed determined to blow another election by not running a campaign on Hillary's supposed merits and attacking Trump for rational, verifiable reasons. ..."
"... You are all a school of piranhas waiting to tear the flesh of anyone who is against 'Her'. I have noticed your comments towards any rational reply is met with condescending and abusive tones. You've probably realised I am poorly educated. However, I have common sense which I believe most of you don't. Most of you comment in order to receive recognition and votes in order to make you feel good because of low self esteem and belonging issues. ..."
"... I believe we in the west currently live in a pluralist society for now. If Hillary is elected I reckon she will lay the foundation for sharia law, Merkel is doing her bit. Anyway, how can anyone vote for this vile human being? ..."
"... Hillary Rodman Clinton does not care about YOU! Its all about her wanting power to control YOU. Have you ever asked yourself why does she want to be President? What is her motivation? ..."
"... Oh, come on, Hillary has all 30 of the admirals and generals that previously endorsed Jeb. Can't Donald have one general? The US military is in schism between the moderates (represented by Flynn) and the hawks (represented by Allen, presumably). Hillary's hawks got booed off the stage at the convention. Allen was trying to shout down the protesters but they were pretty feisty. ..."
"... Follow the money. The Clinton elite and the military/security industrial complex will MAKE BILLIONS with a new cold war. As much as they made off of Iraq and MORE! ..."
"... Julian Assange showed to the DNC who they are, but they are not angry at him, they are angry at Donald Trump. Of course, how can anyone be angry at the mirror because it has shown its ugly face.:-))) ..."
"... A vote against Hillary is not a vote for Trump any more than a vote against the Iraq War was a vote for Saddam Hussein. ..."
"... Hilarious. This Red Scare is ridiculous, will only carry weight with the over 60s. It is just one of the many missteps in Hillary's tone deaf campaign which is going to cost her the presidency. ..."
"... Not a Trump supporter, but this shitty rag attacks everyone except the Red Queen...who is responsible for many acts of terror and murder...documented. ..."
"... Ta, much of the information, especially what Tom Curley (formerly AP chief) revealed, has been removed from the net. I wish I had saved the pdf of his Kansas speech before it vanished everywhere. There was also something on a British server, but that stopped being fed. ..."
"... Often we could see it on the posters' string, how many in how many hours, hence the attempts to hide it through multi ID facility. For disqus, they block the string. We know we are being manipulated. And very few people take things at face value these days, or do they? ..."
"... That single sentence exposes the Guardian as a completely fraudulent news reporting medium. With tears in my eyes I ask you "How does Putin releasing e-mails about the secret and illegal American electoral shenanigans amount to an attack on western democracy?" ..."
"... The old saying "you can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time" is demonstrated by the Guardians reporting without sources, other than anonymous so-called "experts". Your journalistic integrity is little higher than the height of Hillary Clinton's honesty, or the level of the Donald's business ethics. Shame on you. Double shame for being so blatantly easy to expose. ..."
"... The western media, controlled by special interest groups, are driving your low-level sputum which tries to pass for accurate and unbiased reportage. ..."
"... On the whole I would have to agree with you. The picture painted by the Western News Media is that the US is the White Knight when it comes to democracy, they never interfere in other countries political affairs, never try to break into computer systems of other countries, try to topple or assassinate leaders of other countries. They never carry out torture and they ignore the 30m on the poverty line in their own country. ..."
"... Well at least Trump is fostering positive relations with Russia - Hillary Clinton is pushing us to the brink of nuclear war with them. You Tube it. Wishing Good Luck to all people of courage and honesty. ..."
"... Reuters/Ipsos changed it polling methodology as soon as they saw a 17 point swing in favor of Donald the Drumpf. When the methodology by their own admission was under reporting Trump support and over reporting Hillbilly's numbers they did nothing. So don't believe any polls. There is no enthusiasm for Hillbilly in the Democratic party, so the Democratic turn out will be low, on the other hand people want to shake things up, they will vote for Drumpf. I just wished Donald had half a brain in his head to see how much good he could do, with the opportunity he has. ..."
"... A lot of associations and coincidences have been listed here. But no hard evidence linking the hacking to Putin, nor Putin to Trump. It sounds like a load of muckraking. ..."
"... True. If it was the other way round, Guardian journalists and establishment shills would be screaming 'tin-foil' when they should be holding that woman to account. ..."
Joe Biden's son has major business interests in Ukraine. Is that why Biden is so supportive
of Ukraine? Paul Manafort is a rat, like all the major league campaign operatives. All that
is important to them is the win and those that can jump over each other to rent their expertise
around the globe to whatever scumbag has money. It is a bipartisan gig. To spin this in such a
partisan manner when the entire political machinery on both sides operates like this is is either
knowingly deceitful or just plain ignorant. When it is nearly impossible to just get straight
balanced news from a newspaper, when the coverage is just so obviously slanted, real journalism
is dead. This style of news by innuendo and the selective parsing of fact is shoddy reportage.
Shame.
macmarco
Under globalism, it is only natural for corporations and their CEOs to have more contact
with foreign entities and their leaders. Apple and CEO Tim Cook has made a huge commitment to
communist China, one that he told President Obama will not be shaken or reduced.
US tax laws that allow 'profit centers' to be claimed anywhere around the world will almost
certainly bring corporate leaders and foreign leaders closer together as their interests merge
and intertwine.
Political parties will have difficulty claiming this or that country is now an enemy depending
on how much corporate investment and profit holdings were made in the new 'enemy'. One could see
the enormous difficulty the DNC/Hillary would have if they had to make a case against communist
China hacking their emails. Apple, Walmart etal would be working overtime to protect the relationship
at all costs.
notindoctrinated
Has it ever occurred to you Yanks that Putin may be playing global political chess. I'm sure
he is shrewd enough to realize that open support to Trump could be a "kiss of death". A Democratic
presidency may be in Russia's long-term interest, if they want the US to go further down the drain:
Overrunning of the US by Hispanics, as well as Muslims from North Africa and the Mideast,
the latter resulting in increasing insecurity and terrorist attacks at home
Destruction of US economy by the pursuit of green fanatic policies.
Of course a trigger-happy Clinton presidency increases the risk for WW3, therefore Putin's
finger will never be far from the nuke-button.
2. The number one US economic strain is War.....not windfarms.
3. Clinton is a bit more hawkish than I would like, but she is far from trigger happy. Also,
she can handle an insult without declaring the need to punch someone in the face :p
Sam3456
I love the entitled Hillary fans are trying to stifle any dissent of the Queen with "You're
a Putin Bot, You're a commie, your a Trumpster."
Stifling dissent allows for corruption and abuse of power and is what got us into the Iraq
War.
Their condescending attitude is what we can expect from a Clinton Administration?
JohnManyjars
Putin bashing idiots...choke on your spittle! At least he puts the interests of his country
first, unlike US/UK sell outs to Israel-First traitors.
R. Ben Madison -> JohnManyjars
Yet another antisemitic diatribe from the Hillary-haters.
Lee Van Over -> JohnManyjars
Lol, the US supports Israel because its in the best interests of the US, not Israel. They,
unfortunately, are our little forward base of operations in the Mid-east.
John Smith
Burisma is the largest non-governmental gas producer in Ukraine, it was incorporated in 2006
and is based in Limassol, Cyprus - a European tax haven
April 18, 2014, Burisma Holdings announced us VP Biden's son Hunter Biden appointed to the board
Aleksander Kwaśniewski,took up in a director's post named in January.[27] Kwaśniewski was President
of the Republic of Poland from 1995 to 2005 permitted the CIA torture ops in Poland during the
G. W. Bush presidency
Chairman of Burisma is the Wall Street former Merrill Lynch investment banker Alan Apter
Devon Archer, Hunter Biden's partner at the US investment firm, Rosemont Seneca Partners, and
a manager of the family wealth fund of Secretary of State John Kerry's wife Theresa Heinz Kerry,
And all friends together in a company that should be helping Ukraine recover nestled away in
a tax haven!
The director of the US-Ukraine Business Council Morgan Williams pointed to an "American tradition
that frowns on close family members of government working for organizations with business links
to active politics". Williams stated Biden appears to have violated this unwritten principle:
"... when you're trying to keep the political sector separate from the business sector, and reduce
corruption, then it's not just about holding down corruption, it's also the appearance.
This is all so entertaining for as much as they try they cannot lay a finger on Putin..
the PBS special on Putin wealth ended an hour of innuendo with this.. ''How much is a matter of
speculation and some educated guesswork.''
And thats what it was speculation & guesswork!
he may be the richest man on the planet.. he may be richer than god... but they just can't
find it.. they can't find a bankstatement with billions or trillions in it they can't even find
the shoebox with all his cash under his bed... they got nothing!
MtnClimber -> John Smith
They found Putin's money. It's cared for by "friends". One is a concert cellist with over a
billion dollars. They must pay musicians well in Russia.
You seem to like dictators. Do you like the complete censorship of the media in Russia? Do
you like the new laws that allow Putin to jail anyone that denounces him or Russia?
Given that Russians are only allowed to post good things about Putin, what do you expect to
see from them?
John Smith -> MtnClimber
there were plenty of russians in that PBS 'show' complaining about putin and they are still
alive n well..
the only time russian critics become endangered is when they are of no further use to the yankee
and then they come to a sticky end and then the finger gets pointed at putin.. then they have
fully 'outlived' their usefulness.. more useful dead!
annberk
It is obvious that Trump will benefit financially from being nice to Putin and his inner circle.
Trump combs the world for projects and money and Russia must be seen as a target. Win or lose
the election he'll be seen as a friend who deserves to be rewarded. At some point in the next
year or so, the Trump Corporation will announce at least one landmark Russian hotel/condo tower.
I'd bet money on it. Meanwhile, poor old Hillary who has devoted her life to doing good, is being
bullied and lied about by the serfs who want to elect him. (Read 'Dark Money' to see what I mean
by serfs. Trump's adherents won't benefit in the slightest from his policies.)
Sam3456
I have family in the military and the last thing we need is Clinton leading us into another
cold war.
delphicvi
What a lame lead in i.e. "Donald Trump and Russia: a web that grows more tangled all the time.
Donald Trump travelled to Moscow in 2013 to meet Vladimir Putin hoping to discuss plans for
a Trump Tower near Red Square."
Did it really take four 'journalists' viz. Peter Stone, David Smith, Ben Jacobs, Alec Luhn
and Rupert Neate to write this fluff? More worthy of a supermarket check out rag than a serious
newspaper. This facile attempt to stitch together the incongruous and the bizarre is downright
amazing for a paper that puffs itself as the leaker of truth. By the bye, Ukraine is not Russia.
And Russia is not Ukraine.
Sam3456
The Director of National Intelligence says Washington is still unsure of who might be behind
the latest WikiLeaks release of hacked Democratic National Committee emails, while urging that
an end be put to the "reactionary mode" blaming it all on Russia.
"We don't know enough to ascribe motivation regardless of who it might have been," Director
of National Intelligence James Clapper said speaking at Aspen's Security Forum in Colorado, when
asked if the media was getting ahead of themselves in fingering the perpetrator of the hack.
John Smith -> Sam3456
Anonymous have been quietly busy in the background... laughing at the merkins blaming everything
on Russia..
clintons corrupt... and its Russia's fault??
''The State Department misplaced and lost some $6 billion due to the improper filing of contracts
during the past six years, mainly during the tenure of former Secretary of State Hilary Clinton,
according to a newly released Inspector General report.
I know billions don't mean much today after the american laundering of Trillions of $s worth
of their bad mortgage debt causing the 2008 crash....... BUT SURELY $6 Billion missing must count
for something!
So again...
what really happened in Benghazi? in September 2012
Were they sending gaddafi's weapons to unsavouries in Syria and Assad got wind of it & sent a
team to stop it?
Because it was not a youtube vid or some people on a friday night out deciding to kill americans
as clinton would have us believe. What we have is a clandestine operation.. a democrat version
of reagans ''Arms for Iran''.. or shall we say 'Arms for ISIS' Did they get Ollie North out of
retirement for this??
Having failed this gun running operation...
They then went to Plan B..
''claimed 3,000 tons of weapons dating back to the former Yugoslavia have been sent in 75 planeloads
from Zagreb airport to the rebels, largely via Jordan since November (2012).'' 3000 tons of weapons!!......
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/9918785/US-and-Europe-in-major-airlift-of-arms-to-Syrian-rebels-through-Zagreb.html
But When they arrived in Jordan..
''Weapons shipped into Jordan by the Central Intelligence Agency and Saudi Arabia intended
for Syrian rebels have been systematically stolen by Jordanian intelligence operatives and sold
to arms merchants on the black market, according to American and Jordanian officials.'' I mean
can the CIA be that incompetent? or is this incompetence covering up something else...?
Well looks like Hillary has stared the cold war again before she ever got into office.
This is worse than anything Trump could do...but very beneficial to her military/security industrial
complex backers.
Hillary Clinton = Dick Cheney.
Oldiebutgoodie
With all the tension and volatility in the world, we need mature, rational people leading our
countries. Let's hope that's what we get -- * Vote thoughtfully.
While we watch campaign circuses, a serious situation is taking place in Turkey that will effect
Europe, the West, and the Middle East.
- Erdogan has taken control of, and is purging all sectors of Turkish society.
Julian Assange is not a Republican. He's an Australian with no vested interest in the election.
I'd be worried if I were a Clinton supporter.
spraydrift
'Trump's links to Russia are under scrutiny after a hack of Democratic national committee emails,'
The extremely well informed Israeli website Debkafile is confident that the Russians didn't
hack the DNC or any aspect of the Democrats. Debka believes the signatures on the hack are so
easy to find and so obviously intended to be found that the real culprit lies somewhere within
an anti-Clinton faction of the Democrats. Now who might that be?
Greg Popa -> spraydrift
Wired.com's Noah Shachtman wrote in 2001 that the site "clearly reports with a point of view;
the site is unabashedly in the hawkish camp of Israeli politics".[4] Yediot Achronot investigative
reporter Ronen Bergman states that the site relies on information from sources with an agenda,
such as neo-conservative elements of the US Republican Party, "whose worldview is that the situation
is bad and is only going to get worse," and that Israeli intelligence officials do not consider
even 10 percent of the site's content to be reliable.[1] Cornell Law professor Michael C. Dorf
calls Debka his "favorite alarmist Israeli website trading in rumors."[5]
The site's operators, in contrast, state that 80 percent of what Debka reports turns out to
be true, and point to its year 2000 prediction that al-Qaeda would again strike the World Trade
Center, and that it had warned well before the 2006 war in Lebanon that Hezbollah had amassed
12,000 Katyusha rockets pointed at northern Israel.[1]
mandzorp
This is a fantasy article, pie in the sky stuff. I can't stand Trump and I am sure neither
can the Russian government, he's unpredictable, unstable, what he says today he changes his mind
on tomorrow and so on. Now, Clinton isn't much better all said. Anyone who would trust either
needs to see a psychiatrist urgently. Russia is but a bystander in the US presidential race, except
for the conspiracy theorists at The Guardian.
errovi
"The coordinator of the Washington diplomatic corps for the Republicans in Cleveland was Frank
Mermoud, a former state department official involved in business ventures in Ukraine via Cub Energy,
a Black Sea-focused oil and gas company of which he is a director. He is also on the board of
the US Ukraine Business Council."
So a former official of that russophobic neocon infested State Department which ran both
the 2004 Orange Revolution and the 2014 coup in Kiev also member of the US-Ukraine business council
is now supposed to have helped Yanokovich in 2010 and be in bed with Putin. How gullible do you
think we are?
Oldiebutgoodie -> errovi
Seems every news media outlet and reporter is looking into his Russian business dealings and
funding.
Stop the presses! Trump and people associated with him have had dealings with people from
the LARGEST country in the world. If that doesn't prove he's an active Manchurian candidate on
The Kremlin payroll, then nothing will.
What it really proves is that by going the low road of McCarthyist red-baiting, the Democrats
seemed determined to blow another election by not running a campaign on Hillary's supposed merits
and attacking Trump for rational, verifiable reasons.
John Smith -> MentalToo
drivel.. Nuland admitted/boasted about spendin $5 billion in ''bring democracy to ukraine..
$5 Billion is a lot of money in Ukraine..
Did they build schools No
Did they build hospitals No!
They just destabilised the country...
So $5 billion wasted and the yanks wonder why they don't really have a space program... coz $5
Billion would have bought 3 Space shuttles!
jezzam -> John Smith
The US spent 5 billion over 25 years - trying to encourage the basic institutions of democracy
in Ukraine. Without these corruption cannot be eliminated. Without the elimination of corruption,
none of the things you mention are possible. Non-coincidentally such institutions have been eliminated
in Russia since Putin came to power.
Brian Burman -> jezzam
Yes, those NGOs encouraged democracy so well that they instigated a violent coup against the
elected government. Halt, you say, that government was corrupt!?! But by all standards, the current
government is more corrupt than the one that was overthrown, and polls in the last year show that
Ukrainians are convinced of that fact. Infact, the man hand-picked by Victoria Nuland to be Prime
Minister, "Yats" Yatesenyuk, had to resign under accusations of corruption. Andbthe current Kiev
reginme continues to bomb the civilian population of Donbass and terrorize them with neo-Nazi
militias...ah, the wonders of US funded "democracy".
Виктор Захаров
I wonder, if you say that you are democrats why you are not interested in truth about Malaysian
Boing? Now in the West, Merkel, Obama etc, no one worried about this tragedy because now it's
clear that Ukrainian authorities did it. It's barbarian blasphemous....
Henrychan
Hello all Hillary supporters,
You are all a school of piranhas waiting to tear the flesh of anyone who is against 'Her'.
I have noticed your comments towards any rational reply is met with condescending and abusive
tones. You've probably realised I am poorly educated. However, I have common sense which I believe
most of you don't. Most of you comment in order to receive recognition and votes in order to make
you feel good because of low self esteem and belonging issues.
I believe we in the west currently live in a pluralist society for now. If Hillary is elected
I reckon she will lay the foundation for sharia law, Merkel is doing her bit. Anyway, how can
anyone vote for this vile human being?
You must be either:
Ignorant
Misinformed
Lack common sense or
Mentally ill
Hillary Rodman Clinton does not care about YOU! Its all about her wanting power to control
YOU. Have you ever asked yourself why does she want to be President? What is her motivation?
Comment all you like, you Hillary supporter are defending a witch. I'm not with HER.
Oilyheart
Bernie Sanders visited the USSR. Does that make him a communist? Bernie Sanders visited the
Vatican. Does that make him a Catholic? Gen. Flynn visited RT. Does that make him Scott Pelley?
Bill visits a lot of places.
Виктор Захаров
First of all why Obama calls yourself democrat? It's nonsense, by definition democrats those
who against the coup! Having lied once who would believe you ( Russian saying ). Obama continued
to lie. Malaysian Boing had been shot down by Ukrainian jet, radars neither in Dnepro nor in Rostov
hadn't seen buk missile, buk missile weighs 700 kg radar could not to see it. But radars had seen
Ukrainian jet, Ukrainian authorities restricted access to records....
Oilyheart
Oh, come on, Hillary has all 30 of the admirals and generals that previously endorsed Jeb.
Can't Donald have one general? The US military is in schism between the moderates (represented
by Flynn) and the hawks (represented by Allen, presumably). Hillary's hawks got booed off the
stage at the convention. Allen was trying to shout down the protesters but they were pretty feisty.
Try not to bogart all the retired general officers, Democrats. The moderates are trying to
de-escalate tensions with Russia, is that so wrong? Does gangsterism have to proliferate all over
the place? Does the whole world have to break bad like Walter White into gangsterism and chaos
because it's cool?
GODsaysBRESCAPE
Clinton wants a new cold war with Russia, forget the real enemy the Islamists. She is showing
her warmongering stripes again already. Shame on you Sanders for your betrayal of your supporters,
that will now be your ever lasting and shameful legacy.
Sam3456 -> GODsaysBRESCAPE
Follow the money. The Clinton elite and the military/security industrial complex will MAKE
BILLIONS with a new cold war. As much as they made off of Iraq and MORE!
HRC is Dick Cheney in a pants suit.
GODsaysBRESCAPE
The media, big business and the pentagon: "a web that grows more tangled all the time"
dikcheney
I have to do this. #canthackHillary.
I cant hack her lies
I cant hack her faux ignorance of IT security
I cant hack her unbelievability
I cant hack her attacks on any challenger
I cant hack the cloth she didn't use to wipe her server
I cant hack the way she puts USA security at risk to protect her "private" shenanigans
I cant hack her capacity to corrupt any decent process associated with democray
I cant hack her network of "get out of jail free cards"
I cant hack her transparent deceptions
I cant hack her associates
I cant hack her war criminal mentors
I cant hack her media admirers and shills
I cant hack her Wall Street buddies
I cant hack her mate Obama
Is there anyone out there who can hack Hillary?
Shatford Shatford -> dikcheney
You left out Clinton Foundation donors who receive lucrative contracts in disaster zones or
in African dictatorships.
nnedjo
Julian Assange showed to the DNC who they are, but they are not angry at him, they are
angry at Donald Trump. Of course, how can anyone be angry at the mirror because it has shown its
ugly face.:-)))
Shatford Shatford -> nnedjo
Bless cognitive dissonance for keeping everyone from seeing the truth.
Shatford Shatford -> NewWorldWatcher
I'm sure once Hillary cheats her way into the White House, she'll sick the IRS on him since
she does that to all of her enemies. And naturally, all of her and her husband's crimes will go
unpunished as they always have. Her husband almost got impeached. Not for getting a hummer from
an intern, but because there was so much other bullshit they wanted to nail him on and lying under
oath was the only thing they could use because the Clintons are very good at buying people off.
nnedjo
The Democratic Party and its vassal media proves for the umpteenth time that they have nothing
to do with democracy. If the opposition is called traitors and accused of collaboration with foreign
governments without any evidence, then it is not a democracy, it is called a dictatorship.
So if they think they have evidence that Trump is a traitor, they should arrest him. Otherwise,
they have to admit that Donald Trump is genuine representative of American democracy, and that
they would rather belong to a kind of dictatorship.
gondwanaboy -> nnedjo
So if they think they have evidence that Trump is a traitor, they should arrest him.
They don't have any evidence. This is mud slinging and a diversion from the DNC email corruption
scandal that actually has proof
miri84
Analysts suggest three primary motivations for the WikiLeaks email dump, quite probably overlapping:
doing harm to the US political process to undermine its credibility; doing harm to Clinton (WikiLeaks
founder Julian Assange is no friend); and boosting Trump
The hack would not have succeeded in any of these areas, had the DNC been conducting its operations
fairly and with integrity.
guest88888
Donald Trump and Russia: a web that grows more tangled all the time
Only if you're full of BS, and lack even a shred of journalistic integrity.
McCarthy would be proud. After years of pretending otherwise, it seems the US government has
finally returned to its old and proud tradition of smearing anyone it finds undesirable as in
cahoots with the ever-changing 'enemy.'
All of this is merely a diversion to avoid talking about the mountain of corruption revealed
about both parties in recent days. Not to mention a diversion from talking about the key issue,
that the US is increasingly antagonizing nuclear armed powers like Russia and China, which if
not stopped will lead to a war capable of killing millions.
selvak
I am not Trump but I would much rather ally with Russia than Saudi Arabia. Both have plenty
of oil by the way. Only one is spreading a Death cult over the Globe but still Presidents Bush
and Obama bowed for the Saudi king. More money the be made out of Arab oil for a few uber rich
in the US Establishment I guess. Less 'competition" for the Pentagon from Riyadh too.
sejong -> selvak
Bibi and King Salman will get joint custody of Clinton, so don't worry.
PCollens
100% bullshit, lies and a psy-op being fed to us from all sides on this.
Seriously Graun, what gives with this bullshit? Confirms my conclusion that the Graun, like the
rest of the MSM, has been infiltrated by an Operation Mockingbird as well.
So many psychopaths - GOP, DNC, Trump, the US deep state petro-nazis, the oligarchs in all countries
- all panicking more and more now, out of control.
Here comes some kind of armagedon. Sorry, sheeple - but its bad news for us all.
Alec Dacyczyn
It's worth mentioning the context of the "the US would not automatically come to the aid of
Nato allies" thing. He wants for other Nato countries to either pull their own weight militarily
(2% of GDP) or pay to cover the costs of other countries for defend them. The threat of willingness
to "walk away" is negotiating leverage. He's making a gamble that they will capitulate rather
than be left defenseless.
I believe it's a reasonable safe bet. So until these Nato countries indicate that they'd rather
not spend that much on their militarizes I reject the argument that a President Trump would result
in a weaker Nato alliance and that Putin want Trump to win for that reason (I suspect Putin would
indeed prefer Trump, but because he views Clinton as a neo-con warmonger who would rather bomb
someone than negotiate a deal).
Bruno Costa Alec Dacyczyn
I hate Trump, but this is a VERY safe bet.
Russia will not invade Poland or the Baltic. The world change. Putin has an agenda different from
Ivan the Terrible...
NATO countries will pay their bills and psychopaths like Erdogan will think twice before put down
a Russian fighter.
That was insane. The most dangerous act since the 80's!
Made by a religious fanatical dictator who is ending Turkey secular tradition.
If Russia had responded, protecting Erdogan would've been fair? NATO starting 3rd WW because of
a authoritarian guy that should be expelled is reasonable?
Sam3456
A vote against Hillary is not a vote for Trump any more than a vote against the Iraq War
was a vote for Saddam Hussein.
niftydude
Hilarious. This Red Scare is ridiculous, will only carry weight with the over 60s. It is
just one of the many missteps in Hillary's tone deaf campaign which is going to cost her the presidency.
livingstonfc
Not a Trump supporter, but this shitty rag attacks everyone except the Red Queen...who
is responsible for many acts of terror and murder...documented.
BSchwartz
Trump is married to a woman who grew up under communism. Some his closest advisors have worked
for communists. Many of his own business dealings are with Russians. He has claimed a relationshp
with Putin and says he admires him. He has amended Republican policies to favour Russia. He called
on the Russian's to undertake espionage into Hillary Clinton. There is a pattern here.
A man like Trump, who believed in the conspiracy theory that Obama was Kenyan, should understand
that conspiracies grow as evidence build. There was no evidence to sustain Trump's conspiracy
regarding Obama.
But Trump himself provides much evidence to sustain the theory that his interests are closer
to the Russians than to much of America.
Sam3456 -> BSchwartz
Really? Democrats red baiting and calling people "commies" how shameful and ignorant of you
history. What next Hillary comes out with a "list of Trump/Putin sympathizers"? Shame.
Bruno Costa -> BSchwartz
Hahahahahahahahahaha OMG! Are you going beyond Manchurian Candidate and saying that Trump is
communist? Do you really understand how funny this is?
PCollens -> BSchwartz
A-ha! I see it now! Trump is a commie Manchurian candidate, cleverly hidden as a son of a rich
guy who became a billionaire, spreading capitalist ideology to the masses as a front for his USSR
commie masters. Its obvious! Wake up sheeple!
Gem59
The Clinton-Media machine in full force....Those Russians are in bed with Trump! It must be
the barbarians! Shame on you traitor Donald! Whatever it takes, corrupted Media! Here is an interview
with Julian Assange who argues there is no evidence of any hacking by Russians
Russian literature, the language, the culture...all quite beautiful. OK, and maybe the women
too. But this 'relationship' between Trump and Russia makes me feel uncomfortable. I'm willing
to admit that I may simply be conditioned to be wary of Russian involvement because of all those
Cold War years. Still...creepy!
Ta, much of the information, especially what Tom Curley (formerly AP chief) revealed, has
been removed from the net. I wish I had saved the pdf of his Kansas speech before it vanished
everywhere. There was also something on a British server, but that stopped being fed.
Often we could see it on the posters' string, how many in how many hours, hence the attempts
to hide it through multi ID facility. For disqus, they block the string. We know we are being
manipulated. And very few people take things at face value these days, or do they?
Ping2fyoutoo
"experts argue Vladimir Putin has attempted in the past to damage western democracy."
That single sentence exposes the Guardian as a completely fraudulent news reporting medium.
With tears in my eyes I ask you "How does Putin releasing e-mails about the secret and illegal
American electoral shenanigans amount to an attack on western democracy?"
It doesn't. It's something the western mainstream media should be doing to enlighten the people
about the depths of the crookedness and the evil chicanery surrounding "western democracy" (as
practised today in the US). That omission is what weakens and threatens western democracy.
The old saying "you can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all
of the people all of the time" is demonstrated by the Guardians reporting without sources, other
than anonymous so-called "experts". Your journalistic integrity is little higher than the height
of Hillary Clinton's honesty, or the level of the Donald's business ethics. Shame on you. Double
shame for being so blatantly easy to expose.
The western media, controlled by special interest groups, are driving your low-level sputum
which tries to pass for accurate and unbiased reportage.
And please let us know who these "experts" are that you say that you are quoting.
Alexander Dunnett -> Ping2fyoutoo
On the whole I would have to agree with you. The picture painted by the Western News Media
is that the US is the White Knight when it comes to democracy, they never interfere in other countries
political affairs, never try to break into computer systems of other countries, try to topple
or assassinate leaders of other countries. They never carry out torture and they ignore the 30m
on the poverty line in their own country.
PCollens -> Ping2fyoutoo
Agreed. There is a Deep State mole inside the Graun.
Its Operation Mockingbird for sure.
normankirk
So Starbucks is in Russia,sinister? or is it just that globalisation means financial interests
are worldwide.
And why is no one mentioning that James Clapper head of the NSA, who should know, says that he
is "taken aback by the media's hyperventilations" and that no one knows who was behind the hack
of the DNC.
Suga
Whatever Lies you believe or even think of HRC...
Clinton is our only hope of keeping the White House from The Insane Republican Party!.
Please...Check-out this excellent interview with Michael Ruppert, who tracked exactly what took
place under The Horrible Bush/Cheney Reign Of Terror that brought down America on 9/11!
(Ruppert supposedly committed suicide in 2014) It's amazing this interview is still available...it
will absolutely shock you into realizing that we cannot give the White House back to the GOP...they
are surrounded by Pure Evil!
Brilliant! - Bless you. Mike Ruppert is the greatest hero to emerge from all this.
Copy-paste the following - it is pure fact, forensic level evidence, of the most serious issues,
yet it always gets taken down. I've concluded that this is by the moles in the MSM, including
the Graun, sadly:
Chapter and verse on the drills of terror attacks being run on 911 which removed the air defences
– an coordinated by Cheney: 9/11 Synthetic Terror https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ar6I0jUg6Vs
The Chief CIA back-channel asset who exposed the fore-knowledge of 911 survived the attempts
to rub her out, and finally told the truth:
CIA WhistleBlower Susan Lindauer EXPOSES Everything - "Extreme Prejudice" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68LUHa_-OlA
Well at least Trump is fostering positive relations with Russia - Hillary Clinton is pushing
us to the brink of nuclear war with them. You Tube it. Wishing Good Luck to all people of courage
and honesty.
Eddie2000
Reds under the bed! Reds under the bed! Surely they can beat Trump without resorting to this
nonsense?
woof92105
****warning - This comment area is infested with russian trolls. It becomes easy to spot their
bizarre but consistent pro-putin statements. They reply to each other and uprate each other, etc.
These people are in Russia and are paid by Putin's cronies. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/the-agency.html?_r=0
sejong -> woof92105
Accuracy score 1/10.
normankirk -> woof92105
and how do we know you aren't part of the cyber warrior force thats become a growth industry
in the US and UK?
Gina Mihajlovska -> woof92105
Your an idiot. It's not about Putin it's about how the public is being played. No matter where
the leak came from the dnc is corrupt.focus on the prize. Not on the BS....
shaftedpig
Trump might have his faults, like being a motor mouth but he's not even in the same category
as GW Bush or HR Clinton when it comes to corruption, the Democrats haven't got much on Trump,
so they resort to tin-foil hat conspiracy theories, when what is staring at us directly in the
face is out-and-out full-on corruption by HRC.
This is not about left vs right, it's about right vs wrong. Read any book by investigative
journalist, Roger Stone who nails HRC. If you're on the left and feel let down by Bernie, at least
consider Gary Johnson or Jill Stein, I can't for the life of me understand why Americans revere
corrupt officials when you got decent potential presidents who aren't in the pockets of banksters
like HRC.
Reuters/Ipsos changed it polling methodology as soon as they saw a 17 point swing in favor
of Donald the Drumpf. When the methodology by their own admission was under reporting Trump support
and over reporting Hillbilly's numbers they did nothing. So don't believe any polls. There is
no enthusiasm for Hillbilly in the Democratic party, so the Democratic turn out will be low, on
the other hand people want to shake things up, they will vote for Drumpf. I just wished Donald
had half a brain in his head to see how much good he could do, with the opportunity he has.
So the dreaded ruskies are trying to help Trump? Oh my goodness!
Meanwhile, Clinton's big love for Israel remains unmentioned during most of the Primaries and
even now. I've done a lot of work around the Middle East. The reason certain people hate us is
because the US has vetoed all UN efforts to right the wrongs committed by Israel against the Palestinians.
And with Netanyahu in his 4th term, gelding the news media, and rolling more completely fascist,
we can expect more rubber stamping of territory occupation (that seems like a very simple and
illegal act, but since the USA - and only the USA - disagrees, it's okay) and abuses that will
further fuel hatred from people who'd, at minimum, appreciate it if justice could apply to them.
Let the candidate without sin cast the first stone of superiority!
BTW - What the Russians want is more cash for their wealthiest, trusted oligarchs. That's exactly
what Clinton and Trump are working to do. So why can't they all just be friends?
ahmedfez
A lot of associations and coincidences have been listed here. But no hard evidence linking
the hacking to Putin, nor Putin to Trump. It sounds like a load of muckraking.
shaftedpig -> ahmedfez
True. If it was the other way round, Guardian journalists and establishment shills would
be screaming 'tin-foil' when they should be holding that woman to account.
"... The EU has been jerking Turkey around forever about joining the EU. They clearly intend not to let a Muslim country join but keep pretending they might as a key NATO ally. ..."
"... Merely assuming an official posture of neutrality, as Nasser famously did, would be a big setback for the US and a big gain for Russia ..."
"... The fact that the heads of NATO and the US government, along with their "brain trusts" get so panicky about a possible warming of relations between Russia and Turkey is ridiculous. These asshats have been behaving all along as if the Soviet Union never fell and that Russia is the same thing it was while the heart of the USSR. ..."
"... NATO gets aggressive and spreads itself all over Eastern Europe with the intention of kicking the Bear and then gets its panties in a twist when the Bear, quite reasonably, reacts to their aggressive actions. ..."
"... I literally cannot think of a single thing that Russia has done since the end of the Soviet Union that in any way, shape, or form alarms me or makes me think, "These guys are planning to invade or start a war!" ..."
"... US aggression in Syria HAD to be responded to by Russia. Russia has LONG time major military bases in Syria. How would the US respond if Russia turned the UAE into a chaotic shithole in order to try and kick the US out of its HUGE military bases there? The initiating of chaos would be the aggressive act, NOT the US response to the chaos. The generating of massive chaos in Syria (by the US and its allies) was the aggressive act, NOT Russia's quite reasonable and understandable reaction. Same goes for Ukraine. ..."
"... The US is bound and determined to FORCE Russia to be a major foe for Cold War 2.0 whether Russia wants to be or not. The US cannot see any other way to drive its shitty economic system than to fire up the defense industries to full throttle again, ala Cold War 1.0. Instead of dumping the military economic basis to the US and Western economies to focus on truly beneficial development, they are going with the boogieman…both for the economic shot it will provide, but also in an attempt to quell unrest due to income inequality and the rape/pillage economic system of the West. Make the people afraid of being invaded or nuked into oblivion and they wont complain about no more retirement, inability to buy a decent home, or send their kids to college. ..."
"... If the first Presidents Bush and Clinton had attempted conversion and used some crumbs to mitigate the Soviet collapse, instead of unleashing the worst pack of intellectual sophists, strategists, and black market dregs, then Russia today would probably be neatly colonized into an international system, but after the violent class conflict of decolonization during the Cold War a new world order that appeared like Gore Vidal's semi-sarcastic paradigm-shattering essay in the Nation would prematurely speed up de-colonization with "white privilege" too uncamouflaged: ..."
"... Thank you. I have been wondering about the relationship between the Gulen movement and the CIA that relationship might shed light about whether the US was involved in or pushed or green lighted the coup. Of course, CIA assets have been known to go rogue as well. ..."
"... While exploring this subject, there's a good article and talk given by a career CIA case officer (undercover) who now works for a think tank of some sort. (So I assume she's still with the CIA, even if supposedly she's not.) Her book describes the extent of the Gulen network, including the criminal investigations underway for Gulen's charter schools network. (Did you know Gulen has the largest network of charter schools in the USA?!) This presentation implicitly acknowledged the dangerous / illegal aspects to the Gulen movement. ..."
"... But at a higher, strategic level, CIA seems to be obviously harboring and supporting Gulen, as Edmonds says. ..."
"... Edmonds has also done some amazing work regarding Hastert's pedophile connections–reported this formally to US law agencies in multiple years, and was interviewed for a triple-fact-checked Vanity Fair article. The FBI agents who were doing the investigating (knowing about Hastert's pedophilia 10-20 years ago) thought they were preparing for a criminal investigation. They became disillusioned when they realized after a couple of years that their FBI higher-ups had no intention of prosecuting. Apparently the issue is so widespread, and everyone knows–Edmonds describes a certain palace in Turkey where US Congress members get taken on VIP trips, where the VIP suites were being monitored / videotapes simultaneously by FBI, DIA, DoJ, criminal gangs, and foreign governments. Yet when most recently Hastert comes to public attention, all the known pedophile activities are not mentioned, just the financial money-laundering aspects. Because so many of our officials & media & prominent people have been compromised by pedophilia that no one is willing to speak out about it. ..."
"... Whistleblower Sibel Edmonds has a number of insightful video interviews and papers about Turkey. She predicted the coup about 18 months ago–pointing out that the CIA was preparing to replace Erdogan, and showing the pattern with other regime changes with USA involvement. Both the recent and past interviews give a lot of insight–e.g., into Gulen's CIA-backed financial, cultural and political empire spanning Turkey, Turkik-friendly caucasus countries and deeply embedded within the USA and Congress. ..."
"... For background on Sibel Edmonds, a short 2006 documentary "Kill the Messenger" about her whistleblowing while an FBI translator is a good starting point. ..."
"... Ever wondered why Russia hasn't attempted to internally overthrow any of the Gulf States or Saudi Arabia since the Iraqi invasion? They are definitely fragile, internally vulnerable states and closely aligned with the west. Two can definitely play these color revolution games. I suspect it is due to the vulnerability of their own, Russian, populations and increased Middle east instability could produce blowback in Russia proper. However the US and allies have been playing hard this game of disrupting Middle East stability for the last 13 years. At what point, would the Russians decide, well, Middle East stability is already gone and it is time to strike back at US allies using our own tactics? Personally, I think Putin is too smart for that but what about after Putin? ..."
"... Russia's historical ties were with the Byzantine Empire, with which it shared – after the 9th century A.D. – a crucial common feature, viz. Orthodoxy. The center of Orthodoxy was of course Constantinople, with which the Russian Archbishopric and later, Patriarchate, experienced complicated relations. Upon the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, and the loss of Constantinople to Orthodoxy, Russia envisioned its own capital, Moscow, as taking up the mantle and succeeding Constantinople (the "Second Rome") as Christendom's "Third Rome". The title conflates the relationship between the two countries/empires in the Byzantine period with that during the Ottoman period (i.e., the [Sublime] "Porte"). ..."
"... But for non-U.S. citizens and U.S. citizens who live near the world's hottest geopolitical hotspot, the prospect of Victoria Nuland (of Ukraine regime change fame) as SoS is not at all a happy one. ..."
It's rather improbable to see a Russo-Turkish alliance against US and NATO. The US and the
Russians have probably already agreed on the new Middle East map which includes Kurdish state.
This explains to a great extent why Erdogan is so nervous, making sloppy and dangerous moves.
Um, given reports that the Turks
briefly closed the airbase that the US uses to conduct operations in Syria over the weekend,
Erdogan seems plenty pissed with the US for not turning over Gulen, as he has repeatedly requested.
Europe has agreed to give him only 3 billion euros to halt the refugee flow into Europe, which
is hardly adequate, and a vague promise that maybe the EU will give Turks the freedom of movement
too. The EU has been jerking Turkey around forever about joining the EU. They clearly intend
not to let a Muslim country join but keep pretending they might as a key NATO ally.
Merely assuming an official posture of neutrality, as Nasser famously did, would be a big
setback for the US and a big gain for Russia
Thanks for mentioning the Real News Network fundraiser, Yves. They have a dollar-for-dollar
matching grant going on as well, doubling the impact of every donation.
The fact that the heads of NATO and the US government, along with their "brain trusts"
get so panicky about a possible warming of relations between Russia and Turkey is ridiculous.
These asshats have been behaving all along as if the Soviet Union never fell and that Russia is
the same thing it was while the heart of the USSR.
They take it on faith that the US/West and Russia MUST be at odds, no matter what, to the point
that they create out of whole cloth conflicts where none existed before. NATO gets aggressive
and spreads itself all over Eastern Europe with the intention of kicking the Bear and then gets
its panties in a twist when the Bear, quite reasonably, reacts to their aggressive actions.
Personally, I couldn't care less if Turkey and Russia get kissy-faced with each other. Big
wup. Russia is NOT preparing to invade Western Europe (as much as NATO WISHES it were). Russia
is NOT invading countries and overthrowing their governments to install puppet regimes, that's
the USA and NATO ONLY. The West transgresses, grossly, again and again and when Russia coughs
or clears its throat in opposition, it is "RUSSIAN AGGRESSION! Yaaaa! The Russians are coming!
The Russians are coming!!!!"
I literally cannot think of a single thing that Russia has done since the end of the Soviet
Union that in any way, shape, or form alarms me or makes me think, "These guys are planning to
invade or start a war!" On the other hand, I've seen nothing BUT war starting by the West.
First NATO takes something that wasn't, in all actuality, THAT bad a situation (the breakup of
Yugoslavia) and turns it into a complete hell in Europe.
US aggression in Syria HAD to be responded to by Russia. Russia has LONG time major military
bases in Syria. How would the US respond if Russia turned the UAE into a chaotic shithole in order
to try and kick the US out of its HUGE military bases there? The initiating of chaos would be
the aggressive act, NOT the US response to the chaos. The generating of massive chaos in Syria
(by the US and its allies) was the aggressive act, NOT Russia's quite reasonable and understandable
reaction. Same goes for Ukraine.
The US is bound and determined to FORCE Russia to be a major foe for Cold War 2.0 whether
Russia wants to be or not. The US cannot see any other way to drive its shitty economic system
than to fire up the defense industries to full throttle again, ala Cold War 1.0. Instead of dumping
the military economic basis to the US and Western economies to focus on truly beneficial development,
they are going with the boogieman…both for the economic shot it will provide, but also in an attempt
to quell unrest due to income inequality and the rape/pillage economic system of the West. Make
the people afraid of being invaded or nuked into oblivion and they wont complain about no more
retirement, inability to buy a decent home, or send their kids to college.
If the first Presidents Bush and Clinton had attempted conversion and used some crumbs
to mitigate the Soviet collapse, instead of unleashing the worst pack of intellectual sophists,
strategists, and black market dregs, then Russia today would probably be neatly colonized into
an international system, but after the violent class conflict of decolonization during the Cold
War a new world order that appeared like Gore Vidal's semi-sarcastic paradigm-shattering essay
in the Nation would prematurely speed up de-colonization with "white privilege" too uncamouflaged:
There is now only one way out. The time has come for the United States to make
common cause with the Soviet Union. The bringing together of the Soviet landmass (with all
its natural resources) and our island empire (with all its technological resources) would be
of great benefit to each society, not to mention the world. Also, to recall the wisdom of the
Four Horsemen who gave us our empire, the Soviet Union and our section of North America combined
would be a match, industrially and technologically, for the Sino-Japanese axis that will dominate
the future just as Japan dominates world trade today. But where the horsemen thought of war
as the supreme solvent, we now know that war is worse than useless. Therefore, the alliance
of the two great powers of the Northern Hemisphere will double the strength of each and give
us, working together, an opportunity to survive, economically, in a highly centralized Asiatic
world.
Rereading this it sacrifices coherence to venting. The premise is that historical contiguity
with the racial residues of empire could be confronted or not if they were more simply transparent.
The bigger point I wanted to make is the current demographic disaster may be intentional if
one looks at the recent Russian experience as an experiment. Broken Force? Then social pressure
through thwarting the traditional modes of reproduction of labor leading to a reinvigorated military
economy in 15 years.
Yeah the whole "soviet threat" issue vanished the day Stalin passed. But i fear that the US,
and thus NATO, needed it to maintain compliance within their own nations.
And thus the threat was stoked until the 90s, then it was eased back as they thought they had
the old bear chained down while Yeltsin was in office, only for their antics to cause a blowback
that is still ongoing once Putin took over.
Last week I got curious to have a better understanding of the Turkey situation than what I
was getting from MSM. I decided to see if Sibel Edmonds had spoken up–and discovered that she
predicted this coup 18 months ago.
The "BellingTheCat" website with WhatsApp translated messages of Turkish military during the
coup, which Helmers also mentions,
are here . Helmers says this website is a NATO-sponsored website and that it is not always
trustworthy, but isn't sure in this case. Edmonds doesn't mention this website being linked to
NATO.
For background on Edmonds see "
Kill the Messenger ",
a 2006 documentary about her whistleblowing within the FBI.
Thank you. I have been wondering about the relationship between the Gulen movement and
the CIA that relationship might shed light about whether the US was involved in or pushed or
green lighted the coup. Of course, CIA assets have been known to go rogue as well.
While exploring this subject, there's a good article and talk given by a career CIA case
officer (undercover) who now works for a think tank of some sort. (So I assume she's still with
the CIA, even if supposedly she's not.) Her book describes the extent of the Gulen network, including
the criminal investigations underway for Gulen's charter schools network. (Did you know Gulen
has the largest network of charter schools in the USA?!) This presentation implicitly acknowledged
the dangerous / illegal aspects to the Gulen movement.
But at a higher, strategic level, CIA seems to be obviously harboring and supporting Gulen,
as Edmonds says.
Within the CIA there are therefore different angles / understandings / strategies. The upper
echelon strategy seems to be about supporting Gulen (including helping clandestinely Gulen–or
his puppet-master(s)–to effect regime change). LIHOP is too weak an argument, given the kind of
support Gulen receives from his USA base. Probably he's just a figurehead and the real power is
out of view. (USA? Off-world?)
Edmonds has also done some amazing work regarding Hastert's pedophile connections–reported
this formally to US law agencies in multiple years, and was interviewed for a triple-fact-checked
Vanity Fair article. The FBI agents who were doing the investigating (knowing about Hastert's
pedophilia 10-20 years ago) thought they were preparing for a criminal investigation. They became
disillusioned when they realized after a couple of years that their FBI higher-ups had no intention
of prosecuting. Apparently the issue is so widespread, and everyone knows–Edmonds describes a
certain palace in Turkey where US Congress members get taken on VIP trips, where the VIP suites
were being monitored / videotapes simultaneously by FBI, DIA, DoJ, criminal gangs, and foreign
governments. Yet when most recently Hastert comes to public attention, all the known pedophile
activities are not mentioned, just the financial money-laundering aspects. Because so many of
our officials & media & prominent people have been compromised by pedophilia that no one is willing
to speak out about it.
Whistleblower Sibel Edmonds has a number of insightful video interviews and papers about
Turkey. She predicted the coup about 18 months ago–pointing out that the CIA was preparing to
replace Erdogan, and showing the pattern with other regime changes with USA involvement. Both
the recent and past interviews give a lot of insight–e.g., into Gulen's CIA-backed financial,
cultural and political empire spanning Turkey, Turkik-friendly caucasus countries and deeply embedded
within the USA and Congress.
A longer post with a number of links has been sidetracked to moderation. In case it disappears
I'm posting this short comment.
For background on Sibel Edmonds, a short 2006 documentary "Kill the Messenger" about her
whistleblowing while an FBI translator is a good starting point.
How would the US respond if Russia turned the UAE into a chaotic shithole in order to
try and kick the US out of its HUGE military bases there?
Ever wondered why Russia hasn't attempted to internally overthrow any of the Gulf States
or Saudi Arabia since the Iraqi invasion? They are definitely fragile, internally vulnerable states
and closely aligned with the west. Two can definitely play these color revolution games. I suspect
it is due to the vulnerability of their own, Russian, populations and increased Middle east instability
could produce blowback in Russia proper. However the US and allies have been playing hard this
game of disrupting Middle East stability for the last 13 years. At what point, would the Russians
decide, well, Middle East stability is already gone and it is time to strike back at US allies
using our own tactics? Personally, I think Putin is too smart for that but what about after Putin?
This thread seems to have petered out rather early on, not sure how much to add.
For those (if anyone is still out there) interested, Pat Lang's site SST has been posting regularly
on Turkey, and he has commenters from the region and who are knowledgeable about ME/NE military
and political affairs.
I had read the John Helmer piece on his blog when it was first posted, and forwarded it to
a friend who's similar in many respects to Lang (career military officer, now retired; author
of historical studies and books; keen student of the Eastern Mediterranean, Turkey, Cyprus, the
Balkans) except that he's Greek.
In return he sent me a link to his own latest two pieces on a Greek blog. One discusses the
"coup" in considerable detail. Some random factoids I picked up on, in no particular order or
hierarchy:
-Russia is not interested in regime change in Turkey at the moment;
-Russia is very interested in maintaining its buffer zone (called "The Rimland" by the
late Nicholas Spykman, a geopolitics theoretician), of which Turkey forms perhaps the key part
(historically, and now);
-Russia turned the shooting down of that SU 24 into an opportunity to install S400s or
possibly, S500s, in Syria;
-The current situation in Syria is more or less a proxy war between the U.S. and Russia;
-Russia has recently become very active in the so-called "Northern Corridor" (aka, the
Arctic Circle), something most analysts forget;
-By 2020, Russia will be 100% self-sufficient in food production;
-It is likely that Russian surveillance technology picked up the news of the impending
coup and informed Erdogan of it;
-The presence of nuclear weapons at Incirlik is in violation of Article 2 of the 1975 Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty.
-Russia wants/needs a "southern corridor" to move LNG to the Med. Turkey is in the right
geographic location to serve this purpose.
The historical relationship between Turkey and Russia comes out a bit garbled in Helmer's (original
post) title, i.e. "The New Byzantine Alliance: The Kremlin and the Porte," etc.
Russia's historical ties were with the Byzantine Empire, with which it shared – after the
9th century A.D. – a crucial common feature, viz. Orthodoxy. The center of Orthodoxy was of course
Constantinople, with which the Russian Archbishopric and later, Patriarchate, experienced complicated
relations. Upon the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, and the loss of Constantinople
to Orthodoxy, Russia envisioned its own capital, Moscow, as taking up the mantle and succeeding
Constantinople (the "Second Rome") as Christendom's "Third Rome". The title conflates the relationship
between the two countries/empires in the Byzantine period with that during the Ottoman period
(i.e., the [Sublime] "Porte").
Short version: when you start messing around in somebody else's backyard, trouble ensues.
The 2016 election offers voters two rather stark choices. Another blog I read, LGM, recently
had a comment on a thread about Trump-Clinton (there are so many, one loses count) that laid out
why voters are choosing one or the other candidate very neatly. If one is in the U.S. and is relatively
or very well-off, the Democrats' championing (qualified, I would say) of identity politics looks
pretty good, or at least, not as bad as the Republicans' (I'm still aghast at how black voters
are so staunchly supportive of someone whose husband shoved TANF through in place of AFDC, but
hey). But for non-U.S. citizens and U.S. citizens who live near the world's hottest geopolitical
hotspot, the prospect of Victoria Nuland (of Ukraine regime change fame) as SoS is not at all
a happy one.
Bernie Sanders delegates were forcefully locked out of a DNC meeting
on Saturday as the Democratic National Committee attempted to block superdelegate
reforms.
The meeting of 187 rules committee members took place in a small room at
the Wells Fargo Center where they unceremoniously voted to reject a proposal
that would ban superdelegates in future primaries.
The DNC's Rules Committee,
which is co-chaired by former Massachusetts Congressman and outspoken
Clinton surrogate Barney Frank, is made up of representatives of both campaigns
in proportion to how many delegates each campaign won during the primary
process.
DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz also appointed 25 members of the Rules
Committee who are able to vote on each proposal. The superdelegate elimination
proposal and related measures were easily the most high-profile votes of
the day.
On Saturday afternoon, the committee voted to reject a proposal eliminating
the role of superdelegates in future Democratic presidential primaries -
something that
multiple state Democratic conventions voted in favor of earlier this
year. Similar proposals to minimize or limit the power of superdelegates
were also defeated.
"... Hillary fainted while she was working in her seventh-floor office at the State Department, not at home, as Reines told the media. She was treated at the State Department's infirmary and then, at her own insistence, taken to Whitehaven to recover. ..."
"... She had a right transverse venous thrombosis, or a blood clot between her brain and skull. She had developed the clot in one of the veins that drains blood from the brain to the heart. The doctors explained that blood stagnates when you spend a lot of time on airplanes, and Hillary had clocked countless hours flying around the world. ..."
"... According to a source close to Hillary, a thorough medical examination revealed that Hillary's tendency to form clots was the least of her problems. She also suffered from a thyroid condition, which was common among women of her age, and her fainting spells indicated there was an underlying heart problem as well. A cardiac stress test indicated that her heart rhythm and heart valves were not normal. Put into layman's language, her heart valves were not pumping in a steady way. ..."
The true story of what happened to Hillary, which is being recounted in these
pages for the first time, was radically different from Reines's version.
To begin with, Hillary fainted while she was working in her seventh-floor
office at the State Department, not at home, as Reines told the media. She was
treated at the State Department's infirmary and then, at her own insistence,
taken to Whitehaven to recover. However, as soon as Bill appeared on the scene
and was able to assess Hillary's condition for himself, he ordered that she
be immediately flown to New York–Presbyterian Hospital in the Fort Washington
section of Manhattan. When Reines subsequently released a statement confirming
that Hillary was being treated at the hospital over the New Year's holiday,
it naturally intensified speculation about the seriousness of her medical condition.
While she was at the hospital, doctors diagnosed Hillary with several problems.
She had a right transverse venous thrombosis, or a blood clot between her
brain and skull. She had developed the clot in one of the veins that drains
blood from the brain to the heart. The doctors explained that blood stagnates
when you spend a lot of time on airplanes, and Hillary had clocked countless
hours flying around the world.
To make matters worse, it turned out that Hillary had an intrinsic tendency
to form clots and faint. In addition to the fainting spell she suffered in Buffalo
a few years before, she had fainted boarding her plane in Yemen, fallen and
fractured her elbow in 2009, and suffered other unspecified fainting episodes.
Several years earlier, she had developed a clot in her leg and was put on anticoagulant
therapy by her doctor. However, she had foolishly stopped taking her anticoagulant
medicine, which might have explained the most recent thrombotic event.
"The unique thing about clotting in the brain is that it could have transformed
into a stroke," said a cardiac specialist with knowledge of Hillary's condition.
Page 195
According to a source close to Hillary, a thorough medical examination revealed
that Hillary's tendency to form clots was the least of her problems. She also
suffered from a thyroid condition, which was common among women of her age,
and her fainting spells indicated there was an underlying heart problem as well.
A cardiac stress test indicated that her heart rhythm and heart valves were
not normal. Put into layman's language, her heart valves were not pumping in
a steady way.
When the author attempted to contact the Clintons' cardiologist, Dr. Allan
Schwartz, he refused to comment, which made it impossible to determine the exact
nature of Hillary's medical status or its long-term significance. However, sources
who dis- cussed Hillary's medical condition with her were told that Hillary's
doctors considered performing valve-replacement surgery. They ultimately decided
against it. Still, before they released Hillary from the hospital, they warned
Bill Clinton: "She has to be carefully monitored for the rest of her life."
the former First Lady took a long bathroom break, but now a law-enforcement source with inside
connections is alleging that Clinton was missing from the stage due to health issues stemming from
a previous brain injury.
These long-lasting symptoms stemming from a concussion and blood clot, according to a neurologist,
suggest Clinton is suffering from post-concussion syndrome, which can severely impact her cognitive
abilities.
All that said, however, Clinton's campaign maintained to Breitbart News that she is in good health
and can serve as President of the United States.
"Strong source just told me something I suspected. Hillary's debate 'bathroom break' wasn't that,
but flare up of problems from brain injury," wrote John Cardillo on
Twitter
.
Cardillo, who previously worked as an officer who provided VIP security details for the New York
Police Department (NYPD), told Breitbart News that he knows of two additional sources who have commented
about Clinton's health problems, which have even impacted her ability to walk to her car after delivering
a speech.
"I got this from both a [federal agent] … and I also got it from a New York [NYPD] guy who worked
security at a Hillary event in New York City," Cardillo told Breitbart News, adding:
These are two people that aren't just personal friends. I worked with one and then post law-enforcement
worked with another on some related things. So, these aren't anonymous people. These are good
friends. Both of them told me the same thing, that after her speeches, whether she did a talk
or a policy speech, she had to sit behind – she would come off the podium backstage – and have
to sit and rest before making it back to the car because she was so fatigued, dizzy and disoriented.
Cardillo said these two security officials don't know each other and do not live in the same state,
but "their stories were almost identical."
One of the men told him that Clinton was "very pale, kind of disoriented. He said she looked like
she was about to faint. She was very pale, almost sweaty."
Cardillo said one of the incidents occurred while she was Secretary of State. The event worked
by the NYPD official was roughly a year ago.
Veteran Republican strategist Roger Stone, who previously worked with GOP frontrunner Donald Trump,
told Breitbart News that he has also heard about Clinton's long-term health problems.
"A number of New York Democrats, very prominent, well-known, wealthy New York Democrats, told
me last year that Hillary had very significant health issues and that they were surprised that she
was running in view of her health problems and her lack of stamina," Stone told Breitbart News. "So
far, she's run a very controlled campaign,"
"I don't think she has the physical stamina to be president," he stated. "I have no doubt that
Marco Rubio won't call her on it, but Trump certainly would."
"We also know that in the emails, of course, Huma Abedin… says that she is easily confused," Stone
added, referencing Clinton's close confidant Abedin
comment in an email , "She's often confused," referring to Clinton.
Trump, Stone's former boss, certainly hasn't been shy in questioning whether Clinton has the "stamina"
to be president.
"She goes out and she sees you guys for about 10 minutes, she sees you for a little while, it's
all rehearsed and staged," Trump said in a recent interview on Fox News' Media Buzz.
"They'll pick a couple of people out of the audience that are like, you know, 100 percent. She'll
sit around a little plastic table, they'll talk to the people for a while. It's ridiculous," Trump
added. "And then she goes away for five or six days and you don't see her. She goes to sleep."
Neurologist Dr. Daniel Kassicieh, D.O., reviewed news reports of Clinton's head injury in light
of the recent information revealed from the security sources that are raising questions about her
current health status.
Kassicieh, who has run his own Sarasota, Florida, practice for 20 years, is a board-certified
neurologist and the medical director of the Florida Headache and Movement Disorder Center. He is
a doctor of osteopathic medicine, which is similar to a medical doctor but can involve at a minimum
of 100 more classroom hours of specific training. That additional training is focused on the osteopathic-or
the musculoskeletal system-aspects of medicine. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Neurology
(FAAN) and a Fellow of the American College of Neuro-psychiatrists (FACN). Kassicieh is a registered
Republican in Sarasota, but his purely medical analysis is troubling for Clinton.
"They were trying to poo-poo this off as a minor concussion, but I would just say that reading
it and trying to take all the politics out of it, and just read it purely from a medical standpoint,"
Kassicieh explained:
Considering the point of what happened with Hillary over this time period… the timeline… and
then what has happened here more recently… the break at the debate, I saw that and even the commentators
that were sitting there made a comment that, 'Gee, that seems awful long for a break.' Just looking
at it from a neurological standpoint, the risk factors for developing post-concussion syndrome,
one of them is age, and she was 65 when this happened… just from a physiologic standpoint that's
an older individual. Being female is a risk factor for post-concussion syndrome as well.
"For someone who has treated many post-concussion syndrome patients and that's what I really believe
she's suffering from based on reading these reports and reading what's happened," Kassicieh said.
"I think she has latent
post-concussion syndrome , and I can understand that as a politician they would want to be covering
that up." He stated:
I would say as a neurologist having seen many post-concussion syndrome patients that I would
not want a president who I knew had post-concussion syndrome being president because their super
high-level cognitive abilities are clearly impaired and even their routine multitasking high-stress
abilities are affected because post-concussion syndrome patients in general don't tolerate even
moderate work, stress-related environments.
Kassicieh added that if suffering from post concussion syndrome, Clinton's symptoms could appear
"well beyond a year" after her concussion.
"A transverse sinus thrombosis [blood clot] is a rare condition of a clot forming in the venous
sinus cavities surrounding the brain," Kassicieh told Breitbart News, referencing an
ABC News report from 2012 that detailed Clinton's head injury and blood clot following a fall.
He explained:
These venous sinuses drain blood out of the brain. The [injury] incidence is only about 3 per
1,000,000 adults. The transverse sinus is less commonly affected than the main sagittal venous
sinus. The cause of transverse sinus clots is not well understood although trauma and dehydration
have been described as risk factors. Mrs. Clinton suffered from both.
Dr. Nicholas C. Bambakidis also analyzed the facts for Breitbart News. He is the director of cerebrovascular
and skull base surgery, and the program director of neurological surgery at University Hospitals
Case Medical Center in Cleveland, Ohio, and a professor of neurosurgery and radiology at the CWRU
School of Medicine in Cleveland,
"These types of clots are usually formed spontaneously without an obvious cause," Bambakidis said
in an email:
They can be associated with dehydration, a predisposition to blood clotting disorders, are
more common in women and may be associated with oral contraceptive medication, severe head trauma,
brain surgery, or infection. If untreated, they can progress and lead to bleeding in the brain
or swelling, and a stroke or even death. The treatment is generally anticoagulation and treatment
of any underlying cause.
Bambakidis said that if treated early and quickly, there are no longstanding issues with a person's
health.
"Typically, if caught early and treated adequately (as seems to have been done in this incident)
there is a full recovery without any consequences (normal cognition, memory, etc)," he said.
Dr. Jane Orient, the executive director of the politically conservative Association of American
Physicians and Surgeons also reviewed the 2012 ABC News report about Clinton's concussion and blood
clot. She said she thought the ABC report appeared medically accurate.
"Factors predisposing to clots include air travel, dehydration, hormones, immobilization as during
surgery, blood abnormalities, cancer," Orient said. "Concussions can cause long-term damage including
cognitive problems, even when standard studies including CT or MRI look normal."
"Not saying Mrs. Clinton has any of the above–just speaking generally and hypothetically," she
clarified.
One former member of Orient's group is Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), an ophthalmologist. He was a member
of AAPS for more than 20 years before his election to the U.S. Senate. He is now also running for
president on the Republican side in 2016.
Neurologist Kassicieh agreed with Orient about the possibility of Clinton suffering from long-term
cognitive symptoms.
"Concussions in older adults can be more serious, resulting in a condition known as post-concussion
syndrome. This condition can be characterized by symptoms of persistent dizziness, complaints of
memory difficulties, forgetfulness, loss of ability to focus on complex tasks or concepts and indecisiveness,"
Kassicieh explained. He added, "Latent depression and overt anxiety are also common in this condition."
Kassicieh noted that although a Clinton spokesperson told the press that Clinton "got over this
quickly," another
ABC report quotes former President Bill Clinton saying that his wife's injury "required six months
of very serious work to get over."
"Other reports in the same article show an interesting timeline for Hillary over the next several
months, showing that she was not fully functional in her capacity as [Secretary of State]," Kassicieh
added:
As a neurologist, I would interpret these and more recent events involving Hillary as possibly
showing signs of post-concussion syndrome. This condition could have serious impact on the cognitive
and intellectual functioning of an individual, particularly a high level job as [President of
the United States].
Dr. Drew Pinsky, nationally syndicated radio talk show host heard on KABC radio "Dr. Drew Midday
Live," also spoke to Breitbart News about Clinton's health and explained that experiencing symptoms
for more than a year after a head injury is very serious.
"In my clinical experience, it's very common for them to have six months and even up to a year
of exercise intolerance, and sort of [needing] frequent rest, and can easily get overwhelmed," he
said of head injury patients. "But after a year, that's something else."
He said symptoms like Clinton's, as an elderly person in her 60s, "are very serious."
"Those are not trivial symptoms," Pinsky stressed:
If my patient came in with that, the first thing I would do is put them on a treadmill. I would
get a sleep study, make sure they don't have sleep apnea. I would do all sorts of metabolic studies
and make sure there wasn't something metabolic. I would actually do some extensive cancer screenings.
Why is this person suddenly having exercise intolerance?
Pinsky added that if Clinton is overworking herself, "I hope she has a medical team attending
to her."
Breitbart News sent a detailed set of questions regarding these questions raised by law enforcement
and medical professionals to Clinton's campaign.
The specific questions sent to Nick Merrill, a spokesman for Clinton, include:
1.) Does Secretary Clinton have difficulty with fatigue, dizziness and being disoriented? Does
she have difficulty after speeches and during debates continuing for lengthy periods of time–or
for instance walking back to her car after events?
2.) Is she suffering from latent post concussion syndrome?
3.) Is she being completely honest with the public about her health? Does she have a clean
bill of health?
4.) Is she able to conduct high level cognitive abilities on the same level she has been able
to throughout her life? Is she able to conduct routine multitasking high stress abilities on the
same level she has been able to throughout her life?
5.) Does she have or did she have a transverse sinus thrombosis, or blood clot?
6.) Is she capable of serving as President of the United States with these conditions and symptoms?
7.) Has she done tests with a doctor on a treadmill? Has she gotten a doctor-supervised sleep
study? Has she worked with a doctor on metabolic studies? Has she gotten cancer screenings?
8.) Does she have a medical team attending to her? What are the details of that?
In response, Merrill told Breitbart News that Clinton's doctors have already answered the questions
in Clinton's health statement.
"These questions are all addressed in her health statement," Merrill told Breitbart News, referring
to a letter from Clinton's doctor, Dr. Lisa Bardack-the chair of internal medicine at the Mount Kisco
Medical Group in New York.
The letter, labeled a "healthcare statement" and dated on July 28, 2015-which was released along
with Clinton's tax filings-is two full pages long and includes a complete description from Dr. Bardack
clearing Clinton as fit to serve as president.
"This letter summarizes the health history and current medical evaluation of Hillary Rodham Clinton,"
Dr. Bardack wrote. "I am an internist and the Chairman of the Department of Medicine at the Mount
Kisco Medical Group in Mount Kisco, New York. I have served as Mrs. Clinton's personal physician
since 2001, during which time I have been involved in all aspects of her healthcare."
The letter states that Clinton is a "healthy 67-year-old female whose current medical conditions
include hypothyroidism and seasonal pollen allergies."
"Her past medical history is notable for a deep vein thrombosis in 1998 and in 2009, an elbow
fracture in 2009 and a concussion in 2012," Dr. Bardack continues.
"In December of 2012, Mrs. Clinton suffered a stomach virus after traveling, became dehydrated,
fainted and sustained a concussion," the doctor wrote:
During follow-up evaluations, Mrs. Clinton was found to have a transverse sinus venous thrombosis
and began anti-coagulation therapy to dissolve the clot. As a result of the concussion, Mrs. Clinton
also experienced double vision for a period of time and benefitted from wearing glasses with a
Fresnel Prism. Her concussion symptoms, including the double vision, resolved within two months
and she discontinued the use of the prism. She had follow-up testing in 2013, which revealed complete
resolution of the effects of the concussion as well as total dissolution of the thrombosis. Mrs.
Clinton also tested negative for all clotting disorders. As a precaution however, it was decided
to continue her on daily anticoagulation.
The letter continues by detailing her current medication list, which includes Armour Thyroid-a
hormone used to treat an under-active thyroid– plus various antihistamines, Vitamin B12 and the blood-thinner
Coumadin.
"She was also advised in 1998 to take Lovenox, a short-acting blood thinner, when she took extended
flights; this medication was discontinued when she began Coumadin," Dr. Bardack continued:
Her Coumadin dose is monitored regularly and she has experienced no side effects from her medications.
She takes no other medications on a regular basis and has no known drug allergies. She does not
smoke and drinks alcohol occasionally. She does not use illicit drugs or tobacco products. She
eats a diet rich in lean protein, vegetables and fruits. She exercises regularly, including yoga,
swimming, walking and weight training.
Dr. Bardack noted that Clinton's family history also complicates matters: her father "lived into
his 80s and died after having a stroke" while her mother "lived into her 90s and passed away after
having congestive heart failure." One of her brothers-it's not clear whether it's Tony or Hugh Rodham,
according to this letter-"had premature heart disease," Dr. Bardack wrote.
"Due to her family history, she underwent a full cardiac evaluation, which was negative," the
doctor wrote. "She had a coronary calcium score of zero and a normal carotid ultrasound."
She's also had cancer screenings: "Her routine health maintenance is up to date, and has included
a normal colonoscopy, gynecologic exam, mammogram, and breast ultrasound."
She had a physical on March 21, 2015, which revealed, according to Dr. Bardack, that Clinton was
in top-notch health.
"In summary, Mrs. Clinton is a healthy female with hypothyroidism and seasonal allergies, on long-term
anticoagulation," Dr. Bardack wrote. "She participates in a healthy lifestyle and has had a full
medical evaluation, which reveals no evidence of additional medical issues or cardiovascular disease.
Her cancer screening evaluations are all negative. She is in excellent physical condition and fit
to serve as President of the United States."
Clinton's own campaign manager Robby Mook wouldn't commit during a mid-June 2015 interview on
CBS's Face The Nation to release Clinton's full health records.
"I will let Hillary decide that," Mook replied when John Dickerson asked him if Clinton would
release her full healthcare records. "But I can tell you she has been hitting the campaign trail
hard."
The letter from Clinton's doctor-not her full healthcare records, but just a mere statement-came
after that Mook interview.
Hillary Clinton's health issues are drastically worse than she has revealed publicly - and the
potential presidential candidate tried to keep her medical information private for fear that it would
damage her bid for the White House in 2016, according to a new book.
The 66-year-old former secretary of state has suffered more fainting spells than publicly known,
is prone to have blood clots, and may be at serious risk of a stroke, according to the book, "Blood
Feud: The Clintons vs. the Obamas," by Edward Klein.
Modal Trigger
The medical scare that forced Clinton to be rushed to New York-Presbyterian Hospital on Dec. 30,
2013, revealed how serious the situation is.
"She has to be carefully monitored for the rest of her life," doctors warned former President
Bill Clinton before Hillary was released from the hospital, according to the book.
The book claims Hillary was taken to New YorkPresbyterian after a fainting spell and concussion
that she suffered in her seventh-floor office at the State Department - not at her home, as claimed.
Hillary was initially treated at a State Department facility and was transferred to her home to
recover. Bill Clinton, however, insisted Hillary be flown to New York City and be treated by specialists
there, Klein claims.
During her visit to the Manhattan hospital, the presumed 2016 Democratic front-runner was diagnosed
with several problems, including the clots.
Hillary had a right transverse venous thrombosis, or a blood clot, between her brain and skull.
"The unique thing about clotting in the brain is that it could have transformed into a stroke,"
a cardiac specialist with knowledge of Hillary's condition says in the book.
The clots are especially a threat while flying, when blood pools while sitting, and she did a
lot of flying while at the State Department.
In addition to a 2005 fainting spell during a speech in Buffalo, Hillary also fainted while boarding
her plane in Yemen in 2009, which caused her to fall and fracture her elbow.
Meanwhile, coming after Hillary's recent comments that she was "dead broke" when she left the
White House, she played the poor card again, telling The Guardian that she is not "truly well off"
when compared to the super rich.
"We pay ordinary income tax," she told the paper, "unlike a lot of people who are truly well off,
not to name names; and we've done it through dint of hard work."
Among her issues are "blinding headaches" that have "frequently plagued her," he claimed. As Radar
reported, other insiders have claimed she has had a series of strokes and
may be suffering from MS.
In fact, the friend claimed, Clinton even turned to sleeping pills like Ambien and Lunesta in
her desperation, but they offered no relief. Said the friend, "She said they made her less sharp
the next day.
"There were incidents on the campaign trail when she felt faint and nearly swooned," he claimed.
"Those incidents were kept secret."
Clinton's health has long been an issue in this year's election cycle, most recently when the
candidate disappeared from the ABC Democratic presidential debate stage in December for an extended
period of time for what her campaign said was an
extended bathroom break.
Breitbart News previously
reported that a law enforcement source believed the extended break stemmed from a flare-up of
a previous brain injury, though the Clinton campaign refuted the report.
"... We write to request an investigation to determine whether Former Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton committed perjury and made false statements during her testimony under oath before congressional
committees. ..."
"... While testifying before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on July 7, 2016,
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director James Comey stated the truthfulness of Secretary's testimony
before Congress was not within the scope of the FBI's investigation. Nor had the FBI even considered
any of Secretary Clinton's testimony. ..."
"... Director Comey further testified the Department of Justice requires a criminal referral from
Congress to initiate an investigation of Secretary Clinton's congressional testimony. We are writing
for that purpose. ..."
"... The evidence collected by the FBI during its investigation of Secretary Clinton's use of a
personal email system appears to directly contradict several aspects of her sworn testimony. ..."
"... In light of those contradictions, the Department should investigate and determine whether to
prosecute Secretary Clinton for violating statutes that prohibit perjury and false statements to Congress,
or any other relevant statutes. ..."
"... Thank you for your attention to this important matter. ..."
"... During FBI Director Comey's testimony before Congress, he admitted that statements made by
Clinton under oath were "not true" and that her handling of this nation's classified material was "extremely
careless." ..."
It is only one more scandal. The Congressional website which contained a call from
2 Congressmen to prosecute Hillary for perjury has mysteriously been taken down.
On July 11, Congressman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) and House Judiciary Committee Chairman
Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) sent the following letter to US Attorney Phillps. I have been waiting
for action on this item.
I went to the Congressional website where I expected to see an update and the site is down
and has been down for 2 days. Does Hillary Clinton have that kind of power to erase this kind
of evidence with regard to sociopathic criminality?
Here is the letter written by Chaffetz and Goodlatte:
Dear Mr. Phillips:
We write to request an investigation to determine whether Former Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton committed perjury and made false statements during her testimony
under oath before congressional committees.
While testifying before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform
on July 7, 2016, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director James Comey stated the truthfulness
of Secretary's testimony before Congress was not within the scope of the FBI's investigation.
Nor had the FBI even considered any of Secretary Clinton's testimony.
Director Comey further testified the Department of Justice requires a criminal
referral from Congress to initiate an investigation of Secretary Clinton's congressional
testimony. We are writing for that purpose. The evidence collected by the FBI during its investigation of Secretary Clinton's
use of a personal email system appears to directly contradict several aspects of her sworn
testimony.
In light of those contradictions, the Department should investigate and determine
whether to prosecute Secretary Clinton for violating statutes that prohibit perjury and
false statements to Congress, or any other relevant statutes.
Thank you for your attention to this important matter.
During FBI Director Comey's testimony before Congress, he admitted that statements
made by Clinton under oath were "not true" and that her handling of this nation's classified
material was "extremely careless."
Clinton has escaped the prosecution the Congressmen called for based upon a technicality
because she was not under oath when she was questioned. However, I have a source that said
they strongly suspect Clinton's aids in taking down this Congressional website until the Democrats
can get the above letter removed. You see, it's now to the point that even die-hard Democrats
have had it with her criminality. One more revelation could be the tipping point for many of
her supporters.
Now, the website is mysteriously down. How convenient for Hillary that this website malfunction
has taken place during the GOP convention where they could capitalize on the political fall-out
from this letter to the US Deputy Attorney.
Do want to bet that the letter from the two Congressman to the US Deputy Attorney requesting
an investigation into Clinton for perjury diappears when the website comes back up?
Here it is America, I could not make this stuff up. The following site has been down since
yesterday.
Site Under Maintenance
The site you requested is currently undergoing maintenance. Please try again later.
I'm Hillary goddamn Clinton. I'm a political prodigy, have been since I was 16. I have an insane
network of powerful friends. I'm willing to spend the next eight years catching shit on all sides,
all so I can fix this fucking country for you. And all you little bitches need to do is get off your
asses one goddamn day in November.
"Oh but what about your eeeemaaaaillls???" Shut the fuck up. Seriously, shut the fuck up and listen
for one fucking second...
But you know what? I don't fucking care. If I gave two shits about the haters I would've dropped
the game decades ago.
"... What cannot be ignored is that Hilary Clinton has supported a war machine that has resulted in the death of millions, while also supporting a neoliberal economy that has produced massive amounts of suffering and created a mass incarceration state. ..."
"... It is crucial to note that Clinton hides her crimes in the discourse of freedom and appeals to democracy ..."
What cannot be ignored is that Hilary Clinton has supported a war machine that has resulted in
the death of millions, while also supporting a neoliberal economy that has produced massive amounts
of suffering and created a mass incarceration state. Yet, all of that is forgotten as the mainstream
press focuses on stories about Clinton's emails and the details of her electoral run for the presidency.
It is crucial to note that Clinton hides her crimes in the discourse of freedom and appeals to democracy
while Trump overtly disdains such a discourse. In the end, state and domestic violence saturate American
society and the only time this fact gets noticed is when the beatings and murders of Black men are
caught on camera and spread through social media.
A very weak article, but some ideas are worth quoting. I think "Make America Great" again is
a slogan of paleoconservatives, who are organically opposed neoconservatives -- the groups most closely
related to neofascism (despite the fact that it consists mainly of Jewish intellectuals and policymakers).
So
Henry A. Giroux is wrong on this particular slogan: neofascism is first of all the wars of
[neoliberal] conquest and Noninterventionalism is not compatible with neofascism. In this sense
Hillary Clinton is truly neofascist candidate in the current race.
Notable quotes:
"... State-manufactured fear offers up new forms of domestic terrorism embodied in the rise of a surveillance state while providing a powerful platform for militarizing many aspects of society. ..."
"... Under such circumstance, the bonds of trust dissolve, while hating the other becomes normalized and lawlessness is elevated to a matter of commonsense. ..."
Across the globe, fascism and white supremacy in their diverse forms are on the rise. In Greece,
France, Poland, Austria and Germany, among other nations, right-wing extremists have used the hateful
discourse of racism, xenophobia and white nationalism to demonize immigrants and undermine democratic
modes of rule and policies. As
Chris Hedges observes, much of the right-wing, racist rhetoric coming out of these countries
mimics what Trump and his followers are saying in the United States.
One consequence is that the
public spheres that produce a critically engaged citizenry and make a democracy possible are under
siege and in rapid retreat. Economic stagnation, massive inequality, the rise of religious fundamentalism
and growing forms of ultra-nationalism now aim to put democratic nations to rest. Echoes of the right-wing
movements in Europe have come home with a vengeance.
Demagogues wrapped in xenophobia, white supremacy and the false appeal to a lost past echo a brutally
familiar fascism, with slogans similar to Donald Trump's call to "Make America Great Again" and "Make
America Safe Again." These are barely coded messages that call for forms of racial and social cleansing.
They are on the march, spewing hatred, embracing forms of anti-semitism and white supremacy, and
showing a deep-seated disdain for any form of justice on the side of democracy. As
Peter Foster points out in The Telegraph, "The toxic combination of the most prolonged period
of economic stagnation and the worst refugee crisis since the end of the Second World War has seen
the far-Right surging across the continent, from Athens to Amsterdam and many points in between."
State-manufactured lawlessness has become normalized and extends from the ongoing and often brutalizing
and murderous police violence against Black people and other vulnerable groups to a criminogenic
market-based system run by a financial elite that strips everyone but the upper 1% of a future, not
only by stealing their possessions but also by condemning them to a life in which the only available
option is to fall back on one's individual resources in order to barely survive. In addition, as
Kathy Kelly points out, at the national level, lawlessness now drives a militarized foreign policy
intent on assassinating alleged enemies rather than using traditional forms of interrogation, arrest
and conviction. The killing of people abroad based on race is paralleled by (and connected with)
the killing of Black people at home. Kelly correctly notes that the whole world has become a battlefield
driven by racial profiling, where lethal violence replaces the protocols of serve and protect.
Fear is the reigning ideology and war its operative mode of action, pitting different groups against
each other, shutting down the possibilities of shared responsibilities, and legitimating the growth
of a paramilitary police force that kills Black people with impunity. State-manufactured fear
offers up new forms of domestic terrorism embodied in the rise of a surveillance state while providing
a powerful platform for militarizing many aspects of society. One consequence is that, as Charles
Derber argues, America has become a warrior society whose "culture and institutions... program civilians
for violence at home as well as abroad." And, as Zygmunt Bauman argues in his book Liquid Fear, in
a society saturated in violence and hate, "human relations are a source of anxiety" and everyone
is viewed with mistrust. Compassion gives way to suspicion and a celebration of fear and revulsion
accorded to those others who allegedly have the potential to become monsters, criminals, or even
worse, murderous terrorists. Under such circumstance, the bonds of trust dissolve, while hating
the other becomes normalized and lawlessness is elevated to a matter of commonsense.
Politics is now a form of warfare creating and producing an expanding geography of combat zones
that hold entire cities, such as Ferguson, Missouri, hostage to forms of extortion, violence lock
downs and domestic terrorism -- something I have demonstrated in detail in my book America at War
with Itself. These are cities where most of those targeted are Black. Within these zones of racial
violence, Black people are often terrified by the presence of the police and subject to endless forms
of domestic terrorism. Hannah Arendt once wrote that terror was the essence of totalitarianism. She
was right and we are witnessing the dystopian visions of the new authoritarians who now trade in
terror, fear, hatred, demonization, violence and racism. Trump and his neo-Nazi bulldogs are no longer
on the fringe of political life and they have no interests in instilling values that will make America
great. On the contrary, they are deeply concerned with creating expanding constellations of force
and fear, while inculcating convictions that will destroy the ability to form critical capacities
and modes of civic courage that offer a glimmer of resistance and justice.
... ... ...
In short, this emerging American neo-fascism in its various forms is largely about social and
racial cleansing and its end point is the construction of prisons, detention centers, enclosures,
walls, and all the other varieties of murderous apparatus that accompany the discourse of national
greatness and racial purity. Americans have lived through 40 years of the dismantling of the welfare
state, the elimination of democratic public spheres, such as schools and libraries, and the attack
on public goods and social provisions. In their place, we have the rise of the punishing state with
its support for a range of criminogenic institutions, extending from banks and hedge funds to state
governments and militarized police departments that depend on extortion to meet their budgets.
"... The pedophile scandals among the U.K.'s elite and officialdom are now well know even among the snoozers and comatose. But the snoozers can't connect the dots that infestations of pedophiles and perverts in government is by design. A number of U.K. police investigators have been openly murdered over the years for stumbling onto high-level pedophiles. ..."
"... As I have often mentioned on these pages previously, I do believe pedophiles and various other perverts are actively recruited into positions of power so that they can be compromised and controlled by the criminal cabal. ..."
The case of well-connected Jewish billionaire Jeffrey Epstein made a
splash about a year ago. Convicted of sex with under-aged girls, since
then related news has been largely suppressed. Epstein is in a position
to compromise high level people by providing under-aged girls for the
likes of Prince Andrew and Bill Clinton. Dossiers and lewd photos with
teenyboppers may be called upon as needed.
I actually believe these
activities are a requirement for entrance into the Crime Syndicate inner
circle. In fact, this goes along way in explaining how an obscure Arkansas
governor who can't keep it in his pants can go on to become president
of the United States and his wife the leading presidential candidate
now. According to John Perkins in Confession of an Economic Hitman,
the motives of psychopaths at the top of pyramid are sex, money and
power.
Now it has been revealed that Bill Clinton was in reality a dedicated
regular reveler on Epstein's jet, Lolita Express. The mainstream media
has suddenly "discovered" that instead of being an infrequent "acquaintance"
of Epstein, Clinton was listed on the flight logs 26 times in just three
years. One wonders why such a story wasn't revealed much earlier?
Curiously, faux nationalist Donald Trump also has some Epstein involvement,
including a rape accusation (at an Epstein party) that so far has gotten
little Dominant Media (aka MSM) play. Trump's other friends were described
here.
In addition, another one-two punch story is emerging of Clinton Foundation
slush funds being used for "investments" with Bill's alleged mistress,
and yet another member of the Tribe, Julia Tauber McMahon, known as
"The Energizer." With the sleaze coming in all directions, is the takedown
of the Clintons at hand; and if so, why and by whom? Is somebody else
is in the wings to replace Hillary? Does the Epstein slime blob end
up slurping Trump?
The pedophile scandals among the U.K.'s elite and officialdom
are now well know even among the snoozers and comatose. But the snoozers
can't connect the dots that infestations of pedophiles and perverts
in government is by design. A number of U.K. police investigators have
been openly murdered over the years for stumbling onto high-level pedophiles.
As I have often mentioned on these pages previously, I do believe
pedophiles and various other perverts are actively recruited into positions
of power so that they can be compromised and controlled by the criminal
cabal. For more background on this general topic, see "Belgium's
Dutoux Pedophile and Child Rape Case: A Road Map for Deep-State Criminality,"
"Crime Syndicate Sexual Entrapment Operations" and "Wikispooks: Covert
Blackmail Ops."
In exploring sex offender Epstein's background story, what's particularly
interesting is how out of the blue this former math teacher was given
important positions in the organization of Jewish cabalist multi-billionaire
Ace Greenberg during the 1970s and '80s. As you may recall, the Greenberg
syndicate included Bear Stearns, the firm that nearly brought down the
world economy. Greenberg was the plutocrat who took down Elliott Spitzer
by way of a scandal. As the U.K.'s Independent reports:
Among [Epstein's] pupils was the son of Bear Stearns chairman
Ace Greenberg. In 1976, after a few years teaching the children
of the wealthy, he accepted a job offer from Mr. Greenberg that
allowed him to oversee their money.
Four years later, he was made a partner, but by 1982 he had
left to set up his own boutique investment company, J. Epstein and
Co. He reportedly only accepted clients prepared to invest a minimum
of $1 billion, though many profiles of Epstein admit a lack of hard,
verifiable facts about his business have added to the air of mystery."
Epstein was not just a run-of-the-mill sex offender but someone with
friends in high places that he liked to entertain in a certain manner
and who shared his proclivities.
Also notable and named in a lawsuit involving Epstein is the well-known
Zionist Israeli Hasbara mouthpiece and Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz,
who represented Epstein in his 2007 sex-offender case.
The claim from Jane Doe No. 3 (who joined three others) alleges that
Dershowitz himself participated in sex acts with underage girls. As
Epstein's legal representation, Dershowitz then arranged a secret non-prosecution
agreement (NPA) with the federal government in the cases of JD No. 1
and No. 2. According to the complaint, Dershowitz managed to influence
immunity from prosecution for all co-conspirators, including himself.
Prince Andrew also attempted to influence the U.S. judicial process
in the matter through lobbyist ties. Epstein served 13 months under
State charges.
"... 0bama v Bush43, who was the More Effective Evil? At least Bush43 didn't have the passion for Crapifying social insurance like 0bama did – IIRC Bush43 meekly tried to privatize SS & then let it go. Bush43 didn't push any Rigged Trade Outsourcing deals the size of TPP, perhaps there was a minor one (DR-CAFTA?). ..."
"... I'd guesstimate 0bama is even worse than Bush43. The sad thing is that I fear the Fockin New Guy will be even worse than 0bama ..."
"... Well, Bush43 has Iraq going for him. And IMNSHO, the only reason Obama didn't seriously put "boots on the ground" is that Iraq and Afghanistan broke the army. But I bet they're recovered enough now, and ready for Hillary! ..."
"... Clearly, from Hickenlooper's speech before Clinton, the brass can't wait! ..."
BTW, do you think we "dodge 2 bullets" & make it to Jan 2017 without 0bama being able to implement
his beloved TPP & Grand Ripoff?
Flying Spaghetti Monster Willing, I hope so!
0bama v Bush43, who was the More Effective Evil? At least Bush43 didn't have the passion for
Crapifying social insurance like 0bama did – IIRC Bush43 meekly tried to privatize SS & then let
it go. Bush43 didn't push any Rigged Trade Outsourcing deals the size of TPP, perhaps there was
a minor one (DR-CAFTA?).
0bama's passion is allowing the 1%ers enrichment by parasitically ripping off 99%ers. In contrast
Bush43's passion was neocon Middle East warmongering regime-change, & Christian Theocratic stances
like banning stem cell research & gay marriage, & fellow theocrat SCOTUS nominations.
I'd guesstimate 0bama is even worse than Bush43. The sad thing is that I fear the Fockin New
Guy will be even worse than 0bama.
Perhaps there is a small chance for HClinton to be less bad
than 0bama if the Sanders-ish social democrats (typically labeled Progressives) can force HClinton
to halfway stick to the 2016 platform. Based on HClinton's behavior during the campaign, I doubt
that is possible – she seems to detest the Progressive faction, based off the Kaine nomination
& authoritarian banning of Sanders delegates from the convention floor, etc, & so far HClinton
seems to get away with this "hippie punching" behavior.
One positive aspect is that I feel like that HClinton will be unable to use the 0bama excuses
to valid Progressives' policy critiques of
You are a sexist for critizing Dear Leader! (racist in 0bama's case)
Those Evil Rs won't let her do that policy
These bogus replies are "dead horses" after continual use by 0bamabots, that IMHO will not
be available for HClinton to use.
Well, Bush43 has Iraq going for him. And IMNSHO, the only reason Obama didn't seriously
put "boots on the ground" is that Iraq and Afghanistan broke the army. But I bet they're
recovered enough now, and ready for Hillary!
Clearly, from Hickenlooper's speech before Clinton, the brass can't wait!
"... How can anyone vote for that corrupt warmonger? Seriously, can someone explain why she has 50% of the votes in the USA. Unbelievable. ..."
"... Killary, like Barry, loves killing people. Psychopaths--both of them. ..."
"... I honestly don't care if Trump wins. I don't think it will be good, but whatever. But I know for a fact that no matter what, Hillary must not win. ..."
"... Oy Vey! It's funny how Liberals, most Muslims etc are offended by Trump but not offended by the direct policies of the same old warmongers resulting in the deaths of millions of people in the Middle East for a decade and on going in the sham war on t3rror. The fuck? ..."
Funny the Dems are so hot for Hillary and don't recognize she's a regime-changing warmonger on
a par with Bush, responsible for millions of dead and displaced in Libya, Syria, and Ukraine.
Exactly how nuts do you have to be to think you can go to war with Russia? Even if you come out
on top, what's the environment going to be like? Is emerging from your bunker with 70% of the
population dead and no atmosphere left considered a win? FUCK HILLARY RAW.
I honestly don't care if Trump wins. I don't think it will be good, but whatever. But I know
for a fact that no matter what, Hillary must not win. She's bad news.
WE ARE WITNESSING THE MOST CORRUPT, MAFIA-LIKE.. ANTI AMERICAN WOMAN IN HISTORY OF POLITICS. THERE
ARE REASONS WHY SCANDALS AND LIES AND DEATHS HAVE FOLLOWED HER FOR YEARS.
Truth Archives
Oy Vey! It's funny how Liberals, most Muslims etc are offended by Trump but not offended
by the direct policies of the same old warmongers resulting in the deaths of millions of people
in the Middle East for a decade and on going in the sham war on t3rror. The fuck?
2eyesofhorus
Hillary has become in effect, a NeoConservative, not a Democrat-she votes for war continually
Aisha K
Actually a lot of Muslims don't support Hillary or Trump and prefer Bernie because Bernie really
did vote against the war in Iraq, while Trump only claims he was once against it. Regardless of
that fact, Trump makes a powerful argument against voting for Hillary because of her warmonger
record in Iraq, Libya and any other place she gets involved in, and the damage it has caused the
entire world, including USA.
This Trump ad gives us a taste of what the Democrats will be up against if we have to try to mobilize
the voters behind Hillary to stop him. And why so many of us won't be able to put our hearts into
it. Because on this issue he is absolutely right. Hillary's record on foreign policy is reprehensible
- and terrifying. But it's not just on this issue - she has been lying about many things, among
them the state of the economy. With no public voting record to defend, no fundamental commitment
to the truth or reality, with a prostitute press that selectively forgets what he said yesterday,
Trump can be selectively right - and righteous - on any issue he chooses. Until it no longer suits
him.
Do I think Trump would be better than Clinton on issues of war and peace? Not for a minute.
Would he be worse? Maybe - I'm honestly not sure...
Garou
Take it from me .. She's a monster.
gamira007
+PeaceAndJustice Yes absolutely she is propped up by the MSM and the Corporate death machine.
The Majority do know this woman is pure evil but our rulers hand pick who is prez here cause if
voting did really matter then it would be illegal.
PeaceAndJustice
+Philo Beddoe
Her 'support' is driven by the MSM which is completely controlled by the PRC (Predatory Ruling
Class). Basically the people that believe the television think she is just a swell lady.
"... However, to ease tensions with the Clinton wing of the party, Obama selected Clinton to be his Secretary of State, one of the first and most fateful decisions of his presidency. He also kept on George W. Bush's Defense Secretary Robert Gates and neocon members of the military high command, such as Gen. David Petraeus. ..."
"... Inside Obama's foreign policy councils, Clinton routinely took the most neoconservative positions, such as defending a 2009 coup in Honduras that ousted a progressive president. ..."
"... Clinton also sabotaged early efforts to work out an agreement in which Iran surrendered much of its low-enriched uranium, including an initiative in 2010 organized at Obama's request by the leaders of Brazil and Turkey. Clinton sank that deal and escalated tensions with Iran along the lines favored by Israel's right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a Clinton favorite. ..."
"... But no one should be gullible enough to believe that Clinton's invasion of Syria would stop at a "safe zone." As with Libya, once the camel's nose was into the tent, pretty soon the animal would be filling up the whole tent. ..."
"... Perhaps even scarier is what a President Clinton would do regarding Iran and Ukraine, two countries where belligerent U.S. behavior could start much bigger wars. ..."
"... In Ukraine, would Clinton escalate U.S. military support for the post-coup anti-Russian Ukrainian government, encouraging its forces to annihilate the ethnic Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine and to "liberate" the people of Crimea from "Russian aggression" (though they voted by 96 percent to leave the failed Ukrainian state and rejoin Russia)? ..."
"... Robert Kagan, a co-founder of the neocon Project for the new American Century, has endorsed Clinton, saying "I feel comfortable with her on foreign policy. If she pursues a policy which we think she will pursue it's something that might have been called neocon, but clearly her supporters are not going to call it that; they are going to call it something else." [See Consortiumnews.com's " Yes, Hillary Clinton Is a Neocon. "] ..."
"... So, by selecting Clinton, the Democrats have made a full 360-degree swing back to the pre-1968 days of the Vietnam War. After nearly a half century of favoring a more peaceful foreign policy – and somewhat less weapons spending – than the Republicans, the Democrats are America's new aggressive war party. ..."
... But former Secretary of State Clinton has made it clear that she is eager to use military
force to achieve "regime change" in countries that get in the way of U.S. desires. She abides by
neoconservative strategies of violent interventions especially in the Middle East and she strikes
a belligerent posture as well toward nuclear-armed Russia and, to a lesser extent, China.
Amid the celebrations about picking the first woman as a major party's presumptive nominee, Democrats
appear to have given little thought to the fact that they have abandoned a near half-century standing
as the party more skeptical about the use of military force. Clinton is an unabashed war hawk who
has shown no inclination to rethink her pro-war attitudes.
As a U.S. senator from New York, Clinton voted for and avidly supported the Iraq War, only cooling
her enthusiasm in 2006 when it became clear that the Democratic base had turned decisively against
the war and her hawkish position endangered her chances for the 2008 presidential nomination, which
she lost to Barack Obama, an Iraq War opponent.
However, to ease tensions with the Clinton wing of the party, Obama selected Clinton to be
his Secretary of State, one of the first and most fateful decisions of his presidency. He also kept
on George W. Bush's Defense Secretary Robert Gates and neocon members of the military high command,
such as Gen. David Petraeus.
This "Team of Rivals" – named after Abraham Lincoln's initial Civil War cabinet – ensured a powerful
bloc of pro-war sentiment, which pushed Obama toward more militaristic solutions than he otherwise
favored, notably the wasteful counterinsurgency "surge" in Afghanistan in 2009 which did little beyond
get another 1,000 U.S. soldiers killed and many more Afghans.
Clinton was a strong supporter of that "surge" – and Gates
reported in his memoir that she acknowledged only opposing the Iraq War "surge" in 2007
for political reasons. Inside Obama's foreign policy councils, Clinton routinely took the most
neoconservative positions, such as defending a 2009 coup in Honduras that ousted a progressive president.
Clinton also sabotaged early efforts to work out an agreement in which Iran surrendered much
of its low-enriched uranium, including an initiative in 2010 organized at Obama's request by the
leaders of Brazil and Turkey. Clinton
sank that deal and escalated
tensions with Iran along the lines favored by Israel's right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,
a Clinton favorite.
Pumping for War in Libya
In 2011, Clinton successfully lobbied Obama to go to war against Libya to achieve another "regime
change," albeit cloaked in the more modest goal of establishing only a "no-fly zone" to "protect
civilians."
Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi had claimed he was battling jihadists and terrorists who were building
strongholds around Benghazi, but Clinton and her State Department underlings accused him of slaughtering
civilians and (in one of the more colorful lies used to justify the war) distributing Viagra to his
troops so they could rape more women.
Despite resistance from Russia and China, the United Nations Security Council fell for the deception
about protecting civilians. Russia and China agreed to abstain from the vote, giving Clinton her
"no-fly zone." Once that was secured, however, the Obama administration and several European allies
unveiled their real plan, to destroy the Libyan army and pave the way for the violent overthrow of
Gaddafi.
Privately, Clinton's senior aides viewed the Libyan "regime change" as a chance to establish what
they called the "Clinton Doctrine" on using "smart power" with plans for Clinton to rush
to the fore and claim credit once Gaddafi was ousted. But that scheme failed when President Obama
grabbed the limelight after Gaddafi's government collapsed.
But Clinton would not be denied her second opportunity to claim the glory when jihadist rebels
captured Gaddafi on Oct. 20, 2011, sodomized him with a knife and then murdered him. Hearing of Gaddafi's
demise, Clinton went into a network interview and
declared , "we came,
we saw, he died" and clapped her hands in glee.
Clinton's glee was short-lived, however. Libya soon descended into chaos with Islamic extremists
gaining control of large swaths of the country. On Sept. 11, 2012, jihadists attacked the U.S. consulate
in Benghazi killing Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other American personnel. It turned
out Gaddafi had been right about the nature of his enemies.
Undaunted by the mess in Libya, Clinton made similar plans for Syria where again she marched in
lock-step with the neocons and their "liberal interventionist" sidekicks in support of another violent
"regime change," ousting the Assad dynasty,
a top neocon/Israeli goal since the 1990s.
Clinton pressed Obama to escalate weapons shipments and training for anti-government rebels who
were deemed "moderate" but in reality
collaborated closely with radical Islamic forces, including Al Nusra Front (Al Qaeda's Syrian
franchise) and some even more extreme jihadists (who coalesced into the Islamic State).
Again, Clinton's war plans were cloaked in humanitarian language, such as the need to create a
"safe zone" inside Syria to save civilians. But her plans would have required a major U.S. invasion
of a sovereign country, the destruction of its air force and much of its military, and the creation
of conditions for another "regime change."
In the case of Syria, however, Obama resisted the pressure from Clinton and other hawks inside
his own administration. The President did approve some covert assistance to the rebels and allowed
Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the Gulf states to do much more, but he did not agree to an outright U.S.-led
invasion to Clinton's disappointment.
Parting Ways
Clinton finally left the Obama administration at the start of his second term in 2013, some say
voluntarily and others say in line with Obama's desire to finally move ahead with serious negotiations
with Iran over its nuclear program and to apply more pressure on Israel to reach a long-delayed peace
settlement with the Palestinians. Secretary of State John Kerry was willing to do some of the politically
risky work that Clinton was not.
Many on the Left deride Obama as "Obomber" and mock his hypocritical acceptance of the Nobel Peace
Prize in 2009. And there is no doubt that Obama has waged war his entire presidency, bombing at least
seven countries by his own count. But the truth is that he has generally been among the most dovish
members of his administration, advocating a "realistic" (or restrained) application of American power.
By contrast, Clinton was among the most hawkish senior officials.
A major testing moment for Obama came in August 2013 after a sarin gas attack outside Damascus,
Syria, that killed hundreds of Syrians and that the State Department and the mainstream U.S. media
immediately blamed on the forces of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
There was almost universal pressure inside Official Washington to militarily enforce Obama's "red
line" against Assad using chemical weapons. Amid this intense momentum toward war, it was widely
assumed that Obama would order a harsh retaliatory strike against the Syrian military. But U.S. intelligence
and key figures in the U.S. military smelled a rat, a provocation carried out by Islamic extremists
to draw the United States into the Syrian war on their side.
At the last minute and at great political cost to himself, Obama listened to the doubts of his
intelligence advisers and called off the attack, referring the issue to the U.S. Congress and then
accepting a Russian-brokered deal in which Assad surrendered all his chemical weapons though continuing
to deny a role in the sarin attack.
Eventually, the sarin
case against Assad would collapse. Only one rocket was found to have carried sarin and
it had a very limited range placing its firing position likely within rebel-controlled territory.
But Official Washington's conventional wisdom never budged. To this day, politicians and pundits
denounce Obama for not enforcing his "red line."
There's little doubt, however, what Hillary Clinton would have done. She has been eager for a
much more aggressive U.S. military role in Syria since the civil war began in 2011. Much as she used
propaganda and deception to achieve "regime change" in Libya, she surely would have done the same
in Syria, embracing the pretext of the sarin attack – "killing innocent children" – to destroy the
Syrian military even if the rebels were the guilty parties.
Still Lusting for War
Indeed, during the 2016 campaign – in those few moments that have touched on foreign policy –
Clinton declared that as President she would order the U.S. military to invade Syria. "Yes, I do
still support a no-fly zone," she said during the April 14 debate. She also wants a "safe zone" that
would require seizing territory inside Syria.
But no one should be gullible enough to believe that Clinton's invasion of Syria would stop
at a "safe zone." As with Libya, once the camel's nose was into the tent, pretty soon the animal
would be filling up the whole tent.
Perhaps even scarier is what a President Clinton would do regarding Iran and Ukraine, two
countries where belligerent U.S. behavior could start much bigger wars.
For instance, would President Hillary Clinton push the Iranians so hard – in line with what Netanyahu
favors – that they would renounce the nuclear deal and give Clinton an excuse to bomb-bomb-bomb Iran?
In Ukraine, would Clinton escalate U.S. military support for the post-coup anti-Russian Ukrainian
government, encouraging its forces to annihilate the ethnic Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine and
to "liberate" the people of Crimea from "Russian aggression" (though they voted by 96 percent to
leave the failed Ukrainian state and rejoin Russia)?
Would President Clinton expect the Russians to stand down and accept these massacres? Would she
take matters to the next level to demonstrate how tough she can be against Russian President Vladimir
Putin whom she has compared to Hitler? Might she buy into the latest neocon dream of achieving "regime
change" in Moscow? Would she be wise enough to recognize how dangerous such instability could be?
Of course, one would expect that all of Clinton's actions would be clothed in the crocodile tears
of "humanitarian" warfare, starting wars to "save the children" or to stop the evil enemy from "raping
defenseless girls." The truth of such emotional allegations would be left for the post-war historians
to try to sort out. In the meantime, President Clinton would have her wars.
Having covered Washington for nearly four decades, I always marvel at how selective concerns for
human rights can be. When "friendly" civilians are dying, we are told that we have a "responsibility
to protect," but when pro-U.S. forces are slaughtering civilians of an adversary country or movement,
reports of those atrocities are dismissed as "enemy propaganda" or ignored altogether. Clinton is
among the most cynical in this regard.
Trading Places
But the larger picture for the Democrats is that they have just adopted an extraordinary historical
reversal whether they understand it or not. They have replaced the Republicans as the party of aggressive
war, though clearly many Republicans still dance to the neocon drummer just as Clinton and "liberal
interventionists" do. Still, Donald Trump, for all his faults, has adopted a relatively peaceful
point of view, especially in the Mideast and with Russia.
While today many Democrats are congratulating themselves for becoming the first major party to
make a woman the presumptive nominee, they may soon have to decide whether that distinction justifies
putting an aggressive war hawk in the White House. In a way, the issue is an old one for Democrats,
whether "identity politics" or anti-war policies are more important.
At least since 1968 and the chaotic Democratic convention in Chicago, the party has advanced,
sometimes haltingly, those two agendas, pushing for broader rights for all and seeking to restrain
the nation's militaristic impulses.
In the 1970s, Democrats largely repudiated the Vietnam War while the Republicans waved the flag
and equated anti-war positions with treason. By the 1980s and early 1990s, Ronald Reagan and George
H.W. Bush were making war fun again – Grenada, Afghanistan, Panama and the Persian Gulf, all relatively
low-cost conflicts with victorious conclusions.
By the 1990s, Bill Clinton (along with Hillary Clinton) saw militarism as just another issue to
be triangulated. With the Soviet Union's collapse, the Clinton-42 administration saw the opportunity
for more low-cost tough-guy/gal-ism – continuing a harsh embargo and periodic air strikes against
Iraq (causing the deaths of a U.N.-estimated half million children); blasting Serbia into submission
over Kosovo; and expanding NATO to the east toward Russia's borders.
But Bill Clinton did balk at the more extreme neocon ideas, such as the one from the Project for
the New American Century for a militarily enforced "regime change" in Iraq. That had to wait for
George W. Bush in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. As a New York senator, Hillary Clinton made sure
she was onboard for war on Iraq just as she sided with Israel's pummeling of Lebanon and the Palestinians
in Gaza.
Hillary Clinton was taking triangulation to an even more acute angle as she sided with virtually
every position of the Netanyahu government in Israel and moved in tandem with the neocons as they
cemented their control of Washington's foreign policy establishment. Her only brief flirtation with
an anti-war position came in 2006 when her political advisers informed her that her continued support
for Bush's Iraq War would doom her in the Democratic presidential race.
But she let her hawkish plumage show again as Obama's Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013 – and
once she felt she had the 2016 Democratic race in hand (after her success in the southern primaries)
she pivoted back to her hard-line positions in full support of Israel and in a full-throated defense
of her war on Libya, which she still won't view as a failure.
The smarter neocons are already lining up to endorse Clinton, especially given Donald Trump's
hostile takeover of the Republican Party and his disdain for neocon strategies that he views as simply
spreading chaos around the globe. As The New York Times has
reported, Clinton is "the vessel into which many interventionists are pouring their hopes."
Robert Kagan, a co-founder of the neocon Project for the new American Century, has endorsed
Clinton, saying "I feel comfortable with her on foreign policy. If she pursues a policy which we
think she will pursue it's something that might have been called neocon, but clearly her supporters
are not going to call it that; they are going to call it something else." [See Consortiumnews.com's
"Yes,
Hillary Clinton Is a Neocon."]
So, by selecting Clinton, the Democrats have made a full 360-degree swing back to the pre-1968
days of the Vietnam War. After nearly a half century of favoring a more peaceful foreign policy –
and somewhat less weapons spending – than the Republicans, the Democrats are America's new aggressive
war party.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated
Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America's Stolen
Narrative, either in
print here or as an e-book (from
Amazon and
barnesandnoble.com).
How about WAPO does some real reporting and compares the two candidate on the issues at hand and
leaves out all the speculation"
Judging from comments the level of brainwashing of WaPo readship is just staggering... Far above
that existed in soviet Russia (were most people were supciously about Soviet nomeklatura and did not
trust them).
Notable quotes:
"... In their zeal to portray Donald Trump as a dangerous threat to national security, the Clinton campaign has taken a starkly anti-Russian stance, one that completes a total role reversal for the two major American parties on U.S.-Russian relations that Hillary Clinton will now be committed to, if she becomes president. ..."
"... And now, for mostly political reasons, the Clinton campaign has decided to escalate its rhetoric on Russia. ..."
"... This year, the Clinton team is accusing Putin of waging information warfare against the Democratic candidate in order to help elect the Republican candidate. Clinton is also running ads claiming she stood up to Putin. Meanwhile, Trump is called for a weakening of NATO and his staff worked to remove an anti-Russia stance on Ukraine from the GOP platform. ..."
"... Now that the Democrats are the tough-on-Russia party, they should explain exactly what that means. What would Clinton do about Russia's increasingly aggressive cyber-espionage and information warfare in Europe and around the world? Would she expand sanctions on Russia in response to the hacks? Would she use U.S. cyber forces to retaliate? Would she abandon President Obama's plan to deepen U.S.-Russian military and intelligence cooperation in Syria? ..."
"... if Clinton wins, she will be committed to implementing the anti-Putin, tough-on-Russia policy she is running on and Democrats will need to fall in line ..."
"... I am not a national security expert but it does not look intelligent to antagonize Russia and China at the same time. But I think it is unfair to blame Hillary for this, Obama has been antagonizing Russia and China for some time now. He has being very successful at that, for the first time in many years now Russia and China are BFF doing naval exercises together. ..."
"... In other words, her use of a homebrew email server constituted a threat to national security? ..."
"... The Dems and their Washington Post surrogates are apoplectic over Donald Trump's supposed affinity for the Russians. Russia is now America's mortal enemy in the current Dem narrative. ..."
"... Mook's claim of Russian involvement would be more convincing if he had offered any proof. Otherwise it just looks like pure deflection and distraction and disinformation. ..."
In their zeal to portray Donald Trump as a dangerous threat to national security, the Clinton
campaign has taken a starkly anti-Russian stance, one that completes a total role reversal for the
two major American parties on U.S.-Russian relations that Hillary Clinton will now be committed to,
if she becomes president.
The side switching between the parties on Russia is the result of two converging trends. U.S.-Russian
relations have gone downhill since Russian President Vladimir Putin came back to power in 2012, torpedoing
the Obama administration's first term outreach to Moscow, which Clinton led. Then, in the past year,
Trump's Russia-friendly policy has filled the pro-engagement space that Democrats once occupied.
And now, for mostly political reasons, the Clinton campaign has decided to escalate its rhetoric
on Russia. After Trump
suggested Wednesday that if Russia had indeed hacked Clinton's private email server it should
release the emails, the Clinton campaign sent out its Democratic surrogates to bash Russia and Trump
in a manner traditionally reserved for Republicans.
"This has gone from being a matter of curiosity, and a matter of politics, to being a national
security issue," Clinton senior foreign policy adviser Jake Sullivan said.
Set to one side that Trump was probably joking. Russia clearly does not need Trump's permission
to hack U.S. political organizations or government institutions. And there's no consensus that Russia
released the Democratic National Committee emails in order to disrupt the presidential election.
In fact, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who has his own personal vendetta against Clinton, claimed
that he alone chose the timing of the release of the DNC emails.
Regardless, the idea that a GOP presidential nominee would endorse Russian cyber-espionage was
too tempting for the Clinton campaign to resist, especially on the day their convention was dedicated
to painting Trump as dangerous on national security.
At an event on the sidelines of the convention Wednesday, several top Clinton national security
surrogates focused on Trump's latest comments to argue that they embolden Russia in its plan to destabilize
and dominate the West. Former national security adviser Tom Donilon said that Russia is interfering
with elections all over Europe and said Trump is helping Russia directly.
"The Russians have engaged in cyberattacks in a number of places that we know about, in Georgia,
in Estonia and in Ukraine. . . . In the Russian takeover of Crimea, information warfare was a
central part of their operations," Donilon said. "To dangerously embrace a set of strategies by
the Russian Federation that are intent on undermining key Western institutions . . . is playing
into the hands of Russian strategy."
Former defense secretary and CIA director Leon Panetta said that if Donilon was still in the White
House, he would have tasked the CIA to retaliate against Moscow. Panetta then doubled down on Sullivan's
argument that Trump's comments by themselves are making the United States less safe.
"This is crazy stuff, and yet somehow you get the sense that people think it's a joke. It has
already represented a threat to our national security," Panetta said. "Because if you go abroad
and talk to people, they are very worried that someone like this could become president of the
United States."
In 2008, the Russian government was definitely not rooting for the Republican candidate for president.
Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) had made a feature of his campaign a pledge to stand up to Russian aggression
and dispatched two top surrogates to Georgia after the Russian invasion.
In 2012, Mitt Romney warned that Russia was the United States' "number one geopolitical foe."
Then-Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John F. Kerry mocked Romney at the Democratic National
Convention in Charlotte, saying that Romney got his information about Russia from the movie "Rocky
IV."
This year, the Clinton team is accusing Putin of waging information warfare against the Democratic
candidate in order to help elect the Republican candidate. Clinton is also running ads claiming she
stood up to Putin. Meanwhile, Trump is called for a weakening of NATO and his staff worked to remove
an anti-Russia stance on Ukraine from the GOP platform.
Now that the Democrats are the tough-on-Russia party, they should explain exactly what that
means. What would Clinton do about Russia's increasingly aggressive cyber-espionage and information
warfare in Europe and around the world? Would she expand sanctions on Russia in response to the hacks?
Would she use U.S. cyber forces to retaliate? Would she abandon President Obama's plan to deepen
U.S.-Russian military and intelligence cooperation in Syria?
The Clinton team hasn't said. For now, they are content to use Trump's statements about Russia
to make the argument that he's not commander-in-chief material. But if Clinton wins, she will
be committed to implementing the anti-Putin, tough-on-Russia policy she is running on and Democrats
will need to fall in line . If Putin wasn't rooting for Trump before, he is now.
NotaClinton , 7/28/2016 6:25 PM EDT
So TRUMP is threat to NATIONAL SECURITY for asking RUSSIA for the emails she destroyed? Because
they would be the one likely to have them since she completely ignored Security protocol while
in Russia? WOW they get better every day. They have already explain Russia could have been in
and out of her accounts all along because of her complete lack of security of her devises. She
had less security than a commercial account using the private server the way she did. And she
did cause a breach in national security. She fwd classified email to an intern and it did get
hacked. Whether or not Russia got any info from her we will never know. Because the lack of security
on her server Russia could have got her password and and the info leaving no tracks.
NotaClinton , 7/28/2016 5:22 PM EDT
People agree with PUTIN you know like the ones in CRIMEA and SYRIA. I'd rather see a PUTIN
TRUMP ticket. I like what I see in PUTIN doing in the world. He seems to be the one SAVING people
around the world. Assad let the people have freedom of religion. These Sunni the USA is arming
want to force Sharia law. I don't approve of my tax dollars being spent arming those terrorists
nor do I consider Saudi Arabia an ally!!! I would rather see a TRUMP PUTIN ticket and add 75 more
stars to our flag. Than what the current government is. Although I would more so like to see the
USA government take a much more democratic stance. Change our government to be more like Switzerland
Norway and the Netherlands. Who were inspired by the USA constitution. Our constitution and democracy
has been lost to corruption!!!!
George1955, 7/28/2016 5:08 PM EDT
I am not a national security expert but it does not look intelligent to antagonize Russia
and China at the same time. But I think it is unfair to blame Hillary for this, Obama has been
antagonizing Russia and China for some time now. He has being very successful at that, for the
first time in many years now Russia and China are BFF doing naval exercises together. Maybe
there is a very profound strategy in that (everybody says that Obama is a genius) but I cannot
see what is the logic of provoking at the same time the two biggest military powers apart of the
United States while weakening our military forces with budget cuts.
It is the worst foreign policy since the Arab Spring brought us ISIS. They are incapable of
intelligent policy. Their whole idea was to "not do stupid stuff" and here they are. They just
can't help themselves.
chayapartiya, 7/28/2016 5:01 PM EDT
The only thing standing between a highly productive US/Russian relationship are the other relationships
the United States has, both institutional and personal among our elites.
Russia is the sworn enemy of many US allies and has barred our richest citizens from taking
charge of large sectors of the Russian economy. That is the source of our new Cold War.
Lacking Communist ideology Russia will never be an existential threat to the United States
or our way of life. On the other hand, Islam is. On the other hand, Red China is.
You have to be willing to abandon the entire US foreign policy establishment to turn our relationship
with Russia around, and if we did maintaining our relationships with Poland, the Baltics, Georgia,
Turkey, Saudi Arabia and more would become vastly more difficult.
But the idea is too good of one to abandon, Russia is far too influential to ignore. I'm glad
one major party is going to recognize that now.
invention13, 7/28/2016 5:01 PM EDT
"This has gone from being a matter of curiosity, and a matter of politics, to being a national
security issue," Clinton senior foreign policy adviser Jake Sullivan said.
In other words, her use of a homebrew email server constituted a threat to national security?
I'm finding this whole flap just too funny. The whole point was probably to step on the news
coverage of the convention on the night that the president and vice president were to speak. Trump
is happy to fan the flames a bit. This is what he does when there is something he doesn't want
people to pay attention to (whether it is unfavorable coverage of Trump University, or a convention).
He throws out something outrageous that sucks the oxygen out of the news cycle. This whole thing
will die down, simply because in the absence of hard evidence, most people don't believe it is
true that Trump is Putin's agent. He may admire him, but work for him? I doubt it.
NotaClinton, 7/28/2016 5:44 PM EDT
Her actions DID once agains threaten NATIONAL SECURITY there was no doubt about that. She fwd
classified email to her interns who got hacked. That is definitely a threat to national security.
She carried her Blackberry and laptop into countries while acting as head of state. Which was
not recommended for anyone to do even if there devices were secured by the state. She took hers
to countries with her personal server that had zero security less than a commercial account. Then
there was the fact she deleted and kept her business out of reach of FOIA. Zero respect for those
laws. All federal employees are allowed to have a personal email for there person life. But Hilary
decides she is above the law. Those federal laws don't apply to her and got away with it. When
Comey was asked about that. He said he wasn't asked to investigate whether she broke those federal
laws. He wasn't investigating whether she broke the law. But only if he should charge her for
violating security. His conclusion was yes she violated the law. But he sees the law meant nothing
so why file a criminal charge.
Trump only requested information that they very well may have. Because Hilary handed it to
them. it's hard to believe the Russians hacked the DNC. They most likely had the passwords from
Hilary's accounts. Which would leave no footprints.
OswegoTex , 7/28/2016 2:54 PM EDT
The Dems and their Washington Post surrogates are apoplectic over Donald Trump's supposed
affinity for the Russians. Russia is now America's mortal enemy in the current Dem narrative.
Wasn't Romney ridiculed by a snarky and arrogant Obama and his press sycophants for identifying
Russia as a major geopolitical threat in the 2012 election cycle. What happened? Oh-- I know---
the Clinton/Obama "reset".
stella blue, 7/28/2016 2:45 PM EDT
Very interesting article. Hillary is a neocon. She never saw a war she didn't like. I don't
know what would be so wrong with having good relations with Russia. Wasn't that what Hillary's
stupid reset button was all about?
NotaClinton, 7/28/2016 6:11 PM EDT [Edited]
I admire PUTIN and so do a lot of people. If you are a Citizens and believe in our values and
the constitution. He held a democratic Legal election in Crimea. Where the people voted unanimously
in favor of Belonging to Russia, A Vote that would be exactly the same today. The USA invades
Syria with terrorists from countries whose own people wouldn't vote them in.
All I have seen Putin do is save people. He saved Syria finally. i don't know what took him
so long. Maybe WMDs he knew the opposition would use and some more dirty filthy rotten tricks
that have been happening there. He turned the war around on less money than a shipment of weapons
and training to the rebels forces costed the USA. those shipments and training was going on since
before the conflict broke out. What was the point?
Why has the USA spent a dime in that country other than they should have immediately neutralized,
destroyed or recovered all the military equipment that was stolen from Iraq. I you like Russian
your anti american? If you don't like illegal Immigrants your a racist. That is to be expected
from those educated Hilary Voters...
Nikdo, 7/28/2016 4:26 PM EDT
Mook's claim of Russian involvement would be more convincing if he had offered any proof.
Otherwise it just looks like pure deflection and distraction and disinformation.
The video accompanying the article is actually better the the text. John Bolton made some interesting
remarks. For example he said that it is stunning that Hillary Clinton said something about damage from
hack of DNC server. What she though by engaging in her reckless behaviors with bathroom server four
years while she were in office. He also suggested that points to Russia might be just attempt if disinformation
from a real perpetuator.
Notable quotes:
"... In her acceptance speech, Clinton reaffirmed a commitment to NATO, saying she was "proud to stand by our allies in NATO against any threat they face, including from Russia." ..."
"... As U.S. secretary of state, Clinton in 2009 presented her Russian counterpart with a red button intended to symbolize a "reset" in relations between the two countries, one of U.S. President Barack Obama's initiatives. In Russia, the gesture is best remembered for the misspelling of the word in Russian, while the reset itself failed in the face of Putin's return as Russian president in 2012 and Russia's seizure of Crimea from Ukraine two years later. ..."
"... Clinton once compared the annexation of Crimea to Adolf Hitler's moves into Eastern Europe at the start of World War II, a comparison that was deeply offensive in Russia, where the country's victory over Nazi Germany remains a prime source of national pride. ..."
"... "And as far as the Ukraine is concerned, it's a mess. And that's under the Obama's administration with his strong ties to NATO. So with all of these strong ties to NATO, Ukraine is a mess," Trump said. "Crimea has been taken. Don't blame Donald Trump for that." ..."
"... Putin was outraged by U.S. support for Ukraine and by U.S. military intervention around the world, particularly in Libya, on Clinton's watch. But it was what he saw as interference in Russia that really rankled. ..."
"... When Clinton described Russia's 2011 parliamentary elections as rigged, Putin said she was "sending a signal" to his critics. He then accused the U.S. State Department of financially supporting the protests that drew tens of thousands of people to the streets of Moscow to demand free elections and an end to Putin's rule. ..."
"... Channel One began its report by introducing Clinton as "a politician who puts herself above the law, who is ready to win at any cost and who is ready to change her principles depending on the political situation." The anchorwoman couched the description by saying that was how Clinton is seen by Trump's supporters - but it was a nuance viewers could easily miss. ..."
MOSCOW – To understand what the Kremlin thinks about the prospect of Hillary Clinton becoming
the U.S. president, it was enough to watch Russian state television coverage of her accepting the
Democratic nomination.
Viewers were told that Clinton sees Russia as an enemy and cannot be trusted, while the Democratic
Party convention was portrayed as further proof that American democracy is a sham.
In her acceptance speech, Clinton reaffirmed a commitment to NATO, saying she was "proud to
stand by our allies in NATO against any threat they face, including from Russia."
In doing so, she was implicitly rebuking her rival, Republican nominee Donald Trump, who has questioned
the need for the Western alliance and suggested that if he is elected president, the United States
might not honor its NATO military commitments, in particular regarding former Soviet republics in
the Baltics.
While Trump's position on NATO has delighted the Kremlin, Clinton's statement clearly stung.
"She mentioned Russia only once, but it was enough to see that the era of the reset is over,"
Channel One said in its report.
As U.S. secretary of state, Clinton in 2009 presented her Russian counterpart with a red button
intended to symbolize a "reset" in relations between the two countries, one of U.S. President Barack
Obama's initiatives. In Russia, the gesture is best remembered for the misspelling of the word in
Russian, while the reset itself failed in the face of Putin's return as Russian president in 2012
and Russia's seizure of Crimea from Ukraine two years later.
Clinton once compared the annexation of Crimea to Adolf Hitler's moves into Eastern Europe
at the start of World War II, a comparison that was deeply offensive in Russia, where the country's
victory over Nazi Germany remains a prime source of national pride.
Trump, on the other hand, told ABC's "This Week" in a broadcast Sunday that he wants to take a
look at whether the U.S. should recognize Crimea as part of Russia. "You know, the people of Crimea,
from what I've heard, would rather be with Russia than where they were," Trump said.
This runs counter to the position of the Obama administration and the European Union, which have
imposed punishing sanctions on Russia in response to the annexation.
"And as far as the Ukraine is concerned, it's a mess. And that's under the Obama's administration
with his strong ties to NATO. So with all of these strong ties to NATO, Ukraine is a mess," Trump
said. "Crimea has been taken. Don't blame Donald Trump for that."
Putin was outraged by U.S. support for Ukraine and by U.S. military intervention around the
world, particularly in Libya, on Clinton's watch. But it was what he saw as interference in Russia
that really rankled.
When Clinton described Russia's 2011 parliamentary elections as rigged, Putin said she was
"sending a signal" to his critics. He then accused the U.S. State Department of financially supporting
the protests that drew tens of thousands of people to the streets of Moscow to demand free elections
and an end to Putin's rule.
In the years since, the Kremlin has defended Russian elections in part by implying they are no
different than in the United States, a country it says promotes democracy around the world while
allowing its business and political elite to determine who wins at home.
The Democratic Convention, which ended Friday morning Moscow time, was given wide coverage throughout
the day on the nearly hourly news reports on state television, the Kremlin's most powerful tool for
shaping public opinion.
Channel One began its report by introducing Clinton as "a politician who puts herself above the
law, who is ready to win at any cost and who is ready to change her principles depending on the political
situation." The anchorwoman couched the description by saying that was how Clinton is seen by Trump's
supporters - but it was a nuance viewers could easily miss.
The reports ran excerpts of Clinton's speech, but the camera swung repeatedly to a sullen Sen.
Bernie Sanders of Vermont, her Democratic challenger, and his disappointed supporters. The Rossiya
channel also showed anti-Clinton protesters outside the convention hall who it said "felt they have
been betrayed after the email leak that showed Bernie Sanders was pushed out of the race."
Russia is a prime suspect in the hacking of Democratic National Committee computers, which led
to the release of emails showing that party officials favored Clinton over Sanders for the presidential
nomination.
The Kremlin has denied interfering in the U.S. election. A columnist at Russia's best-selling
newspaper, however, said it would have been a smart move.
"I would welcome the Kremlin helping those forces in the United States that stand for peace with
Russia and democracy in America," Israel Shamir wrote in Komsomolskaya Pravda.
Trump, meanwhile, has encouraged Russia to seek and release more than 30,000 other missing emails
deleted by Clinton. Democrats accused him of trying to get a foreign adversary to conduct espionage
that could affect this November's election, but Trump later said he was merely being sarcastic.
whollop
Putin has tried to remind the world what a mistake break up of Yugoslavia was and corruption
involved and lies, no one listens. Next leader of Russia might not be so restrained and patient.
Sad we are letting such bad minds lead US now. What is it about Clinton's that make ppl so gullible?
whollop
Read "how the srebrenica massacre redefined US policy," by US professor. Media distorts truth
everywhere, all the time. Bought and paid for.
Russians didn't start last 2 WW's either. You can bet if ISIS attacks Russia, Pres O won't
go to their aid.
This constant demonizing of Russia has pushed them closer to China. Obama and Clinton and Bill
Clinton (from earlier and beyond) have made a mess of the world because their values are built
on wrong philosophy. German rationalism does not mesh with American freedom and love of law.
Trump17
Her and Obama interfered in their affairs and now without any proof they are blaming Russia
for a hacking of the DNC. Back in March the FBI told the DNC it was hacked and wanted information
to conduct an investigation which Hillary of course blocked. Now they are crying the blues..
HmmIsee
Dems have hated Russia ever since Reagan disbanded their beloved USSR
teabone
Russia and the U.S. used to have a common enemy, radical/extremist Islamism.
Not anymore since Obama and Clinton loves Muslims more than they like American citizens.
Looks like this is a new part of Hillary strategy to take Trump down
Notable quotes:
"... "We know that Russian intelligence services hacked into the DNC," Clinton said, in her first interview with Fox in more than five years. "And we know that they arranged for a lot of those emails to be released and we know that Donald Trump has shown a very troubling willingness to back up Putin, to support Putin." ..."
Clinton answered tough questions on Benghazi, her emails and her campaign and policies, and focused
her own attack on her opponent's alleged links to Russia and Putin.
"We know that Russian intelligence services hacked into the DNC," Clinton said, in her first interview
with Fox in more than five years. "And we know that they arranged for a lot of those emails to be
released and we know that
Donald Trump has shown
a very troubling willingness to back up Putin, to support Putin."
Asked if she believed Putin wanted Trump to win the presidency, Clinton said she would not make
that conclusion. "But I think laying out the facts raises serious issues about Russian interference
in our elections, in our democracy," she said.
The US would not tolerate that from any other country, Clinton said, adding: "For Trump to both
encourage that and to praise Putin despite what appears to be a deliberate effort to try to affect
the election, I think, raises national security issues."
"... Older people–and older AAs are no exception–I think just are less receptive to the Sanders message. They've been propagandized for too long and too successfully. Actually I don't just think this, the polling data fairly screams it. It might be a waste of time chasing those AA church lady grandmothers, they are right wing conservatives in almost any objective sense who minus the identity politics woo woo would be Republicans but just need a safe space to be that way without rubbing shoulders with overt white racists, and the corporate neocon-neolib DP mainstream is a perfect fit for them. ..."
"... Obama, who pretty much could be George W Bush in blackface, is the perfect identity politics totem for that role. ..."
We will have to wait for the campaign tell-alls to understand what the Sanders
campaign believed its strategy was, and whether the campaign believes
it was successful, or not. While it is true that reform efforts in the Democrat
Party have a very poor track record, it's also true that third parties have
a terrible track record. (It's worth noting that in the eight years just past,
with the capitol occupations, Occupy proper, Black Lives Matter, fracking campaigns
all on the boil, the Green Party was flatlined, seeminly unable to make an institutional
connection with any of these popular movements. It may be that 2016 is different.
It may also be that the iron law of institutions applies to the GP just as much
as it does to any other party.) Therefore, "working within the Democrat Party"
- which Sanders consistently said he would do; the label on the package
was always there - is not, a priori , a poor strategic choice, especially
if "working within" amounts to a hostile takeover followed by a management purge.
And it's hard for me to recall another "working within" approach that garnered
45% of the vote, severed the youth of the party - of all identities - from the
base of the ruling faction, and invented an entirely new and highly successful
funding model. Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition, which the dominant faction
in today's Democrat Party destroyed, would be the closest parallel, and the
material conditions of working people are worse today than they were in Jackson's
time, and institutions generally far less likely to be perceived as legitimate.
And if we consider the idea that one of Sander's strategic goals was not the
office but the successful propagation of the socialist idea - as a Johnny Appleseed,
rather than
a happy warrior - then the campaign was a success by any measure. (That
said, readers know my priors on this: I define victory in 2016 as the creation
of independent entities with a left voice; an "Overton Prism," as it were, three-sided,
rather than an Overton Window, two-sided. I've got some hope that this victory
is on the way, because it's bigger than any election.)
With those views as background, most of the attacks on Sanders accuse him
of bad faith. This was the case with the Green Party's successfully propagated
"sheepdog" meme; it's also the case with the various forms of post-defeat armchair
cynicism, all of which urge, that in some way Sanders succeeded by betraying
his supporters in some way. (This is, I suppose, easier to accept than the idea
that Sanders got a beating by an powerful political campaign with a ton of money
and the virtually unanimous support of the political class.)
If Sanders had defined success as betraying his supporters, I would expect
him to act and behave like a successful man. That's not the case. Here is Sanders
putting Clinton's name into nomination:
It's a sad, even awful, moment, I agree, but politics ain't beanbag. While
it would be irresponsible to speculate that Sanders looks so strained and unhappy
because he found a horse's head in his bed (
"Mrs. Clinton never asks a second favor once she's refused the first, understood?"
), his body language certainly doesn't look like he's a happy man, a man
who is happy with the deal he's made, or a man who has achieved success through
the betrayal of others; you'd have to look at the smiling faces on the Democrat
main stage for that.
I don't know the psychology of Sanders, but, how much did he really expect
to win in the early days of his campaign? Could "getting the Socialism ball
rolling" have been his definition of success in the beginning? Like Trump,
the other disruptional candidate, could his very success in the primary
season have surprised him? If so, then his pivot back to the Senate and
Socialist coalition movement building makes perfect sense.
In this sense, the anger focused on Sanders would be a displacement
of the groundswell of anger by the general public at the sheer brazenness
of the DNC's anti public policies. The DNC has shown contempt and disdain
for the very people they purport to work for. Whoever shifted the popular
anger from the DNC onto Sanders has done a masterful job of propaganda.
Saint Bernays would be proud.
I don't think he was expecting to win when he started, but at the same
time he was probably thinking it was worth a running a primary challenge
to change the conversation. His political strategy of trying to increase
turnout of working class voters was not a bad one, considering that Democrat
primary voters have lately been the demographics who support either neoliberalism
or would be racially biased against a non-Christian candidate. He was mainly
hurt by three things, two of which were largely out of his control: (1)
he lacked the polish/media saavy to not get dragged into minor issues that
distracted from his core message (like the flap about calling Clinton unqualified,
or his visit to the Vatican), (2) he literally had the entire media and
political establishment working against him, and arguably inciting voter
suppression and fraud , and (3) his non-Christianity limited his ability
to coalesce support from older African-Americans, which hurt him in the
South and hurt him from a perception standpoint.
What remains to be seen is where his supporters go now. Dissatisfaction
with the status quo will only continue to increase. Something interesting
though, is that Tulsi Gabbard seems to be setting herself to be the continuation
of the Sanders movement. I am unfamiliar with her policies, but her positioning
is in stark contrast to the rest of the Democrat Party.
Older people–and older AAs are no exception–I think just are less
receptive to the Sanders message. They've been propagandized for too long
and too successfully. Actually I don't just think this, the polling data
fairly screams it. It might be a waste of time chasing those AA church lady
grandmothers, they are right wing conservatives in almost any objective
sense who minus the identity politics woo woo would be Republicans but just
need a safe space to be that way without rubbing shoulders with overt white
racists, and the corporate neocon-neolib DP mainstream is a perfect fit
for them.
Obama, who pretty much could be George W Bush in blackface, is the
perfect identity politics totem for that role. The good news is obviously
that this demographic is dying off and young AAs don't share their elders'
pretty extreme right wing Christian viewpoint. I don't think the left needs
to fix that "problem" or even can. Time will fix it and nothing much else
can.
"... …and vote FOR the person who voted for the invasion of Iraq, supported NAFTA and the undermining of universal health coverage in support of private insurance companies/managed care, was likely the deciding factor in overthrowing the Libyan government, was instrumental in supporting multiple dictatorships in Haiti (good pieces linked to that on NC recently), was possibly instrumental in and for sure responsible for the support after the fact of the coup in Honduras, was a founder of what might go down in history as one of the largest fraudulent charities ever (with those tentacles doing the very same things the DNC is accusing Putin of doing), has a history of quid pro quo dealings with predator international investment banks and vulture capitalists (which Elizabeth Warren has identified in speeches that are available on Youtube)… one could go on and on, but basically the candidate who has never met a nation state or corrupt business dealing that she didn't want to stick herself in the middle of the dealings with… ..."
"... I would think the xenophobe might look more attractive to non-passport holders of the American empire simply based upon a cursory reading of history. But nothing should surprise me anymore. ..."
This is some irresponsible stuff. For all of Naked Capitalism's concerns
with Clinton's neocon tendencies, you neglect to understand that we are
terrified of Trump here in Europe, and as a Brazilian, I do not know a single
person from my country who would prefer him as President. 2016 Democrats
are not "neoliberals," even as they operate in a neoliberal structure. The
only thing any of this indicates is Trump has is that he has *no record*
– Hudson thinks that every last thing that happened under the Obama government
was out of the President's personal desire to make it so. If Trump had a
political career, he would be no better, if not much worse. Trump's career
in business does not support Hudson's optimism, at all.
I do agree with you. I have many friends in Europe and Australia who
are literally begging me to vote for Clinton – and they don't like her much
either.
I love NC, but I disagree with the fawning acceptance of Trump as somehow
fit to be President. He's a racist, bigoted, xenophobic, homophobic, sexist
jerk with no really good plans in place. The so-called "ideas" or "plans"
that he has do not pencil out and would bankrupt this country should they
ever be implemented. I agree that Clinton is awful and was well nigh disgusted
with the DNC convention (but expected nothing less or different).
But voting for Trump is irresponsible in my opinion. I just cannot go
there. Yet and still in this nation today, you are free to vote for who
you want.
You would rather vote against the egomaniacal, sexist, xenophobe,
who is willing to downshift international military interventions, lessen
spending on NATO, work WITH the Russians on ISIS, possibly exit trade neoliberal
trade agreements like NAFTA and the WTO (while not adopting the TPP), etc…
…and vote FOR the person who voted for the invasion of Iraq, supported
NAFTA and the undermining of universal health coverage in support of private
insurance companies/managed care, was likely the deciding factor in overthrowing
the Libyan government, was instrumental in supporting multiple dictatorships
in Haiti (good pieces linked to that on NC recently), was possibly instrumental
in and for sure responsible for the support after the fact of the coup in
Honduras, was a founder of what might go down in history as one of the largest
fraudulent charities ever (with those tentacles doing the very same things
the DNC is accusing Putin of doing), has a history of quid pro quo dealings
with predator international investment banks and vulture capitalists (which
Elizabeth Warren has identified in speeches that are available on Youtube)…
one could go on and on, but basically the candidate who has never met a
nation state or corrupt business dealing that she didn't want to stick herself
in the middle of the dealings with…
I would think the xenophobe might look more attractive to non-passport
holders of the American empire simply based upon a cursory reading of history.
But nothing should surprise me anymore.
There were some newbie walk-ins at the top of the thread who were keen
on Trump, which I agree was creepy.
But aside from our relentless jgordon, no regular LIKES Trump. The ones
who say they will vote for him weigh that choice against Jill Stein. They
see themselves reluctantly voting for Trump as the "less effective evil,"
that as an outsider, hated by his own party, he won't get much done. Think
Jimmy Carter cubed. The other reasons for being willing to consider Trump
are that Hilary clearly wants a hot war with Russia, and that she will push
for the TPP, which is a dangerous and irrevocable deal.
As someone who consistently advocates here for Trump being the lesser
evil, I want to chime in behind Yves. I do not like Trump. I just consider
putting him into the Presidency to be a far safer choice than enabling Clinton
into power, and I recognize that however I choose to vote, one of those
two people will be President. I also value highly the possibility of weakening
the hold of big finance and corporations over the Democratic Party by purging
the Clintons and leaving the party too weak to be of much use to its current
owners.
Fundamentally, I am Anyone But Clinton, a handy catchphrase that captures
my perspective exactly. I will probably end up voting for a socialist third
party no one ever discusses here, because why not support the party closest
to my own values and policy desires? But if Stein OR Trump actually got
enough traction to possibly take my state, I'd add my vote to that pile,
happily. Well, "happily" in that I would feel I was making the best possible
choice with whatever tiny amount of agency my vote represents. But the next
four years are likely to be quite grim, no matter what.
As I live in CA, which is assumed to be in the bag for HRC, my vote against
her is only of import to me.
This election is akin to someone who desperately needs a tricky surgery
and their choice of surgeons is limited to two with long records of malpractice
but with good media advertising campaigns.
When I visualize a President Hillary Clinton, my only hope is that once
she has successfully climbed the Presidential mountain she has so doggedly
pursued (as her faux "namesake" Sir Edmund did his), she might realize she
should serve the people, not the elite.
But my hope in the original trademarked "Hope" candidate Obama dissipated
rather quickly.
And Hillary has a lifetime record of serving herself, her family and
her ambitions, not the people.
Look, I live in Australia and the msm Clinton bias verges on
is ridiculous. Why is Europe more terrified of Trump than Clinton?
The media? I understand Trump is problematic, but do you know Hillary's
history? Looking forward to a hot war with Russia?
As an Argentinian, I urge you to vote for Trump.
As bad as Bush was for you and for Middle East, in Latin America we enjoy
the possibility of finding our own ways to develop, as Bush did not care
about us.
Once Obama got to office, the wave changed starting from the Honduras' coup,
followed by Paraguay coup. Now, the only countries resisting are the ones
that reformed its constitution: Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia.
Policies of Democrats to Latin America, from some reason that I do not comprehend,
have been particularly bad for Latin America. The only exception I remember
is the active policies of Jimmy Carter against the violation of human rights
in Argentina.
Not surprised by the European take on Trump. I've caught bits and pieces
of CBC coverage(can't stomach much of it) and they make CNN look objective!
Trump has been neatly inserted into the bad guy role and all coverage assumes
the viewers only care about one thing: stopping Trump. You'd think they
were still covering Iraq and talking about Saddam, not Donald. I can't call
the CBC's coverage of Trump juvenile because it's barely infantile in its
simplicity. Other Canadian media outlets are pretty much falling in with
the CBC narrative. After all, you think pro-neocon/pro-war Sun Media is
going to give Trump and his anti-war rhetoric any chance?
To put it simply: Canadian media is a captured entity. No surprise as
Canada has always done what it takes to have a presence in the imperial
court(even if it's a spot in the far corner). This is Canada's reason for
being: to kiss the imperial ass. First the British Empire and now the American
Empire. As a good loyal supplicant, we've now stepped forward to combat
the latest imperial threat: Donald Trump.
The irony is delightful. Part of the national narrative here is how much
better educated we are than those ignorant Americans. I'm sure Europeans
share the same conceit. Yet we are the ones swallowing all the establishment
propaganda while Americans are seeing through all the media lies, are engaged
and demanding change. I guess this makes sense. After all, Americans have
run the world, while Europeans are the "has beens" and Canadians the "never
have been at all"!
"... They tell us that Hillary is a flawed but basically progressive candidate who shouldn't be "demonized." After all, she's spent her "entire life" advocating on behalf of "women and girls." ..."
"... As Doug Henwood has pointed out , most of what Clinton did "for women and girls" as Secretary of State was to do photo-ops with women around the world wearing colorful ethnic garb. ..."
"... The candidate herself frequently talks up the sheer number of miles she traveled as if this alone added up to some sort of praiseworthy political accomplishment. The fact is that the policies she flew around the world supporting were a disaster for poor people around the world, and especially for poor women. ..."
"... During the early years of the Obama administration, the Haitian government tried to raise the minimum wage there to all of 61 cents an hour, which works out to about five dollars a day. (The minimum wage before the proposed increase was 22 cents.) Diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks in 2011 show that the sweatshops supplying Hanes and Levi-Strauss made a huge stink, and got the State Department involved to lobby the Haitian government against their plan to go to all the way up to 61 cents an hour. ..."
"... Today, after preparing to write this article by reviewing Secretary Clinton's disgusting rhetoric about welfare mothers and reviewing the facts about workfare, benefit reductions, and the uptick in extreme poverty, I know exactly what to think. Guns should be confiscated from NRA members and redistributed to single mothers who have been kicked off of benefits. Lacking money from the now-defunct Aid to Families with Dependent Children program to help them keep the lights on and buy groceries for their kids, let's give them the ability to procure groceries by other means. ..."
"... Ben Burgis is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Underwood International College, Yonsei University. ..."
I voted for
Jill Stein in 2012, and I'll do so again as a matter of course if Hillary is nominated in 2016.
I'm cautiously optimistic that a non-trivial fraction of those currently Feeling the Bern may do
the same, just as a spillover effect from Ron Paul's liberatarian-ish Presidential campaign in 2012
seems to have contributed to the unprecedented million votes received by Libertarian Party candidate
Gary Johnson in the 2012 general election. I would argue that breaking the stranglehold of the
two-party 'duopoly' on American politics is clearly in the interests of working people-not to mention
the interests of all the people in the third world who live in fear of American bombs. As OACW union
leader Tony Mazzocchi
was fond of saying, "The bosses have two parties. We need one of our own."
But let's assume for the sake of argument that I'm wrong about all of that. Let's assume, as liberal
pundits uniformly insist, that it would be dangerously irresponsible to even consider voting for
anyone but Hillary Clinton in the general election. Even granting that premise, why not vote for
her with rubber gloves and open eyes?
Instead of emulating the French, scolding liberal commentators constantly tell us that the differences
between Hillary and Bernie shouldn't be "exaggerated." They tell us that Hillary is a flawed
but basically progressive candidate who shouldn't be "demonized." After all, she's spent her "entire
life" advocating on behalf of "women and girls."
As Doug Henwood has
pointed
out, most of what Clinton did "for women and girls" as Secretary of State was to do photo-ops
with women around the world wearing colorful ethnic garb. Indeed, it's revealing that, when
you dig beyond bumper sticker slogans like "advocacy on behalf of women and girls," Clinton supporters
rarely want to discuss the particulars of her record. The candidate herself frequently talks
up the sheer number of miles she traveled as if this alone added up to some sort of praiseworthy
political accomplishment. The fact is that the policies she flew around the world supporting were
a disaster for poor people around the world, and especially for poor women.
During the early years of the Obama administration, the Haitian government tried to raise
the minimum wage there to all of 61 cents an hour, which works out to about five dollars a day. (The
minimum wage before the proposed increase was 22 cents.) Diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks
in 2011 show that the sweatshops supplying Hanes and Levi-Strauss made a huge stink, and got the
State Department involved to lobby the Haitian government
against
their plan to go to all the way up to 61 cents an hour. The U.S. State Department has a
fairly massive level of sway in the deliberations of the Haitian government, considering the United
States' long history of meddling, backing coups, and even invading the country when governments there
displease Uncle Sam. Nor is this ancient history from the Cold War. U.S. Marines removed the democratically
elected President of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, in 2004. So when the U.S. Embassy says jump,
the Haitian government tends to ask how high. In this case, they ended up cutting the proposed minimum
wage hike of 39 cents an hour all the way down to 9 cents. It might be worth thinking hard about
the fact that the girls sewing your jeans have Hillary Clinton to thank for their current salary
of 31 cents an hour next time a liberal scold tells you not to "demonize" Secretary Clinton.
Of course, Haitians are foreigners, and black foreigners at that, so maybe they don't quite count.
(After all, Hillary's liberal supporters are willing to overlook that small matter of her support
for the invasion of Iraq.) Perhaps, in evaluating her record, we should focus on her no-doubt glorious
history of domestic progressivism.
Back in the mid-1980s, the Clintons and a lot of their friends founded something called the Democratic
Leadership Council to move the Democratic Party back to "the center." Throughout that decade, Ronald
Reagan had led the Republicans in demonizing "welfare queens" allegedly ripping off vast sums from
the hard-working taxpayers. The evidence for the claim that a non-trivial amount of money was being
lost to welfare benefits being paid out to people who simply didn't want to work was always pretty
thin, but it hardly mattered. The racial subtext was powerful and it was thinly disguised, and Reagan's
skillful use of this rhetoric paid off in a big way for the GOP.
When the Democratic Leadership Council, which still claimed to be "socially progressive," talked
about moving "to the center" on economic issues, this is precisely the center they were talking about
capturing. Bill Clinton made it explicit in 1992 with his campaign promise to "end welfare as we
know it." Unlike quite a few of his other promises, he kept this one, signing away the end of federal
welfare requirements in 1996. The impact of this "reform" on millions of desperate people was predictably
grim, even for those who did manage to hold onto some kind of benefits so they could keep the heat
on and make rent.
(Google "workfare" to see what this often looked like in practice. One of the options Google helpfully
offers you when you type that word into the search engine is workfare is a form of slave labor.)
With federal requirements abolished, the paltry funds made available for welfare were sent out as
bloc grants to the states, where bloody-minded conservative state legislatures could have their way
with the programs. In the years since "welfare reform" was passed, the percentage of Americans living
in extreme poverty has greatly increased. As Ryan Cooper
puts it, "Even after the worst economic crisis in 80 years, TANF has basically ceased to exist
in much of the country. Eligibility requirements have gotten so onerous, and benefit levels so miserly,
that many poor people haven't even heard of the program, or think it was abolished."
So, where was Hillary Clinton in all this? She was an enthusiastic supporter of her husband's
initiative, both in her role as an administration advisor and in her
many public statements on the matter, including ones that she made after Bill's Presidency ended
and she was elected to the Senate. She called single mothers on benefits "deadbeats" and talked about
them over and over again in the most offensively cliched terms, as people who knew nothing but "dependency"
and had no inkling of the value of work. So, for example, using Ronald Reagan's trademark rhetorical
technique of a supposedly representative anecdote that sounds authoritative becomes it comes with
a proper name, Clinton talked about a former welfare queen named Rhonda Costa. "Rhonda Costa's daughter
came home from school and announced, 'Mommy, I'm tired of seeing you sitting around the house doing
nothing.' That's the day Rhonda decided to get off welfare…."
Because it's just that easy, right? These people are clearly on welfare because they don't want
to work, and any time they decide that they'd like a job, one will fall in their lap. It's certainly
not as if holes on resumes matter, or workfare requirements often prevent welfare recipients from
being able to go to job interviews, or "structural unemployment" is a feature of market economies.
For lifelong upper class pundits, these statements may not actually cause much feeling inside
of them. But, as someone who actually grew up in and adjacent to the class of people being described
here, I can tell you that these are really the height of anti-poor slurs. Under Clinton's estimation,
welfare beneficiaries are dignity-lacking dependent deadbeats who are such losers that even their
own kids think they are trash. We don't talk a lot about classism in the US (and frankly I don't
like the term), but that's what this is. It is the class equivalent of calling women airhead bimbos.
Nor, of course, are the class and gender dimensions of all this entirely unrelated. Not so coincidentally,
the picture of an allegedly typical welfare recipient you get from Hillary Clinton's rhetoric on
this-the "Rhonda Costa" of her anecdote-is a single mother.
As Bernie Sanders tried to keep the focus of this year's Democratic debates on economics and his
proposals to expand the welfare state, Hillary Clinton changed the subject as often as possible to
guns. This is the one issue where the Secretary thought she had an opening to outflank Bernie Sanders
on the "left," on the grounds that Senator Sanders has sometimes been insufficiently enthusiastic
about gun control.
It's a complicated issue. On the one hand, the statistics about gun accidents, never mind gun
crimes, are pretty grim. On the other hand, the fact that "stop and frisk" started as a program to
go after illegal guns should make leftists who harbor concerns about police power and the carceral
state think twice about bold new gun regulations are likely to play out. On a normal day, I'm not
entirely sure what to think.
Today, after preparing to write this article by reviewing Secretary Clinton's disgusting rhetoric
about welfare mothers and reviewing the facts about workfare, benefit reductions, and the uptick
in extreme poverty, I know exactly what to think. Guns should be confiscated from NRA members and
redistributed to single mothers who have been kicked off of benefits. Lacking money from the now-defunct
Aid to Families with Dependent Children program to help them keep the lights on and buy groceries
for their kids, let's give them the ability to procure groceries by other means.
Not all that familiar with PJMedia and their reliability. Is this the same outfit as Pajama
media? – I may be misremembering but I seem to recall that Pajama was a bit dubious.
Anyone else heard anything about these claims? Pretty damning if true…
I wish ANY claims against the CGM (Clinton Grift Machine TM) could be considered "damning",
instead the "Trump works for Putin!" ridiculous bloviating receives the coveted "damning" label.
(Damnation requires a "damner" and a "damnee", but when the damner is the entire media and one
damnee is innoculated and the other is open season the outcome is as you'd expect).
But back to the emails: "Putin hacked the DNC!" but….um he didn't hack the server under the desk
at the home of the SoS containing highly classified material?
("It's not cognitive dissonance "dammit" because I say it's not…the Red Queen doesn't do cognitive
dissonance thank you very much").
Evidently the fact that Clinton's State Dept obstructed attempts to have Boko Haram designated
as a terrorist operation has been known for a couple years.
Never heard or read about it, I just learned it from your comment…
It fits with the push to delist the MEK as a terrorist organization.
Yeah I hadn't seen it before today either – read it earlier and lost the link so did a search
for Clinton and Boko Haram and saw a bunch of articles from May 2014 mentioning it. It was a republican
talking point at the time and this Clinton apology from Thinkprogress comes across as pretty weak
tea:
http://thinkprogress.org/world/2014/05/08/3435588/hillary-and-boko-haram/
Once Kerry replaced Clinton at State they were added to the list.
Like the MEK, just goes to show one person's terrorist is another's freedom fighter --
And that most of the rhetoric around these issues is a bunch of BS.
"... You have succeeded in making Hillary's coronation unpleasant for her. Embarrassed her with her shady past, and demonstrated on topics on which she has a firm interest in pas$$ing (TPP). ..."
"... For those of you who believe Jill Stein is worthy of a vote, I do not believe so. If she were motivated then she would be copying Bernie's fundraising activities, and not off in her own world of irrelevance (and possibly privilege). The Iron Law of Institutions hold here, she is happier in her position and has demonstrated no incentive to change things. ..."
"... Of course Clinton does not respect my views. But the idea that Donald Trump "respects my views" is patently ludicrous. ..."
I'll be blunt. You and you beliefs will be thrown under the bus, and trampled into the dust.
Hilary has plans to attract
Republican Votes
to secure the presidency, as predicted.
You have succeeded in making Hillary's coronation unpleasant for her. Embarrassed her with
her shady past, and demonstrated on topics on which she has a firm interest in pas$$ing (TPP).
Note:
The DNC has also informed Sanders delegates that they will have their credentials taken
away for holding up anti-TPP signage as well
That is not the action of a person who respects your views in any manner at all.
For those of you who believe Jill Stein is worthy of a vote, I do not believe so. If she
were motivated then she would be copying Bernie's fundraising activities, and not off in her own
world of irrelevance (and possibly privilege). The Iron Law of Institutions hold here, she is
happier in her position and has demonstrated no incentive to change things.
So who will you vote for? That's a poor question, a better question is who will you vote against?
Why do I write that? Well, you can vote for (Jill, the Looser, Stein), a person who will damage
you (Hillary the Honest), or a person who might help you (Donald the Magnificent). – Just to be
clear, sarcasm is intended in all three instances.
Good luck with that decision, mine is made, and I made it months ago (a list of preferences,
1, 2 3), 3 was ABC – Anyone but Clinton, for I believe firmly that she will do me no good, and
probably do myself and my children and my grandchildren much harm.
What I read here is people somewhere in the stages of grief. Time to move on, at least by November.
Of course Clinton does not respect my views. But the idea that Donald Trump "respects my
views" is patently ludicrous.
And is a fallacy of false choice. I'm surprised you offer that. The fact that Trump doesn't "respect
your views" doesn't make HRC a more acceptable choice.
...Although I know other people who are convinced that Clinton is the lesser evil. Anyhow,
Lesser Evilism is only relevant in swing states. Everywhere else, people ought to vote strategically.
They should look to the future, and choose a candidate who will help create positive outcomes
in future elections. We already know that the result of the 2016 election will be a disaster.
Who cares what foreigners think about our election?
Only people with financial ties to the outcome of the election can be expected to really care.
Goldman Sach's tentacles are worldwide.
I love those old cartoons from the 1890s that show the reformers smashing the monopolists.
Envision Trump with an axe, chopping off the tentacles of the vampire squid which screams in agony
and bleeds to death.
I'm reminded of the buttinsky old woman from Austria who is always lecturing me on how we treat
our "Africa-Americans."
I respond with , "So, how do you treat the gypsies in Austria?"
" Oh, that's different!" she shrieks.
Pro-Hilary bots dominate discussion. Still there are few interesting comments
Notable quotes:
"... Meh, Hitler only ascended to power because he aligned himself with corporate interests and Germany's 1%. They did so because he stoked their fear of the other guys...who were communists. Sounds more like Hillary's playbook than Trumps ..."
"... Trump may or may not be as he is portrayed, but to hold Hilary up as a paragon of virtue isn't going to get the Democrats very far. Between Hilary and Bill there are so many skeletons that there are not enough cupboards to hold them. Whitewater and other nepharious business dealings combined with corruption , sexual double dealing , this couple (for that is what they are) cannot preach to anyone re morality , honesty and trustworthiness. In addition Hilary is a master of the dark arts of Politics ( and that's being kind) Trump, has not been found out and if there were skeletons there then be sure they would have been found by now. Trump to win and Hilary to be placed in a well deserved prison cell. ..."
Hedge fund owners and employees have so far this election cycle contributed nearly $48.5
million for Hillary Clinton, compared to about $19,000 for Donald Trump, an indication that
Wall Street is clearly backing the Democratic presidential nominee.
He didn't ask anyone to spy on us. He said if the Russians *already* had Clinton's 30,000 deleted
emails, the media would love to get them and he'd love to read them. At no point did he ask anyone
to hack anything.
Donald Trump sings from Hitler's playbook. There is a real difference, however, as an orator,
he is not quite so polished. To date, his campaign has been devoted creating a "cult of personality",
and on labeling all those who disagree un-American. A collection of slogans and sound-bites and
an itchy Twitter finger do not a coherent platform make, but they are ideally suited to turning
a crowd into a mob, one of the oldest tricks in the Hitler playbook.
Meh, Hitler only ascended to power because he aligned himself with corporate interests and
Germany's 1%. They did so because he stoked their fear of the other guys...who were communists.
Sounds more like Hillary's playbook than Trumps
The CLinton's already have that sewn up by flogging the Russkies Uranium mines a deal facilitated
through the Clinton Foundation.
'Uranium1' - check it.
Thank God for Donald Trump. He is the only person of national stature who has taken the whip to
GWB and his sorry, criminal administration. Donald Trump should be lauded for telling the truth
in front of 40,000,000 viewers about the neocon crime syndicate that created Operation Iraqi Freedom
and, of course, its members, like Hillary Rodham Clinton, erstwhile U.S. Senator who voted in
favor of going to war in Iraq and who has never seen a war she didn't like or profit from. Trump
in a single evening destroyed once and forever the myth that GWB "kept America safe". I look forward
to the taking down of the Clinton brand.
Seems blindingly obvious to me that Trump is a born entertainer and knows exactly how to manipulate
the media spotlight and get headlines..his "no more Mr Nice Guy" schtick is straight out of the
TV villain playbook, like those mullet swinging moustachioed Amercan wrestlers..the crowd love
it..he gets the attention..it generates comments and effectively shifts the low level debate back
on to his ground, after Hillary enjoyed a couple of days of glass ceiling smashing. It's old vaudeville
and pantomime and he's a master of it. Every serious reaction and outraged comment plays beautifully
into his now gloveless hands. Don't fall for it. No need to worry, until he secures the keys to
the kingdom come November.
'Nice'? Trump has never been 'nice' to Hillary or any other person, let alone another candidate
Repub or Dem. How long did it take for him to come up with this rhetoric? Be afraid, very afraid,
if he ever becomes POTUS. ��
Real people worth voting for. Who would have guessed that America had a choice?
Given a level democratic playing field, surely what a democracy is meant to be, then we would
be seeing prime time coverage of all people standing for President.
But the U.S. is not a democracy, it is an elected dictatorship.
Anyone but the Clinton family in the White House for another eight years signals a disaster for
the whole of the United States of America
Trump has never sullied the White House and never will like that dirty bugger Clinton.
What has happened to America's conscience, its democratic traditions, its sense of reason and
fair play, where is its morality - all gone apparently if the Democratic Party Convention and
nomination of HRC is anything to go by.
Herewith an interesting snippet.
''Our Gross National Product - if we should judge America by that - counts air pollution and
cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks
for our doors and the jails for those who break them. It counts the destruction of our Redwoods
and the loss of our natural wonder in a chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear
war-head, and armoured cars and police to fight riots in our streets. It counts Whitman's rifle
and Specks Knife, and the TV programmes which glorify violence to sell toys to our children.
GDP does not the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of
our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our
courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country;
it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.''
Who said that? Martin Luther King, Noam Chomsky, Jill Stein? Actually it was Bobby Kennedy
(Remarks at the University of Kansas, 18 March 1968 - quoted in S.Das - The Age of Stagnation
2015)
Can anyone today imagine in their wildest dreams a leading Democrat espousing views such as
this? This is how far into the night that America has come. God help us all.
Obama tried to influence our referendum by saying that if the UK voted for Brexit then the UK
would go to the back of the queue. Hilary as president will try and make sure that his word is
carried out. However.....
Trump wanted Brexit to happen. He also has a love for Scotland where he owns a golf course. He
is also likely to see eye to eye with our new Foreign Secretary who was responsible for annoying
Obama in the first place. I think both Boris and Trump are lunatics but looking at the bigger
picture Trump will be so much better for British and Scottish interests than Hilary. He will place
us at the front of the queue and Nicola Sturgeon would almost certainly be given a place at the
high table.
The people complaining about Trump being dishonest about the numbers of New Jersey Muslims celebrating
911 are themselves guilty of an even bigger falsehood in claiming that the number was zero.
""When I saw they were happy, I was pissed," said Ron Knight, 56, a Tonnele Avenue resident
who said he heard cries of "Allahu Akbar" as he shouldered his way through a crowd of 15 to 20
people on John F. Kennedy Boulevard that morning.
"Collectively, the gatherings amounted to dozens of people at the two locations, the witnesses
said. Callers also flooded the 911 system with accounts of jubilant Muslims on a rooftop at a
third location, three police officers said"
And honestly, why should this even be surprising? Living in a Western country doesn't instantly
make all Muslims loyslpatriots, as I would've thought anyone would recognise by now.
I thought that it was supposed to be Israelis celebrating in NJ because of 9/11? I guess that
I must have been fed the wrong conspiracy theory. It doesn't matter, really, because it's pure
unadulterated bullsh--, whoever you claim it about.
Lots of anti-Trump comments, fine and perfectly understandable. To clarify, the election is not
a yes/no vote on Trump as President. It is a choice between Trump and HRC. To call HRC a deeply
flawed candidate is an understatement. The important discussion is not over which one is evil,
but which one is the lesser evil.
If there is one candidate that you simply cannot go into a voting booth and vote for, then
the other one gets your vote. For some people both candidates are "unvoteable", which is a quandary.
Throwing away ones vote by not voting or going third party is not a civic option. It will be a
tough few months.
Trump may or may not be as he is portrayed, but to hold Hilary up as a paragon of virtue isn't
going to get the Democrats very far. Between Hilary and Bill there are so many skeletons that
there are not enough cupboards to hold them. Whitewater and other nepharious business dealings
combined with corruption , sexual double dealing , this couple (for that is what they are) cannot
preach to anyone re morality , honesty and trustworthiness. In addition Hilary is a master of
the dark arts of Politics ( and that's being kind) Trump, has not been found out and if there
were skeletons there then be sure they would have been found by now. Trump to win and Hilary to
be placed in a well deserved prison cell.
Clinton supporters always focus on the petty issues. Listen to Trump speak, there is a lot of
substance in those speeches relating to the common people of the US of A. Reason why this guy
is winning! And Why the Main stream media ( Including the quintessential Hillary supporters news
paper The Guardian) hates Donald Trump. Let's put it this way, if you want a fair assessment of
Donald Trump and what He is about, stay away from the main stream media.
Judging by the comments below Trump is doing just fine! They remind you of people who would go
to see stand-up comedy acts, not get the jokes, then mis-represent them and run home to mummy
in shock! Yes, Trump is a stand-up act, hes entertaining, hes mainly unscripted and he has an
audience. I think the world is divided between those with a sense of humor and those without!
No-one with such a sense of humor can be dangerous, but sure as heck the Clintons and the Sanders
are, as they take themselves very seriously now dont they!
"his false claim that Muslims celebrated September 11"
It isn't false that (some) Muslims celebrated 911. It isn't even false that some in New Jersey
celebrated it. The only dispute is over numbers: dozens, possibly hundreds (as early news reports
suggested) or thousands (as Trump asserts). It is ridiculous that the media so quick to paint
Trump as a liar on this issue are themselves pushing an even bigger lie, ie that no Muslims celebrated
at all.
Earlier in the US farce, I looked up the various candidates websites and looked for their foreign
policy. Non had foreign policy. All had war policy, or war and peace. This is the US version of
foreign policy. On this Trump has been consistent - negotiation.
Trump's an unknown, a showman. Clinton is a known - war.
In the stratosphere of US $emocracy, all we can hope for here is an independent foreign policy
rather than a foreign policy delivered direct from the US embassy.
Good lord, the Russiaphobic brainwashing on these comments is thick and terrifying. I'm sorry,
but I'd rather not have Cold War 2.0 over fucking Syria, thanks! But please go ahead and Vote
For Hillary even though she's in bed with all the MidEast Wahhabist Dictatorships, AIPAC, and
wants to demolish Damascus. Fucking nightmare. Seriously, Hillary people are either bought-off
or brainwashed. And it's all because of Big Bad Trump, a decades long Clinton-Democrat who is
now literally Hitler, right?
All this simplistic "Trump = bad / Clinton = good" reporting is getting ridiculous. Both candidates
have a lot of dubious qualities and skeletons in their cupboards, yet one is glossed over while
the other is exaggerated into caricature.
Are there any truly independent newspapers that will report both sides fairly and evenly? The
Guardian clearly won't.
Another Trump bashing article. Nice to see your journalistic objectivity is intact Guardian. The
establishment is finally being challenged - No more spin, no more smooth one liners, no more oppressive
political correctness from the liberal elites. The gloves are off - and if we don't see the establishments
bare hands this time - they will without a doubt lose. People are tired of being handled the the
establishments kit gloves.
Can we have an article on Clinton's proposed 'Syria reset' please, the one where she's proposing
ramping the war up and arming more 'moderate rebels' and imposing a 'no fly zone' on Russian airstrips
(what could possibly go wrong)..... This woman is a dangerous menace and will bring you everything
you all wanted to get away from. Lots and lots of war for her mates in the banks and MIC.
I despair if that warmongering liar gets in.
Donald Trump: "I've been Mr Nice Guy for too long. Now, I'm taking the gloves off, and I'm
going to yell and scream and swear and insult anyone and everyone who doesn't believe I'm a real
candidate, and that I really want to be president. No one understands just how serious I am. I've
been trying to be serious all my life, and I will scare the bewillies out of anyone who doesn't
believe in me now. After all, some one's go to pay."
The Guardian is quaking in their boots. The propaganda is not working thanks to the abundant info
on the internet.
People are waking up to the populist. I predict a double digit lead in 2 weeks time.
Great time to be alive!
In response to Ambrit. I do not know who is attacking Bernie. New poll shows that Jill Stein
will pull 22% of Democrats w/ a negative view of Clinton which is 67% of Democrats. May be off
w/ the 67% but the poll is recent and from WSJ/NBC
Clinton will not win. Sanders mortally wounded the DLC/Clinton machine.
@xxSJWxx @Calvinus @CorporatistNation I think that xxSJWxx misunderstood where I am at... I
AGREE 100% that Hillary should go down for racketeering etc... Watch
Clinton Cash!!! What I said was... IF
THE VOTES WERE ACTUALLY "COUNTED"... WE WOULD HAVE A DIFFERENT NOMINEE... E.G., BERNIE SANDERS...
The Votes were NOT counted and so we have this unethical sociopath named Hillary who in my opinion
is also a Meglomaniac... who WILL start World War Three given half a chance. So lets hope that
there is a judge somewhere with courage and integrity who will indict her.
IF you want to be FULLY informed on The Clinton Foundation, The Clinton Global Initiative and
just what scoundrels Bill and Hill are... Then you MUST watch "Clinton Cash!"
I watched "Clinton Cash" TWICE last night rather than watch the "Sh*tShow!" #Vote2DefeatHER#VoteJillNOTHill
When one really examines the overall plan, the overall structure of the design of the banksters,
it really shouldn't be that difficult to reduce inequality:
The Clintons and the Bankers
1992: The Blackstone Group, at that time the wealthiest private equity firm (private
bank) in the world, would provide presidential candidate, Bill Clinton, with free office space
to solicit campaign donations. (Blackstone Group was founded by David Rockefeller protégé, Peter
G. Peterson, with Rockefeller family seed money.)
1993: In response to a request from the JP Morgan Bank, the Group of 30 (lobbyists for
the central bankers founded by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation in 1978) publishes
a paper promoting the widespread adoption of credit derivatives, with the caveat that "legal risk"
should be removed. (Members of the G30 includes Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner, whose first
position after college was with Kissinger Associates, founded by Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller's
right-hand man.)
1993: Mortgage Bankers Association publishes a paper outlining the structure and concept
of MERS, or Mortgage Electronic Registry System, a necessity for rapid mortgage securitizations
(credit derivatives) and shuffling home loans between lenders so that homeowners couldn't find
the actual owner.
1993: The SEC - under Clinton - will drop the requirement for investment firms to report
on the identity of the major shareholders. (This is to obscure the ownership - if you don't know
who the owners are, you won't know who owns everything.)
Next, President Clinton's aiding and abetting the bankers:
Clinton will sign NAFTA (actually version 2.0, after LBJ's Border Industrialization Program)
which includes a clause to allow for the foreign ownership of Mexican banks - previously only
allowed to be Mexican-owned.
Within one year 90% of Mexican banks are foreign owned, principally by US banks.
Next, Clinton will sign the Riegle-Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act, allowing
for full interstate banking - a major step in the cartel formation.
Next up, Clinton signs the Telecommunications Act of 1996, allowing for the consolidation of
corporate media and reconstitution of AT&T into one entity.
The Investment Company Act of 1996 is signed into law, allowing for unlimited number of investors
per hedge fund or similar funds. The combination of the potential for an unlimited number of credit
default swaps, and an unlimited number of commodity futures purchases, and an unlimited number
of investors per fund, allows for ultra-speculation.
Next the Big Three: the REIT Modernization Act, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Financial Services Modernization
Act and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act - these together will set the stage for the greatest
transfer of wealth in human history, the global economic meltdown (and kill the New Deal entirely).
1997: Years after this date, investigative gumshoe reporter, Greg Palast, would uncover
a secret 1997 memorandum between Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers, urging for the inclusion
of the "credit derivatives-acceptance clause" in the WTO's Financial Services Agreement (so that
the various governmental signatories around the world would accept Wall Street's fantasy finance
Ponzi scheme).
The legal advisors in the creation of the Mortgage Electronic Registry System - or MERS - were
the attorneys at Covington & Burling, the same law firm from which Eric Holder, President Obama's
choice for attorney general to contain the banker meltdown, came from.
So Covington & Burling, which has long enjoyed a strategic partnership with Kissinger Associates,
was the legal advisor of record, and their man, Eric Holder, was appointed by the president to
insure no bankers were prosecuted, and this entire criminal conspiracy would not be exposed. President
Obama also appointed Judith ("Jami") Miscik, then president and vice-chair of Kissinger Associates,
to his Intelligence Advisory Board.
And the then CEO of Fannie Mae, the fellow who promoted the large-scale adoption of mortgage
securitizations, James Johnson, had a longstanding relationship with David Rockefeller and Henry
Kissinger; Johnson was the business contact for the American Friends of Bilderberg, Inc. (directors:
David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger, Richard Perle, et al.).
So, I just looked at the wordles that Lambert used in the Kitchen Table post and I didn't see
the word 'liberal' anywhere. However, if you made a wordle from Rush Limbaugh's broadcast career,
'liberal' would be one of the bigger words. I guess Thomas Frank is attacking 'liberals' from
the left? One thing is for sure, the word is dirtier than ever. It just makes me want to use it
more and more. It's so dirty!
Everyone at Davos calls themselves [neo]liberals. The Joint Chiefs of Staff go into the woods
and do primal screams, "we're liberals and we're going to turn the Middle East into glass!!!!
We're so liberal!!" That's what they're doing at the Bohemian Grove. They all gather around Henry
Kissinger and sing about being liberals in their hearts.
Davos People are the quintessential [neo]liberals. USians are as liberal as they are
Christian: they only say it in order to be accepted by people who have been told that only
self-described liberals are worthy...
"... Right now the Democratic Party is giving all of their attention to the Demexiting progressives, in an effort to try and sway them to vote for Hilary by using a narrative that suggests Demexting progressives will be the cause of a Trump presidency ..."
"... My background in marketing/psychology gives me quite a bit of perspective when it comes to narratives; and lets me know that this "not voting for Hillary is a vote for Trump" narrative can be completely reversed - because those who hold attention always hold power. ..."
"... Progressives hell bent on #demexit in support of the Green Party candidate can force progressive Hilary supporters to #demexit. Current polls show that Trump is neck to neck with Hilary when it comes to securing enough votes for the Whitehouse. This alone means there's no true reason to vote for her. People leaving the Democratic Party for the Green Party can use the strength and momentum of their movement to force other progressive Democrats' hands in migrating to the Green Party this election ..."
"... It's time for the US to leave the 2 party system for one of multiple parties to slow and/or disrupt the infiltration of political parties by corporate interests. ..."
"... PLEASE ANYONE BUT CLINTON... ..."
"... The most unethical faux married couple in the modern history of this nation. BTW fu*k the corporate media.. ..."
In actuality, it's the progressives deciding not to vote for Hilary that hold the power in
this presidential election. Anyone who receives attention holds power over the interests of those
giving them attention.
Right now the Democratic Party is giving all of their attention to the Demexiting progressives,
in an effort to try and sway them to vote for Hilary by using a narrative that suggests Demexting
progressives will be the cause of a Trump presidency
"Vote for Hilary or Trump becomes President."
My background in marketing/psychology gives me quite a bit of perspective when it comes
to narratives; and lets me know that this "not voting for Hillary is a vote for Trump" narrative
can be completely reversed - because those who hold attention always hold power.
Progressives hell bent on #demexit in support of the Green Party candidate can force progressive
Hilary supporters to #demexit. Current polls show that Trump is neck to neck with Hilary when
it comes to securing enough votes for the Whitehouse. This alone means there's no true reason
to vote for her. People leaving the Democratic Party for the Green Party can use the strength
and momentum of their movement to force other progressive Democrats' hands in migrating to the
Green Party this election by twisting the same fear-based argument Hilary supporters are
using into:
"There's no stopping #Demexit. Go Green or Trump becomes president."
43 million votes will help the Green Party candidate to secure the presidency in a 3 party
race. This is completely doable. A Green Party presidency is absolutely realistic; especially
with over 40% of the US population being Independent voters.
It's time for the US to leave the 2 party system for one of multiple parties to slow and/or
disrupt the infiltration of political parties by corporate interests.
A prediction... I'm pretty sure one of the tactics that will be used to try and prevent Bernie
Sanders supporters from voting for the Green Party candidate will be to encourage them to "write
in Bernie's name," which will ultimately assist in progressives part of the Demexit movement relinquishing
their voting power.
Also be mindful of the possibilities of this coming presidential election being rigged in ways
similar to the DNC primaries with a particular focus to hold back 3rd parties. Investigative actions
should probably be taken now to see what kind of corruption has and is being planned as we speak
for the Presidential Election.
Larry1961
PLEASE ANYONE BUT CLINTON...
DudeWTF
@Jim1984 Hillary is 100 times more dangerous than Trump.
xxSJWxx
@DudeWTF @Jim1984 They are BOTH EXTREMELY DANGEROUS to this country. We've got a NEOLIBERAL
CORPORATIST WARMONGER and a NEOCON FASCIST RACIST BIGOT MISOGYNIST and BOTH are SOCIOPATHS.
CorporatistNation
@Nothing Out Of The Ordinary Well... in response...
IF the votes were actually counted as cast and suppression of voters for Sanders was not permitted
then yep we would have a different nominee. Despite all the confetti last night Hillary will be
going down the tubes as Bernie supporters in large part will not follow this criminal to the voting
booth.
Watch Clinton CASH on Youtube and then decide if you think "that" is "what" you want in the
WH...
The most unethical faux married couple in the modern history of this nation. BTW fu*k the
corporate media... reporting just what they are instructed to tell us. Check the wikileaks
emails... texting and emailing the likes of Chuck Toad and Rachel ... while they are on -air...
It couls hardly be worse. 21st century FASCIST Amerika!
xxSJWxx
@Calvinus @CorporatistNation The 'kook' is you. There is a MOUNTAIN of evidence and as many
as 20+ lawsuits in the courts right now for voter fraud, ballot shredding, ballot tampering, vote
flipping, voter suppression, voter roll purging, giving out illegal provisional ballots, registration
tampering and exit poll discrepancies as much as 15-20%... anything over 2% is a RED FLAG for
FRAUD.
The FBI and investigators, statisticians, etc have been documenting the evidence since the
beginning of the election and also have proof of collusion between the DNC, MSM and Clinton campaign
MONTHS before the #DNCLeaks.
Pull your head out of your rear end and pay attention. They're all going down on RACKETEERING
charges.
@xxSJWxx @Calvinus @CorporatistNation I think that xxSJWxx misunderstood where I am at... I
AGREE 100% that Hillary should go down for racketeering etc... Watch
Clinton Cash!!! What
I said was... IF THE VOTES WERE ACTUALLY "COUNTED"... WE WOULD HAVE A DIFFERENT NOMINEE... E.G.,
BERNIE SANDERS...
The Votes were NOT counted and so we have this unethical sociopath named Hillary who in my
opinion is also a Meglomaniac... who WILL start World War Three given half a chance. So lets hope
that there is a judge somewhere with courage and integrity who will indict her.
IF you want to be FULLY informed on The Clinton Foundation, The Clinton Global Initiative and
just what scoundrels Bill and Hill are... Then you MUST watch "Clinton Cash!"
I watched "Clinton Cash" TWICE last night rather than watch the "Sh*tShow!" #Vote2DefeatHER#VoteJillNOTHill
"... Forget the Hillarys and BHO's and Bushes of the world. If we want to get Liberty back and stop the Globalism we have to bring down the media, first. ..."
"... It doesn't matter who you people "vote" for, this isn't a democracy ran by us, this is a corporate oligarchy ran by the most powerful men in the world, you have no say in it. ..."
"... It's telling when people are asked to name ONE SINGLE ACCOMPLISHMENT BY HILLARY CLINTON AS SEC. of STATE and they can't give ONE! Not one!!! I don't blame Hillary. She's what she is: a lying, scamming, scheming, selfish, self-serving piece of trash. She is what she is. I blame the stupid, ignorant, uninformed, lackadaisical American electorate that only cares about smartphones, texting, and Pokeman! ..."
"... Woe to America, because with Hollywood, the evil, liberal media, and brainless Americans bowing at her feet, she's going to be the next president. I truly shutter at the thought! ..."
"... I actually want her to be the 1st female president. Cause then feminist MIGHT realise that the 1st female president was the absolute worst president in the history of mankind. But i don't think the realization is worth it ..."
"... How anybody who fabricated reports to make it seem like a 12 year old girl had a past of lying about being abducted, in order to get the guy who raped the girl successfully off the hook (who can never have children again as a result of the rape) is allowed to even breathe in the open air is beyond me. ..."
"... the clintons are proof that crime pays and pays well if you can lie like hillary and that pervert Bill all of those that follow them and cover for them are just as guilty. ..."
Feminism and Equality are obviously important, but we shouldn't let ourselves be blinded by
these claims. The historic facts, political records, and personality traits are much more
important when electing American politicians.
Vlad Tepes Dracul 2 months ago
Equality is not voting for someone just because of their gender. It is finding them
qualified for the position regardless of their gender or race.
martianshoes
Forget the Hillarys and BHO's and Bushes of the world. If we want to get Liberty back
and stop the Globalism we have to bring down the media, first.
F**K-THE-NWO
It doesn't matter who you people "vote" for, this isn't a democracy ran by us, this is
a corporate oligarchy ran by the most powerful men in the world, you have no say in it.
Jacopo Toniazzo
Modern Americans=USSR Russians. Cannot think on their own, totally guided by propaganda and
no knowledge of what is going on in the world. GG USA u fucked up big time. Of course there
always is a minority of people that have a decent IQ, luckily.
Winston Chang
It would send the wrong message for little girls across the country. Hillary did not work
her way up as a young woman. She became a First Lady first. If she became president, you are
telling little girls that they have gotta be a president's wife first, have the hubby help you
become Senator and persuade the President of the country make her Secretary Of State first.
and then run for president. She did not, again, WORK herself up the ladder. She used her
public image, made by her husband,
to get to here today.
Jeff Rhoades
It's telling when people are asked to name ONE SINGLE ACCOMPLISHMENT BY HILLARY CLINTON
AS SEC. of STATE and they can't give ONE! Not one!!! I don't blame Hillary. She's what she is:
a lying, scamming, scheming, selfish, self-serving piece of trash. She is what she is. I blame
the stupid, ignorant, uninformed, lackadaisical American electorate that only cares about
smartphones, texting, and Pokeman!
Woe to America, because with Hollywood, the evil, liberal media, and brainless
Americans bowing at her feet, she's going to be the next president. I truly shutter at the
thought!
spongefire10
I actually want her to be the 1st female president. Cause then feminist MIGHT realise
that the 1st female president was the absolute worst president in the history of mankind. But
i don't think the realization is worth it :(
Steven Van Westing
How anybody who fabricated reports to make it seem like a 12 year old girl had a past
of lying about being abducted, in order to get the guy who raped the girl successfully off the
hook (who can never have children again as a result of the rape) is allowed to even breathe in
the open air is beyond me.
You governments are run by the wicked, and the wicked is whom it serves.
Michaela Writesel
Any woman who votes for Hillary just because she is a woman is sexist. No different than a
man voting for another man because of just that, he is a man. Anyone who votes for someone
just based of gender is sexist and anyone who votes for someone based of race is racist. The
end.
Terry Pirkle
the clintons are proof that crime pays and pays well if you can lie like hillary and
that pervert Bill all of those that follow them and cover for them are just as guilty.
All speeches at Democratic convention remind me speeches at the USSR Communist Party congresses.
The same level of hypocrisy, the same level of detachment from reality. Obama definitely can server
as General Secretary of CPSU without any moral or presentation problems.
Notable quotes:
"... But back to Clinton's primary mission. The dominance of the FIRE sector at the Democrat National
Convention was overwhelming. If you think they are funding Clinton on behalf of labor, and not on their
own behalf, capital, then I have a headquarters in Brooklyn I would like to sell you; I think maybe
there's a kitchen table in one of the meeting rooms. ..."
"... First, Clinton sees her problem with labor as a public relations problem ("we haven't done
a good enough job showing"). She's airbrushing even worse than Obama, since she draws attention to the
airbrushing explicitly. See the charts; we're look at policy failure (or, depending on your level of
cyncism realism, policy success). Second, "we're going to do something about it." Well, where were you
in the hell of the last eight years? ..."
. (One ubiquitous phrase in press coverage of the convention was that Obama
"passed the baton of hope" to Clinton. Well, if the promised "change" was all that great, why
does the baton of hope need to be passed in the first place? And if we are in some kinda relay race,
then how come the finish line is constantly receding? (See above at "not yet felt.") Here she is:
[CLINTON]: I've gone around our country talking to working families. And I've heard from so
many of you who feel like the economy just isn't working.
Some of you are frustrated - even furious.
And you know what??? You're right.
It's not yet working the way it should.
Americans are willing to work - and work hard.
But right now, an awful lot of people feel there is less and less respect for the work they
do.
And less respect for them, period.
Democrats are the party of working people.
But we haven't done a good enough job showing that we get what you're going through, and that
we're going to do something about it.
So I want to tell you tonight how we will empower Americans to live better lives.
My primary mission as President will be to create more opportunity and more good jobs with
rising wages right here in the United States…
From my first day in office to my last!
I'm not going to look at the
Gish Gallop of minor policy
fixes and shopworn slogans that Clinton emits. I am, however, amazed at the effrontery these claims
by Clinton, later in the speech:
[CLINTON:] That's why we need to appoint Supreme Court justices who will get money out of politics
and expand voting rights, not restrict them. And we'll pass a constitutional amendment to overturn
Citizens United!
First, Obama had the chance to nominate a Supreme Court justice who would do just that; last I
checked, Merrick Garland had not expressed a view on Citizens United. Second, if Democrats were serious
about voting rights, they'd have voter registration as a normal party function, 24/7/365. They would
also be setting up voters with IDs, in states that require them. They have done neither. Finally,
in order to save the Clinton candidacy from fully justified charges of corruption, Democrats have
accepted the doctrine of Citizens United, which is that the only form corruption takes is a quid
pro quo (and not, say, laundering political favors through a Foundation).
But back to Clinton's primary mission. The dominance of the FIRE sector at the Democrat National
Convention was overwhelming. If you think they are funding Clinton on behalf of labor, and not on
their own behalf, capital, then I have a headquarters in Brooklyn I would like to sell you; I think
maybe there's a kitchen table in one of the meeting rooms. But let me pull out one sentence
from Clinton's speech, exactly as I did with Obama:
[CLINTON:] But we haven't done a good enough job showing that we get what you're going through,
and that we're going to do something about it.
First, Clinton sees her problem with labor as a public relations problem ("we haven't done
a good enough job showing"). She's airbrushing even worse than Obama, since she draws attention to
the airbrushing explicitly. See the charts; we're look at policy failure (or, depending on your level
of cyncism realism, policy success). Second, "we're going to do something about it." Well,
where were you in the hell of the last eight years?
"... Shame on you Bernie. You stain yourself by endorsing crooked, lying, corrupt
and immoral Hillary. Bernie, you are part of the corrupt establishment and SOLD
OUT your supporters. ..."
"... Crooked Hillary is a criminal and should go to jail. "LOCK HER UP". How
could you let a criminal running for US president? This b**** has no morals, is
a world-class pathological liar and corrupt to the bone. Look at what the Clintons
DID not what they preached. The cancerous corruption of Democrats is so widespread
all the way to the top. Below are just some of many immoral things that the corrupt
Clintons did: ..."
"... What's dark and negative is that Hillary won't have a press conference.....is
she afraid of the questions that she'll have to answer? Ya know, like, why did you
lie to the American people about basically EVERYTHING regarding your personal, unsecured
server? ..."
"... Hillary faces hacking and heckling, and the heckling are mostly from within
the party supporters ..."
"Remember this," Trump said during a rally Friday in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
"Trump is going to be no more Mr. Nice Guy." And for the first time he encouraged
his supporters' anti-Clinton chants of "lock her up."
"I've been saying let's just beat her on Nov. 8," Trump said, "but you know
what? I'm starting to agree with you."
TT
WOW! The DEMOCRATIC PARTY HAS NOMINATED CROOKED, LYING, IMMORAL AND CORRUPT
HILLARY. The Democrats' primary was totally rigged behind the scenes to
PRE-SELECT crooked Hillary as the only nominee from the beginning according
to leaked DNC emails. This is an election CRIME committed by the Democratic
Party. CROOKED HILLARY should be a DISQUALIFIED DEMOCRAT CANDIDATE from
the beginning. The Clintons are evil people and corrupt to the bone. SATAN
IS TAKING OVER THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY.
Shame on you Bernie. You stain yourself by endorsing crooked, lying,
corrupt and immoral Hillary. Bernie, you are part of the corrupt establishment
and SOLD OUT your supporters.
Crooked Hillary is a criminal and should go to jail. "LOCK HER UP".
How could you let a criminal running for US president? This b**** has no
morals, is a world-class pathological liar and corrupt to the bone. Look
at what the Clintons DID not what they preached. The cancerous corruption
of Democrats is so widespread all the way to the top. Below are just some
of many immoral things that the corrupt Clintons did:
HOME EMAIL SYSTEM - Crooked Clinton installed a home email system
FOR WORK while secretary of state to hide shady communications between
her and unfriendly foreign governments related to quid pro quo transactions
to the Clinton Foundation in exchange for influence on U.S. policy while
she was Secretary of State. Crooked HILLARY DELETED 33,000 emails to
avoid criminal prosecution. This crooked would not delete these emails
if they were truly personal. This b**** sold out USA and committed TREASON.
LIES AFTER LIES - Crooked Clinton's lies after lies to Congress,
FBI and Americans on Bosnia sniper fire, Benghazi attack, her home email
system, etc.
ELECTION RIGGING – Crooked Clinton colluded with DNC to rig 2016
primary according to 19,000 leaked DNC emails released by WikiLeaks.
DNC PRE-ANOINTED crooked Hillary as the only nominee from the beginning
according to leaked DNC emails.
CLINTON FOUNDATION – this is basically a front company so immoral
Clintons can pocket through implicit bribery and money laundering. While
abusing the public office, the Clintons have used the Clinton Foundation,
which is based in Canada for non-disclosure policy of charitable contributors,
to make "quid pro quo" deals with special interests and foreign governments.
The Clinton Crime Syndicate (Foundation) KEEPS 93% OF DONATIONS and
only donates 7% to the charities. They list 93% of the income taken
in as used for "Administrative Expenses".
CORRUPTION OF DEMOCRATS ALL THE WAY TO THE TOP - A FIX was in through
a SECRET meeting between immoral Bill Clinton and corrupt AG Loretta
Lynch NOT to charge Crooked Hillary on home-based emails and made her
ABOVE THE LAW. AG Loretta Lynch is the boss of FBI director James Comey.
CROOKED HILLARY IS TRULY AN IMMORAL LOW-LIFE WHITE TRASH - After
leaving the White House, crooked Hillary was forced to return an estimated
$200,000 in White House furniture, china, silverware, and artwork that
she had stolen. HOW COULD YOU VOTE FOR THIS TRASH TO BE US PRESIDENT?
QUID PRO QUO case out of many - THE CLINTON SCHOOL KICKBACKS. In
April 2015, Bill Clinton was forced to abruptly resign from his lucrative
perch as honorary chancellor of Laureate Education, a for-profit college
company. The reason for Clinton's immediate departure: Clinton Cash
revealed, and Bloomberg confirmed, that Laureate funneled Bill Clinton
$16.46 million over five years while Hillary Clinton's State Department
pumped at least $55 million to a group run by Laureate's founder and
chairman, Douglas Becker, a man with strong ties to the Clinton Global
Initiative. Laureate has donated between $1 million and $5 million (donations
are reported in ranges, not exact amounts) to the Clinton Foundation.
CLINTON THEFT OF RELIEF FUNDS FOR HAITI EARTHQUAKE - Here's what
really happened. The Clinton Foundation selected Clayton Homes, a construction
company owned by Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway, to build temporary
shelters in Haiti. Buffett is an active member of the Clinton Global
Initiative who has donated generously to the Clintons as well as the
Clinton Foundation. The contract was supposed to be given through the
normal United Nations bidding process, with the deal going to the lowest
bidder who met the project's standards. UN officials said, however,
that the contract was never competitively bid for. Clayton offered to
build "hurricane-proof trailers" but what they actually delivered turned
out to be a disaster. The trailers were structurally unsafe, with high
levels of formaldehyde and insulation coming out of the walls. There
were problems with mold and fumes. The stifling heat inside made Haitians
sick and many of them abandoned the trailers because they were ill-constructed
and unusable.
The Clintons also funneled $10 million in federal loans to a firm called
InnoVida, headed by Clinton donor Claudio Osorio. Osorio had loaded its
board with Clinton cronies, including longtime Clinton ally General Wesley
Clark; Hillary's 2008 finance director Jonathan Mantz; and Democratic fundraiser
Chris Korge who has helped raise millions for the Clintons. Normally the
loan approval process takes months or even years. But in this case, a government
official wrote, "Former President Bill Clinton is personally in contact
with the company to organize its logistical and support needs. And as Secretary
of State, Hillary Clinton has made available State Department resources
to assist with logistical arrangements." InnoVida had not even provided
an independently audited financial report that is normally a requirement
for such applications. On the basis of the Clinton connection, InnoVida's
application was fast-tracked and approved in two weeks. The company defaulted
on the loan and never built any houses. An investigation revealed that Osorio
had diverted company funds to pay for his Miami Beach mansion, his Maserati,
and his Colorado ski chalet. He pleaded guilty to wire fraud and money laundering
in 2013, and is currently serving a twelve-year prison term on fraud charges
related to the loan.
And these are only 2 examples of the dozens of thefts the Clintons and
their cronies did just to Haiti.
DONALD TRUMP, as the Republican presidential candidate, is truly an OUTSIDER
who goes against the corrupt PROFESSIONAL DEMOCRAT POLITICIANS who have
led USA in a wrong track of economic and military disadvantage for the last
eight years. SINCE CROOKED HILLARY BECAME SECRETARY OF STATE IN 2009 WITH
FAILED FOREIGN POLICY, USA has been unsafe and being attacked by RADICAL
ISLAMIC TERRORISTS MORE THAN EVER BEFORE. American citizens are ANGRY of
these corrupt PROFESSIONAL politicians like crooked, lying, immoral and
corrupt HILLARY. VOTE TRUMP 2016.
The West has been blinded and lured by the big Chinese market. However,
it forgot that it has been dealing with a Communist China inside its disguising
Capitalist shell. The Chinese GDP has increased from $303B in 1980 to current
around $11,000B, an increase of more than 35 times along with Intellectual
Property thefts from the West worth a few trillions of dollars and millions
and millions of job losses in the West. Only top few % in the West including
the corrupt CLINTONS were significantly benefited from the BAD trade deals
with China. The Americans are getting poorer while the Chinese are getting
MUCH richer due to BAD trades deals with the West.
That was why Donald Trump, who is NOT racist but puts USA first, said
the trade deals with China are all BAD that cost millions and millions of
domestic jobs. BOYCOTT Chinese-made products and BRING BACK JOBS FROM CHINA.
VOTE TRUMP 2016 AND TRUMP WILL RE-NEGOTIATE ALL BAD TRADE DEALS, BRING JOBS
BACK AND REBUILD US MANUFACTURING.
The liberal mainstream media is pro-Clinton. It is getting paid big from
the crooked Clinton campaign and putting out LYING POLL NUMBERS and ARTICLES
TO BASH TRUMP. A majority of people thought crooked Hillary should have
been INDICTED. People in government would be in JAIL or lose their jobs
at least if they just have done 10% of what crooked Hillary has done. This
is a tremendous US national security implication. HAVE YOU NOTICED THAT
USA HAS BEEN ON A DOWN HILL BIG TIME IN TERMS OF BEING RESPECTED BY PEOPLE
AROUND THE WORLD AND FOREIGN DIPLOMACY SINCE CROOKED HILLARY BECAME SECRETARY
OF STATE IN 2009 ??? Hacking of the crooked Clinton's home, low-secured
private email system by foreign agents would have caused tremendous damage
to USA since 2009.
Russian agents along with agents from other countries like China or Iran
most likely have hacked the crooked Clinton's home, low-secured private
email system and retrieved all her emails including nationally sensitive
emails, shady communications between her and unfriendly foreign governments
related to quid pro quo transactions to the Clinton Foundation in exchange
for influence on U.S. policy while she was Secretary of State. Crooked HILLARY
DELETED 33,000 emails to avoid criminal prosecution, sold out USA and committed
TREASON.
Chitta
Did HRC say that these new jobs will be created offshore?
The 23 million jobs in Bill C's time that she brags about have long been
shipped offshore with the support of Bill and Hillary. What a hypocrite!
anonymous
Mr. Trump: the convention is over, the nominees are in place.
Take the gloves off.
Clinton has literally endless amounts of factual material you can work
with.
Stick to the documented facts:
• No hyperbole
• No exaggeration
• No undocumented assumptions
• Vet everything first
Then, unload on her with all barrels.
Relentlessly.
Maggie
She should be facing jail time with all the money she and Bill were given
for favors to big business, foreign countries and personal friends. Remember
in 1978 when she turned $1,000 into $100,000 in one year playing the commodities
market? Pretty good for someone who never played the market before. Maybe
if we all had some insider info, we'd be "lucky," too.
Tomahawk
Hillary is horribly amazing. She wants to con her sheep into believing
Trump cannot be trusted with the nuclear codes when she can't even be trusted
with emails.....lol
Stathis
What's dark and negative is that Hillary won't have a press conference.....is
she afraid of the questions that she'll have to answer? Ya know, like, why
did you lie to the American people about basically EVERYTHING regarding
your personal, unsecured server?
AAR
Correction
Hillary faces hacking and heckling, and the heckling are mostly from
within the party supporters
"... If she wins in November, my one hoped-for consolation – again, assuming she doesn't end up setting off WW3 – is that I lay better than even odds of another global-economic meltdown in the next 4 years. Much better for it to land in her well-deserving-of-it lap than Trump's. In the meantime I continue to derive hearty and almost-daily enjoyment from The Donald's gift for sending the corrupt establishment – in both major parties as well as the loathsome MSM – into conniptions. I mean, seeing the likes of drone-boy Leon Panetta yesterday blustering about "beyond the pale", "treason" and "inviting a foreign government to meddle in our electoral process" (not like the CIA et al. ever meddled in any other nation's electoral process, right?) after Trump called for Russia (or anyone else) who might be in possession of the disappeared SoS e-mails to release them … priceless. ..."
"... Trump made his quip about Russia in what actually was an eloquent and funny press conference.[1] The media took this out of context to depict him as urging the Russians to hack into our e-mails. What he actually said was that if Russia – or China, or somebody "sitting in his bed" – did indeed read Hillary's State Department and Clinton Foundation dealings, they should do the world a favor and release them to reveal her self-dealing. ..."
"... the German court's unambiguous, landmark finding ..."
"... We have truly reached a new low in this country with the nomination by a major party of an unindicted felon. I don't see how anyone with a scrap of moral conscience could vote for Hillary. The political revolution truly begins when we kick this "vulgar and terminally unethical" couple (thank you Bob Herbert) out of D.C. for good. ..."
"... The aha moment came when Sanders said. "Let me say something that may not be great politics. The Secretary is right. The American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails!" ..."
"... That was the warning to me that Sanders was not interested in taking down her majesty. I knew right then without a doubt he was not fully in it to win it. This was the revelation much like when your spouse gets a call late at night and the conversation is in hushed tones or your child comes home for the first time with a glazed look in their eye or you hear that a relative has just been hospitalized but not to worry because it's nothing serious. ..."
The response across the Democratic neocon spectrum, from Anne Applebaum at
the
Washington Post
to red-baiting Paul Krugman and the Sunday talk
shows it was suggested that behind the Wikileaks to release DNC e-mails was
a Russian plot to help elect Trump as their agent. Former US ambassador to
Russia Michael McFaul lent his tattered reputation to claim that Putin must
have sponsored the hackers who exposed the DNC dirty tricks against Bernie.
The attack on Trump was of course aimed at Sanders. At first it didn't take
off. Enough delegates threatened to boo DNC head (and payday-loan lobbyist)
Debbie Wasserman Schultz off stage if she showed her face at the podium to
gavel the convention to order. The down-note would have threatened the
"United Together" theme, so she was forced to resign. But Hillary rewarded
her loyalty by naming her honorary chairman of her own presidential
campaign! If you're loyal, you get a pay-off. The DNC was doing what it was
supposed to do. No reform seems likely.
... ... ...
VP Kaine as Hillary's Stand-in if She's Indicted or Seems Unelectable
The potential "Hillary Republicans" who are turning away from Trump – whose
ranks include Mike Bloomberg, the neocon Kagan family (Robert and Victoria
Nuland) and William Kristol – far outnumber the Sanders supporters who may
stay home or vote for Jill Stein on the Green Party ticket. Hillary sees
more votes (and certainly more campaign contributions and future "speaking
fees") from the Koch Brothers, George Soros, Wall Street, Saudi Arabia and
the corporatist Chamber of Commerce.
Kaine recently has fought to "free" small and medium-sized banks from being subject to the
Consumer Financial Protection Agency. He has long supported the TPP, deregulation of Wall Street,
and most everything that Sanders opposes. Appointed as DNC head by President Obama in 2008, he
dismantled Howard Dean's 50-state strategy, not bothering to fight Republicans in the South and
other solid Republican states. His move let them elect governors who gerrymandered their voting
districts after the 2010 census.
... ... ...
Bernie's campaign targeted Wall Street and corporate deregulation (the
essence of TTP and TTIP) as the key to the One Percent's monopolization of
income and wealth since Obama's post-2008 sacrifice of the economy on the
altar of rescuing banks and their bondholders. That is why the Wall Street's
Donor Class that controls the Democratic Party machine want to discourage
new voter enrollment and turnout. The last thing they want is an influx of
new voters advocating real reform. Millennial newcomers are more
progressive, born into a generation that has no opportunity to obtain jobs
and housing as easily as their parents. So it's best to keep out
independents in favor of the old-time voters with brand loyalty to
Democrats.
Demonizing Trump for Saying what Bernie Sanders Has Been
Saying
Trump made his quip about Russia in what actually was an eloquent and
funny press conference.
[1]
The media took this out of context to depict him as urging the Russians to
hack into our e-mails. What he actually said was that if Russia – or China,
or somebody "sitting in his bed" – did indeed read Hillary's State
Department and Clinton Foundation dealings, they should do the world a favor
and release them to reveal her self-dealing.
Trump is right in saying that there has not really been a recovery for
the Rust Belt or for the 99 Percent. Hillary brazens it out by claiming that
Obama's neoliberal economics have helped wage-earners, despite the debt
deflation blocking recovery. She promises to continue his policies (backed
by his same campaign funders).
That would seem to be a losing strategy for this year's election – unless
the Democrats gain control of the electronic voting machines, especially in
Ohio. But the Republicans may decide to throw the election to Hillary, who
is fortunate to have Donald Trump as her opponent. Demonized as Putin's
"Siberian candidate," he has become the Democrats' unifying force: "Hillary
isn't Trump."
That's what voting for the "lesser evil" means. Hillary's message is:
"Even though we support TPP and a New Cold War, at least you'll have a woman
at the helm. Anyway, you have nowhere else to go, because the other side is
even
more
evil!" Her logic is that (1) if you criticize Hillary,
you're supporting Trump; (2) Trump is the Siberian candidate; hence (3)
Criticism of Hillary, NATO's New Cold War escalation or the TPP's anti-labor
treaty and financial deregulation is pro-Russian and hence anti-American.
All that strategists for the One Percent need to do is fund an even worse
party platform to the right of the Democrats. So the choice will be between
Evil A (economic evil with ethnic and sexual tolerance) and Evil B (without
such tolerance).
It doesn't have to be this way. But Sanders gave up, not feeling up to
the task. Having mocked him as a socialist, Hillary is acting as the Joe
McCarthy of the 2010s, mobilizing a wave of commie bashing against her
Republican opponent.
On Monday leading up to the convention, the Democratic Party's cable
channel MSNBC kept juxtaposing pictures of Trump and Putin. Criticizing
Hillary's neocon stance supporting Ukraine's military coup is depicted as
support of Russia – while other commentators followed President Obama
claiming that criticism of TPP means making China the new leader of Asia.
The message is that criticizing NATO's adventurism risks being called a
Soviet – I mean, Russian – puppet.
... ... ...
The problem facing Hillary's rivals is that she has wrapped herself in the legacy of President
Obama. Having shied from criticizing the president, Sanders and his supporters are facilitating
what may be a Lame Duck session sellout after the November election. My fear is that Obama will
try to "save his legacy" by joining with the Republicans to drive through the TPP, and also may
escalate the New Cold War with Russia and China so as to make it easier for Hillary to sign onto
these moves.
Selecting Tim Kaine as her running mate means neoliberal, pro-TPP business as usual. Hillary
didn't oppose TPP. She just said she would put in rhetoric saying that its "purpose" was to raise
wages – whereas most voters have shown themselves to be smart enough to realize that the effect
will be just the opposite.
Yet Sanders endorsed her. Evidently he hopes to keep his position within the Party chairing
the Senate Minority Budget Committee, while simultaneously trying to promote a revolution outside
the Democrats. I was reminded of a Chinese proverb: When there is a fork in the road, a man who
tries to take two roads at once gets a broken hip joint.
... ... ...
Bernie's supporters who walked out on Tuesday have been duly radicalized.
But he himself seems akin to be an American Alex Tsipras. Tsipras thought
withdrawal from the eurozone was even worse than capitulating to austerity,
while Sanders believes that withdrawing from the Democrats and backing a
political realignment – perhaps electing Trump in the interim is even worse
than Hillary's pro-Wall street Obama-like agenda.
Matters were not
improved when Bill Clinton gave a hagiographic biography of Hillary
emphasizing her legal aid work to protect children, without mentioning how
the 1994 welfare "reform" drastically cut back aid to dependent children.
Madeline Albright said that Hillary would keep America safe, without
mentioning Hillary's promotion of destabilizing Libya and backing Al Quaeda
against Syria's government, driving millions of refugees to Europe and
wherever they might be safer.
The many anti-TPP signs waved by Sanders delegates on Wednesday saw
Hillary say that she would oppose TPP "as currently written." This suggests
that a modest sop thrown to labor – a rhetorical paste-on saying that the
TPP's aim was to raise living standards. This simply showed once again her
sophist trickery at lawyering, giving her an out that she and long-time TPP
supporter Tim Kaine were sure to take.
Obama's brilliant demagogy left many eyes glazed over in admiration.
Nobody is better at false sincerity while misrepresenting reality so
shamelessly. Probably few caught the threatening hint he dropped about
Hillary's plan for corporations to share their profits with their workers.
This sounds to me like the Pinochet plan to privatize Social Security by
turning it into exploitative ESOPs (Employee Stock Ownership Programs). The
idea is that wage withholding would be steered to buy into the company's
stock – bidding it up in the process. Employees then would end up holding an
empty bag, as occurred recently with the Chicago
Tribune
. That
seems to be the great "reform" to "save" Social Security that her Wall
Street patrons are thinking up.
One might think that the Democrats would see the Obama administration as
an albatross around their neck, much as Gore had Bill Clinton around his
neck in 2000. Gore didn't want him showing his face in the campaign. Yet
Hillary presents herself as continuing the Obama policies with "business as
usual," as if she will act as his third term.
Voters know that Obama bailed out the banks, not the economy, and that
Hillary's campaign backers are on Wall Street. So this year would seem to
have been a propitious time to start a real alternative. Hillary is
mistrusted, and that mistrust is spreading to the Democratic Party machine –
especially as the Koch Brothers and kindred backers of failed Republican
candidates find neoliberal religion with Hillary. A third party
Green/Socialist run might indeed have taken off – with Sanders stealing
Trump's thunder by pre-empting his critique of TPP, free trade and NATO,
adding Wall Street and Citizens United campaign financing.
This Fall's Presidential Debates
Hillary and even Bernie assured the Democratic convention again and again
how much President Obama has revived the economy from the "mess" that Bush
left. While Trump centers his disdain on the TPP (much as he knocked Jeb
Bush out by saying that the invasion of Iraq was a mistake), he can reply,
"What recovery? Have you voters
really
recovered from 2008?"
Hillary and other speechmakers at the Democratic convention criticized
Trump for saying that "things are bad." But according to the July 13 NBC/WSJ
poll, 73% of voters believe that the country is going "off on the wrong
track." If Trump shifts his epithet from simply "Crooked Hillary" to the
more nuanced "Crooked Wall Street and their candidate, Crooked Hillary,"
he'll score a ratings spurt.
Debt deflation and shrinking markets over the next two years do not
provide much hope for increasing the minimum wage – which wouldn't help much
if one can't find a job in the first place! By 2018 the continued stagnation
of the 99 Percent may lead to a midterm wipeout of Democrats (assuming that
Hillary wins this year against Trump), catalyzing an alternative party
(assuming that she does not blow up the world in her neocon military
escalation on the borders of Russia and China).
The problem with Trump is not mistrust; it is that nobody knows what
policies he will back. The media are giving him the same silent treatment
they did with Bernie, while accusing him of being in Putin's pocket. He did
admit selling some real estate to Russian nationals. Perhaps some of these
gains fueled his presidential campaign …
The solution is not to save the Democratic Party, but to replace it. The
debate reminds me of that about the Soviet Union in the 1950s: Is it a
degenerated workers' state, or a Stalinist bureaucratic mutation going the
opposite direction from real socialism?
I wonder how many years it will take for Hillary to end up booed so
loudly that she has to leave hotels and other speaking venues via their back
alleys, much as Lyndon Johnson had to sneak out to avoid the anti-war booers
leading leading up to the 1968 election.
ewmayer
,
July 29, 2016 at 5:39 am
...
"I wonder how many years it will take for Hillary to end up booed
so loudly that she has to leave hotels and other speaking venues via
their back alleys, much as Lyndon Johnson had to sneak out to avoid the
anti-war booers"
That kind of well-deserved non-ignorable odium still hasn't driven the
likes of Henry Kissinger and Alan Greenspan from the public eye, so I am
sorry to say I harbor scant hope of it ever happening to Hillary. Please let
me be proven wrong on this point!
If she wins in November, my one hoped-for consolation – again,
assuming she doesn't end up setting off WW3 – is that I lay better than even
odds of another global-economic meltdown in the next 4 years. Much better
for it to land in her well-deserving-of-it lap than Trump's. In the meantime
I continue to derive hearty and almost-daily enjoyment from The Donald's
gift for sending the corrupt establishment – in both major parties as well
as the loathsome MSM – into conniptions. I mean, seeing the likes of
drone-boy Leon Panetta yesterday blustering about "beyond the pale",
"treason" and "inviting a foreign government to meddle in our electoral
process" (not like the CIA et al. ever meddled in any other nation's
electoral process, right?) after Trump called for Russia (or anyone else)
who might be in possession of the disappeared SoS e-mails to release them …
priceless.
Excellent piece. I confess this is the first place I read what is
apparently Trump's full comment re the DNC leaks and Russia:
Trump made his quip about Russia in what actually was an eloquent and
funny press conference.[1] The media took this out of context to depict him
as urging the Russians to hack into our e-mails. What he actually said was
that if Russia – or China, or somebody "sitting in his bed" – did indeed
read Hillary's State Department and Clinton Foundation dealings, they should
do the world a favor and release them to reveal her self-dealing.
A far cry from the "treasonous" call reported
ad nauseum
in the
MSM and at the convention.
And yes, those are typical Clinton weasel words regarding the TPP ("as
currently written"). Vote for Hillary! - more drones, more wars, concessions
to Wall Street, and TPP… Obama's third term indeed.
I became interested in Donald Trump after Scott Adams (The creator of
Dilbert) described Trump as "The master persuader". So I started watching
Trumps speeches and press conferences out of curiosity. I really liked what
he was saying and how he was saying it (with humor and genuine (authentic)
good will and common sense. I don't agree with everything he said, but you
never do. However, everytime I google searched Trump; the blogs, the
editorials and the reports, were either virulently negative (he is a fascist
etc) ranging all the way to halfhearted (he is the lesser of two evils etc).
No mainstream commentators were unashamedly Pro-Trump. How can this be?Watch
his press conferences. He answers all the questions, he is charming, he
doesn't pull his punches (he says what he thinks, not what he is supposed to
think). He is this legendary American Character (like Davy Crockett, Joe
Hill or Paul Henry IMO) and yet, the chattering press despise him??? They
all love Hillary or Bernie?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGHWou0h1kk
This is what I think
Scott Adams said
"Some of you watched with amusement as I endorsed Hillary Clinton for my
personal safety. What you might not know is that I was completely serious. I
was getting a lot of direct and indirect death threats for writing about
Trump's powers of persuasion, and I made all of that go away by endorsing
Clinton".,,,,,, Writing about Trump ended my speaking career, and has
already reduced my income by about 40%".
The people (managers), one step down from the Ruling Class, are not
allowed to be pro- Trump, at the risk of their salaried employment, or
demotion, or of being shamed or of getting death threats (Scott adams said
he got death threats).
However, and Thank God, The People are welling up, are rising up………… I
think that Trump will win by a landslide.
It has happened before. It is the subject of thousands of years of
His-Story and Her-Story.
I started watching Trump for same reason and in many ways he makes
more sense than Hill-Bill. Yes at times hard to take him serious, but his
is very funny. I would vote for him for 4 years of disruption.
I have a friend that works in government and last election begged
everyone to vote for Mitt. This person was hired under Bush & said under
Obama everyone is expected to spy on each other.
Where is crazy US going?
"According to Travis, the line from the chorus, "another day older and
deeper in debt", was a phrase often used by his father, a coal miner
himself. This and the line, "I owe my soul to the company store", is a
reference to the truck system and to debt bondage. Under this scrip
system, workers were not paid cash; rather they were paid with
non-transferable credit vouchers which could be exchanged only for goods
sold at the company store. This made it impossible for workers to store
up cash savings. Workers also usually lived in company-owned dormitories
or houses, the rent for which was automatically deducted from their pay.
In the United States the truck system and associated debt bondage
persisted until the strikes of the newly formed United Mine Workers and
affiliated unions forced an end to such practices."
I predict Trump will win also. If it's obvious that the dems win by
rigging the voting machines in certain battleground states, Trump won't lay
down and take it quietly, like John Kerry did. Although I'm not sure there
is anything he could do about that. We're at the point where even a
respected professorial type like Hudson is assuming that rigging the vote
count by controlling the voting machines is likely. Yet I don't know if
there is a viable appeal process is you are defrauded by computer.
. . . Paul Lehto, a U.S. election attorney and Constitutional rights
expert, summarized
the German court's unambiguous, landmark finding
:
"No 'specialized technical knowledge' can be required of citizens to vote
or to monitor vote counts."
There is a "constitutional requirement of a publicly observed count."
"[T]he government substitution of its own check or what we'd probably
call an 'audit' is no substitute at all for public observation."
"A paper trail simply does not suffice to meet the above standards.
"As a result of these principles, . . . 'all independent observers'
conclude that
'electronic voting machines are totally banned in
Germany'
because no conceivable computerized voting system can
cast and count votes that meet the twin requirements of being both
'observable' and also not requiring specialized technical knowledge.
I work in Washington D.C. and live in the adjacent Maryland suburbs.
One thing I have noticed, the number of cars with "Bernie" bumper
stickers has been off the chart. The number of cars with bumper stickers
for Hillary, however, are still few. (Many fewer than the Obama stickers
from a few years ago). I haven't heard 10 people say they support her (in
a government town). My prediction: Its going to be a landslide for Trump.
Who voted for her in D.C., Maryland and Virginia, then?
I'm being serious. I've felt the same thing everywhere I've gone
and I keep "hearing" that there is this vast underground,
conspicuously invisible, yet deep support for her. Yet I never see it
or hear it IN PERSON, ANYWHERE. In fact most of it seems to be online,
which some of it is parroted talking points from David Brock and that
ilk or in the corporate media.
The few people I've ever even seen that are pro-Hillary are like
the audience of the DNC–very fiery, but usually veiled in an identity
politics aura devoid of nearly any nuance on real issues.
If the media and political class has been overstating (and faking
things - maybe ballot stuffing, matching exit polls to vote totals)
the support of her and downplaying (and whiting out ballots/throwing
out ballots/rigging voting machine tallies) the support of
Bernie…don't you wonder what the REAL numbers are out there?
If Obama starts a war or signs TPP he is ensuring people vote Trump.
There are more people that hate trade agreements & more people ruined by
false wars of Iraq/Afghanistan. No one trusts big media or big gov from
either party.
The TPP will not be pushed by Obama until AFTER the elections in
the lame duck session.
So I believe the TPP will pass in the lame duck session, with
overwhelming Republican and Blue Dog Democrat support (especially
retiring Blue Dogs viewing the revolving door).
It is Obama's parting shot showing he determined that
bi-partisanship means giving the wealthy and the Republicans exactly
what they want.
HRC can assume the presidency, crocodile tear up about the harmful
TPP that was passed before she was elected, while stating it can't be
undone..
My only hope is one of the other nations throws a wrench in the TPP
works.
For a hint of the actions of the future imperial presidency of
"well-connected mediocrity" Hillary Clinton consider these two events:
1. Sleazy, corrupt DWS resigns, only to be rescued by a new job by
a grateful HRC
2. The non-binding Democratic platform did not get a zero-cost to
Clinton anti-TPP platform plank,
True hippie punching, as HRC stays on message for the TPP.
The Democrats really threw their low dollar supporters/foot
soldiers under the bus with this ticket. If HRC is impeached/becomes
incapacitated then Tim Kaine is installed to pursue the Neolib agenda.
I don't believe the Democratic party can be reformed.
"The potential "Hillary Republicans" who are turning away from Trump …
far outnumber the Sanders supporters who …"
It was striking throughout the convention that the speakers from Clinton
on down focused their criticism almost exclusively on Trump, not on
Republicans in general. The fact that the GOP as a whole has gone bat-sh*t
crazy over the last 15 years, fueled by Radio Rwanda in the form of Fox News
and right-wing radio, went unmentioned. Presumably because the campaign will
spend all of its energy and resources going after the `moderate
Republicans', who will turn out to be as numerous, and as reliable, as the
`moderate opposition' in Syria.
One last thing: I was running errands last night and caught Gen. Allen's
chant-fest on the car radio. It was as if I were trapped in an episode of
the Twilight Zone, having gotten into the car and entered an alternate
universe where the Dems of 2016 had become the GOP of 2004. All that was
missing were the Purple Heart bandaids. God help us all.
On a purely anecdotal basis, I think many even moderate Republicans
have a visceral hatred of the Clintons that goes beyond their politics. I
strongly suspect that many who would be persuaded to vote a blue dog
would find themselves just unable to vote for HC, even if they hate
Trump. I do wonder if the campaign has built this into their strategy.
I've a feeling that many of the type of old style Republican voter the
Clinton campaign is relying on will simply not vote or vote Libertarian
instead.
During the Gen Allen war rant, I felt like Alice through the Looking
Glass, esp when all the hideous "USA! USA! USA!" chanting went on,
replete with Allen chanting alongside. I later heard that the chant was
planned and choreographed in advance to drone out the Sanders delegation
who apparently were chanting either "No More War" and/or "No More
Drones."
Sad to say that several purportedly "left wing" blogs today were
resoundingly spanking the protestors and hecklers.
Egad. That was one big old slick slick slick show filled with hype
spin lies and bullshit. Hard to take. And freakin' hard to accept that
THIS is the so-called "Democratic" party, which has literally co-opted
just about every rightwing GOP talking point out there: shining city on
the hill (BARFARAMA), exceptionalism, blah de blah.
And all the so-called "lefty" blogs are in paroxisms of delight over
this development.
Well Said !! No kidding RUKidding. Watching the news praising and
slanting the news in favor of the neoliberal neocons makes me feel
like I'm existing in some sort of parallel universe! What the heck is
going on. It's getting so I can't stand to watch the news anymore,
it's so perversely slanted to one extreme view or the other, as if an
in-between never existed.
The value of the Trump smear leads me to question its impact on Google
and Facebook's recent strong quarterly results. If there are payoffs for
skewing search does that count as ad revenue?
"
Probably few caught the threatening hint
[Obama]
dropped about
Hillary's plan for corporations to share their profits with their workers.
This sounds to me like the Pinochet plan to privatize Social Security by
turning it into exploitative ESOPs (Employee Stock Ownership Programs).
"
We have truly reached a new low in this country with the nomination
by a major party of an unindicted felon. I don't see how anyone with a scrap
of moral conscience could vote for Hillary. The political revolution truly
begins when we kick this "vulgar and terminally unethical" couple (thank you
Bob Herbert) out of D.C. for good.
Hudson nailed when he said that Sanders gave up. And that happened well
before his Clinton endorsement.
I could see signs of it during the debates. He seemed like he was
deferring to Hillary.
Likewise, during his rallies. I went to three of them.
First two, he was on fire. Third was so low energy. I could not believe
that I was hearing Bernie Sanders. And I was so disappointed that I left
early.
I'd wondered about that. He's not young and he isn't a particularly
fit and healthy man for his age. A lot of younger, fitter people would
wilt under the stress of a campaign. I wonder if he simply ran out of
steam physically and mentally.
The aha moment came when Sanders said. "Let me say something that
may not be great politics. The Secretary is right. The American people
are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails!"
That was the warning to me that Sanders was not interested in
taking down her majesty. I knew right then without a doubt he was not
fully in it to win it. This was the revelation much like when your spouse
gets a call late at night and the conversation is in hushed tones or your
child comes home for the first time with a glazed look in their eye or
you hear that a relative has just been hospitalized but not to worry
because it's nothing serious.
You know something ain't just right and that things are probaly going
get worse real soon!
The issue with the private server when Hillary was Sec.of State
is that:
:"WASHINGTON - The State Department's inspector general on
Wednesday sharply criticized Hillary Clinton's exclusive use of a
private email server while she was secretary of state, saying that
she had not sought permission to use it and would not have received
it if she had.
…"The inspector general found that Mrs. Clinton "had an
obligation to discuss using her personal email account to conduct
official business" with department officials but that, contrary to
her claims that the department "allowed" the arrangement, there was
"no evidence" she had requested or received approval for it."
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/26/us/politics/state-department-hillary-clinton-emails.html?_r=0
and
"Although Hillary Clinton and her allies may be claiming that her
private e-mail system is no big deal, Hillary's State Department
actually forced the 2012 resignation of the U.S. ambassador to
Kenya in part for setting up an unsanctioned private e-mail system.
According to a 2012 report from the State Department's inspector
general, former U.S. ambassador to Kenya Scott Gration set up a
private e-mail system for his office in 2011…."
http://thefederalist.com/2015/03/05/hillarys-state-dept-forced-the-resignation-of-an-ambassador-for-using-private-e-mail/
and this:
" The policy, detailed in a manual for agency employees, adds
clarity to an issue at the center of a growing controversy over
Clinton's reliance on a private email account. Aides to Clinton, as
well as State Department officials, have suggested that she did
nothing inappropriate because of fuzzy guidelines and lack of
specific rules on when and how official documents had to be
preserved during her years as secretary.
"But the 2005 policy was described as one of several "clear cut"
directives the agency's own inspector general relied on to
criticize the conduct of a U.S. ambassador who in 2012 was faulted
for using email outside of the department's official system.
"'It is the Department's general policy that normal day-to-day
operations be conducted on an authorized [Automated Information
System], which has the proper level of security control to provide
nonrepudiation, authentication and encryption, to ensure
confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the resident
information," the Department's Foreign Affairs Manual states. '"
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/03/state-department-email-rule-hillary-clinton-115804
The point is that Hillary surreptitiously violated her own
dept's security rules without permission. Violated policies that
others were dismissed for violating. Warned subordinate State Dept
employees against using private email servers for their govt
communications. Had State Dept techs temporarily disable State's
email server security measures to find a glitch in her private
email system. The point is that Hillary violated policy and
security measures. That is an order of magnitude different than the
blythe disclaimer that "all servers get hacked, so what's the
problem."
Did it ever occur to you that Hillary used her private e-mail server
to circumvent FOIA? BTW, the so called sysadmin who set up her server
charge only $5,000. She got what she paid for. If you like Hillary so
much I can suggest Huffington Post or many other shill sites for you. NC
is the best site for the truth unless you don't want to know the truth or
can't handle it. Good bye!
If HRC stalls out on the debates, the Orange One would be well advised
to go ahead and debate the Green and Libertarian candidates. It would get
yuge ratings, make HRC look like a coward, and finally expose third party
ideas to the mainstream. The MSM would be in a pickle: do they go ahead
and broadcast a non-HRC debate and anger the Queen of Chaos, or do they
pass up the yuge dollars such debates would earn?
"... The difference between Trump and Hillary is that enough is known from Hillary's past actions to leave little doubt about her mendacity. ..."
"... I perceive Trump as a representative of the local big money and power centers, the people who run the show in state houses and county freeholders - people rooted to specific locales. ..."
"... I perceive Hillary as a representative of jet-set big money and international corporate interests with a willingness to support all their most destructive activities including wars ..."
"... There is no "we" here. After the mess in Ukraine, Syria and Libya we now know that a continuation of Obama's policies will basically destroy Europe. ..."
"... The odds are that our leadership will simply go along with less US stupidity when it's coming from Trump, while they will certainly follow Hillary to whatever end. ..."
"... The reality of the Democrats consists of a party with significant constituencies that increasingly support a militarized foreign policy as well as economic/cultural policy that is anti-growth, anti-working class and pro-ethnic/race identity– in essence–more and more classically reactionary. ..."
"... Modern Democrats have also increasingly merged with and identify primarily with upper-middle class professional/managerial/bureaucratic power centers as well as with key sectors of Big capital and Big Finance. ..."
"... This party now stand completely against that average citizens interest in rising living standards, equality of opportunity and the strengthening of democracy. ..."
I don't see what optimism Hudson manifests about Donald Trump in his essay. Mildly put he shows
a lack of optimism about Hillary as well as disgust at Sanders capitulation.
Here's my penny's worth of a two cents - how I see our choices in the upcoming election:
Trump has some very skivy friends and associates. The Bill Moyers website posted a review of Donald
Trump's business associates and friends
http://billmoyers.com/story/donald-trump-story-youre-not-hearing/
[not sure if this has already been referenced in the past - if so sorry]. Trump is in a business
very close to the "legitimate" side of organized crime - casinos and large scale real-estate development.
Trump makes outrageous statements I've seen described as explicit statements of the coded statements
the Republican party rolled out to draw the South into their party. Trump also makes a lot of statements
with a ring of truth seeming to "talk truth to power." Several people I've discussed politics with
favor Trump just because the people who run our show have displayed such plain distaste for him.
Hillary Clinton's email server fiasco would land most ordinary holders of government clearance
in prison or at very least put them back on the streets with a large blackball next to their name.
But I consider the email server affair a minor breach compared to her ties with big money and big
Corporations, her actions as Secretary of State and her efforts on her Healthcare plan during Bill's
reign.
Trump says a lot of the right stuff - but so did Obama - and Hillary tries to say the right stuff.
The difference between Trump and Hillary is that enough is known from Hillary's past actions
to leave little doubt about her mendacity. Trump's business associations and his handling of
his businesses only suggest he too just mouths the right words.
I perceive Trump as a representative of the local big money and power centers, the people
who run the show in state houses and county freeholders - people rooted to specific locales.
I view organized crime as relatively respectful of eachother's turfs. Trump is the friend to people
who build highways to nowhere and use eminent domain to take over beach areas for their developments
in places like Atlantic City.
I perceive Hillary as a representative of jet-set big money and international corporate interests
with a willingness to support all their most destructive activities including wars .
I can't offer any specifics or solid reasons for why I have these feelings and perceptions about
the candidates.
We have no good choices here. I am terrified of Donald Trump and of Hillary Clinton. I could never
vote for either one of them and I don't regard Jill Stein or the Greens as viable alternatives. I
plan to renew my passport and lie low someplace away from large urban areas if possible. I can salve
any concerns that not voting for Hillary is a vote for Trump with the forlorn hope that should Trump
win he will at least tend to keep the destruction within our borders. fajensen
,
July 29, 2016 at 2:39 pm
There is no "we" here. After the mess in Ukraine, Syria and Libya we now know that a continuation
of Obama's policies will basically destroy Europe.
The odds are that our leadership will simply go along with less US stupidity when it's
coming from Trump, while they will certainly follow Hillary to whatever end.
You make an interesting point here. Even if Trump has an only marginally effective presidency
(take this to mean whatever you would like, lol) and the constituencies that vote for him feel
that he is better than Hillary would've been or the other Republican clown show that he beat in
2016, it pretty much means Ted Cruz's political career is history as Trump (or a hand-picked successor)
will be running as a Republican again in 2020.
Trump going down this year means we are going to see and hear 4 years of Cruz campaigning.
And with the $hill as president there will be A LOT to campaign against. Yuck.
The reality of the Democrats consists of a party with significant constituencies that increasingly
support a militarized foreign policy as well as economic/cultural policy that is anti-growth,
anti-working class and pro-ethnic/race identity– in essence–more and more classically reactionary.
Modern Democrats have also increasingly merged with and identify primarily with upper-middle
class professional/managerial/bureaucratic power centers as well as with key sectors of Big capital
and Big Finance.
This party now stand completely against that average citizens interest in rising living
standards, equality of opportunity and the strengthening of democracy.
What was once progressive has become terminally reactionary–what was once considered left has
become terminally right.
I write from Lyon, France. I will be voting for Jill Stein, but rooting for Trump. The anti-Trump
bias in the American media is beyond belief, matched only by its hatred for Putin. No one has
mentioned how a Trump victory would undermine the two-party duopoly, a huge gain for America.
"... If I'm not mistaken I believe that it's already been debunked that Trump supporters are ignorant as it is. The corporate media will always quote the crazies when it suits them and ignore any inconvenient truths, statements or memes ..."
If I'm not mistaken I believe that it's already been debunked that Trump supporters are ignorant
as it is. The corporate media will always quote the crazies when it suits them and ignore any
inconvenient truths, statements or memes. (An older NC link had even noted that Trump supporters
had the highest average income, not that I'm saying that's important, but it may be from a managerial
class perspective).
That would be hard to believe anyway after seeing the true believers in the audience of the
DNC last week.
The Russian theme has expectedly become one of the most important in the US presidential election.
Democrats are unsurprisingly engaged in anti-Russian hysteria. Donald Trump says that he will establish
good relations with Russia and is ready to discuss the issue of recognition of the referendum in
the Crimea.
Noise and hysteria
Mass hysteria on the part of the Democrats, neocons, ultra-liberals and plain and simple Russophobes,
was provoked by the recent statements of Donald Trump. Speaking at a press conference in Florida,
Trump called on Russia to hand over the 30,000 emails "missing" from the Hillary Clinton's email
server in the US. Their absence is a clear sign that Clinton destroyed evidence proving that she
used her personal e-mail server to send sensitive information. Democrats immediately accused Trump
of pandering to Russian hackers, although in reality the multi-billionaire rhetorically hinted that
the data that Clinton hid from the American investigation is in the hands of foreign intelligence
services. So, Clinton is a possible target for blackmail.
Trump's statement that he is ready to
discuss the status of Crimea and the removal of anti-Russian sanctions caused even more noise. This
view is not accepted either in the Democrat or in the Republican mainstream. Trump also said that
Vladimir Putin does not respect Clinton and Obama, while Trump himself hopes to find a common language
with him. Trump appreciates Putin's leadership and believes that the US must work together with Russia
to deal with common threats, particularly against Islamic extremism.
The establishment's tantrum
Both Democrats and Republicans are taking aim at Trump. The vice-presidential candidate, Mike Pence,
made threats to Russia. The head of the Republican majority in Congress, Paul Ryan, became somewhat
hysterical. He said that Putin is "a thug and should stay out of these elections."
It is Putin
personally, and the Russian security services, who are accused of leaking correspondences of top
employees of the National Committee of the Democratic Party. This unverified story united part of
the Republicans and all of the Democrats, including the Clinton and Barack Obama themselves. Trump
supporters note that the Russian threat is used to divert attention from the content of these letters.
And these show the fraud carried out during the primaries which favored Hillary Clinton.
The pro-American candidate
The "Russian scandal" demonstrates that on the one hand the thesis of the normalization of relations
with Russia, despite the propaganda, is becoming popular in US society. It is unlikely that Donald
Trump has made campaign statements that are not designed to gain the support of the public in this
election. On the other hand - Trump - a hard realist, like Putin, is not pro-Russian, but a pro-American
politician, and therefore the improvement of relations with Russia in his eyes corresponds to the
US's national interests. Trump has never to date done anything that would not be to his advantage.
Sometimes he even said he would order US fighter jets to engage with Russian ones, and declared he
would have a hard stance in relations with Russia.
Another thing is that his understanding of US
national interests is fundamentally different from the dominant American globalist elite consensus.
For Trump, the US should not be the source of a global liberal remaking of the world, but a national
power, which optimizes its position just as efficiently as any commercial project. And in terms of
optimizing the position of the United States, he says there should be a normal American interaction
with Putin and Russia in the field of combating terrorism and preventing the sliding of the two countries
into a global war. He claims this is to be the priority instead of issues relating to the promotion
of democracy and the so-called fight against "authoritarian regimes".
"... "In order to rally people, governments need enemies. They want us to be afraid, to hate, so we will rally behind them. And if they do not have a real enemy, they will invent one in order to mobilize us." ..."
"... Plus there's the psychological advantage of having some country/countries to blame for the lack of US success, or to distract attention away from US problems that need it. ..."
"... I've always thought the US inherited the hatred of Russia from the Brits and the Brits hated Russia at least back as far as the Crimean War in 1853. Not saying this as fact and am happy to get updated. ..."
"... Official Brit hatred of Russia got started right after the Napoleonic Wars. About 4 centuries of Brit hatred of France got transferred, lock, stock, and barrel, to Russia, since Russia then became the most powerful land power in the world. ..."
"... Russia's primary offense is that it has dared to have its own national interests. ..."
"... Today, all those "freedom-loving" people of former USSR, even including all those scores of West Ukrainians who hate Russian guts and Middle Asian "nationalists" flock to Russia "in pursuit of happiness". ..."
"... I am not saying that all those people are bad, but the question I do ask sometimes is this: you hated us, you evicted (sometimes with bloodshed) us, Russians, from your places. You got what you asked for, why then, do you come to Russia in millions (I am not exaggerating, in fact, most likely underestimating)? What happened? Of course, we all know what happened. ..."
"... I read before that Obama was pushing back against this lunacy. Now the HRC-NEOCON camp are in full attack mode. I honestly think I'll be voting for Trump because I feel he can't do all of the things that I would hate for him to do. I KNOW that Hillary would get away with murder. I'm quite serious. ..."
"... "I KNOW that Hillary would get away with murder. I'm quite serious." It has already happened on this watch, see the case of MH-17. ..."
"... The American talking point about the Crimea is a laughable piece of High School Debating Team rhetoric. The people in charge know full well the truth about Ukraine's claim to the Crimea. The thing that hurts is that the whole point of the "Nuland Putsch",and the rise of a western aligned govt., was to provide the crown jewel in Nato's (read America) crown: Eliminating Russia's naval base at Sevastopol completing the encirclement of Russia in the west (except for the always vulnerable Kaliningrad). ..."
"... Once the FreeMarketDemocratic Reformers were removed from power, Russia began to recover. The birth rate started to improve immediately, and Russia's death rate started to decline in 2006. By 2009, the gap between Russia's births and deaths closed sufficiently that immigration could fill it, and so the Russian population was growing. By 2012, births in the Russian Federation exceeded deaths, for the first time since 1991. ..."
"... In the mid-2000s, Putin proposed measures to support families having children. Western politicians and demographers poured scorn on the very idea that Russian demographics might improve. In fact, the U.S. Census Bureau's population projections had Russia's population declining by 500,000/year as recently as 2015. Now Western politicians and demographers are reduced to claiming that "Putin had nuthin' to do with it!" ..."
"... Putin inherited a helpless, bankrupt, dying Russia. ..."
"... Russia, for all the Borg media grandstanding, seems to only be concerned with Russian related interests. There is no indication of greater plan for global domination. They are upgrading and preparing for a future war, sure. Any country would be smart to prepare accordingly to defend itself (and their interests). ..."
"... Russia became the enemy of United States in early 2000's after Putin started cracking down on the oligarchs that had taken over Russia's economy during Yeltsin's privatization efforts. It is estimated that seven individuals were controlling as much as 50% of Russia's economy at its peak during the late 90's: ..."
"... The ruling ideology of the West is the free movement of capital and people together with the dismantling of sovereign states and replacing them with global institutions and corporate trade pacts. Donald Trump's "America First" threatens this so he is subject to full throated attacks by the media and the connected. Vladimir Putin stands in the way of the global hegemony and the return of Russia to the 1990s. Thus, the western hybrid war for a Kremlin regime change. ..."
"... If Clinton takes over for Obama it will only mean continued escalation by the US against any country resisting a unipolar world. There are a lot more than Russia and China resisting US hegemony and that attacks, subtle as they are, continue unabated. If Trump dials that back this can only be a good thing for world peace. The neocons apparently are betting the farm on Hillary. Good, I pray they lose and are cleansed permanently from the US political landscape. Personally, I see a win by Clinton as the end of mankind. ..."
"... I remember the end of Cold War extremely well, when the relations warmed up and the danger of nuclear exchange faded. In Russia, at that time, this was precisely the idea what you described but, as Pat Buchanan wrote several days ago "The inability to adapt was seen when our Cold War adversary extended a hand in friendship, and the War Party slapped it away." ..."
"... In the early 1880s the U.S. government decided to become a global seapower. Hostility towards the world's largest landpower followed, as night follows day. ..."
The Democratic Party convention and the media are full of the assumption that Russia is the enemy
of the United States. What is the basis for that assumption?
Russian support for the Russian ethnic minority in eastern Ukraine? How does that threaten
the United States?
Russian annexation of the Crimea? Khrushchev arbitrarily transferred that part of Russia to
Ukraine during his time as head of the USSR. Khrushchev was a Ukrainian. Russia never accepted
the arbitrary transfer of a territory that had been theirs since the 18th Century. How does this
annexation threaten the United States?
Russia does not want to see Syria crushed by the jihadis and acts accordingly? How does that
threaten the United States?
Russia threatens the NATO states in eastern Europe? Tell me how they actually do that. Is
it by stationing their forces on their side of the border with these countries? Have the Russians
made threatening statements about the NATO states?
Russia has made threatening and hostile statements directed at the United States? When and
where was that?
Russia does not accept the principle of state sovereignty? Really? The United States is on
shaky ground citing that principle. Remember Iraq?
Russian intelligence may have intercepted and collected the DNC's communications (hacked)
as well as HC's stash of illegal e-mails? Possibly true but every country on earth that has the
capability does the same kind of thing every single day. That would include the United States.
The Obama Administration is apparently committed to a pre-emptive assertion that Russia is a world
class committed enemy of the United States. The Borgist media fully support that.
We should all sober up. pl
Valissa
"In order to rally people, governments need enemies. They want us to be afraid, to hate,
so we will rally behind them. And if they do not have a real enemy, they will invent one in order
to mobilize us."
-- Thich Nhat Hanh
Not to mention the financial advantages to the Military-Industrial-Thinktank complex (I'm including
NATO in this) and all the politicians that benefit from the lobbying monies from that complex.
Plus there's the psychological advantage of having some country/countries to blame for
the lack of US success, or to distract attention away from US problems that need it.
Grizziz -> Ghostship...
I've always thought the US inherited the hatred of Russia from the Brits and the Brits
hated Russia at least back as far as the Crimean War in 1853. Not saying this as fact and am happy
to get updated.
rkka said in reply to Grizziz...
Official Brit hatred of Russia got started right after the Napoleonic Wars. About 4 centuries
of Brit hatred of France got transferred, lock, stock, and barrel, to Russia, since Russia then
became the most powerful land power in the world.
Maritime empires hate, with undying passion, the most powerful land power in the world.
And its a funny thing, the U.S. hatred of Russia dates from the early 1880s, right when the
U.S. began laying down a new steel navy to replace the rotting wooden navy built for the Civil
War, started with the explicit intention of making the U.S. a global power.
Tel said in reply to Valissa...
Quote: "Plus there's the psychological advantage of having some country/countries to blame
for the lack of US success, or to distract attention away from US problems that need it."
Clinton and Obama are busy campaigning that the USA has been completely successful, nothing
is going wrong, everyone has jobs, etc.
I dunno who would believe this, but that's their story and for the time being they are sticking
to it. You have never had it so good.
Dave Schuler
Russia's primary offense is that it has dared to have its own national interests.
SmoothieX12 -> kooshy ...
Today, all those "freedom-loving" people of former USSR, even including all those scores
of West Ukrainians who hate Russian guts and Middle Asian "nationalists" flock to Russia "in pursuit
of happiness".
I am not saying that all those people are bad, but the question I do ask sometimes is this:
you hated us, you evicted (sometimes with bloodshed) us, Russians, from your places. You got what
you asked for, why then, do you come to Russia in millions (I am not exaggerating, in fact, most
likely underestimating)? What happened? Of course, we all know what happened.
NotTimothyGeithner said...
Moscow is large enough to be a mommy figure for a small country with an interest in dealing
with China which doesn't want to be swamped by Beijing's sheer size. Moscow is a threat to U.S.
financial and military domination without firing a shot, engaging in a trade war, or leading a
diplomatic revolt.
The average American doesn't care about a loss of hegemony. We naturally want cooperation and
hippie peace, love, dope. The Western industries with effective monopolies abroad would see immense
profits under threat because the Chinese and Russian competitors would drive prices down in finance,
defense, pharmaceuticals, tech, and so forth. So they are turning to the Goering play book to
keep the Russians out of the world stage. The professional Risk players in the neoconservatives
would see their plans fall apart if the Erdogan-Putin meeting is a positive one.
Also, Putin embarrassed Obama over Syria in 2013 and then was magnanimous. Obama hasn't forgotten
that perceived slight.
SmoothieX12 -> NotTimothyGeithner...
Moscow is large enough to be
A medium-size European country herself. It is also a very peculiar economic entity. I do, however,
have a question on what do you mean by a "mommy for a small country"? No matter how small the
country is, in my understanding, it still will have a fair degree of freedom when building trade
relations with any entity, even of such mammoth size as China.
Cee:
Col. Lang,
I read before that Obama was pushing back against this lunacy. Now the HRC-NEOCON camp
are in full attack mode. I honestly think I'll be voting for Trump because I feel he can't do
all of the things that I would hate for him to do. I KNOW that Hillary would get away with murder.
I'm quite serious.
"I KNOW that Hillary would get away with murder. I'm quite serious." It has already happened
on this watch, see the case of MH-17.
Erik
The American talking point about the Crimea is a laughable piece of High School Debating
Team rhetoric. The people in charge know full well the truth about Ukraine's claim to the Crimea.
The thing that hurts is that the whole point of the "Nuland Putsch",and the rise of a western
aligned govt., was to provide the crown jewel in Nato's (read America) crown: Eliminating Russia's
naval base at Sevastopol completing the encirclement of Russia in the west (except for the always
vulnerable Kaliningrad).
All the rest about Russia's alleged expansionism is similar debating team poppycock.
Looking at the history of empire building and aggressive wars, one is well served to think
in terms of the 3 legged stool of criminology (for aggressive wars are simply, as Jackson said
at Nurnberg, the supreme international crime) and consider means, opportunity, and motive.
We have motive, the Russians do not. The motive in this case is theft, plain and simple. Russia
with its small population and vast real estate holdings is already provided with more resources
than she knows what to do with. We, on the other hand are not, and have not been since at least
the seventies. Russia has its work cut out for it to develop what it owns already and why would
they want to conquer populous resource poor neighbor states?
Not only has Putin snatched away the score of the century by re-asserting Russian control over
Crimea, but he had since 2000 or so been forestalling the western feeding frenzy on the carcass
of the Soviet Union that had Americans creaming their jeans. Re assertion of Russian true sovereignty
was his real offense.
What's so poignant is the long standing western ambition to be able to steal what Russia has.
2 centuries of western aggression against Russia, and all dedicated to theft. Same now, and the
drumbeat of warmongering rhetoric now directed at Russia is hilarious in a dangerous way. We really
are using the Goering argument to drag our unwilling population towards war.
James said...
If I might be permitted to express some thoughts about why Russians feel the way they do about
Putin ...
Median income in Russia increased 260% (in inflation adjusted terms) during the first 10 years
that Putin was in power. That is a staggering increase in people's financial well being. The Economist
and its brethren like to dismiss this achievement as being "solely due to the increased price
of oil" - but if you look at Canada, its oil production per capita was and is equal to that of
Russia yet Canada's median income only increased 9% during the same time period.
I think a good way to get a better sense of how the Russian's feel about Putin is to watch
the Russian film "Bimmer" (if you can get access to a copy with English subtitles):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bimmer_(film)
I took a trip in Africa where our white South African guides favorite catch phrase was "In
Africa, anything is possible." Dystopias are terribly messed up and most people living in them
suffer greatly - but there is something really sexy about them, about the feeling that anything
is possible.
Russia was dystopic like this before Putin came to power - utter anarchy, crime, poverty, worse
corruption than now despite what you hear from the Borg ... but at the same time, anything was
possible. Bimmer depicts the transition from the anarchy of the Yeltsin years to the greater prosperity
and rule of law that Russia now enjoys - while at the same time communicating the fact that many
Russians can't help but feel some nostalgia for the time when anything was possible.
(I visited Russia before, during, and after this transition. I have friends who live there.)
kao_hsien_chih said in reply to James...
The 260% increase in the Russian median income (an important point--the middle Russian became
financial secure under Putin) under Putin's watch underscores the other point: before Putin, Russia
was a total and complete economic wreck. People who saw economic ruin firsthand don't cavalierly
dismiss hard won economic security.
rkka -> Ulenspiegel...
While Russia was being run by FreeMarketDemocratic Reformers, Russians were dying off at the
rate of nearly a million/year.
Once the FreeMarketDemocratic Reformers were removed from power, Russia began to recover.
The birth rate started to improve immediately, and Russia's death rate started to decline in 2006.
By 2009, the gap between Russia's births and deaths closed sufficiently that immigration could
fill it, and so the Russian population was growing. By 2012, births in the Russian Federation
exceeded deaths, for the first time since 1991.
In the mid-2000s, Putin proposed measures to support families having children. Western
politicians and demographers poured scorn on the very idea that Russian demographics might improve.
In fact, the U.S. Census Bureau's population projections had Russia's population declining by
500,000/year as recently as 2015. Now Western politicians and demographers are reduced to claiming
that "Putin had nuthin' to do with it!"
Putin inherited a helpless, bankrupt, dying Russia.
Russia now has a future. That's what Putin did, and he is rightly popular with Russians, Russians
who pine for the days of the drunken incompetent comprador buffoon Yeltsin excepted.
SmoothieX12 -> Ulenspiegel...
Putin is judged by his ability to transform the Russian economy from an exporter of oil, gas
and academics to something more sustainable.
It seems like you are one of those thinkers who thinks that repeating popular BS will create
new reality. FYI, Russia now is #1 exporter of grain in the world. If you didn't catch real news
from Russia, Rosatom's portfolio of contracts exceeds 100 billion USD. Evidently you also missed
the fact that Russia is #2 exporter of many #1 weapon systems in the world, some of which are
beyond the expertise (industrial and scientific) of Europe (I assume you are from that part of
the world). Do you know what it takes and what host of real hi-tech goes into production of a
top fighter jet or modern SSK? Russia is an active and a dominant player at the commercial space
launch business, in fact whole US Atlas program flies on Russian-made RD-180 rocket engines. I
will repeat again, learn facts on the ground, which is relatively easy to do in the world of global
IT. And finally, Russia will never live as well as US or Canada, for starters--there is a colossal
difference in consumer patterns between Russians and North Americans (albeit there are many similarities
too) but there is very little doubt that standard of living in Russia grew tremendously and a
lot of it has very little to do with gas or oil prices. It has, however, a lot to do with retooling
and re-industrialization of the country, which was ongoing since circa 2008. It is a very significant
year. Last, but not least--Russia is huge own consumer market (and then some due to markets of
former USSR) and that is a key. German MTU followed sanctions, well, guess what--it will never
appear again on Russian markets. Thales loved to sell IR matrices to Russia, well, guess what.....you
may fill in the blanks.
SmoothieX12 said in reply to different clue...
In terms of pork and poultry Russia produces 100% of that and, which did surprise me, even
exports turkey. Beef--about 80% covered. Most of what Russia consumes in food stuff is home grown
or made. Exceptions are some luxury food items and things like well-aged cheeses. Russian food
stores can give any best US or European grocery chain a run for their money. Variety is excellent
and most of it affordable. Per salmon, as far as I know it is both farm-raised and wild. What
are the proportions, I don't know. I can, however, testify to the fact that, say, in Troitsky
supermarket you can buy alive strelyad' (sturgeon). ...
SmoothieX12,
This is good to hear. When the "sanction Russia" crowd began embargoing various food-items
being sold to Russia, they unintentionally began without realizing it an economic experiment in
Protectionism. The food embargo against food going into Russia amounts to a kind of Protectionism
for Russian food production within a protectionized and defended Russian market.
If it ends up allowing more monetizable food-as-wealth to be produced withIN Russia, that will
allow all sorts of sectors and people to buy and sell more monetizable non-food goods and non-food
services FROM withIN Russia TO withIN Russia as well. If that allows Russia to become more all-sectors-in-balance
wealthier, that fact would be hard to hide eventually. And various farm-sector advocates in America
could seize upon it and point to it as evidence that Protectionism WORKS to allow a country to
increase its own net production and enjoyment of overall wealth withIN its own borders. And it
might inspire more people to suggest we try it here within America as well. And through the abolition
of NAFTA, allow Mexico to revive Protectionism for its agricultural sector as well. It might allow
for enough broad-based ground-up revival of economic activity withIN Mexico that some of the millions
of NAFTAstinian exiles in America might decide they have a Mexican economy to go back to again.
And some of them might go back.
IF! NAFTA can be abolished and Mexico set free to re-protectionize its own agricultural economy.
Perhaps if enough Mexican political-economic analysts look at events in Russia and see the ongoing
success there, they too might agitate for the abolition of NAFTA and the re-protectionization
of farm-country Mexico.
SmoothieX12 -> different clue...
Protectionism WORKS to allow a country to increase its own net production and enjoyment of
overall wealth withIN its own borders
Free Trade fundamentalism (which is a first derivative of liberalism) is what killing USA and,
I assume, Mexico. Most "academic" so called economists and bankers (monetarists) are clueless
but it is them who set the framework of discussion on economy. It is a long discussion but let
me put it this way--all their "theories" are crap. As for Russia--she is largely self-sustainable
for years now.
kao_hsien_chih -> Ulenspiegel...
That Russia before Putin provides for better explanation of his support than even the 260%.
Yes, Russia is still a relatively poor country, but only a decade before, it was a total and complete
basketcase and people remember that Putin is responsible for putting things back to a semblance
of normalcy.
Daniel Nicolas
In another thread, it was mentioned that countries have no friends, only interests.
Russia, for all the Borg media grandstanding, seems to only be concerned with Russian related
interests. There is no indication of greater plan for global domination. They are upgrading and
preparing for a future war, sure. Any country would be smart to prepare accordingly to defend
itself (and their interests).
Obama's USA has been far too hostile to Russia without apparent cause. A Clinton administration
would likely swing even further. While Russia has openly declared that it not want a new hot war,
they are preparing accordingly because they have no choice but to prepare for the possible future
USA being even more hostile.
The Germans are obviously still sore about it all.
EricB
Russia became the enemy of United States in early 2000's after Putin started cracking down
on the oligarchs that had taken over Russia's economy during Yeltsin's privatization efforts.
It is estimated that seven individuals were controlling as much as 50% of Russia's economy at
its peak during the late 90's:
The ruling ideology of the West is the free movement of capital and people together with
the dismantling of sovereign states and replacing them with global institutions and corporate
trade pacts. Donald Trump's "America First" threatens this so he is subject to full throated attacks
by the media and the connected. Vladimir Putin stands in the way of the global hegemony and the
return of Russia to the 1990s. Thus, the western hybrid war for a Kremlin regime change.
Hillary Clinton is supremely qualified to maintain the status quo. If Donald Trump wins, it
has to be due to the perfidious Russians hacking the election; not Globalism's Losers voting against
their exploitation by the insanely wealthy and the enabling technocrats. Meanwhile, the "War of
Russian Aggression" heats up, Turkey turns Islamist and the EU splinters due to the war refugees
and austerity.
Old Microbiologist -> Bill Herschel...
Bill,
I am with you all the way. It, of course, goes much further. There are ongoing US-manufactured
destabilization events unfolding all around Russia. Then you have the economic attacks via sanctions
and trade which have arguably crippled Russia. On top of that you have these insipid attacks via
things like SWIFT bank transfers, IMF, World Bank and idiocy such as attempting to ban the entire
Russian Olympic team from the Olympics. Russia senses these attacks on all fronts and was unfortunately
caught early being unprepared. During the Soviet Union Russia was 100% self sufficient but as
mentioned in other comments under Yeltsin's "privatization" programs an awful lot of that industry
was sold or closed. Now Russia has had to start from scratch replacements for things not available
in Russia and yet still has a budget surplus (unlike the US with a near $20 trillion deficit).
They have created alternates to SWIFT, VISA/Mastercard, the IMF and even the G8.
The Crimea debacle was a clear attempt to kick Russia out of their base in Sevastopol which
was brilliantly countered. However, the cost has been enormous. Little commented on is that Ukraine
under US leadership has cut off water, gas, and electricity to the peninsula and blocked all traffic
to the mainland. Russia is nearing the completion of the bridge to Crimea from Russia and water/power
are already being delivered. This is a huge effort which shows the dedication to their control
of Crimea.
Then they have undertaken to directly thwart the anti-Assad US-led coalition in Syria and have
hoisted the US on its own petard. It hasn't been easy nor cheap and all of this has been happening
simultaneously. On top of all of this we have buildups on the Russian borders so Putin also has
to upgrade his military to counter any potential EU/NATO/US invasion of Russia. The aggression
has all been one sided but delusional citizens in the US see our aggression as defensive as bizarre
as that is. Outside the US people see US aggression for what it is and are not fooled into believing
that we are trying to help anyone except the rich plutocrats. The immigrant invasion of Europe
is seen as a US caused problem for these continuous insane wars that never end nor apparently
have any actual purpose.
If Clinton takes over for Obama it will only mean continued escalation by the US against
any country resisting a unipolar world. There are a lot more than Russia and China resisting US
hegemony and that attacks, subtle as they are, continue unabated. If Trump dials that back this
can only be a good thing for world peace. The neocons apparently are betting the farm on Hillary.
Good, I pray they lose and are cleansed permanently from the US political landscape. Personally,
I see a win by Clinton as the end of mankind.
Peter Reichard said...
Have always thought Russians and Americans were more like each other than either of us were
like Europeans. Both a little crude, crazy, traditionally religious and musical with big countries
created from an expanding frontier and thinking big in terms of infrastructure and vehicles. We
ought to be natural allies as we were in the nineteenth century in opposition to the British Empire
and again in World War 2. Russia, a land power in the heart of the world island in balance with
the US, an ocean power on the other side of the planet with mutual respect could create a stable
multi-polar world.
SmoothieX12 -> Peter Reichard...
That is generally true. There are a lot of similarities. And I remember the end of Cold
War extremely well, when the relations warmed up and the danger of nuclear exchange faded. In
Russia, at that time, this was precisely the idea what you described but, as Pat Buchanan wrote
several days ago "The inability to adapt was seen when our Cold War adversary extended a hand
in friendship, and the War Party slapped it away."
kao_hsien_chih -> SmoothieX12...
In mid-19th century, Russia was extremely friendly to United States, where many remained deeply
suspicious of the British Empire. Somehow, by the end of 19th century, United States became peculiarly
fond of the British Empire and inexplicably hostile to Russia--Mahan was both an Anglophile and
Russophobe, as I understand, and his sentiments shows up in his ideas, or so I've heard. (I imagine
SmoothieX12, as an ex Soviet navy man, is far more familiar with this than I ever could). How
did that happen?
rkka -> kao_hsien_chih...
"How did that happen?"
In the early 1880s the U.S. government decided to become a global seapower. Hostility towards
the world's largest landpower followed, as night follows day.
"... Westen is a Democrat and he basically wrote this book to try and help Democrats win more presidential election, though the research portion in the beginning of the book shows how people in both parties are biased in their interpretation of political events based on their political party allegiance. ..."
"... Then a year or two later he wrote some follow up articles whining and complaining about how disappointed he was in Obama not being much different from Bush, etc, etc ..."
"... The fact that Mr. Western could wake up to Obama's basic Bushness in only one or two years means that Mr. Western had a freer mind than most Obama supporters. ..."
"... Good find. Yes and yes. They never stop manipulating. Now the MSM will finally have to admit that the machines are compromised ONLY when it serves the interests of th few. ..."
Two "liberal" IT luminaries today pick up the (totally unproven) assertion that Russia hacked
and published via wikileaks the DNC shennigens of preferring Clinton.
The used this to (preemptively) accuse Russia of manipulating the U.S. election via voting
computers on November 9.
I think this is a sign that both Schneier and Doctorow are democrats who fear Trump. Tribal allegiance
exerts a very powerful, and irrational, force on the so-called rational mind.
Warning, Westen is a Democrat and he basically wrote this book to try and help Democrats
win more presidential election, though the research portion in the beginning of the book shows
how people in both parties are biased in their interpretation of political events based on their
political party allegiance.
When Obama first ran in 2007-2008, Westen had clearly been drinking the glorious pro-Obama
koolaid as was evident in some HuffPo articles he wrote at the time.
Then a year or two later he wrote some follow up articles whining and complaining about
how disappointed he was in Obama not being much different from Bush, etc, etc.
Clearly this man was so caught up in his tribal allegiance he couldn't recognize the very biases
his research showed. Btw, he is still a consultant to the Democrats... attempting to be the Frank
Luntz of the left.
The fact that Mr. Western could wake up to Obama's basic Bushness in only one or two years
means that Mr. Western had a freer mind than most Obama supporters.
Good find. Yes and yes. They never stop manipulating. Now the MSM will finally have to
admit that the machines are compromised ONLY when it serves the interests of th few.
If the intent is to expose corruption then that is doing a public service. The public's interest
is the content of the e-mails and the dirty tricks played by the DNC and Clinton. The e-mails
clearly show that the journalists are in bed with the DNC/Clinton and this article is just another
example of this corruption of the media
Notable quotes:
"... Reading the comments it is hard to understand what is wrong with a lot of you commenters. You seem to swallow whole one side or the other and march off the cliff just like lemming. This argument is a few sentences and is about proper handling of the leaks, not the leaks themselves. The leaks show Hillary supporters helped steal the primary votes from Sanders when the DNC was supposed to be neutral. That is a crime against democracy, an attack on you, it is third world corruption. If you believe Hillary is for you than you are just hopeless. ..."
"... All the noise about Russian plots and secret agendas is a bit ironic as it seems the truth is that the DNC and their presidential candidate are the ones with a secret agenda that was made public. ..."
"... The collapse of the government and Google as a-censor is imminent. ¨ Everyone is switching to Duckduckgo.com ..."
"... How this backfire ??? We just get proof how the DNC establishment nominate what candidate they want not what people want. If after this Sanders supporters will still vote for Hillary, they just simply give the establishment green lite to do it same thing anytime they want and democracy really is just the empty word...... ..."
"... Wikileaks only confirms that DNC has rigged the primaries to help Hillary Clinton, that's why Debbie W. Schultz had to resign her Chair. Whether that will cost Clinton her election depends on how many of the Bernie Sanders supporters are angry enough to boycott the election. ..."
"... The problem in America is that we have a two party political system that can be easily manipulated by the wealthy and those with evil intent .When that happens you have basically one party speaking double talk , controlled by the few and sewing confusion among the voters in order to divide and polarize the country . ..."
"... It is interesting (albeit unsurprising) that since the leak makes Hillary Clinton's backers in the DNC look bad, the media is so interested in the motives of the leakers. This was never the case with the anti-Bush crowd in the 2000's. Going back a bit further, anyone involved in exposing the Watergate break-in is practically treated like a national hero. Suddenly, the "truth to power" crowd has become the "can't handle the truth" crowd. ..."
"... This #$%$ article is just ridiculous! "Oh, well, the leak hasn't revealed anything important". Hello! Wake up! It has shown how crooked the DNC was during this election cycle ..."
"... Did you notice there's no (By-Line) for this article? Because what is IN the emails is most important. Firstly, they blame the Russians. Then they blame Trump. Then they blame the Russians and Trump. Now they don't know who to blame. But, the FBI said for certain the server was hacked and there were indications of who hacked it. This was established in a couple of short weeks - or less. The FBI had Hillary's server for a year and couldn't make a determination. ..."
"... The most important question to ask is about the motives of American Journalists is there report a distraction from the truth are they in fact trying to do damage control are they being controlled by a political party as these E-MAILS seem to suggest . The motive of the leaker is less important than the truth. ..."
"... The DNC had to hire actors at $50 a pop by advertising on Craigslist so Hillary Clinton wouldn't look like the clown she is in front of a half-empty DNC stadium during her acceptance speech. ..."
"... The exodus of hundreds, if not thousands, of Bernie Sanders supporters from the convention made crystal clear the extent of discord among Democratic voters. ..."
"... It's a sad state of affairs in that we are depending on Julian Assange to save the Republic from corrupt Hillary and the Clinton foundation. If Clinton becomes President she will basically place the United States up for sale so that the globalists can destroy what little remains of the American middle class. America will truly become a third world nation with only rich and poor. ..."
"... We can not allow this to happen. Trump may be a little "rough around the edges" however he is a true American who will bring back jobs, try his best to eliminate illegal immigration, and take America back from the globalists. This will help middle class Americans to thrive -- Vote Trump for President in 2016 -- ..."
"... I think most commenters are missing the point that Snowden made: what is the intent of the leak? If the intent is to expose corruption then that is doing a public service. ..."
"... All look at the bang up job the FBI did with Clinton's email wrong doings. She broke the law and lied and the FBI tip toed around it by not taking her statements under oath so she wouldn't be charged. ..."
"... Another article to divert from the content of the emails, which were so damning that the DNC used all their Media contacts to create the "Russia Hack" scenario and then accused Trump of conspiring with Russia. As of yet not one DNC official has denied the facts or content in the e-mails. ..."
"... I found it interesting you didn't mention that Politico was found in cahoots with the DNC as well in the emails.. Just like the mainstream media didn't hardly cover the protesters at the DNC convention but surely did at the RNC convention. You pick & choose what you want to report don't you. ..."
Reading the comments it is hard to understand what is wrong with a lot of you commenters.
You seem to swallow whole one side or the other and march off the cliff just like lemming. This
argument is a few sentences and is about proper handling of the leaks, not the leaks themselves.
The leaks show Hillary supporters helped steal the primary votes from Sanders when the DNC was
supposed to be neutral. That is a crime against democracy, an attack on you, it is third world
corruption. If you believe Hillary is for you than you are just hopeless.
DoctorNoDoctorNo
At what point in civilization did the truth become unethical? No one is denying that the information
contained in these e-mails is not true. All the noise about Russian plots and secret agendas
is a bit ironic as it seems the truth is that the DNC and their presidential candidate are the
ones with a secret agenda that was made public.
We have one presidential candidate under IRS, FBI and State Department investigation and another
who opens their mouth only to change feet placing the American voter in an untenable position
come November.
fudmer
@ Tim Schultze Humanity refuses to be ruled by the few! ¨
The collapse of the government and Google as a-censor is imminent. ¨ Everyone is switching
to Duckduckgo.com
Enough Oligarch monopoly and control. Yesterday 40 civilians bombed to death and 50 more injured
in Syria by US Air force and marines killed in actions in Yemen. What the hell is the USA doing
in Syria or Yemen?
Democracy is freedom of movement, action and thought, not controlled, restricted and regulated
movement, not punishment for each action that challenges the established monopolies, and not mind
control and media propaganda as a total cultural environment.
Everywhere world wide humanity, Christian, Jew, Hindu, or Moslem [except the wabahi Sunni]
are rising to the challenge the few.
nobodynobody
"The DNC email leak has backfired on WikiLeaks, and arguably Russia and Trump, because
theorizing about who leaked these emails has been far more intriguing to journalists and the
general public than the emails themselves."
How this backfire ??? We just get proof how the DNC establishment nominate what candidate
they want not what people want. If after this Sanders supporters will still vote for Hillary,
they just simply give the establishment green lite to do it same thing anytime they want and democracy
really is just the empty word......
AlitaAlita,
Wikileaks only confirms that DNC has rigged the primaries to help Hillary Clinton, that's
why Debbie W. Schultz had to resign her Chair. Whether that will cost Clinton her election depends
on how many of the Bernie Sanders supporters are angry enough to boycott the election.
JohnJohn
The problem in America is that we have a two party political system that can be easily
manipulated by the wealthy and those with evil intent .When that happens you have basically one
party speaking double talk , controlled by the few and sewing confusion among the voters in order
to divide and polarize the country . Which leads to a lack of unity and everyone for him
or her self . What we need is not more or fewer political parties but a more informed public
Scotty P.Scotty P.
It is interesting (albeit unsurprising) that since the leak makes Hillary Clinton's backers
in the DNC look bad, the media is so interested in the motives of the leakers. This was never
the case with the anti-Bush crowd in the 2000's. Going back a bit further, anyone involved in
exposing the Watergate break-in is practically treated like a national hero. Suddenly, the "truth
to power" crowd has become the "can't handle the truth" crowd.
Similarly, Edward Snowden proudly violated national security laws, in the name of exposing
government corruption. But now that someone else has done it to a politcal base Snowden finds
more tolerable (he's a known liberal), he takes issue with it? Get over yourself, Ed. You're no
better than WikiLeaks, and your agenda is no more "pure" than theirs.
Lastly, the author of this article saying the leak has "backfired" is truly rich. This isn't
the 90's, when feckless partisans tried to take down the Clintons, only to have disgraced themselves-
although Newt Gingrich still ATTEMPTS to be relevant. (But I digress.) This time, the Clintons
have angered a lot of people on the left, who see that the Democrats are no more a "party of the
people" than the Republicans are- although anyone paying attentions wouldn't need WikiLeaks to
tell them that.
SomeSome
Talk about playing it down, this proved media collusion further evidenced by the blackout of
delegates lack of media coverage when over 1,000 walked out after roll call and stormed the media
tents. (Video's all over YouTube)
My Revolution brothers and sisters, even though we are separated by #DemExit, I understand
and appreciate your fight from within. I am fighting to build a new home in the Green party. We
are still together even when we are apart.
If you can't fly then run,
If you can't run then walk,
If you can't walk then crawl,
But whatever you do you have to keep moving forward!
michael
Another is a long line of distortion and lies by the establishment to make the establishment
Queen elected. The lies just never stop. Snowden tweeted a sentence and Wikileaks tweeted by another.
from this a whole pyramid of lies and distortions was written. There is zero evidence the Russians
government hacked these emails, zero, nada, nothing. What is important is the DNC was for Hillary
and was trying to sabotage another Democrat, Sanders, running for the same office. That is corruption
pure and simple, nothing less. Third world corruption going on at the DNC.
TimmyTimmy
This #$%$ article is just ridiculous! "Oh, well, the leak hasn't revealed anything important".
Hello! Wake up! It has shown how crooked the DNC was during this election cycle, and in truth
the RNC probably isn't any better. But here we have PROOF of just how crooked hilary and her cronies
are, and they are all getting a free pass. No one sees a problem with this?
Gordon
Did you notice there's no (By-Line) for this article? Because what is IN the emails is
most important. Firstly, they blame the Russians. Then they blame Trump. Then they blame the Russians
and Trump. Now they don't know who to blame. But, the FBI said for certain the server was hacked
and there were indications of who hacked it. This was established in a couple of short weeks -
or less. The FBI had Hillary's server for a year and couldn't make a determination.
Too much of this just doesn't add up. The Democrats went into immediate Damage Control mode
when the emails came out and Not ONE person was screaming, "This ain't True!". Nope, not even
a whisper. We can't tell who's pulling the strings on this. But, there's dammed sure someone behind
the curtain.
Richard
The most important question to ask is about the motives of American Journalists is there
report a distraction from the truth are they in fact trying to do damage control are they being
controlled by a political party as these E-MAILS seem to suggest . The motive of the leaker is
less important than the truth. Wiki-leaks hates Clinton , Russia hacked the DNC server that
is another subject . The fact weather or not the DNC acted in a unethical manner is the subject.
JULEA
There is nothing wrong with Transparency. We need MORE of it. How long did WE Hack and Spy
on Germany, Merkel? They were suing US. What ever happened about this? We ALSO need more transparency
about TPP and who can be sued for some Corporation losing profits..even if they are doing wrong
to make their profits. I think something falls on States, counties, even citizens. Even SCIENCE
for proving harmful things involved. We just need Transparency and who is giving money to who
and why. The DNC became VERY Undemocratic and this just a BIG BIG BIG No to every Liberal and
should not be covered up for anything. WE HACK EVERY COUNTRY.
DickDick
Nobody except America's enemies wants vital secrets that jeopardize our well being hacked.
On the other hand we have a national interest in finding out what our leaders have been hiding
that jeopardize our liberties. Snowden exposed extreme violations of the fourth amendment by the
NSA. Wikileaks exposed political chicanery by the democrat central committee. Hiding information
like this is harmful and only benefits those who are trying to cover up something just to protect
themselves. Both Snowden and wikileaks have done good deeds.
Snowden, who risked his life to spill the beans, said he would reveal all in return for immunity.
But too many people have reason to fear the truth so I doubt if he will be granted it. A shame.
mike
Democrat or Republican they both pull this kind of #$%$. The only answer is to vote all of
them out of office and put term limits in place . We need to stop the Life long politicians who
are in it for their own riches. And we know its "All" of them, they find out how easy it is to
rip the American people off and get by with it.
DavidSDavidS
This attempt to paint Clinton the victim is sooooo over played. She has been the "victim" all
her life. Focus on just how corrupt she and everyone around her is. DWS didn't get punished for
what she did (or allowed), she was rewarded. Doesn't that speak volumes about Clinton? The more
corrupt you are, the more she and hers will reward. Wake up people, there was a time when a single
lie told to the public was a career ending blotch. Now it's who can tell the biggest.
Ron
I love how this story tries to downplay the content of the emails and focus on the hackers.
The emails exposed a coordinated effort to rob Bernie. Journalists may be having more fun speculating
on who hacked them, but Bernies followers could care less. They know the old man got robbed.
Lord Doom
The Leak disclosed how the main stream media has bias with the DNC. Yahoo news wants to blow
down the story and mask its importance it seems to me.
Idontwanngiveit
Dan Seitz.... Do you practice being a political dolt or does it come naturally?
The DNC had to hire actors at $50 a pop by advertising on Craigslist so Hillary Clinton
wouldn't look like the clown she is in front of a half-empty DNC stadium during her acceptance
speech.
The exodus of hundreds, if not thousands, of Bernie Sanders supporters from the convention
made crystal clear the extent of discord among Democratic voters.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out the devastating fall-out of the WikiLeaks
e-mail dump on Hillary Clinton's election bid. She is the No. 1 casualty -- albeit "collateral
damage" -- inflicted by the party upon itself!
Prior to the WikiLeaks e-mail showing how Bernie got jerked around by a rigged system, most
of his supporters would have held their nose and grudgingly voted for Hillary in November. Now,
since learning how party officials conspired against them, they want and deserve blood!
The disgruntled masses who stormed out of the DNC represent a microcosm of the equally disgruntled
masses of Democrats nation-wide who are incensed over the party's machinations and shenanigans.
The ones in Pennsylvania and those watching on TV, following events on the Internet and reading
newspapers at home are fully informed about what took place and will now do one of three things:
Sit out the election entirely our of frustration over a status-quo system that's patently
rigged against them, which benefits Donald Trump.
Vote for a third-candidate, which splits the Democratic ticket and, again, benefits Trump.
Vote for Donald Trump directly out of shear spite to show the Democratic Party exactly what
it deserves for screwing with them, which also Trump.
Even if all those people constitute just 5 or 10 percent of the Party's voting base, their
loss and its effect on Hillary's chances of winning the White House will be devastating!
So, as a staunch Trump supporter myself, Thank you, Julian Assange! Thank you very much for
your generous and very helpful assistance in securing the Oval Office for Donald J. Trump on Nov.
8.
Oh yeah. And one other thing.... Please keep those Democratic Party internal e-mails coming.
They're absolutely fascinating!
Joseph
It's a sad state of affairs in that we are depending on Julian Assange to save the Republic
from corrupt Hillary and the Clinton foundation. If Clinton becomes President she will basically
place the United States up for sale so that the globalists can destroy what little remains of
the American middle class. America will truly become a third world nation with only rich and poor.
We can not allow this to happen. Trump may be a little "rough around the edges" however
he is a true American who will bring back jobs, try his best to eliminate illegal immigration,
and take America back from the globalists. This will help middle class Americans to thrive -- Vote
Trump for President in 2016 !
Elizabeth
I think most commenters are missing the point that Snowden made: what is the intent of
the leak? If the intent is to expose corruption then that is doing a public service. Leaking
private information like credit card numbers and SS numbers only makes the victims vulnerable
to thieves and does not fall in the "need to know" category. Wiki could have edited the leak to
expose the DNC while protecting private information.
joanjoan
All look at the bang up job the FBI did with Clinton's email wrong doings. She broke the
law and lied and the FBI tip toed around it by not taking her statements under oath so she wouldn't
be charged.
A Yahoo reader
What could be more hypocritical of this pro-Clinton commentary questioning the objectivity
of documents released with no commentary at all. Any rational person appreciates being provided
the truth. It's of no consequence that the truth provider doesn't like Clinton. There's no law
that says people have to like Clinton, at least not yet.
alfredalfred
Nice try to discredit the emails. They happened. She resigned. Democrats are terrible people.
They get away with it because we are stupid and believe everything this media tells us.
Danny
OK, you won't listen to a guy (Edward Snowden) about issues, when he releases information that
the public NEEDS to know, but "MAY BE" detrimental to the people in National Security, you put
him on the World's MOST WANTED LIST, take his citizenship away. So what is his choice, he HAS
NO CHOICE, he goes on the offense, obtaining and releasing even more information, and working
with whomever will protect him.
There is no evidence Russia is holding him prison, just protecting him. There is no evidence
he can't leave anytime he wants, even come back to his own country. Yet our government continues
to villanize Snowden.
Look at the data released - It is true, it proves ALL the crooks are in our own government
and politics, there is no evidence Russia is doing anything but helping people find, obtain and
release material our politicians create.
So, Killary, DNC, Obama, one and all attack Snowden and Russia, even adding Trump to the mix.
I think we need to pack up all these crooked Democrats, including Obama, and ship them off to
another country and tell them to GET A JOB. Then, let Snowden back into his country and let him
do his job of protecting the United States of America. And Trump doesn't have anything to do with
Killary, Obama and DNCs crooked politics.
krainkrain
Then there is the language issue. "I hate being attributed to Russia," the Guccifer 2.0 account
told Motherboard, probably accurately. The person at the keyboard then claimed in a chat with
Motherboard's Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai that Guccifer 2.0 was from Romania, like the original
Guccifer, a well-known hacker. But when asked to explain his hack in Romanian, he was unable to
respond colloquially and without errors. Guccifer 2.0's English initially was also weak, but in
subsequent posts the quality improved sharply, albeit only on political subjects, not in technical
matters-an indication of a team of operators at work behind the scenes.
VernyVerny
The government is protecting Hillary and the Clinton Gang, so "leaks and hacks" are the only methodology of showing Americans the truth about Hillary, the most corrupt politician in American history.
Jayster b
Another article to divert from the content of the emails, which were so damning that
the DNC used all their Media contacts to create the "Russia Hack" scenario and then accused
Trump of conspiring with Russia. As of yet not one DNC official has denied the facts or
content in the e-mails. So, Assange scored in this first round so much that Debbie is no
longer head of the DNC, and the FBI has demanded access to the DNC server to analyze it,
meaning they will have access to all the donor information from foreign countries that are
helping the Democrats steal the nomination from Bernie. What a crazy world. Assange 1, DNC 0
TomTom
I found it interesting you didn't mention that Politico was found in cahoots with the
DNC as well in the emails.. Just like the mainstream media didn't hardly cover the protesters
at the DNC convention but surely did at the RNC convention. You pick & choose what you want to
report don't you.
As my colleague Glenn Greenwald
told
WNYC on Monday, while there may never be conclusive evidence that the Democratic National Committee
was hacked by Russian intelligence operatives to extract
the trove of embarrassing emails
published by WikiLeaks, it would hardly be shocking if that was what happened.
"Governments do spy on each other and do try to influence events in other countries," Glenn noted.
"Certainly the U.S. government has
a very long and
successful history of doing exactly that."
Even so, he added, given the ease with which we were misled into war in Iraq by false claims about
weapons of mass destruction - and
the long history
of Russophobia in American politics - it is vital to cast a skeptical eye over whatever evidence
is presented to support the claim, made by Hillary Clinton's aide Robby Mook, that this is all part
of a Russian plot to sabotage the Democrats and help Donald Trump win the election.
The theory
gained some traction , particularly among Trump's detractors, in part because the candidate has
seemed obsessed at times with reminding crowds that Russian President Vladimir Putin once said
something sort of nice about him (though
not, as Trump falsely
claims , that the American is "a genius"). Then last week, Trump's campaign staff watered down
a pledge to help Ukraine defend its territory from Russian-backed rebels and the candidate
told the New York Times he would not necessarily honor the NATO treaty commitment that
requires the United States military to defend other member states from a direct attack by Russia.
Since Trump has refused to release his tax returns, there are also questions about whether or
not his businesses might depend to some extent on Russian investors. "Russians make up a pretty disproportionate
cross-section of a lot of our assets," Trump's son Donald Jr. told a real estate conference in 2008,
the Washington Post reported last month. "We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia."
Paul Manafort, who is directing Trump's campaign and was for years a close adviser of a Putin
ally, former President Viktor Yanukovych of Ukraine,
called the theory that Trump's campaign had ties to the Russian government "absurd." (On Monday,
Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News
reported that a DNC researcher looking into Manafort's ties to pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine
in May had been warned that her personal Yahoo email account was under attack. "We strongly suspect
that your account has been the target of state-sponsored actors," the warning from the email service
security team read.)
Unhelpfully for Trump, his most senior adviser with knowledge of the world of hacking, retired
Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency,
told Bloomberg View that he "would not be surprised at all" to learn that Russia was
behind the breach of the DNC network. "Both China and Russia have the full capability to do this,"
he said.
Later on Monday, Trump himself then
attributed
the attack on the DNC to "China, Russia, one of our many, many 'friends,'" who "came in and hacked
the hell out of us."
Since very few of us are cybersecurity experts, and the Iraq debacle is a reminder of how dangerous
it can be to put blind faith in experts whose claims might reinforce our own political positions,
there is also the question of who we can trust to provide reliable evidence.
One expert in the field, who is well aware of the evidence-gathering capabilities of the U.S.
government, is Edward Snowden, the former Central Intelligence Agency technician and National Security
Agency whistleblower who exposed the extent of mass surveillance and has been given temporary asylum
in Russia.
"If Russia hacked the #DNC, they should be condemned for it,"
Snowden wrote
on Twitter on Monday, with a link to
a 2015 report on the U.S. government's response to the hacking of Sony Pictures. In that case,
he noted, "the FBI presented evidence" for its conclusion that North Korea was responsible for the
hacking and subsequent release of internal emails. (The FBI is now investigating the breach of the
DNC's network, which officials
told the Daily Beast they first made the committee aware of in April.)
What's more, Snowden added, the NSA has tools that should make it possible to trace the source
of the hack. Even though the Director of National Intelligence usually opposes making such evidence
public, he argued, this is a case in which the agency should do so, if only to discourage future
attacks.
Edward Snowden
✔ @Snowden
Even if the attackers try to obfuscate origin, #XKEYSCORE makes following exfiltrated data easy.
I did this personally against Chinese ops.
Edward Snowden
✔ @Snowden
Evidence that could publicly attribute responsibility for the DNC hack certainly exists at #NSA,
but DNI traditionally objects to sharing.
Edward Snowden
✔ @Snowden
The aversion to sharing #NSA evidence is fear of revealing "sources and methods" of intel collection,
but #XKEYSCORE is now publicly known.
Edward Snowden2 Verified account ?
@Snowden
Without a credible threat that USG can and will use #NSA capabilities to publicly attribute responsibility,
such hacks will become common.
"... Really? Do I trust Trump to give the keys to 6970 nukes, 10 carrier strike groups, and a $1Trillion/yr military-industrial complex to a bigoted, sociopathic liar. NOT. I still do remember what it was like the first time I gave my car keys to my 16-year old son. Give the nuclear keys to Trump – ABSOLUTELY. NEVER. ..."
"... Why can't the choice be that noone should have the keys to the nukes? That's assuming anyone does single handedly which is almost certainly false anyway. You think senile old Reagan did? Really you really truly believe that do you? ..."
"... "Should the president decide to order the launch of nuclear weapons, they would be taken aside by the "carrier" of the nuclear football and the briefcase opened. Once opened, the president would decide which "Attack Options", specific orders for attacks on specific targets, to use. The Attack Options are preset war plans developed under OPLAN 8010, and include Major Attack Options (MAOs), Selected Attack Options (SAOs), and Limited Attack Options (LAOs). The chosen attack option and the Gold Codes would then be transmitted to the NMCC via a special, secure channel. As commander-in-chief, the president is the only individual with the authority to order the use of nuclear weapons;however, the two-man rule still applies. ..."
Really? Do I trust Trump to give the keys to 6970 nukes, 10 carrier strike groups, and a $1Trillion/yr
military-industrial complex to a bigoted, sociopathic liar. NOT. I still do remember what it was
like the first time I gave my car keys to my 16-year old son. Give the nuclear keys to Trump –
ABSOLUTELY. NEVER.
Which is not to say that I am totally thrilled with neocon hawk Hillary. Number 1 on my list
of the 9 reasons why I voted for Bernie rather than her in our Primary is that she voted for Bush's
Iraq War and my son did six tours.
"The solution is not to save the Democratic Party, but to replace it."
True enough, but that will not happen between now and 08 November.
We have a binary choice on 08 Nov – I do not think a replay Nader in FL in 2000 is a particularly
smart option.
Why can't the choice be that noone should have the keys to the nukes? That's assuming anyone
does single handedly which is almost certainly false anyway. You think senile old Reagan did?
Really you really truly believe that do you?
"Should the president decide to order the launch of nuclear weapons, they would be taken aside
by the "carrier" of the nuclear football and the briefcase opened. Once opened, the president
would decide which "Attack Options", specific orders for attacks on specific targets, to use.
The Attack Options are preset war plans developed under OPLAN 8010, and include Major Attack Options
(MAOs), Selected Attack Options (SAOs), and Limited Attack Options (LAOs). The chosen attack option
and the Gold Codes would then be transmitted to the NMCC via a special, secure channel. As commander-in-chief,
the president is the only individual with the authority to order the use of nuclear weapons;however,
the two-man rule still applies.
The National Command Authority comprising the president and Secretary
of Defense must jointly authenticate the order to use nuclear weapons to the Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff. The order would then be transmitted over a tan-yellow phone, the Joint Chiefs
of Staff Alerting Network, otherwise known as the "Gold Phone", that directly links the NMCC with
United States Strategic Command Headquarters at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska."
So there are some checks to prevent Donald Trump or HRC launching a nuclear strike in a fit
of temper..
Trying to steal back workers from Trump will probably not work -- Hillary is too distrusted to
make the message convincing.
But a
nice try... Nailing Hillary
on issues is like trying to pin jelly to a wall
Notable quotes:
"... She devoted a fair amount of time addressing Trump voters, white working-class folks whose wages and position in the country have been gradually squeezed. She promised good jobs for everyone, to punish Wall Street, to reject bad trade deals, to protect steel and auto workers, to stand up to China. This was essentially an effort to steal the Trump platform and adopt part of Trump's message, and these words would never have been uttered by Goldman Sachs' favorite speaker if the GOP had nominated Jeb Bush or if Trump weren't actually leading in some national polls. This is new territory for Hillary, a concession to Trump she didn't make to Bernie Sanders. ..."
"... Probably, somewhere in the back of her mind, Hillary knows that there is a fundamental contradiction between good-paying jobs and open borders, but denying that inescapable economic fact of supply and demand is now part of her party's message. ..."
"... On foreign policy, she remains a liberal hawk, giving a warning that we are prepared to go war over Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania, while giving a one-sentence endorsement of the centerpiece of Obama's diplomatic legacy, the Iran deal. Again, this is a kind of rhetorical box-checking that doesn't predict much about her future orientation: clearly either the neocons or Obama supporters will be roundly disappointed in a Hillary foreign policy. We just don't know which it will be. ..."
Nevertheless, the speech Hillary did give revealed much about where the race is.
She
devoted a fair amount of time addressing Trump voters, white working-class folks whose
wages and position in the country have been gradually squeezed. She promised good jobs
for everyone, to punish Wall Street, to reject bad trade deals, to protect steel and
auto workers, to stand up to China. This was essentially an effort to steal the Trump
platform and adopt part of Trump's message, and these words would never have been
uttered by Goldman Sachs' favorite speaker if the GOP had nominated Jeb Bush or if Trump
weren't actually leading in some national polls. This is new territory for Hillary, a
concession to Trump she didn't make to Bernie Sanders. Clinton crony Terry McAuliffe's
blurting out that Hillary didn't really mean it (her opposition to the TPP in
particular) is probably a reliable assertion that she doesn't. But the fact that she had
to proclaim that she heard the complaints of working-class voters and would seek to
address them is a kind of tribute to the Trump and Sanders movements.
In Hillary's
world, America's diversity is its strength, and she probably does believe this. We will
not build a wall, she said, but build an economy where "everyone who wants a good paying
job" can have one. In years past, a presidential candidate might have said, more or less
unconsciously, "every American" instead of "everyone," but Hillary has already embraced
a comprehensive immigration reform with amnesty as its centerpiece, and the Democratic
Party is increasingly aligned to that part (now vanquished) of the GOP that prefers
relatively open borders. If any kind of future border enforcement is part of that
comprehensive package, Hillary certainly didn't mention it. Left-wing activists now tout
a "right to immigrate," and this may implicitly have become part of the Democratic
platform. Probably, somewhere in the back of her mind, Hillary knows that there is a
fundamental contradiction between good-paying jobs and open borders, but denying that
inescapable economic fact of supply and demand is now part of her party's message.
... ... ...
On foreign policy, she remains a liberal hawk, giving a warning that we are prepared
to go war over Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania, while giving a one-sentence endorsement
of the centerpiece of Obama's diplomatic legacy, the Iran deal. Again, this is a kind of
rhetorical box-checking that doesn't predict much about her future orientation: clearly
either the neocons or Obama supporters will be roundly disappointed in a Hillary foreign
policy. We just don't know which it will be.
"... her vote for the Iraq War made me promise her that I would never vote for her again ..."
"... Our biggest problem here isn't Trump – it's Hillary. She is hugely unpopular - nearly 70% of all voters think she is untrustworthy and dishonest. She represents the old way of politics, not really believing in anything other than what can get you elected. ..."
Quite a few aren't. I think most aren't, Moore thinks most are, but numbers, at this point,
aren't important, that could change. What is important, is the passion and the arguments:
I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but I gave it to you straight last summer when I told
you that Donald Trump would be the Republican nominee for president. And now I have even more
awful, depressing news for you: Donald J. Trump is going to win in November… Here are the 5 reasons
Trump is going to win:
Midwest Math, or Welcome to Our Rust Belt Brexit. I believe Trump is going to focus much of
his attention on the four blue states in the rustbelt of the upper Great Lakes – Michigan, Ohio,
Pennsylvania and Wisconsin… it's because he's said (correctly) that the Clintons' support of NAFTA
helped to destroy the industrial states of the Upper Midwest. Trump is going to hammer Clinton
on this and her support of TPP and other trade policies that have royally screwed the people of
these four states. When Trump stood in the shadow of a Ford Motor factory during the Michigan
primary, he threatened the corporation that if they did indeed go ahead with their planned closure
of that factory and move it to Mexico, he would slap a 35% tariff on any Mexican-built cars shipped
back to the United States. It was sweet, sweet music to the ears of the working class of Michigan,
and when he tossed in his threat to Apple that he would force them to stop making their iPhones
in China and build them here in America, well, hearts swooned and Trump walked away with a big
victory that should have gone to the governor next-door, John Kasich…
The Last Stand of the Angry White Man… There is a sense that the power has slipped out of their
hands, that their way of doing things is no longer how things are done. This monster, the "Feminazi,"the
thing that as Trump says, "bleeds through her eyes or wherever she bleeds," has conquered us -
and now, after having had to endure eight years of a black man telling us what to do, we're supposed
to just sit back and take eight years of a woman bossing us around…
Can we speak honestly, just among ourselves? And before we do, let me state, I actually like
Hillary – a lot – and I think she has been given a bad rap she doesn't deserve. But her vote for
the Iraq War made me promise her that I would never vote for her again… Our biggest problem here
isn't Trump – it's Hillary. She is hugely unpopular - nearly 70% of all voters think she is untrustworthy
and dishonest. She represents the old way of politics, not really believing in anything other
than what can get you elected. That's why she fights against gays getting married one moment,
and the next she's officiating a gay marriage… no independent is waking up on November 8th excited
to run out and vote for Hillary the way they did the day Obama became president or when Bernie
was on the primary ballot. The enthusiasm just isn't there. And because this election is going
to come down to just one thing - who drags the most people out of the house and gets them to the
polls - Trump right now is in the catbird seat…
The fire alarm that should be going off is that while the average Bernie backer will drag him/herself
to the polls that day to somewhat reluctantly vote for Hillary, it will be what's called a "depressed
vote" – meaning the voter doesn't bring five people to vote with her. He doesn't volunteer 10
hours in the month leading up to the election. She never talks in an excited voice when asked
why she's voting for Hillary. A depressed voter. Because, when you're young, you have zero tolerance
for phonies and BS. Returning to the Clinton/Bush era for them is like suddenly having to pay
for music, or using MySpace or carrying around one of those big-ass portable phones. They're not
going to vote for Trump; some will vote third party, but many will just stay home…
the anger that so many have toward a broken political system, millions are going to vote for
Trump not because they agree with him, not because they like his bigotry or ego, but just because
they can. Just because it will upset the apple cart and make mommy and daddy mad. And in the same
way like when you're standing on the edge of Niagara Falls and your mind wonders for a moment
what would that feel like to go over that thing, a lot of people are going to love being in the
position of puppetmaster and plunking down for Trump just to see what that might look like. Remember
back in the '90s when the people of Minnesota elected a professional wrestler as their governor?
They didn't do this because they're stupid or thought that Jesse Ventura was some sort of statesman
or political intellectual. They did so just because they could. Minnesota is one of the smartest
states in the country. It is also filled with people who have a dark sense of humor - and voting
for Ventura was their version of a good practical joke on a sick political system. This is going
to happen again with Trump.
We should not believe any reporting of MSM. Even 'Guccifer 2.0' can be just
a smoke screen designed to protect a disgruntled insider, who leaked this information
to Wikileaks. Moreover intelligence agencies understand the NSA intercept all the
communication and store at least "envelope" for a long time. Large download is instantly
noticeable. I am not sure the Putin does not want to see Clinton as the president.
She is compromised enough to face impeachment, and that might prevent her from unleashing
new wars. In any case with republican congress she needs to fight for her life.
They really want her in jail.
Notable quotes:
"... 'The true identity of the hacker that sent the cat among the Democratic
party pigeons, at the most damaging moment for Hillary Clinton, remains the subject
of conjecture for lack of firm proof. The leading suspects may well be one or more
of her party opponents.' ..."
"... The evidence presented so far that the hack is by the Russian government
reminds me of the Iraq WMD evidence. Very dodgy. But, the media did its job. Russia
has been convicted. My twitter feed is fully convinced since the "experts" have
said so. ..."
With a situation which is changing so rapidly as the present, assessments
of Russian 'intentions' are very difficult.
However, before making conjectures about what the Russian authorities
might do in the future, it is prudent to start by trying to make as accurate
assessment as we can of what they have, and have not, done up until now.
If indeed the GRU are responsible for supplying WikiLeaks with the DNC
materials, that would represent a very major 'escalation' in 'political
warfare'.
At the moment, however, while it is perfectly possible that either they,
or the SVR or FSB – whose 'patch' this would more normally be – are responsible,
the available evidence is a mess.
In relation to 'Debka File', the Colonel's injunction to assess source
and content separately applies in spades.
So without simply accepting it, one should also not simply dismiss claims
made in a recent piece on their site entitled 'The DNC e-mails were not
hacked by Russian GRU.'
'The true identity of the hacker that sent the cat among the Democratic
party pigeons, at the most damaging moment for Hillary Clinton, remains
the subject of conjecture for lack of firm proof. The leading suspects may
well be one or more of her party opponents.'
What 'DebkaFile' point to is a central tension in the claims by 'CrowdStrike'
and others.
On one hand, according to the conventional wisdom – recycled on SST by
'herb' – the hacks into the DNC networks are likely to have required much
more than the capabilities of a solitary hacker, but were the product of
the kind of sophisticated operation which points to a state agency.
On the other, apparently this very sophisticated operation could be cracked
by 'CrowdStrike' in two hours – and had left obvious signatures.
A more general claim is made in the 'DebkaFile' piece on which people
better informed than myself may have a view:
'Russia's cyber warfare system is still mostly a "black hole" for the
West. Although it is highly effective, very little is known about its methods
of operation, organizational structures, scale of cooperation with counterparts
in other countries, and the tools and resources at its disposal.
"Had any branch of Russian intelligence been responsible for the hacking
the Democratic party's servers, no obvious signatures, such as the terms
'Fancy Bear, and 'Cozy Bear' that were discovered, would have been left
behind for investigators to find."
In exchanges in response to the analysis by 'TTG', who clearly has an
extensive familiarity with this whole field, 'herb' linked to a widely-quoted
analysis by Professor Thomas Rits of King's College, London. A cybersecurity
expert to whom I linked, Jeffrey Carr, has now produced a detailed critique
of Rits, under the title 'Can Facts Slow the DNC Breach Runaway Train?'
At the end of the piece are links to his two earlier articles, 'Faith-Based
Attribution' and 'The DNC Breach and the Hijacking of Common Sense', which
I would most strongly recommend to anyone interested in the problems of
attributing responsibility for the hack.
The three pieces by Carr produce, in my view, highly cogent support for
the scepticism expressed by 'DebkaFile' about the notion that 'CrowdStrike'
had actually established that either the GRU, or the FSB/SVR, had hacked
the DNC servers.
Of course, this does not mean that one can discount the possibility that
Russian state authorities had hacked into them. It would seem to me extremely
probable that some of them had.
However, the 'CrowdStrike' report is smelling to me more and more of
an 'information operation' aimed at 'damage limitation'.
A key reason for this is that the report, and discussion of this, obfuscates
an absolutely central problem. Even if the company had, within two hours,
identified penetration operations by the GRU and the FSB/SVR, this would
quite clearly not establish beyond reasonable doubt that the only possible
suspect in relation to the handing over of the materials to WikiLeaks was
either or both of these agencies.
One could only assert this with confidence, if CrowdStrike could guarantee
1. that they were able to identify all possible successful hackings into
the system over the relevant period, and 2. that they could rule out the
possibility that successful hacks had been made by people who could have
obtained the relevant materials and handed them over to WikiLeaks.
The question of whether they were said anything to the DNC about how
they had ruled out these possibilities has barely been discussed in the
MSM coverage.
But this also brings us to the question of what 'Guccifer 2.0' is attempting
to hide. That at the minimum he is not quite what he portrays himself as
being is evident.
That said, any one of a multitude of plausible hypotheses about his role
– including, incidentally, the possibility that he is actually acting on
behalf of Americans who want to see Hillary Clinton exposed – suggests he
would be to a greater or lesser extent 'making smoke'.
What the observations of 'TTG' and Sam Peralta suggested was that the
self-portrait by 'Guccifer 2.0' of himself as a particularly brilliant hacker
obscures the actual situation.
When I put their observations to a software engineer acquaintance who
is well versed in the technicalities, he strongly agreed, and elaborated
on some of the technical issues.
A key problem seems to be that, for a range of reasons, crucial networks
go on using old software. Keeping old software secure, in the face of constantly
evolving threats, requires relevant expertise and hard work. Commonly it
doesn't get it – and it seems that the DNC servers were a pretty easy target.
But in relation to hacking into such systems, what counts is not sheer
brilliance. It is a combination of thorough technical knowledge and sheer
persistence and hard graft.
Now it may well be the case that the claims by 'Guccifer 2.0' about his
own brilliance are simply a case of vainglory. However, it may also be possible
that both 'CrowdStrike' and he have a disguised common interest in obscuring
the fact that the range of people who had the technical competence to hack
into the DNC servers was great.
By the same token, the range of people who had a motive to hack into
these servers and were in a position to employ people with the relevant
technical competence may also have been very considerable.
This has all kinds of implications. For one thing, if the suggestion
that the hacking required the capabilities of a state organisation is false,
then the obvious way for a state organisation to preserve 'deniability'
would be to get hold of competent individuals, using systems and approaches
which had not been used in previous hacks.
What is not obvious is why such any competent intelligence organisation
should leave the kind of easily accessible 'metadata' on documents which
are supposed to establish that 'Guccifer 2.0' is a front for the GRU. It
is not clear to me whether the documents in question have been subjected
to critical examination by competent – and independent – analysts.
However, if the 'metadata' really can be shown to exist, I think the
comment by Carr about the use of the name of Dzerzhinsky is to the point:
"OK. Raise your hand if you think that a GRU or FSB officer would add
Iron Felix's name to the metadata of a stolen document before he released
it to the world while pretending to be a Romanian hacker. Someone clearly
had a wicked sense of humor."
In his most recent piece, Carr links to remarks from a 1968 paper by
Sherman Kent, founder of the analytical tradition in the CIA, entitled 'Estimates
and Influence.'
In it, Kent used the metaphor of 'pyramid'. Good intelligence assessment
starts off with a 'base' of reliably ascertainable fact – on the basis of
which it may be possible to construct a structure which ends up with a definite
'apex', but may not.
The reverse method is to start with a desired 'apex' and then attempt
to construct a 'pyramid' which will support it. As Kent puts it:
"There it floats, a simple assertion screaming for a rationale. This,
then, is worked out from the top down. The difficulty of the maneuver comes
to a climax when the last stage in the perverse downward deduction must
be joined up smoothly and naturally with the reality of the base. This operation
requires a very considerable skill, particularly where there is a rich supply
of factual base-material. Without an artfully contrived joint, the whole
structure can be made to proclaim its bastardy, to the chagrin of its progenitor."
Of course, one can simply fabricate large elements of the 'base'.
As the release of 'hacked' material seems likely to continue, establishing
a reliable 'base' on which we can begin to build a structure leading to
a credible 'apex' seems a matter of some moment.
A key part of it, obviously, is working out what kinds of people might
have had a motive.
In relation to Putin, I think one needs to keep in mind both that he
may very much want to avoid seeing a new Clinton Presidency – for reasons
with which I have every sympathy. Equally, however, there are strong 'downsides'
in using this kind of means to prevent it, and if they are involved, it
will have been through means preserving 'deniability.'
The 'metadata' claims, however, make me think that the suggestion by
'DebkaFile' that people should be looking closer to home should be taken
seriously.
The evidence presented so far that the hack is by the Russian government
reminds me of the Iraq WMD evidence. Very dodgy. But, the media did its
job. Russia has been convicted. My twitter feed is fully convinced since
the "experts" have said so.
"... According to this woman from Los Angeles the DNC sought to exclude Bernie delegates from the convention last night by filling the hall with hired actors and excluding Sanders delegates. ..."
"... Fucking sickening. These people need to lose their ass in November badly. ..."
According to this woman from Los Angeles the DNC sought to exclude Bernie delegates from the
convention last night by filling the hall with hired actors and excluding Sanders delegates.
Fucking sickening. These people need to lose their ass in November badly.
micatoung35 1h
Will not vote for another democrat for as long as I live. After seeing the corruption this
party is involved in, there's no way I can give them my support. People really need to open their
eyes to Hillary Clinton. She's a thieving, lying bitch. She's stolen millions from Haitians. After
her husband's term they both stole thousands of dollars of merchandise from the white house. She
let Americans die in Benghazi. She's for big corporations, not Americans. She'll run this country
into the ground and smile while doing it. And, Sanders gave her his support after losing. Wtf?!?
Sorry, but voting Trump#2016.
He's the only one brave enough to stop the corruption of our government.
He's the only one that cares more about Americans than illegal immigrants. He's the only one that'll
expose the Federal Reserve Bank and audit them. He's the only one that can be somewhat trusted.
I know when the whole democrat and Republican parties are attacking ONE PERSON, I have the right
man for the job. Stop the corruption and #voteTrump2016!
American_Guero 1d
Facebook is repeatedly deleting this as I share it. Again and again. They are right on top
of things. This is democracy.
kooshy
Colonel, DNC and Clintons at any price are cheating their own suppose to be supporters , that's
how sick this is. according to now available DNC emails hey cheated the democratic voters in the
primaries and with the support of the MSM they were able to twist the subject, and blame Putin
for cheating their own party' voters. What more voters need to look for to decide how to vote?
I watched most of her speech on CNN while waiting for a plane in Ft. Lauderdale. I noticed
a few Jill Stein supporters in the audience and thought whoever was controlling the scenes of
the crowd must be nuts. Every time they started showing the crowd, besides the VIP sections, they
were cutting to a new scene every 4-5 seconds. Did anyone else notice that or was it only CNN?
"... According to this woman from Los Angeles the DNC sought to exclude Bernie delegates from the convention last night by filling the hall with hired actors and excluding Sanders delegates. ..."
"... Fucking sickening. These people need to lose their ass in November badly. ..."
According to this woman from Los Angeles the DNC sought to exclude Bernie delegates from the
convention last night by filling the hall with hired actors and excluding Sanders delegates.
Fucking sickening. These people need to lose their ass in November badly.
micatoung35 1h
Will not vote for another democrat for as long as I live. After seeing the corruption this
party is involved in, there's no way I can give them my support. People really need to open their
eyes to Hillary Clinton. She's a thieving, lying bitch. She's stolen millions from Haitians. After
her husband's term they both stole thousands of dollars of merchandise from the white house. She
let Americans die in Benghazi. She's for big corporations, not Americans. She'll run this country
into the ground and smile while doing it. And, Sanders gave her his support after losing. Wtf?!?
Sorry, but voting Trump#2016.
He's the only one brave enough to stop the corruption of our government.
He's the only one that cares more about Americans than illegal immigrants. He's the only one that'll
expose the Federal Reserve Bank and audit them. He's the only one that can be somewhat trusted.
I know when the whole democrat and Republican parties are attacking ONE PERSON, I have the right
man for the job. Stop the corruption and #voteTrump2016!
American_Guero 1d
Facebook is repeatedly deleting this as I share it. Again and again. They are right on top
of things. This is democracy.
kooshy
Colonel, DNC and Clintons at any price are cheating their own suppose to be supporters , that's
how sick this is. according to now available DNC emails hey cheated the democratic voters in the
primaries and with the support of the MSM they were able to twist the subject, and blame Putin
for cheating their own party' voters. What more voters need to look for to decide how to vote?
I watched most of her speech on CNN while waiting for a plane in Ft. Lauderdale. I noticed
a few Jill Stein supporters in the audience and thought whoever was controlling the scenes of
the crowd must be nuts. Every time they started showing the crowd, besides the VIP sections, they
were cutting to a new scene every 4-5 seconds. Did anyone else notice that or was it only CNN?
Donald Trump Calls Comments About Russia and Clinton Emails 'Sarcastic' | 28 July 2016
| Facing a torrent of criticism over his comments seeming to condone the hacking of Hillary Clinton's
emails by Russian intelligence services, Donald J. Trump and his allies on Thursday sought to tamp
down his remarks, with Mr. Trump saying he was simply being "sarcastic." In public interviews and
private conversations on Thursday, Mr. Trump; his running mate, Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana; and campaign
staff members contended that Mr. Trump was being facetious when, during a news conference on Wednesday,
he said he hoped Russia would be able to find Mrs. Clinton's missing emails. "Of course I'm being
sarcastic," Mr. Trump told "Fox and Friends" Thursday morning as his aides accused the news media
of misconstruing his remarks.
brucebennett
•
an hour ago
"Continuity we can believe in". Well, Barry, you can stick that comment where the Sun
don't shine. To me, that translates as - more of the same old shit with an even more
aggressive foreign policy. Like England we had the chance to actually start making
changes to our country that would begin a reform that could benefit the 99%. And like
England, our political process is so corrupt that the two party system will be
retained to do its bidding for the 1% while providing window dressing that
masquerades as progress for the rest of us.
England now has a PM who in some ways is worse than Cameron and we have the choice
between one egomaniac and reckless a-hole and a ruthless power hungry neoliberal who
will have Kissinger as her "mentor".
Man, go to
Salon.com
now and see all of
the insulting posts against Jill Stein in the rah-rah Clinton piece.. The New
Democrats are really circling the wagons around Shillary. Stein is "crazy", an "egpmaniac"
and a "narcissist".
It is part of our political mania that we just love to join the group around the
presumed "winner" while most of us will lose when they actually take power.
capnanarcho
•
3 hours ago
War you can believe in....
Loss of individual rights you can believe in...
Debt slavery you can believe in...
Unaffordable healthcare you can believe in...
Outsourced jobs you can believe in...
Failed education systems you can believe in...
A prison industrial complex you can believe in...
Summary executions by cops you can believe in..
Civil asset forfeiture you can believe in...
A fundamentally broken justice system you can believe in...
Rich people walking away from slam dunk cases of murder you can believe in...
Whistle-blowers of horrific crimes locked up and exiled you can believe in..
Poisoned city drinking water you can believe in..
Regime change in Ukraine you can believe in so Biden Hunter can run that nations
energy sector...
Regime change in Libya you can believe in to stop them from selling oil in something
other than dollars then sending the nations weapons to ISIS in Syria...
Regime change in Syria you can.. Oh, wait.. Still working on that...
So much to
believe in...
Stand now or kneel forever.
leftofabbie
capnanarcho
•
42 minutes ago
That was a painful litany to read. I've just been deleting the msgs in my inbox
asking whether I think Obama has been a good President. His treatment of
whistleblowers alone is enough to condemn him.
Dante Miles
•
3 hours ago
While in Vietnam we called the o's, b's, and c's ChickenHawks. So long as they could
send someone to do their killing, they were Hawks! The minute they or one of theirs
was put in harm's way... they reverted to chickens, gutless cowards. Someone please
pass the drones.
Bobbylon
•
3 hours ago
Barack Obama 2008: hillary clinton will say anything and do nothing
JohnR654
•
4 hours ago
"Continuity We Can Believe In." Count me in O, I'm with you all the way I
believe in our beloved POTUS and the continuity he is talking about --
absolutely do -- And that being more of the same from (HRC) the corporate war
monger wall street lovin' mama wh**re candidate (if selected as our leader we
will continue with more -war, inequality, environmental destruction, austerity
for us peons, spying, torturing, etc.) Hey, we are patriotic citizens and
blindly love this country and all that we imagine it stands for and we refuse
to acknowledge reality and that thing they stick even further up our collective
arse every day. I don't feel a thing. /S
Ben Bache
•
4 hours ago
All of the leaders mock you. They all work together to make sure the sheep don't
revolt. Vote for me and change will come. Spare change at a street light, maybe. But
even there, you never see someone in an expensive car give a beggar money. The people
in old cars and trucks give most of the money to the beggars, because they know not
much separates them.
ARIC
•
4 hours ago
Thus Dionne in the guise of the Democrats, offers the quintessential Democratic Party
excuse:
"We just underestimated Republican evil. Sorry. Too bad you're f*cked."
In reality, the Republicans have served as foils to the Democrats. It's a feature
of the system that it drifts ever farther to the right with false Democratic
"incompetence". Meant entirely to benefit the venality of Washington politicians at
the expense of everyone else.
basarov
•
4 hours ago
Incredible: in america the difference between macdonalds and burger king is
"profound"....
as with obama, clinton is a liar---the perfect leader for a "nation of liars"
(Prof Kiese Laymon) who believe they are free because they have 5 brands of
burgers and shopping malls.
Peter Quinn
•
5 hours ago
"Hillary is the ultimate change agent..!" Bill Clinton Tuesday night.
"Hillary is continuity we can believe in..!" Barack Obama Wednesday night.
donnasaggia
•
5 hours ago
The only "change" under Obama was from bad to worse, and it will stay in that
direction under Clinton. Obama is a failure on so many levels. From day one he
brought neoliberals and neocons into his administration. He escalated illegal
and unnecessary wars throughout the Middle East -- allowed Clinton to talk him
into invading Libya; illegally interfered in Syria; and escalated the tensions
with Russia by his reckless NATO war games.
No minority has done better under
Obama, and African-Americans have done significantly worse. He refused to
support the teachers' strike in Wisconsin and has not kept his promises to
labor regarding their right to organize. He sabotaged the Copenhagen
environmental conference and is pushing the TPP, which would further erode the
environment, and he negotiated it in secret. He has prosecuted more whistle
blowers and deported more Central American immigrants than any other president,
and he boasted that his administration completed the 650-mile anti-immigrant
wall on the US-Mexico border.
But most egregious of all, he failed to prosecute the people responsible for
lying us into the Iraq war, thus setting a dangerous precedent for all future
presidents. This precedent has served him well, for he now gets away with
killing civilians on his "kill list" without benefit (or bother) of a trial.
The president is now judge, jury and executioner -- in violation of the US
Constitution. Between 2008 and 2016, Obama has squandered the enormous amount
of hope and trust the people had placed in him.
John
•
5 hours ago
Fool me once, shame on you.... I will not be fooled again. Vote Jill Stein.
More wars, more socialism for the wealthy, more inequality, more
Surveillance State, more Obamacare.
With Clinton the continuity is certain. She may even significantly up the
ante in some respects.
Reading past the headline would be a waste of time in my experience with
Dionne. But he got the headline right. It's terrifying.
Michael Valentine
•
5 hours ago
Do we really want the continuity of unending wars Mr. Obama. You sick rekcuf.
friendnotfoe
•
5 hours ago
Do people actually believe this shit? Do they convince themselves that they
are doing so much better now? High unemployment still, high student loan
debt still, High cost of health care still. More wars ahead they have been
preparing for that right along more then just a little obvious due to the
high increase in horrible attacks. It is all madness yet they make themselves
believe it's not at all bad and they themselves are doing good things for
the people of this country. Stealing their hard earned money through the
Wall St. crash in 2008 no need to bring any justice for that. The rich
are bent on taking more and yet we are to believe that isn't so. Really???
Cloudchopper
Brad Benson
•
5 hours ago
The other day many Sanders supporters actually cried when he endorsed Hillary and
told people to vote for her to defeat Trump. I have no tears about Sanders selling
out since the writing was on the wall from the beginning.
But most people in this
country should be crying about the horrible situations for at least 80% of the
people. I do not like to use the 1% and 99% comparison alone, it is not quite
realistic but it got the message across by OWS which was dismantled and gotten rid of
by the Obama Administration via the FBI and the police forces around the country.
Chris Henn
Cloudchopper
•
4 hours ago
I think you're spot on with the 80%. There's a theory - I think it's called
the pareto principle - that of any group, the top 20% reap 80% of the
benefits. And of course the top 20% of the top 20% are even more removed
from the rest of us. I think it's much more interesting to look at the top
4% than the top 1%.
Russ
•
6 hours ago
Bullshit we can believe in.
You will never see another marginally progressive policy enacted by the USG, but
please, keep on believing the bullshit while we finish destroying your future!
John T
•
6 hours ago
The difference between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton? Simple, E.J. It's the
difference between a bought and paid for politician who went along with the
Pentagon's endless hunger for war and confrontation as the price to be paid for
occupying the office he lusted after and a bought and paid for politician who cackles
with glee as she leads the charge towards Armagedon.
Brad Benson
John T
•
5 hours ago
"We came. We saw. He died!"
John T
Cloudchopper
•
3 hours ago
If I were pushing for Trump's election, I would make this clip the centerpiece of
every campaign commercial between now and Nov. 8. It is the most appalling
performance that I have ever seen by a major American political figure. Why ANYONE
who pretends to be a liberal would accept this person is beyond my understanding.
WhiteRoses
John T
•
an hour ago
That clip is like the Howard Dean "scream" x 10,000. I agree, it is the most
appalling thing I've seen a major American political figure say and do. She shows her
(considerable) psychopathic side.
John T
Brad Benson
•
5 hours ago
Exactly what I was thinking of. Any human being who would react in this manner is
carrying some very heavy and dangerous psychological baggage with himself or herself.
If I knew nothing at all about HRC, this episode by itself would cause me to oppose
her ever being given a position of power of any sort. A sick and vicious person.
Midnight
•
6 hours ago
More hope and change BS pandering to a room of the deluded by a corporate owned, Wall
St. servant...
A Hillary Clinton parody account on Medium wrote what the real Hillary Clinton has wanted to say
for a long time in an article titled "Let
Me Remind You Fuckers Who I Am." Here's a sample:
What the fuck is your problem, America??
I'm Hillary goddamn Clinton. I'm a political prodigy, have been since I was 16. I have an insane
network of powerful friends. I'm willing to spend the next eight years catching shit on all sides,
all so I can fix this fucking country for you. And all you little bitches need to do is get off
your asses one goddamn day in November.
"Oh but what about your eeeemaaaaillls???" Shut the fuck up. Seriously, shut the fuck up and
listen for one fucking second.
Here's all you need to know about me:
1. In 1992, I said I was proud to have followed my career instead of baking cookies.
3. Every time I have a job, y'all love me. Every time I run for anything, the GOP breaks out
the big guns again and fucks me up good. And apparently it fucking works.
But you know what? I don't fucking care. If I gave two shits about the haters I would've dropped
the game decades ago.
Only the sex-obsessed writers at Cosmopolitan could try that line out... In the article
The Clintons and the Reality of a Long Marriage, the women's magazine attempts to
make the case that the Clinton marriage is actually one that everyone should look up to.
Apparently, hating philandering men is no longer a part of the feminist agenda. At least, as long
as one's wife is running for president.
... ... ...
But virtuous Hillary Clinton stuck by her man! She "could have put her husband's recklessness behind
her like a bad haircut and moved on to continue her change-making and achievements without him too.
But she stayed." And now, the sweet old couple "get to be doting grandparents together, mutually
supporting each other in their latest acts, and potentially becoming the first married to couple
to ever both be President, which will make a good Christmas letter."
Hillary shouldn't be painted
as "a doormat, a punching bag, a fool" for staying married to Bill. It's a sign of strength and nobility!
Or a savvy politician who is trying to be elected President.
The writer's marital counseling goes on. "In the Clinton's marriage model, you screw up. You forgive.
You grow. And you grow old, together, making new memories and celebrating old ones with the same
person you've known since she was "a girl," someone you fell in love with many years ago in the spring."
As gag-inducing as this is, it can't be a surprise. A serial adulterer who's still a popular national
figure and married? That's Cosmo's idea of a hero.
IRS Commissioner John Koskinen
referred congressional charges of corrupt Clinton Foundation "pay-to-play" activities to his
tax agency's exempt operations office for investigation, The Daily Caller News Foundation
has learned.
The request to investigate the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation on charges of "public
corruption" was made in a
July 15 letter by 64 House Republicans to the IRS, FBI and Federal Trade Commission (FTC). They
charged the foundation is "lawless."
The initiative is being led by Rep. Marsha Blackburn, a Tennessee Republican
who serves as the vice chairwoman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, which oversees FTC.
The FTC regulates public charities alongside the IRS.
The lawmakers charged the Clinton Foundation is a "lawless 'pay-to-play' enterprise
that has been operating under a cloak of philanthropy for years and should be investigated."
Koskinen's July 22 reply came only a week after the House Republicans contacted the tax agency.
It arrived to their offices Monday, the first opening day of the Democratic National Convention in
Philadelphia.
"We have forwarded the information you have submitted to our Exempt Organizations
Program in Dallas," Koskinen told the Republicans.
The Exempt Organization Program is the division of the IRS that regulates the operations of public
foundations and charities. It's the same division that was led by former IRS official Lois
Lerner when hundreds of conservative, evangelical and tea party non-profit applicants were
illegally targeted and harassed by tax officials.
Blackburn told TheDCNF she believes the IRS has a double standard because, "they
would go after conservative groups and religious groups and organizations, but they wouldn't be looking
at the Clinton Foundation for years. It was as if they choose who they are going to audit and question.
It's not right."
Blackburn said she and her colleagues will "continue to push" for answers on the Clinton Foundation's
governing policies, including its insular board of directors. She said they also will examine
conflicts of interest and "follow the money trail."
"In my opinion, there's a lack of good governance, there is the appearance of conflicts
of interest, and there are continued questions about the financial dealings," she told
TheDCNF.
House Republicans singled out
Laureate Education and Uranium One as two companies that seemed to have paid lavish sums to the
Clintons and later received official government benefits.
Laureate hired former President Bill Clinton as "honorary chancellor," paying him $16.5 million
over five years. The Baltimore-based company, which operates for-profit universities in 28 countries,
also donated between $1 million and $5 million to the Clinton Foundation, according to the foundation's
web site.
While Bill was collecting a paycheck from the company and his wife was secretary of state, the
International Finance Corporation (IFC), an arm of the World Bank, invested $150 million in Laureate.
It was the largest-ever single IFC investment to an educational company. The United States government
is the largest contributor to the IFC. During that same period, the Department of State's U.S. Agency
for International Development awarded $55 million to the International Youth Foundation. Laureate
CEO Douglas Becker is on the foundation's board of directors. International Youth Foundation, the
Clinton Foundation and Laureate jointly participated in foundation programs.
A Laureate spokesman denied the quid pro quo charges: "Allegations of any quid pro
quo between Laureate, the International Youth Foundation and the Clintons are completely false,"
she told TheDCNF, adding, "the IFC's decision to invest in Laureate had no connection to and was
not influenced in any way whatsoever by Hillary Clinton."
The IFC also awarded $150 million to another company owned by Frank Giustra, a close friend of
Bill Clinton. Giustra donated $100 million to create the "Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership"
within the Clinton Foundation. The funds went to Pacific Infrastructure, a company in which Giustra
had a significant financial stake. The company was to build a port and oil pipeline in Colombia that
was strenuously opposed by environmental and human rights groups because the pipeline sliced through
five indigenous villages and forcibly displaced the tribes.
Giustra also was an owner in Uranium One, a uranium mining company with operations in Kazakhstan
and in the western United States. Giustra wanted to sell a share of the uranium business to Russia's
atomic energy agency, which required U.S. approval, including that of Secretary Clinton. The Russian
investment was approved.
Blackburn added that it appeared the Clinton Foundation - which was tax-exempt only to construct
and manage Clinton's presidential library - never got IRS approval to become a tax-exempt global
organization with operations in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Pacific and the Caribbean.
"In the Clinton Foundation we have a charity that has never filed the appropriate
paperwork," Blackburn charged.
Charles Ortel, a Wall Street analyst who has been investigating the Clinton Foundation, told TheDCNF
that the expansion of the foundation into a global giant was not legally approved by the IRS.
"It's crystal clear in a review of their application that their purposes were narrowly
limited, as they should have been, to a presidential archive in Little Rock, Arkansas,"
he said to TheDCNF. "End of discussion."
Blackburn also questions the makeup of the Clinton Foundation's board of directors, which IRS
rules require include independent, arm's-length board members. The Clinton Foundation board mainly
consists of close friends, business colleagues and big donors to the Clintons, as
reported by TheDCNF.
"All charities need to guard against incestuous relationships which limit their ability
to be objective," the congresswoman said. "In the Clinton Foundation, we see a lack
of diversity within their board."
Uranium One did not respond to TheDCNF's request for comment. The Clinton Foundation also did
not respond to TheDCNF's request for comment.
"... The policy differences between Bernie and Hillary are a chasm from military interventions for regime change, to break up the banks that created the worst recession in the US, to the support of the TPP by HRC, until she thought of political expediency. ..."
"... The Democratic Party is already in disarray and their operatives are carefully shielding this fact with the help of the media that is supportive of HRC. This article will provide what all insiders of the Democratic Party are discussing. http://www.politico.com/story/2016/07/dnc-debbie-wasserman-schultz-226352 ..."
"... The record of the last 8 years is of a president with an almost divine oratory eloquence, but whose words of "Hope, change and the Dreams of My Father" clearly were nothing more than a "sales job" on small donors who were duped in to believing the promised land was on the way. ..."
"... He had 2 years with a complete majority in both houses of congress, but chose to dither rather than promote much needed progressive legislation, for all Americans, but especially those folks in white Appalachia and black urban areas who most needed "Hope". ..."
"... He staffed his cabinet with the very same people who had staffed the banks who gleefully robbed Americans of their pace to live. Bernie, Geitner and others running the Treasury is about as from "Change You Can Believe In" as Chicago is from Mars. ..."
"... His legacy is exclusively "Obamacare", legislation which forces folks to buy from a monopoly of private insurance companies, whose coffers have soared since the regime was implemented. ..."
"... Nice man I do believe, but a shill of the first order and a master stroke by the establishment in producing the right actor at a time when ordinary people seemed ready to storm the castle. ..."
"... Don't get duped by Hillary because she's a female candidate like the black folks did in 2008. ..."
"... Unlike you, there is no "Glass Ceiling" for people like Hillary and Obama. It is as tall and limitless as the elites promise them in return for their obedience and servitude. ..."
"... Sen. Elizabeth Warren in her book "A Fighting Chance" gives one example of Hillary Clinton's lack of any principles. HRC promised Mrs. Warren that she will oppose the Bankruptcy Bill that was lobbied by Big Banks and, as previously existed gave a chance to those who were financially strapped from starting all over. Most who filed for bankruptcy earlier was driven to do so because of medical bills. However, when the Bill came to the vote Hillary Clinton voted with the banks. That's Hillary Clinton. ..."
"... How can you vote for someone who basically destroyed the African American male population w/ the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994? An apology for millions of lives ruined after cheering on her husbands murder of Ricky Ray Rector. ..."
"... "pockets of resistance" ... keep dreaming (and lying) in the hope that your fiction will come true ... the resistance to a HRC presidency (even amongst Democratic convention delegates) is substantial, vibrant and growing ... soon you will see that your misrepresentations are of no effect ..."
"... my guess is that on election day 30-35% of Bernie voters and supporters are either voting for a third party or . . .voting for Trump. ..."
"... The last time something like this happened was 1968. Hundreds of thousands of anti-war young people refused to vote for Hubert Humphrey and that was more or less the margin of his defeat. ..."
"... Don't be naive. The first thing Clinton will do upon entering office is install a shredder next to her personal email server so she can shred the DNC platform away from prying eyes. She has never had any use for progressives and now holds a personal animus toward them for marring her coronation. ..."
We've been played folks - again. We fought for our candidate and lost - we can accept that. What
is hard to swallow is the utter corruption in the DNC and the US election process. We are no longer
the greatest democracy in the world - we're not even a democracy.
We need a third party as an alternative to the corporate controlled parties. This election provides
voters with the best opportunity.
If HRC wins in November it will be the end of the movement that Sanders started, and if the
Democrats lose, it will not only be the end Democratic Party controlled by the corporatists, it
will also be the end of the Republican Party as we know it. We know who will be in charge. Therefore,
defeating the Democratic Party will certainly provide the optimum openings for the Sanders movement,
with or without him, to become stronger, and most probably without him.
Bernie Sanders will live to regret his endorsement of HRC because he caved in to the Democratic
Party establishment that wanted a coronation of Hillary Clinton and not an election. Make no mistake
that the DNC not only undermined Sen. Sanders's democratic campaign, it undermined the the very
democratic process.
The policy differences between Bernie and Hillary are a chasm from military interventions
for regime change, to break up the banks that created the worst recession in the US, to the support
of the TPP by HRC, until she thought of political expediency.
The Democratic Party is already in disarray and their operatives are carefully shielding
this fact with the help of the media that is supportive of HRC. This article will provide what
all insiders of the Democratic Party are discussing.
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/07/dnc-debbie-wasserman-schultz-226352
I say this as someone who is married to an African American woman and mean no disrespect to those
who differ.
I was in Grant Park in Chicago the night Obama got elected in 2008. The atmosphere was electric
with expectation and as we waded through the crowds, I watched in delight as black folks young,
old and for the most parts of the city rejoiced and exalted in the historic breaking of the color
line by the first African American president. "Not healthy to expect one man to achieve all things
in just 4 or 8 years...cut him a little slack" I dead panned, at which point I was roundly put
down as being "Canadian, and just not getting it".
Well I did "get it" and take no pleasure in having proved my in laws wrong.
The record of the last 8 years is of a president with an almost divine oratory eloquence,
but whose words of "Hope, change and the Dreams of My Father" clearly were nothing more than a
"sales job" on small donors who were duped in to believing the promised land was on the way.
He had 2 years with a complete majority in both houses of congress, but chose to dither
rather than promote much needed progressive legislation, for all Americans, but especially those
folks in white Appalachia and black urban areas who most needed "Hope".
He staffed his cabinet with the very same people who had staffed the banks who gleefully
robbed Americans of their pace to live. Bernie, Geitner and others running the Treasury is about
as from "Change You Can Believe In" as Chicago is from Mars.
His legacy is exclusively "Obamacare", legislation which forces folks to buy from a monopoly
of private insurance companies, whose coffers have soared since the regime was implemented.
Nice man I do believe, but a shill of the first order and a master stroke by the establishment
in producing the right actor at a time when ordinary people seemed ready to storm the castle.
So what's the point of this tabling post? Simply this:
There is no more "Left & Right" in western politics. The equation is much simpler. It's You
And your neighbours' interests vs. those of the establishment.
It would have done a lot more for the interests of urban to have gotten a non-black president
in 2008 who actively championed policies and laws to help all poor Americans.
Point is, it doesn't matter a fig if the candidate is he's owned by corrupt interests that
are
And it will matter even less for women, when the candidate is female but has an agenda which
is as far from feminist as New York is from Mercury. Unnecessary wars, a refusal to back a $15
minimum wage and a demonstrated wilful intent to impose the TPP on American workers, and an acceptance
of spousal a issue as a norm make Hillary a bizarre choice for anyone who holds women in high
esteem.
If people tell you the only other choice is Trump, don't believe them and you can't bring yourself
to vote for him then don't . A real feminist is running as candidate for the Greens and even the
Libertarians appear to ha e a more women friendly candidate. What's more, Elizabeth Warren has
a great shot at it in 2020, and she would make an exemplary first female president.
Don't get duped by Hillary because she's a female candidate like the black folks did in 2008.
Unlike you, there is no "Glass Ceiling" for people like Hillary and Obama. It is as tall and
limitless as the elites promise them in return for their obedience and servitude.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren in her book "A Fighting Chance" gives one example of Hillary Clinton's lack
of any principles. HRC promised Mrs. Warren that she will oppose the Bankruptcy Bill that was
lobbied by Big Banks and, as previously existed gave a chance to those who were financially strapped
from starting all over. Most who filed for bankruptcy earlier was driven to do so because of medical
bills. However, when the Bill came to the vote Hillary Clinton voted with the banks. That's Hillary
Clinton.
the African Americans who support her nomination have made a grave mistake letting her be the
nominee. How can you vote for someone who basically destroyed the African American male population
w/ the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994? An apology for millions of lives
ruined after cheering on her husbands murder of Ricky Ray Rector. It makes no sense. We would
be better off voting for Trump. At least we know the racist acts will be to our face as opposed
to in our backs.
"pockets of resistance" ... keep dreaming (and lying) in the hope that your fiction will come
true ... the resistance to a HRC presidency (even amongst Democratic convention delegates) is
substantial, vibrant and growing ... soon you will see that your misrepresentations are of no
effect
Anti-Hillary sentiments may be waning across the country, but it depends how you look at it. I'm
a Bernie voter who won't vote for Hillary. Most of the people I know are capitulating to her candidacy
but not all by a long shot. And then there are the white union voters in the Midwest, who voted
for Bernie. Many are going to vote for Trump. Like with Brexit in the UK, I'm not sure the polling
is sophisticated enough to pick up the unusual nature of anti-Hillary Democratic vote, but my
guess is that on election day 30-35% of Bernie voters and supporters are either voting for a third
party or . . .voting for Trump.
The last time something like this happened was 1968. Hundreds of thousands of anti-war young
people refused to vote for Hubert Humphrey and that was more or less the margin of his defeat.
What another terrible article!! The disunity is not quiet, you're just not willing to tell the
story, instead you post another biased condescending article.
46% of the people who voted in the primaries voted for Bernie many more would if they hadn't been
purged or otherwise had their desire to vote for him sabotaged. That is a lot of people to alienate
for someone who wants to be elected. But the establishment has clearly demonstrated their tin
ear by electing the most establishment team ever in a year when the establishment is held in contempt
by most voters.
For the hypocrite politicians we are IDIOTS! They ignore us, they do not listen or support us.
They think that with empty , fake promises they will convince us to vote them, as we did ALWAYS!
NOW WE SAY NOOOO! We will not vote Clinton, we are not sheep, we will punish them to learn to
listen and respect us.
For many left wing liberals changing our U.S. corrupted political system is a must goal, even
if fascist Trump does it. We know that Clinton wants to maintain it. At this point the far right
conservatives & the far left liberals want to change it democratically by the vote. If it can't
be done democratically the hatred for the system will eventually explode into sheer violence (we
are a violent culture). Trump & Sanders both saw the urgent need for change. Sanders back down
from creating a third party was a huge delay for having a greater democracy. Fascist Trump wants
to change it democratically (making it probable that the RP may split into two parties.). Sander's
great fear of a Trump presidency blinded him from seeing the potential of "after Trump" increasing
the democracy of our nation. (Students take this to the classroom)
Don't be naive. The first thing Clinton will do upon entering office is install a shredder
next to her personal email server so she can shred the DNC platform away from prying eyes. She
has never had any use for progressives and now holds a personal animus toward them for marring
her coronation.
We all knew how serious the DNC was when Kaine was announced - the guy is pro TPP. Hillary doesn't
give a honk about the liberal side of the DP. She would run for either party if it got her in
power to perpetuate her pay-for-play business.
I recognize voting for Jill Stein might hand the presidency to Trump, but people would realize
that you can't let the Clintons run the DNC like happened this time. I hate Trump, but I can't
vote for Hillary.
"... The DNC is an arm of the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party. Hillary is a neo-liberal on economics, and a neo-con on foreign policy. She and her crowd are masters of spin and the management of popular perception. I think Frank and Scheer are being far too kind. The politicians and bankers know exactly what they are doing. They are not deluded, or simply mistaken; they simply do not care. ..."
"The hypocrite's crime is that he bears false witness against himself. What makes it so plausible
to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover
of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with
the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core."
Hannah
Arendt
"Those who are able to climb up the ladder will find ways to pull it up after them, or selectively
lower it down to allow their friends, allies, and kin to scramble up. In other words: 'who says
meritocracy says oligarchy.'"
Chris Hayes
The DNC is an arm of the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party. Hillary is a neo-liberal on economics,
and a neo-con on foreign policy. She and her crowd are masters of spin and the management of popular
perception. I think Frank and Scheer are being far too kind. The politicians and bankers know
exactly what they are doing. They are not deluded, or simply mistaken; they simply do not care.
July 26th, 2016 |
LawNewz
A high profile law firm is now caught up in the DNC WikiLeaks mess. A group of
Bernie Sanders
supporters filed a class action lawsuit against the Democratic
National Committee, and the now-former chairwoman,
Debbie Wasserman-Shultz
.
In a letter sent Monday
, they are demanding that attorneys from Perkins Coie LLP be
removed from the case due to a conflict of interest. New emails discovered through the
WikiLeaks dump show that attorneys from the law firm have given strategy advice to hurt
Sanders, well before he dropped out. To add fuel to their claim, they've now discovered
that attorneys from Perkins Coie are representing both the Democratic National Committee
and Clinton's campaign.
The
lawsuit
, which was actually filed before the leaks, claims that the DNC "actively
concealed its bias" from its donors and supporters backing
Bernie Sanders
. The
plaintiffs say the recent emails only give them more evidence that the Democratic
National Committee was on board with
Hillary Clinton
from the start.
My suggestion is that the DNC put out a statement saying that the
accusations the Sanders campaign are not true. The fact that CNN notes
that you aren't getting between the two campaigns is the problem. Here,
Sanders is attacking the DNC and its current practice, its past practice
with the POTUS and with Sec Kerry. Just as the RNC pushes back directly
on Trump over "rigged system",
the DNC should push back DIRECTLY
at Sanders
and say that what he is saying is false and harmful
the Democratic party. [emphasis added]
"What we have here is evidence from the Wikileaks
database that the same attorneys that are appearing in our case and representing the DNC
in the Southern District of Florida were previously attorneys for the Clinton campaign
or they were providing advice to the DNC that was adverse to Bernie Sanders," attorney
Jared Beck
said in a video posted on line.
While it might "smell" funny, the fact that Elias gave "advice" to the DNC is not
illegal, according to the Campaign Legal Center.
"This email exchange pertains to a perfectly legal joint fundraising committee that
includes the Clinton campaign, the DNC and a bunch of state Democratic Party committees.
The coordination laws/rules don't restrict this type of interaction,"
Paul Ryan,
the Campaign Legal Center's deputy executive director told
LawNewz.com
.
However, attorneys for Bernie Sanders supporters contend that the federal court rules
bar Perkins Coie lawyers from representing the DNC as defense counsel in the case. They
say that the Perkins Coie attorneys may become "potential material witnesses" or
"defendants" in the case and should be disqualified. They plan to file an official
motion in court.
Beck's firm
is
representing about 150 supporters of Bernie Sanders in the proposed class action
lawsuit.
"My email account shows that I've been getting 10 emails per minute from people
around the country that want to join the lawsuit," Beck said. The DNC is attempting
to get the lawsuit dismissed on procedural grounds, they contend that it was never
properly served. Several emails sent to Clinton's lawyer Marc Elias have not been
returned. (He is also listed as the attorney for the DNC on the class action
lawsuit). If we hear back from him, we will update this article accordingly.
Political advocacy group Freedom Watch filed a racketeering lawsuit Wednesday against the
Clintons and their foundation for failing to produce documents under the Freedom of Information
Act.
The civil suit accuses the former secretary of state of conducting a corrupt enterprise for
more than 10 years by using her private emails to, quote, "arrange donations to ... The Clinton
Foundation and large speaking fees ... in return for official government actions, policies,
statements, and/or access to and from State, the U.S. Senate, U.S. House of Representatives or
other parts of the U.S. Government, and arranging other political benefits using the leverage of
her official position."
Freedom Watch's founder Larry Klayman said in a statement:
"This is the first and only hard-hitting case to address the growing email scandal. What
Hillary Clinton, her husband, and their foundation have done is nothing new. It is simply part
of a criminal enterprise which dates back at least 10 years, all designed to enrich themselves
personally at the expense of the American people and our nation. It's time, however, that they
finally be held legally accountable."
Clinton, who is expected to announce a presidential bid in the coming weeks, is also dealing
with conservative group Citizens United over the recent email scandal. The group has filed two
lawsuits demanding photos, videos and hotel bills of Clinton's travels.
Clinton gave more than 55,000 pages of emails from her private account to the State Department
in December, which she has insisted cover any and all official business she conducted via the
private email account while in office. The State Department said it plans to release the 300
emails under FOIA rules once it is done processing them - which is expected to take several
months.
Millions of Bernie Sanders' donors may now have legal recourse against the Democratic
primaries they saw as rigged.
Beck & Lee Trial Lawyers, a civil litigation firm based in Miami, Florida, is announcing the
filing of a class action lawsuit against the DNC early next week, alleging fraud and collusion
with the Hillary Clinton campaign. While roughly one hundred people have officially signed on as
plaintiffs, partner Jared Beck told US Uncut that thousands of requests for legal paperwork have
come in within the last 48 hours.
"Signed agreements are coming in steadily and we continue to get new requests by the minute,"
Beck said.
Anyone who donated to the DNC after Bernie Sanders entered the race for the Democratic
nomination, either directly or indirectly through third-party payment platforms like ActBlue, is
eligible to join the lawsuit, along with anyone who donated to Bernie Sanders' campaign
throughout the course of the primaries and caucuses.
"We think that the DNC has been running absolutely out of control and completely disregarding
their responsibilities, rights, and duties to the public," attorney Elizabeth Beck told US Uncut.
PHILADELPHIA - Scores of Bernie Sanders supporters felt burned Tuesday evening
when Hillary Clinton clinched the Democratic nomination in Philadelphia,
expressing their disappointment by walking out of the Wells Fargo Arena.
With at
least 2,382 delegates pledged to her, Clinton became the first woman to be
nominated to a major U.S. party ticket after a tough primary fight against
Sanders.
Sanders spoke at the end of the roll call asking for unity within the
Democratic party and throwing his support behind the former first lady and
secretary of state, saying he "move[s] that Hillary Clinton be selected as the
nominee of the Democratic Party for president of the United States."
Within minutes of Sanders speaking, a throng of his supporters walked out of
the convention center, waving "Bernie or Bust" signs in the air.
Why those unknown forces (probably a disgruntled insider) leaked this bombshell so late. At this
point it does not affect Sanders chances to beat Hillary.
Notable quotes:
"... "The same people on the Clinton team who made enormous efforts to claim her private email server-which operated unencrypted over the Internet for three months, including during trips to China and Russia, and which contained top-secret national-security data-was not hacked by the Russians now are certain that the DNC server was hacked by the Russians" http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/unpacking-the-dnc-emails/ ..."
"... The British government has learned that Vladimir Putin recently sought significant quantities of malware from Africa. ..."
"... Well, golly, if you're going to create a bright, shiny object to distract people from the actual content of the e-mails, why not blame little green men from Mars? I mean, seriously, isn't what this is all about – deflecting away from what the DNC was up to, so as to keep as much of it as possible from further tarnishing the already-clouded view of both the process and the major candidate whom it benefited? ..."
"... And in addition to this little bit of obviousness, how can it possible have escaped anyone with a functioning brain that this escalating hysteria about the DNC hack was noticeably absent with respect to Clinton's own email operation? ..."
"... I also find it deeply and almost-hilariously ironic that we're all supposed to be livid at the idea of some foreign government trying to manipulate the US elections when not only is the Democratic Party's flagship organization flagrantly engaged in trying to manipulate the outcome, but the AMERICAN MEDIA wouldn't know what to do with itself if it wasn't constantly fking around with the entire process. ..."
"... Looks like another false flag propaganda ploy. The Obama Admin flares up with phony indignation and immediately swears there will be more sanctions. The FBI wants to prosecute ( or is it persecute) the messenger instead of investigating the real crimes. The e-mails and their contents are real. The noise is to cover up this fact! ..."
"... The CNN poll in yesterday's Links shows Trump beats Hillary by huge margins (12 points) on the economy and terrorism. She beats him on foreign policy (and nothing else). Dragging in Russian hackers and foreign intelligence services plays to her strength. ..."
"... In reality, politically motivated attacks like this are almost always domestic in origin. To go to Wikileaks specifically I expect an inside whistleblower is responsible. The same thing happened to Sony and the Swiss banks. Elites simply don't understand how many people they work with are disgusted by their policies. To them this is a perfectly believable thing. ..."
"... It reminds me very much of the French Fries to Freedom Fries movement. If you have a critical mass of people in on the fun, it can work, at least for a time. But what happens when most people don't care about being excommunicated from the DNC Serious People List? ..."
"... Obvious clues pointing back at a known adversary…strategically-timed leaks from anonymous intelligence sources…vague statements on the record from the President and other high-level officials…stories fed to sympathetic media outlets…yep, sounds a lot like the playbook used by the Bush White House for the run-up to the Iraq War. Except there's no way that the Democrats would ever ..."
"... No matter who is responsible for the hack, I'm just glad that the information about the DNC corruption is out in the open. I'm disappointed that this didn't happen before June 7, when California, New Jersey, and several other states had their primaries. Better late than never, I guess. ..."
"... why hadn't our press revealed this? ..."
"... It's now so routine to spin-doctor aggressively that the elites have lost any sense of whether what they are saying is credible or not. ..."
"... I thought Trump's comments today about wanting the Russians to find Hillary's emails were genius. He fans the flames of this whole Russia-Putin thing on day 3 of the Dem convention and what are the media outlets talking about? Plus, Hillary's campaign, in it's rebuttal to Trump, is indirectly reminding everyone that her homebrew server was putting national security at risk. ..."
Washington's Blog asked the highest-level NSA whistleblower in history, William Binney – the NSA
executive who created the agency's mass surveillance program for digital information, who served
as the senior technical director within the agency, who managed six thousand NSA employees, the 36-year
NSA veteran widely regarded as a "legend" within the agency and the NSA's best-ever analyst and code-breaker,
who mapped out the Soviet command-and-control structure before anyone else knew how, and so predicted
Soviet invasions before they happened ("in the 1970s, he decrypted the Soviet Union's command system,
which provided the US and its allies with real-time surveillance of all Soviet troop movements and
Russian atomic weapons") – what he thinks of such claims:
Edward Snowden says the NSA could easily determine who hacked Hillary Clinton's emails:
Evidence that could publicly attribute responsibility for the DNC hack certainly exists
at #NSA , but DNI traditionally
objects to sharing.
The mainstream media is also trumpeting the meme that Russia was behind the hack, because it
wants to help Trump get elected. In other words, the media is trying to deflect how damaging the
email leaks are to Clinton's character by trying to somehow associate Trump with Putin. See e.g.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/26/us/politics/kremlin-donald-trump-vladimir-putin.html
Who's right?
Binney responded:
Snowden is right and the MSM is clueless. Here's what I said to Ray McGovern and VIPS with
a little humor at the end. [McGovern is a 27-year CIA veteran, who chaired National Intelligence
Estimates and personally delivered intelligence briefings to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George
H.W. Bush, their Vice Presidents, Secretaries of State, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and many other
senior government officials. McGovern is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for
Sanity ("VIPS" for short).]
Ray, I am suspicious that they may have looked for known hacking code (used by Russians). And,
I'm sure they were one probably of many to hack her stuff. But, does that mean that they checked
to see if others also hacked in?
Further, do they have evidence that the Russians downloaded and later forwarded those emails
to wikileaks? Seems to me that they need to answer those questions to be sure that their assertion
is correct. Otherwise, HRC and her political activities are and I am sure have been prime targets
for the Russians (as well as many others) but without intent of course.
I would add that we proposed to do a program that would monitor all activity on the world-wide
NSA network back in 1991/92. We called it "Wellgrounded." NSA did not want anyone (especially
congress) to know what was going on inside NSA and therefore rejected that proposal. I have not
read what Ed has said, but, I do know that every line of code that goes across the network is
logged in the network log. This is where a little software could scan, analyze and find the intruders
initially and then compile all the code sent by them to determine the type of attack. This is
what we wanted to do back in 1991/92.
The newest allegation tying the Clinton email hack to Russia seems to be
all innuendo .
Binney explained to us:
My problem is that they have not listed intruders or attempted intrusions to the DNC site.
I suspect that's because they did a quick and dirty look for known attacks.
Of course, this brings up another question; if it's a know attack, why did the DNC not have
software to stop it? You can tell from the network log who is going into a site. I used that on
networks that I had. I looked to see who came into my LAN, where they went, how long they stayed
and what they did while in my network.
Further, if you needed to, you could trace back approaches through other servers etc. Trace
Route and Trace Watch are good examples of monitoring software that help do these things. Others
of course exist … probably the best are in NSA/GCHQ and the other Five Eyes countries. But, these
countries have no monopoly on smart people that could do similar detection software.
Question is do they want to fix the problems with existing protection software. If the DNC
and OPM are examples, then obviously, they don't care to fix weakness probably because the want
to use these weaknesses to their own advantage.
Why is this newsworthy?
Well, the mainstream narrative alleges that the Clinton emails are not important … and that it's
a conspiracy between Putin and Trump to make sure Trump – and not Clinton – is elected.
But there are other issues, as well …
For example, an allegation of hacking could
literally lead to
war .
So we should be skeptical of such serious and potentially far-reaching allegations – which may
be true or may be false – unless and until they are proven .
Yup, as a former server admin it is patently absurd to attribute a hack to anyone in particular
until a substantial amount of forensic work has been done. (read, poring over multiple internal
log files…gathering yet more log files of yet more internal devices, poring over them, then –
once the request hops out of your org – requesting logfiles from remote entities, poring over
*those* log files, requesting further log files from yet more upstream entities, wash rinse repeat
ad infinitum)
For example, at its simplest, I would expect a middling-competency hacker to find an open wifi
hub across town to connect to, then VPN to server in, say, Tonga, then VPN from there to another
box in Sweden, then connect to a PC previously compromised in Iowa, then VPN to yet another anonymous
cloud server in Latvia, and (assuming the mountain dew is running low, gotta get cracking) then
RDP to the target server and grab as many docs as possible. RAR those up and encrypt them, FTP
them to a compromised media server in South Korea, email them from there to someones gmail account
previously hacked, xfer them to a P2P file sharing app, and then finally access them later from
a completely different set of servers.
In many cases where I did this sort of analysis I still ended up with a complete dead end:
some sysadmins at remote companies or orgs would be sympathetic and give me actual related log
files. Others would be sympathetic but would not give files, and instead do their own analysis
to give me tips. Many never responded, and most IPs ended up at unknown (compromised) personal
PCs, or devices where the owner could not be found anyway.
If the hacker was sloppy and left other types of circumstantial evidence you might get lucky
– but that demographic mostly points back to script kiddies and/or criminal dweebs – i.e., rather
then just surreptitiously exfiltrating the goods they instead left messages or altered things
that seemed to indicate their own backgrounds or prejudices, or left a message that was more easily
'traced'. If, of course, you took that evidence at face value and it was not itself an attempt
at obfuscation.
Short of a state actor such as an NSA who captures it ALL anyway, and/or can access any log
files at any public or private network at its own whim – its completely silly to attribute a hack
to anyone at this point.
So, I guess I am reduced to LOL OMG WTF its fer the LULZ!!!!!
hah, well I had a nice long answer but cloudflare blocked me. heh…apparently it doesnt like
certain words one uses when describing this stuff. Understandable!
I guess try looking up 'phishing' and 'privilege elevation' on wikipedia. Former is easiest,
latter gives you street cred.
Just to clarify on the "…If the hacker was sloppy and left other types of circumstantial evidence…"
– this is basically what I have seen reported as 'evidence' pointing to Russia: the Cyrillic keyboard
signature, the 'appeared to cease work on Russian holidays' stuff, and the association with 'known
Russian hacking groups'.
Thats great and all, but in past work I am sure my own 'research' could easily have gotten
me 'associated' with known hacking groups. Presumably various 'sophisticated' methods and tools
get you closer to possible suspects…but that kind of stuff is cycled and recycled throughout the
community worldwide – as soon as anything like that is known and published, any reasonably competent
hacker (or org of hackers) is learning how to do the same thing and incorporating such things
into their own methods. (imitation being the sincerest form of flattery)
I guess I have a lot more respect for the kinds of people I expect to be getting a paycheck
from foreign Intelligence agencies then to believe that they would leave such obvious clues behind
'accidentally'. But if we are going to be starting wars over this stuff w/Russia, or China, I
guess I would hope the adults in the room don't go all apesh*t and start chanting COMMIES, THE
RUSSIANS ARE COMING!, etc. before the ink is dry on the 'crime'.
Even then, I fail to see why this person (foreign, domestic, professional, amateur, state-sponsored,
or otherwise) hasn't done us a great service by exposing the DNC corruption in the first place.
Hell, I would love to give them the Medal of Freedom for this and (hopefully) the next boot to
drop! :)
There is a problem with those who argue that these are sophisticated Nation State attackers
and then point to the most basic circumstantial evidence to support their case. I'd bet that,
among others, the Israelis have hacked some Russian servers to launch attacks from and have some
of their workers on a Russian holiday schedule. Those things have been written about in attack
analysis so much over the last 15-20 years that they'd be stupid not to.
Now, I'm not saying the Israelis did it. I'm saying that the evidence provided so far by those
arguing it is Russia is so flaky as to prove that the Russia accusers are blinded
or corrupted by their own political agenda.
Oh, "they" just use the system management features baked right into the embedded computers
either the ones inside the "secure server" itself or (much more convenient and easy to do), they
attack the cheap-ish COTS lapdog that the support techie will be using to access the "secure server"
with:
– if there's a non-NSA evidence the attacks originated from Russia, then someone wanted the
world to know it was from Russia (or was just a private snoop).
– even if there was a technical evidence that the attack originated from Russia, unless it
could be tied very specifically to an institution (as opposed to a "PC in Russia"), it does not
prove that it was Russia. All it proves that someone using a computer in Russia initiated it.
Well phooey. My theory now goes up in smoke: Here we can clearly see an attempt at disinformation
from a Russian Operative, likely FSB – possibly from Putin's inner circle.
We know this through 2 things:
A.) The name, 'Vlad' – inequivocally a Russian given name, and not a common one at that.
B.) Note the slightly wrong grammar: "…a non-NSA evidence…" & "..was a technical evidence".
Clearly not a native English speaker.
See how easy that was? Yves, no need for log files to track IP here…case closed. In Soviet
Russia, crow eats me.
Anyone gots some nuke launch codes handy? 00000000 doesn't work for me anymore…
The recently murdered DNC Date Director Seth Rich being the leaker, or at least knowing who
the leaker was, as was hinted at recently by Julian Assange himself, makes a far more interesting
conspiracy theory.
Ten days after the murder of promising Democratic staffer Seth Rich, the Washington D.C.
slaying remains unsolved and police say they have no suspects in the crime.
Rich, a Jewish data analyst for the Democratic National Committee who worked on polling
station expansion, was shot and killed as he walked home on Sunday, July 10.
Police told Rich's parents that they believed his death was the result of a botched robbery.
Though Rich's killer did not take his wallet or phone, D.C. Police Commander William Fitzgerald
said that "there is no other reason (other than robbery) for an altercation at 4:30 in the
morning" at a community meeting on Monday.
The meeting was meant to address the recent uptick in robberies in the Bloomingdale neighborhood
near Howard University. Police reports say robberies in the area are down 20%, but an investigation
by the Washington Post found that armed robberies are actually up over 20% compared
with July 2015.
Of course there is absolutely no proof of Seth Rich's involvement, but I suppose it is a reasonable
surmise, as George Will recently said about the Russia allegations! In any case a possible crypto-BernieBro
tech-guy mole from within the DNC, as the source of the DNCLeaks, would make a much better made-for-TV
movie than the Russian theory. And if it was an internal mole, what better way to cover their
tracks than to leave some "traces" of a Russian hack.
Its one thing for Republicans to resort to the old chestnut of red scare mongering, but for
the Democrats to use the same ammo they once had lobed at them is surreal….
"The same people on the Clinton team who made enormous efforts to claim her private email
server-which operated unencrypted over the Internet for three months, including during trips to
China and Russia, and which contained top-secret national-security data-was not hacked by the
Russians now are certain that the DNC server was hacked by the Russians"
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/unpacking-the-dnc-emails/
Well, golly, if you're going to create a bright, shiny object to distract people from the
actual content of the e-mails, why not blame little green men from Mars? I mean, seriously, isn't
what this is all about – deflecting away from what the DNC was up to, so as to keep as much of
it as possible from further tarnishing the already-clouded view of both the process and the major
candidate whom it benefited?
And in addition to this little bit of obviousness, how can it possible have escaped
anyone with a functioning brain that this escalating hysteria about the DNC hack was noticeably
absent with respect to Clinton's own email operation?
I also find it deeply and almost-hilariously ironic that we're all supposed to be livid
at the idea of some foreign government trying to manipulate the US elections when not only is
the Democratic Party's flagship organization flagrantly engaged in trying to manipulate the outcome,
but the AMERICAN MEDIA wouldn't know what to do with itself if it wasn't constantly fking around
with the entire process.
I'm not sure we're ever coming out of this rabbit-hole-to-hell.
Looks like another false flag propaganda ploy. The Obama Admin flares up with phony indignation
and immediately swears there will be more sanctions. The FBI wants to prosecute ( or is it persecute)
the messenger instead of investigating the real crimes. The e-mails and their contents are real.
The noise is to cover up this fact!
"Why play the Russian/Putin/Trump card with the DNC email hack?" – An excellent question for
which you have provided a logical potential answer. Beyond that, this generally seems like an
act of desperation. I am nowhere near an expert on the details of hacking like the two who have
commented above, but what I see is a desperate attempt to capture the "stupid" vote. The whole
Democrat dog and pony show being put on now only serves to make those who will vote for Hillary
no matter what, feel self satisfied that they are right minded. What matters though is how they
connect with those not inclined to vote for her. In their logic it follows that the HIllary crowd
basically believes that anyone who would consider voting for Trump is very stupid, and this is
a desperate attempt to convince the "stupid's" to vote for Hillary. I have no idea how Trump will
act if he is elected President, but the critical factor for me is that there is now overwhelming
evidence that the entire Democrat establishment is just like Hillary (as made clear by Mr. Comey):
They are either grossly negligent and incompetent, or criminals who are not being prosecuted.
Anyone but her and her merry band of thieves will leave us all better off after November.
The association the Dems want to create is "scary foreign people support Trump".
The CNN poll in yesterday's Links shows Trump beats Hillary by huge margins (12 points)
on the economy and terrorism. She beats him on foreign policy (and nothing else). Dragging in
Russian hackers and foreign intelligence services plays to her strength.
In reality, politically motivated attacks like this are almost always domestic in origin.
To go to Wikileaks specifically I expect an inside whistleblower is responsible. The same thing
happened to Sony and the Swiss banks. Elites simply don't understand how many people they work
with are disgusted by their policies. To them this is a perfectly believable thing.
I also wonder whether there are significant numbers of Poles and Eastern Europeans generally
in the industrial precincts in some swing states; a vote against Russia in the form of a vote
against Trump might appeal to them.
I doubt it's that strategic–looks more like classic red-baiting (minus any communism but saying
"Russia" still evokes the same emotional response for people of a certain age) of the sort a former
Goldwater girl like Hillary would understand all too well.
Linking the hack and delivery of DNC emails to WIkiLeaks by Putin as a way of helping Trump
may strategically backfire.
Agreed. There are so many moving parts at this point the blowback looks to happen more rapidly
than they can manage perception, especially with things online. They spent so much time segmenting
and dismissing the various developments as disparate conspiracy theories, and now in one fell
swoop they've both legitimized critiques and connected them together (they run the risk that even
criticism that isn't true will still stick more than it otherwise would have). I'm not sure they
fully realize what they've done yet. It's a simple equation to them: Wikileaks = Bad. Russia =
Bad. Wikileaks + Russia = DoubleBad.
It reminds me very much of the French Fries to Freedom Fries movement. If you have a critical
mass of people in on the fun, it can work, at least for a time. But what happens when most people
don't care about being excommunicated from the DNC Serious People List?
Obvious clues pointing back at a known adversary…strategically-timed leaks from anonymous
intelligence sources…vague statements on the record from the President and other high-level officials…stories
fed to sympathetic media outlets…yep, sounds a lot like the playbook used by the Bush White House
for the run-up to the Iraq War. Except there's no way that the Democrats would ever do
something so shady.
Admin feeds story to crony media –> media report story as if independently sourced –> admin
then uses those reports to corroborate its own claims
It's not like they can reasonably deny anymore that they do this. The DNC leak provides hard
evidence. So plant your stories now, before there's a run!
Hey why fix our cybersecurity problems when we can just bomb Russia instead? To a hammer with
bombs everything looks like a nail.
Perhaps the biggest tell regarding our clueless, and mostly geriatric, establishment is their
superstitious misunderstanding of modern technology. Every toddler these days probably knows that
you don't put controversial material in emails or on cellphones unless you are willing to take
the kind of precautions Snowden talks about. The notion of ginning up an international conflict
over hacking is like Hollywood's idea of five years in jail for stealing one of Meryl Streep's
movies. The punishment doesn't fit the crime.
Plus of course there's the immense irony of the US, home of the NSA, getting huffy about other
countries doing the same thing. As always with out elites it's "do as we say, not as we do."
No matter who is responsible for the hack, I'm just glad that the information about the
DNC corruption is out in the open. I'm disappointed that this didn't happen before June 7, when
California, New Jersey, and several other states had their primaries. Better late than never,
I guess.
1. Before the evidence comes out: "The DNC is secretly sabotaging Sanders? Laughable conspiracy
theory!"
2. After the evidence comes out: "There's nothing new here, everyone knew this was happening,
it made no difference anyway! Sore loser."
Was flipping through 'convention' last night and happened upon Bernie's face as they try to
thank/bury him. It was the look of resignation to corruption, like Mr. Smith's just before Claude
Rains goes extra-Hollywood, tries to off himself, then says 'Arrest me', etc.
Bernie, you should have just run against both of them, damn the torpedoes.
It doesn't matter if Russia hacked it or someone else. The really important issue this brings
up is why hadn't our press revealed this? Why do we need to here about this from outsiders? And
why, now that it has been released, do they spend the bulk of their time speculating on the source
and not the content? Me thinks it's because our corporate main stream media, that merely masquerades
as a press entity, was complicit.
I think the leaked emails establish that the DNC was working closely with the 'press'. Anyone
who watched CNN during the primary season would not be surprised at the revelation that the 'press'
was complicit in the coronation of Hillary.
The DNCLeaks showed that the DNC (aka the Clinton Machine) was heavily influencing,
if not totally controlling, much of the mass media, using it to smear HRC's rivals and to
whitewash her crimes.
This fascist totalitarian control of the mass media by the DNC/Clinton campaign
has been exposed but that doesn't mean it has stopped! It hasn't. Ergo, one
will see minimal to no coverage, or whitewashing or diversionary coverage.
Why isn't it just as grave a concern that the primary contest of one of the 2 major political
parties was rigged to favor one candidate? Heck, people worried more about deflategate.
an aside: "A separate story pointed out that Trump's primary banking relationships are with
mid-sized players, and that makes sense too. He's be a third-tier account at a too-big-to-fail
banks (see here on how a much richer billionaire was abused by JP Morgan). Trump would get much
better service at a smaller institution. "
From what I've read at NC I think everyone would get much better service at a smaller
bank than at a TBTF.
"I joked early on that in the Obama administration that its solution to every problem was
better propaganda. What is troubling is how so many other players have emulated that strategy.
It's now so routine to spin-doctor aggressively that the elites have lost any sense of
whether what they are saying is credible or not. And as a skeptical consumer of media,
I find it uncomfortable to be living in an informational hall of mirrors."
It's no coincidence that trust in institutions is at an all-time low.
Eroded public trust translates to crappy, Banana Republic economies - and politics so venal that
it requires constant deceit to (mal)function.
On the upside, the dwindling credibility of institutions is providing opportunities for outlets
like The Young Turks (via YouTube), which take a lot of time unpacking propaganda and looking
for alternative perspectives. Ditto 'The Real News Network' (RNN). And ditto NC.
When I hear the "reporters" and "newscasters" on our American MSM speak, it reminds me of something
Wolfgang Leonhard taught: "Pravda lies in such a a way that not even the opposite of what they
say is true."
Huh. It is clear and irrefutable that the NSA (ie, the USA) has hacked Germany, France, Britain,
Japan, etc, etc, etc, etc. So…since hacking is an "act of war" we are now at war with our allies.
Yes?
Or does a war-worthy hack HAVE to originate in Russia (or China) to be an "act of war"? If
the USA is doing it it's an act of peacylove?
If the issue is the hack itself and its perpetrator(s), as opposed to the content of the hack,
I remain curious about the inattention to this fact: One of the documents in the DNC cache released
by Wikileaks was an excel spreadsheet of Trump donors. I haven't heard
anyone question the origin of a document that would itself appear to be the product of a hack
by the DNC (the only other possibility that comes to mind is a mole inside the Trump campaign).
I certainly haven't seen a request by the Trump campaign or anybody else for an FBI investigation
of what would seem to be prima facie evidence of a hack by the DNC of Trump computers in violation
of 18 U.S.C. § 1030.
But, then, there's been relative silence, generally, by the DNC with regard to leaks of donor
information. At least I haven't seen any PR-ly apology by the DNC, or Trump's organization for
that matter, for the insecure storing of donor information and a promise that steps have been
taken to make sure it doesn't happen again. Maybe I just missed that public apology. But I also
wonder if there isn't a reluctance to draw any attention whatsoever to that now public information.
Trump's affection for Putin and all things Russian has been known for years. In Russia, however,
Trump is considered to be clownish. Putin's affection for Trump might best be characterized as
condescending. Trump is the preference of the Putin crowd. And why not? Russian oligarch money
has been flowing into Trump's coffers for at least a decade. Why? Well, after four bankruptcies,
where else is Trump going to borrow money? There is solid evidence of financial ties between Trump
advisors and Putin's circle. Try the website Ballotpedia and look up "Carter Page," Trump's advisor
on all things Russian. Other examples are out there.
That said, I would not absolutely eliminate Putin and his operatives of conspiring with hackers
to obtain and then release documents that would denigrate the Democratic party and HRC.
I find it interesting that Trump telegraphed to the world a skeptical view of NATO allies,
especially the Putin-coveted Baltics, and signaled that he might not come to their defense if
attacked. Those views were expressed in an interview with the New York Times on Thursday, July
21. These comments, predictably, set off alarms all across Europe, and had Republicans scrambling
to backpedal. And then the next day, come the DNC leaks.
And now rumors of Scalia's assassination are being floated again! Distraction after distraction!
KKR, Blackstone, Apollo, etc al, have bankrupted HUNDREDS of companies each. Yet they not only
do they have no trouble borrowing money, they are eagerly pursued by Wall Street.
Trump has never gone bankrupt personally. He had four companies go bankrupt. Trump has started
and operated hundreds of corporate entities. That makes his ratio of bankruptcies way lower than
average and thus means he's a good credit, and much better than private equity. I'm not about
to waste time tracking it down, but the media has already reported on who Trump's regular lender
is, and it's a domestic financial institution, but not one of the TBTF banks.
In addition, I had a major NYC real estate developer/syndicator, a billionaire, in the late
1980s. The early 1990s recession hit NYC real estate very hard and every developer was in serious
trouble. My former client and Trump were the only big NYC developers not to have to give up major
NY properties to the banks.
And as far as your NATO remarks are concerned, you've clearly not been paying attention. Trump
has been critical of the US role in NATO for months, and has already gotten plenty of heat for
that.
Finally, as even the New York Times was forced to concede, the timing of the hacks was all
wrong to be intended to help Trump. It started long before he was a factor on the Republican side.
The DNC hired Crowdstrike to get 2 major Russian hacks off the DNC network prior to this guccifer2.0
nonsense.
You write: "Binney explained to us:
My problem is that they have not listed intruders or attempted intrusions to the DNC site. I suspect
that's because they did a quick and dirty look for known attacks."
But they have listed the initial intruders, see links below.
Binny keeps describing how he would check his LAN back in 1991. His experience is that of a
dinosaur. This article is a mess, conflating the Hrc email scandal with the DNC scandal. What
is at issue, as stated in the FAIR link, is whether the leak to gawker and wiki etc was perpetrated
by a lone Romanian hacker or by the Russian government, not whether the DNC was spied upon by
the Russian; it was.
I am not arguing the the Clinton campaign did not figure out how to use this to their advantage,
guccifer 2.0 and crowd strike stuff both came out in June but was not the subject of much crowing
until now…
> not whether the DNC was spied upon by the Russian; it was.
Based on what evidence? So many blanket statements we're supposed to accept as fact. No.
Guccifer 1.0, who is Romanian, hacked Sidney Blumenthal's email. Generally speaking, Romanians
like many Eastern Europeans hate Russia. Guccifer 1.0 was extradited to the US and made various
statements to the press about Clinton's private email server. I'm not aware of anything he said
about the DNC.
Guccifer 2.0 released DNC documents to the public and apparently to WikiLeaks. There is no
evidence he is Russian or connected to the Russians.
The mainstream media is also trumpeting the meme that Russia was behind the hack, because it
wants to help Trump get elected. In other words, the media is trying to deflect how damaging the
email leaks are to Clinton's character by trying to somehow associate Trump with Putin. See e.g.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/26/us/politics/kremlin-donald-trump-vladimir-putin.html "
don't you mean MSM wants to get Clinton elected, not Trump?
think the sentence was trying to express the idea that "Russia" "wants to help Trump get elected–the
"it" referring to "Russia" and not to "mainstream media"–as that idea is the predicate of a meme
that the mainstream media is trumpeting.
Always better to repeat the noun you are referring to, rather than use a pronoun, where use
of a pronoun could create ambiguity, as "it" (or should I have said, " such use" ?) did here.
Did any one see the recent docu ' Zero days' re STUXNET worm (invented by combined efforts
of US _NSA,CIA + Israeli intelligent +?UK) introduced into the NET to take down the Nulc program
in IRAN!
There is fascinating discussion and the threat of cyber terrorism from any one from any where
to the infra structures – Energy grid, transportation ++
It has lot of bearing on this Hillary E-mail gate scandal
Did you bother reading the comments earlier in this thread by JacobiteInTraining and Hacker,
who confirm that the claims don't stand up to scrutiny?
And you appear not to have been following this at all. Right after the story broke, a hacker
who called himself Guccifer 2.0 posted two sets of DNC docs and said more were coming, which was
presumed even then to be a Wikileaks releases (Assange had separately said lots of material on
Clinton was coming).
Because Hillary's campaign has insisted that national security was not compromised with her
use of a homebrew email server. Which would be the higher value target to a foreign intelligence
service – email she used as sec state, or the DNC server? Which would probably have better security
– the homebrew server, or the DNC server? If you buy into the idea that the Russians hacked the
DNC server, you have to admit there is a _strong_ probability they hacked her personal server
as well. I find it kindof amusing that her campaign, in it's response to Trump today, is basically
making the same point (even though it hasn't sunk in yet).
That's why it's relevant.
I can't speak to what security Hillary had in place. But I can say with 100% certainty that
it is I direly easier to secure a small network for one or two people over a large network that
has 100s or 1000s.
I have been working in network security for 20 years. I guarantee that I could build a small
network that would be close to impossible to break into regardless of the ability of the attacker.
So I reject the premise that we should presume that Hillary was hacked
I suggest you get up to speed on this story before making assumptions and assertions based
on them. It has been widely reported that Hillary's tech had no experience in network security
whatsoever, so the issue re the size of the network is irrelevant.
Bryan Pagliano's
resume , which the State Department recently turned over to Judicial Watch, shows he had
neither experience nor certification in protecting email systems against cyber security threats
His main qualification seems to be that he had been an IT director for the Clinton campaign
in 2006. CNN points out he was hired at State as a "political appointee":
Again, irrelevant to my point. The fact that the DNC mail servers were hacked does NOT mean
that Clinton's mail servers were hacked. Clinton's mail servers may have been hacked and Assange
is claiming that he has documents that prove it was. But, to date, no evidence has been provided
to show that her mail servers were hacked.
What we DO know is that the State Department mail servers were hacked, at least twice and at
least once by the Russians.
Regardless, none of this has anything to do with whether the Russians hacked the DNC mail servers
and whether they gave that information to Wikileaks.
Crowdstrike ,
Fiedlis Cybersecurity , and Mandiant all independently corroborated that it was the Russians.
The German government corroborated that an SSL cert found on the DNC servers was the same cert
that was used to infiltrate the German Parliament.
guccifer 2.0 is some guy that made a claim that made a claim the day AFTER Crowdstrike released
their report. He/She offered no evidence to support their claim.
So perhaps 3 different professional IT security companies are incompetent, despite all evidence
to the contrary, or Guccifer 2.0 is just some guy trying to take credit for something they didn't
do or it is a Russian agent trying to actively distract people from the actual culprits.
It is possible that the Russians weren't the ones to give the docs to wikileaks. But they almost
certainly were the ones who perpetrated an attack into the DNC mail servers. That in itself is
a huge problem.
I'm curious, is your background on the computer side or the policy side? You're making some
leaps where I think I follow your meaning, but the actual logic/evidence/warrant isn't there,
so I'm not sure exactly what you're claiming.
Aside from questions of whether elements of the Russian government attacked the DNC,
for example, you imply that the Russians were the only people attacking the DNC. Do you
have any technical reason to conclude that? Or is it just sloppy sentence construction, and you
didn't mean to imply that? Because at a policy level, it seems a reasonably solid understanding
of the world we inhabit that elements of many foreign governments attack US computer
systems, both for active penetration of documents and for more passive denial of service by legitimate
users. For goodness sakes, elements of the USFG itself attack US computer systems.
Anyone who can stand up straight for 5 minutes without falling over backwards and has half
a brain and an ounce of institutional memory knows it wasn't the Russkies who dropped the email
dime on the DNC shenanigans…
I thought Trump's comments today about wanting the Russians to find Hillary's emails were
genius. He fans the flames of this whole Russia-Putin thing on day 3 of the Dem convention and
what are the media outlets talking about? Plus, Hillary's campaign, in it's rebuttal to Trump,
is indirectly reminding everyone that her homebrew server was putting national security at risk.
This whole Russia-Putin connection thing won't work – it really isn't that believable in the
first place, the timing is suspect, and a lot of people in this country really don't care that
deeply about Putin one way or the other.
"... If he just avoids a major world war, that will be enough for me. Because I believe the American elite would be quite happy for that to happen – it badly wants Russia taken off the board, and China too if they will not cooperate and learn their place, and such a war would be fought in Europe – again – while America is insulated by distance. Of course Russia would ensure America paid a price, but in the plan, their missiles would not reach their targets owing to the USA's brilliant missile defense. ..."
"... If this is not America's plan, then the last 5 years' amped-up hatred and deliberate alienation of Russia from the United States, for a generation at least, looks awfully stupid. ..."
"... For the moment, at least, Trump has pulled into the lead . It remains to be seen if Sanders democrats will forgive Clinton for her unconscionable maneuvering, self-promotion and subordination of the DNC to her cause alone, not to mention what must now be complete disillusionment with the latter organization. The democrats, amazingly, are making the republicans look clean by comparison. ..."
"... Don't underestimate how stupid they can be. They trashed Afghanistan and Iraq, and were then surprised that Iran became the dominating power in the region (after destroying Iran's two most formidable foes). ..."
"... The US government can do stupidity, I don't think they plan so well. ..."
If you should happen to like to see our Fern's excellent comment on here turned into a 'Letter
to the Editor', look no further than here: http://www.ukipdaily.com/letters-editor-26th-july-2016/
Hers is the second of three – the last one by an American friend about the Hillary convention
is a hoot!
It looks even more visionary in a newspaper format. And the third comment is indeed a cracker.
I don't understand why there is not a general revolt in the United States – are Americans seriously
going to put up with this complete and brazen hijacking of what was not even a democratic process
to begin with? And what next? Will Hillary simply rewrite the Presidential term in office to 'forever'?
I don't think Hilary is going to get in.
In the first place, the now nearly daily muslim terrorist acts in Europe add another 5% each to
Trump's vote.
In the second place, more and more dirt will come out on Hilary and Bill, and more and more people
are aware of the underhand dealings in vote counting. It was one thing to keep quiet four years
ago when most people couldn't give a toss about Romney, so squeals of voting fraud were not widely
reported.
Now they know, now they are aware, and now, unlike Romney, there's one candidate who's not afraid
of saying what most people think.
I belive Trump will do it.
What happens after he's in – well, it's gotta be better than Hilary.
If he just avoids a major world war, that will be enough for me. Because I believe the American
elite would be quite happy for that to happen – it badly wants Russia taken off the board, and
China too if they will not cooperate and learn their place, and such a war would be fought in
Europe – again – while America is insulated by distance. Of course Russia would ensure America
paid a price, but in the plan, their missiles would not reach their targets owing to the USA's
brilliant missile defense.
If this is not America's plan, then the last 5 years' amped-up hatred and deliberate alienation
of Russia from the United States, for a generation at least, looks awfully stupid.
For the moment, at least,
Trump has pulled into the lead . It remains to be seen if Sanders democrats will forgive Clinton
for her unconscionable maneuvering, self-promotion and subordination of the DNC to her cause alone,
not to mention what must now be complete disillusionment with the latter organization. The democrats,
amazingly, are making the republicans look clean by comparison.
"Of course Russia would ensure America paid a price, but in the plan, their missiles would not
reach their targets owing to the USA's brilliant missile defense."
Don't underestimate how stupid they can be. They trashed Afghanistan and Iraq, and were then surprised
that Iran became the dominating power in the region (after destroying Iran's two most formidable
foes).
The US government can do stupidity, I don't think they plan so well.
After Flame and Stixnet worms as well as Snowden revelations, the US now is on receiving end its
own sophisticated method of attacks which make finding the origin almost impossible.
Notable quotes:
"... Mook's "Russians under the bed" gaslighting is useful on a number of fronts: Ginning up war fever for an October surprise ; setting up a later McCarthy-ite purge of Trump supporters, Clinton skeptics, or even those prematurely anti-Trump ; and if we're truly blessed, a real shooting war ; some damned thing in the Baltic or the Black Sea, or wherever the Kagan clan points to on the map in the war room. And it's always useful to be able to convert one's opponents to enemies by accusing them of treason, especially in an election year. ..."
"... Yup, as a former server admin it is patently absurd to attribute a hack to anyone in particular until a substantial amount of forensic work has been done. (read, poring over multiple internal log files…gathering yet more log files of yet more internal devices, poring over them, then – once the request hops out of your org – requesting logfiles from remote entities, poring over *those* log files, requesting further log files from yet more upstream entities, wash rinse repeat ad infinitum). ..."
"... For example, at its simplest, I would expect a middling-competency hacker to find an open wifi hub across town to connect to, then VPN to server in, say, Tonga, then VPN from there to another box in Sweden, then connect to a PC previously compromised in Iowa, then VPN to yet another anonymous cloud server in Latvia, and (assuming the mountain dew is running low, gotta get cracking) then RDP to the target server and grab as many docs as possible. RAR those up and encrypt them, FTP them to a compromised media server in South Korea, email them from there to someones gmail account previously hacked, xfer them to a P2P file sharing app, and then finally access them later from a completely different set of servers. ..."
"... most IPs ended up at unknown (compromised) personal PCs, or devices where the owner could not be found anyway. ..."
"... If the hacker was sloppy and left other types of circumstantial evidence you might get lucky – but that demographic mostly points back to script kiddies and/or criminal dweebs – i.e., rather then just surreptitiously exfiltrating the goods they instead left messages or altered things that seemed to indicate their own backgrounds or prejudices, or left a message that was more easily 'traced'. If, of course, you took that evidence at face value and it was not itself an attempt at obfuscation. ..."
"... Short of a state actor such as an NSA who captures it ALL anyway, and/or can access any log files at any public or private network at its own whim – its completely silly to attribute a hack to anyone at this point ..."
"... That's great and all, but in past work I am sure my own 'research' could easily have gotten me 'associated' with known hacking groups. Presumably various 'sophisticated' methods and tools get you closer to possible suspects…but that kind of stuff is cycled and recycled throughout the community worldwide – as soon as anything like that is known and published, any reasonably competent hacker (or org of hackers) is learning how to do the same thing and incorporating such things into their own methods. (imitation being the sincerest form of flattery) ..."
"... There is a problem with those who argue that these are sophisticated Nation State attackers and then point to the most basic circumstantial evidence to support their case. I'd bet that, among others, the Israelis have hacked some Russian servers to launch attacks from and have some of their workers on a Russian holiday schedule. Those things have been written about in attack analysis so much over the last 15-20 years that they'd be stupid not to. ..."
"... Now, I'm not saying the Israelis did it. I'm saying that the evidence provided so far by those arguing it is Russia is so flaky as to prove that the Russia accusers are blinded or corrupted by their own political agenda. ..."
"... Problem #1: The IP address 176.31.112[.]10 used in the Bundestag breach as a Command and Control server has never been connected to the Russian intelligence services. In fact, Claudio Guarnieri , a highly regarded security researcher, whose technical analysis was referenced by Rid, stated that "no evidence allows to tie the attacks to governments of any particular country." ..."
"... This post is not about today's ..."
"... Carr makes the point that even supposed clues about Russian involvement ("the default language is Cyrillic!") are meaningless as all these could be spoofed by another party. ..."
"... Separately it just shows again Team Clinton's (and DNC's) political deviousness and expertise how they –with the full support of the MSM of course –have managed to deflect the discussion to Trump and Russia from how the DNC subverted US democracy. ..."
"... Absent any other evidence to work with, I can accept it as credible that a clumsy Russian or Baltic user posted viewed and saved docs instead of the originals; par for the course in public and private bureaucracies the world over. It would have been useful to see the original Properties metadata; instead we get crapped up copies. That only tells me the poster is something of a lightweight, and it at least somewhat suggests that these docs passed through multiple hands ..."
"... Absolutely agree. Breed the stupid, use the stupid. how long can an idiocratic system last. I need to emigrate. ..."
"... "If the electorate doesn't meet your standards, lower them." ..."
"... One guy on Twitter, even with 10 million followers, can't overcome the Mighty Wurlitzer of the media all blasting the "Looke, over there! Baddie Rooskies!" tout ensemble ..."
"... The thing that most bothers me is that this is supportive of the Kagans and Hillary's push to foment a shooting war with Russia. The so-called metadata that they point to is all something that could very easily be created by an amateur who was actually given access to the DNC's server(s). The "investigator" who issued the conclusion has no record of integrity. ..."
"... Yes, the logical endgame of a 'Trump is a Russian stooge' strategy is that the stronger Trump is in the polls, the greater the incentive to stage an October Surprise with Russia. Something tells me that this lot would quite happily risk a nuclear war if it gave them a better chance of winning an election. ..."
"... … all of which does indeed show a smoking gun, but not the same smoking gun as is being reported. What is shown is that, in addition to the fact that a technical investigation being made by reasonably competent people, a PR team has also been brought in to design the messaging, disseminate the message to the public and create the "right" optics for the story. Such PR / media management teams are fully-paid up members of the Credentialed Class. As such, they want to be seen to earn their money and prove they should get more of it from their elite benefactors in the future. This has an almost inevitable consequence that they will seize on what was probably a suggestive-but-not-conclusive piece of evidence from an investigating team and embellish it with a conclusion which isn't proven or even supported by the actual evidence. Saddam Hussein's "weapons of mass destruction" (which, of course, didn't exist) is perhaps the best-known example of this phenomena. ..."
"... When you set up a new computer, one of the things a setup routine gets the user to answer is the location of the PC and the input language. This, amongst many other things, sets the code pages used for backwards compatibility in text files which don't support Unicode. It is so easy to forget this has ever been set by a hacker who then merrily goes on to write their hack completely oblivious to the fact they've given - if they are not very careful - the location of their home country away. Or, at least, their native language. If I get chance I'll send a screen shot of a typical application and how a user might be completely unaware of how they are disclosing their location / language if I can hook up to an anonymous hosting service) which might make it a bit clearer for readers. ..."
"... As I've described above, it is a trivial task to "spoof" a PC into looking like it was being used by a Russian, Korean, Chinese, whatever, based person or group. You either do it during the PC setup process or else you can with a few clicks change the default locale on any PC or other operating system. Hey-presto. You can now produce what looks like "Russian" (or any other language) flavoured text and cunningly have these tell-tale code pages appear in your malicious code or similar. ..."
"... In other words, the Cyrillic attribute indicates that the posted docs are not originals ..."
"... Which is telling. The DNC never disavowed the e-mails. They just simply said "See, it's those damn Russians up to their old tricks again". It's like watching an episode of "Maury" when someone gets caught cheating, then try to 1) blame someone/something else for the cheating 2) then apologize for said cheating (ONLY because they got caught) and say "c'mon, baby, let's move on from this"… ..."
"... I wonder if it would be overly technodeterminist to argue one of the primary reasons for displacement of journalists and other human knowledge interpreters by machines and algorithms was the NSA's secret need to make sense of their massive telemetry and data as the Cold War ended and the Information Age and Comparative Advantage became ossified neoclassical economic theory and practice. ..."
"... The Russians are trying to rig the elections by exposing how we tried to rig the elections! THIS MEANS WAR! ..."
"... The childish, credulous, transparently Machevellian propagandizing by the DNC here, especially the deflection in place of serious scientific analysis, is beyond contemptible: it's staggering. But it works because over a quarter century after PCs started showing up on desks the vast majority of the public still don't know as much about how these machines work as most of those living in the 1930's groked about their automobiles (which were in far shorter supply). The world is becoming more complex by the minute, and unless folks start to knuckle down and start learning how it really works they're going to be doomed to be mere passengers on a runaway train. ..."
"... Even if there was a way to determine exactly when and were the malicious code was made, wouldn't there be a good chance it could have been used by someone else. I would imagine everyone in that "industry" would find bits of the others work and incorporate it into their own. What better way to throw people off the trail than to incorporate pieces from different groups for just that purpose. Especially if you know a forensic examination would be looking for those clues. Also how about a "script kiddie" or non-sophisticated actor getting ahold of it and using it like any other tool. ..."
"... Hacker's link to the ars technica article below is the most detailed explanation I have seen relating these intruders to previous attacks, and Yves link to the Carr article is handy for readers because he includes a chart to cross reference the various names that each of the known russian intruders. ..."
"... "Symbol manipulators - like those in the Democrat-leaning creative class - often believe that real economy systems are as easy to manipulate as symbol systems are." ..."
"... "One cannot stress enough the point about APTs being, first and foremost, a new attack doctrine built to circumvent the existing perimeter and endpoint defenses. It's a little similar to stealth air fighters: for decades you've based your air defense on radar technology, but now you have those sneaky stealth fighters built with odd angles and strange composite materials. You can try building bigger and better radars, or, as someone I talked to said, you can try staring more closely at your existing radars in hope of catching some faint signs of something flying by, but this isn't going to turn the tide on stealthy attackers. Instead you have to think of a new defense doctrine." ..."
"... Really the DNC and Hill-bots are looking foolish on this. I have some very well-educated friends going full "red scare" on Facebook. Too easy to troll them by agreeing and exaggerating just a little too much! ..."
"... Besides wasn't Hillary the one against xenophobia? Wasn't she all about building bridges and not (fire!) walls? Now it seems it's OK to blame shiit on foreigners! So it becomes a question of WHICH foreigners we should blame. Trump says Saudi Arabia, Mexico, and China while Clinton says Russia. Let the voters decide! ..."
"... But while the comparisons to McCarthyism write themselves, another uncanny historic parallel is the run-up to the Iraq War. First we have these damn Hackers of Mass Disruption (HMD) trying to manipulate a US election (by showing the DNC actually did manipulate an election!). Next we will have our intelligence services and perhaps "trusted sources" like Curveball informing us Putin did it. Will Theresa May quickly crank out a dossier and some posh-sounding Brits confirm the HWD allegations? Obama will have to hurry to get the war going in time but Colin Powell will be called out of retirement to present the hacking evidence to the UN. Putin will be given a deadline for surrendering ALL his HMD. UN inspectors will sent in but not find any traces of HMD. Debka and the New York Times will insist Putin is hiding his HMD in the Moscow metro or perhaps he has sent them all to a third-party nation for safekeeping? The Washington Post will remind us of how the Kurds were brutalized by HMD cracking into the PKK's main servers. The tension will build to an unbearable crescendo. ..."
"... One of the e mails said the price of a private dinner with Hill is $200,000. Wow. In my case, I wouldn't give two cents for this. In fact, she would have to pay me at least a few grand, and I would split the scene as soon as possible. ..."
"... That article also goes into stated Russian doctrine about intent to use whatever means necessary to, in my words, protect themselves. As it is pretty obvious to me that America is the global bully these days. ..."
"... I'm not sure where this Jeffrey Carr guy came from but his company previously indicated the Russians were behind the Sony hack. And his argument was based on linguistic comparisons of the errors made in the English statements issued by the fake group claiming the hack. Not based on code at all. Seems like he's a character that shows up to muddy the waters. Don't assume he's an ally just because his arguments support your thesis. ..."
"... Clinton is trying to market herself as the Serious/Safe candidate, and instead her campaign is acting all CT hysterical. This whole Putin-hack thing is sabotaging her own brand. ..."
"... Hillary's brand was always just branding. In 2007, she ran as the candidate ready to take that 3 am phone call because of her experience. What experience? Selecting White House China for state functions? Raising money for the White House restoration? I liked the Christmas decorations Hillary had. Her followers believed her brand would win the day, and they simply ignored Obama largely won because of Hillary's poor foreign policy record. ..."
"... So she went out and bargained herself into State to get the foreign policy experience and now has a record on it that should have every sane person saying keep her away from sharp objects and things that go boom. Instead we once again have her running on taking that 3 am phone call while her team is acting like the twelve year old whose parents told her there are monsters home alone for the first time thinking that the refrigerator is a monster because she never heard it cycle on before. ..."
"... After the hackers were "shocked, shocked" when they saw the true operation of the DNC, then they decided to leak the information. This could suggest the leak may have been done, not to harm USA democracy, but to improve it by getting the DNC to behave in a fair and ethical manner in the future. ..."
"... The Democratic Party establishment is selling a used car knowing there's no way of getting a verifiable title history for the vehicle. To weave the narrative here, a few basic statements are made which may (perhaps) be technically true, as a foundation, but perhaps grossly misleadingly so. ..."
"... Perhaps at least one Russian at some point hacked the DNC. It is implied that _only_ this/these Russians hacked the DNC. It is implied that the WikiLeaks doc-dump came from this same set of people. "An IP address was found" is a very passive statement then used similarly. It's possible a templatized kit had a default address (maybe even commented out) and was used in more than one place. Kits like this may be used by a single player or entity (in the case of a state actor, perhaps, though it seems potentially sloppy) or may be used by someone who purchased them or stole them from someone else. Only a few leading statements, eliding particular details, are necessary to promulgate a crafted narrative, when injected into the echo chamber and laundered through friendly or credulous security firms for expert confirmation. ..."
"... Some U.S. intelligence officials suspect that Russian hackers who broke into Democratic Party computers may have deliberately left digital fingerprints to show Moscow is a "cyberpower" that Washington should respect. ..."
"... If one watches ' ZERO DAYS' docu on how STUXNET/worm/olypic game was invented/manufactured by the combined efforts of US – cyber command @NSA, +CIA and Isralei intelligence +UK?) and planted into the NET in bringing down the Iran's Nucl program, most of us are way, way behind in understanding cyber terrorism! They were clueless and firing their Nucl experts for incompetence! ..."
Hillary Clinton's campaign manager is alleging that Russian hackers are leaking Democratic
National Committee emails critical of Bernie Sanders in an effort to help Donald Trump win the
election in November.
It comes on the heels of "changes to the Republican platform to make it more pro-Russian,"
Robby Mook told CNN's Jake Tapper on "State of the Union" Sunday.
"I don't think it's coincidental that these emails were released on the eve of our convention
here, and I think that's disturbing," he said.
Mook's "Russians under the bed"
gaslighting is useful on a number of fronts: Ginning up war fever for
an October surprise
; setting up a later McCarthy-ite
purge of Trump supporters, Clinton skeptics, or even those
prematurely anti-Trump
; and
if
we're truly blessed, a real shooting war ; some damned thing in the Baltic or the Black Sea,
or wherever
the
Kagan clan points to on the map in the war room. And it's always useful to be able to convert
one's opponents to enemies by accusing them of treason, especially in an election year.
However, in this short post I want to focus on a much narrower question: Can we ever know who
hacked the DNC email? Because if we can't, then clearly we can't know the Russians did. And so I
want to hoist
this by alert reader JacobiteInTraining from comments :
Yup, as a former server admin it is patently absurd to attribute a hack to anyone in particular
until a substantial amount of forensic work has been done. (read, poring over multiple internal
log files…gathering yet more log files of yet more internal devices, poring over them, then –
once the request hops out of your org – requesting logfiles from remote entities, poring over
*those* log files, requesting further log files from yet more upstream entities, wash rinse repeat
ad infinitum).
For example, at its simplest, I would expect a middling-competency hacker to find an open wifi
hub across town to connect to, then VPN to server in, say, Tonga, then VPN from there to another
box in Sweden, then connect to a PC previously compromised in Iowa, then VPN to yet another anonymous
cloud server in Latvia, and (assuming the mountain dew is running low, gotta get cracking) then
RDP to the target server and grab as many docs as possible. RAR those up and encrypt them, FTP
them to a compromised media server in South Korea, email them from there to someones gmail account
previously hacked, xfer them to a P2P file sharing app, and then finally access them later from
a completely different set of servers.
In many cases where I did this sort of analysis I still ended up with a complete dead end:
some sysadmins at remote companies or orgs would be sympathetic and give me actual related log
files. Others would be sympathetic but would not give files, and instead do their own analysis
to give me tips. Many never responded, and most IPs ended up at unknown (compromised) personal
PCs, or devices where the owner could not be found anyway.
If the hacker was sloppy and left other types of circumstantial evidence you might get lucky
– but that demographic mostly points back to script kiddies and/or criminal dweebs – i.e., rather
then just surreptitiously exfiltrating the goods they instead left messages or altered things
that seemed to indicate their own backgrounds or prejudices, or left a message that was more easily
'traced'. If, of course, you took that evidence at face value and it was not itself an attempt
at obfuscation.
Short of a state actor such as an NSA who captures it ALL anyway, and/or can access any log
files at any public or private network at its own whim – its completely silly to attribute a hack
to anyone at this point.
So, I guess I am reduced to LOL OMG WTF its fer the LULZ!!!!!
Just to clarify on the "…If the hacker was sloppy and left other types of circumstantial evidence…"
– this is basically what I have seen reported as 'evidence' pointing to Russia: the Cyrillic keyboard
signature, the 'appeared to cease work on Russian holidays' stuff, and the association with 'known
Russian hacking groups'.
That's great and all, but in past work I am sure my own 'research' could easily have gotten
me 'associated' with known hacking groups. Presumably various 'sophisticated' methods and tools
get you closer to possible suspects…but that kind of stuff is cycled and recycled throughout the
community worldwide – as soon as anything like that is known and published, any reasonably competent
hacker (or org of hackers) is learning how to do the same thing and incorporating such things
into their own methods. (imitation being the sincerest form of flattery)
I guess I have a lot more respect for the kinds of people I expect to be getting a paycheck
from foreign Intelligence agencies then to believe that they would leave such obvious clues behind
'accidentally'. But if we are going to be starting wars over this stuff w/Russia, or China, I
guess I would hope the adults in the room don't go all apesh*t and start chanting COMMIES, THE
RUSSIANS ARE COMING!, etc. before the ink is dry on the 'crime'.
The whole episode reminds me of
the Sony hack , for which Obama
also blamed a demonized foreign power. Interestingly - to beg the question here - the blaming
was also based on a foreign character set in the data (though Hangul, not Korean). Look! A clue!
JacobiteInTraining's methodology also reminds me of NC's coverage of Grexit. Symbol manipulators
- like those in the Democrat-leaning creative class - often believe that real economy systems are
as easy to manipulate as symbol systems are. In Greece, for example, it really was a difficult technical
challenge for Greece to reintroduce the drachma, especially given the time-frame, as contributor
Clive remorselessly showed. Similarly, it's really not credible to hire a consultant and get a hacking
report with a turnaround time of less than a week, even leaving aside the idea that the DNC just
might have hired a consultant that would give them the result they wanted (because who among
us, etc.) What JacobiteInTraining shows us is that computer forensics is laborious, takes time, and
is very unlikely to yield results suitable for framing in the narratives proffered by the political
class. Of course, that does confirm all my priors!
There is a problem with those who argue that these are sophisticated Nation State attackers
and then point to the most basic circumstantial evidence to support their case. I'd bet that,
among others, the Israelis have hacked some Russian servers to launch attacks from and have some
of their workers on a Russian holiday schedule. Those things have been written about in attack
analysis so much over the last 15-20 years that they'd be stupid not to.
Now, I'm not saying the Israelis did it. I'm saying that the evidence provided so far by those
arguing it is Russia is so flaky as to prove that the Russia accusers are blinded
or corrupted by their own political agenda.
Update [Yves, courtesy Richard Smith] 7:45 AM. Another Medium piece by Jeffrey
Carr,
Can Facts Slow The DNC Breach Runaway Train? who has been fact-checking this story and comes
away Not Happy. For instance:
Thomas Rid wrote:
One of the strongest pieces of evidence linking GRU to the DNC hack is the equivalent of
identical fingerprints found in two burglarized buildings: a reused command-and-control address - 176.31.112[.]10 - that
was hard coded
in a piece of malware found both in the German parliament as well as on the DNC's servers.
Russian military intelligence was identified by the German domestic security agency BfV as
the actor responsible for the Bundestag breach. The infrastructure behind the fake MIS Department
domain was also linked to the Berlin intrusion through at least one other element, a
shared SSL
certificate.
This paragraph sounds quite damning if you take it at face value, but if you invest a little
time into checking the source material, its carefully constructed narrative falls apart.
Problem #1: The IP address 176.31.112[.]10 used in the Bundestag breach as a Command and Control
server has never been connected to the Russian intelligence services. In fact,
Claudio Guarnieri , a highly regarded security researcher,
whose technical analysis was
referenced by
Rid, stated that "no evidence allows to tie the attacks to governments of any particular country."
Mind you, he has two additional problems with that claim alone.
This piece is a must read if you want to dig further into this topic.
NOTES
[1] More than a talking point but, really, less than a narrative. It's like we need a new word
for these bite-sized, meme-ready, disposable, "throw 'em against the wall and see if they stick"
stories; mini-narrative, or narrativelette, perhaps. "All the crunch of a real narrative, but none
of the nutrition!"
[2] This post is not about today's Trump moral panic, where the political class is frothing
and stamping about The Donald's humorous (or ballbusting, take your pick) statement that he
"hoped" the Russians had hacked the 30,000 emails that Clinton supposedly deleted from the email
server she privatized in her public capacity as Secretary of State before handing the whole flaming
and steaming mess over to investigators. First, who cares? Those emails are all about yoga lessons
and Chelsea's wedding. Right? Second, Clinton didn't secure the server for three months. What did
she expect? Third, Trump's suggestion is just dumb; the NSA has to have that data, so just ask them?
Finally, to be fair, Trump shouldn't have uttered the word "Russia." He should have said "Liechtenstein,"
or "Tonga," because it's hard to believe that there's a country too small to hack as fat a target
as Clinton presented; Trump was being inflammatory. Points off. Bad show.
For those interested, the excellent interviewer Scott Horton just spoke with Jeffrey Carr,
an IT security expert about all this. It's about 30 mins:
Jeffrey Carr, a cyber intelligence expert and CEO of Taia Global, Inc., discusses his fact-checking
of Josh Marshall's TalkingPointsMemo article that claims a close alliance between Trump and
Putin; and why the individuals blaming Russia for the DNC email hack are more motivated by
politics than solid evidence.
Carr makes the point that even supposed clues about Russian involvement ("the default language
is Cyrillic!") are meaningless as all these could be spoofed by another party.
Separately it just shows again Team Clinton's (and DNC's) political deviousness and expertise
how they –with the full support of the MSM of course –have managed to deflect the discussion to
Trump and Russia from how the DNC subverted US democracy.
and again, we see the cavalier attitude about national security from the clinton camp, aggravating
the already tense relationship with russia over this bullshit, all to avoid some political disadvantage.
clinton doesn't care if russia gets the nuclear launch codes seemingly, but impact her chances
to win the race and it's all guns firing.
Well yeah, and I could be a bot, how do you know I'm not?
Absent any other evidence to work with, I can accept it as credible that a clumsy Russian or
Baltic user posted viewed and saved docs instead of the originals; par for the course in public
and private bureaucracies the world over. It would have been useful to see the original Properties
metadata; instead we get crapped up copies. That only tells me the poster is something of a lightweight,
and it at least somewhat suggests that these docs passed through multiple hands.
But that doesn't mean A) the original penetration occurred under state control (or even in
Russia proper), much less B) that Putin Himself ordered the hack attempts, which is the searing
retinal afterimage that the the media name-dropping and photo-illustrating conflation produces.
Unspoofed, the Cyrillic fingerprints still do not closely constrain conclusion to A, and even
less to B.
Yes, I made the same point below in terms of the intrusion ("hack") on the DNC itself too.
The running away with a conclusion based on easily-created evidence says a lot about the people
saying it.
"The running away with a conclusion based on easily-created evidence says a lot about the people
saying it." Clive, I don't think that this can be emphasized enough. These are the people representing
to be competent to run our country. I made the point yesterday: Trump voters are mostly stupid;
this kind of argument will attract those stupid people to Hillary; let's run with it. God help
us.
1. Who cares if the Russians did it?
2. Why were they able to?
3. Are the releases real? Are these actual emails from the DNC? Appears so given their response.
4. Trump once again bungled a prime opportunity. I'm pretty concerned that if a political strategy
cannot be summed up in 140 characters, it's beyond his ability to cope.
It's getting harder and harder to place limits on the catastrophe that either of these "choices"
will be.
One guy on Twitter, even with 10 million followers, can't overcome the Mighty Wurlitzer of
the media all blasting the "Looke, over there! Baddie Rooskies!" tout ensemble to divert
attention from the content of the DNC e-mails. And the Dems were hitting that theme regularly
in the convention speeches, which meant the MSM could replay it that way too.
The thing that most bothers me is that this is supportive of the Kagans and Hillary's push
to foment a shooting war with Russia. The so-called metadata that they point to is all something
that could very easily be created by an amateur who was actually given access to the DNC's server(s).
The "investigator" who issued the conclusion has no record of integrity.
Yes, the logical endgame of a 'Trump is a Russian stooge' strategy is that the stronger Trump
is in the polls, the greater the incentive to stage an October Surprise with Russia. Something
tells me that this lot would quite happily risk a nuclear war if it gave them a better chance
of winning an election.
The comment I wanted to make was around the "Cyrillic keyboard". This is interesting because
it has all the characteristics of:
a) an investigation into an intrusion incident being undertaken by someone who is pretty
skilled and knows a reasonable amount about how to start their analysis and what to look for,
where to look for it and so on
b) the investigator or investigators finding something interesting - in this case the "Cyrillic
keyboard"
c) non-technical people being told of the investigator's findings but not getting the technicalities
of it or some PR type saying "yeah, but can you tell me what this means in simple terms" and
ending up missing an important subtlety and then telling equally ignorant reporters the mis-information
who repeat it verbatim
d) the story or stories, as published, then being wrong in a way that the media outlets
telling the stories don't realise makes them embarrassingly inept to people who really understand
the technical side of things
… all of which does indeed show a smoking gun, but not the same smoking gun as is being reported.
What is shown is that, in addition to the fact that a technical investigation being made by reasonably
competent people, a PR team has also been brought in to design the messaging, disseminate the
message to the public and create the "right" optics for the story. Such PR / media management
teams are fully-paid up members of the Credentialed Class. As such, they want to be seen to earn
their money and prove they should get more of it from their elite benefactors in the future. This
has an almost inevitable consequence that they will seize on what was probably a suggestive-but-not-conclusive
piece of evidence from an investigating team and embellish it with a conclusion which isn't proven
or even supported by the actual evidence.
Saddam Hussein's "weapons of mass destruction" (which, of course, didn't exist) is perhaps
the best-known example of this phenomena.
To try to set the record straight, what I think was discovered in the DNC email hack was a
file or files (or code in a malicious payload) - the specifics depend on the hack itself and what
attack vector it used - which had a Cyrillic code page set.
This goes back to the mechanics of how you actually write a hack / virus / malicious web page
/ whatever. You have to, at its most basic, write the code. You don't do this using a word processor.
You do it using a text editor (albeit often a very fancy one in an Integrated Development Environment
- a special piece of software to help you write code). But regardless, the code itself is in "plain
text".
But "plain text" isn't actually that plain. Non Latin languages use different code pages for
8-bit plain text (I'll have to skim over the lower level complexity here for the sake of brevity).
But this means that a subtle footprint can get left behind on certain types of files which may
be used as the payload for an intrusion into a computer system or even end up being compiled into
code which delivered into the target system.
When you set up a new computer, one of the things a setup routine gets the user to answer is
the location of the PC and the input language. This, amongst many other things, sets the code
pages used for backwards compatibility in text files which don't support Unicode. It is so easy
to forget this has ever been set by a hacker who then merrily goes on to write their hack completely
oblivious to the fact they've given - if they are not very careful - the location of their home
country away. Or, at least, their native language. If I get chance I'll send a screen shot of
a typical application and how a user might be completely unaware of how they are disclosing their
location / language if I can hook up to an anonymous hosting service) which might make it a bit
clearer for readers.
(and this can so easily catch out the unwary; I recall one horrid incident I gave Yves when,
in trying to submit an article for her to run on Naked Capitalism, I tried to make life easier
by submitting it in "plain text" so that WordPress wouldn't find it so difficult to handle the
formatting. Big mistake! I didn't realise until much grief had been caused that because I'd set
my PC up with a Japanese locale, my supposedly nice, simple "plain text" files I was sending had
Japanese encoding. WordPress, expecting US English encoding, was completely befuddled and Yves
had to try to manually correct dozens of spurious / misplaced characters).
This is not, though, a "keyboard". It does affect the "keyboard" setup. But no reasonably sophisticated
technical person would ever describe this as a "keyboard". Hence my conclusion that, following
an explanation which I've just given readers above (and I'll happily concede it is a rather tortuous
subject to get ones head around if you're not an IT expert), some fairly inept media manager ran
away with the idea this was something to do with a Russian PC being used, because of the "Cyrillic
keyboard".
So it was the pesky Russians then ?
Erm, no, not necessarily. As I've described above, it is a trivial task to "spoof" a PC into
looking like it was being used by a Russian, Korean, Chinese, whatever, based person or group.
You either do it during the PC setup process or else you can with a few clicks change the default
locale on any PC or other operating system. Hey-presto. You can now produce what looks like "Russian"
(or any other language) flavoured text and cunningly have these tell-tale code pages appear in
your malicious code or similar.
But as the comment in the above article makes clear, this is really dumb and not at all the
sort of thing a sophisticated state-backed actor would end up doing. It is however precisely the
sort of thing that a sophisticated state-backed actor would do if they wanted to make it *appear*
as if the Russians were responsible.
It makes me cry to see clicking on "Properties" equated with "pretty skilled".
Also, the docs were last saved through an older version of MSWord, one that the DNC is almost
certainly not running in-house (because of licensing and Microsoft Office Update, although it
can probably be found on the odd State or County level Party desktop).
In other words, the Cyrillic attribute indicates that the posted docs are not originals
. The DNC could have disavowed the docs as partially or completely fabricated, on that basis
alone.
The DNC could have disavowed the docs as partially or completely fabricated, on that
basis alone.
Which is telling.
The DNC never disavowed the e-mails. They just simply said "See, it's those damn Russians up
to their old tricks again". It's like watching an episode of "Maury" when someone gets caught
cheating, then try to 1) blame someone/something else for the cheating 2) then apologize for said
cheating (ONLY because they got caught) and say "c'mon, baby, let's move on from this"…
Ha, great minds, my friend… this is what I edited out of that post:
And in the larger context, it's like my neighbor peering across their driveway seeing me
in bed with somebody else's spouse, and when they tell the not-my-spouse's spouse about it
I respond with "You're not supposed to be looking in my window!" and calling the cops to arrest
my neighbor for snooping (without a FISA permit, egads).
It's a deflection. It discredits my neighbor's story to the not-my-spouse's spouse.
And snooping is wrong! Not supposed to do it! Somebody mention this to the NSA as well! Although,
granted, so far the NSA seem to be a lot better at keeping everybody's secrets (assuming they
can even sort meaning out of their data, which I question).
In other words, it's okay when the NSA does it, because they don't tell what they know, the
way those awful awful Russians do.
the NSA seem to be a lot better at keeping everybody's secrets (assuming they can even sort
meaning out of their data, which I question).
Between 1984 and 1987 I was stationed at Offutt AFB as a satellite operator. Because my off
base roommate worked for Electronic Security Command(ESC) as a cryptologic linguist flying around
in unpressurized planes with earphones on, my military social circle consisted largely of airmen(all
men) who worked for NSA and some of them would go to Ft. Meade on TDY. They were an elite, heterogeneous,
cosmopolitan bunch who shared a common belief that their jobs weren't directly evil because it
was impossible to find the man hours to analyze it: "last night the best thing I picked up in
Nicaragua was an abuela giving tips for mole."
I wonder if it would be overly technodeterminist to argue one of the primary reasons for displacement
of journalists and other human knowledge interpreters by machines and algorithms was the NSA's
secret need to make sense of their massive telemetry and data as the Cold War ended and the Information
Age and Comparative Advantage became ossified neoclassical economic theory and practice.
Aren't these whiners (Weiners? See, selfie dicks on display) the same set of people who tell
us the Security State is just fine, because, "if you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing
to hide, and no reason to be afraid!"?
Combining two comments as I worry about our country, our democracy: Where have we gone wrong?
"It makes me cry" as "It's getting harder and harder to place limits on the catastrophe that either
of these "choices" will be."
Absolutely accurate. I fell into the simplification trap myself with my own 'Cyrillic keyboard'
reference in comment, but your explanation is perfect.
Admittedly I am getting a little older (and don't do much work anymore with International OSes)
but my own first introduction to a variant of this issue was with older IIS web server ISAPI extensions
and other widgets where using something as prosaic as notepad.exe (which you normally don't expect
to do anything nefarious) causing prod web servers at a large corporation to all go 'boom' and
fall over, dead.
Turns out that when you modified a previously-working plain-text extension config file originally
in (as I recall) ANSI, update it, then accidentally saved it as UNICODE things like quotation
marks et al become…different…even, threatening… ;)
Long since patched of course. Perhaps I need to patch myself too – perhaps with some fine Scotch!
Used wordpad for that, eh. Could have been worse. I've seen HR guys in the UK running a localized
version of Office copy and paste "text" from an Excel sheet originally composed on in a Scandanavian
locale completely wreck the rendering of their data. For awhile I tried getting people to use
Sublime or Notepad++ set to UTF-8 for that sort of exercise, but the ubiquity of text mangling
tools out there is overwhelming.
The childish, credulous, transparently Machevellian propagandizing by the DNC here, especially
the deflection in place of serious scientific analysis, is beyond contemptible: it's staggering.
But it works because over a quarter century after PCs started showing up on desks the vast majority
of the public still don't know as much about how these machines work as most of those living in
the 1930's groked about their automobiles (which were in far shorter supply). The world is becoming
more complex by the minute, and unless folks start to knuckle down and start learning how it really
works they're going to be doomed to be mere passengers on a runaway train.
And, it's not that hard. But I think people's mental bandwidths are overloaded with:
a) work (not pay, just work),
b) "entertainment",
c) media deluge (info+fiction=media!),
d) magical thinking / myths (only geeks can understand it!),
e) ever smaller devices with little tiny screens!!!
Well, that sort of thing makes life interesting eh? Clive's horror story of Japanese locale
mucking up an article submission made me cringe in sympathy.
GEDIT OR BUST!!!
or wait – did gedit go ahead and withdraw, thus endorsing Hillery? In which case I guess its
back to the typewriter… :p
This is a good point. They are shamelessly preying on naive peoples' lack of understanding
of computers. They are also shamelessly preying on naive peoples' trust in experts, which has
serious downstream effects when these "experts" are debunked.
Even if there was a way to determine exactly when and were the malicious code was made, wouldn't
there be a good chance it could have been used by someone else. I would imagine
everyone in that "industry" would find bits of the others work and incorporate it into their own.
What better way to throw people off the trail than to incorporate pieces from different groups
for just that purpose. Especially if you know a forensic examination would be looking for those
clues. Also how about a "script kiddie" or non-sophisticated actor getting ahold of it and using
it like any other tool.
Clive: Also, there are varieties of Cyrillic, depending on the language. Bulgarian has a few
more characters, as does Ukrainian. So would "Russian" even be identifiable from the settings?
Maybe it all went through Montenegro and we are seeing ghosts of Montenengrin.
To extend the question: If the computer has as its setting the Roman alphabet, I'm assuming
that language isn't identified, because language on a computer is aseparate setting (for the user)
from alphabet. So are we in a situation where someone is seeing a Roman letter and then announces
that the document was originally in Hungarian?
(yep, Clive's cut-out-and-keep guide to pretending you're a nefarious Russian sneakypants trying
to besmirch the good name of the DNC. Or Trump. Or whoever:
1) Set up your PC as being located in Russia and having a language of Russian (Cyrillic).
2) Open notepad (in windows, similar for other O/S'es)
3) Create your incriminating text (e.g. "I think Bernie is really stinky and we really should
make sure Hillary wins because she is a woman and so on, all those other really good reasons…
signed Debbie Wasserman Schultz").
4) Click "Save"
5) Change the encoding to something not Unicode-ey e.g.
ANSI
6) Get out your Rolodex and hit the phones of your favourite friendly media outlets
Clive, I'm interested in what you think about the apt28 and apt29 intrusions on the DNC servers.
Hacker's link to the ars technica article below is the most detailed explanation I have seen
relating these intruders to previous attacks, and Yves link to the Carr article is handy for readers
because he includes a chart to cross reference the various names that each of the known russian
intruders.
For your convenience, here is the link I am referring to:
"Symbol manipulators - like those in the Democrat-leaning creative class - often believe
that real economy systems are as easy to manipulate as symbol systems are."
What a great observation! This speaks to so much of what ails modern western society.
"Symbol manipulators" reflects the way lawyers and most policy wonks are trained to believe
that the social construction of reality is all that matters.
"One cannot stress enough the point about APTs being, first and foremost, a new attack doctrine
built to circumvent the existing perimeter and endpoint defenses. It's a little similar to stealth
air fighters: for decades you've based your air defense on radar technology, but now you have
those sneaky stealth fighters built with odd angles and strange composite materials. You can try
building bigger and better radars, or, as someone I talked to said, you can try staring more closely
at your existing radars in hope of catching some faint signs of something flying by, but this
isn't going to turn the tide on stealthy attackers. Instead you have to think of a new defense
doctrine."
Really the DNC and Hill-bots are looking foolish on this. I have some very well-educated friends
going full "red scare" on Facebook. Too easy to troll them by agreeing and exaggerating just a
little too much!
Besides wasn't Hillary the one against xenophobia? Wasn't she all about building bridges and
not (fire!) walls? Now it seems it's OK to blame shiit on foreigners! So it becomes a question
of WHICH foreigners we should blame. Trump says Saudi Arabia, Mexico, and China while Clinton
says Russia. Let the voters decide!
But while the comparisons to McCarthyism write themselves, another uncanny historic parallel
is the run-up to the Iraq War. First we have these damn Hackers of Mass Disruption (HMD) trying
to manipulate a US election (by showing the DNC actually did manipulate an election!). Next we
will have our intelligence services and perhaps "trusted sources" like Curveball informing us
Putin did it. Will Theresa May quickly crank out a dossier and some posh-sounding Brits confirm
the HWD allegations? Obama will have to hurry to get the war going in time but Colin Powell will
be called out of retirement to present the hacking evidence to the UN. Putin will be given a deadline
for surrendering ALL his HMD. UN inspectors will sent in but not find any traces of HMD. Debka
and the New York Times will insist Putin is hiding his HMD in the Moscow metro or perhaps he has
sent them all to a third-party nation for safekeeping? The Washington Post will remind us of how
the Kurds were brutalized by HMD cracking into the PKK's main servers. The tension will build
to an unbearable crescendo.
Finally, and regretfully, in October, Operation Data Security will be launched. After a very
brief but exceedingly violent confrontation, In the end no HMD will be found in Russia. On the
other hand since most of the tens of millions of US soldiers who died were drafted from working
class families, the war will be declared a victory anyway since now Trump does not have hardly
any angry working class whites left to vote for him!
There's much more to it than that. If you don't kneejerk it away, it asks you to consider that
the government can't be relied upon to thoroughly pursue the charges against her. It also builds
on what has been, to me, the surprising acceptance that the Wikileaks DNC emails are valid, not
fabricated. It then dissolves the honorific constraints indignantly invoked by the Times re "investigating
a former secretary of state," exposing those invocations as rationalizing a coverup. In short,
it treats her as a perp for whom we need reliable informants to help bring down, and we need to
rely on the Russians/Wikileaks, not the Times, or the Post, or the AG.
I think we're looking at a 5-star legitimation crisis accelerator.
If Russia has Clinton's emails … I do want them to release them.
If Chuck Norris has them I want Chuck to release them.
The very idea that our Government has them (read NSA) and will not release them because they
would damage Clinton scares me a whole lot more than the idea that espionage today includes hacking
unsecured servers.
So … please … pretty please … whoever has them … release them.
One of the e mails said the price of a private dinner with Hill is $200,000. Wow. In my case,
I wouldn't give two cents for this. In fact, she would have to pay me at least a few grand, and
I would split the scene as soon as possible.
1. Donald Trump is a fascist demagogue
2. Donald Trump is Hitler, Super Hitler, a Devil
3. Donald Trump is being aided by Russia and loves Putin
4. Donald Trump is guilt of treason, is a Russian agent
5. Bill Clinton mostly likely gave Trump advice and/or encouragement to run in the 2016 race
I apologize for not being able to dig into this as much as I'd like. Yesterday, the loggers
at my remote doomstead dropped some trees on one of the garden plots and the day job as an Information
Security manager hasn't been much easier.
There is a decent, but still biased thus not linked, article on ArsTechnica "How DNC, Clinton
campaign attacks fit into Russia's cyber-war strategy" that provides better evidence that the
DNC was targeted by the Russians. That alone doesn't link the Russians to the release and I haven't
had the time to dig deeply into the evidence to fully understand it.
That article also goes into stated Russian doctrine about intent to use whatever means necessary
to, in my words, protect themselves. As it is pretty obvious to me that America is the global
bully these days.
So we've got a DNC using whatever underhanded tactics it can draw upon to corrupt democracy.
Yet both Hillary at the State and then the DNC for the primaries do practically nothing to protect
themselves from state actors who have declared an intention to do the same? That sounds like a
foreign policy blindspot that should be a disqualifier.
Not really. Carr is putting down a British professor's sloppy claims that apt28 and apt29 are
related to the GRU. But the agencies analysing the breach never pointed to the GRU. Crowd strike
suggests FSB or SVR, and fidelis agrees on the involvement of apt28 and apt29 but does not attribute
a source. Carr is saying the hack is Russian but could be non governmental.
I'm not sure where this Jeffrey Carr guy came from but his company previously indicated the
Russians were behind the Sony hack. And his argument was based on linguistic comparisons of the
errors made in the English statements issued by the fake group claiming the hack. Not based on
code at all. Seems like he's a character that shows up to muddy the waters. Don't assume he's
an ally just because his arguments support your thesis.
The most interesting thing I ran into when looking up the Sony hack was that Sony told everyone
to shut up about it in December and threatened to sue the media it they persisted with the story.
Kinda makes you go hmmmm.
I suspect the author meant that the encoding used in the files represented the standard Hangul
character set (used in South Korea), and not the variant of the Hangul character set used in North
Korea (which differs in the number and ordering of characters, and hence is encoded differently).
Anyway, CJK character sets and encodings are just hell. I absolutely see Clive's file encoded
in EUC-JP or Shift_JIS royally screwing up the CMS editor of NakedCapitalism.
Clinton is trying to market herself as the Serious/Safe candidate, and instead her campaign
is acting all CT hysterical. This whole Putin-hack thing is sabotaging her own brand.
Today, while reading Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables , I unexpectedly came
across a passage which fittingly describes the DNC:
They are practiced politicians, every man of them, and skilled to adjust those preliminary
measures which steal from the people, without its knowledge, the power of choosing its own rulers…This
little knot of subtle schemers will control the convention, and, through it, dictate to the party.
Maybe Will Rogers was off the beam, then, given current events and past performance, with his
comment that "I don't belong to any organized political party. I'm a Democrat!"
At least as to the people close to the center of the beast, the ones who use the parties as
just a set of tools to keep the mopes in check…
Hillary's brand was always just branding. In 2007, she ran as the candidate ready to take that
3 am phone call because of her experience. What experience? Selecting White House China for state
functions? Raising money for the White House restoration? I liked the Christmas decorations Hillary
had. Her followers believed her brand would win the day, and they simply ignored Obama largely won
because of Hillary's poor foreign policy record.
So she went out and bargained herself into State to get the foreign policy experience and now
has a record on it that should have every sane person saying keep her away from sharp objects
and things that go boom. Instead we once again have her running on taking that 3 am phone call
while her team is acting like the twelve year old whose parents told her there are monsters home
alone for the first time thinking that the refrigerator is a monster because she never heard it
cycle on before.
I have no respect for her average supporter. And even less respect for the press. The contempt
the people who really pull the strings in her camp show they obviously have little regard for
the intelligence of either group.
After all the "democracy" promotion the USA has done around the world, perhaps the entire DNC
hack should be re-cast as an attempt to determine exactly how the USA democracy functions by a
curious group.
This is somewhat akin to an interested grad student, as the hackers may have thought "Why not
find how a professional democratic organization, the Democratic National Committee, works?"
After the hackers were "shocked, shocked" when they saw the true operation of the DNC, then
they decided to leak the information. This could suggest the leak may have been done, not to harm USA democracy, but to improve it
by getting the DNC to behave in a fair and ethical manner in the future.
Instead, we've watched the DNC, while not denying their documented behavior, argue that their
behavior should not have been exposed by an alleged "wrong" group.
Perhaps more damaging blackmail information is being saved to use against HRC if she is elected?
The Democratic Party establishment is selling a used car knowing there's no way of getting
a verifiable title history for the vehicle. To weave the narrative here, a few basic statements
are made which may (perhaps) be technically true, as a foundation, but perhaps grossly misleadingly
so.
Perhaps at least one Russian at some point hacked the DNC. It is implied that _only_ this/these
Russians hacked the DNC. It is implied that the WikiLeaks doc-dump came from this same set of
people. "An IP address was found" is a very passive statement then used similarly. It's possible
a templatized kit had a default address (maybe even commented out) and was used in more than one
place. Kits like this may be used by a single player or entity (in the case of a state actor,
perhaps, though it seems potentially sloppy) or may be used by someone who purchased them or stole
them from someone else. Only a few leading statements, eliding particular details, are necessary
to promulgate a crafted narrative, when injected into the echo chamber and laundered through friendly
or credulous security firms for expert confirmation.
I would be curious to know when the Russian hack was supposed to have happened. I would also
be curious what other hacks of the DNC are believed to have or known to have happened. It might
even be interesting to know whether particular individuals' accounts or machines were compromised
on the way in, as the incestuous relationships between Democratic Party organizations make it
quite possible such a compromise might cross to another organization and increase the likelihood
of compromise there. I'm imagining a future Clinton Foundation document dump, perhaps.
I haven't read any comments that highlight the smell of extreme desperation coming from the
Clinton camp?
Sanders efforts had already gotten the DNC droogs soiling their pants, add Trumps momentum
and likely trajectory to the mix, and this is what you get, panic, and poor judgement.
I expect internal leaks and dissertions from the campaign soon.
While attribution of malware attacks is rarely simple or conclusive, during the course of
this investigation I uncovered evidence that suggests the attacker might be affiliated with
the state-sponsored group known as Sofacy Group (also known as APT28 or Operation Pawn Storm).
Although we are unable to provide details in support of such attribution, previous work by
security vendor FireEye suggests the group might be of Russian origin, however no evidence
allows to tie the attacks to governments of any particular country.
Sofacy, aka Fancy Bear, is a well known Advanced Persistent Threat. APTs are generally regarded
government backed given their abilities and resources but it is not always verifiable. Sofacy
generally focuses on NATO aligned government and military sites and has also focused on Ukrainian
targets in recent years.
So it cannot be 100% confirmed that the Russian government is involved, it is the most likely
backer of the hacking group.
Which does not mean that Trump had any knowledge or involvement in the attack or that the Russians
are necessarily backing Trump.
Some U.S. intelligence officials suspect that Russian hackers who broke into Democratic
Party computers may have deliberately left digital fingerprints to show Moscow is a "cyberpower"
that Washington should respect.
Three officials, all speaking on condition of anonymity, said the breaches of the Democratic
National Committee (DNC) were less sophisticated than other cyber intrusions that have been
traced to Russian intelligence agencies or criminals.
NO has no clue re DNC e-mail leak! how or who did it. Just narration of speculations!
If one watches ' ZERO DAYS' docu on how STUXNET/worm/olypic game was invented/manufactured
by the combined efforts of US – cyber command @NSA, +CIA and Isralei intelligence +UK?) and planted
into the NET in bringing down the Iran's Nucl program, most of us are way, way behind in understanding
cyber terrorism! They were clueless and firing their Nucl experts for incompetence!
There is extensive discussion of that subject by various NET security Cos incl Symantec, Kaparnisky
(russia), Israeli cyber terrorism expert, even officials/non officials from NSA, cyber command, CIA,
all over the World
It is NOT THAT EASY to trace the hacker's foot prints! This was about 6-8 years ago! WE all
are just groping in the dark, like 7 blind men describing the 'elephant'!
"... This propaganda is for retards. They make it sound like hacking is trivial.
Maybe if the idiot administrators of the DNC computers left them without passwords.
I have overseen web attached computer systems at a university for over 20 years
and have never had them hacked. Disable all the vulnerable daemons and block most
ports. Run a firewall and regulate SSH access. They have tried but they never succeeded.
..."
"... Then we have the obvious one: if the hackers are from Russia, then so what?
Does Putin tell every Russian hacker what to do. Perhaps Putin personally hacked
these servers. Those system logs have exactly zero to say about who are the hackers.
Only Hollywood fiction does the cyber realm extend into the physical realm. Then
the issue is why is incriminating evidence of Democratic Party wrongdoing Russia's
problem? Seriously, why is the screeching about Russian hacking and not Russian
"fraud" or something else? What happened to transparency? These alleged Russian
hackers did not release personal information. They released information of wrong
doing in a public organization. ..."
"... Same-same likee FireEye, which said almost word-for-word the same tired
old shit back in 2014, when the Russians supposedly hacked some other U.S. system.
Coded during working hours in Moscow, just as if (1) hackers keep normal working
hours like accountants and grocery clerks, and (2) Moscow is the only place in the
world at Moscow's latitude. There's only an hour's difference between Moscow and
Jerusalem, for example. And although the coding of the malware was brilliant, causing
seasoned professionals to shake their heads in admiration…once again, the Russians
slipped up, and coded on Cyrillic keyboards. Sure they did. But I'll let you read
the article. ..."
"... When Captain Dickhead says "I'm sure beyond a reasonable doubt", what he
means is, "Nobody can prove I'm not sure, because nobody knows". And everyone in
the west will believe poor Hillary is the victim of the dastardly Russians, no problem,
although the screwing Bernie Sanders got is likely to be much more on their minds
come voting time, and not where the information came from. Is somebody else interested
in the outcome of the U.S. election besides Russia? You decide. ..."
This propaganda is for retards. They make it sound like hacking is trivial.
Maybe if the idiot administrators of the DNC computers left them without
passwords. I have overseen web attached computer systems at a university
for over 20 years and have never had them hacked. Disable all the vulnerable
daemons and block most ports. Run a firewall and regulate SSH access. They
have tried but they never succeeded.
If the DNC computers are configured like Hillary's personal email server
then this is deliberate. They claim that the hackers are from Russia but
they have zero evidence. Some IP logs can be faked without any effort. It's
not like there is some bank level security over system logs.
Then we have the obvious one: if the hackers are from Russia, then
so what? Does Putin tell every Russian hacker what to do. Perhaps Putin
personally hacked these servers. Those system logs have exactly zero to
say about who are the hackers. Only Hollywood fiction does the cyber realm
extend into the physical realm. Then the issue is why is incriminating evidence
of Democratic Party wrongdoing Russia's problem? Seriously, why is the screeching
about Russian hacking and not Russian "fraud" or something else? What happened
to transparency? These alleged Russian hackers did not release personal
information. They released information of wrong doing in a public organization.
Remind you of anything? Same-same likee FireEye, which
said almost word-for-word the same tired old shit back in 2014, when
the Russians supposedly hacked some other U.S. system. Coded during working
hours in Moscow, just as if (1) hackers keep normal working hours like accountants
and grocery clerks, and (2) Moscow is the only place in the world at Moscow's
latitude. There's only an hour's difference between Moscow and Jerusalem,
for example. And although the coding of the malware was brilliant, causing
seasoned professionals to shake their heads in admiration…once again, the
Russians slipped up, and coded on Cyrillic keyboards. Sure they did. But
I'll let you read the article.
When Captain Dickhead says "I'm sure beyond a reasonable doubt",
what he means is, "Nobody can prove I'm not sure, because nobody knows".
And everyone in the west will believe poor Hillary is the victim of the
dastardly Russians, no problem, although the screwing Bernie Sanders got
is likely to be much more on their minds come voting time, and not where
the information came from.
Is somebody else interested in the outcome of the U.S. election besides
Russia? You decide.
M of A - Clinton Asserts Putin Influence On Trump - After Taking Russian Bribes
Off topic but still within context of the West's "lets bash Russia/Putin at every chance we
get"..
Seems the BBC and their assorted groupies just got eggs all over their collective faces after
the IOC ruled that Russian athletes can compete in the olympics. The British press are crying
foul - dunno if they're afraid of losing to Russian athlete or something.
This whole doping thing stunk from day one.. All the accusers pretends they never dope before.
But then, anything to humiliate Russia and Putin will do. How many American athletes have been
caught doping - yet nobody called for a blanket ban on the American Olympic team. The hypocrisy
is just beyond stupid!!!
Watch this space, won't be long before we see a campaign to oust the current OIC chief..lol
Clinton/Kaine certainly confident that the MSM will not report.
For all the money given to the Clinton's it didn't prevent the Ukraine disasters. Of course,
Ukraine may not have been a concern among the particular oligarchs who made these bribes.
For those who have a Twitter account, checkout #dncleak or #dncleaks on the latest over the Wikileaks
release of the DNC emails.
Here's one -"Hillary Clinton is now blaming the Russians for leaking the emails. Like that
makes it any better that you rigged the primary."
Sanders to Chuck Todd on the leaks -
Todd: "So just to sum up here, these leaks, these emails, it hasn't given you any pause about
your support for Hillary Clinton?"
Sanders: "No, no, no. We are going to do everything that we can to protect working families
in this country. And again, Chuc, I know media is not necessarily focused on these things. But
what a campaign is about is not Hillary Clinton, it's not Donald Trump. It is the people of this
country, blah blah blah..."
"[...] And I'm going to go around the country discussing them [issues] and making sure Hillary
Clinton is elected president."
So, there you have it. The guy who suspected his campaign was being intentionally marginalized
by the party apparatus learns in fact he, his campaign and most importantly, his voters were indeed
intentionally marginalized by the leadership of the Democratic Party. The chairman of the Party
is Barack Obama. He appoints the Director who we all know is Wasserman Schultz. Thus, the entirety
of the DNC leadership knowingly and with intent marginalized Sanders and his voters. Yet, Sanders
remains loyal and naively believes his voters will stay with him if he sticks with the party and
their chosen candidate that screwed him and them.
UNFRIGGINBELIEVABLE!
His response reminds me of battered wife syndrome. He has absolutely bonded with his abusers.
He is a sick man as in mentally impaired, maybe fatigued, and should seriously consider some rest.
I cannot imagine learning after years of planning, hard work and personal sacrifices being
made to fulfill my lifelong ambition to get within a whisker of achieving my goals, only to learn
within weeks after capitulating, that my entire life's effort was undermined from the beginning
by the very apparatus I aligned with, albeit as an Indy, for decades. An apparatus that must remain
neutral.
Think about his response to Todd. Think about all that man has put himself, his family, his
workers, his voters through this last year. His efforts were ginormous. Yet, within less than
48 hours the man dismisses the gravity of how his life's work was deliberately, with intent, sabotaged
by the DNC and goes onto say it's not important, the issues are.
If I were a Bernie supporter I'd be starting a campaign to convince that man to take some serious
time off. Go fishing. Go for hikes whatever. Just get away from the bubble and clear your head
and soul.
Sure the issues are important to his voters but their learning the DNC put their resources
behind their chosen candidate vs remaining neutral as their Bylaws require, would seriously piss
me off. Hell it does piss me off and I'm not even a Sanders supporter. And why on earth would
any of Sanders voters ever believe that the same party that marginalized him and his efforts would
ever give weight to the issues he's fighting for!
PERIES: So let's take a look at this article by Paul Krugman. Where is he going with this analysis
about the Siberian candidate?
HUDSON: Well, Krugman has joined the ranks of the neocons, as well as the neoliberals, and
they're terrified that they're losing control of the Republican Party. For the last half-century
the Republican Party has been pro-Cold War, corporatist. And Trump has actually, is reversing
that. Reversing the whole traditional platform. And that really worries the neocons.
Until his speech, the whole Republican Convention, every speaker had avoided dealing with economic
policy issues. No one referred to the party platform, which isn't very good. And it was mostly
an attack on Hillary. Chants of "lock her up." And Trump children, aimed to try to humanize him
and make him look like a loving man.
But finally came Trump's speech, and this was for the first time, policy was there. And he's
making a left run around Hillary. He appealed twice to Bernie Sanders supporters, and the two
major policies that he outlined in the speech broke radically from the Republican traditional
right-wing stance. And that is called destroying the party by the right wing, and Trump said he's
not destroying the party, he's building it up and appealing to labor, and appealing to the rational
interest that otherwise had been backing Bernie Sanders.
So in terms of national security, he wanted to roll back NATO spending. And he made it clear,
roll back military spending. We can spend it on infrastructure, we can spend it on employing American
labor. And in the speech, he said, look, we don't need foreign military bases and foreign spending
to defend our allies. We can defend them from the United States, because in today's world, the
only kind of war we're going to have is atomic war. Nobody's going to invade another country.
We're not going to send American troops to invade Russia, if it were to attack. So nobody's even
talking about that. So let's be realistic.
Well, being realistic has driven other people crazy.
The same used to be true of Iran. This reminds me of a spoof I read years ago where Jesus General
writes a letter to Iran requesting that they fix a pothole in his street.
From Bloomberg - "If the Democrats can show the hidden hand of Russian intelligence agencies, they
believe that voter outrage will probably outweigh any embarrassing revelations, a person familiar
with the party's thinking said'
Ha! Fat chance. I'm thinking the American voter is going to start sending Thank You notes to the
Kremlin! As usual, their heads are stuck so far up the arse of their donkey they incapable of gauging
Main Street sentiment.
"During his recent visit to Moscow, US Secretary of State John Kerry voiced several preconditions
for US-Russia cooperation in Syria.
According to Lavrov, Kerry called for the immediate resignation of Syrian President Assad without
giving any explanation of his position.
"They say that we could join our efforts in the fight against terrorism […] but first we need
to agree that we remove Assad from power," Lavrov said, speaking at a national youth educational
forum."
Funny though, Schultz takes her orders from Obama, as the Chairman of the Party, the DNC Board
of Directors and team Hillary. Period. If any blame should go around it should splash onto all individuals
NOT just Schultz.
She is buy a symptom of the DNC disease. And yes, she'll take the fall for the team, but make
no mistake, the cancer remains and will continue to metastasize.
Apologies for misspells - 'over' not 'ovee'; Putin, not Puting. Gee whiz. But obviously, that is
the problem with US policy - they don't have that blankety-blank reset button any longer. Please
give it back!
@19 yeah, and that should give said supporters great pause. I've seen suggestions made that he was
running to gain the youth vote so as to deliver them in Nov to Hillary. I'm not convinced by that
suggestion BUT if he was a set up, and Wikileak emails can show it, well, all bets are off.
And why Sanders is only singling out Schultz is disingenuous. Any who have engaged in electoral
politics in this country learn quickly the party's hierarchy. It starts with Obama, the DNC's Board
of Directors and then Wasserman Schultz in that order. Sanders knows this. Schultz didn't run a rogue
party.
His response reminds me of battered wife syndrome.
You are assuming that Sanders is a victim instead of a conspirator.
Why would anyone give any politician in our corrupt system the benefit of the doubt? Even one
that seems to be against 'the system'?
Why didn't Bernie release more than one year of tax returns? Especially since Hillary cited this as a reason not to release the transcripts of her speaches
to Goldman Sachs.
Why didn't Bernie use the emails against Hillary after the State Department Inspector General
released their report? This official report clearly demonstrated that Hillary had consistently misled the nation about
her emails.
Why didn't Bernie attack Obama's record on Black/Minority affairs?
Obama's support is part of the reason that Blacks/Minorities were voting for Hillary. Obama never
went to Feruson or New York or Baltimore. Obama's weak economic stimulous and austerity policies
have been very bad for blacks/minorities. Obama bailed out banks that targeted minorities for
toxic loans. Etc.
Why does Bernie, at 74-years old, care more about Hillary (which he calls a friend of 25
years) and the Democratic Party than his principles?
AFAICT he got very little for his support (will he get a cabinet position for himself?). He didn't
have to endorse Hillary. He doesn't have to speak at the Convention (but he will tonight).
Putin is god--it is well-known scientific fact. He actually controls the weather and even Earth's
rotation speed. Russians always knew it, now, with the advancement of information technologies (also
controlled by Putin--ah yes, he, not Al Gore, invented the internet) decadent West can witness his
powers and omnipresence. Remember Katrina? Putin! Remember the water main break in NYT--also Putin.
I had a constipation last week--damn Putin. Got rid of constipation and back to normal BMs--Putin's
hand was definitely in it. If you look attentively at HRC for 20+ minutes you will see Putin's image
surfacing on her face.
In an interview Andrew Bacevich spoke about what he saw at various insitute, academic, etc. conferences
he attended as an academic which I believe has effected his later known books. He noted among other
things, that there was an inability for empathic thinking. He did not mean sympathy, but rather the
act of trying to understand the actions of other people. I think the phrase is to treat people as
rational actors. As horrific as Hitler was, historians dug into his motivations for example, for
his invasion of the Soviet Union.
So we get with Putin not a rational understanding of what he does and why, but rather cartoon
psychological and religious explanations which cannot be argued against as they defy rationality.
How can one argue against people calling Putin evil as that person has not invoked a rational argument.
The propaganda demonization of Putin and the Russians is part of the same playbook republicans
and the neocons used to fertilize the field of popular belief for the justification of war and invasion
of Iraq to the American people (but now followed by democrats). Every one of those articles is a
bit of propaganda manure which will eventually sprout the seeds of conflict and war.
What I find alarming about all of this Putin bashing and Hillary using it in her campaign is that
I am seeing many of my acquaintances who identify as liberal/progressive Democrats are becoming more
and more anti-Russian. By the time she becomes president there will be a majority of Democrats clamoring
for war against Russia. This is something to worry about. Recall that liberal Democrat Truman got
us involved in the Korean war and it was liber LBJ that led us to war in Vietnam. I recall very clearly
how the liberal press in the US was advocating for and supporting war in Vietnam between 1964 and
1968. The liberalists of all liberal Democrats Hubert Humphrey was leading that charge.
Democratic Party partisans are losing their common sense in this effort to back Clinton. A year
ago I could carry on rational discussion with those I know about how unwise our Ukraine policy is
-- today when I try to defend Russia I am accused of backing Trump.
@60 He really is versatile. No sooner had he finished rigging the Brexit vote than he was off to
France in a truck. Then he was spotted in Kabul. This week he has been busy making trouble in Germany
and he still finds time to fake HRC's emails. The man must be stopped!
Yes, yes, it's all true; Vladimir Putin, master of the universe; the Whirlwind; omnipotent; everywhere
and nowhere all at the same time.
I'm so glad people are waking up to reality. :-)
Indeed. Democrats have become hysterical and unhinged in all things regarding Clinton. I have
been reading a few Democrat partisan sites. With the DNC blaming Putin/Russians for the release of
the DNC emails, the partisans are demanding what amounts to McCarthy era witch hunts, and some strong
immediate NATO action against the Russians for the evil act. One supporter had a posting showing
how the Russians plan to invade the Baltics with graphics showing the invasion route--good grief.
It is curious to see that those not buying the propaganda are drawing comparisons to the witch hunts
of the 1950s'.
When I post or talk to partisan Dems I don't get accused of supporting Trump but called a Putin
lackey/stooge.
@ Relis 44
Thanks for quote-will use it . You did something readers of anti-Russian/Putin propaganda don't
do. Actually listen to or read what Putin says. I am still puzzled even though I shouldn't be when
I read descriptions of Putin in the Western media, and then read what he actually said or acted on:
two people from two different planets. I was listening to Stephen Cohen, and he said the same thing.
Nobody bothers to read what Putin says, forget his actions.
Putin should hire an agent and get a role on the TV series SHIELD as the new head of HYDRA. And
then attend comic-cons giving out autographs.
Now that the NYC Mob has secured the Goldman-Trump-Clinton hat trick in November, after which
a 5th Chosen Supreme Court Justice for Life assures a tie-winning Tribal 55% majority of Torahia
law in the USA, with not a single Protestant Justice on the bench, and knowing now it's in the bag,
fahged abahd et, now the NYC Mob has already begun the takedown of non-Tribal banks like HSBC and
1MDB, following a lull of eight years since the Lehman takedown, after which They precipitated the
greatest financial piracy in human history: the wholesale transfer of adulterated synthetic CDO gambling
debts, by the private Fed Bank, onto the public US Treasury, ...during which not a single Tribal
member was ever indicted, ... but now the arrests are happening fast and furious among their foreign
banking competition, as S&P's credit rating arm is holding a gun to Brexit.
"I can't tell you where all the money went!" Benhamin
Once the NYC Mob has Trump-Clinton in the WH and the Tribe owns the Executive, then swings the
Judicial to 55% Tribal sovereignty, so that the Tribe owns Justice too, then our poor Congress-critters
will have to stand and clap for Bibi until the blood literally runs down their arms, and yet still
not one of them will dare to stop clapping first, because it would be career and financial suicide
to 'vote your conscience' against the Trotskyim.
You know this will all come to pass in just six months from now, after which Trump-Clinton of
The Chosen, Mr. Law-and-Order-Shekinah and Ms We-Came-We-Saw-He-Died-Haw-Haw-Haw, will launch their
all-out attack on Russia, over the roads and bridges of Eastern Ukraine, which even now the World
Bank is rapidly upgrading to combat capacity for missile launchers, troop carriers and heavy tanks.
Right now. Because that's what Tribal juntas do! Look closely at the junta in Kiev that Congress
in 2015 grifted $50,000M of your last life savings to, Kiev, traditional home of Ashkenazim who spawned
1998, 2001, 2008 and 2011. They're warlords.
But the Sheeple are so conditioned to live in fear, and never speak about Those Who Cannot Be
Named, that the Sheeple will remain willfully ignorant while the mortgage credit-debt ring is bound
through their nose, the school-debt tag punched in their ear, and 'Six-Kinds-of-Stupid' tattoed on
their forearms, and their children sent off to fight in foreign wars.
Tribal historians will completely rewrite the US annals, claiming The West Was Tamed by the Chosen,
that the Chosen raised up the American Heathen and taught them to Read and Write and to Pokemon Go,
and that there never was an 'American Dream', ...that Xtian Kulaks were just illegal Dreamers in
what was always Greater New Zion, the same as Bolshevik Chosen slaved 60,000,000 Christian Russians
to death, and destroyed 20,000 churches, then wiped out 1,000 years of Russian history.
Today there is only the Now, the Dharma of the Chosen:
"We won, you lost. It's just business, get over it. Now get off my land." שלוש מאות
Putin had nothing to do with it. He was just another oligarch in Their crosshairs.
Fort-Russ has the video of '
Putin's
full speech ' at St. Petersburg International Economic Forum - 2016 with subtitles, I
transcribed
the subtitles , if any one else is interested in reading what he actually said on the subject of
the US auto-missile defense in Romania and Poland.
Thanks for the links. I distrust almost all media; so, I listen to unedited complete speeches
by Pres. Putin whenever possible. His (Putin's) talk at Valdi in 2014 was great; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXh6HgJIPHo
"... Seems Putin controls Trump and Clinton! The man is amazing. ..."
"... Hold on there, Clintonites - Both I and the World remember seeing Madame
Clinton herself hand over to Putin that gigantic red Reset button. ..."
"... So now, of course - he's resetting EVERYTHING! And you, dear lady, you
gave it to him! I rest my case. ..."
"... Putin is god--it is well-known scientific fact. He actually controls the
weather and even Earth's rotation speed. Russians always knew it, now, with the
advancement of information technologies (also controlled by Putin--ah yes, he, not
Al Gore, invented the internet) decadent West can witness his powers and omnipresence.
Remember Katrina? Putin! Remember the water main break in NYT--also Putin. I had
a constipation last week--damn Putin. Got rid of constipation and back to normal
BMs--Putin's hand was definitely in it. If you look attentively at HRC for 20+ minutes
you will see Putin's image surfacing on her face. ..."
"... In an interview Andrew Bacevich spoke about what he saw at various institutes,
academic, etc. conferences he attended as an academic which I believe has effected
his later known books. He noted among other things, that there was an inability
for empathic thinking. He did not mean sympathy, but rather the act of trying to
understand the actions of other people. I think the phrase is to treat people as
rational actors. As horrific as Hitler was, historians dug into his motivations
for example, for his invasion of the Soviet Union. ..."
"... The propaganda demonization of Putin and the Russians is part of the same
playbook republicans and the neocons used to fertilize the field of popular belief
for the justification of war and invasion of Iraq to the American people (but now
followed by democrats). Every one of those articles is a bit of propaganda manure
which will eventually sprout the seeds of conflict and war. ..."
"... What I find alarming about all of this Putin bashing and Hillary using
it in her campaign is that I am seeing many of my acquaintances who identify as
liberal/progressive Democrats are becoming more and more anti-Russian. ..."
"... I like a good meme as much as the next guy, but there wasn't any putin-did-it
in that Reuters article about the ferry accident in NY. ..."
"... 'But Russia is secretly plotting even more nefarious schemes. Putin is
infiltrating Europe. And not only Europe.' US regime would never infiltrate europe...its
already there! ..."
"... All I can say here is ... this is Sheer Comedy Gold. Hollywood couldn't
make this stuff up. ..."
"... PS - anyone know what Putin does on the seventh day? ..."
"... @60 He really is versatile. No sooner had he finished rigging the Brexit
vote than he was off to France in a truck. Then he was spotted in Kabul. This week
he has been busy making trouble in Germany and he still finds time to fake HRC's
emails. The man must be stopped! ..."
"... Indeed. Democrats have become hysterical and unhinged in all things regarding
Clinton. I have been reading a few Democrat partisan sites. With the DNC blaming
Putin/Russians for the release of the DNC emails, the partisans are demanding what
amounts to McCarthy era witch hunts, and some strong immediate NATO action against
the Russians for the evil act. One supporter had a posting showing how the Russians
plan to invade the Baltics with graphics showing the invasion route -- good grief.
It is curious to see that those not buying the propaganda are drawing comparisons
to the witch hunts of the 1950s'. ..."
"... When I post or talk to partisan Dems I don't get accused of supporting
Trump but called a Putin lackey/stooge. ..."
"... Thanks for quote-will use it . You did something readers of anti-Russian/Putin
propaganda don't do. Actually listen to or read what Putin says. I am still puzzled
even though I shouldn't be when I read descriptions of Putin in the Western media,
and then read what he actually said or acted on: two people from two different planets.
I was listening to Stephen Cohen, and he said the same thing. Nobody bothers to
read what Putin says, forget his actions. ..."
M of A - Clinton Asserts Putin Influence On Trump - After Taking Russian
Bribes
Off topic but still within context of the West's "lets bash Russia/Putin
at every chance we get"..
Seems the BBC and their assorted groupies just got eggs all over their
collective faces after the IOC ruled that Russian athletes can compete in
the olympics. The British press are crying foul - dunno if they're afraid
of losing to Russian athlete or something.
This whole doping thing stunk from day one.. All the accusers pretends
they never dope before. But then, anything to humiliate Russia and Putin
will do. How many American athletes have been caught doping - yet nobody
called for a blanket ban on the American Olympic team. The hypocrisy is
just beyond stupid!!!
Watch this space, won't be long before we see a campaign to oust the
current OIC chief..lol
Clinton/Kaine certainly confident that the MSM will not report. For all
the money given to the Clinton's it didn't prevent the Ukraine disasters.
Of course, Ukraine may not have been a concern among the particular oligarchs
who made these bribes.
Putin is god--it is well-known scientific fact. He actually controls
the weather and even Earth's rotation speed. Russians always knew it, now,
with the advancement of information technologies (also controlled by Putin--ah
yes, he, not Al Gore, invented the internet) decadent West can witness his
powers and omnipresence. Remember Katrina? Putin! Remember the water main
break in NYT--also Putin. I had a constipation last week--damn Putin. Got
rid of constipation and back to normal BMs--Putin's hand was definitely
in it. If you look attentively at HRC for 20+ minutes you will see Putin's
image surfacing on her face.
In an interview Andrew Bacevich spoke about what he saw at various institutes,
academic, etc. conferences he attended as an academic which I believe has
effected his later known books. He noted among other things, that there
was an inability for empathic thinking. He did not mean sympathy, but rather
the act of trying to understand the actions of other people. I think the
phrase is to treat people as rational actors. As horrific as Hitler was,
historians dug into his motivations for example, for his invasion of the
Soviet Union.
So we get with Putin not a rational understanding of what he does and
why, but rather cartoon psychological and religious explanations which cannot
be argued against as they defy rationality. How can one argue against people
calling Putin evil as that person has not invoked a rational argument.
The propaganda demonization of Putin and the Russians is part of
the same playbook republicans and the neocons used to fertilize the field
of popular belief for the justification of war and invasion of Iraq to the
American people (but now followed by democrats). Every one of those articles
is a bit of propaganda manure which will eventually sprout the seeds of
conflict and war.
What I find alarming about all of this Putin bashing and Hillary using
it in her campaign is that I am seeing many of my acquaintances who identify
as liberal/progressive Democrats are becoming more and more anti-Russian.
By the time she becomes president there will be a majority of Democrats
clamoring for war against Russia. This is something to worry about. Recall
that liberal Democrat Truman got us involved in the Korean war and it was
liber LBJ that led us to war in Vietnam. I recall very clearly how the liberal
press in the US was advocating for and supporting war in Vietnam between
1964 and 1968. The liberalists of all liberal Democrats Hubert Humphrey
was leading that charge.
Democratic Party partisans are losing their common sense in this effort
to back Clinton. A year ago I could carry on rational discussion with those
I know about how unwise our Ukraine policy is -- today when I try to defend
Russia I am accused of backing Trump.
'But Russia is secretly plotting even more nefarious schemes. Putin
is infiltrating Europe. And not only Europe.' US regime would never infiltrate
europe...its already there!
@60 He really is versatile. No sooner had he finished rigging the Brexit
vote than he was off to France in a truck. Then he was spotted in Kabul.
This week he has been busy making trouble in Germany and he still finds
time to fake HRC's emails. The man must be stopped!
Yes, yes, it's all true; Vladimir Putin, master of the universe; the
Whirlwind; omnipotent; everywhere and nowhere all at the same time.
I'm so glad people are waking up to reality. :-)
Indeed. Democrats have become hysterical and unhinged in all things
regarding Clinton. I have been reading a few Democrat partisan sites. With
the DNC blaming Putin/Russians for the release of the DNC emails, the partisans
are demanding what amounts to McCarthy era witch hunts, and some strong
immediate NATO action against the Russians for the evil act. One supporter
had a posting showing how the Russians plan to invade the Baltics with graphics
showing the invasion route -- good grief. It is curious to see that those
not buying the propaganda are drawing comparisons to the witch hunts of
the 1950s'.
When I post or talk to partisan Dems I don't get accused of supporting
Trump but called a Putin lackey/stooge.
@ Relis 44
Thanks for quote-will use it . You did something readers of anti-Russian/Putin
propaganda don't do. Actually listen to or read what Putin says. I am still
puzzled even though I shouldn't be when I read descriptions of Putin in
the Western media, and then read what he actually said or acted on: two
people from two different planets. I was listening to Stephen Cohen, and
he said the same thing. Nobody bothers to read what Putin says, forget his
actions.
Putin should hire an agent and get a role on the TV series SHIELD as
the new head of HYDRA. And then attend comic-cons giving out autographs.
Fort-Russ has the video of '
Putin's full speech ' at St. Petersburg International Economic Forum
- 2016 with subtitles, I
transcribed the subtitles , if any one else is interested in reading
what he actually said on the subject of the US auto-missile defense in Romania
and Poland.
"... Oh, there was a whole series of screechy hysterical articles on what a dangerous loose cannon Trump is. They're preaching to the choir here, but they do not seem to realize that arguing against any sort of change in American policy is arguing for more sameness, which is plainly failing. Maybe the American government loves the Kiev government so much because the American government is so much like ..."
"The Republican nominee for president, Donald J. Trump, has chosen this week to unmask himself
as a de facto agent of Russian President Vladimir Putin, a KGB-trained dictator who seeks to
rebuild the Soviet empire by undermining the free nations of Europe, marginalizing NATO, and
ending America's reign as the world's sole superpower."
And Goldberg says that like it's
a bad thing – hee hee!
Oh, there was a whole series of screechy hysterical articles on what a dangerous loose cannon
Trump is. They're preaching to the choir here, but they do not seem to realize that arguing
against any sort of change in American policy is arguing for more sameness, which is plainly
failing. Maybe the American government loves the Kiev government so much because the American
government is so much
like
the Kiev government.
"... That's geopolitical consequence number one. Geopolitical consequence number two is that if we are serious about tackling Islamic terrorism, it means we have to stop using such groups to achieve geopolitical goals. Western elites condemn the ideology that has led to deaths throughout Europe but cheer on (and materially aid) groups with the self-same ideology bringing the self-same carnage to Syria as long as those groups aim to depose Assad. Most Western countries but especially the US and the UK, have long and dishonourable histories of using the most aggressive, most blood-thirsty, most socially regressive Islamic groups to achieve foreign policy objectives. ..."
"... This, I think, touches on something TPTB and the MSM are also reluctant to confront: the relationships between different ethnic groups as opposed to the relationships of those groups to – for want of a better expression – mainstream society. I see this all the time in London where there are often very significant tensions between the many immigrant communities who've settled here. Anyone who observes that these maybe don't bode well for the future, is dismissed as a xenophobe or racist. ..."
"... The debacle that is the Democratic Convention is hilarity on crack. My favorite part is where Hillary's campaign manager, a testosterone-free simulacrum by the name of Robbie Mooks, gravely warns us that 'experts' have told them the Russians hacked their emails and are releasing them to help Trump. Cue loud laughter! Let's just ignore their comrade in socialism, Bernie, and point to the billionaire capitalist … Of course, nobody knows who did it, so they might as well make it up. Also, if you're still using 'Robbie' after your 12th birthday, you aren't allowed to hunt with the big dogs, get back under the porch. ..."
"... Make no mistake. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (Chair of the Democratic Party) is an appalling human being, period, full stop. But she did exactly what she was hired to do – get Hillary the nomination. ..."
"... She was fighting the inevitable so Obama made the phone call to 'thank her for her service' and Hillary gave her a nothing burger job title. ..."
"... The real story, the stench of corruption, isn't coming from there, thouth. It's coming from the emails that show the collusion between the media and the Dems. Also nothing we didn't know, but nobody in the media will lose their position. You know why? Because that crowd thinks it's a trophy to be in cahoots with these politicians. They think they're helping pull the levers of power, and influencing which levers get pulled. The Debbie Wasserman Schultzs of the world are a dime a dozen, but these people need to become intimately acquainted with lamp posts and strong hemp rope. ..."
Following three letters are of general as well as particular interest. The first is from our contributor
Reece Haynes:
Sir,
Time and again, the Daily Mail's Comment page laments the decline of the Labour Party because
"The Daily Mail has never been a Labour-supporting paper but we recognise the vital importance
of a strong opposition to hold the government to account" – or words to that effect. The above
is from Friday 22nd July's edition, but a similar message has been written there on several previous
occasions.
My bone of contention is: why don't they seem to consider the idea that UKIP could supplant
Labour as that "strong opposition"?
And what an opposition UKIP would be, instead of those misguided Labourites we have chatting
about such important issues like whether this or that organisation is 'diverse enough' to reflect
'multicultural Britain'.
On a more serious note, I believe the reason for this is that the Daily Mail have a vested
interest in keeping the Establishment in government and in opposition because that would keep
the status quo, thus allowing the paper to please its mainly anti-Establishment audience with
diatribes against our foul immigration policies and other political scandals.
Also of note is the fact that its owner, Lord Rothermere, is one of those infamous 'non-doms',
meaning non-domiciled individuals who don't pay UK tax on foreign incomes. This means keeping
the Tories in power with their generous taxation policies is to his advantage. But nevertheless,
seeing the same comments about the necessity of the Conservative/Labour duopoly is incessantly
frustrating.
Best regards,
Reece Haynes
The next letter, from a reader, raises points which we really ought to debate, and which we've
overlooked for too long:
Sir,
I think you're right to point out how TPTB are reluctant to acknowledge the very problematic
nature of certain interpretations of Islam. I'd attribute this, however, to slightly different
causes.
If we are serious about tackling the extremism that has resulted in these mass killings, then
we have to seriously tackle the underlying ideology – Wahabism and its offshoots – and that means
seriously tackling friend and ally, Saudi Arabia. It means recognising that Saudi is not a 'friend'
of the West, that its funding of the spread of extremist ideology underpins movements like Islamic
State. It means recognising that effective measures have to be taken against Saudi Arabia, and
that means accepting we're going to lose the Kingdom as the major customer of Western arms industries.
That's geopolitical consequence number one. Geopolitical consequence number two is that if
we are serious about tackling Islamic terrorism, it means we have to stop using such groups to
achieve geopolitical goals. Western elites condemn the ideology that has led to deaths throughout
Europe but cheer on (and materially aid) groups with the self-same ideology bringing the self-same
carnage to Syria as long as those groups aim to depose Assad. Most Western countries but especially
the US and the UK, have long and dishonourable histories of using the most aggressive, most blood-thirsty,
most socially regressive Islamic groups to achieve foreign policy objectives.
Geopolitical consequence number three is that if we are serious about tackling terrorism, we'd
need to stand with Russia. I've personally never felt more ashamed of the UK than when witnessing
the MSM response to atrocities like the Moscow theatre siege, Beslan and the recent downing of
the Russian airliner over Sinai. The West has rushed to give safe passage and shelter to those
who've carried out acts of terror in Russia – Amnesty International even campaigned on behalf
of the guy who later masterminded the Istanbul airport bombing to prevent his extradition to Russia
to answer terror charges.
What are the odds of anything changing?
One further point I intended to make: in relation to the specifics of the most recent attack
in Munich, it seems to me to resemble a US-style school shooting rather than what is understood
as a terror attack. The gunman was allegedly the victim of at least two assaults, claimed to have
been bullied for 7 years and seemed to have a particular beef with Turks.
This, I think, touches on something TPTB and the MSM are also reluctant to confront: the relationships
between different ethnic groups as opposed to the relationships of those groups to – for want
of a better expression – mainstream society. I see this all the time in London where there are
often very significant tensions between the many immigrant communities who've settled here. Anyone
who observes that these maybe don't bode well for the future, is dismissed as a xenophobe or racist.
Best regards,
Fern
And finally, a brief communication from our contributor in the USA, on the occasion of the Democratic
Party Convention which has now started:
Sir,
The debacle that is the Democratic Convention is hilarity on crack. My favorite part is where
Hillary's campaign manager, a testosterone-free simulacrum by the name of Robbie Mooks, gravely
warns us that 'experts' have told them the Russians hacked their emails and are releasing them
to help Trump. Cue loud laughter! Let's just ignore their comrade in socialism, Bernie, and point
to the billionaire capitalist … Of course, nobody knows who did it, so they might as well make
it up. Also, if you're still using 'Robbie' after your 12th birthday, you aren't allowed to hunt
with the big dogs, get back under the porch.
Make no mistake. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (Chair of the Democratic Party) is an appalling human
being, period, full stop. But she did exactly what she was hired to do – get Hillary the nomination.
Everybody knew what was going on from the day boxes of uncounted ballots got shoved in the trunk
of a car and driven away by a Democratic operative during the Iowa caucuses. Debbie's problem
is that she got caught in such a way that implicated the entire process and everybody in it, so
she's the sacrificial goat. To be absolutely clear, one person gets to remove her. The President.
And he did. She was fighting the inevitable so Obama made the phone call to 'thank her for her
service' and Hillary gave her a nothing burger job title.
The real story, the stench of corruption, isn't coming from there, thouth. It's coming from the
emails that show the collusion between the media and the Dems. Also nothing we didn't know, but
nobody in the media will lose their position. You know why? Because that crowd thinks it's a trophy
to be in cahoots with these politicians. They think they're helping pull the levers of power,
and influencing which levers get pulled. The Debbie Wasserman Schultzs of the world are a dime
a dozen, but these people need to become intimately acquainted with lamp posts
and strong hemp rope.
Facebook has once again been accused of censoring news, this time having to do with the
Democratic National Committee email leak just hours before the party launches its convention in
Philadelphia.
WikiLeaks released the nearly 20,000 emails on Friday, revealing everything from DNC staffers
seemingly working against Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders to staffers using
phrases such as "
no homo
"
and "
taco bowl
engagement
."
"... Clinton and the Democrats have far more to worry about from Wikileaks than they do disaffected Sanders supporters. ..."
"... The game is rigged and the house always win. You should know that by now. ..."
"... the neoconservatives do not support or trust Trump or anyone who makes nice with Putin. Hillary is a dependable hawk. Victoria Nuland worked in her State Dept. The empire will continue with Hillary in the White House. ..."
"... The other reason she is vulnerable to Trump is because she is almost as loathed as he is but unlike Trump she doesn't generate the adulation to counter it. ..."
"... I think the election could be compared to the EU referendum because just like the EU it's very hard to feel much enthusiasm for Clinton, wheras just like the Brexit campaign, Trump generates strong support with a bunch of easy answers and cheap soundbites ..."
"... Even Bill Clinton chose someone other than Hillary ... shouldn't we? ..."
"... If Trump is elected. who knows what will happen, but we know what will happen if the Clintons are elected. I will vote for Trump and watch the events and hope that the DNC fragments and then watch as a revolution and a rebuilding of our political system begins. I do not anymore wars. With the Clintons, there will be a continuation and new wars, perhaps a conflict with Russia and mankind will vanish. ..."
"... Obama didn't equal huge positive change, so why do we think Trump can create huge negative change ??? ..."
"... There won't be a video, Goldman Sachs own her. And with either Clinton or Trump, we will still be living under the dictate of Wall Street. ..."
"... Once again this election is proof positive that you BUY elections. The masters of the DNC ordained that Clinton represent them and they were so insulated in their rich little world that they failed to recognize that she is unelectable; the republican turnout will be higher than it has ever been in history, so polarizing is she. People like me, poor people who crave change, will NOT vote for banks so, by default, Trump wins. ..."
If Bernie won the nomination, and Clinton gave him 'belated and tepid support', he would still
win the election by a large margin. Which is testament to Clinton's ineptitude as a politician
I had hoped Obama would deliver genuine economic change – but that didn't happen. Before
becoming a journalist, I even moved to Pennsylvania for a couple of months to volunteer for
Barack Obama's campaign. I was enamored by his intelligence and the beautiful ways he wrote
and spoke about race. But I was also thrilled (naively) that Obama seemed to get his money
from small donors, and that he might break Wall Street's stranglehold on the Democrats.
The game is rigged and the house always win. You should know that by now.
George won the vote in Florida because Cubans in Dade and Broward counties voted for him 4-1 over
Gore. Why do you think she went to Miami last week and her V.P. is fluent in Spanish?
Latinos and women will vote in the tens of millions for Hillary. Plus, the neoconservatives
do not support or trust Trump or anyone who makes nice with Putin. Hillary is a dependable hawk.
Victoria Nuland worked in her State Dept. The empire will continue with Hillary in the White House.
Sanders would never have lost to Trump.
Hillary is incredibly vulnerable to Trump.
The Media and the DNC's obsession with making sure that Hillary won may go down as one of the
greatest mistakes in American history.
Obviously she can win. But Sanders looks infinitely more capable of beating Trump in the states
where it's going to be dog fight. Whereas Hillary represents everything Trump has specialised
in opposing with such great success.
Sanders would have brushed Trump off like a fly and peeled off large parts of his blue collar
support. And Rep leaders would blush and giggle when discussing his integrity and honesty. But
instead we get Hillary and her baggage train. Lousy.
Whereas Hillary represents everything Trump has specialised in opposing with such great
success.
Very good point.
The other reason she is vulnerable to Trump is because she is almost as loathed as he is
but unlike Trump she doesn't generate the adulation to counter it.
I think the election could be compared to the EU referendum because just like the EU it's
very hard to feel much enthusiasm for Clinton, wheras just like the Brexit campaign, Trump generates
strong support with a bunch of easy answers and cheap soundbites.
If the Democrats are to bring about a different outcome they need to recognise just how bad
their candidate is and really concentrate on running an anti-Trump campaign. As I see it it's
the only they can win.
If Trump is elected. who knows what will happen, but we know what will happen if the Clintons
are elected. I will vote for Trump and watch the events and hope that the DNC fragments and then
watch as a revolution and a rebuilding of our political system begins. I do not anymore wars.
With the Clintons, there will be a continuation and new wars, perhaps a conflict with Russia and
mankind will vanish.
Poor whites in the U.S. are not voting for the "Left" because they have been dismissed, if not
vilified, by the cosmopolitan luvvies of the Democratic Party who are in thrall to every trendy
identity politics of the moment.
The elections are the X-Factor theatre for us lot every 4/5 years.
The shadow government (Wall Street/global corporations/war machine) always remains the same
throughout the decades, regardless of the rolling red/blue figurehead.
You can't get anywhere near the top job without being in the pocket of the kingmakers.
If only you could take the money out of politics. Maybe in a parallel universe we'll have grown
up sufficiently to understand that it's absolutely this that kills any hope of democracy.
Would a Trump presidency be a disaster? Yes. Would it cause all manner of economic, legal,
political and moral crises? Definitely. Yup. Would a good chunk of Trump voters – even angry
white Trump voters – grow to regret their votes? No doubt.
Would poor people and people of color – especially immigrants, those assumed to be immigrants
and Muslims – pay the highest price?
Why would it be a disaster ?
Would it cause all manner of economic, legal, political and moral crises?
Would poor people and people of color – especially immigrants, those assumed to be immigrants
and Muslims – pay the highest price?
I don't think you can categorically say it would be a disaster, any policy would still need
to be voted through, and congress isn't suddenly going to change based on the President.
You thought Obama was going to change everything for the better, but he couldn't due to the
restrictions of power on a president, so why do people think Trump is suddenly going to have unlimited
power.
Obama didn't equal huge positive change, so why do we think Trump can create huge negative
change ???
Bernie actually brought in the young crowd who frankly sees Clinton as an establishment dragging
the sack candidate and would have never voted for her. Ron Paul did the same for Republicans.
He did actually start a conversation about what it means to be a socialist and have all the
great ideas and no way to pay for them, except raise taxes.
Neither Bernie or Hillary have a response to get people employed. Their answer is to send people
to school till they actually want to drop out of the perpetual education carousel and try and
get a job.
I wouldn't consider the same old steal (tax) the working stiffs money from them under a different
acronym (slush fund) a viable plan.
At last some rational commentary coming from the Guardian. The democratic party nominated Hillary
Clinton last night and elected Donald Trump.. Blame Clinton, Wasserman and the rest of the crooked
DNC cabal for what may well be the disintegration for the Democratic Party...
If Hillary Clinton hadn't been married to Bill Clinton she would have come nowhere, she wouldn't
have been a senator, the same principal as the Bush legacy, where would GWBush have got in the
selection process if his father hadn't have been pulling strings. The US needs a president on
merit, not who they are related to or married to. It is like a monarchy, just what the American
revolution was carried out to escape from.
There really is only one party at the Federal level and that is the $ party. The rest is just
a carnival con game with the banners and shouting. The truth is that all of us but the very rich,
have been abandoned by what is supposed to be representative govt. Sanders supporters have learned
a hard lesson, that you can't reform this level of corruption from inside the system.
Another interesting aspect will be the Wall Street speeches that no one has mentioned for a while.
Clinton still refuses to disclose anything about those but now, she's up against the very people
to whom those speeches were delivered. They not only have transcripts, they doubtless have VIDEO and that video will probably surface at the least-convenient time for Clinton.
> the Democrats seem bent on putting up people and policies that
> will redistribute money to Wall Street and ignore the 99% when their
> base been screaming at them to stop this.
> Americans might not regret casting a vote for Trump until it's too late.
>
One of the policies that Trump advocates is less of a seeming oneness with Wall Street. If Obama
couldn't divorce himself of that sort of thing, why do you think that Hillary Big Banks Pay Me
Big Bucks For Speeches Clinton would?
Once again this election is proof positive that you BUY elections. The masters of the DNC
ordained that Clinton represent them and they were so insulated in their rich little world that
they failed to recognize that she is unelectable; the republican turnout will be higher than it
has ever been in history, so polarizing is she. People like me, poor people who crave change,
will NOT vote for banks so, by default, Trump wins.
The 4 Most Damaging Emails From the DNC WikiLeaks Dump"
Well, NO --- those might be the most damaging emails concerning Sanders,
but they are HARDLY the most damaging emails, considering all the emails
confirming corruption of the media, faking sex-ads concerning Trump, engaging
in what Bernie supporters called "money laundering," a clear plan to reward
large donors with high-level positions in government, and MANY more very
important issues.
Google the article titled, "HERE IT IS=> Detailed List of Findings in
Wikileaks DNC Document Dump," at the Gateway Pundit.
There you will find
an impressive list of misconduct culled by both Bernie supporters and Trump
supporters from the released DNC documents.
You must understand, ABC is part of the DNC propaganda wing, they and all
the other MSM are going to try and reshape this mess to reduce the amount
of damage.
Yeah --- that's why I've been trying to make a point of posting factual
information that the MSM won't report on, instead of doing what most others
are doing, which is just use forums like this to rave on about what a crook
Hillary is --- you know the kind of thing --- posting feel-good opinions
when they SHOULD be posting FACTS that substantiate those opinions.
"... As life exceeds satire, one can imagine that within a week Wikileaks will
produce those "missing e-mails". And later Hillary's Wall Street speeches, following
the next appeal from Trump. ..."
"... PB @ 4, confirming some earlier analysis that trump is playing the media
for suckers over HRC's hysteria. "Trump calls on Kremlin to commit acts of espionage
against Hillary Clinton." omg. ..."
"... they cannot afford to have the truth about ISIS revealed. They need the
next president to continue their lies. It is terrifying. ..."
"... Even if Russia did the hack and leaked that information (no evidence) --
so what? We have done and do the same all the time in other countries. Just doesn't
feel as good when you are at the receiving end. ..."
"... It's like 9/11. What do you desperately want to believe? What are you desperately
afraid to admit? ..."
"... No amount of 'debunking' of the DNC's assertions will affect the beliefs
of those who want to believe, who are afraid to admit that they are going to vote
for the corporate whore who mocks them with her pathetic ruses. The corporate media
have suffered irreparable damage to their credibility over the past decade, at least.
..."
"... What is scary about this campaign is that the anti-Russian hysteria is
being incorporated by Hillary supporters. By the time she is elected there will
be many millions of Democrats crying for war against Russia. The last time a Democrat
ran to the right of the Republican in a presidential election was the Kennedy-Nixon
race. That resulted in Kennedy entering office and believing his own bs. He then
very quickly carried out the Bay of Pigs fiasco but much worse the near start of
WWIII during the Cuban missile crisis. ..."
"... Hillary is definitely stupid enough to listen to her neocon advisers and,
fueled with self righteous Russian hatred, get us involved in some shooting war
with them in Syria, Ukraine or the Baltic region. Very dangerous times ahead I fear.
This why I am moving closer and closer to voting for Trump rather than a third party.
..."
"... Great observation. Cuts to the chase, to bedrock reality. We are the Evil
Empire that Ronald Reagan ranted about. Have been since the Dulles Boys' coup. ..."
"... Trump is beginning to look like the lessor of two evils. And we Americans
are proven suckers for that line of 'reasoning'. The champion poll forecaster now
'shows Donald Trump leading Hillary Clinton with a shocking 15 percentage point-greater
chance of winning if the general election were held today.'. ..."
Usually, the only thing that stops mass- and self-delusion (and the attending
propaganda) on this scale is the massive intervention of reality. I worry
that many casualties will ensue.
Trump apparently said in his press conference that the US should
cooperate to with Russia to destroy ISIS. The panic created in DC by this
man must be incredible.
ELECTION 2016
Trump Calls for Russia's Help to Expose Emails Clinton Deleted
By ASHLEY PARKER 11:44 AM ET (NYT)
"Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails
that are missing," Donald J. Trump said, referring to messages deemed personal
by Hillary Clinton and deleted from her private email server.
===
As life exceeds satire, one can imagine that within a week Wikileaks
will produce those "missing e-mails". And later Hillary's Wall Street speeches,
following the next appeal from Trump.
PB @ 4, confirming some earlier analysis that trump is playing the media
for suckers over HRC's hysteria. "Trump calls on Kremlin to commit acts
of espionage against Hillary Clinton." omg.
There is just not enough of Orville Redenbacher's popcorn to last to the
end of this crazy 2016 . I think if Putin came out personally and said that
he did it the world would cheer . yet for some reason Russia needs to be
vilified ...Thanks for the work you do b ...
What cracks me up about the idea that the Russians were behind the DNC hack
is that Putin has little to fear from the accusation. It would probably
help him politically at home and seriously, what are we going to do about
it? Go to war? More sanctions? Denounce Russia in the UN? He's probably
having a good laugh over the whole thing.
Here are a couple of links to techie stories about the issue. They each
have links and educational comments. How deep down the rabbit hole do you
want to go?
Assange Timed WikiLeaks Release of Democratic Emails to Harm Hillary
Clinton
The New York Times
By CHARLIE SAVAGE
5 hrs ago
WASHINGTON - Six weeks before the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks
published an archive of hacked Democratic National Committee emails ahead
of the Democratic convention, the organization's founder, Julian Assange,
foreshadowed the release - and made it clear that he hoped to harm Hillary
Clinton's chances of winning the presidency.
Mr. Assange's remarks in a June 12 interview underscored that for all
the drama of the...
Essentially: "Even if Russia did the hack and leaked that information
(no evidence) -- so what? We have done and do the same all the time in other
countries. Just doesn't feel as good when you are at the receiving end."
Thanks, b - a very acute analysis. It reminds me of the warning of false
narrative the "Merlin" sponsors were peddling which Control warned George
Smiley about in Le Carre's "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy":
"They're buying their way in with false money, George."
It's like 9/11. What do you desperately want to believe? What are you
desperately afraid to admit?
Trump made light of the charges with 'hope the Russians find the 30,000
missing emails' crack, but his vp immediately made a show of taking the
claim seriously ... he looks to be the mole set up by the RNC to take down
Trump.
No amount of 'debunking' of the DNC's assertions will affect the
beliefs of those who want to believe, who are afraid to admit that they
are going to vote for the corporate whore who mocks them with her pathetic
ruses. The corporate media have suffered irreparable damage to their credibility
over the past decade, at least.
The D-N-Cee,
the men-a-ger-ie,
they're not for you,
and they're not for me!
They're runnin' in circles,
around the tree.
When they turn to butter, let's make pancakes. I'm so hungry I could
eat one hundred and sixty-nine! Breakfast for us indigenes.
What is scary about this campaign is that the anti-Russian hysteria
is being incorporated by Hillary supporters. By the time she is elected
there will be many millions of Democrats crying for war against Russia.
The last time a Democrat ran to the right of the Republican in a presidential
election was the Kennedy-Nixon race. That resulted in Kennedy entering office
and believing his own bs. He then very quickly carried out the Bay of Pigs
fiasco but much worse the near start of WWIII during the Cuban missile crisis.
Hillary is definitely stupid enough to listen to her neocon advisers
and, fueled with self righteous Russian hatred, get us involved in some
shooting war with them in Syria, Ukraine or the Baltic region. Very dangerous
times ahead I fear. This why I am moving closer and closer to voting for
Trump rather than a third party.
Credit to Julian Assange for having guts. If Clinton should win it's foreseeable
that a major effort to regime-change Ecuador will ensue so they can get
him booted from the London embassy straight into a CIA jet.
Putin knows the zionists hate him, and Trump. I don't believe he would release
this stuff. just because of the anti Russian BS the MSD would stir, which
wo proof, they are anyway.
I read it was Guccifer?somewhere,a Russian? blogger.
This will all backfire,as the American people have been had too many
times by the serial liars.
What if this came from GB,say?What would be the reaction then?
And why is Russia,who has never done a thing to US,in history,an enemy,when
the Zionists spy,bribe and control our whole nation,nakedly,shamelessly,but
there is the ol'crickets only, chirping in the weeds?
Yahoo to Putin; Hey, you are cutting in on our action.
WaPo comment sections are full of people who seem to be true believers in
the ideology of the new Cold War. Or maybe they only say that because they're
being paid to do so. Hard to believe so many people could be so stupid.
I was thinking the other day that Putin should send a squad of angry babushkas
after the sisterhood of the traveling pantsuits running the DNC. Evidently
this is already in the works.
#UKRAINE-UA police released warning that the "#HolyCross Procession
includes violent grandmas who provoke Ukrainian youth to beat them up."
Great observation. Cuts to the chase, to bedrock reality. We are
the Evil Empire that Ronald Reagan ranted about. Have been since the Dulles
Boys' coup.
Still I agree with yours and with Toivo S' point just above. Trump
is beginning to look like the lessor of two evils. And we Americans are
proven suckers for that line of 'reasoning'. The
champion poll forecaster now 'shows Donald Trump leading Hillary Clinton
with a shocking 15 percentage point-greater chance of winning if the general
election were held today.'.
Before the Dulles Boy's coup there was the changing of the motto in the
1950's from E Pluribus Unum (Out of many, one) to In Gawd We Trust.
Before that in 1913 the Fed was created with the 12 regional banks owned
privately.
Has the City of London and that empire ever died?
Has the City of Rome corner of the global financial system ever been
made clear?
The basic tenets of the Western way are private ownership of property
enhanced by rampant inheritance at the top and private finance owned and
operated by historical families and others unknown. It is sad to me when
commenter here and other places rail on about bankers and corporations and
not the global cabal that own them all.
Why can't humanity evolve beyond private finance to totally sovereign
finance and, at a minimum, neuter inheritance laws globally so that none
can accumulate enough to control social policy? Private finance is a cancer
humanity can no loner afford.
(Washington, DC 7/25) As I was idly wondering what Vladimir Putin would say about the DNC
email scandals, I received a call from Vladimir Putin himself. He said he wanted to talk about
the Wikileaks release of DNC emails. When I asked why he picked me to contact, he said "I
probably strarted at the wrong end of the list" and laughed heartily.
MC:
President Putin, did the Russian government hack the DNC email server and then
publically release those emails through Wikileaks the day before the Democratic convention?
Putin:
Yes.
MC:
Yes! Are you serious?
Putin:
I'm quite serious.
MC:
How can you justify this open meddling in United States politics?
Putin:
Your question should be what took Russia so long. The US oligarchs and their minions
surround us with military bases and nuclear missiles, damage our trade to Europe, and seek to
destabilize our domestic politics. These emails are nothing in the big picture. But they're
sort of funny, don't you agree?
MC:
I'm not sure that funny is the right word. What do you mean by that?
Putin:
You've got Hillary Clinton running as a strong and independent woman. Of course,
nobody would know who she is had she not married Bill Clinton. She's not independent. Quite
the contrary. She had to marry a philandering redneck to get to where she is. When it comes to
strength, I can say only this. How strong can you be if you have to cheat and create a rigged
game to win the nomination?
MC:
Anything else about your leak to cheer us up?
Putin:
This situation is the epitome of ironic humor. After the emails were released, the
focus was all on DNC Chair and Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz. That's fine for now but
what happens when people start asking why Wasserman-Schultz had the DNC screw Sanders and
boost Hillary? Did she just wake up one day and decide this on her own?. Not likely. She was
and remains Hillary's agent. It will take people a while to arrive that answer. When enough
people hear about Wasserman-Schultz's key role in the Clinton campaign, everything will be
clear. It's adios Hillary. That inevitable conclusion, by the way, is the reason the DNC
made such a big deal about Russia hacking the DNC. That was diversion one right out of the
gate.
MC:
Is Russia an equal opportunity hacker? What about the Trump campaign?
Putin: Why not? I hear there are some very rather graphic home movies and videos of Mr.
Trump with some interesting playmates. But that can wait. Enjoy Hillary's hypocrisy to the
fullest. When it comes to either candidate, my only advice is
let the buyer beware
.
That was it for my time with the man. I'd like to think it was Putin. Even if it wasn't,
this is what I suspect Putin would say.
In a
New York Times article earlier this month detailing Saudi Arabia's hyper-controlling
Islamic theocracy, journalist Ben Hubbard profiled Ahmed Qassim al-Ghamdi - a former "morals
enforcer" for the national government.
For the majority of his adult life, Ghamdi was a devoted employee of Saudi Arabia's Commission
for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, often referred to abroad as the
"religious police."
In this December 2012 photo, some 200 Muslim clerics visit Saudi Labor Ministry demanding a ban
on women's employment in lingerie shops. (Photo credit: aleqt.com via Al Arabiya)
In this December 2012 photo, some 200 Muslim clerics visit Saudi Labor Ministry demanding a ban
on women's employment in lingerie shops. (Photo credit: aleqt.com via Al Arabiya)
As Hubbard describes it, the objective of the government organization is to shield the "Islamic
kingdom from Westernization, secularism and anything but the most conservative Islamic
practices." That could include normal law enforcement operations like cracking down on illegal
drug dealers and bootleggers, but he said the bulk of what "the Commission" does involves
enforcing the "puritanical public norms that set Saudi Arabia apart not only from the West, but
from most of the Muslim world."
After years of working for the Commission, Ghamdi was tasked with monitoring the Islamic holy
city of Mecca. It was there that the moral enforcer began to question the rules and restrictions
of the Saudi government.
He turned to the Koran and the Hadith, Muslim holy texts, in search of answers, and made a
shocking discovery: Many first generation Muslims, including the founding prophet Muhammad, did
not observe many of the restrictions Ghamdi had been enforcing for years. For example, there had
been plenty of ikhtilat, or "unauthorized mixing" of men and women, something Saudi clerics have
long taught leads to fornication, adultery and "full-blown societal collapse."
He was compelled to speak out in favor of what he found to be "true Islam," something vastly more
liberal than Wahhabism, the ultra-strict brand of Islam founded in the 18th century and
maintained by most modern Saudi Muslims.
Ghamdi wrote articles and appeared on television to discuss his findings and noted the difference
between Islam as a religion and the Arabian cultural practices that many Saudis have mistaken for
faith.
From the Times:
There was no need to close shops for prayer, he said, nor to bar women from driving, as Saudi
Arabia does. At the time of the Prophet, women rode around on camels, which he said was far more
provocative than veiled women piloting S.U.V.s.
He even said that while women should conceal their bodies, they needed to cover their faces only
if they chose to do so. And to demonstrate the depth of his own conviction, Mr. Ghamdi went on
television with his wife, Jawahir, who smiled to the camera, her face bare and adorned with a
dusting of makeup.
Hubbard compared Ghamdi's outspokenness to "a bomb inside the kingdom's religious establishment,"
threatening the social structure that secured the virtually unlimited moral authority of the
sheikhs, or Islamic religious scholars.
"He threatened their control," Hubbard wrote.
Muslim worshippers gather at the Prophet Mohammed mosque for morning Eid al-Fitr prayers on July
6, 2016 marking the end of the holy month of Ramadan. (Stringer/AFP/Getty Images)
Muslim worshippers gather at the Prophet Mohammed mosque for morning Eid al-Fitr prayers on July
6, 2016 marking the end of the holy month of Ramadan. (Stringer/AFP/Getty Images)
As a result of his efforts, Ghamdi was shunned by his colleagues. He received angry phone calls
and anonymous death threats on Twitter. High-profile sheikhs denounced him in the media as "an
ignorant upstart who should be punished, tried - and even tortured."
"Many attacked his religious credentials, saying he was not really a sheikh - a dubious
accusation since there is no standard qualification to be one," Hubbard continued.
"There is no doubt that this man is bad," Sheikh Saleh al-Luheidan, a member of the top clerical
body reportedly said of Ghamdi. "It is necessary for the state to assign someone to summon and
torture him."
"The first irony of Mr. Ghamdi's situation is that many Saudis, including members of the royal
family and even important clerics, agree with him, although mostly in private," Hubbard noted.
"And public mixing of the sexes in some places - hospitals, conferences and in Mecca during the
pilgrimage - is common. In some Saudi cities it is not uncommon to see women's faces, or even
their hair."
But the firmly implanted religious establishment is not ready to loosen its grip. So for now,
someone like Ghamdi is forced out of the picture.
"These days, he keeps a low profile because he still gets insults when he appears in public,"
Hubbard wrote of Ghamdi. "He has no job, but publishes regular newspaper columns, mostly abroad."
"... A vote for Mrs Clinton will mean a repeat of what we've experienced during these past twenty-four years, and that is not acceptable. ..."
"... Bern lost the nomination last October when he declined to make Hillary's emails, wall street capitulations and warmongering an issue and DID NOT FIGHT TO WIN! ..."
"... yes, I will vote Trump to keep the Clintons from a 3rd and 4th term. ..."
"... The mass media is just as responsible as the DNC for tilting the scale toward Clinton. Did you you hear the fawning by the CNN presenters? Remember how they dissed O'Malley and Lincoln Chaffee. Bernie was intended to be like the "other team" and Clinton the Harlem Globe Trotters, only Bernie kept untying her shoes and shooting baskets. ..."
"... Only a very few Bernie supporters I know, and I know and have informally polled HUNDREDS, is going to vote for Hillary, especially after these latest revelations (which only scratch the surface), and the DNC's "apology", which apologized for language, but not for proven bias and rigging. ..."
"... Hillary is a lying, corrupt neocon. ..."
"... The dem party in America is now fully in the hands of the globalists. At least the repubs had the integrity to not cheat THEIR insurgent candidate. ..."
"... If not for an independent socialist by the name of Bernie Sanders who's upstart campaign is subject to derision and sabotage at a mainstream media and the DNC itself, there would be not a primary, but a coronation (which is in effect what we've been given). ..."
"... Please friends, join me in NOT supporting this sham of an election process and the anointment of Queen Hillary. The stakes for our democracy are just too high to let them get away with it - much worse than 4 years of just about anyone ..."
"... I agree with Trump on few things but he was right when he said the election was rigged. ..."
"... The news blogs have Hillary supporters trashing Bernie and referring to him as undemocratic and just a carpet bagger. During the primaries Hillary stumpers were offering misinformation or false information on Bernie and continue to trash him now. The assumption that Bernie supporters are FOR SALE or Hillary's by a nod from Sanders is not a given. ..."
"... The fact that Hillary's base is still bashing Bernie hardliners is a sign of how little respect they have for his huge voting block. Independents were nervous before the infighting. ..."
"... Trump is a one-term feather-brain and will end up, if president, as somebody's tool. And who or what would use that tool? Fossil fuel companies and other corporations. The same as Hillary, whose foundation receives donations from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Kuwait, Chevron, and many more oil producing corps and States. The difference is between the devil we know and the devil we don't. Hillary- the devil we know ..."
"... She loves wars: ask people in Libya, Iraq and other oil States. She loves Saudi money. Of course she'll go for the TPP no matter what she says. ..."
"... Trump's going to win. Clinton's staggeringly self-destructive combination of corruption and stupidity guarantees it; by making Debbie Wassermann Schultz her campaign manager, Hillary's saying "Fuck you" to millions of people whose votes she desperately needs, not to mention telling everyone "Yes, it's true. My loyalty to Debbie, whose dishonesty and corruption has just become a matter of public record, shows exactly why people don't like me and don't trust me." There's only one way the Democrats can win: drop Hillary for vote-rigging, and put up a /bernie_sanders.Warren ticket. It's the only thing between us and Trumpocalypse. ..."
"... Trade deals were supposed to improve and lift wages and job conditions. As it turns out the only trading being done is lowering wages and and less decent jobs. Government buy-up and controlling interest in some major companies is needed to bring the system back to public influence. ..."
A vote for Mrs Clinton will mean a repeat of what we've experienced during these past
twenty-four years, and that is not acceptable. A Senator Sander's vote would be the
opposite, but the Democratic Party doesn't want that, even though a majority of
Democrats does. I won't stand for that, and will vote Green Party with Dr. Stein.
Bern lost the nomination last October when he declined to make Hillary's emails, wall street capitulations
and warmongering an issue and DID NOT FIGHT TO WIN!
I remember being so frustrated during the debates, knowing that he could have torn her a new
one.... LIKE TRUMP WILL when he debuts her.
I just came out of the closet.
My first was Bernie, my second and third choice won't even be allowed on the debate stage, but
I have an open mind if the polls indicate a chance slightly better than a snowballs. . . Sans
that, yes, I will vote Trump to keep the Clintons from a 3rd and 4th term.
Great debate on why to/not vote for Hillary but Jill Stein. After watching that, if I had my ballot,
I'd would have mailed it in for Jill Stein. Another debate on the site with Chris Hedges and Robert
Reich.
The mass media is just as responsible as the DNC for tilting the scale toward Clinton. Did
you you hear the fawning by the CNN presenters? Remember how they dissed O'Malley and Lincoln
Chaffee. Bernie was intended to be like the "other team" and Clinton the Harlem Globe Trotters,
only Bernie kept untying her shoes and shooting baskets.
More promises and bargains at least. And i think that it should be published and re-iterated
that the media declared Hillary the winner, before voting had even happened, California exit polls
and research by Stanford students - say that Bernie won California.
Myself and a friend separately
experienced questionable stuff at the voting booth polls, etc. and Democratic big-wig, now fallen;
Wassermann cannot be ignored.
I understood that Bernie was going to raise the California debacle
at this Convention [ perhaps he had ]. There is a way he could not say that Hillary would be "
an outstanding President" and just say vote for her to defeat Trump and be honest about our situation.
Up until know he has been consistently brave, clear, etc. And the Green Party alternative stuff
is good and Bernie could say " i would join the Greens but i am too worried about Trump".
As an example of brave, please goggle Ted Cruz,in which he also demonstrated courage for his convictions
in his NON-endorsement of Trump, unlike Bernie, who accepted corruption as part of the democratic
ticket, very sad.
Don't get me wrong, I do not agree with Cruz on anything at all, but I do recognize courage
when I see it. Apparently, that attribute is absent among democrats.
Only a very few Bernie supporters I know, and I know and have informally polled HUNDREDS, is going
to vote for Hillary, especially after these latest revelations (which only scratch the surface),
and the DNC's "apology", which apologized for language, but not for proven bias and rigging.
We're
all either voting for Stein or, holding our noses, Trump. It's time to crash this plane with no
survivors.
Hillary is a lying, corrupt neocon. Politics as usual are over, and it's amazing to
me that the crazy cat-lady boomer dems will fall in line for smugly authoritarian DNC corruption
that makes Trump look like an amateur (and he is, compared to sHillary), whereas, if the obvious
lies of the Hillary camp were coming from repubs, the banshee howls would be heard from Marin
County to Martha's Vineyard. DEMS- YA DUN GOOFED. You'll never get us back. You can't spit in
our faces, call us crazy for accusing you of what it has now been proven you did, and then spit
in our faces again with your bogus apology.
The dem party in America is now fully in the hands
of the globalists. At least the repubs had the integrity to not cheat THEIR insurgent candidate.
I never thought I'd live to see this travesty. (BTW, I was born in 66 and a lifelong Dem). NEVER
AGAIN.
Just imagine if those "super-delegates" weren't decided until the convention where this election
would be now. Thanks Debbie Bark Bark Wassermen-Shultz not only do we have a manipulated nominee
but one which may loose.
Let me see if I understand this: The democratic party in the year 2016 puts forward a SINGLE candidate
for it's primary. Out of a population of 330 million, this party could come up with only a SINGLE
candidate, ignoring entirely that we live in a Democracy, and giving the voter but a single choice
in the election, effectively shutting out any other option or any hope of a substantive dialogue
on the issues. If not for an independent socialist by the name of Bernie Sanders who's upstart
campaign is subject to derision and sabotage at a mainstream media and the DNC itself, there
would be not a primary, but a coronation (which is in effect what we've been given).
Now, I'm told, ignoring the fact that this candidate, an individual with dubious ethics and
questionable competence that I MUST vote for this person, and that if I decide that I won't be
play along in the most undemocratic primary possibly in the history of the United States, and
I decide to vote my conscience either by voting a 3rd party or abstaining, that it will be MY
FAULT when things go badly, as I'm promised they will if they other guy wins. I am in effect being
told by the establishment that I'm beholden to their single-choice candidate, a person who in
my view stinks to high heavens of corruption and incompetence, or else.
IS THAT what I'm being told ? Because that sounds like the kind of sham elections they have
in the 3rd world and far, far beneath the standard of electoral decision making we should have
in this country. Now, I think that's what I'm hearing, and I'm telling you that I don't play that
sh*t. I'm not selling my conscience to play along with this sham - especially not to elect this
LOUSY candidate. And, frankly, it's a disgrace that anyone would imply that I should - worse even
- that people are so complicit in the utter destruction of their own political system and don't
see how utterly foul the stink of corruption is.
Please friends, join me in NOT supporting this sham of an election process and the anointment
of Queen Hillary. The stakes for our democracy are just too high to let them get away with it
- much worse than 4 years of just about anyone
The news blogs have Hillary supporters trashing Bernie and referring to him as undemocratic and
just a carpet bagger. During the primaries Hillary stumpers were offering misinformation or false
information on Bernie and continue to trash him now. The assumption that Bernie supporters are
FOR SALE or Hillary's by a nod from Sanders is not a given.
Supporting Bernie, then voting the
party ticket because Bernie has caved in to a rigged system, won't guarantee his base. The
fact that Hillary's base is still bashing Bernie hardliners is a sign of how little respect they
have for his huge voting block. Independents were nervous before the infighting.
Trump is a one-term feather-brain and will end up, if president, as somebody's tool. And who or
what would use that tool? Fossil fuel companies and other corporations. The same as Hillary, whose
foundation receives donations from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Kuwait, Chevron, and many more oil producing
corps and States. The difference is between the devil we know and the devil we don't. Hillary-
the devil we know because we can read her record and see what she's done, loves fracking in the
US and has exported it to the rest of the world. She loves wars: ask people in Libya, Iraq and
other oil States. She loves Saudi money. Of course she'll go for the TPP no matter what she says.
Donald is the devil we don't know, his one virtue is that he'll probably one-term unless he becomes
a very effective corporate tool indeed. Then he'll be just another fossil fuel puppet like Clinton.
There is really only one over-riding issue: and that is climate change. If we can't manage to
survive as a species then all other problems are moot. Scientists are in despair because political
wrangling and greed are dooming all life on earth to extinction- and it's happening very quickly.
So- what that means is that we have two candidates and neither will do squat to keep fossil fuels
in the ground. Hillary will probably pretend to do something about it which will of course fall
pathetically short of what we'll need to have any chance of survival. And, of course, she'll have
two terms- she knows the ropes and will pay off her corporate donors well.
So which one of these two candidates, both of whom will doom my children and grandchildren to
death, and yours too, should I vote for?
Trump's going to win. Clinton's staggeringly self-destructive combination of corruption and stupidity
guarantees it; by making Debbie Wassermann Schultz her campaign manager, Hillary's saying "Fuck
you" to millions of people whose votes she desperately needs, not to mention telling everyone
"Yes, it's true. My loyalty to Debbie, whose dishonesty and corruption has just become a matter
of public record, shows exactly why people don't like me and don't trust me." There's only one
way the Democrats can win: drop Hillary for vote-rigging, and put up a /bernie_sanders.Warren ticket.
It's the only thing between us and Trumpocalypse.
Trade deals were supposed to improve and lift wages and job conditions. As it turns out the only
trading being done is lowering wages and and less decent jobs.
Government buy-up and controlling interest in some major companies is needed to bring the system
back to public influence.
"... We all know Debbie Wasserman Schultz (DWS) was the co-chair of Hillary's 2008 presidential run, where she lost the nomination to Obama. So, in order to lock down the nomination for 2016, Hillary was able to get DWS in charge of the DNC and manipulate it from within ..."
We all know Debbie Wasserman Schultz (DWS) was the co-chair of Hillary's 2008 presidential
run, where she lost the nomination to Obama. So, in order to lock down the nomination for 2016,
Hillary was able to get DWS in charge of the DNC and manipulate it from within. That's the
theory anyway, except....
In order for this to work, they would first have to, not only get the DNC chair to step down,
but also get them to recommend DWS for the position. The Clinton's would have to promise something
to that person, something more prestigious than being head of the Democratic party. So who was
that person and what did they get in return?
It would appear that Donna Brazile was in-line
to get the position, but she was only the interim chair after the previous chair left, served
only one month. According to this, http://rulers.org/usgovt.html#parties
, the previous chair of the DNC prior to DWS was Tim Kaine.
"... The selection has already been made. Trump isn't supporting Labor, his 'Make America Work Again' schtick was immediately removed. ..."
"... The dissassociation is everyone is conditioned to Old School Party Politics Kennedy versus Nixon. That was fifty years ago! We're in a GOOG-FB hyper-focus-group mind-manipulation fractal world! Everything you see, that seems to be real, is illusory repetitive mirrors off one core equation: ..."
The whole selection is a carefully-staged WWE Smackdown publicity event, not an election at
all.
The selection has already been made. Trump isn't supporting Labor, his 'Make America Work Again'
schtick was immediately removed. The Takers grow queasy at the word 'work'. They have plenty of
people in SEAsia who work for them. Right now, I can get India(n) engineers for $12 an hour that
I can list as $125 an hour, and bill out after O&P at $275 an hour. India(n) engineers with Burj
Dubai experience on ultra high rise! The Takers have no intent of restoring the American Dream.
Trump isn't supporting any roll-back of NATO or reduction in P2A-R2P-PNAC. His main plank is
to Make America Secure Again. Make America Strong. Kick Some Muzzie Ass. Let's Roll. And the reason
he's pledging that, is the same reason Sanders carved out the Left, ...so that Hillary can EXPAND
her Centrist-Right capture even further to the Right. Trump is placing a pick for her 3-pointer!
Bernie took the Left, so Hillary didn't have to appear weak to her base group. And Trump will
move further Right to give her more room to pick up delegates. Then BB-D and Milo-the-Gay will
explode the Rabbinicals / Evangelists with repeated cognitive-dissonant LGBTF references. Watch.
"Milo-The-Gay calls for 'refugee' status for world's Islamic gays." Ka-boom! the John Birchers!
The dissassociation is everyone is conditioned to Old School Party Politics Kennedy versus
Nixon. That was fifty years ago! We're in a GOOG-FB hyper-focus-group mind-manipulation fractal
world! Everything you see, that seems to be real, is illusory repetitive mirrors off one core
equation:
Zn = (Zn-1)^2 + C, where (Zn-1)^2 are Trump-Clinton Janus faces of the same ZioQEnBankim, +
C, and where C is The Chosen's massive Corruption of the US political, judicial and financial
process, begun under Bush-Cheney and capped with Citizens United and Clinton Cash 501(c)3 Grand
Larceny.
"... by making Debbie Wassermann Schultz her campaign manager, Hillary's saying "Fuck you" to millions of people whose votes she desperately needs ..."
"... DWS was Hillary Boo Clinton's campaign manager last time around. DWS then ran the crooked DNC and lied to America 24x7 about its lack of neutrality. ..."
"... And as a reward for her bias Hillary Boo Clinton just rehired DWS as honorary campaign chair. ..."
Trump's going to win. Clinton's staggeringly self-destructive combination of corruption
and stupidity guarantees it; by making Debbie Wassermann Schultz her campaign manager, Hillary's saying
"Fuck you" to millions of people whose votes she desperately needs, not to mention telling everyone
"Yes, it's true. My loyalty to Debbie, whose dishonesty and corruption has just become a matter of public
record, shows exactly why people don't like me and don't trust me."
There's only one way the Democrats
can win: drop Hillary for vote-rigging, and put up a /bernie_sanders.Warren ticket. It's the only thing between
us and Trumpocalypse.
Mike5000 -> HurtTurtle
Please do some research before *you* vent.
DWS was Hillary Boo Clinton's campaign manager last time around. DWS then ran the
crooked DNC and lied to America 24x7 about its lack of neutrality.
And as a reward for her bias Hillary Boo Clinton just rehired DWS as honorary campaign
chair.
"... Clinton would want to widen the gulf between AIPAC and Donald Trump, the likely Republican nominee. "We need steady hands, not a president who says he's neutral on Monday, pro-Israel on Tuesday, and who knows what on Wednesday, because everything is negotiable," she said to applause, out-hawking the man who is running on a platform of Middle Eastern war crimes. ..."
"... In doing so, she offered a bridge to #NeverTrump neoconservatives like Max Boot and Robert Kagan, who has already written that, should Trump be the nominee, "the only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton. ..."
"... It is a strange, strange spectacle, this yearly AIPAC conference, where U.S. politicians from across the political spectrum are compelled to stand in front of a bunch of Israeli flags and proclaim unquestioning fealty to a foreign ethno-state. ..."
"... This year of all years, Clinton could have afforded to show a bit of courage before AIPAC. Jews will vote Democratic no matter what. Sixty-nine percent of them voted for Obama in 2012, despite the well-known tension between him and Netanyahu. ..."
"... Her correspondence with adviser Sid Blumenthal-a man loathed by the Israel lobby for not disavowing his anti-Zionist son, Max-suggests that she's aware of the damage Netanyahu is doing to the cause of peace in the Middle East. But if she is, she doesn't care about it enough to take even a tiny political risk, to tell a crowd something other than exactly what it wants to hear. Either Clinton's AIPAC speech was driven by belief, or it was driven by cynicism. It's hard to say which is worse. ..."
ny presidential candidate speaking to AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, during
an election year is going to bow to the hawkish elements of the Israel lobby. Hillary Clinton's keynote
speech at AIPAC's annual meeting Monday, however, was more debased than it needed to be, promising
that under her administration, Israel will be spared even the mild rebukes it has suffered under
President Obama. A symphony of pandering, it attempted to outflank Donald Trump on the right and
will end up outraging a large chunk of the left.
As Joe Biden acknowledged in his AIPAC
speech on Sunday, Israel's
"steady and systematic process of expanding settlements, legalizing outposts, seizing land" is making
a two-state solution impossible. The settlements are pushing Israel toward a one-state reality, in
which Jews rule over the Arabs with whom they are geographically intermingled. Clinton's speech,
however, barely nodded toward this reality, and when it did, it was with a promise to protect Israel
from the consequences of flouting international law. Advertisement
Here is the entirety of Clinton's remarks about settlements:
"Everyone has to do their part by avoiding damaging actions, including with respect to
settlements. Now, America has an important role to play in supporting peace efforts. And as president,
I would continue the pursuit of direct negotiations. And let me be clear-I would vigorously oppose
any attempt by outside parties to impose a solution, including by the U.N. Security Council."
She spent significantly more time railing against the "alarming"
Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement
, which is gaining traction on college campuses nationwide. Pledging to "take our alliance to the
next level," Clinton said that one of the first things she'd do in office is invite the Israeli prime
minister to the White House. That was a barely veiled rebuke to Obama, who never treated Benjamin
Netanyahu with the
deference the prime minister felt entitled to. Before the speech, some had
hoped that Clinton
might offer a word of solidarity or encouragement to beleaguered progressives in Israel. She gave
them nothing. It's understandable that Clinton would want to widen the gulf between AIPAC and
Donald Trump, the likely Republican nominee. "We need steady hands, not a president who says he's
neutral on Monday, pro-Israel on Tuesday, and who knows what on Wednesday, because everything is
negotiable," she said to applause, out-hawking the man who is running on a platform of Middle Eastern
war crimes.
In doing so, she offered a bridge to #NeverTrump neoconservatives like Max Boot and
Robert Kagan, who has already
written that, should Trump be the nominee, "the only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton.
The party cannot be saved, but the country still can be." Anti-Trump neoconservatives, however, are
a minuscule group of people. And in seeking their approval, Clinton has further alienated left-wing
voters, particularly young ones. Polls show that Americans under 30 are far more
critical of Israel than are older voters. Liberal Democrats
sympathize more with the Palestinians than they do with Israel. There is already deep suspicion
of Clinton's foreign-policy instincts among Bernie Sanders' supporters; Clinton doesn't need to give
them new reasons to distrust her.
It is a strange, strange spectacle, this yearly AIPAC conference, where U.S. politicians from
across the political spectrum are compelled to stand in front of a bunch of Israeli flags and proclaim
unquestioning fealty to a foreign ethno-state.
This year of all years, Clinton could have afforded to show a bit of courage before AIPAC. Jews
will vote Democratic no matter what. Sixty-nine percent of them voted for Obama in 2012, despite
the well-known tension between him and Netanyahu. Unlike Obama, Clinton is going to be running against
a demagogue with German roots who plays footsie with white supremacists and reportedly kept a
volume of Hitler's speeches beside his bed. She'll have all the Jewish support she needs without
sucking up to the Likud. So why is she doing it?
Her
correspondence with adviser Sid Blumenthal-a man loathed by the Israel lobby for not disavowing
his anti-Zionist son, Max-suggests that she's aware of the damage Netanyahu is doing to the cause
of peace in the Middle East. But if she is, she doesn't care about it enough to take even a tiny
political risk, to tell a crowd something other than exactly what it wants to hear. Either Clinton's
AIPAC speech was driven by belief, or it was driven by cynicism. It's hard to say which is worse.
"... Obama has been refusing to help Iraq for at least a year. A year ago, it would have been easy, comparatively, to wipe out ISIS. They were still gathering tightly together in their staging zones. ..."
"... Had you heard of ISIS a year ago? I venture to say that most people heard of ISIS for the first time in the past couple months. So Obama had plenty of chances. In fact, ladies and gentlemen, if Obama had wanted to take out ISIS, he would not have formed a supportive relationship with them in Syria! ISIS is who is "the rebels" in Syria opposing Bashar al-Assad. Before I get to Syria, I just want to put the exclamation point on this thought. ..."
"... Barack Obama, the Democrat Party, and the media (their willing accomplices) need Iraq to be always seen as a Bush miserable failure, a Bush war, a Bush failure. Just as Vietnam was supposed to be seen as a failure for Nixon. Now, you may be learning for the first time that the rebels in Syria were ISIS. Over the weekend, it was reported that Hillary Clinton ripped into Obama for his failure to help the Syrian rebels and that this failure to help the Syrian rebels led to the rise of ISIS. ..."
"... MCINERNEY: I happen to agree with her. I'm not sure why it's just coming out now. I was pushing for the Free Syrian Army. They were a huge ally. We ended up arming the wrong people over there, and, remember, ISIS was formerly Al-Qaeda in Iraq, and so look at what we have now create -- we didn't create it. By doing nothing, we let it create itself. And if we don't stop it now and stop it and protect the Kurds, we have a huge problem not only in the Middle East, but globally. ..."
"... I said, "I'm not defending Assad. As always, I'm interested in the truth, and I just don't believe --" I had to work hard to get to a point where I automatically reject everything I hear coming out of the news media in Washington when the Democrats are in power because, by and large, when it comes to foreign policy, every story is made to cover up for their inadequacies, their incompetence, and the fact that they're wrong about everything. But here's McInerney again because there's a little hidden gem in this sound bite that I want to see, if by some chance, some of you picked up. ..."
RUSH: Now,
I mentioned this, I think, in first hour, previously on the program. Obama has been refusing
to help Iraq for at least a year. A year ago, it would have been easy, comparatively, to wipe out
ISIS. They were still gathering tightly together in their staging zones.
Had you heard of ISIS a year ago? I venture to say that most people heard of ISIS for the first
time in the past couple months. So Obama had plenty of chances. In fact, ladies and gentlemen, if
Obama had wanted to take out ISIS, he would not have formed a supportive relationship with them in
Syria! ISIS is who is "the rebels" in Syria opposing Bashar al-Assad. Before I get to Syria, I just
want to put the exclamation point on this thought.
Barack Obama, the Democrat Party, and the media (their willing accomplices) need Iraq to be always
seen as a Bush miserable failure, a Bush war, a Bush failure. Just as Vietnam was supposed to be
seen as a failure for Nixon. Now, you may be learning for the first time that the rebels in Syria
were ISIS. Over the weekend, it was reported that Hillary Clinton ripped into Obama for his failure
to help the Syrian rebels and that this failure to help the Syrian rebels led to the rise of ISIS.
It's in The Atlantic in a story by Jeffrey Goldberg. It's a long interview. But there is this
knife-in-the-back criticism that Hillary directs at Obama, a comment that he made while Hillary was
his secretary of state. Do you remember he praised her, "best secretary of state ever"? She might
be, he said. On the day she resigned or the day they announced of her resignation, there was a joint
presser.
Obama is praising Hillary to the nines and talking about how she may be one of the best secretaries
of state ever, and now here comes Hillary back-stabbing Obama by claiming that his failure to help
the Syrian rebels led to the rise of ISIS. Right here it is, Jeffrey Goldberg: "The former secretary
of state, and probable candidate for president, outlines her foreign-policy doctrine.
"She says this about President Obama's: 'Great nations need organizing principles, and "Don't
do stupid stuff" is not an organizing principle.'" It's a slam, but I wonder: Are reset buttons organizing
principles? Because, let's not forget that Mrs. Clinton actually showed up with a Soviet leader...
(pfft, slap myself) a Russian leader with a plastic and red toy that said, in crudely spelled words,
"reset button." I kid you not!
... ... ...
The conventional wisdom was that Assad was gassing his own people. Remember,
Obama, in the previous summer of 2013, issued this red line and dared Assad not
to cross it. (imitating Obama) "You cross that red line, pal, you're gonna have
me to deal with," and we never did anything. But the word was out that Assad was
gassing and harming his own people. And I remember saying on this program -- Koko,
go back to that era and just for the website today, go find what I said on those
days and relink it, 'cause I made the point, I asked the question, "What if it
isn't Assad? What if the people creating mayhem in Syria are actually Assad's enemies
disguising themselves as protesters of Assad and trying to make it appear as though
he's doing this, when in fact he's not?"
And after I'd mentioned that, I got an e-mail from a friend who is somewhat aware of the circumstances
in Iraq and I was told that I was more right than I knew. And Hillary is now coming along and essentially
saying the same thing. She's not suggesting that ISIS was there. She is suggesting that our lack
of doing anything about it led to ISIS taking over the anti-Assad movement, when in fact it was ISIS
all along. ISIS was doing it and they were making it look like Assad did it. And just like the media
was biased toward Hamas, so was the media biased toward the same type of people in Syria who are
trying to make it look like Assad was doing this.
I had never seen any evidence that Bashar Assad -- his father was different. His father, Hafez
al-Assad, was a brutal guy and did commit atrocities to keep people in line. But there's no evidence
that Bashar had really done it. I knew that Al-Qaeda's on the march and they're trying to gain control.
The Muslim Brotherhood's trying to gain control, that whole area. It was a lot of Christians in Syria
that were being beaten up, killed, assaulted, what have you, and it was made to look like it was
Assad, and now we've learned that it wasn't.
The point is I called it. I was right, and that's what Hillary is now claiming that Obama missed
and that she was right about, but she never said it.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Okay. Here's me, folks, from this program on September 11th, 2013. By the way, Koko, if
you want to find the website history to link to what I originally said about this, find September
2nd, 3rd, 4th, somewhere in there, my memory is. But this was September 11th of last year.
RUSH ARCHIVE: Here we are 12 years later after 9/11, and think about it. Twelve years later we
are supporting Muslim terrorists in Syria. Muslim terrorists who are threatening to kill Syrian Christians
if they don't convert to Islam. That's who our allies are. Those are the rebels that Bashar Assad
is supposedly gassing. So we're aligned with 'em because we're aligned against Assad. They're threatening
to kill Syrian Christians if they don't convert to Islam.
RUSH: This was ISIS, folks, and we were anti-Assad. It was made to look like Assad was doing the
gassing. He wasn't, as it turns out. This morning on Fox & Friends, Brian Kilmeade spoke to retired
Air Force Lieutenant General Thomas McInerney about Clinton's remarks criticizing Obama's handling
of ISIS and here's what the general said about Hillary's remarks.
MCINERNEY: I happen to agree with her. I'm not sure why it's just coming out now. I was pushing
for the Free Syrian Army. They were a huge ally. We ended up arming the wrong people over there,
and, remember, ISIS was formerly Al-Qaeda in Iraq, and so look at what we have now create -- we didn't
create it. By doing nothing, we let it create itself. And if we don't stop it now and stop it and
protect the Kurds, we have a huge problem not only in the Middle East, but globally.
RUSH: Well, that's General McInerney. I've got 15 seconds before the break. It turns out that
my sources on this way back a year ago were absolutely right, that Assad was not the bad guy.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: You know, I tell you what's funny about this is Hillary Clinton. It's clear to me that Hillary
Clinton obviously thinks that foreign policy is still gonna be her strong pantsuit, as she heads
into the campaign. She really does. That's why she's doing all of this. But I want to play this audio
sound bite again from General McInerney, because there's a gem in this that is another example of
how Obama and the left, the Democrats, the media lied for five years, 2004 to 2009. Actually, 2003
to 2008 would be the specific time period, bashing Iraq every day, every night, every day of the
year.
One other thing. Koko has found exactly what I was talking about. There was a post at RushLimbaugh.com
on September 3rd, "What if Assad Didn't Do It?" And my memory has now been refreshed. I had a couple
of sources and an e-mail from a friend confirm, so three different confirmations here from people,
that what we were getting in the news every day that Assad was gassing his people probably wasn't
true. That it was, it turns out ISIS, at the time known as Al-Qaeda in Iraq that was doing it, and
making it look like it was Assad, and that's who our allies were. We were anti-Assad and we actually
had an alliance, loose though it was, formed with the very people we're now bombing in Iraq.
I remember I took my fair share of heat, and I always do when I'm not part of the conventional
wisdom. Assad's easy to hate. Assad's a dictator. Assad has a typical bad image and when somebody
says he's gassing his own people, it's automatically believed. And here I came, all of Washington
supports the idea that Assad was doing it, and I said, "I'm not so sure. What if."
"Rush, you didn't have to say anything. Why are you going out on a limb? Why do you want to sound
like you're defending Assad?"
I said, "I'm not defending Assad. As always, I'm interested in the truth, and I just don't
believe --" I had to work hard to get to a point where I automatically reject everything I hear coming
out of the news media in Washington when the Democrats are in power because, by and large, when it
comes to foreign policy, every story is made to cover up for their inadequacies, their incompetence,
and the fact that they're wrong about everything. But here's McInerney again because there's a little
hidden gem in this sound bite that I want to see, if by some chance, some of you picked up.
MCINERNEY: I happen to agree with her. I'm not sure why it's just coming out now. I was pushing
for the Free Syrian Army. They were a huge ally. We ended up arming the wrong people over there,
and, remember, ISIS was formerly Al-Qaeda in Iraq, and so look at what we have now create -- we didn't
create it. By doing nothing, we let it create itself. And if we don't stop it now and stop it and
protect the Kurds, we have a huge problem not only in the Middle East, but globally.
RUSH: In the early days of 2002 when Bush was traveling the country making the case for invading
Iraq and getting rid of Saddam Hussein, I remember a couple of instances pointing out that Al-Qaeda,
prior to 9/11, had done some training in Iraq. And one of the things that had been found was a hollowed-out
shell of an airliner fuselage.
Now, the conventional wisdom was that Al-Qaeda had never been in Iraq, that Bush was making this
up, or that the intel was all wrong, but likely it was just Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld lying to
make their case, because Al-Qaeda was clearly the enemy after 9/11. Al-Qaeda had hijacked the planes
at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and Al-Qaeda was the evil, Osama bin Laden, and Bush
was going after them in Afghanistan and Saddam in Iraq.
The Democrats and the media, led by Obama starting in 2002, and other Democrats, Teddy Kennedy,
they were all -- I mean, John Kerry, they were all making fun and mocking the idea that Al-Qaeda
had anything to do with Iraq. Al-Qaeda was never in Iraq and nobody can prove it, they said. Saddam
had nothing to do with 911. Now, the Bush people at the time were saying, "We can't afford --" 9/11
had just happened. "What happened here is real. And any time there is anybody in the world vowing
to do that or more, we are going to take it seriously."
They were making the case for preemptive military strikes. That's what all this was called, because
the left and the Democrats were arguing that Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11, therefore it was
not moral or strategically wise to hit Iraq. They had nothing to do with it. The Bush people were
saying, whether they did or didn't, it doesn't matter, they're threatening to do the same thing.
And after it's happened once, we are in charge of protecting this country and defending the people,
and we can't sit here and take these threats lightly.
Saddam at the time was lying to the UN inspectors about his weapons of mass destruction. It turned
out that he was big timing and he was trying to look like the most powerful Arab in the region by
being the most feared. So he was lying about at least the size of his weapons of mass destruction
stock. And part of the lie, part of the illusion was to not let the inspectors in. He wanted everybody
to conclude that he had a boatload of the stuff. And the Bush administration was trying to tell everybody
we can't afford to wait to be hit again to take action. We've got to hit preemptively.
I'll never forget any of this, folks. Because I'll never forget the Democrats arguing about it.
Because the Democrats, even after 9/11, after a week of solidarity went by, the Democrats conceived
a political strategy, the purpose of which was to make sure Bush did not secure any long-lasting
credit for any policy he instituted following 9/11.
Also remember this, along those same lines. Bill Clinton, it was reported -- he later denied it
-- but Clinton, according to some famous well-known Democrats, was lamenting that 9/11 didn't happen
on his watch, because it prevented him an opportunity to show greatness and leadership. He was upset
that it had happened with Bush. If it was gonna happen, why couldn't it have happened during his
time? We reported that and all hell broke loose. A string of denials were forthcoming.
But the point is they politicize everything. There was unity for a week and after that the Democrats
devised a political strategy, the purpose of which was to make sure Bush did not secure one positive
achievement in the aftermath of 911. So these guys began opposing everything Bush wanted to do when
it came to Iraq. At first they even opposed the use of force in Afghanistan. That's when they asked
for the vote a second time.
Remember, there was a memo uncovered, a memo that was written by Jay Rockefeller, Democrat senator
from West Virginia, in which it was stated that as a strategy -- and this had come from James Carville
and Stan Greenberg in a memo. It was then written up by Rockefeller, who was the Intelligence Committee
ranking Democrat in the Senate. He said that they had to make Bush out to be a liar.
And it said if they were to succeed with this, that their strategy depended on convincing people
that Bush was lying about all of this in order to depress and lower his high approval numbers. So,
as I say, here's the gem that was in McInerney's piece ('cause I'm running out of time here). Throughout
all of this in the run-up to invading Iraq, whenever the possibility that Al-Qaeda might have been
in Iraq came up, the Democrats said, "No way!
"Al-Qaeda never found its way to Iraq! They wouldn't know how to get to Iraq if you gave 'em a
map. They haven't been to Iraq. They don't have anything to do with Saddam! They were helpless."
Now listen to what we just heard here. ISIS was originally known as Al-Qaeda in Iraq. Now, some of
you might be saying, "Well, maybe so, Rush, but Al-Qaeda in Iraq didn't exist before we attacked."
It did!
We were able to confirm that elements of Al-Qaeda did connect with Saddam for training exercises
and so forth. But the point is, in hindsight, look at what we're learning here. ISIS and Al-Qaeda
in Iraq are all over the Middle East, just like the Muslim Brotherhood. And in Syria, we were actually,
stupidity and maybe unknowingly (given this bunch, I could believe it was unknowingly) supporting
them
Because we had concluded that Bashar Assad was the one gassing his own people. I had never seen
any evidence that Assad treated his own people that way. I knew he treated political enemies that
way, which is why it was not a very long leap to making people believe that he might gas his own
people if he's gassed others. Ditto, Saddam and the Kurds. But there hadn't been any evidence that
Bashar Assad gassed his own people.
So, anyway, that's that, and it's just... Some of it's ancient history, but some of it's just
last year and some of it's just yesterday, and so much of it is lies. And so many of these lies are
why we're even here today. So all of these lies about all of this stuff is one of the very large
reasons why Obama was elected in the first place. It's just dispiriting in a way -- and in another
way, surely frustrating, and that's why I've been so ticked off all day.
Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver spoke to The Hill,
telling Sanders supporters to stop repeating the chant and channel their energy more productively.
"I would encourage them to continue the political revolution by advancing the cause of progressive
change," he said.
The convention has had a chaotic starting day thus far, as Sanders' supporters
have consistently voiced their outrage over accusations of corruption involving the Clinton campaign
and the Democratic party.
The chant was first heard the night before during a speech by Retired Lt.
General Mike Flynn said: "We do not need a reckless president who believes she
is above the law."
"Lock her up, that's right," Flynn said. "Lock her up."
"... These "indictments" don't carry the force of law, of course, but they do carry a worrying rhetorical weight. Around the world, it's not uncommon for rulers who have just come to power to prosecute, imprison, and even execute their rivals or predecessors; historically, it's probably the norm. ..."
"... Would a President Trump be inclined to engage in this kind of score-settling? It's impossible to tell. ..."
For many Republicans, it's not enough that Hillary Clinton be defeated at
the polls in November. They want to see her imprisoned
... ... ...
The attitude that Clinton must be jailed or even executed is by no means
universal. Some delegates seem as disgusted by the saber-rattling as they are
by their nominee and the fights over rules at the convention-more signs of a
party veering into populism and barbarity. Clinton is also an unusual figure
in that she is
plagued by some real legal problems, so it's not just partisan animosity.
But the Justice Department's decision not to bring charges against Clinton over
the use of her private email server inspired a harsh backlash. For months, Republican
leaders suggested that Clinton would be indicted, despite legal experts' consensus
view that a prosecution was unlikely. When FBI Director James Comey dashed those
hopes by recommending against charges, people who had gotten their hopes up
were furious. Since the Justice Department won't bring charges, people like
Smith, Baldasaro, and Folk are making their own citizens' indictments.
These "indictments" don't carry the force of law, of course, but they
do carry a worrying rhetorical weight. Around the world, it's not uncommon for
rulers who have just come to power to prosecute, imprison, and even execute
their rivals or predecessors; historically, it's probably the norm. The
United States has been an international outlier-it has been
exceptional, even-in its long pattern of peaceful and non-recriminative
transfers of power. Even Richard Nixon, who likely could have been convicted
of crimes, was pardoned by Gerald Ford. In announcing that decision, which was
deeply unpopular, Ford cited the necessity of preserving American norms. It
would take too long for Nixon to be tried, Ford said. "During this long period
of delay and potential litigation, ugly passions would again be aroused, our
people would again be polarized in their opinions, and the credibility of our
free institutions of government would again be challenged at home and abroad,"
he said.
Would a President Trump be inclined to engage in this kind of score-settling?
It's impossible to tell.
"I know emotions are running high right now, but I think people really have to consider the
implications of what a [Donald] Trump presidency would mean for those of us who support the kind
of agenda that Bernie Sanders has laid out for the country," Weaver, who served as campaign
manager for Sanders's presidential bid, told The Hill in a brief interview at the Wells Fargo
Center.
"It's of utmost importance you explain this to your delegations," Sanders
wrote in a separate text message to delegates.
But the message was lost on many of his supporters in the audience, who repeatedly
shouted "Bernie" over those speaking in favor of Clinton, while "booing" Clinton.
Some even chanted, "lock her up," a familiar message used by Republicans who
believe Clinton should go to prison for using a private email server while secretary
of state.
The Democratic divide was inflamed over the weekend following leaked emails
that highlighted an effort by the DNC to tilt the primary in favor of Clinton.
The party is expected to remain neutral during the nominating process.
Wasserman Schultz resigned in the aftermath. On Monday, the DNC announced that
she would not preside over the convention this week, after she was heckled at
the Florida delegation breakfast, with some yelling "Shame!"
Her ousting served as a monumental and symbolic moment for Sanders supporters
who have lamented for months about unfair treatment.
The divide from the Democratic convention resembled unrest seen by Republicans
last week at their convention. Colorado Republicans overwhelmingly declined
to support Trump, instead backing Ted Cruz, while attempting a coup against
Trump. Cruz refused to endorse Trump.
"... Supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) adopted a slogan from the Republican National Convention in their protests against presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton on Sunday: "Lock her up!" ..."
Supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) adopted a slogan from the Republican
National Convention in their protests against presumptive Democratic presidential
nominee Hillary Clinton on Sunday: "Lock her up!"
At a lively Sunday march in support of former Democratic presidential
candidate Bernie Sanders, chants of "lock her up," "Hillary for Prison"
signs and t-shirts and calls for indictment were common among the most ardent
supporters of Mr. Sanders, who arrived in Philadelphia to make their voices
heard to the delegates attending the Democratic National Convention.
"... when one political party characterizes the candidate of the other as not just wrong but corrupt and criminal, the toxic effects are likely to linger long after Inauguration Day. ..."
...Monday's speech by retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who said the nation didn't
need a president "who believes she is above the law," a reference to Clinton's
use of a private email server as secretary of state. Fair enough, even though
Flynn failed to add that the FBI and the Justice Department decided not to file
criminal charges against Clinton. But then, responding to delegates' shouts
of "Lock her up," Flynn shot back: "Yeah, that's right, lock her up."
...
Patricia Smith, whose son Sean was one of four Americans killed in the Benghazi
attack. Responding to a sign in the audience, Smith extemporized: "That's right,
'Hillary for Prison.' She deserves to be in stripes."
On Tuesday New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, introducing himself as a former
federal prosecutor, conducted a call-and-response session in which delegates
- whom he described as "a jury of her peers" - pronounced "Guilty!" as he reeled
off a litany of supposed Clinton offenses.
... ... ...
Donald Trump has encouraged this unhinged rhetoric by calling Clinton "crooked
Hillary" and saying that she "has to go to jail."
... ... ...
It's not out of bounds to question a candidate's character, and Clinton's
clearly is an issue in this campaign. But when one political party characterizes
the candidate of the other as not just wrong but corrupt and criminal, the toxic
effects are likely to linger long after Inauguration Day.
Some at MOA predicted early on that Sanders was a sheepherder from the start. His latest remarks
provide additional evidence that this is the case. No question about it.
Notable quotes:
"... They are invested in the status quo, are smart enough to realize that their investment is fast becoming worthless, have fallen for the siren song of salvation through warfare, that old FDR tune. No more reasoning. ..."
"... What's particularly confusing to me is that Clinton just gave Wasserman a top job right after she was dismissed from the DNC without a care to the optics. Is she just that stupid, or are the elections just that rigged? ..."
@48 Toivo S 'Democratic Party partisans are losing their common sense in this effort to back Clinton.'
They are invested in the status quo, are smart enough to realize that their investment
is fast becoming worthless, have fallen for the siren song of salvation through warfare, that
old FDR tune. No more reasoning. They only ever rationalized instead anyway, and have now
come to the end of their collective rope. Hope to hang the other guy. Think 'we' can fight the
war 'over there' again, just as we 'always have'. The Germans, marvelous to relate, seem willing
to comply. 'Cause we're both on the same side this time? Japan too, against China. Obama/Clinton
and the All-Stars.
We must do all we can to prevent the election of Hillary Rodham Clinton.
What's particularly confusing to me is that Clinton just gave Wasserman a top job right after
she was dismissed from the DNC without a care to the optics. Is she just that stupid, or are the
elections just that rigged?
"What's particularly confusing to me is that Clinton just gave Wasserman a top job right
after she was dismissed from the DNC without a care to the optics."
Michael, please un-confuse.
DWS was HRC's campaign chief while sitting in the DNC chair ---working for Hillary to be the
standard-bearer of the status quo.
Notice DWS' new job title? Honorary Chair of the HRC's Campaign.
What has changed? Not the job description; just the physical chairs - brown or grey leather
in a new corner office.
"... Sorry, we're not just another Stockholm Syndrome-suffering constituency for the DNC to ignore or abuse, and still be supportive of our captors out of an artificial fear of something claimed to be worse. Neither the DP nor the GOP represents us, and there's no rational reason for us to vote for either, especially when we have an alternative (the GP). ..."
"... All of this "unpleasantness" could have been avoided had the DNC honored its charter mandate to be an impartial and neutral actor in the primary process instead of openly colluding with the Clinton campaign to stack the deck and grease the skids (and launder the money) for Clinton. The M$M could have honored its Fourth Estate responsibility to be the public's watch-dog, instead of the Clinton's lap dog. ..."
"... When total spending (exclusive of the M$M's 'free advertising', of which Clinton got 2-3 times more of than Sanders) is included, it's far more likely that Clinton outspent Sanders by a four-to-one margin. And still nearly lost. ..."
"... Once again, it's not about Sanders. It's not about the man. It's a movement about creating a viable future for Americans and all the world that is not ravaged by corporate dominance and exploitation. ..."
"... Once again, the record is clear: Hillary is antithetical to the principles I have just mentioned. Her support for the TPP, interventionist wars, domestic surveillance, her collusion with the corrupt DNC to make sure those superdelegates who did not endorse her early would not be funded, and her constant fearmongering (against Trump, now against the Russians) have made it impossible for me to vote for her. ..."
"... No, but you can walk away and vote for a different candidate, one who didn't directly screw you. ..."
If the Sanders people want to show their collective anger, then don't vote in November. Don't
support the political machine that screwed him over. Send a message that you are free thinking
individuals who don't want to just follow the crowd because you are told it's the right thing.
At the moment, in state-by-state polls, Johnson is getting 5-13% of the vote (and, statistically
speaking, none of it from Sanders' supporters), and Trump is still pulling away from Clinton.
Not even Sanders can save Clinton from her own tone-deaf/brain-dead campaign, because the core
problem is the candidate herself.
Sorry, we're not just another Stockholm Syndrome-suffering constituency for the DNC to ignore
or abuse, and still be supportive of our captors out of an artificial fear of something claimed
to be worse. Neither the DP nor the GOP represents us, and there's no rational reason for us to
vote for either, especially when we have an alternative (the GP).
All of this "unpleasantness" could have been avoided had the DNC honored its charter mandate
to be an impartial and neutral actor in the primary process instead of openly colluding with the
Clinton campaign to stack the deck and grease the skids (and launder the money) for Clinton. The
M$M could have honored its Fourth Estate responsibility to be the public's watch-dog, instead
of the Clinton's lap dog. And Clinton could have run an issue-oriented campaign, instead
of hiding behind carefully stage photo-ops and giving David Brock (her long-time character assassin-for-hire)
tens of millions to practice the politics of personal destruction against Sanders, his Bro's and
his Ho's.
Had the establishment parties to the DP nominating process behaved ethically and responsibly,
there would no Bernie or Bust, no Demexit, no #Neverhillary , and peace and harmony would
have prevailed. Of course, had that happened, Sanders would be putting the finishing touches on
his acceptance speech instead of Clinton--and that's why, in a nutshell, none of the playing-by-the-rules
(on the part of the DNC, M$M and Clinton campaign) ever occurred.
And underlying the schism is a point neither the M$M, the DNC nor the Clinton campaign has
yet to acknowledge: for us, this election isn't about personalities, identity politics or tribalized
partisanship. It 's about policies--a democratic-socialist alternative to the DP-GOP bipartisan
consensus on neo-liberal (economic) and neo-con (foreign) policies, that is equitable, environmentally
responsible and humane. We're not getting any of that from Clinton or Trump, and neither are they
getting our votes.
Uh, the horse bolted that barn over a year ago. Clinton--through her David Brock-run "Concocting
the Record" Super PAC--has been waging an eight-figure, scorched earth campaign against Sanders
even before he announced his candidacy. And between the infamous #milliondollartrolls on-line,
and the treatment of Sanders delegates and staff on the Convention floor, the war against the
progressive left will be waged even more fiercely than the one against Trump, right to election
day on Nov. 8th, and then (win or lose) beyond.
If nothing else, the DP primary process revealed just how much the DNC has become a wholly-owned
subsidiary of the Clinton family, that can't even maintain the pretense of neutrality or impartiality--as
the DNC's charter requires. And it's also exposed just how much the Fourth Estate has abandoned
even the pretense of being the public's watch-dogs for the role of being the Clinton's lap-dogs,
and the encyclopedic definition of the "courtier press".
Link, please? Obviously you're just counting Campaign account spending; but Clinton raised and
spent hundreds of millions through Super PAC's, like the $150M+ funneled through David Brock's
"Concocting the Record" PAC alone, and even more in dark-money PACs that don't have to report
contributors or amounts; and the (probably illegal) massive money-laundering between scores of
PACs, most of which ended up in the DNC and spent directly on Clinton's campaign.
Sanders never had any Super PACs, or even held a single, formal fund-raising event, but relied
on millions of small-sum donors (with virtually no overhead); unlike Clinton and her high-end,
big-check ($350K and up) fund-raisers that disappeared into her mega-laundromat money-washing
operation.
When total spending (exclusive of the M$M's 'free advertising', of which Clinton got 2-3
times more of than Sanders) is included, it's far more likely that Clinton outspent Sanders by
a four-to-one margin. And still nearly lost.
Once again, it's not about Sanders. It's not about the man. It's a movement about creating
a viable future for Americans and all the world that is not ravaged by corporate dominance and
exploitation. The election has never been about him; it's been about working toward mitigating
Global Climate Destabilization; it's been about bringing responsive democracy back to federal
government in the US; it's been about ratcheting down the violence which comes from the failure
of the Social Contract.
Once again, the record is clear: Hillary is antithetical to the principles I have just
mentioned. Her support for the TPP, interventionist wars, domestic surveillance, her collusion
with the corrupt DNC to make sure those superdelegates who did not endorse her early would not
be funded, and her constant fearmongering (against Trump, now against the Russians) have made
it impossible for me to vote for her.
I do not live in a swing state, and it is genuinely beyond me why any Progressive who lives
in a solidly Red or Blue state would possibly vote for her, given her proven record. Yes, the
is the most experienced at voting for wars, bombing civilians, supporting dictators, bailing outbanks,
spreading neo-liberalism, promoting fossil fuels and fracking the heck out of the planet. Sure
if you fear Trump AND live in a swing state, or if you are actually a Conservative Democrat AND
live in a swing state, fine - give in to your fear or conservatism. But if you are not in a swing
state and you are not driven by fear or a conservative, why on earth you would vote for her now
or in November?
Perhaps this is a call for you to question your own values, or the labels you use to describe
yourself if you consider yourself a "Progressive" - or this is a call for you to educate yourself
on her past record. Her actual record. Not the Benghazi charade Faux News promotes, but her active
intervention in bombing Libya to hell (for access for oil corporations). Look at her deceitful
hiding behind the "faulty information" argument she uses to defend her vote for Iraq (she did
not call for the UN Weapons Inspectors to see what better information there was). Look at how
she, as Secretary of State promoted the blight of fracking world wide (despite plenty of scientists
calls for better capping and methane leak prevention and the diminution or cessation of groundwater
contamination). There are plenty of people who see benefits in having her elected which helps
their own privilege, but they support her at the peril and loss of the global community as well
as the degradation of many Americans.
Now, more than Ever,
Hillary Never!
1iJack -> TheMonitor
When you lose you don't get to dictate terms of surrender.
No, but you can walk away and vote for a different candidate, one who didn't directly screw
you.
Clinton mafia and corrupt MSM like Guardian cannot deny the reality of what they wrote, so
they focus on how the information came out. "But voters don't care where the info came from. What voters
care about (for a change) is what the democrats actually wrote to each other, thinking their words were
"safe" (i.e., their hubris and arrogance is coming back to bite them in the ass). And the DNC are completely
guilty, based on their own words." "So, the media is lockstep quiet about their outting as
utterly disingenuous manipulators and distorters of the political process. And they are crying
foul at full volume at the Russians for allegedly daring to affect the political process by introducing
the truth of the situation. Apparently, some folk never learn, can never be taught a lesson.
So what's the solution?"
Notable quotes:
"... The first report by the Guardian's own correspondent, Alan Yuhas, and the one in today's newspaper, includes responses both from the Clinton team and from Sanders. But the Clinton response does not just get a mention, it dictates the entire theme of the Guardian story: that the leaks themselves are of little consequence. The real story, apparently, is an unproven and deflectionary claim by the Clinton camp that Russia is behind the leak. The headline says it all: "Hillary Clinton campaign blames leaked DNC emails about Sanders on Russia". ..."
"... The story itself does not tell us anything about the leaks until the sixth ..."
The pattern is unmistakable in both the UK and US – and I apologise for sounding like a stuck record.
Liberal mainstream media prove over and over again their aversion to telling us the news straight.
They conspire – I can think of no fairer word – with the political elites in Washington and London
to spin and subvert stories damaging to their mutual interests, even when the facts are driving real
events in an entirely different direction.
A perfect illustration is the story of the Democratic
party's leaked emails, which reveal that the national leadership was actively seeking to swing the
primaries battle in Hillary Clinton's favour by harming Bernie Sanders. One leaked email (there are
more to come, apparently) shows officials trying to highlight Sanders' "faith" – it is unclear whether
the goal was to play up his Jewishness or his supposed atheism, or both.
As Sanders says, this is "outrageous" activity by the Democratic National Committee (DNC), even
if it is hardly surprising. He, and we, knew it was happening during the primaries, even if it wasn't
being reported, just as we know the British parliamentary Labour party has been trying to undermine
its leader, Jeremy Corbyn, since he was elected last summer, even if everyone denies it. The difference
with the Democratic party scandal is we now have the proof.
It is worth examining the Guardian's coverage of this affair. It's like a masterclass in
Pravda-style journalism – and entirely illustrative of how the Guardian is not reporting news
but framing debates to protect its political interests: they have been rock solid behind the status-quo
candidacy of Clinton rather than Sanders ("let's focus on the fact she's woman rather than that she's
the spokeswoman for the military-industrial complex"), just as they seem ready to back anyone for
British PM as long as it's not Jeremy Corbyn, including Theresa May.
The DNC email leak story broke badly for the Guardian, with the first reports arriving
Sunday UK time, when the paper does not publish. A bland Associated Press
report appears to be the first time the story runs on its website, too early for responses from
the main actors.
The
first report by the Guardian's own correspondent, Alan Yuhas, and the one in today's newspaper,
includes responses both from the Clinton team and from Sanders. But the Clinton response does not
just get a mention, it dictates the entire theme of the Guardian story: that the leaks themselves
are of little consequence. The real story, apparently, is an unproven and deflectionary claim by
the Clinton camp that Russia is behind the leak. The headline says it all: "Hillary Clinton campaign
blames leaked DNC emails about Sanders on Russia".
This is exactly what the Clinton team wanted: for the media to focus on her phony outrage
rather than our justified outrage that the party system is rigged to make sure ordinary voters
cast their ballots the way the Democrat leadership want them cast.
The story itself does not tell us anything about the leaks until the sixth paragraph.
Before that we have lots of Clinton camp indignation about Russia interfering in US domestic politics
– as though this story is primarily yet another chance to knock Vladimir Putin and his supposed best
pal, Donald Trump, Clinton's chief rival for the presidency. Even when we finally reach mention of
the leaks, they are glossed over, with it unclear what the substance of these emails was and why
they are significant.
This is stenographic journalism that has become entirely the norm in the Guardian (if you
don't believe me, just scroll back through my blog posts to see more examples).
The real angle – the one that should have the been the focus of the story, at least based on news
value – is buried near its end: Sanders' demand that DNC chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, should
resign. That angle as the lead would have highlighted its true news interest: evidence of corrupt
practices at the DNC. It would have allowed the Guardian to focus on the nature of the leaked
emails rather get sidetracked into Clinton's anti-Russia spiel.
Proof that this was the real news story is confirmed by the fact that, soon after the Guardian
published its report, Wasserman Schultz did, in fact, resign. The real scandal, rather than the Washington
spin, finally cornered the Guardian very belatedly to
run the story online in a more realistic fashion.
The fact that it took more than 24 hours and three attempts before the story was reported in a
way any first-year journalism student would understand it had to be covered is not to the Guardian's
credit. It is to its shame. This was a desperate damage limitation operation by the Clinton camp
that was (yet again) actively supported and assisted by the Guardian.
Social media is changing many things. But one of the clearest examples is in the way it is bypassing
mainstream media gatekeepers like the Guardian and allowing the facts to speak for themselves.
NYT is afraid to open comments on this as they will swamped with denunciation
of Hillary. Sanders lied to his supporters that Trump represents bigger danger then
Killary. nobody represent bigger danger then Killary. Bernie Sanders, hypocrite,
or canny operator? Is this another hostage situation and with what Clinton criminal
cartel threatened him ? "This campaign is not really about Hillary Clinton,
or Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders, or any other candidate who sought the presidency,"
Sanders told a New Hampshire crowd Tuesday in a speech endorsing Hillary Clinton.
"This campaign is about the needs of the American people and addressing the
very serious crisis that we face." Posting under the hashtag #SandersSellsOut,
sanders supporters drew parallels with a previous uncomfortable endorsement of a
presidential candidate, labeling it "another hostage situation." Most view his endorsement
on Monday, as the infidelity in a relationship and a bad break up.
On the opening day of the Democratic National Convention, the ragtag coalition
of liberals that Mr. Sanders is supposed to deliver to Hillary Clinton heckled
from the convention floor. They marched in the streets. They protested outside
the arena.
They refused to go quietly.
"I'm booing now, and I'm going to boo for four more days," said Jody Feldman,
a
... ... ...
Liz Maratea, 31, a delegate from New Jersey, said she refuses to lay down
arms and accept Mrs. Clinton as the nominee. "She has the moral depth of a thimble,"
Ms. Maratea said. "Are we supposed to take this, or are we supposed to rise
up?"
Here in Philadelphia, it was the Sanders-inspired activists who seized the
message and the megaphone of his self-proclaimed rebellion against money and
power - and who decided that the man who had inspired their cause, and who adorned
their T-shirts, was no longer their movement's unchallenged leader.
"As beloved as Bernie is," said Norman Solomon, a Sanders delegate from California,
"he's not running the show."
... ... ...
The rejection of Mrs. Clinton inside the Wells Fargo Center was scattered
but persistent. Those loyal to Mr. Sanders waved fists with thumbs turned down.
They screamed "No" and "Nay." They wore pins, stickers, shirts and hats bearing
Mr. Sanders's face. And they defaced Clinton signs that once read "Stronger
Together," transforming them into a different message: "Stop Her."
In a way, the angry remnants of Mr. Sanders's presidential campaign are not
really about him anymore: They have become a stew of simmering grievances from
the primaries about rules, process, money, fairness and democracy - and were
reignited by leaked emails from the Democratic National Committee revealing
the bias of some party officials in favor of Mrs. Clinton.
... ... ...
Their distrust of Mrs. Clinton runs deep. Even if she wins, they already
expect to be disappointed by her presidency. Rosario Dawson, an actress and
a Sanders supporter, admonished fellow Democrats to watch a Clinton White House
carefully for signs of betrayal on signature liberal issues like universal health
care and a $15 federal minimum wage.
If not, she warned, "then civil disobedience will follow, because we are
serious."
... ... ...
As tensions mounted, verbal skirmishes occasionally broke out on the floor.
Inside the Wisconsin delegation, a Sanders supporter stood up with a piece of
paper taped over her mouth. "Silenced," read a message on the tape.
How can anyone continue to run for office when your record is such, that
even your own party is chanting "lock her up, lock her up". I think the
Democrats are making a big mistake as she is clearly very devisive and as
such appears to be Trump's only chance of winning.
Folks the media will not inform you but there are 4 candidates running for
president. Jill Stein on the Green Party ticket and Gary Johnson ( former
governor of New Mexico) on the Libertarian ticket. Check them out. Both
are very capable people. I plan to vote for one of them. If we all do one
of them will win. The media are in bed with the military-industrial complex.
So continuing wars with both Clinton and Trump!
True! However, Hillary is in bed with the Neocons who started the whole
charade about Iraq. Check out the great journalist, Robert Parry (broke
the Iran-Contra story), on her ties to the Kagans, etc. Also her recent
speach at AIPAC. Clinton will get us into a nuclear confrontation with Russia.
Trump is no better. Please reconsider.
So the email leaks prove the DNC was working against Sanders all along and
trying to get Hillary in there. So basically, the democratic candidate race
wasn't fair. Why should voters support a party that doesn't take their votes
seriously?
If we keep letting them get away with this shit because "the other guy
might get in!", they'll just keep doing it and keep pushing the envelope
to erode democracy.
People seem to hilariously think Trump can unilaterally make good on
all his ridiculous promises. Sorry guys, that's not how the presidency works.
His ideas will be shot down at the other levels of government pretty fast.
As far as starting wars goes, Hillary is just as hawkish and actually has
a far worse history of voting for wars.
What a state of affairs -- Bernie Sanders supporting a presidential candidate
who charged $10,000 per minute for a chat with the oligarchs who had bought
her and got her surrogates to undermine the democratic process.
Hillary did not win the primaries, it was offered to her as an entitlement.
An average worker would have been arrested for what Clinton did. I am not
saying that is right, but it is clear that punishment is different for people
based on their economic and political influence. And that is not right.
What you said is true. The CNN newscasters commented that the Attorney General
and the FBI Director knew that their jobs are in danger ...if they tried
to prosecute
a powerful person such as Clinton.
So we can put the following as official:
The punishment of a crime is inversely proportional to the economic and
political influence of of the criminal.
I think jenniferintls comment is based on the factual evidence that the
Clintons are greedy corrupt immoral people. Nothing to do with a legal education
The Clintons, as "public servants," have amassed $200 million in wealth
and yet nobody can point to anything either one of them solved or accomplished.
The Clintons are masters at using politics to create wealth. But, their
party is over. America won't elect Hillary, she's a weasel.
"Matt Schmidheiser, an 18-year-old student from Cherry Hill, New Jersey,
was similarly emphatic.
'I think she does need to be locked up her along with the DNC chairwoman
who just stepped down. Because they both just horribly mislead the American
public and they spit lie after lie and nobody seems to care.'
Schmidheiser was carrying a homemade poster that catalogued Clinton's
alleged misdeeds. He had been a little late arriving at city hall and missed
the chant.
'I wasn't there for it but I would love to have been a part of it and
I would love to start another,' he said.
'I think it's accurate and I think she needs to be in prison for the
rest of her life.' "
Oh really, so here's someone who wants to imprison someone for lying.
Authoritarians come in all stripes. And he couldn't be bothered to get his
sorry butt to the demonstration so he could chant "get a rope" errrrr "lock
her up".
Don't be condescending. Hillary Clinton represents everything Bernie is
against. She is only slightly less toxic than Trump. On top of that the
entire primary season was rigged against Sanders. The apex of that was having
the major networks "call" the entire nomination the night before California
(and 4 other states) got to vote. I can't imagine how that happened (nor
why). The two-party system is dead. They are both wholly owned by corporate
and military industrial complex interests. Millions of Americans have had
enough and no Hillary cheerleaders are going to change that...
What did you expect? The DNC, a supposedly neutral party in the nomination
race, blatantly sided with one candidate to help them win against the other,
in a close race, and were kind enough to document all the evidence in long
email chains. In the year 2016, a time when everyone should know that no
one has any privacy anymore. Not you, not me, not even them. They should
of realised the emails would eventually be leaked. Now their actions are
known to all, and half of the democrat base feel utterly betrayed.
It's a good day to be Trump. He must be thanking his lucky stars.
"... See, I believe progressive people are sick of collecting the little scraps they're thrown after the real corporate agenda has been set in stone. If there was ever a time to not go along with this, stand firm and say ''No more'', this is it. ..."
"... This movement is bigger than Bernie Sanders. If Hillary loses to Trump, it won't be the fault of Sanders supporters, but the slimy lies and corruption of her and the DNC. It has been said that the Democratic party is the place where social movements die. Good to know that "Berners" still want to fight for the greater good, something establishment politics doesn't provide. ..."
"... Hillary Clinton = Jeb! + Gun Control ..."
"... Sanders supporters will get more for their vote with Trump than with Hillary. ..."
"... If Bernie truly believes that Hillary would "make an outstanding president" why did he stand against her in the first place? ..."
"... Hillary is an imperialist. If there's actually a "lesser evil" out of these two, I don't see it. ..."
"... A vote for Clinton is condemning Middle Eastern people to their deaths with the obvious invasions that she'll likely cook up. ..."
"... Trump wants to make jobs, better the education system and raise salaries. Voting for Trump will bring Sanders supporters more of what they want and less is they vote for Clinton. ..."
"... I cancelled my visit to the Democratic convention in Philadelphia when I realised it was going to be Hilary Clinton. She is a female version of Tony Blair, even, more dishonest and unscrupulous. Had the blacks and latinos voted for Sanders in numbers, this result could have been avoided. But we have to live with it. The hope is that Bernie has started a movement that will survive and perhaps one day we will have a social democratic president in the USA. ..."
"... Make Sanders VP and then Assange plus the FBI will take care of the details. Simple. ..."
"... I may have voted Hillary, but then "DWS". Tomorrow I become a independent. F@ck the DNC 30 years a Dem now a disappointed. ..."
"... It's Billary who intends to pursue a more 'muscular' foreign policy http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/hillary-clinton-middle-east_us_56f06ab2e4b09bf44a9e3177 ..."
"... Crooked Clinton and her crooked backers are laughing their asses off at Bernie. The old fool is being used. ..."
"... She's dishonest, She has no clear principles, and She has a long history of questionable judgement/ethics. The first two issues are ones of degree: just about all of us are guilty of the occasional fib, and people often alter their views to what is fashionable. Politicians tend to be especially bad in both regards. But even by the low standards of politicians, Clinton stands out. Clinton's "flexible reality" is really something to behold. ..."
"... Or take the Trans Pacific Partnership, which Clinton stewarded during her tenure as Secretary of State. Caught in a close fight with far-left candidate Bernie Sanders, Clinton was quick to jettison the TPP and distance herself from it, even though her husband and she have decades of unequivocal support for free trade. The list could go on and on. There are plenty of politicians who equivocate on important issues, and whose views "evolve" to magically fit what voters want. But Clinton is special in her ability to (a) voice strong views on various issues and then (b) act as though those who remember her prior views are crazy. The problem that most people have with Clinton is that if free trade returned to being en vogue in 2018, or there was a successful movement to amend the Constitution to prohibit gay marriage, there's a pretty good chance that Clinton would be at the forefront, claiming that those were "always" her views, and that prior statements to the contrary were taken out of context/the work of the "vast, right-wing conspiracy." ..."
"... Oh, and another thing, which I'll never get tired of repeating: if the past few years proved anything, is that a President can only do so much against a hostile House. ..."
"... While it's obvious why the Clinton camp would want to convince people a Trump presidency would bring forth the Armageddon, the true battle is not for the president: it's for the two houses. It will be the two houses that determine who the next SCOTUS is, it will be the two houses that pass legislation, it will be the two houses that approve or reject the next President's war plans. A red house will make a Clinton presidency irrelevant, and a blue house will make a Trump presidency harmless. ..."
"... Clinton on the other hand, is a chicken hawk psychopath establishment lackey who believes the rule of Law simply doesn't apply to her and also has a husband who deregulated all the financial sector, removed welfare, deregulated healthcare to the benefit of big business, has links to Iran Contra, is sexually dysfunctional and if you believe multiple credible authors (including Christopher Hitchens) is probably a rapist. She too would be a terrible President. ..."
"... I can't believe you're seriously suggesting that voting for a member of the Clinton Crime family is so much better and the only option but then again, you believe in the 2 party system and talk about Democrats and Republicans in a ridiculously tribal and childish way. It's time for you to wake up and smell the coffee. Trump is almost certainly a narcissistic, uneducated, racist, self-obsessed sociopath whose sole obsession in life is the acquisition of material wealth. He would undoubtedly be a terrible President. Clinton on the other hand, is a chicken hawk psychopath establishment lackey who believes the rule of Law simply doesn't apply to her and also has a husband who deregulated all the financial sector with disastrous results, removed welfare, deregulated healthcare to the benefit of big business, has links to Iran Contra, is sexually dysfunctional and if you believe multiple credible authors (including Christopher Hitchens) is probably a rapist. Clinton too would be a terrible President. ..."
"... The Clinton team have been busy insulting progressives for the past year and they did not give us much in the massaged platform. The choice of VP was another slap in the face along with Debbie's new job. ..."
"... The Clintonites are nothing but bullies, gutless wonders willing to grovel before power. In supporting her they betray every good thing this nation ever stood for. They are willing to accept corruption, lies, and incompetence for reasons I don't comprehend, ignoring clear lawbreaking in order to install their false idol. ..."
"... Leave it and join the Greens, join the Libertarians, join anything but the party of the corrupt, the party of betrayal, the party of the oligarchs. ..."
"... The Guardian comment on the leaked emails: 'this seems to mark a new development in the constant struggle of propaganda and disinformation' ... could easily be said about its own approach. Oh the irony. ..."
"... If you haven't seen this amazing rant by a Bernie delegate, your life is missing something: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydIbIgg7djI ..."
"... This was never about Sanders. The Clinton folks spent so much time portraying us as blind followers that they started to believe their own hype. It was always about progressive policies and values and if Sanders endorses a candidate who doesn't share those valued, a candidate who will take to us war it's time to say: thanks you Sanders for all you've done but I can't join you on the path you are walking on now. ..."
"... Clinton and cronies will say or do anything to bring over the Bernie fans. When she no longer needs them she will throw them away along with their ideas. The important decisions were made long before anyone showed up in Phila. The fact DWS was given a job on HC's staff after getting fired says it all. Now Bernie sells out. Don't you feel just a little used? ..."
"... With the exception of one super delegate, the majority of the DNC super delegates had already endorsed Hilary before the first primary, and none changed his/her vote when Bernie got traction. Even his closest ally, in ideology, Liz Warren, did not endorse Bernie. That is how corrupt & controlling the DNC leadership has become: in this election they clearly are the king makers, while the GOP produced 18 well-known candidates that tore each other to pieces. That tells you how planned this whole thing was with the Democrats. Both parties are corrupt; but while the GOP suffers from internal Chaos & cannibalism, the DNC acted with a script that fits more the way Russians have been picking their presidents. ..."
"... Well, perhaps a Trump victory can finally help DNC internalize the message of America's Progressives. So, I have a better analogy for not voting & possibly seeing Trump win; sometimes you lose an arm in order to save the body. ..."
"... Chicken hawk psychopath with innumerable foreign policy disasters on her watch including Libya; ..."
"... Bought and paid for by the usual suspects - Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan etc; ..."
"... A security risk to the US i.e. used an unencrypted private server which was contrary to the rules, was routinely hacked by foreign powers, contained information about covert US black sites and was also obviously designed to hide Clinton Foundation business dealings/shenanigans. This had nothing to do with convenience; - Subverted the democratic process with regards to her nomination. ..."
"... Do I really need to go on? ..."
"... Reagan started deregulation, but Billy Boy and Robert Rubin continued with devastating abandon. Just one piece of legislation: Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 - largely the cause of the 2007/2008 subprime derivatives crisis. ..."
Sanders is being just being a political realist. He knows that Hillary is a lying sociopath, but
she will still be easier to deal with than Trump who is also stupid and erratic.
The best way to push Hillary to the left is to vote for her and then keep up the pressure through
every political means available. Contribute to truly progressive organizations (not the DNC),
volunteer, demonstrate, etc.
I think the problem here is that while it is only rational for Americans to vote Hillary to big
up the anti-Trump vote and stop him getting in, there is a double bind in the sense that if Hillary
takes power with her traditional Democrat big business/small time social reform politics, then
it may make people complacent. I think this what the Bernie radical edge is concerned about; the
last few decades have shown that people are really, really easy to pacify if they are able to
just cruise on the mediocrity of self-interested neoliberal governments that throw a few crumbs
from the table.
I don't necessarily think the argument is a good enough excuse if it means handing Trump the
presidency. After all, he might not be able to do everything he says going to do with congress
in the way, but he could still do an awful lot of damage whereever he can get support,
and it's irresponsible to let him get away with it when you could have helped try to stop him.
The most important thing is that people do not forget that their job is to go above and beyond
the supporting of any particular leader, and maintain pressure on whoever is in power to turn
things around dramatically and irreversibly.
Sanders's supporters are correct not to trust Hillary. Throughout their careers in politics, both
Clintons have repeatedly demonstrated that when they are caught up in personal scandals they react
by making enormous concessions to conservatives, completely undermining the liberals who elected
them.
This might not be a problem if the Clintons' scandals were rare, but Bill is a serial abuser
of lower-status women and Hillary will do anything for money. They just can't control themselves.
They are always involved in unsavory activities which is why they are so paranoid and secretive.
You would think that liberals would have realized that these two can't be trusted but many
liberals are hopelessly naďve and they focus on rhetoric and not past behavior when choosing a
candidate.
Here are the 6 steps I recommend US progressives take in the coming months to get the best outcome
from the November elections and beyond:
1) Support progressive Democratic candidates wherever they are running.
2) In the presidential race: in states that are solidly Democratic or Republican, vote for Jill
Stein
3) In swing states, vote for Hillary Clinton to ensure Trump is defeated
4) Keep the pressure on Clinton to ensure she abides by the policy commitments she made to Bernie
Sanders
5) Raise awareness among progressives, moderates and all minority groups about the need to change
the voting system to proportional representation, and lobby Democratic politicians to support
this change also
6) Keep building the political movement that Bernie has inspired, and be willing to transform
ideals into action by becoming involved in politics and effective activism in a long-term way.
The DNC is a corrupt organisation. There is no doubt.
So is the Republican party.
The choice people are faced with is unpalatable to say the least. It's one of the starkest
examples of a lesser of two evils decision as I've ever seen.
Clinton is a right leaning democrat, heavily enmeshed in the Washington machine. She's 100%
a part of the establishment. She's a hawk.
She's everything wrong with the political system in the US.
You would only vote for her if you were faced with something worse...
The elephant in the room in the whole Hillary vs Bernie vs Trump debate is the US voting system.
The current US electoral system is a variation of 'first past the post', which is the worst type
of voting system it is possible to have in a democracy. Not only does it promote the dominance
of one or two massive corporatised parties, but it punishes those who vote for smaller parties
and independents by effectively denying their vote any value in determining the candidate who
will be elected. The preferential system (used in Australia) is better, but still tends to result
in a 2 party state.
If progressive activists want to create a more conducive environment for electing progressive
leaders in the future, they need to start campaigning for a move to proportional representation,
as favoured by the vast majority of democracies, including virtually all European states, New
Zealand, Israel, South Africa and most developing nations. This system allows for greater representation
for all voices in the political process, and does not disenfranchise those who vote for smaller
parties.
This change is unlikely to happen in a hurry, but it does need to happen at some stage, unless
progressives want to continually be forced into choosing between voting for an undesirable centre-right
candidate such as Clinton, or voting for a stronger candidate, such as Bernie Sanders or Jill
Stein, and potentially losing the value of their vote.
This does all beg the question as to why the Democrats couldn't find a better 'mainstream' candidate
than Clinton if she's that unpopular. The answer I suspect is 'money'.
the Vermont senator was "bending reality in favour of what he feels is the most responsible
course".
See, I believe progressive people are sick of collecting the little scraps they're thrown
after the real corporate agenda has been set in stone. If there was ever a time to not go along
with this, stand firm and say ''No more'', this is it.
It's about punishing the corrupt system that always gets away with murder and making it pay
the price. Because the people WILL pay the price if either Trump or Hilary gets elected. And the
blame for this won't lie with those that don't vote for a corrupt politician like Hilary, the
blame will lie with those that rigged the system and those who did vote for her.
I am astonished that The Secretary of State would go on record and be filmed personally insulting
Putin, when this is such a sensitive time, or at ANY time.
Most of this sounds pretty reasonable to me- vote Clinton if a swing state, otherwise Stein; put
pressure on Clinton to deliver concrete policy proposals (eg on TPP); recognition that progressive
politics doesn't begin and end with Sanders (important because it means this isn't just populism
focused on a single leader).
But...does anyone ever raise the possibility of voting reform in the US? Because the way the
landscape is now cannot be comfortably accommodated by two parties. It should be no surprise that
many Sanders supporters can't abide Clinton, (nor that trad republicans despair at Trump). In
most Western democracies Clinton and Sanders would naturally belong in different parties.
Q: HRC meetings with Goldman and others?
I dunno. But I did public speaking. Its fun
Q: What do you think she is giving away in those meetings?
She doesn't want the people knowing about her relationships on Wall Street She wants to achieve
consistency and the best way to do that is to keep the people ignorant
The naivete of some people who still fall for the politics of "lesser evils" is staggering. There
is no good outcome of this election. On one hand you have a fascist with little clue of what he's
doing and has made a campaign of empty soundbites. The other is an imperialist war hawk for whom
bombing people in the Middle East is a hobby and said Iraq brought good business opportunities.
Fascism at home and imperialism abroad are two sides of the same coin and if you actually dispute
that, I feel sorry for you.
This movement is bigger than Bernie Sanders. If Hillary loses to Trump, it won't be the
fault of Sanders supporters, but the slimy lies and corruption of her and the DNC. It has been
said that the Democratic party is the place where social movements die. Good to know that "Berners"
still want to fight for the greater good, something establishment politics doesn't provide.
The Bush and Clinton crime families stand for the same thing.
They are the same thing.
Wish Jeb! had won the GOP nomination? Vote for Hillary, you'll get the same thing (except you'll
also lose the 2nd Amendment - that's the only difference).
Spoken like a true partisan hack.
Trump is a fascist, Hillary is an imperialist. If there's actually a "lesser evil" out of
these two, I don't see it.
A vote for Trump is throwing America into the deep end, emboldening of the far right and likely
to end in economic disaster. A vote for Clinton is condemning Middle Eastern people to their
deaths with the obvious invasions that she'll likely cook up.
Anyone who calls themselves socialist after Bernie's campaign should realise that socialism
is about resisting hatred at home and abroad
Trump wants to make jobs, better the education system and raise salaries. Voting for Trump
will bring Sanders supporters more of what they want and less is they vote for Clinton.
I cancelled my visit to the Democratic convention in Philadelphia when I realised it was going
to be Hilary Clinton. She is a female version of Tony Blair, even, more dishonest and unscrupulous.
Had the blacks and latinos voted for Sanders in numbers, this result could have been avoided.
But we have to live with it. The hope is that Bernie has started a movement that will survive
and perhaps one day we will have a social democratic president in the USA.
I may have voted Hillary, but then "DWS". Tomorrow I become a independent. F@ck the DNC 30
years a Dem now a disappointed.
OH no The orange man will destroy the world, who cares about Fracking, NATO, Monsanto, Health
care and Pharmaceuticals... Not HIllary and her bestie's Debbie Wassermann Schultz, Barbara Boxer,
Roberta Lange etc... Let it burn I seriously don't give a sh#t Whats the Donalds gonna do... Push
through religious agendas?
OH that already happened while Obama was POTUS. Export jobs? that happened with NAFTA ( Bill
Clinton ), close down woman's health clinics, take away women's rights to choose and right to
preferred birth control? that happened. Triple the cost of Health Insurance? Pharmaceuticals?
Back Monsanto? TPP? I guess either way we are just screwed... HILLARY+DONALD = Equally Toxic!
Piss on the Press... vote in a new congress, house, state and local.
This fascinates me. I draw very close similarities with J. Corbyn over here. In short, in the
Anglo-Saxon world the 'left' has split into a centre (your Clinton, T. Blair in the past) and
a 'purer' left. Now, for us (Latins for instance) away from strict binary systems, it makes more
sense if at least four parties were to represent most population's views: a 'harder' left, a centre-left-right,
and a 'harder' right. I am aware of the potential pitfalls, such as unstable governments etc.
but two parties cannot cover, or even attempt to cover, the political ideas spectrum of whole
nations. And it can causes odd outcomes, such as Trump (!?!) as a representative for a whole electorate
who doesn't want to vote Clinton. Could you have three-four candidates system?
Crooked Clinton and her crooked backers are laughing their asses off at Bernie. The old fool
is being used.
I have a problem with Clinton for three main reasons:
She's dishonest, She has no clear principles, and She has a long history of questionable
judgement/ethics.
The first two issues are ones of degree: just about all of us are guilty of the occasional fib,
and people often alter their views to what is fashionable. Politicians tend to be especially bad
in both regards. But even by the low standards of politicians, Clinton stands out. Clinton's "flexible
reality" is really something to behold.
Let's use a recent example of gay rights. Personally, I suspect that Hillary Clinton has always
been a proponent of gay rights, and doesn't have a homophobic bone in her body. But in 2004, when
gay marriage was a hot issue and many states were amending their constitutions to define marriage
as being between a man and a woman, Clinton gave a speech on the Senate floor in defence of traditional
marriage that could have been written by Jesse Helms. In other words, she didn't just bite her
tongue or give lukewarm support to one side or the other; she went "all in" in her opposition
to legalizing gay marriage, because that was a winning approach in 2004. Now that gay marriage
is legal in all 50 states and the LGBT community is an important Democrat voting bloc, Clinton
wants to pretend that she's always been at the vanguard on gay rights, as though her vocal opposition
to gay marriage just a decade earlier somehow never happened. Indeed, Clinton has thrown out trial
balloons suggesting that her opposition to gay marriage was somehow designed to defend gay rights
from even more extreme elements in Congress!
Or take the Trans Pacific Partnership, which Clinton stewarded during her tenure as Secretary
of State. Caught in a close fight with far-left candidate Bernie Sanders, Clinton was quick to
jettison the TPP and distance herself from it, even though her husband and she have decades of
unequivocal support for free trade. The list could go on and on. There are plenty of politicians
who equivocate on important issues, and whose views "evolve" to magically fit what voters want.
But Clinton is special in her ability to (a) voice strong views on various issues and then (b)
act as though those who remember her prior views are crazy. The problem that most people have
with Clinton is that if free trade returned to being en vogue in 2018, or there was a successful
movement to amend the Constitution to prohibit gay marriage, there's a pretty good chance that
Clinton would be at the forefront, claiming that those were "always" her views, and that prior
statements to the contrary were taken out of context/the work of the "vast, right-wing conspiracy."
And as for crossing the line, there are too many examples to mention. The Clintons are not
wrong to accuse Republicans of being out to get them, and too often, Republicans have played into
the Clintons' hands by attempting to make mountains out of molehills. But the Clintons perpetually
find themselves in hot water because they can't resist bending the rules and associating with
questionable people. Does anyone really believe that Hillary Clinton legitimately made a small
fortune trading cattle futures? Does anyone honestly believe that Clinton's use of a private email
server while Secretary of State was due to a lack of technological sophistication and not a desire
to subvert public record-keeping law? Does anyone accept that taking in millions of dollars in
speaking fees/charitable donations from questionable sources has no impact on her ability to govern
impartially? If you answered yes to any of those questions, I've got a bridge I'd like to sell
you. The fact that Clinton hasn't gone to prison doesn't mean that she's conducted herself in
a manner befitting the leader of the US.
Oh, and another thing, which I'll never get tired of repeating: if the past few years proved
anything, is that a President can only do so much against a hostile House.
While it's obvious why the Clinton camp would want to convince people a Trump presidency
would bring forth the Armageddon, the true battle is not for the president: it's for the two houses.
It will be the two houses that determine who the next SCOTUS is, it will be the two houses that
pass legislation, it will be the two houses that approve or reject the next President's war plans.
A red house will make a Clinton presidency irrelevant, and a blue house will make a Trump presidency
harmless.
To recap, vote blue for the Congress, vote blue for the Senate (that applies for Republicans
as well: if you're secretly scared of what Trump might do, keep him in check by electing a democrat
house), but vote for whomever you want (Clinton, Trump, Johnson, Stein, Sanders, Claire Underwood
or Tyrion Lannister. It really makes no difference) for President.
It's hard not to lose all respect for Americans when they suggest with a straight face that voting
for a member of the Clinton Crime family is so much better and the only option.
Trump is almost certainly a narcissistic, uneducated, racist, self-obsessed sociopath whose
sole obsession in life is the acquisition of material wealth. He would undoubtedly be a terrible
President.
Clinton on the other hand, is a chicken hawk psychopath establishment lackey who believes
the rule of Law simply doesn't apply to her and also has a husband who deregulated all the financial
sector, removed welfare, deregulated healthcare to the benefit of big business, has links to Iran
Contra, is sexually dysfunctional and if you believe multiple credible authors (including Christopher
Hitchens) is probably a rapist. She too would be a terrible President.
You Americans, have the political system you deserve by continuously voting for a rigged,
failed two party state that has been completely corrupted by Corporate lobbying. Someone once
said "the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different
results." Yet, the US still do this every election cycle.
Anyone who continues to vote for the lesser evil is still voting evil so they're just as ridiculous
as those voting Trump.
Either way, the US are in for a bumpy ride in the next 4 years especially when there's another
financial crash - which is just around the corner.
I can't believe you're seriously suggesting that voting for a member of the Clinton Crime
family is so much better and the only option but then again, you believe in the 2 party system
and talk about Democrats and Republicans in a ridiculously tribal and childish way. It's time
for you to wake up and smell the coffee.
Trump is almost certainly a narcissistic, uneducated, racist, self-obsessed sociopath whose
sole obsession in life is the acquisition of material wealth. He would undoubtedly be a terrible
President.
Clinton on the other hand, is a chicken hawk psychopath establishment lackey who believes the
rule of Law simply doesn't apply to her and also has a husband who deregulated all the financial
sector with disastrous results, removed welfare, deregulated healthcare to the benefit of big
business, has links to Iran Contra, is sexually dysfunctional and if you believe multiple credible
authors (including Christopher Hitchens) is probably a rapist. Clinton too would be a terrible
President.
You Americans, have the political system you deserve by continuously voting for a rigged, failed
two party state that has been completely corrupted by Corporate lobbying. Someone once said "the
definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results."
Yet, you and many others in the US still do this every election cycle.
The Democrats and Republicans are 2 cheeks of the same arse both funded by and told what to
do by the financial sector, the military industrial complex, oil and big business. You'll eventually
realise this if you ever wake up.
Anyone who continues to vote for the lesser evil is still voting evil so they're just as ridiculous
as those voting Trump.
Either way, the US are in for a bumpy ride in the next 4 years especially when there's another
financial crash - which is just around the corner.
The Clinton team have been busy insulting progressives for the past year and they did not
give us much in the massaged platform. The choice of VP was another slap in the face along with
Debbie's new job. I am so glad the Sanders supporters are protesting the very questionable
elections. If the DNC Were behaving like rational adults, they would have given us more at the
platform and chosen a more Left VP and stopped the insults. We have not been treated with respect
that our election numbers merit.
Time for Clintonites to show some moral strength and some semblance of ethical behavior, and stop
supporting corruption, stop blaming those who DO have some sense of ethics and what's best for
this nation for voting their conscience.
The Clintonites are nothing but bullies, gutless wonders willing to grovel before power.
In supporting her they betray every good thing this nation ever stood for. They are willing to
accept corruption, lies, and incompetence for reasons I don't comprehend, ignoring clear lawbreaking
in order to install their false idol.
The contemptuousness with which they attack those who desire some modicum of honesty, empathy
, and ethical behavior in a candidate is utterly shameful.
They, like all bullies, seem to think that insults, threats, and contempt will force the results
they want.
Little do they realize that they are only making enemies of those who wanted to be friends,creating
an anger that won't fade for years.
Never vote for Democrats again, that party has entirely lost what little credibility it had
left.
Leave it and join the Greens, join the Libertarians, join anything but the party of the
corrupt, the party of betrayal, the party of the oligarchs.
They've had more than enough chances to prove their worth, and have failed miserably.
The Guardian comment on the leaked emails: 'this seems to mark a new development in the constant
struggle of propaganda and disinformation' ... could easily be said about its own approach. Oh
the irony.
This was never about Sanders. The Clinton folks spent so much time portraying us as blind
followers that they started to believe their own hype. It was always about progressive policies
and values and if Sanders endorses a candidate who doesn't share those valued, a candidate who
will take to us war it's time to say: thanks you Sanders for all you've done but I can't join
you on the path you are walking on now.
Clinton and cronies will say or do anything to bring over the Bernie fans. When she no longer
needs them she will throw them away along with their ideas. The important decisions were made
long before anyone showed up in Phila. The fact DWS was given a job on HC's staff after getting
fired says it all. Now Bernie sells out. Don't you feel just a little used?
The mistake of establishment - Thinking people will obey Bernie's orders, nope they will get convinced
only Hillary changes some policies. 15$ and free education was a good start and that showed good
poll results for her but after this Dncleak she needs to do more than this.
The mistakes of the establishment, in this case the DNC, were numerous. The DNC thought they knew
better than anyone else who should be the party's nominee. Form the time HRC lost to Obama, they
planned for Hilary to run essentially unchallenged by any other Democrat in 2016. Her campaign
manager was made the DNC chairwoman who as we now know did her best to diminish Bernie's chances;
Hilary was offered the position of SOS to boost her credentials. She knew she could quit being
SOS in 2012 to prepare to run in 2016; and she lied for the next three years about whether or
not she would run for President because she could, as a private citizen, continue to cash in on
her speeches to the business elite and set up a network of political and business elite who could
then support her.
I have no explanation why Kerry or Biden did not run for President except that they knew better
than to challenge what was already decided. The only person willing to go for it was the most
discounted Senate member, an Independent, who for two decades had made no attempt to build a support
system within the political establishment.
With the exception of one super delegate, the majority of the DNC super delegates had already
endorsed Hilary before the first primary, and none changed his/her vote when Bernie got traction.
Even his closest ally, in ideology, Liz Warren, did not endorse Bernie. That is how corrupt &
controlling the DNC leadership has become: in this election they clearly are the king makers,
while the GOP produced 18 well-known candidates that tore each other to pieces. That tells you
how planned this whole thing was with the Democrats. Both parties are corrupt; but while the GOP
suffers from internal Chaos & cannibalism, the DNC acted with a script that fits more the way
Russians have been picking their presidents.
Despite the huge surprise success of Bernie's campaign, the passion he aroused, the young he
managed to draw in, and the millions of $27 contributions he raised, the DNC continued to weigh
more on HRC's side and, as we now know, tried to work against him behind the scenes.
The DNC's biggest mistake, however, is that they are out of touch with the young Progressives
that are their future voters, despite the fact that they can see how a sense of betrayal and disappointment
has caused the virtual demise of the GOP political elite. HRC shares the arrogance of the DNC
in thinking she can collect millions of dollars from special interests in speaking fees and then
tell us she is for Bernie's reforms. She thinks she can regurgitate much of what Bernie says,
then choose the most centrist Democratic politician to be her running mate, and still count on
the majority of Bernie's supporters to vote for her because … well, Trump is a monster. She is
wrong; the DNC is also wrong; real progressive do not cast their vote because they are afraid
of Trump; they vote for what they believe in. Voting for HRC from fear of Trump is a vote for
status quo; it does not help me if I am against status quo. The DNC has no sense of what Bernie
Sanders evoked in the young Progressive because like their GOP counterparts they too are political
automatons out of touch with real humans.
I have been told that by not voting in November, I am cutting off my nose to spite my face,
because Trump may win. Well, perhaps a Trump victory can finally help DNC internalize the
message of America's Progressives. So, I have a better analogy for not voting & possibly seeing
Trump win; sometimes you lose an arm in order to save the body.
I don't judge Hillary just on the actions of her husband. There's plenty to get my teeth into:
- Chicken hawk psychopath with innumerable foreign policy disasters on her watch including
Libya;
- Bought and paid for by the usual suspects - Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan etc;
- A security risk to the US i.e. used an unencrypted private server which was contrary to
the rules, was routinely hacked by foreign powers, contained information about covert US black
sites and was also obviously designed to hide Clinton Foundation business dealings/shenanigans.
This had nothing to do with convenience;
- Subverted the democratic process with regards to her nomination.
Reagan started deregulation, but Billy Boy and Robert Rubin continued with devastating abandon.
Just one piece of legislation: Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 - largely the cause
of the 2007/2008 subprime derivatives crisis.
Jill Stein will probably siphon off Bernie supporters who would have otherwise voted for
Shillary.
As Republican nominee Donald Trump twitted Sanders "sold out to Crooked Hillary Clinton." He was
right. Actually Sanders supporter "were more than eager to list the reasons that Mrs. Clinton
deserved to be incarcerated," and were quite capable of doing so. "Lock her up" slogan became quite
popular.
June 24, 2016 was the day Bernie became a BOUGHT-AND-PAID-FOR-SHILLARY-FOR-HILLARY. Or wait,
is that what happened?
Is Bernie selling his soul to the greatest criminal mastermind in
American history, who emailed four dead Americans to Benghazi while Whitewatering Vince Foster
with LIES, LIES, SO MANY LIES? Or is that just something your Republican dad believes? (Dear
old dad, awwwwww.)
The Trump campaign also issued a
press release
saying that Sanders has now joined forces with a "rigged system," providing the
list of elitist policies he now supports by endorsing Hillary:
The candidate who ran against special interests is endorsing
the candidate who embodies special interests.
The candidate who ran against TPP is endorsing the candidate
who helped draft the TPP.
The candidate who ran in opposition to globalization is running
against the candidate who has led the push for globalization.
The candidate who warned that open borders destroy the working
class is endorsing the candidate with the most open borders policy in our history.
The candidate who wants to reform H1-B visas is endorsing the
candidate who supported lifting the caps on H1-B visas.
The candidate who wants less war is endorsing the candidate who
launched wars in Iraq and Libya and would lead us to a new war in Syria.
The candidate who wants to get money out of politics is voting
for the candidate who has made a career out of making money from politics.
"... Johnson goes in for the kill. "If you're still feeling the Bern, and feeling burned because the Clinton machine rolled over your ideals, there is another option. The Libertarian party nominee will be on the ballot on all 50 states. ..."
Due to the explosion of uncovered intrigue and foul play from within the DNC, chaos as erupted
within the Democratic party. Long story short, the DNC conspired to screw over Bernie Sanders in
favor of Hillary Clinton.
Sanders could have taken the ball and run with it, but instead punted. Regardless of all the foul
play, Sanders has told his supporters that they need to vote for Hillary. This resulted in
Sanders' own supporters turning on him, and with such intensity, that he couldn't reign them back
in.
So now we seem to have Democrat apostates, much like those seen in the Republican party who
wouldn't tolerate Trump. And like those wayward Republicans, these Democrats are likely looking
for a new home.
Enter Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson, who is wasting no time in
reaching out to these former Bernie supporters with a video on Facebook.
"You
think Hillary Clinton is going to stand up for your civil rights?" said
Johnson, going on to talk about how the ACLU gave him the highest score in
Presidential politics, higher than Obama and Ron Paul.
Johnson then went on to remind the viewers about Clinton's pro-war past, and
how she regularly boasts about her decision to bomb Libya. He even puts the
expansion of ISIS's power at her feet.
"Is anything going to change if Hillary Clinton is elected President?" he
asks. "Unlike Hillary Clinton, I never supporting bombing Libya. I never
supported the Iraq War."
He even attacked her back and forth history with bad decisions regarding
criminal justice. "I've always stood up for drug policy, and criminal justice
reform."
Then Johnson goes in for the kill. "If you're still feeling the Bern,
and feeling burned because the Clinton machine rolled over your ideals, there
is another option. The Libertarian party nominee will be on the ballot on all
50 states."
Various polls have Johnson at different states of
approval, from 13% to 9%, but one thing is for sure. Johnson's support is growing daily, and with
these new developments coming out of the DNC, the Libertarian candidate may see a surge.
have to disagree with Bernie, DWS didn't do the right thing - she just got
caught, the right thing would have been to put a stop to planted stories
with no attribution and ensure a level playing field. Anyone US side want
to tell me if the thing about Bill Clinton meeting Epstein on numerous occasions
is actually true?
"... If destroying Syria is the way we "help" Israel, how many other nations must the U.S. destroy to "help" Israel? And before John Hagee's braindead disciples start shouting "Destroy them all!" I remind you that Syria and other parts of the Middle East is the historic home of millions of Christians going back to the time of the Apostle Paul. ..."
"... On the whole, Neocons and Neolibs are people without conscience. At their core, they have no allegiance to the United States or any other country. They are globalists. The only god they serve is the god of power and wealth, and they don't care how many people--including Americans--they kill to achieve it. The blood of millions of dead victims around the world is already dripping from their murderous hands. ..."
Why isn't the Mainstream Media (MSM) in America reporting the fact that Hillary Clinton admitted
in public that the U.S. government created Al Qaeda, ISIS, Al Nusra, etc.? Why does the MSM refuse
to tell the American people that the United States has not ever actually fought ISIS but instead
has surreptitiously and very actively supported ISIS and the other radical Muslim terrorists in the
Middle East? Why has the media refused to reveal the fact that ever since Russia started to fight
a true offensive war against ISIS the terrorist organization has been reduced to almost half?
I'll tell you why: the MSM is nothing more than a propaganda machine for the U.S. government--no
matter which party is in power. The MSM doesn't work for the U.S. citizenry. It doesn't even work
for its corporate sponsors. It works for the Washington Power Elite permanently ensconced in D.C.
(and yes, those same Power Elite control most of those media corporate sponsors).
It is a sad reality that if one wants to get accurate news reporting, one must mostly bypass the
U.S. propaganda media and look to sources outside the U.S. Here is a Canadian publication that covered
the Hillary admission:
"The following video features Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton acknowledging that America
created and funded Al Qaeda as a terrorist organization in the heyday of the Soviet-Afghan war:
"'Let's remember here the people we are fighting today we funded them twenty years ago.
"'Let's go recruit these mujahideen.
"'And great, let them come from Saudi Arabia and other countries, importing their Wahabi brand
of Islam so that we can go beat the Soviet Union.'"
"What she does not mention is that at no time in the course of the last 35 years has the US ceased
to support and finance Al Qaeda as a means to destabilizing sovereign countries. It was 'a pretty
good idea', says Hillary, and it remains a good idea today:
"Amply documented, the ISIS and Al Nusrah Mujahideen are recruited by NATO and the Turkish High
command, with the support of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Israel.
"The more fundamental question:
"Should a presidential candidate who candidly acknowledges that 'We created Al Qaeda' without
a word of caution or regret become president of the US, not to mention Hillary's commitment to waging
nuclear war on Russia if and when she becomes president of the United States of America."
The report continues:
"The Global War on Terror (GWOT) is led by the United States. It is not directed against Al Qaeda.
"Quite the opposite: The 'Global War on Terrorism' uses Al Qaeda terrorist operatives as their
foot soldiers.
"'Political Islam' and the imposition of an 'Islamic State' (modeled on Qatar or Saudi Arabia)
is an integral part of US foreign policy."
The report further states:
"It is a means to destabilizing sovereign countries and imposing 'regime change'.
"Clinton's successor at the State Department, John Kerry is in direct liaison with Al Nusra, an
Al Qaeda affiliated organization in Syria, integrated by terrorists and funded by the US and its
allies.
"In a bitter irony, John Kerry is not only complicit in the killings committed by Al Nusra, he
is also in blatant violation of US anti-terrorist legislation. If the latter were to be applied to
politicians in high office, John Kerry would be considered as a 'Terror Suspect'".
Think it through, folks: the U.S. government creates the radical Islamic terror networks that
justify America's "Global War On Terror" which directly results in millions of refugees (and no doubt
plants terrorists among them) flooding Europe. At the same time, it purposely refuses to protect
our own borders and even forces states and local communities to accept hundreds of thousands of Muslim
refugees (but the government is not sending any Christian refugees to America, even though a sizable
percentage of the refugees include Christians also) and pushes NATO to the doorstep of Russia, which
to any objective observer could only be regarded as an overt incitement to war.
Furthermore, why doesn't the MSM report the words of Hillary saying that the "best way to help
Israel" is to destroy Syria? Why doesn't the media acknowledge that official U.S. foreign policy
is to foment perpetual war, not in the name of the safety and security of the United States, but
in the name of "helping" Israel?
Here is how the same Canadian publication covers this part of the story:
"A newly-released Hillary Clinton email confirmed that the Obama administration has deliberately
provoked the civil war in Syria as the 'best way to help Israel.'
"In an indication of her murderous and psychopathic nature, Clinton also wrote that it was the
'right thing' to personally threaten Bashar Assad's family with death.
"In the email, released by Wikileaks, then Secretary of State Clinton says that the 'best way
to help Israel' is to 'use force' in Syria to overthrow the government."
It continues:
"Even though all US intelligence reports had long dismissed Iran's 'atomic bomb' program as a
hoax, (a conclusion supported by the International Atomic Energy Agency), Clinton continues to use
these lies to 'justify' destroying Syria in the name of Israel."
And again:
"The email proves--as if any more proof was needed--that the US government has been the main sponsor
of the growth of terrorism in the Middle East, and all in order to 'protect' Israel.
"It is also a sobering thought to consider that the 'refugee' crisis which currently threatens
to destroy Europe, was directly sparked off by this US government action as well, insofar as there
are any genuine refugees fleeing the civil war in Syria.
"In addition, over 250,000 people have been killed in the Syrian conflict, which has spread to
Iraq--all thanks to Clinton and the Obama administration backing the 'rebels' and stoking the fires
of war in Syria."
If destroying Syria is the way we "help" Israel, how many other nations must the U.S. destroy
to "help" Israel? And before John Hagee's braindead disciples start shouting "Destroy them all!"
I remind you that Syria and other parts of the Middle East is the historic home of millions of Christians
going back to the time of the Apostle Paul.
The truth is, Hillary (and the rest of the grubby gaggle of Neocons) doesn't give a tinker's dam
about Israel. Neocons such as Hillary Clinton simply use Israel (and the misguided passions of Christians
and conservatives who blindly support Israel) as cover to accomplish their real agenda: manipulating
world governments to the enrichment and empowerment of themselves.
Donald Trump is untested. But if Hillary should be elected, I'm confident she would not make it
through her first term without taking us into another G.W. Bush-type war (or worse)--except she will
also add the attempted disarmament of the American people to her nefarious agenda.
That's what Neocons do: they foment war. To their very soul, they are warmongers. And never forget
that Hillary Clinton is a true-blue Neocon. Or if the word "Neoliberal" sounds better to you in describing
Hillary, so be it. They both mean the same thing: WAR.
Here is a good explanation of how both Neocons and Neolibs are working from the same script:
On the whole, Neocons and Neolibs are people without conscience. At their core, they have
no allegiance to the United States or any other country. They are globalists. The only god they serve
is the god of power and wealth, and they don't care how many people--including Americans--they kill
to achieve it. The blood of millions of dead victims around the world is already dripping from their
murderous hands.
And if you think my indictment against the Neocons is an exaggeration, Paul Craig Roberts (Assistant
Secretary of the Treasury under President Ronald Reagan) was even more scathing in his condemnation
of them:
"The remaining danger is the crazed American neoconservatives. I know many of them. They are completely
insane ideologues. This inhuman filth has controlled the foreign policy of every US government since
Clinton's second term. They are a danger to all life on earth. Look at the destruction they have
wreaked in the former Yugoslavia, in Ukraine, in Georgia and South Ossetia, in Africa, in Afghanistan
and the Middle East. The American people were too brainwashed by lies and by political impotence
to do anything about it, and Washington's vassals in Europe, UK, Canada, Australia, and Japan had
to pretend that this policy of international murder was 'bringing freedom and democracy.'
"The crazed filth that controls US foreign policy is capable of defending US hegemony with nuclear
weapons. The neoconservatives must be removed from power, arrested, and put on international trial
for their horrendous war crimes before they defend their hegemony with Armageddon.
"Neoconservatives and their allies in the military/security complex make audacious use of false
flag attacks. These evil people are capable of orchestrating a false flag attack that propels the
US and Russia to war."
"... So, there you have it. The guy who suspected his campaign was being intentionally marginalized by the party apparatus learns in fact he, his campaign and most importantly, his voters were indeed intentionally marginalized by the leadership of the Democratic Party. The chairman of the Party is Barack Obama. He appoints the Director who we all know is Wasserman Schultz. Thus, the entirety of the DNC leadership knowingly and with intent marginalized Sanders and his voters. Yet, Sanders remains loyal and naively believes his voters will stay with him if he sticks with the party and their chosen candidate that screwed him and them. ..."
"... His response reminds me of battered wife syndrome. He has absolutely bonded with his abusers. He is a sick man as in mentally impaired, maybe fatigued, and should seriously consider some rest. ..."
"... Think about all that man has put himself, his family, his workers, his voters through this last year. His efforts were ginormous. Yet, within less than 48 hours the man dismisses the gravity of how his life's work was deliberately, with intent, sabotaged by the DNC and goes onto say it's not important, the issues are. ..."
"... Sure the issues are important to his voters but their learning the DNC put their resources behind their chosen candidate vs remaining neutral as their Bylaws require, would seriously piss me off. Hell it does piss me off and I'm not even a Sanders supporter. ..."
"... And why on earth would any of Sanders voters ever believe that the same party that marginalized him and his efforts would ever give weight to the issues he's fighting for! ..."
For those who have a Twitter account, checkout #dncleak or #dncleaks on the
latest over the Wikileaks release of the DNC emails.
Here's one -"Hillary Clinton is now blaming the Russians for leaking the
emails. Like that makes it any better that you rigged the primary."
Sanders to Chuck Todd on the leaks -
Todd: "So just to sum up here, these leaks, these emails, it hasn't given
you any pause about your support for Hillary Clinton?"
Sanders: "No, no, no. We are going to do everything that we can to protect
working families in this country. And again, Chuc, I know media is not necessarily
focused on these things. But what a campaign is about is not Hillary Clinton,
it's not Donald Trump. It is the people of this country, blah blah blah..."
"[...] And I'm going to go around the country discussing them [issues] and
making sure Hillary Clinton is elected president."
So, there you have it. The guy who suspected his campaign was being intentionally
marginalized by the party apparatus learns in fact he, his campaign and most
importantly, his voters were indeed intentionally marginalized by the leadership
of the Democratic Party. The chairman of the Party is Barack Obama. He appoints
the Director who we all know is Wasserman Schultz. Thus, the entirety of the
DNC leadership knowingly and with intent marginalized Sanders and his voters.
Yet, Sanders remains loyal and naively believes his voters will stay with him
if he sticks with the party and their chosen candidate that screwed him and
them.
UNFRIGGINBELIEVABLE!
His response reminds me of battered wife syndrome. He has absolutely
bonded with his abusers. He is a sick man as in mentally impaired, maybe fatigued,
and should seriously consider some rest.
I cannot imagine learning after years of planning, hard work and personal
sacrifices being made to fulfill my lifelong ambition to get within a whisker
of achieving my goals, only to learn within weeks after capitulating, that my
entire life's effort was undermined from the beginning by the very apparatus
I aligned with, albeit as an Indy, for decades. An apparatus that must remain
neutral.
Think about his response to Todd. Think about all that man has put himself,
his family, his workers, his voters through this last year. His efforts were
ginormous. Yet, within less than 48 hours the man dismisses the gravity of how
his life's work was deliberately, with intent, sabotaged by the DNC and goes
onto say it's not important, the issues are.
If I were a Bernie supporter I'd be starting a campaign to convince that
man to take some serious time off. Go fishing. Go for hikes whatever. Just get
away from the bubble and clear your head and soul.
Sure the issues are important to his voters but their learning the DNC
put their resources behind their chosen candidate vs remaining neutral as their
Bylaws require, would seriously piss me off. Hell it does piss me off and I'm
not even a Sanders supporter.
And why on earth would any of Sanders voters ever believe that the same
party that marginalized him and his efforts would ever give weight to the issues
he's fighting for!
his does not look like a common seizure, unless seizures are so common to her that she already
knows how to control it. It is strange, but the lady behind her is even more strange, she keeps looking
at the journalists, she glances at Hillary but shows no surprise at all, nor try to help. It is almost
as if she is part of it.
The expression of one reporter seems to be pure fear:
Very fine piece of media analysis, B. The Clintonistas can only go negative, because they have
nothing meaningful to offer the electorate in a positive sense.
Just watched 'Clinton Cash' over at Breitbart and highly recommend for any interested in learning
a bit more about The Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation's 'Pay to Play' scheme to enrich
their personal purse while selling out our laws aka U.S. citizens.
It's airing again tomorrow at 2pm ET and 8 pm ET Sunday, July 24 @breitbart.com
"... Well, it's obvious that Hillary wanted to keep some information from the public finding out. The information that she wanted to keep from the public probably didn't concern national security so much as her own private dealings. Nobody, I think, in American history has merged their public service as secretary of state or president with their private gains to the extent that Hillary really has. And by that I mean the Clinton Foundation, overall. ..."
"... She's going to Saudi Arabia, she's going to Europe, she's going to the Near Eastern countries. Saudi Arabia has asked her–and this is all very public–we want more arms. We want to buy arms in America. We know that Saudi Arabia is one of the major contributors to the Clinton Foundation. ..."
"... Well, lo and behold, the military-industrial complex is one of the big contributors to the Clinton Foundation, as is Saudi Arabia, and many of the parties who are directly affected by her decisions. Now, my guess is what she didn't want people to find out, whether on Freedom of Information Act or others, are the lobbying she's doing for her own foundation, which in a way means her wealth, her husband's wealth, Bill Clinton's wealth, and the power that both of them have by getting a quarter billion dollars of grants into the foundation during her secretary of state. ..."
"... We don't have any evidence one way or the other. So certainly there is no evidence. There is only the appearance of what looks to me to be an inherent conflict of interest with the foundation. ..."
On Thursday morning, the media fest and political fest around Hillary Clinton's email scandal
continued, as the head of the FBI, James Comey, spoke at a congressional House oversight committee.
Here's a little clip of what was said there. But let me just foreshadow–maybe the emails aren't the
real issue that should be in front of these hearings. Now, here's the chairman of the House Oversight
Committee, Jason Chaffetz, questioning James Comey and a bit of his answer.
JASON CHAFFETZ: It seems to a lot of us that the average Joe, the average American, that if they
had done what you laid out in your statement, that they'd be in handcuffs. And I think there is a
legitimate concern that there is a double standard. Your name isn't Clinton, you're not part of the
powerful elite, that Lady Justice will act differently.
JAMES COMEY: I believe this investigation was conducted consistent with the highest traditions
of the FBI. Our folks did it in an apolitical and professional way. There are two things that matter
in a criminal investigation of a subject. And so when I look at the facts we gathered here–as I said,
I see evidence of great carelessness. But I do not see evidence that is sufficient to establish that
Secretary Clinton, or those with whom she was corresponding, both talked about classified information
on email, and knew when they did it they were doing something that was against the law. So give that
assessment of the facts and my understanding of the law, my conclusion was, and remains, no reasonable
prosecutor would bring this case. No reasonable prosecutor would bring the second case in 100 years
focused on gross negligence.
JAY: Now joining us from New York is Michael Hudson. Michael's a Distinguished Research Professor
of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. His latest book is Killing the Host: How
Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy. Thanks for joining us, Michael.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Good to be back here, Paul.
JAY: First, let's talk a little bit about what we just heard. The chairman of the House Oversight
Committee says, is there a double standard here? Somebody else might be in handcuffs, and Hillary
Clinton's not being charged. I guess a lot of people are asking that question. The FBI director says
this doesn't rise to the level of criminality; it's carelessness. I don't know the law well enough.
I'm certainly not a lawyer. But it seems to me that the deliberate, willful decision to use a private
server–and some people have said one of the reasons could be to avoid Freedom of Information Act
requests–and I don't know if that rises to the level of criminality. But it's sure wrong.
HUDSON: Well, it's obvious that Hillary wanted to keep some information from the public finding
out. The information that she wanted to keep from the public probably didn't concern national security
so much as her own private dealings. Nobody, I think, in American history has merged their public
service as secretary of state or president with their private gains to the extent that Hillary really
has. And by that I mean the Clinton Foundation, overall.
Here's the problem, you can imagine. She's going to Saudi Arabia, she's going to Europe, she's
going to the Near Eastern countries. Saudi Arabia has asked her–and this is all very public–we want
more arms. We want to buy arms in America. We know that Saudi Arabia is one of the major contributors
to the Clinton Foundation. On the other hand, Hillary's in a position to go to Raytheon, to
Boeing, and say look, do I have a customer for you. Saudi Arabia would love to buy your arms. Maybe
we can arrange something. I'm going to do my best. By the way, you know, my foundation is–you know,
I'm a public-spirited person and I'm trying to help the world. Would you like to make a contribution
to my foundation?
Well, lo and behold, the military-industrial complex is one of the big contributors to the
Clinton Foundation, as is Saudi Arabia, and many of the parties who are directly affected by her
decisions. Now, my guess is what she didn't want people to find out, whether on Freedom of Information
Act or others, are the lobbying she's doing for her own foundation, which in a way means her wealth,
her husband's wealth, Bill Clinton's wealth, and the power that both of them have by getting a quarter
billion dollars of grants into the foundation during her secretary of state.
JAY: As far as we know, there's no direct evidence that she did precisely what you're saying.
And
That they actually say–"Give money to the foundation; I will facilitate such-and-such a contract."
There's no evidence of that, correct?
HUDSON: That's right. And partly there's no evidence because her private emails are not subject
to [inaud.]. They're not subject to finding out this. We don't have any evidence one way or the
other. So certainly there is no evidence. There is only the appearance of what looks to me to be
an inherent conflict of interest with the foundation.
JAY: And there's no direct evidence that any abnormal amount of money has gone to Bill Clinton,
in terms of fees and expenses. One can assume he's well-compensated. But it does have charitable
status, it has to file a 990. They are under charitable law regulations, and so far I don't know
of any reporting that says that they have violated the–.
HUDSON: You're right. The advantage of being under charitable law is it's in a foundation that–you
can look at it in effect as your savings account. And you can treat it–you can do with a foundation
whatever you want.
Now, if you or I had a quarter billion dollars, what we'd want to do is influence policy. Influence
the world. Well, that's what they want to do. They want to use the foundation to support policies
that they want. And here we're not dealing with unexplained enrichment. This isn't money that comes
into them that goes into an offshore account in Switzerland or the Cayman Islands. It's hidden in
plain sight. It's all the foundation. It's tax-exempt. It's legitimate. So she's somehow been able
to legitimize a conflict of interest, and what that used to be called corruption in office. Or at
least the appearance of what could be corruption in office.
And the fact is, that is what there has been a blacked-out screen painted over it, and we don't
have any idea what she's been saying to these affected parties that not only has she been dealing
with, the secretary of state, but it turned out to be major contributors to her and Bill's foundation.
JAY: Now, the reason the emails rose to such prominence is because it was the potential of criminal
charges. That seems to have ended now. The Clinton foundation certainly has been reported upon in
various places in the mainstream press. It never rose to the same level of attention as the emails.
But why do you think that is? Because you think there's enough fodder there that that could have
been quite a media fest. Feast, I should say.
HUDSON: Well, there's no direct link between the foundation that says it's existing to promote
various social purposes, and Hillary's actions as secretary of state. But there's such overlap there.
I can't think of any public official at cabinet level or above, in memory who's ever had an overlapping
between a foundation that they had and had control, personally, and their public job. So there's
never been so great a blurring of categories.
JAY: So why isn't this a bigger issue in the media? Corporate media?
HUDSON: I don't–I think the media are supporting Hillary. And that's a good question. Why are they
supporting her so much with all of this? Why aren't they raising this seemingly obvious thing? I
think the media want two things that Hillary wants. They want the trade agreements to essentially
turn over policy to, trade policy to corporations, and regulatory policy to–.
JAY: You're talking
about TTIP and [TTP].
HUDSON: [They're neocons.] They're the agreement of politics. If the media agree with her politics
and says, okay, we want to back her because she's backing the kind of world we want, a neocon world,
a neoliberal world, then they're going to say, this is wonderful. We can now distract attention onto
did she leak a national secret. Well, the secrets that are really important aren't the national classification
secrets. They're the personal, personal, the big-picture secrets. And it's the big picture we don't
have a clue of as a result of all of these erasures.
JAY: Okay, thanks very much for joining us, Michael.
HUDSON: Good to be here.
JAY: And thank you for joining us on the Real News Network.
"... Well that isn't surprising. Hillary Clinton is a loser and a weak candidate ..."
"... I think Trump will win because the e-mail scandal has destroyed whatever credibility Hillary Clinton had. Sanders would beat Trump by a landslide, Elizabeth Warren would too. But Hillary is doomed. ..."
"... Polls are nonsense; particularly this far out in an unconventional election. The pollsters themselves are scratching their heads as to how to properly frame the poll questions and establish the correct survey demographics. It's all new territory for them ..."
"... Three of the four latest polls that showed Trump ahead of Clinton were conducted via telephone. So, maybe the latest polling boost for Trump isn't about increasing popularity but about emboldened supporters ..."
"... "also a few Scalias". There are worse things than Scalias. Like Hillarys. ..."
"... I think Hillary is far more dangerous. She wants war with Russia, Syria, etc ..."
"... Hilary is a poor candidate and Obama shifted the world in a significantly amoral direction. ..."
"... Nate predicts a trump win now, and for good reason. Clinton's numbers will only continue to drop with each new email leak, State Department report, Clinton Foundation pay to play allegation, and lie from her own mouth reinforcing to the majority of the electorate why they distrust and dislike her. ..."
"... Sorry liberal apologists, this is not an ordinary "post convention bump". The polls indicate that 3/4 of Americans do not believe that their country is headed in the right direction. Trump is a protest vote. ..."
"... As repugnant as some of you may find Trump's brash personality and idiotic rhetoric to be, many view him as refreshing. Most American are tired of the "establishment" and would prefer anybody to another corrupt / dishonest / smug Bush or Clinton in the White House. They have also grown tired of a neutered society and a political correctness that has quashed individuality and freedom of speech. ..."
"... Trump has built an empire and employed people. By contrast, Clinton policies have (i) caused the subprime housing crisis, (ii) exported jobs to Mexico via NAFTA, (iv) destroyed the US educational system with no child left behind, and (iv) have caused numerous foreign policy blunders. Ms. Clinton has systematically failed at everthing that she has done. More would have been accomplished by doing the opposite. ..."
"... Hillary is toast. ..."
"... Since Cruz dropped out of the primaries, the mainstream media has been engaged in a non-stop assault on Trump, fought with the kind of raw brutality last seen in the battle of Stalingrad. The Washington Post runs at least four anti-Trump opinion pieces every day. (Yes, almost 30 per week.) Yet, Trump's poll numbers continue to improve. Hillary has spent big money on advertising in the last month, and Trump has spent nothing. Yet, Trump's poll numbers continue to improve. The Republican poobahs refused to attend the convention. Yet, Trump's poll numbers continue to improve. Ted Cruz detonated a suicide bomb at the convention. Yet, Trump's poll numbers continue to improve. ..."
"... Also, as crazy as Trump is, he didn't alienate his base with his VP pick. Instead, he sought to appease the far right of his party with Mike Pence. Meanwhile, Hillary has sought to move the Green Party's polling numbers into the double digits by picking a running mate who is opposed to abortion, presided over executions, supported a coal-fired power plant, and supports the TPP. The arrogance displayed by Hillary in picking Kaine makes Trump look humble. ..."
"... DinoMight, Leftist here again. Kain is far right on what matters - Money. Pro TPP and wants to let banks be less regulated. Also, Trump is being pounded negatively by the MSM nearly as much as Sanders was denigrated or ignored. MSM, owned by Murdock and other large corporations want Clinton. She's the money man. Trump may pull this off due to low demo turn out and objection to Clinton big $$$$$. ..."
"... As was seen with Brexit....and the death of Bruce Lee ..the Guardian is about to learn a harsh lesson it will refuse to believe is real. ..."
"... Trump will win in November because of the simple reason of whom his opponent is. ..."
I think elections reinforce discontent narratives against incumbents, and politicians wont contradict
wide spread sentiments that they don't agree with, but they instead look for some way to neutralise
them.
Hillary has two problems, as a democrat linked to Obama she is effectively the incumbent here.
Obama ran on hope and change, but provided very little change in peoples lives. Without the change
part, second time around its difficult to inspire hope.
This was the lesson of Brexit, the incumbents (Remain) were unable to offer any real change,
but their opposition (Leave) where offering real change, and therefore Hope!
So you have Clinton effectively offering people who are crying out for change, no change, and
therefore little control of their lives, and therefore little hope.
And you've got Trump offering much change, an opportunity to take back control, and therefore
much hope!
The extent to which Trumps message will resonate with voters will determine who wins. How many
people get left behind by Globalisation?...In the West look at Britain, look at Europe, look at
America....I'd say most, mainly because one size doesn't fit all.
These polls are completely skewed. CNN's poll included NO ONE UNDER 35 years old.
Last week's sample by Reuters was 78% white. The electorate in 2012 was 72% white and given
demographic changes, the electorate will be even less white this time around, while Trump's share
of non-white vote will be even smaller than Romney's was.
Meh. Clinton is actually more of a hawk that Trump. He is actually an isolationist. Clinton has
voted for more war and is for more aggressive use of the military than Trump would be.
I fear Trump would be a problem on other fronts but as far as involving us in more war and
negotiating bad trade agreements Hillary is to be feared more than Trump.
Smug limousine liberals and money printing rent seekers with no clothes swanning about. La dee
da aren't you so pretty. As John Stewart said we're not allowed to have a country. So it's yours?
Whose is it? I think it's a question that needs answering.
Trumps going to win! Sanders people will not vote. Young will not vote.
Trump 52-48
Clinton is branded crooked and e mails , no matter what just shows many this.
Predictable response? Hillary Clinton is objectively the weaker Democratic candidate this year
who always lost against nearly all Republican nominees except for Trump who even then, she is
starting to lose now.
I think Trump will win because the e-mail scandal has destroyed whatever credibility Hillary
Clinton had. Sanders would beat Trump by a landslide, Elizabeth Warren would too. But Hillary
is doomed.
Hillary might win if the non-whites come out to vote in unprecedented numbers but that is unlikely.
Trump's supporters are more motivated. The white working class will swing to Trump because Hillary
predicatably played cowardly and refused her chance to nominate Sanders or Warren for the VP slot,
choosing instead a boring fellow who is big on free trade.
The only consolation is that Trump is no Hitler and the US president will be arrested and jailed
the moment he breaks the law. May even be executed. The Americans are very very very tough on
issues like that.
Polls are nonsense; particularly this far out in an unconventional election. The pollsters
themselves are scratching their heads as to how to properly frame the poll questions and establish
the correct survey demographics. It's all new territory for them
The headline to this story is very certain reading "Why Trump's bump in the polls IS
more significant than ever" (meant to catch your eye) but in the very next sentence the words
start backpeddling to "his rise in the polls COULD be different".
So which is it Guardian ?
It is also stated in the article " Three of the four latest polls that showed Trump ahead
of Clinton were conducted via telephone. So, maybe the latest polling boost for Trump isn't about
increasing popularity but about emboldened supporters ".......could it be that these calls
went to land lines, which are skewed very much towards older voters? Young folks are more cell
phone / smart phone oriented. In that case it's capturing the older white Fox News crowd with
a heavy implicit bias...doubling down on nonsense at this point.
In the last presidential lection the polls by Nate Silver got the result exactly. This year
in Canada Nanos Polls got the general lection result accurate to 0,5 percent.
In Uk elections, typically the polls prove accurate enough.
"In Uk elections, typically the polls prove accurate enough".
Actually in the last two polls, the general election and the referendum, the polls have been
hopelessly wrong as wrong therefore as you calling woodyTX an "illiterate doit", whatever a doit
is.
Trump better have a person at every voting precinct watching those Deibold machines. Clinton got
quite good at stealing, misdirecting, shredding and generally restricting votes in a handful of
key states. When there was a paper trail, Sanders won 53% - 49%. When no paper trail, Clinton
65% to Sanders' 35%. These elections are quite rigged.
I believe that in usa is going to happen something similar with the Brexit. All the polls show
a victory of Clinton, and at the end we finish with a triumph of Trump.
The pollsters are doing and are done a very bad work in the last polls.
I ask myself, who pay them...
Its clear Trump will win.We can handle a reality TV star
We cannot handle the corrupt Clinton Machine, nor a corrupt Democratic party.
They overplayed their hand.
1. Trump is an idiot and an embarrassment.
2. Hillary is a liar.
3. The "up-side" to a Trump presidency is 4 years of entertainment. He does after all have multiple
years of the Apprentice on his resume.
4. There is no "up-side" to a Clinton presidency.
5. The "down-side" to a Trump presidency is chaos at the top levels of government.
6. The "down-side" to a Clinton presidency is another Arab-Israeli war and likely US troops committed
and dying somewhere in order to make Clinton "look" tough and gritty.
So we'll take the entertainment. Will be four years of a Rodney Dangerfield show played out
live with an unwitting lead actor.
I don't believe polls when there's a vested interest, like the Brexit ones. Yet I believe Trump
will be the next president of the US. Hilary is a poor candidate and Obama shifted the world in a significantly amoral direction.
Many will dismiss this, but a huge chunk of voters feel it is important. I'm one such.
The media has pretty much discredited itself over the years by seldom doing the complex research
necessary to report current events and hiring journalists with the education, intelligence, and
ethics to communicate realities to the readers.
The result is that even with the internet version of the newspapers, few really take their
reporting and recommendations seriously.
The public just decides for itself knowing that whether it is spin on felonious Clinton, Distracted
Sanders ("We are sick of your e-mails"), Benito Trump, or Gift-Accepting Little Don Kaine the
media will not represent anything fairly and inaccurately.
Even heaven doesn't know who is going to win the presidency this year, which is compelling
in its own way.
These polls are very bad news for those who want to believe that Hillary Clinton has already won
the election. The size of the bump is far less important then the fact that there was one. Much
of the media believes that the Republican's convention performance drastically diminished their
chances in November. It is likely that everyone will have to wait until the votes are counted
in November to know how this election plays out. But, these polls are very bad news for those
who dream of establishing the idea that Donald Trump is outside the political mainstream and that
there is something wrong with anyone who votes for him.
Obamas presidency is ending in a disaster. Foreign policy failure and a divided and violent domestic
society. All the while he seems to revel in playing the joker and appearing like the cool uncle
at a wedding.
"Three of the four latest polls that showed Trump ahead of Clinton were conducted via telephone."
Who the hell responds to a phone survey? People with a brain just hang up on them.
Instead of cherry-picked polls to justify this "story" how about the facts that matter?
http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/pollster/2016-general-election-trump-vs-clinton
Has Trump gained? Yes.
Is he leading "the polls?" No. Unless you leave out the polls that show Clinton leading.
Why did Hillary have the DNC sabotage Bernie? She didn't need to. She's her own worst enemy. Now
many Bernie backers won't vote for her.
I'll never vote for Trump. Usually I vote for a candidate who promises to stop the war on drugs
because such a stance entails other views I find congenial
You are right about the US, but it's hard to share your optimism. Rich enclaves like La Jolla
and Carmel and Santa Barbara are full of educated bigots, fearful people who take their instructions
from the likes of Rush Limbaugh. (One rich idiot told me that Obama was going to raise property
taxes.) And the DNC emails - plus the tone-deaf response - make it harder for Clinton than it
was already.
Trump or Brexit will never happen in an undemocratic country. A democracy controlled by a "progressive"
and "compassionate" elite through PC triple speak is not a democracy. The fears and insecurities
of people need to be addressed and not dismissed or scoffed at. Trump will win in Nov. because
he is addressing them while Hillary is not. Hillary's issues are all very old like wealth redistribution,
various rights, gun control, etc. etc. the same as those of Fidel Castro and as old too.
Superdelegates have moments left to spare the world a trump presidency by nominating Sanders instead
of Clinton.
Nate predicts a trump win now, and for good reason. Clinton's numbers will only continue
to drop with each new email leak, State Department report, Clinton Foundation pay to play allegation,
and lie from her own mouth reinforcing to the majority of the electorate why they distrust and
dislike her.
Nominate Clinton and head over the cliff to a trump presidency.
Nominate Sanders and save the white house for the Democrats with the influx of Independent and
disenfranchised Democratic voters who will never vote for Clinton.
Not necessarily true. Double edged sword. Trump and the GOP will attack Bernie "Socialist" Sanders
relentlessly. Even disenfranchised Democrats and Independents will not sacrifice the country to
the likes of Trump. There's too much as stake. The Dems have four months to turn this around and
show the American people that Trump is full of sh*t...his tax plan would make himself even reach
and save his estate billions by doing away with inheritance tax. He's not fit be be president
per his own party even Governor Chris Christie said this. Trump and the GOP will do everything
to distract the people away from the real issues...their policies and ideology is corrupt and
bankrupt. Trump like the Leave Campaign in the UK has no game plan. Just hollow words and GOP
tax policies that have time and time again been proven wrong. What George H.W. Bush called voodoo
economics. The GOP have controlled both Houses of Congress for 4 years now...and DONE absolutely
nothing to move the country forward.
Sorry liberal apologists, this is not an ordinary "post convention bump". The polls indicate
that 3/4 of Americans do not believe that their country is headed in the right direction. Trump
is a protest vote.
As repugnant as some of you may find Trump's brash personality and idiotic rhetoric to
be, many view him as refreshing. Most American are tired of the "establishment" and would prefer
anybody to another corrupt / dishonest / smug Bush or Clinton in the White House. They have also
grown tired of a neutered society and a political correctness that has quashed individuality and
freedom of speech.
Trump has built an empire and employed people. By contrast, Clinton policies have (i) caused
the subprime housing crisis, (ii) exported jobs to Mexico via NAFTA, (iv) destroyed the US educational
system with no child left behind, and (iv) have caused numerous foreign policy blunders. Ms. Clinton
has systematically failed at everthing that she has done. More would have been accomplished by
doing the opposite.
The "back-and-forthing" involved in these polls is grimly hilarious. I don't put a lot of stock
in anything taken before Labor Day, but all the same, just try to imagine the picture of the average
voter conjured up by time-lapsed poll results: "I think I'll vote for Hillary .... well, maybe
I'll vote for Trump ... no, make that Hillary .... dang it all, I'm a-goin' for Trump! ... uh,
maybe not ............" Do people just decide who to vote for based on whose face they last saw
on their television screen? What the hell is up with that? Or is there a better way to construe
the see-sawing results than my rather unflattering construction? If there is, I would be interested
in hearing it because I don't like sounding so ungenerous towards my fellow Americans.
In any case, I'll continue to hope for the best -- i.e. that the majority of us reject the
fake populism of Donald Trump.
Since Cruz dropped out of the primaries, the mainstream media has been engaged in a non-stop
assault on Trump, fought with the kind of raw brutality last seen in the battle of Stalingrad.
The Washington Post runs at least four anti-Trump opinion pieces every day. (Yes, almost 30 per
week.) Yet, Trump's poll numbers continue to improve. Hillary has spent big money on advertising
in the last month, and Trump has spent nothing. Yet, Trump's poll numbers continue to improve.
The Republican poobahs refused to attend the convention. Yet, Trump's poll numbers continue to
improve. Ted Cruz detonated a suicide bomb at the convention. Yet, Trump's poll numbers continue
to improve.
Also, as crazy as Trump is, he didn't alienate his base with his VP pick. Instead, he sought
to appease the far right of his party with Mike Pence. Meanwhile, Hillary has sought to move the
Green Party's polling numbers into the double digits by picking a running mate who is opposed
to abortion, presided over executions, supported a coal-fired power plant, and supports the TPP.
The arrogance displayed by Hillary in picking Kaine makes Trump look humble.
Trump's handling of the media is interesting. I consider it to be one of his greatest talents.
It is undeniable that the majority of pundits (on both the left and the right) dislike Trump.
He's getting attacked from all sides whether it is the traditional pro-democrat pundits to even
a lot of the traditional republican ones (especially ones who support things like free trade and
what not, traditional republican platforms)
However, Trump himself gets a ton of air time, deservedly so I might add. When he shows up
on TV, ratings go up. People want to see him on TV, people want to see his interviews. He doesn't
need to pay for ads when there are tons and tons of reporters who want to interview him! He is
earning his own air time!
DinoMight, Leftist here again. Kain is far right on what matters - Money. Pro TPP and wants
to let banks be less regulated. Also, Trump is being pounded negatively by the MSM nearly as much
as Sanders was denigrated or ignored. MSM, owned by Murdock and other large corporations want
Clinton. She's the money man. Trump may pull this off due to low demo turn out and objection to
Clinton big $$$$$.
I've heard some people recently commenting that they are going to vote for Trump not because they
particularly like Trump but rather because they actively dislike Hillary. As in the case of president
Obama there are many who cannot get their heads around that someone other than a white man could
be president. Sanders was a breath of fresh air but the political machine that is the Democratic
party had already chosen Hillary. Sadly, it's a contest that will be about which candidate is
the lessor of two weevils.
Well, to base an article on a speculation that Trump's post-convention bump will be like no other
is a bit silly. Best to wait until the end of the Democratic Party's convention before jumping
to any conclusions.
"... Sanders was always just the shiny carrot used to attract the naive youth and rope them in to Clinton's campaign. It's all a charade as it's always been. ..."
"... Well Clinton is a neoliberal. They believe in destroying someone's whole life for making a mistake once. So perhaps she is getting a taste of her own medicine. ..."
"... bernie is a accomplice sell out….sanders sold out to the criminal psychopath clinton…what a disappointment he turned out to be... ..."
"... In different manner, Mr Trump has shaken the Republican Party to its foundations. He too has been subject to a devious counter-campaign. Thus, this is a unique moment for the USA: each of the two dominant political parties is reeling and given the right push shall either reform or fall. ..."
"... Victoria Nuland and Hunter Biden as instrumental supporters of a fascist coup in the Ukraine...fascist coup. Support for Nazis. "We came, we saw; he died", said Hilary Rodham Clinton following the bloody Benghazi incident. There you have two excellent examples of Fascism and Authoritarianism, M.C.. Words and acts. ..."
"... Sanders is trying to hold back the tide for change , and he will be found out. He is an utter hypocrite, who is reneging on everything that he said so recently. The Democrats are a party for the 1% ---whoever is the leader. A new, mass party of socialism is urgently needed. ..."
"... Trump is a Bully, Hillary is a War Criminal. If Bernie won't lead a REVOLT--then We, the People will. ..."
"... Loons. Hillary Clinton is just Dick Cheney without the long, ah, nose... ..."
"... Hillary is indisputably a Neoliberal and Necon (warmonger), she's a threat to humanity. ..."
"... Actually Hillary Clinton is perched quite a bit to the right of the Party. ..."
"... Let me correct the record: it is nuts to support a candidate that is trusted by only 28% of the population! Nate Silver came out with a new projection that shows Hillary will lose to Trump. In a poll with a three way race Hillary, Trump, and with Johnson opposing Trump, Hillary STILL loses to Trump even though Johnson got a nice little chunk of the right leaning voters... ..."
"... How is somebody not going to jail? And, why isn't there talk of holding a fair and Democratic primary? ..."
"... HRCand DWS brought it on themselves. I am a registered democrat. I wanted a relatively clean establishment democrat without looming scandals to run. That didn't happen because Hillary ran. ..."
"... She gives me the heebie jeebies. Julian Assange has apparently got something on her which will deliver the coup de grace. I am loving Wikileaks at the moment. ..."
"... I hope Clinton will become less and less popular in the run up to the election, what would be fantastic is if we see Bernie running as an independent, America needs to have real democracy for once. ..."
"... People say lock her up ..."
"... No, she's above the law. As ex-Guardian columnist states so eloquently, there are 2 sets of laws in America---1 for elites like the Clintons, and another for everybody else. ..."
Sanders was always just the shiny carrot used to attract the naive youth and rope them in to Clinton's
campaign. It's all a charade as it's always been.
Well Clinton is a neoliberal. They believe in destroying someone's whole life for making a
mistake once. So perhaps she is getting a taste of her own medicine.
Mr Sanders is wrong to continue support for Clinton.
Not only has Clinton admitted wilful breach of sensible electronic communication security arrangements
but also her associates, likely with her tacit blessing, have done all in their power to undermine
Mr Sanders. Allegations of vote rigging (e.g. excluding people entitled to vote, closing polling
stations in locations where support for Clinton is thin, and strong presumptive statistical evidence
that voting machines have been tampered with) give little credence to Clinton being fit for the
presidency.
Even Mr Trump has condemned this behaviour and I don't believe that wholly to be through political
opportunism.
There is an open offer for Mr Sanders to jump ship and front the Green Party. Else, he could
stand as an independent democrat. What Mr Sanders must not do is lie down and accept having been
shafted. He has pledged support to Clinton. He did this without full knowledge of the facts of
Clinton's duplicity. Thus he is no longer honour bound to stick to his word. Indeed, by accepting
the manipulated would-be status quo he becomes tainted by Clinton's malodorous persona.
Mr Sanders is of an age when it soon shall be increasingly difficult to meet the physical demands
of running for high office. This is his one and only chance for the presidency. Regardless of
whether he succeeds, his stab at the presidency will give heart to a huge number of disenchanted
US voters and bring about major changes to the Democratic Party establishment, to its electoral
procedures and to its longer term policy platform; an alternative being collapse of that party
and replacement by an entity better suited to the 21st century.
In different manner, Mr Trump has shaken the Republican Party to its foundations. He too has
been subject to a devious counter-campaign. Thus, this is a unique moment for the USA: each of
the two dominant political parties is reeling and given the right push shall either reform or
fall.
Victoria Nuland and Hunter Biden as instrumental supporters of a fascist coup in the Ukraine...fascist
coup. Support for Nazis. "We came, we saw; he died", said Hilary Rodham Clinton following the
bloody Benghazi incident. There you have two excellent examples of Fascism and Authoritarianism,
M.C.. Words and acts.
Remember how Team Clinton kept pushing the lie about Bernie supporters throwing chairs at the
Nevada convention? I think I saw that mentioned in articles here more than once as well.
Who needs to look at facts would be you and the other willfully blind Hillary supporters.
Notably, the FBI DID NOT investigate this law...why didn't the Hillary loyalist, Loretta Lynch,
include this one as part of their investigation? Hmmm. I wonder...
Hillary Clinton broke this law.
http://www.justice.gov/usam/criminal-resource-manual-1663-protection-government-property-protection-public-records-and
Subsection (b) of 18 U.S.C. § 2071 contains a similar prohibition specifically directed at custodians
of public records. Any custodian of a public record who "willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes,
mutilates, obliterates, falsifies, or destroys (any record) shall be fined not more than $2,000
or imprisoned not more than three years, or both; and shall forfeit his office and be disqualified
from holding any office under the United States." While the range of acts proscribed by this subsection
is somewhat narrower than subsection (a), it does provide the additional penalty of forfeiture
of position with the United States.
Sanders is trying to hold back the tide for change , and he will be found out. He is an utter hypocrite,
who is reneging on everything that he said so recently. The Democrats are a party for the 1% ---whoever
is the leader. A new, mass party of socialism is urgently needed.
Let me correct the record: it is nuts to support a candidate that is trusted by only 28% of the
population! Nate Silver came out with a new projection that shows Hillary will lose to Trump.
In a poll with a three way race Hillary, Trump, and with Johnson opposing Trump, Hillary STILL
loses to Trump even though Johnson got a nice little chunk of the right leaning voters...
Who is nuts, now, dude?
HRCand DWS brought it on themselves. I am a registered democrat. I wanted a relatively clean establishment
democrat without looming scandals to run. That didn't happen because Hillary ran.
I wanted a clean looking election with few glaring conflicts of interests. That didn't happen
because DWS didn't step down and high level party members couldn't keep their mouths shut over
email.
Now, we're expected to smile, nod, look the other way, and vote for Hillary. I will do that
this time, but, if Hillary loses, I will never support her again.
She gives me the heebie jeebies. Julian Assange has apparently got something on her which will deliver the coup de grace. I am loving Wikileaks at the moment.
I hope Clinton will become less and less popular in the run up to the election, what would be
fantastic is if we see Bernie running as an independent, America needs to have real democracy
for once.
No, she's above the law. As ex-Guardian columnist states so eloquently, there are 2 sets of laws
in America---1 for elites like the Clintons, and another for everybody else.
There is no Debbie Wasserman. There has never been any Debbie Wasserman. The Party is unified.
The Party has always been unified. The Great Leader, Hillary...
Bernie Sanders Gets Booed When He Asks Delegates to Elect Hillary Clinton | 25 July 2016 |The
crowd of delegates in the convention center ballroom didn't come for unity: They came for Bernie
Sanders. Sanders, the Vermont senator whose bid to beat back Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination
fell short, took the stage this afternoon to speak to his delegates before he'll take a bigger stage
in a few hours-at the Democratic National Convention on its opening night, in a bid to promote unity
in the party as it gears up to face Republican Donald Trump in the fall. The packed ballroom cheered
and chanted as Sanders recounted the successes of his campaign...But when he finally got around to
speaking about the woman who will actually be the Democratic nominee, the crowd soured on their hero.
During a California delegation breakfast at the opening of the DNC Monday, House Minority
Leader Nancy Pelosi and her colleagues were practically booed off the stage by enraged members of
their state's delegation.
Roll Call reports:
Members of the delegation repeatedly disrupted the lineup of speakers, including House
Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, with protestations against Clinton and cheers for her erstwhile
primary rival, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.
But whenever a speaker talked about uniting to elect Clinton in November, the crowd balked.
They booed Rep. Michael M. Honda. And chanted, "Bernie, Bernie, Bernie!" during Rep. Barbara
Lee's address.
Pelosi tried to unify the room by emphasizing the commonalities in the room rather than the
divisions. "The differences that we have are not so great compared to the chasm between us and
Republicans," she said.
But the crowd wasn't having it. When a "Bernie" sign was thrust in Pelosi's face on stage,
she remained calm, saying, "I don't consider it a discourtesy even if it is intended as one."
[...]
With one final call for unity, and rallying calls to take back the House and the Senate,
Pelosi walked off stage to more "Bernie" chants.
Perhaps in their arrogance establishment Democrats actually expected delegates to swallow
whole the lies they have been selling all this time.
Fifty-five people have been issued citations for disorderly conduct for trying to climb over
police barricades at the edge of the security zone surrounding the convention, law enforcements
said, according to AP.
Protests have descended on City Hall and FDR Park, which are downtown right behind the
Democratic Convention security zone. Local police have been bracing for the up to 50,000
protesters that are expected daily.
Protesters have been chanting "Hell no DNC, we won't vote for Hillary" as
anti-Clinton banners flood the streets outside the Wells Fargo Center.
... ... ...
Some of the banners read "Hillary for Prison," while others had pictures of
Republican nominee Donald Trump and Clinton united under the slogan "Either Way, Wall Street
Wins."
"... The "dark speech" theme was obviously a canned response by the Clinton campaign. ..."
"... independent media ..."
"... You know that's a common problem with the 1% oriented inner party and their outer party wannabes. They 'have nothing meaningful to offer the electorate in a positive sense'. ..."
"... The Don has benefitted not only from his worldwide brand prior to entering the race, but also from what came before him. A pretty large Paulite mobilisation in 2008, followed by an at times clinical insurgency into the party rank and file in 2012 created an atmosphere just perfect for Trump to follow in behind. ..."
"... The Paulite insurgency which in great detail engineered massive primary caucus delegate victories (see Minnesota) against the popular vote were so effective that the RNC changed the voting rules. And so, the 2016 primary delegates would be bound to the popular vote. ..."
"... I am not sure that this revolution is what Good Dr Ron had in mind, but as an outsider looking in it's not hard to tell that The Don has aimed a couple of clever soundbites in regards to foreign policy squarely at the Paulites...even though you don't need to be too anti-war entice votes from Hilary. ..."
"... The RNC imploded. Because of Paul they lost a switch and lever crucial to event rigged - whenever Trump tweets 'RIGGED' that a war chant aimed at all conscious human beings. ..."
"... Trump raises much less money than Clinton. He simply does not need as much as she does. He can spend more time on real campaigning than Clinton who must hurry from one fund raiser to the next one. Meanwhile Clinton's negative campaigning against Trump reinforces his message. ..."
"... Good one - yes, the mass corporate press really is scripted, and really they all read from the same script. ..."
"... I look at politics through what is called "Deep Politics" which to me means politics viewed as it is rather than through the lens of American Exceptionalism." The oligarchs have fallen out among themselves at the very time that they achieved absolute control over our society. Part of all the differences are about "personal" rivalries among the aristocracy, another and part is about ethnic and social rivalries, and finally there are several different ideologies at work here. This explains the drift we have seen during the Obama years. ..."
"... In the current system American politicians are power brokers who arrange deals and they tend to have very little personal power. Thus Obama's FP seems to be utterly rudderless and full of constant zig-zags. ..."
"... Trump, in my view, saw that the disaffected factions had nowhere to go and were more nationalist and not as global in their views and believed he could Marshall those then inchoate forces into a movement. Trump was also, unlike most oligarchs, in touch with the yeoman class who do the heavy lifting in our society and are and have been ignored by the major factions as being irrelevant. Now Trump is heading the first genuine populist movement since FDR ..."
"... I have it from a source I trust that Trump is fully aware of some of the skullduggery of the back ops cadre which explains his alliance with Alex Jones and his posse. ..."
Clinton's negative campaign against Trump, and the media leashed to her messages, are doing Trump
a huge favor. Unless they can break away from their limited framework, stop their unintended advertising
for Trump's campaign, they will propel him to victory.
The three networks on Thursday night immediately derided Donald Trump's "dark speech" as one coming
from a "vengeful" "demagogue."
The "dark speech" theme was obviously a canned response by the Clinton campaign. Her
independent media (not) dutifully repeated it over and over. But that negative "dark speech"
theme, supposed to condemn Trump, only makes his point.
@4, Colin 'The Clintonistas can only go negative, because they have nothing meaningful to offer
the electorate in a positive sense.'
You know that's a common problem with the 1% oriented inner party and their outer party
wannabes. They 'have nothing meaningful to offer the electorate in a positive sense'. That's
exactly the 'problem' here in Thailand. The Democrat Party here, which is in about the same position
as there, adopted the 'strategy' of boycotting elections. Not even running. They knew they had
not a snowball's chance in South Thailand of winning.
The 'solution' to their problem here was ... military coup and dictatorship. Turn back the
clock to the middle ages and see how that works out. The thing about dictatorships is that they
make 'society' stupid and cowardly. All the state functionaries identify with the dictator and
in every situation ask themselves 'what would the dictator do?' and then they do it. They are
at once even more irrational and brutal than the dictator himself ... or than the dictator himself
after his advisors have cajoled and pleaded or the plutocrats have threatened him ... because
they are deathly afraid of incurring the dictator's wrath for being 'lax'.
And at the same time they'd like to stand out as dictatoresque men of action themselves ...
just like the d-man himself. Maybe they can be d-men someday. Society is degenerating, and the
pace has picked up in the past couple of months on the way to the dictator's referendum on his
waaaay over the top charter, aka constitution, for Thailand. They arrested and charged two 8 year-old
girls the other day who appropriated some important papers they'd hung up, because they put there
orders on pink paper and the girls thought the paper was beautiful.
Anyway, Trump is analogous to Thaksin, not to put too fine a point on it, at least he's talkin'
the talk. The Democrats have nothing to offer ordinary
@7 ms, 'It is the time for nationalists and globalists to have a political war'
I think its time for corporatists and humanists to have a war. I know that hard-right - libertarians
- conceive of the government as the arch, evil corporation, but in fact that is because it is
run by the arch. evil transnational corporations. The TTP / TTIP embody that corporate manifest.
They want to take decision-making out of the hands of human beings and put it in the hands of
the TNCs, because as slave 'owners' or 'managers' of corporations their livelihoods are completely
dependent on the 'well-being', bottom line anyway, of those TNCs.
The real problem with government
is that it is absentee-owned, we the people have taken a permanent vacation, and the corporations
have usurped our place. So the battle is to seize control of our governments and to geld the TNCs.
There is much more overlap in our immediate goals than in our conception of how the world works,
but the key word there is immediate. We have enough common ground there to form a coherent, goal
directed, expeditionary-force, to battle the corporatists from the left and the globalists from
the right, though we retire to separate tents with our fellows to plan the struggles of tomorrow,
once the immediate battle has been closed and won.
@jfl 5
No, he cant lose vs Hilary. Impossible... as the outside observer (so more tuned to receive US
foreign policy banter)
The Don has benefitted not only from his worldwide brand prior to entering
the race, but also from what came before him. A pretty large Paulite mobilisation in 2008, followed
by an at times clinical insurgency into the party rank and file in 2012 created an atmosphere
just perfect for Trump to follow in behind.
For how fortunate the republican climate was/is for The Don, it was equally balanced by how
unforgiving it was to Cruz. The RNC shot stooge Cruz in the back 4 years ago.
The Paulite insurgency which in great detail engineered massive primary caucus delegate
victories (see Minnesota) against the popular vote were so effective that the RNC changed the
voting rules. And so, the 2016 primary delegates would be bound to the popular vote.
An unfathomable lack of foresight right there, but also gives you an idea of how shitscared
Stooge Romney was of the Paul faithful, whose leader had been subject to media blackout by much
of the MSM and passed off as a cuck wherever else he was mentioned. Romney couldn't have him hijacking
the 2012 RNC.
Delegates now bound by popular vote instead of the caucus based system which encourages grass
roots involvement is a perfect platform for...well..a populist.
I am not sure that this revolution is what Good Dr Ron had in mind, but as an outsider
looking in it's not hard to tell that The Don has aimed a couple of clever soundbites in regards
to foreign policy squarely at the Paulites...even though you don't need to be too anti-war entice
votes from Hilary.
The Dems will have their reformation in 2020 - but I don't think they'll be feeling The Bern
as much as the RNC is feeling Dr Ron's Pay-It-Forward Prescription.
The RNC imploded. Because of Paul they lost a switch and lever crucial to event rigged
- whenever Trump tweets 'RIGGED' that a war chant aimed at all conscious human beings.
At least with Emperor Trump libertarians also get their wish of minimal government. Something
to smile about I guess.
For all of Hillary's weaknesses and venality it is going to be next to impossible for Trump to
beat her as long as he labors under a
gender gap of historic proportions . After Hillary is elected, expect even more and larger
U.S. wars. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists
Doomsday Clock will likely tick
two minutes to midnight, something it hasn't done since 1953 at the height of the Cold War.
Excellent run-down on the way Visionless Twerps emphasize their lack of vision by resorting to
one-word slogans as a substitute for POLICIES, b.
This observation sums up Hillary's dilemna with superb and delicious clarity:
Trump raises much less money than Clinton. He simply does not need as much as she does.
He can spend more time on real campaigning than Clinton who must hurry from one fund raiser
to the next one. Meanwhile Clinton's negative campaigning against Trump reinforces his message.
If she keeps believing her own bullshit (fingers crossed), and she slides in the polls, it's
not hard to imagine that she'll have to put the Putin excuse on the back-burner and swing a wrecking
ball through Team Clinton in retribution for her own dumbfuckery.
With Right-wing Cranks it's ALWAYS somebody else's fault when a half-baked scheme goes belly-up.
Good one - yes, the mass corporate press really is scripted, and really they all read from
the same script.
I guess they decided that 'racist' and 'fascist' were starting to lose their shock value due
to overuse, and they decided to try 'dark' for a while.
If I was a talented hacker I would love to intercept the marching orders that the media get
and replace the official cuss-word of the day with something like 'ontological', and see how many
media outlets blindly use the word even though it makes no sense at all…
"Donald Trump's speech darkly ontological" - NYT
"The specter of ontology haunting the Trump campaign" - The Guardian
"Putin and Trump: ontological partners?" - Time magazine
I can dream...
I think perhaps the worst thing that Bill Clinton did to this country - worse than NAFTA, worse
than repealing Glass-Steagall, or bailing out the big banks that made bad loans to Mexico etc.etc.,
was allowing the media to consolidate.
I think the biggest priority for anyone who wants his country to stop going down the drain,
would be to break up the big media monopolies, prevent news organizations from owning or being
owned by any other business, and blocking foreign nationals from controlling US media outlets.
IMHO.
Bravo b. But you've been too kind with your description:
"The New York Times journalist tweeted" [..] The journos' shallow-brained reaction is a
main ingredient of it"
Imho, "journalist" joined the Dodos decades ago. What we now have are Stenos., Cut and Pasters
at corporate media.
May I use your apt descriptor "shallow-brained"? Yes, shallow-brain Stenos. No exercise of
brain cells required.
"Oh my, we need to separate the adverts, do you have a ready piece you'd like us to print? Send
it over."
On Election day, the turnout to vote may be as low as 30%.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
@ Mike Maloney 15
For all of Hillary's weakness and venality it is going to be next to impossible for Trump
to beat her…[..]"
btw, I .do. not. have. a. vote.
but
May I suggest
You underestimate the utter public disgust for the Clinton dynasty. Take any segment - from the
low-informed to independents- they are tired and wish to see the backs of Clintons.
Michael Moore sees even progressives will stay at home. A low turnout favours Trump.
And do you not think the emails, ones from the DNC and HRC private servers, will keep on giving?
At the link, do scroll up to "Wow" read the DNCLeak email. Donna Brazile says there are more
coming….
Democrats in Disarray UPDATE 10:25 P.M. ET
Hillary Clinton, in an interview with 60 Minutes, says: "I don't know anything about these emails.
I haven't followed it. But I'm very proud of the campaign I ran. And I'm very proud of the campaign
that Sen. Sanders ran."
When asked by 60 minutes if it would have been "improper" for anyone inside the DNC to favor one
candidate over another, Hillary Clinton responds: "Again, I don't have any information about this.
So I can't answer specifically. We ran our campaign. We ran hard. We worked to have as many successes
as possible. We're very proud we got{.}
~ ~ ~
as always HRC admits to " knowing nothing about it " and "is sometimes confused."
HRC, the next president with Bill the first spouse?
I look at politics through what is called "Deep Politics" which to me means politics viewed
as it is rather than through the lens of American Exceptionalism." The oligarchs have fallen out
among themselves at the very time that they achieved absolute control over our society. Part of
all the differences are about "personal" rivalries among the aristocracy, another and part is
about ethnic and social rivalries, and finally there are several different ideologies at work
here. This explains the drift we have seen during the Obama years.
In the current system American politicians are power brokers who arrange deals and they
tend to have very little personal power. Thus Obama's FP seems to be utterly rudderless and full
of constant zig-zags.
The main faction which includes Soros and his gang have the advantage of controlling the major
propaganda organs and they support the Clintons. Trump, in my view, saw that the disaffected
factions had nowhere to go and were more nationalist and not as global in their views and believed
he could Marshall those then inchoate forces into a movement. Trump was also, unlike most oligarchs,
in touch with the yeoman class who do the heavy lifting in our society and are and have been ignored
by the major factions as being irrelevant. Now Trump is heading the first genuine populist movement
since FDR though he is much closer to Mussolini in style and substance except for the imperial
ambitions.
Even if Trump wins that does not mean the dominant faction is dead because as long as the muscle
part of the faction, mainly the black op faction remains in the globalist corner, they will still
be able to assert themselves. Trump, if he wants to have free rein must purge some of these people
and make some deals with the rest of we will see major instability. I have it from a source
I trust that Trump is fully aware of some of the skullduggery of the back ops cadre which explains
his alliance with Alex Jones and his posse.
The "issues" here are irrelevant. This is about a struggle for power and if it is a close election
the race will come down to who can control the ballot. American elections are noonger honest so
who controls the count controls the election.
One little caveat here. During the 00 ballot counting period in Florida while I was working
on a top secret project one of the senior people on the project who was ex-military told me his
sources in the military told him that if Gore won there would be a military coup. I believe the
Supreme Court was aware of this and threw the election to Bush. I think we are seeing the most
important election of our lifetime and no matter who wins we will see even more unraveling of
the USA.
This is exactly the analysis that Scott Adams, the Dilbert comic strip creator, has been following
for over a year. Understanding Trump as a 'Master Persuader' and relying on his training as a
hypnotist, he was one of the first to say Trump was on his way to a landslide win, not just the
Republican nomination. Check out his twitter feed "@ScottAdamsSays" for his latest thoughts.
Donald
Trump bounces into the lead | 25 July 2016 | The bounce is back. Donald Trump comes
out of his convention ahead of Hillary Clinton in the race for the White House, topping her 44% to
39% in a four-way matchup including Gary Johnson (9%) and Jill Stein (3%) and by three points in
a two-way head-to-head, 48% to 45%. That latter finding represents a 6-point convention bounce for
Trump, which are traditionally measured in two-way matchups. There hasn't been a significant post-convention
bounce in CNN's polling since 2000.
"... More than 1,000 people from as far as Seattle and Florida participated in the first of what are expected to be many Sanders rallies during the convention, which formally begins Monday. ..."
"... anger at Hillary Clinton and the Democratic establishment was not cooled ..."
"... At the front of the parade was a flag with the Democratic donkey flying upside down. Further animating the protest was the release by WikiLeaks of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee showing party efforts to undermine Mr. Sanders's candidacy, reinforcing a widespread view among marchers that party leaders had stacked the deck against him. ..."
"... "It's not just young people who are furious. There are people who have been Democrats for decades and are completely angry," said Kimberly Cooper, 59, of Florida. "Now with the WikiLeaks thing, I am finished supporting her." ..."
"... Numerous marchers said they would support Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate. They rejected the argument that not voting for Mrs. Clinton would help Mr. Trump. ..."
More than 1,000 people from as far as Seattle and Florida participated in the first of what are
expected to be many Sanders rallies during the convention, which formally begins Monday. The march,
led by a banner proclaiming "Help End Establishment Politics, Vote No on Hillary," was far larger
than any of the protest marches last week in Cleveland at the Republican National Convention.
... ... ...
But the unreconstructed anger at Hillary Clinton and the Democratic establishment was not cooled,
despite Mr. Sanders's endorsement of Mrs. Clinton two weeks ago.
At the front of the parade was a flag with the Democratic donkey flying upside down. Further animating
the protest was the release by WikiLeaks of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee
showing party efforts to undermine Mr. Sanders's candidacy, reinforcing a widespread view among marchers
that party leaders had stacked the deck against him.
"It's not just young people who are furious. There are people who have been Democrats for
decades and are completely angry," said Kimberly Cooper, 59, of Florida. "Now with the WikiLeaks
thing, I am finished supporting her."
Brandon Gorcheff, of Youngstown, Ohio, who held a handmade sign reading "Move Left" that spoofed
the Clinton campaign's arrow logo, said nothing could get him to support Mrs. Clinton. Michelle
Cyr, who flew to Philadelphia from Bath, Me., said, "The Democratic Party is so out of touch with
its constituents."
Joshua Brown, an alternate delegate from North Carolina who supports Mr. Sanders, a Vermont senator,
said he was concerned that people would desert the party in the fall, either abstaining or voting
for a third-party candidate and bolstering Mr. Trump's chances.
... ... ...
Numerous marchers said they would support Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate. They rejected
the argument that not voting for Mrs. Clinton would help Mr. Trump.
It is interesting how quickly the elite lost control. Revolutionary situation indeed.
Notable quotes:
"... Every time Clinton's name was mentioned thereafter, the crowd erupted into chaos: Sanders supporters shouting against Clinton supporters. ..."
"... As Cummings talked about how proud his late father would be of the people in the room, Sanders' supporters shouted, "No TPP, No TPP," in reference to the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement. ..."
When Rev. Cynthia Hale mentioned Hillary Clinton for the first time during the invocation, the
floor erupted into boos.
Clinton supporters began chanting, "Hil-la-ry, Hil-la-ry," but they were quickly drowned out
by chants of "Bernie, Bernie!"
Bernie Sanders supporter and organizer Billy Taylor held a coffin painted with donkeys during a
march Sunday in Philadelphia. He told NPR he applied for protest permits to "stop any Hillary
supporters from obtaining permits."
Every time Clinton's name was mentioned thereafter, the crowd erupted into chaos: Sanders
supporters shouting against Clinton supporters.
... ... ...
A Democratic Party official tells Tamara that the Sanders and Clinton campaigns have tried to
work together to present a united front. Early into the convention, it was clear those talks and
the message from Sanders had not swayed the delegations.
Rep. Marcia Fudge, from Ohio, was shouted down many times as she tried to get through some
procedural motions.
"I intend to be fair," she said as the crowd booed. "I am going to be respectful of you and I
want you to be respectful of me. We are all Democrats and we need to act like it."
The same thing happened as Rep. Elijah Cummings delivered a speech centering on social
justice.
As Cummings talked about how proud his late father would be of the people in the room,
Sanders' supporters shouted, "No TPP, No TPP," in reference to the Trans-Pacific Partnership
agreement.
Late-night host Stephen Colbert "took the gloves off" and went into a nearly three-minute long
skit this week on Hillary
Clinton's integrity.
"F*** it, I gotta take the gloves off," the comedian told his audience Monday night. "The Late
Show" host then began a series of pop-culture analogies to demonstrate the former secretary of
state's alleged dishonesty.
"Secretary Clinton, you
are so untrustworthy that Beyoncé is working on a concept about you," Mr. Colbert said. "Come on.
Come on, Hillary. You knew
that people think you're untrustworthy, and then you did something untrustworthy. That's like
Richard Gere going to the pet store and hovering around the gerbil aisle. You look so shady right
now that FIFA wants to hire you. […] I wouldn't trust you with Secret deodorant."
The comedian then said that
Mrs. Clinton might want to check her email server for fortune cookies because "I'm guessing
there's been a lot of Chinese take-out."
FBI Director James B. Comey recently said
Mrs. Clinton was "extremely
careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information," during her tenure
as President Obama's top diplomat.
"Seven email chains concern matters that were classified at the Top Secret/Special Access
Program level when they were sent and received," Mr. Comey
said during a nationally televised press conference on July 5. "These chains involved
Secretary Clinton both
sending emails about those matters and receiving
"... So, there you have it. The guy who suspected his campaign was being intentionally
marginalized by the party apparatus learns in fact he, his campaign and most importantly,
his voters were indeed intentionally marginalized by the leadership of the Democratic
Party. The chairman of the Party is Barack Obama. He appoints the Director who we
all know is Wasserman Schultz. Thus, the entirety of the DNC leadership knowingly
and with intent marginalized Sanders and his voters. Yet, Sanders remains loyal
and naively believes his voters will stay with him if he sticks with the party and
their chosen candidate that screwed him and them. ..."
"... His response reminds me of battered wife syndrome. He has absolutely bonded
with his abusers. He is a sick man as in mentally impaired, maybe fatigued, and
should seriously consider some rest. ..."
"... I cannot imagine learning after years of planning, hard work and personal
sacrifices being made to fulfill my lifelong ambition to get within a whisker of
achieving my goals, only to learn within weeks after capitulating, that my entire
life's effort was undermined from the beginning by the very apparatus I aligned
with, albeit as an Indy, for decades. An apparatus that must remain neutral. ..."
"... Think about all that man has put himself, his family, his workers, his
voters through this last year. His efforts were ginormous. Yet, within less than
48 hours the man dismisses the gravity of how his life's work was deliberately,
with intent, sabotaged by the DNC and goes onto say it's not important, the issues
are. ..."
"... Sure the issues are important to his voters but their learning the DNC
put their resources behind their chosen candidate vs remaining neutral as their
Bylaws require, would seriously piss me off. Hell it does piss me off and I'm not
even a Sanders supporter. ..."
"... And why on earth would any of Sanders voters ever believe that the same
party that marginalized him and his efforts would ever give weight to the issues
he's fighting for! ..."
"... AFAICT he got very little for his support (will he get a cabinet position
for himself?). He didn't have to endorse Hillary. He doesn't have to speak at the
Convention (but he will tonight). ..."
For those who have a Twitter account, checkout #dncleak or #dncleaks on the
latest over the Wikileaks release of the DNC emails.
Here's one -"Hillary Clinton is now blaming the Russians for leaking the
emails. Like that makes it any better that you rigged the primary."
Sanders to Chuck Todd on the leaks -
Todd: "So just to sum up here, these leaks, these emails, it hasn't
given you any pause about your support for Hillary Clinton?"
Sanders: "No, no, no. We are going to do everything that we can
to protect working families in this country. And again, Chuc, I know media
is not necessarily focused on these things. But what a campaign is about
is not Hillary Clinton, it's not Donald Trump. It is the people of this
country, blah blah blah..."
"[...] And I'm going to go around the country discussing them [issues] and
making sure Hillary Clinton is elected president."
So, there you have it. The guy who suspected his campaign was being intentionally
marginalized by the party apparatus learns in fact he, his campaign and most
importantly, his voters were indeed intentionally marginalized by the leadership
of the Democratic Party. The chairman of the Party is Barack Obama. He appoints
the Director who we all know is Wasserman Schultz. Thus, the entirety of the
DNC leadership knowingly and with intent marginalized Sanders and his voters.
Yet, Sanders remains loyal and naively believes his voters will stay with him
if he sticks with the party and their chosen candidate that screwed him and
them.
UNFRIGGINBELIEVABLE!
His response reminds me of battered wife syndrome. He has absolutely
bonded with his abusers. He is a sick man as in mentally impaired, maybe fatigued,
and should seriously consider some rest.
I cannot imagine learning after years of planning, hard work and personal
sacrifices being made to fulfill my lifelong ambition to get within a whisker
of achieving my goals, only to learn within weeks after capitulating, that my
entire life's effort was undermined from the beginning by the very apparatus
I aligned with, albeit as an Indy, for decades. An apparatus that must remain
neutral.
Think about his response to Todd. Think about all that man has put himself,
his family, his workers, his voters through this last year. His efforts were
ginormous. Yet, within less than 48 hours the man dismisses the gravity of how
his life's work was deliberately, with intent, sabotaged by the DNC and goes
onto say it's not important, the issues are.
If I were a Bernie supporter I'd be starting a campaign to convince that
man to take some serious time off. Go fishing. Go for hikes whatever. Just get
away from the bubble and clear your head and soul.
Sure the issues are important to his voters but their learning the DNC
put their resources behind their chosen candidate vs remaining neutral as their
Bylaws require, would seriously piss me off. Hell it does piss me off and I'm
not even a Sanders supporter.
And why on earth would any of Sanders voters ever believe that the same
party that marginalized him and his efforts would ever give weight to the issues
he's fighting for!
His response reminds me of battered wife syndrome.
You are assuming that Sanders is a victim instead of a conspirator.
Why
would anyone give any politician in our corrupt system the benefit of the
doubt? Even one that seems to be against 'the system'?
Why didn't Bernie release more than one year of tax returns?
Especially since Hillary cited this as a reason not to release
the transcripts of her speaches to Goldman Sachs.
Why didn't Bernie use the emails against Hillary after the State
Department Inspector General released their report?
This official report clearly demonstrated that Hillary
had consistently misled the nation about her emails.
Why didn't Bernie attack Obama's record on Black/Minority affairs?
Obama's support is part of the reason that Blacks/Minorities
were voting for Hillary. Obama never went to Feruson or New York
or Baltimore. Obama's weak economic stimulous and austerity policies
have been very bad for blacks/minorities. Obama bailed out banks
that targeted minorities for toxic loans. Etc.
Why does Bernie, at 74-years old, care more about Hillary (which
he calls a friend of 25 years) and the Democratic Party than his principles?
AFAICT he got very little for his support (will he get a
cabinet position for himself?). He didn't have to endorse Hillary.
He doesn't have to speak at the Convention (but he will tonight).
"... Trump, unlike most politicians, isn't a pitiful, cowardly liar who'd sell his soul, his mother and his best friend for a fistful of cash. You're probably confusing him with Tony Bliar, Bush II and 'Mr Magoo without the good intentions' - John W Howard, a creepy sell-out with no presence, personality or moral compass. ..."
But don't expect anything much in the way of 'keeping promises' post-election. "What, those
were promises? I was just putting on a show, and you _loved_ it." Posted by: fairleft | Jul 25, 2016 12:28:47 PM | 42
You wish...
Trump, unlike most politicians, isn't a pitiful, cowardly liar who'd sell his soul, his mother and
his best friend for a fistful of cash. You're probably confusing him with Tony Bliar, Bush II and
'Mr Magoo without the good intentions' - John W Howard, a creepy sell-out with no presence, personality
or moral compass.
After one of his early promise-laden election victories, he had the gall to dismiss a press query
about several of his broken promises thus:
"Uhh, they were non-core promises."
Trump's too smart and proud to box himself in with false promises. If he's flogging a vague idea
it'll be vague BEFORE the election, not afterwards.
Remember Obama railed against "stupid wars". I assumed that he was referring to the destruction
of Iraq. Since then, Obama has engaged the USA in more stupid wars than any president in history.
Now we have Trump - America First. Also opposed to stupid wars. But his favorite Foreign Policy guy is Zionist for Yinon Plan for Greater Israel John Bolton.
That can't be good.
BUT Trump is not saber rattling straight out of the box like the Hell Bitch is doing.
"... If you want to understand the Trump campaign team and Paul Manafort then read Franklin Foer's outstanding article in Slate magazine (28 April 2016) entitled "The Quiet American" . It'll blow your socks off. Manafort is selling Trump to the American people as a clean skin product, a break from insider corruption. It's a lie but it's enough to defeat Hillary. ..."
Trump is an egotist but I don't think he's that smart. I think his media successes are due to
his curent campaign director Paul Manafort, who takes over from Roger Stone, a long time Trump ally
and Republican Party trickster. Previously Manafort ran a PR firm that catered to every dictator
imaginable (it was joked about in Washington as 'The Torturers' Lobby').
Manafort and Stone formed a company in 1980 that ran the election campaigns for a generation of
Republicans and held cartel-like control over the Republican primaries. As one consultant put it:
"They managed all of the major campaigns. Atwater took Bush; Black ran Dole; Stone handled Jack Kemp.
A congressional staffer joked to a reporter from Time, 'Why have primaries for the nomination? Why
not have the candidates go over to Black, Manafort and Stone and argue it out?'"
If you want to understand the Trump campaign team and Paul Manafort then read Franklin Foer's
outstanding article in Slate magazine (28 April 2016) entitled
"The Quiet American". It'll blow your socks off. Manafort is selling Trump to the American people
as a clean skin product, a break from insider corruption. It's a lie but it's enough to defeat Hillary.
Manafort says the Trump campaign is about
law and order and that dark themes, absurdly, only elevate Trump as the peace bringer.
"... Barack Obama = CIA creation to be a rubber stamp. He was never a leader. Early on, he'd
clearly indicated that the job of the President is not to lead, but to pass or veto bills from
Congress. This narrow interpretation allowed him to screw us good. He and his dupes explained that
we got screwed because of meany republicans and especially b/c "his hands were tied". ..."
Barack Obama = CIA creation to be a rubber stamp. He was never a leader. Early on,
he'd clearly indicated that the job of the President is not to lead, but to pass or veto bills
from Congress. This narrow interpretation allowed him to screw us good. He and his dupes
explained that we got screwed because of meany republicans and especially b/c "his hands were
tied".
So many lies. One of my favorites: "The government cannot create jobs."
Trump, OTOH, is a natural leader. He is a boor, but he is a natural leader. When Congress sets
about to screw the commons, the remedy is "The Bully Pulpit".
Explain on TV the nature of the situation to the people. Watch Congress capitulate when you call
the bastards out individually.
"... Trump is favored mostly because he is an anti-establishment figure (and part of his mutterings about Mexicans and Muslims are there just to get him that cred, though other readings are possible..), because he is the first to run on American decline and reversing it, because of the discourse about jobs, NAFTA, other countries not paying their way, China and trade, a certain isolationism, etc. and because he sneers at the instituted estates (incl. the media.) ..."
"... Many ppl will ignore it of course in their new-leader enthusiasm (see Sanders!) but others not. It also signals an alarming precedent for any future nominations (were he to become Prez.) Trump's interest - as he must know - is in sharpening divisions and not 'normalizing' himself. ..."
"... I listened to Trump's convention speech. It sounded like it sprung from analysis of focus groups where you chew over data blah blah and go on to create 'sceintific' opinion clusters and focus on the things ppl agree on. Not the best. ..."
Trump is favored mostly because he is an anti-establishment figure (and part of his
mutterings about Mexicans and Muslims are there just to get him that cred, though other
readings are possible..), because he is the first to run on American decline and reversing it,
because of the discourse about jobs, NAFTA, other countries not paying their way, China and
trade, a certain isolationism, etc. and because he sneers at the instituted estates (incl. the
media.)
According to the standard copy-book, he should have picked another anti-est. (or only
marginally connected) person, even someone unknown or utterly outrageous. Or done something
nutty, such as run a contest for the spot on the intertubes, after saying he contacted Bernie
and the Bern refused so now what? ;)
The Pence choice looks like it is an outcome of the usual slice/n/dice calculations (Pence
will bring in his home state, Cruz voters will like Pence, or whatever..), imposed by the
Repubs. to 'normalize' Trump, bring his candidacy 'into the fold.' It looks like a deal was
made, and Trump had not the mojo to resist. Pence and Trump are not natural allies, and imho
will soon be at odds. OK one can argue that there is only one figure here, Maestro Trump, and
all the sattelites around are not important. Yet, this move imho puts his candidacy into
question.
Many ppl will ignore it of course in their new-leader enthusiasm (see Sanders!) but
others not. It also signals an alarming precedent for any future nominations (were he to
become Prez.) Trump's interest - as he must know - is in sharpening divisions and not
'normalizing' himself.
I listened to Trump's convention speech. It sounded like it sprung from analysis of
focus groups where you chew over data blah blah and go on to create 'sceintific' opinion
clusters and focus on the things ppl agree on. Not the best.
He can maybe still win, on the numbers, imho. Facing one of the most hated pols ever…
Depends on vote-rigging etc. as, for now, it looks like a close? race. Presumably Trump will
now bring out major guns against Killary.
"... According to recent figures, the BASF PAC has distributed $399,000 in donations. The lion's share of this money, a good 72 percent, flowed to the Republicans. This is not surprising, writes Die Welt. In previous election years, BASF, Allianz and Bayer had supported the Republicans. ..."
In a guest editorial reprinted from the Los Angeles Times, the FAZ writes of a possible
military coup in the oldest democracy in the world. Under the headline, "If Trump wins, a coup
isn't impossible here in the US," journalist James Kirchick develops a scenario in which
President Trump gives the military an illegal command, which it refuses to carry it out.
The article ends with the following: "Trump is not only patently unfit to be president, but a
danger to America and the world. Voters must stop him before the military has to."
German corporations with operations in the US reacted somewhat differently. As Die Welt
reports, notable large concerns from Germany gave more than two-thirds of their election
donations to the Republicans, and thus to Trump; above all BASF, Allianz, Siemens and Deutsche
Bank.
Since US law prevents American or foreign companies from making direct donations to
candidates, campaign funding takes place via so-called Political Action Committees (PACs). This
is a legal construct allowing the circumvention of both the strict limit on donations as well as
the ban on corporate donations. Via so-called super PACs, hundreds of millions of dollars flow
into campaign advertising.
According to recent figures, the BASF PAC has distributed $399,000 in donations. The
lion's share of this money, a good 72 percent, flowed to the Republicans. This is not surprising,
writes Die Welt. In previous election years, BASF, Allianz and Bayer had supported the
Republicans.
According to Die Welt, in this election campaign the chemical and pharmaceutical
group Bayer sent 80 percent of its donations to benefit the Republicans. At financial services
company Allianz it was 72 percent.
Deutsche Bank, on the other hand, changed political camps. The paper writes: "While Deutsche
Bank donated comparatively little, only $37,000, it is remarkable that 86 percent of this money
was distributed to the Republican camp." Such a clear tendency could not be seen in any other
German company.
That Deutsche Bank sympathies with the Republicans is new. In 2006 and 2008, the bank had
clearly tended toward the Democrats. The change of side was not surprising, "since Deutsche Bank
is the largest lender to Donald Trump." For the renovation of a hotel in Washington, Trump
borrowed $170 million from Deutsche Bank.
@37 jfl If you think Trump is a liar, then everything he says is bullshit. But I see his remarks over a long time are consistent.
And in sequel on #32 William Engdahl has to explain a lot. In his "A Century of War" he describes how the US industry was crippled in the 50's and 60's. And how the protestors were demonised.
p. 119 Riots were deliberately incited in industrial cities like Newark, Boston, Oakland and Philadelphia
by government-backed 'insurgents', such as Tom Hayden. The goal of this operation was to break the
power of established industrial trade unions in the northern cities by labeling them racist.
p. 120 The newly created U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity weakened the political voice of traditional
American labor and the influential urban constituency machines. The targeted white blue-collar industrial
operatives, only a decade earlier hailed as the lifeblood of American industry, were suddenly labeled
'reactionary' and 'racist' by the powerful liberal media. These workers were mostly fearful and confused
as they saw their entire social fabric collapsing in the wake of the disinvestment policy of the
powerful banks.
Hey William, did you read about Trump's ideas to bring back jobs to the USA? (and do you recognize something?)
And William, did you understand his remarks about that Mexican Wall (on American Soil). (preventing illegal immigration, ALSO because he wants higher minimum wages (impossible with illegal
immigrants))
"... If anyone remembers anything about Kaine, it is that he is a slimy backstabbing, beltway politician - a Democrat version of Ted Cruz. In other words, Kaine is a lot like Hillary. ..."
"... It's Mega Corps, The MIC, TPP and Yinon Plan for Greater Israel all the way. ..."
"... What's funny is that warmongering - glass the ME - knuckleheads are for Trump and not the Hell Bitch. They don't seem to know that Obama has been doing a bang up job for them. ..."
If anyone remembers anything about Kaine, it is that he is a slimy backstabbing, beltway politician
- a Democrat version of Ted Cruz. In other words, Kaine is a lot like Hillary.
Pence is also cut from the same cloth, but he looks good and he was obviously a compromise choice
negotiated by the Party and the Trump. Trump surely accepted Pence on the condition that he keep
his mouth shut and stay in the background. Trump can run his crazy train by himself. Another strong
personality type would clash.
Hillary, OTOH, needed someone who could fake a genuine, friendly demeanor and to also throw a
bone to self-identified progressives. In Kreepy Kaine of the TPP she failed miserably. No question
remains as to the nature of this beast.
It's Mega Corps, The MIC, TPP and Yinon Plan for Greater Israel all the way.
What's funny is that warmongering - glass the ME - knuckleheads are for Trump and not the Hell
Bitch. They don't seem to know that Obama has been doing a bang up job for them.
"... Accusations of Russian involvement with the DNC email leak is important for one very big reason; It suggests to me that the US elites fear the exact sort of color revolution and destabilization campaign that they have set loose on so many other victims. It means they know the public hates them and that they are now facing a serious adversary now and some unfortunate 3rd world country without the means to defend itself. ..."
"So all of Hitlery's Russophobia is actually her way of showing love and
support for Russia. "
Putin is god -- it is well-known scientific fact. He actually controls the weather
and even Earth's rotation speed. Russians always knew it, now, with the advancement
of information technologies (also controlled by Putin--ah yes, he, not Al Gore,
invented the internet) decadent West can witness his powers and omnipresence.
Remember Katrina? Putin! Remember the water main break in NYT--also Putin.
I had a constipation last week--damn Putin. Got rid of constipation and back to
normal BMs--Putin's hand was definitely in it. If you look attentively at HRC for 20+
minutes you will see Putin's image surfacing on her face.
So all of Hitlery's Russophobia is actually her way of showing love and support for
Russia. Just when I thought I had American politics pretty much figured out, you had to
drop this bomb on me, Bernhard...
The opinion of William Blum (Author of "Rogue State"):
And Mr. Trump? Much more a
critic of US foreign policy than Hillary or Bernie. He speaks of Russia and Vladimir
Putin as positive forces and allies, and would be much less likely to go to war against
Moscow than Clinton would. He declares that he would be "evenhandedť" when it comes to
resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (as opposed to Clinton's boundless support of
Israel). He's opposed to calling Senator John McCain a "hero", because he was captured.
(What other politician would dare say a thing like that?)
He calls Iraq "a complete disaster", condemning not only George W. Bush but the
neocons who surrounded him. "They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction
and there were none. And they knew there were none. There were no weapons of mass
destruction." He even questions the idea that "Bush kept us safe", and adds that
"Whether you like Saddam or not, he used to kill terrorists."
Yes, he's personally obnoxious. I'd have a very hard time being his friend. Who
cares?
Posted by: From The Hague | Jul 24, 2016 2:58:28 PM |
30
@27 Putin is unbeatable. All those cartoons and late-night TV jokes wasted. Even the
shirtless photos didn't get the anticipated feminist reaction. Kerry is getting nowhere
with threats and blandishments.
Accusations of Russian involvement with the DNC email leak is important for one very
big reason; It suggests to me that the US elites fear the exact sort of color revolution
and destabilization campaign that they have set loose on so many other victims. It means
they know the public hates them and that they are now facing a serious adversary now and
some unfortunate 3rd world country without the means to defend itself.
In an interview Andrew Bacevich spoke about what he saw at various insitute, academic,
etc. conferences he attended as an academic which I believe has effected his later known
books. He noted among other things, that there was an inability for empathic thinking.
He did not mean sympathy, but rather the act of trying to understand the actions of
other people. I think the phrase is to treat people as rational actors. As horrific as
Hitler was, historians dug into his motivations for example, for his invasion of the
Soviet Union.
So we get with Putin not a rational understanding of what he does and why, but rather
cartoon psychological and religious explanations which cannot be argued against as they
defy rationality. How can one argue against people calling Putin evil as that person has
not invoked a rational argument.
The propaganda demonization of Putin and the Russians is part of the same playbook
republicans and the neocons used to fertilize the field of popular belief for the
justification of war and invasion of Iraq to the American people (but now followed by
democrats). Every one of those articles is a bit of propaganda manure which will
eventually sprout the seeds of conflict and war.
Debbie Wasserman Schultz, speaking to her Florida delegation, was loudly booed this
morning. At least per tape of the meeting used on WNYC pubic radio broadcast this morning. An NBC
video had microphones which captured DWS's speaking, but barely caught the crowd noise.
In a YouTube video about the lawsuit, Jason Beck said there were six claims to the case. The
first is fraud against the DNC and Debbie Wasserman Schultz, stating that they broke legally
binding agreements by strategizing for Clinton.
The second is negligent misrepresentation.
The third is deceptive conduct by claiming they were remaining neutral when they were not. The
fourth is is retribution for monetary donations to Sanders' campaign.
The fifth is that the DNC broke its fiduciary duties during the primaries by not holding a
fair process. And the sixth is for negligence, claiming that the DNC did not protect donor
information from hackers.
"... What matters is what the emails said . They said, let's sink a decent candidate by telling the Stupid Classes that Bernie's an atheist Jew . ..."
"... So instead of addressing the urgent concerns of working Americans, let's manipulate Mr. and Mrs. Paycheck by playing to their antisemitism. ..."
"... We'll pretend working people matter, but we'll just be using them to make ourselves richer and more powerful! ..."
"... Let's not let HRC and the rest of the Democratic leadership change the subject to" the Russians did it". Let us, instead, stay focused on the content of those emails. That the DNC under Schultz did, in fact, rig the game. ..."
"... The rigging of the 2016 election has clarified to all of these people why they were weary about going to the polls...the system is rigged and they already knew it. Bernie Sanders got everyone unified and no other politician has that ability. It infuriates me to think that the Democratic party is angry at Bernie for revolutionizing a nation! ..."
"... I supported Bernie to the max even though I live on a smallish pension. I could never support HC. I sort of understand that Bernie had to endorse HC but I wish he would not be at all enthusiastic about it. She is still the candidate he criticized so strongly. The Clintons always make everyone who comes into contact with them look sleazy. They themselves are very clever at getting away with murder (figuratively speaking). ..."
"... Sort of like the Soviet Union - the Party is everything. The people unimportant. ..."
"... Russian involvement is a straw man. The importance is in the accuracy of the reports and so far there seems to have been no evidence produced to show that the emails were tampered with. If I had not already been dead set against supporting the corrupt and dishonest Hillary the Horrible this would certainly clinch the deal! Those being willing to swallow the "lesser of evils" deserve what they get. But then, despite the talk, is she really less evil? ..."
"... Other experts are now saying that the current Democratic Party is just as fascist as the Republicans and that we should vote our conscience. Vote Green. ..."
"... These #DNCleaks are another great example of the corruption and collusion in journalism. No ethics whatsoever. ..."
"... They also swindle the millions of Americans who donated $27 to Bernie's campaign on the basis that it was a fair contest... ..."
"... This convert may also have noticed the corruption at the DNC. The strange requests to create narratives to discredit Sanders ands then feed them to the media. This is how whistleblowers are made. ..."
"... We shouldn't get roped into discussing spurious allegations about who leaked the emails. That's what she wants the conversation to be about. The fact is these emails show the DNC fixed the nomination for Hillary. And Hillary has just appointed the chief culprit to chair her presidential campaign. Politics doesn't get much more dirty and shameless than that. ..."
"... DWS is just the tip of the iceberg. The entire DNC leadership needs to go, and to be replaced with people who will go back to Dean's 50 state strategy. But it is too late for this election. ..."
"... Jesus wept. How did we sleepwalk into this strange world where all the politicians are lying, thieving, murderous idiots? Before there were at least some of them who were impressive human beings able to inspire great progress, this bunch sounds like all of them were created by a wizard whose favourite material is a boy cow excrement. ..."
"... These people have no shame. Vote Trump! ..."
"... If you can't pull yourself to vote for Trump, please vote for Jill stein in protest, but Hilary can't win. ..."
"... This has been so downplayed by the mainstream media as it shows them in their true light. Compare this to the coverage Melania Trump's plagiarized speech got. ..."
"... Like clockwork, we have Clinton supporters, paid or otherwise, demonstrating in this comment board their utter contempt for logic, integrity, and any ideology other than team ..."
"... Billy Kristol - the neo-con skank and the likes already declared they will vote for the fellow warmonger. ..."
"... Hank Paulson - Ex Goldman chief and treasury secretary responsible for TARP under shrub junior also switching sides for the dems. ..."
"... Yep that's what our current foreign policy does, we topple governments. We need a common enemy to unite the EA and Nato, Russia makes a good scape goat! Who armed Osama Bin Laden against Russia in the 1980's? Then Arab Spring? Any country that practices Sharia Law can not allow Free Speech or democracy. Women will never be equal or have the vote in these countries we arm with weapons. Our arms dealers make money! We destabilize countries and keep the world in fear, united for causes we create. ..."
"... Clinton has dragged the party into the sewer with her. They should have told her to step down months ago. This is a shameful Dem convention ..."
"... "His son, Donald Trump Jr, appeared on CNN's State of the Union. "They should be ashamed of themselves," he said of the Clinton campaign. "If we did that … if my father did that, they'd have people calling for the electric chair." ..."
Oh, you mean our emails are not secure ?
Maybe the DNC honchos didn't see all those stories about Snowden, the NSA and ole 'Gentleman'
Jimmy Clapper. Maybe the Russians were involved. Maybe the NSA and all the other spook agencies are too honest
to tap the DNC's emails and use them for political advantage.
What matters is what the emails said .
They said, let's sink a decent candidate by telling the Stupid Classes that Bernie's an atheist
Jew .
So instead of addressing the urgent concerns of working Americans, let's manipulate
Mr. and Mrs. Paycheck by playing to their antisemitism.
We'll pretend working people matter, but we'll just be using them to make ourselves
richer and more powerful!
Let's not let HRC and the rest of the Democratic leadership change the subject to" the Russians
did it". Let us, instead, stay focused on the content of those emails. That the DNC under Schultz
did, in fact, rig the game. HRC needs to cut Schultz loose and repudiate this conduct if the party
is to have any hope of true unification. Let us hope that HRC appoints Sen. Warren as DNC chair.
She is a person with real integrity.
Rigged, rigged, rigged...took 'em 8 years to perfect it, but they (Dem. underground) sure got
it all nailed down didn't they? They put Sen. Sanders in a chokehold and he had to make a choice,
bless his heart. What will go down in history regarding the 2016 election, is what it did to ALL
the disenfranchised and young voters who were moved by Bernie Sanders and become lit up and excited
about politics.
The rigging of the 2016 election has clarified to all of these people why they
were weary about going to the polls...the system is rigged and they already knew it. Bernie Sanders
got everyone unified and no other politician has that ability. It infuriates me to think that
the Democratic party is angry at Bernie for revolutionizing a nation!
How right you are. This is the very reason that I can't get my 28 year old son to register to
vote. His constant mantra every time I try is that his vote doesn't matter because the game is
rigged. How terribly sad that he is proven right.
Ever decreasing circles..
Of the meaningless kind ..
Security?:)
Just trust the Democrats.
The bastions of oxymorons, eulogising hyperbolic denialistic gaga.
Who has contributed more to global security of the private kind..
Snowden or HRC ??
What not to do!
Really, she always Knew....
Is there anything the Russian government is not responsible for??
Yes, Democratic email systems of security, that are quite clearly insecure, untrustworthy, unreliable
& incompetent , just like their sponsors Goldman Sachs.. Surely the US people don't wish to bail
them out again to the tune of $814 Billion??
What a farcical circus, calling themselves politicians, oxymoronic.
How can Trump lose?
The system is bankrupt both morally & financially: Shrillary, our living proof! Gawd, just her
voice..
It is being found out that is the bad thing - according to HC.
I supported Bernie to the max even though I live on a smallish pension. I could never support
HC. I sort of understand that Bernie had to endorse HC but I wish he would not be at all enthusiastic
about it. She is still the candidate he criticized so strongly. The Clintons always make everyone
who comes into contact with them look sleazy. They themselves are very clever at getting away
with murder (figuratively speaking).
Not sure why the religion thing is singled out as most shocking by the press. Not that it was
acceptable, but how about calling MSNBC in the middle of a program and ordering them to stop a
coverage? How about all the other slimy tricks they pulled? And DWS was not just a bystander on
some of them . . . she initiated them. The arrogance of that machine in assuming that kind of
power is astonishing, but Sanders supporters have known about it for months.
Try running a race uphill with someone who's being carried like a queen?
Where was Yuhas 2 days ago on this scandal Oh that's right, he was flacking for the Clinton campaign
by focusing on the evil Putin. it was Putin's fault the DNC screwed its base over.
So Labour in the UK and the Democrats in the US both actively using all party mechanisms to fix
the decision of their own members about who leads them.
Have these people the slightest clue what democracy means? At least in Labour's case, the result
is still out.
I think the candidates' relative positions on enabling corporate rule may have been a bigger factor
in the DNC's antics than any principles about how long they'd been big D Democrats.
Russian involvement is a straw man. The importance is in the accuracy of the reports and so far
there seems to have been no evidence produced to show that the emails were tampered with. If I
had not already been dead set against supporting the corrupt and dishonest Hillary the Horrible
this would certainly clinch the deal! Those being willing to swallow the "lesser of evils" deserve
what they get. But then, despite the talk, is she really less evil?
Experts are telling us that the Democrats are only embarrassed they got caught rigging the primary
process before the convention. Other experts are now saying that the current Democratic Party
is just as fascist as the Republicans and that we should vote our conscience. Vote Green.
These #DNCleaks are another great example of the corruption and collusion in journalism. No ethics
whatsoever. They swindled Bernie Sanders of the chance to run for President. CNN comes out of
this looking pretty bad. And there is MORE to come. Panic stations for dodgy journalists, and
all those journalists who claim "impartiality", but are in collusion to push narratives. Just
as GamerGaters exposed.
have to disagree with Bernie, DWS didn't do the right thing - she just got caught, the right thing
would have been to put a stop to planted stories with no attribution and ensure a level playing
field. Anyone US side want to tell me if the thing about Bill Clinton meeting Epstein on numerous
occasions is actually true?
At some point they are going to have to provide some evidence, until then I reserve the right
to assume she's lying based on everything she has said over the last 30 years.
If not the Russians then Who? Maybe a DNC worker, who, over time got to respect Sanders, he
listened to a few speeches and thought "Hey, this guy gets it!". This happened to millions of
Americans over the last year so it's not too hard to believe that some DNC staffer, even if he
was originally vetted for 'being with her' he could change his mind once he saw the better option
that was available.
This convert may also have noticed the corruption at the DNC. The strange requests to create
narratives to discredit Sanders ands then feed them to the media. This is how whistleblowers are
made.
Gucifer 1 was Romanian and he hacked Clinton's private server and apparently gave it to the
Russians. Gucifer 2, is responsible for the DNC leak and we've no idea who they are. Could it
be another Putin supported hacker? Sure, but it's even more likely that it was a DNC staffer who
didn't like what he saw.
I say this because if Putin's task was to destroy Hillary he could have release the 30,000
emails (about yoga and wedding planning - lol). Everyone knows what these contain, the evidence
that the Clinton foundation was engaged in cash for favours schemes that were mainly used by human
rights abusing petro-monarchies.
We shouldn't get roped into discussing spurious allegations about who leaked the emails. That's
what she wants the conversation to be about. The fact is these emails show the DNC fixed the nomination
for Hillary. And Hillary has just appointed the chief culprit to chair her presidential campaign.
Politics doesn't get much more dirty and shameless than that.
....."I think I read he is an atheist," the DNC chief financial officer, Brad Marshall, wrote
in one email. "This could make several points difference with my peeps. My Southern Baptist peeps
would draw a big difference between a Jew and an atheist.".....
Sigh!.....Oh Alfred Dreyfus, Henri Bergson, Benjamin Disraeli and so on and so on....
(Do not tell the Southern Baptists and the fundamentalist nutters that TRUTH is another name
for GOD-want a reference? Here you go: El Emet - The God Of Truth: (Psalm 31:6)- they will not
know whether to s**t or wind their watch".
DWS is just the tip of the iceberg. The entire DNC leadership needs to go, and to be replaced
with people who will go back to Dean's 50 state strategy. But it is too late for this election.
If Trump wins, God help us all, but it won't be the fault of the Sanders supporters. HRC was
chosen by the DNC in advance of any of the primaries, with the expectation that any other contenders
would drop out early in the process. That did not happen, and that is why the DNC took increasingly
desperate measures to insure her victory.
What this election has proven is just how far the Democratic establishment will go to crush
any opposition within the party, and how unhappy the members of both parties are with the status
quo. They have no one to blame but themselves for ignoring the needs of the American people. After
this election, for the first time in over 100 years, I think that new political parties have a
chance to succeed.
So, instead of addressing this shocking corruption openly and honestly, DNC is blaming....Russia?
Jesus wept. How did we sleepwalk into this strange world where all the politicians are lying,
thieving, murderous idiots? Before there were at least some of them who were impressive human
beings able to inspire great progress, this bunch sounds like all of them were created by a wizard
whose favourite material is a boy cow excrement.
One resignation is not enough. The party is still corrupt, they still cheated Bernie and by proxy
his supporters yet they want our unity against Trump. Screw that. Its time to show the party that
they can not treat their constituents with a complete lack of respect. If you can't pull yourself
to vote for Trump, please vote for Jill stein in protest, but Hilary can't win.
This has been so downplayed by the mainstream media as it shows them in their true light.
Compare this to the coverage Melania Trump's plagiarized speech got.
There is no Debbie Wasserman. There has never been any Debbie Wasserman. The Party is unified.
The Party has always been unified. The Great Leader, Hillary...
Indeed. That woman behind the curtain, who's just been appointed chair of Hillary's campaign,
just coincidentally happens to have the same name as DWS, and look exactly like her. But do not
look at her. You will not remember having seen her.
Like clockwork, we have Clinton supporters, paid or otherwise, demonstrating in this comment board
their utter contempt for logic, integrity, and any ideology other than team.
I'm guessing a scan of their brain activity would show such kinship with Trump supporters that
it would shock them -- assuming fact had any sway, which, of course, it doesn't.
So they don't think anything is wrong with kneecapping a democratic candidate! They don't think
anything is wrong with subverting US politics. NO they are disgusted that someone revealed the
TRUTH!
WOW anyone who votes for the DNC OR GOP deserves everything that is coming! If ever there was
a time where a 3rd party candidate is needed this is it! Just look at the crap Clinton gives to
other countries not having free and fair elections! HOW DARE THE US LECTURE OTHER COUNTRIES!
Clinton supporters are a DISGRACE worse than Trump - at least trump fans don't PRETEND to be
something they aren't!
There is so much talk about the DNC e-mail about promoting Bernie as atheist so that they could
get church going low information people in the South to vote for Hillary. But, then they said
they didn't do anything about it. Wait a second in South Carolina, no one knew who Bernie Sanders
was, but apparently they all knew he was a "communist Jew". I personally heard this in South Carolina,
and it was a whisper campaign initiated by Hillary crowds. Now it is proven the whole DNC was
behind it.
I don't for a minute believe Debbie Wasserman-Schultz or Hillary Clinton are anti-Semites.
But these Clinton mafia goes to any length, employ any dirty trickery to win. The corrupt warmonger
Hillary should quit and take Debbie Wasserman-Schultz with her. I am sure Debbie Wasserman-Schultz
won't get through her primary, why? Because most of her constituents are just like Bernie, and
they won't appreciate what she has become.
"On Sunday, the Trump campaign rejected Mook's allegations, ... telling... they were "absurd"
and "pure obfuscation on the part of the Clinton campaign".
"What those emails show is that it was a clearly rigged system, and that Bernie Sanders
never had a chance..."
Even Trump campaign is more truthful about this. It is horrifying to think someone like Clinton
could become the president.
According to the NYT, Michael Bloomberg, who bypassed his own run for the presidency this election
cycle, will back Hillary Clinton in a speech at the Democratic convention. The news was unexpected
from Mr. Bloomberg, who has not been a member of the Democratic Party since 2000.
I wonder who else they are going to drag out to endorse their lying ways.
I wonder who else they are going to drag out to endorse their lying ways?
Billy Kristol - the neo-con skank and the likes already declared they will vote for the fellow
warmonger. Hank Paulson - Ex Goldman chief and treasury secretary responsible for TARP under shrub junior
also switching sides for the dems.
These two are the major red flag for any progressive voter.
1. Blame your own private server for leaks Hillary.
2. Blame Wasserman Schulz for rigging primaries
3. Blame yourself for not being trustworthy
4. Blame US foreign policy for making it a norm meddling in other countries elections.
Yep that's what our current foreign policy does, we topple governments. We need a common enemy
to unite the EA and Nato, Russia makes a good scape goat! Who armed Osama Bin Laden against Russia
in the 1980's? Then Arab Spring? Any country that practices Sharia Law can not allow Free Speech
or democracy. Women will never be equal or have the vote in these countries we arm with weapons.
Our arms dealers make money! We destabilize countries and keep the world in fear, united for causes
we create.
Russia like us has a migration issue of Muslims, 11.7% now. The USA backs Muslim regimes
and usually the more radical. Syria is in the middle of a civil war, Assad is Aliwee and they
are only 20%, they allow Christians and various Muslims faiths. If we arm the rebels, the educated
Aliwee closer to the coast will be exterminated in favor of the more extreme.
Assad is not a good
guy, but if Russia had armed the South in our civil war, how would we feel? In 2001 Bush Senior
headed up the Carlyle Group which sold weapons, 29 weapon companies, with investors like the Bin
Laden Construction Company is Saudi Arabia, Bin Ladens brother. Both sides have profited from
a destabilized middle east. They don't tell on each other, because both sides do it.
In the Soviet times, they used to blame all their short comings on US. Sounds like the Clinton
campaign has alot in common with Soviet Union. This is just an obfuscation. They aren't questioning
the validity of the e-mails but blaming their mafia control over DNC on Russia. If Russia or whoever
disclosed the e-mails, more power to them. The Clinton mafia in the Democratic party needs to
get purged. Hillary cheated to get nominated, she will hand the presidency to Drumpf. She is an
awful candidate besides being a corrupt war monger.
Clinton, who received 3.1m from Wall Street for speeches last year, and who was "extremely careless"
with national security and who clearly lied under oath to Congress had the entire system rigged
in her favour and millions of mostly younger people who supported Sanders have received a slap
in the face by a corrupt Dem Party.
Clinton has dragged the party into the sewer with her. They should have told her to step down
months ago. This is a shameful Dem convention
Typical tactic to divert attention away from the real issue which is the corruption exposed by
the Democratic party..There are rumours of another leak to come..hopefully the contents of Clintons
personal and the Clinton Foundation emails.. Sunlight is a wonderful disinfectant..
well this is what we've been talking about. Mainstream media, including the Guardian, the one
source of information I could trust , are also complicit in their unwavering support of the Hillary
machine and the stars quo for the 1%.
Just waiting for the promised emails from Hilary's server that wiki leaks has promised.
Citizens have the right to know.
saying its hackers stole Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails and released them to
foment disunity in the party and aid Donald Trump.
It's so pathetic, it's sad really. No introspection whatsoever. No, like a little snotty kid
that refuse to take any responsibility whatsoever for their own fuck-ups.
Come on, Hillary. You used dirty tactics to get rid of Sanders. I'm sure you've got more tricks
up your sleeve. We all know Bush Jr. wasn't suppose to be the President of the US. But he became
one anyway. That's how the Plutocrats play the game and you've been in the pipeline for a long
time now. Don't worry. We know where you've been.
The issue is not whether they were leaked by Russia, but that they were written and sent in the
first place. Clear collusion and vote-rigging between DNC and Clinton campaign to obstruct, disparage
and hinder Sanders.
This is how the Clinton machine works and why people don't like/trust her. 70% negative ratings
should tell the myopic DNC something. They are just as bent as she is.
You spin it right round, baby round round like a record, baby right round round round.
Unfortunately (for her), Americans have their bullshit metre *ON* let alone they don't believe
a word said any longer. Americans are eagerly waiting for the decision about the email server
thingy where lies and more lies were delivered.
You spin it right round, baby round round like a record, baby right round round round. :)
That's it from the Clinton cabal? "Look over there! It's the shiny Russian's fault!"
How about denouncing the HORRIBLE behavior of individuals and CLEAR bias by the DNC?...crickets....
The email the press is not mentioning shows the DNC had materials for HILLARY as the nominee
prepared before the primary was over! How is that just individuals showing their personal opinions
inappropriately? That was work that was PAID FOR, TIME that APPROVED and USED!
And the go-Hillary weenie Chuck Todd had a phone conversation with DWS about an entirely different
show...Mika on Morning Joe ticked her off and she wanted Chuck to handle it for her...
I am done with this party of corruption and Hillary cronies unless some pink slips start flying
and Bernie gets the Superdelegates.
He's the Cowardly Lion, sad to say. But what he tapped shall not be bought off. I say it again,
a mass walkout by the Sanders delegates would send a clear signal to Hillary, the DNC, and the
nation.
Guardian is still not getting the significance of this story. The DNC chair cannot preside over
the DNC convention. She can't even show her face. This is huge and it completely vindicates Bernies
mistrust of her. This isn't about the nationality of the hackers. It's about a crooked DNC rigging
the system.
Never mind the real issue is the content of the e-mails not who leaked them, but who are those
"experts" who tell us those were Russians? Are those the same "experts" who found weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq?
Ironic that Sanders would sit with Jake Tapper on the C orrupt C linton N
etwork for an interview...Tapper was named in the Wikileaks DNC emails as being in collusion with
the DNC for Hillary.
We know there were at least two leakers. The first, Guccifer, real name Marcel Lazăr Lehel,
is Romanian. He is now supposedly safely in federal prison incommunicado, so he won't be telling
anyone anything he knows any time soon, if he is even still alive that is.
There is circumstantial reason to believe that Guccifer II is Romanian or Moldovan also.
The Russians probably have all this and a lot more, but the chances of them leaking it are
essentially zero.
Clinton is desperate to lurk voters by anything, then let it be those Russians that hacked her
mail. A Russian proverb to the point - "A bad dancer always blames his balls that hamper him".
"His son, Donald Trump Jr, appeared on CNN's State of the Union. "They should be
ashamed of themselves," he said of the Clinton campaign. "If we did that … if my father did
that, they'd have people calling for the electric chair."
"... Like Clinton, Kaine has also supported the creation of a no-fly zone in Syria, an action that would quickly provoke a confrontation with Russia. ..."
"... Earlier this month, in the lead-up to the NATO summit in Warsaw, Poland, Kaine co-authored an open letter to President Barack Obama urging him to "carry a message to world leaders…[that] success in Ukraine and resistance to Russian aggression, including through the rotational deployment of NATO troops to Eastern Europe, are in the best interest of all member countries." ..."
"... In other words, the Clinton-Kaine campaign boasts that, in contrast to the "unreliable" Trump, they are more willing to "keep America safe" by pursuing a confrontational policy whose logic leads inexorably to a nuclear exchange. ..."
In selecting Kaine, Clinton is making clear that she plans on running a right-wing, pro-war campaign
targeted at winning over the military and sections of the Republican Party dissatisfied with Trump,
and particularly with the Republican candidate's attitude toward Russia. Clinton also wanted to repudiate
any association with the issues of social inequality that motivated the widespread support for her
main rival in the primaries, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.
Kaine is among the most hawkish figures among Senate Democrats. As governor of Virginia from 2006
to 2010, Kaine oversaw billions of dollars in cuts to the state budget. The state of Virginia is
a major center for the military and defense industry, and is home to the Pentagon and the headquarters
of the CIA
Between 2009 and 2011, Kaine served as the head of the Democratic National Committee, the leadership
body of the Democratic Party. He is close to Wall Street, having recently backed measures to deregulate
banks.
As a Senator since 2013, Kaine has regularly called for increased US involvement in Iraq, Syria
and Afghanistan. He has consistently supported the Obama administration's reckless brinkmanship against
Russia and China, two nuclear-armed powers. He has repeatedly pushed for a Congressional resolution
officially declaring war against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in order to clear the
way for stepped-up US intervention.
Like Clinton, Kaine has also supported the creation of a no-fly zone in Syria, an action that
would quickly provoke a confrontation with Russia.
Earlier this month, in the lead-up to the NATO summit in Warsaw, Poland, Kaine co-authored an
open letter to President Barack Obama urging him to "carry a message to world leaders…[that] success
in Ukraine and resistance to Russian aggression, including through the rotational deployment of NATO
troops to Eastern Europe, are in the best interest of all member countries."
In the past few days the Clinton camp has focused, in particular, on comments Trump made to the New
York Times, in which he raised the possibility that, as president, he would not necessarily start
a war against Russia in the case of a Russian "attack" on one of the Baltic states that are members
of NATO.
"Ronald Reagan would be ashamed. Harry Truman would be ashamed," Clinton senior policy advisor
Jake Sullivan responded Thursday morning. "Republicans, Democrats, and Independents who helped build
NATO into the most successful military alliance in history would all come to the same conclusion:
Donald Trump is temperamentally unfit and fundamentally ill-prepared to be our commander-in-chief."
"When you say to an ally-who you have a treaty obligation to defend-'We're not sure we will,'
that is a very, very dangerous thing," Kaine told reporters on Thursday. "We have American men and
women spread throughout those countries right now in service who are there and are at risk."
In other words, the Clinton-Kaine campaign boasts that, in contrast to the "unreliable" Trump,
they are more willing to "keep America safe" by pursuing a confrontational policy whose logic leads
inexorably to a nuclear exchange.
"... But finally came Trump's speech, and this was for the first time, policy was there. And he's making a left run around Hillary. He appealed twice to Bernie Sanders supporters, and the two major policies that he outlined in the speech broke radically from the Republican traditional right-wing stance. And that is called destroying the party by the right wing, and Trump said he's not destroying the party, he's building it up and appealing to labor, and appealing to the rational interest that otherwise had been backing Bernie Sanders. ..."
"... So in terms of national security, he wanted to roll back NATO spending. And he made it clear, roll back military spending. We can spend it on infrastructure, we can spend it on employing American labor. And in the speech, he said, look, we don't need foreign military bases and foreign spending to defend our allies. We can defend them from the United States, because in today's world, the only kind of war we're going to have is atomic war. Nobody's going to invade another country. We're not going to send American troops to invade Russia, if it were to attack. So nobody's even talking about that. So let's be realistic. ..."
PERIES: So let's take a look at this article by Paul Krugman. Where is he going with this analysis
about the Siberian candidate?
HUDSON: Well, Krugman has joined the ranks of the neocons, as well as the neoliberals, and they're
terrified that they're losing control of the Republican Party. For the last half-century the Republican
Party has been pro-Cold War, corporatist. And Trump has actually, is reversing that. Reversing the
whole traditional platform. And that really worries the neocons.
Until his speech, the whole Republican Convention, every speaker had avoided dealing with economic
policy issues. No one referred to the party platform, which isn't very good. And it was mostly an
attack on Hillary. Chants of "lock her up." And Trump children, aimed to try to humanize him and
make him look like a loving man.
But finally came Trump's speech, and this was for the first time, policy was there. And he's
making a left run around Hillary. He appealed twice to Bernie Sanders supporters, and the two major
policies that he outlined in the speech broke radically from the Republican traditional right-wing
stance. And that is called destroying the party by the right wing, and Trump said he's not destroying
the party, he's building it up and appealing to labor, and appealing to the rational interest that
otherwise had been backing Bernie Sanders.
So in terms of national security, he wanted to roll back NATO spending. And he made it clear,
roll back military spending. We can spend it on infrastructure, we can spend it on employing American
labor. And in the speech, he said, look, we don't need foreign military bases and foreign spending
to defend our allies. We can defend them from the United States, because in today's world, the only
kind of war we're going to have is atomic war. Nobody's going to invade another country. We're not
going to send American troops to invade Russia, if it were to attack. So nobody's even talking about
that. So let's be realistic.
Well, being realistic has driven other people crazy.
Seems the Clinton and her assorted groupies just need a scapegoat :-). Seems Putin controls Trump
and Clinton! The man is amazing.
Notable quotes:
"... From Bloomberg - "If the Democrats can show the hidden hand of Russian intelligence agencies, they believe that voter outrage will probably outweigh any embarrassing revelations, a person familiar with the party's thinking said' ..."
"... Ha! Fat chance. I'm thinking the American voter is going to start sending Thank You notes to the Kremlin! As usual, their heads are stuck so far up the arse of their donkey they incapable of gauging Main Street sentiment. ..."
"... She is just a symptom of the DNC disease. And yes, she'll take the fall for the team, but make no mistake, the cancer remains and will continue to metastasize. ..."
Russia is weaponizing everything : Word files, federalism, finance and Jedi mind tricks - everything
is transformed into a weapon if Russia or its president Putin is imagined to come near it.
Putin, the President of the Russian Federation, is influencing, manipulating and controlling many
"western" politicians, parties and movements - in Europe AND in the United States.
Here are,
thanks
to Mark Sleboda , a partial list
of political entities and issue Putin secretly manipulates and controls:
Putin is
in cahoots with the Republican presidential candidate Trump -
claims the Clinton
campaign . Putin is behind, it asserts, the leak of the DNC emails which prove that the Democratic
National Committee
has been working against Sanders to promote Hillary Clinton. The leak of the DNC emails, says
the Clinton campaign, is ..:
.. further evidence the Russian government is trying to influence the outcome of the election.
The Clinton campaign has not looked thoroughly enough into Putin's schemes. Reveal we can that
Putin has penetrated U.S. politics even deeper than thought - right down into the Clinton Foundation
and the
Clinton family itself:
As the Russians gradually assumed control of Uranium One in three separate transactions from 2009
to 2013, Canadian records show, a flow of cash made its way to the Clinton Foundation. Uranium
One's chairman used his family foundation to make four donations totaling $2.35 million.
That money, surely, had no influence on then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's decisions? And
what about her husband?
Mr. Clinton received $500,000 ... from a Russian investment bank with links to the Kremlin
These undisputed facts demonstrate that Putin is indeed waging influence by bribing U.S. politicians.
But the Clinton campaign is be a bit more hesitant in pointing these out.
Clinton/Kaine certainly confident that the MSM will not report.
For all the money given to the Clinton's it didn't prevent the Ukraine disasters. Of course,
Ukraine may not have been a concern among the particular oligarchs who made these bribes.
HOw could this anti-russian hysteria/bashing go on, I mean the level of paranoia and disinformation
against Russia and Putin is plain crazy.
From Bloomberg - "If the Democrats can show the hidden hand of Russian intelligence agencies,
they believe that voter outrage will probably outweigh any embarrassing revelations, a person
familiar with the party's thinking said'
Ha! Fat chance. I'm thinking the American voter is going to start sending Thank You notes
to the Kremlin! As usual, their heads are stuck so far up the arse of their donkey they incapable
of gauging Main Street sentiment.
Funny though, Schultz takes her orders from Obama, as the Chairman of the Party, the DNC Board
of Directors and team Hillary. Period. If any blame should go around it should splash onto all
individuals NOT just Schultz.
She is just a symptom of the DNC disease. And yes, she'll take the fall for the team, but
make no mistake, the cancer remains and will continue to metastasize.
"... ...if you are a hard-core promoter of wars like Robert Kagan, Dick Cheney, Henry Kissinger, Jamie Weinstein, Max Boot, Eliot Cohen, Richard Perle, George Shultz, Lindsey Graham, John McCain, and many others, you have either endorsed or said very positive things about Hillary Clinton. How to explain this? ..."
"... But if you believe that the U.S. military is a force for good that hardly ever kills anyone worthy of redemption, that the chief role of the military is to rescue poor innocents from evil by overthrowing tyrants and spreading democracy by drone missile, if you believe air wars are more humane because in air wars nobody gets hurt, if you think presidents checking off kill lists on Tuesdays is ideal as long as it's the right presidents doing it, if you cheer for diversity in the U.S. military and want the Selective Service expanded to force every 18-year-old woman to register for the draft, if you believe Honduras and Ukraine and Libya had it coming or you have no idea what I'm referring to, if you think suggesting the abolition of NATO or a halt to overthrowing governments is crazy talk, and if you believe a good heavy bombing campaign of Syria would be the perfect way to demonstrate that we care about Syrians and value them as human beings, you just might be a Democrat. ..."
"... I've studied the marketing of wars , and the most successful war marketing campaigns in the United States include, in order from most to least necessary: ..."
"... The demonization of an entire foreign population. ..."
"... The demonization of a particular foreign person. ..."
"... The pretense of urgency, inevitability, and ideally of the state of being already underway. ..."
"... The pretense of upholding the rule of law. ..."
"... The pretense of humanitarianism. ..."
"... Point #7 will pick up a section of the population's support, even among people opposed to some of the other justifications. But alone it won't work. Points #1 and #2 can do well without #7. Any of these points can be strengthened or undone by partisanship if the war is labeled the possession of one political party or the other. And once the war is really up and rolling, a new justification slides into the #1 spot, namely the need to "support the troops" by killing more of them. ..."
...if you are a hard-core promoter of wars like Robert Kagan, Dick Cheney,
Henry Kissinger, Jamie Weinstein, Max Boot, Eliot Cohen, Richard Perle, George
Shultz, Lindsey Graham, John McCain, and many others, you have either
endorsed or said very
positive things about Hillary Clinton. How to explain this? Are the
most rabid war supporters on one side and the most dependable war makers getting
nominated by the other? Well, maybe.
But if you believe that the U.S. military is a force for good that hardly
ever kills anyone worthy of redemption, that the chief role of the military
is to rescue poor innocents from evil by overthrowing tyrants and spreading
democracy by drone missile, if you believe air wars are more humane because
in air wars nobody gets hurt, if you think presidents checking off kill lists
on Tuesdays is ideal as long as it's the right presidents doing it, if you cheer
for diversity in the U.S. military and want the Selective Service expanded to
force every 18-year-old woman to register for the draft, if you believe Honduras
and Ukraine and Libya had it coming or you have no idea what I'm referring to,
if you think suggesting the abolition of NATO or a halt to overthrowing governments
is crazy talk, and if you believe a good heavy bombing campaign of Syria would
be the perfect way to demonstrate that we care about Syrians and value them
as human beings, you just might be a Democrat.
Yes, Hillary Clinton is the most dependable war monger nominated by a major
party in the United States in many years. She has the most
consistent and lengthy
record of doing what she's paid to do, of marketing U.S. weaponry abroad,
of manufacturing justifications for wars, of lobbying branches of the U.S. government
and foreign governments to support wars. And she'll do so while keeping up a
pretense of abiding by some selection of laws.
... ... ...
I've studied the marketing
of wars , and the most successful war marketing campaigns in the United
States include, in order from most to least necessary:
The pretense of a threat to anyone in the United States, most powerfully
if it is a threat of torture or rape or death by hand or knife. It need
not be the least bit realistic.
The demonization of an entire foreign population.
The demonization of a particular foreign person.
Revenge.
The pretense of urgency, inevitability, and ideally of the state
of being already underway.
The pretense of upholding the rule of law.
The pretense of humanitarianism.
Point #7 will pick up a section of the population's support, even among
people opposed to some of the other justifications. But alone it won't work.
Points #1 and #2 can do well without #7. Any of these points can be strengthened
or undone by partisanship if the war is labeled the possession of one political
party or the other. And once the war is really up and rolling, a new justification
slides into the #1 spot, namely the need to "support the troops" by killing
more of them.
"... Robert Mackey would like you to know that many in the Arab-speaking world are doing some genuine soul-searching about their culture's own role in the emergence of ISIS and that these conspiracy theories have simply been a haven for the obstinate and the self-deluded; Muslims who are too afraid to look themselves and their societies in the mirror. ..."
"... Ha, ha. "Washington." What buffoons! ..."
"... In a report this week on the blistering efficiency and military prowess of ISIS, ABC News reporter James Gordon Meek got an incredibly great, short answer as to where the Islamic State gained its technical expertise: "Probably the Chechens," a U.S. official said. ..."
"... ISIS, or ISIL, or the Islamic State-whatever you want to call it-was nearly dead in 2007, after U.S. forces in Iraq and local Sunni tribes successfully joined forces against the group. It wasn't until the Syrian uprisings that it reemerged as a potent force, after a failed merger with the al-Qaida-affiliated Syrian rebel group al-Nusra, lead most of al-Nusra's foreign-born jihadis to defect to ISIS . ..."
"... "Foreign-born jihadis" here meaning career Islamists like the Chechen groups, which have been conducting terror campaigns, kidnappings, and suicide bombings in Russia , with a reasonable degree of success, for over 15 years now. Some of the most prominent leaders now fighting with ISIS are Chechens: the ginger-bearded "rising star" Omar al-Shishani and the group's Che Guevara, Muslem al-Shishani (the unnervingly studly viking face pictured above). In addition to Saudi and Pakistani assistance, many of the Chechens were led and supported by the CIA-trained Afghan mujahideen, up-to-and-including Osama bin Laden: ace mentors, in other words, with proven experience in a professional terror setting. ..."
"... When not actively defending the Chechen extremists with weirdly bipartisan neocon-neoliberal advocacy groups , policy makers and government officials in Washington have turned a proactively blind eye to Chechen Islamist activities in Russia and here in the United States with infamously fatal consequences. Both the 9/11 Commission Report and FBI whistleblower Coleen Rowley have shown that senior-level officials refused to classify Islamic terrorists in Chechnya-like their then-leader Ibn al Khattab who had direct contact with bin Laden-as actual terrorists, thus preventing the FBI from properly investigating "20th hijacker" Zaccarias Moussaoui before 9/11. ..."
"... A big part of the reason for this sensitivity is that covertly letting the Saudis and their Islamic radicals chip away at the oil-rich rubble on the fringes of the collapsed Soviet empire has been America's favored strategy for collecting the spoils of the Cold War. ..."
"... "The policy of guiding the evolution of Islam and of helping them against our adversaries worked marvelously well in Afghanistan against the Red Army," a former CIA analyst told Swiss journalist Richard Labévičre back in the late 1990s . "The same doctrines can still be used to destabilize what remains of Russian power, and especially to counter the Chinese influence in Central Asia." ..."
Wise Men of Foreign Affairs have jumped at the chance
to debunk a wild rumor that Hillary Clinton bragged about creating ISIS in her new memoir-truly
an easy layup in the annals of punditry. The rumor even got the name of Clinton's memoir wrong. But,
that's OK: The remaining facts still allow America to feel guilty.
According to
at least one Egyptian blogger, the conspiracy theory-complete with fake quotes from a fantasy
version of Clinton's memoir entitled Plan 360-emerged from the hothouse of Egypt's Pro-Mubarak/Pro-Military
Facebook pages: a social circle in which it is already de rigueur to suggest that the U.S.
and the Muslim Brotherhood secretly conspired to orchestrate the Arab Spring. This screenshot of
a Facebook page for the Egyptian military's counter-terrorism and special operations unit,
Task Force 777, and its reconnaissance
special operations unit, Task Force 999, depicts one of the earliest appearances of the fake Clinton
quotes:
Leaving aside for the moment the question of why Clinton would brag about this covert operation,
in progress, in her memoir, what foreign policy objectives could possibly be achieved by America
manufacturing ISIS? Like: Why do that? To what ends?
One version involves Israel (obviously), and something about balkanizing Israel's Mid-East neighbors
to both justify their nefarious Zionist expansion, or whatever, and remove opposition to it. Another
version,
as The Week pointed out Tuesday, claims that the U.S. would plan to recognize an ISIS
caliphate and that this caliphate would turn out to be (somehow) very amenable to America's strategic
and economic interests.
The hashtag #HilaryClintonsMemoirs (
#مذكرات_هيلاري_كلينتون)
quickly started trending across social media in the region,
Huffington Post UK reported, "with satirical tweets mocking the theory with outlandish claims
about what else the Secretary of State might have written-like a secret CIA plot to close all the
restaurants in Cairo and replace them with McDonalds."
Good one, the Middle East. I'm lovin' it.
Not everyone appreciated the Middle East's jokes, however.
Writing in his "Open Source" column for the
New York Times, Robert Mackey would like you to know that many in the Arab-speaking world
are doing some genuine soul-searching about their culture's own role in the emergence of ISIS and
that these conspiracy theories have simply been a haven for the obstinate and the self-deluded; Muslims
who are too afraid to look themselves and their societies in the mirror.
For instance, the Lebanese scholar Ziad Majed
wrote
on his blog that at least six factors from the recent history of the Middle East helped give
birth to the militant movement, including "despotism in the most heinous form that has plagued
the region," as well as "the American invasion of Iraq in 2003," and "a profound crisis, deeply
rooted in the thinking of some Islamist groups seeking to escape from their terrible failure to
confront the challenges of the present toward a delusional model ostensibly taken from the seventh
century."
That sort of introspection is not for everyone, of course, so a popular conspiracy theory has
spread online that offers an easier answer to the riddle of where ISIS came from: Washington.
Ha, ha. "Washington." What buffoons!
Let's learn a valuable lesson from the psychological projections of these weak-willed Third World
plebes: desert Archie Bunkers and izaar-clad Tony Sopranos too parochial in their worldview
and too much in denial of their own culpability to face this present danger.
America is better than that.
Let us examine with clear eyes all the ways in which our own democratically elected government-in
Washington-is responsible for where ISIS came from.
U.S. Policy in Chechnya
In a report this week on the blistering efficiency and military prowess of ISIS, ABC News
reporter James Gordon Meek got
an incredibly great, short answer as to where the Islamic State gained its technical expertise:
"Probably the Chechens," a U.S. official said.
ISIS, or ISIL, or the Islamic State-whatever you want to call it-was nearly dead in 2007,
after U.S. forces in Iraq and local Sunni tribes successfully joined forces against the group. It
wasn't until the Syrian uprisings that it reemerged as a potent force, after a failed merger with
the al-Qaida-affiliated Syrian rebel group al-Nusra,
lead most of al-Nusra's foreign-born jihadis to defect to ISIS.
"Foreign-born jihadis" here meaning career Islamists like the Chechen groups, which have been
conducting
terror
campaigns, kidnappings, and suicide bombings in Russia, with a reasonable degree of success,
for over 15 years now. Some of the most prominent leaders now fighting with ISIS are Chechens:
the ginger-bearded "rising star" Omar al-Shishani and
the group's Che Guevara, Muslem al-Shishani (the unnervingly studly viking face pictured above).
In addition to Saudi and Pakistani assistance, many of the Chechens were led and supported by the
CIA-trained Afghan mujahideen, up-to-and-including Osama bin Laden: ace mentors, in other words,
with proven experience in a professional terror setting.
When not actively defending the Chechen extremists with
weirdly
bipartisan neocon-neoliberal advocacy groups, policy makers and government officials in Washington
have turned a proactively blind eye to Chechen Islamist activities in Russia and here in the United
States with infamously fatal consequences. Both
the 9/11 Commission Report and
FBI whistleblower Coleen Rowley have shown that senior-level officials refused to classify Islamic
terrorists in Chechnya-like their then-leader Ibn al Khattab who had direct contact with bin Laden-as
actual terrorists, thus preventing the FBI from properly investigating "20th hijacker" Zaccarias
Moussaoui before 9/11. Another pre-9/11 FBI investigation, this time into a Florida summer camp
run by the Saudi-funded
World Assembly
of Muslim Youth (WAMY), discovered that the group was showing children videos praising Chechen
bombers, only to be pulled off the case according to an FBI memo,
ID 1991-WF-213589, uncovered by
Greg Palast for the BBC and Vice.
Upon further digging by Palast:
Several insiders repeated the same story: U.S. agencies ended the investigation of the bin
Laden-terrorist-Chechen-jihad connection out of fear of exposing uncomfortable facts. U.S. intelligence
had turned a blind eye to the Abdullah bin Laden organisation [yes, WAMY was run by a bin Laden
brother] because our own government was more than happy that our Saudi allies were sending jihadis
to Afghanistan, then, via WAMY, helping Muslims to fight in Bosnia then, later, giving the Russians
grief in Chechnya. The problem is that terrorists are like homing pigeons – they come home to
roost.
As Joe Trento of the National Security News Service, who helped me on the investigation, said,
"It would be unseemly if [someone] were arrested by the FBI and word got back that he'd once been
on the payroll of the CIA What we're talking about is blow-back. What we're talking about is embarrassing,
career-destroying blow-back for intelligence officials."
A big part of the reason for this sensitivity is that covertly letting the Saudis and their
Islamic radicals chip away at the oil-rich rubble on the fringes of the collapsed Soviet empire has
been America's favored strategy for collecting the spoils of the Cold War.
"The policy of guiding the evolution of Islam and of helping them against our adversaries
worked marvelously well in Afghanistan against the Red Army,"
a former CIA analyst told Swiss journalist Richard
Labévičre back in the late 1990s. "The same doctrines can still be used to destabilize what remains
of Russian power, and especially to counter the Chinese influence in Central Asia."
Granted: The events of September 11th made this
grand strategy
a little tricky, domestically, but as you may have noticed over the past few years,
particularly in Russian-allied Syria, it's mostly back on track.
I knew that Hillary would pick a neo-liberal corporate tool. I still think Trump might be worth
voting for - if only to throw sand in the gears of the system - but his picking neo-liberal corporate
tool Mike Pence as VP was disappointing. Business as usual? Mike Pence might be viewed as Jeb Bush copycat.
Apparently the Pence in the ticket is not "America first" but " Israel First". Trump picked a neocon
who voted twice for the Iraq war and also for invasion and regime-change in Libya. This is in contrast
to Trump's own non-interventionist policy. See "Trump's VP Choice a Betrayal: Open Letter to the Campaign
Team":
https://quemadoinstitute.org/2016/07/16/trumps-vp-choice-a-betrayal-open-letter-to-the-campaign-team/
Notable quotes:
"... As a Senator since 2013, Kaine has regularly called for increased US involvement in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. He has consistently supported the Obama administration's reckless brinkmanship against Russia and China, two nuclear-armed powers. He has repeatedly pushed for a Congressional resolution officially declaring war against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in order to clear the way for stepped-up US intervention. ..."
"... Like Clinton, Kaine has also supported the creation of a no-fly zone in Syria, an action that would quickly provoke a confrontation with Russia. ..."
Number Of Iraqis Slaughtered In US War And Occupation Of Iraq "1,455,590"
Number of U.S. Military Personnel Sacrificed (Officially acknowledged) In U.S. War And Occupation
Of Iraq 4,801
Number Of International Occupation Force Troops Slaughtered In Afghanistan :
3,487
Cost of War in Iraq & Afghanistan $1,702,044,597,
In selecting Kaine, Clinton is making clear that she plans on running a right-wing, pro-war campaign
targeted at winning over the military and sections of the Republican Party dissatisfied with Trump,
and particularly with the Republican candidate's attitude toward Russia. Clinton also wanted to repudiate
any association with the issues of social inequality that motivated the widespread support for her
main rival in the primaries, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.
Kaine is among the most hawkish figures among Senate Democrats. As governor of Virginia from 2006
to 2010, Kaine oversaw billions of dollars in cuts to the state budget. The state of Virginia is
a major center for the military and defense industry, and is home to the Pentagon and the headquarters
of the CIA
Between 2009 and 2011, Kaine served as the head of the Democratic National Committee, the leadership
body of the Democratic Party. He is close to Wall Street, having recently backed measures to deregulate
banks.
As a Senator since 2013, Kaine has regularly called for increased US involvement in Iraq,
Syria and Afghanistan. He has consistently supported the Obama administration's reckless brinkmanship
against Russia and China, two nuclear-armed powers. He has repeatedly pushed for a Congressional
resolution officially declaring war against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in order to
clear the way for stepped-up US intervention.
Like Clinton, Kaine has also supported the creation of a no-fly zone in Syria, an action that
would quickly provoke a confrontation with Russia.
Grateful for what? For sinking Sanders? Look Obama, the Clintons are criminals, and their affiliate
entities, including the DNC, could be considered criminal enterprises or co-conspirators at this point.
Notable quotes:
"... Obama issued a statement, saying, "For the last eight years, Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz has had my back. This afternoon, I called her to let her know that I am grateful." ..."
Obama issued a statement, saying, "For the last eight years, Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz
has had my back. This afternoon, I called her to let her know that I am grateful."
"... "And I'm talking about the establishment Democrats and the establishment Republicans who are much more interested in holding on to power and their positions than they are about their party or about their country." "This is really very sad, and I hope that more people will wake up and see what's happening," Carson said. ..."
"I knew that there was corruption, but the level of corruption throughout the political system
is overwhelming," Carson said Sunday on Fox News. "And I'm talking about the
establishment
Democrats and the establishment Republicans who are much more interested in holding on to power
and their positions than they are about their party or about their country." "This is
really very sad, and I hope that more people will wake up and see what's happening," Carson said.
"... Transcript of Trump's acceptance speech as delivered [ Vox ]. I watched for deviations; there were few, and generally they improved the text. ..."
"... and Vox doesn't engage with the footnotes ..."
"... Key omissions: No assault on big banks, nothing on the minimum wage, nothing on Social Security. In other words, Trump is appealing the local oligarchs in his off-Beltway coalition, and not appealing to the (white) working class on economic grounds; neoliberalism wins with the Republicans, as with Democrats. ..."
"... I'm old enough to remember the Bush administration, when many of today's young liberal wonks were just coming up, and the blogosphere developed a very detailed critique of the Bush administration's fascist tendencies, based on his expansion of executive power under the doctrine of the unitary executive, and his destruction of the Fourth Amendment and the rule of law generally through his program of warrantless surveillance ( "sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception" ). ..."
"... As soon as Obama was elected, those same liberal wonks dropped the critique of fascist powers in the executive like the hot potato it was, even as Obama proceeded to rationalize and consolidate everything Bush did (and had signaled his intent to do so, in July ..."
Headlines on the newspaper rack when I went to get coffee this morning, both above the fold and
spanning the page: "'I am your voice.' - Trump" (USA Today) and "'I will fight for you' - Trump"
(Bangor Daily News). Smart speechwriting; 15 and 20 characters respectively, so the quotes are made
for huuuge headline type. And call me crazy - I'll get to the details below - but is it possible
that there are voters who feel they have no voice, and that nobody's fighting for them? I can't think
why, but the morning paper dropped outside every hotel room door in America seems to think so. As
does my local paper.
Transcript of Trump's acceptance speech as delivered [
Vox ]. I watched for deviations; there were few, and generally they improved the text. For
example, Clinton's legacy of (a) "death, destruction and weakness" in the written speech became (b)
"death, destruction, terrorism, and weakness" as delivered. (Modulo "weakness," since Clinton can't
really be held accountable for a process of imperial collapse,
I hate it when Trump's right ). It's funny to watch the quotes propagate through the press, since
anybody using variant (a) is writing off the written transcript, and anybody using variant (b) is
reporting in something closer to real time. Perhaps the variants are introduced for that purpose?
Transcript of Trump's acceptance speech as written [
Donald J. Trump
]. Cheekily, there are 282 footnotes. This is actually both clever by the Trump campaign, and
important as a yardstick for the allegiances of the political class. Why? Fact-checking. Here's Vox:
"Trump says: 'Decades of progress made in bringing down crime are now being reversed by this administration's
rollback of criminal enforcement.' In fact:… Ruling: Baseless" [Vox staff,
Vox ]. The wee problem here is that Trump backs up that claim with material at footnotes 19,
20, 21 and 22, and Vox doesn't engage with the footnotes . So, despite the faux
judiciousness of "Ruling," the article doesn't engage with Trump's material at all. As one might
expect,
given this useful post by Corey Robin , the wonks at Vox are ritually enacting the forms of scholarship,
whiile emptying them of content. (Troll prophylactic: I'm not saying Trump's claim is correct; I'm
saying that Vox makes its tendentiousness really obvious when it fails to engage with it.) I don't
have time to look at all the other fact checking out there - and I don't expect anything either presumptive
candidate says to survive a fact-checking process anyhow - but I would bet they, too, fail to engage
with Trump's footnotes.
"Trump's speech was a significant moment for an impulsive entertainer and savvy media manipulator
now striving to look presidential to a wide audience. He cleared the bar handily Thursday, showing
the political force he could become when he reins in his most bombastic rhetoric and sticks to his
populist-infused message" [
US News ].
Anyhow, I watched the speech. Key omissions: No assault on big banks, nothing on the minimum
wage, nothing on Social Security. In other words, Trump is appealing the local oligarchs in his off-Beltway
coalition, and not appealing to the (white) working class on economic grounds; neoliberalism wins
with the Republicans, as with Democrats.
(That is, liberals are correct to point to the dogwhistles, but evil to airbrush the policies
they pursued, together with the Republicans, which present the working class with a Sophie's Choice
between rejecting "law and order" dogwhistles while also rejecting some minimal gestures
toward their economic interests.) Here are some random - really random - screen shots, with commentary
under this:
This is the stage, all Trumped up. Cult of personality in full swing, along with Gilded Age decor
complete with digital gilding (I don't think that's physical signage). Sure, the burnished logo looks
like something you'd see on the Las Vegas strip, but then an America run by the FIRE sector is
a casino .
And so the 2016 election brings another moment of bracing clarity.
This is the balloon drop, which was excellent - lots and lots of balloons, like bubbles in a really
frothy glass of champers - proof that the Trump staff can actual deliver competent advance work,
though whether the campaign can scale up to the full campaign trail is an open question. There were
also fireworks outside. I would like to know who chose the closing music: "All Right Now" (Free
Bad Company ) followed by "You Can't Always Get What
You Want" (Rolling Stones). But you get what you need?
And this is a shot of Barron Trump not, apparently, getting what he needs. I'm including it because
there wasn't a moment he was on the stage when he didn't look downcast, even when looking up at the
balloons. A rarely human moment, contrasted with Melania Trump's
weaponized
graciousness . Sad.
"In his most important speech ever, Trump echoes Richard Nixon" [Dan Balz,
WaPo ]. "In Nixon's time, it was a call for the 'Silent Majority' to rise up and take back the
country. Trump spoke to the "forgotten men and women" who he said no longer have a voice in a rigged
political system run by 'censors' and 'cynics."
* * *
UPDATE Lambert here: I rarely mention the F-word, if only because I don't want to start a trash
fire. That said - [throwing a flag at my own Godwin's Law violation] - I'm going to go there. Here's
why I'm suspicious of liberal goodthinker claims that Trump is a fascist: I'm old enough to remember
the Bush administration, when many of today's young liberal wonks were just coming up, and the blogosphere
developed a very detailed critique of the Bush administration's fascist tendencies, based on his
expansion of executive power under the doctrine of the unitary executive, and his destruction of
the Fourth Amendment and the rule of law generally through his program of warrantless surveillance
( "sovereign is he who decides
on the state of exception" ).
Well… As soon as Obama was elected, those same liberal wonks dropped the critique of fascist
powers in the executive like the hot potato it was, even as Obama proceeded to rationalize and consolidate
everything Bush did (and had signaled his intent to do so, in July 2008, by voting to give
corporations retroactive immunity for Bush's program of warrantless surveillance). These same wonks
might also be usefully asked what sort of State adopts a "disposition matrix" and uses it to assassinate
its own citizens, and what sort of State orchestrates a 17-city paramilitary crackdown on non-violent
direct actions. Or what sort of State sets up Homan Center (for example).
Now, I know this reasoning exhibits the genetic fallacy, and the grim moral of "The Boy Who Cried
Wolf" is that sometimes the wolf is a wolf , but if there's any serious analysis on this
topic, I'd love to see it, because I trust the young and youngish wonks in the political class about
as far as I can throw a piano. A concert grand piano.
Take for example youngish James Fallows (
from April ), on the unsavory history of "America First":
But the term "America First" has a specific and nasty history, mainly because of the America
First movement that essentially advocated accommodating Nazi interests on the eve of World War
II. There's a list of terms you're wiser to avoid, no matter how deserving the underlying idea
might be. "Separate but equal," in the United States. "Cultural Revolution" or "Great Leap Forward"
if you're in China. "Final solution," anywhere. In the realm of foreign policy, America First
is one of these. You can make the point without using the phrase.
To begin with, never mind that Democrat Dick Gephardt - thanks for destroying Howard Dean in Iowa
2004, Dick! -
ran for office in the 1980s using the same phrase ; apparently, in Fallows mind, that's not inoculation
enough. The real issue -
as once again Corey Robin points out - that Fallows is rather like a cargo cult historian: Invoking
the form, while lacking the substance. That's because - follow me closely here - this is not the
1940s. If fascism is
"the merger of state and corporate power" , have not both Democrats and Repblicans already arrived
at that point? Further, on what grounds are we to make the Sophie's Choice between the merger of
state and corporation at the national level, a la Trump ("Make America great
again) and the surrender of national sovereignty to corporations at the international level,
a la Clinton and Tim Kaine's
"gold standard" TPP and its ISDS system? This is 2016, not 1940.
I'd welcome reader thoughts and meditations on this topic. But I'm gonna be ruthless on drive-bys
and me-toos.
"... Camille Paglia made the best argument against Hillary: she's incompetent. She couldn't even stave off an FBI investigation into her emails; she's lucky that AG Lynch was in the bag. ..."
"... Trump simply does not care, in the least, if he gets 90% covered in excrement, so long as his detractors get covered 95+%. If he is slightly, barely less-caked-in-filth at the finish line, he wins, and that is the only thing that matters to him. It is simply never a "mistake" for Trump to make speech choices that cake him in yet more filth, so long as he causes even more filth to adhere to his only real opponent … especially if his "mistakes" cause cultural elites like you to give him even-more-mountains of free publicity poring over those "mistakes". ..."
"... I liked that he called HC out on her ineptitude and transgressions and hope that he continues to do so to keep her on the defensive. If you happen to think Trump's screaming delivery was bad (I did but as a fellow native NYer, I get it) just wait until we are subjected to the screeching, robotic monotone of Broom Hilda next week. ..."
"... The key point is, Trump held fast to all the points on which he disagrees with the previous GOP consensus–and got the audience to cheer along with his "heresies." ..."
"... He is running as an anti-free trade, anti-immigration, anti-foreign intervention, non-social-issue-conservative–and getting the Pence-style conservatives to go along with it. Movement conservatism is dead–Ted Cruz is "rotting-flesh Reaganism" in Rusty Reno's hideously accurate phrase. If it wasn't for the fact that Trump is the messenger, this would be a very good message. ..."
"... Regarding the vile Hillary Clinton's ethics and "temperament": https://m.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/4u367e/wikileaks_release_19252_from_the_dnc_start/d5mflj8 ..."
George Will once wrote that Thomas Paine had written the single most effective political pamphlet
in history. 'Nuff said on that point.
Hillary Clinton does live in her own kind of bubble, but she is not incompetent. She is razor
sharp competent, at doing the wrong things. The best argument I've heard for supporting Trump
is that he's not competent to do as much damage as she is.
Rod, the fact that he yelled a lot in a well-written speech does not tell us much about
how his mind works. It just tells us that his speaking style differs from your preferences…
Nope, it tells us a lot about how his mind works. He can't stay on point, he can't stay any
course because he can't pick one in the first place, he can't focus, he can't adhere to any consistent
set of principles. He blabs different things every day because he thinks different things every
day. His mind is a mess, and for that matter, so is his business record.
In the same type of poll from last time around, 79% of people liked Mitt Romney's acceptance
speech in 2012. Shockingly, outside of political junkies, the people watching political conventions
mostly already like the candidate.
"Jesse this election is probably going to be settled by people ion the rust belt and Florida.
It doesn't matter if people in places like Oregon and Delaware think things are going just great."
Let's see here – let's go to the average, all from Pollster.com. I've just given Clinton Illinois
and Trump Indiana.
Wisconsin – +9 Clinton average
Iowa – +3 Clinton average
Michigan – +7 Clinton average
Ohio – +4 Clinton average
Florida – +2 Clinton average
And in all those states, Trump barely gets above 40. Hillary Clinton just had her worst week
+ Trump just had his rollout at the RNC and he still can't get above 40.
I don't think Clinton has this thing locked, but I do think that on Election Day, a lot of
Trump supporters will be feeling like Pauline Kael, in that there is a Silent Majority in America,
but it's not Nixon's Silent Majority, but a new Silent Majority of white collar secular social
liberals + minorities.
Love it. Having helped turn the country into a moral cesspool, an economic basketcase, and a frothing-at-the-mouth
interventionist Goliath fighting and killing in multiple countries for over a decade now, the
New York Times has the nerve to chide Trump for his "dark vision"!!!!
We're not supposed to know that things are so screwed up, you see. The Emperor is fully clothed
and all's right in this, the best of all possible worlds.
If the NYT people and other elites didn't want to be treated with contempt they shouldn't have
behaved contemptibly. If they feel revulsion at Trump's "dark vision", they shouldn't have so
darkened the world.
[NFR: No Trump fan here, as you know, but boy, do you ever have a point here. When I read
the Times site most days, and see the things they consider signs of progress, I feel us sinking
further into the mire. - RD]
The polls said 56% were more likely to vote for him and 75% liked the speech.
This is the second article that shows even AmConMag's authors are out of touch with the base.
We aren't looking for elites, or their high-church criticism. What you heard only maybe 5%
would see and agree with.
Do you also similarly rate the problem with the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleader cheers that they
might not be perfect grammar or might not be properly making the point?
Who wins political debates is not a matter of the Oxford style. It is a question of who advances
his candidacy.
The question of the quality of Trump's speech is not a question of whether you think it went
on too long, wasn't as crisp as the written version, or that he yelled. It is a question of whether
it advanced his candidacy.
From the numbers I have seen that seems to be the case. Rhetoric is, brutally, a function of
accomplishing aims.
Edward Hamilton writes: "But if Trump has even a few percent of such voters hidden from current
polling, and the current polls are otherwise accurate, I think that we might witness a unprecedented
alliance of low-attention rural and young voters who combine to push Trump over the top."
A couple rejoinders. By all accounts, Trump has no ground game or GoTV organization. So one
would have to count on these disaffected youths finding the willpower to register and show up
when they're needed without any help. A tall order. Trump's support so far has been non-first
time voters, i.e. Republicans and some Democrats - his voters skew older.
Then they need to show up in OH, VA, FL, and NV or NH. The national percentage points really
don't matter in this case. They have to show up in these states like a tsunami (maybe WI and IA
too, depending on how you do the swing-state math). The Democrats have viable machines in OH,
VA, and FL. Another tall order, when Clinton's GoTV is swinging into action. What's the old saying?
"In war, logistics is everything." The easier path for Trump at this stage is to try and convince
registered Democrats to vote for him.
But your description of this potential voting demographic is spot on, imho. This who they are.
If history is any guide, Mrs. Clinton's "worst week" is always before her. She can't help it,
and those around her can't fix it, because it's who she is.
Pity poor Kaine, who seemed like a nice enough guy, soon to bear the Clinton taint – and already
a source of anger and division as Clinton consolidates her stranglehold on the party by smashing
the youthful, hopeful Sanders people.
"They want their buttons pushed and he did that very very well."
Absolutely. And the talking heads saying "things aren't that bad", "crime is down", "the economy
is recovering" just don't get it. Those things may even be true in a national sense, but they
are not felt on a local level.
FWIW in evangelical country, Trump isn't the first choice of most. But faced with the known
entity that is Hillary, and her toxic identity politics, I think a lot of them are prepared to
take a flier with Trump.
Camille Paglia made the best argument against Hillary: she's incompetent. She couldn't
even stave off an FBI investigation into her emails; she's lucky that AG Lynch was in the bag.
In reading (and rereading) the comments above, I think i've begun to understand Karl Rove's point
back in 2004 when he famously claimed that Republicans have no need for reality; they create their
own reality and the world must adjust to it. This election underscores his point and makes the
further point that Democrats are no less wedded to their reality.
That one is more in sync with "real reality" – whatever that means in an age when half the
population dismisses scientific evidence, scorns the lessons history teaches (if they are even
aware of history's lessons) and fervently thinks the lack of will alone is the cause of the ruin
they see – will probably determine how effective the administration that takes office in January
will become. I never thought Trump would get this far, and though I have always had low expectations
of my fellow voters, I have become increasingly discouraged by their proud lack of information,
let alone knowledge, and their attraction to the "strong man" form of leadership, a form of leadership
that has caused ruin for Germany and Italy in the last century, not to mention South American
dictatorships of the right and left then and now.
Trump's speech was ideal in tone and perfect in the amount of impromptu additions he made on the
spot, which enlivened the speech and made it a living, breathing, passionate presentation instead
of merely a typically stilted prepared speech that never digresses at all but sticks slavishly
to a text. The speech cohered extremely well–for those able to follow Trump's train of thought,
which is unusually Mercurial and thus requires more mental vitality, flexibility and integrated
thinking than Mr. Dreher is accustomed to practicing.
"And yet, Trump is getting 0% (yes 0) of the black vote."
Not to say Trump is the answer, but for some reason blacks keep voting near 100 percent for
politicians who have a vested interest in their failure.
I think the window is open for Trump to make the hardest play a Republican has made for black
votes in a long time. No establishment candidate can make a serious or remotely compelling case
to have any interest in Black America at this point. His school choice idea is very compelling
to black Americans whose children are generally stuck in failing schools. He seems to be the only
candidate who recognizes the astronomical murder rates in urban centers.
As I said, the trick is doing this while being the "law and order" candidate. How does one
do that given what "law and order" means to so many blacks. He might be able to temper that by
taking a libertarian page out of Rand Paul's book and talking about silly laws and discriminatory
sentencing. He could weigh in on cases like Eric Garner (stupid law led to his death)…find ways
to be legitimately critical of how the system is anti-black in its practical results. Most whites,
even conservative whites, would be receptive to this if its not wrapped up in the brainwash PC
lingo of "anti-discrimination" and BLM. Let's be honest, those are political organizations which
(their leadership) LOVE to see a black man get killed by a white man, because it serves their
cause.
Does Trump care about black kids in urban areas? Can he communicate it? Does he have the courage
to communicate it? If so he has an opportunity. The footage of black mothers whose children didn't
get selected at the charter school lotteries are POWERFUL and HEART RENDING. Can Trump deliver
the message of tragedy affecting black youth with the passion of Chief Flynn? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7MAO7McNKE
(go to about 1:15)
Trump should HAMMER on this point until November. It should be his primary issue. It would
go a long way toward breaking the accusation that he is running an identity politics campaign
and I think he could make a meaningful dent in the black vote.
I watched the speech with my college-age grand-daughter. She was so enthused at times that she
jumped up and clapped. She said, "He talks to ordinary people with respect."
I thought the speech was effective, but too long. His shouting didn't bother me. It shows that
he is not a politician. The speech was tailored to his style- short declarative sentences. I think
it helped him.
The Washington Post posted the speech as given, with Trump's ad-libs in bold. There weren't that
many of them. The speech he gave was probably 90% identical to the speech as written. Many of
the ad-libs were just adding things like "really" to the end of a sentence. He did add a whole
paragraph about NATO.
[NFR: I wonder if Trump's inability to deliver a speech with any kind of rhythm and cadence
and direction made it seem far more scattered than it appeared on paper. - RD]
Although it may be a sad commentary on the US population if patriotism and primary loyalty
to one's countrymen is now considered a white thing.
That "primary loyalty to one's countrymen" is the sin described as nativism , which
anti-white SJW types have determined to be one of the particular evils of white people. In that
sense, the SJW's and white identitarians such as Elrond are in agreement that it is indeed a "white
thing." Except that Elrond - and perhaps you and others - don't consider it evil.
after last night, watching him screw up the most important speech of his life with his inability
to stay focused, I am much less confident in his ability to make the sale to the American people
You sincerely asked, in another thread, how someone could possibly call you a "cultural liberal"
even if you were a theological conservative and a social conservative.
Re-read the italicized sentence above, because that is how someone can call you a painfully-unself-aware
"cultural liberal".
You (incorrectly) assume, even after Trump has thoroughly annihilated all of your prior expectations,
that you just obviously know "what makes a good political speech" better than Trump does. Thus,
you blithely assert the Self-Evident Truth that Trump clearly screwed his speech up.
No, you don't know better.
Trump did not screw his speech up.
Trump getting your hackles to rise and your knee to jerk and your mouth to open to reflexively
slam him for "doing it wrong" is part of the point
You are (once again) doing Trump's bidding by giving him yet more free publicity to (incorrectly)
lecture the world on how he "obviously did it wrong". He simply could not pay you to write more
effective press for him.
You reflexively write "cultural elite" prose against Trump for free, but not only does Trump
not care about your critique … he privately basks and gloriously wallows in it. Just as much as
Trump revelled in National Review's self-immolating condemnation of his campaign in February,
he invites any and all merely-procedural sneering about his convention today.
Trump simply does not care, in the least, if he gets 90% covered in excrement, so long as
his detractors get covered 95+%. If he is slightly, barely less-caked-in-filth at the finish line,
he wins, and that is the only thing that matters to him. It is simply never a "mistake"
for Trump to make speech choices that cake him in yet more filth, so long as he causes even more
filth to adhere to his only real opponent … especially if his "mistakes" cause cultural elites
like you to give him even-more-mountains of free publicity poring over those "mistakes".
Once again: "Why doubt that Trump can make a Mexico that loathes Trump pay for Trump's wall?
Every week, Trump makes a media that loathes Trump pay for Trump's campaign."
[NFR: Um, what? If expecting rhetorical coherence makes one a cultural liberal, then there's
no difference between Alan Alda and William F. Buckley. - RD]
I find myself wondering if we are in the shallows before the Trump Tsunami crashes ashore. I just
returned from visiting my sister and brother-in-law, who live in a red Southern state. They are
fairly affluent, and both work hard for it. They are incredibly generous with their resources,
not merely when it comes to their three children (all in their twenties now), in whom they have
tried to instill a traditional work ethic and Christian virtue, but with all manner of friends
and acquaintances. They open their home to friends and travelers, take meals to cancer strugglers,
and have a strong sense of goodness. And they are silent supporters of Donald J. Trump. Not too
silent, as I found out while we watched and talked about the RNC this past week! Although they
certainly know who they can and can not discuss him in front of. Not worth the static and trauma
of bringing Trump's name up in front of their liberal friends. They are decidedly not from Appalachia,
they are the "silent majority," and I think the RNC this past week, and the many speeches, especially
Trump's, have "sealed the deal." I suspect there are many like them.
Although I hate this word, I can't think of a better one to use here: Trump gave this speech with
a good dose of "swagger", as if he was riding on a wave of realization that, "Holy sh!t, I can
win this!" Admittedly, I'm still on the fence as to whether or not I can vote for him.
I liked that he called HC out on her ineptitude and transgressions and hope that he continues
to do so to keep her on the defensive. If you happen to think Trump's screaming delivery was bad
(I did but as a fellow native NYer, I get it) just wait until we are subjected to the screeching,
robotic monotone of Broom Hilda next week.
I'm also surprised that no one has mentioned Matthew Sheffield's very sharp analysis elsewhere
on TAC. The key point is, Trump held fast to all the points on which he disagrees with the
previous GOP consensus–and got the audience to cheer along with his "heresies."
He is running
as an anti-free trade, anti-immigration, anti-foreign intervention, non-social-issue-conservative–and
getting the Pence-style conservatives to go along with it. Movement conservatism is dead–Ted Cruz
is "rotting-flesh Reaganism" in Rusty Reno's hideously accurate phrase. If it wasn't for the fact
that Trump is the messenger, this would be a very good message.
"... When the world sees how bad the United States is and we start talking about civil liberties, I don't think we are a very good messenger. ..."
"... Trump is just saying true things that we are not supposed to say outloud, like no one takes the American gov. talk on human rights seriously anymore, and no one, no one is going to start a nuclear war over Latvia. That's why people are only denying what trump said in the most general terms, rather than saying directly that we'd go to war with Russia over Lativa, because we're not going to. ..."
"... "We do know that the Iraqi regime has chemical and biological weapons. His regime has amassed large, clandestine stockpiles of chemical weapons - including VX, sarin, cyclosarin and mustard gas. … His regime has amassed large, clandestine stockpiles of biological weapons-including anthrax and botulism toxin, and possibly smallpox." (presentation to Congress) ..."
"... The point being, as irresponsible foreign policy statements go, this (one hopes) will be the standard by which political actors -actual or aspirational- will be judged for quite sometime. ..."
"... Reagan and Thatcher's warmongering was so terrifying for much of the world it reinvented the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament which had once been seen to be decisively defeated by the Labour right. They held unprecedented rallies and even had the organising power to great the Glastonbury Festival as we know it. ..."
"... Reagan's belligerence could have easily triggered a nuclear war. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alarm_incident ..."
"... Whenever I hear this kind of stuff-with all the faux-seriousness and operatic gnashing of teeth, the pompous heavy breathing, the weird identification with America's global mission (as Tim Barker mused on Twitter, does Bouie seriously think the "end of US hegemony would be more dangerous than nuking a small post colonial state?")-I wonder, whom are they performing for? Each other? Themselves? Political elites? ..."
"... It's about time we recognize the triumph of liberalism/neoliberalism in America, past hegemony into dominance. ..."
"... liberal imperialism is gonna kill a lot of people. Again. ..."
"... Bob @33 yep. enter Hillary http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/democrats-will-learn-all-the-wrong-lessons-from-brush-with-bernie-20160609 ..."
"... So none of this is about NATO or about whether Trump really said something scary. Asteele is right, of course, and no one is going to start a nuclear war over Latvia, but Trump being Trump I'd say that he told the truth in this case by accident. But if Trump gains in the polls and starts to win, all of these pundits will reverse themselves. By the end of the campaign, they'll be saying how great it is to have a straight talker in the White House. The truth, much less historical comparisons about the truth, is irrelevant. ..."
"... Voila: the Donald wins, the US imperialism defeated, the world saved. I'll give it a 40% chance… Otherwise, we're all dead within the next 4 years… ..."
"... By what possible criteria could he be considered worse than the psychos, narcissists, nutjobs, crooks and lunatics that the Americans have been in the habit of voting in as their President since about 1960? Look at JFK (subsequently canonised) and his wild and reckless decision to literally bring the world close to nuclear Armageddon because of his unilateral decree that the sovereign state of Cuba was not to be allowed nuclear weapons (imagine how we would feel about Castro if he unilaterally decreed that the United States was 'not to be allowed' nuclear weapons, had invaded the United States to overthrow its legal government, and then blockaded the US for over 50 years to protest against the US' many human rights violations, as well as attempting to assassinate all of its leaders. But when the US does the same to Cuba, we all think its perfectly reasonable). ..."
"... The TV series 'Altered Statesmen', which is worth checking out, posited that Kennedy was a drug addict (amphetamines) and that this contributed to his reckless behaviour over Cuba. ..."
"... Then we have Barack Obama, and it has to be said, compared to the others, he looks good. He is, as Glenn Greenwald has pointed out, a perfectly competent and sane imperial administrator. His policies in no way deviate from the main contours of American foreign policy as they have existed since about 1949 and in no way from American domestic foreign policy since 1981. He is no better, morally, than his predecessors, but he is less nuts. But he is unequivocally the best (except maybe Lyndon Johnson in terms only of his domestic policy), and he ain't that great. ..."
"... There are good reasons to loathe Trump. But the liberal commentariat go out of their way to find bad reasons. The objective fact is we heard harder and more aggressive arguments against the invasion of Iraq in the Republican debates than we heard in the Democrats' debates (and that includes Sanders). In his last speech, Trump went out of his way to condemn Hilary/Obama's annihilation of Libya. It is not clear what Trump would do vis a vis Syria, but he is right to point out that Syria is now a disaster area and that Obama/Clinton share some of the blame. Trump condemned TPP: will Hilary? ..."
"... Those who argue that they can see Trump causing world war 3 are right, but surely one can also imagine Hilary Clinton causing it? She is a hawk: indeed, far more of a hawk than Obama. ..."
"... Trump attacks Nato (an organization which, as has been said, exists to solve the problems caused by its own existence). Good. So what's the big deal? It is hard not to see a connection between this hysteria over Trump, and the concurrent hysteria the liberal commentariate are having in the UK over Corbyn. And in both cases, denial of the obvious: the neo-liberal consensus as we have known it since 1979 (1981 in the US) is breaking down. What replaces it might be worse. But it is definitely breaking down, and Clinton's attempts to piece it together again will not work. ..."
"... "The rally was because of the recent economic crisis that struck Latvia in 2009 and made more than almost 70% of the Latvian population either poor or unemployed." ..."
"... Trump is only saying what Patrick Buchanan has been saying for years. And the latter was a Presidential candidate, though not a real contender. ..."
"... The real effect will be further down the line, in 10 years. Now that someone has put the Buchananite end-the-Empire stuff into the mainstream, it will be taken up and brought forward by serious people. ..."
"... 30 years ago nobody thought the UK's membership of the EEC (as was) was ever going to be put in question again. Nobody really thought that 20 years ago either. But 10 years ago it was a distant possibility, and then it all slides away in the final few years and months. ..."
"... Those people believed we could win a nuclear war. I think there are people in the State Department today who believe that we can fight a war with Russia without having it quickly turn into a nuclear war. ..."
"... I am scared because I think Hillary believes the (a) Russia will not resist an invasion by NATO land forces AND that they will not launch their missiles before they are overwhelmed. This really, really scares me. Honest to Dog, they were thinking in terms of a dozen of our cities being obliterated, maybe eight or ten million casualties, heck, just a flesh wound. I don't have the references to the Field Manuals, but it was official, settled doctrine in the Department of Defense that is was possible to fight and win a nuclear war, and the people who claimed the Russian General Staff were lunatics for thinking so were fringe elements at best. ..."
"... Truman – nuclear weapons and invasion of Korea 1950. Kennedy – Bay of Pigs – numerous assassinations/support for dictators across the globe. Johnson – massive escalation of US troops in Viet Nam. Staunch cold warrior. ..."
"... The policy of Mutually Assured Destruction provided the 'stability' during the cold war. Is there a crazier notion than 'we can win' a full-scale nuclear conflagration? That's what passed for normal from 1945 to 1992, more or less. Both the US and Russia deserve credit for stepping back from that brink. ..."
"... The fiction that Democrats are somehow more humane and caring than the rest of the planet is very much open to question. Indeed, the historical record offers plenty of evidence to the contrary, at least as damning as HRC's giddy recollections of killing Libyans. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fgcd1ghag5Y ..."
"... I don't expect HRC to attack Russia for the same reason that I don't expect Russia to attack Europe: MAD is still in effect. I don't think that people are really that crazy. That said, NATO pledging full defense of small countries on Russia's border is inherently destabilizing and leads to stances like Daragh's at @85, in which we have to make crystal clear that we are promising to do something that it would be insane to do, and the crystal clearness of this insane promise is the best guarantee of stability. ..."
"... Indeed, I was referring to Clinton's foreign and military policies. By the standards of the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, which seem reasonable to me, the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a war crime, and those who supported it in a significant way, such as being in the U.S. Senate and voting for it, being accomplices, are war criminals. Clinton's excuse is that she was fed bad intelligence, but I don't believe she is that stupid or incompetent. Absent a war-crimes trial, we must guess, but my guess is that she calculated that if the war turned out badly, it would be Bush's war, and if it turned out well (politically, I mean) she would have been in on it. That is, she voted for the violent or deaths or other serious harm of several hundred thousand innocent people in order to secure a political advantage. In my view this makes her a war criminal and I won't vote for or otherwise support such a person. Her subsequent career seems to confirm my guess. Insofar as she shows emotion about slaughter, she seems to enjoy it, as witness her crowing about Qaddafi. ..."
"... In regard to Ukraine, my take on what happened there was that the existing situation, in which Ukraine was a more or less neutral state, tolerated by its neighbors, was unsatisfactory to some important people in the US. As long as Ukraine followed more or less democratic forms, the large Russian population there would tend to keep it neutral, so a violent coup against the elected government was fomented, obviating that problem. I'd guess the targets of the exercise were the Russian naval base at Sevastopol, and the chance of putting NATO forces and weapons next to southern Russia. Putin's response was to play black: he took just what he needed, to wit, a couple of eastern provinces and Crimea, and left the rest. A gangster, no doubt, but a rational one. I don't see this sequence of events as relating strongly to the Baltic states. I suppose if NATO built huge bases there it might make the Russians nervous, but to my knowledge that isn't planned. God knows, though - people could be that stupid, I suppose, considering the pair the major parties have presented us with. ..."
"... The thing is, there's absolutely nothing terrifying about Trump. In fact, he's a quintessential American hero; and not just that: he's a quintessential non-violent American hero, unlike, say, Bonnie and Clyde. Has always been, for as long as I remember. In fact, stating that Trump is terrifying is outright unAmerican and treasonous. ..."
"... What nonsense. There is no 'Russian expansionism'. South Ossetia is begging to be accepted – the RF won't take it. Similar story with Donetsk and Lugansk, whom Putin personally asked in 2014 NOT to hold the referendum for independence. And these are regions that really-really want to join the RF; what the hell would they do with the Baltic republics, where most people don't even want it? This is simply a whole 100% imaginary issue; you people are completely brainwashed… ..."
"... The neocon in a dress who supported the Iraq debacle and enjoyed it so much that she played a key role in American regime change in Libya, and still wants kill more brown people through more violent regime change in Syria is far and away the safer, saner candidate https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fgcd1ghag5Y ..."
Last night, Donald Trump shocked the world, or at least the pundit class, when the
New York Times published a wide-ranging
interview Trump had given the paper on the subject of foreign policy.
... ... ...
But he also said some things that were true. Like this:
When the world sees how bad the United States is and we start talking about civil liberties, I
don't think we are a very good messenger.
And while the article makes a muchness of Trump's refusal to pressure Turkey over its response to
the failed coup, the fact is that Obama hasn't done anything concrete on that score either (as the
article acknowledges). Nor did Obama do much about the coup in Egypt or Honduras. To the contrary,
in fact.
But that wasn't the focus of last night's chatter on Twitter. Instead, the pundits and
experts were keen to establish the absolutely unprecedented nature of Trump's irresponsibility: his
recklessness when it came to NATO , his adventurism, his sheer reveling in being the Bad Boy of US
Foreign Policy: this, it was agreed, was new.
In a tweet that got passed around by a lot of journalists, Peter Singer, senior fellow at the
New America Foundation (who's written a lot of books on US foreign policy), had this to say:
It is the most irresponsible foreign policy statement by a presidential nominee of any party
in my lifetime. https://t.co/V3C6nbp5wu
It's been a weird couple of months. Not so long ago, this rising generation of pundits were
in agreement that there was a dinosaur foreign policy blob in fancy buildings between Dupont Circle
and K Street whose first instinct was to drag the USA into unwinnable wars. Yet the Blob and the
New Pundits are in complete agreement that (1) the main problem in Turkey is Mt Erdogan and (2)
Trump is unprecedented. Just one among many examples: this tweet, which relies on unnamed NATO
foreign minister using apocalyptic language that this same group would ridicule in other contexts.
From all Trump's awfulness, is his reticence about a Baltic war the worst thing?
Asteele 07.21.16 at 8:28 pm
Trump is just saying true things that we are not supposed to say outloud, like no one takes
the American gov. talk on human rights seriously anymore, and no one, no one is going to start
a nuclear war over Latvia. That's why people are only denying what trump said in the most general
terms, rather than saying directly that we'd go to war with Russia over Lativa, because we're
not going to.
b9n10nt 07.21.16 at 8:44 pm
09/18/2002, Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense (before Congress)
"We do know that the Iraqi regime has chemical and biological weapons. His regime has amassed
large, clandestine stockpiles of chemical weapons - including VX, sarin, cyclosarin and mustard
gas. … His regime has amassed large, clandestine stockpiles of biological weapons-including anthrax
and botulism toxin, and possibly smallpox." (presentation to Congress)
The point being, as irresponsible foreign policy statements go, this (one hopes) will be
the standard by which political actors -actual or aspirational- will be judged for quite sometime.
Placeholder 07.21.16 at 9:28 pm
Reagan and Thatcher's warmongering was so terrifying for much of the world it reinvented
the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament which had once been seen to be decisively defeated by the
Labour right. They held unprecedented rallies and even had the organising power to great the Glastonbury
Festival as we know it.
The New Zealand Labour party swept back to power in the 1980s when they promised that its territory
will never be used for production, storage and transmission of nuclear material. When the US just
wouldn't tell them if their subs had nukes on them they simply banned them. To this day the policy
has made New Zealand a nuclear-free territory.
Really though Trump is just saying what Europeans, the craven complicity of the warmongering
media bosses aside, actually believe so…. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-33072093
PS Turkey is suspending its membership of the ECHR, or as I phrase it OUTRAGE AS MIDDLE EASTERN
DICTATOR DOES THING THERESA MAY HAS ALWAYS SAID SHE'LL DO
Yes, it's Wikipedia, but I've read similar things elsewhere. I didn't realize there were people
who would still defend the rhetoric of fighting and winning a nuclear war.
max 07.21.16 at 11:47 pm
I'll admit that I find it hard to take this ahistorical high dudgeon of the pundit class seriously.
ZOMG yes!
Whenever I hear this kind of stuff-with all the faux-seriousness and operatic gnashing
of teeth, the pompous heavy breathing, the weird identification with America's global mission
(as Tim Barker mused on Twitter, does Bouie seriously think the "end of US hegemony would be more
dangerous than nuking a small post colonial state?")-I wonder, whom are they performing for? Each
other? Themselves? Political elites?
Quite. Also endorse entire post. I would also point out that Kevin Drum kicked off some of
the hyperventilating and he ought to know better. (But then he's from Orange county, center of
some seriously intense Cold War hatred of the Russians.)
heckblazer 07.21.16 at 11:56 pm
If Trump is right when he said "When the world sees how bad the United States is and we start
talking about civil liberties, I don't think we are a very good messenger," it's by complete accident
given his reasoning. What he said right before that in the interview was:
"We have tremendous problems when we have policemen being shot in the streets, when you have
riots, when you have Ferguson. When you have Baltimore. When you have all of the things that are
happening in this country – we have other problems and I think we have to focus on those problems."
He doesn't think police shootings delegitimize American criticisms of Edrogan, he thinks protests
against police shootings delegitimize American criticisms of Edrogan.
Anarcissie 07.21.16 at 11:59 pm
In regard to the 'Which one is worse?' conversation, which I've been seeing a lot of lately,
some have pointed out that Trump hasn't actually gotten anyone killed - yet - either as a principal
actor or as an accomplice.
I was unaware, as implied in #1, that Russia had been bothering the Baltic States. The only
thing I have seen about them in the news in the last few years was that the US was 'bolstering'
its military presence there, absent any mentioned provocation. This seemed to comprise the addition
of a few thousand troops, hardly much of a counterweight to the Russian army. I figured, after
having failed with Georgia/Abkhazia/Ossetia, Ukraine/Crimea, and Syria, the US had to do something
to show Putin a thing or two. What's up?
bob mcmanus 07.22.16 at 12:21 am
It's about time we recognize the triumph of liberalism/neoliberalism in America, past hegemony
into dominance. And ahistorical moralism, with a side order of apocalyptic and missionary
imperialism, is what the petty bourgeois do, and Vox, Bouie, and the feminists at Slate and Jezebel
are just parts of the latest iteration. It shouldn't be that hard to recognize Comstock and Carrie
Nation and John Harvey Kellogg under the bicycle helmets and tattoos.
Trump's gonna get smashed. Same relevance and interest as maybe WJ Bryan or Henry Wallace.
End of an era. But this is not good news, cause liberal imperialism is gonna kill a lot of
people. Again.
I seriously take issue with this post. I don't think the attitude of the press has anything
to do with amnesia or lack of historical knowledge. It's just that it's cool right now for them
to be against Trump. If it were cool to be for Trump, they'd reverse positions in a dime.
Let's look at the microcosm of CT threads for an example. When Trump started getting popular,
some people here wrote the same kinds of things in reference to his statements about protestors
- had any Presidential candidate asked so barbarously towards protest? So I thought for less than
a minute and came up with a couple of examples from both the Bush and Obama administrations of
protestors being arrested for wearing the wrong T-shirt, of laws being made to make it even easier
to arrest people, of cops brutalizing protesters much more severely than (to my knowledge) any
anti-Trump protestor has been brutalized without any official reaction, and so on. People didn't
have amnesia about all of this: it happened within the last decade.
And they didn't care, because they weren't really interested in historical comparisons, much
less an abstract right to protest. It was all about whether it was being done by their side or
the other side. I got treated to a long explanation of why Obama needed to crack down on protestors
because someone somewhere was scary.
So none of this is about NATO or about whether Trump really said something scary. Asteele is
right, of course, and no one is going to start a nuclear war over Latvia, but Trump being Trump
I'd say that he told the truth in this case by accident. But if Trump gains in the polls and starts
to win, all of these pundits will reverse themselves. By the end of the campaign, they'll be saying
how great it is to have a straight talker in the White House. The truth, much less historical
comparisons about the truth, is irrelevant.
Donald Johnson 07.22.16 at 4:28 am
I thought it was sort of a truism that politics attracts sociopaths. You can google it and
find articles like this–
Trump seems like an exceptionally inept sociopath– what is horrifying about him is that millions
find his openly and unashamedly narcisstic personality attractive. Politicians usually try to
fake humility, but Trump can't be bothered and for whatever reason this seems to be working for
him.
Ze K 07.22.16 at 6:27 am
"Trump's gonna get smashed."
Well, here's my hopeful scenario, two parts:
no one bothers coming to vote for Hillary, because no one likes her. This much is obvious,
but also:
no one bothers coming to vote against Trump, because he can't win anyway.
Voila: the Donald wins, the US imperialism defeated, the world saved. I'll give it a 40% chance…
Otherwise, we're all dead within the next 4 years…
Hidari 07.22.16 at 6:44 am
Looking at it from outside, I simply don't understand all this horror and hatred of Trump. Perhaps
we should create (or adapt) a new phrase for it. 'Trump-Derangement-Syndrome' a mental disease
(like so many other similar mental illnesses) disproportionately suffered by white middle class
males who have well-paid positions in the corporate media.
Now: don't get me wrong: Trump is awful. He is probably (morally) a bad person, although I've
never met him so what would I know. It is possible that he is a 'sociopath' although that phrase
tends to have a somewhat elastic meaning in 'liberal' political discourse.
But there are a number of points to be made here.
1: By what possible criteria could he be considered worse than the psychos, narcissists, nutjobs,
crooks and lunatics that the Americans have been in the habit of voting in as their President
since about 1960? Look at JFK (subsequently canonised) and his wild and reckless decision to literally
bring the world close to nuclear Armageddon because of his unilateral decree that the sovereign
state of Cuba was not to be allowed nuclear weapons (imagine how we would feel about Castro if
he unilaterally decreed that the United States was 'not to be allowed' nuclear weapons, had invaded
the United States to overthrow its legal government, and then blockaded the US for over 50 years
to protest against the US' many human rights violations, as well as attempting to assassinate
all of its leaders. But when the US does the same to Cuba, we all think its perfectly reasonable).
The TV series 'Altered Statesmen', which is worth checking out, posited that Kennedy was a
drug addict (amphetamines) and that this contributed to his reckless behaviour over Cuba.
Then we had Lyndon Johnson, who, although his domestic policies were good (better than Kennedy's),
invaded Vietnam, and was relatively keen to start a nuclear war over Vietnamese resistance to
his belligerence.
Then we had Nixon. 'Nuff said.
Then we had Carter, like all of them, a believer in a sky God who doesn't exist, who brought
religious fundamentalism to the White House (thanks Jimmy!) and who was also a a believer in UFOs.
Then Ronald Reagan. Where to start? A man who (apparently) had Alzheimer's Disease for much
of his second term (although the liberal commentariat helped to deceive the American public about
this). The times of whose meetings were planned (apparently) by an astrologer. A man who openly
hoped for an alien invasion to unite the 'peoples of Earth'.
Then we had Slick Willie, who, although nominally sane, has at least the same aura of sleaze
about him as Trump does.
Then George Bush, the first real, 'hardcore' religious fundamentalist in the White House, a
religious extremist who apparently invaded Iraq (amongst other reasons) because of the Biblical
prophecies of Gog and Magog.
Then we have Barack Obama, and it has to be said, compared to the others, he looks good. He
is, as Glenn Greenwald has pointed out, a perfectly competent and sane imperial administrator.
His policies in no way deviate from the main contours of American foreign policy as they have
existed since about 1949 and in no way from American domestic foreign policy since 1981. He is
no better, morally, than his predecessors, but he is less nuts. But he is unequivocally the best (except maybe Lyndon Johnson in terms only of his domestic
policy), and he ain't that great.
2; By what possible criteria is Trump worse than the other Republican candidates?
3: There are good reasons to loathe Trump. But the liberal commentariat go out of their way
to find bad reasons. The objective fact is we heard harder and more aggressive arguments against
the invasion of Iraq in the Republican debates than we heard in the Democrats' debates (and that
includes Sanders). In his last speech, Trump went out of his way to condemn Hilary/Obama's annihilation
of Libya. It is not clear what Trump would do vis a vis Syria, but he is right to point out that
Syria is now a disaster area and that Obama/Clinton share some of the blame. Trump condemned TPP:
will Hilary?
Those who argue that they can see Trump causing world war 3 are right, but surely one can also
imagine Hilary Clinton causing it? She is a hawk: indeed, far more of a hawk than Obama.
Trump attacks Nato (an organization which, as has been said, exists to solve the problems caused
by its own existence). Good. So what's the big deal? It is hard not to see a connection between this hysteria over Trump,
and the concurrent hysteria the liberal commentariate are having in the UK over Corbyn. And in
both cases, denial of the obvious: the neo-liberal consensus as we have known it since 1979 (1981
in the US) is breaking down. What replaces it might be worse. But it is definitely breaking down,
and Clinton's attempts to piece it together again will not work.
"Gosh, do you think that people in other countries that used to be part of the Soviet Union (and
didn't like it) might be a little nervous?"
Yes, most people in the Baltic republics definitely are a little nervous:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Riga_riot
"The rally was because of the recent economic crisis that struck Latvia in 2009 and made more
than almost 70% of the Latvian population either poor or unemployed."
Should, next time, large majorities there demand quitting the EU and NATO, and integrating
(or, god forbid, joining) with the Russian Federation, German troops being deployed there will
certainly come handy: they know the terrain…
If they are well-read in history and good at querying JStor, why are they ignorant of relevant
facts from the recent US past? Perhaps it takes too much time and effort to check broad assertions
such as "it has never happened before" even if one has access to all the research databases in
the world? If it's true, and the columnist does not have the background in history to come up
with instant counterexamples, "ask an expert" seems to be the only sensible approach left unless
the writer is willing to compromise his integrity to make his dubious point.
Trump's suggestion that US protection for NATO members be conditioned on those members' fulfilling
unspecified obligations towards "us" (the US?) did sound like something completely new coming
from a US presidential candidate. That NATO members are free-riding on the American military buildup
and should be made to pay up is an old hobby horse of Trump's. But suggesting the US should or
might renege on its treaty obligations is a novelty.
No, I don't think Putin is going to invade Latvia – he has learned his lesson in Eastern Ukraine.
However, Russia might still be able to pull Latvia to its side in the big game. If Trump's view
prevailed in DC, Latvian voters would start asking themselves, "Why do we need NATO if they won't
protect us? Why do we need the EU if they're out to flood us with refugees?"
On the other hand, Trump's unpredictability might give him an advantage against Putin.
The thing is, the U.S. shouldn't be offering security guarantees to countries on Russia's doorstep.
The U.S. is overextended and some scheme of multilateral arrangements, suitable to a multipolar
world ought to be on the agenda.
There is an out-of-the-mouth-of-babes quality lurking in Trump's stream of consciousness, as
the OP points out. Of course you can always question the context (and in his disjointed ramblings
that can be hard to pin down) and everything he says is quickly contradicted, but he isn't the
one trapped by conventional nonsense. He has his own nonsense.
Ze K 07.22.16 at 7:42 am
…
Should, next time, large majorities there demand quitting the EU and NATO, and integrating
(or, god forbid, joining) with the Russian Federation, German troops being deployed there will
certainly come handy: they know the terrain…
If large majorities in Latvia (or any of the Baltic states) demand quitting the EU and NATO
and integrating or joining with the Russian Federation, pinch yourself and wake up.
Trump is only saying what Patrick Buchanan has been saying for years. And the latter was a Presidential
candidate, though not a real contender.
The real effect will be further down the line, in 10 years. Now that someone has put the Buchananite
end-the-Empire stuff into the mainstream, it will be taken up and brought forward by serious people.
30 years ago nobody thought the UK's membership of the EEC (as was) was ever going to be put
in question again. Nobody really thought that 20 years ago either. But 10 years ago it was a distant
possibility, and then it all slides away in the final few years and months.
Why, because some anglophone commenter from down-under can't believe it's possible? Tsk. Oh
well, thanks for your suggestion, and rest assured that it'll get all the attention it deserves…
casmilus 07.22.16 at 11:45 am
@68
The First Czechoslovak Republic had lots of treaties and allies, until it needed them.
Procopius 07.22.16 at 1:12 pm
Reading the comments, I find myself wondering when these people were born. I especially was baffled
by Daragh at #1. You are wrong. The official, and widely publicised, policy of the United States
government and its Department of Defense was that it was perfectly possible to win a nuclear war.
True, we might take as many as 80 million immediate casualties, with many more to die from radiation
and fallout later, but we could survive. You betcha. Do you know who Curtis Le May was? I served
in the Air Force from 1955 – 1959, and then in the Army from 1965 – 1982. I remember.
Those people
believed we could win a nuclear war. I think there are people in the State Department today
who believe that we can fight a war with Russia without having it quickly turn into a nuclear
war.
I am scared because I think Hillary believes the (a) Russia will not resist an invasion
by NATO land forces AND that they will not launch their missiles before they are overwhelmed.
This really, really scares me. Honest to Dog, they were thinking in terms of a dozen of our cities
being obliterated, maybe eight or ten million casualties, heck, just a flesh wound. I don't have
the references to the Field Manuals, but it was official, settled doctrine in the Department of
Defense that is was possible to fight and win a nuclear war, and the people who claimed the Russian
General Staff were lunatics for thinking so were fringe elements at best.
kidneystones 07.22.16 at 1:53 pm
FDR allows 527 heavy bombers of the US Eighth Air Force to drop 1, 247 tons of high explosives
on Dresden on January 14 and 15 of 1945 'fierce winds fueled the resulting fire-storm'. (Six Months
in 1945, p. 97) That's after the Brits had already firebombed the civilian target on the
night of February 13.
FDR allows Curtis Le May to deploy new 'miracle' weapon' napalm against Japanese civilian targets
in 60 Japanese cities. The March raid on Tokyo killed 100,000. FDR 'raised no objections when
informed of incendiary attacks on Japan (Targeting Civilians in War, p. 132)
Truman – nuclear weapons and invasion of Korea 1950.
Kennedy – Bay of Pigs – numerous assassinations/support for dictators across the globe.
Johnson – massive escalation of US troops in Viet Nam. Staunch cold warrior.
A number of us served during the cold war. Procopius @ 78 is right.
The policy of Mutually Assured Destruction provided the 'stability' during the cold war. Is
there a crazier notion than 'we can win' a full-scale nuclear conflagration? That's what passed
for normal from 1945 to 1992, more or less. Both the US and Russia deserve credit for stepping
back from that brink.
Partisan blinders prevent some from recognizing that war/torture/state terror/and meddling
in the affairs of allies and enemies alike has long been part of the policies not just of both
parties in the US, but of many governments around the globe, including that of the UK.
The fiction that Democrats are somehow more humane and caring than the rest of the planet is
very much open to question. Indeed, the historical record offers plenty of evidence to the contrary,
at least as damning as HRC's giddy recollections of killing Libyans.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fgcd1ghag5Y
I don't expect HRC to attack Russia for the same reason that I don't expect Russia to attack Europe:
MAD is still in effect. I don't think that people are really that crazy. That said, NATO pledging
full defense of small countries on Russia's border is inherently destabilizing and leads to stances
like Daragh's at @85, in which we have to make crystal clear that we are promising to do something
that it would be insane to do, and the crystal clearness of this insane promise is the best guarantee
of stability.
Ze K 07.22.16 at 2:20 pm
"The fiction that Democrats are somehow more humane and caring than the rest of the planet is
very much open to question. Indeed, the historical record offers plenty of evidence to the contrary…"
Well, Democrats and Republicans are, of course the same thing, and the attraction of Trump
is that he appears to be neither.
But yes, it is true, although it's probably a mere coincidence, that the administrations led
by Democratic presidents appear to be more dangerous, in terms of provoking a nuclear war. The
Kennedy admin is, obviously, beyond the pale. The Clinton admin bombed Serbia, Russia's close
ally, from high altitudes with no military purpose, killing thousands of people and hitting the
Chinese embassy in Belgrade. The Pristina incident almost resulted in a direct armed confrontation.
Obama's admin is responsible for the coup in Ukraine and its consequences, as well as the incredibly
aggressive propaganda campaign, and all the recent escalations, all well-known. Compare this with
Bush II admin's careful handling of the '08 crisis in Georgia and '01 incident with Chinese plane
collision…
'I have no idea what you're saying here. You've been seeing a lot of people asking whether
Trump or Clinton is worse? Truly, is there no limit to the stupidity of the intellectual left?
Most of my conversational parters, in Real Life or online, are not what I would call 'intellectuals'
and many of them are not leftists in the bourgeois intellectual leftist sense. I read CT as I
used to read the New York Review of Books, to find out what the bourgeoisie are up to. I hope
my terms will be understood, but if not, it doesn't matter; I'm sure you get the general idea.
Indeed, I was referring to Clinton's foreign and military policies. By the standards of the
Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, which seem reasonable to me, the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a war
crime, and those who supported it in a significant way, such as being in the U.S. Senate and voting
for it, being accomplices, are war criminals. Clinton's excuse is that she was fed bad intelligence,
but I don't believe she is that stupid or incompetent. Absent a war-crimes trial, we must guess,
but my guess is that she calculated that if the war turned out badly, it would be Bush's war,
and if it turned out well (politically, I mean) she would have been in on it. That is, she voted
for the violent or deaths or other serious harm of several hundred thousand innocent people in
order to secure a political advantage. In my view this makes her a war criminal and I won't vote
for or otherwise support such a person. Her subsequent career seems to confirm my guess. Insofar
as she shows emotion about slaughter, she seems to enjoy it, as witness her crowing about Qaddafi.
'It's easy not to get anyone killed if you never spend any time in international politics.
Very hard otherwise, either by commission or by omission.'
Or, as Stalin is said to have said, 'If you kill one man, it's murder. If you kill a million
men, it's a statistic.' I see that kind of thinking as a problem as well as a joke, and I'm not
going to go along with it. How do you deal with it? Don't you find it somewhat problematical?
In regard to Ukraine, my take on what happened there was that the existing situation, in which
Ukraine was a more or less neutral state, tolerated by its neighbors, was unsatisfactory to some
important people in the US. As long as Ukraine followed more or less democratic forms, the large
Russian population there would tend to keep it neutral, so a violent coup against the elected
government was fomented, obviating that problem. I'd guess the targets of the exercise were the
Russian naval base at Sevastopol, and the chance of putting NATO forces and weapons next to southern
Russia. Putin's response was to play black: he took just what he needed, to wit, a couple of eastern
provinces and Crimea, and left the rest. A gangster, no doubt, but a rational one. I don't see
this sequence of events as relating strongly to the Baltic states. I suppose if NATO built huge
bases there it might make the Russians nervous, but to my knowledge that isn't planned. God knows,
though - people could be that stupid, I suppose, considering the pair the major parties have presented
us with.
"I'm sorry you can't accept that the Ukrainians are a separate nation from the Russians"
What's this all about? Are you replying to voices inside your head? In that case, you don't
need to type your replies…
Ze K 07.22.16 at 3:00 pm
The thing is, there's absolutely nothing terrifying about Trump. In fact, he's a quintessential
American hero; and not just that: he's a quintessential non-violent American hero, unlike,
say, Bonnie and Clyde. Has always been, for as long as I remember. In fact, stating that Trump
is terrifying is outright unAmerican and treasonous. Yessiree Bob!
Daragh 07.22.16 at 2:52 pm @ 108 -
I know only what I read in the media, so I don't really, really know what happened in Ukraine,
but I do know there was a violent coup against an elected government, apparently supported by
the US - no one seems to disagree with that part - and the rest seems to organize itself around
that event pretty well. I was also impressed by the torrent of propaganda that promptly issued
forth at that time, which always makes me suspect advanced preparation. If you are in contact
with any of those people, I suggest that in the view of us outerworld cranks their work in this
area has not been up to the best standards of the art. Agreed, it's a tough case.
The strategic difference between having major NATO installations in Turkey and having them
in the north and east of Ukraine ought to be obvious.
Ze K 07.22.16 at 5:07 pm
"If ever something was going to green light Russian expansionism, that would certainly do it,
I'd imagine."
What nonsense. There is no 'Russian expansionism'. South Ossetia is begging to be accepted
– the RF won't take it. Similar story with Donetsk and Lugansk, whom Putin personally asked in
2014 NOT to hold the referendum for independence. And these are regions that really-really want
to join the RF; what the hell would they do with the Baltic republics, where most people don't
even want it? This is simply a whole 100% imaginary issue; you people are completely brainwashed…
kidneystones 07.22.16 at 12:55 pm
@ 73 I agree!
The neocon in a dress who supported the Iraq debacle and enjoyed it so much that she played
a key role in American regime change in Libya, and still wants kill more brown people through
more violent regime change in Syria is far and away the safer, saner candidate
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fgcd1ghag5Y
"... The most important difference between our plan and that of our opponents, is that our plan will put America First. Americanism, not globalism, will be our credo. As long as we are led by politicians who will not put America First, then we can be assured that other nations will not treat America with respect. This will all change in 2017. ..."
"... The American People will come first once again. My plan will begin with safety at home – which means safe neighborhoods, secure borders, and protection from terrorism. There can be no prosperity without law and order. On the economy, I will outline reforms to add millions of new jobs and trillions in new wealth that can be used to rebuild America. ..."
"... Big business, elite media and major donors are lining up behind the campaign of my opponent because they know she will keep our rigged system in place. They are throwing money at her because they have total control over everything she does. She is their puppet, and they pull the strings. ..."
"... That is why Hillary Clinton's message is that things will never change. My message is that things have to change – and they have to change right now. Every day I wake up determined to deliver for the people I have met all across this nation that have been neglected, ignored, and abandoned. ..."
"... I have visited the laid-off factory workers, and the communities crushed by our horrible and unfair trade deals. These are the forgotten men and women of our country. People who work hard but no longer have a voice. ..."
"... I have embraced crying mothers who have lost their children because our politicians put their personal agendas before the national good. I have no patience for injustice, no tolerance for government incompetence, no sympathy for leaders who fail their citizens. ..."
"... And when a Secretary of State illegally stores her emails on a private server, deletes 33,000 of them so the authorities can't see her crime, puts our country at risk, lies about it in every different form and faces no consequence – I know that corruption has reached a level like never before. ..."
"... When the FBI Director says that the Secretary of State was "extremely careless" and "negligent," in handling our classified secrets, I also know that these terms are minor compared to what she actually did. They were just used to save her from facing justice for her terrible crimes. ..."
"... In fact, her single greatest accomplishment may be committing such an egregious crime and getting away with it – especially when others have paid so dearly. When that same Secretary of State rakes in millions of dollars trading access and favors to special interests and foreign powers I know the time for action has come. ..."
"... We must have the best intelligence gathering operation in the world. We must abandon the failed policy of nation building and regime change that Hillary Clinton pushed in Iraq, Libya, Egypt and Syria. Instead, we must work with all of our allies who share our goal of destroying ISIS and stamping out Islamic terror. ..."
"... We are going to build a great border wall to stop illegal immigration, to stop the gangs and the violence, and to stop the drugs from pouring into our communities. I have been honored to receive the endorsement of America's Border Patrol Agents, and will work directly with them to protect the integrity of our lawful immigration system. ..."
"... On January 21st of 2017, the day after I take the oath of office, Americans will finally wake up in a country where the laws of the United States are enforced. We are going to be considerate and compassionate to everyone. ..."
"... But my greatest compassion will be for our own struggling citizens. My plan is the exact opposite of the radical and dangerous immigration policy of Hillary Clinton. Americans want relief from uncontrolled immigration. Communities want relief. ..."
"... Remember, it was Bill Clinton who signed NAFTA, one of the worst economic deals ever made by our country. ..."
"... My opponent, on the other hand, has supported virtually every trade agreement that has been destroying our middle class. She supported NAFTA, and she supported China's entrance into the World Trade Organization – another one of her husband's colossal mistakes. ..."
"... She supported the job killing trade deal with South Korea. She has supported the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The TPP will not only destroy our manufacturing, but it will make America subject to the rulings of foreign governments. I pledge to never sign any trade agreement that hurts our workers, or that diminishes our freedom and independence. Instead, I will make individual deals with individual countries. ..."
"... My opponent would rather protect education bureaucrats than serve American children. We will repeal and replace disastrous Obamacare. You will be able to choose your own doctor again. And we will fix TSA at the airports! We will completely rebuild our depleted military, and the countries that we protect, at a massive loss, will be asked to pay their fair share. We will take care of our great Veterans like they have never been taken care of before. My opponent dismissed the VA scandal as being not widespread – one more sign of how out of touch she really is. We are going to ask every Department Head in government to provide a list of wasteful spending projects that we can eliminate in my first 100 days. The politicians have talked about it, I'm going to do it. We are also going to appoint justices to the United States Supreme Court who will uphold our laws and our Constitution. ..."
Not only have our citizens endured domestic disaster, but they have lived through one international
humiliation after another. We all remember the images of our sailors being forced to their knees
by their Iranian captors at gunpoint.
This was just prior to the signing of the Iran deal, which gave back to Iran $150 billion and
gave us nothing – it will go down in history as one of the worst deals ever made. Another humiliation
came when president Obama drew a red line in Syria – and the whole world knew it meant nothing.
In Libya, our consulate – the symbol of American prestige around the globe – was brought down
in flames. America is far less safe – and the world is far less stable – than when Obama made the
decision to put Hillary Clinton in charge of America's foreign policy.
I am certain it is a decision he truly regrets. Her bad instincts and her bad judgment – something
pointed out by Bernie Sanders – are what caused the disasters unfolding today. Let's review the record.
In 2009, pre-Hillary, ISIS was not even on the map.
Libya was cooperating. Egypt was peaceful. Iraq was seeing a reduction in violence. Iran was being
choked by sanctions. Syria was under control. After four years of Hillary Clinton, what do we have?
ISIS has spread across the region, and the world. Libya is in ruins, and our Ambassador and his staff
were left helpless to die at the hands of savage killers. Egypt was turned over to the radical Muslim
brotherhood, forcing the military to retake control. Iraq is in chaos.
Iran is on the path to nuclear weapons. Syria is engulfed in a civil war and a refugee crisis
that now threatens the West. After fifteen years of wars in the Middle East, after trillions of dollars
spent and thousands of lives lost, the situation is worse than it has ever been before.
This is the legacy of Hillary Clinton: death, destruction and weakness.
But Hillary Clinton's legacy does not have to be America's legacy. The problems we face now –
poverty and violence at home, war and destruction abroad – will last only as long as we continue
relying on the same politicians who created them. A change in leadership is required to change these
outcomes. Tonight, I will share with you my plan of action for America.
The most important difference between our plan and that of our opponents, is that our plan will
put America First. Americanism, not globalism, will be our credo. As long as we are led by politicians
who will not put America First, then we can be assured that other nations will not treat America
with respect. This will all change in 2017.
The American People will come first once again. My plan will begin with safety at home – which
means safe neighborhoods, secure borders, and protection from terrorism. There can be no prosperity
without law and order. On the economy, I will outline reforms to add millions of new jobs and trillions
in new wealth that can be used to rebuild America.
A number of these reforms that I will outline tonight will be opposed by some of our nation's
most powerful special interests. That is because these interests have rigged our political and economic
system for their exclusive benefit.
Big business, elite media and major donors are lining up behind the campaign of my opponent because
they know she will keep our rigged system in place. They are throwing money at her because they have
total control over everything she does. She is their puppet, and they pull the strings.
That is why Hillary Clinton's message is that things will never change. My message is that things
have to change – and they have to change right now. Every day I wake up determined to deliver for
the people I have met all across this nation that have been neglected, ignored, and abandoned.
I have visited the laid-off factory workers, and the communities crushed by our horrible and unfair
trade deals. These are the forgotten men and women of our country. People who work hard but no longer
have a voice.
I AM YOUR VOICE.
I have embraced crying mothers who have lost their children because our politicians put their
personal agendas before the national good. I have no patience for injustice, no tolerance for government
incompetence, no sympathy for leaders who fail their citizens.
When innocent people suffer, because our political system lacks the will, or the courage, or the
basic decency to enforce our laws – or worse still, has sold out to some corporate lobbyist for cash
– I am not able to look the other way.
And when a Secretary of State illegally stores her emails on a private server, deletes 33,000
of them so the authorities can't see her crime, puts our country at risk, lies about it in every
different form and faces no consequence – I know that corruption has reached a level like never before.
When the FBI Director says that the Secretary of State was "extremely careless" and "negligent,"
in handling our classified secrets, I also know that these terms are minor compared to what she actually
did. They were just used to save her from facing justice for her terrible crimes.
In fact, her single greatest accomplishment may be committing such an egregious crime and getting
away with it – especially when others have paid so dearly. When that same Secretary of State rakes
in millions of dollars trading access and favors to special interests and foreign powers I know the
time for action has come.
I have joined the political arena so that the powerful can no longer beat up on people that cannot
defend themselves. Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it. I have
seen firsthand how the system is rigged against our citizens, just like it was rigged against Bernie
Sanders – he never had a chance.
But his supporters will join our movement, because we will fix his biggest issue: trade. Millions
of Democrats will join our movement because we are going to fix the system so it works for all Americans.
In this cause, I am proud to have at my side the next Vice President of the United States: Governor
Mike Pence of Indiana.
We will bring the same economic success to America that Mike brought to Indiana. He is a man of
character and accomplishment. He is the right man for the job. The first task for our new Administration
will be to liberate our citizens from the crime and terrorism and lawlessness that threatens their
communities.
... ... ...
We must have the best intelligence gathering operation in the world. We must abandon the failed
policy of nation building and regime change that Hillary Clinton pushed in Iraq, Libya, Egypt and
Syria. Instead, we must work with all of our allies who share our goal of destroying ISIS and stamping
out Islamic terror.
This includes working with our greatest ally in the region, the State of Israel. Lastly, we must
immediately suspend immigration from any nation that has been compromised by terrorism until such
time as proven vetting mechanisms have been put in place.
My opponent has called for a radical 550% increase in Syrian refugees on top of existing massive
refugee flows coming into our country under President Obama. She proposes this despite the fact that
there's no way to screen these refugees in order to find out who they are or where they come from.
I only want to admit individuals into our country who will support our values and love our people.
Anyone who endorses violence, hatred or oppression is not welcome in our country and never will
be.
Decades of record immigration have produced lower wages and higher unemployment for our citizens,
especially for African-American and Latino workers. We are going to have an immigration system that
works, but one that works for the American people.
On Monday, we heard from three parents whose children were killed by illegal immigrants Mary Ann
Mendoza, Sabine Durden, and Jamiel Shaw. They are just three brave representatives of many thousands.
Of all my travels in this country, nothing has affected me more deeply than the time I have spent
with the mothers and fathers who have lost their children to violence spilling across our border.
These families have no special interests to represent them. There are no demonstrators to protest
on their behalf. My opponent will never meet with them, or share in their pain. Instead, my opponent
wants Sanctuary Cities. But where was sanctuary for Kate Steinle? Where was Sanctuary for the children
of Mary Ann, Sabine and Jamiel? Where was sanctuary for all the other Americans who have been so
brutally murdered, and who have suffered so horribly?
These wounded American families have been alone. But they are alone no longer. Tonight, this candidate
and this whole nation stand in their corner to support them, to send them our love, and to pledge
in their honor that we will save countless more families from suffering the same awful fate.
We are going to build a great border wall to stop illegal immigration, to stop the gangs and the
violence, and to stop the drugs from pouring into our communities. I have been honored to receive
the endorsement of America's Border Patrol Agents, and will work directly with them to protect the
integrity of our lawful immigration system.
By ending catch-and-release on the border, we will stop the cycle of human smuggling and violence.
Illegal border crossings will go down. Peace will be restored. By enforcing the rules for the millions
who overstay their visas, our laws will finally receive the respect they deserve.
Tonight, I want every American whose demands for immigration security have been denied – and every
politician who has denied them – to listen very closely to the words I am about to say.
On January 21st of 2017, the day after I take the oath of office, Americans will finally wake
up in a country where the laws of the United States are enforced. We are going to be considerate
and compassionate to everyone.
But my greatest compassion will be for our own struggling citizens. My plan is the exact opposite
of the radical and dangerous immigration policy of Hillary Clinton. Americans want relief from uncontrolled
immigration. Communities want relief.
Yet Hillary Clinton is proposing mass amnesty, mass immigration, and mass lawlessness. Her plan
will overwhelm your schools and hospitals, further reduce your jobs and wages, and make it harder
for recent immigrants to escape from poverty.
I have a different vision for our workers. It begins with a new, fair trade policy that protects
our jobs and stands up to countries that cheat. It's been a signature message of my campaign from
day one, and it will be a signature feature of my presidency from the moment I take the oath of office.
I have made billions of dollars in business making deals – now I'm going to make our country rich
again. I am going to turn our bad trade agreements into great ones. America has lost nearly-one third
of its manufacturing jobs since 1997, following the enactment of disastrous trade deals supported
by Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Remember, it was Bill Clinton who signed NAFTA, one of the worst economic deals ever made by our
country.
Never again.
I am going to bring our jobs back to Ohio and to America – and I am not going to let companies
move to other countries, firing their employees along the way, without consequences.
My opponent, on the other hand, has supported virtually every trade agreement that has been destroying
our middle class. She supported NAFTA, and she supported China's entrance into the World Trade Organization
– another one of her husband's colossal mistakes.
She supported the job killing trade deal with South Korea. She has supported the Trans-Pacific
Partnership. The TPP will not only destroy our manufacturing, but it will make America subject to
the rulings of foreign governments. I pledge to never sign any trade agreement that hurts our workers,
or that diminishes our freedom and independence. Instead, I will make individual deals with individual
countries.
No longer will we enter into these massive deals, with many countries, that are thousands of pages
long – and which no one from our country even reads or understands. We are going to enforce all trade
violations, including through the use of taxes and tariffs, against any country that cheats.
This includes stopping China's outrageous theft of intellectual property, along with their illegal
product dumping, and their devastating currency manipulation. Our horrible trade agreements with
China and many others, will be totally renegotiated. That includes renegotiating NAFTA to get a much
better deal for America – and we'll walk away if we don't get the deal that we want. We are going
to start building and making things again.
Next comes the reform of our tax laws, regulations and energy rules. While Hillary Clinton plans
a massive tax increase, I have proposed the largest tax reduction of any candidate who has declared
for the presidential race this year – Democrat or Republican. Middle-income Americans will experience
profound relief, and taxes will be simplified for everyone.
America is one of the highest-taxed nations in the world. Reducing taxes will cause new companies
and new jobs to come roaring back into our country. Then we are going to deal with the issue of regulation,
one of the greatest job-killers of them all. Excessive regulation is costing our country as much
as $2 trillion a year, and we will end it. We are going to lift the restrictions on the production
of American energy. This will produce more than $20 trillion in job creating economic activity over
the next four decades.
My opponent, on the other hand, wants to put the great miners and steel workers of our country
out of work – that will never happen when I am President. With these new economic policies, trillions
of dollars will start flowing into our country.
This new wealth will improve the quality of life for all Americans – We will build the roads,
highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, and the railways of tomorrow. This, in turn, will create millions
more jobs. We will rescue kids from failing schools by helping their parents send them to a safe
school of their choice.
My opponent would rather protect education bureaucrats than serve American children. We will repeal
and replace disastrous Obamacare. You will be able to choose your own doctor again. And we will fix
TSA at the airports! We will completely rebuild our depleted military, and the countries that we
protect, at a massive loss, will be asked to pay their fair share.
We will take care of our great Veterans like they have never been taken care of before. My opponent
dismissed the VA scandal as being not widespread – one more sign of how out of touch she really is.
We are going to ask every Department Head in government to provide a list of wasteful spending projects
that we can eliminate in my first 100 days. The politicians have talked about it, I'm going to do
it. We are also going to appoint justices to the United States Supreme Court who will uphold our
laws and our Constitution.
The replacement for Justice Scalia will be a person of similar views and principles. This will
be one of the most important issues decided by this election. My opponent wants to essentially abolish
the 2nd amendment. I, on the other hand, received the early and strong endorsement of the National
Rifle Association and will protect the right of all Americans to keep their families safe.
He is correct. People hate Hillary. She just turned off every progressive left - her last
reserve - and does not have the positive support that is needed to get out the vote.
The dems might lose. The other reasons Moore list are also sound.
Notable quotes:
"... When Trump stood in the shadow of a Ford Motor factory during the Michigan primary, he threatened the corporation that if they did indeed go ahead with their planned closure of that factory and move it to Mexico, he would slap a 35% tariff on any Mexican-built cars shipped back to the United States. It was sweet, sweet music to the ears of the working class of Michigan, and when he tossed in his threat to Apple that he would force them to stop making their iPhones in China and build them here in America, well, hearts swooned and Trump walked away with a big victory that should have gone to the governor next-door, John Kasich. ..."
...if you believe Hillary Clinton is going to beat Trump with facts and smarts and logic, then
you obviously missed the past year of 56 primaries and caucuses where 16 Republican candidates
tried that and every kitchen sink they could throw at Trump and nothing could stop his
juggernaut. As of today, as things stand now, I believe this is going to happen – and in order to
deal with it, I need you first to acknowledge it, and then maybe, just maybe, we can find a way
out of the mess we're in.
Here are the 5 reasons Trump is going to win:
Midwest Math, or Welcome to Our Rust Belt Brexit. I believe Trump is
going to focus much of his attention on the four blue states in the rustbelt of the upper
Great Lakes – Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Four traditionally Democratic states
– but each of them have elected a Republican governor since 2010 (only Pennsylvania has
now finally elected a Democrat). In the Michigan primary in March, more Michiganders came out
to vote for the Republicans (1.32 million) that the Democrats (1.19 million). Trump is ahead
of Hillary in the latest polls in Pennsylvania and tied with her in Ohio. Tied? How can
the race be this close after everything Trump has said and done? Well maybe it's because he's
said (correctly) that the Clintons' support of NAFTA helped to destroy the industrial states
of the Upper Midwest. Trump is going to hammer Clinton on this and her support of TPP and
other trade policies that have royally screwed the people of these four states. When Trump
stood in the shadow of a Ford Motor factory during the Michigan primary, he threatened the
corporation that if they did indeed go ahead with their planned closure of that factory and
move it to Mexico, he would slap a 35% tariff on any Mexican-built cars shipped back to the
United States. It was sweet, sweet music to the ears of the working class of Michigan, and
when he tossed in his threat to Apple that he would force them to stop making their iPhones in
China and build them here in America, well, hearts swooned and Trump walked away with a big
victory that should have gone to the governor next-door, John Kasich.
From Green Bay to Pittsburgh, this, my friends, is the middle of England – broken,
depressed, struggling, the smokestacks strewn across the countryside with the carcass of what
we use to call the Middle Class. Angry, embittered working (and nonworking) people who were
lied to by the trickle-down of Reagan and abandoned by Democrats who still try to talk a good
line but are really just looking forward to rub one out with a lobbyist from Goldman Sachs
who'll write them nice big check before leaving the room. What happened in the UK with Brexit
is going to happen here. Elmer Gantry shows up looking like Boris Johnson and just says
whatever shit he can make up to convince the masses that this is their chance! To stick to
ALL of them, all who wrecked their American Dream! And now The Outsider, Donald Trump, has
arrived to clean house! You don't have to agree with him! You don't even have to like him! He
is your personal Molotov cocktail to throw right into the center of the bastards who did this
to you! SEND A MESSAGE! TRUMP IS YOUR MESSENGER!
And this is where the math comes in. In 2012, Mitt Romney lost by 64 electoral votes. Add
up the electoral votes cast by Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. It's 64. All Trump
needs to do to win is to carry, as he's expected to do, the swath of traditional red states
from Idaho to Georgia (states that'll never vote for Hillary Clinton), and then he just
needs these four rust belt states. He doesn't need Florida. He doesn't need Colorado or
Virginia. Just Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. And that will put him over the top.
This is how it will happen in November.
The Last Stand of the Angry White Man. Our male-dominated, 240-year run
of the USA is coming to an end. A woman is about to take over! How did this happen?! On
our watch! There were warning signs, but we ignored them. Nixon, the gender
traitor, imposing Title IX on us, the rule that said girls in school should get an equal
chance at playing sports. Then they let them fly commercial jets. Before we knew it, Beyoncé
stormed on the field at this year's Super Bowl (our game!) with an army of Black Women, fists
raised, declaring that our domination was hereby terminated! Oh, the humanity!
That's a small peek into the mind of the Endangered White Male. There is a sense that the
power has slipped out of their hands, that their way of doing things is no longer how things
are done. This monster, the "Feminazi,"the thing that as Trump says, "bleeds through her eyes
or wherever she bleeds," has conquered us - and now, after having had to endure eight years of
a black man telling us what to do, we're supposed to just sit back and take eight years of a
woman bossing us around? After that it'll be eight years of the gays in the White House! Then
the transgenders! You can see where this is going. By then animals will have been granted
human rights and a fuckin' hamster is going to be running the country. This has to stop!
The Hillary Problem. Can we speak honestly, just among ourselves? And
before we do, let me state, I actually like Hillary – a lot – and I think she has been given a
bad rap she doesn't deserve. But her vote for the Iraq War made me promise her that I would
never vote for her again. To date, I haven't broken that promise. For the sake of preventing a
proto-fascist from becoming our commander-in-chief, I'm breaking that promise. I sadly believe
Clinton will find a way to get us in some kind of military action. She's a hawk, to the right
of Obama. But Trump's psycho finger will be on The Button, and that is that. Done and done.
Let's face it: Our biggest problem here isn't Trump – it's Hillary. She is hugely unpopular
- nearly 70% of all voters think she is untrustworthy and dishonest. She represents the old
way of politics, not really believing in anything other than what can get you elected. That's
why she fights against gays getting married one moment, and the next she's officiating a gay
marriage. Young women are among her biggest detractors, which has to hurt considering it's the
sacrifices and the battles that Hillary and other women of her generation endured so that this
younger generation would never have to be told by the Barbara Bushes of the world that they
should just shut up and go bake some cookies. But the kids don't like her, and not a day goes
by that a millennial doesn't tell me they aren't voting for her. No Democrat, and certainly no
independent, is waking up on November 8th excited to run out and vote for Hillary
the way they did the day Obama became president or when Bernie was on the primary ballot. The
enthusiasm just isn't there. And because this election is going to come down to just one thing
- who drags the most people out of the house and gets them to the polls - Trump right now is
in the catbird seat.
The Depressed Sanders Vote. ...They're not going to vote for Trump; some
will vote third party, but many will just stay home. Hillary Clinton is going to have to do
something to give them a reason to support her - and picking a moderate, bland-o, middle of
the road old white guy as her running mate is not the kind of edgy move that tells millenials
that their vote is important to Hillary. Having two women on the ticket – that was an exciting
idea. But then Hillary got scared and has decided to play it safe. This is just one example of
how she is killing the youth vote.
The Jesse Ventura Effect. Finally, do not discount the electorate's
ability to be mischievous or underestimate how any millions fancy themselves as closet
anarchists once they draw the curtain and are all alone in the voting booth. It's one of the
few places left in society where there are no security cameras, no listening devices, no
spouses, no kids, no boss, no cops, there's not even a friggin' time limit. You can take as
long as you need in there and no one can make you do anything. You can push the button and
vote a straight party line, or you can write in Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. There are no
rules. And because of that, and the anger that so many have toward a broken political system,
millions are going to vote for Trump not because they agree with him, not
because they like his bigotry or ego, but just because they can. Just because it will
upset the apple cart and make mommy and daddy mad. And in the same way like when you're
standing on the edge of Niagara Falls and your mind wonders for a moment what would that feel
like to go over that thing, a lot of people are going to love being in the position of
puppetmaster and plunking down for Trump just to see what that might look like. Remember back
in the '90s when the people of Minnesota elected a professional wrestler as their governor?
They didn't do this because they're stupid or thought that Jesse Ventura was some sort of
statesman or political intellectual. They did so just because they could. Minnesota is one of
the smartest states in the country. It is also filled with people who have a dark sense of
humor - and voting for Ventura was their version of a good practical joke on a sick political
system. This is going to happen again with Trump.
Coming back to the hotel after appearing on Bill Maher's Republican Convention special this
week on HBO, a man stopped me. "Mike," he said, "we have to vote for Trump. We HAVE to
shake things up." That was it...
Nothing seems to rattle Hillary Clinton quite so much as pointed questions about
her personal finances. How much she's made. How she made it. Where it all came
from. From her miraculous adventures in the cattle futures market to the
Whitewater real estate scam, many of the most venal Clinton scandals down the
decades have involved Hillary's financial entanglements and the serpentine
measures she has taken to conceal them from public scrutiny.
Hillary is both
driven to acquire money and emits a faint whiff of guilt about having hoarded so
much of it. One might be tempted to ascribe her squeamishness about wealth to her
rigid Methodism, but her friends say that Hillary's covetousness derives from a
deep obsession with feeling secure, which makes a kind of sense given Bill's
free-wheeling proclivities. She's not, after all, a child of the Depression, but a
baby boomer. Hillary was raised in comfortable circumstances in the Chicago
suburbs and, unlike her husband, has never in her life felt the sting of want.
"... If turnout in the primaries has been any indicator, Trump has energized not only the base but attracted independents and Democrats, while the Dem turnout has been dismal. With Obama gone, it's anyone's guess if African-Americans and Hispanics will vote in large numbers. ..."
"... The truth is that Trump supporters cut across all socioeconomic and racial demographics. The media is just angry they are losing their ability to tell everyone who to vote for. ..."
"... Someone who has gamed the system is a good bet for being able to change the system. That is Trump's appeal. ..."
A lot of Trump bashing because of the Media and worried Democrats. However: Donald Trump
did not steal your money.
Donald Trump did not raise your taxes.
Donald Trump did not raise the price of food.
Trump is not stirring a race war.
Trump did not leave any US soldiers in Benghazi to be slaughtered and desecrated by Muslims.
Trump did not send the US Navy to fight for Syrian Al-Qaeda.
Trump did not arm ISIS and systematically exterminate Christians throughout the Middle East.
Trump did not betray Israel.
Trump did not provide financing and technology to Iran's nuclear weapons program.
Trump did not give our military secrets to China.
Trump did not remove our nuclear missile shield in Poland at the behest of Russia.
Trump did not shrivel our military, and betray our veterans.
Under Obama, a large percentage of us are on public welfare programs like food stamps, section
8 housing, and SSI, because of low wages.
Health insurance is unaffordable (mine is $450/month… contrast this to my $24/month auto
insurance from Insurance Panda… or my $11/month life insurance).
Two thirds of young adults have student loans to which they cannot pay back due to lack of
good jobs in the community.
Trump didn't do that.
Trump did not cripple our economy.
Trump did not increase our debt to 20 trillion dollars.
Trump did not ruin our credit, twice.
Trump did not double African American unemployment.
Trump did not increase welfare to a record level for eight years.
Trump did not sign a law making it legal to execute, and imprison Americans.
Trump did not set free all of the terrorists in Guantanamo Bay.
Trump did not steal your rights, violate US Constitutional law, or commit treason, hundreds of
times.
Trump is being ripped apart in the news, non-stop. Whereas, Barrack Hussein, Hillary Clinton
and the criminals occupying our government, are not being touched. The media is the Democratic
Party.
Save your culture. Stop listening to them.
Tex9260,
3/26/2016 6:47 AM EDT [Edited]
Trump will get 75% of the Bernie Supporters. They have in a lot of ways the same
message....The game is rigged by special interest. Americans are tired of all the
quid-pro-quo. I can't wait for the FBI to recommend a criminal indictment recommendation for
Hillary, and watch the Justice Department ignore it. Taking money from countries with horrific
human rights violations, especially while she was Secretary of State. Of the $500 million the
Clinton Foundation raised last year, only .10 of every dollar actually goes to charities. The
rest is administrative costs for the foundation. Leaving Americans to die in Libya, and lying
to the nation in front of flag draped coffins of the Ambassador and the others, to
facilitating the sell of most of our Uranium to Russia, to line her pockets. 500 million $$ to
Solindra (Solar company that went belly up in 2 years). That was Nancy Pelosis' brother in
law. I'm looking forward to the parade of women that will speak out on Bill, and how the
lengths Hillary went to destroy them (Let's not forget-Jeffery Epstein and orgy island and
those underage girls). Hillary has said she wanted open boarders, and all the cost's:
processing, increased education expense, healthcare costs, Welfare, increased crime and it's
costs, lower wages, etc., all being paid for by John -Q taxpayer, when that money should be
spent on America and it's citizens in one form or another. Hillary has no accomplishments
other than making us less safe. She only made things more perilous while SOS. No
accomplishments, and used her positions to enrich herself with America's money, and is a
pathelogical liar. No Thanks. At least Trump speaks what to many of the things the country
already thinks and wish would happen, if the government actually had it's citizens in their
best interests.
Brent E, 3/21/2016 3:40 PM EDT
Clinton the chronic liar calling others' language ugly, what a laugh. Perhaps Hillary
forgot how ugly lies are when she came under sniper fire...
pmk123, 3/21/2016 3:24 PM EDT
If turnout in the primaries has been any indicator, Trump has energized not only the
base but attracted independents and Democrats, while the Dem turnout has been dismal. With
Obama gone, it's anyone's guess if African-Americans and Hispanics will vote in large numbers.
If they are dispirited because of a flawed candidate who is a screaming robot, this group
could very well sit out the general election. So, the Dems better not get too cocky.
joesopinion,
3/21/2016 5:58 AM EDT
Tired of reporters racist comments about Trump supporters being white and uneducated. It is
becoming as abrasive as the N word. Why don't you just call us White Trash.
The truth is that Trump supporters cut across all socioeconomic and racial
demographics. The media is just angry they are losing their ability to tell everyone who to
vote for.
lolly52,
3/21/2016 6:25 AM EDT
I went thru the login procedure just to post to you! I agree. The media and the donor class
need to wake up. We are not buying their lies any more.
lolly52,
3/21/2016 7:58 AM EDT
Someone who has gamed the system is a good bet for being able to change the system.
That is Trump's appeal.
Clinton is owned by the system.
Kasich believes in the Republican Establishment's view of the system. He has spent his life
playing by those rules.
Cruz's wife worked for the CFR. No single entity hates America more than the CFR.
I like Bernie's anti-establishment stance, but his position on illegal immigration does not
appeal to me.
Snowbird101,
3/20/2016 10:16 PM EDT
"There's no denying that many blacks share the same anxieties as many whites about the wave
of illegal immigration flooding our Southern border"
-Barack Obama IN 2006
"The Audacity of Hope"
"The number of immigrants added to the labor force every year is of a magnitude not seen in
this country for over a century"
-Barack Obama IN 2006
"The Audacity of Hope
"If this huge influx of mostly low-skill workers provides some benefits to the economy... It
also threatens to depress further the wages of blue-collar Americans."
-Barack Obama IN 2006
"The Audacity of Hope"
The above is what Trump has been saying and is being called Racist. Doesn't make sense.
The path to victory may seem obvious. Hammer her on trust: Benghazi, emails, Goldman Sachs
speeches and Wall Street donations. Twist the knife by dredging up charges of Bill Clinton's
sexual harassment and abuse, and accuse Hillary of enabling. Pick up disgruntled Bernie Sanders
supporters and white working-class voters by rejecting big corporate donors, highlighting your
opposition to unfair trade deals and assuring you know how to bring back jobs.
"... Krugman has joined the ranks of the neocons, as well as the neoliberals, and they're terrified that they're losing control of the Republican Party. For the last half-century the Republican Party has been pro-Cold War, corporatist. And Trump has actually, is reversing that. Reversing the whole traditional platform. And that really worries the neocons. ..."
"... But finally came Trump's speech, and this was for the first time, policy was there. And he's making a left run around Hillary. He appealed twice to Bernie Sanders supporters, and the two major policies that he outlined in the speech broke radically from the Republican traditional right-wing stance. And that is called destroying the party by the right wing, and Trump said he's not destroying the party, he's building it up and appealing to labor, and appealing to the rational interest that otherwise had been backing Bernie Sanders. ..."
"... So in terms of national security, he wanted to roll back NATO spending. And he made it clear, roll back military spending. ..."
"... Well, being realistic has driven other people crazy. Not only did Krugman say that Trump would, quote, actually follow a pro-Putin foreign policy at the expense of America's allies, and he's referring to the Ukraine, basically, and it's at–he's become a lobbyist for the military-industrial complex. But also, at the Washington Post you had Anne Applebaum call him explicitly the Manchurian candidate, referring to the 1962 movie, and rejecting the neocon craziness. This has just driven them nutty because they're worried of losing the Republican Party under Trump. ..."
"... In economic policy, Trump also opposes the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the TTIP trade and corporate power grab [inaud.] with Europe to block public regulation. And this was also a major plank of Bernie Sanders' campaign against Hillary, which Trump knows. ..."
"... And this may be for show, simply to brand Hillary as Wall Street's candidate. But it also seems to actually be an attack on Wall Street. And Trump's genius was to turn around all the attacks on him as being a shady businessman. He said, look, nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it. Now, what that means, basically, as a businessman, he knows the fine print by which they've been screwing the people. So only someone like him knows how to fight against Wall Street. After all, he's been screwing the Wall Street banks for years [inaud.]. And he can now fight for the population fighting against Wall Street, just as he's been able to stiff the banks. ..."
"... When it comes–he also in that sense appealed to, as you said, the Bernie Sanders people when he talked about the trade deals. You know, he's been talking about NAFTA, TTIP, TTP, and these are areas that really is traditionally been the left of the left issues. And now there's this, that he's anti-these trade deals, and he's going to bring jobs home. What does that mean? ..."
"... I think that the most, the biggest contradiction, was you can look at how the convention began with Governor Christie. Accusing Hillary of being pro-Russian when she's actually threatening war, and criticizing her for not helping the Ukrainians when it was she who brought Victorian Nuland in to push the coup d'etat with the neo-nazis, and gave them $5 billion. And Trump reversed the whole thing and said no, no, no. I'm not anti-Russian, I'm pro-Russian. I'm not going to defend Ukrainians. Just the opposite. ..."
"... All of that–you've had the Koch brothers say we're not going to give money to Trump, the Republicans, now. We're backing Hillary. You've got the Chamber of Commerce saying because Trump isn't for the corporate takeover of foreign trade, we're now supporting the Democrats, not the Reepublicans. ..."
"... So this is really the class war. And it's the class war of Wall Street and the corporate sector of the Democratic side against Trump on the populist side. And who knows whether he really means what he says when he says he's for the workers and he wants to rebuild the cities, put labor back to work. And when he says he's for the blacks and Hispanics have to get jobs just like white people, maybe he's telling the truth, because that certainly is the way that the country can be rebuilt in a positive way. ..."
Trump's divergence from the conventional Republican platform is generating indignant punditry
from neocons and neoliberals alike
SHARMINI PERIES, EXECUTIVE PRODUCER, TRNN: It's the Real News Network. I'm Sharmini Peries coming
to you from Baltimore.
On Friday, just after the Republican National Congress wrapped up with its presidential candidate,
Donald Trump, Paul Krugman of the New York Times penned an article titled "Donald Trump: The Siberian
Candidate." He said in it, if elected, would Donald Trump be Vladimir Putin's man in the White House?
Krugman himself is worried as ludicrous and outrageous as the question sounds, the Trump campaign's
recent behavior has quite a few foreign policy experts wondering, he says, just what kind of hold
Mr. Putin has over the Republican nominee, and whether that influence will continue if he wins.
Well, let's unravel that statement with Michael Hudson. He's joining us from New York. Michael
is a distinguished research professor of economics at the University of Missouri Kansas City. His
latest book is Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroyed the Global Economy.
Thank you so much for joining us, Michael.
MICHAEL HUDSON:
It's good to be here, Sharmini. It's been an exciting week.
PERIES:
So let's take a look at this article by Paul Krugman. Where is he going with this analysis
about the Siberian candidate?
HUDSON:
Well,
Krugman has joined the ranks of the neocons, as well as the neoliberals, and
they're terrified that they're losing control of the Republican Party. For the last half-century
the Republican Party has been pro-Cold War, corporatist. And Trump has actually, is reversing that.
Reversing the whole traditional platform. And that really worries the neocons.
Until his speech, the whole Republican Convention, every speaker had avoided dealing with economic
policy issues. No one referred to the party platform, which isn't very good. And it was mostly an
attack on Hillary. Chants of "lock her up." And Trump children, aimed to try to humanize him and
make him look like a loving man.
But finally came Trump's speech, and this was for the first time, policy was there. And he's
making a left run around Hillary. He appealed twice to Bernie Sanders supporters, and the two major
policies that he outlined in the speech broke radically from the Republican traditional right-wing
stance. And that is called destroying the party by the right wing, and Trump said he's not destroying
the party, he's building it up and appealing to labor, and appealing to the rational interest that
otherwise had been backing Bernie Sanders.
So in terms of national security, he wanted to roll back NATO spending. And he made it clear,
roll back military spending.
We can spend it on infrastructure, we can spend it on employing
American labor. And in the speech, he said, look, we don't need foreign military bases and foreign
spending to defend our allies. We can defend them from the United States, because in today's world,
the only kind of war we're going to have is atomic war. Nobody's going to invade another country.
We're not going to send American troops to invade Russia, if it were to attack. So nobody's even
talking about that. So let's be realistic.
Well, being realistic has driven other people crazy. Not only did Krugman say that Trump would,
quote, actually follow a pro-Putin foreign policy at the expense of America's allies, and he's referring
to the Ukraine, basically, and it's at–he's become a lobbyist for the military-industrial complex.
But also, at the Washington Post you had Anne Applebaum call him explicitly the Manchurian candidate,
referring to the 1962 movie, and rejecting the neocon craziness. This has just driven them nutty
because they're worried of losing the Republican Party under Trump.
In economic policy, Trump also opposes the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the TTIP trade and
corporate power grab [inaud.] with Europe to block public regulation. And this was also a major plank
of Bernie Sanders' campaign against Hillary, which Trump knows.
The corporatist wings of both
the Republican and the Democratic Parties fear that Trump's opposition to NAFTA and TPP will lead
the Republicans not to push through in the lame duck session after November. The whole plan has been
that once the election's over, Obama will then get all the Republicans together and will pass the
Republican platform that he's been pushing for the last eight years. The Trans-Pacific Partnership
trade agreement with Europe, and the other neoliberal policies.
And now that Trump is trying to rebuild the Republican Party, all of that is threatened. And so
on the Republican side of the New York Times page you had David Brooks writing "The death of the
Republican Party." So what Trump calls the rebirth of the Republican Party, it means the death of
the reactionary, conservative, corporatist, anti-labor Republican Party.
And when he wrote this, quote, Trump is decimating the things Republicans stood for: NATO, entitlement
reform, in other words winding back Social Security, and support of the corporatist Trans-Pacific
Partnership. So it's almost hilarious to see what happens. And Trump also has reversed the traditional
Republican fiscal responsibility austerity policy, that not a word about balanced budgets anymore.
And he said he was going to run at policy to employ American labor and put it back to work on infrastructure.
Again, he's made a left runaround Hillary. He says he wants to reinstate Glass-Steagall, whereas
the Clintons were the people that got rid of it.
And this may be for show, simply to brand Hillary as Wall Street's candidate. But it also seems
to actually be an attack on Wall Street. And Trump's genius was to turn around all the attacks on
him as being a shady businessman. He said, look, nobody knows the system better than me, which is
why I alone can fix it. Now, what that means, basically, as a businessman, he knows the fine print
by which they've been screwing the people. So only someone like him knows how to fight against Wall
Street. After all, he's been screwing the Wall Street banks for years [inaud.]. And he can now fight
for the population fighting against Wall Street, just as he's been able to stiff the banks.
So it's sort of hilarious. On the one hand, leading up to him you had Republicans saying throw
Hillary in jail. And Hillary saying throw Trump in the [inaud.]. And so you have the whole election
coming up with-.
PERIES:
Maybe we should take the lead and lock them all up. Michael, what is becoming very clear
is that there's a great deal of inconsistencies on the part of the Republican Party. Various people
are talking different things, like if you hear Mike Pence, the vice presidential candidate, speak,
and then you heard Donald Trump, and then you heard Ivanka Trump speak yesterday, they're all saying
different things. It's like different strokes for different folks. And I guess in marketing and marketeering,
which Trump is the master of, that makes perfect sense. Just tap on everybody's shoulder so they
feel like they're the ones being represented as spoken about, and they're going to have their issues
addressed in some way.
When it comes–he also in that sense appealed to, as you said, the Bernie Sanders people when he
talked about the trade deals. You know, he's been talking about NAFTA, TTIP, TTP, and these are areas
that really is traditionally been the left of the left issues. And now there's this, that he's anti-these
trade deals, and he's going to bring jobs home. What does that mean?
HUDSON:
Well, you're right when you say there's a policy confusion within the Republican Party.
And I guess if this were marketing, it's the idea that everybody hears what they want to hear. And
if they can hear right-wing gay bashing from the Indiana governor, and they can hear Trump talking
about hte LGBTQ, everybody will sort of be on the side.
But I listened to what Governor Pence said about defending Trump's views on NATO. And he's so
smooth. So slick, that he translated what Trump said in a way that no Republican conservative could
really disagree with it. I think he was a very good pick for vice president, because he can, obviously
he's agreed to follow what Trump's saying, and he's so smooth, being a lawyer, that he can make it
all appear much more reasonable than it would.
I think that the most, the biggest contradiction, was you can look at how the convention began
with Governor Christie. Accusing Hillary of being pro-Russian when she's actually threatening war,
and criticizing her for not helping the Ukrainians when it was she who brought Victorian Nuland in
to push the coup d'etat with the neo-nazis, and gave them $5 billion. And Trump reversed the whole
thing and said no, no, no. I'm not anti-Russian, I'm pro-Russian. I'm not going to defend Ukrainians.
Just the opposite.
And it's obvious that the Republicans have fallen into line behind them. And no wonder the Democrats
want them to lose.
All of that–you've had the Koch brothers say we're not going to give money to
Trump, the Republicans, now. We're backing Hillary. You've got the Chamber of Commerce saying because
Trump isn't for the corporate takeover of foreign trade, we're now supporting the Democrats, not
the Reepublicans.
So this is really the class war. And it's the class war of Wall Street and the corporate sector
of the Democratic side against Trump on the populist side. And who knows whether he really means
what he says when he says he's for the workers and he wants to rebuild the cities, put labor back
to work. And when he says he's for the blacks and Hispanics have to get jobs just like white people,
maybe he's telling the truth, because that certainly is the way that the country can be rebuilt in
a positive way.
And the interesting thing is that all he gets from the Democrats is denunciations. So I can't
wait to see how Bernie Sanders is going to handle all this at the Democratic Convention next week.
"... "On the one hand he says something that sounds good to non-interventionists…On the other hand he says something like 'Obama went in there and bombed Libya and just walked away.'" ..."
Following Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump's exploratory foreign policy
speech on Wednesday, political analyst Daniel McAdams speaks with Radio Sputnik's Loud & Clear to
discuss what, exactly, the candidate's worldview encompasses.
"It is clear that in Washington he has aligned himself with foreign policy advisors that are not
the usual neocons. So that's good news, to a degree. That's why you have so much gnashing of the
teeth in Washington," McAdams, of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, tells
Loud & Clear,
referring to billionaire Donald Trump.
"On the other hand, the people that he does have around him are realists, to a degree, but that
is not super satisfying to a non-interventionist and an anti-war person because realists…lack the
philosophy…of avoiding war and avoiding entangling alliance."
"…The specific plans that he outlined a) were not very well hashed out, and b) they don't make
a lot of sense," says McAdams.
While Trump does recognize the failure of Washington's insistence on pursuing a Cold War-era strategy,
the candidate does not see American imperialism as part of the problem.
One example is his opposition to the Iran nuclear agreement.
"This groveling to Israel, this blind condemnation of the Iran nuclear deal…I don't get his beef
and I don't think he gets his beef. It just makes him sound good, it makes him sound tough."
On the issue of the Iraq and Syria, the Republican frontrunner seemed to offer contradictory positions.
"This is where I think he's either very clever or fairly goofy," McAdams says.
"On the one hand he says something that sounds good to non-interventionists…On the other hand
he says something like 'Obama went in there and bombed Libya and just walked away.'"
"That's the whole point," states McAdams. "Not walking away means staying in and doing nation
building. So he doesn't understand what caused the problem. He also promises to use military force
to contain radical Islam, and he talks about 'Why are we not bombing Libya right now?'"
Trump also spoke of restoring the military superiority of America, the country with the largest
military budget in the world, shortly after stating that he would pursue peace.
"Rebuild our military from what? We spend more than most of the rest of the world combined. We
have an enormous military, we're involved in over 120 countries," McAdams says.
"What he means by 'rebuild' the military is keep Washington and its environs extraordinarily rich,"
he adds, describing the military-industrial complex, which Trump appears to support.
He did, however, offer a surprisingly insightful take on US-Russia relations.
"Here's what he said exactly. 'We should seek common ground based on shared interest with Russia.'
He said he'd, 'Make a deal that's good for us and good for Russia.' That sounds terrific. If he follows
through with that I think we should be very optimistic."
"... Despite Hillary's blatant willingness to be bribed in public, her opponent, Bernie Sanders, has not succeeded in making an issue of Hillary's shamelessness. Both of the main establishment newspapers, the Washington Post and the New York Times have come to Hillary's defense. ..."
"... Hillary is a warmonger. She pushed the Obama regime into the destruction of a stable and largely cooperative government in Libya where the "Arab Spring" was a CIA-backed group of jihadists who were used to dislodge China from its oil investments in eastern Libya. She urged her husband to bomb Yugoslavia. ..."
"... She has pushed for "regime change" in Syria. She oversaw the coup that overthrew the democratically elected president of Honduras. She brought neoconservative Victoria Nuland, who arranged the coup that overthrew the democratically elected president of Ukraine, into the State Department. Hillary has called President Vladimir Putin of Russia the "new Hitler." Hillary as president guarantees war and more war . ..."
"... For the Clintons government means using public office to be rewarded for doing favors for private interests. The Wall Street Journal reported that "at least 60 companies that lobbied the State Department during her [Hillary Clinton's] tenure as Secretary of State donated a total of more than $26 million to the Clinton Foundation . ..."
This is an English translation of an article that I wrote for the German
magazine, Compact. I was encouraged by the high level of intelligent discourse that Compact brings
to its readers. If only the US had more people capable of reaching beyond entertainment to comprehending
the forces that affect them, there might be some hope for America.
Compact brings hope to Germany. The German people are beginning to understand that their country
is not sovereign but a vassal of Washington and that their chancellor serves Washington's hegemony
and American financial interests, and not the German people.
Hillary Clinton is proving to be the
"teflon candidate." In her campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, she has escaped damage
from major scandals, any one of which would destroy a politician.
Hillary has accepted massive bribes in the form of speaking fees from financial organizations
and corporations.
She is under investigation for misuse of classified data, an offense for which a number of whistleblowers
are in prison. Hillary has survived the bombing of Libya, her creation of a failed Libyan state that
is today a major source of terrorist jihadists, and the Benghazi controversy. She has survived charges
that as Secretary of State she arranged favors for foreign interests in exchange for donations to
the Clintons' foundation.
And, of course, there is a long list of previous scandals: Whitewater, Travelgate, Filegate. Diana
Johnstone's book, Queen of Chaos, describes Hillary Clinton as "the top salesperson for the ruling
oligarchy."
Hillary Clinton is a bought-and-paid-for representative of the big banks, the military-security complex,
and the Israel Lobby. She will represent these interests, not those of the American people or America's
European allies.
The Clintons' purchase by interest groups is public knowledge. For example, CNN
reports that between February 2001 and May 2015 Bill and Hillary Clinton were paid $153 million in
speaking fees for 729 speeches, an average price of $210,000.
As it became evident that Hillary Clinton would emerge as the likely Democratic presidential candidate,
she was paid more. Deutsche Bank paid her $485,000 for one speech, and Goldman Sachs paid her $675,000
for three speeches. Bank of American Morgan Stanley, UBS, and Fidelity Investments each
paid $225,000.
Despite Hillary's blatant willingness to be bribed in public, her opponent, Bernie Sanders,
has not succeeded in making an issue of Hillary's shamelessness. Both of the main establishment newspapers,
the Washington Post and the New York Times have come to Hillary's defense.
Hillary is a warmonger. She pushed the Obama regime into the destruction of a stable and largely
cooperative government in Libya where the "Arab Spring" was a CIA-backed group of jihadists who were
used to dislodge China from its oil investments in eastern Libya. She urged her husband to bomb Yugoslavia.
She has pushed for "regime change" in Syria. She oversaw the coup that overthrew the democratically
elected president of Honduras. She brought neoconservative Victoria Nuland, who arranged the coup
that overthrew the democratically elected president of Ukraine, into the State Department. Hillary
has called President Vladimir Putin of Russia the "new Hitler." Hillary as president guarantees
war and more war.
In the United States government has been privatized. Office holders use their positions in order
to make themselves wealthy, not in order to serve the public interest. Bill and Hillary Clinton epitomize
the use of public office in behalf of the office holder's interest.
For the Clintons government means using public office to be rewarded for doing favors for
private interests. The Wall Street Journal reported that "at least 60 companies that lobbied the
State Department during her [Hillary Clinton's] tenure as Secretary of State donated a total of more
than $26 million to the
Clinton Foundation."
"... Trump has done much to trigger the scorn of neocon pundits. He denounced the Iraq War as a mistake based on Bush administration lies, just prior to scoring a sizable victory in the South Carolina GOP primary. In last week's contentious GOP presidential debate, he defended the concept of neutrality in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is utterly taboo on the neocon right. ..."
"... "It serves no purpose to say you have a good guy and a bad guy," he said , pledging to take a neutral position in negotiating peace. ..."
"... This set off his rival Marco Rubio, who replied, "The position you've taken is an anti-Israel position. … Because you cannot be an honest broker in a dispute between two sides in which one of the sides is constantly acting in bad faith." The Jerusalem Post suggested that Rubio's assault on Trump's views on the Middle East was designed to win Florida . If that's the case, it's apparently not working - in the Real Clear Politics ..."
"... In his quest to take up George W. Bush's mantle, Rubio has arrayed a fleet of neoconservative funders, ranging from pro-Israel billionaire Paul Singer to Norman Braman , a billionaire auto dealer who funds Israeli settlements in the West Bank. His list of advisers is like a rolodex of Iraq War backers, ranging from Bush administration alumni Elliot Abrams and Stephen Hadley, to Kagan and serial war propagandist Bill Kristol. ..."
"... Kristol also sits on the board of the Emergency Committee for Israel - a dark money group that assails candidates it perceives as insufficiently pro-Israel. The group started airing an ad this weekend against Trump portraying him as an ally to despots like Bashar Assad, Saddam Hussein, and Muammar Qaddafi - mostly because he argued that military invasions of Libya and Iraq left those countries worse off. ..."
"... The guy who accelerated the process of reducing the middle east to chaos ran on a platform of a 'humbler' foreign policy, condemning nation-building. How'd that work out for us? ..."
"... The pain and anguish of the neo cons is highly entertaining, and so damn warranted, but let's not get taken in. ..."
"... isn't robert kagan the husband of state diplomat and cheney/h.clinton appointee victoria nuland? hillary is already as neocon as it gets. ..."
"... If Trump can survive the nomination process, in spite of what the MSN can muster-up against him, it will represent first time in the past 60 years that the Establishment did not choose and own the candidates of both parties. ..."
"... TRUMP's opponents offer nothing but their arrogant condescending attitudes towards the voting population. Their use of scare tactics on voters will no longer work. These cookie-cutter politicians and their obsolete powerful old-boy establishment handlers are wrong for today's challenges and tomorrows solutions. Stop wasting voter's time and energy trying to make this election about personalities, gender, race, minorities, religion, fear and hatred. TRUMP has faith and trust in the voters; TRUMP is the only candidate who doesn't insult, scare or lie to voters; TRUMP offers voters hope and a future ALL Americans can believe in and deserve. ..."
"... All of Trump's establishment opponents are begging for just one more chance. These opponent candidates squandered thousands of opportunities, for the past fifty years, at the expense of All Americans in America and abroad. Powerful corrupt insiders', of every party affiliation, who discredit TRUMP, or any candidate, are also discrediting American voters', the American voting process and the freedoms of democracies and republics everywhere. These discrediting efforts, to take down any candidate, will fail because this is America and in America the peoples' choice for their next president must and will always prevail. American voters' rights and choices must always be protected, respected and never ignored. Because America is not a dictatorship voters' choices' still count. We are lucky to live in a country where we can agree to disagree. This is the essence of freedom. Every American and every candidate should be upset when this kind of corruption goes on. Thank you, Donald Trump, and every candidate, for running for President and offering informed voters an opportunity out of this nightmare and a path to a better America for ALL Americans! ..."
"... The debates heading into Super Tuesday continues to show voters TRUMP's presidential qualities. Eminent Domain didn't stick to TRUMP, neither will groundless tax allegations nor outrageous innuendos. TRUMPS opponents are doing themselves a disservice attacking TRUMP. TRUMP offers voters hope and a future ALL Americans can believe in. TRUMP will own Super Tuesday. ..."
"... This explains the virulent dislike of Trump by the lamestream media. Hillary, an unindicted war criminal based on her central role in instituting the Khaddafi overthrow and her role in starting the Syrian war, is without a doubt the greater evil in comparison with Trump. Since Trump in the fall campaign won't hesitate to highlight the fact that the jihadis in Libya put in as largely as a result of Hillary's initiative liquidated tens or hundreds of thousands of black Africans who had settled in Khaddafi's Libya as hostile to Jihadi elements, this will likely dampen Afro-American ardour for Hillary's campaign. Hopefully this will be a torpedo which sinks her campaign. ..."
"... Truth is the enemy of the Zionist serial liars. ..."
"... I've been saying for awhile that Trump is probably the least bad of the Republican candidates. He's definitely not as bad as Rubio or Cruz would be. For one thing, he's opposed to the TPP and similar crap. Now this. ..."
"... Make no mistake, the only candidate left who wouldn't continue the same awfulness would be Sanders, who doesn't stand a chance (for those who don't understand how the 15% super delegates rigs the election for Clinton and other establishment candidates, do the math, not to even mention the money and power behind Clinton). ..."
"... Bernie and Donald are simply two-fisted middle fingers enthusiastically directed at the paid enforcers of the oligarchy's desired status quo, the Republican and Democrat political machines. ..."
"... And who did HRC appoint as SecState? Marc Grossman, Bush inner circle guy and Bush family relative; Victoria Nuland, former defense policy advisor to Dick Cheney, and her husband, Robert Kagan. This has to be a WTF moment for anyone with a brain? ..."
"... I believe the neoconservatives may have had some self-esteem issues and perhaps tended to overcompensate by splurging on vanity wars. Trump will return the Republican party to its conservative roots of fiscal responsibility and insist on getting good value for his wars. A Trump campaign will completely dispense with 'shock and awe'. Instead, he'll cut straight to the chase: "Where are the oilfields and how long will it take to pump them dry?" The neoconservatives could benefit from that sort of discipline. ..."
"... It be fitting for the neocons who were originally leftist followers of Trotsky to go back home to the Democratic party. Maybe then the old non-interventionist anti-war right can rise again in amongst the Republicans. ..."
"... Perhaps worth noting that the Neocons originally found influence with interventionist Democrats like Dan Moynihan, they went on to develop alliances with fiercely nationalistic Reaganites (like Cheney and Rumsfeld), but only truly came to the fore as policy-makers within the GW Bush presidency. ..."
"... The Neocons are like parasites that jump from host to host. When they've killed one host they move on to the next. I'm reminded of the old Sci-Fi movie, "The Hidden". ..."
"... … just in case y'all are not aware, the view from outside the walls of Empire U$A, when we see the audience holding up placards declaring "MAKE AMERICA'S MILITARY GREAT AGAIN" we're all thinking – 'you guys are truly the most manipulated, compromised and fucked up people on the planet'. ..."
"... "And what about Russia? Washington's talking like the west bank of the Dnieper is our east coast.", Surrounding and dismantling Russia has been the goal since the collapse of the USSR. And Killary and the neocons (including the large contingent she and Obama installed at State) are definitely crazy enough to push it. ..."
"... In the short tem it means replacing Putin by another Eltsin-like stooge. In the middle term, it meant dismantling the USSR. In the long term it means defending Capital against the threat of Socialism. ..."
"... The chaos Trump will bring to the neocon's imperialist project is probably the only good thing that might come out of a Trump presidency. ..."
"... You mean US "corporate" interest and Israel's interest don't you? For the past 30 years, both parties have pursued policies that are in direct conflict with the interest of the American people. ..."
"... Neoconservative historian Robert Kagan - one of the prime intellectual backers of the Iraq war and an advocate for Syrian intervention - announced in the Washington Post last week that if Trump secures the nomination "the only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton.", Truly, this tells you all you need to know about Hillary Clinton… ..."
"... Fascinating that Trump has the warmongers nervous. Heading Hillary's way where they know their rearrangement of the middle east (PNAC, JINSA) no matter how many thousands are killed or refugees are displace is safe with Hillary. She has demonstrated her commitment to the death and destruction in the middle east. ..."
"... Good to see that all those neoconservative prayer breakfasts Sen. Hillary Clinton attended at the Geo. W. Bush White House aren't going to waste. Of course, the neocons embrace "Wall Street Hillary" as they always have, regardless of all the silly political theater to the contrary. ..."
"... It's good to see that Hillary is finally being openly welcomed into the fold of neo-conservatives. Also, pardon my lack of modesty for a certain pride in having been proven right about her. She is not a progressive, not liberal, but rather a fascist in the true sense of representing the corporatists. ..."
"... Good call on the timing of the NYT series, Jeff. And kudos on having recognized her early on for the fascist she has always been. ..."
"... Kagan was hand picked to be on Hillary Clinton's defense policy board while at the State Dept and for those who don't know who Kagan is, he's the husband of the assistant secretary of state for eurasian affairs, Victoria Nuland. ..."
Donald Trump's runaway success in the GOP primaries so far is setting off alarm bells among neoconservatives
who are worried he will not pursue the same bellicose foreign policy that has dominated Republican
thinking for decades.
Max Boot, an
unrepentant supporter of the Iraq War, wrote
in
the Weekly Standard that a "Trump presidency would represent the death knell of America
as a great power," citing, among other things, Trump's objection to a large American troop presence
in South Korea.
Trump has done much to trigger the scorn of neocon pundits. He
denounced the
Iraq War as a mistake based on Bush administration lies, just prior to scoring a
sizable victory in the South Carolina GOP primary. In last week's contentious GOP presidential
debate, he defended the concept of neutrality in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is utterly
taboo on the neocon right.
"It serves no purpose to say you have a good guy and a bad guy,"
he said, pledging to take a neutral position in negotiating peace.
This set off his rival Marco Rubio, who replied, "The position you've taken is an anti-Israel
position. … Because you cannot be an honest broker in a dispute between two sides in which one of
the sides is constantly acting in bad faith." The Jerusalem Post suggested that Rubio's assault
on Trump's views on the Middle East was
designed to win Florida. If that's the case, it's apparently not working - in the Real Clear
Politics averaging of GOP primary polls in the state, Trump is
polling higher than he ever has.
In his quest to take up George W. Bush's mantle, Rubio has arrayed a fleet of neoconservative
funders, ranging from
pro-Israel billionaire
Paul Singer to
Norman Braman, a billionaire auto dealer who funds Israeli settlements in the West Bank. His
list of advisers
is like a rolodex of Iraq War backers, ranging from Bush administration alumni Elliot Abrams and
Stephen Hadley, to Kagan and serial war propagandist Bill Kristol.
Kristol also sits on the board of the Emergency Committee for Israel - a dark money group
that assails candidates it perceives as insufficiently pro-Israel. The group started airing an ad
this weekend against Trump portraying him as an ally to despots like Bashar Assad, Saddam Hussein,
and Muammar Qaddafi - mostly because he argued that military invasions of Libya and Iraq left those
countries worse off.
John D, Mar. 3 2016, 6:31 a.m.
I love what Trump's saying from time to time and don't believe it for a second. How short are
our memories? The guy who accelerated the process of reducing the middle east to chaos ran
on a platform of a 'humbler' foreign policy, condemning nation-building. How'd that work out for
us? Trump is a demagogue, and this is what they do: say whatever gets them support, just
like other politicians, but on steroids. Huey Long is an example of this, and he also took some
positions that we would all have supported over that of the two major parties of the time.
The pain and anguish of the neo cons is highly entertaining, and so damn warranted, but
let's not get taken in. The man's a monster, and the only good that might come of his election
would be his impeachment. I know, that leaves us with horrible choices, and what else is new.
But don't be suckered by Trump. The degree really is worthless.
vidimi, Mar. 2 2016, 8:55 a.m.
isn't robert kagan the husband of state diplomat and cheney/h.clinton appointee victoria
nuland? hillary is already as neocon as it gets.
M Hobbs -> vidimi, Mar. 3 2016, 2:25 p.m.
Robert Kagan told the NYT last June that he "feels comfortable" with Hillary on foreign policy–and
that she's a neocon. "If she pursues a policy which we think she will pursue," he added, "it's
something that might have been called neocon, but clearly her supporters are not going to call
it that; they are going to call it something else."
The people behind this ad don't get it- this video could easily have been issued and approved
by the Trump campaign. To a lot of people, what this video accuses Trump of saying is the absolute,
utter truth. The world would be a far, far better place, Iraq would be better off, Libya would
be better off, and the United States would have a lot more money, and a lot less dead soldiers,
if Saddam and Khadaffi were still alive.
They should have focus grouped this. Because it likely increases Trump's numbers.
Joe F -> Duglarri, Mar. 1 2016, 1:53 p.m.
If Khadaffi were still alive Ambassdor Stevens and several more Americans would still be alive
also. But then the press would have one less thing to whinge about and the MIC would have one
less hotzone to expliot.
Carroll Price, Mar. 1 2016, 11:10 a.m.
If Trump can survive the nomination process, in spite of what the MSN can muster-up against
him, it will represent first time in the past 60 years that the Establishment did not choose and
own the candidates of both parties.
Which leads me to believe that if history serves as a guide, and I think it does, the Establishment
will have him assassinated, while the resources are still available and in place to cover it up
and have it white-washed by an official inquiry similar to the fake 9/11 Commission & Warren Commission
Report.
Clark, Mar. 1 2016, 10:28 a.m.
Trump worries/offends the neo-cons in his perversity, but the neo-cons know they can rely on
Hillary Clinton.
M Hobbs -> Clark, Mar. 3 2016, 2:30 p.m.
So if HRC gets the nomination, all the neocon Rs will vote for her and lots of the lefty Ds
and independents will vote for Trump. This is getting confusing.
Gene Poole -> M Hobbs, Mar. 4 2016, 4:32 a.m.
Yep. And ain't it sweet!?
SeniorsForTrump, Mar. 1 2016, 9:57 a.m.
TRUMP's opponents offer nothing but their arrogant condescending attitudes towards the
voting population. Their use of scare tactics on voters will no longer work. These cookie-cutter
politicians and their obsolete powerful old-boy establishment handlers are wrong for today's challenges
and tomorrows solutions. Stop wasting voter's time and energy trying to make this election about
personalities, gender, race, minorities, religion, fear and hatred. TRUMP has faith and trust
in the voters; TRUMP is the only candidate who doesn't insult, scare or lie to voters; TRUMP offers
voters hope and a future ALL Americans can believe in and deserve.
All of Trump's establishment opponents are begging for just one more chance. These opponent
candidates squandered thousands of opportunities, for the past fifty years, at the expense of
All Americans in America and abroad. Powerful corrupt insiders', of every party affiliation, who
discredit TRUMP, or any candidate, are also discrediting American voters', the American voting
process and the freedoms of democracies and republics everywhere. These discrediting efforts,
to take down any candidate, will fail because this is America and in America the peoples' choice
for their next president must and will always prevail. American voters' rights and choices must
always be protected, respected and never ignored. Because America is not a dictatorship voters'
choices' still count. We are lucky to live in a country where we can agree to disagree. This is
the essence of freedom. Every American and every candidate should be upset when this kind of corruption
goes on. Thank you, Donald Trump, and every candidate, for running for President and offering
informed voters an opportunity out of this nightmare and a path to a better America for ALL Americans!
The debates heading into Super Tuesday continues to show voters TRUMP's presidential qualities.
Eminent Domain didn't stick to TRUMP, neither will groundless tax allegations nor outrageous innuendos.
TRUMPS opponents are doing themselves a disservice attacking TRUMP. TRUMP offers voters hope and
a future ALL Americans can believe in. TRUMP will own Super Tuesday.
Carroll Price -> SeniorsForTrump, Mar. 1 2016, 11:15 a.m.
Very well stated. I agree whole-heartedly.
john p. Teschke, Mar. 1 2016, 2:28 a.m.
This explains the virulent dislike of Trump by the lamestream media. Hillary, an unindicted
war criminal based on her central role in instituting the Khaddafi overthrow and her role in starting
the Syrian war, is without a doubt the greater evil in comparison with Trump. Since Trump in the
fall campaign won't hesitate to highlight the fact that the jihadis in Libya put in as largely
as a result of Hillary's initiative liquidated tens or hundreds of thousands of black Africans
who had settled in Khaddafi's Libya as hostile to Jihadi elements, this will likely dampen Afro-American
ardour for Hillary's campaign. Hopefully this will be a torpedo which sinks her campaign.
dahoit -> john p. Teschke, Mar. 1 2016, 8:22 a.m.
Truth is the enemy of the Zionist serial liars.
Jeff, Mar. 1 2016, 2:05 a.m.
I've been saying for awhile that Trump is probably the least bad of the Republican candidates.
He's definitely not as bad as Rubio or Cruz would be. For one thing, he's opposed to the TPP and
similar crap. Now this.
Make no mistake, the only candidate left who wouldn't continue the same awfulness would
be Sanders, who doesn't stand a chance (for those who don't understand how the 15% super delegates
rigs the election for Clinton and other establishment candidates, do the math, not to even mention
the money and power behind Clinton). I don't support Trump in any way, but I also find it
laughable how some so-called progressives are wetting their pants over him. Yes he's racist, but
so are the Republicans in general. At least Trump has a few good positions, making him about the
same as Clinton.
Winston, Feb 29, 2016, 7:48 p.m.
Bernie and Donald are simply two-fisted middle fingers enthusiastically directed at the paid
enforcers of the oligarchy's desired status quo, the Republican and Democrat political machines.
Donald, unlike poor Bernie, has the advantage of being able to avoid the oligarchy's mega-cash-fueled
vetting process intended to weed out true boat rockers by funding his own campaign.
When Reps threaten to vote for Dems and I see headlines like "Democratic National Committee
Vice Chair Tulsi Gabbard resigned from her post on Sunday to endorse Democratic presidential candidate
Bernie Sanders, following months of rising tensions within the group," I have hope that both party
machines will, deservedly, become increasingly irrelevant. The facade has come off and we finally
see the truth, which is there is no loyalty within the establishment of either political party
to anything but the continued power of the oligarchy they BOTH defend.
Election 2016 is turning out to be a rare popcorn worthy event because voters are now TOTALLY
fed up with THIS:, From the 2014 Princeton University study:, Testing Theories of American Politics:
Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens, Excerpts:, A great deal of empirical research speaks
to the policy influence of one or another set of actors, but until recently it has not been possible
to test these contrasting theoretical predictions against each other within a single statistical
model. We report on an effort to do so, using a unique data set that includes measures of the
key variables for 1,779 policy issues.
Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business
interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens
and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial
support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not
for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.
In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule-at least not in the
causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with
economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong
status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans
favor policy change, they generally do not get it.
…the preferences of economic elites (as measured by our proxy, the preferences of "affluent"
citizens) have far more independent impact upon policy change than the preferences of average
citizens do. To be sure, this does not mean that ordinary citizens always lose out; they fairly
often get the policies they favor, but only because those policies happen also to be preferred
by the economically-elite citizens who wield the actual influence.
-–, From "Post-Soviet Lessons for a Post-America Century" by Dmitry Orlov, someone who experienced
the collapse of the Soviet Union and the various effects of that collapse on life there:, People
in the United States have a broadly similar attitude toward politics with people of the Soviet
Union. In the U.S. this is often referred to as "voter apathy", but it might be more accurately
described as non-voter indifference. The Soviet Union had a single, entrenched, systemically corrupt
political party, which held a monopoly on power. The U.S. has two entrenched, systemically corrupt
political parties, whose positions are often indistinguishable, and which together hold a monopoly
on power. In either case, there is, or was, a single governing elite, but in the United States
it organized itself into opposing teams to make its stranglehold on power seem more sportsmanlike.
Although people often bemoan political apathy as if it were a grave social ill, it seems to
me that this is just as it should be. Why should essentially powerless people want to engage in
a humiliating farce designed to demonstrate the legitimacy of those who wield the power? In Soviet-era
Russia, intelligent people did their best to ignore the Communists: paying attention to them,
whether through criticism or praise, would only serve to give them comfort and encouragement,
making them feel as if they mattered. Why should Americans want to act any differently with regard
to the Republicans and the Democrats? For love of donkeys and elephants?, -–, "Now [the United
States is] just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the
nominations for president or to elect the president. And the same thing applies to governors and
U.S. senators and congress members. So now we've just seen a complete subversion of our political
system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect and sometimes get favors for themselves
after the election's over. … The incumbents, Democrats and Republicans, look upon this unlimited
money as a great benefit to themselves. Somebody's who's already in Congress has a lot more to
sell to an avid contributor than somebody who's just a challenger. – - Jimmy Carter, former president,
in 2015.
sgt_doom, Feb 29, 2016, 6:58 p.m.
So one of the principal founding members of PNAC, or the Project for a New American Century (and
Victoria Nuland's husband), R. Kagan, says vote for Hillary?
And this just weeks after Hillary is bragging about receiving complements from Henry Kissinger,
mass murderer?
Are there still fools in America who believe HRC is some kind of liberal?
And who did HRC appoint as SecState? Marc Grossman, Bush inner circle guy and Bush family
relative; Victoria Nuland, former defense policy advisor to Dick Cheney, and her husband, Robert
Kagan. This has to be a WTF moment for anyone with a brain?
Benito Mussolini, Feb 29, 2016, 6:46 p.m.
I don't think the neoconservatives should purchase a one way ticket into the Hillary camp. Trump
could be quite amenable to the 'Ledeen Doctrine' that: "Every ten years or so, the United States
needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show
the world we mean business". My understanding is that Trump has no objections in principle, but
as a prudent businessman, questions whether it's worth shelling out 1 trillion dollars just to
show you mean business.
I believe the neoconservatives may have had some self-esteem issues and perhaps tended
to overcompensate by splurging on vanity wars. Trump will return the Republican party to its conservative
roots of fiscal responsibility and insist on getting good value for his wars. A Trump campaign
will completely dispense with 'shock and awe'. Instead, he'll cut straight to the chase: "Where
are the oilfields and how long will it take to pump them dry?" The neoconservatives could benefit
from that sort of discipline.
However, if the neoconservatives decide to return to the party they abandoned in the 1960s,
then I wish them well. They had a good run with the Republicans and certainly left their mark
on foreign policy. Sometimes a change of scenery is good; it may be all they need to rekindle
their enthusiasm for the third (or is the fourth?) Iraq war.
Lawrence, Feb 29, 2016, 6:05 p.m.
It be fitting for the neocons who were originally leftist followers of Trotsky to go back
home to the Democratic party. Maybe then the old non-interventionist anti-war right can rise again
in amongst the Republicans.
eddie-g, Feb 29, 2016, 5:21 p.m.
Perhaps worth noting that the Neocons originally found influence with interventionist Democrats
like Dan Moynihan, they went on to develop alliances with fiercely nationalistic Reaganites (like
Cheney and Rumsfeld), but only truly came to the fore as policy-makers within the GW Bush presidency.
So they've never exactly had a set ideological compass, they're happy to back anyone who'll
do their bidding on Israel and the Middle East. With Trump, I can't imagine they (or anyone else)
knows what they're getting; Hillary meanwhile is a known quantity, and hawkish enough for their
tastes.
craigsummers -> eddie-g, Feb 29, 2016, 6:47 p.m.
"……..Perhaps worth noting that the Neocons originally found influence with interventionist Democrats
like Dan Moynihan, they went on to develop alliances with fiercely nationalistic Reaganites (like
Cheney and Rumsfeld), but only truly came to the fore as policy-makers within the GW Bush presidency….."
True, but they lost favor in the Bush White House after the invasion of Iraq turned south.
dahoit -> craigsummers, Mar. 1 2016, 8:38 a.m.
Somewhat true, but how does that explain the demoncrats embracing them in Obombas administration?
Craigsummers -> dahoit, Mar. 1 2016, 7:21 p.m.
I don't believe that Obama has embraced the neocons.. Obama has alienated our allies in the ME
including Israel, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. His large disagreements with Netanyahu flag Obama as
anything but a neocon.
Duglarri -> eddie-g, Mar. 1 2016, 11:37 a.m.
The Neocons are like parasites that jump from host to host. When they've killed one host they
move on to the next. I'm reminded of the old Sci-Fi movie, "The Hidden".
owen, Feb 29, 2016, 4:53 p.m.
… just in case y'all are not aware, the view from outside the walls of Empire U$A, when we
see the audience holding up placards declaring "MAKE AMERICA'S MILITARY GREAT AGAIN" we're all
thinking – 'you guys are truly the most manipulated, compromised and fucked up people on the planet'.
Dave Fisher, Feb 29, 2016, 4:38 p.m.
"Neoconservative historian Robert Kagan announced that if Trump secures the nomination "the only
choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton.", i hope Sanders runs with that, uses it in his ads,
cites that quote during the debates, makes the electorate aware of the fox (weasel?) in the chicken
coop…
Balthazar, Feb 29, 2016, 3:58 p.m.
The US has become the laughing stock of the world. Oh wait, we've been that for decades.
star, Feb 29, 2016, 3:52 p.m.
"worried he will not pursue the same bellicose foreign policy"
No, he will pursue a different
bellicose foreign policy relying on banning Muslims from the US, torture, filling up Guantanamo,
threatening Mexico and 'hitting' the families of 'terrorists'. The Intercept is actually starting
to scare me.
Robert -> star, Feb 29, 2016, 6:01 p.m.
So drone warfare killing thousand+ innocent people isn't "starting to scare" you? Overthrowing
governments in Iraq, Libya, and Syria isn't "starting to scare" you? ISIS forming out of those
overthrows isn't "starting to scare" you?
dahoit -> star, Mar. 1 2016, 8:42 a.m.
Wow, the only guy to critique the Iraq war, Libya, trade steals, getting along with Russia and
stop being the policeman of the world gets critiqued by alleged liberals as the bad choice in
a world of crazy Ziomonsters.
Hang it up children, you've lost your minds.
nfjtakfa -> Roy David, Feb 29, 2016, 5:49 p.m.
Um, I think Vivek Jain's assertion is the destruction of Iraq and destabalization of the region
was 100% intentional, i.e. "wasn't a mistake."
Roy David -> nfjtakfa, Mar. 1 2016, 5:25 p.m.
Thanks nfjtakfa. Sometimes the written word can be misinterpreted.
Christopher -> Vivek Jain, Feb 29, 2016, 5:47 p.m.
Remind me just where and when we found the nukes Iraq was supposed to have, then. Or the mobile
bioweapons labs. Or Hussein's al-Qaeda collaborators.
coram nobis -> Christopher, Feb 29, 2016, 6:13 p.m.
As you see, the Iraq war wasn't a mistake, but a deliberate fake.
reflections, Feb 29, 2016, 3:40 p.m.
They created Donald Trump and thanks to the Supreme Court any rich ass-- can run for office they
don't need to fund a particular political republican bigot.
Bob, Feb 29, 2016, 3:25 p.m.
Trump is a professional actor as are all the cons but he is better at it. Read his book, TAoTD
and you may change your mind a lot on him as POTUS. He certainly is no conbot and IMHO would make
a much better POTUS than any of the dwarf wall st. sucking varlets competing against him. I'm
still hoping Senator Bernie Sanders will take the gloves off and start attacking the war mongering,
wall st. courtier Clinton before it's too late but, if my choice was Clinton vs. Trump I would
hold my nose and vote Trump. Rubio is so hollow he is unqualified for his present job. Good luck
USA.
coram nobis, Feb 29, 2016, 2:31 p.m.
It's an interesting shift of perspective in this crazy year, although the question with the Donald
is (1) whether he has a coherent ideology from one speech to the next and (2) whether the GOP
would become more dovish (or less neocon) under a Trump administration, or whether the GOP would
simply abandon him.
As for Hillary, sir, your coda begs another article: " … and Clinton moving the Democrats towards
greater support for war.", With whom?, Okay, Iran is a definite possibility, given her pro-Israel
stance. But what about China? That situation in the South China Sea is ratcheting up. And what
about Russia? Washington's talking like the west bank of the Dnieper is our east coast.
Doug Salzmann -> coram nobis, Feb 29, 2016, 3:19 p.m.
"And what about Russia? Washington's talking like the west bank of the Dnieper is our east
coast.", Surrounding and dismantling Russia has been the goal since the collapse of the USSR.
And Killary and the neocons (including the large contingent she and Obama installed at State)
are definitely crazy enough to push it.
On the list of Big Dumb Mistakes, this would be very close to the top.
Dave Fisher -> Doug Salzmann, Feb 29, 2016, 4:26 p.m.
"dismantling Russia", what exactly does that mean?
Si1ver1ock -> Dave Fisher, Feb 29, 2016, 5:26 p.m.
Ask the Syrians or the the Libyans, or the Iraqis or the Sundanese, or the Yemenis or … or ….
Doug Salzmann -> Dave Fisher, Feb 29, 2016, 8:18 p.m.
"dismantling Russia", what exactly does that mean?, It means exactly what I said, Dave. Surrounding,
weakening and (ultimately, hopefully) dismantling and absorbing the pieces of the Russian Federation
has been at the core of American foreign policy aims since the collapse of the USSR.
See, for instance, the pre-revised version of the 2/18/1992 Wolfowitz (and Scooter Libby) Memo:
Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory
of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly
by the Soviet Union. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy
and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources
would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.
And then, refer to Zbigniew Brzezinski's Grand Chessboard:
Given the enormous size and diversity of the country, a decentralized political system, based
on the free market, would be more likely to unleash the creative potential of both the Russian
people and the country's vast natural resources. In turn, such a more decentralized Russia
would be less susceptible to imperial mobilization.
. . . and . . .
A loosely confederated Russia-composed of a European Russia, a Siberian Republic, and a Far
Eastern Republic-would also find it easier to cultivate closer economic relations with Europe,
with the new states of Central Asia, and with the Orient, which would thereby accelerate Russia's
own development. Each of the three confederated entities would also be more able to tap local
creative potential, stifled for centuries by Moscow's heavy bureaucratic hand.
Hope this helps. ;^)
Gene Poole -> Dave Fisher, Mar. 4 2016, 5:13 a.m.
In the short tem it means replacing Putin by another Eltsin-like stooge. In the middle term,
it meant dismantling the USSR. In the long term it means defending Capital against the threat
of Socialism.
Patricia Baeten, Feb 29, 2016, 2:30 p.m.
Great article. I wrote something similar in my blog post last week titled, NATO, Turkey and Saudi
Arabia's Worst Nightmare President Donald Trump.
Excerpt:, The beneficiaries of Bush and Obama's Evil American Empire invading and destroying
nations throughout the world have been Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Along with their NATO allies,
America has spent trillions of dollars on the military industrial complex while our roads and
bridges fail and jobs have been shipped to third world countries.
The unparalleled destruction of Syria as well as all of the Middle East, Eurasia and Africa
will come to an end under President Donald Trump and the world is taking note.
My greatest fear is that a full hot war against Russia and China will commence before the election.
Love your writing, thanks.
Patricia
Bob -> Patricia Baeten, Feb 29, 2016, 3:29 p.m.
I hope you meant NOT commence. I really don't want to die and these things have a habit of escalating.
dahoit -> Bob, Mar. 1 2016, 9:00 a.m.
She is intimating the Zionists will start war with Russia before Trump takes office, a quite possible
scenario when dealing with the insane Zionists.
Jose -> Patricia Baeten, Feb 29, 2016, 3:32 p.m.
The chaos Trump will bring to the neocon's imperialist project is probably the only good thing
that might come out of a Trump presidency.
The Shame Chamber -> Patricia Baeten, Feb 29, 2016, 7:19 p.m.
Trump said he would declassify the 28 pages on foreign government ties to 9/11. Why hasn't that
happened yet?, http://28pages.org/
dahoit -> The Shame Chamber, Mar. 1 2016, 9:02 a.m.
Uh, he's not in government? sheesh.
dahoit -> Patricia Baeten, Mar. 1 2016, 8:58 a.m.
Good comment, don't mind the idiots stuck in their false narrative.
craigsummers, Feb 29, 2016, 2:22 p.m.
Mr. Jilani, "……Neoconservative historian Robert Kagan - one of the prime intellectual backers
of the Iraq war and an advocate for Syrian intervention - announced in the Washington Post last
week that if Trump secures the nomination "the only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton."…..",
The Intercept is clearly confused on quite a few issues. First, the Republican Party generally
supports a strong leadership role for the US in foreign policy (as do the Democrats). Both parties
will ensure that the US pursues our geopolitical interests. Of course, this is not limited just
to the Neocons. Second, the entire Republican establishment opposes Trump for obvious reasons.
Again, this is not limited to the Neocons, and it is not too surprising that Republicans may cross
party lines to vote for Hillary who more closely mirrors some of their foreign policies. She is
a hawk. Third, the Republican and Democratic Parties are strong supporters of Israel – not just
the Neocons. In general, Republicans support Israel even to a greater degree than the Democrats
– and again, this is not limited to the Neoconservatives.
Finally, how important is the Israel-Palestinian conflict to the Intercept? Obviously very
important since the Intercept seems willing to forget that Trump has been called a xenophobe and
an anti-Muslim bigot by many on the left. Have you ever heard the saying: the enemy of my enemy
is my friend?
sgt_doom -> craigsummers, Feb 29, 2016, 4:20 p.m.
I fully agree with Jilani and this Summers is an obvious neocon sycophant of Wall Street.
craigsummers -> sgt_doom, Feb 29, 2016, 5:03 p.m.
sgt_doom, What is extraordinary to me is that Jilani seems to value the Israel-neutral stance
of Trump over Hillary (and her obvious support for Israel) despite Trump (initially) not even
being able to disavow support from the KKK. Maybe that is not so remarkable considering that Jilani
tweeted the term "Israel firsters".
Christopher -> craigsummers, Feb 29, 2016, 5:50 p.m.
"Both parties will ensure that the US pursues our geopolitical interests.", Jesus. Have you been
in a coma since 2003? Or I guess maybe since the 1980's, cough Iran-Contra cough cough.
craigsummers -> Christopher, Feb 29, 2016, 6:44 p.m.
I'm not saying there aren't differences, but generally speaking both the Democrats and the Republicans
have maintained strong policies which favor US interests. Obama had some confusing policies which
alienated long term allies like Saudi Arabia, Israel and Egypt.
Carroll Price -> craigsummers, Mar. 1 2016, 8:30 p.m.
You mean US "corporate" interest and Israel's interest don't you? For the past 30 years, both
parties have pursued policies that are in direct conflict with the interest of the American people.
Gene Poole -> Carroll Price, Mar. 4 2016, 5:31 a.m.
Bravo. I was going to reply to his first post, in which he said " Both parties will ensure that
the US pursues our geopolitical interests", and ask just who "we" are.
Boaz Bismuth: Mr. Trump, yesterday, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio tried to question your support
for Israel. How is his commitment to Israel stronger than yours?, Donald Trump: "My friendship
with Israel is stronger than any other candidate's. I want to make one thing clear: I want
to strike a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. It is what I aspire to
do. Peace is possible, even if it is the most difficult agreement to achieve. As far as
I understand, Israel is also interested in a peace deal. I'm not saying I'll succeed, or
even that an agreement between Israel and the Palestinians is within reach, but I want to
try. But in order for an agreement to happen, the Palestinians need to show interest. It's
a little difficult to reach an agreement when the other side doesn't really want to talk
to you.
"Don't get confused there in Israel: I am currently your biggest friend. My daughter
is married to a Jew who is an enthusiastic Israel supporter, and I have taken part in many
Israel Day Parades. My friendship with Israel is very strong."
Yes, an especially bitter sop to those who harbor the manufactured illusion that trump is concerned
with the sovereign rights of the individual.
avelna2001, Feb 29, 2016, 1:45 p.m.
Neoconservative historian Robert Kagan - one of the prime intellectual backers of the Iraq
war and an advocate for Syrian intervention - announced in the Washington Post last week that
if Trump secures the nomination "the only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton.", Truly,
this tells you all you need to know about Hillary Clinton…
Doug Salzmann -> avelna2001, Feb 29, 2016, 3:24 p.m.
"Truly, this tells you all you need to know about Hillary Clinton…", Well, that and the fact that
Killary and Obama named Kagan's wife, Victoria Jane "Cookie" Nuland to the post of Assistant Secretary
of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, where she led the sponsorship and underwriting of
a coup against the elected leadership of Ukraine.
avelna2001 -> Doug Salzmann, Feb 29, 2016, 3:51 p.m.
Well yeah, true enough.
Kathleen, Feb 29, 2016, 1:43 p.m.
Fascinating that Trump has the warmongers nervous. Heading Hillary's way where they know their
rearrangement of the middle east (PNAC, JINSA) no matter how many thousands are killed or refugees
are displace is safe with Hillary. She has demonstrated her commitment to the death and destruction
in the middle east.
This is no bs…know some multi millionaire Republicans here in Colorado who are going with
Hillary if Trump gets nomination. They know their capital gains are safe with her. Yes indeed...
sgt_doom, Feb 29, 2016, 1:33 p.m.
Good to see that all those neoconservative prayer breakfasts Sen. Hillary Clinton attended
at the Geo. W. Bush White House aren't going to waste. Of course, the neocons embrace "Wall Street
Hillary" as they always have, regardless of all the silly political theater to the contrary.
BTW, isn't Robert Kagan the hubby of Victoria Nuland, Assistant Secretary of State for European
and Eurasian Affairs appointed by then Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton?, I believe so
. . .
Of course, we haven't had a legitimate government in the USA since the Coup of 1963 (the JFK
assassination, reinforced by the murders of Rev. King and Bobby Kennedy), so evidently Trump represents
the first break in a long line of illegitimate administrations.
Trump really appears to be giving the nervous willies to the oligarchs – – – glad to see those
swine who gave us - and profited from - the global economic meltdown being shaken up for a change!,
With Hillary they have nothing to fear, she's the perfect Wall Street running dog lackey, but
with Trump they could end up in jail - or worse . . . .
24b4Jeff, Feb 29, 2016, 1:20 p.m.
It's good to see that Hillary is finally being openly welcomed into the fold of neo-conservatives.
Also, pardon my lack of modesty for a certain pride in having been proven right about her. She
is not a progressive, not liberal, but rather a fascist in the true sense of representing the
corporatists.
Does anyone else find it ironic that the New York Times has chosen now to start a series on
her role in the overthrow of Qaddafi and the subsequent conversion of Libya into a failed state?
Had the articles started appearing a couple of weeks ago, it might have helped Sanders in Iowa
and Nevada. No, it would not have helped Sanders in South Carolina, and he is foredoomed in the
rest of the deep south as well, not only because of his being a social democrat (on domestic issues)
but also because he is a Jew.
Doug Salzmann -> 24b4Jeff, Feb 29, 2016, 4:15 p.m.
Good call on the timing of the NYT series, Jeff. And kudos on having recognized her early
on for the fascist she has always been. I've not caught up with the Times series; does each
installment open with this video clip?
ghostyghost, Feb 29, 2016, 1:16 p.m.
"With Trump's ascendancy, it's possible that the parties will re-orient their views on war and
peace, with Trump moving the GOP to a more dovish direction and Clinton moving the Democrats towards
greater support for war."
Right because "bomb the shit out of them" is a well known rallying
cry of pacifists.
coram nobis -> ghostyghost, Feb 29, 2016, 2:37 p.m.
You've got a point; the Donald isn't exactly another Gandhi. The diff between him and Hillary
is that she would act according to longstanding neocon policy, concerted war. The Donald would
attack impulsively. Picture him as the Groucho Marx character in "Duck Soup" and there's a possible
simile, but not funny.
ghostyghost -> coram nobis, Feb 29, 2016, 2:49 p.m.
What scares me the most about President Trump is him taking a look at the nuclear arsenal and
thinking "we have these awesome weapons and they are just sitting here collecting dust. Well lets
show everyone that a real leader isn't afraid to use his best tools!" and then wiping Mosul and
and Raqqa off the map.
coram nobis -> ghostyghost, Feb 29, 2016, 4:36 p.m.
Glad Robert Kagan's neoconservative re-branding attempts have started to garner headlines.
Kagan was hand picked to be on Hillary Clinton's defense policy board while at the State
Dept and for those who don't know who Kagan is, he's the husband of the assistant secretary of
state for eurasian affairs, Victoria Nuland.
Or, Victoria "let's spend $5 billion to overthrow the democratically elected administration in
the Urkaine" Nuland.
Lin Ming, Feb 29, 2016, 1:13 p.m.
These people will do anything to further their cause – just as they always have – up to and including
eliminating an opponent in the most forceful permanent manner…
"... Leaping from this incident to the Iranian nuclear agreement that has essentially decreased the likelihood of Iran ever building nuclear weapons, Trump continued his litany of lies by portraying the agreement as virtual surrender to unnamed dark forces. ..."
"... Hillary Clinton's campaign promises more of the same corporatist politics in the service of the Goldman-Sachs of the nation. The primary difference may be found in her social stances, which are more liberal and tolerant than those expressed by Trump's ticket. ..."
"... In short, we are witnessing a serious split in the US ruling class. Both elements recognize capitalism is in crisis and has been for decades. The two main solutions to this crisis as represented by the campaigns will not solve this crisis, because it is essentially unsolvable. ..."
"... Militarily, there is also a split between the rulers. Neither Trump's combination of fear-ridden America First bluster nor the corporate world order represented by Clinton's campaign will prevent war or terrorism. Both will guarantee the continued waste of monies that the permanent war economy is. Both will also guarantee the continued domination of the US economy by the war industry. Donald Trump knows this and so does Hilary Clinton. ..."
More importantly, however, was his take on history, which went no further back
then 2008, at best. By pretending that history began when Barack Obama was
elected president, all the decades of jobs being sent overseas because
corporations want cheap labor became the fault of more recent free trade
agreements. While these agreements certainly expedited the desire/need of the
capitalist overlords to go for the cheap labor, this process was taking place
before such agreements were passed. Furthermore, Trump and his businesses
benefited from them and he did nothing to oppose them then. In short, it is how
monopoly capitalism works: capital goes to where it can accumulate greater
profits, utilizing the military and "free" trade to cajole and force its will
on nations and peoples around the world.
Continuing his litany of America
wronged, Trump referred to the Iran nuclear agreement. He related the FoxNews
version of some US sailors being held by Iranian military after their ship
sailed into Iranian waters. According to this version, the sailors were
humiliated hostages who were wrongly held. In actuality, the sailors were
treated well and were in the wrong. Their captain surely knew this when he
sailed where he sailed. Leaping from this incident to the Iranian nuclear
agreement that has essentially decreased the likelihood of Iran ever building
nuclear weapons, Trump continued his litany of lies by portraying the agreement
as virtual surrender to unnamed dark forces.
Of course, the presence of "dark" forces and the threat they represent to
Trump and his followers are essential to understanding his appeal. Indeed, the
local Gannett broadsheet here in Vermont, introduced Trump's acceptance speech
in the next day's paper with this quote from the speech "safety will be
restored." I first noted this emphasis on safety while listening to an argument
between a young anti-Trump protester and an even younger Trump supporter at the
end of a Vermont anti-Trump action. Besides the obvious fact that his proposed
policies based on fear, hate, and US triumphalism are no more likely to restore
safety than Clinton's policies of brinksmanship and subterfuge, this statement
begs the question about whose safety Mr. Trump is referring to.
... ... ...
While Trump pretends that his millennialist rhetoric will bring the US back to a time my
father grew up in-when father knew best and was whiter than Ivory Snow soap, Hillary
Clinton's campaign promises more of the same corporatist politics in the service of the
Goldman-Sachs of the nation. The primary difference may be found in her social stances, which are
more liberal and tolerant than those expressed by Trump's ticket.
In short, we are witnessing a serious split in the US ruling class. Both elements recognize
capitalism is in crisis and has been for decades. The two main solutions to this crisis as
represented by the campaigns will not solve this crisis, because it is essentially unsolvable.
Trump's approach hopes to move the capitalist economy back to a time before World War One,
when production of goods was almost as important as the financial manipulation of monies for
profit and national economies were the primary and dominant macro economy. Clinton's approach
would continue the trend of the last few decades that has seen capital move beyond national
boundaries to create what Lenin called "the formation of international monopolist capitalist
associations which share the world among themselves." This latter phenomenon is what the
so-called free trade agreements are about. Trump's belief that he can buck this trend runs
counter to history, although he seems to think that he is beyond history, except for that which
he makes.
Militarily, there is also a split between the rulers. Neither Trump's combination of
fear-ridden America First bluster nor the corporate world order represented by Clinton's campaign
will prevent war or terrorism. Both will guarantee the continued waste of monies that the
permanent war economy is. Both will also guarantee the continued domination of the US economy by
the war industry. Donald Trump knows this and so does Hilary Clinton.
"... I think this is about the dumbest thing a politician has done since her husband nominated Lloyd Bentson secretary of the Treasury (OK the stuff he did with Lewinsky wasn't too smart either but this Clinton wasn't as tempted this time). ..."
I was fairly certain that if Clinton were elected president and the Democrats were to
win a majority in the Senate, that they would lose that majority in 2018.
I think that Hillary Clinton may have proven me wrong and found
the only way to prevent that - by causing the Democrats to lose the majority in 2017.
I think this is about the dumbest thing a politician has done since her husband nominated
Lloyd Bentson secretary of the Treasury (OK the stuff he did with Lewinsky wasn't too smart either
but this Clinton wasn't as tempted this time).
"... Chris Hedges, Ralph Nader, and even Noam Chomsky have long understood that the term "socialist"is a misnomer when applied to Sanders; the terms "liberal democrat" and "Roosevelt democrat" are far more accurate in describing the bulk of his ideas. ..."
"... Anyone who has labored to sit through the string of debates between the two could not help but conclude that Sander's has consistently refrained from attacking Clinton in a way that would irreparably harm her candidacy in a general election. Consider Sander's defense of Clinton's illegal use of an Email server in her residence and the chronic mishandling of classified information while she was secretary of State and then ask yourself why it is that Sanders believes that Clinton should be held to a standard any different from those who have been indicted, and in some cases maliciously prosecuted, for the leaking and/or mishandling of classified information. ..."
"... A major Clinton Foundation donor, a commodity trader and Hillary's campaign bundler, Mr. Rajiv Fernando, was appointed at State Department International Security Advisory Board . Fernando is also one of the superdelegates! ..."
"... Also he would shrink NATO and curtail US bases overseas, very needed actions. NATO should be dissolved and it's functions rolled into a new UN, with Russia and China included–all countries. Clinton being the blood thirsty neocon hawk she is, could leave us into dangerous wars, as she has already, that could culminate in a nuclear one. ..."
"... Generally speaking the American political system is not parliamentary in nature, so third parties are really unable to affect government policy. ..."
"... I have written to the Sanders campaign encouraging them to NOT go to the convention, because the Dem elite are convinced that they have successfully rigged the primary, and I think they may be correct in that assessment. Regardless, the Democratic Party is far too gone, too bought and too corrupt to reform. ..."
"... Once the Democrat elite unleashes one of the most brutal police forces in the country on demonstrators at a Philadelphia convention, to break heads and bones, and pepper spray to near asphyxiation, it will not have been worth it; not one demonstrator, young or old, should suffer an injury for the rotten Dems. Better to have a political Woodstock in Burlington, start a new party, and never vote Democrat again. I'm done with them, up ticket and down. ..."
"... Very well said. I can't believe how much the shills are clinging to that "unity" argument. "We need the party to all pull together. That's why we're stacking the deck in every conceivable way against the popular candidate who represents the vast majority's viewpoint on almost every domestic issue, who's virtually guaranteed to trounce the other side come election day, and urging everyone instead to get in line behind an irredeemably corrupt enemy of everything they want, the only candidate weak enough to possibly lose." ..."
"... Bullshit. If Hill was serious about party unity, she'd have dropped out by now. ..."
"... They cling to the "unite" myth because they cling to the myths, distortions, diversions and outright lies of the whole Clinton myth. There are not able to objectively reason, intelligently discern, or give up their lust (and hers) for power, positions and perks. Corruption laid bare. ..."
"... I detest Hillary Clinton, and did so well before I even knew more than that Bernie Sanders was this Independent senator from Vermont. What his campaign did do, so fantastically, is highlight for many (especially youngs) all the justified reasons to renounce almost everything Hillary Clinton stands for as well as the neoliberal, Democratic Party establishment she helped bring about and which she now leads. ..."
"... So if you think her being the nominee is going to "change things" in terms of Greenwald becoming all deferential and respectful toward Hillary fucking Clinton, well, I think you get the message now, right? ..."
Last night, the Associated Press - on a day when nobody voted -
surprised everyone by
abruptly declaring the
Democratic Party primary over and Hillary Clinton the victor. The decree, issued the night before
the California primary in which polls show Clinton and Bernie Sanders in a very close race, was
based on the media organization's survey of "superdelegates": the Democratic Party's 720
insiders, corporate donors, and officials whose votes for the presidential nominee count the same
as the actually elected delegates. AP claims that superdelegates who had not previously announced
their intentions privately told AP reporters that they intend to vote for Clinton, bringing her
over the threshold. AP is concealing the identity of the decisive superdelegates who said this.
This is the perfect symbolic ending to the Democratic Party primary: The
nomination is consecrated by a media organization, on a day when nobody voted, based on secret
discussions with anonymous establishment insiders and donors whose identities the media
organization - incredibly - conceals. The decisive edifice of superdelegates is itself
anti-democratic and inherently corrupt: designed to prevent actual voters from making choices
that the party establishment dislikes. But for a party run by insiders and funded by corporate
interests, it's only fitting that its nomination process ends with such an ignominious, awkward,
and undemocratic sputter.
Gator90, June 12 2016, 6:31 p.m.
Clinton: "To the LGBT community: please know that you have millions of allies
across our country…."
Trump: "What happened in Orlando is only the beginning…. I called it and asked for the ban [on
Muslim immigrants]."
Nope. No difference at all.
Muhib ↪ Gator90, June 13 2016, 3:55 a.m.
Clinton: 200,000 Muslims dead
Trump: 0
oh wait a minute there is a difference after all… Ill be damned
Karl, June 12 2016, 4:10 p.m.
Candace doesn't realize that quite a few supporters of Bernie Sanders are that rare thing
in US presidential politics: positively enthusiastic about their candidate's policies and
character!
Chris Hedges, Ralph Nader, and even Noam Chomsky have long understood that the term
"socialist"is a misnomer when applied to Sanders; the terms "liberal democrat" and "Roosevelt
democrat" are far more accurate in describing the bulk of his ideas. Likewise, the notion
that Sanders would operate in open defiance of the Democratic party and withhold his support
of Hillary Clinton in the general election is ludicrous. Anyone who has labored to sit
through the string of debates between the two could not help but conclude that Sander's has
consistently refrained from attacking Clinton in a way that would irreparably harm her
candidacy in a general election. Consider Sander's defense of Clinton's illegal use of an
Email server in her residence and the chronic mishandling of classified information while she
was secretary of State and then ask yourself why it is that Sanders believes that Clinton
should be held to a standard any different from those who have been indicted, and in some
cases maliciously prosecuted, for the leaking and/or mishandling of classified information.
All of this wringing of ones hands and gnashing of ones teeth by progressives over a Warren or
Sander's endorsement of Hillary Clinton is a mere reflection of their inability to acknowledge
their own unfailing propensity for gullibility.
Melissa Shutta, June 11 2016, 8:27 p.m.
Hillary won where independents could not vote, also I looked at the exit polls and they
were all adjusted to fit the results.
Thomas McGaffey, June 11 2016, 10:11 a.m.
HRC got more votes only because of the undemocratic weighted voting system.
The Democratic Party got what it deserved…we, the people, didn't!
Akech, June 11 2016, 10:09 a.m.
A major Clinton Foundation donor, a commodity trader and Hillary's campaign bundler,
Mr. Rajiv Fernando, was appointed at State Department International Security Advisory Board .
Fernando is also one of the superdelegates!
Am I just a jealous person in thinking there is something wrong here? We cast our votes and
they laugh their ways to the banks!
This is the face of the Clintons controlled Democratic establishment!
Bochos, June 11 2016, 7:50 a.m.
She is completely bought and paid for. It is a sad state of affairs when all America can
offer
are these two candidates for president. The leaders of the democratic party just do not get
it. They take care of themselves and forget about the people. I am afraid that Bernie was the
last
chance. The working men and women of this country will take it in the shorts for the next four
years.
Super Delegate Resolution adopted by the State of Colorado Democratic Convention
SUPER DELEGATE RESOLUTION
We the Democratic Party of Colorado believe that the selection of delegates to the Democratic
National Convention should be representative of the votes cast for Presidential candidates in
Democratic Party caucuses and primary elections, consistent with each state's Affirmative
Action Plan and principles of inclusivity and diversity.
We do not believe that the current Super-Delegate system of delegate selection is reflective
of these principles or the ideals of the Democratic Party.
It is therefore RESOLVED THAT the Democratic Party of Colorado hereby requests and urges the
Democratic National Committee (DNC) to review and change the Presidential delegate selection
process for future elections in a manner consistent with this resolution and our determination
that the current Super-Delegate system does not achieve our principles and ideals.
Mass Independent -> Pedinska, June 9 2016, 12:45 p.m.
Yes, I too love how all these people can predict the future. Gore picked the vicious neocon
Israeli Congressional voice Joe LIEberman as his VP. If Gore had died if office or been
removed, LIEberman would have joined in a war on Iraq, AND IRAN, in 2 seconds. But they
conveniently like to whine about Nader, who I proudly voted for twice, for 16 years now. Same
thing with Trump now, they all think they know what he would do, and use it to frighten weak
minded sheeple accordingly.
Now, I will not vote for Trump and do think he is really bad on many things. But on a few very
important things, I think he could be very beneficial. He has said he is willing to talk to
Russia, and North Korea, which shows that he is not a brain washed NATO stooge. Russia used
decades of oil revenue to rebuild their armaments and munitions, missiles and jets, and the
results showed in Syria (always helps to have smaller wars to test the toys in, US has been
doing that since Korea) and Outin is not to be toyed with. Yet NATO keeps pushing hard up to
the Russian borders, FOR NO GOOD REASON, and threatening Russia. Even Kerry complimented them
on how they were so effective against ISIS in Syria, quite an admission.
Also he would shrink NATO and curtail US bases overseas, very needed actions. NATO
should be dissolved and it's functions rolled into a new UN, with Russia and China
included–all countries. Clinton being the blood thirsty neocon hawk she is, could leave us
into dangerous wars, as she has already, that could culminate in a nuclear one. For me,
that is enough reason NOT to vote for Clinton. She has much blood on her hands, and while she
now claims Iraq vote was a mistake, she has no apologized for it. Not at all. Simply put, she
is a sociopath. And I will not vote for a sociopath.
I agree that Trump could be a disaster in many ways, but maybe not. I am not against slowing
Muslim immigration to do better background checking. It will be harder on them, but will not
cost us much more and possibly reduce some lone wolf internal terrorism, which is the driving
force for the fascist police/security state we are becoming. I fear Clinton's drive against
BDS and the 1st, 4th, 5th (ironic as she may end up over using it) and 8th Amendments more
than I fear terrorism. I'll risk Trump over Clinton. It's a strange world when we are forced
to pick a horrible Democrat because the Republicans picked a horrible candidate too. Vote Jill
Stein! A woman!
J. C. Martin, June 9 2016, 11:47 a.m.
This election signifies the ending of the Democratic Party for me. Obama was a wimp as a
president after we thought that he was going to be a Lincoln or an FDR. Hillary and Bill
Clinton are opportunists who have used the political system to enrich themselves. Bernie
Sanders is the greatest politician of my lifetime.
photosymbiosis -> Wortmanberg, June 9 2016, 11:26 a.m.
Generally speaking the American political system is not parliamentary in nature, so
third parties are really unable to affect government policy. In countries where third
(and fourth and fifth) parties are effective, it's because of the need of the majority parties
to form coalitions with these outsiders in order to gain a governing majority. But in
Congress, consider how the majority system works – even if it was 46% Republican, 45%
Democrat, and 9% Green, Republicans would still be the majority, right?
Correct me if I'm wrong – but in parliamentary systems, one of the two parties would have to
form a coalition with the Green party in that case to get majority status; so the Democrats
would be forced to give Green members important committee positions, etc., to surpass the
Republicans.
However, there's the other option – look at how successful Black Lives Matter has been. I was
pretty skeptical of them at first, but its undeniable that they've forced many racist police
chiefs and corrupt city mayors out of office by their direct action techniques – so perhaps
Sanders supporters should form a "Middle Class Lives Matter" movement, affiliated with no
party (as with BLM), but focused on pressuring both Republican and Democratic politicians at
the local, state and federal level over their issues.
After all, the issues that will protect the middle class from further destruction – student
loan forgiveness and expanded public education, revoking trade deals that ship manufacturing
jobs overseas, domestic infrastructure repair, ending foreign regime change games, raising the
minimum wage, getting off fossil fuels, lowering health care costs, regulating the crooked
home loan financial industry, etc. – are all far more important than any what any individual
political figure does.
I mean, any political figure will have flaws; for example while Bernie Sanders did a great
job, coming from nowhere, I think he flubbed the foreign policy issues entirely; not pushing
back against Clinton on supporting the Honduras coup, going along with the drone strike
program instead of pointing out that terrorists could be captured and tried in U.S. courts (as
was done with the 1993 WTC bombing), not getting a good foreign policy team on board that
could have exposed Clinton's disasters in Libya and Syria, not pushing back against expanding
NATO funding – really, without cutting the foreign military budget, how was Sanders going to
pay for his domestic programs? Recall how Lyndon Johnson's 'Great Society' was sacrificed to
finance the Vietnam War?
No politician is going to be perfect; you still need independent people to push issues,
playing follow-the-leader never works out in the long run (which is why we have term limits,
right?)
As Bob Dylan said: "Don't follow leaders, watch the parking meters."
Mass Independent, June 9 2016, 9:44 a.m.
Lots of comments today! NY Whore Times asked for comments on how readers "view this moment"
of Clinton trying to "unite" Sanders supporters with her corrupt, criminal primary "win". Here
is my comment:
How I view this moment. The hoopla and media bias will convince the weak minded and ignorant
Dem inclined American people, much of them with a 10-second attention span, that this most
compromised, entitled and possibly criminal candidate Clinton won fairly. Those who have been
paying close attention, who know her record, and witnessed the corruption and multi-state vote
fraud of the primary process will see it differently.
I have written to the Sanders campaign encouraging them to NOT go to the convention,
because the Dem elite are convinced that they have successfully rigged the primary, and I
think they may be correct in that assessment. Regardless, the Democratic Party is far too
gone, too bought and too corrupt to reform.
I would encourage Senator Sanders to run as an Independent Democratic Socialist, invite Jill
Stein and other Independents and a few Democrats of integrity to join him, and hold a
convention in Burlington, Vt. A joyous convention, a new party, a new start, a "new birth of
freedom" as Abe would say.
Once the Democrat elite unleashes one of the most brutal police forces in the country on
demonstrators at a Philadelphia convention, to break heads and bones, and pepper spray to near
asphyxiation, it will not have been worth it; not one demonstrator, young or old, should
suffer an injury for the rotten Dems. Better to have a political Woodstock in Burlington,
start a new party, and never vote Democrat again. I'm done with them, up ticket and down.
Phil -> Mass Independent, June 9 2016, 9:52 a.m.
Very well said. I can't believe how much the shills are clinging to that "unity"
argument. "We need the party to all pull together. That's why we're stacking the deck in every
conceivable way against the popular candidate who represents the vast majority's viewpoint on
almost every domestic issue, who's virtually guaranteed to trounce the other side come
election day, and urging everyone instead to get in line behind an irredeemably corrupt enemy
of everything they want, the only candidate weak enough to possibly lose."
Bullshit. If Hill was serious about party unity, she'd have dropped out by now.
Mass Independent -> Phil, June 9 2016, 12:24 p.m.
They cling to the "unite" myth because they cling to the myths, distortions, diversions
and outright lies of the whole Clinton myth. There are not able to objectively reason,
intelligently discern, or give up their lust (and hers) for power, positions and perks.
Corruption laid bare.
They also think that since their party primary rigging appears to be succeeding, that they can
rig the general. They'll try if it is close. I doubt they will succeed, as they don't run the
SCOTUS yet. I'll be voting Green, and then I can whine at THEM for 16 years when they lose
SCOTUS to Trump because of their flawed, corrupt candidate.
Phil, June 9 2016, 9:05 a.m.
Here's an interesting read with more on the CA primary: reports of truckloads of ballots
gone missing, statistical anomalies and what looks almost like sabotage of the voting process
through incompetence.
The problem with our screwed up governing process is the effects of factionalism of the 1%.
A small faction of our country plots and carries out its schemes to the detriment of the
majority. Creditor interests have more influence in legislation that debtor's interests.
Madison says it best in Federalist #10: "There are two methods of curing the mischiefs of
faction: the one, by removing its causes; the other, by controlling its effects."
Madison later concludes that 'controlling the effects' are the only means available to cure
the problem of factionalism.
Madison states: "The inference to which we are brought is, that the causes of faction cannot
be removed, and that relief is only to be sought in the means of controlling its effects."
He believed a large enough republic was the solution. However, since money influences
everyone, we are susceptible to its effects, especially career politicians and the election
cycle.
Therefore, the solution is to reduce the effects of money….yes, easier said than done.
Legislating money doesn't work as we have seen with the Citizen's United ruling. The 1% always
find a way around it. Therefore, prevention of career politicians might be a solution.
Proposed 28th Amendment
1. All current members of Congress are hereby dismissed and removed from office for a period
of 10 years. (select a future date out 2 years to implement)
2. Each State will randomly selects it representatives to serve a 2 year term from a voluntary
list of candidates who meet the qualification of being at least 35 years of age and have an
accredited degree from a post high school institution.
3. The term for a Junior senator is hereby extended to a 10 year term
4. The term for a Senior senator is hereby extended to a 20 year term
5. The department of Justice and the appointment of the Attorney General is hereby removed
from the office of the Executive and resides with the Senate
6. The term of office of the Attorney General is 4 years
By removing the election cycle from the House members, you remove the effects of career
politicians and the effects of monies being sent to them. The debtors (which are a majority of
the country) now have control of the House, and a sizeable interest in making legislation.
Influence peddlers can certainly try to bribe legislation and have it presented, but it will
most likely fail because Party has been removed as well as all the Paid-For Politicians.
The 1% is still invested in government as the Senate still holds elections, but the influence
of the 1% is reduced over the longer time of the new extended term.
Removing the Justice department from the Executive removes many (but not all) of the follies
of the Executive branch with their memos, etc.
It's our government. We can change it if we really want to.
Bluestate 1, June 8 2016, 9:31 p.m.
I'm surprised that Mr. Greenwald didn't also mention that in 2008, Hilary Clinton also won
the popular vote, but the DNC awarded the nomination to Obama based on Superdelegate votes
(and delegate votes that he did not earn, given that the DNC provided him with delegates from
both Michigan and Florida, places where he was not even on the ballot).
Joshua88, June 8 2016, 6:07 p.m.
Captured my sentiment well, Mr Greenwald. While MSNBC was the only cable network to
broadcast the news, instead of looking like they led the coverage, I thought it made them look
mean and petty.
I read something last week that MSNBC intended to announce HRC as the winner early. I think
they just assumed the eastern delegate counts would put her over the top. Nice that they went
after this story so vigorously while ignoring so many other important stories and issues.
Not turning on the television until late, I missed the real AP story. I went up and down the
"dial" and since nobody else was reporting this, I formed my opinion early. I hadn't heard
about the unnamed sources until now. Whoa…
Watching RT last night, the crawl mentioned that the Clintons are friends with Google (yes,
humans and a corporation). I cannot assume that it is Mr Schmidt, the face at all kinds of
Obama events. Noticeable to the point that Thomas Frank wondered about the omnipresent Mr
Schmidt in Listen, Liberal. Mr Schmidt ties the two politicians together in several
narratives. With that RT crawl, it makes you wonder how magical it is having (a) Google during
a primary and then presidential contest. (It makes me wonder.)
Mass Independent -> Joshua88, June 9 2016, 11:42 a.m.
Mr Schmidt loves Mr. Kissinger, and was one of a gang that went to that estate in England
when Assange was there under house arrest to talk to him. I think Schmidt is a real danger to
Democracy, the one behind the curtain of Big Brother-1984 style.
craigsummers, June 8 2016, 1:02 p.m.
Mr. Greenwald
This is certainly one of your classic, bitter anti-American articles.
"…….And just as was true in 2008 with Obama's nomination……..Clinton's nomination is an
important and positive milestone. Americans, being Americans, will almost certainly overstate
its world significance and wallow in excessive self-congratulations: Many countries on the
planet have elected women as their leaders, including many whose close family member had not
previously served as president……"
This is very similar in tone to your article written after Bin Laden was assassinated (Salon;
"Killing of bin Laden: What are the consequences?" May 2, 2011)
"……The killing of Osama bin Laden is one of those events which, especially in the immediate
aftermath, is not susceptible to reasoned discussion………all Good Americans chant "USA! USA!" in
a celebration of this proof of our national greatness and Goodness (and that of our
President)…… And then there's the notion that America has once again proved its greatness and
preeminence by killing bin Laden. Americans are marching in the street celebrating with a
sense of national pride…….It seems telling that hunting someone down and killing them is one
of the few things that still produce these feelings of nationalistic unity. I……..had actually
intended to make this point with regard to our killing of Gadaffi's son in Libya - a mere 25
years after President Reagan bombed Libya and killed Gadaffi's infant daughter. That is
something the U.S. has always done well and is one of the few things it still does well………."
I love your last line – and it is a very telling (about your view of Americans): "One of the
few things left that Americans still do well".
Priceless Mr. Greenwald.
photosymbiosis -> craigsummers, June 8 2016, 1:44 p.m.
Bitter Anti-Americanism? Come on, don't you know that those who refuse to honestly examine
their own flaws will never be able to overcome them?
There is nothing quite as ridiculous as some jackass like Donald Rumsfeld running around, high
on his own PR, believing he's a genius when in reality he's a clueless idiot.
Just look at history, the endless line of leaders who surrounded themselves with sycophants
and flatterers: "Oh yes, my Lord, you are so wise, your decisions are perfect!"
Do you really believe that kind of empty-headed 'patriotism' is anything other than a
justification for continuation of the disastrous status quo?
Yes, America used to be the world leader in manufacturing; but the idiots in Washington rigged
trade deals that let corporations ship almost everything except weapons manufacturing abroad;
now we're way behind other countries in manufacturing.
Yes, America used to be a world leader in research and development, but funds for public
education were cut and now we have high school students entering colleges in need of remedial
math; China and Japan and Germany don't have that problem, do they?
Empty-headed cheerleading won't change those realities, you bubblehead. Only a major shift in
policies, like Sanders has proposed, will do that.
craigsummers -> photosymbiosis, June 8 2016, 8:12 p.m.
"……Bitter Anti-Americanism? Come on, don't you know that those who refuse to honestly
examine their own flaws will never be able to overcome them?….."
Of course, there is nothing wrong with self examination, but you can hardly ignore the obvious
loathing of Americans by Greenwald:
"……..Americans, being Americans, will almost certainly overstate its world significance and
wallow in excessive self-congratulations….."
At the Guardian, he wrote an article criticizing "American exceptionalism". This is just
follow-up work by Greenwald ("Americans, being American").
"……There is nothing quite as ridiculous as some jackass like Donald Rumsfeld running around,
high on his own PR, believing he's a genius when in reality he's a clueless idiot….."
You are kidding I hope. Rumsfeldt came up with one of my favorite sayings of all time:
"……..There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns.
That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown
unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know……"
Rumsfeld is no idiot, photo. Jesus.
"……Do you really believe that kind of empty-headed 'patriotism' is anything other than a
justification for continuation of the disastrous status quo?……"
Status quo in what areas? All areas? Economy? Foreign policy? This all depends on what you
believe America's place in the world is today. For example, Hillary might give us more "status
quo" in the Middle East than Obama did to counter Russia, Syria and Iran. Just depends on what
you believe is the right course of action to achieve stability and peace in the world.
"…….Yes, America used to be the world leader in manufacturing; but the idiots in Washington
rigged trade deals that let corporations ship almost everything except weapons manufacturing
abroad; now we're way behind other countries in manufacturing……"
The trade deals were good for lifting millions of people in the developing world out of
poverty. Additionally, US corporations had to compete on a global level which was nearly
impossible with the cheap labor and lax environmental and safety standards overseas. Our high
standard of living versus the low standard of living in the third world could not be
maintained in my opinion. Those trade deals will never be reversed.
"……..Empty-headed cheerleading won't change those realities, you bubblehead. Only a major
shift in policies, like Sanders has proposed, will do that……"
I don't think I said anything about cheerleading in my post. I just took exception to
Greenwald's bitter remarks about Americans. He has a history of such mindless criticism of the
American population.
Thanks photo
barabbas -> craigsummers, June 8 2016, 9:28 p.m.
didnt anyone warn you about getting high on your own supply?
photosymbiosis -> craigsummers, June 8 2016, 9:44 p.m.
Here craig, I found something just for you – it's a test devised by U.S. scientists during
World War II, a personality test aimed at indentifying authoritarian fascist tendencies:
"As the war raged overseas, Daniel Levinson, Nevitt Sanford, and Else Frenkel-Brunswik decided
to use the greatest power at their disposal – scientific rationality – to stop fascism from
ever rising again. They did it by inventing a personality test eventually named the F-scale,
which they believed could identify potential authoritarians. This wasn't some plot to weed out
bad guys. The researchers wanted to understand why some people are seduced by political
figures like Adolf Hitler, and they had a very idealistic plan to improve education so that
young people would become more skeptical of Hitler's us-or-them politics."
Time for a little self-examination . . .?
Particularly for someone who believes that "Rumsfeld is no idiot."
dahoit, June 8 2016, 12:48 p.m.
If this pos had done one heroic thing in the last 20 years in the corridors of power, one
might have a little sympathy for her, but on every goddamn occasion she has only capitulated
to Americas enemies and fomented disaster after disaster with wrongheaded decisions, lies and
obfuscation of reality.
Not once has she tried any attempt at bucking convention and the absolute terrible legacy
of neolibconism.
Mona, June 8 2016, 10:45 a.m.
Candace beclowns herself:
You know, I thought Sanders candidacy was supposed to encourage a discussion.
No. The Sanders campaign was, among other things, meant to put him in the Oval Office.
I thought that discussion was going to be arguing the merits of his ideas, what he stands for.
I waited and I waited and I waited but it seems the only discussion that his candidacy has
been allowed to encourage is hate for Hillary.
Sure you did, sweetheart. You "waited" your little heart out.
I detest Hillary Clinton, and did so well before I even knew more than that Bernie Sanders
was this Independent senator from Vermont. What his campaign did do, so fantastically, is
highlight for many (especially youngs) all the justified reasons to renounce almost everything
Hillary Clinton stands for as well as the neoliberal, Democratic Party establishment she
helped bring about and which she now leads.
Now, here is where our gal Candace especially amuses:
As far as the article here goes, we shall see if there is any incentive to actually
change things after the election or if it is only brought up to claim that Hillary is an
illegitimate choice.
Candace, Candace, Candace. Glenn Greenwlad has been justly pointing out the vile actions
and words of Hillary Clinton for many years now. Well, well before this campaign season. I
promise you, if there's one thing a President Hillary will do, it is to provide heaping mounds
of excellent fodder for his (properly) scathing critiques of this vile woman.
So if you think her being the nominee is going to "change things" in terms of Greenwald
becoming all deferential and respectful toward Hillary fucking Clinton, well, I think you get
the message now, right?
Christie Mayo, June 8 2016, 10:36 a.m.
The Empire strikes back
"it should not be forgotten that a Clinton presidency, in addition to being historic in one
respect, would also be a continuation-as opposed to a ground-breaking shift-of a march down
the path of neoliberal folly bought and paid for by Wall Street and the military-industrial
complex."
Oooh… the defender of lobbyists is now weaving a fantasy tale of projection.
Sorry, but it is Hillary and her defenders doing all the things you are projecting onto the
left.
No passion.
No facts.
No integrity.
No intelligence.
Sweeping the issues under the rug…
… and all from right wing paid "perception management loonies" who try to present themselves
as taking the high road, while denigrating and insulting those they claim they want to engage.
The tactic is well known, and you're not very good at it.
24b4Jeff -> exiled off mainstreet, June 8 2016, 8:45 a.m.
Hegel said that the only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.
In 1968 the democrat party turned against the progressives who wanted to end the war, even to
the extent of setting the police on peaceful demonstrators in Chicago (the so-called Police
Riot). As a result those of us who supported the progressive cause withheld our votes from
Hubert Humpfrey, the one-time liberal who refused to repudiate Johnson's war policies.
We as citizens need to learn that a vote for Hillary, cast solely to prevent Trump from
becoming president, is not worth the effort, because despite her many pronouncements to the
contrary she is no better. Just as voting against a woman on account of her gender is a sexist
act, so is voting for one on account of her gender. Besides, if you want to vote for a woman,
there's one running: Jill Stein, of the Greens. While Jill admittedly lacks the credentials
endowed by the political establishment, she does posses one attribute lacking in the two Party
candidates: a soul.
Many of Clinton's leading critics, among them two dozen former CIA agents, have presented a myth
that Hillary's main offence is her 'carelessness in handling official documents and her deliberate
deceptions and lies to the government.
These critics have trivialized, personalized and moralized
what is really deliberate, highly politicized state behavior. Mme. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
was not 'careless in managing an insecure mail server'. If Clinton was engaged in political liaison
with foreign officials she deliberately used a private email server to avoid political detection
by security elements within the US government. She lied to the US government on the use and destruction
of official state documents because the documents were political exchanges between a traitor and
its host
The 22 top secret reports on 'Special Access Programs' which Clinton handled via her private computer
provided foreign governments with the names and dates of US operatives and proxies; allowed for counterresponses
inflicting losses of billions of dollars in program damages and possibly lost lives.
The Inspector General Report (IGP) deals only with the surface misdeeds. The Federal Bureau of
Investigations (FBI) has gone a step further in identifying the political linkages, but faces enormous
obstacles from Hilary's domestic allies in pursuing a criminal investigation. The FBI, whose director
is a political appointee, has suffered a series of defeats in its attempts to investigate and prosecute
spying to Israel, including the AIPAC espionage case of Rosen and Weismann and in their long held
opposition to the release of the notorious US-Israeli spy, Jonathan Pollard. The power of the Zionists
within the government halted their investigation of a dozen Israeli spies captured in the US right
after the attacks of September 11,
2001.
Clinton's choice of conducting secret private communications, despite several years of State Department
warnings to abide by their strict security regulations, is an indication of her Zionist power base,
and not a mere reflection of her personal hubris or individual arrogance.
Clinton has circulated more vital top-secret documents and classified material than Jonathan Pollard.
"... While many neocons and fellow travelers may be anxious to demonstrate their power and influence, it would seem, based on Trump's
electoral performance, that the Republican Party electorate is not very interested in what they have to offer. ..."
"... The neocons best bet to have a seat at the table in 2017 is Hillary Clinton. ..."
2016It is now official: the neoconservatives are united against Donald Trump. A new open letter organized by Project for the New
American Century (PNAC) co-founder Eliot Cohen states the signatories
oppose
a Trump presidency and have committed to "working energetically" to see that he is not elected.
PNAC was, notoriously, the neoconservative
group that called for increased US imperialism in the Middle East, especially Iraq. Many of those who signed PNAC's statement of
principles and various letters went on to serve in the Bush Administration.
The letter comes after Trump's ferocious attacks on neocon policies and narratives, such as the Iraq War and the idea
that President George W. Bush kept the country safe despite being in office on 9/11. Those attacks were most pronounced just prior
to the South Carolina primary when former Florida Governor Jeb Bush and the Bush Administration was the focus of Trump's fire.
Trumps' foreign policy has long been in the neocon cross-hairs. It already appeared as though
many of the neocons were
against Trump; now it's impossible to deny.
Journalist Josh Rogin, after talking to Trump advisors,
lamented that "The practical
application of that doctrine plays out in several ways. Trump's narrow definition of 'national interest' does not include things
like democracy promotion, humanitarian intervention, the responsibility to protect people from atrocities or the advocacy of human
rights abroad. Trump believes that economic engagement will lead to political opening in the long run. He doesn't think the U.S.
government should spend blood or treasure on trying to change other countries' systems."
The other co-founder of PNAC, Robert Kagan,
went even further, comparing Trump to a monster and
claiming that, "For this former Republican, and perhaps for others, the only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton. The
party cannot be saved, but the country still can be."
Military historian Max Boot, also a signatory to the letter, has denounced Trump,
saying, "A Trump presidency threatens
the post-World War II liberal international order that American presidents of both parties have so laboriously built up." He claimed
that "A Trump presidency would represent the death knell of America as a great power."
Many of those who signed the latest letter were also among those that signed PNAC communications including; Kagan, Boot, Cohen,
Robert Zoellick, Daniel Blumenthal, Reuel Marc Gerecht, Thomas Donnelly, Aaron Friedberg, Randy Scheunemann, Jeffrey Gedmin, Gary
Schmitt, and Dov Zakheim.
While many neocons and fellow travelers may be anxious to demonstrate their power and influence, it would seem, based on Trump's
electoral performance, that the Republican Party electorate is not very interested in what they have to offer.
The neocons best bet to have a seat at the table in 2017
is Hillary Clinton.
"... Other neoconservatives say Trump's foreign policy stances, such as his opposition to the Iraq war and the U.S. intervention in Libya, are inconsistent and represent "completely mindless" boasting. "It's not, 'Oh I really feel that the neoconservatism has come to a bad end and we need to hearken back to the realism of the Nixon administration,' " said Danielle Pletka, senior vice president for foreign and defense policy at the American Enterprise Institute. ..."
"... Despite the opposition he faces in some corners of the GOP, polls indicate that Trump's message is in line with the public mood. ..."
"... Experts say the isolationist sentiment is prevalent in the Democratic Party as well. ..."
"... "The [Bernie] Sanders supporters charge Hillary Clinton Hillary with never seeing a quagmire she did not wish to enter, and basically with not just complicity, but a leading role in contriving some of the worst disasters of American foreign policy in this century," said Amb. Chas Freeman, a senior fellow at Brown University's Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, and a former Nixon and George H.W. Bush official. ..."
"... Some experts say neoconservatives are fighting hard because they have the most to lose. "They're losing influence inside the foreign policy establishment in general, and they have definitely lost influence inside the Republican party, which was their home base," Mearsheimer said. ..."
"... Some neoconservatives are even throwing in their lot with likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, most prominently Kagan and Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. ..."
"... Julian Hattem contributed to this story. ..."
The rise of
Donald Trump
is threatening the power of neoconservatives, who find themselves at risk of being marginalized
in the Republican Party. Neoconservatism was at its height during the presidency of George W. Bush, helping to shape
the rationale for the U.S. invasion of Iraq. But now the ideology is under attack, with Trump systematically rejecting each of its core
principles. Whereas neoconservatism advocates spreading American ideals through the use of military force,
Trump has made the case for nationalism and a smaller U.S. military footprint. In what Trump calls an "America First" approach, he proposes rejecting alliances that don't
work, trade deals that don't deliver, and military interventionism that costs too much. He has said he would get along with Russian President Vladimir Putin and sit down with North
Korean dictator Kim Jong Un - a throwback to the "realist" foreign policy of President Nixon.
As if to underscore that point, the presumptive GOP nominee met with Nixon's Secretary of
State and National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger, earlier this week, and delivered his first
major foreign policy speech at an event last month hosted by the Center for National Interest,
which Nixon founded.
Leading neoconservative figures like Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan have assailed Trump's
foreign policy views. Kagan even called Trump a "fascist" in a recent Washington Post
op-ed. "This is how fascism comes to America, not with jackboots and salutes (although there have
been salutes, and a whiff of violence) but with a television huckster, a phony billionaire, a
textbook egomaniac 'tapping into' popular resentments and insecurities, and with an entire
national political party - out of ambition or blind party loyalty, or simply out of fear -
falling into line behind him," wrote Kagan, who is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
Other neoconservatives say Trump's foreign policy stances, such as his opposition to the Iraq
war and the U.S. intervention in Libya, are inconsistent and represent "completely mindless"
boasting. "It's not, 'Oh I really feel that the neoconservatism has come to a bad end and we need to
hearken back to the realism of the Nixon administration,' " said Danielle Pletka, senior vice
president for foreign and defense policy at the American Enterprise Institute.
... ... ...
"[Neoconservatives] are concerned for good reason," said O'Hanlon, a Democratic defense hawk
"These people don't think that Trump is prepared intellectually to be president." "It's not just that their stance of foreign policy would be losing .. .all foreign policy
schools would be losing influence under Trump with very unpredictable consequences," he added.
Despite the opposition he faces in some corners of the GOP, polls indicate that Trump's
message is in line with the public mood. A
recent Pew poll found that nearly six in 10 Americans said the U.S. should "deal with its own
problems and let other countries deal with their own problems as best they can," a more
isolationist approach at odds with neoconservative thought.
John Mearsheimer, a preeminent scholar in realist theory, says there's a parallel in history
to the way America turned inward after the Vietnam War. "There's no question that Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger went a considerable ways to pursue
a less ambitious foreign policy, and they talked about allies doing more to help themselves, and
they began to pursue detente with the Soviet Union." "And this was all a reaction to Vietnam. Vietnam of course was a colossal failure. The body
politic here in the United States was deeply disenchanted with American foreign policy,
especially in its most ambitious forms and the end result is we ended up backing off for awhile,"
he said. "We have a similar situation here."
Experts say the isolationist sentiment is prevalent in the Democratic Party as well.
"The [Bernie] Sanders supporters charge
Hillary ClintonHillary with
never seeing a quagmire she did not wish to enter, and basically with not just complicity, but a
leading role in contriving some of the worst disasters of American foreign policy in this
century," said Amb. Chas Freeman, a senior fellow at Brown University's Watson Institute for
International and Public Affairs, and a former Nixon and George H.W. Bush official.
"This is the principle reason that Hillary Clinton is having so much trouble putting
Bernie Sanders away," said Mearsheimer, who supports the Vermont senator. "Sanders is
capitalizing on all that disenchantment in the public, and Hillary Clinton represents the old
order."
But the ideological battle over foreign policy is playing out more forcefully in the GOP. While some members of the Republican foreign policy establishment are coming to terms with
Trump becoming their party's nominee, including lawmakers like Sens.
John McCain (R-Ariz.) and
Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), neoconservatives remain staunch holdouts.
Some experts say neoconservatives are fighting hard because they have the most to
lose. "They're losing influence inside the foreign policy establishment in general, and they have
definitely lost influence inside the Republican party, which was their home base," Mearsheimer
said.
Some neoconservatives are even throwing in their lot with likely Democratic nominee
Hillary Clinton, most
prominently Kagan and Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
With Republican foreign policy figures split, influential Republican donors such as
Charles and David Koch are trying to shape the GOP's new direction.
The Charles Koch Institute recently launched a daylong conference that featured Mearsheimer
and another prominent realist Stephen Walt that questioned U.S. foreign policy since the end of
the Cold War.
"This has meant the frequent use of force, a military budget the size of the next seven to
eight countries combined, and an active policy of spreading American power and values," said
William Ruger, vice president of research and policy at the Charles Koch Institute.
"After a quarter century of this approach, it's time to ask: Has our foreign policy been
working? Is it making America safe? Should we continue on this path? And if not, what do
alternative approaches look like?"
"... Theodore Roosevelt, whom Max and his neocon buddies love, issued a whopping 1,006 executive orders (when his immediate predecessors had issued a handful) and treated Congress contemptuously. He said that he, after all, was the unique representative of the American people, so it was his job to implement their will, regardless of what any other body had to say about it. ..."
"... We can only imagine their response if Trump had said such a thing. In fact, Trump says that executive orders are terrible and that the president should govern by consensus. ..."
"... Trump is boorish. Oh, sure. Too bad we can't have more refined candidates like John McCain, who sing, "Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran." ..."
"... Trump betrays conservative values. This supposedly disqualifies him. To the contrary, hasn't it been the role of the GOP nominee to betray conservative values? In 1996, Bill Kristol - who's just so overcome with concern about the betrayal of conservative values, remember - enthusiastically endorsed Colin Powell for president. ..."
"... And by the way, just what are these "conservative values"? The leftist project of bringing democracy to faraway lands - the exact opposite of what Edmund Burke (who knew a little something about conservatism) would have recommended? Creating Medicare Part D? No Child Left Behind? Auto bailouts? Bank bailouts? Keynesian stimulus? ..."
"... Had George W. Bush been eligible for a third term, would the same people who demand Trump debase himself in sackcloth and ashes for his betrayals of conservatism have done anything remotely similar to Bush? ..."
"... The alleged reasons for disliking Trump do not match the neocons' actions. Therefore, they are not the real reasons. ..."
"... They don't trust him on foreign policy. He makes fun of their interventions and says the world would be much better off, and we'd be a lot richer if none of it had been done. ..."
"... They can't control him. He isn't owned by anyone. He can't be bought. The neocons, along with the GOP establishment they pretend to oppose, are control freaks. They can't deal with someone who may be independent of them. ..."
"... If you want to oppose Trump, knock yourself out. But at least, be honest about it. The neocons have repeatedly endorsed candidates whose deviations from orthodoxy are much more severe than Trump's. So they're lying. ..."
Now before I tell you how I figured that out - apart from the fact that their
lips are moving - I need to begin by parrying any manifestations of Trump
Derangement Syndrome.
I do not support or endorse Donald Trump, who is not a libertarian and who
appears to have no clear philosophy of any kind. He would no doubt do countless
things that I would deplore.
Just like all the other candidates, in other words.
My point is not to cheer for him. My point is that the neocons' stated reasons
for opposing him so hysterically don't add up.
(1) Max Boot worries that Trump will rule like a "strongman." Right - quite
unlike the restrained, humble executors of the law whom Max has endorsed over the
years. In fact, Max has spent his career calling for a strong executive. Now he's
worried about a "strongman." I'd say that horse has already left the stable, Max.
You might want to look in the mirror to figure out how that happened.
Theodore Roosevelt, whom Max and his neocon buddies love, issued a whopping
1,006 executive orders (when his immediate predecessors had issued a handful) and
treated Congress contemptuously. He said that he, after all, was the unique
representative of the American people, so it was his job to implement their will,
regardless of what any other body had to say about it.
We can only imagine their response if Trump had said such a thing. In fact,
Trump says that executive orders are terrible and that the president should govern
by consensus.
Now maybe he doesn't mean that, and maybe he'd use executive orders
anyway. But what if he'd said what their hero Teddy said?
Remember the last time Max, or any neocon, or anyone in the GOP establishment,
warned us that Teddy wasn't a good role model?
Me neither.
(2) Trump is boorish. Oh, sure. Too bad we can't have more refined
candidates like John McCain, who sing, "Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran."
(3) Trump betrays conservative values. This supposedly disqualifies him. To
the contrary, hasn't it been the role of the GOP nominee to betray conservative
values? In 1996, Bill Kristol - who's just so overcome with concern about the
betrayal of conservative values, remember - enthusiastically endorsed Colin Powell
for president.
(4) And by the way, just what are these "conservative values"? The leftist
project of bringing democracy to faraway lands - the exact opposite of what Edmund
Burke (who knew a little something about conservatism) would have recommended?
Creating Medicare Part D? No Child Left Behind? Auto bailouts? Bank bailouts?
Keynesian stimulus?
Had George W. Bush been eligible for a third term, would the same people
who demand Trump debase himself in sackcloth and ashes for his betrayals of
conservatism have done anything remotely similar to Bush?
Sure, we'd get the wringing of hands and the occasional anguished newspaper
column, but then we'd get the stern lecture that if we don't vote for Bush,
civilization comes to an end.
See what I mean? Something is fishy here. The alleged reasons for disliking
Trump do not match the neocons' actions. Therefore, they are not the real reasons.
Know what I think the real reasons are?
(a) They don't trust him on foreign policy. He makes fun of their
interventions and says the world would be much better off, and we'd be a lot
richer if none of it had been done.
Now it's true, here as elsewhere, that Trump is not consistent. He's now
calling for ground troops against ISIS, for instance. But his primary message is:
we have too many problems at home to be traipsing around the world destroying
countries. This is not music to a neocon ear.
(b) They can't control him. He isn't owned by anyone. He can't be bought.
The neocons, along with the GOP establishment they pretend to oppose, are control
freaks. They can't deal with someone who may be independent of them.
If you want to oppose Trump, knock yourself out. But at least, be honest
about it. The neocons have repeatedly endorsed candidates whose deviations from
orthodoxy are much more severe than Trump's. So they're lying.
As usual.
Tom Woods, Jr. [send him mail; visit his website], hosts the Tom Woods Show, a libertarian
podcast, Monday through Friday, and co-hosts Contra Krugman every week. He is the New York Times
bestselling author of 12 books, a course creator for the Ron Paul homeschool curriculum, and
founder of Liberty Classroom, a libertarian education site for adult enrichment.
"... The fact however remains that Trump has challenged the ideological foundations upon which US foreign policy is built whilst offering an alternative that has elicited a powerful response from the US public. ..."
"... The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do notnecessarily reflect the official position of Sputnik. ..."
Donald Trump's recent speech on foreign policy
has been roundly condemned by the US foreign establishment.
It has also been ridiculed as confusing and contradictory.
This is a
misrepresentation. Whilst Trump did not provide a detailed programme - to have done so in the
middle of
an election would have been unwise - his underlying message is clear enough.
Instead of a foreign policy based on an ideology centered on US world hegemony, "exceptionalism"
and "democracy promotion" Trump promises a foreign policy straightforwardly based on the pursuit
of US national interests.
To understand what that would mean in practice consider the contrast between what the US public
wants and what the US has actually done under successive US administrations.
Whereas the US public since 9/11 has been overwhelmingly focused on jihadi terrorism as the greatest
threat to the US, the US foreign policy establishment is only minimally interested in that question.
Its priority is to secure US world hegemony by reshaping the world geopolitical map.
First and foremost that has meant confronting the two great powers -
Russia and China - the US sees as the primary obstacle to its hegemony. It has also meant
a series of geopolitical adventures in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria, a protracted
confrontation with Iran, and head on collisions with Russia and China in Ukraine and the South China
Sea. The US public for its part has shown little or no enthusiasm for any of these projects. By contrast
the US foreign policy establishment has show little enthusiasm for confronting the Islamic State/Daesh.
The military campaign it is purporting to wage against the Islamic State is essentially a "going
through the motions" public relations exercise. The real fight against the Islamic State is being
fought by Iran and Russia. Elsewhere - in Chechnya, Libya and Syria - the US has willingly collaborated
with jihadi terrorists to achieve its geopolitical goals.
Trump threatens to turn all this on its head. In place of confrontation with Russia and China
he says he wants to cut deals with them calculating - rightly - that they are no threat to the US.
In place of collaboration with jihadi terrorism he promises a single-minded focus on its destruction.
Other pillars of current US foreign policy are also challenged.
Whereas the ideologues
currently in charge of US foreign policy treat US allies as ideological soulmates in a quest to spread
"Western values" (ie. US hegemony), Trump sees the US's relationship with its allies as transactional:
the US will help them if they help themselves, with no sense of this being part of some ideological
common cause.
Having dumped the ideology and the foreign policy that goes with it Trump,
promises to focus on sorting out the US's internal problems, which is where the US public's priorities
also lie. Trump expresses himself in often crude language eg. threatening to "carpet
bomb" the Islamic State. He is not coherent. He continues to talk of Iran as an enemy - ignoring the fact that it is as
much a potential partner of the US as Russia and China are. Some of the things Trump says - for example his talk of embracing torture
- are frankly disturbing. It remains to be seen whether a President
Trump if elected would be either willing or able - as he promises - to change the entire foreign
policy direction of the US.
The fact however remains that Trump has challenged the ideological foundations upon which US foreign
policy is built whilst offering an alternative that has elicited a powerful response from the US
public.
That is why the US political establishment is so alarmed by him.
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do notnecessarily reflect
the official position of Sputnik.
Trump seems less willing than his opponent to engage in adventurous missions abroad under
neoconservative "world domination" banner
Notable quotes:
"... As Donald Trump is splitting off blue-collar Democrats on issues like America's broken borders and Bill Clinton's trade debacles like NAFTA, Hillary Clinton is trying to peel off independents and Republicans by painting Trump as "temperamentally unfit" to be commander in chief. ..."
"... In portraying Trump as an intolerable alternative, Clinton will find echoes in the GOP establishment and among the Kristol-Kagan neocons, many of whom have already signed an open letter rejecting Trump. ..."
"Clinton to Paint Trump as a Risk to World Order." Thus did page one of Thursday's New
York Times tee up Hillary Clinton's big San Diego speech on foreign policy.
Inside the Times, the headline was edited to underline the point: "Clinton to Portray Trump as
Risk to the World." The Times promoted the speech as "scorching," a "sweeping and fearsome
portrayal of Mr. Trump, one that the Clinton campaign will deliver like a drumbeat to voters in
the coming months."
What is happening here?
As Donald Trump is splitting off blue-collar Democrats on issues like America's broken
borders and Bill Clinton's trade debacles like NAFTA, Hillary Clinton is trying to peel off
independents and Republicans by painting Trump as "temperamentally unfit" to be commander in
chief.
Clinton contends that a Trump presidency would be a national embarrassment, that his ideas are
outside the bipartisan mainstream of U.S. foreign policy, and that he is as contemptuous of our
democratic allies as he is solicitous of our antidemocratic adversaries.
In portraying Trump as an intolerable alternative, Clinton will find echoes in the GOP
establishment and among the Kristol-Kagan neocons, many of whom have already signed an open
letter rejecting Trump.
William Kristol has recruited one David French to run on a National Review-Weekly Standard line
to siphon off just enough votes from the GOP nominee to tip a couple of swing states to Clinton.
Robert Kagan contributed an op-ed to a welcoming Washington Post saying the Trump campaign is
"how fascism comes to America."
Yet, if Clinton means to engage on foreign policy, this is not a battle Trump should avoid.
For the lady has an abysmal record on foreign policy and a report card replete with failures. As
senator, Clinton voted to authorize President Bush to attack and invade a nation, Iraq, that had
not attacked us and did not want war with us. Clinton calls it her biggest mistake, another
way of saying that the most important vote she ever cast proved disastrous for her country,
costing 4,500 U.S. dead and a trillion dollars.
That invasion was the worst blunder in U.S. history and a contributing factor to the deepening
disaster of the Middle East, from which, it appears, we will not soon be able to extricate
ourselves.
As secretary of state, Clinton supported the unprovoked U.S.-NATO attack on Libya and joked of
the lynching of Moammar Gadhafi, "We came. We saw. He died." Yet, even Barack Obama now agrees
the Libyan war was started without advance planning for what would happen when Gadhafi fell. And
that lack of planning, that failure in which Clinton was directly involved, Obama now calls the
worst mistake of his presidency.
Is Clinton's role in pushing for two wars, both of which resulted in disasters for her country
and the entire Middle East, something to commend her for the presidency of the United States? Is
the slogan to be, "Let Hillary clean up the mess she helped to make?"
Whether or not Clinton was complicit in the debacle in Benghazi, can anyone defend her
deceiving the families of the fallen by talking about finding the evildoer who supposedly made
the videotape that caused it all? Even then, she knew better. How many other secretaries of state
have been condemned by their own inspector general for violating the rules for handling state
secrets, for deceiving investigators, and for engaging, along with that cabal she brought into
her secretary's office, in a systematic stonewall to keep the department from learning the truth?
Where in all of this is there the slightest qualification, other than a honed instinct for
political survival, for Clinton to lead America out of the morass into which she, and the failed
foreign policy elite nesting around her, plunged the United States?
If Trump will stay true to his message, he can win the foreign policy debate, and the election,
because what he is arguing for is what Americans want.
They do not want any more Middle East wars. They do not want to fight Russians in the Baltic or
Ukraine, or the Chinese over some rocks in the South China Sea.
They understand that, as Truman had to deal with Stalin, and Ike with Khrushchev, and Nixon with
Brezhnev, and Reagan with Gorbachev, a U.S. president should sit down with a Vladimir Putin to
avoid a clash neither country wants, and from which neither country would benefit.
The coming Clinton-neocon nuptials have long been predicted in this space. They have so much in
common. They belong with each other.
But this country will not survive as the last superpower if we do not shed this self-anointed
role as the "indispensable nation" that makes and enforces the rules for the "rules-based world
order," and that acts as first responder in every major firefight on earth. What Trump has
hit upon, what the country wants, is a foreign policy designed to protect the vital interests of
the United States, and a president who will - ever and always - put America first.
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of the new book "The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon
Rose From Defeat to Create the New Majority." To find out more about Patrick Buchanan and read
features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at
www.creators.com.
This is one of the few articles when you can see anger at neocons from rank-and-file
republicans. Especially in comments.
Notable quotes:
"... Trump's steadfast support from paleoconservative icon and Kristol arch-nemesis Pat Buchanan clearly terrified the neoconservative wing of the party, which still remembers how Buchanan drummed up three million votes against George Bush in the 1992 Republican primary by blasting globalist trade policy. ..."
"... The people are speaking and Hillary will not win. Every single tactic employed to derail Trump has backfired and only made him more popular. ..."
"... The Neo-Cons like Kristol are addicted to power and donor skims. He is why we are now on the verge of rebellion. Vote Trump. ..."
"... CIA Operation Mockingbird....to infiltrate and control all news reporting, see.... "New Think Progress and the Ozzard of Wiz".... Multilevel Information Racketeering.... ..."
"... The establishment media is showing their RINO-ness. They are being exposed in the light. ..."
"... The National Review and Weekly Standard have become bird-cage liner as a result of Messrs. Kristol, Wills, etc. ..."
"... Bill Kristol ... GO AWAY ... Republicans have REJECTED you ... ..."
"... "Let me hasten to admit: I underestimated your skills as a demagogue and the credulity of some of the American public." Let me translate: "Hey, America, you're too stupid to vote. I'm an elite and know better than you!" ..."
"... Donald --- deny his access and take his room card. I imagine he'll be more pissed about that then selling out. Fat slob. He reminds me of the corrupt Monks under the Medici, stuffing gold under their tunics while the poor died in the streets. ..."
"... Latter Day Republicans.. LOL ..."
"... fine use of words... as in latter day saints, Glenn Beck, Romney etc. ..."
"... Neocons have always been Trotskyites and are conservative in name only. It is because of this that I believe that we the people should hold state conventions to enact several amendments to curtail the donor class, removing of political parties, enacting Vigilance Committees, and enforcing Article I Section XI Clause VIII of the Constitution of the United States. ..."
"... Campaign donations and raising money for PACs is unconstitutional and is treason as defined by the Constitution. An emolument is a fee or payment for services rendered. By removing the donor class and the lobbyists we can return the government back to the people. ..."
"... One can only conclude that the neocons want to splinter the vote, and they want the Democrats to win. No other conclusion seems possible. This is a betrayal that should be taken quite seriously. ..."
Kristol recently met with #NeverTrump champion
Mitt Romney to discuss a third-party campaign, but Kristol has hinted that Romney will not be
the independent "White Knight." Kristol
tweeted Saturday,
"If Mitt decides he can't, someone will step forward to run" then quoted William Gladstone to declare,
"The resources of civilization are not yet exhausted."
This is not the first time Trump and Kristol
have sparred on Twitter. When Trump asked last week why networks continue to employ Kristol's punditry
services, Kristol admitted that he had been wrong to have underestimated Trump's political appeal:
Kristol's neoconservative inner circle has reason to fear the threat posed by a populist outsider,
especially one who could gain anti-Establishment traction by attacking the legacy of the Kristol-supported
Iraq War. Kristol's "Weekly Standard" magazine and his son-in-law Matt Continetti's blog "Free Beacon"
hammered Trump throughout the Republican primaries to little avail. The "Beacon" blog's writers and
editors flogged the "small hands" insult that infamously made it into Marco Rubio's campaign stump
speech in Rubio's desperate final days.
Trump's
steadfast support from paleoconservative icon and Kristol arch-nemesis Pat Buchanan clearly terrified
the neoconservative wing of the party, which still remembers how Buchanan drummed up three million
votes against George Bush in the 1992 Republican primary by blasting globalist trade policy.
Tryle N Error
It's time for an intervention. Get him into rehab and off the Kristol Meth, or whatever
that deluded lunatic is injecting.
dtom2 > Tryle N Error
Kristol has become unhinged faced with the reality that he has lost what little influence
he had on the republic electorate. His all out promotion of Jeb Bush failed and this is
nothing more than sour grapes. So, instead of conceding defeat, he launches all out war on our
nominee. My question is this... if he wants Hillary instead of Trump, which will be the
eventual outcome if he follows through with his plan, why not just come out of the closet and
support her. La Raza and the Chamber of Commerce both get their wish, more hordes of criminal
illegals to undermine American workers, and an increased democrat parasitic voter
base...see...so much simpler than a third candidate launch...same outcome. America slides
closer to the third world cesspool of their dreams. Trump 2016!
Ann > dtom2
The people are speaking and Hillary will not win. Every single tactic employed to
derail Trump has backfired and only made him more popular.
bucketnutz > Tryle N Error
The Neo-Cons like Kristol are addicted to power and donor skims. He is why we are now
on the verge of rebellion. Vote Trump.
FauxScienceSlayer
CIA Operation Mockingbird....to infiltrate and control all news reporting, see.... "New
Think Progress and the Ozzard of Wiz".... Multilevel Information Racketeering....
Be Still
The establishment media is showing their RINO-ness. They are being exposed in the
light.
Bill the Cat > Robert Tulloch
The National Review and Weekly Standard have become bird-cage liner as a result of
Messrs. Kristol, Wills, etc. Their next stop is the HuffPo and motherjones.
Patriot
Kristol needs to be brought down from his perch. He thinks he is smarter than the voters.
If he pushes this nonsense and the GOP does not censor him, it will be the time for the
millions of sane Americans to join the GOP and then destroy it from within. It is time for
average Americans to control their destiny as opposed to the elites.
darwin
Kristol is an anti-American traitor. He's actively engaged in fighting the will of the
people to keep himself and the people he works for in power and wealth.
Archimedes
Bill Kristol is destroying the Republican party ... he is a globalist who believes in
spending trillions while deploying AMERICANs in the Middle East ... he believes in open
borders ... he believes in unfettered "free trade" ...
Bill Kristol ... GO AWAY ... Republicans have REJECTED you ...
#NeverHillary
ljm4
Billy, work on your Cruise ship offerings. As you are failing in journalism are you also
trying to take down the GOP party yourself?
Doctor Evil
"Let me hasten to admit: I underestimated your skills as a demagogue and the credulity
of some of the American public." Let me translate: "Hey, America, you're too stupid to vote.
I'm an elite and know better than you!"
Lee Ashton > Doctor Evil
On the other hand...
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that. -
George Carlin US comedian and actor (1937 - 2008)
Douglas Rowland > Lee Ashton
Those would be the ones voting for Hillary.
WaylonII
Splitting the Republican vote would be a sure way to get Hillary elected. What is wrong with these people?
Avatar
timdb > WaylonII
Maybe Kristol expects President Hillary Clinton will appoint him as ambassador to Israel.
Lee Ashton > TheLastPlainsman
Neocon - deficit spending via the warfare state
Leftist - deficit spending via the welfare state.
The right and left wings of the same vulture.
MrnPol725
... Donald --- deny his access and take his room card. I imagine he'll be more pissed about that then selling out. Fat slob. He reminds me of the corrupt Monks under the Medici, stuffing gold under their tunics while the poor died in the streets.
SPQR_US
Another turd exposed...Kristol Meth...time to arrest and jail the neocons...
Pitbulls LiL Brother
Kristol has been wrong so many times for so many years how does he get a voice in the
process?
Amberteka > Pitbulls LiL Brother
MONEY. His relatives Own USA Media.
Roadchaser
Latter Day Republicans.. LOL
James > Roadchaser
fine use of words... as in latter day saints, Glenn Beck, Romney etc.
gladzkravtz
The founding publisher of the Weekly Standard is News Corp!! Just found it on wiki! I
didn't know that and now it makes sense that Kristol gets to mug on FNC so much. I have stock
in News Corp, bought it back long before there was a Megyn Kelly, but now it's time to go
ahead, sell and take the loss.
Those creeps.
PreacherPatriot1776
Neocons have always been Trotskyites and are conservative in name only. It is because
of this that I believe that we the people should hold state conventions to enact several
amendments to curtail the donor class, removing of political parties, enacting Vigilance
Committees, and enforcing Article I Section XI Clause VIII of the Constitution of the United
States.
That clause states, "No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person
holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress,
accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King,
Prince, or foreign State."
Campaign donations and raising money for PACs is unconstitutional and is treason as
defined by the Constitution. An emolument is a fee or payment for services rendered. By
removing the donor class and the lobbyists we can return the government back to the people.
Since the government is not self-policing itself like it should then it's time for the Fourth
Branch of the government to step up and exercise their power to hold these individuals
accountable. A Vigilance Committee would be comprised of citizens of a single state and
oversee everything their elected/appointed representatives adhere to their oaths of office.
Failure to adhere to the oath would be an automatic charge of treason and a trial of said
individual for violating their oath. Once enough of these traitors are executed the rest of
them will behave and follow their oaths plus the Constitution of the United States.
Another amendment could be the requirement that every child must learn the Declaration of
Independence, Constitution of the United States, Bill of Rights, and their state
constitutions. This way we as a people can stop dangerous ideologies that are antithetical to
liberty, like Marxism and communism, can never be used in the United States.
jackschil
Its about time the real conservative Republicans took a stand. They could start by ignoring
the Rockefeller wing of the Republican party and start paying attention to the
Goldwater/Reagan wing. The Chamber of Commerce, the Wall Street Journal, Bill Kristol, Carl
Rove, George Will, and Charles Krauthammer do not represent conservative values, but pretend
establishment values. They would be better served joining with the Democrats. Trump has these
establishment jackals, along with the K Street lobbyists, scared to death. For the first time
since 1984, the people aren't stuck voting for a Republicrat candidate.
SpeedMaster
The Globalists have been exposed for what they really are. Thank You Mr. Trump.
Ohiolad
One can only conclude that the neocons want to splinter the vote, and they want the
Democrats to win. No other conclusion seems possible. This is a betrayal that should be taken
quite seriously.
Gene Schwimmer
If Kristol does, indeed, produce an independent candidate and if "President Hillary" is a
real problem for Trumpists, we of #NeverTrump invite them to abandon Trump and join us in
supporting the independent candidate. If you choose not to, blame yourselves if Trump loses. #NeverTrump
warned you well before you voted for Trump that we would never vote for him and it's still not
too late to nominate someone else at the convention. Not our problem if you thought you could
win without us and nominated Trump, anyway.
PrinceLH > Gene Schwimmer
Are you for real? Why would we turn our backs on the candidate that has garnered the most
votes, in Republican Primary history? You people don't get it! It's not the Republicans vs the
Democrats. It's the people vs the Establishment. We don't want any more of your ruling class
garbage. We don't want any more of stagnant wages and job loses to other countries, so you can
expand your Globalist agenda. You people need to be stopped. Bill Kristol, George Will, Glenn
Beck, Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Warren, George Soros, the Bush family, the Koch Brothers and
the list goes on, are our enemies.
You will be soundly defeated, this fall, and you can hand in your membership to the Human
Race, on the way out the door to your European Liberal Utopia.
Zolt
No more THIRD-WORLD IMMIGRATION
No more GLOBAL TRADE
No more ENDLESS WARS FOR ISRAEL AND THE NWO
God bless ASSAD, protector of Syrian Christians!
Get on board with the #PALEOCONS!
billsv
You just don't get it. Middle class jobs have been given to foreigners through H2B
programs, globalist policies, etc. why is this conservatism? Why do illegal aliens get more
benefits than US citizens? Is this conservatism? We just don't like Bill Kristol's view of
conservatism that de stories the Middle Class, let' s those in the bottom percentiles languish
and caves to the wishes of the Chamber of Commerce.
Please back off and give what many if
Americans want. We have suffered enough.
"... If anything, the whole plagiarism scandal reflects somewhat poorly on Michelle Obama. One reason Obama's words were able to play so well at the RNC was that in the lifted passages, Obama was speaking using the conservative language of "bootstrapping." Obama's sentence, that "the only limit" to one's achievements is the height of one's goal and the "willingness to work" toward it, is the Republican story about America. It's the story of personal responsibility, in which the U.S. is overflowing with opportunity, and anyone who fails to succeed in such a land of abundance must simply not be trying hard enough. ..."
"... People on the left are supposed to know that it is a cruel lie to tell people that all they need to do is work hard. There are plenty of people with dreams who work very hard indeed but get nothing, because the American economy is fundamentally skewed and unfair. This rhetoric, about "hard work" being the only thing needed for the pursuit of prosperity, is an insult to every tomato-picker and hotel cleaner in the country. It's a fact that those who work the hardest in this country, those come home from work exhausted and who break their backs to feed their families, are almost always rewarded the least. ..."
"... This is, of course, the myth of "meritocracy" that Thomas Frank has exposed with scalpel-like precision in his latest book Listen, Liberal . It's clear that the Democratic Party, at its core, believes with Michelle (and Barack) Obama the comfortable and self-serving lie that no individual has anyone to blame but herself if she fails to achieve high goals. She should just have reached higher; she should just have worked harder. ..."
"... It's not only a lie, it's a "cruel lie," as Nimni says. So why is she, Michelle Obama, telling it? Clearly it serves her interests, her husband's interests, her party's interests, to tell the "rich person's lie," that his or her achievement came from his or her own efforts. To call most people's success a product of luck (right color, right gender, right country, right neighborhood, right schools, right set of un-birth-damaged brain cells) or worse, inheritance (right parents), identifies the fundamental unfairness of our supposed "meritocratic" system of allocating wealth and undercuts the "goodness," if you look at it writ large, of predatory capitalism. By that measure, neither the very wealthy themselves (Charles Koch, Jamie Dimon) nor those who serve them (Barack Obama et al ) are "good" in any moral sense. ..."
Consider for a second the bare statement -
"the only limit to the height of your achievements is the reach of your dreams and your willingness
to work for them" (Obama's version). Is this true? Is it true that if you dream big enough and work
hard enough, the "limit to the height of your achievements" disappears?
Obviously not. As a young high school graduate, working summers in a General Motors assembly plant
to earn college money, I saw hundreds of men and women, many the lowest of the low, the sweepers,
for example, whose lives mark "lie" to that statement. The next time you stay in a hotel, look at
the woman who cleans your room and ask if she's where she is because she won't work hard. Most people
like these are trapped, the way billions are trapped around the world, working in powerless service
to others for the scraps those others allow them?
Oren Nimni: Obama's statement "is an insult to every tomato-picker and hotel cleaner in the
country"
The fact that Michelle Obama's statement is blatantly false (and that a woman of color in the
United States said it) is revealing. Current Affairs writer Oren Nimni
on that (emphasis in original):
If anything, the whole plagiarism scandal reflects somewhat poorly on Michelle Obama. One
reason Obama's words were able to play so well at the RNC was that in the lifted passages, Obama
was speaking using the conservative language of "bootstrapping." Obama's sentence, that "the only
limit" to one's achievements is the height of one's goal and the "willingness to work" toward
it, is the Republican story about America. It's the story of personal responsibility,
in which the U.S. is overflowing with opportunity, and anyone who fails to succeed in such a land
of abundance must simply not be trying hard enough.
People on the left are supposed to know that it is a cruel lie to tell people that
all they need to do is work hard. There are plenty of people with dreams who work very hard
indeed but get nothing, because the American economy is fundamentally skewed and unfair. This
rhetoric, about "hard work" being the only thing needed for the pursuit of prosperity, is an insult
to every tomato-picker and hotel cleaner in the country. It's a fact that those who work the hardest
in this country, those come home from work exhausted and who break their backs to feed their families,
are almost always rewarded the least.
Far from embarrassing Melania Trump and the GOP, then, it should be deeply humiliating for
Democrats that their rhetoric is so bloodless and hollow that it can easily be spoken word-for-word
in front of a gang of crazed racists. Instead of asking "why is Melania Trump using Michelle Obama's
words?" we might think to ask "why is Michelle Obama using the right-wing rhetoric of self-reliance?"
This is, of course, the
myth of
"meritocracy" that Thomas Frank has exposed with scalpel-like precision in his latest book
Listen, Liberal. It's clear that the Democratic Party, at its core, believes with Michelle (and
Barack) Obama the comfortable and self-serving lie that no individual has anyone to blame but herself
if she fails to achieve high goals. She should just have reached higher; she should just have worked
harder.
It's not only a lie, it's a "cruel lie," as Nimni says. So why is she, Michelle Obama, telling
it? Clearly it serves her interests, her husband's interests, her party's interests, to tell the
"rich person's lie," that his or her achievement came from his or her own efforts. To call most people's
success a product of luck (right color, right gender, right country, right neighborhood, right schools,
right set of un-birth-damaged brain cells) or worse, inheritance (right parents), identifies the
fundamental unfairness of our supposed "meritocratic" system of allocating wealth and undercuts the
"goodness," if you look at it writ large, of predatory capitalism. By that measure, neither the very
wealthy themselves (Charles Koch, Jamie Dimon) nor those who serve them (Barack Obama et al)
are "good" in any moral sense.
(The idea of the supposed "goodness" of the successful capitalist, by the way, his supposed "greater
morality," goes all the way back to the 18th Century attempt of the wealthy to counter the 17th Century
bleakness of Protestant predestination. How could people, especially the very rich, know whether
they are among the "elect" or the damned?
God
gives them wealth as a sign of his plans for them, just as God gives them morally deficient poverty-wage
workers to take advantage of.)
Completely toothless, baseless article and very weak comments. Trump, at least in part, is paleoconservatives
and he signify change of the course: less interventionalist wars, less color revolutions, rejection
of Neoconservatism with some checks of dual citizenship holders in Washington like Kagan, less globalization,
more nationalism. Very few commenters mention Neoconservatism and globalization which is the key problem
that put Trump in the game.
Here are some realistic comments: "Do all the Trumplings really believe he will rethink or change
the NATO mafia, close down any of the 1,100 military bases and outposts 'Mericuh has all around the
world, restore the Glass-Seagull act, interfere with all the CIA middlings in the Ukraine, Latin 'Mericuh,
Turkey, Iran, ect., change or end NAFTA? lmao "
And " Trump's candidacy is about so much more than personality. Once the media are forced to
report Trump's positions, instead of his persona, even more Americans will see that Trump is the sole
Republican who rejects a "free trade" that gives away the keys to the store and opposed the ill-fated
Iraq war. He is the type of candidate Americans always wanted but the party establishments are too afraid
to provide."
Notable quotes:
"... What is amusing that Guardian gaged all comments on all articles about Hillary but opened flood
gates for those on Trump. Can't wait this political paparazzi return to b*tching about Murdoch and Fox.
Or tear jerking about free press in Russia. ..."
"... Consequently -- and after outspending Donald 15-to-1 in millions of dollars of tv and radio
advertisements (LA Times) -- Hillary leads him by 3 points (HuffPost). ..."
"... Thats the USA, two potential presidents nobody wants. ..."
"... Let's face it, you need billions to get elected. That's not democracy by anybody's standards.
..."
"... You are confusing money with elitism. They are not interchangeable. For example, even before
he had any money, Obama was an elite. ..."
"... If you look at Bill Clinton's record he really wasn't that much of a Democrate...more like
a moderate Republican. One reason I never could understand the GOPs almost pathological hatred of the
Clintons..and I'm not just talking about the far far far right Republicans either. ..."
"... Trump is a better alternative because he is likely to get us into unnecessary conflicts around
the world. I think it's great that he is ending the politically correct culture that we have in the
United States. ..."
"... Trump's appeal to the disenfranchised workers of the USA is a strong one, whereas Clinton thinks
Democrats, many of whom have deep reservations about her, will simply fall into line as if she's the
matron of the WH. ..."
"... The fact that she's a corrupt grifter won't help. ..."
"... Whatever anyone thinks of him, you cannot deny this is history being made. The last was Roosevelt
almost 100 years ago. Independent politicians are popping up around the world. ..."
"... Just wondering : Which paradise do you come from? ..."
"... "Trump is a better alternative because he is likely to get us into unnecessary conflicts around
the world. I think it's great that he is ending the politically correct culture that we have in the
United States." ..."
"... So i get that Democrats were hoping that the RNC convention would be an utter disaster but
it hasnt turned out to be so. Apart from some shamefully contrived nonsense about plagiarism to attack
a woman who appears to be a decent woman ( by the way I thought Democrats were all about women, hypocrites)
and Ted Cruz deciding to end his political career, the RNC convention has gone rather well. ..."
"... His comments on Neo-Liberal globalization and the creation of the nationless aristocracy at
the expense of common folk labour all over the world is bang on . ..."
"... I am happy to see that this disastrous , extraordinarily exploitive phenomenon has finally
be brought out into the light of day ..... where it will stay long after this election is over . ..."
"... When your a colony you obey the emperor whoever he or she is. If President Trump exposes NATO
as just another Mafia by making threats and demanding money of all the 'allies' ,as the US's European
quislings call themselves, they will pay up. ..."
"... Do all the Trumplings really believe he will rethink or change the NATO mafia, close down any
of the 1,100 military bases and outposts 'Mericuh has all around the world, restore the Glass-Seagull
act, interfere with all the CIA middlings in the Ukraine, Latin 'Mericuh, Turkey, Iran, ect., change
or end NAFTA? lmao ..."
"... Quickest way to a bullet if he does try!! ..."
"... Both the Republican and Democratic Parties are disasters in being, neither has shown the slightest
interest in doing anything for the country, both are vastly more concerned about fighting each other,
and fighting within, all to accumulate yet more wealth and power for themselves. ..."
"... "The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses
is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society
constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. …We are governed,
our minds are moulded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of..
…In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social
conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who understand
the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control
the public mind." – Edward Bernays, Propaganda (1928) ..."
"... Trump is a breath of fresh air. I don't understand all the vitriol against him. ..."
"... US politics needs an earthquake to re orientate the electorate's priorities. Trump is a populist
and a populist is what America needs. ..."
"... The liberal media's constant Trump hit pieces have no effect and the clowns are getting desperate
as the realization sets in. Trump 2016! ..."
"... The Guardian along with it's U.S. counterparts, have become one big opinion piece. This is
cementing voters views that the media is elitist, and terriblly out of touch with ordinary Americans.
It looks like you are actively trying to tear him down, this has backfired since day one, and attracted
more right wing voters to come out for a protest vote. Trump is a sensationalist, and you have played
into his reality show hands. ..."
"... Trump comes along as an anti establishment choice for people who have been left behind by globalisation/capatalism.
People who have felt ignored and disenfranchised. ..."
"... Not unlike the make-up of the brexit voters in the UK. It's an odd grouping. ..."
"... I would like to hear, in clear terms that reflect precise policies, why Trump is preferable
to Clinton. Let's assume for a start that both candidates are in different ways dishonest, that they
are both elitist, and that they both are opportunist (adapting their rhetoric to suit their goals).
..."
"... Actually, dugandben's comment was spot on. Hillary is the bigger fascist considering the way
the media (like the Guardian) shills for her, and how she is by far, the corporate-approved candidate.
..."
"... Another Hilbot being paid to distort the truth, eh, Arundel? That's what good little fascists
do. Inverted Totalitarianism . ..."
Nazly De La Hoya, 26, a delegate from El Paso, Texas, initially backed Kentucky senator Rand Paul.
"He [Trump] was not my first choice; however, I'm very against the corruption and lies that Hillary's
been involved with," she said during a rally in Cleveland's Public Square. "Trump is a better alternative
because he is likely to get us into unnecessary conflicts around the world. I think it's great that
he is ending the politically correct culture that we have in the United States."
The US currently pays 75% of the cost of European defence! How can that be good?
After Brexit, a European army may emerge . Many politicians in Germany and especially France
have desired this idea of an EU force for a long time , with the Brits as the main obstacle.
What is amusing that Guardian gaged all comments on all articles about Hillary but opened
flood gates for those on Trump. Can't wait this political paparazzi return to b*tching about Murdoch
and Fox. Or tear jerking about free press in Russia.
"He's a disaster. He's a wild card. You don't know what he's going to do. He has no principles.
He's a playboy entertainer and it's shocking that the American people would choose him."
Consequently -- and after outspending Donald 15-to-1 in millions of dollars of tv and radio
advertisements (LA Times) -- Hillary leads him by 3 points (HuffPost).
If you look at Bill Clinton's record he really wasn't that much of a Democrate...more like
a moderate Republican. One reason I never could understand the GOPs almost pathological hatred
of the Clintons..and I'm not just talking about the far far far right Republicans either.
."Trump is a better alternative because he is likely to get us into unnecessary conflicts
around the world. I think it's great that he is ending the politically correct culture that
we have in the United States."
I do hope that the word "not" was missing from that sentence.
Michael Moore has said he thinks Trump will win - and that's a distinct possibility. it's complacency
that will put Trump in the White House and that may as well be Hillary's middle name. Trump's
appeal to the disenfranchised workers of the USA is a strong one, whereas Clinton thinks Democrats,
many of whom have deep reservations about her, will simply fall into line as if she's the matron
of the WH. After watching the brexit campaign, people should be worried that weak campaigning
from Clinton wont pull enough of the undecided voters and her soft opposition to her side.
Whatever anyone thinks of him, you cannot deny this is history being made. The last was Roosevelt
almost 100 years ago. Independent politicians are popping up around the world.
If it's true that in a democracy you get the government you deserve it's hard to imagine a more
perfect candidate for the job. Crass, crooked, mendacious, irresponsible bully, exactly like the
country he seeks to lead.
"Trump is a better alternative because he is likely to get us into unnecessary conflicts around
the world. I think it's great that he is ending the politically correct culture that we have in
the United States."
Jesus, why are these people so obsessed with political correctness? In light of all the other
issues plaguing America - out of control health care costs, crumbling infrastructure, stagnant
wages, terrorism, overpriced education, race wars, etc. - these people are going to pick the next
POTUS based primarily on his/her disdain for political correctness? Really?
So i get that Democrats were hoping that the RNC convention would be an utter disaster but
it hasnt turned out to be so. Apart from some shamefully contrived nonsense about plagiarism to
attack a woman who appears to be a decent woman ( by the way I thought Democrats were all about
women, hypocrites) and Ted Cruz deciding to end his political career, the RNC convention has gone
rather well.
Now over to you Democrats. Lets see how many people can keep a straight face
while extolling the virtues of a criminal for the highest office. If we are lucky we might see
some self shame as person after person shows up to demonstrate their sold out souls.
...His comments on Neo-Liberal globalization and the creation of the nationless aristocracy
at the expense of common folk labour all over the world is bang on .
I am happy to see that this disastrous , extraordinarily exploitive phenomenon has finally
be brought out into the light of day ..... where it will stay long after this election is over
.
When your a colony you obey the emperor whoever he or she is. If President Trump exposes NATO
as just another Mafia by making threats and demanding money of all the 'allies' ,as the US's European
quislings call themselves, they will pay up.
Do all the Trumplings really believe he will rethink or change the NATO mafia, close down
any of the 1,100 military bases and outposts 'Mericuh has all around the world, restore the Glass-Seagull
act, interfere with all the CIA middlings in the Ukraine, Latin 'Mericuh, Turkey, Iran, ect.,
change or end NAFTA? lmao
Trump is a better alternative because he is likely to get us into unnecessary conflicts
around the world. Probably a slip or a typo, but keeping the US military-industrial complex ticking
never did any harm - to stakeholders in it, at least.
Everybody, and I mean everybody, fails to comprehend (capiche) how pressing is the global MIC.
These vermin, aside from the otherwise good and decent enlistees and career soildiers, are guided
ONLY by MORE WAR, MORE stupidly profitable revenues. $700 hammers, etc.
Poor guy--his latest screw up is that he said he might not want to go to a nuke, end the world,
war to save Estonia from the Russians--not that Russians have any real desire to do so at this
point. Maybe he is the only sane man in politics.......
But he's just reflective of and the result of the ongoing disaster that American politics and
political parties have been for the last few decades.
Both the Republican and Democratic Parties are disasters in being, neither has shown the
slightest interest in doing anything for the country, both are vastly more concerned about fighting
each other, and fighting within, all to accumulate yet more wealth and power for themselves.
Neither party really gives a rat's ass about the country or the people. To both, the people
are annoyances to be manipulated and then ignored.
Some Democrats smugly view the catastrophic disarray of the Republicans with glee, thinking
that it shows how superior they are, but they are merely partisan nitwits who look no further
than "Yay, we win!", completely failing to examine what that might mean in practicality. In point
of fact, the Democratic Party is little better.
Neither party has either the chops or the inclination to actually do anything about the mess
the country is in other than to profit personally from it.
Both parties need to be swept from office, but that is unlikely to happen. Neither is fit to
govern.
It makes me more sympathetic to a button I saw the other day:
"If God meant for us to vote, He would have given us candidates."
At this point, the rot is so deep I despair of finding an alternative way to fix it other than
the time-honored solution: Off with their heads!
The system told Clinton she would be President next time around when Obama was elected.
They have set up a contest with the only person in the US she could beat & she is struggling with
that.
She may have to resort to tactics used in the past, which wouldnt be good for Trumps health.
"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses
is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society
constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. …We are governed,
our minds are moulded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard
of.. …In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in
our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of
persons…who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who
pull the wires which control the public mind." – Edward Bernays, Propaganda (1928)
Trump is a breath of fresh air. I don't understand all the vitriol against him. Cruz
is way to the right of Trump, an absolute toady to the Republican right. Hillary is as bad - 100%
owned by Wall Street. Bill Clinton was 8 years of drift and disaster and Hillary will be at least
another four years of the same. US politics needs an earthquake to re orientate the electorate's
priorities. Trump is a populist and a populist is what America needs.
First off, Trump is a horrific candidate. But, I can't help thinking The Guardian along with
it's U.S. counterparts, have become one big opinion piece. This is cementing voters views that
the media is elitist, and terriblly out of touch with ordinary Americans. It looks like you are
actively trying to tear him down, this has backfired since day one, and attracted more right wing
voters to come out for a protest vote. Trump is a sensationalist, and you have played into his
reality show hands.
Trump comes along as an anti establishment choice for people who have been left behind by
globalisation/capatalism. People who have felt ignored and disenfranchised. He also appeals
to the racist right wing and the conservatives who are sick of career politicians. Not unlike
the make-up of the brexit voters in the UK. It's an odd grouping.
It might have to run its course - I can see him getting in despite Clinton war chest Trump
is offering the change that people think they want. (Even though of course he cannot and wouldn't
if he ever could deliver it)
I would like to hear, in clear terms that reflect precise policies, why Trump is preferable
to Clinton. Let's assume for a start that both candidates are in different ways dishonest, that
they are both elitist, and that they both are opportunist (adapting their rhetoric to suit their
goals).
Actually, dugandben's comment was spot on. Hillary is the bigger fascist considering the way
the media (like the Guardian) shills for her, and how she is by far, the corporate-approved candidate.
"... A year ago, Trump was a joke. A media circus. A novelty. We assumed – I assumed – he was in it for the giggles. I thought he'd drop out like he'd down twice before. I thought his total lack of experience, his profanity and his recklessness would count against him in a primary among conservatives. But the very nature of conservatism has changed. ..."
"... Trump didn't just defy the establishment. He defied what we thought for years were the outsiders: the ideological conservatives who hitherto cast themselves as the rebels. By beating Ted Cruz, Trump actually ran an insurgency against the insurgent. He demonstrated that what people wanted wasn't something more ideologically pure – as Cruz assumed – but something that was totally different. ..."
"... That is one big positive we can take from this campaign. If Trump can win when challenging the Republican position on trade and war, maybe someone in the future can win while challenging their positions on other things. ..."
"... Donald Trump did, in fact, beat the hell out of the GOP Establishment. But let's also note here that the GOP Establishment beat itself. If you haven't yet, check out conservative writer Matthew Sheffield's evisceration of the Republican Industrial Complex. It was e-mailed to me by a Republican friend who until fairly recently was part of that world, and knows about it intimately. ..."
"... Consider the conservative nonprofit establishment, which seems to employ most right-of-center adults in Washington. Over the past 40 years, how much donated money have all those think tanks and foundations consumed? Billions, certainly. (Someone better at math and less prone to melancholy should probably figure out the precise number.) Has America become more conservative over that same period? Come on. Most of that cash went to self-perpetuation: Salaries, bonuses, retirement funds, medical, dental, lunches, car services, leases on high-end office space, retreats in Mexico, more fundraising. Unless you were the direct beneficiary of any of that, you'd have to consider it wasted. ..."
"... Pretty embarrassing. And yet they're not embarrassed. Many of those same overpaid, underperforming tax-exempt sinecure-holders are now demanding that Trump be stopped. Why? Because, as his critics have noted in a rising chorus of hysteria, Trump represents "an existential threat to conservatism." ..."
"... It turns out the GOP wasn't simply out of touch with its voters; the party had no idea who its voters were or what they believed. For decades, party leaders and intellectuals imagined that most Republicans were broadly libertarian on economics and basically neoconservative on foreign policy. That may sound absurd now, after Trump has attacked nearly the entire Republican catechism (he savaged the Iraq War and hedge fund managers in the same debate) and been greatly rewarded for it, but that was the assumption the GOP brain trust operated under. They had no way of knowing otherwise. The only Republicans they talked to read the Wall Street Journal too. ..."
"... On immigration policy, party elders were caught completely by surprise. Even canny operators like Ted Cruz didn't appreciate the depth of voter anger on the subject. And why would they? If you live in an affluent ZIP code, it's hard to see a downside to mass low-wage immigration. Your kids don't go to public school. You don't take the bus or use the emergency room for health care. No immigrant is competing for your job. (The day Hondurans start getting hired as green energy lobbyists is the day my neighbors become nativists.) Plus, you get cheap servants, and get to feel welcoming and virtuous while paying them less per hour than your kids make at a summer job on Nantucket. It's all good. ..."
"... Trump hasn't said anything especially shocking about immigration. Control the border, deport lawbreakers, try not to admit violent criminals - these are the ravings of a Nazi? ..."
"... This year, and this week, in Republican Party politics and in American conservatism has been about nothing but moral, intellectual, and institutional decadence. It did not happen because of Donald Trump. Donald Trump emerged because the institutions were rotten. It is an almost Shakespearean twist that Roger Ailes is being defenestrated from atop the Fox News empire even as Trump receives his crown in Cleveland. ..."
It's mostly how I feel, though the one consolation I take from this debacle is that genuine creativity
may emerge out of Trump's destruction of the old GOP. It's a small bit of comfort, but I'll take
what I can. If Marco Rubio or any other of the GOP bunch were being nominated now, I would not be
excited at all, or even interested. I prefer that to being freaked out by the prospect of a Trump
presidency, but I would prefer to have someone to vote for , instead of against.
But then, I've wanted that for years.
Because I'm feeling contrarian, I want to give Donald Trump his due in this, his hour of triumph.
He pulled off something that nobody imagined he would do. I remember watching him give a political
speech for the first time - my first time watching him, I mean. He was addressing a big crowd in
Mobile. I watched the thing nearly gape-mouthed. I could not believe the crudeness, the chaos, and
the idiocy of the speech. This won't go anywhere, I thought, but it's going to be fun
watching him implode.
I laughed a lot at Donald Trump back then. Who's laughing now?
A year ago, Trump was a joke. A media circus. A novelty. We assumed – I assumed – he was in
it for the giggles. I thought he'd drop out like he'd down twice before. I thought his total lack
of experience, his profanity and his recklessness would count against him in a primary among conservatives.
But the very nature of conservatism has changed.
It was likely the rise of Sarah Palin in 2008 that made this possible – a candidate who suggested
there was a choice to be made between intellectualism and common sense, and who inspired deep
devotion among those who identified with her. Folks don't identify with Trump in the same, personal
way as they did with the hockey mom from Alaska. How can they? He flies everywhere in a private
jet and has a model as a wife. But his issues did strike a chord. The Wall cut through.
Trump didn't just defy the establishment. He defied what we thought for years were the outsiders:
the ideological conservatives who hitherto cast themselves as the rebels. By beating Ted Cruz,
Trump actually ran an insurgency against the insurgent. He demonstrated that what people wanted
wasn't something more ideologically pure – as Cruz assumed – but something that was totally different.
That is one big positive we can take from this campaign. If Trump can win when challenging
the Republican position on trade and war, maybe someone in the future can win while challenging
their positions on other things.
American presidential elections usually amount to a series of overcorrections: Clinton begat
Bush, who produced Obama, whose lax border policies fueled the rise of Trump. In the case of Trump,
though, the GOP shares the blame, and not just because his fellow Republicans misdirected their
ad buys or waited so long to criticize him. Trump is in part a reaction to the intellectual corruption
of the Republican Party. That ought to be obvious to his critics, yet somehow it isn't.
Consider the conservative nonprofit establishment, which seems to employ most right-of-center
adults in Washington. Over the past 40 years, how much donated money have all those think tanks
and foundations consumed? Billions, certainly. (Someone better at math and less prone to melancholy
should probably figure out the precise number.) Has America become more conservative over that
same period? Come on. Most of that cash went to self-perpetuation: Salaries, bonuses, retirement
funds, medical, dental, lunches, car services, leases on high-end office space, retreats in Mexico,
more fundraising. Unless you were the direct beneficiary of any of that, you'd have to consider
it wasted.
Pretty embarrassing. And yet they're not embarrassed. Many of those same overpaid, underperforming
tax-exempt sinecure-holders are now demanding that Trump be stopped. Why? Because, as his critics
have noted in a rising chorus of hysteria, Trump represents "an existential threat to conservatism."
Let that sink in. Conservative voters are being scolded for supporting a candidate they consider
conservative because it would be bad for conservatism? And by the way, the people doing the scolding?
They're the ones who've been advocating for open borders, and nation-building in countries whose
populations hate us, and trade deals that eliminated jobs while enriching their donors, all while
implicitly mocking the base for its worries about abortion and gay marriage and the pace of demographic
change. Now they're telling their voters to shut up and obey, and if they don't, they're liberal.
It turns out the GOP wasn't simply out of touch with its voters; the party had no idea who
its voters were or what they believed. For decades, party leaders and intellectuals imagined that
most Republicans were broadly libertarian on economics and basically neoconservative on foreign
policy. That may sound absurd now, after Trump has attacked nearly the entire Republican catechism
(he savaged the Iraq War and hedge fund managers in the same debate) and been greatly rewarded
for it, but that was the assumption the GOP brain trust operated under. They had no way of knowing
otherwise. The only Republicans they talked to read the Wall Street Journal too.
On immigration policy, party elders were caught completely by surprise. Even canny operators
like Ted Cruz didn't appreciate the depth of voter anger on the subject. And why would they? If
you live in an affluent ZIP code, it's hard to see a downside to mass low-wage immigration. Your
kids don't go to public school. You don't take the bus or use the emergency room for health care.
No immigrant is competing for your job. (The day Hondurans start getting hired as green energy
lobbyists is the day my neighbors become nativists.) Plus, you get cheap servants, and get to
feel welcoming and virtuous while paying them less per hour than your kids make at a summer job
on Nantucket. It's all good.
Apart from his line about Mexican rapists early in the campaign, Trump hasn't said anything
especially shocking about immigration. Control the border, deport lawbreakers, try not to admit
violent criminals - these are the ravings of a Nazi? This is the "ghost of George Wallace" that
a Politico piece described last August? A lot of Republican leaders think so. No wonder their
voters are rebelling.
Read the whole thing. Let it sink in that Carlson wrote this before a single vote had been cast
in the GOP primaries.
This year, and this week, in Republican Party politics and in American conservatism has been about
nothing but moral, intellectual, and institutional decadence. It did not happen because of Donald
Trump. Donald Trump emerged because the institutions were rotten. It is an almost Shakespearean twist
that Roger Ailes is being defenestrated from atop the Fox News empire even as Trump receives his
crown in Cleveland.
Trump didn't steal the Republican Party. It was his for the taking, because the people who run
it and the institutions surrounding it failed.
When Trump loses in November, maybe, just maybe, some new blood and new ideas will rebuild the
party.
And if he wins? We will have far bigger things to worry about than the fate of the Republican
Party. We will be forced to contemplate the fate of the Republic itself.
"... Shell-shocked, his foes, unwilling to admit their politically correct system has tanked, failed to understand that political incorrectness is to Trump what spinach is to Popeye. ..."
"... "So many 'politically correct' fools in our country," Trump tweeted. "We have to all get back to work and stop wasting time and energy on nonsense!" ..."
"... Trump's candidacy is about so much more than personality. Once the media are forced to report Trump's positions, instead of his persona, even more Americans will see that Trump is the sole Republican who rejects a "free trade" that gives away the keys to the store and opposed the ill-fated Iraq war. He is the type of candidate Americans always wanted but the party establishments are too afraid to provide. ..."
"... The last time America saw a strong paleo-conservative was Pat Buchanan in 1996. An early win in Louisiana caused Buchanan to place second in Iowa and first in New Hampshire. Lacking money, Buchanan was steamrolled by the establishment in Arizona and, in terms of paleo-conservatism, many thought he was the Last of the Mohicans. Trump's campaign is Buchananesque with one difference: Trump has money, and loads of it. He can fend off any attack and self-finance his campaign. He is establishment kryptonite. ..."
"... This reality is what makes him the new face of paleo-conservativism. It might also make him president. ..."
Political incorrectness is to Trump what spinach is to Popeye: Columnist. When the term paleo-conservative
is floated in conversation, most folks imagine a creature out of Jurassic World. But paleo-conservatism
- a near extinct brand of conservatism that heralds limited government, nonintervention, economic
nationalism and Western traditions - is finding a comeback in an unlikely spokesperson.
The history-making campaign of
Donald Trump is turning the clock of U.S. politics back to a time when hubris was heroic and
the truth, no matter how blunt, was king. It is resurrecting a political thought that does not play
by the rules of modern politics.
And as the nation saw the top-tier
GOP candidates take the stage for the first time, they saw Trump, unapologetic and confident,
alongside eight candidates clueless on how to contain him and a tongue-lashed Rand Paul.
The debate itself highlighted the fear a Trump candidacy is creating throughout the political
establishment. The very first question asked the candidates to pledge unconditional support to the
eventual GOP nominee and refrain from a third-party run. Trump refused.
Those in the Beltway resumed drafting Trump's political obituary. But while they were busy scribbling,
post-debate polls showed Trump jumped in the polls. Republicans are ignoring their orders from headquarters
and deflecting to the Donald.
Shell-shocked, his foes, unwilling to admit their politically correct system has tanked, failed
to understand that political incorrectness is to Trump what spinach is to Popeye.
"So many 'politically correct' fools in our country," Trump tweeted. "We have to all get back
to work and stop wasting time and energy on nonsense!"
Is he not correct? Days before the nation started debating Kelly's metaphorical blood, an unauthorized
immigrant in New Jersey pleaded guilty to actually spilling the blood of 30-year-old Sviatlana Dranko
and setting her body on fire. In the media, Dranko's blood is second fiddle. This contrast is not
lost on the silent majority flocking to Trump.
Trump's candidacy is about so much more than personality. Once the media are forced to report
Trump's positions, instead of his persona, even more Americans will see that Trump is the sole Republican
who rejects a "free trade" that gives away the keys to the store and opposed the ill-fated Iraq war.
He is the type of candidate Americans always wanted but the party establishments are too afraid to
provide.
The last time America saw a strong paleo-conservative was
Pat Buchanan in 1996. An early win in Louisiana caused Buchanan to place second in Iowa and first
in New Hampshire. Lacking money, Buchanan was steamrolled by the establishment in Arizona and, in
terms of paleo-conservatism, many thought he was the Last of the Mohicans. Trump's campaign is Buchananesque
with one difference: Trump has money, and loads of it. He can fend off any attack and self-finance
his campaign. He is establishment kryptonite.
This reality is what makes him the new face of paleo-conservativism. It might also make him
president.
Joseph R. Murray II is a civil-rights attorney, a conservative commentator and a former official
with Pat Buchanan's 2000 campaign.
"... "[W]hat is most astonishing is the rising level of rage among Trump's political enemies from inside the Republican establishment," said Scarborough . "Many of my conservative friends are sounding as arrogant and unmoored as left-wing pundits let loose on MSNBC during the Bush years." ..."
"... Trump, who does hold some positions at odds with traditional conservatism, such as strengthening entitlement programs, has fought back against that criticism, calling commentators like Will "eggheads." ..."
MSNBC "Morning Joe" host Joe Scarborough is hitting back at some conservatives in the media who
he says are taking an elitist attitude toward Donald Trump and his supporters.
In a Sunday column for the Washington Post, Scarborough, a former Republican congressman, said
that some conservative commentators "are sounding as cocooned from their own political party as any
liberal writing social commentary for the New Yorker or providing political analysis for ABC News."
"[W]hat is most astonishing is the rising level of rage among Trump's political enemies from
inside the Republican establishment,"
said Scarborough. "Many of my conservative friends are sounding as arrogant and unmoored as left-wing
pundits let loose on MSNBC during the Bush years."
Scarborough took criticism earlier this year from some of the same commentators, and many others,
for what critics
call
his
fawning
treatment of Trump in interviews.
Stay abreast of the latest developments from nation's capital and beyond with curated News
Alerts from the Washington Examiner news desk and delivered to your inbox.
Some venerable
right-leaning publications and commentators, like National Review and George Will of the Washington
Post, have
denounced Trump for, they say, his insufficient conservatism and his apparent lack of knowledge
about conservative thinking and policy.
Trump, who does hold some positions at odds with traditional conservatism, such as strengthening
entitlement programs, has fought back against that criticism, calling commentators like Will
"eggheads."
"... Donald Trump has raised three issues of real concern to paleoconservatives and traditional conservatives like myself." ..."
"... These three stances that Trump hits on to Buchanan's contentment are border security, economic nationalism, and being "skeptical of these endless wars and interventions." ..."
"... "I think many folks who agree with me have welcomed Trump into the race," Buchanan said. He added while laughing, "the very fact that the neocons seem so disconsolate is the icing on the cake." ..."
"... "Neocons offer nothing more than more wars," he said, before adding that their support for free trade is "almost a religious belief." ..."
"... The person who will lead America to its end is Hillary Clinton. I don't know how to say it any clearer - Bill and Hillary are pure evil. All the stories about them while in Arkansas are true - murders, cocaine smuggling, money laundering and they continued their evil activities when Bill got into the White House. ..."
"... They continue today with their Foundation which is nothing but a front for money laundering. It is not right wing conspiracies which Hillary continues to imply and the people whose deaths are connected to the Clinton's will never have justice. ..."
Buchanan ran in 1992 for the Republican party nomination on a platform opposing globalization,
unfettered immigration, and the move away from social conservatism. He has been harping on these
views ever since.
"What we've gotten is proof that we were right," Buchanan told The Daily Caller Tuesday. While
he said, "I would not say that Donald Trump is a paleoconservative," and, "I don't think [Trump's]
a social conservative."
Buchanan told TheDC, "I was just astonished to see him raise the precise issues on which we ran
in the 1990s… Donald Trump has raised three issues of real concern to paleoconservatives and
traditional conservatives like myself."
These three stances that Trump hits on to Buchanan's contentment are border security, economic
nationalism, and being "skeptical of these endless wars and interventions."
"I think many folks who agree with me have welcomed Trump into the race," Buchanan said. He
added while laughing, "the very fact that the neocons seem so disconsolate is the icing on the cake."
Buchanan is not only opposed to immigration and trade, he is also a staunch social conservative.
Trump has had two divorces and has previously held pro-choice views, making it tough for some to
support him. Buchanan though said, "I think Trump respects the position of the social conservatives."
"I do think he would appoint the type of justices that would unite the Republican Party," he said.
The conservative commentator continued on to say, "I think the great emperor Constantine converted
to Christianity but he may have killed one of his sons as well."
Buchanan told TheDC, "we don't have any perfect candidates," but the other options besides Trump
are more frightening.
"Neocons offer nothing more than more wars," he said, before adding that their support for
free trade is "almost a religious belief."
Richard
The person who will lead America to its end is Hillary Clinton. I don't know how to say
it any clearer - Bill and Hillary are pure evil. All the stories about them while in Arkansas
are true - murders, cocaine smuggling, money laundering and they continued their evil activities
when Bill got into the White House.
They continue today with their Foundation which is nothing but a front for money laundering.
It is not right wing conspiracies which Hillary continues to imply and the people whose deaths
are connected to the Clinton's will never have justice.
Why is it that every time a Grand Jury was to be convened and people were subpoenaed to testify
against the Clinton's, it never happened and some of those people ended up in prison, dead or
disappeared. Anyone who has ever had files implicating the Clinton's of illegal activities either
commits suicide or was murdered, and the files have disappeared. People if your voting for or
have voted for Hillary - do your homework and learn about who you vote for?
"... Though he has been a hugely successful builder-businessman, far more successful than, say, Carly Fiorina, who has been received respectfully, our resident elites resolutely refuse to take Trump seriously. ..."
"... Trump's success comes from the issues he has seized upon - illegal immigration and trade deals that deindustrialized America - and brazen defiance of Republican elites and a media establishment. ..."
"... The reaction of Trump's Republican rivals has been even more instructive. Initially, it was muted. But when major media began to demand that GOP candidates either denounce Trump or come under suspicion or racism themselves, the panic and pile-on began. ..."
"... What Trump has done, and [Ted] Cruz sees it, is to have elevated the illegal immigration issue, taken a tough line, and is now attacking GOP rivals who have dithered or done nothing to deal with it. ..."
"... Trump intends to exploit the illegal immigration issue, and the trade issue, where majorities of middle-class Americans oppose the elites. And he is going to ride them as far as he can in the Republican primaries. ..."
Since Trump's presidential
announcement last month including controversial comments about illegal immigrants from Mexico,
Buchanan has written two editorials on his website lauding Trump's efforts.
Though he has been a hugely successful builder-businessman, far more successful than, say,
Carly Fiorina, who has been received respectfully, our resident elites resolutely refuse to take
Trump seriously.
They should. Not because he will be nominated, but because the Trump constituency will represent
a vote of no confidence in the Beltway ruling class of politicians and press.
Votes for Trump will be votes to repudiate that class, whole and entire, and dump it onto the
ash heap of history.
Votes for Trump will be votes to reject a regime run by Bushes and Clintons that plunged us
into unnecessary wars, cannot secure our borders, and negotiates trade deals that produced the
largest trade deficits known to man and gutted a manufacturing base that was once "the great arsenal
of democracy" and envy of mankind.
A vote for Trump is a vote to say that both parties have failed America and none of the current
crop of candidates offers real hope of a better future.
Trump's success comes from the issues he has seized upon - illegal immigration and trade
deals that deindustrialized America - and brazen defiance of Republican elites and a media establishment.
By now the whole world has heard Trump's declaration:
"When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. … They're sending people that
have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems to us. They're bringing drugs. They're
bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people."
Politically incorrect? You betcha.
Yet, is Trump not raising a valid issue? Is there not truth in what he said? Is not illegal
immigration, and criminals crossing our Southern border, an issue of national import, indeed,
of national security?
. . .
The reaction to Trump's comments has been instructive. NBC and Univision dropped his Miss USA
and Miss Universe contests.
Macy's has dropped the Trump clothing line. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio is talking of terminating
city contracts with Trump.
The reaction of Trump's Republican rivals has been even more instructive. Initially, it
was muted. But when major media began to demand that GOP candidates either denounce Trump or come
under suspicion or racism themselves, the panic and pile-on began.
. . .
What Trump has done, and [Ted] Cruz sees it, is to have elevated the illegal immigration
issue, taken a tough line, and is now attacking GOP rivals who have dithered or done nothing to
deal with it.
Trump intends to exploit the illegal immigration issue, and the trade issue, where majorities
of middle-class Americans oppose the elites. And he is going to ride them as far as he can in
the Republican primaries.
In the coming debates, look for Trump to take the populist and popular side of them both. And
for Cruz to stand by him on illegal immigration.
Americans are fed up with words; they want action. Trump is moving in the polls because, whatever
else he may be, he is a man of action.
Trump later
retweeted
and thanked a follower who cited to Buchanan's labeling of Trump as "a man of action."
"... From a Paleo-Conservative perspective what is there to lose with Trump as POTUS? In the absence of a Trumpian paradigm shift in American politics, the status quo will indeed change, quite dramatically, but not in the direction favorable to the principles of 1776 and 1861. At least with a President Trump there is a chance, possible but not necessarily probable, for change in the right direction. As the presidential campaigning heats up, Middle America is bound to rise up. The collective wisdom of Middle America seems to understand that Trump is not the perfect candidate, but they also seem to realize (to paraphrase M. E. Bradford) "that all of us who will not take half a loaf will get a stone." ..."
There are several attributes of Donald Trump's bid for the U.S. Presidency that this Paleo-Conservative
finds to be interesting. To follow is an adumbration of the more salient.
His campaign style is refreshing. The absence of teleprompters, which results in spontaneity,
which in turn reveals the unvarnished candidate in contradistinction to the coached, stale, and
unconvincing political hacks, is refreshing. Trump's campaign speeches and debate performance
have actually juiced up political discourse, making politics interesting not simply for the political
class but also for Middle American.
The engagement of Middle American into this presidential election cycle have the political
class spooked. It is this same political class responsible for the removal of all things Confederate
from the public square, not Middle American. It is Middle America that has catapulted Trump into
the lead. In other words, Middle America may actually have some meaningful input into the election
of the next POTUS.
The spooking of the political class has exposed what it thinks of Middle America. Its
charge against Trump is that the bulk of his support rests upon the inherent racism, national
jingoism and stupidity of average Americans. Some have even claimed that Trump is a closet fascist
and that his supporters are inherently supportive of fascism. This is nonsense. Middle America's
detestation of ruling elites is not fascist, but it is an acknowledgment that it will take a strongman,
statesman if you prefer, to knock out the ruling elites.
Trump's detractors may be his best campaign weapon. Without knowing much about Trump's
policy positions, immigration notwithstanding, there is logic in supporting Trump based upon knowing
who his political enemies are. This may be the best voting cue Middle America has. The enemy (Trump)
of my enemy (the ruling class) is my friend. In other words, the more Trump agitates the ruling
class the more he endears himself to Middle America.
Trump appears to be more the pragmatist than ideologue, and that's a good thing. The
American federative republic's original blueprint is nomocratic (a Southern characteristic), but
has been replaced with a teleocratic (New England Puritanism) one. It is the latter that has resulted
in the unitary US of A, nation-building abroad and the welfare state domestically.
For any Southern patriot the status quo in American politics is totally unacceptable.
One thing is fairly certain; if Trump were to be the next POTUS, the status quo would be in for
quite a shock. At this point it matters little how the status quo might be changed. Middle America
wants change and it wants it now. Moreover, if Trump were to succeed in his bid to be the next
POTUS, he would be much more likely to expose the fraud and corruption inside the beltway than
any of his presidential campaign competitors. Unlike the latter, he would not be held captive
to the interests that funnel money and votes to sustain the status quo, but to the average American
voter, i.e., Middle America.
The disruptions, if not chaos, Trump might affect in Washington may result in preoccupying
the ruling class to the extent that the focus on things Southern, e.g., the Battle Flag, may dissipate.
This might just provide Southern patriots with the space to regroup and be better prepared for
the next assault on their culture.
Trump's campaign slogan is Make America Great Again. As an intelligent man he must know that to
achieve that goal he must remove the government shackles, e.g., taxation, regulations, and centralization,
holding Americans and America down, both domestically and internationally.
From a Paleo-Conservative perspective what is there to lose with Trump as POTUS? In the absence
of a Trumpian paradigm shift in American politics, the status quo will indeed change, quite dramatically,
but not in the direction favorable to the principles of 1776 and 1861. At least with a President
Trump there is a chance, possible but not necessarily probable, for change in the right direction.
As the presidential campaigning heats up, Middle America is bound to rise up. The collective wisdom
of Middle America seems to understand that Trump is not the perfect candidate, but they also seem
to realize (to paraphrase M. E. Bradford) "that all of us who will not take half a loaf will get
a stone."
Marshall DeRosa received his Ph.D. and M.A. from the University of Houston and his B. A. from
West Virginia University, Magna Cum Laude. He has taught at Davis and Elkins College (1985-1988),
Louisiana State University (1988-1990), and Florida Atlantic University (1990-Present). He is a Salvatori
Fellow with the Heritage Foundation and full professor in the Department of Political Science. He
has published articles and reviews in professional journals, book chapters, and three books. He resides
in Wellington, FL, with his wife and four children. More from Marshall DeRosa
"... Build the wall to block the gangsters and their heroin shipments. "We have situations right now where we have the migration. And we're accepting people in. And we're accepting them in by the thousands ..."
"... Trump wants to repeal Obamacare and replace it with a private system with more options and no state-specific boundaries, lower deductibles, take on the drug companies and install competitive bidding for medicine, and save enough money to take care of the poor. ..."
"... He wants to strengthen the armed forces but cut waste out of the budget and re-focus it. "We're buying equipment and we're buying things that our generals don't even want. We're buying planes they don't want instead of other ones because that company has better lobbyists… ..."
"... This is the politics of putting America First. It echoes the politics of Ross Perot's Reform Party, which once almost became Trump's party and which once housed Trump friend and paleoconservative firebrand Pat Buchanan. ..."
Trump has turned the Republican primary into a reality show. It's an effective tactic, one that
resonates with a country weaned on the TV genre that he helped to create. The sweating, bumbling
politicians have all become boardroom wannabes or castaways on an island where their flaws are exposed,
picked apart, and analyzed. And they all come off dishonest compared to him. This is the politics
of Richard Pryor as Montgomery Brewster and Peter Sellers as Chance the Gardener. This was never
supposed to happen. But it did.
And scarier still for the suits trying so hard to shut it down: Trump has substance.
On the border:Build the wall to block the gangsters and their heroin
shipments. "We have situations right now where we have the migration. And we're accepting people
in. And we're accepting them in by the thousands…Look at New Hampshire, the problems you
have with the drugs. We are letting people into this country and we have absolutely no idea who
they are, where they come from, are they ISIS? Maybe, maybe not."
On health care:Trump wants to repeal Obamacare and replace it with a
private system with more options and no state-specific boundaries, lower deductibles, take on
the drug companies and install competitive bidding for medicine, and save enough money to take
care of the poor. And he brushed off those who say it's not the Republican Way. "There's
a small group of people on the bottom who are not going to be able to be taken care of [under
Obamacare]. And I say, as Republicans, is there anybody who doesn't want to take care of them?
We are not going to have people dying on the streets. We're going to get them into a hospital
to take care of them…Let me tell you, the Republican way is, People CAN take care of themselves.
We have to help them. We're not going to let them die."
On the military:He wants to strengthen the armed forces but cut waste
out of the budget and re-focus it. "We're buying equipment and we're buying things that our generals
don't even want. We're buying planes they don't want instead of other ones because that company
has better lobbyists…We're going to get them the equipment they want. We're going to save
a lot of money." He wants to build a military so strong we'll never have to use it. After we take
care of ISIS, that is. And no more nation-building experiments that de-stabilize the Middle East
and embolden Iran. "Nobody, I'm telling you, nobody, is going to want to play with us."
This is the politics of putting America First. It echoes the politics of Ross Perot's Reform
Party, which once almost became Trump's party and which once housed Trump friend and paleoconservative
firebrand Pat Buchanan.
When Trump explains his views, it all sounds self-evident. It sounds like common sense. It wouldn't
sound so controversial if we didn't live in a media climate controlled by globalist corporate interests.
It's the kind of politics - tough, protectionist, and nationally self-interested - that Trump has
been thinking about for a very long time.
And now, like the last American tycoon, he's the only one fighting for it.
"... "In many countries today, moral and ethical norms are being reconsidered." ..."
"... "They're now requiring not only the proper acknowledgment of freedom of conscience, political views and private life, but also the mandatory acknowledgment of the equality of good and evil." ..."
"... President Reagan once called the old Soviet Empire "the focus of evil in the modern world." President Putin is implying that Barack Obama's America may deserve the title in the 21st century. ..."
"... Nor is he without an argument when we reflect on America's embrace of abortion on demand, homosexual marriage, pornography, promiscuity, and the whole panoply of Hollywood values. ..."
"... Unelected justices declared abortion and homosexual acts to be constitutionally protected rights. Judges have been the driving force behind the imposition of same-sex marriage. Attorney General Eric Holder refused to enforce the Defense of Marriage Act. ..."
"... America was de-Christianized in the second half of the 20th century by court orders, over the vehement objections of a huge majority of a country that was overwhelmingly Christian. ..."
"... Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of " Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? " Copyright 2013 Creators.com . ..."
Is Vladimir Putin a paleoconservative? In the culture war for mankind's future, is he one of us?
While such a question may be blasphemous in Western circles, consider the content of the Russian
president's state of the nation address.
With America clearly in mind, Putin declared, "In
many countries today, moral and ethical norms are being reconsidered."
"They're now requiring not only the proper acknowledgment of freedom of conscience, political
views and private life, but also the mandatory acknowledgment of the equality of good and evil."
Translation: While privacy and freedom of thought, religion and speech are cherished rights, to
equate traditional marriage and same-sex marriage is to equate good with evil.
No moral confusion here, this is moral clarity, agree or disagree.
President Reagan once called the old Soviet Empire "the focus of evil in the modern world."
President Putin is implying that Barack Obama's America may deserve the title in the 21st century.
Nor is he without an argument when we reflect on America's embrace of abortion on demand,
homosexual marriage, pornography, promiscuity, and the whole panoply of Hollywood values.
Our grandparents would not recognize the America in which we live.
Moreover, Putin asserts, the new immorality has been imposed undemocratically.
The "destruction of traditional values" in these countries, he said, comes "from the top" and
is "inherently undemocratic because it is based on abstract ideas and runs counter to the will of
the majority of people."
Does he not have a point?
Unelected justices declared abortion and homosexual acts to be constitutionally protected
rights. Judges have been the driving force behind the imposition of same-sex marriage. Attorney General
Eric Holder refused to enforce the Defense of Marriage Act.
America was de-Christianized in the second half of the 20th century by court orders, over
the vehement objections of a huge majority of a country that was overwhelmingly Christian.
And same-sex marriage is indeed an "abstract" idea unrooted in the history or tradition of the
West. Where did it come from?
Peoples all over the world, claims Putin, are supporting Russia's "defense of traditional values"
against a "so-called tolerance" that is "genderless and infertile."
While his stance as a defender of traditional values has drawn the mockery of Western media and
cultural elites, Putin is not wrong in saying that he can speak for much of mankind.
Same-sex marriage is supported by America's young, but most states still resist it, with black
pastors visible in the vanguard of the counterrevolution. In France, a million people took to the
streets of Paris to denounce the Socialists' imposition of homosexual marriage.
Only 15 nations out of more than 190 have recognized it.
In India, the world's largest democracy, the Supreme Court has struck down a lower court ruling
that made same-sex marriage a right. And the parliament in this socially conservative nation of more
than a billion people is unlikely soon to reverse the high court.
In the four dozen nations that are predominantly Muslim, which make up a fourth of the U.N. General
Assembly and a fifth of mankind, same-sex marriage is not even on the table. And Pope Francis has
reaffirmed Catholic doctrine on the issue for over a billion Catholics.
While much of American and Western media dismiss him as an authoritarian and reactionary, a throwback,
Putin may be seeing the future with more clarity than Americans still caught up in a Cold War paradigm.
As the decisive struggle in the second half of the 20th century was vertical, East vs. West, the
21st century struggle may be horizontal, with conservatives and traditionalists in every country
arrayed against the militant secularism of a multicultural and transnational elite.
And though America's elite may be found at the epicenter of anti-conservatism and anti-traditionalism,
the American people have never been more alienated or more divided culturally, socially and morally.
We are two countries now.
Putin says his mother had him secretly baptized as a baby and professes to be a Christian. And
what he is talking about here is ambitious, even audacious.
He is seeking to redefine the "Us vs. Them" world conflict of the future as one in which conservatives,
traditionalists, and nationalists of all continents and countries stand up against the cultural and
ideological imperialism of what he sees as a decadent west.
"We do not infringe on anyone's interests," said Putin, "or try to teach anyone how to live."
The adversary he has identified is not the America we grew up in, but the America we live in, which
Putin sees as pagan and wildly progressive.
Without naming any country, Putin attacked "attempts to enforce more progressive development models"
on other nations, which have led to "decline, barbarity, and big blood," a straight shot at the U.S.
interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Egypt.
In his speech, Putin cited Russian philosopher Nicholas Berdyaev whom Solzhenitsyn had hailed
for his courage in defying his Bolshevik inquisitors. Though no household word, Berdyaev is favorably
known at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal.
Which raises this question: Who is writing Putin's stuff?
"... "The U.S., as paleos have claimed for decades, was only meant to be a constitutional republic, not an empire-as Buchanan's 1999 foreign policy tome A Republic, Not an Empire nostalgically states," Scotchie explains. "Republics mind their own business. Their governments have very limited powers, and their people are too busy practicing self-government to worry about problems in other countries. Empires not only bully smaller, defenseless nations, they also can't leave their own, hapless subjects alone…. Empires and the tenth amendment aren't friends…. Empires and small government aren't compatible, either." ..."
"... If anti-interventionism and a commitment to the Old Republic defined by strict-construction constitutionalism and highly localized and independent social and political institutions defined one major dimension of paleoconservatism, its antipathy to the mass immigration that began to flood the country in the 1980s defined another. Indeed, it was ostensibly and mainly Chronicles' declaration of opposition to immigration that incited the neoconservative attack on Rockford and its subsequent defunding. Scotchie devotes a special but short chapter to paleoconservative thought on immigration and makes clear that to paleos, America was an extension of Western civilization. It was intended by the Founding Fathers to be an Anglo-Saxon-Celtic nation also influenced by Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem. Large-scale immigration from non-Western nations would, as Fleming (and most other paleos) maintained, forever spoil a distinct American civilization. ..."
"... The implication of this passage is that paleoconservatives, unlike libertarians, most neoconservatives, and many contemporary mainstream conservatives, do not consider America to be an "idea," a "proposition," or a "creed." It is instead a concrete and particular culture, rooted in a particular historical experience, a set of particular institutions as well as particular beliefs and values, and a particular ethnic-racial identity, and, cut off from those roots, it cannot survive. Indeed, it is not surviving now, for all the glint and glitter of empire. ..."
Joseph Scotchie's Revolt from the Heartland is not, as some readers might guess from the title,
about the terrorism of right-wing militias in the Midwestern United States, although some readers
might also say that guess was close enough. In fact, Revolt from the Heartland deals with the emergence
of "paleoconservatism," a species of conservative thought that despite its name ("paleo" is a Greek
prefix meaning "old") is a fairly recent twist in the cunningly knotted mind of the American Right.
While paleos sometimes like to characterize their beliefs as merely the continuation of the conservative
thought of the 1950s and '60s, and while in fact many of them do have their personal and intellectual
roots in the conservatism of that era, the truth is that what is now called paleoconservatism is
at least as new as the neoconservatism at which many paleos like to sniff as a newcomer.
Paleoconservatism is largely the invention of a single magazine, the Rockford Institute's Chronicles,
as it has been edited since the mid-1980s by Thomas Fleming, and Scotchie's book is essentially an
account of what Fleming and his major colleagues at Chronicles mainly, historian Paul Gottfried,
book review editor Chilton Williamson Jr., professor Clyde Wilson, and I believe, and what the differences
are between our brand of conservatism and others.
Scotchie's first three chapters are a survey of the history of American conservatism up until
the advent of Chronicles, including an account of the "Old Right" of the pre-World-War-II, pre-Depression
eras (for once, an account not confined to the libertarian "isolationists" but encompassing also
the Southern Agrarians), as well as the emergence of the "Cold War conservatism" of National Review
and the neoconservatism of the Reagan era and after. Scotchie's overview of these different shades
of the Right is useful in itself and necessary to clarify the differences between these colorations
and the paleos who constitute his main subject, though he may underestimate the differentiation between
the current, paleo "Old Right" and earlier "Old Rights."
Although Scotchie does not put it quite this way, contemporary paleoconservatism developed as
a reaction against three trends in the American Right during the Reagan administration. First, it
reacted against the bid for dominance by the neoconservatives, former liberals who insisted not only
that their version of conservative ideology and rhetoric prevail over those of older conservatives,
but also that their team should get the rewards of office and patronage and that the other team of
the older Right receive virtually nothing.
... ... ...
Paleos and those who soon identified with them almost spontaneously rejected U.S. military intervention
against Iraq. It was a moment, falling only a year after the neoconservative onslaught on the Rockford
Institute, that solidified the paleoconservative identity.
"The U.S., as paleos have claimed for decades, was only meant to be a constitutional republic,
not an empire-as Buchanan's 1999 foreign policy tome A Republic, Not an Empire nostalgically states,"
Scotchie explains. "Republics mind their own business. Their governments have very limited powers,
and their people are too busy practicing self-government to worry about problems in other countries.
Empires not only bully smaller, defenseless nations, they also can't leave their own, hapless subjects
alone…. Empires and the tenth amendment aren't friends…. Empires and small government aren't compatible,
either."
If anti-interventionism and a commitment to the Old Republic defined by strict-construction
constitutionalism and highly localized and independent social and political institutions defined
one major dimension of paleoconservatism, its antipathy to the mass immigration that began to flood
the country in the 1980s defined another. Indeed, it was ostensibly and mainly Chronicles' declaration
of opposition to immigration that incited the neoconservative attack on Rockford and its subsequent
defunding. Scotchie devotes a special but short chapter to paleoconservative thought on immigration
and makes clear that to paleos, America was an extension of Western civilization. It was intended
by the Founding Fathers to be an Anglo-Saxon-Celtic nation also influenced by Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem.
Large-scale immigration from non-Western nations would, as Fleming (and most other paleos) maintained,
forever spoil a distinct American civilization.
The implication of this passage is that paleoconservatives, unlike libertarians, most neoconservatives,
and many contemporary mainstream conservatives, do not consider America to be an "idea," a "proposition,"
or a "creed." It is instead a concrete and particular culture, rooted in a particular historical
experience, a set of particular institutions as well as particular beliefs and values, and a particular
ethnic-racial identity, and, cut off from those roots, it cannot survive. Indeed, it is not surviving
now, for all the glint and glitter of empire.
Trump is essentially a paleoconservative and as such is hostile to neocons that dominate
Washington establishment. That's' why they hate him so much and blackmail him so much.
Notable quotes:
"... Trump is millions of Republican voters' judgment against a party that failed them, and the fact that Trump is thoroughly unqualified for the office he seeks makes that judgment all the more damning. ..."
Trump officially
secured the Republican nomination last night:
Mr. Trump tallied 1,725 delegates, easily surpassing the 1,237 delegate threshold needed to
clinch the nomination. The delegate tally from his home state of New York, announced by Mr. Trump's
son Donald Jr., put him over the top.
Like
Rod Dreher, I see Trump's success as proof that "the people who run [the GOP] and the institutions
surrounding it failed." They not only failed in their immediate task of preventing the nomination
of a candidate that party leaders loathed, but failed repeatedly over at least the last fifteen years
to govern well or even to represent the interests and concerns of most Republican voters.
Had the Bush administration not presided over multiple disasters, most of them of their own making,
there would have been no opening or occasion for the repudiation of the party's leaders that we have
seen this year. Had the party served the interests of most of its voters instead of catering to the
preferences of their donors and corporations, there would have been much less support for someone
like Trump. Party leaders spent decades conning Republican voters with promises they knew they wouldn't
or couldn't fulfill, and then were shocked when most of those voters turned against them.
Trump is millions of Republican voters' judgment against a party that failed them, and the
fact that Trump is thoroughly unqualified for the office he seeks makes that judgment all the more
damning.
"... the best explanation of Trump's surprising success is that the constituency he has mobilized has existed for decades but the right champion never came along. ..."
"... Trump's platform combines positions that are shared by many populists but are anathema to movement conservatives-a defense of Social Security, a guarantee of universal health care, economic nationalist trade policies. "We have expanded the Republican Party," Trump claimed the night of his Super Tuesday victories. ..."
"... Buchanan, in a recent interview , characterized Trump as his populist heir. "What Trump has today is conclusive evidence to prove that what some of us warned about in the 1990s has come to pass," he said. But the evidence is that Trump doesn't see it that way. Trump even competed briefly with Buchanan for the presidential nomination. T he year was 2000 , and Trump, encouraged by his friend Jesse Ventura, then governor of Minnesota, was considering a run for the presidential nomination of Perot's Reform Party, on the grounds that the Republican Party of George W. Bush and Karl Rove had "moved too far toward the extreme far right." Trump and Ventura hoped to rescue the Reform Party from the conservative allies of Buchanan, of whom Trump said: "He's a Hitler lover; I guess he's an anti-Semite. He doesn't like the blacks, he doesn't like the gays." Trump floated the idea of Oprah Winfrey as his running mate . In his 2000 manifesto The America We Deserve , Trump proposed a platform that included universal employer- based health insurance, gays in the military and a one-time 14.5 percent tax on the rich that would reduce the federal deficit and help eliminate the shortfall in Social Security. ..."
"... Compared to Trump, Buchanan was a flawed vehicle for the Jacksonian populism of the ex-Democratic white working class. So was another Pat, the Reverend Pat Robertson, television evangelist, founder of the Christian Coalition, and, like Buchanan, a failed candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. But while the mainstream conservative movement marginalized Buchanan, it embraced Robertson and other evangelical Protestant leaders like Jerry Falwell and James Dobson of Focus on the Family. ..."
"... On social issues like abortion and gay rights, Buchanan shared the agenda of the religious right. But his advocacy of tariffs to protect American industry and immigration restriction threatened the mainstream right's consensus in favor of free trade and increased legal immigration. And his neo-isolationism threatened the post-Cold War American right's support of high military spending and an assertive global foreign policy. ..."
"... Many of the rank-and-file members of the religious right shared the traditional populist suspicion of bankers and big business ..."
"... But even before the unexpected success of Trump in the Republican primary race beginning in 2015, there were signs that this generation-old bargain was coming undone. Hostility to both illegal immigration and high levels of legal immigration, a position which free-market conservatives had fought to marginalize, has moved very quickly from heresy to orthodoxy in the GOP. ..."
"... There were other signs of populist discontent with establishment conservative orthodoxy, for those who paid attention. No project is dearer to the hearts of mainstream movement conservatives than the goal of privatizing Social Security, a hated symbol of the dependency-inducing "statism" of the allegedly tyrannical Franklin D. Roosevelt. But George W. Bush's plan to partly privatize Social Security was so unpopular, even among Republican voters, that a Republican-controlled Congress did not even bother to vote on it in 2005. ..."
Trump, in fact, has more appeal to the center than the conservative populists of the last half century.
Before Trump's rise in this year's Republican primary elections, the best-known populist presidential
candidates were Alabama Governor Wallace and tycoon Ross Perot, along with Buchanan. Yet none of
these past figures had broad enough appeal to hope to win the White House. Despite his folksy demeanor,
Perot was more of a technocrat than a populist and did poorly in traditionally populist areas of
the South and Midwest, where Trump is doing well. Wallace was an outspoken white supremacist, while
Trump tends to speak in a kind of code, starting with his "birther" campaign against President Obama,
and his criticism of illegal immigrants and proposed ban on Muslims may appeal to fringe white nationalists
even if it has offended many if not most Latinos. Nor has Trump alienated large sections of the electorate
by casting his lot with Old Right isolationism, as Buchanan did, or by adopting the religious right
social agenda of Robertson.
Indeed, the best explanation of Trump's surprising success is that the constituency he has
mobilized has existed for decades but the right champion never came along. What conservative
apparatchiks hate about Trump-his insufficient conservatism-may be his greatest strength in the general
election. His populism cuts across party lines like few others before him. Like his fans, Trump is
indifferent to the issues of sexual orientation that animate the declining religious right, even
to the point of defending Planned Parenthood. Trump's platform combines positions that are shared
by many populists but are anathema to movement conservatives-a defense of Social Security, a guarantee
of universal health care, economic nationalist trade policies. "We have expanded the Republican Party,"
Trump claimed the night of his Super Tuesday victories.
He may well be right, though it's not clear what that Republican Party will look like in the end.
... ... ...
Buchanan, a former Nixon aide and conservative journalist, ran unsuccessfully for
the Republican presidential nomination in 1992 and was awarded with a prime-time speech at the Republican
National Convention that nominated George Herbert Walker Bush for a second term in the White House.
Buchanan's speech focused almost entirely on the "religious war" and "culture war" to save America
from feminism, legal abortion, gay rights, and "the raw sewage of pornography."
In his 1996 campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, and in his 2000 campaign as the
Reform Party nominee, Buchanan emphasized populist themes of economic nationalism and immigration
restriction. But he was too much of a member of the Old Right that despised FDR and sought a return
to the isolationism of Robert Taft and Charles Lindbergh to have much appeal to former New Deal Democrats.
Buchanan's history of borderline anti-Semitic remarks led William F. Buckley Jr. to criticize him
in "In Search of Anti-Semitism," (1992) and some of his associates like Samuel Francis were overt
white racial nationalists.
For Reagan Democrats and their children and grandchildren, World War II showed America at its
best. But Buchanan concluded a long career of eccentric World War II revisionism in 2009 with "Churchill,
Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost its Empire and the West Lost the World," arguing
that Hitler should have been appeased by Britain and the U.S.
Buchanan,
in a recent interview, characterized Trump as his populist heir. "What Trump has today is conclusive
evidence to prove that what some of us warned about in the 1990s has come to pass," he said. But
the evidence is that Trump doesn't see it that way. Trump even competed briefly with Buchanan for
the presidential nomination. The
year was 2000, and Trump, encouraged by his friend Jesse Ventura, then governor of Minnesota,
was considering a run for the presidential nomination of Perot's Reform Party, on the grounds that
the Republican Party of George W. Bush and Karl Rove had "moved too far toward the extreme far right."
Trump and Ventura hoped to rescue the Reform Party from the conservative allies of Buchanan, of whom
Trump said: "He's a Hitler lover; I guess he's an anti-Semite. He doesn't like the blacks, he doesn't
like the gays." Trump floated the idea of Oprah Winfrey as his running mate . In his 2000 manifesto
The America We Deserve, Trump proposed a platform that included universal employer- based
health insurance, gays in the military and a one-time 14.5 percent
tax on the rich
that would reduce the federal deficit and help eliminate the shortfall in Social Security.
In his press release announcing
his withdrawal from the race for the presidential nomination of the Reform Party, Trump wrote: "Now
I understand that David Duke has decided to join the Reform Party to support the candidacy of Pat
Buchanan. So the Reform Party now includes a Klansman-Mr. Duke, a Neo-Nazi-Mr. Buchanan, and a Communist-Ms.
[Lenora] Fulani. This is not company I wish to keep."
Compared to Trump, Buchanan was a flawed vehicle for the Jacksonian populism of the ex-Democratic
white working class. So was another Pat, the Reverend Pat Robertson, television evangelist, founder
of the Christian Coalition, and, like Buchanan, a failed candidate for the Republican presidential
nomination. But while the mainstream conservative movement marginalized Buchanan, it embraced Robertson
and other evangelical Protestant leaders like Jerry Falwell and James Dobson of Focus on the Family.
On social issues like abortion and gay rights, Buchanan shared the agenda of the religious
right. But his advocacy of tariffs to protect American industry and immigration restriction threatened
the mainstream right's consensus in favor of free trade and increased legal immigration. And his
neo-isolationism threatened the post-Cold War American right's support of high military spending
and an assertive global foreign policy.
Unlike Buchanan, Robertson and other religious right leaders did not deviate from the Republican
Party line on trade, immigration, or tax cuts for the rich. Many of the rank-and-file members
of the religious right shared the traditional populist suspicion of bankers and big business.
But in the 1990s there was a tacit understanding that religious right activists would focus on issues
of sex and reproduction and school prayer, leaving economics to free-marketers. In foreign policy,
the Christian Zionism of many Protestant evangelicals made them reliable allies of neoconservatives
with close ties to Israel and supportive of the Iraq War and other U.S. interventions in the Middle
East.
From the 1980s until this decade, the religious right was the toothless, domesticated "designated
populist" wing of the Republican coalition, and mainstream conservative politicians took it for granted
that as long as they said they opposed abortion and gay marriage, evangelical voters would support
free-market conservative economics and interventionist neoconservative foreign policy.
But even before the unexpected success of Trump in the Republican primary race beginning in
2015, there were signs that this generation-old bargain was coming undone. Hostility to both illegal
immigration and high levels of legal immigration, a position which free-market conservatives had
fought to marginalize, has moved very quickly from heresy to orthodoxy in the GOP. The opposition
of populist conservatives killed comprehensive immigration reform under George W. Bush in 2007 and
also killed the Gang of Eight immigration reform effort led in part by Senator Marco Rubio in 2013.
The defeat of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in the 2014 Republican primary for the 7th District
of Virginia by an unknown conservative academic, David Brat, was attributed largely to Cantor's support
for the immigration reform effort.
There were other signs of populist discontent with establishment conservative orthodoxy, for
those who paid attention. No project is dearer to the hearts of mainstream movement conservatives
than the goal of privatizing Social Security, a hated symbol of the dependency-inducing "statism"
of the allegedly tyrannical Franklin D. Roosevelt. But George W. Bush's plan to partly privatize
Social Security was so unpopular, even among Republican voters, that a Republican-controlled Congress
did not even bother to vote on it in 2005. And a Republican-controlled Congress passed Medicare
Part D in 2003-the biggest expansion of a universal middle-class entitlement between the creation
of Medicare in 1965 and the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010. Blue collar Republican voters
applauded, as libertarian think-tankers raged.
Conservative populists cannot be accused of inconsistency. Like New Deal Democrats before them,
they tend to favor universal benefits for which the middle class is eligible like Social Security,
Medicare and Medicare Part D, and to oppose welfare programs like Medicaid and the ACA which feature
means tests that make the working class and middle class ineligible. The true inconsistency is on
the part of the mainstream conservative movement, which has yoked together left-inspired crusades
for global democratic revolution abroad with minimal-state libertarianism at home.
It remains to be seen whether Trump can win the Republican nomination, much less the White House.
But whatever becomes of his candidacy, it seems likely that his campaign will prove to be just one
of many episodes in the gradual replacement of Buckley-Goldwater-Reagan conservatism by something
more like European national populist movements, such as the National Front in France and the United
Kingdom Independence Party in Britain. Unlike Goldwater, who spearheaded an already-existing alliance
consisting of National Review, Modern Age, and Young Americans for Freedom, Trump has followers but
no supportive structure of policy experts and journalists. But it seems likely that some Republican
experts and editors, seeking to appeal to his voters in the future, will promote a Trump-like national
populist synthesis of middle-class social insurance plus immigration restriction and foreign policy
realpolitik,through conventional policy papers and op-eds rather than blustering speeches and tweets.
That's looking ahead. Glancing backward, it is unclear that there has ever been any significant
number of voters who share the worldview of the policy elites in conservative think tanks and journals.
In hindsight, the various right-wing movements-the fusionist conservatism of Buckley, Goldwater and
Reagan, neoconservatism, libertarianism, the religious right-appear to have been so many barnacles
hitching free rides on the whale of the Jacksonian populist electorate. The whale is awakening beneath
them, and now the barnacles don't know what to do.
"... Trump advances core paleoconservative positions laid out in "The Next Conservatism" - rebuilding infrastructure, protective tariffs, securing borders and stopping immigration, neutralizing designated internal enemies and isolationism. ..."
"... I don't like what I see happening to America. The infrastructure of our country is a laughingstock all over the world. Our airports, our bridges, our roadways - it's falling apart. It's terrible thing to see. Our politicians are all talk, no action. Millions of people are flowing across our Southern border. We've got to build a real wall… Let's make America great again. ..."
"... He says Republicans (along with Democrats) have aided the deindustrialization of America and the dispossession of the middle class, wasted the national treasure on idiotic wars (such as in Iraq) and enabled the dramatic expansion of repressive federal power. ..."
"... As far as Trump's campaign platform goes, he appears to be capitalizing on the ideas of some of America's most astute right-wing thinkers, Weyrich and Lind, who have crafted a new breed of conservatism with far broader populist appeal than the increasingly discredited trickle-down economics, big government, interventionist, corporate capitalism-beholden style of conservatism that's become dominant in the years since Reagan. Think of the power of the platform. Prior to the election, it was taken for granted that funding from plutocratic billionaires - the Kochs, Adelson, and so on - would shape the GOP primary outcome. Now, Trump has unique talents that set him apart, sure - but without the paleocon program, Trump would be just another Republican in the pack. ..."
The corporate media haven't been able to make much sense of Donald Trump. One thing they've said
is that he's non-ideological, or at least at odds with "true conservatives." But you've pointed he
has strong affinities for paleoconservative ideas, particularly as laid out in the 2009 book, "The
Next Conservatism" by Paul Weyrich and William Lind - a copy of which Lind recently gave to
Trump. You wrote, "Trump could have derived most of his 2016 primary positions from a two-hour session
with Lind's and Weyrich's book." Could you elaborate?
Trump advances core paleoconservative
positions laid out in "The Next Conservatism" - rebuilding infrastructure, protective tariffs, securing
borders and stopping immigration, neutralizing designated internal enemies and isolationism.
For example, an eleven-minute pro-Trump infomercial from August 2015, "'On
Point' With Sarah Palin and Donald Trump" - which now has over 3,800,000 views - begins with
a mini-Trump speech that could have been ghostwritten by William Lind:
I don't like what I see happening to America. The infrastructure of our country is a laughingstock
all over the world. Our airports, our bridges, our roadways - it's falling apart. It's terrible
thing to see. Our politicians are all talk, no action. Millions of people are flowing across our
Southern border. We've got to build a real wall… Let's make America great again.
... ... ...
Lind says they're intellectually vacuous, and that the current conservatism is "rubbish" and filled
with "'I've got mine' smugness." He says Republicans (along with Democrats) have aided the deindustrialization
of America and the dispossession of the middle class, wasted the national treasure on idiotic wars
(such as in Iraq) and enabled the dramatic expansion of repressive federal power.
... ... ...
As far as Trump's campaign platform goes, he appears to be capitalizing on the ideas of some
of America's most astute right-wing thinkers, Weyrich and Lind, who have crafted a new breed of conservatism
with far broader populist appeal than the increasingly discredited trickle-down economics, big government,
interventionist, corporate capitalism-beholden style of conservatism that's become dominant in the
years since Reagan. Think of the power of the platform. Prior to the election, it was taken for granted
that funding from plutocratic billionaires - the Kochs, Adelson, and so on - would shape the GOP
primary outcome. Now, Trump has unique talents that set him apart, sure - but without the paleocon
program, Trump would be just another Republican in the pack.
Paul Rosenberg is a California-based writer/activist, senior editor for Random Lengths News,
and a columnist for Al Jazeera English. Follow him on Twitter at @PaulHRosenberg.
"... The term "paleoconservatism" is a retronym coined in the 1980s to characterize a brand of conservatism that was by then going extinct, a brand exemplified by Robert Taft, the Ohio senator and legendary isolationist who lost the 1952 Republican nomination to Dwight Eisenhower. In its day it was often referred to as the "Old Right." ..."
"... Republican isolationists prevented the US from participating in the League of Nations, led a largely non-interventionist foreign policy in the '20s, and were skeptical of the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine in the early years of the Cold War. ..."
"... The increasing interest of American business in trade abroad made the anti-internationalism of the Old Right increasingly unviable in the party of capital. ..."
"... The losses kept coming. In the 1980s, the rise of neoconservatism both threatened the anti-internationalist, America-first mentality of the paleocons and enraged them due to the prominence of Jewish writers in the neoconservative movement. ..."
"... They nearly universally opposed the war in Iraq and war on terror more broadly, and were deeply skeptical of Bill Clinton's humanitarian interventions in the Balkans. ..."
"... "We are getting out of the nation-building business, and instead focusing on creating stability in the world," he declares. "Our moments of greatest strength came when politics ended at the water's edge." That's pure paleocon. ..."
"... Whether the establishment likes it or not, and it evidently does not, there is a revolution going on in America. The old order in this capital city is on the way out, America is crossing a great divide, and there is no going back. Donald Trump's triumphant march to the nomination in Cleveland, virtually assured by his five-state sweep Tuesday, confirms it, as does his foreign policy address of Wednesday. ..."
"... Donald Trump has raised three issues of real concern to paleoconservatives and traditional conservatives like myself." ..."
"... Trump is an imperfect paleocon. He's unrefined, a recent convert, and not as socially conservative as they may like. But on the important stuff, the term fits him better than any other. ..."
One of the strangest allegations leveled against Donald Trump by his Republican critics is that
he's not a conservative - or even, in the most extreme version of this critique, that he's actually
a liberal.
"People can support Donald Trump, but they cannot support him on conservative grounds," former
George W. Bush aide
Peter Wehner writes at Commentary. "The case for constitutional limited government is the case
against Donald Trump," declares Federalist founder
Ben Domenech. "Instead of converting voters to conservatism, Trump is succeeding at converting
conservatives to statism on everything from health care and entitlements to trade," complained
National Review's Jonah Goldberg.
Insofar as these commentators are criticizing the recency of Trump's conservative convictions,
well, fair enough. In an earlier life he was indeed a big fan of
universal
health care,
wealth taxation,
and legal
abortion - and if his general election
pivoting on taxes and the minimum wage is any indication, conservative fears that he would return
to his more liberal roots in the general election may yet be vindicated.
But the ideological vision Trump put forward during the Republican primary campaign was deeply
conservative, and, more specifically, deeply paleoconservative.
The paleoconservatives were a major voice in the Republican Party for many years, with Pat Buchanan
as their most recent leader, and pushed a line that is very reminiscent of Trump_vs_deep_state.
They adhere to the normal conservative triad of nationalism, free markets, and moral traditionalism,
but they put greater weight on the nationalist leg of the stool - leading to a more strident form
of anti-immigrant politics that often veers into racism, an isolationist foreign policy rather than
a hawkish or dovish one, and a deep skepticism of economic globalization that puts them at odds with
an important element of the business agenda.
Trump is an odd standard-bearer for paleocons, many of whom are conservative Catholics and whose
passionate social conservatism doesn't jibe well with Trump's philandering. His foreign policy ideas
are also more interventionist than those of most paleocons. But the ideas that have made him such
a controversial candidate aren't ones he got from liberals. They have a serious conservative pedigree.
A brief history of paleoconservatism
The term "paleoconservatism" is a retronym coined in the 1980s to characterize a brand of
conservatism that was by then going extinct, a brand exemplified by Robert Taft, the Ohio senator
and legendary isolationist who lost the 1952 Republican nomination to Dwight Eisenhower. In its day
it was often referred to as the "Old Right."
There was a time when these positions were normal for the Republican party. Leaders like William
McKinley supported tariffs as a way of supporting domestic industries and raising revenue outside
of an income tax. Smoot and Hawley, of the infamous Great Depression tariff, were both Republicans.
Republican isolationists prevented the US from participating in the League of Nations, led a largely
non-interventionist foreign policy in the '20s, and were skeptical of the Marshall Plan and the Truman
Doctrine in the early years of the Cold War.
But starting in the first decade of the 1900s and continuing gradually through the '50s, this
balance began to be upset, especially on trade but also on issues of war and peace. Progressives
within the Republican Party began to challenge support for trade protection and argue for a more
hawkish approach to foreign affairs. The increasing interest of American business in trade abroad
made the anti-internationalism of the Old Right increasingly unviable in the party of capital.
The two defining moments that led to paleocon decline were Taft's defeat and the suppressing of
the John Birch Society by William F. Buckley and National Review in the early 1960s. The Birch Society
differed strongly from the most isolationist of paleocons on foreign affairs; it was named after
an American missionary killed by Chinese communists in 1945, whom the group claimed as the first
casualty of the Cold War.
The organization advocated an aggressive, paranoid approach to the Soviet Union. But on other
issues they were right in sync: extremely anti-immigration, hostile to foreign trade, supportive
of limited government (except where trade, immigration, and anti-communism are concerned).
Buckley, along with Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-AZ) and others, issued a series of attacks on the
society, which were successful in marginalizing it, and establishing Buckley and National Review's
brand of conservatism as the ideology's public face in America. "The attack established them as the
'responsible Right,'" according to
Buckley biographer John Judis, "and moved them out of the crackpot far Right and toward the great
center of American politics." It was a key victory for the New Right, and a key loss for the Old
Right.
The losses kept coming. In the 1980s, the rise of neoconservatism both threatened the anti-internationalist,
America-first mentality of the paleocons and enraged them due to the prominence of Jewish writers
in the neoconservative movement. While not everyone in the paleoconservative movement was an
anti-Semite, it certainly had an anti-Semitism problem, which its attacks on the neocons revealed
frequently.
From the Sobran purge to Pat Buchanan
The saga of Joseph Sobran is a case in point. A longtime columnist at National Review, he was
fired by William F. Buckley in 1993 following years of open clashes about his attitude toward Israel
and Jewish people in general. In 1991, Buckley had dedicated an entire issue of the magazine to a
40,000-word essay he wrote,
"In Search of Anti-Semitism," in which he condemned Buchanan (then challenging President George
H.W. Bush in the GOP primaries) and his employee Sobran for anti-Jewish prejudice.
Buckley had a point. Sobran really was a world-class anti-Semite, writing in one National Review
column, "If Christians were sometimes hostile to Jews, that worked two ways. Some rabbinical authorities
held that it was permissible to cheat and even kill Gentiles."
After leaving NR, Sobran's writing, in the words of fellow paleocon and
American Conservative editor Scott McConnell, "deteriorated into the indefensible." He started
speaking at conferences organized by famed Holocaust denier David Irving and the denial group
Institute for Historical Review,
asking at the latter, "Why on earth is it 'anti-Jewish' to conclude from the evidence that the standard
numbers of Jews murdered are inaccurate, or that the Hitler regime, bad as it was in many ways, was
not, in fact, intent on racial extermination?"
While Sobran was purged, Buchanan continued his rise. His ability to distinguish himself from
the non-paleoconservatives was enhanced by the end of the Cold War. Many paleocons made an exception
to their isolationism for the unique evil of the Soviet Union. With that boogeyman gone, they retreated
to a stricter non-interventionism. They nearly universally opposed the war in Iraq and war on
terror more broadly, and were deeply skeptical of Bill Clinton's humanitarian interventions in the
Balkans.
The '90s anti-immigrant panic, and the era's high-profile trade deals, made Buchanan and the paleocons'
views on those issues appealing to base Republicans tired of pro-trade, pro-migration GOPers.
... ... ...
Paleocons love Trump
Trump fits into this tradition quite well. He's less stridently anti–welfare state, and less socially
conservative than most paleoconservatives. But he is a great exemplar of the movement's core belief:
America should come first, and trade and migration from abroad are direct threats to its way of life.
"We are getting out of the nation-building business, and instead focusing on creating stability
in the world," he declares. "Our moments of greatest strength came when politics ended at the water's
edge." That's pure paleocon.
Whether the establishment likes it or not, and it evidently does not, there is a revolution
going on in America. The old order in this capital city is on the way out, America is crossing
a great divide, and there is no going back. Donald Trump's triumphant march to the nomination
in Cleveland, virtually assured by his five-state sweep Tuesday, confirms it, as does his foreign
policy address of Wednesday.
…Whether the issue is trade, immigration or foreign policy, says Trump, "we are putting the
American people first again." U.S. policy will be dictated by U.S. national interests.
"I would not say that Donald Trump is a paleoconservative. … I don't think [Trump's] a social
conservative,"
he elaborated in an interview with the Daily Caller. But he added, "I was just astonished to
see him raise the precise issues on which we ran in the 1990s. … Donald Trump has raised three
issues of real concern to paleoconservatives and traditional conservatives like myself."
It's not just Buchanan, either.
Derbyshire
has said that Trump is "doing the Lord's work shaking up the GOP side of the 2016 campaign," and
in another column
volunteered
his services as a speechwriter.
Virgil Goode, a former Congress member who was the paleocon Constitution Party's 2012 nominee,
has endorsed Trump as the only candidate serious about immigration. Taki has featured reams of pro-Trump
coverage, like
this piece praising his economic nationalism.
Trump is an imperfect paleocon. He's unrefined, a recent convert, and not as socially conservative
as they may like. But on the important stuff, the term fits him better than any other.
"... Trump is a paleoconservative who preaches the reduction of the U.S. presence and engagement throughout the world. His precursors were active in the America First movement, which wanted American neutrality during World War II. He can identify with Robert Taft, a Republican senator who was against NATO and the expedition to North Korea at the beginning of the Cold War. He also shares Pat Buchanan's nationalism, who was a candidate before him. ..."
"... Although Trump's political philosophy is not entirely insubstantial, his campaign stances do not have the same ideological coherence. He accuses President Bush of having lied to invade Iraq, but wants to confiscate Iranian oil to compensate the war's American victims. He has expressed his admiration for Vladimir Putin, but wants to build a wall at the Mexican border and close military bases in ally countries. He intends to ally with Russia to bomb the Islamic State group, but is contemplating a tariff war against China to protect jobs. He adheres to the Iran deal and dismisses a change of regime in Syria, but is suggesting killing North Korea's leader and the families of terrorist leaders. ..."
Published in Le Devoir (Canada) on 14 March 2016 by Charles Benjamin
[link to original]
After having shaken up the American establishment, Donald Trump's unexpected success is sowing
panic in the neoconservative camp. Known for the failed crusade they led against Iraq, the neoconservatives
are looking for a new icon to bring their ideals back to life. The announced defeat of their favorite,
Marco Rubio, has not convinced them to join forces with the lead candidate, whose populism goes against
their political convictions.
The controversial candidate's nomination could thus lead to a neoconservative exodus to the Hillary
Clinton clan, who is embodying their ideological stance more and more. This break-off would reveal
the cleavage that separates the presidential candidates. Besides the personalities, the primary elections
are the setting for a showdown between the deeply engrained political traditions of American history.
Marco Rubio: The Neoconservative Hope
Neoconservatives stem from former Democrats who were opposed to the nomination of George McGovern,
who advocated détente with the Soviet Union during the 1972 primary election. They were seduced by
the ideological zeal with which Ronald Reagan was fighting "the evil empire." The Sept. 11 attacks
sealed their grip on George W. Bush's presidency. Taken over by the missionary spirit bequeathed
by Woodrow Wilson, they wanted to free the Middle East at gunpoint and export democracy there as
a remedy to terrorism. They had a nearly blind faith in the moral superiority and military capabilities
of their country. Iraq was like a laboratory for them, where they played wizards-in-training without
accepting defeat.
In a hurry to undo Barack Obama's legacy, neoconservatives are advising Marco Rubio in regaining
the White House. They are thrilled with the belligerent speech by the candidate, who is reminiscent
of Reagan. Settled on re-affirming the dominance of the U.S., Rubio has committed to increasing the
defense budget, toughening the sanctions against Moscow, providing weapons to Ukraine, and expanding
NATO to the Russian border. He intends to increase troops to fight the Islamic State group, revive
the alliance with Israel, and end the nuclear disarmament deal with Iran. The son of Cuban immigrants,
he also promises to end all dialogue with the Castro regime and to tighten the embargo against the
island.
Donald Trump: The Paleoconservative
Donald Trump's detractors describe him as an impostor who has a serious lack of understanding
of international affairs. Yet, he has set himself apart by cultivating a noninterventionist tradition
that goes back to the interwar period. Trump is a paleoconservative who preaches the reduction
of the U.S. presence and engagement throughout the world. His precursors were active in the America
First movement, which wanted American neutrality during World War II. He can identify with Robert
Taft, a Republican senator who was against NATO and the expedition to North Korea at the beginning
of the Cold War. He also shares Pat Buchanan's nationalism, who was a candidate before him.
Although Trump's political philosophy is not entirely insubstantial, his campaign stances
do not have the same ideological coherence. He accuses President Bush of having lied to invade Iraq,
but wants to confiscate Iranian oil to compensate the war's American victims. He has expressed his
admiration for Vladimir Putin, but wants to build a wall at the Mexican border and close military
bases in ally countries. He intends to ally with Russia to bomb the Islamic State group, but is contemplating
a tariff war against China to protect jobs. He adheres to the Iran deal and dismisses a change of
regime in Syria, but is suggesting killing North Korea's leader and the families of terrorist leaders.
Hillary Clinton: The Democratic Hawk
Will Donald Trump's noninterventionist temptation and unpredictable character lead the neoconservatives
to make up with their former political group? Two figures of the movement have already repudiated
the Republican lead and announced their future support of Hillary Clinton.
The Democratic candidate boasts a much more robust and interventionist position than Obama. Annoyed
with her boss's caution while she was secretary of state, Clinton was pleading early on to send massive
reinforcements in Afghanistan. She believes in U.S. humanitarian imperialism and persuaded the president
to use force against Moammar Gadhafi in Libya. Her call to help Syrian rebels at the dawn of the
Arab Spring was ignored. Now, she is giving faint support to the agreement negotiated with Iran and
supports the creation of a military exclusion zone over Syria. Her platform offers a new base for
neoconservatives, who will have to decide if they will stay loyal to their ideals or to their party.
"... Trump has been a vocal opponent of bad trade deals, while Cruz is a supporter of "free trade," even vocally backing Trade Promotion Authority for months before opportunistically voting against it when it no longer mattered ..."
"... Trump is opposed to raising the retirement age for Social Security while Cruz supports it ..."
"... Trump has famously promised he'd get along with Vladimir Putin, praised Putin's actions in Syria and has received compliments from the Russian leader; Cruz sticks to the usual anti-Russian rhetoric of the conservative movement calling Putin a "KGB thug" and saying America should undertake more intervention in the Middle East to confront Russia ..."
"... Ted Cruz notoriously called a group of Middle Eastern Christians "consumed with hate" for being insufficiently pro-Israeli while Trump has defended Middle Eastern Christians as a group that is "under assault" from Islamic terrorism ..."
But Donald Trump has changed everything. He has created the potential for a different movement
altogether. Not only is immigration at the center of his campaign, it's part of a larger agenda
that is genuinely different from the "movement conservatism" of Ted Cruz:
Trade.Trump has been a vocal opponent of bad trade deals, while Cruz is a supporter
of "free trade," even vocally backing Trade Promotion Authority for months before opportunistically
voting against it when it no longer mattered [Cruz reverses support for TPA trade bill,
blasts GOP leaders, by Manu Raju, Politico, June 23, 2015]
Safety Net. Trump is opposed to raising the retirement age for Social Security
while Cruz supports it [Where the presidential candidates stand on Social Security, by
Steve Vernon, MoneyWatch, November 23, 2015] Trump is also placing the protection of Medicare
at the center of his campaign, defying conservative movement dogma [Debate over Medicare, Social
Security, other federal benefits divides GOP, by Robert Costa and Ed O'Keefe,Washington Post,
November 4, 2015]
Russia.Trump has famously promised he'd get along with Vladimir Putin, praised
Putin's actions in Syria and has received compliments from the Russian leader; Cruz sticks
to the usual anti-Russian rhetoric of the conservative movement calling Putin a "KGB thug"
and saying America should undertake more intervention in the Middle East to confront Russia
[Ted Cruz: Russia-US tensions increasing over weak foreign policy, by Sandy Fitzgerald,Newsmax,
October 7, 2015]
Christianity. Ted Cruz notoriously called a group of Middle Eastern Christians
"consumed with hate" for being insufficiently pro-Israeli while Trump has defended Middle Eastern
Christians as a group that is "under assault" from Islamic terrorism [Trump: Absolutely
An Assault on Christianity, by Joe Kovacs, WND, August 25, 2015]. At the same time, while Trump
has been quick to defend American Christians from cultural assaults, he is also probably the
Republican "most friendly" to gay rights, as homosexual columnist Mark Stern has mischievously
noted [Of course Donald Trump is the Most Pro-Gay Republican Presidential Candidate, Slate,
December 18, 2015]
http://www.unz.com/article/whither-the-american-right/
Military coup sounds awfully good to me right about now!
xxx
Christianity. Ted Cruz notoriously called a group of Middle Eastern Christians "consumed with
hate" for being insufficiently pro-Israeli while Trump has defended Middle Eastern Christians
as a group that is "under assault" from Islamic terrorism
Maybe, I'm misunderstanding something; maybe I'm just not sure what "insufficiently pro-Israeli"
means, but Ted Cruz didn't condemn the group of Middle Eastern Christians for being "pro-Israel".
He condemned them for being anti-Israel, and said he wouldn't stand with them if they didn't stand
with Israel.
Neoliberalism is self-defeating social system, which creates the mechanism of redistribution of
wealth up, that takes that whole system down.
Notable quotes:
"... The Republicans weren't interested in inequality-but inequality was interested in them. The
conservative elite told us that we were a center-right country, that we didn't do class warfare, that
envy was un-American. But the voters, invertebrates that they are, disagreed. In fact, they thought
Obama was on to something when he said that secretaries shouldn't have to pay a higher tax rate than
their billionaire bosses. ..."
In Kennedy's day, Republicans worried more about budget deficits than economic growth and therefore
opposed his tax cuts. When the legislation came up for a final vote in the House of Representatives,
only 48 Republicans supported it and 126 voted against it, and it passed only because 223 liberal
Democrats voted for it. Remember, we are talking about a top marginal rate of 91 percent, which the
bill reduced to a still very high 65 percent.
... Trump, while he is not the poster child of inclusiveness when it comes to immigrants, has
nonetheless revived the old Reagan coalition by bringing formerly Democratic voters to the voting
booths to support him. They have left a Democratic Party whose leaders think them ignorant rednecks
who cling to their guns and religion, and they're not made to feel especially welcome when Cruz supporters
call them invertebrates and bigots: that's a good way to win an election, said no one ever.
... ... ...
What Obama had spoken to were the classically liberal themes of equality and mobility, of the
promise of a better future. The Republicans weren't interested in inequality-but inequality was
interested in them. The conservative elite told us that we were a center-right country, that we didn't
do class warfare, that envy was un-American. But the voters, invertebrates that they are, disagreed.
In fact, they thought Obama was on to something when he said that secretaries shouldn't have to pay
a higher tax rate than their billionaire bosses.
... ... ...
Our mobility problem results from departures from and not our adherence to capitalism. Rising
inequality in America has been blamed on the "1 percent," the people in the top income centile making
more than $400,000 a year. They alone don't explain American income immobility, however. Rather,
it's the risk-averse New Class-the 1, 2, or 3 percent, the professionals, academics, opinion leaders,
and politically connected executives who float above the storm and constitute an American aristocracy.
They oppose reforms that would make America mobile and have become the enemies of promise.
The New Class is apt to think it has earned its privileges through its merits, that America is
still the kind of meritocracy that it was in Ragged Dick's day, where anyone could rise from the
very bottom through his talents and efforts. Today's meritocracy is very different, however. Meritocratic
parents raise meritocratic children in a highly immobile country, and the Ragged Dicks are going
to stay where they are. We are meritocratic in name only. What we've become is Legacy Nation, a society
of inherited privilege and frozen classes, and in The Way Back I explain how we got here and what
we can do about it.
"... "Donald Trump is probably not a long-time reader of The American Conservative. Yet those who are instantly recognized the constellation of issues Trump chose to highlight in his campaign: concern about mass immigration, criticism of the foreign policy that took us to war in Iraq, skepticism about free-trade deals. These were the distinguishing traits of Pat Buchanan's campaigns in the 1990s. Trump is no paleoconservative, but he has independently discovered something that sounds a lot like paleoconservatism" [ The American Conservative ]. "That's not a coincidence. The elements of a populist, nationalist right have been present in American politics since at least the end of the Cold War; the cluster of issues common to Trump and Buchanan is a natural set. It isn't necessarily a winning political formula-opportunistic politicians have shunned this combination precisely because they thought it couldn't win-but the economic and cultural conditions that bring it to life are persistent. As long as they exist, "paleoconservatism" will always come back, no matter what happens to campaigns like Buchanan's or Trump's." ..."
"Who Will be President?" This is a "path to victory" interactive graphic that lets you test
out various electoral college scenarios [
New York Times ]. "By letting you choose the outcome in the 10 most competitive states, it
becomes very clear that Florida is the key to victory for Trump. Without it, it's nearly impossible
for him to win" [
PoliticalWire ]. Wasserman Schultz's home state.
How delicious
UPDATE "Donald Trump is probably not a long-time reader of The American Conservative. Yet those
who are instantly recognized the constellation of issues Trump chose to highlight in his campaign:
concern about mass immigration, criticism of the foreign policy that took us to war in Iraq, skepticism
about free-trade deals. These were the distinguishing traits of Pat Buchanan's campaigns in the
1990s. Trump is no paleoconservative, but he has independently discovered something that sounds
a lot like paleoconservatism" [
The
American Conservative ]. "That's not a coincidence. The elements of a populist, nationalist
right have been present in American politics since at least the end of the Cold War; the cluster
of issues common to Trump and Buchanan is a natural set. It isn't necessarily a winning political
formula-opportunistic politicians have shunned this combination precisely because they thought
it couldn't win-but the economic and cultural conditions that bring it to life are persistent.
As long as they exist, "paleoconservatism" will always come back, no matter what happens to campaigns
like Buchanan's or Trump's."
Our Famously Free Press
"Trump, Jr., was too naive to check.hire [sic] a speechwriter willing to do bespoke work rather
than recycle, and was too naive to check" [
Bradford DeLong ]. I hope this doesn't get me on
some kinda liberal goodthinker hit list , but DeLong seems to angling for work like another
former economist, Paul Krugman. He needs to
work harder , and on more than proofreading.
He should consider putting on his own yellow waders and going through a Clinton speech looking
for "bespoke work," as I have, or look at a Sanders speech, which was the same white paper with
elbows delivered over and over again. Speechwriting is like that.
Money
"In the year that Donald Trump was transformed from a long-shot presidential candidate into
the presumptive Republican nominee, he took on more debt and sold at least $50 million of stocks
and bonds. At the same time, the value of his golf courses and his namesake Manhattan tower soared"
[
Bloomberg ]. So Trump's candidacy works out for the Trump brand, which is Trump's main asset,
literally and metaphorically.
Conventions
Christie on a Clinton presidency: "[A]ll the failures of the Obama years with less charm and
more lies" [
US News ]. If Christie maintains the standard as an attack dog, he'll certainly outdo Warren
(and who would have thought the two would end up being comparable? It's a funny old world).
"Tuesday was "Make America Work Again" day at the Republican National Convention, which also
happened to coincide with the party formally nominating Donald Trump as its nominee" [
The Intercept ]. "But neither jobs nor Trump got much attention as a grab bag of Republican
headliners Tuesday spent most of their time demonizing Hillary Clinton and talking about themselves
without offering an affirmative case for the nominee or a concrete economic policy agenda." Pivot
to the general? In a way, the Republican "Because Clinton!" is a mirror image of the Democrat
"Because Trump!" A fun-house mirror, perhaps, but still .
The Trail
Clinton on Kaine: "World-class mayor, governor, and senator and– is one of the most highly
respected senators I know" [
NBC ]. "While Clinton went on to praise Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, as well as Elizabeth
Warren, it sure seemed like the Kaine stuff was a little too well-rehearsed." Since Clinton is
famously scripted, her staff may already have been prepping her.
"Election Update: Clinton's Lead Is As Safe As Kerry's Was In 2004" [Nate Silver,
FiveThirtyEight] . "What's relatively safe to say is that we'll know a lot more in a month
or so." 538's charts are fun. But they're just illustrations.
Interestingly, in 2008 the Clinton campaign accused Obama of plagiarizing from Deval Patrick,
though it looks like the both of them were trading riffs [
Snopes
]. So I assume this story will die down now. Not.
More on plagiarism here .
"Beyond the clear ethical violations here, there is a larger principle at play in the way that
a Republican vision of the world relies on both the manual and intellectual labor of black women,
while hating black women in practice" [
Cosmopolitan ].
The problem with this "vision" framing is that it airbrushes Democrat (hence neoliberal (hence
Republican too )) economic violence against Black women. Delphine Davis, on
Obama's SOTU: "We heard about the economy and giving people a fair shot at opportunity. The president
said that 'we're in the middle of the longest streak of private-sector job creation in history.'
But he didn't acknowledge that black women aren't advancing. Black women are more likely to experience
wage theft and they are making 64 cents, compared to the 77 cents white women make, to every dollar
made by white men in our economy. [
Black Lives Matter] . Tavis Smiley: "On every leading economic issue, in the leading economic
issues Black Americans have lost ground in every one of those leading categories. So in the last
ten years it hasn't been good for black folk. This is the president's most loyal constituency
that didn't gain any ground in that period" (though note poll results at bottom) [
Essence ]. To be clear, I'm not urging either/or here (except in the sense that you can't
throw all your troops at a plagiarism dogpile and talk about the economy at the same time); I'm
urging both/and. Thought experiment: Suppose we have policies D and R, and economic outcome E,
and we set H to "hate." If R + H = E, and D = E, what does H equal?
UPDATE "Mary Susan Rehrer, a delegate from Minnesota, was standing in the hallway, outside
of the convention floor posing for photographs in her red and blue light-up Trump cape that had
been sewn for her by a 'legal immigrant' (who, in the true entrepreneurial spirit of the GOP convention,
has since made a business of making light-up capes.) "I'm in business, OK, and I speak for a
living as one of the things that I do. All the best stuff is stolen and there is nothing
original, so it's all hocus pocus ' Rehrer said. "We're supposed to share.'" [
Talking Points Memo ]. So there you have the base. And her views are not without merit.
"Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush's three delegates at the Republican National Convention cost
him and his campaign about $50 million each" [
The Hill ]. See, there is a bright side.
Canova v. Wasserman Schultz
"One former Sanders staffer, who spoke on condition of anonymity, put things bluntly: 'It's
the proxy campaign'" [
Miami New Times ]. "Sanders staffers, too, have migrated to South Florida to help." Profile
of Canova, including:
Howie Klein, who operates the Blue America Political Action Committee, which raises money
for progressive candidates, is a longtime Wasserman Schultz adversary. He recalls cold-calling
Canova around that time. "I told him to please, please, please think about running really closely,"
Klein says. "I called him out of the blue just to tell him how important it is that she can't
keep on winning without a challenge. The only way to get out that evil is with a primary."
A rewrite of the MTN article at Jezebel [
Jezebel ]. The new Sanders organization "
Our Revolution will target candidates
from both local and national campaigns, but one of its more prominent focuses includes Canova."
"Tim Canova, a law professor at Nova Southeastern University, reported raising $1.7 million
between April 1 and June 30, while Wasserman Schultz brought in $1.3 million" [
The Hill ]. "Canova's fundraising boost is likely a result of Sen. Bernie Sanders's (I-Vt.)
May endorsement."
"... FBI agents who worked on the investigation of Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server reportedly had to sign an unusual non-disclosure form banning them from talking about the case unless they were called to testify. ..."
"... Unnamed sources tell the New York Post they'd never heard of the special form - known as a "case briefing acknowledgment" - being used before, though all agents initially have to sign nondisclosure agreements to obtain security clearance. ..."
FBI agents who worked on the investigation of Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server reportedly had to sign an unusual
non-disclosure form banning them from talking about the case unless they were called to testify.
Unnamed
sources tell the New York Post they'd never heard of the special form - known as a "case briefing acknowledgment" - being
used before, though all agents initially have to sign nondisclosure agreements to obtain security clearance.
"This is very, very unusual. I've never signed one, never circulated one to others," one unnamed retired FBI chief tells the Post.
"I have never heard of such a form. Sounds strange," an anonymous FBI agent said.
The Post additionally reports some FBI agents are disappointed that Director James Comey decided against recommending that
charges be broughtagainst Clinton for her mishandling of classified information.
"FBI agents believe there was an inside deal put in place after the [Attorney
General] Loretta Lynch/Bill Clinton tarmac meeting" just hours before the release of a House report on the Benghazi, Libya
terror attack in 2012, one unnamed source tells the Post.
Another Justice Department source tells the newspaper he was "furious" with Comey, deriding him for having "managed to piss off right
and left."
"... Campaign manager Robbie Mook and communications director Jennifer Palmieri-who would later help coax the candidate into issuing an apology-agreed, according to people close to the situation. ..."
"... One thing was quite clear: Clinton was in no mood to apologize for, or even admit to, an error in judgment. She'd repeatedly tell her staff "I have done nothing wrong" and maintained she was simply following the example set by George W. Bush's first secretary of state, Colin Powell, who had transacted much of his own State Department business over private email. ..."
Hillary Clinton is a hard woman to counsel during
a crisis. She is at times warm, at times withering-when staffers offer excuses, her favorite rejoinder
is "shoulda, woulda, coulda!"-and she's prone to fretting that her staff doesn't have her back.
For all the dysfunction on her famously infighting 2008 campaign, Clinton's team that year was
made up of many old friends who knew how to navigate her moods and reassure her when things went
sour. Facing the server scandal, Clinton headed into battle surrounded by people she hardly knew,
and a staff so new that many weren't even officially on the payroll yet. The fact that she spent
most of her time working out of a Manhattan office and seldom visited her cubicle-farm headquarters
in seriously un-hip downtown Brooklyn didn't help either.
When the story splashed onto the New York Times website on the evening of March 2, Clinton
was above all angry, and in the first strategy sessions-over the phone -- she defaulted to what old
Clinton hands refer to as "pity party mode," dismissing the media frenzy over the emails as a whiffle-ball
Whitewater while railing against the very real right-wing campaign amassed against her.
Podesta, often speaking on the road or from his home in Washington, counseled transparency and
disclosure within the legal restrictions placed on him by Kendall. Clinton's new pollster and strategist,
Joel Benenson-a longtime Obama adviser with no longstanding personal relationship with the candidate
-- advised her to take responsibility for what had been, at the least, a political mistake. Campaign
managerRobbie Mook and communications director Jennifer Palmieri-who would later help coax
the candidate into issuing an apology-agreed, according to people close to the situation.
Even Mills, Clinton's most trusted and protective adviser-a lawyer who had been aware of the server
setup as Clinton's chief of staff at the State Department-agreed on the politics. Nonetheless, Mills
had a knack for expressing the advice in the most frightening terms possible: Air your linen, she'd
say, but you'll pay a terrible personal price.
One thing was quite clear: Clinton was in no mood to apologize for, or even admit to, an error
in judgment. She'd repeatedly tell her staff "I have done nothing wrong" and maintained she was simply
following the example set by George W. Bush's first secretary of state, Colin Powell, who had transacted
much of his own State Department business over private email.
"... On Monday night, aides for the former secretary of state held a private conference call with members of the Democratic National Committee's Rules Committee and laid out how the campaign would like those members to vote at an upcoming rules meeting in Philadelphia. The purpose of the conference call was to answer any questions and ensure that the Rules Committee members, picked by DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and by Clinton, remained in lockstep with the presumptive Democratic nominee. ..."
"... The stars will ultimately align and the convention will go smoothly and without a hitch. Bernie and Liddy Warren will continue their unabashed endorsement of Her, the party will be united, and the good of the American people will be top priority on the go forward. Curtain. Exit stage left. Thank you for attending another Clinton Theater production. ..."
Looks like there's a slightly different dynamic in the Clinton camp:
On Monday night, aides for the former secretary of state held a private conference call
with members of the Democratic National Committee's Rules Committee and laid out how the campaign
would like those members to vote at an upcoming rules meeting in Philadelphia. The purpose
of the conference call was to answer any questions and ensure that the Rules Committee members,
picked by DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and by Clinton, remained in lockstep with
the presumptive Democratic nominee.
The roughly 30-minute call was a glimpse into how Clinton officials have sought to shape
the party platform and party rules with minimal public drama. Campaign officials have corresponded
with members via text messages to direct them how to vote and counseled them to bring concerns
directly to the campaign, rather than follow a process laid out by the DNC for submitting amendments
and resolutions. …
The plea to keep any policy disputes in-house, and off-camera, underscores the campaign's
determination to present a united front at the convention, and stave off any conflict between
the Clinton-aligned committee members and Sanders members during the drafting process. A few
months ago, Sanders was vowing to take his policy sticking points all the way to the convention
floor.
This is nothing more than a ploy to get Sanders supporters to watch the convention coverage,
so we can become acquainted with the "new" Hillary Clinton, and thus vote for Her in November.
"Let's all tune in; maybe the Bernie delegates will turn the party upside down". Expect to
be disappointed.
The stars will ultimately align and the convention will go smoothly and without a hitch. Bernie
and Liddy Warren will continue their unabashed endorsement of Her, the party will be united, and
the good of the American people will be top priority on the go forward. Curtain. Exit stage left.
Thank you for attending another Clinton Theater production.
Oh, and none of the speeches will result in legislation that actually benefits the American
people, but at least they won't be plagiarized!
There are two tiny fragments, that were amplified in a video to enormous proportion.
Reminds me the trick played with Donald Dean... BTW Michelle speech proved to be all
lie. Barack proved to be king of "bait and switch" who want to join private equity industry
after his term expires.
Here's the transcript of Michelle Obama's speech at the
Democratic National Convention in Denver eight years ago:
"As you might imagine, for Barack,
running for president is nothing compared to that first game of basketball with my brother,
Craig. I can't tell you how much it means to have Craig and my mom here tonight. Like Craig, I
can feel my dad looking down on us, just as I've felt his presence in every grace-filled moment
of my life. At 6 foot 6, I've often felt like Craig was looking down on me too. Literally. But
the truth is, both when we were kids and today, Craig wasn't looking down on me - he was watching
over me. And he's been there for me every step of the way since that clear day in Feb. 19 months
ago, when - with little more than our faith in each other and a hunger for change - we joined my
husband, Barack Obama, on the improbable journey that's led us to this moment.
But each of us also comes here tonight by way of our own improbable
journey. I come here tonight as a sister, blessed with a brother who is my mentor, my protector
and my lifelong friend. I come here as a wife who loves my husband and believes he will be an
extraordinary president. And I come here as a mom whose girls are the heart of my heart and the
center of my world. They're the first things I think about when I wake up in the morning and the
last thing I think about when I go to bed at night. Their future - and all our children's future
- is my stake in this election. And I come here as a daughter - raised on the South Side of
Chicago by a father who was a blue collar city worker and a mother who stayed at home with my
brother and me. My mother's love has always been a sustaining force for our family, and one of my
greatest joys is seeing her integrity, her compassion and her intelligence reflected in my
daughters. My dad was our rock. Although he was diagnosed with
multiple sclerosis in his early 30s, he was our provider, our champion, our hero. As he got
sicker, it got harder for him to walk. It took him longer to get dressed in the morning. But if
he was in pain, he never let on. He never stopped smiling and laughing - even while struggling to
button his shirt, even while using two canes to get himself across the room to give my mom a
kiss. He just woke up a little earlier and worked a little harder. He and my mom poured
everything they had into me and Craig. It was the greatest gift a child could receive: never
doubting for a single minute that you're loved and cherished and have a place in this world. And
thanks to their faith and their hard work, we both were able to go on to college.
So I know firsthand from their lives - and mine - that the American
dream endures. And you know, what struck me when I first met Barack was that even though he had
this funny name, even though he'd grown up all the way across the continent in Hawaii, his family
was so much like mine. He was raised by grandparents who were working class folks just like my
parents and by a single mother who struggled to pay the bills just like we did. Like my family,
they scrimped and saved so that he could have opportunities that they never had themselves. And
Barack and I were raised with so many of the same values - like you work hard for what you want
in life, that your word is your bond and you do what you say you're going to do, that you treat
people with dignity and respect, even if you don't know them and even if you don't agree with
them. And Barack and I set out to build lives guided by these values and to pass them on to the
next generation. Because we want our children - and all children in this nation - to know that
the only limit to the height of your achievements is the reach of your dreams and your
willingness to work hard for them.
And as our friendship grew and I learned more about Barack, he
introduced me to the work he'd done when he first moved to Chicago after college. You see,
instead of heading to Wall Street, Barack went to work in neighborhoods that had been devastated.
Steel plants shut down, and jobs dried up. And he'd been invited back to speak to people from
those neighborhoods about how to rebuild their community. The people gathered together that day
were ordinary folks doing the best they could to build a good life. They were parents living
paycheck to paycheck, grandparents trying to get it together on a fixed income, men frustrated
that they couldn't support their families after their jobs disappeared. Those folks weren't
asking for a handout or a shortcut. They were ready to work. They wanted to contribute. They
believed - like you and I believe - that America should be a place where you can make it if you
try. Barack stood up that day and spoke words that have stayed with me ever since. He talked
about the world as it is and the world as it should be. And he said that all too often, we accept
the distance between the two and settle for the world as it is - even when it doesn't reflect our
values and aspirations. But he reminded us that we know what our world should look like. We know
what fairness and justice and opportunity look like. And he urged us to believe in ourselves - to
find the strength within ourselves to strive for the world as it should be.
And isn't that the great American story? It's the story of men and
women gathered in churches and union halls, in high school gyms - people who stood up and marched
and risked everything they had - refusing to settle, determined to mold our future into the shape
of our ideals. It is because of their will and determination that this week, we celebrate two
anniversaries: the 88th anniversary of women winning the right to vote and the 45th anniversary
of that hot summer day when Dr. King lifted our sights and our hearts with his dream for our
nation. And I stand here today at the crosscurrents of that history - knowing that my piece of
the American dream is a blessing hard won by those who came before me. All of them driven by the
same conviction that drove my dad to get up an hour early each day to painstakingly dress himself
for work. The same conviction that drives the men and women I've met all across this country.
People who work the day shift, kiss their kids goodnight and head out for the night shift -
without disappointment, without regret - that goodnight kiss a reminder of everything they're
working for. The military families who say grace each night with an empty seat at the table. The
servicemen and -women who love this country so much, they leave those they love most to defend
it. The young people across America serving our communities - teaching children, cleaning up
neighborhoods, caring for the least among us each and every day. People like Hillary Clinton, who
put those 18 million cracks in the glass ceiling, so that our daughters - and sons - can dream a
little bigger and aim a little higher. People like Joe Biden, who's never forgotten where he came
from and never stopped fighting for folks who work long hours and face long odds and need someone
on their side again. All of us driven by a simple belief that the world as it is just won't do -
that we have an obligation to fight for the world as it should be. That is the thread that
connects our hearts. That is the thread that runs through my journey and Barack's journey and so
many other improbable journeys that have brought us here tonight, where the current of history
meets this new tide of hope. And you see, that is why I love this country.
[Jul 20, 2016] And in my own life, in my own small way, I've tried to
give back to this country that has given me so much. See, that's why I left a job at a law firm
for a career in public service, working to empower young people to volunteer in their
communities. Because I believe that each of us - no matter what our age or background or walk of
life - each of us has something to contribute to the life of this nation. And it's a belief
Barack shares - a belief at the heart of his life's work. It's what he did all those years ago,
on the streets of Chicago, setting up job training to get people back to work and after-school
programs to keep kids safe - working block by block to help people lift up their families. It's
what he did in the Illinois Senate, moving people from welfare to jobs, passing tax cuts for
hardworking families and making sure women get equal pay for equal work. It's what he's done in
the United States Senate, fighting to ensure that the men and women who serve this country are
welcomed home not just with medals and parades but with good jobs and benefits and health care,
including mental health care.
See, that's why he's running - to end the war in Iraq responsibly, to
build an economy that lifts every family, to make health care available for every American and to
make sure every child in this nation gets a world class education all the way from preschool to
college. That's what Barack Obama will do as president of the United States of America. He'll
achieve these goals the same way he always has - by bringing us together and reminding us how
much we share and how alike we really are. You see, Barack doesn't care where you're from or what
your background is or what party - if any - you belong to. That's not how he sees the world. He
knows that thread that connects us - our belief in America's promise, our commitment to our
children's future - he knows that that thread is strong enough to hold us together as one nation
even when we disagree. It was strong enough to bring hope to those neighborhoods in Chicago. It
was strong enough to bring hope to the mother he met worried about her child in Iraq, hope to the
man who's unemployed but can't afford gas to find a job, hope to the student working nights to
pay for her sister's health care, sleeping just a few hours a day. And it was strong enough to
bring hope to people who came out on a cold Iowa night and became the first voices in this chorus
for change that's been echoed by millions of Americans from every corner of this nation. Millions
of Americans who know that Barack understands their dreams, millions who know that Barack will
fight for people like them and that Barack will finally bring the change we need.
And in the end, after all that's happened these past 19 months, the
Barack Obama I know today is the same man I fell in love with 19 years ago. He's the same man who
drove me and our new baby daughter home from the hospital 10 years ago this summer, inching along
at a snail's pace, peering anxiously at us in the rearview mirror, feeling the whole weight of
her future in his hands, determined to give her everything he'd struggled so hard for himself,
determined to give her what he never had: the affirming embrace of a father's love. And as I tuck
that little girl and her little sister into bed at night, you see, I think about how one day,
they'll have families of their own. And how one day, they - and your sons and daughters - will
tell their own children about what we did together in this election. They'll tell them how this
time, we listened to our hopes instead of our fears. How this time, we decided to stop doubting
and to start dreaming. How this time, in this great country - where a girl from the South Side of
Chicago can go to college and law school and the son of a single mother from Hawaii can go all
the way to the White House - we committed ourselves to building the world as it should be. So
tonight, in honor of my father's memory and my daughters' future - out of gratitude to those
whose triumphs we mark this week and those whose everyday sacrifices have brought us to this
moment - let us devote ourselves to finishing their work. Let us work together to fulfill their
hopes. And let's stand together to elect Barack Obama president of the United States of America.
Thank you, God bless you, and God bless America."
And here's the transcript of the speech that Melania Trump read
at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland Monday night:
"Thank you very much. Thank you. You have all been very kind to Donald
and me, to our young son, Barron, and to our whole family. It's a very nice welcome, and we're
excited to be with you at this historic convention. I am so proud of your choice for president of
the United States, my husband, Donald J. Trump. And I can assure you, he is moved by this great
honor. The 2016 Republican primaries were fierce and started with many candidates, 17 to be
exact, and I know that Donald agrees with me when I mention how talented all of them are. They
deserve respect and gratitude from all of us. However, when it comes to my husband, I will say
that I am definitely biased, and for good reason.
I have been with Donald for 18 years and I have been aware of his love
for this country since we first met. He never had a hidden agenda when it comes to his
patriotism, because, like me, he loves this country so much. I was born in Slovenia, a small,
beautiful and then communist country in Central Europe. My sister Ines, who is an incredible
woman and a friend, and I were raised by my wonderful parents. My elegant and hardworking mother
Amalia introduced me to fashion and beauty. My father Viktor instilled in me a passion for
business and travel. Their integrity, compassion and intelligence reflect to this day on me and
for my love of family and America. From a young age, my parents impressed on me the values that
you work hard for what you want in life, that your word is your bond and you do what you say and
keep your promise, that you treat people with respect. They taught and showed me values and
morals in their daily life. That is a lesson that I continue to pass along to our son, and we
need to pass those lessons on to the many generation to follow. I traveled the world while
working hard in the incredible arena of fashion.
After living and working in Milan and Paris, I arrived in New York City
20 years ago, and I saw both the joys and the hardships of daily life. On July 28, 2006, I was
very proud to become a citizen of the United States - the greatest privilege on planet Earth. I
cannot or will not take the freedoms this country offers for granted. But these freedoms have
come with a price so many times. The sacrifices made by our veterans are reminders to us of this.
I would like to take this moment to recognize an amazing veteran, the great Sen. Bob Dole. And
let us thank all of our veterans in the arena today and those across our great country. We are
all truly blessed to be here. That will never change.
I can tell you with certainty that my husband has been concerned about
our country for as long as I have known him. With all of my heart, I know that he will make a
great and lasting difference. Donald has a deep and unbounding determination and a never-give-up
attitude. I have seen him fight for years to get a project done - or even started - and he does
not give up. If you want someone to fight for you and your country, I can assure you, he is the
guy. He will never, ever, give up. And, most importantly, he will never, ever, let you down.
Donald is and always has been an amazing leader. Now he will go to work for you. His achievements
speak for themselves, and his performance throughout the primary campaign proved that he knows
how to win. He also knows how to remain focused on improving our country - on keeping it safe and
secure. He is tough when he has to be, but he is also kind and fair and caring. This kindness is
not always noted, but it is there for all to see. That is one reason I fell in love with him to
begin with. Donald is intensely loyal. To family, friends, employees, country. He has the utmost
respect for his parents, Mary and Fred; to his sisters, Maryanne and Elizabeth; to his brother
Robert; and to the memory of his late brother, Fred. His children have been cared for and
mentored to the extent that even his adversaries admit they are an amazing testament to who he is
as a man and a father. There is a great deal of love in the Trump family. That is our bond, and
that is our strength.
Yes, Donald thinks big, which is especially important when considering
the presidency of the United States. No room for small thinking. No room for small results.
Donald gets things done. Our country is underperforming and needs new leadership. Leadership is
also what the world needs. Donald wants our country to move forward in the most positive of ways.
Everyone wants change. Donald is the only one that can deliver it. We should not be satisfied
with stagnation. Donald wants prosperity for all Americans. We need new programs to help the poor
and opportunities to challenge the young. There has to be a plan for growth. Only then will
fairness result. My husband's experience exemplifies growth and the successful passage of
opportunity to the next generation. His success indicates inclusion rather than division. My
husband offers a new direction, welcoming change, prosperity and greater cooperation among
peoples and nations. Donald intends to represent all the people, not just some of the people.
That includes Christians and Jews and Muslims. It includes Hispanics and African-Americans and
Asians and the poor and the middle class. Throughout his career, Donald has successfully worked
with people of many faiths and with many nations.
Like no one else, I have seen the talent, the energy, the tenacity, the
resourceful mind and the simple goodness of heart that God gave Donald Trump. Now is the time to
use those gifts as never before, for purposes far greater than ever before. And he will do this
better than anyone else can, and it won't even be close. Everything depends on it, for our cause
and for our country. People are counting on him - all the millions of you who have touched us so
much with your kindness and your confidence. You have turned this unlikely campaign into a
movement that is still gaining in strength and number. The primary season - and its toughness -
is behind us.
Let's all come together in a national campaign like no other. The race
will be hard-fought, all the way to November. There will be good times and hard times and
unexpected turns - it would not be a Trump contest without excitement and drama. But through it
all, my husband will remain focused on only one thing: this beautiful country that he loves so
much. If I am honored to serve as first lady, I will use that wonderful privilege to try to help
people in our country who need it the most. One of the many causes dear to my heart is helping
children and women. You judge a society by how it treats its citizens. We must do our best to
ensure that every child can live in comfort and security, with the best possible education. As
citizens of this great nation, it is kindness, love and compassion for each other that will bring
us together - and keep us together. These are the values Donald and I will bring to the White
House. My husband is ready to lead this great nation. He is ready to fight, every day, to give
our children the better future they deserve. Ladies and gentlemen, Donald J. Trump is ready to
serve and lead this country as the next president of the United States.
The problem with this paragraph lifted in not so much that Melania is plagiarizing (she does)
but that Michele is blatantly lying. What she said is a blatant, obvious lie: "Barack and I were raised with so many of the same values: that you work hard
for what you want in life; that your word is your bond and you do what you say you're going to do;
that you treat people with dignity and respect, even if you don't know them, and even if you don't
agree with them." Barack for example is a king of "bait and switch", one of the most
dishonest Presidents the USA ever has (and the USA has many -- think about Clinton and Bush II).
He betrayed all his votes and not once but trice. Throwing them under the bus, with a broad smile
and nice words. Michele herself was skating using "affirmative action" bandwagon. It one read her
Princeton thesis one would understand that she did not got much out of this privileged university
and probably unfairly was awarded her diploma for her gender and the color of her skin, not so much
for her academic achievements.
The way MSM launched this attack suggest that they were preparing for something like that. what
a neoliberal bastards ;-) Actually I do no know about Michelle (whose Princeton graduation thesis
is really extremely weak nonsense -- no signs of work on it at all) , but plagiarism or not, for Melania
herself this statement is more or less true (abstracting from republican "meritocracy" memo) -- "From
a young age, my parents impressed on me the values that you work hard for what you want in life; that
your word is your bond and you do what you say and keep your promise; that you treat people with respect." She managed to get to top level of model business on her own, and also proved to be a
rather talented jewelry
designer on her own right (and this talent was demonstrated by her at young age -- her high school
friends report that she never wear jewelry not made by herself). .
Notable quotes:
"... "From a young age, my parents impressed on me the values that you work hard for what you want in life; that your word is your bond and you do what you say and keep your promise; that you treat people with respect. ..."
"... The borrowed phrases are trite and generic ..."
"... It's also true, as my colleague David Lauter points out, that the controversy has been a distraction for the Trump campaign. ..."
"... But Democrats (including Michelle Obama) would be wise to play it cool. Even if the mockery is directed at the Trump campaign, Melania Trump will suffer collateral damage - and sympathy for her could redound to her husband's benefit. ..."
Outrages abound at this week's Republican National Convention, so there is plenty for Democrats
and other Trumpophobes to get exercised about. Melania Trump's alleged plagiarism of a Michelle Obama
speech isn't one of them.
Granted, it looks as if the potential first lady (or her speechwriters) lifted some passages from
the current first lady's speech at the 2008 Democratic National Convention. Viewed synoptically,
as New Testament scholars would say, the parallels are striking.
Michelle Obama: "Barack and I were raised with so many of the same values: that you work hard
for what you want in life; that your word is your bond and you do what you say you're going to do;
that you treat people with dignity and respect, even if you don't know them, and even if you don't
agree with them."
Melania Trump:"From a young age, my parents impressed on me the values that you work hard
for what you want in life; that your word is your bond and you do what you say and keep your promise;
that you treat people with respect."
Case seemingly closed. But so what?
Melania Trump (unlike Donald Trump's adult children) is apparently not a campaign adviser.
Her speech would have been fluff even if it had been 100% original.
The borrowed phrases are trite and generic. (Michelle Obama is no Neil Kinnock, the
lyrical Welsh politician famously ripped off by Joe Biden.)
Even a sophisticated political campaign might make this mistake, and the Trump campaign is
far from sophisticated.
The similarity between the two speeches is embarrassing, and so is the insistence by one campaign
official that there was "no cribbing." A Republican National Committee strategist ramped up the ridicule
by noting that other passages in the speech mirrored language used by a character in "My Little Pony."
It's also true, as my colleague David Lauter points out, that the controversy has been a distraction
for the Trump campaign.
But Democrats (including Michelle Obama) would be wise to play it cool. Even if the mockery
is directed at the Trump campaign, Melania Trump will suffer collateral damage - and sympathy for
her could redound to her husband's benefit.
"... Admitting that the Iraq war was a grievous, horrible error is necessary but not sufficient to reform Republican foreign policy. ..."
"... The trouble with the rest of the 2016 field wasn't just that many of the candidates were Iraq war dead-enders, but that they were so obsessed with the idea of American "leadership" that almost all of them thought that the U.S. needed to be involved in multiple conflicts in different parts of the world in one way or another. ..."
"... Almost none of the declared 2016 candidates opposed the Libyan war at the time, and very few concluded that the problem with intervening in Libya was the intervention itself. The standard hawkish line on Libya for years has been that the U.S. should have committed itself to another open-ended exercise in stabilizing a country we helped to destabilize. ..."
"... Until Republican politicians and their advisers start to understand that reflexive support for "action" (and some kind of military action at that) is normally the wrong response, we can't expect much to change. Most Republican foreign policy professionals seem to hold the same shoddy assumptions that led them to endorse all of the interventions of the last 15 years without exception, and nothing that has happened during that time has caused most of them to reexamine those assumptions. ..."
"... Until they stop fetishizing American "leadership" and invoking "American exceptionalism" as an excuse to meddle in every new crisis, Republicans will end up in the same cul-de-sac of self-defeating belligerence. ..."
"... Opposition to the deal reflects so many of the flaws in current Republican foreign policy views: automatic opposition to any diplomatic compromise that might actually work, grossly exaggerating the potential threat from another state, conflating U.S. interests with those of unreliable client states, continually moving goalposts to judge a negotiated deal by unreasonable standards, insisting on maximalist concessions from the other side while refusing to agree to minimal concessions from ours, and making spurious and unfounded allegations of "appeasement" at every turn to score points against political adversaries at home. ..."
It would be a good start if all future presidential candidates could acknowledge the disastrous
and costly folly of the Iraq war, but it would only be a start. Admitting that the Iraq war was a
grievous, horrible error is necessary but not sufficient to reform Republican foreign policy.
The
trouble with the rest of the 2016 field wasn't just that many of the candidates were Iraq war dead-enders,
but that they were so obsessed with the idea of American "leadership" that almost all of them thought
that the U.S. needed to be involved in multiple conflicts in different parts of the world in one
way or another.
Almost none of the declared 2016 candidates opposed the Libyan war at the time, and
very few concluded that the problem with intervening in Libya was the intervention itself. The standard
hawkish line on Libya for years has been that the U.S. should have committed itself to another open-ended
exercise in stabilizing a country we helped to destabilize. Most Republican politicians are so wedded
to a belief in the efficacy of using hard power that they refuse to admit that there are many problems
that the U.S. can't and shouldn't try to solve with it.
Until Republican politicians and their advisers start to understand that reflexive support
for "action" (and some kind of military action at that) is normally the wrong response, we can't
expect much to change. Most Republican foreign policy professionals seem to hold the same shoddy
assumptions that led them to endorse all of the interventions of the last 15 years without exception,
and nothing that has happened during that time has caused most of them to reexamine those assumptions.
Until they stop fetishizing American "leadership" and invoking "American exceptionalism" as
an excuse to meddle in every new crisis, Republicans will end up in the same cul-de-sac of self-defeating
belligerence. Unless Republicans adopt a much less expansive definition of "vital interests,"
they will routinely end up on the wrong side of most major foreign policy debates.
Finally, unless most Republican politicians and their advisers overcome their aversion to diplomatic
engagement they will end up supporting costlier, less effective, and more destructive policies for
lack of practical alternatives. The virtually unanimous opposition to the nuclear deal with Iran
is a good example of the sort of thing that a reformed Republican Party wouldn't do.
Opposition to
the deal reflects so many of the flaws in current Republican foreign policy views: automatic opposition
to any diplomatic compromise that might actually work, grossly exaggerating the potential threat
from another state, conflating U.S. interests with those of unreliable client states, continually
moving goalposts to judge a negotiated deal by unreasonable standards, insisting on maximalist concessions
from the other side while refusing to agree to minimal concessions from ours, and making spurious
and unfounded allegations of "appeasement" at every turn to score points against political adversaries
at home.
Obviously these are habits cultivated over decades and are not going to be fixed quickly
or easily, but if the next Republican administration (whenever that may be) doesn't want to conduct
foreign policy as disastrously as the last one did they are habits that need to be broken.
Daniel Larison is a senior editor at TAC, where he also keeps a solo blog. He has been
published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, Orthodox Life, Front Porch
Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and is a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in
history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Dallas. Follow him on Twitter.
I doubt many public figures were happier than Bernie Sanders to see the seemingly endless presidential
election carnival overtaken by other news last week. Beneath the headlines on race and criminal justice,
the nominal socialist "revolution" advocate Sanders got to make his official endorsement of the right-wing
corporatist and war hawk Hillary Clinton with the public's eyes focused on different and more immediately
hideous matters.
Anyone on the left who was surprised or disappointed by Bernie's long-promised Cowardly Lion endorsement
of Mrs. Clinton one week ago hadn't paid serious attention to his campaign and career. Sanders' "democratic
socialism" has always been a leaky cloak for a mildly social-democratic liberalism that is fiscally
and morally negated by his commitment to the nation's giant Pentagon System.
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If Trump is the price we have to pay to defeat Clintonian neoliberalism – so be it.
-- Mumia Abu-Jamal
With these words the revolutionary journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal offers a bold challenge to those
who circulate the fear of a Trump presidency to drum up a mandate for voting for Clinton.
Mumia's words were shared with me just a month ago in a prison visit with him. They are a timely
challenge to Bernie Sanders' endorsement this week of Hillary Clinton's drive for the presidency.
Sanders mantra is anchored in the fear of Trump: "I will do everything possible to help defeat Trump."
But it is not just a Trump presidency that needs defeating. It is just as important to defeat
the very "Clintonian neoliberalism" whose party Sanders now joins.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie blasted Hillary Clinton, conducting a mock trial and asking the
audience to "render [a] verdict" on her record as secretary of state. He was on target about Libya and Algeria, off the mark as for
Syria and Iran (that does not means that Hillary is not guilty of instigating civil war in the country).
He is completely lunatic on Russia.
Days after being passed over as Donald Trump's running mate, Chris Christie took the podium at
the GOP convention to make the case for the party's presidential nominee.
But his focus, as has been the case for many of the convention speakers, was focused more on
Hillary Clinton than Trump.
"This election is not just about Donald Trump. It is also about his Democratic opponent, Hillary
Rodham Clinton," he said at the beginning of his remarks.
"... Manafort mentioned the return of Glass-Steagall specifically as a counterpoint against Hillary Clinton, arguing it was Democrats that were the ones actually beholden to big banks. "We believe the Obama-Clinton years have passed legislation that has been favorable to the big banks, which is why you see all the Wall Street money going to her," he said. "We are supporting the small banks and Main Street." ..."
"... Good! Screw the Clintons and crony capitalism. ..."
"... Bob Rubin already cashed the checks....Mission Accomplished. ..."
"... Laugh Track Deafening) ..."
"... How different would it be now if everyone in that photo had died simultaneously BEFORE Clinton signed it? ..."
"... Panic attacks and violent pangs on Wall Street tomorrow? Or will they just pour billions more into the Clinton corruption campaign? ..."
"... Hang the Clintons, Bushes, and all the damned banksters with them. Then your reforms might mean something ..."
While we know better than to trust politician promises, we were surprised to read that today the
GOP joined the Democrats in calling for a repeal of Gramm-Leach-Bliley, the Financial Services Modernization
Act of 1999 pushed through by none other than Bill Clinton, and will seek a return to Glass-Steagall,
the banking law launched in 1933 in the aftermath of the Great Depression meant to prohibit commercial
banks from engaging in the investment business, and which according to many was one of the catalysts
that led to the Global Financial Crisis.
According to
The Hill, Paul Manafort, Donald Trump's campaign manager, told reporters gathered in Cleveland
Monday that the GOP platform would include language advocating for a return of that law, which was
repealed under President Bill Clinton, husband of, well you know...
"We also call for a reintroduction of Glass-Steagall, which created barriers between what big
banks can do," he said.
Including that language in the GOP platform comes shortly after Democrats agreed to similar language
in their own, calling for an "updated and modernized version" of the law.
However before anyone gets their hopes up, recall that a party platform is not binding but is thought
to reflect the values of the party.... until the values change as a result of Wall Street "incentives"
because if there is one thing US "commercial banks" can not afford it is a separation of their depository
and investment activities.
The GOP platform has not yet been officially released, although the convention is expected to
approve it later Monday. Nonetheless, the embrace of Glass-Steagall by both parties is a telling
indication of how unpopular Wall Street remains with the public, years after the financial crisis.
Manafort mentioned the return of Glass-Steagall specifically as a counterpoint against Hillary Clinton,
arguing it was Democrats that were the ones actually beholden to big banks. "We believe the Obama-Clinton
years have passed legislation that has been favorable to the big banks, which is why you see all
the Wall Street money going to her," he said. "We are supporting the small banks and Main Street."
I think we're a step further than that. The majority still accept it as a De- facto,
impossible to change reality which they are to lazy to try and change. The excuse of
''its all too late and impossible to change'' peddled to them by all the branches of
the system and in particular the corrupt establishment mainstream media. But that era
is coming to an end....next election will be far more momentous...this one may be the
last time BAU politicians prevail
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I think we're a step further than that. The majority
still accept it as a De- facto, impossible to change reality which they are to lazy to try
and change. The excuse of ''its all too late and impossible to change'' peddled to them by
all the branches of the system and in particular the corrupt establishment mainstream
media."
Strangely enough, this isn't so different from Russian politics. Two different sides of
the same, or similar, coin. Eery stuff.
We need to flush congress. All the attention is on president/presidential election,
and many don't vote for a congressman while there. Oust the incumbents.
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2-3 elections with all incumbents being voted out with the exception of always voting
against the candidate with the most dark money always being voted against and the
candidates will get the message to start listening to the voters instead of the
donors.
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I'd be in favor of electing congressmen for 4 years rather than 2. Most of them will get
reelected anyway and at least then they may have a year of two where they might actually
consider wise legislation rather than never getting off the money treadmill.
Between the hag and the buffoon, I'm sorry to say that we're all fcuked for another 8
years. Million more white collar jobs will have left the US at that time, middle class
wealth completely shredded and the top 1 or 2% richer than ever before (or probably
buying up Mars real estate).
The people we elect work for the economies of China and
India. Our tax dollars are creating jobs in Shanghai. Let's all sit down and cry. Or
take to FB and post selfies. Duck face.
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No reason to demonize China and India. They produce many quality products at low
prices Americans want.
US corps are outsourcing these jobs. And we are buying more than we need or use.
Complain to government, tax corps, close tax havens and stop buying foreign produced
goods by paying an extra 20 to 40%.
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Revoking Citizens United is Bernie's issue. Once in a while Hillary quietly mouths a platitude
about campaign reform, but her hand is in the till bigtime. Her Supreme Ct issue is abortion;
she won't touch Citizens United. After all, the status quo is her cause.
I see more of this articles very frequently nowadays as Hillary already clinched the
nomination. These things are not out of the blue issues, Sanders started his campaign
talking about these yet the Guardian dint a give shit then. Now all they care is their
readers. Pff,give me break.
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Thank you. It was so blatant that is was shocking. The Guardian turned its back on
the first Green President - and yet asks me to join their campaigns?!
Interesting the near obsession about Citizens United. Nothing about Bill Clinton driving
a Mack truck through campaign finance laws. Nothing about the legal graft of Goldman
Sachs passing $675,000 to Hillary for speeches nobody would pay a quid to hear, and
nothing about the last campaign reform effort, where McCain-Feingold inserted an
incumbent protection clause in what was supposed to keep dirty money out of politics.
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She will not release the transcripts because she knows they are damning. It's obvious. When
she says "I'll release them when everyone else does." Does that sound like a LEADER? no way. A
leader would own up to that shit. SHe is a tool, not a leader.
There is a bright side to all this. Obama, the Guardian, and many liberals are
propounding the benefits of a stronger and even more centralized government. Given the
gains that the Republicans made in the Congress and various states, it seems even Obama
never really sold the public on this. Should Clinton win, which seems probable though
it's a weird year, her primary focus will clearly be on propelling the family into the
ranks of billionaires. I think, or am at least hopeful, that four years from now much of
the public will be so sick of these people that they'll realize that we really don't get
all that much from them.
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Whence Hillary's obsession with lucre? When she was first lady of Arkansas she bitched to her
friends about her lack of money. She was the pipeline for Tyson's bribery concerning the phony
cattle futures. Before she took the oath of office as a Senator she posted a wish list for
people who wanted to buy favors. There's something weird about someone who never lacked for
creature comforts her entire life devoting her life to collecting funds, even if by crook.
From this side of the pond, from a 60's kid, America is dead. Maybe All those American
states would do better as independent countries. The America today is a disgrace to its'
peoples.
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You know, from this side of the pond (US) we are seriously thinking of asking Texas to
go back to Mexico. That would be a good start, after all Texas thinks it a good idea for
its citizens to walk around their city streets carrying "assault style weapons" and not
only that, now they want students in their Universities to carry concealed weapons also.
Would any of you on your side of the pond like to have Texas, we will be willing to let
them go real cheap. C'mon now, make us an offer we can't refuse.
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From this (US) side of the pond, it's clear that people reading the MSM think that the whole
of the US is like a wild west movie shootout. If I were to believe the MSM, I might be
forgiven that thinking that Godzilla is crashing through the Houses of Parliament as I write.
Try a bit of perspective will you? And put your tinfoil hat back on. It wasn't that long ago
that a crazed UK citizen shot and killed an MP was it?
Our system was founded on the presumption that an informed electorate will make the best
choice. Obviously we have missed that mark. Having the average voter be better informed is
always a good thing. Can we lay some blame at the feet of our incompetent public schools? How
many recent public school graduates can recite the declaration of Independence? Who is
responsible for our current state of ignorance? Is half the story a lie? Our founding fathers
intended a free press to inform the masses. The Guardian is one of several media outlets that
have gone from informative to outright advocacy. The opinion pieces here that are passed off
as fact are nonstop. The progressive revision of history and willful ignorance of facts is
disheartening. Sure big money can distort results, but putting a government agency in charge
of policing who gets to donate is a whole new mess.
We were blessed with an enduring document in our constitution. To ignore it is foolish. More
government is not always better government. The current rise of outsiders reflects our angst
here in flyover country. We have had enough of Washington insiders doing the bait and switch.
We are not under taxed, we are not under regulated, we need you media outlets to tell the
truth about the corruption and deceit rampant in Washington even on the left
"Our system was founded on the presumption that an informed electorate will make the best
choice."
Depends on who is doing the informing, and what information pablum they feed to the masses.
"The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental
principle is borne in mind constantly - it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them
over and over."
― Joseph Goebbels
Goebbels had a thorough understanding of how to manipulate the minds of the masses, and
current politicians have studied him well. All it takes is money to put the spin on. The media
love it, because that's where all that money goes to produce the spin. Why do you think they
left Sanders in such a void? Because his platform is to get all that money out of politics.
The only hope the US has is for 34 states on a local level,to call for a convention to
amend the constitution,with the repeal citizens united being the amendement proposed.
The beautiful part the US founding fathers left for the people is the ability to change
the law if enough states want it. So when the judicial,executive,legislative as well as
the press fail the people,they can change the law themselves. Its the only hope the US
has at this point.
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Citizens United doesn't just let Walmart fund PACs to run ads against unions. It allows unions
to fund PACs to run ads against trade agreements. It allows the Sierra Club to fund PACs to
run ads about environmental policy. It allows NARAL to fund PACs to support abortion rights.
Do you really want create an environment where only individuals can engage in political speech
and where people can't organize groups to speak collectively? Limiting political speech is not
something we should take lightly. Citizens United didn't cause the partisanship problems we
have today and it's not the reason our representatives are content to do nothing. The way we
elect people is the real problem, not how we fund our elections, that's a side effect of the
former.
Guardian presstitutes are ready to defend even indefensible Hillary Clinton behaviour.
Notable quotes:
"... I think that the moment she mixed personal and work related or classified information, she loses the right to claim that any of the emails were personal. Hence, all emails become connected to her work as SOS, and none of the emails can be deleted. None of her emails can be treated as personal anymore, they have now become government property. She had no right to delete anything. ..."
"... In Hillary's case, I suspect "personal emails" is a euphemism for ANY correspondence she does not want exposed in official governmental records, including that which could be used against her politically in the future, i.e. backroom deals, dubious policies, nefarious schemes, etc. ..."
This is disheartening and outrageous, with State and Justice skirting around the issues,
and as one commenter said, covering for Hillary in a partisan way.
The departments have
been largely silent on rules and legalities, and now they've evolved to tiptoeing.
Pathetic.
The comparison of government server deletions versus private server deletions
and
wipes
is inapt. Government employees and service members -- the millions who aren't as
special as Hillary with private off-site servers for their work -- surely can delete any
emails they choose, work or personal. But backup records are controlled by government IT
departments, who ideally are following records-keeping regulations.
Not so with the queen's server and email setup. She's deplorable, as is this State and
Justice mockery.
If the President continues to stand for this, I have no interest in voting. I haven't
pulled him into my disgust with this topic until now ... Justice is full of crap.
1. The media covers it but not in a
comprehensive or responsible way. The NY Times barely touches it. Same with The Economist.
The Post pushes it to those vacuous bloggers, DM and CC. The New Yorker is hiding under a
rock.
2. You would expect all to write "Calls to Action" of some kind.
3. Some kind of legal clarifications is order--several, actually. All the Title 18 items
need to be clarified for the public. Do they apply?
4. Damage analysis. What possible damage could have been done?
5. Role of the administration? How did this situation last for four years?
6. Are the deleted e-mails going to surface?
7. Cost. Why should public pay for the legal and administrative chaos of a rogue SoS?
All these issues lead to more questions. In this case, who authorized the use? Who knew?
Who responded to the existence of this rogue communications network? Who maintained? Which
if any clearances did they have? Did they share any of what they knew with others? And this
is just the most basic of this whole tsunami of needless problems. Just this avenue leads
to millions of dollars of investigative hours. Many millions...
The Guardian is being quite irresponsible here. You need to quote/date your sources and
supply links to the full documents. Which case? When? Who? It looks to me as though you are
just grabbing an article by a disreputable Metro DC publication that I am not going to
dignify by naming.
Also, assuming that something like this story is accurate, why would
DOJ do this?
Am not sure why you add a click-bait article to this complex topic--you should just
stick with the tabloid, sports, Hollywood junk articles that fill your virtual space these
days.
She simply used a classified government email system, or more likely, approved
hardcopy classified draft messages for a member of her staff to send with her
approval.
No, she didn't use a government email system (classified or not). She
used a private email system, completely outside the government.
And no, she didn't set up her own server for the purpose of having hard copies of
message drafts. So far, she has suggested a range of different reasons:
- To have just one device for both her official and personal
communications....which is a lie: she had two devices.
- She was "not thinking very much about it"... which is a lie: she had a private
server installed in her house, a domain registered under a former aide's name, and
key staffers conducting official government business on that server. And she paid
$5000 to a former IT aide to set up the system.
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In short, she wrongly used a private server and
personal email address for the majority of her official work, which of course is not
permissible for classified information, and questionable at best for unclassified content.
And she has wrongly lied to the American public in response to related questions.
But just because she used her private account does not mean she did not have a largely
inactive .gov address. And she also likely had a government address on a classified
government system, which she or her staff likely used when receiving or sending
marked
classified information.
Of course she had the right to delete to personal emails - keep in mind that had she used a
gov't-provided account like almost all other State Department employees she would have had
to follow the rules governing personal use of tax payer-provided equipment and services.
Ms Clinton certainly did not have the right to process classified information on a
personal computer system. That's illegal. You'd think the top executive would know such
things.
I think that the moment she mixed personal and work related or classified information,
she loses the right to claim that any of the emails were personal. Hence, all emails become
connected to her work as SOS, and none of the emails can be deleted. None of her emails can
be treated as personal anymore, they have now become government property. She had no right
to delete anything.
In Hillary's case, I suspect "personal emails" is a euphemism for ANY correspondence
she does not want exposed in official governmental records, including that which could be
used against her politically in the future, i.e. backroom deals, dubious policies,
nefarious schemes, etc.
How very cynical of you! If ever there was an opening for a 'Mr. Clean' named Joe Biden,
this is it. Hillary is plummeting in the polls. Biden is not in the race, yet he polls 20%.
After his appearance on Colbert on Thursday evening, I think that if he were to declare,
his support would double, at least. At 40%, he would be ahead of Hillary. In addition to
being thoroughly unethical, Hillary is not liked even by those who work with her.
For many, Hillary's very existence is a crime, so no amount of exoneration by the
Justice Dept... or indeed anyone else.... will change anything. The relentless
attacks will continue, and many of us will continue to see them as a clear indication
of how vulnerable the Republicans feel about their own Presidential prospects, with a
campaign that's in complete disarray, and a front runner who seems determined to
systematically alienate every single one of the demographic groups that the GOP had
hoped to court this time around. Frankly, I'd be worried too if I were a Republican!
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The Justice Department run by a political democratic appointee says Hillary has "rights" I
wonder.....Fast and Furious, NSA spying, Waco, refusal to disseminate information after
numerous court orders as directed under freedom of information act etc etc.. So you say we
we should stand behind whatever the justice department says....LOL. Seems they are even
more guilt of lying and cover ups then she is.
For almost all of us when using the company's equipment our emails become the property of
the company. All mail on a company server is backed up for a period of time and it is the
responsibility of the user to insure critical Emails are saved or archived properly to
prevent them from being deleted thru periodic routine house keeping by the IT department.
Being that all emails become company property and subject to review at any time by the
company it seems quite obvious this was unacceptable to the Clinton's and could lead to
problems similar to the Nixon fiasco on which Hillary cut her teeth just out of school. She
as arrogant as she is decided she could ignore the the rules and keep all her
communications to herself. She thinks if she says she did no wrong long enough people will
give up. They usually do. While that still won't make her right it certainly makes her
someone not to be trusted.
Here is the deal folks.... This person wants to be president and have the responsibilities
that go along with the office. If she can't even be competent with the little data she was
entrusted why should she be given more responsibility? Because she is a woman?
Why are we rewarding incompetence? Obama was re-elected despite the incredibly low labor
usage, declining wage growth, and skyrocketing health care costs. He made it his mission to
provide "affordable" care with the ACA, yet my rates doubled up to $500/month (compare this
with my ever decreasing car insurance rates… only $25/month from Insurance Panda now). Yet
we voted him in for 8 years? And we want to elect Hillary?
I am sorry but when you do a poor job at any job they don't promote you unless they just
want to go out of business. Also what this woman did was a crime. Nixon was impeached for
less, Edward Snowden did the same thing and is in hiding in Russia and the Government won't
let him come home, and General Petraeus was forced to resign from his position in the CIA
yet this woman is not facing any charges so far and is running for the highest office in
the land. What is wrong with this picture?
Read the entire section under 5 FAM 443.5. Nothing in the system is considered "personal"
and there is no expectation of privacy expected or granted. Cherry picking or rephrasing a
rule that anybody can read in two minutes is also no way to go about your day.
Every email has a sender and a receiver. Usually multiple servers are involved. Every email
in the system is recorded at numerous points, even if deleted at the source or destination.
A day or two with a talented engineer and a high speed search engine would recover just
about all of it. No warrant would be required for anything with a government connection. --
only the will to do it or an order from the appropriate judge.
a corrupt woman with such poor judgment and a Tory attitude toward the working class should
not be president. No wonder Sanders is rising in the polls.
To Clinton's supporters ... here's a nice summary of everything she's done wrong on this
subject, most of it intentional with no respect for most anyone.
She has purposely circumvented maintaining public records, dragged her feet in providing
records as required, and botched public attempts to claim her actions have been aboveboard
... because they haven't been.
However legal or illegal, unbelievable gullibility is
needed to assert she's done nothing wrong.
She's trying to play us, people of all political beliefs. And despite notable executive
and media support, she's largely failing, as both public responses and her reactions have
demonstrated.
Another biased article that fails to include the context of the allegations (that Clinton
had the right to delete emails) and consequently it provides a misleading impression.
This is NO vindication for Hillary Clinton - it is a defence filing in a case where the
Judge Emmet Sullivan has already decided at an earlier hearing that Clinton has violated
Government Policy with regard to the handling of emails.
As a result of his decision he ordered the State Department to tell the FBI to go
through all the emails (that are recovered - assuming they can be recovered), both business
and personal, on her home brew server to see if Hillary deleted any emails she should have
handed over to him as part of the FOI case.
Now Clinton's people are up in arms - Why? Is it because she deleted embarrassing emails
regarding Benghazi? Is it because the FBI (having been instructed by a Federal Judge) might
end up reading emails relating to dodgy dealings at the Clinton Foundation?
In the deeply Politicised US Civil Service both the State Department and the Justice
Department are objecting to the Judge's decision and are attempting to limit the inquiry.
For those that naively (or perhaps because they support Hillary) believe this is simply
a political attack by GOP opponents - It is worth remembering the FBI investigation was
launch by the Inspector General and decision to have ALL emails examined was made by a
member of the Judiciary (appointed ironically by Bill Clinton).
Both parties cited above are independent of the GOP.
Also for the record Hillary did NOT delete the emails at the time - She deleted them
some 18 months after leaving office (according to her lawyer some time after October last
year) and AFTER several investigations had been launched.
If Hillary Clinton deleted info relating to matters under investigation after an
investigation was launched (destroying evidence) then that is a felony offence.
Hillary understood the seriousness of the question when asked did she wipe the server -
That is why she replied along these lines: With a cloth or something.
Again this is no vindication of Clinton - Instead it is a lame defence to a serious
charge to a Federal Judge who has already decided in the matter.
What do you Brits know about the "Fast and Furious" scandal in the Dept. of Justice ?
; to have a perspective of how outrageous this was , consider this hypothetical
situation.
In Manhattan , a narcotics squad interdicts a gang of drug dealers , a
"shoot-out" erupts, and one of the squad members is murdered. The firearm that was
used to commit the murder is seized , and an investigation reveals the "Source" of
the murder weapon was-- the Office of the District Attorney on New York County!! (
Manhattan)
The D- A's Office was supplying drug criminals with firearms?; would never happen
you might say. But that's EXACTLY what happened in the "Fast and Furious" scandal
when Eric Holder was Attorney-General; the ATF division of the U. S. Dept. of Justice
was selling firearms to members of Mexican drug cartels , and a Border Agent was
murdered by a weapon supplied by the ATF division of the Justice Dept.
So much for the Dept. of Justice under the current President. The present A-G ,
Loretta Lynch , is loyal to the President and the Democratic Party , but not loyal to
"Justice".
Report
"I believe in an open, transparent government that is
accountable to the people. Excessive government secrecy harms democratic governance and can
weaken our system of checks and balances by shielding officials from oversight and inviting
misconduct or error. ... To me, openness and accountability are not platitudes _ they are
essential elements of our democracy."
-- Hillary Clinton, May 2008 in response to Sunshine Week survey of presidential
candidates.
Hillary just needs to lie the U.S. into a very costly war in terms of American and
indigenous deaths, trillions of dollars and significant more destabilization in the
Mideast.
The State Department guidelines for emails had prohibited use of a private server since
2005.
Yet she still keeps saying that what she did was allowed.
Hillary's State Department fired U.S. Ambassador Scott Gration (Kenya) in part for using
private emails to evade agency rules.
Hillary said the emails she deleted included private ones between her and her husband.
Her husband's spokesman, within days, announced surprise at that, since Bill Clinton has
only sent two emails in his entire life...and not to Hillary.
She is a liar. And a felon in violation of the Espionage Act.
"... Melania also made her own jewelry. "Melania never wore anything from the store," recalls one friend. ..."
"... Like her sister, Ines, her goal was to become a designer, and she applied to the school of architecture at the local university, successfully passing the notoriously difficult entrance exams ..."
"... She didn't drink, didn't party, didn't smoke. ..."
"... "She kept to herself, she was a loner. After a shoot or a catwalk, she went home, not out. She didn't want to waste time partying," Jerko remembers. ..."
When she was getting her jewelry plans off the ground, Melania sketched the designs for the collection
herself, relying on a talent for drawing that her childhood friends tell me she flashed as a girl.
"It's not free; it's precise," Petra Sedej, one of Melania's high school classmates, says of her
art. "She has a really good feeling for this."
... ... ...
"She was always very fancy." Amalija spent evenings after work sewing clothing for herself and
her two daughters, Ines and Melania. Once she learned to draw, Melania sketched her own designs,
and her mother or sister sewed them. Melania also made her own jewelry. "Melania never wore anything
from the store," recalls one friend.
... ... ...
While working for the car company in Ljubljana, Viktor had an apartment there, in one of the city's
first residential high-rises. It was a prestigious address and provided the girls a place to stay
in the capital so that they could attend design school-another luxury.
... ... ...
In those days, Melania wasn't thinking about a career as a model. Like her sister, Ines, her
goal was to become a designer, and she applied to the school of architecture at the local university,
successfully passing the notoriously difficult entrance exams. In those years in Ljubljana,
she was focused on school. She didn't drink, didn't party, didn't smoke. Even after she
met Jerko and began dabbling in modeling, she preferred to go home after work, to be with her equally
quiet and reserved sister. "She kept to herself, she was a loner. After a shoot or a catwalk,
she went home, not out. She didn't want to waste time partying," Jerko remembers.
... ... ...
Melania decamped to Milan after her first year of college, effectively dropping out
... ... ...
In New York, Melania lived a quiet, homebound life, taking assiduous care of her body: walks with
ankle weights, seven pieces of fruit every day, diligently moisturizing her skin. She rarely partied,
never brought anyone back to the apartment, and was always home early. "She didn't go out to dance
clubs; she'd go to Cipriani for dinner at ten and be home by one," Atanian recalls.
Ms. Trump, born in 1970, grew up in this hilly town of 4,500 best known around Slovenia, at least
until Mr. Trump entered the presidential race, for its medieval castle and annual salami
festival. Then, Slovenia was the northern region of Yugoslavia, ruled by Josip Broz Tito, a
Communist dictator who kept his distance from the Soviet Union and allowed more freedoms than did
other Eastern bloc leaders.
... ... ...
Mr. Trump, in an interview last month, said he had never discussed the topic with his
father-in-law. "But he was pretty successful over there," he said. "It's a different kind of
success than you have here. But he was successful."
In 1972, the Knavses moved into a larger apartment in a new housing block for workers of the
government-owned textile factory, including Melania's mother, Amalija, nicknamed Malci. She drew
patterns for children's clothes and later designed them, crossing the bridge to the factory every
day in heels.
Mr. Knavs, a traveling car salesman, spent a lot of time on the road. But when he was home, he
was noticed. Friends say he had a jocular personality and a fondness for his Mercedes sedans and
his coveted Maserati. Ms. Trump's childhood friends recalled him incessantly washing the cars,
but also carrying himself in a self-assured way that now reminded them of Mr. Trump.
...
Friends say that she enjoyed geography lessons in a room adorned with maps of the world, and that
she adored art class. The future creator of the QVC collection "Melania Timepieces & Jewelry" made
bracelets there...
In 1985, Melania left Sevnica, traveling on the narrow roads along the slow-moving Sava River,
green from the reflection of the wooded hills, and through coal mining towns on the way to
Ljubljana. There she attended the Secondary School of Design and Photography, housed in an
arcaded Renaissance monastery.
She lived in an apartment that her father, who had opened a bicycle and car parts shop in
Ljubljana, had bought a few years earlier on the outskirts of the city.
... ... ...
Melania and her older sister, Ines, also stood out, for their looks, their wardrobe and the
makeup they put on whenever they left the apartment. At school, Melania kept her distance from
peers listening to the Cure or Metallica, Mr. Kracina said, and gravitated toward a clique of pop
music fans who hung out at the Horse's Tail bar by the Triple Bridge in Ljubljana.
It was there that Peter Butoln, who prided himself on having Ljubljana's only metallic blue Vespa,
noticed Melania one night among the regulars dressed in bleached jeans and Benetton shirts,
drinking Mish Mash (Fanta and wine) and chatting each other up. Now 17, Melania was abstemious
and more wholesome than the other girls, he said, and they started dating. He would pick her up
on weekends and drive her around on his Vespa, and they would dance badly to Wham in "a nice
discothčque" by the cathedral.
... ... ..
Melania had also begun a process that would carry her away from Slovenia. In January 1987, the
photographer Stane Jerko spotted her and asked if she would be interested in modeling.
...Melania's entire family sensed potential in her modeling. After high school, she concentrated on
her career, dropping out of architecture school. (She still claims on her website to have
graduated.) On one occasion, Mr. Kravs drove his Mercedes to the shop of the seamstress Silva
Njegac, hours from Ljubljana, to order leather dresses for Melania that his wife had designed.
... ... ...
A second-place finish in Jana magazine's Slovenian Face of the Year contest in 1992 expanded
Melania's ambitions. In a fashion video for a Slovenian label, she wore a skirt suit, exited a
plane shadowed by bodyguards and signed papers at the national library.
...
She would soon Germanize her name to Melania Knauss and become an international model.
1. Sanders: Clinton has backed "virtually every trade agreement that has cost the workers
of this country millions of jobs"
2. Sanders: Clinton is in the pocket of Wall Street
3. Sanders: Hillary Clinton = D.C. Establishment
4. Sanders: Democrat Establishment immigration policies would drive down Americans' wages,
create open borders
5. Sanders: Clinton supports nation-building in Middle East through war and invasion
Sanders: "And now, I support her 100%."
DurbanPoisonWillBurn
Anyone who believes Hillary is progressive deserves the horrible outcome a Hillary
presidency will bring. How ANYONE can still support Hillary is beyond me. The woman has
accomplished NOTHING except chaos & failure. Wake up folks. Hillary does NOT care about you.
She cares about power, money, and making deals that benefit HER. Vote Jill Stein
Yesterday, the House of Representatives formally
referred Hillary Clinton's testimony to the FBI for investigation into
perjury/false statements under oath.
Hillary Clinton, as you well know, made no less than three false
statements under oath during her previous Congressional testimony.
She declared she never sent any emails with information marked
classified.
She did
.
She asserted that she handed over all of her work-related emails.
She didn't
.
And she claimed that her attorneys went through all of her emails
before deciding what to turn over and what to delete.
They didn't
.
The FBI will now investigate and submit a recommendation to Loretta
Lynch.
But after yesterday's joke of a hearing, does anyone really think that
Lynch would prosecute Hillary Clinton? Lynch refused to answer at least
74 questions pertaining to the Clinton email scandal.
She was asked point-blank to explain her reasoning in declining to
indict Hillary Clinton and each time, she just refused to answer.
Unfortunately, after yesterday's performance, it is clear that even if
the FBI does find evidence that Hillary Clinton committed perjury or made
false statements under oath – which is absolutely obvious – Lynch will
protect the Clintons once again.
But there is a way to take Loretta Lynch out of the equation entirely.
There is a way to ensure that a Grand Jury is impaneled and that both the
FBI and DOJ would be powerless to stop it.
When the House refers a matter to the FBI, there is no guarantee that
anything will come of it. Technically, the FBI doesn't even need to
accept the referral.
Even when there are so many clear lies and false statements, the Obama
administration can still derail such an investigation at every level.
The same is not true for
Contempt of Congress
charges.
When Congress charges someone with Contempt, the law is actually
written to take the DOJ and FBI pretty much out of the equation.
According to the law, the Attorney General has a "duty" to impanel a
Grand Jury for action on a Congressional Contempt charge. The law does
not allow the DOJ or FBI to insert themselves into the case if they don't
agree with the findings. It the House votes to charge someone with
Contempt of Congress, the Sergeant at Arms is instructed to have that
individual arrested and, if necessary, is given the power to imprison
someone in the Capitol Jail pending the Grand Jury's decision.
In 1983, the House of Representatives held Rita Lavelle, an EPA
administrator, in Contempt of Congress for lying under oath. The Attorney
General impaneled a Grand Jury, as the law requires, and Rita Lavelle was
convicted and ultimately served three months of her six month sentence.
This isn't some obscure function that hasn't been used since the
1800s. This is a legitimate method for Congress to hold administration
officials accountable without having to deal with corruption in the
Executive Branch.
One floor vote. That's all it takes. One House of Representatives
vote.
It takes 218 "yes" votes and then the House can force the Attorney
General to impanel a Grand Jury. Just to put it in perspective,
twenty-nine RINOs could vote with the Democrats and there would still be
enough votes to hold Hillary in Contempt.
No more political interference… no more re-interpreting the law to get
Hillary off the hook…
"... The classified status of her emails was not her only lie under oath. She also testified that she had submitted all her work related emails to the FBI. Now it is apparent that was also a complete fabrication, as the FBI reports thousands of other work related emails retrieved from the recipient's servers. ..."
"... The biggest example of her intentional deception is that she testified that she only had one server and Comey said she had several. Since those are physical objects she had to know that she had more than one. To claim ignorance not only asserts that she didn't know simple math, but that as a former senator who sat on the Senate Intelligence Committee that she didn't understand what classified information meant, the same Hillary Clinton who earned her law degree from Yale. ..."
Cary
Aguillard, Opinions are like a**holes; everybody's got one and nobody wants to hear yours!
237 Views
She unquestionably lied under oath at the Benghazi hearings about the sending of classified
emails through her personal server. Mrs. Clinton clearly stated that she sent no classified information
through her emails. Period. Now we know this is a big, fat lie. Under sworn oath.
The classified status of her emails was not her only lie under oath. She also testified that
she had submitted all her work related emails to the FBI. Now it is apparent that was also a complete
fabrication, as the FBI reports thousands of other work related emails retrieved from the recipient's
servers.
Multiple lies under oath. Perjury. If you or I distorted the truth to that extent under oath,
they would lock us up and destroy the key. The time for perversion of justice in
favor of this habitual criminal offender is over. If charges of perjury are not brought then our
entire justice system will be proven corrupt in the eyes of America and the world. End this embarrassment,
and let justice be served!
"All of my work related emails, yes." All that weren't erased and all the hard copies that
were put into burn bags don't count by her reasoning. If she had nothing to hide why did her staff
take the 5th so frequently? Of course she committed perjury.
Drew McCormick , No,
Hillary did not lie about Benghazi 91 Views
No. She instructed her lawyers to release all work related emails and they, based on the headings,
separated out all of those that seemed to be work related. They then told her that they had released
all her work related emails.
Apparently the Lawyers did the job competently but not thoroughly, as the FBI did identify
a few emails that should have been released.
Since Hillary believed her Lawyers and their statements, she did not lie. She may have
been mistaken, but it does not meet minimal standards for perjury.
A couple of points for those who didn't pay attention the last time a Clinton was baselessly
charged: Lying is not perjury. It has to be material to the investigation in order to be perjury.
Obviously this didn't meet that standard since none of her emails were informative to the case.
The second is that being mistaken is not a lie. If a New York Times reader believed that there
were extant weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, they would be mistaken, but their statements
would not knowingly be false. When the British politicians stated that, however, they were lying.
I believe she did. She certainly made false statements under oath, and I think there is sufficient
evidence to show that she knowingly and intentionally made false statements. The continuous references
to "marked" emails as a qualifier is used by her supporters as a safety net that is irrelevant
since classified information is classified whether or not it is marked. Moreover, since so many
emails were kept on her private servers they could not have been passed on to officials whose
job it was to make markings.
The biggest example of her intentional deception is that she testified that she only had one
server and Comey said she had several. Since those are physical objects she had to know that she
had more than one. To claim ignorance not only asserts that she didn't know simple math, but that
as a former senator who sat on the Senate Intelligence Committee that she didn't understand what
classified information meant, the same Hillary Clinton who earned her law degree from Yale.
Does this mean that she will be recommended for an indictment, prosecution or any penalty?
Probably not. She could probably order a hit squad and leaders of her party would protect her
as her supporters would cheer her on.
Investigators with the State Department issued a subpoena to the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton
Foundation last fall seeking documents about the charity's projects that may have required approval
from the federal government during Hillary Clinton's term as secretary of state, according to people
familiar with the subpoena and written correspondence about it.
The subpoena also asked for records related to Huma Abedin, a longtime Clinton aide who for six
months in 2012 was employed simultaneously by the State Department, the foundation, Clinton's personal
office, and a private consulting firm with ties to the Clintons.
The full scope and status of the inquiry, conducted by the State Department's inspector general,
were not clear from the material correspondence reviewed by The Washington Post.
[Democratic debate: Clinton receives key endorsement, but faces new questions]
A foundation representative, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing inquiry,
said the initial document request had been narrowed by investigators and that the foundation is not
the focus of the probe.
joeshuren, 2/24/2016 1:02 PM EST
Washington Free Beacon Staff
March 20, 2015 8:27 am
Haitian activists protested outside of the Clinton Foundation in New York over the loss of
"billions of dollars" that was meant to help rebuild after the devastating 2010 earthquake.....
"We are telling the world of the crimes that Bill and Hillary Clinton are responsible for in Haiti,"
said Dhoud Andre of the Committee Against Dictatorship in Haiti. "And we are telling the American
people that the over 32,000 emails that Hillary Clinton said she deleted have evidence of the
crimes they have committed."
Five years, later a majority of Haiti is still in disrepair. The capital's main hospital has
yet to be finished, and there is a major rise of cholera.
_____
HR 3509, To direct the Secretary of State to submit to Congress a report on the status of post-earthquake
recovery and development efforts in Haiti, failed to pass the Senate in 2013. Where is the accounting?
ZZ44, 2/17/2016 12:28 PM EST
Best news I've heard in a long time... And I'm a Democrat! They should also investigate the
CGI and State Dept. (under Hilary) links with Aidmatrix and solicitation of funds after the Haiti
earthquake. That will be an eye-opener for sure.
Mistery Mahn, 2/16/2016 2:48 PM EST [Edited]
The Clintons represent everything that is wrong with American politics with their countless,
criminal wrong doings. Yet by pandering to a sea of uneducated fools to blindly prop them up,
here we are with someone who should be behind bars running for POTUS. If Hillary is elected, I
have little hope for what is left of this once great country.
TEL AVIV – Did former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton commit perjury when she claimed in a
Senate hearing that she did not know whether the U.S. mission in Libya was procuring or
transferring weapons to Turkey and other Arab countries?
The goal of the alleged weapons shipments was to arm the rebels fighting Syrian President Bashar
al-Assad's regime.
Any training or arming of the Syrian rebels would be considered highly controversial. A major
issue is the inclusion of jihadists, including al-Qaida, among the ranks of the Free Syrian Army
and other Syrian opposition groups
During the recent hearings over the Obama administration's handling of the Sept. 11, 2012, attack
on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Clinton was directly asked about alleged U.S. weapons shipments
out of Libya.
Clinton claimed she did not know whether the U.S. was aiding Turkey and other Arab countries in
procuring weapons.
The exchange took place with Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky.
Paul asked Clinton: "Is the U. S. involved with any procuring of weapons, transfer of weapons,
buying, selling, anyhow transferring weapons to Turkey out of Libya?"
"To Turkey?" Clinton asked. "I will have to take that question for the record. Nobody has ever
raised that with me."
Continued Paul: "It's been in news reports that ships have been leaving from Libya and that may
have weapons, and what I'd like to know is the annex that was close by, were they involved with
procuring, buying, selling, obtaining weapons, and were any of these weapons being transferred to
other countries, any countries, Turkey included?"
Clinton replied, "Well, Senator, you'll have to direct that question to the agency that ran
the annex. I will see what information is available."
"You're saying you don't know?" asked Paul.
"I do not know," Clinton said. "I don't have any information on that."
Clinton's claims seem to now be unraveling.
Confirming WND's exclusive reporting for over a year, the New York Times earlier this week
reported that since early 2012, the CIA has been aiding Arab governments and Turkey in obtaining
and shipping weapons to the Syrian rebels.
Middle Eastern security officials speaking to WND have said U.S.-aided weapons shipments go back
more than a year, escalating before the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. facilities in
Benghazi.
In fact, the Middle Eastern security officials speaking to WND since last year describe the U.S.
mission in Benghazi and nearby CIA annex attacked last September as an intelligence and planning
center for U.S. aid to the rebels in the Middle East, particularly those fighting Syrian
President Bashar al-Assad's regime.
The aid, the sources stated, included weapons shipments and was being coordinated with Turkey,
Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
The specifics of the New York Times reporting, meanwhile, open major holes in Clinton's sworn
claims to be in the dark about the alleged weapons shipments.
U.S. officials speaking on condition of anonymity told the Times that American intelligence
officers have helped the Arab governments shop for weapons and then helped to vet rebel
commanders and groups to determine who should receive the weapons as they arrive.
The plan mirrors one the Times reported last month in a separate article that was proposed by
Clinton herself. The Times described Clinton as one of the driving forces advocating for arming
the Syrian rebels.
Last month, the New York Times reported Clinton and then-CIA Director David Petraeus had
concocted a plan calling for vetting rebels and arming Syrian fighters with the assistance of
Arab countries.
The Times report from earlier this week of U.S. arms shipments and vetting seems to be the
Clinton-Petraeus plan put in action.
It may be difficult for most to believe the secretary of state was not aware that her alleged
plan was being implemented, especially when arming the Syrian rebels is a serious policy with
obvious major repercussions internationally.
Clinton is not the only one in hot water.
As WND reported yesterday, the New York Times report threatens the longstanding White House
narrative that claims the Obama administration has only supplied nonlethal aid to the rebels.
The White House has repeatedly denied directly arming the rebels.
Recruiting jihadists
Days after the Benghazi attack that killed U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, WND broke the
story that Stevens himself played a central role in recruiting jihadists to fight Assad's regime
in Syria, according to Egyptian and other Middle Eastern security officials.
Stevens served as a key contact with the Saudis to coordinate the recruitment by Saudi Arabia of
Islamic fighters from North Africa and Libya. The jihadists were sent to Syria via Turkey to
attack Assad's forces, said the security officials.
The officials said Stevens also worked with the Saudis to send names of potential jihadi recruits
to U.S. security organizations for review. Names found to be directly involved in previous
attacks against the U.S., including in Iraq and Afghanistan, were ultimately not recruited by the
Saudis to fight in Syria, said the officials.
The latest New York Times report has bolstered WND's reporting, citing air traffic data,
interviews with officials in several countries and the accounts of rebel commanders describing
how the CIA has been working with Arab governments and Turkey to sharply increase arms shipments
to Syrian rebels in recent months.
The Times reported that the weapons airlifts began on a small scale in early 2012 and continued
intermittently through last fall, expanding into a steady and much heavier flow late last year,
the data shows.
The Times further revealed that from offices at "secret locations," American intelligence
officers have helped the Arab governments shop for weapons, including a large procurement from
Croatia. They have vetted rebel commanders and groups to determine who should receive the weapons
as they arrive.
The CIA declined to comment to the Times on the shipments or its role in them.
The Times quoted a former American official as saying that David H. Petraeus, the CIA director
until November, had been instrumental in helping set up an aviation network to fly in the
weapons. The paper said Petraeus had prodded various countries to work together on the plan.
Petraeus did not return multiple emails from the Times asking for comment.
Both WND's reporting, which first revealed the U.S.-coordinated arms shipments, and the Times
reporting starkly contrast with statements from top U.S. officials who have denied aiding the
supply of weapons to the rebels.
Rebel training
It's not the first time WND's original investigative reporting on U.S. support for the Syrian
rebels was later confirmed by reporting in major media outlets. Other WND reporting indicates
support for the Syrian rebels that goes beyond supplying arms, painting a larger picture of U.S.
involvement in the Middle East revolutions.
A story by the German weekly Der Spiegel earlier this month reporting the U.S. is training Syrian
rebels in Jordan was exclusively exposed by WND 13 months ago.
Quoting what it said were training participants and organizers, Der Spiegel reported it was not
clear whether the Americans worked for private firms or were with the U.S. Army, but the magazine
said some organizers wore uniforms.
The training in Jordan reportedly focused on use of anti-tank weaponry.
The German magazine reported some 200 men received the training over the previous three months
amid U.S. plans to train a total of 1,200 members of the Free Syrian Army in two camps in the
south and the east of Jordan.
Britain's Guardian newspaper also reported U.S. trainers were aiding Syrian rebels in Jordan
along with British and French instructors.
Reuters reported a spokesman for the U.S. Defense Department declined immediate comment on the
Der Spiegel report. The French foreign ministry and Britain's foreign and defense ministries also
would not comment to Reuters.
While Der Spiegel quoted sources discussing training of the rebels in Jordan over the last three
months, WND was first to report the training as far back as February 2012.
At the time, WND quoted knowledgeable Egyptian and Arab security officials claimed the U.S.,
Turkey and Jordan were running a training base for the Syrian rebels in the Jordanian town of
Safawi in the country's northern desert region.
Editor's note: Additional research by Joshua Klein
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2013/03/did-hillary-commit-perjury/#GD9uo2OOii2wJdpE.99
Bernie on Monday to his supporters : Thanks for comin', see ya!
Notable quotes:
"... Donations to Jill Stine skyrocket after Sander's endorsement. https://www.rt.com/usa/351129-jill-stein-bernie-donations/ ..."
"... And, let me guess: Sanders' much-vaunted e-mailing list has a pesky shrinkage problem. Which started on Tuesday. ..."
"... Bernie denouement is the best thing that could have happened to Stein and the Greens. ..."
"... The Stein campaign seems unprepared. They simply don't have any staff to deal with volunteers. There is a well trained group out there now, so they need gear, packets, flyers, talking points. ..."
"... Sanders will attempt to maintain his supporters by focusing their time, skills and money on his new institute. Should serve to keep a good number from paying attention to Stein. ..."
Bernie denouement is the best thing that could have happened to Stein and the Greens. If Bernie
and West had started with the Greens, they would have gotten zero traction. Another noble cause
no one's ever heard of. Instead, Bernie started something that came close to blowing up the Democrats
the way Trump blew up the Republicans.
Now a lot of the Bernie sisses and bros are looking for somewhere to go. Stein is well placed
to pick up the pieces if she knows what to do with them.
The Stein campaign seems unprepared. They simply don't have any staff to deal with volunteers.
There is a well trained group out there now, so they need gear, packets, flyers, talking points.
Sanders will attempt to maintain his supporters by focusing their time, skills and money on
his new institute. Should serve to keep a good number from paying attention to Stein.
Donald Trump comments on the end of what he called the "FBI Primary," saying that Bernie
Sanders has so far refused to drop out of the race for the Democratic nomination in hopes that
Clinton might be indicted. He says that the FBI's recommendation not to indict proves Sanders was
right when he said the Democratic primary was "rigged."
Today is the best evidence ever that we have seen that our system is totally, absolutely
rigged," Trump said at a rally in North Carolina.
"It's rigged," Trump said. "And I used that term nationally when I was running in the Republican
primaries, and I was the first to use it, and then all of a sudden it became a hot term and
everyone was using the word rigged, rigged, rigged. But if you remember, I won Louisiana. And I
didn't get enough delegate, what happened? Places like Colorado, which was so good to me, but all
of a sudden we find out that they don't have the vote... I'll be honest, if I didn't win in
landslides, I wouldn't be standing here. You would be watching some politician who will lose to
Hillary.
"I learned about the rigged system really fast. All of a sudden, Bernie started using it and now
everyone talks about the system being rigged," he said.
"I'm going to keep using it because I was the one that brought it up."
"I asked a couple of political pros," he said. "Think of Bernie Sanders. I think the one with the
most to be angry about. The one with the most to lose is Bernie Sanders, because honestly, he was
waiting for the FBI primary, and guess what? He just lost today the FBI primary!"
"He lost the FBI primary! Bernie, my poor Bernie, oh, Bernie! I feel so badly for Bernie, but you
know what? A lot of Bernie Sanders supporters are going to be voting for Trump, because Bernie
Sanders was right! Bernie Sanders was right about a couple of things. He's right about the system
being rigged, but he's also right about trade. Our trade deals are a disaster. They're killing
our jobs. They're killing our families. They're killing our incomes."
Bernie Sanders is this election's Democratic sheepdog. The sheepdog is a card the Democratic
party plays every presidential primary season when there's no White House Democrat running for
re-election. The sheepdog is a presidential candidate running ostensibly to the left of the
establishment Democrat to whom the billionaires will award the nomination. Sheepdogs are herders,
and the sheepdog candidate is charged with herding activists and voters back into the Democratic
fold who might otherwise drift leftward and outside of the Democratic party, either staying home
or trying to build something outside the two party box.
"... my interview with him earlier we played a little clip from, he said if she doesn't confront the oligarchs, his supporters are not likely to want to support her. That's a far cry from what was said today. ..."
"... I think a great many of the activists who made up the volunteer and donor core of the Sanders campaign will be difficult to bring on board. Many will go in other directions. I don't have any doubt about that. ..."
PARK: Well, I did expect him to endorse at some point. I didn't know when he would do it, but
I was mentally, emotionally prepared for the day. And so I can't say I was disappointed.
I do feel like we have to be very respectful of Bernie Sanders, very grateful to him, because I
believe he performed a political miracle in America with his campaign. But at the same time, I
feel like we have to be independent of Bernie Sanders and do what we feel is right for our
country. For some of us that means that there won't be protests, and for some it will be a
rejection of the endorsement. So the protests come in different forms, but there will be
protests, to be sure.
...But
my interview with him earlier we played a little clip from, he said if she doesn't
confront the oligarchs, his supporters are not likely to want to support her. That's a far cry
from what was said today.
CURRY: Well, and I think that that was a prediction he made that Annabel's remarks just
confirmed.
I think a great many of the activists who made up the volunteer and donor core of
the Sanders campaign will be difficult to bring on board. Many will go in other directions. I
don't have any doubt about that.
... ... ...
If I can just make an observation, right now in the Labour Party in Britain, which is
controlled at its elites by a kind of neoliberal economic world order group that is very much
like the group that still is running the Democratic Party here in United States, they've begun to
chase him out, Corbyn out, over the Brexit vote, saying that he didn't speak full-throatedly
against it. But if you followed that thing over in England at all--and lots of us have--he really
couldn't. His constituency wasn't going to listen to an unadorned, full-throated, 100 percent
endorsement of staying in the E.U. That's not what they felt. And, in fact, I think he spoke to
them quite reasonably.
... ... ...
CURRY: You know what, actually I didn't hear it that way. And again I would invite you to sort
of go over the text of that speech. I thought this was a very nuanced argument that Bernie made
today. Again, it was an unconditional endorsement, but he was very careful about not overstating
the areas of agreement. If you parse those sentences, he was very careful, I thought, to say only
as much as they agreed on and no more. It's why he couldn't mention national security or foreign
affairs in any way, because there is no agreement.
... ... ...
CURRY: I don't think they have anything to give him. There was a very callow piece in The New
York Times speculating--two of their young political reporters speculating as to whether Bernie
had earned a primetime speaking slot at the convention. And the fact of the matter is they need
him to give a primetime speech at the convention. If they didn't give him a speaking slot, he
could just go outside--all of his delegates would go with him--and give the speech on his own,
and the convention would simply have to shut down. There's still a complete denial in the bubble
of the elites in terms of how much the country's changing.
In terms of the progress he's gotten, the first draft of this platform was, I thought, a
borderline disgrace. This last draft from Sunday is better. I'm still absorbing it. There are
things here. Hillary Clinton never came out for expanding Social Security until the last six
weeks. She's 68 years old. Her entire adult life, both presidents Obama and Clinton have put
proposals to cut Social Security on the table many times. That's over now. It took Clinton years
to decide that she could even put a number on an increase to the minimum wage. President Obama
refused to introduce a minimum wage hike in 2009 when he had the votes in both houses to pass it.
The commitment is there.
This isn't about a negotiation with the power elite. At most they're going to give him a
chairmanship. It doesn't matter as much as the movement we have to build.
"... Bernie supporters are crowing about his great success at influencing the Democratic Party platform. How exciting is that? Is there anything less useful than the platform of a political party? Screen doors in a submarine come to mind. A political party platform has all of the significance and impact of a good healthy a fart in the midst of a hurricane. ..."
"... bernie sanders, when it comes right down to it, is either a liar, or is willing to support hillary in spite of who and what she stands for.. trumps comments on this are indeed bang on. ..."
"... The Sanders move is straight out of the Democratic Party playbook of the last 100 years, as so many predicted. The Democrats have co-opted every grass-roots movement that has arisen in the US, co-opted and quashed it. ..."
"... The party primaries in the USA are not intended to be representative, democratic elections: they simply serve as a sort of consumer survey to see which of their candidates would be most popular in the general election. ..."
"... Bernie Sanders claims some concessions were achieved in the platform committee document. But one issue of greatest importance, on trade issues,--specifically the rejection of TPP, is a lost cause. Bernie threw in the towel. The phony sideshow of reconstituted New Deal hoopla is merely the same tired fantasy narrative that the Democrats predictably trot out for every presidential election. ..."
"... The dear old man who started this campaign with this gem of rhetoric: "What we need is a revolution in the streets", is ending his monkeyshines with a ringing endosement of one of the most politically corrupt figures in our history. ..."
"... Jill Stein, who ran for president on the Green Party platform, says that Bernie's endorsement of Hillary is the "last nail in the coffin" which turns Sanders' revolution over to a counter-revolutionary party. ..."
"... Trump would do well to attract Bernie Voters now, by exploiting areas of agreement. The TPP is one example. ..."
"... He led people to believe that he had principles - that he really was against Wall St. and SuperPACs and all that Hillary stands for. He also (late in the race) began talking about 'revolution' to play to the discontented and young idealists. ..."
"... Its all just bullshit when he ultimately supports Hillary. But those who support Hillary (like rufus does) try hard to finesse Sanders failing because they value the "service" that Sanders performed for the Obama-Hillary "Third Way" Democratic Party. ..."
"... What chance do we have with Hillary?--a back-stabbing, forked-tongue, daughter of Goldman Sachs, whose speeches to the industrialists and bankers are practically a state secret? Yes, Hillary!--who is coated from head to toe with a patina of blood, and smells of corpses? ..."
"... US corporations aren't stupid. They know bad, expensive education, decaying infrastructure and violence in the street are bad for business. They might even realize that corruption is bad for them. And that worker representation makes life easier all around. ..."
"... In fact, Sanders pulled several key punches in the race ..."
"... he failed to call Hillary out on her emails after the State Inspector General report was release and it was CLEAR that she had lied about her emails; ..."
"... he is close/friendly with all of the top Democrats: Obama campaigned for him to win his Senate seat; Schumer endorses him; he calls Hillary a 'friend' of 25 years. ..."
"... Except in style, Hillary is no different than Obama, Bush II, or her husband. Whereas earlier presidents felt the need to put on a show of decency -- well, okay, Bush II let it drop now and then -- H. Clinton will be a bitch Cheney, going out of her way to rub everyone's face in it and bragging there's nothing they can do about it. ..."
"... There's a bright side however. She's dumb and knows no bounds. Think Louis XVI. That, along with her arrogance, may finally bring a tipping point of sorts. With things coming apart everywhere, a smooth-talking fraud like Reagan or Obama might be able to somehow hold it together a little longer. Hillary's nastiness could actually bring real change. God in his infinite irony. ..."
"... To say there is a deep state controlling Clinton may be an over simplification. More likely their are lots of competing and conflicting forces working in the dark, none with any clear idea or plan (or inkling of what other powers are doing) each pushing for immediate gains without a thought for the future. ..."
"... In the struggle for power everyone. including H. Clinton, is a useful fool and a potential patsy. Those hidden powers have a history of eating their own. ..."
"... Sanders has been a great disappointment. In order to prevent Trump from getting the votes, he is embracing and selling his soul and his supporters to a demon! In fact Sanders has more in common with Trump that he has with Hillary. ..."
"... "Bernie Sanders endorsing Crooked Hillary Clinton is like Occupy Wall Street endorsing Goldman Sachs" ..."
"... His followers were fools. I think some of them know that now. ..."
"... I for one, hoped for more than "sheepdog" from Sanders, but, alas, those who said so, were totally correct ..."
"... in American politics, none of these people are for dismantling the biggest budgetary fraud & boondoggle in human history: the pentagon. anybody saying they are for "small gov't" who doesn't immediately propose to slash the military/para-military budget (not the VA, not now) by 50% every year for the next 500 years is lying. ..."
"... Hillary represents a continuation of the last 8 years, or even perhaps the last 16 or 24+ years. There is absolutely no doubt about that. ..."
"... People taken in by Sanders learned no lessons from gushing over Obama. They hurt themselves again and are sociopathically indifferent to the far greater harm they have done to those who were not gullible. ..."
"... Even if she had given any "significant concession", it would have been meaningless noise with not an iota of intention to implement such concessions. She is a POS who will say anything at all to get elected. The only thing we really know is she relishes confrontation on the foreign policy scene. Otherwise nobody can rely on her to act in their interests in the domestic realm, except big corporate entities. ..."
"... It is stupid for B to keep linking to Trumps quotes exclusively. Why does b not link to Jill Stein criticism. Sure Trumps criticism of evil Hillarys corruption will gather important support, but exclusively giving torture loving warmongering Trump ammunition, strangles other better candidates in their political birth in the alternative to status quo attention. In the same way that the Sanders, Chomsky, and other shortsighted cowards react by strangle politically strangling a desperate new movement. ..."
"... Congrats to those who labeled the 'Sheepdog' so early. Such an apt description. Good call. ..."
"... Sanders released only one year of tax returns (2015). His campaign manager claimed his taxes held no surprises. Well they didn't for 2015. But why didn't Sanders release earlier years? Any serious Presidential candidate would expect to release at least 3 years of tax returns. ..."
"... Given the 'service' that he performed, it might be especially interesting to have seen his taxes for 2014, the year before he entered the race. The lack of transparency and Sanders' 'sheepdogging' raises questions of whether he received any inducements to enter the race. ..."
"... The Plan was always from the start for Bernie to hold down the Left, so Hillary could capture Center-Right, and Donald could lead the Far Right into Smackdown. Then Bernie would deliver the Left to Hillary. And so it has come to pass. ..."
"... Strange bedfellows? Not at all. The Israelis and the GCC countries, the USG and EU, are all soul brothers : tiny 'elite' minorities attempting to rule their respective roosts by technological means encompassing everything from drones to the media to their ubiquitous taps. ..."
"... in loco parentis ..."
"... In 1963 there was a coup in America. Since then the military-industrial complex has run the country. It has been most apparent in its foreign policy, which has been the conquest of natural resources (especially oil and gas) worldwide. America's resentment with the USSR/Russia has to do with their living on top of resources. ..."
"... But in order to continue the illusion of democracy in the US, it was necessary to maintain some differences between the two parties so that Americans would think that they have a choice. Meanwhile, the party that is supposed to represent the working class has been sliding into the arms of the corporatists. Essentially, in order to give Americans a "choice" Trump has been pushed as the demonic clown versus H. Clinton. Unfortunately, for good reasons as well as because of endless propaganda from the right, most Americans distrust Clinton, as well they should. Her casual announcement about enforcing a "no-fly zone" over Syria is essentially a declaration of war against Russia. ..."
"... Going back to the coup in 1963, in order to maintain control of the population it was necessary for the ruling class to continue to generate candidates each election cycle to pretend to care about the working class. I have long suspected that early on in their careers both Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton were recruited by US intelligence. During his time in Britain Bill's classmates assumed that he was CIA ..."
"... I suspect it was the beginning of her career in US power politics. Shortly after she wrote a pro-Vietnam speech for Melvin Laird in 1968, she was involved with the various Black Panther trials around the US. ..."
"... It's hard to believe that the Hillary who stands before us now was ever a political ally of the Panthers. Rather, I suspect she was observing for an intelligence agency, the FBI or CIA She sat through a Panther trial in New Haven, Connecticut, and then spent a summer in Oakland working for the law firm that was representing the Panthers in the Bay Area. Essentially, she was in the right place at the right time to glean information for COINTELPRO, the massive spying program directed against anti-war and black movements. A few years later she worked on the Democrats' legal team for Watergate, another good place for a government informant to be. Bill, during his time at Oxford, would have functioned like the thousands of informants who sat in on peace group meetings across American campuses. ..."
"... Later, when the CIA was dumping cocaine at Mena, Arkansas, Bill Clinton was in position to make sure state police left the operation alone. It's not surprising that George W. Bush's first head of the DEA was Asa Hutchinson, who'd been the incurious federal prosecutor over that part of Arkansas when the drugs came in. ..."
"... The Clintons were prominent in the Democratic Leadership Council, which was an organization within the Democratic Party pushing it to the right. In 1992 Bill pushed trade agreements that would destroy the American middle class. Since then the party has been hopelessly corrupted by Wall Street money. ..."
"... I cannot think of another president in memory who is more wed to military adventurism than Hillary. ..."
"... But if she polls badly enough, Democratic establishment may see the light and go for Sanders. ..."
Jun 13, 2016 |
Bernie Sanders folded. This without gaining any significant concession from Hillary Clinton on
programmatic or personal grounds. (At least as far as we know.) He endorsed Clinton as presidential
candidate even as she gave no ground for his voters' opinions. This disenfranchises the people who
supported him.
... ... ...
I expect the "Not Hillary" protest vote to be very strong in the November election. There is still
more significant dirt to be dug up about her and her family foundation. Trumps current lows in the
polls will recover when the media return to the "close race" mantra that makes them money. He still
has a decent chance to win.
It is long, long past the time to see the world we really live in; the realities of our western
faux democracies. Until and unless we recognise the facts, as they are, nothing can be changed.
The problem/s must be identified for it/them to be solved.
It doesn't take a critical mass of
people; but it takes more than a few; far more than evidenced this election cycle...
Bernie supporters are crowing about his great success at influencing the Democratic Party
platform. How exciting is that? Is there anything less useful than the platform of a political
party? Screen doors in a submarine come to mind. A political party platform has all of the significance
and impact of a good healthy a fart in the midst of a hurricane.
thanks b, for highlighting these sad realities. bernie sanders, when it comes right down to
it, is either a liar, or is willing to support hillary in spite of who and what she stands for..
trumps comments on this are indeed bang on.
the labour. party is run by a gang of thugs.. i hope the people who want corbyn are able to
overcome the mostroisity the labour party has become.
i echo @1 v. arnolds comments..
@2 bill..bernie spporters better not show how stupid they are by also voting for hillary..
The Sanders move is straight out of the Democratic Party playbook of the last 100 years, as
so many predicted. The Democrats have co-opted every grass-roots movement that has arisen in the
US, co-opted and quashed it.
Even as deliberately unplugged as I've been from this race, it's been easy to see at a glance
that Sanders magnetized the next wave of concerned citizens - of course the young people rallied
to his banner - and will now leave them broken and in disarray, or delivered to the Democrats.
He was an independent. He so simply could have turned the Green Party into a ten-percent force
in the US, making it hugely important, and advancing in one leap the cause of multi-party governance.
The party primaries in the USA are not intended to be representative, democratic elections:
they simply serve as a sort of consumer survey to see which of their candidates would be most
popular in the general election.
Registering for a party does not mean that you are a member of a particular party or even support
it, you are simply choosing to vote in their primary elections (if you live in a state with closed
primaries). That is something a lot of Bernie supporters found out much too late. But that is
not a "rigged system", those rules were in place long before Sanders decided to run as a Democrat.
And rules differ from state to state: some places allot delegates proportionally, in others
it is winner-take-all. Some states hold a general election, other hold a caucus:you have to travel
to a certain place at a certain time to cast your vote, which means you have to have the time
and money in order to participate.
I have never seen a similar system in place anywhere else. Usually it is only card-carrying,
dues-paying party members who are allowed to select their candidates.
Seventh is the real possibility Bernie has inspired of a third party – if the Democratic Party
doesn't respond to the necessity of getting big money out of politics and reversing widening
inequality, if it doesn't begin to advocate for a single-payer healthcare system, or push hard
for higher taxes on the wealthy - including a wealth tax - to pay for better education and
better opportunities for everyone else, if it doesn't expand Social Security and lift the cap
on income subject to the Social Security payroll tax, if it doesn't bust up the biggest banks
and strengthen antitrust laws, and expand voting rights.
If it doesn't act on these critical issues. the Democratic Party will become irrelevant
to the future of America, and a third party will emerge to address them.
From the first I hoped that the revolutionary left would be able to capitalize on the issues
raised by Sanders' insurgency. You will win support by winning concrete gains for real people.
Not by shrill denunciations of the masses ignorance or gullibility.
Very good observations from b. Bernie Sanders claims some concessions were achieved in the
platform committee document. But one issue of greatest importance, on trade issues,--specifically
the rejection of TPP, is a lost cause. Bernie threw in the towel. The phony sideshow of reconstituted
New Deal hoopla is merely the same tired fantasy narrative that the Democrats predictably trot
out for every presidential election.
The dear old man who started this campaign with this gem of rhetoric: "What we need is
a revolution in the streets", is ending his monkeyshines with a ringing endosement of one of the
most politically corrupt figures in our history. And once again, every 1930s, New Deal trope
and hurrah, is to be trotted out, even though the former Clinton administration drove a stake
into the heart of most of FDR's work.
Get in line sheep. Mutton will be served.
Jill Stein, who ran for president on the Green Party platform, says that Bernie's endorsement
of Hillary is the "last nail in the coffin" which turns Sanders' revolution over to a counter-revolutionary
party.
Trump would do well to attract Bernie Voters now, by exploiting areas of agreement. The TPP
is one example.
Owned by Goldman Bilderberg and the CFR, the Den of Lying Thieves and Whores - aka the Democratic
Party - now has sneakily moved forward to tee up the TPP for passage by Crooked Hillary if not
Oilbomber.
Note: The Republican Party is also a Den of Lying Thieves and Whores.
rufus: Sanders did what he said he would from the start ...
He led people to believe that he had principles - that he really was against Wall St. and
SuperPACs and all that Hillary stands for. He also (late in the race) began talking about 'revolution'
to play to the discontented and young idealists.
Its all just bullshit when he ultimately supports Hillary. But those who support Hillary
(like rufus does) try hard to finesse Sanders failing because they value the "service" that Sanders
performed for the Obama-Hillary "Third Way" Democratic Party.
Those who said that Sanders was a sheepdog from the start were right: the Democratic
Party led by "Third Way" sellouts is hopeless. Long past time to move on.
Now now Jackrabbit, go easy on rufus. You have to remember that cognitive dissonance is infinitely
extensible across a mind that is captured by delusion.
Yes Virginia, they are all hucksters -- Surely the microscopic communist party, or its
pale American likeness, of which rufus is a mustache twirling member, is less of a political fantasy,
than the Green Party!
What chance do we have with Hillary?--a back-stabbing, forked-tongue, daughter of Goldman
Sachs, whose speeches to the industrialists and bankers are practically a state secret? Yes, Hillary!--who
is coated from head to toe with a patina of blood, and smells of corpses?
So it is basically the British Trade Unions making sure their members dominate in the leadership
election?
The US democratic party is a huge income generating corporation with some worker representation.
Sanders is correct to stay inside if he wants to change politics. If Sandernistas continue the
fight (they will, it is generational, same as the Clintons were generational) seat for seat they
will change the party. They will get changed themselves in the process for sure.
It seems the Libertarian party succeeds in splitting Republicans. For Sanders to split Democrats
would be voting for Trump. He would have to live with this fame outside of the Democratic Party
with no one to team up in the Senate.
US corporations aren't stupid. They know bad, expensive education, decaying infrastructure
and violence in the street are bad for business. They might even realize that corruption is bad
for them. And that worker representation makes life easier all around.
Jill goes easy on Sanders in her statement because she wants to attract his supporters.
In fact, Sanders pulled several key punches in the race:
> he was late in calling out Hillary-DNC collusion - campaign financing got the headlines but
what about the DNC's silence about: a) media bias toward Hillary and b) voter irregularities:
AP called the race for Hillary the day before California voted based on secret polling of
Super-delegates! ;
> he failed to attack Obama's record on black/minority affairs - despite Sanders having
conducted a fake filibuster over the Fiscal Cliff/Sequester - Hillary walked away with
the black vote;
> he failed to call Hillary out on her emails after the State Inspector General report was
release and it was CLEAR that she had lied about her emails;
And Sanders is not an "independent" as any ordinary person would interpret that term:
> he has caucused with the Democrats for a very long time (nearly 20 years?);
> he runs in the Vermont Democratic Primary when running for House/Senate with the understanding
that he will not run in general election as a Democrat (this effectively blocks opposition
from a Democratic candidate);
> he is close/friendly with all of the top Democrats: Obama campaigned for him to win
his Senate seat; Schumer endorses him; he calls Hillary a 'friend' of 25 years.
The strategy of lesser evilism has been an utter disaster for the 99%. Effectively unchallenged
by the left, the Democratic Party helped the Republican Party to push the agenda steadily to
the right over the past decades. As Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein has aptly
put it, "the politics of fear has delivered everything we were afraid of."
... Bernie's endorsement will be used in an attempt to prop up that same rotten establishment
... [that makes] Sanders endorsement of Clinton is [sic] a fundamental failure of leadership.
...
We can't afford to follow Bernie's error. It is time for us to move on. ... That is why I'm
endorsing Green Party candidate Jill Stein. ... There can be no doubt that Jill's campaign
is the clear continuation of our political revolution, and deserves the broadest possible support
from Sandernistas.
Mark Stoval @ 16 -- We've had a fascist economic system (since the 30s)...
Even before. At least since 1913 with the establishment of the Federal Reserve, which transferred
the holdings of the U.S. treasury to international bankers.
b, me too. For the first time I think Clinton may actually be president. Sanders never had
a chance for the simple reason -- never stated -- that he is too old. When he took office he would
have been only a few years short of the age Reagan was when he left.
(For some reason age has never come up with this elderly bunch. Both Bill Clinton (as co-president)
and Trump will be older than Reagan was on election day, and Hillary will be only a few months
younger. You'd think we'd be seeing clips of Hillary chopping logs and Trump free climbing the
face of cliffs -- the sort of stuff they put poor old Ron through.)
A scary thought is that age has never come up because the powers that pick presidents don't
intend for them to be in office long.
Except in style, Hillary is no different than Obama, Bush II, or her husband. Whereas earlier
presidents felt the need to put on a show of decency -- well, okay, Bush II let it drop now and
then -- H. Clinton will be a bitch Cheney, going out of her way to rub everyone's face in it and
bragging there's nothing they can do about it.
Her style's different, but the same game will go on.
There's a bright side however. She's dumb and knows no bounds. Think Louis XVI. That, along
with her arrogance, may finally bring a tipping point of sorts. With things coming apart everywhere,
a smooth-talking fraud like Reagan or Obama might be able to somehow hold it together a little
longer. Hillary's nastiness could actually bring real change. God in his infinite irony.
To riff off a comment by Banger a few posts back. To say there is a deep state controlling
Clinton may be an over simplification. More likely their are lots of competing and conflicting
forces working in the dark, none with any clear idea or plan (or inkling of what other powers
are doing) each pushing for immediate gains without a thought for the future.
It's often said here that the plan is chaos. Maybe, or it could be that there is such confusion
and turmoil and chaos is so prevalent, that it looks like it must be a plan. Or taking a longer
view, it could be what we're seeing everywhere is the inevitable collapse of a vast culture that
has grown too complex.
In the struggle for power everyone. including H. Clinton, is a useful fool and a potential
patsy. Those hidden powers have a history of eating their own.
Sanders has been a great disappointment. In order to prevent Trump from getting the votes,
he is embracing and selling his soul and his supporters to a demon! In fact Sanders has more in
common with Trump that he has with Hillary.
One hopes that disenchanted Sanders supporters will either abstain or vote for Trump.
Having the choice only of two candidates is an absurdity.
"Bernie Sanders endorsing Crooked Hillary Clinton is like Occupy Wall Street endorsing Goldman
Sachs" is not a valid statement.
Sanders is a long time member of The Party and Congress. One cannot be a member of those clubs
for so long -- particularly during the years spanning the turn of the last century -- and not
be rotten to the core.
His followers were fools. I think some of them know that now.
Like million and millions of Americans you have been fooled not once but repeatedly and still
believe in democracy and Democratic party. Get real, Sanders probably a better lair than most
liars but not as good as Obomo and Hillary. Understands million and millions still believe these
two liars (dun believes me look at the most recent poll).
Do the smart things vote the opposite what the masses or MSM tells you. Better still vote Trump
and end the drip, drip and drips. Buy yourself a good cheap pitchfork, snows shovel or whatever
in yr local Craigslist or yard sales. Get ready for the final solution.
I for one, hoped for more than "sheepdog" from Sanders, but, alas, those who said so, were
totally correct. Trump and HRC are 2 sides of the same coin. It matters not who wins. With
either one, workers of the world are fucked. The corporate global takeover rolls on.
jules @ 46: in American politics, none of these people are for dismantling the biggest budgetary
fraud & boondoggle in human history: the pentagon. anybody saying they are for "small gov't" who
doesn't immediately propose to slash the military/para-military budget (not the VA, not now) by
50% every year for the next 500 years is lying.
PS-I guess, to distill the question, one might say.. Should corporations serve the people, or
should people serve the corporations? As of now, "the powers that are", believe in the latter.
People taken in by Sanders learned no lessons from gushing over Obama. They hurt themselves
again and are sociopathically indifferent to the far greater harm they have done to those who
were not gullible.
"Bernie Sanders folded. This without gaining any significant concession from Hillary Clinton on
programmatic or personal grounds. (At least as far as we know.) He endorsed Clinton as presidential
candidate even as she gave no ground for his voters' opinions. This disenfranchises the people
who supported him."
Even if she had given any "significant concession", it would have been meaningless noise
with not an iota of intention to implement such concessions.
She is a POS who will say anything at all to get elected. The only thing we really know is she
relishes confrontation on the foreign policy scene. Otherwise nobody can rely on her to act in
their interests in the domestic realm, except big corporate entities.
Syriza...oops, Sanders, was always more loyal to the Democratic party then his ideology. ALWAYS.
I don't know why his supporters are surprised. Did they actually think he was lying when he said
he would support Hillary Clinton.
And not only that, he out right lied saying that the Democrats have the most progressive platform
in Democrat history !!! A fucking ludicrous lie to protect evil Hillary. Disgraceful.
Most of The left are so pathetic it's embarrassing, it's a great invitation to be dominated
by the right wing.
I believe every threat that the despicable right wing will bring, I do not believe the ideology
commitment the vast majority of the left wing in power. Miserable lying cowards.
It is stupid for B to keep linking to Trumps quotes exclusively. Why does b not link to Jill
Stein criticism. Sure Trumps criticism of evil Hillarys corruption will gather important support,
but exclusively giving torture loving warmongering Trump ammunition, strangles other better candidates
in their political birth in the alternative to status quo attention. In the same way that the
Sanders, Chomsky, and other shortsighted cowards react by strangle politically strangling a desperate
new movement.
Congrats to those who labeled the 'Sheepdog' so early. Such an apt description. Good call.
Yesterday I had two emails from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, giddy with joy
over Sanders endorsement of Clinton. Today I had another, which made me giddy with joy:
After Bernie's call for unity yesterday, we just figured Democrats would...well...unify.
But instead, everything is falling apart.
FIRST: We heard barely a peep from grassroots Democrats.
THEN: A Quinnipiac poll showed Trump and Clinton tied in Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania.
NOW: We're questioning whether the Democratic Party can unify at all.
Great to hear that they're falling on their faces. The DCCC recruits ex-Republicans, Republicans-Lite,
and conservative Democrats to run for Congress, and actively oppose liberal candidates. Long may
they fail. Support worthy individual candidates.
Don't know if anyone's mentioned this book: "The Clinton's war on Women." There's a good long
review posted here, http://thesaker.is/the-clintons-war-on-women/
Lots of potential mud for Trump to sling that will stick.
Sanders released only one year of tax returns (2015). His campaign manager claimed his taxes
held no surprises. Well they didn't for 2015. But why didn't Sanders release earlier years? Any
serious Presidential candidate would expect to release at least 3 years of tax returns.
Given the 'service' that he performed, it might be especially interesting to have seen
his taxes for 2014, the year before he entered the race. The lack of transparency and Sanders'
'sheepdogging' raises questions of whether he received any inducements to enter the race.
Donald Trump is even worse. He hasn't released any tax info. He claims that the IRS
is auditing him (and that they have for many years) . But why not release estimates and/or
earlier tax returns?
We have gone through the looking glass. This evening on Public Broadcasting Service television
news hour Dr. Assad was interviewed by Judy Woodruff, a talking head teleprompter reading hand
puppet. Dr. Assad was asked if Donald Trump was elected President would his lack of foreign relations
diplomacy chops hinder his administrations abilities to achieve their goals. The question was
of no import. Nor was the answer. THE FACT THAT DR. ASSAD WAS TREATED AS AN EQUAL and not "Assad
must go" is a very significant event. VERY SIGNIFICANT!
He's a democratic socialist, so such affiliations and tactics are not unusual. The Democratic
Socialists of America, for example, a Socialist International section, is wholly within the Democratic
Party.
The Plan was always from the start for Bernie to hold down the Left, so Hillary could capture
Center-Right, and Donald could lead the Far Right into Smackdown. Then Bernie would deliver the
Left to Hillary. And so it has come to pass.
I thought everyone knew Bernie, Hillary and Donald are all bought and sold by Goldman? Hillary
and Donald sold their progeny to The Tribe, and Bernie is a woo-woo already. The traitor Chosen
sold US into slavery with Gramm-Leich-Bliley, and fawning sycophant Al-Clintonim signed that bill
into 'law' (sic), in return for her US Senate seat from NY.
Badda-boom, badda-bing!
These are the Vampire Squid, the Takers, Mafia Elites 'who settled the Western Frontier' and
now are the 'Disruptors' of the Public Space into a privatized Fivrr-Uber hell. They own you.
You are owned by the Private Central Bankim. Even a small child will tell you that your only real
'free choice' is to write-in "HELL NO!" in November, then flee to the 3W.
Sanders didn't release his other tax returns even when it became an issue in the campaign
.
Hillary said that she wouldn't release the transcripts of her Goldman speeches until Sanders
had released more tax returns. Her reasoning: she had complied with what was expected of a Presidential
candidate while the other had not yet done so.
Why wouldn't he immediately release those returns - which his campaign had claimed contained
no surprises - so as to force Hillary to release the transcripts?
Not only are staffers subjected to this,
volunteers are as well. "The tight control of volunteers stands in stark contrast to not only
American political-campaign norms but also Trump's reputation for speaking his mind."
Combine that with his statement that he'd like to
change libel laws to make it easier for himself to sue news organizations that down fawn all
over him. Does he seem like the sort to encourage whistle-blowers like Manning or Snowden? Will
he be logging all his email traffic for future FOIA requests? Or maybe he'll kill that off, too.
News Flash: Israel wins U.S. election; Iran to be nuked during inauguration
Trump just picked Mike Pence as running mate. And from (((
Forward ))):
"...Pence has said his support of Israel is deeply rooted in his Christian faith, as well as
in his strong relationship with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Pence was introduced
to AIPAC members in 2009 by then-board member Marshall Cooper at an AIPAC policy conference.
"Let me say emphatically, like the overwhelming majority of my constituents, my Christian
faith compels me to cherish the state of Israel," then-Rep. Pence said.
Cooper described Pence to the audience as "Israel's good friend."..."
So whether Hillary or Trump gets the job (or Obama declares a national emergency an remains)
Israel will be the de-facto new commander-in-chief of the U.S., henceforth to be know as Palestine
West.
The new Falcon Eye surveillance system-sold to the UAE by an Israeli defense contractor-"links
thousands of cameras spread across the city, as well as thousands of other cameras installed
at facilities and buildings in the emirate," the Abu Dhabi Monitoring and Control Center said
in an official statement. The Falcon Eye will "help control roads by monitoring traffic violations
while also monitoring significant behaviors in (Abu Dhabi) such as public hygiene and human
assemblies in non-dedicated areas."
Strange bedfellows? Not at all. The Israelis and the GCC countries, the USG and EU, are all soul
brothers : tiny 'elite' minorities attempting to rule their respective roosts by technological
means encompassing everything from drones to the media to their ubiquitous taps.
Totalitarianism is alive and well in the Middle East ... and in North America, the UK, Europe
... the last thing to be tolerated, the first things to be crushed, are 'human assemblies in non-dedicated
areas' over which their corporate selves would rule.
The Powers That Are are thicker than thieves. Among mere thieves competition remains. The PTA
are acting in loco parentis ... taking 'care' of us all for their own good.
Mike Gravel used to describe our present political situation as 'adolescent': mature enough
to understand the fix we're in, too immature to do anything but complain to 'those in charge'.
We're in charge. We've just been asleep at the wheel. Time to wake up, finally? Before our
whole world become Nice?
I agree that if Sanders had gone on to the Green Party he could have gotten significant support,
enough to guarantee Clinton's loss. But that's not what he wanted to do, whatever his reasons
for running. Folks overseas who think that Trump is anything more than a loudmouth, racist who
would be controlled by the same forces as Clinton is controlled by are fooling themselves. If
Sanders ran as a "pied piper" it wasn't successful. If anything, he presented a contrast to what
the Democratic Party has become.
In 1963 there was a coup in America. Since then the military-industrial complex has run the
country. It has been most apparent in its foreign policy, which has been the conquest of natural
resources (especially oil and gas) worldwide. America's resentment with the USSR/Russia has to
do with their living on top of resources.
But in order to continue the illusion of democracy in the US, it was necessary to maintain
some differences between the two parties so that Americans would think that they have a choice.
Meanwhile, the party that is supposed to represent the working class has been sliding into the
arms of the corporatists. Essentially, in order to give Americans a "choice" Trump has been pushed
as the demonic clown versus H. Clinton. Unfortunately, for good reasons as well as because of
endless propaganda from the right, most Americans distrust Clinton, as well they should. Her casual
announcement about enforcing a "no-fly zone" over Syria is essentially a declaration of war against
Russia.
Going back to the coup in 1963, in order to maintain control of the population it was necessary
for the ruling class to continue to generate candidates each election cycle to pretend to care
about the working class. I have long suspected that early on in their careers both Bill Clinton
and Hillary Clinton were recruited by US intelligence. During his time in Britain Bill's classmates
assumed that he was CIA At about this time Hillary, who'd been raised a rabid Republican, went
to both the Republican and Democratic national conventions in 1968. Not only was it a rather expensive
thing to do for a college student, but most people who are interested in one party aren't interested
in the other. I suspect it was the beginning of her career in US power politics. Shortly after
she wrote a pro-Vietnam speech for Melvin Laird in 1968, she was involved with the various Black
Panther trials around the US.
It's hard to believe that the Hillary who stands before us now was ever a political
ally of the Panthers. Rather, I suspect she was observing for an intelligence agency, the FBI
or CIA She sat through a Panther trial in New Haven, Connecticut, and then spent a summer in
Oakland working for the law firm that was representing the Panthers in the Bay Area. Essentially,
she was in the right place at the right time to glean information for COINTELPRO, the massive
spying program directed against anti-war and black movements. A few years later she worked on
the Democrats' legal team for Watergate, another good place for a government informant to be.
Bill, during his time at Oxford, would have functioned like the thousands of informants who sat
in on peace group meetings across American campuses.
Later, when the CIA was dumping cocaine at Mena, Arkansas, Bill Clinton was in position
to make sure state police left the operation alone. It's not surprising that George W. Bush's
first head of the DEA was Asa Hutchinson, who'd been the incurious federal prosecutor over that
part of Arkansas when the drugs came in.
The Clintons were prominent in the Democratic Leadership Council, which was an organization
within the Democratic Party pushing it to the right. In 1992 Bill pushed trade agreements that
would destroy the American middle class. Since then the party has been hopelessly corrupted by
Wall Street money.
It's now Hillary's turn. If you've always wanted to take a vacation somewhere or wanted to
do something before you die, I suggest you make time for it this year. I cannot think of another
president in memory who is more wed to military adventurism than Hillary.
Proportional representation etc. is not a panaceum. I think that party solidarity, even if the
party is only partially satisfactory is a good tool. What is happening is that Sanders who represents
"turn left" for Democrats is now more electable than Clinton. This has a potential for a big change,
much bigger than ephemeral "relative success" of the Greens, who are fated to collect less votes
than Libertarians (they may have their best year in a long, long time).
Of course, the "right wing of the left" discards party solidarity with ease. They more or less
rejected McGovern and Carter. Hillary's health care reform had the same fate. But they have very
hard time copying with change. Hillary basically promised good old times, and this is not good
enough. I suspect that her game plan is to unload full blast of "Trump's corruption" ads closer
to elections and keep the "positive tone" for now, and that may even work.
But if she polls badly enough, Democratic establishment may see the light and go for Sanders.
"Advisers and family members stressed to Mr. Trump that he was selecting a running mate to unite
the party, not a new best friend, according to people briefed on the process."
Mr. Pence, Indiana's governor, is a former congressman and radio host.
Notable quotes:
"... Reports that Mike Pence is set to be announced as Donald Trump's VP pick tomorrow have set off alarm bells amongst many Trump supporters because of the Governor of Indiana's pro-amnesty, pro-TPP advocacy. ..."
"... While Trump has campaigned against job-killing foreign trade deals, Pence vehemently supports NAFTA, CAFTA, and the TPP. ..."
"... As recently as December, Pence tweeted, "Calls to ban Muslims from entering the U.S. are offensive and unconstitutional." This completely contradicts Trump's policy of a temporary halt on Muslim immigration ..."
"... Pence voted for the Iraq war and opposed a withdrawal date even after it became apparent that U.S. involvement in the country was a disastrous policy. ..."
"... Pence is not a woman. Picking a female would have completely neutralized Hillary Clinton's sole campaign platform, one bolstered by the media, which is the fact that Hillary has a vagina. ..."
"... The overwhelmingly negative reaction from many of Trump's hardcore supporters should serve as a big wake up call and hopefully lead to the announcement of someone other than Pence to be Trump's running mate. ..."
Reports that Mike Pence is set to be announced as Donald Trump's VP pick tomorrow have set
off alarm bells amongst many Trump supporters because of the Governor of Indiana's pro-amnesty, pro-TPP
advocacy.
Here are more reasons why picking Pence doesn't make sense;
– While Trump has promised to build a wall, Pence has been savaged by respected conservatives
like Pat Buchanan and Phyllis Schlafly for advocating "stealth amnesty" in the form of a guest worker
program.
– While Trump has campaigned against job-killing foreign trade deals, Pence vehemently supports
NAFTA, CAFTA, and the TPP.
– As recently as December, Pence tweeted, "Calls to ban Muslims from entering the U.S. are
offensive and unconstitutional." This completely contradicts Trump's policy of a temporary halt on
Muslim immigration
– Pence voted for the Iraq war and opposed a withdrawal date even after it became apparent
that U.S. involvement in the country was a disastrous policy.
– Pence once advocated "conversion therapy" for homosexuals. This will be exploited by the left
to portray Pence as intolerant and bigoted, turning off many Bernie Sanders supporters who might
have voted for Trump, as well as gays who were thinking about voting for Trump in the aftermath of
the Orlando massacre.
– Pence is not a woman. Picking a female would have completely neutralized Hillary Clinton's
sole campaign platform, one bolstered by the media, which is the fact that Hillary has a vagina.
Hopefully, the Pence leak is just the Trump campaign testing the waters before a final call is
made.
Trump's campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks said that "a decision has not been made," and the Indianapolis
Star did not provide a source for its Pence leak.
The overwhelmingly negative reaction from many of Trump's hardcore supporters should serve
as a big wake up call and hopefully lead to the announcement of someone other than Pence to be Trump's
running mate.
NYT: "Advisers and family members stressed to Mr. Trump that he was selecting a running mate to
unite the party, not a new best friend, according to people briefed on the process."
Notable quotes:
"... Trump is best known to voters as a man who wants to build a wall on the Mexican border, and Pence is no different – he previously voted to put a wall on the same border. Additionally, he has moved to end birthright citizenship to "anchor babies" and wanted to require that hospitals report undocumented patients to immigration officials. ..."
"... Pence's small government, slash taxes and budgets approach to legislating has made him a favorite among Tea Party members. The Washington Post deemed him a "tea party Republican before there was a tea party." ..."
"... When asked to describe himself, Pence says he is "a Christian, a conservative and a Republican, in that order." In other words, he puts his faith first, which is probably why he can't get behind any socially liberal ideas. ..."
Trump is best known to voters as a man who wants to build a wall on the Mexican border, and
Pence is no different – he previously voted to put a wall on the same border. Additionally, he has
moved to end birthright citizenship to "anchor babies" and wanted to require that hospitals report
undocumented patients to immigration officials.
Back in 2006 when the House and Senate were having a difficult time agreeing on immigration reform,
Pence offered up a "compromise" bill that offered no amnesty to immigrants currently living in the
country. That's hardly a compromise – that's a tougher stance than most conservatives take, actually.
... ... ...
6. He's Buddies With the Koch Brothers
"I've met David Koch on several occasions," Pence said. "I'm grateful to have enjoyed his support."
In particular, he thanked the Koch brothers and their organization Americans for Prosperity for their
"activism" in helping to reduce the income tax in Indiana and (supposedly) limiting the role of government.
7. He's Frighteningly Anti-Choice
While it may be too much to expect a pro-choice VP nominee from Trump, did he have to choose a
man with such clear contempt for a woman's autonomy over her body? Indiana has some of the most restrictive
abortion laws in the country, thanks in large part to Pence's leadership on this issue.
In addition to turning the defunding of Planned Parenthood into his personal hobby, Pence promoted
laws designed to humiliate women and make abortion procedures less safe. Some of his own Republican
colleagues disagreed with his ideas, worried that his emphasis was on punishing women rather than
actually saving fetuses.
8. He's a Tea Party "Hero"
Pence's small government, slash taxes and budgets approach to legislating has made him a favorite
among Tea Party members. The Washington Post deemed him a "tea party Republican before there was
a tea party."
... ... ...
11. He's Extremely Religious
Pence was actually raised in a Catholic, apolitical household , but later became a born-again
Christian after meeting his wife.
When asked to describe himself, Pence says he is "a Christian, a conservative and a Republican,
in that order." In other words, he puts his faith first, which is probably why he can't get behind
any socially liberal ideas.
Pence is expected to be a big hit with evangelical voters who might be unconvinced of Trump's
self-professed strong Christian faith.
Now when Obama swiped "emailgate" under the carpet, hopefully "Clinton Cash" scandal will come
on the forefront and sink her candidacy. There was not president in US history of electing
criminally negligent and simultaneously criminally greedy character to such a high position.
Notable quotes:
"... Senator Bernie Sanders made it a useful attack against her in early 2016, suggesting that by speaking to banks like Goldman Sachs, she was compromised. There have been calls for Clinton to release the transcripts of her speeches, which she was declined to do, saying if every other candidate does, she will too. ..."
"... Where did Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton speak? How did they decide how much to charge? What did they say? How did they decide which speeches would be given on behalf of the Clinton Foundation, with fees going to the charity, and which would be treated as personal income? ..."
"... Are there cases of conflicts of interest or quid pro quos-for example, speaking gigs for Bill Clinton on behalf of clients who had business before the State Department? ..."
"... How did their speeches intersect with Hillary Clinton's work at the State Department? Were there quid-pro-quos involving U.S. policy? Did the foundation steer money improperly to for-profit companies owned by friends? The second, connected question is about disclosure. When Clinton became secretary, she agreed that the foundation would make certain disclosures, which it's now clear it didn't always do. And the looming questions about Clinton's State Department emails make it harder to answer those questions. ..."
"... Since the Clintons have a long history of controversies, there are any number of past scandals that continue to float around, especially in conservative media: Whitewater. Troopergate. Paula Jones. Monica Lewinsky. Travelgate. Vince Foster's suicide. Juanita Broaddrick. ..."
"... January 2016 resurfacing of Juanita Broaddrick's rape allegations offers a test case to see whether the conventional wisdom is truly wise-or just conventional. On May 23, Donald Trump released a video prominently highlighting Broaddrick's accusation . ..."
"... Her tenure as SoS was one of all failures. She also failed at managing her own department (Benghazi) as confirmed by the Senate Intelligence Report on Benghazi. More importantly she is as corrupt a politician as there is. Look elsewhere because she will not be your nominee in the end. ..."
"... It's really not whether she was lied to or not. Any Senator who voted yes opened us up to decades more of violence and war. ..."
"... The leader of a soverign nation Libya was murdered under Hillary's order and she even laughed about it, on national news. Now consider hundreds of thousands are dead across the middle east and we have the greatest refugee crisis since WWII thanks to Hillary and her tenure as Sec. Of State. ..."
"... To be fair to Democrats this policy of intervention and destabilization of mid eastern countries was birthed by the Bush administration and began in Iraq. Obama and Clinton have simply carried the baton and moved the plan into a new phase with the actions being more covert and backdoor than the way Bush did it. ..."
"... Considering Trump is tied or beating Hillary in most polls one can reasonably conclude from empirical evidence that he must be solidy ahead knowing the samples are bias being weighted with extra Democrats at this point in the game. ..."
"... "Party loyalty and greed will trump ( pardon the pun) the welfare of the country." This statement is equally true for Clinton. ..."
"... The one and only time Hillary has been in a leadership position that means personal responsibility (Sec. of State) and it resulted in bigger than Bush weapons deals in the Middle East, the destabilization of Libya and the region, Honduran coups, the suppression of a wage increase in Haiti, a reversal of gender neutral language policies in the State Dept, and none of that even touches on the things the Repubs are harping about. ..."
"... Hmm, the Dem party is not corrupt? They are awash in big business donations and lobbyists. Republican party is no better, sure, but it's stretch to say the Dem party is not corrupt. ..."
"... Hillary Clinton simply reminds me too much of Nixon, paranoia, secrecy, and all. Start from Filegate and work your way to the present. Feel free to cast aside the conspiracy theories and Republican's hypocritical attacks. The Clintons are a horrible part of Washington and Wall Street, and there isn't a stone's throw of distance between them and the Republicans that love them in private, and hate them in public. ..."
"... Also isn't it hypocritical of you not to insist that Bernie and Hillary disavow support from the racist BLM crowd? I said that race relations are at a low for the past 60 years. For your information, segregation was outlawed more than 60 years ago. How can you possibly argue that America is great with all of the problems which I have listed plus the many more that exist? By the way, these are facts, not "complaints". Get real. ..."
"... Back up to Clinton administration. Important stuff happened. Glass-Steagall Act (Banking Act of 1933) was abandoned and replaced, allowing big banks to "gamble." Glass-Steagall had protected us for three generations. Also remember NAFTA which shipped jobs out of the country. Remember the landmark trade agreement with China that shipped more jobs out of the country (and got me a new China made version of a name brand cordless drill that I had trusted before, and the Chinese version was a potential fire hazard with a battery charger that could burn a house down). The important changes came under Clinton and grew and exploded under Bush who was focused on 9/11 and invading Iraq. ..."
What? Since Bill Clinton left the White House in 2001, both Clintons have made millions
of dollars for giving speeches.
When? 2001-present
Who? Hillary Clinton; Bill Clinton; Chelsea Clinton
How serious is it? Intermittently dangerous. It has a tendency to flare up, then die down.
Senator Bernie Sanders made it a useful attack against her in early 2016, suggesting that by speaking
to banks like Goldman Sachs, she was compromised. There have been calls for Clinton to release the
transcripts of her speeches, which she was declined to do, saying if every other candidate does,
she will too.
For the Clintons, who left the White House up to their ears in legal debt, lucrative speeches-mostly
by the former president-proved to be an effective way of rebuilding wealth. They have also been an
effective magnet for prying questions. Where did Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton speak? How did
they decide how much to charge? What did they say? How did they decide which speeches would be given
on behalf of the Clinton Foundation, with fees going to the charity, and which would be treated as
personal income?
Are there cases of conflicts of interest or quid pro quos-for example, speaking gigs for Bill
Clinton on behalf of clients who had business before the State Department?
The Clinton Foundation
What? Bill Clinton's foundation was actually established in 1997, but after leaving the
White House it became his primary vehicle for … well, everything. With projects ranging from public
health to elephant-poaching protection and small-business assistance to child development, the foundation
is a huge global player with several prominent offshoots. In 2013, following Hillary Clinton's departure
as secretary of State, it was renamed the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation.
When? 1997-present
Who? Bill Clinton; Hillary Clinton; Chelsea Clinton, etc.
How serious is it? If the Clinton Foundation's strength is President Clinton's endless intellectual
omnivorousness, its weakness is the distractibility and lack of interest in detail that sometimes
come with it. On a philanthropic level, the foundation gets decent ratings from outside review groups,
though critics charge that it's too diffuse to do much good, that the money has not always achieved
what it was intended to, and that in some cases the money doesn't seem to have achieved its intended
purpose. The foundation made errors in its tax returns it has to correct. Overall, however, the essential
questions about the Clinton Foundation come down to two, related issues. The first is the seemingly
unavoidable conflicts of interest: How did the Clintons' charitable work intersect with their for-profit
speeches? How did their speeches intersect with Hillary Clinton's work at the State Department? Were there quid-pro-quos involving U.S. policy? Did the foundation steer money improperly to
for-profit companies owned by friends? The second, connected question is about disclosure. When Clinton
became secretary, she agreed that the foundation would make certain disclosures, which it's now clear
it didn't always do. And the looming questions about Clinton's State Department emails make it harder
to answer those questions.
The Bad Old Days
What is it?Since the Clintons have a long history of controversies, there are any number
of past scandals that continue to float around, especially in conservative media: Whitewater. Troopergate.
Paula Jones. Monica Lewinsky. Travelgate. Vince Foster's suicide. Juanita Broaddrick.
When? 1975-2001
Who? Bill Clinton; Hillary Clinton; a brigade of supporting characters
How serious is it? The conventional wisdom is that they're not terribly dangerous. Some are
wholly spurious (Foster). Others (Lewinsky, Whitewater) have been so exhaustively investigated it's
hard to imagine them doing much further damage to Hillary Clinton's standing. In fact, the Lewinsky
scandal famously boosted her public approval ratings. But the January 2016 resurfacing of Juanita
Broaddrick's rape allegations offers a test case to see whether the conventional wisdom is truly
wise-or just conventional. On May 23, Donald Trump
released a video prominently highlighting Broaddrick's accusation.
BuckRogers -> lost in the stars
Why do you support his awful candidate?
KlugerRD -> lost in the stars
Her tenure as SoS was one of all failures. She also failed at managing her own department
(Benghazi) as confirmed by the Senate Intelligence Report on Benghazi. More importantly she is
as corrupt a politician as there is. Look elsewhere because she will not be your nominee in the
end.
ladychurchillusa -> SSDD
Hillary's economic philosophy is "make money for Hillary" it begins and ends there. She is
an extortionist plain and simple.
Erik Kilpatrick -> BulldogNYCrC
Bill Clinton received a nice 16mil a year job at a FOR PROFIT College...but had to resign after
it came out the Hillary, Then our SOS funneled 55min of taxpayers money into one of the Board
member's side business..http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2016/...
Disappointed -> William Erik Kilpatrick
I find it incredible that this woman is even allowed to run for the highest office in the land,
(which is now controlled by corporations). Be that as it may, how are you American people possibly
allowing this to happen? I thought that, when Bernie announced his intention to run for office,
the country was saved from ever having another 'Clinton' in office. Then I sat back and watched
as the DNC Chairperson DWS and HRC and the Democratic party, with the help of the media, (controlled
by corporations that gave money to Hillary's campaign), just pushed Bernie Sanders into the dirt
even though he had more supporters than Hillary.
Special Delegates, corrupt delegates, etc. made sure that through corruption at every turn,
Hillary would come out on top. If I was you, the population of America, I'd write in Bernie Sanders
at any voting chance that's offered. If you stick with Hillary, America and maybe the world is
lost. If you go with Trump that would be better but still very dangerous. Take your country back
into the hands of the people. Outlaw; Super Delegates, Computer voting machines, electoral college,
and just have the popular paper vote of the people. Corporations aren't people no matter what
the Supreme Court says. Time to reverse the madness and do it now. Make sure Bernie Sanders is
your next president, anyway possible!
ldness -> uberengineer
They are both scum. Fortunately, there is a path for Johnson when the election reaches the
House in Dec.
Rosa1984 -> uberengineer
HIllary has Demonstrated she's Not Presidential.
Allan Nichols -> Jim_Satterfield
Jim Barack Obama was a failure on all levels, he promised to unite us ending the politically
divisive language of the Bush Admin. What did he do? He took the politically divisive 100% partisan
language of the Bush admin and gave us his own rendition. Only Obama made it far worse injecting
racially divisive language creating a cocktail of hate that caused whole blocks to be burnt to
the ground and riots. As if that were not enough he has exploited thr already strained relationship
between the police and citizens in our most crime ridden neighborhoods. Instead of attacking the
drug dealers and gang members who make these neighborhoods hell holes, president Obama used his
bully pulpit to repeatedly blame the police.
Mist importantly in my eyes and many other peoples, Obama never went after any of the criminals
in the Bush admin, nor did he put a single wall st scumbag in jail. He promised to fix healthcare,
to make it cheaper and go after the drug companies and insurance companies holding them accountable
and what
intheivy longtail
It's far worse than that; Hillary actually laughed about the torture and death of a person.
Granted, said person was a dictator, but what kind of a human laughs about torture and death?
Hillary has said that she will be far tougher on foreign nations than Obama has been.
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
ntheivy Mr. Fusion
It's here––
"We came, we saw, he died [laughter]" –Hillary Clinton, on the torture and death of Qaddafi
Hillary fooled?? But I thought she was/is super diligent and smart. It was clear as day that
the Iraq war was fabricated by Cheney & Co. Have you forgotten the bogus yellow cake?
Funny how when it's convenient Hillary is fooled and all other times Hillary is smart as a
whip.
Helen Weatherall -> William Reynish
Hillary is ALL about Hillary. She has no apparent morals. Hillary is as opportunist as any
of the best before her.
Christopher Clusen -> longtail
It's really not whether she was lied to or not. Any Senator who voted yes opened us up
to decades more of violence and war. Even if Saddam had actually cooperated with AQ, there
is stil no excuse for what happened. I feel the same about the Afghan conflict. No more war!
Christopher Clusen -> longtail
What lives will be saved? HRC is very clear about her interventionist foreign policies. I dislike
Trump very much, but st the end of the day I trust him more to stay out of the ME.
Allan Nichols longtail
NEWSFLASH The leader of a soverign nation Libya was murdered under Hillary's order and
she even laughed about it, on national news. Now consider hundreds of thousands are dead across
the middle east and we have the greatest refugee crisis since WWII thanks to Hillary and her tenure
as Sec. Of State.
To be fair to Democrats this policy of intervention and destabilization of mid eastern countries
was birthed by the Bush administration and began in Iraq. Obama and Clinton have simply carried
the baton and moved the plan into a new phase with the actions being more covert and backdoor
than the way Bush did it.
aesop55 -> MamaMaggie
I'm less afraid of Trump than I am of the Clintons. Bill and Hillary will insure that the TPP
is implemented. Hillary is already talking about re-instating the draft. We know how much she
hates Iran (even tried to sabotage the Iranian nuclear deal) and how much she loves Henry Kissinger
and BiBi. She has said that Iran poses the greatest threat to Israel and so we can all look forward
to WWIII in the Middle East with Hillary at the helm and our kids/grandkids used as front line
fodder for her war games. She has been noted as saying that Iraq war was good for business - tell
that to the Vets, parents, wives, husbands, children who lost loved ones or whose son, daughter,
wife, husband came back with irreparable damage due to her "mistakes".
No thanks. I remain #BernieOrBust and if you get a Trump because the DNC and HRC have rigged
this whole primary process with election fraud, campaign fraud, etc., you have yourself to blame.
You want to coronate the most fatally flawed candidate in US history? Go ahead. The rest of us
hope that the FBI and the AG will put the rule of law above stoking the narcissistic hopes and
dreams of Hillary Clinton and once and for all bring this crime family to heel. Prison is too
good for them.
Betty Pringle -> aesop55
Love your post as you are telling it like it is. I've read many, many books about the Clinton's
and my God, what they have gotten away with is just outrageous. Hillary was the one who hired
the detectives to go after Bill's many women to harass and terrorize them into silence. She didn't
care what Bill didwith women she just didn't want what he did to hinder her chances of becoming
President. They have all the angles covered in any situation. Now they've got Terry McAuliffe
their friend, who is Gov. of Virginia who recently allowed 200,000 felons to vote and right there
he had the Democratic Committee ready to sign them up as Democrats. The Clinton's did the same
thing when Hillary was running for Senator of New York.
Bill Clinton pardoned a bunch of fellas from a certain district in New York City and when it
came election time that district voted for Hillary and they had never voted for a Democrat before.
The Clinton's always seem to have all the angles covered in any situation.
In the Book CLINTON INC. it states the Clinton Machine operates like the MAFIA. Very, Very,
Very SCARY. 5/7/16
Allan Nichols -> MamaMaggie
If he pulls off the nomination lol. NEWSFLASH...... Republicans historically run well behind
Democrats in presidential polls entering June and up till about a month before the election when
we start to see the real numbers because no one wants to be wrong.
Considering Trump is tied or beating Hillary in most polls one can reasonably conclude
from empirical evidence that he must be solidy ahead knowing the samples are bias being weighted
with extra Democrats at this point in the game.
Helen Weatherall -> MamaMaggie
#BernieOrBust !! #HillaryCheats #NeverHillary
Marion Emory -> Terri Geer
One reason people might vote for Trump is to facilitate the reform of the Republican and Democratic
Party.
Marion Emory -> lena mcfarland
Well, Trump is not Hitler, and you have no insight into the thinking or motivations of Germany,
but don't let that stop you from pretending.
Nevertheless, if you would like a break down, here it is...
If Trump is the Republican nominee, and then goes on to 'win' in the General Election, the GOP
will undoubtedly split (maybe even before then), and the DNC will be signaled to avoid corrupt
candidates like Hillary Clinton. Neither party will work with Trump or pass any legislation he
pushes for, and nothing, nothing, nothing, will make it through Congress that Republicans and
Democrats don't already agree on. Both parties would be forced to reform, and in the next election,
both parties would emerge with a new platform and Trump's lameduck term would come to an end.
lena mcfarland -> Marion Emory
Wishful drinking.
There's no reason to suppose that an all republican congress wouldn't do as Trump asked. Or vice
versa. So what policies are they voting for? Caps on trade and immigration. Restrictions on women's
right to abortion. Worse, president Trump sends the American military out to defend his ego if
he gets into a Rosie O'Donnell type tiff with another head of state.
I wouldn't mind seeing a reform of both parties. But voting a mad man into office has NEVER been
a good idea, and it's not a good idea now. Trump's racial contempt for other groups, his sexism,
make me worry about my bodily safety if he were president. And yours.
My Hitler comparison is not made lightly. We've never elected someone before who openly attacks
a reporter for being disabled.
Your premise that Trump would be unable to act on his worst ideas is naive. A president has the
power to take lives in his hands. That power cannot be placed in the hands of an unpredictable
bigot simply to express your frustration with the political parties. Your cure is more deadly
than the disease.
If Trump wins the Republican nomination I see no indication the a Republican House Or Senate
wouldn't cooperate with him completely. Even his former campaign rivals have dutifully stood behind
him hoping for scraps from the table. Party loyalty and greed will trump ( pardon the pun) the
welfare of the country.
intheivy -> longtail
"Party loyalty and greed will trump ( pardon the pun) the welfare of the country." This
statement is equally true for Clinton.
intheivy -> southvalley
Plans for $300,000 UCLA visit give rare glimpse into Hillary Clinton's paid speaking career
UCLA asked for a "public school" special rate – was told that $300K was the public school special
rate. http://wpo.st/CUpW1
Haze -> intheivy
Donald Trump took $200,000 from the students of university at buffalo in 2004. He answered
10 prescreened questions from students. Please remember to also bring up Trump's speaking fees
when you mention the above!
Tdab T_Cantu
Beautiful comment! I am intrigued with the psychology angle you proffer when looking at Hillary
and Trump, which further solidifies my Bernie or bust conviction!
DidiM -> Abbie Correa
"Godwin has stated that he introduced Godwin's law in 1990 as an experiment in memetics.[2]
Godwin's law does not claim to articulate a fallacy; it is instead framed as a memetic tool to
reduce the incidence of inappropriate hyperbolic comparisons. "Although deliberately framed as
if it were a law of nature or of mathematics, its purpose has always been rhetorical and pedagogical:
I wanted folks who glibly compared someone else to Hitler or to Nazis to think a bit harder about
the Holocaust", Godwin has written.[12] In December 2015, Godwin commented on the Nazi and fascist
comparisons being made by several articles on Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump,
saying that "If you're thoughtful about it and show some real awareness of history, go ahead and
refer to Hitler or Nazis when you talk about Trump. Or any other politician."[13]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Marion Emory -> longtail
Hillary and the DNC are absolutely corrupted by corporate influence, which is evident in the
main source of their campaign financing, and rule changes they made to reverse Obama's campaign
financing rules. The Republicans are in the toilet, but Hillary and the Democrats are standing
on the rim, eager to jump in.
Marion Emory -> DidiM
How's this for "cut and paste?"
The one and only time Hillary has been in a leadership position that means personal responsibility
(Sec. of State) and it resulted in bigger than Bush weapons deals in the Middle East, the destabilization
of Libya and the region, Honduran coups, the suppression of a wage increase in Haiti, a reversal
of gender neutral language policies in the State Dept, and none of that even touches on the things
the Repubs are harping about.
William Reynish -> longtail
Hmm, the Dem party is not corrupt? They are awash in big business donations and lobbyists.
Republican party is no better, sure, but it's stretch to say the Dem party is not corrupt.
Marion Emory -> DidiM
Hillary Clinton simply reminds me too much of Nixon, paranoia, secrecy, and all. Start
from Filegate and work your way to the present. Feel free to cast aside the conspiracy theories
and Republican's hypocritical attacks. The Clintons are a horrible part of Washington and Wall
Street, and there isn't a stone's throw of distance between them and the Republicans that love
them in private, and hate them in public.
Robert Grant -> lena mcfarland
How can you claim that America in it's current state is great? Nearly 50 million are using
EBT cards. We are drowning in debt. The national debt has doubled since Obama came into office.
The mid-east, indeed the entire world is a chaotic mess due to poor foreign policy decisions.
Our military is the weakest in years. Our veterans are dying from lack of proper medical care.
Over 90 million working age Americans are not working. Median family incomes have declined since
Obama took office, with many people underemployed or working part time. We have suffered the slowest
recovery from recession in history. Obamacare has been a disaster with billions squandered on
the launch, rising premiums, huge deductibles, young people not enrolling, to say nothing of people
not being able to keep their insurance or their doctors despite Obama's promises. We have allowed
tens of millions of illegal "immigrants", questionable "refuges" and people with expired visas
to remain in our country and place a great burden on our welfare and educational systems as well
as compete with native Americans and legal immigrants for scarce jobs. Race relations are at a
low point in the past 60 years. Ferguson, Baltimore and other cities are seething cesspools of
lawlessness. The black lives matter crowd and other radical groups openly call for the murder
of our law enforcement officers. Colleges are being taken over by radical student groups. University
degrees have been degraded as to be nearly worthless and the cost of higher education has exploded
exponentially. Our enemies no longer fear us and our friends no longer trust us.
Robert Grant -> lena mcfarland
It is so easy to label someone as being a racist these days with little or no basis in fact.
"Welcome KKK to rallies"? Not excluding them is very different than welcoming them. If you try
to exclude every objectionable group to all people, wouldn't that be an exercise. Trump did disavow
KKK support, but you don't acknowledge that do you? Also isn't it hypocritical of you not
to insist that Bernie and Hillary disavow support from the racist BLM crowd? I said that race
relations are at a low for the past 60 years. For your information, segregation was outlawed more
than 60 years ago. How can you possibly argue that America is great with all of the problems which
I have listed plus the many more that exist? By the way, these are facts, not "complaints". Get
real.
Robert Grant -> manderso
You appear to be either a juvenile or mentally handicapped so let me go over the facts again
for your benefit. This is the slowest recovery from recession in the history of our country. The
economy is improving at a snail's pace. The median net worth of the middle class is lower than
eight years ago. Seniors especially are hard hit with interest rates lower than the inflation
rates. Interest rates can not be raised because the economy is too fragile. Over 90 million of
our fellow citizens who are of working age are not working. Over 50 million on food stamps. The
unemployment rate for young people, especially minorities, is in the 20 plus per cent range. The
GDP growth rate is anemic. Businesses are reluctant to invest due to the current economic climate,
Obamacare and left wing Democratic economic policies which are anti-business to the extreme.
shadow013 -> Floridatexan
Back up to Clinton administration. Important stuff happened. Glass-Steagall Act (Banking
Act of 1933) was abandoned and replaced, allowing big banks to "gamble." Glass-Steagall had protected
us for three generations. Also remember NAFTA which shipped jobs out of the country. Remember
the landmark trade agreement with China that shipped more jobs out of the country (and got me
a new China made version of a name brand cordless drill that I had trusted before, and the Chinese
version was a potential fire hazard with a battery charger that could burn a house down). The
important changes came under Clinton and grew and exploded under Bush who was focused on 9/11
and invading Iraq.
"... The mainstream US news media have never liked the brash billionaire Trump. He makes good circulation figures for sure, but the large coverage the Republican contender has received from the outset is preponderantly negative. ..."
"... Trump's campaign has instead been buoyed by the popular vote, not by endorsement from the elite establishment, including the Republican Party leadership and the corporate media. Now that the race for the presidency is turning into a two-horse contest between Democrat Hillary Clinton and Trump, the media's antipathy towards Trump is moving to an all-out barrage of attacks. Attacks, it has to be said, that are bordering on hysteria and which only a corporate machine could convey. ..."
"... Trump vehemently rebuffed the claims. He said it was simply a star, like the ones that US Marshals use. When his campaign team reacted to the initial media furor by replacing the red star with a circle it only served to fuel accusations against Trump because he was seen to be acting defensively. However, he later defiantly rebuked his campaign team and said they should have stuck with the star image and let him defend that choice of image as simply an innocuous star shape. For what it's worth, Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who is Jewish, subsequently rallied to the tycoon's defense and said he was not racist nor anti-Semitic and that the controversy was a media-contrived storm in a teacup. ..."
"... Trump makes a valid point that Clinton's abuse of state secrecy – whether intentional or negligent – has in fact posed a national security threat. Yet the media focus is decidedly not on his Democrat rival. It is rather centered on overblown concerns about the wealthy real estate developer. ..."
"... Trump is right. The political system in the US is rigged . Not just in terms of double standards of the justice system, but in the bigger context of how candidates are screened and vetted – in this case through undue vilification. ..."
"... Trump's reactionary views on immigration, race relations and international politics are certainly questionable. His credibility as the next president of the US may be dubious. But is his credibility any less than that of Hillary Clinton? Her melding of official capacity with private gain from Wall Street banks and foreign governments acting as donors to her family's fund-raising Clinton Foundation has the pungent whiff of selling federal policy for profit. Her penchant for criminal regime change operations in Honduras, Libya, Syria and Ukraine speak of a political mafia don. ..."
"... American politics has long been derided as a "dog and pony show" ..."
"... But what we are witnessing is a brazen display of how the powers-that-be (Wall Street, media, Pentagon, Washington, etc) are audaciously intervening in this electoral cycle to disenfranchise the voting population. ..."
Presidential hopeful Donald Trump is right: the 'system is 'rigged'. The media barrage against
the billionaire demonstrates irrefutably how the power establishment, not the people, decides who
sits in the White House.
Trump is increasingly assailed in the US media with alleged character flaws. The latest blast
paints Trump as a total loose cannon who would launch World War III. In short, a "nuke nut".
In the Pentagon-aligned Defense One journal, the property magnate is described as someone who
cannot be trusted with his finger on the nuclear button. Trump would order nuclear strikes equivalent
to 20,000 Hiroshima bombings as "easy as ordering a pizza", claimed the opinion piece.
If that's not an example of "project fear" then what is?
The mainstream US news media have never liked the brash billionaire Trump. He makes good circulation
figures for sure, but the large coverage the Republican contender has received from the outset is
preponderantly negative.
Trump's campaign has instead been buoyed by the popular vote, not by endorsement from the elite
establishment, including the Republican Party leadership and the corporate media. Now that the race
for the presidency is turning into a two-horse contest between Democrat Hillary Clinton and Trump,
the media's antipathy towards Trump is moving to an all-out barrage of attacks. Attacks, it has to
be said, that are bordering on hysteria and which only a corporate machine could convey.
Like a giant screening process, the Trump candidacy and his supporters are being systematically
disenfranchised. At this rate of attrition, by the time the election takes place in November the
result will already have been all but formally decided – by the powers-that-be, not the popular will.
The past week provides a snapshot of the intensifying media barrage facing Trump. Major US media
outlets have run prominent claims that Trump is a fan of the former brutal Iraqi dictator Saddam
Hussein. Those claims were based on a loose interpretation of what Trump said at a rally when he
referred to Saddam's strong-arm suppression of terrorism. He didn't say he liked Saddam. In fact,
called him a "bad guy". But Trump said that the Iraqi dictator efficiently eliminated terrorists.
A second media meme to emerge was "Trump the anti-Semite". This referred to an image his campaign
team tweeted of Hillary Clinton as "the most corrupt candidate ever". The words were emblazoned on
a red, six-pointed star. Again, the mainstream media gave copious coverage to claims that the image
was anti-Semitic because, allegedly, it was a Jewish 'Star of David'.
Trump vehemently rebuffed the claims. He said it was simply a star, like the ones that US Marshals
use. When his campaign team reacted to the initial media furor by replacing the red star with a circle
it only served to fuel accusations against Trump because he was seen to be acting defensively. However,
he later defiantly rebuked his campaign team and said they should have stuck with the star image
and let him defend that choice of image as simply an innocuous star shape.
For what it's worth, Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who is Jewish, subsequently rallied to
the tycoon's defense and said he was not racist nor anti-Semitic and that the controversy was a media-contrived
storm in a teacup.
Not only that but the Trump-risks-Armageddon article also refers to him being in the same company
as Russian leader Vladimir Putin and North Korea's Kim Jung Un who, we are told, "also have their
finger on the nuclear button".
Under the headline, 'How to slow Donald Trump from pushing the nuclear button', a photograph shows
the presidential contender with a raised thump in a downward motion. The answer being begged is:
Don't vote for this guy – unless you want to incinerate the planet!
This is scare-tactics to the extreme thrown in for good measure along with slander and demonization.
And all pumped up to maximum volume by the US corporate media, all owned by just six conglomerates.
Trump is having to now spend more of his time explaining what he is alleged to have said or did
not say, instead of being allowed to level criticisms at his Democrat rival or to advance whatever
political program he intends to deliver as president.
The accusation that Trump is a threat to US national security is all the more ironic given that
this week Hillary Clinton was labelled as "extremely careless" by the head of the FBI over her dissemination
of state secrets through her insecure private email account.
Many legal experts and former US government officials maintain that Clinton's breach of classified
information is deserving of criminal prosecution – an outcome that would debar her from contesting
the presidential election.
Why the FBI should have determined that there is no case for prosecution even though more than
100 classified documents were circulated by Clinton when she was Secretary of State (2009-2013) has
raised public heckles of "double standards".
The controversy has been compounded by the US Attorney General Loretta Lynch also declaring that
no charges will be pressed and the case is closed – a week after she met with Hillary's husband,
Bill, on board her plane for a hush-hush chat.
Trump
makes a valid point that Clinton's abuse of state secrecy – whether intentional or negligent
– has in fact posed a national security threat. Yet the media focus is decidedly not on his Democrat
rival. It is rather centered on overblown concerns about the wealthy real estate developer.
Trump is right. The political system in the US is
rigged. Not just in terms of double standards of the justice system, but in the bigger context
of how candidates are screened and vetted – in this case through undue vilification.
Trump's reactionary views on immigration, race relations and international politics are certainly
questionable. His credibility as the next president of the US may be dubious. But is his credibility
any less than that of Hillary Clinton? Her melding of official capacity with private gain from Wall
Street banks and foreign governments acting as donors to her family's fund-raising Clinton Foundation
has the pungent whiff of selling federal policy for profit. Her penchant for criminal regime change
operations in Honduras, Libya, Syria and Ukraine speak of a political mafia don.
American politics has long been derided as a "dog and pony show", whereby powerful lobbies
buy the pageant outcome. Trump's own participation in the election is only possible because he is
a multi-billionaire who is able to fund a political campaign. That said, however, the New York businessman has garnered a sizable popular following from his
maverick attacks on the rotten Washington establishment.
But what we are witnessing is a brazen display of how the powers-that-be (Wall Street, media,
Pentagon, Washington, etc) are audaciously intervening in this electoral cycle to disenfranchise
the voting population.
Clinton has emerged as the candidate-of-choice for the establishment, and the race to the White
House is being nobbled – like never before.
It is difficult to imagine how the Trump rank and file and the party's corporate
"establishment" will paper over their irreconcilable differences, rooted in the party's failure
to preserve skin privilege and good jobs in a White Man's Country.
Just as brazenly, Trump, the rabble rousing billionaire, has violated the most sacred ruling
class taboos by rejecting the
national security rationale for the hyper-aggressive, ever-expanding, global U.S. military
presence. If Trump fails to convincingly recant such heresies, the rulers will deal with him with
extreme prejudice.
Dear dear … not one single serious issue in that article … just
divisiveness. Nothing about the economy, excessive corporate power,
international trade treaties, widespread (illegal) surveillance,
potential for war … nothing.
Well, there was some stuff. It seems to me that Trump needs an
ambassador to what we might call the Parliamentary Republican Party
- same wankers the Trump campaign went through like the Blitzkreig
through the French in 1939 - but who still control levers of party
power; I wouldn't be surprised to learn that they were trying to
McGovern Trump by denying him a VP candidate at all, until
Manafort whipped them like the curs they are.
Dunno about the Kochs; from their quote yesterday ("Trump is a
nice fellow") I doubt it. However, Ivanka has clevely gotten other
donors dubious about Trump to contribute to other aspects of the
campaign, so the Kochs might end up doing that.
I used to love bilious pieces like that, and wrote plenty of
them, too. It gets tiring, after awhile, getting all whipped up. I
like more signal, less noise.
EndOfTheWorld
Trump picking Pence was a concession to the repug establishment so they
will finally give up their idea of revolting against The Donald. Also he
will always be there reminding Trump that many repugs would be very happy if
Trump were assassinated, so The Donald will be careful.
MyLessThanPrimeBeef
They'd be wrong to think about assassinating him.
And they'd be equally wrong to think about doing that to Sanders, or
anyone else.
Why only Trump is mentioned though? Is he most dangerous to them?
No, I'm saying if Trump is prez with Pence as veep, he will have to
be nice to the repug establishment, or else. Because Pence is
preferable to them. But he had to do this, apparently, just to get
past the convention in Cleveland. This is my opinion, only--I'm not
saying I have inside info. A prez feels safer with a really dumb veep,
like the first Bush with Quayle, since the establishment is not going
to off the prez only to get an even worse one ascending from the
veepship. Trump would have preferred Joni Ernst, probably, but she
"declined." Yeah, right-she was ordered to decline, to make way for
giving Trump a choice between Gingrich or Pence, so he chose the
lesser of two evils. Trump is appeasing the repugs, playing ball,
making deals.
JTMcPhee
The joke with Bush the First was that the Secret Svc had
standing orders that if anyone shot the Bush, they were to turn and
shoot some Quayle. Had this from a guy who used to work there.
different clue
Really? As dimm and dumm and sometimes nasty as Pence is? I
would think Pence is anti-assassination insurance. " You kill the
Donald, you get some Pence. You really want that?"
EndOfTheWorld
Maybe he is dumb-not that familiar with his brains or lack
thereof. I know damn well nobody in his right mind would want
Newt Gingrich sitting behind him in the veep slot, so The Donald
made the right move in squelching that notion.
Seems to me Pence may be dumb but very MALLEABLE and LOYAL to
TPTB. He could be easily controlled, which is what the powers
behind the throne love. Trump, not so much.
EndOfTheWorld
Pence may be a little dumb, but seems to be well under the
thumb of the big shots in the repugs. Would go along with the
program, unlike The Donald, who may or may not play ball at any
given moment;
"... The biggest difference between the Mr. Trump and Mr. Pence when it comes to foreign policy is their respective stances on the Iraq war. Mr. Pence supported it, while Mr. Trump claims that he was against it from the beginning. ..."
"... While Mr. Pence has expressed support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, Mr. Trump regularly rails against it. Mr. Trump has also threatened to impose tariffs on imports from foreign countries to protect American jobs. ..."
Mr. Pence's foreign policy views mesh well with Mr. Trump's "America First" framework, which is built
around the idea of a robust American military. The Indiana governor called for big increases in military
spending during a speech in 2015 and he has criticized Democrats who do not use the phrase "Islamic
extremism" when discussing jihadists. As a member of Congress, where he was on the House Foreign Affairs
Committee, Mr. Pence was a strong supporter of Israel and a proponent of tough interrogation measures
for prisoners at Guantánamo Bay. Mr. Pence voted to authorize military action in Iraq in 2002 and opposed
proposals to set a date to withdraw troops from Iraq.
Where they differ The biggest difference between the Mr. Trump and Mr. Pence when it comes to foreign
policy is their respective stances on the Iraq war. Mr. Pence supported it, while Mr. Trump claims that
he was against it from the beginning.
... ... ...
Trade
Mr. Pence has said he supports free trade, but he has also
raised
concern over the enforcement of trade agreements with China. Specifically, he asked the federal government
to investigate allegations that Chinese steel companies were dodging tariffs in deals with American
businesses. As governor, Mr. Pence
visited nations like Japan and Germany on trade missions meant to stoke Indiana's trade relationships
with international businesses.
Where they differWhile Mr. Pence has expressed support for the Trans-Pacific
Partnership trade deal, Mr. Trump regularly rails against it. Mr. Trump has also threatened to impose
tariffs on imports from foreign countries to protect American jobs.
"... Just as George W. Bush was "wholly ill-suited" so is Mrs. Clinton. It was her policy which is mostly responsible for the refugee flood into Europe from both Libya and Syria. She treats foreign policy like it's a board game. She gets ideologically convinced that overthrowing Assad or Quadifi is a grand idea and starts the process. Neither she nor her advisers ever ask, basic questions about the mechanics of the "process." For example, as part of this "process" the population of Allepo (just Allepo without respect to all the other towns, villages and hamlets) will be reduced from a population of 1.1 million to less than 100,000 with the difference being refugees conscripts or dead. What do we plan to do with the 750,000 plus refugees? Talk about "wholly ill-suited." ..."
"... I don't want to see Trump as President, however, the Dems have picked the one candidate who might actually lose to him. Clinton is not only demonstrably inept and widely recognized as dishonest, she has also contributed a great deal to the mess in the Middle East. ..."
"... The only people currently doing the heavy lifting with cogent and perceptive commentary on serious issues and the systemic inability of political and economic institutions to embrace reality are professional comedians. John Oliver, Jim Jeffries et al are continuing the George Carlin tradition of pointing out the abject lunacy of our "leaders", whose words are reported by the mainstream media (corporate media that is, let's not forget to "follow the money") as if they were something other than delusional drivel. ..."
George W Bush showed himself wholly ill-suited to the presidency within nine months of his
inauguration. Those of us who covered his campaign should have seen that moment coming, even if
we had no idea about Osama bin Laden's plotting.
On board his campaign plane, all Candidate Bush wanted to talk about was baseball statistics. If
he talked about the world, it revolved around his vacations. Perhaps we should have realized he
would find it hard to distinguish Afghanistan from Iraq, and Sunni from Shia.
A charming cut-up as Texas governor, Bush's superficial grasp of policy didn't matter nearly as
much as the fact that he seemed more entertaining than that earnest, wonkish Al Gore. At least
that was the tenor of much of what passed for news analysis of the 2000 campaign.
Bush projected the notion that he understood leadership; that his guts were greater than the
facts. As Tony Blair discovered within a year of 9/11, Bush's leadership was reckless playacting,
and the facts on the ground in Iraq were far more formidable than his gut instincts.
FugitiveColors
Another,be afraid of Donald Trump article. Lets settle this crap right here. Donald trump
is a horrible SOB, even his supporters agree.
Which matters not one iota. Much of America wants crap to change, even if it means using a
wrecking ball.
Bogdanich
Just as George W. Bush was "wholly ill-suited" so is Mrs. Clinton. It was her policy
which is mostly responsible for the refugee flood into Europe from both Libya and Syria. She
treats foreign policy like it's a board game. She gets ideologically convinced that
overthrowing Assad or Quadifi is a grand idea and starts the process. Neither she nor her
advisers ever ask, basic questions about the mechanics of the "process." For example, as part
of this "process" the population of Allepo (just Allepo without respect to all the other
towns, villages and hamlets) will be reduced from a population of 1.1 million to less than
100,000 with the difference being refugees conscripts or dead. What do we plan to do with the
750,000 plus refugees? Talk about "wholly ill-suited."
legalimmigrant
Message to Richard Wolffe - you may enjoy sounding off in your echo chamber but that's all
you're doing. The elites have had their day. The people demand something "different" and if
that "different" is orange colored with a strange folicular arrangement then so be it. You can
get back to frenziedly typing about what a devil DJT is now.
Benjohn6379 -> legalimmigrant
"People in this country have had enough of experts" - Brexit campaigner/propagandist and
huge liar Michael Gove
The anti-establishment movement is real and healthy and global. I can totally understand, as
I'm also sick and tired of being lied to and told that the status quo is the only way. But
don't kid yourself, Trump is one of these elites.
He may seem "different" as you say, but that's only because he's a piece of shit openly as
opposed to trying to hide it, like Hillary.
Neither candidate has any desire to help the middle class.
Confess -> Benjohn6379
Open is good. Americans are sick and tired of being lied and having facts hidden from us.
How can we progress when everything is covered up? Just give us the facts or a real god damn
opinion. All the double talk and cover ups are tearing the country apart. Soon BLM will have
the same amount of power as Muslims, no one can say anything bad about them, even when it's
true. That is what's dangerous.
Obelisk1
I don't want to see Trump as President, however, the Dems have picked the one candidate
who might actually lose to him. Clinton is not only demonstrably inept and widely recognized
as dishonest, she has also contributed a great deal to the mess in the Middle East.
Moreover, her refusal to speak about the ideological basis for so many of the terrorist
atrocities in recent years should be enough to bar her from office.
The US, and the world, is in danger as a result of the failures of both parties to pick
reasonable candidates.
Benjohn6379 -> ohyesHedid
The "war-hawk" meme
It's not a meme, it's reality. Her neo-conservative record speaks for itself. There is a
very real fear that she will take us to war in Syria, as a no fly zone would require tens of
thousands of ground troops in direct opposition to Russia, Assad and numerous terrorist cells.
ISIS has to be stopped, absolutely, but war in Syria will be just another tragic foreign
policy mistake.
I think all this "Hillary hate" is disproportional, possibly sexist.
Some of the "Hillary hate" is sexist, sure, but don't use this excuse as a blanket
statement that covers people that have intelligent and well thought out criticisms of her
policies and voting record.
There are legitimate concerns with both candidates, come at it rationally and intelligently.
Tom Jones
Not a Trump fan. But he called out Bush in the debates.
He wouldn't have invaded Iraq or Libya. War has caused most of these problems. The real scary
part is that he is less of a war monger then Clinton!
Gaurdian applogist pieces are almost as vile as the bigotry from Trump. In fact the bias in th
MSM has led to a Trump.
gunnison 5h ago
Perhaps the voters are confused about how to rate these candidates because there is
almost no coverage of national security and foreign policy. Nobody – except for rarities
like NBC's Andrea Mitchell – wants to produce a block of TV on something that sounds as
complicated as how to fight Isis in Syria.
The only people currently doing the heavy lifting with cogent and perceptive commentary
on serious issues and the systemic inability of political and economic institutions to embrace
reality are professional comedians. John Oliver, Jim Jeffries et al are continuing the George
Carlin tradition of pointing out the abject lunacy of our "leaders", whose words are reported
by the mainstream media (corporate media that is, let's not forget to "follow the money") as
if they were something other than delusional drivel.
Our much-vaunted "free press" has degenerated into becoming a transcription service for power
and privilege, with "journalists" now blatantly finessing the truth for fear of losing the
"access" without which they would be consigned to the outer reaches of internet blogworld.
Hell, if one sifts through the comment threads here or on other "reputable" news sites to
eliminate the usual dross, there's one hell of a lot more accurate and thoughtful commentary
happening down here in the cheap seats than in most of the articles to which those thread are
appended.
Trump is a showman and a conman and a buffoon, and Mike Pence is a rabid ideologue driven by
religious zealotry and a profound misogyny and sexual squeamishness. Neither is the sort of
person who should ever be placed in a position of authority. (None of this should be taken as
covert support for Hillary Clinton. My comment history here exculpates me from any accusations
of being a Clinton shill.)
That's the reality. Presenting the evidence for that, and there is mountains of it, is the
true function of a media which serves the public interest.
Benjohn6379 -> gunnison
Hell, if one sifts through the comment threads here or on other "reputable" news sites to
eliminate the usual dross, there's one hell of a lot more accurate and thoughtful commentary
happening down here in the cheap seats than in most of the articles to which those thread are
appended.
Your whole comment being a prime example of this, very well said.
John Wilson
And so what are you saying here Wolfe. That the alternative is Clinton? She'll be even
faster to push the red button.
Does not this guy make Trump a clone of Hillary in foreign relations: voting for Iraq war, pro-Israel
stance, all war hawk attributes. In other words younger version of Senator McCain: "Pence chaired
the
House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Middle East and was a prominent supporter of George W.
Bush's Iraq War
troop surge of 2007. At the time, Pence stated that "the surge is working" and defended the initial
decision to invade in 2003"
Pence ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 1988 and 1990, losing to longtime
Democratic incumbent
Phil Sharp.[18]
He later wrote an essay apologizing for running negative ads against Sharp.[14]
In November 2000, Pence was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in Indiana's 2nd Congressional
District after six-year incumbent
David M. McIntosh (1995–2001)
opted to run for governor
of Indiana. The district (renumbered as the 6th District beginning in 2002) comprises all or
portions of 19 counties in eastern Indiana. Pence was re-elected four more times by comfortable margins.
In the
2006 House elections, he defeated
DemocratBarry Welsh. In 2008, he
was listed as one of the top ten legislators by Esquire magazine.[19]
Pence defeated Reverend Barry
Welsh in the
2008 House election. In January 2009, Pence was elected by his GOP colleagues to become the
Republican Conference Chairman, the third-highest-ranking Republican leadership position. He
ran unopposed and was elected unanimously. He was the first representative from Indiana to hold a
House leadership position since 1981.[2]
In 2010, Pence was encouraged
to run against incumbent Democratic Senator
Evan Bayh.[23][24][25]
According to Rasmussen polling done on January 21 and 24, 2010, Pence led Bayh by a three point margin.[26]
On January 26, 2010, in an open letter to friends and supporters through his Facebook page, Pence
announced his decision not to run for the Senate; he cited his role in the Republican leadership
and the belief that Republicans would win back the House in 2010 as his reasons for staying in the
House of Representatives.[citation
needed]
After the November 2010 election, Pence announced that he would not run for re-election as the
Republican Conference Chairman.[27]
On May 5, 2011, Pence announced that he would seek the Republican nomination for
Governor
of Indiana in 2012.[28][29]
During the Iraq War, Pence
opposed setting a public withdrawal date from
Iraq. During an April 2007 visit
to Baghdad, Pence and
John McCain visited
Shorja market, the site of a deadly
attack in February 2007, that claimed the lives of 61 people. Pence and McCain described the visit
as evidence that the security situation in Iraqi markets has improved.[46]
The visit to the market took place under large security including helicopters overhead, and the
New York Times reported that the visit gave a false indication of how secure the area was
due to the extremely heavy security forces protecting McCain.[47]
Pence has opposed closing the
Guantanamo
Bay detention camp and trying the suspected terrorists in the U.S.[48]
Pence believes that "the Obama administration must overturn this wrongheaded decision".[48]
As an alternative, Pence has said that the "enemy combatants" should be tried in a military tribunal.[48]
Pence has stated his support of Israel and its right to attack facilities in Iran to prevent them
from developing nuclear weapons, has defended the actions of Israel in its use of deadly force in
enforcing the blockade of Gaza, and has referred to Israel as "America's most cherished ally".[49]
He visited Israel in 2014 to express his support, and in 2016 signed into law a bill which would
ban Indiana from having any commercial dealings with a company that boycotts Israel.[50]
"... I think that dissent will continue as long as the United States continues. We don't know exactly what forms it will take, or what causes dissenters will take up. But we do have a pretty good idea from history that dissenters will always push for more freedom, more liberty, more economic equality, and that there will be counter-dissenters who will seek to deprive them of these goals. There always seems to be that for every two steps forward, there's one step back. ..."
What do you foresee as far as the future of dissent is concerned in the United States?
I think that dissent will continue as long as the United States continues. We don't know exactly
what forms it will take, or what causes dissenters will take up. But we do have a pretty good idea
from history that dissenters will always push for more freedom, more liberty, more economic equality,
and that there will be counter-dissenters who will seek to deprive them of these goals. There always
seems to be that for every two steps forward, there's one step back.
What is gained for leftist movements today by anchoring themselves a positive account of the
nation's founding (accounts that suggest that this nation has leftist impulses at its core)?
I think that leftist movements today have a deep, abiding faith in "democracy." And in that way,
they are the true heirs of the American Revolution. Even if most of the "founding fathers" like [George]
Washington and [Alexander] Hamilton and [Thomas] Jefferson were elites who distrusted the masses,
they did give lip service to liberty and equality, and they did formulate fundamental arguments promoting
the idea of a government of the people. Today, their ideas are more broadly conceived than they themselves
conceived them. Because leftists today believe in the value of democracy, what they are in essence
doing is holding America's feet to the fire. They are demanding that the United States live up to
those ideals ensconced in our founding documents. "Be true to what you said on paper," as Martin
Luther King Jr. expressed it in his last speech on April 3, 1968, in Memphis.
What is inevitably lost or papered over when one embraces a positive founding narrative about
a nation-state?
What is papered over is that the majority of the "founding fathers" were slave owners. And the
institution of slavery gave them the leisure time to devote to thinking and writing about such high-fallutin'
and precious concepts as democracy, liberty and republican forms of government. Historian Edmund
S. Morgan, in his book American Slavery, American Freedom, makes a compelling argument that the notions
we have of freedom, that the basis for American freedom is slavery. If it weren't for slavery, we
would never have developed as we have. So it is rather presumptuous of us, even for the left, to
feel that we've embraced freedom and believe in equality for all. Still, despite that, it doesn't
mean we should throw the baby out with the bath water. What it does mean is that we should aspire
to those ideals, even if the "founding fathers" didn't fully believe in them themselves, even if
they were disingenuous hypocrites who framed a constitution solely to benefit and protect the property
rights and aristocratic status of their class.
Today, we need to take those ideals seriously and work toward making the reality of American society
more closely resemble the ideals they espoused in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.
"... Wheeler thinks Comey is covering for Attorney General Loretta Lynch, his boss, whose reputation for impartiality was damaged by her recent tarmac meeting with Bill Clinton. Wheeler writes, "By overstepping the proper role of the FBI here, Comey surely gave Lynch cover - now she can back his decision without looking like Bill Clinton convinced her to do so on the tarmac." ..."
"... That's the money line right there. Just as back in the 50's, all of this is based on simplistic moralistic arguments concerning intent to harm the state. HRC virtually embodies the modern state, and thus, her intent cannot and will not ever ..."
"... I agree absolutely. And I would add that the "state" now a days is far more of an ideological monolith than 60 or even 40 years ago. Any "serious" person in the upper echelons of the US governing class believes in the all security state, and whatever is necessary to maintain it. ..."
"... If Daniel Ellsberg had done today what he did in the '70's, he would be in solitary confinement in a maximum security prison, and there would be NONE in the high reaches of the US governing class opposed to this outcome. ..."
"... Or by Exxon and JP Morgan so they could get even more details on how to make a fortune off our tragic foreign policy. http://www.ibtimes.com/campaign-2016-hillary-clinton-pitched-iraq-business-opportunity-us-corporations-2121999 ..."
"... The government tries to stuff this hero/traitor dichotomy up our butts but Manning, Sterling, and Drake are human rights defenders. Manning defended our right to information freedom. Sterling defended our human right to peace by denouncing illegal war propaganda. Drake defended our human right to privacy from illegal NSA surveillance. ..."
"... Chelsea Manning's trial was a classic case for Francis Boyle's civil resistance framework. The issue was not only information freedom but denunciation of war crimes. Under federal law and the Army Field Manual, disobedience was Manning's legal duty. But we heard this drumbeat of he wouldn't dare, he wouldn't dare The implication was, he'd be punished more harshly for explicitly complying with the federal law of war crimes. ..."
"... Human rights defenders like Sakharov, Sharansky, and Slepak helped reform the USSR out of existence. Manning, Sterling, Drake, and the ones who come after them will do the same for all of us Americans trapped in the USA. ..."
"... I like the way you think. Those who defend human rights by pointing fingers at the state for its transgressions are considered traitors, while those who embody the state, yet violate its laws are exonerated. Isn't that pretty close to placing the state above the law – a police state? ..."
"... Yeah depending on to whom she was trading our government secrets for, it doesn't really matter that it was (for example) through intermediaries like Blumenthal in exchange for donations to the Clinton Foundation and not out of loyalty to a foreign country. There is still the potential that she did things that constituted espionage. ..."
"... Hillary's email debacle and subsequent lack of prosecution is an important milestone on the road to widespread recognition that America has become a third world banana republic. This has undermined belief in the system, credibility of government, and ultimately the global empire. ..."
"... Four months after Clinton left the State Dept, she was still keeping her emails at home, in violation of a requirement to turn them over for official archiving. Had it not been for Guccifer, she would never have turned them over. ..."
"... The commenter is looking at Comey's unusual public statement through the lens of DOJ group-think makes it seem driven by "the need for absolute transparency." This is how they pass the buck in that organization. Comey's statement makes perfect sense inside the DOJ - his assertion that "no reasonable prosecutor" would file charges only makes sense to a careerist to whom pleasing their superiors is the only "sensible" and "reasonable" behavior, and to whom actual justice is a mere abstraction. ..."
"... Apparently at the DOJ, as with Antonin Scalia*, the law is not about right and wrong, innocence or guilt. Its about CYA and protecting the prerogatives of the state. ..."
"... Read Bill Moushey's 10-part "Win at All Costs" series on the federal conviction mill, and you would not even want an "AUSA" living in your neighborhood, for fear of being swept up in their mindless criminal dragnet. ..."
"... As a prosecutor of 32 years successful legal practice, let me just say: "You're wrong." The only mens rea ..."
"... This sort of violation is the easiest thing in the world to prove to a judge or jury, and I've personally taken scores of unanimous jury verdicts involving General Intent crimes. Petraeus was easily convicted of this violation, and many men and women have been cashiered and/or imprisoned for it, especially by the Obama Justice Department. No Ken Starr crusade required - the evidence is beyond dispute ..."
"... My brother is in the service with a security clearance and they are all furious. They said what she did is illegal and if anyone else did it they would be prosecuted . ..."
"... The Clintons are grifters and it would not surprise me if most of those deleted emails involved starting wars in other countries, TPP and scamming for the foundation. The claim she was too stupid to know what she was doing was wrong is ludicrous. If she wins the presidency we need a congress full of tea partiers so she cannot enact anything. ..."
"... The retired LTG who was vetted by Trump for veep also said if it was him, he would be doing jail time for what Hill did. I'm sure that's why Trump would love to have this guy as an attack dog on the campaign trail. ..."
"... I have a cousin who is a commander in the Navy with Southern Command who nearly never talks publicly about "politics" or much that is in the media. He speaks with his near family and very close friends, but widely or on any sort of social media, no way. He is irate about Clinton not being prosecuted. He sees this as an issue of justice and national security and is very public about his views. I asked him why he was willing to be so public with his views in this instance and he explained it is based on the seriousness of the crimes and the undermining of all he believes he is serving for. ..."
"... I used to be a USAFA nuclear launch officer. One of my fellow officers (unthinkingly) brought a crew bag into the classified vault where we were processing a rev change (a periodic change to procedures, methods and/or targets). One of the sheets from the old rev slipped into his crew bag. He took the crew bag into the (occupied) squadron office where it sat for several hours. The destruction inventory came up short. The sheet was found in the officer's crew bag. Consequences were brutal. He was immediately relieved of duty. I never saw him again. The entire squadron was given a mandatory security refresher and told that the consequences for being *involved* in such negligence would, at the least, result in a dishonorable discharge and quite likely would involve an extended stay in Leavenworth, KS. Involvement could include just being in the line of sight of unauthorized containers such as a crew bag. ..."
"... I think this is a basic feature of a totalitarian or fascist state. Make a lot of laws and then enforce only the ones that serve your ends. Whether it's the Espionage Act or a traffic violation, it's then up to the state to decide who they want to punish. Now every time I hear the phrase "rule of law", I think of this. I don't know if we were ever "a nation of laws, not a nation of men", but we can safely say now that we are officially not. ..."
"... To wit, Either Comey, loyal Republican that he is, wants to see Trump elected president and figures that the best thing he can do in that respect is to issue a scathing non-indictment of Clinton, thereby wounding but not killing her candidacy ..."
"... I would argue that the very fact that Comey issued a public opinion on prosecution (completely outside the FBI remit) should be clear evidence of bias and invalidate their investigation and his statements on the basis they were prejudiced. A clever counsel could, in fact, use this as a defence if HRC is indeed tried. Comey, like Lynch, should have been recused. There is bias written all over this entire debacle. ..."
"... The true smoking gun will be the Clinton Foundation, variously described by others as a fraud, a giant slush fund,or a private criminal hedge fund. Just the optics of the pay-for-play circumstances of arms deals, corporate takeovers, mineral concessions, etc. should be more than sufficient to empanel a Grand Jury. Less than $1billion of the $4billion raised for Haiti's earthquake relief effort was ever spent. Where's the rest? Remember the commercials? Poppy Bush and Bill sitting side by side pleading for money. ..."
"... This article doesn't explain why a punishment such as the one given to Petraeus was not considered by Comey or the DOJ. Petraeus was an elite insider who was not a spy and did not threaten the state, yet he still received a minor punishment so as not to delegitimatize the legal system and in order to give at least a minimal impression of fairness. Since Comey said it was possible - and most experts say very possible - that foreign governments read Hillary's emails, she may have caused significant damage to the US national interest over four years. Therefore even a loyal elite could expect to be at least fined for such gross negligence. Why wouldn't a fine and a reprimand and/or temporary loss of security clearance be normal even for a loyal DC insider? This suggests that the power of the Clinton Machine and its real-world ability to deliver retribution was the deciding factor in the lack of any suggestion of indictment. Comey surely wants to keep his job. ..."
"... The article also fails to deal with the fact that Comey mistakenly claimed that only one person had ever been prosecuted under the 1917 Espionage Act. This is clearly not the case, and you list some of those prosecuted. There have also been several other convictions, including US vs. McGuinness in 1992 (see Andrew C. McCarthy, "Military Prosecutions Show That A Gross Negligence Prosecution Would Not Unfairly Single Out Mrs. Clinton" National Review (7/7/2016), CIA director John Deutch in 1997 (pardoned by Bill Clinton), James Hitselberger (who carried classified documents off his naval base in 1997 and simply kept them), and Jason Brezler, a Marine Major who sent classified information about a dangerous Afghan mayor in order to warn a colleague in 2014 (he is now appealing his conviction based on Comey's criteria). Also please see Jared Beck, "Why Hillary Clinton's Emails Matter: A Legal Analysis" (6/6/2016): Beck lists 4 convictions under 793(f) alone. Also see Beck's "Comey's Volley, Or The Indictment That Wasn't" (7/11/2016). You also need to deal with the question of why Comey ignored the obvious fact that Hillary willfully and knowingly broke State Department rules in setting up the private server and therefore knew she was endangering security. The fact that Comey gave a false number of prosecutions under s. 793 and avoided mention of willful, knowing acts by Hillary suggests his decision to oppose indictment was a political decision, not a legal decision. ..."
"... Let's say Comey and Lynch get together and agree that Clinton should be indicted. That's fine, but what, they ask, are the chances be of having a fair trial in a reasonable timeframe (i.e. before a Clinton inauguration made one meaningless)? What are the chances of it not turning into a highly politicized media circus? The answer of course is zero. ..."
"... Jill Stein and Gary Johnson take more support from Clinton than Trump. Many Millennials or 35 and under will either go with Stein or Johnson. It may be enough to keep her out of the White House. ..."
"... I will point out that regardless of the motives we impute to Comey his presentation on July 5 did real damage to HRC. She has lost ground in the polls taken since then and the GOP has resurrected this issue as a cudgel. Not sure if that makes people around here feel better or not. ..."
"... Comey (in his mind) fatally wounded Hillary Clinton without exposing himself as a coverup merchant. He is wrong of course but he definitely resides in a fool's bubble. Comey handed enough specifics of evidence to enable a wholesale demolition any credibility HRC had left. The dogs of war are out baying for her blood as a result. ..."
"... My guess is that Comeys antics will drive the detestation of HRC harder and deeper to point where she will have little margin with Trump. ..."
By Gaius
Publius , a professional writer living on the West Coast of the United States and frequent
contributor to DownWithTyranny, digby, Truthout, and Naked Capitalism. Follow him on Twitter
@Gaius_Publius ,
Tumblr and
Facebook . Originally published
at
at Down With Tyranny . GP article
here
It's going to be a while before the jury of informed comment returns a verdict regarding James
Comey's pre-emptive declaration of "no prosecution" for Hillary Clinton. But let's see what a
first look gets us. I want to start with a couple of points made by Marcy Wheeler, then amplify
them from other sources. The questions at issue are:
Should James Comey have made the call not to prosecute? Should Clinton be prosecuted at all?
If she should be prosecuted, why? If she should have been prosecuted, why wasn't she?
Some of these questions we can answer now. Others will have to wait until the people who specialize
in this material discuss it more fully, which could take a while.
Comey Had No Business Making a Prosecutorial Decision
Before we get into his argument, consider a more basic point: It is not Jim Comey's job
to make prosecutorial decisions . Someone else - whichever US Attorney oversaw the prosecutors
on this case, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, or Loretta Lynch - makes that decision.
[H]e has no business making this decision, and even less business making it public
in the way he did (the latter of which points former DOJ public affairs director Matthew Miller
was bitching about).
FBI Director Comey Preempts Justice Department By Advising No Charges for Hillary Clinton
FBI Director James Comey took the unprecedented step of publicly preempting a Justice Department
prosecution when he declared at a
press conference Tuesday that "no reasonable prosecutor" would bring a case against Hillary
Clinton for her use of a private email server.
The FBI's job is to investigate crimes; it is Justice Department prosecutors who are supposed
to decide whether or not to move forward. But in a case that had enormous political implications,
Comey decided the FBI would act on its own.
"Although the Department of Justice makes final decisions on matters like this, we are expressing
to Justice our view that no charges are appropriate in this case," he said. Prosecutors could
technically still file criminal charges, but it would require them to publicly disagree with
their own investigators.
Matthew Miller, a former spokesman for the Justice Department under Eric Holder, also agrees,
and is quoted by both Wheeler and Emmons. Emmons account (my emphasis):
Matthew Miller, who was a spokesman for the Department of Justice under Attorney General
Eric Holder, called Comey's press conference an " absolutely unprecedented, appalling, and
a flagrant violation of Justice Department regulations. " He told The Intercept
: "The thing that's so damaging about this is that the Department of Justice is supposed
to reach conclusions and put them in court filings . There's a certain amount of due process
there."
Legal experts could not recall another time that the FBI had made its recommendation so
publicly.
"It's not unusual for the FBI to take a strong positions on whether charges should be brought
in a case," said University of Texas law professor Steve Vladeck. " The unusual part is
publicizing it ."
Which leaves us with a mystery. Why did Comey do this?
It Looks Like Comey Said "No Prosecution" So Loretta Lynch Wouldn't Have To
Wheeler thinks Comey is covering for Attorney General Loretta Lynch, his boss, whose reputation
for impartiality was damaged by her recent tarmac meeting with Bill Clinton. Wheeler writes, "By
overstepping the proper role of the FBI here, Comey surely gave Lynch cover - now she can back
his decision without looking like Bill Clinton convinced her to do so on the tarmac."
Emmons largely agrees:
Given the extraordinary circumstances, Vladeck called it "both unusual and completely unsurprising
that Comey went out of his way to make this statement."
He added: "It's certainly preemptive on Comey's part."
Attorney General Loretta Lynch was widely
criticized for meeting with former President Bill Clinton last week while his wife was
still under investigation
You read that right: "unusual and completely un surprising." For Emmons and Vladeck
it appears to be a case of insiders going out of their way, far out of their way in fact, to cover
for insiders. Given how unprecedented Comey's speech was, I think we have to accept this hypothesis
until others weigh in with more likely alternatives. This seems perfectly plausible to me. I can
think of another motives for Comey's actions, but they don't exclude this one.
Should Clinton Be Prosecuted Despite Loretta Lynch's Refusal to Do So?
So far, we've been able to answer the first question, should Comey have made the call not to
prosecute? The answer is clearly no. But that only gets us started. As to the prosecution itself
- should she be prosecuted and why? - we're in more complicated territory, which I hope to make
clear.
(Note, by the way, that in my heading just above, I'm transferring responsibility for the refusal
to prosecute from Comey back to the Justice Department, where it belongs . I suggest in
thinking about this that you do the same. Comey notwithstanding, it's Lynch who has the authority,
and Lynch who is refusing to prosecute.)
About prosecution, there are many laws that Clinton appears to have broken. In fact, there
may develop a minor cottage industry that lists them. Comey himself identified some transgressions
during his post-announcement speech (my emphasis below):
[S]even e-mail chains concern matters that were classified at the Top Secret/Special
Access Program level when they were sent and received. These chains involved Secretary
Clinton both sending e-mails about those matters and receiving e-mails from others about the
same matters. There is evidence to support a conclusion that any reasonable person in Secretary
Clinton's position, or in the position of those government employees with whom she was corresponding
about these matters, should have known that an unclassified system was no place for that conversation.
Note that this confirms, by the way, the fact that Special Access Program (SAP) information
- one of the highest, most sensitive levels of secret the government possesses - was indeed housed
on the server. Brian Pagliano, in doing any number of maintenance chores at the Clinton IT home-headquarters,
could have read it, as could anyone helping him. Risking SAP information will be a tripwire for
many in the intelligence community, who are likely to regard its mishandling as unforgivable.
This is one of those areas where we'll know more over time as specialists weigh in. (The political
response of the intel community, if any, could also be interesting, in a "drama of retaliation"
way. This may not occur, but it's one of the possibilities.)
Next Comey adds:
In addition to this highly sensitive information, we also found information that was
properly classified as Secret by the U.S. Intelligence Community at the time it was discussed
on e-mail (that is, excluding the later "up-classified" e-mails). None of these e-mails
should have been on any kind of unclassified system, but their presence is especially concerning
because all of these e-mails were housed on unclassified personal servers not even supported
by full-time security staff, like those found at Departments and Agencies of the U.S. Government-or
even with a commercial service like Gmail.
In other words, despite Ms. Clinton's allegations that nothing she sent or received was "marked
classified at the time" - her statements were incorrect. (Note that the extent of this violation
is in doubt, however; i.e., the exact number of these "properly classified" emails and their contents
was not revealed. Below, as you'll read, Comey admits that the number of these emails is "very
small." Wikileaks
disagrees
.)
Finally:
Separately, it is important to say something about the marking of classified information.
Only a very small number of the e-mails containing classified information bore markings indicating
the presence of classified information. But even if information is not marked "classified"
in an e-mail, participants who know or should know that the subject matter is classified
are still obligated to protect it .
The last is important. Some material is "born classified," a phrase you've likely encountered
if you've been following this story. If an admiral in World War II, for example, doodles a possible
plan of attack against an enemy fleet, that doodle contains classified information, whether marked
as such or not. And more, the duty to guard this information goes beyond not divulging it. It
must be carefully protected in a non-negligent way.
Hillary Clinton and the Espionage Act
So should Clinton have been prosecuted? The duty to protect important government information
is codified, among other places, in the Espionage Act, Title 18 of the criminal code, Sections
792 and following. I earlier wrote about Clinton's vulnerability to this act, specifically Title
18, Section 793, here: "
Three Data Points Regarding Clinton's Email Server and the Law ". There I made two points:
first, that the information covered by the act doesn't require a formal "classified" designation
to be relevant; and second, that "intent" (meaning intent to disclose) is not necessary to trigger
the law's penalties. "Gross negligence" in handling the information is sufficient to trigger prosecution.
Part of this section
reads :
(f) Whoever, being entrusted with or having lawful possession or control of any document
, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint,
plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, note, or information, relating to the national
defense , (1) through gross negligence permits the same to be removed from its proper
place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of his trust, or to be lost, stolen,
abstracted, or destroyed, or (2) having knowledge that the same has been illegally
removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of its trust,
or lost, or stolen , abstracted, or destroyed, and fails to make prompt report of such
loss, theft, abstraction, or destruction to his superior officer-
Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both .
To get the gist of this language as it applies to Clinton, just read the part bolded above.
Cut down, it says:
Whoever, being entrusted with or having lawful possession or control of any document relating
to the national defense or having knowledge that the same has been illegally removed from its
proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of its trust, or lost, or stolen
shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.
If your consideration is whether Clinton violated the letter of the law, that's pretty straight-forward.
Storing the information listed by Comey in his non-indictment indictment of Clinton on her unsecured
server (and sent, for a time, by unencrypted transmission) puts Clinton at clear risk of prosecution
for violating the Espionage Act. And again, the bar isn't "intent" to risk or violate national
security information. The bar is "gross negligence" in its handling, a phrase that's almost a
dictionary synonym for what Comey meant when he accused Clinton and her colleagues of being "extremely
careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly
classified information."
Thus she's very likely vulnerable under the letter of the law. Yet unlike others she will not
be tried (a word that means "tested"), much less punished, for violating it. Her lack of prosecution,
when others have been vigorously pursued in court for similar acts or less, explains much of what
exercises her critics. To understand their frustration and anger, let's look at those who have
been prosecuted under the Act for negligence or worse. Then let's look at the critical element
that separates their situations from Clinton's. (It's not just her elevated status.)
The Espionage Act Under Obama
It turns out that the Espionage Act has become a popular tool of punishment under the Obama
administration, which has broadened its application from use against actual espionage to use against
unfriendly
leakers
and whistle-blowers :
Under the Obama
administration , seven
Espionage Act prosecutions have been related not to traditional
espionage but to either
withholding information or communicating with members of the media. Out of a total eleven prosecutions
under the Espionage Act against government officials accused of providing classified information
to the media, seven have occurred since Obama took office.
[89] "Leaks related to national security can put people at risk," the President said
at a news conference in 2013. "They can put men and women in uniform that I've sent into the
battlefield at risk. I don't think the American people would expect me, as commander in chief,
not to be concerned about information that might compromise their missions or might get them
killed."
[90]
Secrecy is a virtual religion in Washington. Those who violate its dogma have been punished
in the harshest and most excessive manner – at least when they possess little political power
or influence. As has been
widely noted , the Obama administration has prosecuted more leakers under the 1917 Espionage
Act than all prior administrations combined . Secrecy in DC is so revered that even
the most banal documents are reflexively marked classified, making their disclosure or mishandling
a felony. As former CIA and NSA Director Michael Hayden
said
in 2010 , "Everything's secret. I mean, I got an email saying 'Merry Christmas.' It carried
a top secret NSA classification marking."
Even when no leakage or other damage was contemplated or occurred, the Espionage Act was applied
against violators. Here's
what happened to Naval Reserve Engineer Brian Nishimura (link via Greenwald above):
A Naval reservist was sentenced for mishandling classified military materials.
A federal attorney announced Wednesday that Bryan Nishimura of Folsom, California, pleaded
guilty to the unauthorized removal and retention of classified materials.
Nishimura, deployed in Afghanistan in 2007 and 2008 as a regional engineer, admitted to
downloading classified briefings and digital records onto his personal electronic devices.
He carried the materials off base and brought them back to the U.S. when his deployment ended.
An FBI search of Nishimura's home turned up classified materials, but did not reveal evidence
he intended to distribute them.
How was his case handled? He was obviously prosecuted, as the lead paragraph tells us. Then:
He was sentenced to two years of probation and a $7,500 fine , and was ordered to
surrender his security clearance . He is barred from seeking a future security clearance
.
This is a Navy engineer who took home downloaded briefings and records. We're not told under
what act he was prosecuted, but we don't need to be told, just that doing what he did was a crime.
The Espionage Act is perfectly suited to that crime, if the prosecutors wished to use it.
According to court documents, Nishimura was a Naval reservist deployed in Afghanistan in
2007 and 2008. In his role as a Regional Engineer for the U.S. military in Afghanistan, Nishimura
had access to classified briefings and digital records that could only be retained and viewed
on authorized government computers . Nishimura, however, caused the materials to be
downloaded and stored on his personal, unclassified electronic devices and storage media.
In the United States, Nishimura continued to maintain the information on unclassified
systems in unauthorized locations, and copied the materials onto at least one additional
unauthorized and unclassified system
Sounds like what Clinton did to a T. Should she be prosecuted? Loretta Lynch, speaking through
James Comey, doesn't think so. To understand why not, let's look at three more notorious and more
vigorously prosecuted cases: Jeffrey Sterling, Thomas Drake and Chelsea Manning. Those cases not
only reveal why Clinton, in the eyes of many, should be prosecuted; they reveal why she wasn't.
Jeffrey Sterling, Thomas Drake and Chelsea Manning
This gets to the heart of the problem related to when and why to prosecute. There's first a
question of what should happen and what does happen. Then there's a question of
intent, as in, what intent if any is the target of the law , and what intent is the target
of prosecutors who apply the law. These are not the same.
Greenwald doesn't think Clinton should be prosecuted, since in isolation her crime,
as he sees it, doesn't merit it. What Clinton did was attempt to shield all of her communications
to the extent she could, an act that in his mind doesn't deserve jail time, despite the letter
of the law. I would add that we're talking about applying the Espionage Act after all,
and Clinton in no way committed or intended to commit espionage.
But that kind of sensible thinking isn't what does happen. What does happen is that
under Obama, certain people are prosecuted and sentenced very harshly. Greenwald again (bolded
emphasis mine):
But this case does not exist in isolation. It exists in a political climate where secrecy
is regarded as the highest end, where people have their lives destroyed for the most trivial
– or, worse, the most well-intentioned – violations of secrecy laws, even in the absence of
any evidence of harm or malignant intent . And these are injustices that Hillary Clinton
and most of her stalwart Democratic followers have never once opposed – but rather enthusiastically
cheered. In 2011, Army Private Chelsea Manning was charged with multiple felonies and faced
decades in prison for leaking documents that she firmly believed the public had the right to
see; unlike the documents Clinton recklessly mishandled, none of those was Top Secret
. Nonetheless,
this is what then-Secretary Clinton said in justifying her prosecution
Clinton's justification for Manning's prosecution is this (emphasis Greenwald's):
"I think that in an age where so much information is flying through cyberspace, we all have
to be aware of the fact that some information which is sensitive, which does affect the security
of individuals and relationships, deserves to be protected and we will continue to take
necessary steps to do so. "
Seems damning in retrospect, especially the emphasized portion. For Clinton, "necessary steps"
to protect "sensitive" information that's "flying through cyberspace" means
the
following :
In 2010, Chelsea
(formerly Bradley) Manning , the
United States Army
Private First
Class accused of the largest leak of state secrets in U.S. history, was charged under Article
134 of the
Uniform
Code of Military Justice , which incorporates parts of the Espionage Act
18 U.S.C. §
793(e) . At the time, critics worried that the broad language of the Act could make news
organizations, and anyone who reported, printed or disseminated information from WikiLeaks,
subject to prosecution, although former prosecutors pushed back, citing Supreme Court precedent
expanding First Amendment protections.
[103] On July 30, 2013, following a judge-only trial by court-martial lasting eight
weeks, Army judge Colonel Denise Lind convicted Manning on six counts of violating the Espionage
Act, among other infractions.
[98]
That harsh punishment doesn't count the
torture
she endured while in pre-trial detention. The fate that befell Chelsea Manning was (and is) draconian.
Again, in retrospect Clinton's words at the time are damning.
Let's look at two more cases, starting with
Jeffrey
Sterling . As you read, see if you can see the thread that ties these three cases together:
Jeffrey
Alexander Sterling , a former
CIA
agent was indicted under the [Espionage] Act in January 2011 for alleged unauthorized disclosure
of national defense information to
James Risen , a New York Times reporter, in 2003 regarding his book State of War
. The indictment described his motive as revenge for the CIA's refusal to allow him
to publish his memoirs and its refusal to settle his racial discrimination lawsuit against
the Agency. Others have described him as telling Risen about a backfired CIA plot against Iran
in the 1990s.
[91]
But the evidence of wrong-doing was almost non-existent,
flimsily circumstantial , and the conviction relied heavily on the jury's reaction to the
government's presentation of motive.
The government's case consisted mostly of records of emails and phone calls between
Sterling and Risen that began in 2001 and continued into 2005. The emails were very short,
just a line or so, and did not reference any CIA programs. The phone calls were mostly short
too, some just a few seconds, and the government did not introduce recordings or transcripts
of any of them .
Sterling was represented by two lawyers, Edward MacMahon Jr. and Barry Pollack. In his opening
statement, MacMahon pointed to the lack of hard evidence against his client.
"Mr. Trump is a fine lawyer," MacMahon
said . " If he had an email with details of these programs or a phone call, you would
have heard it , and you're not going to hear it in this case . Mr. Trump told you that
[Sterling] spoke to Risen. Did you hear where, when, or anything about what happened? No.
That's because there isn't any such evidence of it whatsoever . You don't see a
written communication to Mr. Risen from Mr. Sterling about the program at all, no evidence
they even met in person ."
Nevertheless, despite this lack of real evidence:
[T]he jury convicted Sterling, based on what the judge, Leonie Brinkema, described at
the sentencing as "very powerful circumstantial evidence." She added, "In a perfect world,
you'd only have direct evidence, but many times that's not the case in a criminal case."
A few minutes before three in the afternoon, Judge Brinkema said that Sterling would go
to prison for three and a half years. This was far below the sentencing guidelines - and was
seen as a
rebuke of the prosecution's portrayal of Sterling as a traitor who had to be locked
away for a long time. But that wasn't much comfort for Sterling or his wife, because he would
nonetheless be locked away. After the hearing ended, Sterling walked to the front row of seats
to console his sobbing wife. You could hear her wails in the courtroom.
His lawyers requested that he be allowed to serve his sentence in his home state of Missouri,
so that his wife and other family members could easily visit him. Earlier this week, Sterling
reported to the prison that was selected for him. It is in Colorado.
We still don't know for sure that Sterling was the person who leaked information to reporter
James Risen. Nothing showing that they worked together was presented in court. Nothing. Yet the
prosecutor did a good job of painting Sterling as "a traitor" motivated by "anger, bitterness,
selfishness," adding, "The defendant struck back at the CIA because he thought he had been treated
unfairly. He had sued the agency for discrimination and demanded that they pay him $200,000 to
settle his claim. When the agency refused, he struck back with the only weapon he had: secrets,
the agency's secrets."
On that basis and almost no evidence, the jury convicted.
Finally, in the case of Thomas Drake, mentioned above by both Wheeler and Greenwald,
this happened:
What sets Drake, Sterling and Manning apart from Clinton in the way their violations of the
Espionage Act are treated? It's not just her elite status.
Why Is Clinton's Case Different?
Clinton may well have been let off because the Justice Department thought prosecution was just
the wrong thing to do. Given all the arcane rules of classification, and the fact that Clinton,
put plainly, is not a spy, Comey and Lynch may well have decided that prosecution was pointless.
Espionage, after all, was never her intent, and getting Hillary Clinton convicted on espionage
charges may have looked to them like a very heavy lift. Yet espionage was never the intent of
Sterling, Drake or Manning, yet they had the proverbial book thrown at them, and more. (Read the
rest of the
article on Sterling to see how his prosecution nearly destroyed his life, literally.)
The government's behavior in these four cases isn't clarified when comparing motives, at least
not initially. It could be argued that the motives of Sterling, Drake and Manning were entirely
beneficial, since whistle-blowers intend to perform a societal good, whereas Clinton's motives
were more self-centered, less morally defensible, and possibly illegal - at the very least, she
was attempting to move all of her communication beyond the reach of FOIA records requests. (We'll
have to wait to see if she may have had other motives, such as shielding the Clinton Foundation
from embarrassing scrutiny, or worse. I keep seeing mention of a separate investigation into that.)
Which brings us to the the matter of intent - not the intent contemplated by the law (intent
to steal or to otherwise mishandle government secrets), but the intent contemplated by the prosecutors
in applying the law. Look again at the Sterling conviction and what the prosecution relied on
to get it. The man was painted by his prosecutors as, in effect, evil - a man whose goal was to
harm the government, a betrayer, a traitor, motivated by anger, bitterness, selfishness, a man
taking revenge. Though most stark in Sterling's prosecution (and in Manning's torture), you see
this thread in all three whistle-blower cases.
What separates these cases from Clinton's is the desire of the government to punish "evil deeds,"
attempts to harm the country as the prosecutors defined harm , then secondarily to use
the Espionage Act as a tool of that punishment, wielded in such a heavy way as to frighten others.
Note that this initial filter - looking for who has done the kind of harm deserving of punishment,
as opposed to looking for who violated the law - precedes the prosecution itself. What doesn't
precede the prosecution - certainly not in Clinton's case - is an even-handed application of the
law.
Yes, this is selective prosecution, but it's much more than elites protecting elites, though
it's that as well. It's also and primarily using the prosecutorial weight of the established state
to mercilessly crush the perceived enemies of that state, while protecting its friends from that
weight should they also stray under the law's dark umbrella.
In other words, the key to determining who will be prosecuted is indeed intent, but not intent
to violate the law. What's being prosecuted is intent to violate the state as the state
perceives it.
So we return where we started, to Marcy Wheeler, who calls the real crime of Sterling and Drake
"disloyalty" and not a violation of the Espionage Act itself.
Wheeler (my emphasis):
I can only imagine Comey came to his improper public prosecutorial opinion via one of two
mental tricks. Either he - again, not the prosecutor - decided the only crime at issue was
mishandling classified information (elsewhere in his statement he describes having no evidence
that thousands of work emails were withheld from DOJ with ill intent , which dismisses
another possible crime), and from there he decided either that it'd be a lot harder to prosecute
Hillary Clinton (or David Petraeus) than it would be someone DOJ spent years maligning like
Sterling or Drake. Or maybe he decided that there are no indications that Hillary is disloyal
to the US.
Understand, though: with Sterling and Drake, DOJ decided they were disloyal to the US,
and then used their alleged mishandling of classified information as proof that they were
disloyal to the US (Drake ultimately
plead to Exceeding Authorized
Use of a Computer).
Ultimately, it involves arbitrary decisions about who is disloyal to the US , and
from that a determination that the crime of mishandling classified information occurred.
This entirely ignores the political dimension, which I'll take up at another time. But it perfectly
characterizes, as I see it, the legal one.
Too Big to Jail, Too Innocent to Flail, or Both
Should Clinton have been prosecuted at all? It depends on whether you wish to apply the law
(many do), to apply what others consider common sense, or to rebalance the scale of unequal prosecution.
And if the latter, rebalance in which direction? Should Clinton go to jail, or should Manning,
among others, go free? I would personally be fine if Clinton never saw a courtroom and prisoners
like Manning were freed. For the overall good of the nation, I would take that trade. Others,
I'm sure, would choose differently.
Returning to why Clinton wasn't prosecuted - was it just that Clinton is too important, too
protected, to prosecute? "Too big to jail" in other words? Too high to be brought down by something
as low as the law? After all, starting with Nixon, the circle of those who can never be punished
for their crimes has grown constantly more inclusive. (I almost wrote "for their non-violent crimes,"
but then I remembered the torturing George W. Bush.) That's certainly a possible explanation,
even a likely one, given our recent failure to prosecute even a
straight-up thief like former Goldman Sachs chief, ex-governor and Democratic Party fundraiser
Jon Corzine.
But we live in a punishing, prosecutorial state as well, one that treats its enemies as harshly
as it treats its friends gently, especially its inner circle friends. It's this second aspect,
not just who is too big to jail, but who is too high-minded and innocent to torture and
flail - too "loyal" to be treated, in other words, like Sterling and Manning - that must be
considered before we can understand the unequal application of these laws. Clinton, for all her
faults in James Comey's eyes, was no Chelsea Manning.
As Wheeler says in her closing, this is "another way of saying our classification system is
largely a way to arbitrarily label people you dislike disloyal." On reflection, it's hard to disagree.
In other words, the key to determining who will be prosecuted is indeed intent, but not
intent to violate the law. What's being prosecuted is intent to violate the state as the state
[itself] perceives it.
That's the money line right there. Just as back in the 50's, all of this is based on simplistic
moralistic arguments concerning intent to harm the state. HRC virtually embodies the modern state,
and thus, her intent cannot and will not ever be questioned. Game over.
I agree absolutely. And I would add that the "state" now a days is far more of an ideological
monolith than 60 or even 40 years ago. Any "serious" person in the upper echelons of the US governing
class believes in the all security state, and whatever is necessary to maintain it.
If Daniel Ellsberg had done today what he did in the '70's, he would be in solitary confinement
in a maximum security prison, and there would be NONE in the high reaches of the US governing
class opposed to this outcome.
We live in a more EFFECTIVELY one party state than the Soviets or Red Chinese ever mustered
Unfortunately, there was quite a lag. The phrase is attributed to Louis XIV, who died in 1715.
Nearly 3/4 of a century elapsed before the events of 1789.
Two submerged legal protections show why the government is trying so hard to fend off human
rights law. The authorities here are freedom of information in accordance with Article 19, and
human rights defenders, who have protections under state and federal common law as customary international
law. The US is legally committed to bring domestic law into compliance with human rights law,
which is the supreme law of the land.
The government tries to stuff this hero/traitor dichotomy up our butts but Manning, Sterling,
and Drake are human rights defenders. Manning defended our right to information freedom. Sterling
defended our human right to peace by denouncing illegal war propaganda. Drake defended our human
right to privacy from illegal NSA surveillance.
Chelsea Manning's trial was a classic case for Francis Boyle's civil resistance framework.
The issue was not only information freedom but denunciation of war crimes. Under federal law and
the Army Field Manual, disobedience was Manning's legal duty. But we heard this drumbeat of he
wouldn't dare, he wouldn't dare The implication was, he'd be punished more harshly for explicitly
complying with the federal law of war crimes.
The government goes through increasingly ridiculous bad-faith contortions to escape this body
of law. International forums are making a laughingstock of this government, shredding its pretensions
to legitimacy. The last step is for human rights defenders to go over the head of this government
to the world and argue the necessity of exposing this criminal state.
Human rights defenders like Sakharov, Sharansky, and Slepak helped reform the USSR out
of existence. Manning, Sterling, Drake, and the ones who come after them will do the same for
all of us Americans trapped in the USA.
I like the way you think. Those who defend human rights by pointing fingers at the state
for its transgressions are considered traitors, while those who embody the state, yet violate
its laws are exonerated. Isn't that pretty close to placing the state above the law – a police
state?
Yeah depending on to whom she was trading our government secrets for, it doesn't really
matter that it was (for example) through intermediaries like Blumenthal in exchange for donations
to the Clinton Foundation and not out of loyalty to a foreign country. There is still the potential
that she did things that constituted espionage.
Hillary's email debacle and subsequent lack of prosecution is an important milestone on
the road to widespread recognition that America has become a third world banana republic. This
has undermined belief in the system, credibility of government, and ultimately the global empire.
It's like the elites took out a payday loan; they get to play their little games and protect
their corrupt friends for now–and in the future their creditors, the American people, will extract
their pound of flesh (via the guillotine). Somewhere in that process the empire will collapse.
Now if only we can avoid a nuclear Armageddon (ie by supporting Trump from here on out) I'd say
that is a win-win for everyone in the world despite how bad it looks in the short term.
In the filing Tuesday [in a Judicial Watch FOIA case], longtime Clinton attorney David Kendall
even offered the politically awkward contention that a general effort by Clinton to thwart
FOIA would not be enough to give the Judicial Watch legal authority to proceed with its case.
Kendall argued that a 1980 Supreme Court case that discussed the possibility of recovering
records sought under FOIA but no longer in agency control "requires a close temporal connection
between an official's removal of records and a specific FOIA request."
"That standard cannot be satisfied here. Judicial Watch's FOIA request was submitted nearly
four months after Secretary Clinton left the State Department, and there is no evidence that
Secretary Clinton or anyone else at the Department knew that Judicial Watch would submit the
request, let alone intended to circumvent it," Kendall wrote, along with attorneys Katherine
Turner and Amy Zaharia.
Four months after Clinton left the State Dept, she was still keeping her emails at home,
in violation of a requirement to turn them over for official archiving. Had it not been for Guccifer,
she would never have turned them over.
It would be not be surprising at this point for Hillary to Arkancide "Bill," and then plead
for the court's mercy because she is a widow.
Speaking as a former AUSA with years of experience making prosecution decisions in complex
fraud cases, some of those decisions in agreement with recommendations made by the investigating
agency (FBI and others), some in the teeth of opposition from the investigating agency, the only
unusual aspect of the handling of the email affair I observed was DOJ's decision to make public,
through Comey's speech, the reasoning behind the declination. Reasoning underlying prosecution
decisions is, as a rule, never made public. Making the reasoning public was likely a nod to the
highly politicized nature of the investigation and the need for absolute transparency.
As for the assertion that the decision was made by the wrong person or department, FBI/Comey
not Lynch the prosecutor, Lynch made it clear beyond dispute that she would defer to the fact
finder's recommendation when it was made. That decision was itself a prosecution decision made
by Lynch, was within her authority and again, given the highly politicized nature of the investigation,
was an obviously sensible decision, given her position as a cabinet member in a Democratic administration.
The remark that this was "an obviously sensible decision, given her position as a cabinet
member in a Democratic administration," is also the kind of crap that I've gotten in the past
from AUSA's, who are one of the most intellectually (and ethically) captive groups I've ever
dealt with. Everything that they do is for "show" value within the DOJ. If I bring up the public's
interest in justice, they look at me like I'm some kind of nut. The commenter is correct that
Lynch's actions make perfect sense within the rules of DOJ Kabuki theater. They very much like
decisions to be made by somebody else.
The commenter is looking at Comey's unusual public statement through the lens of DOJ
group-think makes it seem driven by "the need for absolute transparency." This is how they
pass the buck in that organization. Comey's statement makes perfect sense inside the DOJ -
his assertion that "no reasonable prosecutor" would file charges only makes sense to a careerist
to whom pleasing their superiors is the only "sensible" and "reasonable" behavior, and to whom
actual justice is a mere abstraction.
Ironically, it is the precarious nature of legal employment as recently discussed on NC
that has caused this sort of organizational behavior to be the norm in the profession any more,
and it's prevalence is why I'm getting out.
This brings to mind the mantra "there's justice and then there's the law". Though when I've
heard that said it was not as a defense of how little the latter mirrors the former but a criticism.
Apparently at the DOJ, as with Antonin Scalia*, the law is not about right and wrong, innocence
or guilt. Its about CYA and protecting the prerogatives of the state.
Read Bill Moushey's 10-part "Win at All Costs" series on the federal conviction mill, and you
would not even want an "AUSA" living in your neighborhood, for fear of being swept up in their
mindless criminal dragnet.
Federal prosecutors are like the poseur who knocks out an opponent with no arms, then claims
to be Heavyweight Champion of the World.
They don't know what a fair adversary proceeding is anymore, since federal sentencing guidelines
(1984) and other changes tilted the whole table in their favor.
When 95% of federal criminal cases are plea-bargained under extreme duress for the defendant,
prosecutors don't need any skill whatsoever to put fresh pelts on the wall.
What Tallichet is saying is indeed true. He is not making it up. The burden is upon the government
to prove intent or "mens rea" evil mind. No reasonable prosecutor would take up another Ken Starr
crusade for years to come to prove something which can not be proven. If you are young and maybe
want a crusade (Starr did) then maybe you take it up to make a name for yourself.
I have enough court time to know when a battle can be won and not won. Spent enough money doing
it.
As a prosecutor of 32 years successful legal practice, let me just say: "You're wrong." The only mens rea required to prove a violation of 18 U.S.C. 1924 is General Criminal
Intent, not Specific Intent. There is no legal requirement that a person accused of Unauthorized
Removal and Retention of Classified Documents intend to break the law or damage the interests
of the United States. The only requirement is that the accused person knowingly remove
the materials and intentionally retain them at an unauthorized location.
This sort of violation is the easiest thing in the world to prove to a judge or jury, and I've
personally taken scores of unanimous jury verdicts involving General Intent crimes. Petraeus was
easily convicted of this violation, and many men and women have been cashiered and/or imprisoned
for it, especially by the Obama Justice Department. No Ken Starr crusade required - the evidence
is beyond dispute.
However, the difference is that I've been at my work for 32 years, and I've never had the slightest
intention of walking through the revolving door of representing the very people who it was my
duty to prosecute.
Your ability to generalize with such breadth and detail about a very large, diverse group of
individuals is impressive. My experience as a state prosecutor, Federal prosecutor, defense attorney
and thoughtful human being has taught me that such generalizations cannot be relied upon. I have
interacted with many police and investigators from a multitude of agencies ranging from small
town Texas pds to FBI and have found that some of them were tall, others short, some blue eyed,
others brown eyed some smart others not so smart, some honest, others not. I have found the same
diversity in other groups I have come to know through experience judges, prosecutors, defense
attorneys, women, men, blonds, brunettes the list is really endless. Are you able to similarly
generalize with such breadth and detail about groups within our society other than AUSAs?
i dont know shit about 'the law', and NO LONGER CARE because it is a totaaly corrupted institution
which serves the interests of the 1%
my personal morals are a superset of 'the law', only mine are evenhanded, not corrupt
oh, you sound like quite the douche, hoping we have an opportunity to meet at a necktie party
when the hard rain comes lawyers will be escorted to the front of the line
My brother is in the service with a security clearance and they are all furious. They said
what she did is illegal and if anyone else did it they would be prosecuted .
The Clintons are grifters and it would not surprise me if most of those deleted emails involved
starting wars in other countries, TPP and scamming for the foundation. The claim she was too stupid
to know what she was doing was wrong is ludicrous. If she wins the presidency we need a congress
full of tea partiers so she cannot enact anything.
I'd definitely be interested in reading more about how the email scandal is sowing distrust
and discord in the national security state. Please share more about how people on the inside are
feeling; it's always reassuring to get confirmation that not all of these people are vile and
mendacious crooks.
The retired LTG who was vetted by Trump for veep also said if it was him, he would be doing
jail time for what Hill did. I'm sure that's why Trump would love to have this guy as an attack
dog on the campaign trail.
I have a cousin who is a commander in the Navy with Southern Command who nearly never talks
publicly about "politics" or much that is in the media. He speaks with his near family and very
close friends, but widely or on any sort of social media, no way. He is irate about Clinton not
being prosecuted. He sees this as an issue of justice and national security and is very public
about his views. I asked him why he was willing to be so public with his views in this instance
and he explained it is based on the seriousness of the crimes and the undermining of all he believes
he is serving for.
I used to be a USAFA nuclear launch officer. One of my fellow officers (unthinkingly) brought
a crew bag into the classified vault where we were processing a rev change (a periodic change
to procedures, methods and/or targets). One of the sheets from the old rev slipped into his crew
bag. He took the crew bag into the (occupied) squadron office where it sat for several hours.
The destruction inventory came up short. The sheet was found in the officer's crew bag.
Consequences were brutal. He was immediately relieved of duty. I never saw him again. The entire
squadron was given a mandatory security refresher and told that the consequences for being *involved*
in such negligence would, at the least, result in a dishonorable discharge and quite likely would
involve an extended stay in Leavenworth, KS. Involvement could include just being in the line
of sight of unauthorized containers such as a crew bag.
It's glaring that HRC sold the office and that is why a private server and hiding emails was
essential.
Puleeze can we stop being insulted that she didn't know, wasn't technically sophistocated !
She went to GREAT Lenghts at considerable inconvenience to set up and operate seperate system ..
Think of the opportunities to shape policy and approve/disapprove State Department transactions
around Clinton Foundation contributors!!
Allowing this obvious glaring conflict of interest to exist in the first place was incredible
and an example of how corrupt and far down things have fallen.
Where are the Clinton Foundation emails ??? Intent is a no brainer
I think this is a basic feature of a totalitarian or fascist state. Make a lot of laws and
then enforce only the ones that serve your ends. Whether it's the Espionage Act or a traffic violation,
it's then up to the state to decide who they want to punish. Now every time I hear the phrase
"rule of law", I think of this. I don't know if we were ever "a nation of laws, not a nation of
men", but we can safely say now that we are officially not.
Comey made the decision most everyone with skin in the game that's not a Sander's supporter
wanted him to make. And in that regard there is one ultimate explanation that Trumps all others
as it were. Though this can be parsed in two ways, to his credit Comey manages to cover both with
his public statement.
To wit, Either Comey, loyal Republican that he is, wants to see Trump elected
president and figures that the best thing he can do in that respect is to issue a scathing non-indictment
of Clinton, thereby wounding but not killing her candidacy – in full knowledge that polling has
consistently shown Trump would likely fare much less well against Sanders, or perhaps another
democrat who might replace Clinton; or, loyal republican that he is, Comey believes Trump would
be even more of a disaster for the Republican party than he already is if he were actually elected
president – thus Comey elicits sympathy for Clinton, casting himself as part of the vast right
wing conspiracy against her by airing his belief in her culpability, yet he spares her political
viability and himself the possibility of political retribution from her side down the line.
Win-win
for Comey. Brilliant! At one stroke he's made the case to both Clinton and Trump that he would
be the perfect nominee to fill Scalia's slot on SCOTUS.
Nice analysis. My first thought when I read Comey's statement was that he had delivered a huge
passive aggressive fu to some person or persons who had told him what result they wanted. This
was perfect if the goal was to make sure the issue didn't go away politically for Clinton. Much
more effective than delivering a pro indictment message that would be ignored quietly.
Come on! Team D will not nominate Bernie under any circumstances.
If HRC were to die today, Team D would shove Biden into the nomination or trot out Kerry or
even Al Gore if they must, but Bernie is a threat that must be dealt with.
I would argue that the very fact that Comey issued a public opinion on prosecution (completely
outside the FBI remit) should be clear evidence of bias and invalidate their investigation and
his statements on the basis they were prejudiced. A clever counsel could, in fact, use this as
a defence if HRC is indeed tried. Comey, like Lynch, should have been recused. There is bias written
all over this entire debacle.
The true smoking gun will be the Clinton Foundation, variously described by others as a
fraud, a giant slush fund,or a private criminal hedge fund. Just the optics of the pay-for-play
circumstances of arms deals, corporate takeovers, mineral concessions, etc. should be more than
sufficient to empanel a Grand Jury. Less than $1billion of the $4billion raised for Haiti's earthquake
relief effort was ever spent. Where's the rest? Remember the commercials? Poppy Bush and Bill
sitting side by side pleading for money.
My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse or will,
The ship is anchor'd safe and sound, its voyage closed and done
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won:
Exult O shores, and ring O bells!
But I with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
Oh Captain! My Captain!
One more sabre to the torso of democracy. How many more can we ThePeople endure and survive?
>looking for who has done the kind of harm deserving of punishment, as opposed to looking for
who violated the law - precedes the prosecution itself.
This is a global takeaway from this article. I always hated the second "civil" prosecution
of OJ Simpson almost as much as I hated OJ himself – the ability to keep bringing somebody "bad"
to trial until something sticks is exactly what double-jeopardy is supposed to prevent.
Having covered the second OJ trial, I can say only this in its defense: the two trials asked
juries to rule on two different questions. The first trial asked the jury whether the state had
proved its case against Simpson beyond a reasonable doubt. The second asked the jury who was responsible
for the killings of Brown and Goldman. Both juries, imho, answered correctly.
This article doesn't explain why a punishment such as the one given to Petraeus was not considered
by Comey or the DOJ. Petraeus was an elite insider who was not a spy and did not threaten the
state, yet he still received a minor punishment so as not to delegitimatize the legal system and
in order to give at least a minimal impression of fairness. Since Comey said it was possible -
and most experts say very possible - that foreign governments read Hillary's emails, she may have
caused significant damage to the US national interest over four years. Therefore even a loyal
elite could expect to be at least fined for such gross negligence. Why wouldn't a fine and a reprimand
and/or temporary loss of security clearance be normal even for a loyal DC insider? This suggests
that the power of the Clinton Machine and its real-world ability to deliver retribution was the
deciding factor in the lack of any suggestion of indictment. Comey surely wants to keep his job.
The article also fails to deal with the fact that Comey mistakenly claimed that only one person
had ever been prosecuted under the 1917 Espionage Act. This is clearly not the case, and you list
some of those prosecuted. There have also been several other convictions, including US vs. McGuinness
in 1992 (see Andrew C. McCarthy, "Military Prosecutions Show That A Gross Negligence Prosecution
Would Not Unfairly Single Out Mrs. Clinton" National Review (7/7/2016), CIA director John Deutch
in 1997 (pardoned by Bill Clinton), James Hitselberger (who carried classified documents off his
naval base in 1997 and simply kept them), and Jason Brezler, a Marine Major who sent classified
information about a dangerous Afghan mayor in order to warn a colleague in 2014 (he is now appealing
his conviction based on Comey's criteria). Also please see Jared Beck, "Why Hillary Clinton's
Emails Matter: A Legal Analysis" (6/6/2016): Beck lists 4 convictions under 793(f) alone. Also
see Beck's "Comey's Volley, Or The Indictment That Wasn't" (7/11/2016). You also need to deal
with the question of why Comey ignored the obvious fact that Hillary willfully and knowingly broke
State Department rules in setting up the private server and therefore knew she was endangering
security. The fact that Comey gave a false number of prosecutions under s. 793 and avoided mention
of willful, knowing acts by Hillary suggests his decision to oppose indictment was a political
decision, not a legal decision.
The article also fails to deal with the theory that Comey, taking into account various evidence,
such as his talks with DOJ attorneys and the fact that Lynch agreed to meet Bill Clinton, decided
that that there was no possibility that the Democrat-staffed DOJ would indict Hillary. Therefore
Comey decided to make the best of a difficult situation by giving a two-part speech that first
laid out reasons why Hillary could be indicted and then explained that it was not "reasonable"
to indict her. "Reasonable" is of course a legal term, but it also covers a variety of meanings,
including political motives. Do you reject this theory, or were you just unaware of it?
Seriously? Go back and see what Petraeus did and admitted to and what Clinton did and did not
admit to and then analyze what you said. You have not proven intent in Clinton's case. You have
a specious argument going on here.
Stop this. You are just plain wrong. You are not an attorney and you are out of your depth.
Go read the link I provided in my into and the rebuttal to your comment above.
I don't know why everyone seems to be ignoring that she destroyed evidence, 30,000 e-mails,
when she knew the investigation was zeroing in on her. Her claim that they were ALL about personal
matters is totally suspect considering how much the Foundation received during that period and
the global events that transpired.
Say the 30,000 emails were private. Taking a very liberal assumption that she only spent 10
minutes ((read and respone – just 10 minutes – I really am bending over backwards)) on each, that
means "private" email time took 5,000 hours. In 4 years, a government employee officially is suppose
to put in 8, 348 hours. So more than half the time was spent on private emails???
Now, for those who say that maybe some of these emails were done after hours .I say why weren't
they ALL done after hours? – On her own home private computer???
WHAT was so damn urgent about those yoga pants???? (or does Goldman Sachs demand instant gratification???)
I mean, the Secretary of State has time from her O SO BUSY schedule for all this private emailing .?????
HMMMM what president said he was SO, SO, SO busy he never would have time for a hummer in the
oval office?????
Alex Jones (yes, I admit to being a fan, albeit less than totally devoted -and I can't stand
his heavy metal bumper music) has contracted to have airplanes towing "Hillary For Prison" banners
over both the repug and dem conventions. I'm interested in seeing: (1) if these planes are even
allowed in the air space by the relevant authorities, and (2) if they do fly, will there be any
press coverage whatsoever. Jones already had his first contractor cancel, but his second aerial
contractor apparently intends to go through with it.
Optimader, TFR applies to prez and veep--the airplane guy has stated they won't be able to
fly on the last day of the dem convention, when Obama and/or Biden will be there. The other days
should be OK, in his opinion.
OK, just today the FAA announce TFR for 10 nautical miles around both convention sites. Just
the feds shutting down freedom of speech for your protection.
In the grand scheme probably ok by me. Someone could drop a Cessna Caravan filled with ****
and make a real mess of it. Some employees might get killed .
Yes, well I hope that was all theraputic for GP, dont really need any more than the bold print.
-HRC admits what she was doing;(parsing modivation is not relevant)
-She knowingly has (is?) engaged in a series of illegal activities; (Everyone at the SofS dept
down to secretaries were explicitly classroom trained how to appropriately handle anything that
is gov info (including *.gov) and signed off on it. Those records exist
-Her employees knowingly engaged with her in illegal activities (conspiracy, all premeditated);
-HRC has serially lied about her activities, under oath or not, a pattern of knowingly trying
to hide criminal behaviour;
-Everyone involved who took an oath of office violated said oath;
-The last one arguably applies to Comey as well. Comey concedes that his investigation confirmed
the nuts and bolts of what HRC and her conspirators did yet he has attempted to intervene in the
legal process in an unprecedented and illegal manner; (it doesnt matter what he thinks, descretion
on prosecution is above his pay grade)
-If Comey's interview with HRC was infact not peformed under oath, you can probably take that
deerpath into the woods on Comey as well; (is that normal procedure with a perp, no less when
it is well established criminal activity has and probably still IS occurring – as a minimum she
is still trying to coverup felonies allegations).
This I confirmed in less than one beer floating in a pool.
Another big difference is whether or not the higher ups have a social relation with the accused.
If they have never even met the accused, they have no personal feelings about ruining the life
of the accused and the lives of the relatives of the accused. If they have socialized with the
accused and are in the same social class as the accused, they can believe the accused is such
a nice person that the accused does not deserve severe punishment.
One of the amazing sub-texts to all of this is the secrecy that covers what should be public
information. After all, Hillary did use a very public server to do her "business" as SoS. It should
be understood that such information as she had on it (in spite of her obvious goal of keeping
it secret from the Department, a really ludicrous attempt, given the spying ability of today's
governments and hackers) was public information to be seen by the citizens of this country, since
she was, and will be as President, a public EMPLOYEE
This is a case of straight-forward, audacious corruption of the US judicial system.
Comey claims that a "reasonable" prosecutor would not indict Clinton; and in the next breath
insists that a "reasonable" prosecutor would savagely indict anyone else who committed the same
acts as Clinton. And furthermore that the "intent" defense would never stand.
What more needs to be said?
The Clintons operate with full immunity. Always have, always will.
Let's say Comey and Lynch get together and agree that Clinton should be indicted. That's
fine, but what, they ask, are the chances be of having a fair trial in a reasonable timeframe
(i.e. before a Clinton inauguration made one meaningless)? What are the chances of it not turning
into a highly politicized media circus? The answer of course is zero.
The (perhaps not so) obvious solution to this would be to turn it over to the House, where
the matter would be handled via impeachment. Instead of being halted by inauguration, and indictment
would be triggered by one, and of course, impeachment by its very definition is meant to be a
political (and media) event.
Sure, it would be messy, but how would a criminal indictment be any less so. Hell, Clinton
could even pardon herself with a criminal indictment, so impeachment isn't merely an option, it
is the only option that would even have a chance of functioning as it was supposed to.
So that's what (I believe) Comey and Lynch agreed upon. Send it to the House, and let the political
process handle it.
Lynch did not agree to turn it over to the House. We will find out what she receives if Clinton
makes it to the White House. I expect her to either remain as AG or go into lobbying with a hefty
pay raise.
I also do not think that Clinton will win the White House. Republicans control important battle
ground states and they will either help Trump steal the election if necessary or prevent Clinton
from stealing the election if she is behind. Clinton only beat Sanders by rigging the electronic
voting machines. I do not expect her to get away with that in states controlled by Republican
governors.
Jill Stein and Gary Johnson take more support from Clinton than Trump. Many Millennials
or 35 and under will either go with Stein or Johnson. It may be enough to keep her out of the
White House.
Trump can win because he is a brilliant marketer (or at least maintaining and enhancing his
own brand) and it appears that he is more under control. Clinton's negatives will only increase
as the House investigates Clinton for perjury followed by the debates where Trump will tear apart
Clinton's record whenever they attempt to attack Trump on Trump U, Molestation, or outsourcing.
The latter is a cakewalk. The Clinton's crafted the rules that Trump used. He was playing the
game and they wrote the rules. How on Earth do they think that Trump will allow that line of attack
to stick to him.
I really go side tracked. Clinton passed on information to her husband and son in law. Her
son in law received information about Greece as his hedge fund was entering the Greek market.
She passed along information for private gain which is corruption but since this information was
classified it was also espionage just not between states.
KING HENRY V
We judge no less. Uncle of Exeter,
Enlarge the man committed yesterday,
That rail'd against our person: we consider
it was excess of wine that set him on;
And on his more advice we pardon him.
SCROOP
That's mercy, but too much security:
Let him be punish'd, sovereign, lest example
Breed, by his sufferance, more of such a kind.
KING HENRY V
O, let us yet be merciful.
CAMBRIDGE
So may your highness, and yet punish too.
GREY
Sir,
You show great mercy, if you give him life,
After the taste of much correction.
And then there was Hillary:
"I think that in an age where so much information is flying through cyberspace, we all have to
be aware of the fact that some information which is sensitive, which does affect the security
of individuals and relationships, deserves to be protected and we will continue to take necessary
steps to do so." But Comey is no Henry and there is no Exeter to remove Hillary from the room
I will point out that regardless of the motives we impute to Comey his presentation on
July 5 did real damage to HRC. She has lost ground in the polls taken since then and the GOP has
resurrected this issue as a cudgel. Not sure if that makes people around here feel better or not.
Yeah. So a shoutout to the state prosecutor quoted by Yves, I'm with you bro (or sis). My own
brief experience representing the state in the middle of the "Age of Reagan" provided similar
experiences with how things work, although I didn't see a lot of differences at the state and
local level. Looking back, especially on the whole drug war thing, none of us had any excuse for
going along. Props to Yves' correspondent for at least trying. Too many of us didn't. On their
future plans: take it from this ex-lawyer who walked away under his own power while still in good
standing, leaving the law was the best thing I ever did for myself and my family. Godspeed to
you.
I am angry that powerful people don't get indicted for crimes while regular folk do. But I
am equally furious that HRC is the one getting busted based on a fishing expedition born out of
the politicized Benghazi affair. If Benghazi had been about looking into whether or not the CIA
was routing weapons to rebels in Syria, then I might be sympathetic. But no, this was about the
fact that the administration didn't use the right language in describing the attacks and may have
alluded to the incident being caused by a video and was not quick enough to pin the blame on Al
Qaida, even though their saying these things out loud would not have changed anything. In other
words, a tragic event happened that was like countless tragic events that happens under any administration's
watch and the GOP started a fishing trip.
We all know that if we want to bring down any president we just need to start a scandal and
then spawn fishing trips. With the countless interactions a president and their staff has it is
almost certain that they will be caught doing something wrong. Perhaps they will go to a campaign
event while on an official government trip. Should they have skipped the event even though it
would have been very convenient? How many people, from work, have used office phones to call up
the mechanic and arrange for a time to take the car in? We all do it and we are all vulnerable.
And we all know that if we chose to create a massive fishing expedition aimed at Trump we could
find loads of dirt much more serious than what is confronting HRC.
So in light of the context, do we really want to bring HRC down when we know this was the aim
of the GOP all along and we all know that they are sitting on equally reprehensive acts that are
going unpunished? And do we really think this will change things? As if, by punishing HRC we will
somehow make it the norm to bust powerful people for their crimes. To me, that is the crux. If
I believed for half a second that this would somehow set a new standard and that the Justice Department
and the FBI and SEC and so on would actually start prosecuting powerful people for the crimes
we know they are committing then I would say yes, she should be indicted. Lock her up. Lock them
all up! Or, compare her crime to what others really are doing. Lying to get us into wars. CEOs
who break the law to earn billions and get off with a small fine in comparison. How many politicians
knowingly allow our banks to launder money for drug cartels and do nothing while actively throwing
the book at low-level users and dealers? It's rampant. And yet we are hung up on the fact that
HRC sent classified emails on an unsecure server. Emails that probably shouldn't have been classified.
Content of classified emails that should be scrutinized more than their classification status.
How about the fact that we don't question the actions being discussed in those emails because
they would be supported by GOP politicians anyway and they do not want those acts to be the focus
of any investigation? Instead, we pretend that the mode of her communication is some kind of grave
issue and we are willing to prevent her from being president over the guy who willfully scams
people and admits to paying off politicians. We have all been played by the GOP's scandal machine.
Why does everyone presume Clinton would not assist or otherwise allow information to land in
the hands of foreigners?
Seems like the unstated presumption of the article is that she wouldn't sell out the US to a foreigner
under any circumstances ..is that a good bet? Depends on what you mean by *is*?
Answering my own hypothetical, I think the presumption is that the SoS gets to pick who is
a friend, and who is an enemy, of the US. So there is discretion inherent in the job.
But how does oversight of that critical government function work, when Clinton has expended
a remarkable amount of effort over a long period of time to directly undermine FOIA request &
government records requirements? This is what I find appalling - that she had the time and motivation
to scrub out the normal government records necessary to determine whether she is conducting official
government business on behalf of the US, or not. Especially in the "if you are doing nothing wrong,
what do you have to hide?" war on terror era she gets a free pass issued when normal non-governmental
officials living private lives are having every email they've ever sent vacuumed up for evaluation
relative to the national good.
A thought: I am never convinced that any situation of political importance is all on the individual.
I am not convinced of any unitary theories of command and control. In short, it ain't Hilly or
Billy but the outfit they clearly work for: the inheritors of the Rhodes dream of Anglo-Saxon
ownership of the entire world, which is to say, the CFR. If not for the power of the CFR (which
really means the combined power of the oligarchs represented by the CFR) neither of these two
CFR aparatchiks would possess any immunity whatsoever. In the words of Captain Bryant in Bladerunner
they would just be "little people". So it seems almost to me that fretting about which stooge
gets off this time is missing the point because there is always another stooge lined up for the
job in case this one gets picked off. Always.
Another question rarely addressed in these musings on the Clinton case is the accusation that
her motivation for using her own server was to be able to keep any emails she wanted out of FOIA
requests–which due to her deletion of many emails before their delivery to the government seems
to have been accomplished successfully, at least so far. Whether she committed "espionage" or
not, it's widely acknowledged that she was doing dealmaking with the Clinton Foundation while
serving as Secretary of State. Granted, there may not be hard evidence to prove this link but
the circumstantial evidence in terms of donations to the CF and arms deals involving those countries
is extremely damning.
Great story and love the comments. I can see why Bernie Sanders should be endorsing Clinton
in a tactical sense. I will hazard an explanation.
Comey (in his mind) fatally wounded Hillary Clinton without exposing himself as a coverup merchant.
He is wrong of course but he definitely resides in a fool's bubble. Comey handed enough specifics
of evidence to enable a wholesale demolition any credibility HRC had left. The dogs of war are
out baying for her blood as a result.
Bernie Sanders has moved so close as to tactically shut out any third person chance to get
the nomination should the dogs of war take her down. My guess is that Comeys antics will drive
the detestation of HRC harder and deeper to point where she will have little margin with Trump.
Consider that Bernie Sanders is clearly seen to be a solid Democrat supporter (and reformer),
he did not traipse off after the hapless Greens as he has millions more support than they can
muster, he did not maul HRC viciously (its not in his character) through the campaign, he brings
vast numbers of new voters to the game to fulfill the adage that Democrats win when voter turnout
is high.
He is most likely the only Democrat who could pull off a last minute switch as nominee with
any prospect of trouncing Trump. It is a long shot of course but starting a revolution and seeing
it through is a long game necessitating tactics that include persistence against heavy odds, shock,
surprise and tactical positioning in both political space and ethical behavior. I know many are
seriously p!ssed with him but what else is there than catch the momentum and resources that can
position a win now or in three years.
Would an indictment of Clinton over her handling of sensitive information via email forced
the identification and indictment of those who exchanged that information with her?
I was in the Foreign Service for about 30 years. Early in my career, I left classified material
on my desk twice and got caught. It didn't happen again. Fear did its job.
That may not work with senior people who think they are too important. They need to be protected
with effective help or replaced. It really is that simple.
"... "We have been offering Bernie Sanders, basically to sit down and talk and to explore how we might be collaborate, because I can't give away the nomination," ..."
"... "could certainly work with him for all sorts of possibilities, including leading the ticket." ..."
"... "truly saw the light," ..."
"... "the green light, that we do need independent politics." ..."
"... "the revolution is now being stuffed back into a counter-revolutionary party," ..."
"... "leading the charge for Wall Street, for wars and for the Walmart economy." ..."
"... "Bernie said let's forget the past, but I don't think people can forget this movement that they've worked so hard to build," ..."
"... "there were a lot of people who were watching this endorsement in complete and utter disbelief." ..."
"... "I think there are a lot of broken hearts out there among the Bernie campaign. A lot of people who are feeling burned by the Democratic Party, who are not going to simply resign themselves to an election that offers them either a billionaire, one hand, or a cheerleader for the billionaires," she added. ..."
Following Sanders officially dropping out of the race, Stein reminded RT viewers
of her proposal to step aside in order to offer him the nomination in her Green
Party.
"We have been offering Bernie Sanders, basically to sit down and
talk and to explore how we might be collaborate, because I can't give away the
nomination," Stein told RT, stressing that even though she cannot take
the delegates' role of assigning nominations, she "could certainly work
with him for all sorts of possibilities, including leading the ticket."
This could be possible, she said, if Sanders "truly saw the light,"
meaning "the green light, that we do need independent politics."
In Stein's view, "the revolution is now being stuffed back into a counter-revolutionary
party," whose standard bearer, Clinton, she scorns for "leading the
charge for Wall Street, for wars and for the Walmart economy."
"Bernie said let's forget the past, but I don't think people can forget
this movement that they've worked so hard to build," Stein said, adding
that on Tuesday "there were a lot of people who were watching this endorsement
in complete and utter disbelief."
.... ... ...
Sanders supporters have taken to social media in a stern backlash against
the former Democratic presidential candidate.
"They also can't forget Hillary Clinton's record, which is very much the
opposite of what they have been working for the past year," Stein says.
"I think there are a lot of broken hearts out there among the Bernie
campaign. A lot of people who are feeling burned by the Democratic Party,
who are not going to simply resign themselves to an election that offers
them either a billionaire, one hand, or a cheerleader for the billionaires,"
she added.
She says that after primaries in California where "it became clear that the
Democratic Party was really shutting [Sanders] out," her Green Party began to
see people's interest surge.
"We are seeing that now, in the last 24 to 36 hours as well, as people realize
that the game is over," Stein said.
@MajorCallowayLeader
Well, now it's Stein or Trump - time will tell.
Sanders is the worst kind of turncoat.
How can he possibly support the Laughing Butcher of Libya? He must have
been a lost soul to begin with, or sold it long ago.
"... In late April I was among the 25 Vermonters who occupied Congressman Bernie Sanders' Burlington office to protest his support of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia and the ongoing war against Iraq. Calling ourselves the "Instant Antiwar Action Group," we decided to bring our outrage at Bernie's escalating hypocrisy directly to his office, an action that resulted in 15 of us being arrested for trespass. ..."
"... Dissident Voices ..."
"... Despite his own claims, Sanders has not been an antiwar leader. . . . His hawkish [stance] drove one of his key advisers, Jeremy Brecher, to resign from his staff. Brecher wrote in his resignation letter, "Is there a moral limit to the military violence you are willing to participate in or support?" ..."
"... Dissident Voices ..."
"... Under the Bush regime, Sanders' militarism has only grown worse. While he called for alternative approaches to the war on Afghanistan, he failed to join the sole Democrat, Barbara Lee, to vote against Congress' resolution that gave George Bush a blank check to launch war on any country he deemed connected to the September 11 attacks. ..."
"... After thousands of people are killed in the World Trade Center and Pentagon, President George Bush and Congress declared war on Afghanistan. Sanders joined the bandwagon and voted to adopt the joint resolution that authorized the President to use the United States Armed Forces against anyone involved with the attacks of September 11th, 2001 and any nation that harbors these individuals. ..."
"... While Sanders voted against the original authorization to use military force against Iraq, he followed that vote with several subsequent votes authorizing funding of that war and the debacle in Afghanistan. ..."
What also stands out in the above criticism is that Sanders, seeking the
Democratic nomination as a Tea Party of the Left outlier, has a long-standing
history of supporting presidential military forays: anathema to aggressive
progressives.
In 1999, Congressman Sanders signed onto President Bill Clinton's military
interventions into Kosovo. Peace activists crashed his Burlington, VT Congressional
Office. One of the protesters commented on
the Liberty Union Party website :
In late April I was among the 25 Vermonters who occupied Congressman
Bernie Sanders' Burlington office to protest his support of the NATO bombing
of Yugoslavia and the ongoing war against Iraq. Calling ourselves the "Instant
Antiwar Action Group," we decided to bring our outrage at Bernie's escalating
hypocrisy directly to his office, an action that resulted in 15 of us being
arrested for trespass.
Dissident Voices blasted Sanders not just for cozying up with
the Democratic Party, but war authorizations throughout his tenure in the
House of Representatives.
Despite his own claims, Sanders has not been an antiwar leader. .
. . His hawkish [stance] drove one of his key advisers, Jeremy Brecher,
to resign from his staff. Brecher wrote in his resignation letter, "Is there
a moral limit to the military violence you are willing to participate in
or support?"
Under the Bush regime, Sanders' militarism has only grown worse.
While he called for alternative approaches to the war on Afghanistan, he
failed to join the sole Democrat, Barbara Lee, to vote against Congress'
resolution that gave George Bush a blank check to launch war on any country
he deemed connected to the September 11 attacks.
Indeed,
Barbara
Lee (D-CA) was the lone vote against granting this extended power to
President Bush. Sanders joined with both parties on this issue. Of course.
While Presidential candidate Sanders
has
relaunched his speech on the House floor opposing the War on Iraq in
2002,
Counterpunch has already exposed Sanders' connections with
Bush 43's military ventures:
After thousands of people are killed in the World Trade Center and
Pentagon, President George Bush and Congress declared war on Afghanistan.
Sanders joined the bandwagon and voted to adopt the joint resolution that
authorized the President to use the United States Armed Forces against anyone
involved with the attacks of September 11th, 2001 and any nation that harbors
these individuals.
And then:
While Sanders voted against the original authorization to use military
force against Iraq, he followed that vote with several subsequent votes
authorizing funding of that war and the debacle in Afghanistan.
Sanders has followed a pattern of voting against initial efforts to expand
government resources into the War on Terror, then voted for funding them
afterwards.
The Democratic Party's 2016 Presidential bench is a clown-car of political
dysphoria. From Hillary Clinton's early yearning for Republican Barry Goldwater,
to Lincoln Chafee's former GOP US Senator status, and Jim Webb's service
in the Reagan Administration, now left-wing partisans can argue that "Weekend
at Bernie" Sanders
is right-wing warmonger .
Sanders has spent a lot of time and energy convincing voters that Clinton had
no place in the Oval Office.
The following are just a few examples.
1 – "Are you qualified to be President of the United States when
you're raising millions of dollars from Wall Street whose greed, recklessness
and illegal behavior helped to destroy our economy?" – Philadelphia rally,
April 2016.
However, Sanders may be singing a different tune when he is back in Philadelphia
for the Democratic National Convention. His change of heart Tuesday included
telling the audience: "I have come here to make it as clear as possible as to
why I am endorsing Hillary Clinton and why she must become our next president."
2 – "I proudly stood with the workers. Secretary Clinton stood
with the big money interests" – Youngstown, Ohio March 14
Sanders has frequently attacked Clinton's use of Super PACs and potential
interest from elite banks. While the former secretary of state has been endorsed
by many unions, such as the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees,
Sanders' speech swapped that rhetoric for something a little more flattering.
In his endorsement speech, he said: "Hillary Clinton understands that we
must fix an economy in America that is rigged and that sends almost all new
wealth and income to the top one percent."
3 – "Do I have a problem, when a sitting Secretary of State and
a Foundation ran by her husband collects many millions of dollars from foreign
governments, governments which are dictatorship… um yeah, do I have a problem
with that? Yeah I do."
Sanders passionately attacked the Clinton Foundation in June, calling its
reception of money from foreign governments such as Saudi Arabia a "conflict
of interest." However, on Tuesday he told the audience that Clinton "knows that
it is absurd that middle-class Americans are paying an effective tax rate higher
than hedge fund millionaires, and that there are corporations in this country
making billions in profit while they pay no federal income taxes in a given
year because of loopholes their lobbyists created."
4 – "She was very reluctant to come out in opposition. She is running
for president. She concluded it was a good idea to oppose the TPP, and she did."
Clinton's slow opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) raised the
ire of both Sanders and his supporters. Perhaps through intense negotiations
to make Clinton's campaign more progressive, he is now willing to focus more
on Clinton's interior economy, saying, "She wants to create millions of new
jobs by rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure – our roads, bridges, water
systems and wastewater plants."
5 – "Well, I don't think Hillary Clinton can lead a political revolution"
Commenting on Clinton's potential to carry the torch for the political revolution
he claimed he was spearheading, Sanders lacked faith in her ability to make
the changes he deemed necessary back in June, when he was on CBS's "Face the
Nation."
However, perhaps through negotiating the terms of his endorsement, Clinton's
platform sounds more and more like Sanders' when he talks about it. Describing
new platforms such as lowering student debt and making free education attainable
without accruing massive amounts of debt, along with expanding the use of generic
medicine and expanding community health centers all sound like shades of Sanders.
6 – "When you support and continue to support fracking, despite
the crisis that we have in terms of clean water… the American people do not
believe that that is the kind of president that we need to make the changes
in America to protect the working families of this country."
Back in an April debate, many voters were frustrated when Clinton gave a
lengthy, difficult explanation about her stance on fracking. Sanders, a longtime
opponent of hydraulic fracturing.
However, since the CNN Democratic Debate, Sanders and Clinton may have both
shifted their positions on the matter that was once clear cut for the senator
from Vermont.
According to Sanders, "Hillary Clinton is listening to the scientists who
tell us that if we do not act boldly in the very near future there will be more
drought, more floods, more acidification of the oceans, more rising sea levels."
7 – "When this campaign began, I said that we got to end the starvation
minimum wage of $7.25, raise it to $15. Secretary Clinton said let's raise it
to $12 ... To suddenly announce now that you're for $15, I don't think is quite
accurate."
At the same CNN debate in Brooklyn, Sanders hammered on Clinton's inconsistent
stance on raising the minimum wage. While her opinion has shifted from debate
to debate, it seems that Sanders' has as well.
"She believes that we should raise the minimum wage to a living wage," Sanders
said, without specifying what the minimum wage would be increased to under her
more progressive campaign.
8– "Almost all of the polls that… have come out suggest that I
am a much stronger candidate against the Republicans than is Hillary Clinton."
Sanders might be eating crow for this one. His entire endorsement speech
often focused on the party's need to defeat presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump.
Throughout the speech, Sanders contrasted the new and improved Clinton strategy
that includes more of Sanders' talking points with those from Trump.
Sanders went as far as to place the importance of the election on keeping
Trump away from the Supreme Court, saying, "If you don't believe this election
is important, take a moment to think about the Supreme Court justices that Donald
Trump will nominate, and what that means to civil liberties, equal rights and
the future of our country."
9 – "[Super predators] was a racist term and everybody knew it
was a racist term."
Clinton's involvement with the criminal justice reform of the 1990s that
contributed to the mass incarceration has frequently been a contentious point
in this election. In 1996, she went on to warn the public about the existence
of "super predators," or children with "no conscience, no empathy, we can talk
about why they ended up that way, but first we have to bring them to heel."
However, both Clinton and Sanders have a track record of working with the
civil rights movements, and now Sanders may not be so quick to put Clinton and
racist in the same sentence.
"Hillary Clinton understands that our diversity is one of our greatest strengths,"
he said Tuesday.
* This is the
topper, on the whole email
server issue
-
Interesting (and inconvenient) fact:
Hillary (while Sec. of State) forced the
resignation, in June of 2012, of
US Ambassador
to Kenya J. Scott Gration
, (get this) after
the Inspector General found that he
was using an
unauthorized (personal) email account to conduct
official government business
… sound familiar?!?
I guess the '
Queen
' is exempt.
Source: Washington Post (hardly a conservative
newspaper) June 29, 2012
viablanca
@GP Russell well yeah,
even her dumbest, I mean most loyal followers know she is a
living double standard
mryummie
65% of americans (across the board) dont trust hillary........lmao
"... These three groups comprise much, but certainly not all, of what many of us refer to as the "status quo." These crony capitalists, corrupt legislators and their media gatekeepers have been absolutely instrumental in creating the wretched, lawless and disintegrating socio-economic fabric that anyone with an open mind can clearly see around us. As such, it comes as no surprise to me that Trump has now taken the lead in two swing states, and is tied in a third. Actually, that's not entirely true, I am pretty surprised about Florida. ..."
"... All indications are that both Gary Johnson and Jill Stein will be on the ballot in a majority of states, so what does this mean for the general election? I'll let you come to your own conclusions. ..."
"... The American public is far more pissed off than even you'd like to admit. Part of the reason you refuse to admit it is that this reality is truly terrifying. You'd have to acknowledge that people are so upset, they so want to blow up the status quo, that they'd even vote for the buffoon Trump to do it. While I'm not 100% sure we're there yet, we're much closer than most people care to ad ..."
"... To many, Trump is no Buffoon, but right on target in so many ways. And that includes showing no respect for the Politically Correct world we're supposed to bow to. Trump is the Titty Twister MSM and Status Quo truly deserve. ..."
We are living in an era of justified general disgust. While this disgust manifests itself in all
sorts of unproductive ways, the root cause is completely and entirely justified. People see so-called
"elites" as the cause of their suffering and they are correct in that assessment. When I say elites,
I refer to people who are in charge of crafting our public policy (politicians), those who bribe
them (oligarchs) and the pundits who defend them (the mainstream media).
These three groups comprise much, but certainly not all, of what many of us refer to as the
"status quo." These crony capitalists, corrupt legislators and their media gatekeepers have been
absolutely instrumental in creating the wretched, lawless and disintegrating socio-economic fabric
that anyone with an open mind can clearly see around us. As such, it comes as no surprise to me that
Trump has now taken the lead in two swing states, and is tied in a third. Actually, that's not entirely
true, I am pretty surprised about Florida.
...
All indications are that both Gary Johnson and Jill Stein will be on the ballot in a majority
of states, so what does this mean for the general election? I'll let you come to your own conclusions.
What really surprised me today is the continued cluelessness of even the somewhat enlightened,
celebrated thinkers out there. In this case, I'm referring to Robert Reich, who I applaud
for having done some very good work which I have specifically highlighted on these pages. As such,
I was stunned to see the following tweet from him earlier today (my response included).
How is it possible? Are we watching the same race?
Hillary Clinton is the nominee. That's how it's possible. https://t.co/7gfZdnnU22
Robert Reich gets it more than most, yet still harbors an enormous blindspot.
How is that? First, I think that most of his conversations in everyday life are with people from
deep within the "status quo." As such, he's having discussions within an echo chamber of incompetent
and corrupt people. The ones who aren't incompetent or corrupt are simply in a state of complete
denial as to the reality around them.
Here's the thing Robert. The American public is far more pissed off than even you'd like to
admit. Part of the reason you refuse to admit it is that this reality is truly terrifying. You'd
have to acknowledge that people are so upset, they so want to blow up the status quo, that they'd
even vote for the buffoon Trump to do it. While I'm not 100% sure we're there yet, we're much closer
than most people care to ad
Supernova Born •Jul 13, 2016 5:45 PM
If you're crooked and corrupt and a crony capitalist, Hillary is your pick.
The MSM is all of the above.
Supernova Born -> d eforce •Jul 13, 2016 5:53 PM
Goldman Sachs loves Hillary.
Comcast/NBC loves Hillary (they did the polls in question).
Looney -> Supernova Born •Jul 13, 2016 5:56 PM
Here's a "What if?" scenario…
1. Hillary is nominated
2. Her poll numbers drop to single-digits
3. The DNC starts panicking and…
4. She goes to Dallas to mow a… strike that… THE green knoll.
I betcha, the demented Joey Biden's paradrop is still an option for the Libs. I think? ;-)
Bumpo
Sounds like the writer doesn't "get it" either. To many, Trump is no Buffoon, but right
on target in so many ways. And that includes showing no respect for the Politically Correct
world we're supposed to bow to. Trump is the Titty Twister MSM and Status Quo truly deserve.
mofio -> macholatte •Jul 13, 2016 7:20 PM
Whether we like it or not, we're about to get our first female POTUS. http://bit.ly/1p1jKnr
MalteseFalcon -> jcaz •Jul 13, 2016 9:00 PM
The MSM has two missions:
1. keep Hitlery in the game.
2. keep you watching the MSM.
So the election will be nip and tuck right up to the landslide for Trump announced on election
night.
The story for the day after the election?
How did our models get this so wrong?
drendebe10 -> mofio •Jul 13, 2016 8:27 PM
Wutta complete and total fukjob that the first black and the eventual first woman
presidents are two of the most despicable humans on the face of the earth.
"I am the democrat party's worst nightmare. A thinking black man." Charles Ramsey in his book
Dead Give Away. Evidently he may be only one of a handful.
Malvern Joe
There is no media anymore. The Washington Post is run by Amazon. Comcast is run by GE. CNN
is the NWO. And Fox is Fox.
jeff montanye -> Malvern Joe •Jul 13, 2016 10:36 PM
comcast and ge once owned nbc jointly however comcast bought out ge in 2013.
but your point is well taken. abc is walt disney, cbs is viacom, and all of the big six but
fox have zionist jews as ceo's. fox's rupert murdoch is a zionist but, apparently, not a jew.
from wiki:
The Big Six[76] Media Outlets Revenues (2014)[77]
Comcast NBCUniversal (a joint venture with General Electric from 2011 to 2013), NBC and
Telemundo, Universal Pictures, Focus Features, 26 television stations in the United States
and cable networks USA Network, Bravo, CNBC, The Weather Channel, MSNBC, Syfy, NBCSN, Golf
Channel, Esquire Network, E!, Cloo, Chiller, Universal HD and the Comcast SportsNet
regional system. Comcast also owns the Philadelphia Flyers through a separate subsidiary.
$69 billion
The Walt Disney Company Holdings include: ABC Television Network, cable networks ESPN,
the Disney Channel, A&E and Lifetime, approximately 30 radio stations, music, video game,
and book publishing companies, production companies Touchstone, Marvel Entertainment,
Lucasfilm, Walt Disney Pictures, Pixar Animation Studios, the cellular service Disney
Mobile, Disney Consumer Products and Interactive Media, and theme parks in several
countries. Also has a longstanding partnership with Hearst Corporation, which owns
additional TV stations, newspapers, magazines, and stakes in several Disney television
ventures. $48.8 billion
News Corporation* Holdings include: the Fox Broadcasting Company; cable networks Fox
News Channel, Fox Business Network, Fox Sports 1, Fox Sports 2, National Geographic, Nat
Geo Wild, FX, FXX, FX Movie Channel, and the regional Fox Sports Networks; print
publications including the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post; the magazines
Barron's and SmartMoney; book publisher HarperCollins; film production companies 20th
Century Fox, Fox Searchlight Pictures and Blue Sky Studios. As of July 2013, News
Corporation was split into two separate companies, with publishing assets and Australian
media assets going to News Corp, and broadcasting and media assets going to 21st Century
Fox.[78] $40.5 billion ($8.6 billion News Corp and $31.9 billion 21st Century Fox)
Time Warner Formerly the largest media conglomerate in the world, with holdings
including: CNN, the CW (a joint venture with CBS), HBO, Cinemax, Cartoon Network/Adult
Swim, HLN, NBA TV, TBS, TNT, truTV, Turner Classic Movies, Warner Bros., Castle Rock, DC
Comics, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, and New Line Cinema. $22.8 billion
Viacom Holdings include: MTV, Nickelodeon/Nick at Nite, VH1, BET, Comedy Central,
Paramount Pictures, and Paramount Home Entertainment. $13.7 billion
CBS Corporation Holdings include: CBS Television Network and the CW (a joint venture
with Time Warner), cable networks CBS Sports Network, Showtime, TVGN; 30 television
stations; CBS Radio, Inc., which has 130 stations; CBS Television Studios; book publisher
Simon & Schuster. $13.8 billion
Seek_Truth -> macholatte •Jul 13, 2016 9:35 PM
I live in Pennsylvania.
I do business in PA, MD, DE, VA and DC.
Out of hundreds of contacts that I do business with, NOT ONE is voting for Hellary.
All Trump.
That's my experience.
Spigot -> European American •Jul 13, 2016 7:42 PM
Oh, I'm with you on that sentiment.
The reason they are flooding the media with fake polls and fake news showing The Beast ahead
of Trump all the time is to provide cover for the intense voter fraud campaign they will be
mounting. I believe they will continue AND increase the reporting of fraudulent
disinformation, and saturate the media with this effluent as a means to legitamize their voter
fraud results if it does swing the election to The Beast.
Personally, I believe there is so much dirt to be revealed on The Beast that those who can't
stomach voting for Trump will simply not go to the polls.
Dabooda -> NoDebt •Jul 13, 2016 7:05 PM
As long as we vote using programmable voting machines, the election will go to the most
connected and corrupt. The courts that judge fair play or foul -- likewise. Quotes from Stalin
and Mark Twain are apropos:
Joseph Stalin - 'Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything.'
Mark Twain - 'If voting made any difference they wouldn't let us do it.'
Quick -> NoDebt •Jul 13, 2016 9:10 PM
This is posturing by the oligarchy. Since there is only one candidate to tow the oligarchy
line, Hitlery, they have to pull all the stops and skew poll results wildly to make the 'Fixed
Diebold machines' look reasonable in the coming fixed election.
You really think BarryO won the vote in 2012. Even duchbag mittens would have won in an
unfixed election.
Yeah, brexit taught me loads about polls, and to a degree you are right in that they are
propaganda not polls. That said tey are in my view effective, floaters want to associate with
the winning team.
In the whole lead up to brexit I and many were perplexed by the "polls", whenever there was
on of those online instant polls in the press (telegraph/Guardian) asking whether to stay or
go, it always resulted in a 70% plus for Brexit, yet the official polls were neck and neck.
Whenever I couched opinion at work or pub or street, I hardly ever met anyone with any real
fervor to remain, most expressed either a mild or very strong wish to leave. If that MP had
not been murdered, and billions had not been spent by the Government and the EU, I just wonder
what the true result would have been (60/40 minimum), and I think deep down the pollies and
Theresa May now know that.
Beware the polls, they will help in a close run thing, and the Hilderbeasts team know it.
cowdiddly -> August •Jul 13, 2016 8:51 PM
Dude nailed it years ago. The New British FM Boris Johnson once compared Hillary Clinton to
"a sadistic nurse in a mental hospital"
Perimetr -> Looney •Jul 13, 2016 6:41 PM
Rigged polls are necessary
in order to make sense of the rigged vote
sharonsj -> auricle •Jul 13, 2016 7:27 PM
"Diebold is a democrat." That's pretty funny--and pretty stupid--considering the former
owner was responsible for stealing the election for George Bush.
And from Truth-out.org: "See the eye-opening
statistical analysis of vote results from 2008 to 2012 compiled by citizen watchdog team
Francois Choquette and James Johnson. Results showed a highly suspect, so far inexplicable
gain of votes, only in larger precincts, only for Republicans (and in the primaries, only for
Mitt Romney), and only when votes are counted by computers."
You have a computer, use it to learn something.
samsara •Jul 13, 2016 7:22 PM
"...may be seen as injecting additional bias into the results."
Ya think?
They probably got the particular area codes or phone numbers to sample that Facebook execs
said were democrats or pro Bernie or Hillary.
They just want to keep the impression that it's a too close to call race so their Diebold
programmers could work under the radar.
"... The New York Times/CBS survey released on Thursday found that 67 percent of voters believe Clinton is not honest or trustworthy – up from 62 percent last month. The new figure represents the highest percentage in this election cycle. ..."
"... Only 28 percent of voters said they view the Democratic candidate as honest and the number of people saying she is prepared for the job of president dropped from last month. However, half of those polled still believe she's qualified. ..."
The FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton's email scandal has damaged the Democratic candidate's
approval ratings, according to a new poll. The survey found that a majority of voters believe she
cannot be trusted.
The New York Times/CBS
survey released on Thursday found that 67 percent of voters believe Clinton is not honest or
trustworthy – up from 62 percent last month. The new figure represents the highest percentage in
this election cycle.
Only 28 percent of voters said they view the Democratic candidate
as honest and the number of people saying she is prepared for the job of president dropped from last
month. However, half of those polled still believe she's qualified.
Most voters said they believe Clinton did something wrong when she set up a personal server and
email address for work when she served as secretary of state. Forty-six percent believe the move
was illegal, up from 41 percent last month.
Unsurprisingly, most of those critical of Clinton's email practices are associated with the GOP.
Some 78 percent of Republicans believe what she did was illegal, while half of independents expressed
the same sentiment.
Note the NYT was afraid to open comment section for this article :-)
Notable quotes:
"... "Intelligent Bernie supporters will NEVER support her because she stands for everything were fighting against," he said. "Just because Bernie has left our movement does not mean it is over." ..."
"... Despite Hillary's penchant for flip-flopping rhetoric, she's spent decades serving the causes of the Wall Street, war, & Walmart economy. ..."
Daniel Whitfield, of Discovery Bay, Calif., insisted that the political revolution Mr. Sanders
had championed did not have to end just because the senator had given up. However, he said that
voting for Mrs. Clinton was not an option.
"Intelligent Bernie supporters will NEVER support her because she stands for everything were
fighting against," he said. "Just because Bernie has left our movement does not mean it is over."
... ... ...
Some of the lesser-known candidates running for president sought to capitalize on the moment.
Jill Stein, the Green Party's presidential nominee, sent out a barrage of Twitter posts as Mr.
Sanders made his endorsement arguing that Mrs. Clinton's policies were antithetical to a liberal
progressive agenda.
Dr. Jill Stein
✔ @DrJillStein
Despite Hillary's penchant for flip-flopping rhetoric, she's spent decades serving the causes
of the Wall Street, war, & Walmart economy.
Gov. Gary Johnson
✔ @GovGaryJohnson
If joining Sen. Sanders in the Clinton Establishment isn't a good fit, there IS another
option... #afterthebern
For those who believed that Mr. Sanders still had a chance to snatch the nomination at the
convention in Philadelphia, it was too soon after his endorsement to consider alternatives. It
would take time for the mix of anger and disbelief to subside.
"You chose her over us," Jessica Watrous Boyer, of Westerly, R.I., wrote on Mr. Sanders's
Facebook page, lamenting that he had broken his promise to take the fight to the convention.
"Truly shocked and saddened by this."
Some of Bernie Sanders' most loyal backers have turned into his biggest bashers on the heels
of his Hillary Clinton endorsement.
The Vermont senator, who slammed Clinton repeatedly during the presidential primary campaign,
offered his unwavering support to the presumptive Democratic nominee at a rally in New Hampshire
Tuesday.
"Hillary Clinton will make a great president and I am proud to stand with her today," he said.
What followed was an avalanche of angry tweets, blogs and other social media posts from those who
had been feeling the 'Bern' -- and now just feel burned.
In New York, Monroe County Sanders activist Kevin Sweeney told the Democrat & Chronicle he's
shifting his donations to Green Party candidate Jill Stein. "A lot of Bernie supporters are
making $27 donations to Jill Stein's campaign today," he said.
Others were more direct, as the hashtag #SelloutSanders and others took off on Twitter....
... ... ...
Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, jumped in on the action.
He tweeted, "Bernie Sanders endorsing Crooked Hillary Clinton is like Occupy Wall Street
endorsing Goldman Sachs. "
brendajc
Bernie supporters.......trump welcomes you
1. We are and have been socialist since FDR....welfare...unemployment ...medicare....social
security. ...,studebt loans....these a3 socialist programs.
nobody wants these socialist programs gone
We just don't want communism
And we want fiscal responsibility.
Come join us.
are122
I sometimes think Bernie was nothing more then a setup or a patsy encouraged to run by the
DNC. With all the "superdelegates" supporting HC, the Bern had to know he virtually had no
chance to win but put on a show anyway. He's suddenly very nice to all those that basically
shafted him in advance.
hotdogsdownhallways
Cannot wait until we find out how much the Clinton Foundation gave him.
From Twitter: Bernie Sanders, We didn't donate $230M to vote for a warmonger with 4 superPACs,
scam charity and $150M speeches who sabotaged your campaign
Notable quotes:
"... Today, you decided to officially express your support for Hillary Clinton in the race for president of the United States. Unlike many, I will not label you a "sellout." Though I'm disappointed in your decision, I would also like to thank you for your contribution to American politics. ..."
"... But I reject the political hive-mind's notion that you had to endorse Hillary. You did not. You've been an independent for decades, refusing to officially associate yourself with a party that you didn't fully believe in. ..."
Today, you decided to officially express your support for Hillary Clinton in the race for
president of the United States. Unlike many, I will not label you a "sellout." Though I'm
disappointed in your decision, I would also like to thank you for your contribution to American
politics.
... ... ...
Like me and many other conservatives, your supporters now stand without a candidate to believe
in. And, like me, they are disappointed in your decision to bow to the pressure exerted by the
political muscle that the Clintons have been flexing for decades. I understand that your arm has
been twisted by every establishment Democrat from the top down...
But I reject the political hive-mind's notion that you had to endorse Hillary. You did
not. You've been an independent for decades, refusing to officially associate yourself with a
party that you didn't fully believe in. Throughout the campaign, you highlighted all of the
problems with your opponent, and even went so far as to declare her "unfit" for the office of the
presidency. You told America that you were starting a political revolution. By its very nature,
though, a revolution refuses to be cowed by the protectors of the status quo. It can concede
temporary defeat in certain battles, sure, but it can't survive if betrayed by its leaders. It is
disingenuous for you to pretend that you will continue your revolution despite your endorsement -
or even worse, imply that Hillary will. I thought you were better than that.
...During your endorsement speech, once more you called out the Wall Street billionaires for
whom you've so often expressed unqualified loathing over the last 14 months. But this time,
something was wrong: There stood, bobbing her head next to you, someone who has made a career out
of selling favors to those very same billionaires. I thought you were someone who put principles
before politics, and that you would never hesitate to stick to your guns, regardless of the
pressure. I guess not. Despite feeling disappointed and deflated, I want to thank you for helping
to rekindle my faith and interest in politics.
... ... ...
Sincerely, Andrew - Andrew Badinelli is an intern at National Review.
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/437758/bernie-sanders-wrong-beliefs-ideologically-principled
"... Hillary Clinton may not be indicted on criminal charges over her handling of classified email, but the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, all but indicted her judgment and competence on Tuesday - two vital pillars of her presidential candidacy - and in the kind of terms that would be politically devastating in a normal election year. ..."
Hillary Clinton may not be indicted on criminal charges over her handling of classified email, but the
F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, all but indicted her judgment and competence on Tuesday - two vital pillars of her presidential
candidacy - and in the kind of terms that would be politically devastating in a normal election year.
... ... ...
To her charge that he is "reckless," Mr. Trump may now respond by citing Mr. Comey's rebuke: that Mrs. Clinton and her team "were
extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information."
To her promises to defend the United States, Mr. Trump may now retort with Mr. Comey's warning that "it is possible that hostile
actors gained access" to Mrs. Clinton's email account and the top secret information it contained.
And to her reproofs about his temperament and responsibility, Mr. Trump may now point to Mr. Comey's finding that "there is evidence
of potential violations of the statutes" on handling classified information - though Mr. Comey said that other factors, like Mrs.
Clinton's intent, argued against criminal charges.
Worst of all was the totality of Mr. Comey's judgment about Mrs. Clinton's judgment.
She is running as a supremely competent candidate and portraying Mr. Trump, in essence, as irresponsible and dangerous. Yet the
director of the F.B.I. basically just called her out for having committed one of the most irresponsible moves in the modern history
of the State Department.
... ... ...
Her clearest selling point - that she, unlike Mr. Trump, can manage challenging relationships with allies and adversaries - has
now been undercut because she personally mismanaged the safeguarding of national security information.
"... "I thought it would be easier to carry just one device for my work and for personal emails instead of two." – 12 March 2015, New York ..."
"... Comey said that Clinton not only used multiple servers but also "used numerous mobile devices to view and send email" using her personal account, undercutting her justification. ..."
"I thought it would be easier to carry just one device for my work and for personal emails
instead of two." – 12 March 2015, New York
Comey said that Clinton not only used multiple servers but also "used numerous mobile devices to
view and send email" using her personal account, undercutting her justification.
"That empowerment must be both economic and political. Workers deserve
to be compensated fairly for their work, and have generous social support
programs to rely upon when economic changes that are out of their control
throw them out of work or force them to accept lower paying jobs.
We should not hesitate to ask those who have gained so much from
globalization and technological change to give something back to those
who have paid the costs of their success."
All this would have been especially great, say, forty or even thirty
years ago.
Of course Bernie Sanders appears to have sold out emerging from a White
House meeting with President Barack Obama vowing to work together with Hillary
Clinton to defeat Donald Trump in November. Bernie would rather endorse
a traitor who has sold her influence as Secretary of State just to save
the Democratic Party. Obama assured Bernie, no doubt, that he would not
allow Hillary to be indicted. And to further rig the game, the State Department
refuses to release her emails until
AFTER the election. But the actual date they gave was
November 31st, 2016, which does not exist since November has only 30 days.
Once she is president, no doubt they will vanish altogether.
It appears that Bernie is betraying all those who supported him. Hillary
will raise $1 billion to buy the White House. That kind of money does not
come from bankers without strings. Wall Street supports Hillary – not Trump.
That says it all. How Bernie can just give up is amazing. What happened
to his "revolution" will never be discussed.
"Text of Bernie Sanders' speech endorsing Hillary Clinton" [MarketWatch].
Lambert here: Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin. The moment had to come,
and now it has come. Will Sanders, in practice, have proven to be a sheepdog?
Will Sanders' endorsement decapitate his movement? To me, the open question
is what actions Sanders voters will take, going forward, beyond the ballot
box, and as organizers. I'm not really sanguine about that, because the
Chicago conference didn't give me confidence the left could unsilo itself,
and distinguish itself, as a single institutional force ready to take power,
from the (neoliberal) liberals (mostly Democrats) and the (neoliberal) conservatives
(some Democrats, mostly Republicans). That said, the Sanders campaign did
more than the left could have expected in its wildest dreams. To the text:
[SANDERS:] I have come here today not to talk about the past but
to focus on the future. That future will be shaped more by what happens
on November 8 in voting booths across our nation than by any other event
in the world. I have come here to make it as clear as possible as to
why I am endorsing Hillary Clinton and why she must become our next
president.
During the last year I had the extraordinary opportunity to speak
to more than 1.4 million Americans at rallies in almost every state
in this country. I was also able to meet with many thousands of other
people at smaller gatherings. And the profound lesson that I have learned
from all of that is that this campaign is not really about Hillary Clinton,
or Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders, or any other candidate who sought
the presidency. This campaign is about the needs of the American people
and addressing the very serious crises that we face. And there is no
doubt in my mind that, as we head into November, Hillary Clinton is
far and away the best candidate to do that.
I'd prefer the position that Clinton hasn't won the nomination until
there's a vote on the convention floor, which I had understood to be the
position of the Sanders campaign.
[SANDERS:] Hillary Clinton understands that we must fix an economy
in America that is rigged and that sends almost all new wealth and income
to the top one percent.
Assumes facts not in evidence.
[SANDERS:] This election is about the grotesque level of income and
wealth inequality that currently exists, the worst it has been since
1928. Hillary Clinton knows that something is very wrong when the very
rich become richer while many others are working longer hours for lower
wages.
Assumes facts not in evidence.
[SANDERS:] I am happy to tell you that at the Democratic Platform
Committee which ended Sunday night in Orlando, there was a significant
coming together between the two campaigns and we produced, by far, the
most progressive platform in the history of the Democratic Party. Our
job now is to see that platform implemented by a Democratic Senate,
a Democratic House and a Hillary Clinton president - and I am going
to do everything I can to make that happen.
Platform as a highly inadequate baseline and a method to hold Clinton's
feet to the fire? Yes. Not negligible, but not much. And
Clinton immediately showed - before the rally! - that she didn't
take it seriously.
[SANDERS:] Hillary Clinton will make an outstanding president and
I am proud to stand with her here today.
I don't see how the institutionalized corruption of both legacy parties
generally and the Clinton Dynasty in particular make any of this possible.
One door closes, another opens…
"'I can't help but say how much more enjoyable this election is going
to be when we are on the same side,' [Clinton] said. "You know what? We
are stronger together!'" [CNN].
Whichever Clinton operative decided to deploy the "stronger together" slogan
shouldn't be expected to have known that it's also a slogan developed by
the military junta in Thailand. But whatever.
"Tuesday's rally drew supporters of Clinton and Sanders, some of whom
chanted 'Bernie' while others chanted 'unity.' Some Sanders supporters left
their seats when Sanders endorsed Clinton. Earlier, when New Hampshire Sen.
Jeanne Shaheen said 'we need to elect Hillary,' she was interrupted by shouts
of 'No!' and chants of "Bernie, Bernie' [USA
Today]. "But there were deafening cheers as Sanders said Clinton would
'make an outstanding president and I am proud to stand with her here today.'"
"The most ringing portion of the endorsement came at the end, with Sanders
bringing up some of the personal reasons why he had chosen to support Clinton.
But even this portion felt a bit lifeless, with Sanders citing Clinton's
intellect and passion on children's issues, and failing to address her integrity,
which he directly challenged during the campaign and which will continue
to be an issue the Republicans attack in the wake of the conclusion of the
FBI's investigation into her email scandal" [Slate].
And what happened here?
Do we have any readers who were on that conference call?
"[I]n a nod to Sanders's successful fundraising efforts that brought
in millions of dollars from small donors, with at one time an average donation
of $27, Clinton's campaign has made $27 an option on its online donor page"
[CNN].
"About 85 percent of Democrats who backed Mr. Sanders in the primary
contests said they planned to vote for her in the general election, according
to a Pew poll released last week. Yet she has struggled to appeal to the
independents and liberals who rallied behind the senator's call for a 'political
revolution' to topple establishment politicians, Mrs. Clinton included"
[New
York Times]. 85% of declared Democrats. Not such a good number from
a third of the electorate.
"I am not voting for Hillary Clinton, regardless of her endorsement by
Bernie Sanders. My decision isn't because of the scandal around her emails
or because of some concern over her character. My reasons are pretty straightforward.
I don't agree with her ideologically" [Eddie S. Glaude,
Time].
The Trail
"The final amendment to the Democratic Party platform was meant to sprinkle
Hillary Clinton's name throughout the document, putting a contentious and
drawn-out primary process to rest in favor of a unified party. It never
came up for a vote" [Bloomberg].
"Despite having the support of both the Clinton and Bernie Sanders campaign
staffs, the amendment hadn't been run by committee members or Sanders supporters
in the audience, some of whom angrily shouted down the language because,
they argued, Clinton isn't the official nominee yet. The moment highlighted
the state of the party after a long weekend of intense debates in Orlando,
Florida, that left some tempers frayed, and extensive back-room policy negotiations
between the two campaigns…."
"On Tuesday, the [Trump and Indiana Governor Mike Pence] will put their
compatibility to the test when they appear together at a rally near Indianapolis,
the latest in a string of public auditions for the running mate role" [RealClearPolitics].
""Hillary Clinton's campaign is vetting James G. Stavridis, a retired
four-star Navy admiral who served as the 16th supreme allied commander at
NATO, as a possible running mate" [New
York Times].
From the Wikipedia entry, which seems to have been written by a Clinton
operative: "Stavridis has long advocated the use of "Smart Power," which
he defines as the balance of hard and soft power taken together. In numerous
articles[17] and speeches, he has advocated creating security in the 21st
century by building bridges, not walls." I mean, come on.
jo6pac
Those that sent money to Bernie please let Lambert and us know if dddc
or dnc ask for $$$$$$. Then may be it will just be a letter from the foundation
asking for $$$$$$$$$$$$.
Roger Smith
I will update should I receive anything. I am curious about the list
as well.
Arizona Slim
I just unsubscribed from Bernie's e-mailing list.
Rick
As did I. I will keep the poster I bought from his campaign as a reminder
of a now passed moment of hope.
cwaltz
The moment hasn't passed unless you were expecting Bernie Sanders to
do all the heavy lifting.
The reality is that each and every person disappointed today should make
a concerted effort to let the DNC know in no uncertain terms did their lying,
cheating and outright rigging of this primary mean that they'll be getting
a vote this November. It also means that each and every person find their
spine and support someone other than the Democratic nominee. Expect to hunker
down for 4 years no matter what because if Clinton or Trump are the nominees
then you can pretty much expect there won't be many benefits for average
Americans.
"... "A Sanders endorsement of Clinton would be the ultimate betrayal of his supporters, especially those of us that poured money into his campaign." ..."
"... "Bernie, if you endorse Hillary Clinton, after is NOW A PROVEN FACT she lied to the American people, then you sir are a FRAUD." ..."
"... "Bernie, endorsing Clinton destroys every point you made and everything you stood for in the race. You are letting the people who supported you down. You made a promise to fight in the end, but instead you are conceding. You are not the elected leader you lead us to believe in. Shame on you." ..."
"Hillary Clinton will make an outstanding president and I am proud to stand
with her here today," Sanders said at the end of the rally.
This proclamation is a far cry from how his stance was a couple months
ago, when he claimed that Clinton wasn't qualified for the presidency.
"I don't believe that she is qualified," Sanders said in a Philadelphia
rally back in April, as reported by thinkprogress.org. "[I]f she is, through
her super PAC, taking tens of millions of dollars in special interest funds.
I don't think that you are qualified if you get $15 million from Wall Street
through your super PAC."
Trump was one of the first to call Sanders a sell-out on Twitter, comparing
his endorsement of "Crooked Hillary Clinton" to Occupy Wall Street endorsing
Goldman Sachs.
"I am somewhat surprised that Bernie Sanders was not true to himself
and his supporters," Trump tweeted. "They are not happy that he is selling
out!"
While some Democrats are happy that the party has seemed to have finally
united, like the Communications Workers of America who have now changed
their endorsement from Sanders to Clinton, other supporters share Trumps
sentiments, feeling outraged and disappointed at Bernie's sudden change
of heart.
"A Sanders endorsement of Clinton would be the ultimate betrayal
of his supporters, especially those of us that poured money into his campaign."
"Bernie, if you endorse Hillary Clinton, after is NOW A PROVEN FACT
she lied to the American people, then you sir are a FRAUD."
"Bernie, endorsing Clinton destroys every point you made and everything
you stood for in the race. You are letting the people who supported you
down. You made a promise to fight in the end, but instead you are conceding.
You are not the elected leader you lead us to believe in. Shame on you."
These are just some of the comments people have been leaving on Sander's
Facebook page, as reported on the Forward Progressives website.
Other supporters have asked him to wait for the Democrats Party convention,
to run in a third-party or to join Jill Stein in the Green Party ticket.
Now that Sanders has endorsed Clinton, Clinton's campaign will most likely
focus on convincing his supporters to join them in their fight for the presidency.
Bernie is anti war, anti Wall St., anti TPP. If that is not a betrayal of his
supporters and his principles what is it then. Endorsing Clinton is like taking
a job at Goldman-Sachs.
So why exactly he endorses her? We still don't know.
The Democrats has good political operatives. There is Barack, the "change-no-change"
"black not for blacks" candidate, and Bernie, The Revolutionary who stands
staunchly behind Goldman Sachs and everything it presents.
Of course the real governing task is delegated to Hillary Clinton and
the "experts" from the banks.
Hey guys. Good job. Just remember: ultimately there is that cliff you're
marching towards.
Why is he not doing as he promised and taking his message and challenge
all the way to the convention? The super delegates are still an play and
I doubt they've even finished counting California...This is very disheartening...
Prepare for eternal war.
I'd like to formally thank Bernie Sanders for endorsing my wife Hillary
today. I know how tough it was for Bernie to stump for her today. Especially
considering Hillary is even more crooked than my 4-inch yogurt slinger.
As many of my young interns know, that's really crooked!
I'd also like to formally apologize to Bernie for all the death threats
and that severed horse's head my guys left in his bed. lol whoops! Ok, gotta
go make another phone call to my good friend Trump now.....
You could just crawl back into your socialist hole and not say anything
Bernie, but no, you're just another fool brought by Clinton because she
needs your votes like she needs air. Congratulations on becoming another
member of the Clinton foundations bankroll
The problem isnt her most recent rhetoric, it is her person, and trusting
to do the things she says (as she has held every side of every position).
The endorsement doesn't fix the problem that we still don't want her...
I think many of us will be looking for at the third party alternatives.
If we give into this lesser of two evils every election cycle, we'll soon
find candidates worse than Trump.
1. Party platforms are consolation bullshit. They mean nothing, especially
when the big money funding the campaign is against the platform. This is
just a political fact.
2. Therefore, Bernie's campaign has not started a revolution, but rather
has dead-ended with a big bowl of nothing.
3. Parties are the vehicles through which policies get pushed and accomplished.
Since it was re-engineered by the Clinton's in the 1990's, the Democratic
Party is like a vehicle with its steering welded to turn right.
4. Therefore the only way to achieve a successful and peaceful political
revolution is to re-engineer the vehicle; and this requires breaking it
down and putting it back together.
In other words, for the sake of progress, the D.N.C. as presently constituted
and managed had to be destroyed.
5. The only way to destroy the D.N.C. would have been to hand Hillary
a defeat on a platter. This would have driven home, in the only way politicians
understand, that progressive Americans will not be played and fooled.
6. The willingness to do this requires strategic fortitude -- a willingness
to think in long term objectives and to endure immediate and temporary inconveniences.
Four years of Trump will not be the "sky-is-falling" disaster the Hillary
Hens are clucking over. Eight years of Hillary will only solidify the grip
corporations, banks and neo-con militarists, have on the country.
7. Bernie should have run as an independent, precisely in order to defeat
Hillary. Only then could a four year hiatus be used to clean out the D.N.C.,
and revitalize it with real progressive blood. Then and only then will progressives
get the "platform" they want. Is four years of Clown Trump worth it? You
bet.
I disagree. Chris Hedges believes that Sanders intended to mislead voters
and intentionally funnel them back to Hillary Clinton under the belief that
they would uncritically support her. That seems to be completely false,
and even if it were true, it's seems he made a terrible sheepdog as many
of us will not support Hillary. The problem was that although he saw no
chance for an independent to win, the Democratic Party is a dead end for
real change as well. I guess we all know that now.
When it comes to intention I guess that I believed that he was genuine
in his attempt to win and bring about change (except on the nation that
cannot be criticised and on foreign policy) but the endorsement of HRC is
another blow for the massive desire to remove these two corporatist parties.
With the DNC having decided to support fracking, settlements etc the
American people (and the world) are in for more of the same, war, privatisation,
alienation of the poor, secret trade deals that give more power to corporations
and environmental destruction etc. etc. etc
"He's lending credibility to a party that is completely corporatized.
He has agreed that he will endorse the candidate, which, unless there
is some miracle, will probably be Hillary Clinton."
You bottled it in the end. Sad. I never liked him much, but in running
as an independent or siding with the Greens he could have showed that he
stands for something. Endorsing Clinton is like taking a job at Goldman-Sachs.
Oh, so he admitted it'd be better to support a lesser evil? How should you
support an evil anyway? How about quietly withdrawing from the race and
not saying anything that violates his own principles? I don't see what that's
difficult to understand myself!
There was never a doubt that Democrats would eventually unite behind whoever
ended up being the nominee. The problem is that all those NON-Democrats
who so passionately supported Bernie will not. He was the real deal, and
our best hope of actually engaging them, expanding our party, and having
the wave election we need to actually get progress done.
I have been actively trying to recruit folks like this into our ranks
for many years now, so trust me when I tell you that we are in very serious
trouble this year. No matter what Bernie says or does, these non-Dems will
not feel the bern for her. We are heading to a low voter turnout election
with two major candidates that have record low net favorability ratings,
and Republicans usually do best in situations like that since they have
the most reliable voting base.
In my book, when you've run against somebody, you must think that guy would
be a bad choice. When you think a person is a bad choice, how come you endorse
that person? Bernie lost my respect (even though he doesn't care)!
F*** this lesser-of-two-evils rubbish. We paid for his campaign, to resist
this criminal and what she represents with every fibre of his body and he's
sold us out. Jill Stein offered him something that could have brought real
change and he sold us out. He is there because of the money and faith we
put in him.
What a turncoat bastard. I am disgusted.
For a vast library of information detailing the many crimes of the ghastly
Clinton crime syndicate, please see the following link.
http://www.arkancide.com
Super delegates have yet to vote, Hillary has not made it past the threshold,
so if Sanders torpedos her, he gets booted out as a Dem nominee by party
rules. So in order to stay to the convention he is doing what he has to.
Has he conceded? No! If Bernie showed and asked me to vote for Hillary
I would tell him no.
At this point, Bernie's endorsement of Hillary does not matter at all. The
genie of his movement is already out of the bottle, and it cannot be put
back in.
The movement never belonged to him, he belongs to the movement, and Bernie
knows it. He knows it even as he pronounces the endorsement. He has played
his enormously important part in that movement through his candidacy and
now he will go back to fighting for the progressive cause from inside the
Democratic party, because that is what he has been doing for twenty years
and before he launched that candidacy. But the forces that he has unleashed
will keep growing and gathering strength on their own.
Same old shit then. The Plutocrats won again and can freely go on
selling 'war for profit' as 'fighting for freedoms.'
With the useful benefit that La Clinton can now swan about on stage draped
in a coat made from the hide of an old leftie.
"We came, we saw we skinned it." And oh how the laughter rang out the entire
length of Wall Street.
So the warmongers and wall street win again. For the moment at least. The
struggle continues. A new front opens under the banner of the Greens. In
the UK the Grassoots on the left now have the whole power of the elite arrayed
against them, with dirty tricks and media lies. The right wing blairites
are using every trick in the book to split our Labouur Movement and remove
our democratically elected Leader Corbyn. We are hanging in. Wish us luck,
American friends! Looks like we are going to need it. No surrender!
There was never any doubt, in any election ever fought in the USA, that
the military-industrial-financial complex would be the winner. They always
are.
The left in the UK are tearing themselves apart Life of Brian
style (how prescient that film was!). It will be generations before they
every wield power in this country, if ever. I'll probably see out my days
under a vicious Tory administration.
It's a shame it has come to this but kind of expected.
Bernie wants to stop Trump now, and he believes that his is the way to
do it. I don't personally this will have the desired effect enough people
despise Clinton, but we will see.
If I was a US citizen and had a vote, I would have thrown my full support
behind Bernie, but this endorsement certainly would not make me vote for
Hillary either (I certainly wouldn't support Trump, I'm not totally insane),
I'd prefer to abstain completely.
Strategic voting is an expression of support for the rigid, corrupt and
self-serving political system that led to self-serving cretins like Trump
and Clinton being among the elite ruling class in the first place.
All it does is prolong the death rattles of the lower orders of society.
Fellow Americans: Our country was demolished by Clinton, and Obama has been
running a kill list for extra judicial killins, and he is the sitting president
under wich a police force appears to be on a rampage to coloured people.
The first black president leading a nation of multiple racist killings.
Do
Not
Ever
Vote
Democrats
Again
The word lie doesnt cover it. The word lying says it doesnt want anything
to do with Democrats. Trump, or any other republican, is a far better bet.
bring back George Bush jr for all I care. Anyone but a Demorcratic president.
Dont do it.
To endorse Hillary Clinton is to be in alliance with a cynical and utterly
corrupt liar who is willing to say anything to get elected. By endorsing
Hillary you, Bernie, have become a part of everything you have been complaining
about. Never mind. It never was about you and your endorsement isn't worth
shit.
After the progressive cause was successively sold out to Goldman Sachs by
Paul Krugman, Gloria Steinem, John Lewis and the Congressional black caucus,
Lena Dunham, Beyonce, George Clooney and Elizabeth Warren (Did I forget
any of the earlier hate figures here?) it was inevitable that Bernie would
ultimately also be revealed as a neoliberal sellout.
Has to be viewed in the context of the global threat of Donald Trump
though
yeah imagine anyone daring to public oppose further neo-conservative
onslaught.
Obviously the man's unhinged and has to be stopped pronto.
fortunately bill kristol, victoria nuland, robert kagan et al are hot on
the case and 100% on board with hillary (& bill) on this
Sanders and Warren are now subsumed into the maw of the Empire of the Exceptionals
and are pledging their loyalty to it. Just like Obama all hopie changie
during campaigns but when the chips are down they show their true colors
as Neoliberal sycophants and support every policy the claimed to oppose.
I for one will never support a now proven corrupt and dishonest career politician.
Sorry Bernie, but the political revolution can never take place within a
party as establishment focused as the Democratic Party. A sad and depressing
time for all real progressives.
Trump is a man whose uncompromising attitude means he'll get even less
done than Obama. He'd be remembered as an ineffective washout of a president,
unable to get anything done and sorely disappointing a lot of voters.
Hillary is a smooth political operator who's in it for her own gain and
will get an awful lot done - just not the things you want her to do. She'll
be hawkish against Russia, interventionist against the Middle East, she'll
throw her full weight behind the establishment in both America and Europe,
and she'll make sure her paymasters at Goldman Sachs aren't disappointed
in her.
I suppose voting for Hillary to stop Trump might be an unavoidable course
of action. But few people realize the danger Hillary represents to the United
States... not because of what she will do, but because of what she won't
do.
Across the Western world, the centre is rapidly crumbling. Without a
significant course correction, it will soon fall and what replaces it is
hard to predict – but I doubt it will be pretty. Austria almost elected
a far right president, the UK voted for Brexit, the GOP nominated Trump.
You're a fool if you think this is the anti-establishment backlash... it's
only the beginning, and these events are just canaries in the mine. The
real backlash is yet to come.
With 4-8 years of a Clinton-led status quo government, resentment will
grow, inequality and hopelessness will increase... and eventually a right
wing demagogue who is much smarter than Trump will see an opportunity and
pounce. I suspect it'll happen right after the next market crash, which
Clinton will do nothing to prevent.
Historically illiterate people are constantly looking out for the "next
Hitler" and so point their finger at the likes of Trump. But that's the
wrong question. Anyone who understands the events that led to Nazism realizes
the true question is who is the next Von Hindenburg . Clinton looks
like a pretty good candidate in that respect.
At least 50% of supporters of the Vermont senator insist they won't vote for neocon warmonger
Clinton, no matter what. Many view the former secretary of state with her deep ties to the Democratic
establishment as the polar opposite of Sanders and his rallying cry of political revolution
Notable quotes:
"... I am somewhat surprised that Bernie Sanders was not true to himself and his supporters. They are not happy that he is selling out! ..."
An architect of the federal healthcare law said last year that a "lack
of transparency" and the "stupidity of the American voter" helped Congress approve
ObamaCare.
He suggested that many lawmakers and voters didn't know what was in
the law or how its financing worked, and that this helped it win approval.
In case you're wondering whether or not Hillary Clinton's advisers harbor similar
contempt for the American public, let the following
Facebook post
from
Robert Reich dispel any confusion:
An acquaintance from my days in the Clinton administration, who has been
advising Hillary, phoned this morning.
ACQUAINTANCE: "Don't you think your blog post from last night was a bit
harsh?"
ME: "Not at all. The Democratic Party is shooting itself in the foot
by not officially opposing the Trans Pacific Partnership."
ACQ: "But you know why. The Party can't take a stand opposite the President's.
He's the leader of the Party, for chrissake. And he wants the TPP."
ME: "Yeah, because he sees the TPP as a way to limit China's economic
influence. So he made a Faustian bargain with big global corporations who want more
protection for their foreign investments. But he's wrong. The TPP won't crimp China.
Global corporations will give China whatever it wants to gain access to the Chinese
market. The TPP …."
ACQ: "Look, it doesn't matter what you or I think. The President wants the
TPP, and the Party isn't going to oppose him."
ME: "You mean Hillary won't oppose him."
ACQ: "Hillary won't, and Debbie [Wasserman Schultz] won't, and neither
will Nancy [Pelosi] or Harry [Reid] or Dick [Durbin] or Chuck [Schumer].
ME: "But it's terrible policy. And it's awful politics. It gives Trump a
battering ram. Obama won't be president in six months. Why risk it?"
Now here's how extraordinarily dismissive and contemptuous of the American public
Hillary Clinton's people really are.
ACQ: "They don't see much of a risk. Most Americans don't know or care
about the TPP."
ME: "But they know big corporations are running economic policy.
They think the whole system is
corrupt. Believe me, Trump will use this against Hillary.
"
ACQ: "He can't. She's inoculated. She's come out against the TPP."
ME: "But it's her delegates who voted not to oppose it in the Democratic
platform. Her fingerprints are all over this thing."
ACQ: "I think you're being too cynical."
ME: "Actually, the real cynic is you."
Just in case you remain confused, let's not forget what we learned in the following
posts:
Hillary Clinton is and always has been in favor of the TPP, despite what
she's saying to get elected. If you don't get that, you're as dumb as her advisors think
you are.
So is the rest of the Democratic Party, by the way. As the
New York Times
reported:
Amid boos from the sidelines, allies
of Hillary Clinton and President Obamaon Saturday beat back an effort by the Bernie
Sanders campaign to have the Democratic Party officially oppose a congressional vote
on the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal.
At a sometimes-raucous meeting in
Orlando, Fla., of the party's platform committee, which is drawing up policy goals
for the Democratic National Convention this month, lieutenants of Mr. Sanders argued
that the trade deal would lead to a loss of jobs and competitive wages and that it
would ultimately harm American workers and labor unions.
But given Mrs. Clinton's need to unite
the party, and Mr. Sanders's desire to defeat the presumptive Republican nominee,
Donald J. Trump, Mr. Sanders may ultimately choose not to mount a distracting and
divisive war on the convention floor over trade.
What's the big deal. Just another
agreement to further annihilate the U.S. middle class. "Unity" is more important.
Washington DC is a toilet and she is but
one of many turds that need to be flushed.
Trump might consider adding "You're
flushed!" to his "You're fired" repertoire to add a little extra
panache for those particularly egregious POS's in DC.
makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part.
You can't even passively take part!
And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon
the wheels,
upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to
make it stop!
And you've got to indicate to the people who run it,
to the people who own it - that unless you're free,
the machine will be prevented from working at all!"
Tarzan
The best Sun
Jul 12, 2016 11:17 AM
Obama support for TPP has nothing to do with China, he's
an adherent to the
Cloward–Piven
strategy which seeks to overwhelm the welfare system,
while at the same time destroying our middle class, the
engine of our economy.
Wake up, they're not stupid,
they're EVIL!
flaminratzazz
VinceFostersGhost
Jul 12, 2016 10:41 AM
The tpp is just another nail of many in the coffin of the nations
people. we were screwed by nafta, ndaa, pnac, patriot act, obama care,
militarized police, multiple false flags, ppt, the fed,insane foreign
policy, the mic, non stop creeping gun control, and an all around
disdain of the proles.. no the tpp is just another fvk you of
thousands.
DuneCreature
flaminratzazz
Jul 12, 2016 10:43 AM
Want the bitch witch Killary hogtied and stuffed in a jail cell?
Print out the briefs and reports as he posts them.
Take them to yours states Attorney General's office
and ask them to check and see if the Clinton Foundation collects or
disperses funds in your state. .... Tell them if they do you would like
the charity investigated and prosecuted for anything shady (This crap
ain't shady it's pitch black) and that you are monitoring the their
shitshow performance.
Pass this along. .. The more eyes on it the better.
You might be saving Charles Ortel from and
Arkansiding fate along with monkey wrenching the Killary machine.
Corporate Dems - Clinton and Wasserman Shultz appointees - just killed an
amendment to the Democratic Party platform that would have blocked public
officials from going to work in the industries they regulate.
"
a Faustian bargain
with big global corporations who want more protection for their foreign
investments
"
on the
expenses
of the sovereign... hosts. that's the real problem
of those treaties. they are win/lose proposals
a
win
for megacorps. a
win
for "
The
Dough That Roams The World
" and a
loss
for those who
happen to live in those "markets", pardon me, host countries
Kina
Jul 12, 2016 10:37 AM
This is where Trump needs to break through against Clinton.
The majority of
the public know that she is crooked and dishonest to the core, but many still
support her, why??
BECAUSE
they assume
, even though she is crooked and
dishonest, she wouldn't do anything to hurt the American people, she cares
about Americans.
This is why she can be totally dishonest, the public cant imagine that she
would ever actually betray THEM.
TRUMP needs to enhance his Crooked Hillary message - to get the public to
also believe and understand that her dishonesty goes as far as betraying them
for her own gain.
FireBrander
Kina
Jul 12, 2016 10:44 AM
Blind support of Hillary, or Trump, comes from a lifetime of political
conditioning which is really set in cement.
That is why 40% vote R and 40%
vote D no matter the candidate. It's the 20% that have broken free of the
R/D saviour mindset that really matter.
These polls of "likely voters" are horseshit; I want to see the polls of
"not affiliated" or "Registered Independent" voters...they are the ones that
will decide this election.
Not My Real Name
FireBrander
Jul 12, 2016 12:40 PM
In case you haven't noticed, Trump is not really an R. Yes, he has an "R"
after his name -- but the establishment is doing everything in its power
to remove it.
HRC, on the other hand, is a dyed-in-the-wool D.
Grimaldus
Kina
Jul 12, 2016 4:51 PM
Trump actually has already broken through. He has 60% of the vote and
Hillary has about 35% and dropping like a stone. The only ones supporting
her are reduced to blathering micro-encephalitic name calling juveniles. The
progressive stupid getting desperate.
Now she wants to be in charge of everything. .... Will she
sell off the White House drapes and carpeting too? Rumor had it she tried to
cart off a truckload of furnishings after her last visit to the joint. .....
The shifty bitch has got sticky fingers
She may even enter the slave trade if we let her.
Yard sale snake lady needs to take a break from her little
global influence peddling spree. ...... Maybe in a slightly cramped 'time out'
8 x 12 foot room for saaaay,... till hell freezes over, thaws out and then
freezes over again would be my vote.
Live Hard, Don't Buy The Snake Oil Or Stolen Guns, Die
Free
Assuming Hillary shows up to any of the debates, all the questions will be
curve balls for Trump and light handed bunts for Hillary.
They wont ask her any hard hitting questions, and they will just bury Trump
in a sea of race cards.
Trump is just going to have to completely talk over the questions and
control the debates by interjecting real issues there or they will trample him
with pre-scripted bullshit.
"... There goes Trump's narrative that Hillary is a bad negotiator. She got everything from Sanders and paid with non binding promises. I think I have some of those lying around, maybe Sanders would like to give me his house in exchange for them. ..."
"... It matters little that Sanders "thinks" he has pushed the Dems to the left with policy. Without a mechanism to ensure that party policy hammered out at a convention or in a closed-door session becomes legislation to be voted upon...it's totally worthless. ..."
"... Who cares? If he endorses Hillary - and forget about her so-called platform concessions - he'll be endorsing a thug, one who breaks any rule that gets in her way. And then Bernie will be a partner in her chicanery...But he will able to hang on to his war chest - and a nice "take" it is for a few months work. ..."
"... Crooked Hillary. And now, Sellout Sanders. I'm done being a Democrat in America. ..."
"... "This party is done," wrote actor and Sanders surrogate Susan Sarandon after Clinton supporters blocked the proposed amendment. "[It has] warped into the party of the rich. No longer represents working people." ..."
"... Well I guess this was bound to happen. Sanders is just another politician ready to tow the line for the Democratic corporate establishment. Sad. ..."
"... Chris Hedges was right, Bernie is a traitor. He misled a lot of people into believing he was going to stand up for something different, now he is promoting the status quo, I'm pissed. ..."
"... I see Hillary as part of the problem not the solution. Sanders disappoints me. I didn't see him as part of the problem, but guess what he is now. ..."
"... Bernie was a joke from the moment he said " nobody cares about your damn emails." ..."
"... I did not think Sanders was so gullible to believe that Clinton will take action on anything in the democratic platform. From a mass movement demanding change to accepting a few non-binding policies at a democratic convention. I think Bernie lost his opportunity to make a difference when he refused to stand as an independent. Now people are stuck with Trump or Clinton which is not exactly a great choice. ..."
"... The Party Platform is meaningless and Sanders should know that. $hillary will do what ever she wants after the convention if she is nominated. The allegiance $hillary has is to Wall Street and a NEO-CON foreign policy. ..."
"... As much as I want to vote for HRC, the stench of neocon corporatism is too much, the thin layer of accumulated grime from years of ethical expediency too toxic, the opaque lack of transparency too dangerous, and the shifting sands of her amorphous policy too treacherous. ..."
"... As Jill Stein has said, "What We Fear from Donald Trump, We Have Already Seen from Hillary Clinton." ..."
"... I understand only about half of sanders supporters are willing to switch to clinton http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/06/bernie-or-bust-clinton/488276 / ..."
"... I'm afraid Bernie's endorsement of Clinton will not stop Trump. There is no room for a neo-liberal status quo candidate like Clinton in this race. The American economy is going to hell in a hand cart. 50 million Americans use food banks millions more are facing bankruptcy, joblessness and homelessness. They need a radical socialist candidate. Voting for more of the same for them is utterly pointless. Trump will beat Clinton. America needed Bernie if Trump was to be beaten. ..."
"... Pulling the party to the left is meaningless if the nominee is a neocon. It's just window dressing.(And Bernie, of course, definitely knows that.) ..."
Bernie was able to influence the Democratic Party platform, and his endorsement is part of the
trade. I get it. I think its smart to close the deal on some gains.
Hillary Clinton said she was opposed to passage of the TPP trade agreement but 2 days ago her
supporters made it part of her campaign platform. Hillary Clinton told Sanders some lies which
it appears, unfortunately, that he believed. She is and will be forever a lying, corrupt, Wall
Street-toadying warmonger.
It is so funny to see so many people that once swore Bernie was the messiah now calling him a
sellout. Hilarious. So much for a revolution. Usually during a revolution people dont give up
so quickly.
Absolutely right. Every revolution has its roadblocks. However, Bernie supporters should realize
that if Trump is elected the SC will move back to the right for 20+ years. This will kill their
revolution for a long time to come. Bernie is doing the smart thing here and it is becoming really
easy to see why Bernie lost. His supporters are not capable of seeing what the smart thing is.
"people who got involved in the political process"
I first read that last phrase as "political princess" and had to go back to read what Bernie
said. But either reading seems suitable.
I have a hard time picturing Bernie actually believes platforms mean anything. Maybe he's giving
Hillary enough rope, as the saying goes? I'm sure he's conferred with his advisors. Hillary's
leftward move is entirely illusory and temporary; once she quickly falls back into the neolib
agenda, he'll have cause to bail, and there still might be time to take up Jill Stein on her ticket
offer.
Bernie is supposed to meet with Hillary tomorrow in Portsmouth, NH. I would like to be there,
in front of the venue, cutting my Bernie campaign sign into little bitty bits....
Bernie's efforts will be for NOTHING once he endorses Hillary. Nothing.
Wall Street's Warmongering Madame is the perfect foil for Donald Trump's huckster-populism: a
pseudo-progressive stooge whose contempt for the average person and their intelligence is palpable.
She's an arch-environmentalist who has worked tirelessly to spread fracking globally.
She supports fortifying Social Security but won't commit to raising the cap on taxes to do
so.
She's a humanitarian who has supported every imperial slaughter the US has waged in the past
25 years.
She cares deeply about the plight of the Palestinians but supported the starvation blockade
and blitzkrieg of Gaza and couldn't bother to mention them but in passing in a recent speech before
AIPAC.
She's a stalwart civil libertarian, but voted for Patriot Acts 1 and 2 and believes Edward
Snowden should be sent to federal prison for decades.
She stands with the working class but has supported virtually every international pact granting
increased mobility and power to the corporate sector at its expense in the past 25 years.
She cares with all her heart about African-Americans but supports the objectively-racist death
penalty and the private prison industry.
She will go to bat for the poor but supported gutting welfare in the '90s, making them easier
prey to exploiters, many of whom supported her husband and her financially.
She worries about the conditions of the poor globally, but while Sec. of State actively campaigned
against raising the minimum wage in Haiti to 60 cents an hour, thinking 31 cents an hour sounded
better for the investor class whose interests are paramount to her.
She's not a bought-and-paid-for hack, oh no, no, no, but she won't ever release the Wall Street
speeches for which she was paid so handsomely.
She's a true-blue progressive, just ask her most zealous supporters, who aren't.
There goes Trump's narrative that Hillary is a bad negotiator. She got everything from Sanders
and paid with non binding promises. I think I have some of those lying around, maybe Sanders would
like to give me his house in exchange for them.
"Sanders promised from the start to support whoever the DP nominated. He is keeping his promise,
and it would be extremely dangerous for him to do otherwise."
No it wouldn't. He could simply say that he's reconsidered and apologize for the confusion.
it is a sure way to destroy your reputation associating with these people. To suggest that a candidate
that needs "keeping the pressure" on them well it is good for a laugh.
It matters little that Sanders "thinks" he has pushed the Dems to the left with policy. Without
a mechanism to ensure that party policy hammered out at a convention or in a closed-door session
becomes legislation to be voted upon...it's totally worthless. We have the same situation
here in Canada with the NDP. It's why Mulcair came in 3rd. Who needs 2 liberal parties?
60% of people disagree with FBI's recommendation not to charge Clinton according to Washington
post and ABC poll. No mention of that in corporate guardian
Who cares? If he endorses Hillary - and forget about her so-called platform concessions -
he'll be endorsing a thug, one who breaks any rule that gets in her way. And then Bernie will
be a partner in her chicanery...But he will able to hang on to his war chest - and a nice "take"
it is for a few months work.
You must be joking! While aiming at Bernie, Hillary even accused his Vermont for arming criminals
in New York.
It must be that you remember that, it was not a long time ago.
According to Washington Post, the republican party has strong anti TPP language in their party
platform, the very same thing the democratic party voted down.
Oh, the irony. People who are against TPP find it in the republican party yet Bernie is about
to endorse Clinton
The spittle-flecked Clinton surrogate Barney Frank just the other day declared contemptuously
that party platforms are "irrelevant."
You know, party platforms--like the Democratic Party platform that's being larded with Sanders-friendly
"policy goals" that Wall Street's Warmongering Madame will feel no obligation to fulfill if she's
elected president.
With his coming endorsement, Sanders makes himself not simply useless to the fight against
the capitalist status quo; no, he has become a direct impediment to it.
Whenever people on the left side of the political spectrum, whatever their reasoning, vote
for servants of Wall Street, the Pentagon, and the national security apparatus, the political
center of gravity moves another notch decisively to the right.
We're constantly told that if we don't vote for the latest pseudo-progressive stooge the Dems
put forward that we're effectively voting for the Republicans.
In other words, if we don't vote for stooges who in many respects are indistinguishable
from Republicans, that systematically cede the political initiative to Republicans,
that it is we who might as well be Republicans!
Meanwhile, these same "progressives" are nowhere to be seen when a fight kicks off in the streets
against imperial war or austerity or police brutality or lay-offs. No, of course not: they're
too busy doing nothing waiting for the next opportunity to vote for another crop of corporate
liberals who'll save us from the Republicans.
It's fair to ask what all this voting for corporate liberals has gotten us over the past 25
years. Here's a list of signature policies supported and/or enacted by the last two Democratic
Party presidents, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama:
--Deregulation of investment banks and telecommunications
--The Omnibus Crime Bill (mass incarceration)
--The destruction of welfare (which caused extreme poverty to double in the 15 years after its
passage)
--The sanctions regime against Iraq (which killed 500,000 Iraqi children)
--NAFTA
--CAFTA
--TPP
--Fracking
--The objectively-racist death penalty
--The Defense of Marriage Act
--Historic levels of repression against whistle-blowers
--Preservation of Bush-era tax cuts on the rich
--Patriots Acts 1 and 2
--Massive expansion of NSA spying
--Years of foot-dragging on climate change
--Support for Israeli atrocities
--Support for the right-wing coup in Honduras
--Support for fraudulent election in Haiti
--Support for the Saudi dictatorship
--Support for a 31 cents/hour minimum wage in Haiti and against attempts to raise it
--Oil drilling on the Atlantic seaboard, Gulf of Mexico, and the Arctic
--A $1 trillion 20-year "modernization" of the US's nuclear weapons arsenal
--Historically high numbers of deportations
--Drone missile strikes that have killed large numbers of civilians and inflamed anti-US hatred
--Health care reform that has fortified the power of the insurance cartel not weakened or obliterated
it
--Industry-approved bankruptcy "reform"
--The bail-out of Wall Street
This is comprehensive list of what the Democrats are, and what Hillary Clinton is. I thought you
were going to leave out drones, and Clinton's support for the military coup in Honduras over a
democratically-elected president (partly due to President Zalaya's attempts to raise the Honduran
minimum wage!), which resulted in five years (so far) of Honduras being the 'murder capital of
the world', and its children the highest numbers of attempts to immigrate to the United States.
This one fact alone -- her support for this coup, Zalaya kidnapped in his pajamas and taken to
a U.S. military base, her and Bill's friend a high-priced consultant to the coup -- is one reason
I know Clinton is not a democrat, not a believer in democracy.
I just posted my congratulations on getting the Democratic platform to a much better point
than it would have been if Bernie Sanders had not hung in and appointed great people to the platform
committee while holding them hostage while doing it. (While shaming the Clintonians for leaving
out crucial anti-TPP, pro-minimum wage of $15, and no fracking stances on the platform.)
BUT I forgot until reading this post and being reminded, that each time I picture going to
the polls and voting for Clinton I feel nauseated. I think I will vote for Jill Stein (who graciously
and strategically offered to move out of her place on the Green ticket in favor of Sanders. I
believe Bernie Sanders would have an equal chance to Clinton if he took her up on the offer. My
sense of history and my self-respect makes me want to risk Trump.
I'm going repost one paragraph of my initial comment that I think is its most important paragraph
and which I believe is the best way in a few words to explain to "progressives" why they shouldn't
vote for her.
Whenever people on the left side of the political spectrum, whatever their reasoning,
vote for servants of Wall Street, the Pentagon, and the national security apparatus, the political
center of gravity moves another notch decisively to the right.
"We have made enormous strides," said Sanders in a statement issued after a meeting in Orlando
that swung the party in his direction on the minimum wage, climate change and marijuana
though failed to make headway on fracking and trade.
So Bernie's political revolution will end up with the legalization of ganja?
OK, I get it! Bernie is in fact a "Rastafarian Socialist", and not a Democratic Socialist as it
was thought until now.:-)))
People liked Sanders because on many matters he was unsparing in his condemnation of Wall Street's
Warmongering Madame and the system she services.
It's hard to reconcile that with his namby-pamby "we can just get along" bullshit statement
and pitch for the victims of the policies she supports to support Clinton Corp.
Bernie Sanders set to endorse Clinton after Democratic platform negotiations
Yeah, as you can see here
, everything is already prepared for their joint performance at tomorrow's rally in New Hampshire.
Interestingly, the UK rock band Status Quo had scheduled a concert in the same place for tomorrow,
but at the last minute they canceled their performance with the message, "There is no need for
us to come, Hillary and Bernie together are better 'Status Quo' than we are."
"When they served together in the US Senate, Sanders and Clinton voted the same way 93% of the
time."
Oh, not that "they're 93% alike" bullshit again.
That misleading factoid was put forward by Nate Silver (whose pro-Clinton bias is transparent)
and picked up on and spread by Clinton supporters ad nauseaum.
It's based only on the two years in which Sanders and Clinton were in the Senate together and
therefore doesn't, for example, take into account their opposing stances on the destruction
of welfare, NAFTA, the Iraq War, the Libyan bombing campaign, TPP (which she now weakly claims
to support), fracking, the Patriot Act, or TARP.
The 93% likeness is, in any case, an unscientific way of gleaning political similarity as many
votes are basically formalities and not all are of equal significance.
That said, it's interesting to note that Clinton Corp. and her gullible liberal supporters
like smalltownboy expend so much energy dishonestly claiming that she and Sanders are so much
alike. Why is that? Could it be that tens of millions don't much like what Clinton actually stands
for?
Once challenged from the left by Sanders, Clinton claimed to oppose TPP, but there's
reason to believe her opposition is weak and if elected president she'll accept some superficial
fix and proclaim her support for it. Pro-Clinton members of the platform committee have tipped
her hand by voting down a plank opposing the TPP (a trade agreement that grants massive new powers
to the capitalist class, the opposition to which smalltownboy dishonestly depicts as being about
"nuances of free trade agreements).
Smalltownboy is a smart guy who isn't interested in engaging in an honest debate.
So with Sanders falling into line we have a choice between tweedle dumb and tweedle dumber. Nothing
progressive about that and it goes to show just how sleazy and corrupted the political system
has become.
". . .'though failed to make headway on fracking and trade."
***Vote for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. THEIR platform eviscerates both: fracking AND
trade deals that only enrich the duopoly elites.
". . .particularly over trade, where the Sanders camp failed to insert outright opposition
to Barack Obama's controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership deal.
"This party is done," wrote actor and Sanders surrogate Susan Sarandon after Clinton supporters
blocked the proposed amendment. "[It has] warped into the party of the rich. No longer represents
working people."
I can't vote for Hillary if she is pro-TPP.
This is what can happen under this trade pact. Foreign companies can sue the U.S. government outside
of the U.S. courts.
This actually happened to Australia because of a law passed to reduce smoking.
In 20ll, the Aussies passed a plain packaging law banning tobacco packaging branding.
Two tobacco companies sued Australia. Then when the tobacco company lost, Phillip Morris, under
a 1993 trade agreement, sued in international court.
Then Ukraine sued Australia, which does not sell tobacco to Australia. Tobacco companies covering
legal costs.
A legal challenge against Uruguay followed, which didn't have the money to pay court costs.
Also against Togo, one of the poorest countries on earth.
Canada is suing the U.S. taxpayers for billions because the U.S. did not go through with the keystone
pipeline.
Chris Hedges was right, Bernie is a traitor. He misled a lot of people into believing he was
going to stand up for something different, now he is promoting the status quo, I'm pissed.
Supporters of Hillary Clinton successfully voted down amendments supporting a single payer healthcare
system, a nationwide ban on fracking, as well as an amendment objecting to Israel's occupation
of the West Bank and characterizing the settlements as illegal.
Sanders focused on the substantive issues to a literal fault, and it's going to cost him one way
or another.
Though I feel disapointed if he endorses Hillary, I really believe Sanders believes he's acting
on behalf of the issues that affect regular people. Whether the platform planks actually benefit
the people in reality is another story.
Even if Sanders endorses Hillary, it doesn't mean you're bound to do the same. You are a free
agent, Sanders unfortunately is not when he signed onto the Democratic platform.
I know through disapointment it will be hard to feel respect towards Sanders. We should strive
to see his potential endorsement as a means to an end for this election cycle, working within
the constraints of being the loser. But we should also strive to see that this election cycle
isn't the end to Bernie Sanders all together nor his message.
I would have liked to see Bernie go all the way to the convention. A lot of people signed up
and crowd funded to join him in Philly. It may be that the pressure just got to be too overwhelming
and he was crossing into territory that would actually destroy him going forward. Sometimes you
lose the battle to win the war.
He already materially lost the battle. However, It is a contested convention by definition going
in. Hillary niether lost or won anything until November.
It is way too early for Sanders to concede until the convention. This would not represent the
best interests of those he has fought for his whole career.
The guy has no spine. The platform means nothing. In the end he caved and became a good little
soldier. And with him goes my one chance to vote for a Democrat. I guess I will go with Trump.
Trump says some stupid things and the Media flays him for it. Could he be as bad as he appears?
Seems unlikely.
On the other hand, Hillary is a true politician. I listened to an interview she gave to Wolf
Blitzer. She answered like a politician, she didn't say a single thing that could be used against
her. That is problem with professional politicians they never really tell you what they really
think. Who knows what she really plans to try to do if she gets there. Can we say that Obama has
brought the hope and change that he claimed? The world seems more dangerous than ever. Hillary
had a part in that. I can't say the same about Trump. He didn't get a vote in the Senate when
they voted to authorized action in Iraq. Hillary did. Trump didn't run the State Department for
four years as the world became a more dangerous place. Hillary did. Trump didn't leaked classified
government secrets recklessly. Hillary did.
I see Hillary as part of the problem not the solution. Sanders disappoints me. I didn't
see him as part of the problem, but guess what he is now.
So, what is to be said about Hillary Clinton's personality? In an essay by Audrey Immelman,
published in 2001 by the Unit for the Study of Personality in Politics of St. Johns University
in Minnesota, a discussion of Clinton's dominant traits is taken up. Here are some of the conclusions:
Hillary Clinton is an aggressive and controlling personality; when she makes up her mind about
something, she loses interest in other people's points of view; she is often impatient; she
lacks empathy and can act harshly to those seen as standing in her way; she has boundary problems
due to her excessive level of self-confidence – that is, when she "knows" she is right, she
doesn't like the idea that there are limits that she has to abide by.
Bernie Sanders has cleared the way for an endorsement of Hillary Clinton on Tuesday, and
declared a successful end to his campaign to pull their party to the left during weekend negotiations
over the Democratic policy platform.
"We have made enormous strides," said Sanders in a statement issued after a meeting in Orlando
that swung the party in his direction on the minimum wage, climate change and marijuana though
failed to make headway on fracking and trade.
This "platform" they all stand up on during election years is just a stage to perform on for
the crowd. Once the elections are over, the curtain comes down and they will be meeting their
buddies from the business world to make the real legislation.
Anybody who believes this show is real is a fool.
Deeply disappointed in Sanders for using Revolution as a sales tactic and then supporting
this public fraud. If he believes they will maintain their convictions for his ideals after an
election, then he was a fool who didn't deserve the office.
I'm a Republican reluctantly supporting Donald Trump. Had the Democrats nominated Senator Sanders
I would have switch my allegiance. However, my disdain for Secretary Clinton means I'll vote for
someone I don't like because I view the alternative as worse. How very sad.
Dogs, Bernie did not say shit about the Disguised Global Capitalist Empire that is eating our
environment, our children, our grand children, and our entire fragile little planet alive so that
it can loot trillions via negative externality cost dumping.
It was said in the 19th century that "it took half the world to support the British Empire"
--- but now it would take a dozen worlds to support this God damned Disguised Global Capitalist
Empire only nominally HQed in, and merely 'posing' as, our former country.
"The U.S. state is a key point of condensation for pressures from dominant groups around the
world to resolve problems of global capitalism and to
secure the legitimacy of the system overall. In this regard, "U.S." imperialism refers to the
use by transnational elites of the U.S. state apparatus to continue to attempt to expand, defend,
and stabilize the global capitalist system. We are witness less to a "U.S." imperialism per se
than to a global capitalist imperialism. We face an EMPIRE OF GLOBAL CAPITAL, headquartered, for
evident historical reasons, in Washington."
Robinson, William. 2014 "Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity". Cambridge University
Press.
Good point. I wondered why he timidly refrained from attacking her, too. Cost him the nomination
- and the Presidency - in my view. Thing is, he's a genuinely decent man who unfortunately forgot
he was in the fight of his life. Worse, he acted like there were Marquis of Queensberry Rules
for politics. Worse, in forgetting the old saw about 'nice guys finish last' he let down what
he lived his entire life for. And now, in endorsing her he brings the futility of his life full
circle. Is what it is. Heavy sigh.
Okay all you Sanders supporters, especially the ones who INSISTED that he was somehow different
from other Democratic Party candidates. Will you persist in this nonsense now that you see your
man endorse more Clintonism?
You remember Clintonism, right? What you've been decrying for so long? Your man is going to
give it his blessing. That's how U.S. politics works. You get pulled in by yet another patsy,
and then you get TRASHED if you refuse to support the inevitable "centrist" (read: vetted by capital)
nominee.
Still liking it? No? Then why participate in the first place when you already know the outcome?
And besides, Sanders is a capitalist. Sure, he'd be a better capitalist leader than the others,
since he'd try to mitigate some of the worst aspects of same. But come on, you know better than
to believe he would make structural changes.
Withdraw your consent to this horror. Get real. Stop imagining that people who have been in
government for decades, voting for militarism and other vile policies, will change anything. Sanders
is another apologist for capital. Period.
One might think that after being hoodwinked by the Peace Prize-winning charlatan
Drone Ranger , twice, that an iota of skepticism might have penetrated the leftist fog wafting
about between their ears, but alas, one would be wrong.
And so there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth, until the next silver-tongued mountebank
appears, promising them all more free shit courtesy of their fellow citizens.
Wall Street's Warmongering Madame is the perfect foil for Donald Trump's huckster-populism:
a pseudo-progressive stooge whose contempt for the average person and their intelligence is palpable.
She's an arch-environmentalist who has worked tirelessly to spread fracking globally.
She supports fortifying Social Security but won't commit to raising the cap on taxes to do
so.
She's a humanitarian who has supported every imperial slaughter the US has waged in the past
25 years.
She cares deeply about the plight of the Palestinians but supported the starvation blockade
and blitzkrieg of Gaza and couldn't bother to mention them but in passing in a recent speech before
AIPAC.
She's a stalwart civil libertarian, but voted for Patriot Acts 1 and 2 and believes Edward
Snowden should be sent to federal prison for decades.
She stands with the working class but has supported virtually every international pact granting
increased mobility and power to the corporate sector at its expense in the past 25 years.
She cares with all her heart about African-Americans but supports the objectively-racist death
penalty and the private prison industry.
She will go to bat for the poor but supported gutting welfare in the '90s, making them easier
prey to exploiters, many of whom supported her husband and her financially.
She worries about the conditions of the poor globally, but while Sec. of State actively campaigned
against raising the minimum wage in Haiti to 60 cents an hour, thinking 31 cents an hour sounded
better for the investor class whose interests are paramount to her.
She's not a bought-and-paid-for hack, oh no, no, no, but she won't ever release the Wall Street
speeches for which she was paid so handsomely.
She's a true-blue progressive, just ask her most zealous supporters, who aren't.
But don't you realise that all these supposed defects make her an ideal President? It's the idealists
who are the real threat to global stability and the survival of mankind.
For myself, Clinton will never get my vote, nor Trump for that matter. And no, the argument that
this is in effect a vote for Trump does not hold water. I am responsible ONLY for my vote, and
can not be held responsible if there are enough idiots in the US elsewhere to be found to vote
for either Clinton or Trump.
Some Sanders supporters appear to believe that Hillary Clinton is such a poor candidate that allowing
Trump to be elected would be a palatable alternative.
Voring for any candidate involves a degree of compromise. It is effectively a deal between the
subjective and the objective.
I have recently read a fair amount of biographical detail of Secretary Clinton, and also of Mr
Trump. I see in Mrs Clinton a woman who has been driven by a notion of public service since an
early age. She isn't beyond reproach and isn't a messiah. And yes, she accepted well-paid speaking
engagements as well. I guess she likes having financial security.
In Mr Trump I see someone who inherited great wealth, who has textbook narcissistic personality
disorder, who in unprincipled, who swindled the vulnerable out of their savings with a fraudulent
"University" scheme, who takes terrible risks with the money of others, making skilful use of
bankruptcy laws and junk bonds, who is a braggart, who flirts with white supremacists, who can
take no consistent position. Trump has a thing for dictators and tyrants. He mocks the disabled.
A draft-dodger himself, he seeks to ridicule a man who was captured (with three broken limbs)
as insufficiently heroic for him.
Are you really prepared to assist this man to the Presidency, just to spite Hillary Clinton?
"I see in Mrs Clinton a woman who has been driven by a notion of public service since an early
age."
You're referring back to when she supported the presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater, who
ran on a platform explicitly opposed to the Civil Rights Movement? That's an interesting definition
of public service.
"She isn't beyond reproach and isn't a messiah."
Wow, what a concession to reality.
"And yes, she accepted well-paid speaking engagements as well. I guess she likes having financial
security."
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!!!
You Clinton supporters are sooooo terrible at defending her!
Yes, as expected, Bernie Sanders, the great "liberal" hope is not "liberal" at all. The entrenched
power of Neoliberalism subsumes all in its view. There are no "liberals" or progressives in US
politics. Elizabeth Warren is no different, when the chips are down and it is time to stand up
for anything that might be mildly progressive they surrender - each and every one kneels before
their masters and support warmongering and sycophantism to Wall Street.
People should understand from the Obama - every day war and every day more hungry children
- presidency that hope is a vanishing commodity and those who offer it in the US are in fact worse
than the ones who don't bother.
Frankly don't see what Sanders gets out of this . Putting aside the fear-mongering by the Clinton
loyalists, Sanders points on :
- TPP
- unions and decline of middle class
- education
- money in politics
- minimum wage 15 usd
- fair and transparent elections
- end of trickle down pseudo economics by the baby boomers
-climate change-fracking
All these have been left unaddressed or with so much wiggle room for Clinton , that you know
that she will pivot to the right just after the convention and stay there for the rest of her
administration.
And he doesn't even know who the VP will be.
Clinton and her crowd will throw his/our ideas away like a used condom as soon as convenient.
Just like they are doing with Liz Warren .
Pity but we always new that Bernie was too principled to win this event.
At the moment, he is an a catch-22 situation.
If he endorses Clinton, be to honor the promise he made before getting access to the Dem primaries..because
to honor your promises is the honourable thing to do...he disappoints those who say the issues
at stake are too important to be sacrificed on that particular altar.
If he does not endorse Hillary, but goes for the proffered Green ticket, the Hillary camp will
be shouting "see, you can't trust him!..or "he is so self-serving" ( I know that is ironic since
Hillary is the epitome of the "Queen of self-serve"). We his followers are not bound by such restrictions
though. We did not promise anything and are free to follow our consciences.
First, Guardian readers should know that quarrels about the Democratic Party's platform are typically
instigated by the candidate who loses the nomination, if his or her ego requires such a palliative
to compensate for the loss. Sanders' ego is a good example. Platforms mean next to nothing in
any meaningful political sense. They bind no one, least of all the president or members of Congress.
Clinton gave Sanders a bit of space to argue that he had "won" something. She allowed him to insert
aspirational goals ($15 an hr minimum wage), but not opposition to trade deals, which might cause
some difficulty once she approves trade deals.
Next, the statement that Clinton "narrowly escaped prosecution" is a blatant falsehood. The
FBI's investigation found no grounds to charge that she violated any applicable federal law. I
suppose if one thinks a person is guilty until proven innocent (which is the usual attitude of
the media, apparently including the Guardian, toward Clinton), then the FBI Director's opinion
that she had violated no law might be considered a narrow escape. His statement that she had received/sent
several classified emails, which was one of the major justifications for saying that she and hundreds
of State Dept. officials were "extremely careless" in handling classified info, was itself false,
which the FBI Director was forced to acknowledge less than 24 hrs after his reckless charge! Amazing.
He also claimed that Clinton's use of a Blackberry "might have been hacked" -- there is no proof
that it was. He said she should have used the Dept's secure server/communications system. That
would be a salient criticism, except for the fact that throughout Clinton's four years as Secretary
of State, the Dept's "secure" communications system was hacked by the Russians, the Chinese and
for all we know, you Brits too. Puts Clinton's use of her Blackberry in a somewhat different light,
wouldn't you agree? No?
Finally, you may not know that the FBI Director's making a public statement in the way he did
was entirely unprecedented in our history. He effectively made the prosecutorial decision himself,
when the legal responsibility is and always has been with his superiors. He also went on to make
clearly false statements about Clinton, which he had to retract. Worse he, a Republican, made
these seemingly damning statements about one of the two candidates for president in an election
year. Talk about extreme carelessness! In other times he would be fired.
Can't the Guardian entrust writing such a report to someone who actually understands American
politics?
I have paid very close attention. It seems you are not. He refers to classified emails NOT
owned by Clinton, she has no right to change classification on data she receives or forwards.
The fact is that some of these emails were obviously copy pasted from a SAP system into her email
system.
What you are confused about is actual marking in some of the emails.
When you take for example a CIA or NSA email off their system and run it via a private email
account, Microsoft Outlook is not the type of system to allow the assignment of classification
headers. there were some emails that retained in the text section header, this is just a side
show issue, it does not change that she received and sent high classified emails. The OIG later
pointed out his staff had to get special clearances just to read the emails she had on her system.
"From the group of 30,000 e-mails returned to the State Department, 110 e-mails in 52 e-mail
chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time
they were sent or received . Eight of those chains contained information that was Top Secret
at the time they were sent; 36 chains contained Secret information at the time; and eight contained
Confidential information, which is the lowest level of classification. Separate from those, about
2,000 additional e-mails were "up-classified" to make them Confidential; the information in those
had not been classified at the time the e-mails were sent."
What I don't understand is the absence of an automatic knee jerk rejection of Clinton. The US
fought the Revolutionary War (1775) by rejecting royalty and primogeniture. Run forwards two hundred
and forty years and what do they vote? Kennedy I, almost Kennedy II, Bush I, Bush II, Clinton
I, now Clinton II? The US is not there yet, but it certainly looks like they're reverting to type.
It's almost as if they hunger for Bill, but can't have him so will settle for Hillary instead.
In any case Elizabeth Warren was by far the most able, the most intelligent, and less divisive
Democratic candidate.
It would be a very difficult choice to pick a 'most depressing headline' award at the moment but
this one for me would be a clear winner.
I find it truly astonishing that the career criminal and soul for hire Clinton has got this
far without the past, or the present, catching up with her. Nothing could give further indication
of how hopelessly brainwashed we are that out of a population of 300 million people they are left
with a 'choice' of these two grotesque, vacuous and narcissistic wall street prostitutes.
These political parties are different tentacles of the same monster and if you haven't worked
that out by now or If you are under the impression that Hillary would be a positive vote for females
then I would recommend you pulling your head out of the sand and do some thinking for yourself
instead of being force fed your 'news' through the mainstream.
Please feel free to peruse the following website for an exhaustive library of information documenting
the many crimes of the criminally insane and corrupt Clintons.
"If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you're going to get selfish, ignorant leaders". -
George Carlin
I did not think Sanders was so gullible to believe that Clinton will take action on anything
in the democratic platform. From a mass movement demanding change to accepting a few non-binding
policies at a democratic convention. I think Bernie lost his opportunity to make a difference
when he refused to stand as an independent. Now people are stuck with Trump or Clinton which is
not exactly a great choice.
You really have no idea about the character or deeds of Hillary Clinton and her husband and
what lays in story but heres a sample
Imprisoning of black people en mass
Private prison system - largest increase in the nations history
Wall mart
Against 15$ minimum wage until this year
Destroyed Libya
Massive scandals with Clinton foundation
Ardent supporters of settlements
Biggest arms sales in US history while Clinton was Secretary of state.
Biggest health reform flop
Mysterious deaths when people close to Clintons were investigated.
Belligerent policy towards Russia - That is the biggest danger of all.
Syria - arming of rebels
Bernie, endorsing Clinton is unworthy of him. Go green and have a fat lady singing on stage when
you do please. It will show the Democratic Party, the party that has become Republican Lite, that
life as they know it is OVER.
Thank Obama for hiring Paulson from Wall Street and Tim Geitner, from the Fed, which together
assured that Wall Street CEOs could keep their millions, and their jobs, after forcing taxpayers
to bail their ass out. SHAME on the White Collar Criminals and the WALL STREET WHITEHOUSE they
Own. They have destroyed the planet with their greed.
The revolution continues. March on Main Street formerly for Bernie Sunday July 24, 2016. Feel
The Burn vote for Trump he is the poison pill that will hit them where they live and decimate
the Republican Party.
The Party Platform is meaningless and Sanders should know that. $hillary will do what ever
she wants after the convention if she is nominated. The allegiance $hillary has is to Wall Street
and a NEO-CON foreign policy.
Sanders can endorse $hillary if he wants, but I voted for Sanders because of his platform.
I did not vote for Sanders so he could endorse Clinton. I will be voting for a Third Party Candidate,
if it is Clinton vs Trump. Oh and do not give me the Ralph Nader Guilt Trip. The Gorebot lost
to Bush the Younger on his own. The Gorebot could not carry his own state.
It is better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want
and get it.
- Eugene Victor Debs.
Debs polled over a million votes while doing some hard time in a federal prison for sedition:
he dared oppose american entry in World War One. That man stood up for what he believed in, and
was willing to pay any price. Bernie -- who reportedly has a portrait of Debs hanging over his
desk -- should hang his head in shame for his cowardice in selling out so cheaply
Debs also said > The Republican and Democratic parties, or, to be more exact, the Republican-Democratic
party, represent the capitalist class in the class struggle. They are the political wings of the
capitalist system and such differences as arise between them relate to spoils and not to principles.
Bernie must know that a "plank" in the platform is nothing more than a sop. It is not binding.
Even the sops he got are chicken feed. The $15.00 minimum wage should have been a non negotiable
default, not some trumpeted victory. The minimum wage in 1962 was worth $22.00 in today's dollars.
The vague "committment" on saving the environment would be laughable were its consequences
not so tragic.
Trade Agreements (aka secret global corporate rule)? Zip
Single Payer Health Care? Zip
Free Higher Education? Zip
Expanded Social Security? Zip
Restraining Israel? Zip
De-militarization of police? Zip
Resumption of nuclear & arms control negotiations with Russia? Zip
Return to detente with Russia? Zip
The list of platform failures is about as long as the list of Hillary's corporate donors.
There were those (certainly not in the embedded press) who said from the start that Bernie
was a stalking horse for Hillary -- an exercise in bait and switch.
If he was, he deserves an Oscar.
Hey! But we got weed!! Oh wow. Bong Hits. Yaaaaaay!!!!
As much as I want to vote for HRC, the stench of neocon corporatism is too much, the thin
layer of accumulated grime from years of ethical expediency too toxic, the opaque lack of transparency
too dangerous, and the shifting sands of her amorphous policy too treacherous.
A vote for HRC is: a vote for Palestinian kids growing up without a future; a vote for American
kids subject to the Common Core; a vote for water polluted by fracking precipitates; a vote for
drone strikes; a vote for kids locked up for a joint, a vote for lives ruined by corporate prisons,
and a vote for bankers first, the people second.
Can't do it. Jill Stein. Let the chips fall where they do.
Is the lawsuit against Clinton still happening? Not for the deletion of 30,000 personal emails
between herself and her husband, but for the campaign fraud and election fraud in Arizona? Or
are we still pretending that America is a democracy and not the most corrupt and aggressive asylum
in the history of mankind?
This detailed legal dissection of last week's Comey hearing indicates there's plenty still to
mine there, if Mr. Chump isn't merely shilling
5 Reasons The Comey Hearing Was The Worst Education In Criminal Justice The American Public
Has Ever Had
What America Saw on July 7th in No Way Resembles Our Justice System
the fact remains that the non-indictment of Hillary Clinton is as much a stain on the
fair and equal administration of justice as is the disparate treatment of poor black males
at all stages of the criminal justice system. I witnessed the latter injustice close up, nearly
every day, during my seven years working as a public defender; now America has seen the same
thing, albeit on a very different stage, involving a defendant of a very different class and
hue.
Sanders just became irrelevant for the rest of his life. Not accepting Stein's offer was a chance
to change American politics and make three parties viable instaed of just two.
Big mistake.
Endorsing Clinton by claiming Trump must be defeated ONLY holds up IF Sanders supporters are
needed to defeat him. That certainly isn't the case. Hillary will easily defeat Trump with or
without them.
0-50 in November.
Bernie missed his chance. His whole campaign was a wasted effort. His supporters must feel
like fools.
The main problem is that she puts things now in the agenda to pretend she's bridging the gap between
her and progressives, but once she starts ''negotiating'' with Republicans, she'll drop practically
everything she added because of Bernie and claim she had to do it to achieve a compromise.
So actually Progressives once again will get nothing, especially on economics....might get some
scraps off the table on social issues, but that's it. They'll all do the usual song and dance
about these ''huge achievements'' and sing along...
Same story....no real change....might get a war though cause she's gagging for one
this charade will probably continue only until she has Bernie's endorsement fully and irrevocably
in the bag - and not a second longer. While she paid lip service momentarily to opposing TPP,
her operatives have ensured that in no way will the party platform oppose it.
see robert reich's facebook posting from earlier today:
So Bernie wins for the potheads. Is that supposed to be a triumph for the progressives... He is
about to endorse the queen of Wall Street and give her a free pass on TPP, the two pillars of
his candidacy. This talk about pulling Clinton to the left is crap.
As Jill Stein has said, "What We Fear from Donald Trump, We Have Already Seen from Hillary
Clinton."
So rant away about how voting Green will allow Trump in...it's the failed Democratic Party
and Hillary Clinton that are really to blame for the rise of the reprehensible Donald Trump.
If they were worth anything, they would have the support of everyone.
If EVERYONE voted their conscience, the Greens would win by a landslide.
So you are the one who is deluded thinking that rewarding the unethical status quo with
your vote will be good for the planet...the wars and environmental destruction will go on and
on thanks to you and others like you .
Right? Right.
CahootsConspiracy
14h ago
9 10
Not sure what the goal of his endorsement would be at this point. Many if not most of his supporters
already know whether or not they'll vote for Clinton in November, and it seems unlikely that him
urging his supporters to vote for her will pick up many new converts.
I'm afraid Bernie's endorsement of Clinton will not stop Trump. There is no room for a
neo-liberal status quo candidate like Clinton in this race. The American economy is going to hell
in a hand cart. 50 million Americans use food banks millions more are facing bankruptcy, joblessness
and homelessness. They need a radical socialist candidate. Voting for more of the same for them
is utterly pointless. Trump will beat Clinton. America needed Bernie if Trump was to be beaten.
Americans want the short lived rush of another Obama moment with the first woman President.But
look at Obamas America,anything changed? Black protest riots across the Country as we speak.
They used to say when 'Billy' was running and Hillary was by his side, that we were getting 'two
for the price of one, This time around, the bargain is two outdated, technologically incompetent,
out-of-touch, power-hungry, money-grubbing globalists who have consistently lied to the American
people. They have sold out the American people in their self-serving, addictive grasp for more
power and more money.
the Sanders camp failed to insert outright opposition to Barack Obama's controversial Trans
Pacific Partnership deal. [...] Clinton supporters blocked the proposed amendment
Hardly a surprise that Clinton is a slave of corporate interests. That's been the crowd she
has surrounded herself with for decades.
A "sophisticated" person would understand the importance of handling very sensitive information.
Clinton signed documents from the FBI, which acknowledged the importance of appropriately handling
classified information, how then as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton could possibly have thought
having an unsecured private server was appropriate?
"I don't think that our investigation established she was actually particularly sophisticated
with respect to classified information and the levels and treatment."
If Sanders endorses Clinton then he has wasted his efforts entirely -- Killary is a war mongering
Wall St stooge, who cannot be trustd one bit -- His progressive agenda should have joined hands with
The Greens and stood for a new socialist agenda -- A v sad day --
I wonder if conspiracy theorists also stated clinton perjured herself many times over the last year?
Tut tut
By the way...
"A second Stanford study comparing voting machines to pre-election polls shows extreme discrepancies
in many states where electronic voting machines were utilized."
Even if Sanders endorses her, I -- a lifelong Democrat -- will not vote for her. She claims she opposes
TPP and yesterday her delegates made passage of TPP part of her campaign platform. She's a lying,
hypocritical, corrupt, Wall Street-toadying warmonger. No thank you. Sayonara Democratic Party. Prospect
of Bill Clinton back in White House makes her candidacy doubly nauseous.
The Republican request, five days after the
department closed a yearlong investigation into Mrs. Clinton's handling of classified information in the emails, threatens to shadow
her through the campaign and perhaps even into the White House if she is elected.
In a letter Monday evening, House Republicans
asked the Justice Department to determine whether Mrs. Clinton had "committed perjury and made false statements" during her appearance
in October before a special House panel on the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya.
The letter was signed by Representatives Jason
Chaffetz, Republican of Utah, who leads the Oversight Committee, and Robert W. Goodlatte, Republican of Virginia, who leads the Judiciary
Committee.
The Justice Department declined to comment
on the request. In a Twitter post, Brian Fallon, a spokesman for the Clinton campaign, called the Republican request "another futile,
partisan attempt to keep this issue alive now that the Justice Dept has declared it resolved."
Mrs. Clinton has said
she regrets the decision to use a private email server for official communications as secretary of state, but she has defended the
truthfulness of her public remarks.
Legal analysts said that while it appeared
unlikely the F.B.I. would ultimately find enough evidence to prosecute Mrs. Clinton on charges of lying to Congress, there might
be enough to warrant opening an investigation. That alone could prove damaging to her campaign.
"... The real wild card that's yet to be played is the investigation into the Clinton Foundation. Jim Comey at the FBI seems to have given up a little too easily on Mrs. Clinton - perhaps because he knows something more damning is coming? ..."
According to the Associated Press, the internal investigation will not result in
criminal charges. Many of Ms Clinton's top aides could have their security clearances revoked,
which would all but dissolve their chances of being a part of the national security team should
the former Secretary of State win the presidency.
... The probe by the department will focus on 22 emails found on Ms Clinton's emails that were
considered to be "top secret".
... Mr Kirby would not identify the top aides under investigation, but the AP said the ones
most likely to face scrutiny are Jake Sullivan, Cheryl Mills, and Huma Abedin.
Marine
I quit being a dem after 45 yrs., when Bill Clinton stabbed workers in the back. I know I
was not the only one to do so & change . politicians don't represent voters anymore, money has
corrupt the whole system of government we have now. The TRADE BILLS signed benefited Wall
Street & the 1%. It is them that that regulate the two party system when they should be
regulating Wall Street & a brand new set of Campaign laws.
It is the 1% who tell us who to vote for, they choose the candidates offering large sums of
money to both party's campaign funds. If only more voters could see the real evil in our
system of government instead of just feeling it. The country is in decline like never before &
worse then the 1928 crash.
Earthnotmoving2me
The insanity has reached epic proportions and it's all caused by our own government... The
American people are being held hostage by psychopaths ... A large portion of the population
can't seem to make the connection our government has turned into one of the most violent
corrupt destructive evil forces working against humanity on earth...
wanderingone56
Awkward for Mrs. Clinton, I know, but State won't really do much more than provide a few
awkward moments. (After all, would you really want to be the Statie who p!$$ed off your future
boss?)
The real wild card that's yet to be played is the investigation into the Clinton
Foundation. Jim Comey at the FBI seems to have given up a little too easily on Mrs. Clinton -
perhaps because he knows something more damning is coming?
Sal20111
Sounds a bit off. Hilary can become President, despite the carelessness that was basically
hers, but her aides can't get sensitive cabinet positions - are the cabinet positions more
sensitive than President? Reeks like a trade-off: no criminal charges but some punishment in
terms of restricting your aides. Is Hilary already compromised before becoming President?
Enso
We already know George W Bush set up a private email server WHILE he was president and
there were 88 accounts on the server. Karl Rove had one and did a range of things with it.
Just after Valerie Plame was outted by an anonymous source as a CIA field agent, just after
her husband said something the administratin didn't like - that was when Karl Rove destroyed
22 MILLION emails.
mokopoloko
why wouldn t they be looking to pursue criminal charges if she is found guilty of
wrongdoing.this woman is a liar and a criminal as was her slimeball of a husband.they are not
fit to run as smalltown mayors nevermind the supposed leader of the free world.
anti-morons
But as we all know, America is no "free world" - it is a dump of corruption, bible-belt
hate-mongering and fear-mongering, and the world's greatest threat to security and peace.
America is nothing other than a terrorist, rogue State.
SpinResistant
Michel Gove pulled exactly the same dodge with private emails as Hillary when he was
Secrtary of State for Education, and he went on to become one of the most trusted politicians
in the Conservative Party.
anti-morons
Trusted by whom precisely ?
Neither UK nor USA can be trusted - both are warmongering nations and responsible for the
destabilisation of the whole of the Middle Eastern region, which has ultimately led to
non-stop war, the murder of millions, and a continuing influx of millions of displaced persons
into Europe.
Time to say NO to England's and America's murder machine !
It's not something the least but new or unique.
Muffin
Oh Hillary the wagons are circling. Who and why? I think we can guess.....
sinbad
Clinton has been chosen by the Wall St Gods to be the Queen of the World.
Nothing can change that, she has been chosen.
Tom North London
Correct. The world will be changed as necessary to make it compatible with Her.
ComberBryan
No charges for Hillary, so time to scapegoat some of the little people.
"... The reality is that prosecutors don't normally consider the legislative history or possible unconstitutionality of criminal statutes. Why? Because that's not their job. ..."
"... We can say, accurately, that the judgment of the FBI in its investigation into Clinton and her associates ― and Comey confirmed Clinton was indeed a "subject" of the investigation ― is that Clinton is a criminal. ..."
"... whether criminal statutes on the books had been violated ..."
"... criminal statutes had been violated ..."
"... So, my first point: for Comey to imply that there is any prosecutor in America uncomfortable with the "constitutionality" of criminal statutes predicated on "negligent," "reckless," or "knowing" mental states is not just laughable but an insult to both the prosecutorial class and our entire criminal justice system. Whatever issue Comey may have had with the felony statute he agrees Clinton violated, that wasn't it. ..."
"... specific intent ..."
"... Black's Law Dictionary ..."
"... First he asked, "What would other prosecutors do?" That's not a question prosecutors are charged to ask, and we now see why: as Comey himself concedes, countless prosecutors have already come out in public to say that, had they been investigating Clinton, they would have prosecuted her. A standard for prosecutorial discretion in which you weigh what others in your shoes might do based on some sort of a census leads immediately to madness, not just for the reasons I'm articulating here but many others too numerous to go into in detail in this space. ..."
"... Comey found credible that Clinton had created her private basement server set-up purely out of "convenience"; yet he also found that old servers, once replaced, were "stored and decommissioned in various ways." Wait, "various ways"? If Clinton was trying to create a streamlined, convenient personal process for data storage, why were things handled so haphazardly that Comey himself would say that the servers were dealt with "in various ways" over time? ..."
"... And indeed, the evidence Comey turned up showed that Clinton's staff was aware ― was repeatedly and systematically made aware ― that the Secretary's set-up had the effect of evading FOIA requests. And Clinton was, by her own admission, clear with her inferiors that "avoiding access to the personal" was key to her private basement-server set-up. That's very different from "convenience." ..."
"... completely different and more stringent protocols and requirements for data storage ..."
1. According to Comey, Clinton committed multiple federal felonies and misdemeanors.
Many people will miss this in the wash of punditry from non-attorneys in the mainstream media that
has followed Comey's public remarks and Congressional testimony.
The issue for Comey wasn't that
Clinton hadn't committed any federal crimes, but that in his personal opinion the federal felony
statute Clinton violated (18 U.S.C. 793f) has been too rarely applied for him to feel comfortable
applying it to Clinton. This is quite different from saying that no crime was committed; rather,
Comey's position is that crimes were committed, but he has decided not to prosecute those crimes
because (a) the statute he focused most on has only been used once in the last century (keeping in
mind how relatively rare cases like these are in the first instance, and therefore how rarely we
would naturally expect a statute like this to apply in any case), and (b) he personally believes
that the statute in question might be unconstitutional because, as he put it, it might punish people
for crimes they didn't specifically intend to commit (specifically, it requires only a finding of
"gross negligence," which Comey conceded he could prove). Comey appears to have taken the extraordinary
step of researching the legislative history of this particular criminal statute in order to render
this latter assessment.
The reality is that prosecutors don't normally consider the legislative history or possible
unconstitutionality of criminal statutes. Why? Because that's not their job. Their job is to
apply the laws as written, unless and until they are superseded by new legislation or struck down
by the judicial branch. In Comey's case, this deep dive into the history books is even more
puzzling as, prior to Attorney General Loretta Lynch unethically having a private meeting with Bill
Clinton on an airport tarmac, Comey wasn't even slated to be the final arbiter of whether Clinton
was prosecuted or not. He would have been expected, in a case like this, to note to the Department
of Justice's career prosecutors that the FBI had found evidence of multiple federal crimes, and then
leave it to their prosecutorial discretion as to whether or not to pursue a prosecution. But more
broadly, we must note that when Comey gave his public justification for not bringing charges ― a
public justification in itself highly unusual, and suggestive of the possibility that Comey knew
his inaction was extraordinary, and therefore felt the need to defend himself in equally extraordinary
fashion ― he did not state the truth: that Clinton had committed multiple federal crimes per statutes
presently on the books, and that the lack of a recommendation for prosecution was based not on the
lack of a crime but the lack of prosecutorial will (or, as he might otherwise have put it, the exercise
of prosecutorial discretion).
The danger here is that Americans will now believe many untrue things about the executive branch
of their government. For instance, watching Comey's testimony one might believe that if the executive
branch exercises its prosecutorial discretion and declines to prosecute crimes it determines have
been committed, it means no crimes were committed. In fact, what it means (in a case like this) is
that crimes were committed but will not be prosecuted. We can say, accurately, that the judgment
of the FBI in its investigation into Clinton and her associates ― and Comey confirmed Clinton was
indeed a "subject" of the investigation ― is that Clinton is a criminal. She simply shouldn't,
in the view of the FBI, be prosecuted for her crimes. Prosecutorial discretion of this sort is relatively
common, and indeed should be much more common when it comes to criminal cases involving
poor Americans; instead, we find it most commonly in law enforcement's treatment of Americans with
substantial personal, financial, sociocultural, and legal resources.
Americans might also wrongly believe, watching Comey's testimony, that it is the job of executive-branch
employees to determine which criminal statutes written by the legislative branch will be acknowledged.
While one could argue that this task does fall to the head of the prosecuting authority in a given
instance ― here, Attorney General Loretta Lynch; had an independent prosecutor been secured in this
case, as should have happened, that person, instead ― one could not argue that James Comey's
role in this scenario was to decide which on-the-books criminal statutes matter and which don't.
Indeed, Comey himself said, during his announcement of the FBI's recommendation, that his role was
to refer the case to the DOJ for a "prosecutive decision" ― in other words, the decision on whether
to prosecute wasn't his. His job was only to determine whether criminal statutes on the books
had been violated.
By this test, Comey didn't just not do the job he set out to do, he wildly and irresponsibly
exceeded it, to the point where its original contours were unrecognizable. To be blunt: by obscuring,
in his public remarks and advice to the DOJ, the fact that criminal statutes had been violated
― in favor of observing, more broadly, that there should be no prosecution ― he made it not just
easy but a fait accompli for the media and workaday Americans to think that not only would no prosecution
commence, but that indeed there had been no statutory violations.
Which there were.
Americans might also wrongly take at face value Comey's contention that the felony statute Clinton
violated was unconstitutional ― on the grounds that it criminalizes behavior that does not
include a specific intent to do wrong. This is, as every attorney knows, laughable. Every single
day in America, prosecutors prosecute Americans ― usually but not exclusively poor people ― for crimes
whose governing statutes lack the requirement of "specific intent." Ever heard of negligent homicide?
That's a statute that doesn't require what lawyers call (depending on the jurisdiction) an "intentional"
or "purposeful" mental state. Rather, it requires "negligence." Many other statutes require only
a showing of "recklessness," which likewise is dramatically distinct from "purposeful" or "intentional"
conduct. And an even larger number of statutes have a "knowing" mental state, which Comey well knows
― but the average American does not ― is a general- rather than specific-intent mental state (mens
rea, in legal terms).
And the term "knowingly" is absolutely key to the misdemeanors Comey appears to concede
Clinton committed, but has declined to charge her for.
To discuss what "knowingly" means in the law, I'll start with an example. When I practiced criminal
law in New Hampshire, it was a crime punishable by up to a year in jail to "knowingly cause unprivileged
physical contact with another person." The three key elements to this particular crime, which is
known as Simple Assault, are "knowingly," "unprivileged," and "physical contact." If a prosecutor
can prove each of these elements beyond a reasonable doubt, the defendant could, at the discretion
of a judge, find themselves locked in a cage for a year. "Physical contact" means just about exactly
what you'd expect, as does "unprivileged" ― contact for which you have no claim of privilege, such
as self-defense, defense of another, permission of the alleged victim, and so on. But what the heck
does "knowingly" mean? Well, as any law student can tell you, it means that you were aware of the
physical act you were engaged in, even if you didn't intend the consequences that act caused. For
instance, say you're in the pit at a particularly raucous speed-metal concert, leaping about, as
one does, in close proximity with many other people. Now let's say that after one of your leaps you
land on a young woman's foot and break it. If charged with Simple Assault, your defense won't be
as to your mental state, because you were "knowingly" leaping about, even if you intended no harm
in doing so. Instead, your defense will probably be that the contact (which you also wouldn't contest)
was "privileged," because the young lady had implicitly taken on, as had you, the risks of being
in a pit in the middle of a speed-metal concert. See the difference between knowingly engaging in
a physical act that has hurtful consequences, and "intending" or having as your "purpose" those consequences?
Just so, I've seen juveniles prosecuted for Simple Assault for throwing food during an in-school
cafeteria food fight; in that instance, no one was hurt, nor did anyone intend to hurt anybody, but
"unprivileged physical contact" was "knowingly" made all the same (in this case, via the instrument
of, say, a chicken nugget).
So, my first point: for Comey to imply that there is any prosecutor in America uncomfortable
with the "constitutionality" of criminal statutes predicated on "negligent," "reckless," or "knowing"
mental states is not just laughable but an insult to both the prosecutorial class and our entire
criminal justice system. Whatever issue Comey may have had with the felony statute he agrees Clinton
violated, that wasn't it.
What about the misdemeanor statute?
Well, there's now terrifying evidence available for public consumption to the effect that Director
Comey doesn't understand the use of the word "knowingly" in the law ― indeed, understands it less
than even a law student in his or her first semester would. Just over an hour (at 1:06) into the
six-hour
C-SPAN video of Comey's Congressional testimony, Representative Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) makes a
brief but absolutely unimpeachable case that, using the term "knowingly" as I have here and as it
is used in every courtroom in America, Secretary Clinton committed multiple federal misdemeanors
inasmuch as she, per the relevant statute (Title 18 U.S.C. 1924), "became possessed of documents
or materials containing classified information of the United States....and knowingly removed such
documents or materials without authority and with the intent to retain such documents or materials
at an unauthorized location." Comey, misunderstanding the word "knowingly" in a way any law school
student would scream at their TV over, states that the FBI would still, under that statutory language,
need to prove specific intent to convict Clinton of a Title 18 U.S.C. 1924 violation. Lummis
points out that Comey is dead wrong ― and she's right, he is wrong. Per the above, all Clinton
had to be aware of is that (a) she was in possession of classified documents, and (b) she had removed
them to an unauthorized location. Comey admits these two facts are true, and yet he won't prosecute
because he's added a clause that's not in the statute. I can't emphasize this enough: Comey makes
clear with his answers throughout his testimony that Clinton committed this federal misdemeanor,
but equally makes clear that he didn't charge her with it because he didn't understand the statute.
(At 1:53 in the video linked to above, Representative Ken Buck of Colorado goes back to the topic
of Title 18 U.S.C. 1924, locking down that Comey is indeed deliberately adding language to that federal
criminal statute that quite literally is not there.)
Yes, it's true. Watch the video for yourself,
look up the word "knowingly" in Black's Law Dictionary, and you'll see that I'm right.
This is scary stuff for an attorney like me, or really for any of us, to see on television ― a government
attorney with less knowledge of criminal law than a first-year law student.
2. Comey has dramatically misrepresented what prosecutorial discretion looks like.
The result of this is that Americans will fundamentally misunderstand our adversarial system of justice.
Things like our Fourth and Fifth Amendment are part and parcel of our "adversarial" system of
justice. We could have elected, as a nation, to have an "inquisitorial" system of justice ― as some
countries in Europe, with far fewer protections for criminal defendants, do ― but we made the decision
that the best truth-seeking mechanism is one in which two reflexively zealous advocates, a prosecutor
and a defense attorney, push their cases to the utmost of their ability (within certain well-established
ethical strictures).
James Comey, in his testimony before Congress, left the impression that his job as a prosecutor
was to weigh his ability to prove a case beyond a reasonable doubt not as a prosecutor, but as a
member of a prospective jury. That's not how things work in America; it certainly, and quite spectacularly,
isn't how it works for poor black men. In fact, what American prosecutors are charged to do is imagine
a situation in which (a) they present their case to a jury as zealously as humanly possible within
the well-established ethical code of the American courtroom, (b) all facts and inferences are taken
by that jury in the prosecution's favor, and then (c) whether, given all those conditions, there
is a reasonable likelihood that all twelve jurors would vote for a conviction.
That is not the standard James Comey used to determine whether to prosecute Hillary Clinton.
What Comey did was something else altogether.
First he asked, "What would other prosecutors do?" That's not a question prosecutors are charged
to ask, and we now see why: as Comey himself concedes, countless prosecutors have already come out
in public to say that, had they been investigating Clinton, they would have prosecuted her. A standard
for prosecutorial discretion in which you weigh what others in your shoes might do based on some
sort of a census leads immediately to madness, not just for the reasons I'm articulating here but
many others too numerous to go into in detail in this space.
The second thing Comey did was ask, "Am I guaranteed to win this case at trial?" Would that
this slowed the roll of prosecutors when dealing with poor black men! Instead, as I discuss later
on, prosecutors ― via the blunt instrument of the grand jury ― usually use the mere fact of misdemeanor
or felony charges against a defendant as a mechanism for ending a case short of trial. Even prosecutors
who ultimately drop a case will charge (misdemeanor) or indict (felony) it first, if only to give
themselves time ― because defendants do have speedy trial rights, and statutes of limitation do sometimes
intercede ― to plan their next move.
Third, Comey imagined his case at trial through the following lens: "How would we do at trial
if the jury took every fact and presumption ― as we already have ― in Clinton's favor?" Indeed, I'm
having more than a hard time ― actually an impossible time ― finding a single unknown or unclear
fact that Comey took in a light unfavorable to Clinton (including, incredibly, the facts that became
unknowable because of Clinton's own actions and evasions). Instead, Hillary was given the benefit
of the doubt at every turn, so much so that it was obvious that the only evidence of "intent" Comey
would accept was a full confession from Clinton. That's something prosecutors rarely get, and certainly
(therefore) never make a prerequisite for prosecution. But Comey clearly did here.
I have never seen this standard used in the prosecution of a poor person. Not once.
3. Comey left the indelible impression, with American news-watchers, that prosecutors
only prosecute specific-intent crimes, and will only find a sufficient mens
rea (mental state) if and when a defendant has confessed. Imagine, for a moment, if
police officers only shot unarmed black men who were in the process of confessing either verbally
("I'm about to pull a gun on you!") or physically (e.g., by assaulting the officer). Impossible to
imagine, right? That's because that's not how this works; indeed, that's not how any of this works.
Prosecutors, like police officers, are, in seeking signs of intent, trained to read ― and conceding
here that some of them do it poorly ― contextual clues that precede, are contemporaneous with, and/or
follow the commission of a crime.
But this apparently doesn't apply to Hillary Clinton.
It would be easier to identify the contextual clues that don't suggest Clinton had consciousness
of guilt than those that do ― as there are exponentially more of the latter than the former.
But let's do our best, and consider just a few of the clear signs that Clinton and her team, judging
them solely by their words and actions, knew that what they were doing was unlawful.
For instance, Clinton repeatedly said she used one server and only one device ― not that she
thought that that was the correct information, but that she knew it was. Yet the
FBI found, per Comey's July 5th statement, that Clinton used "several different servers" and "numerous
mobile devices." So either Clinton didn't know the truth but pretended in all her public statements
that she did; or she was given bad information which she then repeated uncritically, in which case
a prosecutor would demand to know from whom she received that information (as surely that
person would know they'd spread misinformation); or she knew the truth and was lying. A prosecutor
would want clear, on-the-record answers on these issues; instead, Comey let other FBI agents have
an unrecorded, untranscripted interview with Clinton that he himself didn't bother to attend. It's
not even clear that that interview was much considered by the FBI; Comey declared his decision just
a few dozen hours after the interview was over, and word leaked that there would be no indictment
just two hours after the interview. Which, again, incredibly ― and not in keeping with any
law enforcement policy regarding subject interviews I'm aware of ― was unrecorded, untranscripted,
unsworn, and unattended by the lead prosecutor.
This in the context of a year-long investigation for which Clinton was the primary subject.
Since when is an hours-long interview with an investigation's subject so immaterial to the charging
decision? And since when is such an interview treated as such a casual event? Since never. At least
for poor people.
And since when are false exculpatory statements not strong evidence of intent?
Since never - at least for poor people.
Comey found credible that Clinton had created her private basement server set-up purely out
of "convenience"; yet he also found that old servers, once replaced, were "stored and decommissioned
in various ways." Wait, "various ways"? If Clinton was trying to create a streamlined, convenient
personal process for data storage, why were things handled so haphazardly that Comey himself would
say that the servers were dealt with "in various ways" over time? Just so, Comey would naturally
want to test Clinton's narrative by seeing whether or not all FOIA requests were fully responded
to by Clinton and her staff in the four years she was the head of the State Department. Surely, Clinton
and her staff had been fully briefed on their legal obligations under FOIA ― that's provable ― so
if Clinton's "convenience" had caused a conflict with the Secretary's FOIA obligations that would
have been immediately obvious to both Clinton and her staff, and would have been remedied immediately
if the purpose of the server was not to avoid FOIA requests but mere convenience. At a minimum, Comey
would find evidence (either hard or testimonial) that such conversations occurred. And indeed,
the evidence Comey turned up showed that Clinton's staff was aware ― was repeatedly and systematically
made aware ― that the Secretary's set-up had the effect of evading FOIA requests. And Clinton was,
by her own admission, clear with her inferiors that "avoiding access to the personal" was key to
her private basement-server set-up. That's very different from "convenience."
Even if Comey believed that "avoiding access to the personal," rather than "convenience," was
the reason for Clinton's server set-up, that explanation would have imploded under the weight
of evidence Clinton, her team, and her attorneys exercised no due caution whatsoever in determining
what was "personal" and what was not personal when they were wiping those servers clean. If Clinton's
concern was privacy, there's no evidence that much attention was paid to accurately and narrowly
protecting that interest ― rather, the weight of the evidence suggests that the aim, at all times,
was to keep the maximum amount of information away from FOIA discovery, not just "personal" information
but (as Comey found) a wealth of work-related information.
But let's pull back for a moment and be a little less legalistic. Clinton claimed the reason for
her set-up was ― exclusively ― "convenience"; nevertheless, Comey said it took "thousands of hours
of painstaking effort" to "piece back together" exactly what Clinton was up to. Wouldn't that fact
alone give the lie to the claim that this system was more "convenient" than the protocols State already
had in place? "Millions of email fragments ended up in the server's 'slack space'," Comey said of
Clinton's "convenient" email-storage arrangement. See the contradiction? How would "millions of email
fragments ending up in a server's 'slack space'" in any way have served Clinton's presumptive desire
for both (a) convenience, (b) FOIA complicance, (c) a securing of her privacy, and (d) compliance
with State Department email-storage regulations? Would any reasonable person have found this set-up
convenient? And if not ― and Comey explicitly found not ― why in the world didn't that help
to establish the real intent of Clinton's private basement servers? Indeed, had Clinton
intended on complying with FOIA, presumably her own staff would have had to do the very same painstaking
work it took the FBI a year to do. But FOIA requests come in too fast and furious, at State, for
Clinton's staff to do the work it took the FBI a year to do in a matter of days; wouldn't this in
itself establish that Clinton and her staff had no ability, and therefore well knew they had no intention,
of acceding to any of the Department's hundreds or even thousands of annual FOIA requests in full?
And wouldn't ignoring all those requests be not just illegal but "inconvenient" in the extreme? And
speak to the question of intent?
It took Clinton two years to hand over work emails she was supposed to hand over the day she left
office; and during that time, she and her lawyers, some of whom appear to have looked at classified
material without clearance, deleted thousands of "personal" emails ― many of which turned out the
be exactly the sort of work emails she was supposed to turn over the day she left State. In this
situation, an actor acting in good faith would have (a) erred on the side of caution in deleting
emails, (b) responded with far, far more alacrity to the valid demands of State to see all work-related
emails, and (c) having erroneously deleted certain emails, would have rushed to correct the mistake
themselves rather than seeing if they could get away with deleting ― mind you ― not just work emails
but work emails with (in several instances) classified information in them. How in the world was
none of this taken toward the question of intent? Certainly, it was taken toward the finding of "gross
negligence" Comey made, but how in the world was none of it seen as relevant to Clinton's
specific intent also? Why does it seem the only evidence of specific intent Comey would've looked
at was a smoking gun? Does he realize how few criminal cases would ever be brought against anyone
in America if a "smoking gun" standard was in effect? Does anyone realize how many poor black men
wouldn't be in prison if that standard was in effect for them as well as Secretary Clinton?
4. Comey made it seem that the amount and quality of prosecutorial consideration he gave
Clinton was normal. The mere fact that Comey gave public statements justifying his prosecutorial
discretion misleads the public into thinking that, say, poor black men receive this level of care
when prosecutors are choosing whether to indict them.
While at least he had the good grace to call the fact of his making a public statement "unusual"
― chalking it up to the "intense public interest" that meant Clinton (and the public) "deserved"
an explanation for his behavior ― that grace ultimately obscured, rather than underscored, that what
Comey did in publicly justifying his behavior is unheard of in cases involving poor people. In the
real America, prosecutors are basically unaccountable to anyone but their bosses in terms of their
prosecutorial discretion, as cases in which abuse of prosecutorial discretion is successfully alleged
are vanishingly rare. Many are the mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers of poor black men who
would love to have had their sons' (or brothers', or fathers') over-charged criminal cases explained
to them with the sort of care and detail Hillary Clinton naturally receives when she's being investigated.
Clinton and the public "deserve" prosecutorial transparency when the defendant is a Clinton; just
about no one else deserves this level of not just transparency but also ― given the year-long length
of the FBI investigation ― prosecutorial and investigative caution.
What's amazing is how little use Comey actually made of all the extra time and effort. For instance,
on July 5th he said that every email the FBI uncovered was sent to the "owning" organization to see
if they wanted to "up-classify" it ― in other words, declare that it should have been classified
at the time it was sent and/or received, even if not marked that way at the time. One might think
Comey would want this information, the better to determine Clinton's intent with respect to those
emails (i.e., given Clinton's training, knowledge, and experience, how frequently did she "miss"
the classified nature of an email, relative to the assessment of owning agencies that a given email
was effectively and/or should have been considered classified ― even if not marked so ― at the time
Clinton handled it?) Keep in mind, here, that certain types of information, as Clinton without a
doubt knew, are "born classified" whether marked as such or not. And yet, just two days after July
5th, Comey testified before Congress that he "didn't pay much attention" to "up-classified" emails.
Why? Because, said Comey, they couldn't tell him anything about Clinton's intent. Bluntly,
this is an astonishing and indeed embarrassing statement for any prosecutor to make.
Whereas every day knowledge and motives are imparted to poor black men that are, as the poet Claudia
Rankine has observed, purely the product of a police officer's "imagination," the actual and indisputable
knowledge and motives and ― yes ― responsibilities held by Clinton were "downgraded" by Comey to
that of merely an average American. That is, despite the fact that Clinton was one of the most powerful
people on Earth, charged with managing an agency that collects among the highest number of classified
pieces of information of any agency anywhere; despite the fact that Clinton's agency had the strictest
policies for data storage for this very reason; despite the fact that State is, as Clinton well knew,
daily subjected to FOIA requests; despite all this, Comey actually said the following: "Like many
email users, Secretary Clinton periodically deleted emails..."
What?
How in the world does the "many email users" standard come into play here? Clinton's server, unlike
anyone else's server, was set up in a way that permitted no archiving, an arrangement that one now
imagines led (in part) to the person who set up that server taking the Fifth more than a hundred
times in interviews with the FBI; even assuming Clinton didn't know, and didn't request, for her
server to be set up in this astonishing way ― a way, again, that her own employees believe could
incriminate them ― how in the world could she have been sanguine about deleting emails "like many
email users" when the agency she headed had completely different and more stringent protocols
and requirements for data storage than just about any government agency on Earth? Just so, once
it was clear that Clinton had deleted (per Comey) "thousands of emails that were work-related" instead
of turning them over to State, in what universe can no intent be implied from the fact that her attorneys
purged 30,000 emails simply by looking at their headers? At what point does Clinton, as
former Secretary of State, begin to have ill intent imputed to her by not directing her attorneys
to actually read emails before permanently destroying them and making them unavailable to the FBI
as evidence? If you were in her situation, and instead of saying to your team either (a) "don't delete
any more emails," or (b) "if you delete any emails, make sure you've read them in full first," would
you expect anyone to impute "no specific intent" to your behavior?
The result: despite saying she never sent or received emails on her private basement server that
were classified "at the time," the FBI found that 52 email chains on Clinton's server ― including
110 emails ― contained information that was classified at the time (eight chains contained
"top secret" information; 36, "secret" information; and another eight "confidential" information).
Moreover, Clinton's team wrongly purged ― at a minimum ― "thousands" of work-related emails. (And
I'm putting aside entirely here the 2,000 emails on Clinton's server that were later "up-classified.")
At what point does this harm become foreseeable, and not seeing it ― when you're one of the best-educated,
smartest, most experienced public servants in U.S. history, as your political team keeps reminding
us ― become evidence of "intent"? Comey's answer? Never.
Indeed, Comey instead makes the positively fantastical observation that "none [of the emails Clinton
didn't turn over but was supposed to] were intentionally deleted." The problem is, by Comey's own
admission all of those emails were intentionally deleted, under circumstances in which the
problems with that deletion would not just have been evident to "any reasonable person" but specifically
were clear ― the context proves it ― to Clinton herself. During her four years as Secretary of State
Clinton routinely expressed concern to staff about her own and others' email-storage practices, establishing
beyond any doubt that not only was Clinton's literal key-pressing deliberate ― the "knowing" standard
― but also its repeated, systemic effect was fully appreciated by her in advance. Likewise, that
her attorneys were acting entirely on their own prerogative, without her knowledge, is a claim no
jury would credit.
Clinton's attorneys worked Clinton's case in consultation with Clinton ― that's how things work.
In other words, Clinton's lawyers are not rogue actors here. So when Comey says, "They [Clinton and
her team] deleted all emails they did not produce for State, and the lawyers then cleaned their devices
in such a way as to preclude complete forensic recovery," we have to ask, what possible reason would
an attorney have for wiping a server entirely within their control to ensure that no future court
order could access the permanently deleted information? In what universe is such behavior not
actual consciousness of guilt with respect to the destruction of evidence? Because we must be clear:
Comey isn't saying Clinton and her lawyers accidentally put these emails outside even a hypothetical
future judicial review; they did so intentionally.
There's that word again.
The result of these actions? The same as every other action Clinton took that Comey somehow
attributes no intent to: a clear legal benefit to Clinton and a frustration, indeed an obstruction,
of the FBI's investigation. As Comey said on July 5th, the FBI can't know how many emails are "gone"
(i.e., permanently) because of Clinton and her team's intentional acts after-the-fact. So Comey is
quite literally telling us that the FBI couldn't conclude their investigation with absolute confidence
that they had all the relevant facts, and that the reason for this was the intentional destruction
of evidence by the subject of the investigation at a time when there was no earthly reason to destroy
evidence except to keep it from the FBI.
In case you're wondering, no, you don't need a legal degree to see the problem there.
As an attorney, I can't imagine destroying evidence at a time I knew it was the subject of a federal
investigation. And if I ever were to do something like that, I would certainly assume that all such
actions would later be deemed "intentional" by law enforcement, as my intent would be inferred from
my training, knowledge, and experience as an attorney, as well as my specific awareness of a pending
federal investigation in which the items I was destroying might later become key evidence. That Clinton
and her team repeatedly (and falsely) claimed the FBI investigation was a mere "security review"
― yet another assertion whose falseness was resoundingly noted by Comey in his public statements
― was clearly a transparent attempt to negate intent in destroying those emails. (The theory being,
"Well, yes, I destroyed possible evidence just by looking at email headers, but this was all just
a 'security review,' right? Not a federal investigation? Even though I knew the three grounds
for referral of the case to the FBI, and knew that only one of them involved anything like a 'security
review'?")
And certainly, none of this explains Comey's (again) gymnastic avoidance of stating the obvious:
that crimes were committed.
Listen to his language on July 5th: "Although we did not find clear evidence that Clinton or her
colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information" (emphasis
in original) ― actually, let's stop there. You'd expect the second half of that sentence to be something
like, "...they nevertheless did violate those laws, despite not intending to." It's the natural continuation
of the thought. Instead, Comey, who had prepared his remarks in advance, finished the thought this
way: "....there is evidence that they were extremely careless with very sensitive, highly
classified information" (emphasis in original).
Note that Comey now uses the phrase "extremely careless" instead of "gross negligence," despite
using the latter phrase ― a legal phrase ― at the beginning of his July 5th remarks. That matters
because at the beginning of those remarks he conceded "gross negligence" would lead to a statutory
violation. So why the sudden shift in language, when from a legal standpoint "extreme carelessness"
and "gross negligence" are synonymous ― both indicating the presence of a duty of care, the failure
to meet that duty, and moreover a repeated failure on this score? Comey also avoids finishing
his sentence with the obvious thought: that they may not have intended to violate criminal
statutes, but they did nonetheless. Remember that, just like our hypothetical raver may not have
intended to commit a Simple Assault by stepping on that poor young woman's foot, he nevertheless
could be found to have done so; just so, had Comey accepted the statute as written, Clinton's "gross
negligence" would have forced him to end the above sentence with the finding of a statutory violation,
even if there had been no "specific intent" to do so.
This is how the law works. For poor black men, just not for rich white women.
5. Comey, along with the rest of Congress, left the impression, much like the Supreme
Court did in 2000, that legal analyses are fundamentally political analyses. Not only is
this untrue, it also is unspeakably damaging to both our legal system and Americans' understanding
of that system's operations.
I'm a staunch Democrat, but I'm also an attorney. Watching fellow Democrats twist themselves into
pretzels to analyze Clinton's actions through a farcically slapdash legal framework, rather than
merely acknowledging that Clinton is a human being and, like any human being, can both (a) commit
crimes, and (b) be replaced on a political ticket if need be, makes me sick as both a Democrat and
a lawyer. Just so, watching Republicans who had no issue with George W. Bush declaring unilateral
war in contravention of international law, and who had no issue with the obviously illegal behavior
of Scooter Libby in another recent high-profile intel-related criminal case, acting like the rule
of law is anything they care about makes me sick. Our government is dirty as all get-out, but the
one thing it's apparently clean of is anyone with both (a) legal training, and (b) a sense of the
ethics that govern legal practice. Over and over during Comey's Congressional testimony I heard politicians
noting their legal experience, and then going on to either shame their association with that august
profession or honor it but (in doing so) call into question their inability or unwillingness to do
so in other instances.
When Comey says, "any reasonable person should have known" not to act as Clinton did, many don't
realize he's quoting a legal standard ― the "reasonable person standard." A failure to meet that
standard can be used to establish either negligence or recklessness in a court of law. But here,
Clinton wasn't in the position of a "reasonable person" ― the average fellow or lady ― and Comey
wasn't looking merely at a "reasonableness" standard, but rather a "purposeful" standard that requires
Comey to ask all sorts of questions about Clinton's specific, fully contextualized situation and
background that he doesn't appear to have asked. One might argue that, in keeping with Clinton's
campaign theme, no one in American political history was more richly prepared ― by knowledge, training,
experience, and innate gifts ― to know how to act properly in the situations Clinton found herself.
That in those situations she failed to act even as a man or woman taken off the street and put in
a similar situation would have acted is not indicative of innocence or a lack of specific intent,
but the opposite. If a reasonable person wouldn't have done what Clinton did, the most exquisitely
prepared person for the situations in which Clinton found herself must in fact have been providing
prosecutors with prima facie evidence of intent by failing to meet even the lowest threshold
for proper conduct. Comey knows this; any prosecutor knows this. Maybe a jury would disagree with
Comey on this point, but his job is to assume that, if he zealously advocates for this extremely
powerful circumstantial case, a reasonable jury, taking the facts in the light most favorable to
the government, would see things his way.
Look, I can't possibly summarize for anyone reading this the silly nonsense I have seen prosecutors
indict people for; a common saying in the law is that the average grand jury "would indict a ham
sandwich," and to be clear that happens not because the run-of-the-mill citizens who sit on grand
juries are bloodthirsty, but because the habitual practice of American prosecutors is to indict first
and ask questions later ― and because indictments are absurdly easy to acquire. In other words, I've
seen thousands of poor people get over-charged for either nonsense or nothing at all, only to have
their prosecutors attempt to leverage their flimsy cases into a plea deal to a lesser charge. By
comparison, it is evident to every defense attorney of my acquaintance that I've spoken to that James
Comey bent over backwards to not indict Hillary Clinton ― much like the hundreds of state
and federal prosecutors who have bent over backwards not to indict police officers over the past
few decades. Every attorney who's practiced in criminal courts for years can smell when the fix is
in ― can hear and see when the court's usual actors are acting highly unusually ― and that's what's
happened here. The tragedy is that it will convince Americans that our legal system is fundamentally
about what a prosecutor feels they can and should be able to get away with, an answer informed largely,
it will seem to many, by various attorneys' personal temperaments and political prejudices.
No one in America who's dedicated their life to the law can feel any satisfaction with how Hillary
Clinton's case was investigated or ultimately disposed of, no more than we can feel sanguine about
prosecutors whose approach to poor black defendants is draconian and to embattled police officers
positively beatific. What we need in Congress, and in prosecutor's offices, are men and women of
principle who act in accordance with their ethical charge no matter the circumstances. While James
Comey is not a political hack, and was not, I don't believe, in any sense acting conspiratorially
in not bringing charges against Hillary Clinton, I believe that, much like SCOTUS did not
decide in the 2000 voting rights case Bush v. Gore, Comey felt that this was a bad time
for an executive-branch officer to interfere with the workings of domestic politics. Perhaps Comey
had the best of intentions in not doing his duty; perhaps he thought letting voters, not prosecutors,
decide the 2016 election was his civic duty. Many Democrats could wish the Supreme Court had felt
the same way in 2000 with respect to the role of judges. But the fact remains that the non-indictment
of Hillary Clinton is as much a stain on the fair and equal administration of justice as is the disparate
treatment of poor black males at all stages of the criminal justice system. I witnessed the latter
injustice close up, nearly every day, during my seven years working as a public defender; now America
has seen the same thing, albeit on a very different stage, involving a defendant of a very different
class and hue.
To have prosecuted Clinton, said Comey, he would need to have seen "clearly intentional and willful
mishandling of classified information, or vast quantities of information exposed in such a way as
to support an inference of intentional misconduct, or....efforts to obstruct justice..." When Comey
concludes, "we do not see those things here," America should ― and indeed must ― wonder what facts
he could possibly be looking at, and, moreover, what understanding of his role in American life he
could possibly be acting upon. The answers to these two questions would take us at least two steps
forward in discussing how average Americans are treated by our increasingly dysfunctional system
of justice.
Seth Abramson is the Series Editor for Best American Experimental Writing (Wesleyan University)
and the author, most recently, of
DATA (BlazeVOX, 2016).
Neoliberal MSM response to latest FBI director Comey testimony is a textbook example of brainwashing (or groupthink). It shows to
me again that you need to go to the source watch at least the fragments of the testimony on YouTube. It deadly serious situation for
Hillary. No person with even cursory knowledge of security can avoid thinking that she should be in jail. Republicans know it and will
not let her off the hook. Probably special prosecutor will be appointed. See for example
https://judiciary.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/House-Letter-to-FBI-Director-1.pdf
Now Comey is under strong fire and need to save his own skin. You can tell anything about Republican members of House of Representative,
but it is now quite clear to me that several of them are brilliant former lawyers/prosecutor/judges.
From now on they will block all attempt to swipe this matter under the carpet and unless Hillary withdraw they might try to implicate
Obama in the cover-up (and they have facts: he recklessly corresponded with her on this account).
They already requested all FBI files on Clinton. Soon they will have all the dirty laundering from Hillary server and FBI probably
recovered most of it.
From this point it is up-hill battle for Obama, and might well think about finding appropriate sacrificial lamp NOW. My impression
is that she lost her chance to became the President. With FBI files in hand, In four month they can do so much damage that she would
be better to take her toys and leave the playground.
And this topic hopefully already influence super-delegates. I think her best option now is give Sanders a chance. Because the real
threat now is not that she will go to jail. She belongs to the elite and is above the law. Now the real threat is that all her close
associates might.
On Tuesday, the FBI assumed the role of prosecutor and not simply investigator and took the unprecedented act of proclaiming that
no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case. Based on the perception that a decision has been made by the FBI that has seemingly
ignored facts that the FBI itself found in its own investigation, we have additional questions that are aimed at ensuring that the
cloud which now hovers over our justice system is at least minimally pierced:
1) As a former prosecutor, please explain your understanding of the legal difference between actions performed with "gross negligence"
and those done "extremely carelessly." How did you determine that "extreme carelessness" did not equate to "gross negligence?"
2) You said that no reasonable prosecutor would decide to prosecute the Clinton case on the evidence found by FBI agents during
the Bureau's investigation over the past year. We have multiple former prosecutors in Congress, and it is not far-fetched for many
of us to envision a successful prosecution of someone for doing far less than that which was committed by Secretary Clinton. Is your
statement not an indictment and prejudgment against any Assistant United States Attorney who is now tasked with reviewing the evidence
you presented Tuesday? In your judgment, does it not follow that you would think that a prosecutor who moved forward with the instant
prosecution of Secretary Clinton would be "unreasonable?"
3) Are you aware of any internal opinions by FBI agents or management who were intimately aware of the Clinton investigation which
differed from your eventual decision to not recommend the case for prosecution?
4) You mentioned that Top Secret Special Access Programs (SAPs) were included in emails sent and received by Secretary Clinton. SAP
material is some of the most highly classified and controlled material of the U.S. Government. If an agency of the U.S. Government
were to encounter similar information from a foreign adversary, it would be extremely valuable data for us to exploit. Did the FBI
assess how SAP information, due to its controlled nature, ever made it onto unclassified systems that were not air-gapped or physically
blocked from outside Internet access? Is it not "gross negligence" to permit such SAP data to leave the confines of the most protective
and secure governmental enclaves? Or even "intentional" conduct that allowed that to happen?
5) You mentioned that this investigation
stemmed from a referral from the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community to determine whether classified information had
been transmitted on an unclassified personal system. Following your investigation, it is clear that Secretary Clinton transmitted
classified information on an unclassified system. Secretary Clinton on multiple occasions has said that she did not send or receive
classified information or information marked as classified.3 In light of your decision to also not refer a false statements charge
under 18 U.S.C. § 1001 for prosecution, we can only presume that Secretary Clinton admitted during her interview with your agents
that she, in fact, sent and received emails containing classified information. Please confirm.
6) Are you aware of whether any deleted emails which the FBI was able to forensically recover from Secretary Clinton's servers
pertained to the Clinton Foundation?
7) You stated Tuesday, "Given that combination of factors, we assess it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary
Clinton's personal e-mail account." Is the FBI's Counterintelligence Division still involved in determining the level of damage related
to possible exploitation of Secretary Clinton's or her associates' email accounts and other communications?
8) If the FBI performed a background check on an applicant for employment with the FBI or elsewhere in the U.S. Government, and
that applicant engaged in conduct committed by Secretary Clinton, would a security clearance ever be granted to that person?
Mr. Comey said the emails included eight chains of emails and replies, some written by her, that contained information classified
as "top secret: special access programs." That classification is the highest level, reserved for the nation's most highly guarded
intelligence operations or sources.
Another 36 chains were "secret," which is defined as including information that "could be expected to cause serious damage to
the national security"; eight others had information classified at the lowest level, "confidential."
"... The reality is that prosecutors don't normally consider the legislative history or possible unconstitutionality of criminal statutes. Why? Because that's not their job. ..."
"... We can say, accurately, that the judgment of the FBI in its investigation into Clinton and her associates ― and Comey confirmed Clinton was indeed a "subject" of the investigation ― is that Clinton is a criminal. ..."
"... whether criminal statutes on the books had been violated ..."
"... criminal statutes had been violated ..."
"... So, my first point: for Comey to imply that there is any prosecutor in America uncomfortable with the "constitutionality" of criminal statutes predicated on "negligent," "reckless," or "knowing" mental states is not just laughable but an insult to both the prosecutorial class and our entire criminal justice system. Whatever issue Comey may have had with the felony statute he agrees Clinton violated, that wasn't it. ..."
"... specific intent ..."
"... Black's Law Dictionary ..."
"... First he asked, "What would other prosecutors do?" That's not a question prosecutors are charged to ask, and we now see why: as Comey himself concedes, countless prosecutors have already come out in public to say that, had they been investigating Clinton, they would have prosecuted her. A standard for prosecutorial discretion in which you weigh what others in your shoes might do based on some sort of a census leads immediately to madness, not just for the reasons I'm articulating here but many others too numerous to go into in detail in this space. ..."
"... Comey found credible that Clinton had created her private basement server set-up purely out of "convenience"; yet he also found that old servers, once replaced, were "stored and decommissioned in various ways." Wait, "various ways"? If Clinton was trying to create a streamlined, convenient personal process for data storage, why were things handled so haphazardly that Comey himself would say that the servers were dealt with "in various ways" over time? ..."
"... And indeed, the evidence Comey turned up showed that Clinton's staff was aware ― was repeatedly and systematically made aware ― that the Secretary's set-up had the effect of evading FOIA requests. And Clinton was, by her own admission, clear with her inferiors that "avoiding access to the personal" was key to her private basement-server set-up. That's very different from "convenience." ..."
"... completely different and more stringent protocols and requirements for data storage ..."
"... simply by looking at their headers ..."
"... every other action ..."
"... Seth Abramson is the Series Editor for Best American Experimental Writing (Wesleyan University) and the author, most recently, of DATA (BlazeVOX, 2016). ..."
1. According to Comey, Clinton committed multiple federal felonies and misdemeanors.
Many people will miss this in the wash of punditry from non-attorneys in the mainstream media that
has followed Comey's public remarks and Congressional testimony.
The issue for Comey wasn't that
Clinton hadn't committed any federal crimes, but that in his personal opinion the federal felony
statute Clinton violated (18 U.S.C. 793f) has been too rarely applied for him to feel comfortable
applying it to Clinton. This is quite different from saying that no crime was committed; rather,
Comey's position is that crimes were committed, but he has decided not to prosecute those crimes
because (a) the statute he focused most on has only been used once in the last century (keeping in
mind how relatively rare cases like these are in the first instance, and therefore how rarely we
would naturally expect a statute like this to apply in any case), and (b) he personally believes
that the statute in question might be unconstitutional because, as he put it, it might punish people
for crimes they didn't specifically intend to commit (specifically, it requires only a finding of
"gross negligence," which Comey conceded he could prove). Comey appears to have taken the extraordinary
step of researching the legislative history of this particular criminal statute in order to render
this latter assessment.
The reality is that prosecutors don't normally consider the legislative history or possible
unconstitutionality of criminal statutes. Why? Because that's not their job. Their job is to
apply the laws as written, unless and until they are superseded by new legislation or struck down
by the judicial branch. In Comey's case, this deep dive into the history books is even more
puzzling as, prior to Attorney General Loretta Lynch unethically having a private meeting with Bill
Clinton on an airport tarmac, Comey wasn't even slated to be the final arbiter of whether Clinton
was prosecuted or not. He would have been expected, in a case like this, to note to the Department
of Justice's career prosecutors that the FBI had found evidence of multiple federal crimes, and then
leave it to their prosecutorial discretion as to whether or not to pursue a prosecution. But more
broadly, we must note that when Comey gave his public justification for not bringing charges ― a
public justification in itself highly unusual, and suggestive of the possibility that Comey knew
his inaction was extraordinary, and therefore felt the need to defend himself in equally extraordinary
fashion ― he did not state the truth: that Clinton had committed multiple federal crimes per statutes
presently on the books, and that the lack of a recommendation for prosecution was based not on the
lack of a crime but the lack of prosecutorial will (or, as he might otherwise have put it, the exercise
of prosecutorial discretion).
The danger here is that Americans will now believe many untrue things about the executive branch
of their government. For instance, watching Comey's testimony one might believe that if the executive
branch exercises its prosecutorial discretion and declines to prosecute crimes it determines have
been committed, it means no crimes were committed. In fact, what it means (in a case like this) is
that crimes were committed but will not be prosecuted. We can say, accurately, that the judgment
of the FBI in its investigation into Clinton and her associates ― and Comey confirmed Clinton was
indeed a "subject" of the investigation ― is that Clinton is a criminal. She simply shouldn't,
in the view of the FBI, be prosecuted for her crimes. Prosecutorial discretion of this sort is relatively
common, and indeed should be much more common when it comes to criminal cases involving
poor Americans; instead, we find it most commonly in law enforcement's treatment of Americans with
substantial personal, financial, sociocultural, and legal resources.
Americans might also wrongly believe, watching Comey's testimony, that it is the job of executive-branch
employees to determine which criminal statutes written by the legislative branch will be acknowledged.
While one could argue that this task does fall to the head of the prosecuting authority in a given
instance ― here, Attorney General Loretta Lynch; had an independent prosecutor been secured in this
case, as should have happened, that person, instead ― one could not argue that James Comey's
role in this scenario was to decide which on-the-books criminal statutes matter and which don't.
Indeed, Comey himself said, during his announcement of the FBI's recommendation, that his role was
to refer the case to the DOJ for a "prosecutive decision" ― in other words, the decision on whether
to prosecute wasn't his. His job was only to determine whether criminal statutes on the books
had been violated.
By this test, Comey didn't just not do the job he set out to do, he wildly and irresponsibly
exceeded it, to the point where its original contours were unrecognizable. To be blunt: by obscuring,
in his public remarks and advice to the DOJ, the fact that criminal statutes had been violated
― in favor of observing, more broadly, that there should be no prosecution ― he made it not just
easy but a fait accompli for the media and workaday Americans to think that not only would no prosecution
commence, but that indeed there had been no statutory violations.
Which there were.
Americans might also wrongly take at face value Comey's contention that the felony statute Clinton
violated was unconstitutional ― on the grounds that it criminalizes behavior that does not
include a specific intent to do wrong. This is, as every attorney knows, laughable. Every single
day in America, prosecutors prosecute Americans ― usually but not exclusively poor people ― for crimes
whose governing statutes lack the requirement of "specific intent." Ever heard of negligent homicide?
That's a statute that doesn't require what lawyers call (depending on the jurisdiction) an "intentional"
or "purposeful" mental state. Rather, it requires "negligence." Many other statutes require only
a showing of "recklessness," which likewise is dramatically distinct from "purposeful" or "intentional"
conduct. And an even larger number of statutes have a "knowing" mental state, which Comey well knows
― but the average American does not ― is a general- rather than specific-intent mental state (mens
rea, in legal terms).
And the term "knowingly" is absolutely key to the misdemeanors Comey appears to concede
Clinton committed, but has declined to charge her for.
To discuss what "knowingly" means in the law, I'll start with an example. When I practiced criminal
law in New Hampshire, it was a crime punishable by up to a year in jail to "knowingly cause unprivileged
physical contact with another person." The three key elements to this particular crime, which is
known as Simple Assault, are "knowingly," "unprivileged," and "physical contact." If a prosecutor
can prove each of these elements beyond a reasonable doubt, the defendant could, at the discretion
of a judge, find themselves locked in a cage for a year. "Physical contact" means just about exactly
what you'd expect, as does "unprivileged" ― contact for which you have no claim of privilege, such
as self-defense, defense of another, permission of the alleged victim, and so on. But what the heck
does "knowingly" mean? Well, as any law student can tell you, it means that you were aware of the
physical act you were engaged in, even if you didn't intend the consequences that act caused. For
instance, say you're in the pit at a particularly raucous speed-metal concert, leaping about, as
one does, in close proximity with many other people. Now let's say that after one of your leaps you
land on a young woman's foot and break it. If charged with Simple Assault, your defense won't be
as to your mental state, because you were "knowingly" leaping about, even if you intended no harm
in doing so. Instead, your defense will probably be that the contact (which you also wouldn't contest)
was "privileged," because the young lady had implicitly taken on, as had you, the risks of being
in a pit in the middle of a speed-metal concert. See the difference between knowingly engaging in
a physical act that has hurtful consequences, and "intending" or having as your "purpose" those consequences?
Just so, I've seen juveniles prosecuted for Simple Assault for throwing food during an in-school
cafeteria food fight; in that instance, no one was hurt, nor did anyone intend to hurt anybody, but
"unprivileged physical contact" was "knowingly" made all the same (in this case, via the instrument
of, say, a chicken nugget).
So, my first point: for Comey to imply that there is any prosecutor in America uncomfortable
with the "constitutionality" of criminal statutes predicated on "negligent," "reckless," or "knowing"
mental states is not just laughable but an insult to both the prosecutorial class and our entire
criminal justice system. Whatever issue Comey may have had with the felony statute he agrees Clinton
violated, that wasn't it.
What about the misdemeanor statute?
Well, there's now terrifying evidence available for public consumption to the effect that Director
Comey doesn't understand the use of the word "knowingly" in the law ― indeed, understands it less
than even a law student in his or her first semester would. Just over an hour (at 1:06) into the
six-hour
C-SPAN video of Comey's Congressional testimony, Representative Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) makes a
brief but absolutely unimpeachable case that, using the term "knowingly" as I have here and as it
is used in every courtroom in America, Secretary Clinton committed multiple federal misdemeanors
inasmuch as she, per the relevant statute (Title 18 U.S.C. 1924), "became possessed of documents
or materials containing classified information of the United States....and knowingly removed such
documents or materials without authority and with the intent to retain such documents or materials
at an unauthorized location." Comey, misunderstanding the word "knowingly" in a way any law school
student would scream at their TV over, states that the FBI would still, under that statutory language,
need to prove specific intent to convict Clinton of a Title 18 U.S.C. 1924 violation. Lummis
points out that Comey is dead wrong ― and she's right, he is wrong. Per the above, all Clinton
had to be aware of is that (a) she was in possession of classified documents, and (b) she had removed
them to an unauthorized location. Comey admits these two facts are true, and yet he won't prosecute
because he's added a clause that's not in the statute. I can't emphasize this enough: Comey makes
clear with his answers throughout his testimony that Clinton committed this federal misdemeanor,
but equally makes clear that he didn't charge her with it because he didn't understand the statute.
(At 1:53 in the video linked to above, Representative Ken Buck of Colorado goes back to the topic
of Title 18 U.S.C. 1924, locking down that Comey is indeed deliberately adding language to that federal
criminal statute that quite literally is not there.)
Yes, it's true. Watch the video for yourself,
look up the word "knowingly" in Black's Law Dictionary, and you'll see that I'm right.
This is scary stuff for an attorney like me, or really for any of us, to see on television ― a government
attorney with less knowledge of criminal law than a first-year law student.
2. Comey has dramatically misrepresented what prosecutorial discretion looks like.
The result of this is that Americans will fundamentally misunderstand our adversarial system of justice.
Things like our Fourth and Fifth Amendment are part and parcel of our "adversarial" system of
justice. We could have elected, as a nation, to have an "inquisitorial" system of justice ― as some
countries in Europe, with far fewer protections for criminal defendants, do ― but we made the decision
that the best truth-seeking mechanism is one in which two reflexively zealous advocates, a prosecutor
and a defense attorney, push their cases to the utmost of their ability (within certain well-established
ethical strictures).
James Comey, in his testimony before Congress, left the impression that his job as a prosecutor
was to weigh his ability to prove a case beyond a reasonable doubt not as a prosecutor, but as a
member of a prospective jury. That's not how things work in America; it certainly, and quite spectacularly,
isn't how it works for poor black men. In fact, what American prosecutors are charged to do is imagine
a situation in which (a) they present their case to a jury as zealously as humanly possible within
the well-established ethical code of the American courtroom, (b) all facts and inferences are taken
by that jury in the prosecution's favor, and then (c) whether, given all those conditions, there
is a reasonable likelihood that all twelve jurors would vote for a conviction.
That is not the standard James Comey used to determine whether to prosecute Hillary Clinton.
What Comey did was something else altogether.
First he asked, "What would other prosecutors do?" That's not a question prosecutors are charged
to ask, and we now see why: as Comey himself concedes, countless prosecutors have already come out
in public to say that, had they been investigating Clinton, they would have prosecuted her. A standard
for prosecutorial discretion in which you weigh what others in your shoes might do based on some
sort of a census leads immediately to madness, not just for the reasons I'm articulating here but
many others too numerous to go into in detail in this space.
The second thing Comey did was ask, "Am I guaranteed to win this case at trial?" Would that
this slowed the roll of prosecutors when dealing with poor black men! Instead, as I discuss later
on, prosecutors ― via the blunt instrument of the grand jury ― usually use the mere fact of misdemeanor
or felony charges against a defendant as a mechanism for ending a case short of trial. Even prosecutors
who ultimately drop a case will charge (misdemeanor) or indict (felony) it first, if only to give
themselves time ― because defendants do have speedy trial rights, and statutes of limitation do sometimes
intercede ― to plan their next move.
Third, Comey imagined his case at trial through the following lens: "How would we do at trial
if the jury took every fact and presumption ― as we already have ― in Clinton's favor?" Indeed, I'm
having more than a hard time ― actually an impossible time ― finding a single unknown or unclear
fact that Comey took in a light unfavorable to Clinton (including, incredibly, the facts that became
unknowable because of Clinton's own actions and evasions). Instead, Hillary was given the benefit
of the doubt at every turn, so much so that it was obvious that the only evidence of "intent" Comey
would accept was a full confession from Clinton. That's something prosecutors rarely get, and certainly
(therefore) never make a prerequisite for prosecution. But Comey clearly did here.
I have never seen this standard used in the prosecution of a poor person. Not once.
3. Comey left the indelible impression, with American news-watchers, that prosecutors
only prosecute specific-intent crimes, and will only find a sufficient mens
rea (mental state) if and when a defendant has confessed. Imagine, for a moment, if
police officers only shot unarmed black men who were in the process of confessing either verbally
("I'm about to pull a gun on you!") or physically (e.g., by assaulting the officer). Impossible to
imagine, right? That's because that's not how this works; indeed, that's not how any of this works.
Prosecutors, like police officers, are, in seeking signs of intent, trained to read ― and conceding
here that some of them do it poorly ― contextual clues that precede, are contemporaneous with, and/or
follow the commission of a crime.
But this apparently doesn't apply to Hillary Clinton.
It would be easier to identify the contextual clues that don't suggest Clinton had consciousness
of guilt than those that do ― as there are exponentially more of the latter than the former.
But let's do our best, and consider just a few of the clear signs that Clinton and her team, judging
them solely by their words and actions, knew that what they were doing was unlawful.
For instance, Clinton repeatedly said she used one server and only one device ― not that she
thought that that was the correct information, but that she knew it was. Yet the
FBI found, per Comey's July 5th statement, that Clinton used "several different servers" and "numerous
mobile devices." So either Clinton didn't know the truth but pretended in all her public statements
that she did; or she was given bad information which she then repeated uncritically, in which case
a prosecutor would demand to know from whom she received that information (as surely that
person would know they'd spread misinformation); or she knew the truth and was lying. A prosecutor
would want clear, on-the-record answers on these issues; instead, Comey let other FBI agents have
an unrecorded, untranscripted interview with Clinton that he himself didn't bother to attend. It's
not even clear that that interview was much considered by the FBI; Comey declared his decision just
a few dozen hours after the interview was over, and word leaked that there would be no indictment
just two hours after the interview. Which, again, incredibly ― and not in keeping with any
law enforcement policy regarding subject interviews I'm aware of ― was unrecorded, untranscripted,
unsworn, and unattended by the lead prosecutor.
This in the context of a year-long investigation for which Clinton was the primary subject.
Since when is an hours-long interview with an investigation's subject so immaterial to the charging
decision? And since when is such an interview treated as such a casual event? Since never. At least
for poor people.
And since when are false exculpatory statements not strong evidence of intent?
Since never - at least for poor people.
Comey found credible that Clinton had created her private basement server set-up purely out
of "convenience"; yet he also found that old servers, once replaced, were "stored and decommissioned
in various ways." Wait, "various ways"? If Clinton was trying to create a streamlined, convenient
personal process for data storage, why were things handled so haphazardly that Comey himself would
say that the servers were dealt with "in various ways" over time? Just so, Comey would naturally
want to test Clinton's narrative by seeing whether or not all FOIA requests were fully responded
to by Clinton and her staff in the four years she was the head of the State Department. Surely, Clinton
and her staff had been fully briefed on their legal obligations under FOIA ― that's provable ― so
if Clinton's "convenience" had caused a conflict with the Secretary's FOIA obligations that would
have been immediately obvious to both Clinton and her staff, and would have been remedied immediately
if the purpose of the server was not to avoid FOIA requests but mere convenience. At a minimum, Comey
would find evidence (either hard or testimonial) that such conversations occurred. And indeed,
the evidence Comey turned up showed that Clinton's staff was aware ― was repeatedly and systematically
made aware ― that the Secretary's set-up had the effect of evading FOIA requests. And Clinton was,
by her own admission, clear with her inferiors that "avoiding access to the personal" was key to
her private basement-server set-up. That's very different from "convenience."
Even if Comey believed that "avoiding access to the personal," rather than "convenience," was
the reason for Clinton's server set-up, that explanation would have imploded under the weight
of evidence Clinton, her team, and her attorneys exercised no due caution whatsoever in determining
what was "personal" and what was not personal when they were wiping those servers clean. If Clinton's
concern was privacy, there's no evidence that much attention was paid to accurately and narrowly
protecting that interest ― rather, the weight of the evidence suggests that the aim, at all times,
was to keep the maximum amount of information away from FOIA discovery, not just "personal" information
but (as Comey found) a wealth of work-related information.
But let's pull back for a moment and be a little less legalistic. Clinton claimed the reason for
her set-up was ― exclusively ― "convenience"; nevertheless, Comey said it took "thousands of hours
of painstaking effort" to "piece back together" exactly what Clinton was up to. Wouldn't that fact
alone give the lie to the claim that this system was more "convenient" than the protocols State already
had in place? "Millions of email fragments ended up in the server's 'slack space'," Comey said of
Clinton's "convenient" email-storage arrangement. See the contradiction? How would "millions of email
fragments ending up in a server's 'slack space'" in any way have served Clinton's presumptive desire
for both (a) convenience, (b) FOIA complicance, (c) a securing of her privacy, and (d) compliance
with State Department email-storage regulations? Would any reasonable person have found this set-up
convenient? And if not ― and Comey explicitly found not ― why in the world didn't that help
to establish the real intent of Clinton's private basement servers? Indeed, had Clinton
intended on complying with FOIA, presumably her own staff would have had to do the very same painstaking
work it took the FBI a year to do. But FOIA requests come in too fast and furious, at State, for
Clinton's staff to do the work it took the FBI a year to do in a matter of days; wouldn't this in
itself establish that Clinton and her staff had no ability, and therefore well knew they had no intention,
of acceding to any of the Department's hundreds or even thousands of annual FOIA requests in full?
And wouldn't ignoring all those requests be not just illegal but "inconvenient" in the extreme? And
speak to the question of intent?
It took Clinton two years to hand over work emails she was supposed to hand over the day she left
office; and during that time, she and her lawyers, some of whom appear to have looked at classified
material without clearance, deleted thousands of "personal" emails ― many of which turned out the
be exactly the sort of work emails she was supposed to turn over the day she left State. In this
situation, an actor acting in good faith would have (a) erred on the side of caution in deleting
emails, (b) responded with far, far more alacrity to the valid demands of State to see all work-related
emails, and (c) having erroneously deleted certain emails, would have rushed to correct the mistake
themselves rather than seeing if they could get away with deleting ― mind you ― not just work emails
but work emails with (in several instances) classified information in them. How in the world was
none of this taken toward the question of intent? Certainly, it was taken toward the finding of "gross
negligence" Comey made, but how in the world was none of it seen as relevant to Clinton's
specific intent also? Why does it seem the only evidence of specific intent Comey would've looked
at was a smoking gun? Does he realize how few criminal cases would ever be brought against anyone
in America if a "smoking gun" standard was in effect? Does anyone realize how many poor black men
wouldn't be in prison if that standard was in effect for them as well as Secretary Clinton?
4. Comey made it seem that the amount and quality of prosecutorial consideration he gave
Clinton was normal. The mere fact that Comey gave public statements justifying his prosecutorial
discretion misleads the public into thinking that, say, poor black men receive this level of care
when prosecutors are choosing whether to indict them.
While at least he had the good grace to call the fact of his making a public statement "unusual"
― chalking it up to the "intense public interest" that meant Clinton (and the public) "deserved"
an explanation for his behavior ― that grace ultimately obscured, rather than underscored, that what
Comey did in publicly justifying his behavior is unheard of in cases involving poor people. In the
real America, prosecutors are basically unaccountable to anyone but their bosses in terms of their
prosecutorial discretion, as cases in which abuse of prosecutorial discretion is successfully alleged
are vanishingly rare. Many are the mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers of poor black men who
would love to have had their sons' (or brothers', or fathers') over-charged criminal cases explained
to them with the sort of care and detail Hillary Clinton naturally receives when she's being investigated.
Clinton and the public "deserve" prosecutorial transparency when the defendant is a Clinton; just
about no one else deserves this level of not just transparency but also ― given the year-long length
of the FBI investigation ― prosecutorial and investigative caution.
What's amazing is how little use Comey actually made of all the extra time and effort. For instance,
on July 5th he said that every email the FBI uncovered was sent to the "owning" organization to see
if they wanted to "up-classify" it ― in other words, declare that it should have been classified
at the time it was sent and/or received, even if not marked that way at the time. One might think
Comey would want this information, the better to determine Clinton's intent with respect to those
emails (i.e., given Clinton's training, knowledge, and experience, how frequently did she "miss"
the classified nature of an email, relative to the assessment of owning agencies that a given email
was effectively and/or should have been considered classified ― even if not marked so ― at the time
Clinton handled it?) Keep in mind, here, that certain types of information, as Clinton without a
doubt knew, are "born classified" whether marked as such or not. And yet, just two days after July
5th, Comey testified before Congress that he "didn't pay much attention" to "up-classified" emails.
Why? Because, said Comey, they couldn't tell him anything about Clinton's intent. Bluntly,
this is an astonishing and indeed embarrassing statement for any prosecutor to make.
Whereas every day knowledge and motives are imparted to poor black men that are, as the poet Claudia
Rankine has observed, purely the product of a police officer's "imagination," the actual and indisputable
knowledge and motives and ― yes ― responsibilities held by Clinton were "downgraded" by Comey to
that of merely an average American. That is, despite the fact that Clinton was one of the most powerful
people on Earth, charged with managing an agency that collects among the highest number of classified
pieces of information of any agency anywhere; despite the fact that Clinton's agency had the strictest
policies for data storage for this very reason; despite the fact that State is, as Clinton well knew,
daily subjected to FOIA requests; despite all this, Comey actually said the following: "Like many
email users, Secretary Clinton periodically deleted emails..."
What?
How in the world does the "many email users" standard come into play here? Clinton's server, unlike
anyone else's server, was set up in a way that permitted no archiving, an arrangement that one now
imagines led (in part) to the person who set up that server taking the Fifth more than a hundred
times in interviews with the FBI; even assuming Clinton didn't know, and didn't request, for her
server to be set up in this astonishing way ― a way, again, that her own employees believe could
incriminate them ― how in the world could she have been sanguine about deleting emails "like many
email users" when the agency she headed had completely different and more stringent protocols
and requirements for data storage than just about any government agency on Earth? Just so, once
it was clear that Clinton had deleted (per Comey) "thousands of emails that were work-related" instead
of turning them over to State, in what universe can no intent be implied from the fact that her attorneys
purged 30,000 emails simply by looking at their headers? At what point does Clinton, as
former Secretary of State, begin to have ill intent imputed to her by not directing her attorneys
to actually read emails before permanently destroying them and making them unavailable to the FBI
as evidence? If you were in her situation, and instead of saying to your team either (a) "don't delete
any more emails," or (b) "if you delete any emails, make sure you've read them in full first," would
you expect anyone to impute "no specific intent" to your behavior?
The result: despite saying she never sent or received emails on her private basement server that
were classified "at the time," the FBI found that 52 email chains on Clinton's server ― including
110 emails ― contained information that was classified at the time (eight chains contained
"top secret" information; 36, "secret" information; and another eight "confidential" information).
Moreover, Clinton's team wrongly purged ― at a minimum ― "thousands" of work-related emails. (And
I'm putting aside entirely here the 2,000 emails on Clinton's server that were later "up-classified.")
At what point does this harm become foreseeable, and not seeing it ― when you're one of the best-educated,
smartest, most experienced public servants in U.S. history, as your political team keeps reminding
us ― become evidence of "intent"? Comey's answer? Never.
Indeed, Comey instead makes the positively fantastical observation that "none [of the emails Clinton
didn't turn over but was supposed to] were intentionally deleted." The problem is, by Comey's own
admission all of those emails were intentionally deleted, under circumstances in which the
problems with that deletion would not just have been evident to "any reasonable person" but specifically
were clear ― the context proves it ― to Clinton herself. During her four years as Secretary of State
Clinton routinely expressed concern to staff about her own and others' email-storage practices, establishing
beyond any doubt that not only was Clinton's literal key-pressing deliberate ― the "knowing" standard
― but also its repeated, systemic effect was fully appreciated by her in advance. Likewise, that
her attorneys were acting entirely on their own prerogative, without her knowledge, is a claim no
jury would credit.
Clinton's attorneys worked Clinton's case in consultation with Clinton ― that's how things work.
In other words, Clinton's lawyers are not rogue actors here. So when Comey says, "They [Clinton and
her team] deleted all emails they did not produce for State, and the lawyers then cleaned their devices
in such a way as to preclude complete forensic recovery," we have to ask, what possible reason would
an attorney have for wiping a server entirely within their control to ensure that no future court
order could access the permanently deleted information? In what universe is such behavior not
actual consciousness of guilt with respect to the destruction of evidence? Because we must be clear:
Comey isn't saying Clinton and her lawyers accidentally put these emails outside even a hypothetical
future judicial review; they did so intentionally.
There's that word again.
The result of these actions? The same as every other action Clinton took that Comey somehow
attributes no intent to: a clear legal benefit to Clinton and a frustration, indeed an obstruction,
of the FBI's investigation. As Comey said on July 5th, the FBI can't know how many emails are "gone"
(i.e., permanently) because of Clinton and her team's intentional acts after-the-fact. So Comey is
quite literally telling us that the FBI couldn't conclude their investigation with absolute confidence
that they had all the relevant facts, and that the reason for this was the intentional destruction
of evidence by the subject of the investigation at a time when there was no earthly reason to destroy
evidence except to keep it from the FBI.
In case you're wondering, no, you don't need a legal degree to see the problem there.
As an attorney, I can't imagine destroying evidence at a time I knew it was the subject of a federal
investigation. And if I ever were to do something like that, I would certainly assume that all such
actions would later be deemed "intentional" by law enforcement, as my intent would be inferred from
my training, knowledge, and experience as an attorney, as well as my specific awareness of a pending
federal investigation in which the items I was destroying might later become key evidence. That Clinton
and her team repeatedly (and falsely) claimed the FBI investigation was a mere "security review"
― yet another assertion whose falseness was resoundingly noted by Comey in his public statements
― was clearly a transparent attempt to negate intent in destroying those emails. (The theory being,
"Well, yes, I destroyed possible evidence just by looking at email headers, but this was all just
a 'security review,' right? Not a federal investigation? Even though I knew the three grounds
for referral of the case to the FBI, and knew that only one of them involved anything like a 'security
review'?")
And certainly, none of this explains Comey's (again) gymnastic avoidance of stating the obvious:
that crimes were committed.
Listen to his language on July 5th: "Although we did not find clear evidence that Clinton or her
colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information" (emphasis
in original) ― actually, let's stop there. You'd expect the second half of that sentence to be something
like, "...they nevertheless did violate those laws, despite not intending to." It's the natural continuation
of the thought. Instead, Comey, who had prepared his remarks in advance, finished the thought this
way: "....there is evidence that they were extremely careless with very sensitive, highly
classified information" (emphasis in original).
Note that Comey now uses the phrase "extremely careless" instead of "gross negligence," despite
using the latter phrase ― a legal phrase ― at the beginning of his July 5th remarks. That matters
because at the beginning of those remarks he conceded "gross negligence" would lead to a statutory
violation. So why the sudden shift in language, when from a legal standpoint "extreme carelessness"
and "gross negligence" are synonymous ― both indicating the presence of a duty of care, the failure
to meet that duty, and moreover a repeated failure on this score? Comey also avoids finishing
his sentence with the obvious thought: that they may not have intended to violate criminal
statutes, but they did nonetheless. Remember that, just like our hypothetical raver may not have
intended to commit a Simple Assault by stepping on that poor young woman's foot, he nevertheless
could be found to have done so; just so, had Comey accepted the statute as written, Clinton's "gross
negligence" would have forced him to end the above sentence with the finding of a statutory violation,
even if there had been no "specific intent" to do so.
This is how the law works. For poor black men, just not for rich white women.
5. Comey, along with the rest of Congress, left the impression, much like the Supreme
Court did in 2000, that legal analyses are fundamentally political analyses. Not only is
this untrue, it also is unspeakably damaging to both our legal system and Americans' understanding
of that system's operations.
I'm a staunch Democrat, but I'm also an attorney. Watching fellow Democrats twist themselves into
pretzels to analyze Clinton's actions through a farcically slapdash legal framework, rather than
merely acknowledging that Clinton is a human being and, like any human being, can both (a) commit
crimes, and (b) be replaced on a political ticket if need be, makes me sick as both a Democrat and
a lawyer. Just so, watching Republicans who had no issue with George W. Bush declaring unilateral
war in contravention of international law, and who had no issue with the obviously illegal behavior
of Scooter Libby in another recent high-profile intel-related criminal case, acting like the rule
of law is anything they care about makes me sick. Our government is dirty as all get-out, but the
one thing it's apparently clean of is anyone with both (a) legal training, and (b) a sense of the
ethics that govern legal practice. Over and over during Comey's Congressional testimony I heard politicians
noting their legal experience, and then going on to either shame their association with that august
profession or honor it but (in doing so) call into question their inability or unwillingness to do
so in other instances.
When Comey says, "any reasonable person should have known" not to act as Clinton did, many don't
realize he's quoting a legal standard ― the "reasonable person standard." A failure to meet that
standard can be used to establish either negligence or recklessness in a court of law. But here,
Clinton wasn't in the position of a "reasonable person" ― the average fellow or lady ― and Comey
wasn't looking merely at a "reasonableness" standard, but rather a "purposeful" standard that requires
Comey to ask all sorts of questions about Clinton's specific, fully contextualized situation and
background that he doesn't appear to have asked. One might argue that, in keeping with Clinton's
campaign theme, no one in American political history was more richly prepared ― by knowledge, training,
experience, and innate gifts ― to know how to act properly in the situations Clinton found herself.
That in those situations she failed to act even as a man or woman taken off the street and put in
a similar situation would have acted is not indicative of innocence or a lack of specific intent,
but the opposite. If a reasonable person wouldn't have done what Clinton did, the most exquisitely
prepared person for the situations in which Clinton found herself must in fact have been providing
prosecutors with prima facie evidence of intent by failing to meet even the lowest threshold
for proper conduct. Comey knows this; any prosecutor knows this. Maybe a jury would disagree with
Comey on this point, but his job is to assume that, if he zealously advocates for this extremely
powerful circumstantial case, a reasonable jury, taking the facts in the light most favorable to
the government, would see things his way.
Look, I can't possibly summarize for anyone reading this the silly nonsense I have seen prosecutors
indict people for; a common saying in the law is that the average grand jury "would indict a ham
sandwich," and to be clear that happens not because the run-of-the-mill citizens who sit on grand
juries are bloodthirsty, but because the habitual practice of American prosecutors is to indict first
and ask questions later ― and because indictments are absurdly easy to acquire. In other words, I've
seen thousands of poor people get over-charged for either nonsense or nothing at all, only to have
their prosecutors attempt to leverage their flimsy cases into a plea deal to a lesser charge. By
comparison, it is evident to every defense attorney of my acquaintance that I've spoken to that James
Comey bent over backwards to not indict Hillary Clinton ― much like the hundreds of state
and federal prosecutors who have bent over backwards not to indict police officers over the past
few decades. Every attorney who's practiced in criminal courts for years can smell when the fix is
in ― can hear and see when the court's usual actors are acting highly unusually ― and that's what's
happened here. The tragedy is that it will convince Americans that our legal system is fundamentally
about what a prosecutor feels they can and should be able to get away with, an answer informed largely,
it will seem to many, by various attorneys' personal temperaments and political prejudices.
No one in America who's dedicated their life to the law can feel any satisfaction with how Hillary
Clinton's case was investigated or ultimately disposed of, no more than we can feel sanguine about
prosecutors whose approach to poor black defendants is draconian and to embattled police officers
positively beatific. What we need in Congress, and in prosecutor's offices, are men and women of
principle who act in accordance with their ethical charge no matter the circumstances. While James
Comey is not a political hack, and was not, I don't believe, in any sense acting conspiratorially
in not bringing charges against Hillary Clinton, I believe that, much like SCOTUS did not
decide in the 2000 voting rights case Bush v. Gore, Comey felt that this was a bad time
for an executive-branch officer to interfere with the workings of domestic politics. Perhaps Comey
had the best of intentions in not doing his duty; perhaps he thought letting voters, not prosecutors,
decide the 2016 election was his civic duty. Many Democrats could wish the Supreme Court had felt
the same way in 2000 with respect to the role of judges. But the fact remains that the non-indictment
of Hillary Clinton is as much a stain on the fair and equal administration of justice as is the disparate
treatment of poor black males at all stages of the criminal justice system. I witnessed the latter
injustice close up, nearly every day, during my seven years working as a public defender; now America
has seen the same thing, albeit on a very different stage, involving a defendant of a very different
class and hue.
To have prosecuted Clinton, said Comey, he would need to have seen "clearly intentional and willful
mishandling of classified information, or vast quantities of information exposed in such a way as
to support an inference of intentional misconduct, or....efforts to obstruct justice..." When Comey
concludes, "we do not see those things here," America should ― and indeed must ― wonder what facts
he could possibly be looking at, and, moreover, what understanding of his role in American life he
could possibly be acting upon. The answers to these two questions would take us at least two steps
forward in discussing how average Americans are treated by our increasingly dysfunctional system
of justice.
Seth Abramson is the Series Editor for Best American Experimental Writing (Wesleyan University)
and the author, most recently, of
DATA (BlazeVOX, 2016).
"... "The evidence collected by the FBI during its investigation of Secretary Clinton's use of a personal email system appears to directly contradict several aspects of her sworn testimony. In light of those contradictions, the Department should investigate and determine whether to prosecute Secretary Clinton for violating statutes that prohibit perjury and false statements to Congress, or any other relevant statutes." ..."
"... The evidence collected by the FBI during its investigation of Secretary Clinton's use of a personal email system appears to directly contradict several aspects of her sworn testimony. In light of those contradictions, the Department should investigate and determine whether to prosecute Secretary Clinton for violating statutes that prohibit perjury and false statements to Congress, or any other relevant statutes. ..."
Today, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee
Chairman Jason Chaffetz (UT-03) and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (VA-06)
sent a letter to the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia requesting an investigation
into whether former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton committed perjury and made false
statements when testifying under oath before Congress.
The letter states:
"The evidence collected by the FBI during its investigation of Secretary Clinton's use of
a personal email system appears to directly contradict several aspects of her sworn testimony.
In light of those contradictions, the Department should investigate and determine whether to
prosecute Secretary Clinton for violating statutes that prohibit perjury and false statements to
Congress, or any other relevant statutes."
Background:
During a July 5,
2016 hearing before the House Oversight Committee, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
Director James Comey stated the truthfulness of Secretary Clinton's testimony before Congress was
not within the scope of the FBI's investigation. According to Director Comey the Department of
Justice requires a criminal referral from Congress to initiate an investigation into Secretary
Clinton's congressional testimony.
Additionally, Chairman Chaffetz
sent a letter to Director Comey requesting the FBI's full investigative file from its review
of former Secretary Clinton's use of an authorized private email server.
Chairman Goodlatte
sent a letter to Director Comey pressing for more information about the FBI's investigation
and also led a
letter signed by over 200 members of Congress demanding answers from FBI Director Comey
regarding the many questions surrounding his announcement that he does not recommend federal
prosecution against former Secretary Hillary Clinton for mishandling classified information
through private email servers.
The Honorable Channing D. Phillips
U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia
555 Fourth Street NW
Washington, D.C. 20530
Dear Mr. Phillips:
We write to request an investigation to determine whether former Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton committed perjury and made false statements during her testimony under oath before
congressional committees.
While testifying before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on July 7,
2016, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director James Comey stated the truthfulness of
Secretary Clinton's testimony before Congress was not within the scope of the FBI's
investigation. Nor had the FBI even considered any of Secretary Clinton's testimony.
Director Comey further testified the Department of Justice requires a criminal referral from
Congress to initiate an investigation of Secretary Clinton's congressional testimony. We are
writing for that purpose.
The evidence collected by the FBI during its investigation of Secretary Clinton's use
of a personal email system appears to directly contradict several aspects of her sworn
testimony. In light of those contradictions, the Department should investigate and determine
whether to prosecute Secretary Clinton for violating statutes that prohibit perjury and false
statements to Congress, or any other relevant statutes.
Thank you for your attention to this important matter.
... as Trump prepared to address a rival rally 170 miles away in Raleigh, it was clear that
the Democrats were going to have to do more than this if they really expected the email scandal
to go away for good.
"As FBI Director James Comey let Clinton off the hook for her 'extremely careless' actions, the
fix was final," blasted Trump in a statement. "The Obama administration's anointed successor has
had an indictment removed from her path, and will now be able to glide to the rigged Democrat
nomination. As we move toward November, the question now becomes, 'what is Hillary hiding?'"
When the dust from the FBI investigation settles, the former secretary of state is likely to have
to give a fuller account of her actions, now that the world knows just how agents assessed them.
"... Much of this has to do with Peronism's founder, and his ability to bring in broad sectors of Argentine society into his political program, broadly against imperialism and for nationalist workers rights and political sovereignty. ..."
"... It is an idea founded on Christian social values that has three basic principles: social justice, political sovereignty and economic independence. ..."
"... It was under Peron that a version of nationalized state capitalism, and an elimination of foreign investors was initiated in Argentina. He used nationalism, unlike his European counterparts, as a weapon of anti-imperialism. Peronism under Peron was Bonapartist in its manipulation of the social classes on behalf of industrializing an underdeveloped country and challenging dominant American imperialism. His style of leadership was one of a leader who took power in a power vacuum when no single class is in the position do so, and using reformist measures to win the radical support of the more populous class. ..."
"... Peron and Peronism also has to be viewed as a stage in the battle of Latin America for economic independence which is still yet to be achieved with at home the oligarchical structures still intact, and foreign manipulation in the country. ..."
Juan Peron is the most important political figure in Argentina, with reams of paper dedicated to
himself and his followers, but surprising little ink has been spilled over his, and the movement
named after him, Peronism's ideology. Perhaps because of its near undefinable nature, that it neither
sits comfortably on the left, right nor center or because of the number of ideological disperse groups
and politicians that call themselves Peronist.
Much of this has to do with Peronism's founder, and his ability to bring in broad sectors
of Argentine society into his political program, broadly against imperialism and for nationalist
workers rights and political sovereignty.
However there are a few key points behind the ideology of Peron himself and Argentina's most political
movement Peronism that can be gleaned.
Peron called his movement "Justicialism", a blending of the Spanish words for social justice and
this is also the name of the party of Argentina's current president Cristina Fernandez.
It is an idea founded on Christian social values that has three basic principles: social justice,
political sovereignty and economic independence. To do this Peron said his movement was in a
"third position" which counterposed itself equally to capitalism and communism. He also aimed to
create a social model of an organized community with direct state intervention to mediate between
labor and capital. Although not the same as a traditional Scandinavian welfare state, the model has
similarities in its mixed economy and a central role for Unions.
In a speech in the Congress in 1948, Peron himself said, "Peronism is humanism in action; Peronism
is a new political doctrine, which rejects all the ills of the politics of previous times; in the
social sphere it is a theory which establishes a little equality among men… capitalist exploitation
should be replaced by a doctrine of social economy under which the distribution of our wealth, which
we force the earth to yield up to us and which furthermore we are elaborating, may be shared out
fairly among all those who have contributed by their efforts to amass it."
The populist program of higher wages and better working conditions, which was actually developed
by the Public Works minister Juan Pistarini could well be the classic ideological core of Peronism,
but it was always dependent on the structural circumstance of Argentina. For example, in the late
1940s, Peronism was more concerned with the women's vote and the export market, and in the 1990s
attempting to rebuild Argentina under a neo-liberal pro market guide.
Indeed, over time it has been an odd mix of socialism, liberalism and populism Peron himself,
and therefore the movement became a symbol of and a champion of what he called the "shirtless ones,"
(descamisados) appealing to the dispossessed, labor, youth and the poor.
Peronism accepts that the state should coordinate society for the common good and that it can
do this without serving class interests.
Peron, and Peronism is hostile to many of the tenets of classic liberalism, although at times
concedes such as considering that democratic and republican institutions are the only ones that can
guarantee freedom and happiness for the people, and a political opposition is admitted as necessary.
But Peron was also hostile to Marxism, thinking that "forced collectivism" robs individuals of
their personality, even though he garnered many supporters from the communist left during the seventies
thinking that he, and his ideology would be the only way for Argentina to implement a communist state.
Yet Peron thought that class conflict could be transcended by a social collaboration mediated by
the state.
It was mostly through this ideological and structural blend that Peron was able to split every
party and political formation from the extreme Catholic Right to the Communist Left and line up the
dissidents behind his banner. As Carleton Beals wrote, his leading opponents had nothing to offer
except to complain of the lack of civil liberties. Their cry for freedom was somewhat suspect, however,
as they had never respected it when in office.
It was under Peron that a version of nationalized state capitalism, and an elimination of
foreign investors was initiated in Argentina. He used nationalism, unlike his European counterparts,
as a weapon of anti-imperialism. Peronism under Peron was Bonapartist in its manipulation of the
social classes on behalf of industrializing an underdeveloped country and challenging dominant American
imperialism. His style of leadership was one of a leader who took power in a power vacuum when no
single class is in the position do so, and using reformist measures to win the radical support of
the more populous class.
Peron and Peronism also has to be viewed as a stage in the battle of Latin America for economic
independence which is still yet to be achieved with at home the oligarchical structures still intact,
and foreign manipulation in the country.
"... The new regime sought to implement a change in the country's social and economic structures, based on strong State intervention, where the long-term goals of the workers coincided with the nation's need for economic development. Perón's work from the Labour Secretariat helped organise the workers' movement (until then divided into Communist, Socialist, and Revolutionary factions) into strong, centralised unions that cooperated with the government in solving labour disputes and establishing collective bargaining agreements, and whose leadership was under government influence. ..."
"... It was during this time that Perón would establish a strong alliance with the unions, who would later become the backbone of peronism. Workers started seeing that many of their historic demands were finally being attended to, including severance pay, retirement benefits, and regulation for rural labour. ..."
"... This new economic paradigm was based around the development of labour-intensive, light industry to create jobs and produce domestic goods for the internal market. The State played an important role in channelling income from agricultural exports to industry, raising import tariffs, and nationalising foreign-owned companies such as the railways, gas, phone and electricity. ..."
"... The political model that accompanied these economic changes was based on a class alliance between the workers, industrial employers, the Armed Forces and the Catholic Church. However, this alliance excluded the old landowners -"the oligarchy" -- who would become the number one enemy of the new government. ..."
"... In political terms, the heterogeneous support base of peronism started to disintegrate. Without Evita, the more combative unionists and political leaders were ousted by the conservative, bureaucratic sectors of the movement. ..."
The coup d'etat that brought the so-called "Década Infame" to an end in 1943, was headed by a
group of Army officials known as GOU (Grupo de Oficiales Unidos). General Pedro Ramírez became president
after the coup, but was removed in 1944 and replaced by General Edelmiro Farrell. During Farrell's
presidency, Colonel Juan Domingo Perón -- who was a member of the GOU -- became vicepresident, Minister
for War and Labour Secretary (simultaneously).
The new regime sought to implement a change in the country's social and economic structures, based
on strong State intervention, where the long-term goals of the workers coincided with the nation's
need for economic development. Perón's work from the Labour Secretariat helped organise the workers'
movement (until then divided into Communist, Socialist, and Revolutionary factions) into strong,
centralised unions that cooperated with the government in solving labour disputes and establishing
collective bargaining agreements, and whose leadership was under government influence.
It was during this time that Perón would establish a strong alliance with the unions, who would
later become the backbone of peronism. Workers started seeing that many of their historic demands
were finally being attended to, including severance pay, retirement benefits, and regulation for
rural labour.
These measures earned him the loyalty and support of the working masses, but strong opposition
from the local bourgeoisie and existing political parties, whose core voters were largely middle
class. The political opposition organised itself around the figure of US Ambassador Spruille Braden
and found enough support from dissident groups within the Armed Forces to pressure Farrell into removing
Perón. Eventually, Perón lost Farrell's support, resigned from all his positions on the 9th October
1945 and was jailed at the Martín García Island, then famous for hosting deposed politicians.
The Federal Workers Confederation (CGT) had called for a strike for the 18th October to support
Perón. However hundreds of thousands of workers spontaneously decided to gather at Plaza de Mayo
a day earlier. On a symbolic level, the images of the workers taking over the heart and soul of Argentine
political life -Plaza de Mayo-, making it their own, washing their feet in the fountains, became
the expression of a new era in the country's social and political history. The relegated masses had
made a triumphal entry into Argentina's political life, leaving behind decades of political isolation.
The images of 17th October 1945 continue to depict the deeper historical meaning of peronism:
the inclusion of the working class in the country's social, political and economic life.
Due to popular pressure, Perón was released that same day and addressed the people from the balconies
of the Casa Rosada in the evening, launching his presidential candidacy for the forthcoming elections.
Perón's First Government (1946-1951)
Perón was elected president in February 1946, winning 56% of the vote. He had the support of the
Labour Party (which was formed by the unions after the 17th October) and a faction of the Radical
party called UCR Junta Renovadora (Perón's eventual vicepresident, Hortensio Quijano, was from this
breakaway). He'd run the presidential campaign around the slogan "Braden or Perón" -where Braden
and the opposition parties centred around the Unión Democrática represented imperialism, while Perón
maintained a nationalist stance.
The period 1946-1955 marked a turning point in the economic development of the country. Up until
that point, the economy had been characterised by a model based around agricultural exports, dominated
by large landowners and a strong intervention of foreign companies-British, and increasingly from
the US. This model had started to weaken during the 1930's, but it was not until the mid-1940s that
it was replaced by what became known as "import substitution industrialisation" (ISI).
This new economic paradigm was based around the development of labour-intensive, light industry
to create jobs and produce domestic goods for the internal market. The State played an important
role in channelling income from agricultural exports to industry, raising import tariffs, and nationalising
foreign-owned companies such as the railways, gas, phone and electricity.
The political model that accompanied these economic changes was based on a class alliance between
the workers, industrial employers, the Armed Forces and the Catholic Church. However, this alliance
excluded the old landowners -"the oligarchy" -- who would become the number one enemy of the new government.
During this period, Perón's charismatic wife, Eva Perón (or "Evita" as her followers called her)
played a prominent role, and it is widely acknowledged that she was the main link between the president
and the workers' movement. Evita also had an active role in the development of womens' rights, such
as the right to vote (1947) and the equality of men and women in marriage and in the care of children
-- even fighting internal opposition to achieve these goals. The Eva Perón Foundation channelled the
social policies of the government, emphasising the concept of social justice as opposed to charity.
Evita was loved and admired by the people as much as she was derided by the opposition and by the
more conservative factions within the peronist movement, whose power and influence in government
were being diminished by her growing profile.
The new role of the State and the rights acquired during this period were articulated in a new
Constitution, adopted in 1949, which put social justice and the "general interest" at the centre
of all political and economic activities. The new constitutional text included a range of "social
rights" (the so-called second generation rights), related to workers, families, the elderly, education
and culture.
Perón's Second Government (1951-1955)
Perón was re-elected in 1951, obtaining a massive 62% of the vote (which, for the first time,
included the female voters). His second term, however, proved to be much more complicated than the
first. The day he took office, 4th June 1952, was the last public appearance of Evita, who died of
cancer the following month. The economic situation worsened, with a drop in the international price
of agricultural products and severe droughts between 1949 and 1952 affecting domestic production.
This prompted Perón to embrace austerity measures, putting the brakes on consumption and wealth
redistribution, and improving the relationship with foreign companies -- such as the Standard Oil,
which was awarded new contracts. All these measures contradicted the model that Perón himself had
implemented, and divided opinion among his followers.
In political terms, the heterogeneous support base of peronism started to disintegrate. Without
Evita, the more combative unionists and political leaders were ousted by the conservative, bureaucratic
sectors of the movement. At the same time, the relationship with the Church became increasingly frosty,
before turning into an open conflict in 1954. In addition, some members of the industrial bourgeoisie,
less favoured by the new economic reality, also started to abandon this alliance and join the ranks
of the opposition, which now included some hardline sectors in the military. All these groups united
against what was perceived as the increasingly authoritarian tendencies of the government, which
had by this point closed down several media outlets and utilised public radio, television and print
media for its own propaganda.
On the 16th June 1955, the political opposition (conservative, radicals and socialists) together
with the Navy and with the support of the Church, carried out a botched coup d'etat against Perón.
Navy planes bombed Plaza de Mayo, where a rally was taking place, killing more than 300 people. Perón's
attempt to appease the crowd failed and that very same night groups of peronist activists took to
the streets of Buenos Aires and burnt several churches.
After the failed coup, Perón tried to keep the situation under control and called for a truce
with the opposition. However on 31st August, after talks with the opposition failed, the president
hardened his position when, during a public speech, he pronounced the now famous phrase: "for each
one of us who fall, five of them will follow". Seventeen days later, on the 16th September, a new
military uprising -- led again by the Navy -- succeeded in deposing Perón, who asked for political refuge
in Paraguay and left the country on the 20th of September. It would be 17 years until he stepped
on Argentine soil again.
Contradictions and Resistance: Peronism Without Perón (1955 – 1960's)
By this time, the peronist movement was made up of a mixture of factions from different backgrounds:
socialists, catholic nationalists, anarchists, yrigoyenist radicals, and conservatives, among others.
From the beginning they co-existed in constant tension -a tension that could only be overcome by
the dominant and unifying figure of Perón.
With Perón in exile, the contradictions between all these factions bubbled to the surface. In
a country now deeply divided by the peronism/anti-peronism dichotomy, new divisions started to emerge
within the peronist side. These would not only mark the evolution of the peronist movement, but would
also play a major role in Argentina's political life to this day. Perón's legendary pragmatism and
political ability became very evident during these years, as even in exile he managed to mantain
an important level of control over the situation, playing the different factions to his advantage.
Two months after the coup, the liberal faction of the self-proclaimed "Liberating Revolution"
took over the government and started a process of "de-peronisation". This involved dissolving the
peronist party and banning any of its members from running for public office, banning the display
of all the peronist symbols and any mention of the names of Perón or Evita, intervening in the CGT,
and proscribing the unions' old leadership. The persecution of the CGT leaders and the weakening
of the peronist unions left many workers once again unprotected and exposed to the abuses of some
employers.
It was in this context that the Peronist Resistance was born-an inorganic protest movement that
carried out clandestine actions of sabotage (ranging from breaking machinery at the workplace to
placing home-made bombs). The Resistance was an expression of the grassroots of the peronism: the
workers who wanted their leader back and were fighting to protect the legacy of his government.
One of the main organisers of the Resistance was John William Cooke, a left-wing peronist deputy
who had been named by Perón as his personal representative whilst in exile. In 1956, peronist General
Juan José Valle led an unsuccessful uprising against the government, which ended up with 30 people
-- many of them civilians -- executed. The violent suppression of the uprising caused Perón and the Resistance
to abandon the idea of armed struggle and focus on reorganising the unions.
If Trump secures the Republican nomination, now an increasingly imaginable prospect, the party
is likely to implode. Whatever rump organization survives will have forfeited any remaining claim
to represent principled conservatism.
None of this will matter to Trump, however. He is no conservative and Trump_vs_deep_state requires no party.
Even if some new institutional alternative to conventional liberalism eventually emerges, the two-party
system that has long defined the landscape of American politics will be gone for good.
Should Trump or a Trump mini-me ultimately succeed in capturing the presidency, a possibility
that can no longer be dismissed out of hand, the effects will be even more profound. In all but name,
the United States will cease to be a constitutional republic. Once President Trump inevitably declares
that he alone expresses the popular will, Americans will find that they have traded the rule of law
for a version of caudillismo. Trump's Washington could come to resemble Buenos Aires in
the days of Juan Perón, with Melania a suitably glamorous stand-in for Evita, and plebiscites suitably
glamorous stand-ins for elections.
That a considerable number of Americans appear to welcome this prospect may seem inexplicable.
Yet reason enough exists for their disenchantment. American democracy has been decaying for decades.
The people know that they are no longer truly sovereign. They know that the apparatus of power, both
public and private, does not promote the common good, itself a concept that has become obsolete.
They have had their fill of irresponsibility, lack of accountability, incompetence, and the bad times
that increasingly seem to go with them.
So in disturbingly large numbers they have turned to Trump to strip bare the body politic, willing
to take a chance that he will come up with something that, if not better, will at least be more entertaining.
As Argentines and others who have trusted their fate to demagogues have discovered, such expectations
are doomed to disappointment.
In the meantime, just imagine how the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library, no doubt taller than
all the others put together, might one day glitter and glisten -- perhaps with casino attached.
"... Clinton Theater Production. Does NOT work for me. ..."
"... They need Liddy Warren to appear genuine/authentic. If she doesn't, her endorsement does nothing to move the needle on getting Sanders supporters on board with Her. The matching blue pantsuit act didn't focus group very well. ..."
"... I agree. My take on Elizabeth Warren's role in this theater production. The Dems take turns playing the part of "man/woman of the people." In this high visibility, it's HerTurn drama, Elizabeth Warren gets the lead, so HRC doesn't have to try to sell it. ..."
"... What does being a Republican have to do with untrustworthiness? At least Republicans are somewhat honest about wanting to screw everyone. Democrats on the other hand tend to be duplicitous, sanctimonious rats who always try to pretend that they're the good guys who are out to help people – while they're screwing everyone over. I wouldn't trust anyone who's been roped into either party. ..."
"... I've had the exact same thought! The Republicans, as odious as they are, at least are honest about their desire to destroy the lives of vast numbers of people. Sure, they lie about some things, such as Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. But it's the slightly more decent Democrats who are the real pathological liars. ..."
Warren has a problematic habit of criticizing Clinton's most loyal donors, a fact that has
not been overlooked by the Wall Street moneymen bankrolling her campaign. As if that were not
enough to dampen the veepstakes buzz she is embarking on a major nationwide campaign to derail
a major trade deal being pushed by the White House and that Clinton supported as secretary of
state
Warren, in other words, is not the first Democrat (or Republican) to attack the T.P.P., highlighting
Clinton's flip-flop. But it's not the first time the fiery politician has taken a stance that
clashes with Clinton's policy platform, either. Just last week, Warren unloaded on Silicon Valley
for what she claimed are anti-competitive practices, and singled out a handful of the same tech
titans that Clinton had been busy currying favor with less than 24 hours earlier. If the senator
is still in the running for Clinton's ticket, her anti-T.P.P. tirade won't do the presidential
hopeful any favors. It also doesn't inspire confidence in her ability to help Clinton build a
unified front in the battle against Trump, no matter how much she inspires the Sanders wing of
the party. The last thing any presidential nominee needs is a No. 2 who doesn't know how to fall
in line.
We've deemed the rumors that Warren was a serious vice presidential candidate for Clinton as ludicrous.
Yes, the Clinton campaign may have gone through the motions of vetting her, but planting the story
that Warren was under consideration was merely to burnish Clinton's image with progressives and Sanders
voters.
They need Liddy Warren to appear genuine/authentic. If she doesn't, her endorsement does nothing
to move the needle on getting Sanders supporters on board with Her. The matching blue pantsuit
act didn't focus group very well.
Not to worry none of this will be taken seriously once the Clintons have moved back into the
White House.
I agree. My take on Elizabeth Warren's role in this theater production. The Dems take turns
playing the part of "man/woman of the people." In this high visibility, it's HerTurn drama, Elizabeth
Warren gets the lead, so HRC doesn't have to try to sell it.
Agreed. This is pure theater for consumption by the important impoverished grad student Sanders
base -- the future meritocrats who will be running our world as soon as they pay off their student
loans.
What does being a Republican have to do with untrustworthiness? At least Republicans are somewhat
honest about wanting to screw everyone. Democrats on the other hand tend to be duplicitous, sanctimonious
rats who always try to pretend that they're the good guys who are out to help people – while they're
screwing everyone over. I wouldn't trust anyone who's been roped into either party.
I've had the exact same thought! The Republicans, as odious as they are, at least are honest
about their desire to destroy the lives of vast numbers of people. Sure, they lie about some things,
such as Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. But it's the slightly more decent Democrats who are
the real pathological liars.
"... Maureen Dowd is right today, but she didn't really bring out the big guns, like Clinton's ties to Wall Street, Haiti, Syria or a coup in South America. ..."
"... Or maybe she could have written about the Clinton Foundation and those so called "private" emails. And I don't think she won the primary fair and square. Thousands and thousands showed up at Sanders' rallies. Clinton's average was 347 people. ..."
"... After being rescued by FBI director James Comey this week, Mrs. Clinton is both unapologetic and uncontrite for her actions. Particularly galling is her comment dismissing Comey's statements about her actions as "speculative." ..."
"... If the superdelegates care about reversing 35 years of Reaganomics and reversing our slide to oligarchy they would support Bernie Sanders ..."
"... Furthermore, Hillary knew it or should have known it, by knowing that subject matter is classified. She was Sec of State, she knew which things she was doing were Top Secret. Drones. Her Libyan war. Her attempts to expand the Syrian war. Her efforts in Ukraine. ..."
"... For Hillary and Bill to have maintained their positions for decades and stroked their shared sense of entitlement, others collectively needed to bear the consequences of all the karma debt they accumulated. It's as if these they glide along committing what outrages they will, incurring no personal damage, yet those around them populate some portrait of Dorian Gray, collectively taking the blows while the principles smile and move on to the next disaster without a mark on them. ..."
"... She shut down objections to reckless behavior that defied the new, clear, written rules enacted to deal with past problems. It was reckless. It was reckless disregard of the rules and dangers they were designed to prevent. That is one of the definitions of criminal negligence. It was a crime ..."
"... I read an article where someone called Hillary's appointment to be Secretary of State a "vanity appointment." I think that is exactly how she saw it. Just a stepping stone to the presidency and payback from Obama for winning against her. She didn't take the office seriously, and clearly didn't take the requirements of the office seriously, as far as security. The article cited in the column contains a quote where Hillary makes a joke about hacking by the Chinese into an account at the State Department. ..."
"... This column accurately depicts the "Tom and Daisy Buchanan of American Politics." In their eyes, they are the victims of their enemies' ethical standards. It should be possible to agree with the facts that Dowd presents without having to read 30 responses about how terrible Trump is and how necessary she is to avoid a Trump presidency. I don't want Trump as president, but Clinton deserves this critical analysis. It's unfortunate that she has thus far been incapable of accepting criticism and changing her actions. ..."
"... Hillary Clinton benefits from a double standard in evaluating security risks; she is running for President and has the support of the President. Others, at lower levels, who have arguably created far fewer security risks, have been stripped of security clearances, fired, or prosecuted. Those at her top level of government (positions requiring Senate confirmation) are not prosecuted, but are forced to resign. A few examples only, at Clinton's level: former Defense Secretary John Deutsch and former General David Petraeus. ..."
"... What is lost in all the discussion of what emails were classified, when and at what level, is a far bigger issue: Clinton tried to control what information would be available to future historians; in short, she tried to edit future history. ..."
"... Like Nixon, Hillary is a paranoid. She can't wrap her mind around disagreement with her views, preferring instead to think it comes from unfair, mean-spirited bias or worse. Like Nixon, Hillary wants to live a public life but detests scrutiny. Like Nixon, Hillary believes she has earned the privilege to live above those silly ethical rules that should only apply to other people. After all, she knows better than anyone else what the people want and need. And finally, like Nixon, Hillary, if elected, will be the President no one truly wants, elected by default. ..."
"... The parallels are amazing. In retrospect, Nixon turned out to be the very type of person who should never be President. Let's see whether history repeats itself. ..."
"... Well if the voters are 'careless' they will elect her. If we can't blame Hillary for carelessness, why should voters be blamed for being careless. I mean, I guess Nixon was careless to. So was Martha Stewart. Maybe Snowden was careless. And surely Gen. David Petraeus was just a tad careless. Yet the rest went to jail, or resigned, or ran to Russia. ..."
"... Anyone who voted for the Iraq War is not qualified to be president in my opinion. In addition to voting for an unnecessary war, Clinton pushed for intervention in Libya, Syria, Honduras, and Ukraine. ..."
"... For all those that love Clinton, imagine if an R had pulled any of these stunts. The R's kicked Nixon to the curb for far less. Meanwhile if Trump were a D, the press would be eating up his populist message by the spoonful. He would be the next messianic D figure. One big advantage of Trump vs Clinton? At worst, he's a one term mistake. If he doesn't perform, both the R's and D's will toss him aside in a heartbeat. Clinton? She is a two term mistake. As this email case has proven, she is either incredibly incompetent and/or incredibly corrupt ..."
"... NB, Ms. Clinton lied that she had a private e-mail server and she lied that the server contained confidential e-mails. This is the crux of this article, the result of the FBI investigation and the report from the Department of State. And, this article is no longer about e-mail, it is about Ms. Clinton's ethics, or lack of them. ..."
"... Best column in a long time, but are you really that scared of Trump? He may bluster, but in the long run I think he is less likely to get us into a war than Ms. Hillary ..."
"... If Bernie took up Jill Stein's offer to run with her, I've vote for them, and so would millions of others. ..."
"... "So many lawyers in this column, so little law." That is one of the things lawyers are good for. That is what the Bush Admin used them for, from signing statements to memos justifying torture and rendition. They're baaack, like the Terminator. And they bring a good many of the neocons with them. It really isn't much different from W's team. ..."
"... Exactly, but Hillary has often advocated taking us back into that criminal joyride in Mesopotamia. ASAP, she'll do far worse than emails, she'll do Bush Admin neicon policy, on steroids, in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, and start it in Ukraine too. She's promised AIPAC to pick an early fight with Iran. She wants to fight at the same time with China and North Korea. ..."
"... The emails are not the problem, they are the warning. ..."
"... Maureen, as brilliant as ever in your absolute, perfect take on a woman who is not just Teflon, but dangerous...as are all the people in her "machine." Read the WP today about the case in the nineties when the same scenario took place, when the judge could not convict, she lied, and yet, she slipped right through. ..."
"... For us mortals who are honest, have a moral core, and know right from wrong, there are no words to express the exasperation that befalls us all at this most dangerous woman ..."
"... Maureen, how about a column on your former Times colleague Judith Miller whose fabricated articles about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq help make the Bush administration's case. She and they should be tried as war criminals. Instead you write about this stupid, non-issue. Clinton made a stupid mistake. Get over it. ..."
"... Well, I think that we've at least laid to rest the oft-repeated accusation that Hillary is calculating. No calculating politician intending to run for president would have committed the silly error ..."
"... He is less likely to get us into wars, because she is near certain to leap gleefully into wars. We already know the multiple ones she'll start with. But it is "pick your poison" because Trump will do other things, not wars, but cause no end of problems all the same. Those many nutty things he says? He'd keep saying them, and start doing them. ..."
"... Her competence is questionable at best resting as it does on a paper-resume, but her dishonesty and ability to lie in your face is beyond any doubt. ..."
"... "Hillary willfully put herself above the rules - again - and a president, campaign and party are all left twisting themselves into pretzels defending her." Twisting like a plane in a death spiral. You'll note that Clinton never puts herself above the rules to take political risks for progressives or progressive causes. She never sticks her neck out to do something bravely principled. ..."
"... Hence, the democratic party has squandered the surge of strength that came with Obama's election in 2008 to end up instead twisted-pretzel-selling exactly what Obama was embraced to refute and replace, feebly marketing it to an electorate that has only grown more informed, engaged, and impatient for the change Obama fell inexplicably short of delivering. ..."
"... That, politically, the Hillary play, so long in the planning, so tedious in the execution, is a self-destructive, backwards-sliding strategic move on nearly every level only underscores that other priorities and constituencies are driving the party. Driving it right off the cliff. ..."
"... Same with the influence peddling. She and Bill took hundreds of millions in speech money while she was Senator, Secretary, and then presumed Dem nominee. The Foundation, the Clinton slushy, took in a billion more. Much of this money all came from very shady places, people needing to buy influence, and the Clinton for sale sign was in blinking neon. They will get away with, however, only because these were not technically gifts, but were speech payments and "charity" donations. ..."
"... Thanks again Maureen for enlightening those who read the NYTimes with the truth about Mrs. Clinton and her extremely reckless behavior. It is obvious there are many rabid Hillary supporters who refuse to accept what you have to say. Old news. A waste of ink. Move on. But the truth is the truth. ..."
"... Sainthood is not a qualification for the office. We could do worse than Clinton ..."
Why not pick a clean candidate? There's still time. Bernie Sanders has not endorsed Clinton,
nor has he backed out of the campaign. Maybe there is a good reason. I can't see endorsing her
if I were him. I still have hope the delegates will understand how tainted Clinton is and how
Trump will make mince meat of her. Maureen Dowd is right today, but she didn't really bring
out the big guns, like Clinton's ties to Wall Street, Haiti, Syria or a coup in South America.
Or maybe she could have written about the Clinton Foundation and those so called "private"
emails. And I don't think she won the primary fair and square. Thousands and thousands showed
up at Sanders' rallies. Clinton's average was 347 people. Except for NYTimes readers, the
rest of the country simply doesn't like her. For that matter they don't care for Trump either.
70% of the independents are for Sanders. In the electorate, 39% are independents. That means 29%
are Republicans and 31% are Democrats. With some Repubicans voting Sanders, DO THE MATH! Clinton
can't win.
Alison, Menlo Park, California 18 hours ago
After being rescued by FBI director James Comey this week, Mrs. Clinton is both unapologetic
and uncontrite for her actions. Particularly galling is her comment dismissing Comey's statements
about her actions as "speculative."
Nick Metrowsky, is a trusted commenter Longmont, Colorado 15 hours ago
Wow. I never expected this in the newspaper that tooted the Clinton horn, since last January,
when they endorsed her. This is quite an honest assessment; effectively the NYT honeymoon is over.
The words here have been said in many ways, by those who seen through Ms. Clinton and those
trying to get her into office, at all costs. It is no longer about e-mails; it was never about
e-mails; it comes down to the ends the the Clintons will go to attain and keep power. That is
lie, cheat, steal. And go further, to poison anyone and anything they touch.
Ms. Clinton could end up in the White House, but a number of people were damaged in the process.
Her aides, members of the Obama Administration, Mr. Sanders, Mr. Biden, the DNC, journalists and
the media. There is still time to undo this possibility.
This sums up things up perfectly:
"We're resigned to the Clintons focusing on their viability and disregarding the consequences
of their heedless actions on others. They're always offering a Faustian deal. This year's election
bargain: Put up with our iniquities or get Trump's short fingers on the nuclear button.
RLS, is a trusted commenter Virginia 19 hours ago
If the superdelegates care about reversing 35 years of Reaganomics and reversing our slide
to oligarchy they would support Bernie Sanders. A Sanders candidacy would help to change
the makeup of Congress because he attracts more Independents and Millennials, and some Republicans.
A bonus in supporting Sanders: no scandals, and no unethical deals and conflicts of interest
(see the Clinton Foundation).
Mark Thomason, is a trusted commenter Clawson, Mich 16 hours ago
No, many more were classified when sent, 14 entire chains about Top Secret matters were sent.
In order for them to "not be marked" someone had to remove the markings by retyping them into
the non-secure system. But that was illegal. Those were already classified.
Furthermore, Hillary knew it or should have known it, by knowing that subject matter is
classified. She was Sec of State, she knew which things she was doing were Top Secret. Drones.
Her Libyan war. Her attempts to expand the Syrian war. Her efforts in Ukraine.
Richard Luettgen, is a trusted commenter New Jersey 23 hours ago
Maureen will be lambasted by the usual suspects here, as offering up yet another dose of humble
pie to the woman who would be president. But of course everything she writes is true. There's
a natural law, the Conservation of Political Viability. For Hillary and Bill to have maintained
their positions for decades and stroked their shared sense of entitlement, others collectively
needed to bear the consequences of all the karma debt they accumulated. It's as if these they
glide along committing what outrages they will, incurring no personal damage, yet those around
them populate some portrait of Dorian Gray, collectively taking the blows while the principles
smile and move on to the next disaster without a mark on them.
However, as the NYT has noted, eMailGate is a ready-made Republican attack ad. Certainly, the
right's establishment as well as the supportive Super-PACs will exploit Comey's dreadful condemnation
of her behavior. We'll see if Trump can get his act together sufficiently to benefit from it in
more than an indirect manner. But those attack ads no doubt are going into the can as we write,
Hillary's poll numbers will go down and the commentariat here as well as much of Dem America will
again wring its blue hands that Trump could win.
Me, very little that Hillary does surprises me; and neither did I want her in prison for this
or expected it to happen. It remains that with an opposed Congress she wouldn't accomplish anything
as president but Trump just might.
Mark Thomason, is a trusted commenter Clawson, Mich 19 hours ago
"Hillary was trying to make her job more efficient and protect her privacy."
No she wasn't. She was entitled and paranoid. She shut down objections to reckless behavior
that defied the new, clear, written rules enacted to deal with past problems. It was reckless.
It was reckless disregard of the rules and dangers they were designed to prevent. That is one
of the definitions of criminal negligence. It was a crime.
Shellie F., Kensington, Md. 10 hours ago
I read an article where someone called Hillary's appointment to be Secretary of State a
"vanity appointment." I think that is exactly how she saw it. Just a stepping stone to the presidency
and payback from Obama for winning against her. She didn't take the office seriously, and clearly
didn't take the requirements of the office seriously, as far as security. The article cited in
the column contains a quote where Hillary makes a joke about hacking by the Chinese into an account
at the State Department.
All of the people here who are supporting her, whether because you want her or because you
are afraid of Trump, really confuse me. Maureen Dowd is absolutely correct about the bizarre behavior
of the Clintons and the sleazy crowd that will return to the White House if she is elected.
anne d, ca 10 hours ago
This column accurately depicts the "Tom and Daisy Buchanan of American Politics." In their
eyes, they are the victims of their enemies' ethical standards. It should be possible to agree
with the facts that Dowd presents without having to read 30 responses about how terrible Trump
is and how necessary she is to avoid a Trump presidency. I don't want Trump as president, but
Clinton deserves this critical analysis. It's unfortunate that she has thus far been incapable
of accepting criticism and changing her actions.
Aram Hollman, Arlington, MA 11 hours ago
Hillary Clinton benefits from a double standard in evaluating security risks; she is running
for President and has the support of the President. Others, at lower levels, who have arguably
created far fewer security risks, have been stripped of security clearances, fired, or prosecuted.
Those at her top level of government (positions requiring Senate confirmation) are not prosecuted,
but are forced to resign. A few examples only, at Clinton's level: former Defense Secretary John
Deutsch and former General David Petraeus.
President Obama's directives to government employees, forbidding them to talk to the media
and promising dire consequences to those who do, have been far more stringent than any other president,
have decreased the openness and transparency of the federal government. Too bad his directives
applied only to the disclosure of government records, not their confiscation.
Clinton is smart, well-spoken, and has used her legal training to navigate the gap between
what is prohibited by guidelines and what is prohibited by law; her private server was the former
(State Dept. rules), not the latter.
What is lost in all the discussion of what emails were classified, when and at what level,
is a far bigger issue: Clinton tried to control what information would be available to future
historians; in short, she tried to edit future history.
Look for a future trend, former Presidents whose Presidential Libraries' content will be more
and more limited.
steven, g 10 hours ago
Thank you Maureen, for perfectly summarizing where things are with the Clintons. What is wrong
with the American people that so many can't see what you so clearly articulate? Hillary and Bill
are a pox on our nation, and yes maybe she is preferrable to Trump, but then let's vote for her,
but that's it. No rallies, no signs, no enthusiasm. Don't give her the wrong impression. Let's
send a message to her that we know she is dishonest. We are simply choosing, as Russell Crowe
once said in a movie, the lesser of two weevils.
AR Clayboy, Scottsdale, AZ 9 hours ago
In an odd way, Hillary Clinton is the second coming of Richard Nixon. Like Nixon, Hillary grew
up as the unpopular, socially awkward over-achiever, whose achievements always were more about
proving the popular kids wrong than the joy of actually accomplishing anything. Like Nixon, Hillary's
resume is hollow -- plenty of appointments and titles, but very little of substance to show for
it. Like Nixon, Hillary is a paranoid. She can't wrap her mind around disagreement with her
views, preferring instead to think it comes from unfair, mean-spirited bias or worse. Like Nixon,
Hillary wants to live a public life but detests scrutiny. Like Nixon, Hillary believes she has
earned the privilege to live above those silly ethical rules that should only apply to other people.
After all, she knows better than anyone else what the people want and need. And finally, like
Nixon, Hillary, if elected, will be the President no one truly wants, elected by default.
The parallels are amazing. In retrospect, Nixon turned out to be the very type of person
who should never be President. Let's see whether history repeats itself.
Paul, Texas 10 hours ago
Well if the voters are 'careless' they will elect her. If we can't blame Hillary for carelessness,
why should voters be blamed for being careless. I mean, I guess Nixon was careless to. So was
Martha Stewart. Maybe Snowden was careless. And surely Gen. David Petraeus was just a tad careless.
Yet the rest went to jail, or resigned, or ran to Russia.
Think carefully folks as to who you really want for President. Votes do matter, and Presidents
can do a great good or grievous damage to this country and to this world.
JJ, Georgia 20 hours ago
This election makes me think of a bank considering a new chief executive. Do you hire a person
with a questionable skill set and personality similar to a Jerry Lewis movie character or the
person known to have embezzled and is unrepentant except for having been caught. For the first
time I am giving the other 3rd party candidates a look.
RLS, is a trusted commenter Virginia 20 hours ago
Anyone who voted for the Iraq War is not qualified to be president in my opinion. In addition
to voting for an unnecessary war, Clinton pushed for intervention in Libya, Syria, Honduras, and
Ukraine.
Jack, Texas 10 hours ago
For all those that love Clinton, imagine if an R had pulled any of these stunts. The R's
kicked Nixon to the curb for far less. Meanwhile if Trump were a D, the press would be eating
up his populist message by the spoonful. He would be the next messianic D figure. One big advantage
of Trump vs Clinton? At worst, he's a one term mistake. If he doesn't perform, both the R's and
D's will toss him aside in a heartbeat. Clinton? She is a two term mistake. As this email case
has proven, she is either incredibly incompetent and/or incredibly corrupt, yet still garners
support of her party.
Nick Metrowsky, is a trusted commenter Longmont, Colorado 16 hours ago
NB, Ms. Clinton lied that she had a private e-mail server and she lied that the server
contained confidential e-mails. This is the crux of this article, the result of the FBI investigation
and the report from the Department of State. And, this article is no longer about e-mail, it is
about Ms. Clinton's ethics, or lack of them.
phil morse, cambridge, ma 8 hours ago
So much to dislike about Hillary and so little time. I hope that Maureen keeps venting because
I think she sees Hillary more clearly than almost anybody else, even the Donald. NY Times readers
can carp about the damage, but most of the people who will vote for Trump despise the Times. Echo
chamber that it is, a discordant note is a good thing. Soldier on Ms Dowd.
Jean, Scarsdale, NY 20 hours ago
Best column in a long time, but are you really that scared of Trump? He may bluster, but
in the long run I think he is less likely to get us into a war than Ms. Hillary
Mark Thomason, is a trusted commenter Clawson, Mich 20 hours ago
If Bernie took up Jill Stein's offer to run with her, I've vote for them, and so would
millions of others. It might be Teddy Roosevelt coming close but failing with the Bull Moose
Party, or it might be Lincoln succeeding with the original Republican Party's creation. Either
way, we've been here before, and we went third party.
Mark Thomason, is a trusted commenter Clawson, Mich 22 hours ago
"So many lawyers in this column, so little law." That is one of the things lawyers are
good for. That is what the Bush Admin used them for, from signing statements to memos justifying
torture and rendition. They're baaack, like the Terminator. And they bring a good many of the
neocons with them. It really isn't much different from W's team.
Mark Thomason, is a trusted commenter Clawson, Mich 20 hours ago
"Compare Benghazi and the emails to what Bush/Cheney did. Hundreds of souls are still
dying in Iraq because of our criminal joyride in Mesopotamia."
Exactly, but Hillary has often advocated taking us back into that criminal joyride in Mesopotamia.
ASAP, she'll do far worse than emails, she'll do Bush Admin neicon policy, on steroids, in Iraq,
Syria, Libya, Yemen, and start it in Ukraine too. She's promised AIPAC to pick an early fight
with Iran. She wants to fight at the same time with China and North Korea.
The emails are not the problem, they are the warning.
Susan, Mass 9 hours ago
Maureen, as brilliant as ever in your absolute, perfect take on a woman who is not just
Teflon, but dangerous...as are all the people in her "machine." Read the WP today about the case
in the nineties when the same scenario took place, when the judge could not convict, she lied,
and yet, she slipped right through. To say there is something pathological, in this woman's
DNA would be too kind. But, the bottom line...or two..is "how does this continue to happen?" And,
"What difference does it make?"
For us mortals who are honest, have a moral core, and know right from wrong, there are
no words to express the exasperation that befalls us all at this most dangerous woman
Michigander, Alpena, MI 6 hours ago
Did she start a war in Afghanistan with no clue how to end it?
Did she lie us into a war with Iraq?
Did she out a CIA agent?
Did she declare "Mission Accomplished" when the 13 year and counting war had only just begun?
Was she responsible for Abu Ghraib and authorize torture?
Was she the one who told Brownie that he was doing a heck of a job while New Orleans was washing
into the ocean?
Was it Hillary who allowed a financial crises and unprecedented deficit to trigger the worst recession
since the Great Depression?
No, her offense is much worse: she used a private email server.
Peter, Cambridge, MA 7 hours ago
Another success for the GOP propaganda machine. Karl Rove, Colin Powell, and General Petraeus
and scores of other Republican officials all used private email servers, one of them located at
the Republican National Committee headquarters, and tens of thousands of their emails were destroyed.
No complaints from the GOP then. They all knew what Clinton knew - the State Department's non-classified
system was cumbersome and leaked like a sieve, and they didn't have the funds to fix it.
It's just like Benghazi "scandal": during the GWBush administration there were 14 terror attacks
on embassies or consulates, with 100 people killed, including a US diplomat. Where was the Republican
outrage then? No investigations, no hearings. Maureen, you should do some homework before leaping
on the Fox Noise bandwagon.
Realist, Santa Monica, Ca 7 hours ago
Isn't it painfully obvious than Hillary set up this private system because she didn't want
every gumshoe on the Koch payroll investigating every action and breath she took in hopes of discovering
a "scandal" that would lead to an "investigation." So this time it backfired big time and she
wound up with more "transparency" than she bargained for. But in the end, what did she do that
was so bad. If Russia is hacking the US Government payroll records, I can hardly see how some
how drone mission intelligence is going to tip the balance of power.
It's just that, since Reagan, Republicans will simply not accept a Democratic (NOT Democrat!)
president. It's all rule or ruin with those guys. How can they blame Obama for a mess when they
scuttled his plans at every turn?
And speaking of Saint Ronnie, where was the fine-tooth-comb "investigation" of Reagan after
he injected US Marines into the Lebanese civil war and got them all killed? And how about an investigation
into how the basic rule of law disintegrated after the Marines took Baghdad. How was all that
looting and secular murder a good thing Mr. Gowdy? Maybe you should look into it, ha ha.
Bruce, MA 8 hours ago
Maureen, how about a column on your former Times colleague Judith Miller whose fabricated
articles about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq help make the Bush administration's case. She
and they should be tried as war criminals. Instead you write about this stupid, non-issue. Clinton
made a stupid mistake. Get over it. This nation faces some very serious issues: racism and
injustice, weapons on our streets, student debt crisis, social security insolvency to name a few.
As we said in the 60's, "if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the pollution." Get
with it Maureen. Stop polluting.
Allie, New York 8 hours ago
Well, I think that we've at least laid to rest the oft-repeated accusation that Hillary
is calculating. No calculating politician intending to run for president would have committed
the silly error of for which she is now being pilloried (again!) by Maureen Dowd.
I find Hillary's decision with respect to her private email server understandable, however
unfortunate. Ever since she was first lady her every word has been parsed (remember "baking cookies"?),
her every action dissected and subjected to the most unfavorable interpretation. She has been
accused of murder. She has been repeatedly investigated by Republican partisans in their effort
to besmirch her, or worse and despite being exonerated each time, she has been vilified by vindictive
people like Dowd. And, speaking of "goo," at the time of the Lewinsky scandal, instead of being
an object of sympathy, she suffered the intrusion of the public into her private life and condemnation
for not leaving her husband.
Is it any wonder that a person so treated over such a long period would be skittish about public
scrutiny of communications she considered exempt from it?
Hillary Clinton may be a flawed human being, like the rest of us, but she is neither arrogant
nor entitled, and compared to Trump she is a sage and and a saint.
Mark Thomason, is a trusted commenter Clawson, Mich 20 hours ago
He is less likely to get us into wars, because she is near certain to leap gleefully into
wars. We already know the multiple ones she'll start with. But it is "pick your poison" because
Trump will do other things, not wars, but cause no end of problems all the same. Those many nutty
things he says? He'd keep saying them, and start doing them.
Dick Purcell, Leadville, CO 4 hours ago
"Obama tried to get Hillary without the shadiness. (Which is what we all want, of course.)"
No, we don't all want that. Wih or without shadiness, Hillary represents Rule of the Money-Insider
Royalty at home, which is what The People have risen up against, and Wars Abroad.
We the People do not want these things.
Applarch, Lenoir City TN 6 hours ago
No Mo, self-described "lifelong Republican" Comey was far out of line with his highly irregular
press conference. He pushed Republican narratives as far as he could get away with, in the process
doing a grave disservice to FBI and Justice Department traditions, policy, and procedure. The
picture he (and you) paint bears little relationship to the truth.
Here's what he should have said. "If it's a crime for people to ever use personal accounts
for government work, whether hosted by a public service or a private server, we'd have to charge
millions of people. We investigated something else: classified information on email systems. In
the 30,000 emails exchanged among 300 top officials at the State Department that included Secretary
Clinton on distribution, only a tiny number had any indication of classification, and these turned
out to not be classified. We also discovered a difference of opinion on about fifty discussions.
The intelligence community's senior professionals believe that these require classification, while
State Department senior professionals believe they do not. Clearly we need to define consistent
classification standards that all federal agencies can agree to. As to the notion that there is
any criminality associated with this difference of opinion, it makes absolutely no sense that
the entire senior ranks of the State Department professional civil service, a group numbering
in the hundreds, needs to be charged, or that we should single out the Secretary."
Vsh Saxena, New Jersey 4 hours ago
It is a lamentable state of political maturity in US that the 'cherub faced con woman' has
an almost inevitable shot at the Presidency.
Her competence is questionable at best resting as it does on a paper-resume, but her dishonesty
and ability to lie in your face is beyond any doubt.
Four months before the election we know this, and are we so helpless as a nation state that
- with Trump as the non-alternative - there is nothing we can do about it?
R.C.W., Heartland 7 hours ago
Pardon my French, but the Clintons are really nothing other than the earliest and biggest example
of the reverberating power of double-career couples-- especially when the couples are in the same
field.
You will see more of this-- in law firms, universities, hospitals, and corporations.
The Clintons are more like Bonnie and Clyde than the Buchanans of the Great Gatsby -- the Buchanans
were simply born into old money, and didn't really work. By contrast, the Clintons are still strivers,
ambitious, determined to see their meritocratic rise via the Ivy League to its most grandiose
fulfillment.
But we have seen this movie before--Imelda Marcos, for example-- and the Macbeths of corse.
But I fear the apparent quid pro quo with Lynch and the FBI director may not be as obvious
as hoping to keep one's job in the new, seemingly inevitable, Clinton administration.
What about their retaliation once in power? Would anyone really dare to cross this powerful
pair?
J, NYC 4 hours ago
"Hillary willfully put herself above the rules - again - and a president, campaign and
party are all left twisting themselves into pretzels defending her."
Twisting like a plane in a death spiral. You'll note that Clinton never puts herself above
the rules to take political risks for progressives or progressive causes. She never sticks her
neck out to do something bravely principled.
Hence, the democratic party has squandered the surge of strength that came with Obama's
election in 2008 to end up instead twisted-pretzel-selling exactly what Obama was embraced to
refute and replace, feebly marketing it to an electorate that has only grown more informed, engaged,
and impatient for the change Obama fell inexplicably short of delivering.
That, politically, the Hillary play, so long in the planning, so tedious in the execution,
is a self-destructive, backwards-sliding strategic move on nearly every level only underscores
that other priorities and constituencies are driving the party. Driving it right off the cliff.
leitskev, Andover, Ma. 15 hours ago
I'm glad to see a rare Democrat not drinking the kool aid. The Clintons will skate on charges
here because it's difficult to prove criminal intent, though we all know she did this to avoid
oversight, knew she was breaking the rules, delayed turning over her emails by years, and then
lied to the public.
Same with the influence peddling. She and Bill took hundreds of millions in speech money
while she was Senator, Secretary, and then presumed Dem nominee. The Foundation, the Clinton slushy,
took in a billion more. Much of this money all came from very shady places, people needing to
buy influence, and the Clinton for sale sign was in blinking neon. They will get away with, however,
only because these were not technically gifts, but were speech payments and "charity" donations.
One might prefer Hillary to Trump, that argument can be made. But no one should fool themselves
about just how corrupt the Clintons are. When you cheer for them, understand what you are enabling.
ss, nj 4 hours ago
Dowd is correct. The crux of the problem is Hillary's continuing pattern of dissembling and
obfuscation. Hillary has demonstrated questionable judgement for a presidential candidate. Equally
disturbing is the self-igniting quality of Bill and Hillary, who create many of their own problems,
like the server fiasco and Bill's recent inappropriate conversation with Lynch. What unpleasant
surprises does the Clinton Foundation yet hold?
While Trump is not a viable candidate, I fear a Clinton administration mired in scandal and
characterized by opacity and secrecy. I realize that in voting for Hillary, I choose to ignore
the red flag waving chaotically for the Clinton's pattern of poor judgement, and their belief
that they are above the law. It is difficult to muster a sanguine outlook for a Clinton presidency,
because established patterns of behavior don't easily change.
tmann, los angeles 4 hours ago
Thanks again Maureen for enlightening those who read the NYTimes with the truth about Mrs.
Clinton and her extremely reckless behavior. It is obvious there are many rabid Hillary supporters
who refuse to accept what you have to say. Old news. A waste of ink. Move on. But the truth is
the truth. And once again you have bravely gone where those who deny and deny, spin and spin
refuse to go. Bravo to you and keep the ink flowing!
John Plotz, Hayward, CA 4 hours ago
Sainthood is not a qualification for the office. We could do worse than Clinton --
witness any Republican you can name. We could do very much worse -- witness her opponent, that
orange lunatic.
N B, is a trusted commenter Texas 17 hours ago
Mark, your love affair with Bernie is messing with your judgment. Sending classified emails
to those with classified clearance seems like a low voltage issue. I get email chains that are
tomes long. I don't read to the fist link ever.
La Mirada, CA 13 hours ago
Well, what I remember is what happened after Bill Clinton had the temerity to reject the received
wisdom of the political class and raise taxes in the early 1990s when the economy flourished to
such a degree that he ended his final years as President with both a robust economy and budget
surpluses sufficient to pay off the entire national debt in just another decade. Then, GWB was
elected, and as usual after electing a Republican, disaster ensued. I don't want to go down the
GWB road again. We've already tried stupid, and it simply doesn't work.
c. thomas, washington 5 hours ago
Hillary released her emails-50K of them. My current job is in public disclosure. So I read
zillions of public officials' emails. Most of the elected are having to be trained to stop using
their private emails, cell phones, etc to conduct business. Why do they do it?
Because it is something they have been doing forever, because it is easier, because they did
it before they became officials, because they are older people and have a harder time figuring
out how to direct their devices to the shared servers.
Hillary admitted she made a mistake.
Jeb Bush used a private server to handle state business when he was governor, but no one made
a big deal about that. Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell also used personal email accounts that
had classified emails in them. It has been distressing to see people attack Clinton viciously
for everything that I have to believe they would not do to a man. She was crucified as the First
Lady for doing more than giving tea parties, for forgiving her husband for cheating, for being
a strong smart woman with ambition.
This article attempts to tarnish her because of who she is married to, again, the wife role.
And it brands her actions in gutter terms that are not supported by the investigation. Hillary
is a role model to many of us who thought none of us would see the possibility of a smart brave
woman at the helm. Obama is right on about Hillary. Even Republicans praised her as a rock star
for her performance as Secretary of State.
This thread is interesting by presence of complete lunatics like
Brett Dunbar , who claims tha capitalism leads to peace.
Notable quotes:
"... Militarism is the belief or desire of a government or people that a country should maintain a strong military capability and be prepared to use it aggressively [^1] to defend or promote national interests ..."
"... Bringing Bush, Blair, and Aznar to justice would be the greatest deterrent for further war. I like the part about economic crimes. Justice brings peace. ..."
"... War is a tool of competition for resources. Think Iraq. ..."
"... the Nuremberg War Crimes tribunal hanged Nazis for doing exactly what Bush 2 and company did ..."
"... The Labour leader said last year Blair could face trial if the report found he was guilty of launching an illegal war. ..."
"... John Quiggin, I think your definition of militarism is flawed. I think that cultural attitudes and the social status of the military are very important as well. To paraphrase Andrew Bacevich, Militarism is the idea that military solutions to a country's problems are more effective than they really are. Militarism assumes that the military's way of running things is inherently correct. A militaristic society glorifies violence and the people who carry it out in the name of the state. ..."
"... They chose force first and dealt with the consequences later. So militarism can exist and flourish on a tight budget. Its all about mentality. ..."
"... The notion that capitalism is peaceful is preposterous, even if you accept the bizarre notion that only wars between the capitalist Great Powers really count as wars. It's true that it's tacitly presumed by many, perhaps most, learned authorities. But that is an indictment of the authorities, not a justification for the claim. The closely related claim that capitalism is responsible for technological advancement on inspection suggests that the real story is that technological progress enabled the European states to begin empires that funded capitalist development. ..."
"... Russia and China had achieved success in Central Asia, unlike the United States, by pursuing a respectful [sic] foreign policy based on mutual interest. ..."
"... Although the term 'global policeman' (or 'cops of the world') is mostly used ironically (in my experience), 'policeman' does have a straight meaning, denoting a person who operates under the authority of law, whereas the supreme Mafia capo is a law and authority unto himself, at least until someone assassinates him. I think this second metaphor more closely approximates the position and behavior of the present United States. ..."
100 years after the Battle of the Somme, it's hard to see that much has been learned from the
catastrophe of the Great War and the decades of slaughter that followed it. Rather than get bogged
down (yet again) in specifics that invariably decline into arguments about who know more of the historical
detail, I'm going to try a different approach, looking at the militarist ideology that gave us the
War, and trying to articulate an anti-militarist alternative.
Wikipedia offers a definition
of militarism which, with the deletion of a single weasel word, seems to be entirely satisfactory
and also seems to describe the dominant view of the political class, and much of the population in
nearly every country in the world.
Militarism is the belief or desire of a government or people that a country should maintain
a strong military capability and be prepared to use it
aggressively[^1] to defend or promote national
interests
Wikipedia isn't as satisfactory (to me) on
anti-militarism, so I'll
essentially reverse the definition above, and offer the following provisional definition
Anti-militarism is the belief or desire that a military expenditure should held to the minimum
required to protect a country against armed attack and that, with the exception of self-defense,
military power should not be used to promote national interests
I'd want to qualify this a bit, but it seems like a good starting point.
... ... ...
My case for anti-militarism has two main elements.
First, the consequentialist case against the discretionary use of military force is overwhelming.
Wars cause huge damage and destruction and preparation for war is immensely costly. Yet it is
just about impossible to find examples where a discretionary decision to go to war has produced
a clear benefit for the country concerned, or even for its ruling class. Even in cases where war
is initially defensive, attempts to secure war aims beyond the status quo ante have commonly led
to disaster.
Second, war is (almost) inevitably criminal since it involves killing and maiming people who
have done nothing personally to justify this; not only civilians, but soldiers (commonly including
conscripts) obeying the lawful orders of their governments.
Having made the strong case, I'll admit a couple of exceptions. First, although most of the above
has been posed in terms of national military power, there's nothing special in the argument that
requires this. Collective self-defense by a group of nations is justified (or not) on the same grounds
as national self-defense.
... ... ...
[^1]: The deleted word "aggressive" is doing a lot of work here. Almost no government ever admits
to being aggressive. Territorial expansion is invariable represented as the restoration of historically
justified borders while the overthrow of a rival government is the liberation of its oppressed people.
So, no one ever has to admit to being a militarist.
Is it obvious that limiting use of military force to self-defense entails a minimal capability
for force projection?
If the cost of entirely securing a nation's territory (Prof Q, you will
recognise the phrase "Fortress Australia") is very high relative to the cost of being able to
threaten an adversary's territorial interests in a way that is credible and meaningful – would
it not then be unavoidably tempting to appeal to an expanded notion of self-defence and buy a
force-projection capability, even if your intent is genuinely peaceful?
To speculate a little further – I would worry that so many people would need to be committed
to "national defence" on a purely defensive model that it would have the unintended side effect
of promoting a martial culture that normalises the use of armed force.
Of course, none of this applies if everyone abandons their force-projection capability – but
is that a stable equilibrium, even if it could be achieved?
Well, you'll be pleased to know that they're working hard on WWI's perception [1]. Many of us
working against militarism. Not easy. And the linked NYtimes piece is worth reading.
I think it'd make sense to talk about imperialism, rather than militarism. Military is just a
tool. One could, for example, bribe another country's military leaders, or finance a paramilitary
force in the targeted state, or just organize a violence-inciting mass-media campaign to produce
the same result.
We'd need an alternative history of the Cold War to work through the ramifications of a less aggressive
Western military. Russia would have developed nuclear weapons even if there hadn't been an army
at its borders, and the borders of the Eastern bloc were arguably more the result of opportunity
than necessity. The colonial wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan and everywhere else could be similarly
described.
After World War I, the chastened combatants sheepishly disarmed, cognizant of their
insanity. World War II taught a different lesson, perhaps because, in contrast to the previous
kerfuffle, both the Russian and American behemoths became fully engaged and unleashed their full
industrial and demographic might, sweeping their common foes from the field, and found themselves
confronting each other in dubious peace.
Both sides armed for the apocalypse with as many ways to bring about the end of civilization
as they could devise, all the while mindlessly meddling with each other around the globe. Eventually
the Russians gave up; their system really was as bad as we thought, and Moore's law is pitiless:
the gap expands exponentially. They've shrunk, and so has their military.
So why is America such a pre-eminent bully, able to defeat the rest of the world combined in
combat? Habit, pride, domestic politics, sure; but blame our allies as well. Britain and France
asked us to to kick ass in Libya, and Syria is not that different. We've got this huge death-dealing
machine and everyone tells us how to use it.
Ridiculous as it is, it's not nearly as bad as it was a hundred years ago, or seventy, or forty.
We may still be on course to extinguish human civilization, but warfare no longer looks like its
likely cause.
david 07.04.16 at 8:14 am
As you point out in fn1, nobody seems to ever fight "aggressive" wars. By the same token, there's
no agreed status quo ante. For France in 1913, the status quo ante bellum has Lorraine restored
to France. Also, Germany fractures into Prussia and everyone else, and the Germans should go back
to putting out local regionalist fires (as Austria-Hungary is busy doing) rather than challenging
French supremacy in Europe and Africa please.
The position advanced in the essay is one for
an era where ships do not hop from coaling station to coaling station, where the supremacy of
the Most Favoured Nation system means that powerful countries do not find their domestic politics
held hostage for access to raw materials controlled by other countries, where shipping lanes are
neutral as a matter of course, and where the Green Revolution has let rival countries be content
to bid, not kill, for limited resources. We can argue over whether this state of affairs is contingent
on the tiger-repelling rock or actual, angry tigers, but I don't think we disagree that this is
the state of affairs, at least for the countries powerful enough to matter.
But, you know, that's not advice that 1913 would find appealing, which is a little odd given
the conceit that this is about the Somme. The Concert of Europe bounced from war to war to war.
Every flag that permits war in this 'anti-militarist' position is met and then some. It was unending
crisis after crisis that miraculously never escalated to total war, but no country today would
regard crises of those nature as acceptable today – hundreds of thousands of Germans were besieging
Paris in 1870! Hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen were dead! If Napoleon III had the Bomb he would
have used it. But he did not. There was no three score years of postwar consumer economy under
the peaceful shadow of nuclear armageddon.
Anderson 07.04.16 at 9:07 am
3: "After World War I, the chastened combatants sheepishly disarmed, cognizant of their insanity."
One could only wish this were true. Germany was disarmed by force and promptly schemed for the
day it would rearm; Russia's civil war continued for some years; France and Britain disarmed because
they were broke, not because they'd recognized any folly.
… Quiggin, I don't know if you read Daniel Larison at The American Conservative; his domestic
politics would likely horrify us both, but happily
jake the antisoshul sohulist 07.04.16 at 1:32 pm
Other than the reference to "the redempive power of war", the mythification of the military
is not mentioned in the definition of militarism. I don't think a definition of militarism can
focus only on the political/policy aspects and ignore the cultural aspects.
Militarism is as much cultural as it is political, and likely even more so.
Theophylact 07.04.16 at 2:17 pm
Tacitus:
Auferre, trucidare, rapere, falsis nominibus imperium; atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt,
pacem appellant (To plunder, butcher, steal, these things they misname empire: they make a
desolation and they call it peace).
LFC 07.04.16 at 4:55 pm
from the OP:
100 years after the Battle of the Somme, it's hard to see that much has been learned from
the catastrophe of the Great War
The counterargument to this statement is that the world's 'great powers' did indeed learn
something from the Great War: namely, they learned that great-power war is a pointless
endeavor. Hitler of course didn't learn that, which is, basically, why WW2 happened. But there
hasn't been a great-power war - i.e., a sustained conflict directly between two or more
'great' or major powers - since WW2 (or some wd say the Korean War qualifies as a great-power
war, in which case 1953 wd be the date of the end of the last great-power war).
The next step is to extend the learned lesson about great-power war to other kinds of war.
That extension has proven difficult, but there's no reason to assume it's forever impossible.
-–
p.s. There are various extant definitions of 'great power', some of which emphasize factors
other than military power. For purposes of this comment, though, one can go with Mearsheimer's
definition: "To qualify as a great power, a state [i.e., country] must have sufficient
military assets to put up a serious fight in an all-out conventional war against the most
[militarily] powerful state in the world" (The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001), p.5).
Using this definition of 'great power', the last war in which two or more great powers
directly fought each other in any kind of sustained fashion (i.e. more than a short conflict
of roughly a week or two [or less]) was, as stated above, either WW2 or Korea (depending on
one's view of whether China qualified as a great power at the time of the Korean War).
Lupita 07.04.16 at 7:06 pm
ZM @ 7 quoting Mary Kaldor:
An emphasis on justice and accountability for war crimes, human rights violations and economic
crimes, is something that is demanded by civil society in all these conflicts. Justice is
probably the most significant policy that makes a human security approach different from
current stabilisation approaches.
Bringing Bush, Blair, and Aznar to justice would be the greatest deterrent for further
war. I like the part about economic crimes. Justice brings peace.
Kevin Cox 07.04.16 at 9:19 pm
The place to start is with the Efficient Market Hypothesis as the mechanism to allocate
resources. This hypothesis says that entities compete for markets. War is a tool of
competition for resources. Think Iraq.
Instead of allocating resources via markets let us allocate resources cooperatively via the
ideas of the Commons. Start with "Think like a Commoner: A short introduction to the Life of
the Commons" by David Bollier.
A country that uses this approach to the allocation of resources will not want to go to war
and will try to persuade other countries to use the same approach.
The place to start is with renewable energy. Find a way to "distribute renewable energy" based
on the commons and anti militarism will likely follow.
Anarcissie 07.05.16 at 12:31 am
Lupita 07.04.16 at 10:22 pm @ 46 -
While the Nuremberg War Crimes tribunal hanged Nazis for doing exactly what Bush 2 and
company did, I doubt if starting a war of aggression is against U.S. law in an
enforceable way. However, since the war was completely unjustified, I suppose Bush could be
charged with murder (and many other crimes). This sort of question is now rising in the UK
with regard to Blair because of the Chilcot inquiry.
Ze K 07.05.16 at 1:29 pm
Not in internal national politics, but in international law. There's something called
'crimes againt peace', for example. Obviously it's not there to prosecute leaders of
boss-countries, but theoretically it could. And, in fact, the fact that it's accepted that the
leaders of powerful countries are not to be procesuted is exactly a case of perversion of
justice you are talking about… no?
Anarcissie 07.05.16 at 1:56 pm
Watson Ladd 07.05.16 at 3:57 am @ 56 -
According to what I read at the time the US, or at least some of its leadership, encouraged
the Georgian leadership to believe that if they tried to knock off a few pieces of Russia, the
US would somehow back them up if the project didn't turn out as well as hoped. Now, I get this
from the same media that called the Georgian invasion of Russia 'Russian aggression' so it may
not be very reliable, but that's what was said, and the invasion of a state the size of Russia
by a state the size of Georgia doesn't make much sense unless the latter thought they were
going to get some kind of help if things turned out badly. I guess the model was supposed to
be the dismemberment of Yugoslavia, but bombing the hell out of Serbia is one thing and
bombing the hell out of Russia quite another.
It is interesting in regard to Georgia 2008 to trace the related career of Mr. Saakashvili,
who was then the president of Georgia, having replaced Mr. Shevardnadze in one of those color
revolutions, and was reported to have said that he wanted Georgia to become America's Israel
in central Asia. The Georgians apparently did not relish this proposed role once they found
out what it entailed and kicked him out. He subsequently popped up in Ukraine, where according
to Wikipedia he is the governor of the Odessa Oblast, whatever that means. Again, I get this
from our media, so it may all be lies; but it does seem to make a kind of sense which I
probably don't need to spell out.
Ze K 07.05.16 at 2:10 pm
No, south Ossetia was a part of Georgia. They were fighting for autonomy (Georgia is a bit
of an empire itself), and Russian peacekeeping troops were placed there to prevent farther
infighting. One day, Georgian military, encouraged by US neocons, started shelling South
Ossetian capital, killing, among other people, some of the Russian peacekeeprs, and this is
how the 2008 war started.
Ze K 07.05.16 at 2:31 pm
…a lot of these ethnic issues in Georgia are really the legacy of stalinism, when in many
places (Abkhazia, for sure) local populations suffered mass-repressions with ethnic Georgians
migrating there and becaming majorities (not to mention, bosses). Fasil Iskander, great Abkhaz
writer, described that. Once the USSR collapsed, it all started to unwind, and Georgia got
screwed. Oh well.
Anarcissie 07.05.16 at 4:34 pm
Ze K 07.05.16 at 2:38 pm @ 80 -
The Russian ruling class experimented with being the US ruling class's buddy in the 1990s,
sort of. It didn't work well for them. The destruction of Yugoslavia, the business in Abkhazia
and Ossetia, the coup in Ukraine, the American intervention in Syria which must seem (heh) as
if aimed at the Russian naval base at Tartus, the extensions of NATO, the ABMs, and so on,
these cannot have been reassuring. Reassurance then had to come from taking up bordering
territory, building weapons, and the like. Let us hope the Russian leadership do not also come
to the conclusion that the best defense is a good offense.
Lupita 07.05.16 at 5:52 pm
We're a nation of killers.
Justice can ameliorate that problem. For example, Pinochet being indicted, charged, and
placed under house arrest until his death (though never convicted) for crimes against
humanity, murder, torture, embezzlement, arms trafficking, drugs trafficking, tax fraud, and
passport forgery and, in Argentina, Videla getting a life sentence plus another 500 being
convicted with many cases still in progress, at the very least may give pause to those who
would kill and torture as a career enhancement move in these countries and, hopefully,
throughout Latin America. Maybe one of these countries can at least indict Kissinger for
Operación Cóndor and give American presidents something extra to plan for when planning their
covert operations.
For heads of state to stop behaving as if they were untouchable and people believing that they
are, we need more convictions, more accountability, more laws, more justice.
Asteele 07.05.16 at 7:42 pm
In a capitalist system if you can make money by impoverishing others you do it. There are
individual capitalists and firms that make money off of war, the fact that the public at large
sees no aggregate benefit in not a problem for them.
Anarcissie 07.05.16 at 8:35 pm
LFC 07.05.16 at 5:28 pm @ 85 -
I think that, on the evidence, one must doubt (to put it mildly) that either the Russian or
the American leadership care whether Mr. Assad is a nice person or not. They have not worried
much about a lot of other not-nice people over recent decades as long as the not-nice people
seemed to serve their purposes. Hence I can only conclude that the business in Syria, which
goes back well before the appearance of the Islamic State, is dependent on some other
variable, like maybe the existence of a Russian naval base in mare nostrum. I'm just guessing,
of course; more advanced conspiratists see Israeli, Iranian, Saudi, and Turkish connections.
Note as well that the business in Ukraine involved a big Russian naval base. And I used to
heard it said that navies were obsolete!
ZM 07.06.16 at 7:06 am
There has been coverage in The Guardian about the Chilcot report into the UK military
interventions in Iraq.
"The former civil servant promised that the report would answer some of the questions raised
by families of the dead British soldiers. "The conversations we've had with the families were
invaluable in shaping some of the report," Chilcot said.
Some of the families will be at the launch of the report at the Queen Elizabeth II Centre, at
Westminster. Others will join anti-war protesters outside who are calling for Blair to be
prosecuted for alleged war crimes at the international criminal court in The Hague.
Speaking to BBC Radio 4's Today programme on Wednesday, Karen Thornton, whose son Lee was
killed in Iraq in 2006, said she was convinced that Blair had exaggerated intelligence about
Iraq's capabilities.
"If it is proved that he lied then obviously he should be held accountable for it," she said,
adding that meant a trial for war crimes. "He shouldn't be allowed to just get away with it,"
she said. But she did not express confidence that Chilcot's report would provide the
accountability that she was hoping for. "Nobody's going to be held to account and that's so
wrong," she said. "We just want the truth."
Chilcot insisted that any criticism would be supported by careful examination of the evidence.
"We are not a court – not a judge or jury at work – but we've tried to apply the highest
possible standards of rigorous analysis to the evidence where we make a criticism."
…
Jeremy Corbyn, who will respond to the report in parliament on Wednesday, is understood to
have concluded that international laws are neither strong nor clear enough to make any war
crimes prosecution a reality. The Labour leader said last year Blair could face trial if
the report found he was guilty of launching an illegal war.
Corbyn is expected to fulfil a promise he made during his leadership campaign to apologise on
behalf of Labour for the war. He will speak in the House of Commons after David Cameron, who
is scheduled to make a statement shortly after 12.30pm. "
Only Tony Blair could read the Chilcot report and claim it vindicates his conduct.
LFC 07.06.16 at 5:48 pm
B. Dunbar @123
Interstate wars have declined, and the 'logic' you identify might be one of various reasons
for that.
The wars dominating the headlines today - e.g. Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan,
Ukraine/Donetsk/Russia - are not, however, classic interstate wars. They are either civil wars
or 'internationalized' civil wars or have a civil-war aspect. Thus the 'logic' of
business-wants-peace-and-trade doesn't really apply there. Apple doesn't want war w China but
Apple doesn't care that much whether there is a prolonged civil war in Sri Lanka, Afghanistan,
etc.
So even if one accepted the argument that 'capitalism' leads to peace, we'd be left w a set of
wars to which the argument doesn't apply. I don't have, obvs., the answer to the current
conflicts. I think (as already mentioned) that there are some steps that might prove helpful
in general if not nec. w.r.t. specific conflict x or y.
The Kaldor remark about reversing the predatory economy - by which I take it she means, inter
alia, black-market-driven, underground, in some cases criminal commerce connected to war - is
suggestive. Easier said than done, I'm sure. Plus strengthening peacekeeping. And one cd come
up w other things, no doubt.
Ze K 07.06.16 at 6:35 pm
@120, 121, yes, Georgians living in minority areas did suffer. But ethnic
cleansing/genocides that would've most likely taken place should the Georgian government have
had its way were prevented. Same as Crimea and Eastern Ukraine two years ago. This is not too
difficult to understand – if you try – is it? Similarly (to Georgians in Abkhasia) millions of
ethnic Russians suffered in the new central Asian republics, in Chechnya (all 100% were
cleansed, many killed), and, in a slightly softer manner, in the Baltic republics… But that's
okay with you, right? Well deserved? It's only when Abkhazs attack Georgians, then it's the
outrage, and only because Russia was defending the Abkhazs, correct?
Lupita 07.07.16 at 3:23 pm
My impression since yesterday is that, while Brits are making a very big deal out of the
Chilcot report, with much commentary about how momentous it is and the huge impact it will
have, coverage of this event by the US media is notoriously subdued, particularly compared
with the hysterical coverage Brexit got just some days ago. This leads me to believe that it
is indeed justice that is feared the most by western imperialists such as Bush, Blair, Howard,
Aznar, and Kwaśniewski and the elites that supported them and continue to cover up for them. I
take this cowardly and creepy silence in the US media as an indicator that Pax Americana is so
weakened that it cannot withstand the light of justice being shined upon it and that the end
is near.
Anarcissie 07.07.16 at 3:46 pm
Lupita 07.07.16 at 3:23 pm @ 147 - For the kind of people in the US who pay attention to
such things, the Chilcot Report is not really news. And the majority don't care, as witness
the fortunes of the Clintons.
Anarcissie 07.08.16 at 12:25 am
Brett Dunbar 07.07.16 at 11:47 pm @ 160 -
If capitalist types are so totally against war, it's hard to understand why the grand
poster child of capitalism, the plutocratic United States, is so addicted to war. It is hard
to consider it an aberration when the US has attacked dozens of countries not threatening it
over the last fifty or sixty years, killed or injured or beggared or terrorized millions of
noncombatants, and maintains hundreds of overseas bases and a world-destroying nuclear
stockpile. What could the explanation possibly be?
As human powers of production increase, at least in potential, existing scarcities of basic
goods such as food, medicine, and housing are overcome. If people now become satisfied with
their standard of living - not totally satisfied, but satisfied enough not to sweat and strain
all the time for more - sales, profits, and employment will fall, and capitalists will become
less important. In order to retain their ruling-class role, there needs to be a constant
crisis of production-consumption which only the capitalist masters of industry can solve.
Hence new scarcities must be produced. The major traditional methods of doing this have been
imperialism, war, waste, and consumerism (including advertising). Conceded, major processes of
environmental destruction such as climate change and the vitiating of antibiotics may lead to
powerful new self-reinforcing scarcities which will take their place next to their traditional
relatives, so that producing new scarcities would be less of a problem.
Anarcissie 07.08.16 at 2:30 am
LFC 07.08.16 at 1:30 am @ 163:
'OTOH, I don't think capitalism esp. needs war to create this kind of scarcity….'
But then one must explain why the major capitalist powers have engaged in so much of it, since
it is so dirty and risky. I suppose one possible explanation is that whoever has the power to
do so engages in it, capitalist or not; it is hardly a recent invention. However, I am mindful
of the position of the US at the end of World War 2, with 50% of the worlds total productive
capacity. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive! So war turned out to be pretty handy for some
people. And now we have lots of them.
Matt_L 07.08.16 at 3:32 am
John Quiggin, I think your definition of militarism is flawed. I think that cultural
attitudes and the social status of the military are very important as well. To paraphrase
Andrew Bacevich, Militarism is the idea that military solutions to a country's problems are
more effective than they really are. Militarism assumes that the military's way of running
things is inherently correct. A militaristic society glorifies violence and the people who
carry it out in the name of the state.
I also think that just reducing military spending or the capacity for military action is
not enough to counter serious militarism. Austria-Hungary was a very militaristic society, but
it spent the less on armaments than the other European Powers in the years leading up to 1914.
The leaders of the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy caused World War One by invading Serbia for
a crime committed by a Bosnian Serb subject of the Monarchy. They had some good guesses that
the Serbian military intelligence was involved, but not a lot of proof.
Franz Joseph and the other leaders chose to solve a foreign policy problem by placing armed
force before diplomacy and a complete criminal investigation. Their capacity to wage war
relative to the other great powers of Europe did not enter into their calculations. They
chose force first and dealt with the consequences later. So militarism can exist and flourish
on a tight budget. Its all about mentality.
stevenjohnson 07.08.16 at 9:29 pm
"Great Power warfare became a lot less common after 1815, at the same point that the most
advanced of the great powers developed capitalism."
In Europe, locus of the alleged Long Peace, there were the Greek Rebellion; the First and
Second Italian Wars of Independence; the First and Second Schleswig Wars; the Seven Weeks War;
the Crimean War; the Franco-Prussian War; the First and Second Balkan Wars. Wars between a
major capitalist state and another well established modern state included the Opium Wars; the
Mexican War; the French invasion of Mexico; the War of the Triple Alliance; the War of the
Pacific; the Spanish-American War; the Russo-Japanese War. Assaults by the allegedly peaceful
capitalist nations against non-state societies or weak traditional states are too numerous to
remember, but the death toll was enormous, on a scale matching the slaughter of the World
Wars.
Further the tensions between the Great Powers threatened war on numerous occasions, such as
conflict over the Oregon territory; the Aroostook "war;" the Trent Affair; two Moroccan
crises; the Fashoda Incident…again, these are too numerous to remember.
The notion that capitalism is peaceful is preposterous, even if you accept the bizarre
notion that only wars between the capitalist Great Powers really count as wars. It's true that
it's tacitly presumed by many, perhaps most, learned authorities. But that is an indictment of
the authorities, not a justification for the claim. The closely related claim that capitalism
is responsible for technological advancement on inspection suggests that the real story is
that technological progress enabled the European states to begin empires that funded
capitalist development.
Hidari 07.09.16 at 11:13 am
' Capitalist states tend to avoid war with their trading partners.'
This has an element of truth in it, but it can be parsed in a number of ways. For example,
'Rich, powerful countries tend to avoid war with other rich, powerful countries'. After all,
in the 2nd half of the 20th century, the US avoided going to war with Russia, despite having
clear economic interests in doing so (access to natural resources, markets) mainly because
Russia was strong (not least militarily) and the cost-benefit matrix never made sense (i.e.
from the Americans' point of view).
A much stronger case can be made that self-proclaimed Socialist states tend not to go to war
with each other. After all, there were big fallings out between the socialist (or 'socialist',
depending on your point of view) countries in the 20th century but they rarely turned to war,
and when they did (Vietnam-Cambodia, Vietnam-China) they were short term and relatively
limited in scope. The Sino-Soviet split was a split, not a war.
But again this is probably not the best way to look at it. A much stronger case can be made
that the basic reason for the non-appearance of a Chinese-Russian war was simply the size and
population of those countries. The risks outweighed any potential benefits.
Of course, between 1914 and 1945, lots of capitalist states went to war with each other.
Anarcissie 07.09.16 at 3:22 pm
Layman 07.09.16 at 2:59 pm @ 188 -
One explanation, I think already given, is that the capitalist powers were too busy with
imperial seizures in what we now call the Third World to fight one another. In the New World,
the United States and some South American states were busy annihilating the natives, speaking
of ethnic cleansing. If capitalism is a pacific influence, the behavior of the British and
American ruling classes since 1815 seems incomprehensible, right down to the present: the
plutocrat Clinton ought to be the peace candidate, not the scary war freak.
Hidari 07.09.16 at 5:44 pm
Surely (assuming that it's real) the decline in wars in some parts of the world since 1945
is because of the Pax Americana?
Most countries are too frightened to attack (at least directly) the United States. There is a
sense in which the US really is the 'Global Policeman'.
…WaPo continues that Trump is "broadly noninterventionist, questioning the need for the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization and calling for Europe to play a larger role in ensuring its
security." Page, too, "has regularly criticized U.S. intervention":
In one article for Global Policy Journal, he wrote, "From U.S. policies toward Russia to Iran
to China, sanctimonious expressions of moral superiority stand at the root of many problems
seen worldwide today."
Page wrote that the war in eastern Ukraine was "precipitated by U.S. meddling in the Maidan
revolution…
And so, here we are: Trump is the lesser evil in this cycle. Vote Trump, save the world.
LFC 07.10.16 at 2:40 pm
Hidari @192
Surely (assuming that it's real) the decline in wars in some parts of the world since 1945
is because of the Pax Americana?
Started to write a long reply but decided no point. Shorter version: reasons for no
WW2-style-war in Europe from '45 to '90 are multiple; 'pax Americana' only one factor of many.
End of CW was destabilizing in various ways (e.g., wars in ex-Yugoslavia) but so far not
enough to reverse the overall trend in Europe. Decline in destructiveness of conflict in some
(not all) other parts of the world has to do in large part w change in nature/type of conflict
(sustained interstate wars have traditionally been the most destructive and they don't happen
much or at all anymore, for reasons that are somewhat debatable, but, again, pax Americana wd
be only one of multiple reasons, if that).
LFC 07.10.16 at 2:54 pm
Re Carter Page (see Ze K @194)
Page refused [speaking in Moscow] refused to comment specifically on the U.S. presidential
election, his relationship with Trump or U.S. sanctions against Russia, saying he was in
Russia as a "private citizen." He gave a lecture, titled "The Evolution of the World Economy:
Trends and Potential," in which he noted that Russia and China had achieved success in
Central Asia, unlike the United States, by pursuing a respectful [sic] foreign policy based on
mutual interest.
He generally avoided questions on U.S. foreign policy, but when one attendee asked him
whether he really believed the United States was a "liberal, democratic society," Page told
him to "read between the lines."
"If I'm understanding the direction you're coming from, I tend to agree with you that it's
not always as liberal as it may seem," he said. "I'm with you."
In a meeting with The Washington Post editorial board in March, Trump named Page, a former
Merrill Lynch executive in Moscow who later advised the Russian state energy giant Gazprom on
major oil and gas deals, as one of his foreign policy advisers. Page refused to say whether
his Moscow trip included a meeting with Russian officials. He is scheduled to deliver a
graduation address Friday at the New Economic School, a speech that some officials are
expected to attend.
Above quote is from the Stars & Stripes piece, evidently republished from WaPo, linked at the
'Washington's Blog' that Ze K linked to.
If you want to put for. policy in the hands of the likes of Carter Page (former Merrill Lynch
exec., Gazprom adviser), vote Trump all right.
HRC's for. policy advisers may not be great, but I don't think this guy Page is better. He
does have connections to the Russian govt as a past consultant, apparently, which is no doubt
why Ze K is so high on him.
Ze K 07.10.16 at 3:16 pm
You bet this guy Page is better. Anyone is better.
And why would I care at all (let alone "no doubt") if he was a Gazprom consultant? What the
fuck was that supposed to mean? Asshole much?
LFC 07.10.16 at 5:25 pm
And why would I care at all (let alone "no doubt") if he was a Gazprom consultant?
B.c Gazprom is a Russian state-owned company and a fair inference from your many comments on
this blog (not just this thread but others) is that you are, in general, favorably disposed to
the present Russian govt. and its activities. Not Gazprom in particular necessarily, but the
govt in general. You make all these comments and then get upset when they are read to say what
they say.
You consistently attack HRC as a war-monger, as corrupt etc. You consistently say anyone wd
be better. "Vote Trump save the world." You said there was no Poland in existence in '39 when
the USSR invaded it. Your comments and exchanges in this thread are here for anyone to read,
so I don't have to continue.
Ze K 07.10.16 at 5:44 pm
"You make all these comments and then get upset when they are read to say what they
say. "
You're right; come to think of it, you've been into slimeball-style slur for a while now,
and I should've gotten used to it already, and just ignored you. Fine, carry on.
Anarcissie 07.11.16 at 2:19 am
@Hidari 07.10.16 at 2:57 pm @ 197 -
Although the term 'global policeman' (or 'cops of the world') is mostly used ironically
(in my experience), 'policeman' does have a straight meaning, denoting a person who operates
under the authority of law, whereas the supreme Mafia capo is a law and authority unto
himself, at least until someone assassinates him. I think this second metaphor more closely
approximates the position and behavior of the present United States.
"... "I can't legitimately vote for either presidential candidate," he said. "I don't trust Hillary Clinton. Trump is refreshing, but only so far as he's throwing a wrench into the political system. But I'm not going to cast a vote just in protest." ..."
"... But this cycle, dissatisfaction with both major-party options - what Comedy Central's Trevor Noah called "Sophie's choice if Sophie hated both of her kids" - has redefined "undecided." ..."
"... Undecided voters like these tend to break for lesser-known candidates, says Doug Schwartz, Quinnipiac University's polling director. That's fueling a modest bump in the polls for Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate, who's polling at about 8 percent nationally. ..."
"... Sometimes the people who call themselves "undecided" are actually leaning toward Mr. Trump, and maybe feeling uneasy about admitting it. ..."
Take John Sinsley, a telecommunications consultant in Raleigh, N.C., capital of a battleground
state. Mr. Sinsley, 47, who says Bill Clinton was our last good president, is the type of independent
voter Hillary Clinton is courting in this tossup state.
"I can't legitimately vote for either presidential candidate," he said. "I don't trust Hillary Clinton.
Trump is refreshing, but only so far as he's throwing a wrench into the political system. But I'm
not going to cast a vote just in protest."
Every presidential year, the "undecideds" exasperate pollsters and partisans until November, when
most of them wind up voting for a major party candidate, or not at all.
But this cycle,
dissatisfaction with both major-party options - what Comedy Central's Trevor Noah
called "Sophie's choice if Sophie hated both of her kids" - has redefined "undecided." About
four in 10 voters say they're having trouble choosing between the two candidates because neither
would make a good president, according to a
new Pew Research Center study. That's as high as at any point since 2000. Very few - 11 percent
- find the choice difficult because both candidates would make a good president, the lowest
proportion in the same time period.
Related, but separate, is that the share of voters calling themselves "independent" this year is
at a
75-year high,
according to the Pew Center. At 39 percent, they're a plurality of the electorate.
Undecided
voters might be sitting on the fence, but they're paying attention. Fully 80 percent of registered
voters say they have given "quite a lot" of thought to the election, the highest share at this point
in any campaign since 1992, according to Pew.
Buzz Merchant,
a construction company owner from Wendell, N.C., told me that Bernie Sanders's loss leaves him in
a quandary. "If it were life or death, I'd pick Trump," he said.
Shamone Moise,
Mr. Merchant's girlfriend, disagreed. "If Trump gets in we're done - I'm thinking bombs, war, boom,"
she told me. "But I don't believe a word Clinton says."
"I may have
to find another button, but I will vote," she said.
Undecided voters like these tend to break for lesser-known candidates, says Doug Schwartz,
Quinnipiac University's polling director. That's fueling a modest bump in the polls for Gary
Johnson, the Libertarian candidate, who's polling at about 8 percent nationally.
"Things could shift dramatically because there's so many people still up for grabs who don't have
the anchor of party ID," Mr. Schwartz said.
Sometimes the people who call themselves "undecided" are actually leaning toward Mr. Trump,
and maybe feeling uneasy about admitting it.
"... Both Clintons are corporatists driven by personal ambition for power and $$$. Of course HRC is no "worse' than all the other corrupted politicians in our neoliberal universe. But we have reached a point in our late-stage capitalist development where "no worse than" is no longer good enough. Expect to see the rise of third parties moving forward as the morally bankrupt Democrats and Republicans self-destruct. ..."
"... The Clintons do fine and have managed to become multimillionaires from their political careers, regardless of mistakes and scandals. It's the people around the Clintons -- and with Hillary as president, that's all of us -- who end up with problems. ..."
"... The idea that Ms. Clinton is the most qualified candidate for president in the history of the country, what President Obama called, "the truth," is a load of hogwash. ..."
"... Just off the top of my head, Thomas Jefferson was ALSO Secretary of State, had been an ambassador (at a time when they were important, not rewards for poitical supporters), and had actually written much of the constitution. ..."
"... Heck, on resume, you could argue for Richard Nixon over Hillary: Member of the House, Senator and Vice President. ..."
"... Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton are indeed survivors, but they are more like escape artists. They survive and prosper, but for those who have witnessed their act there's a suspicion that something just isn't authentic. The repeated trickery needed to survive decades of raised eyebrows suggest a contempt for the truth that is damning. ..."
"... We progressives can be more thoughtful this November by rejecting both of these candidates and voting Jill Stein of the Green Party. http://www.jill2016.com/plan ..."
"... Clintons ability to survive hinges on two things. First, her regular supporters will mindlessly support her just as her regular detractors will mindlessly attack her. When it comes to the public, the vast majority chose sides more than 20 years ago and will not change not matter what information develops. ..."
"... Second, the press, including this op-ed will continue to call her things like "obviously qualified" in reference to Clinton. She is obviously an experienced politician but I don't understand the "qualified" part. Her actions with the emails is the kind of thing that would get 95% of us fired. This means we would be "disqualified" from our jobs. ..."
"... The Clintons are "survivors" because they are privileged members of the power elite. You're just sugar-coating their reprehensible qualities. They've just received reinforcement that the rules don't apply to them, and that lying is just one of those things you do as you climb the ladder. ..."
"... This is in no way an absolution of Hillary's action, or of whatever the Clintons may or may not have done, but whatever scandals they've been involved in are no worse than what has been going on in every single Republican White House after Ike. Literally. Every. Single. One. ..."
"... 'Oh, she used a private e-mail server?' How about deleting 5 million(!) White House administration emails many of which certainly contained the real truth behind the reasoning for Bush's disastrous debacle in Iraq. 'Oh, the president has consensual sex with an intern?' How about selling arms to one of our sworn enemies to get money to secretly finance a nasty little civil war involving thousands of dead civilians, and breaking a bunch of laws in the process. ..."
"... In the current case, Director Comey has confirmed that Secretary Clinton has acted "extremely carelessly" and, when her public statements on her email issues are taken into consideration, lied. Has our collective social morality dipped to a level so low as to not recognize lying openly and consistently to the public as a disqualifying action by a candidate? ..."
"... It is not enough for Hillary to say, "I am sorry that I was "extremely careless" and "grossly negligent" with my sloppy and reckless, behavior while committing actions with my e-mail activities that harmed the USA (maybe some of our foreign citizen informers and US government employees died horrible deaths because of my slack security protocol with my personal computer that I installed for my personal convenience), but I promise not to do that again if I am elected POTUS." ..."
"... We may need more than an expert, hyper-political survivor in the next 4 years. My worry is that Hillary is more in tune with what's politically advantageous than what is the right thing to do. Survive, yes; lead and thrive, not so much. Her skill is spinning mistakes rather that creating positive outcomes ..."
"... I want to vote for someone I respect for President, not a survivor or someone who is extremely careless. ..."
"... Why do the elite "DONOR CLASS" and PAC (foreign and domestic) campaign contributors contribute so much money to Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush, Paul Ryan and other people seeking elective offices that control and pass out government taxpayer money from the US Treasury, control of US foreign policy, and make laws that affect their business profits, instead of Bernie Sanders and/or Donald Trump? ..."
"... Hillary's PAC (foreign and domestic) club members in the form of "PAY TO PLAY" no-bid Military Industrial Complex contracts, CGI Federal "NO BID" contracts at many times the price that open bidding would cost, and Solyndra loan guarantee contracts with US taxpayer money given from the US Treasury to these elite "DONOR CLASS" and PAC (foreign and domestic) campaign contributors at much greater price that if these contracts were competitively bid, farm subsidies, NO-BID military equipment manufacturing contracts, etc. ..."
"... The "DONOR CLASS" and PAC (foreign and domestic) club members also pay these crooked politicians to get laws created to make their businesses exempt from existing US laws against monopolies, off shore banking, repeal of Glass-Steagall, license for the export of "TOP SECRET" Hughes Aircraft Missile Guidance Military Technology to Communist China (Chinagate), Free Foreign Trade Agreements, Foreign Aid, etc. ..."
Both Clintons are corporatists driven by personal ambition for power and $$$. Of course
HRC is no "worse' than all the other corrupted politicians in our neoliberal universe. But we
have reached a point in our late-stage capitalist development where "no worse than" is no
longer good enough. Expect to see the rise of third parties moving forward as the morally
bankrupt Democrats and Republicans self-destruct.
Steve C, Boise, ID July 7, 2016
Just because the Clintons themselves survive their thoughtless mistakes and indiscretions
doesn't mean that the people around them do.
The Monica scandal hurt Gore's chances in 2000 and the vilification of Monica by the public
and the Clintons doomed a young woman's life to unwanted notoriety. Per today's NYT, Hillary's
close advisors may have a hard time retaining or gaining high security clearances.
The Clintons do fine and have managed to become multimillionaires from their political
careers, regardless of mistakes and scandals. It's the people around the Clintons -- and with
Hillary as president, that's all of us -- who end up with problems.
Paul, Bellerose Terrace July 7, 2016
The idea that Ms. Clinton is the most qualified candidate for president in the history
of the country, what President Obama called, "the truth," is a load of hogwash.
Just off the top of my head, Thomas Jefferson was ALSO Secretary of State, had been an
ambassador (at a time when they were important, not rewards for poitical supporters), and had
actually written much of the constitution.
If Hillary was more qualified than TJ was, I've got a bridge for sale. Only 133 years old,
landmarked, reasonable terms.
If you want to go by resume, George HW Bush has her beaten, too: Congressman, Director of
CIA, Vice President, and unquestioned WWII war hero. But he was not a successful president,
which only goes to show that the resume doesn't define qualification.
Heck, on resume, you could argue for Richard Nixon over Hillary: Member of the House,
Senator and Vice President. Do we hope Hillary will live up to Nixon? (Shudder)
Liberty Apples, Providence July 7, 2016
Please tell me Mr. Blow didn't just equate Hillary Clinton with Wonder Woman?
Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton are indeed survivors, but they are more like escape
artists. They survive and prosper, but for those who have witnessed their act there's a
suspicion that something just isn't authentic. The repeated trickery needed to survive decades
of raised eyebrows suggest a contempt for the truth that is damning.
Hillary Clinton is likely the next president, as she should be considering the certifiable
opponent offered by the hapless GOP. But I do not expect the nation will view the next
occupant of the Oval Office as Wonder Woman. No, the nation will probably regard the next
occupant of the Oval Office as someone who should be watched very carefully. Like someone who
don't really trust.
Scott K, Atlanta July 7, 2016
The fact that we have ended up with these two lousy candidates says a lot about us as a
society, as a people - that includes Democrats and Republicans. Ultimately, you and I are to
blame for this mess, and we must be more thoughtful about our choices in the future.
Steve C, Boise, ID July 7, 2016
We progressives can be more thoughtful this November by rejecting both of these
candidates and voting Jill Stein of the Green Party.
http://www.jill2016.com/plan
SomeGuy, Ohio July 7, 2016
Hillary Clinton and her subordinates were careless in their handling of e-mail, and should
have done a better job.
But how is this missing the point--that the security of the nation, when faced with the
sometimes conflicting priorities of secure communications and the urgency of communications
over available networks and devices, or utilizing the means of communication of choice for the
other party, even when that party is an adversary, is better served by the timely exchange of
crucial communications by imperfect and insecure means rather than delay such communications
while seeking a secure system that may not even exist, or, in the case of the State
Department, wasn't even funded?
The MEDIUM is not the message. The MESSAGE is the message.
In the Grenada invasion, when the secure systems didn't work and were unavailable, the Navy
Seals used a Grenada commercial insecure line--certainly tapped by Cuban and Soviet
intelligence--to call in an urgently needed air strike that saved American lives. In the Cuban
missile crisis, John Scali of ABC had lunch with a known KGB agent who relayed the Kremlin's
desire for a peaceful solution when the world was on the brink of nuclear war.
Should we now prosecute those SEALs? And if Mr. Scali was picked up by the FBI for consorting
with the KGB, how many "red states" would still be uninhabitable from the radiation left over
from nuclear devastation?
John Townsend, Mexico July 7, 2016
There are two things about this so called email "scandal" that are troubling. First off the
FBI investigation was an administrative investigation of the State Department's email systems,
prompted by a GOP request that appears to have been a deliberate effort to perpetuate the
email issue that emerged from the Benghazi investigation (a GOP witch hunt, price tag $7
million). Second, the FBI director James Comey some 20 years ago was the Deputy Special
Counsel who carried out the senate's investigation of the so called Whitewater "scandal" (yet
another GOP witch hunt into the Clintons, price tag $2 million), clearly a 'conflict of
interest' situation from which Comey should have recused himself.
For years the GOP and their legions of shrill extreme right wing pundits have been waging a
veritable war of attrition on the Clintons ... their legacy and their character. These two
investigations are the skulduggery hallmarks of one of the most ugly persistent prolonged
smear campaigns in US political history.
SJG, NY, NY July 7, 2016
Clintons ability to survive hinges on two things. First, her regular supporters will
mindlessly support her just as her regular detractors will mindlessly attack her. When it
comes to the public, the vast majority chose sides more than 20 years ago and will not change
not matter what information develops.
Second, the press, including this op-ed will continue to call her things like
"obviously qualified" in reference to Clinton. She is obviously an experienced politician but
I don't understand the "qualified" part. Her actions with the emails is the kind of thing that
would get 95% of us fired. This means we would be "disqualified" from our jobs. Yet
somehow, we fail to to let real evidence of incompetence, lying, connection to scandal, lack
of actual accomplishments, etc. from tarnishing her qualifications in favor of vague ones like
years of "experience" or "service."
Diego, Los Angeles July 7, 2016
Our nation is addicted to drama, unequipped see government as a necessary function composed
mostly of unexciting exercises in bureaucracy. We have been conditioned to insist that public
events follow the cadences of Survivor, A Michael Bay movie, and NFL game.
Politics is no longer (if it ever was) a contest between ideas. It's lion wrestling in the
Coliseum, with James Bond sneaking around in the catacombs and aliens storming the walls. I
guess with all that going on, you can't ask people to stick around for a procedural vote on a
fractional adjustment to the graduated redundant-income lower phalanges tax rate.
So the rate goes unadjusted, and the rich get richer.
Mark Thomason, a trusted commenter Clawson, Mich July 7, 2016
Hillary supporters are now taunting the FBI. They say it ought not to have criticized her
if it was not going to indict her.
This taunting is cause for a reasonable prosecutor to re-visit the decision not to indict.
The taunting displays disrespect for the law, and a sense of entitlement which undermines the
law.
The taunting offsets the concern not to influence an election. If the election becomes open
disrespect of law and law enforcement, then it is necessary to influence it.
If Hillary says one word along these lines herself, even one, she should be indicted the very
next day.
John, Oregon July 7, 2016
I do not have to accept this "swirl of madness" and "political mastery" should be gauged
not by how one navigates the results of said madness but rather the results of legislative
history and policy judgments. To this end, Clinton has fared poor on both accounts. I
certainly will not be casting a vote for Trump, but I can in no good conscience cast one for
Clinton either. Trump's ludicrous policies will fall flat and never see the light of day.
Hillary though will have the full force of the Clinton money machine to continue business as
usual. I will be voting independent for the office of President and leave those who supported
this mockery of an election to justify the end. If those two are the best we have to offer our
nation and the world, we should be sorely ashamed.
Fourteen, Boston July 7, 2016
Although you have no reason to vote for Clinton, you do have reason to vote against the
Trumpster.
After she gets elected, we can impeach her and re-do the election in four years.
Michele, Seattle July 7, 2016
Something makes me uneasy about this column and I will put my finger on it. When you say as
a journalist that something makes you uneasy about the Clintons, I expect, as the reader, to
have this vague impression followed up with some concrete examples. I am a Hillary supporter
and am frustrated by the lack of specificity with which the media both talks about her
successes and failures. If you are arguing that Republicsns have overplayed their hand, give
several concrete examples of fair charges that they could have made against Hillary. If you
are uneasy about her, tell why. If you can't, then don't do a hit-and-run on the reader with
your uneasy emotions. Are you uneasy because there is something about Hillary that we should
really take into account and factor into our decision making process, or are you uneasy
because powerful women make us uneasy? In your journalistic role, help us to tell the
difference. If you aren't ready to articulate the specific source of your unease, leave it
out.
StephenKoffler, New York July 7, 2016
The Clintons are "survivors" because they are privileged members of the power elite.
You're just sugar-coating their reprehensible qualities. They've just received reinforcement
that the rules don't apply to them, and that lying is just one of those things you do as you
climb the ladder. Apologetics of this nature is exactly what I would expect from the New
York Times, the official party publication of the Clinton machine.
PeterE, Oakland,Ca July 7, 2016
In light of the Clintons' history to date, is there any reason to think that they will stop
being reckless? A Trump presidency would be a disaster but surely it's likely that a Clinton
presidency will be one mishap after another and include a few unnecessary and costly military
adventures.
drspock, New York July 7, 2016
Just another note on the Clinton case. It is a felony to posses unauthorized, classified
government material. It's also a felony to download them to unauthorized devices as well as to
retain classified material after your government assignment that permitted you to posses them
concluded. Clinton obviously had top clearance when she was Secretary, but I assume that ended
with her resignation.
I haven't read the full FBI report, but I'm not sure how they decided that no prosecutor would
pursue such a case, especially when under Obama the Justice Department has prosecuted people
for precisely those offenses.
John Wildermann, North Carolina July 7, 2016
My biggest issue with Hillary comes down to her judgment. After all, you survived the
Clinton years, the endless attacks and investigations. You're main goal in life seems to be
returning to the White House, this time as the President, not the first lady. So why wouldn't
you make sure that you don't do anything that would seem even remotely wrong.
Why would you bother with the paid speeches to Wall Street, why not just use the government
server for your emails?
bbrennan, Novato, Ca. July 7, 2016
If Hillary Clinton is elected the hatred for her will not abate. She is a much more
divisive figure than Barack Obama or even George Bush. With a Libertarian and Green candidate
on the ballot the best Clinton could ever hope for is a plurality that carries no mandate.
I've already tuned the whole thing out.
Gary, New York, NY July 7, 2016
Hillary made a careless mistake, but then our government was also careless in NOT
thoroughly scrutinizing her use of a private email server for classified communications. She's
only partly to blame. It's important to look at intention. She did this for convenience and
for non-classified communications. And then over time, she allowed the lines to blur. She
probably didn't realize the gravity of her actions, because it was a technical matter. Hillary
is of an older generation that uses email and cellular technology without being fully aware of
the technical complexities. So it is understandable. But the US government failed its job of
policing its own people.
Anetliner Netliner, is a trusted commenter Washington, DC area July 7, 2016
Technical matter? Older generation? I think it's more likely that Clinton, having spent 8
years in the White House and 6 as a Senator, was unused to organizational constraints. The
email matter speaks more to hubris than to technical competence.
JQuincyA, Houston July 7, 2016
Liberals cheer for someone who puts her own self interests before our national security. "
Extremely careless" I believe was the phrase Comey used. Can someone explain the difference
between that and gross negligence? Mr. Blow can you explain why you think not bringing charges
against Clinton is the "right call" other than you're going to vote for her? The rule of law
is ignored and once again liberals are ecstatic.
Vincenzo, Albuquerque, NM, USA July 7, 2016
Overlook, for a few minutes, the opposition (Trump). Irrespective of "the contest" in
November, the salient point is made right upfront by Mr. Blow. Recklessness is not a desirable
trait in one who should be depended upon to carefully adjudicate all opinions and is expected
to productively interact with international leaders to effect a stabilization and ultimately
productive actions regarding planetary challenges, beginning of course, with climate change.
Forget Trump --- ask yourself if the US will likely really benefit from such a personality in
the Oval Office. Is it any wonder that the Sanders campaign pushes onward, given that Senator
Sanders has consistently manifested careful consideration of his votes in Congress and the
Senate and in that sense is the antidote to Mrs. Clinton's impulsive behavior, a hallmark of
her political life. I'm apprehensive in the extreme.
Mike W., Brooklyn July 7, 2016
This is in no way an absolution of Hillary's action, or of whatever the Clintons may or
may not have done, but whatever scandals they've been involved in are no worse than what has
been going on in every single Republican White House after Ike. Literally. Every. Single. One.
'Oh, she used a private e-mail server?' How about deleting 5 million(!) White House
administration emails many of which certainly contained the real truth behind the reasoning
for Bush's disastrous debacle in Iraq. 'Oh, the president has consensual sex with an intern?'
How about selling arms to one of our sworn enemies to get money to secretly finance a nasty
little civil war involving thousands of dead civilians, and breaking a bunch of laws in the
process.
Scandals involving character flaws vs. scandals that involve how our country is actually
governed? That should be no contest.
Patrick Moynihan, RI July 7, 2016
I am concerned that the Clintons' spectacular history of escape clouds the seriousness and
vast array of the actions for which they have been questioned.
In the current case, Director Comey has confirmed that Secretary Clinton has acted
"extremely carelessly" and, when her public statements on her email issues are taken into
consideration, lied. Has our collective social morality dipped to a level so low as to not
recognize lying openly and consistently to the public as a disqualifying action by a
candidate?
Gerald, Houston, TX July 7, 2016
It is not enough for Hillary to say, "I am sorry that I was "extremely careless" and
"grossly negligent" with my sloppy and reckless, behavior while committing actions with my
e-mail activities that harmed the USA (maybe some of our foreign citizen informers and US
government employees died horrible deaths because of my slack security protocol with my
personal computer that I installed for my personal convenience), but I promise not to do that
again if I am elected POTUS."
Will Hillary promise to be more careful and follow US government regulations and laws with
control of the US Nuclear Weapons of Mass Destruction if she is elected POTUS?
The FBI has elected to not prosecute Hillary, because they did not believe that Hillary had
any intent to pass this information to our enemies (She was just stupid and careless).
Any other government employee committing these types of actions would have been prosecuted and
hopefully sent to prison.
PE, Seattle, WA July 7, 2016
We may need more than an expert, hyper-political survivor in the next 4 years. My worry
is that Hillary is more in tune with what's politically advantageous than what is the right
thing to do. Survive, yes; lead and thrive, not so much. Her skill is spinning mistakes rather
that creating positive outcomes. And I have a feeling she will not untie Congress, which
is what we desperately need. I hope she beats Trump, but I do not want her to shed her
survivor, spin-mode skin and evolve into progressive, courageous leader, willing to stand up
for core beliefs, even when the political polls temp her to settle.
Far from home, Yangon, Myanmar July 7, 2016
Really? You have in this corner a candidate who barely survived a major investigation by
the FBI. And in that corner, a candidate who is "embroiled in two class action lawsuits...as
well as a lawsuit brought by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman."
Recently, after many months of being a contender for a teaching fellowship from the US State
Department, I was rejected. Phew! Part of the job was being an ambassador for the US
government. How would I have pulled that off?
Regis, Greenville July 7, 2016
The massive story looming is the Clinton Foundation, which is the reason for the personal
server being set up. Anything and everything has a price to the Clinton's. It was all funneled
through "the foundation".
Chriva, Atlanta July 7, 2016
I don't think anyone would find fault with describing Clinton as a battle tested survivor.
Her ability to endure the 11 hour Benghazi hearing in which she was shown to be a bald faced
liar repeatedly was impressive. Still most of her troubles are completely of her own making,
she's corrupt as they come, and in the pocket of the evil Saudis and Wall Street. I'm only
voting for her because Trump is worse. I don't there are many Americans that will be proud
when she and Pocahontas, the first VP of color, are crowned but more than a few may breathe a
small sigh of relief.
citizen vox, San Francisco July 7, 2016
It isn't just recklessness; Hillary takes great liberties for the singular goal of gaining
ever more power/money. In contrast, Bill's liberties are more purely reckless e.g. Monika and
degrading of the Presidency e.g. under the Presidential desk activities.
It's one thing for Hillary to risk her political life/reputation to disaster, but as
President, she will be ensnaring our nation's welfare into her area of danger. I don't find
that acceptable. How do I vote for that?
Timshel, New York July 7, 2016
I want to vote for someone I respect for President, not a survivor or someone who is
extremely careless. Suffering does not make you a good person. In fact many so-called
criminals were people who suffered and used that to be unjust.
Trump is the worst candidate in American history after that phony Reagan. We need a Democratic
candidate who is careful, really competent, honest and trustworthy. That person is certainly
not Hillary Clinton. It is Bernie Sanders. It is not too late!
Solomon Grundy, The American South July 7, 2016
The Clintons are Wall Street's dream. The Clinton's sell the Lincoln Bedroom, radioactive
materials, and other public property.
Pay to Play.
Clinton's election as president will finally expose the progressive complaint about 1%ers,
corporate greed, corruption, and human rights as the sham it is.
Let's be adults about this. Progressives love the direct thoroughfare from Washington to Wall
Street.
Gerald, Houston, TX July 7, 2016
Solomon Grundy,
Why do the elite "DONOR CLASS" and PAC (foreign and domestic) campaign contributors
contribute so much money to Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush, Paul Ryan and other people seeking
elective offices that control and pass out government taxpayer money from the US Treasury,
control of US foreign policy, and make laws that affect their business profits, instead of
Bernie Sanders and/or Donald Trump?
Hillary's PAC (foreign and domestic) club members in the form of "PAY TO PLAY" no-bid
Military Industrial Complex contracts, CGI Federal "NO BID" contracts at many times the price
that open bidding would cost, and Solyndra loan guarantee contracts with US taxpayer money
given from the US Treasury to these elite "DONOR CLASS" and PAC (foreign and domestic)
campaign contributors at much greater price that if these contracts were competitively bid,
farm subsidies, NO-BID military equipment manufacturing contracts, etc.
The "DONOR CLASS" and PAC (foreign and domestic) club members also pay these crooked
politicians to get laws created to make their businesses exempt from existing US laws against
monopolies, off shore banking, repeal of Glass-Steagall, license for the export of "TOP
SECRET" Hughes Aircraft Missile Guidance Military Technology to Communist China (Chinagate),
Free Foreign Trade Agreements, Foreign Aid, etc.
Of the dozens of intelligence memos that Sidney Blumenthal sent to Hillary Clinton while she
served as secretary of state, 23 contained information classified as
"Confidential" or "Secret," a Daily Caller analysis shows.
Sending nearly two
dozen sensitive emails makes Blumenthal, a former journalist and aide in the Bill
Clinton White House, one of Clinton's most prolific sharers of classified
information. The Democratic presidential candidate herself sent 104 emails
containing classified information, The Washington Post
found
.
Some of Clinton's State Department aides, such as chief of staff Cheryl Mills and deputy chief of
staff Huma Abedin, sent dozens of emails which contain now-classified information. Jake Sullivan,
Clinton's top foreign policy adviser, sent 215 now-classified messages.
But the Blumenthal memos are especially intriguing because the longtime Clinton ally did not work
for the government. Instead, during the period that he sent Clinton memos, he was working for the
Clinton Foundation as well as for several non-profit organizations with close ties to the Clintons.
He also worked during some of that period as an editor for The Daily Beast.
Here is a complete list of Blumenthal's classified memos and emails:
2009
June 23 email
- Blumenthal forwarded Clinton a nearly entirely redacted email with subject
line "N. Ireland/Shaun," an apparent reference to Shaun Woodward, who then served as Northern
Ireland's secretary of state.
July 15 memo
- Blumenthal refers to information from William Drozdiak, who at the time was
the president of the American Council on Germany. The non-redacted portion of the email refers to
the "disastrous nature" of an Obama diplomatic trip.
Sept. 23 email
- Entitled "URGENT FOR NORTHERN IRELAND MEETINGS TOMORROW," the Blumenthal
memo refers to a Clinton Global Initiative event held days before to discuss ways to increase
foreign investment in Northern Ireland.
Oct. 8 memo
- Blumenthal provided an update on developments in Northern Ireland.
Oct. 11 memo
- Blumenthal advised Clinton ahead of a speech she was set to give at Stormont
Castle in Belfast in support of devolution, or the shifting of power from the U.K. parliament to
the Northern Ireland national assembly.
Oct. 20 memo
- Blumenthal shared an email from Northern Ireland's Sec. of State Shaun
Woodward. Clinton was set to meet with UK Shadow Foreign Minister
US to send
Ukraine small drones and armoured Humvees
William Hague. "This makes your meeting with Hague
unexpectedly pressing," Blumenthal wrote of Woodward's email.
Nov. 28 memo
- Blumenthal sent yet another update about negotiations in Northern Ireland.
April 8 memo
- Blumenthal forwarded Clinton an email from a source discussing internal
politics in Kyrgyzstan, which was then in the midst of a revolution.
April 23 "Secret" memo
- Blumenthal updated Clinton on the situation in Kyrgyzstan. The
portion of the memo redacted for "secret" classified information discussed a criminal
investigation.
2011
March 5 memo
- Blumenthal forwarded Clinton an email from his longtime associate Cody
Shearer, who has worked on behalf of the Clintons over the years. The memo, sent in the early
days of the Libyan revolt, discussed the formation of the National Transitional Council, which
replaced Muammar Gaddafi's dictatorship.
March 18 memo
- Blumenthal discussed Gaddafi's response to the UN's decision to authorize the
use of force in Libya.
June 20 memo
- Blumenthal's memo, with the subject line "Bahrain, Iranian intelligence," is
completely redacted.
Oct. 12 memo
- A memo entitled "Saudi Arabia/Iran/Turkey" relied on Blumenthal's "Sources
with access to the highest levels of the Government of Turkey, and Saudi Arabia, as well as
regional and Western Intelligence services."
2012
May 30 memo
- Blumenthal sent Clinton two memos containing information on German policy on
the Eurozone crisis, which had reached full steam at that point. The information in the memos was
passed to Blumenthal by sources who had conversations with German Finance Minister Wolfgang
Schauble.
In the memo, Blumenthal cautioned Clinton that the information came from "an extremely
sensitive source" and "should be handled with care." He also insisted that the information must
not be shared "with anyone associated with the German government.
June 27 memo
- A memo entitled "Internal pressures and potential schisms in German government
over Euro-zone" is entirely redacted.
July 14 memo
- Blumenthal's memo entitled "Egypt internal politics" came from "sources with
access to the highest levels of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, The Supreme Council of the Armed
Forces, and Western Intelligence and security services."
Blumenthal characterized the sources as "extremely sensitive" and cautioned that the
information should be "handled with care."
Aug. 3 memo
- Blumenthal passed along a memo discussing European Central Bank president Mario
Draghi and negotitions with Germany to resolve the Eurozone debt crisis. The memo is entirely
redacted as classified and is b ased on "sources with access to the highest levels of the
Governments and institutions."
Sept. 4 memo
- Blumenthal passed along another now-entirely redacted memo based on
"high-level sources." The subject matter of the memo is not clear.
You can look at the source documents yourself. This is not opinion, conjecture, or rumor. Hillary Clinton transmitted the names
of American intelligence officials via her unclassified email.
From a series of Clinton emails, numerous names were redacted in the State Department releases with the classification code "B3
CIA PERS/ORG," a highly specialized classification that means the information, if released, would violate the Central Intelligence
Act of 1949 by exposing the names of CIA officials.
How FOIA Works
The Freedom of information Act (FOIA) requires the government to release all, or all parts of a document, that do not fall under
a specific set of allowed exemptions. If information cannot be excluded, it must be released. If some part of a document can be redacted
to allow the rest of the document to be released, then that is what must be done. Each redaction must be justified by citing a specific
reason for exclusion.
But don't believe me. Instead, look at page two of this
State Department document
which lists the exemptions.
Note specifically the different types of "(b)(3)" redactions, including "CIA PERS/ORG." As common sense would dictate, the government
will not release the names of CIA employees via the FOIA process. It would - literally - be against the law. What law? Depending
on the nature of the individual's job at CIA, National Security Act of 1947, the CIA Act of 1949, various laws that govern undercover/clandestine
CIA officers and, potentially, the Espionage Act of 1917.
Names of CIA, NSA Officials Mentioned, Now Redacted
Yet Hillary's emails contain at least three separate, specific instances where she mentioned in an unclassified email transmitted
across the open Internet and wirelessly to her Blackberry the names of CIA personnel. Here they are. Look for the term "(b)(3) CIA
PERS/ORG" Click on the links and see for yourself:
There are also numerous instances of exposure of the names and/or email addresses of NSA employees ("B3 NSA"); see page 23 inside
this longer PDF document.
Why It Matters
These redactions point directly to violations of specific laws. It is not a "mistake" or minor rule breaking.
These redactions strongly suggest that the Espionage Act's standard of mishandling national defense information through "gross
negligence" may have been met by Clinton.
There is no ambiguity in this information, no possible claims to faux-retroactive classification, not knowing, information
not being labeled, etc. Clinton and her staff know that one cannot mention CIA names in open communications. It is one of the
most basic tenets taught and exercised inside the government. One protects one's colleagues.
Exposing these names can directly endanger the lives of the officials. It can endanger the lives of the foreigners they interacted
with after a foreign government learns one of their citizens was talking with the CIA It can blow covers and ruin sensitive clandestine
operations. It can reveal to anyone listening in on this unclassified communication sources and methods. Here is a
specific example
of how Clinton likely compromised security.
These redactions show complete contempt on Clinton's part for the security process.
BONUS: There is clear precedent for others going to jail for exposing CIA names. Read the
story of John Kiriakou .
A Personal Aside: I just remain incredulous about these revelations seeming to mean nothing to the world. They're
treated in the media as almost gossip.
Peter Van Buren blew the whistle on State Department waste and mismanagement during Iraqi reconstruction in his first book,
We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose
the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People . His latest book is Ghosts of Tom Joad:
A Story of the #99 Percent . Reprinted from the his blog with permission.
tom •
a month ago
So if Hillary is elected and she takes the USA into WW3 by continuing to harass Russia and supporting terrorists, and
the USA is finally attacked like the USA attacks other nations, are not the people who supported Clinton, and the Clintons themselves,
fair game for some sort of retribution? When are these obvious war crimes going to be met with some sort of justice? There is a story
well-known by now of how a group f German soldiers tried to assassinate Hitler and failed. Well, the FBI and DOJ have every opportunity
to stop another Hitler before she acquires more leverage to reign down death and destruction on America's "enemies". Will they do
their job or will we in 10 tens be wondering what could have been?
While and at the same time doing much business with Russia, and China, and all of the newly conquered (but not very conquered)
puppet dictatorships like Iraq and Libya. The first real indication we'll get is if the Halliburton operatives get pulled out.
I haven't seen a mass exodus of pipeline workers coming back to the states. My lowly position as an ex-Halliburton worker (they
literally broke me and then abandoned me. I can't walk two blocks without extreme pain for an uncompensated on-the-job injury
23 years ago) gives me a unique vantage no CIA spook can ever get. Unless you were to talk some Harvard Princesses to get up on
a damned ladder or roughneck on an oil rig or pipeline. On our level we get a larger view of what's going on. Like for instance,
Sudan was invaded by Halliburton years before the Libyan coup. How does that matter? The nation is landlocked and the only direction
they can point a pipe to the Med is through Libya. Shell and Exxon want to export the extorted oil so they had to take down Libya.
Roll the dice. Also by publishing the names of the agents who were previously outed, we'd be doing the exact same thing. Prove
that those agents were endangered and wham bam thank you ma'am they'll be even more endangered. The alternative would be a secret
trial. Which happens.
It seems that HRC may become POTUS, thanks to the actions of DNC, DWS and the MSM and the inaction of the FBI and DOJ - much to
the relief of the MIC, CIA and NSA and the satisfaction of the TBTF banks and the RDA*.
The rest of us are FUCD.
* I made this one up; it stands for "Revolving Door Apparatchiks".
The media has been bought and paid for. There is no longer news reporting, only propaganda recitation. Statistically, most people
are followers. Let's hope there are a few principled public servants at the FBI to help save our country.
An external IT audit is necessary in this case, if it hasn't already been ordered. Who gave the approval to set this thing up?
Where is the documentation requesting access to the State's servers? Who signed off on that? Who verified that approval? Who processed
the request and what verification did the approvals undergo?
An IT auditor would rip State several new orifices with which to excrete solid waste matter.
"... If you get drunk and run over someone's kid it doesn't matter that you didn't mean to do it, you still committed a crime. Not to mention that Hillary Clinton was the Secretary of State and she used to be a lawyer. You would have to be stupid to think that she didn't know that what she was doing was illegal. ..."
"... Hillary Clinton is the lap dog of Wall Street. And for the big mutual funds it is always important so early as they can to know, what the american goverment will do. This can be essential to earn billion of Dollars or to avoid the loss of billion of dollars. ..."
"... That would be treason. Wall Street or not. Capitalism is like a rose bush - it must be pruned every now and then, otherwise he wears barely flowers, but only thorns. And capitalism in the United States has never been pruned. ..."
"... Paul Ryan is already openly working on getting her security clearance denied. How is that any less disabling of her presidency than an indictment? ..."
"... It sounds less dramatic, but how does it change Bernie's case to the superdelegates, especially considering how likely immediate impeachment on her inauguration day seem now? ..."
"FBI director James Comey pretty much laid it all out. He flat out said that she broke the
law and then in the same breath said that they weren't going to pursue charges. His statement
that they weren't going to recommend indictment because she didn't mean to break the law is
laughable. Not intending to break the law is not a defense.
If you get drunk and run over someone's kid it doesn't matter that you didn't mean to
do it, you still committed a crime. Not to mention that Hillary Clinton was the Secretary of
State and she used to be a lawyer. You would have to be stupid to think that she didn't know
that what she was doing was illegal.
The only explanation of why the FBI is not recommending indictment is that James Comey was
paid off by the Clinton's. He was probably offered a cushy position after Clinton takes the
white house..."
Leo Moran
Ultimately, a vote for Hillary is going to be a vote for whomever she has as her nominated
Vice President, because a GOP Congress is going to impeach her on Day 1 of her presidency.
The NWO will likely switch out Trump or Hillary for another puppet they control and then
give them the election. Either that or just make Hillary win anyway or buy off Trump or kill
him. It's all rigged. They got a plan A B C D and E. In the end NWO will do what ever it takes
to win and the clintons are one of them. You will get a Bush or Clinton lackey in the white
house soon enough.
griffphilm
Cenk: I've been a fan of your extensively rationale support for Bernie. The Young Turks are
now dropping him, and his truth, and our truth as a result of an obviously skewed, and
partisan FBI anointment of a pathologically corrupt candidate? I don't believe one can support
"the revolution" and in any way support H for Hawk Clinton. Have you been threatened?
Chefchaot
No one discuss the following issue:
Hillary Clinton is the lap dog of Wall Street. And for the big mutual funds it is always
important so early as they can to know, what the american goverment will do. This can be
essential to earn billion of Dollars or to avoid the loss of billion of dollars.
So, if a friend of Hillary Clinton has her password and for this favour he pays a few dollars
to a bank account in Panama or somewhere else, nobody knows.
Look at the development of Goldman-Sachs after the bank crisis.
Chefchaot
That would be treason. Wall Street or not. Capitalism is like a rose bush - it must be
pruned every now and then, otherwise he wears barely flowers, but only thorns. And capitalism
in the United States has never been pruned.
Daniel Roig
Looks like I'm voting Trump and make it a revenge vote against Hillary. By voting Trump it
will be a double whammy against the DNC and Hillary.
Daniel Roig
You might be underestimating the number of fellow idiots that Trump has. Trump is dangerous
in different ways, but Hillary and her cohorts are at least as dangerous and totally corrupt.
What's more dangerous than openly stealing an election against the will of the people?
Matt Davis
+Daniel Roig: hillary not being prosecuted for perjury or miss handling of top secret
materials or stealing a nomination against the will of the people. and still somehow
becoming the most powerful person in the US. Thats about as dangerous as it gets.
partisanliberal
So Comey based his lack of indictment on no "intent".
So Clinton didn't "intend" to hire computer personnel to implement server hardware at her
home, didn't "intend" to secure a domain name, didn't "intend" to register a mail server on
the internet, didn't "intend" to have high speed connection infrastructure installed at her
home to facilitate data traffic, didn't intend to make all her email accounts point to her
secret server, didn't "intend" to delete thousands of emails (that SHE claims were personal
;), didn't "intend" to do all this when facilities were made available and required by rule
for her electronic communications while SoS. Based on Comey's logic it was apparently an
accident, forced on Clinton without her consent or she just flat didn't understand. This is
the same Clinton who spent 8 years in the White House where security measures are everywhere,
who underwent numerous security protocol briefings as first lady, who had to take (and affirm
by signature) security classes as a senator and the same Clinton that as SS was fully briefed
and required to acknowledge/affirm dept. of State security protocols that specifically
prohibited her activities.
It boils down to four letters: "FOIA" - I am above the common man (whom I constantly claim to
relate to), the rules don't apply to me, it's none of their business and I figured a way to
get around the Freedom Of Information Act (as I claim to be the "most transparent"). WOW!
Apparently the 'aw shucks' I didn't know it was wrong and "everyone else did it too" are now
valid defenses; kind of like what the definition of "is, is". Next time you're stopped for
speeding, tell the cop you "didn't INTEND" to and you'll get a pass.
Does anyone wonder why, on the day BEFORE she is questioned by the FBI, Bill has a meeting
with the AG on the tarmac of an airport? The same AG that now says she wont pursue the matter.
Anyone wonder why the man who appointed Comey and Lynch now flies Clinton around on Air Force
One (at a cost of $220,000/hr to the taxpayer) selling her as his successor? It's time for
real change.
David Delgado
(Original Compositions)
FBI Comey said she did not have "intent" to mishandle classified documents. Actual emails
showed the letter for classified (C) typed before the classified paragraph and at the end of
the classified paragraph, clearly proving intent......Crooked Hillary should be in prison.
Gerald Stacy
They knew the suggestion would be no indictment, but didn't know if Lorreta Lynch would
accept the bullshit reason for not suggesting one. I think Bill met her specifically to force
her to recuse herself somehow.
Gerald Stacy
+wshgtnry Yep! ya did it! facts are that the Clinton's have been found out to be crooked.
They won't be charged or convicted of any of it. But the proof is out there. So while this
particular idea has no specific factual basis, aside from that Bill Clinton specifically went
out of his way to meet with somebody who he should have stayed far far away from, There is
plenty of proof to suggest that the Clinton Family is manipulating events to their advantage.
Eggshit Bowl Gate
Paul Ryan is already openly working on getting her security clearance denied. How is
that any less disabling of her presidency than an indictment?
It sounds less dramatic, but how does it change Bernie's case to the superdelegates,
especially considering how likely immediate impeachment on her inauguration day seem now?
HillBilly Deluxe
What about the fact that Hillary is now blackmailable, due to her emails possibly being put
in the hands of foreign operatives? Could it be that there are way more than just 7 TOP Secret
emails that have been compromised? Is the USA (all of us) and the US government now
blackmailable?
Who knows what they now have on us!
The other point is: how can Hillary apply for the highest security clearance in the nation
with recless handling of classified documents on her record? The job of President requires it!
No government employee would ever get high level access with that on their record. Even if she
wins the election, she no longer qualifies for the position. Have we ever had a president
without top level security clearance? Think about it!
capri cious
The only revolution I expect is the spinning heads of the punditry, Left and Right. I think
your estimate of the DNC Nominee is correct. I voted for Bernie in the Primary. I live in a
state that has been Red since Reagan (May He burn in pieces, Were there a Hell). I think Sen.
Sanders was the only hope we had of any "revolution" in the country. I think He has
demonstrated that He could not have pulled it off. His failure to defend himself, Speaks of
what he would have likely been able to have accomplished.
JL
There is NO "Revolution" with Hillary, Cenk! I'd rather vote for pondscum than to vote for
that conniving sniveling Hillary! She is responsible for ousting Bernie Sanders with the
corrupt media in her back pocket and you want to endorse that trash?
"... She put those secrets at risk by using a private email server kept in her basement, against security protocol. ..."
"... She failed, miserably, in protecting the secrets of her nation. So for all this she should be rewarded and promoted and handed the near absolute power of an imperial presidency? ..."
"... And, she lied to the American people. That much is clear. She lied about what she did and how and why. There are tapes of it floating all about on the internet, lies to reporters, lies in those rare public appearances where she actually takes questions. ..."
"... Election to and retention of public office breeds prevarication-- or at least punishes brutal honesty. I dare YOU to prove otherwise. ..."
"... Virtually no person who rises to that level in our political system is completely squeaky-clean and is still effective. High-level politics is a bare knuckle sport, and one at which Hillary has shown an aptitude. ..."
Hllary Clinton has disqualified herself from the presidency.
No matter what your tribal politics may be, after FBI Director James Comey's withering testimony
before Congress on Thursday over her email scandal, there really is no way around it, is there?
... ... ...
Mrs. Clinton, former secretary of state, has already proved she can't be trusted with national
secrets. She put those secrets at risk by using a private email server kept in her basement,
against security protocol.
That server was likely hacked by foreign intelligence. She failed, miserably, in
protecting the secrets of her nation. So for all this she should be rewarded and promoted and
handed the near absolute power of an imperial presidency?
And, she lied to the American people. That much is clear. She lied about what she did and
how and why. There are tapes of it floating all about on the internet, lies to reporters, lies in
those rare public appearances where she actually takes questions.
Chi Town Gal
Kass, do your homework. Republicans (Bush, Powell, Rice's staff) did similar things, but no
investigations or public commendations against their own. Their own investigative committee
(which took 2 years to release) could not find her guilty of anything, and two Republicans
admitted that the whole Benghazi / email scandal was to bring down Hillary's approval rating.
...
Therightway...
@Chi Town Gal No (Bush, Powell, Rice's staff) did not use personal servers.
wiu1986
Great column . HC , like her husband are jerks. Good friends of mine from her HS school
days knew her as a jerk. She is a lying, conniving piece of work. But knowing ,insightful
individuals such as yourself and some of your readers, will have zero impact on her
electability. The lessons of the Roman Empire have come to the US. We are a country of
minorities and special interests. The citizens descended from 3,4,5 generations of American
citizens are the new minorities. The democratic party, I refuse to capitalize democratic, know
the demographics. Bottom line---this nation is screwed.
DaveB9
@wiu1986: You should capitalize Democratic in that usage. Small-d democracy means
government of the people, by the people, for the people. Big-D Democratic means government of
the people, by a small cadre of connected elites, for the benefit of those elites and their
hangers-on. Big-D Democrats aren't small-d democratic. Capitalization matters; it can change
the whole meaning of a word.
billyboy55
The slime trail that follows behind Hilly, and her disbarred lawyer husband, is never
ending! Please, voters, put an end to it.
mligue
John , the lemmings will get in line , vote for her, hang onto to her lies with a glitter
in their eyes, pronounce her to be the queen to Obama's kingdom. She , along with her husband
has always been corrupt and above the law. I too, feel bad for Jim Comey a man that I always
believed would be true to the law and constitution. But politics puts a heavy load onto just
men , Comey just simply did not want to be labeled the man that would stop the first woman
president. I pray that the American voter finally will se through this travesty, we call
Hillary Clinton.
considerthis9
@Doc McGee I cannot claim that Hillary has never lied, nor would I try. And I cannot think
of another politician from either party who could pass your test of purity (except possibly
George "I cannot tell a lie" Washington, with his cherry tree). Election to and retention
of public office breeds prevarication-- or at least punishes brutal honesty. I dare YOU to
prove otherwise.
Likewise, show me your proof that Hillary has been a "money-grubbing grifter," as you put it.
First, define your terms -- which are inherently subjective and hyperbolic -- then provide
proven facts in support. I'll bet you can't do it without resort to sources that rely upon
opinion and speculation.
Money for political favors? Again, show me your proof. Did Hillary get paid to speak to big
banks? Sure. Where is the quid pro quo? She hasn't been in the Senate for some time, and as a
member of the State Department, was in no position to enact law or policy that favored anyone.
You may believe Bernie Sanders-style "where there's smoke, there must be a fire SOMEWHERE"
speculation, but--like Bernie --I suspect you also have no smoking gun to tie it up.
The so-called "issues" on which you demand exonerating facts are principally informed by
partisan political stone-throwing, name-calling and fact-spinning. Hillary is not
squeaky-clean. Virtually no person who rises to that level in our political system is
completely squeaky-clean and is still effective. High-level politics is a bare knuckle sport,
and one at which Hillary has shown an aptitude. Many criticized President Obama for his
history of political horse-trading in the Illinois Senate, yet he was twice elected. Most
importantly, Hillary is far better informed and more accomplished on policy, communication and
diplomacy than Trump.
TheBunch
I was at Maine South High School at the same time as Hillary. She -- and some of her
friends who were headed off to elite Eastern colleges -- believed they were the "elite" at
that time and made no bones about it. And 50 years later nothing has changed, other than the
scope.
R. Allan
Clinton lies? Until Cheney and Bush are brought to justice for their lies, which resulted
in thousands of American soldiers' deaths and millions of other casualties, which continue to
this day, forget about lies about some emails.
"... the committee approved an amendment backed by organized labor that called for tough restrictions on trade deals, but did not explicitly oppose the trade pact with a dozen Pacific Rim nations that liberals say would hurt workers. ..."
"... Sanders will now have to decide whether he wants to use a parliamentary mechanism to push the issue to a fight on the floor of the Democratic National Convention later this month in Philadelphia. ..."
"... ...the Obama administration supports it. Establishment Democrats, including organized labor, sought to avoid embarrassing the president by allowing language in the party platform that would directly oppose the deal. ..."
In a major defeat during an otherwise fruitful process for him, Bernie Sanders failed to get
strong language opposing the Trans-Pacific Partnership inserted in the draft Democratic platform
at a party meeting here Saturday.
Instead, the committee approved an amendment backed by organized labor that called for
tough restrictions on trade deals, but did not explicitly oppose the trade pact with a dozen
Pacific Rim nations that liberals say would hurt workers.
Sanders will now have to decide whether he wants to use a parliamentary mechanism to push the
issue to a fight on the floor of the Democratic National Convention later this month in
Philadelphia.
Sanders will now have to decide whether he wants to use a parliamentary mechanism to push the
issue to a fight on the floor of the Democratic National Convention later this month in
Philadelphia.
"We are very disappointed," said Sanders top policy adviser Warren Gunnells. "The good news is
that virtually everyone who spoke during the debate on trade made it clear that they opposed this
unfettered free trade agreement."
...the Obama administration supports it. Establishment Democrats, including organized
labor, sought to avoid embarrassing the president by allowing language in the party platform that
would directly oppose the deal.
"... House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) formally requested Thursday that Clinton's security clearance be revoked because of the careless handling of classified material that the FBI investigation revealed. ..."
"... Clinton's personal system did not have full-time security staff ensuring that its protection was up to date. ..."
"... Comey said as many as ten people who did not have clearance had access to the system. ..."
"... Unconfirmed media reports had indicated that the FBI investigation spread to look at the activities of the Clinton Foundation as well ..."
House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) formally requested Thursday that Clinton's security clearance be revoked because of the careless
handling of classified material that the FBI investigation revealed.
... ... ...
While Comey maintained that nobody else would face criminal prosecution for doing the same things Clinton did, he emphasized in
his testimony that there would be consequences if a current government employee did it. This could include termination, administrative
sanctions, or losing clearance.
He refused to definitively assess a hypothetical situation where someone like Clinton was seeking security clearance for an FBI
job, though.
... ... ...
Gmail: One aspect of Clinton's actions that Comey said was particularly troubling was that he could not completely exclude
the possibility that her email account was hacked. Unlike the State Department or even email providers like Gmail, Clinton's
personal system did not have full-time security staff ensuring that its protection was up to date.
... ... ...
Clearance: Clinton and her top aides had security clearance to view the classified material that was improperly being transmitted
on the server, but Comey said as many as ten people who did not have clearance had access to the system.
... ... ...
Clinton Foundation:Unconfirmed media reports had indicated that the FBI investigation spread to look at the activities
of the Clinton Foundation as well
Trey Gowdy GRILLS James Comey On Hillary Clinton Emails. Hillary Clinton Email Investigation FBI Director James Comey testified
at a hearing on the FBI's investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of private email servers while serving as secretary of state,
as well as the decision to not recommend criminal charges against her. Rep. Gowdy Q&A - Oversight of the State Department.
At a congressional hearing Thursday, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) grilled FBI director James Comey about several of Hillary Clinton's
statements to the public, which the FBI investigation revealed to be untrue. For instance, Clinton had previously claimed that she
had never received or sent classified information to or from her private email server; Comey conceded to Rep. Gowdy that that was
not true.
Another claim of Clinton's, which the investigation revealed to be untrue, was that she had retained all work-related emails.
Comey noted that they had uncovered "thousands" of work-related emails not returned to the State Department. "In the interest of
time and because I have a plane to catch tomorrow afternoon," Gowdy concluded after running through a catalogue of Clinton's claims,
"I'm not going to go through any more of the false statements."
But Gowdy determined that "false exculpatory statements" can be used to determine intention and consciousness of guilt.
Wesley Eskildsen
Is this guy a Starfish from Bikini Bottom!? If Hillary gave her Lawyer, or anyone without the proper Security Clearance AND
the "Need to know", access to her Server containing classified information then she is in violation of Federal Law. If she were
on active Duty she would be court-martialed. that is Chaffetz point exactly!
John Doe
As a democrat, I am disgusted that every member of my party, when givin the opportunity to ask some questions, not one of these
cowards asked a real question and instead focussed on basically explaining about what a wonderful human being Hillary Clinton
is, and what terrible people the republicans are....
Wayne Paul
This chick Maloney just throwing softballs I have no clue why she is even talking.
aadrgtagtwe aaqerytwerhywerytqery
Comey is a liar, look at his reaction when asked about what questions did FBI ask hillary during the 3 and a half hour interview.
He said he couldn't remember at the moment. How is that possible? The only question to ask hillary during the fbi interview was:
"Did you send and receive classified top secret emails through your servers?"
Both answers Hillary could have given, would have been enough to indict her. If she said "Yes", then she would have been indicted
for sending top secret info. If she said "No" , she would have lied, because the report that Comey presented said that "top secret
emails were sent and received, and they were top secret at the time they were sent and received. Fbi didn't ask that question
at all. That tells you that the whole interview was a sham, Hillary was never interviewed.
The propaganda-media reported "hillary was grilled by fbi during 3 and a half hour interview". What unbelievable bullshit!
WE WANT JUSTICE!!!!!!!!! For all those people who are now in jail for the rest of their lives for doing much less than the criminal-hillary!!!!!!!
"... At a contentious hearing of the House oversight committee, Mr. Comey acknowledged under questioning that a number of key assertions that Mrs. Clinton made for months in defending her email system were contradicted by the FBI's investigation. ..."
"... Mr. Comey said that Mrs. Clinton had failed to return "thousands" of work-related emails to the State Department, despite her public insistence to the contrary, and that her lawyers may have destroyed classified material that the F.B.I. was unable to recover. He also described her handling of classified material as secretary of state as "negligent" - a legal term he avoided using when he announced on Tuesday that "no reasonable prosecutor" would bring a case against her. ..."
... He also provided new details that could prove damaging to her just weeks before she is to be named the Democrats' presidential
nominee.
At a contentious hearing of the House oversight committee, Mr. Comey acknowledged under questioning that a number of key assertions
that Mrs. Clinton made for months in defending her email system were contradicted by the FBI's investigation.
Mr. Comey said that Mrs. Clinton had failed to return "thousands" of work-related emails to the State Department, despite her
public insistence to the contrary, and that her lawyers may have destroyed classified material that the F.B.I. was unable to recover.
He also described her handling of classified material as secretary of state as "negligent" - a legal term he avoided using when he
announced on Tuesday that "no reasonable prosecutor" would bring a case against her.
"... I also made this comment during the morning links, but I think it bears repeating. Robinson considers this to be a great day for Clinton? By what standard? The FBI director went on national television and described her as "extremely careless," and then essentially called her a liar. Is a politician considered to be ethical if he or she is not indicted? ..."
"... Called her a liar? Un-indicted liar or perjurer because the investigators are reasonable. ..."
"... What an inversion – this must be the first time it was good for Hillary that her husband had a scandalous private meeting with a younger woman. ..."
"... In Hillary's nomination victory speech a month ago she argued she has the moral high ground and Trump's response was to focus on the problems in the economy. If the recession starts to hit hard enough late this year, Trump will win, and he will tell Hillary and Bill, "Its the economy stupid!" ..."
"... It is a SAD day when a President of the US cheers for an "extremely careless" leaker after being the most aggressive prosecutor of whistleblowers under the Espionage Act ever. Can I haz my money back? ..."
"... When "mere mortals" undertake the kind of reckless action with regard to classified material that Clinton did, wouldn't a likely and appropriate sanction be to pull that person's security clearance? ..."
"... Can a president operate without having a security clearance? ..."
"... "Mere mortals" get indicted. Here is the complaint filed in U.S.A v. Bryan Nishimura, July 24, 2015 ..."
"... BRYAN H. NISHIMURA, defendant herein, from on or about January 2007 through April 2012, while deployed outside of the United States on active military duty with the United States Navy Reserve in Afghanistan and thereafter at his residence located in the County of Sacramento, State and Eastern District of California, being an officer and employee of the United States, specifically: a United States Navy Reserve Commander, and, by virtue of his office and employment as such, becoming possessed of documents and materials containing classified information of the United States, specifically: CLASSIFIED United States Army records, did knowingly remove such documents and materials without authority and with the intent to retain such documents and materials at his residence in the County of Sacramento, an unauthorized location, in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 1924(a), a Class A misdemeanor. ..."
"... In a decision Tuesday in a case not involving Clinton directly, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit held that messages contained in a personal email account can sometimes be considered government records subject to Freedom of Information Act requests. ..."
"... Apparently Hillary's problems with the FOIA cases will worsen. ..."
"Comey and Lynch asked to testify before Congress on Clinton probe" [MarketWatch].
From my armchair at 30,000 feet: If the Republicans really want to make Lynch squirm, they just have to ask Lynch one question, which
Comey - strong passive-aggressive move, there, Jim! - handed to them on a silver platter at his presser, yesterday. I've helpfully
written it down (quoted phrases
from Comey's press release, parsed here):
Q: Attorney General Lynch, what "security or administrative sanctions" do you feel are appropriate for Secretary Clinton's
"extremely careless" handling of her email communications at the State Department?
No speeches instead of questions, no primping on camera for the folks back home, nothing about the endless lying, no Benghazi
red meat, no sphincter-driven ranting about "security", tie gormless Trey Gowdy up in a canvas bag and stuff him under a desk. Just
ask that one question. And when Lynch dodges, as she will, ask it again. I don't ever recall having written a sentence that
includes "the American people want," but what the American people want is to see some member of the elite, some time, any time, held
accountable for wrong-doing. If it's Clinton's "turn" for that, then so be it. She should look at the big picture and consider the
larger benefit of continued legitimacy for the Republic and take one for the team. So let's see if the Republicans overplay their
hand. They always have. UPDATE This
is a good, that
is, sane letter from Bob Goodlatte (pdf), chair of the House Judiciary Committee (via MsExPat). But don't get down in the goddamned
weeds!! K.I.S.S.!!!
"Comey's solo appearance Tuesday stood out for historical reasons, because it's highly unusual for the FBI to make public findings
when investigators have decided no charges should be brought" [CNN].
This purports to be the inside story of how Comey "stood alone" to make the announcement. But there are some holes in the narrative:
Matthew Miller, the former top Justice spokesman under Attorney General Eric Holder, called Comey's announcement "outrageous."
"The FBI's job is to investigate cases and when it's appropriate to work with the Justice Department to bring charges," he said
on CNN. House Republican
sides with Comey over Trump on Clinton emails. Instead, Miller said: "Jim Comey is the final arbiter in determining the appropriateness
of Hillary Clinton's conduct. That's not his job."
When you've lost Eric Holder's spokesperson And then there's this. After Clinton's "long-awaited" Fourth-of-July weekend three
hours of testimony:
Officials said it was already clear that there wasn't enough evidence to bring criminal charges. The interview cemented that
decision among FBI and Justice officials who were present.
By Monday night, Comey and other FBI officials decided the public announcement should come at the earliest opportunity.
The fact that Tuesday would also mark the first public campaign appearance by Obama alongside Hillary Clinton didn't enter
in the calculation, officials said.
But as Yves points out, there was no time to write an official report of Clinton's "interview" over the weekend. So for this narrative
to work, you've got to form a mental picture of high FBI officials scanning the transcript of Clinton's "interview," throwing up
their hands, and saying "We got nuthin'. You take it from here, Jim." That doesn't scan. I mean, the FBI is called a
bureau for good reason. So to me, the obvious process violation means that political pressure was brought
to bear on Comey, most likely by Obama, despite the denials (those being subject to the Rice-Davies Rule). But Comey did the bare
minimum to comply, in essence carefully building a three-scoop Sundae of Accountability, and then handing it, with the cherry ("security
or administrative sanctions"), to Lynch, so Lynch could have the pleasant task of making the decision about whether to put the cherry
on top. Or not. Of course, if our elites were as dedicated to public service as they were in Nixon's day, there would have been a
second Saturday Night Massacre (link for those who
came in late), but these are different times. (Extending the sundae metaphor even further, it will be interesting to see if the
ice cream shop staff knows what else is back in the freezer, the nuts and syrups that Comey decided not to add; Comey certainly made
the ethical case for leaks.)
"Hillary Clinton's email problems might be even worse than we thought " [Chris Cilizza,
WaPo]. Cillizza, for whom I confess a sneaking affection, as for Nooners, isn't the most combative writer in WaPo's stable
voteforno6, July 6, 2016 at 2:12 pm
Re: "Hillary Clinton's great day"
I also made this comment during the morning links, but I think it bears repeating. Robinson considers this to be a great day
for Clinton? By what standard? The FBI director went on national television and described her as "extremely careless," and then essentially
called her a liar. Is a politician considered to be ethical if he or she is not indicted?
MyLessThanPrimeBeef, July 6, 2016 at 3:29 pm
Called her a liar? Un-indicted liar or perjurer because the investigators are reasonable.
Elizabeth Burton, July 6, 2016 at 6:17 pm
The cultish nature of Clinton followers struck me months ago; it's quite plain to anyone who's done any amount of study of cults.
The giddy insistence now that the Comey statement is total vindication is a case in point, and any attempt to point out how damning
it actually was only brings an "innocent until proven guilty" reply.
One can only surmise that a large number of people have been so inured to corruption they no longer consider it a negative unless
the perpetrator goes to jail; and even then there would likely be more insistence that person was railroaded.
Tertium Squid, July 6, 2016 at 2:15 pm
What an inversion – this must be the first time it was good for Hillary that her husband had a scandalous private meeting
with a younger woman.
Tim, July 6, 2016 at 2:40 pm
On election day hindsight will show the real inversion with the Clintons is:
In 1990s Bob Dole ran on a platform of having the moral high ground, while Bill Clinton said "it's the economy stupid", and Bill
won.
In Hillary's nomination victory speech a month ago she argued she has the moral high ground and Trump's response was to focus
on the problems in the economy. If the recession starts to hit hard enough late this year, Trump will win, and he will tell Hillary
and Bill, "Its the economy stupid!"
Isolato, July 6, 2016 at 2:18 pm
It is a SAD day when a President of the US cheers for an "extremely careless" leaker after being the most aggressive prosecutor
of whistleblowers under the Espionage Act ever. Can I haz my money back?
Kokuanani, July 6, 2016 at 3:19 pm
When "mere mortals" undertake the kind of reckless action with regard to classified material that Clinton did, wouldn't a
likely and appropriate sanction be to pull that person's security clearance?
Can we hope for that to happen to Clinton? [Why not?]
Can a president operate without having a security clearance?
3.14e-9, July 6, 2016 at 6:05 pm
When "mere mortals" undertake the kind of reckless action with regard to classified material that Clinton did, wouldn't
a likely and appropriate sanction be to pull that person's security clearance?
"Mere mortals" get indicted. Here is the complaint filed in U.S.A v. Bryan Nishimura, July 24, 2015:
The United States Attorney charges: THAT BRYAN H. NISHIMURA, defendant herein, from on or about January 2007 through April
2012, while deployed outside of the United States on active military duty with the United States Navy Reserve in Afghanistan and
thereafter at his residence located in the County of Sacramento, State and Eastern District of California, being an officer and
employee of the United States, specifically: a United States Navy Reserve Commander, and, by virtue of his office and employment
as such, becoming possessed of documents and materials containing classified information of the United States, specifically: CLASSIFIED
United States Army records, did knowingly remove such documents and materials without authority and with the intent to retain
such documents and materials at his residence in the County of Sacramento, an unauthorized location, in violation of Title 18,
United States Code, Section 1924(a), a Class A misdemeanor.
voteforno6, July 6, 2016 at 6:13 pm
Since the classification program falls under the President by law, it is impossible for a President to not have a security clearance.
Pookah Harvey, July 6, 2016 at 2:54 pm
Clinton supporters seem to feel the fat lady has sung but it might be they are only hearing someone who is slightly chunky. From
Politico:
On the same day that the FBI announced that the criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server is
likely to conclude without any charges, a federal appeals court issued a ruling that could complicate and prolong a slew of ongoing
civil lawsuits over access to the messages Clinton and her top aides traded on personal accounts.
In a decision Tuesday in a case not involving Clinton directly, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit held that
messages contained in a personal email account can sometimes be considered government records subject to Freedom of Information
Act requests.
Apparently Hillary's problems with the FOIA cases will worsen.
Rep. Ken Buck questions FBI Director James Comey about his insertion of the term "willfully"
into 18 U.S. Code § 1924. Comey says he "imputes" the term in line with the Department of
Justice's history/tradition of enforcing the statute.
The above clip is taken from the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee's hearing
regarding Hillary Clinton's criminal email conduct.
"... ...Mr. Comey also referenced a more obscure provision of the Espionage Act that has little to do with intent or state of mind, but rather makes it a crime to disclose classified information through "gross negligence." ..."
"... But the crime of "gross negligence" in the Espionage Act doesn't appear to require proof of any intentional mishandling of documents, according to Stephen I. Vladeck , a national security scholar at the University of Texas. ..."
"... Specifically, the law makes it a felony to permit classified information relating to national defense to be "removed from its proper place of custody" through gross negligence. ..."
"... Why are you focusing on the gross negligence aspect? ..."
"... Where is the removal from the proper place of custody? I've seen nothing in any legal analysis in this paper that talks about it. Is the presence of classified material on a private server of one who is authorized to have it equivalent to such a removal? ..."
"... She was specifically not authorized to have a private server. ..."
"... "From the group of 30,000 emails returned to the State Department in 2014, 110 emails in 52 email chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received. Eight of those chains contained information that was TOP SECRET at the time they were sent; 36 of those chains contained SECRET information at the time; and eight contained CONFIDENTIAL information at the time. That's the lowest level of classification." ..."
"... "We assess it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton's personal email account." ..."
"... Making an argument for the difference between "gross negligence" and "extreme carelessness" is the sort of semantic hair-splitting that Hillary Clinton ought to have been compelled to do in court - in the same way that her husband prevaricated over "what the meaning of the word 'is' is," shortly before he lost his law license. ..."
...Mr. Comey also referenced a more obscure provision of
the Espionage Act that has little to
do with intent or state of mind, but rather makes it a crime to disclose classified information through
"gross negligence."
That provision of the Espionage Act, the primary law governing the handling of classified information,
could require at least proof that the offender knew the classified information disclosed could harm
the United States or benefit a foreign power if it got into the wrong hands.
But the crime of "gross negligence" in the Espionage Act doesn't appear to require proof of any
intentional mishandling of documents, according to
Stephen I. Vladeck, a national security scholar at the University of Texas.
Specifically, the law makes it a felony to permit classified information relating to national
defense to be "removed from its proper place of custody" through gross negligence.
What would constitute a degree of recklessness that rises to gross negligence? Mr. Vladeck offered
an example of accidentally leaving a briefcase stuffed with classified national security secrets
on a busy sidewalk in Washington, D.C.
... ... ...
Charles Silva
Why are you focusing on the gross negligence aspect?
Where is the removal from the proper place of custody? I've seen nothing in any legal analysis
in this paper that talks about it. Is the presence of classified material on a private server
of one who is authorized to have it equivalent to such a removal?
Lee Hartwig
@Charles Silva She was specifically not authorized to have a private server.
Clifford Crouch
@Michael Piston
"From the group of 30,000 emails returned to the State Department in 2014, 110 emails in 52
email chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the
time they were sent or received. Eight of those chains contained information that was TOP SECRET
at the time they were sent; 36 of those chains contained SECRET information at the time; and eight
contained CONFIDENTIAL information at the time. That's the lowest level of classification."
-FBI Director James Comey, July 5, 2016
"We assess it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton's personal
email account."
-James Comey, July 5, 2016
Making an argument for the difference between "gross negligence" and "extreme carelessness"
is the sort of semantic hair-splitting that Hillary Clinton ought to have been compelled to do
in court - in the same way that her husband prevaricated over "what the meaning of the word 'is'
is," shortly before he lost his law license.
Wright noted that while the State Department's information technology budget trails many other departments, Clinton's arrangement
was likely still more vulnerable because it was administered by many people without a cybersecurity background.
"When you take a bad situation and put something else bad on top of it you've made it far worse," he told POLITICO.
And the countries interested in going after Clinton's emails all possess advanced cyber capabilities, experts said. The federal
government has determined that Chinese hackers have been snooping on personal email accounts of top U.S. officials for years and
just last year Secretary of State John Kerry said it is "likely" that Russian and Chinese hackers are reading his emails.
As for Israel, hackers would have targeted Clinton's emails to glean her positions on Middle East issues, according to Wright.
"They're friendly … but even friendlies can get aggressive on spying on each other," he said.
Clinton also accessed her private email "extensively" while traveling, Comey said, "including sending and receiving work-related
emails in the territory of sophisticated adversaries."
This practice considerably heightened the risk of compromise, particularly if Clinton used unencrypted pathways to access her
email while abroad, said Jason Straight, chief privacy officer of UnitedLex, which advises corporations on cybersecurity practices.
Comey also said FBI investigators determined that hackers had infiltrated the private commercial email accounts of people that
regularly emailed Clinton's personal account, opening up another potential entry point for digital snoops.
The FBI chief didn't name these outside contacts, leading some, including Wright, to wonder if there would be further investigation
into the emails of top aides, like Cheryl Mills or Huma Abedin.
But while there are considerable factors pointing to a likely intrusion, there may never be a smoking gun, according to specialists.
"The bottom line is that we will likely never know for certain whether her server was compromised or not," said Straight.
Elizabeth Warren tweeted about holding public officials accountable. Nobody is above the law, not even public officials, she tweeted.
She is the leading candidate to be Hilary Clinton's VP, a public official who is above the law.
FBI Director James Comey announced there would be no charges for Hillary relating to her reckless use of a private email server
while Secretary of State.
During the same exchange, Chaffetz inquired as to whether the FBI investigated Clinton's statements
to the Benghazi committee, including her declaration that there was "nothing marked classified on
my emails, either sent or received."
"Not to my knowledge. I don't think there's been a referral from Congress," Comey responded, noting
that such a probe would usually require a referral from Congress.
Chaffetz responded with a chuckle, "You'll have one. You'll have one in the next few hours."
"... But in a potentially destabilising move for the Democratic party, and an exciting one for Sanders' supporters, the Green party candidate said she was willing to stand aside for Sanders. ..."
"... If he continues to declare his full faith in the Democratic party, it will leave many of his supporters very disappointed," she said. "That political movement is going to go on – it isn't going to bury itself in the graveyard alongside Hillary Clinton ..."
"... Stein said the Democratic establishment had conducted "psychological warfare" against Sanders and "sabotaged" his attempts to gain the party's presidential nomination. Many of his young, progressive supporters are now moving over to the Green party rather than fall in behind Clinton ..."
"... a less interventionist approach to foreign affairs than Clinton, the Greens have also pitched at voters who have been dubbed as being "Bernie or bust". ..."
Bernie Sanders has been invited to continue his underdog bid for the White House by the Green
party's probable presidential candidate, who has offered to step aside to let him run. Jill Stein,
who is expected to be endorsed at the party's August convention in Houston, told Guardian US that
"overwhelming" numbers of Sanders supporters are flocking to the Greens rather than Hillary Clinton.
Stein insisted that her presidential bid has a viable "near term goal" of reaching 15% in national
polling, which would enable her to stand alongside presumptive nominees Clinton and Donald Trump
in televised election debates.
But in a potentially destabilising move for the Democratic party, and an exciting one for
Sanders' supporters, the Green party candidate said she was willing to stand aside for Sanders.
"I've invited Bernie to sit down explore collaboration – everything is on the table," she said.
"If he saw that you can't have a revolutionary campaign in a counter-revolutionary party, he'd be
welcomed to the Green party. He could lead the ticket and build a political movement," she said.
Stein said she had made her offer directly to Sanders in an email at the end of the primary season,
although she had not received a response. Her surprise intervention comes amid speculation that Sanders
will finally draw a line under a bruising Democratic contest by endorsing Clinton's presidential
bid next week.
"If he continues to declare his full faith in the Democratic party, it will leave many of his
supporters very disappointed," she said. "That political movement is going to go on – it isn't going
to bury itself in the graveyard alongside Hillary Clinton."
Stein said the Democratic establishment had conducted "psychological warfare" against Sanders and
"sabotaged" his attempts to gain the party's presidential nomination. Many of his young, progressive
supporters are now moving over to the Green party rather than fall in behind Clinton, Stein added.
"I'm not holding my breath but I'm not ruling it out that we can bring out 43 million young people
into this election," she said. "It's been a wild election; every rule in the playbook has been tossed
out. Unfortunately, that has mainly been used to lift up hateful demagogues like Donald Trump, but
it can also be done in a way that actually answers people's needs."
Stein, a former Massachusetts doctor turned environmental activist, is attempting to woo young voters
with a promise to make college free and, beyond what Sanders has pledged, to cancel all existing
student debt through quantitive easing.
With a more ambitious climate change policy (Stein favors getting to 100% renewable-powered electricity
by the middle of the century) and a less interventionist approach to foreign affairs than Clinton,
the Greens have also pitched at voters who have been dubbed as being "Bernie or bust".
In this first of a multi-video
series examining the corporate influence of potential Vice
Presidential candidates Hillary Clinton may choose, TYT
Politics Intern Emma Vigeland (@EmmaVigeland) reported on
Virginia Senator Tim Kaine.
Kaine is a deeply "moderate," establishment Democrat from
Virginia who has deep corporate ties.
From comments: "Just last year:
http://www.navytimes.com/story/military ... /30862027/ Granted that was two a year probation plus
forever not being allowed a security clearance but there is no substantial difference between between
their violations. In fact her violations were several magnitudes worse. "
Notable quotes:
"... Congressman Mick Mulvaney (R-SC) responded, "Isn't she an original classification source?"-meaning that Clinton was responsible for assigning a level of classification to information as Secretary of State. "Yes, she was," Comey replied. "Good grief," exclaimed Mulvaney. ..."
"... Under further questioning from Chaffetz, Comey said that the FBI did not look at civil issues, such as violations of the Freedom of Information Act and federal records law, nor did they look at whether Clinton had committed perjury before Congress in sworn testimony wherein she said that she had neither sent nor received classified information via her e-mail. ..."
"... Comey also said that Clinton's mail server was "less secure" than Gmail. "Individual accounts might be less secure, but Google does regular security checks and updates," he explained. Clinton's mail server, set up by people working for former President Bill Clinton's foundation, sat in a basement of the Clinton home in Chappaqua, New York. ..."
"... He's calling her incompetent, stupid, careless, reckless even...but just saying he doesn't believe they can charge her based on the evidence they reviewed. He even said that prior to this investigation he would have thought that any reasonable person would have known this, but now he is not so sure. ..."
"... "Break classification rules for the public's benefit, and you could be exiled. Do it for personal benefit, and you could be President." -- Edward Snowden ..."
"... Between a rock and hard place... On one hand he needs to show us peasants that the law applies to everyone, and on the other, he does not want to take on arguably the most powerful woman in the world and possibly the next president. For someone who wanted software backdoors so much - it couldn't happen to a more deserving person. ..."
"... This seems like a situation where an independent attorney should have been brought on. Why the fuck would the FBI have a role in determining whether or not to prosecute? Isn't that the DOJ's role? A role best delegated to an independent attorney in cases like this? ..."
"... Proving criminal intent was never necessary considering the standard here should be gross negligence, and even though actual harm was done when her server according to experts was almost certainly hacked, her not being indicted is about what anybody who has been paying attention to the bishops of the democratic party circling her and anointing her while chanting "All really do like her. None have any issues with trusting her... ..."
"... In his testimony, in response to questions about whether Clinton should have been aware that she was sending highly classified data in unclassified e-mails, Comey said, "I don't think our investigation established she was that sophisticated about classification." Congressman Mick Mulvaney (R-South Carolina) responded, "Isn't she an original classification source?", meaning that Clinton was responsible for assigning a level of classification to information as Secretary of Stat. ..."
"... People with security clearances are not generally prosecuted for unintentionally mishandling classified documents. If it is a significant level of negligence, they lose their security clearance and therefore their job and the ability to hold a similar job. ..."
"... Clinton's intentional use of her own email server takes negligence to new heights. While I don't think she had any justifiable reason to set up her own mail server and we have good reason to suspect that it was done to avoid oversight, it doesn't seem to have been done with the intention of mishandling classified docs. With Clinton we once again have evidence that she is trying to hide her actions, but no clear evidence of criminal intent. Ideally she would lose her ability to handle classified material and be banned from any position requiring access to classified information. However, negligence in handling the nation's secrets isn't spelled out in the Constitution as disqualifying someone for the office of President. You might think that no one would vote for someone who's been proved untrustworthy and negligent on this scale, but that simply isn't the case. ..."
"... Other people who negligently handle classified information also do face serious consequences. They lose their security clearance. That means they lose their job and can't get another one like it. In some cases that is pretty much career ending. ..."
"The FBI's recommendation is surprising and confusing," Chaffetz said in a statement announcing
the hearing. "The fact pattern presented by Director Comey makes clear Secretary Clinton violated
the law. Individuals who intentionally skirt the law must be held accountable. Congress and the American
people have a right to understand the depth and breadth of the FBI's investigation. I thank Director
Comey for accepting the invitation to publicly answer these important questions."
Update, 11:30 am: Eight e-mail threads of the more than 30,000 messages stored on
Clinton's server included conversations containing what was determined by State Department and Intelligence
Community review to be of the highest level of classification (Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented
Information). But that information wasn't marked as such-and much of it was sent to Clinton by her
staff from the State Department's unclassified e-mail system. Both Clinton and State Department staff
sent messages stored on Clinton's server and on the State Department's unclassified e-mail system
that included classified, secret, and Top Secret/SCI information, including names of intelligence
community personnel.
In response to questions about whether Clinton should have been aware that she was sending highly
classified data in unclassified e-mails, Comey said, "I don't think our investigation established
she was that sophisticated about classification." (Later in his testimony, Comey elaborated that
the lack of sophistication was more technical than understanding the importance of protecting classified
data.)
Congressman Mick Mulvaney (R-SC) responded, "Isn't she an original classification source?"-meaning
that Clinton was responsible for assigning a level of classification to information as Secretary
of State. "Yes, she was," Comey replied. "Good grief," exclaimed Mulvaney.
"Based on your answers, and what we know, it seems to me that she is stunningly incompetent
in handling e-mail and classified information," said Rep. Gary Palmer (R-AL), acknowledging Comey's
honesty. "For a Secretary of State, that level of carelessness is shocking."
Chaffetz concluded the hearing with a battery of questions over the people who had access to Clinton's
e-mails, including the administrators and lawyers. "She's not the head of Fish and Wildlife," Chaffetz
shouted.
Comey responded that it wasn't unreasonable for Clinton to assume that administrators would not
be reading her e-mail. And in other testimony, Comey said that because of the lack of security markings
on the vast majority of the content, it was reasonable to assume Clinton believed the contents to
be unclassified.
Under further questioning from Chaffetz, Comey said that the FBI did not look at civil issues,
such as violations of the Freedom of Information Act and federal records law, nor did they look at
whether Clinton had committed perjury before Congress in sworn testimony wherein she said that she
had neither sent nor received classified information via her e-mail.
Update, 1:00 pm: While a statute passed by Congress in 1917 allowed for prosecution
based on "gross negligence," Comey said that there were questions about the constitutionality of
that statute, and a later statute for misdemeanor offenses based on negligence. He said the decision
not to recommend prosecution "fits within a framework of fairness and what the Justice Department
has prosecuted over the last 50 years. I don't see cases that were prosecuted on facts like these,"
continued Comey. "There was one time it was charged in an espionage case, and the defendant pled
guilty on another charge so it was never adjudicated."
The general tone of Comey's testimony was that while Clinton was careless with classified information,
virtually none of the information that was sensitive was marked as such. Three e-mail threads included
"content markers" at the beginning of paragraphs within the body of messages indicating that the
paragraphs included classified information (using a letter "C" in parentheses). In response to a
question from Rep. Thomas Massie, Comey said, "Someone down in the chain put a portion marking in
the paragraph."
However, as noted by Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman, the State Department had said that the content
classification markings were in error-that they were preliminary marks from a "call sheet" for Clinton,
and should not have been left in the document when it was forwarded to Clinton.
Comey also said that Clinton's mail server was "less secure" than Gmail. "Individual accounts
might be less secure, but Google does regular security checks and updates," he explained. Clinton's
mail server, set up by people working for former President Bill Clinton's foundation, sat in a basement
of the Clinton home in Chappaqua, New York.
As for Clinton's comments when asked if she had "wiped" her server: "Do you mean with a cloth?"
Comey quipped. "I would assume it was a facetious comment about a cloth, but I wouldn't know that."
In his testimony, in response to questions about whether Clinton should have been aware
that she was sending highly classified data in unclassified e-mails, Comey said, "I don't think
our investigation established she was that sophisticated about classification."
Congressman Mick Mulvaney (R-South Carolina) responded, "Isn't she an original classification
source?", meaning that Clinton was responsible for assigning a level of classification to information
as Secretary of Stat.
"Yes, she was," Comey replied.
This says volumes about Comey's bias and political aspirations. Shame! Shame!
I didn't read it like that. I think Comey is honestly trying to say that Hillary is just not
sophisticated about it, even after decades of being read in to the program.
He's calling her incompetent, stupid, careless, reckless even...but just saying he doesn't
believe they can charge her based on the evidence they reviewed. He even said that prior to this
investigation he would have thought that any reasonable person would have known this, but now
he is not so sure.
TechTuner777Wise ,
"Break classification rules for the public's benefit, and you could be exiled. Do it for
personal benefit, and you could be President." -- Edward Snowden
iPirateEverything
Between a rock and hard place... On one hand he needs to show us peasants that the law
applies to everyone, and on the other, he does not want to take on arguably the most powerful
woman in the world and possibly the next president. For someone who wanted software backdoors
so much - it couldn't happen to a more deserving person.
arkielArs
This seems like a situation where an independent attorney should have been brought on.
Why the fuck would the FBI have a role in determining whether or not to prosecute? Isn't that
the DOJ's role? A role best delegated to an independent attorney in cases like this?
Is an FBI recommendation a prerequisite to prosecution now? The fact that they found "extremely
careless" sounds like factual information upon which charges could be brought (but then again,
I don't know the letter of this law).
The last two cases could easily have been hand waived in the same was as being "extremely careless".
MeaildaArs
Marid wrote:
The decision not to prosecute was expected by anyone neutral to the politics. Proving
criminal intent is a very high bar to meet. And without actual harm done the case became even
more difficult who understands the politics.
Sub this for the strike: Proving criminal intent was never necessary considering the standard
here should be gross negligence, and even though actual harm was done when her server according
to experts was almost certainly hacked, her not being indicted is about what anybody who has been
paying attention to the bishops of the democratic party circling her and anointing her while chanting
"All really do like her. None have any issues with trusting her...
Read them yourselves. Look at the actual PDFs and see all the redacted info. Read the emails
and see how there is conversation that directly discusses information that was sent via secure
channels.
crustytheclown
In his testimony, in response to questions about whether Clinton should have been aware
that she was sending highly classified data in unclassified e-mails, Comey said, "I don't think
our investigation established she was that sophisticated about classification." Congressman
Mick Mulvaney (R-South Carolina) responded, "Isn't she an original classification source?", meaning
that Clinton was responsible for assigning a level of classification to information as Secretary
of Stat.
"Yes, she was," Comey replied.
This says volumes about Comey's bias and political aspirations. Shame! Shame!
I did a quick bit of research. The only instance of 18 U.S.C. 793(f) being used to prosecute
anyone was U.S. v. Dedeyan, 584 F.2d 36 (4th Cir., 1978) (which was referenced by Dir. Comey in
his press conference and at the House hearing).
In that case, a civilian mathematician took some classified documents home to proofread. His
cousin, who was a Soviet agent, was staying with him and took pictures of the classified work
he brought home with him. The cousin later told him he copied the classified materials and gave
him $1000 to keep quiet, which he did.
In that case, the DOJ brought charges under 18 U.S.C. 793(f) because he didn't report that
the classified material was copied after he learned about it, and for taking the bribe to remain
silent.
There has never been an instance of the DOJ bringing a 18 U.S.C. 793(f) case against anyone
for mere gross negligence alone.
I have lost all faith in the democracy the US politicians spout. Sounds good but its rotten
to the core with secret bullshit behind closed doors actually calling the shots. There is not
much point on expecting anything meaningful to come from this circus, its just pretending to look
busy and the outcome was already decided long before it even started.
Last edited by
AlexisR200X on Thu Jul 07, 2016 10:34 am
On one hand he needs to show us peasants that the law applies to everyone,
and on the other, he does not want to take on arguably the most powerful woman in the world and
possibly the next president.
For someone who wanted software backdoors so much - it couldn't happen to a more deserving
person.
People with security clearances are not generally prosecuted for unintentionally mishandling
classified documents. If it is a significant level of negligence, they lose their security clearance
and therefore their job and the ability to hold a similar job.
Clinton's intentional use of her own email server takes negligence to new heights. While
I don't think she had any justifiable reason to set up her own mail server and we have good reason
to suspect that it was done to avoid oversight, it doesn't seem to have been done with the intention
of mishandling classified docs. With Clinton we once again have evidence that she is trying to
hide her actions, but no clear evidence of criminal intent. Ideally she would lose her ability
to handle classified material and be banned from any position requiring access to classified information.
However, negligence in handling the nation's secrets isn't spelled out in the Constitution as
disqualifying someone for the office of President. You might think that no one would vote for
someone who's been proved untrustworthy and negligent on this scale, but that simply isn't the
case.
Prosecuting Hillary would be justified. However, an argument can also be made that without
evidence of clear criminal intent, that the voters should not be denied the opportunity to elect
their candidate of choice. Even if it's a really bad choice in my opinion.
The decision not to prosecute can be justified and if the people want to elect someone as President
who as Secretary of State put covering her ass and obscuring her actions over the security of
the United States, then we will have one more example of how democracy is an imperfect system.
I don't think there is a better system overall, but I of course have my own ideas on how our system
could be tweaked to make it a bit better.
Marid wrote: The decision not to prosecute was expected by anyone neutral to the politics.
Proving criminal intent is a very high bar to meet. And without actual harm done the case became
even more difficult.
Yep. Criminal intent is core to a good persecution.. Simple possession of classified information
can be trouble, but these people in state all have clearances. Just from personal job experience,
a staggering number of government employees have top secret clearances. It's not like stuff on
a private email server was more or less safe than going through official routing. In fact, it's
probably a bigger target.
If this is about how big a liar Hilary Clinton is, I would push people to look over some of
the very first presidential campaigns the USA has had to see all sorts of whoppers flying at candidates.
This is business as usual. Complete with the totally uninformed public spouting expert technological
opinions about things they know nothing about.
You all know this is a witch hunt. FBI Comey is doing the right thing in trying to be transparent
so as to let voters decide. Still going to vote Hillary and not Trump.
But this has nothing to do with voting for Hillary or Trump. I don't plan on voting for
either one, but that doesn't change what Hillary did, and the fact that her actions received
zero consequences, when anyone else would have received life in prison.
The FBI director has been very clear that no one else has EVER received prison for something
like this. In fact, this is a direct quote from him from this hearing: "You know what would
be a double standard? If Clinton actually were prosecuted for gross negligence"
Well there is a significant difference in both the level of negligence and the level of authority
of the person involved. Other people who negligently handle classified information also do
face serious consequences. They lose their security clearance. That means they lose their job
and can't get another one like it. In some cases that is pretty much career ending.
As long as Clinton can get elected to public office that requires access to classified data,
she can't be denied access simply based on mishandling such data in the past. The voters can elect
the representatives they want and have every right to make stupid choices. So basically Clinton
violated the law and is avoiding all consequences because she seeks to be an elected official,
not a government employee.
If Clinton manages to escape any consequences it will be because of voters. If she was criminally
prosecuted, maybe more voters would realize who they would be voting for, however there seems
to be lots of evidence that Hillary supporters just don't care that she is untrustworthy and puts
her own ambitions ahead of the country. It's not likely they haven't been presented with enough
evidence of that before now.
I think a big take-away here from watching this unfold is that the FBI director is correct in
his assertion that Clinton did not lie to the FBI. BUT because she was in charge she bears the
responsibility of information handled improperly.
From the questioning it was brought up that no actual documents classified or greater classification
were actually transmitted to/from her email server, BUT transcribed conversations (conversations
that happened in person between two or more individuals) that contained classified information
was. These message threads all originated from a person lower on the chain and then forwarded
around (not just to Clinton's server) through non-classified systems. Sometimes (like in many
forwarded emails) only portions of the original messages were maintained (this is common with
any forwarded and or quoted email in long chains) and a paragraph for instance would have a [C.]
marking at the beginning of the thread, but as it got forwarded around that message was quoted
and modified and the marking was removed by another individual (accidentally or on purpose, this
is unknown).
Comey stated that they are not actively investigated the origination of the email chains as
that was not part of their original investigation (this is somewhat interesting, but makes sense
as it was not in their original investigative scope)
Quote: When another officer who received the email raised the alarm about sending the
document over a nonsecure network, Brezler reported himself to his superiors and cooperated with
a Naval Criminal Investigative Service probe into the classified material spillage. The probe
turned up another folder with some 106 documents marked secret. Brezler said he inadvertently
brought them back with him following his 2010 deployment to Now Zad, Afghanistan, where limited
resources sometimes meant Marines worked on their personal computers and thumb drives.
Quote: But a Marine prosecutor said this week that the case was about more than that
one communication with Marines in Afghanistan. Brezler knowingly kept classified documents to
inform a book he was writing about his Now Zad experiences, said Maj. Chip Hodge, showing that
Brezler had copied and pasted a paragraph from the Sarwar Jan document into his manuscript, "Rebirth
of Apocalypse Now Zad."
Hillary coped her emails and gave all of the to her private lawyer, who has no security clearance, on the USB stick.
That's alone qualifies for gross negligence.
Notable quotes:
"... Hillary Clinton also used the department's secure email system for transmitting classified information, but the FBI found that some of the regular communications with her staff on the personal server involved facts and details that she should have known were classified. In a few cases, the emails bore markings to indicate they contained classified information. ..."
"... Stewart Baker, a top national security lawyer in the Bush administration, called Comey's statement "pretty damning for Secretary Clinton, even if the facts don't make for an impressive criminal case. He suggests that she should have been, or arguably could still be, subjected to 'security or administrative sanctions.' What he doesn't say, but what we can infer, is that she ran those incredible risks with national security information because she was more worried about the GOP reading her mail than of Russian or Chinese spies reading it. That's appalling," he said. ..."
"... HIllary lied about her servers, she lied about sending classified information, she lied about the re-classification of confidential, secret and SAP documents. Some two hours after Comey's announcement, she and Obama took off on Air Force One for a rally together. ..."
"... But a new security regimen is dawning for those who hold security clearances. According to the FBI, they are now free to transfer data between secure and non-secure networks without punishment, as long as the INTENT is not to harm the United States. ..."
"... A retired FBI agent on Fox said this : The Comey conference was to take the heat off of Lynch - because if the FBI had just been quiet with their results, and it would have been Lynch who came out and said...No charges - AFTER the Phoenix scandal, people would really be skeptical. end - ..."
"... Of course this took AG-LL off the hook. NOW - for all of this to fall in place? Had to be some meetings beforehand - AG - FBI and Whitehouse general council - 3 US government lawyers colluding this event - to make SURE they have jobs the next 4 years and the GRATITUDE of Potus Hillary. ..."
"... Corrupt? I would not go that far...let's just say DIRTY. ..."
"... "Gross negligence" is the standard under 18 U.S.C., section 793-f. FBI Director Comey said Hillary Clinton was "extremely careless" in her handling of highly classified information. What's the difference, other than semantics, between "gross negligence" and "extremely careless?" ..."
"... Hillary's emails may be great confirmation of Hillary's war role in the Mid-east and even Ukraine. However, more to the point they confirm for all Democrats that Hillary's agenda is the Neo-con one of Geo. W. Bush's handlers from PNAC, Chicago School of Economics, Bill Kristol, Robert Kagan and his wife Victoria Nuland. (The Neo-con/Neo-liberal company includes Larry Summers, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc.) She is not a run of the mill hawk like John McCain, she is a New World Order marionette just as Geo W was. She needs to be dumped as she is beholden to anti-democratic values of elitism. ..."
"... Bill Kristol is attacking Donald Trump because his candidate is Hillary. ..."
"... This was historical. Law enforcement does not make decisions on prosecution. That is left to prosecutors. Law enforcement are fact finders who should have presented the case to a career professional prosecutor to make a decision. ..."
"... The question is, why was well established policy and protocol violated and the case not presented to a prosecutor for a decision? Ask any local D.A. If they reject a case, they write a "reject" documenting their rationale. In a very public or complicated case, that reject is written in great detail regarding each and every potential charge. ..."
"... The Obama Administration has prosecuted more people under the same WW I espionage act than all other administrations COMBINED. Comey has prosecuted a person under this act for a 21-word email .not 30,000 destroyed emails. ..."
"... Everybody knows this was fixed. The examples of similar incidents, putting people in jail, are coming out of the shadows. It is time to vote the career politicians out of office and take our country back. ..."
"... NSA has copies of every email sent to/from US, & likely most others, for last 10+ years. So they have all 30,000+ of the emails she deleted. ..."
"... When in the Navy I saw a LT. career destroyed for leaving a top secret safe open over night. We did not know who maybe got in. The assumption by NCIS was that someone did enter and Top Secret information was taken. He was prosecuted for maybe forgetting and Clinton no prosecution for being dumb? ..."
"It's just not a crime under current law to do nothing more than share sensitive information over unsecured networks," said Stephen
Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas. "Maybe it should be, but that's something for Congress to decide going forward."
John M. Deutch, another former CIA director, narrowly avoided a misdemeanor charge for having taken hundreds of top secret files
home on his laptop computer. He was pardoned by Clinton before charges were filed.
... ... ...
Hillary Clinton also used the department's secure email system for transmitting classified information, but the FBI found
that some of the regular communications with her staff on the personal server involved facts and details that she should have known
were classified. In a few cases, the emails bore markings to indicate they contained classified information.
However, investigators did not find evidence she knowingly or intentionally disclosed government secrets or that she exposed secrets
through gross negligence. Clinton's apparent interest was in maintaining her privacy.
... ... ...
Stewart Baker, a top national security lawyer in the Bush administration, called Comey's statement "pretty damning for Secretary
Clinton, even if the facts don't make for an impressive criminal case. He suggests that she should have been, or arguably could still
be, subjected to 'security or administrative sanctions.' What he doesn't say, but what we can infer, is that she ran those incredible
risks with national security information because she was more worried about the GOP reading her mail than of Russian or Chinese spies
reading it. That's appalling," he said.
knox.bob.xpg
No amount of facts, no amount of evidence, and no amount of lies will change the minds of supporters of Hillary Clinton. Her
coronation was pre-determined. Ideology is more important to her supporters than the quality of the candidate. While brash, Trump
nailed it yesterday. The fix was in and the optics played out.
HIllary lied about her servers, she lied about sending classified information, she lied about the re-classification of
confidential, secret and SAP documents. Some two hours after Comey's announcement, she and Obama took off on Air Force One for
a rally together.
Obama would have never done this if Comey's decision was to seek criminal charges. Presidential travel is not spur
of the moment, it is carefully planned weeks in advance. So what happened here ? I believe Comey knew that DOJ would not seek
criminal charges against her despite the overwhelming evidence of gross negligence.
Comey "fried" her yesterday and now she will be tried in the court of public opinion. There are simply some people who believe
that global warming, income inequality, and transgender bathrooms are more important than ISIS, our economy, terror, or national
debt.
unclesmrgol
Hillary has been freed from any punishment, for some animals are more important than others.
But a new security regimen is dawning for those who hold security clearances. According to the FBI, they are now free to
transfer data between secure and non-secure networks without punishment, as long as the INTENT is not to harm the United States.
That is the new standard, and a mighty fine one it is -- right?
SandyDago
A retired FBI agent on Fox said this : The Comey conference was to take the heat off of Lynch - because if the FBI had
just been quiet with their results, and it would have been Lynch who came out and said...No charges - AFTER the Phoenix scandal,
people would really be skeptical. end -
That seems very obvious at this point...The FBI does not do - what James Comey did yesterday. No comment is how they roll -
Yet we get a play by play yesterday.
Of course this took AG-LL off the hook. NOW - for all of this to fall in place? Had to be some meetings beforehand - AG
- FBI and Whitehouse general council - 3 US government lawyers colluding this event - to make SURE they have jobs the next 4 years
and the GRATITUDE of Potus Hillary.
Corrupt? I would not go that far...let's just say DIRTY.
Chris Crusade
"Gross negligence" is the standard under 18 U.S.C., section 793-f. FBI Director Comey said Hillary Clinton was "extremely
careless" in her handling of highly classified information. What's the difference, other than semantics, between "gross negligence"
and "extremely careless?"
lon.ball
Hillary's emails may be great confirmation of Hillary's war role in the Mid-east and even Ukraine.
However, more to the point they confirm for all Democrats that Hillary's agenda is the Neo-con one of Geo. W. Bush's handlers
from PNAC, Chicago School of Economics, Bill Kristol, Robert Kagan and his wife Victoria Nuland. (The Neo-con/Neo-liberal company
includes Larry Summers, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc.) She is not a run of the mill hawk like John McCain, she is a New
World Order marionette just as Geo W was. She needs to be dumped as she is beholden to anti-democratic values of elitism.
Bill Kristol is attacking Donald Trump because his candidate is Hillary. (See this article
in this issue.) So, it is not about Democrat vs. Republican. The new political dichotomy is Centralization (corporatism, totalitarian,
collectivism) vs. Personal Constitutional freedom. I am a lifelong Democrat and Sanders man who is "never Hillary" for good reason.
I cannot sit by idly and watch as our national Democracy continues to devolve into world fascism with the Neo-cons. Hillary is
a traitor to the Nation and to the late great Democratic Party.
It is time for the old right and old progressive left to unite for preservation of the US Constitution
and personal freedom. Never Hillary; never New World Order!"
less
tommy501
This was historical. Law enforcement does not make decisions on prosecution. That is left to prosecutors. Law enforcement
are fact finders who should have presented the case to a career professional prosecutor to make a decision.
The question is, why was well established policy and protocol violated and the case not presented to a prosecutor for a
decision? Ask any local D.A. If they reject a case, they write a "reject" documenting their rationale. In a very public or complicated
case, that reject is written in great detail regarding each and every potential charge.
Something's fishy.
andytek2
@tommy501 he didn't make a prosecutorial decision he only said that no reasonable prosecutor would file charges.
DennisWV
The Obama Administration has prosecuted more people under the same WW I espionage act than all other administrations COMBINED.
Comey has prosecuted a person under this act for a 21-word email .not 30,000 destroyed emails.
Everybody knows this was fixed. The examples of similar incidents, putting people in jail, are coming out of the shadows.
It is time to vote the career politicians out of office and take our country back.
Outside the Herd
NSA has copies of every email sent to/from US, & likely most others, for last 10+ years. So they have all 30,000+ of the
emails she deleted.
FBI & O knew months ago what was in all of them, & delayed looking away until primaries were clinched. Which was also crooked,
ask Bernie's peep's.
Andre-Leonard
"A second law makes it a crime to "remove" secret documents kept by the government or to allow them to be stolen through
"gross negligence."
Funny how they went after Edward Snowden for the very same thing. Yet no one in their 'right' mind expected a Justice Department
led by Obama to allow for Billary to be indicted. It's all about favorites here and justice is 'not' really blind.
kenwrite9
When she was in foreign countries she should have known that those countries spy on American officials. I now that, why she
did not is strange. When in the Navy I saw a LT. career destroyed for leaving a top secret safe open over night. We did not
know who maybe got in. The assumption by NCIS was that someone did enter and Top Secret information was taken. He was prosecuted
for maybe forgetting and Clinton no prosecution for being dumb?
That's a classic case of pro-Clinton propaganda. Existing cases contradict CBS attempt to brainwash
the public. Even mishandling of a single document can lead to prosecution and often were.
Notable quotes:
"... There is a lower standard that the FBI director mentioned, however, which is that of gross negligence. ..."
"... He was referring to part of the Espionage Act, section (f), says Melendres. ..."
"... Clinton repeated lied to the FBI. ..."
"... During the '08 Campaign, Obama himself stated: "She (Clinton) will say anything to get elected" ..."
"... The Washington Post even called her a liar. ..."
"... Obama's White House is "disgusted with the fact Hillary Clinton violated their rules on donations" ..."
"... the law alone is a felony to remove email from its intended domain. The clinton net worth went [up] of tens of millions of dollars while hillary was at the state dept. You're a fool to think the usa can afford this carelessness of usa intel. ..."
"... through gross negligence permits the same to be REMOVED FROM ITS PROPER PLACE OF CUSTODY or delivered to anyone in violation of his trust ..."
"... you cannot remove email from its intended domain. it is a felony to do so. ..."
"... Thousands of Americans working for the Government and Military lost their security clearances or denied clearances for less than what Mrs Bill Clinton did. ..."
"... @Infantryman1968_1 Because she's the Queen, you silly peasant. ..."
"... " He was referring to part of the Espionage Act, section (f), says Melendres. To meet that standard, according to Lenzner, prosecutors would have had to see instances of large-scale transmission of classified documents, for instance. The classified emails would have to have been delivered to improper entities like foreign government actors, members of the media, or, say, your biographer, Lenzner said, referring to the Petraeus case. "Just sending between Clinton and her staff might not meet the standard," he added." So here is section f. It says nothing about large scale. It says if data is removed from its proper place of custody OR given to an entity you are guilty. Also, it you know it is not in its proper place of custody and don't report it you are guilty. So where does this "expert's" information come from. And how does one reach the conclusion that Hillary has not violated this??? "(f) Whoever, being entrusted with or having lawful possession or control of any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, note, or information, relating to the national defense, (1) through gross negligence permits the same to be removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of his trust, or to be lost, stolen, abstracted, or destroyed, or (2) having knowledge that the same has been illegally removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of its trust, or lost, or stolen, abstracted, or destroyed, and fails to make prompt report of such loss, theft, abstraction, or destruction to his superior officer- Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both." ..."
"... Since congress is having another hearing, why not start an investigation, similar to the Brits, as to the real reasons Bush took us to war in Iraq and killed thousands of Americans and 100,000s of thousands of Iraq's? Maybe charges would result and the war criminal Bush could go to prison. ..."
"... Mrs. Bill Clinton and Joe Biden Authorized the Iraq War. Trump and Sanders did not. ..."
"... Oh wow look at CBS dug up one prosecutor to say the FBI was right. How about 100's of other prosecutors who are saying they got it wrong. where's the articles interviewing them. ..."
"... Even if she isn't indicted does anyone think any other person would still have security clearance after the extreme "Carlessness" Clinton showed with understanding and handling classified information? ..."
"... The GOP is being stupid. They could take everything that Comey said about how careless Hillary was with classified information, about how Hillary lied about the email, about how she lied about what the investigation was and play those quotes over and over to their benefit. But no. They are going to whine about not getting an indictment. ..."
"... Comey has sold the integrity, trust and honesty of the FBI. Events such as that can only be done once. Another trusted institution bites the dust in the Obama administration. ..."
"... Plain and simple, Comey totally disregarded the Gross Negligence section of the law. ..."
In Clinton's case, on the question of whether there was intentional misconduct, indications of
disloyalty to the U.S. or obstruct justice, Comey concluded, "We do not see those things here."
There is a lower standard that the FBI director mentioned, however, which is that of gross
negligence. "Our investigation looked at whether there is evidence classified information was
improperly stored or transmitted on that personal system, in violation of a federal statute making
it a felony to mishandle classified information either intentionally or in a grossly negligent way,"
Comey said Tuesday.
He was referring to part of the Espionage Act, section (f), says Melendres. To meet that
standard, according to Lenzner, prosecutors could be looking for instances of large-scale transmission
of classified documents, for instance. The classified emails might have been delivered to improper
entities like foreign government actors, members of the media, or, say, your biographer, Lenzner
said, referring to the Petraeus case. "Just sending between Clinton and her staff might not meet
the standard," he added.
Theoretically, a felony prosecution could be based on this, but it's not likely, Melendres said.
"It is exceedingly rare for the department or FBI to base a felony prosecution on that lower standard.
I have no knowledge of it being used before."
Neither Melendrez nor Lenzner seemed surprised by the brief time that elapsed between
Clinton's FBI interview Saturday and Comey's announcement Tuesday. When the interview comes at
the end of the investigation, that "formal interview is unlikely to be the thing that the case turns
on," said Lenzner. The case, he said, would have been made on objective, independent evidence like
the emails. If the FBI has gone through all of that evidence over the past year -- as Comey indicated
they had -- "the interview with her is not going to be as crucial." Typically, investigators would
be leaning in one direction or the other before that interview began, Lenzner added.
That interview with Clinton, rather, was likely the time to answer questions that had been deferred
to her by other people who were interviewed -- to confirm facts and to be comprehensive, suggested
Lenzner. If evidence had led them to believe she had committed a crime, Clinton would have been interviewed
earlier in the investigation.
2016: Obama calls Hillary "Best prepared candidate in history" This is the worst comment in
Obama's entire presidency and there have been some real doosies
Cowdogpete
Clinton repeated lied to the FBI.
During the '08 Campaign, Obama himself stated: "She (Clinton) will say anything to get
elected"
The Washington Post even called her a liar.
National Journal Senior Political Columnist and Editorial Director, , Ron Fournier on MSNBC,
reported Obama's White House is "disgusted with the fact Hillary Clinton violated their rules
on donations"
2016: Obama calls Hillary "Best prepared candidate in history"
Guess his stance hasn't changed all that much.
datay55
@bobo212 No, there wasn't intent to do wrong. What was her actual motivation for this server
decision? Unknown. But there wasn't intent to do wrong, just an intent to do stupid and careless.
Defend her all you want Bobo but Hillary is not a stellar candidate when you have to constantly
offer rationalization for her actions. Face reality. We have two lousy choices this year in November.
Cowdogpete
@datay55 @bobo212 "I didn't mean to speed officer. I really didn't know I was going 70mph in
a school zone."
Trober
@bobo212
the law alone is a felony to remove email from its intended domain. The clinton net worth
went [up] of tens of millions of dollars while hillary was at the state dept. You're a fool to
think the usa can afford this carelessness of usa intel.
djlcbs
@Lone_Star_Ranger "through gross negligence permits the same to be REMOVED FROM ITS PROPER
PLACE OF CUSTODY or delivered to anyone in violation of his trust,"
Trober
@Lone_Star_Ranger IT MOST CERTAINLY IS A CRIME. MULTIPLE CRIMES
READ THE @%(*&@(*%& law.
- you cannot remove email from its intended domain. it is a felony to do so.
- you cannot destroy the email. it is a felony to do so.
- hillary committed perjury by lying to the fbi.
- she committed another felony obstructing justice by deleting the email.
Infantryman1968_1
LOL
Thousands of Americans working for the Government and Military lost their security clearances
or denied clearances for less than what Mrs Bill Clinton did.
coachg61
@Infantryman1968_1 Because she's the Queen, you silly peasant.
djlcbs
" He was referring to part of the Espionage Act, section (f), says Melendres. To meet that
standard, according to Lenzner, prosecutors would have had to see instances of large-scale transmission
of classified documents, for instance. The classified emails would have to have been delivered
to improper entities like foreign government actors, members of the media, or, say, your biographer,
Lenzner said, referring to the Petraeus case. "Just sending between Clinton and her staff might
not meet the standard," he added."
So here is section f. It says nothing about large scale. It says if data is removed from its
proper place of custody OR given to an entity you are guilty. Also, it you know it is not in its
proper place of custody and don't report it you are guilty. So where does this "expert's" information
come from. And how does one reach the conclusion that Hillary has not violated this???
"(f)
Whoever, being entrusted with or having lawful possession or control of any document, writing,
code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model,
instrument, appliance, note, or information, relating to the national defense, (1) through gross
negligence permits the same to be removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone
in violation of his trust, or to be lost, stolen, abstracted, or destroyed, or (2) having knowledge
that the same has been illegally removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone
in violation of its trust, or lost, or stolen, abstracted, or destroyed, and fails to make prompt
report of such loss, theft, abstraction, or destruction to his superior officer-
Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both."
just my thoughts 99
Since congress is having another hearing, why not start an investigation, similar to the
Brits, as to the real reasons Bush took us to war in Iraq and killed thousands of Americans and
100,000s of thousands of Iraq's? Maybe charges would result and the war criminal Bush could go
to prison.
Infantryman1968_1
@just my thoughts 99
LOL
Mrs. Bill Clinton and Joe Biden Authorized the Iraq War. Trump and Sanders did not.
Nonsense_In_Politics
Oh wow look at CBS dug up one prosecutor to say the FBI was right. How about 100's of other
prosecutors who are saying they got it wrong. where's the articles interviewing them.
Even if she isn't indicted does anyone think any other person would still have security
clearance after the extreme "Carlessness" Clinton showed with understanding and handling classified
information?
I guess this is just another case of "Influenza". It is not about what you did, it is about
who you are and who you know.
datay55
The GOP is being stupid. They could take everything that Comey said about how careless
Hillary was with classified information, about how Hillary lied about the email, about how she
lied about what the investigation was and play those quotes over and over to their benefit. But
no. They are going to whine about not getting an indictment.
They could play Lynch coming out just days ago saying she would follow the FBI recommendations
as very suspect to being collusion that she knew the what Comey would do. They could play the
negative way Comey spoke of Clinton with the hesitation and reluctance in his voice as his being
forced to make the recommendation he made.
This could all easily play to the GOP favor. But no. They are going to go with hearings and
whining about what didn't happen happen. They are going to take their lemons and instead of getting
lemonade they're just going to get rotten lemons.
Willkx
Comey has sold the integrity, trust and honesty of the FBI. Events such as that can only
be done once. Another trusted institution bites the dust in the Obama administration.
Independent909
Comey didn't recommend indictment but he sure laid out the list of Hillary's email lies, and
reckless carelessness in her email handling.
wakeuplibs
@Independent909
Plain and simple, Comey totally disregarded the Gross Negligence section of the law.
"... Hillary Clinton checked every box required for a felony violation of Section 793(f) of the federal penal code (Title 18) ..."
"... The point of having a statute that criminalizes gross negligence is to underscore that government officials have a special obligation to safeguard national defense secrets; when they fail to carry out that obligation due to gross negligence, they are guilty of serious wrongdoing. The lack of intent to harm our country is irrelevant. People never intend the bad things that happen due to gross negligence. ..."
"... It is a common tactic of defense lawyers in criminal trials to set up a straw-man for the jury: a crime the defendant has not committed. ..."
"... Judges generally do not allow such sleight-of-hand because innocence on an uncharged crime is irrelevant to the consideration of the crimes that actually have been charged. ..."
"... Meanwhile, although there may have been profound harm to national security caused by her grossly negligent mishandling of classified information, we've decided she shouldn't be prosecuted for grossly negligent mishandling of classified information. ..."
"... To my mind, a reasonable prosecutor would ask: Why did Congress criminalize the mishandling of classified information through gross negligence? The answer, obviously, is to prevent harm to national security. So then the reasonable prosecutor asks: Was the statute clearly violated, and if yes, is it likely that Mrs. Clinton's conduct caused harm to national security? If those two questions are answered in the affirmative, I believe many, if not most, reasonable prosecutors would feel obliged to bring the case. ..."
Hillary Clinton checked every box required for a felony violation of Section 793(f) of the federal penal code (Title 18):
With lawful access to highly classified information she acted with gross negligence in removing and causing it to be removed it from
its proper place of custody, and she transmitted it and caused it to be transmitted to others not authorized to have it, in patent
violation of her trust. Director Comey even conceded that former Secretary Clinton was "extremely careless" and strongly suggested
that her recklessness very likely led to communications (her own and those she corresponded with) being intercepted by foreign intelligence
services.
In essence, in order to give Mrs. Clinton a pass, the FBI rewrote the statute, inserting an intent element that Congress did not
require. The added intent element, moreover, makes no sense: The point of having a statute that criminalizes gross negligence
is to underscore that government officials have a special obligation to safeguard national defense secrets; when they fail to carry
out that obligation due to gross negligence, they are guilty of serious wrongdoing. The lack of intent to harm our country is irrelevant.
People never intend the bad things that happen due to gross negligence.
... ... ...
It is a common tactic of defense lawyers in criminal trials to set up a straw-man for the jury: a crime the defendant has
not committed. The idea is that by knocking down a crime the prosecution does not allege and cannot prove, the defense may confuse
the jury into believing the defendant is not guilty of the crime charged.
Judges generally do not allow such sleight-of-hand because innocence on an uncharged crime is irrelevant to the consideration
of the crimes that actually have been charged. It seems to me that this is what the FBI has done today. It has told the public
that because Mrs. Clinton did not have intent to harm the United States we should not prosecute her on a felony that does not require
proof of intent to harm the United States.
Meanwhile, although there may have been profound harm to national security caused by her grossly negligent mishandling of
classified information, we've decided she shouldn't be prosecuted for grossly negligent mishandling of classified information.
I think highly of Jim Comey personally and professionally, but this makes no sense to me. Finally, I was especially unpersuaded
by Director Comey's claim that no reasonable prosecutor would bring a case based on the evidence uncovered by the FBI.
To my mind, a reasonable prosecutor would ask: Why did Congress criminalize the mishandling of classified information through
gross negligence? The answer, obviously, is to prevent harm to national security. So then the reasonable prosecutor asks: Was the
statute clearly violated, and if yes, is it likely that Mrs. Clinton's conduct caused harm to national security? If those two questions
are answered in the affirmative, I believe many, if not most, reasonable prosecutors would feel obliged to bring the case.
As a former Justice Department official, I
have, of late, been asked by both Democratic and Republican friends
whether Hillary Clinton could be indicted for her email related actions.
The simple answer is yes - she, and perhaps some of her senior staff,
could be indicted for violating a number of federal criminal statutes.
But for reasons that will be discussed later, it is unlikely that she
will be.
Nevertheless, it is well worth discussing the various criminal
provisions of federal law that she and others may have been violated
based on mainstream news reports. Remember that news reporting can be
incorrect or incomplete - and that Hillary Clinton, and anyone else
involved, deserves every presumption of innocence. Also keep in mind that
an indictment is not a conviction but rather the informed opinion of a
grand jury that probable cause exists to believe one or more violations
of federal criminal statutes have transpired.
This intellectual and legal research
exercise should commence with a brief review of the basics of criminal
jurisprudence: There are two elements of a criminal offense: the
prohibited conduct as defined in statute; and the
mens rea
or mental intent of the individual or individuals engaging in the
prohibited conduct. Thus, to gain a conviction on a criminal count in an
indictment, a prosecutor must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that: (1)
the prohibited conduct occurred, (2) the prohibited conduct was
undertaken by the defendant, and (3) the defendant had the requisite
mens rea
or intent at the time.
1.) 18 U.S. Code § 793 – Gathering, transmitting or losing defense
information
18 U.S. Code § 798 – Disclosure of classified information
A federal prosecutor would naturally
focus first on the most serious allegations: willfully transmitting or
willfully retaining Top Secret and Compartmented (TS/SCI) material using
a private server system. The individual who transmits and the individual
who receives and retains TS/SCI information on a private server jointly
share the culpability for risking the compromise and exploitation of the
information by hostile intelligence services. The prosecutor's charging
document would likely include felony counts under 18 U.S. Code § 793 and
under 18 U.S. Code § 798 against each transmitting individual as well as
separate counts against each receiving and retaining individual.
Violation of either provision of the U.S. Code cited above is a felony
with a maximum prison term of ten years.
The prohibited conduct is the insecure
transmission of highly classified information, as well as the receipt and
retention of highly classified information in an unapproved manner. The
requisite
mens rea
is the willful commission of the
prohibited conduct and the knowledge that compromised information could
result in prejudice or injury to the United States or advantage to any
foreign nation. Proof of intent to disclose the classified information is
not required.
During Clinton's news conference
last month, she was asked if she was aware of the security implications of using her own email. Clinton
answered this way:
"I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. There is no classified material.
So I'm certainly well-aware of the classification requirements and did not send classified material."
What's remarkable about that answer is that she wasn't asked in the preceding question specifically
about classified emails, but offered that answer anyway. There's a reason for that. It would be illegal
for anyone to store classified information in an unauthorized way, like, say, on an unauthorized
personal email server.
The day after Clinton's news conference, the
New York Times
reported, quoting a former State Department official, that it "seemed unlikely"
that Clinton didn't email at least
something
classified.
"A former senior State Department official who served before the Obama administration said that
although it was hard to be certain, it seemed unlikely that classified information could be kept
out of the more than 30,000 emails that Mrs. Clinton's staff identified as involving government
business.
" 'I would assume that more than 50 percent of what the secretary of state dealt with
was classified,' said the former official, who would speak only on the condition of anonymity
because he did not want to seem ungracious to Mrs. Clinton. 'Was every single email of the secretary
of state completely unclassified? Maybe, but it's hard to imagine.' "
The bottom line is this: No one will likely ever know what was deleted from Clinton's server.
Barring one of the 30,000 emails Clinton turned over to the State Department being deemed "classified,"
it's also unlikely she will ever be found to have violated the letter of the law.
"... "'By using a private email system, Secretary Clinton violated the Federal Records Act and the State Department's Foreign Affairs Manual regarding records management, and worse, could have left classified and top secret documents vulnerable to cyber attack,' Cause of Action Executive Director Dan Epstein said in an email to reporters. ..."
"... 'This is an egregious violation of the law, and if it were anyone else, they could be facing fines and criminal prosecution.'" ..."
"... "Agencies that allow employees to send and receive official electronic mail messages using a system not operated by the agency must ensure that Federal records sent or received on such systems are preserved in the appropriate agency record keeping system." ..."
"... "Federal regulations, since 2009, have required that all emails be preserved as part of an agency's record-keeping system. In Mrs. Clinton's case, her emails were kept on her personal account and her staff took no steps to have them preserved as part of State Department record. ..."
"... In response to a State Department request, Mrs. Clinton's advisers, late last year, reviewed her account and decided which emails to turn over to the State Department." ..."
"... "'At this point in time, I think we're the only ones that specifically asked for both her personal and government email and phone logs,' Arends said of his group's Benghazi-related request." ..."
"... "'Hillary Clinton's system was designed to defy Freedom of Information Act requests, which is designed to defy the law.'" ..."
"'By using a private email system, Secretary Clinton violated the Federal
Records Act and the State Department's Foreign Affairs Manual regarding records management,
and worse, could have left classified and top secret documents vulnerable to cyber
attack,' Cause of Action Executive Director Dan Epstein said in an email to reporters.
'This is an egregious violation of the law, and if it were anyone else, they
could be facing fines and criminal prosecution.'"
Harper goes on to point out that multiple violations of this law have been enforced recently,
including in 1999, when former CIA Director John M. Deutch's security clearance was suspended for
using his personal email to send classified information.
Additionally, this past week, Gen. David Patraeus
pleaded guilty for mishandling classified information by using a Gmail account instead of his
official government email.
Violation of The 2009 Federal Records Act
Section 1236.22 of the 2009 National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) requirements
states that:
"Agencies that allow employees to send and receive official electronic mail
messages using a system not operated by the agency must ensure that Federal records sent or
received on such systems are preserved in the appropriate agency record keeping system."
According to the original story on Clinton's emails
published in The New York Times:
"Federal regulations, since 2009, have required that all emails be preserved as
part of an agency's record-keeping system. In Mrs. Clinton's case, her emails were kept on her
personal account and her staff took no steps to have them preserved as part of State
Department record.
In response to a State Department request, Mrs. Clinton's advisers, late last
year, reviewed her account and decided which emails to turn over to the State Department."
The fact that the State Department combs through the
55,000 pages of emails sent on Clinton's private email account seems to verify that at least
some of the emails Clinton sent contained classified information.
Violation of the Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA)
Veterans for a Strong America has filed a lawsuit against the State Department over potential
violations of FOIA. Joel Arends, chairman of the non-profit group, explained to the
Washington Examiner that their FOIA request over the Benghazi affair specifically asked for
any personal email accounts Secretary Clinton may have used:
"'At this point in time, I think we're the only ones that specifically asked
for both her personal and government email and phone logs,' Arends said of his group's
Benghazi-related request."
MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell believes that the use of a personal emails server appears to be a
preemptive move, specifically designed to circumvent FOIA:
"'Hillary Clinton's system was designed to defy Freedom of Information Act
requests, which is designed to defy the law.'"
These are just three of the
potential violations that Clinton may have committed by using a personal email account to
conduct official State business. More information will be provided as this story continues to
develop.
On Tuesday, multiple Republicans said they expected to hear from Comey, as
Independent Journal Review
reported. That was followed Tuesday evening by
House Speaker Paul Ryan,
who told Megyn Kelly
he would be calling Comey to the Hill to explain his
decision:
"Comey should give us all the publicly available information to see how and
why they reached these conclusions … Jason Chaffetz, Chairman of the Oversight
Committee, is going to be calling up James Comey to ask questions. He didn't
answer any questions with the press. And our judiciary committee has sent a
number of questions. There are a lot of unanswered questions here, Megyn."
Now, we've got a concrete development. Just a day after the FBI announced its
decision on Hillary's emails, the House Oversight Committee will be holding a
hearing where Comey will testify on his decision.
That's right. Comey will be on Capitol Hill on Thursday, just two days after
his statement.
In a statement from the House Oversight Committee, Rep. Jason
Chaffetz (R-UT) said:
"The FBI's recommendation is surprising and confusing. The fact pattern
presented by Director Comey makes clear Secretary Clinton violated the law.
Individuals who intentionally skirt the law must be held accountable. Congress
and the American people have a right to understand the depth and breadth of the
FBI's investigation."
Republicans will have plenty of "questions" for Comey, as Chaffetz has said in
the past. Now that Comey has nailed down numerous Clinton lies on the emails, it
will be very intriguing to see how he'll explain his decision not to indict.
We'll find out on Thursday.
Sigmund Kramer · On-Air Personality at Salem Media Group
This will serve no real purpose, not even much of a political one. But Comey needs to be put
in the hot seat over his dereliction of duty. It's all a game, though. And that's the worst part
of all of this corrupted mess.
"... But a numeric analysis of the emails that have been made public, focusing on conspicuous lapses
in email activity, raises troubling concerns that Clinton or her team might have deleted a number of
work-related emails. ..."
But, when it comes to Clinton's correspondence, the most basic and troubling questions still remain
unanswered: Why are there gaps in Clinton's email history? Did she or her team delete emails that
she should have made public?
Story Continued Below
The State Department has released what is said to represent all of the work-related, or "official,"
emails Clinton sent during her tenure as secretary-a number totaling about 30,000. According to Clinton
and her campaign, when they were choosing what correspondence to turn over to State for public release,
they deleted 31,830 other emails
deemed "personal and private."But a numeric analysis of the emails that have been
made public, focusing on conspicuous lapses in email activity, raises troubling concerns that Clinton
or her team might have deleted a number of work-related emails.
We already know that the trove of Clinton's work-related emails is incomplete. In his comments
on Tuesday, Comey
declared, "The FBI … discovered several thousand work-related e-mails that were not in the group
of 30,000 that were returned by Secretary Clinton to State in 2014." We also already know that some
of those work-related emails could be permanently deleted. Indeed, according to Comey, "It is also
likely that there are other work-related e-mails that [Clinton and her team] did not produce to State
and that we did not find elsewhere, and that are now gone because they deleted all emails they did
not return to State, and the lawyers cleaned their devices in such a way as to preclude complete
forensic recovery."
Why does this matter? Because Clinton
signed documents declaring she had turned over all of her work-related emails. We now know that
is not true. But even more importantly, the absence of emails raises troubling questions about the
nature of the correspondence that might have been deleted.
Peter Schweizer is president of the Government Accountability Institute, senior editor at large
at Breitbart News and the author of
Clinton Cash.
WikiLeaks
Published Over 1,200 of Hillary Clinton's Iraq War Emails | 05 July 2016 | On Monday,
whistleblowing website WikiLeaks tweeted a link to 1,258 emails that it claims were sent and received
by the former Secretary of State pertaining to the war in Iraq. The emails were part of a trove of
30,322 emails made available by the U.S. State Department as a result of a Freedom of Information
Act request, according to WikiLeaks.
While the emails were available since February of this year, the tweet was timed to Wednesday's release
of the so-called
Chilcot report,
which will outline the U.K.'s involvement in the Iraq war.
"... Given her "extremely careless" handling of classified material, how can she be given the required
security clearance that the President of the United States must bear? ..."
Was Clinton properly trained by WH IT advisers and the FBI?
I worked as a contractor employee for DoD for 43 years until retirement end of 2007.
I recall that my company had specific requirements from DoD Security with respect to the technical
considerations required to be implemented to protect classified information (physical building
'shielding', computer devices and use thereof having to be closed systems within the secure domain
used for the classified program, etc).
Both the FBI and DoD personnel performed the clearance investigations required for all employees.
So the FBI was very much aware of the risks associated with communications devices.
But since task performance did require some communication beyond the firewall, the primary
line of defense was simply to prohibit verbal and written communication of classified aspects
of the project. And any classified information 'captured' on hard copy or electronically had to
be managed on a 'need to know', ...even if the audience had a clearance compatible with or exceeding
the declared classified level of the information annotated with security labeling appropriate
to hard copy and electronic 'copy'.
In other words if information which you had access was classified, the DD-254 Security document
peculiar to the project clarified made it very clear which information was classified and to what
security level (Confidential, Secret, Top Secret, etc).
The FBI was responsible for making sure personnel (including management and company executives)
were cognizant with respect to all aspects of classified information and material handling, ..and
.even thought despite appropriate levels of clearance, ...some project personnel might not have
access because they did not have a need to know with respect to their tasks on the program.
My point is that the FBI along with DoD security had a responsibility to prevent inappropriate
handling of classified information, ...and after making it clear what was expected, ...to then
address abuses which were contrary to FBI and DoD requirements which had been clearly communicated
as part of the clearance process.
So how is it that the FBI did not tell State what the rules were? If State makes up the rules
for security on the fly, ...then why is the FBI asked to enforce rules which they did not establish
with respect to the operation?
Are we saying the FBI is not enforcing a lack of rules which they failed to implement with
State employees?
I am just saying that this whole "email' issure seems incredibly disjointed with respect to
common sense security protocol required by DoD, ....so I would expect the FBI should be establishing
security procotol for State in a manner just like, ...or at least similar too, ...the requirements
for process required for Defense Department contractors?
I cannot believe that security protocol considerations of 50 years ago would not be engaged
today? The FBI knew how to protect information, so why did they not do it, ...and now be passing
judgement on the character of a political candidate even though the FBI cannot show any wrongdoing????
Looks like a political hack job instead of an FBI investigation.
Larry
And no mention of the biggest crime she committed: the cover up and deletion of evidence when
she deleted select emails that she knew could be used as criminal evidence against her. She did
that KNOWINGLY AND WILLFULLY WITH CRIMINAL INTENT. She's a damn lawyer she fully knew the consequences
of her actions.
Why have we sunk to such lows as a free society to allow something like this to happen without
public protest? Why is Hillary Clinton even being considered as a possible candidate for president?
Have we lost all our personal pride as a free and just society?
Larry
"Intent" is the word as to why she got off. The report clearly shows that she lied to the public,
and must of given a very different story to the FBI, State Department, and Justice Department,
or she would have been prosecuted for lying to investigators. This means she and her campaign
knew they were purposely lying to us. It is also clear she did not follow the freedom of information
act. I never thought they would be able to show intent, but the way she handled classified material
should have already been investigated by the DIS (Defense Investigative Service), and most likely
would take away her security clearance. How can you be president without a clearance?
Kitt
The Bilderberg-CFR-controlled press are relentless. There is an adage that comes to mind that
befits what they're trying to do. "Don't pee on my leg and then tell me it's raining."
;..
Not since the complicity of the FBI and the Justice Department in the Kennedy Assassination and
the 9/11 False Flag Ruse have they been so complicit in being dutiful servants to the Bilderberg
Round Table Usury-Oil-War Enslaver Hierarchy.
With a billion people around the world scratching their heads, wondering how such a miscarriage
of justice could happen - we all wonder how Comey, Lynch and Obama can live with themselves. Shrillary
and Bill (the Anti-Christ couple) have no problems living with their evil selves. But, Comey,
Lynch and Obama - even though you're all members of the Council on Foreign Relations (one the
evil subgroups of the Bilderberg Round Table), we had some hope that you would be honest brokers
and help Americans come to the conclusion that no one is above the law. We have certainly learned
on July 5, 2016, that's nowhere close to being true.
Non-Politicus
The most corrupt person ever to run for president and she is about to be our commander in chief.
For the record, during my military career I placed on report several service members for security
violations [they lost their security clearances and were FIRED] which were insignificant when
compared to what this candidate did. American voters do have a very serious decision to make before
the general election: elect the crooked one, elect the trash talking one, or elect the boring
one.
Michael
Hillary used a personal email server for 100% of her government work for one reason and one
reason only: Secrecy. Se knew exactly what she was doing. She didn't need any government watchdog
groups drawing conclusions between her position as Sec. of State & the Clinton Foundation & Bill's
speaking gigs.
Bill
Interesting, I work for a government agency where people have been charged, convicted and sent
to prison for far less.
Bart
"no reasonable prosecutor" would file criminal charges against Hillary Clinton for using a
private email system as secretary of state.
Say what? FOR USING A PRIVATE EMAIL SERVER? Is that all she did? Who writes this idiocy?
opiegreensboro
One issue not being discussed is that she fired an ambassador for doing the same thing she
did, on a much smaller scale. If it was important enough to fire that person, why isn't she being
held accountable? Oh, because the current Attorney General was co-opted in a clear conflict of
interest meeting which is also not being reported. Must be great to be a Clinton. Laws matter
people.
Tom
Ok, maybe if I squint just right and make a generous interpretation of laws regarding intent
versus gross negligence, I could see some argument for this recommendation by the FBI...but let's
not pretend avoiding prison time is compelling evidence that she should be promoted to leader
of the free world.
John
The FBI director should have referred this matter to a grand jury. This was he job. His job
was NOT to unilaterally decide whether ''a reasonable prosecutor'' would file criminal charges.
This is just another example of the total corruptness of Washington, D.C. Hillary Clinton is only
qualified to clean latrines since she and ''Bubba Bill'' crawled out of one! They are both POS.
Blair
Intent. Well a good percentage of prisoners in jails across the country can be let out now
and the legal system completely revamped as the FBI has established new Harvard Law policies.
All hit and runs, manslaughter, and anyone that can lie should be freed. Clinton and their arrogance
put my military brothers and our country in peril. Screw her send her packing.
Try A Hammer
Given her "extremely careless" handling of classified material, how can she be given the
required security clearance that the President of the United States must bear? Will she be
careless with nuclear launch codes as well, effectively fumbling the "Nuclear football" in her
"extremely careless" hands? This alone disqualifies her for the presidency.
alex
The guy spent 15 minutes outlining, point after point, Clinton's level of incompetence and
dishonesty. The, when it was time for action, he rolled over and played dead like every other
government hack.
Coward.
"... it could hardly have gone any worse for Hillary. Many people proclaimed that she was the safe
pair of hands but she's now been stamped with "extremely careless" with regards to national security.
..."
"... If the FBI (at the time) did not know that Hillary Clinton was using a personal email address
and a private server during her tenure as Secretary of State, then I have lost all confidence in our
nation's security apparatus. ..."
"... I think it was good for the FBI to let Hillary Clinton off even though she violated the law
(no intent is no excuse). It actually takes the curtain down and the voters realize the special DC people
have different rules than the common people! ..."
"... Nope. Dems did this. None of this stuff today is new info, Dems nominated and voted for her
despite this investigation. Plus it was Clinton's fault, no one forced her to have a private email server
or an unsecured phone. I don't often agree with Trump, but this is one thing he's right about, and it's
all on the Dems this time. ..."
"... Didn't the FBI director say most people would face consequences for this kind of thing? Then
let's Hillary off the hook.... Rather careless of him. ..."
"... Seems about right. The Wall St bankers, credit ratings agencies, and government regulators
didn't intentionally destroy the world economy. They were simply "extremely careless", too. ..."
"... Hillary's arrogance, not "Republican operatives," put her in this hole. The question is why
she ignored her own agency's regulations, and for so long. ..."
"... No one really believes that Hilary thinks any of the rules apply to her, so this is all about
nothing. She was able to dispose of about half of her e-mails before there destruction could be the
subject of obstruction of justice charges, so she skates there too. ..."
"... Christopher Hitchen's wrote a great deal on the Clinton's when they were last in the White
House. He was scathing about them and their corrupt dealings. Christopher Hitchens' Case Against Ever
Voting For Hillary Clinton https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyDQxfDeWRc ..."
"... I've never seen the DNC struggle so hard to support a disaster. Shady smoke around donations
to the Clinton Foundation and arms deals certainly haven't made her any more trustworthy to many Americans.
She not a disaster waiting to happen...she's a disaster happening. ..."
"... If the FBI were to charge Clinton for using her private e-mail for government work they the
FBI would have to charge Bush and several hundred of his employee's. Not only did they use a private
e-mail server but it was run by the National Republican Committee. They not only used it but they illegally
deleted at least 5 million government E-mails that by law had to be saved. Bush and Cheney and the Republican
Nation Committee did this to cover up multiple crimes related to hundreds of Billions of American Taxpayer
dollars as well as activities into 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq. ..."
"... She DELIBERATELY set up the home server to try and keep her emails out of the reach of Freedom
of Information Act requests. ... Calculated felony. ..."
"... That is absolutely ****ing outrageous, as is the fact Hillary has apparently promised Lynch
she'll be re-appointed AG in the event she is elected come November. ..."
"... The reason why Clinton is viewed as liar is not because she is a woman, or because of partisan
smears or because of the fact that she has had a long political career. The reason she is viewed as
a liar is because she is one. ..."
"......but Clinton's enemies will say yes. And that means the political witch hunts will begin
anew......".
This is no witch hunt. Aside from the fact that she wasn't indicted, it could hardly have
gone any worse for Hillary. Many people proclaimed that she was the safe pair of hands but she's
now been stamped with "extremely careless" with regards to national security. She's also,
yet again, been confirmed as a shameless liar. Her proclamation - in that tired, "bored teenager"
voice that she affects when she's boxed in to a corner - at that event: "I never sent any classified
information.....I never received any classified information" has been proven as a lie. The standard
that she was held to was that intent meant that she was a spy. The standard of intent that you
or I would have been held to would have been a heck of a lot lower.
Also, the law says that 'gross negligence' is enough to either fine someone or put them in
jail for not more than ten years or both: how is Hillary's 'extreme carelessness' is any way different
from 'gross negligence'? Everything that people suspected of Hillary Clinton has been borne out,
if not more (yesterday was the first I'd heard of *multiple* servers: how is that not intent to
circumvent the Freedom of Information Act?) but - yay! - the bar for presidential candidates is
now so staggeringly low that champagne corks are being popped because she avoided jail.
*Clap..........clap.............clap...........clap...........clap.........clap.......*
Raskente
If the FBI (at the time) did not know that Hillary Clinton was using a personal email address
and a private server during her tenure as Secretary of State, then I have lost all confidence
in our nation's security apparatus.
Iron Mike
I think it was good for the FBI to let Hillary Clinton off even though she violated the
law (no intent is no excuse). It actually takes the curtain down and the voters realize the special
DC people have different rules than the common people!
There is no telling what Bill told Loretta but it worked. I know they didn't discuss grand
kids for 30 minutes.
HungerArtist
In that way, Republican operatives have already accomplished their mission
Nope. Dems did this. None of this stuff today is new info, Dems nominated and voted for
her despite this investigation. Plus it was Clinton's fault, no one forced her to have a private
email server or an unsecured phone. I don't often agree with Trump, but this is one thing he's
right about, and it's all on the Dems this time.
erik_ny
Didn't the FBI director say most people would face consequences for this kind of thing?
Then let's Hillary off the hook.... Rather careless of him.
ga gamba
Seems about right. The Wall St bankers, credit ratings agencies, and government regulators
didn't intentionally destroy the world economy. They were simply "extremely careless", too.
One can be graduated from one of the world's finest law schools and still plausibly state that
she didn't intend to break the law. Seems law school trains people how to treat the law cavalierly.
Sure, she was informed she was flouting the rules, and she disregarded this each time, but this
is meaningless because the FBI is unable to read her mind. Ignore the actions because they suggest
nothing of a person's intent.
That's the privilege of power. You're never accountable.
Tom Cuddy
Once again with feeling. We know Sec Clinton won her delegates. She has achieved the numerical
feat of having enough delegates to be our nominee. And I see the tree coming closer and the brakes
are not working. This is why Sander's is not enthusiastically joining the Clinton effort as yet.
The party can stop from making a terrible mistake. I like Sec Clinton and believe she would make
a good Prime Minister. She is also exactly the kind of politician Trump eats for breakfast. We
are not unrealistic, we are not anti woman and we are not "Bros'. We just see Sanders as giving
Trump a serious campaign and Hillary just being , not quite.... The question; do Americans fear
Clinton or Trump more. The great unpopulated states ( y'know, the Red one's) are terrified of
Clinton. DEmocrats ( and a few Republicans) are terrified of trump. This truly shows Plato's point
about Democracy
Shotcricket -> Tom Cuddy
Sanders is what the US need but are told they don't, not unlike the UK in its portrayal of
Parties & their leaders etc.
Robert Rudolph
Hillary's arrogance, not "Republican operatives," put her in this hole. The question is
why she ignored her own agency's regulations, and for so long.
Did Hillary want to evade normal channels because she was using her official position to lever
money out of people? Follow the money, people....
Dee Smith
I wish to humbly apologize in advance to the other nations that inhabit this earth on what
the US is about to unleash on our collective space. Mrs. Clinton has demonstrated she is a money
and power grasping disingenuous liar, complicit in the murder of US citizens, and not bearing
the sense that the good Lord gave a woodchuck in handling information that ought to be more protected
than storing it on an unsecured server in a basement. Conversely, we have Mr. Trump, whom, while
opening up a very necessary dialog for myself and my American brethren, demonstrates all the sensitivity
of rampaging water buffalo at a wallow.
Dear God, help us.
SteveofCaley -> Dee Smith
Don't fret. They already suspected, I think. Another day, another drone.
devanand54
The FBI did a lot more than rebuke her for being "extremely careless." It was a scathing report,
the conclusion of which was not consistent with what was actually in the report. It also proved
Clinton to - once again - be lying.
Dale Roberts
No one really believes that Hilary thinks any of the rules apply to her, so this is all
about nothing. She was able to dispose of about half of her e-mails before there destruction could
be the subject of obstruction of justice charges, so she skates there too. I recall a couple
of military officers who were brought up on charges for failing to lock their safe containing
classified material in a secure building. The nightly security sweep found the safe closed but
combination lock had not been engaged. Eventually no one was prosecuted but the matter was handled
administratively so neither was likely to ever see another promotion. Being a politician may save
Hilary from this fate too.
DebraBrown
Oh, enough of the balony that we don't trust Hillary because of her gender. We don't trust
her because she LIES, again and again, demonstrably and proveably, beyond any shadow of doubt.
Both the IG Report and Comey confirm her lies about the email server.
Comey's decision is purely practical, given America's two-tiered justice system. The wealthy
class are virtually un-indictable, they can get away with any crime because they hire armies of
lawyers. It is sickening.
After being a loyal party member for 35 years, I am leaving the Democratic Party because Hillary
Clinton is a bridge too far. God save America... from the Clintons.
eminijunkie
Odd. No mention of the fact that like Bill, who got nailed for lying under oath, albeit he
only lost his lawyer's license and gained some fame for having said 'it all depends on the meaning
of the word is,' Hillary is now shown beyond a shadow of a doubt to have committed perjury. As
far as I know though, that's only something Congress can deal with at this point.
We should hear soon if they are going to do anything about it.
Balmaclellan
The case ultimately comes down to a matter of intent, something famously difficult to
prove. Did Clinton intentionally send out or receive any sensitive information?
The Guardian seriously expects people to pay for this 'jourrnalism'? Seriously?
Clinton was the Secretary of State. How could she fail to "intentionally send out or receive sensitive
information"? What the case actually comes down to is whether she intentionally placed the sensitive
information she was sending out and receiving on a private server in order to conceal it from
scrutiny and specifically to evade the provisions of Freedom of Information.
And no, I won't be subscribing.
Balmaclellan
Some of it may be attributable to poor optics... attributable to gender... partisan-fueled
attacks...
Alternatively, it could simply be that she's a pathological liar. You know, the sort of person
who tells stupid, pointless lies for the purpose of self-aggrandisement, and then bone-headedly
continues to insist that they're true even when they've been incontrovertibly proven to be lies.
"Yah, the plane zig-zagged as it landed under sniper fire... I ran across the tarmac dodging
bullets..."
BigPhil1959 -> Balmaclellan
Her husband was accused of rape and had sexual relations with an intern. She trashed the reputations
of these women to protect her husband. I doubt neither May nor Leadsom have ever played the woman's
card as Hilary Clinton has. The Clinton's are awful people and should be banned from public office.
badfinger
Flox Newts asks the tough questions:
1. What is the Statute of Limitations?
2. What about the Clinton Foundation?
Watch for a bogus "investigation" of the Foundation soon.
Brought to you by the GOP at taxpayers expense.
Filipe Barroso -> badfinger
A bogus investigation on a Foundation that would make the Mafia embarrassed? No way, they are
too compromised for that and the Clinton's would be able to bought their way off anyway.
BigPhil1959 -> badfinger
Christopher Hitchen's wrote a great deal on the Clinton's when they were last in the White
House. He was scathing about them and their corrupt dealings.
Christopher Hitchens' Case Against Ever Voting For Hillary Clinton
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyDQxfDeWRc
Sadly no longer with us, but a proper journalist.
Alpheus Williams
"Careless" with classified material...certainly careless with the facts...careless with promoting
the bombing of M.E. countries. Her record on Iraq, Syria and Libya don't instil confidence....Europe
is overwhelmed with refugees from war and chaos from our making and Clinton's judgement certainly
hasn't helped. She has not only managed to spot the Nation but there own political party.
I've never seen the DNC struggle so hard to support a disaster. Shady smoke around donations to
the Clinton Foundation and arms deals certainly haven't made her any more trustworthy to many
Americans. She not a disaster waiting to happen...she's a disaster happening.
WMDMIA
If the FBI were to charge Clinton for using her private e-mail for government work they
the FBI would have to charge Bush and several hundred of his employee's. Not only did they use
a private e-mail server but it was run by the National Republican Committee. They not only used
it but they illegally deleted at least 5 million government E-mails that by law had to be saved.
Bush and Cheney and the Republican Nation Committee did this to cover up multiple crimes related
to hundreds of Billions of American Taxpayer dollars as well as activities into 9/11 and the invasion
of Iraq.
Beside these government protected account are hacked far more often than private servers, so
the information she passed on was safer where she had it.
simonsaysletsgroove -> jsayles
From what I read elsewhere, it wasn't an 'accidentally leaving files on a bus' scenario...
She DELIBERATELY set up the home server to try and keep her emails out of the reach of Freedom
of Information Act requests. ... Calculated felony.
kaltnadel
If Hillary had any integrity, she would step down in the face of being deemed "extremely careless"
by the director of the FBI. Clearly she is unsuitable for a position of responsibility.
Being better than Trump is not good enough.
"Witch hunt" is a totally inappropriate phrase. HC has been close to felons over and over again
for decades. She lies as she breathes; she speaks in vapidities; she laughs without a glimmer
of what good humor is. She is not only bad, she is dangerous. If she has avoided out and out criminality
herself, she has her Yale law degree to thank for that, not her moral compass. And she has not
a grain of political ambition that isn't personal to herself.
Someone should help her to realize that she ought to step down, and it clearly isn't going
to be Obama.
Metreemewall
Never mind her husband, her carelessness, her snipe's fire dodging skills, her gender.
She's a warmonger - "We came , we saw, he died"a - was her giggling reaction to the news of
Gaddaff being sodomised and murdered. And she is an AIPAC tool. And she's partly responsible for
the immoral profitable prisons' scheme. And she does not believe in universal healthcare. And
she's putting her "Glass-Steagall" poster child of a husband in charge of the economy.
And the list goes on, and on, and on...
elliot2511
"Bill Clinton bumbled his way into the eye of a political storm last week when a private meeting
he arranged with Lynch"
That is absolutely ****ing outrageous, as is the fact Hillary has apparently promised Lynch
she'll be re-appointed AG in the event she is elected come November.
If this sort of thing had occurred in, say, Bolivia or Kazakhstan, everyone would know what
was going on and be able able to see this behaviour for what it is. The contemptible idiocy and
demagoguery of Trump doesn't change that.
keeptakingthetablets
The reason why Clinton is viewed as liar is not because she is a woman, or because of partisan
smears or because of the fact that she has had a long political career. The reason she is viewed
as a liar is because she is one.
Just to take this particular issue as an example, she lied when she said she would fully cooperate
"anytime, anywhere' with the respective inquiries and she lied when she said she had permission
to use a private email server.
Slammy01
I don't see the matter of intent as a particularly relevant factor here. She has an obligation
to protect classified information as part of being granted access. James Comey said she and her
aids were "extremely careless" with how they handled information which any reasonable person in
that situation would recognize was classified. Any other person would already have been indited....
calderonparalapaz
compared the case to that of retired general David Petraeus, former director of the CIA, who
was sentenced to twoyears' probation after he shared classified information with his biographer,
with whom he was having an affair. . "The system is rigged. General Petraeus got in trouble for
far less. Very very unfair! As usual, bad judgment."
"... "Only a very small number of the emails here containing classified information bore markings that indicated the presence of classified information," Comey explained. "But even if information is not marked classified in an email, participants who know, or should know, that the subject matter is classified are still obligated to protect it." ..."
"... Comey explained that in the course of its investigation, the FBI was able to recover "several thousand" work-related emails that were not among the 30,000 that Clinton and her staff produced to the State department in 2014, three of which contained information that was classified at the time they were sent. Comey said it is "highly likely" that additional work-related emails were deleted by Clinton's lawyers but not subsequently recovered by the FBI. ..."
"... "In my opinion there is a 100% chance that all emails sent and received by her, including all the electronic correspondence stored on her server in her Chappaqua residence, were targeted and collected by the Russian equivalent of NSA," a former CIA case officer told the Associated Press last summer. ..."
"... The FBI found that Clinton's use of a private domain was widely known and that hackers had accessed the private email accounts of people with whom Clinton regularly communicated using her private email account. ..."
"... "She also used her personal e-mail extensively while outside of the United States, including sending and receiving work-related emails in the territory of sophisticated adversaries," Comey said. "Given that combination of factors, we assess it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton's personal email account." ..."
Comey's statement contradicted Clinton's claim in no uncertain terms: "From the group of
30,000 emails returned to the State Department in 2014, 110 emails in 52 email chains have been
determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or
received. Eight of those chains contained information that was 'top secret' at the time they were
sent. Thirty-six of those chains contained 'secret' information at the time, and eight contained
'confidential' information at the time."
Note that Clinton's statement refers to information "marked" classified, while Comey's does
not. As
Politifact pointed out recently, Clinton's phrasing was revealing because, under scrutiny, it
left open the possibility that Clinton's emails might have included information that was
classified but inappropriately left unmarked. This appears to have been the case with the
majority of the 110 classified emails Comey referenced.
"Only a very small number of the emails here containing classified
information bore markings that indicated the presence of classified information," Comey
explained. "But even if information is not marked classified in an email, participants who know,
or should know, that the subject matter is classified are still obligated to protect it."
Comey did not elaborate on the "very small number" of Clinton's emails that bore classified
markings (as opposed to emails that contained classified information not marked as such), but his
statement indicates that at least some of the emails on Clinton's private server contained
information marked classified at the time they were sent or received. If this is the case, it
renders Clinton's claim false even by a legalistic standard.
2. The FBI isn't really sure how much Clinton didn't hand over from her
private server
Before Clinton handed over 30,000 work-related emails from her private server to the State
Department in 2014, her lawyers deleted roughly 30,000 other emails containing
information they deemed personal in nature. After this process was complete, Comey explained,
Clinton's lawyers "then cleaned their devices in such a way as to preclude complete forensic
recovery."
"I have provided all of my work-related emails,"
Clinton told ABC News in May. The FBI's investigation revealed that, knowingly or not, a
significant number of Clinton's work-related emails were not actually handed over by her staff.
Comey explained that in the course of its investigation, the FBI was able to recover
"several thousand" work-related emails that were not among the 30,000 that Clinton and her staff
produced to the State department in 2014, three of which contained information that was
classified at the time they were sent. Comey said it is "highly likely" that additional
work-related emails were deleted by Clinton's lawyers but not subsequently recovered by the FBI.
Though Comey said that the FBI has "no evidence that any of the additional work-related emails
were intentionally deleted in an effort to conceal them in some way," his remarks revealed that
the FBI's investigation lacked "complete visibility" because it relied so heavily on the sorting
process employed by Clinton's lawyers. That is to say, the FBI acknowledges the existence of what
Donald Rumsfeld might refer to as "known
unknowns" in its investigation.
3. The FBI doesn't know if Clinton's personal server was hacked
Critics have long claimed that the Clinton's use of a private email server unprotected
by government security standards put classified information at risk of being accessed by foreign
states or actors.
"In my opinion there is a 100% chance that all emails sent and received by her, including
all the electronic correspondence stored on her server in her Chappaqua residence, were targeted
and collected by the Russian equivalent of NSA," a former CIA case officer told the
Associated Press last summer.
Comey said that while the FBI "did not find direct evidence" that hostile actors had
successfully hacked Clinton's email, the bureau would be unlikely to find such evidence even if a
breach had occurred.
The FBI found that Clinton's use of a private domain was widely known and that hackers had
accessed the private email accounts of people with whom Clinton regularly communicated using her
private email account.
"She also used her personal e-mail extensively while outside of the United States,
including sending and receiving work-related emails in the territory
of sophisticated adversaries," Comey said. "Given that combination of factors, we assess it is
possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton's personal email account."
"... "For Jim Comey to come out and make that kind of public statement about someone whom the government is not going to charge is completely inappropriate and arguably violates DOJ and FBI rules." ..."
"... "I think that type of statement is why the FBI director is not supposed to hold press conferences like the one he held today. If you're not going to bring charges you shouldn't insert yourself in the middle of a political campaign the way he did," ..."
"... "If there is to be a judgment that her behavior was careless or inappropriate, that's a judgment for the State Department and Inspector General to make. The FBI's job is to determine whether laws were violated and charges can be brought in court. His determination was that there were no laws violated and he wouldn't recommend charges." ..."
"... "Beyond that, it's really inappropriate for him to be talking about this case any further." ..."
"... "And I can't remember a time in history when the FBI director or when an Attorney General has reviewed a case, decided that the evidence does not support bringing charges, and still make really reckless statements about an underlying individual's behavior. It's really just not appropriate unless he's ready to back them up in court which obviously as he said today he doesn't believe is appropriate." ..."
Mrs. Greenspan began by asking Matt Miller,
ex-spokesman for the Department of Justice how he
could "justify the fact that she was this careless
with her emails?"
Oh, the vapors. You could almost
see them on the screen.
Miller shot back, "For Jim Comey to come out
and make that kind of public statement about someone
whom the government is not going to charge is
completely inappropriate and arguably violates DOJ
and FBI rules."
Mrs. Greenspan was having none of it, so she
dragged out
Paul Ryan's statement where he did everything
but call Clinton Satan.
Miller had a comeback for that, too, and it was
not kind to Director Comey.
"I think that type of statement is why the
FBI director is not supposed to hold press
conferences like the one he held today. If you're
not going to bring charges you shouldn't insert
yourself in the middle of a political campaign the
way he did," Miller asserted.
He went on to repeat, "If there is to be a
judgment that her behavior was careless or
inappropriate, that's a judgment for the State
Department and Inspector General to make. The FBI's
job is to determine whether laws were violated and
charges can be brought in court. His determination
was that there were no laws violated and he wouldn't
recommend charges."
"Beyond that, it's really inappropriate for
him to be talking about this case any further."
... ... ...
He continued, "And I can't remember a time in history when the FBI director or
when an Attorney General has reviewed a case, decided that the evidence does not support bringing
charges, and still make really reckless statements about an underlying individual's behavior.
It's really just not appropriate unless he's ready to back them up in court which obviously as he
said today he doesn't believe is appropriate."
"... We have all been riveted by news Tuesday that FBI Director James Comey concluded that although then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had mishandled more than 100 classified documents, had destroyed evidence, and had acted in an "extremely careless" way at the helm of the US Department of State, he could not recommend that any charges be filed against her. ..."
"... But let's not just pick on Hillary. What about then-SACEUR (NATO's Supreme Allied Commander, Europe), USAF General Philip Breedlove, whose hacked e-mails reveal that he considered civilian control of the military an inconvenient joke? Breedlove, while in uniform, actively conspired with other former military officers and with think tanks and PR firms to undermine President Obama's cautious policy toward the 2014 conflict in Ukraine. He presented false information to suggest that Russia had invaded Ukraine and he misrepresented the Ukraine situation to Congress -- at the same time he was working behind the scenes to fully arm Ukrainian extremists who wanted war with Russia. NATO claims its role is to keep us safe -- but we learn from Breedlove's secret, Strangelovian maneuvers, that those in charge will do anything to make us believe they are still relevant, including provoke a nuclear war. Move over, Hillary. Breedlove deserves a turn on the dock. ..."
"... Congress refusing to act on eight solid years of President Obama's illegal wars is every bit as destructive to the rule of law as Hillary Clinton's email homebrew. ..."
"... That is why we are taking our case to Washington this September, to make a pitch for a new foreign policy that resists to the face the deep state's secret manipulations, the Clintons' maneuverings, and Congress's dereliction of duty. ..."
We have all been riveted by news Tuesday that FBI Director James Comey concluded that
although then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had mishandled more than 100 classified
documents, had destroyed evidence, and had acted in an "extremely careless" way at the helm of
the US Department of State, he could not recommend that any charges be filed against her.
Former State Department official and good friend of the Ron Paul Institute, Peter Van Buren,
reminded us of the grotesque double standards that on the one hand govern whistleblowers like
Chelsea Manning and Ed Snowden, and on the other hand excuse the behavior of the privileged elite
like Hillary Clinton. Van Buren tweeted this quote from Comey's statement today: "This is not to
suggest that in similar circumstances a person who engaged in this activity would face no
consequences." Pretty clearly, then, there are one set of rules for the Hillary Clintons of the
world and a very different set of rules for the Snowdens or the John Kiriakous of the world. And
most of the rest of us are in the second category. Van Buren used sarcasm to point out that in
the old days when he (and I) signed a non-disclosure agreement with the US government it was
expected that violation of that agreement would be evenly applied regardless of one's placement
on the food-chain.
Alas this is not the case.
But let's not just pick on Hillary. What about then-SACEUR (NATO's Supreme Allied Commander,
Europe), USAF General Philip Breedlove, whose hacked e-mails reveal that he considered civilian
control of the military an inconvenient joke? Breedlove, while in uniform, actively conspired
with other former military officers and with think tanks and PR firms to undermine President
Obama's cautious policy toward the 2014 conflict in Ukraine. He presented false information to
suggest that Russia had invaded Ukraine and he misrepresented the Ukraine situation to Congress
-- at the same time he was working behind the scenes to fully arm Ukrainian extremists who wanted
war with Russia. NATO claims its role is to keep us safe -- but we learn from Breedlove's secret,
Strangelovian maneuvers, that those in charge will do anything to make us believe they are still
relevant, including provoke a nuclear war. Move over, Hillary. Breedlove deserves a turn on the
dock.
And if we want to further discuss how the rule of law has been flushed to oblivion in the US of
2016, we need look no further than Congress, which actively facilitates lawlessness through its
continued inaction and fecklessness in areas of its Constitutional responsibility. Congress
refusing to act on eight solid years of President Obama's illegal wars is every bit as
destructive to the rule of law as Hillary Clinton's email homebrew.
Yes, there is plenty of lawlessness to go around, and in both parties. That is why we are
taking our case to Washington this September, to make a pitch for a new foreign policy that
resists to the face the deep state's secret manipulations, the Clintons' maneuverings, and
Congress's dereliction of duty. The old system is breaking apart and we will make the case
for peace, prosperity, and non-intervention.
"... Comey laid out a 100% air-tight case for a life-sentence felony conviction, and then said "no reasonable prosecutor would bring an indictment". ..."
"... She is as good as convicted. You could say it was a pardon. ..."
"... Anybody besides me wonder how a "Loyal Bushie" became Obama's FBI Director? ..."
"... So we watch this guy spend 20 minutes telling us how many Federal Criminal Laws / NATIONAL SECURITY she and her staff has broken. Then you tell us that it's impossible to prove intent. That is absurd, pathetic, cowardly and obscene. (Maybe reread the OATH you took to the Constitution and God). ..."
"... I would think the choice of vice president for a Hillary administration is EXTREMELY important. The Corporatists now supporting Hillary will demand a Corporatist VP. Many of the Sanders supporters will not vote for her if she chooses a Corporatist VP. ..."
"... There is one way that Trump is the lessor of two evils: she already has the blood of millions dripping from her hands before the election. What we don't know is if Trump will follow in the footsteps of the previous three fools in the WH and after his election rack up his own million deaths. Killing millions is now another trophy of being president. ..."
"... It's not "lesser of two evils." It's "different of two evils." ..."
"... The remarkable events also serve as a clear reminder that while the Clintons enriched themselves over the years, they were helping to bankrupt the public trust in its government and institutions. And they won't stop until they're stopped. ..."
"... Giuliani: "This is an extremely hard conclusion to justify. People have been charged under these statues for far less than this but... when one is Hillary Clinton, the laws don't exactly apply like they do for ordinary people. . ..."
"... Trump has been handed a lot of firepower. Oh for the debates. Perhaps Hillary's cough may deflect. ..."
"... My personal opinion is that women in Power are expeditive persons whose only concern is" Can I get away with it?" Hillary loves to find ways to break the law. Re her stint as counselor to certain congressional entities in her first job. ..."
"... "Hell hath no fury as a woman scorned", and even Obama should remember it, without counting countless others who stepped on her toes or so she deemed. ..."
"... Surely for all his bravado, Trump is a lesser evil. But I doubt he can win counter to the whims of the Establishment. ..."
"... The Empire's choice not charged? Well, I'm really shocked......NOT! ..."
"... Wikileaks appears to have a substantial amount of information on Clinton, having already released a large archive of Clinton's emails earlier in the year. Breitbart has previously reported on Julian Assange's claims that Google is complicit in the managing of Clintons online media campaign. ..."
"... Released only a week after Bill Clinton's meeting with Attorney General, Loretta Lynch and a day after Huma Abedins admission that Hillary Clinton had burned daily schedules, the contents of Hillary's released emails, containing multiple interactions between Clinton and multiple white house officials, could be extremely damaging to Clinton's current presidential campaign. ..."
"... For those who bellow about her candidacy just being an extension of Obama's (sorry, Obomber) presidency, just bear in mind if he were running again he'd be a shoe-in. ..."
"... Think Jill before Hill hashtag will get some momentum? ..."
"... I completely understand them. Because the most horrible and obscene things Clinton did were not illegal (As far as US law is concerned.) So if destroying Libya and laughing like a hyena at Qadhafi's murder doesn't make you hate here, poor handling of national security documents won't do it either. ..."
"... The global plutocrats that own private finance should be tried for war crimes and their political psychopaths removed from control but since they own rule of law I expect they have legalized all their theft as they go.....history is written by the winners. ..."
Pasting what a fellow posted on the CD comment board on the article related to this event,
""Precedent" (DEJA VU) then BUSH acting AG / Deputy AG Jim Comey's March 16, 2004 Draft Resignation
Letter: (Anybody besides me wonder how a "Loyal Bushie" became Obama's FBI Director?)
"I was asked what I would do if I concluded that a course of action was fundamentally wrong
and I could not convince my superiors of that fact....Over the last two weeks I have encountered
just such an apocalyptic situation, where I and the Department of Justice have been asked to be
part of something that is fundamentally wrong. As we have struggled over these last few days to
do the right thing, I have never been prouder of the Department of Justice or of the Attorney
General. Sadly, although I believe this has been one of the institution's finest hours, we have
been unable to right that wrong...I would give much not to be in this position. But, as I told
you during our private meeting last week, here I stand; I can do no other. Therefore, with a heavy
heart and undiminished love of my country and my Department, I resign as Deputy Attorney General
of the United States, effective immediately.
Sincerely yours, James B. Comey."
The next day he / they (FBI) had a meeting with W. Bush and they all had their minds changed.
/
So, a tainted Hillary is elected president. After she is sworn in, and there is a Repub majority
in the House, impeachment time!
I would think the choice of vice president for a Hillary administration is EXTREMELY important.
The Corporatists now supporting Hillary will demand a Corporatist VP. Many of the Sanders supporters
will not vote for her if she chooses a Corporatist VP.
Is a dilemma. For the voters, not for the Corporatist Dems.
There is one way that Trump is the lessor of two evils: she already has the blood of millions
dripping from her hands before the election. What we don't know is if Trump will follow in the
footsteps of the previous three fools in the WH and after his election rack up his own million
deaths. Killing millions is now another trophy of being president.
The "lesser evil" problem is the "either-or" fallacy. Either one of them is worse or the other
is. They both are. It's not "lesser of two evils." It's "different of two evils." Some
say the world will end in fire, some in ice. Trump is the roaring fire, Clinton is the suffocating
ice. Both end us up the same place, just different ways at different speeds. Freddy Krueger or
Hannibal Lecter.
Dismemberment by chain saw or scalpel. A gaping chest wound or gangrene. Going off that high
mountain cliff at 500 mph or 400 mph. Either choice is just projecting one's personal fears, not
dealing with reality, which is that our grandchildren will look at their conditions when adults
and at this election of either Trump or Clinton with hatred and contempt for our stupidity at
allowing things to evolve to this point and for relying on "lesser of two evils" arguments to
perpetuate them.
[.] The explosive result shows the Clintons haven't lost their touch for leaving destruction
and chaos in their wake. The remarkable events also serve as a clear reminder that while the
Clintons enriched themselves over the years, they were helping to bankrupt the public trust in
its government and institutions. And they won't stop until they're stopped.
And
Rudy Giuliani: "Today Hillary Clinton Was Put Way Above The Law"
Giuliani: "This is an extremely hard conclusion to justify. People have been charged under
these statues for far less than this but... when one is Hillary Clinton, the laws don't exactly
apply like they do for ordinary people. .
~ ~ ~
Trump has been handed a lot of firepower. Oh for the debates. Perhaps Hillary's cough may
deflect.
Sad day indeed and vexing hours to come, on all fronts, once HRC is elected and sworn in as POTUS.
My personal opinion is that women in Power are expeditive persons whose only concern is"
Can I get away with it?"
Hillary loves to find ways to break the law. Re her stint as counselor to certain congressional
entities in her first job.
She will spin her ways through the miseries of mankind wrought by her very ministrations. And
as sower of wars galore
she will probably receive a Nobel Peace Prize for good measure.
"Hell hath no fury as a woman scorned", and even Obama should remember it, without counting
countless others who stepped on her toes or so she deemed.
Surely for all his bravado, Trump is a lesser evil. But I doubt he can win counter to the
whims of the Establishment.
Re: "Additionally a judge ruled today that Clinton's "private" emails will be open to FOIA requests.
Some dirt will be found in them."
Look at the history of FOIA requests for Clinton emails.
The cases may be won, but the timeline for actually releasing the information in all cases so
far is AFTER the November election--in one case 75 years from now according to the Unanimous Dissent
podcast on Sputnik.
The Link to Director Comey's statement got mixed up apparently. There is a
press release online, and I think it's worth reading in full. I loved the subtlety…
What I would like to do today is tell you three things: what we did; what we found; and
what we are recommending to the Department of Justice.
[…]
So, first, what we have done:
[…]
That's what we have done. Now let me tell you what we found:
[…]
So that's what we found. Finally, with respect to our recommendation to the Department of
Justice:
[…]
I know there will be intense public debate in the wake of this recommendation, as there
was throughout this investigation. What I can assure the American people is that this investigation
was done competently, honestly, and independently. No outside influence of any kind
was brought to bear.
I know there were many opinions expressed by people who were not part of the investigation-including
people in government-but none of that mattered to us. Opinions are irrelevant, and they were
all uninformed by insight into our investigation, because we did the investigation the right
way. Only facts matter, and the FBI found them here in an entirely apolitical and professional
way.
I couldn't be prouder to be part of this organization.
Wikileaks appears to have a substantial amount of information on Clinton, having already released
a large archive of Clinton's emails earlier in the year. Breitbart has previously reported on
Julian Assange's claims that Google is complicit in the managing of Clintons online media campaign.
Released only a week after Bill Clinton's meeting with Attorney General, Loretta Lynch
and a day after Huma Abedins admission that Hillary Clinton had burned daily schedules, the contents
of Hillary's released emails, containing multiple interactions between Clinton and multiple white
house officials, could be extremely damaging to Clinton's current presidential campaign.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has previously stated that he has multiple leaks in store
for Clinton and, as a free speech fundamentalist, believes that a Clinton presidency could be
damaging.
The American people aren't surprised that HRC isn't going to be prosecuted, neither are they highly
outraged. It just wasn't that big a deal for them in the first place. They are aware of her shortcomings
and Bill's aura has taken a significant hit over the last while.
For those who bellow about her candidacy just being an extension of Obama's (sorry, Obomber)
presidency, just bear in mind if he were running again he'd be a shoe-in.
Trump has pissed off some major voting blocks in the US, Hispanics and women to name but two.
The Blacks are usually Democratic voters and there's no reason to think that's about to change.
His message mostly resonates with angry young whites and they simply don't have the numbers. That
being said, there's a chance that Trump could conceivably find enough dirt on hHillary to make
a difference, but he's already called her everything but a white woman.
The Yanks still see themselves as inclusive and a nation of immigrants even if the reality
is somewhat different. There's something about Trump's denigration of Mexicans and his walked-back
ban of all Muslims that doesn't fit with their view of themselves.
The Yanks couldn't give a fiddler's fuck about Brexit and its implications. They don't share
this thread's widely held view that now is the time for revolution. Some do, of course, but they're
mostly regarded as a fringe.
It's true that Hillary is more of a warmonger than the Donald but that's not too important
in this election. Then again Trump's worldview could change in a heartbeat if he were elected
and saw an opportunity to cash in on some of that MIC money.
I completely understand them. Because the most horrible and obscene things Clinton did
were not illegal (As far as US law is concerned.) So if destroying Libya and laughing like a hyena
at Qadhafi's murder doesn't make you hate here, poor handling of national security documents won't
do it either.
I am now thinking that we are entering a high cognitive dissonance phase of empire decline with
rule of law being the center piece and Clinton II's teflon application of it being one example.
I encourage folks to read the Warren piece and ask yourselves how someone who believes what
she exposes can be associated in any way with Clinton II politics.....but the rumor is that she
may be VP pick.....another Dem sheepdog?
The global plutocrats that own private finance should be tried for war crimes and their
political psychopaths removed from control but since they own rule of law I expect they have legalized
all their theft as they go.....history is written by the winners.
"... Why did Congress criminalize the mishandling of classified information through gross negligence? The answer, obviously, is to prevent harm to national security. So then the reasonable prosecutor asks: Was the statute clearly violated, and if yes, is it likely that Mrs. Clinton's conduct caused harm to national security? If those two questions are answered in the affirmative, I believe many, if not most, reasonable prosecutors would feel obliged to bring the case. ..."
"... I did not believe that official Washington would indict Hillary Clinton, not in a presidential election year, and not when she's the only thing standing between Donald Trump and the White House. ..."
"... The thought of four more years of those people, the Clintons, in the White House, with all their sleaziness, their drama, their sense of entitlement - it's sick-making. What a country. What a year. ..."
Clinton won't be indicted for breaking any laws, but Comey's statement is
nonetheless an indictment of her poor judgment, negligence, and recklessness. This
should be very damaging for Clinton, and maybe it still could be, but it can hardly
come as a surprise to anyone that remembers how the Clintons have operated over the
years. The sloppiness, sense of entitlement, and disregard for consequences are all
only too familiar. We can expect several more years of this sort of behavior from a
future Clinton administration.
Andrew McCarthy is stunned. He says the FBI director has refused to indict her on a
premise that is not required for an indictment to be issued. And:
I was especially unpersuaded by Director Comey's claim that no reasonable
prosecutor would bring a case based on the evidence uncovered by the FBI. To my mind,
a reasonable prosecutor would ask: Why did Congress criminalize the mishandling
of classified information through gross negligence? The answer, obviously, is to
prevent harm to national security. So then the reasonable prosecutor asks: Was the
statute clearly violated, and if yes, is it likely that Mrs. Clinton's conduct caused
harm to national security? If those two questions are answered in the affirmative, I
believe many, if not most, reasonable prosecutors would feel obliged to bring the
case.
It is somehow comforting to find that one's pitch-black cynicism is vindicated. I
did not believe that official Washington would indict Hillary Clinton, not in a
presidential election year, and not when she's the only thing standing between Donald
Trump and the White House.
The thought of four more years of those people, the Clintons, in the White House,
with all their sleaziness, their drama, their sense of entitlement - it's sick-making.
What a country. What a year.
Looks like the Democratic establishment decided that they wants Clinton in November no matter what.
But the price of this decition si that she will now compete as officially named "reckless and stupid"
candidate.
An interesting side affect might be that there will be attempts to impeach her from day one.
Notable quotes:
"... How is having your own private server for Secretary of State business not any of these things? What is the purpose of having your own email server if not for intentional misconduct? I imagine it costs a fair amount to set up and then run, did she just set it up for the lulz? ..."
"... "Had someone who was obscure and unimportant and powerless done what Hillary Clinton did – recklessly and secretly install a shoddy home server and worked on Top Secret information on it, then outright lied to the public about it when they were caught – they would have been criminally charged long ago, with little fuss or objection." ..."
"... After the FBI qualifying Hillary as extremely careless - precisely while acting as SoS - it sounds silly to hear Obama saying she was a great Secretary of State. ..."
"... Well, Comey just secured his job in a Clinton administration. ..."
"... Hitlery is just another establishment bankster cartel stooge/puppet. Expect more wars and genocides if this woman is elected. ..."
"... The NYTimes, 2 days ago: ..."
"... But, can we now at least admit that she lied, repeatedly and comprehensively, about her email server. This is now proven. ..."
"... She said there was no classified info on her email. This was a lie. ..."
"... She said everything was allowed per State Dept rules. This was a lie. ..."
"... She said the server was never hacked and remained secure. This was a lie. ..."
"... She said that she turned over all her emails. This was a lie. ..."
"... "110 e-mails in 52 e-mail chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information AT THE TIME they were sent or received. EIGHT of those chains contained information that was TOP SECRET AT THE TIME they were sent; 36 chains contained SECRET information AT THE TIME;" ..."
"... I think they got that backwards, An Indictment would destroy Clinton's election hopes, and opened the door for Bernie Sanders to become president. ..."
"... Obama himself issued an executive order in 2009, "Executive Order 13526- Classified National Security Information," that deals at length with the handling of various levels of classified/top secret data by top officials and others they designate. An executive order has the force of law, and Obama specified various sanctions and penalties that violations can occur. ..."
"... The order even includes sanctions for "reckless" handling of classified data, and Comey used the term "reckless." Why those sanctions were not applied here is baffling. ..."
"... This woman is a dangerous sociopathic liar. I say that as a feminist and registered Democrat for 35 years who voted for her husband in the 1990's. Yes, I'm afraid of what Trump might do as president. But I am MORE afraid of what Hillary will do. I will never vote for Hillary Clinton. ..."
"... "Extremely Careless" - that's a great defense for a potential president of the USA. That's what we all welcome - an extremely careless president. ..."
"... Now, to be really, really clear: 'All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.' ~~ George Orwell, Animal Farm (1945). ..."
"... First, the FBI decides whether to indict, not whether to prosecute. It is not part of its proper remit to decide not to indict on the supposition that no reasonable prosecutor would prosecute. That is end-running the legal system of a nation ruled by law. ..."
"... Second, whether or not Hillary Clinton could mount a defense of carelessness is not a concern of the FBI, though they act as if they know the mind of Hillary Clinton. I realize they interviewed her yesterday or something. I would hazard she knew every question beforehand and they knew every answer beforehand. But, anyways. ..."
"... They all lie even Comey. He was there and with straight face saying what Clinton did didn't rise to the level of prosecution. Nonsense, for even smaller infractions the FBI refers prosecution to the DOJ. DOJ in these cases depending on mostly resources, decides if to prosecute or not, or seek a plea bargain. ..."
"... Everything he said pronounced her guilt, you'd think he was about to announce charges, then no charges. He even described her actions as gross negligence using other words, which is enough to indict. But no... ..."
"... She was careless with the fate of Libya and she was careless with national security. Yet, according to President Obama, it is hard to think of any person better qualified for the presidency than she. ..."
"... the State Dept contradicts her assertion that she was authorised to use an unguarded private server. No she was not. She neither had the approval, nor had she even requested it. Pure lies! ..."
"... Sorry but carelessness is when you are distracted like going to take a coffee and forget to lock the screen. She deliberately setup an email server at home ans she knew that is illegal and a huge breach of security. ..."
"... Is the FBI also suggesting that she is suffering from Affluenza, you know when rich people think they are above the law. ..."
In violation of the Espionage Act. The relevant part of the law, 18 USC 793, says that anyone
who handles important national security documents with "gross negligence," so that they are "delivered
to anyone," or "lost," or "stolen," is guilty of a felony.
The guilty party "shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 10 years, or
both."
18 USC §793. This statute explicitly states that whoever, "entrusted with or having lawful possession
or control of any document…through gross negligence permits the same to removed from its proper
place of custody…or having knowledge that the same has been illegally removed from its proper
place of custody….shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both."
Comey called her "extremely careless." But even by that standard, Hillary was grossly negligent
with classified material. Comey says Hillary had no intent to transmit information to foreign
powers. But that's not what the statute requires.
18 USC §1924. This statute states that any employee of the United States who "knowingly removes
[classified] documents or materials without authority and with the intent to retain such documents
or materials at an unauthorized location shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for not
more than one year, or both." Hillary set up a private server explicitly to do this.
18 USC §798. This statute states that anyone who "uses in any manner prejudicial to the safety
or interest of the United States…any classified information…shall be fined under this title or
imprisoned not more than ten years, or both." Hillary transmitted classified information in a
manner that harmed the United States; Comey says she may have been hacked.
18 USC §2071. This statute says that anyone who has custody of classified material and "willfully
and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, falsifies, or destroys the same, shall
be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years." Clearly, Hillary meant to
remove classified materials from government control.
Wall Street's Warmongering Madame is the perfect foil for Donald Trump's huckster-populism:
a pseudo-progressive stooge whose contempt for the average person and their intelligence is palpable.
She's an arch-environmentalist who has worked tirelessly to spread fracking globally.
She supports fortifying Social Security but won't commit to raising the cap on taxes to
do so.
She's a humanitarian who has supported every imperial slaughter the US has waged in the
past 25 years.
She cares deeply about the plight of the Palestinians but supported the starvation blockade
and blitzkrieg of Gaza and couldn't bother to mention them but in passing in a recent speech
before AIPAC.
She's a stalwart civil libertarian, but voted for Patriot Acts 1 and 2 and believes Edward
Snowden should be sent to federal prison for decades.
She stands with the working class but has supported virtually every international pact
granting increased mobility and power to the corporate sector at its expense in the past 25
years.
She cares with all her heart about African-Americans but supports the objectively-racist
death penalty and the private prison industry.
She will go to bat for the poor but supported gutting welfare in the '90s, making them
easier prey to exploiters, many of whom supported her husband and her financially.
She worries about the conditions of the poor globally, but while Sec. of State actively
campaigned against raising the minimum wage in Haiti to 60 cents an hour, thinking 31 cents
an hour sounded better for the investor class whose interests are paramount to her.
She's not a bought-and-paid-for hack, oh no, no, no, but she won't ever release the Wall
Street speeches for which she was paid so handsomely.
She's a true-blue progressive, just ask her most zealous supporters, who aren't.
"Even if information is not marked classified in an e-mail, participants who know, or should know,
that the subject matter is classified are still obligated to protect it," Mr. Comey said, suggesting
that Mrs. Clinton and her aides were "extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive,
highly classified information."
Mr. Comey said the emails included eight chains of emails and replies, some written by her,
that contained information classified as "top secret: special access programs." That classification
is the highest level, reserved for the nation's most highly guarded intelligence operations or
sources.
SEE A PATTERN HERE ?
"no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case" (FBI/CNN). that's a lie. anyone in a working
situation who lie so many times, and in so many different ways would be terminated. for Clinton
to become the next US President is an absolute moral disaster - which will haunt not only America,
but generations of young people watching this moral deception unfold.
Bernie did not lose. He was run over by the corrupt establishment of the Dem. Party. He didn/t
take their money, & condemned them for their undemocratic manipulations.
BlooperMario
She is a symbol of American hegemony and globalisation.
The East is rebelling and so is Europe.
Shamerica has been exposed as liars and cheats.
Poverty in Asia was promoted in order for USA to rule.
Regime change in Europe and Middle East created to support Lockheed-Martin , Boeing, and military
financial machinery.
Time for Europe to disconnect from Washington; link with Asia where the future will come very
soon.
Stop Uncle Sam's Navy and Air Force provoking China and Russia.
Hilary needs to go to Laos and Vietnam to clear minefields and unexploded bombs that US is responsible
for.
Chirographer
Comey offers his opinion that "no reasonable prosecutor" would press charges, but the dividing
line is between a finding that Clinton did wrong and was "extremely careless" is that she was
not "grossly negligent."
That's a judgment call to be made by the 'reasonable prosecutors" in the DOJ. It's not for
the FBI to prejudge that for them.
In a case like this the decision would normally be made by the AG. But, she had already announced
she would not be able to do her job in the circumstances- her chit chat with Bill tainted her
impartiality - and the decision whether or not to prosecute would be made by senior level career
prosecutors. Apparently the FBI wasn't interested in what the people charged with the responsibility
to make the decision would think.
Finally, for some unexplained reason, the FBI Director felt he had to make his statement today
without the DOJ's knowledge. Doesn't the FBI operate under the DOJ?
What a mess.
ExKStand
I think this shows you how scared the establishment in the U.S. is of Trump taking up power.
Save them from organising a black operation against him. No way should Hiliary be exonerated in
this way. In a democracy this should be for a court to decide, not the FBI. Hard to see how a
fair court could find her not guilty of at least incompetence.
kiwijams
Are their Clinton supporters who can read through this entire saga and still think she has
a high degree of integrity and honesty? By all means vote for her because she isn't Trump, but
surely you can't think this woman is all that trustworthy?
GrandmasterFlasher
Hillary is too big to fail, and too big to jail. There are too many vested interests invested
in the megalomaniac for charges to be laid.
funnynought
Hillary Clinton has repeatedly lied that none of her emails were classified at the time of
sending/receiving. This stinks.
Bill Clinton didn't have a "chance meeting" with Loretta Lynch, but walked across the tarmac
and boarded her plane to talk. Hillary Clinton has misleadingly characterized numerous times how
the two met, even with Lynch's own account out in the press. This stinks.
Lynch had the option of refusing to talk with Bill Clinton for the sake of avoiding conflict
of interest. She didn't. This stinks.
Just days after her husband met Lynch, Hillary Clinton was called into the FBI for a meeting,
on the quietest news weekend of the year till Thanksgiving. This stinks.
Somehow, after a mere 3 days of deliberating--over a holiday weekend--the FBI came to a recommendation.
This stinks.
The recommendation was no charges. This stinks.
The recommendation lays heavy emphasis on her intention, not on her negligence with classified
information. This stinks.
If elected president, Hillary Clinton is "considering" retaining Lynch as Attorney General.
Quid pro quo. This stinks.
President Hillary Clinton: "I didn't really mean to leak the nuclear codes to ISIS in Libya.
My bad. I didn't have bad intentions, though." This stinks.
"The buck stops here." -Democratic President Harry Truman. This doesn't stink.
Shardz
Meanwhile, feel free to leak any government documents you might have and see how lenient the
FBI will be with your case. I guarantee you will be in federal prison before dusk. Hillary was
not authorized to set up an external mail server no matter what the status was with those documents.
More Liberal ridiculousness.
Britaining
So Hillary carelessly voted for Iraqi war, carelessly pushed the Libya/Syria civil wars, carelessly
paved the way for Benghazi attack and refugee crisis in EU.......but liberal idiots won't care.
Anyway, she made a special contribution to Brexit, just like theGuardian's smarty pants.
Michronics42
This decision is deeply disappointing but not surprising as the late Carl Sagan observed:
" One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend
to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth.
The bamboozle has captured us. It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that
we've been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back."
The FBI's partial exoneration of Hillary comes with this proviso: "Although we did not find
clear evidence that the Secretary or colleagues intended to violate laws, [of course has been
clearly documented that Clinton knew exactly what she was doing
1)by lying that she received government permission to set up her private servers and
2)knowing full well that she would evade FOIA requests by destroying thousands of these emails]there
is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of highly classified information,
said Comey."
For those Clinton, Inc supporters who continue to support this "congenital liar," and longtime
"charlatan," this just the latest 'careless' episode in the deeply troubling career of a sociopath
who craves power way more than she cares about the nation she may one day govern.
I'll always Feel the Bern and I'll always support those who will continue the fight for reform.
jimmy coleman
Praise the mosquitoes in a Louisiana swamp, Ms. Hillary is innocent. She didn't know what she
was doing!! On several levels I can believe that. We can now all sleep better just knowing the
Clinton's once again dodged a close one, like the time Ms. Hillary and Chelsea dodged gunfire
in Bosnia. We are told to believe that no reasonable prosecutor, from Maine to Texas, from Alaska
to Florida, from the moon to Pluto would dare try the fair lady.
Ms. Hillary may not know what she twas doing after she signed the pledge not to do such a thing,
she may have misspoken like she did when traveling in Bosnia or talking about the Benghazi video
to the victim's families. She may have used bad judgment, ad infinitum, slept through the burning
of the midnight oil as Rome burned and been a lousy administrator of the nation's secrets but
add, according to the latest legalese, Ms. Hillary ain't guilty of deliberately knowing what she
was doing!! She can do more harm in ignorance than a smart person can do on purpose!
For those of you working in the computer security field, your job has just become easier, for
now nothing, absolutely nothing one can do with classified or even Top Secret information can
be considered criminal. If the prospective Democratic nominee, perhaps our next Great Leader of
the 'free' world, can do what the FBI Director himself said she did, then none of the underlings
should have a fear to face or a hefty price to pay for emulating the shenanigans of Ms. Hillary.
Ain't this country great. If you got money and power - where you can send your disbarred, impeached
hubby to visit secretly for half an hour with the chief law enforcement official, all the while
the FBI G-men shoo away pesky reporters with cameras rolling - and then two days later those same
G-men interview the prez-in-waiting, - with just a one day interval in-between the FBI Director
can say to the country, with a straight face, that 'no reasonable prosecutor in the whole wide
country would convict Ms. Hillary.... And if that don't beat all, while the FBI is talking to
the nation, Ms. Hillary and the other guy,...... oh yes, Mr. Obama, who promised us to run the
most transparent and honest government in the nation's history, strap themselves in Air Force
One to go campaigning together. And if that wasn't enough poop through a goose, a big chunk of
the unwashed masses swallowed what was said and done, hook, line and stinker!!
I wouldn't rule Bernie out quite yet! The superdelegates don't like liars!
TheRealCopy
"Several thousand work related emails were not among those returned to the government and appeared
to have been deleted"!
How does the FBI know what was in the e-mails apparently missing if they were deleted?
It appears to be a political decision not to charge her for security breached and they won't
charge her because she's who she is and in the middle of a campaign as POTUS nominee for the Democratic
Party!
To put the matter into perspective, Remember what happened to General Petreaus! A top notch
war commander completely destroyed over breaching information security on a much smaller scale!
ericsony
Talk about friends in high places....Watch the Clinton chronicles on you tube.. what these
people get away with is amazing...If it was made into a film you would think it was a bit too
far fetched!!
CaliforniaLilly -> ericsony
Time to watch a classic movie: The Manchurian Candidate. Love the original one with Angela
Lansbury. But, good time to see it. Trust me.
"Extremely careless" just the kind of person you need with the finger on the button.
ID8020624
The 15 minute press interview w/ the FBI, however, was vey revealing, but not duplicated here.
She was shown to be the careless arrogant system-girl that she is. W-leaks just published 1000
of her emails for all to see,...go see for yourselves.
Bot candidates have highest unfavorable ratings ever recorded in US history. This is not right:
over 60% of voters neither support nor Trump!
The Oligarchic rule is stripped naked for all to see. US people are not that dumb not to see
a couple crooks running to rule over them,...
Vote Green! Vote Stein!
Unfortunately Bernie is busy trimming party platform that has never been followed by any Dem
president.
Robb1324
All the cases prosecuted involved some combination of: clearly intentional and willful
mishandling of classified information; or vast quantities of materials exposed in such a way
as to support an inference of intentional misconduct; or indications of disloyalty to the United
States; or efforts to obstruct justice. We do not see those things here.
How is having your own private server for Secretary of State business not any of these
things? What is the purpose of having your own email server if not for intentional misconduct?
I imagine it costs a fair amount to set up and then run, did she just set it up for the lulz?
Is there a benefit to having your own email server to conduct department business on other
than skirting FOIA requests and internal oversight?
"Had someone who was obscure and unimportant and powerless done what Hillary Clinton did
– recklessly and secretly install a shoddy home server and worked on Top Secret information on
it, then outright lied to the public about it when they were caught – they would have been criminally
charged long ago, with little fuss or objection."
time2plyBsides -> Nelson Ricardo
I worked in IT for the U.S. gov't. Everybody has to take the trainings for IT and data protocol.
The lowliest cleaning staff who merely dust a laptop. The highest ranked general. They are VERY
serious about it.
There are specific rules for which communications go over which networks. If Hilary wants to
log on to her gov't computer, the system must register that she took the training or she will
be locked out. Let me be clear: THERE IS NO WAY THE SEC. OF STATE DID NOT KNOW ALL DoS BUSINESS
ALWAYS MUST STAY ON SECURE GOV. NETWORK. She would have had that drilled into her head by then.
She is a lawyer. She knows all Sec. of State emails are archived to protect the People from
malfeasance. She intentionally side-stepped protocol. There is no other reasonable explanation
IMO.
eminijunkie
""I am confident I never sent nor received any information that was classified AT THE TIME
it was sent and received,..."
Same sentence parsed properly: " I know i sent and received classified information, so I can't
say I didn't, but I need to make it sound like I didn't know what I was doing in an nice, innocent
way, so I'll say I was 'confident that I didn't because I think that's the safest thing I can
say to seem to deny the possibility of doing what i know I did."
Goias Goias -> CriticAtLarge
After the FBI qualifying Hillary as extremely careless - precisely while acting as SoS
- it sounds silly to hear Obama saying she was a great Secretary of State.
Bo1964
A decade ago CIA claimed Iraq of WMD, now FBI recommends 'no charges' against Hillary. All
collusions to please the bosses!
Brockenhexe
Well, Comey just secured his job in a Clinton administration.
Brendan Groves
Hillary has been careless with her emails, careless with her votes for the Iraq war, and very
careless with her husband. all of this carelessness does not bode well for a future President.
shaftedpig
Hitlery is just another establishment bankster cartel stooge/puppet. Expect more wars and
genocides if this woman is elected.
johhnybgood
Proof if any is needed, that the US Administration, together with its Judiciary and its law
enforcement agencies, are criminally negligent. The elites are above the law, just like the banks.
This may well be the tipping point that sends Trump and Sanders supporters over the edge.
rochestervandriver -> MtnClimber
"The head of the FBI is a Republican, btw."
This is what he is (below) so no wonder people think the fix is in. Obama appointed him , republican
or not. He's a "Business as usual" man. I guess he hopes that Trump doesn't get elected as I'm
sure this story will not end here.
Anyway, this will cost Hilary on the campaign trail . Trump will rip chunks out of her with
this.
In December 2003, as Deputy Attorney General, Comey appointed the U.S. Attorney in Chicago,
close friend and former colleague Patrick Fitzgerald, as Special Counsel to head the CIA leak
grand jury investigation after Attorney General John Ashcroft recused himself. In August 2005,
Comey left the DOJ and he became General Counsel and Senior Vice President of Lockheed Martin.
In 2010, he became General Counsel at Bridgewater Associates. In early 2013, he left Bridgewater
to become Senior Research Scholar and Hertog Fellow on National Security Law at Columbia Law School.
He also joined the London-based board of directors of HSBC Holdings. In 2013, Comey was appointed
as the director of the FBI by President Barack Obama.
Whether it's putting the Bush/Cheney crime family in prison for an illegal war and thousands
of innocent deaths, or HRC in prison for Bengazi and releasing sensitive documents, y'all are
starting to see what's wrong in this nation. It's a nation of crooked professional politicians,
family dynasties run by the 1% and the banksters... Welcome to the land of the free. Free for
the wolves to eat our souls.
Clinton is not above the law. If the GOP really thinks they have a legitimate case then Speaker
Ryan and the other members can impeach her if she wins. The reality is it is game over since it
is only GOP partisans who are interested in pursuing this. I think it would be a repeat of the
last time with the Senate laughing at the House for their stupidity. Everyone knows that neither
Clinton nor Trump are honest. The Democrats don't see it as a real issue. Bernie Sanders said
he does not care about "her damn emails".
Both the GOP and the Democrats are more intent on partisanship than in talking about ideas
on how to improve the government and society. Sanders was different and I think a lot of his supporters
felt that it wasn't just about him. Both Trump and Clinton do not have strong morals and it is
a bit sad.
Leviathan212
I'm glad Hillary is not being indicted, and I'm happy that we still have a viable candidate
against Donald Trump.
But, can we now at least admit that she lied, repeatedly and comprehensively, about her
email server. This is now proven.
- She said there was no classified info on her email. This was a lie.
- She said everything was allowed per State Dept rules. This was a lie.
- She said the server was never hacked and remained secure. This was a lie.
- She said that she turned over all her emails. This was a lie.
People are so blinded by their worship of a candidate that they are willing to ignore blatant
wrong-doing. This is how moral and ethical corruption happens. Try admitting the truth to yourself
- it's okay to say, "Yes, I support Hillary Clinton, but I can also see how she lied in these
instances".
RealWavelengths
if an average worker at, say, a bank would have been caught using a private email account to
conduct bank business, and some of those emails contained unsecured, confidential bank customer
info that could have been at risk for interception by identity theft crime rings, that worker
would have been in violation of several laws. And if subsequently it turns out that employee deleted
some of those emails and claimed they did not contain customer data but were personal, it is doubtful,
given other evidence, the employee would have gotten away with just scolding words from the FBI.
At least a fine would be levied, and perhaps a prohibition from working with confidential financial
data again. Here, Clinton just got scolded, and that's it. Clearly, this is a problem with high
ranking elected and appointed officials, and yet many of us somehow keep letting these people
get into office. We should indeed let our voices be heard online in various ways that enough is
more than enough. Time to get rid of the revolving door of past corrupt officials getting back
into office with the same corrupt ethics. Both parties are trash. There's a better way…
Georwell
"...is Ian Bremmer who said that "it's very clear that in trying to make it go away actually
lied, repeatedly, about whether or not these materials were classified at the time. And it's the
cover up frequently that gets people in trouble, it's not the actual misdeed. This was very badly
mishandled by Hillary all the way through."
But then she got some much needed help from the FBI to complete the cover up.
In retrospect, perhaps former Attorney General Eric Holder said it best when he justified with
the US DOJ simply refuses to bring up criminal cases against those it deems "too big to prosecute":
if you do bring a criminal charge it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps
world economy
And just like that, Hillary is "systemically important", if mostly for her countless Wall Street
donors. "
Welcome foreign countries. You will soon be able to know everything you need to know about
thrUS if Hillary becomes President. Will need a larger bedroom or basement for her server which
of course the White House has. The head of the FBI says although statutes may have been broken,
it is no big deal. We don't need them anyway. Good to know, so if anyone wants to break statutes
in the future, they just need to ask the FBI for the Hillary deal. Poor people of Washington D.C.
Just when we thought it couldn't get any worse then the poisoned water in Flint, or the Green
Algae in Southern Florida, the toxic smell of whitewashing covers D.C. Stay indoors, take precautions,
donate to the Clinton Foundation, because this could last for years.
Leviathan212
So, Bill Clinton meets with Loretta Lynch and four days later the FBI recommends no charges?
I'm not saying that there was any corruption - mainly because I have a high enough opinion
of Loretta Lynch's integrity (and not of Bill Clinton's). But the optics are not good. It further
fuels the idea that the Clintons play fast and loose with the rules and are morally and ethically
compromised.
virginiacynic -> boscovee
No one should ever, ever talk to the FBI without a lawyer (preferably two lawyers) and a Tape
Recorder.
The FBI will not record it and instead write up a summary of what was said and ask the person
to sign the summary. If the person subsequently says something contrary to the FBI summary then
that person can be charged with lying to the FBI.
It was not overkill when the FBI had eight people. It was good sense and good lawyering by Clinton's
Counsel once it had been decided to talk with them. If she were not running for President then
any sane lawyer would have said to take the fifth, just as the guy who set up the server system
did.
greg2644
For all of you guys who are up in arms about this decision, let's pretend for a second that
serious classified information did get out from her server. Even if that were true, involuntary
treason is not a crime. Intent matters in a court of law. All of the things Hillary is being accused
of are only crimes if she intended for information to get out. There's no proof that she did,
so they can't charge her with anything. This decision shouldn't surprise anyone. Politicians are
untouchable unless they're caught with blood on their hands... and even then...
Vladimir Makarenko -> greg2644
It's called "criminal negligence". The stress is on the word "criminal". If she couldn't have
understood after had been told many times the rules of separation of private from government emails
how she can be trusted with Red Button?
As minimum JD must withdraw her clearance. She can apply for a job at her "foundation".
Georwell
so Hitlary declare she never sent any classifieds documents
""I am confident I never sent nor received any information that was classified AT THE TIME it
was sent and received,..." (Hitlary )
BUT next we get this from FBI :
"110 e-mails in 52 e-mail chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified
information AT THE TIME they were sent or received. EIGHT of those chains contained information
that was TOP SECRET AT THE TIME they were sent; 36 chains contained SECRET information AT THE
TIME;"
Its this incompetence or just THE MOST corrupt system ever ?
ghostintheshell29
"An indictment could have wrecked Clinton's election hopes and perhaps opened the door for
Donald Trump to become president."
I think they got that backwards, An Indictment would destroy Clinton's election hopes,
and opened the door for Bernie Sanders to become president.
Its a lot easier for Trump to beat Hillary then Bernie. People actually like him.. Huge advantage
over both other opponents.
RealWavelengths -> Joe Smith
Actually, laws were broken. Comey just chose not to prosecute because, in his and his staff's
opinion, no reasonable prosecutor would pursue the matter, which is in the discretion of the prosecutor
to do. But Obama himself issued an executive order in 2009, "Executive Order 13526- Classified
National Security Information," that deals at length with the handling of various levels of classified/top
secret data by top officials and others they designate. An executive order has the force of law,
and Obama specified various sanctions and penalties that violations can occur.
As Secretary of State, Hillary was considered an "Original classification authority," which
is a top ranking official that not only handles such data, but classifies and declassifies it.
The order even includes sanctions for "reckless" handling of classified data, and Comey used
the term "reckless." Why those sanctions were not applied here is baffling.
America's two-tiered justice system strikes again. One rule of law for the masses, a very different
set of rules for the elite.
However one may feel regarding whether or not Hillary committed crimes, one thing is absolutely
clear -- she lied.
Comey listed a number of points which prove beyond doubt that she lied. For instance, she said
she never sent or rec'd anything marked classified at the time. Per Comey, there were seven (known)
email strings that were clearly marked classified at the time.
The Inspector General's report also made it clear beyond doubt that Hillary lied about her
use of the email server, point by point by point refuting everything she said about its use. And
yet, after the IG report came out, Hillary went on air to say how happy she was that the IG report
validated everything she'd been saying (though the opposite is true).
This woman is a dangerous sociopathic liar. I say that as a feminist and registered Democrat
for 35 years who voted for her husband in the 1990's. Yes, I'm afraid of what Trump might do as
president. But I am MORE afraid of what Hillary will do. I will never vote for Hillary Clinton.
gvs951
"Extremely Careless" - that's a great defense for a potential president of the USA. That's
what we all welcome - an extremely careless president.
Sarah7
FBI Director James Comey stated the following, which makes it clear that the investigation
of Hillary Clinton and her top aides is a very 'special case' that would not pass the standard
statutory criteria:
To be clear, this is not to suggest that in similar circumstances, a person who engaged
in this activity would face no consequences. To the contrary, those individuals are often subject
to security or administrative sanctions. But that is not what we are deciding now. (Emphasis
added)
Now, to be really, really clear: 'All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal
than others.' ~~ George Orwell, Animal Farm (1945).
theguardianread
Forgot to say that mishandling US Official communications is a crime-- there is NO WAY TO KNOW
IF AN INCOMING COMMUNICATION IS CLASSIFIED OR NOT, ESP AT THAT LEVEL, EVERYTHING IS CLASSIFIED
BY THE "LOOSE LIPS SINK SHIPS" RULE. No matter how unimportant it may seem to you, it is part
of the bigger picture of responsibility...
Goias Goias
I am listening to Hillary giving a speech and she hasn't mentioned a word about the FBI declarations.
Can she really think her bulshit is above answering for being called extremely careless by the
FBI?
KlaatuVerataNiktu -> Goias Goias
Being high-ranking in the establishment means never having to say you're sorry.
Goias Goias Goias Goias
Even Obama is looking ridiculous building up Hillary after the FBI wiped the floor with her
credibility.
MARK Corrales
So by this rational it is okay to break the law and violate national security protocols as
long as its unintentional. WOW! The political elite do not have to worry about any kind of accountability
for there actions.
Jessica Roth -> Stu Wragg
It's not so much her wealth, but how she got it. When you're in the pay of the Saudis/MIC/Wall
Street, the US government looks out for you.
Seriously, she swears under oath that she's turned over all her emails, it eventuates that
there are thousands more emails, but the FBI goes "no big, don't worry"? I didn't know that the
federal perjury statutes had been wiped off of the books. Perhaps Hillary sent me an email, but
I missed it?
Snowden gets exiled, Manning gets tortured…Clinton gets a coronation. Yes, very fair.
I urge everyone to vote for Jill Stein. Nothing can be done about this election (Trump, despite
his manifest flaws, is the more honest candidate and the peace candidate, but he has very little
chance of winning), but by getting Stein/the Greens to 5%, there is an opportunity for the left
to be properly heard next time, rather than the same corrupt dance between the two halves of the
Money Party. It's the only way to deny Clinton the second term she's already planning.
Yuri Esev -> zepov
Quote: ...love people who think that because Comey is a Republican, that this means that he
tried everything he could to reach an indictment. He's TELLING YOU that he's choosing not to.
Some people refuse to acknowledge this simple reality:
If there is one thing that democrats and republicans *always* agree on, it's helping big business
to buy our politicians wholesale so that they can continue to redirect money away from the most
electorate, and towards big business and the existing political establishment. In this case, it
means putting the first lady of Goldman Sachs in the White House Unquote
Carpasia
First, the FBI decides whether to indict, not whether to prosecute. It is not part of its
proper remit to decide not to indict on the supposition that no reasonable prosecutor would prosecute.
That is end-running the legal system of a nation ruled by law.
Second, whether or not Hillary Clinton could mount a defense of carelessness is not a concern
of the FBI, though they act as if they know the mind of Hillary Clinton. I realize they interviewed
her yesterday or something. I would hazard she knew every question beforehand and they knew every
answer beforehand. But, anyways.
I believe Hillary Clinton fully intended to break the law, that law being the Freedom of Information
Act under which her emails were capable of being publicized upon request after vetting for, among
other things, how classified they were. Only a fool would think otherwise given the information
she had and the use of a private server in the face of that information.
I do not think she intended to break laws concerning effectively risking the loss and publication
of classified security materials by using an unsecured private server for her email.
Thus, what she did resulted in the risk of loss of classified materials that would never have
been lost if she had stayed within the government system, which laws she broke, one intentionally
and one carelessly, so journalists could not read her other unclassified emails, for they would
never have seen the classified ones.
At best, she was ignorant of the law on classified materials while intending to break the law
on access to information.
This bodes well if she is elected a President of the United States, for it will put paid to
the vaunted myth the Americans ceaselessly tell the rest of the world, that it is a nation in
which no one is above the law. This is the truth. Hillary and Barack having a laugh at The Donald.
Its great to see this investigation come to an end so quickly after such a long process.
June 27th Bill speaks with Lynch
July 2nd FBI interviews Hillary
July 5th FBI clears Hillary
ClearItUp
They all lie even Comey. He was there and with straight face saying what Clinton did didn't
rise to the level of prosecution. Nonsense, for even smaller infractions the FBI refers prosecution
to the DOJ. DOJ in these cases depending on mostly resources, decides if to prosecute or not,
or seek a plea bargain.
For what she did, at a minimum she would have been charged with something to cause her to agree
to a plea bargain, the terms of which would have been at a minimum not being able to receive classified
information, i.e. losing her security clearance. If she were not running for president, I have
no doubt she would have plea bargained to that level and admitted she broke the law.
But in the infinite wisdom of the FBI, they decided not to pursue her because just charging
her with anything would have ended her campaign for presidency. The punishment would have been
greater than the crime, again in their mind. So they didn't charge her. They would have even charged
Hillary Clinton if she wasn't running for president. This was a political decision no matter how
you look at it.
dongerdo
Critically, the FBI said that other similar cases in which a prosecution had been sought
involved evidence of "willful or intentional" breaches of the rules, "vast quantities" of data
or "indications of disloyalty or efforts to obstruct justice". "We do not see that here," he
said.
Interesting. Considering all those things are actually applicable, it was intentional, it involved
a lot of mails concerning Libya, she made an effort to keep it secret and tried to delete rather
large quantities and therefore has been obstructing justice I am curious if they would still 'Do
not see that here' if the opponent would not be called Trump....
Adoniran
"Nonetheless the detail of the FBI's investigation is likely to hit Clinton politically. Comey
revealed that of the 30,000 emails returned to the state department, 110 emails in 52 chains were
determined to contain classified information at the time they were sent."
Just add it to the list of lies that she told about this.
From the FBI:
"Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended
to violate laws governing the handling of classified information, there is evidence that they
were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information."
So I guess we have different standards of intent for her than we do for the rest of us. That
intent to commit an action that is felonious would be enough for anyone else. For Clinton though,
it seems she needed to intend to break the law knowingly, otherwise she's immune. But wait, even
if we use that lofty, specialized standard, more from the FBI:
"There is evidence to support a conclusion that any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton's
position, or in the position of those government employees with whom she was corresponding
about these matters, should have known that an unclassified system was no place for that conversation."
..........So why, again, are we not indicting?
ClearItUp
If a government agent takes a folder of classified (not even talking about highly classified)
information and leaves them on a counter in a public restroom, then after say a few hours remembers
and goes and retrieves it, he will be charged with neglect or mishandling classified information.
Depending on what the information and intent was, they could be charged anywhere from a misdemeanor
to a felony with possible years in jail. If this act occurs multiple time by the same individual
not being charged with something is unusual, even in cases of unintentional confidential information.
The usual outcome for such unintentional negligence, if they are minor is plea bargain in which
the subject gives up his/her security clearance for a period of time or permanently.
Hillary Clinton by Comey's own admission violated the law, but they decided no to pursue prosecution.
Because, the penalty would have been too strong in her case, i.e. dropping out of nomination.
This is the real story. It was a political judgement, no two ways about it.
venkatt
The Farce of a Presidential nomination cycle is now complete. The billionaire Donor class has
officially INSTALLED its "Chosen One" on the American Masses...
Lester Smithson
The Clinton propensity for ethical shortcuts, special treatment, statute dodging (they are
both Yale-educated lawyers), and supreme entitlement are eclipsed by the last GOP president ($7T
war, and wrecking the economy) and the prospect of Trump, whose potential for destruction in near
infinite.
Clinton dodged this one. She'll destroy Trump and the next ethically challenged foot in the
dung is just around the corner. It's the Clinton way.
Jill Stein 2016
skatterbrayn
Everything he said pronounced her guilt, you'd think he was about to announce charges,
then no charges. He even described her actions as gross negligence using other words, which is
enough to indict. But no...
Another win for the oligarchy and queen of the weapons industry. I fear for families in the
Middle East if she is POTUS. Get ready to go play in the desert again troops.
A sad day for justice in America. The Guardian must be thrilled though. Congratulations. I'm
sure Lucia will write a a great nyah nyah piece about this. Pat yourselves on the back, your queen
of global intervention skated on something others have been destroyed for.
callingallcars
People are attracted to Trump because he is not a member of the political establishment, viewed
by many as incorrigibly corrupt and discredited. Ironically, the decision not to prosecute Clinton
will enhance the prospect of Trump's being elected, because it reinforces widespread views in
the public that political elites like Clinton can act with impunity and are immune from the laws
that apply to the rest of us. If Trump is elected, Clinton only has her own bad judgment to blame.
Using a private server for email and effectively stealing the public record is conduct that one
only does if one actually feels immune to the rules that the rest of us must follow. Her arrogance
may well lead to her own downfall and the foisting of Trump on the rest of us. (That is not to
suggest that Clinton would serve the American public well.)
There's an old Roman saying -- 'Res ipsa loquitur' -- 'The thing speaks for itself'. Basic
to our tort law; you don't need to prove intent.
For 28 minutes, Comey precisely described the 'thing'. Then, in his last two minutes, he ran
away from the law, and then out of the room as fast as he could go.
Is there a different law for the Clintons than for the rest of us? Yes. From Whitewater until
today, obviously. In the corridors of power, from the leaders of both parties, the fix is in.
As a Democrat, does this mean that I should vote for Trump, and put up with four years of babbling
idiocy, rather than going with Hillary and furthering the assault on our democracy and on our
law?
Maybe.
steveky
So She was not knowingly Criminal.
She only had an unsecured server and put national security at rick so she could have her own Blackberry.....
Or she had the server to circumvent freedom of information act laws, which Comey did not even
address.
This is not over folks....
Stupid or Criminal... If she is to be president I almost hope Criminal....
Curt Chaffee
"Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes … our judgment is that
no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case," said Comey."
The poodle speaks.
Copper65 -> Curt Chaffee
..no reasonable prosecutor who wanted to keep his job (or maybe his life).
dddxxx -> Wolfclan
Winston Churchill once said when criticized, "Any fool can see what is wrong---Can you see
what is right?"
BillFromBoston
I'm sure that many of you Europeans speak Spanish and,therefore,know what "plato o plomo" means.However,I'll
wager that few of you know much about the Mexican drug cartels that literally control Mexico today.And
they control Mexico through "plato o plomo".This utterance is very,*very* effective when directed
at the police,judges,prosecutors and elected officials.
Although it's possible that Mr Comey and/or his subordinates were promised "silver" that seems
unlikely.Much more likely is that they were promised jobs...promotions...lucrative consulting
gigs.Remember,Europe...there are many,many,*many* people who make very,*very* comfortable livings
while connected to folks "inside the Beltway" (meaning Washington).
It's also possible,but highly unlikely,that anyone involved was threatened with "lead".Much
more likely is that threats to careers...threats to reveal the existence of a mistress...and other
less extreme,but *very* persuasive,threats were communicated.
"Plato o plomo"..."I'll make him an offer he can't refuse"...take your pick.
nerospizza -> ID1773222
It means silver or lead- as in you can take a bribe or a bullet..
Arbuzov
I possessed a Top Secret Special Intelligence Compartmented Access security clearance for 34
years before my retirement, and I handled uncountable classified documents in my time. And I can
assure you that 90 percent of them (at a minimum) were either overclassified, or never should
have been classified in the first place.
Joelbanks
She was careless with the fate of Libya and she was careless with national security. Yet,
according to President Obama, it is hard to think of any person better qualified for the presidency
than she.
What is grievously wrong with this picture?
ilipe Barroso -> alan101
Then, explain this rubbish: https://www.fbi.gov/sacramento/press-releases/2015/folsom-naval-reservist-is-sentenced-after-pleading-guilty-to-unauthorized-removal-and-retention-of-classified-materials
There was no intent but a lot of recklessness. How different is from this case? I'll help you:
he was a nobody.
makaio -> alan101
Lying - Her ongoing lie about the server's purpose, and her past b.s. about it being approved
and fully above board.
Reckless - See this article, and take into account her support for toppling Muammar Gaddafi,
among others.
Obstinate - Twelve years to admit toppling Saddam Hussein -- with millions suffering as a result
to this very day -- was a bad call. She's still lying about her server a year after its discovery
and, to the detriment of her supporters who always have to avoid this topic, she obviously doesn't
care.
Secretive - Her server was implemented to evade public and official records requests, with
a degree of success.
Warring - Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Syria, and Honduras leader ousters or attempts, all without follow-on
plans, all increasing suffering and terrorism, all indirectly or directly supported by Hillary.
Her traits are right before us, and they're only "Rubbish!" for those who cower, deny, and
stick their heads in sand.
And they don't bode well for our future.
guicho
So she lied when she said no classified information was sent on the private server, the FBI
just admitted that there was information of the highest security classification on the server.
Whether intentional or not, failing to keep top secret information safe from intrusion and access
to persons without the proper security clearances is a crime. Yet the FBI won't recommend charges.
I can't believe this is going to be swept under the rug and "news" media will continue to champion
Hillary for president. If any of us breached security protocol at work we would be fired, prosecuted
and prevented from finding work in the future. Just another example of how the law discriminates
based on who you are and how much money and influence you have.
bill9651
Emailgate looks like it is just the tip of the iceberg!
Clinton has been outed as a serial lair to the nation:
.
the State Dept contradicts her assertion that she was authorised to use an unguarded private
server. No she was not. She neither had the approval, nor had she even requested it. Pure lies!
Now the FBI contradicts her statements that none of the material she sent was marked as top
secret or as classified.
The FBI found: 110 emails in 52 chains were determined to contain classified information at the
time they were sent.
Eight of those chains contained information that was top secret at the time, 36 chains contained
secret information at the time, and eight contained confidential information.
So is the FBI part of the right wing conspiracy? And if so, why no indictments. She broke rules
in order to keep the public from knowing anything about her using her post to boost the corrupt
Clinton Foundation. By doing so, she played fast and loose with govt secrets, even top secrets.
And then she repeatedly lied to the nation about it.
Not my findings, not that of Republicans, but of Democrat appointed FBI directors and State
Dept investigators.
Her corruption is becoming public knowlege at last.
Battlehenkie
Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes … our judgment is
that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case"
Because doing so would make for a weak case that a prosecutor is unlikely to win, or because
it would be career suicide for the prosecutor due to upsetting vested interests?
wjpietrzak
Now we'll never know if the contents of the compromised Secret files led to any harm to the
US, its citizens, Servents and allies. No prosecution, no need to reveal the facts.
Sorry but carelessness is when you are distracted like going to take a coffee and forget
to lock the screen. She deliberately setup an email server at home ans she knew that is illegal
and a huge breach of security.
Doug Wenzel
When my dad was a lt. jg on Kwajalein 50+ years ago, he was an entry level Communications Officer.
The whole island was one big Nay base. One day, he got distracted, and forgot to deliver a minor,
routine encrypted message. It was found in his pants at the base laundry.
Needless to say, that was the end of his career in communications. he was reassigned as a radar
operator in the belly of a single-engined SkyRaider like this one, which meant sure drowning if
the plane had to ditch.
When Hillary Clinton opted to have her own server she assumed strict liability for everything
involved with it. Plus she signed an acknowledgement when assuming work at the State Department.
Clearing her is an disgrace, and an insult to those in the intelligence community and with foreign
allies whose lives were put at risk, as well as to all those who have had their careers drawn
and quartered for breaches far less significant than these.
Jack Dornan
Careless = little or no regard to the consequences.
Top Secret = disclosure consequences would be damaging to the nation or place US lives in danger
No prosecution = no unauthorized disclosure occurred
Conclusion = Lucky Lady
stratplaya
No classified info: lie
Allowed by State: lie
Turned over all work emails: lie
Wanted a single device: lie
Never breached: lie
Laws are for the peasants, not our rulers.
Reason336 -> stratplaya
ahhh when has it EVER been different than that in human history???
You expected different now?
Kommentator
On the premise she did nothing wrong (snigger....) she is reckless, careless, a proven lair,
Wall St. bought & paid for, a known warmonger, a recipient of funds from dubious nation states
and apparently a war hero from dodging snipers bullets........and yet......and yet you still she
is the best option, you could not make this up.
Urgelt
This is very disturbing to me.
The FBI doesn't mention the legality, or lack of legality, of Clinton's avoidance of compliance
with federal records statutes and the FOIA. She purged official correspondence from her e-mail
server - a fact turned up by discovery of that correspondence on the senders' servers. Did they
even ask her if her intent was to avoid compliance with federal records statutes and the FOIA?
We can see no evidence that the FBI even brought it up.
So the Obama Administration hands to Clinton a mild spanking on classified document handling,
but ignores the elephant in the room: why she refused to use an official government server for
her official correspondence. If her intent was to avoid compliance with federal statutes, then
she broke the law.
Adrian Newton
Is the FBI also suggesting that she is suffering from Affluenza, you know when rich people
think they are above the law.
God bless exceptional America. Lady Justice will not be back anytime soon.
callingallcars
"Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes … our judgment is that
no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case," said Comey.
Evidence of potential violations of criminal statutes is typically called "probable cause"
that would get every American in the country other than its elite and untouchable political classes
indicted and brought to trial. Or at least all of the black ones, i.e., the superpredators that
must be brought to heel.
"... The Republican senator and former presidential candidate took to Twitter to express his outrage over what he called "a loss for the rule of law" that "further degrades Americans' faith in the justice system." ..."
"... "While I respect the law enforcement professionals at the FBI, this announcement defies explanation. No one should be above the law. But based upon the director's own statement, it appears damage is being done to the rule of law. Declining to prosecute Secretary Clinton for recklessly mishandling and transmitting national security information will set a terrible precedent. The findings of this investigation also make clear that Secretary Clinton misled the American people when she was confronted with her criminal actions. ..."
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) on Tuesday blasted the FBI's recommendation not to prosecute Hillary
Clinton over her use of a private email server as secretary of State.
The Republican senator and former presidential candidate took to Twitter to express his
outrage over what he called "a loss for the rule of law" that "further degrades Americans' faith
in the justice system."
Paul also criticized the controversial private meeting between the former president Bill
Clinton and Attorney General Loretta Lynch that took place just days before the FBI's
announcement regarding possible charges for Clinton.
WASHINGTON-House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) issued the following statement regarding the
recommendation from FBI Director James Comey that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton not
be prosecuted for her "extremely careless" mishandling of classified information:
"While I respect the law enforcement professionals at the FBI, this announcement defies
explanation. No one should be above the law. But based upon the director's own statement, it
appears damage is being done to the rule of law. Declining to prosecute Secretary Clinton for
recklessly mishandling and transmitting national security information will set a terrible
precedent. The findings of this investigation also make clear that Secretary Clinton misled the
American people when she was confronted with her criminal actions.
While we need more information about how the Bureau came to this recommendation, the American
people will reject this troubling pattern of dishonesty and poor judgment."
Fred Lang,
Just underscores that there are 2 justice systems in America today: One for us peons and
another for the rich, powerful and politically connected.
From comments: "Judging by the vast majority of comments, NO ONE has been fooled by the decision.
The massive awakening is in full swing. The people are just waking up and won't be stopped now.
Throughout history once the people opened their eyes to the fraud, the powers that should NOT be was
removed, destroyed or both."
Now, to be really, really clear: 'All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than
others.' ~~ George Orwell, Animal Farm (1945).
Notable quotes:
"... I have not coordinated or reviewed this statement in any way with the Department of Justice or any other part of the government. ..."
"... Our investigation looked at whether there is evidence classified information was improperly stored or transmitted on that personal system, in violation of a federal statute making it a felony to mishandle classified information either intentionally or in a grossly negligent way, or a second statute making it a misdemeanor to knowingly remove classified information from appropriate systems or storage facilities. ..."
"... Consistent with our counterintelligence responsibilities, we have also investigated to determine whether there is evidence of computer intrusion in connection with the personal email server by any foreign power, or other hostile actors. ..."
"... Secretary Clinton used several different servers and administrators of those servers during her four years at the state department, and used numerous mobile devices to view and send email on that personal domain ..."
"... when one of Secretary Clinton's original personal servers was decommissioned in 2013, the email software was removed. ..."
"... 110 emails in 52 email chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received. Eight of those chains contained information that was 'top secret' at the time they were sent; 36 chains contained 'secret' information at the time; and eight contained 'confidential' information, which is the lowest level of classification. Separate from those, about 2,000 additional emails were "up-classified" to make them 'confidential'; the information in those had not been classified at the time the emails were sent. ..."
"... The FBI also discovered several thousand work-related emails that were not in the group of 30,000 that were returned by Secretary Clinton to State in 2014. ..."
"... I should add here that we found no evidence that any of the additional work-related emails were intentionally deleted in an effort to conceal them. Our assessment is that, like many email users, Secretary Clinton periodically deleted emails or emails were purged from the system when devices were changed. ..."
"... The lawyers doing the sorting for Secretary Clinton in 2014 did not individually read the content of all of her emails, as we did for those available to us; instead, they relied on header information and used search terms to try to find all work-related emails among the reportedly more than 60,000 total emails remaining on Secretary Clinton's personal system in 2014. ..."
"... there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information. ..."
"... we also found information that was properly classified as Secret by the US Intelligence Community at the time it was discussed on email (that is, excluding the later "up-classified" emails). ..."
"... None of these emails should have been on any kind of unclassified system, but their presence is especially concerning because all of these emails were housed on unclassified personal servers not even supported by full-time security staff, like those found at departments and agencies of the US government – or even with a commercial service like Gmail. ..."
"... Only a very small number of the emails containing classified information bore markings indicating the presence of classified information. But even if information is not marked "classified" in an email, participants who know or should know that the subject matter is classified are still obligated to protect it. ..."
"... With respect to potential computer intrusion by hostile actors, we did not find direct evidence that Secretary Clinton's personal email domain, in its various configurations since 2009, was successfully hacked. ..."
"... Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case. Prosecutors necessarily weigh a number of factors before bringing charges. There are obvious considerations, like the strength of the evidence, especially regarding intent. Responsible decisions also consider the context of a person's actions, and how similar situations have been handled in the past. ..."
"... To be clear, this is not to suggest that in similar circumstances, a person who engaged in this activity would face no consequences. To the contrary, those individuals are often subject to security or administrative sanctions. But that is not what we are deciding now. ..."
"... As a result, although the Department of Justice makes final decisions on matters like this, we are expressing to Justice our view that no charges are appropriate in this case. ..."
Good morning. I'm here to give you an update on the FBI's investigation of Secretary Clinton's use
of a personal email system during her time as secretary of state.
After a tremendous amount of work over the last year, the
FBI is completing its investigation and referring the case to the Department of Justice for a
prosecutive decision. What I would like to do today is tell you three things: what we did; what we
found; and what we are recommending to the Department of Justice.
This will be an unusual statement in at least a couple ways. First, I am going to include more
detail about our process than I ordinarily would, because I think the American people deserve those
details in a case of intense public interest. Second, I have not coordinated or reviewed this statement
in any way with the Department of Justice or any other part of the government. They do not know what
I am about to say.
I want to start by thanking the FBI employees who did remarkable work in this case. Once you have
a better sense of how much we have done, you will understand why I am so grateful and proud of their
efforts.
So, first, what we have done:
The investigation began as a referral from the Intelligence Community Inspector General in connection
with Secretary Clinton's use of a personal email server during her time as secretary of state. The
referral focused on whether classified information was transmitted on that personal system.
Our investigation looked at whether there is evidence classified information was improperly stored
or transmitted on that personal system, in violation of a federal statute making it a felony to mishandle
classified information either intentionally or in a grossly negligent way, or a second statute making
it a misdemeanor to knowingly remove classified information from appropriate systems or storage facilities.
Consistent with our counterintelligence responsibilities, we have also investigated to determine
whether there is evidence of computer intrusion in connection with the personal email server by any
foreign power, or other hostile actors.
I have so far used the singular term, "email server", in describing the referral that began our
investigation. It turns out to have been more complicated than that. Secretary Clinton used several
different servers and administrators of those servers during her four years at the state department,
and used numerous mobile devices to view and send email on that personal domain. As new servers and
equipment were employed, older servers were taken out of service, stored, and decommissioned in various
ways. Piecing all of that back together – to gain as full an understanding as possible of the ways
in which personal email was used for government work – has been a painstaking undertaking, requiring
thousands of hours of effort.
For example, when one of Secretary Clinton's original personal servers was decommissioned in 2013,
the email software was removed. Doing that didn't remove the email content, but it was like removing
the frame from a huge finished jigsaw puzzle and dumping the pieces on the floor. The effect was
that millions of email fragments end up unsorted in the server's unused-or "slack"-space. We searched
through all of it to see what was there, and what parts of the puzzle could be put back together.
FBI investigators have also read all of the approximately 30,000 emails provided by Secretary
Clinton to the state department in December 2014. Where an email was assessed as possibly containing
classified information, the FBI referred the email to any US government agency that was a likely
"owner" of information in the email, so that agency could make a determination as to whether the
email contained classified information at the time it was sent or received, or whether there was
reason to classify the email now, even if its content was not classified at the time it was sent
(that is the process sometimes referred to as "up-classifying").
From the group of 30,000 emails returned to the state department, 110 emails in 52 email chains
have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were
sent or received. Eight of those chains contained information that was 'top secret' at the time they
were sent; 36 chains contained 'secret' information at the time; and eight contained 'confidential'
information, which is the lowest level of classification. Separate from those, about 2,000 additional
emails were "up-classified" to make them 'confidential'; the information in those had not been classified
at the time the emails were sent.
The FBI also discovered several thousand work-related emails that were not in the group of 30,000
that were returned by Secretary Clinton to State in 2014. We found those additional emails in a variety
of ways. Some had been deleted over the years and we found traces of them on devices that supported
or were connected to the private email domain. Others we found by reviewing the archived government
email accounts of people who had been government employees at the same time as Secretary Clinton,
including high-ranking officials at other agencies, people with whom a secretary of state might naturally
correspond.
This helped us recover work-related emails that were not among the 30,000 produced to State. Still
others we recovered from the laborious review of the millions of email fragments dumped into the
slack space of the server decommissioned in 2013.
With respect to the thousands of emails we found that were not among those produced to State,
agencies have concluded that three of those were classified at the time they were sent or received,
one at the Secret level and two at the 'confidential' level. There were no additional 'top secret'
emails found. Finally, none of those we found have since been "up-classified".
I should add here that we found no evidence that any of the additional work-related emails were
intentionally deleted in an effort to conceal them. Our assessment is that, like many email users,
Secretary Clinton periodically deleted emails or emails were purged from the system when devices
were changed. Because she was not using a government account – or even a commercial account like
Gmail – there was no archiving at all of her emails, so it is not surprising that we discovered emails
that were not on Secretary Clinton's system in 2014, when she produced the 30,000 emails to the state
department.
It could also be that some of the additional work-related emails we recovered were among those
deleted as "personal" by Secretary Clinton's lawyers when they reviewed and sorted her emails for
production in 2014.
The lawyers doing the sorting for Secretary Clinton in 2014 did not individually read the content
of all of her emails, as we did for those available to us; instead, they relied on header information
and used search terms to try to find all work-related emails among the reportedly more than 60,000
total emails remaining on Secretary Clinton's personal system in 2014. It is highly likely their
search terms missed some work-related emails, and that we later found them, for example, in the mailboxes
of other officials or in the slack space of a server.
It is also likely that there are other work-related emails that they did not produce to State
and that we did not find elsewhere, and that are now gone because they deleted all emails they did
not return to State, and the lawyers cleaned their devices in such a way as to preclude complete
forensic recovery.
We have conducted interviews and done technical examination to attempt to understand how that
sorting was done by her attorneys. Although we do not have complete visibility because we are not
able to fully reconstruct the electronic record of that sorting, we believe our investigation has
been sufficient to give us reasonable confidence there was no intentional misconduct in connection
with that sorting effort.
And, of course, in addition to our technical work, we interviewed many people, from those involved
in setting up and maintaining the various iterations of Secretary Clinton's personal server, to staff
members with whom she corresponded on email, to those involved in the email production to State,
and finally, Secretary Clinton herself.
Last, we have done extensive work to understand what indications there might be of compromise
by hostile actors in connection with the personal email operation.
That's what we have done. Now let me tell you what we found:
Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate
laws governing the handling of classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely
careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.
For example, seven email chains concern matters that were classified at the Top Secret/Special
Access Program level when they were sent and received. These chains involved Secretary Clinton both
sending emails about those matters and receiving emails from others about the same matters. There
is evidence to support a conclusion that any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton's position, or
in the position of those government employees with whom she was corresponding about these matters,
should have known that an unclassified system was no place for that conversation. In addition to
this highly sensitive information, we also found information that was properly classified as Secret
by the US Intelligence Community at the time it was discussed on email (that is, excluding the later
"up-classified" emails).
None of these emails should have been on any kind of unclassified system, but their presence is
especially concerning because all of these emails were housed on unclassified personal servers not
even supported by full-time security staff, like those found at departments and agencies of the US
government – or even with a commercial service like Gmail.
Separately, it is important to say something about the marking of classified information. Only
a very small number of the emails containing classified information bore markings indicating the
presence of classified information. But even if information is not marked "classified" in an email,
participants who know or should know that the subject matter is classified are still obligated to
protect it.
While not the focus of our investigation, we also developed evidence that the security culture
of the state department in general, and with respect to use of unclassified email systems in particular,
was generally lacking in the kind of care for classified information found elsewhere in the government.
With respect to potential computer intrusion by hostile actors, we did not find direct evidence
that Secretary Clinton's personal email domain, in its various configurations since 2009, was successfully
hacked. But, given the nature of the system and of the actors potentially involved, we assess that
we would be unlikely to see such direct evidence. We do assess that hostile actors gained access
to the private commercial email accounts of people with whom Secretary Clinton was in regular contact
from her personal account. We also assess that Secretary Clinton's use of a personal email domain
was both known by a large number of people and readily apparent. She also used her personal email
extensively while outside the United States, including sending and receiving work-related emails
in the territory of sophisticated adversaries. Given that combination of factors, we assess it is
possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton's personal email account.
So that's what we found. Finally, with respect to our recommendation to the Department of Justice:
In our system, the prosecutors make the decisions about whether charges are appropriate based
on evidence the FBI has helped collect. Although we don't normally make public our recommendations
to the prosecutors, we frequently make recommendations and engage in productive conversations with
prosecutors about what resolution may be appropriate, given the evidence. In this case, given the
importance of the matter, I think unusual transparency is in order.
Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified
information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case. Prosecutors necessarily
weigh a number of factors before bringing charges. There are obvious considerations, like the strength
of the evidence, especially regarding intent. Responsible decisions also consider the context of
a person's actions, and how similar situations have been handled in the past.
In looking back at our investigations into mishandling or removal of classified information, we
cannot find a case that would support bringing criminal charges on these facts. All the cases prosecuted
involved some combination of: clearly intentional and willful mishandling of classified information;
or vast quantities of materials exposed in such a way as to support an inference of intentional misconduct;
or indications of disloyalty to the United States; or efforts to obstruct justice. We do not see
those things here.
To be clear, this is not to suggest that in similar circumstances, a person who engaged in this
activity would face no consequences. To the contrary, those individuals are often subject to security
or administrative sanctions. But that is not what we are deciding now.
As a result, although the Department of Justice makes final decisions on matters like this, we
are expressing to Justice our view that no charges are appropriate in this case.
I know there will be intense public debate in the wake of this recommendation, as there was throughout
this investigation. What I can assure the American people is that this investigation was done competently,
honestly, and independently. No outside influence of any kind was brought to bear.
I know there were many opinions expressed by people who were not part of the investigation – including
people in government – but none of that mattered to us. Opinions are irrelevant, and they were all
uninformed by insight into our investigation, because we did the investigation the right way. Only
facts matter, and the FBI found them here in an entirely apolitical and professional way. I couldn't
be prouder to be part of this organization.
"... That assumption, he says, may stem from the sense of status that comes from being in academe. The idea that "if you're in this room, you're an elite - so you're not going to respond to things like trade policy and illegal immigration because these things largely don't affect you." ..."
"... The academics who support Mr. Trump acknowledge that many of his ideas are dangerous. Outweighing that concern is the conviction that something has to change, and that there's no better alternative than a Trump presidency. ..."
"... Compounding their support for the billionaire is a lack of other options. Mr. Van Horn says he would be open to voting for a Democrat, but he thinks the proposals of the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders are unrealistic. As for Hillary Clinton, he neither likes her nor trusts her. (When confronted with the fact that he also says he neither likes nor trusts Mr. Trump, Mr. Van Horn says the former secretary of state is more likely to be beholden to a "very narrow set of society.") ..."
"... But two and a half years into the program, he has found that some academics can be even more closed-minded than people he grew up with. "I was this very liberal person where I was from, and then I come out here and they're all very, very liberal, and they're all very, very rigid." ..."
"... And in political science, where this year's election is particularly relevant, the popular treatment of the Trump candidacy as a joke has made Mr. Van Horn wonder about the costs to scholarship: "How can you do objective scholarly research? You don't even treat American voters as people who are qualified to cast a ballot." ..."
"... Mr. Van Horn still loves studying political science, and he still wants to be a professor. But he watches what he says, and he's more cynical about higher education. "It's a very closed community," he says. "It's like the smallest town in the world." ..."
Conventional wisdom says poorly educated voters have fueled Mr. Trump's improbable rise. "I love
the poorly educated,"
he proclaimed after winning Nevada's primary last month (though he also boasted of winning the
votes of the well educated). "The single best predictor of Trump support in the GOP primary is the
absence of a college degree,"
wrote Derek Thompson in
The Atlantic this month.
In academe - where professionals can have three, four, five degrees - Trump supporters may be
hard to find. But they're out there.
Like many people, Joseph Van Horn first treated Mr. Trump's candidacy as a joke. But as more-traditional
candidates failed to outpace the billionaire, Mr. Van Horn, a Ph.D. student in political science
at the University of California at Los Angeles, listened more closely.
What he heard excited him - among other things, that Mr. Trump was willing to talk about narrow
policy proposals rather than harp on conservative social issues. That willingness, coupled with his
lack of attachment to the political establishment, made Mr. Van Horn think, "When's the last time
I heard a candidate and thought, 'That could really happen'?"
Mr. Van Horn doesn't like Donald Trump personally. And he doesn't find him all that trustworthy.
"I wouldn't give him the key to my apartment," he says. But he's excited about the Trump movement,
particularly how it has spurred higher turnout and more engagement with the election.
When he brings up that sense of excitement in an academic setting, however, he gets shut down,
he says. "I was kind of shocked at how staunchly anti-Trump people are," he says. Many of his peers
are willing to issue a blanket condemnation of Mr. Trump's candidacy as racist and nativist, Mr.
Van Horn says, but "shouting 'racists' and 'bigots' and 'he's Hitler' is just not productive."
"The reaction of everyone in the audience was, you know, chuckling, the implication being that no
one in this room could possibly take Trump seriously."
It's not as if those terms are not warranted at times. Mr. Trump has been shocking and crass,
suggesting, for example, that Mexican immigrants are responsible for widespread rape. "He's certainly
playing to people's prejudices," Mr. Van Horn says, adding that he doesn't share those prejudices.
He hates the proposal to bar Muslims from entering the country ("I think it's really shameful that
we have Muslims in the armed forces that have to listen to this stuff") but thinks such extreme proposals
are unlikely to become policy.
Sharp rhetoric aside, he says, shouldn't a political-science department be willing to take seriously
the merits of a formidable political movement? Mr. Van Horn says the popular dismissal of the Trump
campaign has been disheartening and reflective of a broader bias against right-leaning ideas.
Linda Grochowalski, a Trump supporter who teaches English part time at Assumption College and
Quinsigamond Community College, in Worcester, Mass., encountered that bias once upon moving into
a new office. A previous occupant's poster still hung on the back of the door.
"It essentially said, You have to be pretty stupid to vote for a Republican," she says. "I guess
the writing's on the wall, or the door."
That bias manifests itself in large groups, too. Mr. Calautti recalls attending a colloquium on
civility in public discourse at which the speaker used as an example of uncivil discourse - surprise!
- Mr. Trump's performance in the Republican debates. "The reaction of everyone in the audience was,
you know, chuckling," he says, "the implication being that no one in this room could possibly take
Trump seriously."
That assumption, he says, may stem from the sense of status that comes from being in academe.
The idea that "if you're in this room, you're an elite - so you're not going to respond to things
like trade policy and illegal immigration because these things largely don't affect you."
Gina Marcello, an assistant professor of communication at Georgian Court University, in New Jersey,
says she hasn't often heard the election come up as a topic of conversation on her campus. "If it
does come up," she says, "it's dismissive of Donald Trump." The subtext, which helps prevent her
from talking politics with her colleagues, comes through loud and clear: "You'd have to be out of
your mind to support a Trump candidacy."
Why Trump?
The academics who support Mr. Trump acknowledge that many of his ideas are dangerous. Outweighing
that concern is the conviction that something has to change, and that there's no better alternative
than a Trump presidency.
Ms. Grochowalski says eight years of the Obama administration left her with $8,000 in medical
bills. The Affordable Care Act, she says, forced her and her husband off their preferred health-insurance
plan. And she's been disturbed by President Obama's use of executive orders to bypass Congress.
Ms. Grochowalski, who worked as a marketing and communications director in the private sector,
acknowledges that Mr. Trump lacks experience in public office. But she trusts that he would surround
himself with smart people because of his business experience.
His lack of political experience could be an asset, Ms. Marcello says, enabling him to appoint
the "very best people" to advise him instead of bestowing political patronage.
Compounding their support for the billionaire is a lack of other options. Mr. Van Horn says he
would be open to voting for a Democrat, but he thinks the proposals of the Vermont senator Bernie
Sanders are unrealistic. As for Hillary Clinton, he neither likes her nor trusts her. (When confronted
with the fact that he also says he neither likes nor trusts Mr. Trump, Mr. Van Horn says the former
secretary of state is more likely to be beholden to a "very narrow set of society.")
As for those of Mr. Trump's ideas that Ms. Grochowalski calls "pretty outrageous," legal and constitutional
checks are there to stymie any truly devastating plans, she says. "He probably can't do 30 percent
of them, even if he wanted to."
'The Smallest Town'
For Mr. Van Horn, academe's reaction to the Trump candidacy has been a particularly disappointing
sign of a larger problem. The 29-year-old grew up in Louisville, Ky., which he calls a "small city in the South." He enrolled
in the University of Kentucky when he was 18, but struggled and dropped out after two years. He then became an electrician, but after a few years of doing that, he wasn't satisfied. "You
can always make a lot of money as an electrician, but learning about the world is something different,"
he says.
"I was this very liberal person where I was from, and then I come out here and they're all very,
very liberal, and they're all very, very rigid."
So he returned to school, finishing his undergraduate education at Indiana University-Southeast.
He then applied to the political-science program at UCLA. He was over the moon about getting to follow
his passion for a living - and to broaden his horizons beyond what his upbringing had restricted
him to.
But two and a half years into the program, he has found that some academics can be even more closed-minded
than people he grew up with. "I was this very liberal person where I was from, and then I come out
here and they're all very, very liberal, and they're all very, very rigid."
And in political science, where this year's election is particularly relevant, the popular treatment
of the Trump candidacy as a joke has made Mr. Van Horn wonder about the costs to scholarship: "How
can you do objective scholarly research? You don't even treat American voters as people who are qualified
to cast a ballot."
Mr. Van Horn still loves studying political science, and he still wants to be a professor. But
he watches what he says, and he's more cynical about higher education. "It's a very closed community," he says. "It's like the smallest town in the world."
"... The Trumps: Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate, ..."
"... To the extent that Mr. Trump found inspiration in the classroom, Ms. Blair continues, it was in those courses with the clearest connections to building and real estate. "He said the only thing he was interested in was geometry," Ms. Blair says. "It had something to do with buildings, it had something to do with spaces. That interested him." ..."
"... "Perhaps the most important thing I learned at Wharton was not to be overly impressed by academic credentials," Mr. Trump wrote in The Art of the Deal. ..."
"... On their first day of classes together, when a professor asked the students why they had come to Wharton, Mr. Calomaris recalls Mr. Trump saying, "I'm going to be the next Bill Zeckendorf," referencing a prominent New York City developer, "but I'm going to be better." ..."
"... From the beginning, it was clear to Mr. Trump's classmates that Mr. Trump's relationship with Penn would be a transactional one; he would learn what he thought he needed to learn, and skim the rest. ..."
"... Mr. Trump "never prepared for study group," says Mr. Calomaris, a restaurant owner and consultant, who says he is considering a vote for Mr. Trump. "He was not an intellectual, and you see that now. He doesn't prepare for speeches. He doesn't prepare himself. He doesn't have a battle plan. But he certainly knows what he wants to do. He wanted to win the nomination and now the presidency." ..."
"... "He was a real-estate expert; he really was," recalls Mr. Sachs, who has worked in finance and consulting. "He would talk about major developers around the country. He knew the history and properties where I was from, which was Chicago. I was very amazed with his command of the subject and his interest in it. He knew the history of high-rise developers like a textbook." ..."
"... "because he didn't care a whit about the technicalities of the real-estate business, just as today he doesn't care about the technicalities of virtually anything. He's a big-picture person." ..."
By Donald J. Trump's own account, he saw higher education as a means to an end. Fordham University
and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where Mr. Trump transferred to complete
a bachelor's degree in economics, were essentially credential factories. To become the real-estate
mogul he envisioned, he needed these institutions - but in the same dispassionate way that a mechanic,
say, needs a socket wrench.
"In my opinion, that degree doesn't prove very much, but a lot of people I do business with take
it very seriously, and it's considered very prestigious," Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential
nominee, wrote in his book The Art of the Deal. "So all things considered, I'm glad I went to Wharton."
... ... ...
In her book, The Trumps: Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate,
Ms. Blair stops short of saying that Donald Trump owed his Penn admission to family connections.
But she reports that, before Mr. Trump's transfer, he interviewed with a "friendly Wharton admissions
officer" who was a high-school classmate of Mr. Trump's older brother, Freddy.
"He acknowledged he wasn't much of a student," Ms. Blair, an adjunct professor in Columbia University's
Graduate School of Journalism, said in a recent interview. "He wasn't interested in school. Let me
be clear: He never said he was a poor student. He never said he was poor at anything."
To the extent that Mr. Trump found inspiration in the classroom, Ms. Blair continues, it was
in those courses with the clearest connections to building and real estate. "He said the only thing
he was interested in was geometry," Ms. Blair says. "It had something to do with buildings, it had
something to do with spaces. That interested him."
Mr. Trump, who did not respond to interview requests, has said he was unfazed by the supposedly
elite crowd he found at Penn.
"Perhaps the most important thing I learned at Wharton was not to be overly impressed by academic
credentials," Mr. Trump wrote in The Art of the Deal. "It didn't take me long to realize
that there was nothing particularly awesome or exceptional about my classmates, and that I could
compete with them just fine."
One of those classmates was Louis J. Calomaris, who was among about a half-dozen students, along
with Mr. Trump, in the real-estate concentration of Wharton's business program. Mr. Calomaris remembers
well the first time he laid eyes on Mr. Trump, who had a "big blond mop of hair" and an ego to match.
On their first day of classes together, when a professor asked the students why they had come
to Wharton, Mr. Calomaris recalls Mr. Trump saying, "I'm going to be the next Bill Zeckendorf," referencing
a prominent New York City developer, "but I'm going to be better."
The professor peered over his horn-rimmed glasses and asked for the name of this cocksure young
man. "And that was our introduction to Donald Trump," Mr. Calomaris says.
From the beginning, it was clear to Mr. Trump's classmates that Mr. Trump's relationship with
Penn would be a transactional one; he would learn what he thought he needed to learn, and skim the
rest.
Wharton's small group of real-estate majors met regularly for a study group, Mr. Calomaris says,
often at the home of Joseph M. Cohen, a future television-sports impresario who lived in Society
Hill Towers, a high-rise condominium.
"That degree doesn't prove very much, but ... it's considered very prestigious."
Mr. Trump "never prepared for study group," says Mr. Calomaris, a restaurant owner and consultant,
who says he is considering a vote for Mr. Trump. "He was not an intellectual, and you see that now.
He doesn't prepare for speeches. He doesn't prepare himself. He doesn't have a battle plan. But he
certainly knows what he wants to do. He wanted to win the nomination and now the presidency."
Another of Mr. Trump's classmates, Edward M. Sachs Jr., recalls the future candidate for his uncommon
knowledge of developers across the nation.
"He was a real-estate expert; he really was," recalls Mr. Sachs, who has worked in finance
and consulting. "He would talk about major developers around the country. He knew the history and
properties where I was from, which was Chicago. I was very amazed with his command of the subject
and his interest in it. He knew the history of high-rise developers like a textbook."
Mr. Sachs was unaware that Mr. Trump's father was a wealthy real-estate developer. The former
classmate remembers Mr. Trump as a low-key guy, who liked to break away on Fridays for fried-oyster
sandwiches at Howard Johnson's.
"Even though he was from New York, you could have sold him in some small town in Indiana," Mr.
Sachs says. "He had a common touch at that time."
... .. ...
There was much in college that did not seem to interest Mr. Trump, but he did latch
on to a favorite lecture of one of Wharton's professors, who argued that the essence
of good business was to understand the desires and even the psychologies of those on
the other side of the negotiating table. Are they young and aggressive? Are they
conservative and more interested in steady, predictable returns? This, the professor
argued, was often more important than statistical analysis or actuarial appraisal.
"Trump certainly took that to heart," Mr. Calomaris says, "because he didn't care a
whit about the technicalities of the real-estate business, just as today he doesn't
care about the technicalities of virtually anything. He's a big-picture person."
On the campaign trail, Mr. Calomaris continues, "you're seeing an extension of
what was there when he was 19 or 20 years old. It's a very accurate picture. It's
Trump."
"... Then there is Hillary Clinton, who will be this year's nominee. Few Democrats have more consistently favored the use of military force. She voted for the Iraq War. As secretary of state, she urged President Obama to escalate the war in Afghanistan. ..."
"... New York Times correspondent Mark Landler, author of the new book Alter Egos: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and the Twilight Struggle Over American Power, told me her aides have told him she favored shipping lethal defensive military equipment to the government of Ukraine after the Russian invasion, something Obama rejected. ..."
"... She pushed for U.S. intervention in Libya. She proposed similar action in Syria. She has recounted her advice to her husband in dealing with Serbia in 1999: "I urged him to bomb. ..."
"... Clinton thinks "that American intervention does more good than harm, and that the writ of the United States properly reaches, as George W. Bush once declared, into 'any dark corner of the world.'" ..."
"... Robert Gates, who was defense secretary under Obama, likes and admires Clinton. But when she pressed Obama to bomb Moammar Gadhafi's forces-which Landler says he probably would not have done otherwise-Gates resisted, arguing that Libya was not a vital U.S. interest and that there was no telling what would happen next. "In meetings, I would ask, 'Can I just finish the two wars we're already in before you go looking for new ones?'" he wrote later. ..."
"... Clinton has gotten endless criticism for her handling of the 2012 attacks on a U.S. facility in Benghazi. She deserves more, but has gotten far less, for recommending an intervention that led to that attack and left Libya in violent turmoil that continues today. ..."
"... The question is why a child of the 1960s, whose husband strenuously avoided being drafted for the Vietnam War, would grow so fond of military power. Obama needs a compelling reason to use force. Clinton needs a compelling reason not to. ..."
"... Obama made the mistake of intervening in Libya, but in a recent interview with The Atlantic, he admitted, "It didn't work," and "Libya is a mess." Clinton, however, has never expressed second thoughts. During his recent visit to Chicago, I asked Landler about her ability to confront the possibility she was wrong. ..."
"... In that instance, she apparently didn't learn from our failed military intervention. If she becomes president, I'm guessing, she'll get another chance. ..."
In an era of endless military conflict, anti-war sentiment abides among Democrats. In 2004, their
presidential nomination went to John Kerry, who was strongly critical of George W. Bush's handling
of the war in Iraq. In 2008, they chose Barack Obama, largely because he had opposed that war. This
year, 12 million people cast ballots for Bernie Sanders, who voted against it.
According to Gallup, 68 percent of Democrats think the Iraq War was a mistake-compared with just
31 percent of Republicans. Two in three reject the use of ground combat troops against Islamic State.
Then there is Hillary Clinton, who will be this year's nominee. Few Democrats have more consistently
favored the use of military force. She voted for the Iraq War. As secretary of state, she urged President
Obama to escalate the war in Afghanistan.
New York Times correspondent Mark Landler, author of the new book Alter Egos: Hillary Clinton,
Barack Obama, and the Twilight Struggle Over American Power, told me her aides have told him she
favored shipping lethal defensive military equipment to the government of Ukraine after the Russian
invasion, something Obama rejected.
She pushed for U.S. intervention in Libya. She proposed similar action in Syria. She has recounted
her advice to her husband in dealing with Serbia in 1999: "I urged him to bomb."
Most Democrats, particularly Obama, have learned to be wary of entangling the United States in
wars of choice. But not Clinton. Despite the disaster in Iraq, the failure in Afghanistan and the
chaos in Libya, she remains a hawk at heart.
Landler, who covered Obama and Clinton for The New York Times, sees a clear difference between
her approach to foreign policy and that of the president she served. Obama believes "the United States
resorts too readily to military force to defend its interests," he writes. Clinton thinks "that
American intervention does more good than harm, and that the writ of the United States properly reaches,
as George W. Bush once declared, into 'any dark corner of the world.'"
Robert Gates, who was defense secretary under Obama, likes and admires Clinton. But when she
pressed Obama to bomb Moammar Gadhafi's forces-which Landler says he probably would not have done
otherwise-Gates resisted, arguing that Libya was not a vital U.S. interest and that there was no
telling what would happen next. "In meetings, I would ask, 'Can I just finish the two wars we're
already in before you go looking for new ones?'" he wrote later.
Clinton has gotten endless criticism for her handling of the 2012 attacks on a U.S. facility
in Benghazi. She deserves more, but has gotten far less, for recommending an intervention that led
to that attack and left Libya in violent turmoil that continues today.
The question is why a child of the 1960s, whose husband strenuously avoided being drafted
for the Vietnam War, would grow so fond of military power. Obama needs a compelling reason to use
force. Clinton needs a compelling reason not to.
Landler attributes this bias to several factors, including her conservative Midwestern upbringing,
her rapport with generals and, in the words of one staffer, "a textbook view of American exceptionalism."
Other reasons come to mind. She saw Democratic senators politically damaged by voting against
the 1991 war against Iraq, and she was not about to take the risk of opposing the next one. As a
woman, she doubtless has felt the need to demonstrate that she can be as tough-as that term is typically
defined in American politics-as any male leader.
Obama made the mistake of intervening in Libya, but in a recent interview with The Atlantic,
he admitted, "It didn't work," and "Libya is a mess." Clinton, however, has never expressed second
thoughts. During his recent visit to Chicago, I asked Landler about her ability to confront the possibility
she was wrong.
"I don't find the same evidence of a learning curve with her," he said. "I would have liked to
see a little more introspection from her on that, because I think that's the key case where she led
the charge, it didn't go the way they hoped it would and there are some really important lessons
to be drawn."
In that instance, she apparently didn't learn from our failed military intervention. If she
becomes president, I'm guessing, she'll get another chance.
"... The truth is that the pretext for military intervention was almost as thin in Yugoslavia as it was in Libya. ..."
"... SANCTIONS HAVE been the favorite smart weapon of both Clintons. Iraq was the target country for Bill in the 1990s, as Iran would be for Hillary starting in 2009. The point of sanctions is to inflict pain, in response to which (it is hoped) the people will blame their government. The point is therefore also to create the conditions for regime change. Neither of the Clintons seems to have absorbed a central lesson of the Amnesty International Report on Cuba in 1975–76: that the "persistence of fear, real or imagined, of counterrevolutionary conspiracies" bore the primary responsibility for "the early [Cuban] excesses in the treatment of political prisoners"; and that "the removal of that fear has been largely responsible for the improvements in conditions." Both Clintons have felt pressed to perform supererogatory works to show that liberals can be tough. For Mrs. Clinton, there is the additional need-from self-demand as much as external pressure-to prove that a female leader can be tougher than her male counterpart. ..."
"... Those sentences are notable for a historical omission and a non sequitur. The NATO expansion that began under George H. W. Bush, was enhanced in the presidency of Bill Clinton and continued under George W. Bush and Obama, was not a widely appreciated moderate policy, as Mrs. Clinton implies. The policy was subject to skeptical challenge from the first, and one of its sharpest critics was George F. Kennan. (He described it, coincidentally, as "a tragic mistake.") Leaving aside the abridgment of history, there is a disturbing logical jump in Clinton's dismissal of the challenge regarding NATO. The gratitude expressed by newly admitted member states does nothing at all to "refute" the fact that Vladimir Putin, along with many Western diplomats, thought the post–Cold War expansion of a Cold War entity was a hostile policy directed provocatively against Russia in its own backyard. ..."
"... Her sentences about NATO could have been written by Tony Blair; and this explains why at least three neoconservatives-Eliot A. Cohen, Max Boot and Robert Kagan, in ascending order of enthusiasm-have indicated that a Clinton presidency would be agreeable to them. She is a reliable option for them. ..."
"... Her comparison of Putin to Hitler in March 2014 and her likening of Crimean Russians to Sudeten Germans were reminiscent, too, of the specter of Munich evoked by an earlier secretary of state, Dean Rusk, to defend the escalation of the Vietnam War in 1965-the kind of tragic mistake that Hillary Clinton seems prepared to repeat for the most laudable of humanitarian reasons. ..."
An incorrigible belief in the purity of one's motives is among the most dangerous endowments a
politician can possess.
... ... ...
Clinton gave two pages to the war in her memoir Living History. She sympathized there with the burden of responsibility borne by
President Johnson for "a war he'd inherited," which turned out to be "a tragic mistake." Johnson
is her focus: the man of power who rode a tiger he could not dismount. On a second reading, "mistake"
may seem too light a word to characterize a war that destroyed an agrarian culture forever and killed
between one and three million Vietnamese. "Mistake" is also the word that Hillary Clinton has favored
in answering questions about her vote for the Iraq War.
Like every Democrat who has run for
president since 1960, Clinton sometimes talks as if she wished foreign policy would go away. A president's
most important responsibility, she agrees, is to strengthen the bonds of neighborhood and community
at home, to assure a decent livelihood for working Americans and an efficient system of benefits
for all. Yet her four years as secretary of state-chronicled in a second volume of memoirs,
Hard Choices-have licensed her
to speak with the authority of a veteran in the world of nations. War and diplomacy, as that book
aimed to show, have become an invaluable adjunct to her skill set. Clinton would want us to count
as well a third tool besides war and diplomacy. She calls it (after a coinage by Joseph Nye) "smart
power." Smart power, for her, denotes a kind of pressure that may augment the force of arms and the
persuasive work of diplomacy. It draws on the network of civil society, NGOs, projects for democracy
promotion and managed operations of social media, by which the United States over the past quarter
of a century has sought to weaken the authority of designated enemies and to increase leverage on
presumptive or potential friends. Smart power is supposed to widen the prospects of liberal society
and assist the spread of human rights. Yet the term itself creates a puzzle. Hillary Clinton's
successful advocacy of violent regime change in Libya and her continuing call to support armed insurgents
against the Assad government in Syria have been arguments for war, but arguments that claim a special
exemption. For these wars-both the one we led and the one we should have led-were "humanitarian wars."
This last phrase Clinton has avoided using, just as she has avoided explaining her commitment to
the internationalist program known as "Responsibility to Protect," with its broad definition of genocide
and multiple triggers for legitimate intervention. Instead, in a Democratic primary debate in October
2015, she chose to characterize the Libya war as "smart power at its best."
The NATO action to overthrow Muammar el-Qaddafi, in which Clinton played so decisive a role,
has turned out to be a catastrophe with strong resemblances to Iraq-a catastrophe smaller in degree
but hardly less consequential in its ramifications, from North Africa to the Middle East to southern
Europe. The casus belli was the hyperbolic threat by Qaddafi to annihilate a rebel force in Benghazi.
His vow to hunt down the rebels "like rats" door to door could be taken to mean a collective punishment
of inhabitants of the city, but Qaddafi had marched from the west to the east of Libya, in command
of an overwhelming force, without the occurrence of any such massacre, and the Pentagon and U.S.
intelligence assigned low credibility to the threat. Clinton took more seriously an alarmist reading
of Qaddafi by Bernard-Henri Lévy, Nicolas Sarkozy, David Cameron, Susan Rice and Samantha Power,
and chose to interpret his threat as a harbinger of "genocide."
Landler, in his book Alter Egos on the Clinton-Obama relationship, joins the consensus
that has lately emerged from the reporting of Patrick Cockburn, Anne Barnard and other journalists
on the ground. "Libya," Landler writes, "has descended into a state of Mad Max–like anarchy";
the country is now "a seedbed for militancy that has spread west and south across Africa"; it "has
become the most important Islamic State stronghold outside Syria and Iraq"; "it sends waves of desperate
migrants across the Mediterranean, where they drown in capsized vessels within sight of Europe."
Clinton's most recent comments, however, leave no doubt that she continues to believe in the healing
virtue of smart power. The belief appears to be genuine and not tactical.
FOLLOW HER definition a little further and a host of perplexities arise. Cyber war could presumably
be justified as a use of smart power, on the Clinton model, since it damages the offensive capabilities
of a hostile power in an apparently bloodless way. Shall we therefore conclude that the deployment
of the Stuxnet worm against Iran's nuclear program was an achievement of smart power? Or consider
a related use that would disrupt the flow of water or electricity in a city of three million persons
controlled by a government hostile to the United States-an action aimed at stirring discontents to
spur an insurrection. Could that be called smart power? We approach a region in which terminological
ingenuity may skirt the edge of sophistry; yet this is the rhetorical limbo in which a good deal
of U.S. policy is conceived and executed.
Clinton also plainly has in view the civil associations that we subsidize abroad, and the democracy-promotion
groups, funded indirectly through USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy, Freedom House and
other organizations. The nonviolent protests that turned bloody in Tahrir Square in Cairo, and in
the Maidan in Kiev, received indications of American support by means both avowed and unavowed-a
fact acknowledged by Victoria Nuland (assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs)
when in December 2013 she said that more than $5 billion had been spent on democracy promotion in
Ukraine since 1992. If the story of the Syrian Civil War is ever fully told, we are likely to discover
that the early "liberal" or "moderate" rebels were encouraged in their misreading of U.S. intentions
through social-media messaging approved by forces within the U.S. government.
In Ideal Illusions-a study
of the history of NGOs, the international culture of rights and U.S. foreign policy-James Peck noticed
how the responsibilities of the caretakers of human rights had expanded after the 1970s "from prisoners
of conscience to the rights of noncombatants to democratization to humanitarian intervention." It
is the last of these elements that completes the R2P package; and Hillary Clinton is among its warmest
partisans. The Western powers have a moral obligation to intervene, she believes, especially when
that means guarding the rights of women and assuring the welfare of the neediest children. Her mistakes
in the cause have been not tragic like President Johnson's in Vietnam but, as she sees them, small,
incidental and already too harshly judged. One ought to err on the side of action, of intervention.
And military intervention in this regard bears a likeness to the "community intervention" that may
save the life of a child in an abusive family.
The bombing, invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 were, among other things, an experiment to
prove the neoconservative strategy of "force projection." The experiment did not work out as planned.
By contrast, the test for liberal interventionists was Kosovo, and popular memory has abetted the
legend that Kosovo was a success. Thus Anne-Marie Slaughter was able to
write in a tweet
regarding the Munich Security Conference of February 2014: "Contrast b/w Serb-Kosovo panel this morning
& ME panel now at #msc50 so striking; in Balkans US was willing to ACT w/ diplomacy AND force." Recall
that, in order to create the nation of Kosovo, NATO acted against the nation of Yugoslavia with smart
power whose leading articulation was seventy-seven days of bombing. The satisfied pronouncements
on Kosovo and Libya that emanate from liberal interventionists show a striking continuity. As a director
of policy planning in Clinton's State Department, Slaughter had written to her boss three days after
the start of the NATO bombing of Libya: "I have NEVER been prouder of having worked for you."
The truth is that the pretext for military intervention was almost as thin in Yugoslavia as
it was in Libya. There, too, genocide was said to be in progress-the slaughter of tens of thousands
of ethnic Albanians-but the reports were chimerical. In
First Do No Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and
the Destruction of Yugoslavia, David Gibbs concluded that approximately two thousand
had been killed before the NATO bombing; whereas, during the bombing itself and in retaliation for
it, Serbian security forces killed approximately ten thousand. Given the status of the episode in
liberal mythology, the treatment of Kosovo in Living History is oddly minimal: less than a
paragraph, all told, scattered over several chapters. Living History was published in 2003;
and it seems possible that Clinton had an inkling of the mob violence that would break out in March
2004 in the nationwide pogrom against the Serbs of Kosovo-violence that would lead in early 2016
to the construction of tent cities in the capital, Pristina, and the firing of tear gas canisters
in parliament to protest the abridgment of the political rights of the remaining ethnic minority.
The aftermath of the Kosovo intervention has recently entered a new chapter. "How
Kosovo Was Turned Into Fertile Ground for ISIS" was the astute headline of a New York Times
story by Carlotta Gall, on May 21, 2016. Gall's opening sentence offers a symptomatic tableau:
"Every Friday, just yards from a statue of Bill Clinton with arm aloft in a cheery wave, hundreds
of young bearded men make a show of kneeling to pray on the sidewalk outside an impoverished mosque
in a former furniture store."
SANCTIONS HAVE been the favorite smart weapon of both Clintons. Iraq was the target country
for Bill in the 1990s, as Iran would be for Hillary starting in 2009. The point of sanctions is to
inflict pain, in response to which (it is hoped) the people will blame their government. The point
is therefore also to create the conditions for regime change. Neither of the Clintons seems to have
absorbed a central lesson of the Amnesty International Report on Cuba in 1975–76: that the "persistence
of fear, real or imagined, of counterrevolutionary conspiracies" bore the primary responsibility
for "the early [Cuban] excesses in the treatment of political prisoners"; and that "the removal of
that fear has been largely responsible for the improvements in conditions." Both Clintons have felt
pressed to perform supererogatory works to show that liberals can be tough. For Mrs. Clinton, there
is the additional need-from self-demand as much as external pressure-to prove that a female leader
can be tougher than her male counterpart.
Landler's account suggests that neither the Iran nuclear deal nor the restoration of diplomatic
relations with Cuba would have been likely to occur in a Hillary Clinton presidency. When President
Obama
announced the thaw with Cuba in December 2014, he said that the United States "wants to be a
partner in making the lives of ordinary Cubans a little bit easier, more free, more prosperous."
Clinton, by contrast, warned that the Cuban regime should not mistake the gesture for a relaxation
of hostility; and
on a visit to Miami in July 2015, she threw in a characteristic warning and proviso: "Engagement
is not a gift to the Castros. It's a threat to the Castros." She thereby subverted the meaning of
Obama's policy while ostensibly supporting the measure itself.
"Superpowers
Don't Get to Retire" was the title and message of a New Republic essay by Robert Kagan,
published in May 2014, about the time it became clear that President Obama would not be confronting
Russia over its annexation of Crimea and would disappoint the neoconservative appetite for regime
change in Syria. Writing in Hard Choices of the eastward expansion of NATO, Clinton concurred:
"In the wake of Russia's illegal annexation of Crimea in early 2014, some have argued that
NATO expansion either caused or exacerbated Russia's aggression. I disagree with that argument,
but the most convincing voices refuting it are those European leaders and people who express their
gratitude for NATO membership."
Those sentences are notable for a historical omission and a non sequitur. The NATO expansion
that began under George H. W. Bush, was enhanced in the presidency of Bill Clinton and continued
under George W. Bush and Obama, was not a widely appreciated moderate policy, as Mrs. Clinton implies.
The policy was subject to skeptical challenge from the first, and one of its sharpest critics was
George F. Kennan. (He described it, coincidentally, as "a tragic mistake.") Leaving aside the abridgment
of history, there is a disturbing logical jump in Clinton's dismissal of the challenge regarding
NATO. The gratitude expressed by newly admitted member states does nothing at all to "refute" the
fact that Vladimir Putin, along with many Western diplomats, thought the post–Cold War expansion
of a Cold War entity was a hostile policy directed provocatively against Russia in its own backyard.
It would do no harm to her persuasiveness if Clinton admitted a degree of truth in the case made
by her opponents, whether on the Libya war, the advisability of repeating that experiment in Syria,
or the innocent design of propagating democracy that drove the expansion of NATO. An incorrigible
belief in the purity of one's motives is among the most dangerous endowments a politician can possess.
Her sentences about NATO could have been written by Tony Blair; and this explains why at least
three neoconservatives-Eliot A. Cohen, Max Boot and Robert Kagan, in ascending order of enthusiasm-have
indicated that a Clinton presidency would be agreeable to them. She is a reliable option for them.
Her comparison of Putin to Hitler in March 2014 and her likening of Crimean Russians to Sudeten
Germans were reminiscent, too, of the specter of Munich evoked by an earlier secretary of state,
Dean Rusk, to defend the escalation of the Vietnam War in 1965-the kind of tragic mistake that Hillary
Clinton seems prepared to repeat for the most laudable of humanitarian reasons.
"... "Sanders is not just a 'lesser evil'. His proposals and policies are good In addition, Sanders seeks to change the current electoral process based on money coming from corporations, political action committees and wealthy individuals. Changing this system is the first step...." ..."
"... The November election will be a referendum on the neolibcon establishment in the U.S. as much as the Brexit vote was for the EU. The Brexit vote showed that people are so fed up that they aren't listening to establishment fear-mongering. ..."
"... No matter how Democratic Party loyalists try to spin it, the blame for a Trump win will fall on the corrupt Democratic Party establishment. It is no accident that the vast majority of Super-delegates have steadfastly stood by Hillary, warts and all. ..."
"... Bernie the sheepdog has failed his movement but the Greens and true progressives will continue. ..."
"... It says a great deal about both Warren and the Democratic Party, in which she is the most high-profile "left" politician, that she never endorsed Bernie and has now enthusiastically endorsed Hillary. It would not be a stretch to say that had Warren endorsed and campaigned for Sanders, it could well have been the difference needed to defeat Clinton in the primary. But she did not. ..."
"... Because of course the problem is much larger than just Warren, Clinton, or Debbie Wasserman Schultz. At the heart of the matter is a political party that is thoroughly undemocratic and corrupt to its very core – one that answers to Wall Street, not working people. It's the second most pro-capitalist party in the world, after the Republican Party. ..."
"... Yes it is the Washington Post, but the point stands: it is a strange place for a 'revolutionary' to deliver his message. Unless that message is one of capitulation (it is) . ..."
Seems you mean the Washington Post, not the WSJ.
Alternet seems to like it.
"What do we want? We want to end the rapid movement that we are currently experiencing toward
oligarchic control of our economic and political life," Sanders concluded. "As Lincoln put it
at Gettysburg, we want a government of the people, by the people and for the people. That is what
we want, and that is what we will continue fighting for."
rufus magister | Jun 24, 2016 8:02:34 AM |
86 rufus magister | Jun 25, 2016 9:11:21 AM |
94
This post at
Countepunch takes on the "dog" analogy, arguing that "Sanders is not just a 'lesser evil'.
His proposals and policies are good In addition, Sanders seeks to change the current electoral
process based on money coming from corporations, political action committees and wealthy individuals.
Changing this system is the first step...."
There are any number of arguments that Sanders has changed and will continue to change the
political dyanmics. More and in a different direction might be nice. But after decades of neo-liberal
assaults on the working class, let's not have the best be the enemy of the good.
Sanders' meteoric rise is evidence that unabashed progressive politics is an effective antidote
to the far-right xenophobia on the rise across the developed world. "Every time we have a spasm
of capitalism, whether this is the 1930s or now, the seeds of vulgar ultra-right-wingness sprout
into a very ugly tree," Varoufakis said....
"I am very impressed by his capacity to rise from almost complete marginality to the center
of the debate," Varoufakis continued. "And if you look at the discussion he has invigorated,
or reinvigorated, in the Democratic Party, that just goes to show that it is perfectly possible
to excite young people....
Yeah, he botched with Syriza in Greece. But he was principled enough to resign and move on
politically. I don't know with what sort of success his proposed organization met.
Alternet offers a handy list of things Sanders has already changed about American politics.
I particulary note points 5 and 6, on princples and issues, but the author notes he has brought
progressives together, shown popularly-funded campaigns to be viable, and made socialism respectable.
"Not too shabby."
Politics isn't for the meek, but it doesn't have to be all mud all the time like the GOP's
nominating contest, and Sanders has shown that in state after state....
The passion and public purpose of his campaign has struck deep and wide notes precisely
because of that. More than anything, Sanders has reminded vast swaths of the country that his
democratic socialist agenda is exactly what they want America to be-a fairer and more dignified,
tolerant, responsible and conscientious country.
I have previously noted, the consensus amongst the pundit class is that Sanders is a principled
politician. The conduct of his campaign reflects these principles. I do not agree with them, but
I respect that he has been consistent in their application throughout his political career.
Ah, but "what is to be done" with all of the passion aroused? Sanders clearly intends to keep
the pressure on within the Democratic Party. Though doubtless, it will not all remain there.
I keep hearing that "things" are different, post-Occupy, etc., and that some sort of Green/Libertarian/Trump
miracle is possible. It is also possible, and historically conditioned, that these pressures will
in fact push the Democrats to the left.
This would be good, in and for the short-term. Revolutionary change takes patient work,
especially in early stages. We're quite a "Long March" away, and these are useful baby-steps.
So this whole notion that but the hopes of the masses and left wing of the Democratic Party,
we'd have our Utopia by now, us a cheap alibi as to why the divided left
(as "b" very accurately describes) can't make any headway, even after the economy nearly repeated
the Great Depression.
The nerve of those damn proles, hoping for short-term improvement! What about the intersectionality?
You know, I don't think "Suck it up and butch it out 'til after The Revolution, you ignorant,
evil, unenlightened over-privileged sell-outs" is really that attractive as politics. Maybe that
overstates this argument, but probably not too much. "The Greens know that someone is in the
buff but the Sanders gang has yet to catch on that their emperor has no clothes" does strike a
rather condescending tone, sure to win friends and influence people.
Somewhat at odds with the next paragraph, though. But is topic is the "Green Machine."
Second, and more importantly, Marsh has left out a key point in his analysis. The Greens just
passed a major benchmark to gain federal funding.
Your dismissing of 'collusion' for lack of a smoking gun ignores much circumstantial evidence:
> Sanders has been a Democrat for many years in all but name;
- he has an arrangement with the Democratic Party whereby he runs in Vermont Democratic
Primaries but will not accept the Democratic nomination and the Democratic Party will not
fund candidates that oppose him;
- Obama campaigned for him, Schumer and Reid endorsed him, he calls Hillary "a friend",
etc.
> He pulled punches in his campaign - refusing to attack Hillary or Obama on issues that
could've made a big difference for his campaign, like:
- when Hillary defended taking money by pointing to Obama who has clearly been pro-Wall
Street;
- Obama's record on the economy and black issues (Obama's support has helped Hillary
to win over blacks) ;
- his slowness to criticize Hillary-DNC collusion;
- on Hillary's emails after the State Dept IG report;
- he all but endorsed Hillary from the start.
The November election will be a referendum on the neolibcon establishment in the U.S. as much
as the Brexit vote was for the EU. The Brexit vote showed that people are so fed up that they
aren't listening to establishment fear-mongering.
No matter how Democratic Party loyalists try to spin it, the blame for a Trump win will
fall on the corrupt Democratic Party establishment. It is no accident that the vast majority of
Super-delegates have steadfastly stood by Hillary, warts and all.
If Bernie refuses to break from the Democratic Party, our movement should back Jill Stein
as the strongest left alternative in the presidential election ... Stein deserves the strongest
possible support from Sandernistas .... With Bernie stepping out of the race, and likely
endorsing Clinton, it will be up to us to continue the political revolution and to stand up
against both Clintonism and Trump_vs_deep_state.
And drives home the point with:
It says a great deal about both Warren and the Democratic Party, in which she is the most
high-profile "left" politician, that she never endorsed Bernie and has now enthusiastically
endorsed Hillary. It would not be a stretch to say that had Warren endorsed and campaigned
for Sanders, it could well have been the difference needed to defeat Clinton in the primary.
But she did not.
It says a great deal about the whole of the Democratic Party leadership – which claims that
its key priority is to defeat Trump – that it has fiercely backed Clinton in spite of the fact
that the polls have shown Sanders to be the far stronger candidate in every matchup.
Because of course the problem is much larger than just Warren, Clinton, or Debbie Wasserman
Schultz. At the heart of the matter is a political party that is thoroughly undemocratic and
corrupt to its very core – one that answers to Wall Street, not working people. It's the second
most pro-capitalist party in the world, after the Republican Party.
<> <> <> <> <> <> <>
@86 Yes it is the Washington Post, but the point stands: it is a strange place for a 'revolutionary'
to deliver his message. Unless that message is one of capitulation (it is) .
"... Newly revealed emails, released via a court order in relation to a public records lawsuit filed by the conservative legal watchdog group Judicial Watch, cast yet more doubts on Hillary Clinton's claim that she used a private email server while serving as secretary of state merely " for convenience ." ..."
"... You can't have it both ways, Madame Secretary. Either you didn't know the rules or you thought you were above the rules. ..."
"... Yesterday the Washington Post 's Chris Cillizza wrote that Clinton's exchange with Abedin "reads to me as though Clinton is both far more aware of the email setup and far more engaged in how it should look than she generally lets on publicly," which he describes as "deeply problematic" for a candidate so widely distrusted ( ..."
Newly revealed emails, released via a court order in relation to a
public records lawsuit filed by the conservative legal watchdog group Judicial Watch, cast yet
more doubts on Hillary Clinton's claim that she used a private email server while serving as secretary
of state merely "for
convenience."
Among the 165 pages of emails released Monday, the Associated Press notes one particularly telling exchange from March 2009 between Clinton
(who had been in office barely two months) and aide Huma Abedin:
"I have just realized I have no idea how my papers are treated at State," Clinton wrote to
Abedin and a second aide. "Who manages both my personal and official files? ... I think we need
to get on this asap to be sure we know and design the system we want."
You can't have it both ways, Madame Secretary. Either you didn't know the rules or you thought
you were above the rules.
The AP adds, "In a blistering audit released last month, the State Department's inspector
general concluded Clinton and her team ignored clear internal guidance that her email setup violated
federal records-keeping standards and could have left sensitive material vulnerable to hackers."
Reason's Peter Suderman
wrote after the report's release, "It makes clear that [Clinton] refused to play by the rules
while acting as Secretary of State-ignoring them as a point of personal privilege, and creating both
security vulnerabilities and transparency and accountability problems in the process."
Yesterday the Washington Post's Chris Cillizza wrote that Clinton's exchange with Abedin "reads to me as
though Clinton is both far more aware of the email setup and far more engaged in how it should
look than she generally lets on publicly," which he describes as "deeply problematic" for a candidate
so widely distrusted (but not by former
New York Times editor Jill Abramson,
who inexplicably declared Clinton "fundamentally honest" in a recent
Guardian column).
"... But opposing the right's sexist slurs against Clinton or any other wealthy or powerful woman and concluding that her presidency would be good for the majority of women -- or the majority of working people -- are entirely different things. ..."
"... Another myth is that Clinton's is an "outsider" campaign, which she has also claimed. On the contrary, a Clinton presidency represents the continuation of the status quo in Washington -- above all, the disappointing presidency of Barack Obama. ..."
"... Instead, as the limitation of the U.S.'s two-party electoral system dictates, the only option for people who don't support the Republican is to support the Democrat, even if she stands for policies that you oppose. The dominant logic is to vote for the lesser of two evils. ..."
The Republican right has regularly lobbed sexist attacks at Clinton, and Trump is no exception
to that rule. "I think the only card she has is the women's card -- she's got nothing else
going," Trump raved in April. "And frankly, if Hillary Clinton were a man, I don't think she'd
get 5 percent of the vote."
But opposing the right's sexist slurs against Clinton or any other wealthy or powerful woman
and concluding that her presidency would be good for the majority of women -- or the majority of
working people -- are entirely different things.
Her record shows a Hillary Clinton presidency would mean the opposite. She has proven her
allegiance to corporate power, sitting on the board of Walmart, no less. And she has supported
policies that specifically target poor and working-class people, backing Bill Clinton's crime
bill and the shredding of welfare programs. As secretary of state, she imposed U.S. power abroad,
supporting secret drone warfare in Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia and the deadly troops surge in
Afghanistan.
Another myth is that Clinton's is an "outsider" campaign, which she has also claimed. On the
contrary, a Clinton presidency represents the continuation of the status quo in Washington --
above all, the disappointing presidency of Barack Obama.
The Bernie Sanders campaign provided a glimpse into what it might look like for a U.S. election
to take up issues that affect working-class people, like single-payer health care, a $15 an hour
minimum wage and taxing the rich. But now that the Democratic Party establishment's candidate is
in place, there's no room for that debate.
Instead, as the limitation of the U.S.'s two-party electoral system dictates, the only option
for people who don't support the Republican is to support the Democrat, even if she stands for
policies that you oppose. The dominant logic is to vote for the lesser of two evils.
... ... ...
Elizabeth Schulte is a journalist and reviews editor for the Socialist Worker, writing
frequently on low-wage workers, the Democratic Party and women's liberation
While Trump's proposed blanket ban on Muslim travelers is both constitutionally and ethically
wrongheaded and, in my opinion, potentially damaging to broader U.S. interests, his related
demand to temporarily stop travel or immigration from some core countries that have serious
problems with militancy is actually quite sensible. This is because the United States has only a
limited ability to vet people from those countries. The Obama administration claims it is
rigorously screening travelers and immigrants-but it has provided little to no evidence that its
procedures are effective.
The first step in travel limitation is to define the problem. While it is popular in Congress and
the media to focus on countries like Iran, nationals of such countries do not constitute a
serious threat. Shi'a Muslims, the majority of Iranians, have characteristically not staged
suicide attacks, nor do they as a group directly threaten American or Western interests. The
Salafist organizations with international appeal and global reach are all Sunni Muslim. In fact,
al-Qaeda, ISIS, the Taliban, and al-Nusra all self-define as Sunni Muslim and regard Shi'as as
heretics. Most of the foot soldiers who do the fighting and dying for the terrorist groups and
their affiliates are Sunnis who come from Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, and
Somalia, and even the homegrown Europeans and Americans who join their ranks are Sunni.
It is no coincidence that the handful of Muslim countries that harbor active insurgencies have
also been on the receiving end of U.S. military interventions, which generate demands for revenge
against the West and the U.S. in particular. They would be the countries to monitor most closely
for militants seeking to travel. All of them represent launching pads for potential attacks, and
it should be assumed that groups like ISIS would be delighted to infiltrate refugee and immigrant
groups.
U.S. embassies and consulates overseas are the choke points for those potential terrorists.
Having myself worked the visa lines in consulates overseas, I understand just how difficult it is
to be fair to honest travelers while weeding out those whose intentions are less honorable. At
the consulate, an initial screening based on name and birth date determines whether an applicant
is on any no-fly or terrorism-associate lists. Anyone coming up is automatically denied, but the
lists include a great deal of inaccurate information, so they probably "catch" more innocent
people than they do actual would-be terrorists. Individuals who have traveled to Iran, Iraq,
Sudan, or Syria since 2011, or who are citizens of those countries, are also selected out for
additional review.
For visitors who pass the initial screening and who do not come from one of the 38 "visa waiver"
countries, mostly in Europe, the next step is the visitor's visa, called a B-2. At that point,
the consulate's objective is to determine whether the potential traveler has a good reason to
visit the U.S., has the resources to pay for the trip, and is likely to return home before the
visa expires. The process seeks to establish that the applicant has sufficient equity in his or
her home country to guarantee returning to it, a recognition of the fact that most visa fraud
relates to overstaying one's visit to disappear into the unregistered labor market in the U.S.
The process is document-driven, with the applicants presenting evidence of bank accounts,
employment, family ties, and equity like homeownership. Sometimes letters of recommendation from
local business leaders or politicians might also become elements in the decision.
"... The U.S. Navy stewards who served as butlers at the White House were usually the first to discover physical evidence of Clinton's philandering, says Byrne. ..."
"... According to Byrne, the lipstick was clearly not the shade worn by Lewinsky or Hillary. He believed it belonged to a young White House receptionist who was also having an affair with Clinton. ..."
"... Identifying for the first time something he says was dubbed the 'jogging list', he recalls how, early in Clinton's first administration, women 'dressed as if they were going clubbing or working out' would wait by the White House south-east gate for him to take his daily exercise. ..."
"... His bodyguards would collect their names and carry out security checks on them. 'Agents . . . insinuated that this list was used by President Clinton to try to meet these women,' says Byrne. ..."
"... The account chimes with previous claims that the Clintons fought on at least one occasion over his affair with Lewinsky. Byrne gilds Mrs Clinton's aggressive image by recounting how - some years later - she and her husband visited the Secret Service's firing range. ..."
"... For Hillary - gaining in the polls over Donald Trump and potentially just months away from becoming America's first female President - 11th-hour revelations about how the Clintons behaved in the White House last time round may be enough to have her hurling more than vases and Bibles. ..."
The U.S. Navy stewards who served as butlers at the White House were usually the first to
discover physical evidence of Clinton's philandering, says Byrne.
One, who he names as Nel, shared that evidence with Byrne, revealing that over a period of time,
he had been finding and secretly cleaning White House embossed towels stained with lipstick.
Anxious to protect the presidency from embarrassment, Nel was washing them by hand rather than
sending them to the laundry.
According to Byrne, the lipstick was clearly not the shade worn by Lewinsky or Hillary. He
believed it belonged to a young White House receptionist who was also having an affair with Clinton.
... ... ..
There were many other women besides Lewinsky, Eleanor Mondale and the unnamed receptionist, says
Byrne.
Identifying for the first time something he says was dubbed the 'jogging list', he recalls
how, early in Clinton's first administration, women 'dressed as if they were going clubbing or working
out' would wait by the White House south-east gate for him to take his daily exercise.
His bodyguards would collect their names and carry out security checks on them. 'Agents .
. . insinuated that this list was used by President Clinton to try to meet these women,' says Byrne.
He recalls an incident in December 1997 when he heard on his two-way radio that Monica Lewinsky
was at one of the White House gates.
The guard had been instructed to delay her entrance . . . because Mr Clinton was already ensconced
with Eleanor Mondale. Suspecting the truth, Lewinsky - according to Byrne - furiously gestured at
herself and told the guard: 'What's he want with her when he has this?' (Mondale's affair with Clinton
was strongly rumoured at the time although she denied it. She died of brain cancer in 2011.)
Was Hillary aware of his philandering? Byrne suspects that she knew about some of her husband's
affairs but not Lewinsky, who, at 22, was young enough to be their daughter.
... ... ...
The account chimes with previous claims that the Clintons fought on at least one occasion
over his affair with Lewinsky. Byrne gilds Mrs Clinton's aggressive image by recounting how - some
years later - she and her husband visited the Secret Service's firing range.
Mrs Clinton chose an old Thompson sub-machine-gun and, 'smiling ear-to-ear' let rip, pumping bullets
into the male target's crotch area. Witnesses laughed, looked away in embarrassment or glanced at
the President, says Byrne.
Almost as ferocious as the Clintons' fight related by Byrne is the current battle between the
Democrats and Republicans over this explosive book.
And it's not just historic allegations being thrown around. Even at 69, Mr Clinton's sex life
is still proving controversial, with his charity foundation recently facing questions over a $2 million
donation to a company partly owned by a woman alleged to be his mistress.
The Clinton camp has dismissed the memoir as 'fantasy' without addressing specific claims. Also,
some media supporters have noted that some of Byrne's claims contradict what he told the 1998 official
inquiry that led to Bill Clinton's impeachment.
(Others argue that Byrne, who clearly likes Mr Clinton much more than his wife, was lying to protect
him at the time, but feels no such qualms about damaging Hillary).
Some former Secret Service agents allege Byrne was too low-ranking to see everything he claims,
and accuse him of recycling old rumours.
Others, however, have rushed to his defence.
Dan Emmett, a respected former agent and Secret Service historian, says Byrne spent 'many hundreds
of hours' just feet from the President, adding: 'He was without question in a position to see and
hear at least some of the things he claims.'
For Hillary - gaining in the polls over Donald Trump and potentially just months away from
becoming America's first female President - 11th-hour revelations about how the Clintons behaved
in the White House last time round may be enough to have her hurling more than vases and Bibles.
"... I didn't just mean Walmart and the like, I explained. I also meant the monopolistic powers that aren't obvious to the general public. Such as wholesale suppliers and shippers. And such as Visa and Mastercard, which impacts very substantially the profitability of small retailers and franchisers. ..."
"... Which brought me then, and brings me again, to one of my favorite examples of how the Dems forfeit the political advantage on government regulation by never actually discussing government regulation, in this instance, what's known as the Durbin Amendment. It limits the amount that Visa and Mastercard-clearly critical players in commerce now-can charge businesses for processing their customers' credit card and ATM card transactions. ..."
"... Talk to any owner of a small retail business-a gas station franchise owner, an independent fast food business owner, an independent discount store, for example-about this issue, as I did back when the Durbin Amendment was being debated in Congress. See what they say. ..."
"... The Durbin Amendment was one of the (very) precious few legislative restrictions on monopolies, on anticompetitive business practices, to manage to become law despite intense lobbying of the finance industry or whatever monopolistic industry would be hurt by its enactment. To my knowledge, though, it was never mentioned in congressional races in 2010 or 2014, or in the presidential or congressional races in 2012. Antitrust issues have been considered too complicated for discussion among the populace. ..."
"... And also presumably, it's why the news media ignored Elizabeth Warren's speech on Wednesday entirely about the decisive, dramatic effects of the federal government's aggressive reversal over the last four decades of antirust regulation and the concerted failures of one after another White House administration (including the current one) to enforce the regulation that remains. ..."
"... Washington Monthly ..."
"... What amazed me yesterday was how Warren synthesized the main points of virtually everything we've published into a single speech that, while long and wonky, was Bill Clintonesque in its vernacular exposition. You can imagine average Americans all over the country listening, nodding, understanding . ..."
"... Though many in the press didn't notice the speech, you can best believe Hillary Clinton's campaign operatives were paying attention (Trump's too, I'll bet). That's why I think the speech has the possibility of changing the course of the campaign. The candidate who can successfully incorporate the consolidation message into their campaign rhetoric will an huge, perhaps decisive advantage. Hillary has already signaled, in an op-ed she published last fall, that she gets the larger argument. Yesterday, Elizabeth Warren showed her how to run on it. You can read the full prepared text below. ..."
"... I'm thrilled. Except for that parenthetical that says "even the "populist" candidates running president have shied away from it, which is inaccurate regarding Bernie Sanders. The link is to an article by Glastris in the November/December 2015 edition of Washington Monthly titled " America's Forgotten Formula for Economic Equality ," which regarding Sanders concludes based upon an answer to a question by Anderson Cooper at a then-recent televised debate in which Sanders asked the question about how he expected to win the presidency as a democratic socialist failed to mention the issue of antitrust, that Sanders did not campaign on the issue of the demise of antitrust law and enforcement. ..."
"... We already know from the DNC's public description of the latest draft of the platform that it includes things such as a general commitment to the idea of a $15-per-hour minimum wage; to expanding Social Security; to making universal health care available as a right through expanding Medicare or a public option; and to breaking up too-big-to-fail institutions. ..."
"... Eliminating conflict of interest at the Federal Reserve by making sure that executives at financial institutions cannot serve on the board of regional Federal Reserve banks or handpick their members. ..."
"... Banning golden parachutes for taking government jobs and cracking down on the revolving door between Wall Street and Washington. ..."
"... Prohibiting Wall Street from picking and choosing which credit agency will rate their product. ..."
"... Empowering the Postal Service to offer basic banking services, which makes such services available to more people throughout the country, including low-income people who lack access to checking accounts. ..."
"... Ending the loophole that allows large profitable corporations to defer taxes on income stashed in offshore tax havens to avoid paying less taxes. ..."
"... Using the revenue from ending that deferral loophole to rebuild infrastructure and create jobs. ..."
"... Okay, folks. While being credited to Sanders, this far more likely is a blunt-force impact of Warren, since every one of these points concerns Warren's particular area of interest: financial industry regulation. ..."
"... In other words, Warren is the intermediary between the Clinton and Sanders campaigns. And in exchange for her unbridled campaigning for and with Clinton has combined her own top priorities-precise legislative ones that Warren has the deep expertise to demand and to draft, e.g., items 1 and 3-with one very specific one of Sanders and with more generic ones of his as well, e.g., items 2 and 5. ..."
Is the window closing on Bernie Sanders's moment? A number of folks,
your humble blogger included , have suggested as much. We've argued that with Democrats seeming
to unite behind Hillary Clinton, it's possible that the longer Sanders withholds his endorsement
for her in the quest to make the party platform more progressive, the less leverage he'll
end up having.
But a
new battleground state poll from Dem pollster Stan Greenberg's Democracy Corps suggests Sanders'
endorsement could, in fact, still have a real impact, meaning he may still have some genuine leverage
to try to win more concessions designed to continue pushing the party's agenda in a more progressive
direction.
– A Sanders endorsement of Clinton could still make a big difference , Greg Sargent,
The Plum Line, Washington Post, yesterday at 3:24 p.m.
– Greg Sargent, The Plum Line, Washington Post, yesterday at 6:21 p.m.
Just about exactly a year ago-early last summer-as Clinton was picking up the pace of her campaign
appearances and formulating her substantive arguments, she said something that the news media caught
onto immediately as really strange. In an attempt to woo aspiring and current small-business owners,
she did her default thing: She adopted a Republican slogan and cliché, this one that government regulation
and bureaucracy are the main impediments to starting and expanding small businesses, and are, well,
just making the lives of small business owners miserable.
Federal regulations and bureaucracy, see.
It shouldn't take longer to start a business in America than it does to start one in France, she
said, correctly. And it shouldn't take longer for a small-business owner to fill out the business's
federal tax forms than it takes Fortune 500 corporations to do so. Also, correctly. And as president
she will … something.
There were, the news media quickly noted, though, a few problems with this tack. One was that
regulations that apply varyingly to other than a few types of small businesses-those that sell firearms
and ammunition, for example-small-business regulations are entirely state and local ones and are
not of the sort that the federal government even could address.
Another was that Clinton was relying upon a survey report that provided average times to obtain
business licenses in various cities around the world, for companies that would employ a certain number
of employees within a numerical, midsize range (or some such), and that cited Paris as the only French
cities; showed that the differences in the time it took on average to obtain a business license there
and in several American cities was a matter of two or three days, and that only Los Angeles (if I
remember correctly) among the American cities had a longer average time than did Paris; and that
the all the cities listed had an average of less than two weeks.
Some folks (including me, here at AB) also noted that the actual time it takes to open a small
business depends mostly on the type of business, often the ease of obtaining a business loan, purchasing
equipment such as that needed to open a restaurant, leasing space, obtaining insurance, and ensuring
compliance with, say, local health department and fire ordinances.
And one folk (me, here at AB) pointed out that the relative times it takes to fill out a federal
tax form for a business depends far more on whether your business retains Price Waterhouse Coopers
to do that, or has in-house CPAs using the latest software for taxes and accounting, or relies upon
the sole proprietor to perform that task.
But here's what I also said: Far, far more important to the ease of starting a business
and making a profit in it than regulatory bureaucracy-state and local, much less and federal ones-is
overcoming monopolistic practices of, well, monopolies.*
I didn't just mean Walmart and the like, I explained. I also meant the monopolistic powers
that aren't obvious to the general public. Such as wholesale suppliers and shippers. And such as
Visa and Mastercard, which impacts very substantially the profitability of small retailers and franchisers.
Which brought me then, and brings me again, to one of my favorite examples of how the Dems
forfeit the political advantage on government regulation by never actually discussing government
regulation, in this instance, what's known as the Durbin Amendment. It limits the amount that Visa
and Mastercard-clearly critical players in commerce now-can charge businesses for processing their
customers' credit card and ATM card transactions.
Talk to any owner of a small retail business-a gas station franchise owner, an independent
fast food business owner, an independent discount store, for example-about this issue, as I did back
when the Durbin Amendment was being debated in Congress. See what they say.
The Durbin Amendment was one of the (very) precious few legislative restrictions on monopolies,
on anticompetitive business practices, to manage to become law despite intense lobbying of the finance
industry or whatever monopolistic industry would be hurt by its enactment. To my knowledge, though,
it was never mentioned in congressional races in 2010 or 2014, or in the presidential or congressional
races in 2012. Antitrust issues have been considered too complicated for discussion among the populace.
Which presumably is why the news media never focused on the fact that Bernie Sanders discussed
it regularly in his campaign. And that it resonated with millennials.
And also presumably, it's why the news media ignored Elizabeth Warren's speech on Wednesday
entirely about the decisive, dramatic effects of the federal government's aggressive reversal over
the last four decades of antirust regulation and the concerted failures of one after another White
House administration (including the current one) to enforce the regulation that remains.
Yesterday, straight off her high-profile campaign appearance Monday with Hillary Clinton, Sen.
Elizabeth Warren gave a keynote address about industry consolidation in the American economy at
a conference at the Capitol put on by New America's
Open Markets program. Though the speech has so far gotten only a
modicum of attention-the press being more interested in litigating Donald Trump's Pocahontas
taunts-it has the potential to change the course of the presidential contest. Her speech begins
at minute 56:45 in the video below.
Warren is, of course, famous for her attacks on too-big-to-fail banks. But in her address yesterday,
entitled "Reigniting Competition in the American Economy," she extended her critique to the entire
economy, noting that, as a result of three decades of weakened federal antitrust regulation, virtually
every industrial sector today-from airlines to telecom to agriculture to retail to social media-is
under the control of a handful of oligopolistic corporations. This widespread consolidation is
"hiding in plain sight all across the American economy," she said, and "threatens our markets,
threatens our economy, and threatens our democracy."
As our readers know, economic consolidation is a subject the Washington Monthly has
long been obsessed with-see
here ,
here ,
here
,
here ,
here ,
here ,
here ,
here ,
here , and
here
. In our current
cover story , Barry Lynn (impresario of yesterday's event) and Phil Longman argue that antitrust
was the true legacy of the original American Populists and a vital, under-appreciated reason for
the mass prosperity of mid-20 th Century America. But this legacy, and the new Gilded
Age economy that has resulted from its abandonment, is not a narrative most Americans have been
told (one reason why even the "populist" candidates running president have
shied away from it).
What amazed me yesterday was how Warren synthesized the main points of virtually everything
we've published into a single speech that, while long and wonky, was Bill Clintonesque in its
vernacular exposition. You can imagine average Americans all over the country listening, nodding,
understanding .
Though many in the press didn't notice the speech, you can best believe Hillary Clinton's
campaign operatives were paying attention (Trump's too, I'll bet). That's why I think the speech
has the possibility of changing the course of the campaign. The candidate who can successfully
incorporate the consolidation message into their campaign rhetoric will an huge, perhaps decisive
advantage. Hillary has already signaled, in an op-ed she
published last fall, that she gets the larger argument. Yesterday, Elizabeth Warren showed
her how to run on it. You can read the full prepared text below.
I'm thrilled. Except for that parenthetical that says "even the "populist" candidates running
president have
shied away from it, which is inaccurate regarding Bernie Sanders. The link is to an article by
Glastris in the November/December 2015 edition of Washington Monthly titled "
America's Forgotten Formula for Economic Equality ," which regarding Sanders concludes based
upon an answer to a question by Anderson Cooper at a then-recent televised debate in which Sanders
asked the question about how he expected to win the presidency as a democratic socialist failed to
mention the issue of antitrust, that Sanders did not campaign on the issue of the demise of antitrust
law and enforcement.
But as it happens, I knew that was incorrect. One of my fondest memories of the Sanders campaign
dates back to a detailed first-person report by a journalist covering the Sanders campaign in Iowa
last summer, who attended a rally not as journalist but instead from the cheap seats in the midst
of the attendees. I can't remember the journalist or the publication, and was unable to find it just
now in a search. But I remember this: He sat next to a young woman, blond, cheerleadery-looking,
who whenever Sanders said a word or phrase referencing one of his favorite topics, would stand up,
thrust her arm up in a punch-the-air motion, and shout the word or phrase. Cheerleader-like, the
reporter said.
One of the words? Antitrust. Or, as the young woman said it, "ANTITRUSSSTTT!"
In searching for that article, which as I said I couldn't find, I did find a slew of references
by Sanders to antitrust-the economic and political power of unchecked and ever-growing monopolies-in
reports about his rallies. One, about a rally in Iowa, for example, quoted Sanders as saying that
Agribusiness monopoly has reduced the prices human farmers receive for their products well below
their market value in a competitive economy.
Other statements made clear the critical reason that Sanders has so focused on the call to break
up the big banks: their huge economic and political power. Including the resultant demise of community
banks of the sort that made America great when America was great-for obtaining small-business loans
and mortgages, anyway.
So here's my point: If you click on the link to that Democracy Corps poll, you'll see what so
many people whose heads are buried in the sands of the pre-2015 political era (including the ones
who constantly trash me in the comments threads to my posts like
my last one ) don't recognize. All that the Democrats need do in order to win a White House and
down-ballot landslide is to campaign on genuinely progressive issues, and genuinely explain them.
Which is why Warren is so valuable to the Dems up and down the ballot. And why Sanders is, too.
Warren endorsed Clinton last week, and on Tuesday campaigned with her in a speech introducing
her, singing her praises, and trashing Donald Trump. Headline-making stuff. But not the stuff that
will matter most. When she goes on the road and repeats her Wednesday speech, not her Tuesday one,
and then asks that people vote Democratic for the White House on down, it will matter far more.
And that is true also for Sanders. But I don't expect many politicos over the age of 40 to recognize
that.
Surprisingly, apparently in response to the release of the Democracy Corp poll yesterday, hours
after suggesting that Clinton was about to begin campaigning as a triangulator because Sanders was
refusing to endorse her, and anyway that's what some Clinton partisans have been urging, someone
in the Clinton campaign
rescinded that , indirectly. Presumably, it was someone under the age of 40.
The latest draft of the Democratic Party platform, which is set to be released as early as
this afternoon, will show that Bernie Sanders won far more victories on his signature issues than
has been previously thought, according to details provided by a senior Sanders adviser.
The latest version of the platform, which was signed off on recently by a committee made up
of representatives for the Sanders and Clinton campaigns and the DNC, has been
generally summarized by the DNC and characterized in news reports. Sanders has hailed some
of the compromises reached in it, but he has vowed to continue to fight for more of what he wants
when the current draft goes to a larger Democratic convention platform committee in Orlando coming
weeks, and when it goes to the floor of the convention in Philadelphia in late July.
But the actual language of the latest draft has not yet been released, and it will be released
as early as today. It will show a number of new provisions on Wall Street reform, infrastructure
spending, and job creation that go beyond the victories that Sanders has already talked about.
They suggest Sanders did far better out of this process thus far than has been previously thought.
Many of these new provisions are things that Sanders has been fighting for for years.
We already know from
the DNC's public description of the latest draft of the platform that it includes things such
as a general commitment to the idea of a $15-per-hour minimum wage; to expanding Social Security;
to making universal health care available as a right through expanding Medicare or a public option;
and to breaking up too-big-to-fail institutions.
Warren Gunnels, the chief policy adviser to the Sanders campaign, is Sargent's source. Gunnels
listed six additions to the platform draft:
Eliminating conflict of interest at the Federal Reserve by making sure that executives
at financial institutions cannot serve on the board of regional Federal Reserve banks or handpick
their members.
Banning golden parachutes for taking government jobs and cracking down on the revolving
door between Wall Street and Washington.
Prohibiting Wall Street from picking and choosing which credit agency will rate
their product.
Empowering the Postal Service to offer basic banking services, which makes such services
available to more people throughout the country, including low-income people who lack access
to checking accounts.
Ending the
loophole that allows large profitable corporations to defer taxes on income stashed in
offshore tax havens to avoid paying less taxes.
Using the revenue from ending that deferral loophole to rebuild infrastructure and
create jobs.
Okay, folks. While being credited to Sanders, this far more likely is a blunt-force impact
of Warren, since every one of these points concerns Warren's particular area of interest: financial
industry regulation.
But there are, I believe, clear Sanders hallmarks in there, too: particularly item 4, empowering
the Postal Service to offer basic banking services, which makes such services available to more people
throughout the country, including low-income people who lack access to checking accounts.
In other words, Warren is the intermediary between the Clinton and Sanders campaigns. And
in exchange for her unbridled campaigning for and with Clinton has combined her own top priorities-precise
legislative ones that Warren has the deep expertise to demand and to draft, e.g., items 1 and 3-with
one very specific one of Sanders and with more generic ones of his as well, e.g., items 2 and 5.
This will be an unbeatable platform and team. During the campaign, and in the four years that
follow.
"... "It's either you stick with the establishment or you go for change. People want change. A guy like Donald Trump, he's pushing for change." ..."
"... The blue-collar counties of western Pennsylvania have largely swung Republican as unions have grown weaker and evangelical churches stronger. Despite overwhelmingly endorsing Hillary Clinton, labor unions face a big challenge with frustrated workers like Mr. Haines. That many white male union members are embracing Mr. Trump doesn't necessarily mean overall union membership is moving right, however. In recent years, as unions have organized more government employees and low-wage workers, the percentage of union members who are black, Hispanic or female has risen - and those groups are solidly anti-Trump. ..."
"... The A.F.L.-C.I.O. has endorsed Mrs. Clinton, calling her "an unstoppable champion for working families" while dismissing Mr. Trump as "an unstable charlatan who made his fortune scamming them." ..."
"... On Tuesday, Mr. Trump spoke to applauding workers at a scrap-metal plant in Westmoreland County. He denounced "failed trade policies," saying he would renegotiate Nafta and scrap the proposed Trans-Pacific trade deal. He also borrowed Mr. Sanders's arguments to attack Mrs. Clinton from the left, saying she "voted for virtually every trade agreement." He added that she has betrayed American workers in favor of "Wall Street throughout her career." ..."
"... Mike Podhorzer, the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s political director, estimated that around one-third of union members back Mr. Trump. ..."
"... ...some voters are reluctantly backing Mr. Trump simply out of frustration with the status quo. "We need someone who will say things are wrong and will push hard to fix them," said Paul Myers, a 50-year-old steelworker. "Trump might be lying about bringing jobs back, but at least he'll try to." ..."
Greensburg, Pa. - THIS faded mining town east of Pittsburgh seems right out of "The Deer
Hunter," one of many blue-collar, gun-loving communities that dot western Pennsylvania. For
Donald J. Trump, such largely white, working-class towns are crucial to his hopes in the
presidential campaign - and that's one reason he campaigned in this region on Tuesday. By rolling
up large enough margins in former industrial strongholds like Greensburg - not just in
Pennsylvania, but also in Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin - he might offset expected losses in
cities like Philadelphia, Detroit and Cleveland, enabling him to capture those pivotal states.
Mr. Trump's "Make America Great Again" message resonates with many of this region's workers,
whose wages - and hopes - have been tugged downward by the abandoned steel mills and coal mines.
Take Dennis Haines, 57, thrown out of work in January when the printing plant where he worked for
30 years closed. Mr. Haines, a member of the machinists union, said: "It's either you stick
with the establishment or you go for change. People want change. A guy like Donald Trump, he's
pushing for change."
... ... ...
The blue-collar counties of western Pennsylvania have largely swung Republican as unions
have grown weaker and evangelical churches stronger. Despite overwhelmingly endorsing Hillary
Clinton, labor unions face a big challenge with frustrated workers like Mr. Haines.
That many white male union members are embracing Mr. Trump doesn't necessarily mean overall union
membership is moving right, however. In recent years, as unions have organized more government
employees and low-wage workers, the percentage of union members who are black, Hispanic or female
has risen - and those groups are solidly anti-Trump.
... ... ...
The A.F.L.-C.I.O. has endorsed Mrs. Clinton, calling her "an unstoppable champion for
working families" while dismissing Mr. Trump as "an unstable charlatan who made his fortune
scamming them."
... ... ...
On Tuesday, Mr. Trump spoke to applauding workers at a scrap-metal plant in Westmoreland
County. He denounced "failed trade policies," saying he would renegotiate Nafta and scrap the
proposed Trans-Pacific trade deal. He also borrowed Mr. Sanders's arguments to attack Mrs.
Clinton from the left, saying she "voted for virtually every trade agreement." He added that she
has betrayed American workers in favor of "Wall Street throughout her career."
Late this
summer, unions will mobilize a nationwide campaign to knock on doors, mail out pro-Clinton
literature and speak to members at their workplaces.
Tim
Waters, the political director of the United Steelworkers, said his Pittsburgh-based union will
warn its members that Mr. Trump isn't pro-worker: "He's a wolf in sheep's clothing."
Unions
have compiled a long list of objections to Mr. Trump. In one debate, he said wages were too high.
Many workers have sued his companies for cheating them on wages. His Las Vegas hotel is battling
unionization.
"Every
opportunity he's had to help American workers or American jobs, he did the opposite," Mr. Waters
said. "He has had Trump-brand suits, shirts and ties made in Bangladesh, China and Honduras,
everywhere but the U.S. He has imported workers to work at his facilities in Florida."
Mike
Podhorzer, the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s political director, estimated that around one-third of union
members back Mr. Trump.
...
... ...
...some voters are reluctantly backing Mr. Trump simply out of frustration with the status quo.
"We need someone who will say things are wrong and will push hard to fix them," said Paul Myers,
a 50-year-old steelworker. "Trump might be lying about bringing jobs back, but at least he'll try
to."
"... So Warren left the GOP because they were becoming too much for banking and wall street. And now she joins with Clinton who takes tens of millions a year from big banks and Wall Street. Go figure. ..."
"... The writer I think is trying to imply Clinton is not a neoliberal. This is dog whistle media politics of implying something else about Clinton who comprehensively not what this person is writing as if. So once she is elected courtesy I must say of Trump she will immediately act behind the scenes to effect neoliberal goals and policies. ..."
"... Warren the converted republican is just another neoliberal pretender to progressive stances. ..."
"... sHillary should fess up to her corruption and crimes, face criminal charges, and acknowledge that we need Bernie. The young people would happy indeed. ..."
"... This is a beautiful metaphor for after brexit: "This is really a battle between the pimps of Wall Street and the whores of Wall Street." Redistribution of wealth again to rich again. ..."
"... This is completely unfair..... Clinton listens to the young. The young bankers, the young hedge funders, the young trust funders, all are welcome as long as they pay. ..."
"... Lots of older people are specifically rejecting the dog-eat-dog globalization game, even as 30-something tech industrialists fight for ever fewer barriers to capital flight, cheaper immigrant workers and disruptive technologies. ..."
"... When nearly half of federal tax money is spent on death destruction and endless war and when the only thing our leaders can agree on is spending for more of the same all to the benefit of Central Banking and the MIC you think the young voting for Killary will put things right? Dream on, good luck and good night. Get off your ass. ..."
"... So, regardless of what the media call it, the question is how long the system will resist the torrent of protests of the people angered due to miserable socio-economic situation in which they find themselves without a big fault of their own. ..."
"... What is more interesting, Bernie Sanders who was unjustly called "a radical" is actually very careful in its demands, addressing at the same time dissatisfied people and the state establishment as well, and trying to find a point of an agreement between the first and the later. ..."
"... So, in my opinion, there are only two options here. The establishment can accept this alleviated form of socialism promoted by Bernie, or by Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, all together with the vocabulary of "socialist euphemisms" that they are using now. ..."
"... Hillary has no interest in "winning" Bernie supporters. She simply expects us to come to heel, and Donald Trump is the rolled-up newspaper we are threatened to be smacked with, unless we obey. ..."
"... Warren-Clinton would be a respectable ticket. Clinton-Warren is significantly less so, and both seem highly unlikely to me ..."
"... The problem Bernie supporters have with Hillary is more about policy than it is about genitalia. If you don't figure that out before November, you'll be quite surprised when a large number of reputedly misogynist "young Bernie men" end up voting for Jill Stein. ..."
"... Wrong answer. Hillary should pay no attention to the young. Hillary listens only to those who pay her, like Wall Street. Hillary pays the Clinton foundation money only to those guaranteed to vote in blocs, and she monitors them. Ethnic and single-issue groups can be counted on to vote as paid. ..."
"... It's her's, Obama's and the rest of the party leadership on both the left and the right that have created a vacuum on issues such as immigration. They refuse to acknowledge real problems associated with large scale and unrestricted immigration. ..."
"... Clinton's campaign/DNC supporters are already going showing their non-progressive stances, they have just voted down progressive amendments, including minimum wage, fracking and TPP. ..."
"... Lawless illegal immigration has nothing to do with diversity. It's basically preferred cheap labor over our own citizens. If only Hillary and the DNC fought that hard for the 46 million Americans living in poverty. They put their party's interests before our country. ..."
"... One more article that only if $hillary can triangulate, with some meaningless platitudes she will win over the Bernie Voters. I am a Boomer and I voted for Bernie in the Primary in my state and donated to his campaign. I still have the Bernie yard sign in my from yard and Bernie Bumper Sticker. I will not be triangulated by $hillary. If Bernie is not on the ballot for President I will vote for Jill Stein. ..."
"... I guess it is a case of $hillary's Oligarchs are better than the Koch Bros. ..."
"... You must be new to Mrs. Clinton. She listens to her handlers who work up carefully scripted and rehearsed sound bites that can trick people into believing that she is authentic and cares about the problems of the 99%. For everything else, the communication is transmit-only. Now curtsy, close your trap, and move along - she doesn't have time for your drivel! ..."
"... Clinton is all talk and Trump is all nonsense. As soon as she gets her tiara, she'll be right back to doing whatever she feels like doing. The two of them are off-the-charts narcissists who simply want power and the ability to use that power. Everything either of their supporters project onto them is just nonsensical wishful thinking. ..."
"... The basic problem is that New Democrats like Bill Clinton threw the traditional Democratic constituencies under the bus. I gather that something similar happened in the UK, and that New Labour under Tony Blair did likewise. ..."
Hillary is not a progressive she is a neoliberal. The business community has done what it does
to cut costs - globalization is not much more than a scheme to cut labor costs. It is the job
of our political leaders to see to it that our trade policies promote prosperity for all Americans.
It is impossible to expect politicians who depend on money from financial interests - including
Hillary - to fulfill that mandate to the American public.
The young should see Hillary for what she is, a corrupt part of the old guard of politicians
serving the business community and should vote for candidates who serve social justice. Which
of course why the young liberals supported Bernie Sanders.
So Warren left the GOP because they were becoming too much for banking and wall street. And
now she joins with Clinton who takes tens of millions a year from big banks and Wall Street. Go
figure.
The writer I think is trying to imply Clinton is not a neoliberal. This is dog whistle media
politics of implying something else about Clinton who comprehensively not what this person is
writing as if. So once she is elected courtesy I must say of Trump she will immediately act behind
the scenes to effect neoliberal goals and policies.
There is not the slightest chance that Clinton will do anything progressive. The current painting
of Elizabeth Warren as the great progressive banner holder is part of this nonsense. Warren
the converted republican is just another neoliberal pretender to progressive stances. Being
for bankruptcy is not a meaningful progressive position to take. Their pretense hides their deep
ties to Wall Street, and the election of Clinton and her promoting neoliberalism will be just
the sort of thing the young need to see that betrays their trust so that change can happen over
these "politically bankrupt" polls.
That's actually a great idea... sHillary should fess up to her corruption and crimes, face
criminal charges, and acknowledge that we need Bernie. The young people would happy indeed.
This is a beautiful metaphor for after brexit: "This is really a battle between the pimps
of Wall Street and the whores of Wall Street." Redistribution of wealth again to rich again.
This is completely unfair..... Clinton listens to the young. The young bankers, the young
hedge funders, the young trust funders, all are welcome as long as they pay.
This is really a battle between the pimps of Wall Street and the whores of Wall Street. No
one else really has any skin in the game.
"Young people are rejecting dog-eat-dog economics and welcoming diversity, while large chunks
of our older and supposedly wiser compatriots do the exact opposite. "
Is that what you think your older compatriots' think? How ageist.
Lots of older people are specifically rejecting the dog-eat-dog globalization game, even
as 30-something tech industrialists fight for ever fewer barriers to capital flight, cheaper immigrant
workers and disruptive technologies.
That Abbott Labs just forced their fired IT staff to train their H1-B visa replacements and
sign contracts to remain silent, doesn't mean they're against immigration or diversity. Just,
against insidious ways corporations seek to replace domestic workers with uncomplaining indentured
servants from India.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-abbott-layoffs-durbin-0302-biz-20160301-story.html
No age group is a monolith. How about older and younger people try to work together for a country
we'd all like to live in.
Spot on: "The great test of whether Clinton understands the generational opportunity will be her
selection of a running mate. If she plays it safe with a conservative white male in the hopes
of not offending furious older voters, she'll risk leaving young Americans disgusted by Trump
but uninspired by her. On the other hand, selecting a vice presidential nominee with a clear track
record of progressive policies, such as an Elizabeth Warren, would send a clear signal that Clinton
hears the voice of a generation demanding more from the future than a slightly kinder neoliberalism."
Actually, the same thing happened with Obama. He chose Biden (and Rahm Emanuel as his chief
of staff) making huge mistakes on both men. They helped kill real change.
Hillary Clinton needs to chose Warren or the Sanders backers will simply not support her. They
will either abstain from voting or vote for Jill Stein.
When nearly half of federal tax money is spent on death destruction and endless war and when
the only thing our leaders can agree on is spending for more of the same all to the benefit of
Central Banking and the MIC you think the young voting for Killary will put things right? Dream
on, good luck and good night. Get off your ass.
Hillary supporters do not frequent the internet and where they do not in places they are likely
to find valuable information. There is a search tool. you can research all of Hillary's history
and it is not pretty. Like this it is not some grand conspiracy. she really was at the gmo Association.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1AkrQaWwMc
At least as it was told to us, socialism as a state project has failed some 25 years ago. Then,
some eight years ago capitalism has also come to a major crisis, the biggest since the Great Depression
of the 30s. And this has led to a revival of socialist ideas exactly where it was least expected,
that is, in the capitalist West. From Greece, through Spain, Great Britain ... and all the way
to the United States, the people cheered again essentially socialist ideas, and the election campaigns
takes the form of popular movements, which are commonly called by the media as a "populism" .
So, regardless of what the media call it, the question is how long the system will resist
the torrent of protests of the people angered due to miserable socio-economic situation in which
they find themselves without a big fault of their own.
What is more interesting, Bernie Sanders who was unjustly called "a radical" is actually
very careful in its demands, addressing at the same time dissatisfied people and the state establishment
as well, and trying to find a point of an agreement between the first and the later.
To make sure that this is true, it is sufficient to note that Sanders' statements are
full of euphemisms. He is a "democratic socialist," and not just "socialist," and his "revolution"
is just a "political revolution". Then, Bernie talks about "rigged economy" that is rigged in
favor of the richest 1%, or even worse, one-tenth of one percent. But if you'd asked, "Since when
the economy is rigged this way?", every true socialists including Bernie would probably replied,"Ever
since the capitalism was created!" :-)))
So, in my opinion, there are only two options here. The establishment can accept this alleviated
form of socialism promoted by Bernie, or by Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, all together with the vocabulary
of "socialist euphemisms" that they are using now.
And the other option is that the establishment will soon be faced with another kind
of Socialists, who will openly propagate the pure socialism without any euphemisms or any excuses.
With this kind of guys it would be difficult to make any compromise, because they are fighting
because "they have nothing to lose". And if the establishment would say to them that their ideas
are disaster for the country, they would then reply: "So what? If we are already perishing, let
perish together!"
Hillary has no interest in "winning" Bernie supporters. She simply expects us to come to heel,
and Donald Trump is the rolled-up newspaper we are threatened to be smacked with, unless we obey.
I've voted blue-no-matter-who too many times in the 35 years since I first registered
Democratic. No more. Never Hillary, Never Trump -- Political Revolution NOW
Warren-Clinton would be a respectable ticket. Clinton-Warren is significantly less so, and
both seem highly unlikely to me. The first because Clinton doesn't seem the type that would
want to play second fiddle in a figurehead role, and the second because Warren as VP would be
a waste of her talents, and she's come as close as she can to refusing it outright without actually
ruling it out. No thinking person should want to waste Warren in the VP role.
The problem Bernie supporters have with Hillary is more about policy than it is about genitalia.
If you don't figure that out before November, you'll be quite surprised when a large number of
reputedly misogynist "young Bernie men" end up voting for Jill Stein.
Wrong answer. Hillary should pay no attention to the young. Hillary listens only to those
who pay her, like Wall Street. Hillary pays the Clinton foundation money only to those guaranteed
to vote in blocs, and she monitors them. Ethnic and single-issue groups can be counted on to vote
as paid.
Youth constitutes no bloc vote. They are all over the place and they are not herdable.
Also far too many youth are hampered by principles and ideals.
That's strange, I'd have suggested the very opposite to Clinton. It's her's, Obama's and the
rest of the party leadership on both the left and the right that have created a vacuum on issues
such as immigration. They refuse to acknowledge real problems associated with large scale and
unrestricted immigration.
Not only have they refused to acknowledge those problems, but they accuse anyone who's views
differ, of racism and bigotry. in doing so, they've allowed Trump to fill that populist void.
Clinton would be wise to not give a populist full control of such topics and moderate her stance.
Not doing so, as Britain has demonstrated, only further divides a citizenry.
Clinton's campaign/DNC supporters are already going showing their non-progressive stances,
they have just voted down progressive amendments, including minimum wage, fracking and TPP.
I'm a Boomer. And I fully support the political revolution led by Bernie Sanders. I will not vote
for Hillary Clinton for any reason. Big Media and the DNC colluded with Hillary from the very
start. If the DNC really cared for the working class, it would have promoted fairness. Look at
the actions; do they match the words? No.
The Chinese economy stopped being Communist long ago. You could make a case that it's fascist
since one definition of fascism is a free market economy in tight cahoots with an autocratic government.
But whatever you call it, Chinese Millenials have a more positive attitude toward their futures
than western ones do.
Lawless illegal immigration has nothing to do with diversity. It's basically preferred cheap
labor over our own citizens. If only Hillary and the DNC fought that hard for the 46 million Americans
living in poverty. They put their party's interests before our country.
One more article that only if $hillary can triangulate, with some meaningless platitudes she
will win over the Bernie Voters. I am a Boomer and I voted for Bernie in the Primary in my state
and donated to his campaign. I still have the Bernie yard sign in my from yard and Bernie Bumper
Sticker. I will not be triangulated by $hillary. If Bernie is not on the ballot for President
I will vote for Jill Stein.
When the party establishments only offer garbage, why does anyone bother to vote? The choices
all lead to no improvement at all, so I find it hard to blame anyone for not coming out. I vote
every time, but I am finding myself writing people in for positions as a protest because too many
candidates don't deserve the office they seek.
Oh Horseshit. Young people know next to Goddamn nothing. All of us older folks know that because
, believe it or not, we were once young people ourselves.
Free college tuition is a give away to the white middle class. College tuition would fall into
a reasonable range tomorrow if we reinstated a Federal student Loan Program with a max amount
allowed a year. Tuituion at public universities would be within a $1,000 bucks of that in short
order.
The current problem had its start when Bush Junior created a private banking program for student
loans. Kids starting borrowing massive amounts and schools started raising tuition like it was
going out of style. Tuition has more than doubled at penn State and Pitt in the last 10 years,
for no reason apparent to anybody.
Free college tuition is a give away to the white middle class.
If everyone is taxed to pay for tuition, how can it possibly be considered a "giveaway" specifically
to the middle class? Why is the middle class the only group that should pay for college (it's
nothing to the rich to afford and the poor get grants)?
You must be new to Mrs. Clinton. She listens to her handlers who work up carefully scripted
and rehearsed sound bites that can trick people into believing that she is authentic and cares
about the problems of the 99%. For everything else, the communication is transmit-only. Now curtsy,
close your trap, and move along - she doesn't have time for your drivel!
Saying Clinton is the better choice over Trump is like saying Mussolini is a better choice over
Stalin.
And just the same, want nothing to do with these scumbags.
Clinton is all talk and Trump is all nonsense. As soon as she gets her tiara, she'll be
right back to doing whatever she feels like doing. The two of them are off-the-charts narcissists
who simply want power and the ability to use that power. Everything either of their supporters
project onto them is just nonsensical wishful thinking.
The best and only answer with such a galling selection is to follow the path that gets
either of them out of office as fast as possible.
Hillary is too busy warmongering to listen. She's too busy threatening Snowden to listen. She
has too much Wall Street money stuffed in her ears to listen.
The basic problem is that New Democrats like Bill Clinton threw the traditional Democratic
constituencies under the bus. I gather that something similar happened in the UK, and that New
Labour under Tony Blair did likewise.
From what I can see here, it's hardly Jeremy Corbyn's fault that those traditional Labour constituencies
refused to do as they were told. Instead, they chose to make a stand against immigration, globalization,
and free trade. Of course, they get called racists for all that. It's the customary rejoinder
these days.
What needs to happen here and there is the re-empowerment of those people. They need the means
to stand up to globalization and free trade. The ideology that holds that these are some kind
of inevitable natural process, rather than the results of political decisions that hurt most people,
needs to go. This means tariffs and trade barriers on foreign manufactured goods, to bring the
factories back and revive organized labor.
"... This article is a thinly disguised anti-Sanders spiel. The first quote is from a Dem elite Hillary supporter Barney Frank, who turns logic its head by declaring the Sanders supporters are well-off white people who won't be hurt much by a GOP presidency compared to Hillary's working class rainbow coalition. ..."
"... The fact that race has become a talking point for her surrogates reinforces my belief that this is all a swift boat campaign. Clinton's record on race is actually bad compared to Sanders: ..."
"... The Democratic base constantly votes against it's own interest in primaries due to unsubstantiated beliefs about electability , which explains Talking Points Memo. ..."
"... Electability was used by Clinton in 2007. It may have been a dog whistle for Obama, but Hillary and her cronies are repeating the same attacks they used then. It may have been in play early, but New Hampshire is basically white Alabama. ..."
Talking Points Memo reader survey: Readers support Sanders (44.8% to 36.6%) but think Clinton
will win (78% to 16.5%) [Talking
Points Memo]. Not a representative sample, but influencers.
"Sanders' supporters, who number among the most intense partisans in the primary, have not
helped close the gap" [WaPo].
The S.S. Clinton
Clinton suggests the minimum wage is a local issue [Truth
Digest]. Eesh. "Leave it up to the states"?
Quinnipiac poll: "Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is behind or on the wrong side
of a too-close-to-call result in matchups with" Rubio, Bush, and Walker [Quinnipiac].
The election is 474 days away; I don't think these top-line numbers mean much, especially in state
polls. It's Clinton's persistently poor
trust numbers that might be more concerning to her campaign. But despite them, people seem
willing to vote for her anyhow. Lowered expectations?
"A day after proposing higher capital gains taxes on short-term investors, Clinton raised at
least $450,000 last night at the Chicago home of Raj Fernando, a longtime donor. His firm, Chopper
Trading, specializes in high-frequency transactions and was recently purchased by Chicago-based
competitor DRW" [Crains
Chicago Business]. "Clinton's summertime fundraising circuit highlights a central tension
of her campaign: how to encourage financial executives to open their wallets for her presidential
effort even as she comes out with plans aimed at reining in multimillion-dollar paychecks."
This article is a thinly disguised anti-Sanders spiel. The first quote is from a Dem elite
Hillary supporter Barney Frank, who turns logic its head by declaring the Sanders supporters are
well-off white people who won't be hurt much by a GOP presidency compared to Hillary's working
class rainbow coalition.
This is WaPo after all, and they have been quite obvious in their preference of a Bush/Clinton
election.
Ditto, July 22, 2015 at 2:27 pm
The fact that race has become a talking point for her surrogates reinforces my belief that
this is all a swift boat campaign. Clinton's record on race is actually bad compared to Sanders:
Several are policies created by her husband and iothers are policies she supports
Brindle, July 22, 2015 at 3:07 pm
Yea, I noticed some weeks ago that Hillary insider Joan Walsh was re-tweeting various "Sanders
doesn't connect w/ Black voters" lines. It's probably been in the works for awhile.
different clue, July 22, 2015 at 3:29 pm
I hope the Sanders group can spare some money/time/people to do "mortal combat" quality opposition
research on the black "protesters" for use against them if they are deployed again against Sanders
at future Sanders events. I hope the Sanders group also does very careful psychological studies
and psy-ops war-gaming to advise Sanders on how to look better than the "protesters" the next
time the Clintonites send them. And Sanders should figure out how to look totally innocent of
any oppo knowledge or psy-war skills throughout the whole thing.
Llewelyn Moss, July 22, 2015 at 2:37 pm
Also no mention in Wapo that article of that Bernie drew 11,000 people to the rally in Phoenix.
Sounds more like pervasive voter disgust and anger with the status quo and not just a bunch of "intense
partisans". Dem voters just haven't yet realized that Hillery IS THE STATUS QUO.
Arizona Slim, July 22, 2015 at 4:36 pm
I was at that rally. More than 11,000 of us in a convention center exhibit hall that could
have held three times as many people.
And, for some STRANGE reason, there is very little media mention of this event.
different clue, July 22, 2015 at 6:28 pm
The media can only drop a Cone Of Silence over the Sanders events. They can't stop people from
attending and they can't stop attendees from socially mediacasting the true extent of Sanders's
visible support.
And there are still land lines, index cards, and other physical tools and technologies left
over from an earlier analog era which political campaign organizers could use to propel Sanders
just as an earlier generation of such organizers/workers used them to propel McGovern into the
Nomination.
Ditto, July 22, 2015 at 2:22 pm
The Democratic base constantly votes against it's own interest in primaries due to unsubstantiated
beliefs about electability , which explains Talking Points Memo. It's a habit that the base
devekoord from the 70s -90s but I question whether it still makes sense. Is the base really any
good at picking candidates based on electability ?
NotTimothyGeithner, July 22, 2015 at 2:53 pm
Electability was used by Clinton in 2007. It may have been a dog whistle for Obama, but
Hillary and her cronies are repeating the same attacks they used then. It may have been in play
early, but New Hampshire is basically white Alabama.
And as far as Hillary's surrogates or any surrogates opining about electability, no one cares.
After all, conservative darling endorsed Mittens, and Trump's current supporters voted for Santorum.
There are a few exceptions. I can't think of a living American who could make a difference.
My guess is Liz Warren supporters and anti-Hillary types cover a similar field. Who knows or
cares who Barney Frank is? This is a country where people cant find Iran on a map. As long as
Hillary only fields elite surrogates and cant draw crowds, the electability issue wont enter the
general discussion.
Hillary will have a real problem with her declining numbers over the last two years. She is
already a lower despite every advantage. Frauds like Rubio are outperforming her.
OpenThePodBayDoorsHAL, July 22, 2015 at 4:55 pm
Won't matter, demographics and the Electoral College means it's just a zombie-walk to Hilary's
coronation:
Oh, goody, expanded corporo-fascism and "Change We Can Believe In", only this time with a dissociated
old woman who will need to "prove her manhood" with lots of shiny new wars.
MT, July 22, 2015 at 7:34 pm
I don't buy the argument that demographics will lead to Democratic inevitability. It is an
argument that is popular with the front page writers of DailyKos, and I believe it is popular
because it fits within the racial/social framing that allows the party to ignore economic matters
and continue with their kayfabe. In fact, some of the more interesting side-stories of the 2014
midterm elections were the elections of Republicans from minority communities that were nearly
indistinguishable in economic or social policy from current Democrats.
I think the demographics argument is wrong for other reasons as well. A growing number of Hispanics
are conservative: No one would mistake Jeb Bush's children (who are Hispanic) for Democratic Party
supporters. Furthermore, the different demographic groups that are currently Democratic supporters
are facing increasingly diverging interests. One example is affirmative action for college admissions,
which the Asian-American community is opposing with more focus. (As an aside, the SCOTUS blog
has had an interesting series of postings about the long-term prospects of affirmative action
for admissions.)
ifthethunderdontgetya, July 22, 2015 at 6:36 pm
It's also a product of "Thanks Ralphing."
Blame Ralph Nader for G.W. Bush, don't dare question your right-wing, less-evil-by-as-little-as-they-can-get
away-with Dems.
(This in spite of the fact that Nader was well down the list of reasons that G.W. Bush was
installed in 2001…it's the narrative that counts.)
Aljazeera America - March 30, 2016 - Reporter: David Shuster
More info: http://reason.com/archives/2016/03/31...
http://www.mediaite.com/online/ajams-...
"... we all sit somewhere on a psychopathic spectrum, and that aspects of psychopathy can be harnessed for good ..."
"... The concept doesn't meet with universal acceptance, however. "I think that would be kind of a remarkable combination," says Visser. "Because in general there's this aspect of impulsivity and really short-term thinking where I'm picturing this person maybe trying that out and then just throwing it all away for short-term gain." ..."
"... Since you've got this far, well, the truth is probably not. Psychopaths don't examine their consciences, and they rarely seek treatment. "We find not one in one hundred … spontaneously goes to his physician," observers Cleckley. ..."
'A lack of concern for feelings, needs, or suffering of others; lack of remorse after hurting
or mistreating another; use of seduction, charm, glibness.'
re psychopaths trendy? Does saying "I have psychopathic tendencies" pass the dinner table test? Is
this merely the latest debilitating condition to be reimagined as a fascinating quirk, ŕ la "I'm
a little bit OCD"?
If so, popular non-fiction might be to blame. In 2011, Jon Ronson's
The Psychopath Test introduced millions of readers to a checklist, devised by psychologist Robert
Hare, that scores people on a range of psychopathic traits. A year later, Kevin Dutton's
The Wisdom of
Psychopaths advanced the idea that we all sit somewhere on a psychopathic spectrum, and that
aspects of psychopathy can be harnessed for good. ME Thomas used an alternative term to describe
her superficial charm and lack of empathy in
Confessions of a Sociopath. Hare's own own book,
Snakes in Suits,
written with psychologist Paul Babiak, examines the success of the psychopath in corporate settings.
We love reading about psychopaths, then. But can we even agree on what they are?
... ... ...
It turns out that there are a number of physiological traits strongly linked to psychopathy, including
tell-tale patterns of activation in the brain and
autonomic nervous
system. One theory is that psychopaths inherit a set of genes that make it harder to experience
fear or excitement. It simply takes more for them to feel stimulated. What seems like a thrill for
a psychopath is, for the average person, taking things way too far.
In his 2013 book,
The Anatomy of Violence, Adrian Raine, who has been studying the physiological correlates of
psychopathy for 40 years, tells the story of cheerful Massachusetts nurse "Jolly"
Jane Toppan. Trusted by her patients and with easy access to powerful drugs, she managed to kill
31 people in between 1895 and 1901. Found not guilty by reason of insanity, Toppan ended her years
in an asylum at the ripe old age of 81.
"One of her greatest excitements in life was to watch life itself slowly sucked out of the patients
she cared for. She would first inject them with an overdose of morphine. She would then sit patiently
with them, gazing into their eyes almost like a lover, observing the moment when their pupils contracted
and their breath shortened." She wanted to witness the very moment of death, which, she later said,
gave her a moment of "voluptuous delight". And yet, she recounted:
When I try to picture it, I say to myself, 'I have poisoned Minnie Gibbs, my dear friend, I have
poisoned Mrs Gordon, I have poisoned Mr and Mrs Davis.' This does not convey anything to me, and
when I try to sense the condition of the children and all the consequences, I cannot realize what
an awful thing it is.
Raine believes this is because parts of her brain linked to the experience of emotion and "moral
sense" – the amygdala and the pre-frontal cortex – were impaired. There's no record of her having
been injured or suffering from a disease that could account for this. Does that mean she was born
a psychopath?
As ever, nature and nurture both play a part. There are certainly genetic differences that can
predispose someone to psychopathy. They may even bestow an evolutionary advantage. "If you went through
life exploiting, taking advantage, as long as you kept on the move, you could certainly have lots
of children," says psychologist Beth Visser,
assistant professor at Lakehead University in Canada. "You wouldn't support them, enough of them
would make it. So this aggressive, cheating strategy could work." She points out, however, that it
would only be effective if less deceitful temperaments were the norm. If we were all psychopaths,
there'd be no one to take advantage of.
As a result of this 'carrying' of psychopathic genes in the general population, there are some
people born with "quite strong tendencies" who are at especially high risk. According to Visser,
"they need more exceptional parenting and the right circumstances to become good people". Get things
wrong, and you end up with Jolly Jane.
Samuel Juni, professor
of applied psychology at New York University, places even greater emphasis on early environment.
For him, the wellspring of psychopathy is hurt. "It usually comes about because of having been extremely
disappointed or traumatised … in childhood." If the developing child is placed in a position where
emotions are painful, threatening or overwhelming, one defense is to "block them totally and become
more or less like a computer, or a robot, that just pursues their own particular interests regardless
of feelings. Both their own feelings and anybody else's." But what about nurse Toppan, and her desperate
attempts to feel something – anything? Attempts that led her to murder, again and again. "Running
away and trying to get in touch are psychologically not contradictory unfortunately. When you're
running part of you is running from something that you would very much like to be in touch with but
you can't."
... ... ...
So how does Fallon's psychopathy manifest, if not through cruelty or criminality? "I'm always
on the make … I'm always trying to get people to buy into my little world. Even if for five minutes
or an hour." Does that involve inventing stuff? "I don't have to lie or use violence to get what
I want. [I'm] upper middle class, always had enough money and sex, dates … I grew up, I was good
looking and athletic and very popular." All the same, "I have … this intense, non-stop manipulation
of people, and it's something that I have to fight actively."
Does he feel emotions? "I can be moved by certain things." When was the last time he cried? "Well
do you know, when my father died – I didn't cry, but I had this intense welling up of sort of connection.
He and I were close, I have been close to my parents and much admired them and did a lot of things
with them. You know I was hyperventilating and it was … it wasn't sadness, it was another emotion,
it was quite unique, I don't know how to describe it."
Fallon regards himself as a "pro-social psychopath" – someone who inherited most of the high-risk
genes for psychopathy, but "hasn't been triggered" and lives a productive life. And there is indeed
evidence that psychopathic traits can be of benefit – they've been linked in
some studies to creative prowess, for example.
The concept doesn't meet with universal acceptance, however. "I think that would be kind of
a remarkable combination," says Visser. "Because in general there's this aspect of impulsivity and
really short-term thinking where I'm picturing this person maybe trying that out and then just throwing
it all away for short-term gain." Juni is more direct. "They're not pro-social. They are keen
on picking up what it is that people are feeling or not and then using it practically but not empathically."
"There have been quite a few 'expert' psychopaths who understand other people, who were really
quite perceptive about what others' feelings were," he continues. "They use that understanding to
hurt them, not help them – and really caused a lot of trouble because of that. Goering, for example."
So am I a psychopath?
Since you've got this far, well, the truth is probably not. Psychopaths don't examine their
consciences, and they rarely seek treatment. "We find not one in one hundred … spontaneously goes
to his physician," observers Cleckley. Visser says: "It's the people around them who have had
their hearts broken or their money stolen or whatever who are going for help. "If it's bothering
you, you're probably fine." You're fine. But what about the person sitting next to you: could they
be wearing the mask of sanity? Ask if you can check their pulse – but do it very, very nicely.
"... Remember that piece by Democratic operative Dan Metcalfe about how Hillary Clinton was clearly in deep trouble with this criminal investigation and that the Dems had to come up with a Plan B for when she was indicted and would have to be replaced? ..."
"... It may be a fantasy, but it fits the Loretta/Billy/FBI facts known so far: Before the convention, Hill suddenly takes "ill" (she has a spot on her soul, er, lungs), and just can't continue campaigning. Joe Biden steps in, and is crowned as the next Prez at the convention. If Obomba has to pardon her, she will become his Marc Rich. Better to get rid of her before that need to happen. It would be the best thing he's done in eight years. ..."
"... In 2008, when Barach Obama was elected President, I cried with joy and relief. This beautiful, eloquent, principled, fearless, peace loving, family-man would stop the relentless fascist conquest of Earth (All Government owned by a small number of Super Business') . ..."
"... Eight years later and the Powerful Super Business', in their fearsome glory, are arrayed against the tiny, weak, relatively poor, comical figure of Donald Trump. History pushes forward the most unlikely heroes, in times of great need. ..."
"... I am beginning to think that Bill Clinton doesn't really want his wife to be president; maybe part of it is that her presidency would – at a minimum – put the sweet Foundation deals in jeopardy, and at a maximum, completely take the lid off that swamp of incestuous mutual enrichment, leading to who knows what? ..."
"... ""The GOP's War on Voting Is Working" [The Nation]. What a steaming load. If the Democrat Party were serious about voter registration, it would be running voter registration drives as a normal, year-round, 24/7 part of normal party function, certainly since Florida 2000. They aren't, so they don't. They would also be setting up programs to get voters IDs in states were Republicans insist on that. This talking point is classic "mean Republican" whinging, issued by a flaccid party apparatus, flat on its back, making no effort to rise.'" ..."
"... Today Hillary Clinton gets 'interviewed' by the FBI. Yesterday her best friend had a chitchat with the AG Loretta Lynch. What a coincidence. I wonder to which circle of Hell Dante would have assigned the Clintons. ..."
This takes me back to something I've been wondering about for a while. Remember that piece
by Democratic operative Dan Metcalfe about how Hillary Clinton was clearly in deep trouble with
this criminal investigation and that the Dems had to come up with a Plan B for when she was indicted
and would have to be replaced? At the time, observers pointed to the piece as a signal to establishment Dems that they had to seriously start thinking about an establishment backup to Hillary.
But I've been thinking now that maybe it was more than that. Maybe the signal was to the FBI
and the Justice Department. The gist of Metcalfe's plan was that because the nominee couldn't
be Sanders (?!), Democratic Party "leaders" would have to choose a nominee. Was this a way of
telling law enforcement and prosecutors, please, just let us get through the convention, after
which the Sanders rabble will be safely out of the way and the "responsible" people who pull the
strings in the party can decide who the nominee will be? Meaning an indictment very soon after
the convention.
The timing of when an indictment might be filed – or even Clinton being called in for an interview
where she would be forced to take the Fifth which would trigger the same effects – certainly won't
be accidental, strictly by the book, or done in a political vacuum. There's far, far, far too
much riding on it.
It may be a fantasy, but it fits the Loretta/Billy/FBI facts known so far: Before the convention, Hill suddenly takes "ill" (she has a spot on her soul, er, lungs), and
just can't continue campaigning. Joe Biden steps in, and is crowned as the next Prez at the convention. If Obomba has to pardon her, she will become his Marc Rich. Better to get rid of her before
that need to happen. It would be the best thing he's done in eight years.
In 2008, when Barach Obama was elected President, I cried with joy and relief. This beautiful,
eloquent, principled, fearless, peace loving, family-man would stop the relentless fascist conquest
of Earth (All Government owned by a small number of Super Business') .
Eight years later and the Powerful Super Business', in their fearsome glory, are arrayed against
the tiny, weak, relatively poor, comical figure of Donald Trump. History pushes forward the most unlikely heroes, in times of great need.
You all know the story/joke of the man who cried out to God to save him from the rising flood
waters.
"Upon arriving in heaven, the man marched straight over to God. "Heavenly Father," he said,
"I had faith in you, I prayed to you to save me, and yet you did nothing. Why?" God gave him a
puzzled look, and replied "I sent you two boats and a helicopter, what more did you expect?""
Maybe, Donald Trump is the man in the rowboat sent to rescue us from the rising waters?
I am beginning to think that Bill Clinton doesn't really want his wife to be president; maybe
part of it is that her presidency would – at a minimum – put the sweet Foundation deals in jeopardy,
and at a maximum, completely take the lid off that swamp of incestuous mutual enrichment, leading
to who knows what?
What I am pretty sure of, though, is that something is really rotten here; it's a smorgasbord
of corruption and likely criminal acts and Hillary ascending to the presidency is very, very threatening.
And Loretta Lynch either isn't as smart as we thought she was, or she's willing to take this
hit because she knows crimes have been committed and the foot-dragging and slow-walking are leaving
her with only rumor and innuendo – and a media and Trump willing to take that bait – to cast enough
doubt on Hillary's fitness for office that she has no choice but to step down.
""The GOP's War on Voting Is Working" [The Nation]. What a steaming load. If the Democrat Party
were serious about voter registration, it would be running voter registration drives as a normal,
year-round, 24/7 part of normal party function, certainly since Florida 2000. They aren't, so
they don't. They would also be setting up programs to get voters IDs in states were Republicans
insist on that. This talking point is classic "mean Republican" whinging, issued by a flaccid
party apparatus, flat on its back, making no effort to rise.'"
And they wouldn't have pushed ACORN over a cliff. I particularly remember Barbara Boxer giving
a shove.
And do not forget one of my favorite legislative options, the continued use of unrelated amendments
in important bills. You want to make sure people can get what they need to vote, require by federal
law that states that require ID to vote not only pay for said ID but must provide services to
help voters acquire the documentation they need for that ID AND pay for that as well. Up to but
not limited to, hiring genealogists to search records to find evidence in local and church records
when no birth certificate was created.
Today Hillary Clinton gets 'interviewed' by the FBI. Yesterday her best friend had a chitchat
with the AG Loretta Lynch. What a coincidence. I wonder to which circle of Hell Dante would have
assigned the Clintons.
"... Unless both Lynch and Clinton thought it would be a shh, secret, ..."
"... Obama pays homage to the most qualified candidate evah, whom he and Michele love like one of their own, only to find he's powerless, just powerless, because of a subordinate's foolish PR blunder, to help Hillary with that pesky investigation his AG can't go heavy on. ..."
"... What would be a good name for the American version of Kremlinologists? Beltwayologists? Wallstreetologists? Plutocratologists? ..."
But surely that "shadow" would have been obvious in advance to lawyer Lynch and (disbarred)
lawyer Clinton. So WTF?
Getting so you can't tell who's grifting whom. Unless both Lynch and Clinton thought it would
be a shh, secret, it's blazingly obvious their private-jet meetup is public relations
poison. Must've been pur-ty important, then. Makes ya wonder how treacherous Lynch and the shadowy
figures pulling her strings could be.
Obama pays homage to the most qualified candidate evah,
whom he and Michele love like one of their own, only to find he's powerless, just powerless, because
of a subordinate's foolish PR blunder, to help Hillary with that pesky investigation his AG can't
go heavy on.
Hillary Clinton was questioned on Saturday as part of the FBI's inquiry into her use of a
private e-mail server while U.S. secretary of state, a practice that's dogged her presidential
run, fueled Republican charges that she's unfit for office, and caused Clinton herself to say she
wishes she could take it back.
The roughly three-and-a-half hour meeting at FBI headquarters in Washington was confirmed by
Clinton's campaign. It threatens more turbulence for the presumptive Democratic presidential
nominee days after Attorney General Loretta Lynch was criticized for meeting former President
Bill Clinton privately on an aircraft in Phoenix.
In her first comments on the interview, Clinton said on MSNBC on Saturday that she "was happy I
got the opportunity to assist the department and bring this to a conclusion." The Democrat told
NBC's Chuck Todd, though, that she had "no knowledge of any timeline" for the investigation to
conclude. "I'm not going to comment on the process," she said. "I'm not going to go into any more
detail then I already have in public many times."
Nick Merrill, a spokesman for Clinton, said in an earlier e-mailed statement that Clinton's
appearance had been "voluntary."
Once it finishes its investigation, the FBI will make a recommendation to Lynch about whether to
pursue a prosecution of Clinton or her aides, guidance the attorney general said Friday that she
expects to accept. And while the holiday-weekend interview doesn't imply that the former first
lady and senator from New York faces indictment, the idea of Clinton having met with law
enforcement officers will have political consequences.
Hillary Clinton could be interviewed by the FBI in the coming days as part of an investigation
into the former secretary of state and her staff's use of private email to conduct official U.S.
State Department business, according to a source familiar with the U.S. Department of Justice's
investigation.
The Justice Department's goal is to complete the investigation and make recommendations on
whether charges should be filed before the two major party conventions take place toward the
latter half of July, the source said.
"... The question never obviously arose in the Guardian whether Obama should be endorsing a candidate under investigation -- forgetting for the moment that he previously declared her innocent. ..."
The US attorney general,
Loretta Lynch
, intends to accept whatever recommendation career prosecutors and federal
agents make in the investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server, a justice
department official said on Friday.
"The attorney general expects to receive and accept the determinations and findings of the
department's career prosecutors and investigators, as well as the FBI director," the official
said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the
ongoing investigation
.
Lynch was expected to discuss the matter further at a summit on Friday in Aspen, Colorado.
This revelation comes amid a controversy surrounding an impromptu private discussion that
Lynch had aboard her plane on the tarmac at a Phoenix airport on Monday with Clinton's husband,
former president Bill Clinton. That get-together has been criticized as inappropriate by
Republicans and some Democrats at a time when the justice department has been investigating
whether classified information was mishandled through Clinton's exclusive use of a private email
server while she was secretary of state.
Lynch was expected to discuss the matter further at a summit on Friday in Aspen, Colorado.
This revelation comes amid a controversy surrounding an impromptu private discussion that
Lynch had aboard her plane on the tarmac at a Phoenix airport on Monday with Clinton's husband,
former president Bill Clinton. That get-together has been criticized as inappropriate by
Republicans and some Democrats at a time when the justice department has been investigating
whether classified information was mishandled through Clinton's exclusive use of a private email
server while she was secretary of state.
Lynch told reporters that she and Bill Clinton did not discuss the email investigation during
the encounter.
Did Chickenshit Cheney recuse himself from oil policies after he had secret meetings
with oil companies during the administration of his puppet the Texas Moron? No!
Do conspiracy mongers have any proof or evidence that Ms. Lynch discussed email
matters with president Clinton? Of course not! just plain b.s.
The question never obviously arose in the Guardian whether Obama should be endorsing a
candidate under investigation -- forgetting for the moment that he previously declared her
innocent.
Now we know why both Hillary and her patron President Obama have been so complacent about
the outcome of the FBI investigation. Loretta Lynch, who made clear her political edge
during her confirmation hearing, would decide to indict or ignore or minimise. And the
decision would be in line with Obama's nod.
In Loretta Lynch's own words, her private conversation with Bill Clinton, the Foundation
man, had 2 dimensions. She has described the primary dimension; she has been silent about
the secondary one.
What was secondary to Lynch might have been primary to Clinton.
I just read the NY Times article of the same title and they have airbrushed her "primarily
social" comment by Lynch concerning her meeting (why the qualification?)", leaving intact
her claim they talked about grandkids and travel (thereby giving the impression that she
said that was all they talked about). Interestingly, the FBI, at the airport went around
strongarming journalists not to take any pictures of the meeting.
Do you have a link for this "strong arming" that allegedly took place? Was it Clinton's
security detail? Yesterday, I read that Clinton knew Lynch's schedule and maneuvered his
schedule so that he was on the tarmac at the same time as Lynch so he could force a
meeting. Arizona is friendly territory for the Clintons.
The one point every one is "Glossing Over" is that if the Clinton Server and E-mail
account was the "Official" Secretary of States E-mail... That makes all E-mail on
that Account subject to the "Freedom of Information Act" Hillary has No Right to Pick
and Choose"...
The Court Needs to decide what is irrelevant not Hillary....
except her private email which was supposedly deleted and lost will be difficult to make
public.. Hopefully Assange, Guccifer 2.0 or others will do so. Ask yourself why Clinton
would have deleted those emails and not made a backup..just makes no sense.
"I guarantee that there is no political influence in any investigation
conducted by the Justice Department, or the FBI-not just in this case but in
any case," President Obama said in an
interview with Fox News this past April. Despite his repeated claims of not
influencing the Department of Justice and FBI investigation into
Hillary Clinton's private email server scandal, Obama has helped shield her
throughout the fiasco.
The White House has protected Clinton's emails with the most potential to
incriminate or impugn Clinton's self-portrayed public image. In October 2015,
the Obama Administration
blocked the release of emails between Clinton (while she served as
secretary of state) and the president, citing the need to keep
such communications confidential. Recently, the Obama Administration also blocked
the State Department's release of emails from Clinton regarding the
controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership after it had promised to fulfill a
Freedom of Information Act Request to IBTimes earlier this year. The request
will now allegedly not be completed until after the general election in late
November.
"The delay was issued in the same week the Obama administration filed a court
motion to try to kill a lawsuit aimed at forcing the federal government to
more quickly comply with open records requests for Clinton-era State Department
documents,"
reported David Sirota of IBTimes.
Hillary Clinton's involvement with the Trans-Pacific Partnership is riddled
with hypocrisy. As secretary of state, Clinton
helped move TPP negotiations along. However, she avoided taking a position
on TPP for the first few months of her 2016 presidential campaign-until Bernie
Sanders' staunch opposition to
the deal forced Clinton to risk losing highly coveted
endorsements from labor unions who strongly oppose it. Politifact
rated Clinton's switch as a full flip-flop.
Despite holding back an endorsement during the Democratic primaries, Obama
hasn't made much effort to
hide where his favoritism lies. The Clinton campaign recently
claimedObama
will be releasing an endorsement for
Hillary
Clinton very soon. This came shortly after Obama reaffirmed
his endorsement of DNC chair
Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who faces growing calls for resignation from
Sanders supporters and a strong Democratic primary opponent in
Tim Canova.
In January 2016, Obama condescendingly referred to
Sanders and his unexpected challenge to Clinton's coronation as a "bright,
shiny object," in an
interview with Politico.
"If Bernie Sanders' campaign has proven anything, it is that there are
millions of citizens who are engaged, invested and closely scrutinizing the
policy positions of all of the candidates in the electoral field,"
countered Harry Jaffe for The Guardian. "If Sanders can bring new
voters to the polls with his message of authenticity and empowerment-as he
seems to be doing-that's a testament to the power of his words rather than
their shiny quality."
If
Bernie Sanders was under investigation by the FBI and Department of
Justice, it is doubtful Obama would be jumping to his defense as he has
repeatedly done for
Hillary
Clinton. "She would never intentionally put America in any kind of
jeopardy," he
told Fox News in April 2016, while simultaneously guaranteeing he wouldn't
interfere with the investigation. But by making a judgment at all on Clinton's
private server use, he is intervening-especially by affirming Clinton
had no
intent, which is vital to determine criminal liability in this case.
Obama, like many of his Democratic colleagues who overwhelmingly support
Clinton, were downplaying the
private
email server investigation as frivolous, until the recent
report from the State Department Inspector General illuminated the blatant
lies
Clinton has been telling the public for over a year. She never received
authorization for using a private
email server and broke federal record laws by not preserving and turning
over her records to the State Department when she left office. Shortly after
the report was released, Obama dodged
a question at a press conference in Japan, refusing to provide an answer at
all, instead telling reporters such questions should be directed to the
Clinton and Sanders campaigns-which is what he should have been doing all
along.
Just as
Hillary Clinton has depended on Obama whenever she was cornered in a debate
and needed help diverting an issue, she is now depending on him to get through
the FBI and Department of Justice
investigation long enough to get to become president-at which point there
will be no chance of serving the indictment her actions certainly warrant.
"What we already know about her
security infractions should disqualify her for any government position that
deals in information critical to mission success, domestic or foreign," wrote
Philip Jennings in an
op-ed for USA Today. "But beyond that, her responses to being
found out-dismissing
its importance, claiming
ignorance,
blaming others-indict her beyond anything the investigation can reveal.
Those elements reveal her character. And the saddest thing is so many Americans
seem not to care."
Dropped charges against a uniformed
Black Panter carrying a billy club at a
voting place. The case was all but done.
ObamaCo came in and dropped all charges.
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145
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Jun 7, 2016 12:21pm
Walter Riley
·
Grand Island, New York
The President
is inexorably tied to the Clinton
private server, and now working behind
the scenes to force Bernie from the race
before the Democratic convention. The
strategy? Should word leak that Hillary
is recommended for indictment, the
establishment will be able to install
its own establishment choice (not
Bernie). Really sleazy!
Hillary is evil enough to have set the
President up by sending and receiving
from him information that is potentially
damaging to the country's security. This
is a tactic used by common criminals to
lure unsuspecting persons into a trap of
having committed a crime and suddenly
begins to suffer the 'in-to-deep', and
the 'let's overlook it for now'
syndrome, and the consequences will
somehow simply be forgotten and go away.
Bottom line, the President of the United
States is being blackmailed by the
Secretary of state and her husband Bill
Clinton.
If the POTUS had classified e-mail
exchanges with the SOS, he (the POTUS)
has been naively sucked in, and Hillary
is constantly free to imply everyone
knew (inferring the POTUS as well) and,
hence she gets a free ride. The FBI
should give special attention to this
likely possibility. Bill and Hillary has
been at this game forever, and there is
no reason to calculate otherwise.
HOW ELSE CAN SHE SAY WITH SUCH
CONVICTION, "IT'S NOT GOING TO HAPPEN'!
Our POTUS has his ass in a bind. The FBI
cannot help but conclude that, many in
the White House (and perhaps the
President himself) knew this e-mail
address was not secure!
Where the President had been too
compliant, he now finds himself too
complicit.
It's no wonder how the broadest spectrum
of Social Media is 5 to 1 in support of
Bernie, and the ballot box ends up a
vote or two in favor of Hillary? BERNIE
OR BUST!
Richard Davidson
·
The University of Michigan
Impeachment requires
only a majority of the House, but
removal requires a two thirds vote of
the Senate. It failed to happen the last
two times a president was impeached, and
it certainly would fail again against
Hillary.
BTW, impeachment is not a criminal or
civil matter, but a political one.
Theresa M Brown
·
Works at
Freelance new build/home renovation
designer
Walter Riley - at
some point, if Bernie doesn't, Trump
will force the hand of the crooks up in
Washington - when that happens -
Americans will probably have their one
chance to uninfest this country of the
new world order
Joe Clark ·
Works at
Retired
I think many millions of Americans do
care about Hillary's past indiscretions but feel helpless
to stop her progress given the influence of the political
elite who throw millions of dollars her way knowing they
all will eventually be rewarded for their support. Hillary
Clinton is as corrupt as any politician I have ever seen
in my lifetime; even more dangerous than Richard Nixon.
America will pay dearly if see is somehow elected
president.
Anita Katleen Ruggles-Zigmont
·
Haddon Heights High School
Obama can claim all he wants that
there has been no political influence used by him or the
DOJ. It's like all the other lies he tells and of course
while keeping a straight face. Like I have said many times
now, if some poor GI had mishanlded classified material or
put it on a private server, he would have been tried,
convicted and still sitting in some Federal Prison, before
you could say Obama! Wake up people, she put the safety of
the USA on the line, with her blantant disregard for
established rules on handling classified materials! How
can she be trusted in the White House?
Charles DeJoseph
·
Sr. Airframe Mech at Sikorsky Aircraft.
at
Where do you work
This President and his administration
are the worst obstuctionists in our history. The only
reason he wasn't impeached was because of the fear
Congress had of the riots in the streets that would have
ensued, from the minorities and possible bloodshed from
the victims of the riots who would finally arm them selves
cause they've had enough of their buisnesses being burned
down and their families threatened.
Frank Ciurca ·
University of Maryland, College Park
She has broken so many Federal Laws
it's ridiculous. Then Obama's henchmen went after General
Petraeus for arguably much less. Now this corrupt
Administration, the worse since Nixon, is protecting
Clinton. Patraeus as an honorable person admitted to his
wrong doing. Clinton has no problem lying, after all she's
related to another liar.
Steve Taylor
Obama is complicit in the Clinton
corruption and lies. He should be impeached, imprisoned
and deported if he is ever released. If he is found guilty
of treason he should be publicly executed by firing squad.
Perry Rondou ·
UW Whitewater
Is this the as advertised 'Most
transparent Administration'? Hah, the bunch of lib
hypocrites. The republicans have a much better candidate
than the convict and the socialist. The left is intent on
giving illegals everything in exchange for their votes,
and turning us into Greece or Venezuela. Hell, obama and
the hollywood left love Ortega.
Richard McDonald
·
Jacksonville, Florida
The "most transparent
administration", yeah, right! We can see right through
Obama, what his agenda is and was from Day one when he was
"ready to rule" as Ms. Jarrett so specifically put it. He
has not been a "President of the people", he's been many
things while in office, but, clearly, not a President.
His entire administration was built on lies and deceit,
with divisiveness thrown in for good measure. Everything
he has touched, from Solyndra to shovel ready, to the
automobile companies to our healthcare has turned to a
pile of dog feces and he's been behind it all, and more.
He chose the most inept people to run critical cabinet
departments.
Hillary was, perhaps, the worst of all. She claims abject
failures as "accomplishments" and is too stupid to
understand the difference. From her meddling in Lybia to
the Egyptian "spring" debacle. She cannot account for $ 6
Billion in cash that went missing on her watch that was in
Iraq and Afghan safes that were under the watchful eye of
the CIA and others. As long as she got her cut, doesn't
care.
Barack Hussein Obama, the one man wrecking crew of a
nation.
Alice Gaunt ·
Phoenix Union High School, Phoenix, AZ
Wake up people!!!!!! She lied directly
to the families of the Benghazi victims along with all the
other lies she's told!!!!! She blamed the women that Bill
sexually abused and yet she says shes all for women's
rights?!?!?!?! This woman is as corrupt if not moreso as
the Obama administration and the only reaon he's covering
for her as he knows he can control her if she's
elected!!!!!! He'll be calling in all these "favors" hes
giving her now sooner or later. We really don't want nor
need another ace liar in the WH!!!!!! God help us if this
corrupt bit*ch gets electd!!!!!!
Lee Abbamondi ·
Goldenwest, Huntington Beach, California
She has condemned herself...She
obstucted this investigation. We know she destroyed
documents conerning Top Secret e-mails sent over her
server. She sent her computer to a company in Texas to
have it cleaned. Check U.S. Code Title 18 Section 2017. If
she destroyed any government documents she cannot hold any
government office--EVER. She gets 3-yuears in prison and I
want to see her and billy-boy in those orange jumpsuits
for the fraud of the Clinton Foundation. Based on her
record as Secretary of State---what did she accomplish
other than have Russia buy our uranium for a $50M donation
to the Foundation through Canada along with the
Arab Countries give hundred of millions----she was working
for herself and not the country. And as far as her doing
things for women----name one. Words. Words. Words. Every
time she opens her mouth, you can smell what she has been
eating. Wait to see how much more the muslim in the White
House will do to save her arse. And she has had her face
lifted so many times she has hair on her chest. One more
time and she'll have a mustache or that could be something
she has been diving.
Thomas Schanher
·
Works at
Retired
When are all you people going to
realize that this is all part of Barry's plan. He'll save
Billary & Butthead from embarassment & prison, fix the
November elections for that witch like he did for himself,
all in exchange for her nominating Barry to the Supreme
Court. Ever wonder why Barry says he's not leaving
Washington DC? It's all part of his ongoing masterplan to
ruin America, something he's done a good job of doing for
the past 7 1/2 years. Without a Trump election in
November, we're all in trouble!!
Charles Smith ·
The
Ohio State University
Benghazi got burried in the shredder.
Fast & Furious did not get investigated. Hillary's Emails
what was left of them have not been gone through by Lynch.
The Black Panthers refusing to let White voters in
Philliadelpha vote in 2008. That was filmed voice and all
Holder refused to prosecute. The federal Government
brought a huge injustice to a MR Finican in Oregon. They
killed MR Finican in Col Blooded Murder and for a topper
shot him in the head after they knew he was dead. The
umjust department of unjust bussed Blacks from Orlando to
get the Police chief fired. Then tried to influence a jury
to convict an innocent Zimmerman for killing Martin.
Matthew Graff ·
Various
So Trump may be a buffoon, but what
does that say about Hillary and Obama - liars to the core.
Sorry, can't vote democrat, they're basicaly unamerican in
every way shape and form.
Joe Butler ·
Las Vegas, Nevada
It would be hard to explain why Obama
did nothing to inform Clinton not to use a private server
when she corresponded with him via email. Both are
culpable. Covering her butt is Obama just covering
himself.
Shirley Allan ·
Administrative Assistant at
Dr. Perry Mueller
She talkes of honesty, doing the right
thing for the people etc., etc. - she needs to be held
responsible NOW before this election stuff goes further -
whether others have done anything similar doesn't matter -
it is NOW AND NOW - you can't simply do wrong and then
expect the average person to respect and vote for her - I
don't trust any of the candidates running, but what
choices do we have really? Our earth will end soon just
watch the weather changes - people are in panic mode -
people lie to get our attention. I feel each candidate
should live in our WORLD and walk in our SHOES for few
months just to get an idea of what we the average person
goes through and the conflicts and hardships we all go
through and then maybe we can get on track - The President
needs to do the correct thing !!
Woody Nelson
Obama has become appalling. I hate to
make this observation but blacks just don't recognize
criminal activity. Obama has supported the thugs Trayvon
Marting and Michael Brown while throwing our police
departments under the bus. Eric Holder with Obama's nod
illegally sold guns to gang members, etc. Now he doesn't
recognize the criminality of Hillary Clinton. I worked for
DoD for over 20 years and retired and while I was employed
we had annual mandatory training about handling classified
materials and the legal repercussions of violating any of
these U.S. codes and laws governing classified material.
We also had very strict guidelines governing telework. At
no time were we allowed to do government business on
personal or home accounts. All business was conducted
through a government firewall. Hillary without a doubt
violated some of the codes and laws and should be held
accountable in the same manner I would have been held
accountable had I violated any of these.
Lee Allen
·
Riverside, California
If you would have
seen the Documentary that came out,
wayback when AKA BARRY SOTORO decided to
run for PREZ. It was entitled, Obama's
America 2016.Denesh Desousa producted
it. Everything that was said in th film,
has come true. An,he is getting ready to
release one on the Clintons, soon.
Roger Rocky Scobey
Obama has lied about everything. He
promised to have the most transparent administration ever
but he lied. He promised to close Guantanamo, but lied. He
lied that the IRS was not targeting conservatives groups.
He lied about selling guns to the Mexican drug cartels, he
lied about Obamacare not being a tax. He lied about the
Iran Nuclear deal. He lied about blaming a youtube video
for the killing of our Ambasador in Benghazi. Etc., etc..
His lies are too many to list.
Jason Hadley ·
Louisiana Tech University
The President should be charged with
"obstruction of justice". Any common place citizan would
be. this country has become so caulis that they dont even
see or care that our goverment has become so corrupt and
dagerously strong that eventually we will lose all our
freedoms and we will cease to be The United States of
America.
Terry Foster
The headline needs to be corrected .
Obama's Latest Attempt to "OBSTRUCT" JUSTICE "and Save
Clinton From Indictment !!! That illegitimate ,low life
,lawless fool crackhead obama has been the mos corrupt ,incompetent,most
destructive,most divisive and up till now ,the most
unqualified fraud ever installed in our White House !!!
Joseph Kaminski
No one in governmnet has the courage,
or desire to charge obama with his crimes, or clinton with
hers. NONE, because they are all as corrupt as him and
her. they are all criminals. Instead they attempt to tell
Americans lies that even a child would not believe. The
entire world is looking on in shock and disbelief , and
when it wears off they will themselves decide to expand
their own corrupt crimess and be like the USA, since
Julie Hardaway
·
Aiken, South Carolina
The writer is mistaken in this
statemtn: "But by making a judgment at all on Clinton's
private server use, he is intervening-especially by
affirming Clinton had no intent, which is vital to
determine criminal liability in this case." In fact, the
Espionage law does NOT require intent for guilt. Gross
negligence is quite sufficient. Not that it matters, since
we now see that the Clinton-Obama Democrats--not the
Sanders Dems--don't give a damn about "equal justice under
(snicker) law." THe law, as Hillary's alter-ego Leona
Helmsley so colorfully put it, "is for little people."
That means you and me.
Gail Newman
America always gets the
president we deserve. Why do we deserve Clinton? It's not
our fault. Public schooling was intentionally designed to
shut off critical thinking and independent thought. It's
all documented. It was NEVER meant to educate, though
Johann Ficht's documents say that SOME education is
inevitable, but that's not the purpose of schooling. It
said that history should never teach facts, but should
teach patriotic themes. That's how so many American don't
have a clue that the Supreme Court conducted a coup d'etat
in 1819 and it threw out the Constitution and our
Constitutional Republic - replacing it with a common law
government (the 1st 2 reasons given in the Dec. of
Independence for breakinig with England). Until we get the
real truth about our own history into public knowledge, we
are doomed. OUr economic paradigm is directly responsible
for every social/political/ecological problem we have, but
that isn't taught in schools either. The end of human life
on earth is much closer to us than most dare imagine. And
that indoctrination / programmiing given us in public
schools is why we have a Clinton and a Trump today.
America must join in a Learn-In .
Thomas Bryan · Medellín, Colombia
Obama will always have a go-between so he never is directly held reponsible for his actions,
remember all the statements....I didn't know anything until I saw it on the news. He's 100% lying
traitor to the American People. Who else has the authority to hender evidence in a Federal
Investigation, Duh
Clifford Fargason
Failure to safeguard classified information is illegal regardless of intent. For example, Gen
Petraus, Eric Snowden, and PFC Manning were all convicted for mishandling classified information.
In Gen Petraus's case he shared information with an individual who had the appropriate clearance
level but not "need to know."
Cheryl Gumulauski
·
Coupeville, Washington
Wow, Nixon tried this with is tapes
and lost. Time to file a suit for them and have the courts
order Obama hand them over. They are not his, but belong
to the government unless classified and a special judge
has to sign off on that. Political embarrassment is not
justification for classification, as the case for the
Pentegon papaers proved.
Randy Vandegrift
In mishandling classified materials,
hillary is either stupid, incompetent or hiding something,
and I would postulate that she is guilty of all 3. She is
stupid because we now know that some hacker, and Putin,
have her emails; incompetent because she did not protect
classified materials placing people and operations at
risk, going so far as to direct someone to remove the
classification markings and fax some classified materials
over an unsecured fax line; and hiding something because,
as we now know, she did not want them subject to FOIA
(maybe selling her influence as Sec'y of State for
donations to a Clinton Foundation; colluding on the
elections; or post your own thoughts). As a former federal
contractor, I know that had I or any of my colleagues done
what she did, we would have been fired immediately and
facing serious federal charges including signficant prison
time.
Mark Foster ·
Escambia High School
If you believe that then I want to
sell you some land in FL, come see it at low tide:)
Let your vote be counted, let's make America rich and
great again, because now that Obama is almost out of
office and running up the national debt from 10 Trillion
to 20 Trillion maybe a real business man can accomplish
something great for America?
Fran Ferreira
I would love to see the "dirt" the
Clinton's have on Obama. We all know Obama hates the
Clintons and for him to continue covering her butt it must
be good. Oh, to be a fly on the wall when those two get
together.
Alan Jones ·
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
First of all, if Obama has to stand
there and say "I guarantee that there is no political
influence in any investigation conducted by the Justice
Department" chances are political influence has already
been exercised. That's just like Slick Willy saying "I
never had sex with that woman".
Like ·
Reply ·
Jun 7, 2016 1:55pm
Ed Ernst ·
DePaul University
I truly believe that this entire
administration is re-writing the old hand book "lying for
Dummies"!! Every department is so full of crap, from the
Administration, to the IRS, to the EPA, to the Justice
Dept., and the Veterans Administration that they no longer
would know the truth if it bit them in the arse!!! This is
why that lyin', scumbag, schemin', PHONY of a human being
hil-airous cling-on can't be elected president.
Like ·
Reply ·
Jun 8, 2016 4:23am
Eric Park
How can we collectively get the
message to James Comey, Director of the FBI....Sir, if you
have or have not discovered sufficient evidence to
justifyt indictment of ex-Sec of State Hillary Rodham
Clinton, we the American voters believe you have an
obligation to us to reach your conclusion and publicly
recommend or not recommend indictment by the Dept of
Justice. Please, sir, let us go into this critical
Presidential election fully informed. Should the evidence
support indictment (be it violation of FOIA and record
keeping, ala private servers, or selling govt access via
the Clinton Foundatio ... See
More
Like ·
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1
·
Jun 7, 2016 1:19pm
Jenny Racine York Lloyd
Obama and both Clintons should
probably all be in jail but the truth will never be
believed or acted upon. Power-mongers and greed-filled.
They will answer to a much high power some day.
Thomas Topmiller
·
Works at
Retired
The democrats don't seem to care about
Hillary's moral character, only Trump's. Hillary will have
Obama intervening for her and Obama will tell the justice
dept. not to prosecute her. I can only hope that the fbi
will blow the whistle when Obama interfers. There was s no
doubt that Obama will interfere, it's just a matter of
when. Everybody knows the clintons and obama's are in bed
together.
Joseph Stretanski
·
Stamford, Connecticut
Hope and Change
Eight years ago we were sold a bill of goods called "Hope
and Change".
Eight years ago we were a nation of laws.
In fact, Obama took an oath of office to abide by the laws
of this land and the constitution.
Today, we are re-writing laws after they are passed (Obamacare).
Today, the President is implementing laws he likes and
ignoring those he doesn't.
Today , the President is making laws and ignoring the will
of the people who made the House and the Senate Republican
to prevent the President from continuing his assault on
the laws and the constitution of this nation.
Today, judges are ruling against the President for his
immigration executive orders.
Today, the Presidents economic policies and the use of
excessive regulations and the Govt. agencies, such as the
EPA, has resulted in anemic growth and the lowest labor
participation rate in 30 years.
However, if you exist in Obamaland, none of this is true.
Granted the "Change" part is true. However, today 62% of
the public thinks it is in the wrong direction. A fact
that the President, and also, his close associates ignore.
I would say it is time to reverse the current direction.
Andrew Martinson
Barack "the pathological and
sociopathic liar" Obama; the same liar who has been proven
to have known he was lying when he told us over and over
and over again ad nauseam "if you like your doctor, you
can keep your doctor" ... and "if you like your insurance
plan, you can keep your insurance plan" ... and "the
average American family will save $2500 on their health
insurance" ... and not to be forgotten;
"there's not even a smidgeon of corruptness in the I R S".
More and more and more lies by the Barack "the
pathological and sociopathic liar" Obama. THAT will be his
legacy.
"... But former US attorney Joseph DiGenova is blunt: "I don't think there's any question Mrs Clinton and her staff broke the law. She maintained a server in her private home in Chappaqua, New York, and conducted government business. This clearly was beyond gross negligence. ..."
"... "When she set up the server, the intent was to avoid accountability. There is no other intent required. The notion this is not a violation of the law is ludicrous. If she and her staff get a pass, there will be hell to pay in the intelligence community." ..."
"... Innocent until proven guilty, she would not be legally barred from running for president. Handy draws parallels with Sheldon Silver , the former speaker of the New York assembly who last month was jailed for 12 years for corruption. ..."
"... The political, media and public pressure on Clinton might be overwhelming, however, making her candidacy untenable and prompting a sensational, unprecedented and humiliating withdrawal. ..."
"... Cox adds: "If charges came down before the convention, it would raise questions over whether the Democratic party really wanted to proceed with a nominee facing criminal charges but, again, I think it is very unlikely that is going to happen." ..."
As an FBI investigation continues, expert opinion is divided. Some offer a view reminiscent of
Bill Clinton's famous remark that he experimented with marijuana but "didn't inhale".
... ... ...
State department and intelligence officials have identified 2,093 email chains from Clinton's
server as containing classified information. Twenty-two were deemed so highly classified that
they were withheld from release to the public. Clinton contends that none of the messages was
marked classified at the time.
But former US attorney Joseph DiGenova is blunt: "I don't think there's any question Mrs
Clinton and her staff broke the law. She maintained a server in her private home in Chappaqua,
New York, and conducted government business. This clearly was beyond gross negligence.
"When she set up the server, the intent was to avoid accountability. There is no other
intent required. The notion this is not a violation of the law is ludicrous. If she and her staff
get a pass, there will be hell to pay in the intelligence community."
... ... ...
If Clinton is indicted, what would happen?
Innocent until proven guilty, she would not be legally barred from running for president.
Handy draws parallels with
Sheldon Silver, the former speaker of the New York assembly who last month was jailed for 12
years for corruption.
"I would hope that she would step down but even given Shelly Silvers' indictment, it took
tremendous pressure to get him to step down as speaker. Even if there were an indictment, I don't
know if she would step aside. I would hope someone indicted would say, 'For the good of the
party, for the good of the nation.' But her supporters would probably say, 'She deserves her day
in court'."
While she would not be arrested, experts say, she would normally be expected to appear in
court. The optics would be disastrous for a would be commander-in-chief but she could apply to
have the charges dismissed or plead to a minor dismeanour in the hope that it would not
necessarily disqualify her.
The political, media and public pressure on Clinton might be overwhelming, however, making
her candidacy untenable and prompting a sensational, unprecedented and humiliating withdrawal.
Stewart says: "I don't know how you couldn't pull out, especially for something like this
involving national security."
Cox adds: "If charges came down before the convention, it would raise questions over
whether the Democratic party really wanted to proceed with a nominee facing criminal charges but,
again, I think it is very unlikely that is going to happen."
But what if she is forced to pull out?
The Democratic party's charter and bylaws state that responsibility for finding a replacement
nominee would fall to the Democratic National Committee, but the rules do not specify exactly how
this would be done.
Sanders would presumably claim that he should inherit the mantle of nominee after pushing
Clinton close in the primaries and earning the right to face Donald Trump. Indeed, it has been
speculated that the
Vermont senator has clung on so long in case the FBI investigation proves a cataclysmic event
for the former first lady and a gamechanger for him.
"... The permanent war state is the 800-pound gorilla in US society and political life. As the old joke goes, the answer to the question, "Where does an 800-pound gorilla eat?" is, "Anywhere he likes." As long as the organs of "national security" continue to retain the extraordinary power to appropriate budgetary resources and to involve the United States in foreign conflicts without real accountability, US politics will be grotesquely distorted to the profound disadvantage of the movement for fundamental change. The Pentagon, the CIA and the National Security Agency will continue to control most of the $1.1 trillion federal discretionary spending budget, crowding out programs that would benefit people. And beyond wielding that obvious financial power, by maintaining the premise that the United States must continue to make war indefinitely, they will also wield an ideological weapon that helps the economic elite maintain the status quo. ..."
"... For more original Truthout election coverage, check out our election section, "Beyond the Sound Bites: Election 2016." ..."
"... But that fundamental obstacle to change was not even mentioned by any of the speakers who introduced the main themes of the conference on the first night. On the second day, US Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) strongly denounced moves by powerful interests for a new war for regime change in Syria, but she did not address the underlying system of institutional interests and power that keeps the United States at permanent war. There was one breakout session entitled "Healthcare Not Warfare," which highlighted what people already know -- that spending for war and preparation for war robs the people of resources needed to build a more prosperous and equitable society. But it was evidently an afterthought for conference organizers, and did not interest many of the attendees, drawing perhaps 30 people. ..."
"... The Sanders campaign never explicitly raised the issue of the permanent war state during the primary election contest, either. He did present a sharp contrast to Hillary Clinton when they debated foreign policy, effectively demolishing her position urging a more militarily aggressive policy in Syria. He called for a policy that "destroys ISIS" but "does not get us involved in perpetual warfare in the quagmire of the Middle East."But he never talked about ending the unprecedented power that national security institutions have seized over the resources and security of the American people. ..."
"... The power of the military-industrial-congressional complex that has morphed into a permanent war state has long been the real "third rail" in US politics, which anyone aspiring to national office touches only at the risk of being branded "anti-American." News media coverage constantly reinforces the idea that US global military presence and aggressiveness are legitimate responses to foreign threats. So, for politicians, explaining why the power of that combination of institutions is a danger not only to people's economic interests, but also to their physical security is seen as extremely difficult and fraught with political risk. Sanders, who had no problem opposing specific wars, undoubtedly feared that an effort to deal with the interests and power behind the wars that most Americans oppose would force him to respond to attacks from the Clinton camp and the corporate media, and thus interfere with his populist message. ..."
"... Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare ..."
The People's Summit in Chicago June 17-19 dramatically displayed both the strengths and the vulnerabilities
of what has emerged in 2016 as one of the most potentially powerful movements for fundamental change
in the United States in many decades. The event, which brought together 3,000 committed movement
activists to rally in support of the "political revolution" given impetus by Bernie Sanders' campaign,
was an opportunity to ensure that the movement will not dissipate in the wake of Hillary Clinton's
clinching the Democratic nomination.
The leaders of the movement sought to use the summit to reconcile conflicting activist views on
the relationship between movement organizations and electoral politics. The summit may have succeeded
in keeping the coalition of those who privilege electoral politics and those who see it as a distraction
from their local struggles from splitting up. But despite the political sophistication and pragmatism
of the organizers, the gathering failed to deal seriously with the problem of the "permanent war
state" -- the central power bloc in the US government that looms menacingly over everything the movement
hopes to accomplish.
The permanent war state is the 800-pound gorilla in US society and political life. As the
old joke goes, the answer to the question, "Where does an 800-pound gorilla eat?" is, "Anywhere he
likes." As long as the organs of "national security" continue to retain the extraordinary power to
appropriate budgetary resources and to involve the United States in foreign conflicts without real
accountability, US politics will be grotesquely distorted to the profound disadvantage of the movement
for fundamental change. The Pentagon, the CIA and the National Security Agency will continue to control
most of the $1.1 trillion federal discretionary spending budget, crowding out programs that would
benefit people. And beyond wielding that obvious financial power, by maintaining the premise that
the United States must continue to make war indefinitely, they will also wield an ideological weapon
that helps the economic elite maintain the status quo.
But that fundamental obstacle to change was not even mentioned by any of the speakers who
introduced the main themes of the conference on the first night. On the second day, US Rep. Tulsi
Gabbard (D-Hawaii) strongly denounced moves by powerful interests for a new war for regime change
in Syria, but she did not address the underlying system of institutional interests and power that
keeps the United States at permanent war. There was one breakout session entitled "Healthcare Not
Warfare," which highlighted what people already know -- that spending for war and preparation for
war robs the people of resources needed to build a more prosperous and equitable society. But it
was evidently an afterthought for conference organizers, and did not interest many of the attendees,
drawing perhaps 30 people.
The permanent war state is the 800-pound gorilla in US society and political life.
The Sanders campaign never explicitly raised the issue of the permanent war state during the
primary election contest, either. He did present a sharp contrast to Hillary Clinton when they debated
foreign policy, effectively demolishing her position urging a more militarily aggressive policy in
Syria. He called for a policy that "destroys ISIS" but "does not get us involved in perpetual warfare
in the quagmire of the Middle East."But he never talked about ending the unprecedented power that
national security institutions have seized over the resources and security of the American people.
It is not difficult to see why Sanders did not take on that larger issue. The power of the
military-industrial-congressional complex that has morphed into a permanent war state has long been
the real "third rail" in US politics, which anyone aspiring to national office touches only at the
risk of being branded "anti-American." News media coverage constantly reinforces the idea that US
global military presence and aggressiveness are legitimate responses to foreign threats. So, for
politicians, explaining why the power of that combination of institutions is a danger not only to
people's economic interests, but also to their physical security is seen as extremely difficult and
fraught with political risk. Sanders, who had no problem opposing specific wars, undoubtedly feared
that an effort to deal with the interests and power behind the wars that most Americans oppose would
force him to respond to attacks from the Clinton camp and the corporate media, and thus interfere
with his populist message.
The permanent war state also appears to be outside the political comfort zone of National Nurses
United, the single most influential organization in planning and funding the People's Summit. As
a senior official of National Nurses United explained, the organization is able to talk about corporate
control of the health care system because nurses constantly see the consequences in their own work,
but most have no such personal experiences enabling them to talk about the war system.
But despite these understandable reasons for taking a pass on the issue, the leadership of the
movement inspired by the Sanders campaign is making a big mistake by failing to take on the problem
of the permanent war state. The popular organizations represented in Chicago understand this, but
they have hesitated to go up against the most powerful combination bureaucratic interests the world
has ever known, in part because they have not had any clear idea about how those interests could
be defeated. What has been not been tried, however, is a strategy that attacks the war system where
it is most vulnerable -- the fact that the war system bureaucrats have systematically pursued their
own personal and institutional interests at the expense of the American people.
The publicly available records of US intervention and war, especially since the beginning of the
Cold War, reveal an endless succession of policies and programs that were utterly useless and provoked
reactions from states and from non-state actors that threatened the safety of the American people.
But the policy makers preferred those policies, because they gave them and their organizations more
power, more budgetary resources, more people under their command, more new technology, more foreign
bases and perquisites, and more lucrative jobs and contracts when they leave the government for private
companies.
All the services were looking for a boost in military appropriations when they pushed Presidents
John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson to intervene militarily in Vietnam. The US Air Force sold its
"shock and awe" strategy for regime change in Iraq to then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in
order to capture a larger share of the military budget. The CIA got control over a major new mission
when it convinced President George W. Bush to launch a drone war in Pakistan.
But the American people suffered the direct and indirect consequences of these wars in each case.
The fundamental conflict between the national interest and the personal and bureaucratic interests
of the policy makers of the permanent war state explains why the system has continued to produce
uniformly disastrous policies decade after decade.
So the strategy of the movement that the Sanders campaign has mobilized must include a broadly
concerted campaign that explains to young people, disaffected working-class people and others how
the permanent war state produces winners and losers. The winners are the national security organs
themselves, as well as those who make careers and fortunes from the permanent state of war. The losers
are those who must suffer the socioeconomic and other consequences of such reckless policies. Such
a campaign should aim at nothing less than taking away the flow of money and the legal authority
that the permanent war state has seized on the pretext of "threats" that are largely of its own making.
Even though the permanent war state seems to be at the peak of its power, like all essentially
hollow institutions, it has a serious political vulnerability. Millions of Americans know that the
wars the war-state agencies have wrought over the past half century -- from the Vietnam War to the
war in Afghanistan -- were worse than useless. So the legitimacy of the permanent war state is extremely
tenuous. A determined campaign to challenge that legitimacy, carried out with sufficient resources
over a few years with the participation of a broad coalition, could shake it to its roots. Such a
campaign must be included in the work to open up new political spaces and propel the movement for
change. Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission
.
Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist and historian writing on US national
security policy. His latest book, Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear
Scare , was published in February of 2014. Follow him on Twitter:
@GarethPorter .
"... On Monday, Raffi Williams, deputy press secretary for the Republican Party, tweeted, "Woman Suing Jeffrey Epstein For Sexual Slavery Claimed Bill Clinton Must Have Known" and linked to a post that in turn referred to a Daily Mail story from 2011. The Drudge Report went for the more sensational "BUBBA AND THE PALM BEACH PEDOPHILE" and linked to the same story. Conservative viral news sites Twitchy and IJReview piled on, as did pundits at conservative websites, including Breitbart and the Blaze . ..."
"... But unsealed court documents revealed that he had been the subject of a much larger federal probe into alleged prostitution and could have faced 10 years in prison or more, if the case had gone forward. After his guilty plea, two of his alleged victims, who had were underage at the time of their encounter with Epstein, sued him in federal court, claiming that he had a "sexual preference and obsession for underage girls" and that he had sexually assaulted them (and many others). Epstein has consistently denied criminal wrongdoing and downplayed his 2008 conviction, telling the New York Post that he is " not a sexual predator ." ..."
"... Clinton's relationship with Epstein is old news. It's long been publicly known that Clinton and other notable figures hobnobbed with Epstein. Still, the new headlines the case has generated have given GOPers a fresh opportunity to try to link Clinton to a sex scandal. Williams, the GOP spokesman, was attempting to draw attention to a three-year-old story that does not implicate Clinton in any lawbreaking. That article, which relies on court documents, recounts the story of Virginia Roberts, who alleged that she became Epstein's sex slave at the age of 15 and that Clinton had once had dinner with Epstein and two girls whom she believed were underage (but she didn't know their ages). But, according to the Daily Mail, Roberts said that "as far as she knows, the ex-President did not take the bait." Roberts did say that she believed Clinton had to have been aware of Epstein's alleged illegal activities, but provided no evidence to support her assumption. ..."
Conservatives think they've found new ammunition for their campaign against
the Clintons-a new Clinton sex scandal. Or sort of.
On Monday, Raffi Williams,
deputy press secretary for the Republican Party,
tweeted, "Woman Suing Jeffrey Epstein For Sexual Slavery Claimed Bill Clinton
Must Have Known" and linked to a post that in turn referred to a Daily Mail
story from 2011. The Drudge Report went for the more
sensational "BUBBA AND THE PALM BEACH PEDOPHILE" and linked to the same
story. Conservative viral news sites Twitchy and
IJReview piled on, as did pundits at conservative websites, including
Breitbart and the Blaze.
What has the right in a tizzy is a six-year-old lawsuit against Jeffrey Epstein,
a former Democratic donor who
has been accused of luring underage girls to his island resort to give massages
before ultimately sexually assaulting them. Epstein, a billionaire hedge fund
manager, pleaded guilty in 2008 to soliciting an underage woman and served 13
months in prison. But unsealed court documents
revealed that he had been the subject of a much larger federal probe into
alleged prostitution and could have faced 10 years in prison or more, if the
case had gone forward. After his guilty plea, two of his alleged victims, who
had were underage at the time of their encounter with Epstein, sued him in federal
court,
claiming that he had a "sexual preference and obsession for underage girls"
and that he had sexually assaulted them (and many others). Epstein has consistently
denied criminal wrongdoing and downplayed his 2008 conviction, telling the
New York Post that he is "not
a sexual predator."
Last week a new anonymous allegation was introduced in the case, with a court
filing charging that Prince Andrew, Queen Elizabeth's second son, had sexually
abused an underage girl when he was a guest at Epstein's house in the US Virgin
Islands. (Prince Andrew has denied any wrongdoing.) And on Monday, The Smoking
Gun
resurfaced old court documents revealing that Epstein's phone book included
telephone numbers and email addresses for Bill Clinton. ("Now that Prince Andrew
has found himself
ensnared in the sleazy sex slave story of wealthy degenerate Jeffrey Epstein,
Bill Clinton can't be too far behind," the site declared.)
Clinton's relationship with Epstein is old news. It's long been publicly
known that Clinton and other notable figures hobnobbed with Epstein. Still,
the new headlines the case has generated have given GOPers a fresh opportunity
to try to link Clinton to a sex scandal. Williams, the GOP spokesman, was attempting
to draw attention to a three-year-old story that does not implicate Clinton
in any lawbreaking. That article, which relies on court documents, recounts
the story of Virginia Roberts, who alleged that she became Epstein's sex slave
at the age of 15 and that Clinton had once had dinner with Epstein and two girls
whom she believed were underage (but she didn't know their ages). But, according
to the Daily Mail, Roberts said that "as far as she knows, the ex-President
did not take the bait." Roberts did say that she believed Clinton had to have
been aware of Epstein's alleged illegal activities, but provided no evidence
to support her assumption.
Clinton and Epstein were indeed once close. The former president used Epstein's
private jet. And the presence of numerous teenage girls on the financier's private
island might have struck a visitor as unusual or even troublesome.
"... On Monday, Raffi Williams, deputy press secretary for the Republican Party, tweeted, "Woman Suing Jeffrey Epstein For Sexual Slavery Claimed Bill Clinton Must Have Known" and linked to a post that in turn referred to a Daily Mail story from 2011. The Drudge Report went for the more sensational "BUBBA AND THE PALM BEACH PEDOPHILE" and linked to the same story. Conservative viral news sites Twitchy and IJReview piled on, as did pundits at conservative websites, including Breitbart and the Blaze . ..."
"... But unsealed court documents revealed that he had been the subject of a much larger federal probe into alleged prostitution and could have faced 10 years in prison or more, if the case had gone forward. After his guilty plea, two of his alleged victims, who had were underage at the time of their encounter with Epstein, sued him in federal court, claiming that he had a "sexual preference and obsession for underage girls" and that he had sexually assaulted them (and many others). Epstein has consistently denied criminal wrongdoing and downplayed his 2008 conviction, telling the New York Post that he is " not a sexual predator ." ..."
"... Clinton's relationship with Epstein is old news. It's long been publicly known that Clinton and other notable figures hobnobbed with Epstein. Still, the new headlines the case has generated have given GOPers a fresh opportunity to try to link Clinton to a sex scandal. Williams, the GOP spokesman, was attempting to draw attention to a three-year-old story that does not implicate Clinton in any lawbreaking. That article, which relies on court documents, recounts the story of Virginia Roberts, who alleged that she became Epstein's sex slave at the age of 15 and that Clinton had once had dinner with Epstein and two girls whom she believed were underage (but she didn't know their ages). But, according to the Daily Mail, Roberts said that "as far as she knows, the ex-President did not take the bait." Roberts did say that she believed Clinton had to have been aware of Epstein's alleged illegal activities, but provided no evidence to support her assumption. ..."
Conservatives think they've found new ammunition for their campaign against
the Clintons-a new Clinton sex scandal. Or sort of.
On Monday, Raffi Williams,
deputy press secretary for the Republican Party,
tweeted, "Woman Suing Jeffrey Epstein For Sexual Slavery Claimed Bill Clinton
Must Have Known" and linked to a post that in turn referred to a Daily Mail
story from 2011. The Drudge Report went for the more
sensational "BUBBA AND THE PALM BEACH PEDOPHILE" and linked to the same
story. Conservative viral news sites Twitchy and
IJReview piled on, as did pundits at conservative websites, including
Breitbart and the Blaze.
What has the right in a tizzy is a six-year-old lawsuit against Jeffrey Epstein,
a former Democratic donor who
has been accused of luring underage girls to his island resort to give massages
before ultimately sexually assaulting them. Epstein, a billionaire hedge fund
manager, pleaded guilty in 2008 to soliciting an underage woman and served 13
months in prison. But unsealed court documents
revealed that he had been the subject of a much larger federal probe into
alleged prostitution and could have faced 10 years in prison or more, if the
case had gone forward. After his guilty plea, two of his alleged victims, who
had were underage at the time of their encounter with Epstein, sued him in federal
court,
claiming that he had a "sexual preference and obsession for underage girls"
and that he had sexually assaulted them (and many others). Epstein has consistently
denied criminal wrongdoing and downplayed his 2008 conviction, telling the
New York Post that he is "not
a sexual predator."
Last week a new anonymous allegation was introduced in the case, with a court
filing charging that Prince Andrew, Queen Elizabeth's second son, had sexually
abused an underage girl when he was a guest at Epstein's house in the US Virgin
Islands. (Prince Andrew has denied any wrongdoing.) And on Monday, The Smoking
Gun
resurfaced old court documents revealing that Epstein's phone book included
telephone numbers and email addresses for Bill Clinton. ("Now that Prince Andrew
has found himself
ensnared in the sleazy sex slave story of wealthy degenerate Jeffrey Epstein,
Bill Clinton can't be too far behind," the site declared.)
Clinton's relationship with Epstein is old news. It's long been publicly
known that Clinton and other notable figures hobnobbed with Epstein. Still,
the new headlines the case has generated have given GOPers a fresh opportunity
to try to link Clinton to a sex scandal. Williams, the GOP spokesman, was attempting
to draw attention to a three-year-old story that does not implicate Clinton
in any lawbreaking. That article, which relies on court documents, recounts
the story of Virginia Roberts, who alleged that she became Epstein's sex slave
at the age of 15 and that Clinton had once had dinner with Epstein and two girls
whom she believed were underage (but she didn't know their ages). But, according
to the Daily Mail, Roberts said that "as far as she knows, the ex-President
did not take the bait." Roberts did say that she believed Clinton had to have
been aware of Epstein's alleged illegal activities, but provided no evidence
to support her assumption.
Clinton and Epstein were indeed once close. The former president used Epstein's
private jet. And the presence of numerous teenage girls on the financier's private
island might have struck a visitor as unusual or even troublesome.
This just one case of Clinton's family corruption and probably not the most outrageous one. It is
now more clear why she deleted so many emails. Clinton faces many questions about whether she helped
her family foundation collect millions of dollars from questionable people, countries and organizations
when she was secretary of state.
Notable quotes:
"... A major Democratic donor personally lobbied then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's office for a seat on a sensitive government intelligence board, telling one of her closest aides that if appointed he would make Clinton "look good." ..."
"... The emails shed new light on how Fernando got a spot on the International Security Advisory Board . He resigned in 2011, days after his appointment and after his selection was questioned. ..."
"... In recent weeks, emails obtained by Citizens United show the appointment perplexed the State Department's professional staff, according to ABC News , and that dozens of State Department officials worked overtime to quickly obtain Fernando's security clearance, according to Fox News . ..."
"... Reines appeared to mock the appointment by responding to Samuelson: "Not the most compelling response I've ever seen since it's such a dense topic the board resolves around. Couldn't he have landed a spot on the President's Physical Fitness Council?" ..."
Rajiv Fernando lobbied top Clinton aide for a seat on sensitive intelligence board. He had
little experience in the field and resigned after appointment was scrutinized. The Chicago businessman
donated to Clinton, Obama and the Clinton Foundation.
A major Democratic donor personally lobbied then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's office
for a seat on a sensitive government intelligence board, telling one of her closest aides that if
appointed he would make Clinton "look good."
Rajiv Fernando acknowledged that he may not have
the experience to sit on a board that would allow him the highest levels of top-secret access, but
he assured deputy chief of staff Huma Abedin in newly released 2009 emails that he was talking to
two professors who were "getting me up to speed on the academics behind the field."
Fernando, who contributed to Clinton, her
family's foundation and Barack Obama,
described himself as one of "Hillary's people" and mentioned that he recently had sent an ailing
Clinton flowers to wish her a speedy recovery.
The emails shed new light on how Fernando got a spot on the
International Security Advisory Board.
He resigned in 2011, days after his appointment and after his selection was questioned.
... ... ...
In recent weeks, emails obtained by Citizens United show the appointment perplexed the State
Department's professional staff, according to
ABC News, and that dozens of State Department officials worked overtime to quickly obtain Fernando's
security clearance, according to
Fox News.
Reines
appeared to mock the appointment by responding to Samuelson: "Not the most compelling response
I've ever seen since it's such a dense topic the board resolves around. Couldn't he have landed a
spot on the President's Physical Fitness Council?"
Fernando founded Chopper Trading, a high-frequency trading firm that was acquired by the Chicago
firm DRW Trading Group in 2015. In an economic speech last year, Clinton criticized high-frequency
traders. Providence, Rhode Island, sued Chopper Trading and other financial companies, charging they'd
defrauded the city, which managed funds for its employees.
"... is the use of public office for private gain ..."
"... as a troll prophylactic, let me say that this post is not an endorsement of any candidate ..."
"... There's a lot of truth on each front, and Trump builds his case using simple, effective language. Of course, there's a million dollar SuperPAC with the billable hours to refute these charges by funding trolls - you can go online and meet them! - but to me, they're pounding the table because they're losing on the facts and (maybe) the law. On corruption, it's common sense that taking huge sums of money from Wall Street influences you, just as much as an effing coffee mug ..."
"... Many have commented that both the Democrat and Republican candidates have unfavorables that are, historically, uniquely high . At 55%, Trump's unfavorables are, amazingly, 20 points higher than Clinton's also amazing unfavorables, at 35%. Short of running into a burning building to save a small child, it's doubtful that Trump can reduce his unfavorables. What he can do is drive up Clinton's unfavorables so that they are at his level. The series of speeches that we've looked at are, I think, a coordinated effort to do that, and there's good reason to think they'll succeed. To what extent, we don't know. Again, anybody who thinks that Clinton will get a free ride to the Oval Office is delusional. ..."
With that, I'll look at four themes that should carry Trump through to November, as exemplified
by excerpts from the speech
Rigged System Corruption TPP Email
The speech is long, and there's a rather a lot of oppo, including a narrative of Benghazi that
is, at long last, at least coherent - red meat for the base! - but these the themes that I think
are in NC's wheelhouse, and will resonate most with NC readers. (
I've demoted Clinton's warmongering to a footnote, since in my view that's so obvious as not to need
discussion .) You can decide for yourselves whether the truth lies closer to Beutler's interpretation,
or to People's .
I'm going to take selected portions of Trump's speech, and annotate them, with two streams of
notes: The first, numbered ("[1"), will cover the substance of Trump's speeech. The second, lettered
("[A]"), will cover the rhetoric. (At some point, I should get out the Magic Markers™and look at
Trump's rhetoric exclusively, but this post is not that post.) First, the rigged system.
1. Rigged System: "Her phony landing in Bosnia"
[TRUMP:} [I]it's not just the political system that's rigged, it's the whole economy.
(APPLAUSE)
It's rigged[A] by big donors who want to keep wages down[1]. It's
rigged by big businesses who want to leave our country, fire our workers and sell their products
back into the United States with absolutely no consequences for them .[2]
It's rigged by bureaucrats who are trapping kids in failing schools[3]. It's rigged against
you, the American people. Hillary Clinton, and as you know she - most people know she's a world-class
liar. Just look at her pathetic e-mail server statements[4] or her phony landing…
(APPLAUSE)
TRUMP: … or her phony landing in Bosnia[5], where she said she was under attack, and the attack
turned out to be young girls handing her flowers[6], a total and - look, this was - this was one
of the beauts[B], a total and self-serving lie. Brian Williams' career was destroyed for saying
less, remember that[7].
[3] "Bureaucrats": Trump probably means unions. Of course,
the Obama administration's charter-friendly policies ,
backed by scab temp agency Teach
for America , are also an assault on unions, using the classic neoliberal strategy of starving
public services budgets and then introducing a privatized, rent-seeking alternative. Conservatives
(Trump) and liberals (Clinton) can't say that, although the left can.
[4] "Pathetic email statements." There are many, such that only long-form posts can cope with
the volume and shifting detail. See
here ,
here , and
here
.
[A] "It's rigged… It's rigged… It's rigged…." a fine example of
anaphora , especially
because the repeated word, "rigged," is so charged.
[B] "[O]ne of the beauts": This descent to
a low style is
very characteristic of Trump. It's
a figure of pathos
, designed to provoke an emotional response, or even a function of the emotional state of the
speaker, but I can't find a precise term for it! (The technique is like bathos,
which also a descent in style, but an anti-climatic lapse .
Aschematiston is
a vice, not a virtue.) Because Trump is disconnecting from his audience in one style, and reconnecting
with them by addressing them in a second style, I'm going to use
apostrophe as a placeholder
in this post.
2. Corruption: "They totally own her and that will never ever change "
[TRUMP:] Then when she left, she made $21.6 million giving speeches to Wall Street banks and
other special interests[1] and in less than two years[A], secret speeches that she does not want
to reveal under any circumstances to the public[2]. I wonder why?[B]
Together, she and Bill made $153 million giving speeches to lobbyists, CEOs and foreign governments
in the years since 2001[3]. They totally own her[4] and that will never ever change, including
if she ever became president, God help us[C].
[4] "Own her:" A pardonable exaggeration;
for a typology of corruption in American political life, see at NC here . This is really not
hard: Up here in the Great State of Maine, when the managers of the (privatized) landfill
give "the community" a tour, they always make sure to serve free food? Why? Out of the goodness
of their hearts? Of course not! They want to influence people to feel good about the landfill and
its owners, duh!
Doctors can
be influenced in their prescriptions by promotional items as small as a coffee mug . Are we really
to believe, then, that Clinton won't be influenced by $21.6 million dollars? If your answer is "No",
or "Hell no," then understand the definition of corruption: It's not only leaving an envelope
on the dresser with cash in it; corruption is the use of public office for private gain
. And in allowing Wall Street to purchase options on her future, public actions, based on her past,
public actions as FLOTUS and SoS, that is exactly what Clinton is doing. (Note that when Clinton
advocates demand proof of a quid pro quo , they're accepting the majority doctrine of Citizens
United, which in essence sets "money in an envelope in exchange for services rendered" as the standard.
That's not the case with my landfill example, it's not the case with the doctors, and it's not the
case with Clinton, either.
All these relations are still corrupt using Teachout's approach , which is grounded in how the
writers of the Federalist papers understood corruption, and not Antonin Scalia.
* * *
[A] "and in less than two years":
anastrophe , changing
word order for emphasis. Putting this phrase at the end of the sentence (rather than following "millions")
emphasizes the rapidity with which Clinton made this money, suggesting greed. Anastrophe is another
important feature of Trump's style.
3. TPP: "If she is elected president, she will adopt the Trans-Pacific Partnership"
[TRUMP:] This is the latest Clinton cover-up and it doesn't change anything. If she is elected
president, she will adopt the Trans-Pacific Partnership[1] and we will lose millions of jobs and
our economic independence for good[2]. She'll do this, and just as she has betrayed the American
worker on trade at every single stage of her career[3], and it will be even worse than the Clinton's
NAFTA deal, and I never thought it could get worse than that.[A]
We will lose jobs, we will lose employment, we will lose taxes, we will lose[B] everything.
We will lose our country[4]. I want trade deals, but they have to be great for the United States
and for our workers.
[1] "She will adopt": Likely true. The Democratic National Convention drafting committee
defeated a proposal from Rep. Keith Ellison that would have rejected the pact. If you believe
that the Clinton campaign has the DNC wired, then you believe Clinton supports the TPP.
[2] "millions of jobs and our economic independence for good": partly true. On "jobs,"
some estimates say 450K , not "millions." If we go by NAFTA, "millions" would be correct, but
the Rust Belt has already been hollowed out; we can't do that twice. On "economic independence,"
that's true if losing our "independence" means "surrendering our national sovereignty to the ISDS
system."
[4] Again, I'm surprised Trump doesn't mention ISDS; loss of "sovereignty" would certainly be
red meat for his audience. He should talk to Jeff Sessions, who has actually taken a principled stand
on the issue.
* * *
[A] "worse than that": Anastrophe.
[B] "we will lose": Anaphora
4. Email: "Her server was easily hacked by foreign governments"
[TRUMP:] To cover up her corrupt feelings [sic], Hillary illegally[1] stashed[A] her State
Department e-mails on a private server[2]. She's under investigation, but it seems like nothing
is going to happen[3]. Even though other people who have done similar things, but much - at a
much lower level, their lives have been destroyed[4].
It's a rigged system, folks. It's a rigged system.[B] Her server was easily hacked by foreign
governments[4], perhaps even by her financial backers in communist China.[5] Sure they have it.[C]
Putting all of America and our citizens in danger, great danger.[D]
Then there are the 33,000 e-mails she deleted. Well, we may not know what's in those deleted
e-mails, our enemies probably know every single one of them. So they probably now have a blackmail
file over someone who wants to be the president of the United States.[6]
This fact alone disqualifies her from the presidency. We can't hand over our government to
someone who's deepest, darkest secrets[E] may be in the hands of our enemies. Can't do it.[F]
[1] "illegally": Not yet determined by a court. Again, see
here ,
here , and
here
, all of which make the case that Clinton committed crimes.
[2] "e-mails on a private server": Plausible. If you believe that the half of her email Clinton
(believed she) destroyed was about Chelsea's wedding and yoga lessons, then you reject Trump's thesis.
[4] "lives have been destroyed": true.
David Petraeus , who pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for mishandling classified documents, or
any number of victim's of the administration's campaign against whisteblowers, which are often based
on the misuse of confidential information (for example,
William Binney ).
[4] "easily hacked by foreign governments": True.
AP : "In a blistering audit released last month, the State Department's inspector general concluded
that Clinton and her team ignored clear internal guidance that her email setup broke federal standards
and could leave sensitive material vulnerable to hackers. Her aides twice brushed aside concerns,
in one case telling technical staff 'the matter was not to be discussed further,' the report said."
[5] "communist China": unproven, although note the lawyerly "perhaps"!s
[6] Plausible, especially if you consider an unsecured email server as a
phishing equilibrium .
* * *
[A] "Stashed." Ouch!
[B] "rigged system":
conduplicatio ,
repetition of words in adjacent phrases or clauses, a third key Trump technique.
[C] "Sure they have it": Anastrophe.
[D] "danger": conduplicatio.
[E] " d eepest, d arkest secrets":
alliteration , most
often repeated initial consonants.
[F]. "Can't do it": Anastrophe.
Conclusion
Again as a troll prophylactic, let me say that this post is not an endorsement of any candidate.
However, as we know too well with the Clintons. just because it's oppo doesn't mean it isn't true!
In this speech, Trump opens up four lines of attack:
Rigged System Corruption TPP Email
There's a lot of truth on each front, and Trump builds his case using simple, effective language.
Of course,
there's a million dollar SuperPAC with the billable hours to refute these charges by funding trolls
- you can go online and meet them! - but to me, they're pounding the table because they're losing
on the facts and (maybe) the law. On corruption, it's common sense that taking huge sums of money
from Wall Street influences you, just as much as an effing coffee mug can influence your
doctor when he's prescribing that. If you agree with that, then you agree that Clinton has used her
past public service and prospects for future public service for private gain; there's no way around
the influence peddling. Corruption is important, because it means that the calculus for the actual
policies that Clinton will deliver - as opposed to those she says she'll deliver now - isn't transparent
to voters, although we already know enough to know it will be skewed to donor interests.
Many have commented that both the Democrat and Republican candidates have
unfavorables that are, historically, uniquely high . At 55%, Trump's unfavorables are, amazingly,
20 points higher than Clinton's also amazing unfavorables, at 35%. Short of running into a burning
building to save a small child, it's doubtful that Trump can reduce his unfavorables. What he can
do is drive up Clinton's unfavorables so that they are at his level. The series of speeches that
we've looked at are, I think, a coordinated effort to do that, and there's good reason to think they'll
succeed. To what extent, we don't know. Again, anybody who thinks that Clinton will get a free ride
to the Oval Office is delusional.
"... Weapons from the former Libya military stockpiles were shipped from the port of Benghazi, Libya to the Port of Banias and the Port of Borj Islam, Syria. The weapons shipped during late-August 2012 were Sniper rifles, RPG's, and 125mm and 155mm howitzers missiles. ..."
"... The weapons shipped from Libya to Syria during late-August 2012 were Sniper rifles, RPG's, and 125mm and 155mm howitzers missiles. The numbers for each weapon were estimated to be: 500 Sniper rifles, 100 RPG launchers with 300 total rounds, and approximately 400 howitzers missiles [200 ea - 125mm and 200ea - 1[55 mm]. ..."
WARNING: (U) THIS IS AN INFORMATION REPORT. NOT FINALLY EVALUATED
INTELLIGENCE. REPORT CLASSIFIED SECRET//NOFORN .
TEXT: 1. ( S//NF ) EXECUTIVE SUMMARY. Weapons from the former Libya
military stockpiles were shipped from the port of Benghazi, Libya to
the Port of Banias and the Port of Borj Islam, Syria. The weapons
shipped during late-August 2012 were Sniper rifles, RPG's, and 125mm
and 155mm howitzers missiles.
2.( S//NF }During Ihe immediate altermath of, and following the
uncertainty caused by, the downfall of the ((Qaddafi)) regime in
October 2011 and up until early September of 2012, weapons from the
former Libya military stockpiles located in Benghazi, Libya were
shipped from the port of Benghazi, Libya to the ports of Banias and
the Port of Borj Islam, Syria. The Syrian ports were chosen due to
the small amount of cargo traffic transiting these two ports. The
ships used to transport the weapons were medium-sized and able to
hold 10 or less shipping containers of cargo. (NFI)
3. ( S//NF ) The weapons shipped from Libya to Syria during late-August
2012 were Sniper rifles, RPG's, and 125mm and 155mm howitzers
missiles. The numbers for each weapon were estimated to be: 500
Sniper rifles, 100 RPG launchers with 300 total rounds, and
approximately 400 howitzers missiles [200 ea - 125mm and 200ea - 1[55
mm].
(b)(1) Sec. 1. 4(c).(b)(3): 10§USC 424,(b)(3):50§USC 3024(i)
REDACTED
CLASSIFIED
Finally, there is official confirmation of what has been rumored for years: President
Obama, his White House, and Hillary Clinton and her State Department knew that
weapons were being shipped from Benghazi to rebel troops in Syria. Those "rebels"
were largely al Qaeda and Muslim Brotherhood extremist factions, according to
corroborating documents.
Below is a gem of an intelligence cable we unearthed from the Defense Intelligence
Agency dated September 12, 2012, the day after the Benghazi attack, courtesy of
Judicial Watch's stacks of ongoing FOIA litigation. Absent wholesale redaction, this
could prove to be a smoking gun finally exhibiting what the United States was doing
in Benghazi prior to the Jihadists attacks on the U.S. consulate and then-secret CIA
annex just miles away.
Last week's Brexit vote was just the latest example - albeit a giant one - in this wild political
year when workers have been sending the clear message that status quo economic policies are unacceptable.
Politicians here in America and in Europe ignore the concerns of workers at their great peril. For
the Democratic Party in this country in 2016, the lessons are especially clear.
In the 35 years
since Ronald Reagan became President, we've seen a steady erosion in the attention political leaders
have given to the economic and political concerns of the working class. From the dramatic decline
of union membership to the excessive deregulation of Wall Street; from trade deals that enrich multinational
corporations but not American workers to a lack of antitrust enforcement that's allowed near-monopolies
in too many sectors; from a lack of significant wage increases for all but the top 10% of Americans
to ever-escalating inflation in the costs of health care, groceries and college, our political system
breakdown and our persistent 'trickle down' sense of economics have combined - and conspired - to
weaken the well-being of most American working people and retirees.
And now they're angry, in ways that once hardly seemed imaginable.
A ridiculous huckster and nativist named Donald J. Trump is only days away from officially being
the Republican Party nominee for President. And in the United Kingdom, Brexit has just validated
that working class anger isn't only an American phenomenon and concern.
The Democratic Party and the Hillary Clinton campaign need to understand that this reality matters,
and that- in spite of some national polls showing a significant lead right now- beating Donald Trump
in 2016 will be no easy lift. For all the people Trump has offended over the last year and for all
of his racism and misogyny, for all the mistakes he has made in recent weeks, he is in a near tie
with Secretary Clinton in several key swing states, and is still within striking distance nationally.
And don't forget that Trump outperformed his polling numbers throughout much of his primary run.
Democrats at all levels are going to need a big turnout of our base, as well as a message that
appeals strongly to working class swing voters.
"... ROSKAM: Secretary Clinton, you were meeting with opposition within the State Department from very senior career diplomats in fact. And they were saying that it was going to produce a net negative for U.S. military intervention. ..."
"... For example, in a March 9th, 2011 e-mail discussing what has become known as the Libya options memo, Ambassador Stephen Mull, then the executive secretary of the State Department and one of the top career diplomats, said this, "In the case of our diplomatic history, when we've provided material or tactical military support to people seeking to drive their leaders from power, no matter how just their cause, it's tended to produce net negatives for our interests over the long term in those countries." ..."
"... But then you had another big obstacle, didn't you, and that was -- that was the White House itself. There were senior voices within the White House that were opposed to military action -- Vice President Biden, Department of Defense, Secretary Gates, the National Security Council and so forth. ..."
"... But you persuaded President Obama to intervene militarily. Isn't that right? ..."
"... ROSKAM: Well I think you are underselling yourself. You got the State Department on board. You convinced the president, you overcame the objections of Vice President Biden and Secretary of Defense Gates, the National Security Council. And you had another obstacle then, and that was the United Nations. ..."
"... And you were able to persuade the Russians, of all things, to abstain, and had you not been successful in arguing that abstention, the Security Council Resolution 1973 wouldn't have passed because the Russians had a veto. So you overcame that obstacle as well, right? Isn't that right? ..."
Jake Sullivan, your chief foreign policy adviser, wrote a tick- tock on Libya memo on August 21,
2011. And this was the day before the rebels took Tripoli. He titles it, quote, "Secretary Clinton's
Leadership on Libya," in which he describes you as, quote, "a critical voice" and, quote, "the public
face of the U.S. effort in Libya and instrumental in tightening the noose around Gadhafi and his
regime."
But that didn't come easy, did it? Because you faced considerable opposition, and I can pause
while you're reading your notes from your staff.
CLINTON: One thing at a time, Congressman.
ROSKAM: OK. That didn't come easy, did it, that leadership role and that public face and so forth
that I just mentioned?
CLINTON: (OFF-MIKE) this is an issue that the committee has raised. And it really boils down to
why were we in Libya; why did the United States join with our NATO and European allies, join with
our Arab partners to protect the people of Libya against the murderous planning of Gadhafi. Why did
we take a role alongside our partners in doing so.
There were a number of reasons for that. And I think it is important to remind the American people
where we were at the time when the people of Libya, like people across the region, rose up demanding
freedom and democracy, a chance to chart their own futures. And Gadhafi...
ROSKAM: I take your point.
CLINTON: ... Gadhafi threatened them with genocide, with hunting them down like cockroaches. And
we were then approached by, with great intensity, our closest allies in Europe, people who felt very
strongly -- the French and the British, but others as well -- that they could not stand idly by and
permit that to happen so close to their shores, with the unintended consequences that they worried
about.
And they asked for the United States to help. We did not immediately say yes. We did an enormous
amount of due diligence in meeting with not only our European and Arab partners, but also with those
were heading up what was called the Transitional National Council. And we had experienced diplomats
who were digging deep into what was happening in Libya and what the possibilities were, before we
agreed to provide very specific, limited help to the European and Arab efforts.
We did not put one American soldier on the ground. We did not have one casualty. And in fact,
I think by many measures, the cooperation between NATO and Arab forces was quite remarkable and something
that we want to learn more lessons from.
ROSKAM: Secretary Clinton, you were meeting with opposition within the State Department from
very senior career diplomats in fact. And they were saying that it was going to produce a net negative
for U.S. military intervention.
For example, in a March 9th, 2011 e-mail discussing what has become known as the Libya options
memo, Ambassador Stephen Mull, then the executive secretary of the State Department and one of the
top career diplomats, said this, "In the case of our diplomatic history, when we've provided material
or tactical military support to people seeking to drive their leaders from power, no matter how just
their cause, it's tended to produce net negatives for our interests over the long term in those countries."
Now, we'll come back to that in a minute. But you overruled those career diplomats. I mean, they
report to you and you're the chief diplomat of the United States. Go ahead and read the note if you
need to.
(LAUGHTER)
CLINTON: I have to -- I have to...
ROSKAM: I'm not done with my question. I'm just giving you the courtesy of reading your notes.
CLINTON: That's all right.
ROSKAM: All right.
They were -- they were pushing back, but you overcame those objections. But then you had another
big obstacle, didn't you, and that was -- that was the White House itself. There were senior voices
within the White House that were opposed to military action -- Vice President Biden, Department of
Defense, Secretary Gates, the National Security Council and so forth.
But you persuaded President Obama to intervene militarily. Isn't that right?
CLINTON: Well, Congressman, I think it's important to point out there were many in the State Department
who believed it was very much in America's interests and in furtherance of our values to protect
the Libyan people, to join with our European allies and our Arab partners. The ambassador, who had
had to be withdrawn from Libya because of direct attacks -- or direct threats to his physical safety,
but who knew Libya very well, Ambassador Cretz, was a strong advocate for doing what we could to
assist the Europeans and the Arabs.
CLINTON: I think it's fair to say there were concerns and there were varying opinions about what
to do, how to do it, and the like. At the end of the day, this was the president's decision. And
all of us fed in our views. I did not favor it until I had done, as I said, the due diligence speaking
with not just people within our government and within the governments of all of the other nations
who were urging us to assist them, but also meeting in-person with the gentleman who had assumed
a lead role in the Transitional National Council.
So it is of course fair to say this is a difficult decision. I wouldn't sit here and say otherwise.
And there were varying points of view about it. But at the end of the day, in large measure, because
of the strong appeals from our European allies, the Arab League passing resolution urging that the
United States and NATO join with them, those were unprecedented requests.
And we did decide in recommending to the president there was a way to do it. The president I think,
very clearly had a limited instruction about how to proceed. And the first planes that flew were
French planes. And I think what the United States provided was some of our unique capacity. But the
bulk of the work militarily was done by Europeans and Arabs.
ROSKAM: Well I think you are underselling yourself. You got the State Department on board.
You convinced the president, you overcame the objections of Vice President Biden and Secretary of
Defense Gates, the National Security Council. And you had another obstacle then, and that was the
United Nations.
And you were able to persuade the Russians, of all things, to abstain, and had you not been
successful in arguing that abstention, the Security Council Resolution 1973 wouldn't have passed
because the Russians had a veto. So you overcame that obstacle as well, right? Isn't that right?
Top Democratic donors in the financial industry are threatening revolt after
news broke that top Wall Street critic and progressive darling Sen.
Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is one of the leading candidates for vice
president under Hillary Clinton.
An in-depth
report
published by
Politico
on Monday cites a dozen interviews
with Clinton's Wall Street backers-of which there are
many
-warning that the coffers will dry up if Warren is chosen.
"If Clinton picked Warren, her whole base on Wall Street would leave
her," one top Democratic donor told
Politico
reporter Ben White.
"They would literally just say, 'We have no qualms with you moving left,
we understand all the things you've had to do because of Bernie Sanders, but
if you are going there with Warren, we just can't trust you, you've killed
it,'" added the anonymous bundler, who has reportedly helped raise millions
for Clinton.
"... Hillary Clinton's official calendar from her time as Secretary of State is missing details of dozens of meetings with political donors and Clinton Foundation contributors, according to a review of the calendar and related records by AP. ..."
Hillary Clinton's official calendar from her time as Secretary of State is missing details of
dozens of meetings with political donors and Clinton Foundation contributors, according to a review
of the calendar and related records by AP.
The calendar was among files turned over to
AP by the State Department after the news outlet
filed a lawsuit to access Clinton's records from her tenure as Secretary of State.
However, the official record did not match up with detailed staff reports of her meetings, AP
reports. Some were left entirely out of the calendar while other entries omitted the names of those
involved.
The incomplete calendar further highlights the likely Democratic presidential nominee's issues
around the handling of government records at a time when she is under investigation by the FBI for
improper use of a private email server.
The FBI's case against a BlackBerry-obsessed Hillary Clinton could be strengthened following a
bombshell report
she ignored State Department and spy community warnings her outdated phone
and private email server posed national security risks
, former federal prosecutors and
officials told the Herald.
"... "What? Like with a cloth or something?" she asked, then laughed. "I don't know how it works
digitally at all." ..."
"... She made the quip during an exchange with Fox News' Ed Henry . ..."
"... The Intelligence Community's inspector general had notified senior members of Congress that
two emails randomly sampled from Clinton's server contained sensitive information that was later given
a "Top Secret" classification, while two others contained classified information at the time they were
sent. ..."
"... The emails with information subsequently classified as "Top Secret" were forwarded to Clinton,
according to the State Department. ..."
Hillary
Clinton joked to reporters Tuesday in Las Vegas about whether she "wiped" her email server clean
before giving it to the
FBI.
"What? Like with a cloth or something?" she asked, then laughed. "I
don't know how it works digitally at all."
Clinton maintained that she has turned over the server to investigators
and gave them "every single thing" that was work-related. Federal investigators are looking into
the security of the server and whether there was classified information in the emails from the private
account she used while serving as secretary of state.
She made the quip during an exchange with Fox News'
Ed Henry.
This isn't the first time Clinton has joked about her emails: the former
Secretary of State also quipped about why she liked Snapchat at the Wing Ding Dinner in Iowa.
"You may have seen that I recently launched a Snapchat account," she said.
"I love it. Those messages disappear all by themselves."
Clinton turned over more than 30,000 personal messages from her email server
to the State
Department, which is being released in batches. And earlier this month, Clinton turned over her
private email server to the
Department
of Justice.
The Intelligence Community's inspector general had notified senior
members of Congress that two emails randomly sampled from Clinton's server contained sensitive information
that was later given a "Top Secret" classification, while two others contained classified information
at the time they were sent.
The emails with information subsequently classified as "Top Secret"
were forwarded to Clinton, according to the State Department.
Just this week, Intelligence community officials involved in the review
of Clinton's emails flagged 305 messages for further inspection, new court documents released Monday
said.
Clinton has maintained that she never used her private email to handle
classified information. Her spokesman, Nick Merrill, said it was "not surprising" that several hundred
messages were flagged for further inspection "given the sheer volume of intelligence community lawyers
now involved in the review of these emails."
"We expect there will continue to be competing assessments among the various
agencies about what should and shouldn't be redacted," Merrill said in a statement to ABC News.
A more responsible accounting of another scandal that has dogged Hillary Clinton came this week
from the State Department's inspector general, who was tasked with looking into the propriety of
Clinton's use of a personal e-mail account while she was Secretary of State.
The I.G.'s
eighty-three page report, "Office of the Secretary: Evaluation of Email Records Management and
Cybersecurity Requirements," is one of the more comprehensive examinations the government has ever
issued on proper document-retention habits in the federal bureaucracy. Skip to page forty-two if
you want the scintillating conclusion:
Longstanding, systemic weaknesses related to electronic records and communications have existed
within the Office of the Secretary that go well beyond the tenure of any one Secretary of State.
OIG recognizes that technology and Department policy have evolved considerably since Secretary
Albright's tenure began in 1997. Nevertheless, the Department generally and the Office of the
Secretary in particular have been slow to recognize and to manage effectively the legal requirements
and cybersecurity risks associated with electronic data communications, particularly as those
risks pertain to its most senior leadership. OIG expects that its recommendations will move the
Department steps closer to meaningfully addressing these risks.
...The fact that Clinton did not fully cooperate with the I.G. investigation (she declined to
be interviewed, for example) does not inspire confidence that her Administration would be a model
of transparency
...The fact that Clinton did not fully cooperate with the I.G. investigation (she declined to
be interviewed, for example) does not inspire confidence that her Administration would be a model
of transparency
"... One other State Department official evidently violated this policy: Her Deputy Chief of Staff, Huma Abedin. Ms. Abedin's emails are of particular interest insofar as Huma has extensive ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. That's the Islamist organization whose self-declared mission is "destroying Western civilization from within." ..."
Hillary Clinton's Emailgate scandal is becoming more problematic by the day. Turns out she
exclusively used a private email account while personally prohibiting other State Department
employees from doing the same.
One other State Department official evidently violated this policy: Her Deputy Chief of
Staff, Huma Abedin. Ms. Abedin's emails are of particular interest insofar as Huma has extensive
ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. That's the Islamist organization whose self-declared mission is
"destroying Western civilization from within."
The indispensable investigative group, Judicial Watch, has filed suit in federal court for
access to these emails. It remains to be seen if they are provided and, if so, what they reveal
about these ladies' contacts with the Muslim Brotherhood – and their damage-control concerning
revelations about Huma's connection to it.
"... The secretary of state's information technology office "believes that Ms. Mills and Ms. Abedin were each issued BlackBerry devices," State Executive Secretary Joseph Macmanus wrote in a declaration submitted to a federal court in Washington (and posted here). The office, referred to as S/ES-IRM in agency parlance, "has not located any such device at the department" and "standard procedure upon return of such devices is to perform a factory reset (which removes any user settings or configurations) and then to reissue the device to another employee, to destroy it, or to excess it," he added. ..."
"... The official also said former Secretary of State Clinton appeared never to have had a BlackBerry from her agency or any other official gadget. "S/ES-IRM does not believe that any personal computing device was issued by the Department to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and has not located any such device at the Department," Macmanus wrote. ..."
"... Earlier this month, Sullivan ordered the State Department to ask Clinton, Mills and Abedin to preserve all official records they had responsive to Judicial Watch's request and to execute a declaration under penalty of perjury about their use of private email or devices to store such records. ..."
BlackBerry devices the State Department issued to former Hillary Clinton aides Cheryl Mills
and Huma Abedin have likely been destroyed or sold off as surplus, a State official said in a
court filing Wednesday.
The secretary of state's information technology office "believes that Ms. Mills and Ms.
Abedin were each issued BlackBerry devices," State Executive Secretary Joseph Macmanus wrote in a
declaration submitted to a federal court in Washington (and posted here). The office, referred to
as S/ES-IRM in agency parlance, "has not located any such device at the department" and "standard
procedure upon return of such devices is to perform a factory reset (which removes any user
settings or configurations) and then to reissue the device to another employee, to destroy it, or
to excess it," he added.
"Because the devices issued to Ms. Mills and Ms. Abedin would have been outdated models, in
accordance with standard operating procedures those devices would have been destroyed or excessed.
As stated above, the state.gov email accounts themselves are generally housed on the Department's
servers," Macmanus said.
The official also said former Secretary of State Clinton appeared never to have had a
BlackBerry from her agency or any other official gadget. "S/ES-IRM does not believe that any
personal computing device was issued by the Department to former Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton, and has not located any such device at the Department," Macmanus wrote.
The filing came in a lawsuit where the conservative group Judicial Watch is seeking records
relating to Abedin's employment arrangements, including a period after she left a full-time post
as deputy chief of staff and took a part-time position while also working for a New York-based
firm run by a former aide to President Bill Clinton.
In recent weeks, U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan has expressed increasing concern that the
State Department was not making an adequate effort to recover all records about the matter,
including emails Clinton or the other aides may have had on private accounts or took with them
when they left the department.
Earlier this month, Sullivan ordered the State Department to ask Clinton, Mills and Abedin to
preserve all official records they had responsive to Judicial Watch's request and to execute a
declaration under penalty of perjury about their use of private email or devices to store such
records. Clinton submitted such a declaration. Abedin and Mills did not submit personal
declarations, but lawyers for the aides said they had returned or were in the process of
returning any official records to State and would preserve any such records in their possession.
Judicial Watch announced today that it has filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit
against the State Department seeking any and all communications – including emails – from
then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her Chief of Staff Huma Abedin with Nagla Mahmoud,
wife of ousted Egyptian president Mohammad
Morsi, from January 21, 2009 to January 31, 2013 (Judicial
Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:15-cv-00321)). This latest lawsuit will
require the State Department to answer questions about and conduct thorough searches of Hillary
Clinton's newly discovered hidden email accounts. Judicial Watch also has nearly a dozen other
active FOIA lawsuits that may require the State Department to search these email accounts. Huma
Abedin is also alleged to have a secret account as well.
Judicial Watch submitted its original FOIA request on August 27, 2014. The State Department
was required by law to respond by September 26, 2014 at the latest to Judicial Watch's request
for:
Any and all records of communication between Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Nagla
Mahmoud, wife of ousted Egyptian president Muhammad Morsi, from January 21, 2009 to January
31, 2013; and
Any and all records of communication between former State Department Deputy Chief of Staff
Huma Abedin and Nagla Mahmoud from January 21, 2009 to January 31, 2013.
To date, the State Department has not responded.
Ms. Mahmoud threatened Mrs. Clinton after Morsi was ousted. According to JihadWatch.org:
In the words of El-Mogaz News,
Morsi's wife "is threatening to expose the special relationship between her husband and
Hillary Clinton, after the latter attacked the ousted [president], calling him a simpleton who
was unfit for the presidency. Sources close to Nagla confirmed that she has threatened to
publish the letters exchanged between Morsi and Hillary."
The report continues by saying that Nagla accuses Hillary of denouncing her former close
ally, the Brotherhood's Morsi, in an effort to foster better relations with his successor,
Egypt's current president, Sisi-even though, as Nagla laments, "he [Morsi] was faithful to the
American administration."
"Now we know why the State Department didn't want to respond to our specific request for
Hillary Clinton's and Huma Abedin's communications," stated Tom Fitton. "The State Department
violated FOIA law rather than admit that it couldn't and wouldn't search the secret accounts that
the agency has known about for years. This lawsuit shows how the latest Obama administration
cover-up isn't just about domestic politics but has significant foreign policy implications."
"... Piling on more embarrassment for Hillary Clinton amid a row about her emails, U.S. officials revealed Thursday that during her time as secretary of state she had declined a government-issued cellphone. ..."
Piling on more embarrassment for Hillary Clinton amid a row about her emails, U.S.
officials revealed Thursday that during her time as secretary of state she had declined a
government-issued cellphone.
Spokeswoman Jen Psaki said Clinton was "not issued a State Department BlackBerry, and that
wasn't a requirement - no one is required to be issued a State Department BlackBerry."
Since he became president, Barack Obama has carried a special "secure" BlackBerry, altered by
the NSA to make it as difficult as possible for hackers to turn it into a remote spying device.
Now it's been revealed in emails obtained by the conservative legal advocacy group Judicial Watch
that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asked in 2009 for one of those uncrackable BlackBerries,
too, and the NSA denied her request for unknown reasons. Conservative pundits have used the news
to argue that Clinton knew her BlackBerry was insecure and yet still used it for sensitive
emails.
"... Clinton liked to use her BlackBerry rather than a desktop or laptop to stay on top of her emails at all times, but this was a problem at the secure office space at the State Department's headquarters, where wireless devices were banned, according to the documents. To overcome this, she requested the same modified 8830 World Edition used by the president, which would allow her to check her email constantly, something she had become accustomed to during the 2008 presidential campaign. ..."
"... The NSA refused, saying that it had phased out the waivers that allowed her predecessor, Condoleezza Rice, to use a BlackBerry as they had been "expanded to an unmanageable number of users from a security perspective." ..."
President Barack Obama wasn't the only administration official enamored of the BlackBerry
phone.
When she was serving as the US secretary of state from 2009 to 2013, Hillary Clinton repeatedly
tried to get her hands on "BlackBerry-like communications," but was denied by the National
Security Agency out of concerns for security and cost, according to a report Wednesday by
conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch.
Emails obtained by the organization under a Freedom of Information Act request show that Clinton
demanded access to the same type of secure BlackBerry device used by President Obama, and the
NSA's subsequent rebuffs often led to heated exchanges between the two camps.
"Each time we asked the question 'What was the solution for POTUS?' we were politely told to shut
up and color," or to mind their own business, according to one email sent in 2009 by Donald Reid,
the State Department's coordinator for security infrastructure.
Once the de rigueur instrument of business communications, BlackBerry dominated the cell phone
industry before losing its crown to Apple's iPhone and to Google's Android software. Corporate
and government types loved using BlackBerrys because they offered a level of data encryption that
prevented everyone, including BlackBerry itself, from snooping into the phone's contents. Clinton
has come under fire over the past few months for using her personal email on the BlackBerry she
used while she was secretary of state.
Clinton liked to use her BlackBerry rather than a desktop or laptop to stay on top of her
emails at all times, but this was a problem at the secure office space at the State Department's
headquarters, where wireless devices were banned, according to the documents. To overcome this,
she requested the same modified 8830 World Edition used by the president, which would allow her
to check her email constantly, something she had become accustomed to during the 2008
presidential campaign.
The NSA refused, saying that it had phased out the waivers that allowed her predecessor,
Condoleezza Rice, to use a BlackBerry as they had been "expanded to an unmanageable number of
users from a security perspective."
Clinton, now the front-runner in the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries, carried on using her
personal BlackBerry for state business after her request for a customized secure device was
rejected by the NSA. She has since apologized and claimed that she never used the BlackBerry to
send classified information.
ADVERTISING
The Clinton campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman
Chuck Grassley,
Republican of Iowa, raised questions about Abedin's work as a State Department employee,
concerning the fact that she held four jobs[20]
from June 2012 to February 2013.[14][21][22][23]
These included serving as a part-time aide to Clinton at the State Department, while also working
as a consultant to private clients for the consulting firm
Teneo Holdings,[21][22]
a consulting firm run by
Douglas Band, a longtime aide to former president Bill Clinton.[24]
At the time, she was also being paid a salary for work at the
Clinton
Foundation, and working as Hillary Clinton's personal assistant.[20]
The State Department and Abedin both responded, with the State Department indicating that it uses
special government employees routinely "to provide services and expertise that executive agencies
require", and Abedin stating that she did not provide any government information or inside
information gained from her State Department job to her private employers.
... ... ...
Employment records and emails
In October 2015, a federal court in Washington heard arguments on a
Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by
Judicial Watch
for records related to Abedin. Judicial Watch asked to make Ms. Abedin's emails and employment
records public, asking for details of the arrangement under which Abedin was designated a
"special government employee," allowing her to do outside consulting work while also on the
federal payroll.[26][27]
On October 6, the State Department said it would be able to hand over 69 pages of emails in
response to the FOIA request.[28]
In 2015, emails by Abedin became part of the FBI investigation and the controversy concerning
Hillary Clinton's private email account while Secretary of State,[29][30]
resulting in various allegations by Republicans of violations of State Department regulations.[31]
Some officials within the intelligence community have stated that potentially-classified
information was contained in e-mails from Abedin relating to the 2012 Benghazi attack and its
aftermath which had been sent through Clinton's private, non-government server.[29][32][33]
So far, 1818 emails contain classified information on the private server, with 22 being
classified as Top Secret. "They were not marked classified at the time they were sent, but they
did contain classified information when they were originally sent and received." Her aides also
sent and received classified information.[34]
House Benghazi Committee
testimony
On October 16, 2015, Abedin testified in closed session before the
House Select Committee on Benghazi, in a session that was expected to focus on the
2012
Benghazi attack during which Ambassador
J.
Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed.[35]
The committee had previously heard closed-door testimony from two other Clinton aides,
Cheryl Mills and
Jake Sullivan, in
September 2015,[35]
and former Secretary Clinton appeared before the panel in a public hearing on October 22.[36]
The Republican-led committee's top Democrat Representative,
Elijah Cummings
of Maryland, questioned the panel's decision to hear testimony from Abedin, arguing that her
knowledge of details at the time of the attacks was minimal.[35]
Republican Representative
Mike Pompeo of Kansas, defended the decision to interview Abedin, saying: "Ms. Abedin was a
senior official at the State Department at all of the relevant times. Every witness has a
different set of knowledge."[37]
Although there were political tensions surrounding Abedin's appearance, the proceedings were
friendly, and after her almost eight hours of testimony, Abedin said: "I came here today to be as
helpful as I could be to the committee."[37]
Allegations by some Republican members of Congress
In a letter dated June 13, 2012, to the
State Department Inspector General, five Republican members of Congress-Michele
Bachmann of Minnesota,
Trent Franks of
Arizona, Louie
Gohmert of Texas,
Thomas J. Rooney of Florida, and
Lynn
Westmoreland of Georgia-claimed that Abedin "has three family members – her late father, her
mother and her brother – connected to
Muslim
Brotherhood operatives and/or organizations."[38][39][40]
The five members of Congress alleged that Abedin had "immediate family connections to foreign
extremist organizations" which they said were "potentially disqualifying conditions for obtaining
a security
clearance" and questioned why Abedin had not been "disqualified for a security clearance."[39]
The claims in the letter were generally rejected, and were labeled by some as
conspiracy
theories.[38][41]The
Washington Post editorial board called the allegations "paranoid," a "baseless attack,"
and a "smear."[38]
The letter was also criticized by, among others, House Minority Leader
Nancy Pelosi and
Representative Keith
Ellison, Democrat of Minnesota, the first Muslim member of Congress, who called the
allegation "reprehensible."[42]
Senator John McCain,
Republican of Arizona, also rejected the allegations, saying "The letter and the report offer not
one instance of an action, a decision or a public position that Huma has taken while at the State
Department that would lend credence to the charge that she is promoting anti-American activities
within our government....These attacks on Huma have no logic, no basis and no merit."[42]
Bachmann's former campaign manager
Ed Rollins said the
allegations were "extreme and dishonest" and called for Bachmann to apologize to Abedin.[43]
The
Anti-Defamation League condemned the letter, calling upon the Representatives involved to
"stop trafficking in anti-Muslim conspiracy theories."[44]
"... Judicial Watch , a conservative public interest law firm that uses open-records laws to pry information loose, had filed a request to get a look at Ms. Abedin 's emails during her four years at the State Department . News outlets have reported that Ms. Abedin also used the private email server Mrs. Clinton set up to handle government business, but the status of her messages is unclear. ..."
"... The State Department said it wouldn't comment now that Judicial Watch has filed a lawsuit - though it had struggled to explain its procedures even before the lawsuit was filed, and the status is of Ms. Abedin 's emails remains unclear. ..."
"... The law at the time Mrs. Clinton was in office urged federal employees doing government business to use their official accounts, but said those who used personal accounts were required to forward all government-related messages to their official accounts for storage. Mrs. Clinton rejected using an official account and did not forward her messages, but after Mr. Gowdy's inquiries the State Department asked her to belatedly turn her emails over. ..."
"... Ms. Abedin , who is married to former Rep. Anthony Weiner, has come under scrutiny for her time at the State Department . Mrs. Clinton designated her a special government employee, allowing her to collect a federal salary even as she also worked for an outside consulting company. ..."
"... The department's inspector general is looking into whether that arrangement was legal, since the designation is supposed to be used to lure workers with special skills into government service. Ms. Abedin was already a government employee when she was given the designation, and the State Department has yet to explain what skills she brought to earn the special status. ..."
May 5, 2015 | The Washington Times
The emails of Huma Abedin,
the top personal aide to former Secretary of State
Hillary Rodham Clinton,
are now facing a disclosure lawsuit after the
State Department failed
to turn them over in response to an open-records request.
Judicial Watch, a
conservative public interest law firm that uses open-records laws to pry information loose, had
filed a request to get a look at Ms.
Abedin's emails during her four years at the
State Department. News
outlets have reported that Ms.
Abedin also used the private email server
Mrs. Clinton set up
to handle government business, but the status of her messages is unclear.
It's one of a number of open-records requests
Judicial Watch filed after
the email scandal broke, and Tom Fitton, president of the organization, said they've been
stonewalled on all of them, so now they're turning to the courts.
"We're churning through these," he said. "The scandal at the
State Department is more
than about Hillary Clinton. There are others involved."
The State Department
said it wouldn't comment now that
Judicial Watch has filed a lawsuit - though it had struggled to explain its procedures even
before the lawsuit was filed, and the status is of
Ms. Abedin's emails remains
unclear.
Rep. Trey Gowdy, the South Carolina Republican who exposed the private emails as part of his
investigation into the 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi, has urged
Mrs. Clinton to turn
the server over to a neutral third party while questions get sorted out, but
Mrs. Clinton has
refused, saying she believes she has now complied with the law by finally going through and
turning emails over.
The law at the time
Mrs. Clinton was in
office urged federal employees doing government business to use their official accounts, but said
those who used personal accounts were required to forward all government-related messages to
their official accounts for storage.
Mrs. Clinton rejected
using an official account and did not forward her messages, but after Mr. Gowdy's inquiries the
State Department asked
her to belatedly turn her emails over.
The State Department
has turned about 300 emails over to the Benghazi probe, but has refused to release the other tens
of thousands of messages, saying it wants to process and clear them all at the same time, which
will take months.
But the department has admitted in court that it was remiss in not searching the emails
earlier, and has agreed to reopen some previous open-records requests from
Judicial Watch that had
sought Clinton
emails.
Ms. Abedin, who is
married to former Rep. Anthony Weiner, has come under scrutiny for her time at the
State Department.
Mrs. Clinton
designated her a special government employee, allowing her to collect a federal salary even as
she also worked for an outside consulting company.
The department's inspector general is looking into whether that arrangement was legal,
since the designation is supposed to be used to lure workers with special skills into government
service. Ms. Abedin was already
a government employee when she was given the designation, and the
State Department has yet
to explain what skills she brought to earn the special status.
"... The 2016 Democratic front-runner on Monday told a federal judge that Abedin - long considered her boss's keeper and even dubbed her "shadow" - had her own email account on Clinton's now infamous home-brewed server, "which was used at times for government business," Clinton acknowledged. That's an unusual arrangement, even for top brass at the State Department. ..."
"... Abedin had been granted "special government employee" (SGE) status, allowing her to work both for Clinton and the private sector - and it's unclear if she continued using the server that appears to have held classified information following her departure from her full-time State gig. ..."
"... But Steven Aftergood, who directs the Federation of American Scientists' project on government secrecy, said any former employee's potential access to secret materials could be problematic after they leave the government. ..."
"... "What happens if [a former government employee] still retains access through a prior server, to information that was justified by a previous position? That's not supposed to happen - and that's one of the anomalies that are created by the private server," Aftergood said. ..."
Clinton's top aide is likely to face more questions, not least from congressional
investigators, about her access to Clinton's system.
Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton's most trusted confidante, is increasingly becoming a central figure
in the email scandal that's haunting her boss on the campaign trail, as Republicans and federal judges
seek information about Clinton's communications while she was running the State Department.
The 2016 Democratic front-runner on Monday told a federal judge that Abedin - long considered
her boss's keeper and even dubbed her "shadow" - had her own email account on Clinton's now infamous
home-brewed server, "which was used at times for government business," Clinton acknowledged. That's
an unusual arrangement, even for top brass at the State Department.
... ... ...
After an inspector general found that Clinton had at least two "top secret" emails stored
on her unsecured computer network, Abedin is likely to face more questions from congressional investigators,
and perhaps others, about her access to Clinton's system.
Abedin had been granted "special government employee" (SGE) status, allowing her to work both
for Clinton and the private sector - and it's unclear if she continued using the server that appears
to have held classified information following her departure from her full-time State gig.
... ... ...
"It's election season, and congressional Republicans are running the same series of plays,
just on a different field," Merrill said in an email, later adding that Abedin maintained her security
clearance while she worked as a State contractor.
Merrill said SGEs often have clearance and there's nothing unusual about her having such access.
He also said that many government workers take on such contractor status, adding that Abedin had
a green-light from State's legal and human resources departments to do so.
But Steven Aftergood, who directs the Federation of American Scientists' project on government
secrecy, said any former employee's potential access to secret materials could be problematic after
they leave the government.
"What happens if [a former government employee] still retains access through a prior server,
to information that was justified by a previous position? That's not supposed to happen - and that's
one of the anomalies that are created by the private server," Aftergood said.
Classified materials with national security implications are supposed to be stored in a place where
no one can gain access to them unless they have special clearance.
"... Donald Trump moved Wednesday to make the race for the White House a referendum on Hillary Clinton, saying his Democratic rival has padded her pockets at the expense of Americans and the security of the nation, as the presumptive Republican presidential nominee looked to get his campaign back on track after a trying stretch. ..."
"... Mr. Trump launched a searing assault on Mrs. Clinton , calling her a "world-class liar," accusing her of destabilizing the Middle East and charging that she and her husband, former President Bill Clinton , have profited off the misery of Americans. ..."
"... "She gets rich making you poor," ..."
"... He later charged that "Hillary Clinton may be the most corrupt person ever to seek the presidency." ..."
Donald Trump moved
Wednesday to make the race for the White House a referendum on Hillary Clinton, saying his
Democratic rival has padded her pockets at the expense of Americans and the security of the
nation, as the presumptive Republican presidential nominee looked to get his campaign back on
track after a trying stretch.
Seeking to shift the discussion from his paltry fundraising, campaign shake-up and shaky poll
numbers, Mr. Trump
launched a searing assault on Mrs.
Clinton, calling her a "world-class liar," accusing her of destabilizing the Middle East and
charging that she and her husband, former President
Bill Clinton, have profited off
the misery of Americans.
He later charged that "Hillary Clinton may be the most corrupt person ever to seek the
presidency."
The speech marked Mr. Trump's
first address since he fired campaign manager Corey Lewandowski this week and replaced him with
Paul Manafort, a veteran Republican political operative who had served as Mr.
Trump's campaign
"... "Qualified security people are very rare," she says. And that's one of the problems with this setup for Clinton. ..."
"... As a result, Moussouris assumes whoever set up Clinton's private email server was a staffer, unless they were very well paid. And if that's the case, the best way to email like Hillary Clinton is to spend a lot of money. ..."
But most people aren't trying to protect sensitive State Department data. Instead, one reason
people run their own email services is so they can use their own domain name in their email address.
If this was a reason for Clinton, it was a foolhardy one, argues Moussouris. If being a high-value
target for hackers is a reason for using an (allegedly) more secure private email service, choosing
an domain name like clintonemail.com, as Clinton did, only gave her a higher profile.
"Such an obvious name would make it an interesting target for a hacker," says Moussouris. "People
with that high of a profile, whether it's a politician, celebrity, or high-level executive, they
should already be operating with that in mind."
Besides, consumer-based services not only allow users to use their own domain name while hosting
their emails in the cloud, they also provide end-to-end encryption, ensuring that their messages
stay safe while traveling through the web.
But if you still want to email like Hillary Clinton, Moussouris recommends relying on an expert
- if you can find one. "Qualified security people are very rare," she says. And that's one of
the problems with this setup for Clinton.
"I couldn't imagine a top-notch security person going to work for anyone in Washington, let alone
an individual in, essentially, a non-technical function," Moussouris says. "We have a scarcity of
talent in the security industry, and we see this when we try to hire good people all the time."
As a result, Moussouris assumes whoever set up Clinton's private email server was a staffer, unless
they were very well paid. And if that's the case, the best way to email like Hillary Clinton is to
spend a lot of money.
"... It may not be obvious to the political and media elites living in their hallowed, protected homes in privileged areas. ..."
"... ut travel to the north of England, or to the middle of America, and you will find very real fury with government and very real concern over the impact of perceived immigration control failures. ..."
They've also focused with laser-like, ruthless precision on hot button issues which they know
many of those people are genuinely worried about, notably immigration and terrorism.
At his presser in Scotland this morning, Trump said: 'People are angry all over the world. They're
angry over borders, they're angry over people coming into the country and taking over and nobody
even knows who they are. They're angry about many, many things in the UK. It's essentially the same
thing that's happening in the United States.'
Regardless of what you think of Trump's inflammatory rhetoric, and his uncompromising talk of
walls and bans, does anybody really doubt after this shock Brexit result that he's right about the
levels of anger?
It may not be obvious to the political and media elites living in their hallowed, protected homes
in privileged areas.
But travel to the north of England, or to the middle of America, and you will find very real fury
with government and very real concern over the impact of perceived immigration control failures.
There's an increasing large gulf between the politically correct 'cool' and 'establishment' crowd
who view any publicly stated concern about border controls as 'racism', and those who have to live
at the sharp end of it.
The clear message from this sensational day for any politician or world leader is this: ignore
the concerns of the people at your peril.
Donald Trump's
speech
(transcript) on the stakes of the election made good points on globalization
and trade. It was also full of lies and obfuscations. But that will, as the primaries
have shown, not diminish his central message nor hurt him within his potential
electorate. He hits the right buttons with a lot of people:
Our country lost its way when we stopped putting the American people first.
We got here because we switched from a policy of Americanism – focusing on what's
good for America's middle class – to a policy of globalism, focusing on how to make
money for large corporations who can move their wealth and workers to foreign
countries all to the detriment of the American worker and the American economy.
We reward companies for offshoring, and we punish companies for doing business in
America and keeping our workers employed.
This is not a rising tide that lifts all boats.
This is a wave of globalization that wipes out our middle class and our jobs.
Those words will ring with many people.
Trump now needs money for the general election. He sold out to hard-line Zionist
donors. Within an otherwise isolationist foreign policy view he claimed that "Thanks to
Hillary Clinton, Iran is now [...] on the road to nuclear weapons." Neither was Clinton
much involved in the nuclear agreement with Iran, nor is Iran on such a road. But Trump
will rake in millions from Adelson and other arch-Zionists for making these claims.
His anti-globalization shtick will sell well in fly-over country and with
marginalized workers. My hunch is that the media, overwhelmingly in Clinton's favor,
will underestimate his pull until the day he wins the election.
harrylaw | Jun 23, 2016 5:41:07 AM |
3
Trump.. "Her decisions spread death, destruction and terrorism everywhere she
touched," Mr Trump said, accusing Mrs Clinton of being a "world-class liar". And
"Hillary Clinton may be the most corrupt person ever to seek the presidency of the
United States," he said, accusing her of having run the State Department "like her
own personal hedge fund".
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-06-23/trump-accuses-clinton-of-corruption-attacks-policy-record/7535288
Who could disagree with any of that, Clinton has so many faults to attack it is hard
to see her winning.
/a>
b, 'If one wants to play the populist card one needs to take up popular issue.'
A
measure of just how out of touch with Americans democrats are ... They got where they
are
because they switched from a policy of Americanism – focusing on what's good for
America's middle class – to a policy of globalism, focusing on how to make money
for large corporations who can move their wealth and workers to foreign countries
all to the detriment of the American worker and the American economy.'
If you like Tom Clancy, here's the real deal. A former Air
Force intelligence officer turned manufacturing engineer,
pilot, and independent business man is recruited by the CIA
(Oliver North) to assist in the training of Contra pilots in
Mena, Arkansas. His name is Terry Reed, and does he have an
incredible story to tell! This American patriot reveals
everything after the CIA tried to screw him after
Iran-contra. Plenty of very interesting information about
Clinton, Bush, the Arkansas elite, covert CIA operations, CIA
super-agent Barry Seal, money laundering, international
narcotics trafficking, and CIA influence in the US political
system.
/span>
By
[email protected]
on April 19, 1999
Format: Hardcover
UNANSWERED QUESTIONS
ANSWERED ABOUT OUR CORRUPT GOVERNMENT!
I found this book to answer the mystery of the
Iran-Contra/Mena, Arkansas drug smuggling operation. Having
read "Under Fire" by Oliver North and this book I find it
quite obvious who's lying. Terry Reed, a CIA operative, who
thought he was serving an honest government, is compelled to
expose the corruption that he himself encountered. Whereas,
Oliver North in his book COVERS it all up. We should be
thankful for Terry Reed's courage to bring this information
out. This book corroborates the documentary, "Mena Cover-up".
A man who follows his conscience should never be bound to
secrecy when that secrecy only hides corruption. May more
COURAGEOUS men and women who have vowed "to secrecy" STAND
up!
Deep Politics in the
Flesh
By
Herbert L Calhoun
on March 2, 2008
Format: Hardcover
This book underscores and confirms Peter Dale Scott's
paradigmatic expansion (appearing in his book Deep Politics
and the Death of JFK), of the parameters of American politics
to the cesspool of secrecy just beneath the waterline of
normal everyday political maneuverings.
Here, Air Force Colonel Terry Reed tells the story of being
assigned, as an "Operations Officer" in charge of a CIA-run
transshipment drop-off-point, disguised as a parking meter
manufacturing plant, somewhere out in the boondocks on the
periphery of the small Hamlet of Mena, Arkansas.
According to Reed, while operating under various "deep
covers" and "cut-outs," he later discovered, that he was in
fact working for Oliver North's Nicaragua-Contra
"drugs-for-gun" project. Quite by accident he had discovered
that his small operation in Mena was a link in a much larger
and longer chain of activities that led from Ronald Reagan's
NSC, to the Medellin cocaine fields. Apparently, as Reed
surmised, cocaine was being picked up and transshipped
through Mena, enroute to being laundered for guns (pick up at
the Pentagon, paid for out of cocaine proceeds), and sent on
to the Nicaraguan "contras."
All of cargo that arrived in Mena was of course carefully
concealed in the typical large steel locked-down transport
containers. According to Reed (whose job it was to make sure
such containers were securely locked and un-tampered with),
he, somehow was able to see inside that they were packed full
of "one-kilo sized bricks" of cocaine -- one of which he
wriggled out to keep as evidence to later either "blow the
whistle" on the whole operation, or at the very least, to be
used as a hedge against being called a "conspiracy kook and
liar" once his revelations were made public. That is the
essence of Reed's story.
Well, that theft by the "good old colonel" was a big mistake:
For the rest of book is about what happened to him and his
family as he was forced to "go on the lam," to avoid being
"terminated with extreme prejudice" by his U.S. government
handlers and overseers. According to Reed, he and his family
are still being pursued all across the U.S., Canada and
Mexico in a harrowing odyssey with enough twists and turns in
it to make a move that would rival "The Bourne Identity," of
Matt Damon fame.
At the time this book went to print, Reed's story seemed like
so much "out there" conspiracy theory by the kooks, who were
again weaving their familiar and always un-substantiated
tales about the "goings-on" of people in power. However, the
revelations since the book was published all seem to have
produced nothing but a constant stream of cross-confirmation
and convergence with Reed's facts. And here I mean the arrest
of Eugene Hasenfus shot down in Nicaragua on October 5, 1986;
the incredible well-written and revealing book by Gary Webb
called "Dark Alliance;" the ultimate expose on the Clintons
written by the renown British journalist Ambrose
Evans-Pritchard called "The Secret Life of Bill Clinton, and
the roller-coaster ride down the dark side of American
history by Daniel Hopsicker called "Barry & `the boys," about
the life and times of the Soldier of Fortune and known CIA
agent Barry Seal.
According to Hopsicker, it was none other than the infamous
Barry Seal who was piloting the plane that crashed in
Nicaragua and who flew all of the other planes on regularly
missions both into Colombia for the pick-up and back to Mena
for the drop off, and on to Nicaragua with guns for the
Contras. Seal in fact even had his own private "financial
interests" invested in the whole Mena operation.
And as is by now well known, from Gary Webb's Dark Alliance,
it was "Contra cocaine money" that was sold in America's
black ghettoes that led to the "crack explosion" and that
financed the whole "Reagan Contra" Operation (At the same
time that Nancy Reagan was preaching "Just Say No!"). But it
is Evans-Prichard's book that tied all these various loose
strains together: from Mena, directly to the backdoor of the
Clinton White House: Once the then Governor of Arkansas, Bill
Clinton, got wind that a big CIA drug smuggling operation was
taking place on his back porch, in Mena, Arkansas, he wanted
"in on the deal" and "wanted his cut." Apparently he got both
with a flourish, by utilizing the likes of Dan Lasater
(Chapter 19), who became the Arkansas "Cocaine Kingpen,"
laundering most of his money through the Arkansas Development
Finance Corporation (ADFC), which in a very short time became
the largest bonding company in the world. The ADFC was such
an improbable place for such spike in bonding activity that
this activity alone actually triggered the IRS investigation
that eventually led to Lasater and others arrest. [There is
another whole story of how that investigation was eventually
stifled and then completely snuffed out.]
As one of many postscripts to Reed's expose. Barry Seal was
released to a halfway house in Baton Rouge, La, with a
bulls-eye painted on his back, and the predictable happened:
He was gunned-down in a hail of bullets from a Uzi,
presumably by Colombian hit men. The May 23, 1992 (?)
Washington Post entitled "Iran-Contra Figure Shot Down Again
(by Guy Guliotta) relates how a Congressional Bill to award
Eugene Hasenfus $805,209 for his injuries, was shelved: Bill
Clinton had written Hasenfus' lawyers in Arkansas, saying
that "he would not look favorably on the bill." In the mean
time, Oliver North, who lied to Congress, almost won a Senate
seat in Va., and then went on to lucrative book deal and an
additional lucrative deal as a Rightwing Talk Show Host.
Elliot Abrams, who also lied to Congress, did 100 hours of
community service and wrote a book about how the Democrats
had scape-goated him.
If this does not confirm Peter Dale Scott's theories, I don't
what will. Five stars.
Following The Money
By
Acute Observer
on July 25, 2003
Format: Hardcover
Terry Kent Reed joined the Air Force while in college. He
soon learned that "the government and the military had to
deceive the American public to accomplish its national
security objectives" (p.18)! The CIA relied extensively upon
Air America to conduct their unstated objectives (p.20). What
happened to our MIAs? POW camps were bombed by the Air Force
(p.22)! The newspapers and government lied about Southeast
Asia (p.23). After leaving the Air Force TKR got a commercial
pilot's license and worked as a salesman in the machine
industry. TKR became an asset for the FBI, then the CIA, on
international sales. In 1983 he began to work for the CIA
"Insurance losses" would be used to raise untraceable funds
(p.43). What happened to those old traditional values (p.14)?
A NJ arms company was bought and shipped to Arkansas to build
receiver housings that converted a civilian AR-15 to a
military M-16, and had no tracable serial number. The Rose
Law Firm's specialty was brokering deals (p.55). Governor
Bill Clinton was disliked because of his attempts to attract
out-of-state businesses, and for trying to improve the state
educational system (p.56). Page 86 explains how stolen
aircraft are laundered if you have Government connections.
Mena airport specialized in illegal modifications to
aircraft. Barry Seal was used by the Reagan Administration,
then thrown away (pp.97-98). Payoffs were made to Arkansas
state officials (p.125). The CIA is above the law (p.133).
Pages 212-4 tell how the Arkansas governor's friends and
relatives were dirtied-up. Does the CIA decide who will
become President (pp.231-6)? The BCCI and First American Bank
were used by Arkansas banking (p.245). When dirty money is
deposited in the Netherlands Antilles, it can be laundered
and taxes avoided (p.249). Things went well for TKR until a
C-123 was shot down (pp.289-90).
The Mexican Enterprise began Phase 2. The elite of Mexico,
like in Arkansas, opposed any change unless they personally
benefited. They suppressed any attempt to empower a middle
class(p.330). Then TKR discovered his business was being used
to ship pure cocaine to the States; the US Govt. was the
biggest cocaine smuggler (p.343)! What powerful men owed
their fortune to CIA drug traffic (p.346)? Was the crew on
that downed C-123 killed before the crash (p.356)? Page 390
tells how a false crime can be created to destroy the
credibility of a witness. The Reeds went underground with
hidden identities, and traveled the country.
After the case went to trial, the judge declared Terry Reed
not guilty due to a lack of evidence (p.459). This kept the
story of drug trafficking hidden from the public. The Reeds
tried to sue for their false prosecution, but no lawyer would
take their case after the judgment against the Christic
Institute (p.470). A famous legal expert took their case on
contingency. Page 502 tells of the smear story created by
'TIME' magazine. Iran-Contra was not an issue in the 1992
election because both Bush and Clinton were involved! Terry
Reed discovered the CIA counsel was now Attorney-General!
The Epilogue claims the Dept of Justice perverted itself
under Reagan, Bush, and Clinton. I think Bush picked Clinton
as an opponent because Clinton would not prosecute Bush for
drug trafficking; then Bush Jr to continue the cover-up.
Congress failed to expose Iran-Contra (p.545) because of a
pay-off. (Like the Senate failure to impeach Clinton?) The
book ends by asking why Barry Seal was bumped off. Did he
threaten very powerful people with exposure? Page 240 tells
how dirty drug money ended up in Attorney-General Meese's
personal bank account. Do these 'Black Operation' flights
still continue? [The book has too many pages.]
"... Just a month before the email issue arose, in November 2010, Abedin and Clinton discussed that department employees were not receiving emails sent by then-secretary, the newly-released emails indicate. ..."
"... "We should talk about putting you on state email or releasing your email address to the department so you are not going to spam," Abedin wrote to Clinton on November 13, 2010. ..."
"... Another email shows that John Bentel, then the technical support director, warned Clinton that if she opted to use the official email box, "any email would go through the Department's infrastructure and subject to FOIA searches." ..."
"... After Abedin reported the technical problem, the State Department technical staff suggested that "turning off the anti-spam filter" would resolve the problem. ..."
"... As shutting down the security software didn't appear to be helpful, one email recommended turning off two of the three anti-phishing filters that protect personal data from identity thieves and cybercriminals "in order to eliminate the categorizer." ..."
Hillary Clinton's private server was temporarily unprotected by security features in December
2010, when the then-secretary of state had technical problems with her email. In 2011, Clinton's
server was hacked multiple times, newly-disclosed papers show.
On Wednesday, the legal advocacy group Judicial Watch published a batch of back-and-forth emails
between high-level State Department technical support and Clinton staffers as they tried to fix a
serious problem with the secretary's private home email server.
"There are many messages and responses not received," one of the officials, Cindy Almodovar,
wrote to S/ES-IRM staff, delivering Huma's complaint.
Just a month before the email issue arose, in November 2010, Abedin and Clinton discussed
that department employees were not receiving emails sent by then-secretary, the newly-released
emails indicate.
"We should talk about putting you on state email or releasing your email address to the
department so you are not going to spam," Abedin wrote to Clinton on November 13, 2010.
In response, the secretary wrote: "Let's get separate address or device but I don't want any risk
of the personal being accessible."
Another email shows that John Bentel, then the technical support director, warned Clinton
that if she opted to use the official email box, "any email would go through the Department's
infrastructure and subject to FOIA searches."
After Abedin reported the technical problem, the State Department technical staff suggested
that "turning off the anti-spam filter" would resolve the problem.
However, after the Trend Micro Inc. security software installed on Clinton's server was turned
off, a senior State Department official, Thomas W. Lawrence, wrote: "We view this as a Band-Aid
and fear it's not 100 percent fully effective. We are eager for TrendMicro to fully resolve,
quickly."
A screenshot of TrendMicro's 'ScanMail for Exchange' in one of the emails showed the anti-spam
disabled.
As shutting down the security software didn't appear to be helpful, one email recommended
turning off two of the three anti-phishing filters that protect personal data from identity
thieves and cybercriminals "in order to eliminate the categorizer."
However, in his response, Lawrence did not support the idea, saying that both "content-filtering
and anti-virus checking… has blocked malicious content in the recent past."
Another set of emails from January 2011, just mere weeks after attempts to fix Clinton's email
server, reveal that someone tried to compromise it.
"Someone was trying to hack us and while they did not get in i didnt [sic] want to let them have
the chance to," the non-departmental advisor to President Bill Clinton, who provided technical
support, told the State Department's deputy chief of staff for operations on January 9, 2011.
"We were attacked again so I shut [the server] down for a few min," he wrote later that day.
The next day, Abedin instructed Clinton's chief of staff and deputy chief of staff for planning
not to email the secretary "anything sensitive" and stated that she could "explain more in
person."
Clinton, now the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, has repeatedly denied that her
private email server was ever breached.
In late May, the State Department's Office of the Inspector General released a scathing report
largely concerning Clinton's email use, saying that unsecured communications at such a high level
created "significant security risks."
This most recent release of Clinton-linked records by Judicial Watch referred to that report. The
group requested the emails and was granted the right to obtain the records under a June 14, 2016
court order by Judge Emmet G. Sullivan.
Clinton's use of a private email server has been a major headache for her presidential campaign.
"... Aside from the hypocrisy and duplicity of the Clintons who are portrayed as congenital liars, corrupt, mean, and manipulative, the bias of the mainstream media and the effect they have on the political landscape is frightening, and the main thrust of the book. ..."
"... This woman is not qualified or fit to be President. She made "politics of personal destruction " an art form. ..."
"... This book shines a light on the fawning and incompetent cockroaches in the mainstream media. How her and her husband keep getting a free pass is beyond reasonable comprehension. I was a registered Democrat for 45 years and believe every word of it. It's on the money! ..."
Compelling Read
Brent Bozell has painted a very accurate picture of the
Clinton modus of operation and the documented bias of the
mainstream media. He names names, dates, and places and
has obviously done his homework.
Aside from the hypocrisy and duplicity of the
Clintons who are portrayed as congenital liars, corrupt,
mean, and manipulative, the bias of the mainstream media
and the effect they have on the political landscape is
frightening, and the main thrust of the book.
I'm a recovering liberal (their Socialist and partisan
agenda lost me) who voted for Bill C. twice( we all make
mistakes) and feel hoodwinked by the media. A subtle
manipulation that the average or casual viewer or reader
may not pick up on--they are duplicitous. This is a book
for middle of the roaders and Independents. If you're far
left, you won't buy it or believe it. If you're far right,
it's preaching to the choir. But before the next election
I would hope those that depend on the nightly news and the
mainstream print media for truth in reporting read this.
This woman is not qualified or fit to be President.
She made "politics of personal destruction " an art form.
The "Vast Right Wing Conspiracy"" (A book by Jeffrey
Toobin that I also read) exists only in her mind and is
right out of the Clinton playbook. When cornered , play
the "poor me" victim card, obfuscate, blame "they" and
lie. The media will enable and help.
The left wing conspiracy poses far more danger to all
of us. You will know that there are far more Dan Rathers
and Katie Courics than there are Rush Limbaughs.
This book shines a light on the fawning and
incompetent cockroaches in the mainstream media. How her
and her husband keep getting a free pass is beyond
reasonable comprehension. I was a registered Democrat for
45 years and believe every word of it. It's on the money!
Thank you Brent Bozell and Tim Graham
Bloomberg presstitutes definitely displays strong pro-Clinton bias. The article looks like
written by Clinton campaign staffer. It's not accidental the Goldman
Sachs pay Hillary that much money. How high information voter can vote for Hillary is unclear
to me. As Jill Stein said ""Terrible things we expect from Donald Trump, we've actually already seen
from Hillary Clinton"
Notable quotes:
"... "He speaks my language," said one participant in the more than two-hour discussion expertly guided by Hart. ..."
"... On the whole, the group gave the impression of citizens at sea, troubled by the economy, frustrated by politics and unclear exactly what powers are shaping their world and to what end. ..."
Swing voters tend to be low-information voters. But when veteran pollster Peter Hart convened a group
of 11 "blue-collar and economically struggling" voters from suburban Pittsburgh on Tuesday, in research
for the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, it seemed that Donald Trump's
campaign messages had pierced the fog.
"He speaks my language," said one participant in the more
than two-hour discussion expertly guided by Hart.
A majority of the group favored a temporary ban on immigration by Muslims, though one participant
did point out that there is no way to discern who is, and is not, a Muslim. A slightly slimmer majority
supported building a wall on the Mexican border, and plenty of hands also went up to support deporting
11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S., though a barrage of qualifications soon followed,
suggesting few were eager to see the theory of deportation rendered into reality.
On the whole, the group gave the impression of citizens at sea, troubled by the economy, frustrated
by politics and unclear exactly what powers are shaping their world and to what end.
Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House and the 2012 Republican vice presidential nominee, is not
an obscure political figure. But upon hearing his name, none could identify him.
,,,Another volunteered that Trump "doesn't come off as a liar,"
...Speaking of Hillary
Clinton's ambitions, one woman said, "I don't think women and men are equal." She doubted that
Clinton, on that count, was up to the masculine demands of the presidency. Others chimed in with
their own concerns about Clinton's womanhood, citing "emotions" in one case, and the challenges
of the "male arena" of politics in another.
"... He blamed Clinton for destabilizing the Middle East and spreading "death, destruction and terrorism" as secretary of state. He also accused her and Bill Clinton of helping strengthen the Chinese economy through their support of "disastrous" trade deals that he said helped triggered an exodus of America's "best jobs" abroad. ..."
"... In return, Hillary Clinton got rich … She gets rich making you poor ..."
"... He continued to hammer home the point that Clinton, if elected, would cater to special interests at the expense of the American people. ..."
"... Clinton is very much so, a corrupted politician that should have been examined closer during her tenure as Secretary of State ..."
"... In six states, primary exit polls had a discrepancy of 5 to 33 per cent from vote counts, and Clinton won all six. Hmmm. If any direct suppression orchestrated by the DNC and/or Clinton campaign is uncovered, all the worse. You'd think the Dem machine could foresee these kinds of ugly revelations bubbling up, but no. ..."
"... Trumpster finally got one right. Hillary charges $225K for a 30 minute speech, demands to be flown in a private jet, a presidential suite with 3 adjoining rooms for her staff, 1st class flights for her pre-event planners and on and on. Hill & Bill have made over $180 million off of their holding of public office. Corruption at its finest. ..."
"... The Guardian, which long ago lost itself in pro-Clinton zeal, has missed the point that despite all of Trump's blunders over the last month and Clinton's supposed bounce for winning the nomination he's only 4 -5 % points behind her in the latest CNN national poll. That's a serious problem for her. I saw David Gergen making that very point this a.m. on CNN. ..."
"... For Mrs Clinton, any attack leveled against her, even a factual one, is a lie or a conspiracy theory. Unfortunately for her, that is another lie. Mr. Trump, as any entrepreneur, is not lilly-white, but he's not even comparable to Mrs Clinton in volumes and amounts. ..."
"... Clinton is corrupt. Read this one account: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/foreign-governments-gave-millions-to-foundation-while-clinton-was-at-state-dept/2015/02/25/31937c1e-bc3f-11e4-8668-4e7ba8439ca6_story.html ..."
"... The problem is that him being a con man does not change the fact that Hillary is still, probably ( like he said ) the most corrupt person to ever seek the presidency. Him being bad in no way makes her good -- ..."
"... "We're asking Bernie Sanders voters to join our movement so together we can fix the system for all Americans. It's not just the political system that's rigged. It's the whole economy." ..."
"... Huh, this plea to Sanders supporters is better than any from Democratic Party or Hillary Clinton ..."
"... Yep. Trump sure does employ a lot of people. He pays most of the the absolute minimum and provides no benefits in most cases. Yep. He's as good for American jobs as Walmart. ..."
"... What are Hillary's policies that have been put forth. Stating that you are going to concentrate on Cyber Security when you had an unsecure server in a bathroom storing national classified information? Stating that she has done so much for women? what has she done? ..."
"... It doesn't matter who wins the White House, The Donald or the sociopath Hillary, the American people lose. ..."
"... Loved Albright's idiotic comment: There's a special place in hell for women who don't support Hillary. In actuality, the opposite is true. There is a special place in hell for those who vote for her because she is a woman. ..."
"The choice in this election is a choice between taking our government back from the special interests,
or surrendering our last scrap of independence to their total and complete control," Trump said in
a speech delivered from the chandelier ballroom of the Trump Soho hotel in New York.
In his 45-minute address, Trump reprised many of the same concerns conservatives and other detractors
have long expressed about Clinton, over her trustworthiness and personal ethics. He blamed Clinton
for destabilizing the Middle East and spreading "death, destruction and terrorism" as secretary of
state. He also accused her and Bill Clinton of helping strengthen the Chinese economy through their
support of "disastrous" trade deals that he said helped triggered an exodus of America's "best jobs"
abroad.
"In return, Hillary Clinton got rich … She gets rich making you poor," Trump said, echoing
an attack Clinton made against him on Tuesday. He continued to hammer home the point that Clinton,
if elected, would cater to special interests at the expense of the American people.
relgin
Clinton is very much so, a corrupted politician that should have been examined closer during
her tenure as Secretary of State:
The Democrats are running the first-ever major candidate to be under FBI investigation. You
just know the Republicans will repeat that info over and over and over. Even if Clinton isn't
indicted, the Republicans will spin the word "indictment" anyway. They're so good at doing that.
You'd think the Dem machine would've learned this by now, but no.
Wait till the investigative press pieces together enough evidence that millions of "provisional"
ballots that voted for Sanders weren't counted... sometime by the middle of the campaign. The
Republicans will eat that up.
In six states, primary exit polls had a discrepancy of 5 to 33 per cent from vote counts,
and Clinton won all six. Hmmm. If any direct suppression orchestrated by the DNC and/or Clinton
campaign is uncovered, all the worse. You'd think the Dem machine could foresee these kinds of
ugly revelations bubbling up, but no.
MemphisTigerFan89
Trumpster finally got one right. Hillary charges $225K for a 30 minute speech, demands
to be flown in a private jet, a presidential suite with 3 adjoining rooms for her staff, 1st class
flights for her pre-event planners and on and on. Hill & Bill have made over $180 million off
of their holding of public office. Corruption at its finest.
Round-trip transportation on a chartered private jet "e.g., a Gulfstream 450 or larger
jet," plus round-trip business class travel for two advance staffers who will arrive up to
three days in advance
Hotel accommodations selected by Clinton's staff and including "a presidential suite for
Secretary Clinton and up to three (3) adjoining or contiguous single rooms for her travel aides
and up to two (2) additional single rooms for the advance staff"
She doesn't travel alone, relying on an entourage of a couple of "travel aides," and a
couple of advance staffers who check out her speech site in the days leading up to her appearance
Hillary will remain at the event no longer than 90 minutes; will pose for no more than
50 photos with no more than 100 people
"It is agreed that Speaker will be the only person on the stage during her remarks"
There will be no press coverage or video- or audio-taping of her speech
The only record allowed will be made by a stenographer whose transcription will be given
only to Clinton
The foundation, meanwhile, is prohibited from advertising the event on radio, TV or billboards
Clinton staffers must approve in writing any promotional material.
Trump has a talent for summarizing his opponent's weaknesses. It's not reported here, but he
said Clinton's ideas were "old and tired". That's an impression she'll have a lot of difficulty
shedding.
The Guardian, which long ago lost itself in pro-Clinton zeal, has missed the point that
despite all of Trump's blunders over the last month and Clinton's supposed bounce for winning
the nomination he's only 4 -5 % points behind her in the latest CNN national poll. That's a serious
problem for her. I saw David Gergen making that very point this a.m. on CNN.
Clinton supporters : don't underestimate Trump's abilities. He is very capable of winning the
election and is a very dangerous opponent.
hipocampelofantocame
For Mrs Clinton, any attack leveled against her, even a factual one, is a lie or a conspiracy
theory. Unfortunately for her, that is another lie. Mr. Trump, as any entrepreneur, is not lilly-white,
but he's not even comparable to Mrs Clinton in volumes and amounts.
The man that schemes to pay no taxes, has declared to have made no profit, but filed foralmost
a million in tax write-offs, worked with the Philly Mob to build his casinos.
Corrupt is right. Trump is a con man. He's great at it (taxes are for the little people), but
he's still a con man.
Oboy1963 -> MtnClimber
Absolutely correct.
The problem is that him being a con man does not change the fact that Hillary is still,
probably ( like he said ) the most corrupt person to ever seek the presidency. Him being bad in
no way makes her good !
Darby Kathleen
"We're asking Bernie Sanders voters to join our movement so together we can fix the
system for all Americans. It's not just the political system that's rigged. It's the whole
economy."
Huh, this plea to Sanders supporters is better than any from Democratic Party or Hillary
Clinton.
Not saying it will work but its more effective than 'you'll be responsible for Trump', 'I'm
Not-Trump', 'its time for us to unite to fight Trump', 'He lost, I'm the nominee, time to fall
in line' (Paraphrasing of course).
I hate to say it but he sounds more genuine & authentic than she ever has. The Democrats have
made it clear they don't want Sanders policies only his votes. 22% are going to Trump vs 55% to
Hillary. 23% undecided or to 3rd parties. She better hope today wasn't a turnpoint for him.
GeorgiaTeacher -> Social36
What Trump has done is worse than Hillary selling favors while in the Secretary of State position?
Come on you can be serious? Maybe you have researched it?
Some govts were allowed to not pay debt to the USA and just so happen to give to the foundation.
Name when something like that has ever occurred. Either party.
Dan Willis
As an American the comments posted by some below are not true. Trump has created many jobs
in the United States. In NY and NJ alone he employs nearly 1400 general workers, many may in fact
be imported workers under legal agreements. The Trump empire employs many people and pays wages
to them supporting many families who contribute taxes to the government. You can easily travel
the United States and see that Trump creates jobs. What can be said of Hillary Clinton? who employs
very few and most of them are paid by the government, probably no more than 5-10 total. She has
never created anything like a company unless selling access and shaping of policy to collect revenue
within her foundation could be considered a company. Hillary has been disbarred, fired, removed
from her position of shaping health care under her husbands presidency, the worst Secretary of
State, and as stated by Trump probably the greatest liars ever.
MtnClimber -> Dan Willis
Yep. Trump sure does employ a lot of people. He pays most of the the absolute minimum and
provides no benefits in most cases. Yep. He's as good for American jobs as Walmart.
Dan Willis -> Mint51HenryJ
What are Hillary's policies that have been put forth. Stating that you are going to concentrate
on Cyber Security when you had an unsecure server in a bathroom storing national classified information?
Stating that she has done so much for women? what has she done? Of the two, Trump may not
be the greatest but she is a farce and a liar.
66Degreesnorth
Hillary campaigned against OBAMA saying she was capable of handling "The 3:00am Phone Call"
when she got that call ,she did little but call Obama,,,Obama DID NOT ATTEND the Situation Room
that night , his whereabouts has never really been explained as to why or why he didn't walkover
to see real time drone footage of the destruction of the US Embassy in Benghazi. US Staff were
quoted as saying "they were waiting for the Cavalry to arrive " ,,,they never came US Ambassador
J. Christopher Stevens and Sean Smith; CIA contractors Tyrone S. Woods and Glen Doherty ALL DIED
,,,, No Retaliation was taken . This coupled with Obama welcoming ARAB SPRING created in part
,,,the violence and terrorism in the mid east and now in Europe and beyond ,North America . PEASE
go to YOUTUBE to view Brilliant British journalist Christopher Hitchens scathing critical attacks
on Bill and Hillary Clinton . I believe America are tired of the Clintons and will VOTE TRUMP
, to make AMERICA STRONG & GREAT AGAIN !!
prairie
It doesn't matter who wins the White House, The Donald or the sociopath Hillary, the American
people lose.
Celt23 -> prairie
I don't believe you understand the meaning of sociopath - but do feel free to bandy these words
about - if she were a man you'd be praising her for her grit and strength.
bcarey -> Celt23
if she were a man you'd be praising her for her grit and strength.
If she was a man, I would be criticizing her for her corruption, just as Jeb! was. She is very
much like Jeb, you know.
This isn't about the fact that she is a woman, except for those who want to pander to women for
her vote.
Loved Albright's idiotic comment: There's a special place in hell for women who don't support
Hillary. In actuality, the opposite is true. There is a special place in hell for those who vote
for her because she is a woman.
Dan Willis -> Celt23
Interesting. Obama is a man and I do not praise his grit and strength. I agree that the term
sociopath may not totally apply but what term does? Hillary has no strength of her own. If you
are honest to yourself look at her history. She has relied on Bill for everything, her first job,
her positions within the government. You can say she ran for Senator but what of that? she moved
from her real home state to NY to run for a "shoe in" position. She was a terrible Senator who
lost jobs in her home district. Utilize google and research all of this as it is true. She was
fired as an assistant DA in the justice department and her boss called her a "liar". One would
have to be intellectually dishonest with themselves to believe that she has ever done anything
on her own. She is propped up with money by very important people "Soros" who will utilize her
for their gain.
He fielded questions from the audience and also the moderator neocon Kori Schake, mostly about
Donald Trump.
At one point, he named a list of non-mainstream Republican candidates that had their moment in
the sun and then faded away.
This included Ron and Rand Paul. "We beat back Ron Paul and Rand Paul," he said. Implying that
they were nothing but a footnote in Republican history.
Kristol said the current election resembled one coming out of a third world country. He also
admitted that he underestimated "Trump's seeing what the people are upset about."
He said the current move by some delegates to open up the upcoming Republican national convention
by "voting conscience" to deny Trump the nomination has about a 15% chance of succeeding. He said
only last week he would have said it only had a 5% chance.
He said he could not rule out a Trump victory in November.
He said he sent out this tweet to "energize" Reince Priebus:<
"... Prior to Hillary's being approved as Secretary of State, a detailed agreement was worked out requiring public notification of gifts from foreign entities and businessmen, as well as prior approval for donations from foreign government-owned businesses. Unfortunately, this agreement was almost immediately violated. ..."
"... There, when the government needed to help a Clinton supporter/cause was, naturally, a despot, Bill Clinton would even praise that person for his 'enlightened rule.' Another damning observation - 'In his first eight years on the global lecture circuit, Bill had never been paid to speak in Nigeria. But once Hillary was appointed secretary of state, he booked two of his top three highest-paid speeches ever by traveling to Nigeria, pulling in a whopping $700,000 each.' ..."
"... Read the book for yourself and not allow the Clinton Attack Machine to divert your attention from the important questions raised ..."
"... Mind you, Hillary was the one claiming poverty when trying to get mortgages (plural) for their homes (also plural). They were part of the political wing that vilified Romney for his wealth without ever blushing at their being in the same ball park as him. Romney at least made his money in the private sector. The Clintons seem to have made theirs by trading on the political connections and power while dancing on a razor's edge away from the legal definition of illegality. ..."
Tens of millions of dollars have gone
to the Clinton Foundation, and tens of millions more to the ex-president in the form of speaking
fees from around the world. Both fundings have primarily come from foreign governments and businessmen,
and quite often are temporally associated with deals involving U.S. actions that benefit the donors
and required approvals from our government.
It has long been illegal for foreigners to contribute to U.S. political campaigns. Yet, that
hasn't deterred the Clintons from this parallel practice. Further, the amounts of these donations,
per Schweizer, are often far larger than allowable campaign contributions. Thus, the Clintons
have become quite wealthy - Bill Clinton receiving $105 million in speaking fees through 2012..(Also
donations to the Clinton library, the Democratic Party, etc.) This pattern of major donations
followed by major beneficial U.S. government acts (eg. dropping proposed regulations, DOJ investigations,
and the Marc Rich pardon) began in 1999 while Clinton was still president.
An obvious question - Why haven't these foreign donors (eg. in India) given money directly
to local charities instead of to the Clinton Foundation? Another - Doesn't this make Hillary's
deleting innumerable official emails while Secretary of State especially suspicious?
Prior to Hillary's being approved as Secretary of State, a detailed agreement was worked
out requiring public notification of gifts from foreign entities and businessmen, as well as prior
approval for donations from foreign government-owned businesses. Unfortunately, this agreement
was almost immediately violated.
The bulk of Schweizer's excellent report consists of detailing various donations and possibly
associated U.S. government actions. The most glaring - selling control of a major US uranium resource
to Russia, while we don't even have enough of that invaluable fuel for our own current power needs.
He also points out that the Clinton's most 'profitable' responses don't occur in nations where
business and politics are separated by rules (eg. Germany, G.B.), but 'in despotic areas of the
world where the rules are very different.'
There, when the government needed to help a Clinton supporter/cause was, naturally, a despot,
Bill Clinton would even praise that person for his 'enlightened rule.' Another damning observation
- 'In his first eight years on the global lecture circuit, Bill had never been paid to speak in
Nigeria. But once Hillary was appointed secretary of state, he booked two of his top three highest-paid
speeches ever by traveling to Nigeria, pulling in a whopping $700,000 each.'
D. Buxman TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE VOICE on May 5, 2015
Hillary's Hypocrisy Knows No Bounds
I purchased this book understanding the flaws that permeate the modern American Political System
on both sides of the aisle. At this point in my life, it is hard to be shocked by the moral depravity
of our leaders. Bill and Hillary Clinton, however, have crafted a legal structure through the
Clinton Foundation that brings to bear the worst aspects of public fraud and influence peddling
imaginable.
As Hillary says, the Clinton's started this century, "Dead Broke," and yet today, having engaged
in no productive business activity beyond public speaking engagements and poorly received books,
they have accumulated untold personal wealth and control billions through a "charitable" foundation.
Along the way, they have accepted millions of dollars from foreign donors who just happen to have
business interests that could be advanced through Hillary's activities as a Senator or Secretary
of State and Bill's lobbying efforts as an ex-President. To see one instance where a donation
was followed by a favorable outcome might be a coincidence, but Schweizer provides dozens, in
what could only be described as a concerted scheme of bribery and influence peddling.
To rail against the Republican War on Women, while accepting millions in "donations," from
despotic foreign regimes that stone women for adultery is the height of hypocrisy. In a world
of equal justice, Bill and Hillary would be headed to prison, not on the campaign trail. This
book is extensively researched and footnoted. It is a well-written and cogent depiction of facts
that the Clinton Spin Machine seems unable to rationally dispute, from an author who has a history
of justifiably attacking both Democrats and Republicans.
Craig Matteson HALL OF FAMETOP 500 REVIEWER on May 5, 2015
Read the book for yourself and not allow the Clinton Attack Machine to divert your attention
from the important questions raised
No matter what I write about this book someone will take offense, dismiss and attack what I
write without reading a word of it. So, when you look at the votes and read the comments, take
it all with a box of Morton Salt. This is a book that was written to draw lightning. Some of the
writers who defend the Clintons, such as Newsweek, review this book as a hatchet job. Others will
dismiss any examination of the author's motives as unfair and irrelevant. I say, let the facts
speak and judge the author on whether he is asking serious questions, presenting honest evidence,
and drawing reasonable conclusions. In my view, he is. He is not making claims beyond what the
evidence supports, but he does ask why there are always a preposterous number of coincidences
around Bill and Hillary and everything they do. And how something that enriches this couple so
fabulously can also somehow be characterized as both public service and charity.
Mind you, Hillary was the one claiming poverty when trying to get mortgages (plural) for
their homes (also plural). They were part of the political wing that vilified Romney for his wealth
without ever blushing at their being in the same ball park as him. Romney at least made his money
in the private sector. The Clintons seem to have made theirs by trading on the political connections
and power while dancing on a razor's edge away from the legal definition of illegality. And
somehow, for the Clintons and their acolytes, if they aren't on videotape actually admitting to
taking cash for delivering political favors it somehow never happened. As you read the evidence
around the transactions reported in this book, I think you have to have some pretty thick rose
colored lenses to not see some difficulty in the connections, arrangements, deals, payments, and
reporting of the transactions as required by law. But we can each judge for ourselves. The Clintons
hope you will reject the book. Hillary's opponents hope you will either embrace it, or at least
begin asking some probing questions of your own and go digging for more evidence.
The Clintons have a well-practiced and effective Method of dealing with an immediate crisis
caused when yet another scandal arises, and they always do with these two. It works like this:
The scandal breaks and Team Clinton immediately sends out people like Begala and Carville to attack
the reporters, whistleblowers, or regular folks who dare tell the world what is going on. Another
group of somewhat more removed Clintonistas hit the air, cable, and print media to deny the scandal
outright. The Clintons avoid speaking for as long as possible. The idea is to consume as many
of the information cycles as possible with their own accusations and denials to overwhelm the
scandal outright. If they can't do that and they must speak, they know it doesn't matter what
they say. It can be directly in conflict with the evidence because they have put so much by way
of denial in the media that the "fair" media will quote the denials as if they were legitimate
bits of evidence, too. Eventually, another event comes along and bumps this scandal from the headlines
and then it will either go away or, if it does come back into view, they just refuse to discuss
it as old news and declare that the public knows it was politically motivated and that there is
nothing to it. Really. This is their method. And it works for them. Absurdly; it works.
You can see a similar method used by those on the Left here on Amazon and right here with this
book. They will latch on to a book they hate and provide a vast number of one-star "reviews" of
a sentence or two that say nothing at all except claiming the book is all lies, or old and outdated
claims that have been disproven, or that the author is in thrall to the Koch brothers or some
other Conservative paymaster. They often use fake names so you can't even tell if the same person
is posting multiple attacks using multiple accounts. It is always the same. The idea is to overwhelm
the book with so many reviews that the real reviews get hidden in the clutter and people just
stop looking and reading. Do you see this pattern? Of course you do. It is right in front of your
eyes.
The Clintons have raked in billions for their foundation (The Family Business) by using another
well-oiled and smoothly running operation that works something like this. You can see a version
of it in every deal cited in this book.
A super rich person the Clintons want as a donor and who needs or wants a piece of influence
peddled for them by the Clinton Machine for their nation, oil venture, uranium deals, their for
profit university, their "non-profit" charity, telemarketing business, or whatever, walks into
the shadow of the great Sun of the Clinton Sphere of Influence. Checks are written to the Clinton
Foundations, fabulously rich speaking fees are paid, and lavish travel and accommodations are
provided to Bill and/or Hillary. While on scene giving the speech, photo opportunities and favorable
stories are provided on camera to great fanfare and wide media coverage for the charitable work
being publicized. Once the lights, cameras, and recorders are turned off and in the quiet after
the reporters go off to wherever it is reporters go when not flacking for the Clintons, deals
are worked out in quiet rooms without anything being done directly that breaks the law or at least
not recorded and becoming evidence for breaking the law. Remember, this is all about access to
the Clinton world. They provide connections to a vast entourage of connected influencers. The
price of admission are the big donations to the Clinton Foundation and the fees to Bill and Hillary.
But unseemly is not illegal and seems to be something the Clintons are very comfortable with
as they "do good" in the world for their Foundation. More money flows to the Foundation in seven
figures and more. Mere millions are minor donations according to Lanny Davis on Fox News Sunday
with Chris Wallace. Somehow, despite assurances of transparency by Bill and Hillary, these donations
are generally not reported until they are caught not reporting them. Even when they are caught
in a compromising position, the media barely talks about it because the Clintons declare them
an oversight and promise to fix them right away. And because the public is never told to care
it doesn't pay attention to the absurdity of this level of corruption by someone running for President;
essentially for a third and fourth term of the Clinton Machine.
The issues raised by Schweitzer in this book are serious and the Clintons need to answer for
the vast ocean of money raised. We have already seen them admit to more than $30 million raised
from more than a thousand donors that they never reported to authorities as was required by law
and their own promises of transparency. That seems far too systematic and large-scale to be the
mere mistake they want us to believe. Will the press hold them accountable? We shall see. I hope
so, but won't hold my breath. What I honestly don't get is how Progressives who honestly believe
in their agenda can stomach this kind of naked profiteering, money grubbing, influence peddling,
and corruption so enthusiastically. Over the years we have seen that there is no shame from the
Clintons; ever. But from the entire Democrat party? From all the Progressive Media? I mean the
way the Clintons behave would make a Tammany Hall blush and Huey Long stare at their operations
in admiration at the audacity of it all.
Those of us who remember the scandals from the first and second Clinton Administrations do
not want to go through them again. But their fans will forgive them anything. Anything. And the
Clintons have more than $2 billion raised by their vast machine to ensure they regain the Whitehouse.
Will we let them have it?
I hope not.
This book will never persuade anyone who is already worshipping at the altar of Hillary. Not
because it fails to present convincing evidence and powerful arguments, but because those who
already believe in Our Hillary - Right Or Wrong are not looking for evidence or weighing arguments.
While the book is interesting to those of us who could never be persuaded to vote for her under
any circumstance whatsoever, the more interesting question is whether this book can get the traction
with the public to start raising questions in the minds of those who might be leaning towards
Hillary but have concerns or are leaning away from her and need a little more to move further
away. I hope it does. In any case, I hope you get the book, read it with an open mind and think
about the ridiculous number of coincidences the Clintons want you to believe don't provide evidence
of corrupt dealing.
For those concerned that there may be a conflict of interest for US Attorney General Loretta Lynch
as it relates to the Clinton investigation, you can rest at ease. On Sunday, Lynch
promised that
there is
no conflict of interest
, period.
In an interview with
Fox News Sunday, Lynch told Chris Wallace that there is nothing to worry about, even if her boss
is openly campaigning for Clinton to become the next president of the United States.
Wallace: "You're a political appointee of the president. Does that create a conflict of
interest for you? Does it make it harder for you to handle the criminal investigation into Clinton
when your boss is saying he thinks she should be president."
Lynch: "Well you know I don't get involved in who the president endorses. I don't have
comments on any of the candidates. The investigation into the State Department email matter is
going to be handled like any other matter.
We've got career agents and lawyers looking
at that, they will follow the facts, and follow the evidence wherever it leads and come to a conclusion.
"
Wallace: "So does this create a conflict of interest for you?"
Lynch: "
No, this is not a conflict for me, for the department or for anyone.
"
When Wallace brought up the fact that on the same day Obama came out and endorsed Clinton, Lynch
met with Obama at the White House, Lynch quickly downplayed the meeting by saying they've never discussed
the case.
Wallace: "The same day that Clinton was endorsed by the president, you met with the president
at the White House. Did you in any way, shape or form discuss the Clinton case with the president?"
Lynch: "
We've never discussed the Clinton case. I've never spoken about it with
the president, or really with anyone at the White House.
"
Well now that we have all of that settled, we can all rest assured that if the FBI recommends
the DOJ bring charges against Clinton, the DOJ will follow through with that. Also, when Lynch
refers to the fact that there are those at the DOJ working the case and allowing the facts to
lead them,
Lynch doesn't mean those that
donated nearly $100,000
to Clinton's campaign, we assume
. Because that too is surely
not a conflict of interest.
They could find a pile of dead bodies in Hillary
Clinton's Freezer and the DOJ would stone wall it.
847328_3527
DeathMerchant
Jun 20, 2016 12:16 PM
These are career politicians who lie and steal and phuck over Americans as easily as
they breath.
Ballin D
847328_3527
Jun 20, 2016 12:20 PM
I don't understand how our politicians are so consistently stupid and weak. Honestly,
corrupt and smart would be a welcome change at this point. This overt corruption
while they kill the host (the American people) is extraordinarily frustrating.
Countrybunkererd
Ignatius
Jun 20, 2016 12:52 PM
Conflict of interest? NOOOO!!!! she laughs. We have the exact same interests, no conflicts
here.
ebworthen
Jun 20, 2016 11:47 AM
Obama said that Clinton is "the most qualified person ever to run for President".
Look at virtually everyone in every
workplace. There--on the job--you tell the marketing lies, drop whatever spin you're told
upon any established customer, throw up whatever obstacles and screens your company directs
you to put in place as "policy", and on and on and on. Don't do it and YOU'RE FIRED.
That's called
work
in American. Land of the (technically) free incorrigible
liars.
If you can't see it everywhere you go, it's because you've joined them.
51 neocons warmongers, who need to be send to Afghanistan for some on site learning. Nuland's birds
of feather try to get worm places in Hillary new administration, playing on her war hawk tendencies...
Those "diplomats" forgot about the existence of Saudis and other theocracies which are much more brutal
and less democratic, viewing woman as domestic animals. These are dark times for American foreign
policy. the easy part is to depose Assad. But what might happen after Assad is disposed of? You
know, the hard part, what follows?
Notable quotes:
"... These Diplomats should be fired as idiots. Did they not just live through the Iraqi occupation, destruction and disaster? ..."
"... Are you a bit confused as to who these neocon dissenters at State support in the Syrian civil war? ..."
"... This is simply a roll call of neocon diplomats making a case for another non-strategic war that would badly hurt US interests. It does not represent State Department policy. The neocons have been very persistent in securing career appointments at State for decades now. ..."
"... You are pushing the world closer to war. ..."
"... what is intolerable about the position of the 51 "diplomats" in the memo is that it is their (failed) efforts to dislodge Assad by proxy, facilitating and organizing the flow of arms that more often than ended up in the hands of hard-line jihadists, that has led to almost 400,000 deaths (not to mention wounded) and the flight of over a million refugees. ..."
"... Wow, sounds like some housecleaning is needed at State. Whatever happened to jaw-jaw being better than war-war? If they are so keen on military action, they're in the wrong building. I'm sure some of the overworked troops and officers in the armed forces would be happy to let these guys take a few of the chances of getting shot or blown up that they deal with daily. ..."
"... It is troubling that the State Department, long a bulwark of common sense against America's foreign adventurism, has become as hawkish as its former head, Hillary Clinton. ..."
"... The Middle East Institute is financed, primarily, by the petroleum and arms industries. The Washington Institute for Near Eastern Policy has HRC's close ally, Dennis Ross; who, with Martin Indyk, founded AIPAC in the mid-80's. ..."
"... This group's contention that direct confrontation with Russia could be avoided echoes their 2002 claim that Operation Iraqi Freedom would be a three month cake walk. ..."
"... Since WWII, U.S. foreign policy has been rooted in the projection and use of force (covert and overt) as the primary means to achieve whatever goals the executive office seeks. It placed the world on notice that the U.S. was ready and willing to use violence to back its foreign policy objectives. Just as in Vietnam and before the disastrous decision to escalate the use of ground forces, President Johnson's national security advisors (all holdovers from Kennedy's Presidency) pressed Johnson to use aerial bombardment against N. Vietnam to induce them to seek a negotiated peace that would allow the U.S. to withdraw from the conflict and save face while preserving the policy of projecting force as a means to maintain world order in accordance with U.S. designs. ..."
"... My oldest son is now completing his sixth Afghan/Iraq tour.I don't want him in Syria. Let these 51 diplomats volunteer their sons/daughters for Syria.That'll demonstrate their commitment.I'll bet not one of these 51 "geniuses" has a child on active military duty in Iraq/Afghan. ..."
"... These folks are, it appears, mid-level foreign service officers like I was. They are utterly unqualified to make these judgements as the Department of State is a failed organization culturally and functionally. Like HRC, who is still advocating for forced regime change if she wins, they have learned nothing from the past and again have no answer for what follows Asad being deposed. A majority Sunni regime in Syria will tear Iraq apart and there is no likelihood of it avoiding the trajectory of other "pluralistic" Arab state attempts. The fact that State has no culture of strategic analysis informing operational design and operational planning which, in turn, spawn series of tactical events, comes clear in situations like this. Doing nothing is the best case here. Tragic but still the best case. President Obama has seen this. Asad needs to regain control of Syria's territory, all of it. Feeding the hopes of the Ahmed Chalabi equivalents in Syria is perpetuating the violence. And, there is no room for an independent Kurdistan in the region, nor is it in the United States' interest for there to be one. ..."
"... That's the same class of people who figured that invading in Iraq in 2003 would turn out all right. ..."
"... Exhibit A being Samantha Power, the latest in a long line of militaristic, European-born white Americans (see Albright, Kissinger, Brzezinski) who believe that American firepower can bring order to the world. ..."
"... Sorry hawkish diplomats, but you're living in a fantasyland where the invasion of Iraq in 2003 did not permanently tarnish the image of the USA and wreck its credibility as an honest arbiter. That is the reality all US presidents will have to face in the post-Bush 43 era. ..."
"... Are those 51 U.S. Diplomats responsible for advising the Obama Administration to bomb Libya back in 2011? Apparently they have not learned from their mistakes. Or maybe they should just go work for their true Employer, The Military Industrial Complex. ..."
"... This is reckless and irresponsible. US backed "moderates" are fighting elbow to elbow with the Nusra Front and other radicals groups; that is why the cease-fire is collapsing. ..."
"... If we weaken Assad, Islamists will take over Damascus and if Damascus falls, soon Beirut will follow. These folk at State are neo cons, as usual shooting from the hip. ..."
"... Vietnam, 212,000 dead and countless north and south Vietnamese and citizens. Unjust and unwarranted war on Iraq with 4,491 and counting dead and countess Iraqi citizens. Now, Syria? Are you wanting the draft returned? You asking for boots on the ground? How about you 50 join up. I will willingly pay for taxes just arm you and send you in. Along with every other know it all who wants us 'TO DO MORE'!! Spare me. You have learned NOTHING in your past failures, have you? 1956, Iran. Cause the over throw of a duly elected government for the Shahs which led to 1980 revolution to fear of them acquiring nuclear weapons. Vietnam led to 'WHAT'? Now Iraq. ..."
"... The worse destabilization in that area I can remember. Not even during their many attacks on Israel when Egypt got a clue. Fire Saddam Hussein's soldiers and they become ISIS by 2006, yet one bright senator lied and said Obama caused them when we left which was President Bush's treaty Maliki. They did not want us there. Leave per the Iraqi people, also. When ISIS showed up they ran and left the weaponry we gave them and the money in the banks for them to grab. Now, you want us steeped into Syria. It's been said, hindsight is 20/20, ..."
"... In these so called diplomats cases, it is totally and legally blind. Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles has a better perception and one of them is dead. ..."
"... The war hawks, so comfortably away from the battle, are banging those drums of war again. Easy to do when your life and the lives of your fellow military are not at risk. ..."
"... We all know now that the invasion of Iraq by Mr. Bush junior was a) a mistake, and b) a War Crime - there were no threatening WMDs nor did Saddam hold hads with Al Quaeda (he was, actually, their worst enemy - and our security!), so, Iraq was c) total stupidity. It was an aggressive war without any cause - for the USA! ..."
"... This is much more about what Mark Landler thinks than about what those generic diplomats think. The Times's principal hawk, Landler has book and a series of articles pushing his neocon view. I guess we should assume the Times agrees. ..."
"... Having spent substantial time as a private consultant at the US Embassy in Kabul I was shocked by the lack of feelings of midlevel officials there with regard to the dead and injuries of American Troops. The Embassy shared a wall with the ISAF/NATO Main Quarters and every single day the US Flag there was half-mast to acknowledge the dead of our troops on that day in that country. The Embassy never shared this sadness and all midlevel officials there were only concerned about their paycheck, quality of meals served, having a drink, going for a swim, and their frequent trips back to the US; for such people wanting to have a say in when to fight in Syria is a sad state of affair. ..."
"... Perhaps we should figure out one take-down before we move on to the next. After 13 years, we still haven't figured out life in Iraq without Saddam. Any thoughts, neocons, on what might happen after Assad is disposed of? You know, the hard part, what follows? ..."
"... Get Rid of Assad, make relations with Russia worse (they back Assad) and allow ISIS to effectively take over Syria. Sounds like a great plan. I guess our military-industrial complex is getting itchy for a new war. And, of course, doing what these diplomats want will also result in putting boots on the ground. This will be a great legacy for Ms. Clinton (under her watch ISIS came into being), Mr. Kerry (who continued Clinton's failed legacy) and Mr. Obama (the Nobel Peace Prize president; who wasn't). ..."
"... The signers of the dissent letter are militarist neocons (of the Victoria Nuland ilk). More than any other, these people and their CIA collaborators are responsible for the death and destruction in Syria and the ensuing refugee crisis. They can't even give a cogent reason for deposing Assad other than point to the carnage of the civil war they fomented-as if Assad were solely responsible. Assad is acting no differently than the US did during it's own Civil War. ..."
"... The value of the memo can be summed up in one sentence as described in the article itself "what would happen in the event that Mr. Assad was forced from power - a scenario that the draft memo does not address." ..."
"... I wonder about the arrogance of these mid-level State Department foreign service officers. ..."
"... Sure -- a few well-placed cruise missiles will make it all good. Yeah, right. ..."
"... Absolutely amazing. My first question is who released this memo? Having a back channel does not permit anyone to unilaterally decide to release information that could cost lives and ruin negotiations that the releasing person knows nothing about. If you do not like the chain of command, then leave. We cannot continue to be involved in sectarian conflicts that cannot be resolved except by the combatants. Haven't we learned anything from Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, and Vietnam? No neocon insanity. We have lost enough lives and treasure in the ME. ..."
"... Are these the same ingrates who urged Bush to attack Iraq - his legacy - ISIS! ..."
"... As a 26 year Marine Corps combat veteran I have a hard time trying to figure out what is going on here, and a harder time not becoming totally disgusted with our State Department. ..."
"... My suggestion would be that we arm these 51 individuals, given them a week's worth of ammunition and rations, and drop them into Syria, I am sure they can lead the way in showing us how to solve the mess in the ME. ..."
"... It's the fact that these are not "widely known names" which scares me most. However, Western-instituted regime change in that region has proven disastrous in every single country it has been tried. If possible, I would investigate these diplomats' ties to defense contractors. ..."
"... US intervention created the rubble and hell that is now Syria. When Assad had full control of Syria, the human rights of the people of Syria suffered under him but many if not most people led a civilised life. They had water and electricity. Past US interventions created Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. To puy it simply, life expectancy in all these countries dropped by 20 to 30 years after the US intervened, each time with the highest utopian ideals, and increased the power of Sunni supremacists after each act. ..."
"... Let's not forget that Bush's hasty appointment of Paul Bremer as the hapless Governor of Iraq following the defeat of Hussein's military regime led immediately to the disbanding of the entire Iraqi military, an incredibly short-sighted and reckless move that essentially unleashed 400,000 young trained fighters (including a honed officers corps) absent support programs to assimilate back into Iraqi society, only to have them emerge as readily available fodder essential for ISIS's marshalling a strong military force almost overnight. A huge price is now being exacted for this astounding stupidity. ..."
"... This is conveniently laying grounds for Hillary's grand comeback to the theatre of "humanitarian interventionism" in the Middle East. God help us all, as this is a prelude to the WW3. ..."
"... Wow the neo-cons are beating the war drums yet again! They have already created a huge mess throughout the Middle East with wars and revolutions directly attributable to the United States in invading Afghanistan and Iraq under false pretenses, helping overthrow the government in Libya, and arming rebels in Syria and Yemen. ..."
"... Unfortunately if Hillary Clinton wins, she is a neo-con puppet and we will be at war in Syria and/or Iran within a year or two. God help us! ..."
"... First of all, if this was a channel for employees to share "candidly and privately" about policy concerns, why is it on the front page of the NY Times? Additionally, as usual, it seems the war hawks are hawking war without thought for what comes next. We've done this most recently in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, all of which are now failed states and havens for terrorists. Because this seems rather obvious, either we are pathologically incapable of learning from past mistakes, or there are people who have an agenda different from the publicly stated one. ..."
"... The U.S. has a lengthy, very sordid history of leaping into the fray in areas such as the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Central America and Afghanistan, among others - all with catastrophic results, for which we never seemed to have a credible, well- crafted plan, nor have we ever comprehended the millennia of internecine tribal hatred and sectarian warfare. ..."
"... I am more scared of US diplomats and politicians than terrorists! Have they learned nothing from the US efforts to create western style democracy in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria (by supporting separatists att an early stage). The US diplomats proposal would ensure more chaos, death and prolonged wR. 38 % of the population are Alewits. They will be killed, Christians will be killed. ..."
ScottW, is a trusted commenter Chapel Hill, NC 16 hours ago
These Diplomats should be fired as idiots. Did they not just live through the Iraqi occupation,
destruction and disaster?
A few years ago, a diplomat who quit was complaining about Syria at a conference I attended.
When I asked who would fill the void if Assad was deposed he said, "That is a difficult question
to answer." What he really meant to say is, "I don't have a clue."
We have already disrupted Syria by supporting rebels/terrorists. The region cannot tolerate
another Iraq.
Dan Stewart, NYC 16 hours ago
Are you a bit confused as to who these neocon dissenters at State support in the Syrian
civil war?
Here's a helpful hint:
If they have beards down to their belt buckles and seem to be hollering something about Allah,
those are the guys the neocons support.
If they're recently shaved and wearing Western attire, in other words, if they look like anyone
you might bump into on a US city street, those are the people the neocons call the enemy.
Retroatavist, DC 10 hours ago
This is simply a roll call of neocon diplomats making a case for another non-strategic
war that would badly hurt US interests. It does not represent State Department policy. The neocons
have been very persistent in securing career appointments at State for decades now. It's
as if we hadn't forgotten the endless horrible mess they got us and the rest of the world into
by breaking Iraq and destroying all its institutions with the insane de-baathification policy.
And it all started with a similar steady drumbeat for war throughout the mid and late '90s and
up to the 2003 disastrous invasion. Did we not learn anything? Really: Whose interest would
an open US war against Assad really serve, and what predictable outcome would be in the US's strategic
favor?
Robert Sawyer, New York, New York 14 hours ago
How many among the 51 are members of "Hillary's Legions, " the same geniuses responsible for
the unqualified success we achieved in Libya?
Gennady, Rhinebeck 16 hours ago
Stop this irresponsible reporting. You are pushing the world closer to war. Humanitarian
support is all we should bring to the Syrian people, regardless of which side they are on.
ScottW, is a trusted commenter Chapel Hill, NC
These Diplomats should be fired as idiots. Did they not just live through the Iraqi occupation,
destruction and disaster?
A few years ago, a diplomat who quit was complaining about Syria at a conference I attended.
When I asked who would fill the void if Assad was deposed he said, "That is a difficult question
to answer." What he really meant to say is, "I don't have a clue."
We have already disrupted Syria by supporting rebels/terrorists. The region cannot tolerate
another Iraq.
Alyoshak, Durant, OK
Isn't Congress supposed to declare war, and the President command our armed forces when such
declarations occur? But what is intolerable about the position of the 51 "diplomats" in the
memo is that it is their (failed) efforts to dislodge Assad by proxy, facilitating and organizing
the flow of arms that more often than ended up in the hands of hard-line jihadists, that has led
to almost 400,000 deaths (not to mention wounded) and the flight of over a million refugees.
But no, these casualties have nothing to do with our attempts at regime change, No!, the blame
for them lies squarely upon Assad for not scooting out of town immediately and submissively when
the U.S. decided it was time for him to go. So now we're supposed to double-down on a deeply immoral
and flawed strategy? How many more Syrians' lives must be ruined to "save" them from Assad?
Everyman, USA 16 hours ago
Wow, sounds like some housecleaning is needed at State. Whatever happened to jaw-jaw being
better than war-war? If they are so keen on military action, they're in the wrong building. I'm
sure some of the overworked troops and officers in the armed forces would be happy to let these
guys take a few of the chances of getting shot or blown up that they deal with daily.
Dan, Alexandria 16 hours ago
It is troubling that the State Department, long a bulwark of common sense against America's
foreign adventurism, has become as hawkish as its former head, Hillary Clinton.
I am grateful to President Obama for resisting this foolishness, but make no mistake, no matter
who gets into office in January, the kind of farcical, counterproductive, unrealistic "limited
engagement" advocated by these so-called diplomats will be our future. Clinton is champing at
the bit for it, and Trump is too weak to do anything but go along with it.
Clark M. Shanahan, Oak Park, Illinois 16 hours ago
Sadly, they'll most likely have a more accommodating commander and chief with HRC.
The Middle East Institute is financed, primarily, by the petroleum and arms industries.
The Washington Institute for Near Eastern Policy has HRC's close ally, Dennis Ross; who, with
Martin Indyk, founded AIPAC in the mid-80's.
This group's contention that direct confrontation with Russia could be avoided echoes their
2002 claim that Operation Iraqi Freedom would be a three month cake walk.
Paul Cohen, is a trusted commenter Hartford CT 15 hours ago
Since WWII, U.S. foreign policy has been rooted in the projection and use of force (covert
and overt) as the primary means to achieve whatever goals the executive office seeks. It placed
the world on notice that the U.S. was ready and willing to use violence to back its foreign policy
objectives. Just as in Vietnam and before the disastrous decision to escalate the use of ground
forces, President Johnson's national security advisors (all holdovers from Kennedy's Presidency)
pressed Johnson to use aerial bombardment against N. Vietnam to induce them to seek a negotiated
peace that would allow the U.S. to withdraw from the conflict and save face while preserving the
policy of projecting force as a means to maintain world order in accordance with U.S. designs.
Nixon carried on this bombing for peace strategy to insane war crime level. This heavy reliance
on military force over a diplomatic solution has never worked. It didn't work for our knee-jerk
response to 9/11 by immediately resorting to military force without first thinking through the
consequences. We are now into our 15th year of aggression against the Muslim World. The time is
long past due to question our failed policy and seek an alternative solution.
Bud, McKinney, Texas 16 hours ago
My oldest son is now completing his sixth Afghan/Iraq tour.I don't want him in Syria. Let
these 51 diplomats volunteer their sons/daughters for Syria.That'll demonstrate their commitment.I'll
bet not one of these 51 "geniuses" has a child on active military duty in Iraq/Afghan.
Abu Charlie, Toronto, Ontario 14 hours ago
These folks are, it appears, mid-level foreign service officers like I was. They are utterly
unqualified to make these judgements as the Department of State is a failed organization culturally
and functionally. Like HRC, who is still advocating for forced regime change if she wins, they
have learned nothing from the past and again have no answer for what follows Asad being deposed.
A majority Sunni regime in Syria will tear Iraq apart and there is no likelihood of it avoiding
the trajectory of other "pluralistic" Arab state attempts. The fact that State has no culture
of strategic analysis informing operational design and operational planning which, in turn, spawn
series of tactical events, comes clear in situations like this. Doing nothing is the best case
here. Tragic but still the best case. President Obama has seen this. Asad needs to regain control
of Syria's territory, all of it. Feeding the hopes of the Ahmed Chalabi equivalents in Syria is
perpetuating the violence. And, there is no room for an independent Kurdistan in the region, nor
is it in the United States' interest for there to be one.
AR, is a trusted commenter Virginia 15 hours ago
How undiplomatic. I don't care that these people are diplomats and that many of them probably
have impeccable academic pedigrees with degrees from the usual suspects such as the Ivy League
schools, SAIS, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and Kennedy. That's the same class
of people who figured that invading in Iraq in 2003 would turn out all right. Obama is correct
to ignore these people, who more often than not are possessed by the notion of American Exceptionalism.
Exhibit A being Samantha Power, the latest in a long line of militaristic, European-born white
Americans (see Albright, Kissinger, Brzezinski) who believe that American firepower can bring
order to the world.
Let this be made clear: Any escalation of American involvement in Syria will be interpreted
as 1) an attempt to enhance the national security of Israel, 2) a means of benefiting the revenue
stream of the American military industrial complex, or 3) both. Only the most naive and foolish
people, since the absolutely disastrous events of 2003, would be inclined to believe that American
military intervention in Syria is motivated mainly by humanitarian impulses.
Sorry hawkish diplomats, but you're living in a fantasyland where the invasion of Iraq
in 2003 did not permanently tarnish the image of the USA and wreck its credibility as an honest
arbiter. That is the reality all US presidents will have to face in the post-Bush 43 era.
Robert Roth, NYC 14 hours ago
Everyone closes their eyes and imagines all the bloodshed they will prevent by all the bloodshed
they will cause.
Samsara, The West 16 hours ago
Have Iraq and Libya taught these State Department officials NOTHING??
Simon, Tampa 15 hours ago
The neo-cons who love regime change that never works. Let us examine their track record:
Iraq - a mess and infested with ISIS and Al Qaeda.
Libya - now an anarchist state infested with ISIS and Al Qaeda.
Yemen - bombing and murdering thousands of innocents and Al Qaeda.
Syria, the only secular Arab state, destroyed and infested with ISIS and Al Qaeda. The only
reason Syria hasn't completely fallen apart is thanks to Assad and his Sunni dominated army, Iran,
and the Russians. So of course, these neo-cons want to complete the job at the behest of the money
they will be getting from the Saudis and the other Gulf States.
Don't worry you warmongering greedy neocon, Hillary Clinton is one of you and will be president
soon enough.
Title Holder, Fl 15 hours ago
Are those 51 U.S. Diplomats responsible for advising the Obama Administration to bomb Libya
back in 2011? Apparently they have not learned from their mistakes. Or maybe they should just
go work for their true Employer, The Military Industrial Complex.
Andrea, New Jersey 15 hours ago
This is reckless and irresponsible. US backed "moderates" are fighting elbow to elbow with
the Nusra Front and other radicals groups; that is why the cease-fire is collapsing. Syrians
and Russians can not split hairs on the battlefield.
If we weaken Assad, Islamists will take over Damascus and if Damascus falls, soon Beirut
will follow. These folk at State are neo cons, as usual shooting from the hip.
Jett Rink, lafayette, la 15 hours ago
Here's the thing most people don't get about ISIS. They thrive on us being involved in the
Middle East. They are willing to kill other Muslims in order to keep us involved. As long as we
are there, terrorism will persist, over there and here too. They are playing us like chumps. They
use our tendency to knee-jerk reactions against us. They're out smarting us at every juncture.
Of course it's human nature to want to help people in such dire straights. But that's exactly
what ISIS wants, and correctly predict, that we'll do. So as long as they out-think us, they'll
continue to win.
If you want to help the innocent people caught in the cross-hairs of ISIS, the best thing we
could possibly do is pack up and leave. There'll be some more carnage, but eventually the backlash
from within will force them to stop the wrecking and killing. Many people will die, but in the
end, the tally would be far fewer.
Their goal is to keep us engaged. Ours should be to get out! As long as we stay, they win.
And that's how they're able to convince long-wolf's to strike us here, even when here is home
to them too.
Joane Johnson, Cleveland, Ohio 15 hours ago
Vietnam, 212,000 dead and countless north and south Vietnamese and citizens. Unjust and
unwarranted war on Iraq with 4,491 and counting dead and countess Iraqi citizens. Now, Syria?
Are you wanting the draft returned? You asking for boots on the ground? How about you 50 join
up. I will willingly pay for taxes just arm you and send you in. Along with every other know it
all who wants us 'TO DO MORE'!! Spare me. You have learned NOTHING in your past failures, have
you? 1956, Iran. Cause the over throw of a duly elected government for the Shahs which led to
1980 revolution to fear of them acquiring nuclear weapons. Vietnam led to 'WHAT'? Now Iraq.
The worse destabilization in that area I can remember. Not even during their many attacks
on Israel when Egypt got a clue. Fire Saddam Hussein's soldiers and they become ISIS by 2006,
yet one bright senator lied and said Obama caused them when we left which was President Bush's
treaty Maliki. They did not want us there. Leave per the Iraqi people, also. When ISIS showed
up they ran and left the weaponry we gave them and the money in the banks for them to grab. Now,
you want us steeped into Syria. It's been said, hindsight is 20/20,
In these so called diplomats cases, it is totally and legally blind. Stevie Wonder and
Ray Charles has a better perception and one of them is dead.
Bev, New York 16 hours ago
Yes the war machine wants more wars. Who will take the place of the evil Assad? We have removed
a number of evil dictators in that area of the world and all it has done is sap our resources,
killed hundreds of thousands of innocents, made millions hate us, and created vacuums of power
which are then filled with Saudi-assisted ISIS - AND profited our war machine (that's the important
part!) We need less involvement in the Mideast, not more. Bring them all home and start transitioning
from a war economy to an economy that serves the American citizens here.
ME, Toronto 13 hours ago
Thank goodness Obama kept his head and didn't (and hopefully won't) listen to such crazy advice.
To call the signers "diplomats" is a real stretch. It seems that somewhere back in time various
U.S. "diplomats" decided that they have the right to decide who and what the government should
be in various jurisdictions throughout the world. Of course this is motivated by purely humanitarian
concerns and love of democracy and not the self-interest of the U.S., as in having a friendly
government in place. As despicable as some governments are, the lessons over many years now should
be that military strikes are just as (maybe more) likely to produce something bad as anything
good. Better to talk and try to influence the development of nations through positive reinforcement
(as Obama has done in Iran). Undoubtedly this is a slow and somewhat frustrating process but that
is something real "diplomats" should be good at. If this process had been pursued in Syria we
would all be better off today and especially the Syrian people.
Mitchell, New York 16 hours ago
I assume these people at State also believe in the Tooth Fairy. The fantasy of "moderate" rebels
who will be grateful to us after they depose a tyrant and put in a fair democratic government
that takes into account all of our Western ideals and freedoms is so unrealistic that these people
at State need to find a job where their last words are, "Can I supersize that for you?" Our involvement
in the Middle East displacing despots and replacing them with chaos has been the biggest disaster
in foreign policy in many decades. Egypt, Iraq, Libya, and even Syria (remember the line in the
sand?). We should join with Russia in destroying ISIS and use our leverage to push Assad to make
some level of concessions.
Dan, Sandy, UT 15 hours ago
Here we go again. The war hawks, so comfortably away from the battle, are banging those
drums of war again. Easy to do when your life and the lives of your fellow military are not at
risk.
Second thought, as stated by a political comedian/satirist, let the Middle East take its own
trash out.
I couldn't agree more.
blackmamba, IL 16 hours ago
Since 9/11/01 only 0.75% of Americans have volunteered to put on the military of any American
armed force. They have been ground to emotional, mental and physical dust by repeated deployments.
Getting rid of Arab dictators has unleashed foreign ethnic sectarian socioeconomic political educational
civil wars that cannot be resolved by American military power.
Assad is an Arab civil secular dictator. Just like many of Americas Arab allies and unlike
those American Arab allies who are Islamic royal fossil fuel tyrants. But Assad is an Alawite
Shia Muslim allied with Russia. The alternatives to Assad are al Qaeda, ISIL and al Nusra. Diplomats
need to stick to diplomacy.
Jo Boost, Midlands 16 hours ago
This situation is not that simple.
There is not -as people in Washington who know better have told for years now- one big bad
wolf called Assad preying and devouring all poor little peaceful lambs (who, accidentally, have
been armed to their teeth by a certain Ms. Clinton and her Saudi friends - even with poison gas
which was, then, blamed on the said Assad).
We have here a follow-up civil war to the (also US started) one in Libya.
Let us just look at International Law, as understood since the Nuremberg Trials:
We all know now that the invasion of Iraq by Mr. Bush junior was a) a mistake, and b) a
War Crime - there were no threatening WMDs nor did Saddam hold hads with Al Quaeda (he was, actually,
their worst enemy - and our security!), so, Iraq was c) total stupidity. It was an aggressive
war without any cause - for the USA!
But a great cause for Saudi "Royals" whose cousins had been thrown out of Iraq, which is good
enough cause, in Arab customs, for a bloody feud and revenge.
The same applies to Syria, and could one, therefore, still wonder why ISIL was so well equipped
for the follow-up (envisaged) invasion?
Libya was a danger for Saudi Autocrates, because a secular Arab country with such a living
standard from fair distribution of oil wealth would be a dangerous advertisement for a Mother
of All Arab Springs in the desert.
So, we have one side with interest - and one without any - but the latter does the dirty work.
Is there more than one tail that wags the US dog?
Bonnie Rothman, NYC 13 hours ago
How brilliant---not! And what do these 50 people expect to happen if and when Assad falls,
chaos prevails and ISIS rushes in? Not to mention the immediate nasty confrontation with Putin.
This isn't 1941 and big Armies and big bombs are useless, USELESS against ISIS which operates
like cancer cells in the human body. And the last time we toppled a tyrant we midwived the ISIS
group which is funded by the Saudis which is funded by our own use of oil. Don't you dopes ever
read history and see the "whole" problem? Sheesh.
Prof. Jai Prakash Sharma, is a trusted commenter Jaipur, India. 16 hours ago
Given the complexity of the Syrian crisis and the multipower stakes involved in Syria, it would
be foolish for the US to direct its unilateral military fury at toppling the Assad regime ignoring
its fall out and the military financial cost to the US itself, specially when except for meeting
the common challenge and threat of the ISIS no direct national interests are at stake for the
US in Syria. The state department's dissenting memo to the President seems an attempt by the vested
interests to further complicate President Obama's Middle East policy that's on the right track
following the Iran deal.
Dennis Sullivan, NYC 16 hours ago
This is much more about what Mark Landler thinks than about what those generic diplomats
think. The Times's principal hawk, Landler has book and a series of articles pushing his neocon
view. I guess we should assume the Times agrees.
Rudolf, New York 7 hours ago
Having spent substantial time as a private consultant at the US Embassy in Kabul I was
shocked by the lack of feelings of midlevel officials there with regard to the dead and injuries
of American Troops. The Embassy shared a wall with the ISAF/NATO Main Quarters and every single
day the US Flag there was half-mast to acknowledge the dead of our troops on that day in that
country. The Embassy never shared this sadness and all midlevel officials there were only concerned
about their paycheck, quality of meals served, having a drink, going for a swim, and their frequent
trips back to the US; for such people wanting to have a say in when to fight in Syria is a sad
state of affair.
pat knapp, milwaukee 16 hours ago
Perhaps we should figure out one take-down before we move on to the next. After 13 years,
we still haven't figured out life in Iraq without Saddam. Any thoughts, neocons, on what might
happen after Assad is disposed of? You know, the hard part, what follows?
Mike Edwards, Providence, RI 16 hours ago
In what way do the views of the State Department officials in ISIS differ from those in the
US State Department who signed this memo?
Recent terrorist attacks in France and the US have been inspired by ISIS, not Mr. Assad. ISIS
is our enemy right now. Let Mr. Assad do what he can to eliminate them.
And haven't we learnt that the removal of a head of State, be it in Iraq, Afghanistan or Libya
does not lead to an improvement; it actually causes an outright deterioration.
Finally, please let's also do away with this twaddle about "moderate" forces being present
in the Middle East, ready to enact our fantasy of what a peaceful Middle East should be like.
They don't exist in the Middle East. Ask the Israelis. Those moderates that do exist seem to serve
one purpose, which is to hand over the weapons supplied to them by the West to the terrorists.
I wish the signatories would have had the guts to spell it out. The Middle East is home to
a number of weal nations, a situation the stronger ones don't wish to correct. The only solution
would be for the West to take over the running of those countries and provide for their policing
and defense, as once the West leaves, a vacuum is created allowing terrorist groups to proliferate.
I doubt there is any appetite in the West for such a cause.
Donald, Yonkers 16 hours ago
Interesting how these " moderate" Syrian rebels so often fight alongside al Nusra.
The death toll in Syria is as high as it is because the rebels have outside help, Somehow no
one in the American mainstream, including the NYT, ever points this out. Incidently, note how
the NYT always uses the largest estimates for the death toll-- quite different from what they
did in Iraq.
Nick Metrowsky, is a trusted commenter Longmont, Colorado 17 hours ago
Get Rid of Assad, make relations with Russia worse (they back Assad) and allow ISIS to
effectively take over Syria. Sounds like a great plan. I guess our military-industrial complex
is getting itchy for a new war. And, of course, doing what these diplomats want will also result
in putting boots on the ground. This will be a great legacy for Ms. Clinton (under her watch ISIS
came into being), Mr. Kerry (who continued Clinton's failed legacy) and Mr. Obama (the Nobel Peace
Prize president; who wasn't).
So, guess what? The US starts bombing Syria, Assad will use human shields. ISIS is already
using human shields. So, the US will have more innocent blood on their hands. Of course, the US
follows through with these diplomats idea, ISIS, and their allies, will increase the risk of terrorism
attacks in the US. More mass shootings and bombings.
Of course, in an election year, the political rhetoric will be pushed up a notch between the
two wonderful people now running for president. Both who are more than willing to love the diplomat's
idea to show they are "strong". Mr. Obama may or may not follow through, but he hand may be forced.
Clinton or Trump will go after him, as both would pull the trigger first and ask questions later.
But, rest assured,. if you feel that a terrorist is lurking around each corner now, just wait
until the US decides that getting in the middle of the Syrian civil war is some warped good idea.
Diplomacy can be messy, as can politics.
Dan Stewart, NYC 16 hours ago
The signers of the dissent letter are militarist neocons (of the Victoria Nuland ilk).
More than any other, these people and their CIA collaborators are responsible for the death and
destruction in Syria and the ensuing refugee crisis. They can't even give a cogent reason for
deposing Assad other than point to the carnage of the civil war they fomented-as if Assad were
solely responsible. Assad is acting no differently than the US did during it's own Civil War.
For five years the US has been promoting Muslim extremists in Syria that move with fluidity
between the ranks of ISIL, al Nusra, al Qeada, etc. There are no reliable "moderates" in Syria.
The best hope for a stable Syria lies only with Bashar Assad, the secular Western-trained optometrist
(and his J.P. Morgan investment banker wife, Asma), who has kept Syria stable and free of terrorists
for decades.
To end the killing in Syria, and to defeat ISIL, the US should immediately stop arming and
funding the Islamic jihadists trying to overthrow the Assad government and join with Russia to
support Assad's military in regaining control over all Syrian territory and borders.
CT View, CT 17 hours ago
The value of the memo can be summed up in one sentence as described in the article itself
"what would happen in the event that Mr. Assad was forced from power - a scenario that the draft
memo does not address."
Why on earth would we support deposing a secular dictator who has multi-ethnic multi-religious
support in favor of a non-secular/ie religious leadership that has no moderates...remember we
tried to train vetted moderates, we found about 2 dozen and gave up on the program after half
were killed and the rest defected to the radicals WITH THE WEAPONS WE SUPPLIED. Perhaps, since
the military is anti-intervention and these diplomats are pro-intervention, the diplomats can
take the front line...would that change their opinion?
Gimme Shelter, 123 Happy Street 17 hours ago
I wonder about the arrogance of these mid-level State Department foreign service officers.
Do they think the National Security Council hasn't considered all options with respect to the
use of air power to affect the political situation in Syria? Do they think the President is unaware
of the what is required to stem the humanitarian crisis? How certain are they that their recommendations
will lead to their desired outcome? Do they not realize their actions undermine the commander
in chief in effectively addressing these issues?
Sure -- a few well-placed cruise missiles will make it all good. Yeah, right.
Wayne, Lake Conroe, Tx 7 hours ago
Absolutely amazing. My first question is who released this memo? Having a back channel
does not permit anyone to unilaterally decide to release information that could cost lives and
ruin negotiations that the releasing person knows nothing about. If you do not like the chain
of command, then leave. We cannot continue to be involved in sectarian conflicts that cannot be
resolved except by the combatants. Haven't we learned anything from Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon,
and Vietnam? No neocon insanity. We have lost enough lives and treasure in the ME.
Chagrined, La Jolla, CA 10 hours ago
Are these the same ingrates who urged Bush to attack Iraq - his legacy - ISIS!
Real Americans don't want any more squandered blood and treasure in wars in the Middle East!
It is sad that our tax dollars pay the salaries for these insidious State Department war mongering
fools. How many neocons are among them?
The war in Syria is tragic as was the war in Iraq. Even more tragic would be more squandered
American blood and treasure.
Fifteen hundred American Jews joined the IDF terrorists to commit the "Gaza Genocide." Perhaps
they will volunteer to go to Syria.??
President Obama has the intellect, sophistication and morals not to repeat the mistakes of
the Bush administration. These State Department rank and file are obviously attempting to undermine
him just as many members of congress attempted to undermine him by supporting Netanyahu and Israel
during the Iran Diplomacy debate. Betraying America has become sport for so many insidious ingrates.
America deserves better!
xtian, Tallahassee 11 hours ago
As a 26 year Marine Corps combat veteran I have a hard time trying to figure out what is
going on here, and a harder time not becoming totally disgusted with our State Department.
So these 51 mid-level diplomates want to bomb a bit more, and that is going to do what?????
And how will that bring peace to that region of the world? Oh, and by the way, the Department
of Defense is not in agreement with that course of action. How wonderful.
My suggestion would be that we arm these 51 individuals, given them a week's worth of ammunition
and rations, and drop them into Syria, I am sure they can lead the way in showing us how to solve
the mess in the ME.
David Henry, Concord 17 hours ago
War is easy to do. Ask "W."
Lives matter! These "diplomats" should be fired.
Yinka Martins, New York, NY 17 hours ago
It's the fact that these are not "widely known names" which scares me most. However, Western-instituted
regime change in that region has proven disastrous in every single country it has been tried.
If possible, I would investigate these diplomats' ties to defense contractors.
PKJharkhand, Australia 7 hours ago
US intervention created the rubble and hell that is now Syria. When Assad had full control
of Syria, the human rights of the people of Syria suffered under him but many if not most people
led a civilised life. They had water and electricity. Past US interventions created Afghanistan,
Iraq, and Libya. To puy it simply, life expectancy in all these countries dropped by 20 to 30
years after the US intervened, each time with the highest utopian ideals, and increased the power
of Sunni supremacists after each act.
Jai Goodman, SF Bay Area 7 hours ago
These "diplomats" should instead be urging US to pressure Turkey and Saudi to stop supporting
terrorists in the region. Both Al Nusra and ISIS. That'll be the right step.
Thank you.
cml, pittsburgh, pa 10 hours ago
How many of these are the same (or same sort) of "wise" men that advised ignoring our weapon's
inspectors and invading Iraq? They're living inside an echo chamber. In a world of imperfect choices
I would prefer Assad to the Nusra Front or ISIL, as apparently our president does as well.
Lawrence, Washington D.C. 15 hours ago
How many of those 51 diplomats haves served in front line units and seen combat? How many have
their children in uniform? They wouldn't allow it.
Each bombing mission costs more than a million dollars, and we live in a nation of Chiraq and
Orlando.
We have more pressing needs at home, and you can't fix stupid mixed with superstition, topped
with hatred.
These diplomats want to continue to strap suicide vests on the rest of us, while they sip champagne.
Out now, no more of our children wasted for corporate profits.
John, San Francisco 15 hours ago
50 employees? There are approximately 24,000 employees in the state department. That's 0.002833%.
Not really a significant voice. Don't listen.
Vanessa Hall, is a trusted commenter Millersburg MO 13 hours ago
Reminds me of those 47 idiots in the House who signed on to the warmonger Tom Cotton's treasonous
letter.
John Townsend, Mexico 15 hours ago
Let's not forget that Bush's hasty appointment of Paul Bremer as the hapless Governor of
Iraq following the defeat of Hussein's military regime led immediately to the disbanding of the
entire Iraqi military, an incredibly short-sighted and reckless move that essentially unleashed
400,000 young trained fighters (including a honed officers corps) absent support programs to assimilate
back into Iraqi society, only to have them emerge as readily available fodder essential for ISIS's
marshalling a strong military force almost overnight. A huge price is now being exacted for this
astounding stupidity.
Hobart, Los Angeles, CA 7 hours ago
This is conveniently laying grounds for Hillary's grand comeback to the theatre of "humanitarian
interventionism" in the Middle East. God help us all, as this is a prelude to the WW3.
rice pritchard, nashville, tennessee 12 hours ago
Wow the neo-cons are beating the war drums yet again! They have already created a huge
mess throughout the Middle East with wars and revolutions directly attributable to the United
States in invading Afghanistan and Iraq under false pretenses, helping overthrow the government
in Libya, and arming rebels in Syria and Yemen. Apparently no regime that does not knuckle
under to the U.S. war machine is "fair game". This turmoil is sending millions of refugees fleeing
their homeland, many trying to swamp Europe, but the arm chair warriors in the diplomatic corps,
Congress, Wall Street, and the military contractors still cry for more intervention, more bombing,
more blockades, more invasions, etc.! Sheer madness! The more America meddle in the Middle East
the worse things become and unrest and fighting spread. Unfortunately if Hillary Clinton wins,
she is a neo-con puppet and we will be at war in Syria and/or Iran within a year or two. God help
us!
xmas, Delaware 13 hours ago
HOW MUCH WILL THIS COST????? When people demand an invasion of a foreign country, can they
please add the total cost of the bill to their request? Instead of saying "we need to invade,"
can they say, "I want your support to spend $1.7 trillion for invading this other country for
humanitarian reasons. Oh, by the way, sorry, about all the cuts to domestic spending. We just
don't have the money." We spent $1.7 TRILLION on Iraq. $1.7 TRILLION. I can think of several things
I would have preferred to spend a fraction of that on. I'm sure you can too.
Robert G. McKee, Lindenhurst, NY 12 hours ago
This is a very interesting development within the walls of the State Department. There seems
to be much enthusiasm for escalating war in the Middle East. My only question is does this enthusiasm
extend to the deaths and maiming of these same State Department officials' children and grandchildren?
Or do they propose that other people's children should die pursuing their high ideals in this
endless and fruitless religious civil war in Syria?
Kathy, Flemington, NJ 13 hours ago
First of all, if this was a channel for employees to share "candidly and privately" about
policy concerns, why is it on the front page of the NY Times? Additionally, as usual, it seems
the war hawks are hawking war without thought for what comes next. We've done this most recently
in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, all of which are now failed states and havens for terrorists.
Because this seems rather obvious, either we are pathologically incapable of learning from past
mistakes, or there are people who have an agenda different from the publicly stated one.
Rebecca Rabinowitz, . 13 hours ago
The U.S. has a lengthy, very sordid history of leaping into the fray in areas such as the
Middle East, Southeast Asia, Central America and Afghanistan, among others - all with catastrophic
results, for which we never seemed to have a credible, well- crafted plan, nor have we ever comprehended
the millennia of internecine tribal hatred and sectarian warfare. We have "been there, done
that" countless times, at the cost of our precious military blood and treasure, and incurring
the enmity of hundreds of millions of people. I empathize with the frustration of these State
Department employees - but apparently, they do not recall our overthrow of the Shah of Iran when
it suited our "cause du jour," or our fraudulent "domino theory" in Vietnam, or the hard reality
that no one has ever successfully invaded or "governed" Afghanistan, not to mention being able
to battle ideology with weapons. The President has already presided over significant mission creep
in the Iraq cesspool left by the Cheney-Bush neo-con crowd. His judicious caution is to be lauded
when it comes to Syria. Are these mid-level State Department employees advocating a war against
Vladimir Putin?
Yngve Frey, Sweden 12 hours ago
I am more scared of US diplomats and politicians than terrorists! Have they learned nothing
from the US efforts to create western style democracy in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria (by
supporting separatists att an early stage). The US diplomats proposal would ensure more chaos,
death and prolonged wR. 38 % of the population are Alewits. They will be killed, Christians will
be killed.
The only way will probably be to work with Russia and force other opposition groups to sign
a peace agreement. Then we should arrange an intensive training course for US diplomats as well
as Syrian leaders: "There is no final truth: we have to learn the art of tolerance and accept
to live in a society where people you don't agree with also can live."
If Clinton were to choose Warren, and put her so very close to a position of significant
influence, the finance industry would likely make the Democrats pay, up and down the ticket. In
effect, Wall Street has veto power over decisions like this. In other words Clinton in reality
is a puppet.
As Democrats aim to "unite the party" in the aftermath of the primary, speculation about Sen.
Elizabeth Warren as Hillary Clinton's choice for vice president has dominated the electoral news
cycle.
Powerful Democratic politicians have been discussing this possibility, including Senate Minority
Leader Harry Reid, who said he "wants Warren for VP." The Senate's number two Democrat, Dick
Durbin, said Warren would be an "excellent choice." The Boston Globe has reported that Reid has
been assessing contingency plans for Warren's Senate seat, should she be selected as Clinton's
running mate. This, according to the Globe, is an "indication of the seriousness" with which the
Democrats are considering this possibility. This speculation is occurring soon after Warren
endorsed Clinton and had a high-profile meeting with her in front of television cameras.
... ... ...
Progressives, however, should take note: Warren, sadly, will probably not be named as
Clinton's running mate. The reason? The Democrats, and Clinton in particular, depend on the
financial support of Wall Street. And they have been receiving it in droves.
"Hillary Clinton is consolidating her support among Wall Street donors and other businesses
ahead of a general-election battle with Donald Trump, winning more campaign contributions from
financial-services executives in the most recent fundraising period than all other candidates
combined," reported The Wall Street Journal.
This is not a new phenomenon. In 2008, Obama got more money from the finance sector than any
candidate in history. Wall Street may generally prefer GOP policies, but they also like to be on
the side of the winner. In 2008, when regulatory changes were inevitable and Obama was favored to
win the White House, the finance industry wanted to have a friendly relationship with the
soon-to-be President. This support continued in 2012. "Mr. Obama's record in drawing money from
Wall Street tracks his political evolution. No longer an insurgent challenger, he is now an
incumbent president soaking up support from well-heeled interests," reported the Wall Street
Journal during the 2012 campaign. Moreover, the industry's donations are highly coveted in
down-ticket races for Congress.
Warren, however, is different from most Democrats in one significant way. According to the
Center for Responsive Politics, Warren (like Sanders) gets no money from Big Finance. In this
they are basically alone among their peers in the Senate. Even Sherrod Brown, whom many view as
the third most liberal Senator, gets some money from the industry. If Clinton and the Democrats
choose someone like Warren -- someone who owes the banks nothing and has devoted her career to
fighting against their greed -- the finance industry will probably take its money elsewhere, most
likely to the Republicans. The GOP has already been benefiting from the industry's donations
going increasingly to GOP candidates, at the expense of the Democrats. Despite this trend, Wall
Street seems far more comfortable with Clinton than with Trump. But adding Warren to the ticket
could change that calculus.
Wall Street has already made threats over such matters. When Warren made harsh critiques of
the big banks in 2015, they responded with the threat of cutting of the flow of money to the
party. "Big Wall Street banks are so upset with U.S. Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren's call
for them to be broken up that some have discussed withholding campaign donations to Senate
Democrats in symbolic protest," reported Reuters at the time. Citigroup decided to withhold
donations to the Democrat Senatorial Campaign Committee, "over concerns that Senate Democrats
could give Warren and lawmakers who share her views more power." A 2015 Bloomberg article
reported that Warren, and her advocacy of breaking up the big banks, "makes Wall Street tremble."
Pinchyuk in the largest donor to Clinton foundation. He donated $6.5 and pledged 20 million more.
Hillary Clinton blending her functions of Secretary State with her functions related to Clinton foundation.
clinton foundation is a front for money laundering and illegal cash flow.
Rolando Esparza
The Clinton are a couple that are no good for the American people, love for money and disregard
for the people, middle class and the poor!
me aul jazzer
so that interpipe owner paid a couple of mil to a corrupt whore...would that have anything
to do with the shit that's gone on in the Ukraine over the last few years? & if so, wudnt she
be liable for the cause of it, & of thousands of deaths?
Looks like State Department became a paradise for neocons. Protest of diplomats is typical trick
used by State Departement during color revolution. That actually means this "color revolution" trick
came to the USA. Our presidents come and go, Republican or Democrat, but our Strangeloves remain permanent
employees of State Department. .
Notable quotes:
"... The State Department and the CIA's 'Plan C' (or are they on 'Plan D' yet?) is an independent Syrian Kurdistan. ..."
"... A desperate attempt to save the rebels, who now hate them and completely understand how they have been thrown under the bus by the State Department neocons. I really don't think the rebels will be the least bit impressed by the phony theatrics of a internal memo by mid-level bureaucrats. ..."
"... The Pentagram is in a bit of a different pickle. They have to do something to stop the Wahhabi head-choppers, but its a bit like herding cats. The best they've come up with is ginning up the SDF to take/hold ISIS territory. But they can't arm the Kurds or Arab members with any REAL weapons because that would anger Turkey. So they give them a bunch of eastern European AKs and a few pickup trucks with anti-aircraft guns, promise air support and toss in a few SF guys ..."
"... The MSM (as CIA lapdogs are paid to do) constantly try to reinforce the message that the independent YPG/YPJ militias are somehow 'the PYD's army'. Nothing is further from the truth - it's all MSM spin to create the impression that the Syrian Kurds uniformly desire the usurped PYD vision of an independent Kurdistan. In reality, the U.S. State Department neocons and the CIA are the ones that want an independent Syrian Kurdistan for their own scheming (and to deny Assad the land/water/oil). The MSM is constantly on message with this to set the narrative to the American public for Syrian partition - most people have no clue. ..."
"... For what it's worth, Assad is keenly aware of his history with the Kurds. Even by Kurdish media reports , he is willing to work with the Syrian Kurds as part of a unified Syrian state. He does not object to Kurdish rights or autonomy, just the U.S. meddling to goad the PYD into creating a separate Kurdish state. ..."
"... The whole Syria nightmare was planned from the US Embassy in Damascus in 2006 because Assad was so broadly popular in the country and "the region." Can't have that so a strategy was drummed up: http://www.globalresearch.ca/syria-and-conspiracy-theories-it-is-a-conspiracy/29596 ..."
"... I'm sure the US will throw the Syrian Kurds "under the bus" when their usefulness is finished. I'm sure also that a lot of Syrian Kurds know this, and are hedging their bets. ..."
"... http://www.globalresearch.ca/france-building-military-bases-in-syria-report/5531259 "The use of proxy forces to destroy the secular government of Syria is now starting to give way to stealth methods of direct ground deployment of Western Special Forces and ground troops under the guise of assistance and coordination with "moderate" terrorists. "With a wide variety of Western-backed terrorist groups ranging from "extremist" terrorists like ISIS, al-Qaeda, and al-Nusra to the "moderate" terrorists of the FSA and the loose collection of terrorists, Kurds, and Arabs like the SDF, the West has a kaleidoscope of proxy forces on the ground already. ..."
"... So Russian peace talks with US evil empire in Syria were a disaster, which makes Putin look like an idiot, as well as the supporters of this idiocy. As well as Russian invitations for the US to join it in Syria makes it one of the most stupidest invitations ever. ..."
"... A preview on America's future strategies? http://www.cnas.org/sites/default/files/publications-pdf/CNASReport-EAP-FINAL.pdf ..."
"... The Iranians have been warring with Kurds by the border with Turkey. Neither the Turks nor the Iranians - nor the Syrians, but they do need the Kurds now - want a Kurdistan. The Kurds must know by now - must have been betrayed enough by now - to know that the US will tell them anything, promise them anything, and deliver nothing but betrayal in the end. ..."
"... As regards the State Department, the Pentagon, the US government ... what's required is a neo-con purge, top to bottom. They are all working against American interests and against the American people. and have been for the past two decades. The likelihood of such a purge is about zero. Neither Trump nor Hillary has the will or the backbone to stand up to anyone. Trump's all mouth and looking out for number one, and Hillary's plugged in to the money-mosaic as well. Obama's getting ready to cash in his chips. ..."
"... I am amazed at your unflagging obsession with holding Putin responsible for the US/UK/EU/NATO/GCC destruction of Syria. You've set him up as your omnipotent god and he's failed you, somehow. Putin, Rusia, is not responsible for the death, devastation, and destruction of Iraq, Syria, Libya or the rest of the middle east or north africa. You're throwing your stones at the wrong guy, at the only guy who's done anything at all to help the Syrians and to forestall the monstrous neo-con plan. ..."
"... Israeli bombed military base in Homs province with impunity from S400 http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.723701 ..."
"... There is more about Russian de-facto acquiescence for Syrian partition and pivot to Israel: STRANGE DAYS: Did Israelis Pivoted to Russia? Or the other way around. https://syrianwarupdate.wordpress.com/ ..."
"... On the bright side, maybe the 50 signatures are just trying to get noticed by the Clinton transition crew. ..."
"... The document you posted is a typical wet dream written by utterly incompetent neocons (Kagan's and Zoellik names are a tell), people who can not and must not be allowed to operate with serious strategic and operational categories in any "advisory" role. ..."
"... i read about 30 of 160 or so comments on this article at NYT. given who the audience of that shit rag is & that comments are vetted, overwhelmingly commenters stated increased military involvement is retarded. ..."
"... How can Russia, which dwarfs Israel in every meaningful category -- from economy to military -- and who does remember her history well can "pivot" to largely regional player -- I don't know. Russian "neocons" are a dramatically different breed than US ones, for starters they are much more educated and, actually, support Assad. Israel's pivot to Russia in some sense is inevitable, albeit it could be fairly protracted, with Russia being observed as honest broker. They are not completely stupid in Israel and are very aware of real situation in American politics, economy and military. ..."
"... I note that the 'moderate' Hillary Clinton is a blood-soaked queen of chaos, who if elected is certain to embroil us in pointless wars and spread death and devastation across even more of the world. ..."
"... Donald Trump is admittedly a gamble, but depute his over-the-top stage persona, his track record is of actually getting along with people and brokering stable working relationships. ..."
"... At this point I wish I could vote for Richard Nixon (!), but we have the choice that we have... ..."
"... This piece out of the NYT is pure propaganda. Period. Here's the big clue - where's the memo? It's not embedded in the article. It can't be found anywhere on the web. It's b/c it doesn't exist. The reader is 'TOLD' by a third party journalist few follow who writes for a MIC/Political/Policy corporate mouthpiece. ..."
"... We see the point of all the saber-rattling by NATO on Russia's borders: to get Putin tied up in a diversionary direct threat to Russia, thereby mitigating or eliminating his efforts in behalf of Assad. And you know what? Americans on the street couldn't care one way or the other what Obama or CIA or DoS does or says about Syria. 280,000 dead, millions displaced and Americans are more concerned by a factor of 1000 about 4 dozen gays in Orlando. ..."
"... Saudi Arabia rejoining Turkey: http://en.farsnews.com/newstext.aspx?nn=13950326000441 ..."
"... These 51 useful idiots are IMO auditioning for the Clinton team while also providing cover for the neo-cons above them like Nuland, Powers, etc. And directionless Kerry says he'll rush home to confer with these idiots rather than dismissing them out of hand. Kerry could only be useful to anyone if Lavrov was in the room with him at all times to keep him in line -- otherwise he reverts to his normal mindless servant of US empire viewpoint, which is to follow whichever way the winds of power are blowing through Washington, DC. ..."
"... Hillary is the neocon's neocon. Pravy Sektor's honorary storm trooper Vicky Nuland is a Hillary protege. NYT has been positioning its readers to embrace Kerry's Plan B for the last month-plus. ..."
"... How many of these diplomats were bribed by Saudi Arabia? ..."
"... This clown Kagan is also the husband of the infamous Victoria Nuland who somehow, defying all logic, still has her job post imbroglio that is the Ukraine today. Hell, she's probably being hailed for that and is an inspiration for lowly State employees. ..."
"... Thank you Victoria, for giving Crimea back to the Russian Federation where it belongs. ..."
"... There are almost exactly 7 months until either Trump or Clinton takes office (presuming that the elites manage to completely control any bad news prior to the Dem nominating convention in late July; if the email dam breaks after that I have no idea what the Dem elites will do, but I figure they won't choose the obviously best candidate against Trump, Bernie). ..."
"... might the West actually directly take on Russia/Syrian government forces? Claiming, of course, some version of R2P ..."
"... State Department Diplomats who have captained failure after failure? If these people were Russian or Chinese they would have been executed for their serial failures in the ME and Afghanistan. The main problem with being 'exceptional' is that the 'exceptional' ones never make a mistake. "War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength" ..."
"... So I was kind of wondering what psychopathic qualities the U.S. War... er, State Department is looking for in potential parasitic career bureaucrats, and came across this self-promotion page on their site. ..."
"... Counterpunch had a great article: http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/06/17/the-case-for-not-voting-in-defense-of-the-lazy-ungrateful-and-uniformed/ ..."
"... And though the content of the review by Army Gen. John W. Nicholson is secret, the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan received a major incentive this month when President Obama decided to expand America's involvement with more airstrikes against insurgents, giving the U.S. military wider latitude to support Afghan forces, both in the air and on the ground." ..."
"... No respect for R2P warriors at the State Department, nor for HRC, Susan Rice and Samantha Power. ..."
"... For Israel to bomb the Syrian military right under the nose of Russian s-400s? Russia, supposedly so dedicated to defending sovereignty, smiles and yawns benignly? A dirty deal has been made... ..."
"... Saudi Arabia desperately needs battlefield success, or there will be a prince, I mean price, to pay http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/u-s-officials-fear-saudi-collapse-if-new-prince-fails-n593996 ..."
"... "Earlier this week as America was trying to make sense of the deadliest case of Islamic terrorism on US soil since 9/11, I wrote a detailed article here at Breitbart News that laid out the clear factual case about Hillary Clinton's top assistant Huma Abedin. I showed how she has deep, clear, and inarguable connections to a Saudi Arabian official named Abdul Omar Naseef, a powerful Kingdom insider who has helped lead a group called the Muslim World League. The Muslim World League is the huge "charity" whose goal is to spread Islam throughout the world and which has been connected to terror groups like Al Qaeda. ..."
"... What is Huma's relationship with a Saudi Arabian official named Abdullah Omar Naseef? ..."
"... Was he the founder of a Saudi charity called the Rabita Trust? ..."
"... Right after 9/11, was the Rabita Trust put on a list by the U.S. government of groups that were funding terrorism? ..."
"... the State Department official obviously has an agenda by providing it to the NYT. The NYT has its own agenda filled as well by prominently posting the article on the top of the front page . ..."
"... One senior official said that the test for whether these proposals for more aggressive action are given high-level consideration will be whether they "fall in line with our contention that there is no military solution to the conflict in Syria." ..."
"... It's important for Russia to ensure that the remains of the first "Israeli" jet it shoots down falls to earth inside Syria. If you've seen a story about the IAF doing something courageous it's bullshit. ..."
"... Wonder how many of these 51 war mongers were appointed by Hillary. ..."
"... The EU-Turkey deal's financial package includes one billion euros in humanitarian aid. There are undoubtedly needs in Turkey, a country which currently hosts close to three million Syrian refugees, but this aid has been negotiated as a reward for border control promises, rather than being based solely on needs. This instrumentalisation of humanitarian aid is unacceptable. ..."
"... kreepy kerry is "running out of patience" since his most desired regime change isn't happening fast enough. ..."
"... The difference between Hillary and ISIS: the latter "takes" the head of enemies, Hillary "gives" head to donors. Forgive the graphic. ..."
"... 50 diplomats petition president for war. Was that written by Orwell? ..."
"... Allow me to further my argument against American Exceptionalism. It is not merely the fact that the U.S. is far from exceptional. From education to infant mortality, the U.S. is woefully behind much of the world. ..."
"... So Hillary, the bloodthirsty Goddess of War, is longing for a second Libya, i.e., a Syria smashed to smithereens, in ashes and ruins, ruled by a chaotic bunch of mad Takfiri extremists, at war all against all. ..."
"... The FBI is stonewalling, keeping the contents of Mateen's 911 call unavailable - though it's part of the public record - presumably because it undermines the "ISIS did it" meme poured over the Orlando mass murder. Apparently Mateen may have mentioned ISIS not quite in the same light as has been portrayed. ..."
"... Now the NYTimes/WSJ are doing the same thing with the 50 dancing diplomats. Releasing what they want us to know and redacting what we want to know : the names of those 50 dancing diplomats. ..."
"... I suppose it comes under the CIA's blanket excuse for secrecy? "Methods and means", or whatever their boilerplate. ..."
"... No doubt the State Department dwarves were ginned up by "Cookies" Nuland and Count Kagan by visions of "x memorandum" of 1946 immortality by attacking the resistance to an unipolar hegemony. Mixing it up in Syria with the Russian presence seems civilization limiting at the outer limits of challenge/ response in a military confrontation. ..."
WASHINGTON - More than 50 State Department diplomats have signed an internal memo sharply critical
of the Obama administration's policy in Syria, urging the United States to carry out military
strikes against the government of President Bashar al-Assad to stop its persistent violations
of a cease-fire in the country's five-year-old civil war.
Note that it was Ahrar al Sham, Jabhat al-Nusra and other U.S. paid and supported "moderates"
who on April 9
broke the ceasefire in Syria by attacking government troops south of Aleppo. They have since
continuously bombarded the government held parts of Aleppo which house over 1.5 million civilians
with improvised artillery.
Back to the piece:
The memo, a draft of which was provided to The New York Times by a State Department official
, says American policy has been "overwhelmed" by the unrelenting violence in Syria. It
calls for "a judicious use of stand-off and air weapons, which would undergird
and drive a more focused and hard-nosed U.S.-led diplomatic process."
...
The names on the memo are almost all midlevel officials - many of them career diplomats - who
have been involved in the administration's Syria policy over the last five years, at home or abroad.
They range from a Syria desk officer in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs to a former deputy
to the American ambassador in Damascus.
While there are no widely recognized names, higher-level State Department officials are known
to share their concerns. Mr. Kerry himself has pushed for stronger American action
against Syria, in part to force a diplomatic solution on Mr. Assad.
...
The State Department officials insisted in their memo that they were not "advocating for a
slippery slope that ends in a military confrontation with Russia," but rather a credible threat
of military action to keep Mr. Assad in line.
These State Department loons have their ass covered by Secretary of State Kerry. Otherwise they
would (and should) be fired for obvious ignorance. What "judicious" military threat against Russian
S-400 air defense in Syria is credible? Nukes on Moscow (and New York)?
In the memo, the State Department officials argued that military action against Mr. Assad would
help the fight against the Islamic State because it would bolster moderate Sunnis
, who are necessary allies against the group, also known as ISIS or ISIL.
Would these "diplomats" be able to name even one group of "moderate Sunnis" in Syria that is not
on the side of the Syrian government? Are Ahrar al-Sahm and the other U.S. supported groups, who
recently killed
50 civilians out of purely sectarian motives when they stormed the town of Zara, such "moderate
Sunnis"?
These 50 State Department non-diplomats, and the stinking fish head above them, have obviously
failed in their duty:
"Diplomats" urging military action do nothing but confirm that they do not know their job
which is diplomacy, not bombing. They failed.
These "diplomats" do not know or do not want to follow international law. On what legal basis
would the U.S. bomb the Syrian government and its people? They do not name any. There is none.
To what purpose would the Syrian government and the millions of its followers be bombed? Who
but al-Qaeda would follow if the Assad-led government falls? The "diplomats" ignore that obvious
question.
The NYT writer of the piece on the memo demonstrates that he is just as stupid or dishonest as
the State Department dupes by adding this paragraph:
[T]he memo mainly confirms what has been clear for some time: The State Department's rank and
file have chafed at the White House's refusal to be drawn into the conflict in Syria
.
How is spending
over $1 billion a year to hire, train, arm and support "moderate rebels" against the Syrian government
consistent with the claim of a U.S. "refusal to be drawn into the conflict"?
It is obvious and widely documented that the U.S. has been fueling the conflict from the very
beginning throughout five years and continues up to today to
deliver thousands of tons of weapons to the "moderate rebels".
All the above, the "diplomats" letter and the NYT writer lying, is in preparation of an open U.S.
war on Syria under a possible president Hillary Clinton. (Jo Cox, the "humanitarian" British MP who
was murdered yesterday by some neo-nazi, spoke
in support of such a crime.)
The U.S. military
continues to reject an escalation against the Syrian government. Its reasonable question "what
follows after Assad" has never been seriously answered by the war supporters in the CIA and the State
Department.
Unexpected support of the U.S. military's position now
seems to come from the Turkish side. The Erdogan regime finally acknowledges that a Syria under
Assad is more convenient to it than a Kurdish state in north-Syria which the U.S. is currently helping
to establish:
"Assad is, at the end of the day, a killer. He is torturing his own people. We're not going to
change our stance on that," a senior official from the ruling AK Party told Reuters, requesting
anonymity so as to speak more freely.
"But he does not support Kurdish autonomy. We may not like each other, but on that
we're backing the same policy ," he said.
Ankara fears that territorial gains by Kurdish YPG fighters in northern Syria will fuel an
insurgency by the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has waged an armed struggle in Turkey's
southeast for three decades.
The Turks have suddenly removed their support for their "Turkmen" proxies fighting the Syrian
government in Latakia in north west Syria. Over the last few days the "Turkmen" retreated and the
Syrian army
advanced . It may soon reach the Turkish border. Should the Latakia front calm down the Syrian
army will be able to move several thousand troops from Latakia towards other critical sectors. The
Turkish government, under the new Prime Minister Binali Yildirim, is now also
sending peace signals towards Russia.
The situation in Syria could rapidly change in favor of the Syrian government should Turkey
change its bifurcating policies and continue these moves. Without their Turkish bases and support
the "moderate rebels" would soon be out of supplies and would lack the ability to continue their
fighting. The Russians and their allies should further emphasize the "Kurdish threat" to advance
this Turkish change of mind.
The race to preempt a Hillary administration war on Syria, which the "diplomats" memo prepares
for, is now on. May the not-warmongering side win.
This is the Yankees trying to pretend that they're still exceptionally invincible, in order to
conceal the fact that they never were. One only need look at all the tentative tiptoeing around
China & Russia to see that they're trying to convince themselves that Russia and China are run
by people as loony and disconnected as the self-seducers in charge of AmeriKKKan Foreign Policy.
SmoothieX got it 100% right in the previous thread..
"The names on the memo are almost all medeival offiCIAls ..."
There, fixed it for you. Enjoying the calm before the Goldman Sturm, the takeover of the US
Executive in 2017 for the Final Solution on liberating the Fifth Quintile's Last Free Life Savings,
and plunging the globe into a New Dark Ages: Trump or Clinton, allatime same-same.
The State Department and the CIA's 'Plan C' (or are they on 'Plan D' yet?) is an independent
Syrian Kurdistan.
The FSA Sunnistan plan has been going down the tubes for months. With the imminent fall of
the last few FSA strongholds, the State Department has gone berserk with their latest standoff
bombing memo 'leak' nonsense. A desperate attempt to save the rebels, who now hate them and
completely understand how they have been thrown under the bus by the State Department neocons.
I really don't think the rebels will be the least bit impressed by the phony theatrics of a internal
memo by mid-level bureaucrats.
The Pentagram is in a bit of a different pickle. They have to do something to stop the
Wahhabi head-choppers, but its a bit like herding cats. The best they've come up with is ginning
up the SDF to take/hold ISIS territory. But they can't arm the Kurds or Arab members with any
REAL weapons because that would anger Turkey. So they give them a bunch of eastern European AKs
and a few pickup trucks with anti-aircraft guns, promise air support and toss in a few SF guys.
This almost works, but not completely. For what it's worth, I don't think the Pentagram cares
at all about an independent Syrian Kurdistan, unifying the cantons or who gets what land/resources,
as long as it's taken from ISIS. When ISIS is wiped out, the SDF will cease to exist and
the SF guys will leave. The SDF and especially the YPG/YPJ will NOT ever be incented to provoke
or go to war with Assad after ISIS is gone. That's a problem for the State Department and CIA
The neocon State Department and CIA - normally at odds with the Pentagon's increasing reluctance
to get involved at all - are taking this opportunity to agitate for an independent Kurdistan.
This is done by funding the Kurdish PYD political party which purports to speak for all Kurds.
The State Department and CIA also fund the PYD's growing Asayish thug secret police 'enforcers'.
The PYD took control of Rojava by throwing out all the other political parties last year and crowning
itself the King of all Syrian Kurds. But most Kurds don't trust the PYD, figuring that either
Assad or the U.S. is really pulling the strings. The Kurds agree with the original PYD ideology,
but not its current land/resource-grabbing frenzy NOR the kind of independent Kurdistan the PYD
is suggesting. They want more rights and control of their affairs, but they do not want an actual
or de facto independent Syrian Kurdistan.
The MSM (as CIA lapdogs are paid to do) constantly try to reinforce the message that the
independent YPG/YPJ militias are somehow 'the PYD's army'. Nothing is further from the truth -
it's all MSM spin to create the impression that the Syrian Kurds uniformly desire the usurped
PYD vision of an independent Kurdistan. In reality, the U.S. State Department neocons and the
CIA are the ones that want an independent Syrian Kurdistan for their own scheming (and to deny
Assad the land/water/oil). The MSM is constantly on message with this to set the narrative to
the American public for Syrian partition - most people have no clue.
For what it's worth, Assad is keenly aware of his history with the Kurds. Even by
Kurdish media reports
, he is willing to work with the Syrian Kurds as part of a unified Syrian state. He does not
object to Kurdish rights or autonomy, just the U.S. meddling to goad the PYD into creating a separate
Kurdish state. The U.S. State Department does NOT want Rojava to be part of Syria or the
Syrian State and spins the Assad/Kurd relation as antagonistic in the MSM. This is the 'Plan C'
Syrian partition scheme. Hopefully, the average Kurd can see through their scheming and will not
follow the dictates of a usurped PYD to go to war with Syria for their independence. They would
be better off dumping and outlawing the PYD completely and working with the new Syrian government
on the future AFTER ISIS (and hopefully without any U.S. State Department and CIA).
Your assessment above is a supremely eloquent assessment and a scream for sanity to return.
Thank you so very much for your always illuminating writings.
I think you're quite right. That corresponds with what I've thought for some time. I'm
sure the US will throw the Syrian Kurds "under the bus" when their usefulness is finished. I'm
sure also that a lot of Syrian Kurds know this, and are hedging their bets.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/france-building-military-bases-in-syria-report/5531259 "The
use of proxy forces to destroy the secular government of Syria is now starting to give way to
stealth methods of direct ground deployment of Western Special Forces and ground troops under
the guise of assistance and coordination with "moderate" terrorists. "With a wide variety of Western-backed
terrorist groups ranging from "extremist" terrorists like ISIS, al-Qaeda, and al-Nusra to the
"moderate" terrorists of the FSA and the loose collection of terrorists, Kurds, and Arabs like
the SDF, the West has a kaleidoscope of proxy forces on the ground already.
"Yet, even as Syria's military clashes with the West's proxies, the United States, Britain,
and France have begun moving in Special Forces soldiers to assist in the mission of destroying
the Syrian government, a mission that Israeli, Jordanian, and Turkish officers have joined in
as well. That is, of course, despite the fact that Russian Special Forces are on the ground fighting
on the side of the Syrian military.
"Likewise, both the United States and Russia are busy building military bases in the northern
regions of Syria to use as staging grounds for new operations."
So Russian peace talks with US evil empire in Syria were a disaster, which makes Putin look
like an idiot, as well as the supporters of this idiocy. As well as Russian invitations for the
US to join it in Syria makes it one of the most stupidest invitations ever.
Since B is not mentioning it, he might as well not mention that the French terrorist invaders
along with the already US terrorists, and possibly German invaders will be occupying parts of
Syria.
Oh, but that's alright because Putin invited the evil minions of the Us empire into Syria,
you know, because the bad PR opportunity is a much better outcome then world War three.
The Iranians have been warring with Kurds by the border with Turkey. Neither the Turks nor
the Iranians - nor the Syrians, but they do need the Kurds now - want a Kurdistan. The Kurds must
know by now - must have been betrayed enough by now - to know that the US will tell them anything,
promise them anything, and deliver nothing but betrayal in the end.
As regards the State Department, the Pentagon, the US government ... what's required is
a neo-con purge, top to bottom. They are all working against American interests and against the
American people. and have been for the past two decades. The likelihood of such a purge is about
zero. Neither Trump nor Hillary has the will or the backbone to stand up to anyone. Trump's all
mouth and looking out for number one, and Hillary's plugged in to the money-mosaic as well. Obama's
getting ready to cash in his chips.
It looks to be more of the same, until they really do go after Russia, when it will be all
over for all of us. I can't imagine that they really believe they can get away with this, but
this bunch is all 'mid-level', 'just following orders', it won't be 'their fault' and that's the
level they're working at. The people calling the tune think they can play the real world as they
do their fake financial world, making up new rules as they go along, as they redefine success
after each of their serial failures.
Talk about boiled frogs. How in the hell have we let it get this far?
I am amazed at your unflagging obsession with holding Putin responsible for the US/UK/EU/NATO/GCC
destruction of Syria. You've set him up as your omnipotent god and he's failed you, somehow. Putin,
Rusia, is not responsible for the death, devastation, and destruction of Iraq, Syria, Libya or
the rest of the middle east or north africa. You're throwing your stones at the wrong guy, at
the only guy who's done anything at all to help the Syrians and to forestall the monstrous neo-con
plan. This letter may be, as b says, a measure of theneo-cons' fear that it will all be over
for 'their guys' in Syria by 21 January. If that were to come to pass, Vladimir Putin will have
had a big hand in it.
Nicola @10 from your link 'Extending American power' I had to laugh at this... 4. "All of which
provides the basis for our strong belief
that the United States still has the military, economic,
and political power to play the leading role in pro
-tecting a stable rules-based international order". 'Rules based',ha, the US is the leading regime
change state, acting always contrary to International law to benefit its hegemonic ambitions.
All five veto wielding powers and their friends are above International law for all time. Thankfully,
Russia and China cannot be threatened militarily and will confront the monstrous US designs in
Syria, once the head choppers are defeated the victors should move against the real source of
terrorism in the region, Saudi Arabia and the various GCC satraps. b's article above is excellent
and is echoed in this piece in Antiwar.com
http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2016/06/16/something-going-worse-thought/
There are other worrying development in Syroi a namely changing of Riusssian attitude to Assaad.
First Lavrov said that Russia is not Syrian government ally, they just fight terrorists together.
An obvious nonsense.
And now this.
Israel, following several similar air raids in previous months just bombed SAA installation
in Homs province, in the middle of Syria just 45 second flight of S400 rockets located in latakia,
while Netanyahu was smiling with Putin in Moscow.
Can you explain WTF? All of that while IDF artillery provides cover for ANF commanded by formed
ISIL commander in Golan Heights foothills,
There is more about Russian de-facto acquiescence for Syrian partition and pivot to Israel:
STRANGE DAYS: Did Israelis Pivoted to Russia? Or the other way around.
https://syrianwarupdate.wordpress.com/
This is not preview nor is it a strategy, since strategies are based on more or less professional
and realistic, I may add, assessments of the outside world. I do not have any recollection of
any serious US doctrinal (policy or military wise) document in the last 20 years written from
the position of comprehensive situational awareness--this is a non existent condition among most
of US current "power elites". The document you posted is a typical wet dream written by utterly
incompetent neocons (Kagan's and Zoellik names are a tell), people who can not and must not be
allowed to operate with serious strategic and operational categories in any "advisory" role.
They simply have no qualifications for that and are nothing more than a bunch of ideologues and
propagandists from Ivy League humanities degree mill. Back to "preview"--it is a dominant ideology
of "exceptionalism" which afflicted US "elites" today, this document is just another iteration
of this ideology.
i read about 30 of 160 or so comments on this article at NYT. given who the audience of that
shit rag is & that comments are vetted, overwhelmingly commenters stated increased military involvement
is retarded. Of course, many of those speak from ignorance of what's really going on, but
the knee-jerk suspicion of US Syria policy & these FSO dickheads seems a good sign.
There is more about Russian de-facto acquiescence for Syrian partition and pivot to Israel:
It is exactly the other way around. How can Russia, which dwarfs Israel in every meaningful
category -- from economy to military -- and who does remember her history well can "pivot" to
largely regional player -- I don't know. Russian "neocons" are a dramatically different breed
than US ones, for starters they are much more educated and, actually, support Assad. Israel's
pivot to Russia in some sense is inevitable, albeit it could be fairly protracted, with Russia
being observed as honest broker. They are not completely stupid in Israel and are very aware of
real situation in American politics, economy and military. In other words -- they know how
to count and see who pulls the strings. And then there is another "little tiny" factor--Israelis
know damn well who won WW II in Europe. It matters, a great deal.
I note that the 'moderate' Hillary Clinton is a blood-soaked queen of chaos, who if elected
is certain to embroil us in pointless wars and spread death and devastation across even more of
the world. I say this not because I am psychic, but because that is her unambiguous record.
Donald Trump is admittedly a gamble, but depute his over-the-top stage persona, his track
record is of actually getting along with people and brokering stable working relationships.
This November I'm going for the wild-card who at least sounds rational (if you listen to what
he actually proposes, and not his style) and has a track record of actually being pragmatic, over
certain doom.
At this point I wish I could vote for Richard Nixon (!), but we have the choice that we
have...
This piece out of the NYT is pure propaganda. Period. Here's the big clue - where's the memo?
It's not embedded in the article. It can't be found anywhere on the web. It's b/c it doesn't exist.
The reader is 'TOLD' by a third party journalist few follow who writes for a MIC/Political/Policy
corporate mouthpiece.
If an article does not link to an original source OR quotes only 'anon sources' be skeptical.
Journalism, especially alt news journalists, site original sources AND try like hell to get sources
to go on the record.
My apologies in advance if I'm being offensive to our generous host. That is not my intent.
Rather, it's venting a long held frustration I've had with the division within corporate newsrooms
who are there solely to sell the readers the news, even if it's made up out of thin air.
Yeah . . .agree 90%. Here are some minor details that need to be tidied up, and a couple thoughts.
1.
b: it was Ahrar al Sham, Jabhat al-Nusra and other U.S. paid and supported "moderates"
who on April 9 broke the ceasefire in Syria.
This is not quite accurate. Resolution 2254 exempted al Nusra from the cease-fire, not sure
about al Sham and whatever others you are referring to. If they were excluded from the cease-fire,
then they couldn't break it.
2.
The NYT writer is Mark Landler, not Lander. If you're going to accuse him of being stupid or dishonest,
you want to get the name right. Mark Lander, whoever he is, might have a pack of bulldog lawyers.
3.
I don't see in Landler's article a link to the memo or a list of the people who signed it. Someone
needs to publish that list of signatories to preserve the record of who the DOS idiots are.
4. We see the point of all the saber-rattling by NATO on Russia's borders: to get Putin tied
up in a diversionary direct threat to Russia, thereby mitigating or eliminating his efforts in
behalf of Assad. And you know what? Americans on the street couldn't care one way or the other
what Obama or CIA or DoS does or says about Syria. 280,000 dead, millions displaced and Americans
are more concerned by a factor of 1000 about 4 dozen gays in Orlando.
Thanks for sharing your outrage, b. I completely agree. I have been ranting about this all morning
and it's good to see someone else stating the case so the rest of us don't feel isolated in our
anger at this vicious and dangerous stupidity. These 51 useful idiots are IMO auditioning
for the Clinton team while also providing cover for the neo-cons above them like Nuland, Powers,
etc. And directionless Kerry says he'll rush home to confer with these idiots rather than dismissing
them out of hand. Kerry could only be useful to anyone if Lavrov was in the room with him at all
times to keep him in line -- otherwise he reverts to his normal mindless servant of US empire
viewpoint, which is to follow whichever way the winds of power are blowing through Washington,
DC.
CIA .... YPG .... ALNUSRA.... FSL , all these acronyms are so confusing , how about considering
the level of sanity and intelligence of these groups ( which is probably below that of a wounded
flea .... ) why not call them Scoobidoos vs the Syrian Army
so the article would go something like this :
In the memo, the Scoobidoos State Department officials argued that military action against
Mr. Assad would help the fight against the Scoobidoos because it would bolster moderate Scoobidoos,
who are necessary allies against the group, also known as Scoobidoos .
I thought it was a "cessation of hostilities" not a case fire. The difference is not trivial,
and State Department employees should know the difference. The signers are either incompetent
or evil (not mutually exclusive, of course).
dont think landler is stupid. dishonest and deceiving would be my say. he is a nyt's jew writing,
maybe lying, regarding syria. NYT: only news acceptable to jews. sometimes, many times we have
to make up stories and facts to (maybe) fit.
cant find any of the dissenting names.
like to know how many are jew if story not total fake
then there is the political hatchet job on the russian track/field olym team.
I think the key takeaway is b's last two sentences: "The race to preempt a Hillary administration
war on Syria, which the 'diplomats' memo prepares for, is now on. May the not-warmongering side
win."
Hillary is the neocon's neocon. Pravy Sektor's honorary storm trooper Vicky Nuland is a
Hillary protege. NYT has been positioning its readers to embrace Kerry's Plan B for the last month-plus.
Whether during or shortly after Hillary's first 100 days in office, U.S. military engagement
with Libya and Syria will likely be significantly greater than it is now.
This is the exact reason the Ministers of Defense of Syria, Russia and Iran held meeting in Teheran
just recently. My assumption is they are planning on rolling up the acres, so to speak in Syria.
All before the new POTUS comes to office. Also, Hezbollah just announced it's sending in reinforcements
to the battlefield. All this while the Chinese continue to sleep. Sigh.
The Kurds are the last great hope for the oil and especially natural gas pipelines dream from
the GCC to Europe, but still, Israel is not happy. They wanted a branch-off pipeline for themselves.
Also Jordan was to get a small branch-off too. Israel is no more than a parasite, look up the
definition. It's exact. Turkey would benefit economically due to transit fees. That's why the
Turks are so heavily involved. Turkey, who's economy is done for due to Chinese cheap products
swamping the M.E; is crashed. Jordan is broke (hence they allow the head choppers to be trained
on their territory). The U.S is the overlord who wants this project to be implemented so as to
deny Russia the European market (see Saudia too).
Netanyahu has visited Russia 3-4 times (not sure)to dissuade Putin on his support for Bashar
( who said yes to the Friendship pipeline- Running from Russia, Iran, Iraq, Syria..to the Mediterranean
thru to Greece, Europe). No other World leader makes that many visits is such a short time to
another capital. Netanyahu obviously failed in his endeavor, as the Russians are familiar with
these Zionist snakes very well. All they have to look at is the genocide perpetrated by said Zionists
in their very own 20th Century history. I even read that Putin irked Netanyahu when Putin offered
him back the Pale of Settlement if they wanted to make the smart choice. Beautiful if true. Probably
wishful thinking tho.
Anyways, Israel runs the U.S State Department(see, the Crazies in the Basement). They don't
call it Foggy Bottom for nothing. Must be foggy now due to too many employess smoking bongs in
the downstairs cafeteria, hence the ridiculous memo. Also the writer of the memo is most certainly
another member of the chosen tribe.
Yes, a 'Night of the Broken Glass' or 'Night of the Long Knives' is much needed to save Humanity
essentially. But don't hope for it. Congress, Capital Hill leaders , MSM heads and head anchors,
most everybody in the Whit house(except the kitchen staff) would have to be rounded up.
The only hope would have been the U.S Military Officer Corp. before the great purges post 9-11.
Now it's I'm possible. God help the American people and the World.
This clown Kagan is also the husband of the infamous Victoria Nuland who somehow, defying
all logic, still has her job post imbroglio that is the Ukraine today. Hell, she's probably being
hailed for that and is an inspiration for lowly State employees.
Thank you Victoria, for giving Crimea back to the Russian Federation where it belongs.
There are almost exactly 7 months until either Trump or Clinton takes office (presuming
that the elites manage to completely control any bad news prior to the Dem nominating convention
in late July; if the email dam breaks after that I have no idea what the Dem elites will do, but
I figure they won't choose the obviously best candidate against Trump, Bernie).
Seven months. If Russia lends more of its strength, is it possible to gain the territory and
hold it to the point that, oh, the West's illegal bases will have to close down? Or might
the West actually directly take on Russia/Syrian government forces? Claiming, of course, some
version of
R2P
State Department Diplomats who have captained failure after failure? If these people were
Russian or Chinese they would have been executed for their serial failures in the ME and Afghanistan.
The main problem with being 'exceptional' is that the 'exceptional' ones never make a mistake.
"War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength"
So I was kind of wondering what psychopathic qualities the U.S. War... er, State Department
is looking for in potential parasitic career bureaucrats, and came across this self-promotion
page on their site. They seem to feel that working for them immerses you in a 'Culture of
Leadership'. I guess the 'Culture of Chaos and Death' theme, although more neocon-appropriate,
was shot down in favor of tempting potential employees with the possibility of more power and
control.
There are times the depressing mood on MoA is mitigated by some of the rather classic spelling
errors. I sometimes wonder if they might be intentional in order to lighten the mood?
In the inner halls of Pentagramagon nothing succeeds financially like serial designed failure
...
KABUL, Afghanistan - "The new U.S. commander in Afghanistan has submitted his first three-month
assessment of the situation in the war-torn country and what it's going to take to defeat the
Taliban, a U.S. military official has told The Associated Press.
And though the content of the review by Army Gen. John W. Nicholson is secret, the U.S.
strategy in Afghanistan received a major incentive this month when President Obama decided to
expand America's involvement with more airstrikes against insurgents, giving the U.S. military
wider latitude to support Afghan forces, both in the air and on the ground."
No respect for
R2P warriors
at the State Department, nor for HRC, Susan Rice and Samantha Power. Jo Cox as former
Oxfam executive was moved by the same massacres of Rwanda, Yugoslavia and Darfur.
Unwittingly (?) the R2P argument was used by the Obama White House to intervene in Libya and
Syria. The US took R2P a step further to force regime change which is illegal by International
law. See George Bush and
Tony Blair
to white-wash the cruelty of torture, rendition, Abu Ghraib, extrajudicial assassinations,
etc, etc.
Former US Ambassador to Syria Robert S. Ford was an apprentice of John Negroponte in Baghdad,
Iraq.
If I were Assad, I would be shaking in my boots right now and having Gaddafi dreams. Russia has
clearly allied itself closely to Israel and Nato in Syria. Some kind of sanctions relief deal
must be in the works. Syria will be split up soon. Assad is a dead man.
For Israel to bomb the Syrian military right under the nose of Russian s-400s? Russia,
supposedly so dedicated to defending sovereignty, smiles and yawns benignly? A dirty deal has
been made...
"Earlier this week as America was trying to make sense of the deadliest case of Islamic terrorism
on US soil since 9/11, I wrote a detailed article here at Breitbart News that laid out the clear
factual case about Hillary Clinton's top assistant Huma Abedin. I showed how she has deep, clear,
and inarguable connections to a Saudi Arabian official named Abdul Omar Naseef, a powerful Kingdom
insider who has helped lead a group called the Muslim World League. The Muslim World League is
the huge "charity" whose goal is to spread Islam throughout the world and which has been connected
to terror groups like Al Qaeda. If that sounds like a serious accusation, you're damn right
it is."
"The three questions are very simple, very straightforward, and, frankly, anybody can research
the answers themselves. They are:
1) What is Huma's relationship with a Saudi Arabian official named Abdullah Omar Naseef?
2) Was he the founder of a Saudi charity called the Rabita Trust?
3) Right after 9/11, was the Rabita Trust put on a list by the U.S. government of groups
that were funding terrorism?"
"If I were Assad, I would be shaking in my boots right now and having Gaddafi dreams."
Interesting opinion? If you made a list of democratically elected Presidents and National Leaders
the US/GB/ISR axis have terminated you will fill a book. From Patrice Lumumba to Hugo Chavez the
list goes on and on. Could you supply me with a list of National Leaders that Russia under Putin
has terminated?
WASHINGTON (Sputnik) - US Department of State has no plans to make public an internal memo
calling for the United States to take military action against Syrian President Bashar Assad's
government, US Department of State spokesperson John Kirby said in a briefing on Friday. "There's
no plans to make it public," Kirby stated when asked when the State Department would release
the dissent letter.
Furthermore, Kirby said there will be no investigation as to how the letter ended up in
the public domain.
By 'public domain', Kirby means on some writer's desk at the NYT, never to be seen by the unwashed
masses. To be fair, the State Department's "Dissent Memo" program is supposed to be confidential
even within the State Department itself to encourage its use. Mark Landler said in his article
that a draft of it was leaked by 'a State Department official' to the NYT. So some skepticism
of the existence or eventual submission of the actual memo is warranted. Not that Landry is lying
or hasn't verified it, but the State Department official obviously has an agenda by providing
it to the NYT. The NYT has its own agenda filled as well by prominently posting the article
on
the top of the front page .
Nyt participating in these pressures is coordinated with medecins sans frontiere announcing
today that they ll refuse eu money to protest on the treatment of refugees and with recent surge
in french and uk msm of so called white helmets exclusive pictured
Obama, despite dissent on Syria, not shifting toward strikes on Assad
The U.S. administration sought on Friday to contain fallout from a leaked internal memo critical
of its Syria policy, but showed no sign it was willing to consider military strikes against Syrian
President Bashar al-Assad's forces called for in the letter signed by dozens of U.S. diplomats.
Several U.S. officials said that while the White House is prepared to hear the diplomats' dissenting
viewpoint, it is not expected to spur any changes in President Barack Obama's approach to Syria
in his final seven months in office.
One senior official said that the test for whether these proposals for more aggressive
action are given high-level consideration will be whether they "fall in line with our contention
that there is no military solution to the conflict in Syria."
It's important for Russia to ensure that the remains of the first "Israeli" jet it shoots
down falls to earth inside Syria. If you've seen a story about the IAF doing something courageous
it's bullshit.
The EU-Turkey deal's financial package includes one billion euros in humanitarian aid.
There are undoubtedly needs in Turkey, a country which currently hosts close to three million
Syrian refugees, but this aid has been negotiated as a reward for border control promises,
rather than being based solely on needs. This instrumentalisation of humanitarian aid is unacceptable.
Last week the European Commission unveiled a new proposal to replicate the EU-Turkey logic
across more than 16 countries in Africa and the Middle East.
These deals would impose trade and development aid sanctions on countries that do not stem
migration to Europe or facilitate forcible returns, rewarding those that do. Among these potential
partners are
Somalia ,
Eritrea , Sudan and Afghanistan – four of the top ten* refugee generating countries.
kreepy kerry is "running out of patience" since his most desired regime change isn't happening
fast enough. How many others are in the works? I'm running-out-of-patience waiting for the
regime change anyone with 1/2 a brain wants, right here in the U.S. Regime Change US. It's our
turn. I just read Putin's speech at the St. Petersburg Int'l Forum. He must have used the word
"cooperation" at least 20 times. We need such a great leader. Terroristic turds like kerry and
co. belong in jail.
50 diplomats petition president for war. Was that written by Orwell? Isn't it enough
that this "peaceful" nation arms the world and places economic "pressure" on those nations that
displease her to the point of causing millions to die - do we really have to "kill the village
to save it?" Yes, I agree, each and every one of those "career diplomats" should be looking for
other work. They have not merely lost their way, they have lost their minds. My contempt for them
is manifest, as is my contempt for the entire MIC. That those trained in diplomacy should send
such a despicable petition illuminates the deep corrupting influence of American Exceptionalism
- a force for the kind of nationalism Germany endured 1933-45. Idiots.
Allow me to further my argument against American Exceptionalism. It is not merely the fact
that the U.S. is far from exceptional. From education to infant mortality, the U.S. is woefully
behind much of the world. My objection is that belief in exceptionalism leads to moral decay.
It is the functional equivalent of the 19th Century preachers who endorsed slavery, who preached
that negroes carried the mark of Cain, etc. Whites were God's chosen. The pseudo-righteousness
that preaching created in believers was largely responsible for America's Civil War. Americans
will be better people, with a better society, if we dispel this myth immediately. We're OK, you're
OK. Then we could have peace. Wouldn't that be nice?
So Hillary, the bloodthirsty Goddess of War, is longing for a second Libya, i.e., a Syria
smashed to smithereens, in ashes and ruins, ruled by a chaotic bunch of mad Takfiri extremists,
at war all against all. The Queen of Chaos, indeed, loves these scenarios. Especially because
her quick attack as first thing should she win the White House would shut the mouths of her critics
wanting her prosecuted for her crooked political and business corruption. But she and her State
Department surrogates would be in for a surprise: Russian and Syrian defences would not remain
silent. And afterwards, what would be left? How would the Exceptionalist who "gets things done"
proceed?
The FBI is stonewalling, keeping the contents of Mateen's 911 call unavailable - though it's
part of the public record - presumably because it undermines the "ISIS did it" meme poured over
the Orlando mass murder. Apparently Mateen may have mentioned ISIS not quite in the same light
as has been portrayed.
Now the NYTimes/WSJ are doing the same thing with the 50 dancing diplomats. Releasing what
they want us to know and redacting what we want to know : the names of those 50 dancing diplomats.
I suppose it comes under the CIA's blanket excuse for secrecy? "Methods and means", or
whatever their boilerplate.
Releasing their names might give us the means to track the 5th column as it winds its way through
'our' government, and that must be prevented at all costs. Think it might lead through Hillary?
Seems no doubt here.
No doubt the State Department dwarves were ginned up by "Cookies" Nuland and Count Kagan by
visions of "x memorandum" of 1946 immortality by attacking the resistance to an unipolar hegemony.
Mixing it up in Syria with the Russian presence seems civilization limiting at the outer limits
of challenge/ response in a military confrontation.
"... This Trump speech is a "victory speech," a genre where a candidate accepts the mandate of the voters, so it's simpler than a speech on policy. As before, I won't annotate or mark up the entire text. Instead, I'll look at four major themes: ..."
"... Let's contrast these two appeals in more detail. Trump (a) appeals ..."
"... Clinton comes to my door, she does so with all the charm of a process server presenting a demand note to garnish my vote. ..."
"... les amis du peuple ..."
"... Thank you. I've fought for my family. I've fought for my business. I've fought for my employees. And now, I'm going to fight for you, the American people like nobody has ever fought before. And I'm not a politician fighting, I'm me. You're going to see some real good things happen. ..."
"... Astonishingly, Trump steals Clinton's clothes while she's at the swimming hole: "I want to be your champion" is an abandonted iteration of Clinton populism. ..."
"... What Tcherneva's chart shows is that under Obama - and unlike all previous "recoveries" - the 1% creamed off all the income gains, and the rest of us (on average) were left worse off. Income inequaltiy under Obama is worse than Bush! That's not good news for Clinton, the candidate of stability. Worse news for Clinton: Anybody who's seen the The Big Short ..."
"... Obama promised change and it didn't work out too well. And every year they fail to deliver. Why would politicians want to change a system that's totally rigged in order to keep them in power? That's what they're doing, folks. Why would politicians want to change a system that's made them and their friends very, very wealthy? [common sense] I beat a rigged system by winning with overwhelming support, the only way you could've done it – landslides all over the country with every demographic on track to win; 37 primary caucus victories in a field that began with 17 very talented people. ..."
"... Putting aside parsing of words on "primary caucus victories," Trump is right. Trump took the Republican Establishment and beat it like a gong. To volatility voters, that's very appealing . Note also the appeal of "totally rigged" to Sanders voters. ..."
"... After years of disappointment, there is one thing we all have learned – we can't fix the rigged system by relying on very, and I mean this so, so strongly, on the very people who rigged it, and they rigged it, and do not ever think anything differently. We can't solve our problems by counting on the politicians who created our problems. ..."
"... Secretary Clinton even did all of the work on a totally illegal private server. Something about how she's getting away with this folks nobody understands. ..."
"... Putting aside parsing of words on "totally illegal," right on both counts. "Nobody understands," for starters, because Clinton destroyed half the mail on the server before turning the rest over ..."
"... Designed to keep her corrupt dealings out of the public record, putting the security of the entire country at risk and a President in a corrupt system is totally protecting her – not right. I am going to give a major speech on probably Monday of next week and we're going to be discussing all of the things that have taken place with the Clintons. I think you're going to find it very informative and very, very interesting. I wonder if the press will want to attend, who knows. ..."
"... Hillary Clinton turned the State Department into her private hedge fund – the Russians, the Saudis, the Chinese – all gave money to Bill and Hillary and got favorable treatment in return. It's a sad day in America when foreign governments with deep pockets have more influence in our own country than our great citizens. ..."
"... Fear and Loathing ..."
"... Just a point on those rust belt areas left behind (PA, Western NY, Ohio, etc.) Not only is it an embarrassment, it has greatly assisted the transition from a community-based sense of democracy and citizen engagement to a disengaged, depressed populace ripe for control by big government/transnational corporate forces. One of the first things done by totalitarian regimes in order to unify large areas (Russia, China) was to deport the highly educated or send them to "work camps." The objective was to ensure that those most likely to make trouble for the regime would end up isolated and unable to connect with a larger community. ..."
"... The same objective has been accomplished by the gutting out of the middle class in large regions of "flyover" country. Albeit somewhat more artfully and without the threat of being shot. Forcing the middle class to move away from their home communities and disperse across the land in search of "jobs" has led to an easier road for neo-liberal policies to take hold, and allowed the 1% to ram through legislation such as the TPP that would have had no chance back in the days of Mondale and Tip O'Neill. ..."
"... These citizens in places like Buffalo, Cleveland and PA have been betrayed by their own government, and if Trump manages to get enough of their votes to take back some small measure of power from the corrupt gangs that ignore their plight, it will be a just result. Of course whether he'll actually do anything about the situation is debatable. ..."
"... Fear and loathing. Hope and change. What's the difference, really? God help us all come January. ..."
"... Fear the hope! Loathe the change! No wait, that's Hillary… ..."
"... If Trump is the vacuum cleaner salesman at the door, Clinton is the Jehovah's Witness. ..."
"... Just love the line about "…real change, not Obama change!" ..."
"... He's hinting at some FDR populism (jobs especially). I wouldn't be at all surprised if a President Trump embraced public works programs of all sizes. ..."
"... If there was an American labor party, that is more than likely what my political label would be. For the first time in my voting life, Sanders is the first candidate I actually wanted to vote for. ..."
"... Trump, if he was younger and had built a media empire instead of a half a$$ed real estate fortune, would likely suggest a similar dilemna as Berlusconi's corruptive work in Italy. ..."
"... "Take care of our African Americans." Trump is drawing a striking contrast to Obama here to Obama who, objectively speaking, has screwed black people harder than even W. Bush did. Trump is doing well to mention well to mention this because many black people operate under the delusion that Obama has been good for them and that Hillary will be good for them. In truth, under the neoliberal regime Clinton will usher in the lives of minorities everywhere will become even more miserable than they already are. At the very least Trump is not a neoliberal. ..."
"... There is something appealing about people who are being themselves. Sanders and Trump share that trait. B. Clinton also has it; H. Clinton doesn't. ..."
"... Or, perhaps, the carefully constructed inner self you keep around for people to find? People like you…' She paused and went on:'… people like us always keep at least one inner self for inquisitive visitors, don't we?' ..."
"... Sorry, Trump is an outsider to both the political classes and the elite power structure. He sits on no important not-for-profit boards, has not become a trustee or given a building or wing to a hospital or university, or an endowed chair. He does not collect art. Nor has he been a big political fundraiser. He borrows from only non-TBTF banks and hence does not have important relations with them. For them, Donald is just a rich guy from Queens who hasn't even tried to class himself up (unlike Jamie Dimon). You can be rich in America and not be part of the power structure. ..."
"... I know this is hardly an original observation, but Trump's Queens background may go far in explaining his bluster and narcissism - his father had money, but it wasn't Old Money and he didn't grow up mingling with prep school friends whose fathers worked on Wall Street or other Establishment places. It's really a Great Gatsby story more than anything else. ..."
"... If he is legitimately against TPP and in favor of better relations with Russia and China that would be enough for my support. One problem is the Republican power base would force him to change his positions. ..."
"... One can be rich, very rich, and yet outside the web of current interlocking reciprocities that make up the power structure. Think of it as the powerful bureaucracy of connections vs. a single individual, rich or not. ..."
"... Good analysis. Trump is easier to listen to than Clinton and he makes more sense. What he would actually do as president is anyone's guess. At least he's showing he can hire competent speech writers. His delivery was effective. He doesn't shirk from borrowing concepts from both Sanders and Clinton, which is good strategy. ..."
"... for one thing he hasn't started any wars. he isn't surrounded by neocon foreign policy advisors, yet, tho i wouldn't be surprised. he claims to be against the trade deal, he didn't vote for the iraq war, so he doesn't need to pretend there was ever a reason to go in. he won't strenghten the clintons' grip on the democratic party. just off the top of my head. ..."
Readers, I apologize for a posting miscue. I set the publication date for this post to June
13 , 2016. And so it appeared, and promptly fell off the front page. –lambert.
In this post, we continue taking a close look at primary sources, in this case a second speech
by presumptive Republican candidate Donald Trump.
Yesterday, we looked at the speech that Trump gave on national security , prompted by the mass
shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando. Today, we'll look at the speech Trump gave on the occasion
of his primary victory at the Trump National Golf Club (!) in Briarcliff Manor, a small town in New
York state and a pleasant fifteen minute drive away from Chappaqua; Clinton "clinched" her nomination
shortly thereafter. The video follows, and
the transcript is here .
If you just skipped over the video, I urge to reconsider, grab some coffee and/or start checking
your mail, and listen to it now; it's only a little over fifteen minutes long. (Note: I listened;
I did not watch. I'd be interested to know what readers who are more visual see, perhaps with the
sound down?) As a speech, it's excellent, and it inspired me to give Trump, as a speaker, the same
level of attention that I've previously given to
Obama ,
Clinton ,
Rubio , and even
Julia Gillard , then Prime Minister of Australia. Since Trump's speech on national security was
timely, I had to post on it first; and since that speech bumped a speech he had planned to give on
"Hillary Clinton and how bad a President" she would be, analysis of that speech to come will
be forthcoming.
This Trump speech is a "victory speech," a genre where a candidate accepts the mandate of
the voters, so it's simpler than a speech on policy. As before, I won't annotate or mark up the entire
text. Instead, I'll look at four major themes:
Appeal to Sanders Supporters Populist Appeal Corrupt Elites
1. Appeal to Sanders Supporters
The contrast between Trump's appeal to Sanders supporters, and Clinton's, is most immediately
seen in the form of a table. Trump's text comes from the video above; Clinton comes from her own
victory speech at the Brooklyn Navy Yard (
video
and transcript here ).
Figure 1: Appeal to Sanders Supporters: Trump vs. Clinton
At a high level, both appeals have the same structure: A direct address to Sanders supporters,
followed by a discussion of policy discussion. I won't discuss the rhetoric of the two in detail[1],
but their stylistic differences are plain. Where Trump is concise, Clinton is verbose. Where Trump
is concrete ("money… and jobs"), Clinton is abstract ("an economy with more opportunity"). Where
Trump is about the voters ("To those who voted…"), Clinton is about Clinton ("And as your president,
I…").[2]
Trump
Clinton
[TRUMP:] To those who voted for someone else in either party, I will work
hard to earn your support and I will work very hard to earn that support. To all of those Bernie
Sanders voters who have been left out in the cold by a rigged system of super delegates, we
welcome you with open arms. And by the way, the terrible trade deals that Bernie was so vehemently
against and he's right on that will be taken care of far better than anyone ever thought possible
and that's what I do. We are going to have fantastic trade deals. We're going to start making
money and bringing in jobs.
Now I know some people say….
And as your president, I will always have your back. I want to congratulate
Senator Sanders for the extraordinary campaign he has run. He has spent his long career in
public service fighting for progressive causes and principles, and he's excited millions of
voters, especially young people. And let there be no mistake: Senator Sanders, his campaign,
and the vigorous debate that we've had about how to raise incomes, reduce inequality, increase
upward mobility have been very good for the Democratic Party and for America.
This has been a hard-fought, deeply-felt campaign. But whether you supported me, or Senator
Sanders, or one of the Republicans, we all need to keep working toward a better, fairer, stronger
America.
Now, I know it never feels good to put your heart into a cause or a candidate you believe
in – and to come up short. I know that feeling well. But as we look ahead to the battle that
awaits, let's remember all that unites us.
We all want an economy with more opportunity and less inequality, where Wall Street can
never wreck Main Street again. We all want a government that listens to the people, not the
power brokers, which means getting unaccountable money out of politics. And we all want a society
that is tolerant, inclusive, and fair.
We all believe….
Let's contrast these two appeals in more detail. Trump (a) appeals to Sanders supporters
in simple language ("we welcome you with open arms"), (b) recognizes a strongly felt and still painful
sense of injury ("left out in the cold by a rigged system of super delegates"), and (c)
pivots to policy ("the terrible trade deals that Bernie was so vehemently against and he's
right on that"). Trump's talking points also have the great merit of being true:
The superdelegate system is "rigged," by design , and
the trade deals are terrible .[3]
Clinton's appeal follows the same sequence of appeal, injury, and policy, but in a way that is
at once more abstract and more clumsy. For (a) appeal , Clinton begins with a lengthy shout-out
to "Senator Sanders" (not "Bernie"), much as if she were at a ribbon-cutting ceremony, in which she
manages to condescend ("excited") to those she most needs ("young people"), and then meanders through
mentions of "the Democratic Party" and "America" before coming to (b) the injury , which,
again, is all about her ("Now, I know…"), is couched in terms both abstract and infantilizing ("…it
never feels good…), is framed as inside baseball ("…. cause or a candidate…."), and twists the knife
in the wound at the end ("and to come up short.")[4]. Finally, Clinton pivots (c) to policy
, where as we have seen, she is bloodless and abstract, and Trump is simple and concrete. Worse,
there are very few Sanders voters who would view her professed desire to get "accountable money out
of politics" as anything but ludicrously and imperviously hypocritical, given the contrast between
the Clinton and Sanders fundraising operation.
Trump reminds me of a vacuum cleaner salesman: When he comes to my door, I know just who and what
he is, his patter may be entertaining, and I can make him go away. When Clinton comes to my door,
she does so with all the charm of a process server presenting a demand note to garnish my vote.
At this point, I should reiterate the caveat that I'm not endorsing any candidate; what I am saying
is that if Clinton is to gain Sanders voters, she'll do so using techniques other than those she
used here. If it's possible for her to do so without reintroducing herself again, she should ask
herself why Trump can say something as simple as "we welcome you with open arms" and she cannot.
2. Populist Appeal
Now to Trump, les amis du peuple :
[TRUMP:] Now I know some people say I'm too much of a fighter.
I confess: I laughed out loud at Trump's humblebrag, because it's exactly like an answer to
the classic job interview question: "What is your greatest weakness?" ("I care too much"; "I'm
obsessively punctual," "I work too hard," etc.) However, Trump is canny, on multiple levels: First,
he's recalling his successful TV show, The Apprentice ; second, he shows that he understands
that he is asking us for a job, that we are his boss; and third, for those of us
who are looking for a job, or worried about the job we have, Trump puts himself in our place. Let
it never be said that simple language cannot send complex messages!
[TRUMP:] My preference is always peace, however and I've shown that. I've shown that for a
long time. I built an extraordinary business on relationships and deals that benefit all parties
involved, always. My goal is always again to bring people together. But if I'm forced to fight
for something I really care about, I will never, ever back down and our country will never, ever
back down.
Always. Be. Closing.
Thank you. I've fought for my family. I've fought for my business. I've fought for my employees.
And now, I'm going to fight for you, the American people like nobody has ever fought before. And
I'm not a politician fighting, I'm me. You're going to see some real good things happen.
"I'm me," along with "some people say I'm too much of a fighter," pre-empts pearl-clutching about
Trump's Twitter eruptions, outrageous statements, and so on; the storm comes, but passes quickly,
and all is sunny again. (Paul LePage used a similar strategy in Maine, successfully.
"He may be an assh*le, but he's our assh*le." )
Just remember this: I'm going to be your champion. I'm going to be America's champion because
you see this election isn't about Republican or Democrat; it's about who runs this country – the
special interests or the people and I mean the American people.
Every election year politicians promise change. Obama promised change and it didn't work out
too well.
A neat transition to our next theme.
3. Corrupt Elites
Here is the "headwind" - to use an elite metaphor - that Clinton is fighting. Pavlina Tcherneva's
famous chart, presented by a political figure some may recognize:
[TRUMP:] Every election year politicians promise change. Obama promised change and it didn't
work out too well. And every year they fail to deliver. Why would politicians want to change a
system that's totally rigged in order to keep them in power? That's what they're doing, folks.
Why would politicians want to change a system that's made them and their friends very, very wealthy?
[common sense] I beat a rigged system by winning with overwhelming support, the only way you could've
done it – landslides all over the country with every demographic on track to win; 37 primary caucus
victories in a field that began with 17 very talented people.
Putting aside parsing of words on "primary caucus victories," Trump is right. Trump took the
Republican Establishment and beat it like a gong.
To volatility voters, that's very appealing . Note also the appeal of "totally rigged" to Sanders
voters.
After years of disappointment, there is one thing we all have learned – we can't fix the
rigged system by relying on very, and I mean this so, so strongly, on the very people who rigged
it, and they rigged it, and do not ever think anything differently. We can't solve our problems
by counting on the politicians who created our problems.
This seems like common sense, but watch Trump's sleight of hand: First, we have "the
very people who rigged it," who turn out to be "the politicians." But "the politicians" don't run
the country. Crudely, they and the political class (and more diffusely,
Thomas Frank's 10% ) manage the country, on behalf of its absentee owners, the 1%. Oligarchs
"create," not politicians. Second, you should be extremely wary of any candidate who runs against
"the politicians" while deploying a narrative of national restoration. We know how that movie ends:
Badly . (When I look at Trump's next speech, I'll cover the question of fascism and Trump in
some detail; for now, let me note that there are rather a lot of "-isms," being deployed in this
campaign, and a large proportion of them call into the category of "any stick to beat a dog.")
The Clintons have turned the politics of personal enrichment into an art form for themselves.
They've made hundreds of millions of dollars selling access, selling favors, selling government
contracts, and I mean hundreds of millions of dollars.
Secretary Clinton even did all of the work on a totally illegal private server. Something
about how she's getting away with this folks nobody understands.
Putting aside parsing of words on "totally illegal," right on both counts. "Nobody understands,"
for starters, because Clinton destroyed half the mail on the server before turning the rest over.
I mean, come on.
Designed to keep her corrupt dealings out of the public record, putting the security of
the entire country at risk and a President in a corrupt system is totally protecting her – not
right. I am going to give a major speech on probably Monday of next week and we're going to be
discussing all of the things that have taken place with the Clintons. I think you're going to
find it very informative and very, very interesting. I wonder if the press will want to attend,
who knows.
Hoo boy. (This is the speech bumped for the national security speech.)
Hillary Clinton turned the State Department into her private hedge fund – the Russians,
the Saudis, the Chinese – all gave money to Bill and Hillary and got favorable treatment in return.
It's a sad day in America when foreign governments with deep pockets have more influence in our
own country than our great citizens.
Trump's upcoming speech should be quite something.
I didn't need to do this. It's not easy, believe me. I didn't need to do it. But I felt I had
to give back to our wonderful country which has been so good to me and to my family. I've traveled
to many of our states and seen the suffering in people's eyes. I've visited communities in New
York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Indiana and Ohio whose manufacturing jobs, they literally,
these jobs have virtually disappeared, an embarrassment to our country and it's horrible.
Absolutely right. Notice, however, the sleight of hand again: Trump doesn't mention private equity,
which played such a large part in "disappearing" those jobs.
I've embraced the victims of illegal immigration, moms and dads who have had to bury their
own children because of people that shouldn't have been in the country – remember it, folks, remember
it.
And absolutely wrong. I'm not a fan of nativism.
Conclusion
Again as a troll prophylactic, let me say that this post is not an endorsement of any candidate.
It's easy to see how Clinton can and should assault Trump's nativism. It's not so easy to see how
Clinton can defend herself against Trump's charges of corruption, especially when Trump connects,
as he can and should, real suffering to the actions of corrupt and criminal elites. It's also not
clear whether Clinton can, or even seeks, to connect to voters outside her relatively narrow base.[6]
Finally, Trump is not dumb. Trump is not a buffoon. Trump is focusing on the vulnerabilities of his
adversary with laser-like precision and lethality. Trump can discipline himself to use a Teleprompter,
select an excellent speechwriter, and deliver a scorcher of a speech; it will be interesting to see
how he does in the debates when he's had time to polish his zingers. Whether Clinton can neutralize
the truths (many) in Trump's critique and capitalize on calling out the bullshit (much, much, much)
is unknown. Whether our famously free press can do to Trump what they did to Sanders is unknown.
Whether Republican elites will do a McGovern on Trump is unknown, and whether Johnson will do for
Hillary in 2016 what Perot did for Bill in 1992 is unknown. There is our rickety and fraud-prone
electoral system to consider. And then there are "Events, dear boy. Events." But anybody who thinks
that Clinton will get a free ride to the Oval Office is delusional.
NOTES
[1] You will note the
anaphora in Clinton's speech: "We all want…. We all want… We all want…." Trump uses even simpler
figures of repetition, like
diacope ("repetition
of a word with one or more between, usually to express deep feeling"): " I will work hard to
earn your support and I will work very hard to earn that support ." Other
figures of repetition include
epizeuxis ("We had
some big, big days") and the more general
conduplicatio combined
with parallelism
(" no matter who it is, no matter who they are." Trump's rhetorical figures,
like his vocabulary and syntax , are simpler than Clinton's. (One wonders whether the repetition
is useful to achieve continuity in a speech punctuated by regular applause or laughter.) That doesn't
mean that they're ineffective; to me,
the repetitive words strike like hammer blows .
[2] Of course voters know that Trump isn't really "about" them. Voters, and especially NC readers,
aren't children. They know that Trump is a billionaire, not an especially nice man, and a business
past not without shade. But at least he cares enough to fake it!
[3] Nobody should take Clinton's crawfishing on trade seriously; Obama's for TPP. If Clinton is
really against TPP, then she needs to start fighting Obama about it, to make sure it doesn't pass
in the lame duck.
[4] At least when Trump says "loser," he uses only one word!
Just a point on those rust belt areas left behind (PA, Western NY, Ohio, etc.) Not only
is it an embarrassment, it has greatly assisted the transition from a community-based sense of
democracy and citizen engagement to a disengaged, depressed populace ripe for control by big government/transnational
corporate forces.
One of the first things done by totalitarian regimes in order to unify large areas (Russia,
China) was to deport the highly educated or send them to "work camps." The objective was to ensure
that those most likely to make trouble for the regime would end up isolated and unable to connect
with a larger community.
The same objective has been accomplished by the gutting out of the middle class in large
regions of "flyover" country. Albeit somewhat more artfully and without the threat of being shot.
Forcing the middle class to move away from their home communities and disperse across the land
in search of "jobs" has led to an easier road for neo-liberal policies to take hold, and allowed
the 1% to ram through legislation such as the TPP that would have had no chance back in the days
of Mondale and Tip O'Neill.
These citizens in places like Buffalo, Cleveland and PA have been betrayed by their own
government, and if Trump manages to get enough of their votes to take back some small measure
of power from the corrupt gangs that ignore their plight, it will be a just result. Of course
whether he'll actually do anything about the situation is debatable.
Kudos! Well said. A pleasure to find a progressive who does not reflexively reguritate that
Trump is 'idea free' and Clinton is full of 'specific policies'.
I must disagree about the 'nativism' part (we're really talking about citizens, not 'natives').
Would you open all the doors and windows on your own home and let anyone at all – and I mean ANYONE
AT ALL – freely enter your house and help themselves to everything you have without your permission?
Of course not. And nor should the American people be expected to take such a suicidal course.
The rich want to open the borders to the overpopulated third world in order to drive wages down
to third-world levels. The average American – 'native born' or recent immigrant alike – does not.
I see no problem with enforcing the laws against illegal immigration, nor with reducing the rate
of legal immigration. Slandering this moderate position as 'nativist' is – dare I say it? – almost
Clintonian…
I know someone who opened their house to anyone for a 6 month period as a personal spiritual
exercise in being non-judgmental and keeping an open heart. Drug dealers, possible murderers–no
one was turned away. They all said they grew from the experience, that it was profound and they
had no regrets. The local police found it confusing, though. The explanation given to the police
was that they were friends.
I'm struggling with the word. I wanted something American, not European (although the unlucky
soul who clicked through on the "Badly" link will find a European image).
Hence, "nativist." I thinking that, with respect to the abolition of human rental, we might
call liberals "doughfaces."
Trump is like able. He's that big loud guy you know, makes mistakes, owns them, and is who
he is. He's no bullshit. Yes, Trump files for bankruptcy. That's what contractors and developers
do. That's the game and Trump plays it.
In this particular speech, Trump owns who he is. He makes no bones about it. He doesn't deflect,
or obstruct or blame someone else. He's out there warts and all. There's some overly vague language
(regulation – no specifics there so tis unclear what he is referring to) He's hinting at some
FDR populism (jobs especially). I wouldn't be at all surprised if a President Trump embraced public
works programs of all sizes.
Background detail – it looked like his wife and daughter kept watching the teleprompter and
the audience very closely. My take away impression is that as soon as he finishes speaking they
give him or someone in his campaign detailed notes. Where he hit, where he missed, where the audience
responded, etc.
I have been castigated because, it is said, no one around here actually likes Trump, they just
hate Clinton. I am, I have been told, been holding up a straw man when I say that people at NC
have often excused and at times praised and de facto endorsed Trump. Well, this is not the first
example of someone who likes and endorses Trump (Working Class Nero certainly did also). Or are
you going to tell me this is not a pro-Trump statement?
Just kidding. Certainly Trump can work an audience better than Clinton and it may win him some
votes (even from the ranks of the NC readership, it must be admitted). At any rate the Clinton/Trump
debates, while likely not to equal the gravitas of Lincoln/Douglas, may actually be fun to watch.
I am being open and honest about my opinion which, I was under the impression, is what Lambert
asked for. Would you prefer I lie?
If there was an American labor party, that is more than likely what my political label
would be. For the first time in my voting life, Sanders is the first candidate I actually wanted
to vote for.
I try very hard not to lie to myself about political realities which is why I just can't bring
myself to vote for Clinton. I just can't. My personal reality is this: which candidate is more
likely to help me work and feed my family without destroying the planet around us?
Sanders is my first choice. The question at this point is if he's not on the November ballot,
how do I vote? In 2012, I opted third party.
So here are the options if Sanders is not on the ballot.
A. Leave it blank
B. Third party candidate
C. Republican
Trump has not at this point ruled himself out as an option.
A third party vote is like one vote against two Clintons. A Trump vote is then like two votes
against two Clintons. Math is weird sometimes. But one would be tempted to think of it as your
big chance to commit election fraud.
It's my second time, and I never thought there could be a second time. I thought I was gonna
play golf. But the golf course is right down the road from the world's largest tactical missile
plant!
The difference between 2012 and 2016 is that in 2012 there just wasn't enough disgust with
the Democrats and the Republicans for a third party vote to matter much. In 2016, disgust is widespread,
and nearly every voter either hates Clinton or hates Trump, and some voters hate both. So a third
party candidate (maybe two of them) has a real chance to get 5% of the vote, which would qualify
the candidate (or his or her party) for federal grant money.
" I just can't bring myself to vote for Clinton."
-I don't think anyone is asking.
"Sanders is my first choice. The question at this point is if he's not on the November ballot,
how do I vote? In 2012, I opted third party."
-This is the point I don't get from voters whose first choice is Sanders. NC boards have been
weighted with Sander's supporters hopeful he will pursue a third party candidacy and wondering
what he expected to accomplish within the Democratic wing of the Business Party. Yet with the
opportunity to choose a third party candidate (Jill Stein is running Green or Emidio "Mimi" Soltysik
Socialist) over both the Democratic and Republican wing of the Business Party somehow they want
to vote for Republican Donald Trump.
As mentioned elsewhere, the third party option is particularly valid this year when third party
sentiment has waxed considerably over recent previous elections.
Excellent analysis. It's easy to forget what Lambert points out several times, about the slight-of-hand
aspect to Trumps orations. It's also quite fun to watch him straight up fuck with Hillary.
I mean, really he's toying with her, and let's face it: we love it. I just wish I had the time
or presence of mind to make the kind of breakdown Lambert presents.
Right now I see many of us pushing to the back of our minds the awareness of the dark side
of all this, darkly hinted at in the final point of Trump's speech. As far as I'm concerned, Trump
is just as much a crook as Clinton, he's just a different kind of crook, and to imagine that he
actually has the well being of regular citizens in mind is a dangerous illusion. He's made it
pretty clear that he is going to foster and perpetuate racial divisions, as well as a brutal and
violent response to to any dissent. For all the smooth talking Trump does, let's not forget that
you and I are likely next on the chopping block, after 'mexicans' and 'muslims' and 'immigrants'.
I can't convince myself to willingly embrace that, sorry.
A non-rhetorical question: what racial divisions is Trump trying to foster? I have never seen
or heard a single statement from him that he has anything against any race. It looks to me like
a baseless meme the media created to disparage Trump.
"what racial divisions is Trump trying to foster?"
Who could think such a thing? In this particular 'victory' speech he's promised to, "take care
of our African American people. " There is no race except the human race in acceptable political
discourse at the presidential level, once you get past that hurdle you're into ethnicity and there
you find Trump the xenophobe. Islam and Mexicans spring unhappily to mind. How 'bout that judge
that must be prejudice against Trump cause he's Mexican?
Trump, if he was younger and had built a media empire instead of a half a$$ed real estate
fortune, would likely suggest a similar dilemna as Berlusconi's corruptive work in Italy.
I suppose it could be argued that Islam is not a race. It's a religion of course, but of course
horrible discrimination can occur on the basis of religion as well. And it' wasn't really about
Mexicans just illegal Mexicans (and is Mexican really truly a race?). And so on. And minorities
hear loud and clear what Trump is (as do those of his backers who are r-ist), while some white
people split semantic hairs on whether Trump is or is not r-ist. It's all so difficult to figure
out … and like Bill Clinton said IS is problematic and …
Whatever. Dogwhistles that sound like trainwhistles as one article said. People get what is
being communicated. I don't know how much Trump means any real harm (unlike some of his supporters
who definitely do), but regardless people get what is being communicated.
Actually come to think of it Berlusconi started out in real estate and construction with ties
to the mob in vaguely similar fashion to Trump but he was younger and moved into media in a more
seminal way than the Apprentice.
"Take care of our African Americans." Trump is drawing a striking contrast to Obama here
to Obama who, objectively speaking, has screwed black people harder than even W. Bush did. Trump
is doing well to mention well to mention this because many black people operate under the delusion
that Obama has been good for them and that Hillary will be good for them. In truth, under the
neoliberal regime Clinton will usher in the lives of minorities everywhere will become even more
miserable than they already are. At the very least Trump is not a neoliberal.
"Mexico" is a country, not a race. My best and closest friend is a Mexican – and after Bernie
lost out he's now supporting Trump. One of the main reasons for that is because he does not like
seeing illegal Mexicans streaming into his country, America, and stealing work. It has nothing
to do with race; it's economics.
And yes confusing the Muslim religion for a race is somewhat offensive to me. People can change
or abandon religions whenever they feel like it. If, under a Trump presidency, a Muslim really
wants to enter the US all he has to do is abandon his faith. If this was about race that wouldn't
be possible.
I didn't have time to listen to it until now. Trump gave a very good speech. But one speech
isn't enough to persuade me to vote for him. I remember George W. Bush's speech on September 20,
2001, in response the the horror of 9/11. With the exception of one sentence, I think Bush's speech
was excellent. The bad sentence is this: "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists."
Manichean bovine manure! I was quite favorably impressed by the rest of Bush's speech, and we
know how badly things turned out over the next few years.
So I won't let a single good speech by Trump persuade me. I will base my vote on the gestalt
of the candidates, and Trump has a lot of baggage, as does Clinton. I don't think either of them
deserves to be President. A lot will have to change over the next few months for me to consider
voting for Trump; for example, he needs to disavow his praise for Scalia.
There is this idea out there that there is an 'inner Hillary' that is completely different
from her outward persona – someone that is funny, warm, engaging, charming, etc…
What if there isn't? What if she _is_ being herself?
Apparently, the Hillary in small groups is "funny, warm, engaging…." As far as inner
Hillary, from Terry Pratchett, Making Money :
Mrs Lavish sniffed. … 'Ah, and she sees your inner self? Or, perhaps, the carefully
constructed inner self you keep around for people to find? People like you…' She paused and
went on:'… people like us always keep at least one inner self for inquisitive visitors, don't
we?'
Moist didn't rise to this. Talking to Mrs Lavish was like standing in front of a magic mirror
that stripped you to your marrow.
and whether Johnson will do for Hillary in 2016 what Perot did for Bill in 1992 is unknown
It is interesting to note at RCP that the Johnson match-up pulls more of those polled away
from HRC than from DT. It is only a frame in a long movie, however my intuition would be that
Johnson would pull support from DT.
Sorry, Trump is an outsider to both the political classes and the elite power structure.
He sits on no important not-for-profit boards, has not become a trustee or given a building or
wing to a hospital or university, or an endowed chair. He does not collect art. Nor has he been
a big political fundraiser. He borrows from only non-TBTF banks and hence does not have important
relations with them. For them, Donald is just a rich guy from Queens who hasn't even tried to
class himself up (unlike Jamie Dimon). You can be rich in America and not be part of the power
structure.
I know this is hardly an original observation, but Trump's Queens background may go far
in explaining his bluster and narcissism - his father had money, but it wasn't Old Money and he
didn't grow up mingling with prep school friends whose fathers worked on Wall Street or other
Establishment places. It's really a Great Gatsby story more than anything else.
If he is legitimately against TPP and in favor of better relations with Russia and China
that would be enough for my support. One problem is the Republican power base would force him
to change his positions.
Lambert, great analysis as always, and especially the notes on the rhetorical devices.
One of the reasons I can't vote for him is that he praised the arch-ideologue Antonin Scalia,
and he has promised to pack the Supreme Court with what could be described as Scalia clones. He's
pandering to the extremists.
Then again, he has also threatened to nominate Gary Busey to the Supreme Court, but that's
just a gambit to force rich Republicans to donate. He's not serious about Mr. Justice Busey.
Plus, anyone who wants to be taken seriously, yet injects the arrogant pejorative, "fool,"
towards those who may have a different view, well, who's the fool here?
"You can be rich in America and not be part of the power structure."
Hope NC readers take this statement on board. I know it's not intuitive but it is true.
One can be rich, very rich, and yet outside the web of current interlocking reciprocities that
make up the power structure. Think of it as the powerful bureaucracy of connections vs. a single
individual, rich or not.
I've taken it on board. However if I wanted to have a word with my senator or congressman I
doubt he or she would jump to attention as quickly as if the Donald requested an audience.
The same goes for a loan from a bank, whether TBTF or otherwise, as well the law firms hired,
the waves made. Trump may not be part of the establishment power structure but he still has juice
that connects to the grid in some fashion.
I agree. My point is that assuming that because someone is rich means they're connect to the
power structure and will therefore f' you is as erroneous as assuming that someone who is not
rich and therefore not connected to the power structure will not f' you.
Both are false. See, for instance, Clintons when they were starting out.
When the "misrulership class" (hat tip, Yves) splits, it splits all the way to the top.
We don't have good both/and language to describe sets with oddball members, that I know of.
Maybe there's a sociologist or a mathematician who can enlighten me….
Very true, Yves. And, apropos of the articles noted yesterday on rational and polite political
disagreement, he is not very polite to his political opponents either in the Republican or Democrat
Parties.
As a candidate, calling out the media and your opponents out in public, especially the televised
"debates", as wimps, liars, crooks, stupid, etc., including his very unflattering nicknames for
all of them, is not how the game is played within the elite political and economic power structures
nowadays.
And it shows… if the Republican Power Structure felt he was an "insider", why are they throwing
all kinds of fits in public regarding his Primary Win?
Of course, that is part of his appeal, like him or not.
Good analysis. Trump is easier to listen to than Clinton and he makes more sense. What
he would actually do as president is anyone's guess. At least he's showing he can hire competent
speech writers. His delivery was effective. He doesn't shirk from borrowing concepts from both
Sanders and Clinton, which is good strategy.
Maybe the Russians will give Trump the low-down on the Clinton e-mails as grist for his next
speech.
I think it's an important point that even if Trump is not totally authentic, at least he cares
enough to pander on economic issues. At the least it expands what can be discussed in political
contexts.
Are you really serious! Really you found all these faults with Clinton, all of which I agree.
WHICH one of these is not true of Trump? Is he not the 1% that this site and especially this Lambert
character loves to despise. And this BS is being eaten up by NC readers? Really? This is what
this (pretty interesting) site has been reduced to? What BS.
for one thing he hasn't started any wars. he isn't surrounded by neocon foreign policy
advisors, yet, tho i wouldn't be surprised. he claims to be against the trade deal, he didn't
vote for the iraq war, so he doesn't need to pretend there was ever a reason to go in. he won't
strenghten the clintons' grip on the democratic party. just off the top of my head.
Wow, Zero Hedge just has a post on "Guccifer 2.0" who hacked the DNC servers and just posted a bunch
of documents on his own website. Some pretty embarrassing stuff including lists of the main HRC donors
and campaign strategy docs. Apparently G 2.0 is sending it all to Wikileaks, which thus may be the source
of the Assange statements re Hillary. Things are heating up :)
One of the bigger news items to hit yesterday was that the Democratic National Committee accused
Russian government hackers of penetrating the DNC's computer network and gaining access to the entire
database of opposition research on GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump. The DNC further said
that no financial, donor or personal information appears to have been accessed or taken, suggesting
that the breach was traditional espionage, not the work of criminal hackers.
It appears that was not entirely true, because barely 24 hours later, the alleged "Russian" hackers
has emerged under the Guccifer2 handle, and instead of a group of government operatives and/or spies
appears to be a "lone" hacker who incidentally adds, "DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz said
no financial documents were compromised. Nonsense! Just look through the Democratic Party lists of
donors!"
He also denounces the claim that no secret docs were stolen: "They say there were no secret docs!
Lies again! Here is a secret document from Hillary's PC she worked with as the Secretary of State."
He concludes by saying that "the main part of the papers, thousands of files and mails, I gave
to Wikileaks. They will publish them soon."
Which in turn may explain why on Monday "Julian Assange Warns WikiLeaks Will Publish "Enough Evidence"
To Indict Hillary Clinton"
Curiously, "Guccifer2" he has chosen the WordPress platform as the website where to post
his initial disclosure. As such we urge those readers who are interested in the hacked files to download
any files locally as this server will be taken down in a matter of moments.
Amazing stuff, thx! Contains strategic blueprints for the election, the transition,
the first 100 days, all the new positions to be created to ratchet up internal
surveillance, names and amounts for donors, whew!
This is my favorite part so far, in the paper on the GOP candidates and
the DNC's tactics. Under "Reporter Outreach" you can see that the press has
played their part perfectly:
Tactics
Working with the DNC and allied groups, we will use several different
methods to land these attacks, including:
• Reporter Outreach: Working through the DNC and others, we should use
background briefings, prep with reporters for interviews with GOP
candidates, off-the-record conversations and oppo pitches to help pitch
stories with no fingerprints and utilize reporters to drive a message.
• Releases and Social Media: Where appropriate these attacks can be
leveraged for more public release, particularly the attacks around
specific issues where a public release can point out that Republicans are
outside of the mainstream.
• Bracketing Events: Both the DNC and outside groups are looking to do
events and press surrounding Republican events to insert our messaging
into their press and to force them to answer questions around key issues.
To: The Democratic National Committee
Re: 2016 GOP presidential candidates
Date: May 26, 2015
From
whom is not clear.
But the really interesting thing is that the doc very much conflates
the DNC with HRC. The fix was already in:
Our goals in the coming months will be to frame the Republican
field and the eventual nominee early and to provide a contrast between
the GOP field and HRC.
And one can only assume that the same "Reporter Outreach" tactic was
employed against Sanders by the DNC. Though in the case of Sanders a kind
of press blackout on behalf of the DNC/HRC was sufficient.
I did the only thing I could think of that made sense to me in terms
of determining authenticity. I emailed the Wikileaks address for press
and other media inquiries and asked if someone there could confirm the
claims of "Guccifer2." I'm sure they're getting a lot of such inquiries
and maybe the inquiries will prompt a public response soon.
Hacker News seems pretty skeptical that it is actually top-secret DNC
docs based on the quality of the strategic stuff within. Then again, based
on the results they get, it wouldn't surprise me to learn their internal
stuff is all idiotic. Guess I'll wait for the full leak.
Because coverage for Trump, as with Sanders, has been vile piece of
jobbery by our Acela-rising
press
scorps, I'm going to quote great slabs from Trump's remarks. I'll briefly compare
and contrast what the press said to what Trump's words were. I may add brief commentary
of my own. I'm not going to quote the whole speech. Instead, I'm going to quote
three topic areas[2] from his
prepared remarks. (The transcript of the speech
as delivered, sadly in ALL CAPS,
is here). The topics:
Diversity and Multiculturalism
Blowback
War and Peace
So let's look at what Trump has to say;
1. Diversity and Multiculturalism
After calling for a moment of silence, Trump says[3] this:
TRUMP: Our nation stands together in solidarity with the members of Orlando's
LGBT Community.
This is a very dark moment in America's history.
A radical Islamic terrorist targeted the nightclub not only because he wanted
to kill Americans, but in order to execute gay and lesbian citizens because
of their sexual orientation.
It is a strike at the heart and soul of who we are as a nation.
It is an assault on the ability of free people to live their lives, love
who they want and express their identity.
It is an attack on the right of every single American to live in peace and
safety in their own country.
We need to respond to this attack on America as one united people – with
force, purpose and determination.
Let's put aside the question of sincerity: that would require us to treat whatever
Manafort and Stone have cooked up, versus whatever Clinton's focus groups have
emitted, as commensurate; but that's not possible. Let's focus on the fact that
Trump, remarkably for a Conservative Republican, puts "solidarity" (!!!) with "the
members of Orlando's LGBT Community" up front, and treats the ability of people
to "love who they want" at "the heart and soul of who we are as a nation." That's
what we used to call, back in the day at Kos,
performative speech; it changes who the Republicans are as a party by virtue
of having been said.[4] Now, politically I'd guess that Trump won't be winning
a lot of votes in the LGBT community over this any time soon, let alone turning
around
his unfavorables. I'd also guess there will be real, and more subtle, effects:
Trump is disempowering certain Republican factions (especially the "Christian"
right, proven losers), and empowering his own base not to act hatefully
toward gays (and if you believe that Trump voters are authoritarian followers,
that's important)[5].
That said, it's quite remarkable to hear the presumptive nominee of the Republican
Party say that he "stands together in solidarity with the members of Orlando's
LGBT Community." I'd even go so far as to say it's newsworthy.
WaPo did;
Bloomberg did; the conservative hive mind managed to emit
a "viral" pro-Trump letter by an anonymous gay person; but Times stenographers
Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns, in an Op-Ed somehow misfiled as reporting,
omit to mention this portion of the speech altogether. Sad!
More seriously,
Dylann Matthews of Vox does real reporting, connecting Trump ideologically
to the European right, starting with the Netherlands' Pim Fortuyn, gay himself,
who combined support for LGBT rights with a blanket ban on Muslim immigration,
and moving on through Marine LePen, concluding that Trump's support is "a smokescreen
through which to advocate anti-Muslim policies."
But Fortuyn was open about his support of gay rights; and open about banning
Muslim immigration, so isn't "smokescreen" itself a smokescreen, begging the question?
What Matthews really seems to mean is that Fortuyn's support for LGBT
rights is incompatible with Fortuyn's support for banning Muslim immigration. Empirically,
that doesn't seem to be the case; Matthews certainly doesn't document any decrease
in LGBT rights after Fortuyn's rise. So where is the incompatibility? At this point,
we note that Trump shares, with Clinton's liberals, and apparently with Fortuyn,
although not with the left, the idea that to "express identity" is the essence
of a "free people." Speculating freely, we might imagine that Matthews believes
that Muslims, like LGBT people, must also to be free to express their
identities, and that to prevent them from doing so is "Islamophobia," along the
lines of homophobia.
Here identity politics founders on its own contradictions, as identities clash
on both values and interests; identities cannot all be silo-ed in their own "safe
spaces." For example, immigration, like globalization, creates public goods but
has economic costs that some classes disportionately bear, and economic benefits
that some classes disproportionately accrue, as blue collar workers know but professional
economists are only belatedly discovering. Does the expression of identity trump
those costs? Why? And whose identity? One does not sense, for example, that liberals
are fired with concern for heartlanders who identify as Christians (unless Christians
serve a geopolitical purpose in faraway Syria), or with men who identify as gunowners.
So if what liberals (and conservatives) mean by identity politics is really just
power politics and the upward distribution of wealth, straight up, that's fine
and clarifying, but wasn't the alpha and omega supposed to be justice? Even love?
Of course, by now we are far afield from Trump; but as far as accepting LGBT
people as fully human, can't liberals take yes for an answer?
2. Blowback
Trump says:
America must do more – much more – to protect its citizens, especially people
who are potential victims of crimes based on their backgrounds or sexual orientations.
It also means we must change our foreign policy.
The decision to overthrow the regime in Libya, then pushing for the overthrow
of the regime in Syria, among other things, without plans for the day after,
have created space for ISIS to expand and grow.
These actions, along with our disastrous Iran deal, have also reduced our
ability to work in partnership with our Muslim allies in the region.
For instance, the last major NATO mission was Hillary Clinton's war in Libya.
That mission helped unleash ISIS on a new continent.
(I think the Iran deal is one of the few good things that Obama has done.) Trump
is describing what
Chalmers Johnson called "blowback." Isn't it remarkable the Trump is the only
candidate - including, AFAIK, Sanders - who's even mentioning it? (See here for
Clinton's pivotal role in promoting the LIbya debacle in the Obama administration.)
And if you want a good view into the heart of the foreign policy establishment,
try the Foreign Policy podcast.
They think Obama was weak because
he didn't put "boots on the ground" in Syria; they love Clinton because they think
she'll be "muscular"; and they hate Trump, and think hes's a lunatic. Well, what's
more lunatic then setting the Mediterranean littoral on fire, and provoking a refugee
crisis in the European Union? Moar blowback, anyone?
3. War and Peace
With respect to a military response to "radical Islamism," the difference between
Trump and Clinton can be summed up most effectively in the form of a table. (I've
taken
Clinton's words from this transcript.)
Figure 1: Recommended Military Action Against "Radical Islam"
Trump
Clinton
The attack in Orlando makes it even more clear: we cannot contain
this threat – we must defeat it.
The good news is that the coalition
effort in Syria and Iraq has made real gains in recent months.
So we should keep the pressure on ramping up the air campaign,
accelerating support for
our friends fighting to take and hold ground, and pushing our partners
in the region to do even more.
(Clinton's speech was
delivered at a Cleveland company that makes military helmets. Military Keynesianism,
anyone?)
AP [***cough***] labels Trump's speech as "aggressive," by contrast to Clinton's,
without mentioning (a) that Trump is conscious of blowback and (b) only Clinton
recommends airstrikes and an "accelerated" ground war; ditto
Politico; ditto
The Economist.
WaPo, omitting the same two points, labels Clinton as "sober." I guess a couple
three more
Friedman Units should do it…
Conclusion
Just as a troll prophylactic, let me say that this post is not an endorsement
of any candidate (not even
Sanders, who snagged an F-35 base for Vermont). I'm not sure how to balance
charges of racism, fascism, and corruption in the context of identity politics,
when clearly all three are systemic, interact with each other, and must be owned
by all (both) candidates. (Do the bodies of people of color char differently because
they are far away? Doesn't a
"disposition matrix" sound like something
Adolf Eichmann might devise?)
Rather, this post is a plea for citizens to "do their own research"[6] and listen
to what the candidates actually say, put that in context, and try to understand.
The press, with a few honorable exceptions, seems to be gripped by the same "madness
of crowds" that gripped them in 2008 (except for Obama, against Clinton) or in
2002-2003 (for WMDs, and for the Iraq War). Only in that way can we hope to hold
candidates accountable.
APPENDIX I
Some brief remarks on Trump's advance work:
1) Trump still needs practice with his teleprompter;
2) The mike was picking up Trump's breathing;
3) The staging looks like Dukakis (that is, provincial). It should look like
Reagan (national);
4) Trump's website is simple and easy to use and looks like it was designed
for a normal person, not a laid-off
site developer. However, it looks low budget. Hmm.
APPENDIX II
Here's why I skipped Trump on guns and the NRA. To frame this in partisan terms:
From Democrats, what I consider to be a rational policy on guns -
taxing gun owners for the externalities of gun ownership combined with Darwin
Awards over time, and ridicule - is not on offer, so it's foolish to waste time
with whatever ineffective palliative they propose, especially while they continue
to take money from private equity firms that own gun manufacturers, and arrange
overseas contracts for those same manufacturers. As for Republicans, it's impossible
to see how the country could be more awash in guns than it already is. So if you
want to argue about guns, don't do it here. There's plenty of opportunity in both
Links and Water Cooler.
[2] Except for Section 3, "War and Peace," I'm not going to compare Clinton's
foreign policy speech today to this speech by Trump, because I've analyzed several
Clinton speeches already, and presumably NC readers already know how to parse her.
[3] I'm not going to analyze Trump's rhetoric in in this post, but note the
anaphora: "It is… It is.. It is…." Notice also
the simple, declarative sentences, which Trump uses very effectively as hammer
blows; the most complicated sentence we get in this passage is the parallel construction
of "not only because… not because." And note the sound patterning from the sentence
containing that phrase, gutturals like gunfire: "A radical Islamic
terrorist targeted the nightclub not only because
he wanted to kill Americans, but in order to execute
gay and lesbian citizens because of their sexual orientation."
Whoever Trump hired to write his speeches, they're doing an excellent, and unobtrusive,
job.
[4] That's not to give the parties, let alone Trump, credit; they follow and
don't lead. LGBT people led, in particular the now almost erased ACT-UP, with its
non-violent direct action.
[5] And if you're extremely cynical, you might see Trump as posthumously rehabilitating
Roy Cohn. But today is my day to be kind.
[6] See
PBS,
CBS, and *** cough ***
AP on fact-checking. Sometimes, of course, facts are "facts"; more importantly:
WANTED: CEO
Must be detail oriented
Said no search firm ever.
Which is better: The candidate who gets the big picture right, and details wrong,
or the candidate who's great with detail, and bounces from one clstrfck to another?
You tell me.
"... If Donald Trump, as seems more than likely, prevails in the GOP primary, then a number of neocons may defect to the Clinton campaign. Already Robert Kagan announced in the Washington Post ..."
"... The impulse of the neocons to return to the Democratic Party should not be wholly surprising. In 1972, for example, Robert L. Bartley, the editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... For its part, neoconservatism has always had a nationalistic streak. But Trump represents everything that the neocons believed that they had purged from the GOP. He represents continuity with the Buchananite wing, the belief that America should tend to its own knitting before launching hopeless wars abroad. When it comes to foreign policy, however, the second generation of neocons such as Kagan does not trace its lineage back to Ohio Senator Robert Taft but to the one that Republicans in the early 1950s reviled: the Truman administration. ..."
Anyone looking for further converts to the Hillary Clinton campaign might do well to look at the
Marco Rubio campaign. If Clinton is the leading liberal hawk, Rubio is the foremost neocon candidate.
In 2014 National Review published an article about him titled "The
neocons return."
Whether it's Cuba or Iran or Russia, he stakes out the most
intransigent line: "I disagree with voices in my own party who argue we should not engage at
all, who warn we should heed the words of John Quincy Adams not to go 'abroad, in search of monsters
to destroy.'" Not surprisingly, he's surrounded himself with neocon advisers, ranging from Max Boot
to Jamie Fly to Elliott Abrams.
If Donald Trump, as seems more than likely, prevails in the GOP primary, then a number of
neocons may defect to the Clinton campaign. Already
Robert Kagan announced in the Washington Post on Thursday that he intends to back Hillary
Clinton if Donald Trump receives the GOP nomination. The fact is that the loyalty of the neocons
has always been to an ideology of American exceptionalism, not to a particular party.
This is what separates the neocon conversion to Clinton from previous examples of Republicans
endorsing Barack Obama. Colin Powell wasn't making an ideological statement. He was making a practical
one, based on his distaste for where the GOP was headed. For the neocons this is a much more heartfelt
moment. They have invested decades in trying to reshape the GOP into their own image, and were quite
successful at it. But now a formidable challenge is taking place as the GOP reverts to its traditional
heritage.
The impulse of the neocons to return to the Democratic Party should not be wholly surprising.
In 1972, for example, Robert L. Bartley, the editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal,
wrote that the fledgling neoconservatives represented "something of a swing group between the two
major parties." He was right. The neoconservatives had their home in the Democratic Party in the
1960s. Then they marched rightward, in reaction to the rise of the adversary culture inside the Democratic
Party. George McGovern's run for the presidency in 1972, followed by the Jimmy Carter presidency,
sent them into the arms of Ronald Reagan and the GOP.
But it wasn't until the George W. Bush presidency that the neocons became the dominant foreign
policy force inside the GOP. They promptly proceeded to wreck his presidency by championing the war
in Iraq. Today, having wrecked it, they are now threatening to bolt the GOP and support Hillary Clinton
rather than Donald Trump for the presidency.
Something like this scenario is
what I predicted in the New York Times in July 2014. Trump wasn't around then as a force
inside the GOP. But already it seemed clear that some of the leading neocons such as Kagan were receptive
to Clinton. Now, in a Washington Post column, Kagan has gone all in.
He decries Republican obstructionism, antipathy to Obama, and the rise of Trump. The tone is apocalyptic.
According to
Kagan,
"So what to do now? The Republicans' creation will soon be let loose on the land, leaving to
others the job the party failed to carry out. For this former Republican, and perhaps for others,
the only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton. The party cannot be saved, but the country
still can be."
This itself represents a curious case of neocon hyperbole. Kagan is an eloquent writer, but he
elides the fact that many of Trump's positions are not all that different from what the GOP has espoused
in the past when it comes to domestic issues. It is on foreign affairs where Trump represents a marked
shift and it is this that truly troubles the neocon wing.
Trump has made it clear that he's dubious about foreign interventions. He's indicated that he
would treat with Russian president Vladimir Putin. His entire foreign policy credo, such as it is,
seems to have a
Jacksonian pedigree-don't tread on me.
For its part, neoconservatism has always had a nationalistic streak. But Trump represents
everything that the neocons believed that they had purged from the GOP. He represents continuity
with the Buchananite wing, the belief that America should tend to its own knitting before launching
hopeless wars abroad. When it comes to foreign policy, however, the second generation of neocons
such as Kagan does not trace its lineage back to Ohio Senator Robert Taft but to the one that Republicans
in the early 1950s reviled: the Truman administration.
Here we come full circle. The origins of the neocons are in the Democratic Party. Should Clinton
become the Democratic nominee and Trump the Republican one, a number of neocons may make common cause
with Clinton. Watch Rubio's ranks first.
Jacob Heilbrunn is editor of the National Interest.
"... Prominent neocon Robert Kagan has endorsed Democrat Hillary Clinton for president, saying she represents the best hope for saving the United States from populist billionaire Donald Trump, who has repudiated the neoconservative cause of U.S. military interventions in line with Israel's interests. ..."
"... Then referring to himself, he added, "For this former Republican, and perhaps for others, the only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton. The [Republican] party cannot be saved, but the country still can be." ..."
"... Kagan, who I've known since the 1980s when he was a rising star on Ronald Reagan's State Department propaganda team (selling violent right-wing policies in Central America), has been signaling his affection for Clinton for some time, at least since she appointed him as an adviser to her State Department and promoted his wife Victoria Nuland, a former top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, to be the State Department's chief spokesperson. Largely because of Clinton's patronage, Nuland rose to assistant secretary of state for European affairs and oversaw the provocative "regime change" in Ukraine in 2014. ..."
"... "I feel comfortable with her on foreign policy. If she pursues a policy which we think she will pursue it's something that might have been called neocon, but clearly her supporters are not going to call it that; they are going to call it something else." ..."
"... Now, Kagan, whose Project for the New American Century wrote the blueprint for George W. Bush's disastrous Iraq War, is now abandoning the Republican Party in favor of Hillary Clinton. ..."
"... While Kagan's op-ed surely makes some accurate points about Republicans, his endorsement of Hillary Clinton raises a different issue for Democrats: Do they want a presidential candidate who someone as savvy as Kagan knows will perpetuate neocon strategies around the world? Do Democrats really trust Hillary Clinton to handle delicate issues, such as the Syrian conflict, without resorting to escalations that may make the neocon disasters under George W. Bush look minor by comparison? ..."
"... Perhaps Robert Kagan's endorsement of Hillary Clinton and what that underscores about the likely foreign policy of a second Clinton presidency might finally force war or peace to the fore of the campaign. ..."
Exclusive: Hillary Clinton's cozy ties to Washington's powerful neocons
have paid off with the endorsement of Robert Kagan, one of the most influential neocons. But it also
should raise questions among Democrats about what kind of foreign policy a President Hillary Clinton
would pursue, writes Robert Parry.
Prominent neocon Robert Kagan has endorsed Democrat Hillary Clinton for president, saying
she represents the best hope for saving the United States from populist billionaire Donald Trump,
who has repudiated the neoconservative cause of U.S. military interventions in line with Israel's
interests.
In a Washington Post
op-ed published on Thursday, Kagan excoriated the Republican Party for creating the conditions
for Trump's rise and then asked, "So what to do now? The Republicans' creation will soon be let loose
on the land, leaving to others the job the party failed to carry out."
Then referring to himself, he added, "For this former Republican, and perhaps for others,
the only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton. The [Republican] party cannot be saved, but
the country still can be."
While many of Kagan's observations about the Republican tolerance and even encouragement of bigotry
are correct, the fact that a leading neocon, a co-founder of the infamous Project for the New American
Century, has endorsed Clinton raises questions for Democrats who have so far given the former New
York senator and Secretary of State mostly a pass on her pro-interventionist policies.
The fact is that Clinton has generally marched in lock step with the neocons as they have implemented
an aggressive "regime change" strategy against governments and political movements that don't toe
Washington's line or that deviate from Israel's goals in the Middle East. So she has backed coups,
such as in Honduras (2009) and Ukraine (2014); invasions, such as Iraq (2003) and Libya (2011); and
subversions such as Syria (from 2011 to the present) all with various degrees of disastrous results.
Yet, with the failure of Republican establishment candidates to gain political traction against
Trump, Clinton has clearly become the choice of many neoconservatives and "liberal interventionists"
who favor continuation of U.S. imperial designs around the world. The question for Democrats now
is whether they wish to perpetuate those war-like policies by sticking with Clinton or should switch
to Sen. Bernie Sanders, who offers a somewhat less aggressive (though vaguely defined) foreign policy.
Sanders has undermined his appeal to anti-imperialist Democrats by muting his criticism of Clinton's
"regime change" strategies and concentrating relentlessly on his message of "income inequality" for
which Clinton has disingenuously dubbed him a "single-issue candidate." Whether Sanders has the will
and the time to reorient his campaign to question Clinton's status as the new neocon choice remains
in doubt.
A Reagan Propagandist
Kagan, who I've known since the 1980s when he was a rising star on Ronald Reagan's State Department
propaganda team (selling violent right-wing policies in Central America), has been signaling his
affection for Clinton for some time, at least since she appointed him as an adviser to her State
Department and promoted his wife Victoria Nuland, a former top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney,
to be the State Department's chief spokesperson. Largely because of Clinton's patronage, Nuland rose
to assistant secretary of state for European affairs and oversaw the provocative
"regime change" in Ukraine in 2014.
Later in 2014, Kagan told The New York Times that he hoped that his neocon views which he had
begun to call "liberal interventionist" would prevail in a possible Hillary Clinton administration.
The Times reported that Clinton "remains the vessel into which many interventionists are pouring
their hopes" and quoted Kagan as saying:
"I feel comfortable with her on foreign policy. If she pursues a policy which we think she
will pursue it's something that might have been called neocon, but clearly her supporters are not
going to call it that; they are going to call it something else."
Now, Kagan, whose Project for the New American Century wrote the blueprint for George W. Bush's
disastrous Iraq War, is now abandoning the Republican Party in favor of Hillary Clinton.
... ... ...
While Kagan's op-ed surely makes some accurate points about Republicans, his endorsement of
Hillary Clinton raises a different issue for Democrats: Do they want a presidential candidate who
someone as savvy as Kagan knows will perpetuate neocon strategies around the world? Do Democrats
really trust Hillary Clinton to handle delicate issues, such as the Syrian conflict, without resorting
to escalations that may make the neocon disasters under George W. Bush look minor by comparison?
Will Clinton even follow the latest neocon dream of "regime change" in Moscow as the ultimate
way of collapsing Israel's lesser obstacles - Iran, Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Palestinian
resistance? Does Clinton have the wisdom to understand that neocon schemes are often half-baked (remember
"the cakewalk" in Iraq) and that the risk of overthrowing Vladimir Putin in Moscow might lead not
to some new pliable version of Boris Yeltsin but to a dangerous Russian nationalist ready to use
the nuclear codes to defend Mother Russia? (For all Putin's faults, he is a calculating adversary,
not a crazy one.)
The fact that none of these life-and-death foreign policy questions has been thoroughly or intelligently
explored during the Democratic presidential campaign is a failure of both the mainstream media moderators
and the two candidates, Sanders and Clinton, neither of whom seems to want a serious or meaningful
debate about these existential issues.
Perhaps Robert Kagan's endorsement of Hillary Clinton and what that underscores about the
likely foreign policy of a second Clinton presidency might finally force war or peace to the fore
of the campaign.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated
Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America's Stolen Narrative,
either in
print here or as an e-book (from
Amazon and
barnesandnoble.com).
This Democratic Party Politburo is approaching in power to the Politburo of
the CPSU making primaries redundant -- candidate supported by Politburo is
the candidate that will be installed as the candidate from the Party in
Presidential election independently of the level rank-and-file voters support.
This is especially true is competition is close.
Notable quotes:
"... Even if Clinton were to lose California to Bernie Sanders, she would be well ahead in the number of delegates awarded based on the outcome of primaries, though still shy of the 2,383 threshold -- a majority at the party's nominating convention in July. ..."
"... AP based its findings on a survey of the superdelegates -- the party's high-level officials, officeholders and operatives who get a vote at the convention just for being Very Important. Clinton has been piling up superdelegate support since long before the first primary. The 571st to promise to vote for Clinton at the convention put her over the top, according to AP. ..."
"... In fact, the media were merely ratifying what Hillary Clinton's supporters have been preaching for months -- more and more frantically when their candidate kept losing to Sanders, who was harangued endlessly about the need to shut up so Democrats could "unify." ..."
"... "It's time to stand behind our presumptive candidate," Michael Brown, a superdelegate from Washington, D.C., who came forward in the past week to back Clinton before the District's June 14 primary, told the AP . "We shouldn't be acting like we are undecided when the people of America have spoken." ..."
"... Except that quite a few "people of America" didn't speak. As The Intercept commented , it was a fitting end to a race where party leaders and prominent liberals relied on their control of the party and media apparatus to steer the nomination to their choice: "Anonymous Superdelegates Declare Winner Through Media." ..."
"... Suddenly, Clinton -- a fixture of the Democratic Party establishment since before her husband occupied the White House and the presumptive nominee in 2016 since just after Barack Obama won re-election in 2012 -- had a fight on her hands against a candidate who connected with the disgust with the status quo felt by millions. ..."
"... As secretary of state , Clinton supported the coup-makers in Honduras who overthrew democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya; the deadly 2009 troop surge in Afghanistan; and the Obama administration's escalation of drone warfare. She used her position to travel the world convincing governments to start fracking for natural gas and oil, among other priorities of Corporate America. ..."
"... The message to the Democratic Party's more liberal voting base is already clear: Sure, you may have some criticisms of Hillary Clinton, and you may have liked what Bernie Sanders had to say -- but it's time to get real and start helping ensure the victory of the "lesser evil" in order to stop the "greater evil." But everything about Clinton's political career is further evidence that voting for the "lesser evil" leads to of evils of both kinds. ..."
"... Clinton will take the support of liberals and progressives for granted, and start concocting strategies to win over moderate and conservative "swing voters." So get ready for more speeches like her foreign policy address where it's hard to see what distinguishes her from a more mainstream Republican than Trump. ..."
"... This exposes the gap between what the Democrats are offering and what the people who are expected to vote for them want. Supporting Hillary Clinton won't close that gap. We need to start organizing for an alternative -- in politics and in all the protest movements throughout society -- that can. ..."
Hillary Clinton did well in the final major day of the Democratic presidential
primaries, winning all but one state, though the outcome in California, the
biggest contest of the whole season, was still in doubt as this article was
published.
Even if Clinton were to lose California to Bernie Sanders, she would
be well ahead in the number of delegates awarded based on the outcome of primaries,
though still shy of the 2,383 threshold -- a majority at the party's nominating
convention in July.
Sanders, whose left-wing campaign surpassed all expectations and inspired
huge numbers of people, has promised to continue his campaign, possibly through
the convention. But on election night, there were signs -- including reports
of a Thursday meeting between Sanders and Barack Obama, scheduled at Sanders'
request -- that he might relent and concede.
Either way, though, the Associated Press (AP) wasn't waiting around.
On Monday night -- with hours to go before polling places opened on the day
with the second-largest number of Democratic delegates at stake -- the news
service announced that Clinton had enough pledged delegates plus "superdelegates"
supporting her to have a lock on the nomination.
AP based its findings on a survey of the superdelegates -- the party's
high-level officials, officeholders and operatives who get a vote at the convention
just for being Very Important. Clinton has been piling up superdelegate support
since long before the first primary. The 571st to promise to vote for Clinton
at the convention put her over the top, according to AP.
In California,
Long Beach resident Arie Gonzalez told the Los Angeles Times, "It's like,
why vote?...I can't believe Democrats have all these superdelegates and that
we vote consistently always with Iowa first and California has no voice by the
time it comes down to it. We're a tenth of the population. It's ridiculous."
In fact, the media were merely ratifying what Hillary Clinton's supporters
have been preaching for months -- more and more frantically when their candidate
kept losing to Sanders, who was harangued endlessly about the need to shut up
so Democrats could "unify."
"It's time to stand behind our presumptive candidate," Michael Brown,
a superdelegate from Washington, D.C., who came forward in the past week to
back Clinton before the District's June 14 primary,
told the AP. "We shouldn't be acting like we are undecided when the people
of America have spoken."
Except that quite a few "people of America" didn't speak.
As The Intercept commented, it was a fitting end to a race where party leaders
and prominent liberals relied on their control of the party and media apparatus
to steer the nomination to their choice: "Anonymous Superdelegates Declare Winner
Through Media."
***
The preempting of the actual vote by superdelegate math overshadowed coverage
of the wave of enthusiasm that Sanders rode going into the final big primaries.
In California, a campaign event in Oakland drew 20,000 people, and another in
LA turned out 13,500, despite being moved to a different venue at the last minute.
This has been the story since the start of the campaign. From the moment
he said he would run for the Democratic nomination, Sanders, the self-declared
socialist, drew crowds eager to hear a candidate who talked about taking on
corporate greed, challenging the corruption of the US political system and putting
working people ahead of Wall Street profits.
Suddenly, Clinton -- a fixture of the Democratic Party establishment
since before her husband occupied the White House and the presumptive nominee
in 2016 since just after Barack Obama won re-election in 2012 --
had a fight on her hands against a candidate who connected with the disgust
with the status quo felt by millions.
... ... ...
As secretary of state, Clinton supported the coup-makers in Honduras
who overthrew democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya; the deadly 2009
troop surge in Afghanistan; and the Obama administration's escalation of drone
warfare. She used her position to travel the world convincing governments to
start fracking for natural gas and oil, among other priorities of Corporate
America.
Clinton says she's ready to stand up to Trump and his agenda, but when ordinary
people do just that with actions, not just words, she's on the other side.
... ... ..
***
The message to the Democratic Party's more liberal voting base is already
clear: Sure, you may have some criticisms of Hillary Clinton, and you may have
liked what Bernie Sanders had to say -- but it's time to get real and start
helping ensure the victory of the "lesser evil" in order to stop the "greater
evil." But everything about Clinton's political career is further evidence that
voting for the "lesser evil" leads to of evils of both kinds.
... ... ...
Clinton, meanwhile, will make the Democratic presidential nominee's time-honored
"move to the center" -- though after a primary where she turned into the "No
we can't" candidate on health care, college tuition and more, she doesn't have
far to go.
Clinton will take the support of liberals and progressives for granted,
and start concocting strategies to win over moderate and conservative "swing
voters." So get ready for more speeches like her foreign policy address where
it's hard to see what distinguishes her from a more mainstream Republican than
Trump.
A recent poll by the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research illustrates
growing dissatisfaction with the political process and the two political parties.
The May study of registered voters, Republicans and Democrats, showed that 90
percent lack confidence in the US political system. Some 40 percent said it
was "seriously broken."
"The views of ordinary voters are not considered by either party, according
to most Americans," the study stated. "Fourteen percent say the Democratic Party
is responsive to the views of the rank-and-file; 8 percent report that about
the Republican Party."
But
as Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting pointed out, the corporate media didn't
report on this poll. They were too busy conducting a survey of anonymous superdelegates
so they could tell primary voters that Clinton was already the winner, so they
don't need to bother.
This exposes the gap between what the Democrats are offering and what
the people who are expected to vote for them want. Supporting Hillary Clinton
won't close that gap. We need to start organizing for an alternative -- in politics
and in all the protest movements throughout society -- that can.
This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It
may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.
Elizabeth Schulte is a journalist and reviews editor for the Socialist Worker,
writing frequently on low-wage workers, the Democratic Party and women's liberation.
"... And if you consider Hillary's centre-right politics "liberal," there would indeed be a "liberal renaissance." But unfortunately, Democrats are now neoliberal "New Democrats" in the service of upper-middle-class professionals. They talk a good line about strengthening the (now practically nonexistent) middle class and addressing the concerns of working families, but don't hold your breath. ..."
"... "We will no longer surrender this country or its people to the false song of globalism" - DJ Trump ..."
"... and SHILLary would say something like this : " Oh yes Dr Kissenger yes we will get rid of the 2nd amendment and mud up the population of the US, don't worry we will bring in lots of illegals to bankrupt the US and push us forward (er backward)..' ..."
"... Trump was never the issue. The issue is the DNC & their unfair, undemocratic system. it begins with big money, super pacs and super delegates. The DNC has left the utmost basic principle of democracy somewhere in neverneverland, namely 1 woman/man = 1 vote. instead the DNC, over the decades, has instituted a system of undeclared monies, undeclared contributors, perhaps accepting money from foreign countries (for an American election) ... who really knows. ..."
"... Well said !! Clinton is part of the elitist establishment who are the ones who truly govern the US. Crooked ..."
"... She's liberal in the same way that Richard Nixon was liberal. And he really was, y'know, in some small and superficial ways. But he was also Richard Nixon. ..."
"... So many guardian articles presenting Clinton as some kind of progressive hero who would be less (a) less conservative and (b) less awful than Trump, but I'm still waiting for anyone to give any kind of reason why we should ignore all the available evidence suggesting she is just as bad. ..."
"... ha and how many people would vote Obama again? Only those living off the government teat by choice, that's who or the very uneducated! ..."
"... I am basing my statement on HRC's militarily aggressive rhetoric and actual record in cabinets that used military intervention; converesely Trump's rhetoric has been conciliatory to Russia and Syria. ..."
"... Remember Vietnam? The US intervention was by Executive Order, and Congress financed it because by not doing so it would have endangered even more the lives of US military personnel. ..."
"... The USA hasn't fought a "war" since WW2 - all other conflicts have been fought under "presidential orders". Even Vietnam, in US history all Govt references are always to the Vietnam "conflict" precisely because legally war was never actually declared. HRC's record is far more aggressive that Trump's policies, she is far more likely to go to war than DT. ..."
"... Root causes. Saudi Arabia is the largest global funder of fundamentalism. As long as they are allowed to continue, all the rest is just ongoing effects and details of a monstrous strategy, that clinton happily ignores. ..."
"... Clintons message yesterday : "To the LGBT community: please know that you have millions of allies across our country. I am one of them." On a platform funded by Saudi Arabia, where homosexuality is punishable by death. You're dreaming if you think Hillary will bring about a liberal renaissance. She's not about values, she's about her getting rich & powerful. ..."
"... That slightly over looks the fact that America is an extremely violent country when compared to any of the worlds other developed economies, (granted compared to Mexico and Iraq things don't look so bad). The homicide rate in the US, down to firearms is off the scale. ..."
"... Well, the answer is simple. Young people do not see any possibility that policy can improve something in their lives, because in the end it all comes down to the same and the preservation of the status quo. And, by losing faith that they can change something with political means, they are turning to violence and destruction. Some resort to violence against themselves, such as drug addicts, some resort to violence against others, as criminals, and some do both at the same time as this young man who committed mass murder in Orlando. ..."
"... Notice how the G4S gunman who ran amok chose a gun free zone. There he was, licensed by the State of Florida to carry firearms on the job and employed by the British G4S security company for almost 9 years and when he had a bad couple of days he selected a nightclub for his target. No guns there except for the off duty cop outside whose fire forced him back in the club when he was trying to run away after his first kills. Cops always choosing the worst possible time to open fire. He should have waited until the guy was a few more feet away from the door. ..."
"... Tanya, I wrote a message about campaigning Humanism instead of gay rights, because every human life is valuable. So, this is what happens when this liberal progressive group tries to sensationalize their campaign of new world order/one world government. ..."
"... This article is nothing but an exercise in wishful thinking. Hillary is a very weak, heavily compromised candidate. And she still has the FBI investigation hanging over his head. ..."
"... Trump is just the symptom of a sick, elitist system. As is Sanders to a less alarming extent. ..."
"... American values were already down the toilet before any influence of muslims. Sold to the highest bidder. The creation of a working poor class, reduction of access to health care and education to only those who can afford it, rule of the gun replacing rule of law - and special" rules"/treatment under law for rich ..."
"... You know why Trump will win the general election? JOBS- that's the number one issue in the United States. ..."
"... If Hillary is promising more of the same with the TPP and TTIP crap (Her husband already screwed over the US with NAFTA and China's accession to the WTO) then she will lose. (38,000 jobs created in the last quarter suggests that Obama's legacy on the economy is going to be shit). ..."
"... She doesn't lie - I love your qualification - "as much" ..."
"... Yes the Clinton's brought in NAFTA and the laws that have led to the explosion of the prison system in the US. She destroyed Libya, supported the Coup D'etat in Honduras (and then edited it out of the second volume of her autobiography). Trump is a terrible option but the way the US has been run for the past 30 years is also terrible and the world is paying and will pay a terrible price for this. You say Clinton. Others say Trump. I say neither. ..."
"... You apply to Trump attributes that could equally fit Hillary Clinton ..."
"... What has the US been doing towards Russia and China in this period of Democratic governance? Have they continued to knock off countries that don't follow their dictates? Do they sell weapons to those who give them to ISIS or those who bomb and murder civilians (Saudi Arabia - Israel etc) ..."
"... Liberal Renaissance! Gee, how come Hillary did not thought to adopt this as its election slogan? Anyway, what was the election slogan of Hillary Clinton? I don't remember that she had any.:-) ..."
"... The author isn't impartial. He has an agenda. A cursory reading of his twitter account confirms his politics and his bias. And this explains why he has misrepresented Trump's attack on Judge Curiel's - It is for political purposes. Trump accused the Judge of being racist. I don't know if that was wise or fair but that was what Trump did - He didn't make a racist attack on the judge instead he accused the Judge of being racist. ..."
"... Certainly you are not looking to Hillary to lead a liberal renaissance. Hillary is not a liberal is the a leading neoliberal. Neoliberalism believes that markets are self-sufficient unto themselves, that they do not need regulation, and that they are the best guarantors of human welfare. ..."
"... Hillary Clinton has been the most perfect embodiment of neoliberalism among all the candidates, she is almost its all-time ideal avatar, and I believe this explains, even if not articulated this way, the widespread discomfort among the populace toward her ascendancy. Hillary Clinton is one of the founders of neoliberal globalization, one of its central historical figures (having accelerated the warehousing of the poor, the attack on trade unions, and the end of welfare and of regulatory prowess), while Trump is an authoritarian figure whose conceptions of the state and of human beings within the state are inconsistent with the surface frictionlessness neoliberalism desires ..."
"... Neocon/neoliberal...is there a difference? Both lead to the same place. However, neocon is more precisely what Clinton is since she's always been far more of a conservative than liberal. ..."
Yeah, there are people who think that Hillary Clinton is a lesser evil than Trump. And there
are some other people who think that Hillary Clinton is just evil. As this one, for example:
Hillary Clinton is Evil!
(REMIX) by placeboing
And I think that the latter are at least more creative, don't you think? :-)
ID8667623 12 Jun 2016 19:34
All true. And if you consider Hillary's centre-right politics "liberal," there would indeed
be a "liberal renaissance." But unfortunately, Democrats are now neoliberal "New Democrats" in
the service of upper-middle-class professionals. They talk a good line about strengthening the
(now practically nonexistent) middle class and addressing the concerns of working families, but
don't hold your breath.
Ezra Pound jamietintin 12 Jun 2016 19:49
He isn't perfect but here ya go
"We will no longer surrender this country or its people to the false song of globalism"
- DJ Trump
and SHILLary would say something like this : " Oh yes Dr Kissenger yes we will get rid
of the 2nd amendment and mud up the population of the US, don't worry we will bring in lots of
illegals to bankrupt the US and push us forward (er backward)..'
hadeze242 12 Jun 2016 19:36
Trump was never the issue. The issue is the DNC & their unfair, undemocratic system. it
begins with big money, super pacs and super delegates. The DNC has left the utmost basic principle
of democracy somewhere in neverneverland, namely 1 woman/man = 1 vote. instead the DNC, over the
decades, has instituted a system of undeclared monies, undeclared contributors, perhaps accepting
money from foreign countries (for an American election) ... who really knows. Voters (independents)
are denied access to a vote, registration takes place the year before a Primary, voting poles
close early ... if this is "progressive" or democratic, then my name is Rumpelstilzchen.
Joe Thruter -> GoodbyeEurope 13 Jun 2016 08:24
Well said !! Clinton is part of the elitist establishment who are the ones who truly govern
the US. Crooked Hillary or Trump for that matter will follow the script given to them by
their "Masters" !!
Drewv D Flynn 13 Jun 2016 04:46
She's liberal in the same way that Richard Nixon was liberal. And he really was, y'know,
in some small and superficial ways. But he was also Richard Nixon.
MrRico1 13 Jun 2016 05:19
So many guardian articles presenting Clinton as some kind of progressive hero who would
be less (a) less conservative and (b) less awful than Trump, but I'm still waiting for anyone
to give any kind of reason why we should ignore all the available evidence suggesting she is just
as bad.
Ezra Pound -> bolshevik96 12 Jun 2016 20:24
ha and how many people would vote Obama again? Only those living off the government teat
by choice, that's who or the very uneducated!
BrunoForestier -> Defiini 13 Jun 2016 00:19
I am basing my statement on HRC's militarily aggressive rhetoric and actual record in cabinets
that used military intervention; converesely Trump's rhetoric has been conciliatory to Russia
and Syria. Trump has seen the light on the Middle East and wants America to disengage and
be free of the region's constant trouble.
The best the West can do is to become oil independent of the ME and just leave the people there
to keep killing each other without exporting the problems our way.
AngryExpat -> Defiini 13 Jun 2016 00:10
Remember Vietnam? The US intervention was by Executive Order, and Congress financed it
because by not doing so it would have endangered even more the lives of US military personnel.
BrunoForestier -> AngryExpat 13 Jun 2016 00:02
The USA hasn't fought a "war" since WW2 - all other conflicts have been fought under "presidential
orders". Even Vietnam, in US history all Govt references are always to the Vietnam "conflict"
precisely because legally war was never actually declared. HRC's record is far more aggressive
that Trump's policies, she is far more likely to go to war than DT.
Kevin P Brown GoodbyeEurope 13 Jun 2016 07:06
Root causes. Saudi Arabia is the largest global funder of fundamentalism. As long as they
are allowed to continue, all the rest is just ongoing effects and details of a monstrous strategy,
that clinton happily ignores.
GoodbyeEurope 13 Jun 2016 06:36
Clintons message yesterday : "To the LGBT community: please know that you have millions
of allies across our country. I am one of them." On a platform funded by Saudi Arabia, where homosexuality
is punishable by death. You're dreaming if you think Hillary will bring about a liberal renaissance.
She's not about values, she's about her getting rich & powerful.
nnedjo -> jamie_qwerty 13 Jun 2016 09:07
You're welcome!
I'd just like to add something. Hillary's statement, "We came, we saw, he died," is in fact
a paraphrase of the statement of the famous Roman emperor Julius Caesar, who once said, "I came,
I saw, I conquered." Thus, in the twisted mind of Hillary Clinton, there is nothing wrong with
the fact that America is now starting military campaigns, not to conquer, but only to kill the
leader of another country. Well, I would say that nevertheless there was more honor in Caesar's
wars to conquer than in this Clinton-Obama war in Libya for the sole purpose of killing.
Andy Mills -> GlennHughes2016 13 Jun 2016 06:07
That slightly over looks the fact that America is an extremely violent country when compared
to any of the worlds other developed economies, (granted compared to Mexico and Iraq things don't
look so bad). The homicide rate in the US, down to firearms is off the scale. But heah, why
should we care, if you want to go on butchering each other by the tens of thousands, year in ,
year out why should the rest of the world give a damn Just don't export your stupid obsession
with firearms to the rest of the world thank you very much.
nnedjo -> philipsiron 12 Jun 2016 20:00
What's the motive behind Orlando shooting?
I think you need to watch some videos of the Bernie Sanders rallies, to understand the "motives"
behind Orlando shooting.
So, Bernie was talking all the time about it; Young people do not see their place in politics,
and they flee from politics in flocks.
And why is that?
Well, the answer is simple. Young people do not see any possibility that policy can improve
something in their lives, because in the end it all comes down to the same and the preservation
of the status quo. And, by losing faith that they can change something with political means, they
are turning to violence and destruction.
Some resort to violence against themselves, such as drug addicts, some resort to violence against
others, as criminals, and some do both at the same time as this young man who committed mass murder
in Orlando.
You can understand that I am right, if you notice that he was a registered voter of the Democratic
Party and was employed by renowned security company, which means that he was trained to defend
unarmed people, and not to kill them. So, one could say that he was on the right track to make
something positive of his life. But then, what could turn him from the right track?
Well, I think I've already answered that question up above, and you consider for yourself.
AlfredHerring -> Ezra Pound 12 Jun 2016 18:30
Seriously. Notice how the G4S gunman who ran amok chose a gun free zone. There he was,
licensed by the State of Florida to carry firearms on the job and employed by the British G4S
security company for almost 9 years and when he had a bad couple of days he selected a nightclub
for his target. No guns there except for the off duty cop outside whose fire forced him back in
the club when he was trying to run away after his first kills. Cops always choosing the worst
possible time to open fire. He should have waited until the guy was a few more feet away from
the door.
philipsiron -> tanya44 12 Jun 2016 19:23
Tanya, I wrote a message about campaigning Humanism instead of gay rights, because every
human life is valuable. So, this is what happens when this liberal progressive group tries to
sensationalize their campaign of new world order/one world government.
peter nelson 13 Jun 2016 13:16
This article is nothing but an exercise in wishful thinking. Hillary is a very weak, heavily
compromised candidate. And she still has the FBI investigation hanging over his head.
Meanwhile Trump's racism and bigotry pays well to an American audience, and events like the
one in Orlando only gain him adherents. The author is making the same mistake contest other pundits
did throughout the election, of underestimating him. What's amazing is that unlike those other
pundits, this one has the benefit of hindsight and still makes it.
Angelaaaa -> hadeze242 12 Jun 2016 19:56
The GOP are no strangers to big money and super pacs either. Undeclared monies, undeclared
contributors, the influence of foreign countries (Papa Saud, anyone?), voters denied access to
a vote ... these are the hallmarks of both sides of politics.
The issue is the evolution of politics away from a fair, democratic system.
Trump is just the symptom of a sick, elitist system. As is Sanders to a less alarming extent.
swmbo2 -> tanya44 12 Jun 2016 19:46
American values were already down the toilet before any influence of muslims. Sold to the
highest bidder. The creation of a working poor class, reduction of access to health care and education
to only those who can afford it, rule of the gun replacing rule of law - and special" rules"/treatment
under law for rich and preferably male, white people. Oh don't forget a multiple times bankrupt
running for President - who along with his supporters also takes great pleasure in the cold blooded
murder of 50 precious lives. American values down the toilet because of muslims - don't think
so. To resort to biblical references - let those without sin cast the first stone…….
And finally, in case your bigotted mind didn't know, islam is very much anti-gay - which aligns
nicely with what appear to be your values.
ShaneFromMelbourne -> phillyred 13 Jun 2016 12:30
You know why Trump will win the general election? JOBS- that's the number one issue in
the United States. Forget all the other bullshit, at the end of the day it is all about feeding
yourself and keeping a roof over your head.
If Hillary is promising more of the same with the TPP and TTIP crap (Her husband already
screwed over the US with NAFTA and China's accession to the WTO) then she will lose. (38,000 jobs
created in the last quarter suggests that Obama's legacy on the economy is going to be shit).
If Trump can convince the voter that he will create more jobs by imposing tariffs then he will
win. (It doesn't have to economically true, just plausible)
Diniz Ramos -> De Deus John Kennedy 13 Jun 2016 13:01
She doesn't lie - I love your qualification - "as much" but only about
Her racist laws
Her emails
She has experience
Yes the Clinton's brought in NAFTA and the laws that have led to the explosion of the prison
system in the US. She destroyed Libya, supported the Coup D'etat in Honduras (and then edited
it out of the second volume of her autobiography). Trump is a terrible option but the way the
US has been run for the past 30 years is also terrible and the world is paying and will pay a
terrible price for this. You say Clinton. Others say Trump. I say neither.
John Kennedy 13 Jun 2016 12:23
It could be, it is about 50/50 either way. Just remember one thing, Trump supporters are reliable
voters. Hillary will only win if she can drive turn out.
RollTide16 -> Milney 13 Jun 2016 12:54
Yes. Like voting for the disastrous Obama twice.
DanielWebster1 -> daveinbalmain 13 Jun 2016 11:33
Read the Art of the Deal. Ask for the extreme and then negotiate down to something manageable
and more reasonable. Then everybody feels like they won something and walk away happy.
mikehowleydcu -> GCBN 13 Jun 2016 12:47
Natural Society "abismal"
Chris Hedges a conspiracy theorist (Now you are showing your ignorance)
William Engdahl a conspiracy theorist (Throwing the label conspiracy theorist is a cheap shot
that avoids having to actually have to answer anything relevant)
Vandana Shiva
One of the most deluded and comprehensively debunked manipulative and greedy know-nothing
The organisation that you refer me to: The Genetic Literacy project is funded by ... .none
other than MONSANTO! (how unfortunate)
Out of all of the points I made to you you choose to reply to only one... Monsanto suing farmers.
You ignored:
Clinton's role in the destruction of Libya,
Her support for war in the ME
Her callousness towards Palestinians
Glycosphate found in newborn babies,
the reality of the so called health insurance in the US where many can still loose their
shirt when illness strikes,
the patenting of seeds and of course the suing of farmers who harvest Monsantso seeds (even
though that is what farmers have done since the farming began on this planet),
the nature of roundup ready crops who's selling point is that they can survive pesticides
- therefore the consumers eat this "poison" (i.e it's in newborn babies throughout the US)
supporting the military industrial and spying complex, representing companies that
destroy nature
conveniently ignored
Your perspective on Monsanto as
a fairly dull seed company that helps improve yields and feed more people.
is completely illogical and deluded as is your view that
To try to ban it is to condemn people to unnecessary deaths and to do unnecessary environmental
damage due to the lower yields from non-GMO crops and the consequentially greater amount
of land needed.
Do you truly understand the nature of weeds and how they grow resistant to pesticides and ever
greater quantities are needed over time thus poisoning the land, water and population more and
more over time. Not to mention that these Biotech companies want to prevent their products being
labelled. I wonder why?
You mock even those not quoted in order to give your argument (singular) legitimacy and even
bring in David Icke. Ignore 90%, focus on something you think you can win. Mock, ridicule, sneer,
discredit, include others not mentioned and presume that you are replying to my posts while in
truth as I have said you missed most of the points made.
You apply to Trump attributes that could equally fit Hillary Clinton
Trump represents incipient fascism in a large, hugely-armed country with the potential
to end human life on earth. And no, that is not hyperbole. If he does half of what he is threatening
this world will become massively more dangerous and frightening even than it already is.
What has the US been doing towards Russia and China in this period of Democratic governance?
Have they continued to knock off countries that don't follow their dictates? Do they sell weapons
to those who give them to ISIS or those who bomb and murder civilians (Saudi Arabia - Israel etc)
Nah... just focus on Monsanto.. .that rather dull seed company!
1. Under Florida statutory law, when the Florida Supreme Court finds that a challenge
to the certified result of an election is justified, it has the power to "provide any relief
appropriate under the circumstances" (§ 102.168(8) of the Florida Election Code). On Friday,
December 8, the Florida court, so finding, ordered a manual recount (authorized under § 102.166(4)(c)
of the Florida Election Code) of all disputed ballots (around 60,000) throughout the entire
state. As a New York Times editorial reported, "The manual recount was progressing smoothly
and swiftly Saturday…with new votes being recorded for both Vice President Al Gore and Governor
George W. Bush…serving the core democratic principle that every legal vote should be counted"
when, in midafternoon, the US Supreme Court "did a disservice to the nation's tradition of
fair elections by calling a halt" to the recount. The stay (requested by Bush), the Times said,
appeared "highly political."4
Under Supreme Court rules, a stay is supposed to be granted to an applicant (here, Bush)
only if he makes a substantial showing that in the absence of a stay, there is a likelihood
of "irreparable harm" to him. With the haste of a criminal, Justice Scalia, in trying to justify
the Court's shutting down of the vote counting, wrote, unbelievably, that counting these votes
would "threaten irreparable harm to petitioner [Bush]…by casting a cloud upon what he claims
to be the legitimacy of his election." [Emphasis added.] In other words, although the election
had not yet been decided, the absolutely incredible Scalia was presupposing that Bush had won
the election–indeed, had a right to win it–and any recount that showed Gore got more votes
in Florida than Bush could "cloud" Bush's presidency. Only a criminal on the run, rushed for
time and acting in desperation, could possibly write the embarrassing words Scalia did, language
showing that he knew he had no legal basis for what he was doing, but that getting something
down in writing, even as intellectually flabby and fatuous as it was, was better than nothing
at all. (Rehnquist, Thomas, O'Connor and Kennedy, naturally, joined Scalia in the stay order.)
The New York Times observed that the Court gave the appearance by the stay of "racing to
beat the clock before an unwelcome truth would come out." Terrance Sandalow, former dean of
the University of Michigan Law School and a judicial conservative who opposed Roe v. Wade and
supported the nomination to the Court of right-wing icon Robert Bork, said that "the balance
of harms so unmistakably were on the side of Gore" that the granting of the stay was "incomprehensible,"
going on to call the stay "an unmistakably partisan decision without any foundation in law."
The fact is the only genuine answer to 'who won' would have been the results of the State Supreme
Court-ordered recount, which the USSC stopped 154 votes short of Bush losing (from the 1,500+
he started with), with tens of thousands of ballots left uncounted. Other news organizations conducted
their own recounts and came up with radically different conclusions. If you have have complaints
or counter-arguments to make, take them up with Bugliosi; i have nothing more to add to his deconstruction
of the decision and its motives.
RogTheDodge 13 Jun 2016 13:57
Recent polls show that Hillary Clinton scores higher than Trump among women voters by more
than 20 points.
Yes, but this is not because Trump is bad or Clinton good. Any woman against any man would
attract a huge girl-power vote, so only a 20% bump is pretty poor. Any other woman would probably
be 30-40%
marshwren -> BostonCeltics 13 Jun 2016 13:35
Actually, it was FL Democrats--300,000+ of them--who voted for Bush that "lost" the state for
Gore. Democrats still blame Nader (94K votes statewide) for that because it's easier to kick a
scapegoat around for decades than to spend five minutes in honest contemplation.
Mindilu -> Heath Morley 12 Jun 2016 19:10
No nation has 100% voter participation - except North Korea. It's true that the US does have
low voter participation compared with other nations, but I don't think that's why they ended up
with a choice between Trump and Clinton. More than any other nation, politics is about money in
the United States.
The Scandinavia countries and New Zealand have impressively high voter participation - higher
than 'compulsory voting' Australia & Belgium. Even the politically cynical United Kingdom generally
has a higher voter participation than the United States. It would be interesting to see how these
nations encourage voter interest.
Trump won't win. In fact, the US could be on the brink of a liberal renaissance
Liberal Renaissance! Gee, how come Hillary did not thought to adopt this as its election
slogan? Anyway, what was the election slogan of Hillary Clinton? I don't remember that she had
any.:-)
Woodenarrow123 12 Jun 2016 18:27
The author isn't impartial. He has an agenda. A cursory reading of his twitter account
confirms his politics and his bias. And this explains why he has misrepresented Trump's attack
on Judge Curiel's - It is for political purposes. Trump accused the Judge of being racist. I don't
know if that was wise or fair but that was what Trump did - He didn't make a racist attack on
the judge instead he accused the Judge of being racist.
Again Trump's opponents call him a racist but as soon as he alleges that someone is engaged
in racism against him, uproar ensues.
His political opponents are hypocritical and operate in an irony free zone.
Ezra Pound -> bobbejaan19 12 Jun 2016 17:12
It means more debauchery, a normalization of transgendered people, pedophilia, less "whiteness"
and more BS wars, and massive debt. No way the US survives a second clinton
BIll signed NAFTA and glass-stegall , both disasters for the US. A national approach is good
TRUMP!
outfitter 12 Jun 2016 16:23
Certainly you are not looking to Hillary to lead a liberal renaissance. Hillary is not
a liberal is the a leading neoliberal. Neoliberalism believes that markets are self-sufficient
unto themselves, that they do not need regulation, and that they are the best guarantors of human
welfare. Everything that promotes the market, i.e., privatization, deregulation, mobility
of finance and capital, abandonment of government provided social welfare, and the reconception
of human beings as human capital, needs to be encouraged, while everything that supposedly diminishes
the market, i.e., government services, regulation, restrictions on finance and capital, and conceptualization
of human beings in transcendent terms, is to be discouraged.
Hillary Clinton has been the most perfect embodiment of neoliberalism among all the candidates,
she is almost its all-time ideal avatar, and I believe this explains, even if not articulated
this way, the widespread discomfort among the populace toward her ascendancy. Hillary Clinton
is one of the founders of neoliberal globalization, one of its central historical figures (having
accelerated the warehousing of the poor, the attack on trade unions, and the end of welfare and
of regulatory prowess), while Trump is an authoritarian figure whose conceptions of the state
and of human beings within the state are inconsistent with the surface frictionlessness neoliberalism
desires
The danger for neoliberalism -- as is clear from the support of millions of displaced human
beings for Trump -- is that with each crisis neoliberalism sheds more workers, makes individuals
and firms more "disciplined," narrows the scope of opportunity even further.
apacheman -> Uillecc MacUillecc Dubh 12 Jun 2016 16:21
Neocon/neoliberal...is there a difference? Both lead to the same place. However, neocon
is more precisely what Clinton is since she's always been far more of a conservative than liberal.
It isn't a purity issue, but a pragmatic one. Baby steps to the left don't counter massive slides
to the right, as we've sen these last forty years..
"... Imagine living under Stalin and never using the communist framework but focusing only on personality clashes between his lieutenants ..."
"... But this curious silence, this looking away from ideology, is exactly what has been happening for a quarter century, since neoliberalism, already under way since the early 1970s, got turbocharged by the Democratic party under the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) and Bill Clinton . We live under an ideology that has not been widely named or defined! ..."
"... Absent the neoliberal framework, we simply cannot grasp what is good or bad for citizens under Cruz versus Trump, or Clinton versus Sanders, or Clinton versus Trump, away from the distraction of personalities. To what extent does each of them agree or disagree with neoliberalism? Are there important differences? How much is Sanders a deviation? Can we still rely on conventional distinctions like liberal versus conservative, or Democrat versus Republican, to understand what is going on? How do we grasp movements like the Tea Party, Occupy, and now the Trump and Sanders insurgencies? ..."
"... Neoliberalism presumes a strong state, working only for the benefit of the wealthy, and as such it has little pretence to neutrality and universality, unlike the classical liberal state. ..."
"... It's an interesting question if it was the stagflation of the 1970s, following the unhitching of the United States from the gold standard and the arrival of the oil embargo, that brought on the neoliberal revolution, with Milton Friedman discrediting fiscal policy and advocating a by-the-numbers monetarist policy, or if it was neoliberalism itself, in the form of Friedmanite ideas that the Nixon administration was already pursuing, that made stagflation and the end of Keynesianism inevitable. ..."
"... Neoliberalism is excused for the crises it repeatedly brings on -- one can think of a regular cycle of debt and speculation-fueled emergencies in the last forty years, such as the developing country debt overhang of the 1970s , the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s , the Asian currency crisis of the 1990s , and the subprime mortgage crisis of the 2000s -- better than any ideology I know of. This is partly because its very existence as ruling ideology is not even noted by the population at large, which continues to derive some residual benefits from the welfare state inaugurated by Keynesianism but has been led to believe by neoliberal ideologues to think of their reliance on government as worthy of provoking guilt, shame, and melancholy, rather than something to which they have legitimate claim. ..."
"... Neoliberalism loves chaos, that has been its modus operandi since the early 1970s, but only the kind of chaos it can direct and control. ..."
"... When Hillary Clinton frequently retorts -- in response to demands for reregulation of finance, for instance -- that we have to abide by "the rule of law," this reflects a particular understanding of the law, the law as embodying the sense of the market, the law after it has undergone a revolution of reinterpretation in purely economic terms. In this revolution of the law persons have no status compared to corporations, nation-states are on their way out, and everything in turn dissolves before the abstraction called the market. ..."
"... One way to sum up neoliberalism is to say that everything -- everything -- is to be made over in the image of the market, including the state, civil society, and of course human beings. Democracy becomes reinterpreted as the market, and politics succumbs to neoliberal economic theory, so we are speaking of the end of democratic politics as we have known it for two and a half centuries. As the market becomes an abstraction, so does democracy, but the real playing field is somewhere else, in the realm of actual economic exchange -- which is not, however, the market. We may say that all exchange takes place on the neoliberal surface. ..."
"... The neoliberal state -- actually, to utter the word state seems insufficient here, I would claim that a new entity is being created, which is not the state as we have known it, but an existence that incorporates potentially all the states in the world and is something that exceeds their sum -- is all-powerful, it seeks to leave no space for individual self-conception in the way that classical liberalism, and even communism and fascism to some degree, were willing to allow. There are competing understandings of neoliberal globalization, when it comes to the question of whether the state is strong or weak compared to the primary agent of globalization, i.e., the corporation, but I am taking this logic further, I am suggesting that the issue is not how strong the state is in the service of neoliberalism, but whether there is anything left over beyond the new definition of the state. Another way to say it is that the state has become the market, the market has become the state, and therefore both have ceased to exist in the form we have classically understood them. ..."
"... The project of neoliberalism -- i.e., the redefinition of the state, the institutions of society, and the self -- has come so far along that neoliberalism is almost beyond the need of individual entities to make or break its case. Its penetration has gone too deep, and none of the democratic figureheads that come forward can fundamentally question its efficacy. ..."
"... I said almost. The reason why Bernie Sanders, self-declared democratic socialist, is so threatening to neoliberalism is that he has articulated a conception of the state, civil society, and the self that is not founded in the efficacy and rationality of the market. ..."
"... The Trump supporters, I believe, are no longer driven by shame, as was true of the Tea Party, and as has been true of the various dissenting movements within the Republican party, evangelical or otherwise, in the recent past. Rather, they have taken the shackles off and are ready for a no-holds barred "politically incorrect" fight with all others: they want to be "winners," even at the cost of exterminating others, and that is not the neoliberal way, which doesn't acknowledge that there can be winners and losers in the neoliberal hyperspace. ..."
"... Neoliberalism, unlike classical liberalism, does not permit a fluidity of self-expression as an occasional participant in the market, and posits prison as the only available alternative for anyone not willing to conceive of themselves as being present fully and always in the market. ..."
"... I believe that the generation of people -- in their forties or older -- supporting Hillary have already internalized neoliberal subjectivity, which they like to frame as realism or pragmatism, refusing for instance to accept that free college or health care are even theoretical possibilities. After all, they have maintained a measure of success in the past three or four decades after conceptualizing themselves as marketplace agents. Just as the Tea Party supporters found it intolerable that government should help irresponsible homeowners by bailing them out of unsustainable debt, the Clinton supporters hold essentially the same set of beliefs toward those who dare to think of themselves outside the discipline of the market. ..."
"... Neoliberalism likes to focus on public debt -- in the Clinton years debt reduction became a mania, though George W. Bush promptly spent all the accumulated surpluses on tax cuts for the wealthy and on wars of choice -- rather than inequality, because the only way to address inequality is through a different understanding of public debt; inequality can only be addressed through higher taxation, which has by now been excluded from the realm of acceptable discourse -- except when Sanders, Trump, or Jeremy Corbyn in England go off script. ..."
"... Neoliberalism expects -- and education at every level has been redesigned to promote this -- that economic decision-making will be applied to all areas of life (parenthood, intimacy, sexuality, and identity in any of its forms), and that those who do not do so will be subject to discipline. Everyone must invest in their own future, and not pose a burden to the state or anyone else, otherwise they will be refused recognition as human beings. ..."
"... The danger for neoliberalism -- as is clear from the support of millions of displaced human beings for Trump -- is that with each crisis neoliberalism sheds more workers, makes individuals and firms more "disciplined," narrows the scope of opportunity even further. At times, the disciplining of the non-neoliberal other -- as with the killing of Michael Brown or Eric Garner -- explodes to surface consciousness in an unsavory way, so an expert manager like Clinton or Obama is required to tamp down the emotions of such unruly entities as Black Lives Matter which arise in response. If climate change, according to Clinton and her cohort, can and should have market solutions, then surely racial disparity, or police violence, should also have market solutions and no others; it is here that neoliberal multiculturalism, operating in the academy, is so insidious, because at the elite level it functions to validate market discourse, it does not step outside it. ..."
"... Unlike the interregnum between 1945-1973, the rising tide -- no matter the befuddlements Arthur Laffer and his fellow Reaganite ideologues proffered -- does not lift all boats today, it is outside the logic of neoliberalism that it do so, so the idea of reforming neoliberalism, or what is often called "globalization with a human face," is a rhetorical distraction. All of the policy innovations -- interpreted as "socialism" by the Tea Partiers -- offered by Barack Obama fall within the purview of neoliberalism, above all the Affordable Care Act, whose genesis was hatched in neoliberal think tanks decades ago . ..."
"... It is important to note that neoliberal economic restructuring necessarily means social restructuring, i.e., a movement toward disciplinarity and away from liberalism; the disciplinarity can take a Bushian, Clintonian, or Trumpian form, but these are manifestations of the same tendency. ..."
"... As Sanders has consistently noted , economic inequality leads to political inequality, which means that democracy, after a certain point, becomes only theoretical (viz. Citizens United and the electoral influence of such powerful entities as the Koch brothers). Both processes -- economic inequality and political inequality -- have accelerated after each downturn in the forty-five-year history of neoliberalism, therefore a downturn is always exciting, and even preordained, for a Bush, a Trump, or a Clinton. Again, economic inequality and political polarity (polarity is simply a manifestation of democracy having become dysfunctional) strongly correlate, and both have come to a head in this election. Neoliberalism's task, from this point on, is to mask and manage the increasing inequalities that are likely to befall humanity, especially as the planet reaches a crisis point in its health . In a way, George W. Bush threw a wrench -- he was a perverted Keynesian in a way, believing in war to prime the pump, or inflating unsustainable bubbles, or spending exorbitantly on grandiose gestures -- into the process of neoliberal globalization that was going very smoothly indeed under Bill Clinton and would likely have flourished under Al Gore as well. With Hillary Clinton, the movement will be toward further privatization of social welfare, "reforming" it along market principles, as has been true of every neoliberal avatar, whether it was Bill Clinton's incentives to work in the performance management makeover of welfare, George Bush's proposed private social security accounts, Mitt Romney's proposed private health care accounts, or the school vouchers that tempt all of them from time to time. ..."
"... What, indeed, does happen beyond Sanders, because as we have seen Hillary Clinton is one of the founders of neoliberal globalization, one of its central historical figures (having accelerated the warehousing of the poor, the attack on trade unions, and the end of welfare and of regulatory prowess), while Trump is an authoritarian figure whose conceptions of the state and of human beings within the state are inconsistent with the surface frictionlessness neoliberalism desires? To go back to Hillary Clinton's opening campaign commercial, to what extent will Americans continue to believe that the self must be entrepreneurially leveraged toward maximum market gains, molded into mobile human capital ever ready to serve the highest bidder? ..."
"... I would suggest that it is not that globalization causes or has caused neoliberalism, but that neoliberalism has pushed a certain form of globalization that suits its interests. This is a crucial distinction, on which everything else hinges. The neoliberal market doesn't actually exist; at the moment it is pure abstraction; what is actually filling up economic and political space can only be discussed when we step away from this abstraction, as Sanders has so ably done, and as the Occupy and Black Lives Matter movements tentatively set in motion. ..."
Over the last fifteen years, editors often asked me not to mention the word "neoliberalism," because
I was told readers wouldn't comprehend the "jargon." This has begun to change recently, as the terminology
has come into wider usage, though it remains shrouded in great mystery.
People throw the term around
loosely, as they do with "fascism," with the same confounding results. Imagine living under fascism
or communism, or earlier, classical liberalism, and not being allowed to acknowledge that particular
frame of reference to understand economic and social issues. Imagine living under Stalin and
never using the communist framework but focusing only on personality clashes between his lieutenants,
or likewise for Hitler or Mussolini or Mao or Franco and their ideological systems! But this
curious silence, this looking away from ideology, is exactly what has been happening for a quarter
century, since neoliberalism, already under way since the early 1970s, got turbocharged by the Democratic
party under
the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) and Bill Clinton. We live under an ideology that has
not been widely named or defined!
Absent the neoliberal framework, we simply cannot grasp what is good or bad for citizens under
Cruz versus Trump, or Clinton versus Sanders, or Clinton versus Trump, away from the distraction
of personalities. To what extent does each of them agree or disagree with neoliberalism? Are there
important differences? How much is Sanders a deviation? Can we still rely on conventional distinctions
like liberal versus conservative, or Democrat versus Republican, to understand what is going on?
How do we grasp movements like the Tea Party, Occupy, and now the Trump and Sanders insurgencies?
Neoliberalism has been more successful than most past ideologies in redefining subjectivity, in
making people alter their sense of themselves, their personhood, their identities, their hopes and
expectations and dreams and idealizations. Classical liberalism was successful too, for two and a
half centuries, in people's self-definition, although communism and fascism succeeded less well in
realizing the "new man."
It cannot be emphasized enough that neoliberalism is not classical liberalism, or a return to
a purer version of it, as is commonly misunderstood; it is a new thing, because the market, for one
thing, is not at all free and untethered and dynamic in the sense that classical liberalism idealized
it. Neoliberalism presumes a strong state, working only for the benefit of the wealthy, and as
such it has little pretence to neutrality and universality, unlike the classical liberal state.
I would go so far as to say that neoliberalism is the final completion of capitalism's long-nascent
project, in that the desire to transform everything -- every object, every living thing, every fact
on the planet -- in its image had not been realized to the same extent by any preceding ideology.
Neoliberalism happens to be the ideology -- unlike the three major forerunners in the last 250 years
-- that has the fortune of coinciding with technological change on a scale that makes its complete
penetration into every realm of being a possibility for the first time in human history.
From the early 1930s, when the Great Depression threatened the classical liberal consensus (the
idea that markets were self-regulating, and the state should play no more than a night-watchman role),
until the early 1970s, when global instability including currency chaos unraveled it,
the
democratic world lived under the Keynesian paradigm: markets were understood to be inherently
unstable, and the interventionist hand of government, in the form of countercyclical policy, was
necessary to make capitalism work, otherwise the economy had a tendency to get out of whack and crash.
It's an interesting question if it was the stagflation of the 1970s, following the unhitching
of the United States from the gold standard and the arrival of the oil embargo, that brought on the
neoliberal revolution, with
Milton Friedman discrediting fiscal policy and advocating a by-the-numbers monetarist policy,
or if it was neoliberalism itself, in the form of Friedmanite ideas that the Nixon administration
was already pursuing, that made stagflation and the end of Keynesianism inevitable.
It should be said that neoliberalism thrives on prompting crisis after crisis, and has proven
more adept than previous ideologies at exploiting these crises to its benefit, which then makes the
situation worse, so that each succeeding crisis only erodes the power of the working class and makes
the wealthy wealthier. There is a certain self-fulfilling aura to neoliberalism, couched in the jargon
of economic orthodoxy, that has remained immune from political criticism, because of the dogma that
was perpetuated -- by Margaret Thatcher and her acolytes --
that There Is No Alternative (TINA).
Neoliberalism is excused for the crises it repeatedly brings on -- one can think of a regular
cycle of debt and speculation-fueled emergencies in the last forty years, such as the developing
country
debt overhang of the 1970s,
the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s,
the Asian currency crisis of the 1990s, and the subprime mortgage crisis of the 2000s -- better
than any ideology I know of. This is partly because its very existence as ruling ideology is not
even noted by the population at large, which continues to derive some residual benefits from the
welfare state inaugurated by Keynesianism but has been led to believe by neoliberal ideologues to
think of their reliance on government as worthy of provoking guilt, shame, and melancholy, rather
than something to which they have legitimate claim.
It is not surprising to find neoliberal multiculturalists --
comfortably established
in the academy -- likewise demonizing, or othering, not Muslims, Mexicans, or African Americans,
but working-class whites (the quintessential Trump proletariat) who have a difficult time accepting
the fluidity of self-definition that goes well with neoliberalism, something that we might call the
market capitalization of the self.
George W. Bush's useful function was to introduce necessary crisis into a system that had grown
too stable for its own good; he injected desirable panic, which served as fuel to the fire of the
neoliberal revolution. Trump is an apostate -- at least until now -- in desiring chaos on terms that
do not sound neoliberal, which is unacceptable; hence Jeb Bush's
characterization of him as
the "candidate of chaos."Neoliberalism loves chaos, that has been its modus operandi since
the early 1970s, but only the kind of chaos it can direct and control.
To go back to origins, the Great Depression only ended conclusively with the onset of the second
world war, after which Keynesianism had the upper hand for thirty-five years. But just as the global
institutions of Keynesianism, specifically the IMF and the World Bank, were being founded at the
New Hampshire resort of Bretton Woods in 1944, the founders of the neoliberal revolution, namely
Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman, and others
were forming the Mount Pelerin Society (MPS) at the eponymous Swiss resort in 1947, creating
the ideology which eventually defeated Keynesianism and gained the upper hand during the 1970s.
So what exactly is neoliberalism, and how is it different from classical liberalism, whose final
manifestation came under Keynesianism?
Neoliberalism believes that markets are self-sufficient unto themselves, that they do not need
regulation, and that they are the best guarantors of human welfare. Everything that promotes the
market, i.e., privatization, deregulation, mobility of finance and capital, abandonment of government-provided
social welfare, and the reconception of human beings as human capital, needs to be encouraged, while
everything that supposedly diminishes the market, i.e., government services, regulation, restrictions
on finance and capital, and conceptualization of human beings in transcendent terms, is to be discouraged.
When Hillary Clinton frequently retorts -- in response to demands for reregulation of finance,
for instance -- that we have to abide by "the rule of law," this reflects a particular understanding
of the law, the law as embodying the sense of the market, the law after it has undergone a revolution
of reinterpretation in purely economic terms. In this revolution of the law persons have no status
compared to corporations, nation-states are on their way out, and everything in turn dissolves before
the abstraction called the market.
One way to sum up neoliberalism is to say that everything -- everything -- is to be made over
in the image of the market, including the state, civil society, and of course human beings. Democracy
becomes reinterpreted as the market, and politics succumbs to neoliberal economic theory, so we are
speaking of the end of democratic politics as we have known it for two and a half centuries. As the
market becomes an abstraction, so does democracy, but the real playing field is somewhere else, in
the realm of actual economic exchange -- which is not, however, the market. We may say that all exchange
takes place on the neoliberal surface.
Neoliberalism is often described -- and this creates a lot of confusion -- as "market fundamentalism,"
and while this may be true for neoliberal's self-promotion and self-presentation, i.e., the market
as the ultimate and only myth, as were the gods of the past, I would argue that in neoliberalism
there is no such thing as the market as we have understood it from previous ideologies.
The neoliberal state -- actually, to utter the word state seems insufficient here, I would
claim that a new entity is being created, which is not the state as we have known it, but an existence
that incorporates potentially all the states in the world and is something that exceeds their sum
-- is all-powerful, it seeks to leave no space for individual self-conception in the way that classical
liberalism, and even communism and fascism to some degree, were willing to allow.
There are competing understandings of neoliberal globalization, when it comes to the question
of whether the state is strong or weak compared to the primary agent of globalization, i.e., the
corporation, but I am taking this logic further, I am suggesting that the issue is not how strong
the state is in the service of neoliberalism, but whether there is anything left over beyond the
new definition of the state. Another way to say it is that the state has become the market, the market
has become the state, and therefore both have ceased to exist in the form we have classically understood
them.
Of course the word hasn't gotten around to the people yet, hence all the confusion about whether
Hillary Clinton is more neoliberal than Barack Obama, or whether Donald Trump will be less neoliberal
than Hillary Clinton. The project of neoliberalism -- i.e., the redefinition of the state, the
institutions of society, and the self -- has come so far along that neoliberalism is almost beyond
the need of individual entities to make or break its case. Its penetration has gone too deep, and
none of the democratic figureheads that come forward can fundamentally question its efficacy.
I said almost. The reason why Bernie Sanders, self-declared democratic socialist, is so threatening
to neoliberalism is that he has articulated a conception of the state, civil society, and the self
that is not founded in the efficacy and rationality of the market. He does not believe -- unlike
Hillary Clinton -- that the market can tackle climate change or income inequality or unfair health
and education outcomes or racial injustice, all of which Clinton propagates. Clinton's impending
"victory" (whatever machinations were involved in engineering it) will only strengthen neoliberalism,
as the force that couldn't be defeated even when the movement was as large and transcendent as Sanders's.
Although Sanders doesn't specify "neoliberalism" as the antagonist, his entire discourse presumes
it.
Likewise, while Trump supporters want to take their rebellion in a fascist direction, their discomfort
with the logic of the market is as pervasive as the Sanders camp, and is an advance, I believe, over
the debt and unemployment melancholy of the Tea Party, the shame that was associated with that movement's
loss of identity as bourgeois capitalists in an age of neoliberal globalization. The Trump supporters,
I believe, are no longer driven by shame, as was true of the Tea Party, and as has been true of the
various dissenting movements within the Republican party, evangelical or otherwise, in the recent
past. Rather, they have taken the shackles off and are ready for a no-holds barred "politically incorrect"
fight with all others: they want to be "winners," even at the cost of exterminating others, and that
is not the neoliberal way, which doesn't acknowledge that there can be winners and losers in the
neoliberal hyperspace.
In the current election campaign, Hillary Clinton has been the most perfect embodiment of neoliberalism
among all the candidates, she is almost its all-time ideal avatar, and I believe this explains, even
if not articulated this way, the widespread discomfort among the populace toward her ascendancy.
People can perceive that her ideology is founded on a conception of human beings striving relentlessly
to become human capital (as her
opening campaign commercial
so overtly depicted), which means that those who fail to come within the purview of neoliberalism
should be rigorously ostracized, punished, and excluded.
This is the dark side of neoliberalism's ideological arm (a multiculturalism founded on human
beings as capital), which is why this project has become increasingly associated with suppression
of free speech and intolerance of those who refuse to go along with the kind of identity politics
neoliberalism promotes.
And this explains why the 1990s saw the simultaneous and absolutely parallel rise, under the Clintons,
of both neoliberal globalization and various regimes of neoliberal disciplining, such as the shaming
and exclusion of former welfare recipients (every able-bodied person should be able to find work,
therefore under TANF welfare was converted to a performance management system designed to enroll
everyone in the workforce,
even if it meant below-subsistence wages or the loss of parental responsibilities, all of it
couched in the jargon of marketplace incentives).
The actual cost to the state of the AFDC program was minimal, but its symbolism was incalculable.
The end of welfare went hand in hand with the disciplinary "crime bill" pushed by the Clintons, leading
to an epidemic of mass incarceration. Neoliberalism, unlike classical liberalism, does not permit
a fluidity of self-expression as an occasional participant in the market, and posits prison as the
only available alternative for anyone not willing to conceive of themselves as being present fully
and always in the market.
I believe that the generation of people -- in their forties or older -- supporting Hillary
have already internalized neoliberal subjectivity, which they like to frame as realism or pragmatism,
refusing for instance to accept that free college or health care are even theoretical possibilities.
After all, they have maintained a measure of success in the past three or four decades after conceptualizing
themselves as marketplace agents. Just as the Tea Party supporters found it intolerable that government
should help irresponsible homeowners by bailing them out of unsustainable debt, the Clinton supporters
hold essentially the same set of beliefs toward those who dare to think of themselves outside the
discipline of the market.
I spoke of the myth of the market, as something that has no existence in reality, because none
of the elements that would have to exist for a market to work are actually in place; this is even
more true for neoliberalism than it was for the self-conscious annihilation of the market by communism,
because at least in that system the market, surreptitiously, as in various Eastern European countries,
kept making an appearance. But when the market takes neoliberal shape, i.e., the classical conceptions
of the buyer and seller as free agents are gone, then radical inequality is the natural outcome.
And inequality in the last four decades, as statistics for the US and everywhere
neoliberalism has made inroads prove beyond a doubt, has exploded, thereby invalidating neoliberalism's
greatest claim to legitimacy, that it brings about a general increase in welfare. So neoliberalism,
to the extent that the inequality discourse has made itself manifest recently, must insist all the
more vocally on forms of social recognition, what Clinton, for example, likes to call the "fall of
barriers."
Neoliberalism likes to focus on public debt -- in the Clinton years debt reduction became
a mania, though George W. Bush promptly spent all the accumulated surpluses on tax cuts for the wealthy
and on wars of choice -- rather than inequality, because the only way to address inequality is through
a different understanding of public debt; inequality can only be addressed through higher taxation,
which has by now been excluded from the realm of acceptable discourse -- except when Sanders, Trump,
or Jeremy Corbyn in England go off script.
So to recapitulate neoliberalism's comprehensive success, let us note that we have gone from a
liberal, Keynesian, welfare state to a neoliberal, market-compliant, disciplinary state.
Neoliberalism expects -- and education at every level has been redesigned to promote this
-- that economic decision-making will be applied to all areas of life (parenthood, intimacy, sexuality,
and identity in any of its forms), and that those who do not do so will be subject to discipline.
Everyone must invest in their own future, and not pose a burden to the state or anyone else, otherwise
they will be refused recognition as human beings.
This supposed economic "rationality" (though it is the greatest form of irrationality) applies
to civil society as much as the state, so that none of the ideals of classical liberalism, or previous
ideologies rooted in humanism, are valid any longer, the only value is the iteration of the market
(as myth, not reality); in other words, neoliberalism, unlike the elevation of the individual in
classical liberalism or the state in fascism or the collectivity in communism, has erected something,
the market, that has no real existence, as the only god to serve! And it is just like a god, with
an ethereal, unchallengeable, irrefutable, ubiquitous presence. Whatever in state policy does not
serve market-conformity is to be banned and banished from memory (the secular scriptures are to be
rewritten), which explains neoliberalism's radical narrowing of public discourse, including the severance
of identity politics from any class foundation.
Neoliberalism will continue to perpetuate reduced opportunity, because one of its characteristics
-- as in any system that wants to thrive on the world stage -- is to constantly refine the field
upon which the human subject can operate.
As such, those displaced workers who have suffered the most from the erosion of the old industries
in the former manufacturing centers of the world are not even factors to contend with, they are invisible
and cannot be part of the policy equation. To the extent that their actual presence is reckoned with,
the economy can be said to have crashed; but the problem doesn't arise because of the management
of unemployment or underemployment statistics, unlike a housing crash which is palpable and cannot
escape statistical definition.
The danger for neoliberalism -- as is clear from the support of millions of displaced human
beings for Trump -- is that with each crisis neoliberalism sheds more workers, makes individuals
and firms more "disciplined," narrows the scope of opportunity even further. At times, the disciplining
of the non-neoliberal other -- as with the killing of Michael Brown or Eric Garner -- explodes to
surface consciousness in an unsavory way, so an expert manager like Clinton or Obama is required
to tamp down the emotions of such unruly entities as Black Lives Matter which arise in response.
If climate change, according to Clinton and her cohort, can and should have market solutions, then
surely racial disparity, or police violence, should also have market solutions and no others; it
is here that neoliberal multiculturalism, operating in the academy, is so insidious, because at the
elite level it functions to validate market discourse, it does not step outside it.
The present breakdown of both major political parties can be explained by the frustration that
has built up in the body politic over the past decade, because after the crash there was no sustained
intellectual movement to question the myth of the market. The substitution of economic justice with
identity politics is something Ralph Nader, Howard Dean, and now Bernie Sanders have contested in
a humane manner, while the same process is at work, admittedly in an inhumane way, in the Trump phenomenon.
Thus, also,
Hillary Clinton's animus against
free college education; that form of expansion of opportunity, which was a reality from the 1950s
to the 1980s, cannot be allowed to return, human beings are supposed to invest in their own future
earnings potential, they are not entitled to a transcendent experience without barriers manifesting
in discipline and self-correction. Education, like everything else, including one's own health, becomes
an expensive consumer good, not a right, no longer an experience that might lead to a consciousness
beyond the market but something that should be fully encapsulated by the market. If one is a capable
market player, education as we have classically understood it becomes redundant.
Unlike the interregnum between 1945-1973, the rising tide --
no matter the befuddlements Arthur Laffer and his fellow Reaganite ideologues proffered -- does
not lift all boats today, it is outside the logic of neoliberalism that it do so, so the idea of
reforming neoliberalism, or what is often called "globalization with a human face," is a rhetorical
distraction. All of the policy innovations -- interpreted as "socialism" by the Tea Partiers -- offered
by Barack Obama fall within the purview of neoliberalism, above all the Affordable Care Act,
whose genesis was hatched in neoliberal think tanks decades ago.
It is important to note that neoliberal economic restructuring necessarily means social restructuring,
i.e., a movement toward disciplinarity and away from liberalism; the disciplinarity can take a Bushian,
Clintonian, or Trumpian form, but these are manifestations of the same tendency.
When wage growth is decoupled
from economic growth (as it has been since Friedman and others inaugurated the revolution in
the early 1970s), this means that the human subject is ripe for discipline. Furthermore, wage fairness
cannot be rationally discussed (hence the obfuscation surrounding the $15 minimum wage orchestrated
by Clinton and others) because the concept of the market has been disembedded from society; the market
as abstraction, not a concrete reality, makes any notion of reform or restructuring impossible. Like
the minimum wage, something like free child care also remains outside the bounds of discourse, because
public policy cannot accommodate discussions that do not take the self-regulating market as unassailable
myth.
What neoliberalism can accommodate is relentless tax cuts (Trump has already offered his huge
tax cut plan, as Bush did as his first order of business), which only exacerbate the problem, leading
to increasing concentrations of wealth. It has to be said, though, that Ted Cruz more comfortably
fit the neoliberal paradigm, with his familiar calls for lower taxes along with reduced regulation
and further limits on social welfare, whereas Trump shows, for now, some elements of apostasy. If
neoliberalism were to get a Cruz, it would have no problem working with him, or rather, Cruz would
have had no problem executing neoliberalism, beyond the surface dissimilarities from Hillary Clinton.
As Sanders has consistently
noted, economic inequality leads to political inequality, which means that democracy, after a
certain point, becomes only theoretical (viz. Citizens United and the electoral influence of such
powerful entities as the Koch brothers). Both processes -- economic inequality and political inequality
-- have accelerated after each downturn in the forty-five-year history of neoliberalism, therefore
a downturn is always exciting, and even preordained, for a Bush, a Trump, or a Clinton. Again, economic
inequality and political polarity (polarity is simply a manifestation of democracy having become
dysfunctional) strongly correlate, and both have come to a head in this election.
Neoliberalism's task, from this point on, is to mask and manage the increasing inequalities that
are likely to befall humanity,
especially as the planet reaches
a crisis point in its health. In a way, George W. Bush threw a wrench -- he was a perverted Keynesian
in a way, believing in war to prime the pump, or inflating unsustainable bubbles, or spending exorbitantly
on grandiose gestures -- into the process of neoliberal globalization that was going very smoothly
indeed under Bill Clinton and would likely have flourished under Al Gore as well. With Hillary Clinton,
the movement will be toward further privatization of social welfare, "reforming" it along market
principles, as has been true of every neoliberal avatar, whether it was Bill Clinton's incentives
to work in the performance management makeover of welfare, George Bush's proposed private social
security accounts, Mitt Romney's proposed private health care accounts, or the school vouchers that
tempt all of them from time to time.
What remains to be seen is the extent to which the millennial generation might be capable of thinking
outside the neoliberal paradigm, i.e., they don't just want more of what neoliberal promises to give
them yet fails to deliver, but want things that neoliberalism does not or cannot promise. On this
rests the near-term future of the neoliberal project.
Beyond Sanders himself, the key question is the ability of the millennial generation to conceive
of themselves outside the neoliberal subjectivity they have been pushed to internalize. They have
been encouraged to think of themselves as capital producers, turning their intellectuality into social
media popularity for the benefit of capital, in the service of the same abstract market that has
no place, no role, no definition beyond the fallen liberal calculus. Does the millennial generation
believe, even about its most intimate core, that everything has been privatized?
I am not necessarily making a pessimistic prediction. I am merely outlining the strength of an
opponent that has refused to be named for forty-five years, although it has been the ruling ideology
that long! In defining neoliberalism, I have sought to distance myself from the distraction of personalities,
and tried to expose the dark side of our politics which we can only see when we name and understand
the ideology as such. We are up against a system that is so strong that it has survived, for the
most part, the last crash, as citizens couldn't get their heads around the idea of nationalizing
banks or health care.
It is existentially imperative to ponder what happens beyond Sanders, because neoliberalism has
its end-game in sight, letting inequality continue to escalate past the crash point (meaning the
point where the economy works for most people), past any tolerable degradation of the planet (which
is being reconceptualized in the shape of the market).
What, indeed, does happen beyond Sanders, because as we have seen Hillary Clinton is one of
the founders of neoliberal globalization, one of its central historical figures (having accelerated
the warehousing of the poor, the attack on trade unions, and the end of welfare and of regulatory
prowess), while Trump is an authoritarian figure whose conceptions of the state and of human beings
within the state are inconsistent with the surface frictionlessness neoliberalism desires? To go
back to Hillary Clinton's opening campaign commercial, to what extent will Americans continue to
believe that the self must be entrepreneurially leveraged toward maximum market gains, molded into
mobile human capital ever ready to serve the highest bidder?
As to whether a non-neoliberal globalization is possible and what that might look like on the
international stage after a quarter-century of Clinton, Bush, and Obama -- which is essentially the
frustration Trump is tapping into -- I'll take that up in a follow-up essay, which will further clarify
the differences between Sanders versus Clinton, and Trump versus Clinton.
I would suggest that it is not that globalization causes or has caused neoliberalism, but
that neoliberalism has pushed a certain form of globalization that suits its interests. This is a
crucial distinction, on which everything else hinges. The neoliberal market doesn't actually exist;
at the moment it is pure abstraction; what is actually filling up economic and political space can
only be discussed when we step away from this abstraction, as Sanders has so ably done, and as the
Occupy and Black Lives Matter movements tentatively set in motion.
This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in
any form without permission or license from the source.
Anis Shivani's recently finished novel is A History of the Cat in Nine Chapters or Less. Forthcoming
books include Karachi Raj: A Novel (2014) and Soraya: Sonnets (2015). Novels in progress include
Abruzzi, 1936 and An Idiot's Guide to America.
"... You know that taking away welfare, as she and her husband did in the 1990s, was never meant to take us to some enhanced welfare system, it was just a destructive end goal, and nothing good followed it. You know that when she talks about tinkering with loans for college or tinkering with the Affordable Care Act, she is only legitimizing the privatization of services that ought to be provided for free by government in any decent democracy, as your bęte noire Bernie likes to remind you. ..."
...In that last debate, his forthright opinions were a stark rebuke to the obfuscation Hillary
offered on every issue. She wouldn't give a straight answer to a single question, as she never
has in her entire political life. This is not some personality flaw. It is a clever tactic
designed to accomplish in office, by incremental measures, what the right-wing ultimately wants.
Make no mistake, you deliberately spurned the clear progressive choice-who offered a clarity we
haven't had in my lifetime!-for the one who acts like a macho warrior in female clothing.
...The way she always resorts to talking about doing something "incremental"-whether it's on
climate change or a living wage or college tuition or health care or mass incarceration-as a way
of promoting and legitimizing precisely the kinds of policies that represent a step backward on
each of these issues? You can see clearly what her trick is, you know what she's up to and which
side she stands with, but you, small property-owners to the core, voted for her anyway.
You know that taking away welfare, as she and her husband did in the 1990s, was never meant to
take us to some enhanced welfare system, it was just a destructive end goal, and nothing good
followed it. You know that when she talks about tinkering with loans for college or tinkering
with the Affordable Care Act, she is only legitimizing the privatization of services that ought
to be provided for free by government in any decent democracy, as your bęte noire Bernie likes to
remind you.
... .. ..
You know that taking away welfare, as she and her husband did in the 1990s, was never
meant to take us to some enhanced welfare system, it was just a destructive end goal, and nothing
good followed it. You know that when she talks about tinkering with loans for college or
tinkering with the Affordable Care Act, she is only legitimizing the privatization of services
that ought to be provided for free by government in any decent democracy, as your bęte noire
Bernie likes to remind you.
It wasn't long ago that college was indeed more or less free. Heck, I went to college in the
late eighties and early nineties, and it was mostly free then. Community college was mostly free.
Great public institutions of learning were more or less free. The Ivy League gave you substantial
aid, regardless of your means, so you weren't saddled with debt. We are not talking about some
pie-in-the-sky scheme, we are talking about reality as it existed less than a generation ago, not
to mention earlier when higher education didn't cost much in this country. And single-payer
health care, as the rest of the civilized world provides it, is that too much of a stretch for
you Hillarybots?
And minorities in New York, you fell for this whole shtick of Bill was the first black
president, or the black community just loves the Clintons! These are the folks who gave you the
enhanced war on drugs, harsher criminal penalties, letting loose cops in your communities with
increased powers, painting one and all who's poor-black, white, or brown-as responsible for their
own misery and weaning them away from expecting help from government. This Hillary, the natural
antithesis of everything that should matter to you, you voted for her and rejected the guy who
wants to make your life easier, give you free health care and higher education, give you a
breather, for heaven's sake, it's not like he's promising to turn us overnight into Scandinavia.
Just a little breather, for a change, you didn't even want that, Hillarybots?
Definition of a Hillarybot, Encyclopedia of Politics, Entry #2,383
A person of apparently civilized demeanor, often older than fifty, with a healthy pension
fund and a decent college education, who has a nice job and either has or aspires to have
grandchildren, who drives a safe Japanese vehicle, and regularly tunes into NPR to affirm
liberal credentials. Unusually impervious to logic and rationality, turning every discussion,
from buying a house to where to vacation, into what is practical and what is not. Mocks
idealists, dreamers, and utopians under the age of thirty who dream of a better world. Keeps
up a social media drumbeat about how anyone who says anything against her idol is a misogynist
who will be called out! Justifies her idol's every sell-out by repeating the same litany of
sophisms, i.e., "Hillary knows how to get things done, Hillary is practical and will work with
the other side, nothing can be had for free and those who promise it are delusional, Hillary
has been there and done that, we cannot ask for more." Sees herself (she's typically an older
female) as having come by every little scrap she's earned through her own efforts alone,
nobody gave her anything for free, and goshdarnit, she's not going to stand for a candidate
who promises stuff for free, she's with the "realist" candidate who says we can only do a
little bit more, perhaps, it's best to preserve what we've already got (with the right Supreme
Court justices in place we get to keep Planned Parenthood, yay!). Keeps herself at a slight
distance from the scruffier youthful types, who, to be honest, scare her a bit with all the
talk of the 1% and the 99%, she was not raised to grow up in an America defined by class
warfare, what's next, revolution? What happens to the grandkids in a revolution? No, it has to
be a firm, steady hand at the wheel, to keep things going as they are, we're still the
greatest country on earth, right? And she's a woman, for god's sake, she's had to fight for
every little privilege that's come her way, she's even had to put up with that philanderer
Bill for a lifetime, and this wrinkly old socialist guy from Brooklyn thinks he's going to
step in, grab hold of a party he doesn't even belong to, and just take it away from her?
...We know that by voting for Hillary you compromised the health of planet earth by who knows
what magnitude, because there is not a destructive policy she will not pursue in the name of
capitalism. But in the end the small-minded ideology you represent will cease to exist, like your
forerunners in either party who were enraged by the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s.
The next Bernie Sanders will even look young and handsome like Justin Trudeau (your worst
nightmare, right?), because either the earth as we know it ends, or we move into a more humane
arrangement than you Hillarybots can abide. Both cannot be true. So goodbye Paul Krugman, goodbye
New York poets and writers, goodbye all of you Hillarybots who showed us your true colors and
made us see where not to look for allies.
And yes, your mockery, Hillarybots, of Bush and Palin and Mitt and Trump and Cruz has no
meaning at all now. You are the problem, you've always been the problem, you in the Democratic
party who've long supported the candidates of war and misery and debt.
"... "We have emails relating to Hillary Clinton which are pending publication," ..."
"... Assange said the leaked emails revealed that she overrode the Pentagon's reluctance to overthrow sovereign Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, and that "they predicted the post-war outcome would be what it is, which is ISIS taking over the country." ..."
"... Sworn testimony from officials working in the department revealed that Clinton did not "know how to use a computer to do e-mail," instead using her Blackberry for official communications. ..."
Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange warns more information will be published about Hillary
Clinton, enough to indict her if the US government is courageous enough to do so, in what he
predicts will be "a very big year" for the whistleblowing website.
... ... ...
"We have emails relating to Hillary Clinton which are pending
publication," Assange told
Peston on Sunday when asked if more of her leaked electronic
communications would be published.
About 32,000 emails from her
private server have been leaked by Wikileaks so far, but Assange would
not confirm the number of emails or when they are expected to be
published.
Speaking via video link from the Ecuadorian Embassy in
London, Assange said that there was enough information in the emails to indict Clinton, but that
was unlikely to happen under the current Attorney General, Obama appointee Loretta Lynch.
He
does think "the FBI can push for concessions from the new Clinton government in exchange for its
lack of indictment."
The former secretary of state pushed for the prosecution of Wikileaks,
rather than the global criminals they exposed, and the organization described her as a "war
hawk."
Assange said the leaked emails revealed that she overrode the Pentagon's reluctance to
overthrow sovereign Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, and that "they predicted the post-war
outcome would be what it is, which is ISIS taking over the country."
The email scandal
could become a headache as the race to the White House heats up and the FBI continues to
investigate her.
Sworn testimony from officials working in the department revealed that Clinton did not "know
how to use a computer to do e-mail," instead using her Blackberry for official communications.
Clinton's office was a designated Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF),
where the use of wireless devices was not permitted, leading to Clinton leaving her office in
order to access emails.
The third-party nominee Gary Johnson believes former Republican candidates for president, Jeb
Bush and Lindsey Graham among them, will defect at the polls this November rather than vote for
Donald Trump. He expects they'll vote Libertarian instead.
"When it's all said and done, they'll pull the Johnson-Weld lever because it's a real choice,"
the former governor of New Mexico told the Guardian in a wide-ranging interview this week.
Johnson said he founded his prediction "on instinct", but that he was confident that he had
high-profile Republican votes – "whether they say so or not is another story".
Johnson may already have at least one Republican leader knocking on his door. Mitt Romney, the
party's 2012 nominee, told CNN on Friday that he was considering casting his lot with the
Libertarians.
"If Bill Weld were at the top of the ticket, it would be very easy for me to vote for Bill Weld
for president," he said. Weld is Johnson's running mate and preceded Romney as governor of
Massachusetts.
Johnson, who is at 12% in a recent national poll, hopes that by winning voters disaffected by
Trump and Hillary Clinton, he can establish his party as a political force to be reckoned with.
In particular, Johnson insisted that he is a fit for supporters of a Democrat – the Vermont
senator Bernie Sanders – who may be less than enthused about Clinton's nomination for the party.
He cited an online quiz in which he sided with the Vermont senator 73% of the time, adding:
"We're on the same page when it comes to people and their choices."
"Legalizing marijuana, military intervention and that crony capitalism is alive and well," he
said, rattling off issues of concern that he and the progressive Sanders share. "People with
money are able to pay for privilege, and they buy it."
"... "JUST DOING THE MATH" "Electoral Fraud In The 2016 Democratic Primaries": http://www.democracyintegrity.org/ElectoralFraud/just-doing-the-math.html
..."
"... The most profitable cliches ever coined are 'perceived threat', 'defense initiative', 'drug
war' and 'globalization'. These recent advents require a strong military and are developing police states
with the cyclical pattern of a willingness to take advantage of the weaker populace, both criminally
and financially. Corporations yanking the rug from under American business and government selling the
very country under our feet may eventually be recognized as predatory acts, yet are capitalism at its
best! Soon, a planned default on payment of our national debt will forever flush our American dream
down the toilet. (Thank Obama's midnight deal to recharter the federal reserve 'absent negotiation'
of our debt for this perpetual rim job. ..."
"... The US State Department investigates election fraud in countries holding democratic elections
if the exit polls are off by even 2%...in our own country, we've had 11 states with exit polls off by
anywhere from 5% to 33% and ALL in favor of Clinton, and all we hear from pundits is: "there is a perfectly
reasonable explanation for this..." ..."
"... Hillary is a self-indulging, power-hungry, war-mongering, law-breaking, seemingly above-the-law
Republican. How could any SANE person vote for her? ..."
"... I speak for thousands when I say as a former lifelong Democrat that Bernie Sanders is the only
candidate with a shred of integrity in this contest and who oddly enough resembles a Democrat instead
of the Neocon Conservative who is winning the primary campaign. ..."
"... A vote for anyone-but-Hillary will do the job. Trump has some important features in common
with Sanders; Libertarian Johnson could be considered ..."
"... Are we witnessing a dishonest election? Our first analysis showed that states wherein the voting
outcomes are difficult to verify show far greater support for Secretary Clinton. Second, our examination
of exit polling suggested large differences between the respondents that took the exit polls and the
claimed voters in the final tally. ..."
"... Your campaign --- I mean you, Guardian ---- & the Hillary supporters both professional and
amateur --- was THE first presidential campaign I have ever seen that targeted the supporters more than
the candidate. Months of slander and mischaracterization of people you don't even know. ..."
"... Your appeal now is that of the abuser who wants the relationship to continue, now that the
beating is over. Sanders supporters would have to be gullible idiots to come back Hillary under current
circumstances. ..."
"... The "Berniebro" smear promulgated by the asshole David Brock is just one of the reasons I'll
never vote for Clinton. I have plenty more, but the cynicism of that was really over the top. It matches
Clinton's scorched earth playing of the racism card in the 2008 campaign, when she was pitching herself
as the champion of "hard working white Americans," putting out pics of Obama in "African/Muslim" garb,
bringing up Reverend Wright (again), and originating the "birther" meme. They are a truly despicable
bunch and deserve to lose. ..."
"... She goes on, Trump says very scary things, deporting immigrants, massive militarism, and ignoring
the climate, well Hillary has a track record for doing all of those things!!! We are rushing towards
war with Hillary Clinton! The terrible things we might expect from Donald Trump we've already seen from
Hillary Clinton! ..."
"... Don't be a victim of this propaganda campaign – which is being waged by people who have selective
amnesia ..."
"... Yes, she is the female version of Trump. "Terrible things we expect from Donald Trump, we've
actually already seen from Hillary Clinton," Jill Stein warns ..."
"Sanders' famously loyal supporters could be forgiven for feeling distraught after investing
so much hope in the grassroots movement."
Then please forgive me;
If you ask someone in this government if governance itself should be considered socialistic,
they'll say 'no' because in actual socialism the population has expectation of a return. This
incorporated government (business) takes from most like any socialist government, but is simply
parasitic when only compelled to perform to its own benefit. The ingrained iconoclast of unbridled
capitalism are firmly rooted in the principle that they deserve what others don't and are overwhelmingly
entitled by birth. A new fast track authority with TPP will put the icing on their cake because
when the potus can make business deals, we've skipped any burden of socialism to effectively become
communistic (oops...wha...tpp top secret stuff? No wonder!). There is little greater evidence
that we suffer a neocon control set than when 'our' corrupt duopoly points the 'pinko' finger
at anyone suggesting a social agenda while existing social programs have a 10 to 1 cost/effect
ratio. This merely demonstrates the willful disconnect of money from purpose in the 'non-socialist'
government. The next step, privatize with a for-profit corporation to supposedly save money? Never
got that one...but somebody sure will!
We are largely poor people in the worlds richest country. A couple of hundred thousand folks
(including family members) proudly espouse paying over 70% of all tax while paying an effective
tax rate of less than 10%. Many pay no tax by using tax shelters, shell corps and offshore banking,
while lower socioeconomic groups pay half of their meager income in realized and hidden tax/fees.
Clearly, when you consider that over three hundred million people live on economic fumes and
social programs, those in our government are beholden to the few accruing trillions annually in
this top 10% wealth bracket. When average Americans know they are not being heard and money is
considered speech, then we see more clearly that being heard comes only with affluence. The resources
of this new country are more than enough to sustain every American, but are sold to the highest
bidder for profits that sustain this top 10%, and those with the deafened ears to whom we have
relinquished control.
The most profitable cliches ever coined are 'perceived threat', 'defense initiative', 'drug
war' and 'globalization'. These recent advents require a strong military and are developing police
states with the cyclical pattern of a willingness to take advantage of the weaker populace, both
criminally and financially. Corporations yanking the rug from under American business and government
selling the very country under our feet may eventually be recognized as predatory acts, yet are
capitalism at its best! Soon, a planned default on payment of our national debt will forever flush
our American dream down the toilet. (Thank Obama's midnight deal to recharter the federal reserve
'absent negotiation' of our debt for this perpetual rim job.
This directive is obviously how an unknown made it to the spotlight while repubs show their
willingness to ram it home in default for their owner$. They are one and the same ultimately,
as we will be reminded that it really was our fault to vote for them...but, by whom and through
what means? Hil and Jeb know!)
Chase Elliott
The US State Department investigates election fraud in countries holding democratic elections
if the exit polls are off by even 2%...in our own country, we've had 11 states with exit polls
off by anywhere from 5% to 33% and ALL in favor of Clinton, and all we hear from pundits is: "there
is a perfectly reasonable explanation for this..."
Yeah, they cheated.
NoSerf -> Chase Elliott
Rocky de la Fuente, Dem. presidential candidate, has the explanation: The DNC goes in within
1 min after final count and delimit Bernie's percentage win from 100%, 90%, whatever it actually
is in a particular county, to whatever the DNC determines (KY: 52%). He has proof on his website.
imothy Everton -> MrsMud
Hillary is a self-indulging, power-hungry, war-mongering, law-breaking, seemingly above-the-law
Republican. How could any SANE person vote for her? But our name is Mud; that I can understand.
Rchrd Hrrcks
It's very interesting to note that, when someone declares that 'voting for the lesser of two
evils leaves us with evil', no Hilary supporters retort with 'but Hilary isn't evil'. I never
see those words. It's an important point. Look out for it.
Ligaya Barlow
If Bernie wants his movement to succeed with revolutionary promise, he should have his name
placed in nomination at the convention then give a rousing speech on national television. Then
he should continue his candidacy as a Green or independent. Sanders-Stein. To be sure he would
get the 15% necessary to take part in the debates. This scenario has the following possible outcomes:
1. He could win the general election.
2. He could throw the election to Trump, culminating in a presidential disaster that would end
the Republican Party as a national party, and open the way to a multiparty system.
3. He could amass enough electoral votes to throw the issue into the House, whose Republican majority
would be put in a position where, if they reject Trump and therefore their own party's electorate,
the party is destroyed; if they elect him, the party is destroyed. This will be the first step
toward abolishing the electoral college, a progressive victory.
4. Clinton wins, but narrowly and at a price: no mandate or consensus, the likely outcome anyway.
If Bernie wants to avoid the dustbin of history, this is what he must do.
His revolutionary movement must include (a.) The abolishment of the electoral college and (b.)
The end of the two party system. Now us the time.
austinpratt -> GreatLizard
We will talk about honor when Hillary Clinton releases the texts of her speeches to donors
and explains why her husband has been on billionaire child-pimping Jeffrey Epstein's private aircraft
26 times, or she explains in detail why she thought killing thousands of people in the Islamic
world and wasting trillions of dollars was a good idea, and why she is sadistically torturing
us with one platitude after another.
I speak for thousands when I say as a former lifelong Democrat that Bernie Sanders is the
only candidate with a shred of integrity in this contest and who oddly enough resembles a Democrat
instead of the Neocon Conservative who is winning the primary campaign.
Longleveler
Greg Palast (who has also written for the Guardian) is a good source for news about the rigged
democratic primaries of 2016: http://www.gregpalast.com
nnedjo cameracoach
Joseph Stalin would be proud...
You mean, Joseph Stalin would be proud of Hillary. Because he has always loved people who know
how to "get things done".:-)
Diniz Ramos De Deus -> Patty Smith
The dems though are a private corporation. They can rig elections in their private company.
it is not a matter of the government what they do in their private company but it is be good reason
to not consider their candidates in the presidential election which is government election.
Kjell Beilman
My question is, what are we gong to do about this? Clearly the majority of people are sick
and tired of both sides, but in the end it's the citizens that need to come out and lobby or government
to change.
IMHO, I fear we have become too complacent with letting the oligarchy rule us. If this recent
election cycle doesn't show that the American people don't get real choices I don't know what
will. We literally have the two most disliked options being presented to us as a choice, give
me a break. I never thought we'd have worse choices then bush v gore, but man the oligarchy really
dug deep on this one!
Que twilight zone music.
cameracoach -> timshan
Since the election was a victim of fraud, the actual number of votes may never be known. Just
as we'll never know who actually won the Iowa caucus because - before the votes were counted -
the state (Hillary supporting) Dem committee announced Hillary won it. Then dumped the evidence.
California is rife with election fraud, Puerto Rico was blatant .. exit polls were eliminated
because after 10 states had different results from exit polls and voting machines .. the networks
decided they didn't want to look so foolish. There was an independent exit polling in CA and their
numbers are just beginning to show up .. showing Bernie winning in areas that the machines show
Hillary winning.
Lost votes, rejected votes and more .. there is no verifiable accurate counting of votes.
nnedjo
So, at first the DNC conceived plan like this. Former Madam Secretary should replace the first
black US president, whose only legacy is that he was the first black US president (although this
is only half true, because Obama is half white).
This is necessary first of all in order to corporate money continued to flow into the funds
of the DNC, and sometimes also directly on accounts of its members in the form of "speaking fees"
or something like that.
For this purpose, in addition to Hillary Clinton, they have chosen a few other candidates whose
name is "no matter what their name is."
Then someone said, "Wait, we can not do it like this! We have to create at least the illusion
of democratic elections, so that Madame Secretary has a "real challenger", someone who will bring
more vibrancy into elections."
And then the choice fell on the old Bernie Sanders, who is actually not a real Democrat, but
even better, because none of the real democrats really wanted to play the role of "mechanical
rabbit" in the race of Madam Secretary for the Democratic nomination.
And then they screwed up, because it turned out that the old Bernie has brought much more vibrancy
in the democratic primary elections than they needed.
How much their plan had been wrong one can conclude from the fact that for a certain period
of time even threatened the danger that Bernie could beat Madam Secretary and so bring into question
the very goals of the plan.
And now the DNC does not know what to do with the old Bernie and his thirty years or more younger
supporters. Meanwhile, Bernie and his supporters wonder why the DNC does not seem to be happy
about this "unexpected gift"? :-)))
Rachman Cantrell
So six people are going to vote for Hillary and one for Trump? This 'poll' is nonsense. Real
polls of Bernie supporters have over 80% saying they will never vote for Hillary! I am one of
them. If Bernie does not get the Dem nomination I am hoping he takes the top slot in the Green
party for the win!
Most independents will vote for Bernie and they make up 43% of the total voting group. Dems
and Repubs are only in the latter twenties and half of them will go with Bernie. He has a real
shot as a third party candidate.
If the Democrat party wants to keep any semblance of power they should get behind Bernie at
the convention because I and many others will be leaving if he is not the nominee! This is not
a threat. It is simply what will happen. Hillary supporters and establishment politicians have
no idea how strongly we feel about this.
panpipes -> Rachman Cantrell
Cite one of those "real polls".
Bernie is the most successful socialist in US history precisely because he is steadfast to
his ideals while knowing how to maneuver through the system that is stacked against him and his
values. Your all or nothing at all stance is not going to do anything good - just like Occupy,
you will burn out while the Bern will keep on with what he has been doing for decades.
inquisitor16 -> Rachman Cantrell
I hope you're right, and think you are.
A vote for anyone-but-Hillary will do the job. Trump has some important features in common
with Sanders; Libertarian Johnson could be considered, though I suggest it's unlikely either
he or the Greens will "win," and one strategy you didn't mention was just to write-in Bernie.
Anyone can easily do that, and it would ensure both that the presumptive nominee never enters
the Oval Office, and that Sanders supporters are identified clearly.
All the above presumes, however, that Clinton is insuperable. If only Bernie will give her
backers an ultimatum ("indict her now for high crimes, or I will endorse Trump") it seems to me
that that assumption can be readily reversed.
xtreemneo
Bernie Sanders' supporters vow the revolution will not be silenced.
Implying Bernie himself will concede to neoliberal dingbats? The man has been at it for 4 decades.
He knows a thing or two about intra-generational equity.
monoitiare
I love these comments, and note these folks read "The Intercept" which I am positive is completely
foreign to HRC supporters....who probably also think Glenn Greenwald is an agent of the underworld,
or something.
"Are we witnessing a dishonest election? Our first analysis showed that states wherein
the voting outcomes are difficult to verify show far greater support for Secretary Clinton.
Second, our examination of exit polling suggested large differences between the respondents
that took the exit polls and the claimed voters in the final tally. Beyond these points,
these irregular patterns of results did not exist in 2008. As such, as a whole, these data
suggest that election fraud is occurring in the 2016 Democratic Party Presidential Primary
election. This fraud has overwhelmingly benefited Secretary Clinton at the expense of Senator
Sanders."
If you're a supporter of honest elections, I hope you spread this info far and wide.
RUwithmeDrWu
Your campaign --- I mean you, Guardian ---- & the Hillary supporters both professional
and amateur --- was THE first presidential campaign I have ever seen that targeted the supporters
more than the candidate. Months of slander and mischaracterization of people you don't even know.
Your appeal now is that of the abuser who wants the relationship to continue, now that the
beating is over. Sanders supporters would have to be gullible idiots to come back Hillary under
current circumstances.
malcolmjackson -> RUwithmeDrWu
Or under any circumstances. She represents everything we're campaigning against.
The "Berniebro" smear promulgated by the asshole David Brock is just one of the reasons
I'll never vote for Clinton. I have plenty more, but the cynicism of that was really over the
top. It matches Clinton's scorched earth playing of the racism card in the 2008 campaign, when
she was pitching herself as the champion of "hard working white Americans," putting out pics of
Obama in "African/Muslim" garb, bringing up Reverend Wright (again), and originating the "birther"
meme. They are a truly despicable bunch and deserve to lose.
Jennifer Marie
Two and a half million votes uncounted and the oligarchy media declares Hillary the winner
the night before? We are NOT giving or giving in .No to corrupt DNC puppet Hillary Clinton, NO
to corrupt GOP Trump, Bernie or bust.
MistMist
Congratulation Paul Lewis and Adithya Sambamurthy for filing an article and video that fails
on multiple levels to accurately portray the current climate and status of the Democratic Primary
election.
Where does it report that California still has close to 2.5 million ballots to count, with
a large portion of these being 'provisional'?
Where does it report that these ballots are likely to be Bernie votes?
Where does it bring to question why California was called at all with these facts being revealed?
Where does it question the role of the Associated Press in falsely claiming Hillary Clinton as
the 'Presumptive' nominee the night before the most important Primary in election history?
Where does it state that neither candidate, Hillary nor Bernie will have the needed 2383 votes
prior to the convention?
Where does is state that the DNC DOES NOT count superdelegates until the convention when they
vote?
Where does it state that the convention will therefore be a contested one?
Where does it reiterate the fact that Hillary Clinton is still under FBI investigation and the
possibility of indictment still looms?
Where does it explore the role of an indictment in determining the strongest candidate against
Donald Trump?
Where does it explore the current polling of Sanders V Trump compared to Clinton V Trump?
I'm no journalist, but I'd imagine these are all rather important points that deserve to be
recognised and reported on. You know, like it's news.
Georgine Henry
Watch Jill Stein, Green Party in an uplifting interview from Democracy Now! She points out
that voting for the lesser evil has no upside/only a downside because it has given us exactly
what we have now!
She goes on, Trump says very scary things, deporting immigrants, massive militarism, and
ignoring the climate, well Hillary has a track record for doing all of those things!!! We are
rushing towards war with Hillary Clinton! The terrible things we might expect from Donald Trump
we've already seen from Hillary Clinton!
Don't be a victim of this propaganda campaign – which is being waged by people who have
selective amnesia – very quick to tell you about the terrible things the Republicans did,
but very quick to forget the equally terrible things that have happened under a Democratic White
House with two Democratic houses of Congress. It's important to move ahead and take back the America
and the world that works for all of us, based on putting people, planet and peace over profit.
Isn't this often the case, someone (Stein) explains something and immediately you recognize
it makes sense – why doing what you've always done, voting for the lesser evil, in this case Trump
or Hillary depending on your perspective, will continue hurtling us down the same destructive
path! As Stein urges us, stand up and fight for the greater good like our lives depend on it,
because they do! Finally I'm clear, no more dilemma, no voting for Trump or Hillary – I'm excited
to watch and see what Stein and Bernie do!
Yes, she is the female version of Trump. "Terrible things we expect from Donald Trump,
we've actually already seen from Hillary Clinton," Jill Stein warns
Alluding to the ongoing FBI investigation into the private server Clinton used for official
business at the State Department, Trump remarked that Clinton's decision to call it by that name
as a calculated move.
"He's protecting her from going to jail, so she's not going to use it," Trump said. "But I bet
you that … she would love to use to those words, because almost everybody agrees that those words
should be used."
"... Clinton framed it in military terms, assuring listeners she would use military force if the deal was violated: "Now we must enforce that deal vigorously. And as I've said many times before, our approach must be 'distrust and verify.' The world must understand that the United States will act decisively if necessary, including with military action, to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon." ..."
"... Even when Clinton is deliberately downplaying her hawkishness, she can't avoid threatening to use force to ensure something that is already being achieved without it. She was trying to define herself as much more of a supporter of diplomatic engagement than she really is, but she remains too much of a reflexive hawk to make that credible. I agree with Cohen that "reasonable discussion of foreign policy free of martial rhetoric is not something to be sneezed at," but after Clinton has spent decades indulging in that martial rhetoric in most major foreign policy debates it is hard to take seriously that she isn't the reliable hawk that we all know her to be. ..."
"... She's given every indication of being more likely, as president, to use large-scale military force than Obama. ..."
That said, it was not remotely a dovish speech. As Jeet Heer
observed
yesterday, even when Clinton endorsed a diplomatic solution she framed it in confrontational terms:
Even when taking pride in the diplomatic success of the nuclear deal with Iran, Clinton framed
it in military terms, assuring listeners she would use military force if the deal was violated:
"Now we must enforce that deal vigorously. And as I've said many times before, our approach must
be 'distrust and verify.' The world must understand that the United States will act decisively
if necessary, including with military action, to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon."
Even when Clinton is deliberately downplaying her hawkishness, she can't avoid threatening
to use force to ensure something that is already being achieved without it. She was trying to define
herself as much more of a supporter of diplomatic engagement than she really is, but she remains
too much of a reflexive hawk to make that credible. I agree with Cohen that "reasonable discussion
of foreign policy free of martial rhetoric is not something to be sneezed at," but after Clinton
has spent decades indulging in that martial rhetoric in most major foreign policy debates it is hard
to take seriously that she isn't the reliable hawk that we all know her to be.
Heer went on to say this:
The Clinton of the San Diego speech hasn't internalized any of the lessons of the Iraq War.
She's given every indication of being more likely, as president, to use large-scale military force
than Obama.
"... Clinton framed it in military terms, assuring listeners she would use military force if the deal was violated: "Now we must enforce that deal vigorously. And as I've said many times before, our approach must be 'distrust and verify.' The world must understand that the United States will act decisively if necessary, including with military action, to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon." ..."
"... Even when Clinton is deliberately downplaying her hawkishness, she can't avoid threatening to use force to ensure something that is already being achieved without it. She was trying to define herself as much more of a supporter of diplomatic engagement than she really is, but she remains too much of a reflexive hawk to make that credible. I agree with Cohen that "reasonable discussion of foreign policy free of martial rhetoric is not something to be sneezed at," but after Clinton has spent decades indulging in that martial rhetoric in most major foreign policy debates it is hard to take seriously that she isn't the reliable hawk that we all know her to be. ..."
"... She's given every indication of being more likely, as president, to use large-scale military force than Obama. ..."
That said, it was not remotely a dovish speech. As Jeet Heer
observed
yesterday, even when Clinton endorsed a diplomatic solution she framed it in confrontational terms:
Even when taking pride in the diplomatic success of the nuclear deal with Iran, Clinton framed
it in military terms, assuring listeners she would use military force if the deal was violated:
"Now we must enforce that deal vigorously. And as I've said many times before, our approach must
be 'distrust and verify.' The world must understand that the United States will act decisively
if necessary, including with military action, to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon."
Even when Clinton is deliberately downplaying her hawkishness, she can't avoid threatening
to use force to ensure something that is already being achieved without it. She was trying to define
herself as much more of a supporter of diplomatic engagement than she really is, but she remains
too much of a reflexive hawk to make that credible. I agree with Cohen that "reasonable discussion
of foreign policy free of martial rhetoric is not something to be sneezed at," but after Clinton
has spent decades indulging in that martial rhetoric in most major foreign policy debates it is hard
to take seriously that she isn't the reliable hawk that we all know her to be.
Heer went on to say this:
The Clinton of the San Diego speech hasn't internalized any of the lessons of the Iraq War.
She's given every indication of being more likely, as president, to use large-scale military force
than Obama.
Note the word "appease" that Guardian neoliberal presstitutes use about possibility of appointment
of Warren as VP
Notable quotes:
"... Conscious of this continuing trust gap among young progressives, the Clinton campaign flirted with perhaps the ultimate response this week by meeting with Elizabeth Warren, the popular Massachusetts senator, for what many assumed were talks about making her a possible running mate. ..."
"... Another argument is that because Warren made a point of resisting endorsing Hillary during the campaign that, de facto, was an endorsement of Sanders in effect. Warren also wrote a couple of op-eds during the race which were like big smoke signals saying: "Vote Bernie! Vote Bernie!". ..."
"... They promise things on the campaign trail and actually deliver maybe 10% of it. The remaining 90% goes to corporate welfare. ..."
"... No, Clinton isn't going to get a lot of Sanders' supporters, but she might get a lot of Republican votes, since she's much closer to them than to progressives. I'd wager most Sanders supporters will vote Green, which is more their natural home than the Democratic Party. Those who won't vote Green will likely not vote at all. ..."
"... Clinton is disingenuous and Sanders supporters realize that. ..."
"... Employing Super delegates to sway the nomination against a popular vote for the nominee shows just how corrupt and contemptible the party is. ..."
"... I don't believe many Sanders supporters could endorse either party's nominee under the circumstances and are therefore going unrepresented in this election. Speaking for myself, I cannot support Clinton due to her commitments to the big money donors to her campaign. She can't be candid about her policy since those donors interests are incongruent with the interests of average Americans. Clinton cannot serve two masters. ..."
"... Both Trump and Sanders are waiting on the results of the FBI investigation. WaPo says that, unlike Holder, Lynch doesn't play political games and won't bow to pressure from Obama to not indict Hillary when the report comes out. ..."
"... Oh, Guardian, Guardian, you've sunk even below your own depths of meretriciousness. ..."
"... Not: "New release likely to show how corrupt, if not outright criminal Clinton is." Just "being found out as a perjurer and a crook is going to present a PR problem." The ethics of a flea. And I'm not just talking about Hillary. ..."
"... American politics is so sleazy and corrupt that neither party is capable of fielding an "honorable candidate". ..."
"... BTW, Wikileaks is about to publish more of Hillary's emails - stay tuned! ..."
"... HRC has a record (no pun intended). If you have examined that record on your own (rather than through the eyes of a biased media) and can see death is so much better than Armageddon, I'll respect your point of view. ..."
"... Trump may have the savvy not to screw with Putin in the git, but once the fire is set, he could be insane enough to pour gasoline on the fire. HRC is going to continue screwing with Putin, the middle class and anybody else who gets in her way. Can you live with that? ..."
"I am going to write in Bernie. Whether or not he's on the ticket, he's getting my vote," said
Chelsea Denman, a 27-year-old who works in the legal profession in Washington. "He's gotten a movement
going that's not dying down anytime soon. He needs to continue on to the convention. He needs to
keep himself out there and talk about the issues."
Asked why she was so opposed to Clinton, Denman replied as many do: "I don't think she's genuine.
I think she says what she thinks she needs to be said to get elected. I don't trust her. I think
it's unfortunate that as a woman I can't trust potentially the first woman president."
Conscious of this continuing trust gap among young progressives, the Clinton campaign flirted
with perhaps the ultimate response this week by meeting with Elizabeth Warren, the popular Massachusetts
senator, for what many assumed were talks about making her a possible running mate.
In contrast to pairings with other rumoured candidates, such as the Virginia senator Tim Kaine or
the New Jersey senator Cory Booker, sharing a ticket with Warren was once considered an unthinkable
lurch to the left by Clinton that is likely to appease many Sanders loyalists.
... ... ...
If Warren were the vice-presidential candidate, it could also alienate many moderate Republicans,
who regard the anti-Wall Street firebrand as a distinctly acquired taste.
"Elizabeth Warren could almost persuade me to re-think my opposition to Trump. She's insufferable,"
wrote one former adviser to John McCain this week.
For others on the left, the more important question is whether Clinton commits to the policies of
Sanders and Warren.
"Elizabeth Warren bolstered the case that the right way to achieve Democratic unity is to show voters
that Clinton, Sanders, and the Democratic party stand united behind big, bold, progressive ideas,"
said Adam Green, founder of the Progressive Change Campaign committee. His list of ideas included
"expanding social security benefits instead of cutting them, debt-free college, breaking up too-big-to-fail
banks, and jailing Wall Street bankers who break the law".
Haigin88 -> mbidding 12 Jun 2016 15:30
I'll argue that the system itself is set up to make almost anyone into a bullshitter or shill.
How can someone run against someone for months, then lose, then say that they endorse them after
all? One might ask: "Are you lying now or were you lying then, during the campaign?". I'm a European,
looking on, and there's much to vex an onlooker, believe me.
That's part of the reason why Bernie's in a tight spot. If he turned around and started saying
how great Hillary is, he'd be almost disavowing his own wonderful campaign but, at the same time,
he doesn't want the short-fingered scoundrel to win and Hillary's the only weapon to hand, so
that's why he had to step carefully after his Obama meeting. Falling in behind Hillary could splinter
his support in all directions. People have to understand that he's boxed in. He made a decision
not to run as a Green and went all in but now he's got to be very careful.
Everyone's a Monday morning quarterback but one argument is that Warren miscalculated; that
the Clintons respect power and that she'd actually have more weight if she *had* swung in behind
Sanders at the start and then come to Hillary after she won. That would have shown strength of
conviction and Warren's post-Sanders endorsement might have carried weight with the public at
large and the Clintons: Warren would have won either way.
Another argument is that because Warren made a point of resisting endorsing Hillary during
the campaign that, de facto, was an endorsement of Sanders in effect. Warren also wrote a couple
of op-eds during the race which were like big smoke signals saying: "Vote Bernie! Vote Bernie!".
Matthew Hartman -> SenseCir 12 Jun 2016 15:30
No, what she'll likely do is pander to both the left and right like her master did. This is
what centrists or "New Democrats" as coined by her husband in the 90's do.
They promise things on the campaign trail and actually deliver maybe 10% of it. The remaining
90% goes to corporate welfare.
So come next Tuesday Sander's is going to meet with her and demand she adopt's Bernie's policies
and she's going to say yes so Bernie will throw his endorsement behind her. She thinks this will
secure Bernie's supporters. Then she's going to turn around and run to the left to grab those
disenfranchised Republicans that are'nt sure about Trump.
Then when she's finally POTUS she's going to do whatever the hell she wants to do.
This woman doesn't want positive change for the American people. She wants to be president.
apacheman 12 Jun 2016 15:17
No, Clinton isn't going to get a lot of Sanders' supporters, but she might get a lot of
Republican votes, since she's much closer to them than to progressives. I'd wager most Sanders
supporters will vote Green, which is more their natural home than the Democratic Party. Those
who won't vote Green will likely not vote at all.
The Democrats are fond of gloating that voters have no choice but to vote for them, but the
reality is they have several choices other than voting for blatant corruption.
Michael Imanual Christos -> simpledino 12 Jun 2016 15:13
Sanders makes sense and in many ways Clinton has parroted Sanders to draw from his support
pool, but Clinton is disingenuous and Sanders supporters realize that.
The party Super delegates are the stich within. The Democrats employed an unethical bias into
its nomination process that completely undermines the integrity of US elections.
Employing Super delegates to sway the nomination against a popular vote for the nominee
shows just how corrupt and contemptible the party is.
We the people must not let this type of party singularity continue.
Michael Imanual Christos 12 Jun 2016 13:44
I don't believe many Sanders supporters could endorse either party's nominee under the
circumstances and are therefore going unrepresented in this election. Speaking for myself, I cannot
support Clinton due to her commitments to the big money donors to her campaign. She can't be candid
about her policy since those donors interests are incongruent with the interests of average Americans.
Clinton cannot serve two masters.
And Donald Trump is a film flam man. He has no clue (even if he thinks he does) how to run
this country or about how the country runs.
When a man criticizes trade deals past with rhetoric of Mr. Sanders solid position and without
characterizing the faults but (again without characterizing specifics) suggests he can make "fantastic"
trade agreements, it shows his lack of knowledge and is just lip service.
Mr. Trump, please tell us specifically what you believe the current trade deals have adversely
effecting the US, and what deals you'll renegotiate to bring balance to the US economy?
I will vote but not for either party in this election.
Without Sanders at the helm, I hold to little hope for my grand babies future.
peter nelson -> JackGC 12 Jun 2016 12:45
Both Trump and Sanders are waiting on the results of the FBI investigation. WaPo says that,
unlike Holder, Lynch doesn't play political games and won't bow to pressure from Obama to not
indict Hillary when the report comes out.
daWOID 12 Jun 2016 12:36
Oh, Guardian, Guardian, you've sunk even below your own depths of meretriciousness.
Here's another headline of yours:
WikiLeaks to publish more Hillary Clinton emails - Julian Assange
New release likely to fan controversy and provide further ammunition for Republican presidential
rival Donald Trump.
Not: "New release likely to show how corrupt, if not outright criminal Clinton is." Just
"being found out as a perjurer and a crook is going to present a PR problem." The ethics of a
flea. And I'm not just talking about Hillary.
peter nelson -> Suga 12 Jun 2016 12:34
Why do you think it's just the Republicans? You think Hillary is an "honorable" candidate?
American politics is so sleazy and corrupt that neither party is capable of fielding an "honorable
candidate".
BTW, Wikileaks is about to publish more of Hillary's emails - stay tuned!
curiouswes -> OurPlanet 12 Jun 2016 12:25
If he was a man true to his word ,why is he not running( Ross Perot) on an Independent ticket.
In case you haven't noticed, the deck is stacked against 3rd party candidates. Why do you think
Bernie ran as a democrat? Why did Ron Paul run as a republican? Perot was a disaster for the Dems
and Reps because he showed that both sides are bought. We don't have a choice between being sold
out and not being sold out. Our choice is between being sold out by whom
curiouswes -> Zepp 12 Jun 2016 12:10
Please don't mistake me for a Hillary supporter. I think she's a very poor choice. But
Trump is a lunatic.
So your point seems to be that we'd be better off with a sane, methodical opportunistic shyster
than we would be with an insane reckless opportunistic shyster. I think that is a fair point but
it is debatable in that we cannot trust what comes out of Trump's mouth so what you perceive as
lunacy could just be the sort of empty rhetoric that HRC continues to fill the heads of her supporters
with.
HRC has a record (no pun intended). If you have examined that record on your own (rather
than through the eyes of a biased media) and can see death is so much better than Armageddon,
I'll respect your point of view. I'm no Obama fan but I will admit that after he screwed
with Putin, he had the sanity to back down in order to avoid nuclear holocaust.
Trump may have the savvy not to screw with Putin in the git, but once the fire is set,
he could be insane enough to pour gasoline on the fire. HRC is going to continue screwing with
Putin, the middle class and anybody else who gets in her way. Can you live with that?
Ligaya Barlow 12 Jun 2016 11:44
If Bernie wants his movement to succeed with revolutionary promise, he should have his name
placed in nomination at the convention then give a rousing speech on national television. Then
he should continue his candidacy as a Green or independent. Sanders-Stein. To be sure he would
get the 15% necessary to take part in the debates. This scenario has the following possible outcomes:
1. He could win the general election.
2. He could throw the election to Trump, culminating in a presidential disaster that would
end the Republican Party as a national party, and open the way to a multiparty system.
3. He could amass enough electoral votes to throw the issue into the House, whose Republican
majority would be put in a position where, if they reject Trump and therefore their own party's
electorate, the party is destroyed; if they elect him, the party is destroyed.This will be the
first step toward abolishing the electoral college, a progressive victory.
4. Clinton wins, but narrowly and at a price: no mandate or consensus, the likely outcome anyway.
If Bernie wants to avoid the dustbin of history, this is what he must do.
His revolutionary movement must include (a.) The abolishment of the electoral college and (b.)
The end of the two party system. Now us the time.
"... Trump isn't even far right, he's just a populist. He's nationalist, but not national socialist. He's for diplomacy, not for invading every country the MIC identifies as "terrorist" (the new, politically-correct n-word for people we can kill with impunity). ..."
"... Trump just represents people who want their jobs and their country back, and for you to malign these followers as far right is nothing short of elitism. ..."
"... Trump will do an 'Alexander' on the US's Gordian knot of a political system. At least that's the hope of the many frustrated and disillusioned. And like Obama, Day-2 in the White House will business-as-usual according to the MIC-Wall St script. ..."
"... Unfortunately, lesser of evils at voting time has not resulted in lesser of evils Presidents. Every time I keep thinking that the new guy can't possibly be as bad as the last, he proves that he can be. ..."
"... Trump appears to be an outsider until you meet his foreign policy team or his economic advisers or watch his virtual oath of fealty to AIPAC to etc. Loose cannons can backfire. The only Never-Hillary alternative beyond Trump is Sanders. ..."
"... Unemployment & underemployment are destroying the lives of US Citizens. Life expectancy of US Citizens is going down. Trump's plan to decrease the number of non-citizens in the US is highly popular among US Citizen voters. ..."
"... Today I read an example. Millions of Americans are scrapping by and rely on so-called payday loans. The Administration tightened regulations on those loans, Republicans oppose, Hillary promises to defend them. Bernie proposed a postal bank as exists in most countries which would eliminate most cases where such loans could start. Sanders plan is realistic, simple to understand and much more effective, and would hurt so called "pay day loan industry" much more, and this is too much for "bleeding liver liberals". ..."
"... Although the legal issues are complicated, what we know for sure is that Clinton played fast and loose with National Security because she deemed that it was more important to secure HER OWN communications. This was NOT a 'judgment call' on a policy issue but a deliberate choice to ignore some of the most grave obligations of her office so as to advantage herself. ..."
"... To any reasonable person, this simple fact is further evidence of Hillary's corrupt elitism and unquestionably disqualifies her for the Presidency. ..."
"... This misconception is still alive and kicking. Killary wasnt the mastermind behind Libya's invasion, she was just a frontwoman for "color revolution" plans which were well under way before she come into power, and will continue when she fades into obscurity. ..."
"... Another misconception is Obama's "peace-loving" nature, its just an illusion he and his PR people are pushing. "Obama is good, its these others who want war", and people still fall for that? :)) The only difference between Bush jr and Obama is that one likes to fight wars directly (US cant afford that anymore), and another through proxy terrorists and drones, its cheaper this way, and even more destructive. ..."
"... As far as I can see, Trump's the only person calling for diplomacy & a de-escalation of tensions with the Chinese & the Russians. His obsession with capitalism, making money & deal-making may paradoxically prove to be his best feature; if you blow up the world, no more deals! ..."
"... Taking formerly unified & regionally powerful countries resistant to USA domination & turning them into defenseless mini-statelets is "strategically pointless"? It amazes me how progressives can look the strategy straight in the eye... and then deny it. ..."
"... Iraq was hostile to Iran before the invasion and Saddam was easy to deal with. Syria used to be stable and sell oil. Now Iraq is aligned with Iran and Syria is a disaster and has given Russia an opportunity to demonstrate loyalty to allies and the effectiveness of the Russian military and weapons. ..."
"... About Obama being an organizer. He seems to have frontend for the FIRE sector: ..."
"... Breaking States is essential and specifically mentioned in the Oded Yinon Plan for Greater Israel. The PNAC Plan for Full Spectrum Dominance with the Global War on Terror further reinforces and justifies the Yinon Plan. ..."
"... Don't miss the event ... all signs are pointing towards the inevitable! ..."
"... "Hillary's experience is one of failure." ..."
"... HRC is a shill politician supporting Israel in the Middle East . Her vote for the Iraq war, her run as senator for NY with the backing of Rupert Murdoch and her abominable policy as Secretary of State versus Libya and Syria. She used the worst of advisors at State to run her affairs. The buck stop at Obama's desk, he is ultimately responsible for the decisions made. ..."
"... Early take on Hillary's foreign policy speech: pot shots at Trump (easy), interspersed with scare-mongering, chest-thumping and neocon talking points like: "we never ever stop trying to make our country a better place" (how exceptional!). ..."
"... Seems Neocons loved HRC's Trump bashing speech as this recap details, https://www.commentarymagazine.com/politics-ideas/campaigns-elections/hillary-clinton-anti-trump-speech/ ..."
"... I have to agree with @1 that it is not at all clear that Trump is "far right". He's a populist, sure, he is. Maybe he even fits the definition of a demagogue. But that doesn't place him on the "far right", it just places him "outside the system". ..."
"... Trump appears to be all in favour of replacing a foreign policy that relies upon a robust military with one that is based upon active diplomacy i.e. that jaw-jaw is better than war-war. ..."
"... Actually, for Germany, Sanders is very much "middle". Hillary would be "right wing" minus the classism and racism. Trump is close to classical National Socialism with a very special US American "businessman" flavor (there is a traditional disdain for business in Germany) ..."
"... So, I guess you could sum up the conclusion to all these comments that there is absolutely no one worth voting for because the electoral system is irrevocably broken due to psychopathic or ponerological "infection". You can thrash out the debate as to who is the greater or lesser of evils chosen for the parade this time around but it's a waste of energy since the foundations upon which elections are built have long been rotten to the core. ..."
"... So, voting for such theatre is surely perpetuating the scenario. The president is already chosen. Period. ..."
"... What must be understood and highlighted is who the political class works for- the savage capitalists. The US government is merely the front for the ruling class. It merely carries out the policies of the over-civilized, well-manicured capitalist thugs. ..."
"... Voting is a ritual that reinforces obedience to state authority. It creates the illusion that "the people" control the state, thereby masking elite rule. That illusion makes rebellion against the state less likely because it is seen as a legitimate institution and as an instrument of popular rule rather than the oligarchy it really is. Embedded within all electoral campaigns is the myth that "the people" control the state through voting. ..."
"... "Who wins the election in the capitalist system makes no difference because all politicians in this system must do what the ruling class want. Elections are a scam whose function is to neutralize resistance movements and dupe ordinary citizens into thinking they have a say in matters of the state." ..."
Yves Smith of the Naked Capitalism
explains why many of her progressive acquaintances will either not vote, or vote for Trump in
the upcoming U.S. election. I recommend to read
this in full.
For starters two excerpts:
Hillary's experience is one of failure. And she did not learn from it.
Hillary has a résumé of glittering titles with disasters or at best thin accomplishments under
each. Her vaunted co-presidency with Bill? After her first major project, health care reform,
turned into such a debacle that it was impossible to broach the topic for a generation, she retreated
into a more traditional first lady role. As New York senator, she accomplished less with a bigger
name and from a more powerful state than Sanders did. As secretary of state, she participated
and encouraged strategically pointless nation-breaking in Iraq and Syria. She bureaucratically
outmaneuvered Obama, leading to U.S. intervention in Libya, which he has called the worst decision
of his administration. And her plan to fob her domestic economic duties off on Bill comes off
as an admission that she can't handle being president on her own.
And the conclusion:
The Sanders voters in Naked Capitalism 's active commentariat also explicitly reject
lesser-evilism, the cudgel that has previously kept true lefties somewhat in line. They are willing
to gamble, given that outsider presidents like Jimmy Carter and celebrity governors like Arnold
Schwarzenegger and Jesse Ventura didn't get much done, that a Trump presidency represents an acceptable
cost of inflicting punishment on the Democratic Party for 20 years of selling out ordinary Americans.
The Clintons, like the Bourbons before the French Revolution, have ensconced themselves in
such a bubble of operative and media sycophancy that they've mistakenly viewed escalating distress
and legitimate demands from citizens as mere noise.
...
If my readers are representative, Clinton and the Democratic Party are about to have a long-overdue
day of reckoning.
To vote for the far right because the former center (left) has lost its bearing is a somewhat
dangerous gamble. The U.S. has a relative stable, inertial system with lots of checks and balances
that make this move less risky than similar moves underway in Poland, Germany or France. But unless
the center left/right politicians recognize that they have lost their former majority there is no
chance they will shun the neoliberal globalization nonsense they impose on their constituency.
Voting for a stronger movement towards a genuine left is be a better strategy than voting for
the far right. But notorious lack of unity within the left, center-right control over the media and
the absence of a successful current archetype will keep a majority away from taking that step.
I agree that the day of reckoning is a long-overdue day. But it may not bring the reckoning we
want.
Trump isn't even far right, he's just a populist. He's nationalist, but not national socialist.
He's for diplomacy, not for invading every country the MIC identifies as "terrorist" (the new,
politically-correct n-word for people we can kill with impunity).
Trump just represents people who want their jobs and their country back, and for you to
malign these followers as far right is nothing short of elitism.
Trump will do an 'Alexander' on the US's Gordian knot of a political system. At least that's
the hope of the many frustrated and disillusioned. And like Obama, Day-2 in the White House will
business-as-usual according to the MIC-Wall St script.
The way to refute the argument that third party votes are wasted votes is for more and more people
to vote third party. If Hillary is nominated, I intend to vote for Jill Stein (whom there seems
to be a media conspiracy to ignore -- even when they're discussing what Sanders supporters might
do, they never mention her).
"nation-breaking." I'll have to remember that. That is a very descriptive term for US middle-east
policy in recent decades. Brzezinski and Kissinger may not admit as much but it's true; look at
the results.
Unfortunately, lesser of evils at voting time has not resulted in lesser of evils Presidents.
Every time I keep thinking that the new guy can't possibly be as bad as the last, he proves that
he can be.
Trump appears to be an outsider until you meet his foreign policy team or his economic
advisers or watch his virtual oath of fealty to AIPAC to etc. Loose cannons can backfire. The
only Never-Hillary alternative beyond Trump is Sanders. Would Sanders truly reign in the
mid-east wars or continue R2P destruction? Can he stand up to Wall Street? I don't know.
Do you realise just what you're asking? To even click on that site I'd rather 'do' dishes;
doing the "Black Plague" is preferable to doing dishes and root canal is just above that.
The only way to regain control of this political system is: Never vote Republican AND Never
vote incumBENT Democrat. Why no one realises 95+ % of the problem comes from having 95+ % incumBENTs
returned election after election. Stop that and the problem soon becomes manageable. Throwing
your vote after unelectables just throws your vote away - to no discernible effect and is downright
foolishness.
Unemployment & underemployment are destroying the lives of US Citizens. Life expectancy of
US Citizens is going down. Trump's plan to decrease the number of non-citizens in the US is highly
popular among US Citizen voters.
Voting for Goldman Sachs' sock puppet Hillary Clinton is a vote for immediate self destruction.
I do not think that Clinton's chief problem is with people who would rather vote for Jill Stein.
Her problem is in the "middle", who are often "culturally" sympathetic to GOP but responding to
a concrete populist message.
Today I read an example. Millions of Americans are scrapping by and rely on so-called payday
loans. The Administration tightened regulations on those loans, Republicans oppose, Hillary promises
to defend them. Bernie proposed a postal bank as exists in most countries which would eliminate
most cases where such loans could start. Sanders plan is realistic, simple to understand and much
more effective, and would hurt so called "pay day loan industry" much more, and this is too much
for "bleeding liver liberals".
Trump has a realistic chance of winning in Ohio and Florida against Hillary, and thus becoming
a president, and this is not because of wide awareness of how wrong Hillary was on Libya (her
failed work on health care reform is known more widely, I presume). Actually, both cases are an
indictment not of Hillary but of the liberal establishment in general. On Libya, Hillary basically
followed the herd (from liberal think tanks). On health care reform, the methodology was liberal:
improve the lot of the consumer without affecting the "industries" too much and concocting a "child
that only mother could love", plus the particular child mothered by Hillary was torned to pieces
by fellow liberals (certain Moynihan comes to my mind). "Single payer", like it or not, is something
that somewhat clueless "centrist voters" can understand, and again, it works even as close to
USA as Canada.
As I have written, There Are No Safe
Choices and arguing over greater or lesser evils is an exercise in futility at best. The question
is, how do we build our own forces of resistance? To vote for Hillary is to commit an act of unilateral
disarmament. A massive write-in for Sanders would not be wasted, although the votes would not
even be counted until weeks after the election.
A vote for Stein will immediately register. I am not a great fan of the Green Party, but a
Stein vote gives us a tactic to organize our own resistance while we dig in and build something
new.
Yves is lobbying Super-delegates on behalf of Sanders. That's why she doesn't mention Jill Stein
or the Green Party.
The problem with Sanders is that he choose Party over principle. That's why he doesn't attack
Hillary on her emails or Obama wrt black issues (Hillary gets the black vote largely because
Obama supports her) .
Although the legal issues are complicated, what we know for sure is that Clinton played
fast and loose with National Security because she deemed that it was more important to secure
HER OWN communications. This was NOT a 'judgment call' on a policy issue but a deliberate choice
to ignore some of the most grave obligations of her office so as to advantage herself.
To any reasonable person, this simple fact is further evidence of Hillary's corrupt elitism
and unquestionably disqualifies her for the Presidency.
But Sanders remains quiet about the emails DESPITE THE STATE DEPT INSPECTOR GENERAL REPORT
which showed that she has been dishonest and deceptive about her email server.
Is it sufficient for Bernie to sit back and let Trump attack Hillary on the emails? Does it
help him to 'unify the party' later? On both counts I would argue: NO!!!
1) The Democratic Party establishment is anti-Sanders. They like things the way they are. If
Hillary is disqualified, they will find someone else to take her place. There are already serious
rumors about Biden (Biden-Warren ticket?).
What the establishment really cares about is that Hillary beats Sanders in delegates and votes
cast so that Hillary can be a King-maker if she can't be a candidate.
2) Bernie's silence:
> contributes to the view that the email server is just a partisan football;
> contributes to the view that it is just a question of judgement;
> undermines his 'man of principle' positioning;
> undermines his argument that Clinton is a flawed candidate;
> undermines his claim to have better judgement than Hillary (as explained above - her decision
to operate a private email server is disqualifying);
Bernie's silence doesn't help him to win or to win over the Party. By pulling punches (once
again!) Bernie is choosing Party over Principle. This seems to confirm that he is indeed just
a sheepdog for the DNC as described by
Black
Agenda Report and
Talking
Points Memo .
<> <> <> <> <> <> <>
One can only hope that this election season Progressives will finally WAKE UP and understand
that the Democratic Party establishment is too corrupt and too entrenched for reform.
Bernie supporters and left-leaning independents should join/vote GREEN PARTY.
I recommend voting third party...any third party. In most states, the outcome is already known,
because most states are reliably either Democratic or Republican.
In all but a handful of battleground states, voters are free to vote their conscience. Only
in battleground states need they consider voting for the lesser of the evils.
Voting third party is important--it conveys a message of disgust with the establishment duopoly.
OTOH NOT voting only conveys complacence and apathy, which the duopoly is totally OK with.
She bureaucratically outmaneuvered Obama, leading to U.S. intervention in Libya, which he
has called the worst decision of his administration.
This misconception is still alive and kicking. Killary wasnt the mastermind behind Libya's
invasion, she was just a frontwoman for "color revolution" plans which were well under way before
she come into power, and will continue when she fades into obscurity.
Another misconception is Obama's "peace-loving" nature, its just an illusion he and his
PR people are pushing. "Obama is good, its these others who want war", and people still
fall for that? :)) The only difference between Bush jr and Obama is that one likes to fight wars
directly (US cant afford that anymore), and another through proxy terrorists and drones, its cheaper
this way, and even more destructive.
The assumption of Obama's progressivism has been found to be misguided time and time again.
It is a con. It is a lubricant.
Black?
He is ethnically half-white and culturally about 90% white.
Community organizer?
Wall Street bailouts and faux mortgage relief. 11-dimensional chess excuses for inaction
(he had majorities in both houses of Congress when he was elected)
Bush tax cuts made permanent - poor get austerity.
Solution for inequality? More low-paying jobs.
Constitutional lawyer?
War on Whistle-blowers; assault on civil liberties; IRS scandal; etc.
Awarded for simply being NOT-Bush. Approved everything the neocons wanted and asserted the
neocon mantra of American exceptionalism.
The faux conflict between Netanyahu and Obama over Iran is just for show. Sanctions weren't
working and the Syrian conflict has dragged out longer than expected (they are not yet ready
to take on Iran).
Note: The above list only scratches the surface of the deceitfulness.
dahoit | Jun 2, 2016 11:10:22 AM | 16
Trump far right? That's Obomba, Clinton, the shrub and HRC, the worst rightists in American
history.
Trump is left-right and in the middle, a non ideologue, who will bring back American prosperity,
get US out of this wacko world domination idiocy and protect our borders,all nationalist endeavors
,and as right as rain. The moron bubblehead says Trumps foreign policy aims will upset the
world order. My God,shes a retard. Never in the history of this planet has such an empty
vessel ever sought such a high office.
Trump is far-right? It seems obvious that when it comes to foreign policy he's to the left of
everyone; Clinton has already promised to "totally obliterate" Iran, lusts after confrontation
with Russia & is clearly willing to hit the button. For his part, Sanders says "The Saudis (ISIS)
should play a bigger role in the Middle East," and says the military option is on the table vis
a vis Russia (which of course means nuclear weapons, since USA could obviously never win a conventional
war with Russia - it can't even defeat a few thousand lightly armed Taliban). As far as I
can see, Trump's the only person calling for diplomacy & a de-escalation of tensions with the
Chinese & the Russians. His obsession with capitalism, making money & deal-making may paradoxically
prove to be his best feature; if you blow up the world, no more deals!
strategically pointless nation-breaking in Iraq and Syria
Taking formerly unified & regionally powerful countries resistant to USA domination & turning
them into defenseless mini-statelets is "strategically pointless"? It amazes me how progressives
can look the strategy straight in the eye... and then deny it.
Naked C. Article is 'factual' within the US landscape from a certain pov..
Always said that:
1) Killary cannot win. Already a one time loser, not enough 'base', her and hubby's
past, corruption etc. etc.
2) that the PTB (deep state, military ind. complex, big corps, Finance..) could accomodate
to a Sanders presidency but not a Trump one.
What Dem alternatives remain? If Killary is indicted for the homey-cellar-e-mail boondoggle,
plus the fact she could not win (say, most likely, as article hints at) against Trump, the Dems
need to put forward another candidate, Biden? Ensuring that the Dems lose the election but the
overall system is maintained. (Keeping the lid on Sanders supporters, switching from Bernie to
X (other candidate) will be a disaster.)
On the Repub. side the picture is the same. They can't support Killary openly and to prevent
Trump from triumphing they need to launch a candidate that splits Repubs. + conservatives votes,
some X 'respectable' candidate getting some 6 better 9-10 or .. % of the vote, enough to throw
the election to the Dem candidate. So that the Repubs. lose the election but the system is maintained
(bis).
The prez. race has turned into vaudeville where different parties are fighting to lose
while conserving their advantages within the status quo.
:) :)
All wll be done to keep the 2-party system alive and put a lid on ALL opposition.
strategically pointless nation-breaking in Iraq and Syria
I have found that the US "Left" is generally anti-Empire and simply see any discussion of foreign
affairs as mere details. They easily fall for the 'chaos' simplification/cloaking.
I have made the case that oligarchs and fundamentalism are global problems and that they reinforce
each other across national and social divides. It's a complex dance that is destructive and anti-human.
The details matter because opening people eyes requires examples.
Iraq was hostile to Iran before the invasion and Saddam was easy to deal with. Syria used
to be stable and sell oil. Now Iraq is aligned with Iran and Syria is a disaster and has given
Russia an opportunity to demonstrate loyalty to allies and the effectiveness of the Russian military
and weapons.
Mark 16 "strategically pointless nation-breaking in Iraq and Syria"
Taking formerly unified & regionally powerful countries resistant to USA domination &
turning them into defenseless mini-statelets is "strategically pointless"? It amazes me how
progressives can look the strategy straight in the eye... and then deny it.
Not strategically pointless by any measure! Complete Bullshit. Breaking States is essential
and specifically mentioned in the Oded Yinon Plan for Greater Israel. The PNAC Plan for Full Spectrum
Dominance with the Global War on Terror further reinforces and justifies the Yinon Plan.
NATO and The US acting as Aggressor (pre-emptive war & war for regime change) is illegal and
Criminal - War Crimes as spelled out clearly in NATO Manifesto.
Part of the problem is that what you refer to as centrist is actually extreme conservatism bordering
on fundamentalism in exactly the same vein as Wahhabism, only in the name of Christ.
I'm one who would certainly vote for Trump over Clinton explicitly to punish the faux left
for perpetrating and perpetuating Obama's treasonous betrayal of every last vestige of progressive
idealism.
As one of the many, many people who don't self identify with political terms like left, right,
democrat and republican, it's not a matter of which camp wins, it's a matter of establishing a
pattern of public policy that over the long term balances out the needs of varying constituencies
in a manner that results in the greatest long-term benefit to the common weal.
Sanders clearly represents a needed swing back to sound investment in infrastructure and establishing
necessary limits on a global oligarchy with no nationalist interests.
Unless a miracle happens and he gets past the concerted effort to defeat him, then Trump represents
the best opportunity to diminish the effectiveness of the current cabal. There should be no illusions
that Trump won't fall into line immediately though.
The reaction against Clinton is purely punitive. We don't need more status quo. Either way,
there will be massive amounts of pain for all as we go through the death of the current paradigm
- and it's coming regardless of who desecrates democracy and the Office of the President.
This statement is very true ... HRC is a shill politician
supporting Israel
in the Middle East . Her vote for the Iraq war, her run as senator for NY with the backing
of Rupert Murdoch and her abominable policy as Secretary of State versus Libya and Syria. She
used the worst of advisors at State to run her affairs. The buck stop at Obama's desk, he is ultimately
responsible for the decisions made.
Iraq was hostile to Iran before the invasion and Saddam was easy to deal with. Syria used to
be stable and sell oil. Now Iraq is aligned with Iran and Syria is a disaster and has given
Russia an opportunity to demonstrate loyalty to allies and the effectiveness of the Russian
military and weapons.
I agree with your first point - a strengthened Iran was certainly one of the few *truly* unintended
consequences of the invasion/destruction of Iraq - which Bush recognized/sought to address in
his 2006 "redirection" plan - but I don't know to what extent the current govt in Iraq is "aligned
with Iran." My understanding (admittedly limited) is that al-Abadi is mostly powerless to resist
US dictates; for instance, after Russia intervened in Syria, he made some fuss about potentially
requesting RU assistance against ISIS, but then ultimately backed down. The destabilization of
Syria has enabled NATO to simply steal the country's oil via ISIS - a major win for USA.
My sincere apology learned fren, dun mean to sound mean. To me the endless killing must end,
Israel continue to mass killing including Palestinians teenagers and if the US cannot, unable
or unwilling to do it.
It's the voters faults continue to votes for the Democratic party and Repug.
Early take on Hillary's foreign policy speech: pot shots at Trump (easy), interspersed with
scare-mongering, chest-thumping and neocon talking points like: "we never ever stop trying to
make our country a better place" (how exceptional!).
C'est posible that Bernie has been the intended candidate all along. Could all the vote-stealing
from Bernie, balanced by the threat of a Clinton indictment have been a distraction? With no interference
and an accurate vote-count Bernie would have long-since emerged as the candidate. In which case--
the microscope would have been on policy & the policies that we WANT. There might even have been
a little attention left over to witness the continued subjugation of South America.
As it is, the US presidential campaign has been greatly side-tracked towards personality, and
the illusion of a horse race. I daresay Bernie's controllable and he's it.
Hillary can go right on coveting Presidential power (of which there is precious little).
Breaking down the 2 party system is tricky, but long term possible. States with initative processes
need to enact preference voting (aka instant runoff) so that somewhat similar candidates do not
wind up splitting the vote as they do with the first-past-the-post system.
After 4-6 parties regularly elect officials at the state and local level, there be enough infrastructure
to flow up to the national level.
Top down pushes will collapse back to 2 parties. Hopefully, the TRUMP run will push all the
'gag' neocon/neolibs into the Democratic party of multicultural globalism. Lindsey Graham and
John McCain would make wonderful Democrats. This would buy America some time, but is not a stable
end state.
... The Tweedle brothers never contradict each other, even when one of them, according to the
rhyme, "agrees to have a battle". Rather, they complement each other's words. ...
Write-in the
name of someone you'd actually want to be President/Senator/Congressional representative on November
8. The stakes are too high for you to stay home.
Let 2016 be the beginning. First time, everytime, write-in your candidate, work with your neighbors
toward convergence. 2016, 2018, 2020, 2022, 2024, 2026, 2028 ... if we'd set out in 2004 we'd
be home by now.
Some Internet gossip that should not be readily dismissed, many facts do check out:
...an elite team of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) assassins controlled by President Obama
have gunned down the husband of a US prosecutor who was preparing to charge former President
William (Bill) Clinton with crimes relating to his having had sex with an underage girl child
kept as a sex slave by his close personal billionaire friend Jeffery Epstein...
In the "exact/near similar" location this CIA "hit squad" had been operating in ... and
shortly after their departure from the Atlanta region, local police officers were called and
discovered the body of Shahriar Zolfaghari who was the husband of Georgia's statewide prosecutor
for human trafficking Camila Wright-and whom Atlanta Police Major Adam Lee III reported had
been shot twice in the chest at close range and said: "It's a mystery as to why someone would
harm him"...
the "possible/supposed" reason for Zolfaghari's killing was a "death message" to his wife
Camila to stop her from charging former President Clinton with child sex crimes and to cease
her sex trafficking investigation all together.
As to Prosecutor Wright's exact criminal case against President Clinton, ... it involves
the "contracting/deal making" with a number of underage female girls living in the Atlanta
region by New York-British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, Sarah Kellen and Nada Marcinkova-all
three of whom were tasked by convicted pedophile, and billionaire, Jeffery Epstein to procure
underage sex slaves for his private Caribbean island compound known as "Pedophile Island" that
catered to the world's rich and famous, including President Clinton and Prince Andrew.
Ghislaine Maxwell, who has been labeled as "Epstein's pimp mama", ... was the main "dealmaker/contractor"
for the underage Atlanta female sex slaves preferred by her close friend President Clinton
during his visits to "Pedophile Island"-and which recently discovered flight log reports have
shown him visiting numerous times, and many without his Secret Service detail.
to whom President Putin ordered this single Hillary Clinton email released to, it doesn't appear
to be that hard to figure out as one hour later the international, non-profit, journalistic
organization Wikileaks, that publishes secret information, news leak and classified media from
anonymous sources, sent out a Twitter message containing this email under the headline
Is
this email the FBI's star exhibit against Hillary Clinton ("H")?
?
The grave implications to Hillary Clinton in regards to this email... is that it provides
conclusive proof that she personally ordered top secret and other type classifications to be
stripped from emails sent to her private unsecured computer server in violation of US law-and,
also, directly contradicts what it says on her presidential campaign website: "Clinton only
used her account for unclassified email. No information in Clinton's emails was marked classified
at the time she sent or received them."
... another Hillary Clinton statement on her campaign website that says: "Was it allowed?
Yes. The laws, regulations, and State Department policy in place during her tenure permitted
her to use a non-government email for work", has, likewise, been exposed as being untrue by
the US State Department's Inspector General who last week said that not only wasn't this allowed,
he detailed how Jonathan Scott Gration, the former US Ambassador to Kenya, who ignored instructions
in July 2011 not to use commercial email for government businesses, was forced to resign, in
mid-2012, when then Secretary Clinton herself initiated disciplinary action against him, while
at the same time she was doing the exact same thing, but keeping it secret.
...many US media news sites ... agreeing that the most serious US laws violated by her were
Executive Order 13526-Classified National Security Information and 18 U.S.C Sec. 793(f)-Gathering,
Transmitting or Losing Defense Information of the federal code that make it unlawful to send
or store classified information on personal email.
Yet Trump, clearly a puppet of some powerful faction of the global deep state (most probably
involving Rocefellers who are e.g. abandoning oil and want to legalize drug business, basically
come out of this current war with clean hands on the victorious side), has been sending many confusing
signals. Could it be that the goal of masters is too fool not the regular, 'good' people, but
the enemies of the humanity (CIA, MI6, Rothshilde, Clinton, Bush, Petreaus, Romney, Koch, Adelson,
Erdogan, Saudi, Netanyahoo, Kolomoiski cabal centered in the City of London living off the illegal
drug trade since the opium wars)?
Mind you that we've already seen the "bifurcation" in the USG action in the Me, most recently
when the Pentagon/Obama rebels been fighting the CIA "rebels".
Unfair hitting below the belt. What makes you think, getting rid of politicians shedding so
much bloods here, Libya, Syria, Afghan... and blames others "so eager to spill other humans' blood
on the street?"
You believe protecting motherfuckers (excuse me Hmmmm..) Liars, murderers, warmongers so no
more blood on the streets? Understands, Enuff, is Enuff, the killing, lying, fake videos must
end. This is not my view, majority Americans feel the same both sides of the fences, Dem or Repug.
We are not the minority but the majority. The differences how to get rid these motherfuckers!!
To be clear, I'm a passive pacifist, believe in the rule of laws.
Asked many Blacks, you know what going on in Ukraine, Crimea, Syria or Greece? Most were clueless.
Never heard of Ukraine etc. Otherwise - Its Putin Faults, Assad the regime must go, Its Repug
faults, Congress faults but Never Obomo! More than 80% voted for Obama twice base on racial line.
Now don't call me a racist. A Cop almost shot me after questioning him in public.....
" buy a pitchfork and hit the streets. Anything less is a cop-out and playing the game."
Dunno if you followed Kazzura, Anna News, Liveleak before and after Feb 2014 Maiden uprising
they awakened the Separatists. Igor Strelkov, the shooter was fighting Kiev Regime, forced to
leave Sloviansk with a handful fighter moved to Donbass. Farmers, doctors, mother, lawyers, grandfather
and children with pitchforks and antique weapons guarding building, road blocks and checkpoints
with burning tires tried to stopped advancing Kiev troops in Donetsk and Lugansk Obasts.
However, in Odessa, well-dress school children, women and men sitting calmly on the sidewalks,
filling Molotov cocktails to massacre separatist holed up in the Union bldg.
Ask Neoliberal, the lesser of evils and apologists who were the blood thirsty killers?
@63 "BTW what happened to the Repubs wanting to STOP Trump from being nominated AT ALL COST theme?
That was so last week. Ryan just endorsed Trump... "I feel confident he would help us turn
the ideas in this agenda into laws to help improve people's lives. That's why I'll be voting for
him this fall," Ryan wrote.
At politico.com
Pro-Hillary commenters have been harshly critical. Many say that potential Trump voters are NOT
progressive and/or are comfortable elites that won't lose anything.
At nakedcapitalism.com
A large number of commenters have said that instead of Trump, they would support the GREEN PARTY!
At MoA
There has been concerns raised about 1) Sanders reluctance to attack Hillary and 2) the naivete
of Yves': "strategically pointless nation-breaking in Iraq and Syria" .
<> <> <> <> <> <> <>
Note: Yves has explained that she initially tried to make the article into one that describes
Sanders supporters anti-Hillary feelings. She says that editor(s) at politico guided the story
to Sanders supporters that would vote Trump as it seemed to be a more dramatic story.
Holy cow, no one will believe me - Bernie advertises in RT!! First time ever, sneaking
pass Ghostly blocker - reaching out to RT viewers.
The message... College should be free, tax Walls street pay for college education. Bernie you
lying shit!! I'll never vote for you even if force to eat cat food.
This what John Pliger wrote in SOTT, 27 May of Bernie...
Stunning silence in America as it prepares to vote for one side of the same coin
"Sanders, the hope of many young Americans, is not very different from Clinton in his proprietorial
view of the world beyond the United States. He backed Bill Clinton's illegal bombing of Serbia.
He supports Obama's terrorism by drone, the provocation of Russia and the return of special forces
(death squads) to Iraq. He has nothing to say on the drumbeat of threats to China and the accelerating
risk of nuclear war. He agrees that Edward Snowden should stand trial and he calls Hugo Chavez
- like him, a social democrat - "a dead communist dictator". He promises to support Clinton if
she is nominated...."
""I didn't come here tonight to pander to you about Israel. That's what politicians do:
all talk, no action… My number one priority is to dismantle the disastrous deal with Iran…
We have rewarded the world's leading state sponsor of terror with $150 billion and we received
absolutely nothing in return… Iran is a problem in Iraq, a problem in Syria, a problem in Lebanon,
a problem in Yemen, and will be a very major problem for Saudi Arabia. Literally every day,
Iran provides more and better weapons to their puppet states… We will totally dismantle Iran's
global terror network. Iran has seeded terror groups all over the world. During the last five
years, Iran has perpetrated terror attacks in 25 different countries on five continents. They've
got terror cells everywhere, including in the western hemisphere very close to home. Iran is
the biggest sponsor of terrorism around the world and we will work to dismantle that reach.
. . . When I become President, the days of treating Israel like a second-class citizen will
end on Day One."
I have to agree with @1 that it is not at all clear that Trump is "far right". He's a populist,
sure, he is. Maybe he even fits the definition of a demagogue. But that doesn't place him on the
"far right", it just places him "outside the system".
Trump appears to be all in favour of replacing a foreign policy that relies upon a robust
military with one that is based upon active diplomacy i.e. that jaw-jaw is better than war-war.
Which certainly places him way, way to the left of many Democrats (certainly to the left of
Hillary) and almost all Republicans.
He also appears to be all in favour of weighing up Trade Deals based upon what effect they
have on the working and middle class of American society, rather than how much those deals enrich
the 1%.
Again, that places him way, way, way to the left of most mainstream politicians in either party.
Sure, his "immigration" policies appear to be racist, and he doesn't appear to have thought
thru many of his *ahem* policies.
But it is very clear to me that the major reason why he blew away a far-right crowd that contained
repulsive Neanderthals as Rubio and Cruz is because he made a deliberate decision to run to the
left of them. And I have no doubt that he'll seek to win the Presidency by running to the left
of Hillary.
Not that it would be hard for anyone to run to the left of Hillary, but, still......
Oh, nuts! I just realized. I didn't follow the Egypt plane crash at all. Are they going to frame
LIBYA & use it as a pretext to attack? I'm only just starting to look at it. Is this possible?
@56, so Commentary Magazine, the cooking magazine for the neocon set, think HRC's Trump bashing
speech was the cat's meow.
Colonel Lang asked this question on his site tonight:
Am I correct in saying that HC's speech in San Diego was not made to some existing group
but rather was an event arranged by her campaign staff in a hired venue with an audience created
by them from her supporters in the area? pl
Someone in the comments said it was closed to the public, and another said it was attended by
200 donors.
What do you think of Gary Johnson as an alternative to the Repubicrat choices? He is antiwar
and supports many of the same social issues that Jill Stein supports. He is also a proven manager,
having served as a popular two time governor of New Mexico.
I share your opinion of the Green Party after what they did to Ralph Nader. There is also the
fact that Green Parties in Europe are filled warmongers, especially in Germany.
Posted by: Piotr Berman | Jun 2, 2016 9:12:38 AM | 9
The "middle" has been decimated enonomically. That's why traditional politics don't work anymore.
Actually, for Germany, Sanders is very much "middle". Hillary would be "right wing" minus
the classism and racism. Trump is close to classical National Socialism with a very special US
American "businessman" flavor (there is a traditional disdain for business in Germany).
How he could prevail with US demography, economy/business interests, and mentality, apart from
winning an election where everyone stays home out of disgust, I just can't see. But a large part
of German Jews (and Social Democrats and Trade Unionists - they said let it blow over it will
pass) did not see it coming in 1933.
So if I was "left" in the US - or just a normal citizen - I would vote Hillary and organize
for my interests to prevail in Congress, in the Senate and finally in 2020 plus refuse to be separated
on lifestyle choice. My impression is that the Sandernistas will be doing just that.
So, I guess you could sum up the conclusion to all these comments that there is absolutely
no one worth voting for because the electoral system is irrevocably broken due to psychopathic
or ponerological "infection". You can thrash out the debate as to who is the greater or lesser
of evils chosen for the parade this time around but it's a waste of energy since the foundations
upon which elections are built have long been rotten to the core.
So, voting for such
theatre is surely perpetuating the scenario. The president is already chosen. Period. Maybe
there's a bit of infighting between Establishment factions but I think it's a done deal. Similarly,
any attempt to grow something truly creative and which actually lasts inside the toxicity of Western
culture will inevitably fail for the same reason: psychopathy and lesser forms of pathology define
our social systems at this stage and it's on an interminable loop that needs to be reset. (And
I suspect Mother nature will have a hand in that fairly soon). Time to start building community
outside of the state and realise just how much creative power we have away from authoritarian
rule in all its guises.
Some folks would make exactly your argument against the rise of Hillary.
@80 MKS
Agree completely. Culture is larger than the politics, politics is part of culture and, as
you point out, culture is a sum over all its parts. It's from beneath the larger, cultural arch
that we can simply takeover politics, from the outside. My suggestion is
write-in voting,
a de facto implementation of
open elections
. There's much too much harm being done now by the broken political machine, we need to get
it under control.
yes, presumably among our inalienable rights is the right not to vote, as the electoral process,
in its present manifestation, can only impede our collective creativity.
What must be understood and highlighted is who the political class works for- the savage capitalists.
The US government is merely the front for the ruling class. It merely carries out the policies
of the over-civilized, well-manicured capitalist thugs.
Anyone who thinks that simply "voting the bums out" (no matter how much Bern they been feeling
lately) is a viable action in such a profoundly corrupt system is in deep denial as to the scope
of our problems.
The system is not broken- it is working exactly as designed- by and for those who designed
it.
In a bourgeoisie democracy the power of the electorate is a legal fiction.
Wasting energy on electoral kabuki Sanders-Style falls into that category belonging to all
strategies based on "trying to push the Dems to the left." It can never happen. The Dems are officially
sanctioned precisely because the business plutocracy is 100% confident that the Party can't be
"pushed to the Left," even if the proverbial Apocalypse threatens. The Dem Party's essential political
function is pretending to sound sympathetic to ordinary citizens, while actually doing the bidding
of the financial elite.
In America, the ovens will not be disguised as showers; they will be marked "Voting Booth".
Reagan was a failed Governor and fake WW2 fighter pilot who embraced the early PNAC after his
first term Super Recession, then got elected by a landslide. Same with Bush2. So policy failures
or weak leadership has nothing whatsoever with electability, and you can vote red, blue or purple,
the Clinton Cash Machine will still dominate the Selections in November.
Wringing hands because there is "no democracy" or the duopoly candidates are so bad is a cop-out.
You have choices.
Personally, I would vote third-party instead of staying at home or write-in.
Also consider:
1) there are grass-roots organizations that are very effective - join one!
2) Hillary was supposed to be coronated. Her downfall (via email scandal) shows that things
are not as hopeless/inevitable as some claim - don't lose heart!
3) A door has been opened. People see and talk about the 'rigged' political and economic
system like never before.
4) You have to be a smart voter. TPTB rely on voter apathy and ignorance. Educate those
around you! (carefully! a 'know it all' attitude or partisanship is counterproductive)
In USA only half of eligible voters actually vote. If everyone that gave up on voting were
to vote third-party we would have a viable alternative.
Notably, the only Party that supports preference voting (which makes third-parties viable and
greatly diminishes 'lesser-evil' voting) is the GREEN PARTY.
72;Ah Iran.Yes,Trump for some reason(Neocon votes?)has it in for Iran, but Iran is not central
to American prosperity, far away and being a Muslim nation makes it a little inviting for American
pol bashing, but hey, hopefully he'll stop this on election.
And yeah, he is trying to get the monsters on his side, or at least to stop the daily demonization
campaign against him, which anyone can see, if they are honest.
He will win based on the economy(66,000 jobs in May,the worst in 6 years btw) and the feelings
of patriotic Americans sick of being Zio boy toys,and sick of furriners coming here and rioting
against American citizens.That got him a few more million votes.
America first, a winning hand, but anathema to the Zionists, our mortal enemy.
>> given that outsider presidents like Jimmy Carter
>> and celebrity governors like Arnold Schwarzenegger
>> and Jesse Ventura didn't get much done,
Says who? They got us through 4+ years without heaping a ton of sh** on us. Reagan, Clinton,
Obama, and Bush did a lot of damage, such that we wish they would've done less.
77; I read that her speech was before the US Pacific Fleet, a bunch of military morons. She is
going full bore dominatrix. She said Trump coddles dictators;Sheesh,you mean like Mubarak,Sissi,Saudis,Bahrain,Dubai
and all points east and west thugs of Clinton favor? A moron, with hypocrisy enough to name a
wing of a museum of political liars after her evil self.
Penelope; Yes, if Trump turns out to be a liar re his plans, the pushback will be the next
election cycle, with an actual clone of Hitler as candidate. We've had enough of these monsters,
who use US and abuse US daily.
....there is absolutely no one worth voting for because the electoral system is irrevocably
broken due to psychopathic or ponerological "infection". You can thrash out the debate as to who
is the greater or lesser of evils....
Ahaaa, Not so, you have another choices. Votes for the MOST ABHORRENT CANDIDATE POSSIBLE,
Erdogan or Avigdor Lieberman if they are in the running or Hillary or Thump.
Better to place this action in an institutional context. The forces placed on the elected person
by the state machinery and pressures from big business dictate the outcome. In the current system
your vote is meaningless. You can argue all you want that "We need to keep up the pressure to
demand Politician______ needs to listen to ordinary citizens, not to business" and you will rot
on the vine as your words disappear into the indifferent air.
There is a difference between the state and government. The state is the permanent collection
of institutions that have entrenched power structures and interests. The government is made up
of various politicians. It is the institutions that have power in the state due to their permanence,
not the representatives who come and go. We cannot expect different politicians to act in different
ways to the same pressures. However, this is all ignored by the voting political consumer who
wishes Politician______ was more a socialist, green, populist etc. and could ignore the demands
of the dominant class in society while in charge of one part of its protector and creature, the
state.
Who wins the election in the capitalist system makes no difference because all politicians
in this system must do what the ruling class want. Elections are a scam whose function is to neutralize
resistance movements and dupe ordinary citizens into thinking they have a say in matters of the
state.
Elections in the capitalist system do not secure popular control over the state, they do help
secure state control over the populace. Voting is a ritual that reinforces obedience to state
authority. It creates the illusion that "the people" control the state, thereby masking elite
rule. That illusion makes rebellion against the state less likely because it is seen as a legitimate
institution and as an instrument of popular rule rather than the oligarchy it really is. Embedded
within all electoral campaigns is the myth that "the people" control the state through voting.
>> Had Sanders run as an independent he would be getting literally no coverage and likely achieving
very little success. ... If he ran as an independent this wouldn't be the case.
Not crazy. But, I disagree.
Implicit in your reasoning is this assumption: In an alternate timeline in which Clinton was
*not* primaried, DNC primary voters would've been unaware of or overlooked her horrible record.
But, that assumption is undermined by the record in the current timeline:
- We know Bernie has been pulling punches -- not making a big deal about her horrible record.
- Therefore, current-timeline Bernie supporters know about Clinton's record because they've
been following it and been appalled by it independently of whatever Bernie has to say.
- These people would've abandoned the DNC as soon as "Clinton" became the presumptive nominee
a year ago.
"Who wins the election in the capitalist system makes no difference because all politicians
in this system must do what the ruling class want. Elections are a scam whose function is to neutralize
resistance movements and dupe ordinary citizens into thinking they have a say in matters of the
state."
"... The Associated Press yesterday declared Hillary Clinton to be the "presumptive" Democratic nominee for the presidential election based on alleged pledges of anonymous super-delegates. This was a quite unprecedented interference in still ongoing and upcoming primaries on a day when no new public vote count was available. ..."
"... The FBI is under Obama's control and there no doubt that he wants Clinton as candidate to continue his right-leaning policies. But the FBI tends to be leaking quite a bit and someone with access to the case may want to speak to some enterprising reporters. ..."
"... Sanders requested a meeting with Obama which will happen on Thursday. Obama will offer him a bad deal which would be akin to a total capitulation. Sanders will look for a way to sneak at least some of his preferred policies into the party agenda. He will demand some significant price for endorsing Clinton and will probably wait to do so up to the last minute. ..."
"... Thanks for the posting b. I was also struck by the AP announcement just prior to the CA vote. I think Bernie knows some dirt and is going to confront Obama about it on Thursday. ..."
"... War criminal and class war media are trying to create a mindset of resignation - no point voting or ever supporting Sanders, they are selling. Now that it's over and Hitlery has won, WW3 took 3 steps closer. ..."
"... Right on! How deep can the most dangerous nation with nuclear weapons sink! ..."
"... A dysfunctional U.S. Congress doesn't represent "We the People." Just state propaganda with media bought by corporate power. And US generals using NATO as its war party across the globe. The UN has become a lame organization abiding by world powers with right to veto with some nations under full protection to abuse human rights with impunity .... Israel and recently the House of Saud in Yemen . Welcome to the 21th century ... ..."
"... Sad, give or takes 30% Bernie supporters will NOT vote for Hillary, what a joke! Time to change my voting preference again for the next show. ..."
"... Many complain that Trump will herald a fascist US. Like, the US isn't already fascist? If the choice is Killery or Trump, and if Trump would get the US out of the many damned foreign wars then a fascist US is a small price to pay. At least the US wouldn't be killing millions overseas. But I somehow doubt that Trump will be any different than Killery. ..."
"... one gets a clear sense of the frustration in the air.. the us election is more proof of it.. ..."
"... I know how bad Hillary Clinton is. I can only presume that the Donald is about the same. I can see no reason to believe he's any worse. ..."
"... The news of the meeting comes as Obama thanked Sanders for "energizing millions" through his campaign ... ... Obama throws the sheepdog a bone. ..."
"... So it happened again. This time with a blatant suppression of votes (that calls for criminal investigation into violation of election law) by a corporate behemoth such as AP doing its dreadful Orwellian deed of straight lie for oligarchic class. ..."
"... Those few who genuinely support Hillary must understand that by supporting the very fascist establishment candidate ..."
"... ems primary elections farce already have been rigged and stolen months ago starting from Iowa and N.H., and a stooge of the establishment is about to be anointed according to the will of those few opulent who paid her off. Not you, even if you voted for her. Your vote don't count at all.Oligarchs won. Are you happy? ..."
"... Sanders campaign was a failed attempt to save democrats' party from oblivion so was successful so far Trump candidacy aiming to save GOP from complete irrelevancy. ..."
"... What's ironic that this time as well, millions of irrational, desperate and helpless Democrat electoral zombies, under a spell of exciting political masquerade and their serf's duties, instead of choosing reason and self preservation are aligning themselves with an anointed by establishment "winner" of a popularity/beauty contest who in fact will inevitably drive utter destruction of the Democratic party itself while a "socialist" Sanders wants really to transform it, to redirect Dems from worshiping of heartless greedy Wall Street oligarchy toward ordinary people to, in a word, save it while Clinton mafia is continuing to authorize Jonestown-like suicide mission of the democrat party into political oblivion. ..."
"... "The individual loses his substance by voluntarily bowing to an overpowering and distant oligarchy, while simultaneously "participating" in sham democracy." C. Wright Mills,"The Power Elite" (1956) ..."
"... AP did not help Clinton, they hurt her by discouraging her voters from turning up and may have put California back into play which would give Sanders enough of a moral boost to keep in the nomination battle. So scratch the oligarch secret collusion manifestos. The party was stronger than the insurgency, that's it. ..."
"... Trump perfect? Nah, he says stupid stuff sometimes, but his pledge of America First is the most needed US dictate since the US Constitution, which of course the Zionists hate, as a level playing field is not to their advantage. ..."
The Associated Press yesterday declared Hillary Clinton to be the "presumptive" Democratic nominee
for the presidential election based on alleged pledges of anonymous super-delegates. This was a quite unprecedented interference in still ongoing and upcoming primaries on a day when
no new public vote count was available.
Bernie Sanders said he will continue to campaign up to the convention. His hope is that either
the FBI will indict Hillary Clinton for using an unsecured private email server for classified state
business, or that some other Clinton scandal will make it most likely that she would lose a vote
against Trump. In both cases some super-delegates may change their vote and the convention might
vote for Sanders as nominee.
The FBI is under Obama's control and there no doubt that he wants Clinton as candidate to continue
his right-leaning policies. But the FBI tends to be leaking quite a bit and someone with access to
the case may want to speak to some enterprising reporters.
Sanders
requested a meeting with Obama which will happen on Thursday. Obama will offer him a bad deal
which would be akin to a total capitulation. Sanders will look for a way to sneak at least some of
his preferred policies into the party agenda. He will demand some significant price for endorsing
Clinton and will probably wait to do so up to the last minute.
People around the world will wonder what democracy is all about when a race for a presidency ends
up as a contest between the two most disliked people in the field who are both proxies for the more
or less same small social segment.
The "Not Hillary"
voices will not die down. A seemingly racist Trump with otherwise unpredictable policies may
be less damaging to the world than an
unreconstructed neolibcon Clinton. ab initio | Jun 8, 2016 2:11:37 AM |
2
This is gonna be battle royale.
The entire political establishment (left, right & center) along with the big money interests
and corporate media are aligned to crown Hillary as the next president. They will use all their
resources to scare the American people that Trump is dangerous. They will stoke fear and anger
and even violence. They will use false flag attacks to pin the violence on Trump supporters to
reinforce their relentless message that Trump is Hitler. The danger not only for America but for
the rest of the world will be the Clintons back in the White House. Now, fully experienced, totally
corrupt, with the tentacles of the ziocons deeply enmeshed, they will wreak vengeance on their
perceived enemies and will be the most arrogant and haughty team to take reins of the destructive
power of the US state. Their unmatched ego and greed and lust for power will try to steamroll
their opposition and leave destruction in their wake.
The election as usual will come down to a handful of states in the midwest and south-east -
Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Indiana, North Carolina. Whoever, wins these states will
be the next US president. Let's hope the working class men and women in these states stay true
to their conscience and keep the Clintons from achieving their ultimate ambition to come back
with vengeance in their heart.
Thanks for the posting b. I was also struck by the AP announcement just prior to the CA vote.
I think Bernie knows some dirt and is going to confront Obama about it on Thursday.
I want this coming election to be between Sanders and Trump so we can get a measure on what
this country stands for better than the past annointments. It may be all talk on both sides but
there are values expressed by the talk and i will take Sanders values over Trump's every day of
the week.
War criminal and class war media are trying to create a mindset of resignation - no point voting
or ever supporting Sanders, they are selling.
Now that it's over and Hitlery has won, WW3 took 3 steps closer.
Right on! How deep can the most dangerous nation with nuclear weapons sink! Of course the U.S.
has long ago ceased to be a democracy conform its true definition. Lately by interference of the
Supreme Court in 2000 "election" and by declaring corporations are people too. A
dysfunctional
U.S. Congress doesn't represent "We the People." Just state propaganda with media bought by corporate
power. And US generals using NATO as its war party across the globe. The UN has become a lame
organization abiding by world powers with right to veto with some nations under full protection
to abuse human rights with impunity .... Israel and recently the
House of Saud in Yemen . Welcome to the 21th century ...
b, its over betcha Bernie wanna VP job? Goodbye President Bernie Sanders, welcome VP Bernie Sanders.
Together invincible duds? Obomo could easily release Hillary's emails. It may happen in Oct?
Sad, give or takes 30% Bernie supporters will NOT vote for Hillary, what a joke!
Time to change my voting preference again for the next show.
Many complain that Trump will herald a fascist US. Like, the US isn't already fascist?
If the choice is Killery or Trump, and if Trump would get the US out of the many damned foreign
wars then a fascist US is a small price to pay. At least the US wouldn't be killing millions overseas. But I somehow doubt that Trump will be any different than Killery.
The Clinton clan won't offer the VP slot to Bernie Sanders ... no way! That's not how HRC operates
and was one of Obama's many mistakes to offer HRC the State Dep't.
I know how bad Hillary Clinton is. I can only presume that the Donald is about the same. I can
see no reason to believe he's any worse. I won't be voting for any of the three 'leading' choices
but I think a lot of people will be voting for the Donald, for one reason or another. It would
be very satisfying to see the Demoblican Party self-destruct, shoving a despised, losing candidate
down the throats of the electorate for no known reason other than pure cronyism, only to be beaten
at the polls.
Of course the fix in November might be on the Demoblican Party side this time, "it's their
turn". That's the reason for pushing the female Clinton, right, it's "her turn"?
So it happened again. This time with a blatant suppression of votes (that calls for criminal investigation
into violation of election law) by a corporate behemoth such as AP doing its dreadful Orwellian
deed of straight lie for oligarchic class.
Make no mistake, tonight, Dems party mafia and disgusting Wall Street oligarchs have spoken
loudly while people have been largely gagged and defrauded, purged, and betrayed in this already
year long farcical spectacle of rich, constipated and ought to be indicted lowlifes, called US
elections. Oh yes she made a history of having more political balls than flaccid Trump.
Those few who genuinely support Hillary must understand that by supporting the very fascist
establishment candidate in the end they support American fascism whether Hillarism or Trump_vs_deep_state,
no difference, and that they will soon be sacrificed and consumed by its flames no matter what
lies they are being told.
Dems primary elections farce already have been rigged and stolen months ago starting from Iowa
and N.H., and a stooge of the establishment is about to be anointed according to the will of those
few opulent who paid her off. Not you, even if you voted for her. Your vote don't count at all.Oligarchs
won. Are you happy?
On the other hand Sanders supporters must be confronted with harsh reality of undeniably and
fatally flawed Sander candidacy, mostly not due to his personal failings but due to a deeply unfair
and outrageously undemocratic electoral system he chose to accept and vowed to uphold. Why?
It is as clear as it gets that Sanders was a flawed candidate to hopelessly flawed, deeply
undemocratic electoral system that is specifically designed to prevent ruling elite from heeding
cry of suffering population, not to mention their willingness of doing something about.
But that's not even democracy. In democracy people rule and do not ask power to heed their
grievances, that's feudalism.
Having said that, Sanders campaign was not off mainstream or radical in any way but of a conservative
centrist type aimed to stop political madness. He was a solemn voice of sanity in this crazy campaign
spectacle; he advocated a moderate, even modest call for return to simple rule of law destroyed
by oligarchic class like Clintons, Trumps and their masters.
Sanders campaign was a failed attempt to save democrats' party from oblivion so was successful
so far Trump candidacy aiming to save GOP from complete irrelevancy. Sanders asked politely Dems'
establishment not to believe their own utter lies and they sadly but not unexpectedly refused
clinching to Wall Street pockets begging for a change.
Make no mistake, Hillary and Trump are both excretions of the same abhorrent regime, equally
hostile to humanity and both deserve utter condemnation from majority of Americans not as a political
or ideological act but as an act of self-preservation and self-defense.
Besides Trumps tasteless reality show passed in MSM as campaign, it was Hillary campaign that
was nothing but ridiculous, shameless influence peddling for oligarchs via lies and innuendoes
for money she got paid for, an intellectual embarrassment for otherwise witty Clinton, who stooped
into utter nonsense and retarded incoherence punctuated by her vicious ad hominem aggression,
outbursts liken to lowlife blog troll against decent man epitomizing civility missing from a screen
play of this electoral farce, complete opposite to her conniving husband she praises and wants
him in W.H. position.
What does tell about her character and basic morality?
Still, in fact Sanders would be right if he calls for Hillary to resign if her criminal investigation
is not dropped, and her bought speeches and taxes since 2008 not released before convention.
It is critical that Sanders understands that those millions of votes people cast for him already
are not his votes; these are people's votes that must be respected and democratically counted.
His responsibility is to guard people's votes and protect them by whatever means available, legal
or political or revolutionary.
What's ironic that this time as well, millions of irrational, desperate and helpless Democrat
electoral zombies, under a spell of exciting political masquerade and their serf's duties, instead
of choosing reason and self preservation are aligning themselves with an anointed by establishment
"winner" of a popularity/beauty contest who in fact will inevitably drive utter destruction of
the Democratic party itself while a "socialist" Sanders wants really to transform it, to redirect
Dems from worshiping of heartless greedy Wall Street oligarchy toward ordinary people to, in a
word, save it while Clinton mafia is continuing to authorize Jonestown-like suicide mission of
the democrat party into political oblivion.
Now it is the last moment to start protests of this fatally deeply undemocratic system that
will never bring any change unless people force it, by taking it over. In this election, it is
the system stupid.
Decision time is now whether Sanders continues as independent and respect millions of his voters
or he ultimately reveals himself as a sheepherder for the establishment and endorses Clinton as
I and many others suspected already 10 months ago.
Political stooges, those farcical clowns of this abhorrent regime will soon understand that
there is no silent majority but only temporarily "silenced majority" and when they hear their
roar it will be the last thing they ever hear.
"The individual loses his substance by voluntarily bowing to an
overpowering and distant oligarchy, while simultaneously
"participating" in sham democracy."
C. Wright Mills,"The Power Elite" (1956)
This is not about Bernie or bust. This is about Bernie or revolution
or precisely about: A Revolution with Bernie or without him.
AP did not help Clinton, they hurt her by discouraging her voters from turning up and may have
put California back into play which would give Sanders enough of a moral boost to keep in the
nomination battle. So scratch the oligarch secret collusion manifestos. The party was stronger
than the insurgency, that's it.
In the GOP the party was weaker than the insurgency, which means
instability on the right will be the new norm. GWs Presidency can now be properly interpreted
as a Party shattering presidency, in a way that Obamas has not been. I too am very concerned about
Hillary's FP thinking. But here is what I don't get.
Do people really not understand how Iraq2
destroyed GW and the GOP?
Does Hillary not get that aggressive FP action risks sinking her Presidency
and Party like a stone? She is a political animal right? How can she ignore the obvious danger?
Maybe the money really is too good to ignore. /a>
Racist Trump? No more than the hell bitch, who uses minorities as a venue to power and then turns
on them for the Zionists.
b has no idea of what is really happening here in America. Our society is being destroyed from
within by dual citizen traitors who know their power rests on American's divisions. HRC is their
babe.
Trump perfect? Nah, he says stupid stuff sometimes, but his pledge of America First is the most needed
US dictate since the US Constitution, which of course the Zionists hate, as a level playing field
is not to their advantage.
Posted by: Northern Observer | Jun 8, 2016 7:59:47 AM | 14
Doubt that, Sanders California win was thought feasable on huge spontaneous turnout - early vote
was done by reliable Democrat voters - ie more in favour of Clinton.
You cannot expect a party that has been dominated by a certain type of politics - for how many
years - plus formed by the self fulfilling expectation that elections can only be won by triangualtion
to suddenly get a different perspective. Sanders got where he got by the Democrat party allowing
independents to vote.
Sanders presumably stays in to send as many social democrat delegates to the Convention and get
as as much leverage as he can. Plus - not to disappear from the news.
If the US are lucky he succeeded in changing the political business model.
"... Would be more meaningful if she weren't an entrenched politician ..."
"... She's seen as just another politician – the same kind of politician who gives politicians bad
names. She's corrupt, she's under FBI investigation, she's enriched herself and her family through public
service and she's belittled women who accused her husband of rape while claiming to stand with accusers.
..."
"... She's too big to jail. She's Hillary Clinton and it's going to take an extreme act of courage
on the part of the federal government to actually hold her accountable for what she's done. ..."
"... A new book from a former secret service officer claims Ms. Clinton had a "Jekyll and Hyde"
personality and that Bill and White House staff were afraid of her. ..."
"... Maybe they're both lying, but Ms. Clinton has done plenty of provably bad things to make one
believe it could be true. ..."
"... Ms. Clinton may be the first female nominated for the presidency by a major political party,
but she is not the female politician one should hope for ..."
Would be more meaningful if she weren't an entrenched politician
... ... ..
She's seen as just another politician – the same kind of politician who gives politicians
bad names. She's corrupt, she's under FBI investigation, she's enriched herself and her family through
public service and she's belittled women who accused her husband of rape while claiming to stand
with accusers.
She hasn't been in the private sector since she was made a partner at the Rose Law Firm, conveniently
after her husband became governor of Arkansas. Also convenient, the firm began bringing in big-name
clients after she was brought on board.
She's too big to jail. She's Hillary Clinton and it's going to take an extreme act of courage
on the part of the federal government to actually hold her accountable for what she's done.
Her current email scandal and FBI investigation make her unfit to be president, it's very possible
that state secrets fell into the hands of hostile nations because she wanted "convenience." If a
non-hacker who simply guessed her password was able to get into her emails, an advanced hacker would
have had no problems. And this doesn't seem to bother her at all, aside from the toll it may take
on her campaign.
The Clinton Foundation, which she and her family continue to use to enjoy fabulously wealthy lifestyles,
accepted millions from foreign governments while Ms. Clinton was Secretary of State. She used her
connections to get husband Bill lucrative speaking gigs in other countries as well. You can't tell
me she's qualified for the presidency when she's so blatantly bought-and-paid-for But she won't be
indicted for her emails, of course not. She's too big to jail. She's Hillary Clinton and it's going
to take an extreme act of courage on the part of the federal government to actually hold her accountable
for what she's done. I'll believe it when I see it.
Leading the charge of the "Who cares?" coalition are millennials, who don't see Ms. Clinton as
the feminist hero the most ardent modern outrage feminists claim she is. She rode her husband's coattails
to get where she was (we millennials were old enough to remember learning about her through President
Bill Clinton, though I personally lived in Arkansas briefly while he was the governor), and doesn't
have much more to her name than the titles she has been given due to her marriage.
She bought a house in New York (well, a wealthy family friend paid the mortgage on a house in
New York) so she could run for Senate after her family left the White House. Her name and husband's
influence helped win her the election. She ran for president in 2008 because of her name, lost, and
was given the position of Secretary of State as a consolation prize, which she's now using as experience
to run for president again.
Beyond all of this, she's just not a likeable candidate. People talk about presumptive Republican
presidential nominee Donald Trump's "temperament" for president, but we're banned from talking about
Ms. Clinton's for fear of being called a sexist. A new book from a former secret service officer
claims Ms. Clinton had a "Jekyll and Hyde" personality and that Bill and White House staff were afraid
of her.
Her campaign says the officer is just trying to cash in, but it's not the first time a former
secret service officer described her as volatile. Maybe they're both lying, but Ms. Clinton has
done plenty of provably bad things to make one believe it could be true.
Things like, calling her own supporters sexist, or getting testy with the press during her extremely
rare press conferences.
Ms. Clinton may be the first female nominated for the presidency by a major political party,
but she is not the female politician one should hope for .
Hannity said Obama's video backing of Clinton looked "like a hostage video." Looks like she's
too big to jail. Her current email scandal and FBI investigation make her unfit to be president,
it's very possible that state secrets fell into the hands of hostile nations because she wanted
"convenience."
Notable quotes:
"... Even if Bernie Sanders ultimately endorses Hillary Clinton for president, many of his supporters, I believe, won't follow suit. ..."
"... Unlike Clinton supporters, they support Bernie because of his principled policies and his message. Clinton, on the other hand, is a candidate who changes her positions based on the political climate-blowing left for now-rather than her convictions. President Barack Obama's recent endorsement is the latest propaganda ploy by the Democratic Party establishment to anoint Clinton as the Democratic Presidential nominee. ..."
"... Throughout the Democratic Primaries, Clinton and her surrogates have repeatedly used similar meaningless rhetoric without properly describing exactly what those qualifications actually are. The president's endorsement also contradicts his claims in April that he guaranteed politics would not influence the FBI/DOJ criminal investigation of Clinton's private email server used during her service as secretary of state. ..."
"... On the same day as the president's endorsement, Sen. Elizabeth Warren gave Clinton her stamp of approval. After remaining silent throughout the Democratic primaries, she announced her support for Clinton, claiming she was ready to help defeat Donald Trump. But if Sen. Warren was truly determined to defeat Trump, she would have long ago endorsed Sen. Bernie Sanders, who polls much better against the bombastic billionaire than Clinton. ..."
"... Sen. Warren's endorsement allows everything she once stood for to fall by the wayside. The Wall Street crusader endorsed a candidate who still has not released transcripts of speeches Clinton delivered for big money to Goldman Sachs, a candidate who has received millions of dollars from the financial industry throughout her political career, while generally supporting of financial deregulation. For Bernie's supporters, Sen. Warren's endorsement is a harrowing sign of how deep corruption and hypocrisy has infiltrated the Democratic Party. ..."
Even if Bernie Sanders ultimately endorses Hillary Clinton for president, many of his supporters,
I believe, won't follow suit.
Unlike Clinton supporters, they support Bernie because of his principled policies and his message.
Clinton, on the other hand, is a candidate who changes her positions based on the political climate-blowing
left for now-rather than her convictions. President Barack Obama's recent endorsement is the latest
propaganda ploy by the Democratic Party establishment to anoint Clinton as the Democratic Presidential
nominee.
"I don't think there has ever been someone so qualified to hold this office," President Obama
said in his formal endorsement video for his former secretary of state-released on June 9.
Throughout the Democratic Primaries, Clinton and her surrogates have repeatedly used similar meaningless
rhetoric without properly describing exactly what those qualifications actually are. The president's
endorsement also contradicts his claims in April that he guaranteed politics would not influence
the FBI/DOJ criminal investigation of Clinton's private email server used during her service as secretary
of state.
On the same day as the president's endorsement, Sen. Elizabeth Warren gave Clinton her stamp of
approval. After remaining silent throughout the Democratic primaries, she announced her support for
Clinton, claiming she was ready to help defeat Donald Trump. But if Sen. Warren was truly determined
to defeat Trump, she would have long ago endorsed Sen. Bernie Sanders, who polls much better against
the bombastic billionaire than Clinton.
In 2014, the IBTimes reported Hillary Clinton's allies were attempting to portray the former first
lady as similar to the populist Sen. Warren in anticipation that Clinton's strong ties to Wall Street
would make her vulnerable to a primary challenge from Sen. Warren. But IBTimes reporter David Sirota
noted several differences between Sen. Warren and Hillary Clinton.
In Sen. Warren's 2004 book, Two Income Trap, she criticized Clinton for flip-flopping when she
opposed a controversial bankruptcy bill as first lady but voted for the same exact bill as senator.
"As New York's newest senator, however, it seems that Hillary Clinton could not afford such a principled
position," Sirota wrote. "The bill was essentially the same, but Hillary Rodham Clinton was not."
The two also differ in their records on trade deals: Clinton favored NAFTA and helped negotiate the
Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement; Sen. Warren has vehemently opposed both. The two also differed
on the Iraq War and welfare reform in the 1990s.
In the Senate, Sen. Sanders has often worked in tandem with Sen. Warren to fight for progressive
reforms-often without the help of other Democrats. For Sanders supporters, her silence during the
primary battle was a betrayal of the progressive ideals she long championed. Her recent endorsement
of Hillary Clinton, just days after claiming she did not believe in superdelegates, seems like away
to coax Clinton to pick her as a running mate.
Several weeks ago, Sen. Warren tested out how well her attacks on presumptive Republican nominee
Donald Trump would play with supporters, and the attacks have often trended on social media as a
result, likely currying favor with the Clinton camp.
Sen. Warren's endorsement allows everything she once stood for to fall by the wayside. The Wall
Street crusader endorsed a candidate who still has not released transcripts of speeches Clinton delivered
for big money to Goldman Sachs, a candidate who has received millions of dollars from the financial
industry throughout her political career, while generally supporting of financial deregulation. For
Bernie's supporters, Sen. Warren's endorsement is a harrowing sign of how deep corruption and hypocrisy
has infiltrated the Democratic Party.
Blakeman says the FBI has deliberately waited to interview Hillary Clinton until after the primaries
because the bureau did not want to interfere with the nominating process. He thinks the FBI is "likely"
to recommend to the Department of Justice whether or not she should be indicted for violating what
she says are agency rules and what others call the law between now and the Democratic National Convention
in Philadelphia, which begins July 25.
If she is indicted before the convention, Blakeman says, it will give the party an opportunity
to make changes in the rules that could result in an alternate nominee.
"... Hillary's emails contain at least three separate, specific instances where she mentioned in an unclassified email transmitted across the open Internet and wirelessly to her Blackberry the names of CIA personnel. ..."
"... These redactions point directly to violations of specific laws. It is not a "mistake" or minor rule breaking. ..."
"... These redactions strongly suggest that the Espionage Act's standard of mishandling national defense information through "gross negligence" may have been met by Clinton. ..."
"... There is no ambiguity in this information, no possible claims to faux-retroactive classification, not knowing, information not being labeled, etc. Clinton and her staff know that one cannot mention CIA names in open communications. ..."
"... Exposing these names can directly endanger the lives of the officials. It can endanger the lives of the foreigners they interacted with after a foreign government learns one of their citizens was talking with the CIA It can blow covers and ruin sensitive clandestine operations. It can reveal to anyone listening in on this unclassified communication sources and methods. Here is a specific example of how Clinton likely compromised security. ..."
"... These redactions show complete contempt on Clinton's part for the security process. ..."
"... A Personal Aside: I just remain incredulous about these revelations seeming to mean nothing to the world. They're treated in the media as almost gossip. ..."
"... It seems that HRC may become POTUS, thanks to the actions of DNC, DWS and the MSM and the inaction of the FBI and DOJ - much to the relief of the MIC, CIA and NSA and the satisfaction of the TBTF banks and the RDA (* I made this one up; it stands for "Revolving Door Apparatchiks".) ..."
"... An external IT audit is necessary in this case, if it hasn't already been ordered. Who gave the approval to set this thing up? Where is the documentation requesting access to the State's servers? Who signed off on that? Who verified that approval? Who processed the request and what verification did the approvals undergo? ..."
"... An IT auditor would rip State several new orifices with which to excrete solid waste matter. ..."
You can look at the source documents yourself. This is not opinion, conjecture, or rumor. Hillary
Clinton transmitted the names of American intelligence officials via her unclassified email.
From a series of Clinton emails, numerous names were redacted in the State Department releases
with the classification code "B3 CIA PERS/ORG," a highly specialized classification that means the
information, if released, would violate the Central Intelligence Act of 1949 by exposing the names
of CIA officials.
How FOIA Works
The Freedom of information Act (FOIA) requires the government to release all, or all parts of
a document, that do not fall under a specific set of allowed exemptions. If information cannot be
excluded, it must be released. If some part of a document can be redacted to allow the rest of the
document to be released, then that is what must be done. Each redaction must be justified by citing
a specific reason for exclusion.
But don't believe me. Instead, look at page two of this
State Department document which lists the exemptions.
Note specifically the different types of "(b)(3)" redactions, including "CIA PERS/ORG." As common
sense would dictate, the government will not release the names of CIA employees via the FOIA process.
It would - literally - be against the law. What law? Depending on the nature of the individual's
job at CIA, National Security Act of 1947, the CIA Act of 1949, various laws that govern undercover/clandestine
CIA officers and, potentially, the Espionage Act of 1917.
Names of CIA, NSA Officials Mentioned, Now Redacted
Yet Hillary's emails contain at least three separate, specific instances where she mentioned
in an unclassified email transmitted across the open Internet and wirelessly to her Blackberry the
names of CIA personnel. Here they are. Look for the term "(b)(3) CIA PERS/ORG" Click on the
links and see for yourself:
There are also numerous instances of exposure of the names and/or email addresses of NSA employees
("B3 NSA"); see page 23 inside this longer
PDF document.
Why It Matters
These redactions point directly to violations of specific laws. It is not a "mistake"
or minor rule breaking.
These redactions strongly suggest that the Espionage Act's standard of mishandling national
defense information through "gross negligence" may have been met by Clinton.
There is no ambiguity in this information, no possible claims to faux-retroactive classification,
not knowing, information not being labeled, etc. Clinton and her staff know that one cannot mention
CIA names in open communications. It is one of the most basic tenets taught and exercised
inside the government. One protects one's colleagues.
Exposing these names can directly endanger the lives of the officials. It can endanger
the lives of the foreigners they interacted with after a foreign government learns one of their
citizens was talking with the CIA It can blow covers and ruin sensitive clandestine operations.
It can reveal to anyone listening in on this unclassified communication sources and methods. Here
is a
specific example of how Clinton likely compromised security.
These redactions show complete contempt on Clinton's part for the security process.
BONUS: There is clear precedent for others going to jail for exposing CIA names.
Read the story of John Kiriakou
.
A Personal Aside: I just remain incredulous about these revelations seeming
to mean nothing to the world. They're treated in the media as almost gossip.
It seems that HRC may become POTUS, thanks to the actions of DNC, DWS and the MSM and the
inaction of the FBI and DOJ - much to the relief of the MIC, CIA and NSA and the satisfaction
of the TBTF banks and the RDA (* I made this one up; it stands for "Revolving Door Apparatchiks".)
The rest of us are FUCD.
Tired_of_poor_healthcare
The media has been bought and paid for. There is no longer news reporting, only propaganda
recitation. Statistically, most people are followers. Let's hope there are a few principled public
servants at the FBI to help save our country.
liveload
An external IT audit is necessary in this case, if it hasn't already been ordered. Who
gave the approval to set this thing up? Where is the documentation requesting access to the State's
servers? Who signed off on that? Who verified that approval? Who processed the request and what
verification did the approvals undergo?
An IT auditor would rip State several new orifices with which to excrete solid waste matter.
Stephen Colbert has made
no attempt on to hide the fact that he isn't a big fan of
Donald Trump. Jokes are frequently
made at the Republican Presidential candidate's expense on
The Late
Show With Stephen Colbert. However in last night's monologue, Colbert's jokes about Trump
were downright scathing.
Colbert - refreshed from a recent 10 day hiatus - started the monologue off in earnest with some
jibes about Burger King's new Whopperrito. But then he tore into Trump with jokes that ripped his
intelligence and racism, calling the mogul's own recent statements to the press, "Proof Donald Trump
doesn't like Mexico and can't name another country."
However, the most scathing parts came with Colbert alluded to Trump' record of offending just
about every major demographic - except for white supremacists and the KKK. He cheekily checked off
all the groups Trump has offended and offered a solution that wound up being quite an indictment:
"Trump's point is he cannot be judged by a member of any group he has offended. So that means no
Mexican judges, no Muslim judges, no Asian judges, no women judges - unless she's a 'ten.' Trump's
insulted the Pope, so no Catholic judges. He called everyone in Iowa 'stupid,' so no judges that
eat corn. You know what? Maybe Trump might be more comfortable if he couldn't tell the judge's race
or gender. Maybe cover the judge up in an unbiased robe. Make it a white robe - maybe with a matching
hood. That seems about right. Don't know who it is!"
Then, Colbert doubled down on Trump's
racism by comparing his recent controversial comments about "my African-American" at a rally with
Thomas Jefferson's history of slave-owning.
Colbert said, "Trump did say he was going to start acting 'presidential,' and 'Look at my African-American'
does sound like something Thomas Jefferson might have said."
If these are the salvos the late night host is lobbing against Trump in June, then it looks like
we're in for quite the election year.
"... The position Trump is now taking on Libya is not that different from the one that liberal hawks took when the Iraq war started to go badly. They wanted "credit" for supporting regime change and war, but also wanted to be able to second-guess how Bush managed the war. So once things started going wrong, they said they favored invading but disagreed with the way Bush had gone about it. Ritual paeans to the importance of multilateralism usually followed. That put them in the rather absurd spot of attacking Bush for mishandling the illegal, unnecessary war that he started, as if it would have been all right if it had just been managed more competently. ..."
"... This sort of criticism, like Trump's complaint about Libya, takes for granted that there was nothing inherently destabilizing and dangerous in overthrowing a foreign government that better management couldn't have fixed. That misses the crucial point that forcible regime change and its consequences can't be "managed" successfully because so many of its effects are out of the control of the intervening government(s) and some can't be anticipated in advance. ..."
comments on Trump's latest position on the Libyan war:
I'm sure the Libya hawks in the Hillary camp would also prefer a timeline
where their war went off without any bad bits. But if Trump has any ideas
about how the Pentagon could have "take[n] out Qaddafi and his group" without
creating a situation where Libya is "not even a country anymore," he didn't
share them. Instead he's basically saying I'm for a Libya war that worked
out better, without Benghazi and all that. Which is a bit like saying The
Iraq war was a great idea, except for the insurgency or Going into Vietnam
was wise, as long as we could've had a quick victory.
The position Trump is now taking on Libya is not that different from the
one that liberal hawks took when the Iraq war started to go badly. They wanted
"credit" for supporting regime change and war, but also wanted to be able to
second-guess how Bush managed the war. So once things started going wrong, they
said they favored invading but disagreed with the way Bush had gone about it.
Ritual paeans to the importance of multilateralism usually followed. That put
them in the rather absurd spot of attacking Bush for mishandling the illegal,
unnecessary war that he started, as if it would have been all right if it had
just been managed more competently.
This sort of criticism, like Trump's complaint about Libya, takes for granted
that there was nothing inherently destabilizing and dangerous in overthrowing
a foreign government that better management couldn't have fixed. That misses
the crucial point that forcible regime change and its consequences can't be
"managed" successfully because so many of its effects are out of the control
of the intervening government(s) and some can't be anticipated in advance. If
Trump was fine with removing Gaddafi from power by force, and he admits that
he was, he
can't credibly complain about the chaos that followed when the U.S. did
exactly that. Trump has the same problem on Libya that Romney and all other
hawkish candidates have had, which is that he cannot challenge Clinton on the
decision to intervene because he ultimately agreed with that decision and supported
joining the conflict at the time.
"... Among Democratic voters, 71% believe Clinton should keep running even under indictment. Nearly half say it will have no impact on their vote. It is unclear that, in theory, that any of those surveyed understand a candidate indicted in the fall of 2016 could face trial/impeachment while in office in 2017. ..."
"... In what I hope is a statistical anomaly, eight percent say indictment makes them more likely to vote for the former first lady. ..."
"... Just to make this as clear as possible, Hillary Clinton is the only presidential candidate in the history of the United States to be running while under an FBI investigation for national security crimes that could reach as high as the Espionage Act. About 65% of American voters already believe she broke laws, ahead of the FBI results and when asked before the State Department Inspector General's report was released. ..."
In a statement I never expected to see in print, half of voters said in a survey a presidential candidate
should continue to run for America's highest office even if she is indicted for national security
crimes.
For those who want historical markers to look back on, charting decline in civilization
and deviations from reality, well, there's a good one.
The latest Rasmussen Reports
survey, taken in late May, finds most voters (65%) believe Hillary Clinton is a lawbreaker, but half
of all voters also say a felony indictment shouldn't stop her campaign for the presidency.
Among Democratic voters, 71% believe Clinton should keep running even under indictment. Nearly
half say it will have no impact on their vote. It is unclear that, in theory, that any of those surveyed
understand a candidate indicted in the fall of 2016 could face trial/impeachment while in office
in 2017.
Those surveyed are saying that even if the FBI releases a report saying their lengthy investigation
shows there is enough evidence to bring Clinton before a grand jury, that does not matter to them.
In what I hope is a statistical anomaly, eight percent say indictment makes them more likely
to vote for the former first lady.
Just to make this as clear as possible, Hillary Clinton is the only presidential candidate
in the history of the United States to be running while under an FBI investigation for national security
crimes that could reach as high as the Espionage Act. About 65% of American voters already believe
she broke laws, ahead of the FBI results and when asked before the State Department Inspector General's
report was released.
But they'll vote for her anyway. I am rarely at a loss for words, but this time I just don't know
what to say anymore.
"... Releasing transcripts of her paid speeches to Wall Street would signal her commitment to reversing these perceptions. ..."
"... Donald Trump is correctly pointing out that Mrs. Clinton has gone many months without answering questions at a news conference. It is past time for her to hold a forthright session with reporters. ..."
"... His intention appears to be to turn the general election into a referendum on Mrs. Clinton's character. ..."
"... A candidate who has taken, along with her husband, over $150 million from every special interest in this Country. A candidate this paper calls a "war hawk," and who the neocons (including Cheney) and Kissinger support. A candidate whose policies are in line with the neoliberals. A candidate who said this Country will "never, ever" have Medicare for All. ..."
"... Criticizing Hillary does not mean a person supports Trump. It means we are really concerned Hillary is too flawed to beat Trump and we will end up with him as President. Check out the facts. We have real reasons to not want Hillary as the Democratic nominee. ..."
"... She is a republican of my youth. On foreign policy this paper labeled her a "war hawk." Neocons (including Cheney) and Kissinger love her foreign policy. She professes neoliberal policies. Supports free trade agreements until politically she needs to retreat. ..."
"... Nope. She is a republican of old. So sad how our Country has drifted so far right that Hillary look like some to be "center left". ..."
"... That was until they took over $150 Million in speaking fees from special interests and sold out their Foundation to every special interest, including foreign governments. And the lobbyists are lining up to fund her campaign. Do you even care? ..."
"... Please name a single policy Hillary has led on that helps the majority of Americans who have been hurt by Hillary's neoliberal policies. Tell me why I should support a candidate who this paper labeled a "war hawk." A candidate who the neocons and Kissinger love. ..."
"... The candidate who said "never, ever" to healthcare for every American, including millions of women, is not the People's candidate. She is the candidate of those who have bought and paid for her. The power elite who will benefit if she is elected. ..."
Beyond these policy-related efforts lie opportunities for Mrs. Clinton to demonstrate her
commitment to running an accountable White House, should she win the presidency. This will
require greater openness and directness from a candidate who has had a tendency to dodge
uncomfortable questions.
Releasing transcripts of her paid speeches to Wall Street would signal her commitment to
reversing these perceptions. So, too, would clearly acknowledging what the State Department
inspector general has said: that using a private email server for official business was not
allowed or encouraged, but she did it anyway, in a misguided effort to protect her privacy.
Donald Trump is correctly pointing out that Mrs. Clinton has gone many months without
answering questions at a news conference. It is past time for her to hold a forthright session
with reporters.
Since declaring his candidacy a year ago, Mr. Trump has revealed almost no policy knowledge or
workable proposals. His intention appears to be to turn the general election into a
referendum on Mrs. Clinton's character.
ScottW, is a trusted commenter Chapel Hill, NC 55 minutes ago
So excited about the presumptive Democratic nominee.
A candidate who has taken, along with her husband, over $150 million from every special
interest in this Country. A candidate this paper calls a "war hawk," and who the neocons
(including Cheney) and Kissinger support. A candidate whose policies are in line with the
neoliberals. A candidate who said this Country will "never, ever" have Medicare for All.
it is an exciting day indeed. Can't wait for November.
njglea, is a trusted commenter Seattle 47 minutes ago
It's hard to understand your level of angst, ScottW. Vote for DT - that should make you
feel better.
ScottW, is a trusted commenter Chapel Hill, NC 43 minutes ago
@njglea: The angst is people like you saying "vote for Trump" when of course you mean
nothing of the sort. The angst is a flawed candidate like Hillary running against the evil
Donald. No. Criticizing Hillary does not mean a person supports Trump. It means we are
really concerned Hillary is too flawed to beat Trump and we will end up with him as President.
Check out the facts. We have real reasons to not want Hillary as the Democratic nominee.
ScottW, is a trusted commenter Chapel Hill, NC 1 hour ago
Give me a break--Hillary occupies the "center left." She is a republican of my youth.
On foreign policy this paper labeled her a "war hawk." Neocons (including Cheney) and
Kissinger love her foreign policy. She professes neoliberal policies. Supports free trade
agreements until politically she needs to retreat.
Nope. She is a republican of old. So sad how our Country has drifted so far right that
Hillary look like some to be "center left".
ScottW, is a trusted commenter Chapel Hill, NC 1 hour ago
You are wrong. Take it from this 59 year old who used to think Bill & Hillary were Golden.
That was until they took over $150 Million in speaking fees from special interests and
sold out their Foundation to every special interest, including foreign governments. And the
lobbyists are lining up to fund her campaign. Do you even care?
Please name a single policy Hillary has led on that helps the majority of Americans who
have been hurt by Hillary's neoliberal policies. Tell me why I should support a candidate who
this paper labeled a "war hawk." A candidate who the neocons and Kissinger love.
The candidate who said "never, ever" to healthcare for every American, including millions
of women, is not the People's candidate. She is the candidate of those who have bought and
paid for her. The power elite who will benefit if she is elected.
Sorry--the truth hurts. Of course those who have benefited off the status quo have no interest
in changing it.
Primary just proved that the Democratic Party is completely corrupt and can no longer be
distinguished from the Republican Party (at the elite level).
Notable quotes:
"... But especially voting today, after that announcement, it sends a really strong message that we're not going to accept it. ..."
"... The worst joke of this century is to see Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump fighting it out for President of the Free World and the possibility that Ms corporate establishment profiteer Clinton could be first female president or alternatively that an overly inflated reality tv host could be in charge of the worlds biggest war machine! ..."
"... Yes, its voter suppression by the "bandwagon effect". They've been doing this for decades to right wing populist candidates. Next will come the marginalizing and name calling. Its very refreshing to see the oligarch's media playing all the same trick on young leftists that they've played on us all these years. ..."
"... The enemy is the Guardian, and the media. This is your enemy. Never let them fool you again. ..."
"... Astute comment. The Clinton victories in the south, which as you point out were a major factor in her primary success, was won on the backs of unsophisticated blacks who once more voted for their own oppression by supporting the wife of the charming sax playing conman who they love although he devastated their families with his support for the war on drugs, welfare elimination called "welfare reform," and other neo-eugenic policies. ..."
"... i think the US can survive trump. i do not think the US can survive dynastic coronations. that way leads to the republic's last breath and the legitimisation of hereditary rulers. it's already that way now--and a mechanism is in place to crush it. that mechanism is electing an outsider. any outsider at all. ..."
"... the problem with the clintonistas is that they desperately need to vilify the progressive opposition and the use of the imaginary bernie bro is a prime example. it shows the underlying character of the corporate shill they feel will most benefit them personally despite how much harm it would bring to those less fortunate. it's an expression of just how bottomlessly empty their rhetoric is and how they are strangers to genuineness, compassion and perspicacity. ..."
"... Exactly. It's the apathy of the electorate that has had a very big impact on the current situation. I'm not in the USA but I have several friends in Cali who are all, meh, politics. They can't be bothered even registering to vote. ..."
"... You've helped nominate the least trusted, most disliked Democratic nominee ever. Since records began. She's going to lose badly of she's not indicted first.. ..."
"... This election has been a huge wake-up call for many of us. I now understand that the Democratic Party is completely corrupt and can no longer be distinguished from the Republican Party (at the elite level). ..."
"... " I'm pretty sure, as no nation can withstand the blatant rigging of an election for its highest office combined with the two choices being among the most loathed people in the country, if the elites insist on Clinton as their candidate." ..."
"... You have to remember Americans forgot about the rigged Bush/Gore election of 2000 the moment they turned on their cable news and they were told ...nothing to see here. The flagrant abuse of democracy is accepted because people feel powerless to do anything about it.. Perhaps this time around Sanders supporters will be the exception and take their democracy back. ..."
"... Even Hillary's cat knows she is corrupt. Corruption is what the Clintons DO. Just ask Trump, he's paid them plenty over the years. Or ask Democratic pollster Pat Caddell, President Carter's advisor. He called the Clintons "the greediest white trash I've ever seen." ..."
"... How women like me would have loved a female presidential candidate to be proud of. Nothing but disgust for this lying, cheating, corrupt-to-the-core, war-mongering Oligarch. Hope the FBI arrests her before late July. ..."
"... Bernie is not going away. He is in it until everyone has a chance to vote and he has said he is in it through the National Convention. The delegates vote on July 25. ..."
"... Hasn't had unscripted press event in 180+ days. Her and her entire staff have lawyered up and taken the 5th. Two separate FBI Criminal investigations in progress. People who support her call this a "nothing burger". ..."
"... With Clinton, the Democrats offer nothing but more of the same stagnant mess we've endured for the last two decades; no vision, no hope, no change. No thanks, I'll pass. The Republicans offer nothing but a three-card monte of a candidate. Neither is fit to lead the nation, and either one is more likely than not to lead to disaster, just disasters of different sorts. ..."
"... Throughout history the privileged elites have proven utterly incompetent to run nations the vast majority of the time, always mistaking the arrogance and ruthlessness required to amass great wealth for wisdom and political competence. ..."
The Associated Press declared late on Monday that the former secretary of state had won the
support of the 2,383 delegates needed to clinch the nomination, an unexpected twist on the eve of
voting on Tuesday in California plus New Jersey, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota and New
Mexico.
The Sanders campaign called the announcement a "rush to judgment" which ignored the Democratic
National Committee's rule to count superdelegate votes only at the convention, not before.
... ... ...
Egbuonu, the physical therapist, said the specter of Trump, the Republican presumptive
nominee, would steel her to back Clinton. "The lesser of two evils." But she hoped Sanders would
continue to fight until the convention. "It's important for him to take it as far as he can. For
him to drop out now would leave people feeling voiceless."
... ... ...
Turner Willman, 26 and a community media activist, was dispirited on the train in San
Francisco on Tuesday morning.
"I feel like my vote has been disregarded. It doesn't feel democratic. It feels like a media
stunt to discourage people from actually voting ... But especially voting today, after that
announcement, it sends a really strong message that we're not going to accept it."
BradKB 8 Jun 2016 00:01
So the status quo continues and America misses a golden opportunity.
Aileronica 7 Jun 2016 23:55
The worst joke of this century is to see Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump fighting it
out for President of the Free World and the possibility that Ms corporate establishment
profiteer Clinton could be first female president or alternatively that an overly inflated
reality tv host could be in charge of the worlds biggest war machine!
I want to wake up from this nightmare, I think I've slipped into an alternate universe and I
don't like it one little bit.
alalos 7 Jun 2016 23:50
The real fault that should be leveled at the Democratic machine is the closed primaries and
then you have the stories of voter roll malfeasance. But even the former, sadly, was a well
known mechanism in place far in advance.
SpiritOf1775 7 Jun 2016 23:39
Yes, its voter suppression by the "bandwagon effect". They've been doing this for
decades to right wing populist candidates. Next will come the marginalizing and name calling.
Its very refreshing to see the oligarch's media playing all the same trick on young leftists
that they've played on us all these years.
Maybe it will wake some people up. Those people you've been taught to hate, the supposed
"right wing" were just humans like you, trying to vote for freedom, for self-determination,
and all your assumptions about them are based on name-calling and media bias. Now when it gets
turned on you, when they start calling you some names, putting pressure on Bernie, lying about
your positions, I hope you wake up.
The enemy is the Guardian, and the media. This is your enemy. Never let them fool you
again.
alalos -> Rationaliste 7 Jun 2016 23:39
Yes, this would be my followup question. However unpalatable it may sound, it should be
asked.
How do pundits feel about the notion that (more conservative/pragmatic) black and latino
communities in the South may have been instrumental in holding back a progressive, liberal
North? If it was white rednecks holding back progress, the finger would be pointed amply.
Aseoria -> thankgodimanatheist 7 Jun 2016 23:38
"megalomaniac fraudster narcissist" pretty much describes both Trump and HRC. The Clintons
are among the most accomplished grifters on the planet.
Rationaliste -> alalos 7 Jun 2016 23:21
Astute comment. The Clinton victories in the south, which as you point out were a major
factor in her primary success, was won on the backs of unsophisticated blacks who once more
voted for their own oppression by supporting the wife of the charming sax playing conman who
they love although he devastated their families with his support for the war on drugs, welfare
elimination called "welfare reform," and other neo-eugenic policies.
Philly_Slim 7 Jun 2016 23:11
Bernie may have beaten Trump. Hillary won't.
That AP report about super-delegates was a confected scam to keep Bernie voters away in Cali.
If Bern still manages to win that State despite the 'black-ops' of the Clinton camp it will be
a stinging rebuke.
panopticon7 YoWayYo 7 Jun 2016 23:06
actually, no--no one who supports sanders needs to ever compromise themselves and vote for
a criminal like clinton. there is no obligation, moral or otherwise, that makes supporting
clinton either inevitable or even advisable. we know for sure what she will do. more war, more
inequality, more student debt, more children with insecure nutrition, more prisons, more
prisoners, more pay day loans, more assassinations, more suppression of whistleblowers, more
everyday corruption. trump is a genuine unknown. what is certain is that if trump wins, there
will never be a clinton dynasty.
i think the US can survive trump. i do not think the US can survive dynastic
coronations. that way leads to the republic's last breath and the legitimisation of hereditary
rulers. it's already that way now--and a mechanism is in place to crush it. that mechanism is
electing an outsider. any outsider at all.
riesling 7 Jun 2016 23:04
Bernie Sanders supporters are voting for the Democratic candidate in California in
contrasting moods of resignation, defiance and hope in the wake of reports that Hillary
Clinton has amassed enough delegates to clinch the party's presidential nomination.
That's anger, dear. Anger at complicit "journalists" who run with the Clinton campaign's
illegitimate claim to superdelegate votes, anger at the very existence of superdelegates,
anger at - oh, forget journalists - newspaper writers who characterize Sanders voters as
dejected losers, the better to solidify Clinton's claim to the nomination. Clinton's rigidity
and apparent belief that the only way to win is through dirty politics is going to lose her a
lot of Sanders voters. She doesn't think she needs them, but she thinks wrong.
nataliesutler -> hadeze242 7 Jun 2016 22:56
Of course they refuse to release the emails prior to the election. The WH after all,wants
Clinton elected. Did you need an announcement to know this would be the case? Perhaps you
might be a tad naive if that's the case.
panopticon7 -> MasonInNY 7 Jun 2016 22:56
the problem with the clintonistas is that they desperately need to vilify the
progressive opposition and the use of the imaginary bernie bro is a prime example. it shows
the underlying character of the corporate shill they feel will most benefit them personally
despite how much harm it would bring to those less fortunate. it's an expression of just how
bottomlessly empty their rhetoric is and how they are strangers to genuineness, compassion and
perspicacity.
Exactly. It's the apathy of the electorate that has had a very big impact on the
current situation. I'm not in the USA but I have several friends in Cali who are all, meh,
politics. They can't be bothered even registering to vote.
As someone who comes from a country with compulsory voting I am always appalled at this
attitude, but I understand there are those appalled at the concept of compulsory voting. We
need to clear away the apathy and get the electorate engaged and excited and wanting to get
involved in a process that can end up with much more rewarding results than the past.
Alpheus Williams 7 Jun 2016 22:12
Congratulations to Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and the DNC for their ardent push, bias and
elitism and successfully stacking the deck against the rank and file of Democrat Voters...I
predict that you have lost at least 50% of them forever. You've certainly lost me. If anyone
has ensured the election of Donald Trump it has been them...
FeatherWood 7 Jun 2016 22:09
Just one final slap in the face from the corporate media to the supporters of Bernie
Sanders.
I've waited for months for the opportunity to vote for Bernie; of course I went out and voted
for him today.
Now, I'm done.
I refuse to watch the Hillary-Trump Reality TV Show, directed by Bill Clinton.
What we are seeing is Reality TV, directed by Bill Clinton, who talked with Donald Trump prior
to Trump's entering the race and reportedly encouraged him to get into it. Bill and Donny are
working together to elect Hillary.
It looks like we really do have a Trump-Clinton race, so I'm going to try to ignore the whole
thing. I hate reality TV, and I'm convinced that's all a Clinton-Trump race is -- a reality TV
show that ends with Hillary in the White House.
The more outrageous Trump is, the more he pushes people, who 2 years ago would have said they
would NEVER vote for Hillary, into voting for her in the fall. It's the only way she can
plausibly win, so that's the theater show Bill and Donald are producing.
I'm also convinced that the powers that rig the voting machines will do so on Hillary's
behalf. She's the Establishment choice, by far. She's the one who will keep the Military
Industrial Complex and Wall Street rolling along as usual, lining the pockets of the rich and
powerful. The outcome is not in doubt.
I'm so certain of my cynical views that if Hillary wins the FBI primary and actually becomes
the nominee, it won't be worth paying attention anymore. I'll show up to vote for Jill Stein
in the fall.
helpmejebus -> MrsMud 7 Jun 2016 21:55
Lol... She lied to your face repeatly, says the OIG. She's seen no errors, in fact she
refused to do anything but send surrogates out to try and trash the OIG.
A simple example is claiming that there was no chance her server was hacked. She said that on
numerous occasions. Privately she was emailing her staff telling them her server had been
hacked. She also had an obligation to report that to State, because there was humint on the
server - actual people's lives at stake... But instead she pretended it never happened.
She also told you and the world that she cooperated with every investigation. In fact she
never once answered questions from the OIG.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg. It doesn't even touch the NUMEROUS shady weapons
deals, including selling WMDs to Mubarak "a close family friend" who used them to massacre
protesters.
Or the fact that she hired the owner of Saudi Arabia's DC lobbying firm as her campaign
chairman. She called approving the sale of billions of dollars in Boeing weapons to Saudi
Arabia a "top priority" of hers at State. Oh and btw her Campaign Chairman's lobbying firm...
They also represent Boeing. And Boeing paid Bill 250k for a few Q&A sessions around the same
time.
Youre helping a horribly corrupt person.
DracoFerret -> helpmejebus 7 Jun 2016 21:52
given a choice between the sleazycrookedhillary or the grumptrump, I would choose the Trump
over a career criminal Hillary--even in her Arkansas mafia days.
BradStorch 7 Jun 2016 21:47
If somebody who supported the Iraq war, Libya war, arming jihadists in Syria for Israel's
benefit, the Patriot Act, TARP, surveillance, etc is the Democratic nominee, then I must not
be a Democrat. I owe you gullible sellouts nothing.
aeausa -> basben 7 Jun 2016 21:41
I dunno. She's been an attack dog on Trump for the last several weeks. Just really lets
rip. Been reported non-stop in our daily papers.
She may bury whatever hatchet she has with Hillary long enough to make sure Trump loses. She's
much more a Bernie type, but she'll sign on to stop Trump.
Local news story yesterday was that she says she doesn't believe in super-delegates--and she's
one of them by virtue of her office. She's between a rock snd a hard spot: not at all a
natural Hillary ally, but bound and determined to see Trump defeated. She turns people off
with her fairly bitchy remarks about him, but if you know her history vis-a-vis big banks and
their rampant consumer fraud, you can see where she's coming from. He's anathema to her.
helpmejebus -> MrsMud 7 Jun 2016 21:39
You've helped nominate the least trusted, most disliked Democratic nominee ever. Since
records began. She's going to lose badly of she's not indicted first..
Seems like a great reason for dancing in the streets.
DebraBrown -> Ramus 7 Jun 2016 21:13
This election has been a huge wake-up call for many of us. I now understand that the
Democratic Party is completely corrupt and can no longer be distinguished from the Republican
Party (at the elite level).
The elites on both sides control the process and distract the 99% from their puppet-mastering
by pitting people against each other based on social issues which the elites don't care about,
because they don't impact their profits.
PotholeKid apacheman 7 Jun 2016 21:03
" I'm pretty sure, as no nation can withstand the blatant rigging of an election for
its highest office combined with the two choices being among the most loathed people in the
country, if the elites insist on Clinton as their candidate."
You have to remember Americans forgot about the rigged Bush/Gore election of 2000 the
moment they turned on their cable news and they were told ...nothing to see here. The flagrant
abuse of democracy is accepted because people feel powerless to do anything about it.. Perhaps
this time around Sanders supporters will be the exception and take their democracy back.
Zendjan -> ElvisK 7 Jun 2016 21:02
Are you serious? Even Hillary's cat knows she is corrupt. Corruption is what the
Clintons DO. Just ask Trump, he's paid them plenty over the years. Or ask Democratic pollster
Pat Caddell, President Carter's advisor. He called the Clintons "the greediest white trash
I've ever seen." Just because you've drunk their Kool-Aid, don't expect the rest of us to
quaff.
Jane Manning 7 Jun 2016 20:59
How women like me would have loved a female presidential candidate to be proud of.
Nothing but disgust for this lying, cheating, corrupt-to-the-core, war-mongering Oligarch.
Hope the FBI arrests her before late July.
Ezajur -> brancusi 7 Jun 2016 20:57
Along the way she made a hundred million dollars with Bill, voted for Iraq and encouraged
the devastation of Gaza, made millions from Wall St., was a lousy Secretary of State,
encouraged deregulation until after the great crash, got record unfavourability ratings,
accepted money from dictators for her foundation, lied about others having made paid speeches
to Wall St ., parachuted into NY bypassing other local Democrats, lost to a black man with a
muslim name (fortunately) and now lost 40% plus of the base to an unknown 74 year old - who is
as much a proponent of women's rights as Hillary.
Kneeling before Aipac, weaker on public education and student debt, weaker on global warming
and climate change, weaker on prison reform and criminal justice reform, weaker on...
Lousy candidate. Bernie or bust.
QuetzalLove1 -> blacklyche 7 Jun 2016 20:45
Yes, HC is the least popular candidate and the most hated -- so how about she moves over.
I'm not voting for going backward, for Wall Street, for more wars, for Bill's disgusting
economic plan -- NAFTA -- CAFTA, more -- along with her backing of Iraq and the deregulation
of banking into the deepest of recessions for the middle class and the greatest number of
incarcerations in the world per capita for people of color, and so much more. I will throw up
if I have to see Chelsea's children on TV with her hedge fund husband, formerly of Goldman,
still a hedge fund trader with a father in jail for screwing over vulnerable people for
decades and a mother in law who mismanaged funds while serving in Congress. If she says again
"I got out of the hedge fund business because I realized money wasn't important to me" --- her
quote, I will want to throw a soft boiled egg a the TV screen. Easier to disclose her parents
who have given us so much to dislike.
Ramus 7 Jun 2016 20:44
Bernie is not going away. He is in it until everyone has a chance to vote and he has
said he is in it through the National Convention. The delegates vote on July 25. Then he
drops out or not..and not before. There is, I think, a possibility that the Republicans, in
their Convention which is before the Democratic Convention, may figure out a way to nominate
someone other than Crazy Donald. That will make a difference in the Democratic Convention
because anybody BUT Trump might well beat Clinton. She is not beloved.
Colrom 7 Jun 2016 20:43
It may not matter whether Bernie can win the nomination. The media has exposed itself as a
paid propaganda/marketing outlet for the powerful and privileged rather than objective
reporter of events.
That stain is permanent.
All4114All -> blacklyche 7 Jun 2016 20:36
The DNC establishment, Hillary and DWS are the disasters in the making. Just watch how they
lose to that moron Trump. That's how much Hillary is despised!
OkavO -> kropotkinsf 7 Jun 2016 20:28
that the hillary campaign tweet showing their shock at the suprise call by the AP was
timestamped 4.6.16 and called "secret win" smells just as bad
Hasn't had unscripted press event in 180+ days. Her and her entire staff have lawyered
up and taken the 5th. Two separate FBI Criminal investigations in progress. People who support
her call this a "nothing burger".
The "US reurning to a manufacturing economy?" You must be joking. Do you know anything
about the way the globalized world operates today? Go back to the 19th century in a time
machine and you'll be happy.
The CEO of General Electric just spoke to a university here in the states last week, and get
this, his message: Localization!
His view is that the global economy is the most unstable he has seen in his lifetime, and
combined with the uprise of nationalism around the world, he thinks businesses are going to be
safest investing their capital in their primary markets, and any gains made in reduced labor
and real estate cost could be simply wiped out when a country "nationalizes" a factory, or a
prime trading partner puts up a tariff.
Which means, in his view, new U.S. factories for GE!
He is the first CEO I've heard say "this isn't about Trump, this is about a war on
globalization and I won't risk my company defending it."
apacheman -> shotandgoal4 7 Jun 2016 19:54
I imagine the dissolution of the USSR was grand theater, too.
This primary season marks the beginning of the dissolution of the US of A, I'm pretty sure, as
no nation can withstand the blatant rigging of an election for its highest office combined
with the two choices being among the most loathed people in the country, if the elites insist
on Clinton as their candidate.
With Clinton, the Democrats offer nothing but more of the same stagnant mess we've endured
for the last two decades; no vision, no hope, no change. No thanks, I'll pass. The Republicans
offer nothing but a three-card monte of a candidate. Neither is fit to lead the nation, and
either one is more likely than not to lead to disaster, just disasters of different sorts.
Throughout history the privileged elites have proven utterly incompetent to run nations
the vast majority of the time, always mistaking the arrogance and ruthlessness required to
amass great wealth for wisdom and political competence.
It's depressing to watch the same shit keep playing out over and over again.
We have a chance to avoid repeating history here, slim, yes, but still a chance, and we must
fight as hard as we can to seize it and avoid the end which has been the fate of so many other
empires.
"... she appears to have endangered national security secrets including the identity of covert CIA officers and done so for selfish reasons (personal convenience or keeping her documents out of reach of transparency laws). ..."
"... The facts of the case would seem to merit criminal charges against her, since Clinton's situation is analogous to problems faced by other senior officials, including former CIA directors John Deutch and David Petraeus who were accused of mishandling classified information, Deutch by having secret material on his home computer and Petraeus for giving notebooks with highly sensitive information to his lover/biographer. ..."
"... Beyond Clinton's legal predicament over secrets, there is also the question of how she manipulates information on small matters as well as big. There's a pertinent Bible quotation: "If you are faithful in little things, you will be faithful in large ones. But if you are dishonest in little things, you won't be honest with greater responsibilities." (Luke 16:10) ..."
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is in a legal pickle over her careless email practices
– in that she appears to have endangered national security secrets
including the identity of covert CIA officers and done so for selfish reasons (personal convenience
or keeping her documents out of reach of transparency laws).
The facts of the case would seem to merit criminal charges against her, since Clinton's situation
is analogous to problems faced by other senior officials, including former CIA directors John Deutch
and David Petraeus who were accused of mishandling classified information, Deutch by having secret
material on his home computer and Petraeus for giving notebooks with highly sensitive information
to his lover/biographer.
Deutch agreed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor but was preemptively pardoned by President Bill
Clinton; Petraeus pled guilty to a misdemeanor in a plea deal that spared him from jail time and
was widely criticized as excessively lenient, especially since the Obama administration had jailed
lower-level officials, such as former CIA officer John Kiriakou, for similar violations.
In 2012, faced with a multiple count indictment, Kiriakou agreed to plead guilty to one count
of violating the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act for giving a reporter the phone number
of a former CIA officer whose work for the spy agency was still classified. Though the reporter did
not publish the ex-officer's name, Kiriakou was sentenced to 30 months in prison.
The Intelligence Identities Protection Act was also a factor in the "Plame-gate affair" in 2003
when officials of George W. Bush's administration disclosed the CIA identity of Valerie Plame as
part of a campaign to discredit her husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who had challenged
Bush's claims about Iraq seeking yellowcake uranium for a nuclear program, one of the falsehoods
that was used to justify invading Iraq.
Right-wing columnist Robert Novak blew Plame's undercover identity but a special prosecutor chose
not to indict anyone, including Bush's aides, under the 1982 law. He did, however, convict Vice President
Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, of obstructing justice. However, Bush commuted Libby's
sentence so he avoided jail time.
The recent State Department Inspector General report makes clear that Clinton blithely disregarded
safeguards designed to protect the most highly classified national security information and that
she included on her unprotected email server the names of US intelligence agents under cover.
In other words, there is legal precedent for Hillary Clinton to be charged in connection with
her decision to handle her State Department emails through a personal server in her home in Chappaqua,
New York, rather than through official government servers. But there's political precedent as well
for the well-connected to be either slapped on the wrist or let off the hook.
A Biblical Warning
Beyond Clinton's legal predicament over secrets, there is also the question of how she manipulates
information on small matters as well as big. There's a pertinent Bible quotation: "If you are faithful
in little things, you will be faithful in large ones. But if you are dishonest in little things,
you won't be honest with greater responsibilities." (Luke 16:10)
And I happen to have personal experience with how Clinton has been dishonest in the little matter
of my brutal arrest on Feb. 15, 2011, after I stood with my back turned toward her while she delivered
a speech at George Washington University about the importance of respecting dissent (in other countries,
that is).
I have looked closely at her relevant email exchanges from late February 2011 after Secretary
Clinton didn't miss a syllable as I was roughly dragged away by security personnel right in front
of her. From my review of those emails, I had two takeaways: (1) Secretary Clinton is not truthful
about the smallest of things; and (2) she had a much more important issue to worry about at the time;
namely, rallying support for a "no-fly zone" as a gateway to a "regime change" war on Libya.
Could that be why she never took up her confidant Sidney Blumenthal's suggestion that an apology
to me might be in order? Since the emails speak so eloquently to both issues, I will cite them below:
On my standing silently at George Washington U. on Feb. 15, 2011:
From: sbwhoeop [Sidney Blumenthal] To: H (Hillary Clinton) Sent: Fri Feb 18, 09:27:25, 2011 Subject: H: FYI, an unfortunate incident. Sid
"Don't know if you are aware of this unfortunate incident described below on Larry Johnson's website.
Ray McGovern, a former CIA officer who gave the daily brief for President George H.W. Bush, is pretty
well known in the intelligence community. He's become a Christian antiwar leftist who goes around
bearing witness. Whatever his views, he's harmless. Something bad happened at your speech at GW.
And it's become a minor cause celebre on the Internet among lefties. You might have someone check
this out and also have someone apologize to Ray McGovern. Sid"
From Sidney Blumenthal (continued)
"Larry C. Johnson is a former analyst at the US Central Intelligence Agency, who moved subsequently
in 1989 to the US Department of State, where he served four years as the deputy director for transportation
security, antiterrorism assistance training, and special operations in the State Department's Office
of Counterterrorism. He left government … in October 1993 … and is an expert in the fields of terrorism,
aviation security, and crisis and risk management, and money laundering investigations. Johnson is
the founder and main author of No Quarter, a weblog that addresses issues of terrorism and intelligence
and politics.)"
Blumenthal then quoted from a blog piece that Johnson wrote after hearing what happened during
Secretary Clinton's speech at GWU on Feb. 15:
"During a speech by Hillary earlier this week at George Washington University retired CIA analyst,
Ray McGovern, was physically accosted and arrested for disorderly conduct for the simple act of standing
up and turning his back to Hillary. Ray ended his career at the CIA as one of the senior officers
who provided George H.W. Bush his daily intelligence brief. Since then Ray has emerged as an antiwar
activist. Ray is a fearless but he also is a kind, gentle soul. …
"Unfortunately Hillary is getting blamed for what happened to Ray, but it is not her fault. Hillary
is not in charge of her security detail. … He had every right to stand and silently protest. He posed
no threat to Hillary and made no threatening move. The security folks grossly overreacted.… Since
the folks inside the auditorium had gone thru a metal detector there was no reason to assume that
Ray represented a threat to do harm. It is the ultimate irony that the Obama Administration is calling
on foreign leaders to tolerate protest and dissent but when it comes to an old man standing silently
there was no tolerance at all."
[end of shortened text of email from Larry Johnson, quoted by Sidney Blumenthal]
Clever Wording
Secretary Clinton then replied:
To: Sidney Blumenthal Subject: "H: FYI, AN UNFORTUNATE INCIDENT. SID" From: H [email protected] [one of two email accounts that Clinton used] To: sbwhoeop Sent: Friday, February 18, 2011 10:14 AM [replying to Blumenthal less than an hour later] Subject: Re: "H: FYI, an unfortunate incident."
"Sid I appreciate your sending thgis (sic) to me. Neither State nor my staff had anything to do
w this. The man stood up just as I was starting and GW–which claims their quick actions were part
of their standard operating procedures to remove anyone who stands up and starts speaking while an
invited guest is talking–moved to remove him. GW claims he was not in any way injured. We have no
other info but I will see what else can be done."
In this brief email, Secretary Clinton takes two misleading tacks. Though she had firsthand knowledge
that I had not been "speaking" - since she was there - she suggests otherwise while not actually
saying so. She just strongly implies that I was "speaking."
Not only was she an eyewitness, numerous videos on the Internet in the days prior showed that
I did not say a word until the security people had me in a headlock and almost out the door and into
the street. Lawyers like Hillary Clinton apparently parse words – even on minor matters, and even
in emails that they hope will never see the light of day. (And what, by the way, is the meaning of
"is?")
Similarly, Secretary Clinton attributes to GWU the claim that I "was not in any way injured."
Case closed. … except for the photos sent around on the Web a few days earlier.
So, as you might guess, there was no apology from the Secretary of State or a statement that perhaps
the "unfortunate incident" with McGovern had unfortunately stepped on her passionate and surely heartfelt
denunciation of Iran for not respecting the right of dissidents to protest their government's policies.
Targeting Gaddafi
But the incident with me was minor compared to what Secretary Clinton was then cooking up for
Libya, where she was outraged that Col. Muammar Gaddafi was citing the need to root out Islamic terrorists
operating around Benghazi. Dismissing Gaddafi's claims, Clinton and her State Department preferred
to denounce Gaddafi's domestic "war on terror" as a "genocidal" attack on innocent dissenters in
eastern Libya.
Again, Clinton was
communicating with her outside adviser Blumenthal about how to rile the world up enough
against Gaddafi to push a "no-fly zone" through the United Nations Security Council.
Secretary Clinton's private emails also contradict her testimony before the House Benghazi Committee
that Blumenthal "was not at all my adviser on Libya," although I guess it depends on what your definition
of "adviser" is. The emails show that she actually took immediate proactive steps to follow up on
his advice, as can be seen in the following:
From: sbwhoeop [Sidney Blumenthal]
Sent: Monday, February 21, 2011 10:32 PM
To: H Subject: H: Option: no-fly zone over Libya. David Owen proposes. S
"UK former Foreign Secretary David Owen has called for a no-fly zone over Libya, imposed by the
United Nations and/or Nato … US might consider advancing tomorrow. Libyan helicopters and planes
are raining terror on cities."
[Article from Aljazeera as quoted by Blumenthal]: "In the wake of reported aiattacks (sic) on
civilian crowds by the Libyan airforce, former Foreign Secretary Lord David Owen has called on the
UN Security Council to immediately meet in emergency session and authorize a `No Fly Zone' over Libya.
Speaking on al Jazeera, Lord Owen called for a UN Charter Chapter 7 intervention (meaning the authorization
of both military and nonmilitary means to 'restore international peace and security') to be enforced
by NATO air forces with Egyptian military support to demonstrate regional backing."
From: H <[email protected]> [the other Clinton email, using her maiden name initials, Hillary
Diane Rodham]
To: Sullivan, Jacob 3 [deputy chief of staff]
Sent: Mon Feb 21 22:42:21 2011
Subject: Fw: "H: Option: no-fly zone over Libya. David Owen proposes. Sid"
"What do you think of this idea?"
From: Sullivan, Jacob J [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Tuesday, February 22, 2011 04:59 AM [early the next morning]
To: H
Subject: Re: "H: Option: no-fly zone over Libya. David Owen proposes. Sid"
"Several have proposed it but honestly, we actually don't know what is happening from the air
right now. As we gain more facts, we can consider."
From: H [email protected] [back to the other email address]
Sent: Tuesday, February 22, 2011 6:09 AM
To: sbwhoeop
Subject: Re: "H: Option: no-fly zone over Libya. David Owen proposes."
"Sid, We are looking at that for Security Council, which remains reluctant to 'interfere' in the
internal affairs of a country. Stay tuned!"
From: H <[email protected]>
To: Sullivan, Jacob J
Sent: Tue Feb 22 06:34:15 2011
Subject: Re: "H: Option: no-fly zone over Libya. David Owen proposes. Sid"
"I've heard contradictory reports as to whether or not there are planes flying and firing on crowds.
What is the evidence that they are?"
From: Sullivan, Jacob J <[email protected]>
Sent: Tuesday, February 22, 2011 7:21 AM
To: H
Subject: Re: "H: Option: no-fly zone over Libya. David Owen proposes. Sid"
"Not much – unconfirmed reports. Though helos firing seems more plausible."
On to War
It took three more weeks, but on March 17, 2011, Secretary Clinton got her wish for a "no-fly
zone" approved by the UN Security Council, acting under the military authority of Chapter Seven of
the UN Charter. The vote was ten in favor, zero against, and five abstentions.
The five abstentions were: Brazil, Russia, India, China and Germany; Russian and China, which
as permanent members could have vetoed the motion, complained later that they were deceived as to
the real purpose of the "no-fly zone," not realizing that it was a pretext for another "regime change,"
which involved slaughtering much of the Libyan army before driving Gaddafi from power.
When Gaddafi was captured in his home town of Sirte on Oct. 20, 2011, he was tortured with a knife,
which was used to sodomize him. Then he was murdered. When Clinton was notified of Gaddafi's demise,
she declared, "we came,
we saw, he died" - and clapped her hands in undisguised glee.
It turned out, however, that Gaddafi was right that many of his adversaries in the east were radical
jihadists and terrorists, a truth that Clinton learned when US Ambassador Christopher Stevens and
three other US personnel were slain by attackers in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012.
Clinton's deception around the Libyan "no-fly zone" – as a gateway to yet another brutal U.S.-backed
"regime change" – also helped poison US relations with Russia and China, which balked at similar
US demands for a "safe zone" inside Syria, an idea that Clinton has advocated both as Secretary of
State and as a presidential candidate.
In other words, Clinton is no more honest about big things than small, just as the Bible passage
foretold, except now the fate of the world may hang in the balance.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour
in inner-city Washington. He is a 30-year veteran of the CIA and Army intelligence and co-founder
of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). McGovern served for considerable periods
in all four of CIA's main directorates.
Mr. Sanders, however, insists that the convention will be contested because he is still lobbying
superdelegates - party officials and state leaders who cast their final votes at the convention -
to withdraw support from Mrs. Clinton and back him instead. He plans to make the case that he is
a stronger candidate against Donald J. Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee. A number of polls,
he said, show he can beat Mr. Trump by larger margins than Mrs. Clinton can.
On Sunday, Mr. Sanders opened a new line of attack against Mrs. Clinton, criticizing donations
made by foreign governments while she was secretary of state to the Clinton Foundation, the organization
founded by former President Bill Clinton.
When Mr. Sanders, who greeted fans in West Hollywood, was asked by reporters if he remained committed
to pushing for a contested convention, he said he "absolutely" was.
"Clinton is a lightening rod for the right, which makes it hard for her to attract independents
in the general election. And her politics are right, which means progressives have no reason to be enthusiastic
supporters. "
"During one of the primary debates in the 2008 presidential campaign, the candidates were asked
what they would do about Social Security. Obama gave us the answer I wanted to hear: he said the best
solution would be to raise the cap on the payroll tax. Hillary, on the other hand, said she didn't want
to answer the question at that time And what did I get? Hillary! He called it a grand bargain."
Notable quotes:
"... pluck is all she's got. Which, admittedly, can get you pretty far in the beltway. ..."
"... Obama could have done a LOT at the time. He chose not to. He outsourced the ACA to Congressional
Democrats, who dithered all year. He didn't even attempt a jobs program. He bailed out the bankers.
..."
"... Dumb opportunism. She thought the Iraq War vote was the safe vote. But she was wrong, and it
cost her. Point 3 in my piece is about that. Frankly, anyone who thought Iraq would turn out well was
dumb...at the time. Millions knew better. ..."
"... HRC is all about HRC. She's all about political opportunism, because everything's about her
and her career, and nothing else. ..."
"... When I was a resident of NY, I voted for her, thinking maybe she'd shine as a progressive in
her own political career. Boy was I wrong. Ted's description of her carpetbagging and the simultaneous
cravenness and idiocy of the Iraq vote is right on. ..."
"... yes, Obama's administration has been much too much of and for Wall Street and corporations
for my comfort. ..."
"... Clinton hasn't accomplished anything of historic import. That her Iraq War vote was, not just
immoral and repugnant, but revelatory as the vote of someone incapable of political prognostication.
..."
"... It doesn't matter when she married bill. She inherited her political capital from HIS presidency
just like George w. bush inherited his from his father. W was his father's son before his dad became
president too. She's not equivalent to a self-made woman like Margaret Thatcher, Elizabeth Warren or
even Sarah Palin. ..."
"... I disagree that she's dumb. She's very smart. Smart enough to know the best way for a woman
of her era to advance was to attach herself to a brilliant ambitious charismatic man. ..."
Here, in an easy clip-and-take-to-the-primaries nutshell, is the non-vast-rightie-conspiracy case
against Hillary:
1.Zero record of accomplishment.
Since 2009 we've seen what happens when we elect a president with charisma but minus a resume:
weakness, waffling, national decline. Obama's signature/single accomplishment, the Affordable Care
Act, embodies design-by-committee conception and autopilot execution.
Hillary's admirers have conflated her impressive list of jobs with actually having gotten things
done. When you scratch the surface, however, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that the woman has
done little more than warm a series of comfy leather desk chairs. How has this career politician
changed Americans' lives? Not in the least.
No doubt, Hillary knows her way around the corridors of power: First Lady, Senator from New York,
presidential candidate, Secretary of State. Nice resume, but what did she do with all her jobs? Not
much.
First Lady Ladybird Johnson led a
highway beautification campaign that literally changed America's landscape for the better. Betty
Ford courageously
exposed herself as an alcoholic, serving as a role model by publicly seeking treatment. In terms
of achievement, Hillary Clinton's political life peaked in 1993 with "HillaryCare," a botched attempt
at healthcare reform that failed because no one, including liberals, agreed with the core mission
of what liberal Democratic Senator Robert Byrd
called "a very complex, very expensive, very little understood piece of legislation": federal
subsidies for wildly profitable private insurance corporations (sound familiar?).
After sleazing her way into the Capitol as an out-of-state
carpetbagger
- New Yorkers still remember - Senator Clinton wiled away the early 2000s as a slacker Senator. This,
remember, was while Bush was pushing through his radical right agenda: the Patriot Act, wars, coups,
drones, torture, renditions and so on.
While Bush was running roughshod, Hillary was meek and acquiescent.
Clinton's legislative proposals were trivial and few. Her bargaining skills were so lousy that
she couldn't find cosponsors for her tiny-bore bills - even fellow Democrats snubbed the former First
Lady on stuff like increasing bennies for members of the Coast Guard. "Senator Clinton is right when
she claims to be the experienced candidate," Adam Hamft wrote for
HuffPo during the 2008 primaries, "although it's not the experience she would like us to believe.
It's a track record of legislative failure and futility."
Hillary cheerleaders brag that she logged nearly a million miles of air travel as Secretary of
State. "She reminded the world that Woody Allen was right even when it comes to diplomacy:
80 percent of success really
is simply showing up," Megan Garber
cheered in The Atlantic (what is it about that rag and Hillary?).
What success?
The best case I could find for Hillary as kickass StateSec comes courtesy of
PolicyMic, which I hope is on her payroll given how much they suck up to her. An article titled
"5 Top Highlights in Hillary Clinton's Secretary of State Tenure" cites "People-to-People Diplomacy"
(all that travel), "The Importance of Economics" ("helping U.S. companies win business overseas"),
"Restoring American Credibility" ("outreach to [the military junta in] Burma," "brokering a ceasefire
between Hamas and Israel," and "coordination with Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi will likely give
the U.S. greater
leverage to pursue a robust peace process in 2013" - but "likely" didn't pan out…why doesn't
Mo return my calls anymore?).
"Rock star diplomat," as The New York Times Magazine called her? Hardly.
As Stephen M. Walt notes in
Foreign Policy, "she's hardly racked up any major achievements…She played little role in
extricating us from Iraq, and it is hard to see her fingerprints on the U.S. approach to Afghanistan.
She has done her best to smooth the troubled relationship with Pakistan, but anti-Americanism remains
endemic in that country and it hardly looks like a success story at this point...She certainly helped
get tougher sanctions on Iran, but the danger of war still looms and there's been no breakthrough
there either…Needless to say, she has done nothing to advance the cause of Israeli-Palestinian peace
or even to halt Israel's increasingly naked land grab there." (Talks with Iran began after Clinton
quit.)
Yeah, she's been busy. But she has little to show for her time in office - she works dumb, not
smart. At least with Obama, 2008 voters saw potential. Hillary has had 20 years to shine. If she
hasn't gotten anything accomplished in all that time, with all that power, why should we think she'll
make a great president?
... ... ...
3.She's kind of dumb.
In 2003, Senator Clinton cast the most important vote of her life, in favor of invading Iraq.
Not only was it morally unconscionable - Bush ginned up the war from thin air, Iraq had nothing to
do with 9/11 and there was neither evidence nor proof that Saddam had WMDs - her war authorization
vote was politically idiotic.
Hillary lost the 2008 Democratic nomination to Obama (who, though voting six times for war funding,
and not in the Senate in 2003, had criticized that "dumb war")
due to that vote.
Though Clinton has never
apologized for pandering to post-9/11 yellow-ribbons-all-over-the-car militarism (which is also
stupid), her lame excuses in 2008 (she
claimed she "thought it was a vote to put inspectors back in" even though it was called the "Authorization
for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002") indicate that she knew she'd blown it.
Also, the fact that she thought anyone would buy such ridiculous lies further indicates less than
awesome intelligence.
Let's give Hillary the benefit of the doubt: we'll assume she wasn't so breathtakingly stupid
as to think invading Iraq was moral or legal. Even so, her pandering betrays poor political calculus.
It should have been obvious - it was to
me - that the U.S. would lose in Iraq. Given Clinton's options at the time (run for president
a year later in 2004, reelection in 2006, or 2008), she was an idiot to think that her vote to authorize
what would soon turn into an unpopular war wouldn't decimate her support among the Democratic party's
liberal antiwar base.
Having a cynical political operator as president is bad. But I'll take a smart cynic over a dumb
panderer.
(Ted Rall's website is tedrall.com.
Go there to join the Ted Rall Subscription Service and receive all of Ted's cartoons and columns
by email.)
COPYRIGHT 2013 TED RALL
Azazello
Whadya' mean "Zero Record of Accomplishment" ? She was on the board of Wal-Mart.
Seneca Doane -> karmsy, Nov 15 · 03:47:01 AM
We really hide-rate tip jars now for this sort of thing? And it's considered OK? Wow.
My opinion of Hillary is less harsh than Rall's, so I'll address that first.
His first point is a fair challenge -- but it should also be an answerable one. If people want
to rebut the idea that Hillary was a failure as First Lady, U.S. Senator from New York, and SecState,
they should be able to do it by now in their sleep. So -- do it. Show how it's done.
I find the second point the weakest. "Married into power" is not really bad role model material,
for example, when you met your husband at Yale Law School and was the main breadwinner for years.
But for Rall to still be pissed off at her 2003 vote to attack Iraq -- what's wrong with that?
(I would not have called her dumb. She was a bit craven -- but at a time when being craven seemed
to many to be the only path to victory.) It sure made things harder on us critics of the war,
though.
I'm surprised that Rall glosses over the thing that gives me the most pause about Hillary --
the Clinton Claque. She has some terrible retrograde friends who are slavering for a return to
power -- the ones who aren't already running the Obama Administration, I mean -- and I don't want
to see the likes of Mark Penn and Lanny Davis pulling Democratic levers of power again. Ever.
None of that -- none of it -- warrants hide-rating. For shame.
Ted Rall -> WB Reeves Nov 13 · 04:24:09 PM
That was a tossed-off aside. Which I stand by. I was speculating. People do that.
Ted Rall -> corvo, Nov 13 · 12:27:11 PM
No one denies her pluck
That part, I'll definitely give her.
quill -> Ted Rall, Nov 13 · 01:08:28 PM
pluck is all she's got. Which, admittedly, can get you pretty far in the beltway.
corvo -> quill, Nov 13 · 02:25:32 PM
that, and the entire machinery of one of the two political parties . . .
Ted Rall -> polecat Nov 13 · 12:28:56 PM
Remember Jan. 20, 2009
Control of Congress. Stratospheric approval ratings. A public terrified by a collapsing economy.
A compliant media.
Obama could have done a LOT at the time. He chose not to. He outsourced the ACA to Congressional
Democrats, who dithered all year. He didn't even attempt a jobs program. He bailed out the bankers.
Remember?
No one denies that GOP obstructionism is a problem now. But what about then?
James Hepburn -> tytalus Nov 13 · 11:45:05 PM
I made it through the first three on that list and upon realizing all three were lies, quit
reading.
• Passing the "largest" economic stimulus bill in American history.
Obama didn't pass anything. Congress passed it and Obama signed it. The only contribution Obama
made to the stimulus bill was to make it suck with a bunch of Republican tax cuts we didn't need
and reduced infrastructure spending which we did.
Real Democrats in Congrees passed the Stimulus bill. Not the White House.
The willingness of people to just rewrite history here and lie in defense of Obama is really
astonishing.
• Ordering the closing of Guantanamo Bay military detention facility and abolishing
"enhanced interrogation techniques."
This one must be a joke. If he had seriously ordered Guantanamo closed, it would be. He alone
has that authority. No, what Obama did was announce his intention, then asked Republicans for
permission. When they balked, he, as usual, caved. But go ahead, make excuses. Oh, and meanwhile,
secret renditions have continued under Obama.
• Setting a fixed timetable for withdrawing U.S. combat forces from Iraq.
And this one. Dude should be HR'd for repeating this lie. Seriously. How many times do people
have to be corrected before it becomes a bannable offense to keep repeating the same lies over
and over again. Obama tried to postpone the timetable for withdrawal - a timetable that was established
before Obama even took office.
I'm approaching 10 years at this site and I just can't believe the shit I see here now. We
used to have standards. You couldn't just make shit up. People would call you on it.
Ted Rall -> pistolSO Nov 13 · 12:30:53 PM
Dumb opportunism. She thought the Iraq War vote was the safe vote. But she was wrong, and
it cost her. Point 3 in my piece is about that. Frankly, anyone who thought Iraq would turn out
well was dumb...at the time. Millions knew better.
Hillary's healthcare creds leave much to be desired. Why no public option in 1993?
quill -> pistolSO, Nov 13 · 01:31:10 PM
HRC is all about HRC. She's all about political opportunism, because everything's about
her and her career, and nothing else.
When I was a resident of NY, I voted for her, thinking maybe she'd shine as a progressive
in her own political career. Boy was I wrong. Ted's description of her carpetbagging and the simultaneous
cravenness and idiocy of the Iraq vote is right on. That one vote, and the immediate and
subsequent inept excuses, defined her as just another lying centrist, as would be expected from
the Clinton dynasty.
Ted Rall -> raptavio, Nov 13 · 12:33:35 PM
Automatically if a man criticizes a woman, it's sexism. Just like automatically if a white
person criticizes a black person, it's racism.
The problem with the application of this theory is that I've called lots of Ivy-league educated
white men idiots...like Bush.
CentralMass -> CenPhx Nov 13 · 07:40:54 PM
Woud you consider our current President a corporatist?
CenPhx -> CentralMass, Nov 14 · 12:07:36 AM
Funny you should ask
My comment initially read "another corporatist president" but I took that out because I didn't
want to start a fight on a whole separate issue and lose track of the point I wanted to make about
HRC.
But yes, Obama's administration has been much too much of and for Wall Street and corporations
for my comfort.
Interesting that, all these posts in, no one has countered my points: That Clinton hasn't
accomplished anything of historic import. That her Iraq War vote was, not just immoral and repugnant,
but revelatory as the vote of someone incapable of political prognostication. That it would
be nice for the first woman president to be not a former First Lady.
Lots of distraction. Which sets off my "they don't have a point" radar. Too bad. I love a good
argument, but those require two sides.
calculator -> raptavio Nov 14 · 09:38:39 AM
You're missing the point It doesn't matter when she married bill. She inherited her political capital from HIS presidency
just like George w. bush inherited his from his father. W was his father's son before his dad
became president too. She's not equivalent to a self-made woman like Margaret Thatcher, Elizabeth
Warren or even Sarah Palin.
I disagree that she's dumb. She's very smart. Smart enough to know the best way for a woman
of her era to advance was to attach herself to a brilliant ambitious charismatic man.
"... "How Clinton can own her email scandal" [ The Hill ]. Essentially, Clinton should be saying not ..."
"... Colin Powell did it ..."
"... there's no security to be had anywhere, because look at all the hacking! ..."
"... UPDATE "A top aide to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declined last week to answer questions from private lawyers about the setup of her email server, citing her subsequent role as Mrs. Clinton's attorney" [ Wall Street Journal , "Clinton Aide Declines To Answer Questions About Email Server Setup"]. Cheryl Mills. Not a good look. ..."
"... (1) In a way, the outcome of the Clinton Email Hairball, whatever it may be, will be an instance of "The Party Decides." For example: There are some forms of cancer that cannot be removed without killing the patient. The Clinton network may have metastatized too much for treatment. In which case, "eat, drink, and be merry." For Clinton to be removed: ..."
"... (3) No matter what Obama does: (a) the FBI leadership and Judicial Watch are independent power sources, and (b) the worker bees at State and FBI are really fed up and ticked off with Clinton (and for good reason). ..."
"... I think one useful thing to consider when gaming this all out (and it all will happen over the next few months!) is to not think so much about who the DNC/delegates (Obama having final say) will pick to replace Clinton at the top of the ticket but to imagine what could be said to make the selection legitimate and credible in the eyes of voters. ..."
"... My sense is in the current environment that complex message will be nearly impossible to pull off. Whoever they pick will not have campaigned at all during the primaries! Then this person is going to go on television and tell the public that the (super)delegates have chosen him/her and the public is supposed to believe that the selection is legitimate! ..."
"... Externally, it would just be portrayed as 'shit happens'. Since the majority of the population only really start paying attention from September onwards, I don't see how it would really matter by November how the person was nominated. ..."
"... The Democrats as always are completely deaf to the reality of the average voter and ate already in hot water. If they pull this it will blow up right in their clueless faces. It will be a year where a third party candidate gets 15-20% of the vote. ..."
"... Fearmongering of Republicans is the tool of choice they use to separate a fool from his money*. ..."
"... secret ballot ..."
"... also they are pretty pissed off at warren for not endorsing sanders. ..."
"... I always want to say to people who want to be rich and famous: 'try being rich first'. See if that doesn't cover most of it. There's not much downside to being rich, other than paying taxes and having your relatives ask you for money. But when you become famous, you end up with a 24-hour job. ..."
"... But why on earth would he waste his time with some of the nitwits in Congress? ..."
"... Perhaps Clinton could introduce the custom of the Roman emperors, who sometimes adopted (literally) their successors. All in the family! ..."
"... Why go to such trouble? Just choose Chelsea. They'd still get the "first female president" *and* keep it in the family. A twofer! ..."
"... Robert Kagan with Victoria Nuland as VP ..."
"... Seriously? If she has to step down because she has committed crimes her entire 'program' and 'ideas' are suspect. A criminal is and has never been a proponent of greatness for anything or anyone, except maybe for themselves ( any maybe thei philandering spouses ..). ..."
"How Clinton can own her email scandal" [
The Hill ]. Essentially, Clinton should be saying not that Colin Powell did it
- "those explanations have always been wack" - but that there's no security to be had anywhere,
because look at all the hacking! "If anything, she opens up a new, fairly noble front and a
way for average people to start seriously talking about cybersecurity - which is something we should
be doing, anyway." Well, maybe. (I like the use of "The Beltway Adverb" in "fairly noble.")
"Bernie Sanders keeps repeating his biggest mistake of the campaign" [Chris Cilizza,
WaPo ]. "For the bajillionth time in this campaign, Bernie Sanders was asked over the weekend
about the ongoing FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton's decision to exclusively use a private
email server during her time as secretary of state. And, for the bajillionth time, Sanders took a
hard pass on the question." Stirring the pot!
'Hillary's fibs or lack of candor are all about bad judgments she made on issues that will not
impact the future of either my family or my country. Private email servers? Cattle futures? Goldman
Sachs lectures? All really stupid, but my kids will not be harmed by those poor calls. Debate where
she came out on Iraq and Libya, if you will, but those were considered judgment calls, and if you
disagree don't vote for her" [The Moustache of Understanding,
New York Times ]. You tell 'em, Tommy! Who cares about corruption?
Corruption
had nothing to do with Iraq!
UPDATE "A top aide to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declined last week to answer
questions from private lawyers about the setup of her email server, citing her subsequent role as
Mrs. Clinton's attorney" [
Wall Street Journal , "Clinton Aide Declines To Answer Questions About Email Server Setup"].
Cheryl Mills. Not a good look.
"Where is President Obama in all this? So far he has largely stayed out of the campaign, other
than to say that he doesn't believe Mrs. Clinton compromised national security with her home-brew
email server. But with her poll numbers dropping, her legal headaches increasing, the Sanders candidacy
showing renewed vigor, and Donald Trump looming as a wrecking ball for the president's legacy, Mr.
Obama and adviser Valerie Jarrett might begin sending signals to the Democratic National Committee
and to the vice president that a Biden rescue operation wouldn't displease the White House" [
Wall Street Journal , "Clinton Might Not Be the Nominee"]. But "Valerie Jarrett might begin sending
signals" jibes well with today's
"The White House Is Terrified the Clinton Campaign "Is in Freefall.'"
Prolegomena to gaming things out:
(1) In a way, the outcome of the Clinton Email Hairball, whatever it may be, will be an instance
of "The Party Decides." For example: There are some forms of cancer that cannot be removed without
killing the patient. The Clinton network may have metastatized too much for treatment. In which case,
"eat, drink, and be merry." For Clinton to be removed:
(2)(b) The White House would have to send a strong enough signal, through Valerie Jarrett. (Remember
that Obama's inner circle is very small.) (2)(b)(i) Although Obama is a lame duck, he retains power
over Loretta Lynch, even though Lynch is a long-time loyalist (
see page 44 ). He also retains the power to pardon. He also retains the affection and loyalty
of a large part of the Democrat base. And he has his library to think of.
(3) No matter what Obama does: (a) the FBI leadership and Judicial Watch are independent power
sources, and (b) the worker bees at State and FBI are really fed up and ticked off with Clinton (and
for good reason).
(4) No matter what Clinton does: She will retain the affection and loyalty of a large part of
her own base. (I remember vividly, though possibly not correctly, WaPo's coverage of the Iowa 2008
caucus, which Clinton unexpectedly lost to Obama, where the young punk reporter mocked
some older women sitting sadly in an empty high school auditorium, mourning their loss, and thinking
"something's not right, here.")
(5) "You can't beat something with nothing." If Clinton is to be removed, there has to be a candidate
willing to replace her at the top of the ticket; #NeverTrump was a fiasco because nobody (credible)
could be found. I think if the party decides on Biden, they will be in a lot more trouble than they
bargained for. And Kerry's a loser. So who?
(6) The formal way for the party to decide is for Clinton delegates, pledged and unpledged, to
vote against her. Who's going to be the first delegate* to do that?
(7) Nobody normal pays attention to the election before Labor Day. So the Democrat Party still
has time to change course. But not a lot, especially if they go with a dark horse (like, say Sherrod
Brown) and have to introduce them to voters.
(8) The obvious face-saving maneuver for everyone is for Clinton to "discover" a previously unknown
medical condition, and decide to spend more time with her family. There's probably more to be said…
This is an overly dynamic situation! (Oh, and: (9) Sanders had better not go up in any small planes.
I cannot imagine the party deciding in his favor.)
I think one useful thing to consider when gaming this all out (and it all will happen over
the next few months!) is to not think so much about who the DNC/delegates (Obama having final
say) will pick to replace Clinton at the top of the ticket but to imagine what could be said to
make the selection legitimate and credible in the eyes of voters.
My sense is in the current environment that complex message will be nearly impossible to
pull off. Whoever they pick will not have campaigned at all during the primaries! Then this person
is going to go on television and tell the public that the (super)delegates have chosen him/her
and the public is supposed to believe that the selection is legitimate!
I mean you have one (if not two - including Bill) of the three most powerful politicians in
the Democratic party dropping out of the election for which every effort was made for this to
be a coronation. I just do not think whoever the replacement is (except for perhaps Elizabeth
Warren) has even a smidgen of a chance at unifying the party.
I'm actually really curious…what could this person say in the event they are shuttled into
a position up to this point they never expressed interest in holding?
Legitimate? With Trump being what he is, the Democrats will be effectively cancelling the 2016
presidential election. The reason the Dems are having such a hard time with the appearance of
legitimacy is because it is not possible.
They will be trying to say that whatever Sanders was doing for the last year, he wasn't running
for President.
They will be trying to say that the $200+ million Sanders supporters dropped on his bid was
what? Oops, sorry about that? Sorry about your hard-earned money.
And what about that? Are they planning to refund that money? Because they said Sanders was
running, and now they're saying he wasn't. ISN'T THAT FRAUD? How about we drop a $200 million
class action on the Democratic Party, and let's see what a GOP-appointed judiciary has to say
about that.
I'm not so sure it would be a difficult message to pull off, so long as they chose someone
with a suitably high profile (which is basically one of half a dozen obvious contenders at most).
The message would be:
1. Hillary has a medical condition and has decided to put her health and family before ambition
*cough*.
2. Sanders did well, but hey, he didn't get the majority, so thats all a bit sad.
3. *** has nobly decided to step in and represent us.
To prevent an internal melt down the person would either have to be fairly acceptable to the
left of the party, or would have a VP pick such as Warren.
Externally, it would just be portrayed as 'shit happens'. Since the majority of the population
only really start paying attention from September onwards, I don't see how it would really matter
by November how the person was nominated.
The media would eat it for breakfast. They'd love the intrigue, the winking and nodding, the
daring-do aspect of it, and the fact that it would cancel out the will of the silly masses who
are not privy to the inside game and not "in the know."
That might have flown in 1968, but people have been shat on for far to long at this point.
The Democrats as always are completely deaf to the reality of the average voter and ate already
in hot water. If they pull this it will blow up right in their clueless faces. It will be a year
where a third party candidate gets 15-20% of the vote.
Team D can deal with any contingency other than a Sanders win.
A shellacking in the general just means that they will still be the main opposition party,
and there's always the 2018 congressional elections and the fundraising opportunities that a Trump
presidency affords.
"the fundraising opportunities that a Trump presidency affords"
This, one thousand times, this. Have you ever got onto a D Party spam email list? Fearmongering
of Republicans is the tool of choice they use to separate a fool from his money*. And a Trump
is a class A bogeyman that will bring the suckers to the tent and turn their pockets inside out.
*with the D Party I don't think it's even about the money from small contributors, they'd rather
work the large donors, but they want to make people feel important and like they belong–invested,
you know–and what better way than to take their pissant money?
Better solution, convention rules committee says that super-delegates will vote by secret
ballot . Problem solved, especially since scandal centric HRC campaign will continue its
swirl down the drain and will be completely flushed by the time the vote is taken. The Dems cannot
risk the loss of the Bernistas.
You ask "So who? " would replace Clinton. Let me say straight out that Al Gore is the obviously
best candidate, one of totally good repute (compromised only by an eight-year association with
Clintons), with worldwide stature and respect, recipient of the highest awards, deeply experienced
in both public and private realms, foremost authority among political figures on the most pressing
issue of our times, and who, to boot, would receive really enthusiastic support from Sanders and
his supporters. A man who would win in a true landslide, especially with Elizabeth Warren as Vice-presidential
candidate.
Politely disagree – the elites are so compromising themselves, Gore would have a good hand
to play. Even with the Saudi's, and who woulda thunk back in 2000?
the sanders supporters love turner. also they may be a pretty good litmus test for a candidate's
integrity. also they are pretty pissed off at warren for not endorsing sanders.
I like Nina Turner a lot, but (like Grayson) I'm not sure she's seasoned enough. I like what
I see though; she's got the stones to go up against the Black Misleadership Class!
Alan Grayson's optics are questionable. I can't furnish a link from my cell phone, but he married
the doctor who is running for his former congressional seat yesterday, as reported on both Fox
News and the Daily Mail.
Maybe it is just my feminism showing. Like she can't win the election on her own without his
sponsorship? It looks to me like he has his thumb on the scale so to speak.
They are in the same district, so I just assumed she was the girl next door and that's how
Alan met her. Then they found out they had similar interests and finally fell in love and got
married. Along the way Alan said, "I'm getting tired of this politics crap. I need a break." She
replied in a joking tone, "Well, I'm not old and jaded yet. I wouldn't mind giving it a shot."
So Alan replied, "Why don't you run for my seat? We won't have move. Besides, the neighbors will
vote for you."
But I'm a guy, so I'm insensitive to feminist things sometimes.
Grayson has at times evinced a mean streak that seems almost altogether absent from Sanders.
He'd probably make a good 'bad cop' to Bernie's 'good cop' if he got his teeth into the role.
Al Gore didn't seem to be particularly interested in becoming president when he actually ran.
I wouldn't assume he'd get the "enthusiastic support" of Sanders supporters, either, at least
not those of us who remember how readily he fell in line with the Clinton agenda as VP. His climate
change work is not enough (especially since he doesn't seem to do a great job of walking the walk).
At this point, I don't think anybody the DNC would be willing to run is anyone I'd be willing
to vote for.
In retrospect I think Gore was the kat backing up from the hairball at the end. He just wanted
to disappear w/ his ample rolodex.
Gore lives an affluent life of relative anonymity, without everyone and his brother up his
ass. In reality, for me at least, what a horrible existence it would be as POTUS/frmr POTUS..
It's a ride you can never get off.
Not a fan of Colin Powell but he got it when he said basically he doesn't what to go through the
rest of his life with some guy in a suit w/ a curly wire to an earphone standing next to him at
the urinal.
Bill Murray once advised along the lines of: I always want to say to people who want to
be rich and famous: 'try being rich first'. See if that doesn't cover most of it. There's not
much downside to being rich, other than paying taxes and having your relatives ask you for money.
But when you become famous, you end up with a 24-hour job.
These comments are baffling.
Do you not realize that Gore has:
(1) served on the board of Apple, the biggest market cap in the world IIRC
(2) been involved in venture capital, i.e., actually help new ideas come to fruition
(3) made a few hundred billion by developing, then selling CurrentTV
The question is, would the presidency bore a man who has had his hand in so many innovative,
world-changing technologies? Would he really be willing to suffer hours with Mitch McConnell?
He might, out of sense of duty.
But why on earth would he waste his time with some of the nitwits in Congress?
The Gore smearing strikes me as more than a tad ill-informed.
I'm not sure global warming is a vote-getter, it seems that when confronted with the hugest
and most painful issues (GW, the end of debt-based money, 9/11 truth) people are much happier
just burying their heads in the sand.
But why on earth would he waste his time with some of the nitwits in Congress?
He was immersed in that sht his whole childhood and youth.. Hell, he was born in DC and grew
up in the equivalent of an extended stay hotel!( Personally I think his wife Tipper who was a
PIA pushed him around)
Then he discovered, hey you'll pay me to sit around a couple hours a month? WTF why would I
want to be under the ultimate political microscope for the rest of my life??
Although he was an avid reader who fell in love with scientific and mathematical theories,[18]
he did not do well in science classes in college and avoided taking math.[17] His grades during
his first two years put him in the lower one-fifth of the class. During his sophomore year, he
reportedly spent much of his time watching television, shooting pool, and occasionally smoking
marijuana.[17][18]
yeahhh.. algore for president
Also, even leaving aside Gore's cheerful assent to Clinton administration warmongering, welfare-wrecking,
prison-gilding etc., why would Sanders supporters rally to any candidate installed in an anti-Sanders
coup, which is what it would be if Hillary were thrown overboard and replaced by someone other
than Sanders?
(That's a genuine question from a long and probably clueless distance: please correct me on the
loyalties of Sanders voters. The antipathy to Gore expressed above is non-negotiable, though.)
Agree. What possible reason could TPTB use to explain to Sanders supporters why they are bypassing
Bernie in favor of someone more acceptable to the establishment? (Even someone somewhat plausibly
progressive (?) like Warren?) Would they say they were concerned Bernie couldn't take out Trump?
No polling comes close to supporting that line of bull. I don't see how Bernie supporters could
view bypassing Bernie as anything other than an "in your face" FU that the establishment imposes
"because we can." That doesn't seem to lend itself to effectively rallying Bernie's troops to
the cause.
I think people are thinking inside the box. This is the Campaign 2016 Reality Show so it could
be ANYBODY. HOPEFULLY, someone high profile with little baggage. Someone with name recognition.
How about Al Franken? GOSH darn it people like him. And her could the full two terms.
I think Her Slyness had put him on her VEEP shortlist. I am not for him but it would have a
certain savor faire eh?
Wait a minute. Am I really hearing this? Are we really playing "Who Should We Replace Sanders
With If the DNC Won't Let Us Have Sanders?" Because that's crazy.
Sorry, if they won't let us have Sanders after a legitimate Sanders win, then I want my money
back. And you all should be insisting on the same thing.
That goes without saying, but we can still "game out" the possibilities when it's looking like
the DNC is hell bent on shoving shit_on_a_stick down our throats.
Agreed!!
I was reading down the comments and getting more horrifyingly outraged with each one. As far as
I am concerned Senator Sanders is the ONLY choice for the Democratic Party to choose. Period.
If he is not on the ballot in November I am voting for Jill Stein and will re-register as an Independent.
I will never cast a vote for ANY Democratic Party candidate again. I have had it with this shit
show.
If Bernie is unable to get the nomination, I will vote Stein as well. After listening to a
number of speeches and interviews, she is an excellent candidate, and way to the left of Bernie.
I was particularly impressed with her argument as to why a vote for the GP is not a wasted vote.
I think those Bernie supporters who detest what HC stands for, should at least give Stein a hearing.
I voted for her in 2012; if Bernie isn't on the ballot in November, she will definitely have
my vote again. (If Bernie hadn't run, Stein would have been my choice to begin with. There was
never any question of voting for Clinton.)
This exactly. It is frightening how many seem to be warming up to this replacement scenario.
If they pull this, retribution is called for. No taking this lying down. Absolutely no none
else is acceptable, they didn't even run! Why are we are abandoning our fight and wmbrac
Replace Hillary Clinton with Al Gore, former president of the Democratic Leadership Council,
a hawkish neoliberal technocrat with close ties to big business? Yeah, sounds about right.
Gore would probably focus more voters' attention on climate change, though, which could be
positive.
I hate to cite Bill Maher, but I believe his line about Gore went something like, "Gore is
a guy who spent his entire life discussing the environment except one, 2000."
Gore put his hobby away and served his DLC interests first. Of course, Tipper won't be around,
so he might not be terrible.
Seriously? If she has to step down because she has committed crimes her entire 'program'
and 'ideas' are suspect. A criminal is and has never been a proponent of greatness for anything
or anyone, except maybe for themselves ( any maybe thei philandering spouses ..).
"... Finally, there is the stench of corruption, dating back to Hillary's impossible-by any legitimate means-trick of parlaying $1,000 into $100,000 in a series of commodities trades in 1978. The Clintons and their backers seriously expect the rubes to believe that large financial firms happily forked over their hefty speaking fees purely out of interest in what they had to say, or that Middle Eastern and Taiwanese moneybags gave big bucks to the Clinton Foundation while Hillary was secretary of state out of their deep belief in the foundation's lofty goals. Why has Hillary refused to release the transcripts of her Goldman speeches, wiped her server and foot-dragged on releasing allegedly personal emails? ..."
"... If my readers are representative, Clinton and the Democratic Party are about to have a long-overdue day of reckoning. ..."
hy do progressives reject Hillary Clinton? The highly educated, high-income, finance-literate readers
of my website, Naked Capitalism , don't just overwhelmingly favor Bernie Sanders. They also say "Hell no!" to Hillary Clinton
to the degree that many say they would even vote for Donald Trump over her.
And they don't come by these views casually. Their conclusions are the result of careful study
of her record and her policy proposals. They believe the country can no longer endure the status
quo that Clinton represents-one of crushing inequality, and an economy that is
literally killing
off the less fortunate-and any change will be better.
One reader writes
:
Story Continued Below
"If Clinton is the nominee 9 out of 10 friends I polled will [do one of three things]:
A. Not vote for president in November. B. Vote for Trump. C. Write in Bernie as a protest vote.
"We are all fifty-somethings with money and college educations. Oh, and we are all registered
Democrats."
"I don't want to vote for Trump. I want to vote for Bernie. But I have reached the point where
I feel like voting for Trump against Clinton would be doing my patriotic duty. … If the only way
to escape a trap is to gnaw off my leg, I'd like to think I'd have the guts to do it."
To be sure, not all of my Sanders-supporting readers would vote for Trump. But only a minority
would ever vote for Clinton, and I'd guess that a lot of them would just stay home if she were the
nominee. Many of my readers tend to be very progressive, and they have been driven even further in
that direction by their sophisticated understanding of the inequities of Wall Street, especially
in the run-up to and the aftermath of the financial crisis, when no senior executives went to jail,
the biggest banks got bigger, and Hillary paid homage to Goldman Sachs. True progressives, as opposed
to the Vichy Left, recognize that the Clintons only helped these inequities along. They recognize
that, both in the 1990s and now, the Clintons do not and have never represented them. They believe
the most powerful move they can take to foster change is to withhold their support.
Some of them also have very reasoned arguments for Trump. Hillary is a known evil. Trump is unknown.
They'd rather bet on the unknown, since it will also send a big message to Team Dem that they can
no longer abuse progressives. I personally know women in the demographic that is viewed as being
solidly behind Hillary-older, professional women who live in major cities-who regard Trump as an
acceptable cost of getting rid of the Clintons.
Who does Naked Capitalism represent? The site, which I describe as "fearless commentary
on finance, economics, politics and power," receives 1.3 million to 1.5 million page views a month
and has amassed approximately 80 million readers since its launch in 2006. Its readership is disproportionately
graduate school-educated, older, male and high income. Despite the overall predominance of male readers,
many of the fiercest critics of Clinton in the commentariat are women, with handles like HotFlash,
Katniss Everdeen, Martha r, Portia, Bev and Pat.
What they also object to is that the larger bloc of Sanders voters has been treated with abuse
and contempt by the Clinton camp, despite the fact that their positions-such as strengthening Social
Security and Medicare, stronger educational funding and higher minimum wages-have for decades polled
by solid majorities or, at worst, ample pluralities in the electorate at large.
By contrast, the Democratic Party in the Clinton and Obama administrations has consistently embraced
and implemented policies that strip workers of economic and legal rights to benefit investors and
the elite professionals that serve them. Over time, the "neoliberal" economic order-which sees only
good, never bad, in the relentless untrammeling of capital and the deregulation of markets-has created
an unacceptable level of economic insecurity and distress for those outside the 1 percent and the
elite professionals who serve them.
The result is that the U.S. economy is becoming lethal to the less fortunate, according to the
New York Times , which
reported this week
that U.S. death rates have risen for the first time in a decade. The increase
in death rates among less educated whites since 2001 is roughly the size of the AIDS epidemic. One
cause, the opioid epidemic, resulted from Purdue Pharma
overselling the effectiveness
of reformulated OxyContin, then recommending higher dosages when
it failed to work properly, which experts deemed a prescription for creating addicts, according to
a number of lawsuits. This was permitted by the U.S. government, leading to thousands of unnecessary
deaths. Despite President Barack Obama's Panglossian claim that the economy is doing well,
the spike in suicides to levels over those during the financial crisis belies that
.
Yet the Clinton campaign is in such denial about this that it has become vitriolic in its verbal
and tactical attacks on Sanders and his supporters-rather than recognizing that the stunning success
of his campaign is proof of their abject policy failures. The message is clear: The Clintons believe,
as Bill himself put it, that the true progressives have nowhere to go.
But in fact, they've been leaving. The Clinton and Obama administrations presided over the worst
losses in congressional and state races in modern history in 1994, 2010 and 2012. And voter preferences
were clear. Under Obama, it was the Blue Dog, Third Way Democrats who were turfed out, while candidates
with strong stances on economic justice kept their seats. Similarly, as political scientist Tom Ferguson
pointed out in a
Roosevelt Institute paper
, Obama's loss of a Senate majority when Republican Scott Brown won
in Massachusetts was the result of his focus on bailing out banks rather than aiding distressed homeowners
(or forcing mortgage services to give modifications to borrowers who still had adequate income, as
banks had done historically). The level of votes for Brown was strongly correlated with the amount
of foreclosures in those particular districts.
True progressives know that the Clinton and Obama presidencies have brought inequality to Gilded
Era, banana-republic levels. They know that Obama's policies, which the Clintons embrace, have had
all of the post-crisis income gains
accrue to the top 1 percent
. In addition, corporate profits have risen to nearly double the
ratio to GDP that Warren Buffett deemed unsustainably high in the early 2000s. Unlike China, they've
also ushered in an era of high unemployment and underemployment, as reflected in unheard-of low levels
of labor force participation and unemployment among the young in a nominal expansion.
The Clintons' dismal record, which Hillary cannot run away from, speaks for itself. And this is
what makes many progressives I know unable to support her, even if she wins the nomination. Consider
the reasons why they feel this way:
Social Security . Bill Clinton
made a deal with Newt Gingrich to privatize Social Security, but Monica Lewinsky derailed his plans
. Sanders has promised to strengthen Social Security. By contrast, Clinton wants to "preserve"
it, which includes means-testing. That would put Social Security on a path to being a welfare program,
not a universal safety net, making it vulnerable in the long run. Bill Clinton's ending of welfare
is an illustration of the regular pattern, dating back to England's Poor Law of 1834, of gutting
safety nets for the poor.
Climate change . Sanders calls for a full-bore, Marshall-Plan level commitment to reducing
carbon output. Hillary talks about climate change but pushed for fracking in Europe while secretary
of state. The Clintons remain firmly committed to fracking, which ruins water supplies and releases
large amounts of methane.
Minimum wage. Inflation-adjusted minimum wage increases under Clinton were negligible-virtually
identical to those under George H.W. Bush. Obama promised a minimum wage increase to $9.50 an hour
and failed to act in the first four years of his presidency. Sanders wants to raise minimum wages
to $15 an hour, while Clinton stands pat with the administration plan to increase wages to $12 an
hour by 2020.
Trade deals . Bill Clinton ushered in NAFTA, which was touted as positive for growth and
employment, and is now widely acknowledged to have cost nearly a million jobs. Even one of its chief
promoters, former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich, now deems it to have been a failure for American
workers. Hillary consistently backed the Trans-Pacific Partnership until Sanders made an issue of
it, and she's recently returned to supporting it. The potential growth and income gains from this
agreement and its European sister, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, are only marginally
positive, while the loss of national sovereignty would be enormous. These agreements would enable
foreign investors to challenge laws for labor, environmental and consumer protection, for threatening
future profits.
Health care . Sanders wants single-payer, government-provided health care. Around the world,
single payer has uncontestably demonstrated that it delivers better results overall at vastly lower
cost. Obamacare took single payer off the table, instead rearranging the current costly, clumsy system
while guaranteeing profits for health insurers and Big Pharma. Clinton at most has offered patches,
but the pressure from Sanders has compelled her to suggest an early buy-in for Medicare.
That's before we get to the Clintons' loyalty to the Robert Rubin and neoliberal fetish of balanced
budgets, which most economists say are not necessary. The recent European experience with austerity
shows how disastrous that approach is, particularly in the wake of a financial crisis. Hillary's
hawkishness means an even greater commitment to military spending, so voters are assured to get more
guns and less butter were she to become president.
The Sanders supporters I interact with also reject Hillary's trickle-down feminism as a substitute
for economic and social justice. Clinton is correct when she points out that there is a glass-ceiling
issue for women. There are fewer female CEOs, billionaires and senators. Women in the elite don't
have it as good as men. But pray tell, what is having more women, or Hispanics or blacks, in top
roles going to do for nurses and hospital orderlies, or the minority group members disproportionately
represented in low-wage jobs like part-time fast food workers? Class mobility has become close to
nonexistent in America. If you are born in one of the lower-income cohorts, you are almost certain
to stay there.
As a woman who broke through an important glass ceiling on Wall Street-Christina Mohr, the first
woman to become partner in mergers and acquisitions at Lazard-told a shocked group at Radcliffe seeking
better career opportunities for women many years ago: "Nothing will change until women own the means
of production." And that sort of change comes from the bottom up.
Then there are questions of competence. Hillary has a résumé of glittering titles with disasters
or at best thin accomplishments under each. Her vaunted co-presidency with Bill? After her first
major project, health care reform, turned into such a debacle that it was impossible to broach the
topic for a generation, she retreated into a more traditional first lady role. As New York senator,
she accomplished less with a bigger name and from a more powerful state
than Sanders did
. As secretary of state, she participated and encouraged strategically pointless
nation-breaking in Iraq and Syria. She bureaucratically outmaneuvered Obama, leading to U.S. intervention
in Libya, which he has called the worst decision of his administration. And her plan to fob her domestic
economic duties off on Bill comes off as an admission that she can't handle being president on her
own.
Mind you, these issues are all topics in the current debates. But what is as important, but not
as obvious, is the way that most citizens have been stripped of legal and economic protections. As
economist Michael Hudson put it, "Most inequality does not reflect differing levels of productivity,
but distortions resulting from property rights or other special privileges." The Clinton era brought
in weaker anti-trust enforcement, which allowed companies to accumulate more market share and with
it, more ability to extract rents. Binding arbitration, which strips employees and consumers of their
right to a day in court, has become widespread. Pensions, which used to be sacrosanct (and still
are if you are a CEO), are regularly renegotiated. Banks got away with predatory servicing and wrongful
foreclosures. Not only was the 2012 National Mortgage Settlement a "get out of liability almost free"
card so large that it was tantamount to a second bailout, but banks were not required to fix their
faulty servicing platforms, assuring that they'd revert to foreclosure abuses again when delinquencies
rise. And let us not forget that senior bankers are a protected class, exempt from prosecution.
Finally, there is the stench of corruption, dating back to Hillary's impossible-by any legitimate
means-trick of parlaying $1,000 into $100,000 in a series of commodities trades in 1978. The Clintons
and their backers seriously expect the rubes to believe that large financial firms happily forked
over their hefty speaking fees purely out of interest in what they had to say, or that Middle Eastern
and Taiwanese moneybags gave big bucks to the Clinton Foundation while Hillary was secretary of state out of their deep belief in the foundation's lofty goals. Why has Hillary refused
to release the transcripts of her Goldman speeches, wiped her server and foot-dragged on releasing
allegedly personal emails?
The Sanders voters in Naked Capitalism 's active commentariat also explicitly reject lesser-evilism,
the cudgel that has previously kept true lefties somewhat in line. They are willing to gamble, given
that outsider presidents like Jimmy Carter and celebrity governors like Arnold Schwarzenegger and
Jesse Ventura didn't get much done, that a Trump presidency represents an acceptable cost of inflicting
punishment on the Democratic Party for 20 years of selling out ordinary Americans.
The Clintons, like the Bourbons before the French Revolution, have ensconced themselves in such
a bubble of operative and media sycophancy that they've mistakenly viewed escalating distress and
legitimate demands from citizens as mere noise. Sanders voters are taking their cue from Talleyrand,
the statesman who navigated the Revolution and the turbulent 50 years that followed with remarkable
success: "I have never abandoned a party before it abandoned itself."
If my readers are representative, Clinton and the Democratic Party are about to have a long-overdue
day of reckoning.
"... The party has relied, successfully, on the idea, made explicit by Bill Clinton, that progressives have no where to go. ..."
"... Third party voting is not a meaningful option in a Presidential election. And the Greens are not even a national party. I agree many NC readers like the idea of voting for Stein, but to stress that in a Politico piece would register as "political naifs who don't know the score" while saying "some progressives actually will vote for Trump if denied Sanders" would get their attention. ..."
"... And as indicated, I did not write the piece originally with that focus. It was about "many Sanders voters will never vote for Clinton" but the editor moved it in the direction of "so what do they do?" ..."
"... Electing Trump also looks like the most effective method to deliver what is a long-overdue message to the Dims that business as usual is not in any way an acceptable outcome, in fact most of us believe that business as usual is actually criminal behavior. ..."
"... The best thing that Bernie had going for him was a lifetime of eschewing the less-evil party. ..."
"... The answer is: no confidence. A look at the superdelegates who signed up for Hillary before the first votes in the primary elections should give you an idea of how many members of Congress would be willing to challenge her agenda. ..."
"... The media and Democrats in Congress did a decent job of opposing GWB's various atrocities in his second term. Pelosi famously took impeachment "off the table" but the dialogue was much healthier than it is today under Obama. You would think the last 8 years had vanished into a black hole for all Progressives talk about Obama's record of failure and his billion dollar presidential library. ..."
"... I'm another 50-something white life-long liberal who has come to the conclusion that voting for Trump is the lesser of some great evils. I'm somewhat relieved to know that I'm not the only one–it feels like it goes against everything I stand for, but I just can't vote for Clinton, nor will I refuse to vote in protest. ..."
"... A-yup. Trump at least says (or said on at least one occasion) that we should get out of the Middle East. Which makes him better than Hillary. And he has not *to date* committed any war crimes (I have standards, and one of them is that I will not vote for a war criminal). ..."
"... White working class, almost college educated here. Reading almost exclusively Yves for eight years. I feel I owe Yves, Lambert and the regular posters here a giant thank you for giving me a viable perspective from which to judge the actions of politicians, and the complicit media in destroying democracy completely. ..."
"... "The pathological party allegiance of both Democrats and Republicans is terrifying." – ..."
"... Obama fooled me in 2008, so I voted Green in 2012. I will not let either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump fool me in 2016, and although I still hope that somehow Bernie Sanders will be the Democratic nominee, I expect to vote Green again in 2016. ..."
"... The extremity of the responses is an indication of aggressive defense of cognitive dissonance ..."
"... Democrats are the love[d] ones addicted to painkillers that progressives have become codependent with. ..."
"... Extrajudicial killings, targeted assignations, shredding the constitution, corruption, indifference to suffering. We don't need Trump for any of those things. We've got Obama for that now. ..."
"... This is why I support the Clintons, they fucking care about people ..."
"... By AMY CHOZICK In a speech today, Hillary Clinton plans to suggest that a Trump presidency would weaken U.S. alliances and embolden enemies. ..."
"... In 2008 I was very naive, I voted for Obama thinking he was the next FDR, I was wrong. I know some folks have objections to MMT, but with Bernie having Stephanie Kelton and Bill Black on his team, I have the hope he understands, and even though he hasn't communicated in the MMT vocabulary, he gives me great hope that he realizes that there are so many things that can be done, so many problems that we can work to make better. ..."
"... Bill bombed a pharma factory in Sudan to distract the masses, and Team Barry O' Hill-Billy destabilized Libya , Syria, and the Ukraine - yet the She-devil wants to sell Trump as being less safe with the atomic football. What would she do to avoid being impeached? Even the unthinkable becomes possible with her. ..."
Mind you, the piece morphed a bit during the editing process. It had started out focusing on the
large policy differences between what Sanders voters want and what Clinton is offering. It made the
point that some, and potentially many, were sick and tired of the "lesser evilism" that the Democratic
party had used to keep the left in line. The party has relied, successfully, on the idea, made
explicit by Bill Clinton, that progressives have no where to go.
I read the piece on Politico, which as far as I can tell from constantly reading all the site's
comments for years, leans right and stupid as well. Yves, you are correct. I am a 50-year registered
Democrat, educated, well read (but financially poor). For me it is Bernie or no one.
I've pretty much decided that America and democracy is toast and the answer is to become a
prepper; live on a cheap rural piece of land, buy local produce or grow your own, and hunker down.
It just isn't going to get any better for the 99%.
I'm bothered by the failure to consider third-party voting as an option. It almost comes across
as an admission that the establishment is right and progressives have nowhere else to go. In fact,
whether you take the Green Party seriously or not, it would be the most progressive option if
you can't have Bernie in the general election. Particularly in a state like mine, where a write-in
vote does not count unless the candidate has registered as a write-in candidate (a weird consequence
of too many Mickey Mouse write-ins in the seventies), voting for a third party may be the strongest
statement a frustrated voter can make that we have somewhere else to go and are going.
3rd party voting is more visible too, as it's easy to count and see the increase from last
time.
Just because it isn't mentioned in the article doesn't mean it's not a viable alternative.
Third party voting is not a meaningful option in a Presidential election. And the Greens
are not even a national party. I agree many NC readers like the idea of voting for Stein, but
to stress that in a Politico piece would register as "political naifs who don't know the score"
while saying "some progressives actually will vote for Trump if denied Sanders" would get their
attention.
And as indicated, I did not write the piece originally with that focus. It was about "many
Sanders voters will never vote for Clinton" but the editor moved it in the direction of "so what
do they do?"
The Greens should be concentrating their efforts on getting a few Senate seats. They'd have
real power that way.
Couldn't agree more. A few weeks back I was planning to vote for Trump if Bernie was not an
option. I heard a couple of interviews with Jill Stein and thought 'how can I not vote for this
women?' I agree with Stein and people like Bruce Dixon who argue that this could be an extremely
important year in US politics. Both the Republican and Democrats are minority parties in terms
of total registration. Voting for Bernie, or Jill Stein is a chance to weaken the hold of the
duopoly that currently has a stranglehold on American politics. Time to throw off the politics
of fear and vote our principles. Of course, I still totally understand why someone might take
a chance on Trump.
From where I sit, it is very hard to see how the grid-lock that might/will result from electing
Trump could possibly be worse than the gridlock that might/will result from electing Clinton.
Electing Trump also looks like the most effective method to deliver what is a long-overdue
message to the Dims that business as usual is not in any way an acceptable outcome, in fact most
of us believe that business as usual is actually criminal behavior.
I'm hoping that in the fullness of time, Hillary will look back on this election season and
be happy just to have stayed out of jail.
The best thing that Bernie had going for him was a lifetime of eschewing the less-evil
party. Do the Democrats suddenly turn evil if Hillary succeeds Barack? If Bernie ends up
endorsing HRC, so much the worse for him!
I have never registered as a Democrat. Hey, I am not condemning anyone who did; we all make
mistakes. I never regretted voting for Nader. But why would I ever even consider Trump? Because
he is a "serious" candidate and Stein is not? Can anyone even make that claim with a straight
face?
It sounds like my perspective is at odds with almost everyone Yves is in contact with. Their
view seems to be that because Bernie joined the (Democratic) fold, he is now worthy of consideration.
As I already stated, I think they have it backwards. He might already be too compromised by throwing
his lot in with them. Where is the incisive critique of Guantánamo, Snowden, and the lack of prison
sentences for criminal banksters.
If you are going to vote based on a cost-benefit analysis, it never makes sense to vote. Why
waste the time and effort when your vote isn't going to make a difference? The people Yves hangs
with seem to base their behavior on the premise that a vote for an "alternative" party, like the
Greens, is a "wasted" vote. So, therefore they are going to support a racist in order to teach
Hillary a lesson?
I am to the left of HRC so I will vote to the left of her, not to the right.
At the same time, what confidence could I have that the Congress under President HRC would
or could hold the line on what I expect will be her effort to "get things done" that are also
bad?
The answer is: no confidence. A look at the superdelegates who signed up for Hillary before
the first votes in the primary elections should give you an idea of how many members of Congress
would be willing to challenge her agenda. On the other hand, one of the least known aspects
of Bernie's time in Congress is how many friendly colleagues he has among Repubs. The Repubs respect
Bernie because they know where he's coming from, not because they always agree with him. Even
John McCain was courteous enough to give Bernie all the credit on the veterans welfare bill they
both co-sponsored. There's a reason Bernie is the "amendment king." Bernie isn't tribal.
The media and Democrats in Congress did a decent job of opposing GWB's various atrocities
in his second term. Pelosi famously took impeachment "off the table" but the dialogue was much
healthier than it is today under Obama. You would think the last 8 years had vanished into a black
hole for all Progressives talk about Obama's record of failure and his billion dollar presidential
library.
I'll vote Green for president as I did in 2008 and 2012 and direct my campaign donations where
Sanders tells me to.
Sitting still for corporate malfeasance is exactly the "bad faith" by which people are rejecting
the Establishment candidates. I'd suggest taking account of the bad faith of the Democratic National
Committee and other Party organs in dealing with him, no more than a token of satisfice, and going
his own way to defeat Trump without providing aid or comfort to Hillary.
The only way that gridlock will end is with Sanders in the White House, at least one branch
of Congress in Democratic hands, and members of the other house sufficiently scared of voters
that they try to represent the interests of the 99%–in other words, a revolution. I don't know
how that happens with the media so complicit in the "Hillary is the nominee" narrative, but I
can hope.
I'm another 50-something white life-long liberal who has come to the conclusion that voting
for Trump is the lesser of some great evils. I'm somewhat relieved to know that I'm not the only
one–it feels like it goes against everything I stand for, but I just can't vote for Clinton, nor
will I refuse to vote in protest.
Gridlock is also preferable to Democrat control of the Senate and the Presidency: You know
we'd get TPP (if Obama doesn't manage to push it through), Grand Bargain, and maybe even a new
war in the first 100 days…
A-yup. Trump at least says (or said on at least one occasion) that we should get out of
the Middle East. Which makes him better than Hillary. And he has not *to date* committed any war
crimes (I have standards, and one of them is that I will not vote for a war criminal).
But I still don't understand why it has to come down to Trump or Hillary. Can't we just have
Bernie?
I just read the comments over there at Politico. Now I need a shower. The pathological party
allegiance of both Democrats and Republicans is terrifying.
Did the same. Wow! Yves, they are killing you. And I bet many of them never, ever visited this
website. Agree with Noonan about the party allegiances. Yikes! And may I add that they seem the
type that, presented with evidence, they still won't believe it.
File under "my opinions are as good as your facts"…
There's actually considerable pushback, although the weight of numbers is on the flying monkey's
side. (Incidentally, I wouldn't put it past Brock to fund both "Republican" and "Democrat" trolls,
depending on the talking points in view….
White working class, almost college educated here. Reading almost exclusively Yves for
eight years. I feel I owe Yves, Lambert and the regular posters here a giant thank you for giving
me a viable perspective from which to judge the actions of politicians, and the complicit media
in destroying democracy completely. I inhabit the bubble of truth that you folks create,
and I am greatly disturbed by the comments at politico. I understand generalized stupidity, and
laziness, but the complete disconnect from reality I encounter whenever I venture from my truth
bubble still amazes me. People have forgotten how to read, and how to think. I like Bernie. I
will vote Trump over Biden in November. Elizabeth would never sell us all that far down the river.
Shes kind of like team blues Paul Ryan that way. What the hell, maybe Michelle should run.
As a white working class progressive inhabiting a bubble of truth I discovered investigating
M.E.R.S, I want you all to understand that I actually support Bernie on his character alone. I
couldn't care less about my chances at upward mobility. Single payer healthcare is great in my
book, provided it means I don't have to run through a rat maze of bullsh*t everytime one of my
children gets sick or breaks a limb. What I really want isn't a shot at what ever the middle class
is supposed to represent. What I want is an end to generalized stupidity and propaganda. I want
the masses to inhabit the truth bubble. I dont know what demographic this makes me. I want to
investigate Stein to perhaps not be a white working class trump voter in the end, but 2 votes
against Biden might be better than one for Stein. Also, I cant really vote green untill the wasteful
stupidity I witness everytime I drive through a toll booth is adressed and rectified. Millions
of barrels of oil per year .
Seconded, one of the reasons. I've always scoffed at the "we're going downhill" or general
end times mentality, favoring instead that it was just moving laterally and depressingly, but
this season and the environment this site provides has helped me see the frailty of this society.
It is fragile, we are approaching a point of no return, and people still won't read the damn signs.
"The pathological party allegiance of both Democrats and Republicans is terrifying."
–
I wouldn't say terrifying, but it certainly shows how we got to where we are today. Party allegiance
and zealotry has usurped not only the needs of The People, but their will as well. Then
both sides wonder why things no longer works.
That sucking sound isn't just people's imagination…
One of the reasons con games are successful beyond the greed of humans is that people do not
like to admit they have been fooled/taken in/played. Denial is deeply ingrained in humans.
My own personal observation is that the most zealous of supporters are either the newest converts
or the ones desperately trying to avoid their growing realization that they have been a patsy.
I really do believe we are seeing a whole lot of the latter among the reactions to ideas like
this article or questions like 'where is your evidence that Trump is more evil than Clinton? I
can list the following things that are actual actions by Clinton along with HER ever shifting
rhetoric, you can list what?'
Obama fooled me in 2008, so I voted Green in 2012. I will not let either Hillary Clinton
or Donald Trump fool me in 2016, and although I still hope that somehow Bernie Sanders will be
the Democratic nominee, I expect to vote Green again in 2016.
Our stories sound similar. I had wanted Edwards, and frankly still think he was the best of
the bad lot, but fell in line and voted for Obama. And then watched with horror. He was no lesser
evil. 2012 was a vote for the Green Party.
I might have gone with burn it down, since I cannot honestly say who is the lesser evil between
Trump and Clinton, and Trump is in reality unknown. But I rolled the device with the unknown Obama
and learned my lesson – evil is evil.
Same here – I voted for Obama in 2008 and was disillusioned by 2012 so I voted for Stein. Looks
like I may vote Green again in 2016.
I hope Bernie can prevail, but the Democratic party doesn't want him – or his supporters. They
will parachute in Joe Biden or perhaps Al Gore (if they can convince him) if Clinton implodes.
They will just ride that train over the cliff; they can simply "blame Bernie" for Clinton's failures.
I didn't read the comments, but you may want to consider that a good portion of them may very
well be from paid commenters. I think that Yves and Lambert look dimly on such practices.
I think that Yves also made a superb point in her essay - those of us who have been reading
NC have developed a far more sophisticated (I would even say 'principled') opposition to the kind
of neoliberal incrementalism that Clinton personifies.
Hence, the Politico commenters don't grasp the economic fraud and bogus theories that are driving
a lot of public policy disasters. On the upside, even my electrician and manufacturing relatives
have started asking some very probing questions about economics in the US.
Just direct your worker bee relatives to N.C, and let the truth educate them. Also, don't shortchange
your electrician friend. He has an education that is every bit as rigorous and oftentimes more
so than 90% of the bachelor programs available today.
It is terrifying, but not all that surprising. No one wants to think they have spent most of
their lives dedicated to a group that have misled them. Then they might be responsible for their
own problems. Its a lot easier to blame someone else and children start picking "sides" in grade-school.
What they rarely get taught is that you can't change other people (absent Gitmo tactics, or working
with them over their entire lives). You can change yourself to adapt to your situation, or change
your situation, but trying to change someone else into who you want them to be hardly ever works.
Democrats are the love ones addicted to painkillers that progressives have become codependent
with. They will lie and use without remorse and deep down we know the only way to help them is
to leave them to their own devices. Sanders is a last chance to go "cold turkey" for a party that
departed their platform a long time ago.
You'll never convince Republicans to your way of thinking. Our only options left are to convince
Democrats (the party hacks that call the shots and take none of the downsides) that it really
can get worse. Both parties have abandoned responsibility in favor of tribalism and personal success
for a fortunate few. Its high time they remember that actions have consequences for the 99%. They've
been preaching tough love for a generation, its time they experience it.
Democrats are the love[d] ones addicted to painkillers that progressives have become
codependent with.
I could never leave the Democrats because where would I go? Besides deep down the Democrats
really love me, even though they sometimes are abusive to me. But that's just because it's my
fault for not being supportive enough and doing things like watching Nader speeches on YouTube.
Plus if I leave them, they'll never get any better, especially with Trump on the horizon when
they need me the most.
Well to be fair as for "most of their lives", the Democratic party wasn't as bad when some
of the older voting block first started voting (boomers and so on). But they do need to wake up
and see the present reality, but many may have become too comfortable at this point to do so.
I'm talking voters, talking heads and so on are mostly paid to say what they do.
As I said to Clive (who did wade into the mire of the Politico comments section), if any of
you can stand to fire up your FB accounts and lob in a comment or two debunking the garbage, it
would be very much appreciated. Not that it will persuade any of them, but to show to third parties
that one side is screeching and the other side has some actual arguments.
I did the same and it reminded me how lucky we are to have such a strong comment section here
(not that we are immune to that kind of thing, but intellectual honesty is at least more strictly
enforced). Tribalism and ad hominem attacks everywhere you look. Some well-reasoned arguments
but they tended to drown in the noise.
As I see it, there's no real difference here. Sure on executive orders Trump could do some
nonsense, but maybe Trump + Executive Orders would be enough to end that practice finally in court.
Overall, either way they're both garbage, but at least if Hillary goes down in flames the Democrats
might be forced to wake up.
The CTR trolls in the comments are so hopping mad you'd think they just found a beehive in
their outhouse the hard way. It scares them to death to see a logical framework for shunning their
candidate. Great work, Yves.
Mr HotFlash pointed this post out to me and I have to admit that I am seriously, *seriously*
swollen-headed at the moment. I will have to do some gardening to get myself back to earth.
Oh, and I have been considering designating myself as a BernieBra? what do you think?
In california and other mountainous places, "bro" has exchanged a phoneme and morphed into
the word "brah" essentially sounding the same as bra. so to many it still sounds male. maybe berniebabe?
or just "an intelligent woman who advocates for bernie?"
i saw a good takedown piece that dissected how team clinton started that disparaging berniebro
nonsense to start with. let me see if i can find the link. started by an attack on team clinton
by a tea party person posing as a fake senator….oh greenwald, i might have gotten that link here
on nc, if not, here it is again for anyone who might have missed it
Speaking of female commenters at NC (and ever-so-slightly off topic), has anyone heard from
"Susan the other" lately? When I saw Yves' list and she wasn't on it, I realized I hadn't seen
her handle in quite some time. I hope she's okay.
Oh, that's a relief. I worry a little about posters who suddenly disappear. Even those who
manage to run themselves off, like Beardo and that deep-state-harping fellow, and the Mexico one,
I wonder how they're doing. I don't post much, because y'all are WAY outa my league in terms of
both knowledge and analytical skills, but I've learned so much since about 2008. Thank you Ms
"Yves", Lambert, and everyone.
Sometimes I wonder if we can ever be effective as a group behind all these handles, where a
"handle" can be gone for weeks before anyone notices, and no one actually knows who that was behind
it, or anything about their lives, their plans, or anything. I take solace that we're all getting
an education. Not just we who frequent this site, but even a good deal of the general public.
Maybe the broader knowledge disemination that this venue encourages has had positive effect, as
in Sanders' amazing, so far, run.
That "sophisticated understanding" actually came from the editor! In retrospect, a word other
than "sophisticated" might have been preferable. Sounds a tad self congratulatory.
And a little over-the-top. However, after what I've seen today, I'd guess the editors at Politico
are weary of their commentariat. Yours looks like a Mensa convention by comparison. Every last
one of us a genius! Genius!
Trump is the worst candidate in the field, period. I'm no fan of Clinton, proudly voted Bernie,
and may vote Jill Stein in the general. An affirmative Trump is just a yes to all the crony, know-nothing,
misogynistic, racist, billionaire twats that want to continue robbing the public. Trump sucks.
From the look of the comments, you've hit a nerve and david brock got the 3 a. m. phone call.
With substance nowhere to be found, ad hominem appears to be the "strategy" for defending the
indefensible. And I, for one, have no problem being called "stupid" by commenters who type "your"
when they mean "you're" on facebook.
but see obama and clinton and (insert dino of your choice) will nominate moderate
republicans! if the republicans get in they will nominate less moderate republicans! and npr will
become upset.
Yeah Obama pretty much laid the once potent "but… the Supreme Court ZMOG!!!" argument to rest
for good when he nominated a Republican. I mean what's even the point of voting Democrat at this
juncture? They hate their base, and swoon over billionaires and Republicans. I'd probably be cheering
on the Republican to humiliate Clinton on if it weren't Trump, and even as much as I despise Trump
I hardly care whether he or Hillary wins. That's how horrible the Democrats are now.
Oh my goodness me, those comments. I will now have to take a lie down in a darkened room in
the hope that it might all fade from memory like a bad dream. I fired up my Facebook account,
having to then throw Holy Water on my PC afterwards (okay, I wiped the dust of the screen, the
gesture meant the same), to chip in some replies, but it was like I was drowning in a warm bath
of gloopy stupidity by the time I got to the end.
I'm going to read the Daily Mail now, or watch Fox News, just to get exposed to something marginally
less corrosive.
And yes, we all make spelling and grammatical mistakes now and again. But at least we demonstrate
a basic grasp of how capital letters work and can construct complete sentences with a subject
and a verb.
I had to bail. Since I don't do the Facebook BS at all I had to suffer "script error!" navel
gazing out the wazoo. To the extent of a restart. Politico sucks as bad as ZH in that regard.
Meh. Buncha dingleberries, imho. Nevertheless, congrats to Yves for the increased visibility.
In fact, WTH: Yves and Lambert 2020. Smith and Strether* has a real ring…jus' sayin'. Yves'd get
this economy going and give the banksters the what for! And Lambert has a fine 12 pt plan…
* First P/VP with internet aliases!
Ok. Yeah. No. No sane person wants to be P or VP. Sigh.
I was struck by how thoroughly the commenters at Politico missed what I thought was one of
the main points of the article: to disabuse Hillary-supporters of their rabid but delusional belief
that Sanders voters will troop obediently to the voting booth and mark an X next to Clinton's
name.
The commenters seem insanely focused on WHY [in their view] not voting for Hillary would be
terrible. Yves' point, I thought, was to try to give them advanced warning of what's going to
happen - to help them understand where some other folks are coming from. But as usual with "the
smartest people in the room" [as the commenters clearly regard themselves], they don't LISTEN;
they only interrupt, lecture and condemn. They've got no interest in anyone's POV but their own.
I was honored to be quoted, although I realize you probably did that because it's such an extreme
metaphor. But, that was the point of using it to begin with.
I was sorely, sorely tempted to respond in the Politico comments section to say, I am that
person being quoted and I am a middle-aged Harvard graduate, but thanks for calling me an idiot
kid. And yes, like the overall demographic Yves was discussing, I'm a white female. Used to work
in the financial services sector, even.
But they weren't hearing it from Yves, so why would it sink in from me?
"Then there are questions of competence. Hillary has a résumé of glittering titles with disasters
or at best thin accomplishments under each. Her vaunted co-presidency with Bill? After her first
major project, health care reform, turned into such a debacle that it was impossible to broach
the topic for a generation, she retreated into a more traditional first lady role. As New York
senator, she accomplished less with a bigger name and from a more powerful state than Sanders
did. As secretary of state, she participated and encouraged strategically pointless nation-breaking
in Iraq and Syria. She bureaucratically outmaneuvered Obama, leading to U.S. intervention in Libya,
which he has called the worst decision of his administration. And her plan to fob her domestic
economic duties off on Bill comes off as an admission that she can't handle being president on
her own."
======================================
I had pretty much cut and pasted the whole column in my comment, and than I realized I can't do
that :( Having to choose a snippet, when I think every word is insightful and brilliant, is heartbreaking.
I pretty much agree with "Watt4Bob" except that the gridlock would only be in things that would
help the 99% – when it comes to doing things for the 1% the parties seem able to work together
just fine (TPP).
Trump MIGHT bollix things up enough to annoy the 1% – I KNOW Clinton will be effective in serving
wall street.
Is merely farting in the general direction of wall street enough? When its the only weapon you
got, you use what is available…
Me too, sadly, as I'd like to vote for Sanders. But, I'm in a state where my vote doesn't matter.
Were I in a state where my vote mattered, I'd reluctantly vote for Clinton, only because her
opponent is Trump. He has a great deal of executive authority to deport people and would be worse
than Obama on this score, which is terribly destructive, as is the overt racism and authoritarianism.
Your vote will matter, although maybe not by helping to elect someone in 2016. If Bernie's
not on the ballot, please vote Green or another third party. If a third party Presidential candidate
gets 5% of the vote, that candidate (or the candidate's party) is eligible for grant money from
the U.S. government.
Since no third-party candidate received 5% of the vote in the 2008 presidential election,
only the Republican and Democratic parties were eligible for 2012 convention grants, and only
their nominees were eligible to receive grants for the general election once they were nominated.
Third-party candidates could qualify for public funds retroactively if they received 5% or
more of the vote in the general election.
++++++++
It is rather amazing that we allow ourselves to be put in such a position by maintaining SUCH
a duopoly. Geez, don't we have decades of evidence now how crappy the dempulicans/republicrats
are???
I agree. This is what "false equivalence" and "normalization looks like. The article was long
on hurt feeling in defense of Sanders and very short on the sh*tstorm that Trump will bring down
on the US if elected.
Those who think think Trump is a "lesser evil", have fallen for the media presentation of him
being equivalent to Hillary in qualifications, relevant knowledge and political experience. He
is CLEARLY not. How anyone considers a random billionaire reality TV show personality capable
of leading the country is baffling.
Rightly or wrongly, Clinton has been the de facto candidate for at least 4 years. It's really
too far late in the game to be pouting about a better candidate being nominated.
There's too much at stake to use your vote in protest of a Democratic party whose only positive
attribute is that they're not worse than the Republican party.
*Sigh*. This is a problem with headlines. They really influence how a piece is interpreted.
The point of the article was not to say "vote Trump". That is your straw man. Nor is it "long
on hurt feelings". It was set forth the substantial policy differences between Clinton and Sanders,
how the Sanders positions represent long-standing views of a majority or plurality of US voters,
and how the Democrats have ignored them out of the view that voters, as Bill himself said, have
"nowhere to go".
The only way to break this dynamic is to go somewhere else, to inflict costs. Refusing to vote
for Clinton is one way. Voting for Trump is a more radical way.
de facto candidate? huh? you have to get elected not just run. The media portrays trump as
a crazy person, and show me an example of trumps qualifications being touted as equal to clintons.
The main argument against clinton is indeed her"qualifications"…she's for TPP and I'm not, trump
is apparently against TPP as is sanders, who if you're truly concerned about trump you should
back sanders, hillary won't stop medicaid clawbacks, hillary will cut social security in some
form of privatization sop to the finance sector, she'll continue her abhorrent foriegn policy
missions that cause death and destruction all over the world to advance the interests of the worst
people in the world. This is just a short form list. Without referencing any other candidate,
tell me one reason I should vote FOR hillary?
In the Senate she voted for the invasion of Iraq; she voted for the destructive bankruptcy
"reform" bill in 2001; she voted for the Patriot Act; she voted to bail out the giant banks at
great public expense. Oh. . . you're asking about a reason to vote FOR her. Well then, never mind.
What? If anything, we in Texas know that deporting immigrants will only hurt businesses who
hire them. Just ask the 1% who live in the state. There are plenty of Texans who will teach Trump
all he needs to know. Don't think all the promises of a candidate will come true. They would rather
hire immigrants that the locals. Trump has already said this himself. He is a bundle of contradictions.
Yves, please accept my thanks, not only for this article, but for leading us to this point.
I agree with you 100%. I don't know how you got Politico to include your article but very happy
the word is getting out. We are mad as hell and not going to take it anymore.
Well done Yves. You've ruffled the feathers of more than a few Hill-trolls. I enjoyed some
of the fact-free comments like this:
"If you don't give a crap about women's rights, minority rights, the environment, gun violence,
immigration reform, religious freedom, labor rights, etc, what exactly is it that makes you a
liberal?"
Obama and the Clintons have done so little on all of these items that it's shocking that someone
could actually write this without irony. The only progress that has been made on things like the
environment and immigration reform was under consistent pressure from organized groups like the
Keystone XL example, and the immigration policy changes that Obama made. Obama's recent change
to overtime rules (though very much a welcome step in the right direction) looks cynically timed
to shore up the wayward left flank of the Democratic Party.
Personally, I'm not voting for Trump, because he's an idiot. I will NEVER vote for a Clinton.
They cause too much destruction! And they get really rich while causing it.
You hit a nerve at Politico.
W/M, early 60's, Real Estate Broker in California and a regular reader here for a decade…I'll
be at the Sanders rally in Cloverdale tomorrow.
Typical NC follower.
I will not vote for HRC under any circumstances and if it's Trump VS Clinton I may well vote for
Trump ( Puking in my mouth as I vote) because he is the lesser evil.
My bet is that HRC takes the Nomination and then steps aside for "Health Reasons" allowing the
power brokers to ease Sanders aside and choose someone like Brown or Biden.
Sander will have a voice in who is chosen (Especially for VP) and that may be enough for him.
Trump is dangerous under any microscope, & THAT is a professional opinion. HRC is a nuclear
device waiting to implode. Sanders has been a principled, consistent politician protecting the
interest of the general citizenry somewhat behind the scenes. I think his current 'revolutionary'
stance is much like mine & a lot of 'our' contemporaries: totally fed up with the lies & path
the Democratic Party insiders chose to go, feeling totally betrayed. We fought for civil rights,
against the Vietnam War, subsequent unnecessary military involvements only to see misspent human
and monetary treasure costs of unconscionable enormity. We see Senator Sanders as the ONLY one
who speaks and cares about America and its citizens in the only proper view, we deserve the human
rights we have worked hard to achieve only to see them disappearing into the pockets of those
who worship the Golden Bull (of Wall Street). The young people (our children & grandchildren)
are wise to this, perhaps many were listening to us when we least expected!
For myself I'll just say I will vote for Mr. Sanders as a delegate and as an American. This country
deserves better, its people deserve "a more perfect union, Justice, domestic Tranquility, common
defense, promotion of the general Welfare, and securing the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves
and our Posterity", not just the 1% of us, all of us, no exceptions! It is what Senator Sanders
has been trying to do most of his life. I believe he is the Real Deal. I believe this is the time
we need to think in the larger perspective. What is best for America and all of the people living
here? How do we return to the ideal of the 'golden city on a hill'? Senator Sanders guiding us
as President is a first step. Wash your hands and roll up your sleeves, we've got a lot of work
to do!
We fought for civil rights, against the Vietnam War, subsequent unnecessary military involvements
only to see misspent human and monetary treasure costs of unconscionable enormity. We see Senator
Sanders as the ONLY one who speaks and cares about America and its citizens in the only proper
view, we deserve the human rights we have worked hard to achieve only to see them disappearing
into the pockets of those who worship the Golden Bull (of Wall Street).
TS, be prepared to arrive at the Sanders rally early. His rally in Santa Barbara required ALL
attendees to pass through a slow moving security check (which took hours). The rally in SB was
massive (much larger than an Obama rally in 2008), and while the "gates" opened at 7 am, Sanders
didn't speak until 11 am.
I spoke with some of the Sanders folks a day before the event and was amazed at their dedication
to detail. These people are not amateurs!
Ditto on the preparedness. I attended the first Michigan rally. I got drug along to Obama in
Detroit in 2007 and even though I didn't necessarily care, I was severely upset that not everyone
could actually see the person they came there for (we were literally just on some adjacent packed
street). In light of that I arrived at 7, first one in line and waited until we got in around
2. Front row though! Be prepared for a long haul!
There's so much more that could be included in that column, but I'm guessing there were space
considerations. Still, I think that it would be worthwhile to step back from Clinton, Sanders,
and Trump, and discuss what they represent. It seems clear to me that the political system in
this country is breaking down, something which a good chunk of the political and media elite refuse
to acknowledge, or are constitutionally unable to comprehend. What do they really think will happen
if Trump or Clinton wins? As tough as they claim it would be for a President Sanders, what could
those other two possibly accomplish that Sanders couldn't? Do they think that it will be any better
in 2020, especially if another financial crisis hits?
I tuned out yesterday after I heard that 5 people are now serious (in someone's mind) candidates
for the president. They added a republican named French and old Uncle Joe Biden. These are to
replace the current party favorites because they ermm will lose favor, be replaced, indicted,
arrested, whatever.
Baggage is being delivered right to the door of the convention that will put the charmed fruit
in hot water and spoil their taste and appearance.
I am glad to see the 1% get their freak on and guarantee a win for Bernie. It looks like it is
going to be a write in vote for the winner.
By the way, is it legal to get a rubber stamp made that says "Bernie Sanders" so no one can claim
poor penmanship? Is that legal? I'd like to buy one.
Interesting article. I'd suggest you're missing the "F**k you!" to the political class that
Trump represents. The Italians elected a prostitute ("La Ciccolina") to their parliament for similar
reasons. It may be impotent, but I'm sure it feels good.
Meanwhile, if Hillary gets the nomination, I suggest those in reliably blue or red states vote
Jill Stein, Greens. It empowers, and perhaps gets revenue sharing for Greens, and registers a
protest without SCOTUS impact.
I can, out of experience, attest to the fact that F-U votes do indeed make one feel good.
Waking up the day after election day to find that Minnesotans had elected Jessie Ventura governor,
was a pure delight.
Our legislature, the two legacy parties, joined hands, circled the wagons and put their collective
fingers in their ears and sang NA-NA-Na-Na, ignored his every effort at change, but in the end,
I'd say the experience gave a brief respite from the endless kayfabe.
What I'm saying is that I fear electing Hillary much more than Trump.
Re Italian electoral choices, I'd have to offer that both houses of the US imperial legislature,
much of the court system, and of course the Imperial Executive and military, are stuffed full
of prostitutes. Bunch of corporate filles et types de joie… As I recall, La Cicciolina had some
very good positions, on the issues too… the Wiki article is dry fun:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilona_Staller
I'm disappointed not to see more focus on down-ticket races.
Look at what the Republicans have done to blockade any of the few good things Obama has managed
to try. Dems could play this role in a Trump presidency, blocking horrid and/or crazy stuff. [And
they'll be needed in this role in a Clinton presidency as well.]
I really think Bernie ought to begin hammering at this. In an awful lot of states, your vote
on the line for president doesn't really matter: your state is already "red" or "blue." The only
thing your vote there does is show that you refuse to vote for Hillary, or add to the total votes
for a Green or Libertarian candidate in the hopes of enabling them to be on future ballots.
But your vote for Senate or House members DOES can make a difference. That's why folks shouldn't
stay home. Don't let the disaster that's the presidential "choice" keep you away from your opportunity
to make a difference elsewhere.
Kokukanani, ding ding ding ding ding! Yes, downticket is the key. Ask any Teapartier ; ). If
Bernie loses the nom (most probable in the current sitch) and Hillary or her replacement loses
the Prez (assuming, with reason, that the we-all won't just come out to vote for her and/or the
Dem's second team Q-back won't just *wipe the field!* wait - Joe Biden? John Kerry? umm, not likely…),
we will have Prez Trump. And the establishment, both D & R, will work v hard to make sure he does
nothing much. Ergo, that will be our time to consolidate.
Find, vet and support more
Bernie-style candidates in down-ticket matches. Take the House in 2019, take state and local
offices whenever they present, build solidarity and a network of elected who are in league with
us. If they betray us, we get them trounced and replaced by Good People. Lather, rinse, repeat.
We have seen even pretty good guys/gals corrupted by the Washington "reality" - keep an eye on
them, keep their feets to fire and exchange them as needed.
Thirty, twenty years ago many, many good people couldn't run for office b/c of perceived 'skeletons'
in their closets. This one was divorced, that one was gay, this one had smoked dope, that one
was an atheist - but people, who cares about that stuff anymore?
Enthusiastically seconding
rezlez , put my money where Bernie says. There are tons of good folks who can be elected,
starting but not ending with his endorsements. That is how we will win The War, even if we lose
the 2016 Nom and Prez battles.
Also recall that 2020 will be particularly important: census year + redistricting.
In 2010, narcissistic Obama and the lazyy DNC couldn't be bothered to deal with an "off-year"
election. As a result, Republicans took over governorships and state legislatures , which then
gerrymandered districts, cementing and increasing the advantages they already had. This was in
addition to gaining House and Senate seats.
Let's not make this mistake again. 2016 is the beginning of the race for 2020.
You are of course right. But I have nearly 30 would be Senators on my ballot, most of whom
can't even write a paragraph in coherent English OR hire an editor to do so for them. It really
is that bad. It's an indictment of both the political and the education system at this point.
So it's not easy to keep the focus …
I too am a highly educated, middle aged, female NC regular who has every intention of voting
for Trump over Clinton as the lesser evil. (I also relish the thought of her gnashed teeth if
she loses!)
I am still hoping that Bernie can pull off the nomination but I comfort myself with the awareness
that he has inspired a generation of activists to run for local office and eventually percolate
up to positions of real power. Change isn't quick but it is coming.
Great piece, but if you're really a progressive and Clinton is the nominee, why not vote for
Jill Stein instead? She's even more progressive than Bernie and will show up on the ballot in
November (at least as far as I know).
The reason is because if 10 people vote for Clinton in a given state, 9 vote for Trump, and
8 vote for Stein, while 1 million stay home, Clinton wins the state. Once she gets to 270, she's
President. It's the percentages of the cast votes that matter.
If you are in a state that is absolutely guaranteed to sweep for Clinton or Trump, then by
all means, vote third party. But bear in mind that polling is both being manipulated AND is inaccurate
this year because the electorate is not the typical one.
This isn't just about "who would I prefer as president". In that regard, no one vote matters
at all. This is about stopping a vast network of militaristic and corporate corruption, purging
the Clintons and corporatists from the party, and thereby making it undesirable for Goldman, Exxon,
Boeing et al. to fund Democratic campaigns and Democratic lobbyists. Weakening that hold is crucial
to either taking the Democratic party back, or building a competitive progressive party that can
beat it nationally.
This is the best description of this move I have seen. The potential message it sends to donors
for Dems is not even something I considered in this play, nice.
One possible reason for the 'pukey' quality of the Politico Commentariat could well be the
requirement that one needs a Facebook account to sign in to comment. One of NC's strengths is
that it does not require a potential commenter to join a 'special club' to participate. I sense
that moderation is a major headache for the NC site admins, but I do not see where Facebook, Disqus,
or others of their ilk provide any quality filtering at all.
I liked one Politico comment that asked if Distort the Record paying by the comment accounted
for the high turnout of HillTrolls. We here at NC get that the HillTroll population is not paid,
but recompensed with "Purity Points," the knowledge that True Believers sacrifice for the 'Greater
Good,' however that is defined. The run of the mill reader might not get that dynamic, so the
idea that the HillTrolls are paid would not only 'fly,' but somehow reduce the effectiveness of
such comments through the subtle corrosive action of the 'pay to play' meme.
Finally, I get the feeling that the Politico crowd likes to see themselves as "thought leaders"
for the "masses." By playing up the "quality" of the NC commentariat in your piece, and their
disdain for H Clinton, you have stuck a very salutary finger in the Politico nomenklaturas collective
eye. Well done!
I know from personal experience with many of FDL alums that when it required commenters to
register via Disquis, many of us opted out of commenting…and reading…and contributing.
I realize that FDL had been under consistent, sustained DDOS attacks on multiple occasions
and Disquis may have been a response, but it still had a discouraging effect, and probably did
much more harm that good.
As for FB, I'm on it primarily for two reasons: to stay in touch with some far-flung old friends
and classmates, and I have an author's page for my book, Public Enemies. I often comment on others'
posts and send the occasional Personal Message, but post original material, at most, 3-4 times
a year. Not really giving Zuck any meaningful personal data for his mining efforts.
It's interesting given that the conventional wisdom is that by removing anonymity on comments
(e.g. by requiring a Facebook account to post) you eliminate the worst behavior. Comparing the
quality of NC comments (totally anonymous) and Politico (FB identified) suggests that that's an
overly simplistic view.
It does make it a bit easier to spot sock puppets though.
I read the Politico piece. I mostly agree with everything Yves Smith says about Mrs. Clinton.
But I cannot believe that anyone could contemplate the accession of Donald Trump to the Presidency
with anything other than terror. There is also the probability that if Trump gains that ephemeral
thing "momentum," he could ruin our chances to put people like Tim Canova, Tammy Duckworth, etc.,
etc. into the Senate (and get people like Debbie Wasserman Schulz out ).
Trump's total ignorance of and contempt for preventing global warming make it a possibility
that Yves and I might not get to vote in the next election, 2020, because our polling places would
be under water. Texas is under water at the moment, South Florida is going under, Virginia Beach
is going under.
Republicans have a very simple outlook, and a very simple solution: if you look at (ugh) television,
you frequently hear Republicans say, "If Hillary Clinton gets in, there goes the Supreme Court
for 100 years." Contrariwise, if Donald Trump gets in, there goes the Supreme Court for 100 years,
assuming we stay above water and below 150 degrees for that long.
My son used to describe himself as a Bolshevik, and we agreed that I was a gradualist. I still
am. I still believe that there is such a thing as the "lesser of two evils," especially when the
greater evil is a completely deranged, destructive, rudderless, persimmon-colored narcissist,
whose main policy position appears to be an unfulfillable desire to build a wall along the Mexican
border and write 'TRUMP WALL" on it in flashing letters.
I do not wish to be insulting, patronizing, or demeaning to the author or to readers of this
blog, which I have gratefully read since 2007 and supported with a (tiny) subscription for a long
time. But when I read that some other readers believe that voting for Trump will "send a big message,"
I am absolutely appalled by the lack of foresight implied. Send a message to whom? To ourselves?
Shall we all move to Canada, or Mars, to get out of the way before the "message" arrives?
I believe that Conservatives are defined by a total ignorance of cause and effect, and a love
of destruction for its own sake. I do not believe that Naked Capitalism should adopt a stance
of, "Let's smash up the republic and see what happens."
Nicely measured comment, withholding the typical insults thrown at Sanders supporters who show
hesitation at voting for Hillary no matter she does or says. It is easy succumbing to the temptation
of supporting Hillary because the prospects of Trump are so horrific. But if I vote for Hillary,
how do I then seriously maintain that I object to the following realities:
1. Her enthusiastic support for the Iraq war before changing course when it became a political
liability.
2. The neocon and Kissinger crowd endorsement of her foreign policy which included bombing Libya
into a stateless terrorist sanction, supporting pro-terrorist rebels invading Syria, advocating
for a greater troop surge in Afghanistan than Obama or the military wanted (40K v. 30K), unbridled
support for Israel, supporting the Honduran coup, approving over a hundred in billion in arms
sales to the most unsavory of Middle East Despots, etc. She is a war monger and advocate of never
ending war.
3. Money controlling politics. Personally she and Bill have received hundreds of millions in special
interest money through speaking fees and the foundation. Her campaign is awash in special interest
money. Money is a corrupting influence in politics until it comes to Hillary?
4. A complete lack of transparency in giving speeches to special interests and in her public actions
as Secretary of State. What is she trying to hide?
5. Neo-liberal economic policies leading to the conclusion we will "never, ever" have single payer
and likely will experience cuts in Social Security. The ultimate privatization of everything.
6. The failure to lead on important social, environmental and trade issues. She was against gay
marriage, supported fracking and free trade until campaigning in the opposite direction. How to
you conclude she is not just pandering for votes?
If I vote for Hillary I am part of the mandate for all that I object to. That is how Bush framed
it when he won. If voting for the lesser of two evils did not lead to more evil, it might be a
viable alternative. But anyone arguing the extension and further establishment of the status quo
is sustainable is living in a fantasy land.
As a final thought, I note Hillary supporters rarely argue her policies are superior to Bernie's.
They fall back on resigned acceptance wrapped in pragmaticism. My guess is all of these people
have (or had) decent paying jobs with benefits, access to healthcare, debt free higher education,
good housing, etc. In other words, holding on to the status quo is the preferred option.
If your big concern for future generations is a wall between the US and Mexico then you should
definitely vote for Hillary Clinton. Who better than the Clinton's to prevent any barriers to
middle class jobs leaving the country?
The message is actually to you and anyone else who could stomach a vote for Clinton after everything
they have done. If you don't want Trump, you have a way out. His name is Bernie Sanders. If you
are willing to risk a Trump Presidency then by all means be appalled and trepidatious. We'll both
suffer together just like we have for the last 30 years. The big difference is that I won't have
to compromise my principles and then be fooled yet again while the serious, reasonable among us
berate me for not cheering loud enough at my own funeral. All politicians lie you'll say, except
I'm supposed to believe Trump will do everything he promises. The Democratic party, the only one
"hope for the masses" is by far the biggest threat to our republic. Far more than a single man
like Trump. Extrajudicial killings, targeted assignations, shredding the constitution, corruption,
indifference to suffering. We don't need Trump for any of those things. We've got Obama for that
now. We're supposed to care which of the elite gets to wear some silly robes while doing the same
thing they have always done?
The message is pretty simple:
Rome's burning (again), grab a bucket if you want to put it out, wasting time discussing why your
flower vase is far prettier than my old bucket isn't going to help. I'll have one of two things
in hand this time, my bucket or marshmallows, you decide.
Extrajudicial killings, targeted assignations, shredding the constitution, corruption,
indifference to suffering. We don't need Trump for any of those things. We've got Obama for that
now.
And Hillary has committed or supported all of those.
I tend to agree, but can't vote for Clinton. I have been critical of what I see as a nihilistic
bent in the "who cares if aprčs Trump le deluge" BECAUSE HILLARY attitude that gets thrown around
from time to time. But I also have to admit that a lot of smart people around here have come to
the conclusion that nothing can be salvaged from the system as a system (bits and pieces of the
culture and ideology of America, perhaps, but the system is kaput). I haven't reached that conclusion,
yet. It may be coming. But what I'd like people to spend more time and energy on is not repeating
ad nauseam how rotten Clinton is, but what we are going to do if either Clinton or Trump grab
the brass ring. That's what is most likely to happen, and that's what we've got to prepare for.
Where to begin? How about with
Tammy Duckworth ? OMG!! "Wounded veteran" parachuted into Illinois 6 in 2005 by DCCC against
local and *real* progressive
Christine Cegelis . More on that at Shadowproof's FDL
wayback machine
.
BTW, I live in Canada, and you know, the healthCARE (as contradistinct from government-mandated
private insurance) is pretty good here. Could be better, we are working on it. Ditto pensions,
education, city services, parks, etc. If you want to live like Canadians, though, you certainly
can - just fix up your own country.
if we don't vote for clinton we lose our chance to get moderate republicans on the supreme
ct. this is crucial. we know a republican won't nominate moderate republicans.
Deloss: speaking as an ardent supporter/contributor of Samders and longtime opponent of both
Clintons, I want to thank you and associate myself with your remarks.
I hope people voicing their justified anger and disgust will reconsider their position before
fall. We have been taken for granted for years and betrayed by Obama. Left to her preference and
instincts, she'll be no better (and in some or many ways worse) than we've had.
That's still light years better than a Trump administration but it doesn't have to be either/or.
We could more easily accept a Clinton presidency by working hard to elect progressive congressional
candidates that will defy and restrain her hawkish policies on deficits and militarism and curtailing
civil liberties. I'd include Russ Feingold and zephyr Teachout and many other candidates in adddition
to those Deloss mentioned, together with the growing ranks of incumbents–none of whom will have
any influence on a Trump administration.
Substantially increasing the number of congressional progressives would give progressives a
louder voice in the legislative and executive branches. Abandoning the party would reinforce the
neoliberal narrative. And what if she wins anyway?
Hopefully your article will start to get the super-delegates to rethink their position. Unfortunately
the signs don't seem to point in that direction. With all the polls showing Trump catching up
tp to Clinton the establishment response is shown in a new story in The Hill "
Doubts creep into Trump-Clinton polls ".
From the story:
Questions about whether the polls can be believed were raised by many on the left after
recent surveys showed Trump running more strongly against Clinton than Beltway pundits expected.
The DNC doesn't want facts to get in the way of a Clinton anointment.
And an ability to totally ignore recent history. How many times did we hear that Trump was
toast during the Republican primary? But then Bernie was only supposed to do well in Vermont and
New Hampshire…
It's perpetually amazing to me how these parties, each representing barely a fourth of the
electorate currently registered to vote, maintain their voting base. Every election year we see
the same "you're wasting your vote" messaging. They're terrified that the independents won't vote
for them.
If I think back to the history lessons I got in school, there was one particular voting event
that really captured my imagination: Bleeding Kansas. People back then were driven to physical
violence over a question that would decide the future of the country…
The parties maintain their voting base (in my opinion) because: (a) mainstream media coverage
of campaigns and issues is so poor, (b) most voters can't or don't want to make the effort to
get and stay educated on candidates and the issues when mainstream media coverage is so poor (or
aren't even aware of the information gap), (c) the public seems much more likely not to vote at
all when the choices from the two main parties are both unattractive, and (d) the parties' funding
stays intact because they both cater to the 1%.
I think "b" is huge. My mom is in her 60's and has a master's degree. She reads a ton, has
a daily newspaper subscription, and watches the news on pbs. I have an advanced degree and read
a ton too, but it's primarily online and sites like naked capitalism.
We have similar political perspectives, but we both get frustrated when talking politics. She
thinks the authors online aren't reputable. I think she's just parroting propaganda.
It's not just a matter of caring or spending the time to become informed. It took a long time
of fairly random wandering before I found quality news sources. How many people have the time,
resources, or skills to do that?
Even parasites need a healthy host and hopefully the dem establishment understands that by
convention time.
I predict they accept the inevitable, give it to Sanders. He makes Warren his VP. Only serves
once and she serves twice. That gets us to 2028.
Wishful thinking, but hope springs eternal.
Long time middle aged male reader of NC and probably fits the demo Yves mentioned. Thank you
for capturing my thoughts regarding this issue. I'll add my 44 year old female life partner feels
the same and is considering a Trump vote just to spite HRC. We caucused for Bernie in Maine after
registering as democrats specifically to do this. As others have mentioned, I had to abandon reading
the willfully misinformed comment section.
This precisely demonstrates why I consistently follow NC. For months now, I have made no secret
of the three options you outlined in the Politico article, Robert Reich's pleas for "party unity"
notwithstanding.
A. Not vote for president in November.
B. Vote for Trump.
C. Write in Bernie as a protest vote.
It pains me greatly to have it come to this. But, fercryinoutloud, I will be 72 at the next
presidential election in 2020, and I really don't want to look back over the four years between
now and then (as I am currently doing with the 8 years since Obama took office), and find myself
bemoaning the disaster that my country has become.
Bernie Sanders is the first candidate in my lifetime that has demonstrated unimpeachable integrity
and has the courage to walk his talk at every step. Is he perfect? Far from it. Is he our mythical
savior? Highly doubtful. If he is elected, will he be taken into the back room to meet with the
PTB just like every other newly elected president and calmly informed that "we know where your
family lives?" You bet. The Deep State isn't going down without a fight.
"Gnawing off my own leg" by voting for Trump would be casting my vote for someone that would
very likely bring our fragile house of cards crashing down. Maybe, just possibly, that's what's
needed, although there would certainly be a lot of suffering, weeping, and gnashing of teeth in
the process.
Once again, thanks for your wisdom. It can be really lonely out here.
I'm a lesser evil voter– Trump is too big a risk. And by emphasizing the demographics of your
readership, you gave ammunition to the people who claim that only privileged people could risk
the possible hardships created by a Trump presidency. As Chomsky has said in the past, small differences
between parties can still translate into large amounts of suffering for the very poor.
That said, I agreed with virtually every criticism you made of Clinton and I am sick of the
hypocrisy we go through every election year, when some awful candidate is the front runner and
we are all supposed to unite in singing his or her praises and lie about their records. At another
website I frequent there are Clinton supporters arguing that she isn't a hawk or barely more of
a hawk than Sanders. At the NYT both the pundits and the Clinton supporters openly attack single
payer as too expensive– when someone pointed out in Friedman's comment thread that it is much
cheaper than our system the reply was a complete non sequitur, something about how high the taxes
are in those countries.
I've been trying to think of a bumper sticker that captures my feelings– something like "Clinton–
better the thug you know". Basically I know how bad Clinton is, but Trump is a complete wild card
and we can't be sure he will be ineffective in whatever insanity he chooses to engage in.
Based on what I have seen since Nader, very few of the Clinton supporters will do what I did
in this post and acknowledge the validity of your points. They will probably focus on the points
I made in my first paragraph and go for the ad hominem and they will look for some factual point
somewhere in your critique that they can dispute, because the overall reality is too painful to
face.
i can't see that the very poor would be any better off under a clinton administration. i can
see where we are going with lesser evilism. it doesn't work, the country keeps moving in the wrong
direction.
I understand your position. I was there as late as 2008. I've just learned that when someone
thinks you have no where else to go they do not hesitate to abuse you if it benefits them in some
manner. They aren't going to take your wishes into consideration until they think you can and
WILL walk. And for the record my relatively comfortable and privileged middle class life has been
a memory for just under a decade although I'm still luckier than a whole lot of Americans.
I'm with the reluctant "Hillary is a lesser evil" crowd at this point. For one reason: I'm
deeply, deeply scared by just how bad I think a Trump presidency could get.
Not "I don't like his politics" scared. Not "he'll make a broken and corrupt system worse"
scared. Full on, "this guy is completely detached from reality and is a completely amoral bully,
and is probably going to be massively incompetent, too" terrified . Trump is like the
car crash you can see coming: the only question is how bad it will be.
Clinton is a type of ongoing failure we know. Maybe things will finally fall apart
on her watch, or pass some invisible point of no return that we'll look back on later. But Trump
is pointlessly (because there is no real upside) rolling the dice on multiple versions of the
apocalypse: total financial collapse, totalitarianism, civil war, nuclear war. You name it, and
Trump is stupid and arrogant enough to give it a real chance of happening. At his best, he'll
be as bad as Clinton. At his worst… we're looking at nightmares.
If I wasn't in a likely swing state, I'd just vote Green with a clear conscience (unless Bernie
or some other decent candidate somehow ends up with the nomination). But I am in a swing
state, and I don't think I could live with myself if I could have prevented President Trump and
didn't. (Although Clinton is certainly making it difficult to back her as a "lesser" evil.)
I feel like the last several elections have been an education in different forms of mental
illness. And while it is an endlessly fascinating exercise to ponder which crazy candidate will
be worse, (or, cynically, funnier), often, we just don't know. But Trump really scares me. I see
someone who does not put self -preservation above the craziness, and that is a Caligula-level
scary flaw. Of course, we are not down to that choice yet, and maybe we won't be.
i think trump puts self preservation above everything, and so does clinton. they give us a
choice between 2 unprincipled panderers in pursuit of their own interests, they just play whatever
role is required.
You might have missed her speech this afternoon. One of her foreign policy planks Is a no lyrics
zone in Syria which means war with Russia. It actually doesn't get worse.
I hear that concern, but I'd say it serves an important function: Sanders' core support has
come from younger voters, who as a group are often dismissed by TPTB as naive, impractical, lazy,
etc. So being transparent about a demographic that is older and wiser, "high skilled", well-informed,
generally "successful" people in the status quo framing of the word, hits some of those pundits
and naysayers where it hurts. You can't blow Yves off as some punk kid who doesn't understand
the real world. The optics on that can be pretty powerful.
Come, now. America has the greatest propaganda system in the world. How would we be perceived
as a nation if our pundits couldn't find ways to blow Yves off? Very sadly, watching people with
probity and intelligence being dragged through the mud has become more popular than MMA.
Yves, thanks for the oasis.
It's good to read a reasonable LOE post. The one thing that this position can not answer, in
my nsho, is the charge that voting for the lessor of two evils perpetuates the evil by giving
the politician in question the power to always ignore them. This includes the sub charge that
politicians have learned to play this strategy like a well tuned instrument. They purposefully
stack the deck to make the most effective evil look like the lesser one.
A curious flaw that has developed in this rigged system is they are starting to run out of
believable monsters since they feel -for whatever reason, perhaps because it's like capitalism,
always more – that at each iteration they have to up the monster ante which is why we
have arrived at Trump who is even more scary than the VP who can see Russia from her window.
Ignoring the bogeymen aspect for a moment, the net policy result of this ratchet effect over
time has been our moving so far to the right and more importantly so far in the direction of monopolistic
capitalism and oligarchy that we are starting to actually collapse as a nation. We are also fast
reaching the point where the process becomes irreversible. From the point of view of climate change,
for instance, going a little bit more slowly by choosing LOE is like the difference between extinction
in 80 years instead of 87. What many have come to believe is that voting for the lessor evil will
neither stop nor significantly slow down this process.
While I don't agree with the LOE point of view, I do believe in respecting people who believe
it is the best way forward and particularly appreciate when they return the civility though I
also know that I have gotten caught up in the heat of an argument more than once where I later
regretted my harshness.
I've been doing the lesser evil most of my life. And even when I didn't know I was doing it,
since I didn't have the internet for alternative media and NC to know the real truth. This year,
exactly who the lesser evil is, is not clear to me. I have always thought that I should vote for
the least corrupt, irregardless of party affiliation. I will support Bernie as long as he is running.
Still hoping.
I'm voting in SC so who cares about my Presidential preference.
But, assuming that by November Sanders has not become a plausible winner in the election, with
Clinton in WH it would be the devil you know, a predictable fight.
The alternative, attempting to transact government with an executive constantly in the chaotic
throes of working for an unthrottled 2-year-old … someone needs to explain to me how that would
be better.
Excellent article. Trump won't sign new trade agreements and won't destroy our national sovereignty
by outsourcing jobs. In fact his campaign banner is America first and buy American. What a relief
to hear that! Congress is now trying to pass the Dark Act where country of origin labels will
be removed and GMO's will have only a bar code to tell you if they are or not genetically modified,
because the COOL's violates a past trade agreement with the WTO.
Hillary represents more endless war, more gutting of citizens protections like SS, more gutting
of the middle class with trade agreements with no relief for those left behind and all the things
mentioned in that article. If the DNC forces HRC on us when we don't want her and she obviously
can't beat Trump when Bernie can, then what's left to do?
I take issue with your first two claims: I have no idea what Trump will sign once he's sealed
the deal in his own favor and gotten the Oval Office, and he isn't going to dismantle the capitalist
system in order to prevent the outsourcing of jobs (most of the type you are referring to being
gone already). Since Nixon's Secret Plan to end the Vietnam War it's hard to accept anything anyone
running for office has to say. Trump has said that he's going to balance the budget, maintain
the world's strongest military forces, surrender the national debt, build his Great Wall, and
spend a whole lot of money on infrastructure (the wrong kind, of course, but infrastructure).
How is that remotely possible? How can those claims be reconciled?
Vote against Clinton as you see fit, but please, don't make such powerful assertions by cherry-picking
the statements of a real estate speculator and media whore who has shown time and again he will
say anything to get what he wants.
Hi James : Actually, I'm spot on, HRC got us into Libya all on her own. She's a known war monger
that gets a kick out of dead monarchs – ie.. her laugh when she said we came, we saw, he died.The
known evil – Hillary is more a threat to democracy to me than 4 years of the unknown evil Trump
at this point. And I won't vote for anyone that supports the TPP and other trade agreements. So,
let's see how it plays out.
It's not liberals he was going for of course, I doubt he likes liberals much, and the worldview
is not liberal and frankly the worldview of the majority of his supporters is probably not liberal
either, there's probably a pretty deep cultural divide.
It was those who feel they have lost jobs due to outsourcing which isn't just liberals.
Talking about how we have to build a wall between us and Mexico to keep out the Mexican Rapists
isn't appealing to liberals. People on the Left may agree that neoliberalism has been utterly
destructive of the American working class (I certainly think so) but Trump wasn't interested in
me, he was interested in Republican voters who had had it with the neoliberalism and corporate
molly coddling of the Republican establishment. And he hit it out of the ballpark with those people,
whom I think, as Obama used those fed up with Bushco and his illegal, immoral administration,
are being sold a bill of goods. You can say "we'll see", but what in the last 50 years would incline
me to think such a thing, especially from a man like Mr. Trump Casino, Trump Steaks, and Trump
University?
Are we prepared to get happy feet for Joe Biden if Clinton drops out?
I like Sanders, but do you think the (corporate) media will ever allow a fair and balanced
presentation of socialist economic ideas into their programming?
Culturally Marxist programming? Sure, we've been seeing that for decades. And how has that
turned out?
But a strong economic counter-narrative? I don't see it. Haven't seen it. I can't imagine I
will see it.
But if Sanders gets a shot, I say: Trump will tie him to Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot and then throw
him down the well.
Imagine the effect on people if, only for a few weeks in September, Auschwitz is displaced
in the minds of Americans by the Holodomor, the Great Leap Forward, Tuol Sleng.
Think that can't happen?
Progressive folks are already beginning to rationalize a Trump victory. I've seen it in these
forums. This is madness. For some reason it reminds me of the "Nader Traders" in 2000.
i think we can't vote according to what will placate the corporate media. the only thing they
want is a continuation of the policies that are gutting the nation. so it doesn't matter, at all,
whether they will oppose sanders. what matters is that we start opposing them .
what culturally marxist program have we been seeing again?
Start with Roger Kimball's "The Long March." Kimball's tone is often snotty, and I don't like
his politics, but start there and then fan out. A lot of that 60s idealism (thank you Baby Boomers)
turns out not to have been so harmless after all.
"We" are not getting happy feet for anyone but Bernie Sanders. This is quite different. Independents
are telling you they will vote for Bernie far and above what Nader dreamt of. That's your option,
present the rest of us, those not tied to party uber all, with Bernie in the general election..
or not. Clinton can't beat Trump anyway, that ship has sailed. It didn't work against the Republicans
fear mongering and its not working against Independents. Look at the polls. You're only challenge
needs to be making sure Bernie gets that primary spot. Unless you prefer Trump. That's
your option. If there are any traitors in the 2016 election it will be the selfish Clintionistas
who gave Trump POTUS because they didn't want to miss out on the bribes from Wall Street.
If Trump declares all out war on the TPP, and pisses off Paul Ryan and the GOP establishment,
which he must do to have any chance at all – Hillary gets caught with her hands all over the top
secret TPP "gold standard" negotiation process, but Bernie's hands are clean. Who then holds the
winning hand?
Yves you really did it this time! Just amazing all around. Im having all my friends read the
piece even if I have to print it out and nail it to their foreheads ;).
Excellent summary in the article as to why true "progressives" (I put this in quotes because
I think the term has too often been hijacked by assorted spokespeople) reject Clinton. My only
quibble might be with the description of the general readership here.
My impression is that the readership represents a broad spectrum of financial well-being or
not-so-well-being. The defining common denominator seems to me to be the level of economic and
political awareness relative to the general populace. This is a highly educated group–both formally
educated and self-educated.
If I were to guess, I imagine that your general description of the readership in the article
was a deliberate slap in the face to Dem strategists, who, as Thomas Frank has pointed out, are
only interested in the "professional class" anymore, as opposed to blue collar, pink collar, or
temporary labor, not to mention retirees.
"If my readers are representative, Clinton and the Democratic Party are about to have a long-overdue
day of reckoning."
Spot on. I won't vote for Hillary IF she is the nominee. I will write in Bernie.
The Democratic Party is in the party loyalty candidate mode that, in the past, the Republicans
frequently and reflexively practiced. He/she is the next in line…. And the result is a stodgy
party hack with obvious and perhaps insurmountable flaws. All things evolve and time is catching
up to the current Democratic Party.
If many Americans continue to believe that things are not fine, and the system is corrupt,
can we imagine pitchforks and guillotines?
Spot on. I won't vote for Hillary IF she is the nominee. I will write in Bernie.
Write in votes for President are meaningless, since we don't vote for Presidential candidates,
but for electors in the Electoral College. Please see my reply to Spring Texan at 11:51 AM for
something meaningful that a voter can do instead.
Sanders dismissed Gov. Jerry Brown's endorsement [of Clinton] as yet another establishment
politician lining up behind Clinton. The comment provoked a scolding from California Sen. Barbara
Boxer.
"For Bernie to say that Jerry Brown is establishment is kind of the biggest joke of the
day," she said on MSNBC. "You can't just dis everybody who supports Hillary Clinton. It doesn't
work."
IIRC, and I mean this is the anthropological sense, not tabloid gossip sense, Boxer's daughter
married Hillary's brother. If they had children, that would make Boxer's grandkid Hillary's niece/nephew.
(Marriage confirmed on Tony Rodham's Wikipedia page; unsure about offspring of that marriage.)
I recall that odd tidbit about the Boxer-Rodham marriage b/c it is so similar to the dynastic
marriages in ancient Rome that my old Roman History Prof used to point out among the Julian, Flavian,
and other wealthy clans ;-)
Good thing Barbara Boxer is Bernie's 'friend'; one would hate to see how she treats 'frenemies'.
Pat Brown was governor of California. Kathleen Brown was State Treasurer. Jerry has been governor
twice, Secretary of State (California), mayor of Oakland, and AG. How can anyone claim he is not
part of the political establishment? He was born into it.
This article is exactly why the American left is irrelevant. You try to give yourself credibility
by praising your class, your highly read high income who will weather the Trump storm in your
bubble of wealth and privilege and you declare everyone else stupid. This is why I support the
Clintons, they fucking care about people whereas you all care about your little intellectual bubble
of purity and intellectual pontificating.
Wow, this is classic Team Clinton projection. It is Team Clinton that regularly calls Sanders
supporters "stupid" and lives in an income stratum where they aren't just insulated from the impact
of the Clinton/Obama economic policies (all brought to you by the Robert Rubin Hamilton Project)
but in fact have benefitted from them handsomely.
Please tell me exactly in the piece where it depicts anyone as intellectually challenged. It's
not there. That's your straw man.
Moreover, the point of stating that NC readers skew high income and highly educated (with a
lot of variation around that norm) is that they are refusing to vote what most would perceive
to be their economic interest by supporting Sanders. The usual bashing of Sanders supporters is
based on class and age assumptions, that they are kids that need to grow up and get some assets
and then they'll understand the wisdom of supporting Team Dem.
Well, they certainly care about themselves , and they are people…so technically
that's true…unless you believe the people who think they're all shape-shifting lizard creatures…
Then again, some days I think most of our ruling class (Clinton and Trump included)
are probably P-zombies. (I think I see more flashes of real humanity, however potentially corrupt
or selfish, from Clinton than I do from Trump. I really do think the latter is, at minimum, a
psychopath.)
Something you might want to keep in mind as you do follow-up pieces.
The LGBT movement didn't make a whole lot of headway with their political agenda for quite
some time. And this is even coming off the HIV issue and groups like Act Up.
Crap like "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" should have let the movement know where they stood with the
Clintons.
Not being inside the social circle, I'm not sure on the timing of this, but they key political
fundraisers in Hollywood with an interest in LGBT issues finally realized that the reason they
were getting no traction with their efforts was that they were being taken for granted. So they
stood back, and held up the fundraising efforts until they saw actual policy changes rather than
empty promises. Once they got traction, the cashflow started back up.
Too many groups inside the Big Tent of the Democratic Party are similarly taken for granted.
It's like watching the speech in The Candidate: "Can't any longer play off black against old –
young against poor. This country cannot house its houseless – feed its foodless."
The whips are running around trying to keep the groups in line, regardless of how they're being
sold out. Blacks showed up for Clinton in the primaries, regardless of BLM, or the history of
legislation decimating them by the Clinton Administration. Hispanics are being deported, when
they're not being warehoused for private profit, and they're being counted on as a deciding demographic.
Senior citizens are viewed as so many "sitting ducks" for their retirement funds and benefits,
that "locked-up capital," that they should be worried about the Clinton agenda for Social Security
privatization.
Only by sitting out, only by holding back resources, only by requiring tit-for-tat achievements
rather than empty promises… only then will these groups return to political relevance.
Supporting Sanders, while not perfect as a candidate, moves the political focus back to a domestic
agenda that, if nothing else, will do less harm. It's the last chance to settle these matters
peacefully before it turns into an American Spring.
Trump has a marginally less probability of marching us all off to war within a short span,
compared to the near-certainty Clinton will torch off a slew of wars.
But remember, if we're marching peacefully in the streets, both Clinton AND Trump are likely
to call out the police, the National Guard, or whatever else they might find necessary, to impose
"law and order" back on us. Also known as, be a happy little serf, do as you're told, consume,
and don't think too much about the future, or even next week, because that won't put a roof over
your head or a meal on the table. In fact, it will get you an arrest record, an internal injury
from a police pacification technique, a lovely opportunity to network inside jail or prison, and
a future of being marked so the conventional, straight economy knows to keep an eye on you, and
never, ever provide material support.
I am just heading off to read what I'm sure is an excellent piece. Two brief thoughts:
1. The NY Times had a main headline this morning:
Clinton to Paint Trump as a Risk to World Order By AMY CHOZICK
In a speech today, Hillary Clinton plans to suggest that a Trump presidency would weaken U.S.
alliances and embolden enemies.
I thought, well, that's a bit rich coming from a woman who supported the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
and had a direct role in starting wars in Libya and Syria, not to mention stirring up trouble
in the Ukraine and enabling hard-line Israelis to commit war crimes in Palestine. But who's counting?
2) I listening online to Diane Rehm because she had Jonathan Turley (very precise and legalistic
in the best sense as always) discuss the email tarbaby. The guests including Turley were:
Brian Fallon spokesman for the Clinton campaign
Eric Lichtblau reporter, The New York Times
Jonathan Turley professor of public interest law, The George Washington University Law School
Hilary Rosen Democratic strategist; managing director, SKDKnickerbocker, a political consulting
and PR firm; and a CNN contributor
Fallon and Rosen were completely deflective and disingenuous and claimed (incredibly) that
HRC has been consistent all along, did nothing wrong, and MOST IMPORTANTLY Colin Powell yada yada
yada. Turley did a great job of rebutting and Lichtblau also was quite clear and accurate as to
the real impact of the IG report.
What shocked me was the quality of the comments - I have seen many Daily Kos threads disintegrate
rapidly into name calling and insults, but the comments here were of 2nd grade level.
I do recommend a listen - I'm not a Diane Rehm fan but Turley's analysis is worth hearing:
Re 1) Weaken alliances? You mean the ones with the governments of Mexico and Colombia who are
thoroughly infested with armed narco gangs that murder truckloads of people on a regular basis?
I'd love to see those alliances weakened!
How about with the EU and Japan and the rest of the Pacific Rim nations trying to sign TPP/TTIP/TISA?
PLEASE WEAKEN THOSE ALLIANCES!!!
2) The guest list says it all. NPR has been godawful on the election coverage. They barely
acknowledge Sanders exists, and when they do, they pepper with Clintonite talking points like
"he can't win" and "too idealistic".
Thanks for and congratulations on getting this published! As a regular reader, the terrain
is quite familiar to me, and I'm impressed at how much filtering you had to do to condense it
down even in what would generally be considered a longish piece. I'm definitely sending it to
at least a few folks I know…
FWIW, I'm a non-partisan CA voter, voting Bernie in the primary next week, and probably Jill
Stein (again) in the fall.
That is a formidable piece. Major props for putting it out there like that. Bonne chance.
I don't know if I'm alone on this, or if there's any way to share this in aggregate without
revealing anyone in particular, but I personally would be rather curious what sort of feedback
you receive privately from people in the know.
One other thought I had is that voting third party may be something people consider in larger
numbers this year than the past handful of elections. If you're not in a swing state, you have
little influence on the electoral college, but trying to get, say, the Greens or Libertarians
beyond 5% may be a consideration some people make in states where they are on the ballot.
The highly educated, high-income, finance-literate readers of my website, Naked Capitalism
Oh really? I'm missing the High Income part. Therefore I do not qualify. I shall have to hang
my head in shame, and hang out at the Fox Blog, when I can find it.
The average for the site is high. That is partly a function of a lot of readers living in NYC,
where incomes are inflated so as to cover the costs of living here.
The reason for stressing that is that one way the Clinton supporters diss Sanders voters is
to depict them as kids who don't have a stake in the system. That is one step away from, "They
can afford to make reckless decisions and burn everything down". So rhetorically, it was important
to stress, "NC readers are demographically a lot like what is supposed to be the core Clinton
base, and they want nothing to do with her."
I'm a California mid-octogenarian who goes to his grave by voting my conscience the past 3-4
elections and go with a clearer conscience than one that has voted, "….for the lesser of two evils".
I too as one stated above will request Dem ballot, vote Bernie and if HC is the crowned one, vote
for Jill Stein in the general.
Clear conscience.
By and large it's probably true, even though plenty of us don't qualify. I think you're taking
it too personally. Yves is pointing out a fact that serves to undercut the usual criticisms of
Bernie supporters. And anyway, if you consider all of humanity, and not just those of us in the
"West," then we are definitely (very nearly) all "high-income."
Two out of three ain't bad! If you are going to have to go over to the FOX Blog, I can only
begin to dread where I am going to end up…. I wish Yves had said something about a full head of
hair….
synoia, i know from comments i've seen over the years that there are plenty of us here at nc
who are just managing to "stay afloat", which does mean different actual income numbers to different
people.
i am some years on medicaid, and i expect to spend my aging years, when i can no longer work,
in low-cost housing for the elderly and disabled–if any spaces are still available, say, 20 years
from now. what i've read on nc has actually helped me cope better with my declining economic situation,
sometimes in very practical ways.
i for one am glad you are here. we're in good company. don't hang your head, and please keep
hanging out here, with the rest of us in the peanut gallery.
Thanks, Yves, for giving me at long last ONE good reason to click on Politico. But the arguments
for sitting out the election if Bernie isn't nominated (or actively voting for Trump if Hillary
is) are so far from thinkable (in my universe anyway) that I thought as a longtime NC lurker I'd
just throw my concerns out here.
Many, if not most, of the arguments I'm seeing along these lines are fairly big-picture, focusing
on larger questions of peace/war, or the truly offensive and depressing prospect of the DNC neoliberal
establishment holding sway, yet again, when a real Bernie sweep (of people and policy) is so sorely
needed by the entire country.
My concerns are a little more granular, in terms of the simple ability of government to get
things done for the American people. My folks worked for the government for years. With each party
change in the White House, we got used to seeing the binge/purge that goes on throughout the government,
not just with Cabinet-level appointive positions but (because those appointees bring in their
own people) throughout the ranks of the federal bureaucracy in Washington. This pertains to appointed
judges and Justice Department prosecutors as well as cabinet and sub-cabinet positions. At every
level, these people influence the tone and function of the entire government–just by their presence
they can insure that government "help" is inadequate, wrong-headed, miserly, ineffective, or (by
deciding how scant resources are used/not used) nonexistent. (During the Bush administration,
the Smithsonian Institution–the national museum of ALL the American people–very nearly had a permanent,
and very right-wing, "Hall of American Patriots" foisted on it as a condition of providing sorely
needed funding to fix water damage from leaks in the roof. Go ahead–picture life-size statues
of Phyllis Schlafly and Dick Cheney in their own special hall in our national museum.) Obama was
rightly criticized for being slow to fill numerous crucial, but less visible, government positions
with new appointees when he came into office, thereby leaving recalcitrant and malicious Bushies
in ideal positions to obstruct or delay good policy initiatives, at their whim; the next Republican
president and his cohorts will make no such mistake with Obama's appointees.
There are millions of acres of federal land that can be either preserved, or mined, drilled,
and clear-cut (and thus destroyed). There is a notion of working for the common good that is (still,
somehow after the Reagan and Bush years) baked into the functioning and mission of the government.
Our National Parks, our wilderness areas–in fact, EVERYTHING that is currently held in trust for
the American people by the federal government–becomes fair game with a Trump presidency. He'll
sweep into office with him legions of termites dedicated to destroying the government and making
themselves piles of dough at the same time. Few of them will be as limited and incompetent as
Trump is; rather, they'll be bankrolled and supported strategically by the brightest and most
brilliantly sociopathic minds in the country.
I don't think this is alarmist talk, I think it's simple fact. I simply can't take four years
of watching the country being turned into Kansas. My position isn't exactly 'lesser of two evils,'
it's more like 'who'll keep our slide into hell's handbasket from accelerating out of control,'
and while Bernie is my vast preference, Hillary will do for that. I do not relish seeing highway
signs that say "Donald Trump Presents the TD Bank Grand Canyon, sponsored in part by Budweiser,
Next Right".
What's more (and I'll shut up now), once these resources are gone, under a Trump presidency,
they're gone for good. Once privatized, entities are never returned to 'we the people.' Political
parties don't "learn a lesson." Millions of innocent people suffer. So yeah, I'll take Hillary.
Degrees of pillage and misery matter to me. Her = less, Trump = unthinkable.
This is the best argument for holding my nose and voting Hillary that I've yet read in any
blog or media comments page. Everything you've said is likely to come to pass in a Trump administration.
President Trump would usher in wholesale land giveaways and Kansas-style gutting of fee revenue
and the commons – not because he affirmatively intended to – but because he'll put a slew of ultra-rightists
in offices throughout the Executive branch. His many 'Undersecretaries of This n' That' would
make it happen while he struts around in public, making yuge promises.
Trump is on record for wanting to open up federal land to the fossil fuel industry etc., he's
campaigning on it now. But yea in many other ways he's also a babe in the woods, and smarter people
with more experience with the political system than him will have the upper hand, but smarter
people in the Republican establishment (including the donors) are up to no good.
The current President, a Democrat, is the one beginning the privatization of national lands
by leasing out advertising. Clinton, who pushed fracking and worships at the public/private partnership
alter, will do the same. I clearly remember her right-wing 'leave it to the states' comment.
There is an apparent trend of projecting what Rs might do when Ds are actually doing it.
+a lot especially for the last sentence. which we also see in the context of the supreme ct.
i think either way we get moderate republicans on the ct that are acceptable to TPTB.
i suppose the main difference i have with voting for the lesser evil (assuming clinton is one)
is that i think the slide has already accelerated out of control, and we need to take drastic
action. she's going to work on privatizing social security, starting more wars in the middle east,
and pushing trade treaties that will hamstring our attempts to deal with global warming. i don't
think obama leaving bush appointees in place was a mistake, i think it was a plan, and clinton
shares his neoliberal values and will listen to the same people. robert kagan indeed.
This. Aside from the identity politics, hotbuttons and dog whistles the two sides are working
for the same bosses: the 0.01% and thus for substantially the same set of perverse ends. That
isn't democracy and I won't be gamed like that and assuming Bernie doesn't find a way, we got
to remember that we came sofa king close to getting it done with an unlikely and little known
candidate with almost no established national base who wore his socialist third rail on his sleeve.
We're so close, and getting closer with every funeral (age strongly correlating with political
outlook presently), the trendlines and dynamics are pretty analogous to the gay marriage thing.
We just need to hold our ground, not support candidates that owe favors to billionaires as a pass/fail
standard and you know what? We'll outnumber them in a few years if we stay authentic and true
to our principles we'll get Bernie's political revolution done. And with the numbers, the only
way we lose momentum and fail is by not adhering to our principles. I'd personally–and everyone
has their own unique ethos–not be adhering to my own principles by voting for Clinton. Once you've
bought into the narrative that your only hope is to support people sneeringly taking bribes from
Wall St. fraudsters, "defense" pork contractors, fossil energy ecocriminals, drug companies holding
people's lives hostage for an incrementally higher profit, etc. etc… once you've decided you're–reluctantly–OK
with supporting that, at that point there you have probably done about the only thing that could
prevent your principles from being realized. That's the real tragedy–and great hope!–that we are
so close to getting there and yet are in huge danger that we won't out of partisan fear selling.
Steady on and hold your ground and have courage, we can win this one by a simple act of collective
will.
This is a good argument. My problem with it is that for over 20 years I've heard some variation
on "vote for the establisment Dem because they will save some remnant of what we're trying to
preserve." It's never an argument that they'll increase what we want to see or improve anything,
only that they'll preserve some remnant of what we once had. And the problem with that argument
is that the neolib Dems instead of preserving any remnants simply trade them away in a slightly
slower fashion, while claiming the GOP made them do it. Having some remnant to trade is the whole
of the neolib Dem's power.
I am tired of voting to preserve scraps when experience shows that the neolib Dem establishment
will throw those scraps under the bus as soon as the optics are right.
I will not vote for another neoliberal Dem whose function seems to be to demoralize the Dems who
will actively work for better conditions.
You express what I think most Democrats generally and Sanders supporters in particular feel.
There does not appear to be any mass movement of Sanders voters to actively work against Clinton.
For at least three years now, this has been Clinton's election to lose. With Trump the GOP nominee,
it is even more likely she wins.
However, what I think is interesting is the trend. The lesser of two evils thinking (and that
is what you are describing, it's all about how uniquely horrible Trump would be) is a little bit
less effective each time the Democratic party goes back to that well. Some Democrats become former
Democrats, while other Democrats keep their party ID but waver due to the particular candidate.
The effect may be imperceptible at first, but with the cumulative weight of decades of this kind
of approach, eventually you build up enough mass to be noticeable. And then enough to really cause
unpredictable things to happen. I don't read Yves as predicting an epic collapse of the Clinton
campaign, but rather, pointing out why the pundit class is so out of touch with the underlying
sea change in our society. If Clinton does lose, it wouldn't be an inexplicable shock. All the
warning signs of turbulence are there, warning signs that the establishment is mocking (or ignoring)
rather than addressing. It is absolutely incredible that Bernie Sanders was able to amass over
40% of the pledged delegates in the Democratic party's nominating process. That's nuts; few had
even heard of the guy a couple years ago, and he did this in the face of the biggest political
machine in the Democratic party. Clinton basically hasn't convinced anyone in the entire campaign.
Her support in the party is about where it was three years ago.
You say sitting out is unthinkable in your universe. Well, the majority of Americans already
do not vote, some because they are prevented from participating, and others because they choose
not to participate. President Obama won convincing electoral college victories in 2008 and 2012,
yet scarcely more than 20% of the American population voted for him. If, at the margins, a few
percent of the electorate in a few places like Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania don't bother voting
this fall, that starts to make things look pretty dicey, even if the bulk of the party faithful
show up determined to stop Trump.
Or to say it differently:
…bankrolled and supported strategically by the brightest and most brilliantly sociopathic
minds in the country…
At this juncture, to which of our three recent baby boomer presidential administrations does
that description not apply?
The very fact that the Executive Branch bureaucracy has so much discretion and control over
life in the US is itself part of the systemic failure of our system. The scope of federal power
is simply too vast for comprehension, nevermind managing credibly.
I have been relating the DNC power dynamic with its voter base to an abusive relationship the
past few months as well. It is nuts to view in this perspective. Beat the snot out of them… they
love you even more!
I agree with Donald, among others here. The intense malice exhibited by Clinton supporters
in comments and op-eds throughout the media reveals their fear and shame. They know what she is,
what Bill was before her, and what most of the Dem nomenklatura is. They know "their" leaders
are no better than Republicans on the critical money and power issues; they vote for them in the
despairing hope that they'll at least be kinder on a few social matters. They hope for buttery
crumbs from the elite table.
The Clinton camp believes she can win with these coopted dead-enders + nonwhite voters, who
have a great deal to lose if Trump wins, and who see her Highness as a burden they can bear. Clinton's
people are likely right on this; she will be Obama's third term. Things may be different in 2020.
Thanks for the article. I will be forwarding it to people I know, moreso to dissuade them from
voting HRC. I also read the comments, and I am surprised by the people who say they will write
in Bernie in the GE. Write ins aren't tallied in my jurisdiction unless it's an official write
in candidate. It's a serious waste of time. No one is going to count the votes for 'Mickey Mouse'
or 'Ken Griffey Jr.' or 'Bernie Sanders'.
Bravo!
I too think that Trump is much more preferable as President than Clinton. That's because I don't
know how much more status quo I - or this country - can take.
So if four years of a carnival-like travesty of a Trump Presidency in necessary as an overdue
shock treatment to the system, then so be it. But I have a hunch the Republic can survive four
years of Trump just fine. Clinton, I'm not so sure.
Thank you Ms Yves Smith for presenting reality - Clinton is a supremely flawed candidate -
to the powers that be so clearly. To give a shout out to some of our eloquent female commentors
(I think at least one of them is an Orange County, NY resident) is nice recognition.
Unfortunately in my neighborhood, Hillary Clinton's supporters if shown that article will propably
pile on the polemics in "Politico's" comment section.
Here are samples of my conversations with neighbors:
Me: "You have to admire how Senator Sanders is funding his campaign."
Retort1: "He's taking money from a Nurses PAC!"
Retort2: "I'd be pissed if he spent my donation to travel to the Vatican!"
Me: "Should not health care be a right?"
Retorts ad Infinitum: "How do we pay for it?"
Me: "A good part of my family is Canadian, who by their guile and whit seem to have coped with
the onerous taxes for single payer health care. And the difference in living standards between
Canada and the US, despite Canada getting gutted by NAFTQ too are diverging rapidly. So great
is that divergence, my wife and I cannot afford to move back."
Reaction in general: Disbelief.
Still your article is helpful! If only to state the case that HRC is incompetent, corrupt and
probably unelectable. I think in time some will find it persuasive rather than offensive.
Personally, I'm not sure why anyone would vote for Trump or Clinton. Count me as another regular
reader who will vote their values and vote for Stein, over either of the right-authoritarian candidates
in the race.
Thanks for getting this article out to the MSM. It is unfortunate that our neoliberal thought
collective has brought us to the practical choice between the lesser of two merchants.
Personally, I am helping to get Jill Stein on the ballot in Illinois fully aware of the financial
weakness of the Green Party and the structural impediments of first-past-the-post/winner-take-all
voting system in the US. That being said, I am hoping for the collective wisdom of the voters
to perpetuate gridlock by not giving one party control over the Executive and Legislative branches
until the egalitarians can unite under a single party.
f Trump declares all out war on the TPP, and pisses off Paul Ryan and the GOP establishment,
which he must do to have any chance at all – Hillary gets caught with her hands all over the top
secret TPP "gold standard" negotiation process, Bernie is left with the winning hand.
Ryan just announced that he will vote Trump. The deal has been made. Look at the Donald's official
site, look at the people he says he respects, look at the people he surrounds himself with. He
has obviously assured the "Conservatives" that he will indeed do as they do. I am willing to bet
there will be no great shakeup or tearing down of anything, just more of the same. Voting for
a Clinton is not a choice I can make in good conscience. Some think voting for a third party is
"throwing away your vote". I think voting for someone, or something you despise, is the true wasting
of your vote. Perhaps each of us should just write in our own name! Strike a blow for government
"of and by the people"!
Excellent summation. Brava!
The screeching in the Politico article's comments section sounds like people protecting their
rice bowls and/or living in a bubble. The screeching proves your point.
Thanks for this post and article.
the comments are amusing. they seem to be mostly plants, as they are mostly quite similar in
tone and slightly "off" to my ear–they do read like stuff written by paid hacks. i doubt they
will persuade anyone to switch his/her vote to clinton. deliberately offensive but not genuinely
offensive. canned outrage! no substantive criticism of sanders or support of hrc. rage on, flunkies…
enjoy the gravy train while it lasts.
Thomas Franks argues that the Dems became the party of the professionals and meritocrats, basically
people who have succeeded at playing the game set up by the neoliberals of both parties. In doing
so, they learned to ignore the pain their policies inflicted on the working people, and whatever's
left of the middle class. HRC and the dems assumed that this class would support her, that it
would be her base.
What Yves says is that it just ain't so. And here's a reason. Once you succeed, if you are
honest with yourself, you realize that it was largely a matter of luck. You partnered well, you
and your family didn't get sick, you didn't get laid off in a downsizing, you didn't fall for
the stupid investments offered by your broker, and, of course, you won the gene lottery. You know
you worked hard, you played by the rules, but if life is a game, you didn't pull the Go Directly
To Jail, Do Not Pass Go card. Once you see that, the rest of the game becomes obvious and you
see the total unfairness that some have to lose if some are going to win huge.
HRC and the Clintons and the DC pundits, none of them see that. They believe that everyone
gets their just reward, because that's how this country works. So do the Trumps and the rest of
the Republicans. Voting for them just cements their view of themselves as better than everyone.
Maybe this reason won't penetrate the bubble surrounding the Dem Power Elites, but maybe the
fear of alienating this crucial constituency will.
To not vote for Hillary or to vote for a third-party candidate or to not vote at all is fine.
But to vote for Trump is imbecilic. The idea that a Trump administration would be no worse than
a Clinton administration is delusional. There is at least one and possibly three Supreme Court
justices up for grabs. Does anybody seriously think Trumps picks for SC will be "as bad" as Clinton's??
So-called scary Supreme Court nominations doesn't cut it for me anymore–not since Obama nominated
Merrick Garland, and probably even before then. While I don't intend to vote for Trump, I also
don't think that if he is elected he will have an easy time pushing through any SC nominees. I
can only think of one time when Hillary took a political action I approved of so, no, I don't
think her nominees will be sufficiently liberal for me. Congress can override the SC anytime it
wants to, even if it hasn't wanted to in recent years. I'm more concerned about a totally corrupt
political system than I am about the SC in particular.
Oh, please go mess with them a bit, particularly ones that have only ad hominem attacks. They
need to be told that's a tell they can't argue a case on its merits.
Please give your reasoning as to why you think Trump presidency would somehow taint an already
tainted Supreme Court? Im seriously asking. Because Hillary will undoubtedly pick the most pro-bank,
pro-elite, neoliberal candidate there is.
There's this idea that somehow, a smarter and more subtle sociopath is worse than a narcissistic
possibly racist idiot. Hillary knows how to subvert American politics to her own gain and runs
a large charity fraud the like of which, had it been part of the Nixon reign, would have possibly
landed her in prison. Trump doesn't know shit. Therefore, do you want the assured neoliberal,
pro-elitist, TTIP outcome or the wildcard? We have had the first for 8 years now and just look
at the state of America:
1). Longest running war of all time
2). Healthcare costs at all time high
3). Lowest rate of employment
4). Lowest rate of business creation
5). Consolidation across all industries (Media, Pharma, Military, Manufacturing, Healthcare)
6). Constant harassment of whistleblowers and journalists
7). Diminishing freedoms
8). Highest incarceration rate with no sign of stopping
9). Police militarization
10). A return to pre-Housing Bubble subprime debt
11). ZERO prosecutions on Wall Street (Obama's biggest crime, imho)
etc etc
I mean ffs, how is Trump going to do anything worse than what's already being done? He will
never build the wall, obviously, that was said to get anti-immigration votes. He will obviously
do as little for the minorities as Obama did (which was, once again, nothing). At least, like
Ive written before, Trump symbolizes a large middle finger to the DC crowd, a crowd which has
a smaller moral compass than anybody on the planet.
You keep buying into the People's magazine view of the world: that Trump is some crazy idiot
racist and therefore should never be allowed into the oval office. The irony is that Bill Clinton
is a serial rapist sociopathic liar, and Hillary is a corrupt sociopathic liar, but because they've
been in politics for years, you think that just being a politician somehow sheds legitimacy. It
DOESNT AT ALL. In fact, you could make the case that the fact the Clinton's are career politicians
is actually why they should absolutely not be allowed to become President. Has the last 3 career
politician presidents taught you nothing?
Bernie has to go all the way. He needs to be the next President of the USA. He can't stop at
the convention. There is no alternative. It truly is Bernie or Bust at this point. Neither Trump
or Hillary provide any hope for a better future whatsoever.
Yves: I posted this in "Comments" on your previous June 2 entry but it seems to have gotten
lost between moderation and appearance. I am not looking for double entry; it seems relevant to
both, however, with a last sentence tacked on for the present entry.
--------
I am almost 70 years old, born and raised in New York City, still living in a near suburb.
Somehow, somewhere along the road to my 70th year I feel as if I have been gradually transported
to an almost entirely different country than the land of my younger years. I live painfully now
in an alien land, a place whose habits and sensibilities I sometimes hardly recognize, while unable
to escape from memories of a place that no longer exists. There are days I feel as I imagine a
Russian pensioner must feel, lost in an unrecognizable alien land of unimagined wealth, power,
privilege, and hyper-glitz in the middle of a country slipping further and further into hopelessness,
alienation, and despair.
I am not particularly nostalgic. Nor am I confusing recollection with sentimental yearnings
for a youth that is no more. But if I were a contemporary Rip Van Winkle, having just awakened
after, say, 30-40 years, I would not recognize my beloved New York City. It would be not just
the disappearance of the old buildings, Penn Station, of course, Madison Square Garden and its
incandescent bulb marquee on 50th and 8th announcing NYU vs. St. John's, and the WTC, although
I always thought of the latter as "new" until it went down. Nor would it be the disappearance
of all the factories, foundries, and manufacturing plants, the iconic Domino Sugar on the East
River, the Wonder Bread factory with its huge neon sign, the Swingline Staples building in Long
Island City that marked passage to and from the East River tunnel on the railroad, and my beloved
Schaeffer Beer plant in Williamsburg, that along with Rheingold, Knickerbocker, and a score of
others, made beer from New York taste a little bit different.
It wouldn't be the ubiquitous new buildings either, the Third Avenue ghostly glass erected
in the 70's and 80's replacing what once was the most concentrated collection of Irish gin mills
anywhere. Or the fortress-like castles built more recently, with elaborate high-ceilinged lobbies
decorated like a kind of gross, filthy-wealthy Versailles, an aesthetically repulsive style that
shrieks "power" in a way the neo-classical edifices of our Roman-loving founders never did. Nor
would it even be the 100-story residential sticks, those narrow ground-to-clouds skyscraper condominiums
proclaiming the triumph of globalized capitalism with prices as high as their penthouses, driven
ever upward by the foreign billionaires and their obsession with burying their wealth in Manhattan
real estate.
It is not just the presence of new buildings and the absence of the old ones that have this
contemporary Van Winkle feeling dyslexic and light-headed. The old neighborhoods have disintegrated
along with the factories, replaced by income segregated swatches of homogenous "real estate" that
have consumed space, air, and sunlight while sucking the distinctiveness out of the City. What
once was the multi-generational home turf for Jewish, Afro-American, Puerto Rican, Italian, Polish
and Czech families is now treated as simply another kind of investment, stocks and bonds in steel
and concrete. Mom's Sunday dinners, clothes lines hanging with newly bleached sheets after Monday
morning wash, stickball games played among parked cars, and evenings of sitting on the stoop with
friends and a transistor radio listening to Mel Allen call Mantle's home runs or Alan Freed and
Murray the K on WINS 1010 playing Elvis, Buddy Holly, and The Drifters, all gone like last night's
dreams.
Do you desire to see the new New York? Look no further than gentrifying Harlem for an almost
perfect microcosm of the city's metamorphosis, full of multi-million condos, luxury apartment
renovations, and Maclaren strollers pushed by white yuppie wife stay-at-homes in Marcus Garvey
Park. Or consider the "new" Lower East Side, once the refuge of those with little material means,
artists, musicians, bums, drug addicts, losers and the physically and spiritually broken - my
kind of people. Now its tenements are "retrofitted" and remodeled into $4000 a month apartments
and the new residents are Sunday brunching where we used to score some Mary Jane.
There is the "Brooklyn brand", synonymous with "hip", and old Brooklyn neighborhoods like Red
Hook and South Brooklyn (now absorbed into so desirable Park Slope), and Bushwick, another former
outpost of the poor and the last place I ever imagined would be gentrified, full of artists and
hipsters driving up the price of everything. Even large sections of my own Queens and the Bronx
are affected (infected?). Check out Astoria, for example, neighborhood of my father's family,
with more of the old ways than most but with rents beginning to skyrocket and starting to drive
out the remaining working class to who knows where.
Gone is almost every mom and pop store, candy stores with their egg creams and bubble gum cards
and the Woolworth's and McCrory's with their wooden floors and aisles containing ordinary blue
collar urgencies like thread and yarn, ironing boards and liquid bleach, stainless steel utensils
of every size and shape. Where are the locally owned toy and hobby stores like Jason's in Woodhaven
under the el, with Santa's surprises available for lay-away beginning in October? No more luncheonettes,
cheap eats like Nedicks with hot dogs and paper cones of orange drink, real Kosher delis with
vats of warm pastrami and corned beef cut by hand, and the sacred neighborhood "bar and grill",
that alas has been replaced by what the kids who don't know better call "dive bars", the detestable
simulacra of the real thing, slick rooms of long slick polished mahogany, a half-dozen wide screen
TV's blaring mindless sports contests from all over the world, over-priced micro-brews, and not
a single old rummy in sight?
Old Rip searches for these and many more remembered haunts, what Ray Oldenburg called the "great
good places" of his sleepy past, only to find store windows full of branded, high-priced, got-to-have
luxury-necessities (necessary if he/she is to be certified cool, hip, and successful), ridiculously
overpriced "food emporia", high and higher-end restaurants, and apparel boutiques featuring hardened
smiles and obsequious service reserved for those recognized by celebrity or status.
Rip notices too that the visible demographic has shifted, and walking the streets of Manhattan
and large parts of Brooklyn, he feels like what walking in Boston Back Bay always felt like, a
journey among an undifferentiated mass of privilege, preppy or 'metro-sexed' 20 and 30-somethings
jogging or riding bicycles like lean, buff gods and goddesses on expense accounts supplemented
by investments enriched by yearly holiday bonuses worth more than Rip earned in a lifetime.
Sitting alone on a park bench by the river, Rip reflects that more than all of these individual
things, however, he despairs of a city that seems to have been reimagined as a disneyfied playground
of the privileged, offering endless ways to self-gratify and philistinize in a clean, safe (safest
big city in U.S., he heard someone say), slick, smiley, center-of-the-world urban paradise, protected
by the new centurions (is it just his paranoia or do battle-ready police seem to be everywhere?).
Old ethnic neighborhoods are filled with apartment buildings that seem more like post-college
"dorms", tiny studios and junior twos packed with three or four "singles" roommates pooling their
entry level resources in order to pay for the right to live in "The City". Meanwhile the newer
immigrants find what place they can in Kingsbridge, Corona, Jamaica, and Cambria Heights, far
from the city center, even there paying far too much to the landlord for what they receive.
New York has become an unrecognizable place to Rip, who can't understand why the accent-less
youngsters keep asking him to repeat something in order to hear his quaint "Brooklyn" accent,
something like the King's English still spoken on remote Smith Island in the Chesapeake, he guesses
.
Rip suspects that this "great transformation" (apologies to Polanyi) has coincided, and is somehow
causally related, to the transformation of New York from a real living city into, as the former
Mayor proclaimed, the "World Capital" of financialized commerce and all that goes with it.
"Financialization", he thinks, is not the expression of an old man's disapproval but a way
of naming a transformed economic and social world. Rip is not an economist. He reads voraciously
but, as an erstwhile philosopher trained to think about the meaning of things, he often can't
get his head around the mathematical model-making explanations of the economists that seem to
dominate the more erudite political and social analyses these days. He has learned, however, that
the phenomenon of "capitalism" has changed along with his city and his life.
Money, it seems to him, has somehow changed its role. It has "increased" (is that possible,
he asks?) while at the same time it has become concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. It appears
to seek to become an autonomous and dominating sector of economic life, functionally separated
from production of real things, almost all of which seem to come from faraway places. "Real" actually
begins to change its meaning, another topic more interesting still. This devotion to the world
of money-making-money seems to have obsessed the lives of many of the most "important" Americans.
Entire TV networks are devoted to it. They talk about esoteric financial instruments that to the
ordinary citizen look more like exotically placed bets-on-credit in the casino than genuine ways
to grow real-world business, jobs, wages, and family income. The few who are in position to master
the game live material lives that were beyond what almost any formerly "wealthy" man or woman
in Rip's prior life could even imagine
.
Above all else is the astronomical rise in wealth and income inequality. Rip recalls that growing
up in the 1950's, the kids on his block included, along with firemen, cops, and insurance men
dads (these were virtually all one-parent income households), someone had a dad who worked as
a stock broker. Yea, living on the same block was a "Wall Streeter". Amazingly democratic, no?
Imagine, people of today, a finance guy drinking at the same corner bar with the sanitation guy.
Rip recalls that Aristotle had some wise and cautionary words in his Politics concerning the stability
of oligarchic regimes.
Last year I drove across America on blue highways mostly. I stayed in small towns and cities,
Zanesville, St. Charles, Wichita, Pratt, Dalhart, Clayton, El Paso, Abilene, Clarksdale, and many
more. I dined for the most part in local taverns, sitting at the bar so as to talk with the local
bartender and patrons who are almost always friendly and talkative in these spaces. Always and
everywhere I heard similar stories as my story of my home town. Not so much the specifics (there
are no "disneyfied" Lubbocks or Galaxes out there, although Oxford, MS comes close) but in the
sadness of men and women roughly my age as they recounted a place and time – a way of life – taken
out from under them, so that now their years are filled with decayed and dead downtowns, children
gone away and lost to either the relentless rootlessness of the trans-national economy or the
virtual hell-world of meth and opioids and heroin and unending underemployed hopelessness.
I am not a trained economist. My graduate degrees were in philosophy. My old friends call me
an "Eric Hoffer", who back in the day was known as the "longshoreman philosopher". I have been
trying for a long time now to understand the silent revolution that has been pulled off right
under my nose, without any "consent of the governed", no debate, no explanations, no excuses for
the replacement of a world that certainly had its flaws (how could I forget the civil rights struggle
and the crime of Viet Nam; I was a part of these things) but was, let us say, different. Among
you or your informed readers, is there anyone who can suggest a book or books or author(s) who
can help me understand how all of this came about, with no public debate, no argument, no protest,
no nothing? I would be very much appreciative.
P.S. If Bernie doesn't run, I'll sit this one out. The hell with the rest of them. I am sick
and tired of frauds.
Heaven forbid (no sarcasm intended) and apologies to Yves hereby submitted. But just so that
you understand the system here (I have posted numerous times before although not within the last
year), the comment was submitted at 10:06. It was actually posted around 3 pm, about 10 minutes
after I resubmitted it here at this entry. Honestly, I kind of forgot how long a "mediation" can
take for a new or (in my case) old out-of-date commenter. If there was a way of pulling it I would
have done so. I have had some recent computer issues and thought it might have been somehow "eaten"
before getting to the right place.
you got a fair number of responses you should go read them..I replied at 2. As to moderation
I think closing your browser and then opening it again keeps your computer from throwing up a
cached version so if you see "comment in moderation", after your edit time expires close the window
and open it again and your post will show up within a couple of hours at most
yesterday it took about 5 hours but that was the first time it took more than a few minutes.
since the post was pretty inoffensive i figured it was some kind of glitch.
Hi Al
I have the same feelings about the changes to my city, Philadelphia. There are and have been a
lot of social scientists, not economists who have been tracking the changes.
Here is one of them with his bi-monthly comments, which I think is a great synchronicity with
Yves hoisted comments. Most people feel we have crossed a Bright White Line, it's different now,
too much so. Some are very clear about the changes others feel its consequences and respond accordingly.
In art, especially popular music, there are chronicles of the changes and for me and my slice
of the generations, Bruce Springsteen has written more clearly about it than anyone else. His
double album, THE RIVER is a snapshot of the decay of industrial America and its workers and their
families. In song after song, the economy comes up, jobs leaving that are never coming back, and
people who have given up once America gave up on them. As he says in the song ATLANTIC CITY: "
I've got debts no honest man can pay".
Here is Immanuel Wallerstein's June 1 comment: The Increasingly Unstable United States.
He is known for his World System Analysis. In this view, the world has core areas, semi-periphery
areas and peripheral areas. The US, The European Union, China, Japan would be inside of the core
areas of the global system. The semi-periphery would be nations such as S Korea and the periphery
would be The Philippines, N Africa, and others that are exporting their wealth to the core of
the system with little of value in return to help them develop.
What is important to realize is that even within core areas, such as the USA, are peripheral
areas, such rural Appalachia or urban poverty districts. The problem for the USA and why we are
seeing a Bright White Line that has been crossed, is that the terrible conditions once permanently
relegated, contained to the peripheral areas of impoverishment in the USA are expanding outward
into the formerly carefree communities. The kind of places where after there is a brutal murder
or rape or mass shooting is called a quiet place where this kind of thing never happens.
The big winners in cities are places where educated, socially homogeneous groups are massing
to replicate the former stability that was spreading outward up until the 1970s. The War on Poverty
has been replaced by a War On Drugs and now that is starting to be unwound. The New Deal is being
erased by the Art of The Deal and The Great Society is being decommissioned so America Can Be
Great Again. That and too much to comment about without writing a book.
Be patient with the site, it has been through the wringer with technical woes due to the 3rd
party providers and Word Press and a lot of other dot com details that I really don't know enough
about other than to say our daily use of the site tends to overwhelm it.
I will either vote for Bernie if he wins the nomination or a third party candidate. I think
Clinton is doomed by the email scandal.
I more or less meet the description of NC commenters in the Politico article but to attribute
that description to all NC readers would probably require a survey.
Concerning Trump's election bid, it reminds me of the ascension of Newt Gingrich to the House
speakership in the 1990's. At the time there were complaints about his uncivil style. I think
corruption became worse while Gingrich was speaker. Of course, Gingrich was a Washington insider
and Trump is not, but perhaps they are similar men. The big question with Trump, I believe, is
the extent to which he would be controlled by the deep state, as Obama seems to be.
I read the Politico piece, but the "Show comments" link no longer works on the story. I wonder
if they pulled the whole comments section? Every time I clicked it, it just took me too the menu
at the bottom of the page.
Too bad, I wanted to get a sense of the craziness I knew would ensue.
Depends on the browser you are using. I can't pull up Comments with Opera, but I can with Firefox.
Also, you have to wait a few seconds for Comments to appear.
just saw hrc's headline at huffpo and can't help but see it as a reaction to blur NC's politico
post.
i'll probably go libertarian unless the greens get on the ballot in enough states. think what
a Sanders MENTION of the Johhson/Weld ticket would do at the Dem convention-
I guess it's possible a number of Sanders supporters get syphoned off by the Libertarian, but
I suspect the Venn diagram of Sanders => Green => Libertarian lines up better for Jill Stein.
That'll be my vote.
Who are "you"? You have everywhere to go once you have dismissed the status quo order of society
as a stipulation. Indeed, the best days of bourgeois liberalism (for the greater good) are behind
it.
Thanks for writing such a great piece. You said it all. Personally, "the lesser of two evils"
argument expired for me when Obama started campaigning for TTP and TTIP, not to mention not going
after the Wall Street criminals. Most Americans, with their backs pressed against the wall, are
realizing that the two political parties in power now do not give a damn about us. Hence, Bernie
and Trump and these crazy primaries. If the leadership in the two parties think they can continue
on creating and promoting an agenda that only benefits the 1% and the people that support them,
they will find that the public will consign both parties to the dustbins of history. That day
cannot come quickly enough for me.
I'm both appalled and astounded by the many suggestions here to vote for Jill Stein and the
Green Party. The Green Party does not want your votes. Neither does Jill Stein. If they did, they
would act like a real, functioning party. (Which they are not, being instead a plaything for dilettantes,
who would rather see it in a permanent vegetative state than lose their titles and insider status.
See: Institutions, Iron Law of.)
I am what the political pros call a "high propensity voter". I vote in every election, from
presidential down to local municipal offices and school board. Never - NEVER, not once ever -
have I:
– Had a Green Party candidate for any office, or a canvasser working on their behalf, knock
on my door;
– Received any election materials from the GP or one of its candidates in my mailbox or on
my doorknob.
– Seen a lawn sign for any of their candidates.
By contrast, I have participated in nine local ballot measure campaigns and at least three
campaigns for local office. I know from experience how we raised money (almost all in small contributions),
mobilized to collect petition signatures, canvassed door-to-door during the election, and managed
to do at least a few mailings in every campaign. It can be done.
You want to be treated like a party, act like one.
I live in outer suburban Philadelphia ( western Montgomery county) . Previously I lived in
the Ahwatukee foothills area in Phoenix AZ. I have had Green Party candidates and surrogates at
my door and on the phone( live not recorded) many many many times for many many years! They work
their tails off trying to meet people on the grass roots level. Perhaps it is just where you live…
They seem serious as a heart attack to me-
Green Party behavior varies widely from state to state, even more so that Dem State Parties.
There is a critical mass of seats in State legislatures that is necessary for a smaller/"3rd"
party to achieve critical mass in that legislative context, and the push into the Federal Congressional
level. Before that, absent a reliable voice on the Congressional side, a Green presidential candidate
has little real potential to deliver political positives for the nation; and voters collectively
don't have to be particularly sophisticated to recognise this.
One of the strengths of the Tea Party has been an early willingness to engage at the local
political levels (municipal, state admin). They also had the benefit of being able to operate
within the context of the established Republican network. For decades the Greens (and various
Libertarian incarnations) have tried to leap higher than their growth at local levels would allow,
and attempted to stand on ideological distinction/purity relative to established Dem(/Rep) institutions.
I hope the Sanders movement can recognize the strategic benefits of remaining, at least nominally,
within the Dem identity.
Actually, I was canvassed by a Green. Happened as I was heading home from work yesterday.
Guy was trying to get on our local election ballot, and I couldn't understand why he was canvassing
at the spot where he was standing. Not what you'd call a high-traffic area. And, get this, there's
a high-traffic area just two blocks away. Easy-peasy to walk there.
Well, wouldn't you know it. Today's FB post from him was short and sad. Saying that he didn't
collect enough signatures to get on the ballot.
So, Jess, I'm going to echo what you just said. If you want to be treated like a party, act
like one.
Whether you regarded him as a spoiler or not, Ralph Nader's 2000 campaign and its aftermath
put a big downer on the Green Party. I live in an especially liberal neck of the woods and I remember
just how annoying I found all the Nader supporters in the run up to 2000. The brand, such as it
was, suffered after that election. And I expect they've had a really difficult time attracting
talented and resourceful politicians to their cause.
The Green party should be looking at this as an opportunity to recruit progressives and move
the Greens into the mainstream. It would mean convincing young progressives to run as Green candidate
rather than as Democrats. Standing on the right street corners now that they have a rare window
of opportunity.
I would see my vote for Jill Stein as a way to send a message that there are people who support
what the Greens stand for and that there is an alternative to supporting a corrupt Democratic
party that only pays lip service to the issues that matter most to progressives.
Here's another way I've been thinking about it, just as only Nixon can go to China, what is
that only Hillary can do? Cut social security, sign another free trade agreement, start another
war, roll back financial regulations?
Conversely, what is I that only Trump can do? Raise the deficit, increase government spending
on infrastructure, end some wars, go after free riding plutocrats and corporations?
Somebody mentioned Kucinich. Funny how caving in on Ocare ended his career. Imagine if he'd
held out, maintained his previous position. He would either be where Bernie is today, or maybe
Bernie's for-sure VP pick. Instead he sold out, chickened out, and is, deservedly, no longer visible,
much less relevant.
Ocare had nothing to do with his political demise. Rep. Nancy Pelosi changed his district to
one that guaranteed his defeat as punishment for not kowtowing to Israel. Rep. Cynthia McKinney
and other Democratic members of congress, mostly black, have met a similar fate for similar reasons.
Correctamundo. Seems to me another white knight fell off his horse in that joust. Advocate
of single payer? Septuagenarian from Vermont? The name'll come to me …
Long out front, outspoken, and practically alone, then a single vote, and off with his head.
Harsh.
The virtuous are punished and the wicked rewarded. Who knows, if the media had done their job
and covered all presidential candidates equally the Kucinich and Nader campaigns might have actually
got somewhere.
Yet another college educated, middle-upper income professional here who refuses to support
Hillary. Been voting Green or Dem my adult life (40s). I see Jill Stein is on the ballot in Michigan.
Perhaps, I'll vote for her again (as I did in '12). I voted for Obama in '08 and came to regret
it the very next month when he picked his transition team. It became clear he was a world-class
confidence man at that point. I have no doubt Clinton will pick a similar or worse team for her
inner circle.
My town, Marquette, went solidly for Bernie March 1st. The few R's are mostly Trump supporters.
Living in a working class neighborhood makes it easy to keep in touch with reality. Lots of people
are struggling here just like everywhere.
I really don't think it will ever get "back to normal". I think in 20 years we wake up and
find we're Mexico (and it could be worse). The good news is, we are headed backwards in time whether
we like it or not to a simpler life!
Yves' piece could have us all–not just the Beltway Dems–questioning assumptions this election.
There's plenty of 'freaking out' [warranted] happening, but that's not a frame of mind conducive
to sound judgment–something to remember when voting. HRC's record is proof that a smart person
can make extremely poor choices. Her consistency in that regard is one reason she doesn't deserve
the Sanders vote.
The field isn't limited to Clinton or Trump now, nor will it be in November. I don't see good
reasons to support either of them, including sending a message to the Democrats. Raising a finger
via a Trump vote is akin to cutting off the nose to spite the face.
Remaining tethered to these failed parties, with their failed ideologies, while the world burns,
is the trap.
God Bless Bernie, but c'mon, let's be real-he knew what he was up against, and he didn't hire
top-tier talent to run his campaign (a comic book store manager-seriously?!?)
Our great experiment has failed miserbaly-it's time for a Constitutional Convention that has
but one goal-blow up the current election system and institute a Parlimenterian System like the
rest of civilized society has. When our neighbors to the north were bitterly complaining about
how long their last election was (a whole six months!), we need to burn our political process
to the ground with fire and salt it.
what miserable failure are you referring to? there is more energy and more recognition of the
actual political realities than i've seen since the 60's.
I honestly don't know what "deserve" has to do with it. People make voting out to be a far
more personal and moral act than it actually is. It's not a means of expression either. It's a
pragmatic act that in some small way brings about a particular outcome from a small set of possible
outcomes.
I voted for Bernie in the MA primary, and he is my preferred choice by far of any candidate
in this election, but I think "Bernie or Bust" is silly and even a bit immature.
Voting is any number of things, depending the voter and the historical circumstances. Voting
is an act whose influence on the voter and on history is not limited to a particular outcome.
Just read your Politico piece… Thanks! And – You go girl!
From another 60-something, highly educated, well-paid, white collar schmoo feminist who will
vote for Trump if the alternative option is any Clinton "Democrat".
This was a good piece- I think the comfortable need a few truth bricks thrown through the windows
of their glassy towers on occasion. Voting for the most ideologically correct third party might
be the moral option, but the volatility option of threatening their jugular with a Trump vote
is the tempting one here.
I might not have the depth of experience or breadth of knowledge of many here- I'm just a broke
kid in Ohio- but I've been reading this for years and I've learned more from the news and commentary
here than I did in an entire political 'science' degree.
From speaking to my coworkers, I can tell you that Yves hits it on the head. "Feel the Bern
or burn the field" isn't just the whine of some college bros- I hear it from the middle aged dads
I work with, older women with kids my age.
The rest started with Sanders- and seem to be leaning Trump in the absence of the option. Volatility,
it is. They like and trust Sanders.
Come to think of it, the only people I know who actually strongly like Hillary are my fiancee's
parents… nearly retired professional degree holders on a nice state pension. I love them to death,
but they're definitely fans of some Democratic party that I cannot relate to. I'd say it's a generation
gap, but I know they aren't the ones pulling the ladder up behind them. The people they support,
however….
I mostly agree with you, Yves. But maybe, Gov. Wald is right. With Trump in power, it might
be like Anne Frank in the attic. I think there's a certain internal momentum to the Trump campaign;
he will probably start to build his wall and also start a campaign to deport illegal aliens. Obama
deported at the border. Trump would probably start a massive initiative to deport people who have
settled into the country. Also, the cops could become even more repressive, believing it's Trump
time.
Trump to use the old Marxist phrase " might heighten the contradictions." He could at the same
time crush any resistance movement.
On the other hand, Hillary is basically a crackpot realist and might start WWIII.
A beautifully written article. I can't tell if it was so clear to me because of the way it
was written or because I read NC articles so frequently but I'm pretty sure either way it was
beautifully written.
Add me to the list of people that is on the Death to Neoliberalism platform. As an anarchist
I have done nothing but write in gag votes for years, but for the first time since the age of
18 I'm contemplating casting an actual vote, because the unknown evil looks more appealing than
Cold Warrior Killary.
And that's my biggest problem with a new Clinton regime. She's promising, incredibly, more
war in the Middle East and across the arc of crisis and steamrolling to a new Cold War with the
Russians. This will make lost of northeastern and west coast billionaires even richer, but do
nothing for the working classes (aside from employing their kids when they turn 18 and shipping
them off to die in some hellhole). Preventing the permanent militarist state is the most important
issue facing the US at the moment. It's driving the destruction.
wow. I never even heard of Politico. I guess it must be a web site about politics or something.
Why would anybody post comments at a nowhere website about politics? That doesn't make any
sense to me at all. It seems like an absurd waste of time. Unless they get paid for it. Wow. That's
even more incredible. To get paid for ranting your nonsense on a nowhere website about politics.
How bored can you be to do that to waste time? haven't they ever heard of YouTube?
What's the point of arguing about this stuff anyway? That's a rhetorical question because there
isn't one.
It's all so obvious! what's there to argue about? The only hope is divine intervention that
raises the consciousness of the hacks out there who think being professional and snotty is an
achievement and a virtue. Arguing won't do it. You need to send thoughts into the nooushphere.
put your hands on the sides of your head like two radio telescopes and look at the sky and shoot
some mind missles up there, into the nousphere. That's better than wasting time debating. Just
be sure to go outside or you'll hit the ceiling and it won't go anywhere
The only real question worth debating is who will be Bernie's VP when he's president. He'd
need somebody. Maybe that Hawaiian senator, Tulsi Gabbard or something like that, I can't remember
exactly. There's a woman for you. There must be a few hundred people who could be Bernie's VP
and be better than almost any party hack on television ranting their yada into the camera with
that fake smile they have. That smile makes me think "liar". I don't know why but always do, and
so I stopped watching TV talk shows entirely, even on Sunday. I felt like I was having my mind
abused by a spectacle whose sordidness was so unbecoming to human dignity that watching was itself
a form of participation. All right, that's being 'too sensitive" but I don't frankly care. Also
there's YouTube, where you can watch music videos instead - if you want to waste time like you
would if you watched the talk shows
Maybe they should just cancel the election and everybody go home and think hard about their
own soul. then come back in two years and start over. Lots of hacks would have nervous breakdowns
and wouldn't be able to vote due to emotional issues & Bernie would be elected in a landslide.
Even without a VP. There's a point where it doesn't even matter when everybody has a soul. You
don't even need politicians then because everything is above that, at that point and people act
naturally in ways that don't require illusions and conceits.
There was a piece on Brain Pickings this week on How to compose a successful critical
commentary , which I think you've embodied quite well in your article . It's part of
what differentiates a fast, automatic, emotional and reflexive attack of an argument from a slower,
more skillful refutation using logic, analysis and evidence grounded in a solid understanding
of the issues. Daniel Kahneman also comes to mind for his writing on what he labeled 'System 1'
and 'System 2' thinking in his bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow.
"the best antidote [for the] tendency to caricature one's opponent"
How to compose a successful critical commentary:
________________________________________
1. You should attempt to re-express your target's position so clearly, vividly, and fairly
that your target says, "Thanks, I wish I'd thought of putting it that way.
2. You should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general
or widespread agreement).
3. You should mention anything you have learned from your target.
4. Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.
- a distillation of Daniel Dennett, "Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking"
Perusing the comments, it looks like a very shallow commentariat gene pool over at Brand X.
You and Lambert are wise to cultivate civilized diversity of opinion. When it comes to a blog
w/open comments, not sure what could be more boring than a superficial and ignorant opinion monoculture
I've been reading Naked Capitalism for 7 years now, it's an absolute great site and community,
I've learned so much. In 2008 I was very naive, I voted for Obama thinking he was the next
FDR, I was wrong. I know some folks have objections to MMT, but with Bernie having Stephanie Kelton
and Bill Black on his team, I have the hope he understands, and even though he hasn't communicated
in the MMT vocabulary, he gives me great hope that he realizes that there are so many things that
can be done, so many problems that we can work to make better.
I guess that's why I have no reason to vote for Hillary Clinton, there's no dreams, no hopes,
no understanding of what can be done, it's all blame the Republicans, we can't do anything, there's
nothing we can do. I get no sense that she understands MMT, she has no vision or understanding.
She can't see.
Loyal NC reader/commentator since 2008, fit your reader profile pretty well, except I take
down tower cranes for a living instead of pushing a pencil. I've always been vocal here in the
combox about my preferences: Sanders>Trump>Clinton-except I'm not holding my nose as I pull the
lever for the Donald. I'm looking forward to it, and confusion to all Politico hacks, DC insiders
and Clinton operatives. May their beards fall out.
line space is limited or many modern readers give up, but I wish there could have been at least
a line on her threat to our youth, even our existence. Bill bombed a pharma factory in Sudan
to distract the masses, and Team Barry O' Hill-Billy destabilized Libya , Syria, and the Ukraine
- yet the She-devil wants to sell Trump as being less safe with the atomic football. What would
she do to avoid being impeached? Even the unthinkable becomes possible with her.
"... But the panic is also a clear indication, and perhaps as important, another message, not just to Clinton but to Team Dem, that the Administration can't, or won't but is making it seem like can't, do what it takes to save Hillary's bacon. ..."
"... The fact that there is an independent effort, completely outside the Administration's control, pursuing the server mess, also makes it riskier for the DoJ to do nothing if Judicial Watch exposes damning documents. ..."
"... The Democrats don't have any dirt on Trump the Republicans didn't have. Trump is a referendum on the establishment. The establishment can't attack him, and any attacks too similar to the very publicized establishment attacks will be dismissed. ..."
"... Maybe not Mittens and Bill Kristol at this point, the GOP elites will show loyalty because anything less will risk their own position. The base will remove GOP elites over certain sins. The Teabaggers cleaned the GOP caucus of TARP voters. ..."
"... "Trump is a referendum on the establishment." ..."
"... That's the best one-sentence explanation for his success that I've seen. ..."
"... That is certainly the narrative Trump wants. What I find the height of black, despairing comedy is that anyone believes it. In addition to being completely untrustworthy and self-centered, Trump has little to gain by overthrowing the status quo, and has given many signs that he will continue business as usual, only with a slightly different crew of low-rent elites in charge at the top. ..."
"... No matter what he says, Trump is not leading some sort of revolution to abolish the Empire and replace it with something else, much less something better. He just wants a shortcut to being Emperor. ..."
"... I'm under the impression that if not for the Benghazi investigation, the home server would not have been discovered. However, maybe someone else can confirm that I'm correct. Which, if you think about it, does not actually make sense. The NSA should have known all along. Why on earth she supposed that she could get around the NSA is simply… words fail me. ..."
"... My tin foil hat has always told me Clintonistas may not have worked overly hard for Kerry in 2004, even offering bad advice. Every Winner and Loser column from after the election listed on clear winner, the front runner for the 2008 Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton. Clinton Inc was operating out of crummy digs in Harlem because they couldn't raise money, but the money poured in after the Kerry loss. ..."
"... My only fear re: how Clinton could win in November would be if she and Bill had the juice to help throw 2000 and 2004 to keep the path clear for her. Unless she can steal in the General, she isn't going to be President. That would also explain Obama's focus on caucuses in 2008 - he went after her soft, less stealable underbelly. (I realize there are also less CT explanations for this.) ..."
"... "Maintaining a homebrew server could be written off as a policy violation, rather than a criminal matter. " ..."
"... Given the last 15 years of brutal, if selective, prosecutions for mishandling materials less sensitive than some of the material on Clinton's servers, I don't think many people will buy that. ..."
"... The elephant in the room is not the private server per se, but the use of it to circumvent any exposure to FOIA requests. The pay-for-play activities of the Secretary with regard to the Foundation can certainly be inferred, and if proven are grounds for an indictment leading to prosecution for treason, and the incarceration (if not the death penalty) for the entire Clinton family. The tons of circumstantial evidence regarding the timing of payments and the goodies granted, would be sufficient for a Grand Jury indictment; the "smell' test is overwhelming. ..."
"... People seem to forget that Clinton served on the Committee on Armed Services from 2003 to 2009 and on the Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities … you know, the Subcommittee that has jurisdiction over Department of Defense policies and programs to counter emerging threats, information warfare and special operations programs. ..."
"... I too would want to keep my PRIVATE and PERSONAL emails and other communications private … if she'd been above board and simply had a private email for non-official communications and kept the official State Dept stuff on the official account, there would be nothing here. ..."
"... Sanders will lose his clout and things go back to normal. ..."
"... private server ..."
"... a personal email account was allowed ..."
"... It seems that Mills claimed that HRC's use of the private email was not kept secret and lots of Admin officials knew about it. (Note that people had to make a special request to be able to use her email.) But Obama claimed he only learned of it "like the rest of you, in the news reports". So Obama and Hillary never emailed each other while she was SoS? ..."
"... They never were chummy esp. after all the heat of the campaign: "You're likeable enough, Hillary". ..."
"... It was reported last January that there were eighteen emails between Clinton and Obama that State was not going to release for security reasons. So yes, they did email each other. It would be interesting to know what security instructions Obama received regarding using his email. Did anyone ever caution him to check the sender's email address as a caution against phishing? Her email address was clintonemail dot com. Even a technical neophyte has to know that means either she or some other entity was hosting the site; and, if a separate entity, did that entity have security clearance for handling those emails? Obama knew darn well that she was using an unsecure system. He is equally guilty of enabling her risk-taking. ..."
"... Now that Elizabeth Warren is being a good girl and playing footsie with Schumer, I can see them thinking putting her in as VP would work well enough. I don't think so (in my neck of the progressive woods, there seems to be a general understanding that she sold out), but more importantly, I can't imagine Hillary stepping away only to see Liz moved in. ..."
"... Their smartest real play would be to let Bernie have the nom and bide their time, hoping they can work in the background with Republicans to taint and undermine him. But I suspect that they're exactly smart enough to know that probably wouldn't work. ..."
"... my rich friends (lifetime republicans included) will vote for hillary, my poor friends won't. ..."
"... Clinton voters are the small amount type. She has only "won," even in the states she did did "win," by massively suppressing the vote. She hasn't even held onto her own voters from 2008, even in conservative states. Her "big wins" in the South were with much smaller numbers of votes cast. There are people who genuinely want to vote for her. They were not enough to win the Democratic primary without massive suppression AND theft. ..."
"... The problem for Hillary is there is no indication the email scandal narrative will ever improve to the point of improving her untrustworthy numbers. The best she can hope for is the FBI stating it will not recommend an indictment which will merely confirm the public's correct perception that the power elite are treated better than the rank and file. Hillary cannot unring the Inspector General's conclusion she circumvented FOIA and federal record keeping laws. She cannot undue the fact she maintained thousands of classified records, along with 22 top secret documents on the private server. She cannot change the fact she hid her use of the private server from the public and only disclosed it when caught by the Senate Committee investigating Benghazi. Everyone who pays attention to the facts is disgusted by her misconduct in this matter. ..."
"... I think her problem is that, in routing official traffic through a private mail server, she's tried to avoid records of her work (as a public official!) ever becoming available to the public. It looks, at the very least, like she's trying to hide something and it's a demonstration of breathtaking contempt for the very people whose votes she's now asking for. ..."
"... If he shagged under the legal age limit girls, traveled on a jet which was used in slave trade of underage girls, etc; then it isn't just his business, it's a criminal matter. If Mrs. Clinton enabled, and/or aided and abetted, then she could be facing criminal charges. ..."
"... The interesting thing is Jeffery Epstein has hidden cameras on both his plane and all over the US Virgin Island private pedophile reserve he ran for politicians and high level government officials. The overseas press is reporting he blackmailed his way out of Federal Charges. Was Bill part of that blackmail? ..."
"... Bill is a sexual predator. His affair with Jennifer Flower was consensual. But starting from when he was Governor, there is a long list of credible allegations of him engaging in sexual harassment (extremely aggressive come-ons with women he had just met, often women who were state employees or Dem consultatnts), including a rape allegation by Juanita Brodderick. We've even had a reader in comments say that when Bill Clinton visited a friend, he asked their college aged daughter when he was alone with her if she wanted to ride in his car and give him a blow job. DC contacts confirm the city is rife with stories like that. ..."
"... If there were an equal ..."
"... As strange a thing as this is to say, I find myself wishing that more journalists had experience in IT security. I do have such experience, and from what I can see most people really don't appreciate just how totally, ludicrously irresponsible it is for that server to exist. Talk of it having been "secured" by some lone IT contractor is ridiculous on its face. I wouldn't run a homebrew email server, and I am basically not worth hacking – very much unlike the US Secretary of State. ..."
"... Seriously, think about it. The Secretary of State had a private email server which seems to have been widely known about within the State Department and other people in government who had dealings with Hillary Clinton. There's really no question as to if that thing was hacked – you can absolutely bet your ass ..."
"... That's what's really galling to me – even by Hillary's own stated standards, what she did with her email is orders of magnitude worse than what Snowden did. But it's Hillary Clinton, so it gets handwaved by the Democrats' long practice at assuming a Clinton scandal is overblown nonsense. ..."
"... That's why people like Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Thomas Drake, Jeffrey Sterling, John Kiriakou, Joe Wilson, and so forth are persecuted by the government while people like Clinton (and Petraeus, Novack, Libby, Bush, Cheney, Obama, Biden, etc.) are protected. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the merits of events. Just as one example, here's the 'ole Gray Lady serving as dutiful stenographer for Nancy Pelosi herself, the Democratic Speaker from San Francisco, supposedly one of the most liberal parts of the entire country, explaining that the law doesn't apply to people in power. ..."
"... I've worked in IT and software development for years and agree that her provision of that server doesn't meet the most basic requirements for security. Also, I work for a rather large company with a sizable federal contract and, if you haven't contracted with the government, you can only imagine the levels of security they impose upon their vendors. Two-factor authentication, encryption at rest, kernel hardening and on and on. Not only do you HAVE to do these things if you want to do business with the government, they bring in teams of their IT people to audit you. And it is not perfunctory in any way. They take InfoSec very, very seriously. ..."
"... Yesterday in the WSJ was this op-ed which made many of the same points that were made here, as well as discusses the fallout if Clinton loses the California primary. I also think that the Dems are not only just worried about the nomination now. The IG's report clears a path for hearings by the Republicans against Clinton after the election. ..."
"... I agree. Sanders has nothing to gain and a lot to lose by "making nice" with the Dem establishment. Why make nice with them? They are the problem, not the solution. That's a mainstay of Sanders' campaign. ..."
"... The Clinton fanaticism isn't about Sanders. They believe they need Clinton. An active DoJ might be a threat. A few have backwards ideas about politics. Some simply did the believe Sanders when he said Hillary was weak, but with a Gabbard in play, many Democrats can kiss their ambitions good bye if Sanders wins. ..."
"... I've said it elsewhere: Sanders is unacceptable to the DNC because a Sanders win would render the DNC networks, influence and fundraising abilities irrelevant overnight. The DNC would no longer be gatekeepers. You can win without them. Thus, Team D does not fear a Sanders defeat, and they can live with President Trump. In fact, that would represent an unprecedented fundraising opportunity. But from the Team D perspective, a Sanders victory must be prevented at all costs. ..."
"... How the hell could Sanders "make friends" with members of the Democratic Party elite? He is blowing up their revolving-door-greasing funding model. Running as effectively as he has with almost no lobbyist money? No major corporate donors to speak of? What can he offer them, except unpleasant changes that negatively impact their careers? ..."
"... "The implications of all of this are that Hillary Clinton did not want her emails subjected to the Freedom of Information Act or subpoenas from Congress. And that's why she set up a home-brew server" ..."
"... But this is definitely putting a lot of spin on the ball, because the other half of the story is the reason WHY she wanted to avoid FOIA and Congressional scrutiny. The answer is: so that between her and Bill she could sell her office to the highest bidders, which the FBI is quite prepared to prove, or if denied that chance, to "leak like crazy" ..."
"... Caution: this course of action carries a high risk of nominating Bernie ..."
"... And that bring up another point for all you "feminist" Clintonistas. Wasn't the whole point of the "first woman in the White House" thing to show that women can do it alone? That they don't need men carrying them around all the time to be successful? Well what's up with your candidate? I have never (in my 65 years) ever seen anyone (woman or man) need more help from other people (mostly men) to gain the success they seek. At every single turn in this campaign we have Ms. Clinton needing someone else, someone MORE, falling on their sword for her. Because left on her own, against a freaking socialist, for Christ's sakes, all she has been able to do is F@ck up. A FIFTY POINT LEAD, gone. Wasted. Nothing to show. And this is what you want as feminism's representative in the White House? Shame on you. ..."
"... Most of the DLC establishment could find it easy enough to "live" with a Trump Presidency. Just like Lil Marco Rubio, they'll easily bend their knees to kiss Trump's heiney and make deals with him. What's it to them, after all? ..."
"... In that scenario Hillary wins the nomination and loses the election, Obama pardons her to head off (in his telling) partisan persecution and looks noble (to the credulous) standing up for her, clearing the way to elbow in on the Clinton network for the-haven't you heard?-Obama Foundation. And the grift goes on. ..."
"... stopped ..."
"... Because the email thing, and the speeches thing, and the neo-liberalism thing, whatever. Bernstein's "leaking" makes clear that as far back as February Obama's guys in the trenches said – hey, we just saw the Bear funds blow up, and this thing is going to end badly one way or the other. We don't know exactly how bad, but bad. Which is bad for us… ..."
"... Yves – Time hss proved you wise. Japanafication is exactly what has been unfolding. And according to Forbes and the Fed, 48% of the population having less than a grand in savings means the US is near third world. One can buy Pop Tarts in third world countries also. ..."
"... The real danger is geopolitics. And this bitch that thinks she is queen has no issues literally seeing 1/3 of the global population dying to escape her crimes. Think of what a rapist does to a rape victim many times. Strangle that woman so she doesnt indict you. Yeah, it is that bad. But there are some form of tech that will end any world war quickly. Stuff of science fiction. America's competitors should think twice, or such may dissapear. Literally. ..."
"... However – and this must have been Clinton's worst nightmare x 10 - unbeknownest to CESC and Platte River, the backup server accidentally synced with another off-site server belonging to Datto for two years before anyone realized it. ..."
"... wasn't ..."
"... to the cloud was taking place ..."
"... So one Democratically connected organization signed onto this separate justice system for the politically connected. Possibly the concern Obama has for his unfunded $1Billion Presidential Library will force him to burnish his legacy by NOT rescuing HRC with some dubious legal maneuver. It is somewhat ironic that Nixon was brought down by a private electronic system (his tape recording system) while Clinton may be brought down by her own private electronic email system. ..."
"... Regardless my experience with talking to Hillary supporters is that no amount of scandal of outright criminal lawbreaking affects their views about Hillary. They revert to "she's been scrutinized and tested for decades by her enemies and she's survived." They are people on the margins who will be affected. How many are the Dem establishment? It's going to take a whopper to get them to tank Hillary IMO. ..."
"... There is a detail that is being universally missed both in the MSM and alternative press: it is a virtual certainty that the NSA has a copy of every email sent or received by that server. ..."
"... Don't forget the mayhem when the FSB (who else) posted Nuland's little chat with Pyatt over an insecure line. Let no one forget that HRC is strongly connected to the neocon project to undermine Russia's return to strength. ..."
"... Just ask yourself: What would Vladimir Putin do? ..."
"... $1 Billion Library ..."
"... I too think bernie will pull it out, the other choices are terrible. I'm looking for aspirational latinos to flock to bernie in california and it'll be a rout that can't be ignored. I hope that's what happens. ..."
"... Clintonsomething – "The Campaign Years" ..."
"... I'm not sure the media's current focus on Hillary's email server is warranted. There are definitely indications that she violated email policies, but there don't seem to be specifics about what these actions were trying to hide. I think her very questionable family ties to corporate money are a more meaningful topic in determining her suitability for the U.S. presidency ..."
"... The Clinton Machine (in other words the political operation of the Bill and Hillary, and potentially Chelsea) has always operated on the basis the money and connections will fix everything. It has, after all, gotten them this far. However, as a core operational mode, it also accumulates cynicism and tends to value loyalty over performance, leading to degradation over time. ..."
"... Seems to me that except in a relatively few corners and local settings, and now very frankly via our mostly collective embrace of the Neo geist, "America" has always and only been about "screwing the other guy." ..."
"... I don't believe "foaming one more runway" (read: having your DOJ, FBI appear helpless) wouldn't bother this administration. A Loyalist are those unengaged (or too engaged) whom choose willingly to believe the disastrous economic and political experiment, that attempted to organize human behavior around the dictates of the global marketplace, has been a splendid success…or worse, blindly, my tribal leader is in accordance with all that is good. ..."
"... Haiti. Look at film of the Clintons in Haiti to see how they work. & Haiti is one place where also the elites own the deeds. Haiti Is America, only sooner. ..."
"... For what it's worth, Jonathan Turley suggests Hillary still has friends in high places in his discussion of former Clinton IT advisor, Bryan Pagliano, who is taking the fifth amendment in deposition on email scandal, ..."
"... Those e-mails don't alarm me anywhere near as much as the $200,000 plus speaking fees from Wall St. NO speech by anyone is worth anywhere near such an amount. These were clearly bribes, there's simply no other way of looking at it. I have no interest in seeing the transcripts of those speeches because the money counts far more than the content, and speaks for itself. No way would I vote for someone so clearly in the pocket of the oligarchy. ..."
But the panic is also a clear indication, and perhaps as important, another message, not just
to Clinton but to Team Dem, that the Administration can't, or won't but is making it seem like can't,
do what it takes to save Hillary's bacon.
And I suspect it really is "can't". The FBI has enough autonomy that if they find real dirt on
the Clintons, they will leak like crazy if the DoJ does not pursue the case in a serious way. That
would make the Administration complicit, and Obama does not want his final months in office tainted
by his Administration touching the Clinton tar baby any more than it has to. In addition, the Judicial
Watch cases are proceeding, and the judge, having had the Clinton side deal with him repeatedly in
bad faith, is not going to cut it any slack. The fact that there is an independent effort, completely
outside the Administration's control, pursuing the server mess, also makes it riskier for the DoJ
to do nothing if Judicial Watch exposes damning documents.
By Gaius Publius
, a professional writer living on the West Coast of the United States and frequent contributor
to DownWithTyranny, digby, Truthout, and Naked Capitalism. Follow him on Twitter
@Gaius_Publius ,
Tumblr and
Facebook . Originally published
at
at Down With Tyranny . GP article here.
The last time I featured former Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein on these pages, it was to showcase
his
delivery of messages he received from the White House , to the effect that the "White House"
thought Clinton was blowing it with her Wall Street speeches stance, and because of that, the "White
House" was freaking out (to put it colloquially) - at least as Bernstein tells it.
Here's part of what Bernstein - a Clinton supporter - said last February (my transcript and emphasis;
video at the link):
Bernstein: There is a huge story going on. I've spent part of this weekend talking
to people in the White House. They are horrified at how Hillary Clinton is blowing up her own
campaign .
And they're worried that the Democrats could blow - they are horrified that the whole business
of the transcripts, accepting the money - that she could blow the Democrats' chance for White
House. They want her to win. Obama wants her to win.
But Sanders has shown how vulnerable she is. These ethical lapses have tied the White House
up in knots. They don't know what to do. They're beside themselves. And now, you've got a situation
with these transcripts a little like Richard Nixon and his tapes that he stonewalled on and didn't
release.
... ... ...
In that context , listen to the current "White House" message about the Clinton campaign
via Bernstein and video at the top (my
italics):
Bernstein: The implications of all of this [the email server issue] are that Hillary
Clinton did not want her emails subjected to the Freedom of Information Act or subpoenas from
Congress. And that's why she set up a home-brew server.
I think we all know that. People around her will tell you that in private if you really get
them behind a closed door.
I was in Washington this week, I spoke to a number of top Democratic officials and they're
terrified, including people at the White House, that her campaign is in free fall because of this
distrust factor. Indeed, Trump has a similar problem, but she's the one whose numbers are going
south.
And the great hope in the White House, as well as the Democratic leadership and people who
support her, is that she can just get to this convention, get the nomination - which they're
no longer 100% sure of - and get President Obama out there to help her, he's got a lot of
credibility, it's an election that's partly about his legacy .
But she needs all the help she can get because right now her campaign is in huge trouble…
... ... ...
Two takeaways - one is that top Democrats know how precarious Clinton's position is . They're
not fooled any more than you are. That's worth noticing. And second, the White House and Bernstein
are not blaming Sanders . Whoever crafted this message for us is blaming the Clinton campaign
only, and by extension, Clinton herself.
Hmm. Does make one wonder.
If "they" are so worried about Hillary flubbing her "inevitable" nomination as presidential candidate,
and "they" are apparently not so worried about Hillary loosing to Trump in the run for president
later, one does wonder about the possibility of "they" having some good quality dirt on Trump
(or a backdoor to the voting machines).
Really Good Quality Dirt!
It is a *big* issue to mishandle classified information – normal people will be prosecuted
and may go to jail even by coincidence; like a selfie in front of equipment they didn't know was
classified and which was not labelled as such. Then on top of that comes the sleaze-factor with
avoiding the FOIA requirements, destruction of evidence (which means that certainly Hillary was
up to *something* crooked, because why else bother with all the work? it's very *easy* to hand
over a verified duplicate of a hard disk compared to everything Hillary tried to not do this!)
and of course the blatant incompetence + arrogance shown by Hillary by running a private business,
a crooked one at that, from work?!
A street level dope dealer can manage to compartmentalize their real business from the one
they report to the IRS. But not Hillary.
The Democrats don't have any dirt on Trump the Republicans didn't have. Trump is a referendum
on the establishment. The establishment can't attack him, and any attacks too similar to the very
publicized establishment attacks will be dismissed.
The simple problem is Republican voters selected him over the GOP establishment. All the Republicans
will line up because Trump is now their rightful leader. Maybe not Mittens and Bill Kristol
at this point, the GOP elites will show loyalty because anything less will risk their own position.
The base will remove GOP elites over certain sins. The Teabaggers cleaned the GOP caucus of TARP
voters.
The secret weapon is to be a generic tax and spend Democrat, uninterested in colonialism.
Yes, the intelligence establishment has dirt the two leading candidates (Trump and Clinton).
This can be used in what ever way is expedient, but most of all to maintain the status quo. Like
the mafia, you have committed a crime so you have to promote our crimes or you will be exposed/deposed.
Which is why the race to the bottom of the hogs wallow is being actively promoted. Likely, no
dirt on Sanders, which is why the MSM and even some parts of social media are enlisted to create
the appearance of dirt because blackmail/graymail of Sanders will be difficult or impossible.
That is certainly the narrative Trump wants. What I find the height of black, despairing
comedy is that anyone believes it. In addition to being completely untrustworthy and self-centered,
Trump has little to gain by overthrowing the status quo, and has given many signs that he will
continue business as usual, only with a slightly different crew of low-rent elites in charge at
the top.
No matter what he says, Trump is not leading some sort of revolution to
abolish the Empire and replace it with something else, much less something better. He just wants
a shortcut to being Emperor.
That he may end up being so bad at the job the entire edifice burns down is not, IMHO, any
sort of positive. I don't like where we are or where we are headed, but neither do I want my family
trying to survive in some sort of post-apocalyptic wasteland.
I'll repeat the tin-foil hat level thought that keeps crossing my mind with Trump: his job
is to discredit any sort of opposition to the establishment from the right for a generation
or more.
I think you're underestimating Trump. As you note, he does want to maintain current establishment,
and he could be successful at this for awhile (e.g. ramping up spending and not worrying about
deficits).
The establishment (Clinton types not aggressively calling out Republicans and proposing credible
alternatives) has brought us to this point.
Then on top of that comes the sleaze-factor with avoiding the FOIA requirements …
That's it, right there. She purposefully conducted the business of the State in such a manner
to avoid scrutiny by the citizenry. That is a breach of the public trust that cannot be countenanced,
cannot go unpunished. She's gotta go, and if "everybody's doing it," then they all gotta go too.
I'm under the impression that if not for the Benghazi investigation, the home server would
not have been discovered. However, maybe someone else can confirm that I'm correct. Which, if
you think about it, does not actually make sense. The NSA should have known all along. Why on
earth she supposed that she could get around the NSA is simply… words fail me.
Morning Joe is saying that Trump is polling as 'more trustworthy' than Clinton.
If the White House isn't in a panic at this point, they're somnambulant.
I thought it was strictly due to Benghazi-related FOIA requests from Congress that brought
her server to light, but
this article indicates it was discovered as a matter of routine housekeeping when John Kerry
became SoS, and they finally filled the position of Inspector General at State.
Something Clinton didn't get around to doing . . .
My tin foil hat has always told me Clintonistas may not have worked overly hard for Kerry
in 2004, even offering bad advice. Every Winner and Loser column from after the election listed
on clear winner, the front runner for the 2008 Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton. Clinton
Inc was operating out of crummy digs in Harlem because they couldn't raise money, but the money
poured in after the Kerry loss.
If this election was about whether the country wanted a fourth term of the Kerry Edwards Cantwell?
(She makes the most sense for a Vice President to Edwards 2012 running mate) teams, where would
Clinton Inc be?
My only fear re: how Clinton could win in November would be if she and Bill had the juice
to help throw 2000 and 2004 to keep the path clear for her. Unless she can steal in the General,
she isn't going to be President. That would also explain Obama's focus on caucuses in 2008 - he
went after her soft, less stealable underbelly. (I realize there are also less CT explanations
for this.)
But watching the primary play out suggests to me that there are limits to election theft capability.
I don't think there's anyway she wanted to drag this out this long. The theft in Kentucky was
pretty obvious and clumsy, too. That plus the Republican Party doing its thing rallying around
its nominee gives me hope that at least we won't get President Clinton.
It feels a bit like clinging to a ice floe in the North Atlantic, though.
But there's another point here too which is out in the open and yet no one is talking about
it much except to note that her emails were not part of the National Archives. She had a private
server for that very Orwellian reason-she planned to control the historical record by having a
whole parcel of it hidden and not available until she decided to release it, if ever. I see the
reference to Orwell as particularly apt . Remember in 1984 our besotted hero, (depressed
with the horror of what he was doing), spent the livelong day erasing or changing the archival
records related to key events that Big Brother needed changing. His needs, like Hilary's, kept
changing from day to day so the censorship was endless.
Clinton has always been in charge of a Ministry of Truth-yesterday she stood for practice 'A'
but now today opposes practice 'A'. The private server is just another facet of MiniTrue.
The domain name was clintonemail.com, so the email addresses would be
[email protected]etc. etc. Anyone receiving
these emails *could* see that if they looked, but if the sender is in your address book it may
just come in as that person's name or nickname as you have it in own your machine.
While it may be that most recipients wouldn't bother to drill down to the actual originating
address, there are offices and agencies that would definitely be tuned to this sort of thing.
For instance, State's in-house IT security people seem to have twigged, not that it helped.
What I wonder is, aren't there 16 some-odd agencies who scan and analyze email traffic? In
this case, the metadata alone would have told much (as it so often does).
suddenly, i'm feeling optimistic again. obama might be many things, but he is a very good politician,
and he protects his legacy like an enraged bear protects cubs. throwing clinton under the bus
to do that? no problem, if doing so results in less damage to his image, and i trust him to be
able to judge that well.
I don't think he gives even one f**k about his image or legacy. He cares about being wealthy
and having high status. He's only cutting Clinton loose if his owners that previously told him
he had to help her now tell him to toss her over.
I still have my doubts that any indictments are forthcoming. Maintaining a homebrew server
could be written off as a policy violation, rather than a criminal matter. The punishments for
that are administrative (loss of job, loss of security clearance), which don't really touch her.
Having classified information in those emails, unless it's really egregious, probably won't result
in any criminal charges, either. I wouldn't be surprised if that is rather common among senior
government officials. If they go after Clinton for that, a lot of other people could be put under
greater scrutiny. My guess is that there is institutional pressure in the government to not charge
one of their own for that.
If any charges are filed, it will probably be for something else that they've stumbled upon,
possibly related to the Clinton Foundation. That's why I find it interesting that the news about
Terry McAuliffe broke when it did. If they are pursuing something, there will be pressure to resolve
it before the election. At the same time, they won't want to rush it, because they're only going
to get one shot at this – you don't want to take a swing at the Clintons, and miss.
"Maintaining a homebrew server could be written off as a policy violation, rather than a criminal
matter. "
Given the last 15 years of brutal, if selective, prosecutions for mishandling materials less
sensitive than some of the material on Clinton's servers, I don't think many people will buy that.
They may not buy it, but that feeds directly into my other point – senior government officials
are rarely held accountable for those types of actions, unless they're really egregious. People
much lower on the food chain are held to a higher standard. Because of that, I think that there
will be resistance to prosecution from other senior officials, simply because they don't want
to be put in jeopardy as well.
The elephant in the room is not the private server per se, but the use of it to circumvent
any exposure to FOIA requests. The pay-for-play activities of the Secretary with regard to the
Foundation can certainly be inferred, and if proven are grounds for an indictment leading to prosecution
for treason, and the incarceration (if not the death penalty) for the entire Clinton family. The
tons of circumstantial evidence regarding the timing of payments and the goodies granted, would
be sufficient for a Grand Jury indictment; the "smell' test is overwhelming.
All well and true, but when do citizens say enough is enough. Creating and maintaining a two
tiered justice system is not the foundation on which democracy is built. How egregious does lawbreaking
have to become before support is withdrawn from these people?
IMVHO, that is exactly what we are seeing play out.
And trying to equate what Hillary did with Colin Powell's early use of email is simply beyond
the pale: I've seen no credible evidence that Powell ever set out to evade the NSA or the FBI.
For Hillary to conflate the two is flagrantly dishonest, and it pisses me off.
We may be at a 'tipping point' of the public finally fed up with a two tier system. Add in
income inequality, and things tip even more.
That's for the FBI to show – hard evidence of intention evasion…a memo or a witness, while
Clinton, on the other side, will argue computer/internet illiteracy.
Clinton has already been planting seeds of computer illiteracy, through her subordinates, who
claim Clinton "didn't even know how to access email on a desktop!" My lands, what's a pretty little
thing to do? Why, a lady such as Hillary must rely on the kindness of strangers, or gentleman
such as Bryan "Nowhere Man" Magliano, her IT Manager, to convey her electronic missives to others
in a timely manner.
People seem to forget that Clinton served on the Committee on Armed Services from 2003 to 2009
and on the Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities … you know, the Subcommittee that
has jurisdiction over Department of Defense policies and programs to counter emerging threats,
information warfare and special operations programs.
If it were possible, I'd go back through the Sub committees minutes or transcripts to see how
involved ole' Hillary got when the subject was attempts by foreign governments or agents to hack
into U.S. government employees' emails.
It's possible that some of the information was only accessible by computer. She couldn't have
had any aides helping her 'cause they probably were not cleared to read such
info.
But if you've ever watched one of these hearings, you know that perhaps 20 percent of the
committee members have even a layperson's knowledge of monetary policy. The rest waste their
5-minute question time delivering set-piece partisan rants.
Probably more display of illiteracy. Or, no unlike some college teachers – no practice experience, thought they sound impressive
in theory.
LS: Little rides on the fact that Mrs Clinton may be guilty of
stupidity, ignorance, or evil intent. The primary fact is that
Mrs Clinton is, was, and probably has been guilty of duplicitous
conduct for the majority of her life. She's no beginner or social
climber, but a real mountaineer.
well…support IS being withdrawn , from them, in real time !!! That's why people, increasingly,
will vote scorched earth …. for Trump, if Sanders gets cheated out of the nom. They've had it
with the two-tired JUST US system, and the corrupt pols and corporate slugs who've benefited by
it !!
Agree. It's hard to know how many, but a significant number of people certainly are sensing
the depth of this morass, even if the particulars remain vague, and are reacting as best they
can given the choices. Since reasonable choices have been crushed to an amazing degree, as Matthews
– under orders no doubt – made clear, and this is part of what people sense is wrong, scorched
earth is what remains.
Hell, if Bonnie Prince Snowden were to land on the US equivalent of Eriskay…I would like as
not put on fatigues and go to join him, along with whatever other ragtag band of 'jacobites' rallied
to the cause.
Yes, it would likely end as miserably as 'The Forty Five' did, but I am long past believing
that ANYONE in a position of power in the Federal Government – any branch – really 'gets it' that
We, The People, are sick and damned tired of the crap they are up to, and the lengths they are
willing to go to pander and enrich their fellow power mongers.
The 'Just Us' system, indeed.
Maybe a little whiff of grapeshot might wake them up.
I know its either that, or someday the guillotines will be set up by a starving rabble with
far less of a sense of humor about these things then I.
What is interesting to me is the quality of what happens next as an exemplar: either Obama
doubles down on the Patraus treatment for the elite and everyone who's ever had a security clearance
is formally notified that the rules only apply to little people, or D O Justice acts on this in
the same spirit they have acted on Assange, Manning, Snowden, Stirling etc.
For those implicated at the heart of the security establishment, either decision will have
crystal clear implications. If it is the latter, the National Security State lumbers on in its
more or less current form which isn't exactly great and embroils our "presumptive" nominee
in a criminal investigation. If the former, things could get very interesting as those feeling
betrayed will be uniquely positioned to do something about it, particularly in the prospect of
spooks foreign or domestic having dirt with which to blackmail a sitting President.
Another great example of a status quo that, however you support it, sucks.
"Maintaining a homebrew server could be written off as a policy violation, rather than a criminal
matter. The punishments for that are administrative (loss of job, loss of security clearance),
which don't really touch her."
Could she be denied top security clearance were she to be elected president? Or, is it given
no matter what to whomever is elected?
Also, it seems from the article that there are many people now privy to just how badly she
managed her email situation (others things as well? And are there actual hard copies? More tapes?)
and that could make her independence as president, well, simply no there there. Sounds like the
PTBs and/or their minions have her by the short hairs. And if she had any tendencies whatsoever
to not serve the Corporatists fully, that is no longer an issue: She would be totally controlled.
So, Hillary would now more than ever be the Corporatists very best bet to consolidate their
control, in the US and globally. Trump, second but could possibly be "uncooperative." Bernie?
Never allowed to be voted on as the Dem nominee.
Oooh … Dear! Good Point: Hillary being so terribly bad that she's absolutely perfect for everyone
who needs to buy influence.
The excitement is seeing the market value of "The House of Clinton's Services" dropping from
hard currency to small favors and protection and now this once-in-a-century opportunity to get
in at the bottom may go away!
Have you read this? from march and linked on 5/29 in the cooler. they've stumbled on a few
things…
https://informedvote2016.wordpress.com/2016/03/18/do-i-really-need-to-worry-about-hillarys-emails-yes-she-will-be-indicted-full-form/
and as pointed out here the administration can't bury judicial watch in the same way they let
the banksters off by telling DOJ to let 'em go. And fajensen points out above, classification
violations get little people in big trouble, and letting clinton off, which they can't seem to
do, will upset a lot of gov employees…but maybe it's just more eleventy dimensional chess
Lurking in the background is the likelihood that the Russians scooped up everything on Hillary's
server, and the certainty that the NSA knows what they know.
This will not sit well with a lot of people.
Hillary will soon be down to her paid hangers-on and diehard loyalists. Even the bankers will
have to start recalculating.
It seems clear that being hacked by the Russians rated pretty low on the Clinton totem pole
of priorities. What concerned her more was the optics of whatever emails she was sending and how
the American public would react to seeing them. All her actions point to that. The Secretary of
State would rather have Russians read her emails than comply with the FOIA and other laws and
risk American citizens see the business she conducted on our behalf and at our expense.
I mean, for all I know senior gov't officials just blanket assume other countries have full
access to everything done on a computer, what do they care what the Russians know, the Russians
are corrupt too. But when it comes to a bad headline? Panic button time.
I don't blame just Hillary. I blame the Clintons in their entirety. Bill was just as squirmy
with the truth (what's YOUR definition of the word "is"? Then there's his whole, "I did not have
asexual relations with that woman"). Their slimy slipperyness is genetic. They can't help but
lie, obfuscate, prevaricate. Bill is Hillary, Hillary is Bill.
As to wanting to avoid FOIA and subpoenas on her emails, I am sympathetic in broad strokes.
I too would want to keep my PRIVATE and PERSONAL emails and other communications private. I believe
strongly in the right to privacy and that is why I vehemently oppose NSA spying and corporate
spying via metadata. Our private lives BELONG TO US ALONE. The difference between Hillary and
I is in the nature of private communications. Unlike the Clintons, I am not a money grubbing greedy
bastard who will lie, cheat, steal my way to wealthy. I have NO sympathy for anyone seeking to
keep that crap secret and private. That said, if she'd been above board and simply had a private
email for non-official communications and kept the official State Dept stuff on the official account,
there would be nothing here. I served 20 years in the military. We kept official and confidential
communication strictly on the official network and via the official email accounts. Personal use
of the official email was discouraged and limited. You NEVER used your personal civilian email
for official communications. Never never never. I can't give her a pass on that because we in
the military wouldn't get a pass. We'd get an investigation and likely lose our security clearance
(career ending that is).
I too would want to keep my PRIVATE and PERSONAL emails and other communications private
…
if she'd been above board and simply had a private email for non-official communications and kept
the official State Dept stuff on the official account, there would be nothing here.
Exactly. How hard can it be?
The work mail belongs to the workplace, we can basically expect that the PHB or the PFY in
tech support will read through it and it will be stored forever. Same with web-traffic. "Work"
may read, store and analyze it – so we visit naughty pages at home, strictly on our own time.
That is some of the reasons why we peons always use a private domain for private mail and the
work email for work email. Another one is to limit the ownership of work and ideas to those that
"work" actually does pay for.
I'm sympathetic to most of your argument, including your characterization of the Clinton's
obsession with personal gain. The Clinton Foundation is a money-making machine fueled by graft,
pure and simple.
But it's ironic that you criticize Bill for lying about personal affairs in one paragraph,
which only happened because Ken Starr actively sought to violate his personal privacy, and state
later that "our private lives belong to us alone." The only reason I have a shred of sympathy
for Bill is because Starr and his ilk trampled on his right to privacy. That judgment is shared
by most Americans, as reflected in public polls.
And as for "we in the military wouldn't get a pass" consider the by-the-book punishment of
David Petraeus – which never happened. The military doesn't have any special claim to legal fidelity
or consequences. As always, the enforcement of laws in this country varies according to the power
of the accused. That's why Hillary isn't and never will be in prison.
While generally sympathetic to LootersParadise's argument, I would point out that when Bill
Clinton was Commander-in-Chief, young military drill sergeants were being court martialed and
sentenced to lengthy prison terms for consensual sex with female trainees. The legal premise was
that the disparity in their rank and authority made any sexual relations "tantamount to rape".
Clinton's behavior with a young intern was worse than bad judgement, it was predatory, and no
military commander or drill sergeant would have been excused from such conduct with the argument
it was merely a "personal affair".
You keep your private business private by using separate equipment. 2 smartphones. 2 laptops.
Tons of people in DC do this, starting with Congressional staffers and assistants to people in
Federal agencies. This isn't rocket science. She just wasn't willing to bother.
Isn't it also possible, though, that since her State business really was private business,
in that she and Bill were working together to sell influence at State to enrich the "Foundation,"
this wasn't merely entitled laziness? Maybe they made the decision that the best way to limit
the paper trail was to just send all State Department correspondence through the server and thus
directly to Bill, making it harder to track and prove when they were explicitly collaborating.
I can totally see them thinking this was quite clever.
Entitled also works, of course. I do think a big reason for the Blackberry is that she refused
to allow the guy who "ought to be carrying her bags" to have a goody she didn't have.
The case can be made that the known hacking was of someone she had a correspondence with (troubling
as that was) not of her server. While I don't believe her server was secure, and I'm pretty damn
sure the IG and the FBI don't think it either, the public can still be spun on this. That is not
the problem.
No, what has become crystal clear is that she didn't have permission to set up her email this
way, that the NSA and State did not sign off on it, that she was told that and because she didn't
want any public oversight of her actions she blew off federal regulations regarding FOIA and the
collection of records for the State Department both in setting up the server itself AND in not
supplying any documents not in government possession upon leaving office (not two years later).
Because she did handle classified material on that email server, she did put herself in jeopardy
legally – regardless of her intent and whether the material was hacked or not. And people who
do have to follow Security guidelines or face dismissal, fines or worse are pissed as hell about
it and are not going to let it go. So it can't just be played off as a right wing conspiracy –
no matter how much they try. These guys aren't Judicial Watch, and their credentials are better
than Podesta's.
On the public level, except for the Clinton sycophants and tribal Dems who desperately want
to believe this really is a nothing burger, what this means is that Clinton had no intention of
allowing public oversight into her actions if she can avoid it by any means whatsoever, regulations
and the law be damned. And that she does not consider herself a public employee even if she is
one and being a public employee is where her power lies. Now those of us who distrust her and
her husband and child just outright assume that this is because her real business is selling access
to government and its monies or services to those with the funds to afford the Clintons. But most
people are reacting to the sheer arrogance of the "law doesn't apply to me" attitude and the lies
about it so far. But the longer this stays around the more it will become 'what DID she have to
hide'.
So this tells me something different. It isn't really about how big a threat Clinton is to
the 'Obama legacy' and how terrified they are she is blowing this. Or rather has blown this since
it stems from actions from seven years ago, although later choices have compounded it. No, this
is about how much bigger a threat Sanders is to that legacy and how close her blowing this gets
HIM to the nomination. Otherwise why is this about her getting the nomination. Her getting the
nomination and then Obama getting out on the road and saving her butt only works if the threats
from the investigation disappear BEFORE she gets the nomination officially. It really blows up
while he is campaigning for her and his legacy is also blown.
Of course, this presupposes that he WILL get out there and campaign for her beyond a few cursory
appearances. If the President is suddenly too busy to campaign, I will admit to being wrong and
it is all about Clinton's threat to him, even if I think a better strategic choice would be to
find a way to torpedo her outright if that is the concern.
this may be one of the initial signs of the torpedo. "captain, it looks like something is moving
toward us underwater". he wasn't required to broadcast his concerns like this. you make some excellent
points. meanwhile, i'm successfully controlling my impulse to attempt to do a cartwheel. so far.
Pat - excellent analysis, thank you.
And Yves, great post. As you point out, the use of Bernstein as White House messenger - if true
- makes that a pretty explosive little interview.
I note the lawyer twisting himself into knots trying to say that Hillary didn't "lie" about
the server.
– And that she does not consider herself a public employee even if she is one and being a public
employee is where her power lies.
That may be the right twist that puts the optics in focus. Arrogance and petulance are tolerated
in politics ('he's got a Blackberry, I want one!') But the Clintons are cunning enough to not
risk the appearance without reason. They need to be smarter than their customers, and just one
bad email from a dunderhead could prove a quid pro quo link from the Clinton Foundation to the
State Department.
Obama knows better than anyone her tendency to collapse. His campaign was 'Change,' and that
she does not do.
"Getting her to the nomination" allows the D establishment, after she is forced to step down,
to replace her with Biden/Warren or some other "anyone but Sanders" ticket with less trouble (party
disunity, bad optics, turnout suppression) than if she implodes before the convention and the
HRC delegates + superdelegates outright steal the nomination from Sanders.
IMO, it's utterly impossible in this climate for anyone other than Sanders (or whoever Sanders
signs off on, like Warren) to become nominee if HRC implodes.
I agree. The optics would be off the charts terrible for the party. They are in a rock and
a hard place. I think their best non-Sanders bet (if they continue their double downs and selfish
folly) is to stay with Clinton. If she implodes, so be it, have her impeached (if she wins) and
be done with it. Pass as much of the responsibility off on her and what she did wrong. "The party
did not know! We are victims!"
actually, the back-door candidate could be Warren. She endorsed neither, has clearly anti-WS
policies, but is not as "radical" as Sanders. She would likely be acceptable to a number of Sanders
people (incomparably much more so than HC), she's woman (so still a first woman president message)
etc.
She's better debater than Sanders I believe (and incomparably better than HC), and could (assuming
there are no bombs in her backyard) deal with Trump pretty well.
So, if the plan in Dem circles is to get past primaries and then shoot HC and fend off Sanders,
I'd say Warren is about their only reasonable choice.
Warren is a threat to the courtesan class as much as Sanders. Saturday design and Warren threaten
every Democrat who has ever said "the dopes would vote for for If they just understood how smart
we were and had better messaging," just by existing.
Warren is a very specific threat to WS. She's a less of a generic threat than Sanders is –
say look at her education proposals. If it looks to Dems like a choice between HC enabling Trump,
Sanders changing the party entirely, or Warren as a compromise, they only reasonably safe bet
is Warren. HC getting nomination and then losing to Trump kills the Dem party (as we know it)
as well as Sanders would if he won. The difference is that one (Sanders) is a certainty, while
the other (HC losing to Trump) is still just a probability. But one raising every day so far.
Coming up with somoene like Warren, even HC can look statesmanlike in pulling it off (say blaming
it on bad health, but giving a chance to another woman), in exchange for a deal that Warren focuses
on WS. Chances of Warren winning against Trump are very high, possibly higher that Sanders.
But the question of the day is – are they smart enough to know this? All the chatter I hear
from the beltway is that they don't. That once the nomination is "decided", Sanders will lose
his clout and things go back to normal.
Whole thing hinges on Sanders' concern for his reputation among the elite, and how much he
buys the "Trump-means-the-end-of-civilization" garbage. His only leverage is his base, and frankly
if he tries to make nice with the Dem establishment after she is nominated, he loses a lot of
his cred with that base.
He's going to get very little from them – at most, Warren as VP, which isn't much. No way she
gets to be Treasury Secretary, for instance. And why would they give Sanders anything? At bottom,
the DNC types believe the left will have nowhere to go come November. Thus Sanders has one job:
GIVE HIS BASE SOMEWHERE TO GO. Doesn't matter if he only wins 8%, either as a Green or (far less
likely) an independent. He's got the invitation from Jill Stein sitting out there. Earn matching
funds, raise tens of millions a year, and run candidates across the country in two years. In four
years, mount strong outsider candidates for major offices including president.
But I don't think Sanders has it in him. Too "constructive," as Chuck Schumer called him.
Sanders will lose his clout and things go back to normal.
He won't lose his list, and he now has more followers than any politician in America. He can
run his project sitting in the Senate, using that list and his follower base to influence policy.
The Internet will save Bernie just like it was envisioned by DARPA in the dawn of the Nixonan
Age, built to survive thermo-nuclear annihilation like the ClinTrumpocalypse.
I don't think she'll win (the presidency) even if she DOESN'T implode. She has no message.
She's banking on identity politics. That won't work in a change election.
It's just a question of degree. If she does get indicted, the Dems lose BIG under every possible
scenario except Sanders. If she doesn't, she still probably loses, but at least it won't be a
wipeout downballot.
Downballot the Democrats have already been wiped out, for 22 years running.
Republicans hold 31 governorships to the Democrats' 18. Republicans hold 56% of all statehouse
seats (Democrats 43%), and they control the lower house of 33 state legislatures (compared to
16 for the Democrats). It's difficult to even view the Democrats as a party, but if they are,
they certainly have no depth of talent.
Add a highly disliked business-as-usual politician to the top of the ticket in a "change" election?
Democrats won't have a prayer in the fall.
As one who believes Clinton ought to withdraw before inflicting or sustaining any more damage
in the certain knowledge that her candidacy has been hopelessly compromised, I would argue that
Sanders is the one candidate now able to pull other contests along with is own. Sanders could
swing it from a Republican Congress literally impaled by a lethal lack of talent to a Dem Congress
with new faces and new marching orders for long-entrenched types. He really could go all the way
in my opinion.
The voice of reason, which is why the choice you suggest will be the very last one ever taken
– we won't see it. This isn't merry 'ol England, ok UK, where they still goof by letting votes
get counted sometimes (Jeremy Corbyn).
The Democratic Party's working priority list apparently putting control over the Party above
winning elections, I imagine they are very interested in doing the "impossible", if the benefits
to the collaborative nexus of interest (i.e. the Party) of blocking Sanders - neoliberal "purity
pledges" with other countries, State selling more Americans' labor abroad like cheap cord wood,
inducing despair among the left (a favorite of the Israeli wing of the Party, who sees leftists
like unto Hamas) - to the Party outweigh the loss of one election or even the ballot line. With
a post-Citizens United machine and its "non-coordinated" universe of nomenklatura, ready to pick
right back up where it left off with a New (Improved) Democrat Party (Same Great Taste!) or somesuch,
constituted specifically to exclude popular participation, it's relatively cheap.
And obviously the reason for the all out push by the media and the Clinton campaign to have
Sanders throw in the towel before the convention which, of course, reached fever pitch the same
week the IG's report came out.
This string of comments looks on target. I think this is the unstated reason why the primaries
are STILL important.
If Bernie were to get swept on 6/7, he might fold. Every time he looks like he's losing steam,
he gets a string of rallies with 10s of thousands of people and realizes that he CANNOT stop.
There's too many people counting on him to save us from a Clinton/Trump nightmare.
If Bernie sweeps her on 6/7, the writing is on the wall at that point and she'll look like
she's toast. FBI will get the green light and Dem elite will have to bite their tongues and deal
with him.
My guess is that he wins 4/6 primaries on 6/7 and NM and NJ are losses, but somewhat closer
than anticipated. Clinton will continue to act like it's over and the FBI will continue to dither
and the convention floor ends up being a fight (prob won by Clinton).
A key question is, "When do the rank and file FBI agents lose patience and start leaking bad
details to the media?"
Or do FBI agents start resigning in protest at the dithering of their superiors.
Obama/Clinton may have the top brass at FBI and DOJ on board, but if the rank and file decide
to mutiny, then they can't save this sinking ship that is the SS Clinton!
You have to have tremendous admiration for Sanders to stick it out with what is obviously a
physically and mentally grueling ordeal at the age of 74. I'm 65.
Of course both Trump and Hillary aren't much behind him in age, but Sanders is doing it imho
out of principle and ideals, as well as respect for the public that has backed him. He must think
back to himself as a young man in the 60s, and realize that this is a chance he could only have
dreamt of 50 yrs. ago, and just can't turn his back on that.
"Getting her to the nomination" allows the D establishment, after she is forced to step
down, to replace her with Biden/Warren or some other "anyone but Sanders" ticket with less
trouble (party disunity, bad optics, turnout suppression) than if she implodes before the convention
and the HRC delegates + superdelegates outright steal the nomination from Sanders.
If they do this, the Dems will lose in November. And badly. They won't get more than a handful
of Sanders voters after this kind of a backstab, and the party will be (rightfully) perceived
as a bunch of clueless clowns who thought a potential criminal would make a suitable nominee.
Independents will strongly swing to Trump.
The question is, do the Democrats care? I can easily see the Dem establishment taking one for
the bipartisan consensus beltway team in order to keep Sanders out of the White House. They never
did much to support Gore and Kerry in the wake of their questionable defeats - and both of them
were much more harmless to the establishment than Sanders.
What would the e-mail address of a private server look like? Would it be apparent to anybody
who encountered it to be something – say – non standard? But keep your mouth shut.
Well, her official email address as SecState would have ended in @state.gov. The address she
actually used was @clintonemail.com. It was obvious to everyone what she was doing. If you work
in the State Dept, do you question your boss over something like that? Maybe not, you might assume
it was cleared somehow. It looks like IT and Security people were appalled.
The IG report found no evidence she had permission from anyone to use her own email server
nor any record of her even asking for permission. Which contradicts statements she made elsewhere.
Has Clinton ever actually said that the State Department allowed her to have a private
server at home and that everyone knew about it? What I've heard her say, and what I took
away from the little bit of the Mills deposition that I've read so far, is that the State Department
knew she had her own email account ; that use of a personal email account was allowed
, and that others before her also did it, most notably Colin Powell.
Anyone can buy a domain using their last name plus "email.com," or whatever variation thereof
is available. However, most people (presumably) use a hosting service. It seems obvious to me
that there's a huge difference between having a personal email account and storing said email
on a server in your basement, but Clinton appears to have succeeded in conflating the two in the
public's mind. Her supporters certainly seem satisfied, particularly since she has apologized
and openly admitted to a lapse in judgment. I'm not a techie, so maybe I'm meowing up the wrong
telephone pole. Tech people here, what's your take?
If I'm right about the distinction and what they've actually said, Clinton and Mills could
well be telling the truth that many people at DOS knew she was using private email, and that it
was allowed, even for official government business. It's unlikely that her clintonemail.com address
raised many eyebrows, even among those who noticed – and many might not have, because once her
address was in their contact list, the extension probably wasn't displayed. The big exception
was at the very beginning, when her clintonemail address was getting stuck in DOS spam filters
and had to be put on a safe sender list, or something to that effect.
Of those who noticed she wasn't using a .gov address, how many would have thought about the
server she was using, and how many of those would have imagined that her office hadn't gone through
proper security procedures? It's quite plausible that the only people knowledgeable enough to
be concerned were the IT security people, and when a couple of them eventually did raise questions,
they were told to keep quiet about it.
At some point, some of the substance of what was hidden will be revealed – it is terribly hard
to believe that it will be that she donated a kidney to a Syrian refugee….(Oh look, she looks
sickly because she is SOOOOO Noble!!!)
The problem is that the "Clinton sycophants and tribal Dems" are a large part of the Democrat
base and an even larger part of the Democrat establishment.
I don't see how they get talked off the ledge (absent Clinton "discovering" new medical problems
(or even Bill, maybe)).
Not mentioned in this item, but relevant to Obama's legacy, is that he left the State Dept
IG post unfilled by a permanent appointment throughout HRC's tenure as Secy State. The acting
IG was a career State Dept official, and did not rock HRC's boat. Obama is implicated in HRC's
misdeeds in the sense that he left the barn door open for her. There's a sense in which the HRC
email scandal may become part of Obama's legacy, whatever he does now. As Yves sometimes puts
it, this has been an unnecessary "own goal".
No. The IG's of major agencies are nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate.
Here is an interesting article which hints that using acting-IG's makes them less independent
and is being done intentionally by the Obama Administration. They have the longest vacancies of
any recent President.
thanks for that, here's a tidbit, I notice the ex-im bank and international development are
(not likely there's any double dealing going on there, no, nothing to see here as long as you
don't look) unmanned, among others
"Currently, said Michael Horowitz, the Justice Department IG who chairs the Council of the
Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency, IG slots are vacant at seven major agencies: Interior,
the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., the Veterans
Affairs Department, the General Services Administration, the Export-Import Bank and the CIA All
but the CIA's have been empty a year or more, he said, and the Obama administration has submitted
nominations for only three."
and also this
"{"When IG positions remain unfilled, their offices are run by acting IGs who, no matter how qualified
or well-intentioned, are not granted the same protections afforded to Senate-confirmed IGs," said
Chairman Ron Johnson, R-Wis. "They are not truly independent, as they can be removed by the agency
at any time; they are only temporary and do not drive office policy; and they are at greater risk
of compromising their work to appease the agency or the president."}"
I browsed through the Cheryl Mills deposition yesterday (which was mainly the lawyers arguing
about the scope of the discussion it seemed) and some of the coverage today. It seems that Mills
claimed that HRC's use of the private email was not kept secret and lots of Admin officials knew
about it. (Note that people had to make a special request to be able to use her email.) But Obama
claimed he only learned of it "like the rest of you, in the news reports". So Obama and Hillary
never emailed each other while she was SoS?
I don't find it surprising that they did not communicate directly. Plausible deniability. What
we have is a career civil servant intent on influence peddling and a figurehead interested only
in legacy burnishing. They are a perfect fit … as long as they stay out of each others way.
To your last comment: I suspect not. They never were chummy esp. after all the heat of the
campaign: "You're likeable enough, Hillary". Obama has plenty of staff to wrangle correspondence
for that, and his aides being middle-persons (and likely being of a generation that put a lot
more trust in technology at the time) likely didn't think that hard about it…
It was reported last January that there were eighteen emails between Clinton and Obama that
State was not going to release for security reasons. So yes, they did email each other. It would
be interesting to know what security instructions Obama received regarding using his email. Did
anyone ever caution him to check the sender's email address as a caution against phishing? Her
email address was clintonemail dot com. Even a technical neophyte has to know that means either
she or some other entity was hosting the site; and, if a separate entity, did that entity have
security clearance for handling those emails? Obama knew darn well that she was using an unsecure
system. He is equally guilty of enabling her risk-taking.
Maybe the FBI can investigate just how many people have mishandled classified information.
10,000 government workers?
100,000?
If one can be in trouble for taking a selfie before a classified equipment, that one wasn't
aware so (as fajensen wrote above), can one be in trouble for opening a letter, a disk or a laptop
(mistakenly delivered or left behind) containing classified information?
Within the perimeter of a secure environment, you bet you can!
Any paper, CD, computer, phone, …. left alone in the open is already a violation. At the place
I consulted at, there are prominent red+white background with the 3-digit number to call for security
in *all* cases. Everything has to be locked away, even if one is going for coffee or toilet, one
must leave all electronics at the gate. "No mistakes are possible, only conspiracies" the thinking
goes.
If one picks any abandoned device / media up, well, it's kind of the same situation as when
you find a gun on a park bench: Pick it up "for safety", but now your finger-prints are all over
it. And now the police shows up because someone reported the gun …
The very minimum price is a really tedious debriefing by security and punitive training from
HR in the handling of classified material. Maybe some Gender Diversity or Cultural Awareness on
top because you cursed at the debriefing.
Maximum … about 30 years.
Outside the classified zone, it's easier.
If you find an unsecured laptop or briefcase that – per long-standing British security tradition
– was left on the London Tube, you are probably not in trouble, you can even hand it over to The
Daily Mail or whatever for a "reward" since the HMG doesn't pay any. Don't sell it on eBay though.
China and Russia may buy and then … it's espionage.
"because her real business is selling access to government and its monies or services to those
with the funds to afford the Clintons. But most people are reacting to the sheer arrogance of
the "law doesn't apply to me" attitude and the lies about it so far. But the longer this stays
around the more it will become 'what DID she have to hide'."
Good point. Proceedeing to conduct the public's business in private is the smoke. Many suspect
the donations to the Clinton foundation by various entities with business beefier the state dept,
could be the fire…
They (DOJ) don't have to charge/indict her with anything to Hindenburg her campaign. RICO the
Foundation and it's over.
I'll bet that's why the FBI is taking so long- the email investigation has spread to the Foundation.
The media isn't going there and the FBI had already leaked that they are looking into it.
The "real business" of the Corporatist Dems is –ta dah!– creating more wealth for the Big Whatevers
and making sure they donate enough of their wealth to get the right Corporatist Dems elected.
And, of course, making sure that those who serve the Big Corporations and Big Whatevers well are
granted true wealth once out of office.
And with more wealth comes even more power
it is stunning how very wealthy (as far as we know) the Clintons have become in such a short
time. But it somewhat stunning how very wealthy Corporatist Dems in general become….
The public doesn't do nuance; it requires in-your-face visuals: "little girl + the daisy, Willie
Horton, blue dress."
I wonder what the reaction would be to a montage, with the caption, "I would never
let campaign contributions influence my decisions."
First, Hillary collecting $675,000+ for a couple of Goldman speeches…….."They offered it"………cackle.
Then, Bill, with a photo of the "Lolita Express" flying overhead (poetic license:)
Repeatedly requesting permission from State to travel to Africa to meet with Joseph Kabila,
the murderous Dictator of the poorest country on earth, the Republic of Congo. The butcher had
offered Clinton $650,000 to give a short talk, and have his picture taken with the Ex-President.
The request was so outrageous it was, of course, summarily turned down. Not to be deterred so
easily, the Big Dog persisted, telling an aide to try again, this time making sure the decision
maker at State knew it was B.C. personally making the request. Turned down again, Willie shifted
gears, "what if the fee was paid to the Foundation (or, GCI, not sure,) and not directly to me?"
We should be thankful intermediaries had the good sense to , diplomatically, tell Bill to,
basically, get-the-F- outta here with this request. But, naturally, it's the optic of this Ex-President
even requesting such an inappropriate meeting that, so perfectly, illustrates how far down the
sleaze ladder the Clintons have descended.
Oh, you can toss in that, "we came, we saw, he died"……….. extended cackle video for good measure.
Considering that Obama sees Clinton as part of his legacy, I think there will be some limit
to how far he (his people) will go to protect her. A thoroughly tainted Hillary doesn't serve
his interest. I read the Bernstein statements as first step away from HRC, and not a tiny one
either. "… no longer 100% sure of …" implies "we don't guarantee it".
And the Obama and Clinton teams never warmed to each other, even during her tenure at SoS.
(Team) Obama is certainly upset about the prospect of a Clinton failure, but they're not shedding
any tears.
What I don't really get is the motivation for allowing stories like this to leak out, if its
not to undermine Clinton?
The way I see it, if Obama was truly, deeply invested in Clinton winning (and I'd be surprised
at that, given that we know he doesn't really like her), he would be working hard behind the scenes
to shore her up. Get her over the finishing line of the convention, and then deal with things
after that as they arise. This sort of leak can only weaken her significantly and maybe even encourage
a few superdelegates to start thinking Sanders is a safer option.
The only motivation I can think is to lay the groundwork for a coup against her (and, by definition,
Sanders). I'm no expert on internal Dem rules and what is possible legally, but it always seemed
to me that the logical and route for Obama to preserve his legacy and ensure a Dem win is to make
private calls to senior Dems and say 'trust me, I've seen the legal documents, Clinton is finished,
I know she can't get out of this', and then parlay a face saving climbdown (glass of whiskey,
gun, private room, medical cert) for Clinton in order to put forward a 'safe' ticket at the convention
(Kerry/Biden?). Is it possible for her to transfer her elected delegates to AN Other?
well, that would likely tear the party apart. i think they would rather trump win than sanders,
but imposing biden/kerry or some such is a risky strategy in the present environment. i think
the natural impulse of these people is to be risk averse, and in their bubble they might not be
able to gauge the risk.
I don't think it would tear the party apart, it would just upset the Dem consultants and vendors.
Sanders reliance on small donations completely upsets their economic model, which is based on
a revenue stream from big donors. Big donors aren't interested in supporting populist goals, ergo
populist goals are not money-makers.
On the other hand, a Sanders general candidacy would expose all the Hillary supporters currently
making the "party loyalty" and "not another Nader" arguments to be completely specious if they
didn't pitch in. Some might have the stomach for that, but most are herd followers to begin with.
And the threat of Trump is completely real, regardless (unless the Reps manage to pull a fast
one at their convention… which would completely sever that last leg Clinton is standing on).
Exactly this. Like vampires, the DNC must find a way to cannibalize the energy of Sanders'
supporters in order to re-invogorate a moribund Party, while not losing influence over it.
But the two fundraising models cannot live comfortably in one party for long, certainly not
if the corp/elite funding continues to determine the Party's direction.
Sanders is risking a historic misstep in staying within the Party too long. He's right to stay
so long as Clinton is capable of imploding, but the moment he's pressured to go full sheepdog
in support of Clinton, he has to step away and use the funding structure to build a truly left/populist
party.
I doubt he will. He wants her to win instead of Trump, and the DNC types will outmaneuver him
because of this. I fear all of the concessions he wins in exchange for his cherished email list
will be for nothing once the real game begins.
Is it really a risk of tearing the party apart? If managed right, it could be sold as a 'unifying'
move to heal the wounds of the nomination process, etc., etc. Especially if a genuine left winger
was added as vice prez. The leadership is risk averse, but they can also be ruthless, and they
may see the risk of a catastrophic Clinton meltdown as a greater risk.
DNC is desperately hoping for a knockout blow on 6/7. Wins in states like CA for Sanders would
only rile up his supporters even more.
If they dare to push a Biden/Kerry ticket, it's going to been seen as a "coup". Tensions are
already visibly raised after the NV debacle. DNC tried playing hardball and smearing him and his
supporters and he didn't fold. It seems like the Dem elite might be backing off on these tactics.
A Biden/Kerry ticket would really escalate things and probably make Sanders bolt to the Green
Party for the general election. Under those circumstances, he'd bring a TON of voters with him.
He'd even bring Clinton sympathizers that don't like the DNC's bait-and-switch tactics.
They need Sanders to fade away and fall in line. Every state he wins, every rally with 10s
of thousands showing up make it harder and harder to make that happen.
Given that the mood of the electorate both left and rightwing is "anti-establishment", I don't
see why on earth the Dems would choose Biden/Kerry… how much more establishment could one get?
At least offer Warren (and get the "first female president" too boot) and throw Sanders a bone
- he's too old for VP but could have a cabinet post. Or Senate Majority Leader? (That is probably
too critical a post for the Schumer/Feinstein axis though.)
There is no genuine left winger to put on as VP. Or rather, they would NEVER put a real left
winger in, given Clinton's possible impeachment or death.
Now that Elizabeth Warren is being a good girl and playing footsie with Schumer, I can see
them thinking putting her in as VP would work well enough. I don't think so (in my neck of the
progressive woods, there seems to be a general understanding that she sold out), but more importantly,
I can't imagine Hillary stepping away only to see Liz moved in.
Their smartest real play would be to let Bernie have the nom and bide their time, hoping they
can work in the background with Republicans to taint and undermine him. But I suspect that they're
exactly smart enough to know that probably wouldn't work.
Exactly right! In their bubble, in their world where they manufacture their own reality, can
they gauge risk? I highly doubt it. The establishment needs an establishment candidate. That's
why Sanders will never get the nomination. Given the freak out on the republican side just over
speculating stealing the nomination from Trump, I think it comical anyone could believe the democrats
could airlift Biden in and get away with it. Such an act would simply be establishment desperation
– the only Plan B they could come up with.
Given the vote rigging Sanders supporters believe has been going on, I doubt any will vote
for Clinton. How many would vote Trump and how many would sit out is open for speculation. However
give the nomination to Biden and i think you're guaranteeing a landslide of Sanders supporters
pinching their noses and voting Trump. They'd be just angry enough.
Clinton or Biden? it doesn't matter as Trump wins in a rout. Sanders would be a close call
but he'll never get the nomination. The establishment must have skin in the game until they finally
get what they deserve in November.
I'll also add that i'm not holding my breath that Trump is the instant panacea to save America.
In fact I wouldn't be surprised to see him cutting deals like crazy with the establishment behind
the scenes or after elected. He won't need the unwashed masses after November. Doesn't mean he
does that and even if he cuts some deals he'll still do more good than any establishment candidate.
More and more American voters see him as the only non-establishment option. It's never really
been about Trump. It's about American voters lashing out at the elites. Trump was simply clever
enough to present himself as the great non-professional politician for people to turn to.
People keep saying this about Sanders voters but I know five (three in my family) who will
without fail vote for Clinton over Trump because they hate Trump, see him as a bigot and a fool,
and expect Clinton to be Obama's third term, which they can live with.
I don't agree with them, but this endlessly repeated meme that Sanders voters will NEVER vote
for Clinton is, I think, wishful thinking.
Guilty as charged! Wishful thinking indeed. Guess I can't condemn those for thinking an Obama
like 3rd term would be a better result. I suppose any kind of thinking falls flat when confronted
with the people who live in a highly materialistic and superficial society. Trump optics are very
unPresidential and that counts for a great deal in a society(not just the US) that has been conditioned
to rever the president of the USA.
Won't even touch on the Left and the Culture War because I've made that point previously.
my rich friends (lifetime republicans included) will vote for hillary, my poor friends won't.
The PTB have created more poor people tha they have wealthy so the numbers won't work for hillary
unless a lot of republicans vote for her, which is not a stretch because she is a republican.
But since we talk about nader costing gore (really it was dinos for bush) by taking 500 odd votes
the sanders deserters (including me, i will not vote for hillary under any circumstances, and
not because I think trump is good in any way, hillary is worse IMO) will exact their revenge even
as their more comfortable peers who have and continue to benefit from the rigged game go for hillary.
We really have no idea how this will pan out. So yes, some sanders supporters will be badgered
into clinton, but I think that's a small percentage, people inclined to support hillary already
support her, most of sanders voters are the castaways. Sorry, can't go along with the endless
drone strikes of the 5th term of GWB. Hillary is not the peace candidate.
Clinton voters – those not in the establishment, that is – seem to be the silent type.
You don't see them here or hear them on radio often (just yesterday, on the local public radio,
almost all the callers were for Sanders – it made me wonder if Hillary would lose 0 to 100 in
the upcoming California primary).
Clinton voters are the small amount type. She has only "won," even in the states she did did "win," by massively suppressing the vote.
She hasn't even held onto her own voters from 2008, even in conservative states. Her "big wins"
in the South were with much smaller numbers of votes cast. There are people who genuinely want to vote for her. They were not enough to win the Democratic
primary without massive suppression AND theft.
Some will, some won't. How many is to be decided. If Sanders gives his list to the Democrats, I will certainly vote for Trump. I would rather
have Götterdämmerung immediately, then have it play out.
The problem for Hillary is there is no indication the email scandal narrative will ever
improve to the point of improving her untrustworthy numbers. The best she can hope for is the
FBI stating it will not recommend an indictment which will merely confirm the public's correct
perception that the power elite are treated better than the rank and file. Hillary cannot unring
the Inspector General's conclusion she circumvented FOIA and federal record keeping laws. She
cannot undue the fact she maintained thousands of classified records, along with 22 top secret
documents on the private server. She cannot change the fact she hid her use of the private server
from the public and only disclosed it when caught by the Senate Committee investigating Benghazi.
Everyone who pays attention to the facts is disgusted by her misconduct in this matter.
Loyal Hillary supporters are the only ones willing to buy into the unbelievable rationales
floated the past year. For the rest of us, everything we learn merely confirms what we previously
thought. That Hillary cannot be trusted, wants to avoid public scrutiny and believes she is above
the law. Everything we learn about the email scandal is much worse than initially portrayed by
Hillary.
As the article states–this is all on Hillary who for over 1,200 days intentionally used a private
email basement server despite being told not to do so. She had numerous opportunities to right
her wrongs, but insisted on doing what she wanted to do because that is always how the Clintons
operate. There is no way Hillary, Bill and her team of misfits should be allowed within a hundred
miles of the oval office. Sadly, Donald will win if Hillary remains the Democrats candidate of
choice.
I believe we can plainly chart the "decay path" (lovely phrase BTW), of Hillary Clinton's failed
attempts to secure the highest office of the land just by looking at pictures of Monica Lewinsky
from 1998 until today.
The true decay path would have been the trajectory Bill Clinton's baggage would have taken,
from the White House to the South Lawn, had Hillary Clinton thrown the bum out in 1998.
I have always been confused by which woman Bill Clinton was lying straight faced about when
the then President of the United States declared before the whole world: "I did not have sex with
that woman."
At the time of the scandal, Hillary Clinton was First Lady of the United States of America,
the most powerful women in the free world. Imagine what her standing-up for women everywhere would
have had, let alone upon the current states of "family values" (so-called)? Imagine the affect
her standing up for herself would have had upon the women of the world?
Instead she used her power to play the "little woman," when she could have assured herself
two (2) terms as President of the United States, even guaranteed herself the title of being the
first Empress of the United States of America if she had wanted.
As it stands, Bill Clinton's legacy is not how he ruined one woman, but two (2).
Who Mr Clinton shags is his business and his wife's*. Hillary came out smelling like roses.
She got sympathy as devoted wife whose hubby screwed around and, in my view, damn near universal
understanding for her decision to honour her marriage by staying with her hubby.
I think her problem is that, in routing official traffic through a private mail server,
she's tried to avoid records of her work (as a public official!) ever becoming available to the
public. It looks, at the very least, like she's trying to hide something and it's a demonstration
of breathtaking contempt for the very people whose votes she's now asking for.
That the Democrat brains trust knew all this and still decided to try and coronate her
leads me to suspect that they've become completely divorced from reality. Any halfway credible
candidate would trample over whoever the R's pick.
* How classy, not to mention politically astute, would it have been if the R's could have kept
their frothing to themselves and made a single public statement along those lines and got on with
the business of serving their constituents.
If he shagged under the legal age limit girls, traveled on a jet which was used in slave
trade of underage girls, etc; then it isn't just his business, it's a criminal matter. If Mrs.
Clinton enabled, and/or aided and abetted, then she could be facing criminal charges.
Bill is a sexual predator. His affair with Jennifer Flower was consensual. But starting
from when he was Governor, there is a long list of credible allegations of him engaging in sexual
harassment (extremely aggressive come-ons with women he had just met, often women who were state
employees or Dem consultatnts), including a rape allegation by Juanita Brodderick. We've even
had a reader in comments say that when Bill Clinton visited a friend, he asked their college aged
daughter when he was alone with her if she wanted to ride in his car and give him a blow job.
DC contacts confirm the city is rife with stories like that.
> Hillary Clinton was First Lady of the United States of America, the most powerful women in
the free world
Most powerful woman in the world? Somebody's wife? Lord I hope not. Surely there was a female
head of state or a Supreme Court Justice or something with better claim.
Clinton's… poster children for Flexians… Disheveled Marsupial… at least the loon pond and wing
nutters are open about their insanity… something about the inelasticity of beliefs…
If there were an equal rule of law in this country, we would not even be discussing
this issue as Clinton would have already been indicted by now. The recent Wikileaks release shows
exactly how complicit Clinton is, was, and will always be, a truly evil human being.
As strange a thing as this is to say, I find myself wishing that more journalists had experience
in IT security. I do have such experience, and from what I can see most people really don't appreciate
just how totally, ludicrously irresponsible it is for that server to exist. Talk of it having
been "secured" by some lone IT contractor is ridiculous on its face. I wouldn't run a homebrew
email server, and I am basically not worth hacking – very much unlike the US Secretary of State.
Seriously, think about it. The Secretary of State had a private email server which seems
to have been widely known about within the State Department and other people in government who
had dealings with Hillary Clinton. There's really no question as to if that thing was hacked –
you can absolutely bet your ass that multiple foreign intelligence services have been
in and out of that thing.
That's what's really galling to me – even by Hillary's own stated standards, what she did
with her email is orders of magnitude worse than what Snowden did. But it's Hillary Clinton, so
it gets handwaved by the Democrats' long practice at assuming a Clinton scandal is overblown nonsense.
To be fair, a large number of Clinton scandals have been overblown nonsense…I think Democrats
have gotten so used to fighting off those attacks, that they just assume the same when something
real pops up.
As for the irresponsibility of maintaining that homebrew server, I've tried to explain on other
forums how it was actually worse than getting it through a commercial provider, or even what Powell
did. The responses were usually along the lines of "it wasn't hacked." Sigh.
Agreed. But that's the thing. These events aren't about the substantive IT issues. They're
just part of concentration of wealth and power; the authoritarians in both major parties are control
freaks who work together in bipartisan cooperation. Laws are for the little people. The ruling
class is above the law. The role of the media is to enforce this system, not challenge it.
That's why people like Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Thomas Drake, Jeffrey Sterling,
John Kiriakou, Joe Wilson, and so forth are persecuted by the government while people like Clinton
(and Petraeus, Novack, Libby, Bush, Cheney, Obama, Biden, etc.) are protected. It has nothing
whatsoever to do with the merits of events.
Just as one example, here's the 'ole Gray Lady serving as
dutiful stenographer
for Nancy Pelosi herself, the Democratic Speaker from San Francisco, supposedly one of the
most liberal parts of the entire country, explaining that the law doesn't apply to people in power.
Agreed. I've worked in IT and software development for years and agree that her provision
of that server doesn't meet the most basic requirements for security. Also, I work for a rather
large company with a sizable federal contract and, if you haven't contracted with the government,
you can only imagine the levels of security they impose upon their vendors. Two-factor authentication,
encryption at rest, kernel hardening and on and on. Not only do you HAVE to do these things if
you want to do business with the government, they bring in teams of their IT people to audit you.
And it is not perfunctory in any way. They take InfoSec very, very seriously.
Rule no 1 of security: a system is only as secure as its weakest link. Imagine how anyone who
abides by the strict security requirements necessary to work in or for government feels when learning
about Clinton's cavalier disregard for the law? Her arrogant refusal to play by the same rules
as the people she is supposed to lead? In fact, her behavior put the entire system and people's
lives at risk.
She fails the most basic test of genuine leadership. Yet another important example of why she
is unfit to be president.
Good article. The IG's report was the crack in the dam and I believe soon the whole sordid
mess that Clinton has created for herself will come flooding through. I think Bernstein's messaging
was to the Democratic party as a whole that its time to pursue other avenues. And there are other
rumblings as well. Yesterday in the
WSJ was this op-ed which made many of the same points that were made here, as well as discusses
the fallout if Clinton loses the California primary. I also think that the Dems are not only just
worried about the nomination now. The IG's report clears a path for hearings by the Republicans
against Clinton after the election.
What pisses me off to no end is the fact that the party and media are unwilling to pivot to
Sanders. He could win the general, perhaps more easily that HRC. But Sanders is also to blame
on this for being so completely inflexible that he can't make the right friends.
That is a positive for him generally though. These people don't want "friends" they want others
who are willing to play ball. Sanders says GTFO, enough is enough.
The truth was never going to sit well with these selfish fools and their sycophants.
I agree. Sanders has nothing to gain and a lot to lose by "making nice" with the Dem establishment.
Why make nice with them? They are the problem, not the solution. That's a mainstay of Sanders'
campaign.
Sanders is the ranking member on the budget committee and has been the chair of the veterans
affairs committee. Those are plum jobs which demonstrates the Democratic Party is not a political
party by any normal standard because you don't give the best jobs to people outside the party
unless you need to.
The Clinton fanaticism isn't about Sanders. They believe they need Clinton. An active DoJ
might be a threat. A few have backwards ideas about politics. Some simply did the believe Sanders
when he said Hillary was weak, but with a Gabbard in play, many Democrats can kiss their ambitions
good bye if Sanders wins.
I've said it elsewhere: Sanders is unacceptable to the DNC because a Sanders win would render
the DNC networks, influence and fundraising abilities irrelevant overnight. The DNC would no longer
be gatekeepers. You can win without them. Thus, Team D does not fear a Sanders defeat, and they can live with President Trump. In fact,
that would represent an unprecedented fundraising opportunity. But from the Team D perspective, a Sanders victory must be prevented at all costs.
How the hell could Sanders "make friends" with members of the Democratic Party elite? He is
blowing up their revolving-door-greasing funding model. Running as effectively as he has with
almost no lobbyist money? No major corporate donors to speak of? What can he offer them, except
unpleasant changes that negatively impact their careers?
Depends on whom one includes in the elite, and what one means by negatively. Are the super
delegates who aspire to be on the ticket in November running for their own amusement? If so, I
suppose they don't care whether they ride on Sanders coat tails or sail off the cliff on whomever
the elite deem the nominee should be. Would you rather be the Senate minority leader, or the Senate
majority leader. House minority leader, or speaker of the house? I have no idea where the power
lies here, but I admit that am curious about Pelosi's non stance, and Reid's pivot, with almost
unseemly hast, from saying Sanders needed to get in line, to that he would be more powerful when
he returned to the senate, to saying: "hands off." And sandwiched in between saying no way in
hell would he tolerate a senate vp coming from a state with a Republican governor. Assuming he
has any actual say in the matter, that would torpedo the preferred sop to the Sandernistas: Warren.
Reid is of course gone either way, but Schumer is next in line is he not? What do I know, but
it's entertaining to speculate.
When Carl Bernstein opens with, "The implications of all of this are that Hillary Clinton
did not want her emails subjected to the Freedom of Information Act or subpoenas from Congress.
And that's why she set up a home-brew server" he is only telling half the truth, and is framing
the conversation around her supposedly innocent desire for a little privacy. Pretty good lying,
Carl.
But this is definitely putting a lot of spin on the ball, because the other half of the
story is the reason WHY she wanted to avoid FOIA and Congressional scrutiny. The answer is: so
that between her and Bill she could sell her office to the highest bidders, which the FBI is quite
prepared to prove, or if denied that chance, to "leak like crazy" to the media. Good
Lord, the FBI is even considering treating the Clinton Foundation as a Racketeering Influenced
Criminal Organization. There's no chance this is going to just go away.
Given this likelihood of the full story going public in any case, given the completely independent
Judicial Watch investigation, and given that the Russian media actually printed Clinton emails
in their newspapers back in 2013 - and claim to have 20,000 of her emails in hand that they can
release at any time - there's no practical path for the White House or DNC to stonewall or to
clamp a lid on this affair, and roll Hillary across the finish line to the nomination on a hospital
gurney if that's what it takes.
The same problem exists with pardoning her prior to prosecution - it won't silence FBI leaks,
or the Russians, or Judicial Watch, or whomever else wishes to leak the full truth to the morning
papers. The public will be fed a steady discovery of exactly what Obama's unconditional pardon
actually covered. It will be a magical expanding pardon - starting out as a balloon but growing
within months to the size of the Hindenburg before burning to the ground along with Obama's legacy.
As to what the White House knows that they aren't leaking - that would be the devastating damage
Hillary's loss of state secrets has done, none of which can ever be shared with the public. If
covert CIA operations have been ruined, if agents have been exposed, arrested or killed, if someone's
name has gone up on that wall of heroes in the CIA lobby because of Hillary Clinton, the CIA will
not forgive, ever. Nor will they tolerate letting her gain the Oval Office, where she can hire,
fire and otherwise direct them. The NSA is known to be well aware of her public corruption of
the SoS office, and of the wholesale money-laundering of the Clinton Foundation, which Charles
Ortel is now meticulously publishing in the form of PDF files covering every separate arena of
corruption ongoing over there. They don't want her as their boss, either. Steps can be taken to
prevent that from happening, with no risk of exposure.
Hillary's got no way out of her legal troubles other than suddenly checking into a hospital
and being declared terminal. Everyone will hold off, at that point. Until she fails to pass away
by the weekend, at which point her legal nightmare resumes its course. So no, she's got no way
out of what's coming, and no actual path to the White House.
All of which leaves the Democratic Party with only two options:
a) get her nominated at the Convention even if it's by just one vote, but hand pick her VP
for her so that person can be the real candidate when she drops out well before November. Problem:
Hillary has spent several years scorching the earth for other Dem candidates. Nobody has any organization
or resume to suddenly step into her shoes and expect anyone to vote for them in November. If Kerry
is their only choice, please don't bother.
b) induce Hillary to drop out before the Convention, and let the Convention be brokered. Don't
elect Bernie Sanders on the first round, and after that you're home free - keep voting, round
after round, until delegates finally accept your Hillary replacement which isn't Bernie Sanders.
Oh, it will be a raucous, riotous event, but it's all above board, and by the rules. Caution:
this course of action carries a high risk of nominating Bernie Sanders.
Just speculation, but by keeping quiet the NSA/CIA/FBI could be "investing" in blackmail futures.
The ghost of J. Edgar may still be lurking somewhere in D.C.
The Clinton Foundation, which controls billions in an opaque labrynth structure and funded
by war profiteers, crass political operatives and those with corrupt cynical motives, functions
like the treasury for a supra national shadow regime.
When this story finally unravels, and it will, it will make WaterGate, IranGate look like a
kiddy party.
I am inclined to agree. Even the mere mention of RICO might mean the FBI is stalking bigger
game – the Clinton Foundation? The Democratic Party itself?
The Libya correspondence between Blumenthal, a Clinton Foundation employee who also representes
a security firm evidently poised to be contracted there and HC is an example.
Given all these wheeling and dealing interscections between SOS Hillary and the Clinton Foundation's
unwholesome donors
and the extraordinary lenghts to privatize correspondence (and not fully turn over Blumenthal's
hacked emails to her) there is no other way to reasonably explain the stunning depths.
Especially given HC's interventions have resulted in lawless no man's lands…… hugely profitable
for donor defense contractors or those poised to acquire resources, weaponry (Lybia).
Cheney et al. got away with the no-bid ultra-corrupt Haliburton contracts in Iraq, so there
is a precedent for this kind of naked thieving going unpunished.
The many examples of gross corrupt war profiteering facilitated by high office holders going
unpunished or rewarded must be emboldening.
But in my view, setting up a foundation with opaque accounting and trotting around the world
soliciting huge donations while SOS with a private server outside government channels and FOIA
is a new level of organized criminal archetecture.
Rewarded or unpunished war profiteering facilitated by high office holders must be emboldening.
But in my view, setting up a foundation with opaque accounting then soliciting huge donations
from donors specializing in political upheaval and military conflict while globe trotting as SOS
using a private server outside of government channels to circumvent FOIA is a new level of criminal
and is essentially a Clinton Foundation serving as treasury at the helm, with presumed HC POTUS
subversively enforcing a shadow supra national archetecture.
To Code Name D – One can watch a program on Netflix about Hayden and the CIA realizing it has
gone too far. What may you ask? Well well has the country done since JFK? Selling out to
the bankers affects intelligence too. It just takes awhile for our species to wake up.
And despite the self admitted overeach directed by corrupt politicians I do not find wasting
(literally as in the slang term of the word) funny. This is an issue I have with bombadier Kissinger.
Energy policies and struggles matter. But Clinton always would say "well that policy is ten years
away" regarding energy policy. So when the Russians play a hot card (but overplayed its hand)
because the West in its corruption didnt move faster, lets blame Russia.
These are the kinds of things that kill and cause increased casualties in intelligence. Think
nobody woud notice?
As always, increase competitors in energy, alternative and others. Then Russia can fuck off
as it tries to raise prices. But that requires the rule of law and not selling the country down
the river. Just getting down to some brass tacks here. I get real pissed beause not only can this
get my countrymen killed, along with me but the other reason is some of us have had to do the
job that government is paid do to. I wont expand.
Ah, I am starting to see the "RICO mention" starting to go mainstream on you-tube. I am starting
to think this was a preemptive leak to try and discredit the real charges should they come out
later. We have yet to see any evidence that would support this and it doesn't fit with the current
noise.
One has to wonder just how many red flags have to be waved in their faces for it to dawn on
them that, hey, maybe Hillary Clinton isn't – and never was – the right person to pass the baton
to.
Seems to me that if there was some kind of bargain struck in 2008 (you concede and enthusiastically
endorse me, and I'll reward you with a plum job from which you can launch a presidential campaign,
and I'll throw in the full support of the DNC and the superdelegates), there were multiple points
along the way where it was clear Clinton was putting all of that in jeopardy. She made some terrible
decisions, and instead of pulling back, she doubled down.
Are we to believe that no one from "the White House" ever took her aside or suggested that
while she may be living a life of entitlement, there was that little thing known as an election
that was going to depend on public perception of her actions and decisions, and she might want
to consider that, promises notwithstanding, she was playing a fool's game if she bought into her
own invincibility and inevitability?
But maybe "the White House" bought into it, too. How else to explain why, in spite of every
kind of assistance it's possible to get, some of it of questionable legality, the anointed candidate
has done nothing but drop in the polls. A little-known, 74-year old Democratic Socialist from
a teeny-tiny state enters the race polling within the margin of error, and a year and hundreds
of millions of small-dollar donations later, is in a position to deny Clinton a pledged-delegate
nomination.
How large does the writing on the wall have to be over there at "the White House?" How myopic
are these people, anyway? Did their eyes all of a sudden just pop open and they can only just
now see what has been obvious for some time?
I'd like to feel bad for them, but the phrase that comes to mind instead is "hoist on their
own petard."
This whole thing is such a massive exercise in selfish indulgence the only emotion these people
deserve is our anger, which we should put to use by denying them the offices and power they seek.
What I don't get here is, if the White House knows she's such a terrible candidate, why do
they want to put her in a real cat fight with Trump? Are they so sure (as Bernstein suggests)
that Obama will be able to carry her across the finish line in November?
And that bring up another point for all you "feminist" Clintonistas. Wasn't the whole point
of the "first woman in the White House" thing to show that women can do it alone? That they don't
need men carrying them around all the time to be successful? Well what's up with your candidate?
I have never (in my 65 years) ever seen anyone (woman or man) need more help from other people
(mostly men) to gain the success they seek. At every single turn in this campaign we have Ms.
Clinton needing someone else, someone MORE, falling on their sword for her. Because left on her
own, against a freaking socialist, for Christ's sakes, all she has been able to do is F@ck up.
A FIFTY POINT LEAD, gone. Wasted. Nothing to show. And this is what you want as feminism's representative
in the White House? Shame on you.
As others have pointed out, all that is required of Hillary at this point is to secure the
nomination. Nothing else really matters. Once Sanders is removed from the picture, her job is
done. A President Trump would be a minor setback from a partisan perspective and a Democratic
Party in opposition to a bogeyman like Trump would experience an amped up version of the unifying
effect it enjoyed in opposition to GWB. It really could serve to paper over the seismic ideological
rifts widening within the current party. Four years in opposition would be a very small price
to pay for averting what would be the existential threat to the party's core that a President
Sanders would represent.
I would think the prospect of a President Trump wouldn't bother the party's insiders much if
at all. The prospect of a President Sanders on the other hand would or could be a crushing and
final defeat for nearly everything the current Democratic Party stands for: a giant and hugely
lucrative influence peddling racket making everyone near its center into extremely wealthy individuals
with patronage jobs waiting for them and their families within the concerns of the people who
are bribing them. President Trump by comparison would be a godsend.
Most of the DLC establishment could find it easy enough to "live" with a Trump Presidency.
Just like Lil Marco Rubio, they'll easily bend their knees to kiss Trump's heiney and make deals
with him. What's it to them, after all?
Sanders? That's a horse of a different feather. Sanders isn't interested in them bending their
knees and kissing his heiney. And THAT's a huge problem for the 1%.
I agree with your assessment. Trump would play the game differently, but he could be counted
on to place the game.
Sanders shows that he knows and respects some of the rules of the game, but more of the rulebook
would be up for grabs and the outcomes perhaps less predictable for TPTB.
There are also wildcards–impeachments, assassinations, health issues, pardons, etc.
In that scenario Hillary wins the nomination and loses the election, Obama pardons her
to head off (in his telling) partisan persecution and looks noble (to the credulous) standing
up for her, clearing the way to elbow in on the Clinton network for the-haven't you heard?-Obama
Foundation. And the grift goes on.
Could be. We'll never know, because we're not at those tables. But could be.
1. Somewhat tangentially. I don't know how the 2007-2008 crisis looked to people on the "outside",
but to many of the guys in the trenches the world "blew up" on or about July 18, 2007, when the
two Bear-affiliated subprime funds hit a wall and the credit bubble literally stopped
the next day. Within a month, the SIVs got obliterated and it was downhill from
there.
Yes, it took a while to get to Lehman/AIG. There was the Bear thing, the commodities super-spike
in the summer of 2008, a few other notable items. But again, by the time Lehman came around the
view in the trenches was that the world had already been blowing up for over a year, and now "main
street" finally took notice. Really the one surprise was that the Fed let Lehman go (presumably
as a live experiment, or perhaps simply out of stupidity), and then the CDS markets went haywire
for awhile (hence AIG).
Not 20%-30% probability of "something bad happening". Rather, 100% probability of "something
bad" having already happened and now we're just watching the explosion in slo-mo.
2. Incidentally, this is pretty much what we're seeing with the Clinton campaign. You've already
seen the campaign "blow up", in a way, because Sanders didn't go away in February, or March, or
April, etc. Part of that was Sanders, part of that was general discontent – but part of that is
also Hillary not being able to put away an opponent that is so way out of the Democratic party
mainstream. Because the email thing, and the speeches thing, and the neo-liberalism thing,
whatever. Bernstein's "leaking" makes clear that as far back as February Obama's guys in the trenches
said – hey, we just saw the Bear funds blow up, and this thing is going to end badly one way or
the other. We don't know exactly how bad, but bad. Which is bad for us…
3. I actually think that this signalling is not about a specific thing. It's a more of a general
– you're not doing what you're supposed to do, and your messing up makes us look bad type of thing.
Today it's the emails, tomorrow it's whatever else – there are so many issues with the campaign
(and the candidate) that you could have Bernstein deliver a new speech weekly if not daily. The
overall message seems to be, "you're blowing up, do something, right now", and I would bet they've
been hitting that theme for months in private (the current leak to Bernstein being a sort of a
– you don't want to listen to us in private, here's something in public, now pay attention).
4. Honestly, I would be shocked – shocked! – if the FBI or the DoJ did anything to Hillary
Clinton on this email front. For one, let's dispense with any talk of "autonomy". Whom does the
FBI director report to? Have there been any instances in the past when the White House "influenced"
the direction of the FBI investigation? And what has this administration specifically demonstrated
time and again vis-a-vis leakers (from the standpoint of intimidation)? Or compartmentalizing
information to prevent such? I'm not saying they'll necessarily get away with it, but certainly
they can think that to themselves, at least through November.
The basic idea is that Obama and his people have put their chips on Clinton. For whatever reason
– political, personal, does not matter. They probably did so with a heavy heart (or some such),
but they did it. Now they're freaking out, justifiably, because they literally cannot, cannot
afford to have the Clinton campaign blow up right at this point (after November, sure, why not).
You think these people won't shut the FBI down if they feel they have to? Of course they
will. It will look dirty, of course, but it's – in their minds – probably better than the alternatives,
unless they want to go out with a real bang blowing up both Clinton and the DNC and ending up
as semi-pariahs among a good portion of the DNC donor base for the rest of their lives…which I
doubt.
Eh. The train wreck continues to unfold in slow motion, except that I think this time she actually
has a more than slim chance of making it to November and making it in November (after
which point, let the scandals lottery commence, to the endless delight of Fox News and the like).
Tend to agree. Clinton will likely win in November. Trump's potential voter base is less in
number than Clinton's. She has a built-in demographic that, unless she botches the debates totally,
should ensure Trump's defeat. BTW I despise the Clinton's and everything they stand for.
The 2008 Financial Crisis narrative I tend to follow is that Bear and Lehman had the most enemies
and so were the most convenient scapegoats/sacrifices to hand to an angry public. The reality
of these big crises is that the banking system fails absent absent government intervention and
so the saving of the others was a CHOICE.
Likewise, at some point the professional Democrats and the affiliated parts of the organism,
including its funders, might at some point view cutting the umbilical cord to the Clintons as
necessary for their own survival. I'd keep an eye out for that!
FWIW, on the outside, it seemed like things were very bad, so bad that it felt like
the political system was going out of its way to try to cover things up and tell people not to
worry their pretty little heads and other almost comically defensive approaches. And not just
in finance specifically, but all over our system, secrecy and ignoring reality seemed to permeate
our public leadership. A willful blindness at a systemic level – because after all, most highly
paid professionals depend upon the system; nobody wants to rock that officialdom boat much.
I have also been interested by some of the revisionist history that starts the GFC in 2008
with Lehman, rather than Bear Stearns in 2007, and more generally with the notion that the 2007-2009
crisis was a unique, isolated event rather than part of a multi-decade long process, that slow
motion train wreck, as if the kind of inequality that leads to systemic crashes magically appeared
out of nowhere in 2006.
To Washunate – I really appreciate the wise commentary, all of the time. The primary issue
is who controls the currency. A private bank like the Fed who is the ultimate lobbyist or the
the public, basically treasury. Our founders new both can and will fall prey to corruption but
out of the two choices public currency (a form of energy of all our labor) is best.
Central banking model is a form of conquest. As an empire it succeeded globally. Now such have
to own the empire and its fallacies. Including buying politicians. The rule of law must be restored
and the currency restored to public domain (despite its flaws).
Thanks for the kind words. One of the things I really like about what Yves has done at NC is
create a space for those inside and outside as panda put it to share directly with each other,
without the filter of technocrats and pundits in the middle who portray an air of expertise, of
rigorous intellectual curiosity about and understanding of the system, yet seem to possess neither
detailed knowledge about things 'in the trenches' nor about the perception of those things by
the general public on 'the outside' of the bubbles of affluence and power in our society.
The general public has known for some time to be leary of everything from bankster pronouncements
to econ PhD jibberish to warmongering buffoons. But the Serious People of our system act like
every problem is a big surprise. Because of course they are protecting the looting – or at least
enabling it through various kinds of navel gazing triviality – rather than doing anything meaningful
about it.
I heartily agree that rule of law isn't some quaint notion, purity test, or luxury. It is the
foundational element of a society that aspires for what are broadly held values (outside DC) like
freedom, justice, mercy, and equality.
1. Economy: "Not 20%-30% probability of "something bad happening". Rather, 100% probability
of "something bad" having already happened and now we're just watching the explosion in slo-mo.
"
Absolutely everyone I know who has established credibility with me in a wide range of spheres
agrees with the 100% figure. Timing: late 2016, early 2017 at the latest. With more far-reaching
impact than "usual" in a Great Depression or GFC.
Did you see by "something bad" I meant a Japan-level unraveling? I wasn't talking about recession
or a bear market. I was talking about a financial crisis, but a slower-moving one than we had.
And if you look at my posts from the time, I was very clear in chronicling the four acute phases
of the crisis: July-Aug 2007, December 2007, Bear and Lehman, as Very Big Deals. I was particularly
critical of the "Mission Accomplished" mode the officialdom went into in Feb-March 2008 and April-July
2008.
Yves – Time hss proved you wise. Japanafication is exactly what has been unfolding. And
according to Forbes and the Fed, 48% of the population having less than a grand in savings means
the US is near third world. One can buy Pop Tarts in third world countries also.
But there are wealth holders still spending (albeit less than two years ago) based on the stock
market or real estate rentals. Both are subject to harsh correction and that will have some knock-on
effects in labor. Not as bad as some may think but some.
The real danger is geopolitics. And this bitch that thinks she is queen has no issues literally
seeing 1/3 of the global population dying to escape her crimes. Think of what a rapist does to
a rape victim many times. Strangle that woman so she doesnt indict you. Yeah, it is that bad.
But there are some form of tech that will end any world war quickly. Stuff of science fiction.
America's competitors should think twice, or such may dissapear. Literally.
But as Americans we do know the corruption stinks to high heaven and we are doing something
about it. So pray, war does not escalate. Mankind is literally at the end of our evolution and
defeating classic death. We need (some is happening and is great) more.of that focus and marketing
of it and less global police, empire crap.
Regarding the Clinton Hairball (or, Dead Woman Walking)
Just read the Cheryl Mills
transcripts and two things jumped out at me. First, on pages 104-106, the Judicial Watch lawyers
asked her about Platte River Networks and Datto, Inc. This
McClatchy article gives a long version, but the short version of what the big deal is this:
Clinton Executive Service Corp. (CESC) had Hillary Clinton's private email server physically
moved to Platte River Networks after she left office in 2013. Platte River is an IT services company.
They are headquartered in Colorado but also have a location in New Jersey, which is where Clinton's
server ended up. Platte River bought a backup device from another IT services company called Datto,
Inc, specifically to back up Clinton's server. CESC requested that Platte River do the backup
on site, and Platte River thought that's how they set up the Datto device. However – and this
must have been Clinton's worst nightmare x 10 - unbeknownest to CESC and Platte River, the backup
server accidentally synced with another off-site server belonging to Datto for two years before
anyone realized it. And here's the kicker: this off-site Datto server had all of Clinton's
30,000 or so work-related and 30,000 or so personal emails.
And the FBI found out about it and seized that Datto server and hit the jackpot of all time!
Now, in the Mills transcript, Judicial Watch dropped the questions to Mills about Platte River
and Datto pretty quick, which suggests to me that they already have some other juicy witnesses
to question and they merely tried a few quicky questions to Mills to see if they got lucky. But
to me this is the nuclear bomb that has already gone off – the shock wave just hasn't reached
us yet. I would imagine that Hillary's personal emails may be a treasure-trove relating to Clinton
Foundation Activities and all the related shenanigans
Ortel is investigating, as mentioned several
times on Naked Capitalism.
On page 138, another item of interest in the transcript appears. Mills is asked about a July
26, 2011 email chain where Clinton jokes with a staffer named Nora Toiv that it was weird Clinton
no longer had Toiv's Gmail account and Clinton wondered, "so how did that happen. Must be the
Chinese!" Here's the
email on Wikileaks.
Keep in mind, this is just a month or so after several warnings from the DS cybersecurity about
private email accounts, including this June 28, 2011 cable, in Clinton's name, warning of specific
threats to Gmail accounts of U.S. Government employees. From page 34 of the
OIG Report :
On June 28, 2011, the Department, in a cable entitled "Securing Personal E-mail Accounts"
that was approved by the Assistant Secretary for Diplomatic Security and sent over Secretary
Clinton's name to all diplomatic and consular posts, encouraged Department users "to check
the security settings and change passwords of their home e-mail accounts because of recent
targeting of personal email accounts by online adversaries."141 The cable further elaborated
that "recently, Google asserted that online adversaries are targeting the personal
Gmail accounts of U.S. government employees. (my emphasis) Although the company believes
it has taken appropriate steps to remediate identified activity, users should exercise caution
and follow best practices in order to protect personal e-mail and prevent the compromise of
government and personal information." It then recommended best practices for Department users
and their family members to follow, including "avoid conducting official Department business
from your personal e-mail accounts."142
Granted, Clinton could have been just having a laugh in the email exchange with Toiv, but it
doesn't help her case. Especially since we know of at least 15 cyberattacks on Clinton's email
server just from publically available information, including attacks from IP address in China,
Republic of Korea and Germany (and possibly Russia, if you believe the Guccifer story).
Sorry for being so long-winded.
TLDR: Clinton is a dead woman walking. And Abedin, Sullivan and others have yet to testify!
– the backup server accidentally synced with another off-site server belonging to Datto for
two years before anyone realized it. And here's the kicker: this off-site Datto server had all
of Clinton's 30,000 or so work-related and 30,000 or so personal emails. And the FBI found out
about it and seized that Datto server and hit the jackpot of all time!
I know. And as an aside, another fact that has been glossed over repeatedly is that Hillary's
personal email server apparently wasn't new when she had it installed in her basement. Oh no,
the server had already been in use as President Bill Clinton's personal server before that. God
only knows what kind of incriminating stuff is on there belonging to him. No wonder he suddenly
looks like he's aged about 30 years!
Probably because it is the Yellow Brick Road winding its way through years of Clinton relationships
with the richest, most powerful and influential people in the world. And we will probably never,
ever catch more than a fleeting glimpse of whatever is behind the curtain.
Just reading that thousands of subpoenaed e-mails went missing from Bill Clinton's server in
year 2000 – personal emails from Monica Lewinsky – that kind of thing. Supposedly.
Searching 'Pagliano' in the trove of emails at Wikileaks only brings up one response for October
26, 2012. It's a Happy Birthday wish. Shouldn't there be more emails either to or from Pagliano
and at an earlier date than 2012, at minimum one test email to make sure the server was working
when it was first set up?
Still surprised that if her server was hacked, those emails have not be given to Wikileaks.
That same story says he has an immunity deal and was cooperating with the FBI. I guess it's
possible he only got limited immunity and is concerned about something else but…
I've heard reports that an attempt was made in late 2012. Not the incident in Israel, but on
a secret trip to Iran to meet with Ahmedinejad. What I heard (not on the internet–other channels)
is that one of her SEALS on the small plane with her had a vision of what she would do as president,
and took it into his own hands to stop it. He shot her (the cause for her much-reported-on hospital
stay–with her recovery in question in early days) and he was killed by the rest of the SEAL team.
His death was then said to have occurred in Afghanistan. There's supporting tangential info about
this event that's findable.
Whether or not this story is accurate, I believe there's more to her hospital stay than the
official story. I do not think it was a routine medical event.
Tom
June 1, 2016 at 9:40 am
Thank you very, very much for that elucidating synopsis – its hard to read EVERYTHING so getting
just a slice of the prime cut keeps me up to date on an onslaught of info!
I sure hope you do more of these!!!
Thank you very much. After writing that, I have even more respect for how much work Yves, Lambert
and others put into this site each and every day. Same for the contributions of the many informed
commenters. Naked Capitalism is truly an exceptional resource.
Agee. Nice work Tom and to all who are restoring the Republic. Make sure you go have a drink
and some fun now and then too. A phase of this has passed for me but now another one is looming
in a different way than educating.
I had seen references to the Datto server and the online backups but there hasn't been much
discussion of them or the FBI's getting ahold of them. If they did, it truly is a nightmare for
HRC.
There is a new poll saying 48% of the public think her server was "illegal" and another 24%
or so thought it was "unethical". She and her staff are stonewalling and doubling down on their
excuses. I guess she is just hoping to make it through the convention but it all depends on the
FBI report at this stage.
If the Datto server debacle checks out - and it sure looks like it does - I have read in several
places that it pretty much is a no-brainer violation of 18 U.S. Code § 793 – Gathering, transmitting
or losing defense information, specifically Section (f):
Whoever, being entrusted with or having lawful possession or control of any document, writing,
code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model,
instrument, appliance, note, or information, relating to the national defense, (1) through
gross negligence permits the same to be removed from its proper place of custody or delivered
to anyone in violation of his trust, or to be lost, stolen, abstracted, or destroyed, or (2)
having knowledge that the same has been illegally removed from its proper place of custody
or delivered to anyone in violation of its trust, or lost, or stolen, abstracted, or destroyed,
and fails to make prompt report of such loss, theft, abstraction, or destruction to his superior
officer-
Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.
If you have classified info on your server and all that data is being sent to another server
for two years, without your knowledge, that's pretty much the definition of "gross negligence,"
I would imagine.
And keep in mind, before we even get to the Datto debacle, I'm already giving Clinton two giant
free hall passes:
1. That it didn't constitute gross negligence to have the server in her basement in the first
place, and
2. That it wasn't gross negligence to move the server to Platte River Networks. (From what I gather,
even if this was an approved server, the U.S. government would have questions like: Who physically
picked up the server, put it on a truck or in a car, who transported the server, who had access
to it before, during and after the move?" Also, questions like, "Who owns Platte River Networks?
What is their security set-up? Who vetted the employees at Platte River? Who had access to the
server while it was there?")
So wait. You're telling me that the half of the email Clinton retained as "personal" wasn't
all about Clinton's yoga sessions and Chelsea's wedding?
On " Platte River bought a backup device from another IT services company called Datto, Inc,
specifically to back up Clinton's server," I don't think that's quite right. First, the issue
is not a device, but backup to the cloud from a device. Second, the Platte River didn't know the
backup to the cloud was taking place . From the McClatchy story:
Unbeknownst to Clinton, IT firm had emails stored on cloud; now in FBI's hands
Datto and Platte River seemed at odds, however, over how Clinton's emails wound up on Datto's
cloud storage, which may have resulted from a misunderstanding.
Platte River spokesman Andy Boian said the firm bought a device from Datto that constantly
snaps images of a server's contents and connected it to the Clinton server at a New Jersey
data storage facility. Platte River never asked Datto to beam the images to an off-site cloud
storage node and never was billed for that service, he said. Company officials were bewildered
when they learned of the cloud storage, he said.
"We said, 'You have a cloud? You were told not to have a cloud.' We never received an invoice
for any cloud for the Clintons.'"
The source familiar with Datto's account, however, said Platte River was billed for "private
cloud" storage, which requires a cloud storage node. Because Platte River lacks one, the source
said, the data bounced to Datto's off-site cloud storage. The source said that senior Platte
River officials may not have realized it, but company technicians "were managing the off-site
storage throughout."
Datto did not know it was backing up Clintons' email server until mid August, the source
said.
As to whether the FBI might recover Clinton's personal emails from Datto's storage, the
source said: "People don't Datto's service for getting rid of data."
What a mess, but no more messy than IT generally.
I like the overall picture, though, that the bomb has already exploded, but the shock waves
have yet to reach the public. Regarding FBI director Comey, this from William Gibson: "I would
say that our Mr. Swain has recently come into possession of a very high-grade source of intelligence
and is busy converting it into power."
Yes, you've clarified some points that I mangled in trying to sum up the story. Thank you.
There are many more tangents to just this Platte River/Datto story that are worth following up,
but it takes so much time to try to piece together even a seemingly small story like this. I can't
even imagine the complexity and confusion facing the FBI investigators as they try to make sense
of all the fallout from Bill and Hillary Clinton's public/private activities through the years.
One can hope that Obama handles Clinton the same way Nixon handled his vice-president, Spiro
Agnew. Spiro Agnew was the corrupt politician of the hoi polloi, as he was known as "The only
politician you could bribe with a bag of groceries.".
The Clinton Foundation and the Clintons sure put the Agnew efforts to shame as they raised
the price of buying politicians and access by many orders of magnitude.
Nixon, busy with his own scandals may have been distracted, but his justice department let
Agnew plead "nolo contendere" (no contest) to the charges of corruption.
One can wonder if Gerald Ford's pardon of Nixon installed this dual USA justice system that
we have seen in effect since his time.
So one Democratically connected organization signed onto this separate justice system for
the politically connected. Possibly the concern Obama has for his unfunded $1Billion Presidential
Library will force him to burnish his legacy by NOT rescuing HRC with some dubious legal maneuver.
It is somewhat ironic that Nixon was brought down by a private electronic system (his tape recording
system) while Clinton may be brought down by her own private electronic email system.
The also share a common advisor, Henry Kissinger, and both have/had phlebitis.
She probably won't borrow Nixon's "I am not a crook." line..
I get the tone of alarm and concern of scandal coming from Team Obama shown in this article
– I'm just not seeing it in Hillary supporters. Maybe Obama's ego is a bit too fragile. Regardless
my experience with talking to Hillary supporters is that no amount of scandal of outright criminal
lawbreaking affects their views about Hillary. They revert to "she's been scrutinized and tested
for decades by her enemies and she's survived." They are people on the margins who will be affected.
How many are the Dem establishment? It's going to take a whopper to get them to tank Hillary IMO.
That's what I see from Clinton supporters on the Twitter. Some of them good people I've known
for years. "Nothingburger" was the favorite phrase, at least for awhile.
Reminds me of the defenders of Elizabeth Holmes at the WSJ, who kept insisting that all the
attacks were from journalists who were jealous of the success of a brilliant young woman and only
knew how to tear down not build.
Their ranks became thinner over time as their view was increasingly less plausible.
Timbers – You know, a close friend since grade school loves the Clintons. He even buyed the
Bill Clinton collector doll. He stole close to $60,000 from his employer Midas, has mistresses
and has done a of very unsavory things. And I am not a saint but these people know but do not
care. Probably 1 of 3 people are sociopaths.
There is a detail that is being universally missed both in the MSM and alternative press:
it is a virtual certainty that the NSA has a copy of every email sent or received
by that server. Does anyone who has read what has been published about Snowden's revelations
doubt that? Therefore the Whitehouse knows precisely what the dirt is. Furthermore, what do you
suppose the chances are that the FSB didn't hack her jury-rigged server? This potential leak path
is also well known to the white house. Don't forget the mayhem when the FSB (who else) posted
Nuland's little chat with Pyatt over an insecure line. Let no one forget that HRC is strongly
connected to the neocon project to undermine Russia's return to strength.
Putin would do a deal. A "small favor" done in return for something else. Any mobster can understand
that.
Trouble is that Hillary represents the US so very well. Any offer would be perceived as a sign
of weakness, therefore, righteous bullying and threats from the US will be the only possible response.
Obama will likely have plenty of drama before he slinks out of the White House to his $1
Billion Library . Future historians will sift through the detritus of his hollow reign and
might eventually find out how he got pwned. Maybe Bernstein could have a journalistic draft underway
about that to put in his two cents?
if you read it keep in mind the reason it was written–specifically to avert a major disaster
involving a nuclear reactor explosion in the US in 2012, to enable a major electronic financial
heist. He had to reveal enough of what he knew to stop the button from being pushed. This was
successful. Only the preliminary "earthquake" at Santa Ana nuclear reactor occurred, as the charges
had already been set, but after the book came out (initially distributed on Amazon for free, so
it could be tracked to who downloaded it) then the full plan could not be carried out.
Read the book before judging it. It will be obvious why names cannot be given. And consider
my comment above about why the book was written. It was not written to be a best seller,
it was written to prevent a major catastrophe. The author has given a number of extended interviews
dealing with the events described and confirming his first-hand participation. (He was offered,
twice, to join the 12 shareholders in the purchase of the 2008 presidency, without a financial
contribution because of his unique big data algorithms. He declined and experienced some very
disagreeable effects–but he's not someone who can be bought or intimidated.)
TheCatSaid – Interesting book recommendation. Mitigation of casualties is an important goal.
It is not set in stone mass casualties will occur because of sociopathic behavior. Some can play
a role to minimize the damage. Yves does this directly regarding lawlessness. Others play some
different roles.
Now at the end of human evolution, there is nothing more important and realistic to end classic
death. But far too few have gotten the memo yet. But that is changing. For what good is it to
gain the whole world when you get old, shit your pants, lose your memory when now that is no longer
necessary? But absolutley, the wolves must be pushed back and the Republic restored to accelerate
such a lofy but now doable goal.
That was my counter-suggestible thought: The White House panicked once, and the Clinton campaign
shrugged it off, successfully.
I don't think the two cases are comparable, though. The Wall Street transcripts are a Sanders
campaign thing, and to every right-thinking member of the political class that spells "not serious."
But this terror is from the heart of the establishment; "serious people."
At some point the White House and the Democratic party "leadership" are going to realize that
if they have to work this hard to get Clinton the nomination, they are going to have worse troubles
winning the election with her at the head of the ticket. They are going to have to choose the
lesser of two evils – 1. Let the Republicans take this election, or 2 – Let the Sanders wing of
the Democratic Party take this election.
From the point of view of the Democratic Party establishment, Trump and the Republicans are
clearly the lesser evil. Despite his apparent appeal as an outsider, Trump is very much an insider.
As a billionaire, he is one of the very small number of people who own the United States. He'll
ruffle the feathers of some of his fellow plutocrats, but the "right people" will remain in charge,
and he will continue most of the billionaire friendly policies of the Clinton, Bush, and Obama
administrations.
if nothing else they must have realized that Sanders and his millions of supporters have effectively
blocked off their – parachute drop Biden – escape route from the Clinton disaster. I think this
is the key to why "they're freaking out". They never really had any planB 'cos those Dems and
their trained MSM toadies who "create their own reality" never for a moment thought they'd ever
need one.
There was Biden speculation early on for a reason, but I think people in New Hampshire (I've
never been to Iowa) take the primary seriously and force the candidates to answer tough questions.
Hillary and Obama had a celebrity following and were protected, but any other Democrat would have
to have a point. Private prison, charter school, and war supporters would be weeded put early.
Biden might be the VP, but he has been at this for years and achieved nothing except to not be
as egregious as Evan Bayh and Tim Kaine. No one will go out to see Biden unless he had a point.
The modern Democratic elite can face their voters directly. They need a celebrity wall to protect
them. Many of these thugs hid behind Obama a day expected Hillary to do the same, but who else
is a celebrity and can hide behind Katie Perry or Oprah? They might be protected by the sycophants
in their own district, but the sycophants outside the district have their own objects of devotion.
They simply can't go to Iowa and New Hampshire and be taken seriously.
Several weeks ago my daughter had a dream.
She witnessed Bernie Sanders accepting the democratic primary nomination
because Hillary Clinton was disqualified by a technicality.
Three years ago during a lengthy Vipassana meditation retreat I experienced
myself sitting on a divan in a long lanai. People were milling around a
banquet table set with fruits salads flowers. There were birds flying in and out
up above us and I became aware that I could understand them and that they were excited and had
decided to have a race. Quickly the race began and was over. The winner was a little brown bird…like
a sparrow. The other birds were incredulous. How could this happen? A green parrot kept flying
up to the little brown bird asking how did you do that? But the little brown bird kept laughing
and flying away so fast the parrot could not stay with him.
The next day, continuing the practice in my room with the curtains drawn, I heard
tapping at the window. I acknowledged the sound and continued practicing but
the tap tap pause continued. Finally I had to see. I got up pushed aside the curtain and there
was a little brown bird.
When I saw the little bird land on the podium while Bernie Sanders spoke I thought of the little
brown bird I'd experienced. And when Bernie in the moments said wistfully something to the effect…it
could have been a dove
representing peace. I thought oh no, that little bird is a metaphor for the people
who want and claim their humanity and the natural world resonates with that.
I too think bernie will pull it out, the other choices are terrible. I'm looking for aspirational
latinos to flock to bernie in california and it'll be a rout that can't be ignored. I hope that's
what happens.
Once Clinton regrettfully announces her decision to suspend her campaign for presidency (due
to mounting health concerns and after consulting with her doctors and family) and returns to private
life, she can always count on giving a speech now and again to "replenish the old coffers," right?
Cut to the kitchen in Clinton's residence:
"What do you mean Blankfein isn't returning my calls? Someone find my BlackBerry so I can call
him myself!!"
From Yves:
"…..
As of late 2007, I was assessing the odds of a really bad outcome (which I did not see as a massive
financial blowup, but a Japan-style bumping downhill over a period of years) as 20-30%, which
I regarded as uncomfortably high. I told Lambert I thought the Clinton train wreck odds were in
that range. He thought it was more like 30% than 20%.
This post indicates the odds are even higher than that. I see two implications in the Bernstein
official messaging beyond those that Gaius describes. One is that the Obama Administration has
been blindsided by how bad the underlying fact set is, and they recognize that even worse is likely
to be exposed. Someone as image-conscious as Obama would be particularly put off by that.
But the panic is also a clear indication, and perhaps as important, another message, not just
to Clinton but to Team Dem, that the Administration can't, or won't but is making it seem like
can't, do what it takes to save Hillary's bacon.
And I suspect it really is "can't". The FBI has enough autonomy that if they find real dirt
on the Clintons, they will leak like crazy if the DoJ does not pursue the case in a serious way.
That would make the Administration complicit, and Obama does not want his final months in office
tainted by his Administration touching the Clinton tar baby any more than it has to…."
============================================
I am really thinking this is the most serious issue about whether this country operates within
the confines of equality before the law since Watergate. I think the financial crisis revealed
a level of corruption that is eye opening, but that was mere pecuniary corruption.
If Hillary goes unprosecuted, we decide to let the facade collapse and no longer put the effort
into pretending that there is any relationship whatsoever between the law, justice, and the running
of the state.
In this imagined history, the Clinton's see their return to the WH thwarted by an upstart junior
senator. As things start to crash around them, in 2008, a light bulb goes off. The junior senator
is still pretty nervous about the Clinton's and Clinton has leverage to make a deal with him.
She can through establishment support behind Obama. Obama takes the deal. Then, with a Clinton
at State and a future presidency on the horizon they will be able to enrich themselves and their
foundation for millions upon millions.
The future value of a Clinton presidency will sell itself. Money will pour in from everyone
in the world who needs a regulatory break or weapons a deal. So, they cut the deal to go in on
an Obama presidency.
What they get is eight years of uninterrupted money making, because a Clinton will be president
again, and you might as well get in on the ground floor. In this imagined scenario, the Clinton's
must get the presidency, because they have essentially promised weapons buyers and regulation
skirters that they will get their return on investment coming in 2017.
Yes, most likely, at least in part. A lot of influence peddling went on, and that's for sure.
It's something that eludes most Clinton supporters that I know personally. They see Hillary as
this shining beacon of something something and something else. They have excuses for everything,
and somehow don't see influence peddling, selling arms and the like as all that bad. IOW: IOKIYAD.
I don't agree with that, myself, but many do.
Note its not just the CIA who would be (or is already) furious that some of their agents may
have been compromised/arrested/executed. The FBI also has agents working abroad undercover. What
if the FBI found info in the backed up emails showed one of their own had been blown ? The vengeance
would be frightening and there's nothing Comey or anyone else could do that would stop it.
I'm not sure the media's current focus on Hillary's email server is warranted. There are
definitely indications that she violated email policies, but there don't seem to be specifics
about what these actions were trying to hide. I think her very questionable family ties to corporate
money are a more meaningful topic in determining her suitability for the U.S. presidency
:
There's been some recent focus on 2013-2015 speeches given by Bill Clinton, and donations to
the Clinton family foundation over this time period. What about speeches and payments during the
earlier time period when Hillary was Secretary of Sate (January 2009 – January 2013)?
Jeez Louise. The focus on her email server is, in major part, driven by the issue of the deleted
emails and HRC trying to keep her communications secret and unobtainable through FOIA. One obvious
reason is to hide the connection between Bill's speeches and Clinton Foundation activities with
Hillary's decisions as SoS. Email and corporate money is all one big hairball.
Gee, the internet told me just this morning that Obama is champing a the bit to hit the 2016
campaign trail for Hillary (or maybe just against Trump?)
After reading this post and comments, I'm further disabused of the Clintons, and think more
and more that Saunders is hanging in there just waiting for the dam to break.
The Clinton Machine (in other words the political operation of the Bill and Hillary, and
potentially Chelsea) has always operated on the basis the money and connections will fix everything.
It has, after all, gotten them this far. However, as a core operational mode, it also accumulates
cynicism and tends to value loyalty over performance, leading to degradation over time.
The Clinton primary 1992 campaign broke new ground (at the time) by putting the (two-way) sharing
of fundraising lists on the table when soliciting endorsements from office holders. This was already
commonplace among Republicans, who were already being consolidated by ideologically or business
focussed fundraising organizations (long before PACs became an common acronym, but already organized
under 501(c)(4) or 501(c)(6)) and often shared these donors. But the Democrats, at the time, were
more driven by fundraising lists, which were often closely guarded assets.
But by offering to share (as in, swap) donor lists with endorsers, the Clintons, without actually
breaking any laws (although improper development and use of these lists could violate FEC regulation),
were putting financial power squarely on the table, and up front (the list share offer was frequently
mentioned on the initial approach to the potential endorser, I have first and second hand knowledge
of this).
And the swap would involve the endorser sharing their list, as well as receiving one,
which would be more than a public endorsement; it would be an endorsement to donors. Reaction
in 1992 was mixed. But with Bill political success and popularity as a president (among moneyed
Dems), the Clinton Machine became a major player in Dem politics, cultivating a "deep" door list.
And what do donors pay for? Consultants, and media and data products. The Machine accumulated
a network of loyal consultants and vendors across the country; loyal, because they were certain
of getting paid (not always a sure thing in politics), and because of the large and diverse (and
at least nominally vetted) network of Machine operatives and vendors. This network also shares
strategic methodologies and technologies; essential commodities, but ones whose shelf life (effective
expiration of value) can be hard to gauge (especially by lazy/uncommitted people who feel little
pressure to actually win anything, as long as they can put on a good show and maintain their stature
by… feeding the Machine). And of course, associated (and implicitly grateful/beholden) elected
office holders (at State and local levels, not just Federal) are collected along the way.
The reliance on this Machine is one of the reasons the Clinton campaigns have displayed such
frequent tone-deafness. Not only is there a sizeable echo chamber of like-minded advisers only
to glad to support the current (but often calcified) rationals, but the approach to voter opinion
is "they'll forget if we divert them" (and also "poor people don't vote, so their opinions are
strategically irrelevant"). The Clintons were relying on a combination of news-cycle turnover
and the chorus of their social and MSM channels (repeat-until-true, repeat-until-true, etc). Both
of these tools are at least somewhat outdated in the social media age, where articles/posts/images/memes
can circulate and resurface independently of MSM news cycles, and where multiple groups can pool
opinion and effort as soon as they notice coincidence/convergence.
One can say what one will about Team Obama, but they have always been aware that they rode
to power on a populist idea (Black President) and the social media arena that amplified its force.
All political groups tend towards tone deafness, but Obama's people have newer ears. They may
not feel very beholden to anyone operating in the social media, but they disinclined to completely
ignore the potential impacts of opinions in circulation.
BTW, the donor-list swap message has changed over the years. Now the intro message for endorsement
solicitations is more like: "We'll mention you to our donors". Which is a double-edged sword;
that mention may also be "such-and-such did not endorse, just so you know". Again, leading with
this message exerts (by implication, not by direct statement) a powerful financial consideration
on the potential (And often acquiescing) endorser. Beyond that common element, solicitations are
likely to say whatever might appeal to the particular target.
Dk – Very interesting point about the data. I am in that space in a nutshell. By referral,
did some work with both Jeb Bush and Dean. I was hired for market intelligence for fundraising.
I remember the Time mag about Dean the Money Machine. Social media was a big deal for donors.
Webbies dont make the best door to door activists however.
Anyways, I like Jeb Bush. Dean is an asshole of a human being. So as I was managing Bush constituent
list for a time I called his office to suggest them doing market intelligence for donors.
The attorney for Jeb called me back. He told me that if I sent over a plan to not expect to get
paid for it. I thought to myself it was no wonder the Clintons could easily win – They paid people.
Jeb did look at an idea for a political social media platform I suggested to connect voters
to politicians, a debate platform. He said to call Pete Peterson for funding. Pete wouldn't give
me a meeting, his secretary said I wasnt in the club.
So for Jeb he has learned the hard way it is the company you keep. But his other issue was
hiring his own Mexican friends his wife and continued amnesty. His campign staff like any tribe,
only wanted fo hire Mexicans. Of course, it is the immigration issue where Trump ate his lunch.
In the end he wasn't ready to be POTUS. But innovation wise and on monopoly issues he was a Teddy
Roosevelt.
Thanks for letting me share my thoughts tonight Yves. You know, I appoached you as a different
user at one time and asked to consider joining in the political social media platform I was building.
But even if it was a right idea, I came across too strong. I apologize. Wish I hadnt done that
your message would been amplified a lot more by now. You are a personal hero of mine. Keep at
it, please, the we are clearing a hump in ways but much work left to do.
Cackling at the demise of intelligence assets is not a joking matter. Neither is it a joke,
right or deposing dictators and joking about it. Fortunately, the rule of law is being restored.
But there is a lot of domestic and geopolitical clean up. With Russia, they are about energy sales.
Yes, they got uppity with monopoly but it has gone to far.
You never want to make Putin a Geronimo with the bomb. The Chinese were made promises never
to be kept. They know a good customer when they see one so they will get over it.
The only job of government is a security racket. An unfortunate, necessary evil. When the Clintons
are well lets call it what it IS – treason. Enough is enough.
Trump is a Democrat. He is for single payer. Not so sure why some are so freaked about his
nationalist campaign rhetoric. Either him or Bernie will make a good president but Bernie has
the experience and Trump does not. It matters.
Trump's main ideas for a replacement [of Obamacare] are to allow health insurance to be
sold across state lines and permit people to make tax-free contributions to Health Savings
Accounts (HSAs). HSAs are paired with a high deductible health insurance plan and are intended
to make people more conscious of how they spend
Mary – Competition is part of Trumps plan for private insurers. A lot of countries have single
payer government but also private insurers. It tends to work althogh I wish it all could remain
private, free market what have you. Health is like money, it is so important you have to have
the awful taint of government one way or the other.
But when pressed Trump has responded he will not let anyone die in the streets. Not arguing
to vote for the man just suggesting reading beween the lines. He is a Democrat in drag, what I
would call a moderate in policy except immigration. He is duplicating the Eisenhower playbook,
on immigration, bond holder haircuts and telling certain bankers to play ball or ELSE. This does
work. But as I mentioned Bernie has more a lot of real experience. So dealmaking as Trump claims
indeed has a lot of human psychology involved but experience is a major plus.
It woudnt surprise me if so much of this is all political theatre. Trump is the friends of
Clinton after all. Could even be with Berniw But that said, rather even if such speculation true
better than false flags to right the country. Besides, it has been fun theatre… Besides, the momentum
on policy is turning in the right direction.
Countries that provide universal healthcare using private insurance (the Bismarck model) do
so with highly regulated, not-for-profit insurance providing legally defined coverage. Competition
and profit-taking are at the margins for elements not included in the defined coverage, such as
cosmetic surgery or a private hospital room. Trump's published healthcare plan is the same gibberish
Republicans have always offered.
There are too many comments to read through right now but is almost 250 comments a record?
Has anyone mentioned this might be a trial balloon for Biden to step in?
It's interesting to ponder the various possibilities. What I don't get is why Obama's IT security
people didn't notice that Clinton digitally engaged and communicated with the *White House* in
a way that could have compromised both parties, and beyond.
fwiw, I think we are all at least *somewhat* impacted by confirmation bais re: the competency
of persons we are mostly in agreement with, even in areas outside their domain. When it comes
to senior executives and IT security (unless they are IT experts), we see these mistakes over
and over again in political and business domains. One can look to any number of well-known political,
scientific, or cultural figures who made stupid gaffs within their sphere of influence in this
way. We always seem surprised by this, but it's really not a surprise.
Most well-known political persons (I have known a few) are so busy and so immersed in what
they are trying to accomplish that their over-trust in operational personnel – and/or belief that
they can maneuver out of or overcome almost any problem – creates scenarios like Clinton's.
Bernie is my guy; I would love to see him take on Trump, but the powers that be appear to want
something else. I can't stand Trump, but when looking for other perspectives I will put on my
long-buried blue collar roots persona; then, I hear a guy (Trump) who "talks the talk" in a way
that is almost mesmerizing. I hate to admit that, but it's true – and when I connect with old
buds from way back, they reinforce this impression.
When you get enough people (in this case, Americans) scared and worried, they are no different
than any other group of human beings; they want to be "saved"; they want to "blame"; they want
to throw out the "chief"; they want to "follow a new leader"; they are not concerned (in this
case) with whether Trump can "walk the walk"; they are susceptible to someone who is very adept
at "talking the talk" (a demagogue) in a way that allays their fear and desperation – leading
them to grab onto the nearest piece of flotsam (screw the other guy!) that will keep them from
drowning. I'm beginning to worry.
Seems to me that except in a relatively few corners and local settings, and now very frankly
via our mostly collective embrace of the Neo geist, "America" has always and only been about "screwing
the other guy." And Tocqueville noted how happy we are to be boiled frogs, or to find ourselves
in deep water and only too happy to stand on the other guy's shoulders, by guile or force, to
try to gain a little buoyancy to keep our own noses above water, even knowing somewhere in our
guts that we ought to cooperate to find the valve and turn off the water, or to go after the pirates
that threw us off the ship…
I don't believe "foaming one more runway" (read: having your DOJ, FBI appear helpless)
wouldn't bother this administration. A Loyalist are those unengaged (or too engaged) whom choose
willingly to believe the disastrous economic and political experiment, that attempted to organize
human behavior around the dictates of the global marketplace, has been a splendid success…or worse,
blindly, my tribal leader is in accordance with all that is good.
Haiti. Look at film of the Clintons in Haiti to see how they work. & Haiti is one place
where also the elites own the deeds. Haiti Is America, only sooner.
Wilmington Coup. C.S.A. methods used again, and again.
Giving the people of the US, the reinsurers of the reinsurer the USPO Service banking they paid
for and pay for is the concrete thing that can be done to "Change the Conversation" as Mad Men's
guy Hamm? no, his character would say.
Opening there.
The silence of Pagliano and the
reported lapse of memory of other top aides is likely good news for the Clinton team in
pre-November damage control. If top aides will claim faulty memories or invoke their right
to remain silent, the only disclosures before the election would have to come from the FBI
or Congress. Yet, the FBI would turn over any proposed indictments to the Justice Department
and, if the Justice Department scuttles any indictment, there would not normally be a public
report.
I kept the link in the above paragraph active as it is interesting reading.
For those curious as to why Pagliano would take the fifth (rather than go straight for a quart
:-)) when he already has immunity, one of the comments to Turley's post explains (from Tin
at 1:42 am):
They are completely different matters. The FBI gave him immunity from possible criminal
prosecution. The deposition mentioned n this post involves a civil lawsuit, "Judicial Watch
v. U.S. Department of State." It is a civil suit brought under the Freedom of Information Act
to get more documents out of the State Dept.. Pagliano is not a party to the suit, but they
want to depose him as a non-party deponent and his lawyers sought a protective order. He plans
to take the 5th and his lawyers don't want it videotaped.
Those e-mails don't alarm me anywhere near as much as the $200,000 plus speaking fees from
Wall St. NO speech by anyone is worth anywhere near such an amount. These were clearly bribes,
there's simply no other way of looking at it. I have no interest in seeing the transcripts of
those speeches because the money counts far more than the content, and speaks for itself. No way
would I vote for someone so clearly in the pocket of the oligarchy.
Lack of empathy is the primary characteristic of a sociopath.
Notable quotes:
"... More like MEGATHATCHER -- ..."
"... Hillary "I remember landing under sniper fire" Clinton. ..."
"... The problem isn't Sanders; the problem is that Clinton is a weak candidate, and her surrogates have focused on trying to bully Sanders supporters into falling in line, rather than making a more convincing argument for their support. ..."
"... And yes the "temporary rules" changed on the floor of the Nevada state convention. There has been plenty of DNC party shenanigans all designed to benefit Hillary. ..."
"... Fair enough, she lacks empathy. ..."
"... A bigger problem is trust. People simply find it hard to trust her. ..."
"... There is a widely held suspicion that, at the same time as she was saying she'd get tough on Wall Street, she was busy promising them business as usual. Hillary could put a stop to all the speculation today and regain a lot of trust, by releasing the transcripts in full. If the speeches are what she says they are, why won't she release them? I just don't understand. ..."
"... She took Goldman's money in 2013. Why? She was already richer than 99.99 percent of her countrymen. She didn't need it. How could such an accomplished "professional" politician make such an incredibly dunderheaded move? The "Vampire Squid" of Wall St.!! What an outstandingly professional decision on her part. ..."
"... Nailed it again! Voters aren't like jurors. We don't have to decide that she's corrupt based on a set of facts that a judge lets us look at, beyond a reasonable doubt, etc. No, we get to decide on any damn reason we want -- emotion, looks, whether we wanna have a beer with her, etc. And on the issue of Clinton's corruption, WE DO NOT NEED A QUID PRO QUO to know, deeply and irretrievably know, that she's corrupt. We get to decide. We get to choose. ..."
"... Oh yeah, she's one amazing politician with a real sense of where her electorate is. That's why she went down to Wall Street in 2013 and took what Goldman Sachs offered, three times, for a total of $675,000 direct to her personal pocket. ..."
"... Good riddance. She is deeply unqualified to be president and she richly deserves to lose this election. ..."
"... I like Bernie for several reasons. One of them is that Bernie's popularity proves that not all Americans are dumb. ..."
At the heart of Clinton's troubles with Sanders are questions
about her empathy, authenticity and honesty.
The one weak measure that she has a shot of overcoming relates
to empathy. When asked 'Which candidate understands people like you?' in the YouGov poll, Clinton
trails Sanders by 44 to 56 points.
Chilblainmthafka -> 5anderson 31 May 2016 19:49
More like MEGATHATCHER --
Chilblainmthafka presstheredbutton 31 May 2016 19:47
Hillary "I remember landing under sniper fire" Clinton.
I've never studied medicine, and only have a casual interest in the subject, therefore my
opinion is more "objective" than someone with a more detailed understanding of the subject.
Same logic, same problems.
There are several problems with your analysis.
1. Clinton has more votes in the context of a party nominating process. Party contests don't
have uniform rules governing registration deadlines, so an apples-to-apples comparison based
on "popular" vote is going to be sloppy. Some contests don't allow independent voters to vote,
others do. Some won't allow people to participate unless they have registered months before a
contest, some allow same day registration. Some contests are caucuses others are primaries;
some of the primaries are open, some are closed, some are semi-closed. The process will tell
you who the most popular choice is with older Democrats, it will not necessarily tell you who
the strongest candidate is.
2. Sanders appeal isn't based on his personal charisma. His argument is based on the way he is
financing his election, his platform, and other issues. The large difference between the
candidates is driving his support. His personal integrity also carries equal weight in an
electoral contest where the other two major candidates have none.
3. Clinton ran a much more negative campaign in 2008, and went until the last votes were cast
in 2008. She then spent two weeks deciding on whether she wanted to push to the convention or
not. In the end, Obama did well. He made use of the long primary to build volunteer networks
that were useful in November. The problem isn't Sanders; the problem is that Clinton is a
weak candidate, and her surrogates have focused on trying to bully Sanders supporters into
falling in line, rather than making a more convincing argument for their support.
4. Sanders long commitment to the issues he is championing gives his message credibility.
His message is resonating in a way that it didn't before the financial crisis. But his long
history is important, because it shows a level of commitment to the policies he is advocating
for. Credibility and trust matter with political leaders.
MacWisconsin -> Calvert 31 May 2016 19:38
They did get together and in February 2016 suspended the "Obama" rules against DNC taking
federal and other PAC money for campaigns and then funneled all those 250,000 donations
through the states and directly into Clinton's fund. The states got 1% of those "down ticket"
funds. https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/politics/2016/02/12/dnc-rolls-back-ban-contributions-from-lobbyists-pacs/UBQmn9xkGyyq0gmxEHwKqM/story.html
And yes the "temporary rules" changed on the floor of the Nevada state convention. There
has been plenty of DNC party shenanigans all designed to benefit Hillary.
CorporalClegg 31 May 2016 19:23
Fair enough, she lacks empathy. But so does Trump. It's a rich person problem and
It comes from having no connection with the lives of normal people.
A bigger problem is trust. People simply find it hard to trust her.
There is a widely held suspicion that, at the same time as she was saying she'd get tough
on Wall Street, she was busy promising them business as usual. Hillary could put a stop to all
the speculation today and regain a lot of trust, by releasing the transcripts in full. If the
speeches are what she says they are, why won't she release them? I just don't understand.
NottaBot -> MysticRevelation 31 May 2016 19:20
She took Goldman's money in 2013. Why? She was already richer than 99.99 percent of her
countrymen. She didn't need it. How could such an accomplished "professional" politician make
such an incredibly dunderheaded move? The "Vampire Squid" of Wall St.!! What an
outstandingly professional decision on her part.
NottaBot -> DebraBrown 31 May 2016 19:12
Nailed it again! Voters aren't like jurors. We don't have to decide that she's
corrupt based on a set of facts that a judge lets us look at, beyond a reasonable doubt, etc.
No, we get to decide on any damn reason we want -- emotion, looks, whether we wanna have a
beer with her, etc. And on the issue of Clinton's corruption, WE DO NOT NEED A QUID PRO QUO to
know, deeply and irretrievably know, that she's corrupt. We get to decide. We get to choose.
NottaBot -> Raaaabert 31 May 2016 19:06
Oh yeah, she's one amazing politician with a real sense of where her electorate is.
That's why she went down to Wall Street in 2013 and took what Goldman Sachs offered, three
times, for a total of $675,000 direct to her personal pocket.
Did she "need" it? Not a chance, she and Bill were millionaires many times over. Did she
"want" it? I guess, but that just points to her obscene greed, on a level with that of the
horrible Trump, just maybe not as effective at in-gathering wealth.
Should she have recognized the danger to which she was going to be putting her planned run for
president? Yes, abso-effing-lutely. People like me took to the streets, camped in parks, got
arrested with the Occupy movement two years previously and put the agenda of inequality and
"get money out of politics" front and center. Obama used Occupy messaging in order to defeat
Obama in 2012 -- portraying him as a rich bastid former hedge fund manager out of touch with
ordinary people.
She should have known. But she was literally CLUELESS and stumbled into a completely
SELF-INFLICTED wound, having nothing to do with some imagined right-wing attack machine, but
entirely to do with Hillary Rodham Clinton's character weaknesses.
Good riddance. She is deeply unqualified to be president and she richly deserves to lose
this election.
politicaltoo 31 May 2016 18:58
I like Bernie for several reasons. One of them is that Bernie's popularity proves that
not all Americans are dumb.
Ambrose Bierce lost much public cachet when he predicted(?) McKinley would meet with a bullet,
as some believed his words were assumed as justification by the assassin.
From his "Devil's Dictionary":
WAR, n. A by-product of the arts of peace. The most menacing political condition is a period
of international amity. The student of history who has not been taught to expect the unexpected
may justly boast himself inaccessible to the light. "In time of peace prepare for war" has a deeper
meaning than is commonly discerned; it means, not merely that all things earthly have an end-that
change is the one immutable and eternal law-but that the soil of peace is thickly sown with the
seeds of war and singularly suited to their germination and growth. It was when Kubla Khan had
decreed his "stately pleasure dome"-when, that is to say, there were peace and fat feasting in
Xanadu- that he heard from afar Ancestral voices prophesying war.
One of the greatest of poets, Coleridge was one of the wisest of men, and it was not for nothing
that he read us this parable. Let us have a little less of "hands across the sea," and a little
more of that elemental distrust that is the security of nations. War loves to come like a thief
in the night; professions of eternal amity provide the night.
His entry just previous to this is for:
WALL STREET, n. A symbol of sin for every devil to rebuke. That Wall Street is a den of thieves
is a belief that serves every unsuccessful thief in place of a hope in Heaven...
I have a copy of his book "Tales of Soldiers and Civilians"; it's like reading a depressive version
of Edgar Allen Poe, all foreboding and involving some supernatural force. Perhaps that's all he could
find to explain the madness of the Civil War.
Wrapped in the flag neocon bottom feeders like Hillary (and quite possibly Trump, although
this article is from Guardian which is a fiercely pro-Clinton rag) might eventually destroy
this nice country.
Notable quotes:
"... the Golden Era of the Chickenhawk. We keep electing leaders who, on the most basic experiential level, literally have no idea what they're doing. ..."
"... Maybe they get away with it because we the people who keep voting them into office don't know anything about war ourselves. ..."
"... As long as we're cocooned in our comfortable homeland fantasy of war, one can safely predict a long and successful run for the Era of the Chickenhawk ..."
"... The author, like most Americans, is in denial about America's role in the world. The reason the US spends more on defense than the next 12 countries has nothing to do with self-defense. America wants to maintain its global military dominance. Both parties agree on this. Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, the war's purpose was to demonstrate American military power. Bill Kristol takes this a stage further and wants America to play the role of global hegemon and be in a state of constant war. This is a stupid idea. ..."
"... It is a simple an obvious fact that the people most eager to see the US go to war, in every generation, are not the people who will suffer and die in those wars. Today is our Memorial Day. This is an article suggesting we, as Americans, stop and think about the people who were wounded and those who died in service to our country. Set aside your partisan rage and consider those people and their deaths, before you listen to words from any politician calling for more of those deaths. ..."
"... And the hypocrisy of all this is how Hillary Clinton doesn't have a problem with war. She participated in toppling Libya and she was doing the same to Syria. So how is it all about Trump and what a war monger he is? ..."
"... The corporations that sell war materiel actively push their products, ensure the support of the government through political contributions, and engage in blackmail by spreading out manufacturing over many locations. In this manner, the only way to profit is by selling weapons, killing more people. What state or city will want to lose employment by letting a manufacturer close? It is incredibly difficult to close an un-needed military base for the same reason, whether here or abroad. War is a great racket, the US has it down pat. ..."
"... Hillary Clinton has started more wars, caused more death than Donald Trump....and yet....you don't mention that do you "We came, He died, We Laughed" ..."
"... Unfortunately we're in a position where the United States is a debtor nation, and the easiest way to keep the house of cards from falling is to maintain "full spectrum dominance" in the words of the Pentagon. There's no easy way to unwind this situation. It is, however, absolutely crucial to keep a known psychopath like Clinton out of the command chair. ..."
"... When congress votes to fund wars then [they need to] add 75% more for after care. As a combat veteran it pisses me off that [instead] charities are used to care for us. Most are run by want a be military, Senease, types. No charities, it's up to American people to pay every penny for our care, they voted for the war mongers so, so pay up people. Citizens need to know true costs, tax raises, cuts in SS , welfare, cuts in schools. Biggest thing, all elected officials and families and those work for them must use VA hospitals, let's see how that works out. ..."
"... we insulate ourselves in a nice, warm cocoon of "Support Our Veterans" slogans and flag waving. ..."
"... "Endless war: Trump and the fantasy of cost-free conflict " How about Hillary and the fantasy of war, PERIOD. There hasn't been a war she didn't like. Did you listen to her AIPAC speech? No 2 State solution there. ..."
"... So easy to be the hero in your wet dreams, your shooter games, your securely located war rooms stocked with emergency rations and the external defibrillator. This sort of unhinged fantasizing has been the defining pattern of the Era of Endless War, in which people – old men, for the most part, a good number of them rich – who never experienced war – who in their youth ran as fast from it as they could – send young men and women – most of them middle- and working-class – across oceans to fight wars based on half-facts, cooked intelligence, and magical thinking on the grand geopolitical scale. Surely it's no coincidence that the Era of the AUMF, the Era of Endless War, is also the Golden Era of the Chickenhawk. We keep electing leaders who, on the most basic experiential level, literally have no idea what they're doing. ..."
"... It is actually NOT Donald Trump who is advocating the endless global conflict and confrontation with Russia, China, India, Iran, Europe and North Korea. The candidate secretly advocating a never-ending war with the rest of the world is -- Madame Secretary, Hillary Clinton, in person. Aided and abetted - publicly - by her right-hand woman, another Madame Secretary, Madeleine Albright and yet another Madame Undersecretary, Samantha Power. All chicken hawks, all neoconservatives, all pseudo-democrats, all on Wall Street payroll, all white, and all women who will never see a second of combat for the rest of their lives. ..."
"... So, the very major premise of the article is flawed and unsustainable. Which, of course, then makes the entire article collapse as false and misleading. ..."
"... John Mearsheimer who is a history professor at the University of Chicago wrote a great book about American foreign policy. Mearsheimer explains how American foreign policy has developed over the centuries. He argues that it firs objective was to dominate the Western Hemisphere before extending its reach to Asia and Europe. The War of 1812 and the Monroe Doctrine was part of a plan to dominate the Americas. The U.S. stopped Japan and Germany dominating Asia and Europe in the 20th century. The U.S. continued to view the British Empire as its greatest threat and Roosevelt set about dismantling it during WW2. Once WW2 was won, the Soviet Union became America's new adversary and it maintained forces in Europe to check Soviet expansion. ..."
"... Mearsheimer argues that the U.S. is often in denial about its behavior and Americans are taught that the U.S. is altruistic and a force for good in the world. Measheimer states that "idealist rhetoric provided a proper mask for the brutal policies that underpinned the tremendous growth of American power." In 1991 the U.S. became the world's only super-power and according to Mearsheimer its main foreign policy objective was to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival. ..."
"... Mearsheimer claims that America's foreign policy elite is still largely made up of people who want to keep America on top, but these days they usually prefer to keep their views under wraps. ..."
"... Trump is the only candidate I've ever heard question the cost of war, it's part of the reason he said we should flush NATO and we can't police the world for free any longer. ..."
"... I have no problem with destroying ISIS. I have a problem with fighting Russia over every former Soviet state on their doorstep ala Madam Secretary. The best way to remember the war dead is to work to ensure that their ranks do not swell. ..."
As America marks Memorial Day, politicians should spare us the saber-rattling and reserve
some space for silence
... ... ...
The times are such that fantasy war-mongering is solidly mainstream. We've seen candidates call
for a new campaign of "shock and awe" (Kasich), for carpet-bombing and making the desert glow (Cruz),
for "bomb[ing] the shit out of them" (Trump), for waterboarding "and a hell of a lot worse" (Trump
again), and for pre-emptive strikes and massive troop deployments (Jeb). One candidate purchased
a handgun as "the last line of defense between Isis and my family" (Rubio), and the likely Democratic
nominee includes
"the nail-eaters – McChrystal, Petraeus, Keane" among her preferred military advisers, and supports
"intensification and acceleration" of US military efforts in Iraq and Syria. Yes, America has many
enemies who heartily hate our guts and would do us every harm they're able to inflict, but the failures
of hard power over the past 15 years seem utterly lost on our political class. After the Paris attacks
last December, Bill Kristol of the Weekly Standard suggested that a force of 50,000 US troops deployed
to Syria, supported by air power, would crush Isis in short order, leading to the liberation of Fallujah,
Mosul, and other Isis strongholds.
"I don't think there's much in the way of unanticipated side-effects that are going to be bad there,"
opined Kristol – funny guy! – who back in 2002 said that removing Saddam Hussein "could start
a chain reaction in the Arab world that would be very healthy".
... ... ...
"A night of waking," as Bierce tersely described it years later. The sheer volume and accuracy
of ordnance made this a new kind of war, a machine for pulping acres of human flesh. Regardless of
who was winning or losing, shock-and-awe was the common experience of both sides; Confederate and
Union soldiers alike could hardly believe the things they were doing and having done to them, and
when Bierce turned to the writer's trade after the war, some fundamental rigor or just plain contrariness
wouldn't let him portray his war in conventionally heroic terms. In his hands, sentimentality and
melodrama became foils for twisted jokes. Glory was ambiguous at best, a stale notion that barely
hinted at the suicidal nature of valor in this kind of war. A wicked gift for honesty served up the
eternal clash between duty and the survival instinct, as when, early in the war, Bierce and his fellow
rookies come across a group of Union dead:
How repulsive they looked with their blood-smears, their blank, staring eyes, their teeth uncovered
by contraction of the lips! The frost had begun already to whiten their deranged clothing. We
were as patriotic as ever, but we did not wish to be that way.
... ... ...
Black humor sits alongside mordantly cool accounts of battles, wounds, horrors, absurd and tragic
turns of luck. There are lots of ghosts in Bierce's work, a menagerie of spirits and bugaboos as
well as hauntings of the more prosaic sort, people detached in one way or another from themselves
– amnesiacs, hallucinators, somnambulists, time trippers. People missing some part of their souls.
Often Bierce writes of the fatal, or nearly so, shock, the twist that flips conventional wisdom on
its back and shows reality to be much darker and crueler than we want to believe. It's hard not to
read the war into much of Bierce's writing, even when the subject is ostensibly otherwise. He was
the first American writer of note to experience modern warfare, war as mass-produced death, and the
first to try for words that would be true to the experience. He charted this new terrain, and it's
in Bierce that we find the original experience that all subsequent American war writers would grapple
with. Hemingway and Dos Passos in the first world war; Mailer, Heller, Jones and Vonnegut in the
second world war; O'Brien, Herr and Marlantes in Vietnam: they're all heritors of Bierce.
It's not decorative, what these writers were going for. They weren't trying to write fancy, or
entertain, or preach a sermon; they weren't writing to serve a political cause, at least not in any
immediate sense. One suspects that on some level they didn't have a choice, as if they realized they
would never know any peace in themselves unless they found a way of writing that, if it couldn't
make sense of their war, at least respected it. Words that represented the experience for what it
was, without illusion or fantasy. Words that would resist the eternal American genius for cheapening
and dumbing down.
.... ... ...
...unhinged fantasizing has been the defining pattern of the Era of Endless War, in which people
– old men, for the most part, a good number of them rich – who never experienced war – who in their
youth ran as fast from it as they could – send young men and women – most of them middle- and working-class
– across oceans to fight wars based on half-facts, cooked intelligence, and magical thinking on the
grand geopolitical scale. Surely it's no coincidence that the Era of the AUMF, the Era of Endless
War, is also the Golden Era of the Chickenhawk. We keep electing leaders who, on the most basic
experiential level, literally have no idea what they're doing.
Maybe they get away with it because we the people who keep voting them into office don't know
anything about war ourselves. We know the fantasy version, the movie version, but only that
1% of the nation – and their families – who have fought the wars truly know the hardship involved.
For the rest of us, no sacrifice has been called for: none. No draft. No war tax (but huge deficits),
and here it bears noting that the top tax rate during the second world war was 90%. No rationing,
the very mention of which is good for a laugh. Rationing? That was never part of the discussion.
But those years when US soldiers were piling sandbags into their thin-skinned Humvees and welding
scrap metal on to the sides also happened to coincide with the heyday of the Hummer here at home.
Where I live in Dallas, you couldn't drive a couple of blocks without passing one of those beasts,
8,600 hulking pounds of chrome and steel. Or for a really good laugh, how about this: gas rationing.
If it's really about the oil, we could support the troops by driving less, walking more. Or suppose
it's not about the oil at all, but about our freedoms, our values, our very way of life – that it's
truly "a clash of civilizations", in the words of Senator Rubio. If that's the case, if this is what
we truly believe, then our politicians should call for, and we should accept no less than, full-scale
mobilization: a draft, confiscatory tax rates, rationing.
Some 3.5 million Americans fought in the civil war, out of a population of 31 million. For years
the number killed in action was estimated at 620,000, though recent scholarship suggests a significantly
higher figure, from a low of 650,000 to a high of 850,000. In any case, it's clear that the vast
majority of American families had, as we say these days, skin in the game. The war was real; having
loved ones at risk made it real. Many saw battles being fought in their literal backyards. Lincoln
himself watched the fighting from the DC ramparts, saw men shot and killed. The lived reality of
the thing was so brutally direct that it would be more than 50 years before the US embarked on another
major war. To be sure, there was the brief Spanish-American war in 1898, and a three-year native
insurgency in the Philippines, and various forays around the Caribbean and Central America, but the
trauma of the civil war cut so deep and raw that the generation that fought it was largely cured
of war. Our own generation's appetite seems steadily robust even as we approach the 15th anniversary
of the AUMF, which, given the circumstances, makes sense. As long as we're cocooned in our comfortable
homeland fantasy of war, one can safely predict a long and successful run for the Era of the Chickenhawk
Bierce survived his own war, barely. Two weeks after writing to a friend "my turn will come",
and one day before his 22nd birthday, he was shot in the head near Kennesaw Mountain, Georgia. The
sniper's ball broke his skull "like a walnut", penetrating the left temple, fracturing the temporal
lobe and doglegging down and around behind his left ear, where it stayed. Head shots in that era
were almost always fatal, but Bierce survived not only the initial wound, but an awful two-day train
ride on an open flatcar to an army hospital in Chattanooga.
He recovered, more or less. Not the easiest personality to begin with, Bierce showed no appreciable
mellowing from his war experience. His life is an ugly litany of feuds, ruptures, lawsuits, friends
betrayed or abandoned, epic temper tantrums and equally epic funks. He was a lousy husband – cold,
critical, philandering – and essentially abandoned his wife after 17 years of marriage. His older
son shot himself dead at age 16, and the younger drank himself to death in his 20s; for his own part,
Bierce maintained a lifelong obsession with suicide. In October 1913, after a distinguished, contentious
50-year career that had made him one of the most famous and hated men in America, Bierce left Washington
DC and headed for Mexico, intending to join, or report on – it was never quite clear – Pancho Villa's
revolutionary army. En route, dressing every day entirely in black, he paid final visits to the battlefields
of his youth, hiking for miles in the Indian summer heat around Orchard Knob, Missionary Ridge, Hell's
Half-Acre. For one whole day at Shiloh he sat by himself in the blazing sun. In November he crossed
from Laredo into Mexico, and was never heard from again, an exit dramatic enough to inspire a bestselling
novel by Carlos Fuentes, The Old Gringo, and a movie adaptation of the same name starring Gregory
Peck.
Late in life, Bierce described his military service in these terms:
It was once my fortune to command a company of soldiers – real soldiers. Not professional life-long
fighters, the product of European militarism – just plain, ordinary American volunteer soldiers,
who loved their country and fought for it with never a thought of grabbing it for themselves;
that is a trick which the survivors were taught later by gentlemen desiring their votes.
About those gentlemen – and women – desiring votes: since when did it become not just acceptable
but required for politicians to hold forth on Memorial Day? Who gave them permission to speak for
the violently dead? Come Monday we'll be up to our ears in some of the emptiest, most self-serving
dreck ever to ripple the atmosphere, the standard war-fantasy talk of American politics along with
televangelist-style purlings about heroes, freedoms, the supreme sacrifice. Trump will tell us how
much he loves the veterans, and how much they love him back. Down-ticket pols will re-terrorize and
titillate voters with tough talk about Isis. Hemingway, for one, had no use for this kind of guff,
as shown in a famous passage from A Farewell to Arms:
There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of the places
had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the
places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor,
courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the
names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.
The author, like most Americans, is in denial about America's role in the world. The reason the
US spends more on defense than the next 12 countries has nothing to do with self-defense. America
wants to maintain its global military dominance. Both parties agree on this. Iraq had nothing
to do with 9/11, the war's purpose was to demonstrate American military power. Bill Kristol takes
this a stage further and wants America to play the role of global hegemon and be in a state of
constant war. This is a stupid idea.
Even if Saddam had WMDs, he still had nothing to do with 9/11. The politicians are very good
at finding new scapegoats and switching the blame. A bunch of Saudis attacked the US on 9/11 so
invade Iraq and Afghanistan. Bin Laden moves to Pakistan so pretend you don't know where he is.
Some European terrorists kill other Europeans so Hillary wants to invade Syria. The assumption
seems to be that all Muslims are the same, it does not matter where you kill them.
Fantastic writing...shame Murika won't listen to any of it.
charlieblue
Reading the comments and conversations below, I found myself sickened and saddened by how
many of my fellow Americans can read a considered and well written article like this and
imagine it is a partisan screed.
It is a simple an obvious fact that the people most eager to see the US go to war, in
every generation, are not the people who will suffer and die in those wars. Today is our
Memorial Day. This is an article suggesting we, as Americans, stop and think about the people
who were wounded and those who died in service to our country. Set aside your partisan rage
and consider those people and their deaths, before you listen to words from any politician
calling for more of those deaths.
"Endless war," but it's not only attacks against other nations, it's a war against civil
liberties thus leading to a state in which, whistle blowers, folks who poke holes in the
government's 911 theory or complain about military operations in the China Sea may be
considered unpatriotic, maybe worse.
Dubikau
A friend recently asked, "What's the big deal about wars? I'v seen them on TV lots of times. They have nothing to do with me." Alas, a generation or two after a devastating conflict, it seems people forget. The lessons of history are unknown or irrelevant to the ignorant, the horror beyond imagination. That the clown, Trump, has made it this far is a living horror movie. As Emerson said about someone:
"The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons."
He's a liar and a joke. Neither friends nor enemies can take him seriously and he is unpredictable.
Bellanova Nova
Excellent article.
We must start talking seriously about Trump's pathology guarantees conflict and chaos, and should he get elected, an escalation of an endless war. The ramifications of his incurable and uncontrollable character defect in a political leader are dire and people should be educated about them before it's too late: https://medium.com/@Elamika/the-unbearable-lightness-of-being-a-narcissist-251ec901dae7#.xywh6cceu
Philip Lundt
As a veteran I have to ask you Ben: who gave you "permission to speak for the violently dead?"
A lot of people love Donald Trump. It's not because they are racists warmongers, ignorant, misinformed or stupid. Veterans overwhelmingly support Donald trump. Go ahead call us racists and warmongers too.
And the hypocrisy of all this is how Hillary Clinton doesn't have a problem with war. She participated in toppling Libya and she was doing the same to Syria. So how is it all about Trump and what a war monger he is?
villas1
Bravo. War is a racket.
olman132 -> villas1
As practiced in the US, certainly. The corporations that sell war materiel actively push their products, ensure the support of the government through political contributions, and engage in blackmail by spreading out manufacturing over many locations. In this manner, the only way to profit is by selling weapons, killing more people. What state or city will want to lose employment by letting a manufacturer close? It is incredibly difficult to close an un-needed military base for the same reason, whether here or abroad. War is a great racket, the US has it down pat.
Jim Given
When your'e putting your life at risk in a war zone wondering if you're going to make it back home, there's damned little discussion about politics. Whatever your reasons might have been for signing on the dotted line, all that matters then is the sailor, soldier, marine or airman standing beside you. It's discouraging, although painfully predictable, to read so few comments about veterans and so many comments about divisive politics.
Mshand
Hillary Clinton has started more wars, caused more death than Donald Trump....and yet....you don't mention that do you "We came, He died, We Laughed"
USApatriot12
Unfortunately we're in a position where the United States is a debtor nation, and the easiest way to keep the house of cards from falling is to maintain "full spectrum dominance" in the words of the Pentagon. There's no easy way to unwind this situation. It is, however, absolutely crucial to keep a known psychopath like Clinton out of the command chair.
talenttruth
For over 30 years, Americans have been carefully "programmed" 24/7, by deliberate Fear / Fear /
Fear propaganda, so we would believe that the entire world is full of evil, maniacal enemies out to
"get us."
Of course there always ARE insane haters out there, who are either jealous of America's wealth, or
who (more sophisticated than that) resent America's attempt to colonize-by-marketing, the entire
world for its unchecked capitalism. Two sides of the same American "coin." Those who are
conscripting jobless, hopeless young men overseas to be part of an equally mad "fundamentalist" army
against America ~ benefit hugely FROM our militarism, which "proves their point," from their warped
perspective.
Thus do the (tiny minority) of crazy America-haters out there (who we help create WITH our
militarism), serve as ongoing Perfectly Plausible Proof for Paranoia ~ the fuel for 24/7
fear/fear/fear propaganda. And who benefits from that propaganda? Oh wait, let us all think on that.
For five seconds.
In 1959, Republican war hero and President Dwight David Eisenhower warned us against combining the
incentives of capitalism with the un-audited profitability of wars: the "military industrial
complex." But in we Americans' orgy of personal materialism since the 1960's, we all forgot his
warning and have let that "complex" take over the nation, the world, all our pocketbooks (53% or
more of our treasury now goes to "defense" ~ what a lying word THAT is).
Answer? It it the 1-percent, crazily Wealth Hoarder super-rich who (a) profit insanely from Eternal
War and who now own (b) America's so-called "free press" (ha ha), the latter of which now slants all
news towards Threat, Fear, and War, again, 24/7. And now that "their" Nazi Supreme Court has ruled
that "money" = free speech, that same of sociopathic criminal class ALSO is coming to own politics.
Welcome to fully blooming Corporate Fascism, folks.
bullypulpit
In his book "1984" George Orwell wrote, "War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is
strength." Have we fallen so far that we are living that nightmare without question? When we hear
the voices of politicians, with those on the political right being the most egregious offenders,
clamoring for war, we must not forget the cost. Not just in terms of treasure, but especially of the
blood spilled by our men and women in uniform. Ask, "Are the causes they are being asked to
fight...and die...for, worthy of the sacrifice?"
Jim Given -> bullypulpit
I'm afraid that yes, we actually have fallen that far. The Patriot Act is the quintessential
example. Who could possibly oppose something called The Patriot Act?
Jim Given -> bullypulpit
The War on Terror, another fine example. What, you oppose fighting terrorists? The language
stifles (reasoned) dissent. It's brilliant, really.
Tom Farkas
Every year I get an uncomfortable sensation around Memorial Day. I know why now thanks to
this article. I didn't serve in the armed forces. Not for want. I was a post Vietnam teenager.
The armed forces were a joke during the Carter years and the US was in the middle of detante
with the USSR. Nothing to fight about and the word terrorist was still a few years away from
being reinvented. My Dad was a decorated veteran of the police action in Korea. He lost his
best friend there. He rarely talked about it. He and I sat on the couch watching the fall of
Saigon on TV. He silently cried. It was all for not. All those lives, all that misery, all for
nothing but power and glory. He knew it and I've known it since but just couldn't put a finger
on it. Thanks for this article.
talenttruth -> Tom Farkas
Tom, what a beautiful post. My husband and I (recently married after we were finally
"allowed" to, just like "real people"), are both Vietnam veterans (we had to "hide" in order
to serve). And I had majored in college in "U.S. Constitutional History," then worked worked
(ironically!) in the advertising "industry" (the Lie Factory) for enough years to see how
America, business and our society actually works, INSTEAD of "constitutionally."
My self-preoccupied generation sleepwalked from the 1960's until now, foolishly allowing the
super-rich to gradually make nearly every giant corporation dependent on military contracts.
Example? The European Union has openly subsidized its aircraft manufacturer, Airbus. But here,
in the USA ~ that would be "socialism," and so Boeing was forced instead (in order to compete)
to rely on military contracts ("military welfare.") They're both "government subsidization,"
but ours is crooked.
So what do we get when all corporations "must have" ongoing Business, in order to keep their
insatiable profits rolling in? Eternal War. And its "unfortunate side effects" - maimed
veterans, dead soldiers, sailors and airmen, and the revolting hypocrisy of "Memorial Day."
On that day, we pay "respect" to those who died serving the Military Marketing Department for
America's totally out of control, unchecked capitalism, which only serves the overlords at the
top.
Sorry to sound so grim, but I did not serve my country, to have it thus stolen.
Barclay Reynolds
When congress votes to fund wars then [they need to] add 75% more for after care. As a
combat veteran it pisses me off that [instead] charities are used to care for us. Most are run
by want a be military, Senease, types. No charities, it's up to American people to pay every
penny for our care, they voted for the war mongers so, so pay up people. Citizens need to know
true costs, tax raises, cuts in SS , welfare, cuts in schools. Biggest thing, all elected
officials and families and those work for them must use VA hospitals, let's see how that works
out.
Jim Given -> Barclay Reynolds
Failure to care for our veterans is a national disgrace. Thanks for your service brother.
SusanPrice58 -> Barclay Reynolds
I agree. While I'm sure that most of these charities try to do well, it always makes me
angry to think about why the need for charities to care for veterans exists. If we are
determined to fight these wars - then every citizen should have to have deep involvement of
some sort. Raise taxes, ration oil, watch footage of battles, restore the draft - whatever.
Instead, we insulate ourselves in a nice, warm cocoon of "Support Our Veterans" slogans
and flag waving.
Tom Wessel
"Endless war: Trump and the fantasy of cost-free conflict "
How about Hillary and the fantasy of war, PERIOD. There hasn't been a war she didn't like. Did
you listen to her AIPAC speech? No 2 State solution there.
gwpriester
The obscene amount of money the US pays just on the interest on the trillions "borrowed" for the Afghanistan and Iraq adventures would fix most that is wrong with the world. Bush & Cheney discovered if you don't raise taxes, require financial sacrifices, and do not have a draft, that you can wage bogus wars of choice for over a decade without so much as a peep of protest from the public. It is sickening how much good that money could do instead of all the death and destruction it bought.
AllenPitt
"So easy to be the hero in your wet dreams, your shooter games, your securely located war rooms stocked with emergency rations and the external defibrillator. This sort of unhinged fantasizing has been the defining pattern of the Era of Endless War, in which people – old men, for the most part, a good number of them rich – who never experienced war – who in their youth ran as fast from it as they could – send young men and women – most of them middle- and working-class – across oceans to fight wars based on half-facts, cooked intelligence, and magical thinking on the grand geopolitical scale. Surely it's no coincidence that the Era of the AUMF, the Era of Endless War, is also the Golden Era of the Chickenhawk. We keep electing leaders who, on the most basic experiential level, literally have no idea what they're doing."
EXACTLY!
OZGODRK
It is actually NOT Donald Trump who is advocating the endless global conflict and
confrontation with Russia, China, India, Iran, Europe and North Korea. The candidate secretly
advocating a never-ending war with the rest of the world is -- Madame Secretary, Hillary
Clinton, in person. Aided and abetted - publicly - by her right-hand woman, another Madame
Secretary, Madeleine Albright and yet another Madame Undersecretary, Samantha Power. All
chicken hawks, all neoconservatives, all pseudo-democrats, all on Wall Street payroll, all
white, and all women who will never see a second of combat for the rest of their lives.
So, the very major premise of the article is flawed and unsustainable. Which, of course,
then makes the entire article collapse as false and misleading.
MOZGODRK -> arrggh
But you are missing the entire point. Trump is NOT advocating the conflict; he is
advocating that we TALK to our enemies, so his lack of combat experience is a moot point.
On the other hand, the Clintons, the Alzhe...er, Albright, and the Samantha Power-Tripp are
all totally kosher with sending millions to die, knowing that they themselves will not
experience a nanosecond of hot cognitive experience.
caravanserai
John Mearsheimer who is a history professor at the University of Chicago wrote a great
book about American foreign policy. Mearsheimer explains how American foreign policy has
developed over the centuries. He argues that it firs objective was to dominate the Western
Hemisphere before extending its reach to Asia and Europe. The War of 1812 and the Monroe
Doctrine was part of a plan to dominate the Americas. The U.S. stopped Japan and Germany
dominating Asia and Europe in the 20th century. The U.S. continued to view the British Empire
as its greatest threat and Roosevelt set about dismantling it during WW2. Once WW2 was won,
the Soviet Union became America's new adversary and it maintained forces in Europe to check
Soviet expansion.
Mearsheimer argues that the U.S. is often in denial about its behavior and Americans are
taught that the U.S. is altruistic and a force for good in the world. Measheimer states that
"idealist rhetoric provided a proper mask for the brutal policies that underpinned the
tremendous growth of American power." In 1991 the U.S. became the world's only super-power and
according to Mearsheimer its main foreign policy objective was to prevent the re-emergence of
a new rival. Following the difficult wars in Afghanistan and Iraq the U.S. is less
certain of its global role. Mearsheimer claims that America's foreign policy elite is
still largely made up of people who want to keep America on top, but these days they usually
prefer to keep their views under wraps. Trump seems to be proposing something completely
different.
Rescue caravanserai
Trump is not proposing anything different. His foreign policy is the same as the establishment. He is not anti-war, nor more hawkish than Obama or Clinton.
Trumps FP is unilateral i.e. The US will go it alone without the UN or anyone else, attack any country he feels is threatning, without paying attention to intl. law, or "political correctness" as he calls it, i.e. the US will kill and torture as many ppl as it feels like to feel safe, and pay no attention to the Geneva Conventions. Other statements about his intended FP, that the msm calls shocking, has already been done, i.e. bomb the crap out of people, kill families of terrorists, waterboarding and much worse. These have been common policies since 9/11 & before. Another policy is to steal Iraq's oil. This has been de facto US FP in the Middle East since Eisenhower. The difference is that Trump says it outright. He makes subtext into the text.
Falanx
I agree with the overall point of this article... but focusing on the GOP and Trump, detracts from its otherwise valid points. What about Wilson, Truman, Johnson, Clinton, Obama and Hillary? Especially Hillary ("We came, We saw, He died") who evidently considers herself a latter day Caesar. The plain fact is that the US was conceived as a warmongering nation. Everyone else in the world understands this.
DanInTheDesert
Wow. What a fantastic article . This is what we need in the era of twitter journalism -- a long think piece. Thank you.[*]
Having said that I have disagree with the conclusion -- we have just a little over a week to avoid a forced choice between two hawks. The chances are slim but not impossible -- be active this weekend. Phonebank for Sanders. Convince a Californian to show up and vote.
PrinceVlad
Trump is the only candidate I've ever heard question the cost of war, it's part of the
reason he said we should flush NATO and we can't police the world for free any longer.
Kenarmy -> PrinceVlad
"Donald Trump would deploy up to 30,000 American soldiers in the Middle East to defeat the
Islamic State, he said at Thursday night's debate."
http://www.politico.com/blogs/2016-gop-primary-live-updates-and-results/2016/03/trump-iraq-syria-220608#ixzz49yJWQras
I have no problem with destroying ISIS. I have a problem with fighting Russia over
every former Soviet state on their doorstep ala Madam Secretary.
The best way to remember the war dead is to work to ensure that their ranks do not swell.
[*] and if anyone is reading who deals with such things -- y'all need to accept paypal or bitcoin so I can subscribe. Who uses their credit card online anymore?
"... the DoS requires workers to print out each email sent or received, and file it in a box, which is preserved. In general, these printouts, when done at all, are "filed" in printout order, making them difficult to search (which may be the intent, given the historic hostility to FOIA requests). ..."
"... Also, wasn't mail.presidentclinton.com used for the emails of the Clinton Foundation aides? Doesn't this mean the FBI likely now has very precise timing of both Hillary's SoS travel communications and Bill Clinton's speaking fee arrangement and Clinton Foundation donation emails, due to the emails likely having timestamps from a common clock? ..."
"... Assuming the ISP has decent security.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGmDBo-00mY ..."
"... That is a GREAT Youtube video. I've only gotten through the first 10 and a half minutes of it so far, and I had to stop watching it for a bit, because I was laughing my ass off so hard that tears were rolling down my cheeks. ..."
"... So let me get this straight, she COULD have been sending stuff involved with Black ops over an unencrypted link, and POTENTIALLY those files could have been printed off ANYWHERE in the world, and people are STILL defending her actions! Did it happen – IRRELEVANT! The very notion that she made it POSSIBLE means she breached national security! ..."
"... if I was an attacker, with or without the backing of a foreign government, I'd have been poking at THE PRINTER in the first instance, because (a) its security is likely to be weaker and also (b) its entirely less likely that there would be any logs produced or kept of my poking around. ..."
"... Now you're saying that not only was a printer available on this subdomain, and there was no firewall and no encrypted transport, but it was actually one of a particular series of HP LaserJet printers that allowed for a firmware upgrade upon receiving a new print job? ..."
"... 24.187.234.188 sounds very much like it was from the optimum online network block, and a quick whois shows that currently it does belong to them. ..."
"... he is not an engineer. Just a Manager that worked for a year 'managing' remote connectivity for foreign Embassies…. he did not go to school for CS or engineering and he has no training either. He was given immunity by the Justice Dept and was then fired by the State Dept so obviously he did something wrong. If you read Brian's post on FB - all of this is explained in the comments below his post with citations/links. ..."
"... The AP and Wired news stories about this whole issue (of the security of the server) catalog an entire boat load of security screw ups. They don't exactly inspire confidence in the competence of the people who set this stuff up. ..."
"... Interesting footnote: On tonight's NBC Evening Nudes, they mentioned that the FBI had seized Clinton's server, and also a USB thumb drive in August of last year. No mention of any PRINTERS being seized. (Typical incompetent FBI, still operating in the Louis Freeh era. The man didn't even know how to use a computer, and didn't want to.) ..."
"... like most hackers, hes a pathological liar. Its in their nature. He came out real quick to brag and prove how he hacked a clinton aid. But didn't want to tell anybody until he went to jail and she runing for president that that he hacked clintons emails? I call total BS. ..."
"... Did the sysadmin(s) who set up the mail and printer systems have security clearance(s) to read all the Mrs. Clinton's mail and print jobs? ..."
"... Because she certainly gave the sysadmin(s) the ability to read her mail and print jobs. archive the data, and transport the data anywhere. If that was not all done by State Department IT employee(s). how is this not a punishable offense? ..."
"... My understanding is that the same person who set up Bill Clinton's website and email after he left office set up Secretary Clinton's; hence, the shared IP addresses for similarly worded domains. Also, wasn't the same server used for both? ..."
"... I say follow the money. Look at the links between Clinton Foundation and classified information. ..."
"... She setup a private email server knowingly to exempt her from compliance. Now, the after the fact doesn't really matter. And she knows that… A .gov address would have full rights to all corispondance as the information belongs the the government and can be requested by ant civilian… ..."
It has, I think, been shown by Venafi that there was for some time in 2012 and 2013 a VPN running
on the clintonemail.com domain. However, that certificate expired. Running a directly Internet
connected printer seems more a security threat than simply a chance of sniffing printer queues
as modern printers sometimes have their own vulnerabilities.
Venafi's posts (first story has information about VPN):
I don't see why she requires a publicly routable IP address for a mail server, print server
and VPN server. It can easily be NATed behind a router on a single public IP.
On a show last week, Rachel Maddow did a segment on the Department of State's official archive
policy.
According to Maddow, the DoS requires workers to print out each email sent or received,
and file it in a box, which is preserved. In general, these printouts, when done at all, are "filed"
in printout order, making them difficult to search (which may be the intent, given the historic
hostility to FOIA requests).
This reminded me that the DoS was dismayed at not finding Brian Pagliano's .pst file, indicating
they did not expect to find his emails on any server-side backup. Presumably, no server-side DoS
email backup capability exists.
Also, wasn't mail.presidentclinton.com used for the emails of the Clinton Foundation aides?
Doesn't this mean the FBI likely now has very precise timing of both Hillary's SoS travel communications
and Bill Clinton's speaking fee arrangement and Clinton Foundation donation emails, due to the
emails likely having timestamps from a common clock?
Well, there are many printers have more than one port and protocols in use which means many different
ways of establishing a connection to that printer and not just layer 2.
Loved all the arguments, but, show me in the laws where it was illegal, for Hillery, to have
a second E-mail address? And that it was illegal to use it on government time. Or to have a printer
hooked to that account? But, I will tell you what was illegal. The employees using that address
to send classified information too. You shouldn't worry about Hillery, but the useful idiots.
There are some registrars that setup DNS by way of a template and assign A record subdomains
by default to make it easier….such as MX, www, etc. Not excusing it as you need to be way more
careful when you are the state department…but this is hardly the worst thing Clinton has done.
I'm not surprised since people don't realize how much of a security risk a printer can be -
and how to protect themselves and their network. Great white paper about printer and network security
written by a third party here: bit.ly/1sq1kyG
I also just read a story about printers and security on Computerworld.
The printer queue to a pimple faced hacker wouldn't be of interest but for a state intelligence
agency it would be a jackpot. Some of the greatest intelligence is gathered from the trash still
today. Don't think that the printer queue would not be interesting to a knowledgeable party.
So… You want me to believe that Hillary's personal email server sat behind MILLIONS of dollars
of security infrastructure to keep it protected? And that it employed D.O.D. grade 2 factor authentication,
disk encryption, and had a team of the worlds best security professionals monitoring all traffic
to/from the server and the network itself?
Secure, nonsecure, whatever. If she had used State's email server, then 1) copies would have
been on their server when she left office, 2) the Benghazi Commitee would have been able to wrap
up its investigation 2 years ago, 3) if State's computers were hacked, that wouldn't be her responsibility,
and 4) due to her choices, she's on the hot seat insisting she didn't do anything wrong. She made
her bed and now has to sleep in it.
The C-SPAN interview with former U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Joseph diGenova
I linked to above was a real eye opener for me to how HUGE this scandal actually is.
Once one is aware of the details, one can easily see through all of the many intentional red
herrings and half truths thrown out on this by Clinton and her campaign. What is absolutely, positively
amazing to me is how they have been able to get away with it since it really doesn't take much
investigative effort at all to expose their spin job for what it is.
Some of the lame excuses now coming from the State Department are a hint that officials there
are also vulnerable to the very major repercussions that SHOULD come from this.
Every one of the 127 to 150 (depending upon who you listen to) FBI agents investigating this
and every person in the intel community knows darn well that if any one of them had done even
the tiniest fraction of what has been done by Clinton and her crew, their security clearance would
have been immediately revoked, they would have been indicted and, most likely, imprisoned.
That is why, as revealed in the C-SPAN interview with Joseph diGenova who has a current Top
Secret clearance himself and has his ear to the conversation within the retired DOJ and intel
community in DC, there would likely be a revolt within the FBI and intel community if there are
no indictments on this. Why?
Well, first, there is that "Think of what would have happened to ME if I'd done even a tiny
fraction of this." Second, the failure to indict and prosecute would set a dangerous precedent
that would make the successful prosecution of anyone guilty of the mishandling of classified materials
and avoidance of public record FOIA inquiries difficult if not impossible.
@notme and other defending Hillary Fanbois: There is tons of evidence it was not way more secure
than a DOD platform and she didn't use a qualified individual to set up the email server.
It was an out of the box config with little or no effort to obfuscate the domain / service.
I highly doubt the server or IIS had been harden and I'd have to profile it was out of ignorance.
No doubt all default vulnerabilities where unaddressed and patches weren't in effect if a reboot
was necessary
How do we know this??? Just a little recon. As you know whatever you post may never go away…
Same goes for domains. Enter one of my favorite Internet recon tools The Way Back Machine. If
you don't know it, search for it and do a little research.
When the default IIS page comes up for the mail domain and the auth login page shows up for
at the default OWA address, we can comfortably conclude this was a lame chatty effort. At least
ssl was being used (by default no doubt): https://mail.clintonemail.com/owa/auth/logon.aspx
Had someone intended to provide a layer of security by hiding her email, it never EVER would've
been via that silly domain. An obfuscated domain would've been irrelevant and distasteful i.e.
openmalwarehere.com
That is a GREAT Youtube video. I've only gotten through the first 10 and a half minutes
of it so far, and I had to stop watching it for a bit, because I was laughing my ass off so hard
that tears were rolling down my cheeks.
Looking forward to the additional amazing absurdities revealed in the NEXT 40 minutes of this
video.
Could also DNS poison. They are not connecting to the printer via IP probably if they are setting
up A records for it. Also don't underestimate how many routers on the web are hacked, and I am
talking up stream core routers.
But why are we even talking about eavesdropping a connection? You can usually trivially compromise
a printer (likely default admin creds) and just capture each print job that is sent to the printer
using the printer itself. Copy each job onto the filesystem memory on the device and FTP it out.
Most all HP and other network capable printers support it or just upload your own firmware.
So let me get this straight, she COULD have been sending stuff involved with Black ops
over an unencrypted link, and POTENTIALLY those files could have been printed off ANYWHERE in
the world, and people are STILL defending her actions! Did it happen – IRRELEVANT! The very notion
that she made it POSSIBLE means she breached national security!
Would anyone else who did this be allowed in public yet alone to run for POTUS!?
The intercepting of data is also somewhat unlikely. Without knowing how they got internet access
you can't say infallibly if it was sniffable. Over a fiber circuit she likely had a CIDR block
and there wouldn't have been anyone else to sniff it. Over DOCSIS they would need to break BPI+,
and be on the local RF segment. Both create extraordinarily unlikely scenarios for sniffing.
Also you sent me on a confusing wild IP goose chase… You have both 24.187.234.188 and 24.197.234.188
listed in the story.
"In one demonstration, Cui printed a tax return on an infected printer, which in turn sent
the tax form to a second computer playing the part of a hacker's machine. The latter computer
then scanned the document for critical information such as Social Security numbers, and when it
found one, automatically published it on a Twitter feed…"
So, um, leaving aside the narrow possibility of printer traffic sniffing, I believe that it
might be accurate to say that most printers these days have memory… lots of it… and thus, it would
seem to be not entirely beyond the realm of the possible to imagine a scenario in which a less-than-perfectly-secured
printer which happened to also have a PUBLIC internet address, might perhaps be induced to give
up its secrets to some remote attacker, e.g. the last five or ten documents that were printed.
The media and the Republicats are all gaga about the security of THE SERVER, but if I was
an attacker, with or without the backing of a foreign government, I'd have been poking at THE
PRINTER in the first instance, because (a) its security is likely to be weaker and also (b) its
entirely less likely that there would be any logs produced or kept of my poking around.
Now you're saying that not only was a printer available on this subdomain, and there was
no firewall and no encrypted transport, but it was actually one of a particular series of HP LaserJet
printers that allowed for a firmware upgrade upon receiving a new print job?
After a few ifs, I agree this could look bad. But, Ron, you're piling on the if after if after
if and stating factually that this was bad. Again, what we have is a subdomain with printer as
the name. There's a ton of things in between that what you're trying to have poor Brian conclude.
Directly connecting a computer to the internet without any firewall or hardening, bad idea.
Directly connecting a printer to the internet without any firewall or hardening, yes, this too
is a bad idea. Too bad we're playing hopscotch because of a subdomain name. Not like this:
http://210.125.31.xxx/hp/device/this.LCDispatcher?nav=hp.EventLog
This brings up another interesting thing I just learned about the clintonemail.com domain.
The FSI passive DNS data bases knows of about 10,000 subdomains of that domain. I was flaberghasted
by this at first, but then I realised the real reason for this. (No, that domain DOES NOT actually
have anywhere near that many REAL subdomains):
The simple answer is that NetworkSolutions points your parked domains at their advertising.
(That's not actually remarkable at all. That's just what pretty much every company that does domain
parking does.)
The more interesting thing is that in the cases of your live/active/non-parked domains for
which NetSol provides DNS, they wildcard these domains, so that any time anybody punches in a
misspelled subdomain name, they end up at NetSol's advertising partner, DoubleClick.
This is arguably an underhanded thing for NetSol to be doing, but hey! It's (apparently) in
the contract, so it _is_ explicit to the customer, and NetSol isn't in business for its health.
It's a commecial enterprise, so they can't be blamed for trying to make a buck, here and there.
But all this info about the DNS really brings up some other issues. Let's say, just for the
sake of argument, that Hillary's server was, in actual fact, as tight as a snare drum with respect
to security. There's still the question of her login credentials for her NetSol account. If those
had gone walkaround… well… you can imagine the scenarios.
The Wayback links I provided are NOT for subdomains or parked domains. They are for the clintonemail.com
domain, for the time period in question that a breach may have occurred. The URL strings captured
show (at least) questionable adware running on this box, and I'm really surprised no one is looking
at that. The &poru= string is tied to some very dubious adware, for example.
So no evidence except wild speculation based on a sub domain name? I used to have a few sub
domains such as router.mydomain voip.mydomain admin.mydomain netgear.mydomain setup as a honeypots.
My plan was to script any ips buzzing them had all their future traffic dropped for several days.
But alas I never got around to completing it.
Gosh! I had no idea, up until this moment, that Hillary was so sophisticated that she was even
running her own honeypots!
Returning to this planet for the moment, I'd just like to emphasize that, as I told Brian,
there are really two core points here:
1) Assigning a *public* IPv4 address to a printer opened up at least the theoretical possibilities
that either (a) printer traffic could be sniffed or (b) that the printer itself could be compromised.
We can debate all day the actual pragmatic level of risk associated with each of these two possibilities,
but I think that it is non-zero in both cases, and in any case, perhaps this all misses the point.
2) Perhaps even MORE importantly, the assignment of a static public IP address to the printer
speaks to the general level of network security competence (or lack thereof) of whoever was setting
up and maintaining this equipment for the Clintons. And what it says is not good at all. I don't
think that many either would or could disagree with that. And this is the more troubling aspect
of the whole story. If the Clinton's sysadmin messed up even this simple and obvious thing, then
what ELSE did he or she mess up, security-wise?
"Putting anything on the internet opens up the theoretical possibility that's its traffic could
be sniffed. So, unless that's the threshold, in which case she's as secure as anything else on
the internet, what's the point of the outrage?"
Actually, yea, you've made a good point. But let's dissect it a bit.
In theory, at least, server-to-server e-mail transmission can be protected from prying eyes
via TLS encryption. I personally don't know how well deployed that (TLS) is at the present moment,
but let's just say for the sake of argument that it's 50/50, i.e. half the time Hillary's inbound
and outbound messages, e.g. to various world potentates, were protected in transit from sniffing
and/or MITM attacks, and the other times they weren't.
More to the point, let's assume, for the sake of argument, that she at least understood the
possibilities of her e-mails being spied upon… which, in the post-Snowden era, at least, she certainly
should have understood… and as a result, she was at least smart enough not to send out e-mails
like "Yea, let's drop those bombs now Bibi!" as some clever wag here said.
Contrast this with her probable level of caution when it came to simply *printing* some draft
document… which could be equally or perhaps even more revealing and/or inflamatory… to the printer
sitting right there next to her desk in her home office.
(As someone suggested, it is at least theoretically possible that data transport to the printer
might be encrypted, but in practice, probably not.)
So Hillary is sitting there, and she prints a draft of a document she's working on called "State
Department Post-Invasion Plan for Crimea". She doesn't worry about the security implications of
"sending" that document out over the Internet, because, as far as she knows, it is actually just
going from the screen on the physical desk right in front of her just over to the printer which
is sitting right at her elbow. As far as her (possibly technically naive) perceptions go, the
document is just being printed, and isn't ever even leaving the room she is sitting in. So her
_perception_ is that printing the document is utterly safe and secure.
But this is the whole point here. Maybe that document could be sniffed. Even if that's not
a realistic possibility, the printer itself could be directly compromised, and made to give up
its secrets.
The apparent high probability that (a) she had a home printer and that (b) this printer had
a public Ipv4 address… which was ridiculously easy to find, by the way… and that (c) she probably
was NOT just using that printer as a paperweight or a doorstop and (d) the undeniable possibility
that said printer could perhaps have been "hacked"… perhaps even via something as simple as remote
login using admin/admin… all adds up to what, in my book at least, seems to be a "Holy s**t!"
type of scenario.
The fact that the FBI apparently didn't bother to impound her printer when it impounded the
rest of her gear is perhaps even more troubling.
For all we know, as we speak, that printer may be sitting exposed in some landfill somewhere
in the hills of Westchester County, just waiting for some dumpster diver with an eye for valuable
e-waste to come along, fish it out, plug it in, login with admin/admin, and then print out copies
of the last 20 documents.
I think that it is safe to say that such a scenario probably would not be fully conformant
with State Department rules & regulations with respect to the security of electronic documents.
Subdomain names mean little to nothing. Someone could guess what an IP address served based
upon the subdomain name, or the domain name itself, but that is silly.
What exactly is an "internet based printer"? I'm not sure if there's a technical person trying
to sound not technical and using random jargon or if it's a non-technical person trying to sound
technical. Let's try and define some terms maybe?
24.187.234.188 sounds very much like it was from the optimum online network block, and
a quick whois shows that currently it does belong to them. That sounds about right because
they provide services around the area Hillary Clinton called home. Optonline does provide static
IP addresses. But I have to wonder, are these terminated in the house? Do we know if the email
server everyone is so hip to talk about was actually located at Clinton's house or was it in a
DC (rack, not washington)? If it was in her house what was the connection? Did this IP reside
on a cable modem? Was it a DSL line? Fiber? That area wasn't know for it's way updated and trendy
transport. Did the carrier provide the equipment? Did Clinton hire a complete idiot to put the
email server directly connected to the internet or was there a firewall in front of it?
How likely is it that there was a firewall of sorts in front of the mail server and any printers
that were likely there? Pretty damn likely. She didn't buy services from Stooges r Us. And even
if she did, they would probably set up a firewall. That's all saying that the vendor supplied
equipment didn't perform some firewalling technology. Anyone in the IT field would see this as
not very likely outside of pre mid 90s.
For the printer subdomain name, we think that the printer actually had IPP or something? LPD?
Are you suggesting, but not saying, that Clinton set up a printing device directly on the internet
so that while she was traveling around wherever she was when not at home and printing to that
printer? That doesn't even make sense. Or are you suggesting, but not saying, she decided this
fancy new printer she saw at Office Depot would look nice with a subdomain sitting next to her
email server? And, now she could actually print stuff while she was outside in the yard or upstairs
in the bedroom? Oh, it was connected to the internet? Really? "I didn't know it was on the internet
even though I somehow called and registered a subdomain so I could get an external IP address
for it. And I just plugged this big old CAT5(e)/6 cable into my printer directly from the wall???"
Factually we can say the following: 4 subdomains pointed to 2 IPs. 2 subdomains use the English
word "mail" and 2 subdomains use the English word "printer".
Do we know that some mail transfer agent was listening on the mail domain? I assume someone
knows this, but I've not seen any documentation on this, haven't looked, barely care. Do we have
any open ports on this other IP? Did anyone do some research? Why don't you contact Robert Graham
and ask him if masscan hit those IPs and what ports were open. Maybe he doesn't like reporters,
but you can ask nicely. Tell him some guy on the internet told you about masscan and that Rob
probably had some port information about those IPs.
"Do we know if the email server everyone is so hip to talk about was actually located at Clinton's
house or was it in a DC (rack, not washington)? If it was in her house what was the connection?
Did this IP reside on a cable modem? Was it a DSL line? Fiber? That area wasn't know for it's
way updated and trendy transport. Did the carrier provide the equipment? Did Clinton hire a complete
idiot to put the email server directly connected to the internet or was there a firewall in front
of it?"
These are all GREAT questions, many of which the FBI, in its usual half-assed manner, is probably
not even thinking about, let alone actually asking. Do you have any of the answers to any of the
questions that you yourself have raised? I mean DEFINITIVE answers, rather than just your personal
speculations?
"How likely is it that there was a firewall of sorts in front of the mail server and any printers
that were likely there? Pretty damn likely."
And you are basing that opinion/supposition on what, exactly?
She used a SUPER USER from State to set it up for her… he is not an engineer. Just a Manager
that worked for a year 'managing' remote connectivity for foreign Embassies…. he did not go to
school for CS or engineering and he has no training either. He was given immunity by the Justice
Dept and was then fired by the State Dept so obviously he did something wrong. If you read Brian's
post on FB - all of this is explained in the comments below his post with citations/links.
The CIDR block 24.187.234.184/29 was allocated to Clinton's home. If the network was configured
following standard practices, traffic between systems inside that CIDR block would not have left
Clinton's LAN, and most definitely would not have been "sent out over the Internet". Guilmette's
comments about vulnerabilities and wasting toner assume incompetence and a total absence of firewalls.
What evidence we have is that the people who setup Clinton's home LAN knew enough to configure
a router, a firewall, a VPN, and some basic CIDR netmasks.
NAT is not a security fix-all, not using NAT is not a sign of vulnerability or incompetence.
"If the network was configured following standard practices, traffic between systems inside
that CIDR block would not have left Clinton's LAN…"
And if perchance it WASN'T configured following standard practices, what then?
Does the FBI know what how the network was actually configured? Does anybody?
"Guilmette's comments about vulnerabilities and wasting toner assume incompetence and a total
absence of firewalls."
Absolutely. Is there any publically known reason to grant the sysadmin(s) who set this stuff
up any more generous assumptions vis a vis their competence? The AP and Wired news stories
about this whole issue (of the security of the server) catalog an entire boat load of security
screw ups. They don't exactly inspire confidence in the competence of the people who set this
stuff up.
"What evidence we have is that the people who setup Clinton's home LAN knew enough to configure
a router, a firewall, a VPN, and some basic CIDR netmasks."
I can teach an 8th grader of average intelligence how to do all that stuff in 1/2 hour. Teaching
him/her how to do it SECURELY takes a bit longer.
The good news is that people with no more intelligence that a bag of hammers can nowadays wander
down to the local BestBuy, purchase a network printer and a router, take them both home, plug
them in, and they just seem to work. The bad news is that people with no more intelligence than
a bag of hammers can nowadays wander down to their local BestBuy, purchase a network printer and
a router, take them both home, plug them in, and they just SEEM to work.
The mere existance of this network isn't proof that it was secure in any sense. It isn't even
evidence of that.
Agreed. The information in this article is largely speculation based on one piece of information
meta data (a DNS record).
Whether a printer existed is speculation; Whether said printer was connected to the internet
is speculation (having an IP does not equal internet connectivity); If said printer existed, and
if said printer was internet connected, any vulnerabilities in the printer itself or in the communications
path are also speculation.
It gets better. Do a dig mx clintonemail.com. You'll see that the machine's incoming email
was filtered by mxlogic.net, a spam filtering service that works by received all your emails,
filtering out the spam, and forwarding you the rest.
This is because the hosting provider, Platte River Network, sold a package along with the hosting.
The package included spam filtering and full-disk off-site backup (since then seized by the FBI).
So every email received by Clinton was going through many unsecured places, including a spam
filtering queue, a backup appliance and an off-site backup server. Which has already been documented.
"It gets better. Do a dig mx clintonemail.com. You'll see that the machine's incoming email
was filtered by mxlogic.net, a spam filtering service that works by received all your emails,
filtering out the spam, and forwarding you the rest."
That arrangement appears to have only been in effect since circa June, 2013. We should think
also about the time BOTH before and after that.
;; bailiwick: clintonemail.com.
;; count: 5454
;; first seen: 2013-06-24 21:27:43 -0000
;; last seen: 2016-05-26 12:57:43 -0000
clintonemail.com. IN MX 10 clintonemail.com.inbound10.mxlogic.net.
clintonemail.com. IN MX 10 clintonemail.com.inbound10.mxlogicmx.net.
"This is because the hosting provider, Platte River Network, sold a package along with the
hosting. The package included spam filtering and full-disk off-site backup (since then seized
by the FBI)."
Was that all in the report? I guess I'll have to go and read that whole thing now.
Interesting footnote: On tonight's NBC Evening Nudes, they mentioned that the FBI had seized
Clinton's server, and also a USB thumb drive in August of last year. No mention of any PRINTERS
being seized. (Typical incompetent FBI, still operating in the Louis Freeh era. The man didn't
even know how to use a computer, and didn't want to.)
"So every email received by Clinton was going through many unsecured places, including a spam
filtering queue, a backup appliance and an off-site backup server. Which has already been documented."
Um, yep. You're right. Arguably, the security of Clinton's e-mails were even WORSE after the
switch in June, 2013, than it had been before that.
And let's not forget that the Stored Communications Act makes it perfectly legal for any service
provider who happens to have YOUR e-mails on THEIR hard drives to peek at those e-mails, pretty
much as they see fit, as long as doing so is ostensibly or arguably for "technical" reasons having
to do with the management of the service they are providing.
(Google goes further and has software that looks at everything, for marketing/advertising purposes.
All 100% legal, based on their end luser contracts, I'm sure.)
So this is basically like when some NSA people got caught peeking at the NSA's records on their
love interests. When they get caught, they just shrug, promise never to do it again, and nobody
goes to jail.
How many sysadmins at MXLogic had access to Clinton's emails? If the one lone guy who pulled
the graveyard shift poked around into those e-mails, at say 3AM, would anybody even know that
had happened? (Even the NSA didn't know what Snowden had looked at until he was already long gone,
and even then, they weren't entirely sure.)
Ah, Brian, it appears that both the Chinese and the Russians had complete access to Hillary's
rogue mail server going back to 2013. I'm not sure there's any point in talking about the printer.
A Romanian cab driver, known as Guccifer and now sitting in a U.S. jail, claimed to have found
her mail server and gotten complete access to it in 2013, up to two years before Farsight discovered
it in March 2015.
But there is a subsequent story that claimed that Guccifer tried to hack into Russian systems
which the Russians discovered. They, in turn, planted malware on Guccifer's computer that allowed
them to see everything that he was able to hack into. It's likely that the Russians have every
piece of email that went through Hillary's server. If there are any missing, we should ask them
about it.
like most hackers, hes a pathological liar. Its in their nature. He came out real quick
to brag and prove how he hacked a clinton aid. But didn't want to tell anybody until he went to
jail and she runing for president that that he hacked clintons emails? I call total BS.
Nobody with any brains believes the recent headline-grabbing pronouncements from this criminal
Guccifer. He's pretty obviously just failing around and hoping that he can come up with some topical
story that will get him in the newspapers and maybe… if they are really dumb… entice his prosecutors
into cutting him some sort of a deal if he "talks" about his alleged break-in to the Clinton server.
But so far, he hasn't produced a single shred of credible evidence to back up his wild claims,
and as someone pointed out, it is really rather absurd, even or especially for someone in his
position, to VOLUNTARILY cop to yet another federal felony.
The smart money says that if anyone ever did compromise any part of Clinton's network, that
party will be smart enough to NEVER talk about that, except to his paymasters, or to whoever is
willing and able to purchase the exflitrated data, with utmost confidentiality and discretion,
obviously.
I assume that when China, Russia, Israel, Germany, Britian, India, Pakistan, etc… reconnoitered
Secretary Clinton's web presence and discovered her use of a private email server and printer,
they would have devoted the required time and resources to compromise them, one way or the other.
That's what state-sponsored intelligence services do. If I were either Clinton, I would assume
my email was compromised and assume my nation-state adversaries have everything … just the same
as if I used the State Department's email system.
Ironically, she would have been better off using the State Dept. email system: she would have
known from the start that eventually every message would be in the hands of our adversaries.
1. DOCSIS – LOL. While her cable company's DOCSIS 3.1 does have encrypted features to prevent
someone on the copper from doing the equivalent of ARP poisoning to pretend to be her gateway,
I have not yet – anywhere in New England or the Mid Atlantic – found those encryption features
enabled. They are left off intentionally by every provider I have tested probably for bandwidth
profit reasons. Her packets were sniffable. Period.
2. FOX level hypocrisy detected.
Let's not forget that Rove and Cheney ran the US government for years during a time of war
using an Exchange 2003 RNC server. When called on it, suddenly (Oopsy, TeeHee!) all the millions
of those email messages – and their backups – got 'accidentally' deleted rather than letting the
world + dog see what those two chimps were trusting Microsoft security to keep safe. Any talk
of Orange suits needs to put those two at the front of the line.
As far as I'm concerned with Hillary, I'd like to see her precedent more widely adopted – hardened
personal mail stores to restore privacy. Screw the folks who think snooping everyone's email is
their personal right under some secret law.
"More importantly, any emails or other documents that the Clintons decided to print would be
sent out over the Internet - however briefly - before going back to the printer. And that data
may have been sniffable by other customers of the same ISP, Guilmette said."
How/why would this be the case?
I can see if we make the assumption of all machines using internal IPs so packets headed to
24.187.234.188 would route out then bounce back in … but if it was local net, or if it was defined
in hosts or the router (also assumptions) then it would never have to bounce out except for a
a lookup.
or am I missing something here ..?
Did the sysadmin(s) who set up the mail and printer systems have security clearance(s)
to read all the Mrs. Clinton's mail and print jobs?
Because she certainly gave the sysadmin(s) the ability to read her mail and print jobs.
archive the data, and transport the data anywhere. If that was not all done by State Department
IT employee(s). how is this not a punishable offense?
It boggles my mind to think that anyone could defend Mrs. Clinton for this blatant breach of
national security.
My understanding is that the same person who set up Bill Clinton's website and email after
he left office set up Secretary Clinton's; hence, the shared IP addresses for similarly worded
domains. Also, wasn't the same server used for both?
I think this person was granted immunity.
Worrying about whether an indictment is in the future is like wondering what verdicts a jury
is going to return. That is something that I learned from a veteran attorney.
So I am in the printer industry, and this story is interesting for a couple of reasons.
1) Most IP based printers (read connected via ethernet card rather than USB "local" connection)
allow for users and administrators to log in to the printer via the IP address and adjust settings,
install new firmware, and so forth. For a state hacker, this could be gold – and the default "service"
logins and passwords can typically be found in service manuals readily available on the web.
2) On that issue, one of the things that a lot of multi function devices ("all in one") allow
for is "multi plexing". "Multi plexing" is performing multiple functions with a single job submission.
For example, there are machines that can receive an incoming fax, print that fax out, forward
the fax using SMB to an archive (typically, but not always on the same subnet), forward that fax
via email to a recipient, forward that fax to another fax machine using telephony, forward that
fax to a fax server using LAN faxing, and so on. You can see how tempting a multifunction machine
would be to a a state intelligence service.
3) All the components in a machine are commercially available, from limited manufacturers –
there are only so many manufacturers for memory, motherboards, etc. For a state intelligence service
with a lot of money – setting up a clone in a lab to use as a template to re-engineer would be
relatively cheap.
4) Many PostScript enabled printers allow for firmware upgrades as a PostScript print submission
– so the printer could be reprogrammed with new firmware (essentially re engineered) remotely
by anyone with access to the IP. Essentially, the multi plexing could be reprogrammed to sent
print submissions out to a server controlled by a foreign intelligence service. Now, this isn't
something that a pimply faced hacker could do. Too expensive, and too time consuming. But if you
had an organization that could figure out how to reprogram centrifuges…
5) Many printers by default "assign themselves" ports with known weaknesses (I'm looking at
you, Port 8xxx), and open those ports up to allow communication over a network – for example,
the "flag" that pops up on your computer to let you know the printer is out of paper. Depending
on how a printer is set up for internet printing, this may or may not apply. Experienced IP administrators
will go back, and change the port settings – if they think of it. But in many cases it is not
something that they are thinking about.
I say follow the money. Look at the links between Clinton Foundation and classified information.
She setup a private email server knowingly to exempt her from compliance. Now, the after
the fact doesn't really matter. And she knows that… A .gov address would have full rights to all
corispondance as the information belongs the the government and can be requested by ant civilian…
Is Hillary Clinton arrogant as a typical sociopath, thinking that everything was allowed for her?
Because "emailgate" is not so much a direct question about her IQ, but about breach of security
(which is undisputable) for the whole Department of State. What bothers me the most is the arrogant
denial of facts that's interwoven throughout Hillary statements and positions on this matter...
Notable quotes:
"... Despite guidelines to the contrary, Clinton used mobile devices to conduct official business on her personal email account and private server. ..."
"... The IG report found that on 9 January 2011, a technical adviser retained by former president Bill Clinton said he had shut down the server because he thought there was "someone was trying to hack us and while they did not get in i didnt [sic] want to let them have the chance to". ..."
"... The IG report states that on 13 May 2011, "two of Secretary Clinton's immediate staff discussed via email the Secretary's concern that someone was 'hacking into her email' after she received an email with a suspicious link". It added: "However, OIG found no evidence that the Secretary or her staff reported these incidents to computer security personnel or anyone else within the Department." ..."
Although the report is potentially less damaging than a separate investigation by the FBI into
whether she broke federal laws, it poses a significant challenge to the Clinton campaign, which has
recently slipped behind Donald Trump in opinion polling .
... ... ...
...the full report, a copy of which was obtained by the Associated Press (AP), cites "longstanding,
systemic weaknesses" related to the agency's communications. These started before Clinton's appointment
as secretary of state, but her failures were singled out as more serious and were said to disregard
various state department guidelines for avoiding cybersecurity risks.
... OIG found no evidence that staff in the Office of the Legal Adviser reviewed or approved Secretary
Clinton's personal system."
Despite guidelines to the contrary, Clinton used mobile devices to conduct official business
on her personal email account and private server. She never sought approval from senior information
officers, who would have refused the request because of security risks, the audit said.
... ... ...
Clinton's private email server appears to have been a target for hackers. The IG report found
that on 9 January 2011, a technical adviser retained by former president Bill Clinton said he had
shut down the server because he thought there was "someone was trying to hack us and while they did
not get in i didnt [sic] want to let them have the chance to". There was another suspected attack
later the same day. On 10 January, Clinton's aide Huma Abedin told officials not to send her "anything
sensitive" and said she could "explain more in person".
The IG report states that on 13 May 2011, "two of Secretary Clinton's immediate staff discussed
via email the Secretary's concern that someone was 'hacking into her email' after she received an
email with a suspicious link". It added: "However, OIG found no evidence that the Secretary or her
staff reported these incidents to computer security personnel or anyone else within the Department."
Published on 17 Apr 2016
Digging deep into Hillary's connections to Wall Street, Abby Martin reveals how the Clinton's
multi-million-dollar political machine operates.
This episode chronicles the Clinton's rise to power in the 90s on a right-wing agenda, the
Clinton Foundation's revolving door with Gulf state monarchies, corporations and the world's biggest
financial institutions, and the establishment of the hyper-aggressive "Hillary Doctrine" while
Secretary of State. Learn the essential facts about the great danger she poses, and why she's
the US Empire's choice for its next CEO.
http://multimedia.telesurtv.net/v/the…
"... With help from Wasserman-Schultz and the DNC, Clinton, having w/ her husband had more than two decades to build-up a political patronage system within the southern Democratic Party, was able to tap her contacts and bring-out the vote in very large numbers before few had even heard of Sanders. ..."
"... Good on you, Bernie. As they say in Florida, "It's tough to clean up the swamp when you're up to your ass in alligators." Alligator Debbie going down. ..."
"... A female president would be a great thing. But not Hillary. We can do better. Maybe Jill Stein or Elizabeth Warren. ..."
"... Obama's and Clinton's policies are criticized precisely because they're a continuation of Bush policy, while Bill's policies led the economic meltdown of 2008. ..."
"... And deregulation! Before I watched the video of that Hillary Clinton campaign event, I had never heard someone denounce deregulation and hail the economic achievements of Bill Clinton in the same speech. That kind of mental combination, I've always assumed, puts you in danger of spontaneous combustion or something. After all, Bill Clinton is America's all-time champion deregulator. He deregulated banks. He deregulated telecoms. He appointed arch deregulators Robert Rubin and Larry Summers to high office, and he re-upped Ronald Reagan's pet Fed chairman, Alan Greenspan. He took some time out to dynamite the federal welfare system, then he came back and deregulated banks some more. And derivative securities, too. ..."
"... Wasserman Schultz will follow her mentor's lead and play the victim. ..."
"... Clinton will swoop in and support her with money and the "woman card" nonsense. ..."
"... Even those facts understate the problem as many of these corporate owned Dems are voting the Historical Republican policies favoring the wealthy power brokers. B. Clinton was known as Republican Lite. ..."
"... 'Yes there is incessant complaining about the party, "corporate democratic whores."' ..."
"... Elect The Warmonger Killary And You Will Have Victoria Nuland As Secretary Of State Says David Stockman And The Result Will Be World War III Says PCR ..."
"... "And that brings us to the deplorable Kagan clan-–Washington's leading resident family of war-mongering neo-cons. The odds are that, if elected President, Hillary would likely choose one of them--her protégé during her stint in the Obama administration, Victoria Nuland-– as Secretary of State. Yet that would be lights out for any hope of caging Washington's imperial ambitions and reducing the massive and utterly unnecessary burden of current defense spending. The truth is, there are fewer greater menaces in the Imperial City today than Victoria Nuland. ..."
"... He is not competitive because the DNC is controlled by the Reagan Neo-cons, Hillary the chief marionette among them. To understand, just reflect on Hillary's relationship with Neo-con Victoria Nuland, Assistant Sec. of State under Hillary who previously worked for Dick Cheney. Two party system is a shill and anachronism; ..."
"... The Neo-con AIPAC agenda is world hegemony; New World Order and Hillary is the pre-annointed. Trump may not be a surprise but Sanders certainly is independent and thankfully a chance for Americans to voice their frustrations at the loss of their civil rights and democracy. ..."
"... The whole electoral system is corrupt, Democrats and Republicans work for the oligarchs they betray the people. ..."
"... BTW: No one knew before Sanders entered that the DNC would call for "Temporary Rules" changes and votes on the floor of state conventions, which is precisely what happened in Nevada. ..."
"... This woman voted FOR a bill that supports rip-off pay day lenders rather than poor working class people. Pay day lenders charge astronomical rates to lend people small amounts of money to pay for a car repair or a dentist visit that they can't cover because they are trying to survive on 7 or 8 dollars an hour, working two or three jobs to get by ..."
"... DWS has done terrible damage to Hillary's chances against Trump. Her blatant rigging of the process against Sanders will be a barrier to their ever supporting Clinton. If it was believed that she one a fair fight, I think most would accept the outcome. But only the most credulous can now believe that it was a fair fight. ..."
"... Sanders has been remiss in confronting Hillary with the evil she has wrought, genocide on Iraq, Syria, and most obviously in turning top standard of living Libya into a failed state. ..."
"... Sanders ha failed to give Hillary the downbraiding she deserves as a budding NWO fascist and apologist for Wall St. and Netanyahu, etc. Despicable woman, much like Margret Thatcher and Madeline Albright. Destroyers; bad at diplomacy and quick on murderous war. Demagogue Hillary will escalate US hegemony and bring on Armageddon for the Christian Zionists; WWIII. Why did Sanders not play his trump card at the beginning of the campaign? ..."
"... Maybe it isn't fair, but if Bernie wanted to change it he should have started a lot earlier. ..."
"... Clinton only leads by 274 pledged delegates. ..."
"... It is a sad and sorry day that you can't recognize a democrat any more. Yes, he's not a "party faithful". Apparently you haven't noticed that "the party" has become about "the party". ..."
"... The problem with Bernie Sanders is he makes Hillary look like the elite disconnected republican that she is. ..."
"... It's so like the current crowd of jerks running the Democratic party to see them start pointing fingers at Bernie for what they can see is their coming defeat in November. They had the chance to back Bernie. They can still do it, but they are all too invested in their own interests to care about anything but their own interests, and so they won't pick up on the best chance to have a Democratic landslide since 1964. ..."
"... Debbie Wasserman Schultz represents the continued failure of the Democratic Party and as such should be replaced. ..."
"... The Democratic Party began to die during Bill Clinton's regime. Bill Clinton in his own way conducted a regime change of the Democratic Party from Main Street and Unions to Wall Street. The results have not been good: ..."
"... The State Parties are ALSO CONTROLLED by the DNC. The kick back monies insure that the DNC is in control of WHO they select rather then open elections. You can lie to yourself however, WE know the truth of how this corrupt system works. WRITE IN Bernie in Nov. I am! ..."
"... Very few outside the Democratic Party establishment seem to like these superdelegates. Abolish them and pledged delegates too while you're at it. ..."
"... Gore did win Florida-- exit polling, which was uncannily accurate, showed that, but it was the Supreme Court that stopped the recount. (OTOH, some post-election analyses, including by the Washington Post, concluded Gore lost.) ..."
"... Debbie Wasserman Shultz, champion of the PAYDAY LOAN SHARKS. DWS helped defeat the Sen. Warren legislation to limit the interest rates to 30% FROM 3000%. DWS and the Clintons take campaign funds and support the loan sharks bleeding economically challenged communities across the U.S. Write IN Bernie in Nov. I am! ..."
"... Bill Moyers has been one of the most respected journalists. Please read what he says about DWS: http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/36991-democrats-cant-unite-unless-wasserman-schultz-goes ..."
"... The chairperson of the DNC is bound to remain impartial, as is clearly stated in the party rules. There is now ample evidence that Ms Schultz has repeatedly broken that rule throughout the campaign cycle and is therefore unfit to remain chairperson of the DNC. If she is not replaced by an impartial chairperson for the convention it will undermine the legitimacy of the nomination process. ..."
"... There's some debate about the world's oldest democracy, but it ain't the United States (which, btw, is a republic). ..."
"... Iceland has had a parliament since the year 930 and the oldest continuous parliament since 979 is on the Isle of Man. Universal adult suffrage was established in New Zealand in 1893, although NZ doesn't elect its Head of State. ..."
"... He sure does know what is best for the party, and it isn't endless war, Wall St. and Wall Mart. ..."
"... You sound as bright as the half-wit who told me last summer that Sanders couldn't win Vermont's primary. ..."
"... It is a sad commentary on our economy when people are so hard up for money that they will troll for a woman who is a Neocon warmonger for money. ..."
"... Senator Sanders is serving this country well by bringing out years of anger and frustration about all the money going to the too 1%, serfdom for working families for the past 30 years, serfdom for those who dare to incur debt to go to college and the endless expensive wars. He is a hero. ..."
"... Despite her promises to be tough on Wall Street, a new report has found that groups supporting Hillary Clinton have received $25 million from the financial industry using so-called shadow banks. Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders has received a new waffle iron for opening a savings account. ..."
"... Were you one of the medical "professionals" at Guantanamo Bay by any chance? I hear they strongly support Clinton as well. ..."
Clinton supporters, most of whom don't even try to put forward a persuasive case for her candidacy,
often point to the fact that Clinton has received a few million more votes than Sanders, but they
rarely want to account for those votes, most of which can be attributed to massive landslide victories
in the early days of the primary season in the South.
With help from Wasserman-Schultz and the DNC, Clinton, having w/ her husband had more than
two decades to build-up a political patronage system within the southern Democratic Party, was
able to tap her contacts and bring-out the vote in very large numbers before few had even heard
of Sanders.
And you can be sure that when she spoke before black church congregations, affecting a southern
drawl, she didn't tout her support for the death penalty or the private prison industry or the
destruction of welfare or deregulation of the investment banks or the Iraq War or NAFTA and TPP
or the bail-out of Wall Street.
No, no, no-of course she didn't draw attention to her actual record. She wanted their votes,
after all.
Bernie is a good man, maybe a great man to some, he 'sold out' throughout his career and advocated
lesser evilism to support Democrats over Independents.
Thanks, but I've read every issue since the first one almost thirty years ago.
Obama's and Clinton's policies are criticized precisely because they're a continuation
of Bush policy, while Bill's policies led the economic meltdown of 2008.
The level of your reading comprehension is lacking.
Here's Thomas Frank's most recent piece on the Clinton's, right here on The Guardian
.
Take her apparent belief that balancing the federal budget is a good way to "revitalize"
an economy stuck in persistent hard times. Nostalgia might indeed suggest such a course, because
that's what Bill Clinton did in the golden 90s, and those were happy days. But more recent
events have taught us a different lesson. Europe's turn toward budget-balancing austerity after
the financial crisis is what made their recession so much worse than ours. President Obama's
own quest for a budget-balancing "grand bargain" is what destroyed his presidency's transformative
potential. There is no plainer lesson from the events of recent years than the folly of austerity
and the non-urgency of budget-balancing.
And deregulation! Before I watched the video of that Hillary Clinton campaign event,
I had never heard someone denounce deregulation and hail the economic achievements of Bill
Clinton in the same speech. That kind of mental combination, I've always assumed, puts you
in danger of spontaneous combustion or something. After all, Bill Clinton is America's all-time
champion deregulator. He deregulated banks. He deregulated telecoms. He appointed arch deregulators
Robert Rubin and Larry Summers to high office, and he re-upped Ronald Reagan's pet Fed chairman,
Alan Greenspan. He took some time out to dynamite the federal welfare system, then he came
back and deregulated banks some more. And derivative securities, too.
Oh, look! Nurse Ratchet Troll is getting desperate for attention and she's resorting to tired
old lies.
Bernie Sanders EARNED the goodwill of Howard Dean and the Democratic Party by voting with the
Party more often than the average Democrat (95% vs 80%) and supporting many of its candidates.
That is why the Democratic Party has awarded Bernie Sanders subcommittee leadership roles while
in the House and the Senate, even promoting him over their own members. And it is why, in 2006,
Vermont Democratic Party leaders "
spearhead[ed] efforts to gather signatures to put Sanders on the ballot as a Democrat ," even
though Sanders informed them that he would turn down the nomination if he won the Democratic primary.
The Democratic Party persisted, however, because Bernie was too popular in Vermont for a Democrat
to beat him, and they did not wish to split the vote and end up with a Republican in the Senate.
"Bernie Sanders has by far the best chance of winning, and would work closely with and would
respect Democratic leadership in Washington," Ian Carleton, the chairman of the Vermont Democratic
Party, said. "Anyone who takes a practical look at Vermont politics will say that this is the
best thing to do for the greater good here."
Bernie Sanders did, indeed, win the Democratic primary, and true to his word and as expected,
he declined its nomination.
Did this work to the Democratic Party's detriment or its benefit? Well, I would assume that
it was the latter, since the Vermont Democratic Party made the SAME EXACT ARRANGEMENT when Sanders
ran for reelection to the Senate in 2012.
So Howard Dean and the Democratic Party thought they could use Bernie Sanders' popularity to
further their own agenda and only their own agenda. But Bernie's loyalty is to the People first.
Too bad the Democratic Party's isn't as well, because then they would have supported the Democratic
candidate who isn't distrusted and despised by the majority of American voters.
Wow. So every candidate, athletic club, and army that is not predicted to succeed should just
lay down their fight and not even try? In Europe a football club with 500-1 odds won the tournament.
Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team. The English scoffed at the Americans
attempt at revolution.
I would say those who can't accept a challenge to their beliefs are losers. You fail because
you will never become better. In roulette, you have stopped spinning, the ball has landed in its
numbered slot where it will remain for eternity unless you challenge yourself to move once again.
1) Wasserman Schultz will follow her mentor's lead and play the victim.
2) She will then use it to fundraise ("Angry white men out to get me! Send money!).
3) Clinton will swoop in and support her with money and the "woman card" nonsense.
4) Panicked rich white people, DWS's Florida constituency, will rush to her aid and easily defeat
the far more qualified Canova.
5) Business as usual.
I think it has always been this way, elections are manipulated. It is a part of every democracy.
At what point does it become exposed and at what point after its exposure do people have the courage
to admit, like you have, that the U.S. election system is already rigged and is being continually
adjusted to rig results in the future.
A few years ago at a discussion I attended the blow hard filmmaker Michael Moore said he thought
the two party system was in Americas DNA and there was no way around that. I realized then how
ignorant he was. This election cycle we are clearly seeing the two party system is not in our
DNA, but is a construction of the ruling class to keep opposing voices out of the mainstream.
Yeah, it is disturbing, but it's sadly nothing new. The oligarchics aren't going anywhere either.
Even those facts understate the problem as many of these corporate owned Dems are voting the
Historical Republican policies favoring the wealthy power brokers. B. Clinton was known as Republican
Lite.
'Yes there is incessant complaining about the party, "corporate democratic whores."'
Not by me. I don't like DWS.
"If the party represents everything that is reprehensible, why are you here? "
Here is a newspaper website. Not the Democrat party forum pages.
"Go green, go Jill. "
Why? I've been a Democrat for 16 years. why would I change that and offer a vote towards Trump?
"Bernie has taken money from the party the money that he maligns."
Yes, it's called constructive criticism. It has a mandate of several million registered Democrat
members throughout the primaries. Should they all leave and vote Green? How's that electoral college
majority looking now? I seem to remember the same was said to Ralph Nader in 2000. Great job Donna
Brazille. President Gore thanks you for your service.
Elect The Warmonger Killary And You Will Have Victoria Nuland As Secretary Of State Says David
Stockman And The Result Will Be World War III Says PCR
"And that brings us to the deplorable Kagan clan-–Washington's leading resident family
of war-mongering neo-cons. The odds are that, if elected President, Hillary would likely choose
one of them--her protégé during her stint in the Obama administration, Victoria Nuland-– as Secretary
of State. Yet that would be lights out for any hope of caging Washington's imperial ambitions
and reducing the massive and utterly unnecessary burden of current defense spending. The truth
is, there are fewer greater menaces in the Imperial City today than Victoria Nuland.
Not only does she happen to be married to Bob Kagen, the leading neocon guru of global interventionism
and regime change, but she earned her spurs as a key aid to Dick Cheney.
No matter. When the American public naively thought it elected the "peace" candidate in 2008,
Nuland just changed her Jersey, joined Hillary's team at State, and by 2013 was assistance secretary
for European Affairs.
And that's when Nuland's rampage of everlasting shame began. She was the main architect of
the coup in Kiev in February 2014 that overthrow the constitutionally elected government of the
Ukraine, thereby commencing the whole sequence of confrontations with Russia and the full-throated
demonization of Vladimir Putin that has followed."
And keep reminding me that Clinton Democrats-and their supporters-are nothing more than thinly-disguised
Republicans. And like dinosaurs, your days are numbered.
He is not competitive because the DNC is controlled by the Reagan Neo-cons, Hillary the chief
marionette among them. To understand, just reflect on Hillary's relationship with Neo-con Victoria
Nuland, Assistant Sec. of State under Hillary who previously worked for Dick Cheney. Two party
system is a shill and anachronism; a Punch and Judy Show.
The Neo-con AIPAC agenda is world hegemony; New World Order and Hillary is the pre-annointed.
Trump may not be a surprise but Sanders certainly is independent and thankfully a chance for Americans
to voice their frustrations at the loss of their civil rights and democracy.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century
Agenda of New World Order cofounded by Nuland's husband, Robert Kagan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria_Nuland
Biography of Nuland
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=435x0dQ5Lzg
What this wrap-up doesn't show is the Chair refusing to allow the Minority Report to be read
after 58 Sanders delegates were not allowed to show their credentials. That report was eventually
read when another delegate ceded his time.
The reporter--Jon Ralston--who reported the chairs being thrown incident has admitted he wasn't
there when that incident didn't happen. No violence. No arrests--despite the calls for that when
calls came for revotes. And this got repeated without being fact checked. Pretty embarrassing
for the media who repeated it ad nauseam. Whole "violence" issued debunked---but you keep repeating
it. Even Jon Ralston who relied another another reporter's statement, couldn't find one clip of
violence. Plenty of foul language, but no violence. Please….post a clip.
Anyone here old enough to remember the results when Teddy Kennedy contested the 1980 convention?
Anyone here old enough to remember 1968? Anyone here old enough to remember all the years of Republican
presidents pushing America to the right?
Anyone here ever studied history or lived through it?
Clinton will not win the general election. Her trustworthiness polls at 36%, tied with Trump.
Sanders, on the other hand, has increased his trustworthiness up to 84% as people have been introduced
to him despite the virtual media blackout.
We don't see the media talking about that, do we?
Nor do we see the media quoting John Boehner's comment that Sanders is the most honest person
in Washington.
We also do not see the Clinton Media Cabal discussing her legal issues, which are quite serious
and real, unless they find some "unnamed source" to downplay the investigations into her multiple
crimes. They ignore the other "unnamed sources" who claim people in the FBI will go rogue with
details if there is a failure to indict by Loretta Lynch, who is a Clinton Supporter, by the way...
The whole electoral system is corrupt, Democrats and Republicans work for the oligarchs they
betray the people. We The People believe that in a democracy, the people are sovereign and
the people are the ultimate source of authority. We believe that truth transforms lives. That
self-scrutiny is not treason, self-examination is not disloyalty. Truth and knowledge diffused
among the people are necessary for the reclamation and preservation of our Democracy, freedom,
liberties and rights. Now is the time to expose this system of corruption. We must work in solidarity
to promote and protect the natural rights of the people and the following: Public Health, Education,
Housing, food and water safety, Jobs and income, cultural heritage and public safety.
We accomplish that by advocating for strengthening the rights of the people and laws and regulations
designed to protect the natural rights of the American people, ensuring the Constitutional rights
of the people and the enforcement of existing laws that protect these rights, also alerting the
people to impending threats and mobilizing the public to address these issues.
We must take peaceable nonviolent actions to address issues of concern to Americans and permanent
residents of our country; we believe that to serve that purpose, we as individuals have both a
right and a duty to preserve our own lives and our human dignity.
Completely over-the-top and destructive nonsense ...
Clinton does not resemble Thatcher in the least, and only an unhinged person would imagine
so. Nor is she personally to blame for intractable problems in the Middle East.
In reality (a place some Sanders followers should visit more often ...) she closely resembles
other mainstream Democrats such as Bill Clinton (her husband) and Obama (her former boss). Why,
of course.
If the self-proclaimed "radical left" keeps pretending that the Moderate Left is really the
same as the Far Right, then it will only help Trump. And needless to say, that's as anti-Progressive
as it gets ...
And Trump is now being coddled by Repub leaders without examining their own failed candidates
and their completely devastating policies that put Party Power over The People.
Corrupt systems need to end---the "it's always been wrong" argument doesn't serve any longer.
BTW: No one knew before Sanders entered that the DNC would call for "Temporary Rules" changes
and votes on the floor of state conventions, which is precisely what happened in Nevada.
This woman voted FOR a bill that supports rip-off pay day lenders rather than poor working
class people. Pay day lenders charge astronomical rates to lend people small amounts of money
to pay for a car repair or a dentist visit that they can't cover because they are trying to survive
on 7 or 8 dollars an hour, working two or three jobs to get by.
Ann Dash, you correct, Bernie Sanders and those who support his platform are issued based, not
"party faithful". When you put party over country you loose. You've also chosen a candidate to
support who has two active FBI investigations--one into violations of the Espionage Act and one
into corruption of the Clinton Foundation during Clinton's tenure as SOS. There are former Clinton
aides being deposed now in two separate FOIA lawsuits as well. When your "party" aligns itself
with such open corruption, it and its preferred candidate deserve the animus both have created
through their own actions.
By Juan Reynoso. Political activist – www.represent.us
We must defend our U.S. Constitution and our God given rights "Natural rights" https://www.whitehouse.gov/1600/constitution
[email protected]
The 2016 U.S. Elections is a war to protect our country's future, the economic and welfare of
the American youth and our future generations. Liberalism, Government corruption, the U.S predatory
corporate system of monopoly, crony capitalism, the corrupt U.S. Financial system and the greedy
super rich are like termites that are destroying the core and the foundation of our country's
moral values; by bribery and deception they have transform our country into a plutocracy system
of government and place money and power before the will of the people and the future of the American
people.
The war has begun and we may lose this battle; but we will win the war, knowledge and solidarity
in America society will prompt the American youth to fight for their future and the future of
America. The collapse of the empire is imminent, God always give the fighters for social justice
the wisdom and courage to destroy the evil enslavers of humanity, history will be repeated again.
So don't be overwhelmed if we lose this battle. We have learned from the battle and will take
that new-found knowledge into the next battle. But we will never consider the possibility of defeat
and we will join the glorious ranks of those who have gone before us – those who won wars against
oppression and tyranny.
Let's place the people's human rights, freedom and dignity before money and power. Fear is
our worst enemy. A most insidious form of fear is that which masquerades as common sense or even
wisdom, condemning as foolish, reckless, insignificant or futile the small, daily acts of courage
which help to preserve man's self-respect, freedom and their God given human rights and dignity.
It is not easy for people conditioned to fear by the main stream news media the propaganda machinery
of this corrupt system of government, that might is possible for people to free themselves from
the enervating oppressive of fear, that under the most crushing police state machinery, our courage
will rises up again and again, because fear is not the natural state of civilized man.
Join the fight for America's future and economic freedom. Solidarity for social justice will
win this war against tyranny and economic slavery.
Requiem for the American Dream, the truth about the demise of our freedom and the making of
our economic slavery. Every American must see this film.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWD8Wksx_zI
DWS has done terrible damage to Hillary's chances against Trump. Her blatant rigging of the
process against Sanders will be a barrier to their ever supporting Clinton. If it was believed
that she one a fair fight, I think most would accept the outcome. But only the most credulous
can now believe that it was a fair fight.
It seems Ross Perot did have an impact on the Presidency. After him they began changing the rules
of election participation. Ralph Nader then didn't meet the requirements to be heard. The RNC
and DNC thought they had formed eternal victories for establishment candidates. When Obama beat
Clinton they changed the rules even more. Now outsiders Sanders and Trump taking victories despite
the changes. What's up there sleeves for the next election? No more voting? Litmus tests? Only
candidates with 7 letters in their first and last names? In 2000, "hanging chads" were used to
determine the outcome. Does anyone else agree that the election process has become a little disturbing?
By Juan Reynoso – WTP- activist. www.represent.us
[email protected]
The fact is that most Americans are being brainwash and indoctrinate into believing that Capitalism
and the neo liberalism economic system is better than Democrat socialism.
The Neo-Liberalist, place money and power before the people, they believe that the private sector
"Corporations, the Banking system and all services including the communication system should be
privatized to benefit the investors and owners and not the general public; they believe that every
man is responsible for their economic and welfare and that they do not have any responsibility
toward the community and the citizens of this country, they do not want any government controls
so they can exploit the community to enrich themselves. The result of this ill system was the
economic catastrophe of 2008 and the continuation of this ill system will be the down fall of
the Dollar and the world economic, in 2016 - 2017.
Now Democrat socialism is placing the people before money and power for the few oligarchs and
corporate elite. This economic system is essential to stop the concentration of wealth and benefit
the whole country by promoting education, good quality of life, and health and minimize poverty.
The Neo-liberalism was implemented by Ronald Reagan and followed by all presidents, this economic
system give control of the country to the oligarchs and the elite multinational corporations to
enrich themselves, making millions of Americans economic slaves by controlling labor the income
of the American working class and the market place. Neo-Liberalism opens the gate for the greedy
corporations to monopolized, control commerce and destroys small business to eradicate competition.
America today is a conglomerate of elite business monopoly that controls our economic and destroyed
the dream of millions of Americans that today live in poverty and extreme poverty. The choice
is ours; to continue on this path of self-destruction and continue promoting this Neo-Liberalist
system of greed and destruction or change to a Democrat more social economic system that will
be beneficial to all Americans and not the few oligarchs that control our country.
Democrat socialism.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/03/bernie-sanders-nordic-countries/473385/#article-comments
We can learn a lot about public policy from the Nordic nations
http://theconversation.com/we-can-learn-a-lot-about-public-policy-from-the-nordic-nations-32204
Better education for all
https://dianeravitch.net/2016/03/22/what-we-can-learn-from-nordic-nations /
U.S. Politicians from both right and left could learn from the Nordic countries
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21571136-politicians-both-right-and-left-could-learn-nordic-countries-next-supermodel
The Nordic countries could teach us about teamwork in education
http://www.theguardian.com/education/2010/oct/05/education-policy-nordic-countries
Nader never ran as in one of the major parties. Bernie has 45% of a primary vote. There are many,
millions of Americans who only vote in general elections.
Ann Dash, the "winning" the popular vote argument leaves out some important figures. 7.2 million
people live in Washington state. Sanders won Washington by 71% and yet none of those votes have
been counted in the popular vote. Sanders won Alaska by 81%--none of those votes are figured into
the "3 million" votes either. 3 million Independents weren't allowed to vote in NY alone. Clinton,
"won" Kentucky by 1923 votes---less than 1/2 of One percent. When you add actual caucus votes
and those who will vote in November, Clinton doesn't fare very well. The popular vote argument
holds no water.
This is the way the system has worked. Maybe it isn't fair, but if Bernie wanted to change it
he should have started a lot earlier. If he were winning now I'll bet he wouldn't be so unhappy
with it.
Bernie is evokes a lot of passion in his followers. They want him to win so badly they will disrupt
the Democratic convention. All this is going to to is fracture the Democratic party and let Trump
get the presidency. The Democrats are like people in a canoe arguing about who gets to paddle
just as they are about to go over the falls.
Clinton's Lead Over Trump Shrinks to 3 Points: New NBC News/WSJ Poll
Hillary Clinton's advantage over Donald Trump has narrowed to just three points - resulting
in a dead-heat general-election contest with more than five months to go until November, according
to a new national NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.
Democrat Bernie Sanders leads Trump by 15 points, 54 percent to 39 percent.
Sanders is the strongest candidate against Trump. Vote Sanders!
Clinton's Lead Over Trump Shrinks to 3 Points: New NBC News/WSJ Poll
Hillary Clinton's advantage over Donald Trump has narrowed to just three points - resulting
in a dead-heat general-election contest with more than five months to go until November, according
to a new national NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.
Democrat Bernie Sanders leads Trump by 15 points, 54 percent to 39 percent.
Sanders has been remiss in confronting Hillary with the evil she has wrought, genocide on
Iraq, Syria, and most obviously in turning top standard of living Libya into a failed state.
Obama apologized about it but not the queens of destabilization, Victoria Nuland and her
puppet, Hillary Clinton.
Sanders ha failed to give Hillary the downbraiding she deserves as a budding NWO fascist
and apologist for Wall St. and Netanyahu, etc. Despicable woman, much like Margret Thatcher and
Madeline Albright. Destroyers; bad at diplomacy and quick on murderous war. Demagogue Hillary
will escalate US hegemony and bring on Armageddon for the Christian Zionists; WWIII. Why did Sanders
not play his trump card at the beginning of the campaign?
However it was well known Florida would be close and be decisive. Nader voters were thought
to be more closely aligned with Gore. They had a choice, they chose.
Yup. I remember there were even several (heavily frequented)
websites dedicated to "voter trade" -- supporters of Nader in battle ground states would "trade"
their votes with Democrats from safe states to enable Nader to reach his goal of 5% of the popular
vote and still allow Gore to carry Florida and others. Definitely not quite legal, but goes to
show that everybody knew what was at stake.
Of course it's silly to blame W exclusively on Nader -- obviously, it's the Bush voters who
are to blame first and foremost, and his brother and the SCOTUS who stole the election for him,
and Gore for running a listless and inept campaign (the kiss! oh, the kiss!). But even if Nader's
share of the responsibility is no greater than his tally of the vote, it's rather baffling, given
the experience of 2000, how many seem to be willing to repeat it.
This stuff about 'not being able to win his home state' is completely weird. Especially given
how eager Bernie fans were on this board to point out that New York is Sanders ' home state,
not Clinton's...
Clinton only leads by 274 pledged delegates. The false picture of the huge lead that results from
super delegates is being presented so people will just give up and not vote for Sanders. Fortunately,
those of us who support Sanders recognize the media bias and the DNC favoritism, and we will not
be fooled.
In the long run, the Democratic Party, the super delegates, and the media that is fully participating
in this attempted coronation are hurting themselves. I, and many many others, not only will not
vote for Hillary, we will no longer support the party or Democrats involved in this travesty,
nor will we support the media and businesses who have joined in.
Bernie or Bust! I voted for the honest guy... NOT with her: NOT EVER!
Clinton's Lead Over Trump Shrinks to 3 Points: New NBC News/WSJ Poll
Hillary Clinton's advantage over Donald Trump has narrowed to just three points - resulting
in a dead-heat general-election contest with more than five months to go until November, according
to a new national NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.
Democrat Bernie Sanders leads Trump by 15 points, 54 percent to 39 percent.
Ann Dash, the "winning" the popular vote argument leaves out some important figures. 7.2 million
people live in Washington state. Sanders won Washington by 71% and yet none of those votes have
been counted in the popular vote. Sanders won Alaska by 81%--none of those votes are figured into
the "3 million" votes either. 3 million Independents weren't allowed to vote in NY alone. Clinton,
"won" Kentucky by 1923 votes---less than 1/2 of One percent. When you add actual caucus votes
and those who will vote in November, Clinton doesn't fare very well. The popular vote argument
holds no water.
This is the way the system has worked. Maybe it isn't fair, but if Bernie wanted to change
it he should have started a lot earlier. If he were winning now I'll bet he wouldn't be so
unhappy with it.
Bernie is evokes a lot of passion in his followers. They want him to win so badly they will
disrupt the Democratic convention. All this is going to to is fracture the Democratic party and
let Trump get the presidency. The Democrats are like people in a canoe arguing about who gets
to paddle just as they are about to go over the falls.
Clinton's Lead Over Trump Shrinks to 3 Points: New NBC News/WSJ Poll
Hillary Clinton's advantage over Donald Trump has narrowed to just three points - resulting
in a dead-heat general-election contest with more than five months to go until November, according
to a new national NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.
Democrat Bernie Sanders leads Trump by 15 points, 54 percent to 39 percent.
Sanders is the strongest candidate against Trump. Vote Sanders!
Clinton's Lead Over Trump Shrinks to 3 Points: New NBC News/WSJ Poll
Hillary Clinton's advantage over Donald Trump has narrowed to just three points - resulting
in a dead-heat general-election contest with more than five months to go until November, according
to a new national NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.
Democrat Bernie Sanders leads Trump by 15 points, 54 percent to 39 percent.
Sanders has been remiss in confronting Hillary with the evil she has wrought, genocide on Iraq,
Syria, and most obviously in turning top standard of living Libya into a failed state. Obama apologized
about it but not the queens of destabilization, Victoria Nuland and her puppet, Hillary Clinton.
Sanders ha failed to give Hillary the downbraiding she deserves as a budding NWO fascist and apologist
for Wall St. and Netanyahu, etc. Despicable woman, much like Margret Thatcher and Madeline Albright.
Destroyers; bad at diplomacy and quick on murderous war. Demagogue Hillary will escalate US hegemony
and bring on Armageddon for the Christian Zionists; WWIII. Why did Sanders not play his trump
card at the beginning of the campaign?
However it was well known Florida would be close and be decisive. Nader voters were thought
to be more closely aligned with Gore. They had a choice, they chose.
Yup. I remember there were even several (heavily frequented)
websites dedicated to "voter trade" -- supporters of Nader in battle ground states would "trade"
their votes with Democrats from safe states to enable Nader to reach his goal of 5% of the popular
vote and still allow Gore to carry Florida and others. Definitely not quite legal, but goes to
show that everybody knew what was at stake.
Of course it's silly to blame W exclusively on Nader -- obviously, it's the Bush voters who
are to blame first and foremost, and his brother and the SCOTUS who stole the election for him,
and Gore for running a listless and inept campaign (the kiss! oh, the kiss!). But even if Nader's
share of the responsibility is no greater than his tally of the vote, it's rather baffling, given
the experience of 2000, how many seem to be willing to repeat it.
This stuff about 'not being able to win his home state' is completely weird. Especially given
how eager Bernie fans were on this board to point out that New York is Sanders ' home state,
not Clinton's...
Clinton only leads by 274 pledged delegates. The false picture of the huge lead that
results from super delegates is being presented so people will just give up and not vote for Sanders.
Fortunately, those of us who support Sanders recognize the media bias and the DNC favoritism,
and we will not be fooled.
In the long run, the Democratic Party, the super delegates, and the media that is fully participating
in this attempted coronation are hurting themselves. I, and many many others, not only will not
vote for Hillary, we will no longer support the party or Democrats involved in this travesty,
nor will we support the media and businesses who have joined in.
Bernie or Bust! I voted for the honest guy... NOT with her: NOT EVER!
Clinton's Lead Over Trump Shrinks to 3 Points: New NBC News/WSJ Poll
Hillary Clinton's advantage over Donald Trump has narrowed to just three points - resulting
in a dead-heat general-election contest with more than five months to go until November, according
to a new national NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.
Democrat Bernie Sanders leads Trump by 15 points, 54 percent to 39 percent.
It is a sad and sorry day that you can't recognize a democrat any more. Yes, he's not a "party
faithful". Apparently you haven't noticed that "the party" has become about "the party".
Are you seriously siding with payday lenders? They are big time vulture capitalists, ripping off
the most vulnerable.
By the way, do you just happen to be a payday lender? Or, do you profit from the industry somehow?
Or, perhaps it may be the dots that accurately and historically connected the dots to Bill Clinton's
'Mother of all Deregulations,' the partial repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, annoys you.
Whatever or whoever informs your thoughts, your reasoning is seriously flawed.
He isn't winning because the media has ignored him, he threatens big business and wall street
(who have thrown their $ support to Hillary) and because he speaks the truth. This has been a
rigged election from the start. Funny thing is Bernie can easily dump trump and Hillary cannot,
she is in trouble. As far as DWS she is in the pockets of big money just like her boss Hillary.
I take it you are neither poor, Hispanic, African American, Muslim, nor a woman then? Not interested
in free speech, the Geneva Convention or basic human decency?
You're right, then, there may not be much to be afraid of for you. Depending, of course,
on how much Trump is willing to escalate that trade war with China that you seem so keen on.
Bernie can win easily win enough of the remaining votes to force the super delegates into the
position of having to choose who should be the nominee. Are they really all that invested in Hillary
still? Can they really not see the difference between the crowds that come to see Bernie versus
the ones that come to see Hillary? Will they neglect all the recent polls?
Or will they pick Bernie? If Bernie gets those votes, which he easily can so long as they aren't
all in rigged caucus meetings, then will have that chance.
One of the current issues (and only one of the issues with the DNC/DWS) is the superdelegates
being lined up PRE-primary voting in order to give the edge to Clinton right from the start.
They don't count until the convention this summer, **neither do their votes** -- not until
the convention, AFTER every citizen who wants to vote has voted.
And their vote isn't written in stone before then, they can and have switched their votes prior
to the convention, re: Obama's election.
When Clinton brings in 400 to hear a speech and Sanders routinely brings in 15,000 or more,
when exit polls don't match the voting booth yet they get rid of the exit polls rather than fix
the voting 'inaccuracies,' something is very fishy in the land of Oz....
One of the current issues (and only one of the issues with the DNC/DWS) is the superdelegates
being lined up PRE-primary voting in order to give the edge to Clinton right from the start.
They don't count until the convention this summer, **neither do their votes** -- not until the
convention, AFTER every citizen who wants to vote has voted. And their vote isn't written in stone
before then, they can and have switched their votes prior to the convention, re: Obama's election.
When Clinton brings in 400 to hear a speech and Sanders routinely brings in 15,000 or more,
when exit polls don't match the voting booth yet they get rid of the exit polls rather than fix
the voting 'inaccuracies,' something is very fishy in the land of Oz....
There is such a massive entitlement in the kind of Democrats who believe that Green party supporters
owed Democrats their votes. Democracy doesn't work like that. You have to earn the votes, and
Gore's campaign was terrible. If he'd run a good campaign, he would have won handily. Blaming
your opponents for your won failure is pathetic.
Who's the one doing the character assassination here? Good grief do people ever look in the mirror?
DWS has worked with Clinton for years and has been blatantly impartial from the beginning. If
independents were allowed to vote in the closed primaries Mr. Sanders would be tied if not clearly
in the lead. How can you be a "Democrat" in favor of "Democracy" and then manipulate the rules
to allow a particular individual to get elected? You may want to think long-term. The people will
not follow a false leader. People will revolt. People vote with their feet... Which direction
do you see them walking? I see them walking away from Clinton.
The vast majority of Americans don't care whether or not Sanders is a loyal Democrat. They assess
him on the basis of his seeming authenticity, honesty, values, and policy positions--and based
on the evaluative system he does well among Democrats and very well among Independents.
You, JohnEgan, are part of a very small minority that gives a rat's ass whether Sanders is
a loyal Democrat.
We will have nothing to blame for Trump but Clinton herself. We have nothing to blame in 2000
for Bush except Gore himself. We have nobody to blame for the Mideast but Bush himself
It is not impossible but involves way too much government involvement for many Americans and it
is seen as "Socialist" (which is not a compliment here btw).
It's so like the current crowd of jerks running the Democratic party to see them start pointing
fingers at Bernie for what they can see is their coming defeat in November. They had the chance
to back Bernie. They can still do it, but they are all too invested in their own interests to
care about anything but their own interests, and so they won't pick up on the best chance to have
a Democratic landslide since 1964.
You had your chance too, and you picked the loser over the winner, so no more of this finger
pointing at Bernie. Accept responsibility for your own bad decisions and live with it, as you
will have no other alternatives in the end.
Nice comments--both! Rich with detail and information -- and thought provoking.
I agree with you about Gore, Nader, and the election. At the same time, we can't use what happened
in 2000 to justify Sanders people voting Green in swing states or sitting it out at home and then
claim that a President Trump is simply Hillary's fault-- or the DNC's.
It would be both-- Hillary's as well as Sanders' supporters not voting to stop Trump. Hillary
is a corporate shill in all too many ways and she has been a lackluster, throwback, self-centered,
and entitled candidate-- although she's beginning to fight and the Clintons, unlike Sanders, have
several decades of knowing how to street fight-- and can better respond to Trump's wild fusillades.
Yet, even if she doesn't represent all, or even most, of what progressives want, the differences
are clear-- it would be so much better to have a corporate centrist in there with some liberal
values who will tweak things at the margins to make them better for more people than a right wing
zealot who is hellbent on destroying everything he encounters, and doing so all on a whim.
Exactly. He chose to hijack the Democratic Party to give himself the best chance of being nominated
as the candidate for that party. He can't now start throwing tantrums because the rules (that
he knew about) aren't working in his favor. Great President he'd make on the international stage.
Perhaps Trump will pick him for Veep then we can have two tantrum-throwing "outsiders" on the
GOP ticket. What fun.
TimCanova.com, send a donation I did. Tim is now very close to raising enough money to defeat
the evil PayDay loan Queen DWS. It's time the corruption at the DNC end. WRITE IN Bernie in Nov.
I am. TimCanova.com and defeat DWS the loan shark.
"Sanders is something one scrapes off the bottom of their shoe before entering the house."
As someone who will vote for Sanders (even though I don't believe he's nearly radical enough)
but will NEVER vote for Wall Street's Warmongering Madame, I truly hope you continue to
say these types of things about Sanders, as it makes it considerably less likely that my fellow
Sanders' supporters will vote for Clinton if she wins the nomination.
You are making my "job" easier, and for that I thank you!
Debbie Wasserman Schultz represents the continued failure of the Democratic Party and as such
should be replaced.
The Democratic Party began to die during Bill Clinton's regime. Bill Clinton in his own
way conducted a regime change of the Democratic Party from Main Street and Unions to Wall Street.
The results have not been good:
In 1992 in the Senate there were 57 Democratic Senators and 43 Republicans.
In 2002 in the Senate there were 48 Democratic Senators and 51 Republicans. One Independent.
In 2012 in the Senate the Democrats had 45 Seats vs 53 Republicans, with two Independents.
In 2014 in the Senate there are 44 Democratic Senators and 54 Republicans with two Independents.
The House:
In 1992 The Democrats had 258 Seats to the Republicans 176, with one Independent.
In 2002 The Democrats had 205 Seats, to the Republicans 229 Seats and one Independent
In 2012 The Democrats 201 Seats vs 234 Republicans.
In 2014 The Democrats have 188 Seats vs the Republicans 247.
A similar decline has happened in the Governor's races.
1992 30 Democrat Governors and 18 Republican
2014 31 Republicans and 18 Democrats
Political Power for the Clinton Family has translated into wealth, and for the Clinton's lining
their own pockets is all that counts.
The State Parties are ALSO CONTROLLED by the DNC. The kick back monies insure that the DNC
is in control of WHO they select rather then open elections. You can lie to yourself however,
WE know the truth of how this corrupt system works. WRITE IN Bernie in Nov. I am!
Very few outside the Democratic Party establishment seem to like these superdelegates. Abolish
them and pledged delegates too while you're at it.
A lot simpler would be whichever candidate gets the majority of states wins the nomination.
In this case, it is (as of this writing) Hillary Clinton - and I'm a Sanders supporter.
Better yet, abolish the primary system which gives voters in small states like Iowa, New Hampshire,
Nevada and South Carolina inflated powers of choosing eventual nominees.
Allow each candidate to spend 8-10 weeks campaigning across the 10 most populous states spending
a maximum set amount of $ leading up to this "super primary" held on one day. And there's your
candidate.
If this is deemed too draconian with regards to disenfranchisement in the remaining 40 states,
let "super primary" narrow the field to the top two candidates. The remaining 40 states can hold
a "final primary" 4 weeks later on the same day. Whichever candidate has the most votes in the
"super primary" + "final primary" is the candidate.
The General Election would follow 8 weeks later. No electoral college, just simple majority
of votes across 50 states wins.
Super Pacs, donations over $X would be abolished. No closed primaries.
Most importantly, any candidate found to be campaigning 10 weeks before the initial "super
primary" would be disqualified. America's multi-year Presidential Election cycle would be limited
to several months.
The media which relies on campaign advertising spending for much of its profits and campaign
scandal/gossip/speculation to fill airtime and column inches would hate this. As would lobby groups/firms,
special interests, the Koch Brothers, etc.
It's very Trump-ish of Bernie to join a party to which he admits he had no ideological affiliation,
just to get on the ballot. Then he complains about how the party runs itself and how the rules
should be changed because he's not winning. I used to think he was an OK guy but he's behaving
like a toddler; just like Trump.
"Sanders is operating his entire campaign based on their model - seek, debase, uglify, insult,
destroy your opponent by character assassination...."
If that's the case, why as he chosen to say not one word about the "email scandal" and the
fact that Clinton is under FBI investigation? Why is it that if he's such a horrible character
assassin? Please explain, it doesn't make ANY sense.
Your description of Sanders is partisan in the worst sense of the word--completely devoid of
fairness and fact-based analysis. You fail to address the many ways in which Wasserman-Schultz
and the DNC have attempted to marginalize and hobble Sanders' campaign--from the scheduling of
debates to the vote count in Iowa to the smears against Sanders in the aftermath of the shady
goings-on of party elites in Nevada and Sanders' supporters response to them.
There's no wonder why Clinton supporters at all levels resort to this sort of bullshit. After
all it's easier than defending the record of someone (Clinton herself) who over the years has
supported the Iraq War, Patriot Acts 1 and 2, the starvation blockade and blitzkrieg of Gaza,
the bombing of Libya, the right-wing coup in Honduras, a 31 cent/hour minimum wage in Haiti (and
against attempts to raise it), the Saudi dictatorship, drone missile strikes in multiple impoverished
countries, NAFTA, CAFTA, TPP, fracking, anti-labor policies while on the board of Wal-Mart, the
objectively-racist death penalty, the destruction of welfare, the private prison industry, deregulation
of investment banks (and against reinstatement of Glass-Steagall), giveaways to the credit card
industry, and the bail-out of Wall Street.
Doing the math, if even 1,000 Nadar supporters had hosted for Bush instead, Bush would have won
Florida by 1,537 votes. If Gore had won the state he served as Senator, Tennessee, he wouldn't
have needed Florida to become President. The election was his to win or lose.
He lost. It was sixteen years ago. Get over it.
Your comments are why We will NEVER vote for the Clintons. Your hate inspires us to write in Bernie.
Thank you for the inspiration we will work even harder now on a national campaign to WRITE IN
Bernie in Nov. The NAFTA, TPP, Crime Bill war morgering Clintons will NOT get our Progressive
votes. So thank you for acknowledging the Clintons DON'T NEED our votes in Nov. Write IN Bernie
in Nov. I am!
Gore did win Florida-- exit polling, which was uncannily accurate, showed that, but it was
the Supreme Court that stopped the recount. (OTOH, some post-election analyses, including by the
Washington Post, concluded Gore lost.)
People make fun of "hanging chads" but it was an amazing thing to see local people from both
parties attempting to do the right thing by voters.
Yes, just by numbers, had most of those Nader votes gone to Gore, he would have become president.
However, it's also true that had Gore campaigned more effectively, unleashed Bill, worried more
about connecting to people than with his wardrobe consultants, and been more like himself as shown
in later years, he would have won decisively-- Nader or not. Remember that Gore did NOT even win
his own state!
So, hard though it may be for people to accept, it will be BOTH Hillary's and Bernie's supporters'
fault, if they stay home or vote Green in swing states, and Trump gets elected.
The stakes are enormous... Hillary's a corporate centrist, for sure, but has many socially
liberal values, while Trump is a right-wing, unhinged, uninformed, neofascist whose racism and
misogyny are abhorrent and is a real threat to democracy. Believing that the election doesn't
matter, or that the two candidates are equally as bad, ignores reality as well as history. Just
consider who the two would put on the Supreme Court.
We'd much prefer it be Bernie, but we definitely do not want it to be Trump!
Debbie Wasserman Shultz, champion of the PAYDAY LOAN SHARKS. DWS helped defeat the Sen. Warren
legislation to limit the interest rates to 30% FROM 3000%. DWS and the Clintons take campaign
funds and support the loan sharks bleeding economically challenged communities across the U.S.
Write IN Bernie in Nov. I am!
The chairperson of the DNC is bound to remain impartial, as is clearly stated in the party
rules. There is now ample evidence that Ms Schultz has repeatedly broken that rule throughout
the campaign cycle and is therefore unfit to remain chairperson of the DNC. If she is not replaced
by an impartial chairperson for the convention it will undermine the legitimacy of the nomination
process.
In light of the formal complaints and petitions submitted by Democratic Party members regarding
Ms Schultz breaking Democratic Party rules, Mrs Clinton and Senator Sanders will need to agree
on a temporary replacement chairperson for the convention until the next permanent chairperson
is appointed.
What spellchecker ? Atlga is clearly a person paid pennies by the Hillary campaign. I did not
realize they are outsourcing the respondents to some remote villages in the world.
You don't seem to understand the difference between primaries and the general election. Compare
the polls for Sanders vs Trump and Clinton vs Trump in the general--
Stop with the misleading inclusion of the super delegate totals in the counts. Or, at least,
emphasize the difference-- elected vs. appointed or, rather, party-automatic supers.
Glad, though, for coverage of the biased Debbie! If anyone' seen her on TV, she is a sorry
excuse for a party leader anyway-- semi-articulate, breathless, and ill-mannered. (And, yes, I
would make the same criticisms of male politicians, too.). Adding in her blatant biases-- even
the Sanders folks have said that they have little or no problem with the rest of the DNC leadership
team, it's clear that she's got to go!
There's some debate about the world's oldest democracy, but it ain't the United States (which,
btw, is a republic).
Iceland has had a parliament since the year 930 and the oldest continuous parliament since
979 is on the Isle of Man. Universal adult suffrage was established in New Zealand in 1893, although
NZ doesn't elect its Head of State.
Senator Sanders is serving this country well by bringing out years of anger and frustration
about all the money going to the too 1%, serfdom for working families for the past 30 years, serfdom
for those who dare to incur debt to go to college and the endless expensive wars. He is a hero.
Despite her promises to be tough on Wall Street, a new report has found that groups supporting
Hillary Clinton have received $25 million from the financial industry using so-called shadow banks.
Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders has received a new waffle iron for opening a savings account.
Bernie isn't "apart from the Democrats"--in fact, he exemplifies Democratic principles, the ones
the party held for a half century before the corporate centrists took it over. If you want to
get rid of confusion and conflict, take the people who oppose a liveable minimum wage, or universal
health care, or trust-busting against the banks and big corps, and put them in the GOP where they
belong.
Atlant
21 May 2016 07:36
1
2
Democrats used to argue Bernie Sanders couldn't win anything. Then he started winning essentially
all of the open or semi-open contests.
So Democrats argued he couldn't win closed contests
among just Democrats. And now he tied in Kentucky and won overwhelmingly in Oregon.
So now Democrats are arguing he's got to drop out because he'll never get enough delegates.
And they say this even as poll after poll shows Senator Sanders strongly winning the General
Election while Clinton just squeaks by or even loses.
Note that these FACTS will NOT be covered
by the large "news" typist corporations. The
1st Amendment (press) has been completely
trashed. The press are part of the Central
Planning political party/movement now.
"Must have been a very
busy day for Hillary
having to give 3 speeches
in two different cities.
Poor woman must have been
exhausted."
I don't believe
she even gave most of
these speeches. Its just
a clever way to slide her
some money. Where are
the transcripts?? Where
are the videos?? Someone
should check her travel
itineraries and figure
out if she was even
anywhere close to where
she was "allegedly"
giving a speech. They
just gave her the money
with a wink and a nod,
and called it a speech.
I call it BULLSHIT.
Someday soon hopefully the Ponzi scheme
meme will be rightly replaced by the Clinton
scheme. It only seems logical given the epic
scale of the deception they are pulling off
globally.
Fifty years of empirical research in personality psychology have resulted in a scientific
consensus regarding the most basic dimensions of human variability. There are countless ways to differentiate
one person from the next, but psychological scientists have settled on a relatively simple taxonomy,
known widely as the Big Five:
Extroversion: gregariousness, social dominance, enthusiasm, reward-seeking behavior
Agreeableness: warmth, care for others, altruism, compassion, modesty
Openness: curiosity, unconventionality, imagination, receptivity to new ideas
Most people score near the middle on any given dimension, but some score toward one pole or the
other. Research decisively shows that higher scores on extroversion are associated with greater happiness
and broader social connections, higher scores on conscientiousness predict greater success in school
and at work, and higher scores on agreeableness are associated with deeper relationships. By contrast,
higher scores on neuroticism are always bad, having proved to be a risk factor for unhappiness, dysfunctional
relationships, and mental-health problems. From adolescence through midlife, many people tend to
become more conscientious and agreeable, and less neurotic, but these changes are typically slight:
The Big Five personality traits are pretty stable across a person's lifetime.
... ... ...
Research suggests that extroverts tend to take high-stakes risks and that people with low
levels of openness rarely question their deepest convictions. Entering office with high levels of
extroversion and very low openness, Bush was predisposed to make bold decisions aimed at achieving
big rewards, and to make them with the assurance that he could not be wrong. As I argued in my psychological
biography of Bush, the game-changing decision to invade Iraq was the kind of decision he was
likely to make. As world events transpired to open up an opportunity for the invasion, Bush found
additional psychological affirmation both in his lifelong desire-pursued again and again before he
ever became president-to defend his beloved father from enemies (think: Saddam Hussein) and in his
own life story, wherein the hero liberates himself from oppressive forces (think: sin, alcohol) to
restore peace and freedom.
Like Bush, a President Trump might try to swing for the fences in an effort to deliver big payoffs-to
make America great again, as his campaign slogan says. As a real-estate developer, he has certainly
taken big risks, although he has become a more conservative businessman following setbacks in the
1990s. As a result of the risks he has taken, Trump can (and does) point to luxurious urban towers,
lavish golf courses, and a personal fortune that is, by some estimates, in the billions, all of which
clearly bring him big psychic rewards. Risky decisions have also resulted in four Chapter 11 business
bankruptcies involving some of his casinos and resorts. Because he is not burdened with Bush's low
level of openness (psychologists have rated Bush at the bottom of the list on this trait), Trump
may be a more flexible and pragmatic decision maker, more like Bill Clinton than Bush: He may look
longer and harder than Bush did before he leaps. And because he is viewed as markedly less ideological
than most presidential candidates (political observers note that on some issues he seems conservative,
on others liberal, and on still others nonclassifiable), Trump may be able to switch positions easily,
leaving room to maneuver in negotiations with Congress and foreign leaders. But on balance, he's
unlikely to shy away from risky decisions that, should they work out, could burnish his legacy and
provide him an emotional payoff.
The real psychological wild card, however, is Trump's agreeableness-or lack thereof. There has
probably never been a U.S. president as consistently and overtly disagreeable on the public stage
as Donald Trump is. If Nixon comes closest, we might predict that Trump's style of decision making
would look like the hard-nosed realpolitik that Nixon and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger,
displayed in international affairs during the early 1970s, along with its bare-knuckled domestic
analog. That may not be all bad, depending on one's perspective. Not readily swayed by warm sentiments
or humanitarian impulses, decision makers who, like Nixon, are dispositionally low on agreeableness
might hold certain advantages when it comes to balancing competing interests or bargaining with adversaries,
such as China in Nixon's time. In international affairs, Nixon was tough, pragmatic, and coolly rational.
Trump seems capable of a similar toughness and strategic pragmatism, although the cool rationality
does not always seem to fit, probably because Trump's disagreeableness appears so strongly motivated
by anger.
In domestic politics, Nixon was widely recognized to be cunning, callous, cynical, and Machiavellian,
even by the standards of American politicians. Empathy was not his strong suit. This sounds a lot
like Donald Trump, too-except you have to add the ebullient extroversion, the relentless showmanship,
and the larger-than-life celebrity. Nixon could never fill a room the way Trump can.
... ... ...
During and after World War II, psychologists conceived of the authoritarian personality as a pattern
of attitudes and values revolving around adherence to society's traditional norms, submission to
authorities who personify or reinforce those norms, and antipathy-to the point of hatred and aggression-toward
those who either challenge in-group norms or lie outside their orbit. Among white Americans, high
scores on measures of authoritarianism today tend to be associated with prejudice against a wide
range of "out-groups," including homosexuals, African Americans, immigrants, and Muslims. Authoritarianism
is also associated with suspiciousness of the humanities and the arts, and with cognitive rigidity,
militaristic sentiments, and Christian fundamentalism.
When individuals with authoritarian proclivities fear that their way of life is being threatened,
they may turn to strong leaders who promise to keep them safe-leaders like Donald Trump. In a national
poll conducted recently by the political scientist Matthew MacWilliams, high levels of authoritarianism
emerged as the single strongest predictor of expressing political support for Donald Trump. Trump's
promise to build a wall on the Mexican border to keep illegal immigrants out and his railing against
Muslims and other outsiders have presumably fed that dynamic.
As the social psychologist Jesse Graham has noted, Trump appeals to an ancient fear of contagion,
which analogizes out-groups to parasites, poisons, and other impurities. In this regard, it is perhaps
no psychological accident that Trump displays a phobia of germs, and seems repulsed by bodily fluids,
especially women's. He famously remarked that Megyn Kelly of Fox News had "blood coming out of her
wherever," and he repeatedly characterized Hillary Clinton's bathroom break during a Democratic debate
as "disgusting." Disgust is a primal response to impurity. On a daily basis, Trump seems to experience
more disgust, or at least to say he does, than most people do.
The authoritarian mandate is to ensure the security, purity, and goodness of the in-group-to keep
the good stuff in and the bad stuff out. In the 1820s, white settlers in Georgia and other frontier
areas lived in constant fear of American Indian tribes. They resented the federal government for
not keeping them safe from what they perceived to be a mortal threat and a corrupting contagion.
Responding to these fears, President Jackson pushed hard for the passage of the Indian Removal Act,
which eventually led to the forced relocation of 45,000 American Indians. At least 4,000 Cherokees
died on the Trail of Tears, which ran from Georgia to the Oklahoma territory.
An American strand of authoritarianism may help explain why the thrice-married, foul-mouthed Donald
Trump should prove to be so attractive to white Christian evangelicals. As Jerry Falwell Jr. told
The New York Times in February, "All the social issues-traditional family values, abortion-are
moot if isis blows up some of our cities or if the borders are not fortified." Rank-and-file evangelicals
"are trying to save the country," Falwell said. Being "saved" has a special resonance among
evangelicals-saved from sin and damnation, of course, but also saved from the threats and impurities
of a corrupt and dangerous world.
Trump appeals to an ancient fear of contagion, which analogizes out-groups to parasites and poisons.
When my research associates and I once asked politically conservative Christians scoring high on
authoritarianism to imagine what their life (and their world) might have been like had they never
found religious faith, many described utter chaos-families torn apart, rampant infidelity and hate,
cities on fire, the inner rings of hell. By contrast, equally devout politically liberal Christians
who scored low on authoritarianism described a barren world depleted of all resources, joyless and
bleak, like the arid surface of the moon. For authoritarian Christians, a strong faith-like a strong
leader-saves them from chaos and tamps down fears and conflicts. Donald Trump is a savior, even if
he preens and swears, and waffles on the issue of abortion.
In December, on the campaign trail in Raleigh, North Carolina, Trump stoked fears in his audience
by repeatedly saying that "something bad is happening" and "something really dangerous is going on."
He was asked by a 12-year-old girl from Virginia, "I'm scared-what are you going to do to protect
this country?"
Trump responded: "You know what, darling? You're not going to be scared anymore. They're
going to be scared."
... ... ...
In the negotiations for the Menie Estate in Scotland, Trump wore Tom Griffin down by making one
outlandish demand after another and bargaining hard on even the most trivial issues of disagreement.
He never quit fighting. "Sometimes, part of making a deal is denigrating your competition," Trump
writes. When local residents refused to sell properties that Trump needed in order to finish the
golf resort, he ridiculed them on the Late Show With David Letterman and in newspapers, describing
the locals as rubes who lived in "disgusting" ramshackle hovels. As D'Antonio recounts in Never
Enough, Trump's attacks incurred the enmity of millions in the British Isles, inspired an award-winning
documentary highly critical of Trump (You've Been Trumped), and transformed a local farmer
and part-time fisherman named Michael Forbes into a national hero. After painting the words no golf
course on his barn and telling Trump he could "take his money and shove it up his arse," Forbes received
the 2012 Top Scot honor at the Glenfiddich Spirit of Scotland Awards. (That same year, Trump's golf
course was completed nonetheless. He promised that its construction would create 1,200 permanent
jobs in the Aberdeen area, but to date, only about 200 have been documented.)
Trump's recommendations for successful deal making include less antagonistic strategies: "protect
the downside" (anticipate what can go wrong), "maximize your options," "know your market," "get the
word out," and "have fun." As president, Trump would negotiate better trade deals with China, he
says, guarantee a better health-care system by making deals with pharmaceutical companies and hospitals,
and force Mexico to agree to a deal whereby it would pay for a border wall. On the campaign trail,
he has often said that he would simply pick up the phone and call people-say, a CEO wishing to move
his company to Mexico-in order to make propitious deals for the American people.
Trump's focus on personal relationships and one-on-one negotiating pays respect to a venerable
political tradition. For example, a contributor to Lyndon B. Johnson's success in pushing through
civil-rights legislation and other social programs in the 1960s was his unparalleled expertise in
cajoling lawmakers. Obama, by contrast, has been accused of failing to put in the personal effort
needed to forge close and productive relationships with individual members of Congress.
... ... ...
For psychologists, it is almost impossible to talk about Donald Trump without using the word
narcissism. Asked to sum up Trump's personality for an article in Vanity Fair, Howard
Gardner, a psychologist at Harvard, responded, "Remarkably narcissistic." George Simon, a clinical
psychologist who conducts seminars on manipulative behavior, says Trump is "so classic that I'm archiving
video clips of him to use in workshops because there's no better example" of narcissism. "Otherwise
I would have had to hire actors and write vignettes. He's like a dream come true."
When I walk north on Michigan Avenue in Chicago, where I live, I often stop to admire the sleek
tower that Trump built on the Chicago River. But why did he have to stencil his name in 20‑foot letters
across the front? As nearly everybody knows, Trump has attached his name to pretty much everything
he has ever touched-from casinos to steaks to a so-called university that promised to teach students
how to become rich. Self-references pervade Trump's speeches and conversations, too. When, in the
summer of 1999, he stood up to offer remarks at his father's funeral, Trump spoke mainly about himself.
It was the toughest day of his own life, Trump began. He went on to talk about Fred Trump's
greatest achievement: raising a brilliant and renowned son. As Gwenda Blair writes in her three-generation
biography of the Trump family, The Trumps, "the first-person singular pronouns, the I and
me and my, eclipsed the he and his. Where others spoke of their memories of Fred Trump, [Donald]
spoke of Fred Trump's endorsement."
... Highly narcissistic people are always trying to draw attention to themselves. Repeated and
inordinate self-reference is a distinguishing feature of their personality.
Narcissism in presidents is a double-edged sword. It is associated with historians' ratings of "greatness"-but
also with impeachment resolutions.
To consider the role of narcissism in Donald Trump's life is
to go beyond the dispositional traits of the social actor-beyond the high extroversion and low agreeableness,
beyond his personal schemata for decision making-to try to figure out what motivates the man.
What does Donald Trump really want? What are his most valued life goals?
Narcissus wanted, more than anything else, to love himself. People with strong narcissistic needs
want to love themselves, and they desperately want others to love them too-or at least admire them,
see them as brilliant and powerful and beautiful, even just see them, period. The fundamental life
goal is to promote the greatness of the self, for all to see. "I'm the king of Palm Beach," Trump
told the journalist Timothy O'Brien for his 2005 book, TrumpNation. Celebrities and rich people
"all come over" to Mar-a-Lago, Trump's exclusive Palm Beach estate. "They all eat, they all love
me, they all kiss my ass. And then they all leave and say, 'Isn't he horrible.' But I'm the king."
The renowned psychoanalytic theorist Heinz Kohut argued that narcissism stems from a deficiency
in early-life mirroring: The parents fail to lovingly reflect back the young boy's (or girl's) own
budding grandiosity, leaving the child in desperate need of affirmation from others. Accordingly,
some experts insist that narcissistic motivations cover up an underlying insecurity. But others argue
that there is nothing necessarily compensatory, or even immature, about certain forms of narcissism.
Consistent with this view, I can find no evidence in the biographical record to suggest that Donald
Trump experienced anything but a loving relationship with his mother and father. Narcissistic people
like Trump may seek glorification over and over, but not necessarily because they suffered from negative
family dynamics as children. Rather, they simply cannot get enough. The parental praise and strong
encouragement that might reinforce a sense of security for most boys and young men may instead have
added rocket fuel to Donald Trump's hot ambitions.
Ever since grade school, Trump has wanted to be No. 1. Attending New York Military Academy for
high school, he was relatively popular among his peers and with the faculty, but he did not have
any close confidants. As both a coach and an admiring classmate recall in The Trumps, Donald
stood out for being the most competitive young man in a very competitive environment. His need to
excel-to be the best athlete in school, for example, and to chart out the most ambitious future career-may
have crowded out intense friendships by making it impossible for him to show the kind of weakness
and vulnerability that true intimacy typically requires.
Whereas you might think that narcissism would be part of the job description for anybody aspiring
to become the chief executive of the United States, American presidents appear to have varied widely
on this psychological construct. In a 2013 Psychological Science research article, behavioral
scientists ranked U.S. presidents on characteristics of what the authors called "grandiose narcissism."
Lyndon Johnson scored the highest, followed closely by Teddy Roosevelt and Andrew Jackson. Franklin
D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Nixon, and Clinton were next. Millard Fillmore ranked the lowest.
Correlating these ranks with objective indices of presidential performance, the researchers found
that narcissism in presidents is something of a double-edged sword. On the positive side, grandiose
narcissism is associated with initiating legislation, public persuasiveness, agenda setting, and
historians' ratings of "greatness." On the negative side, it is also associated with unethical behavior
and congressional impeachment resolutions.
In business, government, sports, and many other arenas, people will put up with a great deal of
self-serving and obnoxious behavior on the part of narcissists as long as the narcissists continually
perform at high levels. Steve Jobs was, in my opinion, every bit Trump's equal when it comes to grandiose
narcissism. He heaped abuse on colleagues, subordinates, and friends; cried, at age 27, when he learned
that Time magazine had not chosen him to be Man of the Year; and got upset when he received
a congratulatory phone call, following the iPad's introduction in 2010, from President Obama's chief
of staff, Rahm Emanuel, rather than the president himself. Unlike Trump, he basically ignored his
kids, to the point of refusing to acknowledge for some time that one of them was his.
Psychological
research demonstrates that many narcissists come across as charming, witty, and charismatic upon
initial acquaintance. They can attain high levels of popularity and esteem in the short term.
As long as they prove to be successful and brilliant-like Steve Jobs-they may be able to weather
criticism and retain their exalted status. But more often than not, narcissists wear out their welcome.
Over time, people become annoyed, if not infuriated, by their self-centeredness. When narcissists
begin to disappoint those whom they once dazzled, their descent can be especially precipitous. There
is still truth today in the ancient proverb: Pride goeth before the fall.
... ... ...
In middle age, George W. Bush formulated a life story that traced the transformation of a drunken
ne'er-do-well into a self-regulated man of God. Key events in the story were his decision to marry
a steady librarian at age 31, his conversion to evangelical Christianity in his late 30s, and his
giving up alcohol forever the day after his 40th birthday party. By atoning for his sins and breaking
his addiction, Bush was able to recover the feeling of control and freedom that he had enjoyed as
a young boy growing up in Midland, Texas. Extending his narrative to the story of his country, Bush
believed that American society could recapture the wholesome family values and small-town decency
of yesteryear, by embracing a brand of compassionate conservatism.
... ... ...
Donald Trump grew up in a wealthy 1950s family with a mother who was devoted to the children and
a father who was devoted to work. Parked in front of their mansion in Jamaica Estates, Queens, was
a Cadillac for him and a Rolls-Royce for her. All five Trump children-Donald was the fourth-enjoyed
a family environment in which their parents loved them and loved each other. And yet the first chapter
in Donald Trump's story, as he tells it today, expresses nothing like Bush's gentle nostalgia or
Obama's curiosity. Instead, it is saturated with a sense of danger and a need for toughness: The
world cannot be trusted.
Fred Trump made a fortune building, owning, and managing apartment complexes in Queens and Brooklyn.
On weekends, he would occasionally take one or two of his children along to inspect buildings. "He
would drag me around with him while he collected small rents in tough sections of Brooklyn," Donald
recalls in Crippled America. "It's not fun being a landlord. You have to be tough." On one
such trip, Donald asked Fred why he always stood to the side of the tenant's door after ringing the
bell. "Because sometimes they shoot right through the door," his father replied. While Fred's response
may have been an exaggeration, it reflected his worldview. He trained his sons to be tough competitors,
because his own experience taught him that if you were not vigilant and fierce, you would never survive
in business. His lessons in toughness dovetailed with Donald's inborn aggressive temperament. "Growing
up in Queens, I was a pretty tough kid," Trump writes. "I wanted to be the toughest kid in the neighborhood."
Fred applauded Donald's toughness and encouraged him to be a "killer," but he was not too keen
about the prospects of juvenile delinquency. His decision to send his 13-year-old son off to military
school, so as to alloy aggression with discipline, followed Donald's trip on the subway into Manhattan,
with a friend, to purchase switchblades. As Trump tells it decades later, New York Military Academy
was "a tough, tough place. There were ex–drill sergeants all over the place." The instructors "used
to beat the shit out of you; those guys were rough."
Military school reinforced the strong work ethic and sense of discipline Trump had learned from
his father. And it taught him how to deal with aggressive men, like his intimidating baseball coach,
Theodore Dobias:
What I did, basically, was to convey that I respected his authority, but that he didn't intimidate
me. It was a delicate balance. Like so many strong guys, Dobias had a tendency to go for the jugular
if he smelled weakness. On the other hand, if he sensed strength but you didn't try to undermine
him, he treated you like a man.
... ... ...
In Trump's own words from a 1981 People interview, the fundamental backdrop for his life
narrative is this: "Man is the most vicious of all animals, and life is a series of battles ending
in victory or defeat." The protagonist of this story is akin to what the great 20th-century scholar
and psychoanalyst Carl Jung identified in myth and folklore as the archetypal warrior. According
to Jung, the warrior's greatest gifts are courage, discipline, and skill; his central life task is
to fight for what matters; his typical response to a problem is to slay it or otherwise defeat it;
his greatest fear is weakness or impotence. The greatest risk for the warrior is that he incites
gratuitous violence in others, and brings it upon himself.
Trump loves boxing and football, and once owned a professional football team. In the opening segment
of The Apprentice, he welcomes the television audience to a brutal Darwinian world:
New York. My city. Where the wheels of the global economy never stop turning. A concrete metropolis
of unparalleled strength and purpose that drives the business world. Manhattan is a tough place.
This island is the real jungle. If you're not careful, it can chew you up and spit you
out. But if you work hard, you can really hit it big, and I mean really big.
The story here is not so much about making money. As Trump has written, "money was never a big
motivation for me, except as a way to keep score." The story instead is about coming out on top.
As president, Donald Trump promises, he would make America great again. In Crippled America,
he says that a first step toward victory is building up the armed forces: "Everything begins with
a strong military. Everything." The enemies facing the United States are more terrifying than those
the hero has confronted in Queens and Manhattan. "There has never been a more dangerous time," Trump
says. Members of isis "are medieval barbarians" who must be pursued "relentlessly wherever they are,
without stopping, until every one of them is dead." Less frightening but no less belligerent are
our economic competitors, like the Chinese. They keep beating us. We have to beat them.
Andrew Jackson displayed many of the same psychological qualities that we see in Trump.
Economic
victory is one thing; starting and winning real wars is quite another. In some ways, Trump appears
to be less prone to military action than certain other candidates. He has strongly criticized George
W. Bush's decision to invade Iraq in 2003, and has cautioned against sending American troops to Syria.
That said, I believe there is good reason to fear Trump's incendiary language regarding America's
enemies. David Winter, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, analyzed U.S. presidential inaugural
addresses and found that those presidents who laced their speeches with power-oriented, aggressive
imagery were more likely than those who didn't to lead the country into war. The rhetoric that
Trump uses to characterize both his own life story and his attitudes toward America's foes is certainly
aggressive. And, as noted, his extroversion and narcissism suggest a willingness to take big risks-actions
that history will remember. Tough talk can sometimes prevent armed conflict, as when a potential
adversary steps down in fear. But belligerent language may also incite nationalistic anger..., and
provoke the rival nations at whom Trump takes aim.
... ... ...
Nearly two centuries ago, President Andrew Jackson displayed many of the same psychological characteristics
we see in Donald Trump-the extroversion and social dominance, the volatile temper, the shades of
narcissism, the populist authoritarian appeal. Jackson was, and remains, a controversial figure in
American history. Nonetheless, it appears that Thomas Jefferson had it wrong when he characterized
Jackson as completely unfit to be president, a dangerous man who choked on his own rage. In fact,
Jackson's considerable success in dramatically expanding the power of the presidency lay partly in
his ability to regulate his anger and use it strategically to promote his agenda.
What's more, Jackson personified a narrative that inspired large parts of America and informed
his presidential agenda. His life story appealed to the common man because Jackson himself was a
common man-one who rose from abject poverty and privation to the most exalted political position
in the land. Amid the early rumblings of Southern secession, Jackson mobilized Americans to believe
in and work hard for the Union. The populism that his detractors feared would lead to mob rule instead
connected common Americans to a higher calling-a sovereign unity of states committed to democracy.
The Frenchman Michel Chevalier, a witness to American life in the 1830s, wrote that the throngs of
everyday people who admired Jackson and found sustenance and substance for their own life story in
his "belong to history, they partake of the grand; they are the episodes of a wondrous epic which
will bequeath a lasting memory to posterity, that of the coming of democracy."
Who, really, is Donald Trump? What's behind the actor's mask? I can discern little more than narcissistic
motivations and a complementary personal narrative about winning at any cost. It is as if Trump has
invested so much of himself in developing and refining his socially dominant role that he has nothing
left over to create a meaningful story for his life, or for the nation. It is always Donald Trump
playing Donald Trump, fighting to win, but never knowing why.
Goldwater girl was virtually on a par with John Kasich among big Republican donors
Notable quotes:
"... The thing about the Clintons is that they are, as politicians, honest. When bought, they stay bought. Hence their popularity with businesses. Trump is far too much of a wheeler dealer to stay bought, this is what seems to worry the oligarchy. ..."
"... Later, I developed an alternate theory for why Obama and Clinton were pushed front. As President, either could be trusted to betray their base and lose badly, divide their base (and give them no motive to energize them) setting the stage for zombie resurrection of the Republicans in 2010 - and also, continue the Republican militaristic anti-civll-liberties, shadow-bank friendly, torture-friendly Bush policies. I have no idea if either theory was correct. ..."
"... 2016: A year ago, we had the media pushing Clinton hard, as this implacable juggernaut, with opponents portrayed as annoying gnats at her heels. Sanders came up and got coverage, perhaps because of his major fundraising, perhaps because he was another candidate they could trust. Other candidates got minimal coverage. ..."
"... So: are they being set up for the Fall again? Or is Clinton being engineered as our next President? ..."
"... Does anyone *really* believe that Clinton will break up the huge shadow banking system? Prosecute the fraudclosers, prosecute the banksters, prosecute the torturers, stop the "humanitarian bombing" and so forth? ..."
"... Does anyone *really* believe that Clinton will break up the huge shadow banking system? Prosecute the fraudclosers, prosecute the banksters, prosecute the torturers, stop the "humanitarian bombing" and so forth? ..."
"... The only people who believe that are the people who also believe that is what Obama will do. ..."
Politico reported in early May, when Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee,
that the Clinton campaign started calling major Republican donors almost immediately , pitching
her as the natural candidate for them. Many of the recipients were cool to the appear, reasoning
that Clinton would probably prevail regardless. But that was before the polls showed that Trump becoming
the virtually official Republican nominee meant he quickly moved in national polls to score a mere
few points behind Clinton, when the widespread assumption had been that he would top out at a much
lower level.
And it's not as if Clinton didn't already have real pull among big Republican givers.
This chart from Time Magazine shows as of late 2015 where 2012 Romney donors were sending their
Presidential bucks in this cycle. You can see that Clinton was virtually on a par with John Kasich
The Financial Times surveyed major US business groups and found
they greatly prefer Clinton . Mind you, "greatly prefer" translates as "loathes Trump, deems
her to be less obviously terrible." Clinton is a status quo candidate, and as much as she would probably
shake her finger at businessmen more than they'd like, she won't break any big rice bowls.
From the Financial Times :
In the most comprehensive survey to date of business views on the US election, half of the
trade groups who responded to the FT said they would break from the traditional party of business
to back Mrs Clinton - despite reservations about the Democratic front-runner's candidacy.
Only a quarter of respondents preferred Mr Trump, who has run a caustic campaign marked by
populist attacks on business. But support for Mrs Clinton was often lukewarm, sparked more by
alarm over the presumptive Republican nominee than enthusiasm for her..
The FT polled 53 Washington-based trade associations and received responses from 16 of them
that lobby for nearly 100,000 businesses with combined annual revenues of more than $3.5tn. A
quarter of respondents said they could not decide which candidate would be best for business because
it was too early to judge their policy platforms, or replied "none of the above".
Several trade groups expressed dismay that for the first time in living memory they faced a
presidential race without a clear pro-business candidate, dashing their hopes of a new dawn after
nearly eight years of what they see as over-regulation by the Obama administration.
Mr [Bill] Reinsch, speaking shortly before retiring from his trade group [companies ranging
from Cisco to General Electric to Procter & Gamble ] this month, added: "The other thing [companies]
want is predictability, which is the antithesis of Trump, who brags about being unpredictable."…
The business groups that said they would prefer Mrs Clinton tended to represent more internationally-minded
members in fast-moving or technology-dependent sectors. The smaller core of Trump support came
from more domestic-oriented sectors and those hurt by the Democratic causes of environmentalism
and trade unions.
The thing about the Clintons is that they are, as politicians, honest. When bought, they stay
bought. Hence their popularity with businesses. Trump is far too much of a wheeler dealer to stay
bought, this is what seems to worry the oligarchy.
I've been wondering… What will really happen in the Fall? All I know is that things will be
interesting, as in cursed. Past history, as I remember: In 2000, the media was quite nice to Candidate
Bush - someone they could sit down and have a beer with. He was the front-runner before a single
primary or caucus was held. Contrast with the serial lying about Candidate Gore, accompanied by
serious coverage of third-party Candidate Nader's campaign.
2008: on the Democratic side, Obama and Clinton were front-runners before a single primary
or caucus was held. My idea back then was that whoever would win would be set up for the Fall
(note the pun). Clinton was subject to the Clinton Rules. Obama had the worst post-9/11 name possible
for a Presidential candidate, not to mention being black.
Of course, economic reality intervened. Later, I developed an alternate theory for why
Obama and Clinton were pushed front. As President, either could be trusted to betray their base
and lose badly, divide their base (and give them no motive to energize them) setting the stage
for zombie resurrection of the Republicans in 2010 - and also, continue the Republican militaristic
anti-civll-liberties, shadow-bank friendly, torture-friendly Bush policies. I have no idea if
either theory was correct.
In 2012, we had minimal coverage of primarying Obama, or of third-party candidates.
2016: A year ago, we had the media pushing Clinton hard, as this implacable juggernaut,
with opponents portrayed as annoying gnats at her heels. Sanders came up and got coverage, perhaps
because of his major fundraising, perhaps because he was another candidate they could trust. Other
candidates got minimal coverage.
So: are they being set up for the Fall again? Or is Clinton being engineered as our next
President?
Does anyone *really* believe that Clinton will break up the huge shadow banking system?
Prosecute the fraudclosers, prosecute the banksters, prosecute the torturers, stop the "humanitarian
bombing" and so forth?
Does anyone *really* believe that Clinton will break up the huge shadow banking system?
Prosecute the fraudclosers, prosecute the banksters, prosecute the torturers, stop the "humanitarian
bombing" and so forth?
The only people who believe that are the people who also believe that is what Obama will do.
Adam Sinclair
·
Charlton, Massachusetts
Hillary Clinton simply doesn't
have enough delegates or votes to win the Democratic
Primary. She is mathematically incapable of winning at
this juncture and therefore must rely on her paid
Superdelegaters to award her the nomination.
If the Superdelegate are truly interested in defeating
Donald Trump and NOT alienating the largest block of
generational voters in the country...they will select
Sanders as the nonminee. If they do not select Sanders not
only with the Democratic Party lose to Trump but they will
cease to be a viable political party in future elections.
Without the MASSIVE
...
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4 hrs
李淼然
Barack Obama
needed around 300-400 superdelegates to
push him over the line. Pretty much
every Democratic nominee (outside of
incumbent presidents) had to use
superdelegates to get past the
threshold. As far as I can remember,
since the modern application of the
delegate system in the Democratic
nomination system, every single
non-incumbent candidate had to use
superdelegates.
So, my question is - why are you holding
Clinton to a higher standard to win the
Democratic nomination? She doesn't have
to get the majority of the pledged
delegates, she just has to get the
majority of the delegates (s
...
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Edited
Adam Sinclair
·
Charlton, Massachusetts
李淼然 Clinton will not
win the Primary. She doesn't have the
delegates. Voters are totally irrelevant
in the Superdelegate Primary system.
If Superdelegates exist to prevent idiot
voters from nominating an obvious
general election loser...then clearly
they should support Bernie Sanders
right?
Like
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Reply
·
3 hrs
Adam Sinclair
·
Charlton, Massachusetts
Yes. Hillary
tied/won the popular vote but the
Establishment wanted Obama so they gave
all of Michigan's "undecided" votes to
Obama even though he wasn't on the
ballot there. The superdelegates went
with him bc, lets face it, Obama is a
WAY more amiable human being than
Hillary.
The establishment has been forcing
candidates on us for a long time. Obama
promptly sold out to Wall Street after
being elected. No prosecutions. Not one.
Cheryl Onstad
Adam Sinclair Obama
also won the popular vote by a slim
margin. Supers went with Obama because
he won the pledged delegates. You are
making things up.
"... Everybody over the age of six knows that Obama was "grateful" for Clinton's support in 2008, and he expressed his support in very tangible ways ..."
"... Even if Sanders is offered a deal he is willing to take (and I think that's a fairly big "if") his supporters are not likely to fall in line just because he tells them to. Most of the people I see online who claim to be Bernie supporters but say they will vote for Clint0n if she is the nominee use language or tactics suggestive of trolls, not of actual Sanders voters. The "typical" Sanders voter (to the extent there is one) does not react well to the "shut up and do as you're told" approach. They are issues voters, not party voters (many only joined the Democratic party-if they ever joined at all- in order to be able to vote in the primaries), and appeals to "party unity" will not sway them. Nor will the "lesser evil" argument, since Clinton has demonstrated a tremendous capacity for evil in her decades in the public eye. Comparisons between 2008 and 2016 simply aren't valid. ..."
"... "issues voters, not party voters" ..."
"... Didn't Obama also give Hillary some help paying off her campaign debt from 2008? ..."
"... Did some Japanese science/tech corp. build a life-like robot in the image of H. Clinton, adding a kind of hybrid Dem/Repub speachifying algorithm, ……to try to pull the faux wool over the realists eyes?? ..."
"... Now Clinton's in the catbird seat, and she conveniently forgets her PUMA pals, all of whom are busily out there dissing the so-called dismissively name "BernieBros" for not "getting in line NOW." ..."
"... Every fiber of my being tells me that any supposed death threats were generated by the Clinton camp or DWS (same thing) to make Bernie's followers look bad, just like the "reports" of chairs being thrown. ..."
"... I believe it all to be more (blatant) hogwash in continuing attempts to knock Bernie off the campaign trail. I think it only proves the Clinton camp (which includes DWS) is growing more concerned by Bernie's support & going even further below the belt in their attempts to coronate the queen. The way DWS went on & on about it convinces me, even more, that's true. ..."
"... HRC is SO hated, however, that I can very well see Trump winning if she gets the nomination. Those who back Clinton are so blinded (by the sun gleaming off their bars of gold?), that they refuse to acknowledge the obvious. We the citizens are not happy. ..."
"... It wasn't all that long ago (hey, I'm a "senior" now), that JFK said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ..."
"... As to the prospect of uniting with Sanders versus going for the moderate Republicans I would say that they have already committed to the latter path. Clinton has been actively raising money from moderate Rs for some time now and has publicly spurned everything Sanders has proposed. The only demonstrable point at which she committed to anything he has pushed for was when she grudgingly and entirely unhappily claimed not to hate the idea of a raise in the minimum wage if, that is, someone else did all the work to get it past the house. ..."
"... They slammed the door on Sanders supporters a long time ago on the assumption that triangulation would work. Unless Trump melts down and actually eats a Mexican between now and election day they will find that a tough sell. My prediction is some tentative back door feelers that will fall because they can't bring themselves to give a damn thing followed by a desperate grab at the end. ..."
"... Jeff Merkley is the Senator supporting Bernie, not Ron "Mr. Nike" Wyden. Merkley opposes the TPP. Wyden is one of the fast trackers. ..."
"... "to see that the wage-worker, the small producer, the ordinary consumer, shall get their fair share of the benefit of business prosperity." ..."
"... "because of his hold upon the less intelligent voters and the discontented." The social justice that Roosevelt sought involved, in Taft's opinion, "a forced division of property, and that means socialism." ..."
"... One should take a look at the "substance" of the TPP-TTIP proposed carve-outs for "excluding publice services from" the corporate takeover. First, I don't find any substantive language, just a couple of ideas about "what's wrong" and little sets of what might be excluded. And anyone who has ever played with lawyers, particularly where stakes are really high, and believes that if the "regime" of TTIP-TTP gets "legitimized" by getting the bought-and-paid-for legislatures and executives of what used to be called "nations" to sign on the dotted line, that somehow a few particles of language that attempt to make exclusions from the general corporate coup for ANYTHING that could "turn a profit," is just off the beam. ..."
"... Mish and his buddies have a knee-jerk Calvinist belief in the power of suffering to turn the economy around. Note that the only kind of suffering that works is that of the middle/working class. Rich people paying their own way or parting with some fraction of their loot, in Mish's view, would immediately crater the economy. ..."
"... He lists "Four Likely Consequences" of the overtime rule change, none of which is "More Pay". According to Mish there can be absolutely no positive effect from expanding overtime eligibility. More pay for workers is actually less pay, somehow. So say the Austrian scriptures he quotes from daily. ..."
"... He further quotes his own tweet: "It seems to me, wages would keep up with inflation. if there was no inflation". I thought the lesson of the last 16 years was that wages don't keep up with inflation. They have in fact decreased. If there were no inflation, wages would simply deflate even more. They would not magically stay the same. Yet this is presented as some sort of self-evident wisdom, instead of a moronic tautology contradicted by the facts. ..."
"... I would find it amusing were someone to duck their head into his comment board and yell out the word "Government!" and watch the denizens scramble for their favorite right wing buzzwords ..."
"... Sanders voters being undercounted: Thousands of presidential primary votes already cast are not being officially counted ..."
"... Thanks for the links. The second one is particularly important since it shows that all the voters in the caucus states (won by Bernie, primarily) aren't being individually counted in these phony numbers Hillary keeps referring to as her lead in total votes. ..."
"... Shorter liberal press: 'we were willing to go slumming and report on the Sanders' campaign for jollies and liberal cred, but now that it looks like his platform represents the views of a large number of voters, views which are *not* our "liberal™ " views, (gawd forbid we miss a meal), we are now obliged by the machine to take Sanders down.' ..."
"... The goldwater conspiracy: …what if she never stopped being a republican…she loves dr strangelove from her days trying to get nelson rock the nomination in 1968 against nixon (who actually ended up losing the voter count to ronnie raygun in the primaries)… ..."
I can't find a transcript, so relying on CNN's paraphrase:
Clinton wouldn't say whether Sanders was being considered for her running mate and said
the Vermont senator needs to "do his part" to unify the party going into November.
She highlighted her role in unifying Democrats - including the 40% of Clinton supporters who
had said they wouldn't support Barack Obama if he won the party's nomination - in 2008, the
last close Democratic nominating contest.
"That's why the lesson of 2008 - which was a hard-fought primary, if you remember - is so pertinent
here. Because I did my part, but so did (then-)Sen. Obama," she said. "We went to Unity, New
Hampshire, together, appeared together, spoke together, and made it absolutely obvious that
I was supporting him, that he was grateful for that support."
Everybody over the age of six knows that Obama was "grateful" for Clinton's support in
2008, and he expressed his support in very tangible ways : The offer to Clinton of the
Secretary of State position, and supporting Clinton in 2016. (Note that the policy differences
between Obama and Clinton were not insignificant, but were marginal. The policy differences between
Clinton and Sanders are much greater, making a deal harder to reach.)
In other words, there was a deal. What deal is Clinton offering Sanders?
Sanders supporters are also not like Clinton supporters. She may have been willing to take
the "deal", and her supporters may have been willing to fall in line because they like being told
what to do, and hey, he was still another corporate Democrat anyway, so no bigs, but that's not
the situation this time.
Even if Sanders is offered a deal he is willing to take (and I think that's a fairly big
"if") his supporters are not likely to fall in line just because he tells them to. Most of the
people I see online who claim to be Bernie supporters but say they will vote for Clint0n if she
is the nominee use language or tactics suggestive of trolls, not of actual Sanders voters. The
"typical" Sanders voter (to the extent there is one) does not react well to the "shut up and do
as you're told" approach. They are issues voters, not party voters (many only joined the Democratic
party-if they ever joined at all- in order to be able to vote in the primaries), and appeals to
"party unity" will not sway them. Nor will the "lesser evil" argument, since Clinton has demonstrated
a tremendous capacity for evil in her decades in the public eye. Comparisons between 2008 and
2016 simply aren't valid.
CUOMO: So, you get into the general election, if you're the nominee, for your party.
CLINTON: I will be the nominee for my party, Chris. That is already done in effect.
There is no way that I won't be.
CUOMO: There is a Senator from Vermont who has a different take on that…
CLINTON: … well…
CUOMO: He says he's going to fight until the end. And, there seems to be a change here as
Donald Trump is trying to galvanize his party. The Democratic party seems to be going the other
way. His supporters have become more aggressive, feeling that the system is rigged against
the Senator.
We saw what happened in Nevada. When you saw that did you believe that Sanders responded
the right way to that situation?
CLINTON: Well, I was very disturbed by what went on there, but I am confident…
CUOMO: With him, or with the supporters?
CLINTON: … well, what we saw, what we saw there…
CUOMO: … the supporters?
CLINTON: What we saw was disturbing. I have every confidence we're going to be unified.
I understand…
CUOMO: … where does that confidence come from?
CLINTON: Well, in part from my own experience, you know? I went all the way to the end against
then Senator Obama. I won nine out of the last 12 contests. Back in 2008 I won Indiana, Kentucky,
West Virginia, so I know the intense feelings that arise, particularly among your supporters
as you go toward the end. But, we both were following the same rules, just as both Senator
Sanders and I are following the same rules.
I'm three million votes ahead of him, and I have an insurmountable lead in pledged delegates,
and I am confident that just as I did with Senator Obama, where I said, you know what? It was
really close - much closer than it is between me and Senator Sanders right.
CUOMO: Votes-wise?
CLINTON: Yes, vote-wise and delegate-wise. I said, you know, in fact, it depends on how
you evaluated it, I had more popular vote but I had fewer delegates, and the name of the game
is how many delegates you have, right? So, when I came out and withdrew and endorsed Senator
Obama, about 40% according to polls, about 40% of my supporters said they would never support
him.
I worked really hard to make the case, as I'm sure Senator Sanders will, that whatever differences
we might have, they pale in comparison to the presumptive nominee of the Republican party.
Name an issue you care about, domestic or international, and clearly we are much closer - Senator
Sanders supporters and mine, than either of us is with Donald Trump.
CUOMO: Why don't you reach out directly to Senator Sanders and do the work of reunification
, of unification of the party, however you want to see it.
I ask this because Senator Sanders has said to me in the past, and to many others, it's
not my job to get my supporters to vote for Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton has to make the
case to these supporters, and given what you're saying with this increase in hostility and
antagonism towards the process within the process of the primaries on the Democratic side,
should you reach out to Bernie Sanders and say let's start doing this the right way? Let me
start talking to the supporters, from your perspective? Have you done that? Have you thought
about doing that…
CLINTON: Well, I certainly said many times what I've just said to everyone, including his
supporters, and I am absolutely committed to doing my part, more than my part. But, Senator
Sanders has to do his part. That's why the lesson of 2008, which was a hard fought primary,
as you remember, is so pertinent here because I did my part. But, so did Senator Obama.
He made it clear. He welcomed people who had supported me. He made it very clear. We went
to Unity, New Hampshire together. Appeared together. Spoke together, and made it absolutely
obvious that I was supporting him, he was grateful for that support.
I was reaching out to my supporters, he was telling his…
CUOMO: … You nominated him Senator Obama at the convention…
CLINTON: … I did.
CUOMO: Bernie Sanders is saying he's going to fight all the way through the convention,
it's different…
CLINTON: … Well, he has to do his part to unify. He said the other day that he
will do everything possible to defeat Donald Trump. He said he'd work seven days a week. I
take him at his word. I think the threat that Donald Trump poses is so dramatic to our country,
to our democracy, and our economy, that I certainly Sanders to do what he said he would.
CUOMO: Any thought to your making the first move, and reaching out to make that process
happen now as opposed to months from now?
CLINTON: Well, we've had lots of conversations between people who know me well, and
support…
CUOMO: … But, not directly?
CLINTON: He know exactly what I'm saying. He hears it all the time because I have said
the same thing. I respect him, I understand the very passionate advocacy he feels for
the issues he's been really pounding away at for years…
CUOMO: You Know what would bring you together very quickly?
If Bernie Sanders became your Vice President. Is there any chance of that?
CLINTON: Well, I'm not going to get into that. That's something down the road…
CUOMO: Where better? We're in your hometown, make some news, make it a historic place…
CLINTON: … I think what brings us together is Donald Trump. I think that's what brings
us together.
So, no voice for Sanders and Sanders supporters. Loyalty or exit.
Later in the interview, Clinton reiterated that Sanders "has to do his part to unify. He
said the other day that he'll do everything possible to defeat Donald Trump. He said he'd work
seven days a day week. I take him at his word."
Message sent. Now we wait to see how Sanders and his loyal supporters react. My guess? Not
well.
In my experience, "I take him at his word" is
irony ; I don't think
Clinton takes Sanders at his word at all.
It would be fun if Sanders worked to defeat Trump by helping down-ticket Democrats - harmed
by Clinton's Victory Fund - and especially down-ticket Democrats the DCCC and DSCC are trying
to destroy.
Did some Japanese science/tech corp. build a life-like robot in the image of H. Clinton,
adding a kind of hybrid Dem/Repub speachifying algorithm, ……to try to pull the faux wool over
the realists eyes??
"Get over it – it's over – get in line" is apparently the new talking point; it is not one
that signals a willingness to acknowledge the platform of her opponent, much less offer him a
prominent role of any kind in the campaign or any future administration. The last thing she –
and her Dem establishment cronies – wants is to crack open the door to the kingdom and let any
of the great unwashed in to ruin the ambiance.
What's sad is that the planning that seems to be going into the political equivalent of pest
control seems to be at the expense of grasping just how poorly Clinton's fortunes are beginning
to look in a Clinton v. Trump contest. They still seem to believe that winning the nomination
makes winning the WH a slam dunk – and it's far from being so.
The current Democratic power structure seems genetically unable to see the forest for the trees,
but then their hold on power is under threat and that just will not stand. They really do not
believe Clinton can or will lose, so cannot and will not game plan for any scenario that even
acknowledges that's a possibility, even it it would work to head off a loss.
It would be nice if the only consequences of losing would inure to the detriment of Clinton
and her establishment cabal, but we all know that those people will land on their expensively-clad
feet; most of us would survive a Trump presidency, but there are so many people who are just barely
hanging on who are going to tumble into the abyss – and that's the part that just frosts my cupcakes.
Many Hillary supporters in Washington are terrified for this reason. If Hillary can't win,
what good is a Clinton acolyte? Bill and Hill won't go broke, but what is a Marcotte going to
do? Or everyone who bought a house they can't afford for appearances expecting to work forever.
If Hillary loses again, the Clinton brain trust won't look too good. Corporate board jobs don't
go to losers.
The Clinton Global Slush Fund won't get another cent going forward.
Sanders and Trump have demonstrated that the underling class of the political structure has
no real value, especially going forward.
That's exactly the point, there is nothing to offer Sen. Sanders, less some ridiculous token
of appreciation, but she owes so much at this point given the support she's been able to acquire,
there is nothing of subsatnce to share – in a policy sense – that would be equitable in trade
for Sen. Sanders lending his endorsement.
I keep thinking about those Hilbot PUMAs (Party Unity My Ass), some of whom vowed they didn't
vote for Obama. Sure Barry Zero made an offer to Hilbot that she couldn't refuse, and Clinton
did pull many of her fans over to vote for Obama. Those voters probably would've voted for Obama
anyway.
Now Clinton's in the catbird seat, and she conveniently forgets her PUMA pals, all of whom
are busily out there dissing the so-called dismissively name "BernieBros" for not "getting in
line NOW."
Hypocrite much?
The past few days I've made what I felt to be some pretty low key comments that highlighted
some issues around the tactics of dissing Sanders. Frankly, I'm not totally sure whom I'm voting
for. But I've been barraged with name calling posts back (not here; elsewhere). I've been told
to stop thinking I'm a "special snowflake," to "grow up," and similar. And someone pretty much
digitally shouted at me for "supporting violence."
Nice. Those kinds of comments really make me feel all warm and cozy about voting for Clinton.
Seems more like what we associate with Trump voters. I keep thinking along the lines of: the fish
is rotten from the head down.
I believe the threats were via Twitter but not sure. Supposedly they were "traced" back to
Sanders supporters. It's unclear to me how accurate that is. But that's the rumor mill, and some
Clintonistas are running with it.
Every fiber of my being tells me that any supposed death threats were generated by the
Clinton camp or DWS (same thing) to make Bernie's followers look bad, just like the "reports"
of chairs being thrown.
Show me the proof of the flying chairs or indisputable evidence of any threats being traced
back to Bernie supporters. There obviously is none or it would have been exposed in a second by
DWS.
I believe it all to be more (blatant) hogwash in continuing attempts to knock Bernie off
the campaign trail. I think it only proves the Clinton camp (which includes DWS) is growing more
concerned by Bernie's support & going even further below the belt in their attempts to coronate
the queen. The way DWS went on & on about it convinces me, even more, that's true.
HRC is SO hated, however, that I can very well see Trump winning if she gets the nomination.
Those who back Clinton are so blinded (by the sun gleaming off their bars of gold?), that they
refuse to acknowledge the obvious. We the citizens are not happy.
It wasn't all that long ago (hey, I'm a "senior" now), that JFK said, "Those who make peaceful
revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
As much as DWS wants us to believe otherwise, it has yet to come to that & I hope it doesn't.
But with the obvious crap going on this election year anything could happen (like a "President
Trump". Aackkkkk!).
And the DNC would have no one to blame but themselves, by expecting us to all fall in line behind
them & HRC.
Bernie needs to be cloned & brought back at every election until they "get it". It would help
keep the new-found awareness alive.
"It could be that most voters have no problem with people yelling at politicians at all,
and wish there were more of it."
Important point! I overheard some people the other day who were all jazzed up by the video
they had seen– of people contemptuously throwing dollar bills at the HRC limo, en-route to the
Clooney fundraiser.
We need more (non-violent of course!) open mockery, jeering, and taunting of our failed elites–
and not just those running for office.
"A senior Democratic aide said that thinking reflects an acknowledgement among the senators
that Reid is the one member of the caucus who "has an actual relationship with him.'" Which
would be how Sanders passed all those amendments. The herd closing up…
I find it telling that these stories do not mention Wyden who actually endorsed Sanders as
a figure. One would think that if they were serious about reaching out to him they would use someone
who has a relationship that is actually publicly acknowledged rather than someone who sat it out,
supported his opponent, and then backed the "reject your extremists!" meme.
If, that is, they were actually serious.
As to the prospect of uniting with Sanders versus going for the moderate Republicans I
would say that they have already committed to the latter path. Clinton has been actively raising
money from moderate Rs for some time now and has publicly spurned everything Sanders has proposed.
The only demonstrable point at which she committed to anything he has pushed for was when she
grudgingly and entirely unhappily claimed not to hate the idea of a raise in the minimum wage
if, that is, someone else did all the work to get it past the house.
They slammed the door on Sanders supporters a long time ago on the assumption that triangulation
would work. Unless Trump melts down and actually eats a Mexican between now and election day they
will find that a tough sell. My prediction is some tentative back door feelers that will fall
because they can't bring themselves to give a damn thing followed by a desperate grab at the end.
As in Harry Reid, the guy who is only in the Senate because the GOP pretty much revolted against
Sharon Angle after she called for the return to a barter economy. 2010 featured candidates as
John Runyan. Sharon Angle was the Ollie North and Harry Reid was the Chuck Robb of that election.
The GOP in wave years managed to lose against the weakest candidates.
The Smithsonian article makes for amazing reading. To just quote two paragraphs:
Tensions deepened in 1912, when Roosevelt began advocating the recall of judicial decisions
through popular vote. With the courts tamed as an enemy to reform, Roosevelt then would press
forward "to see that the wage-worker, the small producer, the ordinary consumer, shall
get their fair share of the benefit of business prosperity." To enact his program, Roosevelt
signaled that he would accept another term as president and seek the nomination of the Republican
Party.
These ambitions revealed, Taft and his fellow conservatives deemed Roosevelt a dangerous
radical. Once in power for a third term, they said, Roosevelt would be a perpetual chief executive.
Roosevelt had become the most dangerous man in American history, said Taft, "because of
his hold upon the less intelligent voters and the discontented." The social justice that Roosevelt
sought involved, in Taft's opinion, "a forced division of property, and that means socialism."
I could see Bernie Sanders repeating Roosevelt's words with relish. And I cannot imagine either
Hillary Clinton or many of her surrogates such as Paul Krugman agreeing with Taft's. Indeed Krugman
said much the same thing in his last few blog posts.
One should take a look at the "substance" of the TPP-TTIP proposed carve-outs for "excluding
publice services from" the corporate takeover. First, I don't find any substantive language, just
a couple of ideas about "what's wrong" and little sets of what might be excluded. And anyone who
has ever played with lawyers, particularly where stakes are really high, and believes that if
the "regime" of TTIP-TTP gets "legitimized" by getting the bought-and-paid-for legislatures and
executives of what used to be called "nations" to sign on the dotted line, that somehow a few
particles of language that attempt to make exclusions from the general corporate coup for ANYTHING
that could "turn a profit," is just off the beam.
Who will interpret and apply those "exclusions?" What "sovereignty" will stand up and fight,
in what forum, to repel the large and small assaults that the corporatists will mount on any resistance
to their "full-spectrum dominance?" The imposition of the new regime will be complete, and there
is no way to "exclude" any of the stuff that the nice Powerpoints say can somehow be protected.
It may not be possible to avoid a complete corporate takeover of all governmental functions,
patently or covertly. It's largely accomplished already, by people a little more subtle than the
Titans of Industry that tried to pull a coup on Roosevelt in 1934. The powers that be are persistent
and patient… The rest of us are soft targets, taken as individuals or small groups.
"public." Does that scan better for you? I've looked again, and do not find any language that
would serve to insulate all those sovereign government functions from the predations of our corporate
overlords…
I wish someone would tell us where the figure of 308,000 Florida Democrats comes from. It's
plausible, and I'm not arguing against it, but it really appears as though Tim Wise made it up
here:
Or consider Democrats, thirteen percent of whom voted for Bush. In all, Gore lost 308,000
voters from his own party to W., while losing 24,000 Dems to Nader.
What's the evidence for that? What am I missing?
Later, Jim Hightower also published an article about the 308,000, and he gave credit to Tim
Wise. But where did Time Wise get the number?
The short version of the story is that Gore was leading then someone uploaded a duplicate memory
card with results from an completed precinct that gave gore -16,022 votes as well as apportioning
several thousand votes to Bush all from a single precinct with at most a thousand voters. This
card passed all security sweeps and was uploaded in a secure area only accessible to select staff.
The results were then "fixed" later back to their original totals but only after Gore had dropped
out.
The sequence of events described, and backed up in the Diebold memos are ludicrously unlikely
on their own suggesting that figures out of Florida should all be treated as suspect.
That said I also agree that the Democrats also did a lot to lose that election having chosen
to run Al Gore and then to focus group him into a lightweight while declining to take Bush (or
rather Rove) seriously.
I was going to sit this one out before the Vegas convention. Now I'm going to vote for Trump
and actively participate in the effort to destroy the Democratic Party. Bernie is weak as hell
and this isn't about him anymore.
More late-term legacy burnishing by Obama … Mish, predictably,
hates the idea . Because out-of-control salaries for the bottom 50% are what is killing America!
Mish and his buddies have a knee-jerk Calvinist belief in the power of suffering to turn
the economy around. Note that the only kind of suffering that works is that of the middle/working
class. Rich people paying their own way or parting with some fraction of their loot, in Mish's
view, would immediately crater the economy.
He lists "Four Likely Consequences" of the overtime rule change, none of which is "More
Pay". According to Mish there can be absolutely no positive effect from expanding overtime eligibility.
More pay for workers is actually less pay, somehow. So say the Austrian scriptures he quotes from
daily.
He further quotes his own tweet: "It seems to me, wages would keep up with inflation. if
there was no inflation". I thought the lesson of the last 16 years was that wages don't keep up
with inflation. They have in fact decreased. If there were no inflation, wages would simply deflate
even more. They would not magically stay the same. Yet this is presented as some sort of self-evident
wisdom, instead of a moronic tautology contradicted by the facts.
I would find it amusing were someone to duck their head into his comment board and yell
out the word "Government!" and watch the denizens scramble for their favorite right wing buzzwords
Thanks for the links. The second one is particularly important since it shows that all
the voters in the caucus states (won by Bernie, primarily) aren't being individually counted in
these phony numbers Hillary keeps referring to as her lead in total votes.
If the election were held now, 47 percent of registered voters would support Mrs. Clinton,
versus 41 percent for Mr. Trump…In a more hypothetical matchup, Mr. Sanders leads Mr. Trump,
51 percent to 38 percent.
Primaries. Primaries are paid for by state tax dollars. (Caucuses aren't paid for by state
tax dollars.) How do you have a primary paid for by tax dollars and exclude independents?
re: our famously free press.
" My favorite includes the phrase "the full sense of moral leadership." "
That's the modern version of a stuffed shirt.
Shorter liberal press: 'we were willing to go slumming and report on the Sanders' campaign
for jollies and liberal cred, but now that it looks like his platform represents the views of
a large number of voters, views which are *not* our "liberal™ " views, (gawd forbid we miss a
meal), we are now obliged by the machine to take Sanders down.'
The goldwater conspiracy: …what if she never stopped being a republican…she loves dr strangelove
from her days trying to get nelson rock the nomination in 1968 against nixon (who actually ended
up losing the voter count to ronnie raygun in the primaries)…
has she ever worked on any hardcore democratic issues…
there are probably c.r.e.e.p. Alumns who might argue her work on watergate eventually opened
the door for nelson to become vp…
it is my turn is not a reason to let her take the mantel…if she keeps this up she will lose
to el donaldo and the democratic party may end up breaking up…
If sanders edges her out on actual voter delegates by california he should fight in philly…if
he doesnt…
He should hold his own event and call it…
bernie 2018…the counter coup…
do as $hillary complains about…find ten senatorial seats and 25 house districts and gather
a million hippies…old and new…maybe get cute and do it at old yasgurs farm…or somewhere in white
lake or bethel…plenty of land around woodstock or across the river on the east side of the hudson
to allow train access…
Too many things can go wrong in philly to expose the bernie or bust yunginz to the stalinist
diktats of the current democratic party plutonomists…
If you dont pass her ex superdelegates, take your toys from the sandbox bernie and focus on
2018…
"Hillary hurt many women, the women that he abused," Trump said. "She's married to a man who
got impeached for lying. He was impeached, and he had to go through a whole big process and he
was impeached for lying about what happened with a woman. And she's gonna take ads about little
Donald Trump? I don't know. I don't think so. And Hillary was an enabler, and she treated these
women horribly."
The Clinton campaign fired back at Trump's latest attack.
"Trump is doing what he does best, attacking when he feels wounded and dragging the American
people through the mud for his own gain," spokesman Nick Merrill said. "If that's the kind of
campaign he wants to run that's his choice. Hillary Clinton is running a campaign to be president
for all of America. It's not surprising that after a week of still refusing to release his taxes
and likening Oakland and Ferguson to the dangers in Iraq, of course he wants to change the
subject. So while he licks his wounds, we'll continue to focus on improving the lives of the
American people."
Bill Clinton did not immediately respond to a request for comment - both Clintons have said in
the past that they do not plan on engaging with Trump in personal attacks.
The presumptive GOP nominee was referring to Bill's
numerous trysts with women over the years. Trump accused Hillary of being
the reason for Bill's infidelities, and shamed her for mistreating the women
Bill cheated with.
"And just remember this," Trump said. "She was an unbelievably nasty, mean
enabler, and what she did to a lot of those women is disgraceful."
"... Clinton preaches trickle-down feminism, which just like trickle-down economics,/*serves only the interests of those at the top of the food chain.*/ She essentially established woman and children trafficked rings in Libya and Syria. ..."
"... In any case here is not much difference between neoliberal attitude toward woman ( women as marketable "perishable goods" including such things as sex trade, sex slavery, etc) and Saudi attitude. ..."
Clinton preaches trickle-down feminism, which just like trickle-down economics,/*serves only
the interests of those at the top of the food chain.*/
She essentially established woman and children trafficked rings in Libya and Syria.
In any case here is not much difference between neoliberal attitude toward woman ( women as
marketable "perishable goods" including such things as sex trade, sex slavery, etc) and Saudi attitude.
Bill Clinton was once again asked to justify the Violent Crime Control
and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 on Friday at an event for Hillary
Clinton's campaign in Paterson, New Jersey. An audience member
questioned Clinton about the efficacy of the bill.
"
Why did you put more people in prison?
" an audience member
asked the former president.
The ex-president tried to highlight the
benefits of the bill. The bill is frequently blamed for a spike in
incarceration rates which opened a Pandora's Box of other problems
such as prison overcrowding, broken communities and incentivizing
states to build prisons and increase sentences.
It was written and signed by Clinton and endorsed by the vast majority of Congress – including
Hillary Clinton's primary rival, Bernie Sanders.
Clinton pointed out a few things about the bill. The first is that it included a provision that
exempted first time drug offenders from certain mandatory minimum sentencing. Mandatory minimum
sentencing is controversial in the US, and the federal government has begun encouraging the
repeal of stringent sentencing laws and has granted clemency to non-violent offenders.
In 1995, Clinton signed a bill that made the sentencing for dealing crack cocaine much longer
than for dealing powdered cocaine. The "100 to 1" method of sentencing crack cocaine dealers as
opposed to powder cocaine dealers made dealing a single gram of crack cocaine equal to dealing
100 grams of powdered cocaine under Clinton's law.
At the time, Clinton
defended
the measure saying, "
trafficking in crack, and the violence it fosters has a
devastating impact on communities across America, especially inner-city communities.
"
... ... ...
In July 2015, at a NAACP convention, Clinton said, "
I signed a
bill that made the problem worse. And I want to admit it.
"
When
Clinton left office in 2001, the nation had the highest incarceration
rate in the world, Salon reported.
Clinton defended himself on Friday by arguing that the 1994 bill
led to the lowest crime rate in 25 years, a 33 year low in murder
rates and a 46 year low in illegal gun deaths. However, FactCheck.org
has
accused
Bill Clinton of exaggerating the effects of the bill,
saying, "
Independent analyses have found that the bill had a
modest effect on crime rates.
"
However, Clinton also defended the higher sentencing by claiming
that "
we could not pass that bill without the higher sentencing.
"
Politico
reported
that the person who asked the question was escorted out
of the event, to which Clinton said, "
he went off mad because I
told him the truth. That's not good for any of us. Nobody's right all
the time. Nobody
."
"... There are really two prongs to this investigation: the sensitive handling or mishandling of classified information in the form of emails. But there is also another aspect of this and that is the significant monies that came to the coffers of the Clinton Foundation while Mrs. Clinton held a high cabinet-level political position. And it is a violation of the law for political officials to accept money. This is somewhat of a grey area. But there are indications that part of the investigation is not only looking at the handling or mishandling of classified information… but, on the second hand, is an individual in an official capacity accepting money or favors on behalf of their position with the US government. ..."
"... When I was an FBI agent and I worked overseas, I was not able to accept anything that had a value over 25 dollars… So, there is a big question about not only the handling of information, but also the accepting of gifts. There has been anecdotal information that upwards of $57 million went into the coffers of the Clinton Foundation while Mrs. Clinton was Secretary of State. So, that is something that the investigation will look at. ..."
"... Could that be an obstruction of justice? Interesting to see. Were emails destroyed? That is a violation of the law in terms of destruction of evidence ..."
"... I think there is a gross negligence of the handling of classified information that protects our national security. ..."
"... They take their orders from the owners of government just like all federal employees. Military included! Oaths mean NOTHING to US government employees. You swear to uphold the constitution and when or if you do you end up like snowden or manning. You collect your pay and your benefits and do as your told otherwise your dealt with like they deal with any citizen that disobeys, they destroy your life one way or another. ..."
"... The handling of Hillary's email is the least of her crimes. She was essentially running a regime change for profit using the US military during her tenure as secretary of state. ..."
"... I had not heard the regime-change-for-profit angle. Fascinating. Hideous. ..."
"... Hillary Clinton taking advantage of her power in such a blatant way setting up a home server for a top US office is beyond poor judgement. That says she believes she is above the law. ..."
"... Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are both narcissistic without forethought. They both do what they want and either get out of the way or suffer the cc consequences. They both believe they can do anything. The sad part is the other political powers are either an ally or afraid of them. The media, politicians, corporate executives are either afraid of them or part of corruption. ..."
"... We'll see if the FBI has any balls or just talk. ..."
"... ...and yet, Donald Trump did not set-up a private server system just to get around the rules of being Secretary of State. Why find a roundabout way to have Trump share blame with Clinton for her dishonest behavior and poor choices? He wasn't the one who made them: She did. ..."
"... Their shady deals were made behind closed doors with the only witnesses being those who would, themselves, be implicated if word got out. I'm currently reading "Clinton Cash" and it just blows my mind. Those two are the absolute epitome of corruption. ..."
"... i dont know about this if she has jeopadised national security then she is no different to bradley manning the fbi plays no favourites although bradley manning did everyone a favour by what he did but hillary did it to put herself into the white house ..."
Clinton faces questioning over her handling of classified information in emails, as well as funds
received by the Clinton Foundation while she was in high office, James Conway former FBI agent and
Managing Director of Global Intel Strategies told RT.
CBS News reported that Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton will be interviewed by the
FBI in the near future regarding messages sent and received on her private email server.
RT: What kind of steps may we expect to see taken by the FBI with regards to Hillary Clinton
and her email controversy? Will she receive some sort of special privilege due to her high-ranking
position?
James Conway: I do know the protocols and standards the FBI follows when it comes to serious
violations of the law. First of all, the FBI is an apolitical organization that has nothing to do
with politics. Agents of the FBI and support employees of the FBI take an oath to uphold the law.
And that's regardless of who may have committed violations of the law.
It is immaterial whether it is the First Lady, or it is the lady down the street, or it is the
mayor of a city - it doesn't matter. The FBI has a long history of enforcing the law. And sometimes
people who are subjects to those investigations happen to be high-level political officials. So,
it has happened a number of times. Just two years ago David Petraeus was charged, former general
and former Director of the CIA was charged with violations of the law as it pertains to the protection
or the passage of sensitive, classified information which is somewhat the subject of this ongoing
investigation or the allegations that have been brought forward against the former First Lady and
current candidate for the president of the US.
RT: Does the investigation pose a threat to Clinton's presidential aspirations?
JC: Political commentators have said this. The FBI has said nothing. The FBI's investigation
is extremely complex. They are looking at years of activity; they are looking at thousands and thousands
of transactions in cyberspace. There are really two prongs to this investigation: the sensitive
handling or mishandling of classified information in the form of emails. But there is also another
aspect of this and that is the significant monies that came to the coffers of the Clinton Foundation
while Mrs. Clinton held a high cabinet-level political position. And it is a violation of the law
for political officials to accept money. This is somewhat of a grey area. But there are indications
that part of the investigation is not only looking at the handling or mishandling of classified information…
but, on the second hand, is an individual in an official capacity accepting money or favors on behalf
of their position with the US government.
When I was an FBI agent and I worked overseas, I was not able to accept anything that had a value
over 25 dollars… So, there is a big question about not only the handling of information, but also
the accepting of gifts. There has been anecdotal information that upwards of $57 million went into
the coffers of the Clinton Foundation while Mrs. Clinton was Secretary of State. So, that is something
that the investigation will look at.
RT: How serious are the charges that Hillary Clinton faces?
JC: Personally, I know that the handling of classified information is extremely sensitive. And
it is viewed by the courts and by national security folks […] as extremely valuable and important.
And those who violate those laws and rules are subject to severe penalties. And sometimes, in the
case of David Petraeus, he passed some sensitive information, not official documents, but in the
forms of notes to Paula Broadwell who was writing a book about him […]. In this particular case that
everybody is talking about in America, because it is within the context of the ongoing presidential
campaign here, Hillary Clinton didn't use a State Department closed email system […] Mrs. Clinton
had her own public server and that is how she was communicating with her associates and others within
the government. To me, that's a clear problem. She has been asked to provide all of that traffic
and there have been instances during the course of the investigation that maybe she didn't hand over
all those documents, all of that email traffic. Could that be an obstruction of justice? Interesting
to see. Were emails destroyed? That is a violation of the law in terms of destruction of evidence.
So, there are a lot of problems here. I think there is a gross negligence of the handling of
classified information that protects our national security.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author
and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
@PeteSanger, ·8 May
"Agents of the FBI and support employees of the FBI take an oath to uphold the law."
If that were the case then they would have reopened the investigation of the so called terrorist
attacks on 9/11.
They take their orders from the owners of government just like all federal employees. Military
included! Oaths mean NOTHING to US government employees. You swear to uphold the constitution
and when or if you do you end up like snowden or manning. You collect your pay and your benefits
and do as your told otherwise your dealt with like they deal with any citizen that disobeys, they
destroy your life one way or another.
@Emmett647, 8 May
The handling of Hillary's email is the least of her crimes. She was essentially running
a regime change for profit using the US military during her tenure as secretary of state.
@LouCoatney -> @Emmett647, ·8 May
I had not heard the regime-change-for-profit angle. Fascinating. Hideous.
@CarolOrcutt, 8 May
Hillary Clinton taking advantage of her power in such a blatant way setting up a home server
for a top US office is beyond poor judgement. That says she believes she is above the law.
There is a pattern of her apologizing after she makes thoughtless decisions and many when
she was Secretary of State and first lady. Her holding these positions does not make her a better
candidate. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are both narcissistic without forethought. They
both do what they want and either get out of the way or suffer the cc consequences. They both
believe they can do anything. The sad part is the other political powers are either an ally or
afraid of them. The media, politicians, corporate executives are either afraid of them or part
of corruption.
We'll see if the FBI has any balls or just talk.
@MidnightAndLulu -> @CarolOrcutt, 9 May
...and yet, Donald Trump did not set-up a private server system just to get around the
rules of being Secretary of State. Why find a roundabout way to have Trump share blame with Clinton
for her dishonest behavior and poor choices? He wasn't the one who made them: She did.
@Andy007, ·8 May
On RT German I read an article (inspired by Seymour Hersh), that Hillary Clinton supported
an secret CIA operation in Libya in 2012, to let steal sarin gas stocks from Gaddafi Regime, to
bring it to Syria, and gave it to islamist rebels, who use it to kill thousands of Syrian people.
In the world's press Asssad was the mass murderer, the offender. I'm not sure if there are some
evidence. But is it clever to support Hillary Clinton, when there are so sensible allegations
against her? Perhaps it is gossip perhaps not. For the Democrats it could be painful, if Hillary
get president and someday in future she must resign, when she get an indictment and must go into
prison. For the Democrats is now the time to clear if it's true or not. Sure I like Bernie Sanders
more than Hillary Clinton, he is a good man. But this is not the point. If Mrs. Clinton was part
of a criminal mission the Democrats must clear it, or bear up the consequences in future.
@ChristinaJones, 9 May
Unfortunately I doubt anything will come of this. They (both Bill and Hillary) have been able
to successfully skirt the law for a very long time now. They have amassed power and wealth by
exploiting their positions and connections and have committed their offenses and done their dirty
deeds right under everyone's noses. It disgusts me. I'm sure there are those in law enforcement
who would love to take them down, are fully aware of their crimes, but, alas, our legal system
requires definitive proof of any wrongdoings regardless of how obvious they are. There would have
to be a recording of a conversation or an email (perhaps among 30,000 deleted?) That proves, without
a doubt, that promises were made and delivered on in exchange for "contributions". The Clintons
aren't stupid, especially Hillary.
Their shady deals were made behind closed doors with the only witnesses being those who
would, themselves, be implicated if word got out. I'm currently reading "Clinton Cash" and it
just blows my mind. Those two are the absolute epitome of corruption. Maybe, just maybe,
this whole email situation is the break many have been looking for. If there is any justice at
all in America the Clintons will be exposed for all they truly are and brought up on charges,
convicted. I have my doubts though. I think what's most sickening is how they (Hillary) has exploited
Americans gullibility by playing the victim in this tiresome "that evil GOP is always out to get
me!" narrative. Wake up, people! The proof is there, all you have to do is look. I'm not anywhere
close to a Republican and I see it. That's because I bothered to look.
@WayneJohnson -> @ChristinaJones, 9 May
i dont know about this if she has jeopadised national security then she is no different
to bradley manning the fbi plays no favourites although bradley manning did everyone a favour
by what he did but hillary did it to put herself into the white house
@Venom88, 8 May
The wicked witch of the west. Check how's she walks it's so odd...
"... Wasserman is a great replacement for him as a stunningly inept strategist. "In the summer of 1994, Coelho was the principal Democratic political strategist during the run-up to the mid-term Congressional elections. Officially, he was Senior Advisor to the Democratic National Committee. ..."
"... The Republican Party won a landslide victory in the fall congressional elections, capturing both the House and Senate by commanding margins." ..."
"... I was trying to be "polite" to temper the rage I feel at these dishonest people who pretend they even comprehend the word progressive and neatly sidestep the role the Koch Brothers played. ..."
Bill and Obama seem to follow the strategy to lose the house and senate. But the smug Clinton
acolytes blame the voters. Always deflect blame eh?
Wasserman is a great replacement for him as a stunningly inept strategist. "In the summer
of 1994, Coelho was the principal Democratic political strategist during the run-up to the mid-term
Congressional elections. Officially, he was Senior Advisor to the Democratic National Committee.
The Republican Party won a landslide victory in the fall congressional elections, capturing
both the House and Senate by commanding margins."
I was trying to be "polite" to temper the rage I feel at these dishonest people who pretend
they even comprehend the word progressive and neatly sidestep the role the Koch Brothers played.
Now we get more of the same. I am part of the 1% financially but I was raised to understand
it was all going to get better for the poor.
But yeah must have been Fox news who MADE Bill get into bed with these creeps. I can't sit
back smugly and proclaim I am alright jack I have 4 kids and I am horrified the world they will
inherit.
"... There is a constant whining from the Clinton side about Fox news smears etc. One would believe that with all her supposed experience, she lacked the imagination to see the consequences of her actions with the email. Myself, this is just one indicator among many that she has learned nothing, her experience is flawed as her judgement is time and time again flawed. ..."
"... The Kochs helped finance the Democratic Leadership Committee with Bill, Hill, McAuliffe, Tony Coelho (remember him?) and the rest of the "Third Way" Democrats who whored themselves to the first wave of christian-jihadist-wacko GOP congressmen swept into power in 1994, and it was all downhill from there, with the Republicans writing draconian legislation, the Dems rolling over, and Dirty Little Billy claiming it as a Great Leap Forward. ..."
"... Much as I despise Drumpf it worked for him, he openly railed against the GOP establishment which fought him to the bitter end with their last champions pulling out of the race. The people had spoken (most of it crazy talk), but the Democrats can't ignore the anti-Clinton sentiment. Bernie was a nobody at the beginning because all the focus was on Clinton, but more coverage was given to Bernie and people got to know what he stood for things have changed. ..."
"... For example, what about the deregulation of Wall Street by President Clinton and the economic crisis eight years later, that after the next eight years Hillary Clinton took over half a million dollars from Goldman Sachs for three speeches? - Unintended consequence! ..."
"... What about voting for the Iraq war at a time when Hillary Clinton was the leader of the Democrats in the US Congress and the loss of people and money that followed after that, not to mention the rise of terrorism as a consequence? - Unintended consequences, too! ..."
"... What about turning Libya into a failed state, and exclamation, "We came, we saw, he [Gaddafi] died!", after which four US embassy staff, including Ambassador Stevens died, and after which Clinton lied to the American public about events that led to their deaths? - Unintended consequences! ..."
"... And, last but not least, what about NAFTA and other international trade agreements, all of them supported by Clinton to this day, although deprived and still depriving millions of American workers from their jobs? - Unintended consequence! ..."
"... I agree, Hillary is worse, and scarier than Trump. Hillary will justify her interventionist wars and terrible trade deals with slick, plastic, professional language which will fool some people into thinking she knows what she is doing. ..."
"... A Shillary in denial... Do you need the NYT or Guardian to report it to make it true? Many of the biggest companies in the US-the biggest polluters, the biggest pharmaceutical companies, the biggest insurance companies, the biggest financial companies-gave to the Clinton foundation while she was Secretary of State and then they lobbied Secretary Clinton and the state department for "favors." Even foreign governments have given to the foundation, including that stalwart of democratic principles Saudi Arabia, who gave at least $10 million… Then magically they had a $26 billion plane deal with Boeing. ..."
"... Alleged pragmatist, but more likely Hillary will actually be a pushover on social and economic issues and a hawk on foreign policy. She is more of a Republican than Trump. ..."
"... The main point is, Hillary has no chance of winning against Trump. She is already trying to get a cadre of neocon Republicans to support her, thinking she could get swing a portion of Republicans to support her, forgetting why she is so despised by a large segment of Democrats and majority of independents. It is her default cling to neocon interventionist, and corporate base of support that causes it. She is tone deaf, ignorant and arrogant. Unless, we Democrats stop her now Trump will beat her handily. I have no doubt about it. ..."
Ammunition : considerations that can be used to support one's
case in debate
There is a constant whining from the Clinton side about Fox news
smears etc. One would believe that with all her supposed experience, she
lacked the imagination to see the consequences of her actions with the email.
Myself, this is just one indicator among many that she has learned nothing,
her experience is flawed as her judgement is time and time again flawed.
She has handed the FBI and Trump AMMUNITION. Not me, not you. She created
this mess. Her supporters have 100% certainty that this particular issue
is not an issue. They hand wave away the FBI. They shut down any discussion
as just another smear manufactured out of thin air.
Probity : the quality of having strong moral principles; honesty
and decency
We all get to decide each candidates probity. That I find her lacking
is based on her actions alone, not on some lens provided by Fox news. If
she were honest, she would admit that there is a risk. She states there
is no risk. If her chickens come home to roost, we get Trump. Can I get
odds from a bookie on the outcome of the FBI investigation? A genuine question
as so many here revel in quoting the odds quoted by bookies.
So lets gamble. Let's get to the race track and study form and history
and see if the bookies have fully transparent info on all the factors leading
to a win or loss. How have we come to be here? That we are is a sign of
the dysfunction we live in politically. Clinton is now immune to all present
and future critical thinking because ...... because she was smeared in the
pass. Free pass. Sometimes ..... sometimes the King is actually naked and
no one cares to call attention to that reality.
The Kochs helped finance the Democratic Leadership Committee with
Bill, Hill, McAuliffe, Tony Coelho (remember him?) and the rest of the "Third
Way" Democrats who whored themselves to the first wave of christian-jihadist-wacko
GOP congressmen swept into power in 1994, and it was all downhill from there,
with the Republicans writing draconian legislation, the Dems rolling over,
and Dirty Little Billy claiming it as a Great Leap Forward.
"Shock victory" is another example of lazy, factually incorrect mass media
journalism. Bernie ran an on the ground campaign in Indiana for 2 moths
prior to yesterday's primary win. I should know, as our family did volunteer
door-to-door canvasing for the first time over a couple weekends. We also
attended the rally on Monday and it was great!
Don't give up Bernie supporters, as we have momentum! Bernie's an honest
man with fair and just principles. Our country needs such a leader and not
another paid-off crony or deranged man-child.
Again as always a deflection from the real point, documented over and
over as to the long tanking DLC led strategy of leading with Southern States.
Nothing to do with blacks, everything to do with Southern Conservatives.
But yes, as always intellectually "honest". Innuendo. You choose to ignore
the systems and structures put in place for reasons. I choose to see them.
People like you choose to ignore the DLC history and the entanglement
with the Koch Brothers who were so so happy Bill Clinton pushed the DNC
into Republican territory, while we are all supposed to pretend that because
the GOP is so bad bad bad, it gives a free pass to the DNC for the right
wards ever rightwards shifting and the bandying of progressiveness on social
issues that cost nothing, and the true position of the modern DLC as a money
machine, with a purpose of existing to garner power.
All you "progressives" love to talk about angry white man yet have zero
answer to :
""In 2010, the median wealth, or net worth, for black families was $4,900,
compared to median wealth for whites of $97,000. Blacks are nearly twice
as likely as whites to have zero or negative net worth-33.9 percent compared
to 18.6 percent."
The fact that the above enrages me matters not to you, as you have your
BernieBro Angry White man meme to deflect from real discussion about solutions.
The real solution starts with getting the politicians beholden to the voters
alone, not to corporate interests. That is Job One. Once that blockade is
removed, then we can move on to poverty and violence as immutable links
and solving them. 85% ...... 85% of the American people agree with this
action. is it difficult? Yes. Wont happen however if we demand on smug entitled
people throwing deflections and memes all over the place. "I am all right
Jack, fuck you" should be the bumper-sticker of the Clinton supporters.
Much as I despise Drumpf it worked for him, he openly railed against
the GOP establishment which fought him to the bitter end with their last
champions pulling out of the race. The people had spoken (most of it crazy
talk), but the Democrats can't ignore the anti-Clinton sentiment. Bernie
was a nobody at the beginning because all the focus was on Clinton, but
more coverage was given to Bernie and people got to know what he stood for
things have changed.
The question for the Democrats is who is more likely to win the General
against Drumpf? Who is more likely to win over the swing votes of those
not affiliated to a party?
The message is load and clear there is a lot of anti-establishment sentiment
out there and Clinton is firmly seen as part of it.
Drumpf having won his first leg of the race will no doubt moderate his rhetoric
to appeal to a broader audience and look to grab a larger portion of the
swing votes.
In the bigger picture, Sanders is more likely to succeed against Drumof
than the institutional Clinton.
If you ask, what is the purpose of the election, the answer is, elections
should be used for two things:
First, that some politicians will be rewarded by the voters, who
will entrust the government to them.
And second, but no less important, that some politicians will be
punished by the voters for their past mistakes, in a way that will refuse
to give them their votes. So, this second function of the elections
is perhaps even more important because it ensures that politicians are
held accountable for their previous actions.
Now, if you look at these elections, you will notice that this is totally
turned upside down in the case of Hillary Clinton.
Her husband has created mass incarceration, and she, as the first lady,
was the main promoter of it. And now she says, "Oops, that was an 'unintended
consequence'! That is to say, over two million people in prison, many of
which serve a sentence for minor offenses is an 'unintended consequence'''
OK, fine, but what about the fact that she has got the money from the
prison lobby?
If the first was an 'unintended consequence', the latter is certainly
not. So these are the things for which in every country on earth some politician
would lose any chance to enter the next government. Provided that the politicians
are held accountable for their previous actions, which is obviously not
the case in the US.
And, this is just one of the things for which Clinton can be held accountable.
For example, what about the deregulation of Wall Street by President
Clinton and the economic crisis eight years later, that after the next
eight years Hillary Clinton took over half a million dollars from Goldman
Sachs for three speeches? - Unintended consequence!
What about voting for the Iraq war at a time when Hillary Clinton
was the leader of the Democrats in the US Congress and the loss of people
and money that followed after that, not to mention the rise of terrorism
as a consequence? - Unintended consequences, too!
What about turning Libya into a failed state, and exclamation,
"We came, we saw, he [Gaddafi] died!", after which four US embassy staff,
including Ambassador Stevens died, and after which Clinton lied to the
American public about events that led to their deaths? - Unintended
consequences!
And, last but not least, what about NAFTA and other international
trade agreements, all of them supported by Clinton to this day, although
deprived and still depriving millions of American workers from their
jobs? - Unintended consequence!
So, as you can see, this is quite a long list, but probably there's more
of it that is not listed here, yet. And it will be even more of such "unintended
consequences" if Hillary Clinton will be elected for the US president.
Hence why I said 'some form of revolt' instead of 'burn the party down rawr'.
The party establishment firmly put themselves behind Clinton early on. This
is indisputable. 40+ percent of primary voters went against this in some
form. Some will still welcome Clinton, some will tolerate her, some will
walk, but the act of voting against establishment preference is already
some form of revolt.
You:"his acolytes will just come up with another dumb ass
reason "
You: "Why didn't you just give it directly to Trump? "
You: "Bernie, when all's said and done, is a fraud."
You: "I never did trust politicians who hold mass rallies." ( Nice Nazi
smear)
You: " are already starting to misquote Bernie, and talk about how it's
all the fault of "Jewish bankers" Smearing Sanders for your relatives jewish
Smears
You: "She doesn't pretend she's a damn rock star" Smear
You: " I take it you are a Trump supporter now" Personal smear to me.
You: "nihilistic" over and over again
You: deleted reference ot Pope as child molester
You: "His trip to kiss the Pope's ass was disgusting pandering" So their
shared stance on global warming is irrelevant?
You: "the ass of the world's most powerful homophobe"
You: "But Bernie has always been a fraud" ( multiple repetitions of this)
On and on....How self righteous are you?
"personal insults from you"
Really? What insults? Intellectually lazy? That is my assessment of you.
Not intended as an insult but an assessment of who you are and how you think.
Based on reading all of your posts. I pay attention. I find it interesting
to figure out motivations.
I agree, Hillary is worse, and scarier than Trump. Hillary will justify
her interventionist wars and terrible trade deals with slick, plastic, professional
language which will fool some people into thinking she knows what she is
doing.
Hillary would be 8 more years of the Corporate Oligarchy cementing its
hold on our process. Trump might last 4 years... then we can elect a real
progressive.
SoS is more extrapolation, based off the weakness of her credentials heading
into the position. It should be remembered that her lack of experience in
foreign policy was one of Obama's attack points in 2008, so to have him
suddenly turn around and name her SoS is a bit odd. Specifically:
The choice of Mrs. Clinton pleased many in the Democratic establishment
who admire her strength and skills, and they praised Mr. Obama for putting
the rancor of the campaign behind him. "Senator Clinton is a naturally gifted
diplomat and would be an inspired choice if she is chosen by President-elect
Obama as secretary of state," said Warren Christopher, who held that job
under her husband.
But it could also disappoint many of Mr. Obama's supporters, who worked
hard to have him elected instead of Mrs. Clinton and saw him as a vehicle
for changing Washington. Mr. Obama argued during the primaries that it was
time to move beyond the Clinton era and in particular belittled her claims
to foreign policy experience as a first lady who circled the globe."
What -is- clear is that she got $17.5 million in personal cash out of
the deal (Obama agreed to cover campaign debts, she lent her campaign 17.5
million).
Don't be lulled into a false "horse race" depiction of an especially HISTORICALLY
IMPORTANT, planetary-civilization-survival moment. A predominantly, establishment,
bankster-owned media, are pushing this epic election of "Main Street vrs
wall street", as just another election. Wrong! A fictiion! Lies!
Over 60% of us didn't vote last election, BECAUSE, only liars and apologists
for "empire" oligarchs were running. Today, we see Bernie and perhaps Dr.
Stein of the Greens. Only "The Bern" gets media minimal coverage, because
he is running as an "Democrat". Indiana and other "open" primaries show,
time and time again, the rigged nature of a duopoly electoral fraud. The
establishment, wall street banksters and their allies DO NOT, WILL NOT let
Bernie win. Do the math and ONLY BERNIE CAN BEAT TRUMP! SO QUIT THE HORSE
RACE BS and see the BERN! And jut maybe we will have an inhabitable planet
for our grandchildren that is fun to live upon.
Putting it another way... Bernie has made them all look like chumps. They
say they cannot get elected without big corporate dollars. Bernie did not
sell out, and he raised money easily. He makes the rest of the lousy corrupt
bunch look like fools.
Hillary did not concede in 2008 until after ALL the states had voted. Even
then, she waited 4 days. What happened between the last primary and 4 days
later, when she finally conceded? NEGOTIATIONS. She laid down the terms
under which she would support Obama -- all goodies for Hillary, because
Hillary Is For Hillary, period.
Bernie will use the clout we give him to negotiate on behalf of THE PEOPLE
at the Democratic Convention. That's the difference between him and self-serving
Hillary.
Looking forward to voting for Bernie in California on June 7. Meanwhile,
praying for the FBI to indict Hillary.
Yet for all her long name recognition, her second national presidential
campaign, the superdelegates lined up before Sanders announced, with the
cunning long term strategy of the DNC "southern firewall" designed to favour
conservative candidates, despite all the power players endorsements, despite
all the Superpac's, she still is not going to arrive at the convention with
the required delegate count for victory. What does that tell us? I know
what it tells me. It tells me that there are a lot of people who want more
of a continuation of Obama Change. They want real change.
So sure, she is "winning" a battle in a longer running war of ideas.
Let's see how this plays out over the next 8 years.
Kicking his ass by the way would have been if she reached the required
pledged delegates months ago. She could not. Complacency is not a great
stance in these times.
Like Hillary has done since 2008? Helping the same old hack politicians,
using her cash and her name and yet the people refused to come out and reverse
the largest loss of Democratic seats in modern history? Yeah, blame the
voters, you have them all pegged. it's never the fault of the politicians
is it, it is the lazy voters. Well there is another theory that explains
Trump and Sanders: They are sick of the same bullshit put out by the DNC
and the GOP. Taking Ted Kennedys seat as an example the safest DNC seat
in the nation, decades it sat with the DNC and as soon as he dies, the DNC
selects one of your hack ersatz progressives, throws Bill Clinton and Hillary
and bags of cash and STILL loses the seat. Was there a message there worth
listening to? Not to you, you blame the voters. No no no never blame the
DNC. Blame the voters.
The voters perhaps is tired of what is presented to them as a voting
solution. So in the end, your way of doing things has led to voter frustration
and here we have Trump. There is a lesson there. Listen or dot listen, but
the people are venting there frustration. Trump is a populist disaster,
but he is a symptom of a dysfunctional system that needs revision and revision
now. But nah! Lets just throw cash into a cesspit of dysfunction.
Also you sit smugly ignoring the FACTS of Clinton laundering State contributions
back into her campaign, leaving little or nothing for State DNC budgets.
Ah, you say, this is a smear from Fox news. Um. No. Do you think we are
idiots? You must. I assure you we are not idiots. Good luck in November.
You will need it.
Bernie hasn't attacked Hillary directly since New York, and he had every
right to go after her then, because she was on full offense against Bernie
at that time, too, so enough with the innocent victim garbage.
Bernie always does better in open primaries because of the Independent voters.
They are more likely to vote Trump in the general election in my opinion.
He is going to start hammering Clinton now he is the nominee.
Bernie should stay in right 'til the end in case anything ever happens with
one of the two Clinton investigations. I don't see anything happening now
though as the private server investigation appears to have stalled.
Regarding the second (the Clinton Foundation) the Supreme Court is about
to legalise political corruption with the McDonnell case. If that happens
democracy is effectively suspended anyway and this is a pointless reality
show farce. Policies will be decided by the highest bidder. How can she
have broken any laws if there aren't any?
Good news for women's rights under Clinton though - whilst her Syria
no-fly-zone might start WW3, women will probably get to be drafted as well
as men...
'Lawyer Hillary who is trained in well being a lawyer she even was a
defense lawyer helping someone she believed was guilty of rapeing a 13 year
old girl who has said Hillary "put her thru hell"."
"someone she believed was guilty of rapeing a 13 year old girl"
Interesting. Clinton discussed what she was thinking at the time with
you?
Or are you suggesting that some accused people should not get legal representation?
I'm intrigued by the "put her through hell" portion of it. Especially
as the case was plea bargained out and never went to trial.
It is effortless to identify the ardent obtuse "Hillary Clinton and Donald
Trump Supporters". Their verbiage and responses are always predicated on
emotion and fiction versus an intellectual discourse based on factual information
– Quite Like the Superficial Candidates that they blindly support. The 1%
Billionaire Oligarchy Ruling Classes Owned Mass Media Outlets is intentionally
protecting the Outed Racists Donald Trump and his female Clone Hillary Clinton
from Public Scrutiny. They are salivating Like Pavlov's Dog for their "Ultimate
Political Reality Show – The Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton Presidential
Race" waiting to cash-in and profit as they stage and promote their "False
Democracy".
Knowledge = Power = Real Freedom..!
1. This is why "Anonymous" Noble, Righteous, True American Heroes and Freedom
Fighters are stepping in to fill the Fourth Estate void abdicated by America's
Billionaire Owned Media to provide the 99% the Truth.
Anonymous – Message to Hillary Clinton: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTMaIX_JPE4
Anonymous – Message to Donald Trump: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ciavyc6bE7A
2. CBS CEO and Chief Leslie Moonves: Comments he made at an investor conference
last month when he said, "The money is rolling in, and this is fun." Added
Moonves: "They're not even talking about issues; they're throwing bombs
at each other, and I think the advertising (revenue $) reflects that. This
is going to be a very good year for us (CBS). Sorry, it's a terrible thing
to say, but bring it on, Donald."
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/daily-show-host-trevor-noah-877273
3. Why isn't the Media asking Hillary Clinton about the Podesta group in
the Panama papers working with the corrupt, Kremlin-run Sberbank, and the
two shell companies setup by Bill Clinton (WJC, LLC) and Hillary Clinton
(ZFS Holdings, LLC) at a Delaware address (1209 North Orange Street Wilmington,
Delaware) that are the same address as 285,000 other companies, many of
which were in the Panama papers and linked to laundering and tax avoidance
schemes?.
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/apr/25/delaware-tax-loophole-1209-north-orange-trump-clinton?CMP=share_btn_fb
4. Why isn't the Media asking Hillary Clinton to Release the Transcripts
from her numerous $275,000.00 Speeches to Goldman Sachs and the Other Wall
Street Banks? https://youtu.be/3UkfsEeHUcg
5. Why don't they ask Hillary Clinton if she would Prosecute her and her
husband Bill Clinton's former "Trusted Deputy" Rahm Emanuel the current
Mayor of Chicago for establishing a "Gulag" on American soil which allowed
the Chicago police to covertly detain and torture more than 7000 people
at the Secret Interrogation Center that completely ignored the American
"Constitution" and the Bill of Rights at Homan Square?
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2015/02/behind-the-disappeared-of-chicagos-homan-square/385964
/
6. Hillary Clinton lying for 13 minutes straight- Hillary, the inevitable
liar: https://youtu.be/-dY77j6uBHI
7. Hillary Clinton: A Career Criminal: https://youtu.be/kypl1MYuKDY
8. Secretary Clinton Comments on the Passing of Robert Byrd her friend and
mentor who is a documented Racist and KKK member: https://youtu.be/ryweuBVJMEA
9. Bill Clinton ATTEMPTS to Justify Robert Byrd's KKK Membership: https://youtu.be/8Fg3XNTMzNo
10. Hillary Clinton & NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio Make Awkward RACIST Joke
About CP TIME Colored People Time https://youtu.be/pP3syBu4ZDM
11. Black Lives Matter protesters repeatedly interrupt Bill Clinton in Philadelphia:
https://youtu.be/xRrVI5gHVyo
Can You Say Hypocrisy?
The only Authentic and Honest Candidate is Bernie Sanders who wants to return
America back into a Transparent Citizen Accountable Democracy for the 100%.
This is why the Bernie Sanders Army of Noble and Righteous Citizens-the
99% will never Vote or Support either of the Illegitimate 1% Billionaire
Anointed Candidates Like Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, Who Represent
the Retention of a False Oligarchy Democracy and Everything That the Decent
Noble and Righteous Citizens Despise, Compulsive Pathological Lying, Narcissism,
and Insatiable Greed.
"So your plan is for Bernie's opponent to get arrested? "
Not my plan. Each citizen in this country has a set of was that rule
what they can and cannot do. Even Clinton. I have spent a long time explaining
my logic of why I believe she has broken various laws. I as a citizen appreciate
the FOIA. If you cannot handle the facts of her actions, then what can I
say? To me it does not bode well how Clinton comports herself. To you it
is not an issue. You choose to ignore the reality of a real and extended
FBI investigation. Obama rules the DoJ and the FBI. If it were indeed only
a political smear, then he has the power to force Comey to resign. It is
not a function of me, it is a function of laws. The investigation not some
fevered Fox News plot as much as you with it to be. I understand completely
what she has done. I understand why she did what she did.
Regarding the bolstering the party, it seems it does not bother you the
games her suprpac has done with bending the rules just up to the breaking
point.
Frankly, sanders on the back of this, and his supporters need to build
an organisation that can put up true progressives. Your opinion is team
based, you accept year after year the shift of the DNC orphaning in to centrist
republicans. Your choice. I choose not to support this. So that he refused
to fund more the same old hack politicians is fine by me. He has over his
career supported the DNC with vote after vote after vote. He had the courage
to offer "democrats" a real choice in the primaries.
You again ignore with your blather about mid term motivations the fact
that the people would not support the DNC in 2010, 2012, and 2014. People
are not stupid, and they see that the change Obama promised is never coming.
We can distill into a simple slogan then rich are getting richer even as
the American worker gets more and more productive, yet their share of the
capitalist pie shrinks and shrinks. The common man sees that Obama care
still is not the solution for him and his family when the average deductions
are over 5000 a year on top of his premiums and the average coverage is
60% of costs when he gets sat the deductible. He is told about Gold Standard
trade agreement negotiated in absolute secrecy, and that cause him discomfort.
Some black families see : ""In 2010, the median wealth, or net worth, for
black families was $4,900, compared to median wealth for whites of $97,000.
Blacks are nearly twice as likely as whites to have zero or negative net
worth-33.9 percent compared to 18.6 percent."" and understand for all of
Clinton's triangulation there is nothing palpable to change that. He sees
she is great at trotting up mothers of dead people and Black people as props
to gain votes, and he see that perhaps Sanders Class based solutions will
help him more, as maybe he is tired of racial divides and knows intuitively
Clinton has no real solution to gun crime, spurred on by poverty, nor solutions
to poverty itself.
So get all huffy about the FBI investigation. I lived though the turmoil
of Nixon and before his reelection I predicted that he would suffer, as
my gut feeling led me to believe he was involved, that he had dirty hands.
Continue to believe that genuine logical conclusions and issues are only
a rehash of Fix news when they are not. Cheap and nasty way to deflect any
and all valid criticism. Is Sanders perfect? far from it, but I believe
I know what he stands for and how he thinks.
"Bernie, when all's said and done, is a fraud."
Funny but I have concluded that Clinton is a fraud. But you are welcome
to vote as you wish. In the end, your fear of Trump? The risk is real and
palpable that she will cause disarray to the party if the FBI fins what
I believe is obvious, and the risk is her handing the election to Trump.
To you? You don't care. You cannot and will not see the risk, preferring
to hide like a gormless child behind tortured smear theories rather than
standing up as an adult and properly assessing the real risks to the Democratic.
All the pieces of what she did are there if you care to look. But nah!
You are lazy intellectually and it is easier to blame Fox news than to actually
look and ponder and conclude the evidence. As are most of the vociferous
Clinton fans here. Intellectually lazy.
Hillary wins closed primaries, where only the tribalized party faithful
participate (and voter suppression and other shenanigans run rampant). Bernie
wins open primaries and brings in millions of new voters. Democrats like
me, Independents, even Republicans vote for Bernie.
She loses on the Big 3 Issues, war, Trade & "corruption" to Trumps words
and Bernie's life walk. Dems are falling into dreamlala math- Hillary will
get women (50%), Blacks (10%) & Hispanics "another 10%). How can she lose.
Start with GOP women at the end will not vote her way. That BLack and
Hispanic percentages are already baked in, and Trump will cater to men,
not just white, on the basis avg men have been getting shafted for 40 years
now.
If there is a terror attack, Trump wins big. If the economy goes down
he wins too.
The tea leaves and tarot readers have been all wrong this election.
& Hill is likely to lose most of the last primaries. Embarassing
"Hillary Clinton will say anything to get elected, and nothing will change."
Barack Obama, 2008
Is that HRC new slogan, "Hillary is shit, but at least she's not as shitty
as Trump"
Actually I think she's worse. The DNC turns a blind eye every time she breaks
the law, and tries to change the rules for her, but both the RNC and DNC
will keep Trump on a short lease.
The Guardian's anti-Bernie agenda is really quite off-putting. Even the
article summary is patronising :
"Despite trailing behind Hillary Clinton in polls, Sanders once again
proved his appeal to disaffected midwest voters by pulling off his 18th
victory of 2016"
The translation is that the Bernie Sanders constituency is backwards
and centred around white males who have lost blue collar jobs to globalisation;
in other words he appeals to people who want to turn back time. The inference
is that Clinton's group is far broader, more cultured and more progressive.
This is patently false. Sanders is popular with young people and with people
who are passionate about politics. Clinton's constituency tends to be older
and more conservative. Clinton is the establishment candidate Sanders is
the beacon of hope.
No surprise there. As is it no surprise that ABC is a "subsidiary" of The
Walt Disney Company, which has been to the right of Attila-the-Hun since
"sweet grandfatherly Walt" himself, who was practically a neo-Nazi politically.
Need proof? Walt's cheerful cooperation with McCarthy's House Un American
Activities persecution of anyone not sharing Adolph Hitler's political persuasion).
Disney's movies have always exhibited that nauseating, fake, treacle
"sweetness" which all fascists use as "cover" for their actual addiction
to fear, hatred, tribalism and Orwellian manipulation.
So we can hardly be "shocked, shocked, shocked" by ABC's gross "news"
bias.
How about NBC? It's been a corporate "investment football," recently
boosted by Comcast from former owner General Electric. You KNOW they're
both dedicated to impartial news reporting, right? HA HA HA
How about CBS? Oh it's owned by Viacom, an "entertainment conglomerate,"
of course dedicated never to sensationalism or deliberate distraction of
the public, but rather, to honest news reporting. Right.
MSNBC? GE + Microsoft. That of course equals total devotion to unbiased
and complete news reporting, even if the news WERE "bad for the Shareholders."
Uh huh. (See the pigs flying by).
CNN? Oh its "daddy" is Time Warner, another paragon of public-spirited
democracy.
Even PBS has fallen. Think that's a "radical statement?" The super right
did a twofer on PBS: (1) cut its government funding so as to make it terrified
and desperate and then (2) gradually brainwashed PBS into actually being
another Corporate PR outlet.
Non-commercial? PBS? IT LIVES ON CORPORATE ADS. And under those deliberately
created survival pressures, even PBS news has collapsed into reporting all
news like it's a trivial sports event - Never Delving Deeper, because its
Corporate Overlords wouldn't like that.
So, welcome to the reality of well-entrenched corporate fascism. For
that, in part, we can thank Ronnie Puppet Reagan's reversal of a former
50-year policy which did not allow non-media corporations to "buy" the news.
May that SOB continue to roast, whereever.
Bernie Sanders would be all of these Corporate Overlord's worst nightmare.
They would have to work "even harder" (yawn, pass the caviar), to blacklist,
cover up, lie about the truth he would tell through his bully pulpit. Thus
all of THEIR media outlets have worked like little beavers to Cancel the
Cancer of Bernie, before he could cause real damage to The Entitled Domain.
Ugh.
The Democrats, just as blind and foolish in their own way as the GOP, will
make a tremendous mistake in nominating HRC. Anyone with an ounce of political
insight can see the coming election is going to be about the revolt of the
middle class against the Establishment and megacorporations that have been
exploiting that class for at least two score years. The politically dimwitted
and somnolent American middle class has finally come to realize how they
have been used and abused and they aren't taking it anymore. They don't
give a damn about foreign policy, single payer or anything else. They are
furious at having been used and hoodwinked and they are in full revolt.
The stupidity of the Democrats, in not seeing this and running an Avatar
of the Establishment, HRC, will make the election very close with a good
chance she will lose. Sanders can out Trump Trump on the anti-Establishment
issue as polls clearly show, but the Dems are going to shoot themselves
in the foot by coronating HRC. With Sanders they could probably sweep Congress
also, but with HRC they will at best keep the White House and possibly a
very narrow majority in the Senate. HRC is a poor campaigner with an unlikable
personality, unlike Elizabeth Warren, and Trump will really mangle Hillary.
With Sanders he will not be able to do that because Sanders easily can out
anti-establishment Trump for, obviously, Trump too is of the 1% like HRC.
There is the slim hope, forlorn as it may be, that the Democrat super-delegates,
most of whom are political pros and thus focused on winning, will see the
light and nominate Sanders. But the Democrats are usually reliably stupid
so look forward to a cliff-hanger in November and very possibly a President
Trump.
Hillary did not concede in 2008 until after the last state finished voting.
The counting was done, and Obama had more delegates. Even then, she waited
4 days before conceding. What went on during those 4 days? Negotiations.
No way a super-predator politician like Hillary Clinton was just
going to give in, without getting something for herself.
Here's what Hillary got out of the deal: a cabinet post,
Obama's promise of support for her next bid in 2016, and Obama's help paying
off her 2008 campaign debt.
The difference with Bernie is that he is not in this for himself. Bernie
stepped up to the plate because America deserves better than another Corporate
Tool Politician. When Bernie goes to the convention, he will not be negotiating
for himself. He will be fighting for ALL OF US. Bernie fights for The People.
This is why we need to give him as many delegates as possible. I look
forward to voting for Bernie in California on June 7. Furthermore, speaking
as a middle aged feminist who has been a registered Dem for 35 years --
I will NEVER vote for Hillary.
A Shillary in denial... Do you need the NYT or Guardian to report it
to make it true? Many of the biggest companies in the US-the biggest polluters,
the biggest pharmaceutical companies, the biggest insurance companies, the
biggest financial companies-gave to the Clinton foundation while she was
Secretary of State and then they lobbied Secretary Clinton and the state
department for "favors." Even foreign governments have given to the foundation,
including that stalwart of democratic principles Saudi Arabia, who gave
at least $10 million… Then magically they had a $26 billion plane deal with
Boeing.
Is that what you're voting for? Does that sound like someone with integrity?
hate to break it to you that this information isn't found only on right
wing websites. Inform yourself. Can't you see why she'd play games with
email? It's all right there, in your face.
Alleged pragmatist, but more likely Hillary will actually be a pushover
on social and economic issues and a hawk on foreign policy. She is more
of a Republican than Trump.
Shock?!!!! How could the American Queen lose right?!!!
The main point is, Hillary has no chance of winning against Trump.
She is already trying to get a cadre of neocon Republicans to support her,
thinking she could get swing a portion of Republicans to support her, forgetting
why she is so despised by a large segment of Democrats and majority of independents.
It is her default cling to neocon interventionist, and corporate base of
support that causes it. She is tone deaf, ignorant and arrogant. Unless,
we Democrats stop her now Trump will beat her handily. I have no doubt about
it.
While there are plenty of differences (too many for a single column), I am more than happy to
share a few nuggets of wisdom I learned post-election with the Gentleman from Texas to help him readjust
to life off-the-trail.
Consider a hobby, but choose carefully
Not cards. Maybe you'll be invited to play cards with some of the boys. But I would caution you
that now is not the right time. Donald Trump "played the woman card" before you, and it isn't turning
out so well for him. And he's already doing better than you are.
Not travel (at least not to New York City). You may be tempted to get away with Heidi and the
kids to see a Broadway show (I hear Hamilton is amazing). But given that "New York values" comment
you made, you may not be welcome there.
Not reading the same old thing. You can really only read Green Eggs and Ham on the Senate floor
once before it becomes cliché. I've got a well-worn copy of The Feminine Mystique I can lend you.
Maybe Twitter? I know it helped to propel Mr Trump to his ultimate victory in the Republican primary.
Rest assured – you'll find kindred spirits online (we call yours "trolls", but that is neither here
nor there). In fact, I've made incredible friends on Twitter; @FullFrontalSamB and I were
talking about
you there just the other day actually! And I've had insightful and amusing conversations with
amazing change-makers like Ellen Page, Kerry Washington, Cecile Richards and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand.
I am sure that @AnnCoulter can't wait to dive deep into a high-minded and compelling Twitter discourse
with you.
Enjoy time with your friends
Following my loss, I found solace and comfort with my daughters and friends. I know Heidi and
the kids can't wait to have you home. Don't fret – Heidi will get over
that elbow to her face after your campaign suspension speech the other night. Plus, now you can
call up Carly – unless her friendship only lasts as long as her tenure as VP candidate, in which
case you may be getting sent to her voicemail about as fast as you'll be sent to Paul Ryan's.
Speaking of which, I'm sure your Senate colleagues will be thrilled to see you. Lindsay Graham
said as much: "If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate,
nobody would convict you." Oh, wait. Surely he just meant, "If Ted Cruz killed it on the floor of
the Senate…"
Get back to work
Your work friends are the perfect segue into my last bit of advice: embrace your job and work
hard upon your return. I am sure that, like me, you embrace the calling to public service. While
I had to resign from the Texas State Senate to run for governor, you didn't have to leave the US
Senate to run for president. That's great! It means you can jump right back into the critical work
of legislating. With all the work that the Senate is doing right now – meeting with appointees to
the US supreme court and holding hearings to confirm a new Secretary of the Army, passing budgets
– wait, none of that is getting done. Well, you will fit right back in nonetheless given your penchant
for shutting down the government when you don't get your way.
Perhaps 2017 will be better; think of how busy you'll be battling all those gender equity initiatives
that Hillary Clinton will launch as president, advancing the revolutionary ideas of equal pay, reproductive
autonomy and family leave policies!
As for me, I've been hard at work since my own run to build
Deeds Not Words, a community of millennial
women passionate about creating positive change (hopefully one of them will one day maneuver to take
your job). In the meantime, though, think how fortunate you'll be to tell your grandchildren one
day that you had the honor of serving under your nation's first woman president.
What is important that Hillary past provides so many powerful and easy
avenues of attack on her (and she in not a Democrat; she is a neocon, warmonger neoliberal, hell bent
on US world domination) that it is easy to be distracted by this excessive menu :-)
Notable quotes:
"... Then there's that Sanders factor. The Vermont senator has presented an unexpected challenge to Mrs Clinton. His attacks on her past support for trade deals and her ties to the current political establishment have drawn blood. ..."
"... It seems the Republican was already testing lines of attack in his victory speech on Tuesday night. He brought up Mrs Clinton's support for coal regulations that have caused unemployment in places like Pennsylvania and Ohio. He mentioned that Bill Clinton backed the North America Trade Agreement, which he called "the single worst trade deal". ..."
"... If Mr Trump can put the Midwest in play, that previously mentioned electoral tilt may not be so imposing after all. ..."
"... Facing off against Mr Trump is going to take a nimble, creative campaign and candidate. That hasn't always been a strength for the instinctively controlled and cautious Mrs Clinton. ..."
Mr Trump is going to present an unpredictable adversary for the former secretary of state. As
the Republican primary has shown, no topic is off the table for him and no possible line of attack
out of bounds.
"Her past is really the thing, rather than what she plans to do in the future," Mr Trump told the
Washington Post on Tuesday. "Her past has a lot of problems, to put it bluntly."
The day before making those comments, Mr Trump had lunch with Edward Klein, a journalist who has
made a career of writing inflammatory books about the Clintons and their sometimes chequered history.
Chances are, Mr Trump was taking notes.
That Bernie Sanders factor
Then there's that Sanders factor. The Vermont senator has presented an unexpected challenge to
Mrs Clinton. His attacks on her past support for trade deals and her ties to the current political
establishment have drawn blood.
Could some of his true loyalists stay home or vote for a third party? Could some of his working-class
supporters in the industrial mid-west cross over to Mr Trump?
It seems the Republican was already testing lines of attack in his victory speech on Tuesday
night. He brought up Mrs Clinton's support for coal regulations that have caused unemployment in
places like Pennsylvania and Ohio. He mentioned that Bill Clinton backed the North America Trade
Agreement, which he called "the single worst trade deal".
If Mr Trump can put the Midwest in play, that previously mentioned electoral tilt may not be
so imposing after all.
There's no playbook for how a Democrat can run against a Republican like Mr Trump. In some places,
such as immigration, he will be well to her right. In other areas, like foreign policy and trade,
he could come at her from the left.
Can abortion or the social safety net be wedge issues? Probably not against a man who defended Planned
Parenthood and Social Security on a Republican debate stage.
Facing off against Mr Trump is going to take a nimble, creative campaign and candidate. That
hasn't always been a strength for the instinctively controlled and cautious Mrs Clinton.
You know you've come to the end of a fireworks show when the shells start bursting all at once.
I have already intimated to you the danger of parties in the State, with particular reference
to the founding of them on geographical discriminations. Let me now take a more comprehensive
view, and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party
generally.
This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest
passions of the human mind. It exists under different shapes in all governments, more or less
stifled, controlled, or repressed; but, in those of the popular form, it is seen in its greatest
rankness, and is truly their worst enemy.
The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural
to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities,
is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism.
The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and
repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing
faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes
of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.
Without looking forward to an extremity of this kind (which nevertheless ought not to be entirely
out of sight), the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make
it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.
It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It
agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of
one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign
influence and corruption, which finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the
channels of party passions.
Priority A in this letter is cyber and jihad strategy? Puh-lease. WTAF, another clueless ideologue.
Here's my list:
1. End American Empire. We have 800 bases in 140 countries. Close them and send the personnel
back to the US, give them shovels and backhoes and make them start rebuilding our Third World
infrastructure.
2. Prosecute financial crime. No more "fines", we need perp walks by senior executives. That's
the only thing that will work.
3. Close the DHS. We already have the FBI and CIA Roll back the Patriot Act spying provisions.
4. Audit the Fed. Full transparency of what they own, what their market activities are, who
owns them. Fed chair to be appointed by the Executive branch, not just selected from a list of
"approved" candidates submitted by the Fed.
5. Remove capital gains taxation on physical gold and silver bullion. Americans need to build
more wealth, not more paper.
6. Remove corporate tax exemption for issuing dividends.
7. Tax all unearned income at the same rate as earned income.
8. Fire the entire staff of the FASB and start over. Plain vanilla GAAP accounting including
mark-to-market.
9. End pre-crime drone assasination policy effective immediately.
10. New Marshall Plan for the MidEast. Take 1/2 of the budget we spend blowing the place up
and put it in a fund for development of ME countries. Announce the end of the drone/invasion/occupation
policy and the new investment fund with huge fanfare. We get peace and prosperity and great new
markets full of people who like us again.
11. Putin, Xi and US pres to hold tri-lateral peace talks. End Cold War II. Invite the Eurozone
lapdogs if you must (but no Frenchmen
The pitiful part of that is, we created the jihad is, we support them, arm them, feed them.
They're our mercenaries. So we create a BOOGIEMAN, tell the country that we must do everything
possible to defend against them, send them into other nations to do our dirty work for us, thereby
increasing the fear and terror back home, as they follow orders and chop off heads on television?
Talk about "wagging the dog"? Then they say in order to protect the "HOMELANDS" from these monsters,
we'll, you'll have to sacrifice some rights? You'll have to sacrifice some security? You'll have
to accept some invasion of your privacy. You'll have to allow the government to spend hundreds
of billions of dollars on spying, making war, building killing machines, and you the American
public will have to accept austerity, so we can get through this together? BULLSHIT!
" The very nature of government - monopoly power - makes it the number 1 destination of the
psychosociopaths. "
Only in 'Murika, the government doesn't hold the monopoly power, private corporations do. They
have even bought your governement lock, stock and barrel. Obama is no more than a mouthpiece for
private companies. See how he is travelling salesman for the TTIP, NAFTA and such treaties that
are bad for the USA's population and all other countries' populations too.
Which means you don't have a government at all . You are ruled by a transnational private sector
through political puppets, banana republic style.
"...4. Our problems are huge right now, but one of the most obvious is that we've not passed
along the meaning of America to the next generation..."
Yes you did, Senator Sasse. America, American government and American politics means systemic
psychopathy. Sick, power-seeking and power-hoarding individuals. What you failed to pass on was
your fantasy of what you would like America to be. The next generation can't ignore the reality
of what they see and believe in your fantasy - if anything, they're realists. The meaning of America
to them is a tax-farming organization run for the benefit of the MIC, big ag,
big pharma, big oil, etc. They recognize that they are cattle, not snowflakes.
"...If we don't get them to re-engage..."
Holy crap... seriously? You sound like the MSM trying to figure out some marketing trick to
sell themselves to 'the next generation' - a generation that has already thrown the MSM on the
scrap-heap of history as a useless tool of the rich and powerful. The next generation has ABANDONED
dreams of your fantasy America. They just want to minimize the oppression and pain America causes
them. They want to be left the fuck alone and don't want to fix YOUR mess - it's unfixable to
them. They're not buying the bullshit of 'fixability' any more - that was your generation's weakness.
"...-- thinking about how we defend a free society in the face of global jihadis,.."
Jihadis the CIA created for their latest Middle East clownfuckery? The jihadi 'threat' as manufactured
by the FBI or MSM? Hey, guess what Senator: that's your fucking problem, not theirs. They're afraid
of cops and gangs of immigrants, not fake jihadis .
"...or how we balance our budgets after baby boomers have dishonestly over-promised for decades,..."
Why would they give a fuck? They know they are already 100% screwed - things will never be
as good for them as it was for their parents. They are going to suffer the consequences of shitty
fiscal policy for the next fifty years, and you expect them to somehow be interested in making
the government behave NOW? Fuck that... are you stupid or something? They didn't break it - YOU
did.
"...or how we protect First Amendment values in the face of the safe-space movement..."
Er... their First Amendment rights have already been whored out by your employer, Senator:
the U.S. Congress. And typical of your employer, you 'see' a problem were none exists: a few hundred,
maybe thousand whiney college students DOES NOT equate to a Constitutional problem for the other
five million or so members of that generation. If you want to debate safe spaces while Rome burns,
go ahead. They're not interested.
"...– then all will indeed have been lost..."
Yes, I agree. Congress and the rest of the U.S. government have been throwing away the American
dream for thirty-plus years. Yes, it's lost. That's what happens when you throw something away.
Don't expect them to go on a scavenger hunt for its decayed corpse now. It's worth saving to YOU,
not THEM. You fucked it up so bad that they have no illusions about 'finding' anything useable
again. They're not looking and not interested in being convinced to look, Senator. It's not there
for them any more.
"...One of the bright spots with the rising generation, though, is that they really would like
to rethink the often knee-jerk partisanship of their parents and grandparents. We should encourage
this rethinking..."
No, they are simply rejecting the failed mechanism of a usurped voting process and a failed
constitutional republic. That doesn't mean they're looking for replacement parts to fix that one
thing, because the rest of the republic is completely fucked up . They're not interested in band-aids
on a stinking, rotting corpse. They don't want to have anything to do with it.
A member of Congress trying to 'market' America to the next generation is exactly like the
MSM trying to market themselves to the next generation: it's pathetic and futile. 'America' is
just the name of their current prison and owner. They simply tolerate it. When it becomes intolerable,
they'll leave (if they're allowed to).
I know that's the meme being pushed, but I don't see it in reality. The two parties, supposedly
so polarized, offer minute differences in actual policy. The differences over which they'd claim
to take us to Civil War really boil down to which constituent and contributor group gets greased.
In dictionary definitions, every politician in America is a liberal. In terms of their dedication
to unifying corporate and State power, they're all Fascists. Some are smilier Fascists than others,
but they're all Fascists.
Wrong. America is not a Liberal nation. In a Liberal nation working class would have a say.
As inequality grows, their taxes would go up. Education and healthcare would be free. Labor wouldn't
be taxed.
Corporativism is to the right and not left. Its labor is to the left.
The excerpt below should help clarify the confusion between Democrats and Republicans:
….(Bakunin) predicted that there would be two forms of modern intellectuals, what he called
the 'Red Bureaucracy', who would use popular struggles to try to take control of state power and
institute the most vicious and ruthless dictatorships in history, and the other group, who would
see that there isn't going to be an access to power that way and would therefore become the servants
of private power and the state capitalist democracy, where they would, as Bakunin put it, 'beat
the people with the people's stick,' talk about democracy but beat the people with it. That's
actually one of the few predictions in the social sciences that's come true, to my knowledge,
and a pretty perceptive one." Chomsky On Democracy and Education, page 248.
Looks like neoliberal Guardian presstitutes love neocons and religious nuts Cruz. Who would guess
? Interesting...
Notable quotes:
"... He also has a certain kind of roguish charm and can be quite amusing, which Hillary Clinton rarely is; he'd easily win the "who'd I prefer to have a beer with" competition. ..."
"... How can anyone say that yet? What we DO know is that the Bush-Obama administration has been an unqualified disaster on many fronts. Change, even with the possibility - NOT 'certainty' - of "bad things happening" is much more desirable... ..."
"... The more this election plays out the more I totally understand why Trump has made it this far. I've lived a long time and been politically active my entire adult life, and I've never seen voters send such a resounding and well deserved fuck you to the political elite. ..."
"... Indeed, the failure and dysfunction of the present political system in the US can be traced to one thing: the failure of the fourth estate. It is worse than failure, it is a betrayal of the nation for those thirty pieces of silver. ..."
"... What his campaign ultimately proves, is that only appealing to ideologically conservative Republicans is not enough to win the nom. The bulk of the party is traditionalist and reactionary rather than puritanical. They'll pretty reliably vote for any grumpy old white guy with a sense of humour (Nixon, Reagan, Bush I, Romney, McCain, now Trump). Secondly Cruz misread the issues of the year. People are frustrated because they believe that they are struggling while others are milking them. Trump gets this, so does Bernie. Hillary, not so much. This will be a big problem for her in the general. ..."
"... I'm getting just a bit tired of the feigned "I can't understand it" air of these articles about Donald Trump. The Trump gave the voters in his party the red meat of bigotry and hate that they require. The others dog-whistled a merry tune. Why talk about 'strange political jujitsu'? Why not admit that a large portion of the Republican Party is unloved by their own candidates. Why not look at the fact that Republicans accept the votes of 'poor white trash' but do nothing for them. ..."
No, I did not think that....however, I do think that there is enough awareness of this issue
that it does not get dangerously into the main stream in Europe. In the US there much less awareness.
Decades of the indoctrination that all bad things are either "communist" or "socialist" has left
the door wide open for a return of the populist nationalist. Trump is just that.
bluet00ns 5 May 2016 13:18
"happy campaign"?...review the tapes, "happy" is nowhere in the oily, twisted, display of sly
that was cruz's campaign, the numb, if not painful, looks on the faces of family as he trotted
them out like props, is exhibit A.
bcarey -> sour_mash 5 May 2016 13:08
My point is that it's common for candidates to suspend their campaigns and continue to
collect money.
Definitely true.
However, we must also take into account the fact that the Cruz delegates are still active and
maybe able to deliver Cruz.... or Romney if necessary. It is likely that Trump will get way more
delegates than needed to stop a contested/open convention, however.
The Cruz suspension is about 2 things. It accomplishes potentially 2 things. Money is just
one of them. The other part is Romney, if he can.
fallentower 5 May 2016 13:02
I actually think the Republican Party made a good choice once it was down to "Cruz or Trump"
by sitting on its hands and thereby letting Trump win. Of course, Trump is far more likely to
do and say unorthodox (from a post-Reagan Republican Party standpoint) things, and will probably
increase the tension and turmoil within the party. But he actually has a chance of winning the
election; Cruz's smarmy personality and nauseating brand of religious conservatism would have
gone down like a lead balloon outside the Bible belt, and he's too committed ideologically to
change his policy positions.
Trump will turn on a sixpence and happily disavow things he may have said in the primary if
he considers them unhelpful baggage for the general, and because he's seen as a showman rather
than a professional politician he'll have much more leeway to do so than your average flip-flopper.
He also has a certain kind of roguish charm and can be quite amusing, which Hillary Clinton
rarely is; he'd easily win the "who'd I prefer to have a beer with" competition. Admittedly
he is going to have to cut down on the clownishness and ill-disciplined outbursts, but if he gets
the right campaign team together and they manage to keep him vaguely on-message I think he'll
have good chances. Better than Cruz, anyway, who had zero chance.
sour_mash bcarey 5 May 2016 12:58
I take your point regarding Secret Agent Mormon and I was aware that he had filed with the
FEC. My point is that it's common for candidates to suspend their campaigns and continue to collect
money.
The exploratory PAC is the new retirement vehicle but that's a different issue.
taxhaven wjousts 5 May 2016 12:58
Trump most certainly is not change for the better.
How can anyone say that yet? What we DO know is that the Bush-Obama administration has
been an unqualified disaster on many fronts. Change, even with the possibility - NOT 'certainty'
- of "bad things happening" is much more desirable...
Harry Dresdon 5 May 2016 12:42
Good riddance to Cruz. Boehner called him "the devil in the flesh". Cruz would have been way
worse for the country than Trump will ever be. Sad but true.
DillyDit2 5 May 2016 12:34
Hey Stephanie Cutter: You think Bernie is responsible for what his supporters think, whether
we'll support Hillary, and how we will decide to vote in the fall? Pappa Bernie should tell us
what to do, and we should fall in line and salute?
Could Cutter and Hillary's minions be any more clueless?! And could they reveal their top down
authoritarian mindset any more clearer?
The more this election plays out the more I totally understand why Trump has made it this
far. I've lived a long time and been politically active my entire adult life, and I've never seen
voters send such a resounding and well deserved fuck you to the political elite.
I wish I could support Trump, because I second that fuck you. For now, along with what is likely
the majority of American voters, all I can do is say- pox on BOTH your houses and may 2020 be
the year an Independent runs and wins.
danubemonster 5 May 2016 12:32
I think it is worth comparing Cruz with Nixon. Both men are/were not particularly likable,
yet Nixon was able to be a two-term president. Nixon was a conservative, but he was not an ideologue
- and he lived in an age where the Republican Party was a relatively broad church. Nixon also
have political instincts which were way beyond those of Cruz. He knew how to play high politics,
and he knew what was required to get to the White House.
PATROKLUS00 -> Tommy Cooper 5 May 2016 12:14
Trump will beat her to death with being the Queen of the Establishment... the Dems will be
idiots to nominate her.
PATROKLUS00 -> voxusa 5 May 2016 12:12
Indeed, the failure and dysfunction of the present political system in the US can be traced
to one thing: the failure of the fourth estate. It is worse than failure, it is a betrayal of
the nation for those thirty pieces of silver.
PATROKLUS00 -> 8MilesHigh 5 May 2016 12:09
Yup, and the Democrat establishment is too stupid and out of touch to recognize that HRC is
just the grist that Trump needs for his anti-establishment mill.
PATROKLUS00 5 May 2016 12:07
Cruz a master strategist???? BWWWWWwwwwwaaaaahhhhhhhaaaaaaaa! Ludicrous ... beyond ludicrous.
Vintage59 David Perry 5 May 2016 12:07
His religious beliefs and the political dogma that goes with them have been well documented.
Have you not been paying attention? Do you insist your wife get you a beer from the fridge when
you can get off your ass and get it yourself?
8MilesHigh 5 May 2016 12:06
What his campaign ultimately proves, is that only appealing to ideologically conservative
Republicans is not enough to win the nom. The bulk of the party is traditionalist and reactionary
rather than puritanical. They'll pretty reliably vote for any grumpy old white guy with a sense
of humour (Nixon, Reagan, Bush I, Romney, McCain, now Trump). Secondly Cruz misread the issues
of the year. People are frustrated because they believe that they are struggling while others
are milking them. Trump gets this, so does Bernie. Hillary, not so much. This will be a big problem
for her in the general.
MalleusSacerdotum 5 May 2016 12:05
I'm getting just a bit tired of the feigned "I can't understand it" air of these articles
about Donald Trump. The Trump gave the voters in his party the red meat of bigotry and hate that
they require. The others dog-whistled a merry tune. Why talk about 'strange political jujitsu'?
Why not admit that a large portion of the Republican Party is unloved by their own candidates.
Why not look at the fact that Republicans accept the votes of 'poor white trash' but do nothing
for them.
The Donald has understood the dynamic better than the rest and has given the voters a coherent,
albeit repugnant, analysis of their problems. An article like this that can shed no light on the
phenomenon that is Trump is hardly worth publishing.
Muammar al-Qaddafi was an easy target. Oil was the goal. Everything else is describable attempt
to white wash the crime.
Notable quotes:
"... At the end, the brainwashing media convince the people to vote for the "bad choice" instead of the worst (which is Trump in this case). You don't need to have any plans or anything, just repeat "Trump bad, Trump bad, Trump bad, Me good" and the sheeple will follow! This strategy has been so successful that almost everywhere around the world are using it to win all types of elections! xD ..."
"... She should be a felon by now, and only her name protects her from jail. ..."
"... Although everyone recognizes that Qaddafi is a brutal ruler, his forces did not conduct deliberate, large-scale massacres in any of the cities he has recaptured, and his violent threats to wreak vengeance on Benghazi were directed at those who continued to resist his rule, not at innocent bystanders. There is no question that Qaddafi is a tyrant with few (if any) redemptive qualities, but the threat of a bloodbath that would "stain the conscience of the world" (as Obama put it) was slight ..."
"... As I've argued previously, the term "humanitarian crisis" is desperately imprecise and the informed public's ability to distinguish between civil strife (which is always bloody) and outright massacres and extermination campaigns is weak. Walt's certainty notwithstanding, the debate about the humanitarian rationale in this case has not been settled. In fact, it's barely begun ..."
"... on the basis that Gaddafi's forces were about to commit a Srebrenica-style massacre in Benghazi. Naturally we can never know what would have happened without Nato's intervention. But there is in fact no evidence – including from other rebel-held towns Gaddafi re-captured – to suggest he had either the capability or even the intention to carry out such an atrocity against an armed city of 700,000 . ..."
"... Of those, uncounted thousands will be civilians, including those killed by Nato bombing and Nato-backed forces on the ground. These figures dwarf the death tolls in this year's other most bloody Arab uprisings, in Syria and Yemen. Nato has not protected civilians in Libya – it has multiplied the number of their deaths, while losing not a single soldier of its own. ..."
"... For the western powers, of course, the Libyan war has allowed them to regain ground lost in Tunisia and Egypt, put themselves at the heart of the upheaval sweeping the most strategically sensitive region in the world, and secure valuable new commercial advantages in an oil-rich state whose previous leadership was at best unreliable. No wonder the new British defence secretary is telling businessmen to "pack their bags" for Libya, and the US ambassador in Tripoli insists American companies are needed on a "big scale". ..."
"... But for Libyans, it has meant a loss of ownership of their own future and the effective imposition of a western-picked administration of Gaddafi defectors and US and British intelligence assets. Probably the greatest challenge to that takeover will now come from Islamist military leaders on the ground, such as the Tripoli commander Abdel Hakim Belhaj – kidnapped by MI6 to be tortured in Libya in 2004 – who have already made clear they will not be taking orders from the NTC. ..."
"... This was an unpopular stance to take on Libya during the high tide of the Arab Spring, when foreign governments and media alike were uncritically lauding the opposition. The two sides in what was a genuine civil war were portrayed as white hats and black hats; rebel claims about government atrocities were credulously broadcast, though they frequently turned out to be concocted, while government denials were contemptuously dismissed. Human rights organisations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch were much more thorough than the media in checking these stories, although their detailed reports appeared long after the news agenda had moved on." ..."
"... the Taliban were winning against the Northern Alliance for various reasons, one was that a lot of people supported them. We turned a blind eye to the destabilising effects of Saudi and Pakistan support of the Taliban as well. We set this up for failure a long time ago. Riding in like the calvary and handing out billions to the Northern Alliance was not very helpful for stability. ..."
"... What people related to me was this: The Taliban were more predictable. Dostum was not predictable. Both were bad, but as Clinton fans love to highlight, the lessor of two evils must be selected. The Taliban also represented the Pashtun who were the largest ethnic bloc in Afghanistan. So in essence the people mostly supported the Taliban. The Northern Alliance had the support of Russia, and you might recall the Afghans did not have fond memories of them. ..."
"... Given our support of Saudi and knowing their interventions, as well as Pakistan, we were stupid to intervene. ..."
Most politicians these days don't care about the people and this ridiculous cycle is repeating
every 4 years! Candidates who actually want to make progress get dumped by the corrupt system
and the parties that are being controlled by their corporate masters and their money to do as
they want to return the more money to them later when they have the office!
At the end, the brainwashing media convince the people to vote for the "bad choice" instead
of the worst (which is Trump in this case). You don't need to have any plans or anything, just
repeat "Trump bad, Trump bad, Trump bad, Me good" and the sheeple will follow! This strategy has
been so successful that almost everywhere around the world are using it to win all types of elections!
xD
Maybe Trump becoming president is necessary for the people to realize once and for all that
this cycle of mistakes and corruption needs to stop and fundamental changes need to happen! Starts
with the USA and the world will follow over time. I personally am done with following these corrupt
political systems and their media and do as they tell me to (same goes for the financial system
but there's no escaping this one in the near future with corps and banks being in total control
of the society).
"As Alan Kuperman of the University of Texas and Stephen Chapman of the Chicago Tribune
have now shown, the claim that the United States had to act to prevent Libyan tyrant Muammar
al-Qaddafi from slaughtering tens of thousands of innocent civilians in Benghazi does not stand
up to even casual scrutiny.
Although everyone recognizes that Qaddafi is a brutal ruler, his forces did not conduct
deliberate, large-scale massacres in any of the cities he has recaptured, and his violent threats
to wreak vengeance on Benghazi were directed at those who continued to resist his rule, not
at innocent bystanders. There is no question that Qaddafi is a tyrant with few (if any) redemptive
qualities, but the threat of a bloodbath that would "stain the conscience of the world" (as
Obama put it) was slight. "
"If humanitarian intervention is to remain a live possibility, there must be much more public
scrutiny, debate and discussion of what triggers that intervention and what level of evidence
we can reasonably require. Did administration officials have communications intercepts suggesting
plans for large-scale killings of civilians? How exactly did they reach their conclusion that
these reprisals were likely? It should be no more acceptable to simply accept government claims
on this score than it was for previous administrations.
As I've argued previously, the term "humanitarian crisis" is desperately imprecise and
the informed public's ability to distinguish between civil strife (which is always bloody)
and outright massacres and extermination campaigns is weak. Walt's certainty notwithstanding,
the debate about the humanitarian rationale in this case has not been settled. In fact, it's
barely begun."
"David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy won the authorisation to use "all necessary means" from
the UN security council in March on the basis that Gaddafi's forces were about to commit a
Srebrenica-style massacre in Benghazi. Naturally we can never know what would have happened without
Nato's intervention. But there is in fact no evidence – including from other rebel-held towns
Gaddafi re-captured – to suggest he had either the capability or even the intention to carry out
such an atrocity against an armed city of 700,000 .
What is now known, however, is that while the death toll in Libya when Nato intervened was
perhaps around 1,000-2,000 (judging by UN estimates), eight months later it is probably more than
ten times that figure. Estimates of the numbers of dead over the last eight months – as Nato leaders
vetoed ceasefires and negotiations – range from 10,000 up to 50,000. The National Transitional
Council puts the losses at 30,000 dead and 50,000 wounded.
Of those, uncounted thousands will be civilians, including those killed by Nato bombing
and Nato-backed forces on the ground. These figures dwarf the death tolls in this year's other
most bloody Arab uprisings, in Syria and Yemen. Nato has not protected civilians in Libya – it
has multiplied the number of their deaths, while losing not a single soldier of its own.
For the western powers, of course, the Libyan war has allowed them to regain ground lost
in Tunisia and Egypt, put themselves at the heart of the upheaval sweeping the most strategically
sensitive region in the world, and secure valuable new commercial advantages in an oil-rich state
whose previous leadership was at best unreliable. No wonder the new British defence secretary
is telling businessmen to "pack their bags" for Libya, and the US ambassador in Tripoli insists
American companies are needed on a "big scale".
But for Libyans, it has meant a loss of ownership of their own future and the effective
imposition of a western-picked administration of Gaddafi defectors and US and British intelligence
assets. Probably the greatest challenge to that takeover will now come from Islamist military
leaders on the ground, such as the Tripoli commander Abdel Hakim Belhaj – kidnapped by MI6 to
be tortured in Libya in 2004 – who have already made clear they will not be taking orders from
the NTC.
"Explanations of what one thought was happening in these countries were often misinterpreted
as justification for odious and discredited regimes. In Libya, where the uprising started on 15
February 2011, I wrote about how the opposition was wholly dependent on Nato military support
and would have been rapidly defeated by pro-Gaddafi forces without it. It followed from this that
the opposition would not have the strength to fill the inevitable political vacuum if Gaddafi
was to fall. I noted gloomily that Arab states, such as Saudi Arabia and the Gulf monarchies,
who were pressing for foreign intervention against Gaddafi, themselves held power by methods no
less repressive than the Libyan leader. It was his radicalism – muted though this was in his later
years – not his authoritarianism that made the kings and emirs hate him.
This was an unpopular stance to take on Libya during the high tide of the Arab Spring,
when foreign governments and media alike were uncritically lauding the opposition. The two sides
in what was a genuine civil war were portrayed as white hats and black hats; rebel claims about
government atrocities were credulously broadcast, though they frequently turned out to be concocted,
while government denials were contemptuously dismissed. Human rights organisations such as Amnesty
International and Human Rights Watch were much more thorough than the media in checking these
stories, although their detailed reports appeared long after the news agenda had moved on."
And then in another note, why do people like you condemn the Taliban but give a free pass to the
Saudi's who have a lot to do with the state of fundamentalism in Afghanistan, and essentially
operate the same as the Taliban? Why are we not intervening in Saudi Arabia to free the people?
Nah. Do people die from either side in Afghanistan? Yes. Excusively the Taliban? no. The western
press prefers the narrative of Taliban extremism. The western press ignores and fails to report
killings by US troops, one incident I know of personally in Kabul. Never reported in the press.
So I suggest you educate yourself on the complexities of Afghanistan before you sound off with
smugness. It is obvious you have no idea of what really goes on there.
Have you ever visited Saudi Arabia? Want a litany of the horrors there? No, you don't. You
have a narrative which I suspect is ill informed.
the Taliban were winning against the Northern Alliance for various reasons, one was that
a lot of people supported them. We turned a blind eye to the destabilising effects of Saudi and
Pakistan support of the Taliban as well. We set this up for failure a long time ago. Riding in
like the calvary and handing out billions to the Northern Alliance was not very helpful for stability.
"was if ending Taliban rule had made things better"
You try to simplify a very complex situation. In fact there was never absolute rule by the
Taliban. You seem to forget there was a civil war in the country before 9/11. There was the Taliban
and the Northern Alliance. There was Pakistan and the ISI ( Pakistan of course if often supported
by the US, then we had Saudi Arabia, again supported by us). Before 9/11 The northern alliance
was about to be defeated. On both sides was indiscriminate killings. You also had a complex mix
if Pashtun Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras. You had multiple political alliances which I will not bother
to list. Kabul was destroyed by the fighting. Atrocities on both sides.
You had Dostum with the Northern Alliance and Massod as well. Massod was reasonable, Dostum
was an animal worse than the Taliban.
What people related to me was this: The Taliban were more predictable. Dostum was not predictable.
Both were bad, but as Clinton fans love to highlight, the lessor of two evils must be selected.
The Taliban also represented the Pashtun who were the largest ethnic bloc in Afghanistan. So in
essence the people mostly supported the Taliban. The Northern Alliance had the support of Russia,
and you might recall the Afghans did not have fond memories of them.
So, you want to simplify the Taliban atrocities and ignore the rest. Afghans did not have the
luxury of this. They had to choose the lesser evil. Had Massood not been entangled with Dostum,
perhaps things would have been different.
We came in and supported the Northern Alliance, which did NOT sit well with a lot of people.
The majority? I don't have statistics exactly pointing this out. The Pashtun felt pushed out of
affairs by the minority remnants of the Northern Alliance. Every ..... and I mean every government
office had photos of Massood on the wall. Not Karzai. Karzai was seen as irrelevant by all sides,
he was seen as the American imposed choice. ( I will not even discuss the "election" but I was
on the ground dealing with Identity cards before the UN arrived, had meetings with the UN team
about approaches to getting ID cards out to all voters, and there is a stink over aspects of the
participation in the elections).
"And seeing a self-described leftist explaining that life under the Taliban wasn't all that
bad if you just grew a beard [!] and fell in line is really sort of pathetic."
Your smug simplistic statement indicates you have no idea of the horrors enacted on both sides.
I was told this time and time again as how people decided to survive by picking a side where there
were rules and they could survive the rules.
But lets put aside my anecdotal evidence and look at the people of Afghanistan:
"Looking at Afghans' views on reconciling with the Taliban does not appear to bear out the
concerns over ethnic divisions shared by Jones and Kilcullen. When asked whether the Afghan central
government should negotiate a settlement with the Taliban or continue fighting the Taliban and
not negotiate, a recent national survey of Afghanistan found that roughly three- quarters (74%)
of Afghans favor negotiating with the Taliban .74 This is in line with previous studies, such
as a series of polls sponsored by ABC News which found that the number of Afghans favoring reconciliation
had risen from 60% in 2007 to 73% in 2009."
""Do you think the government in Kabul should negotiate a settlement with Afghan Taliban
in which they are allowed to hold political offices if they stop fighting, or do you think the
government in Kabul should continue to fight the Taliban and not negotiate a settlement?""
77% of men and 70% of women agree with this.
Here is the ultimate point. We intervened and we had no fucking idea what we were doing. The
Afghans saw the money flowing to Beltway Bandits rather than flowing to real aid and needs. They
saw this! They were not stupid. They saw that the Pashtuns were pushed out of Government, ( hence
the Massod images in ALL government offices [My project of reform dealt with EVERY government
offices and I visited a fair few personally and finally had to ask abut why each office had Masood
an not Karzai)
My opinion? I see indications that the Taliban would have handed over Bin Laden. We refused.
Is this disputed? Yes. Were we right to favour the Northern Alliance? No. They were as bad as
the Taliban, but more ..... unpredictable.
Given our support of Saudi and knowing their interventions, as well as Pakistan, we were
stupid to intervene.
One of the most entertaining bit players in the 2016 campaign has been Craig Mazin, Ted Cruz's college
roommate. Mazin, a screenwriter who co-wrote two of the Hangover films, openly despises Cruz
on both a political and personal level, and talks trash about him at just about every opportunity.
And Mazin is very good at trash talk. These
17 hilarious Craig Mazin tweets about Ted Cruz go a long way to explaining why the Texas senator
is almost not the most beloved guy in Washington.
Scriptnotes. Here's how Mazin put it, and I'm going to quote it in full because it is one
of my favorite things that anybody has ever said about anyone else:
And, you know, I want to be clear, because Ted Cruz is a nightmare of a human being. I have plenty
of problems with his politics, but truthfully, his personality is so awful that 99 percent of
why I hate him is just his personality. If he agreed with me on every issue, I would hate him
only 1 percent less.
That's more than a sufficient diss, but Mazin didn't stop there. He writes a lot about Cruz on
Twitter, and pulls absolutely no punches while doing so. He fired the opening shot in 2013, when
Cruz was about to win election to the Senate.
"... Those comments, her first public ones on the scandal, are now revealed as a lie. What a way to start a presidential campaign! ..."
"... Oh, wait - it's the Clinton way. Always was, always will be. Now what? Does she expect us to assume she'll tell the truth from this moment? Maybe she should wink twice with her right eye and raise her left hand to signal when a lie is coming. ..."
"... Not that we needed any reminding, but the Clinton way is indistinguishable from plain dishonesty. That's how it was when she and Bubba were in the White House for eight years. And it's how it was when she lost the Democratic race in 2008 and opted for the State job in President Obama's cabinet. ..."
"... She could have put two accounts, one personal, one private, on one device connected to a government server. She didn't because she wanted to keep everything secret from everybody - and she's still doing it. Equally preposterous is her insistence that she could make her own rules, while also claiming she followed the letter and spirit of government rules. She did it her way because she thought the rules, like the truth, are flexible and that if she got caught, she'd get away with it. ..."
"... In a sly reference to Watergate, he said in a letter to Clinton's lawyer that his panel wants to know "what the Secretary did, when she did it and why she did it." ..."
"... Of course, that assumes she's even capable of telling the truth. ..."
She can't help herself. Hillary Clinton is addicted to deception.
The news that she used an iPad as well as a BlackBerry demolishes her already ridiculous claim
that she set up a private email server so she would only need to carry one gadget as secretary of
state. At a March 10 press conference, Clinton put it this way: "I thought using one device would
be simpler, and, obviously, it hasn't worked out that way. Looking back, it would have been probably
. . . smarter to have used two devices."
Those comments, her first public ones on the scandal, are now revealed as a lie. What a way
to start a presidential campaign!
Oh, wait - it's the Clinton way. Always was, always will be. Now what? Does she expect us
to assume she'll tell the truth from this moment? Maybe she should wink twice with her right eye
and raise her left hand to signal when a lie is coming.
Not that we needed any reminding, but the Clinton way is indistinguishable from plain dishonesty.
That's how it was when she and Bubba were in the White House for eight years. And it's how it was
when she lost the Democratic race in 2008 and opted for the State job in President Obama's cabinet.
Six years later, she's back in the political ring again, yet nothing's changed. She still won't
tell the truth.
From dodging sniper fire to being dead broke, she says what's most convenient for her in the moment,
and lets her flunkies clean up the mess later.
Her word is not her bond. In contrast to the dictum of the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan,
she believes she's entitled to her own facts as well as her own opinion.
The revelation by the AP that she used at least two electronic devices, neither of them connected
to a government email account, means she will have to come up a with a new reason why she was entitled
to do emails her way.
Whatever she comes up with, it won't wash. It's obvious that her aim was to avoid having Congress
and the White House know what she didn't want them to know.
She could have put two accounts, one personal, one private, on one device connected to a government
server. She didn't because she wanted to keep everything secret from everybody - and she's still
doing it. Equally preposterous is her insistence that she could make her own rules, while also claiming
she followed the letter and spirit of government rules. She did it her way because she thought the
rules, like the truth, are flexible and that if she got caught, she'd get away with it.
Well, she's been caught, and now the question is whether she gets away with it. That's the challenge
before the White House and Congress.
So far, the Obamas are straddling the fence. They've carefully avoided giving full approval to
what she did, with State Department aides saying they didn't know she was using a private server
until after she left office.
The department had requested all official emails be preserved, but accepted her claim that she
deleted 30,000 personal ones before turning over printed versions of about 30,000 others. She and
her lawyer say everybody will have to take her word for what was in those that were deleted.
She also says the server "will remain private" and the lawyer says that all the emails were permanently
deleted and that the server is now "clean."
That puts the final burden on the Republican Congress, and Rep. Trey Gowdy, chairman of the House
Select Committee on Benghazi, is meeting it head-on. After Clinton rebuffed his request to give the
server to an independent examiner, Gowdy on Tuesday offered her a private interview, presumably under
oath, as well as a later, public one.
In a sly reference to Watergate, he said in a letter to Clinton's lawyer that his panel wants
to know "what the Secretary did, when she did it and why she did it."
Clinton will say no as long as she can get away with it. But if the media stays on the story and
public pressure forces her to agree to swear to tell the truth, we may finally get somewhere.
Of course, that assumes she's even capable of telling the truth.
"... Talk about an unpopularity contest! Add the presumptive nominees together and you get just over a tenth of eligible voters choosing the next president. ..."
"... Full Disclosure: the one she ran against was the 74 year-old democratic socialist calling for revolution, who got 4.7% of the eligible voters in those primaries, which took place mostly in conservative states that a few years ago would have been more likely to jail a socialist than vote for one. Until this year, the idea that almost 5% of southern eligible would go for the "Brooklyn Jewish Pinko Socialist" would have been earth-shatteringly newsworthy. ..."
"... Still I found it curious that he neglected to highlight the Clinton role in what he identified as true problems: "financialization and making profits by convincing investors to bear risks they should not; on health-care administration and making profits by passing off to others the hot potato of actually paying for care and treatment for the sick; on making profits by getting paid for locking up two percent of our young men for terms so excessive as to be cruel albeit not, alas, unusual"-all of which have Hillary's hands all over them, especially the incarceration part but one should not forget that she supports financialization of healthcare through mandating private insurance over actually providing healthcare through universal coverage. ..."
"... So here's the question: can a progressive let a friend vote for a Neocon? This has become all the more relevant as it looks more likely that come November many will choose between Hillary or The Donald. ..."
"... (from the abstract) Here we demonstrate that a nonhuman primate, the brown capuchin monkey (Cebus apella), responds negatively to unequal reward distribution in exchanges with a human experimenter. Monkeys refused to participate if they witnessed a conspecific obtain a more attractive reward for equal effort, an effect amplified if the partner received such a reward without any effort at all. These reactions support an early evolutionary origin of inequity aversion. ..."
"... Sanders supporters who think that there's any place for them in the Democrat Party for this point forward are deluding themselves. ..."
But is this supposed to bring Bernie's supporters over to the Hillary camp? Remember, voters came
out by the millions to vote for a candidate who proudly claimed to be a democratic socialist, and
his voters proudly cheered every time he said it. Not only that, they gave their hard-earned savings
to him so that he could run.
By contrast, the establishment candidates relied on Wall Street funding, donations by fat cats
with much to gain by retaining control over Washington. And even with all the support that the establishment
could muster, Bernie is still in the race-much to Hillary's consternation. I think the McCarthy-ite
scare tactics will fail this time.
While Hillary is slightly ahead in the votes, she's viewed with far more suspicion by Americans.
To put it as plainly as possible, they do not like her, and the more they learn, the less they like
her. The more they learn about her surrogates, the less they'll like them, and her.
Yes, she's way ahead in the delegates. She was awarded a quarter of all the delegates before the
campaign even started. All she needed was to get one more quarter, plus one, of the remainder in
order to "win". She only needed to earn 26% of those up for grabs, while Bernie would have to actually
win 51% to come out ahead in delegates. You call that democracy? And, true, Bernie is running behind
that pace. But that was by plan-with all the Democratic establishment calling the race on day one,
only the stubborn would refuse to vote for the putatively inevitable "winner". After every primary,
win or lose, Bernie was declared the underdog with no chance of catching up.
I noted with some amusement that Brad DeLong, a Clinton supporter who worked for her husband's
administration, has dissed Trump by running some numbers: "Donald Trump collects only 40% or so of
the vote from the 15% or so of the adult population that votes in Republican Party primaries, and
polls tell us he is massively unpopular with the bulk of American adults."
OK, true. As of March 25, The Donald had
received just 5.7% of the vote among eligible voters in the primaries that had been run up to
that point. What DeLong failed to note is that Hillary had received 6.6%.
Talk about an unpopularity contest! Add the presumptive nominees together
and you get just over a tenth of eligible voters choosing the next president.
The Donald was running against some dozens of candidates (to tell the truth, I could not tell
who was not running in the Republican primaries-I think there might have been more candidates
than voters), while Hillary was running against just one (well, if there were others, they dropped
out quickly and no one remembers them).
Full Disclosure: the one she ran against was the 74 year-old democratic socialist calling for
revolution, who got 4.7% of the eligible voters in those primaries, which took place mostly in conservative
states that a few years ago would have been more likely to jail a socialist than vote for one. Until
this year, the idea that almost 5% of southern eligible would go for the "Brooklyn Jewish Pinko Socialist"
would have been earth-shatteringly newsworthy.
And with the Democratic primary season as rigged as it could possibly be to stop someone like
Bernie, she's pulling a percent more of the eligible votes than a reality TV star and less than 2%
more than a self-professed socialist. In the conservative states. In states where independents are
denied the right to vote. All front-loaded in the primary season to give a southern conservative
former Goldwater Republican an insurmountable lead.
With 26 primaries already completed by March 25, Hillary had garnered votes from just 10.9% of
the registered voters-in the primaries that lean right-versus Trump's 9.4%.
A mandate for Hillary this ain't.
(By contrast, "none of the above" is winning in a landslide. 34% of those who registered did not
vote, and 39% of the eligible chose not to register. That is no vote of confidence for our two party
system that tries to restrict our choices to party-sanctioned unpalatable candidates. While The Donald
has brought in voters, Hillary has repelled them. If it were not for Bernie, voting by the Dems would
be way down.)
I was also amused by DeLong's "take-down" of those who "pander to populists"-by promising that
which he claims cannot be delivered. And he argues the populists point their fingers at imagined
damage done to them by the mainstream Democrats: deregulating Wall Street and shipping jobs abroad
through NAFTA and by ignoring Chinese currency manipulation.
Now, the first of these happened, and it has played a huge role in producing the boom-bust cycle
followed by stagnation that we now find ourselves in. It was a Clinton deal. Bill and Bob and Larry.
All of them presumed advisors to a presumptive Hillary administration.
And while I side with DeLong in criticizing the second two claims, I don't know many Bernie supporters
who make them. NAFTA had little to do with loss of America's jobs (but a lot to do with destruction
of Mexican agriculture-that pushed migration to the US), and the accusations against China amount
to little more than "red-baiting".
Still I found it curious that he neglected to highlight the Clinton role in what he identified
as true problems: "financialization and making profits by convincing investors to bear risks they
should not; on health-care administration and making profits by passing off to others the hot potato
of actually paying for care and treatment for the sick; on making profits by getting paid for locking
up two percent of our young men for terms so excessive as to be cruel albeit not, alas, unusual"-all
of which have Hillary's hands all over them, especially the incarceration part but one should not
forget that she supports financialization of healthcare through mandating private insurance over
actually providing healthcare through universal coverage.
So here's the question: can a progressive let a friend vote for a Neocon? This has become all
the more relevant as it looks more likely that come November many will choose between Hillary or
The Donald.
On social issues, I must admit that Hillary looks better. But who wouldn't? The Donald, for reasons
only known to himself, has decided to alienate some 85% of the population on social issues. I don't
get it. So his maximum vote take will be 15% of eligible. Hillary might be able to beat that.
On economics and dealings with the rest of the world, it is a toss-up. The Donald will Wall us
in for protection (it is somewhat ironic that a China-basher would choose a Great Wall?), while Hillary
will bomb and drone her "enemies" for regime change. I would prefer the Donald if he'd stop talking
about deportation and religious litmus tests for immigrants. But he won't. He prefers to be repulsive.
On economics, Hillary will continue to promote Wall Street's depravities (after all, her husband
delivered Wall Street to the Democrats, or, more accurately, the Democrats to Wall Street), while
The Donald will make America Grand Again. Apparently by building more casinos and hotels for people
with money to blow. Neither plan is appealing-but legal and supervised gambling in casinos is better
than illegal and unsupervised gambling by Hillary's Wall Street.
Who do you choose? How about neither.
As is well-known, Hillary was a Goldwater Republican. Not just a supporter, but an activist. She
attributes that to youthful exuberance. As she matured, she became a Kissinger-Albright Neocon. In
other words, she moved from isolationism to Neocon regime change.
And, with no small help from her husband's presidency, the Democratic party moved so far right
that a Goldwater Republican can fit nicely within its folds.
A progressive should not let a friend vote Neocon.
I know, I know. If you do not vote for the Neocon, you get the Donald. Well, maybe. That's November.
There's still a lot of water to run under that bridge before we reach November.
But in any case, I don't buy the argument. I don't vote for the lesser of two evils. I don't vote
for evil, period. Yes, my candidates almost always lose. I've voted for exactly one winner in my
life. I don't regret any of my votes, even though that one winning candidate turned out to be a huge
disappointment. All the winning candidates that I did not vote for were even worse disappointments
(and my expectations were understandably low). I would not have felt any better had I voted for winners
Obama 2012, Clinton (twice), Carter, or LBJ, nor if I had voted for losers Kerry, Gore, Dukakis,
Mondale, or Humphrey.
Yes, I voted for McGovern. I'm precisely the type of voter that the party establishment has tried
to disenfranchise-to ensure that the party never again makes the "mistake" of running someone who
leans toward peace and progressive policy. I'm not a "loyalist". I cannot be trusted to vote the
party line.
I do not accept the argument that progressives have no choice but to vote for Neocons. If you
settle for the lesser of evils, all you will get is evils.
I do have a choice. And so do you. As the great philosopher said, "It ain't over, until it's over".
BillC ,
May 2, 2016 at 10:17 am
Are you suggesting that it is never right to allow things to get worse so that enough
outrage accumulates to make them better? Did marching in itself bring civil rights? Or was it
the outrages of bloody faces, broken bones, and lost lives that pushed it over the goal line?
From what she has done, never mind what she says while campaigning - we know that Hil
and her acolytes (actually, her masters) will "foam the runway" for anything the TBTF banks want,
will amplify the failed US military madness in the middle east, and will dilute nations' sovereign
powers to no more than picking the colors of their flag thanks to "trade" deals that put every
nation in an economic straitjacket.
With the Donald we don't know what we'll get. But he talks more sense on foreign policy, military
adventurism, and economic policy than Hil, so there's a chance he might be better in these crucial
areas. And if it turns out to be all talk, his administration will probably preside over the next
Greater Recession, which is likely to be the final nail in neoliberalism's coffin - if Hil's not
in the White House doing everything she can to shield the 0.01% of Americans who are its greatest
beneficiaries from the pitchforks they so richly deserve.
Huh? This "transformative" Left you go on about is a figment of your imagination. The real
Left wants to essentially neuter Capitalism. What you are evidently conjuring up as the Left is
some denatured version of Franklin Roosevelt Centrism. Given that, the status quo you so evidently
want to defend has reached so low that a significant percentage of the populace wants to end said
status quo entirely. Foot dragging by yourself and fellow travelers will only hasten disruption.
Be careful what you wish for.
No. We want something akin to Norway. A VERY successful CAPITALISTIC nation with nice, tight
controls on capitalism to prevent it from running amok. It doesn't suffer massive income inequality,
has universal healthcare, free university, the happiest people on earth, much healthier than Americans
too. Call it Responsible Capitalism. Capitalism reigned in to serve society rather than the other
way around (the American way of capitalism).
Please. If the dems were truly worried about a Trump presidency, Sanders would get the nomination.
You drage Hillary across the finish line, then blackmail the voter?
This morning in the Drudge Report: "Trump Highest Number of Republican Voters in History."
Who do the Republicans want to get rid of? Trump.
On the same page, a poll reports Trump tied with Hillary nationally. Who do the Republicans
want to get rid of? Guess.
It's wonderful. The GOP is looking for someone that Hillary can beat. She would squash Kasich
or Cruz like stepping on bugs. Trump might actually win. This the Republicans strive to avoid.
What could make more sense?
But it does make sense. The Republicans try desperately to ditch the only Republican candidate
who could win the Presidency because… Hillary is one of them.
Because, as every sentient being has by now noticed, the Republicans and Democrats are members
of the same corrupt club of blood-sucking parasites, the action arm of the corporations, Wall
Street, the Israeli lobby, and those who want the US to control the world at any cost - except,
of course, to them. They are panicked at the rise of someone who might put first the interests
of America. Better Hillary, a fellow parasite, than Trump, who isn't.
People in other countries will die by the thousands (perhaps tens or hundreds of thousands)
if Clinton becomes president. Take your lesser of two evils BS elsewhere. It will find no purchase
here.
"[…] And it will be important to do so then because overpromising leads to bad policy decisions,
and overpromising is bad long-run politics as well. But that day is not now."
It's difficult not to choke when I read this during morning coffee. It really sounds like something
I would expect to hear in the Trump camp, but I guess the groupthink brainworm gets the best of
everybody from time-to-time.
I've been reading an old article from Nature about radical Capuchinistas fomenting open rebellion
by invoking social morality and fairness.
Monkeys reject unequal pay (Brosnan & de Waal)
___________________________________________ (from the abstract) Here we demonstrate that a nonhuman primate, the brown capuchin monkey
(Cebus apella), responds negatively to unequal reward distribution in exchanges with a human experimenter.
Monkeys refused to participate if they witnessed a conspecific obtain a more attractive reward
for equal effort, an effect amplified if the partner received such a reward without any effort
at all. These reactions support an early evolutionary origin of inequity aversion.
The day will come when it will be time to gleefully and comprehensively trash people to
be named later for Guevarista fantasies about what their policies are likely to do. The day
will come when it will be time to gleefully and comprehensively trash people to be named later
for advocating Cominternscale lying to voters about what our policies are like to do.
Wow. It's laughably appalling the way the extreme center summons up Cold War Hate to define
both its target and itself. I've been reading Ernst Bloch's "Heritage of Our Times," which contains
some fantastic passages that read like a reflective dreaming, a seance in the midst of social
intoxication, trying to detect the ingredients in the ideological stewpot of late-1920s Germany.
We need him now.
I was amazed to find out that quote came from DeLong.* DeLong is intellectually honest enough
to admit error, so one can only hope he does so in this case.
But honestly, advocating Medicare for All is "Cominternscale lying to voters"? How can those
vile Canadians live with themselves?
NOTE * It's also important that DeLong lets the cat out of the bag with "gleeefully." If
he feels that way, then that's how every other Democrat loyalist feels. Ergo, Sanders
supporters who think that there's any place for them in the Democrat Party from this point forward
are deluding themselves. Not even voluntary pleas before the show trials begin will help them.
(This should also make Sanders think twice about the security of his position on the Budget Committee.
Watch it magically end up in the paws of the bluest of Blue Dogs.)
Sanders supporters who think that there's any place for them in the Democrat Party for
this point forward are deluding themselves.
I still think it makes sense to distinguish the party apparatus from the party. The party itself,
as a vote-getting institution, is a coalition of individuals, associations, business interests,
etc. The issue is who controls the apparatus. I agree that Sanders' supporters are not welcome
in challenging for control of the apparatus but that hardly means we should not try to do so.
And I would argue Sanders should absolutely grab whatever levers of power are made available
to him. Obviously, if the quid pro quo is unacceptable, then no. But we need to learn from rightwing
activists that just because those in control of the party are hacks doesn't mean we forego any
opportunity to use levers of power they make available to us.
DeLong!? Years ago he used to hang out at the Left Business Observer website before options
to email discussions proliferated. He'd debate, not head hunt. It seems that now, with serious
talk of reviving socialism as a policy and political orientation, he's moving into purge mode.
Minorities, minorities, minorities. I am totaly for Bernie.I thought his economic message would
resonate. Where I work (for the USG) racial discrimination certainly has to exist but it is a
minimal sideshow because there is economic equality. Interracial marriage where I work is common
because stability and income trump skin color more often than not. So it really is economics and
Bernie has failed to bring that message to us. He has failed to explain that without economic
parity racial equality is not going to happen. Tht needs to be part of his stump speech. Minorities
think their skin color is what is holding them back…..but there are thousands of experiments every
day that prove that is not the case……from Tiger Woods to Obama himself as his father was at the
top of Kenyan society and not poor. Unfortunately it may be too late for Bernie…….who certainly
understands it but has not really carried the message to minority voters. The establishment loves
to divide by race…..and Hillary has done this masterfully……which you would expect from a Yale
attorney advised by the best PR people money can buy.!
>Furthermore, the Pew report found that Trump's and Sanders's supporters were the most likely
on their respective sides of the ideological divide to be angry at the government; believe that
the economic system unfairly favors powerful interests; and are more isolationist, believing that
America's involvement in global problems makes those problems worse.<
This a winning coalition. We have the votes. Let's do it. Upset the apple-cart. Rock and roll.
Yup. If we can stop sneering at them and calling them racist for five seconds (many are but
we're not exactly unstained ourselves, and it's hardly a binary question – I know more than one
black Trump voter who's creepily anti-Arab) then pickup-driving blue collar conservatives and
actual liberals have more in common than ever before.
Anecdote time: I met a bunch of Tea Partiers at a bar once in about 2009 and tried this argument
on them, saying that they had "more in common with a 20 year old commie-leaning college kid than
with literally anyone you see on TV." They were surprisingly open to the idea of joining forces.
With patience and time I bet they'd start listening to the BLM argument as well – right now
it's just not being aimed towards them. My public defense clients often fit the typical white
conservative working class profile and while they aren't being shot by the cops, they are being
repeatedly arrested, jailed, and fined for minor misdemeanors on scanty evidence in a way that's
making them quite sympathetic towards the idea of a police state.
""Those who "fantasized" about Bernie's "overpromising"""
Not that these are Bernies's proposals but in this vein..
I like the idea of a JG (job guarantee program) paying a living wage (around twice the current
minimum wage) with medical and pension benefits. This would set a standard for private employment.
I like the idea of a BIG associated with this (around the current minimum wage) so that labor
isn't treated as a commodity.
If a person was working a JG and collecting a BIG this would put him/her at the about the standard
of a typical Costco employee.
"... By Russ Baker, editor of WhoWhatWhy.com and author of "Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years." Originally published at WhoWhatWhy ..."
"... The Washington Post, Politico, CNN, ..."
"... The New York Times ..."
"... WhoWhatWhy' ..."
"... Corrupt and "most" pro war – it's a two-fer. (When do we get to put "most" in front of corrupt?). ..."
"... Fuck. DO we really want another fucking Neo-Con in the White House? ..."
"... I think it's interesting to consider that Trump is ostensibly already to the left of Clinton on many issues. ..."
"... I say it is time to leave the Democratic Party in droves. I know, I know. The Supreme Court nominees of a future president loom large. We have to force the hand. Rather than creep to fascism and the earth's destruction, we have to realize the destination is the same as long as we keep our eggs in the basket of the Democratic Party. Time to cut and run, time to build something new, time to vote the Green Party, purge it of its new agey image and begin building it into a democratically functioning party that holds its candidates to its platform. Sure, it will take time. But putting money, time, and energy into the other half of a duopoly that supports empire and neoliberalism is all wasted on the fool's game, which Sander's inadvertently, I think, has exposed as the endgame. Progressives have to realize it will not and cannot be changed. It's core supports those two branches of its world-view, and no matter how they manipulate its adherents by throwing table scraps to them in the form of "social" issues, it will never be something other than what it is. I know, I am done with it. ..."
"... Clinton will not appoint a Supreme Court Justice that is beneficial to the planet. Her appointees will be pro-corporate whores that will play nice on identity issues. Trump will never get a judge through that will overturn Roe v Wade. The Republicans have shown that you can effectively limit the debate of a SCJ and have held appointments up while not in the majority. ..."
"... The article by Mark Landler was brilliant and will keep me from voting for Clinton. I am tired of America being continually and fruitlessly at war. ..."
"... Clinton is pushing for war with Iran, Russia and Hezbollah. How can anyone honestly discuss that Clinton is more sane (in foreign policy) than any person running for office? ..."
"... Trump does not want war with Russia. Clinton wants to go to war with Russia. There is no other way to read her desire for a no fly zone. The only way to implement that policy is through a war with Russia. Clinton is not naive. She knows that any attempt to create a no fly zone will result in a conflict with Russia. ..."
"... Yes, it is a topsy turvy system where the State Department, which one expects to be full of people seeking diplomatic solutions, is led by a warmonger, while many military leaders come off as more cautious. The later often have a better understanding of the futility of the situations they are thrown into and the true costs. ..."
Posted on
April 29, 2016 by
Yves Smith Yves here. It was hard not to notice the awfully convenient timing of the publication
of the New York Times story,
Top Gun: How Hillary Clinton Became a Hawk . If you have not read it, you need to, ASAP. It makes
painfully clear how much Hillary believes that the US should continue to act as if it were the worlds'
sole superpower, when those days are past, is deeply enamored of aggressive military men, and is
in synch with neocons. A sobering article.
By Russ Baker, editor of WhoWhatWhy.com and author of "Family of Secrets: The Bush
Dynasty, America's Invisible Government and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years." Originally
published at
WhoWhatWhy
Following a rough night in five East coast primaries, Bernie Sanders's path to the Democratic
nomination is now more narrow and steep than it has ever been. But are these votes truly a referendum
on who voters think the best candidate is - or are they merely a reflection of what the corporate
media wants Democrats to think?
In our critique of the media, we tend to focus on The New York Times , because
it purports to be the gold standard for journalism, and because others look to the paper for coverage
guidance. But the same critique could be applied to The Washington Post, Politico, CNN,
and most other leading outfits.
We
also noted how it seemed that every little thing the Clinton camp did right was billboarded,
while significant victories against great odds by Sanders were
minimized .
These are truly the kinds of decisions that determine the "conventional wisdom," which in turn
so often determines outcomes.
But there is more - and it is even more disturbing. Clinton's principal reason to claim she is
so qualified to be president - aside from being First Lady and senator - is her four years as Secretary
of State.
What kind of a legacy did she leave? Perhaps her principal role was to push for military engagement
- more soldiers in existing conflicts, and new wars altogether. WhoWhatWhy has written about
these wars and their
dubious
basis .
Wars are good business for Wall Street, for corporations in general, and for others who have been
friendly to her and her campaign.
Why was this never a bigger issue? Why was this not front and center with New York voters, a traditionally
liberal group with a strong antipathy toward war and militarism? Certainly Sanders tried to bring
up this issue, and doesn't seem to have succeeded. But mostly, this was a failure of the media, whose
job it is to shine a strong spotlight.
And why did The New York Times wait until two days after the New York primary
to publish its biggest piece on this, when it could no longer influence that key contest? (It appeared
first on its website and later in its Sunday magazine.)
In fact, with the media declaring this probably now a Clinton-Trump race, highlighting her hawkishness
turns it from a handicap to a strength.
How Hillary Clinton Became a Hawk was the digital equivalent of a huge front-page story.
What the article makes clear - shockingly clear - is that Hillary Clinton is the most militaristic
of any of the presidential candidates, even more than Ted Cruz.
Was this delay in publication just a case of poor scheduling? Was it to ensure that the paper
could not to be accused of influencing the primary outcome?
The Times's editorials had already gotten behind her candidacy (without mentioning her
refusal to release transcripts of her Goldman Sachs speeches, or her opposition to a paltry $15 an
hour minimum wage). Would running Mark Landler's critical piece when it mattered have seemed like
an implicit rebuke of the paper's own editorial board or interfered with its influence?
How ironic it is that "liberal" Hillary Clinton has never met a war she did not like, and has
never been held responsible for the chaos they caused and the policies she advocated - yet it is
Bernie Sanders whose policies are being described as "unrealistic" by the same people who are shielding
Clinton from criticism.
What is the purpose of journalism if not to introduce material when it is relevant - and can have
an impact? And one that is good for humanity - as opposed to the arms industry.
The Times , Judith Miller et al, have certainly had an impact. Go
here for one of WhoWhatWhy' s stories of some of the goriest details.
Corrupt and "most" pro war – it's a two-fer. (When do we get to put "most" in front of corrupt?).
Yet I can visualize all my "enlightened" Boston "liberal" friends so fashionably and smugly rallying
behind her w/o even one second thought of dissent because Republicans. Any criticism will be met
with "delete" on FB friendship.
Yes, but at the end of the day, if you listen to Trump's garbled "message," he's really just
about as NeoCon as Hillary. At least, that's what I'm getting from his very few "policy" speeches.
He wants to "strengthen" our Military, which allegedly has been "weakened" by Obama. Of course,
Trump conveniently ignores the fact the US Military budget is larger than ever, but what I take
from that is that Trump wants to provide them with even more money.
Trump talks about forcing our "allies" to pay us tributes to protect them, which will somehow
enrich us back home. Good luck with that.
Well I could go on, but Trump wants to blast ISIS into glass sand and all the rest of it. I
don't see him as any much less NeoCon that Hillary or anyone else in the GOP. It's just that Trump
dances around things
Not a fan of Clinton. Never have been. Just saying re Trump…. not much different from what
I can parse out.
I have no problem asking other countries to pay for our cost of defense. Yes it is tribute
but if they do not pay then we do not assist. Secondly, Trump in his latest speech basically through
the Wolfowitz Doctrine under the bus. I say more power to that. Trump has said get out of NATO,
I have no problem with that. Lastly, Trump has indicated that he would stop sticking the US's
finger into Putin's eye. I am all for that. What has Hitlary said with regard to any of this.
Trump seems far more pragmatic and he has to show strong defense because that is one of the
key issues of the GOP. On the other hand all of the above issues would be good for the US and
might start taking apart the military-industrial complex.
Yes it is tribute but if they do not pay then we do not assist.
And the hollowness of America's protection "guarantees" gets exposed there and then rather
than a bit further down the road of imperial decline. I rather like your idea…
I do not know where you get hollowness. Most of these countries are running a trade surplus
with the US so why would we defend them for free. The US has never done this in the past (France
and the UK were suppose to pay for their armaments and no one yelled that was hollow). I would
rather we stayed out of the whole freaking thing but asking them to pay is a good start.
These security guarantees are hollow because there is no wayin hell the US can actually defend
a Baltic pipsqueak if Russia is truly determined to spank it for any multitude of transgressions.
That's why these guarantees are hollow.
Also too, the Euros are fast getting wise to the fact that US empire building is actually extracting
high costs from them, your BS about the poor wittle used and abused US notwithstanding. When the
US tries to actually extort cash as well the imperial jig will be well and truly up. Euro nationalism
is on the rise, and in many places it does contain a fairly pronounced dislike for the trigger
happy greedy vulgarians across the pond. And the migrant crisis is not helping US image at all.
Vet – I believe under NATO the other NATO nations are also suppose to contribute to their defense
and only 4 of the 28 countries are meeting their obligations. NATO was not set up for the US to
do all of the heavy lifting.
Personally, I say if Europe wants to go their own way more power to it. As far as Europeans
having a dislike for Americans, maybe. It is my experience having lived on four continents (and
several places in Europe) that many people disliked us before because we did things they could
not. Now we have given then other reasons to dislike us because of our neo-con socialist leanings.
But in total you miss my point which I find that Trump speaks a far more honest foreign affairs
approach than Hitlary or any president since before Bill Clinton. If you disagree then make your
point instead of just ranting.
I think it's interesting to consider that Trump is ostensibly already to the left of Clinton
on many issues. Typically, Democrats trying for presidential nomination have pandered to the party's
Left, and then run to the right for the general election. However, if Clinton wants to run to
the right, she'll be deep in Republican territory, while the proggies are certain to wander off
her home-front plantation. Except maybe for abortion, it appears that she has no home turf. It's
a curious predicament for a Democrat to be in.
Well it makes sense if you just consider that her husband was the best Republican President
the Democrats ever elected. She's a DINO in all serious matters and a "liberal" in the kind of
superficial stuff the MSM uses to differentiate and divide the people from themselves.
Several weeks ago, there was a very pro-Birdie piece on the NYTime's front page. People saw
it on line. Within several hours it was heavily edited and read more negative than positive. The
part about John McCain praising Bernie was removed, ditto other parts.
Huh? Judith Miller and the post election 2004 warrantless wiretapping story beg to differ.
They sat on a story in fear of influencing the election. They had the plagarist from Falwell U.
The NYT has been trash for as long as the Patriots have run the AFC East.
One can remember that Edward Snowden decided not to approach the Times with his story BECAUSE
the Times sat on the warrantless wiretapping story.
I still pay my $15 every 4 weeks for the NTTimes digital, but justify that partially because
I can do archive searches.
The Times Mea Culpa, spearheaded by Bill Keller, after the Judith Miller Iraq war reporting,
was particularly good. The TImes had their Iraq war cake and then got to apologize for eating
it.
The digital edition frequently has thoughtful readers comments that effectively counter the
latest Friedman, Kristof, Krugman, Brooks, Dowd, and Douthat received wisdom.
There must be more than few print readers who yell at their copy of the print NY Times, "Tom/Nick/David/Paul,
you are so #&*$% wrong".
Sadly the print readers can't access the readers' comment section, AKA Times Editorial antidote,
that accompanies the digital edition.
I say it is time to leave the Democratic Party in droves. I know, I know. The Supreme Court
nominees of a future president loom large. We have to force the hand. Rather than creep to fascism
and the earth's destruction, we have to realize the destination is the same as long as we keep
our eggs in the basket of the Democratic Party. Time to cut and run, time to build something new,
time to vote the Green Party, purge it of its new agey image and begin building it into a democratically
functioning party that holds its candidates to its platform. Sure, it will take time. But putting
money, time, and energy into the other half of a duopoly that supports empire and neoliberalism
is all wasted on the fool's game, which Sander's inadvertently, I think, has exposed as the endgame.
Progressives have to realize it will not and cannot be changed. It's core supports those two branches
of its world-view, and no matter how they manipulate its adherents by throwing table scraps to
them in the form of "social" issues, it will never be something other than what it is. I know,
I am done with it.
Doesn't the Supreme Court argument go out the window when the potential President is a lunatic?
Of course, Maryanne Trump was appointed by Bill Clinton.
Clinton will not appoint a Supreme Court Justice that is beneficial to the planet. Her appointees
will be pro-corporate whores that will play nice on identity issues.
Trump will never get a judge through that will overturn Roe v Wade. The Republicans have shown
that you can effectively limit the debate of a SCJ and have held appointments up while not in
the majority.
The abortion issue is a non issue. There is no way that justice would get on the court.
The Republicans will use that issue to get an even more corporate judge onto the court. A similar
deal is going on in NC today. The state will eventually cave and get ride of the bathroom provision
but the anti-worker sections will remain.
I cancelled my subscription to the NYT because of its more than biased reporting of the Democratic
primaries. I tried to make sure the editorial staff knew my reasons.
As a Veteran who deployed to The Middle East the first time , and with children entering
their teens, while I won't be able to control their decisions when they come of age, I have done
everything I possibly can to dissuade them from joining the military.
Sadly, I believe that whether it's Clinton or Trump, they will have zero reservations of sending
my children of to die in a war that will not end.
I agree. I don't see much difference between Trump and Clinton in this regard. Both are itching
to go to War. It's slightly possible – slightly! – that Clinton would be somewhat more sane (insofar
as one can be sane about war) than Trump. That's about the best I can say in this YET AGAIN choice
between the Evil of Two Lessers.
Arguing about the relative sanity of the insane is futile. Lybia and Hillminator's cackle upon
being informed of Khadafy's being sodomized with a knife is proof positive that having her as
prez is a recipe for even more of the same.
Clinton is pushing for war with Iran, Russia and Hezbollah. How can anyone honestly discuss
that Clinton is more sane (in foreign policy) than any person running for office?
Trump does not want war with Russia. Clinton wants to go to war with Russia. There is no other
way to read her desire for a no fly zone. The only way to implement that policy is through a war
with Russia. Clinton is not naive. She knows that any attempt to create a no fly zone will result
in a conflict with Russia.
Yes, it is a topsy turvy system where the State Department, which one expects to be full of
people seeking diplomatic solutions, is led by a warmonger, while many military leaders come off
as more cautious. The later often have a better understanding of the futility of the situations
they are thrown into and the true costs.
The pro-Hillary Times' piece provides compelling, irrefutable evidence of Hillary's neocon
credentials. The neocons adore her–Cheney commented Hillary was Obama's best cabinet appointment.
Add to that the chilling mutual admiration between Hillary and Kissinger and we have a tangibly
scary candidate.
Her supporters reaction? They either dismiss the idea she is loved by the neocons, or refuse
to understand the facts. Similar to rationalizing that money in politics is not a corrupting influence.
If Hillary is elected, she will have bipartisan support for a neocon foreign policy, as well
as money playing a major role in politics and one's personal life (speaking fees/foundation donations).
Citizens United will become a quaint memory.
It is getting impossible to argue the two parties are anything but the same side of the coin.
Getting?
Bill was first elected 24 years ago. Let's say a quarter century… I think Bernie made his tweedle
dum tweedle Dee comment about 20 years ago. The rest of us have been slower to notice.
well, Clinton is a woman and a Democrat. the more perfect evil. just Obama, the Vichy Democrats
do more evil than the Republicans, far more efficiently/effectively than any Republican could
or has. Hearing David/Charles Koch recently say Hillary "could" be better than any of the Republican
candidates, is proof. we are so Fkked!
yet my siblings will vote for Hillary cause of the Supreme Court due to the fact Hillary has
a D by her name. and i gather so many women will vote for Hillary cause she is a "woman." lol
Branding works. Stupidity, American style. if I vote, it will be for Trump, the lesser of two
evils, lol.
But that fails to count all the younger voters, saddled with debt and facing an economy where
business rules always favor capital over labor, who will find alternatives to Hillary that fit
with their moral sensibilities.
Meanwhile, the DNC is committing organizational suicide by becoming enforcers for Hillary,
restricting voting, and failing to sue states like Arizona for election fraud.
Older women will vote for Hillary. The divide between race and gender is primarily age. Older
black women are voting for her at 80% clips in nearly every election. Bernie can not win the 40
and under vote in every election while winning 30 and under at 80% with out winning across those
demographics.
Clinton kills him with older voters and has done so through out the cycle. It is why the DNC's
efforts to suppress the vote have worked so well for Clinton.
The NYT is simply a propaganda machine designed to fool people who can read at a slightly higher
grade level. If the 'newspaper of record' is compromised, how many mainstream outlets have any
real coverage of politics? After reading a large sampl;e,The number is close to zero. Occasionally,
the masses are thrown a bone.
Anyone who thinks there is a difference between the two nominal parties have to be kidding
themselves. The two party system is a facade that lures you into believing you live in a democracy
or republic. You are ruled. Your votes don't matter. Any real threat to power in the US is either
co-opted or neutralized.
We had a pedophile for speaker of the house. TPTB had to know it and used that info to keep
him under control. He was probably selected based on his past. Along with Hillary, Paul Ryan is
clearly a fascist. Look at their actions and their policies.
even the times piece was puffery. all the generals impressed by her wonkish hard work. and
it left out the most damning fact. hillary was the deciding voice in what obama called the worst
decision of his presidency, the invasion of libya and killing of quadaffi. nearly a decade after
iraq, in a nearly equivilant situation, with all the information she claimed not to have the first
time around, she chose the same stupid, destructive approach and sent another nation and region
reeling in choas.
this. I had thought it was because as a gen 1 feminist, she feels she has to out-macho the
boys, but it's both deeper and more pernicious with her. Fucking neocons. Bombing while the world
is burning.
What about the big four?
1 her emails anyone else would be gone for 99 years
2. her speeches? Yea sure. She has the only copy in her (contract)
3. her deals as SOState I'll get you arms (Saudi's) if you give me $1 million for foundation
Plus many more of these.
4. Her health passing out a few time, breaking an elbow, and others ailments.
Not a word on any. As for the NYT. It is as bad a you can get.
There is a great quote from Albert Camus a editor for "Combat" during the war.
"We have a right to think that truth with a capital letter is relative. But facts are facts. And
whoever says the sky is blue when it is grey is prostituting words and preparing the way for tyranny.
Nice comment.
#5 is the discrepancies in the exit poll data. Only the Democrats are having trouble with exit
polls this cycle. Each Republican election has been with in the exit polls but many of the Democratic
primaries are falling outside of the margin of error for exit polls and always siding with Clinton.
I pay $8 a month buying the weekend edition because I like the crossword (based in KL). The
rest of the NYT is crap, been downhill for years. The IHT was okay until it was merged out of
existence.
Otherwise, people who can't see Hillary's vicious streak are blind or stupid. She is the candidate
most likely to engage Russia. Lawrence Wilkerson had a great interview on her.
"… this was a failure of the media, whose job it is to shine a strong spotlight." When are
Americans going to learn that this is not true. The job of the media is to sell advertising to
the people who have the money to buy it. It's easier to do that if they don't tell people too
much about what's happening in the world. Tell them about the Kardashians or what people are saying
about Beyonce's latest video. Baseball games are OK. Good looking blonde announcers help. The
movie "Front Page" was fiction. Also, there's no Tooth Fairy.
With unprecedented access to insiders and whisteblowers, the New York Times is set to publish
a scathing indictment of the horse barn industry on the massive damage caused by closing the barn
doors after the horses have left.
"... So, if you're either a Sanders supporter, sympathetic to the Sanders campaign, or a Hillary voter desperately hoping she'll do something to bring into the Democratic fold the 40 percent of Sanders voters who say they won't vote for Hillary in the fall - all but ensuring a Trump presidency - here's some news for you: the signals are now being sent that Sanders and his people will, by calculated design, get absolutely nothing. ..."
"... What lies behind this "strategy" for the fall election - if we can call it that - is the same hubris that permitted Secretary Clinton never to reveal her Wall Street transcripts, to condescend to millennials at every turn, to refuse to apologize for bad judgment in the whole email-server affair, to refuse to apologize for her 1994 crime bill vote, to try to get away with (during the Michigan debate) the lie that Sanders had opposed the auto bailout, and so on. ..."
"... The Clinton campaign has no interest in Sanders' policies, nor in moving left to win over his supporters, which Clinton desperately needs, if nominated. Her campaign displays nothing but disdain for the left and, honestly, the feeling is mutual. Neither side must move in substance, the differences are irreconcilable. So be it, time to divorce. If Clinton gets the nomination, the best outcome is that Libs mess up the Republican field and defecting Lefties upend Clinton. It's a guess as to how that would shake out, but the substance of the candidates won't be the determining factor. ..."
"... Neocon is not left wing. Wash your mouth out. Obama has governed center right on everything save some social issues. He's only thrown the occasional bone to the left to maintain a brand distinction from the business wing of the Republican party. As the New York Times recounted last week, Hillary is a full bore hawk and even outflanked Obama via bureaucratic infighting (as in got a bunch of current and ex military leaders of the bloodhthirsty persuasion to box him in when his preference was to be more moderate). ..."
"... No doubt we can all pull up anecdotal evidence to one side or the other. My experience has been both in reallife and social media that there isn't a single Clinton supporter who is willing to speak with anyone who supports Sanders without pointing out they're the equivalents of Quislings who are allowing Trump to get the presidency, thus allowing the glorious, free, open, truthful and peaceful US of Obama to slide into the demonic realms. As arguments go, it isn't exactly convincing, given Clinton's positions and comments on a wide variety of issues, and as for tone, it isn't especially conciliatory, much less inviting, when your speaking companion calls you a moron, traitor, and fool. ..."
"... I myself think a better long-term outcome would be for the New Deal Reactionaries to reconquer the Democratic Party from within over the next few decades . . . if we can . . . and purge, burn and exterminate every trace of Clintonite Obamacrat filth from the leadership. And let their Clintonite Obamacrat garbage and trash followers go where-ever the Leadership Filth decide to go. ..."
"... More centrally, with hindsight, we can see that there was one sea change in the organizational capacity of the Democratic electorate in 2008: It could be mobilized, and came to understand it could be mobilized. That is the lesson of 2008, and it would have enabled a continuing war of maneuver had not the Democratic establishment sought instantly to unlearn it (and Obama, personally, to betray it). It may be that we are to learn the same lesson, again, with the Sanders campaign, but this time with victory as a goal, and defined. If so, the sense of wonder in "America" may well prove to be prophetic. ..."
"... Military Misfortunes ..."
"... I tend to consider the Sanders' campaign as the next evolutionary step in the "neo progressive" political trend that started with Occupy Wall Street: one that recognized the decoupling of civil rights from class issues and chose to focus on the latter without fear of being labeled socialist ( the former has been successfully captured by the duopolic "moderates"). Unlike its predecessor, the Sander's movement has a funding mechanism, broader appeal, and an organizational strategy that I think will enable long-term sustainability. I personally am considering how to distribute my next round of donation dollars. Give all 30 to Bernie or do a 3-way split between him, Teachout, and Grayson. I give Grayson points for asking his email subscribers whether to commit his delegate vote to Sanders or Clinton and then chose Sanders in spite of the fact that he is running for Senate in Clinton-friendly Florida. ..."
"... The best result (assuming Sanders does not get the nomination) is for Sanders voters to go anywhere but Clinton, and for Clinton to lose as a result. Those too worried about who might win in this case are trying to accomplish too many goals. ..."
"... I agree with this wholeheartedly. In a very different context, following the 2010 mid-term elections, Ian Welsh said "The left must be seen to repudiate Obama, and they must be seen to take him down." Here Sanders supporters must be seen to repudiate Clinton and must be seen to take her down. That the GOP fears its base while the Democratic party despises its base is, I think, in no small part because the GOP base will walk away from the party (or is perceived as being willing to do that) while the Democratic base will not. ..."
"... The immense problem facing the Dem party and congress followers is that the FBI has form in having the goods on presidents. They know how to wield the power. ..."
"... The idea that the question of whether Clinton will be indicted will be decided by apolitical public servants on the merits of the case if supremely naive. Given Hillary Clinton's stature that decision is inherently political, and would be even if corruption wasn't endemic in contemporary Washington. ..."
"... It's hard to imagine that a President Hillary won't be permanently in the crosshairs of the wacko-fringe-that-is-more-than-a-fringe of the congressional Republicans. To the extent one may find that comforting, you can count on the Tea Partiers (or whatever they'll be called) to keep up a steady drumbeat demanding action on the tapes, with much of the MSM dancing to their tunes. ..."
"... If you put yourself in the shoes of a Clinton strategist, and if you assume a straight Clinton-Trump fight, there are two obvious strategies to follow: A populist 'big tent' campaign, focusing on economics, to try to undermine Trumps appeal to the working classes and bring in the majority of Sanders supporters, and hope that enough 'moderate' Republican supporters stay home to ensure a comfortable victory. a 'centrist moderate' (i.e. right wing) campaign, which would go all out to attract votes from moderate Republicans in northern and western States, along with a scare campaign to ensure that any Dems even slightly to the left of mainstream will feel they have no choice but to hold their nose and vote for Hilary. ..."
"... I think a more important question though is which campaign Trumps strategists would prefer to be facing. I think we've already seen the answer in the manner Trump has gone all out to attack Clinton and her 'women should vote for me' line. I think Trump would much prefer Clinton to take option 2. This allows him to do what he loves – attack his opponents apparent strength. He will go all out to portray her as a puppet of the elites, a flip flopping old style womens libber, and so on. He will bring up Bills indiscretions every single time she tries to appeal to Republican women, and repeatedly attack her supposed foreign policy expertise (and boy will he have a lot of ammunition). He will particularly focus on her health. It will be nasty, but he will do enormous damage. ..."
"... I've thought for a long time that Clinton and the Democrat Establishment as a whole affirmatively want moderate Republican votes and don't care whether they get Sanders votes or not. Hence, I choose Door #2. ..."
"... I think it's key for Trump to focus on 1) corruption and 2) incompetence more than any gender identity stuff (which we all know is what Dems do best) ..."
"... These are two things that turn someone from "inevitable" into "toxic". If Trump spends more time hammering her on the Foundation for things like pay-to-play weapons deals and on her destructive term as Sec. of State, then I think he drives her negatives sky high, the Sanders' supporters won't be able to hold their noses and the moderate Republicans will sit this one out. ..."
"... It's perfect for Trump because it's exactly how he demolished Jebbie. He already knows what to do. ..."
"... Many polls are primarily propaganda. Humans are herd animals; they like to 'go with a winner' and if a poll can show someone in 'the lead' that translates to (often weak) support. ..."
"... Polls are sometimes done primarily to 'steer the herd'. Don't be fooled. ..."
"... I am not sure Clinton will get women. I work with women and work with everyday people, people are very excited about Trump, whereas they hate the Clintons. I am also shocked by the number of people that watch Fox news and they aren't elderly. The Kochs may prefer Clinton but the average tea-partery they cultivated with Americans for Prosperity never will. ..."
"... If Sanders people want to take over a state party they can accomplish it in less that 4 years. Most democratic parties are very old and are essentially a network for lawyers. ..."
"... I don't think Bernie is seriously trying to pull Hillary towards his positions. He is trying to encourage voters to base their position on issues rather than personalities, and convince them that they have power if they do. One of the consequences of that is being willing to vote for another candidate if they (credibly) adopt your positions, which is why he has to make the offer. But I'm sure he is under no illusions as to how it will be received. ..."
"... Homeland Security and Fusion Centers all across the country crushed Occupy. It never mattered how organized, or structured, they were, or not. And it won't matter the next time our mayors, militarized police forces, H.S. and the FBI conspire to crush a movement, either. ..."
"... This is why Sanders wants to influence the party's official platform, because I think the way it's supposed to work is that the nominee runs on that platform. Sadly, it appears Debbie has engineered things so that I think the platform, in the end, is going to straight-up rubber-stamp Clinton's positions. I mean, what's the point of a coronation if the Queen can't dictate the terms, right? ..."
"... I guess what really ticks me off is that Clinton's never going to do what's best for the country, she's always going to do what's best for her; that kind of hubris does not deserve our votes. ..."
"... Hillary says a lot of things (and even posts pdfs to her website!). But what she actually fights for and achieves is always and only what the most powerful interests in our country and world want. And on top of that she's incredibly corrupt (weapons deals for Clinton Foundation donations, and skirting campaign finance laws using 32 state parties to create a massive slush fund being only the two latest egregiously corrupt maneuvers), and quite incompetent (Iraq, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, her ridiculously insecure email server). If all that's not apparent to you by now you're willfully deceiving yourself. ..."
"... whenever it suits them, I notice that party hacks bash the Independents. ..."
"... Obviously neither of you understand the obstacles created by both parties to keep a third party from gaining power. It requires an enormous amount of money and manpower to get on the ballot in 50 states. Also, there is no primary for an Independent party either, which is why some states allow for crossovers and Independents to vote. The resulting chaos would be crazy. ..."
"... A political hack is a negative term ascribed to a person who is part of the political party apparatus, but whose intentions are more aligned with victory than personal conviction. ..."
"... an untalented professional ..."
"... not caring for anything good that may come out of organized politics ..."
"... [Hillary] can't start proposing "Drill, Baby, Drill" instead of solar power and not look like anything less than a oil industry bimbo. ..."
"... Why not? That's exactly what Obama did. He mocked McCain-Palin's all of the above ..."
"... all of the above ..."
"... Obama was liked and coming off of 43. Also, he was an obvious empty suit despite the hyperbole tossed around. ..."
"... The bulk of voters are likely tired and not willing to just embrace a random Senator who is never on the 630 news, still the number one media outlet, and annoyed by broken promises about Healthcare and the economy. The Republicans nominated a robber baron in 2012, and Obama and his supporters made all kinds of promises about how he would be different in a economy term. People with budget concerns aren't answering polls and have cut land lines. ..."
"... Hillary isn't holding mass rallies because she can't. ..."
"... If the Democratic Party is good for nothing, what is Bernie doing running as a dem for the nomination of the party's presidential candidate. ..."
"... 3. It turns out that neither Hillary nor her staff ever had any respect for Sanders, his supporters, or the causes he (and they) have championed. ..."
"... How do we know? Well, a campaign's press secretary is - by definition and responsibility - its mouthpiece. So when Jennifer Palmieri, Clinton's mouthpiece, said publicly after the New York primary that Bernie Sanders and his campaign had been destructive to the Democratic Party and the nation , you know that's exactly what Clinton thinks, too. Had Clinton fired Palmieri or publicly admonished her, one might think differently. ..."
"... Instead, silence - which, in politics, is assent. ..."
"... "It has the potential to personalize it, it has the potential to be a dangerous moment. Not just for Wall Street not just for the people who are particularly targeted but for anybody who is a little bit out of line, " Blankfein said. "It's a liability to say I'm going to compromise I'm going to get one millimeter off the extreme position I have and if you do you have to back track and swear to people that you'll never compromise. It's just incredible. It's a moment in history." ..."
"... Blankfein avoided saying whether he supported former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, though both Clintons have long ties to Blankfein and to Goldman Sachs, which has been a heavy donor to Bill Clinton's charity work. ..."
Yves here. NC regulars are unlikely to be surprised at Gaius' conclusion, but it's useful to
have ifactsndependent confirmation and additional facts.
By Gaius Publius
, a professional writer living on the West Coast of the United States and frequent contributor
to DownWithTyranny, digby, Truthout, and Naked Capitalism. Follow him on Twitter
@Gaius_Publius ,
Tumblr and
Facebook . Originally published
at
at Down With Tyranny
. GP article here.
Clinton to Sanders: "No, you come to me." Can you read that headline any other way?
Something to keep your eye on in the lead-up to post-East Coast voting, and something that could
well affect the voting after that. Will Clinton move toward Sanders' positions, as an appeal for
his supporters, or will she, as I've said elsewhere, insist the mountain (of his voters) come to
Mohammad?
Seems the latter.
First, Clinton operative Peter Daou, in the headline above, makes the position clear:
"If Bernie Wants Real Progress He'll Align His Message With Hers"
No link, but the google will find the piece for you if want to read it.
5. There will be no attempt whatsoever to bring Sanders supporters back into the Democratic
fold.
Sanders supporters knew Clinton was angry at them for voting for Bernie - they could tell by
her comment saying that she "feels sorry for" young voters too misinformed to vote for her; or
by Bill Clinton saying that Sanders voters are so unsophisticated that they just want to "shoot
every third banker on Wall Street"; or by David Plouffe (a Clinton ally) saying that every person
who donates money to Sanders is being taken in by an obvious "fraud"; or by the unnamed Clinton
staffer so certain she or he was speaking in a tone and manner consistent with the view of the
Clinton campaign that she or he told Politico that the Clinton campaign "kicked Bernie's ass"
in New York and that Sanders can "go fuck himself."
And so on.
But who knew that, with almost twenty primaries and caucuses left, and more than 1,400 delegates
left to be awarded, Clinton would start vetting potential Vice Presidential picks in full view
of an electorate she says she's still working hard to win over? And who knew that not only would
Sanders not be considered for a unity ticket, but - apparently - her top picks for VP, Cory Booker
and Julian Castro, are reliable Clintonites with no ties whatsoever to the Sanders campaign or
the movement he heads? And who knew Elizabeth Warren would almost certainly be frozen out of the
VP conversation due to her decision to stay neutral in the primary race rather than endorse Clinton?
Well, everyone.
Everyone who knows the Clintons, that is.
So, if you're either a Sanders supporter, sympathetic to the Sanders campaign, or a Hillary
voter desperately hoping she'll do something to bring into the Democratic fold the 40 percent
of Sanders voters who say they won't vote for Hillary in the fall - all but ensuring a Trump presidency
- here's some news for you: the signals are now being sent that Sanders and his people will, by
calculated design, get absolutely nothing.
Hillary lost in 2008 and received the second-most powerful position in the world [note
the assertion of a trade for SoS]. Sanders will be ignored and shunned.
What lies behind this "strategy" for the fall election - if we can call it that - is the same
hubris that permitted Secretary Clinton never to reveal her Wall Street transcripts, to condescend
to millennials at every turn, to refuse to apologize for bad judgment in the whole email-server
affair, to refuse to apologize for her 1994 crime bill vote, to try to get away with (during the
Michigan debate) the lie that Sanders had opposed the auto bailout, and so on.
In other words, America is already seeing the Hillary Clinton they'll get during the fall election
campaign - and also, should Clinton somehow manage to squeak by Donald Trump in November, the
sort of Nixonian White House we can expect in consequence.
And it isn't pretty.
Is Abramson right? He could well be. Everything through the second large paragraph is true. Will
his conclusion prove true as well?
I've heard from a reliable source that Karl Rove is getting behind Hillary. And that would
mean his considerable resources and expertise with vote-rigging. I guess she thinks she can tell
all those Bernie supporters to eff off.
I suspect that this is that Rove is pitching Hillary, since Cruz is going down and I doubt
he'd work for Manafort/Stone as a de factor subcontractor even if they'd have him. And I don't
see what he brings to the party. Rove is a has been.
The WSJ (the reporting side, which is pretty good, not the lunatic op ed section) had several
articles after the last Prez campaign that made clear that Rove had taken a lot of money, fee
wise and ad budget wise, and had failed to produce. The stories, which I am too lazy to track
down, were really damning. He is apparently at sea in the world of new media and fragmented audiences.
His old narrowcasting was very specifically targeted mailings (ZIP code based, there is a lot
of traditional marketing segmentation on that) but mail is now effective with a relatively small
group of voters.
'Mail is now effective with a relatively small group of voters.'
It reaches Hillary's scrum of African-American grandmothers. :-)
Works the same way as with my late grandma, who used to receive endless letters from Senator
Jesse Helms, and felt obliged to help the poor man save America.
Interesting timing. Just yesterday I received, via the old, analog mail, a Presidential Campaign
Steering Survey from Pelosi, et al.
Full disclosure; I am neither African – American, a grandmother, nor, to my knowledge, scrum.
I'm not a Democrat (I registered as one ahead of the primary to cast a vote for Sanders, justifying
my nose – holding because he's an Independent). In any case, I had a devilishly good time giving
honest answers to all the pertinent questions the survey failed to ask. After completing the survey,
I had to fold it like origami to place it in the envelope, which was too small for the questionnaire,
but appropriately sized for a donation (hilarious, but NO!). I sealed the return envelope with
a nice "Get Well" sticker, though.
The Clinton campaign has no interest in Sanders' policies, nor in moving left to win over his
supporters, which Clinton desperately needs, if nominated. Her campaign displays nothing but disdain
for the left and, honestly, the feeling is mutual. Neither side must move in substance, the differences
are irreconcilable. So be it, time to divorce. If Clinton gets the nomination, the best outcome
is that Libs mess up the Republican field and defecting Lefties upend Clinton. It's a guess as
to how that would shake out, but the substance of the candidates won't be the determining factor.
sanders identifies as a peacenik, yet supports drone killings, boots on the ground in Syria
and the f-35 program.
publius identifies as a reporter, yet fails to recognize bogus elections (coin tosses, results
released before totals were tallied, hundreds of thousands of falsified voter affiliations)
can we please have a real discussion instead of pretending that we're watching democracy in
action?
If there was anything positive to take away from eight years of Obama, it was the wealth of
evidence he provided that one should judge people by what they do, rather than what they say.
Clinton: owned by Wall St, and with Obama tore apart Libya and Syria with their superpower pretenses.
Bernie: at least he has taken actions I consider positive on domestic policy, but no one now thinks
he will be nominated. If I don't vote for Jill, I will for Trump.
1) examine the evidence which strongly suggests that the solution (restoring electoral representation)
will not be found in a voting booth. (clinton's rampant cheating as mentioned above/diebold/hanging
chads)
2) confirm that 80% of us agree on 80% of the issues. (we want our kids to have clean water,
healthy food, proper education, and genuine opportunity. the outrage over social issues like gay
marriage, abortion or immigration is largely manufactured and then amplified by the msm to get
people angry enough to head to their polling stations and vote against the other guy.)
3) apply fiorina's plan to all the major agencies rather than just the v.a. fire the top 400
administrators at the s.e.c./f.d.a./e.p.a./h.u.d./v.a./n.r.c./d.o.d./d.o.j./etc. (this is not
meant in any way to endorse fiorina, she's just hit upon the method required to remove the cancer.)
Is that what Fiorina did at Hewlett-Compackard? Considering that she destroyed half of Hewlett-Compackard's
basic value, why would any method of hers be considered good for anything anywhere else?
About F-35, I had more thought that Sanders was saying the F-35 is too entrenched to ever cancel,
therefore we should resign ourselves to it. A President Trump might feel brave enough to try getting
Congress to cancel the F-35 if he believes it should be cancelled. I don't know what he believes
about F-35.
You are absolutely right. Compared to Bernie, Donald Trump is an angel of peace. What does
it say about Democrats that they've gone so to the right that even their "leftist" "socialist"
candidate is far to the right on foreign policy than the Republican nominee?
"We really have no choice, we have to knock out ISIS," Trump said. "I would listen to the
generals, but I'm hearing numbers of 20,000-30,000."
Trump typically rails against American military involvement around the world, but he was
not alone in calling for ground troops in Iraq and Syria at the debate
He has explitly said that he wants friendly relations with China and Russia. He has also said
that he has no problem with letting Russia take out ISIS. As far as making sense goes, no other
candidate comes close.
Nothing says leftwing foreign policy like hunt down innocent women and children for being related
to terrorists. How on earth is Trump an angel of peace. The delusion is strong with this one.
Neocon is not left wing. Wash your mouth out. Obama has governed center right on everything
save some social issues. He's only thrown the occasional bone to the left to maintain a brand
distinction from the business wing of the Republican party. As the New York Times recounted last
week, Hillary is a full bore hawk and even outflanked Obama via bureaucratic infighting (as in
got a bunch of current and ex military leaders of the bloodhthirsty persuasion to box him in when
his preference was to be more moderate).
The bigger problem is no one in either party appears to believe in civilian control of the
military. That is the cost of having presidents who never served in the armed forces. If they
had, they'd know they were pretty screwed up and would not be intimidated by generals and admirals.
PLUS, there is no civilian "pressure" to end war, as there was during Vietnam, when most soldiers
were draftees. We will have endless discretionary war till all Americans are once again affected
by it directly by having sons and daughters DRAFTED to fight.
He does not support placing troops in Syria but he is not a peacenik and has not campaigned
as a peace candidate. Yes the fix is in and I have not seen articles posted no NK that suggest what the exit polls indicate.
I have not gone through each day of news though so please correct me if I'm wrong.
HAYES: One more question - the announcement today that the U.S. is going to send 250 Special
Forces operators on the ground in Syria. Do you agree with that? Do you think that's permissible,
given the fact that there has not been an authorization?
SANDERS: I think the - look. Here's the bottom line. ISIS has got to be destroyed, and the
way that ISIS must be destroyed is not through American troops fighting on the ground. ISIS
must be destroyed and King Abdullah of Jordan has made this clear, that the war is for the
soul of Islam and it must be won by the Muslim nations themselves.
I think what the President is talking about is having American troops training Muslim troops,
helping to supply the military equipment they need, and I do support that effort.
if the answer is 'no', then sanders should clearly state so. what i hear is standard beltway
waffling. ie: vote against the war this one time, but then vote to fund it five times in a row.
Syria has not attacked the u.s. sending u.s. troops into syria is indisputably illegal and
will likely to lead to ww3.
ps: isn't it time to admit that 'elite american troops' 'training' 'moderate' 'radicals' to
fight 'despotic dictators' bears no resemblance to reality? how would you rate our ten+ years
spent 'training' iraqi 'moderates'?
successful?
or did we just hand over vast stores of munitions to isis and provide them with
billion$ in oil revenue via turkey/erdogan?
sanders argues, as do most neocons, that we can somehow identify and train 'moderates' when
most of our people can't even speak the language. is this ignorance? insanity? the most glorious
ineptitude ever witnessed by mankind?
My understanding is that the American special forces in Syria are in Syrian Kurdistan training
and assisting Kurdish militias which are fighting ISIS. Am I wrong about that?
For the moment , fighting ISIS is not the same thing as fighting the Syrian Arab Republc. If
the Kurds win their fight with ISIS in their own little Kurdish region, then these Kurds always
"could" join the alphabet-jihadi fight against the Syrian Arab Republc. I hope the Kurds don't
do that. I hope they satisfy themselves with an autonomous Syrian Kurdistan federally associated
with the Syrian Arab Republic. This would allow the SAR and the R + 6 to focus forces against
the various alphabet jihadis.
The way to achieve peace in Syria is to achieve the comprehensive extermination of every trace
of any ability to mount any armed opposition against the legitimate government of Syria.
Jihadists are cancer cells. They clump together to form cancers. The only proper approach to
jihadis is total and overwhelming chemotherapy. Exterminate them all in detail, down to the very
last jihadi. And in practice, that means letting the R + 6 get on with the chemotherapy treatments,
and not obstructing or harrassing the R + 6 in any way.
No doubt we can all pull up anecdotal evidence to one side or the other. My experience has
been both in reallife and social media that there isn't a single Clinton supporter who is willing
to speak with anyone who supports Sanders without pointing out they're the equivalents of Quislings
who are allowing Trump to get the presidency, thus allowing the glorious, free, open, truthful
and peaceful US of Obama to slide into the demonic realms. As arguments go, it isn't exactly convincing,
given Clinton's positions and comments on a wide variety of issues, and as for tone, it isn't
especially conciliatory, much less inviting, when your speaking companion calls you a moron, traitor,
and fool.
Frankly, I'm hoping it all continues. I see this as the best chance yet for genuine progressives–you
know, the people who used to be the the center and left of the Democratic Party – to realize that
they're now regarded as vermin whose votes don't even count and whose opinions are totally despised.
Clinton's courting the Republicans who don't want Trump, and counting on the lockstep Dems to
fill out the rest. Best result? The real left finally leaves the Dem Party for good; Clinton loses;
and the party heads begin to question whether the radical shift towards powerful lobbies in Bill
Clinton's administration was really a good idea in the long term, after all. More likely? Third
parties gain, Trump wins, Clinton and the Dems blame Sanders and continue kidney-punching everything
from the unions and the left to their latest enemies, the millennials, as well as bad messaging.
Nothing is learned, and they sink like the Whigs in the 1850s.
Even if not Teachout, I hope someone much younger and scrappier than Sanders picks up the mantle.
Younger, because then they'll be a thorn in the New Dem side for many years to come, and scrappier,
because Sanders' polite, gentlemanly campaign style meant someone who was under active investigation
by the FBI likely will win the nomination.
However, in the background: seas are rising, global warming continues to alter water sources,
agriculture, fisheries, etc. Meanwhile, the EU is under severe economic stress, as are China and
Russia. And that's just for starters, without mentioning the fact that each day tax havens continue
to suck the life out of what could otherwise be functioning economies in socially equitable cultures.
However, ignoring the background problems that are biological and exponential, Clinton offers
incrementalist, legalistic, half-measures.
It's amazing to watch the DNC commit suicide, I'll say that much for this election season.
All those nice, fat paychecks at the beck and call of vindictive, incrementalist machinations.
Sad.
We're 5th Generation Republicans, who's Whig ancestors helped suggest and make the new third
party (Republican) a success (and still hold the record for the most brothers serving simultaneously
in congress). That said we left are old party in 1996 when it was taken over by so completely
by "propertarians" that put contract law and property rights so extremely far ahead of human rights
(reminding us of when some considered owning humans as property, perfectly fine with them, as
long as no one could "own" them).
They were able to start a new party in those relatively simpler times, but we have not done
well in dividing efforts through, I think something like 92 different parties throughout our history.
Few but the top 2 get much traction, then they use it to concentrate and corrupt it down to where
too few imply the consent of too many.
A suggestion: A Universal Open Primary Ballot
List every qualified candidate that has enough signatures to meet the threshold of percentage
of previous voters in the previous off year or 4 year election, list the party they want to run
under and how many signatures the gathered by an early enough deadline, on a voter information
pamphlet distributed before the actual voting (as we do in California). Leave no one out, list
all but let the parties decide if they want to accept any or all of those votes from the UOPB
in addition to their party only ballots (and some who accept non-party preference voters).
The parties can keep their own ballots (as I'm sure Republicans and Democrats would, to restrict
who can be heard in their selection process. I'd add the UOPB as an alternate choice for each
individual voter like those of us who would be more likely to choose different people from other
parties for some offices. We think you could select a mix of the best candidates to keep the separation
of powers more realistic, and the parties could better see where the wants of the people are,
and adjust their candidate lists and platforms accordingly.
We'd expect to see those that best reflect the will of the people to grow stronger, and the
others to form new, and better alliances, perhaps new, more effective parties, too.
I myself think a better long-term outcome would be for the New Deal Reactionaries to reconquer
the Democratic Party from within over the next few decades . . . if we can . . . and purge, burn
and exterminate every trace of Clintonite Obamacrat filth from the leadership. And let their Clintonite
Obamacrat garbage and trash followers go where-ever the Leadership Filth decide to go.
Or maybe we could move to a 3 Party system. Democratic Fascist on the Right, Democratic Socialist
on the Left, and Depublicrat in the Vital Center, where the Clintonites and the Obamacrats and
Pelosi and Alan From and Reid and all those wonderful people can be one big happy family there
in the Vital Center.
The whole game is in how you define victory.* Re,
OFA
:
More centrally, with hindsight, we can see that there was one sea change in the organizational
capacity of the Democratic electorate in 2008: It could be mobilized, and came to understand
it could be mobilized. That is the lesson of 2008, and it would have enabled a continuing war
of maneuver had not the Democratic establishment sought instantly to unlearn it (and Obama,
personally, to betray it). It may be that we are to learn the same lesson, again, with the
Sanders campaign, but this time with victory as a goal, and defined. If so, the sense of wonder
in "America" may well prove to be prophetic.
I'd define a 50-state Sanders-platform policy-focused permanent organization as victory. Maybe
people smarter than I am have considered and dismissed this possibility. But. That's where "the
list" could live, and it could be a dues-paying organization. Now, maybe Sanders, at 74, wants
to go back to the institutional fug of the Senate. On the other hand, maybe Sanders, at 74, gives
zero f*cks and would like to create an institution that might really outlive him. (Notice that
the platform focus would, or at least ought, to make the ideological sectarian battles the left
is so prone to go away. It would be like the Nicene Creed.) And over time and with persistence,
the non -comprador to the 80% would begin to dissolve the identity politics pushed by
the 20%. Concrete material benefits are the universal solvent.
Like I said, I hope smarter people than me have thoughts like this in their minds.
* Here I'm reminded of a wonderful book called Military Misfortunes , and Sadat's
subtle strategic objectives in the Yom Kippur war; among other things victory consisted in "inflicting
heavy losses" on the Israelis in a war that lasted over a week. (There's probably a parallel to
the hubris of the Isreali elites in the Clinton campaign, too.)
I tend to consider the Sanders' campaign as the next evolutionary step in the "neo progressive"
political trend that started with Occupy Wall Street: one that recognized the decoupling of civil
rights from class issues and chose to focus on the latter without fear of being labeled socialist
( the former has been successfully captured by the duopolic "moderates"). Unlike its predecessor,
the Sander's movement has a funding mechanism, broader appeal, and an organizational strategy
that I think will enable long-term sustainability. I personally am considering how to distribute
my next round of donation dollars. Give all 30 to Bernie or do a 3-way split between him, Teachout,
and Grayson. I give Grayson points for asking his email subscribers whether to commit his delegate
vote to Sanders or Clinton and then chose Sanders in spite of the fact that he is running for
Senate in Clinton-friendly Florida.
We expect to follow his lead if he is denied the nomination. So far all money we can donate
is going to Bernie's campaign. Future donations will be redirected to the strongest like minded
down ticket Democrats (and/or others), we imagine as Bernie would.
Already done. It's a 535 strategy. Send money. Truly, it's new535, newcongress or something.
I didn't save the link. Strategy to hand pick 400 or so never rans/community activists and support
them at one time. It's the official start of the Sanders supporters tapping into the energy and
funds.
It's another plug by ActBlue that has generated over 1 billion in donations. And you want me
to believe you need money for travel? You talk a good game but I don't see any clothing on you.
I skipped the donation page. Couldn't give money to the group without more information and history.
But I don't mind being on their list to see what they come up with.
Yes, that's the one I saw, that's Sanders people. No platform and looks like a D recruiting
outfit to me. I'd prefer an independent party and an actual platform (12 point platform/reforms
works for me). I am aware of people using their credit cards to fund Sanders, there is no way
the money train can continue. Might have good intentions but when the first push is for money,
I smell grift.
There is still the old fashioned method of sending a check directly to the campaign. That way
ActBlue does't collect approximately two percent processing fee and, even better, will not contact
you asking for a donation to the party.
50 state organization would be a good start. I suggest you think more broadly outside the electoral
box. An issue based electoral organization could be an important component of a movement based
in the street/community and job site struggles. All parts would inform, influence, and shape each
other. The politics/issues would flow upward from the struggles manifested elsewhere. One obvious
problem: elite domination at all levels of of the movement. The structure would have to ensure
democratic involvement very broadly defined.
In order to maintain perspective and to build true grassroots power we will need to have "one
foot in and one foot out" of the electoral political realm. The "out" is organizing for power
on the job, in the marketplace, in our neighborhoods and municipalities. The dynamic between the
inside and out can build the framework for change of both: pushing out political corruption, and
dispelling the idea that electoral politics trumps (no pun meant) all.
A 10 state strategy…a 3rd party only has to wedge in about 15% to be able to play the democrats
against the republicans to have winning legislation that can lead to prosperous futures…gridlock
can be played…if people are playing to win…50 states from day one will lead to too many chickens
and not enough roosters….
The best result (assuming Sanders does not get the nomination) is for Sanders voters to go
anywhere but Clinton, and for Clinton to lose as a result. Those too worried about who might win
in this case are trying to accomplish too many goals. The Clinton/DLC cadre has ruined the Democratic
Party (or at least turned the US into a one-party state), leaving anything to their left without
national political representation. THEY MUST BE REMOVED before any other progress can occur.
Now, will this single loss accomplish this? Perhaps not, and in this case, this turning of
the Left's back on the party will have to be repeated until it does. Regardless of what is happening
on the other side of the aisle while this is happening. Because the fact is, in a two-party system
such as the US is, not having a party is political death. The Left has to get the Democratic Party
back, and the only way to do that is to make that party useless to those who now control it.
+ 1. As disgusting as it may feel, look at what the tea baggers have done. Over time, they
organized and put their people on local councils and school boards and elections boards by running
against the establishment GOPers to kick them out. Then they took that strategy to state government
by threatening and successfully removing any GOPer who didn't accept their platform. And then
to congressional and Senate races, where they've scared the daylights out of every establishment
GOPer. If we can accept that the working through the Democratic Party is the only reasonable solution
- and that creating a new third party is unreasonable - then this (with a 50-state platform) is
what must be done. It can be done because the Dem establishment has ignored state and local bodies
for a couple decades now. You'd need a stable of progressives lined up to primary every Dem establishment
candidate, from senator down to dog catcher.
The best result (assuming Sanders does not get the nomination) is for Sanders voters to
go anywhere but Clinton, and for Clinton to lose as a result. Those too worried about who might
win in this case are trying to accomplish too many goals.
I agree with this wholeheartedly. In a very different context, following the 2010 mid-term
elections, Ian Welsh
said
"The left must be seen to repudiate Obama, and they must be seen to take him down." Here Sanders
supporters must be seen to repudiate Clinton and must be seen to take her down. That the GOP fears
its base while the Democratic party despises its base is, I think, in no small part because the
GOP base will walk away from the party (or is perceived as being willing to do that) while the
Democratic base will not.
That does not -and I say emphatically, not -mean people who do that "want"
Trump, even if actions like those play a part in having Trump elected. (I'll leave aside the idea
that Trump might not be what he
appears
or is
being made out
to be.) It means that they are not voting with respect to that.
Having a major party that fields candidates whom those on the left might actually want to vote
for -not to mention who support policies that vast majorities of people in the US want
-is, over the long run, better than constantly playing defense in every election and
keeping out the putatively "greater [though perhaps less effective] evil" (if that scenario is
not entirelly kayfabe). We've seen, rather dramatically, how that strategy has played
out over more than 30 years.
There are a number of black swans circling, and a long time until July. The Clinton
campaign has inspired some fierce loyalty among the deluded and the intimidated, but that sort
of cultish devotion can turn quickly. The convention could sure be interesting, as it is
virtually certain to be contested . If I were Comey, my window for releasing any
indictment would land after Hillary had lost the primary, or failing that, perhaps after the
elections were complete. Waiting until after the nomination, if Clinton were the nominee would
be more difficult, and if she beats Drumpf or Ryan or whoever, then he has to wait 4-8 years.
Named head of the Clinton Foundation after it's put into a blind trust following her
election. Nah, j/k. I don't think she'd go that far . . . . . . . . .
'Named head of the Clinton Foundation after it's put into a blind trust following
her election.'
This is big … really big. For sure, the Clintons would have to put their personal assets
in a blind trust if they weasel their way back into the White House.
But the giant money-laundering operation called the Clinton Foundation is not a personal asset.
Bill could carry on globetrotting, raising money for its purported "charitable" activities.
We can depend on the MSM not to pose hard questions like this. But feed it to Trump, and he'll
say anything.
Comey is a dead duck if Clinton is elected and might get a quiet retirement offshore. On the
other hand he has nothing to lose by doing his job and the merest move to further the investigation
by formally questioning her will ultimately terminate Clinton's run.
The immense problem facing the Dem party and congress followers is that the FBI has form in
having the goods on presidents. They know how to wield the power.
From tidbits gathered online I was under the impression that interviews with Hillary were on
the table for the past couple of months. You're right. News of anything like that seems to have
disappeared.
On the plus side, it may also indicate that there are ongoing interviews of the lower level
folks while they work their way up the food chain. Whether it's yay or nay on a Hillary prosecution,
I suspect the FBI will want to have everything nailed down, or at least pretend to be thorough
for public consumption purposes.
The immense problem facing the Dem party and congress followers is that the FBI has form
in having the goods on presidents. They know how to wield the power.
Funny thing, so do Bill and Hillary. And after the careers they have had and the money they
have amassed they have a lot of it. Half of Washington owes them a favour.
The idea that the question of whether Clinton will be indicted will be decided by apolitical
public servants on the merits of the case if supremely naive. Given Hillary Clinton's stature
that decision is inherently political, and would be even if corruption wasn't endemic in contemporary
Washington.
The real question for Clinton's would be prosecutors is whether they really want to throw down
and go ten rounds in a no holds barred, winner takes all cage match against the Clinton Machine.
In Washington when people confront such questions they don't ask "what abstract principles of
pure justice pertain to the case and how can they applied to realize the optimal public good?"
Rather they ask "what are the potential risks and benefits of declaring war on the Clinton Machine,
versus quietly burying the case and collecting a no doubt substantial reward after Hillary wins
the presidency?"
I'm still wondering if Obama will throw her under the bus. After all, all it would take for
her server to be legal is for Obama to say "I authorized it". That hasn't happened.
The server was not secured and they transferred secure information to non-secure servers. Transfers
of secure data to non-secure computers is a crime. Nothing Obama says can change that fact. The
server COULD HAVE BEEN authorized to handled non-secure data but no one would have ever allowed
her to run a off site server for secure data.
It's hard to imagine that a President Hillary won't be permanently in the crosshairs of the
wacko-fringe-that-is-more-than-a-fringe of the congressional Republicans. To the extent one may
find that comforting, you can count on the Tea Partiers (or whatever they'll be called) to keep
up a steady drumbeat demanding action on the tapes, with much of the MSM dancing to their tunes.
Ditto. That is a great article, plus there's a follow-up "Part 2" article
here responding to the main issues people raised following the first article.
If you put yourself in the shoes of a Clinton strategist, and if you assume a straight Clinton-Trump
fight, there are two obvious strategies to follow:
A populist 'big tent' campaign, focusing on economics, to try to undermine Trumps appeal
to the working classes and bring in the majority of Sanders supporters, and hope that enough 'moderate'
Republican supporters stay home to ensure a comfortable victory.
a 'centrist moderate' (i.e. right wing) campaign, which would go all out to attract votes
from moderate Republicans in northern and western States, along with a scare campaign to ensure
that any Dems even slightly to the left of mainstream will feel they have no choice but to hold
their nose and vote for Hilary.
In many ways, no. 2 is the more 'honest' campaign as we all know Clinton's real views are well
to the right of most Dem supporters. It also makes a certain amount of sense for the number crunchers.
And, as Gaius argues, it will viscerally feel more attractive to the Clintons and their hangers
on.
I think a more important question though is which campaign Trumps strategists would prefer
to be facing. I think we've already seen the answer in the manner Trump has gone all out to attack
Clinton and her 'women should vote for me' line. I think Trump would much prefer Clinton to take
option 2. This allows him to do what he loves – attack his opponents apparent strength. He will
go all out to portray her as a puppet of the elites, a flip flopping old style womens libber,
and so on. He will bring up Bills indiscretions every single time she tries to appeal to Republican
women, and repeatedly attack her supposed foreign policy expertise (and boy will he have a lot
of ammunition). He will particularly focus on her health. It will be nasty, but he will do enormous
damage.
I've thought for a long time that Clinton and the Democrat Establishment as a whole affirmatively
want moderate Republican votes and don't care whether they get Sanders votes or not. Hence, I
choose Door #2.
As for Trump, it depends on how well Clinton plays the victim card, and whether moderate Republican
women respond to it. It seems to me that Trump has already begun that assault with "enabler."
I do wonder if it is wise for Clinton to even attempt to play any sort of 'victim card'. Yes,
there is a vote out there, especially among women, who feel empathy for her various trials in
the past, but Trump will keep banging on the 'you are only where you are because of your husband'
line, along with focusing on her privileged upbringing – I suspect she will lose as many votes
as she wins if she even attempts it. I can only bring up anecdote, but I've a few female 'moderate
Republicans' in my extended family, and they really, really, hate Hilary in a way they don't hate
other Dems. They see her as a fraud.
I think it's key for Trump to focus on 1) corruption and 2) incompetence more than any gender
identity stuff (which we all know is what Dems do best)
These are two things that turn someone from "inevitable" into "toxic". If Trump spends more
time hammering her on the Foundation for things like pay-to-play weapons deals and on her destructive
term as Sec. of State, then I think he drives her negatives sky high, the Sanders' supporters
won't be able to hold their noses and the moderate Republicans will sit this one out.
It's perfect for Trump because it's exactly how he demolished Jebbie. He already knows what
to do.
Yes, it'll be similar to Jebbie, but I think a key to Trumps thinking is that he loves to go
for his opponents supposed 'strengths'. He won't back down over being seen as a sexist, he will
instead go full on and attack her standing by Bill. He knows that people aren't looking for a
nice guy as president, they are looking for a winner. He will do everything he can to make her
look weak.
Bernie is squeaky clean on trade. Hillary is filthy dirty on trade. Longstanding bipartisan
trade policy disasters is the primary driver behind Trump's popularity as well as Bernie's.
If The Donald is dead serious about attacking the GOP establishment "free trade" orthodoxy (also
the New Dem orthodoxy) he will pull no punches going after Hillary's touting of the "Gold Standard"
TPP while the text was top secret. Trump however does not have the discipline to stay clear of
identity politics (neither does Hillary) and stick to real economics.
Many polls are primarily propaganda.
Humans are herd animals; they like to 'go with a winner' and if a poll can show someone in 'the
lead' that translates to (often weak) support.
I was at two caucuses in my state this year (precinct, legislative). I talked with my fellow
citizens and a few of us who still have land lines got called on those, but as far as I'm aware,
one is not supposed to be 'solicited' on a cell phone. That has **completely screwed** many poll
results, as many Millenials have only a cell phone, and no land line.
This year, the better indicators are probably size of turnouts for speeches, energy-enthusiasm,
and small donor contributions.
Polls are sometimes done primarily to 'steer the herd'.
Don't be fooled.
re: Option 1. Trying to convince voters that Trump is the elitist whereas she is an everyday,
hardworking, blue collar girl, just like them won't work. People know about the Clinton Foundation
net worth and how it was "earned". (Giving speeches is hard work. /s)
I am not sure Clinton will get women. I work with women and work with everyday people, people
are very excited about Trump, whereas they hate the Clintons. I am also shocked by the number
of people that watch Fox news and they aren't elderly. The Kochs may prefer Clinton but the average
tea-partery they cultivated with Americans for Prosperity never will.
I desperately want Sanders to win, but I think there's a silver lining to Clinton winning:
the global economy will probably crash again within a year or three (obviously hard to pin down
exactly, but that seems to be the opinion of economists like Weisbrot/Baker) and if Sanders happens
to eek out a victory, it goes without saying that the blame will fall upon him, provided that
it doesn't happen before he is elected and takes office.
The 2008 crash brought us Occupy and that would probably have become even stronger as a movement
(at the time) had it already had a structured organization behind it with at least a semi-solid
platform of alternatives that people were familiar with so as to know what to ask for when the
reporters put a camera and mic in their face condescendingly asking what the alternatives are.
Well, Occupy and other leftist movements have made serious headway since then in terms of globally
organized movements with actual platforms, and if Sanders manages to structure his following after
a potential loss, then not only will they be able to pressure Clinton to address these matters
(and it's important that they do this publicly and force her to publicly say something Clintonian
in response i.e. something about how that won't work in reality), but when the economy does shatter
(there also seems to be a consensus that the impending economic collapse will be worse than the
last one), then these movements will be ready to offer a serious and viable alternative. Ready
to pounce, if you will.
It is already happening. There was a meeting today of approx forty people at our county Bernie
campaign headquarters to look at strategies and starting to organize for taking this new found
base past the election and Bernie. Most will stay within Democratic party and start to run for
party committee positions and some local offices. As one election law attorney said today " I
am seventy one and Bernie is seventy four so we aren't going to be carrying this". It will be
about bringing younger people in and look/plan ahead ten years. Strategic thinking instead of
knee jerk tactical thought.
Not a word was said about not carrying a Sanders candidacy into the convention. It's not over.
Taking over the committee positions will be easy. I won my position with out even running.
People who knew me at the polls wrote me in. I won with 15 or 20 votes. I did not last long. I
also did not live in the state at the time so I was kicked out after they found out that I was
still in the process of moving back to the area.
If Sanders people want to take over a state party they can accomplish it in less that 4 years.
Most democratic parties are very old and are essentially a network for lawyers. If the rank and
file come in they can sweep the old guard out quickly. This is true in the Pa especially and was
true of NJ, Delaware and NY but that was a about 12 years ago so my info is of course dated.
I regret not fighting for the seat now. I could have been of some use to the Sanders campaign
in Pa. He was blown out in my area.
1. If the economy crashes when HRC is on watch, and the response is, as it will be, underwhelming,
the main winners will be Repubs. It is then possible 2020 could be a total R blowout at all levels
– pres, congress, states – which would put them in good stead for the next decade, New Occupy
TM or not.
2. I think HRC thinks she has already given the Sanders' people as much as they are going to
get, with her policy moves in his direction during the primary. As every serious person knows,
when you win the primary, you then "pivot" to the general, which for a Dem means saying "just
kidding" about all that populist stuff you said during the primaries. If Sanders thinks he is
going to continue to pull HRC toward his policy positions, that is just more evidence to support
the notion that he doesn't understand how the game is played (which is basically what Barney Frank
says every time he is on MSNBC).
3. I'm with Lambert in that this election is about real policy differences, not personalities.
But that doesn't mean that HRC won't be the beneficiary of a huge number of LOTE votes. Most people
believe there really are only 2 parties.
I don't think Bernie is seriously trying to pull Hillary towards his positions. He is trying
to encourage voters to base their position on issues rather than personalities, and convince them
that they have power if they do. One of the consequences of that is being willing to vote for
another candidate if they (credibly) adopt your positions, which is why he has to make the offer.
But I'm sure he is under no illusions as to how it will be received.
Homeland Security and Fusion Centers all across the country crushed Occupy. It never mattered
how organized, or structured, they were, or not. And it won't matter the next time our mayors,
militarized police forces, H.S. and the FBI conspire to crush a movement, either.
Just as a general point to Left in Wisconson and Carla: cynicism is a very dangerous condition.
It means that you truly do believe that the power is in their hands and not yours, and that no
matter what you try to do, they will inevitably just crush your attempts. That may be true on
an individual basis, but not when 7+ million supporters (or however many Bernie has) form a structured
movement to counteract those forces.
One of the reasons that the 1% and the right in general are better at getting things done is
that they simply know that organization is the key to doing so (hence ALEC and all of the chambers
of commerce, etc). Yes, they (the states on behalf of business interests) may try to stop the
left, but they simply can't just crush organized movements using brute force anymore (at least
not in the US) because of smartphone cameras, among other things.
Get informed, get involved, get organized. They sure are.
Please stop the name calling. Many of us here won't vote for Hillary Clinton and not because
we are partisan hacks. You said in your longer post above
because Bernie and her are already in agreement on most policy issues.
Not so: (BS / HC) 1. minimum wage: $15/ $12 2. Abortion: Yes/ Certain exceptions
3. TPP : No / yes x 45 then no 4. SS: Increase (payroll tax )/ "protect it" (whatever that means)
5. Reinstate Glass/Steagell ; yes / no 6. Break up banks: yes / no 7. Free college: yes/ no
8. Fracking; no/ yes 9. Single payer health care: yes / wants private insurance 10. Death penalty; Opposes/ supports
Yeah, I think you are right. There is real content to the issue of which faction within the
Dems wins. The HRC faction sees no corruption of institutions. I do. If you won't do something
radical about Wall Street you will be surprised about how little change you will achieve. And
regardless of what pdf you have on global warming, taking big bucks from oil companies tells me
that that is just her negotiating position. If the carbon lobby pays get enough she will accommodate
them.
I think single payer is a big poker tell for me. Policy-wise, it's obviously the best option.
If you don't think that, it's cos you have other factors affecting you view. Like insurance company
profits.
But most of all, I think any politician who was involved in government decisions over the 2008
financial crisis, the ME wars, the opiate crisis, and the collapse of the middle class is disqualified.
If you vote for business as usual, you are voting for the end of the Republic.
This is why Sanders wants to influence the party's official platform, because I think the way
it's supposed to work is that the nominee runs on that platform. Sadly, it appears Debbie has
engineered things so that I think the platform, in the end, is going to straight-up rubber-stamp
Clinton's positions. I mean, what's the point of a coronation if the Queen can't dictate the terms,
right?
I guess what really ticks me off is that Clinton's never going to do what's best for the country,
she's always going to do what's best for her; that kind of hubris does not deserve our votes.
"The Democratic Party has policies that have shut down 200 coal fired power plants" Really?
The fact that those plants were old and falling apart in combination with the low cost of generation
by natural gas had nothing to do with that, I suppose? This is just like listening to Democrats insist that people vote for them to protect LGBT rights,
when the fact is that those rights have been advanced and protected due to direct action and court
decisions. Statements such as yours might be given some weight on other sites, but I think you are wasting
your time here.
Aside from the vast differences between Hillary's platform and Bernie's, the difference between
bombing Iran and half a million solar panels is that the first has the backing of Wall Street
and the MIC, while the latter has the support of… no large industry with massive amounts of power.
Hillary says a lot of things (and even posts pdfs to her website!). But what she actually fights
for and achieves is always and only what the most powerful interests in our country and world
want. And on top of that she's incredibly corrupt (weapons deals for Clinton Foundation donations,
and skirting campaign finance laws using 32 state parties to create a massive slush fund being
only the two latest egregiously corrupt maneuvers), and quite incompetent (Iraq, Libya, Syria,
Ukraine, her ridiculously insecure email server). If all that's not apparent to you by now you're
willfully deceiving yourself.
When Hillary was up for re-election as Senator in NY, and the Patriot Act was up for renewal,
I wrote her specifically about her vote regarding the Patriot Act. She wrote back telling me she
was not happy with it and would not vote for it as it was written at that time.
That was my biggest concern then (not including jobs and Upstate NY – equivalent to oil and
water then and now), so I voted for her. Then she voted for the Patriot Act as it was written
at that time.
A small, maybe insignificant, example but what good reason would I have to ever believe what
she says again regarding anything? My experience shows me that she says what people want to hear
and then continues her support of the neo-liberal economists and neo-conservative war mongers.
As a side note, Paul, regarding your statement above, how do the 43% registered Independents
in this country fit into your definition of partisan hack?
Obviously neither of you understand the obstacles created by both parties to keep a third party
from gaining power. It requires an enormous amount of money and manpower to get on the ballot
in 50 states. Also, there is no primary for an Independent party either, which is why some states
allow for crossovers and Independents to vote. The resulting chaos would be crazy.
Actually I believe we are agreeing with you. Sanders is running as a Dem precisely for the
reasons you state. As an independent he would have had to fight for ballot access and publicity.
I'm well aware of how much time and effort both major parties will expend to keep 3rd parties
off the ballot.
In Maine when Tom Allen ran for Senate a few years ago the Dems fought harder to keep a lefty
3rd party candidate (who would have been lucky to crack 5% in the general) off the ballot than
they did fighting against Allen's republican opponent. Allen had his ass handed to him anyway.
we aren't talking about a personal stance. we are talking about collective action to either
change or bring down the corrupt democratic party, as well as the corrupt republican party. collective
action doesn't have to mean supporting war, massive inequality, trade treaties which make mitigating
climate change vastly more difficult, torture, and drone assassinations.
we can collectively act to make our lives better, and those of our children.
Interesting reply. Of course, I have some quibbles :) First, though, thanks for leaving me
out of your definition of hack.
Second, definitions are always important in a discussion (particularly political discussions)
and I've always accepted this definition of political hack:
A political hack is a negative term ascribed to a person who is part of the political party
apparatus, but whose intentions are more aligned with victory than personal conviction. (or
another common slang definition – an untalented professional )
Based on this definition, I don't see how any registered Independent could be any sort of hack,
let alone a political hack.
I am registered Independent, and not because of smug condescension. I registered to vote as
an Independent when I was 18, 47 years ago. I was naive, to say the least. When it came to National
Politics, although I did understand to a small degree the birth of our two-party system, rather
than possibly registering with a Party that I knew little about, not to mention I had one parent
registered as a Dem and one registered as a Repub, I chose to go Independent until I learned more,
quite the opposite of smug condescension. I suspect I'm not alone.
As for insights into either Party, why would a registered Independent have less insight into
either the Dem or Repub Party than any of his neighbors registered in one or the other? Anyone
involved in National US Politics, if he or she is paying attention, has insight into both parties
to some degree. And deep insight is relatively rare among the majority of either Party. I think
we all agree a lot of it is just rooting for the Team, and an awful lot of that rooting is based
on what the Parties say they represent and not necessarily on what they actually represent, and
do. The National Democratic Party is a prime example of that when it comes to Unions and the working
class, as is the National Republican Party when it comes to supporting Small Businesses.
A clear example of this is both Parties' strong support for NAFTA and other Trade Agreements
designed to, among other things, flatten wages as much as possible across the Trade Partners'
domains, hurting both wage workers and small businesses at the expense of large Corps that have
the wherewithal to take advantage of these agreements.
As for not caring for anything good that may come out of organized politics , I don't
believe that is true of most Independents, at least not the ones I know. The ones I know care
a great deal and support many specific individual politicians in both parties, depending, of course,
on the issues they feel are most important to them and their community.
But understanding that a lot of bad things come out of organized Political Parties is also
possible, particularly possible by the vast majority of those registered in either the Dem and
Repub Parties that have little to no influence on those National Parties, mainly due to the fact
that they don't have the monetary power to influence them. We have all seen many studies that
have shown this to be true and we all can cite lots of examples like the one above, so I won't
bore anyone with more of that.
I don't see why my, or many others, remaining Independent is an example of smug condescension.
Donating time and/or money and/or votes to Democrats or Republicans I believe in has happened.
I just have a hard time supporting the overall platforms of either, not based on what they say
the platforms are, but based on their past votes (and by votes I mean actions) towards general
policies I do not agree with. And no matter which Party I would potentially register with, my
feelings would probably remain the same… unless I decided to become a political hack, of course.
That read like someone who did not live through the last Clinton Administration, or Obama's
for that matter. They really don't care about the "sanctimonious purist" vote once it is in the
bag. It is all propaganda, all the time with them.
They will ultimately do what they want to do and find someone to blame when it turns out to
be as unpopular as predicted. Whether it is a vast right wing conspiracy or the "professional
left" there is never any lack of people to blame, and they are never responsible for the results
of their own actions.
[Hillary] can't start proposing "Drill, Baby, Drill" instead of solar power and not look
like anything less than a oil industry bimbo.
Why not? That's exactly what Obama did. He mocked McCain-Palin's all of the above
energy policy and then explicitly adopted it when elected, with barely a wimper
of complaint from anyone. And all of the above really meant drill-baby-drill, with fracking
replacing coal. Why? Because that is what the confluence of Wall Street and Big Oil money wanted.
I have no doubt Clinton will do just the same. In fact, one might posit that Obama was just warming
the seat for the Clintons and conditioning the Democratic Party into believing it is better off
without the Left. Which, as Lambert has repeatedly and presciently predicted, and GP's current
article illustrates, appears to be precisely how Clinton intends to run. And, with Trump as her
opponent, this strategy probably makes political sense for Clinton. But make no mistake: there
is no longer a place for Progressives in the Democratic Party. Do what you will in response to
that fact but a fact it is. Obama demonstrated it. And the Clintons intend to prove it.
Obama was liked and coming off of 43. Also, he was an obvious empty suit despite the hyperbole
tossed around. Admitting this is difficult. Clinton's real problem is the primary universe is
a fraction of the necessary Democratic total to win in November. Hillary 2008 for all her campaign
faults would be clobbering Hillary 2016. If Sanders and Clinton weren't that apart, the rally
around the flag and token candidacy of Hillary would have ended the election ages ago.
The bulk of voters are likely tired and not willing to just embrace a random Senator who is
never on the 630 news, still the number one media outlet, and annoyed by broken promises about
Healthcare and the economy. The Republicans nominated a robber baron in 2012, and Obama and his
supporters made all kinds of promises about how he would be different in a economy term. People
with budget concerns aren't answering polls and have cut land lines.
Hillary isn't holding mass rallies because she can't. She's expected to be the next President.
People will turn out to see the President or next President. The Democrats have been running on
fear for some time. They might conclude Sanders supporters are the problem, but the real problem
is why isn't Hillary doing better or producing crowds to rival Sanders or even Trump.
If she wins it will be stumbling barely across the finish line. Once she gets there she might
not like what she finds either. The GOP Congress is going to perform a 4 year rectal exam on all
things Clinton. Issues like the Foundation, the email server, the money trail aren't going away.
Heck, the electorate may even think the carnival barker that the GOP is offering up is a more
honest broker despite the differences between what he says and what he's done.
But don't you think the classic HRC bait and switch needs to be punished or they will keep
doing it? Are you sure there is more harm in voting Trump than in voting business as usual? Cos
I'm not sure at all!
If the Democratic Party is good for nothing, what is Bernie doing running as a dem for
the nomination of the party's presidential candidate.
What a straw man argument to Carla's point about the Democratic party! Bernie ran as a Democrat
because there was NO CHOICE. A run as a Green Party candidate or other such would have been a
non run. And Sanders has been perfectly clear the party IS dying; it changes top to bottom, inside
and out or it is indeed good for nothing. What is there about "revolution" you don't get?
And what's this business of using Yves as an implicit club for your POV and your assumed right
to be a bully?
I take offense at you falsely claiming I support your point of view.
Hillary will never, never, never adopt Sanders' positions save at most as a bait and switch,
and even then she'd be loath to because it would offend her funders. I don't know what you are
smoking. She is a high end grifter. The fact that she's taken huge amounts of money from foreign
donors via the Clinton Foundation while Secretary State on its face should be criminal.
She is loyal to her big money backers. She identifies with them. She doesn't care at all about
the peasants. Any gestures she makes are that only. The fact that women are suckers enough to
think she's on their side is remarkable. The only women she is serious about helping are her fellow
elite travelers who want to break through the glass ceiling. For ordinary women, her position
is that abortions should be "cheap, safe and rare." Even now with the right trying to restrict
abortions, they are not rare, and her saying they should be rare is really damning. Similarly,
she didn't support gay marriage until 2013, when she really couldn't not support it. And this
is on social identity issues, where it's safer for her to pander to her base than on economic
issues.
Yves Why do you even bother posting the writing about Clinton bringing Bernie's voters in the democratic
fold? Did you want to have a discussion about this or not? Did you think anyone who happened across
the article would not try to look at it as a legit question? If you are predisposed to think her
and her campaign as never giving the time of day to Bernie and the "peasants" he represents, what
was I supposed to talk about? If you take offense at the mildest of analysis, that the policies
of Bernie, but not Bernie himself or his supporters from the Progressive caucus or Warren, may
be included in the platform and acted upon in a first term and if not, she will face a real primary
challenge just what am I suppose to think?
That is a reasonable presentation of the probable candidate for the dems and probable elected
president and not some screaming political pep rally for Hillary and denouncing of Bernie. You
are solely cited for your editorial choice in presenting Gaius's discussion, which I only assume
you see some merit in having. I don't assume to hide behind your skirts as cover. I don't think
I can be any clearer.
My biggest domestic and global issue is support for solar power transitioning away from fossil
fuels. She and Bernie are 100% on board with that. It is simply a fact that is one of their policy
common ground issues. The democrats don't care at all about oil or coal or gas being promoted
any further. What ever small attention they pay to it is summed up by the fact that virtually
all of the money from the oil energy industry goes to republicans, except for a few hundred thousands
dollars recently to Hillary, over 97% of all dollars goes to the republicans. They hate solar.
It is these areas of common ground I base my discussion on, since the topic was published by
you to begin with. I'm not sorry I answered the question, I'm just sorry that it seems so hard
to listen to a few facts that may lead to hopeful outcomes, simply because I have to actually
talk about Hillary and her policies when the question is posed about her and Bernie coming together
in some unified front at the dem political convention.
The first chart on this site shows the top 20 energy firms contributions of almost $30mil with
less than $400k going to Hillary, the sole dem on the receipt list for 2015-2016. She gets less
than 2% of the political donations. There is very little compelling evidence to show that she
or the dems in general will do a whole lot for oil or gas. Coal seems to be near death. Obama
has been coming out against off shore drilling, federal land drilling for oil or gas and new coal
mining leases. On the way out the door, he can throw road blocks on the fossil fuel industry and
promote the solar and wind industry. Bernie and Hillary are going to continue in that manner and
the money donated solely to the republicans will ensure it. That is a reasonable conclusion to
make. I hope I'm right for the sake of mitigating the emerging climate disaster starting to brew
right now.
We are not all binary thinkers. NC's biggest appeal to me is that the commentariate are definitely
not binary thinkers. The "my party, right or wrong" line seems binary to me.
You've now broken two house rules: an as homimem attack on a fellow commentor (cwaltz) and
not reading a post yet commenting on it.
Clinton is NOT trying to bring Sanders voters in in any serious way. She thinks she deserves
their votes as a matter of right if/when she knocks Sanders out.
Gaius makes it very clear that Clinton is only going to make empty overtures to Sanders voters.
But he does so deductively and you couldn't be bothered to read at all/that far.
Just to clarify: I don't despise individual Democrats. I despise the Democratic Party.
And while I certainly do not despise you, I do find it difficult to respect the position you
stated: "I'll pull the lever for the Democrat candidate no matter who he/she is or what he/she
stands for."
I wonder if you even read the Andrew Levine article I cited.
"I'll pull the lever for the Democrat candidate no matter who he/she is or what he/she stands
for."
So, if the Democrat actually has the same or worse policies than the Republican, you will vote
Democrat because… Because what? Because youre one of those 'party hacks' you claim to hate so
much? I don't get it.
":…she can't back away from raising the minimum wage…"
Really!?!?! Do you remember all the talk about the Employee Free Choice Act that the Dems promised
they would promote if only they got Congress back? They dropped that like a hot rock right after
the elections were over. Closing Gitmo? Didn't happen, didn't even try.
The Dems can and do back away from any number of nice sounding campaign promises and the rubes
never seem to catch on. They do it not because of the nasty mean old Republicans but because they
want to. In fact sHillary's minions even came out publicly months ago in one of the MSM papers
saying she would have to pretend to go left during the primary to fend off Bernie but she didn't
really mean it. Can't put my finger on it but I believe the article was linked to here.
Please show me where Clinton has said she wants to expand Social Security. As in links with
exact statements.
I don't buy that at all.
She has been signaling that she wants to "protect" Social Security. That means not make it
pay as you go (which it actually effectively is despite the trust fund), which means either tax
increases or benefit cuts.
Yellen, Clinton appointee to the CEA, has long been pushing for "chained CPI," which would
cut SS by having it lag inflation (as in change inflation measurements so that the inflation increases
are lower than now). Bill wanted to privatize Social Security, and it was the Monica Lewinsky
scandal that derailed that.
Hillary is a neoliberal economically and a neocon. She's going to spend even more on war. That
means less for domestic social programs. She's made remarks consistent with means testing Social
Security, which turns it from a universal safety net to a welfare program. And Bill also showed
what has happened to welfare programs over time. They get cut since why do the poor deserve anything?
Here she says how to get more money into the the trust fund. Not just protect it. Expansion
and extension. Not privatization or cat food actuarial tweeking.
I just spent 4.5 minutes of listening to the equivalent of fingers on a chalkboard so others
don't have to.
Did you watch the whole video? Clinton claims to want to raise the cap to increase funding
and gives a nice little stump speech. Then the moderator mentions that Sanders wants to raise
the cap and that Clinton was opposed to doing so in 2008 and asks point blank if she's in favor
of raising it above $120K now at which point Clinton starts in with the equivocation. Again. You
can see her become much more nervous when confronted with the fact that her position has suddenly
changed with the advent of Sanders campaign. Sanders has been consistent in his positions for
decades while Clinton continues to have her finger in the wind.
Got anything from before Sanders started scaring the pantsuit off her? Otherwise I'm going
to assume she's lying. Again.
Thinking about your gridlock comment elsewhere, Is Trump actively the answer? I don't see that
stuff happening as swiftly under him. I could be totally wrong…..
In point #3 from Seth Abramson's piece, you get a great view of Clinton's shadow.
3. It turns out that neither Hillary nor her staff ever had any respect for Sanders, his
supporters, or the causes he (and they) have championed.
How do we know? Well, a campaign's press secretary is - by definition and responsibility -
its mouthpiece. So when Jennifer Palmieri, Clinton's mouthpiece, said publicly after the New York
primary that Bernie Sanders and his campaign had been destructive to the Democratic Party
and the nation , you know that's exactly what Clinton thinks, too.
Had Clinton fired Palmieri or publicly admonished her, one might think differently.
Instead, silence - which, in politics, is assent.
This is almost an echo verbatim of Lloyd Blankfein.
"It has the potential to personalize it, it has the potential to be a dangerous
moment. Not just for Wall Street not just for the people who are particularly targeted but for
anybody who is a little bit out of line, " Blankfein said. "It's a liability to say I'm
going to compromise I'm going to get one millimeter off the extreme position I have and if you
do you have to back track and swear to people that you'll never compromise. It's just incredible.
It's a moment in history."
Blankfein avoided saying whether he supported former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton,
though both Clintons have long ties to Blankfein and to Goldman Sachs, which has been a heavy
donor to Bill Clinton's charity work.
She won't release the speeches. -–>She's with Them.-–>
Might as well say "Lord Blankfein," since in the view of many millions, his slightly invisible
House of lords pulls the puppet strings on the new money house of Commons and its nominees such
as HRC, and people are increasingly explicit in their sense of opposition to the feudal monarchy
thrust upon them.
The peasants remind each other how
HRC blamed homeowners
(in addition to banksters) for the mortgage fraud GFC.
What would be incredibly funny is if the Judge presiding over the contested NY primary threw
out the results on Monday on the grounds that the primary was unconstitutional.
Obama should have lost re-election based on his economy and treatment of the Dem base, but
I think blacks saved him. Who can blame them for turning out in record numbers to vote for one
their own?
But Hillary won't have blacks to save her if things go the same as they did for Obama come
re-electioin. Blacks will vote for her in good margin as they are now, but likely won't turnout
for her like they did for Obama.
Actually it was Romney being a billionaire plus being caught out with his derisive remarks
about the 47% who don't pay taxes (when they all do, sales taxes, RE taxes even if they rent,
embedded in their rent, gas taxes). Oh, and putting his dog on top of his car for a long trip
(cross country?) lost him more voters than you would think. It was the Republicans' election to
lose and they managed to do that.
All Sander's supporters should burn down the house. In a swing state or a state looking close?
Vote the hairpiece. In a state that won't contest one way or the other? Pick a third party of
choice, or write in the Bern.
Don't give this woman your vote, she doesn't deserve it. If Bernie ends up playing the sheepdog
I am going to be quite disappointed.
I am amazed, as Shakespeare says, at posters on here who seriously advocate voting for Trump,
or for a "third party."
I have little or no ability (or desire) to refute the contentions made about Hillary. Bernie
wants to change things; Hillary wants to be President.
But Trump! To treat him as a possible alternative! And then to discuss his "policy positions"
in a serious way! He doesn't have policy positions, he has twitches, like the wall (which he's
stuck with) and he has itches (like that for Megyn Kelly, which, to his rage, he cannot scratch).
He doesn't have enough brains to have an idée fixe, so his mouthings change with his
audience (except for the wall, which he's already mentioned so many times that he's stuck with
it).
The arguments that Hillary's defeat "will change the Democratic Party" or "end the corrupt
Democratic Party" or "teach them a lesson" seem to me to ignore the fact that we are running out
of time. South Florida and Virginia Beach are going under water. And when they both do go under
water, will this change Republican positions? No, indeed. Donald Duck will say, after much hard
thought, "I think probably it's a bad thing." Ted Cruz will say it is God's punishment for letting
people use the wrong bathroom.
Yes, we have many other pressing problems. I picked one as an example that won't go away unless
something serious is done to oppose it, and we do not have four or eight years to twiddle our
thumbs and say, "Oh, dear."
I am the hack that Paul Tioxin wrote about (and I think he has his tongue firmly in his cheek).
I will continue to send Bernie and Zephyr money, and also to Paul Canova (who is Debbie Wasserman
Schulz' primary opponent, if you didn't already know). But on election day, I will color in all
the Democratic circles on our brand new NYC computer-read ballot. I don't presume I can change
anybody else's mind. If you really think we'd be better off with a lunatic Donald Duck as Prez
than with Hillary, go ahead. No offense intended. It's a democracy (so far). But if you stay home
and don't vote, not only will you get Donald Duck, you may, down the ballot, get more Trey Gowdys
and even a Sharron Angle. You're not forgetting them, are you?
This life long Dem is headed out the door (from the DNC, not NC). I have no interest in associating for people who,
whatever platitudes they temporarily spout to get your vote, are secretly thinking `f*cking ret*arded sanctimonious purist'.
My strategy for the Fall will be looking to see which `centrist' Dems are doing worst in the
polls and then contributing to their GOP opponents. Fewer and better Democrats.
right behind you. people are talking about a coordinated effort when 10s of thousands of us
leave the party the same day. dunno… just tossing it out there.
The Dept of Elections actually have the data. They have detail on how long individuals have
been registered, as what and which elections people have voted in.
I am planning to change my registration the day after the Indiana primary May 3. Find out how
your state handles this and then do it. Send a message to the DNC!
Don't change party until after the convention in July, just to be on the safe side.
If you do that, and it turns out Bernie needs delegate bodies, you won't be able to offer to be
one of them.
What about all of us who did this years ago? But when we did it, there were no 10s of thousands
to keep us company. All I can say to the multitudes is Welcome to Ex-Dem-land !!!
Yes. Now I know why the Dem party is always courting the next wave of the "youth vote" – and
freaking out (see B. Clinton's millenial comments) when that goes wrong.
Shorter DNC: "We went to fancy colleges and our working class voters are easy to fool with
cheap political tricks because they're dumb, dumb, dumbity dumb."
Please don't bail out! You are playing right into the hands of the establishment Dems. Aren't
we seeing how difficult it is for anyone (Bernie, in this case) to run against the establishment
Democratic candidate? What's one reason why this is the case? Closed primaries. Only registered
Dems can vote in the primaries. If you leave, then it's even easier for the establishment candidate
to win delegates and ultimately, the nomination.
Fight back by staying in the Democratic Party! All of Bernie's supporters should register as
Democrats. Not to elect Hillary, but to take back the Democratic Party. Like it or not, we are
stuck with this two-party system for the time-being. The establishment Dems will be happy to stick
with their neo-liberal, neo-con agenda without a "yuge" wave of registered Democrats throwing
them out of power.
The independent ranks are getting larger and larger. As it is, the Democratic Party has been
crowing THIS cycle that only Democratic loyalists should have a say in the candidacy or that only
Democratic loyalists should have been allowed to run.
That's fine. However, they don't get to whine in 2016 when none of those independent voters
don't vote for their candidate and they lose. Live by the party, die by the party. The party is
going to deserve it's march to being irrelevant. They should listen to the Independent candidate
that's trying to help them- it's change or die time for the Democratick Party.
"The party is going to deserve it's march to being irrelevant."
Yup. An animal generally has the intuition and fortitude to gnaw off its own appendage to free
itself, should it become ensared. The Party has its Achilles heel stuck in a bear trap. It's gonna
die there.
I left the Dems years ago. Reregistered this year to vote for Bernie. Now I'll rereg. as an
independent/unaffilitated. Yes, the primary/caucuses are important. The DNC/RNC doesn't own that
game, although they think they do. Registering and reregistering as needs be lets independents
vote where they think best without being captured by ether machine. Some states have a looong
lead time on registration to try and block this. See NY for example. But it can be done. Without
too much hassle, as it turns out, if you know the cutoff dates.
Of course, if the machinery decides to purge your registration, or mysteriously switch your
party affiliation at the primary, or shut down voting stations for "financial reasons", the machine
won't change those tricks change because people remaining loyally registered to the party.
Oh, the long game. The item that's gets tossed out right after Supreme Court. If you would
only try a little harder, donate a little more, ask a little nicer, the next great candidate is
just around the corner.
Fool me for 25 years, shame on you, fool me for 35, shame on me.
Um, when you have the Presidency, the House AND 59 or 60 votes in the Senate and still can
only manage to pass a health care bill that is not the same plan put forth by Republicans over
twenty years previously BUT updated by lobbyists from the Insurance, Big Pharma, and the private
medical industry to provide even less service for higher costs you have already proved that the
long game and electing more Democrats is a boondoggle. And lets talk about that Supreme Court
canard…
But why let facts get in the way of conning the public.
+1000. I cannot believe how many Democrats sincerely believe that Obama and the Democrat Congress
were Powerless in 2009 against the stubborn Republicans.
In reality, the Dems could have passed anything Obama wanted. I still want to know what happened
between Obama and Kucinich on that plane. It takes nerve to stand against a president from your
own party.
And our president didn't want health care for everyone. That's obvious.
For those who don't want to click off site, my attempt at a precis:
Many people misunderstand what primaries are all about. Getting involved in party politics
means showing up repeatedly, not just once to vote. If you show up repeatedly, you can influence
not only the candidates who are offered in the general election, but also the state party platform
and, perhaps eventually, the national platform as well. It's a lot of work, but real change is
certainly possible… it just doesn't happen at the ballot box.
Greg Laden? Oh good grief. People have been members of the D branch of the money party for
decades, gotten effed over repeatedly and the party is fully right, not just center right.
An example is the statement on this page that 'everyone knows' boots on the ground aren't boots
on the ground, because lines have to be moved to demonstrate that the Ds aren't very much the
warmongers Rs are.
I'm put in mind of bank switchers: I'd banked at the same place over 20 years. I always assumed,
death, bank fees, and taxes were just an inexorable part of life. Then 2008 happened, and I started
reading about banking, finance, and was shocked and appalled to realize what trivial social or
economic value TBTF banks actually created, to say nothing of how much they spent lobbying.
But I still kept all my accounts in a TBTF bank for several years. I was frustrated, but not enough to take action.
And then, one day, yet another small, seemingly tiny aggravation occurred in one of my accounts.
I walked in and closed every single account. But I would not have predicted that I would actually take that action.
And I think that a similar kind of 'switching' or 'departing' is happening today with respect
to political parties and voting. People can take just so much.
They don't tend to torch a place, as much as they just want to find a simpler, affordable alternative
that fulfills 90% of what they need and seems to have integrity. People are looking for reasonable
alternatives, whether for banking or political outlets.
The people at the DNC, and in the Clinton campaign, who think that those of us who: - saw years of savings go up in smoke,
- have watched as superstorms increase intensity and destructiveness, while Hillary took money
from Big Oil - have been taxed to underwrite TBTF ownership of houses in Sprawlville that should *never* have
been built in the first place, - have watched as people at the tippy-top got wealthier by the year,
- have waited politely for Hillary to release the Goldman-Sachs transcripts, to no avail
- have realized that our taxes subsidize Wal-Mart and other employers' refusal to pay decent wages
to their employees - have asked, "Where in hell did all those arms that ended up in Syria originate?!" (answer: Libya)
- have paid higher premiums post-'Obamacare' because we're still underwriting health insurance
behemoths, - have watched The Fed pay out helicopter money that has pumped up the stock market but cost savers
dearly
This of us who gave Obama the benefit of the doubt in 2012 (rather than Mr Hedgefund), are
not going to march off the cliff and vote Hillary. Not this time. We've had enough bait and switch, thanks all the same.
Anyone at the DNC and the Clinton campaign who thinks that those of us watching what has played
out deserve contempt are simply delusional, and I know the type - and I'm sick to death of their
parasitic insolence. I'm sure there are plenty of political science majors and law degrees in
the bunch: been there, done that. (There, but for the grace of God, go I.)
I have the sense that many people are, like myself, kind of surprised to find ourselves '
over the Dems' or ' over the GOP'. It's like some vast, quiet national divorce;
we're done fighting, let's just move on. It's a strange parting of ways, and in my own case, both with banking and with Hillary, I didn't
actually see it coming.
Thank God for Bernie and credit unions and those super-smart other Bernie supporters that I've
met this spring. They're funny, and they're energetic, and they are raging against bullshit.
They give me hope.
Yup. For some reason, the general wake up (perhaps incomplete) is occurring. In the US & Europe,
in every identifiable area, whether war, finance, migration, geopolitics, or corruption, people
are getting disgusted with the elites' blatant incompetence. You don't even have to pick a specific
issue.
Hillary is doomed. The FBI can now legally hack any computer and they have Hillary's email
server + they have her IT manager with indemnity agreed, + they have Guccifer the hacker in custody
plus they have likely restored those 30,000 deleted emails. Now whether the FBI proceeds or not
they have Hillary Clinton (Madam President?) in their hands.
I am sure Hillary Clinton's party and Congressional colleagues comprehend the enormity of that
situation!
A reckless lack of judgement by Hillary has entirely compromised her standing as a feasible
US President. Get with sanity, feel the Bern.
Agreed. Hillary supporters have their heads stuck deep in the sand on the email server. She
committed a litany of serious crimes there focused around breaking confidentiality laws. Not to
mention all the Clinton Foundation emails she deleted that they most likely have access to now
either from her server itself or from Guccifer that will show large Foundation donations from
both sides of the arms deals she fixed as Secy of State. Sooner or later she's going down for
this garbage. It appears Clinton hubris finally went too far.
I suspect the FBI feels it can get more out of this episode by letting HIllary win the Presidency
than by doing what the law requires and indicting her now. Pretty much all our institutions have
been deeply compromised and the FBI, even ignoring it's colorful if rather slimy history in that
direction, is no exception. Think of the absolute control the FBI would have over the Presidency!
I would love to be wrong. It would be a true deus ex machina for Sanders who would go on to
win Trump in a heart beat, which is why I don't think I'm wrong – how many times has that happened
in our history?
Nah, that is a flawed plan. Between control of the AG's office and the ability to pardon people
after they take the fall for her, the President would be able to make that go away in a hot minute.
And while it would add fodder to the Congressional investigations, that still doesn't give the
FBI control.
Nope, the question is 'who do they want to be President' and how best do they achieve that?
Trump, they start the indictments in October. Sanders, we start seeing movement in the next two
weeks. Biden, the indictments start happening in the two weeks before the Convention. (And yes,
I do believe the leadership would throw the first ballot and move to Biden on the second.)
But I don't see the blackmail thing really working for them.
The laws regarding diplomatic security all center on "unauthorized use". If the President authorized
the use of the server the whole investigation is moot. Flames are causing the smoke.
If there is a case, they will cross all the t's and dot the eyes and and lower case j's. Taking
down a President is a huge deal especially Hillary. If they trip up, Hillary will come after them.
Hillary isn't a random, disaffected Muslim 20 year old being entrapped. Normal thugs don't
take on a Hillary type without a certain sense of safety. The thugs in the FBI are too busy arresting
"terrorists."
I'm always amazed at the Hillary amnesiac followers ignoring the Clintons investigation years.
Independent counsel Star investigations (1994) headlined the Clintons' Whitewater (investigations
started in 1992- prior to the presidency) and Bill's what is "is?" perjured blue stained dress
for 5 years. Were taxpayer dollars wasted? Sure. But that's not the point. The point is the media
will headline the email-server scandal immediately with all the repubs soundbite target missiles
aimed at the Clinton shock and awe scandals.
Frankly, a Clinton II presidency would follow their same hubris pattern beginning with the
email-server scandal. The republican majority congress with the Koch brothers backing guarantees
a repeat with Hillary as the focus and of course, Bill has his bag of tricks to add to the anticipated
investigations
While this is going on Hillary will be working with Repug Congress in promoting GMO, fracking.
She'll show leadership by flag waving looting social security and sending Americans into danger
to do what Netanyahoo demands.
What has been termed as A reckless lack of judgement by the upper echelon lands lower
level people with Security Clearances jobless, much smaller bank accounts, and possible short
jail terms. Democrats included.
As someone who is familiar with what it takes to get and hold a clearance, including multiple,
required yearly , hour-long seminars on the subject, I can confidently say that this
has left a very bad taste in the mouth of clearance holders, including registered Democrat clearance
holders.
Perhaps for the ones who understand the importance of security clearances even if its over
protective. Hillary did quite well in Maryland and Virginia. Of course, those are pork ridden
states. Any sane government would begin redistributing federal spending, moving whole departments.
Those over priced bed room communities are at risk along with the mortgages.
If the government undertakes sane spending practices and understands Keynesian multipliers,
no one would willing live in Nova outside of old Towne Alexandria. Realistically, why can't cabinet
department X be in City Y given modern communications? The Washington metro area is a transportation
nightmare.
A person expecting to sell to pay off a mortgage and move to a lower cost of living city in
Virginia or Maryland or where ever home is does that care about security clearances. Other than
government spending, Northern Virginia is a swamp with a few nice places such as Mount Vernon.
Upon election Hillary will increase the FBI budget 3000% and order them to take the lead on
terrorism, especially the terrorism of domestic non-conformist thinking. Case Closed! Successful!
Trump is the Lesser Evil. At least you know what you're getting with him. As some guy interviewed
by the Wall Street Journal a week or so ago put it, "Trump speaks before he thinks while Clinton
takes a moment to think up new lies before she opens her mouth." With Hillary you're getting a
war criminal, a compulsive liar, a hypocrite,, a Zionist war monger, a capitalist tool. With Trump
you're getting a racist and misogynist but at least he's no war criminal (yet). Damn them both
but especially damn Clinton.
About Trump's racism… I think the problem with Trump isn't that he's racist, it's that he's
obnoxious/rude about it. Dems are perfectly happy to pass policies that they are aware will be
racially applied to the detriment of poc. The Clinton's policies are the perfect example, and
to make matters worse, it is repeatedly pointed out to them how racist their policies are and
they double down.
Yes, Trump fired his US workers and brought in visa workers. The Clinton's crime bill, militarized
police, private prisons, corrupt financial policies and trade deals have destroyed more lives
than Trump could ever dream of.
I am a 35 year old woman who remembers voting for Bill – Dad took little preteen me into the
voting booth with him to teach me to take pride in our democracy. Our family were extremely loyal
Democrats: Mom has a picture of her with Carter in a place of pride on her mantel; they taught
me the Dems were the party of the people who fought against the Republicans, who represented the
power of unrestrained wealth and capital.
Years of neoliberal policies later, I consider all of it to have been a lie cruelly perpetrated
on my parents. As a favor to my aging mother I voted for Obama in 2008 even though I told her
his open admiration for Reagan meant his promises were likely to be empty air. I left the party
for what I thought was for good after I was proven right.
I came back to the Dems this year, only to vote for Bernie. I'm leaving again if he's not the
nominee, and I'll never, ever be back for any reason. I look within myself and find my hatred
for and anger at the Clintons and all they represent to be so fierce it's honestly a little frightening.
I wonder how many of me there are out there?
There are a lot of us. The Clintons destroyed our party. Sure they had help, but they made
it happen and made it stick. We will not forget as we slowly and painfully build something new
out of the ashes and spend the first half of the 21st century, at least, rebuilding what we once
had. People forget how many fought and died to make the New Deal and the union movement happen,
only to watch their sacrifices die at the hands of a smiling con artist and his Republican wife
from Arkansas. None of it was necessary. None of it was inevitable. We were sold out.
I hope so. I'd even consider voting for Trump out of spite at this point (well, that and a
gridlocked government is a government that's not moving even further towards the cliff) and the
thing is I am personally doing very, very well in the Clinton economy. We can't afford to buy
a house (because we live in Boston) but my spouse and I are debt free and making what years ago
I would have considered crazy amounts of money. Of course everything is more expensive now, but
still.
The point of saying this is not to brag – but that if yuppie little me is this upset, the working
class must be about 5 minutes from violent revolt.
I had a crazy conversation the other day with a bunch of legal aid lawyers – the heroin epidemic
is so bad in towns outside of Boston (Fall River, etc. – all the old industrial towns) that fully
50% of my age group from those places are now dead. I said "oh god, it's the CIA's crack epidemic
all over again! We don't want to give them jobs or welfare so we're just going to flood them with
cheap heroin and hope they die off." There was a long silence. I thought they thought I was a
crazy conspiracy theorist so I said "That was a joke." Another long silence. Oh shit.
Its not a joke, as we know. The current heroin epidemic is the result of an expansion in prescribing
of pain meds over at least the past 10 years, largely due to the lobbying and urging of Big Pharma.
Especially Purdue, the makers of Oxycontin. People got hooked by prescription and with the black
market price of a single 80mg oxy at $50-80 many switched over to the much cheaper heroin.
But was heroin always this cheap and plentiful? That's not coming from the pharma companies.
…I wonder if this is somehow tied into our Imperial adventures in Afghanistan.
Of course it is. Production had exploded with the northern alliance now protected by the us,
and the US military is a very efficient route into the country like all militaries always are.
When the Russians were fighting in Afghanistan, the soldiers smuggled the heroin in via the
zinc coffins they transported the dead back home in.
I'm old enough to have actually voted for Clinton. I can honestly say that I have only mistakenly
voted for both Clintons and Obama once each. In 2008, I did think the contrast between McCain/Palin
and Obama was enough to justify throwing the dice. by 2012 I realized that the only thing that
could be said as a difference for Obama was he was likely more effectively evil than Romney. I
do have to say that I was probably wrong on that, largely because John Kerry has been such an
improvement at State from the last three Secretaries. Even though we are about to fuck up the
Iran deal, that still was something better. As this is a closed primary state I won't be changing my voter registration, but I will never
be a sure bet voter for the Democrats ever again. I no longer believe in the LOTE is automatically
the Democrat. No I will not vote for Clinton or to return the neoliberal Senator. I can only hope
this is the beginning of a real revolution where people don't stay home, but can no longer be
considered 'reliable' by the Democratic Party leadership. It is long past time to demolish their
idea that 'where else are they going to go' has any basis in reality.
I voted for Obama to vote against Palin. McCain was old and what, a 3 or 4X cancer survivor?
Not sure he would hold up under the stress of office. Needless to say, I am not happy with that
vote, but I rationalize that it was in New York and didn't affect the outcome.
I did the same, and voted for Obama again in 2012 in order to vote against Romney. In retrospect,
it was a mistake to bother the second time 'round. The distinction between the 2 men was small.
The only advantage to having Obama in office again was that his presence in the Oval Office assured
gridlock. The Republican Congress would not act in concert with him - not even to pass acts they
favored.
Looking back on the 'do nothing' Congress of the past 4-6 years makes me question the intensity
of their surprise in the face of their base's turn to Trump. They have known for years that their
voters are bored by "conservative" legislation, and motivated by thwarting the Others
(all those young, brown and black people who live side-by-side with professionals in
the coastal cities). They've acted in awareness of this fact for years………. yet they've been stumped
by Trump.
Very well stated…and quite similar to my own evolution since my first vote for Clinton in '92.
For me it's a more visceral realization. Either (1) they punch me in the face, steal my purse
and toss me in the river (2) take me out to dinner and roofie my drink. I'm tired of waking up
the next morning wondering what the hell happened last night. At least with beau #1 I know what
to expect. Sorry I was watching "Nights of Cabiria" last night.
+100 Although never really a devotee of party politics I was pretty sure that the Democrats
were the best– until this election season. The craven manner in which the Dem Party has pushed
Hilary on us all and the disrespect shown Sanders is reprehensible. Even apart from Clinton's
negative record as SS she is s truly awful candidate. I doubt she has a chance in h*** against
Trump.
Shorter Hillary: be a good sheepdog and wag your tail. I suspect one reason Sanders has hardened
his line as the campaign progressed is that he came to realize there's no staying on the good
side of these people when it comes to disputing their power. HRC is a true heir to Nixon's paranoid
style of American politics and like Obama she will be Nixon without the liberalism or without
Nixon's undoubted intelligence (for all the evil). Which is to say there may indeed have been
a vast rightwing conspiracy but whining about it is not the response of a good politician. With
Hillary as president it will be payback time all around. She'll show Sanders who's boss and Putin
too.
There is bad blood between both of them now and that is definitely part of it. Hillary is nothing
if not arrogant and giving in to anything even remotely Bernie like is simply not a dish she wants
served up in any manner.
Second, gaining Sander's voters would be a tough uphill battle because most of us know how
fake she really is and her strategists likely believe she has a clearer shot without even attempting
it.
That said, it would be a mistake to underestimate Hillary's disipline. If anything changes
with that dynamic going forward, she will react accordingly (it should go without saying that
any sudden embrace of Sander's ideas, no matter how diluted, will be Hillary in her purest form
of lying).
The unspoken judgement being made (to Clinton and to "insiders") is that disgruntled independents
don't vote, so they don't matter. And going by turnout trends, this is true; "independents" turn
out in presidential general elections at around 40% compared to 60%+ for Dems (and even higher
for Reps). In non-presidential elections, indy turnout has been much lower.
So to become a political force, job one for Sanders people is to vote every chance they get.
This will put them on the map statistically, and campaigns and "policy makers" will literally
"see" them, and take them seriously in strategy considerations. Without a consistent presence
at the polls, a movement's policy ideas are all but irrelevant (and are even discredited).
Job two is to hoist, support and elect Federal, State and Municipal level candidates to promotes
one's legislative and administrative goals.
Demonstrations and social media presence are all fine and well, (and letter campaigns actually
work, on a one-off basis), but until one can prove that one can elect one's candidates, one is
essential invisible in the political sense.
I hope it goes without saying that this is how the Tea Party reshaped State legislatures and
Congress. So there is no question that the strategy can work. Again; in this game, the actual
quality of political/policy goals is secondary (or even irrelevant) to the performance at the
polls.
As far as the Presidential votes go, one can vote Green or leave the category blank. But casting
a ballot, and voting in down-ticket races, is absolutely necessary.
My personal experience with the Greens as an organization is mixed, and voting Green makes
the Green party a player in a way that I don't think they have earned (yet), so I'll be considering
the leave-it-blank option.
The turnout in the 2014 midterms was a bloodbath. In some states, they hadn't had turnout numbers
that low since the early 1800s (no typo). Turnout in the Dem primaries for 2016 is ~25% below
2008 levels. Given that the 2012 and 2014 elections were the worst for the Democrats up and down
the line in their history, save 1996, I would not bet on Dems turning out at prior levels, particularly
given that Hillary has disapproval ratings of 55% now and only rise with more exposure.
Brand New Congress…I just sent them a small donation and my 3rd one to Bernie…don't leave the
Democrat party, go kick the f*cking door down, chase the grifters out and make it democratic again.
Lazy liberalism allowed the Clintons to take over and follow their worst impulses just by not
minding the store. Brand New Congress…ex Bernie staffers taking up Howard Dean's 50 state strategy…no election uncontested
from the left.
Actually Brand New Congress intends to use both sides of the aisle and independants as well(so
absolutely no reason to stay with the Democrats.) I'm not sure how that will pan out for them
but I do admire them for at least trying to change the landscape instead of just rolling over
because the DNC wants them to.
Having been lectured by professional/managerial hillary supporters, I'm somewhat amused by
tioxin's take, a lot of words, kind of touchy feely stuff, but only one policy, a 9 page pdf on
solar. Now let's get real here for a second. In the event that hillary imposes a solar plan on
the nation it will go like this. The gov't will buy the solar panels, they'll build the factories
to make the panels with gov't money, then they will hand the working operation to the private
sector who along with goldman sachs will profit massively. This is getting in front of a riot.
People are putting panels on their roofs and threatening the uninterrupted gusher of cash to utilities,
a popular source of money for banksters. I know utility executives who consider this a giant problem.
Is the gov going to hire solar installers to put rooftop solar on peoples houses or make a solar
field with a meter on it. Hillary is about the money, and so is the professional class that supports
her. And that's the only thing they've got. A two paragraph preachy condescending comment with
one lame ass justification for voting for more of the same. Clinton supporters fail to see how
what are now legacy democrat policies have harmed the people they so condescendingly insist must
continue to support their classist policies (o care, bank bailouts, QE to infinity and beyond,
privatisation schemes, protectionist trade deals, lets call them what they are free ain't it,
surveillance state, I could go on and on and on…..)but all you've got is solar panels, bernies
not for solar panels? If you truly care about the democrat party you should ditch hillary, she'a
republican and if you agree with her policies, whatever they are, (I still see zero content from
her campaign) then you're a republican too and should switch parties along with all the rest of
us and leave the democrat party in the hovel they built for themselves.
Hillary Clinton is now a known international war criminal, like her dear Henry Kissinger. She
supervised the destruction of the bombing of all of Libya's water infrastructure. This is a war
crime, to bomb civilian infrastructure…not to mention there was no war. They not only bombed the
pipelines, the irrigation systems, but also the factories that make the pipes, leaving the Libyans
to starve to death, and now NATO and the US are blockading Libya to keep people from escaping.
BHO has said Libya was his worst mistake. Hillary says it is a work in progress. Yes, murdering
those people is in progress. Aside from that the Repugs are going to swift boat her…see the movie
trailer ClintonCash for a taste of what's coming. Trump is quite a piece of work, but he has none
of the substantive crimes in his background that Clinton does. It's going to be quite a show.
Yeah, cuz saying "I was an idiot for believing the jerk I had to install as Secretary of State
had a clue about the best action. Logically if you want to be President you don't want a bloody
disaster hanging around your neck and so you avoid falling into the trap of satisfying the ridiculous
need to swing an imaginary dick to appeal to people who are never going to vote for you. My bad,
I should never have given her that much credit." just wasn't an option he could take.
Clinton supporters argue the former secretary of State has already been forced to the left
by Sanders, and can't risk moving further ahead of a general election.
"I don't know what's left to extract," Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.), a Clinton supporter,
said in an interview with The Hill.
He said the Democratic primary moved the discussion "farther to the left than most moderate
Democrats would like to see.
"Some would say it even endangers a victory in November because the further you go to the
left or right, the further you frustrate independents," Cleaver said. …
Another ally bluntly said it will not be possible for Clinton to compromise with Sanders
on some policy demands.
"We can't do it," the ally said. "But there's going to be a place for him to weigh in on
the campaign and at the convention and he should have the satisfaction that he raised some
issues that have been a part of the conversation."
Where `part of the conversation' is Clintonista for `talk to the hand'. Definitely a formula for success.
What will Bernie do? How committed to a political revolution is he? If this is any indication,
we may be disappointed again: From Howie Klein at Down With Tyranny:
Can The Corrupt Democratic Establishment Buy Off Bernie's Movement?
"This has been made painfully more complicated because Schumer has explicitly threatened Bernie
with loss of the Budget Committee chairmanship if he interferes with Schumer's corrupt conservative
candidates in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida. The Schumercrat in Ohio has already beaten the progressive
and Tuesday will either find Schumer without a candidate or having to accept that Pennsylvanians
don't take orders from a sleazy and despised New York ward healer. Florida's primary, pitting
Bernie endorser Alan Grayson against Wall Street's (and therefore Schumer's) top choice of the
cycle, Patrick Murphy, isn't until the very end of August. It will be interesting to see if Bernie
even pays lip service to assisting the grotesque candidates who espouse the essence– the way Murphy
does– of everything he has built his movement to oppose."
As we know now, Bernie did not "interfere" with those races and Schumer corporocrats won.
If people are disappointed, it's because they are ignoring Sanders words and actions. He's
always been a D in everything but name. His revolution has always been through the D party. He
is very clear he is not running third party or independent.
I do think Sanders is necessary to a third party or org. I have never believed he would participate.
His supporters are trying to get a new group going and while I believe you need expertise, they
strike me as establishment. If it is establishment groups, I always watch for the grift.
Since surveys often tell us more about the person or group asking the question than the person
asked, I got this a couple of days ago and wanted to share a bit:
Official 2016 Democratic Party Survey [excerpt questions]
Section II: Policy Priorities 2) Please rate the following … in order of importance. (1 = most important)
__Make it possible for more American workers to earn sick days and family leave __End gender discrimination in pay and ensure women receive equal pay
__Close tax loopholes and simplify the tax code so that corporations and the ultra-wealthy pay
their fair shares
[That's it! 3 choices!]
Section IV: Democratic Party Priorities 1) Please rate the following Democratic Party goals in order of importance. (1= most important)
__Protecting progress achieved by President Obama __Pushing President Obama's new initiatives through GOP opposition
__Keeping a Democrat in the White House __Winning back control of Congress __Electing more Democrats to state and local governments
__All of the above are equally important
[Paradox: so if "all of the above" is #1, just how does one go about numbering the rest, exactly?]
Granted this is a 'lead-by-the-nose' questionnaire to raise money for the DNC, most
of the questions are yes/no/not sure or check 'all that apply' questions, but note these options
all assume that DNC has been on the right track all along, nothing could possibly be wrong
. While I would suspect the GOP also uses the same tactics, I don't have their "Give us your
money" for comparison.
Well, it's my opinion that the survey is meaningless; I don't think they really want to know
what's important to us, they just want our money so they can go about doing whatever it is they've
decided needs doing. So…I've taken to making confetti out of the survey, the letter and the original
envelope it came in, and mailing all of it back to them in the handy-dandy postage-paid envelope
provided.
I don't want that trash in my house, and even my recycling bin is too good for this stuff.
I work too hard for my money to waste it on an organization that doesn't give a flying fig
what I think.
wow, that tirade is awesome. frighteningly educational about how some people think. to see
such an attack on those whom i think are in the majority here is… what can i say? Clinton is evil
personified in today's world. at least to people like me. the Greater Evil is Clinton,while Trump
is.? i have no clue. so i would have to choose the lesser of evils if i were to vote. and i hate
Republicans and the Quisling/Vichy Democrats who enabled the transformation of American society
into a Lord of the Flies world. frightening to be able to see such "fear" and disgust inside of
me. lashing out is so easy.
Partisan Hack. i probably need to get a T shirt that says that along with the DFH label. being
"right" usually requires age to incur the educational/learning about how stupid or ignorant i
was before, learning from my mistakes, if i am lucky. like voting for Obama or Clinton. proof
of my naiveté, lol. as the Who said in one of their songs, "Won't Get Fooled Again." well, at
least i'll do my best not to get fooled again. in America with their Manufacturing Consent paradigm,
that is a difficult talk.
The Green party doesn't exist down here, Louisiana, and doesn't stand a chance in hell of ever
being "allowed" to for that matter. so i read all this pro Green stuff as extremely regional and
wonder what country these people live in. not the same one i do, unfortunately. The South is a
country in and of itself.
Wow. wanting "leaders" to lead and not to screw me over is being a partisan hack. i never knew!!!
learned something new today. thanks!
I teach building trade classes to a group of young adults. 90% of them are adamant Sanders
supporters and will so vote in the California primary. One supports Hillary. The rest like Trump
and will vote for him in the primary.
If Clinton is anointed? Most of the Sanders supporters say that they will vote for Trump in
the general election. These are pragmatic working class kids who know that their future has been
shafted and they are angry.They are in no mood to perpetuate the fraud that has befallen them
and their parents.
A simple question to ask Hillary supporters is: What has the Democratic Party done for Working
Class people in the last thirty years? Well, there's raising the minimum wage and the Family Leave
Act and then….?? Nafta and the de-industrialization of America, led by the Center Democrats and
Republicans has more than negated those alleged gains.
Adapting a classic film script to present day circumstances, I present a dialog between a young
person who supports Bernie and an older person who knows the score:
Quinlan (young person): Come on, read my future for me.
No you won't. He got us out of Vietnam, she would have doubled down. He proposed universal health care( not good enough for the dems.
He said "we're all Keynesianism now", she's not. He would never cut SS.
I've said for about four years that it was pretty devastating to have a Democratic President
make me nostalgic for Richard Nixon. I'm now terrified to find out who I would find a relief by
two years into the Clinton 2 administration.
The best scenario that I can imagine will be that Obama (fearing a tarnish on his legacy for
quashing a high-profile FBI investigation) will treat Hillary as a "made-man" like General Petraeus
by instructing Justice to administer a slap on the wrist with a misdemeanor charge and fine.
Hillary can then claim that it was simply a process error and that she has atoned through her
bravery and humility by accepting responsibility for her totally innocent mistake. After all,
Petraeus was retained as a white house consultant after his 'speeding ticket' for mishandling
classified information.
This is the kind of thing that makes me want to vote for Trump (if Bernie doesn't get the nom)
even though I recently stated that I would never vote for him because of racism. EFF HRC!
It doesn't matter what Clintoris attempts to do. She's never getting my vote. I'm old enough
to have voted for Reagan in his first term, and I will tell you that the Clintons are the best
thing that ever happened to the neo-cons/neo-libs. Either the party knuckles
under to Bernie, or they become irrelevant.
I can see the Rs become irrelevant and the Ds claim the big money constituency, which has been
the goal of each since Wild Bill Clinton induced both parties to race to the right.
So I'd like to ask who took down my comment from the early morning hours of April 30, 2016,
and why? Since when do humourous jabs at Trump get scrubbed AFTER appearing on-line as posted?
You are out of line. No one scrubbed your comment. You put it on the wrong post. I don't take
well to false accusations. And since you made me waste my time, I'm not telling you where you
did put it.
Some 25-30 percent of Sanders backers, according to pollsters, have made it clear that they
will not support Clinton no matter what - including if Sanders were to endorse her.
(Nobody asked me but yeah – NO!) And if negotiations break down, how about the Skunk Party?
Apparently even Dr. Jill Stein, a past presidential candidate of the Green Party and its likely
candidate this year, as well as Kshama Sawant, … are writing a letter to Sanders inviting him
- urging him - to enter into discussions with the Green Party about running as its presidential
candidate.
"negotiation" may be overstating the case but I do like the idea of this "fantasy". I'm thinking
of voting Green one way or the other anyhow.
Perhaps the real question is whether a third party would solve anything, at least in the long
run. TPTB probably have enough money and influence to buy 3 (or 10) parties if any alternatives
to the duopoly succeed. Maybe the best we can hope for is a breath of fresh air every once in
a while. I remember a line from the PBS series on the Roosevelts (in this case, Teddy): "We bought
him but he wouldn't stay bought."
A third party would solve a great deal. It requires not just a platform, but getting knowledge
of the candidates. Sanders got the knowledge, support, money, moved up in votes and delegates
and is walking away. He never had any intention of running third party. If he was serious about
the issues he discussed he would, but his supporters are more serious about the need for drastic
changes than he is and it's painful to watch them try to get him over the finish line while he,
for the most part, refuses to support other candidates nor attack the Ds and Clinton's specific
corruption.
With the vote rigged from start to finish, Clinton doesn't need Sanders' endorsement. This
is simply the kind of ritual abasement Bush put Colin Powell through: torch your cred for me.
Demonstrate your fealty by making a fool of yourself. Pretend to fear that poor little bottled-up
spider Saddam Hussein.
Same here. Hillary is forcing Sanders to bend the knee and discredit himself in front of his
supporters as a tool. Sanders is being punished for opposing the CIA's choice.
Sanders is at the WHCD. Obama joked about Sanders fresh new face and his $27 donations. I've
always loved the WHCD… where the plutocrats get together for a little self indulgence and mock
their crimes. I wonder if Sanders got a photo op of him and Jane going for a stroll into the dinner,
it has been found to be such a down home example of how they are such humble people.
Please respond the multiple frantic requests for donations before the end of the day. They
have a deadline to meet. ka-ching.
You are getting more and more shrill and desperate in your efforts to demonize Sanders, and
all it does is prove how weak your arguments are
So the fact that Sanders goes to the White House Correspondents' dinner is, according to you,
proof that Sanders is sucking up to plutocrats? If he wanted to sell out, trust me, he knows the
price is higher than a rubber chicken dinner and speeches he'd probably rather not have to hear.
And you have the temerity to mock Sanders' success at raising money from small donors, when your
heroine Jill Sanders has no popular following, and for good reason. She's not remotely qualified,
never held an elected office, never wrote legislation, and never even managed anything as complicated
as a dog pound.
If anyone here is a chump, buddy, it's you, not Sanders backers.
You are purposely misreading commenters. It is not shrill and desperate to point out that Sanders
is a moderate Dem. He is/was the best chance to get some desperately needed shift on critical
issues. It is not shrill and desperate to be disgusted when the plutocrats and their courtiers
get together to mock their crimes. It's rubbing it in the public's face. It's sickening.
What the he@@? 'I' am not mocking Sanders donations. The plutocrats are mocking Sanders donations!
And yes, it sickens me that a candidate is participating in such a revolting spectacle. Clinton
is rightly criticized when she is at an event with the 99% and then goes off to a fundraiser,
but Sanders can't be criticized for being with union members and then going to THAT garbage fest?
Voters are always going to hold candidates feet to the fire in theory but never in actuality and
it's disallowed to criticize a friggin' campaign? Are you kidding me?
My heroine Jill Stein? ha!ha!ha! Geez, I find her to be opportunistic and thin skinned. She
was actually mocking Sanders supporters and now is trying to have open arms. The greens platform
is fluff. I'm in CA, my vote doesn't matter but I still try to come up with a presidential strategy.
The green party is non-existent/irrelevant fluff but I MAY mark a box for Stein. Still, you can't
get over when I wrote to link to her twitter, IT WAS A JOKE!
I need to get some errands done because our Labor Temple is having it's caucus today and I
met a couple of people that are Sanders only and want an independent org outside of the Ds to
carry on with I want to vote for. Gee, look at that…. individuals can be critical of a candidate
and keep carrying on.
Again, I donate to Sanders, have registered voters for him, run around in gear, have it on
my belongings, bring up voting frequently, will participate as support in canvassing. I will debate
the candidate I support. I will discuss the policies, positions, campaign, who they choose to
surround themselves with, and their chances to win that I agree with and will likewise criticize
the same.
Truth be told Henry David, you have sounded a bit sanctimonious in your condemnation of Bernie's
tactics. I feel your pain but it's his campaign to run and only he (and perhaps Jane) knows who
he is inside and what he hopes to achieve in this election cycle. One thing is certain as it pertains
to his ardent supporters and everyone else who is paying any attention at all to what he is saying.
The system is truly rigged in favor of the wealthy and powerful and has been for a long time.
This isn't news to me or you but it really is to millions of desperate citizens, both young and
old. Let's see how this all plays out but in the meantime, let's keep supporting each other in
wanting something better for all citizens. As I've said in other comment threads, I would be satisfied
if both legacy political parties would self-destruct. Then we could start to rebuild locally and
form new national alliances from there.
Political moderate here, with occasional strong leftist leanings. Clinton had better be careful.
There is a lot of anger, frustration, and angst among the majority of working and non-working
Americans. Expectations were high after Obama's inauguration, but one-by-one, most Americans –
even those that voted for Obama – have had to enter the world of extreme confirmation bias to
keep supporting him – even in spite of the fact that the GOP has been an anchor around Obama's
neck
I read somewhere (can't find the cite), several months ago, that 80% of *new* jobs in this
so-called recovery paid between roughly $7.50-$13.00 per hour. If the minimum wage had simply
kept pace with income growth in the US, it would be just over $21.00, today. http://inequality.org/minimum-wage/
And we're arguing about a measly $15.00 an hour? It's a travesty.
I really worry that if the GOP gives Trump the nod that he could win, in spite of all the polling
that currently shows him losing badly to either Democrat. There is something about Trump that
stimulates the darker side of what Freud labeled the"Id".
If Clinton insists on defending the status quo, my instincts tell me that she is going to slide
vs. Trump. I don't know if that slide would be steep enough to give Trump a win. but I get an
eerie feeling when I think about it.
I was sure that America would never elect an "actor" (Ronald Reagan; I was sure that California
would never elect Schwarzenegger;I was absolutely sure that an ex-drunk faux-cowboy (Bush) would
never even get close to the White House, no less get elected to a second term.
When I look back on those events, I realize that in every case I had the same feeling that
I do now, about Clinton. She doesn't connect. Reagan connected; Schwarzenegger connected; Bush
connected (the "good old boy" routine). What those experiences taught me, and what my own conformation
bias made was loathe to let me admit, was that I could "Feel" that connection from Reagan, Schwarzenegger,
and Bush – I almost liked them – even though I was extremely opposed to what they stood for and
voted against them in POTUS elections.
When I talk with old friends and their progeny – all middle class folk, many of them moderate,
who lean slightly left, I get that same eerie feeling I had when Reagan, Schwarzenegger, and Bush
were running.
Bernie Sanders stands for something that is unique in American politics, today. Bernie has
his finger on the pulse. His policy details are somewhat wanting, but he hasn't had the luxury
of years and years to refine them in a way that leads to one white paper after another. Nevertheless,
Sanders is someone I "feel" I could trust to carry out – at the very least – the *gist* of his
promises; and, courageous enough to call out the GOP and members of his own (newly found) party
if they tried to frustrate his agenda.
Polls show Sanders winning by larger margins than Clinton, against all three remaining GOP
candidates (with Clinton losing to Kasich).
Looking at those polls, and reflecting on some of what I wrote, above, Clinton NEEDS to find
a way to either move publicly and strongly toward several of Sanders' positions AND select either
Sanders or a Sanders-like surrogate as VP (who can *connect*; who exudes *trustworthiness*) to
bring Sanders' supporters to her side. If she doesn't do this, even though it looks like a lock
for Clinton against Trump at this point in time, I am very worried that Clinton could falter.
Ignoring what is certainly the most inspired *down-to-earth* campaign in memory, and what that
campaign means to those who were given hope, may be a tragic mistake that Clinton lives to regret.
Either way, I hope that doesn't happen. Reagan, Schwarzenegger, and Bush were, in a way, the "Trumps"
of their day – sure losers to the cognoscenti and insider crowd. It could happen again.
Thoughtful, thank you. It's all Versailles. It's clear Sanders is the reluctant candidate who
really would rather not run but feels he has a moral and social obligation to be of public service.
He's not after profit which a lot of people really seem to have a hard time grasping (see: Kevin
Drum)
Yes, you "feel the Bern", as do I and millions of others. Bernie Sanders really does want the
average citizen to have a fair shake. Policy details will follow the logical course of things
once we achieve a consensus to pursue the common good for all citizens. That is what the revolution
is all about, imho.
I just can't bring myself to vote for Clinton knowing what I know about her to date. It's just
a non-starter. She's just not going to change who she is and how she operates.
Sanders hasn't changed in 40 years. Rock solid, you know how he rolls.
Trump is a bit of a magician. Says one thing, does another. Pretends to be mysoginist, but
hires his daughter and former wife, who both ran significant and successful chunks of his business.
He pretends he's some sort of ordinary working class guy who just made it big. Um, no. Started
off with a nice nest egg to invest with. Plays big successful developer, but declares bankruptcy
to get out of paying anyone, and yet, everyone just lines up for another round.
I try to judge on people's actions instead of their words. (Obama lost me the moment he embraced
indefinite detention) Trump is much harder to get a grasp of. If Sanders isn't on the Novemebr
ballot and Trump is, I can't completely rule out voting for him, at least not yet.
"... Perhaps nothing illustrates this point more clearly than the results of multiple studies on Hillary Clinton's online following which reveal that the majority of her Twitter fans, and indeed her social media following in general, are completely fake. Consider the implications of these findings from StatusPeople.com, and well-respected analytical tool TwitterAudit, which both found that no more than 44 percent of Clinton's followers were actually real, active users of Twitter. ..."
"... "I will absolutely admit that Secretary Clinton… has the entire establishment or almost the entire establishment behind her. That's a fact. I don't deny it. I'm pretty proud that we have over a million people who have contributed to our campaign averaging 27 bucks a piece." ..."
"... So too did the State Department under Hillary Clinton, which spent at least $630,000 to buy Facebook likes, essentially manufacturing a public following for itself. ..."
"... "… the U.S. government contracted HBGary Federal for the development of software which could create multiple fake social media profiles to manipulate and sway public opinion on controversial issues by promoting propaganda. It could also be used as surveillance to find public opinions with points of view the powers-that-be didn't like. It could then potentially have their "fake" people run smear campaigns against those "real" people." ..."
"... In this election season alone there have been massive failures in multiple states that have left countless thousands of Americans without the right to vote for their candidates of choice, or victims of outright fraud. Even Arizona's Secretary of State recently admitted that fraud had taken place on a large scale in her state. The hacktivist collective Anonymous has provided detailed analysis pointing to the fact that state databases were likely hacked and manipulated . ..."
"... This finding only further substantiates the claims made by many experts that the hacking of voting machines and election databases is all but assured, not just in the US but internationally. ..."
"... "Any desired algorithm can be used to determine which votes to steal and to which candidate or candidates to transfer the stolen votes." ..."
"... "There is no way to verify the official tally on the electronic machines on which the majority of Americans will vote this fall. Nearly all the machines are a decade old, most are controlled by a single company (ES&S, owned by Warren Buffett) and the courts have ruled that the software is proprietary, making the vote counts beyond public scrutiny." ..."
As New Yorkers go to the polls in Democratic and Republican primaries this week, it is critical to
once again highlight the myriad ways that democracy in the United States is, like most other things,
a commodity to be bought and sold. From corporate control of the infrastructure of elections, to
the creation of mass bases of support out of whole cloth, the candidates, as well as the system itself,
cannot be trusted to be genuine.
Perhaps nothing illustrates this point more clearly than the
results of multiple studies on Hillary Clinton's online following which reveal that the majority
of her Twitter fans, and indeed her social media following in general, are completely fake. Consider
the implications of these findings from StatusPeople.com, and well-respected analytical tool TwitterAudit,
which both found that no more than 44 percent of Clinton's followers were actually real, active users
of Twitter.
This may seem something trivial, but in fact it cuts to the very heart of the notion of democracy,
and the legitimacy of a candidate who is perhaps the most obvious
embodiment of the political and financial establishment in the US. Indeed, Bernie Sanders, among
many others, has correctly noted that Clinton is in many ways the epitome of the ruling elite.
In a blistering commentary on Clinton during a nationally televised debate, Sanders
proclaimed, "I will absolutely admit that Secretary Clinton… has the entire establishment
or almost the entire establishment behind her. That's a fact. I don't deny it. I'm pretty proud that
we have over a million people who have contributed to our campaign averaging 27 bucks a piece."
Sanders highlighted the fact that the political and financial elites back Hillary, and in so doing
noted that his campaign is backed by millions of ordinary Americans.
But Sanders was equally, though perhaps inadvertently, illustrating the fact that the Clinton
campaign is, in effect, being manufactured; that she has no real support except for a near consensus
of establishment policy-makers and powerful individuals. And yet, here's Hillary marching into yet
another major primary with a double-digit
lead. How much of that is based on a perception shaped – at least in part – by social media?
This phenomenon is not relegated only to Clinton's campaign, however; this is true of most of
America's leading political figures. In 2013, it was
revealed President Obama's Twitter following was made up of a majority (53 percent) fake accounts.
The Daily Mail at the time noted that Vice President Joe Biden, First Lady Michelle Obama, and the
White House communications shop all had online followings consisting of mainly non-existent people.
So too did the State Department under Hillary Clinton, which
spent at least $630,000 to buy Facebook
likes, essentially manufacturing a public following for itself.
But who cares, right? What does it matter if Twitter accounts and Facebook likes are fraudulent?
How does that impact anything other than social media image?
How social media manipulation serves the Establishment agenda
Twitter, Facebook, and other social media have become very potent tools in the arsenal of the
US Government as it wages a relentless information war in the service of the military-industrial
complex and the agenda of the elite. In fact, social media goes far beyond just an image. Today,
it has been made into an effective tool for the dissemination of misinformation and disinformation
that conveniently buttresses whatever narrative the establishment wants.
Take for example the lead-up to the criminal war on Libya. In early 2011, with the narrative of
the 'Arab Spring' ubiquitous in western social media, the US-NATO machine set its sights on regime
change in Libya, with social media as one of the critical tools used to achieve it. Close followers
of that conflict will recall that dozens
of Twitter accounts, purportedly from anti-Gaddafi Libyans, mysteriously emerged in the lead-up to
the war that toppled the Libyan government, providing much of the "intelligence" relayed
on western media including CNN, NBC, the New York Times, et al.
At that time (February 2011), PC World published a little publicized
article entitled "Army of Fake Social Media Friends to Promote Propaganda" which noted that:
"… the U.S. government contracted HBGary Federal for the development of software which could
create multiple fake social media profiles to manipulate and sway public opinion on controversial
issues by promoting propaganda. It could also be used as surveillance to find public opinions with
points of view the powers-that-be didn't like. It could then potentially have their "fake" people
run smear campaigns against those "real" people."
Clearly the US Government and intelligence community have known from the beginning the power of
social media, and its ability to influence public opinion and lay the groundwork for policies, as
well as its potential as a weapon.
In fact, the CIA has taken its social media arsenal much further in recent years. There are literally
dozens of companies that have
received seed money from the CIA's investment arm, known as In-Q-Tel, in order to provide the
intelligence and security establishment the ability to do everything – from real-time surveillance
of social media users to data mining and more. In effect then, social media has become the playground
of the elite, the terrain upon which their manipulation and social engineering takes root.
Is This Democracy?
OK, so social media followings are meaningless as they can be manufactured, as we see currently
with Hillary Clinton. But surely the actual mechanisms of voting in the US are clean? Well, not exactly.
In this election season alone there have been massive failures in multiple states that have left
countless thousands of Americans without the right to vote for their candidates of choice, or victims
of outright fraud. Even Arizona's Secretary of State recently
admitted that fraud had
taken place on a large scale in her state. The hacktivist collective Anonymous has provided detailed
analysis pointing to the fact that state databases were likely
hacked and manipulated.
And then of course there's the issue of the voting machines themselves. Recently the Brennan Center
for Justice at NYU School of Law
issued a comprehensive
report entitled America's Voting Machines at Risk which found that the voting machines currently
in use are outdated, running the risk of catastrophic failures. The report highlighted many shocking
examples that should give anyone pause when considering the validity of election results. The authors
of the report noted that "Virginia recently decertified a voting system used in 24 percent of
precincts after finding that an external party could access the machine's wireless features to record
voting data or inject malicious data."
This finding only further substantiates the claims made by many experts that the hacking of voting
machines and election databases is all but assured, not just in the US but internationally.
A case in point is Andrés Sepulveda, a Colombian hacker who literally
stole the Mexican presidential
election for the current president Enrique Peńa Nieto. Sepulveda, who is linked with Miami-based
political power broker Juan José Rendón (the right wing king-maker widely seen as the engineer of
numerous fraudulent elections in Latin America), has laid bare the utterly fraudulent machinations
just behind the artifice of so-called democracy. Does anyone really believe that US elections are
not equally suspect?
Finally, were the problem just the age of the voting machines and the ability of outside hackers
to manipulate them, the machines could simply be replaced with more advanced, high-security equipment,
and the elections could be deemed legitimate, right? Not so fast.
The fact is that nearly all electronic voting machines are designed and manufactured by companies
such as ES&S (owned by Warren Buffett), Dominion (previously Diebold), Smartmatic, and Hart Intercivic,
all of which are connected to very powerful interests within the ruling elite circles. In fact, researchers
at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University demonstrated that in under
60 seconds, anyone could bypass the lock and replace the memory card with another. As the researchers
in the video
explain,
"Any desired algorithm can be used to determine which votes to steal and to which candidate or
candidates to transfer the stolen votes."
Put simply, there is little reason to trust the results of any election in the US. As Harvey Wasserman
and Bob Fitrakis succinctly
wrote: "There is no way to verify the official tally on the electronic machines on which
the majority of Americans will vote this fall. Nearly all the machines are a decade old, most are
controlled by a single company (ES&S, owned by Warren Buffett) and the courts have ruled that the
software is proprietary, making the vote counts beyond public scrutiny."
Given these inescapable facts, there is little reason to wonder why Hillary Clinton, the darling
of the establishment, is always smiling. She knows the game is rigged in her favor.
Despite the momentum Sanders has generated with his grassroots support, the Clinton machine is
alive and well thanks to a fake support base, dodgy election infrastructure, and elite-controlled
nomination process; in other words, corporate control of the election circus.
Think of these things the next time you hear President Obama, or Hillary Clinton, or anyone else
spouting off about America's democracy and its "exceptional" place in the world.
"... "So it sounds like the party, though, you feel like's been fair to you?" Todd asked Sanders. "No," Sanders responded. "I think we have- look, we're taking on the establishment. That's pretty clear." ..."
"... Pointing to the Democratic debate schedule, of which three of the first four took place on weekend nights, Sanders said they were "scheduled - pretty clearly, to my mind, at a time when there would be minimal viewing audience- et cetera, et cetera." "But you know, that's the way it is. We knew we were taking on the establishment," he said. "And here we are. So [I'm] not complaining." ..."
"... "Yeah, we took advantage of the opportunities in front of us. We are in this race. We are not writing our obituary," Sanders said. "We're in this race to California, and we're proud of the campaign we ran." ..."
'We knew we were taking on the establishment,' the Vermont senator says.
Bernie Sanders says the Democratic Party hasn't been fair to him - but he has mixed feelings on
the nominating process overall.
"Do you think this process has been fair to you? The Democratic nomination process?" moderator
Chuck Todd asked the Vermont senator in an interview filmed Saturday in Baltimore and aired Sunday
on NBC's "Meet the Press."
"Yes and no," Sanders said, going on to criticize the role of the media for neglecting to focus
on "real issues facing America." The media, he said, emphasizes "political gossip" rather than "issues
that affect working people."
"So it sounds like the party, though, you feel like's been fair to you?" Todd asked Sanders.
"No," Sanders responded. "I think we have- look, we're taking on the establishment. That's pretty
clear."
Pointing to the Democratic debate schedule, of which three of the first four took place on
weekend nights, Sanders said they were "scheduled - pretty clearly, to my mind, at a time when there
would be minimal viewing audience- et cetera, et cetera." "But you know, that's the way it is. We
knew we were taking on the establishment," he said. "And here we are. So [I'm] not complaining."
Todd then asked Sanders if he felt he was "given a fair shot" at the Democratic nomination.
"Yeah, we took advantage of the opportunities in front of us. We are in this race. We are
not writing our obituary," Sanders said. "We're in this race to California, and we're proud of the
campaign we ran."
"... Speaking of the US putting more troops in Europe near the Russian border, Paul notes that he doesn't think "they have strong evidence that the Russians are about to roll in tanks." Instead, a motivation for the military build-up, Paul says, is "stirring up troubles to justify more military expenditures." ..."
Speaking last week with host Scott Horton on the Scott Horton Show, three-time presidential candidate
and former Republican member of the US House of Representatives Ron Paul discussed the military-industrial
complex's role in US militarism across the world, including in Latin America and Europe.
After Horton introduced Paul as "the greatest American hero," Paul and Horton entered a fascinating
discussion of US foreign policy. Their wide-ranging discussion concerns matters including US intervention
in Iraq and Ukraine, a potential "Brexit" - exit of Great Britain from the European Union (EU), and
Paul's preference for free trade over international trade deals that Paul says put in place "managed
trade to serve the interests of some special interests."
Addressing the influence of the military-industrial complex, Paul comments in the interview on examples
in Europe and Latin America.
Speaking of the US putting more troops in Europe near the Russian border, Paul notes that he doesn't
think "they have strong evidence that the Russians are about to roll in tanks." Instead, a motivation
for the military build-up, Paul says, is "stirring up troubles to justify more military expenditures."
Paul also comments on the military-industrial complex when he discusses how a dispute over which
company would profit from its helicopters being used in the US government's "Plan Columbia" was resolved
by sending both companies' helicopters to Latin America for use in the drug war effort.
Listen through the end of the interview and you will hear Horton's strong praise for the Ron Paul
Institute for Peace and Prosperity (RPI). Paul founded RPI in 2013 after retiring from the House
of Representatives. Says Horton:
Check out the Ron Paul Institute at ronpaulinstitute.org.
They put out great antiwar propaganda all day long seven days a week - the great Dan McAdams,
Dr. Paul, Adam Dick and others there at the Ron Paul Institute, ronpaulinstitute.org.
Billionaire businessman Charles Koch said Sunday that "it's possible" another
Clinton in the White House could be better than having a Republican president.
Koch, the CEO of Koch Industries, made the comment to ABC News' Jonathan
Karl during
an interview that aired on ABC's "This Week."
"... The following is a preview of a chapter by Claudia von Werlhof in "The Global Economic Crisis: The Great Depression of the XXI Century." (2009) ..."
"... To read more, order the book online. Help us spread the word: "like" the book on Facebook and share with your friends -- ..."
No one asks these questions because they seem absurd. Yet, no one can escape
them either. Until the onslaught of the global economic crisis, the motto of
so-called "neoliberalism" was TINA: "There Is No Alternative!"
No alternative to "neoliberal globalization"?
No alternative to the unfettered "free market" economy?
What Is "Neoliberal Globalization"?
Let us first clarify what globalization and neoliberalism are, where they
come from, who they are directed by, what they claim, what they do, why their
effects are so fatal, why they will fail and why people nonetheless cling to
them. Then, let us look at the responses of those who are not – or will not
– be able to live with the consequences they cause.
This is where the difficulties begin. For a good twenty years now we have
been told that there is no alternative to neoliberal globalization, and that,
in fact, no such alternative is needed either. Over and over again, we have
been confronted with the TINA-concept: "There Is No Alternative!" The "iron
lady", Margaret Thatcher, was one of those who reiterated this belief without
end.
The TINA-concept prohibits all thought. It follows the rationale that there
is no point in analyzing and discussing neoliberalism and so-called globalization
because they are inevitable. Whether we condone what is happening or not does
not matter, it is happening anyway. There is no point in trying to understand.
Hence: Go with it! Kill or be killed!
Some go as far as suggesting that globalization – meaning, an economic system
which developed under specific social and historical conditions – is nothing
less but a law of nature. In turn, "human nature" is supposedly reflected by
the character of the system's economic subjects: egotistical, ruthless, greedy
and cold. This, we are told, works towards everyone's benefit.
The question remains: why has Adam Smith's "invisible hand" become a "visible
fist"? While a tiny minority reaps enormous benefits from today's neoliberalism
(none of which will remain, of course), the vast majority of the earth's population
suffers hardship to the extent that their very survival is at stake. The damage
done seems irreversible.
All over the world media outlets – especially television stations – avoid
addressing the problem. A common excuse is that it cannot be explained.[1] The
true reason is, of course, the media's corporate control.
What Is Neoliberalism?
Neoliberalism as an economic policy agenda which began in Chile in 1973.
Its inauguration consisted of a U.S.-organized coup against a democratically
elected socialist president and the installment of a bloody military dictatorship
notorious for systematic torture. This was the only way to turn the neoliberal
model of the so-called "Chicago Boys" under the leadership of Milton Friedman
– a student of Friedrich von Hayek – into reality.
The predecessor of the neoliberal model is the economic liberalism of the
18th and 19th centuries and its notion of "free trade". Goethe's assessment
at the time was: "Free trade, piracy, war – an inseparable three!"[2]
At the center of both old and new economic liberalism lies:
Self-interest and individualism; segregation of ethical principles and economic
affairs, in other words: a process of 'de-bedding' economy from society; economic
rationality as a mere cost-benefit calculation and profit maximization; competition
as the essential driving force for growth and progress; specialization and the
replacement of a subsistence economy with profit-oriented foreign trade ('comparative
cost advantage'); and the proscription of public (state) interference with market
forces.[3]
Where the new economic liberalism outdoes the old is in its global claim.
Today's economic liberalism functions as a model for each and everyone: all
parts of the economy, all sectors of society, of life/nature itself. As a consequence,
the once "de-bedded" economy now claims to "im-bed" everything, including political
power. Furthermore, a new twisted "economic ethics" (and with it a certain idea
of "human nature") emerges that mocks everything from so-called do-gooders to
altruism to selfless help to care for others to a notion of responsibility.[4]
This goes as far as claiming that the common good depends entirely on the
uncontrolled egoism of the individual and, especially, on the prosperity of
transnational corporations. The allegedly necessary "freedom" of the economy
– which, paradoxically, only means the freedom of corporations – hence consists
of a freedom from responsibility and commitment to society.
The maximization of profit itself must occur within the shortest possible
time; this means, preferably, through speculation and "shareholder value". It
must meet as few obstacles as possible. Today, global economic interests outweigh
not only extra-economic concerns but also national economic considerations since
corporations today see themselves beyond both community and nation.[5] A "level
playing field" is created that offers the global players the best possible conditions.
This playing field knows of no legal, social, ecological, cultural or national
"barriers".[6] As a result, economic competition plays out on a market that
is free of all non-market, extra-economic or protectionist influences – unless
they serve the interests of the big players (the corporations), of course. The
corporations' interests – their maximal growth and progress – take on complete
priority. This is rationalized by alleging that their well-being means the well-being
of small enterprises and workshops as well.
The difference between the new and the old economic liberalism can first
be articulated in quantitative terms: after capitalism went through a series
of ruptures and challenges – caused by the "competing economic system", the
crisis of capitalism, post-war "Keynesianism" with its social and welfare state
tendencies, internal mass consumer demand (so-called Fordism), and the objective
of full employment in the North. The liberal economic goals of the past are
now not only euphorically resurrected but they are also "globalized". The main
reason is indeed that the competition between alternative economic systems is
gone. However, to conclude that this confirms the victory of capitalism and
the "golden West" over "dark socialism" is only one possible interpretation.
Another – opposing – interpretation is to see the "modern world system" (which
contains both capitalism and socialism) as having hit a general crisis which
causes total and merciless competition over global resources while leveling
the way for investment opportunities, i.e. the valorization of capital.[7]
The ongoing globalization of neoliberalism demonstrates which interpretation
is right. Not least, because the differences between the old and the new economic
liberalism can not only be articulated in quantitative terms but in qualitative
ones too. What we are witnessing are completely new phenomena: instead of a
democratic "complete competition" between many small enterprises enjoying the
freedom of the market, only the big corporations win. In turn, they create new
market oligopolies and monopolies of previously unknown dimensions. The market
hence only remains free for them, while it is rendered unfree for all others
who are condemned to an existence of dependency (as enforced producers, workers
and consumers) or excluded from the market altogether (if they have neither
anything to sell or buy). About fifty percent of the world's population fall
into this group today, and the percentage is rising.[8]
Anti-trust laws have lost all power since the transnational corporations
set the norms. It is the corporations – not "the market" as an anonymous mechanism
or "invisible hand" – that determine today's rules of trade, for example prices
and legal regulations. This happens outside any political control. Speculation
with an average twenty percent profit margin edges out honest producers who
become "unprofitable".[9] Money becomes too precious for comparatively non-profitable,
long-term projects,
or projects that only – how audacious! – serve a good life. Money instead
"travels upwards" and disappears. Financial capital determines more and more
what the markets are and do.[10] By delinking the dollar from the price of gold,
money creation no longer bears a direct relationship to production".[11] Moreover,
these days most of us are – exactly like all governments – in debt. It is financial
capital that has all the money – we have none.[12]
Small, medium, even some bigger enterprises are pushed out of the market,
forced to fold or swallowed by transnational corporations because their performances
are below average in comparison to speculation – rather: spookulation – wins.
The public sector, which has historically been defined as a sector of not-for-profit
economy and administration, is "slimmed" and its "profitable" parts ("gems")
handed to corporations (privatized). As a consequence, social services that
are necessary for our existence disappear. Small and medium private businesses
– which, until recently, employed eighty percent of the workforce and provided
normal working conditions – are affected by these developments as well. The
alleged correlation between economic growth and secure employment is false.
When economic growth is accompanied by the mergers of businesses, jobs are lost.[13]
If there are any new jobs, most are precarious, meaning that they are only
available temporarily and badly paid. One job is usually not enough to make
a living.[14] This means that the working conditions in the North become akin
to those in the South, and the working conditions of men akin to those of women
– a trend diametrically opposed to what we have always been told. Corporations
now leave for the South (or East) to use cheap – and particularly female – labor
without union affiliation. This has already been happening since the 1970s in
the "Export Processing Zones" (EPZs, "world market factories" or "maquiladoras"),
where most of the world's computer chips, sneakers, clothes and electronic goods
are produced.[15] The EPZs lie in areas where century-old colonial-capitalist
and authoritarian-patriarchal conditions guarantee the availability of cheap
labor.[16] The recent shift of business opportunities from consumer goods to
armaments is a particularly troubling development.[17]
It is not only commodity production that is "outsourced" and located in the
EPZs, but service industries as well. This is a result of the so-called Third
Industrial Revolution, meaning the development of new information and communication
technologies. Many jobs have disappeared entirely due to computerization, also
in administrative fields.[18] The combination of the principles of "high tech"
and "low wage"/"no wage" (always denied by "progress" enthusiasts) guarantees
a "comparative cost advantage" in foreign trade. This will eventually lead to
"Chinese wages" in the West. A potential loss of Western consumers is not seen
as a threat. A corporate economy does not care whether consumers are European,
Chinese or Indian.
The means of production become concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, especially
since finance capital – rendered precarious itself – controls asset values ever
more aggressively. New forms of private property are created, not least through
the "clearance" of public property and the transformation of formerly public
and small-scale private services and industries to a corporate business sector.
This concerns primarily fields that have long been (at least partly) excluded
from the logic of profit – e.g. education, health, energy or water supply/disposal.
New forms of so-called enclosures emerge from today's total commercialization
of formerly small-scale private or public industries and services, of the "commons",
and of natural resources like oceans, rain forests, regions of genetic diversity
or geopolitical interest (e.g. potential pipeline routes), etc.[19] As far as
the new virtual spaces and communication networks go, we are witnessing frantic
efforts to bring these under private control as well.[20]
All these new forms of private property are essentially created by (more
or less) predatory forms of appropriation. In this sense, they are a continuation
of the history of so-called original accumulation which has expanded globally,
in accordance with to the motto: "Growth through expropriation!"[21]
Most people have less and less access to the means of production, and so
the dependence on scarce and underpaid work increases. The destruction of the
welfare state also destroys the notion that individuals can rely on the community
to provide for them in times of need. Our existence relies exclusively on private,
i.e. expensive, services that are often of much worse quality and much less
reliable than public services. (It is a myth that the private always outdoes
the public.) What we are experiencing is undersupply formerly only known by
the colonial South. The old claim that the South will eventually develop into
the North is proven wrong. It is the North that increasingly develops into the
South. We are witnessing the latest form of "development", namely, a world system
of underdevelopment.[22] Development and underdevelopment go hand in hand.[23]
This might even dawn on "development aid" workers soon.
It is usually women who are called upon to counterbalance underdevelopment
through increased work ("service provisions") in the household. As a result,
the workload and underpay of women takes on horrendous dimensions: they do unpaid
work inside their homes and poorly paid "housewifized" work outside.[24] Yet,
commercialization does not stop in front of the home's doors either. Even housework
becomes commercially co-opted ("new maid question"), with hardly any financial
benefits for the women who do the work.[25]
Not least because of this, women are increasingly coerced into prostitution,
one of today's biggest global industries.[26] This illustrates two things: a)
how little the "emancipation" of women actually leads to "equal terms" with
men; and b) that "capitalist development" does not imply increased "freedom"
in wage labor relations, as the Left has claimed for a long time.[27] If the
latter were the case, then neoliberalism would mean the voluntary end of capitalism
once it reaches its furthest extension. This, however, does not appear likely.
Today, hundreds of millions of quasi-slaves, more than ever before, exist
in the "world system."[28] The authoritarian model of the "Export Processing
Zones" is conquering the East and threatening the North. The redistribution
of wealth runs ever more – and with ever accelerated speed – from the bottom
to the top. The gap between the rich and the poor has never been wider. The
middle classes disappear. This is the situation we are facing.
It becomes obvious that neoliberalism marks not the end of colonialism but,
to the contrary, the colonization of the North. This new "colonization of the
world"[29] points back to the beginnings of the "modern world system" in the
"long 16th century", when the conquering of the Americas, their exploitation
and colonial transformation allowed for the rise and "development" of Europe.[30]
The so-called "children's diseases" of modernity keep on haunting it, even in
old age. They are, in fact, the main feature of modernity's latest stage. They
are expanding instead of disappearing.
Where there is no South, there is no North; where there is no periphery,
there is no center; where there is no colony, there is no – in any case no "Western"
– civilization.[31]
Austria is part of the world system too. It is increasingly becoming a corporate
colony (particularly of German corporations). This, however, does not keep it
from being an active colonizer itself, especially in the East.[32]
Social, cultural, traditional and ecological considerations are abandoned
and give way to a mentality of plundering. All global resources that we still
have – natural resources, forests, water, genetic pools – have turned into objects
of utilization. Rapid ecological destruction through depletion is the consequence.
If one makes more profit by cutting down trees than by planting them, then there
is no reason not to cut them.[33] Neither the public nor the state interferes,
despite global warming and the obvious fact that the clearing of the few remaining
rain forests will irreversibly destroy the earth's climate – not to mention
the many other negative effects of such actions.[34] Climate, animal, plants,
human and general ecological rights are worth nothing compared to the interests
of the corporations – no matter that the rain forest is not a renewable resource
and that the entire earth's ecosystem depends on it. If greed, and the rationalism
with which it is economically enforced, really was an inherent anthropological
trait, we would have never even reached this day.
The commander of the Space Shuttle that circled the earth in 2005 remarked
that "the center of Africa was burning". She meant the Congo, in which the last
great rain forest of the continent is located. Without it there will be no more
rain clouds above the sources of the Nile. However, it needs to disappear in
order for corporations to gain free access to the Congo's natural resources
that are the reason for the wars that plague the region today. After all, one
needs diamonds and coltan for mobile phones.
Today, everything on earth is turned into commodities, i.e. everything becomes
an object of "trade" and commercialization (which truly means liquidation, the
transformation of all into liquid money). In its neoliberal stage it is not
enough for capitalism to globally pursue less cost-intensive and preferably
"wageless" commodity production. The objective is to transform everyone and
everything into commodities, including life itself.[35] We are racing blindly
towards the violent and absolute conclusion of this "mode of production", namely
total capitalization/liquidation by "monetarization".[36]
We are not only witnessing perpetual praise of the market – we are witnessing
what can be described as "market fundamentalism". People believe in the market
as if it was a god. There seems to be a sense that nothing could ever happen
without it. Total global maximized accumulation of money/capital as abstract
wealth becomes the sole purpose of economic activity. A "free" world market
for everything has to be established – a world market that functions according
to the interests of the corporations and capitalist money. The installment of
such a market proceeds with dazzling speed. It creates new profit possibilities
where they have not existed before, e.g. in Iraq, Eastern Europe or China.
One thing remains generally overlooked: the abstract wealth created for accumulation
implies the destruction of nature as concrete wealth. The result is a "hole
in the ground" and next to it a garbage dump with used commodities, outdated
machinery and money without value.[37] However, once all concrete wealth (which
today consists mainly of the last natural resources) will be gone, abstract
wealth will disappear as well. It will, in Marx's words, "evaporate". The fact
that abstract wealth is not real wealth will become obvious, and so will the
answer to the question of which wealth modern economic activity has really created.
In the end it is nothing but monetary wealth (and even this mainly exists virtually
or on accounts) that constitutes a monoculture controlled by a tiny minority.
Diversity is suffocated and millions of people are left wondering how to survive.
And really: how do you survive with neither resources nor means of production
nor money?
The nihilism of our economic system is evident. The whole world will be transformed
into money – and then it will disappear. After all, money cannot be eaten. What
no one seems to consider is the fact that it is impossible to re-transform commodities,
money, capital and machinery into nature or concrete wealth. It seems that underlying
all "economic development" is the assumption that "resources", the "sources
of wealth",[38] are renewable and everlasting – just like the "growth" they
create.[39]
The notion that capitalism and democracy are one is proven a myth by neoliberalism
and its "monetary totalitarianism".[40]
The primacy of politics over economy has been lost. Politicians of all parties
have abandoned it. It is the corporations that dictate politics. Where corporate
interests are concerned, there is no place for democratic convention or community
control. Public space disappears. The res publica turns into a res privata,
or – as we could say today – a res privata transnationale (in its original Latin
meaning, privare means "to deprive"). Only those in power still have rights.
They give themselves the licenses they need, from the "license to plunder" to
the "license to kill".[41] Those who get in their way or challenge their "rights"
are vilified, criminalized and to an increasing degree defined as "terrorists"
or, in the case of defiant governments, as "rogue states" – a label that usually
implies threatened or actual military attack, as we can see in the cases of
Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq, and maybe Syria and Iran in the near future.
U.S. President Bush had even spoken of the possibility of "preemptive" nuclear
strikes should the U.S. feel endangered by weapons of mass destruction.[42]
The European Union did not object.[43]
Neoliberalism and war are two sides of the same coin.[44] Free trade, piracy
and war are still "an inseparable three" – today maybe more so than ever. War
is not only "good for the economy" but is indeed its driving force and can be
understood as the "continuation of economy with other means".[45] War and economy
have become almost indistinguishable.[46] Wars about resources – especially
oil and water – have already begun.[47] The Gulf Wars are the most obvious examples.
Militarism once again appears as the "executor of capital accumulation" – potentially
everywhere and enduringly.[48]
Human rights and rights of sovereignty have been transferred from people,
communities and governments to corporations.[49] The notion of the people as
a sovereign body has practically been abolished. We have witnessed a coup of
sorts. The political systems of the West and the nation state as guarantees
for and expression of the international division of labor in the modern world
system are increasingly dissolving.[50] Nation states are developing into "periphery
states" according to the inferior role they play in the proto-despotic "New
World Order".[51] Democracy appears outdated. After all, it "hinders business".[52]
The "New World Order" implies a new division of labor that does no longer
distinguish between North and South, East and West – today, everywhere is South.
An according International Law is established which effectively functions from
top to bottom ("top-down") and eliminates all local and regional communal rights.
And not only that: many such rights are rendered invalid both retroactively
and for the future.[53]
The logic of neoliberalism as a sort of totalitarian neo-mercantilism is
that all resources, all markets, all money, all profits, all means of production,
all "investment opportunities", all rights and all power belong to the corporations
only. To paraphrase Richard Sennett: "Everything to the Corporations!"[54] One
might add: "Now!"
The corporations are free to do whatever they please with what they get.
Nobody is allowed to interfere. Ironically, we are expected to rely on them
to find a way out of the crisis we are in. This puts the entire globe at risk
since responsibility is something the corporations do not have or know. The
times of social contracts are gone.[55] In fact, pointing out the crisis alone
has become a crime and all critique will soon be defined as "terror" and persecuted
as such.[56]
IMF Economic Medicine
Since the 1980s, it is mainly the Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) of
the World Bank and the IMF that act as the enforcers of neoliberalism. These
programs are levied against the countries of the South which can be extorted
due to their debts. Meanwhile, numerous military interventions and wars help
to take possession of the assets that still remain, secure resources, install
neoliberalism as the global economic politics, crush resistance movements (which
are cynically labeled as "IMF uprisings"), and facilitate the lucrative business
of reconstruction.[57]
In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher introduced neoliberalism
in Anglo-America. In 1989, the so-called "Washington Consensus" was formulated.
It claimed to lead to global freedom, prosperity and economic growth through
"deregulation, liberalization and privatization". This has become the credo
and promise of all neoliberals. Today we know that the promise has come true
for the corporations only – not for anybody else.
In the Middle East, the Western support for Saddam Hussein in the war between
Iraq and Iran in the 1980s, and the Gulf War of the early 1990s, announced the
permanent U.S. presence in the world's most contested oil region.
In continental Europe, neoliberalism began with the crisis in Yugoslavia
caused by the Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) of the World Bank and the
IMF. The country was heavily exploited, fell apart and finally beset by a civil
war over its last remaining resources.[58] Since the NATO war in 1999, the Balkans
are fragmented, occupied and geopolitically under neoliberal control.[59] The
region is of main strategic interest for future oil and gas transport from the
Caucasus to the West (for example the "Nabucco" gas pipeline that is supposed
to start operating from the Caspian Sea through Turkey and the Balkans by 2011.[60]
The reconstruction of the Balkans is exclusively in the hands of Western corporations.
All governments, whether left, right, liberal or green, accept this. There
is no analysis of the connection between the politics of neoliberalism, its
history, its background and its effects on Europe and other parts of the world.
Likewise, there is no analysis of its connection to the new militarism.
NOTES
[1] Maria Mies and Claudia von Werlhof (Hg), Lizenz zum Plündern. Das Multilaterale
Abkommen über Investitionen MAI. Globalisierung der Konzernherrschaft – und
was wir dagegen tun können, Hamburg, EVA, 2003 (1998), p. 23, 36.
[2] Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust: Part Two, New York, Oxford University
Press, 1999.
[3] Maria Mies, Krieg ohne Grenzen. Die neue Kolonisierung der Welt, Köln,
PapyRossa, 2005, p. 34.
[4] Arno Gruen, Der Verlust des Mitgefühls. Über die Politik der Gleichgültigkeit,
München, 1997, dtv.
[5] Sassen Saskia, "Wohin führt die Globalisierung?," Machtbeben, 2000, Stuttgart-München,
DVA.
[6] Maria Mies and Claudia von Werlhof (Hg), Lizenz zum Plündern. Das Multilaterale
Abkommen über Investitionen MAI. Globalisierung der Konzernherrschaft – und
was wir dagegen tun können, Hamburg, EVA, 2003 (1998), p. 24.
[7] Immanuel Wallerstein, Aufstieg und künftiger Niedergang des kapitalistischen
Weltsystems, in Senghaas, Dieter: Kapitalistische Weltökonomie. Kontroversen
über ihren Ursprung und ihre Entwicklungsdynamik, Frankfurt, 1979, Suhrkamp;
Immanuel Wallerstein (Hg), The Modern World-System in the Longue Durée, Boulder/
London; Paradigm Publishers, 2004.
[8] Susan George, im Vortrag, Treffen von Gegnern und Befürwortern der Globalisierung
im Rahmen der Tagung des WEF (World Economic Forum), Salzburg, 2001.
[9] Elmar Altvater, Das Ende des Kapitalismus, wie wir ihn kennen, Münster,
Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2005.
[10] Elmar Altvater and Birgit Mahnkopf, Grenzen der Globalisierung. Ökonomie,
Ökologie und Politik in der Weltgesellschaft, Münster, Westfälisches Dampfboot,
1996.
[11] Bernard Lietaer, Jenseits von Gier und Knappheit, Interview mit Sarah
van Gelder, 2006,
www.transaction.net/press/interviews/Lietaer 0497.html; Margrit Kennedy,
Geld ohne Zinsen und Inflation, Steyerberg, Permakultur, 1990.
[12] Helmut Creutz, Das Geldsyndrom. Wege zur krisenfreien Marktwirtschaft,
Frankfurt, Ullstein, 1995.
[13] Maria Mies and Claudia von Werlhof (Hg), Lizenz zum Plündern. Das Multilaterale
Abkommen über Investitionen MAI. Globalisierung der Konzernherrschaft – und
was wir dagegen tun können, Hamburg, EVA, 2003 (1998), p. 7.
[14] Barbara Ehrenreich, Arbeit poor. Unterwegs in der Dienstleistungsgesellschaft,
München, Kunstmann, 2001.
[15] Folker Fröbel, Jürgen Heinrichs, and Otto Kreye, Die neue internationale
Arbeitsteilung. Strukturelle Arbeitslosigkeit in den Industrieländern und die
Industrialisierung der Entwicklungsländer, Reinbek, Rowohlt, 1977.
[16] Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen, Maria Mies, and Claudia von Werlhof, Women,
The Last Colony, London/ New Delhi, Zed Books, 1988.
[17] Michel Chossudovsky, War and Globalization. The Truth Behind September
11th, Oro, Ontario, Global Outlook, 2003.
[18] Folker Fröbel, Jürgen Heinrichs, and Otto Kreye, Die neue internationale
Arbeitsteilung. Strukturelle Arbeitslosigkeit in den Industrieländern und die
Industrialisierung der Entwicklungsländer, Reinbek, Rowohlt, 1977.
[19] Ana Isla, The Tragedy of the Enclosures: An Eco-Feminist Perspective
on Selling Oxygen and Prostitution in Costa Rica, Man., Brock Univ., Sociology
Dpt., St. Catherines, Ontario, Canada, 2005.
[20] John Hepburn, Die Rückeroberung von Allmenden – von alten und von neuen,
übers. Vortrag bei, Other Worlds Conference; Univ. of Pennsylvania; 28./29.4,
2005.
[21] Claudia von Werlhof, Was haben die Hühner mit dem Dollar zu tun? Frauen
und Ökonomie, München, Frauenoffensive, 1991; Claudia von Werlhof, MAInopoly:
Aus Spiel wird Ernst, in Mies/Werlhof, 2003, p. 148-192.
[22] Andre Gunder Frank, Die Entwicklung der Unterentwicklung, in ders. u.a.,
Kritik des bürgerlichen Antiimperialismus, Berlin, Wagenbach, 1969.
[23] Maria Mies, Krieg ohne Grenzen, Die neue Kolonisierung der Welt, Köln,
PapyRossa, 2005.
[24] Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen, Maria Mies, and Claudia von Werlhof, Women,
the Last Colony, London/New Delhi, Zed Books, 1988.
[25] Claudia von Werlhof, Frauen und Ökonomie. Reden, Vorträge 2002-2004,
Themen GATS, Globalisierung, Mechernich, Gerda-Weiler-Stiftung, 2004.
[26] Ana Isla, "Women and Biodiversity as Capital Accumulation: An Eco-Feminist
View," Socialist Bulletin, Vol. 69, Winter, 2003, p. 21-34; Ana Isla, The Tragedy
of the Enclosures: An Eco-Feminist Perspective on Selling Oxygen and Prostitution
in Costa Rica, Man., Brock Univ., Sociology Department, St. Catherines, Ontario,
Canada, 2005.
[27] Immanuel Wallerstein, Aufstieg und künftiger Niedergang des kapitalistischen
Weltsystems, in Senghaas, Dieter: Kapitalistische Weltökonomie. Kontroversen
über ihren Ursprung und ihre Entwicklungsdynamik, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1979.
[28] Kevin Bales, Die neue Sklaverei, München, Kunstmann, 2001.
[29] Maria Mies, Krieg ohne Grenzen, Die neue Kolonisierung der Welt, Köln,
PapyRossa, 2005.
[30] Immanuel Wallerstein, Aufstieg und künftiger Niedergang des kapitalistischen
Weltsystems, in Senghaas, Dieter: Kapitalistische Weltökonomie. Kontroversen
über ihren Ursprung und ihre Entwicklungsdynamik, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1979;
Andre Gunder Frank, Orientierung im Weltsystem, Von der Neuen Welt zum Reich
der Mitte, Wien, Promedia, 2005; Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on
a World Scale, Women in the International Division of Labour, London, Zed Books,
1986.
[31] Claudia von Werlhof, "Questions to Ramona," in Corinne Kumar (Ed.),
Asking, We Walk. The South as New Political Imaginary, Vol. 2, Bangalore, Streelekha,
2007, p. 214-268
[32] Hannes Hofbauer, Osterweiterung. Vom Drang nach Osten zur peripheren
EU-Integration, Wien, Promedia, 2003; Andrea Salzburger, Zurück in die Zukunft
des Kapitalismus, Kommerz und Verelendung in Polen, Frankfurt – New York, Peter
Lang Verlag, 2006.
[34] August Raggam, Klimawandel, Biomasse als Chance gegen Klimakollaps und
globale Erwärmung, Graz, Gerhard Erker, 2004.
[35] Immanuel Wallerstein, Aufstieg und künftiger Niedergang des kapitalistischen
Weltsystems, in Senghaas, Dieter: Kapitalistische Weltökonomie. Kontroversen
über ihren Ursprung und ihre Entwicklungsdynamik, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1979.
[36] Renate Genth, Die Bedrohung der Demokratie durch die Ökonomisierung
der Politik, feature für den Saarländischen Rundfunk am 4.3., 2006.
[37] Johan Galtung, Eurotopia, Die Zukunft eines Kontinents, Wien, Promedia,
1993.
[38] Karl Marx, Capital, New York, Vintage, 1976.
[39] Claudia von Werlhof, Loosing Faith in Progress: Capitalist Patriarchy
as an "Alchemical System," in Bennholdt-Thomsen et.al.(Eds.), There is an Alternative,
2001, p. 15-40.
[40] Renate Genth, Die Bedrohung der Demokratie durch die Ökonomisierung
der Politik, feature für den Saarländischen Rundfunk am 4.3., 2006.
[41] Maria Mies and Claudia von Werlhof (Hg), Lizenz zum Plündern. Das Multilaterale
Abkommen über Investitionen MAI. Globalisierung der Konzernherrschaft – und
was wir dagegen tun können, Hamburg, EVA, 2003 (1998), p. 7; Maria Mies, Krieg
ohne Grenzen, Die neue Kolonisierung der Welt, Köln, PapyRossa, 2005.
[42] Michel Chossudovsky, America's "War on Terrorism," Montreal, Global
Research, 2005.
[43] Michel Chossudovsky, "Nuclear War Against Iran," Global Research, Center
for Research on Globalization, Ottawa 13.1, 2006.
[44] Altvater, Chossudovsky, Roy, Serfati, Globalisierung und Krieg, Sand
im Getriebe 17, Internationaler deutschsprachiger Rundbrief der ATTAC – Bewegung,
Sonderausgabe zu den Anti-Kriegs-Demonstrationen am 15.2., 2003; Maria Mies,
Krieg ohne Grenzen, Die neue Kolonisierung der Welt, Köln, PapyRossa, 2005.
[45] Hazel Hendersen, Building a Win-Win World. Life Beyond Global Economic
Warfare, San Francisco, 1996.
[46] Claudia von Werlhof, Vom Wirtschaftskrieg zur Kriegswirtschaft. Die
Waffen der, Neuen-Welt-Ordnung, in Mies 2005, p. 40-48.
[47] Michael T. Klare, Resource Wars. The New Landscape of Global Conflict,
New York, Henry Holt and Company, 2001.
[48] Rosa Luxemburg, Die Akkumulation des Kapitals, Frankfurt, 1970.
[49] Tony Clarke, Der Angriff auf demokratische Rechte und Freiheiten, in
Mies/Werlhof, 2003, p. 80-94.
[50] Sassen Saskia, Machtbeben. Wohin führt die Globalisierung?, Stuttgart-München,
DVA, 2000.
[51] Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Cambridge, Harvard Univ. Press,
2001; Noam Chomsky, Hybris. Die endgültige Sicherstellung der globalen –Vormachtstellung
der USA, Hamburg-Wien, Europaverlag, 2003.
[52] Claudia von Werlhof, Speed Kills!, in Dimmel/Schmee, 2005, p. 284-292
[53] See the "roll back" and "stand still" clauses in the WTO agreements
in Maria Mies and Claudia von Werlhof (Hg), Lizenz zum Plündern. Das Multilaterale
Abkommen über Investitionen MAI. Globalisierung der Konzernherrschaft – und
was wir dagegen tun können, Hamburg, EVA, 2003.
[54] Richard Sennett, zit. "In Einladung zu den Wiener Vorlesungen," 21.11.2005:
Alternativen zur neoliberalen Globalisierung, 2005.
[55] Claudia von Werlhof, MAInopoly: Aus Spiel wird Ernst, in Mies/Werlhof,
2003, p. 148-192.
[56] Michel Chossudovsky, America's "War on Terrorism," Montreal, Global
Research, 2005.
[57] Michel Chossudovsky, Global Brutal. Der entfesselte Welthandel, die
Armut, der Krieg, Frankfurt, Zweitausendeins, 2002; Maria Mies, Krieg ohne Grenzen.
Die neue Kolonisierung der Welt, Köln, PapyRossa, 2005; Bennholdt-Thomsen/Faraclas/Werlhof
2001.
[58] Michel Chossudovsky, Global Brutal. Der entfesselte Welthandel, die
Armut, der Krieg, Frankfurt, Zweitausendeins, 2002.
[59] Wolfgang Richter, Elmar Schmähling, and Eckart Spoo (Hg), Die Wahrheit
über den NATO-Krieg gegen Jugoslawien, Schkeuditz, Schkeuditzer Buchverlag,
2000; Wolfgang Richter, Elmar Schmähling, and Eckart Spoo (Hg), Die deutsche
Verantwortung für den NATO-Krieg gegen Jugoslawien, Schkeuditz, Schkeuditzer
Buchverlag, 2000.
"... Nevertheless, the election of Sanders or Trump is important, because it demonstrates that American citizens are emerging from The Matrix and have no confidence in the two corrupt political parties that betrayed them. The message would go out to the world as well that the American people have no confidence in the Washington Establishment. These messages are very important and can only have beneficial effects. ..."
"... So why is the progressive left helping the One Percent keep the lid on the rest of us? Has the progressive left sold out or is the progressive left putting its emotional needs above the general welfare? ..."
"Have you noticed that it is not only the presstitute media and the two establishment political
parties that are beating up on Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump but also the progressive left? Sometimes
the messages overlap so much that the progressive left sounds like the One Percent. But mainly the
progressive left is down on Sanders because he is "not pure," and they don't like Trump because he
hurts people's feelings and doesn't apologize.
This is astounding. Here we are faced with the corrupt media and the corrupt party establishments
determined to put in the Oval Office a tried and proven agent of the One Percent, and the progressive
left is beating up on the only two alternatives!
I doubt that Sanders or Trump would be able to achieve much for the American people except to
reduce the flow of official lies that the presstitutes turn into truths by constant repetition. The
Oligarchy is too strong. It was more than a half century ago that President Eisenhower warned us
of the threat to American democracy from the military-security complex. That complex is much stronger
today, and, in addition, we have Wall Street and the mega-banks that control the US Treasury and
Federal Reserve, the Israel Lobby that has the US Congress wrapped around its little finger, the
extractive industries (energy, mining, timber) that prevails over the environment and preservation,
and agribusiness that poisons our food, exterminates honey bees and butterflies and produces chemical
fertilizer runoff into waters that result in massive fish kills from algea. None of these powerful
interests will permit the welfare of the American people to get in the way of their agendas and profits.
Nevertheless, the election of Sanders or Trump is important, because it demonstrates that
American citizens are emerging from The Matrix and have no confidence in the two corrupt political
parties that betrayed them. The message would go out to the world as well that the American people
have no confidence in the Washington Establishment. These messages are very important and can only
have beneficial effects.
So why is the progressive left helping the One Percent keep the lid on the rest of us? Has
the progressive left sold out or is the progressive left putting its emotional needs above the general
welfare?
"... She was a hawk & to the Right of Obama during her entire tenure. ..."
"... Clinton is always going back and forth, tying herself tightly to Obama when she thinks it suits her, and then throwing him under the bus anytime she's called on her nonsense. ..."
"... We've seen Hillary's judgment when it comes to foreign policy. She is as experienced as they come, but every situation she has touched has come out the worse ..."
"... Bernie Sanders will listen to both sides and find the best peaceful option on the table. Under Hillary Clinton, the United States will become involved with at least one more Middle Eastern country, and I am personally terrified of how much she will antagonize Iran. ..."
"... When Ms. Clinton debates or gives a speech, she comes across as smug, haughty, condescending and contemptible. ..."
She was Secretary of State. If she was a true leader, she would have
resigned her post and spoken out against the policies.
Terry Underwood
It was Hillary and the American Ambassador to the UN that pushed
Obama into Libya.
Simon Magus · Oakland, California
She was only offered Sec State by Obama in a deal so that she would
support him and heal the rift in the party after a nasty nomination
process. What, you think she had loads of foreign policy experience
before that? She was a hawk & to the Right of Obama during her
entire tenure.
Simon Magus · Oakland, California
deceptive in what way? Clinton is always going back and forth,
tying herself tightly to Obama when she thinks it suits her, and then
throwing him under the bus anytime she's called on her nonsense.
Kingsley Oji
Bruce Hill Nah we know how government works. The problem is that she
conveniently and deftly passes on responsibility when it suits her.
Wasn't she in the television interview filled with elation that "we
came, we saw, he died!" Did she ever offer any intelligent recourse for
solving the problems in Libya without ousting Assad, publicly or
privately? No. This is a clever misdirection. Notice how when Bernie
calls her out on her Syria policy, she claims to have advised the
President to train and fund opposition. But why are we acting in Syria
anyway? Do you know? Why are we acting in Libya?? Do you know? Those are
the real issues which haven't been adressed.
Tom Planamento · Binghamton, New York
We've seen Hillary's judgment when it comes to foreign policy.
She is as experienced as they come, but every situation she has touched
has come out the worse. The Arab Spring under her tenure of SoS was
a once in a lifetime chance to reform moderate Islam, and under
Clinton's strong support, the United States managed to piss off nearly
every country by selling billions of dollars worth of bombs to both
sides, resulting in chaos over much of the Middle East and North Africa.
It's time for new ideas, and by that I do not mean Donald Trump.
Bernie Sanders will listen to both sides and find the best peaceful
option on the table. Under Hillary Clinton, the United States will
become involved with at least one more Middle Eastern country, and I am
personally terrified of how much she will antagonize Iran.
David Trott
When Ms. Clinton debates or gives a speech, she comes across as
smug, haughty, condescending and contemptible. The "B" word comes
to mind...on steroids. It's no wonder that she has high unfavorability
ratings. After 30 years of her shrillness and self-imposed scandals,
there's nothing that would make Ms. Clinton more likable. Nothing!
However, maybe a house arrest and electronic ankle bracelet would take
the edge off her arrogance.
The status on-going federal investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's use
of a personal email server has begun to bubble up again, less than 10 days before the critical
New York primary.
The issue removed the veneer of inevitability from Clinton's bid to be the 2016 Democratic
presidential nominee last summer and gave rise to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). Clinton's email
scandal had largely fallen off the public radar in recent months as conservative watchdog groups
fought to get more emails from Clinton and her top aides released. The Justice Department had
assigned more than 50 agents to the investigation to try to recover the server's data, even
though Clinton claimed the device has been "wiped clean."
Related: Facing Democratic Fury, Sanders Walks Back His Attack on Clinton
The topic was spiraling toward becoming an "Inside the Beltway" story before it came roaring back
Sunday when President Obama said his former top diplomat has displayed "carelessness" in
arranging the homebrew set-up, and vowed that Justice and FBI will not protect the Democratic
frontrunner.
"I can guarantee that," the president said in interview with Fox News Sunday, his first with the
show since entering the Oval Office in 2009. "I can guarantee that, not because I give Attorney
General Lynch a directive, that is institutionally how we have always operated. I do not talk to
the Attorney General about pending investigations. I do not talk to FBI directors about pending
investigations."
"I guarantee that there is no political influence in any investigation conducted by the Justice
Department, or the FBI, not just in this case, but in any case," Obama added. "Full stop.
Period."
The president's full-throated defense of neutrality is likely to backfire, though. Many
Republicans already believe that even if Clinton is found to have broken the law, Obama's Justice
Department would not prosecute her and that's why the GOP must win the White House this November.
Related: Here's the Big Risk Sanders and Clinton Are Taking as They Trade Insults
Several Republican contenders pledged to continue the investigation into Clinton's email server
and pursue charges against her.
"Absolutely, yes," Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) said last month during an interview with Fox News' "Hannity."
On Sunday, Obama repeated his belief that Clinton's personal email use "has not jeopardized
America's national security," even though they contained classified information.
"Now, what I've also said is that - and she has acknowledged - that there's a carelessness, in
terms of managing e-mails, that she has owned, and she recognizes," he added.
TheLastPlainsman
Guest
•
2 months ago
Actually, out here in Colorado we have an entire,
deserted, semi-modern prison that isn't in use.
(there is no particular reason to put them there other
than our folk in the northern part of the state have yet
to feel the Obama love economics)
bjbrtn
TheLastPlainsman
•
2 months ago
Actually, if the truth were known about much of the
0bama administrations conduct and corruption, we could
probably fill both. Would like to see all the "big"
ones go to Gitmo first though.
Wallmantx
Guest
•
2 months ago
We can give it back to Cuba after they have arrived. make
them stay there forever with no way of being repatriated.
But first take away all their cash. You don't want them to
live a life of luxury when they should be living a life of
misery.
VetMike
andreabeth7
•
2 months ago
No, real prison with Bubba and his/her friends. If they think
they will jut go to some camp then the crimes will continue.
We need to stop having special prisons for the nobility.
Ken Shaffin
Silence
Is Foo ✓
•
2 months ago
Yes but to remain on the subject of the report, the reader is
left to wonder who Sidney Blumenthal is most similar to as a
political hack with the ear of the ruler: is he a Machiavelli or
a Rasputin or the Alfred Rosenberg of the Clinton dynasty? Since
the article also notes Blumenthal's emphasis on favoring the
famous Clinton "economic philosophy, referred to as the "third
way," which called for business and government to join hands as
partners," being as described very much the eco-political
essence of socialist Fascism, and Blumenthal having no
allegiance to anyone but himself and his master, I'll go with
his similarity to Hitler's favorite self-loathing
Judeo-Christian turned neo-pagan and reliable adviser Rosenberg.
M Wayne
Ken
Shaffin
•
2 months ago
I actually wanted to put his corpse on display In NYC with a
sign on it saying this is what happens to terrorists that
attack the US. That would have been a much better use. But I
also wanted to put the twin towers back where they were, each
a foot taller; or maybe three towers in a form that resembled
the middle finger facing eastward. So maybe you shouldn't
listen to me.
On the subject at hand though, I think Obama
did a pretty thorough job spiking the football all on his
own. I lost count on the number of "I's" and "me's" in his
speech after they killed him. I guess that wasn't enough for
Blumenthal.
Matty Q
M
Wayne
•
2 months ago
The Twin Tower Middle Finger idea is the most brilliant
thing I have heard all year!! Maybe you should run for
Pres. LOL Seriously though, that was hilarious...and
awesome!!
M Wayne
Matty Q
•
2 months ago
Love to take credit for it but the idea wasn't mine. I
did want to put two towers back though, and taller,
just for defiance.
Matty Q
M Wayne
•
2 months ago
At least you're honest! Most people would've just
taken the credit. General Wayne would be proud! Ha!
Btw, I agree with building the Towers back, only
taller. That would've have made quite the statement.
Jeffrey D. Sachs @JeffDSachs It's incredible that a silly rant like this passes for commentary
at the New York Times
Notable quotes:
"... I like the fact that Krugman is showing his true colors: the Conscience of the Status Quo ..."
"... Conscience of a Neoliberal. ..."
"... The Paul K Smear Patrol: Krugman can be ferocious going after the Right, but he also has a thing for the Left, as I recall from his trade purism of the 90s. Right now, he's on an anti-Bernie, pro-Hillary jag and pulling no punches... ..."
"... He is too partisan to recognize that the Clinton machine-the Foundation, the campaign-are accommodative toward big pools of money. My speculation is that PK thinks the Left is a bunch of amateurs who have no business being anywhere near power, and that the citadels of expertise (which includes economists who are affiliated or will affiliate with Clinton) need to be defended against the barbarians. If it isn't that, something is causing this guy to lose his analytical balance." ..."
"... That was actually embarrassing for Barney because he has trouble dealing with counterargument and tends to just rant and denigrate whoever he is speaking "at." He had a similar episode about a week ago, also on Hayes, where he doesn't seem to have any ability to demonstrate grace or due respect - which I've often enjoyed when he is countering some crazy Republican, but I'm starting to recognize as a personality flaw. He's got an inflated opinion of himself. ..."
"... "A democratic polity does not elect a technocrat-in-chief, but politicians whose role is to define priorities that must later be translated into well-crafted policy details.... The problems of our polity do not arise because one faction or another is too stupid to do high quality science.... Being smart is great. You may be proud of your GRE scores, your PhD, your Nobel Prize even. And deservedly! But raw intellect is not scarce, and no faction holds anywhere near a monopoly. ..."
"... The thing is, Hillary Clinton is also not a policy wonk. Sanders led out of the gate last year with a 12-point policy agenda while Clinton was still struggling to articulate broad themes. ..."
"... Later, Clinton came out with a detailed financial plan, which is fine. That plan consists in various places of calls for "more regulation" of various functions and sectors. Does anybody think Hillary Clinton actually has a lot of specific ideas about what these regulations will actually look like after the wonks write them up? Of course she doesn't. And well she shouldn't! She's running for President, not the project manager of the policy engineering department. CEOs have to set the vision and mission, keep the team on track, and then make dozens of important decisions every day. They don't wallow in that kind of detail (until they have to go out in public to sell it.) ..."
"... Sanders is popular because he's an authentic dude. He hasn't changed his message for 30 years. People have come around to his view. He's not your normal politician. ..."
"... He's smart enough to know that the corporate media is out to get him and often says so to their faces. ..."
"... Yeah - he forgot that "air quotes" don't translate into print, so he fell for the Clinton campaign's carefully laid "bait." His comments were totally in context of the Clinton campaign's "disqualify" strategy and her slick "I'm taking it to the edge so you can't hang it on me" comments to Morning Joke. Hillary and her strategists are slick and disingenuous, Bernie is blunt and brusque. ..."
"... Sort of like the difference in their relationships to dangerous critters like Lloyd Blankfein. Bernie tells them to go to hell. Hillary takes their money and claims it means nothing that she has their support. ..."
"... Clinton sycophants are incredibly dedicated, no matter what is done or said by the Clintons. ..."
"... The idea that Krugman, an ivory tower careerists who spends most of his time trying to impress the High Church poobahs who run and advise the world's oppressive establishment power structures, should lecture a man whose entire career has been dedicated to defending the poor, weak and vulnerable on "ethical moorings" is flabbergasting. ..."
"... Krugman's politics haven't changed much since he first made his name 35 years ago, whether he is "liberal" or "centrist" is mostly a reflection of where the current center is. His Bernie blasts remind me of the potshots he used to take at John Kenneth Galbraith. ..."
"... Hillary Clinton the last of the angry old white entitled one percenter Rockfeller Republicans cloaked in feminism ready to lead the Neodemocratic party. ..."
"... "It is reported that ..." Exactly. And that means exactly what? The media is owned by people who have exactly zero interest in the American people being informed about who stealing all the bacon and how. ..."
"... It's truly sad to watch Paul Krugman (PK) turn into a political stooge for the wealthy liberal elite that currently runs the Democratic party. ..."
"... What better proof could there possibly be, that it's time to kick Hillary and her cronies to the curb. ..."
"... "Bernie is the only candidate that refuse to play identity politics (pitting minorities and whites against each other). Hillary, and surrogates try to label Bernie as a "defender of white privilege". When, in fact, Bernie is the only one that truly looks beyond race and privilege, with policies that include all Americans, regardless of race or position in society." -Rune Lagman ..."
"... The laziness of "all we need to do is vote for Bernie" is sad. We don't need to build a movement! Just one vote, and centuries of injustice are effortlessly overturned! Don't bother coming again, or paying attention to how resumes with black-sounding names are downplayed! You've done your part and it will all work out in the end! ..."
"... Hopefully we have the fortitude to stand up to the fear-mongering and siren-song of the Democratic establishment. A vote for Hillary won't change anything, but a vote for Bernie will definitely start the changes that are necessary. ..."
"... A vote for Bernie is a vote for a movement and IT IS the kind of movement that Martin Luther King had wanted all along. Doctor King did not want apologies or even reparations. Doctor King wanted fair and equal pay, decent educations, good jobs, and equality in all rights, privileges, and opportunities for his people. Martin Luther King was a black man decent enough for a white man to follow and I did. Bernie Sanders is a white man decent enough for a black man to follow. ..."
"... I just hate the way Hillary campaigns. She said Sanders should apologize for Sandy Hook? Why isn't he media all over her for that? Because they have double standards. She lies about Sanders record as if it's expected just as taking a lot of money from rich donors and corporations is expected. ..."
"... Here is Konczal on Bernie's "disastrous" interview at the NYDN. http://rooseveltinstitute.org/sanders-ending-tbtf/ As you can see, Konczal does not buy into Krugman's and the MSM overblown reactions. Sanders gave pretty straight forward and normal answers. For those who don't know, Konczal is a financial reform expert who Krugman respects and often cites. ..."
"... The same applies to Sanders not knowing the specific statute for prosecuting banks for their actions in the housing bubble. Knowingly passing off fraudulent mortgages in a mortgage backed security is fraud. Could the Justice Department prove this case against high level bank executives? Who knows, but they obviously didn't try. ..."
I guess Paul forgot about JPMorgan, Wells, Goldman, et al mainlining cruddy MBS into the global
economy. Unless he wouldn't locate that near the "heart" of the financial crisis--more like the
arteries. Weak sauce, Krugman.
Comments on Krugman's contribution to the Clinton Campaign closed as I was writing this, so I'll
post it here:
What we are now hearing from PK and the doddering Barney Frank (if his near-meltdown on Chris
Hayes, debating - or shouting at - Robert Reich is any indication), is that Too Big To Fail doesn't
exist. It's only about capital requirements. Capital requirements are critical, but it's crackpot
to dismiss the notion that players in the financial system that are clearly "too big to fail"
can't find ways to threaten the economic system in the future, in their quest for profits. If
Frank believes that his very modest, watered-down-by-lobbyists bill, dependent as much on the
integrity of regulators as the SEC et al for "teeth", erases the risk of "too big to fail" I've
got a bridge to sell Barney. Smart Guys like Krugman and Frank didn't see the meltdown coming.
They won't see the next one if these behemoths have their way. Glass Steagall isn't enough, but
it served the country well for decades and was destroyed by the Clinton administration, in tandem
with the vulture Phil Gramm. When Lloyd Blankfein is no longer comfortable supporting Hillary
Clinton I'll believe that she has cut ties to Wall Street. "Robert Rubin Democrats" aren't Democrats
IMHO - they are stealth Republicans and Bernie is the only candidate who we could trust to drive
these money-changers from the political "temple", as opposed to letting them influence the administration
as Clinton inevitably will.
Qualifications are based on criterion
Bernie's criterion
You are NOT a corporate liberal
Experience is not a valuable criterion
If you served the corporate whales
ilsm -> PPaine ...
experience gained from voting Bush
a blank check with poor kids bodies,
and then taking out Qaddafi for the French
ain't so good!
anyone who gets paid to blither to bankster
has thw rong experience
for a librul.
JohnH -> RGC...
Krugman just went over the edge...along with his reputation as an impartial political observer
and economists. The man has an agenda.
econospeak notes:
"The Paul K Smear Patrol: Krugman can be ferocious going after the Right, but he also
has a thing for the Left, as I recall from his trade purism of the 90s. Right now, he's on
an anti-Bernie, pro-Hillary jag and pulling no punches...
He reads an informative news article through a rather restrictive lens.
He is too partisan to recognize that the Clinton machine-the Foundation, the campaign-are
accommodative toward big pools of money. My speculation is that PK thinks the Left is a bunch
of amateurs who have no business being anywhere near power, and that the citadels of expertise
(which includes economists who are affiliated or will affiliate with Clinton) need to be defended
against the barbarians. If it isn't that, something is causing this guy to lose his analytical
balance."
"My speculation is that PK thinks the Left is a bunch of amateurs who have no business being
anywhere near power, and that the citadels of expertise (which includes economists who are
affiliated or will affiliate with Clinton) need to be defended against the barbarians."
I think that's pretty much spot on. Krugman believes that only policy wonks should run for
office. The possibility that providing visionary leadership and formulating detailed policy proposals
might be two different jobs seems not to have occurred to him.
I watched Frank (who I think is a good and smart guy), a Clinton supporter, debate Reich (who
I think is both, plus his heart is in the right place), a Sanders supporter, about the banks.
Same disconnect: Frank was going on about the details of Dodd-Frank, demanding that Reich provide
more detail about Bernie's proposals, and missing the essential point:
That was actually embarrassing for Barney because he has trouble dealing with counterargument
and tends to just rant and denigrate whoever he is speaking "at." He had a similar episode about
a week ago, also on Hayes, where he doesn't seem to have any ability to demonstrate grace or due
respect - which I've often enjoyed when he is countering some crazy Republican, but I'm starting
to recognize as a personality flaw. He's got an inflated opinion of himself.
Krugman seems like he has a tendency to "go there" as well. Reminiscent of when he called Obama
supporters "a cult" when the Prez took on Hillary. Did that numerous times, just like he can't
stop himself from using "Bernie Bros."
> Krugman believes that only policy wonks should run for office. The possibility that providing
visionary leadership and formulating detailed policy proposals might be two different jobs seems
not to have occurred to him.
Steve Randy Waldman had a good post on this subject a couple months back, Your Theory of Politics
is Wrong. An excerpt:
"A democratic polity does not elect a technocrat-in-chief, but politicians whose role
is to define priorities that must later be translated into well-crafted policy details....
The problems of our polity do not arise because one faction or another is too stupid to do
high quality science.... Being smart is great. You may be proud of your GRE scores, your PhD,
your Nobel Prize even. And deservedly! But raw intellect is not scarce, and no faction holds
anywhere near a monopoly.
In a democratic polity, wonks are the help. The role of the democratic process is to adjudicate
interests and values. Wonks get a vote just like everyone else, but expertise on technocratic
matters ought not translate to any deference on interests and values.
If your theory of democracy is that informed citizens ought to cast votes based on the best
social science, you have no theory of democracy at all."
The thing is, Hillary Clinton is also not a policy wonk. Sanders led out of the gate last
year with a 12-point policy agenda while Clinton was still struggling to articulate broad themes.
Later, Clinton came out with a detailed financial plan, which is fine. That plan consists
in various places of calls for "more regulation" of various functions and sectors. Does anybody
think Hillary Clinton actually has a lot of specific ideas about what these regulations will actually
look like after the wonks write them up? Of course she doesn't. And well she shouldn't! She's
running for President, not the project manager of the policy engineering department. CEOs have
to set the vision and mission, keep the team on track, and then make dozens of important decisions
every day. They don't wallow in that kind of detail (until they have to go out in public to sell
it.)
Clinton's strength is politics, network building and balancing the competing interests and
red lines of top elite stakeholders. The policy stuff comes from other people. Podesta, Brad DeLong
and others built her a whole new fancy policy kitchen over at that Center for Equitable Growth
for those purposes.
You can't reduce a campaign contest to a menu of policies. In an campaign pinch, Clinton can
always text Podesta and tell him to cook up some new policy on Subject X that sounds like Bernie
Sanders. But the world is constantly changing and new challenges are constantly arising, and the
values and general orientation of the leader are more important than what this week's menu looks
like. Clearly Sanders's default outlook is something like: "The plutocrats are always up to no
good. They are robbing, cheating and screwing us at every turn as a result of their bottomless
greed, and so we need to watch them like hawks and take them on politically." Clinton's outlook
seems to be that the elites are mainly good and sensible folks who have matters well in hand,
and getting things done consists mainly in maintaining a consensus among them.
On "Late Night with Seth Meyers," when the studio fills with smoke it's a signal - it's time
for "Ya Burnt," a roasting segment. On Thursday night, audiences were instead treated to "Ya Bernt."
Yes, Bernie Sanders was on "Late Night."
Taking over the segment, Sanders talked about his feelings over some of his most burning issues
- the one percent, big banks, and late-night hosts who make jokes about his hair.
"One percent, what do you need all that money for? If I didn't know any better, I'd think you
were trying to compensate for something," said Sanders. "How is it possible that some of you are
paying a lower tax rate than your secretaries? That makes less sense than the plot of Batman vs.
Superman. One percent, ya burnt."
But when Sanders sat down to interview, the jokes quickly paused and turned to more serious
topics as Meyers pointed out Sanders' remarks about Clinton earlier this week.
"You made a comment about Hillary being unqualified for the office of president," Meyers said.
"Is that something you regret saying?"
"It was said after she and her campaign said that I was unqualified," Sanders said.
Meyers cleared up the matter slightly, suggesting to Sanders that Clinton had never said he
was unqualified.
"I heard her fail to say you were qualified, but she didn't say 'unqualified,' " Meyers said.
...
Sanders is popular because he's an authentic dude. He hasn't changed his message for 30 years.
People have come around to his view. He's not your normal politician.
He's smart enough to know that the corporate media is out to get him and often says so
to their faces.
I think Hillary's suggestion that he apologize for the Sandy Hook shootings genuinely made
him angry. So he responded in kind.
If the corporate media was fair and objective they would have reported that Hillary was going
negative and dragging the primary into the gutter.
But of course the media likes a food fight and the Post fanned the flames. If Sanders didn't
fight back, they would have faulted him for that. No win.
Originally I supported Sanders's objective to run a positive campaign. Given how the Clinton
campaign has behaved, now I think Sanders should have gone negative - fairly - from the start.
There are legitimate questions about the Clinton Foundation, etc.
Krugman etc would have screamed bloody murder that he's helping the Republican but so what.
The Republicans are going to say all of that and worse anyway.
If it is going to be Hillary versus Trump or Cruz, it will be the ugliest campaign in history.
Yeah - he forgot that "air quotes" don't translate into print, so he fell for the Clinton
campaign's carefully laid "bait." His comments were totally in context of the Clinton campaign's
"disqualify" strategy and her slick "I'm taking it to the edge so you can't hang it on me" comments
to Morning Joke. Hillary and her strategists are slick and disingenuous, Bernie is blunt and brusque.
What else is new. Sort of like the difference in their relationships to dangerous critters
like Lloyd Blankfein. Bernie tells them to go to hell. Hillary takes their money and claims it
means nothing that she has their support.
Clinton sycophants are incredibly dedicated, no matter what is done or said by the Clintons.
An interesting political phenomena.
Go Bernie, go Bernie.
Dan Kervick :
The idea that Krugman, an ivory tower careerists who spends most of his time trying to impress
the High Church poobahs who run and advise the world's oppressive establishment power structures,
should lecture a man whose entire career has been dedicated to defending the poor, weak and vulnerable
on "ethical moorings" is flabbergasting.
Where were the ethical moorings of the economic establishment over the past 35 years as they
helped preside over the creation of the most unequal society on Earth? For shame.
JohnH -> Dan Kervick...
Yes, Krugman is loath to criticize trade deals, trickle down monetary policies, and many other
engines of the investor class' wealth and power...he is a liberal face of the power structure's
media machine, as evidenced by his position at the New York Times.
William :
Never thought this would happen, PK became a "Very Serious Person."
BigBozat -> William...
That should have been apparent for quite some time now. The completion of his metastasis should
have been obvious to even casual observers by the time he penned his 'Varieties of Voodoo' screed
attacking Friedman/Bernie with arguments from authority.
BigBozat -> Kerry...
"It seems that you could write similar critiques of Hillary but Paul always choses to make the
critique of Bernie. I am not sure why."
The answer to your question is embedded in your preceding sentence.
Krugtron's definition of 'Liberal' seems curiously circumscribed. Apparently, Progressives,
Social Democrats, Heterodox Economists - among others - are not part of the community.
Dan Kervick -> BigBozat...
I watched a video the other day where a younger Krugman in 1992 was defending basic, established
liberal policies against people like Herbert Stein from AEI. I think reflecting on that discussion
helps get some perspective on Krugman's current limits.
Krugman came of age in an era when economic policy and the elite consensus was turning in a
decisively more conservative, pro-market, anti-regulation, laissez faire direction. In such an
environment, liberals had their hands full just keeping the conservatives from completely dismantling
the social safety net. They also had to work overtime to defend basic fiscal policy responses
which had been considered uncontroversial common sense in the previous era.
The problem is, Krugman still thinks he lives in that world. He thinks the radical conservatives
are still winning, and that being a liberal now mainly consists in being a conservative defender
of existing liberal institutions. I think the Krugman mindset has afflicted a whole generation,
for whom, no matter how many opportunities they are presented with, respond by circling the wagons
and playing defense. They have been playing defense so long they don't realize how conservative
they have become.
But the radical conservatives actually aren't winning. The Republican Party is in total disarray.
2/3rds of the American public say they want "radical change":
Well observed. I think for many Democrats, it's always 2000. I think it's that "siege mentality"
that is causing pundits like Krugman to be extra-critical of Sanders, as if Bernie might hand
the election over to the GOP.
Both Dean Baker and Mike Konczal have written good defenses of Sanders' NYDN statements about
the banks. Perhaps Krugman might look at them before trying to make Sanders look foolish. Very
disappointing run of columns from Krugman.
shows Clinton with 1298
Sanders with 1079, through April 5
'State totals are pledged delegates based on election results.
The Times estimated Washington State's 67 district-level
delegates by using county vote totals and estimating each
district's share based on the county's voting-age population.'
Primaries & caucuses from April 9 through June 14.
Fred C. Dobbs -> Fred C. Dobbs...
The NYT data that appears in the Delegate Counter appear to match more closely with the data that
appears in The Green Papers than it does with the Delegate Calculator.
am -> Fred C. Dobbs...
Agreed. The counter reporting the lead of 219 seems more accurate also. Sanders won heavily in
Washington and the counter more accurately reflects this.
Peter :
Krugman leaves out a lot of context in his column. Perhaps he believes the ends justify the means
during an election.
What happened is that some polls have Sanders leading Clinton nationally. (will this kind of
thing matter to the superdelegates?)
From Chris G in todays links comments:
"Sanders had the support of 47 percent of Democratic or Democratic-leaning voters while Clinton
had 46 percent-a narrow gap that fell within the poll's 2.5 percent margin of error. The national
survey was conducted in the days before the Vermont senator handily defeated the former secretary
of state in the Wisconsin primary, and it tracks other polls in the last week that found Sanders
erasing Clinton's edge across the country. In a poll that PRRI conducted in January, Clinton had
a 20-point lead."
So the Clinton campaign decided to unleash the flying monkeys. The campaign and their surrogates
in the media went on the attacks.
Clinton said Sanders should apologize for Sandy Hook. The media played up the NY Dailey News
interview which they said showed Sanders to be unprepared or unqualified. The Washington Post
ran a headline which said Clinton said Sanders was unqualified. Maddow and others played up the
angle that Clinton was raising money for the DNC while Sanders was not. Clinton asked if Sanders
was a real Democratic. etc.
This is not surprising for anyone who has followed a political campaign.
And when Sanders predictably hit back, the Clinton campaign and the media complained he's being
negative and dragging the primary into the gutter.
Sanders supporters will no longer consider Krugman fair and objective, if they ever did.
He's fine when he sticks to Keynes. I'm guessing he'll walk back his comfort with Dodd Frank as
"not too hot, not too cold, but just right" once he's no longer freaking out about Hillary's remarkably
flawed candidacy (again.)
Krugman's politics haven't changed much since he first made his name 35 years ago, whether
he is "liberal" or "centrist" is mostly a reflection of where the current center is. His Bernie
blasts remind me of the potshots he used to take at John Kenneth Galbraith.
likbez -> MIB...
they're not running around imposing some socialist purity test
Hillary is running around imposing a neocon purity test on the US foreign policy agenda.
rune lagman -> DeDude...
That's absolutely correct. Bernie on top of the Democratic ticket has good chance of capturing
congress, something hillary can't.
Besides Hillary doesn't believe in $15 minimum wage, and won't fight for it. Bernie will.
likbez -> MIB...
Bernie's remark that Hillary is unqualified to be president is immature and sexist.
If we are talking about foreign policy, she is definitely unqualified. Her tenure at State
Department was a disaster. No diplomatic skills, whatsoever. She was trying to imitate Madeleine
Albright not noticing that the times changed.
Her appointment of Dick Cheney close associate Victoria Nuland first as State Department Spokesperson
and then Assistant Secretary of State was an act of betrayal of everything Democratic Party should
stand for. It was actually return to Bush II/Cheney (or should be Cheney/Bush II) foreign policy.
In case she is elected, she will be a real threat to world peace. It is just unclear what country
she will decide to invade next. But she will definitely invade.
dd :
Hillary Clinton the last of the angry old white entitled one percenter Rockfeller Republicans
cloaked in feminism ready to lead the Neodemocratic party.
dd -> MIB...
Hillary is no FDR although a comparison to JFK's father's wall street shenanigans is probably
apt. I particularly admire the tax-free donations to a tax-free entity with of course wall street
as a major donor. I'm sure under her leadership we will begin to explore even more innovative
tax avoidance to help the needy.
am :
It is reported that sanders is walking back the statement that Clinton is unqualified to be president.
"It is reported that ..." Exactly. And that means exactly what? The media is owned by people
who have exactly zero interest in the American people being informed about who stealing all the
bacon and how.
Peter -> am...
You could easily Google it.
Again I don't understand why Hillary doesn't have to walk it back. She started it. What she
said differed very little from Sanders said.
It's truly sad to watch Paul Krugman (PK) turn into a political stooge for the wealthy liberal
elite that currently runs the Democratic party.
What better proof could there possibly be, that it's time to kick Hillary and her cronies
to the curb.
If PK were the numbers guy, that he claims, he'd be all in for Bernie. With Bernie as the Democratic
nominee, it's a very strong possibility that the Democrats retake, not only the presidency and
the senate, but also the house. Hillary might win the presidency, but her upside (beyond the presidency)
is limited.
Bernie has also proven that medicare-for-all is a politically possible, all we need to do (if
we want medicare-for-all) is vote for Bernie.
Likewise for tuition-free college, $15 minimum wage, and a job-market that would make Bill
Clinton's late 90's look puny; even Hillary's economists agree on the over-heated job-market (if
Bernie implemented all his proposals). All we need to do, is, ignore the barrage from the establishment,
and vote for Bernie. It's that simple folks.
Likewise for a 21st century green economy. With Bernie in the white house and friendly house
and senate, we can start building the 21st-century green economy. All we need to do is vote for
Bernie.
A vote for Hillary is a vote for status quo, nothing will really change. The Democratic establishment
will still blame the republican majority in the house for the lack of progress.
Bernie is the only candidate that refuse to play identity politics (pitting minorities and
whites against each other). Hillary, and surrogates try to label Bernie as a "defender of white
privilege". When, in fact, Bernie is the only one that truly looks beyond race and privilege,
with policies that include all Americans, regardless of race or position in society.
If we want a post-racial society, all we need to do is vote for Bernie. The question is, do
we dare to stand up for ourselves against a powerful establishment?
William -> Rune Lagman...
"Bernie is the only candidate that refuse to play identity politics (pitting minorities and
whites against each other). Hillary, and surrogates try to label Bernie as a "defender of white
privilege". When, in fact, Bernie is the only one that truly looks beyond race and privilege,
with policies that include all Americans, regardless of race or position in society." -Rune Lagman
[Bernie is and remains the only candidate to firmly, and unequivocally state "Black Lives Matter"]
jh -> Rune Lagman...
The laziness of "all we need to do is vote for Bernie" is sad. We don't need to build a movement!
Just one vote, and centuries of injustice are effortlessly overturned! Don't bother coming again,
or paying attention to how resumes with black-sounding names are downplayed! You've done your
part and it will all work out in the end!
It won't work out like that, and I dearly hope that nobody is thinking that way.
Rune Lagman -> jh...
This is the kind of defeatism (and lies), that the Democratic establishment is using to preserve
the status quo.
Hopefully we have the fortitude to stand up to the fear-mongering and siren-song of the
Democratic establishment. A vote for Hillary won't change anything, but a vote for Bernie will
definitely start the changes that are necessary.
This is the reason Bernie talks about a political revolution. A vote for Bernie is just the
beginning.
Rune Lagman -> sherparick...
Excellent example of the identity-politics that pit Americans against each other. In this case
women vs men. As a matter of fact Bernie in the white house is better for women than Hillary.
Bernie is much stronger, than Hillary, among independents. Bernie's strength among independents
will make the republican gerrymandering backfire. It only takes a few %-points swing among lower
educated whites. In addition, Bernie brings a whole new cadre of voters, that normally would stay
home, to the polls.
Another perfect example of establishment fear-mongering and misinformation.
jh -> Rune Lagman...
Except you didn't say that it's "just the beginning." You said it's "all we need to do."
The frustration among "establishment" people is that you are promoting the idea that it is
so easy. And you do, until called on it, at which point you pivot.
Rune Lagman -> jh...
Because it is "easy".
As long as we "see through" the fear-mongering and siren-song of the establishment, all we
need to do is show up at the polls; again and again and again ...
RC AKA Darryl, Ron -> jh...
A vote for Bernie is a vote for a movement and IT IS the kind of movement that Martin Luther
King had wanted all along. Doctor King did not want apologies or even reparations. Doctor King
wanted fair and equal pay, decent educations, good jobs, and equality in all rights, privileges,
and opportunities for his people. Martin Luther King was a black man decent enough for a white
man to follow and I did. Bernie Sanders is a white man decent enough for a black man to follow.
I won't try for fake evenhandedness here: most of the venom I see is coming from supporters
of Mr. Obama, who want their hero or nobody. I'm not the first to point out that the Obama campaign
seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality....
Compared with the Times editorial page. People don't seem to know this, but they, not me, were
the first to worry about an Obama cult of personality. * And today's editorial ** is quite something.
Mr. Krugman, a consistent critic of Barack Obama, did not produce a shred of evidence for his
categorical statement that the "venom" being displayed in the Democratic campaign comes from Obama
supporters, "who want their hero or nobody." And it seems to perpetuate the same bizarre bitterness
that he derides in his column.
Even worse is his assertion that "the Obama campaign seems dangerously close to becoming a
cult of personality." I am surprised and saddened that a thoughtful public intellectual like Mr.
Krugman would write such a careless and unfair statement at a moment of critical potential in
national politics.
Barack Obama is changing the way we think about race in America. His inclusive message is so
refreshing that, in addition to strong backing from blacks, he is drawing unprecedented nationwide
support from white voters. It is so upsetting that this remarkable and historic feat is belittled
as a "cult of personality."
William Julius Wilson
Cambridge, Mass., Feb. 11, 2008
The writer is a professor of sociology and social policy at Harvard University.
Excellent link. The letters to the editor are very worthwhile reading; they provide an eerie echo
of the discussion we're having today.
RC AKA Darryl, Ron -> sherparick...
"if you dissent from the Bernie movement you... can only do so if you are a tool of the 1%"
[Perhaps you are right.
I see both sides. The liberal establishment is safe and there are no surprises once you get
used to being perpetually disappointed. I will be 67 years old in a couple weeks. That is a long
time to be perpetually disappointed. I only have so many more years left to live. Viet Nam taught
me to get over my fears and do what needed to be done. I lack both the time and the fear to follow
the liberal establishment as long as there is a progressive alternative available.]
Peter -> sherparick...
I remember 2008 very well and Krugman was blowing things out of proportion about Obama's supporters
just as he is doing now about Sanders supporters.
"Ironically, many of the people blasting him then for criticizing Obama in hte 2008 primary
season in turn started blasting Obama in the summer of 2009 as the Affordable Care Act sausage
was being made and PK was then defending Obama"
Simply not true. The people on the left who hated the ACA didn't support Obama for president.
The said he was too centrist.
Peter -> Rumpole...
I just hate the way Hillary campaigns. She said Sanders should apologize for Sandy Hook? Why
isn't he media all over her for that? Because they have double standards. She lies about Sanders
record as if it's expected just as taking a lot of money from rich donors and corporations is
expected.
I can understand why she might be peeved at constant accusations of corruption because of her
campaign finances, because why is she being singled out, she must be wondering. Everyone does
it. But that's part of Sanders's point, so he's not really being that personal about her.
Peter -> Peter...
And she and her supporters have double standards. Her policy proposals are just as vague and broad-stroked
as Sanders's proposal and yet she has the gall to accuse Sanders of not doing his homework. He's
been thinking about this stuff for decades.
I wonder what Paul has to say about Hillary's racist co-campaigner and husband?
There's a lot of nasty stuff in this campaign, and everyone knows where it's coming from. A
few, like Paul, are playing defense, but they are not fooling anyone. The Clintons are very poor
losers, and at times like these, this secret becomes impossible to keep inside the Washington
beltway.
Clinton questions whether Sanders is qualified to be president
By Juliet Eilperin and Anne Gearan
11:14 AM - 8 Apr 2016
eudaimonia :
Here is Konczal on Bernie's "disastrous" interview at the NYDN.
http://rooseveltinstitute.org/sanders-ending-tbtf/
As you can see, Konczal does not buy into Krugman's and the MSM overblown reactions. Sanders
gave pretty straight forward and normal answers. For those who don't know, Konczal is a financial reform expert who Krugman respects and often
cites.
Reporters Who Haven't Noticed That Paul Ryan Has Called for Eliminating Most of Federal Government
Go Nuts Over Bernie Sanders' Lack of Specifics
Published: 05 April 2016
The Washington press corps has gone into one of its great feeding frenzies over Bernie Sanders'
interview with New York Daily News. Sanders avoided specific answers to many of the questions
posed, which the D.C. gang are convinced shows a lack of the knowledge necessary to be president.
Among the frenzied were the Washington Post's Chris Cillizza, The Atlantic's David Graham,
and Vanity Fair's Tina Nguyen, and CNN's Dylan Byers telling about it all. Having read the transcript
of the interview I would say that I certainly would have liked to see more specificity in Sanders'
answers, but I'm an economist. And some of the complaints are just silly.
When asked how he would break up the big banks Sanders said he would leave that up to the banks.
That's exactly the right answer. The government doesn't know the most efficient way to break up
JP Morgan, JP Morgan does. If the point is to downsize the banks, the way to do it is to give
them a size cap and let them figure out the best way to reconfigure themselves to get under it.
The same applies to Sanders not knowing the specific statute for prosecuting banks for their
actions in the housing bubble. Knowingly passing off fraudulent mortgages in a mortgage backed
security is fraud. Could the Justice Department prove this case against high level bank executives?
Who knows, but they obviously didn't try.
And the fact that Sanders didn't know the specific statute, who cares? How many people know
the specific statute for someone who puts a bullet in someone's head? That's murder, and if a
candidate for office doesn't know the exact title and specific's of her state murder statute,
it hardly seems like a big issue.
There is a very interesting contrast in media coverage of House Speaker Paul Ryan. In Washington
policy circles Ryan is treated as a serious budget wonk. How many reporters have written about
the fact this serious budget wonk has repeatedly proposed eliminating most of the federal government.
This was not an offhand gaffe that Ryan made when caught in a bad moment, this was in his budgets
that he pushed through as chair of the House Budget Committee.
This fact can be found in the Congressional Budget Office's (CBO) analysis of Ryan's budget
(page 16, Table 2). The analysis shows Ryan's budget shrinking everything other than Social Security
and Medicare and other health care programs to 3.5 percent of GDP by 2050. This is roughly the
current size of the military budget, which Ryan has indicated he wants to increase. That leaves
zero for everything else.
Included in everything else is the Justice Department, the National Park System, the State
Department, the Department of Education, the Food and Drug Administration, Food Stamps, the National
Institutes of Health, and just about everything else that the government does. Just to be clear,
CBO did this analysis under Ryan's supervision. He never indicated any displeasure with its assessment.
In fact he boasted about the fact that CBO showed his budget paying off the national debt.
So there you have it. The D.C. press corps that goes nuts because Bernie Sanders doesn't know
the name of the statute under which he would prosecute bank fraud thinks a guy who calls for eliminating
most of the federal government is a great budget wonk.
Let's face it: in times of war, the Constitution tends to take a beating. With the safety or survival
of the nation said to be at risk, the basic law of the land-otherwise considered sacrosanct-becomes
nonbinding, subject to being waived at the whim of government authorities who are impatient, scared,
panicky, or just plain pissed off.
The examples are legion. During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln
arbitrarily suspended the writ of habeas corpus and ignored court orders that took issue with his
authority to do so. After U.S. entry into World War I, the administration of Woodrow Wilson mounted
a comprehensive effort to crush dissent, shutting down anti-war publications in complete disregard
of the First Amendment. Amid the hysteria triggered by Pearl Harbor, Franklin Roosevelt issued an
executive order consigning to concentration camps more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans, many of them
native-born citizens. Asked in 1944 to review this gross violation of due process, the Supreme Court
endorsed the government's action by a 6-3 vote.
More often than not, the passing of the emergency induces second thoughts and even remorse. The
further into the past a particular war recedes, the more dubious the wartime arguments for violating
the Constitution appear. Americans thereby take comfort in the "lessons learned" that will presumably
prohibit any future recurrence of such folly.
Even so, the onset of the next war finds the Constitution once more being ill-treated. We don't
repeat past transgressions, of course. Instead, we devise new ones. So it has been during the ongoing
post-9/11 period of protracted war.
During the presidency of George W. Bush, the United States embraced torture as an instrument of
policy in clear violation of the Eighth Amendment prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment. Bush's
successor, Barack Obama, ordered the extrajudicial killing of an American citizen, a death by drone
that was visibly in disregard of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. Both administrations-Bush's
with gusto, Obama's with evident regret-imprisoned individuals for years on end without charge and
without anything remotely approximating the "speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury" guaranteed
by the Sixth Amendment. Should the present state of hostilities ever end, we can no doubt expect
Guantánamo to become yet another source of "lessons learned" for future generations of rueful Americans.
♦♦♦
Yet one particular check-and-balance constitutional proviso now appears exempt from this recurring
phenomenon of disregard followed by professions of dismay, embarrassment, and "never again-ism" once
the military emergency passes. I mean, of course, Article I, section 8 of the Constitution, which
assigns to Congress the authority "to declare war" and still stands as testimony to the genius of
those who drafted it. There can be no question that the responsibility for deciding when and whether
the United States should fight resides with the legislative branch, not the executive, and that this
was manifestly the intent of the Framers.
On parchment at least, the division of labor appears straightforward. The president's designation
as commander-in-chief of the armed forces in no way implies a blanket authorization to employ those
forces however he sees fit or anything faintly like it. Quite the contrary: legitimizing presidential
command requires explicit congressional sanction.
Actual practice has evolved into something altogether different. The portion of Article I, Section
8, cited above has become a dead letter, about as operative as blue laws still on the books in some
American cities and towns that purport to regulate Sabbath day activities. Superseding the written
text is an unwritten counterpart that goes something like this:
with legislators largely consigned
to the status of observers, presidents pretty much wage war whenever, wherever, and however they
see fit.
Whether the result qualifies as usurpation or forfeiture is one of those chicken-and-egg
questions that's interesting but practically speaking beside the point.
This is by no means a recent development. It has a history. In the summer of 1950, when President
Harry Truman decided that a U.N. Security Council resolution provided sufficient warrant for him
to order U.S. forces to fight in Korea, congressional war powers took a hit from which they would
never recover.
Congress soon thereafter bought into the notion, fashionable during the Cold War, that formal
declarations of hostilities had become passé. Waging the "long twilight struggle" ostensibly required
deference to the commander-in-chief on all matters related to national security. To sustain the pretense
that it still retained some relevance, Congress took to issuing what were essentially permission
slips, granting presidents maximum freedom of action to do whatever they might decide needed to be
done in response to the latest perceived crisis.
The Tonkin Gulf Resolution of 1964 offers a notable example. With near unanimity, legislators
urged President Lyndon Johnson "to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against
the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression" across the length and breadth
of Southeast Asia. Through the magic of presidential interpretation, a mandate to prevent aggression
provided legal cover for an astonishingly brutal and aggressive war in Vietnam, as well as Cambodia
and Laos. Under the guise of repelling attacks on U.S. forces, Johnson and his successor, Richard
Nixon, thrust millions of American troops into a war they could not win, even if more than 58,000
died trying.
To leap almost four decades ahead, think of the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF)
that was passed by Congress in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 as the grandchild of the Tonkin Gulf
Resolution. This document required (directed, called upon, requested, invited, urged) President George
W. Bush "to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons
he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September
11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international
terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations, or persons." In plain language:
here's a blank check; feel free to fill it in any way you like.
♦♦♦
As a practical matter, one specific individual-Osama bin Laden-had hatched the 9/11 plot. A single
organization-al-Qaeda-had conspired to pull it off. And just one nation-backward, Taliban-controlled
Afghanistan-had provided assistance, offering sanctuary to bin Laden and his henchmen. Yet nearly
15 years later, the AUMF remains operative and has become the basis for military actions against
innumerable individuals, organizations, and nations with no involvement whatsoever in the murderous
events of September 11, 2001.
Consider the following less than comprehensive list of four developments, all of which occurred
just within the last month and a half:
In Yemen, a U.S. airstrike killed at least 50 individuals, said to be members of an Islamist
organization that did not exist on 9/11.
In Somalia, another U.S. airstrike killed a reported 150 militants, reputedly members of al-Shabab,
a very nasty outfit, even if one with no real agenda beyond Somalia itself.
In Syria, pursuant to the campaign of assassination that is the latest spin-off of the Iraq
War, U.S. special operations forces bumped off the reputed "finance minister" of the Islamic State,
another terror group that didn't even exist in September 2001.
In Libya, according to press reports, the Pentagon is again gearing up for "decisive military
action"-that is, a new round of air strikes and special operations attacks to quell the disorder
resulting from the U.S.-orchestrated air campaign that in 2011 destabilized that country. An airstrike
conducted in late February gave a hint of what is to come: it killed approximately 50 Islamic
State militants (and possibly two Serbian diplomatic captives).
Yemen, Somalia, Syria, and Libya share at least this in common: none of them, nor any of the groups
targeted, had a hand in the 9/11 attacks.
Imagine if, within a matter of weeks, China were to launch raids into Vietnam, Thailand, and Taiwan,
with punitive action against the Philippines in the offing. Or if Russia, having given a swift kick
to Ukraine, Georgia, and Azerbaijan, leaked its plans to teach Poland a lesson for mismanaging its
internal affairs. Were Chinese President Xi Jinping or Russian President Vladimir Putin to order
such actions, the halls of Congress would ring with fierce denunciations. Members of both houses
would jostle for places in front of the TV cameras to condemn the perpetrators for recklessly violating
international law and undermining the prospects for world peace. Having no jurisdiction over the
actions of other sovereign states, senators and representatives would break down the doors to seize
the opportunity to get in their two cents worth. No one would be able to stop them. Who does Xi think
he is! How dare Putin!
Yet when an American president undertakes analogous actions over which the legislative branch
does
have jurisdiction, members of Congress either yawn or avert their eyes.
In this regard, Republicans are especially egregious offenders. On matters where President Obama
is clearly acting in accordance with the Constitution-for example, in nominating someone to fill
a vacancy on the Supreme Court-they spare no effort to thwart him, concocting bizarre arguments nowhere
found in the Constitution to justify their obstructionism. Yet when this same president cites the
2001 AUMF as the basis for initiating hostilities hither and yon, something that is on the face of
it not legal but ludicrous, they passively assent.
Indeed, when Obama in 2015 went so far as to ask Congress to pass a new AUMF addressing the specific
threat posed by the Islamic State-that is, essentially rubberstamping the war he had already launched
on his own in Syria and Iraq-the Republican leadership took no action. Looking forward to the day
when Obama departs office, Senator Mitch McConnell with his trademark hypocrisy worried aloud that
a new AUMF might constrain his successor. The next president will "have to clean up this mess, created
by all of this passivity over the last eight years," the majority leader remarked. In that regard,
"an authorization to use military force that ties the president's hands behind his back is not something
I would want to do." The proper role of Congress was to get out of the way and give this commander-in-chief
carte blanche
so that the next one would enjoy comparably unlimited prerogatives.
Collaborating with a president they roundly despise-implicitly concurring in Obama's questionable
claim that "existing statutes [already] provide me with the authority I need" to make war on ISIS-the
GOP-controlled Congress thereby transformed the post-9/11 AUMF into what has now become, in effect,
a writ of permanent and limitless armed conflict. In Iraq and Syria, for instance, what began as
a limited but open-ended campaign of air strikes authorized by President Obama in August 2014 has
expanded to include an ever-larger contingent of U.S. trainers and advisers for the Iraqi military,
special operations forces conducting raids in both Iraq and Syria, the first new all-U.S. forward
fire base in Iraq, and at least 5,000 U.S. military personnel now on the ground, a number that continues
to grow incrementally.
Remember Barack Obama campaigning back in 2008 and solemnly pledging to end the Iraq War? What
he neglected to mention at the time was that he was retaining the prerogative to plunge the country
into another Iraq War on his own ticket. So has he now done, with members of Congress passively assenting
and the country essentially a prisoner of war.
By now, through its inaction, the legislative branch has, in fact, surrendered the final remnant
of authority it retained on matters relating to whether, when, against whom, and for what purpose
the United States should go to war. Nothing now remains but to pay the bills, which Congress routinely
does, citing a solemn obligation to "support the troops." In this way does the performance of lesser
duties provide an excuse for shirking far greater ones.
In military circles, there is a term to describe this type of behavior. It's called cowardice.
"... It's truly sad to watch Paul Krugman (PK) turn into a political stooge for the wealthy liberal elite that currently runs the Democratic party. What better proof could there possibly be, that it's time to kick Hillary and her cronies to the curb. ..."
"... A vote for Hillary is a vote for status quo, nothing will really change. The Democratic establishment will still blame the republican majority in the house for the lack of progress. ..."
"... Bernie is the only candidate that refuse to play identity politics (pitting minorities and whites against each other). Hillary, and surrogates try to label Bernie as a "defender of white privilege". When, in fact, Bernie is the only one that truly looks beyond race and privilege, with policies that include all Americans, regardless of race or position in society. ..."
It's truly sad to watch Paul Krugman (PK) turn into a political stooge for the wealthy liberal
elite that currently runs the Democratic party. What better proof could there possibly be, that it's time to kick Hillary and her cronies to
the curb.
If PK were the numbers guy, that he claims, he'd be all in for Bernie. With Bernie as the Democratic
nominee, it's a very strong possibility that the Democrats retake, not only the presidency and
the senate, but also the house. Hillary might win the presidency, but her upside (beyond the presidency)
is limited.
Bernie has also proven that medicare-for-all is a politically possible, all we need to do (if
we want medicare-for-all) is vote for Bernie.
Likewise for tuition-free college, $15 minimum wage, and a job-market that would make Bill
Clinton's late 90's look puny; even Hillary's economists agree on the over-heated job-market (if
Bernie implemented all his proposals). All we need to do, is, ignore the barrage from the establishment,
and vote for Bernie. It's that simple folks.
Likewise for a 21st century green economy. With Bernie in the white house and friendly house
and senate, we can start building the 21st-century green economy. All we need to do is vote for
Bernie.
A vote for Hillary is a vote for status quo, nothing will really change. The Democratic establishment
will still blame the republican majority in the house for the lack of progress.
Bernie is the only candidate that refuse to play identity politics (pitting minorities and
whites against each other). Hillary, and surrogates try to label Bernie as a "defender of white
privilege". When, in fact, Bernie is the only one that truly looks beyond race and privilege,
with policies that include all Americans, regardless of race or position in society.
If we want a post-racial society, all we need to do is vote for Bernie. The question is, do
we dare to stand up for ourselves against a powerful establishment?
"... If we are talking about foreign policy, she is definitely unqualified. Her tenure at State
Department was a disaster. No diplomatic skills, whatsoever. She was trying to imitate Madeleine Albright
not noticing that times changed. ..."
"... In case she is elected, she will be a real threat to world peace. It is just unclear what country
she will decide to invade next. But she will definitely invade. ..."
"... Hillary is running around imposing a neocon purity test on the US foreign policy agenda. ..."
"... A vote for Hillary is a vote for mediocrity; especially in the mid-terms. ..."
"... Its a long campaign. They are not suppose to be friends. Stuff gets said, gets misreported
..."
"... Hillary went negative and dragged the primary into the gutter. She said Sanders should apologize
for Sandy Hook. I don't really blame Sanders for getting angry. ..."
Bernie's remark that Hillary is unqualified to be president is immature and sexist.
If we are talking about foreign policy, she is definitely unqualified. Her tenure at State
Department was a disaster. No diplomatic skills, whatsoever. She was trying to imitate Madeleine
Albright not noticing that times changed.
Her appointment of Dick Cheney close associate Victoria Nuland first as State Department Spokesperson
and then Assistant Secretary of State was an act of betrayal of everything Democratic Party should
stand for. It was actually return to Bush II/Cheney (or should it be Cheney/Bush II) foreign policy.
In case she is elected, she will be a real threat to world peace. It is just unclear what
country she will decide to invade next. But she will definitely invade.
likbez said in reply to MIB...
they're not running around imposing some socialist purity test
Hillary is running around imposing a neocon purity test on the US foreign policy agenda.
Rune Lagman said in reply to MIB...
Without Bernie's revolution the mid-terms is just going to be even more dismal. The Democratic
establishment fail in the mid-terms because they don't run on a national program. They believe
it's about the competency of the individual candidate.
Elections should be about issues that voters care about; the Democratic establishment still
don't get that concept.
A vote for Hillary is a vote for mediocrity; especially in the mid-terms.
dd said in reply to MIB...
Hillary is no FDR although a comparison to JFK's father's wall street shenanigans is probably
apt. I particularly admire the tax-free donations to a tax-free entity with of course wall street
as a major donor. I'm sure under her leadership we will begin to explore even more innovative
tax avoidance to help the needy.
sherparick said in reply to jh...
Its a long campaign. They are not suppose to be friends. Stuff gets said, gets misreported
(in this case a WaPo headline that said something that Clinton did not say. The WaPo by the way
has been far more vicious about Bernie then Clinton and her surrogates on her worse day.)
Sanders is a remarkable politician and always has been. I am not in the end voting for him,
I still admire his campaign as one of the great achievements of the American Left in my lifetime.
Actually, Bernie and Jeff Weaver did Clinton a favor by taking the troll bait. She is at her
best counter-punching and fighting from the underdog position. You can say a lot of things about
Hillary, (I worry about her judgement and group think tendencies), but she is tough and courageous
and seems to actually enjoy a good knock down drag out political fight.
Peter said in reply to sherparick...
Hillary went negative and dragged the primary into the gutter. She said Sanders should
apologize for Sandy Hook. I don't really blame Sanders for getting angry.
Obama was much better at staying focused and on message. But then he made some policy mistakes
as President which I don't believe Sanders would have done.
"... Actually, he upgraded his army after Georgia launched a surprise blitzkrieg operation on S. Ossetia, killing UN-mandated Russian peacekeepers and a few hundred sleeping Ossets, with or without a wink and a nod from the US. Verdict's still out on that last one. You'll have to wait for Karl Rove's posthumous memoirs for that insight. ..."
"... Another silly "what if" article. A conflict between Nato and Russia will very quickly go nuclear. Nobody wins. Taking the three tiny Baltic countries into Nato was an incredibly stupid move. The purpose was purely to provoke Russia. They can't be defended without going nuclear. They will be lost forever. Nato gains nothing except the claim of being the victim. ..."
"... The NATO-bloc spends about a trillion dollars each year on the military -- as much as is spent by all other countries in the world combined, and an order of magnitude more than what Russia spends. ..."
"... If NATO is defending "Freedom", as we're told, then why does it require such a titanic amount of force and money? If U.S.-style "Freedom" is such a good thing, if this Exceptional "Freedom" is something that every sane person wants, then why does it take so much force to impose this "Freedom" on people ? ..."
"... NATO is selling death and destruction, repackaged as "Freedom and Democracy". Ask what is inside the pretty package! -- then you will understand why this "Freedom" is such a hard sell. ..."
"... The Baltic leaders are just milking NATO, with their constant 'threat alerts'. And NATO milks them right back. It's a symbiotic milk maid festival. ..."
Just typical propaganda to justify endless billions for a nonexistent threat. ,you have to be
a brainwashed neocon idiot or have stock in defense corporations or likely both to believe Russia
has any interest in invading anyone. How would we feel if Russia moved missiles and troops to
our borders?
You should be use to it by now since all of your former allies have either joined NATO or want
to join NATO as protection against Russia.
You see - we actually don't have to do anything to convince nations to work with us - we just
let Russia act the way it normally acts and the rest falls into place.
I'm fond of saying that Putin is our best man in Russia. We couldn't ask for a better ally
in helping us dismantle Russia.
Actually, he upgraded his army after Georgia launched a surprise blitzkrieg operation on S. Ossetia,
killing UN-mandated Russian peacekeepers and a few hundred sleeping Ossets, with or without a
wink and a nod from the US. Verdict's still out on that last one. You'll have to wait for Karl
Rove's posthumous memoirs for that insight.
You are right and Georgia was armed and trained by US and instigated by US to attack Russia and
what happened it took Russia 5 days to defeat the well armed US backed Georgians and this is an
indicator how the US will fare against a war with Russia - FULL RETREAT
Brian you really don't know what you are talking about. I doubt you ever have left your neighborhood
let alone the state. You talk down about Russia and how great the American military is. But then
again like all talk it is just talk. In a real war Russia has many more nukes then we do. They
kept their nuclear program up while ours has fallen. Should a real war happen all you will see
Brian is flashes of of light everywhere and that will be the end. GET IT WAKE UP !!!
Without firing a shot? Apparently, you missed the right sector snipers in the Hotel Ukraina, the
Azov battalion civilian massacres in Mariupol and the Odessa holocaust, eh?
But we know, you loved every bullet of it. Psychopaths are as psychopaths do.
And BTW, speak for yourself. This 'we' thing is delusional. If 'we' met, you'd understand that
quick enough.
The Russians brought it upon themselves with their history of bullying...
Your neighbors will continue to hate you, and we don't need to do anything about it.
I'll be happy to send a donation to Ukraine so they can buy more defensive weapons - the more
Russians that invade their land, the more body bags they can send back to Russia.
The Ukrainians brought it upon themselves, sir. You obviously share in that endearing Ukrainian
trait to blame everyone but yourself for the consequences of your actions. Next time, try to keep
your banderite fascist ideologues at bay and maybe you'll learn something about those 'European
values' that Poroshenko seems to like to lecture the Europeans about, if that ain't a hoot in
itself.
What just happened in Syria?
What about the untraceable subs Russia has that can knock out our aircraft carries easily? PS:
Iran has one and we lost track of it shortly after they purchased it from Russia.
What about the large number of nuclear weapon Russia has and has used this threat in an offensives
manor lately?
Are you the type of person who leaves his front door unlocked when you go to work?
Just type up your SS#, Credit Cards, and Name for us please...along with you address since you
do not believe in preventive measures to safeguard yourself.
The untraceable diesel electric are very short range by ocean going standard AND become more visible
it they need to approach the target (The hope to submerge, sit and have a vessel pass very close).
The Baltics and Poland should take an example from Finland. Finland has managed to avoid conflict
with Russia, without any help from the U.S. or NATO. Threats of imminent Russian invasion are
fairy tales.
Another silly "what if" article. A conflict between Nato and Russia will very quickly go nuclear.
Nobody wins. Taking the three tiny Baltic countries into Nato was an incredibly stupid move. The
purpose was purely to provoke Russia. They can't be defended without going nuclear. They will
be lost forever. Nato gains nothing except the claim of being the victim.
MY CONGRATULATIONS FOR YOU OPINION WHICH IS MY OPINION. I AM A PROFESSIONAL ARMY OFFFICER. YOUR
OPINION IS THE CORRECT AND THE REAL ONE. ALL THOSE DISCUSSIONS ABOUT WHATEVER STRENGTH AND KIND
OF TROOPS OR WEAPONS NATO MIGTH HAVE WHEREVER... WITHIN EUROPE IS SIMPLY SILLY...
I THINK ANY ARMY OFFICER KNOWS WHAT YOU JUST TOLD... SO EITHER ALL THIS SHIT AROUND WHOM, WHAT
AND WHERE TO DEPLOY MILITARY POWER TO STOP THE RUSSIANS IS JUST TO HAVE THE STUPID EUROPEANS SPENDING
MORE MONEY BUYING USA WEAPONS OR IF NATO BELIEVES WHAT THEY ARE DOING... THEN THE GENERALS IN
CHARGE ARE JUST DONKEYS ... AND I APOLOGIZE TO DONKEYS... OF COURSE ANY VERY FIRST MILITARY ACTION
FROM RUSSIA EITHER TO DEFEND ITSELF FROM A NATO/ USA ATTACK OR TO CARRY OUT A PRE EMPTIVE ATTACK
WILL BE IMMEDIATELY NUCLEAR... MORE THAN THAT IT WILL BE GLOBAL.... NOT ONLY AGAINST EUROPE...
THE MAIN TARGET WILL BE USA AND ITS MILITARY BASES AROUND THE WORLD... AND OF COURSE EUROPE...
SO CONVENCIONAL MILITARY MEANS IN SUCH A CONTEXT THEY SHALL BE BASICALLY TROOPS AND EQUIPMENT
ABLE TO OPERATE IN A NUCLEAR AND NBQ ENVIRONMENT.
Russia wouldn't have to go nuclear to defeat Europe, so if it does go nuclear, it will be the
US that pushes the button.
As the Russian army would be in Europe, the US would nuke Europe.
"Taking the three tiny Baltic countries into NATO was an incredibly stupid move."
I disagree. Americas' Principles have always stressed spreading Freedom & Liberty as far as
possible. Where "we" Americans went wrong was not electing leadership who understood this principle.
I can agree with the Far Left on one thing: Europeans need to bring their military strength
back up. It's obvious that my country (USA) is headed down a path of isolationism. A pity, really.
Has the Europeans learned to value each other as equals...... or will ancient rivalries tear them
apart?
The NATO-bloc spends about a trillion dollars each year on the military -- as much as is spent
by all other countries in the world combined, and an order of magnitude more than what Russia
spends.
If NATO is defending "Freedom", as we're told, then why does it require such a titanic
amount of force and money? If U.S.-style "Freedom" is such a good thing, if this Exceptional "Freedom"
is something that every sane person wants, then why does it take so much force to impose this
"Freedom" on people ?
If I invent something that people want -- a better mouse-trap, say -- do I have to bomb people
into buying my product? Do I have to use "police" armed with tanks and machine-guns to round people
up and force them into the store where my mouse-trap is sold?
Real freedom is something that sells itself. Freedom is something to live for, not something
to kill and be killed for. We develop freedom by exercising our rights, not by turning other countries
into rubble!
NATO is selling death and destruction, repackaged as "Freedom and Democracy". Ask what
is inside the pretty package! -- then you will understand why this "Freedom" is such a hard sell.
Freedom & Liberty via bombs in invasion! Democracy only when US puppet will win otherwise regime
change like in Syria and in the past many other countries
your reply is silly and stupid. Principles never won anything. You are one of those pedantic liberals
who think we (but, of course, not you) need to save everyone. Reality says most would rather give
up than fight themselves.
I agree with principles (They should not be underestimated!) however I think as Americans we are
going to have to be a bit more pragmatic going forward.
The politicians prefer the U.S. to Russia, perhaps. But I'm not sure that the same can be said
of the people.
A referendum on the future of the Soviet Union was held on 17 March 1991. The question put
to voters was: "Do you consider necessary the preservation of the Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics as a renewed federation of equal sovereign republics in which the rights and freedom
of an individual of any nationality will be fully guaranteed?"
Russia SFSR:
Choice .......... ------Votes . -----%
For .............. 56,860,783 .. 73.00
Against .......... 21,030,753 .. 27.00
Invalid ........... 1,809,633 ...... -
Total ............ 79,701,169 . 100.00
Reg., Turnout ... 105,643,364 .. 75.44
A similar referendum was held 22 years later, by Gallup. In the
2013 Gallup poll , people in countries formed by the Soviet dissolution said, by a two-to-one
margin, that they were worse off than before the Soviet break-up .
But it doesn't matter, of course, what the people think. The "West" -- the U.S. Empire -- decided
that the Soviet Union was bad, and the rulers/bankers/gangsters of the "West" know what is
best for everyone everywhere . That's because the rulers/bankers of the U.S. Empire are Exceptional,
Enlightened and Inherently Superior. They were Born Without Sin, their intentions are Pure and
Holy, and they Know More Than God.
It was foolish. How did Finland survive as a neutral country? If anyone had any justification
for joining NATO after WWII, it was certainly Finland, yet it prospered undisturbed, even benefiting
from Russia trade.
The Baltic leaders are just milking NATO, with their constant 'threat alerts'. And NATO milks
them right back. It's a symbiotic milk maid festival.
Whether Trump wins the nomination or it is stolen from him, a
destructive breakup of the holier-than-thou, war-mongering, neocon pseudo-conservative hypocrites
running the Republican party is potentially at hand. For that we can all thank Trump, whether you
like the guy or not. It's time to rebuild the Republican party, and this is a good start. If the
nomination is stolen from Trump, he can finish the job with a third-party candidacy.
"... When President George HW Bush invaded Iraq in 1991, the warhawks celebrated what they considered the end of that post-Vietnam period where Americans were hesitant about being the policeman of the world. President Bush said famously at the time, "By God, we've kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all." ..."
"... Last month was another anniversary. March 20, 2003 was the beginning of the second US war on Iraq. It was the night of "shock and awe" as bombs rained down on Iraqis. Like Vietnam, it was a war brought on by government lies and propaganda, amplified by a compliant media that repeated the lies without hesitation. ..."
Last week Defense Secretary Ashton Carter laid a wreath at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington
in commemoration of the "50th anniversary" of that war. The date is confusing, as the war started
earlier and ended far later than 1966. But the Vietnam War at 50 commemoration presents a good opportunity
to reflect on the war and whether we have learned anything from it.
Some 60,000 Americans were killed fighting in that war more than 8,000 miles away. More than a
million Vietnamese military and civilians also lost their lives. The US government did not accept
that it had pursued a bad policy in Vietnam until the bitter end. But in the end the war was lost
and we went home, leaving the destruction of the war behind. For the many who survived on both sides,
the war would continue to haunt them.
It was thought at the time that we had learned something from this lost war. The War Powers Resolution
was passed in 1973 to prevent future Vietnams by limiting the president's ability to take the country
to war without the Constitutionally-mandated Congressional declaration of war. But the law failed
in its purpose and was actually used by the war party in Washington to make it easier to go to war
without Congress.
Such legislative tricks are doomed to failure when the people still refuse to demand that elected
officials follow the Constitution.
When President George HW Bush invaded Iraq in 1991, the warhawks celebrated what they considered
the end of that post-Vietnam period where Americans were hesitant about being the policeman of the
world. President Bush said famously at the time, "By God, we've kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once
and for all."
They may have beat the Vietnam Syndrome, but they learned nothing from Vietnam.
Colonel Harry Summers returned to Vietnam in 1974 and told his Vietnamese counterpart Colonel
Tsu, "You know, you never beat us on the battlefield." The Vietnamese officer responded, "That may
be so, but it is also irrelevant."
He is absolutely correct: tactical victories mean nothing when pursuing a strategic mistake.
Last month was another anniversary. March 20, 2003 was the beginning of the second US war
on Iraq. It was the night of "shock and awe" as bombs rained down on Iraqis. Like Vietnam, it was
a war brought on by government lies and propaganda, amplified by a compliant media that repeated
the lies without hesitation.
Like Vietnam, the 2003 Iraq war was a disaster. More than 5,000 Americans were killed in the war
and as many as a million or more Iraqis lost their lives. There is nothing to show for the war but
destruction, trillions of dollars down the drain, and the emergence of al-Qaeda and ISIS.
Sadly, unlike after the Vietnam fiasco there has been almost no backlash against the US empire.
In fact, President Obama has continued the same failed policy and Congress doesn't even attempt to
reign him in. On the very anniversary of that disastrous 2003 invasion, President Obama announced
that he was sending US Marines back into Iraq! And not a word from Congress.
We've seemingly learned nothing.
There have been too many war anniversaries! We want an end to all these pointless wars. It's time
we learn from these horrible mistakes.
"... Albert Camus, talking about the doomed Spanish Civil War in the 1930s wrote, "Men of my generation have had Spain in our hearts. It was there that they learned … that one can be right and yet be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, and that there are times when courage is not rewarded." It's true the light was extinguished for generations in Spain. America was sleeping, but it finally did the right thing and went to war against Fascism. I believe Fascism is still our greatest enemy and its face is everywhere in our so-called "democracies." It was always about the moneyed interests that had the power. That is what Fascism is and that is the danger we are in now. Sanders talks about money, listen to him. He talks cogently about money and its power to distort. He's the only one who has raised his voice against the corruption in our politics. Clinton has embraced this corruption. ..."
"... The truth about the conflict with Russia >> https://goo.gl/nKJndT ..."
"... In some strange way at times I think that perhaps I'd like to see the vile psychopathic bitch win. This entire corrupt shithouse run by the banksters can not be reformed, it has to collapse. No better way to collapse it than some thermonuclear fireworks lighting up over Wall St. and Washingtton DC. ..."
"... war has always been the best automatic "go to" solution to deflect attention away from elite politician's gross malfeasance. ..."
"... Hillary and Bill were dirty with all the goings on at Mena, way before Bill was president. They were downright scary ..."
"... All wars are bankers wars. Its all fiat magic. You cant outbid a banker. ..."
"... The woman is a bonafide Warmonger... No-Fly Zone Over Syria, eh, wanna pick a fight with The Vlad, do ya? Oh, the hubris and the hegemony. There will be a price to pay. I hope it's not RS26's with the hypersonic MIRVs. ..."
"... I am not buying Bernie after what Ron Paul said he did with his Fed bill, he "gave the banks what they wanted". If Ron says that Bernie screwed us, then Bernie screwed us. Ron is the only one of these bastards that has any credibility over any significant period of time and obviously we don't have a significant Fed audit, thanks to Bernie's boot licking. The people desperately needed that bill based in it's original form and so Bernie can go suck a dick and continue to be a fraud sellout. ..."
"... Well sorry buddy but it's far worse than that. Wall Street funded both ends of that debacle too and our politicians were not blind to the coup that was taking place in our nation. It's good that people are waking up to corruption but as people finally admit that something is wrong, they underestimate it. ..."
"... well of course USA is going to war, USA has reached the end of its debt cycle, the ONLY way out is a war since there is no one left to exploit. Russia cannot be allowed to become stronger because according to Nexus Circle of Power theory, Russia will be the next superpower after China. ..."
When fear becomes collective, when anger becomes collective, it's extremely dangerous.
It is overwhelming… The mass media and the military-industrial complex create a prison for us,
so we continue to think, see, and act in the same way… We need the courage to express ourselves
even when the majority is going in the opposite direction… because a change of direction can happen
only when there is a collective awakening… Therefore, it is very important to say, 'I am here!'
to those who share the same kind of insight.
- Thich Nhat Hanh, Buddhist Monk, The Art of Power
Oliver Stone has penned a powerful and emotional takedown of Hillary Clinton, focusing on her
insane neocon foreign policy chops in a piece published in the Huffington Post titled,
Why I'm for Bernie Sanders .
What follows are just a few paragraphs, I suggest reading the entire thing:
We're going to war - either hybrid in nature to break the Russian state back to its
1990s subordination, or a hot war (which will destroy our country). Our citizens should know this,
but they don't because our media is dumbed down in its "Pravda"-like support for our "respectable,"
highly aggressive government. We are being led, as C. Wright Mills said in the 1950s,
by a government full of "crackpot realists: in the name of realism they've constructed a paranoid
reality all their own." Our media has credited Hillary Clinton with wonderful foreign policy experience,
unlike Trump, without really noting the results of her power-mongering. She's comparable to Bill
Clinton's choice of Cold War crackpot Madeleine Albright as one of the worst Secretary of States
we've had since … Condi Rice? Albright boasted, "If we have to use force it is because we are
America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries
into the future."
Hillary's record includes supporting the barbaric "contras" against the Nicaraguan people in
the 1980s, supporting the NATO bombing of the former Yugoslavia, supporting the ongoing Bush-Iraq
War, the ongoing Afghan mess, and as Secretary of State the destruction of the secular state of
Libya, the military coup in Honduras, and the present attempt at "regime change" in Syria.
Every one of these situations has resulted in more extremism, more chaos in the world,
and more danger to our country. Next will be the borders of Russia, China, and Iran.
Look at the viciousness of her recent AIPAC speech (don't say you haven't been warned). Can we
really bear to watch as Clinton "takes our alliance [with Israel] to the next level"? Where is
our sense of proportion? Cannot the media, at the least, call her out on this extremism? The problem,
I think, is this political miasma of "correctness" that dominates American thinking (i.e. Trump
is extreme, therefore Hillary is not).
This is why I'm praying still for Bernie Sanders, because he's the only one willing, at least
in the name of fiscal sanity, to cut back on our foreign interventions, bring the troops home,
and with these trillions of dollars no longer wasted on malice, try to protect the "homeland"
by actually rebuilding it and putting money into its people, schools, and infrastructure.
Albert Camus, talking about the doomed Spanish Civil War in the 1930s wrote, "Men of my
generation have had Spain in our hearts. It was there that they learned … that one can be right
and yet be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, and that there are times when courage is not
rewarded." It's true the light was extinguished for generations in Spain. America was sleeping,
but it finally did the right thing and went to war against Fascism. I believe Fascism is still
our greatest enemy and its face is everywhere in our so-called "democracies." It was always about
the moneyed interests that had the power. That is what Fascism is and that is the danger we are
in now. Sanders talks about money, listen to him. He talks cogently about money and its power
to distort. He's the only one who has raised his voice against the corruption in our politics.
Clinton has embraced this corruption.
Of course, Google told us all we needed to know several months ago:
For more on Hillary and her neocon foreign policy agenda, see:
In some strange way at times I think that perhaps I'd like to see the vile psychopathic
bitch win. This entire corrupt shithouse run by the banksters can not be reformed, it has to collapse.
No better way to collapse it than some thermonuclear fireworks lighting up over Wall St. and Washingtton
DC.
I'll take my chances in a mad max world rather than hoping some politician will some day truly
deliver change and hope.
You can't just clear a cookie. Google builds a permanent profile on you and stores it at their
end. They use a variety of means to do this, such as taking your MAC address and every other bit
transmitted on the internet and linking it to a database they have built that records your popular
searches and clicks.
This is how people get filter bubbled and steered; dirty internet searches. A clean search
would see actual societal interests and trends instead of the contrived ones pushed by the State
narrative. It's also part of the meta- and direct data that goes into secret profiles in the "intelligence
community".
They think they can use this trendy (yet largely mythical) Big Data to create a precrime division.
It's also nice to have dirt on the whole country in case anyone gets out of line and challenges
the aristocracy.
The woman is a bonafide Warmonger... No-Fly Zone Over Syria, eh, wanna pick a fight with
The Vlad, do ya? Oh, the hubris and the hegemony. There will be a price to pay. I hope it's not
RS26's with the hypersonic MIRVs.
I am not buying Bernie after what Ron Paul said he did with his Fed bill, he "gave the
banks what they wanted". If Ron says that Bernie screwed us, then Bernie screwed us. Ron is the
only one of these bastards that has any credibility over any significant period of time and obviously
we don't have a significant Fed audit, thanks to Bernie's boot licking. The people desperately
needed that bill based in it's original form and so Bernie can go suck a dick and continue to
be a fraud sellout.
Then this Camus guy says: " America was sleeping, but it finally did the right thing and went
to war against Fascism."
Well sorry buddy but it's far worse than that. Wall Street funded both ends of that debacle
too and our politicians were not blind to the coup that was taking place in our nation. It's good
that people are waking up to corruption but as people finally admit that something is wrong, they
underestimate it.
The system it toast, your votes do not matter, we have known this for some time. Welcome to
reality.
Waiting for a candidate to be voted in by Diebold to save the day is not only stupid but possibly
insane. Nice try fuckers, we know better. There is big trouble in little China coming and voting
isn't going to fix it. Bernie fans do not have to cry if he doesn't win Diebolds election. Bernie
will be back down the road if/when they are ready to institute full-on banker ball sucking communism.
And if you don't know that banks and communism get along just fine... well fuck you too.
well of course USA is going to war, USA has reached the end of its debt cycle, the ONLY
way out is a war since there is no one left to exploit. Russia cannot be allowed to become stronger
because according to Nexus Circle of Power theory, Russia will be the next superpower after China.
Hillary's not a neocon. She's married to one. Even though she was a senator and a Secretary
of State, she relies on her husband for all her political and foreign policy positions.
Bill was president during the anti-Russia, rape of the Balkans.
I do not watch TV, stopped listening to fake Mocking bird radio propaganda (limbaugh and the
rest) a few years ago and avoid most web sites.
The only people I pay attention to anymore is Russia, Putin, Novo Russians (East Ukraine) and
the Syria on sites like Syrian Perspective.
Syria is about 18% Christian but was relatively peaceful with other religions. Damascus and
other areas have Christmas lights and trees everywhere. The country is the cradle of Christianity.
Why Syria? Becaus ethey had the guts to stand up and fight and die against the ZWO/NWO/See
Eye Aye/State Dept/ Nudelman/NeoCons/McCain/Saudis/Turkey and the rest of the evil evil scum like
the Dems and GOP-e.
The Syrians and the Syrian military at leats have their honor. They never gave up and fortunately
they were helped by Russia, Hezbollah, Kurds and a few others.
Meanwhile in America, we have idiots in texas armed to the teeth but they say nothing about
2 Waco massacres, keep voting for scum like LBJ, Bushes and the Bushes Canadian boy Ted Cruz.
Texans are happy watching their Trayvon ballplayers as Mexicans and other illegals flood in. They
talk big about Liberty but it is all talk.
I respect Syrians who stood up and fought against the NWO/ZWO and NovoRussians. I respect those
in Europe trying to fight back especially the Hungarians.
I do not respect Americans. We are cowards. Seeing idiots vote for a Cubao Canadian dial shitizen
Bush puppet. Pathetic.
"We're going to war - either hybrid in nature to break the Russian state back to its
1990s subordination, or a hot war (which will destroy our country). Our citizens should know this,
but they don't because our media is dumbed down in its "Pravda"-like support for our "respectable,"
highly aggressive government."
This statement is very likely the truth. Basically we are as bad off a Saudi Arabia or Turkey,
the only problem is that we are armed to the teeth making us one if not the most dangerous population
on the planet. Otherwise we would be dying at the same rate and in the same ways that they are.
Basically, the second ammendment has allowed for dumb bitches is Seattle and San Fran to be snowflakes.
Anybody with anything left of their flouride and GMO addled brain, saw this building for years
if not their entire life. The polls are completely fabricated as are most likely every government
figure. Some numbers have been proven to be outright lies and distortions, so all numbers are
suspect.
Some will continue to look at all of what is happening with our food supply (everything Monsanto
has ever created was a killer, it started with aspartame for gawd sakes), the medical system,
prison system, monetary system, interest rates, terrorism, ISIS, the borders, shit being sprayed
on us, importing of supposed "Ebola victims", asset forteiture, "bungled" wars etcetera as some
type of incompetence.
How in the hell do people like that survive? Seriously? I think they are scared shitless to
look at the truth. Some of the others are trying to fit in and stay part of mainstream for safety.
These people are likely going to crack up as the shit hits the fan because denial is going to
be bitch slapped to the ground before too long. And yet, we have allowed them to control the conversation.
They have been wrong and wrong some more. After this next election, whoever hasn't figured it
out yet needs to be declared brain dead.
If anyone thinks the President actually runs the Country, you're sadly mistaken. It's run by
people you can't vote for, don't know or even recognize. The President is only there to ensure
their dream comes alive. More the half the previous presidents have been Satanist, Devil Worshippers,
Zionists, Members of the Occult or Members of Secret Societies. Hillary is the perfect choice
because she will do what ever they tell her to, where as Trump probably won't the Majority of
the time.
If Trump finds a Memo in the Hidden compartment of Office Desk about 911 then hell will be
unleashed. If hillary Finds it, it just gets shredded.
American exceptionalism will be perverted further to American women's exceptionalism. The chosen,
the exceptional, the master race, fourth wave feminism or other glorifications deceive their believers
with their righteousness and invincibility. Stupid American males will die for stupidier American
feminists.
Don't worry it's not going to make it that far. Most likely what you are feeling is a building
of a far right wing brown shirt movement that is developing. These same interests funded and created
Hitler. Think about that for a minute. Germany was primed for it by being treated like a beaten
dog. Maybe that's what they are trying to do to you too.
It's understandable that you feel that way but in the end they are trying to channel your anger
in the direction of their choosing. You could go after feminists, Muslims and street thugs all
day long but in the end they will still be there and they will kill you last.
They will make a move on us at some point. The fact that they haven't already may just be that
they realize that taking out the ME, Europe and Russia at the same time is crazy enough. If you
add the US population now you might have bit off more than you can chew. Maybe they will save
us for last and maybe not. We will know shortly if what is going on in Europe comes here. ISIS
wont be enough but if they created a Neo-fascist group in this environment that would probably
work quite well for them. Just like it did in the Ukraine and just like it always has everywhere
else.
One would hope that they wouldn't choose the timing but in reality the American people are
not as violent as we are portrayed. When it starts it almost certainly be them.
I think they would have to kill somewhere between 2-15 million in the US to make it happen.
Good times. The Bulshevik work camps were set up as extermination camps though work and starvation.
Never go to a "work camp". People went because they thought they would just be enslaved and
that they would have a chance. The reality was that they didn't want nor expect them to live long,
they just kept the trains coming to replace the dead. Since nobody was coming back nobody knew
that everybody was dying, they assumed they were still working.
The numbers will never be known as they were buried all over Siberia and everywhere else. They
are literally built into the infrastructure that they were enslaved to build. After reading about
the Bulshevik camps I just equate "work camp" with extermination camp. Twenty to thirty million
is one damn big pile of bodies. Fuqin banks and scum. Bottom line, if mass arrests start, you
do not go.
You must be from somewhere else. We have a choice. They can take a black bag but they wont
be torturing us and then throwing our bodies in a ditch with two million other defenseless saps.
Unfortunately, for many of our counterparts they will have to get rather creative with frying
pans and baseball bats. You can try begging if you think that will work.
Yes we are. Look at our politics: on all fours, Cruz foaming at the mouth and Hitlery's death
list. When shit goes down, we throw down. Sadly Skinner was not wrong. Happily Leary was right,
we can program ourselves to succeed. Alas we are all in the territory of 2 wolfpacks - the Msms
and the Telecomms.
OS is a Msm. Msms and Telecomms are all selling us that we have to go back to war in Iraq to
clean up that Vietnam repeat pathetic exit. OS is just warming you up to the idea of the mass
rape of your kin to come.
US exit from Germany: slew all the Nazis who would have regrouped a la ISIS, and parked bases.
US exit from Korea: SK rocks. Why is NK still there? Why are we?
US exit from South Vietnam: Dig up LBJ and chuck him in the east med.
US exit from Iraq: ISIS or whatever the shitshifters want to call it.
US exit from Afghanistan: Well, at least I have 1 cool muslim neighbor... and two who would
jihad my ass if they were ordered to by their gas station attendant mole handlers.
Mike Krieger on Oliver Stone in the Huff Post on Hillary on Camus on Bernie Sanders on Mike
Krieger .... a linear presentation of a leftist circle jerk?
I saw a TV thing once (maybe 60 minutes); Hillary was preparing for her role as SOS and explained
very clearly that she let herself guide by Albright. When the first Coke bottling plant was opened
in Myanmar after democracy broke out there, Albright was right there. In 1998 or 1999 I saw Albright
on TV saying 'this ensures another American century'. Her prediction was quite wrong as we now
call it the Asian century.
What arrogance, born to rule? She and Hillary are mindset twins of Erdogan, who sounds like
wanting to re-establish the Ottman rule. Hillary was very callous after Gaddafi was killed in
Libya - now look at Libya - what a spendid result!
Operation successful, patient dead. But it doesn't matter to the exceptionalists how much other
people suffer. Just bomb them into obedience. The Mongols and the Ottomans also demanded obedience
and used violence when it wasn't forthcoming. People are born free - ALL people.
The tragectory is always somewhat like this. It's like being forced to watch someone rob your
home or worse.
They have us carved up that's the purpose of all the candidates, massive polarization.
Can't be for this one or that because they cut you off at the pass there is no one you can
really rally around that can rally everyone and that is by design.
The logical move to make from here is to split off and create a third party pulling enough
from each side to win a three way race. I think it's the only move we have in the political realm
after that we will be cut down one at a time and it will descend into madness.
"... Albert Camus, talking about the doomed Spanish Civil War in the 1930s wrote, "Men of my generation have had Spain in our hearts. It was there that they learned … that one can be right and yet be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, and that there are times when courage is not rewarded." It's true the light was extinguished for generations in Spain. America was sleeping, but it finally did the right thing and went to war against Fascism. I believe Fascism is still our greatest enemy and its face is everywhere in our so-called "democracies." It was always about the moneyed interests that had the power. That is what Fascism is and that is the danger we are in now. Sanders talks about money, listen to him. He talks cogently about money and its power to distort. He's the only one who has raised his voice against the corruption in our politics. Clinton has embraced this corruption. ..."
"... The truth about the conflict with Russia >> https://goo.gl/nKJndT ..."
"... In some strange way at times I think that perhaps I'd like to see the vile psychopathic bitch win. This entire corrupt shithouse run by the banksters can not be reformed, it has to collapse. No better way to collapse it than some thermonuclear fireworks lighting up over Wall St. and Washingtton DC. ..."
"... war has always been the best automatic "go to" solution to deflect attention away from elite politician's gross malfeasance. ..."
"... Hillary and Bill were dirty with all the goings on at Mena, way before Bill was president. They were downright scary ..."
"... All wars are bankers wars. Its all fiat magic. You cant outbid a banker. ..."
"... The woman is a bonafide Warmonger... No-Fly Zone Over Syria, eh, wanna pick a fight with The Vlad, do ya? Oh, the hubris and the hegemony. There will be a price to pay. I hope it's not RS26's with the hypersonic MIRVs. ..."
"... I am not buying Bernie after what Ron Paul said he did with his Fed bill, he "gave the banks what they wanted". If Ron says that Bernie screwed us, then Bernie screwed us. Ron is the only one of these bastards that has any credibility over any significant period of time and obviously we don't have a significant Fed audit, thanks to Bernie's boot licking. The people desperately needed that bill based in it's original form and so Bernie can go suck a dick and continue to be a fraud sellout. ..."
"... Well sorry buddy but it's far worse than that. Wall Street funded both ends of that debacle too and our politicians were not blind to the coup that was taking place in our nation. It's good that people are waking up to corruption but as people finally admit that something is wrong, they underestimate it. ..."
"... well of course USA is going to war, USA has reached the end of its debt cycle, the ONLY way out is a war since there is no one left to exploit. Russia cannot be allowed to become stronger because according to Nexus Circle of Power theory, Russia will be the next superpower after China. ..."
When fear becomes collective, when anger becomes collective, it's extremely dangerous.
It is overwhelming… The mass media and the military-industrial complex create a prison for us,
so we continue to think, see, and act in the same way… We need the courage to express ourselves
even when the majority is going in the opposite direction… because a change of direction can happen
only when there is a collective awakening… Therefore, it is very important to say, 'I am here!'
to those who share the same kind of insight.
- Thich Nhat Hanh, Buddhist Monk, The Art of Power
Oliver Stone has penned a powerful and emotional takedown of Hillary Clinton, focusing on her
insane neocon foreign policy chops in a piece published in the Huffington Post titled,
Why I'm for Bernie Sanders .
What follows are just a few paragraphs, I suggest reading the entire thing:
We're going to war - either hybrid in nature to break the Russian state back to its
1990s subordination, or a hot war (which will destroy our country). Our citizens should know this,
but they don't because our media is dumbed down in its "Pravda"-like support for our "respectable,"
highly aggressive government. We are being led, as C. Wright Mills said in the 1950s,
by a government full of "crackpot realists: in the name of realism they've constructed a paranoid
reality all their own." Our media has credited Hillary Clinton with wonderful foreign policy experience,
unlike Trump, without really noting the results of her power-mongering. She's comparable to Bill
Clinton's choice of Cold War crackpot Madeleine Albright as one of the worst Secretary of States
we've had since … Condi Rice? Albright boasted, "If we have to use force it is because we are
America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries
into the future."
Hillary's record includes supporting the barbaric "contras" against the Nicaraguan people in
the 1980s, supporting the NATO bombing of the former Yugoslavia, supporting the ongoing Bush-Iraq
War, the ongoing Afghan mess, and as Secretary of State the destruction of the secular state of
Libya, the military coup in Honduras, and the present attempt at "regime change" in Syria.
Every one of these situations has resulted in more extremism, more chaos in the world,
and more danger to our country. Next will be the borders of Russia, China, and Iran.
Look at the viciousness of her recent AIPAC speech (don't say you haven't been warned). Can we
really bear to watch as Clinton "takes our alliance [with Israel] to the next level"? Where is
our sense of proportion? Cannot the media, at the least, call her out on this extremism? The problem,
I think, is this political miasma of "correctness" that dominates American thinking (i.e. Trump
is extreme, therefore Hillary is not).
This is why I'm praying still for Bernie Sanders, because he's the only one willing, at least
in the name of fiscal sanity, to cut back on our foreign interventions, bring the troops home,
and with these trillions of dollars no longer wasted on malice, try to protect the "homeland"
by actually rebuilding it and putting money into its people, schools, and infrastructure.
Albert Camus, talking about the doomed Spanish Civil War in the 1930s wrote, "Men of my
generation have had Spain in our hearts. It was there that they learned … that one can be right
and yet be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, and that there are times when courage is not
rewarded." It's true the light was extinguished for generations in Spain. America was sleeping,
but it finally did the right thing and went to war against Fascism. I believe Fascism is still
our greatest enemy and its face is everywhere in our so-called "democracies." It was always about
the moneyed interests that had the power. That is what Fascism is and that is the danger we are
in now. Sanders talks about money, listen to him. He talks cogently about money and its power
to distort. He's the only one who has raised his voice against the corruption in our politics.
Clinton has embraced this corruption.
Of course, Google told us all we needed to know several months ago:
For more on Hillary and her neocon foreign policy agenda, see:
In some strange way at times I think that perhaps I'd like to see the vile psychopathic
bitch win. This entire corrupt shithouse run by the banksters can not be reformed, it has to collapse.
No better way to collapse it than some thermonuclear fireworks lighting up over Wall St. and Washingtton
DC.
I'll take my chances in a mad max world rather than hoping some politician will some day truly
deliver change and hope.
You can't just clear a cookie. Google builds a permanent profile on you and stores it at their
end. They use a variety of means to do this, such as taking your MAC address and every other bit
transmitted on the internet and linking it to a database they have built that records your popular
searches and clicks.
This is how people get filter bubbled and steered; dirty internet searches. A clean search
would see actual societal interests and trends instead of the contrived ones pushed by the State
narrative. It's also part of the meta- and direct data that goes into secret profiles in the "intelligence
community".
They think they can use this trendy (yet largely mythical) Big Data to create a precrime division.
It's also nice to have dirt on the whole country in case anyone gets out of line and challenges
the aristocracy.
The woman is a bonafide Warmonger... No-Fly Zone Over Syria, eh, wanna pick a fight with
The Vlad, do ya? Oh, the hubris and the hegemony. There will be a price to pay. I hope it's not
RS26's with the hypersonic MIRVs.
I am not buying Bernie after what Ron Paul said he did with his Fed bill, he "gave the
banks what they wanted". If Ron says that Bernie screwed us, then Bernie screwed us. Ron is the
only one of these bastards that has any credibility over any significant period of time and obviously
we don't have a significant Fed audit, thanks to Bernie's boot licking. The people desperately
needed that bill based in it's original form and so Bernie can go suck a dick and continue to
be a fraud sellout.
Then this Camus guy says: " America was sleeping, but it finally did the right thing and went
to war against Fascism."
Well sorry buddy but it's far worse than that. Wall Street funded both ends of that debacle
too and our politicians were not blind to the coup that was taking place in our nation. It's good
that people are waking up to corruption but as people finally admit that something is wrong, they
underestimate it.
The system it toast, your votes do not matter, we have known this for some time. Welcome to
reality.
Waiting for a candidate to be voted in by Diebold to save the day is not only stupid but possibly
insane. Nice try fuckers, we know better. There is big trouble in little China coming and voting
isn't going to fix it. Bernie fans do not have to cry if he doesn't win Diebolds election. Bernie
will be back down the road if/when they are ready to institute full-on banker ball sucking communism.
And if you don't know that banks and communism get along just fine... well fuck you too.
well of course USA is going to war, USA has reached the end of its debt cycle, the ONLY
way out is a war since there is no one left to exploit. Russia cannot be allowed to become stronger
because according to Nexus Circle of Power theory, Russia will be the next superpower after China.
Hillary's not a neocon. She's married to one. Even though she was a senator and a Secretary
of State, she relies on her husband for all her political and foreign policy positions.
Bill was president during the anti-Russia, rape of the Balkans.
I do not watch TV, stopped listening to fake Mocking bird radio propaganda (limbaugh and the
rest) a few years ago and avoid most web sites.
The only people I pay attention to anymore is Russia, Putin, Novo Russians (East Ukraine) and
the Syria on sites like Syrian Perspective.
Syria is about 18% Christian but was relatively peaceful with other religions. Damascus and
other areas have Christmas lights and trees everywhere. The country is the cradle of Christianity.
Why Syria? Becaus ethey had the guts to stand up and fight and die against the ZWO/NWO/See
Eye Aye/State Dept/ Nudelman/NeoCons/McCain/Saudis/Turkey and the rest of the evil evil scum like
the Dems and GOP-e.
The Syrians and the Syrian military at leats have their honor. They never gave up and fortunately
they were helped by Russia, Hezbollah, Kurds and a few others.
Meanwhile in America, we have idiots in texas armed to the teeth but they say nothing about
2 Waco massacres, keep voting for scum like LBJ, Bushes and the Bushes Canadian boy Ted Cruz.
Texans are happy watching their Trayvon ballplayers as Mexicans and other illegals flood in. They
talk big about Liberty but it is all talk.
I respect Syrians who stood up and fought against the NWO/ZWO and NovoRussians. I respect those
in Europe trying to fight back especially the Hungarians.
I do not respect Americans. We are cowards. Seeing idiots vote for a Cubao Canadian dial shitizen
Bush puppet. Pathetic.
"We're going to war - either hybrid in nature to break the Russian state back to its
1990s subordination, or a hot war (which will destroy our country). Our citizens should know this,
but they don't because our media is dumbed down in its "Pravda"-like support for our "respectable,"
highly aggressive government."
This statement is very likely the truth. Basically we are as bad off a Saudi Arabia or Turkey,
the only problem is that we are armed to the teeth making us one if not the most dangerous population
on the planet. Otherwise we would be dying at the same rate and in the same ways that they are.
Basically, the second ammendment has allowed for dumb bitches is Seattle and San Fran to be snowflakes.
Anybody with anything left of their flouride and GMO addled brain, saw this building for years
if not their entire life. The polls are completely fabricated as are most likely every government
figure. Some numbers have been proven to be outright lies and distortions, so all numbers are
suspect.
Some will continue to look at all of what is happening with our food supply (everything Monsanto
has ever created was a killer, it started with aspartame for gawd sakes), the medical system,
prison system, monetary system, interest rates, terrorism, ISIS, the borders, shit being sprayed
on us, importing of supposed "Ebola victims", asset forteiture, "bungled" wars etcetera as some
type of incompetence.
How in the hell do people like that survive? Seriously? I think they are scared shitless to
look at the truth. Some of the others are trying to fit in and stay part of mainstream for safety.
These people are likely going to crack up as the shit hits the fan because denial is going to
be bitch slapped to the ground before too long. And yet, we have allowed them to control the conversation.
They have been wrong and wrong some more. After this next election, whoever hasn't figured it
out yet needs to be declared brain dead.
If anyone thinks the President actually runs the Country, you're sadly mistaken. It's run by
people you can't vote for, don't know or even recognize. The President is only there to ensure
their dream comes alive. More the half the previous presidents have been Satanist, Devil Worshippers,
Zionists, Members of the Occult or Members of Secret Societies. Hillary is the perfect choice
because she will do what ever they tell her to, where as Trump probably won't the Majority of
the time.
If Trump finds a Memo in the Hidden compartment of Office Desk about 911 then hell will be
unleashed. If hillary Finds it, it just gets shredded.
American exceptionalism will be perverted further to American women's exceptionalism. The chosen,
the exceptional, the master race, fourth wave feminism or other glorifications deceive their believers
with their righteousness and invincibility. Stupid American males will die for stupidier American
feminists.
Don't worry it's not going to make it that far. Most likely what you are feeling is a building
of a far right wing brown shirt movement that is developing. These same interests funded and created
Hitler. Think about that for a minute. Germany was primed for it by being treated like a beaten
dog. Maybe that's what they are trying to do to you too.
It's understandable that you feel that way but in the end they are trying to channel your anger
in the direction of their choosing. You could go after feminists, Muslims and street thugs all
day long but in the end they will still be there and they will kill you last.
They will make a move on us at some point. The fact that they haven't already may just be that
they realize that taking out the ME, Europe and Russia at the same time is crazy enough. If you
add the US population now you might have bit off more than you can chew. Maybe they will save
us for last and maybe not. We will know shortly if what is going on in Europe comes here. ISIS
wont be enough but if they created a Neo-fascist group in this environment that would probably
work quite well for them. Just like it did in the Ukraine and just like it always has everywhere
else.
One would hope that they wouldn't choose the timing but in reality the American people are
not as violent as we are portrayed. When it starts it almost certainly be them.
I think they would have to kill somewhere between 2-15 million in the US to make it happen.
Good times. The Bulshevik work camps were set up as extermination camps though work and starvation.
Never go to a "work camp". People went because they thought they would just be enslaved and
that they would have a chance. The reality was that they didn't want nor expect them to live long,
they just kept the trains coming to replace the dead. Since nobody was coming back nobody knew
that everybody was dying, they assumed they were still working.
The numbers will never be known as they were buried all over Siberia and everywhere else. They
are literally built into the infrastructure that they were enslaved to build. After reading about
the Bulshevik camps I just equate "work camp" with extermination camp. Twenty to thirty million
is one damn big pile of bodies. Fuqin banks and scum. Bottom line, if mass arrests start, you
do not go.
You must be from somewhere else. We have a choice. They can take a black bag but they wont
be torturing us and then throwing our bodies in a ditch with two million other defenseless saps.
Unfortunately, for many of our counterparts they will have to get rather creative with frying
pans and baseball bats. You can try begging if you think that will work.
Yes we are. Look at our politics: on all fours, Cruz foaming at the mouth and Hitlery's death
list. When shit goes down, we throw down. Sadly Skinner was not wrong. Happily Leary was right,
we can program ourselves to succeed. Alas we are all in the territory of 2 wolfpacks - the Msms
and the Telecomms.
OS is a Msm. Msms and Telecomms are all selling us that we have to go back to war in Iraq to
clean up that Vietnam repeat pathetic exit. OS is just warming you up to the idea of the mass
rape of your kin to come.
US exit from Germany: slew all the Nazis who would have regrouped a la ISIS, and parked bases.
US exit from Korea: SK rocks. Why is NK still there? Why are we?
US exit from South Vietnam: Dig up LBJ and chuck him in the east med.
US exit from Iraq: ISIS or whatever the shitshifters want to call it.
US exit from Afghanistan: Well, at least I have 1 cool muslim neighbor... and two who would
jihad my ass if they were ordered to by their gas station attendant mole handlers.
Mike Krieger on Oliver Stone in the Huff Post on Hillary on Camus on Bernie Sanders on Mike
Krieger .... a linear presentation of a leftist circle jerk?
I saw a TV thing once (maybe 60 minutes); Hillary was preparing for her role as SOS and explained
very clearly that she let herself guide by Albright. When the first Coke bottling plant was opened
in Myanmar after democracy broke out there, Albright was right there. In 1998 or 1999 I saw Albright
on TV saying 'this ensures another American century'. Her prediction was quite wrong as we now
call it the Asian century.
What arrogance, born to rule? She and Hillary are mindset twins of Erdogan, who sounds like
wanting to re-establish the Ottman rule. Hillary was very callous after Gaddafi was killed in
Libya - now look at Libya - what a spendid result!
Operation successful, patient dead. But it doesn't matter to the exceptionalists how much other
people suffer. Just bomb them into obedience. The Mongols and the Ottomans also demanded obedience
and used violence when it wasn't forthcoming. People are born free - ALL people.
The tragectory is always somewhat like this. It's like being forced to watch someone rob your
home or worse.
They have us carved up that's the purpose of all the candidates, massive polarization.
Can't be for this one or that because they cut you off at the pass there is no one you can
really rally around that can rally everyone and that is by design.
The logical move to make from here is to split off and create a third party pulling enough
from each side to win a three way race. I think it's the only move we have in the political realm
after that we will be cut down one at a time and it will descend into madness.
That plan, to me, seems similar to George W. Bush's plan to defeat the Taliban which
was to defeat the Taliban. Or maybe more like Nixon's plan to defeat drugs which had
nothing to do with drugs but was actually a plan
to criminalize blacks and
antiwar hippies
.
The real motive behind the above Clinton nonsense may be the interest of the
powers-that-are to keep the war on ISIS going forever. Obama already did his best to
establish ISIS. He refrained from fighting it
in its infancy
in 2012,
refrained from holding it back
in Iraq to
"regime change" Prime Minister Maliki
and kept its revenues flowing until Putin
shamed him
into
finally bombing its oil infrastructure.
Clinton's
plan
, which declares only aims without any steps to reach them,
would mean endless wars in this or that Middle East country and/or in Africa or Asia. It
means further suppression of any privacy and opposition at home.
It is not a plan but a threat. Will she win votes with such nonsense?
I am "not isolationist, but I am 'America First,'"
Donald Trump told The New York times last weekend. "I like the expression."
Of NATO, where the U.S. underwrites three-fourths of the cost of defending Europe, Trump calls
this arrangement
"unfair, economically, to us," and adds, "We will not be ripped off
anymore."
Beltway media may be transfixed with Twitter wars over wives and alleged infidelities.
But the ideas Trump aired should ignite a national debate over U.S. overseas commitments - especially
NATO.
For the Donald's ideas are not lacking for authoritative support.
The first NATO supreme commander, Gen. Eisenhower, said in February 1951 of the alliance:
"If in 10 years, all American troops stationed in Europe for national defense purposes have not been
returned to the United States, then this whole project will have failed."
As JFK biographer Richard Reeves relates, President Eisenhower, a decade later, admonished the
president-elect on NATO.
"Eisenhower told his successor it was time to start bringing the troops home from Europe. 'America
is carrying far more than her share of free world defense,' he said. It was time for other nations
of NATO to take on more of the costs of their own defense."
No Cold War president followed Ike's counsel.
But when the Cold War ended with the collapse of the Soviet Empire, the dissolution of the Warsaw
Pact, and the breakup of the Soviet Union into 15 nations, a new debate erupted.
The conservative coalition that had united in the Cold War fractured. Some of us argued that when
the Russian troops went home from Europe, the American troops should come home from Europe.
Time for a populous prosperous Europe to start defending itself.
Instead, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush began handing out NATO memberships, i.e., war guarantees,
to all ex-Warsaw Pact nations and even Baltic republics that had been part of the Soviet Union.
In a historically provocative act, the U.S. moved its "red line" for war with Russia from the
Elbe River in Germany to the Estonian-Russian border, a few miles from St. Petersburg.
We declared to the world that should Russia seek to restore its hegemony over any part of its
old empire in Europe, she would be at war with the United States.
No Cold War president ever considered issuing a war guarantee of this magnitude, putting our homeland
at risk of nuclear war, to defend Latvia and Estonia.
Recall. Ike did not intervene to save the Hungarian freedom fighters in 1956. Lyndon Johnson did
not lift a hand to save the Czechs, when Warsaw Pact armies crushed "Prague Spring" in 1968. Reagan
refused to intervene when Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, on Moscow's orders, smashed Solidarity in 1981.
These presidents put America first. All would have rejoiced in the liberation of Eastern Europe.
But none would have committed us to war with a nuclear-armed nation like Russia to guarantee it.
Yet, here was George W. Bush declaring that any Russian move against Latvia or Estonia meant war
with the United States. John McCain wanted to extend U.S. war guarantees to Georgia and Ukraine.
This was madness born of hubris. And among those who warned against moving NATO onto Russia's
front porch was America's greatest geostrategist, the author of containment, George Kennan:
"Expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the post-Cold
War era. Such a decision may be expected to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly
not to our liking."
Kennan was proven right. By refusing to treat Russia as we treated other nations that repudiated
Leninism, we created the Russia we feared, a rearming nation bristling with resentment.
The Russian people, having extended a hand in friendship and seen it slapped away, cheered the
ouster of the accommodating Boris Yeltsin and the arrival of an autocratic strong man who would make
Russia respected again. We ourselves prepared the path for Vladimir Putin.
While Trump is focusing on how America is bearing too much of the cost of defending Europe, it
is the risks we are taking that are paramount, risks no Cold War president ever dared to take.
Why should America fight Russia over who rules in the Baltic States or Romania and
Bulgaria? When did the sovereignty of these nations become interests so vital we would risk a military
clash with Moscow that could escalate into nuclear war? Why are we still committed to fight for scores
of nations on five continents?
Trump is challenging the mindset of a foreign policy elite whose thinking is frozen in a world
that disappeared around 1991.
He is suggesting a new foreign policy where the United States is committed to war only
when are attacked or U.S. vital interests are imperiled.
And when we agree to defend other
nations, they will bear a full share of the cost of their own defense. The era of the free rider
is over.
Trump's phrase, "America First!" has a nice ring to it.
Trumps statements are true, but don't go far enough.
Since the Soviet Union doesn't exist anymore, there is
no reason for NATO to exist, or especially for us to be
a part of it. We gain nothing except the promises to go
to nuclear war with Russia, even over a shitshow country
like turkey, who shot down a fucking Russia plane.
It would also be interesting to see what happens to
the welfare states of Western Europe if they were forced
to pay for all this shit, or the US left all together.
Surely Trump is not so stupid to believe that we are being "had"
by the Europeans in regards to the collective NATO defense budget?
Surely he understands NATO is merely a captive audience for arms sales
ex USA?
Surely he understands that by paying "more than our share" we
are utilizing it to push a fucked up agenda abroad with the complicity
of those who are "not paying their share"?
In a manner of speaking he's right. Other countries don't pay their
fair share of the expenses. However,
the size and scope of what
exists now is orders of magnitude TOO BIG. So everyone else shouldn't
pay more, the US should scale back and spend WAY less.
That is what will get someone killed. Scaling back at all and therefore
costing any private predatory military supplier / contractor money..
Something extraordinary has taken place in the last few weeks.
More and more old-time Republican stalwarts and leaders have
laid their voices bare, if not defending Donald Trump, then for certain
excoriating the three decade long NeoLib/NeoCon pact that is strangulating
American sovereignty and paving the way for a NWO. Paul Craig
Roberts, as always, was perhaps the first. But now David Stockman
(Reagan's Budget Director), Peggy Noonan (Reagan's speechwriter), Patrick
Buchanan (another Reaganite and erstwhile Republican curmudgeon), Robert
Bennett (Reagan's head of the Department of Education), and perhaps
many more that I am not aware of are coming out of the closet.
It is almost as though Trump's 'take-no-prisoners' ethos, and
getting away with it and media and political correctness be damned,
is actually creating enough breathing space for others to say what's
been on their mind but have been too frightened to speak out about.
Well spoken, known, and credible voices are pushing back.
This could be a snowball careening downhill turning into an avalanche.
If enough of these folks keep emerging from dark corners they could
well provide Trump with a political phalanx that diminish the probabliity
of something as outrageous as stealing the nomination or even assassination.
One thing is for certain. A civil war is taking place
already, and its in the Republican Party.
NATO? The USA and European nations cannot even protect
their borders from invasion. End NATO. It is only good for
genocide against small unarmed countries.
Donald Trump toured Washington yesterday for backroom meetings with Republican party bigwigs,
for pandering to the Israel lobby and for an examination by the neoconned Washington Post editors.
The Republican party has given up its resistance to Trump. See for example the Republican functionary
John Feehery who
opined on February 29 that Trump is an authoritarian, and:
We beat the Nazis and the Japanese in the World War II and protected freedom and democracy by
beating the Soviet Union in the Cold War. It would be a damn shame if we lost it all by
giving in to the authoritarian impulse in this election .
Republican voters can support the nominee picked by a majority of the voters, they can sit this
election out, or they can start a third party. The last two choices give the White House to the
Clinton machine.
I am not happy that Donald Trump could be our nominee, but I am learning to live with
that distinct possibility .
That, in short, is the revised position of the Republican party. It has given up on fighting Trump
and will now propel him into the White House. What will happen thereafter? Who knows?
Trump is pure marketing. A salesperson throughout.
This video
explains how his linguistics works - words with only very few syllables, strong buzzword at the
end of the sentences. It is fourth grade reading level language. Exactly the level needed to sell
his product to the U.S. public and the Republican party. He is an expert in doing this.
But what product does Trump sell? Does he know it? Does he know how that product functions? Is
he serious in what he claims that product to be. I have my doubts.
So has Par Lang. He
remarks on yesterday's Trump appearance at the U.S. Zionists beauty contests:
Trump's pander was so extreme that one ponders the possibility that he was mocking the audience.
Trump probably does not even care what political product he sells. For now he is selling the salesman
himself. Buy Trump and all problems will be solved. He does this convincingly. Most of what he said
so far is just nonsense and solely for marketing purpose. There are only few consistent political
lines that did not (yet) change over time. These are the lines that
rile the Washington Post editors:
Donald Trump endorsed an unabashedly noninterventionist approach to world affairs Monday during
a day-long tour of Washington, casting doubt on the need for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
and expressing skepticism about a muscular U.S. military presence in Asia.
...
"At what point do you say, 'Hey, we have to take care of ourselves?' " Trump said in the editorial
board meeting. "I know the outer world exists, and I'll be very cognizant of that. But at the
same time, our country is disintegrating, large sections of it, especially the inner cities."
Trump said U.S. involvement in NATO may need to be significantly diminished in the coming years,
breaking with nearly seven decades of consensus in Washington. "We certainly can't afford to do
this anymore," he said, adding later, "NATO is costing us a fortune, and yes, we're protecting
Europe with NATO, but we're spending a lot of money."
Unfortunately, the visit provided no reassurance regarding Mr. Trump's fitness for the presidency.
"I'm not a radical person," he told us as he was leaving. But his answers left little doubt how
radical a risk the nation would be taking in entrusting the White House to him.
But who are the real radicals, the real radical risk? The salesperson Trump or the neoconned Washington
Post publisher and editors? You may judged that from this excerpt at the end of the talk's
transcript :
[FREDERICK RYAN JR., WASHINGTON POST PUBLISHER]: You [MUFFLED] mentioned a few minutes earlier
here that you would knock ISIS. You've mentioned it many times. You've also mentioned the risk
of putting American troop in a danger area. If you could substantially reduce the risk of harm
to ground troops, would you use a battlefield nuclear weapon to take out ISIS
?
TRUMP: I don't want to use, I don't want to start the process of nuclear. Remember the one
thing that everybody has said, I'm a counterpuncher. Rubio hit me. Bush hit me. When I said low
energy, he's a low-energy individual, he hit me first. I spent, by the way he spent 18 million
dollars' worth of negative ads on me. That's putting [MUFFLED]…
RYAN: This is about ISIS. You would not use a tactical nuclear weapon against ISIS?
[CROSSTALK] ...
The salesperson stopped there. Instead of answering that question Trump asked for personal introduction
to the people taking part in the event. To nuke some lunatics in Toyota technicals is not Trumps
idea of his product. He would not sell that. Not even for gaining the support of the WaPo neocons.
Buying Trump is buying a pig in a poke. One does not know what one might get. But I find it unlikely
that he would pursue an interventionist policy. Then again - George W. Bush also pretended to be
a non-interventionist - until that changed.
But Trumps current non-interventionist position is a big contrast to Hillary Clinton. She unashamedly
offers her well known toxic brew of neo-liberal and neo-conservative orthodoxy. She will wage war,
Trump may. As a foreigner that is the decisive difference to me.
But if I were a voter in the U.S. my position would be based on economic policies. There Bernie
Sanders is surely preferable to Trump and very much preferable to Clinton.
So, I guess what all this means is that the Repubs have accepted Trump as less evil than Hillary?
But, what if the nominee of the Democ side isn't Hillary? What if it is the Bern? Not that it
makes a dimes worth of difference. Did anyone read Dimitri Orlovs post for today? I have to say
that his take is pretty close to where we are headed ... if not soon, eventually.
I have no idea who really originated the bit about interesting times ... but I suspect it may
be what we are living through. That is, if this is living ...
"Trump is pure marketing. A salesperson throughout. This video explains how his linguistics works
- words with only very few syllables, strong buzzword at the end of the sentences. It is fourth
grade reading level language. Exactly the level needed to sell his product to the U.S. public
and the Republican party. He is an expert in doing this."
Gee, did you miss the whole Obama campaign? Does CHANGE YOU CAN BELIEVE IN/HOPE? ring a bell?
Trump, an quintessential oligarchs himself, famous for marrying supermodels and losing half of
his Dad's fortune. The MSM long before elections virtually created Trump as Flaccid Clown TV persona.
This Flaccid Clown made himself a mirror of a fascist American society that through him can
bask in its ugliness, ignorance and narcissism of exceptional mediocrity of Trump_vs_deep_state.
Trump salesman has qualities of a self-invented cult leader, characterized by extreme bullying,
intimidation, threats and/or violence and disregard to humanity reaching fair beyond any acceptable
human conduct. He is a phony opportunist, a sewage excretion of his personal puny psychopathic
insecurities for profit and fame with no other program, idea or thought behind it.
He did not appear on the political stage accidentally, he has his role to play and he is playing
it well so far, whatever establishment wants him to play. These are political puppets, stooges,
chicken hawks, and front-men of the establishment who are scared, afraid that their services will
no longer be needed by true ruling elite who run this abhorrent regime for about 240 years..
This Flaccid Clown is an artificial phenomenon. He is a media phenomenon "hired by a establishment
", to tell establishment "You are fired" in a group psychotic episode of surrealistic transference
of a cartoon character of reality show into empty desperate lives of those rejected by ruling
elite, unable to effectively serve it or submit to power and hence forcefully alienated from delusions
of American Serf Dream. He is uploaded by his oligarchic handlers, with misconceived populist
utterances passes for ideas that he has no interest in, no understanding of or any intention or
intellectual capability to follow. This is all about the show, and he is the entertainer of the
moment.
The establishment has all the bullets, criminal, political, economic, tax evasion, socio-sexual,
financial to kill Trump candidacy in a week, even to indict him. Few front pages with this Flaccid
Clown portrayed as a pariah, Russian spy, a commie, baby killer, thief, Antichrist, terrorist
supporter, with no facts but innuendos would unravel his shallow support among desperate, scared,
confused, blind, revenge seeking mob who now supports and idolizes him regardless what nonsense
he is uttering. All bullets are ready to fire unless he submits and betrays his following and
that's what he did just recently with bending over to AIPAC and refusing to run as independent
if not nominated, another betrayal of his mindless, raging hormones followers. After all he does
what he is hired to do.
What he is actually used for by the Oligarchic establishment that supports him so far (Christie
[and others, establishment bullies], is first one to admit it) is to galvanize desperate public,
who finds his ignorance appealing and refreshing on such a calcified political stage of puppetry
as well as moves those who see in him a danger of fascist narcissistic megalomaniac taking power.
All the political commotion is aimed to insidiously entice Americans all to rush to voting
booths thinking that they could make any slightest difference in their own lives and life of the
nation by supporting or denouncing a puppet of the ruling elite.
Unfortunately, this time as well, millions of irrational, desperate and helpless in their daily
lives electoral zombies, under a spell of exciting political masquerade, are aligning themselves
with an anointed winner of a popularity/beauty contest, in a delusional feat of transference of
a fraction of elite's power to themselves just for a second of a thrill of power. And they will
continue to authorize their own suicide mission, since even baseless, continually disproved hope
of any chance of influencing of the political realm via means of begging is the last thing that
dies.
What's really shocking but beyond the political sensitivity level of Americans is a fact he
is yet to formulate any coherent policy he would like to implement and that's the plan, so he,
if anointed by the establishment will be able to backpedal, deny or ignore his utterances, leaving
gullible crowd betrayed yet again.And people he "listens" to are all hopeless neocons or wall
street hacks, symbols of status quo.
Most of Americans, not unlike a cargo cult, are impatient, nervous, excited and scared sitting
and waiting before an impregnable curtain of political manipulation of the ruling elite, turning
to magic, superstition, appeasement or begging for mercy or praying for a caprice of good will
to save them, while blatantly abandoning their unalienable rights to self-determination and democratic
system of people's rule, based on equality in the law, and one voter one vote principle.
May be the elites will conclude that if mob wants this Flaccid Clown, they will get a them
this Flaccid Clown as a puppet figure sitting in oval office replica in Hollywood following and
watching himself.
It is old principle of rulers: "Vox Populi Vox Dei" that was originally applied in the totalitarian
Roman Imperial regime during imperial games at Circus Maximum and Coliseum as a pressure valve
release for unruly, enraged of cronyism, and fixed, unfair rules of aristocracy, roman proletariat
i.e. people with no power, to pacify them cheaply and prevent costly riots and killing expenses.
What we have here is:
Vox Animali, Vox Inferi.
Trump loves two things, himself and $. He'll follow the $ if elected, by doing what his owners tell
him to do. The sensible utterances by Trump are an act, designed to siphon support from other candidates.
After Change We Can Bereave In and Mr. 9/11 GW Bush, I don't know what to believe. Trump's populist
rhetoric sounds good to the ears of working proles and it amuses me that Chosenites on both the Left
and Right side of the aisle as well as the media seem to be worried about him.
This was supposed to be the end of the white male rule not only in Amerikkka, but also in formerly
homogeneous Western Europe, ushered in by economic migrants, refugees often escaping from non-war
zones, large explosions and heavily armed Wahabbs killing people in the train stations, bus stops,
highways and by ways of these countries!
What went wrong??
What's the problem with the haters here. trump wants to keep NATO out of Russia's hair. WHY slam
him for that. even if he doesn't mean it, he can't suffer an electoral defeat now without making
it radio active for another candidate to see her talk that way. what part of that do you not
understand? It doesn't matter if he's just a puppet if the elites see yet another anti
interventionist electoral phenomenon.
"But if I were a voter in the U.S. my position would be based on economic policies. There Bernie
Sanders is surely preferable to Trump and very much preferable to Clinton."
Becoming another apologist Mr. b? Your previous "Strategist" votes bring about another Neoliberal
warmonger in Canada?
This is where we stand apart and will remain respectful to you and readers.
Between Killary, Bernie and whoever, I will vote Trump for now , he's no different for
any politicians - liars and warmonger . Trump may likely destroy the two party systems and
brought change we need so badly.
What if he (Trump) starts another endless war? Do you really believe Killary and Bernie any different?
The answers, better the devil who will start another war than the one who lies? My opinion, Bernie
is far more dangerous than Obomo another Trojan horse.
I maybe a minority here, but in the real world the numbers are growing - as I came across anyone
I met regardless parties affiliation.
Economic..?. blah! You believe in Fiat money, Wall Street or Banksters?
Trump is nasty, mean, corrupt, a bully and a nut, but he is the only candidate who offers a chance
(however slim) of breaking the stinking rotten corrupt status quo in any way.
I am sorry that he coddled the rotten, murderous Israel. But we are too far down the rabbit hole
- these days all of Congress must express their devotion to Israel. This is craziness, but it is
a sickening fact. They're all Xtians, too. This is also nuts and disgusting pandering.
It's going to take a nasty Republican like Trump to break (or to make a valiant effort to crack)
the nasty machine.
Obama has shown himself and the corrupt D Party to have been a comprehensive, dismal failure for
the common people. The D Party offers no hope and no change.
Perhaps it won't be necessary for Trump to malign and attack the BDS movement as the slavering
Hillary is doing. It's running off her fangs and down the front of her blood- soaked shirt.
Trumps non-interventionist line ( not his policy, because making it up as you go along is not policy.
) is BS. That freak would be a gleeful war criminal by bombing a dozen countries if it got him more
popularity, or he needed a boost from the polls, or he invested in the arms industry. All the non-interventionist
BS, is just a PR counter to his establishment rivals. He doesn't mean any of of it.
The Sanders campaign is a sick joke. Sacrificing genocide against people across the world so Americans
can have a bit better health care is disgusting.
Sanders has been so weak in taking on the evil US Empire and the US capitalist establishment,
then how can he do anything as president where there will be much more pressure as president then
there is now. Sanders would be the lamest sheep political history, and not because of the resistance
by the elite, but because Sanders has no resistance. That way lies childish delusions.
Sanders exists to give motivational speeches in some areas of social politics and that's all he is
good for.
" The Sanders campaign is a sick joke. Sacrificing genocide against people across the world
so Americans can have a bit better health care is disgusting.
Behind Bernie is MoveON, Soros "invested" over a billion to keep Israel the endless slaughter
of Palestinians civilians.
If anyone represents the ruling Establishment, it is the Washington Post. They did force Richard
Nixon out for no better reason than his withdrawal of the troops from Vietnam. Hardly the
criminal acts that are ignored today. The editors' words are clear; endless war including the use
of nuclear weapons. Damn the consequences.
in a world where packaging/appearance is everything and content means nothing - trump is the
ticket.. the usa and the world by extension get what the marketers/propagandists have to offer...
forget about anything to do with content..
Trump's vaunted "independence" would prove a problem to him as president because the ruling elite
could attack his sources of income (the trump biz) and destroy his independence. If elected, he
will be subjected to every nasty attack to sway him to do the bidding of the foreign policy
establishment. He might want to call Putin for tips on how to deal with the nastiness.
b, thank you. I agree entirely. Bernie would be better than a pig in a poke, and a b* in a poke would
be worse.
However, the point is moot because votecounting in the primaries has the overwhelming probability
of having been fraudulent. And I would be shocked if the actual election votes were honestly counted.
Here's what I heard in the Trump voice on the radio first thing, "My first priority is to get
rid of that Iran agreement. That's a bad deal. For our safety. For Israel's safety. That deal needs
to come down. That was a bad deal, and we gave them $--.--!" (He was talking about the part of their
own money which we returned to them years after we "froze" their money.
If I vote this election, it will be for Jill Stein. Foreign policy is #1 to me, and no other
candidate comes close. I don't play the LOTE game or any variation. Besides, the majority of the
voting population are so dependent on what their TV, radio or whatever tells them, there's no
room for sanity.
Trump is simply stripping the "politically correct" packaging off of decades-long fascist rhetoric:
"welfare queens" against the poor, "criminal environments" against the black, clash of civilization
against the Muslims, "axis of evil" against any opponent of Us suprematism, etc
so now he comes along and draws conclusions ... except for the "infinite war" meme, which is a
purely imperialistic effort that seemingly doesn't resonate anymore with the people's frustration
and anger
I think Trump's fans after a few more months of the same speech where money is prominent will be
fed up.
The trouble is that it would be too late and Trump would have offered the presidency to Hillary on
a silver plate.
We'll have to get used to the idea of seeing that witch often on the TV when she will be
president.
perhaps all this will be rendered moot, we'll have an 'event,' Obama will initiate the
Continuity of Operations
(COOP) executive directive...
whatever, it matters little...
in the words of the late, great American composer and statesman, Mr. Frank Zappa:
The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion.
At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery,
they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will
see the brick wall at the back of the theater
It seems to me that Trump appeals to a large group of people who have been screwed. He is a true
populist that says things that shake up the establishment like calling politicians "puppets".
He's vague about where he stands on many issues to allow for moving toward the center after the
nomination. Along those lines, he sometimes pays lip service to the establishment so as to reduce
friction.
Sander's position are much much more detailed and people-friendly. But Sanders doesn't seem to
be willing to do what it takes to win. What does it take? Attacking Hillary's character. Demanding
media time.
And Sanders hasn't created a Movement. He is too wedded to the Democratic Party to do that. A
real progressive movement might switch allegiance to the Greens if Sanders isn't the Democratic nominee.
Sanders wants to deliver his voters to the Democratic nominee (likely to be Hillary).
Each of us has to decide for themselves: can we trust a demagogue (Trump)? Can we trust a career
politician someone that doesn't fight to win (Sanders)? Can we trust ANYONE that comes through the
duopoly?
#2-not anti-latino but illegals latino smart head !!!!
The point I had been mulling over is whether Trump is aware of the forces that rule the world and
whether he would take them on. Would he open up the can of worms behind 9/11, lies to go into Iraq,
Benghazi etc. Well my answer to that is he will if he has to (strike that) if the puppeteers decide
that they want to.
I think that he will be the next president, the Hegelian Dialectic that is being set up is that
the "Government" has been taken over by bad elements and Trump will lead the charge against them
as a "non-bought" free American and maybe the Clinton's take the fall. This of course directs anger
away from the real perps. I base this on F William Engdahl in a wide ranging interview promoting
his latest book on the Genesis
of ISIS opening up a glimpse of the lifestyles of the wealthy at a place called "studio 54".
I think that the next US president will be the one who "collapses" the dollar (the puppetmasters
decide when this will happen, their puppet will be the one that deals with the resulting upheaval,
and the pieces to deal with this are being put on the chessboard right now (Expect ISIS activity
in the US).
BTW, Engdahl makes a prediction in the video that "something big" will draw American boots on
the ground into Syria.
There is Hiltery Clinton: "What difference does it make." Out damn spot from my
hands. Her victims are many, but who is counting.
... when we left the WH, we were broke. Hmmm. In 2008, a $35 million campaign debt was magically
paid by anon donor. Her history is documentable, too many links. In the Whitewater saga, Hillary
could not recall what work she did at the Rose Law firm for client Madison Guarantee Savings and
Loan bank and, when subpoenaed by Prosecutors said she could not find the billing records.
A circus? If only the consequences were not so serious.
You think the USA society will remain intact at the end of 2016?
On Voting: HRC is right. What difference does it make? All bought and paid for. You cannot become
President unless selected by the guys and gals managing the Deep State.
Forget the elephants and donkeys. A journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step -
write-in elections
. I'm all ears as regards a better plan. We need to stop complaining/chasing our tails and instead
to plan, organize, and to seize power to effect real change.
If we'd begun in 2004 we'd be very nearly home by now. So let's begin in 2016. Just as 2016 has
succeeded 2004, whether we choose to continue to suck our thumbs or to act, the leaves will fall
off our calendars and the year 2028 will arrive, one way or another ... I'd prefer another.
A lot of Americans have developed such a low opinion of politicians and politics as usual that
they believe that an outsider with no experience as an elected official can come in and improve
the situation.
Yes, well said. We don't really know what Trump will do - but we DO know what Hillary Clinton, Kasich,
Rubio etc. will do and it's terrifying. We can at least HOPE that Trump will be somewhat less horrible
than Hillary Vlad-the-Impaler Clinton.
They say that 'hope is not a plan.' Actually hope is a plan - just not a very good one. But still
better than cutting your own throat.
I do disagree with you about Sanders. Yes, I mostly like him on foreign policy too, but economics?
Sorry, his open-borders immigration policy WILL crush the average American into third-world poverty
no matter what else he does. Because nobody but nobody beats the law of supply and demand. "People
are the ultimate resource" is the slogan of India where over a half a billion people are chronically
malnourished and the standard of living is inferior to late Medieval England...
Funny that not that long ago Sanders admitted that open-borders immigration was something dreamed
up by the Koch brothers to ensure a supply of cheap labor, but now he's gone full Wall Street on
the issue and he's lost me.
P @ 22: Thanks for the link. And the veil is lifted a bit further.
Trump's cloying tribute to AIPAC made him look like a penitent buffoon in search of redemption as
he desperately scanned the crowd anxiously anticipating and appearing relieved at the sound of applause
after each sentence he uttered.
When it comes to Hillary, however, she has the record of past actions (and even more machinations)
to prove her swooning fealty to The Lobby. Had her groveling not earned her enough kudos with AIPAC,
Hillary could have read to the convention the contents of her recently disclosed email in which she
explained how putting Syria neck under the butcher's knife was salutary for Israel.
Trump has been clear about his economic policies. He has criticized the TPP, H1B visas, lopsided
trade deals, offshoring US jobs and stated repeatedly he wants to place a tariff on companies that
move to low wage countries.
On the other hand, Sanders is completely inconsistent by calling for open borders while claiming
to be for higher wages. How is flooding the market with cheap labor going to raise wages?
On foreign policy Trump has questioned the logic of eliminating secular dictators who kill terrorists.
If is was a mistake to remove Saddam & Gaddafi, then how can we do the same to Assad? Also Trump
has said countries receiving US Military protection will start paying for it's cost and that money
will be used to rebuild US infrastructure.
Regarding ISIS Trump has called for neighboring countries to send their troops backed by US airpower.
He also thinks Gulf countries should pay for refugees' safe zones.
On the other hand, Sanders says the US should be "tough but not stupid" in destroying ISIS. Now
that sounds like a "pig in a poke" foreign policy if I ever heard one.
Thank you Ben @ 18. Stealing the election is really the most important issue, I agree. https://richardcharnin.wordpress.com/
is the site of a statistician who studies election/primary fraud for us.
Elsewhere on the site he indicates that the public chose Bernie, not Hillary in MA, MO, MI & IL.
Also the exact method by which Richard knows this. Did you know that once the results are in they
ADJUST the exit polls to agree?
It's fantastic the amt of info he has; he even knows how many votes on which type of machines where
two types are available.
So it's really a tragedy. If Bernie had been allowed to do better at the beginning he might have
created a bandwagon effect. In those 4 states people didn't vote for that horrible woman.
Everything I'm reading at conservative/activist news blogs is Trump is being sold as an 'insurgency'
candidate. Conservatives have been working to kick the RINO/neocons out of the leadership of the
national R Party for years. They see Trump as the guy who can crack the ceiling so to speak and they
are pulling out all of the stops to get him to the General. Period.
Their coalition that is growing enormously, daily, which includes moderate Evangelicals (if there
is such a thing), conservatives, some Tea Party types and more conservatives.
Many here may dismiss Trump, but I'd suggest that would not be wise. Like it or not, he is a keen
strategist, he's extremely well connected which means his peers are intensely intimidated, he's a
deal maker and breaker, he's been working the conservative side of the aisle for at least a decade
now, he uses people to his advantage yet their is a shady loyalty that goes with it...shady as in
shadows.
As for Hillary, her base just isn't fired up. BUT, and this is a big BUT, when she gets cornered
she comes out fighting, and when chooses to 'turn it on' she acts/behaves like a fighter and she
becomes unstoppable.
Bernie, well, he's Bernie...his policy proposals are worth looking at. He's not offensive. He's
not a Neanderthal. And he's decent. The likelihood of Hillary being indicted is nil, IMHO, thus,
his challenge lies with how he out 'fight's' her and I'm not convinced he has the MOJO to succeed.
As for Jill Stein. When she ran the last time, I tried to do a basic background check on her.
I'm an A2 girl, that is I wanted to learn if she met the three qualifications laid out in the Constitution,
which is Article II, Section 5. I ran a very novice check on her, I admit, but I found it difficult
to learn anything about her upbringing, local schools she's attended, her mom and dad, grandma and
grandpa, brothers and sisters. Dead ends everywhere.
All of the above search info is readily found on just about any of us, which makes me suspect,
that is, she doesn't meet the U.S. Contitution's Presidential qualifications. She may. But I couldn't
confirm it. Which in my mind, should be relatively easy. There is something 'amiss' about her. Just
instinct. Can't place my finger on it.
And Cruz? Ha. Ppppffffttttt....very dishonest IMO. And doesn't have a credible shot at the General.
Donald's meeting with Sheldon was a fait ac·com·pli. He's there man as evidenced by his AIPAC
debut...
Engdahl says no hop in Trump. Trump is a Mafia Don with a pompadour. Direct Mafia Ties via casinos,
attorneys, dad's construction biz. Likes Hillary even less.
Engdahl talks a good game and backs it up, but no mention of Israel's role in the balkanization
of MENA states and the remapping of MENA in accordance w/ Yinon/PNAC Plans.
AN @ 42: Do you REALLY believe the "Donald" will be able to live up to his progressive rhetoric?
If so, I applaud your faith. I, on the other hand, do not. We could well find out in the future.
...
I maybe a minority here, but in the real world the numbers are growing - as I came across anyone
I met regardless parties affiliation.
Economic..?. blah! You believe in Fiat money, Wall Street or Banksters?
Posted by: Jack Smith | Mar 22, 2016 3:33:59 PM | 11
I suspect that you've zeroed in on the Trump 'difference'.
All he needs to get into the White House is to keep dangling the insinuation that he'll be the least
worst of the last dozen or so POTUSes. And he can do that with everything except his tongue tied
behind his back. I'm also inclined to agree that if he turns out not to be anti-establishment then
the next POTUS probably will be.
#2 Trump is anti-latino? That is news to me. I believe he talked about MEXICO. Mexico is not Latin America,
please do not use the race card. Trump makes lots of sense, NO MORE illegal immigration, out, out out
I say. The real unemployment rate in the country is stratospheric. There is a black boy in Chicago who
needs that job, there is a young white boy in Appalachia who needs that job, there is a young native
american boy on a res who also needs that job. Everytime I hear, "these immigrants are doing jobs americans
don't want to do" I get sick to my stomach. Enough is enough.
Posted by: Fernando Arauxo | Mar 22, 2016 11:01:22 PM |
49
b, sorry for the OT, but CISA is even worse than CISPA & they are s'posed to vote for it this week.
I guess it would affect you too. Just what we don't need-- business controlling what we say on the
internet.
"....In 2009, President Obama stood before an adoring crowd in the centre of Prague, in the heart
of Europe. He pledged himself to make "the world free from nuclear weapons". People cheered and some
cried. A torrent of platitudes flowed from the media. Obama was subsequently awarded the Nobel Peace
Prize.
It was all fake. He was lying.........In the last eighteen months, the greatest build-up of military
forces since World War Two – led by the United States – is taking place along Russia's western frontier.
Not since Hitler invaded the Soviet Union have foreign troops presented such a demonstrable threat
to Russia. What makes the prospect of nuclear war even more dangerous is a parallel campaign against
China..........The propaganda laying the ground for a war against Russia and/or China is no different
in principle. To my knowledge, no journalist in the Western "mainstream" – a Dan Rather equivalent,
say – asks why China is building airstrips in the South China Sea...............
................In the circus known as the American presidential campaign, Donald Trump
is being presented as a lunatic, a fascist. He is certainly odious ; but he is also a media
hate figure. That alone should arouse our scepticism ...........
Trump's views on migration are grotesque, but no more grotesque than those of David Cameron.
It is not Trump who is the Great Deporter from the United States, but the Nobel Peace Prize winner,
Barack Obama............
.........Most of America's wars (almost all of them against defenceless countries) have been launched
not by Republican presidents but by liberal Democrats: Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton,
Obama .................."
Further to John Pliger on China.... 2016 presidential election is crucial whether our elected
liar will go to war with China. Watch YouTube (South Front Channel) US massive buildup in South
China sea with known lapdogs especially The Jap and Australia. Missing is Singapore's US naval
base, one of the over a thousands bases around the world encircle Russia and China.
Mr. Trump just made a bold appeal for prompt and severe application of torture. The combo of "some
sensible non-interventionism" and torture somehow lacks appeal, and perhaps it is just me.
In the meantime, as I surfed for a direct quote, I got distracted. American politics is something
indeed. A group styling itself "Make America Awesome" distributed in Utah the picture of Mrs. Cruz
from her maiden days looking, well, awesome. Cruz cleared the caucuses in Utah (and so did Sanders
without similarly appealing pics of his wife).
Khalek read racist and homophobic statements to the interviewees, claiming they were made by Trump.
Little did they know that the quotes actually came from the mouth of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu or other Israeli leaders.
Donald Trump has done more to awaken the American people than anyone in recent memory. His
repeated mentioning of our massive $19 Trillion dollar deficit, job killing trade deals (no one
has mentioned NAFTA since Patrick Buchanan), getting us out of NATO, our taxpayers paying for
everyone's defense, how lobbyists and special interest groups control our politicians like
puppets, and that immigration and especially Muslim immigration is very bad for America, is
priceless. His bringing up Saudi Arabia's responsibility for 9/11 from the depths of the
Orwellian memory hole is also worth mentioning. For a while there I was hoping he was going to
mention Vice President Joe Biden's, 4 Star General Clark, and US General Martin Dempsey's
revealing that ISIS is a fake terrorist organization funded, controlled, and armed by Saudi
Arabia, Qatar, UAE, & Turkey, and indirectly funded by the US, France, UK, & Co with their huge
arms sales to those same nations who than give them to their terrorist puppets. Viva the real
revolution of truth!
ISIS mortars slammed into the base, dubbed Firebase Bell, killing Staff Sergeant Louis Cardin
and wounding several more Marines. Some of the wounded had to be evacuated out of the country
in order to receive proper treatment.
Cardin, 27, from Temecula, California, was on his fifth deployment in a war zone. He had served
three tours of duty in Afghanistan and one previous tour in Iraq before he was airlifted into
Makhmour last month as part of the deployment of the US Marines 26th Expeditionary Unit from the
USS Kearsarge, a troop carrier stationed in the Persian Gulf.
On Monday, a small ISIS unit attacked the base, home to 200 Marines, with small arms fire.
They were driven off without casualties. At that point, Pentagon spokesmen acknowledged the existence
of Firebase Bell, the first US-only facility to be set up in Iraq since the formal end of the
US military occupation of the country in December 2011.
Five tours. How long is a tour? A year? Time between tours? Louis Cardin was a Marine stationed abroad,
fighting the US wars of aggression for how many years? Five? Seven? More? Did he start at 18? Poor
bastard. Poor bastards he undoubtedly killed, too.
How can it be that there is not even one outlier campaigning on 'give peace a chance' or its equivalent?
Or is there? I haven't heard of one.
Trump went to AIPAC to make nice so they would stop the propaganda re his campaign.
From the looks of it today,he failed,as from the Graun to The NY lying times to Wapoo,the venom for
him remains.
Sanders is terrible foreign policy wise,he is totally invested in the thought Israel is unique and
worthy of support,he calls Hezbollah the terrorists,and backed Cast Lead and PE as rational response
to bottle rockets by mice trapped in a cage of Zionist steel.I do believe him pretty good domestically,and
he has called for border control as a logical extension of nationhood,although yes,he needs Latino
and black voters,hence his call of Obomba being good.Its bad enough blacks won't vote for the NY
Jew wo estranging them even more.
HRC tough?A fighter?How about a bubble headed bobblehead of nada,a MSM call girl for Zion.(nobody
else would want her)
That leaves Trump as our only American hope to lead US from the rocks of neoliberalism from Zion.
DS @ 63 said: "Donald Trump has done more to awaken the American people than anyone in recent memory.
"
Where the issues you mentioned, that's partly true. Gotta' give Trump credit for being relevant
on certain subjects, that's where he gets much of his support. But Sanders mentions those subjects,
and more in every speech.
I have to assume you've never heard Sanders speak. Even HRC mentions populist issues sometimes.
The challenge, as always, is...Can their actions match their rhetoric? I, for one, doubt it.
Proposition: BERNIE, A PROP FOR KILLARY (Team "D" establishment)
Given Bernie's milquetoast criticism of Killary and Obombo, I've started contemplating he's a
decoy to create the illusion of a progressive choice within Team "D", to keep progressives engaged
with Team "D", and, in the end, convince them to vote for Killary.
Considerations IMO supporting this proposition:
1. Killary has not pivoted to the left at all. Bernie's been ineffective at changing the Team
"D" platform, which suggests more of a stage prop than actual political threat.
2. As a corollary, Bernie would've had more influence on Team "D" had he run an independent campaign.
3. Had Bernie -- or someone else with at least a little "progressive street cred" -- not entered
the Team "D" primary, progressives would've gasped over a "Hillary only" primary. In turn, they would've
started an independent campaign that would, even in failure in the general election, cost Killary
too many votes for her to win. "A prop for Killary" was a prerequisite for her success.
4. As stated at the outset, Bernie's milquetoast criticism suggests he's trying to avoid wounding
her so badly that she can't win the general election.
Trump and the Clintons are friends and good friends. They are not simply casually acquainted because
they are all rich New Yorkers. Any casual web search will reveal that the two families are close
and thick. Would anyone believe Bill Clinton and Donald Trump could spend hours and hours together
on the golf course and not talk politics?
I don't have any positive evidence that Hillary and the Donald conspired to rig the current election
season. It does beggar belief they have not coordinated in an way.
How can it be that there is not even one outlier campaigning on 'give peace a chance' or its
equivalent
the neocon mindset prevails across the political spectrum and, in fact, it seems to me that most
Americans are pretty much jake with it as well. what's precipitating the currently rising citizenly
angst is the currently falling citizenly purchasing power.
(but in keeping with the adage that 'no crisis should go to waste' it seems a good opportunity
to flesh out the root causes and give them a good public airing)
Trump is what America is, which is cleverly masked by marketing in Hillary, Bernie, Ted, and all
the rest. It won't matter who get elected. Neocons = Neoliberals. More millions will die and more
destruction by the Empire.
If, a big IF, it is the case that the Repubs. now accept Trump, it is because they are afraid
of splitting the Republican Party (it is split, but that's not public) thus destroying it.
They want to conserve the advantages they have with a 'face unity for the public' - Senate, House,
power brokers, funding, corruption, Big Corps, Banks, Energy, etc. etc. - capitalising on the past.
Far prefer that to winning the Presidency. (See Obama-Romney.)
H. Clinton is guaranteed to continue the 'old system', like Obama, but even more collaborative?
(Aka 'Unity Governement' coupled with fake oppositions…)
Possibly, also because they can't stand the runner-up, Cruz, a minor figure, an objectionable
nut-job. A party that proposes two 'final' candidates whom the Cadres despise or even passionately
hate. Heh. History will make hay…
The Republicans are half-burned toast, the whole system is exposed as a decrepit sham, yet they
will try to hang on.
Imho, Trump cannot win against Sanders, and likely not against H. Clinton either. Once again,
the Repubs. will bank on a loss, accept it, to survive, and in their minds perhaps find Glory Another
Day. So accepting Trump as the nominee (if they do) is just part the same-old.
In any case, while the US prez. has tremendous powers, the US is run by other actors behind the
curtain. The Circus trumpets on.
Donald Trump carries with him several flaws: Under informed; self Absorbed; lacks real grace; too
combative in ways that eliminate potential supporters etc etc. One trait I believe the Donald does
not sport: He's not a liar. A Salesman, yes. But not a liar.
He is the collective middle finger of millions of Americans who feel they've been ridden hard
and put up wet by the elites in general and more specifically, by the Republican Party leadership
and those Republican losers in Congress like Boehner, Ryan, McConnell, Graham, McCain and others.
He is/was smart enough to sense the frustrations of the forgotten and repeatedly parrot THEIR
talking points. He's preaching to the choir and the choir is growing geometrically larger, day by
day. One of the posters above clammers for a street revolution, decrying any actions short of that
as ineffective. Trump for all of his character defects has ignited a prairie fire of contempt for
the system as we know it. The horse is out of the barn, for good.
Despite his pandering, I still believe he's the best America has and what America deserves. The only
way to the other side of this is through it. There is no way around it. Hold your nose but don't
close your eyes, otherwise you'll miss all the fun. Weeeee!!!!!!
karlof1 @79 Thanks for the link. Lots of good thoughts in the article.
Unfortunately, what it doesn't talk about directly is our worship as Western humans of the Gawd
of Mammon which is represented by private finance. Humans have not evolved to the point where we
have made finance a public tool. It is still a private tool of the global plutocrats and not just
America has to unify over the effort to throw off the jackboot of private finance. Worldwide the
curtain hiding the effects of private finance needs to be ripped off to show the core of our form
of social organization.
Humanity has made great strides in the past to define a more humanistic and egalitarian world.
The execution of efforts to instantiate those goals have been corrupted by the remaining "non sharing/public"
aspects of our social organization, the major of which is private finance. There used to be an argument
that the global plutocratic families represented the best and the brightest. That was a myth to begin
with and is now resulting in our species being channeled into extinction.
All banking worldwide needs to be "nationalized" and inheritance needs to be neutered to stop
producing families that accumulate enough to effect ongoing social policy.
There used to be an argument that the global plutocratic families represented the best and the
brightest. That was a myth to begin with...
The global plutocrats cannot be described this way any longer. Doesn't sell.
The new propaganda is two-pronged:
First, commoners en masse are told that they are extremely bright and gifted (mockingly, but they
relish the compliments!) highly intelligent, can-do spirited, tenacious, rugged individualists, willing
to sacrifice, help their neighbor, bootstraps and etc. (exceptional Americans!).
Second: obscene wealth and usury is excused (and applauded!) because these rich folks possess
this same can-do spirit and the other traits which they have simply applied in an effective manner.
Reinforcement of same is done by pretending that every American begins on a level playing field
and he was born with the same potential and opportunities as Mitt Romney or Donald Trump or any of
the Bush Klan.
The persistent propagandizing manifests itself thus: If I win the lottery, I want to keep all
the money, so like the rich people, I am in favor of low taxes or a flat tax (even better!).
Do you agree with the argument for a Steady-State Economy with one global currency backed by specie
and processed through a globalized public bank, or would you keep everything at the State-level,
eliminating private, fractional banking?
Any collection of oligarchs - the few - will craft a world that suits themselves and their own
perceived interests. To hell with everyone and everything else. In 'a nice way', of course.
Democracy is essential because it enables the oligarch's victims to countermand their suicidal
ways. Their victims (ourselves) are the onliest ones who can even perceive the oligarchs' errors.
Oligarchy, as masturbation is said to do, makes its practitioners deaf, dumb, and blind. Democracy
is not a luxury, something 'nice' to have, it is essential - if we humans and life on earth as we've
known it during our so brief,
banal sojourn
is to continue.
I must admit that I do not understand American public. I made a mistake reading hastily this morning.
Now correction: "Make America Awesome" distributed in Utah pics of Mrs. Trump (not Cruz!) from her maiden
years looking totally awesome, and yet, take that! it was Mr. Cruz who cleared Utah caucuses. I must
admit that web search "Heidi Cruz images" does return some appealing pics like
this beaty , but apparently, Ted did not replace his wife in, like, ages.
Posted by: Piotr Berman | Mar 23, 2016 7:13:40 PM |
87
It is possible to watch the circus without picking sides Trump has never done anything worthwhile
or meaningful in his life and there is zero evidence to suggest that has changed, As for the rest
of em. they're all just the usual hacks running against Trump the unusual hack.
Which got me thinking I wonder if trump travels with a food taster. Not that it will do him any good
the poisons currently in use seem to be slow acting.
Take the case of
Rob Ford who had become an exceeding embrassment to the conservative wing of the neoliberal movement
just as trump has. The progression of that fellow's illness syncs pretty neatly with his rise fall
and rise again.
No matter how much the media tipped buckets of shit on him it just seemed to make him more popular
which is somewhat similar to the trump. Ford's illness appears to be similar to what Yasser Arafat
went through.
Of course saying this stuff out loud generates calls for the tin foil bonnet but I do hafta say that
a helluva a lot of pols I'm aware of have fallen off the twig early - particularly those who don't
conform to the 'rules'.
And that is the thing with trump - if he doesn't suddenly get sick you do have to wonder exactly
how beyond the pale the amerikan political establishment considers him to be.
b: "...Donald Trump toured Washington yesterday for backroom meetings with Republican party bigwigs..."
1st Republican Bigwig (standing in corner): Ok Mr Trump, well done at AIPAC, glorious stuff. You've
unlocked the Back Room.
Trump: It's true, I was Huge.
2nd Republican Bigwig: Would you like to come upstairs now Mr Trump...? Or should I say, Don...?
Trump: Ah, sure, let's go upstairs then. And you can call me Don.
2nd Republican Bigwig (stands up, leans on table): Now, Mr Trump... Repeat after me "what is building
7? I've never heard of building 7"
@psychoH 82
Inheritance does indeed work against the evolution of humankind. Who knows how far along we'd be
now if it were not for idiots, clowns and tyrants assuming wealth upon conception. One should only
leave enough dosh for cremation or burial. Each person with varying amounts of desire, more or less,
to contribute what they can inside humankinds' most precious commodity - our time.
Your solution is exactly right. But we won't get there unless the global corporate-owned mass
propaganda system is largely replaced by a democratic mass media.
Most people aren't smart/wise enough and/or just don't have the free time and educational resources
to figure out on their own who the enemy is and how to fight it. And such resources and the free
time to use them declines for the bottom 80% in the evermore inegalitarian world the financiers are
creating.
karlof1 @whatever asked
"
Do you agree with the argument for a Steady-State Economy with one global currency backed by specie
and processed through a globalized public bank, or would you keep everything at the State-level,
eliminating private, fractional banking?
"
Ending private finance must happen globally and I believe we need to learn how to get along globally
to survive. Isolating a public utility like finance to nation states, IMO, is a fools game. After
a while we would just end up where we are now.
We need to "grow up" as a species and throw off the vestiges of the middle ages with Kings and
such. There are 8+ billion of us and its sadly laughable how little advancement we have made in some
ways. The circus we live led by the global plutocrats is a sick legacy to the children who have to
live with the mess we have allowed to continue.
If you would have told me after the Trotskyite Liberal Neocons sabotaged and destroyed Patrick Buchanan's
1996 (prophetic) Anti-NAFTA/WTO, Immigration Moratorium, New Hadrian's Wall, stopping the US's endless
wars, and Cultural War campaign, and that Donald Trump would be the one to become its standard bearer,
I would have said that is absurd.
On another note, I read a book called "Conspiracy Against The Dollar" and in that book which was
written in the 70's, Ross Perot popped up at a billionaire Globalist insider meeting with the Bush
crime family & associates. Remember Ross Perot was created to split the Anti-NAFTA/WTO vote so that
the Globalist CFR golden boy Clinto could get elected, and relected. He than tried very hard to keep
Buchanan off the Reform party ticket in 2000. Notice how after the anti-NAFTA/WTO was passed and
the movement destroyed, he disappeared
The Trotskyite Neocons ran "Songbird" McCuckoo & the choke artist Romney so that Obama would win,
and in 96 the pathetic Beltway insider Bob Dole.
Daniel Shays @ 64
Those things you say are true. Trump threw a lot of light on subject matter many can never even think
of approaching. He deserves credit for that, no doubt. It's trump, and so you have to ask, does he
use it all to become the human headline that he is...? Of course, most likely. Will he double on
those efforts as Prez...? Unlikely.
Trump had a good limber up for the AIPAC event at the Jewish Republican Coalition presidential
show in December. Told the crowd " you're not gonna like me, don't want you're money" about 5 times...
Highlight reel stuff. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PQYOvDmWqjo
"Trump is what America is, which is cleverly masked by marketing in Hillary, Bernie, Ted,
and all the rest. It won't matter who get elected. Neocons = Neoliberals. More millions will die
and more destruction by the Empire."
"If you see voters as rational you'll be a terrible politician," Adams writes on his blog. "People
are not wired to be rational. Our brains simply evolved to keep us alive. Brains did not evolve
to give us truth. Brains merely give us movies in our minds that keeps us sane and motivated.
But none of it is rational or true, except maybe sometimes by coincidence."
If one is a firm believer in Enlightenment rationalism (like your humble poster), this while disturbing
must be acknowledged. A contradiction -- one apparently needs to appeal to the emotions to get people
to make rational choices.
Adams notes that the greatest emotional appeal that The Donald has made is to acknowledge the
suffering of the working class, which neither party has really addressed. If there were an effective
labor party here, we proles would be addressing this ourselves.
…a steady state economy, one global currency backed by specie, and processed through a globalized
public bank… ?? - several posts.
Well the 'steady state' part is moot, and globalized not, as Switz. is just a tin-pot postage-stamp
place, but ideas of this type are very much afoot.
In June we will vote the Vollgeld (full money - sovereign money) initiative, which would return
money-creation to one organism, the Central Bank. (link, eng. - campaign site and rather simplistic.)
Commercial banks would effectively be totally neutered. The Swiss love their Central Bank (in contrast
to attitudes to the FED in the US) as its profits are returned to the ppl, half or 2/3.
We will also vote on a guaranteed minimal income (link eng wiki.)
Neither of these initiatives are from the 'left.' They are based on certain monetary theories
and strands of 'libertarian' thought.
As everyone is still reeling from the Feb. 2016 vote serious discussions haven't even started.
This promises to be highly interesting.
Have you seen
Creating
New Money ? I think it's all about finance as a utility and how to get there. Coupled with a
suitable inheritance tax structure it would effect your program, wouldn't it?
To me the salient facit of privately created money is that it's lent into existence. Yes it enriches
its creators, but just as (more?) importantly it puts in place the cornerstone of 'the miracle of
compound interest', the foundation of the unsustainability of 'capitalism'. Rich or poor we're all
headed over the falls in a barrel as long as that's in place.
If you look at the key staff and advisers Bernie looks the best, I think.
Rufus@98
Adams' view of mental processes has demonstrated workability.
Mind and brain have long been considered separate mechanisms, altho they may well intersect.
The psychologist Alice Miller showed how the first 3 years of human life allowed the recording
of potentially] all senses [sights, sounds, etc.] without any inspection or evaluation by a child.
Such could lay dormant or become active at later time as, for example, fixed ideas and unknowingly
interfere with present-time senses and considerations and evaluations.
As for the mind and brain, a crude demo might be:
1. Create a mental picture of a horse being ridden by a whale.
2. Look at your mental picture.
3. Consider that you used the brain compose the picture.
4. Consider that the result [picture} is stored in your mind. Also, you can probably move the
picture around in space.
5. Consider the brain is clearly a physical object and its location is known.
6. Consider the mind is not clearly physical and its location is not clearly known.
And I know that Alice Miller's "First 3 years" studies were preceded by more comprehensive work
of others [much earlier]. Nevertheless, her work explained much to many.
As for "spirit", that subject is a religious hot-potato and I'm feeling too cowardly at the moment
to continue this post.
I thought that I had suggested that I agreed in very large part with Adams view. And just because
we have difficult being rational doesn't mean why shouldn't try. Religion does tend to be a hot one.
in re 99 --
Isn't it funny how the elite always attacks anyone who seeks to challenge their power. The folks
raping us keep telling us, there is no alternative. That's why we reds are always hated.
And I would note, the rising generations have a more positive view of socialism than my Cold War
cohort.
79;You gotta be sh*tting me;Eve Ensler?Common Dreams?Nirvana is just around the corner!
I bet she'll call the hell bitch the words promise.
Cruz posts nude photos of Trumps wife,but won't concede that his wife is now fodder.What a little
pos.The zionists love him.
95;They had a opinion piece in the lying times today,where McCain calls the Gary Cooper character in
For whom the Bell Tolls a personal hero,despite being a commie.What a hoot.
BTW Hemingway might be the most overrated author in American history.Only The Old Man and the Sea holds
anything for me,the rest irrelevant between war turgidity.
He probably realized it too,so he snuffed himself.
Posted by: dahoit | Mar 25, 2016 10:12:12 AM |
111
100;Yeah,real funny dat;Humble.sheesh.And the bit about the enlightenment.And he'll vote for the hell
bitch?double sheesh.
The Zionist have put the enlightenment on permanent hiatus.
Posted by: dahoit | Mar 25, 2016 10:16:13 AM |
112
[I]n order to have access to credit, in order to get money ... you have to pay the banks. ...
It's not production, it's not consumption. The wealth of the One Percent is obtained essentially
by lending money to the 99 Percent and then charging interest on it, and recycling this interest
at an exponentially growing rate. ... The head of Goldman Sachs came out and said that Goldman
Sachs workers are the most productive in the world. That's why they're paid what they are. ...
That's why I used the word parasitism in my book's title. People think of a parasite as simply
taking money, taking blood out of a host or taking money out of the economy. But in nature it's
much more complicated. The parasite can't simply come in and take something. First of all, it
needs to numb the host. It has an enzyme so that the host doesn't realize the parasite's there.
And then the parasites have another enzyme that takes over the host's brain. It makes the host
imagine that the parasite is part of its own body, actually part of itself and hence to be protected.
And 'the banks' have created the money they lend at interest from nothing. Why not ourselves through
our government, right? Just as the fed is doing now, but make the money available to real people
with real needs rather than just to the keep the grand larceny machine's bubbles inflated. 'Growing'.
Until they burst. A few strategic changes to the plumbing could put things right in no time.
"... This type of 'terrorism' fits other well established models that are characterized as a 'strategy of tension', and these historically were planned and executed by assets of US-NATO military intelligence themselves, as part of the Gladio program. ..."
"... So we have to divide between military ISIS - that army of mercenaries, misled youth, drug addicts, ex-prisoners, and religious fanatics on the one hand, backed by Turkey and Gulf monarchies, from the 'ISIS' that is more like Al Qaeda - specially trained intelligence and security assets with knowledge of electronics, bomb making, counter-security/penetration, etc. - who are directly controlled by CIA/Mossad/MI6 and Saudi security and Pakistani ISI. ..."
"... The US-NATO intelligence program, through Gladio has long time assets in Europe, and the last year has been reminiscent of a time during the Cold War when this strategy of tension reached its peak in Europe during the 1970's. ..."
Words always fail to speak to the human tragedy component of yesterday's 'terrorist' attacks, and
my words cannot adequately address them either.
Moreover, it seems in poor judgment to specifically lament over one criminal tragedy, when such
criminal tragic events are so rampant around the world, and are often the product of US-NATO
operations globally.
The terrorist attacks in Belgium are a direct part of US-NATO's plans to perpetuate war and
instability, and destabilization anywhere that the US senses hesitation to fully support its
plans.
I have not yet seen evidence that the individuals who pulled off these attacks have any
connection to any of the named or known 'terrorist' networks. What I have read so far as a
Kurdish media sources claiming that ISIS had claimed responsibility.
For those linking these attacks to the known and documented ISIS/FSA members/soldiers that have
now decided to seek 'refuge' in Europe from the way which they created, I would say that while it
is possible that any such individuals who came as refugees in the recent wave could have been
used in these attacks, such assets already existed and lived in Europe for an indeterminably long
time.
There is a link, however, between the 'refugee' crisis and these terrorist attacks, - and that is
that these are both components of the general destabilization of the middle-east and now, Europe.
From a sociological and strategic point of view, it is difficult to imagine that such
'reverberations' were not foreseen, and therefore expected, and as such perhaps even viewed as
desirable by the powers that be. Which powers that be do I speak of?
This type of 'terrorism' fits other well established models that are characterized as a 'strategy
of tension', and these historically were planned and executed by assets of US-NATO military
intelligence themselves, as part of the Gladio program.
It is unlikely in my view that ISIS, in the meaningful sense of the term, was behind this.
Terrorist attacks such as this have a purpose for actual terrorist groups when they are linked
with demands, a quid pro quo, release of prisoners, or some change in policy, recognition, or
even a cash payment. They come after general warnings, and some inability of the terrorist group
to get its demands met.
At the same time we have another 'ISIS' or, if you will, Al Qaeda - as a western intelligence and
operations program designed to attack targets designated by their US/NATO handlers.
So we have to divide between military ISIS - that army of mercenaries, misled youth, drug
addicts, ex-prisoners, and religious fanatics on the one hand, backed by Turkey and Gulf
monarchies, from the 'ISIS' that is more like Al Qaeda - specially trained intelligence and
security assets with knowledge of electronics, bomb making, counter-security/penetration, etc. -
who are directly controlled by CIA/Mossad/MI6 and Saudi security and Pakistani ISI.
These 'random' attacks serve no tactical purpose for an actual terrorist group in my view, and
only increase the chances that European voters or citizens will support some action, direct or
kinetic, against ISIS. So this does not serve ISIS's interests.
The US-NATO intelligence program, through Gladio has long time assets in Europe, and the last
year has been reminiscent of a time during the Cold War when this strategy of tension reached its
peak in Europe during the 1970's.
Then, as perhaps now, the goal was to push European citizens/voters into a hostile position
against a generally described 'enemy' - then communism, today 'Islamicism/Islamism'.
"... Trumpsters are against the billionaires in their own way. Bernie Bros are against billionaires in a different manner. Neo liberals are not disposed to engage the billionaires. Crubio are all for the billionaires. While neo libs and Crubio are peas in a pod for international violence for the billionaires' neocon themes. ..."
"... Krugman : "Let's dispel with this fiction that the Trump phenomenon represents some kind of unpredictable intrusion into the normal course of Republican politics." I must have missed Krugman's forecast of the rise of this phenomenon. I'm sure he would have cited a prior column if it existed. What is happening on the US right and left is the same thing happening on the European right and left. The dominant status quo political parties have utterly failed large swathes of the electorate for a long period of time. I think the person who did get this early on was Bill McBride. ..."
"... There is less and less reason to read Krugman columns. Economically, he rarely discusses the policy issues most Americans now want to talk about, and when he does, the discussion is flippant, derivative and superficial. ..."
"... Yesterday's propaganda with little innovation and seldom anything that would be accepted by an academic publication. Does he write that trash? A ghost writer? For his rubber stamp? What he gets paid for the stamp? What did he pay for the Nobel Prize? Starting to make people wonder ..."
"... "The establishment composed of journos, BS-Vending talking heads with well-formulated verbs, bureaucrato-cronies, lobbyists-in training, New Yorker-reading semi-intellectuals, image-conscious empty suits, Washington rent-seekers and other 'well thinking' members of the vocal elites are not getting the point about what is happening and the sterility of their arguments. People are not voting for Trump (or Sanders). People are just voting, finally, to destroy the establishment." ..."
...endless austerity and depression would eventually be rejected in a democracy
...the underlying assumption behind the establishment strategy was that voters could be fooled
again and again
...That rage was bound to spin out of the establishment's control sooner or later.
ilsm -> DrDick...
Trumpsters are against the billionaires in their own way. Bernie Bros are against billionaires
in a different manner. Neo liberals are not disposed to engage the billionaires. Crubio are all
for the billionaires. While neo libs and Crubio are peas in a pod for international violence for
the billionaires' neocon themes.
New Deal democrat -> pgl...
Krugman : "Let's dispel with this fiction that the Trump phenomenon represents some kind of
unpredictable intrusion into the normal course of Republican politics." I must have missed Krugman's
forecast of the rise of this phenomenon. I'm sure he would have cited a prior column if it existed.
What is happening on the US right and left is the same thing happening on the European right and
left. The dominant status quo political parties have utterly failed large swathes of the electorate
for a long period of time. I think the person who did get this early on was Bill McBride.
Dan Kervick -> pgl...
There is less and less reason to read Krugman columns. Economically, he rarely discusses the
policy issues most Americans now want to talk about, and when he does, the discussion is flippant,
derivative and superficial.
Politically, his analyses are no more insightful that those of any number of other routine
liberal commentators.
If the stuff that floats your boat is the inflation rate in Japan, or yet another try at the
idea that there is no socioeconomic problem that a little bit of additional demand management
won't solve, then go ahead - Krugman is still your guy. But from my point of view the world is
passing him by.
π day ->Dan Kervick...
Yesterday's propaganda with little innovation and seldom anything that would be accepted by
an academic publication. Does he write that trash? A ghost writer? For his rubber stamp? What
he gets paid for the stamp? What did he pay for the Nobel Prize? Starting to make people wonder
"Years ago we discussed how endless austerity and depression would eventually be rejected in
a democracy."
Did he specifically foresee Trump_vs_deep_state? No. Did he foresee that alternatives to the status quo
would gain traction? Absolutely.
BenIsNotYoda -> DrDick...
Those of us who have lived and run away from socialist democracies (because they do not work)
are afraid of Bernie. These are someone else's words that sum it up perfectly.
Socialism sounds great in speech soundbites and on Facebook, but please just keep it there.
In practice, it corrodes not only the economy but the human spirit itself, and the ambition and
achievement that made modern capitalism possible and brought billions out of poverty. Talking
about socialism is a huge luxury, a luxury made possible by successes of capitalism. The idea
that more government, regulation and more debt will lead to less risk and cure inequality is dangerous
and absurd. And Scandinavia is not a great example, because implementing some socialistic elements
AFTER becoming a wealthy capitalistic economy works as long as you dont choke off what got you
there in the first place.
Dan Kervick -> BenIsNotYoda...
Scandinavia's form of socialism has been in effect for almost a century. But the US is a classic
case for your recommendation. The US isn't Russia or China, trying to jump from an agrarian to
socialist economy. The US already knows how to do capitalism, which it has been doing double-time
and in spades forever, both in industrial and post-industrial forms. It's now time to mix some
sensible socialist elements into the extremist US capitalist formula. All of the market and free-enterprise
infrastructure exists here in the US to build a successful Nordic mixed economy socialism on the
foundation.
cawley -> BenIsNotYoda...
I'm just dying to see some examples of social democracies that people are fleeing ...
Dan Kervick -> cawley...
Well, I guess Anders Breivik doesn't like modern Norway all that much. For almost everyone else,
though, it's A-OK.
Dan Kervick -> BenIsNotYoda...
It's not an either/or thing. All modern developed economies have some combination of liberalized
institutions and socialized institutions. Does socialism work? For some things, definitely yes:
health care, education, retirement, for example. We could also do more to reduce gross income
inequalities by partially socializing income flows without getting rid of private property, private
enterprises and the incentive system.
BenIsNotYoda -> Dan Kervick...
Agreed. Single payor healthcare, public education etc should be done. But, if people have the
delusion that they can raise marginal tax rates much higher from here (40%+8% state + 8%FICA+3.5%Obamacare+7%sales
tax+%real estate = roughly 70%) and are not going to kill any incentive to work, they are wrong.
and no, people dont have ways to get around taxes unless you are private equity fund managers.
There. That IS the marginal tax rate right now. I said it. Have at it socialists.
> I'm just dying to see some examples of social democracies that people are fleeing ...
Be patient. You never know what the next few hundred years might bring.
Jesse :
"The establishment composed of journos, BS-Vending talking heads with well-formulated verbs,
bureaucrato-cronies, lobbyists-in training, New Yorker-reading semi-intellectuals, image-conscious
empty suits, Washington rent-seekers and other 'well thinking' members of the vocal elites
are not getting the point about what is happening and the sterility of their arguments. People
are not voting for Trump (or Sanders). People are just voting, finally, to destroy the establishment."
For the past eight months, Donald Trump's divisive, racially tinged Presidential campaign has
been tearing apart the Republican Party. Over the next eight months, if Trump wraps up the G.O.P.
nomination, it could well have a similar impact on the country at large.
The fracas at a University of Illinois at Chicago campus on Friday, in which hundreds of protesters
clashed with Trump supporters live on national television, shocked many people. But something
like this was inevitable once Trump took his rabble-rousing campaign from predominantly white
suburbs and exurbs to polyglot Northern cities, which are home to many of the people, including
Hispanics and Muslims, who serve as the objects of Trump's rhetoric, as well as to an energetic
left-wing protest movement.
The effort to shut down Trump's rally was prompted by anger that the New York billionaire would
seek to bring his campaign to the college, which has a very diverse student body. As Alex Seitz-Wald
detailed in a report for NBC News, a number of student organizations decided at a meeting last
Monday to organize a protest. "He's marginalized and dehumanized a lot of different groups, and
they all come together," Juan Rosas, one of the student organizers, told Seitz-Wald. After a student
posted a petition on MoveOn.org, outside groups and activists also got involved. "Everyone, get
your tickets to this. We're all going in!!!! #
Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz,
has unveiled his new foreign policy team, stacked with some of the most
aggressive hawks imaginable, saying they are a group of his "trusted friends" who
believe in a "strong America."
Gaffney had previously been speculated to be a Trump adviser, as his dubious
work has been cited by that candidate repeatedly in trying to back up his
proposals to ban Muslim immigration. Gaffney's overt hostility toward Muslims in
general made him a virtual pariah during the 2012 campaign. Incredibly, a number
of Republican hopefuls have courted him this time around, with Cruz declaring him
"clear-eyed" and "a patriot."
Also featuring prominently in the Cruz team is Michael Ledeen, the
man at the center of
the yellowcake uranium forgeries, among the pretexts for the 2003 US invasion
and occupation of Iraq. Ledeen has been involved in a litany of scandals, dating
all the way back to Iran-Contra. He was also, notably, the man who got Israeli spy
Jonathon Pollard his job at the US Navy.
Of course speaking of Iran-Contra, one must inevitably discuss Elliott Abrams,
who famously pled guilty to two charges of withholding information related to the
scandal from Congress, and is likewise a central player in the new Cruz team. In
addition to the Contra scandal, Abrams was involved in myriad ugly Reagan-era
operations, and was a close ally of both former presidents Bush, receiving a
pardon for his Reagan-era crimes by George H.W. Bush, and being appointed as a
special adviser to George W.
During his tenure with the later Bush,
Abrams was accused by The Guardian of being at the center of a failed 2002
US-backed coup attempt against Venezuela, and was said to have personally given
the go-ahead for the effort.
Abram's most recent media comments, interestingly enough, were railing against
Cruz,
accusing him of being anti-semitic for even using the term "neocon." Now that
Cruz is establishing himself as the neocon candidate of choice, that allegation
has been quickly brushed aside.
With this team and more, Cruz is surrounding himself with warmongers and
criminals of the highest caliber. While the attempt appears to center on making
him a more straightforward Republican insider, to serve as a counter to Trump, the
jingoist and xenophobic policies these advisers portend also threatens to sabotage
any hope he has of presenting himself as a safer alternative.
Big business loves bribing the Clintons. They get great returns on investment. In the last forty
years the Clintons have received over three billion from big money interests. Cenk Uygur, host of
the The Young Turks, breaks it down. Tell us what you think in the comment section below.
"Over four decades of public life, Bill and Hillary Clinton have built an unrivaled global network
of donors while pioneering fundraising techniques that have transformed modern politics and paved
the way for them to potentially become the first husband and wife to win the White House.
The grand total raised for all of their political campaigns and their family's charitable foundation
reaches at least $3 billion, according to a Washington Post investigation.
Their fundraising haul, which began with $178,000 that Bill Clinton raised for his long-shot 1974
congressional bid, is on track to expand substantially with Hillary Clinton's 2016 White House run,
which has already drawn $110 million in support. "*
Over the last six months, GOP leaders have watched helpless as the Republican presidential
race has transformed from the usual loveable farce into a terrifying prequel to Mad Max: Fury
Road as tangerine reality show host
Donald Trump gained, attained and retained frontrunner status. With only a few months left
before the Republican National Convention, party luminaries, bigwigs and eminences grises have
come up with a secret blueprint for how to stop the New York business mogul from becoming their
candidate. Exclusive to the Guardian, here is their 10-point plan:
Change the Republican party rules so that all presidential candidates must disclose the
length of their fingers prior to receiving the nomination. Trump will drop out of the race by
the end of the day.
Leave a trail of spray tan canisters and ground beef leading from the door of his
penthouse to a barge about to set off for the Far East.
Lure him into a space shuttle by telling him there's a photograph of his daughter Ivanka
in a bikini onboard and then blast him into orbit.
Attach a $5 bill to a greased pig's back and set it loose backstage before his next
campaign stop. He'll chase that thing until he's out of breath, and miss the speech, which,
due to his inhumanly hectic campaign schedule will have the cumulative knock-on effect of
making him miss the next day's speech, then the next morning's chummy appearance by telephone
with his pals on Morning Joe, then the next four primaries, and before you know it he's missed
the convention and is safely back to being an appalling but harmless reality TV star.
Force Trump to spend as much as five minutes with one of his own supporters.
Remind him that the White House executive residence is a paltry 55,000 square feet and
that presidents are constitutionally prohibited from painting it gold.
Invite Trump to a pool party and before he arrives glue a bunch of nickels to the bottom
of the deep end.
Invent time travel, go back to 2008, and stop ourselves from attacking the Obama
administration with the exact same vitriolic, divisive rhetoric that Trump picked up on and
has now ridden to his present position.
Stop sheepishly acquiescing to Trump's bluster and acting like he isn't a despicable
racist monster in hopes that it's not too late to prevent the complete collapse of society.
Change election procedure so that the remaining delegates must pledge their support to
whichever nominee scores highest on a seventh grade vocabulary test. Unfortunately this will
probably give the edge to college debate champ Ted Cruz, an opportunistic, bigoted liar whose
vision for America is a theocracy engaged in an apocalyptic war against Islam run by a man who
looks like Dracula's fat cousin smugly eating a sour candy he received as a prize for
tattling. But you can't have everything.
The mere suggestion of voting for the dumbercrats under any circumstances is the epitome of insanity.
Voting for serial criminal Billary and her stunning record of incompetence would be a failure
and an indictment of the theory of democracy. Since when does a smooth sound bite suffice for
substance? Who cares how nicely she recites the lines of her masters and special interest groups.
Just ask yourself, what she has ever done for the minority groups on whose fears she preys and
relies on for support? Even under Obama things have got worse for everyone and now we want to
make things even worse?!
Herein we see the final stage of decadence in a collapsing civilisation ... where the plutocrats
work actively against democracy and representative politics. For a long time they have pretended
to be a democracy but at long last we see the United States for what it has really been since
they shot John F. Kennedy. An oligarchy which permits people to elect puppets they control and
fund and offers no alternatives ... going so far as to support the opposition party to thwart
the majority will. You are looking at country going into its death throes and Australia won't
be far behind it.
3.8million manufacturing jobs lost since 2002, 50,000 factories closed in the same time period.
30 million blue collar jobs exported abroad, Trump has a very broad and angry voting base.
Was it a premonition ? In a post made a month ago I clearly stated that Trump wasn't a true blue
republican " You can't be from NY and be a real republican" I wrote. In the same post I also said
that the Clinton Lady was in fact a republican.
In a strange twist of fate my mental perception of reality was right on. Many Sanders democrats
will be voting for Trump rather than the Clinton lady and many republicans will be voting for
the Clinton lady .
The US establishment ( Busch, Clinton) is now viewed as " crime families" by independent medias,
I still think Trump will win the presidency.
WATCH Hillary Clinton's racist "super predators" speech. Cenk Uygur,
host of The Young Turks breaks down the speech and what Clinton really meant. Tell us what you
think in the comment section below.
"Is Hillary Clinton really the kind of candidate who will rally progressives and the black
community behind her when she refers to urban youth as "super predators" with "no conscience,
no empathy"?
She suggests that rather than trying to understand how poverty and social exclusion may have
led children to make certain choices, it is more important to first "bring them to heel."
That's "heel" with an "e," not "heal" with an "a."
Hillary is talking about using the full force of the law to drive these children into
submission."*
"Allies to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton are casting a stark
distinction between a decisive, assertive Clinton and a pragmatic, deliberative President Obama on
foreign policy.
As Obama seeks to make the case for military action against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria
in a prime-time address on Wednesday, Clinton supporters are saying that she would have approached
the battle with ISIS in a completely different way if she were commander in chief.
"You never want to be a Monday morning quarterback on these issues because who knows how things
would ultimately turn out, but Obama has been passive on these issues," one former aide to Clinton
said. "She would have taken a more aggressive approach.""* The Young Turks host Cenk Uygur breaks
it down.
"Allies to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton are casting a stark
distinction between a decisive, assertive Clinton and a pragmatic, deliberative President Obama on
foreign policy.
As Obama seeks to make the case for military action against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria
in a prime-time address on Wednesday, Clinton supporters are saying that she would have approached
the battle with ISIS in a completely different way if she were commander in chief.
"You never want to be a Monday morning quarterback on these issues because who knows how things
would ultimately turn out, but Obama has been passive on these issues," one former aide to Clinton
said. "She would have taken a more aggressive approach.""* The Young Turks host Cenk Uygur breaks
it down.
the Donald Trump campaign released a new ad yesterday touting his slogan, "Make America Great
Again." It also hilariously puts down his Democrat opposition candidate Hillary Clinton, who is
depicted as a joke in terms of her ability to get tough with America's enemies.
The 15-second ad begins with "When it comes to facing our toughest opponents," followed by images
of Russia's Putin performing martial arts and an ISIS fighter waving a gun at the viewer, "the
Democrats have the perfect answer..." The video then cuts to Hillary's bizarre barking from a
recent rally, which earned her a good deal of ridicule.
The video then cuts to laughter from an amused Putin. "We don't need to be a punchline!" the ad
concludes.
Watch above and enjoy.
The Freedom Center is a 501c3 non-profit organization. Therefore we do not endorse political
candidates either in primary or general elections. However, as defenders of America's social
contract, we insist that the rules laid down by both parties at the outset of campaigns be
respected, and that the results be decided by free elections. We will oppose any attempt to rig
the system and deny voters of either party their constitutional right to elect candidates of
their choice.
golightly • 2 days ago
i have to say that dear ol' Trump has some talented folks working for him.
Arlo • 2 days ago
Golly, could at least one Republican have the guts to use the Democrats' Alinsky tactics
against them? Isolate, Ridicule. Defeat? Could it work? I don't know. But, I do know that
playing gentleman/nice guy against the Demoncrats doesn't work.
Crusader Ron :E • 2 days ago
I pray Cruz will just join forces with Trump! Cruz is YOUNG... he has a future! He can
learn soooo much from Trump and refine Trump's bulldog conservatism into True Conservatism...
Christianity... Cruz... HUMBLE THYSELF... and work with Trump!!!
CoolTolerance -> Crusader Ron :E • a day ago
Won't happen. Cruz is hiding many things, of which his wife Heidi's involvement with
globalists, as well as banks giving him too much of a friendly helping hand.
Should he win the nomination, he will lose against Hillary. Why? That Texas twang and his
preacher mannerisms.
And lastly, the Democrats did say last November they will contest his eligibility should he be
the nominee. A sword hanging above his head.
I used to like him. No more. Too devious.
TheCarMan • 2 days ago
When Putin watches this, don't be surprised if he keeps hitting that RESET button over and
over that she sent him.
Kpar -> TheCarMan • 2 days ago
Did he get a replacement? The first one said "overcharge" in Russian.
nacho mamma • 2 days ago
This is just the opening salvo from Trump toward Hillary. Despite her bluster, saying she
looks forward to running against Trump...Hillary knows Trump will get down in the gutter with
her to throw punches.
The Clintons are dirty politicians who've never had a problem with taking the low road, and
Trump will not play nice when the race heats up. This could get real interesting...
tom tuttle • 2 days ago
Mocking old granny is as challenging as poking fun at a useless drunkard
Marc Faber, author of the Gloom, Boom & Doom Report, has thrown down the gauntlet on who he
thinks should be the next president of the United States.
During an interview on Bloomberg TV, Faber said that the U.S. would not be a sound, well-run
economy like Singapore "unless of course the U.S. is run by Mr. Trump, then the U.S. will
improve."
He tempered his assessment seconds later when asked if he was serious, indicating that Donald
Trump might not necessarily be good for the U.S., but that other options were worse.
"It's all relative," he said. "Given the alternatives, I would vote for Mr. Trump because he may
only destroy the U.S. economy, but Hillary Clinton will destroy the whole world."
Back2WeThePeople 1 hour ago
WAKE UP AND SMELL THE BANKSTER PIG-SIHT / BUSHIT – False Left / Right Paradigm
Read this secret circular -- THE BANKERS' MANIFESTO OF 1892 -- unearthed by American hero
Louis McFadden who fought THE FEDERAL RESERVE ACT 1913
land-beaver 8 minutes ago
Hillary vacillates on positions and decisions, never consistent. There are four (4)
consistent constants about Hillary and her 50 years of public service: 1) She has been a
serial liar for all those years; 2) She changes her position and opinions, flipping-flopping
often, depending on polls and public comments / opinions; 3) She has proven to be the most
untrustworthy politician, including her disgraced husband and Pres Nixon, in those years; 4)
She has accomplished nothing note worthy in those 50 years, except setting a travel record as
Sec of State?
Larry 36 minutes ago
Hillary is taking donations from the Globalists and Wall street Bankers for a reason,but
the liberals are too stupid 2 put 1 and 1 together.
BH 5 hours ago
The final sentence indicates that Faber was very negative on the US economy following the
2012 election. If you follow the link you'll see that Faber predicted a 20% market decline.
The week after he made the prediction, the S&P dropped from 1380 to 1360. It recovered to 1409
the following week and has been higher ever since. It's almost impossible to have made a worse
prediction. And the market is up almost 40% since his call. So keep that in mind when you hear
him say that Hillary will "destroy the entire world."
Jay 30 minutes ago
hillary is a criminal that should be in jail. Anyone else who released classified
information over the internet would be in Leavenworth breaking rocks!! and she needs to be
there too. She is a lying no good incapable POS! She is NOT fit to lead a nation, period!
Walmart's Board of Directors member ~> Sanders: No. Clinton: Yes.
Supported NAFTA ~> Sanders: No. Clinton: Yes.
The War on Drugs ~> Sanders: No. Clinton: Yes.
Charter Schools ~> Sanders: No. Clinton: Yes.
The Patriot Act ~> Sanders: No. Clinton: Yes.
The Invasion of Iraq ~> Sanders: No. Clinton: Yes.
The Bank Bailouts ~> Sanders: No. Clinton: Yes.
The Keystone XL pipeline ~> Sanders: No. Clinton: Yes.(just changed to no on sept 23, what a
coincidence.)
The Trans Pacific Partnership ~> Sanders: No. Clinton: Yes.
Marriage Equality ~> Sanders: Yes.(since and before the 80's.) Clinton: No.(until recently,
again what great timing.)
Wall Street Reform ~> Sanders: Yes. Clinton: No.
Student Loan Reform ~> Sanders: Yes. Clinton: No.
Reinstate Glass Steagall ~> Sanders: Yes Clinton: No.
Hillary Clinton is an opportunistic, center right, corporatist 'flip flopper' who has had to
"evolve" on nearly every issue!!!
And, she has more "baggage" than any major metropolitan airport!!
+Bernie Sanders, on the other hand, has been right on every issue all along and he's "The most
trusted man in politics"!!
Wake up, America!! Bernie Sanders is our generation's FDR!! And he can win!!
That research still holds true. Nicely done.
It's maddening to see people swaying to the hypnosis of corporate politics and seriously
contemplating voting for Clinton #2 or any of these insane power mad sociopaths in the red
color coded corporation.
I can only hope that the US voter becomes better informed (and soon.)
Hillary Clinton assures us that
she's not at all biased by the $675,000 she's received from Goldman Sachs for paid speeches. An attendee
of one of Clinton's Goldman Sachs speeches spoke with Politico and revealed why Clinton won't release
the transcripts of the speeches. Cenk Uygur host of The Young Turks breaks down the story.
"When Hillary Clinton spoke to Goldman Sachs executives and technology titans at a summit in Arizona
in October of 2013, she spoke glowingly of the work the bank was doing raising capital and helping
create jobs, according to people who saw her remarks.
Clinton, who received $225,000 for her appearance, praised the diversity of Goldman's workforce
and the prominent roles played by women at the blue-chip investment bank and the tech firms present
at the event. She spent no time criticizing Goldman or Wall Street more broadly for its role in the
2008 financial crisis.
"It was pretty glowing about us," one person who watched the event said. "It's so far from what
she sounds like as a candidate now. It was like a rah-rah speech. She sounded more like a Goldman
Sachs managing director."*
"... Were it not for the DNC's Machiavellian planning of this primary and, had the states been ordered differently, we wouldn't be at roughly the halfway point with such skewed results. Were it not for the horrendous media bias shown Sanders, across mainstream corporate media, voters probably wouldn't be quite so disgusted and angry with the DNC's decision making. ..."
"... This is fundamentally the problem in our system. Each person enters the voting booth in November with two principal choices: Stinks and Stinks-Even-More. ..."
"... Instead, Bernie's chances are slim (#StillSanders), especially thanks to the major establishment outlets. Even if Clinton wins the nomination a lot of us aren't voting for her. She's hardly distinguishable from a Kissinger fangirl. ..."
"... To paraphrase Franklin, we choose not to have our vote manipulated by the fear of the lesser of two evils. We choose not to give up our "essential Liberty" to purchase a little safety because those that give that up deserve neither safety nor Liberty. ..."
"... We can hope that Sanders can come back and win the nomination because if we have Hillary for the Dem nominee Donald Trump will be a very unkind opponent. Sanders could handle the Donald in a debate. At this very moment the Trump campaign is doing their research on the Clintons. ..."
"... The Clintons define "corrupt." Bill Clinton: "It depends on what the definition of 'is' is." Hillary Clinton, who never traded commodities, made hundreds of thousands of dollars trading commodities with only several trades. Yet she claims she wasn't tipped. They leased the Lincoln Bedroom like it was their AirBNB. If someone can tell me where Clinton money ends and Clinton Foundation money begins, please let me know. ..."
"... Hillary Clinton refuses to release transcripts of her expensive speeches to Wall Street executives. I, a lifelong Democrat from a family of lifelong FDR Democrats, won't vote for Clinton until I know what she said in her speeches. The Clintons and I have come to the end of the road. ..."
"... I am a 76 year old life-long Democrat, and I would never vote for anyone who voted for the invasion of Iraq, or who supported NAFTA. These two issues have been the undoing of America - - along with Citizens United. ..."
I'm going for the longshot. In fact, I just donated to Bernie again yesterday. Even if he doesn't
win, we need him to have as many delegates as possible going into the convention so that we have
a strong voice against interventionist policies and pay to play government as the party platform
is crafted. We need to send a loud message to the Democratic establishment: Enough is enough!
#feelthebern
America needs him. A guy who stands up for everyone. A guy with no baggage. A honest politician
who wants to swim against the established norms and bring change. People are still living in recession.
Big corporation are still making big money. Why can't young people afford to go to college?, why
can't old people retired in peace?, why can't people not afford healthcare?, Why we need to bomb
n kill innocent people abroad? Change is hard to bring. Bernie has a vision, I hope everyone can
see it. Peace!
Rima Regas. is a trusted commenter Mission Viejo, CA
12 hours ago
Well, well...
That's exactly what the Sanders people have been saying will be the case.
Were it not for the DNC's Machiavellian planning of this primary and, had the states been
ordered differently, we wouldn't be at roughly the halfway point with such skewed results. Were
it not for the horrendous media bias shown Sanders, across mainstream corporate media, voters
probably wouldn't be quite so disgusted and angry with the DNC's decision making.
But here we are... Yes, we do have the other half of the primary to get through and it gets
Bernie-friendly from here on out.
Meanwhile, Democratic voter turn out is very low. When is the mainstream media going to stop
promoting Donald Trump and turn its attention to that? For all the talk about how scary a President
Trump would be, nothing much is being said to voters about the low turn out. Reading most papers,
one might be led to think everything is hunky dory in that respect. It isn't.
This is fundamentally the problem in our system. Each person enters the voting booth in
November with two principal choices: Stinks and Stinks-Even-More. By voting for Stinks, we
compromise our own passion only to send the wrong message that we somehow support the policies
and approach of the lesser-evil. This then just continues our decline, and encourages the press
to continue to ignore folks like Bernie who stand for truly profound, positive change. We can
collectively talk ourselves blue about income inequality, but failing to give Bernie his due time
and press coverage is a travesty.
Shameful. What good does it do for Kristof, Blow, Friedman and the Editorial Board to opine
about gross income inequality, only to turn around and deny Bernie his share of the press coverage.
The press has truly let America down. This includes the 24-hour news cycle, low-quality CNN types
and the presumably more deliberate and thoughtful NY Times. All of them have (for reasons that
the average citizen could probably guess) have decided Bernie wasn't worth the air time and print
space.
"Why? These states aren't as bad for him as those in the South, but they force him to confront
his two weaknesses: diversity and affluence."
These weaknesses could have been mitigated over time had the Times and the mainstream press
actually told its more diverse readers how Sanders' policies would in fact help them, and its
affluent readers that, by the way, their neighbors are starving.
Instead, Bernie's chances are slim (#StillSanders), especially thanks to the major establishment
outlets. Even if Clinton wins the nomination a lot of us aren't voting for her. She's hardly distinguishable
from a Kissinger fangirl. (Kissinger, as a reminder, had no trouble authorizing the murder
and systematic starvation of hundreds of thousands of East Timorese going into the 80s, which,
surprise, the Times didn't mention *at all* for at least a few years.) She disgusts me, and I
will never support her. I suspect it's the same for other Berniebros (as you would mockingly call
us). You've created a fascist beast, American press. Do your job.
Our family loves Bernie. We have waited so long for someone who we truly knew was leveling
with us. God help us if it comes to the disastrous consequences of 2000 when Bush won as some
people abandoned the Dems for an alternate choice but we must vote with our conscience and will
write his name in if that is what it comes to. We just hope the 'great beast' we see within the
hearts of so many Americans will not awaken yet again as it did in 2003 leading us into the obsenity
known as Iraq or worse .
To paraphrase Franklin, we choose not to have our vote manipulated by the fear of the lesser
of two evils. We choose not to give up our "essential Liberty" to purchase a little safety because
those that give that up deserve neither safety nor Liberty.
We stand or fall with Bernie and if the latter be true, it is with the hope that the next generation
finds its way into the light. It appears, from what I am seeing, that they may be better suited
to run this country than my generation has. My apologies to the Greatest Generation for failing
to deliver on their gift born of such great sacrifice.
We can hope that Sanders can come back and win the nomination because if we have Hillary
for the Dem nominee Donald Trump will be a very unkind opponent. Sanders could handle the Donald
in a debate. At this very moment the Trump campaign is doing their research on the Clintons.
If it ends up being a contest between Trump and Clinton the vulnerabilities of the Clintons will
be on full display. And Trump is not known for his kindness or restraint. It would not be pretty.
If Hillary is the candidate then Trump's path to the White House will be much easier. She's got
too many flaws.
The Clintons define "corrupt." Bill Clinton: "It depends on what the definition of
'is' is." Hillary Clinton, who never traded commodities, made hundreds of thousands of dollars
trading commodities with only several trades. Yet she claims she wasn't tipped. They leased the
Lincoln Bedroom like it was their AirBNB. If someone can tell me where Clinton money ends and
Clinton Foundation money begins, please let me know.
Hillary Clinton's brothers were influence peddlers. Hugh Clinton accepted a large amount of
money to influence Pres. Clinton to offer a pardon. Tony Clinton sells his connections to the
highest bidders.
Hillary Clinton refuses to release transcripts of her expensive speeches to Wall Street
executives. I, a lifelong Democrat from a family of lifelong FDR Democrats, won't vote for Clinton
until I know what she said in her speeches. The Clintons and I have come to the end of the road.
I will never understand why black voters would choose Hillary over Bernie when Bernie is the
one who actual has a tracjk record of fighting for civil rights.
The Democratic Party and its corporate affiliates' support for HRC has blinded them to a large
problem, viz. that HRC is very likely to be beaten in the general election. Whether earned or
not, there exists a very high level of antipathy for HRC, among Independents, and yes, Democrats.
Senator Sanders is widely regarded as honest and straightforward. If he is not nominated, the
legions of young Democrats and the large numbers of Independents that support the Senator, will
stay home on election day and/or the extremely disaffected will vote for Trump if he is nominated...very,
very few will vote for HRC (this is my anecdotal observation from many conversations with the
Senator's supporters). It is also well-known, but often suppressed information that Senator Sanders
does better against Trump than HRC in most national polls. The reality is that Senator Sanders
is by far the best choice for Democrats to beat Trump or any other Republican crazy.
I am a 76 year old life-long Democrat, and I would never vote for anyone who voted for
the invasion of Iraq, or who supported NAFTA. These two issues have been the undoing of America
- - along with Citizens United.
Yes, Sanders is down. Yes, his task is a daunting one, but less daunting than Kasich's path
to the Republican nomination, which is getting more media coverage than the 2.8 million votes
that Sanders drew on Tuesday. Sanders "revolution" is revolutionary only to those who accept the
current Republican view of government as our collective nightmare - an us vs. them fight to the
death over guns, immigration, abortion, deteriorating air and water, income inequality, student
debt, access to health care - funded by sacred and unlimited corporate and PAC dollars.
Sanders
proposes nothing that has not been done before, here or abroad, by representative governments
promoting the health, education, and welfare of all their people. I like to imagine Roosevelt,
Truman, and Eisenhower looking down on Sanders' proposals of what America should be able to do
for its people. Maybe the Ides of March got Sanders. Maybe not?
I keep reading in "The New York Times" that it's over. As I recall, a legendary figure, associated
with two legendary New York baseball teams, used to say that "It aren't over 'til it's over. .
. ."
Why "The New York Times" is so anxious to call the Election of 2016 seems to be a question
fit for an investigation. Where is "Woodstein" when we need them!?
Months before Sanders made any noise about running, I only hoped that we would have someone
besides a Bush or a Clinton as a candidate. In a country this big, don't we have any other qualified
candidates, I wondered. Politics aside, I just didn't think the idea of sending another Bush or
Clinton to the White House was good for (the appearance of) democracy.
Fast forward to today: Bush is out and Sanders is struggling to stay in. Look what happened
to the other democrats (and we won't even talk about third party candidates). They didn't have
a chance. It's an absolute miracle that Sanders has come this far given the toxic role of money
in American politics and the corporate control and neutralizing of American media.
Trump pushed Bush out of the race, but this was hardly a victory over the "establishment".
Trump's money and fame gave him instant access -- and he was quickly able to compete with establishment
candidates.
For me, Sanders is a glimmer of hope. I have no illusions about his chances of securing the
democratic nomination. But I find solace in the idea that, despite everything and everyone working
to get him out, he's still there and his campaign in resonating with young people. He has started
a movement, and that is what can lead to real change.
Rima Regas, is a trusted commenter Mission Viejo, CA
12 hours ago
I have to disagree with Cohn on his assessment of the Black vote. While it is true enough that
Clinton had a lock on the South, her narrow win in Illinois and a close look at the Black vote
there gives us a glimpse of what's to come and there are good ideological and factual reasons
for it as I explain in my essay. Mrs. Clinton, in her campaign, has shown a disdain for the new
civil rights movement. While it may not have swayed older voters, younger ones are not pleased.
Their power, as voters will be felt more in the coming primaries and caucuses:
A few more ways Bernie can win- 1)
the FBI or leaks show Hillary used classified server for emails that she didn't want seen by voters
or the press because they are damning to her election. 2) a larger stronger Yuan devaluation sets
off Wall Street volatility, exposing weaknesses in her economic policcies 3) transcripts of her
Wall Street talks are leaked exposing high level corruption 4) a book is written on how the global
leaders did not take her seriously as Secretary of State 5) polls show that independents don't
like or trust her and will not toe the DNC party line ) etc
Bernie Sanders has a better chance of beating Trump, as several polls show. Trump supporters
want an "outsider" who is not "owned" by either party. He has the advantage over Clinton and Trump
in that he is not corrupt. The Times has been biased through the campaign. They endorsed Clinton
a long time ago, and give her the benefit of coverage. But the REAL story is how Sanders has raised
money from small donors. Why aren't they interviewing those donors on a daily basis? Who are they?
Democrats? Republicans? Independents? The Times is not doing their job, such as conducting investigative
reporting on the Clinton Foundation, and asking will the Clintons close down the Clinton Foundation
if Hillary is elected? Will Bill Clinton continue to give $million dollar speeches when married
to the President? Will he be a co-president, back in the oval office that he disgraced? The Times
should be pushing for Hillary to not only publish the transcripts of her speeches to Wall Street,
but also her and Bill's speeches to Chinese billionaires, and others listed on Clinton Foundation
web site). The Times might also ask how the Clintons turned a nonprofit foundation into an engine
of personal wealth after leaving the White House claiming poverty. Do your job, NYT!!
It is tragic that what is oft referred to as 'the black vote' may well usher in a Donald J.
Trump Presidency. And It is ironic that votes for H. Clinton, as polling suggests, serves to do
a few things a.) it decreases Sen. Sanders chances to be POTUS, which is obvious, but it also
b.) will galvanize Republican voter turnout and may even c.) shift Independents and even some
Democrats to the Right during the generals. I hold accountable the media and its collusion with
DNC establishment and, honestly, the low-information voter.
H. Clinton offers very little, in stated policy goals, for the poor and middle-class, which is
in stark contrast to Sen. Sander's historical record and future policy goals. Sen. Sanders, even
if I were not a fan, is offering positions (e.g. education w/ out debt, single-payer health care,
combating crony capitalism, defeating citizens united, breaking up the largest banks) that have
clearly promoted equality in many other developed nations. There is a direct correlation between
these policy positions and bettering the lives of others. Piketty, Galbraith, Saez, Stiglitz,
and countless other elite economic minds all agree these measures level the playing field.
It is disheartening to witness, yet again, so many people voting against their own best interests
by responding to dog whistle appeals to the color of one's skin and not the truest needs of the
poor and middle-class. I am resigned to 8 more years of "hope and change" that does nothing for
equality.
Bernie Sanders gives the impression that he will achieve major changes soon. He'll bring about
single-payer health care (with everyone saving money). He'll end super PACs and huge corporate/billionaire
contributions in political campaigns. He'll redo our foreign trade agreements to protect American
jobs and bring manufacturing jobs back. He'll do away with income inequality and make labor unions
strong again. If he expressed these goals as dreams in the manner of Martin Luther King's "I have
a dream" speech, I'd say fine and good. Let's work towards these ends. But leading his followers
astray by claiming that a revolution is taking place now and that these things can be achieved
soon is just outright disgraceful. I'm not sure why African American don't support Senator Sanders,
but they definitely know better than anyone the difference between dreams and reality. They know,
as Dr. King did, that change takes hard work and a lot of time. The political pendulum may be
starting to swing leftwards again (I hope so). But a revolution? No way.
I have worked on too many campaigns to count, before I quit my addiction to pain and got a
real job. His was an odd campaign.
He expected the media to be a partner in helping him get elected. No candidate ever expects
help from the media. Sander got the third best media coverage of all who ran--and arguable the
most favorable given most of Clinton's coverage was the email scandal. At best you can get from
the media is benign neglect. But the minute you are winning expect a scrubbing that would make
a Brillo pad look gentle.
He assumed he would have inroads to groups without courting them believing success with one
group meant everyone would like him.
He never seem to understand Clinton's strengths. He then seemed surprised by them. You always
understand your oppotrengths at the very least to mitigate the damage.
He fought with the establishment despite running in the establishment. Not only are they voters
--they have business intelligence on local operatives and state level politics. He hit a brick
wall in Nevada and got his clocked cleaned in South Carolina despite outspending Clinton because
the apparatus that existed preferred Clinton.
And lastly, where everyone in this business pours over data--their relationship with data seems
foreign. There are several instances where you get the sense they made something up on the fly--and
honestly surprised at the result.
Oh dear. Another white person telling all those ungrateful and ignorant people of color, the African
Americans, the Hispanics, that they're doing this voting thing all wrong. Makes right thinking Bernsters
wonder why we even bother to let them vote, if they're just going to mis-use it so.
Sanders was involved, 60 years ago, in some civil rights activities. Since then, he's been the
elected official of some of the whitest sections of the country and has not depended on the black
or Hispanic vote to ge re-elected. If you want to tar Clinton with the '95 crime bill, even though
she wasn't a senator then, it ricochets to hit Sanders, who voted for it.
Clinton worked to develop connections and a reputation in the African American and Hispanic sectors.
Bernie Sanders, though a good man, did not. Nor did he work with the existing Democratic party to
support down-ticket elections or democratic events. He always ran as an outsider. Now, he wants to
be in the party and benefit from what the DNC has to offer. Funny that his supporters cry foul when
he, a non-Democrat, doesn't get the full breadth of support from the party he shunned.
So to all those Bernsters out there - please calm down. Everyone deals with favorite politicians
getting rejected, it's life. and the millennial vote is no more or less important than any other
group.
Now that the press and the political actuaries have crowned Clinton the presumptive nominee,
some of the passion that has sustained Sanders will ebb, and we'll see him do less well. Progressives
will slowly accept Clinton and either sit out the primary or curb their enthusiasm for the Bern.
Clinton has, from the beginning, garnered votes by presenting herself as inevitable, not inspirational.
Not so much "Yes We Can" but "Yes I Will."
It's a shame, because a transformational FDR-style Democrat is desperately needed at this point
in our history.
Here's the thing - general elections are part of the democratic process, but the nomination
process is controlled by the parties, who make the rules and call the shots. For 40 years or so,
Ms. Clinton has been involved in fund raising and campaigning for senators, congressmen, and governors.
She has been involved in the DNC and has been supported in return.
Sanders runs as a pure outsider. He shunned the party until he decided to join in order to
run. He has few supporters in the Senate, and little good will among down-ticket Democrats.
Clinton isn't winning on superdelegates, but on pledged delegates from the states. She has
earned a plurality of votes. Claiming otherwise demeans the millions who have already cast their
votes in her favor, and assumes that they are ignorant, stupid, or insane. Their decisions were
other than what you would want. That's democracy. Get over it.
The DNC has stacked the deck in Clinton's favor with its Superdelegate apparatchiks clogging
the arteries of a fair nominating process with 465 clots of greasy fat. Where is the Democracy
in the Democratic party when viable contenders are forced to run the race in hobbles? Not even
the Republicans have come up with Tammany Hall tactic - yet.
So yes, Hillary will most likely be the nominee of the Democratic Party. As an independent
I will not be voting for her or any members of the Republican Insane Clown Posse. More than likely
I will be writing in for the /bernie_sanders.Warren ticket as a protest to rigged elections.
While otherwise quite good, this article contains a factual error that continues to play into
the false Clinton narrative about racialized voting and the Sanders campaign.
According to exit polling, Oklahoma's Democratic Primary was only 74% white. Sanders won the
vote in that state by 10.5% points. This means that the following statement is false: "Mr. Sanders's
best showing in a state where less than 75 percent of voters were white was his two-point win
in Michigan."
And, while we do not have exit polling data from Colorado, the electorate there was almost
certainly less than 75% white. Sanders won by 18.5%. Take for instance Denver County. Denver County
is just 53% white only per United States Census's Quick Facts. 31% of Denver is Latina or Latino,
10% is African American, 2% is Native American, and 4% is Asian. Sanders won Denver County by
9.4%.
To pretend, as this article does, that Arizona (31% Latino) or even Washington State (70% white
only per US Census data) are "whiter" states than Tennessee (75%) and Arkansas (73%) is to betray
exactly the kind of anti-Sanders bias that Margaret Sullivan had to call out in another context
this morning.
At the very least, the Times owes it to its readers to correct the factual error here in a
prominent way.
It's actually shameful that black voters in SC refused to listen or engage with the second
candidate in two candidate race, even when he came to their church:
And can we please stop referring to a state where 60% of the primary voters were black as "diverse."
In a country with a 13% black population, it's more accurately described as "extremely unrepresentative"
"Diverse" does not mean "minorities overrepresented by a factor of 4." New Hampshire is far
closer to the racial mix in America than the electorate in any Democratic Primary in the south.
Bernie never said this would be easy. He has lost a few battles, but he will win the war. We
have to stay the course & get his message out to the people.
Democrats must realize that we can not win the presidency with only the support of southern blacks
& senior citizens. The way this election has been run by the DNC & media has totally alienated
Bernie supporters to the point that a great majority will go green or vote Rep. rather than back
Clinton & the DNC. This is becoming a reality more & more every day. I hope that the super delegates
figure this out by the time we reach the convention or all is lost.
The establishment media favoring the establishment candidate paints a rosy picture for HRC.
We get it. The Bernie Blackout marches along in lock-step with the Trump Trumpet. This scenario
is far more than mere perception. Empirical data will be mined for years to come to show the glaring
disparity. Future journalism majors will compose graduate theses using this fodder. Should we
end up, as currently appears likely, with President Trump, the "golly-how-did-that-happen?" crowd
will have it all explained later by some kid who is now in junior high school because today's
print news editors and broadcast news producers suffered from the "if-it-bleeds-it-leads" school.
Even the vaunted NY Times betrays its "all the news that's fit to print" motto and remains mesmerized
by the Trump con act. Hey fellas, how about a new motto? "Covering Carnival Barkers Since 2016"?
I have to be honest here; I don't see much hope for Bernie to get the nomination. I do hope
he wins my state, and yes, I'll be caucusing for him next weekend, but the numbers don't look
good and I'm feeling depressed.
I intend to vote in November for all races on the ballot. If my state is not in play--if we're
safely blue, like we usually are--I'm writing in Bernie. If there's a chance we might go red,
I'll hold my nose and vote for Hillary.
I didn't like her in 2008 and I don't like her in 2016. She's a neoliberal hawk and I don't
want her getting the US entangled in more wars we'll never get out of. I don't want her starting
negotiations with the Republicans already close to the center so we'll end up all the way to the
right. I don't think she's trustworthy and I think her only guiding principle is ambition.
Needless to say, I'm depressed, and frankly tuning out of the race at this point. The Republicans
are making the US a laughingstock around the world and the Dems appear to be saddled with a candidate
we don't particularly want. Any way you slice it this is going to be an ugly election, and while
I've been a political junkie all my life, I just don't have the enthusiasm to care about it. I
don't see a winning solution in this any way I look at it.
*This* is Hillary's big problem. People like me, who will grudgingly vote for her if we have
to, but who have absolutely no enthusiasm for it. How many of us will just stay home instead of
voting for the lesser evil?
If electability is your main criteria, you should be voting for Sanders.
Sanders does better against every Republican opponent, in every poll in the last month, because
he gets 3-1 support from independents (40% of the electorate), even if he doesn't get a majority
of democrats (30% of the electorate).
Sanders got 71% of the independent voters in Illinois, 72% of the independent voters in New
Hampshire, and 73% of the independent voters in Michigan (exit poll data)
Clinton has high favorability within the Democratic Party, but among all Americans, she has
a 55% NEGATIVE rating (versus only 42% positive), rivaling Trump. Nothing is red meat to Republicans
like Clinton, and she has no appeal to Independents (see above)
It's why in every poll for the last month among REGISTERED VOTERS, Sanders does better against
every Republican opponent than Clinton.
Bernie's most likely winning opportunity is the self-destruction of his opponent, whose high
unfavorability ratings could prove decisive if her email controversy or any number of other vulnerabilities
gains public attention.
There is much talk of a disqualifying event that will knock Hillary out of the race and allow
Bernie to receive the nomination. Talk of indictments, the content of the Wall Street speeches,
e-mail servers, Benghazi, and so on. The talk on both sides often seems to miss the mark. I agree
with those, generally Clinton supporters, who doubt she said or did anything appalling in any
of these regards. However, I agree with the Sanders supporters that she is not giving adequate
answers on these questions. There is really an element of "I'm not going to address such a ridiculous
question". The problem that I see is that Bernie Sanders, who for the most part is on the same
side as Hillary Clinton and her supporters, has been not forcing the issue- nor would it be appropriate
for him to do so. The Republican nominee will certainly do so, to great affect with the many people
who are not currently strong supporters of Clinton. I don't refer to the people who intensely
dislike her, or would never vote for Democrat/woman/centrist/non-conserative anyway. I mean the
people who when Trump/Cruz raises the question about her speeches or lack of e-mail security will
wonder whether there might be something to it. It is clear that there are many voters looking
for a fresh start away from the usual politics. The Clinton campaign needs to address these questions
with coherent and substantive answers now.
Bernie is the future of Democratic policy; Hillary the past.
Among voters younger than 45 Bernie wins big; by 40 points among millenials.
In 2008 Obama offered a new future of justice but most of his program was broken on the shoals
of mindless GOP hostility. Bernie is more of a fighter.
And now the Dem establishment wants to choke off the voices of the young, those paying the biggest
price for plutocracy and Wall Street government.
Bernie is offering a very limited version of the social democracy that has worked so well in minimizing
poverty and maximizing personal opportunity across Europe, Canada, Australia.
Mass grotesque life-killing poverty is destroying the American 100 million underclass as a parasitic
plutocracy is more and more engorged.
There is an alternative. Continue the Clinton-Sanders debates to the floor of the convention.
Should Hillary win, Bernie is committed to uniting the party behind her for he has actually made
her a better, more progressive candidate, shedding off the muck of triangulation.
Bernie is the hope and change candidate. And he also consistently does better than Hillary matched
up against Cruz/Trump in polling.
As one of those 69 year old millennials, I think I know how the system works. The political
parties put up candidates who take money from huge special interests, they get elected, nothing
is accomplished other than more Corporate control of our country: AKA the buying and selling of
elections and a commitment to becoming a total oligarchy. I recently read that some of the DNC's
super delegates are actually lobbyists. The Democrats and Republicans are running our country
into the ground: polluting the planet, killing our kids in wars for profit; jailing minorities
and thereby disenfranchising them from voting, dumbing down the education system, forcing families
into bankruptcy over medical bills, more rights taken away from citizens (out of fear that people
(like me)are going to take to the streets with their pitchforks). If I may quote Laurel and Hardy
(who this campaign often resembles) This is a fine mess you got me into. I'd like to remind the
Clintons and the DNC of how foolish G W Bush looked after standing under that MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
banner at the beginning of the Iraq War. When more than half the country has not yet voted I am
enraged by the arrogance.
The elephant in the room is the potential for an email indictment. Against Trump, Hillary would
be damaged beyond repair if the FBI investigation goes against her. The Clinton campaign is way
too sanguine about this and nobody in the commentariat is talking about it ... but the whole campaign
could turn on it. The FBI is said to be out for blood because Petraeus got off lightly ... and
lesser players getting immunity can't be a good sign.
Bernie needs to keep going if for no other reason than we need another option.
To the Clinton supporters who drone on about HRC's "experience" and track record of getting
things done, please provide citations/links to support your assertions.
The facts show that the bulk of her experience lies in her amazing talents of fabrication and
obfuscation of facts. As First Lady--her longest "political" role, she successfully covered up
and lied for her serially philandering husband, destroying the reputations of his victims in the
process.
During her stint as Senator of her adopted state, backed by Wall Street, big pharma and other
corporate interests, she succeeded in endorsing the disastrous and ongoing war in Iraq and the
repeal of Glass-Steagall, among other dubious votes.
Her time as Secretary of State can be characterized as inconsequential at best and disastrous
at worst, resulting in an FBI investigation and possible indictment.
Her private life, as an obscenely compensated speaker to the Wall Street firms directly responsible
for the financial meltdown, comprise the bulk of her actual accomplishments.
And her refusal to release transcripts of those speeches and the convenient wiping of her unauthorized
email server suggest major character, trust and honesty issues.
Again, citations of what practical experience at running the country she possesses would be
illuminating.
I am ready for a change. I am ready to elect Senator Sanders to be the next President. Let
us leave the establishment behind and make the necessary change for the better. Unlike those who
have been characterized as his mainstay supporters (the young), I am 68 and have waited my entire
grown up adult life for a leader of our country who was not a bought and paid for apparatchik
of the moneyed elite. Never before have I contributed to any political cause or candidate before
Bernie. Now I find someone worth nominating and electing!
The strength of Sanders candidacy has been less in "revelations" about Clinton, and more about
the recognition by voters that there is an alternative to Clinton. This is especially true for
younger voters who don't tend to see the 1990s through rose-colored glasses.
As more people have gotten to know Sanders, his numbers have gone up. The problem for Sanders
has been a question of time and the sequencing of the primary calendar.
Clinton has done exceptionally well with older party regulars, especially in the south. She
lost the 45 and under vote to Sanders 70-30 in Illinois; she is not growing the party.
If Clinton wins in November, she can thank Trump and/or Cruz for doing the work for her. She
can also thank Sanders for getting younger voters engaged in the process and for providing her
with her platform. Al Gore and John Kerry also dominated the primary process. That didn't mean
they were strong general election candidates.
I am a female, late baby boomer. I've voted a straight Democratic ticket my entire life. It
will be a real battle with my conscience to vote for Ms. Clinton. So, if there's any hope for
Bernie Sanders, I will be sending him more funds.
I think college should be provided for everyone who can't afford it. I think medical care should
be provided for everyone who can't afford it. In total, I think everyone should have a substantial
safety net, a floor beneath which no one should fall.
We think of food and shelter in the same way -- as liberals we believe in providing ample food
stamps and decent shelters for those who can't afford it. In our service economy, a formal education
is no longer a luxury but a necessity. As circumstances change, so should our thinking. That's
what true liberalism is all about.
Taxes should be raised on extreme wealth because inequality has already gotten way out of hand.
Joseph in Misoula
"I'm a liberal democrat. But I don't think college should be free for everyone. I do not want
my taxes to go up even more. I do not think Wall Street is an evil entity that should be dismantled.
In fact, I don't think we should try and force a far-left version of America on the large portion
of the population that clearly does not want it."
So who has a right to education? Who should reign in the excesses of the Wall Street casino,
which nearly destroyed the entire world economy? Who should pay more taxes - the broken middle
class, working class, the decimated unions, and the poor, who already all subsidize the exploitation
that fills the coffers of corporations and billionaires? The Democrats once vigorously and almost
universally supported these groups and the ideas that helped them succeed.
You're right. You should absolutely not support Bernie. Because you're not a liberal democrat,
and you're certainly not a progressive. But you are a great representative of Hillary Clinton's
voice, and the Republican lite that now calls itself the Democratic Party. And she's counting
on you.
It's disappointing that no enterprising investigative journalist has found somebody ready to
spill the beans and provide a pirated copy of the now almost legendary Wall Street speeches. But
it may well be that there is such a source, one insisting on substantial compensation, and most
journalists are forbidden from paying for information
It would not be surprising if Trump already has a source picked out, one who, if not subject
to the threat of exposure of some hidden misdeed or under direct obligation to The Donald, is
susceptible to outright bribery, and that Trump is holding that ammunition, waiting to fire after
Clinton has achieved the nomination and is his opponent in the general election.
If that should be the case: Look forward to a President Trump.
Matt Von Ahmad Silverstein Chong, Mill Valley, CA
9 hours ago
Sanders vs Kasich. Only sane choices on both sides.
Otherwise:
Clinton: liar, opportunistic, risk of indictment after nomination risking defeat
Cruz: liar, extremist, not accomplished anything other than shutting the government
Trump: liar, polarizing, risk of defeat as unable to unify party
Not that Sanders and Kasich don't have their own thorns, but in my opinion they are the most
fit to be elected.
Ms. Regas, you write: "Were it not for the DNC's Machiavellian planning of this primary and,
had the states been ordered differently, we wouldn't be at roughly the halfway point with such
skewed results."
The DNC approved and announced the 2016 primary schedule back in August 2014:
Senator Sanders announced his candidacy eight months later on April 30, 2015.
So the Senator and his inner circle of advisors went into this race with eyes wide open knowing
full well what the primary schedule would be and what they would face.
Perhaps you might consider dropping this complaint from your litany.
John S., is a trusted commenter Washington
4 hours ago
I ran the delegate numbers through 15 March excluding Missouri, which is basically a tie like
Illinois was and there will probably be one delegate difference between the winner and loser,
and if the win-to-lose ration stayed the same, then Mrs. Hillary Clinton would still be short
over 200 pledged delegates after all the voting is done.
But the win-to-lose ratio will not remain constant. It will move in favor of Senator Bernard
"Bernie" Sanders and against Mrs. Clinton. Consequently, her shortfall in pledged delegates could
rise to 300-500 pledged delegates.
Keep on running Bernie! I will continue to support your campaign right through Democratic Party
convention.
If Bernie Sanders wins, he would become president. If Hillary Clinton wins , in the White House
will enter Trump.For the success of cause of the change, which wants many Americans, and Bernie
Sanders, must become president ... Trump.
Only one single-minded Republican could exacerbate problems to burst the boil.
There are no simple answers to the very real issues this country faces on every level. Unfortunately,
the individual developed psychologies of voters combined with the natural desire to embrace the
easiest idea that promises to bring a comfortable conclusion to the problems has blinded voters
to the very flawed candidates they have to choose from. I am a Sanders supporter but not because
he can achieve any of his ideas. I support him because he is a brake on the current business as
usual. His qualms about why the two parties cannot get anything done is truth and before we can
fix anything we have to acknowledge what is broken and remove it from any solution we might strive
for. I don't care if the Sanders car breaks down the moment we get off the road. First thing is
first we need to get off the road.
The DNC and RNC are corrupt and liabilities. The Media is covering up their most important
flaws for the sake of business as usual. Too many people have much to lose if this 2 party gravy
train is derailed and that isn't just the billionaires and multi-national corps. An entire system
has compromised the Republic and it need to be cleansed over a period of a decade to just get
rid of the nepotism, corruption, and pay to play shenanigans.
Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are the poster children for this system. I do not favor Ted
Cruz but he is right when he says the former sells influence and the latter buys it. If those
are options, next time won't be so polite.
Every one should vote according to their convictions ignoring what the media has to say or
does not say. It is also important not to pay attention who is going to win in the general election.
I believe the economy is rigged. The political establishment and corporate America as well as
Banks and Wall Street are all in the same bed. They will have a long happy honeymoon until ordinary
folks cannot support their honeymoon expenses. That gives rise to people like Sanders and Trump,
who will disturb the political order. My vote is for Sanders. Here why? I believe free college
is an economic necessity that we cannot afford not have. I believe the economy is rigged and Main
street should regulate the Wall Street and not the other way around. I believe health care to
all is necessary pre-condition to define a human society. I believe we can afford and we must.
Vote what you believe in and the nation will in the right direction.
Sanders hasn't been allowed to debate, and has gotten little to no media coverage. Our society
picks it's leaders based on 2 things. 1) the candidate with the most royal blood connection to
King John (this is a real theory, may not be true, but 98% of U.S. Presidents are the great-great-great-great-great-great
grand children of Charlemagne and King John,) and 2) which candidate they see in the media the
most. If Bernie loses this nomination, Donald Trump will become our next (and possibly final)
commander in chief.
Your tone is absurdly condescending, as if many Sanders supporters aren't graduate school educated
professionals (doctors, lawyers, accountants, social workers, educators, etc…) In fact, educated
people in pro-social occupations make up one of his stronger demographics.
The differences between the leftists who left their hippie-dropout lifestyles disillusioned
and moved on to professional careers later, and the more youthful Sanders supporters a couple
generations younger are myriad. Foremost, very few of them are cultural dropouts; they didn't
take the "burn out or sell out" brat route of the Boomers. Most are educated, and many are saddled
with student debt loads difficult for older people to understand (the mechanisms that force students
into debt are especially difficult for affluent Boomers to grasp). They compete for jobs with
all those disillusioned brats who settled down to professional practices - and are still working!
Not to mention the fact that your bitter ones - those who never learned the folly of egalitarianism
- are presumably the same ones who never got graduate degrees and cushy jobs; they're still waiting
for representation, for a pro-labor, pro-working-class candidate who never comes.
Nobody has pulled the wool over anyone's eyes, except perhaps the Clinton, the DNC, and the
media outlets that prop them up by appealing to low information voters while engaging only with
policy that benefits affluent ex-leftists in high aging professional positions.
In past elections, I have admittedly voted for the "lesser of two evils." Now, I realize that
just perpetuated a system which is corrupt. If people got truly educated about the issues and
the candidates, there would be only one choice, Senator Bernie Sanders. Alas, as Senator Adlai
Stevenson once said, getting the vote of every right thinking American was not enough. He needed
a majority. Sadly, this is only more true today.
> "These weaknesses could have been mitigated over time had the Times and the mainstream press
actually told its more diverse readers how Sanders' policies would in fact help them"
ANYBODY who wanted to be consumers of Mr. Sanders' talking points had more than enough sources
for that.
Sadly, your complaint is exactly the same one that conservatives have be putting on the NYT since
the mid-70s
What an intelligent person 'might' complain about in relation to your concerns is that the
MSM spends far too little effort accurately 'telling the voters' how delusional Mr. Sanders' proposals
are, and how there is less than a 1% chance they could EVER be implemented under any imaginable
configuration of the Congress
Related to this, I remember sadly, who NYT, WaPo, and others pointed out the lunacy of GWB's
campaign proposals were in 2000
IMPACT: almost zero
The naked agenda of GWB was to take a roaring economy, running in surplus, and open it up for
the private gain of the highest bidder
The GWB/Cheney agenda was very similar to Mitt Romney's LBO scheme to - take control of organizations
- strip them of as many of their valuable assets as they could efficiently do in as short a time
frame as possible
- load them up with debt, that went back into their own pockets so that they had none of their
own assets at risk
- dump the operation as quick as possible so that they wouldn't be holding-the-bag when the feces-hit-the-fan
- look for the next target
I disagree. There has been a very disproportionate coverage of candidates by the media. In
fact, I would argue that the biggest story of this election cycle is the media's own influence
of the election. I find it quite disturbing. This in not my opinion. It's a conclusion based on
studies I've read in the past several days, one of which was published by the NYTimes:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/16/upshot/measuring-donald-trumps-mammoth...
The mainstream media and its corporate owners are deeply troubled over the issue of Campaign
Finance Reform, which has been the most obvious point of Bernie Sanders' campaign--he has financed
his campaign through small donations from individual citizens, instead of SuperPacs like Hillary
has done, and this has been no small feat.
Corrupt campaign finance is a powerful tool the corporate elite uses to manipulate American voters
into voting against their own interests.
This is why the MSM has treated Sanders so shabbily. A glaring example of this problem was the
first Democratic debate put on by CNN. As it turns out, CNN is a subsidiary of Time-Warner, which
is a big donor to Hillary's campaign. Let that sink in.
So, sure enough, Anderson Cooper asked the candidates Zero questions about campaign finance reform,
Bernie Sanders' main issue, and Bernie had to stick the issue into an answer of his to a question
on a different topic near the end of the program. If not for that, the issue would not have been
raised at all.
The same syndrome has been evident, albeit in milder form, in most of the media, including the
NYT, the WaPo, MSNBC, and so on.
Corporate forces, including the corporate media, are loathe to have someone like Bernie Sanders
come along and take their corrupt financing of American politicians away from them.
Of course this latest interesting development must be giving Hillary palpitations; Can a felon
become President of the United States ??
See Business Insider and Link:
"The FBI is widening its investigation of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's
use of a private email account while she was U.S. secretary of state to determine whether any
public corruption laws were violated, Fox News reported on Monday.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has been looking into whether classified material was mishandled
during Clinton's tenure at the State Department from 2009-2013.
It will expand its probe by examining possible overlap of the Clinton Foundation charity with
State Department business, Fox reported, citing three unidentified intelligence officials.
"The [FBI] agents are investigating the possible intersection of Clinton Foundation donations,
the dispensation of State Department contracts and whether regular processes were followed," Fox
quoted one of its unidentified sources as saying."
In my mind, the fact that the Clintons have in the past taken money from Donald Trump disqualifies
Hillary from the presidency. I'm on the Bernie train, and if he's railroaded away from the nomination
by anyone, including President Obama, I'm not going to vote in November. I can't vote for either
Trump or Hillary, as they are in cahoots to fleece the average American and criminalize for life,
those whom they don't like, and that is mostly those in economic distress or poor substance abusers
in our country.
Obama's backing of Hillary is a disappointment. The self claimed most transparent administration
in history we were to get, never materialized, rather just the opposite happened, the least transparent
administration in history. His is an administration that went after whistleblowers exposing crimes
against the public, embraced perpetual warfare and mass incarceration, supports the surveillance
state, and his Justice Department and FBI stood by while unarmed American men and children had
their human rights and lives taken away from them by municipalities in Ohio, Illinois, California,
Florida, Texas, etc. etc. ad nauseam, this includes Tamir Rice and the kids drinking leaded water
in Flint. The list of human and civil rights violations under his watch is a long one that goes
on and on and no better than Dubya's. By supporting Hillary over Bernie, the President has proven
that he too, got into politics for the money. How cynical are leaders are today excluding Sanders.
Note that Donald Trump has won 48% of the GOP delegates so far. He would have to win about
54% of the remain delegates to get a majority, and the pundits consider that to be pretty likely.
Bernie has won 42% of the Democratic delegates so far (not counting superdelegates) and would
need to win about 58% of the remaining delegates to win. The pundits seem to consider it to be
pretty unlikely.
Maybe, but I think the pundits might be wrong on this one.
This nonsense about Ralph Nader has been repeated so often that almost seems plausible (…not
unlike many another myth). The historical truth is as follows.
The 2000 election came down to Florida. Running as "independents" were Nader (progressive)
and Pat Buchanan (conservative). Each of them received almost exactly the same number of votes
-- i.e. they cancelled each other out, Buchanan taking as many votes from Bush as Nader did from
Gore.
The one who who gave Bush the election was his brother Jeb. Through his Florida Secretary of
State, he ordered the recount ended -- the excuse proffered was the fear of violence: precinct
stations where poll workers were counting the votes had been attacked by squads of goons (paid
for, as was later revealed) by Karl Rove. The issue of the recount was then thrown to the Supreme
Court, which issued one of the most partisan rulings in its history.
Gore's loss had absolutely nothing to do with Ralph Nader. And those who claim it did are either
woefully uninformed, or are deliberately (and cynically!) distorting history to push some different
agenda of their own.
As I see things, Sanders is a better bet for the fall and the future . Mrs. Clinton was a "Goldwater
Girl" back in her younger days and was/is actually proud of that. I have to wonder if the African
American population realizes what that meant and now means. It hard to believe that she is not
owned by big business. Her possible indictment and the Republican reaction to no indictment. I
do not trust her for so many reasons. Since the polls seem to show that Sanders could defeat the
Republicans it might just be a safer move. Our nation does not want (or should not want) another
mess with another 'Clinton'. Nor should our country have to endure the problems that may well
accompany Mrs. Clinton into office. And hey, does anyone know why Mrs. Clinton discontinued the
use of her maiden name altogether? Has she any identity on her own that is of real value in her
thinking or does she just have to try to ride on a wave created by her hubby----not a very sharp
move for a true feminist. Shame on Mr. Obama for his comments in her favor. I am with Sanders
and probably not bothering to vote for her in the fall if she get the Democratic nomination---just
too hard to justify. The voters
who send her into the fall election just deserve 4 four years of the likes of Mr. Trump. This
might not be the year for Sanders and his approach, but the future lies ahead as an college Professor
always said.
Nate you are delusional if you don't think Bernie will win big in the Bay Area, the days of
smoke filled back rooms with Willie Brown and Diane Feinstein carving up the spoils are thankfully
over. The Bay Area has a very diverse, intelligent populace who can spot a phony when they see
it, Hillary doesn't stand a chance.
Say what you will, Bernie Sanders has breathed life into the Democrat campaign with sound ideas.
He has resurrected some of the old labor friendly ways of a party drifted too far to the right.
His call for a "revolution" of participation in government and civic lifr will resonate past the
election.
I'm glad he's staying in the race. I'd like my chance to vote for him, even if it proves only
symbolicc.
ScottW, is a trusted commenter Chapel Hill, NC
8 hours ago
Still waiting for the release of Hillary's transcripts of speeches she gave to special interest
who lathered her with millions. If you support Hillary and you don't care about seeing what she
told special interests you either work for one, or have your head in the sand.
Hillary's favorability ratings are below 50% in every poll taken. She is considered trustworthy
by a much lower percentage than Bernie.
But she is the best candidate for the Dems because she supports big money in politics. No way
to avoid the FACT the Dem party loves big donors and has absolutely no interest in having it any
other way. They are competing with Repubs for big donors.
A vote for Hillary is a vote for continuing pay to play, which has ruined this country for
the past 3 decades. Another bought and paid for candidate.
If it's Clinton v. Trump (of whoever v. Trump), and we the citizenry choose Trump, I must say
that humankind has really not come very far. In our country, the wealthiest in the world, where
by all reasonable measures, we live in significantly better conditions than most (but not all)
of the world population, we will have proven ourselves not so different from the typical ups-and-downs
that third-world countries and banana republics experience. For all our riches and our advancements,
we, as humans, must be somehow consigned, as a collective, to make the same stupid mistakes. I
hope we prove ourselves better than that.
There are quite a few more ways Bernie can win: leaks expose Hilary's Wall Street speeches,
; FBI charges; a strong yuan devaluation causes significant stock market volatility; etc
It's sad that educated "affluent" voters will support Clinton ostensibly to try to hold onto
as much of their wealth as possible even when it's worse for the nation at large. It's the exact
confluence of money and politics that Clinton stands for and Sanders rejects. This race is about
one candidate who is well-liked, genuine, and looking to honestly help people versus another who
pretends to be working for the people, but who's track record is a virtual Frank Underwood guide
book of self-serving political maneuvers for wealth and power.
Sanders ideas to give power back to the people instead of back to the wealthy isn't as radical
as the media portrays him. It's the basic tenets of democracy most of us learned back in grade
school. Hopefully whatever magic spell Clinton has over the black vote will be broken and voters
will wake up to realize there is only one candidate fighting on their behalf.
Actually, public colleges USED to be free for every in-state student. In the flower of my mature
years, I can still remember that.
I also remember making a livable living as a woman with only a HS diploma, serving as an executive
secretary for the high-powered and well-connected.
Many of them were identical to the snarling Democratic women who serve as Hillary*s henchpeople.
Even as they worked for the *better good* in the non-profit and socially advanced universe, they
were more than happy to trample on people like me.
And *me* are, like, legion...
I will never vote for Hillary. I will write in Sanders* name if I have to, and sleep soundly
on Election Night, regardless of what happens, because I will have acted according to my own principles
and ethics. If we all do so Sanders can win. If others do the usual craven Democratic fold--you*ll
get what you deserve.
It is time for the NYTimes and the rest of the corporate media to recognize the very real and
terrifying possibility that Donald Trump will be our next president. It is time to drop their
mindless support of Hillary and to face the facts. Bernie defeats Trump in every poll by wider
margins than Hillary. Bernie has no baggage. He has never faced indictment. He is not owned by
Wall St. and super pacs. He has not been a cheerleader for endless war in the Middle East.
Hillary is vulnerable in a general election; Bernie is not. I don't think the Times bothered to
report it, but Bernie actually earned more votes in North Carolina than Trump did. Many Bernie
supporters will not vote for Hillary. Bernie, however, has higher positive ratings than any other
candidate this year. He won his home state by 87% because he is beloved by Republicans and Independents
as well as Democrats. It is time to explain to African-Americans, Latinos, etc. WHY he is so beloved.
There is no reason on earth for African-Americans not to support him except for the fact that
they know nothing about him. That is your fault, corporate media, and nobody else's.
The truth is that Sanders performs way better against Trump in general election and state-by-state
match-ups than Clinton. He has great appeal for Independents, and even garners 25% of the Republican
vote in his home state of Vermont. One can say that Sanders hasn't yet been "tested" against the
Republican spin machine in a general election, but honestly, the worst they can throw at him is
"socialist," a term that is actually very friendly to those who come to understand the meaning
of "Democratic socialism." Clinton has so many lies (think, for just one, of "landing under sniper
fire in Bosnia), flip-flops and evolutions in her history that the Republicans will have a field
day with her. Independents don't like her, millennials are apathetic to her, and her only real
appeal is with strong Democrats, most of whom she doesn't inspire. What I fear the most is a Trump
presidency, and that Clinton will end up being another John Kerry, Michael Dukakis, Walter Mondale.
Cannot fathom why anyone would vote for Hillary
unless you want the "Same Old - Same Old":
The Rich get Richer and Poor get Poorer.
Do you really think someone who took $ 675,000 for making
3 speeches to Goldman Sachs is going to tame the Wall Street Wolves ?
I believe Sen Sanders is committing a terrible error that will cost him the nomination and
the Democrats the presidency.
While sparing HRC all the hovering questions by running a clean campaign
first, he is not only not using the possibility to highlight his superiority on political luggage
and history which could help him with minority groups, veterans and others ,
but also he is not preparing the public for the spectacle waiting the public when the duel with
Trump(or Cruz) starts.
When the issues such as her voting history on wars, Secretary of State
tragic mistakes such as Libya, endangering nation security with the use of a
private server , Bill grotesque history with women and her shaming of the women who went trough,
her past positions on LGBT,
profoundly racist comments as the Superpredators, weird insinuations as the gunfire in Kosovo
start being spit on her by towering, screaming bully of Trump it will be a
a BLOODBATH.
There is so many of them and even now she keep on making them
and when you hear them all spit one by one with a venom and conviction by the "other" candidate,
even diehard Dems will be appalled.
She will be destroyed and no whatsoever credibility will be accorded any
explanation she could give as the offences are BIGGER then anything we have ever witnessed in
president candidate.
Reps are stocking them like silver bullets and they will hit when the time comes.
So shoot now Sanders, otherwise other will use them to kill.
I am a psychiatrist, and I am terrified by the idea that someone with such a narcissistic,
and anti-social personality, would put the future and safety of our country at great risk, in
order to aquire another "property" that he desperately wants, as another trophy to add to his
list of buying everything he wants, no matter the cost or risk.
Unlike a real estate acquisition, you cannot (or should not) bankrupt this country, write it
off as a loss on your taxes, and move on to purchasing another "prize" you want, and feel you
are entitled to "collect/own". For a man who continually demonstrates the temper of a 5 y/o when
he is challenged, and has no political experience mixed with his "ballistic" temper, would you
really choose him to make decisions that involve the safety and welfare of our country, and to
make rationally based decisions in our current state of complex and fragile international affairs?
"... Trump is winning because he is NOT the establishment. Sanders, coming out of nowhere, with only PEOPLE rather than the establishment behind him, is running a fantastic race against a well oiled machine going on twenty years in the building of it. ..."
"... US will just follow the rest of the world's trend towards more extremist politicians and options. It is just a sign that these are not good times at least in peoples' minds. The extreme right is doing great in Northern and Central Europe, while the extreme left is doing the same in Southern Europe creating a rift in almost every issue, but specially the immigration policy. many countries are becoming difficult to govern at a time when separatism, both national (Scotland, Catalonia) and supranational (Brexit) is on the increase. ..."
"... "US will just follow the rest of the world's trend towards more extremist politicians and options. It is just a sign that these are not good times at least in peoples' minds." ..."
"... The odds are, you are right, about HRC being the nominee, but it is still a race, and it ain't over till it's over. I hope like hell you are right about TRUMP LOSING, regardless of who wins, but I have been following politics since the fifties, and HRC has had a hint of dead fish smell following her from day one. They used to talk about RR being the teflon prez, but compared to HRC, he was Velcro. ..."
"... She stinks in terms of the public's opinion of her, and elections are generally decided in the middle in this country. ..."
"... The Republican party is too far to the right for most Europeans, including me. And as of late it seems to even be going farther to the right (Tea party, Trump, etc). ..."
The MSM are doing their usual thing this morning, managing, like the referee at a pro wrestling
match, to miss the real action. It is true that a win is a win in a winner take all state when
it comes to delegates, but when the results are as close as three points, one or two voters out
of a hundred changing sides changes the results.
The people are obviously sick and tired of our old establishment politicians.
Trump is winning because he is NOT the establishment. Sanders, coming out of nowhere, with
only PEOPLE rather than the establishment behind him, is running a fantastic race against a well
oiled machine going on twenty years in the building of it.
When the actual election rolls around, the people who are pissed at the establishment, meaning
damned near everybody except the handful at the top of the economic and political heap, are going
to wish they could vote for an outsider.
The right wing outsiders will get their wish from the looks of things. They will be voting
AGAINST INSIDERS rather than FOR Trump. Their fires will be burning hot and bright, unless he
goes totally nuts campaigning.
This looks BAD for the country imo. The D's are in great danger of running a CLASSIC insider.
It's time for a change, and the younger people of this country feel it in their bones.
And about this old climate change issue, ahem. We can basically go to bed at night, not worrying
about it very much, in terms of people's beliefs, because all that is really left is a mopping
up operation as far as public opinion is concerned.
My generation will soon be either dead or in nursing homes, and the younger generation will
vote the scientific consensus, after a while.
I remember LOTS of people who were DEAD set, pun intended, in their belief that smoking is
a harmless pleasure. It has been a decade at least since I heard even an illiterate moron claim
that smoking is safe, although I do still hear an occasional smoker in denial say that when your
time comes, your time has come, and it does not matter about the WHY of it coming.
This is not to say we can abandon the fight, but that victory is assured, so long as we keep
it up.
After all, the actual EVIDENCE is accumulating that the world is warming up pretty fast.
I have no doubt at all than unless the last ten days of this month are very close to RECORD
COLD, we will be setting a regional record for the warmest March ever. My personal estimate is
that the odds of a frost kill of the tree fruit crop locally are among the highest ever. All it
takes is ONE good frosty night once the buds are too far advanced.
The Koch brothers and their buddies will continue to fight a dirty and ferocious rear guard
action of course, but in another decade, the issue will no longer be in doubt, as far as the general
public is concerned.
Trump is winning because he is NOT the establishment
Nobody is more establishment than Trump. He's a perfect example of a crony-capitalist. Again, this is the classic strategy of exploiting people's problems, and diverting their anger
towards scapegoats, like immigrants and foreign countries. Trump has proposed a massive tax cut for the 1%, and making life harder for immigrants only
helps business exploit them better, and undercuts wages even more for working people.
There is more than one way do define the word "establishment".
In one sense Trump IS the establishment, but in the sense I used it , he is the ANTI establishment,
no doubt, but he is also a new face on the political scene, running against the D party as WELL
as his own NOMINAL party.
No real republican thinks of Trump as a republican, if we define republican as somebody who
agrees with most or all of the positions and values of the republican party for the last couple
of decades.
What I am saying is that the foot soldiers of the R party have been ready to mutiny for a long
time now, and Trump has provided them the leadership necessary to do so.
The working class conservative voters are THOROUGHLY pissed at the R party establishment, feeling
betrayed at every turn.
People who used to work for a living in the industries sent overseas by the D and R parties
working in collusion have felt trapped until today, betrayed by the D party on the social consensus
they held dear, right or wrong, and fucked over by the R party they have been voting for as the
lesser of two evils.
Not many such people still believe in the American Dream, because they are simply not able
to get ahead anymore, no matter how hard they work.
And while they are mistaken to believe in Trump, at least Trump has not be been lying to them
continuously for the last few decades, AS THEY SEE IT.
( That he is lying to them now , in substantial ways, is irrevelant. He is a NEW face. )
Trump IS Wall Street, and HRC is in the vest pocket of Wall Street, except on cultural issues.
Now these comments may not make much sense to hard core liberals, because hard core liberals
have an incredibly hard time believing anybody who disagrees with them has a brain, or morals,
or a culture that suits THEM.
In actuality, at least half of the country disagrees with the D party social agenda, for reasons
that TO THEM are valid and more than adequate.
I agree: Trump has sold himself as an advocate for the working class.
It's the same strategy Republicans have been using for 40 odd years: using people's fears and
hopes to get them to vote for people who proceed to betray them.
Not that Democrats are enormously better, but, with our current political system they can't
be. If they get too progressive, the other party can move to the middle and cut them out.
It's nice to see you posting again. Your spot on. The Republican establishment has been exploiting
their base for the last 50 years with a whisper campaign of racism and bigotry for their own 1%
economic gain. The Donald has only removed the whisper from the campaign and increased the amount
of lies.
"Trump is the same ol', same ol', only worse"
"That's what puzzles me – this idea that fossil fuels are still valuable."
Nick, you over estimate the educated gray matter of your fellow humans. Most don't have your
vision and will not see it until EV's are the norm(10+ years from now). The fossil fuel Republican
parties base will be the last in the world to see the light. If they aren't already.
US will just follow the rest of the world's trend towards more extremist politicians and options.
It is just a sign that these are not good times at least in peoples' minds.
The extreme right is doing great in Northern and Central Europe, while the extreme left is
doing the same in Southern Europe creating a rift in almost every issue, but specially the immigration
policy. many countries are becoming difficult to govern at a time when separatism, both national
(Scotland, Catalonia) and supranational (Brexit) is on the increase.
If we move to the rest of the world we see the very negative result of the Arab Spring. Essentially
no single country that underwent those social revolutions has come better afterwards. Even Tunisia,
a moderate country, has seen its tourism badly damaged and it is now the biggest contributor to
Sirian foreign fighters. Saudi Arabia has a more extremist government that it is making a policy
out of foreign intervention, minority repression and confrontation against Iran, while its population
is cheering the change.
So don't be so surprised by developments in US politics that follow what is happening elsewhere.
It is a product of the times we live.
the world's trend towards more extremist politicians
There's nothing new about demagoguery, in the US or elsewhere, or revolutionary sentiment (I
guess I shouldn't have said Trump was "worse" – he's just a little less subtle about it than has
been the norm lately in the US).
Have you seen any actual data suggesting that there is a real change in "extremism", separatism,
social discontent or other similar things?
"Have you seen any actual data suggesting that there is a real change in "extremism", separatism,
social discontent or other similar things?"
Yes:
French National Front best results ever in 2014-2015 elections. They were the first party in
the last EU parliamentary elections in France with almost 5 million votes.
Alternative for Germany. New party in 2013. Best results ever in 2016 state elections, receiving
second and third place in the three states that held elections.
Freedom Party of Austria second best result ever in 2013 elections with 20,5% of the vote and
30% in Vienna.
Coalition of Radical Left (Syriza) best result ever in 2015 elections with 36.3% of the votes.
Podemos (Radical left in Spain). New party in 2014. Best result ever in 2015 elections with
21% of the votes.
Populism and demagoguery are taking the developed world by storm. New radical (right or left)
parties go from zero to taking second or third places in mere months.
"US will just follow the rest of the world's trend towards more extremist politicians and options.
It is just a sign that these are not good times at least in peoples' minds."
I don't have more than the foggiest idea about Javier's personal political beliefs, other than
that he occasionally makes a remark indicating he leans more to the left than to the right. I
don't think you do either.
Folks who are so TRIBALLY oriented that they cannot distinguish a skeptic from a partisan will
always of course assume that anybody who questions anything associated with their IN group is
a member of their OUT GROUP, and a fraud or a phony or an enemy of some sort.
I disagree with Javier's assessment of the potential risk of forced climate change, but he
on the other hand he never has anything to say, other than about the extent of forced climate
change, that sets off my personal alarm bells when it comes to environmental issues. On every
other environmetal question, unless I have overlooked something, he is very much in one hundred
percent agreement with the overall "big picture " environmental camp consensus.
It is GOOD politics to remember what RR had to say about a man who agrees with you just about
all the time. Such a man is a FRIEND, in political terms, and an ally, rather than an enemy.
Now about that fear card- both parties play it on a regular basis.
In case you haven't noticed, I support the larger part of the D party platform, except I go
FARTHER, in some cases, as in supporting single payer for the heath care industry. I have made
it clear that I am NOT a republican, and stated many times that I am basically a single issue
voter, that issue being the environment.
Now HERE is why I am supporting Bernie Sanders, nicely summarized, although I do not take every
line of this article seriously.
Any democrat who is not afraid to remove his or her rose colored glasses, and take a CRITICAL
look at HRC as a candidate, will come away with a hell of a lot to think about if he or she reads
this link.
I personally know a lot of people who have voted D most of their lives who would rather vote
for ANY other D than HRC. It is extremely hard for a lot of people to accept it, but she STINKS,
ethically, in the opinion of a HUGE swath of independents, and a substantial number of committed
democrats . A good many of them may stay home rather than vote for her, but they will vote for
Sanders, out of party loyalty and fear of Trump.
Sanders polls better,virtually across the board, in terms of the actual election, and he does
not have the negative baggage. I WANT a Democrat in the WH next time around.
Read this , and think, if you are not so immersed in party and personal politics that you can't
deal with it.
Millions and millions of D voters have digested it already, for themselves, over the last decade
or two, which is why Sanders is getting half the vote, excluding minorities in the south, even
though he is coming out of nowhere, without the support of the party establishment, without big
money backing him, against HRC who has been organizing and campaigning just about forever.
I am not saying this guy is right in every respect, but he has his finger on the pulse of many
tens of millions of D voters, or potential D voters.
If it comes down to Trump versus HRC, I am not at ALL sure HRC will win, but if Sanders gets
the nomination, I think he WILL, because even though he has been around forever, he is the NEW
face of the D party, and the PEOPLE of this country are SICK and TIRED of the old faces, D and
R both.
Trump and Sanders have in ONE important thing in common . Both of them are new faces, promising
to bring new life to their parties.
I like a lot about what Sanders is bringing to the table. But sorry Mac, I think its going to
be Clinton.
I'm non-aligned (anti-partisan), but I'd vote for Clinton a thousand times over Trump. And I think
a strong majority of the country will as well.
The odds are, you are right, about HRC being the nominee, but it is still a race, and it ain't
over till it's over. I hope like hell you are right about TRUMP LOSING, regardless of who wins, but I have been
following politics since the fifties, and HRC has had a hint of dead fish smell following her
from day one. They used to talk about RR being the teflon prez, but compared to HRC, he was Velcro.
Almost every regular in this forum seems to be mathematically literate. I challenge anybody
here to explain Cattle Gate as any thing except fraud, pure and simple, in realistic terms.
Hey, this ain't YET North Korea, where we actually believe our leader made a hole in one the
first time he ever tried golf, on a day so foggy nobody could see the green.
I absolutely will never vote for EITHER HRC or TRUMP.
If the D's run HRC, the best hope for the country is that the R's broker their convention,
and Trump gives up crashing the R party and his own personal hard core stays home. That would
make the election safe for HRC, assuming the FBI decides in her favor. Not many prez candidates
have ever had a hundred agents on their case.
Six months ago I was almost sure Trump was a flash in the pan, and would be forgotten by now.
I now fear that there is a very real possibility he may win.
The political waters are so muddy it is impossible to say what will happen a year from now.
Trump is the sort of fellow who successfully "aw shucks" away most of his nasty rhetoric once
he has the nomination, and then he will turn his guns on HRC. He won't have far to go to look
for ammo, and he will make damned sure everything smelly is on the front pages from day one, all
the way back to Arkansas.
Sanders is a far more desirable candidate in the actual election.
She stinks in terms of the public's opinion of her, and elections are generally decided in
the middle in this country.
If she can take her ten years plus campaigning advantage into a big industrial state, Obama's
political home, with the party establishment behind her, and win by only TWO POINTS points, what
does this tell you?She should have won by thirty points or more, if the people were really behind
her, rather than beholden to the party machine.
The deep south will vote for Trump in preference to HRC, with a couple of exceptions, maybe
three or four. So her big delegate lead from there doesn't prove a THING in terms of the actual
election. She is taking all the delegates elsewhere in winner take all states by only very narrow
margins. The BURN in D voter's hearts is mostly for Sanders.
Trump would likely be in worse shape in terms of public opinion, except he is a new face, politically,
and it takes a long time to build up such negatives, it doesn't happen overnight.
My personal opinion of HIS ethics is that he makes HRC look like an altar girl.
I am not too interested in politics, and even less in US politics. The Republican party is
too far to the right for most Europeans, including me. And as of late it seems to even be going
farther to the right (Tea party, Trump, etc).
I do not find myself much of a political space because I do not agree much with both left and
right parties in Europe. I am more of a traditional European liberal, which doesn't translate
well into a US political leaning, and even in Europe is very minoritarian. Let's just say that
I believe that individual rights are above collective rights and I believe in small government.
I also think that the economy should be strictly regulated to avoid dominant positions that always
go against the individual, and that medical care and education should be affordable to anybody.
But I am afraid all these belong to a pre-Oil Peak world and we are going to see very different
politics being played out as our economy starts to suffer from lack of affordable oil. Right now
oil is not affordable because producers cannot afford it, but if it goes up significantly in price
consumers will not be able to afford it.
"... Besides which, it's hard to buy the idea that Gaddafi was "rogue" or " a threat" when both parties named here were "rendering" secret prisoners to him for outsourced torture. ..."
"... There is no honour among thieves, clearly. But it would be folly to depict a squabble among them as a narrative of sinner vs saint... ..."
"... After the cold war, the US and had the chance to lead to a new world order based on democracy and human rights. Yet instead, its politics based became based on bullying and warmongering, and joined by their European allies. As a result we have a world entrenched in chaos and violence. ..."
"... To top it off, there is also their allies, the Saudi and Gulf allies. Therefore, if you want to know how bad the world has become as a result of the US, European and Gulf allies, their hypocrisy, criminal behavior, destruction of countries, and total disregard of international law, all you need to see is the war in Yemen. ..."
"... Imperialism never left,.. The Capitalists are always working at complete control, it has no problem dancing with Dictators and Authoritarian rulers when it suites its purpose. Its just now they appear to be wanting to improve their image by changing their partners who stepped on their toes and Israel's on occasion .. ..."
"... Yes, I will claim it as a U.S. inspired regime change policy, in all those Middle East secular and sovereign countries, by our own beloved War Mongering Nationalistic Neo Cons.. That is already being shown as a complete disaster.. Only 2 million dead so far and just wait until the religious fanatics are in complete control.. ..."
"... "keeping alive the military-industrial lobbies" mmm. An incomplete reading I think. What about oil and gas? Libya is north African richest country if I'm not mistaken ... Is Britain (and France) still trying to get its share there? ..."
"... "Western [ mostly american and british ] warmongering over the past two decades has had nothing to do with the existential defense of territory. "Defense" has become attack, keeping alive the military-industrial lobbies and lumbering military establishments that depend on it." ..."
"... "The result has been mass killing, destruction and migration on a scale not seen, at least outside Africa, since the second world war." ..."
"... The Sykes-Picot agreement was one of the secrets uncovered by the Russian Revolution: it was in the files of the newly-overthrown government, and promptly publicized by the Bolsheviks, along with lots of other documents relating to imperialist secret diplomacy. Sound familiar? ..."
"... The interventionist model that the West has carried out recently is really an extension of the old colonialism in a different guise. In the olden days, the excuse was to spread Western civilization and Christianity to the world living in backwardness. In the modern era, it's democracy. Unfortunately democracy cannot be installed by force. Even if the people of the country being invaded wanted it, the opportunists (either among them or the outsiders) would find ways to exploit the chaos for their own benefits. We have seen different forms of such evolution in Libya, Egypt, Syria, Iraq. ..."
"... The CIA funded and trained the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, to fight the Russians, just as they backed Saddam against Iran. And the US has been mucking about in the Middle East since the 50s, the Brits since the late 19th century. Yours is a very selective reading of history. ..."
"... No, small groups of people with their own particular interests "begged for help." The "Arab Spring" was a Western media confection used to justify Western intervention to get rid of Gaddafi and Assad. Worked with Gaddafi, Assad not so well. ..."
"... You forget who triggered the French intervention. Another neo-con working for Israel. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/02/world/africa/02levy.html?_r=2 ..."
"... Israel does not want a functioning Arab State left in the Middle-East. ..."
"... It's like the Soviet Union invading the US because a few militiamen holed up in a wildlife refuge in Oregon. The neo-con press feeds us this propaganda and the willing idiots lap it up and deny responsibility when everything falls apart. ..."
"... Jihad Dave is supporting islamist maniacs in Libya and Syria. He succeeded in Libya, along with the ludicrous Sarkozy clown, but Russia and Iran have stood up to the plate in Syria. ..."
"... However much we might sympathise with fellow human beings living under brutal dictators and governments, a country can only really progress from within. Certainly, dialogue, sanctions and international cooperation can help foster change, but ultimately countries must want to change. ..."
"... No, Gaddafy's crime was actually to spend the bulk of Libya's oil revenues on useless things such as schools, hospitals, housing and subsidised food when that money could have been flowing into the pockets of the West. ..."
"... Taliban has been trained in the Saudi religious schools in Pakistan. Wahhabism is the official ideology of Saudi Arabia. 10 out of 11 terrorists 9/11 were the Saudis. All the Islamic terror in the last two decades was sponsored by the Saudis, including ISIS. ..."
"... Bosnia - a slow ticking bomb. Just bubbling under the surface. Kosovo - a mafia state run by drug lord Thaci, supported by the US. It is no secret that the main source of income in Kosovo today is drugs, prostitution, organ trafficking. ..."
"... There are no winners or losers in Iraq, everyone lost. Not a single group benefited from that western backed regime change, same in Libya and Syria. ..."
"... The US empire blew up Libya with some help from it's puppets, Sarkozy and Cameron. 100% imperialism. ..."
"... The USA - and its mini-me, the UK - have so blatantly bombed societies, manipulated governments and undermined social change in so many parts of the world that their trading positions are under real threat from emerging economic powers. ..."
"... Yes, Obama shows himself for the buffoon he really is. ..."
"... I, however, would caution against thinking the US led Neoliberal Empire of the Exceptionals is weakening. Its economic hegemony is almost complete only China and Russia remaining, and Obama with his "Pivot to Asia" (TM) has them surrounded and all set up for the female Chaney - Clinton the warmonger to get on with it. ..."
"... The Empire will only get more and more brutal - it has absolutely no concern for human life or society - power over the globe as the Pentagon phrases it: "Global full spectrum domination" don't kid yourself they are going all out to reach their goal and a billion people could be killed - the Empire would say - so what, it was in our strategic interest. ..."
"... Very well put, Sir. Obama's self-serving statement is borderline stupid. I constantly wonder why I voted for him twice. His Deep State handlers continue from the Bush period and having installed their coterie of right-wing extremists from Hillary to the Directors of the CIA, FBI, NSA, DOD, ad nauseum Obama has not had the courage at any point to admit not only the "mess" he makes, but the he is a captive mess of the shadow government. ..."
"... Your comment is so stereotyped: when British aggression or war crimes are involved, every excuse is trundle out, every nuance examined, every extenuating circumstance and of course there is always a convenient statute of limitations. But when others are involved, specifically America and Israel, the same Guardian readers allow no excuses or nuances and every tiny detail going back hundreds of years is repeatedly and thoroughly examined. ..."
"... Smith was murdered by extremists that took over Libya precisely because the death of Gadaffi left a dangerous power vacuum. The US aided and abetted certain groups, weapons found their way to the worse groups and Smith, a brave man, was his own country's victim in one sense. Hilary Clinton who should have known better publicly gloated over Gadaffi's death. Since his death the victimisation of black Libyans and other black Africans has become common, Libya has been overrun by extremists, and as we write is being used as a conduit for uncontrolled entry into Europe. ..."
"... The biggest unanswered and puzzling question, is that of how could Obama have expected or assumed that Britain and France would have stayed behind and clean up the mess they and the Americans have made of Libya? Why did the Americans resolved to play only the part of 'hired guns' to go in and blitzed the Libyan Government and its armed forces, and neglected to learn the lesson of planning what should follow after the destruction? ..."
"... The argument that the Americans had assumed that France and Britain would clean up the euphemistic mess has little or no credibility, since all three countries had been very clear about not wanting American, British and French 'boots on the ground.' ..."
"... "The result has been mass killing, destruction and migration on a scale not seen, at least outside Africa, since the second world war." ..."
"... We bombed in support of competing Jihadis groups, bandits and local war Lords then our well laid plans for a Utopian peace were thwarted because of the unforeseen chaos created as the Militias we gave close airsupport to fought over the spoils. ..."
"... We should remember that we funded the terrorists in Libya and then sent weapons to ISIS from Libya to Syria that is we again used Al Qaeda as a proxy force. We then again used the "threat" from the proxy forces i,e. Al Qaeda to justify mass surveillance of the general population. ..."
"... Of its 237 years of existence it has been at war or cold war for 222 of those years. ..."
"... NATO is behind ISIS and the wars in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Chechen, Afghanistan, Libya and Ukraine. ..."
"... Jane they didn't "come apart" and Libya and Syria were the most stable and least under the thumb of radicals. Syria had equality and education for women who could wear whatever they wanted. Furthermore they did not fall apart they were attacked by the largest military forces in the world excluding Russia. NATO sent in special operations forces to destabilise the government. They along with Al Nusra and other violent Wahabi terrorists attacked police and army barracks, and when Assads police and military hit back it was presented by the Western media and propagandists as an attack on the people of Syria. Do you think any other country would allow terrorists to attack police and other public institutions without retaliating and restoring order. ..."
"... Many people who do not accept the Western medias false reporting at face value know that the wars in Syria were about changing the leaders and redrawing national boundaries to isolate Iran and sideline Russian influence. It was and is an illegal war and it was the barbarity of our Western leaders that caused the terrible violence. It was a pre planned plan and strategy outlined in the US Special Forces document below. http://nsnbc.me/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/special-forces-uw-tc-18-01.pdf ..."
"... In the Libyan case, it was a clear US strategy to put in the forefront their English and French valets, in a coup (euphemistically called "regime change") wanted by them. The nobel peace winner got some nerves to put the blame on his accomplices for the chaos in Libya, while the permanent objective of the US is to divide and conquer, sowing chaos wherever it occurs: Afghanistan, Sudan, Iraq, Syria. Also Hillary is no stranger to the actions in Libya. ..."
"... Simon Jenkins, don't pretend you were against American punitive expeditions around the world to overthrow third world dictators. You worked from the same neo-con ideological script to defend the ultra-liberal, military industrial economy; scare mongering in the pages of the Guardian, as far back as I can remember. You lot are as totally discredited as Bush, Cheney, Rumsfield and American Nato toadies. ..."
"... Libya , Ukraine ,Syria have had the same recipe of de-stabilisation by the US and NATO. The so called popular rebels were in fact CIA trained and financed. Jihadist in Libya and Syria and neo-Nazis in Ukraine. After completing regime change in Libya as planned ,the Jihadist, with their looted arms were transferred to Syria and renamed ISIS. ISIS is Washingtons Foreign Legion army, used as required for their Imperial ends. Renamed as required on whichever territory they operate ..."
"... Cameron has been given a free pass on Libya. It really is quite astonishing. The man has turned a functioning society into a jihadi infested failed state which is exporting men and weapons across North Africa and down the Sahara and now serves as a new front line for ISIS ..."
"... Attacking Libya and deposing Gaddafi was down to enforcing the R2P doctrine on the pretext of "stopping another Rwanda". But it was a pretext. Islamist rebels attacked the armouries within Libya and the Libyans had every right to try and put down the rebellion. Samantha Powers et al were the war mongers. ..."
"... The 2011 regime change shenanigans of the west against Libya is colonialism at its worst from all the parties who instigated it. The aftermath, the resultant mayhem and chaos, was in itself adding insult to injury. Gaddafi was no saint, but the militias, Muslim Brotherhood and ISIS now running rampant in the country are infinitely worse. This is a war crime of the first magnitude and no effort should be spared to address it ..."
"... The west who has assassinated or organised coups against democratically elected secular leaders who didn't give us their natural resources (eg iran) and installed brutal, clepto dictatorships who also take part in plundering the resources leaving the general population poor, uneducated and susceptible to indoctrination from Islamists. ..."
So
Barack Obama thinks Britain in 2011 left Libya in chaos – and besides it does not pull its weight
in the world. Britain thinks that a bit rich, given the shambles America left in Iraq. Then both
sides say sorry. They did not mean to be rude.
Thus do we wander across the ethical wasteland of the west's wars of intervention. We blame and
we name-call. We turn deaf ears to the cries of those whose lives we have destroyed. Then we kiss
and make up – to each other.
Obama was right first time round about Libya's civil war. He wanted to keep out. As
he recalls to the Atlantic magazine , Libya was "not so at the core of US interests that it makes
sense for us to unilaterally strike against the Gaddafi regime". He cooperated with Britain and France,
but on the assumption that David Cameron would clear up the resulting mess. That did not happen because
Cameron had won his Falklands war and could go home crowing.
Obama is here describing all the recent "wars of choice".
America had no "core interest" in Afghanistan or Iraq, any more than Britain had in
Libya . When a state attacks
another state and destroys its law and order, morally it owns the mess. There is no such thing as
imperialism-lite. Remove one fount of authority and you must replace and sustain another, as Europe
has done at vast expense in Bosnia and Kosovo.
America and Britain both attacked countries in the Middle East largely to satisfy the machismo
and domestic standing of two men, George Bush and Tony Blair. The result has been mass killing, destruction
and migration on a scale not seen, at least outside Africa, since the second world war. In this despicable
saga, Cameron's Libyan venture was a sideshow, though one that has destabilised north
Africa and may yet turn it
into another Islamic State caliphate. It is his Iraq.
As for Obama's charge that Britain and other countries are not pulling their weight and are "free
riders" on American defence spending, that too deserves short shrift.
British and French military expenditure is proportionately among the highest in the world, mostly
blown on archaic weapons and archaic forms of war. Western warmongering over the past two decades
has had nothing to do with the existential defence of territory. "Defence" has become attack, keeping
alive the military-industrial lobbies and lumbering military establishments that depend on it.
Meanwhile the bonds between America and Britain will continue to strengthen. They do so, against
all the odds, because they grow from one culture and one outlook on life. That mercifully has nothing
to do with politicians.
I'm stunned that Obama has been able to get away with his absolutely abysmal record with foreign
policy. Libya was a complete disaster and there is evidence to suggest that Libya was a much better
place under Gaddafi. And the fact that once they were in Iraq (something started by his predecessor)
he wasn't committed to bringing about serious change, thus leaving a giant vacuum which, coincided
with the Syrian Civil War, has now been filled by ISIS.
That's not even talking about the Iran deal, Benghazi and the disastrous "Bring Back our Girls"
campaign.
"People find it very hard," said Iman Fannoush, with her two children in tow and a husband
she knows not where. "They are up all night shooting because of good news. We hear the UN is
coming to help us or our fighters have taken Brega or the air strikes have destroyed Gaddafi's
tanks. Then everyone is afraid again when they hear Gaddafi's army is coming and they all want
to know where is France, where are the air strikes, why is the west abandoning us?
We are grateful for the role played by the international community in protecting the Libyan
people; Libyans will never forget those who were our friends at this critical stage and will
endeavour to build closer relations with those states on the basis of our mutual respect and
common interests. However, the future of Libya is for the Libyans alone to decide. We cannot
compromise on sovereignty or allow others to interfere in our internal affairs, position themselves
as guardians of our revolution or impose leaders who do not represent a national consensus.
Hilsum gives a riveting account of the battle for Tripoli, with activists risking their lives
to pass intelligence to Nato, whose targeting – contrary to regime propaganda – was largely
accurate, and too cautious for many Libyans.
The UN security council authorised action to protect Libyan civilians from the Gaddafi regime
but Russia, China and other critics believe that the western alliance exceeded that mandate
and moved to implement regime change.
Libya's Arab spring was a bloody affair, ending with the killing of Gaddafi, one of the world's
most ruthless dictators. His death saw the rebel militias turn on each other in a mosaic of
turf wars. Full-scale civil war came last summer, when Islamist parties saw sharp defeats in
elections the United Nations had supervised, in the hope of bringing peace to the country.
Islamists and their allies rebelled against the elected parliament and formed the Libya Dawn
coalition, which seized Tripoli. The new government fled to the eastern city of Tobruk and
fighting has since raged across the country.
With thousands dead, towns smashed and 400,000 homeless, the big winner is Isis, which has
expanded fast amid the chaos. Egypt, already the chief backer of government forces, has now
joined a three-way war between government, Libya Dawn and Isis.
It is all a long way from the hopes of the original revolutionaries. With Africa's largest
oil reserves and just six million people to share the bounty, Libya in 2011 appeared set for
a bright future. "We thought we would be the new Dubai, we had everything," says a young activist
who, like the student, prefers not to give her name. "Now we are more realistic."
Perpetually engineered destabilization is highly lucrative and has been for 200 years, but I don't
know what's Central or Intelligent about it......except for a tiny handful at the top globally.
On balance, is Libya worse off now than it would have been, had Gaddaffi been allowed free
rein in Benghazi?
No-one can possibly know the answer to that, certainly not Mr Jenkins.
Clearly it was a dictatorship like say Burma is today.....but....from an economic point of
view, it was like the Switzerland of Africa. And actually tons of European companies had flocked
over there to set up shop. In contrast to now where its like the Iraquistan of Africa. No contest
in the comparison there...
Besides which, it's hard to buy the idea that Gaddafi was "rogue" or " a threat" when both
parties named here were "rendering" secret prisoners to him for outsourced torture.
There is no honour among thieves, clearly. But it would be folly to depict a squabble among
them as a narrative of sinner vs saint...
After the cold war, the US and had the chance to lead to a new world order based on democracy
and human rights. Yet instead, its politics based became based on bullying and warmongering, and
joined by their European allies. As a result we have a world entrenched in chaos and violence.
To top it off, there is also their allies, the Saudi and Gulf allies. Therefore, if you
want to know how bad the world has become as a result of the US, European and Gulf allies, their
hypocrisy, criminal behavior, destruction of countries, and total disregard of international law,
all you need to see is the war in Yemen.
Imperialism never left,.. The Capitalists are always working at complete control, it has no
problem dancing with Dictators and Authoritarian rulers when it suites its purpose. Its just now
they appear to be wanting to improve their image by changing their partners who stepped on their
toes and Israel's on occasion ..
Yes, I will claim it as a U.S. inspired regime change policy, in all those Middle East secular
and sovereign countries, by our own beloved War Mongering Nationalistic Neo Cons.. That is already
being shown as a complete disaster.. Only 2 million dead so far and just wait until the religious
fanatics are in complete control..
Yep, many pictures, as there always are with media confections. Remember the footage of Saddam's
statue being torn down in front of a huge crowd? It was only months later we saw the wide angle
shot that showed just how few people there really were there.
These US and UK involvement in the ME are matters of official record; are you really denying the
CIA trained the Mujahideen, or that both the UK and US propped up Saddam? Even Robert Fisk acknowledges
that! And please, don't patronise me. You have no idea what I've read or haven't.
......c'mon, the powers behind the powers intentionally engineer mid-East destabilization to keep
the perpetual war pumping billions to the ATM's in their living rooms; then, on top of it, they
send the bill to average joe's globally; when is this farce going to be called out ?
It is completely illogical, can't stand even eye tests, yet continues like an emperor with
new clothes in our face.
"keeping alive the military-industrial lobbies" mmm. An incomplete reading I think. What about
oil and gas? Libya is north African richest country if I'm not mistaken ... Is Britain (and France)
still trying to get its share there?
"Western [ mostly american and british ] warmongering over the past two decades has
had nothing to do with the existential defense of territory. "Defense" has become attack, keeping
alive the military-industrial lobbies and lumbering military establishments that depend on it."
"The result has been mass killing, destruction and migration on a scale not seen, at least
outside Africa, since the second world war."
The Sykes-Picot agreement was one of the secrets uncovered by the Russian Revolution: it was
in the files of the newly-overthrown government, and promptly publicized by the Bolsheviks, along
with lots of other documents relating to imperialist secret diplomacy. Sound familiar?
The interventionist model that the West has carried out recently is really an extension of
the old colonialism in a different guise. In the olden days, the excuse was to spread Western
civilization and Christianity to the world living in backwardness. In the modern era, it's democracy.
Unfortunately democracy cannot be installed by force. Even if the people of the country being
invaded wanted it, the opportunists (either among them or the outsiders) would find ways to exploit
the chaos for their own benefits. We have seen different forms of such evolution in Libya, Egypt,
Syria, Iraq.
Get your facts right. Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan were all states that crumbled after
the demise of the USSR.
Bullshit. The CIA funded and trained the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, to fight the Russians,
just as they backed Saddam against Iran. And the US has been mucking about in the Middle East
since the 50s, the Brits since the late 19th century. Yours is a very selective reading of history.
No, small groups of people with their own particular interests "begged for help." The "Arab
Spring" was a Western media confection used to justify Western intervention to get rid of Gaddafi
and Assad. Worked with Gaddafi, Assad not so well.
this might answer your question. Syria has suffered for its geography since it was artificially
created by the Sykes Picot agreement at the end of the Ottoman Empire.
"Libyan rebels are secularists, want unified country
Gardels: If the French aim is successful and Qaddafi falls, who are the rebels the West is
allying with? Secularists? Islamists? And what do they want?
Levy: Secularists. They want a unified Libya whose capital will remain Tripoli and whose government
will be elected as a result of free and transparent elections. I am not saying that this will
happen from one day to the next, and starting on the first day. But I have seen these men enough,
I have spoken with them enough, to know that this is undeniably the dream, the goal, the principle
of legitimacy.
It's like the Soviet Union invading the US because a few militiamen holed up in a wildlife
refuge in Oregon. The neo-con press feeds us this propaganda and the willing idiots lap it up
and deny responsibility when everything falls apart.
Britain started the mess in the Middle-East with the Balfour declaration and the theft of Palestinian
land to create an illegal Jewish state. Europe should pay massive reparations of money and equivalent
land in Europe for the Palestinian refugees living in squalid camps. Neo-con Jews who lobbied
for the Iraq, Syria and Libyan wars should have their wealth confiscated to pay for the mess they
created. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/02/world/africa/02levy.html?_r=2
Jihad Dave is supporting islamist maniacs in Libya and Syria. He succeeded in Libya, along
with the ludicrous Sarkozy clown, but Russia and Iran have stood up to the plate in Syria.
Presumably he's going down the Blair/Clinton route of cosying up to Middle Eastern Supremacist
Cults in the hope that he can increase his income by tens of millions within the next 10 years.
There can be no other explanation for his actions, that have never had anything whatsoever to
do with the interests of either Britain or the wider European community.
For me, the bottom line is that, however much might like to believe it, military intervention
does not create nice, liberal, secular democracies. These can only be fostered from within.
However much we might sympathise with fellow human beings living under brutal dictators
and governments, a country can only really progress from within. Certainly, dialogue, sanctions
and international cooperation can help foster change, but ultimately countries must want to change.
The military, under the instruction of politicians, of the West should be pro-defence but anti-regime
change or "nation building".
I'm not suggesting a completely isolationist position, but offensive military action should
be seen as a last resort.
Mr Jenkins is a knowledgeable man but should've thought through this a bit more before so casually
associating death and destruction and misery with Africa.
China's cultural revolution and the Great Leap Forward alone killed and displaced more people
after the second world war than all the conflicts in Africa put together. How about the break
up of India in 1947? Korean War?
But no when he thought about misery Africa popped into his mind..
Meanwhile the bonds between America and Britain will continue to strengthen. They do so,
against all the odds, because they grow from one culture and one outlook on life. That mercifully
has nothing to do with politicians.
One culture?
One outlook?
Sounds all very Soviet.
So, all Enlightened souls are reduced to a monoculture, within the Anglo American Empire.
Obama is a bill of goods. The Voters that choose him thought that they were getting a progressive,
Obama used the reverend
Wright to make himself seem like a man committed to radical change, but behind Obama was Chicago
investment banker Louis Susman (appointed ambassador to Britain).
Obama, a Harvard law professor, is the choice of the bankers, he does not play a straight bat,
all the wars and killing are someone else's fault. Banking wanted rid of Gaddafi since he threatened
the dollar as the reserve currency (as did Dominique Strauss-Kahn) as does the Euro, Obama let
Cameron think he was calling the shots but he was just Obama's beard. Obama is nothing if not
cunning, when he says stay in Europe but the Elites of the Tory party are pushing for out guess
what, they got the nod from Obama and the Banks.
So? All the numbers in the world can't undo Jenkins' thesis: there is no imperialism-lite. Imperialist
wars are imperialist wars no matter how many die, and whether chaos, or neo-colonial rule follow.
In his interview, Obama claims a more deliberate, opaque, and efficient war machine. To him, and
his conscience, John Brennan, these metrics add up to significant moral milestones. To us innumerates,
it's just more imperialist b.s.
Gadaffy had since long planned to free his country and other African states from the yoke of being
forced to trade within the American dollar sphere. He was about to lance his thoroughy well prepared
alternative welcomed not the least by the Chinese when Libya was attacked. Obama is not truthful
when suggesting the attack was not a "core" interest to the US. It was of supreme interest for
the US to appear with its allies, Gadaffy´s independence of mind being no small challenge.
Gadafy may have been particularly nasty with dissidents, but the UK has plenty of allies in the
Muslim world that are far worse: Saudi Arabia, Bahrain... The Gulf States work their imported
slaves to death and the UK kowtows to them. The UK has supplied billions of pounds worth of weapons
to Saudi Arabia and sent military advisors to advise them how to use them to bomb Yemeni schools
and hospitals.
No, Gaddafy's crime was actually to spend the bulk of Libya's oil revenues on useless things
such as schools, hospitals, housing and subsidised food when that money could have been flowing
into the pockets of the West.
Kosovo is also mentioned. There was a relatively low-level conflict (much like the Northern
Ireland 'troubles') there until NATO started bombing and then oversaw the massive ethnic cleansing
of Kosovo Serbs from their homeland (Serbs are the most ethnically-cleansed group in the former
Yugoslavia: around 500,000 refugees).
Yugoslavia's real crime? It was the last country in Europe to refuse the market economy and
the hegemony of Western banks and corporates.
The message is, 'Accept capitalism red in tooth or claw, or we'll bomb the crap out of you.'
Did the attack on Afghanistan improve the situation? Perhaps temporarily in the cities, some things
got a little better as long as you weren't shot or blown up. Over the country as a whole, it made
the situation much worse.
I remember John Simpson crowing that the Western invaders had freed Afghanistan when they entered
Kabul. My reaction at the time was, 'Well, the Soviets had no problem holding the cities. Wait
until you step outside them.' There followed many years of war achieving pretty much nothing except
to kill a lot of people and get recruits flocking to the Taliban.
It seemed we had learned absolutely nothing from the British and Soviet experiences.
And you seem to have forgotten the multitude of US terror attacks on Muslims before the Afghan
invasion, repackaged for our media as 'targeted attacks with collateral damage'. Bombing aspirin
factories and such. And the First Gulf War. And US bases occupying the region. And the fact that
the situation in Afghanistan was due to the Americans and Saudis having showered weapons and cash
on anyone who was fighting the Soviets, not giving a damn about their aims. Bin Laden, for instance.
And one aspect of law and order under the Taliban was that they virtually stopped opium production.
After the invasion, it rose again to dizzying heights.
The only way to deal with countries such as Afghanistan as it returns to its default system,
along with other, more aggressive rogue states such as Saudi Arabia, is to starve them of all
weapons and then let their peoples sort it out. It may take a long time but it's the sole possibility.
As long as we keep pouring weapons into the Middle East for our own shameful purposes, the
apocalypse will continue.
Reading this excellent article one wonders how the war criminal Blair can be offered any peace-keeping
role in the world or continue to get any air or press time.
Taliban has been trained in the Saudi religious schools in Pakistan. Wahhabism is the official
ideology of Saudi Arabia. 10 out of 11 terrorists 9/11 were the Saudis. All the Islamic terror
in the last two decades was sponsored by the Saudis, including ISIS.
Bosnia - a slow ticking bomb. Just bubbling under the surface. Kosovo - a mafia state run
by drug lord Thaci, supported by the US. It is no secret that the main source of income in Kosovo
today is drugs, prostitution, organ trafficking. Tear gas in Parliament for the third time
in as many months. While the squares full of unemployed young and old are adorned with statues
of those that gave them this opportunity Tony Blair and Bill Clinton were popular but I think
their halos are tarnished somewhat. The situation is so serious that the US is beefing up its
presence in camp Bondsteel but you won't read about it in the Guardian.
when British aggression or war crimes are involved, every excuse is trundle out, every nuance
examined, every extenuating circumstance and of course there is always a convenient statute
of limitations
So true . "Oh, oh, but the Spanish/Mongols/Romans etc etc", "Oh, like they were all
so peaceful before Empire came along", "Oh, but but" (ad infinitum).
The bonds between America and Britain will continue to strengthen? Here's hoping. The neo-con
cum neo-ultra liberal dream keeps on giving. Even after Brexit, Britain remains America's poodle
at its peril. The rest of the article is right, but by now accepted wisdom amongst those capable
of independent and rational thought.
Here we go again, off course next phase is the "enlightment" in Al-Andalus...
1. Conflict between sunni and shiites has been dormant for decades. Saudi Arabias promotion
of Wahhabism has awoken it again, along with the catalyst for the recent bloodshed, the invasion
of Iraq. That placed it back in the hands of the majority Shia and upset radical sunnis (eg
the Saudis).
Wahabism grew because of the oil export from Saudi Arabia which started way before World war II.
Bollocks, there was a short period of calm while Europe defeated the Ottoman empire , but the
Mughal empire took great pleasure in slaughtering shiites, and the Ottoman empire had huge conflicts
with the Safavid empire.
2. Pogroms were common against Jews in Europe and Europe has a far worse history of treating
Jews than Muslims ever had. The "golden age of Judaism" in Europe was under Muslim rule in
Spain. Need I mention that the Holocaust was perpetrated by European Christians?
He-he, the fabulous golden age which is always mentioned, no doubt they were golden at that
time compared to Europe, but to compare it today, it would be like living in Nazi Germany as a
Jew before the Nürnberg laws were implemented.
Would you like to pay a special non-muslim tax, step aside when a Muslim passed the street,
be unable to claim any high positions in society to due to your heritage?
3. Didnt forget. the USSR didnt hand them chemical weapons though. That would be the West.
And it wasnt Russia who invaded Iraq later over the scam that they had WMDs.
The Iran-Iraq war made the millions of dead possible primarily due to Soviet equipment, Halabja
killed 5000. No, Russia prefered Chechnya and directly killed 300.000 civilians with the Grad
bombings of cities and villages, whereas the casualties in Iraq primarily can be contributed to
sectional violence.
4. I think you are forgetting Mossadeq in Iran in the 50s. Nasser in Egypt and any Pan-Arab
group that was secular in nature. Pan-Arabism is now dead and radical Islamism is alive and
well thanks to our lust for control over the region.
None of the mentioned were prime examples of democracy, Nasser for example had no problems in
eliminating the Muslim brotherhood or killing 10s of thousands of rebels and civilians in Yemen
with mustard gas.
Obama's remark that the Europeans and Gulf States "detested" Gaddafi and wanted to get rid of
him while others had "humanitarian concerns" is of interest. It's unlikely the Arabs had humanitarian
concerns in all the circumstances; they just wanted Regime Change. It is the lethal combination
of Gulf Arabs and Neo-colonial France and Britain that has driven the Syrian war too- and continues
to do so. No wonder America claims these countries enthuse about war until it comes and then expect
them to fight it. France currently demands the surrender of Assad and for Russia to "leave the
country immediately". Britain says there can be no peace while he remains and that Russia's "interference"
is helping IS.
It's your prerogative whether or not you believe that the US and NATO intervene in countries based
on moral grounds. But if you do want to delude yourself, remember that they only intervene in
countries where they can make money off resources, like Libya and Iraq's oil revenues. If it were
about morality, don't you think NATO and the West would have rushed to help Rwanda during the
genocide?
There are no winners or losers in Iraq, everyone lost. Not a single group benefited from that
western backed regime change, same in Libya and Syria. You do not win when your situation
is worse than it was before Saddam. You can't be a winner when you life in generally worse off
than it was before. basically there is no rule of law now in these nations. Saddam was no monster
like you want to portray him.
Actually, some of those Latin American governments we overthrew were indeed liberal democracies.
As for Canada, there are several reasons we haven't invaded. Too big, too sparse too white...and
economically already a client state. Of course, we did try once: the War of 1812.
"When the same leaders did initially stand aside (as in Syria) "
They didn't stand aside though, they helped create the trouble in the first place, as too with
Libya; gather intelligence to find out who will take up arms, fund, train and give them promises,
get them to organize and attack, then when the dictator strikes back the press swing into action
to tell us all how much of a horrible bastard he is(even though we've been supporting and trading
with him for eons), ergo, we have to bomb him! It's HUMANITARIAN! Not. It would be conquest though.
Frightening.
Obama has done everything in his power to morph into Bush including hiring a flaming chicken hawk
in Ash Carter to play the role of Dick Cheyney. Bush left us with Iraq and Afghanistan, to which
Obama added Egypt with the overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood, Libya, Syria and Yemen. He also
restarted the Cold War with Russia. He is now going after China for building islands in the South
China Sea, a disputed area, something he as well as other Presidents before him has allowed Israel
to build settlements on disputed land for the past fifty years and throughthrough $ 3.5 billion
in gifts annually, has provided for enough concrete to cover all the land the Palestinians live
on.
The 3.5 billion annually will increase by $40 billion over ten years, unless Netanyahu gets
the increase he wants to 15 billion per year. So Obama must settle on a legacy which makes him
both a warmonger and one of the very best arms dealer in the world. His family must be so proud.
To be a humanitarian intervention, a military intervention has to avoid causing regime collapse,
because people will die because of regime collapse. This is an elementary point that the political
class appears not to want to learn.
I agree with your analysis except the last paragraph. Pretty much in all interventions that
we have witnessed, the political class deliberately caused the regimes to collapse. That was always
the primary goal. Humanitarian intervention were never the primary, secondary or even tertiary
objective.
If the political class want to do some humanitarian interventions, they can always start with
Boko Haram in Nigeria.
America had no "core interest" in Afghanistan or Iraq
The USA was enforcing the UN blockade of Iraq, and had massive forces in place to do it. It was
costing a fortune and there were regular border skirmishes taking place. It has been suggested
that Bush and his advisors thought that they could take out Saddam and then pull all their forces
back to the US. They won't admit it now because of the disaster that unfolded afterwards.
Another good piece. What about all the weapons we sold Israel after they started their recent
slaughter in Gaza and the selling of weapons to Saudi Arabia for use in Yemen (one of the poorest
country's in the world) says everything you need to know about the tory party. They are sub humans
and as such should be treated like dirt. I don't believe in the concept of evil...all a bit religious
for me but if I did, it's what they are.
It astonishes me that these great men and women-I include Sec'y Clinton here-give no indication
that their calculations were made without the slightest knowledge of the countries they were preparing
to attack in one way or another. From what one read in the long NYTimes report on preparations
for the Libyan intervention, the participants in the planning knew a great deal about military
matters and less about Libya than they could have found out in a few minutes with Wikipedia. Tribal
societies are different from western societies, dear people, and you damn well should have known
that.
Honduras. The USA backed the coup there. Honduras is now run by generals and is the world's murder
capital. I could go on, jezzam. Please read William Blum's books on US foreign policy. They provide
evidence that the US record is not good.
Without the US the UK and France couldn't have overthrown Gaddafi. The jihadis would have been
killed or fled Libya. I don't believe any post-Gaddafi plan existed. Why would there have been
one? Killing Gaddafi was the war's aim. A western puppet strong man leader grabbing power would
have been icing on the cake of course but why would the US care about Libya once Gaddafi was gone?
Well, Cameron just followed Obama's 'regime change' bad ideas.
Obama is a failed leader of the World who made our lives so much worse.
Obama likes to entertain recently, so after his presidency the best job for him is a clown in
a circus.
We will never know why Stevens and the others were killed.
Absent reliable information, everyone is free to blame whomever they dislike most.
Based on zero non-partisan information, Hillary is the media's top choice for Big Villain.
She may in fact be more responsible than most for this horror, but she may not be too.
Who ya gonna ask: the CIA, the Pentagon, Ted Cruz?
It seems everyone who's ever even visited Washington,D.C., has some anonymous inside
source that proves Hillary did it.
To hear the GOP tell it, she flew to Libya secretly and shot Stevens herself
just because she damn well felt it, o kay -- (female troubles)
My question is: Where has US/Euro invasion resulted in a better government for all those
Middle Eastern people we blasted to bits of blood and bone? How's Yemen doin' these days?
Hope Europe enjoys assimilating a few million people who share none of Europe's customs,
values or languages.
I'm sure euro-businesses would never hire the new immigrants instead of union-backed
locals.
Why, that would almost be taking advantage of a vast reservoir of ultra-cheap labor!
Nor will the sudden ocean of euro-a-day workers undercut unions or wages in the EU. No siree,
not possible.
Just like unions have not been decimated, and wages have not stagnated in the US since 1980
or so. No siree. Not in Europe .
jezzam writes, "the dictator starts massacring hundreds of thousands of his own civilians." But
he didn't. Cameron lied.
The rebellion against Gaddafi began in February 2011. The British, French and US governments
intervened on their usual pretext of protecting civilians. The UN said that 1,000-2,000 people
had been killed before the NATO powers attacked.
Eight months later, after the NATO attack, 30,000 people had been killed and 50,000 wounded
(National Transitional Council figures).
Cameron made the mess; Cameron caused the vast refugee crisis. The NATO powers are getting
what they want – the destruction of any states and societies that oppose their rule, control over
Africa's rich resources. Libya is now plagued by "relentless warfare where competing militias
compete for power while external accumulators of capital such as oil companies can extract resources
under the protection of private military contractors."
any state that wishes to be taken seriously as a player on the world stage
The classic phrase of imperialism - an attitude that seems to believe any nation has the right
to interfere in, or invade, other countries'.
Usually done under some pretence of moral superiority - it used to be to 'bring the pagans to
God', these days more 'they're not part of our belief system'. In fact, it only really happens
when the imperial nations see the economic interests of their ruling class come under threat.
The USA - and its mini-me, the UK - have so blatantly bombed societies, manipulated governments
and undermined social change in so many parts of the world that their trading positions are under
real threat from emerging economic powers.
The two that they are most scared of are Russia and China, who combined can offer the capital
and expertise to replace the old US / European axis across Africa, for instance. The war is already
being fought on many fronts, as
this article makes clear.
Yes, Obama shows himself for the buffoon he really is. Clinton had it right when the
going gets tough Obama gives a speech (see Cairo).
I, however, would caution against thinking the US led Neoliberal Empire of the Exceptionals
is weakening. Its economic hegemony is almost complete only China and Russia remaining, and Obama
with his "Pivot to Asia" (TM) has them surrounded and all set up for the female Chaney - Clinton
the warmonger to get on with it.
The Empire will only get more and more brutal - it has absolutely no concern for human
life or society - power over the globe as the Pentagon phrases it: "Global full spectrum domination"
don't kid yourself they are going all out to reach their goal and a billion people could be killed
- the Empire would say - so what, it was in our strategic interest.
The odd thing is, Obama didn't seem to think getting rid of Gaddafi a bad thing at all at the
time. Clinton was all, "We came, we saw, he died." And this bit about "no core interest" in Afghanistan
and Iraq is just bizarre. Given the mess both countries are in, and the resurgence of the Taliban
and zero clue about Iraq it was clearly a master stroke for Obama to decide the US exit both with
no effective governments in place, ones that could deal with the Taliban et al. Never mind, he
can tootle off and play golf.
Very well put, Sir. Obama's self-serving statement is borderline stupid. I constantly wonder
why I voted for him twice. His Deep State handlers continue from the Bush period and having installed
their coterie of right-wing extremists from Hillary to the Directors of the CIA, FBI, NSA, DOD,
ad nauseum Obama has not had the courage at any point to admit not only the "mess" he makes, but
the he is a captive mess of the shadow government.
America has a historic crisis of leadership and being the sole model left in that field, the
world has followed, the UK and all of Europe included.
Libya is all Hilarys work so expect to return with boots on the ground once Wall Sts finest is
parked in the Oval office. She has the midas touch in reverse and Libya has turned (and will continue)
to turn out worse than Iraq and Syria (believe me its possible) There is absolutely no one on
the ground that the west can work with so the old chestnut of arming and training al qaeda or
'moderate' opposition is not an option. ISIL are solidifying a base there and other than drones
there is zip we can do.
Critising Cameron just shows how insecure Obama is, lets be honest the middle east and afghanistan
are in the state they are because Obama had zero interest in foreign policy when his first term
started, thus allowing the neocons to move into the vacuum and create the utter disaster that
is Syraq and Ukraine. We in europe are now dealing with the aftermath of this via the refugee
crisis which will top 2 million people this year. Obamas a failure and he knows it, hence the
criticism of other leaders. Cameron is no different, foreign policy being almost totally abandoned
to the US, there is no such thing as independent defence policy in the UK, everything is carried
out at the behest of the US. Don't kid yourself we have any autonomy, we don't and there are plenty
of high level armed forces personnel who feel the same way. Europe is leaderless in general and
with the economy flatlining they too have abandoned defence and foreign affairs to the pentagon.
Right now we're in the quiet before the storm, once HRC gets elected expect the situation to
deteriorate rapidly, our only hope is that someone has got the dirt to throw her out of the race.
ISIS established itself in Iraq before moving into Syria. Would ISIS exist is Britain had not
totally destabilized Iraq? Going back even further, it is the 100th anniversary of the Sykes-Picot
agreement, that great exercise in British Imperialism that created the artificial nations in the
Middle East that are collapsing today.
Your comment is so stereotyped: when British aggression or war crimes are involved, every
excuse is trundle out, every nuance examined, every extenuating circumstance and of course there
is always a convenient statute of limitations. But when others are involved, specifically America
and Israel, the same Guardian readers allow no excuses or nuances and every tiny detail going
back hundreds of years is repeatedly and thoroughly examined.
Transparent hypocrisy. Accept responsibility and stop offloading it to Calais.
Ambassador Stevens was killed in a cover up over the arms dealing from Libya to Syria, (weapons
and fighters to ISIS). It seems more likely that he was killed because he was investigating the
covert operation given that he was left to fend for himself by all US military forces but in a
classic defamation strategy he has been accused of being behind the operation. Had he been he
would have been well defended.
"Defense" has become attack, keeping alive the military-industrial lobbies and lumbering
military establishments that depend on it.
Couldn't put it better myself. Yes, America is a full blown Empire now. Evil to it's very core.
Bent on world domination and any cost. All we lack is a military dictatorship. Of course, with
the nation populated by brainwashed sheep, a "Dear Leader" is inevitable,
President Obama was correct in keeping US boots off the ground in Syria. An active US troop presence
would have resulted in an even greater level of confusion and destruction on all sides. However,
it was precisely the US' meddling in Libya that helped pave the way for its current dysfunctional,
failed state status, riven by sectarian conflicts and home to a very active Al Quaida presence.
US interference in Libya saw Gadaffi backstabbed by the US before literally being stabbed to
death although he had been given assurances that the US would respect his rule particularly as
he had sought to become part of the alliance against the likes of Al Quaida.
Obama was behind the disgraceful lie that the mob that attacked the US' Benghazi Embassy and
murdered Ambassador Smith y was 'inflamed' by an obscure video on youtube that attacked extremist
elements of the Islamic faith. Smith deserved better than this blatant lie and the grovelling,
snivelling faux apologies Obama and then Secretary of State Hilary Clinton made to the Muslim
world for something that had nothing to do with 99.9 percent of non Muslims.
Smith was murdered by extremists that took over Libya precisely because the death of Gadaffi
left a dangerous power vacuum. The US aided and abetted certain groups, weapons found their way
to the worse groups and Smith, a brave man, was his own country's victim in one sense. Hilary
Clinton who should have known better publicly gloated over Gadaffi's death. Since his death the
victimisation of black Libyans and other black Africans has become common, Libya has been overrun
by extremists, and as we write is being used as a conduit for uncontrolled entry into Europe.
Disappointingly, President Obama forgets the Biblical saying about pointing out a speck in
somebody's eye while ignoring the plank in his own.
Mr President doesn't privately refer to the Libyan upheaval as the "shit show" for no good reason.
The chaos and anarchy that have ensued since, including the migrant crisis in Europe and the rise
of Islamic State, is directly attributable to the shoddy interventionist approach used by both
Britain and France.
Good article, with justified moral indignation. Only thing I would have changed, is "imperialism-lite"
to 'lesser and greater imperialism.
Would it not have been a great contribution towards peace and justice, had the US decided not
to invade Iraq and Libya, on account that other western countries were "free-riders" and would
not have pulled their weight?
So, what does the world needs now? More 'free-riding countries' to dissuade so-called responsible
countries - Britain, France, America, Italy - from conspiring to invade other countries, after
consulting in the equivalent of a 'diplomatic toilet and drawing up their war plans on the back
of the proverbial cigarette packet.'
For all Obama's niceties, it would now appear that he has been seething and mad as hell about
his perception of Britain and France 'abandoning' Libya and watching it perceptible destabilizing
the region and the flames fanning farther afield.
The biggest unanswered and puzzling question, is that of how could Obama have expected
or assumed that Britain and France would have stayed behind and clean up the mess they and the
Americans have made of Libya? Why did the Americans resolved to play only the part of 'hired guns'
to go in and blitzed the Libyan Government and its armed forces, and neglected to learn the lesson
of planning what should follow after the destruction?
The argument that the Americans had assumed that France and Britain would clean up the
euphemistic mess has little or no credibility, since all three countries had been very clear about
not wanting American, British and French 'boots on the ground.'
Is the Americans now telling the world that they went into Libya without planning for the aftermath,
because it was 'an emergency to save lives' and they had to go in immediately?
Well, if so, that is now how nations behave responsibly, and it is now clear that more lives
have probably been lost and continue to be sacrificed, than those which might have been saved
as a result of the West invading and attacking Libya.
the Europeans expected America to pick up the tab for reconstruction
I don't think there would be many complaints from Halliburton or other American companies to
help with the reconstruction, if the place wasn't such a shit-storm right now.
"The result has been mass killing, destruction and migration on a scale not seen, at least
outside Africa, since the second world war."
Judging from the sentiments expressed in the overwhelming majority of comments posted on multiple
threads on this forum, the British people don't want to accept responsibility for "migration on
a scale not seen... since the second world war". The almost universal resistance to accepting
refugees and migrants that fled their homes due to unprovoked British aggression is disgusting
and pathetic. It highlights the hypocrisy of those who see themselves morally fit to judge almost
everyone else.
Mitchell says that we had a plan to stabilise Libya but that it could not be implement the plan
because there was no peace?#*^..... Der
We bombed in support of competing Jihadis groups, bandits and local war Lords then our
well laid plans for a Utopian peace were thwarted because of the unforeseen chaos created as the
Militias we gave close airsupport to fought over the spoils.
Well there you have it- its the fault of the Libyans.
Hilary Clinton recently blamed Sarkozy for Libya describing him as so "very excited" about the
need to start bombing that he persuaded her and she, Nuland and Power persuaded a reluctant Obama.
Three civilian females argued down the military opinion that it was unnecessary and likely to
cause more trouble than it was worth.
As this was clearly to support French interests the Americans insisted the Europeans do it
themselves if they were that keen. Old Anglo-French rivalry has never been far from the surface
in the ME and it seems Cameron jumped on the bandwagon in fear France would take all the glory.
Neither of them appear to have given any thought about reconstruction. The blame is mostly Cameron's
as Sorkozy was chucked out of office just months later. Did Cameron have a plan at all? If so
it was his biggest mistake and one we'll be paying for over the coming years.
Without Putin's mischief making though, this would have been sorted out long ago.
Putin intervened in September 2015. What have the West been doing since 2011 to stop the conflict,
one wonders.
Russia vetoes any UN attempt to sort out the mess
Looking bad you'd realize that it at least prompted Obama to retract in 2013. Since then though
support to Saudi and proxies destabilizing Syria has only increased.
Russia is clearing the mess of the West, and they should be grateful. Obama might be from what
I read today from his "confessions".
Yes. I don't think that is a pro-imperialist stance. He's arguing that there is no middle ground;
getting rid of dictators you don't like is imperialism, and whether you follow through or not,
there are serious consequences, but to not follow through is an abnegation of moral responsibility
to the people you are at attemting to "free". It seems to me he is arguing against any foreign
intervention, hence his castigation of Obama and Cameron for the "ethical wasteland of their wars
of intervention."
Please do me a favour and study 20th century history a little more. The US overthrow countless
democracies in Latin America and the Middle East and installed fascist dictatorships.
Liberal Democracy haha come on now. They dont care about Democracy. They care about money.
They will install and support any dictatorship (look at Saudi Arabia for example) as long as they
do as they are told economically.
I love western values, dont get me wrong. It is the best place to live freely. However, if
you werent lucky enough to be born in the west and the west wants something your country has (eg.
oil).....you are in for a lot of bad times.
I just wish western leaders/governments actually followed the western values that we all love
and hold dear.
We should remember that we funded the terrorists in Libya and then sent weapons to ISIS from
Libya to Syria that is we again used Al Qaeda as a proxy force. We then again used the "threat"
from the proxy forces i,e. Al Qaeda to justify mass surveillance of the general population.
The solution as Corbyn pointed out is to stop funding the Terrorists.
By the terms of the agreement, funding came from Turkey, as well as Saudi Arabia and Qatar;
the CIA, with the support of MI6, was responsible for getting arms from Gaddafi's arsenals
into Syria. A number of front companies were set up in Libya, some under the cover of Australian
entities. Retired American soldiers, who didn't always know who was really employing them,
were hired to manage procurement and shipping. The operation was run by David Petraeus, the
CIA director who would soon resign when it became known he was having an affair with his biographer.
Peter Oborne investigates claims that Britain and the West embarked on an unspoken alliance
of convenience with militant jihadi groups in an attempt to bring down the Assad regime.
He hears how equipment supplied by the West to so called Syrian moderates has ended up in
the hands of jihadis, and that Western sponsored rebels have fought alongside Al Qaeda. But
what does this really tell us about the conflict in Syria?
This edition of The Report also examines the astonishing attempt to re brand Al Nusra, Al
Qaeda's Syrian affiliate, as an organisation with which we can do business.
What is good that this is finally coming out ,the denial by both Obama and a very left wing media
has failed to confront this issue in what is an incredibly low point for Obama and Hilary Clinton
and their naive ideas about the Arab Spring.
As it is equally so for David Cameron and William Hague. Sarkozy is different he was not naive
he knew exactly what he was doing thais was about saving french influence in North Africa,he was
thinking about Tunisa, Algeria which he was keen to drag others into -- He was the most savvy of
all those politicians at least he was not a fool,but France priorities are not the same as the
UK --
Obama's comments once again as usual do not really confront the real problems of Libya and
gloss over the key issues and ending up passing the buck, he can do no wrong ? It was not the
aftermath of Libya but the whole idea of changing the controlling demographics of the country
which he played a major part in destabilising through the UN AND Nato which was the problem --
It was thought the lessons of Iraq was all about not putting boots on the ground ,or getting
your feet dirty ,as this antagonises the locals and that a nice clinical arms length bombardment
creating havoc ,is the best way to go .
This was not the lesson of Iraq , which was actually not to destabilise the controlling demographics
of the country which will never recover if you do ..It is one thing to depose a leader or ask
a leader to step down but do not disturb 100 of years controlling demographics, sectarian or not
in these countries is not wise . To do so is a misstep or misjudgement --
Demographics are like sand dunes they have taken many years to evolve and rest uneasy, in the
highly religious and sectarian landscape but can be unsettled over night, grain by grain even
by a small shift in the evening night breeze , a small beetle can zig zag across and the whole
dune will crumble
Once again the US pushed the UK who vied with France at how high they could jump, using the
UN blank cheque as cover ,for melting down the country and has left UN credibilty in taters has
now no credibility and Nato is now not trusted .
They took disgracefully no less the UN 1973 Peace Resolution , point one, Cease fire and point
two No Fly Zone .They bent it , twisted it , contorted it into blatant out right support of the
eastern shiite sympathisers sectarian group, against the more secular Sunni Tripoli groups .
(Gaddafi was not one man Mr apologist Rifkind he was the tribal leaders of a quite a large
tribe !)
Which has been part of a historic rivalry going back hundreds of years . They killed more civilians
that Gaddafi ever had or could have done . They even attacked in a no fly zone government troops
retreating and fired on government planes on the ground in a non fly zone .
Then they refused to negotiate with the government or allow the Organisation of African states
to mediate who had agreed general elections .They went on bombing until there was no infrastructure
no institutions or sand dunes ,or beetles left --
It was done after Iraq and that is why it is so shameful and why Obama , Cameron, Sarkozy ,
the UN , Nato must face up to what they have done , and after the Chilcot enquiry there needs
to be a Cameron enquiry . Presumably it will have the backing of Obama --
What is worse is the knock on effect on this massive arm caches and fighters from Libya then
went on to Syria, reek havoc and destabilised the country . Because Russia and China could never
trust again the UN , the UN has been ineffective in Syria for that very reason .The deaths of
British tourist in next door Tunisia has to laid firmly at David Cameron's and the foreign office
door --
No wonder Libya is keeping Obama awake at night , no wonder he is indulging in damage limitation
, no wonder he is trying to re write history ? How can I get this out of my legacy . If only I
had not met Mr Cameron a yes man -- If only I had been told by some with an once of common sense
, not to touch this country with a barge pole ?
The poor Libyan people will agree with him --
The lesson for the UK is do want you think is right not what the US thinks as right , a lesson
that David Cameron has failed to learn , and has shown he is not a safe pari of hands and lacks
judgement --
1. Conflict between sunni and shiites has been dormant for decades. Saudi Arabias promotion of
Wahhabism has awoken it again, along with the catalyst for the recent bloodshed, the invasion
of Iraq. That placed it back in the hands of the majority Shia and upset radical sunnis (eg the
Saudis).
2. Pogroms were common against Jews in Europe and Europe has a far worse history of treating
Jews than Muslims ever had. The "golden age of Judaism" in Europe was under Muslim rule in Spain.
Need I mention that the Holocaust was perpetrated by European Christians?
3. Didnt forget. the USSR didn't hand them chemical weapons though. That would be the West.
And it wasn't Russia who invaded Iraq later over the scam that they had WMDs.
4. I think you are forgetting Mossadeq in Iran in the 50s. Nasser in Egypt and any Pan-Arab
group that was secular in nature. Pan-Arabism is now dead and radical Islamism is alive and well
thanks to our lust for control over the region.
Obama? Censored? You forgot Hillary. she even said the other day at the townhall before Miss/MI
to the effect 'if Assad had been taken out early like Gaddafi then Syria would only be as bad
as Libya'. laughable really. i presume you aren't criticising Hillary Clinton?
Kosovo is now basket case that we are paying for but it is small. Now we have also backed NeoCon
regime change in Ukraine which we are going to be paying for. Libya will soon have enough Jihadist
training camps to be a direct threat.
What we see is a Strategy of Chaos from the US NeoCons but what we have failed to notice is
that the NeoCons see us as the target, as the enemy.
Totally agree that there is no such thing as Imperialism Lite, just as there is no such thing
as Wahabi Lite or Zionism Lite. So I wonder why Hilary Benn thinks Britain has anything to feel
proud about our foreign policy. It seems to me Britain's Foreign Policy is a combination of incompetence,
jingoism and pure evil.
What is the point of employing the brightest brains in the land at the Foreign Office when we
get it wrong almost all the time ?
"Western warmongering over the past two decades has had nothing to do with the existential defence
of territory. "Defence" has become attack, keeping alive the military-industrial lobbies and lumbering
military establishments that depend on it."
Attacking Al qaeda in Afghanistan had nothing to do with defending territory?
Libyan 'rebels' were armed and trained by 'the West' in a first place. The plan was the same for
Syria but Russians stopped it with not allowing 'no fly zone' or to call it properly 'bomb them
into the stone age'.
You probably don't know how 'bloody' Gaddafi was to the Libyans.
* GDP per capita - $ 14,192.
* For each family member the state pays $ 1000 grants per year.
* Unemployment - $ 730.
* Salary Nurse - $ 1000.
* For every newborn is paid $ 7000.
* The bride and groom given away $ 64,000 to buy an apartment.
* At the opening of a one-time personal business financial assistance - $ 20,000.
* Large taxes and extortions are prohibited.
* Education and medicine are free.
* Education and training abroad - at the expense of the state.
* Store chain for large families with symbolic prices of basic foodstuffs.
* For the sale of products past their expiry date - large fines and detention.
* Part of pharmacies - with free dispensing.
* For counterfeiting - the death penalty.
* Rents - no.
* No Fees for electricity for households!
* Loans to buy a car and an apartment - interest free.
* Real estate services are prohibited.
* Buying a car up to 50% paid by the state, for militia fighters - 65%.
* Gasoline is cheaper than water. 1 liter - 0,14 $.
* If a Libyan is unable to get employment after graduation the state would pay the average salary
of the profession as if he or she is employed until employment is found.
* Gaddafi carried out the world's largest irrigation project, known as the Great Man-Made River
project, to make water readily available throughout the desert country
The Gadaffi regime had upset the USA because Gadaffi was setting up an oil currency system based
on gold rather than US dollars. While this was not the sole reason the West turned against him
it was an important factor. The largest factor for the wars so far, and the planned war against
Iran was to cut out the growing Russian domination of the oil supply to Europe, China and India.
A decent article as we could expect from the author.
However personally I doubt there was no ulterior motive in the case of Lybia. Lybia was one
of the countries who tried the change the status quo on the oil market and it has huge reserves
too (as we know Europe is running out of oil, at least Great Britain is).
It is very likely that the European countries retreated because Libya started to look like
another Iraq.
When you are talking about "democratic forces of the revolution.." i imagine you being an enthusiastic
teenager girl who hardly knows anything about the world but goes somewhere far for a gap year
as a volunteer to make locals aware of something that will help them forever. It is instead of
demanding responsible policies and accountability from her own government.
Sorry!!!
What planet have you been living on. What do you read apart from lifestyle magazines full of shots
of celebrity boobs and bums.
The United states is the most interventionist country in history. Of its 237 years of existence
it has been at war or cold war for 222 of those years. NATO is behind ISIS and the wars in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Chechen, Afghanistan, Libya and Ukraine.
If the West stopped intervening there would be very few wars and if the West used its influence
for peace rather than control there would rarely be any was at all.
Well put. People forget the importance of oil in maintaining the standard of living in our western
democracies. Controlling it's supply trumps all other issues.
Jane they didn't "come apart" and Libya and Syria were the most stable and least under the
thumb of radicals. Syria had equality and education for women who could wear whatever they wanted.
Furthermore they did not fall apart they were attacked by the largest military forces in the world
excluding Russia. NATO sent in special operations forces to destabilise the government. They along
with Al Nusra and other violent Wahabi terrorists attacked police and army barracks, and when
Assads police and military hit back it was presented by the Western media and propagandists as
an attack on the people of Syria. Do you think any other country would allow terrorists to attack
police and other public institutions without retaliating and restoring order.
Many people who do not accept the Western medias false reporting at face value know that
the wars in Syria were about changing the leaders and redrawing national boundaries to isolate
Iran and sideline Russian influence. It was and is an illegal war and it was the barbarity of
our Western leaders that caused the terrible violence. It was a pre planned plan and strategy
outlined in the US Special Forces document below.
http://nsnbc.me/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/special-forces-uw-tc-18-01.pdf
If you get your facts right it ruins your argument doesn't it.
In the Libyan case, it was a clear US strategy to put in the forefront their English and French
valets, in a coup (euphemistically called "regime change") wanted by them. The nobel peace winner
got some nerves to put the blame on his accomplices for the chaos in Libya, while the permanent
objective of the US is to divide and conquer, sowing chaos wherever it occurs: Afghanistan, Sudan,
Iraq, Syria. Also Hillary is no stranger to the actions in Libya.
These Middle East countries should have been left alone by the West. Due to their nature, these
countries have strong divisions and battle for their beliefs and a strong man, a dictator is what
prevented them to fall into the chaos they are today. Without the Western meddling, arming and
financing various rebel groups, Isis would not exist today.
Neither is putting political opponents in acid baths and burning tyres, as Tony Blair's friends
in the central Asian Republics have been doing, neither is beheading gays, raped women and civil
rights protesters, as Cameron's Saudi friends have been enjoying, the latter whilst we sell them
shit loads of munitions to obliterate Yemeni villagers. I wonder how the Egyptian president is
getting on with all that tear gas and bullets we sold him? And are the Bahrani's, fresh from killing
their own people for daring to ask for civil rights, enjoying the cash we gave them for that new
Royal Navy base? Our foreign policy is complacent and inconsistent, we talk about morality but
the bottom line is that that doesn't come into it when BAE systems and G4S have contracts to win.
Don't get me wrong, Britain has played a positive role internationally in many different areas,
but there is always a neo-liberal arsehole waiting to pop up and ruin the lives of millions, a
turd with a school tie that just wont be flushed away.
Simon Jenkins, don't pretend you were against American punitive expeditions around the world
to overthrow third world dictators. You worked from the same neo-con ideological script to defend
the ultra-liberal, military industrial economy; scare mongering in the pages of the Guardian,
as far back as I can remember. You lot are as totally discredited as Bush, Cheney, Rumsfield and
American Nato toadies.
It is high time that Europe reviewed and evaluated its relationship with the United States, with
NATO, Russia and China. The world needs to be a peaceable place and there needs to be more legislation
imposed upon the Financial Markets to stop them being a place where economic destabilisation and
warfare can and do take place. The United States would not contemplate these reviews taking place
as they are integral to their continuing position in the world but also integral to the problems
we are all experiencing? It will take a brave Europe to do this but it is a step that has to be
taken if the world is to move forward! Britain should be a huge part of this, outside a weakend
EU this would benefit the United States from Britains lack of input, another reason we should
vote to stay and be positive to our European position. The most vulnerable herring is the one
that breaks out of the shoal?
Libya , Ukraine ,Syria have had the same recipe of de-stabilisation by the US and NATO. The
so called popular rebels were in fact CIA trained and financed. Jihadist in Libya and Syria and
neo-Nazis in Ukraine. After completing regime change in Libya as planned ,the Jihadist, with their
looted arms were transferred to Syria and renamed ISIS. ISIS is Washingtons Foreign Legion army,
used as required for their Imperial ends. Renamed as required on whichever territory they operate
Cameron has been given a free pass on Libya. It really is quite astonishing. The man has turned
a functioning society into a jihadi infested failed state which is exporting men and weapons across
North Africa and down the Sahara and now serves as a new front line for ISIS
Cameron's Libya policy from start to finish is a foreign policy catastrophe and in a just world
would have seen him thrown out of office on his ear
Attacking Libya and deposing Gaddafi was down to enforcing the R2P doctrine on the pretext
of "stopping another Rwanda". But it was a pretext. Islamist rebels attacked the armouries within
Libya and the Libyans had every right to try and put down the rebellion. Samantha Powers et al
were the war mongers.
Then there is this gem: "Egypt's President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has called for a United Nations
resolution allowing international forces to intervene in Libya.
There was no other choice, he told French radio. "We will not allow them to cut off the heads
of our children."
"We abandoned the Libyan people as prisoners to extremist militias," Mr Sisi told Europe 1
radio. He was referring to the aftermath of the 2011 war in which Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi
was toppled with the help of an international coalition.
That intervention was "an unfinished mission", he said."
The US, France and the UK own this ongoing mess but do not have the moral fortitude to clean
it up. As with the "Arab Spring", this will not end well.
The 2011 regime change shenanigans of the west against Libya is colonialism at its worst from
all the parties who instigated it. The aftermath, the resultant mayhem and chaos, was in itself
adding insult to injury. Gaddafi was no saint, but the militias, Muslim Brotherhood and ISIS now
running rampant in the country are infinitely worse. This is a war crime of the first magnitude
and no effort should be spared to address it
The west who propped up the Saudis, who's crazy wahhabi brand of Islam helped radicalise the Islamic
world with 100 billion dollars spent on promoting it.
The west who created israel and then has done nothing to stop israels ever growing land theft
and occupation over decades (not even a single sanction)...leading the Muslim world to hate us
more for our hypocrisy and double standards.
The west who has assassinated or organised coups against democratically elected secular
leaders who didn't give us their natural resources (eg iran) and installed brutal, clepto dictatorships
who also take part in plundering the resources leaving the general population poor, uneducated
and susceptible to indoctrination from Islamists.
The west who arms brutal dictators to wage proxy wars and then invades and bombs these same
dictators countries over claims they have WMDs (that we sold to them).
The west has been intervening in the middle east alot longer than post 9/11. We are very very
culpable for the disasters engulfing the region.
Libya was "not so at the core of US interests that it makes sense for us to unilaterally strike
against the Gaddafi regime"
Let's examine what Obama is saying here: when it is perceived to be at the core of US
interests, the USA reserves the right to attack any country, at any time.
The world inhabits a moral vacuum, and in that state, any country can justifiably choose to
do anything, against anyone, for any reason. And this guy got the Nobel Peace Prize.
In this despicable saga, Cameron's Libyan venture was a sideshow, though one that has destabilised
north Africa and may yet turn it into another Islamic State caliphate.
You forgot to mention Cameron was only following Sarkozy .
Don't forget the French role .
25 February 2011: Sarkozy said Gaddafi "must go."
28 February 2011: British Prime Minister David Cameron proposed the idea of a no-fly zone
11 March 2011: Cameron joined forces with Sarkozy after Sarkozy demanded immediate action
from international community for a no-fly zone against air attacks by Gaddafi.
14 March 2011: In Paris at the Élysée Palace, before the summit with the G8 Minister for
Foreign Affairs, Sarkozy, who is also the president of the G8, along with French Foreign Minister
Alain Juppé met with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and pressed her to push for intervention
in Libya
.
19 March 2011: French[72] forces began the military intervention in Libya, later joined
by coalition forces
Well said in the headline. Imperialism-lite/heavy, colonialism, and neo-colonialism don't work,
should be a thing of the past. Intervening in the politics of another country is a mug's game.
Don't understand why Obama is blaming Cameron for it, perhaps playing to his domestic gallery.
Blair's love fest with the deluded Gaddafi family, followed by the volte-face of pushing for his
violent overthrow by the next government, were both severely misguided policies. Need to diplomatically
encourage change, in foreign policy, and the desired type of political movements to take hold.
Military interventions have the opposite effect, so does propping up dictators, religiously fanatical
regimes, proven time and time again.
So the choices are to do nothing, or invade and create a colony?
Pretty much. As Jenkins rightly says, if you want to launch an aggressive war you either do
it or you don't. If you do it then it is your responsibility to clear up the mess, however many
of your own lives are lost and however much it costs. Trashing a country and then buggering off
is not an option.
Of course, using force for defensive reasons is fine. That's why modern warmongering politicians
always call it "defence" when they drop bombs on innocent people in faraway countries. It is no
such thing.
There was no massacre, not even a hint of one. Total obfuscation to give Hillary Clinton a foreign
policy "success" so that she could use it as a springboard to the presidency. "Hillary Clinton
was so proud of her major role in instigating the war against Libya that she and her advisors
initially planned to use it as basis of a "Clinton doctrine", meaning a "smart power" regime change
strategy, as a presidential campaign slogan.
War creates chaos, and Hillary Clinton has been an eager advocate of every U.S. aggressive
war in the last quarter of a century. These wars have devastated whole countries and caused an
unmanageable refugee crisis. Chaos is all there is to show for Hillary's vaunted "foreign policy
experience".
"... Yeah. Painting the Syria/Libya crisis as Hillary vs the Repubs however is dishonest. not lacking insight or clarity. dishonest. On the Repubs: all the candidates except Trump said at the debate a few days ago that peace was not in the interests of Israel and therefore a US President would betray Israel by SEEKING peace. ..."
"... Hillary said at the townhall before Miss/MI that 'if we'd taken out Assad earlier like we did Gaddafi then Syria would only be as bad as Libya'. Your Hillary vs the Repubs routine is dishonest. This is the neocon oligrachy fighting for its life election. do not fake it in the name of Hillary. ..."
"... The Obama administration has redefined the word "militant " to be a "male of military age within the strike zone" and here's the killer ..."unless POSTHUMOUSLY proven to be innocent" ..."
"... Ramos ought to have asked Hilary exactly why Gadaffi was deposed, and came back at her fiercely with statistics and independent reports if she dared to even muse the suggestion that it was another "humanitarian intervention". ..."
"... If Hillary's two decade history of war mongering was exposed for what it really represents by "journalists" in the corporate media, she would no longer be insulated from the scrutiny her deeply flawed decision making warrants. ..."
"... Unfortunately, the American public have only independent news sites like the Intercept, Truthdig, the Jacobin, Harpers Magazine, Mondoweiss, and a few others from which to evaluate the real damage Hillary has caused. ..."
"... What gives Amerika the right to intervene in the affairs of other nations in the first place? Are they unaware that the rest of the world fears American terrorism more that anything else, or more likely, do they care? No wonder Hillary and the Republican hawks are worrying the planet. ..."
You are absolutely right as far as these five questions are concerned. Yet you forgot an important
one: TTIP as well as the Trans-Pacific Partnership. These so-called free trade agreements are
a fatal threat to democracy as they invest more power in corporations than in parliaments and
additionally they are detrimental to labour and the environment in the concerned countries.
It's a good article and reflects some of the questions I've been having.
My curiosity was aroused when the first CIA-directed drone killed its first victims, a terrorist
leader and some comrades in Yemen years ago. I'd thought that the CIA's assassination of anyone
in a foreign country was illegal. Evidently the rules have changed but I don't recall hearing
about it.
The media are always an easy target but lately I think their responsibility for our collective
ignorance has increased. The moderators in the TV debates seem deliberately provocative. I can
remember the first televised debate -- Kennedy vs. Nixon -- when both men soberly addressed the
camera when answering questions of substance.
The first interaction BETWEEN debators was a brief remark in 1980 by Reagan aimed at Jimmy
Carter. "There you go again." Before then, the debates were sober and dignified, as in a courtroom.
After that, the debates slowly slid into the cage fights they've become.
I'm afraid I see the media as not setting the proper ground rules. Fox News is the absolute
worst. The result is a continuous positive feedback loop in which we are gradually and unwittingly
turned into those people who buy gossip tabloids at the supermarket checkout counter.
BREAKING NEWS! HILLARY WETS BED UNTIL TWELVE YEARS OLD!
If we wind up with one of these egomaniacal clowns in the White House, we'll deserve what we
get.
here it is again Cruz: right now in Fox: Iran wants to kill us; 'Donald' wants to negotiate deals
with Iran and Cuba. We don't negotiate with terrorists. By failing to note what Trump actually
says and by pretending that Hillary is not a neocon - a subtle one to be sure - you are revising
the facts. actually as the facts appear. think about it and be clear. the moderate Islam routine
BY Cruz Rubio Kasich is not about islam. its about the supposed sunni supposed allies. like please.
add some insight. at least a bit.
Yeah. Painting the Syria/Libya crisis as Hillary vs the Repubs however is dishonest. not lacking
insight or clarity. dishonest. On the Repubs: all the candidates except Trump said at the debate
a few days ago that peace was not in the interests of Israel and therefore a US President would
betray Israel by SEEKING peace.
Trump said he'd be even-handed for the purpose of negotitating
a peace deal. the other candidates say - reading from a script, certainly not thinking - that
the trick was to get Saudi Arabia and Turkey to fight ISIS. sure, except they wont. Their agenda
is anti-Assad in the name of conservative sunni-ism. the moderate arab sheikdom theocracy routines
IS part of the problem. frankly the other Repub candidates would flirt with nuking Iran. Iran
must be part of the solution like it or not. Hillary said at the townhall before Miss/MI that
'if we'd taken out Assad earlier like we did Gaddafi then Syria would only be as bad as Libya'.
Your Hillary vs the Repubs routine is dishonest. This is the neocon oligrachy fighting for its
life election. do not fake it in the name of Hillary.
Isn't the reason for most foreign policy decisions that they will make money for the Military
Industrial Complex?
"Modernizing" nuclear weapons? Helping Saudi Arabia slaughter citizens of Yemen? Destabilizing
multiple countries so that MORE weapons become "necessary" to deal with the instability?
All the question should be framed on that basis: "Is there any reason to 'modernize' our nuclear
weapons other than to enhance the bottom line of the companies involved, especially when we are
supposed to be working against nuclear proliferation?"
Fantastic article, absolutely spot on. Its been a long wait , thank you.
The Obama administration has redefined the word "militant " to be a "male of military age within
the strike zone" and here's the killer ..."unless POSTHUMOUSLY proven to be innocent"
Democrats or Republicans alike, foreign policy is predicated on the American drive to maintain
global dominance, whatever illegal murderous callous action it takes.
Ramos ought to have asked Hilary exactly why Gadaffi was deposed, and came back at her fiercely
with statistics and independent reports if she dared to even muse the suggestion that it was another
"humanitarian intervention".
Sanders should be pressed on Israel, and whether he can formally condemn the state for repeatedly
breaking promises re: settlement on the West Bank and for committing war crimes during the Gaza
strip conflict.
If Hillary's two decade history of war mongering was exposed for what it really represents by
"journalists" in the corporate media, she would no longer be insulated from the scrutiny her deeply
flawed decision making warrants. If democracy and transparency actually functioned in the media,
Hillary would be exposed as a neocon, whose terrible policy decisions have led to one global disaster
after another, fomenting terrorism. (Even the New York Times-which endorsed Hillary-detailed her
disastrous decisions in Libya).
Unfortunately, the American public have only independent news sites like the Intercept, Truthdig,
the Jacobin, Harpers Magazine, Mondoweiss, and a few others from which to evaluate the real damage
Hillary has caused.
But, like her domestic policies-historically: from Clintonomics to mass incarceration; welfare
reform; the war on drugs; education (especially in Arkansas); disastrous "free" trade agreements;
rampant fascism in the form of corporatism; plus, the millions donated to her campaign from dark
money super pacs; and her sham "foundation; Hillary continues to represent the worst that politics
offers, both globally and domestically.
And the list above also includes the devolution of the Democratic Party from FDR-like socialism
to Clinton dominated corporate hacks, since Bill's election in 1992.
Until Clinton, Inc is stopped from commanding allegiance from "democratic" politicians on everything
from the macro to micro levels of Democratic Party matters, voters will continue to be denied
a true forum for change.
What gives Amerika the right to intervene in the affairs of other nations in the first place?
Are they unaware that the rest of the world fears American terrorism more that anything else,
or more likely, do they care? No wonder Hillary and the Republican hawks are worrying the planet.
"Currently Saudi Arabia is engaged in an indiscriminate bombing campaign in one of the world's
poorest.."
Saudi Arabia is bombing with logistical help from US and UK, we're not only silent on the crimes
of KSA, we help them
"Currently Saudi Arabia is engaged in an indiscriminate bombing campaign in one of the world's
poorest.."
Saudi Arabia is bombing with logistical help from US and UK, we're not only silent on the crimes
of KSA, we help them
Hillary was the push behind the U.S. Participation in Ukraine, Syria and Libya. Just a pathological
warlord. She appointed VIc Nuland as undersecretary of state for Gods sake. A neo-con. The people
that brought us the Iraq war. If she's elected you will get more of the same in a big way as she
will increase the force structure and the involvement.
It is futile to expect reason from people whose foreign policy education comes primarily from
Hollywood. It used to be that 96 % of people in congress had never left the country, even less
lived abroad with other people and learned a foreign language. The ignorance is truly amazing
and it would be funny if these people were not those that decide what happens in the world.
If the US keeps meddling in world affairs then the whole world should vote in their elections.
Don't exactly celebrate the US 'wag my tail' relationship with Wahhabi Arabia but on Syria, the
only good option is to ally with President Assad and bomb out the Wahhabi infestation.
Libya is the dog that doesn't bark in the night in UK politics too.
During the debate on bombing Syria, speaker after speaker alluded to the disastrous intervention
in Iraq, for which the guilty parties are no longer in the house.
But not one brought up the disastrous intervention in Libya, for which the guilty party was
currently urging us into another intervention.
Having an amateurish, inward-looking Labour party doesn't help, of course.
The only people who have called Cameron out on Libya in the past year are Nigel Farage and
Barack Obama. Ye gods.
"According to the 24 February 2010 policy analysis "The Year of the Drone", released by the New
America Foundation, the civilian fatality rate since 2004 is approximately 32%. The study reports
that 114 reported UAV-based missile strikes in northwest Pakistan from 2004 to present killed
between 830 and 1,210 individuals, around 550 to 850 of whom were militants."
You can quibble about the exact number of civilians killed, but the moment you approve of your
local police bagging bad guys even if your family gets killed then you can maybe make a comment.
Many human rights organizations have called them illegal, and retired military leaders have
said they backfire, creating more terrorists than they kill.
After reading " The Dron Papers
" Edward Snowden came to the conclusion that drones do not really chase the terrorists, but
they chase their mobile phones. Hence so many innocent victims, because who can guarantee that
the mobile phone which was earlier in the possessions of some terrorist, is not now in the hands
of entirely innocent people.
So, in addition to many ethical questions about the use of drones, this raised another question
on how much "high-tech killing" is indeed reliable.
Excellent article.
Informative and quite rightly challenging.
America is really running away with itself on who, where, how and why they attack.
Britains 'special' relations with the US, should be curtailed, forthwith, because they have the
audacity to now start pressuring us about the EU refferendum, too.
Obama had the nerve to say that we were free loading on the back of "US might" and their attempts
at "global order", his words. While neatly avoiding the questions you ask here, about their role
in Libya, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, drones etc., etc, etc.
Britain should fight back with these facts and distance ourselves from this aggression.
While an enormous amount of time during this campaign has focused around the Iran nuclear
deal, almost no attention has been given to any country that actually has nuclear weapons and
what they plan to do with them over the coming years and decades.
This is also a proof of the "schizophrenic" Obama-Clinton foreign policy. US administration is
doing everything to solve the problem of the Iranian nuclear program, and at the same time doing
everything to spoil relations with the other nuclear power in the world, Russia.
The curiosity of its kind is that Russia, which is also affected by the US sanctions, helps US
to resolve its dispute with Iran and suspend sanctions against this country. And not only that,
but Russia agrees to relocate enriched uranium from Iran to its territory and thus provide a practical
implementation of the agreement on the Iranian nuclear program.
yet the presidential candidates are almost never asked about why congress has not authorized
the military action like the constitution requires.
Yes, Trevor Timm also criticized this in some of his previous articles, as well as Ron Paul, who
also often criticized Obama for this fact. It's completely unclear why Obama continues to rely
on the two authorizations that George W. Bush has got from Congress "to punish the perpetrators
of the 9/11 attacks", and for "the destruction of Saddam Hussein's [non-existent] WMD". This is
particularly unclear given that Obama himself came to power mainly due to his criticism of Bush's
war adventures.
It is possible that Obama does not have enough confidence that he can get authorization from the
GOP dominant Congress to combat Isis in Syria and Iraq. However, by using authorizations for the
old wars for something that has nothing to do with the new wars, Obama is not only acting illegally,
but also provides an opportunity for the conclusion that he now supports Bush for the same thing
for which he criticized him earlier, that is, for the Afghan and Iraq war.
'course I wouldn't approve. And I doubt most countries approve of being invaded (except for the
folks who DO approve anyways).
"The US must stop acting as the world police.' Great phrase. You hear it a lot. Totally insupportable.
Here's the fundamental problem: the globe is a small place these days. Countries really are no
longer isolated entities than can act with little to no impact on anybody else. What one does,
others feel. And leadership is a thing - somebody will always lead. Right now, there are very
few candidates for that. With the fall of imperial England, the US became the only real superpower
left (other than Russia, which has since collapsed, and is busy trying to come back). Thus, whether
it likes it or not, the US has a leadership role to play. If it abdicates that position, and does
as you and so many other less-than-brilliant folks demand? Power abhors a vacuum. Most likely
is that either Russia or China will take over the role currently played by the US. And if you
think either of THOSE countries will do a better job than the US, well... enjoy your personal
delusion.
As for 'scratching heads and bleating' about intervention... we did not have to intervene.
Said that before, saying it again, get it through your skull - we did not have to intervene. We
could, in fact, totally disarm and just sit back and do nothing, anywhere. But. THIS WOULD HAVE
CONSEQUENCES TOO. Seriously. Understand that. Doing nothing is doing something. Sitting out is
still an action one can take. And it is INCREDIBLY likely that things would be WORSE in Libya
right now had we not intervened. Not guaranteed, but likely.
The situation sucks. It would have been great if it had all turned out better. It didn't. But
it probably would have been worse had we made a substantially different choice. Yeah, sure, you
could then pat yourself on the back, and pretend that at least the US wasn't responsible, but,
well, as a certain red-and-blue clad superhero says, with great power comes great responsibility.
The US has great power - if we didn't intervene, and horrible things happened, it'd be just as
much our fault as it is now that we DID intervene, and bad things happened. Because it would have
been in our power to stop it, and we didn't.
"... Besides which, it's hard to buy the idea that Gaddafi was "rogue" or " a threat" when both parties named here were "rendering" secret prisoners to him for outsourced torture. ..."
"... There is no honour among thieves, clearly. But it would be folly to depict a squabble among them as a narrative of sinner vs saint... ..."
"... After the cold war, the US and had the chance to lead to a new world order based on democracy and human rights. Yet instead, its politics based became based on bullying and warmongering, and joined by their European allies. As a result we have a world entrenched in chaos and violence. ..."
"... To top it off, there is also their allies, the Saudi and Gulf allies. Therefore, if you want to know how bad the world has become as a result of the US, European and Gulf allies, their hypocrisy, criminal behavior, destruction of countries, and total disregard of international law, all you need to see is the war in Yemen. ..."
"... Imperialism never left,.. The Capitalists are always working at complete control, it has no problem dancing with Dictators and Authoritarian rulers when it suites its purpose. Its just now they appear to be wanting to improve their image by changing their partners who stepped on their toes and Israel's on occasion .. ..."
"... Yes, I will claim it as a U.S. inspired regime change policy, in all those Middle East secular and sovereign countries, by our own beloved War Mongering Nationalistic Neo Cons.. That is already being shown as a complete disaster.. Only 2 million dead so far and just wait until the religious fanatics are in complete control.. ..."
"... "keeping alive the military-industrial lobbies" mmm. An incomplete reading I think. What about oil and gas? Libya is north African richest country if I'm not mistaken ... Is Britain (and France) still trying to get its share there? ..."
"... "Western [ mostly american and british ] warmongering over the past two decades has had nothing to do with the existential defense of territory. "Defense" has become attack, keeping alive the military-industrial lobbies and lumbering military establishments that depend on it." ..."
"... "The result has been mass killing, destruction and migration on a scale not seen, at least outside Africa, since the second world war." ..."
"... The Sykes-Picot agreement was one of the secrets uncovered by the Russian Revolution: it was in the files of the newly-overthrown government, and promptly publicized by the Bolsheviks, along with lots of other documents relating to imperialist secret diplomacy. Sound familiar? ..."
"... The interventionist model that the West has carried out recently is really an extension of the old colonialism in a different guise. In the olden days, the excuse was to spread Western civilization and Christianity to the world living in backwardness. In the modern era, it's democracy. Unfortunately democracy cannot be installed by force. Even if the people of the country being invaded wanted it, the opportunists (either among them or the outsiders) would find ways to exploit the chaos for their own benefits. We have seen different forms of such evolution in Libya, Egypt, Syria, Iraq. ..."
"... The CIA funded and trained the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, to fight the Russians, just as they backed Saddam against Iran. And the US has been mucking about in the Middle East since the 50s, the Brits since the late 19th century. Yours is a very selective reading of history. ..."
"... No, small groups of people with their own particular interests "begged for help." The "Arab Spring" was a Western media confection used to justify Western intervention to get rid of Gaddafi and Assad. Worked with Gaddafi, Assad not so well. ..."
"... You forget who triggered the French intervention. Another neo-con working for Israel. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/02/world/africa/02levy.html?_r=2 ..."
"... Israel does not want a functioning Arab State left in the Middle-East. ..."
"... It's like the Soviet Union invading the US because a few militiamen holed up in a wildlife refuge in Oregon. The neo-con press feeds us this propaganda and the willing idiots lap it up and deny responsibility when everything falls apart. ..."
"... Jihad Dave is supporting islamist maniacs in Libya and Syria. He succeeded in Libya, along with the ludicrous Sarkozy clown, but Russia and Iran have stood up to the plate in Syria. ..."
"... However much we might sympathise with fellow human beings living under brutal dictators and governments, a country can only really progress from within. Certainly, dialogue, sanctions and international cooperation can help foster change, but ultimately countries must want to change. ..."
"... No, Gaddafy's crime was actually to spend the bulk of Libya's oil revenues on useless things such as schools, hospitals, housing and subsidised food when that money could have been flowing into the pockets of the West. ..."
"... Taliban has been trained in the Saudi religious schools in Pakistan. Wahhabism is the official ideology of Saudi Arabia. 10 out of 11 terrorists 9/11 were the Saudis. All the Islamic terror in the last two decades was sponsored by the Saudis, including ISIS. ..."
"... Bosnia - a slow ticking bomb. Just bubbling under the surface. Kosovo - a mafia state run by drug lord Thaci, supported by the US. It is no secret that the main source of income in Kosovo today is drugs, prostitution, organ trafficking. ..."
"... There are no winners or losers in Iraq, everyone lost. Not a single group benefited from that western backed regime change, same in Libya and Syria. ..."
"... The US empire blew up Libya with some help from it's puppets, Sarkozy and Cameron. 100% imperialism. ..."
"... The USA - and its mini-me, the UK - have so blatantly bombed societies, manipulated governments and undermined social change in so many parts of the world that their trading positions are under real threat from emerging economic powers. ..."
"... Yes, Obama shows himself for the buffoon he really is. ..."
"... I, however, would caution against thinking the US led Neoliberal Empire of the Exceptionals is weakening. Its economic hegemony is almost complete only China and Russia remaining, and Obama with his "Pivot to Asia" (TM) has them surrounded and all set up for the female Chaney - Clinton the warmonger to get on with it. ..."
"... The Empire will only get more and more brutal - it has absolutely no concern for human life or society - power over the globe as the Pentagon phrases it: "Global full spectrum domination" don't kid yourself they are going all out to reach their goal and a billion people could be killed - the Empire would say - so what, it was in our strategic interest. ..."
"... Very well put, Sir. Obama's self-serving statement is borderline stupid. I constantly wonder why I voted for him twice. His Deep State handlers continue from the Bush period and having installed their coterie of right-wing extremists from Hillary to the Directors of the CIA, FBI, NSA, DOD, ad nauseum Obama has not had the courage at any point to admit not only the "mess" he makes, but the he is a captive mess of the shadow government. ..."
"... Your comment is so stereotyped: when British aggression or war crimes are involved, every excuse is trundle out, every nuance examined, every extenuating circumstance and of course there is always a convenient statute of limitations. But when others are involved, specifically America and Israel, the same Guardian readers allow no excuses or nuances and every tiny detail going back hundreds of years is repeatedly and thoroughly examined. ..."
"... Smith was murdered by extremists that took over Libya precisely because the death of Gadaffi left a dangerous power vacuum. The US aided and abetted certain groups, weapons found their way to the worse groups and Smith, a brave man, was his own country's victim in one sense. Hilary Clinton who should have known better publicly gloated over Gadaffi's death. Since his death the victimisation of black Libyans and other black Africans has become common, Libya has been overrun by extremists, and as we write is being used as a conduit for uncontrolled entry into Europe. ..."
"... The biggest unanswered and puzzling question, is that of how could Obama have expected or assumed that Britain and France would have stayed behind and clean up the mess they and the Americans have made of Libya? Why did the Americans resolved to play only the part of 'hired guns' to go in and blitzed the Libyan Government and its armed forces, and neglected to learn the lesson of planning what should follow after the destruction? ..."
"... The argument that the Americans had assumed that France and Britain would clean up the euphemistic mess has little or no credibility, since all three countries had been very clear about not wanting American, British and French 'boots on the ground.' ..."
"... "The result has been mass killing, destruction and migration on a scale not seen, at least outside Africa, since the second world war." ..."
"... We bombed in support of competing Jihadis groups, bandits and local war Lords then our well laid plans for a Utopian peace were thwarted because of the unforeseen chaos created as the Militias we gave close airsupport to fought over the spoils. ..."
"... We should remember that we funded the terrorists in Libya and then sent weapons to ISIS from Libya to Syria that is we again used Al Qaeda as a proxy force. We then again used the "threat" from the proxy forces i,e. Al Qaeda to justify mass surveillance of the general population. ..."
"... Of its 237 years of existence it has been at war or cold war for 222 of those years. ..."
"... NATO is behind ISIS and the wars in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Chechen, Afghanistan, Libya and Ukraine. ..."
"... Jane they didn't "come apart" and Libya and Syria were the most stable and least under the thumb of radicals. Syria had equality and education for women who could wear whatever they wanted. Furthermore they did not fall apart they were attacked by the largest military forces in the world excluding Russia. NATO sent in special operations forces to destabilise the government. They along with Al Nusra and other violent Wahabi terrorists attacked police and army barracks, and when Assads police and military hit back it was presented by the Western media and propagandists as an attack on the people of Syria. Do you think any other country would allow terrorists to attack police and other public institutions without retaliating and restoring order. ..."
"... Many people who do not accept the Western medias false reporting at face value know that the wars in Syria were about changing the leaders and redrawing national boundaries to isolate Iran and sideline Russian influence. It was and is an illegal war and it was the barbarity of our Western leaders that caused the terrible violence. It was a pre planned plan and strategy outlined in the US Special Forces document below. http://nsnbc.me/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/special-forces-uw-tc-18-01.pdf ..."
"... In the Libyan case, it was a clear US strategy to put in the forefront their English and French valets, in a coup (euphemistically called "regime change") wanted by them. The nobel peace winner got some nerves to put the blame on his accomplices for the chaos in Libya, while the permanent objective of the US is to divide and conquer, sowing chaos wherever it occurs: Afghanistan, Sudan, Iraq, Syria. Also Hillary is no stranger to the actions in Libya. ..."
"... Simon Jenkins, don't pretend you were against American punitive expeditions around the world to overthrow third world dictators. You worked from the same neo-con ideological script to defend the ultra-liberal, military industrial economy; scare mongering in the pages of the Guardian, as far back as I can remember. You lot are as totally discredited as Bush, Cheney, Rumsfield and American Nato toadies. ..."
"... Libya , Ukraine ,Syria have had the same recipe of de-stabilisation by the US and NATO. The so called popular rebels were in fact CIA trained and financed. Jihadist in Libya and Syria and neo-Nazis in Ukraine. After completing regime change in Libya as planned ,the Jihadist, with their looted arms were transferred to Syria and renamed ISIS. ISIS is Washingtons Foreign Legion army, used as required for their Imperial ends. Renamed as required on whichever territory they operate ..."
"... Cameron has been given a free pass on Libya. It really is quite astonishing. The man has turned a functioning society into a jihadi infested failed state which is exporting men and weapons across North Africa and down the Sahara and now serves as a new front line for ISIS ..."
"... Attacking Libya and deposing Gaddafi was down to enforcing the R2P doctrine on the pretext of "stopping another Rwanda". But it was a pretext. Islamist rebels attacked the armouries within Libya and the Libyans had every right to try and put down the rebellion. Samantha Powers et al were the war mongers. ..."
"... The 2011 regime change shenanigans of the west against Libya is colonialism at its worst from all the parties who instigated it. The aftermath, the resultant mayhem and chaos, was in itself adding insult to injury. Gaddafi was no saint, but the militias, Muslim Brotherhood and ISIS now running rampant in the country are infinitely worse. This is a war crime of the first magnitude and no effort should be spared to address it ..."
"... The west who has assassinated or organised coups against democratically elected secular leaders who didn't give us their natural resources (eg iran) and installed brutal, clepto dictatorships who also take part in plundering the resources leaving the general population poor, uneducated and susceptible to indoctrination from Islamists. ..."
So
Barack Obama thinks Britain in 2011 left Libya in chaos – and besides it does not pull its weight
in the world. Britain thinks that a bit rich, given the shambles America left in Iraq. Then both
sides say sorry. They did not mean to be rude.
Thus do we wander across the ethical wasteland of the west's wars of intervention. We blame and
we name-call. We turn deaf ears to the cries of those whose lives we have destroyed. Then we kiss
and make up – to each other.
Obama was right first time round about Libya's civil war. He wanted to keep out. As
he recalls to the Atlantic magazine , Libya was "not so at the core of US interests that it makes
sense for us to unilaterally strike against the Gaddafi regime". He cooperated with Britain and France,
but on the assumption that David Cameron would clear up the resulting mess. That did not happen because
Cameron had won his Falklands war and could go home crowing.
Obama is here describing all the recent "wars of choice".
America had no "core interest" in Afghanistan or Iraq, any more than Britain had in
Libya . When a state attacks
another state and destroys its law and order, morally it owns the mess. There is no such thing as
imperialism-lite. Remove one fount of authority and you must replace and sustain another, as Europe
has done at vast expense in Bosnia and Kosovo.
America and Britain both attacked countries in the Middle East largely to satisfy the machismo
and domestic standing of two men, George Bush and Tony Blair. The result has been mass killing, destruction
and migration on a scale not seen, at least outside Africa, since the second world war. In this despicable
saga, Cameron's Libyan venture was a sideshow, though one that has destabilised north
Africa and may yet turn it
into another Islamic State caliphate. It is his Iraq.
As for Obama's charge that Britain and other countries are not pulling their weight and are "free
riders" on American defence spending, that too deserves short shrift.
British and French military expenditure is proportionately among the highest in the world, mostly
blown on archaic weapons and archaic forms of war. Western warmongering over the past two decades
has had nothing to do with the existential defence of territory. "Defence" has become attack, keeping
alive the military-industrial lobbies and lumbering military establishments that depend on it.
Meanwhile the bonds between America and Britain will continue to strengthen. They do so, against
all the odds, because they grow from one culture and one outlook on life. That mercifully has nothing
to do with politicians.
I'm stunned that Obama has been able to get away with his absolutely abysmal record with foreign
policy. Libya was a complete disaster and there is evidence to suggest that Libya was a much better
place under Gaddafi. And the fact that once they were in Iraq (something started by his predecessor)
he wasn't committed to bringing about serious change, thus leaving a giant vacuum which, coincided
with the Syrian Civil War, has now been filled by ISIS.
That's not even talking about the Iran deal, Benghazi and the disastrous "Bring Back our Girls"
campaign.
"People find it very hard," said Iman Fannoush, with her two children in tow and a husband
she knows not where. "They are up all night shooting because of good news. We hear the UN is
coming to help us or our fighters have taken Brega or the air strikes have destroyed Gaddafi's
tanks. Then everyone is afraid again when they hear Gaddafi's army is coming and they all want
to know where is France, where are the air strikes, why is the west abandoning us?
We are grateful for the role played by the international community in protecting the Libyan
people; Libyans will never forget those who were our friends at this critical stage and will
endeavour to build closer relations with those states on the basis of our mutual respect and
common interests. However, the future of Libya is for the Libyans alone to decide. We cannot
compromise on sovereignty or allow others to interfere in our internal affairs, position themselves
as guardians of our revolution or impose leaders who do not represent a national consensus.
Hilsum gives a riveting account of the battle for Tripoli, with activists risking their lives
to pass intelligence to Nato, whose targeting – contrary to regime propaganda – was largely
accurate, and too cautious for many Libyans.
The UN security council authorised action to protect Libyan civilians from the Gaddafi regime
but Russia, China and other critics believe that the western alliance exceeded that mandate
and moved to implement regime change.
Libya's Arab spring was a bloody affair, ending with the killing of Gaddafi, one of the world's
most ruthless dictators. His death saw the rebel militias turn on each other in a mosaic of
turf wars. Full-scale civil war came last summer, when Islamist parties saw sharp defeats in
elections the United Nations had supervised, in the hope of bringing peace to the country.
Islamists and their allies rebelled against the elected parliament and formed the Libya Dawn
coalition, which seized Tripoli. The new government fled to the eastern city of Tobruk and
fighting has since raged across the country.
With thousands dead, towns smashed and 400,000 homeless, the big winner is Isis, which has
expanded fast amid the chaos. Egypt, already the chief backer of government forces, has now
joined a three-way war between government, Libya Dawn and Isis.
It is all a long way from the hopes of the original revolutionaries. With Africa's largest
oil reserves and just six million people to share the bounty, Libya in 2011 appeared set for
a bright future. "We thought we would be the new Dubai, we had everything," says a young activist
who, like the student, prefers not to give her name. "Now we are more realistic."
Perpetually engineered destabilization is highly lucrative and has been for 200 years, but I don't
know what's Central or Intelligent about it......except for a tiny handful at the top globally.
On balance, is Libya worse off now than it would have been, had Gaddaffi been allowed free
rein in Benghazi?
No-one can possibly know the answer to that, certainly not Mr Jenkins.
Clearly it was a dictatorship like say Burma is today.....but....from an economic point of
view, it was like the Switzerland of Africa. And actually tons of European companies had flocked
over there to set up shop. In contrast to now where its like the Iraquistan of Africa. No contest
in the comparison there...
Besides which, it's hard to buy the idea that Gaddafi was "rogue" or " a threat" when both
parties named here were "rendering" secret prisoners to him for outsourced torture.
There is no honour among thieves, clearly. But it would be folly to depict a squabble among
them as a narrative of sinner vs saint...
After the cold war, the US and had the chance to lead to a new world order based on democracy
and human rights. Yet instead, its politics based became based on bullying and warmongering, and
joined by their European allies. As a result we have a world entrenched in chaos and violence.
To top it off, there is also their allies, the Saudi and Gulf allies. Therefore, if you want
to know how bad the world has become as a result of the US, European and Gulf allies, their hypocrisy,
criminal behavior, destruction of countries, and total disregard of international law, all you
need to see is the war in Yemen.
Imperialism never left,.. The Capitalists are always working at complete control, it has no problem
dancing with Dictators and Authoritarian rulers when it suites its purpose. Its just now they
appear to be wanting to improve their image by changing their partners who stepped on their toes
and Israel's on occasion ..
Yes, I will claim it as a U.S. inspired regime change policy, in all those Middle East secular
and sovereign countries, by our own beloved War Mongering Nationalistic Neo Cons.. That is already
being shown as a complete disaster.. Only 2 million dead so far and just wait until the religious
fanatics are in complete control..
Yep, many pictures, as there always are with media confections. Remember the footage of Saddam's
statue being torn down in front of a huge crowd? It was only months later we saw the wide angle
shot that showed just how few people there really were there.
These US and UK involvement in the ME are matters of official record; are you really denying the
CIA trained the Mujahideen, or that both the UK and US propped up Saddam? Even Robert Fisk acknowledges
that! And please, don't patronise me. You have no idea what I've read or haven't.
......c'mon, the powers behind the powers intentionally engineer mid-East destabilization to keep
the perpetual war pumping billions to the ATM's in their living rooms; then, on top of it, they
send the bill to average joe's globally; when is this farce going to be called out ?
It is completely
illogical, can't stand even eye tests, yet continues like an emperor with new clothes in our face.
"keeping alive the military-industrial lobbies"
mmm. An incomplete reading I think. What about oil and gas? Libya is north African richest country
if I'm not mistaken ... Is Britain (and France) still trying to get its share there?
"Western [ mostly american and british ] warmongering over the past two decades has had
nothing to do with the existential defense of territory. "Defense" has become attack, keeping
alive the military-industrial lobbies and lumbering military establishments that depend on it."
"The result has been mass killing, destruction and migration on a scale not seen, at least
outside Africa, since the second world war."
The Sykes-Picot agreement was one of the secrets uncovered by the Russian Revolution: it was in
the files of the newly-overthrown government, and promptly publicized by the Bolsheviks, along
with lots of other documents relating to imperialist secret diplomacy. Sound familiar?
The interventionist model that the West has carried out recently is really an extension of the
old colonialism in a different guise. In the olden days, the excuse was to spread Western civilization
and Christianity to the world living in backwardness. In the modern era, it's democracy. Unfortunately
democracy cannot be installed by force. Even if the people of the country being invaded wanted
it, the opportunists (either among them or the outsiders) would find ways to exploit the chaos
for their own benefits. We have seen different forms of such evolution in Libya, Egypt, Syria,
Iraq.
Get your facts right. Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan were all states that crumbled after the
demise of the USSR.
Bullshit. The CIA funded and trained the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, to fight the Russians,
just as they backed Saddam against Iran. And the US has been mucking about in the Middle East
since the 50s, the Brits since the late 19th century. Yours is a very selective reading of history.
No, small groups of people with their own particular interests "begged for help." The "Arab Spring"
was a Western media confection used to justify Western intervention to get rid of Gaddafi and
Assad. Worked with Gaddafi, Assad not so well.
this might answer your question. Syria has suffered for its geography since it was artificially
created by the Sykes Picot agreement at the end of the Ottoman Empire.
"Libyan rebels are secularists, want unified country
Gardels: If the French aim is successful and Qaddafi falls, who are the rebels the West is
allying with? Secularists? Islamists? And what do they want?
Levy: Secularists. They want a unified Libya whose capital will remain Tripoli and whose government
will be elected as a result of free and transparent elections. I am not saying that this will
happen from one day to the next, and starting on the first day. But I have seen these men enough,
I have spoken with them enough, to know that this is undeniably the dream, the goal, the principle
of legitimacy.
It's like the Soviet Union invading the US because a few militiamen holed up in a wildlife refuge
in Oregon. The neo-con press feeds us this propaganda and the willing idiots lap it up and deny
responsibility when everything falls apart.
Britain started the mess in the Middle-East with the Balfour declaration and the theft of Palestinian
land to create an illegal Jewish state. Europe should pay massive reparations of money and equivalent
land in Europe for the Palestinian refugees living in squalid camps. Neo-con Jews who lobbied
for the Iraq, Syria and Libyan wars should have their wealth confiscated to pay for the mess they
created. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/02/world/africa/02levy.html?_r=2
Jihad Dave is supporting islamist maniacs in Libya and Syria. He succeeded in Libya, along with
the ludicrous Sarkozy clown, but Russia and Iran have stood up to the plate in Syria.
Presumably he's going down the Blair/Clinton route of cosying up to Middle Eastern Supremacist
Cults in the hope that he can increase his income by tens of millions within the next 10 years.
There can be no other explanation for his actions, that have never had anything whatsoever to
do with the interests of either Britain or the wider European community.
For me, the bottom line is that, however much might like to believe it, military intervention
does not create nice, liberal, secular democracies. These can only be fostered from within.
However much we might sympathise with fellow human beings living under brutal dictators and
governments, a country can only really progress from within. Certainly, dialogue, sanctions and
international cooperation can help foster change, but ultimately countries must want to change.
The military, under the instruction of politicians, of the West should be pro-defence but anti-regime
change or "nation building".
I'm not suggesting a completely isolationist position, but offensive military action should
be seen as a last resort.
Mr Jenkins is a knowledgeable man but should've thought through this a bit more before so casually
associating death and destruction and misery with Africa.
China's cultural revolution and the Great Leap Forward alone killed and displaced more people
after the second world war than all the conflicts in Africa put together. How about the break
up of India in 1947? Korean War?
But no when he thought about misery Africa popped into his mind..
Meanwhile the bonds between America and Britain will continue to strengthen. They do so,
against all the odds, because they grow from one culture and one outlook on life. That mercifully
has nothing to do with politicians.
One culture?
One outlook?
Sounds all very Soviet.
So, all Enlightened souls are reduced to a monoculture, within the Anglo American Empire.
Obama is a bill of goods. The Voters that choose him thought that they were getting a progressive,
Obama used the reverend
Wright to make himself seem like a man committed to radical change, but behind Obama was Chicago
investment banker Louis Susman (appointed ambassador to Britain).
Obama, a Harvard law professor, is the choice of the bankers, he does not play a straight bat,
all the wars and killing are someone else's fault. Banking wanted rid of Gaddafi since he threatened
the dollar as the reserve currency (as did Dominique Strauss-Kahn) as does the Euro, Obama let
Cameron think he was calling the shots but he was just Obama's beard. Obama is nothing if not
cunning, when he says stay in Europe but the Elites of the Tory party are pushing for out guess
what, they got the nod from Obama and the Banks.
So? All the numbers in the world can't undo Jenkins' thesis: there is no imperialism-lite. Imperialist
wars are imperialist wars no matter how many die, and whether chaos, or neo-colonial rule follow.
In his interview, Obama claims a more deliberate, opaque, and efficient war machine. To him, and
his conscience, John Brennan, these metrics add up to significant moral milestones. To us innumerates,
it's just more imperialist b.s.
Gadaffy had since long planned to free his country and other African states from the yoke of being
forced to trade within the American dollar sphere. He was about to lance his thoroughy well prepared
alternative welcomed not the least by the Chinese when Libya was attacked. Obama is not truthful
when suggesting the attack was not a "core" interest to the US. It was of supreme interest for
the US to appear with its allies, Gadaffy´s independence of mind being no small challenge.
Gadafy may have been particularly nasty with dissidents, but the UK has plenty of allies in the
Muslim world that are far worse: Saudi Arabia, Bahrain... The Gulf States work their imported
slaves to death and the UK kowtows to them. The UK has supplied billions of pounds worth of weapons
to Saudi Arabia and sent military advisors to advise them how to use them to bomb Yemeni schools
and hospitals.
No, Gaddafy's crime was actually to spend the bulk of Libya's oil revenues on useless things
such as schools, hospitals, housing and subsidised food when that money could have been flowing
into the pockets of the West.
Kosovo is also mentioned. There was a relatively low-level conflict (much like the Northern
Ireland 'troubles') there until NATO started bombing and then oversaw the massive ethnic cleansing
of Kosovo Serbs from their homeland (Serbs are the most ethnically-cleansed group in the former
Yugoslavia: around 500,000 refugees).
Yugoslavia's real crime? It was the last country in Europe to refuse the market economy and
the hegemony of Western banks and corporates.
The message is, 'Accept capitalism red in tooth or claw, or we'll bomb the crap out of you.'
Did the attack on Afghanistan improve the situation? Perhaps temporarily in the cities, some things
got a little better as long as you weren't shot or blown up. Over the country as a whole, it made
the situation much worse.
I remember John Simpson crowing that the Western invaders had freed Afghanistan when they entered
Kabul. My reaction at the time was, 'Well, the Soviets had no problem holding the cities. Wait
until you step outside them.' There followed many years of war achieving pretty much nothing except
to kill a lot of people and get recruits flocking to the Taliban.
It seemed we had learned absolutely nothing from the British and Soviet experiences.
And you seem to have forgotten the multitude of US terror attacks on Muslims before the Afghan
invasion, repackaged for our media as 'targeted attacks with collateral damage'. Bombing aspirin
factories and such. And the First Gulf War. And US bases occupying the region. And the fact that
the situation in Afghanistan was due to the Americans and Saudis having showered weapons and cash
on anyone who was fighting the Soviets, not giving a damn about their aims. Bin Laden, for instance.
And one aspect of law and order under the Taliban was that they virtually stopped opium production.
After the invasion, it rose again to dizzying heights.
The only way to deal with countries such as Afghanistan as it returns to its default system,
along with other, more aggressive rogue states such as Saudi Arabia, is to starve them of all
weapons and then let their peoples sort it out. It may take a long time but it's the sole possibility.
As long as we keep pouring weapons into the Middle East for our own shameful purposes, the
apocalypse will continue.
Reading this excellent article one wonders how the war criminal Blair can be offered any peace-keeping
role in the world or continue to get any air or press time.
Taliban has been trained in the Saudi religious schools in Pakistan. Wahhabism is the official
ideology of Saudi Arabia. 10 out of 11 terrorists 9/11 were the Saudis. All the Islamic terror
in the last two decades was sponsored by the Saudis, including ISIS.
Bosnia - a slow ticking bomb. Just bubbling under the surface. Kosovo - a mafia state run by drug
lord Thaci, supported by the US. It is no secret that the main source of income in Kosovo today
is drugs, prostitution, organ trafficking. Tear gas in Parliament for the third time in as many
months. While the squares full of unemployed young and old are adorned with statues of those that
gave them this opportunity Tony Blair and Bill Clinton were popular but I think their halos are
tarnished somewhat. The situation is so serious that the US is beefing up its presence in camp Bondsteel but you won't read about it in the Guardian.
when British aggression or war crimes are involved, every excuse is trundle out, every
nuance examined, every extenuating circumstance and of course there is always a convenient
statute of limitations
So true . "Oh, oh, but the Spanish/Mongols/Romans etc etc", "Oh, like they were all
so peaceful before Empire came along", "Oh, but but" (ad infinitum).
The bonds between America and Britain will continue to strengthen? Here's hoping. The neo-con cum
neo-ultra liberal dream keeps on giving. Even after Brexit, Britain remains America's poodle
at its peril. The rest of the article is right, but by now accepted wisdom amongst those capable
of independent and rational thought.
Here we go again, off course next phase is the "enlightment" in Al-Andalus...
1. Conflict between sunni and shiites has been dormant for decades. Saudi Arabias promotion
of Wahhabism has awoken it again, along with the catalyst for the recent bloodshed, the invasion
of Iraq. That placed it back in the hands of the majority Shia and upset radical sunnis (eg
the Saudis).
Wahabism grew because of the oil export from Saudi Arabia which started way before World war II.
Bollocks, there was a short period of calm while Europe defeated the Ottoman empire , but the
Mughal empire took great pleasure in slaughtering shiites, and the Ottoman empire had huge conflicts
with the Safavid empire.
2. Pogroms were common against Jews in Europe and Europe has a far worse history of treating
Jews than Muslims ever had. The "golden age of Judaism" in Europe was under Muslim rule in
Spain. Need I mention that the Holocaust was perpetrated by European Christians?
He-he, the fabulous golden age which is always mentioned, no doubt they were golden at that
time compared to Europe, but to compare it today, it would be like living in Nazi Germany as a
Jew before the Nürnberg laws were implemented.
Would you like to pay a special non-muslim tax, step aside when a Muslim passed the street,
be unable to claim any high positions in society to due to your heritage?
3. Didnt forget. the USSR didnt hand them chemical weapons though. That would be the West.
And it wasnt Russia who invaded Iraq later over the scam that they had WMDs.
The Iran-Iraq war made the millions of dead possible primarily due to Soviet equipment, Halabja
killed 5000.
No, Russia prefered Chechnya and directly killed 300.000 civilians with the Grad bombings of cities
and villages, whereas the casualties in Iraq primarily can be contributed to sectional violence.
4. I think you are forgetting Mossadeq in Iran in the 50s. Nasser in Egypt and any Pan-Arab
group that was secular in nature. Pan-Arabism is now dead and radical Islamism is alive and
well thanks to our lust for control over the region.
None of the mentioned were prime examples of democracy, Nasser for example had no problems in
eliminating the Muslim brotherhood or killing 10s of thousands of rebels and civilians in Yemen
with mustard gas.
Obama's remark that the Europeans and Gulf States "detested" Gaddafi and wanted to get rid of
him while others had "humanitarian concerns" is of interest. It's unlikely the Arabs had humanitarian
concerns in all the circumstances; they just wanted Regime Change. It is the lethal combination
of Gulf Arabs and Neo-colonial France and Britain that has driven the Syrian war too- and continues
to do so. No wonder America claims these countries enthuse about war until it comes and then expect
them to fight it. France currently demands the surrender of Assad and for Russia to "leave the
country immediately". Britain says there can be no peace while he remains and that Russia's "interference"
is helping IS.
It's your prerogative whether or not you believe that the US and NATO intervene in countries based
on moral grounds. But if you do want to delude yourself, remember that they only intervene in
countries where they can make money off resources, like Libya and Iraq's oil revenues. If it were
about morality, don't you think NATO and the West would have rushed to help Rwanda during the
genocide?
There are no winners or losers in Iraq, everyone lost. Not a single group benefited from that
western backed regime change, same in Libya and Syria. You do not win when your situation is worse
than it was before Saddam. You can't be a winner when you life in generally worse off than it
was before. basically there is no rule of law now in these nations. Saddam was no monster like
you want to portray him.
Actually, some of those Latin American governments we overthrew were indeed liberal democracies.
As for Canada, there are several reasons we haven't invaded. Too big, too sparse too white...and
economically already a client state. Of course, we did try once: the War of 1812.
"When the same leaders did initially stand aside (as in Syria) "
They didn't stand aside though, they helped create the trouble in the first place, as too with
Libya; gather intelligence to find out who will take up arms, fund, train and give them promises,
get them to organize and attack, then when the dictator strikes back the press swing into action
to tell us all how much of a horrible bastard he is(even though we've been supporting and trading
with him for eons), ergo, we have to bomb him! It's HUMANITARIAN! Not. It would be conquest though.
Frightening.
Obama has done everything in his power to morph into Bush including hiring a flaming chicken hawk
in Ash Carter to play the role of Dick Cheyney. Bush left us with Iraq and Afghanistan, to which
Obama added Egypt with the overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood, Libya, Syria and Yemen. He also
restarted the Cold War with Russia. He is now going after China for building islands in the South
China Sea, a disputed area, something he as well as other Presidents before him has allowed Israel
to build settlements on disputed land for the past fifty years and throughthrough $ 3.5 billion
in gifts annually, has provided for enough concrete to cover all the land the Palestinians live
on.
The 3.5 billion annually will increase by $40 billion over ten years, unless Netanyahu gets
the increase he wants to 15 billion per year. So Obama must settle on a legacy which makes him
both a warmonger and one of the very best arms dealer in the world. His family must be so proud.
To be a humanitarian intervention, a military intervention has to avoid causing regime collapse,
because people will die because of regime collapse. This is an elementary point that the political
class appears not to want to learn.
I agree with your analysis except the last paragraph. Pretty much in all interventions that
we have witnessed, the political class deliberately caused the regimes to collapse. That was always
the primary goal. Humanitarian intervention were never the primary, secondary or even tertiary
objective.
If the political class want to do some humanitarian interventions, they can always start with
Boko Haram in Nigeria.
America had no "core interest" in Afghanistan or Iraq
The USA was enforcing the UN blockade of Iraq, and had massive forces in place to do it. It was
costing a fortune and there were regular border skirmishes taking place. It has been suggested
that Bush and his advisors thought that they could take out Saddam and then pull all their forces
back to the US. They won't admit it now because of the disaster that unfolded afterwards.
Another good piece. What about all the weapons we sold Israel after they started their recent
slaughter in Gaza and the selling of weapons to Saudi Arabia for use in Yemen (one of the poorest
country's in the world) says everything you need to know about the tory party. They are sub humans
and as such should be treated like dirt. I don't believe in the concept of evil...all a bit religious
for me but if I did, it's what they are.
It astonishes me that these great men and women-I include Sec'y Clinton here-give no indication
that their calculations were made without the slightest knowledge of the countries they were preparing
to attack in one way or another. From what one read in the long NYTimes report on preparations
for the Libyan intervention, the participants in the planning knew a great deal about military
matters and less about Libya than they could have found out in a few minutes with Wikipedia. Tribal
societies are different from western societies, dear people, and you damn well should have known
that.
Honduras. The USA backed the coup there. Honduras is now run by generals and is the world's murder
capital. I could go on, jezzam. Please read William Blum's books on US foreign policy. They provide
evidence that the US record is not good.
Without the US the UK and France couldn't have overthrown Gaddafi. The jihadis would have been
killed or fled Libya. I don't believe any post-Gaddafi plan existed. Why would there have been
one? Killing Gaddafi was the war's aim. A western puppet strong man leader grabbing power would
have been icing on the cake of course but why would the US care about Libya once Gaddafi was gone?
Well, Cameron just followed Obama's 'regime change' bad ideas.
Obama is a failed leader of the World who made our lives so much worse.
Obama likes to entertain recently, so after his presidency the best job for him is a clown in
a circus.
We will never know why Stevens and the others were killed.
Absent reliable information, everyone is free to blame whomever they dislike most.
Based on zero non-partisan information, Hillary is the media's top choice for Big Villain.
She may in fact be more responsible than most for this horror, but she may not be too.
Who ya gonna ask: the CIA, the Pentagon, Ted Cruz?
It seems everyone who's ever even visited Washington,D.C., has some anonymous inside
source that proves Hillary did it.
To hear the GOP tell it, she flew to Libya secretly and shot Stevens herself
just because she damn well felt it, o kay -- (female troubles)
My question is: Where has US/Euro invasion resulted in a better government for all those
Middle Eastern people we blasted to bits of blood and bone? How's Yemen doin' these days?
Hope Europe enjoys assimilating a few million people who share none of Europe's customs,
values or languages.
I'm sure euro-businesses would never hire the new immigrants instead of union-backed
locals.
Why, that would almost be taking advantage of a vast reservoir of ultra-cheap labor!
Nor will the sudden ocean of euro-a-day workers undercut unions or wages in the EU. No siree,
not possible.
Just like unions have not been decimated, and wages have not stagnated in the US since 1980
or so. No siree. Not in Europe .
jezzam writes, "the dictator starts massacring hundreds of thousands of his own civilians." But
he didn't. Cameron lied.
The rebellion against Gaddafi began in February 2011. The British, French and US governments intervened
on their usual pretext of protecting civilians. The UN said that 1,000-2,000 people had been killed
before the NATO powers attacked.
Eight months later, after the NATO attack, 30,000 people had been killed and 50,000 wounded (National
Transitional Council figures).
Cameron made the mess; Cameron caused the vast refugee crisis. The NATO powers are getting what
they want – the destruction of any states and societies that oppose their rule, control over Africa's
rich resources. Libya is now plagued by "relentless warfare where competing militias compete for
power while external accumulators of capital such as oil companies can extract resources under
the protection of private military contractors."
any state that wishes to be taken seriously as a player on the world stage
The classic phrase of imperialism - an attitude that seems to believe any nation has the right
to interfere in, or invade, other countries'.
Usually done under some pretence of moral superiority - it used to be to 'bring the pagans to
God', these days more 'they're not part of our belief system'. In fact, it only really happens
when the imperial nations see the economic interests of their ruling class come under threat.
The USA - and its mini-me, the UK - have so blatantly bombed societies, manipulated governments
and undermined social change in so many parts of the world that their trading positions are under
real threat from emerging economic powers.
The two that they are most scared of are Russia and China, who combined can offer the capital
and expertise to replace the old US / European axis across Africa, for instance. The war is already
being fought on many fronts, as
this article makes clear.
Yes, Obama shows himself for the buffoon he really is. Clinton had it right when the going gets
tough Obama gives a speech (see Cairo).
I, however, would caution against thinking the US led Neoliberal Empire of the Exceptionals
is weakening. Its economic hegemony is almost complete only China and Russia remaining, and Obama
with his "Pivot to Asia" (TM) has them surrounded and all set up for the female Chaney - Clinton
the warmonger to get on with it.
The Empire will only get more and more brutal - it has absolutely no concern for human life
or society - power over the globe as the Pentagon phrases it: "Global full spectrum domination"
don't kid yourself they are going all out to reach their goal and a billion people could be killed
- the Empire would say - so what, it was in our strategic interest.
The odd thing is, Obama didn't seem to think getting rid of Gaddafi a bad thing at all at the
time. Clinton was all, "We came, we saw, he died." And this bit about "no core interest" in Afghanistan
and Iraq is just bizarre. Given the mess both countries are in, and the resurgence of the
Taliban
and zero clue about Iraq it was clearly a master stroke for Obama to decide the US exit both with
no effective governments in place, ones that could deal with the Taliban et al. Never mind, he
can tootle off and play golf.
Very well put, Sir. Obama's self-serving statement is borderline stupid. I constantly wonder why
I voted for him twice.
His Deep State handlers continue from the Bush period and having installed their coterie of
right-wing extremists from Hillary to the Directors of the CIA, FBI, NSA, DOD, ad nauseum Obama
has not had the courage at any point to admit not only the "mess" he makes, but the he is a captive
mess of the shadow government.
America has a historic crisis of leadership and being the sole model left in that field, the
world has followed, the UK and all of Europe included.
Libya is all Hilarys work so expect to return with boots on the ground once Wall Sts finest is
parked in the Oval office. She has the midas touch in reverse and Libya has turned (and will continue)
to turn out worse than Iraq and Syria (believe me its possible) There is absolutely no one on
the ground that the west can work with so the old chestnut of arming and training al qaeda or
'moderate' opposition is not an option. ISIL are solidifying a base there and other than drones
there is zip we can do.
Critising Cameron just shows how insecure Obama is, lets be honest the middle east and afghanistan
are in the state they are because Obama had zero interest in foreign policy when his first term
started, thus allowing the neocons to move into the vacuum and create the utter disaster that
is Syraq and Ukraine. We in europe are now dealing with the aftermath of this via the refugee
crisis which will top 2 million people this year. Obamas a failure and he knows it, hence the
criticism of other leaders. Cameron is no different, foreign policy being almost totally abandoned
to the US, there is no such thing as independent defence policy in the UK, everything is carried
out at the behest of the US. Don't kid yourself we have any autonomy, we don't and there are plenty
of high level armed forces personnel who feel the same way. Europe is leaderless in general and
with the economy flatlining they too have abandoned defence and foreign affairs to the pentagon.
Right now we're in the quiet before the storm, once HRC gets elected expect the situation to
deteriorate rapidly, our only hope is that someone has got the dirt to throw her out of the race.
ISIS established itself in Iraq before moving into Syria. Would ISIS exist is Britain had not
totally destabilized Iraq? Going back even further, it is the 100th anniversary of the Sykes-Picot
agreement, that great exercise in British Imperialism that created the artificial nations in the
Middle East that are collapsing today.
Your comment is so stereotyped: when British aggression or war crimes are involved, every
excuse is trundle out, every nuance examined, every extenuating circumstance and of course there
is always a convenient statute of limitations. But when others are involved, specifically America
and Israel, the same Guardian readers allow no excuses or nuances and every tiny detail going
back hundreds of years is repeatedly and thoroughly examined.
Transparent hypocrisy. Accept responsibility and stop offloading it to Calais.
Ambassador Stevens was killed in a cover up over the arms dealing from Libya to Syria, (weapons
and fighters to ISIS). It seems more likely that he was killed because he was investigating the
covert operation given that he was left to fend for himself by all US military forces but in a
classic defamation strategy he has been accused of being behind the operation. Had he been he
would have been well defended.
"Defense" has become attack, keeping alive the military-industrial lobbies and lumbering
military establishments that depend on it.
Couldn't put it better myself. Yes, America is a full blown Empire now. Evil to it's very core.
Bent on world domination and any cost. All we lack is a military dictatorship. Of course, with
the nation populated by brainwashed sheep, a "Dear Leader" is inevitable,
President Obama was correct in keeping US boots off the ground in Syria. An active US troop presence
would have resulted in an even greater level of confusion and destruction on all sides. However,
it was precisely the US' meddling in Libya that helped pave the way for its current dysfunctional,
failed state status, riven by sectarian conflicts and home to a very active Al Quaida presence.
US interference in Libya saw Gadaffi backstabbed by the US before literally being stabbed to death
although he had been given assurances that the US would respect his rule particularly as he had
sought to become part of the alliance against the likes of Al Quaida.
Obama was behind the disgraceful lie that the mob that attacked the US' Benghazi Embassy and murdered
Ambassador Smith y was 'inflamed' by an obscure video on youtube that attacked extremist elements
of the Islamic faith. Smith deserved better than this blatant lie and the grovelling, snivelling
faux apologies Obama and then Secretary of State Hilary Clinton made to the Muslim world for something
that had nothing to do with 99.9 percent of non Muslims.
Smith was murdered by extremists that took over Libya precisely because the death of Gadaffi left
a dangerous power vacuum. The US aided and abetted certain groups, weapons found their way to
the worse groups and Smith, a brave man, was his own country's victim in one sense. Hilary Clinton
who should have known better publicly gloated over Gadaffi's death. Since his death the victimisation
of black Libyans and other black Africans has become common, Libya has been overrun by extremists,
and as we write is being used as a conduit for uncontrolled entry into Europe.
Disappointingly, President Obama forgets the Biblical saying about pointing out a speck in somebody's
eye while ignoring the plank in his own.
Mr President doesn't privately refer to the Libyan upheaval as the "shit show" for no good reason.
The chaos and anarchy that have ensued since, including the migrant crisis in Europe and the rise
of Islamic State, is directly attributable to the shoddy interventionist approach used by both
Britain and France.
Good article, with justified moral indignation. Only thing I would have changed, is "imperialism-lite"
to 'lesser and greater imperialism.
Would it not have been a great contribution towards peace and justice, had the US decided not
to invade Iraq and Libya, on account that other western countries were "free-riders" and would
not have pulled their weight?
So, what does the world needs now? More 'free-riding countries' to dissuade so-called responsible
countries - Britain, France, America, Italy - from conspiring to invade other countries, after
consulting in the equivalent of a 'diplomatic toilet and drawing up their war plans on the back
of the proverbial cigarette packet.'
For all Obama's niceties, it would now appear that he has been seething and mad as hell about
his perception of Britain and France 'abandoning' Libya and watching it perceptible
destabilizing
the region and the flames fanning farther afield.
The biggest unanswered and puzzling question, is that of how could Obama have expected or assumed
that Britain and France would have stayed behind and clean up the mess they and the Americans
have made of Libya? Why did the Americans resolved to play only the part of 'hired guns' to go
in and blitzed the Libyan Government and its armed forces, and neglected to learn the lesson of
planning what should follow after the destruction?
The argument that the Americans had assumed that France and Britain would clean up the euphemistic
mess has little or no credibility, since all three countries had been very clear about not wanting
American, British and French 'boots on the ground.'
Is the Americans now telling the world that they went into Libya without planning for the aftermath,
because it was 'an emergency to save lives' and they had to go in immediately?
Well, if so, that is now how nations behave responsibly, and it is now clear that more lives
have probably been lost and continue to be sacrificed, than those which might have been saved
as a result of the West invading and attacking Libya.
the Europeans expected America to pick up the tab for reconstruction
I don't think there would be many complaints from Halliburton or other American companies to
help with the reconstruction, if the place wasn't such a shit-storm right now.
"The result has been mass killing, destruction and migration on a scale not seen, at least outside
Africa, since the second world war."
Judging from the sentiments expressed in the overwhelming majority of comments posted on multiple
threads on this forum, the British people don't want to accept responsibility for "migration on
a scale not seen... since the second world war". The almost universal resistance to accepting
refugees and migrants that fled their homes due to unprovoked British aggression is disgusting
and pathetic. It highlights the hypocrisy of those who see themselves morally fit to judge almost
everyone else.
Mitchell says that we had a plan to stabilise Libya but that it could not be implement the plan
because there was no peace?#*^..... Der
We bombed in support of competing Jihadis groups, bandits and local war Lords then our well
laid plans for a Utopian peace were thwarted because of the unforeseen chaos created as the Militias
we gave close airsupport to fought over the spoils.
Well there you have it- its the fault of the Libyans.
Hilary Clinton recently blamed Sarkozy for Libya describing him as so "very excited" about the
need to start bombing that he persuaded her and she, Nuland and Power persuaded a reluctant Obama.
Three civilian females argued down the military opinion that it was unnecessary and likely to
cause more trouble than it was worth.
As this was clearly to support French interests the Americans
insisted the Europeans do it themselves if they were that keen. Old Anglo-French rivalry has never
been far from the surface in the ME and it seems Cameron jumped on the bandwagon in fear France
would take all the glory. Neither of them appear to have given any thought about reconstruction.
The blame is mostly Cameron's as Sorkozy was chucked out of office just months later. Did Cameron
have a plan at all? If so it was his biggest mistake and one we'll be paying for over the coming
years.
Without Putin's mischief making though, this would have been sorted out long ago.
Putin intervened in September 2015. What have the West been doing since 2011 to stop the conflict,
one wonders.
Russia vetoes any UN attempt to sort out the mess
Looking bad you'd realize that it at least prompted Obama to retract in 2013. Since then though
support to Saudi and proxies destabilizing Syria has only increased.
Russia is clearing the mess of the West, and they should be grateful. Obama might be from what
I read today from his "confessions".
Yes. I don't think that is a pro-imperialist stance. He's arguing that there is no middle ground;
getting rid of dictators you don't like is imperialism, and whether you follow through or not,
there are serious consequences, but to not follow through is an abnegation of moral responsibility
to the people you are at attemting to "free". It seems to me he is arguing against any foreign
intervention, hence his castigation of Obama and Cameron for the "ethical wasteland of their wars
of intervention."
Please do me a favour and study 20th century history a little more. The US overthrow countless
democracies in Latin America and the Middle East and installed fascist dictatorships.
Liberal Democracy haha come on now. They dont care about Democracy. They care about money.
They will install and support any dictatorship (look at Saudi Arabia for example) as long as they
do as they are told economically.
I love western values, dont get me wrong. It is the best place to live freely. However, if
you werent lucky enough to be born in the west and the west wants something your country has (eg.
oil).....you are in for a lot of bad times.
I just wish western leaders/governments actually followed the western values that we all love
and hold dear.
We should remember that we funded the terrorists in Libya and then sent weapons to ISIS from Libya
to Syria that is we again used Al Qaeda as a proxy force. We then again used the "threat" from
the proxy forces i,e. Al Qaeda to justify mass surveillance of the general population.
The solution as Corbyn pointed out is to stop funding the Terrorists.
By the terms of the agreement, funding came from Turkey, as well as Saudi Arabia and Qatar;
the CIA, with the support of MI6, was responsible for getting arms from Gaddafi's arsenals
into Syria. A number of front companies were set up in Libya, some under the cover of Australian
entities. Retired American soldiers, who didn't always know who was really employing them,
were hired to manage procurement and shipping. The operation was run by David Petraeus, the
CIA director who would soon resign when it became known he was having an affair with his biographer.
Peter Oborne investigates claims that Britain and the West embarked on an unspoken alliance
of convenience with militant jihadi groups in an attempt to bring down the Assad regime.
He hears how equipment supplied by the West to so called Syrian moderates has ended up in
the hands of jihadis, and that Western sponsored rebels have fought alongside Al Qaeda. But
what does this really tell us about the conflict in Syria?
This edition of The Report also examines the astonishing attempt to re brand Al Nusra, Al
Qaeda's Syrian affiliate, as an organisation with which we can do business.
What is good that this is finally coming out ,the denial by both Obama and a very left wing media
has failed to confront this issue in what is an incredibly low point for Obama and Hilary Clinton
and their naive ideas about the Arab Spring.
As it is equally so for David Cameron and William Hague. Sarkozy is different he was not naive
he knew exactly what he was doing thais was about saving french influence in North Africa,he was
thinking about Tunisa, Algeria which he was keen to drag others into -- He was the most savvy of
all those politicians at least he was not a fool,but France priorities are not the same as the
UK --
Obama's comments once again as usual do not really confront the real problems of Libya and
gloss over the key issues and ending up passing the buck, he can do no wrong ? It was not the
aftermath of Libya but the whole idea of changing the controlling demographics of the country
which he played a major part in destabilising through the UN AND Nato which was the problem --
It was thought the lessons of Iraq was all about not putting boots on the ground ,or getting
your feet dirty ,as this antagonises the locals and that a nice clinical arms length bombardment
creating havoc ,is the best way to go .
This was not the lesson of Iraq , which was actually not to destabilise the controlling demographics
of the country which will never recover if you do ..It is one thing to depose a leader or ask
a leader to step down but do not disturb 100 of years controlling demographics, sectarian or not
in these countries is not wise . To do so is a misstep or misjudgement --
Demographics are like sand dunes they have taken many years to evolve and rest uneasy, in the
highly religious and sectarian landscape but can be unsettled over night, grain by grain even
by a small shift in the evening night breeze , a small beetle can zig zag across and the whole
dune will crumble
Once again the US pushed the UK who vied with France at how high they could jump, using the
UN blank cheque as cover ,for melting down the country and has left UN credibilty in taters has
now no credibility and Nato is now not trusted .
They took disgracefully no less the UN 1973 Peace Resolution , point one, Cease fire and point
two No Fly Zone .They bent it , twisted it , contorted it into blatant out right support of the
eastern shiite sympathisers sectarian group, against the more secular Sunni Tripoli groups .
(Gaddafi was not one man Mr apologist Rifkind he was the tribal leaders of a quite a large
tribe !)
Which has been part of a historic rivalry going back hundreds of years . They killed more civilians
that Gaddafi ever had or could have done . They even attacked in a no fly zone government troops
retreating and fired on government planes on the ground in a non fly zone .
Then they refused to negotiate with the government or allow the Organisation of African states
to mediate who had agreed general elections .They went on bombing until there was no infrastructure
no institutions or sand dunes ,or beetles left --
It was done after Iraq and that is why it is so shameful and why Obama , Cameron, Sarkozy ,
the UN , Nato must face up to what they have done , and after the Chilcot enquiry there needs
to be a Cameron enquiry . Presumably it will have the backing of Obama --
What is worse is the knock on effect on this massive arm caches and fighters from Libya then
went on to Syria, reek havoc and destabilised the country . Because Russia and China could never
trust again the UN , the UN has been ineffective in Syria for that very reason .The deaths of
British tourist in next door Tunisia has to laid firmly at David Cameron's and the foreign office
door --
No wonder Libya is keeping Obama awake at night , no wonder he is indulging in damage limitation
, no wonder he is trying to re write history ? How can I get this out of my legacy . If only I
had not met Mr Cameron a yes man -- If only I had been told by some with an once of common sense
, not to touch this country with a barge pole ?
The poor Libyan people will agree with him --
The lesson for the UK is do want you think is right not what the US thinks as right , a lesson
that David Cameron has failed to learn , and has shown he is not a safe pari of hands and lacks
judgement --
1. Conflict between sunni and shiites has been dormant for decades. Saudi Arabias promotion of
Wahhabism has awoken it again, along with the catalyst for the recent bloodshed, the invasion
of Iraq. That placed it back in the hands of the majority Shia and upset radical sunnis (eg the
Saudis).
2. Pogroms were common against Jews in Europe and Europe has a far worse history of treating
Jews than Muslims ever had. The "golden age of Judaism" in Europe was under Muslim rule in Spain.
Need I mention that the Holocaust was perpetrated by European Christians?
3. Didnt forget. the USSR didn't hand them chemical weapons though. That would be the West.
And it wasn't Russia who invaded Iraq later over the scam that they had WMDs.
4. I think you are forgetting Mossadeq in Iran in the 50s. Nasser in Egypt and any Pan-Arab
group that was secular in nature. Pan-Arabism is now dead and radical Islamism is alive and well
thanks to our lust for control over the region.
Obama? Censored? You forgot Hillary. she even said the other day at the townhall before Miss/MI
to the effect 'if Assad had been taken out early like Gaddafi then Syria would only be as bad
as Libya'. laughable really. i presume you aren't criticising Hillary Clinton?
Kosovo is now basket case that we are paying for but it is small. Now we have also backed NeoCon
regime change in Ukraine which we are going to be paying for. Libya will soon have enough Jihadist
training camps to be a direct threat.
What we see is a Strategy of Chaos from the US NeoCons but what we have failed to notice is
that the NeoCons see us as the target, as the enemy.
Totally agree that there is no such thing as Imperialism Lite, just as there is no such thing
as Wahabi Lite or Zionism Lite. So I wonder why Hilary Benn thinks Britain has anything to feel
proud about our foreign policy. It seems to me Britain's Foreign Policy is a combination of incompetence,
jingoism and pure evil.
What is the point of employing the brightest brains in the land at the Foreign Office when we
get it wrong almost all the time ?
"Western warmongering over the past two decades has had nothing to do with the existential defence
of territory. "Defence" has become attack, keeping alive the military-industrial lobbies and lumbering
military establishments that depend on it."
Attacking Al qaeda in Afghanistan had nothing to do with defending territory?
Libyan 'rebels' were armed and trained by 'the West' in a first place. The plan was the same for
Syria but Russians stopped it with not allowing 'no fly zone' or to call it properly 'bomb them
into the stone age'.
You probably don't know how 'bloody' Gaddafi was to the Libyans.
* GDP per capita - $ 14,192.
* For each family member the state pays $ 1000 grants per year.
* Unemployment - $ 730.
* Salary Nurse - $ 1000.
* For every newborn is paid $ 7000.
* The bride and groom given away $ 64,000 to buy an apartment.
* At the opening of a one-time personal business financial assistance - $ 20,000.
* Large taxes and extortions are prohibited.
* Education and medicine are free.
* Education and training abroad - at the expense of the state.
* Store chain for large families with symbolic prices of basic foodstuffs.
* For the sale of products past their expiry date - large fines and detention.
* Part of pharmacies - with free dispensing.
* For counterfeiting - the death penalty.
* Rents - no.
* No Fees for electricity for households!
* Loans to buy a car and an apartment - interest free.
* Real estate services are prohibited.
* Buying a car up to 50% paid by the state, for militia fighters - 65%.
* Gasoline is cheaper than water. 1 liter - 0,14 $.
* If a Libyan is unable to get employment after graduation the state would pay the average salary
of the profession as if he or she is employed until employment is found.
* Gaddafi carried out the world's largest irrigation project, known as the Great Man-Made River
project, to make water readily available throughout the desert country
The Gadaffi regime had upset the USA because Gadaffi was setting up an oil currency system based
on gold rather than US dollars. While this was not the sole reason the West turned against him
it was an important factor. The largest factor for the wars so far, and the planned war against
Iran was to cut out the growing Russian domination of the oil supply to Europe, China and India.
A decent article as we could expect from the author.
However personally I doubt there was no ulterior motive in the case of Lybia. Lybia was one
of the countries who tried the change the status quo on the oil market and it has huge reserves
too (as we know Europe is running out of oil, at least Great Britain is).
It is very likely that the European countries retreated because Libya started to look like
another Iraq.
When you are talking about "democratic forces of the revolution.." i imagine you being an enthusiastic
teenager girl who hardly knows anything about the world but goes somewhere far for a gap year
as a volunteer to make locals aware of something that will help them forever. It is instead of
demanding responsible policies and accountability from her own government.
Sorry!!!
What planet have you been living on. What do you read apart from lifestyle magazines full of shots
of celebrity boobs and bums.
The United states is the most interventionist country in history. Of its 237 years of existence
it has been at war or cold war for 222 of those years. NATO is behind ISIS and the wars in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Chechen, Afghanistan, Libya and Ukraine.
If the West stopped intervening there would be very few wars and if the West used its influence
for peace rather than control there would rarely be any was at all.
Well put. People forget the importance of oil in maintaining the standard of living in our western
democracies. Controlling it's supply trumps all other issues.
Jane they didn't "come apart" and Libya and Syria were the most stable and least under the thumb
of radicals. Syria had equality and education for women who could wear whatever they wanted.
Furthermore they did not fall apart they were attacked by the largest military forces in the world
excluding Russia. NATO sent in special operations forces to destabilise the government. They along
with Al Nusra and other violent Wahabi terrorists attacked police and army barracks, and when
Assads police and military hit back it was presented by the Western media and propagandists as
an attack on the people of Syria. Do you think any other country would allow terrorists to attack
police and other public institutions without retaliating and restoring order.
Many people who do not accept the Western medias false reporting at face value know that the wars
in Syria were about changing the leaders and redrawing national boundaries to isolate Iran and
sideline Russian influence. It was and is an illegal war and it was the barbarity of our Western
leaders that caused the terrible violence. It was a pre planned plan and strategy outlined in
the US Special Forces document below.
http://nsnbc.me/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/special-forces-uw-tc-18-01.pdf
If you get your facts right it ruins your argument doesn't it.
In the Libyan case, it was a clear US strategy to put in the forefront their English and French
valets, in a coup (euphemistically called "regime change") wanted by them.
The nobel peace winner got some nerves to put the blame on his accomplices for the chaos in Libya, while
the permanent objective of the US is to divide and conquer, sowing chaos wherever it occurs: Afghanistan,
Sudan, Iraq, Syria. Also Hillary is no stranger to the actions in Libya.
These Middle East countries should have been left alone by the West. Due to their nature, these
countries have strong divisions and battle for their beliefs and a strong man, a dictator is what
prevented them to fall into the chaos they are today. Without the Western meddling, arming and
financing various rebel groups, Isis would not exist today.
Neither is putting political opponents in acid baths and burning tyres, as Tony Blair's friends
in the central Asian Republics have been doing, neither is beheading gays, raped women and civil
rights protesters, as Cameron's Saudi friends have been enjoying, the latter whilst we sell them
shit loads of munitions to obliterate Yemeni villagers. I wonder how the Egyptian president is
getting on with all that tear gas and bullets we sold him? And are the Bahrani's, fresh from killing
their own people for daring to ask for civil rights, enjoying the cash we gave them for that new
Royal Navy base? Our foreign policy is complacent and inconsistent, we talk about morality but
the bottom line is that that doesn't come into it when BAE systems and G4S have contracts to win.
Don't get me wrong, Britain has played a positive role internationally in many different areas,
but there is always a neo-liberal arsehole waiting to pop up and ruin the lives of millions, a
turd with a school tie that just wont be flushed away.
Simon Jenkins, don't pretend you were against American punitive expeditions around the world to
overthrow third world dictators.
You worked from the same neo-con ideological script to defend the ultra-liberal, military industrial
economy; scare mongering in the pages of the Guardian, as far back as I can remember. You lot are as totally discredited as Bush, Cheney, Rumsfield and American
Nato toadies.
It is high time that Europe reviewed and evaluated its relationship with the United States, with
NATO, Russia and China. The world needs to be a peaceable place and there needs to be more legislation
imposed upon the Financial Markets to stop them being a place where economic destabilisation and
warfare can and do take place. The United States would not contemplate these reviews taking place
as they are integral to their continuing position in the world but also integral to the problems
we are all experiencing? It will take a brave Europe to do this but it is a step that has to be
taken if the world is to move forward! Britain should be a huge part of this, outside a weakend
EU this would benefit the United States from Britains lack of input, another reason we should
vote to stay and be positive to our European position. The most vulnerable herring is the one
that breaks out of the shoal?
Libya , Ukraine ,Syria have had the same recipe of de-stabilisation by the US and NATO. The so
called popular rebels were in fact CIA trained and financed. Jihadist in Libya and Syria and neo-Nazis
in Ukraine.
After completing regime change in Libya as planned ,the Jihadist, with their looted arms were transferred
to Syria and renamed ISIS.
ISIS is Washingtons Foreign Legion army, used as required for their Imperial ends.
Renamed as required on whichever territory they operate
Cameron has been given a free pass on Libya. It really is quite astonishing. The man has turned a functioning society into a jihadi infested failed state which is exporting
men and weapons across North Africa and down the Sahara and now serves as a new front line for
ISIS
Cameron's Libya policy from start to finish is a foreign policy catastrophe and in a just world
would have seen him thrown out of office on his ear
Attacking Libya and deposing Gaddafi was down to enforcing the R2P doctrine on the pretext of
"stopping another Rwanda". But it was a pretext. Islamist rebels attacked the armouries within
Libya and the Libyans had every right to try and put down the rebellion. Samantha Powers et al
were the war mongers.
Then there is this gem: "Egypt's President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has called for a United Nations
resolution allowing international forces to intervene in Libya.
There was no other choice, he told French radio. "We will not allow them to cut off the heads
of our children."
"We abandoned the Libyan people as prisoners to extremist militias," Mr Sisi told Europe 1
radio. He was referring to the aftermath of the 2011 war in which Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi
was toppled with the help of an international coalition.
That intervention was "an unfinished mission", he said."
The US, France and the UK own this ongoing mess but do not have the moral fortitude to clean
it up. As with the "Arab Spring", this will not end well.
The 2011 regime change shenanigans of the west against Libya is colonialism at its worst from
all the parties who instigated it. The aftermath, the resultant mayhem and chaos, was in itself
adding insult to injury. Gaddafi was no saint, but the militias, Muslim Brotherhood and ISIS now
running rampant in the country are infinitely worse. This is a war crime of the first magnitude
and no effort should be spared to address it
The west who propped up the Saudis, who's crazy wahhabi brand of Islam helped radicalise the Islamic
world with 100 billion dollars spent on promoting it.
The west who created israel and then has done nothing to stop israels ever growing land theft
and occupation over decades (not even a single sanction)...leading the Muslim world to hate us
more for our hypocrisy and double standards.
The west who has assassinated or organised coups against democratically elected secular leaders
who didn't give us their natural resources (eg iran) and installed brutal, clepto dictatorships
who also take part in plundering the resources leaving the general population poor, uneducated
and susceptible to indoctrination from Islamists.
The west who arms brutal dictators to wage proxy wars and then invades and bombs these same
dictators countries over claims they have WMDs (that we sold to them).
The west has been intervening in the middle east alot longer than post 9/11. We are very very
culpable for the disasters engulfing the region.
Libya was "not so at the core of US interests that it makes sense for us to unilaterally strike
against the Gaddafi regime"
Let's examine what Obama is saying here: when it is perceived to be at the core of US
interests, the USA reserves the right to attack any country, at any time.
The world inhabits a moral vacuum, and in that state, any country can justifiably choose to
do anything, against anyone, for any reason. And this guy got the Nobel Peace Prize.
In this despicable saga, Cameron's Libyan venture was a sideshow, though one that has destabilised
north Africa and may yet turn it into another Islamic State caliphate.
You forgot to mention Cameron was only following Sarkozy .
Don't forget the French role .
25 February 2011: Sarkozy said Gaddafi "must go."
28 February 2011: British Prime Minister David Cameron proposed the idea of a no-fly zone
11 March 2011: Cameron joined forces with Sarkozy after Sarkozy demanded immediate action
from international community for a no-fly zone against air attacks by Gaddafi.
14 March 2011: In Paris at the Élysée Palace, before the summit with the G8 Minister for
Foreign Affairs, Sarkozy, who is also the president of the G8, along with French Foreign Minister
Alain Juppé met with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and pressed her to push for intervention
in Libya
.
19 March 2011: French[72] forces began the military intervention in Libya, later joined
by coalition forces
Well said in the headline. Imperialism-lite/heavy, colonialism, and neo-colonialism don't work,
should be a thing of the past. Intervening in the politics of another country is a mug's game.
Don't understand why Obama is blaming Cameron for it, perhaps playing to his domestic gallery.
Blair's love fest with the deluded Gaddafi family, followed by the volte-face of pushing for his
violent overthrow by the next government, were both severely misguided policies. Need to diplomatically
encourage change, in foreign policy, and the desired type of political movements to take hold.
Military interventions have the opposite effect, so does propping up dictators, religiously fanatical
regimes, proven time and time again.
So the choices are to do nothing, or invade and create a colony?
Pretty much. As Jenkins rightly says, if you want to launch an aggressive war you either do
it or you don't. If you do it then it is your responsibility to clear up the mess, however many
of your own lives are lost and however much it costs. Trashing a country and then buggering off
is not an option.
Of course, using force for defensive reasons is fine. That's why modern warmongering politicians
always call it "defence" when they drop bombs on innocent people in faraway countries. It is no
such thing.
There was no massacre, not even a hint of one. Total obfuscation to give Hillary Clinton a foreign
policy "success" so that she could use it as a springboard to the presidency. "Hillary Clinton
was so proud of her major role in instigating the war against Libya that she and her advisors
initially planned to use it as basis of a "Clinton doctrine", meaning a "smart power" regime change
strategy, as a presidential campaign slogan.
War creates chaos, and Hillary Clinton has been an eager advocate of every U.S. aggressive
war in the last quarter of a century. These wars have devastated whole countries and caused an
unmanageable refugee crisis. Chaos is all there is to show for Hillary's vaunted "foreign policy
experience".
"... Obama is just another establishment drone like Bush and Clinton. If you already hate Wall Street then all these people are covered. Obama is a corporate lawyer who worked for Wall Street. Nothing new here to see. ..."
"... Obama: pre-emptive strikes on Afghanistan, Libya, Syria--all of which have resulted in disasters like the growth of ISIS. Obama: Meets weekly to decide where the drones will kill people, without charge or trial (and without revealing who the targets are and what the success/failure was--and how much "collateral damage" there was in human lives.) Certainly the most lawless president we've had--and the most bloodthirsty. ..."
"... "The most lawless president . . . and the most bloodthirsty?" One need not support Obama to know that he's not even close the most bloodthirsty, or lawless. I strongly recommend you study Nixon, LBJ, and Reagan. Then drop back to Eisenhower and Guatemala to wrap up the bloody evening. ..."
"... I was counting all blood, not simply American blood, which is what I thought the original post was doing. I would also count proxies, such as the Contra, because American aid was essential to them. I would not count the aid Reagan covertly provided Iraq, because that war would have been long and horrid in any event. ..."
"... The lawlessness question is more complex. Nixon and Reagan set up clandestine organizations that did not appear in any budget line, both of which performed illegal actions. (Nixon's was more serious because the Plumbers' actions related to domestic opponents.) ..."
"... So are Yemen, Syria, Honduras and Ukraine ... all put in play during Obama's reign. But much of the credit goes to Hillary and the other war harpies in the Administration. Obama has tried to pull back from the brink. ..."
"... Obama did nothing to de-escalate the conflict in the Ukraine. The "somewhat" means you don't have any clue at all. It has to to more with Putin not wanting to conquer the entire Ukraine. The Ukrainians could have been initially defeated, but holding them down would be impossible. ..."
"... And the fact is the Foreign Policy Establishment is utterly mad; they're furious at Obama for not implementing their crazy militaristic schemes. Which is more or less the same story that Goldberg reports here in the Atlantic. ..."
"... According to the State Department's neoCon Czarina for European Affairs, the US pumped $5 Billion into underwriting NGO agitation in Ukraine. Nuland herself was on the front-lines in the Maidan and picked out "our guy Yats" ... In fact, Congress has passed a motion to prevent further funds to the neo-Nazis in Kiev. ..."
"... Syria was invaded by a jihadi army largely armed by the US (part of the Benghazi affair involved the US Ambassador shipping weapons seized from Qaddafi to the Syrian jihadis via Turkey) and funded by US allies in the Gulf monarchies and Turkey. ..."
"... Russia - not "Putin" - is fighting to defend Syrians - not "Assad" - from terrorist aggressors. ..."
"... Currently, about 4,000 fighters of the 25,000 estimated (by the US) in Latakia province have laid down their weapons. Most of these have been re-deployed back into their original territories alongside Syrian Arab Army support units. ..."
"... That comes out to about 80% of the fighters in Syria are Al Qaida or ISIS-affiliated, and the *VAST* majority of these fighters are foreign mercenaries. ..."
"... Acknowledgement of Obama's feckless, misguided foreign policy is not an endorsement of Bush's adventurism. ..."
"... Hillary Clinton and Samantha Power are engaging in pure speculation that starting this CIA program a few months earlier would have had a different outcome. Why so? This is nothing more than wishful thinking. ..."
"... Our real mistake was in not supporting the 2012 Geneva peace plan which called for post-civil war elections that would include Assad. We maintained an absolutist demand for 'Assad must go' so of course he and the people who depend on him, 50% to 60% of the population would soldier on. ..."
"... American foreign policy has been a disaster since Kissinger. Neocons convinced many on the right it was a solid ideology. Many of you cheered when Reagan armed Al Qaeda, transferred weapons to Iran, terrorized Central/South America by arming death squads and displacing indigenous people to make way for large multinationals. And, to add insult to injury, you all cheered for Bush initiated torture on our soil (torture has been a tool for decades at black sites), created Guantanamo, started illegal wars, helped to foment a global economic system that is the equivalent of carpet bombing, especially as it relates to weaker or poorer countries; the list goes on. ..."
"... You're not wrong about Obama. He has embraced the same insanity, although, not to the same extent. Neoconservatism needs to die but gullible fools in both parties seem to embrace the insanity when their guy is in charge. ..."
"... Hillary supports the same ideology as Bush but you guys will pretend to hate her and Dems will now say her plans are great. It's Americans who allow this insanity to continue. ..."
"... Afghans and Saudis including Bin Laden were first trained by the US, and then the UK. Read the link I attached, Carter started this mass bloodshed and he isn't the least repentant. Yeah, that sweet old peanut farmer is almost as bad as Hitler. Shucks. ..."
"... Bin Laden was, though, a product of a monumental miscalculation by western security agencies. Throughout the 80s he was armed by the CIA and funded by the Saudis to wage jihad against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. Al-Qaida, literally "the database", was originally the computer file of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help from the CIA to defeat the Russians. Inexplicably, and with disastrous consequences, it never appears to have occurred to Washington that once Russia was out of the way, Bin Laden's organisation would turn its attention to the west. ..."
Obama said that to achieve this rebalancing, the U.S. had to absorb the diatribes and insults
of superannuated Castro manqués. "When I saw Chávez, I shook his hand and he handed me a Marxist
critique of the U.S.–Latin America relationship," Obama recalled. "And I had to sit there and listen
to Ortega"-Daniel Ortega, the radical leftist president of Nicaragua-"make an hour-long rant against
the United States. But us being there, not taking all that stuff seriously-because it really wasn't
a threat to us"-helped neutralize the region's anti-Americanism.
The president's unwillingness to counter the baiting by American adversaries can feel emotionally
unsatisfying, I said, and I told him that every so often, I'd like to see him give Vladimir Putin
the finger. It's atavistic, I said, understanding my audience.
"It is," the president responded coolly. "This is what they're looking for."
He described a relationship with Putin that doesn't quite conform to common perceptions. I had
been under the impression that Obama viewed Putin as nasty, brutish, and short. But, Obama told me,
Putin is not particularly nasty.
"The truth is, actually, Putin, in all of our meetings, is scrupulously polite, very frank. Our
meetings are very businesslike. He never keeps me waiting two hours like he does a bunch of these
other folks." Obama said that Putin believes his relationship with the U.S. is more important than
Americans tend to think. "He's constantly interested in being seen as our peer and as working with
us, because he's not completely stupid. He understands that Russia's overall position in the world
is significantly diminished. And the fact that he invades Crimea or is trying to prop up Assad doesn't
suddenly make him a player. You don't see him in any of these meetings out here helping to shape
the agenda. For that matter, there's not a G20 meeting where the Russians set the agenda around any
of the issues that are important."
Russia's invasion of Crimea in early 2014, and its decision to use force to buttress the rule
of its client Bashar al-Assad, have been cited by Obama's critics as proof that the post-red-line
world no longer fears America.
So when I talked with the president in the Oval Office in late January, I again raised this question
of deterrent credibility. "The argument is made," I said, "that Vladimir Putin watched you in Syria
and thought, He's too logical, he's too rational, he's too into retrenchment. I'm going to push
him a little bit further in Ukraine."
Obama didn't much like my line of inquiry. "Look, this theory is so easily disposed of that I'm
always puzzled by how people make the argument. I don't think anybody thought that George W. Bush
was overly rational or cautious in his use of military force. And as I recall, because apparently
nobody in this town does, Putin went into Georgia on Bush's watch, right smack dab in the middle
of us having over 100,000 troops deployed in Iraq." Obama was referring to Putin's 2008 invasion
of Georgia, a former Soviet republic, which was undertaken for many of the same reasons Putin later
invaded Ukraine-to keep an ex–Soviet republic in Russia's sphere of influence.
"Putin acted in Ukraine in response to a client state that was about to slip out of his grasp.
And he improvised in a way to hang on to his control there," he said. "He's done the exact same thing
in Syria, at enormous cost to the well-being of his own country. And the notion that somehow Russia
is in a stronger position now, in Syria or in Ukraine, than they were before they invaded Ukraine
or before he had to deploy military forces to Syria is to fundamentally misunderstand the nature
of power in foreign affairs or in the world generally. Real power means you can get what you want
without having to exert violence. Russia was much more powerful when Ukraine looked like an independent
country but was a kleptocracy that he could pull the strings on."
Obama's theory here is simple: Ukraine is a core Russian interest but not an American one, so
Russia will always be able to maintain escalatory dominance there.
"The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-nato country, is going to be vulnerable to military
domination by Russia no matter what we do," he said.
I asked Obama whether his position on Ukraine was realistic or fatalistic.
"It's realistic," he said. "But this is an example of where we have to be very clear about what
our core interests are and what we are willing to go to war for. And at the end of the day, there's
always going to be some ambiguity." He then offered up a critique he had heard directed against him,
in order to knock it down. "I think that the best argument you can make on the side of those who
are critics of my foreign policy is that the president doesn't exploit ambiguity enough. He doesn't
maybe react in ways that might cause people to think, Wow, this guy might be a little crazy."
"The 'crazy Nixon' approach," I said: Confuse and frighten your enemies by making them think you're
capable of committing irrational acts.
"But let's examine the Nixon theory," he said. "So we dropped more ordnance on Cambodia and Laos
than on Europe in World War II, and yet, ultimately, Nixon withdrew, Kissinger went to Paris, and
all we left behind was chaos, slaughter, and authoritarian governments that finally, over time, have
emerged from that hell. When I go to visit those countries, I'm going to be trying to figure out
how we can, today, help them remove bombs that are still blowing off the legs of little kids. In
what way did that strategy promote our interests?"
But what if Putin were threatening to move against, say, Moldova-another vulnerable post-Soviet
state? Wouldn't it be helpful for Putin to believe that Obama might get angry and irrational about
that?
"There is no evidence in modern American foreign policy that that's how people respond. People
respond based on what their imperatives are, and if it's really important to somebody, and it's not
that important to us, they know that, and we know that," he said. "There are ways to deter, but it
requires you to be very clear ahead of time about what is worth going to war for and what is not.
Now, if there is somebody in this town that would claim that we would consider going to war with
Russia over Crimea and eastern Ukraine, they should speak up and be very clear about it. The idea
that talking tough or engaging in some military action that is tangential to that particular area
is somehow going to influence the decision making of Russia or China is contrary to all the evidence
we have seen over the last 50 years."
... ... ...
A weak, flailing Russia constitutes a threat as well, though not quite a top-tier threat. "Unlike
China, they have demographic problems, economic structural problems, that would require not only
vision but a generation to overcome," Obama said. "The path that Putin is taking is not going to
help them overcome those challenges. But in that environment, the temptation to project military
force to show greatness is strong, and that's what Putin's inclination is. So I don't underestimate
the dangers there." Obama returned to a point he had made repeatedly to me, one that he hopes the
country, and the next president, absorbs: "You know, the notion that diplomacy and technocrats and
bureaucrats somehow are helping to keep America safe and secure, most people think, Eh, that's
nonsense. But it's true. And by the way, it's the element of American power that the rest of
the world appreciates unambiguously. When we deploy troops, there's always a sense on the part of
other countries that, even where necessary, sovereignty is being violated."
TotoCatcher -> Whateveryousay
Obama is just another establishment drone like Bush and Clinton. If you already hate Wall
Street then all these people are covered. Obama is a corporate lawyer who worked for Wall Street.
Nothing new here to see.
Question -> TotoCatcher
Establishment? I thought he was unqualified because he was a "junior Senator" and "community
leader". Now he's establishment?
So basically establishment has about as much meaning as "entitlement" - its definition varies
entirely depending on who you're referencing?
pp91303 -> Question
Totocatcher is a leftist accusing Obama of being a wall street, "corporate lawyer". He wasn't.
The right never said he was. So an ignorant leftist calls Obama a corporate crony and that is
somehow an indictment of the right. Brilliant.
Obama was a red diaper baby, who went to a racist and anti-American church in Chicago, who
worked a few years for a scummy little law firm that represented leftist-subsidized-housing developers
like Tony Rezco, and who previously worked as a community organizer.
nubwaxer -> Whateveryousay
mine's not a hate comment but the extreme right, all republicans it seems, think bush's preemptive
or proactive militarized foreign policy is still the right approach. it's still the shoot, aim,
oops quagmire approach and obama's careful and patient evolving approach drives them crazy.
the problem seems to me our oversized military is so well trained and well armed with the newest
gear, which of course keeps profits flowing to defense contractors, that since we have it we nee
to use it constantly to keep its edge. president obama seems to have reluctantly accepted our
endless war strategy, but to the great ire of the right has shifted away from a militarized foreign
policy to a primarily diplomatic approach. i for one see great success in the iran nuclear deal
and restoration of relations with cuba.
of course there will be those whipped into mass hysteria and seething anger by the relentless
right wing propaganda and i'll be gone before i have to read any of their comments.
Tom Hoobler -> nubwaxer
Obama: pre-emptive strikes on Afghanistan, Libya, Syria--all of which have resulted in
disasters like the growth of ISIS. Obama: Meets weekly to decide where the drones will kill people,
without charge or trial (and without revealing who the targets are and what the success/failure
was--and how much "collateral damage" there was in human lives.) Certainly the most lawless president
we've had--and the most bloodthirsty.
Oscarthe4th -> Tom Hoobler
"The most lawless president . . . and the most bloodthirsty?" One need not support Obama
to know that he's not even close the most bloodthirsty, or lawless. I strongly recommend you study
Nixon, LBJ, and Reagan. Then drop back to Eisenhower and Guatemala to wrap up the bloody evening.
Oscarthe4th -> David Murphy
Glad we agree on LBJ.
I was counting all blood, not simply American blood, which is what I thought the original
post was doing. I would also count proxies, such as the Contra, because American aid was essential
to them. I would not count the aid Reagan covertly provided Iraq, because that war would have
been long and horrid in any event.
The lawlessness question is more complex. Nixon and Reagan set up clandestine organizations
that did not appear in any budget line, both of which performed illegal actions. (Nixon's was
more serious because the Plumbers' actions related to domestic opponents.)
Obama, like most other presidents in messy wars, has expanded the president's power, and I
fully agree that he has gone beyond what is constitutional. For the most part, however, it has
not been covert. That reduces some elements of the danger his acts pose, but not all.
screendummie -> Kimo Krauthammer
No, the Arab Spring happened after Obama was president. The Arab Spring occurred in 2011, first
in Tunisia and then elsewhere throughout North Africa and the Middle East. The uprisings in Libya
and Syria happened a couple years after Obama was president. Libya is a complete mess and a declared
failed state because of Obama.
Sarastro92 -> screendummie
So are Yemen, Syria, Honduras and Ukraine ... all put in play during Obama's reign. But
much of the credit goes to Hillary and the other war harpies in the Administration. Obama has
tried to pull back from the brink.
screendummie -> Sarastro92
Special operation troops are in Syria. This has been reported numerous times. There was even
a Congressional grilling of a general on our troops training Syrian fighters with the revelation
that a half billion was spent training of 3 or 4 Syrian fighters. The officer grilled was Centcom
commander, General Lloyd Austin back last year. You're blatantly ignorant of what's going on in
the world.
screendummie -> Sarastro92
I hope you don't really believe 50 U.S. troops are only in Syria. I bet it's far greater. You
have to remember they get rotated out. More than 50 troops have been deployed to Syria if they're
being rotated. The troops in Jordan are supporting the combat mission. How is that any different?
I'm curious how those 50 troops in Syria are fed and supported. Do they bring it all in themselves,
or are more U.S. troops crossing in and out of Syria on a daily basis? If you really believe there
are 50 U.S. troops in Syria, then you're really kidding yourself.
There are several thousand troops now in Iraq. Before it was just 300. No, I'm not buying the
advisor claim one bit.
Obama did nothing to de-escalate the conflict in the Ukraine. The "somewhat" means you
don't have any clue at all. It has to to more with Putin not wanting to conquer the entire Ukraine.
The Ukrainians could have been initially defeated, but holding them down would be impossible.
Davis Pruett -> Sarastro92
>>>And the fact is the Foreign Policy Establishment is utterly mad; they're furious at
Obama for not implementing their crazy militaristic schemes. Which is more or less the same story
that Goldberg reports here in the Atlantic.
More-or-less the general disposition reported by Goldberg - but minus a vast trove of key facts
which he purposefully distorts and obscures.
Sarastro92 -> David Murphy
Bull. According to the State Department's neoCon Czarina for European Affairs, the US pumped
$5 Billion into underwriting NGO agitation in Ukraine. Nuland herself was on the front-lines in
the Maidan and picked out "our guy Yats" ... In fact, Congress has passed a motion to prevent
further funds to the neo-Nazis in Kiev.
Syria was invaded by a jihadi army largely armed by the US (part of the Benghazi affair involved
the US Ambassador shipping weapons seized from Qaddafi to the Syrian jihadis via Turkey) and funded
by US allies in the Gulf monarchies and Turkey.
The French and Brits are culpable. Putin has changed the whole dynamic leading to a ceasefire
and the demise of ISIS in Syria. But the whole thing can blow up at anytime.
Your problem is that you read the CNN- NY Times propaganda and think you know something.
David Murphy -> screendummie
Can't exclude Cameron and Sarkozy from guilt over Libya. They sent in some special forces,
dropped a few bombs and then moved on to other things. The arab spring was a grass-roots attempt
to bring about democracy, which failed sadly.
elHombre -> Kimo Krauthammer
Really? Libya, Syria and ISIS were "debacles" when Obama took office? Really?
And 23 up votes? The revisionist rubes are out in force on this one.
Kimo Krauthammer -> hyphenatedamerican
Everywhere the US treads we leave chaos and increased radicalism. Time for the US to get out
now and let Putin wipe put ALL the terrorist vermin, even those we have been backing.
Davis Pruett -> hyphenatedamerican •
>>>Putin is not fighting terrorists, he is fighting for Assad. Not the same thing.
Russia - not "Putin" - is fighting to defend Syrians - not "Assad" - from terrorist aggressors.
Apparently, you missed the part where a few weeks ago Syria and Russia offered a ceasefire
and complete amnesty to any "revolutionaries" who are not associated with Al Qaida or ISIS.
Currently, about 4,000 fighters of the 25,000 estimated (by the US) in Latakia province
have laid down their weapons. Most of these have been re-deployed back into their original territories
alongside Syrian Arab Army support units.
That comes out to about 80% of the fighters in Syria are Al Qaida or ISIS-affiliated, and
the *VAST* majority of these fighters are foreign mercenaries.
So, long story short:
You don't know what you're talking about. You are factually wrong, and should be ashamed for
sounding off in public about something you have no knowledge of.
azt24 -> Question
By every objective measure, Iraq was in better shape in 2009 vs. 2016. There was no ISIS, no
Christian or Yazidi genocide, no slave markets in 2009, and violence was a tiny fraction of what
it is today. These are just facts.
As for picking 2009 for a start date, the article is titled The Obama Doctrine. The subject
is Obama, the topic is politics.
David Murphy -> azt24
Iraq's problem now are largely self-inflicted. The Shia majority decided to oppress the Sunni,
and Al Qaeda and ISIS are sunni. A simple resolution to ISIS in the ME would have been for the
Iraq government to act as a national government being fair to all not a partisan Shia government.
Iran has been active in Iraq since Bush's day. Obama could achieve little in that benighted country,
which was in a far better state before Bush led the attack on it.
elHombre -> nubwaxer
Acknowledgement of Obama's feckless, misguided foreign policy is not an endorsement of
Bush's adventurism.
Only Obamadupes can fail to appreciate the risks of Obama's one-sided, ego-assuaging Iran fiasco
and Cuba-courting.
Defense contractors employ people, but you probably believe we don't need the jobs.
You are, indeed, an Obama nubwaxer.
azt24 -> rswfire
" I feel President Obama isn't someone who really seeks the spotlight"
Surely you jest. No President has been more in love with the sound of own voice, or more given
to "I-me-mine-I-me-mine" when talking. Because it's always about him. Like when he explained to
Bibi Netanyahu that he understood the Middle East because he was raised by a single mom.
If Obama has quieted down in recent years, I can only suppose that it must have become obvious
even inside the WH bubble that it wasn't working -- people have completely tuned Obama out.
TotoCatcher
The Atlantic is removing comments from most of the articles. Why? I won't read here if they
don't bring comments back.
This story is booooring. So I don't have much to comment on it. Obama was just another Bush
who was just another Clinton. NEXT!
chris chuba
This article clearly states that we DID start to arm and equip the rebels after 'several months'
in 2011 via a CIA program. It is a myth that we did nothing in Syria.
What ended up happening is exactly what Obama feared would happen. The farmers and doctors
were supplanted by the foreign Jihadist groups that Turkey and Saudi Arabia were sponsoring. This
was inevitable and the only thing that could have prevented that was an actual invasion and occupation
of Syria which I in no way, shape or form endorse.
Hillary Clinton and Samantha Power are engaging in pure speculation that starting this
CIA program a few months earlier would have had a different outcome. Why so? This is nothing more
than wishful thinking.
Our real mistake was in not supporting the 2012 Geneva peace plan which called for post-civil
war elections that would include Assad. We maintained an absolutist demand for 'Assad must go'
so of course he and the people who depend on him, 50% to 60% of the population would soldier on.
Hurrya -> EnderAK12
Are we sure that there was ever a free Syrian army? The Free Syrian Army was a media concept
and never had a significant presence on the ground.
Thermite -> EnderAK12
We were supporting the Free Syrian Army since 2011. Basically when it started.
gtiger -> EnderAK12
You talk about the FSA as it's a viable entity. At best it's a loose alliance of rebel groups
of widely differing ideology. It's Libya part II.
Fresh -> Guyzer
American foreign policy has been a disaster since Kissinger. Neocons convinced many on
the right it was a solid ideology. Many of you cheered when Reagan armed Al Qaeda, transferred
weapons to Iran, terrorized Central/South America by arming death squads and displacing indigenous
people to make way for large multinationals. And, to add insult to injury, you all cheered for
Bush initiated torture on our soil (torture has been a tool for decades at black sites), created
Guantanamo, started illegal wars, helped to foment a global economic system that is the equivalent
of carpet bombing, especially as it relates to weaker or poorer countries; the list goes on.
You're not wrong about Obama. He has embraced the same insanity, although, not to the same
extent. Neoconservatism needs to die but gullible fools in both parties seem to embrace the insanity
when their guy is in charge.
Hillary supports the same ideology as Bush but you guys will pretend to hate her and Dems
will now say her plans are great. It's Americans who allow this insanity to continue.
Innes Mizner -> hyphenatedamerican
They called the Mujahadeen back then, and Carter then Reagan created them, armed them and trained
them. Even a certain Bin Laden.
Innes Mizner -> azt24
Afghans and Saudis including Bin Laden were first trained by the US, and then the UK. Read
the link I attached, Carter started this mass bloodshed and he isn't the least repentant. Yeah,
that sweet old peanut farmer is almost as bad as Hitler. Shucks.
Innes Mizner -> azt24
I have already provided background information and proof he and his crew were trained in Scotland.
I assumed this was well known in the US, I mean before you invaded Afghanistan and Iraq.
A lot of the other articles have been buried, but the BBC one is good, and if you give me a
while I will dig out an SAS officer discussing this.
The Afghan Mujahideen were deported from their southern Scottish, and northern English, training
grounds after the Lockerbie bombing. Nobody suspects them of being the cause of that crash, the
biggest terrorist atrocity in the UK to date, but they were under the flight path and they were
terrorists/freedom fighters training to down Soviet planes, so they were instantly deported to
avoid media attention.
No, I'm claiming that the original fundamentalist Islamic extremist terrorist Mujadeen recruited
by the CIA by Carter included Bin Laden's bodyguards and other Saudis.
I know that because I'm
Scottish, they were trained in Scotland.
No, I think that individual died before "Al Qaeda".
Are you aware "Al Qaeda" is a name assigned
by western security agencies, they just adopted the name after we named them that?
This was written by the British foreign secretary at the time,
Robin Cook,
someone who had access to all the MI6 and NSA and CIA files:
Bin Laden was, though, a product of a monumental miscalculation by western security agencies.
Throughout the 80s he was armed by the CIA and funded by the Saudis to wage jihad against the
Russian occupation of Afghanistan. Al-Qaida, literally "the database", was originally the computer
file of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help from the CIA to
defeat the Russians. Inexplicably, and with disastrous consequences, it never appears to have
occurred to Washington that once Russia was out of the way, Bin Laden's organisation
would turn its attention to the west.
Innes Mizner -> Fresh
"American foreign policy has been a disaster since Kissinger"
I agree with your post but I'd
roll it back 20 years. Kissinger extended the Vietnam debacle and extended it to create Pol Pot.
A lot of Reagan's problems were clearing up his mess, and failing.
Eisenhower, FDR, those guys I admire. New Dealers who knew what war was.
CharlieSeattle -> Innes Mizner
Did ja ever wonder why Reagan gets the teary e/RINO "neocon" accolades and not Eisenhower?
Lets
see...
Reagan embraced the Military Industrial Complex. Eisenhower warned America about the dangers of the MIC corrupting the US government.
Reagan granted amnesty to 3.5 million illegal aliens. Eisenhower deported them all after WWII in Operation Wet back.
Reagan administration was #6th worst scandalous, worse than Obama. Eisenhower administration was #23rd worst scandalous, only because of VP Nixon!
Face it, if Eisenhower was running for office today, the Reagan RINO "neocons" would KILL HIM!
I am very glad Trump is not like Reagan.
.............Trump/Eisenhower in 2016
veerkg_23 -> Innes Mizner
Pol Pot was a Chinese thing. The US supported the Royalists, whoever they were, in Cambodia. Mao
decided he wanted a piece because he fear Soviet domination so formed the Khmer Rouge. Didn't
turn out so well.
Innes Mizner -> veerkg_23
To begin with the Khmer Rouge were a local Nazi group that emerged from the ashes of Kissenger's
cross border bombing. Then after they'd wiped out a third of their population neighbouring Vietnam
invaded, ejected them and then retreated in one of the few genuine examples of military humanitarian
interventions.
The Chinese did hate the Vietnamese, so that annoyed them. But it annoyed Reagan
more, because you yanks also had a big hang up about Vietnam kicking your arse.
So Reagan sent in the Green Berets to train Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in guerilla tactics
- and supply them with funds, weapons and diplomatic cover.
Then Iran-Contra broke, Reagan sacrificed Ollie North on that bonfire, withdrew the Green Berets
from Cambodia, and instead persuaded Maggie Thatcher to send in the SAS to support the Khmer Rouge.
Now say what you want about Thatcher, but she was never a liar. She sent the SAS in and boasted
about her support for the Khmer Rouge on 'Blue Peter', a British childrens TV programme.
None of that is widely known in the US, I know, but I can provide supporting links that prove
what I've claimed here if you ask for any.
In yet another top-secret operation US Green Berets trained genocidal Khmer Rouge
units in Cambodia after contact was established between Ray Cline, senior CIA agent and Steve
Arnold, special adviser to US President Reagan. When the Iran Contra scandal got under way in
1983, President Reagan, fearing another unpleasant exposure, asked British Prime Minister Margaret
Thatcher to take over. She sent the SAS to train Pol Pot forces. 'We first went to Thailand in
1984' senior officials of the SAS (British equivalent of CIA) later testified, 'The Yanks and
us work together; we're close like brothers they didn't like it anymore than we did. We trained
the Khmer Rouge in a lot of technical stuff', the officer remembers. 'At first they wanted to
go into the villages and just chop people up. We told them go easy'. The SAS felt uneasy with
the operation and a lot of us would change sides given half a chance. That's how
"... Bernie Sanders keeps refusing' to hit Hillary Clinton over her email. Or so it seems. But maybe the Vermont senator's relentless assault on Mrs. Clinton's corporate ties is about her email after all. Maybe Mr. Sanders is betting that Hillary has a bigger problem than classified information... ..."
The focus is on state secrets in her email - but what personal favors lay within?
Bernie Sanders keeps refusing' to hit Hillary Clinton over her email. Or so it seems. But
maybe the Vermont senator's relentless assault on Mrs. Clinton's corporate ties is about
her email after all. Maybe Mr. Sanders is betting that Hillary has a bigger problem than
classified information...
"... America 40 years post-Reagan is not the America you were raised in. As a young man who grew up in a small manufacturing city - I saw firsthand what the neoliberal trade policies have done to our country when every major industry left to China, Latin America - and devastated the community I was raised in. ..."
"... Hillary Clinton and people like her preach equality of the sexes, they talk about minority rights, they talk about progressive incremental change- but when it comes down to it - they have stood aside while our manufacturing industry has been gutted and millions of jobs have been shipped overseas. The people with comfortable incomes in the major cities have no idea how devastating this has been. ..."
"... We are going to see a revolution of sorts in this country, either this election or the next - and the real question we have to ask ourselves is this: are we going to be living in a better future, one that breaks the stranglehold of the monopolized concentration of money on our political and economic system and incorporates the social democratic principles of every other industrial nation ..."
Wrong my friend. The Cold War has been over for 25 years - people are no longer scared of
the Communist boogieman. I'm going to tell you something that none of these pundits are
saying.
America 40 years post-Reagan is not the America you were raised in. As a young man who
grew up in a small manufacturing city - I saw firsthand what the neoliberal trade policies
have done to our country when every major industry left to China, Latin America - and
devastated the community I was raised in.
Hillary Clinton and people like her preach equality of the sexes, they talk about
minority rights, they talk about progressive incremental change- but when it comes down to it
- they have stood aside while our manufacturing industry has been gutted and millions of jobs
have been shipped overseas. The people with comfortable incomes in the major cities have no
idea how devastating this has been.
Regular people know what has always been known - that the rich control the economy, they
bankroll the politicans, and increasingly they are starting to realize they control the media
too. With no one speaking for them - the people are turning to racism, to anger, to fear, to
anti-intellectualism - anything that unites them, and fights the hypocrisy of the politicians
that claim to speak for them but have left them behind.
The difference in this election is Bernie Sanders. This man had the balls to stand up and
say ''Wall Street says I am dangerous...well guess what. I AM DANGEROUS TO WALL STREET." This
man is strong. He's a fighter. He's in the tradition of the greatest American presidents - he
is fiery preacher who inspires hope in the masses and speaks the undalterated truth.
The people have their champion. You saw it in Michigan. This 'revolution' is for real.
Trump is capitalizing on the disenchantment and the dissillusionment of the American
populace. Hillary Clinton - with her funding from Wall Street, funding from the private
prisons that promote incarceration and other big moneyed interests - has NO CHANCE OF REACHING
THESE PEOPLE. If you think she has a better chance then Sanders of reaching the voters - you
are dreaming. This is another thing the pundits are not going to tell you.
We are going to see a revolution of sorts in this country, either this election or the
next - and the real question we have to ask ourselves is this: are we going to be living in a
better future, one that breaks the stranglehold of the monopolized concentration of money on
our political and economic system and incorporates the social democratic principles of every
other industrial nation
- or one where we live in a sort of Trumpland - a proto-fascist
nightmare. The choice is yours friend. This is for real. I hope we all make the right one.
Donald Trump answers the question 'what is 2+2?': "I have to say a lot of people
have been asking this question. No, really. A lot of people come up to me, and
they ask me. They say, 'What's 2+2'? And I tell them, look, we know what 2+2
is.
We've had almost eight years of the worst kind of math you can imagine.
Oh, my God, I can't believe it. Addition and subtraction of the 1s the 2s and
the 3s. It's terrible. It's just terrible. Look, if you want to know what 2+2
is, do you want to know what 2+2 is? I'll tell you. First of all the number
2, by the way, I love the number 2. It's probably my favorite number, no it
is my favorite number. You know what, it's probably more like the number two
but with a lot of zeros behind it. A lot. If I'm being honest, I mean, if I'm
being honest. I like a lot of zeros.
Except for Marco Rubio, now he's a zero that I don't like. Though, I probably
shouldn't say that. He's a nice guy, but he's like, '10101000101,' on and on,
like that. He's like a computer! You know what I mean? He's like a computer.
I don't know. I mean, you know. So, we have all these numbers, and we can add
them and subtract them and add them. TIMES them even. Did you know that?
We can times them OR divide them, they don't tell you that, and I'll tell
you, no one is better at the order of operations than me. You wouldn't believe
it. So, we're gonna be the best on 2+2, believe me."
Reply
Report BG
Davis
Sean Anthony Dylan , 2016-03-08 17:42:31
Priceless! Next stop, Saturday Night Live or similar.
"The main topic at the closed-to-the-press confab? How to
stop Republican front-runner Donald Trump,"
Huff Post writes
. Here's a list of attendees:
Apple CEO Tim Cook,
Google co-founder Larry Page,
Napster creator and Facebook investor Sean Parker,
Tesla Motors and SpaceX honcho Elon Musk
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.),
political guru Karl Rove,
House Speaker Paul Ryan,
GOP Sens. Tom Cotton (Ark.), Cory Gardner (Colo.), Tim Scott
(S.C.), Rob Portman (Ohio) and Ben Sasse (Neb.),
Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Fred Upton (Mich.),
Rep. Kevin Brady (Texas)
Kevin McCarthy (Calif.),
Cathy McMorris Rodgers (Wash.),
Budget Committee Chairman Tom Price (R-Ga.),
Financial Services Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling (Texas)
Diane Black (Tenn.)
"
A specter was haunting the World Forum--the specter of Donald
Trump,
" the Weekly Standard founder Bill Kristol wrote in an
emailed report from the conference, borrowing the opening lines of the
Communist Manifesto. "There was much unhappiness about his emergence, a
good deal of talk, some of it insightful and thoughtful, about why he's
done so well, and many expressions of hope that he would be defeated."
Heading to AEI World Forum. Lots of interesting
guests. It's off the record, so please do consider my tweets from
there off the record!
Predictably Karl Rove, GOP mastermind, gave a presentation outlining
what he says are Trump's weaknesses. Voters would have a hard time seeing
him as "presidential," Rove said. Which we suppose is why they are
turning out in droves to vote for him.
yup - a group of billionaires meeting at an exclusive resort
debating how to circumvent the democratic process, failing to
consider that's the exact description of what's wrong with
America (and the GOP)
Tom Price'is one of the highest net worth Congressmen. His Georgia office is in Roswell, which is a corrupt little city in North Atlanta. Roswell city officials harassed and fined a mildly retarded man who refused to give up his ownership of about 20 chickens to the point that the guy was going to lose his paid for house, and he committed suicide. (Google Roswell Chicken Man). Tom Price fits right in with that bunch.
Napster creator and Facebook investor Sean Parker,
Tesla Motors and SpaceX honcho Elon Musk
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.),
political guru Karl Rove,
House Speaker Paul Ryan,
GOP Sens. Tom Cotton (Ark.), Cory Gardner (Colo.), Tim Scott (S.C.), Rob Portman (Ohio) and Ben Sasse (Neb.),
Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Fred Upton (Mich.),
Rep. Kevin Brady (Texas)
Kevin McCarthy (Calif.),
Cathy McMorris Rodgers (Wash.),
Budget Committee Chairman Tom Price (R-Ga.),
Financial Services Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling (Texas)
Diane Black (Tenn.)"~
So work this out with me:
The top 4 people on the list are committed NWO leftists.
The next one and third are reknown RINOs, with the second being a political dirty tricks mechanic.
The rest of the group are owned outright by the banksters.
"Ladies and Gentlemen,
YOUR
REPUBLICAN PARTY LEADERSHIP!"
Maybe Reince Priebus should get a sworn oath out of these coniving little fucks to support the lead vote getter in the primaries. (Don't count on it.) Say..., where is ol' Reince anyway? Why isn't he out denouncing these weasels?
Here's some more confirmation of what a crook Clinton is!
"In 2010/2011 Saudi Arabia was trying to secure the one of largest arms deal ever between a US
company and a ME country. The deal was worth 29.4 BILLION dollars to Boeing and had to be approved
by the State Department – specifically Hillary Clinton.
Regional allies were sceptical; Robert Gates wrote in his book that Israel had to be bribed to
stop them from publicly attacking the deal. They worried the deal would destabilise the region. And
in fact the State Department had released two reports outlining just how atrocious SA was, with it's
endless human rights abuses, and endless subjugation of women Saudi Arabia donated at least 10m (some
sources say as much as 25M) to the Clinton Foundation.
Boeing donated at least 10M to the Clinton Foundation (CF). Boeing also paid Bill 250K for a single
speech.
And Hillary signed off on the deal.
When she did, she and her aides celebrated, and publicly admitted that the weapons deal was a
"top priority". Not helping women in SA, not defending human rights, but signing off on a deal worth
billions between two Foundation donors.
Hillary was confirmed in 2008, with the understanding that the CF would disclose ALL donors, to
avoid even the look of impropriety. In fact Hillary signed an Memorandum of Understanding – a written
promise to the President, that the donor list would be made public annually. Hillary broke that promise
and stopped reporting CF donors. the Foundation also concealed over 1100 foreign donors by siphoning
their money through a Canadian charity owned by yet another big donor.
Hillary's first big hire for her 2016 Presidential run was her Campaign Chairman, John Podesta.
John and his brother Tony own one of DC's biggest lobbying firms. Tony has bundled many hundreds
of thousands for Hillary and the DNC and (DSCC, etc). The Podesta groups, as the lobbying firm is
known, counts among it's clients both Boeing and Saudi Arabia.
Oh and hey, those weapons Clinton signed off on, they're now being used to commit war crimes in
Yemen. Two of the main groups benefiting from those Saudi military strikes in Yemen? ISIS and al
Qaeda."
"... Super delegates do not count towards anyone's delegate total because they don't actually exist
and will never be cast unless an extraordinary set of circumstances arises at the convention circumstances
that so far has only happened once before in the history of the Democratic Party. So in all likelihood
super delegate votes will never be cast, something CNN is both too inept to know and too lazy to find
out about. ..."
"... But it's clear that the Democratic party establishment is willing to create the fiction and
false impression that Clinton has a big delegate lead. She doesn't. Ignorant, incompetent journalists
who have more in common with parrots than Woodward and Bernstein just happily repeat the fraud they
are fed. ..."
"... Hillary Clinton has no actual super delegate votes. Because based on Democratic Party rules
and procedures super delegate votes don't count until the are cast at the convention, not before, and
won't ever be cast unless they are asked to break a hopelessly deadlocked convention. ..."
"... This nonsense about super delegates is sheer political dishonesty with the Clinton campaign
along with the help of the DNC who, as even David Gergen pointed out is in the tank for Clinton, trying
to make it look like she's way ahead when she isn't. ..."
"... Super delegates have only cast a vote once in the history of the Democratic party, 32 years
ago in 1984 when Walter Mondale beat Gary Hart by less than 500 delegates won in the primaries but didn't
have the 2/3 needed for the nomination. ..."
The AP headline read: Super delegates Help Clinton Expand Her Lead Despite NH Loss. It was and
is a complete fabrication. Another way of putting it would be fraud.
Initiated by Clinton and the DNC and unfortunately aided and abetted by two ignorant AP reporters
(and others like CNN) who didn't know ( or maybe didn't care) that they were being snookered and
simply swallowed what was thrown at them. It would help if people who actually think they are reporters
would check DNC rules regarding the use of super delegates. Especially since there has only been
one time in the history of the Democratic party that super delegates ever cast a vote and that was
32 years ago in 1984. And even then it was to affirm the candidate who won the most pledged delegates
in the primaries.
Because as of this moment, all those super delegates claimed by Clinton don't actually exist in
terms of real votes. The only delegates that count right now and in all probability ever will count
are pledged delegates won during the primaries, not super delegates.
CNN has also been doing it's share of inept reporting by perpetuating the fiction around Clinton's
bogus superdelegate count .
Super delegates do not count towards anyone's delegate total because they don't actually exist
and will never be cast unless an extraordinary set of circumstances arises at the convention circumstances
that so far has only happened once before in the history of the Democratic Party. So in all likelihood
super delegate votes will never be cast, something CNN is both too inept to know and too lazy to
find out about.
Super delegate declarations are also non-committal so any declarations made now count for nothing
and carry no force of action even if super delegates were ever asked to cast a vote which is unlikely
and has never happened. Clinton and the DNC know this.
But it's clear that the Democratic party establishment is willing to create the fiction and
false impression that Clinton has a big delegate lead. She doesn't. Ignorant, incompetent journalists
who have more in common with parrots than Woodward and Bernstein just happily repeat the fraud they
are fed.
Hillary Clinton has no actual super delegate votes. Because based on Democratic Party rules
and procedures super delegate votes don't count until the are cast at the convention, not before,
and won't ever be cast unless they are asked to break a hopelessly deadlocked convention.
They do not automatically vote as John King erroneously claimed on CNN and have never
voted since 1984. In 2008 with much talk about superdelegates switching from Clinton to Obama then
back to Clinton and with neither candidate even close to the 2/3 majority needed, even then superdelegates
didn't vote. So the real story which CNN and other news organizations miss, is why is Clinton
and the DNC claiming super delegate votes now as part of her delegate total when it's a sham, super
delegates have no vote now, probably never will and the declarations are non-committal?
It's as much of a fraud as looking at a house you might buy, keep it under consideration, decide
to keep looking but include the house in your financial statement as an asset even though you don't
own it. Or writing a check post dated four months from now, unsigned and on a bank account that's
not even open and claiming it as an asset.
It's not only fraud, it reeks of campaign dirty tricks in collusion with the Obama run DNC as
part of Clinton's backroom deal with Obama, trying to give the illusion of Clinton leading by a substantial
margin when she isn't. And it raises an interesting question: is Hillary Clinton and the DNC thinking
about trying to steal the nomination?
This nonsense about super delegates is sheer political dishonesty with the Clinton campaign
along with the help of the DNC who, as even David Gergen pointed out is in the tank for Clinton,
trying to make it look like she's way ahead when she isn't.
The story as reported by two AP reporters, Hope Yen and Stephen Ohlemacher (yes, let's name names)
had the opening line, "so much for Bernie Sanders big win in New Hampshire. Hillary Clinton has picked
up endorsements from 87 super delegates to the Democratic Conventions dwarfing Sanders gain in New
Hampshire" .
Its total fiction since Sanders pledged delegates are real and the "endorsements" count for nothing
in terms of actual votes so Clinton and the DNC establishment successfully played the two AP reporters
for stooges. As well as John King and others at CNN.
Clinton saying she picked up 87 super delegates after New Hampshire has the same affect and same
weight and real influence on the nomination as if she had picked up 87 empty beer cans. Well, no,
that's not true because the beer cans would be worth more if they had a 5c deposit.
So here are the facts and the truth about super delegates based on Democratic Party rules and
procedures that you won't get from Clinton or the DNC, and it seems from the news media, at least
not now:
Super delegates have only cast a vote once in the history of the Democratic party, 32 years
ago in 1984 when Walter Mondale beat Gary Hart by less than 500 delegates won in the primaries but
didn't have the 2/3 needed for the nomination. But even then they didn't play a role in the
nominating process for president. They cast their votes for Mondale who had 1,606 pledged delegates
won in the primaries to Hart's 1164 which only affirmed the results of the primaries and allowed
Mondale to get to the 2/3 threshold as required by DNC rules.. They have never cast a vote since.
And as of now have no certain role. Pledged delegates do . So any declarations are bogus.
Super delegates would not cast a vote unless an extraordinary set of circumstances arises at the
convention, not before, a set of circumstances which only occurred in 1984,the only time super delegates
voted since they were created. Which is what makes any non-binding declarations now bogus. And Clinton
and the DNC know that too.
Those circumstances are as they occured in 1984, that neither candidate finishes the primary season
with the two thirds majority of pledged delegates needed for the nomination that are won in the primaries
- if they did the nominating process is over without superdelegates casting a single vote - the delegate
count is so close as to make them virtually tied, AND the convention is hopelessly deadlocked with
neither candidate or party officials able to persuade delegates on the other side to switch after
the first ballot.
Super delegates could be used to break a hopeless deadlock when neither candidate is able to get
the two-thirds delegate count needed. Without those circumstances they wouldn't vote and wouldn't
dare vote in a way that would reverse the votes of pledged delegates.
When Obama finished the 2008 primary season with a paltry 65 delegate lead over Clinton and it
looked like the nomination could go either way if superdelegates voted , Nancy Pelosi said super
delegates were obligated to vote for the candidate who won the most delegates if they were to vote
at all.
So where does Clinton get off claiming over 440 super delegates when whether they will vote at
all is yet to be determined, their "endorsements" are non-committal,worthless as votes, and in all
probability super delegates will never vote at all?
Delegates won in primaries, called "pledged delegates", are actually committed to vote for the
candidate they are sent to the convention to vote for as a result of vote counts in the primaries.
Without getting too esoteric, it's actually delegates that are elected during primaries, either Clinton
or Sanders delegates who are then sent by voters to the convention to vote for the candidate they
were elected to vote for on the first ballot. They are the only delegates that actually count now.
And are real. And the delegates that traditionally, and to date have decided the nomination.
So until and unless those extraordinary set of circumstances occur which only ocurred once, in
1984, super delegates will not vote, don't count now and for all intents and purposes dont even exist.
When the first roll call vote is called there will be no super delegates voting. All of which shows
the depths of dishonesty and deception Clinton is willing to go. And with her the Obama run DNC who
look like they are trying to do what they can to rig the process and create false impressions.
If Bernie Sanders finished with 2000 pledged delegates won during the primaries and needed another
three hundred to get the two-thirds majority with Clinton say, 1,000 delegates behind, there would
be some horse trading to get the remaining 300 delegates needed from Clinton perhaps making a deal
on picking a vice presidential running mate. But its inconceivable super delegates even those declaring
for her now ( which again, don't count) would cast votes for Clinton to give her the nomination.Super
delegates casting their votes for the second place finisher never happened even in 1984. It would
bring the Democratic party to its knees if they tried to crown a queen instead of nominate a president.and
Sanders voters would never vote for Clinton no matter what histrionics DNC officials pulled over
Supreme Court nominations etc etc.
Super delegates would only vote to break an otherwise hopeless deadlock and to give a clear winner
the votes required by rules to officially get the nomination. They are a last resort and most importantly
as mentioned earlier, super delegates have only once in the history of the Democratic party ever
cast a single vote and that was 32 years ago And if a hopeless deadlock never occurs super delegates
will have no role. To count them now is pure fraud.
So why is Hillary Clinton putting out the fiction that she is ahead on delegates even though she
isn't because of super delegates? Because she is being underhanded and so is the DNC run by Debbie
Wasserman-Schultz Obama's hand picked chair of the DNC who are trying to build a phony aura of expectation
and inevitability and the illusion that she will be the nominee and then if she doesn't have the
actual votes from the primary battles try and steal the nomination by using super delegates with
Obama and Wasserman-Schultz driving the getaway car.
The New York Times acting like the long arm of the law put their arm on Clinton in a recent editorial
making it clear that super delegates can have no role in the outcome of the nomination which needs
to be decided by whoever wins the most delegates in the primaries.
But there is another reason the Clinton campaign is putting out these super delegate numbers as
if they count now when they don't. Its the kind of outrageous political tactics we've seen from Republicans
-- a tactic to suppress the Sanders vote.
There is little doubt that the Clinton campaign with the help of the DNC, by putting out these
fictitious super delegate numbers are trying to create some false idea that Clinton has such a huge
lead her nomination is inevitable. The hope is this will dampen the spirit and enthusiasm of Sanders
voters (enthusiasm Clinton cant match) and hopefully hold down their turnout in the hopes of making
them think Clinton's nomination is inevitable because of super delegates and there is nothing they
can do to affect the outcome. Which of course is not true . Its more of a Republican style dirty
trick, the kind they have tried in the past in the hopes of holding down the African American vote
in certain communities. The principle is the same.
The Clinton campaign and the DNC needs to be called out for this kind of dishonest manipulation
when she is actually tied with Sanders 51-51 in pledged delegates, the only delegates that matter.
This idea that super delegates have declared anything for her carries no authority, no weight,
no certainty. Nothing a super delegate says now is binding. They could change their minds a hundred
times between now and the convention, and no one would know so how can they be counted now?
And if Clinton is putting out these phony super delegate numbers to try and grease the skids for
an attempt at stealing the nomination at the convention, it might be a good idea for Sanders voters
to remind her and everyone else of one other thing: In 2008 when it looked like Obama might lose
the nomination to Clinton because of a super delegate vote, Donna Brazille, an Obama supporter and
former chair of the DNC said publicly that if super delegates decided the nomination she would quit
the Democratic party.
If Donna Brazile can quit the Democratic party if super delegates decided the nomination so can
Sanders voters. And they can make it clear that they will. Which means if Clinton and the DNC tries
to steal the nomination from Sanders using super delegates if he has the majority of pledged delegates
they can count on Sanders voters staying home.
Clinton putting out the word that she has 469 delegates which include over 400 super delegates
that she can't ethically or even by DNC rules count is almost a veiled threat as if to say, "okay
I got buried by the voters in New Hampshire and it was razor thin in Iowa and Nevada but so what?
I have a trick up my sleeve."
If Clinton, Obama and the DNC think they are greasing the skids now so Clinton can pull a fast
one at the convention later, they better not try. If they do anything to try and rig the nomination,
Sanders voters can just vow never to support it, just like Donna Brazile threatened which will bring
the Democratic party down like a house of cards and do Clinton no good in the general election.
Let Sanders and his supporters put Clinton and the DNC on notice that if they do anything to rig
the nomination, if the nomination does not go to the candidate who won the most votes and most delegates
in the primaries as Nancy Pelosi in 2008 said it must, then the Democrats will have to face the music
and take another drubbing like they did in 2010 and 2014 essentially over Obama's unscrupulous sell
out of the health care public option to the insurance companies.
Make it clear that if Clinton can't win honestly she is not going to win at all.
And if Sanders voters stay home in the face of a corrupt process it will wipe out Democratic down
ticket candidates also, and if that's what it takes to throw open the windows, let in the fresh air
and purge the Democratic party of those corrupting the system, so be it. No amount of whining or
scare tactics by Democratic big wigs about what will happen if Clinton loses and begging Sanders
supporters to go along with the corruption will ever work.
Its called making your own bed and lying in it. With the double meaning of the word "lying" very
clear.
ADDENDUM:
This article has been updated to include the 1984 Democratic convention which is the only time
super delegates have ever voted and then voted for Walter Mondale who won the most pledged delegates
during the primaries, 1606-1164 confirming that pledged delegates won during primaries is the standard
for nominating a presidential candidate. And does not change the fact that super delegate votes do
not count unless cast at the convention and non-binding declarations that Clinton included in her
totals are completely bogus.
Wendy Wasserman- Schultz has also been corrected to Debbie Wasserman-SchultzNOTE: CNN is still
showing super delegate totals for Clinton included with her pledged delegate totals that don't actually
exist and may never exist and for now and until the convention and they are cast, if ever, are pure
fiction. John King is one of the worst offenders but so is Wolf Blitzer. The Sanders campaign needs
to hold them and other media outlets accountable.
"... The comment that Clinton had seemed to have locked up the Democratic race last Tuesday is laughable now, but it was also way out of line last week. The idea that superdelegates will stay with Clinton if she falls measurably behind in the popular vote is very questionable. ..."
"... Adding them now to her delegate total makes sense if you're trying to create a perception of inevitability for the candidate you've endorsed. Wake up, Times analysts. She's not inevitable any more than she was in 2008. ..."
"... The recent polling average at Real Clear Politics placed Clinton ahead of Sanders in Michigan by 21.4%. Zero polls put Sanders ahead of Clinton. Polling organizations projected a Clinton victory chance at 99%. And Sanders just won the state. The victory is stunning. I strongly urge the pundits to revise their inevitability narrative and let the voters decide. ..."
"... HRC is part of establishment that led to this demise. Thank you to the people of Michigan for choosing Sanders and Trump. You have a beautiful state! ..."
"... When polls this morning showed Hillary 13% ahead of Bernie, NYTimes called Michigan a state whose diversity was almost perfectly representative of the nation. Now the goal post has shifted and Michigan is suddenly super-white. ..."
"... Sanders has won in almost all of the states that Obama carried in 2008 and 2012; Clinton has won mainly in the Southern states which the GOP has won in every election since 1968. The DNC should wake up: Sanders is the better candidate. ..."
"... It's going to be interesting how the super-delegates throw their support to. Right now Hillary is leading the delegate count and that lead is increased with a majority of the super-delegates. However, if this upset is followed by more in the future, those super-delegates may have a change of heart and we could have a very interesting summer in this election. ..."
"... The rustbelt does not trust Hillary Clinton - and for a very good reason - NAFTA. ..."
"... The Sanders Clinton divide is almost right on the Mason-Dixon Line thus far. These maps are quite remarkable. They also point to Sanders relative strength in contrast to the queen in a general election. He will carry Hillary's supporters much more so than her ability to expect the support of the Bernie people. ..."
"... Dearborn, Michigan is about 30% Arab Americans. Early returns show a majority voted overwhelmingly for our first Jewish American presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders. What a wonderful thing that says about Democratic Party values and the people of Dearborn. ..."
"... Breaking Bad - Michigan is the point the system went tilt. Bernie has the overwhelming white vote and now blacks are beginning going as well to Bernie. The Clinton Machine is running out of propaganda. People sees Bernie's Integrity ..."
"... It seems that the newspaper of record will have to take a more careful look at its slanted election reporting. The degree of poor and irresponsible journalism from the New York Times regarding the Democratic primaries is astounding! I'm surprised that the Times was able to print the breaking news of a "significant upset over Hillary Clinton." All power to the 99%! ..."
"... Bottom line: Take away the African American vote in the old South and Hillary is a non-candidate. ..."
"... Hillary was going to shift to Trump and the General Election. NOT. SO. QUICK. Ms Clinton. You have just about run out of Old Confederacy States and the shine is off of your inevitability argument. Bernie warned the press not to underestimate him. He just won an industrial state with a significant minority population. ..."
Don't you think it worth mentioning that most of the states Clinton has won are almost certain
to stay red in November? And that Sanders is winning the states Dems need to win in November,
and outpolling her dramatically among independents everywhere? Still think she's most "electable"?
The comment that Clinton had seemed to have locked up the Democratic race last Tuesday is laughable
now, but it was also way out of line last week. The idea that superdelegates will stay with Clinton
if she falls measurably behind in the popular vote is very questionable.
Adding them now to her
delegate total makes sense if you're trying to create a perception of inevitability for the candidate
you've endorsed. Wake up, Times analysts. She's not inevitable any more than she was in 2008.
Eric, Chicago 10 minutes ago
The recent polling average at Real Clear Politics placed Clinton ahead of Sanders in Michigan
by 21.4%. Zero polls put Sanders ahead of Clinton. Polling organizations projected a Clinton victory
chance at 99%. And Sanders just won the state. The victory is stunning. I strongly urge the pundits
to revise their inevitability narrative and let the voters decide.
Just Me, Planet Earth 10 minutes ago
Michigan serves as an example of the US as a whole- considering the fact that they are part of
the rust belt. The manufacturing sector of the US that has been DECIMATED by NAFTA, NATO, TPP
and other trade agreements that have ROBBED the middle class of hard working labor with DECENT
pay, now we are forced to compete with cheap labor. HRC is part of establishment that led to this
demise. Thank you to the people of Michigan for choosing Sanders and Trump. You have a beautiful
state!
Al, CA 10 minutes ago
When polls this morning showed Hillary 13% ahead of Bernie, NYTimes called Michigan a state whose
diversity was almost perfectly representative of the nation. Now the goal post has shifted and
Michigan is suddenly super-white.
In June we'll be hearing about how minority-majority California is grossly unrepresentative.
Why not just admit that some people would rather vote for the man who went to jail
Kevin Cahill, Albuquerque 10 minutes ago
Sanders has won in almost all of the states that Obama carried in 2008 and 2012; Clinton has won
mainly in the Southern states which the GOP has won in every election since 1968. The DNC should
wake up: Sanders is the better candidate.
Cassowary, Earthling 13 minutes ago
Behold the revolution! The people of Michigan have spoken. They are not buying what Clinton, her
corporate donors and media backers are selling.
Listen up, Democrats. Don't try to fight the will of the voters and usurp Sanders if he wins
nationally. Why destroy the party by undemocratically supporting Clinton through superdelegates
and risk the meltdown the GOP is going through? Clinton is now the unelectable candidate. Adjust.
Accept. Get ready for President Sanders, a true Democrat.
Martha Shelley, Portland, OR 13 minutes ago
Just yesterday the NY Times was telling us that Clinton would win a landslide victory in Michigan,
and Sanders was history. Um, is this on the same level as the 1948 headline in the Chicago Tribune,
"Dewey Defeats Truman?"
Andrew L, Toronto 13 minutes ago
"Mr Sanders, who won white voters in Michigan and is targeting them in coming Rust Belt
primaries...."
Wow. Just wow. And Sanders supporters say they are progressive. Has your country come to a
point where candidates and their campaigns barely conceal their implicitly racist aims? This is
utterly astounding and shameful.
Bernie won Michigan and, I believe, will win Ohio. It's not an "upset," NYT: it's momentum.
Were it not for the African-American vote, the Clinton campaign would be in the tank. Maybe it's
time to reconsider the received wisdom that "Bernie can't win"?
It's going to be interesting how the super-delegates throw their support to. Right now
Hillary is leading the delegate count and that lead is increased with a majority of the super-delegates.
However, if this upset is followed by more in the future, those super-delegates may have a change
of heart and we could have a very interesting summer in this election.
This is purely opinion, but I feel confident saying that the next president of this country is
going to come from the winner of this close Democratic Nomination. The Republican Party is very
divided with Trump leading the way, and I cannot see the typical support from losing candidates
thrown Trump's way should he win the nomination.
Bernie received almost 40% in Wayne County --Detroit, so let's end the fiction that Bernie
can't win the African American vote. His message is spreading in urban America, which is where
Democrats win elections.
The Times unfairly uses the term "prolong" to describe this race. Let's see hoee Bernie does
in Philly and Cleveland. Hillary is in big trouble.
Very poor coverage of the big story of the night - Bernie Sanders beating Hillary Clinton in
the rustbelt state Michigan. The rustbelt does not trust Hillary Clinton - and for a very
good reason - NAFTA. The dynamics of the Democratic race have just been transformed. Michigan
is a gamechanger.
Billy , up in the woods down by the river
2 hours ago
The Sanders Clinton divide is almost right on the Mason-Dixon Line thus far. These maps
are quite remarkable. They also point to Sanders relative strength in contrast to the queen in
a general election. He will carry Hillary's supporters much more so than her ability to expect
the support of the Bernie people.
This Michigan upset by Sanders over Clinton may prove to be historic.
Dearborn, Michigan is about 30% Arab Americans. Early returns show a majority voted overwhelmingly
for our first Jewish American presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders. What a wonderful thing that
says about Democratic Party values and the people of Dearborn.
This is a beautiful night for Bernie Sanders and those of us who believe in him. I think he'll
win but even if he doesn't, he proved his candidacyy is very much alive.
Get ready to feel the Bern, Ohio!
Janice Badger Nelson , is a trusted commenter Park City, Utah, from Boston
43 minutes ago
If Hillary and Bernie were switched, you would have called it for her already in Michigan.
CNN is doing the same. Sorry, the big story, even if Hillary squeaks out a narrow win, the BIG
story is how well Bernie Sanders is doing. Of course by reading the NYTimes, you would never know.
Sad state of honest journalism.
Breaking Bad - Michigan is the point the system went tilt. Bernie has the overwhelming
white vote and now blacks are beginning going as well to Bernie. The Clinton Machine is running
out of propaganda. People sees Bernie's Integrity
What an amazing upset by Mr. Sanders. Huge upset and will probably define this race when it's
all said and done. This is exactly what Bernie Sanders needed. The polls have been going against
him in pretty much every state, but this one was over 10% for Hillary today as per the latest
poll. We can't trust the media and the pundits. On to Ohio!!
Howie Lisnoff , is a trusted commenter Massachusetts
32 minutes ago
It seems that the newspaper of record will have to take a more careful look at its slanted
election reporting. The degree of poor and irresponsible journalism from the New York Times regarding
the Democratic primaries is astounding! I'm surprised that the Times was able to print the breaking
news of a "significant upset over Hillary Clinton." All power to the 99%!
Winning the Democratic primary in MS, LA or other deep south states is a far cry from carrying
those states in the general election. Hillary is in trouble.
Bottom line: Take away the African American vote in the old South and Hillary is a non-candidate.
She is strong in states the Democrats will not carry come November. This despite having a huge
advantage in name recognition, endorsements - including the NYT and WaPo, money and all the rest.
If the goal is to win in November, Democrats had better wake up. As of this writing, NBC just
called Michigan for Bernie where Hillary was supposedly up by 10+ Points.
(10:35 PM CST)
#FeelTheBern #NotReadyForHIllary
The clown car on the Republican side is of no consequence. Bernie will wipe the floor with Trump.
Hillary was going to shift to Trump and the General Election. NOT. SO. QUICK. Ms Clinton.
You have just about run out of Old Confederacy States and the shine is off of your inevitability
argument. Bernie warned the press not to underestimate him. He just won an industrial state with
a significant minority population.
"All you had to do was watch Sunday night's debate in Flint, Michigan, to
realize Sanders isn't nearly ready to quit" [
Politico
].
And you know that if Clinton had won, that's what would have been splashed
over Politico's home page, and all the other Acela riders, too.
"Testy debate suggests Clinton and Sanders battle will continue" [
McClatchy
].
Well, that and what Sanders has said, and continuing support from his
coalition, as measured by contributions, which means he can tell the DNC to
take a hike.
Clinton said again she would release the transcripts only if all other
candidates who have given paid speeches did. She also said that she stood
up to Wall Street. "I have a record," she said. "And you know what, if
you were going to be in some way distrusted or dismissed about whether
you can take on Wall Street if you ever took money, President Obama took
more money from Wall Street in the 2008 campaign than anybody ever had."
Sanders quipped: "Secretary Clinton wants everybody else to release
it, well, I'm your Democratic opponent, I release it, here it is. There
ain't nothing. I don't give speeches to Wall Street for hundreds of
thousands of dollars, you got it."
I don't have to tell NC readers how weak that "quip" is. (And Clinton's
effrontery really is boundless, isn't it? Then again, Russell Simmons agrees
with her.)
"The Hillary Clinton-Bernie Sanders clash over the auto bailout,
explained" [
WaPo
].
This is classic:
"I voted to save the auto industry," [Clinton] said. "He voted against
the money that ended up saving the auto industry. I think that is a
pretty big difference."
What Clinton said is technically true, but it glosses over a lot of
important nuance, including the fact that Sanders is actually on the
record as supporting the auto bailout. He even voted for it.
So "techically true" means false, thenk? It's a topsy-turvey world!
(Even leaving aside the idea that a died-on-the-wool Socialist would do
such a thing.)
The Trail
"Clinton insiders are eager to begin recruiting to their cause
Republicans turned off by the prospect of Donald Trump - and the threat
of Sanders sticking it out until June makes the general election pivot
more difficult" [
Politico
].
I have long held that Clinton does not want Sanders voters, and now I am
confirmed in my view. Clinton wants moderate Republicans instead, for
reasons temparamental (Goldwater Girl), financial (ka-ching), and
institutional. Socialism and liberalism do not mix (even Sanders' mild
version of it). In addition, the Democratic establishment refuses to
recognize that Sanders has broken their squillionaire-dependent funding
model, and in consequence has gleefully stomped on youth voters (who
needs 'em, anyhow?). It really is time for Sanders to start thinking
about converting his campaign into a standalone entity that will continue
beyond the election. What's wrong with SFA (Socialists for America?)
"Clinton must make Elizabeth Warren her vice president" [Dana Milbank,
WaPo
]. Ugh.
"Over the next two weeks, Sanders campaign surrogates - and, in some
cases, the candidate - will meet with local activists. The campaign has
employed this strategy before, but surrogates and aides said now it will
be more publicized. Sanders, according to two sources briefed on the
campaign's plans, will also be more specific about economic inequality
and its effect on black communities in his stump speech" [
Buzzfeed
].
"Right now, when you look at the political revolution - it needs to
be more
intersectional
, and his economic proposals need to
be more more explicit on the ground and publicly," the activist [who
wasn't authorized to speak for their organization] said. "The Clintons
will exploit that. When he's talking about it, he'll give specific
examples on the stump in ways he hasn't before, is my understanding."
"The Seattle Times editorial board recommends John Kasich, Bernie
Sanders" [
Seattle
Times
].
"Andrea Mitchell Pulls the Mask Off Harry Reid" [
Down
with Tyranny
]. How the "neutral" Reid delivered Nevada to Clinton.
"Hillary Calls for Michigan Gov's Resignation an Hour After Her Spox
Slammed Bernie for Same" [
Mediaite
].
Send in the bots! There have to be bots!
This could be the last time [
Avedon's
Sidehow
]. An excellent wrap-up of commentary on Super Tuesday.
"Mark Zuckerberg's $100 million donation to Newark public schools
failed miserably - here's where it went wrong" [
Business
Insider
]. Maybe somebody should ask Cory Booker,
before
his
VP aspirations become embarassingly open?
New York: "On the Democratic side, Clinton had a 21-percentage point
lead over Bernie Sanders, 55% to 34%, the same as it was a month ago, the
[Siena] poll found" [
USA
Today
]. Sanders position on fracking will help him, but only upstate.
Was Sanders "pragmatic" enough to offer Sharpton a suitcase full of cash?
Lightweight and uncharacteristically for
Matt Taibbi stupid article. He can't spell the word "neoliberalism". It looks like it was
USSR people against Bolshevik's oligarchy now it is American people against neoliberal oligarchy.
And leaders are mostly symbols. Actually drunk Yeltsin later screw the nation that brought him to
power, selling national treasures for pennies on the dime in criminal privatization. Compare Taibbi
superficial bubble with
Millions of ordinary Americans support Donald Trump. Here's why by
Thomas Frank
Notable quotes:
"... Trump's speeches are never scripted, never exactly the same twice. Instead he just riffs and feels his way through crowds. He's no orator – as anyone who's read his books knows, he's not really into words, especially long ones – but he has an undeniable talent for commanding a room. ..."
"... Trump knows the public sees through all of this, grasps the press's role in it and rightly hates us all. When so many Trump supporters point to his stomping of the carpetbagging snobs in the national media as the main reason they're going to vote for him, it should tell us in the press something profound about how much people think we suck. ..."
"... Reporters have focused quite a lot on the crazy/race-baiting/nativist themes in Trump's campaign, but these comprise a very small part of his usual presentation. His speeches increasingly are strikingly populist in their content. ..."
"... both Democratic and Republican politicians unfailingly do upon taking office, i.e., approve rotten/regressive policies that screw ordinary people. ..."
"... He goes on to explain that prices would go down if the state-by-state insurance fiefdoms were eliminated, but that's impossible because of the influence of the industry. "I'm the only one that's self-funding ... Everyone else is taking money from, I call them the bloodsuckers." ..."
"... "I don't know what the reason is – I do know what the reason is, but I don't know how they can sell it," he says. "We're not allowed to negotiate drug prices. We pay $300 billion more than if we negotiated the price." ..."
...the regular guy has been screwed by a conspiracy of incestuous elites. The Bushes are half
that conspiratorial picture, fronts for a Republican Party establishment and whose sum total of accomplishments,
dating back nearly 30 years, are two failed presidencies, the sweeping loss of manufacturing jobs,
and a pair of pitiable Middle Eastern military adventures – the second one achieving nothing but
dead American kids and Junior's re-election.
Trump picked on Jeb because Jeb is a symbol. The Bushes are a dissolute monarchy, down to offering
their last genetic screw-up to the throne.
"The war in Iraq was a big f ... fat mistake, all right?" he snorted. He nearly said, "A big fucking
mistake." He added that the George W. Bush administration lied before the war about Iraq having WMDs
and that we spent $2 trillion basically for nothing.
... ... ...
Trump had said things that were true and that no other Republican would dare to say.
... ... ...
Rubio, we were told, had zoomed to the front of the "establishment lane" in timely enough fashion
to stop Trump. Of course, in the real world, nobody cares about what happens in the "establishment
lane" except other journalists. But even the other candidates seemed to believe the narrative. Ohio
Gov. John Kasich staggered out of Iowa in eighth place and was finishing up his 90th lonely appearance
in New Hampshire when Boston-based reporters caught up to him.
"If we get smoked up there, I'm going back to Ohio," he lamented. Kasich in person puts on a brave
face, but he also frequently rolls his eyes in an expression of ostentatious misanthropy that says,
"I can't believe I'm losing to these idiots."
But then Rubio went onstage at St. Anselm College in the eighth GOP debate and blew himself up.
Within just a few minutes of a vicious exchange with haranguing now-former candidate Chris Christie,
he twice delivered the exact same canned 25-second spiel about how Barack Obama "knows exactly what
he's doing."
Rubio's face-plant brilliantly reprised Sir Ian Holm's performance in Alien, as a malfunctioning,
disembodied robot head stammering, "I admire its purity," while covered in milky android goo. It
was everything we hate about scripted mannequin candidates captured in a brief crack in the political
façade.
Marco Rubio; GOP Primaries; 2016
Marco Rubio stumbled badly after Iowa. Charles Ommanney/Getty
Rubio plummeted in the polls, and Kasich, already mentally checked out, was the surprise second-place
finisher in New Hampshire, with 15.8 percent of the vote.
... ... ...
All of which virtually guarantees Trump will probably enjoy at least a five-horse race through
Super Tuesday. So he might have this thing sewn up before the others even figure out in what order
they should quit. It's hard to recall a dumber situation in American presidential politics.
"If you're Trump, you're sending flowers to all of them for staying in," the GOP strategist tells
me. "The more the merrier. And they're running out of time to figure it out."
... ... ...
Trump's speeches are never scripted, never exactly the same twice. Instead he just riffs and feels
his way through crowds. He's no orator – as anyone who's read his books knows, he's not really into
words, especially long ones – but he has an undeniable talent for commanding a room.
... ... ...
Trump knows the public sees through all of this, grasps the press's role in it and rightly hates
us all. When so many Trump supporters point to his stomping of the carpetbagging snobs in the national
media as the main reason they're going to vote for him, it should tell us in the press something
profound about how much people think we suck.
Jay Matthews, a Plymouth native with a long beard and a Trump sign, cites Trump's press beat-downs
as the first reason he's voting Donald. "He's gonna be his own man," he says. "He's proving that now with how he's getting all the media.
He's paying nothing and getting all the coverage. He's not paying one dime."
Reporters have focused quite a lot on the crazy/race-baiting/nativist themes in Trump's campaign,
but these comprise a very small part of his usual presentation. His speeches increasingly are strikingly
populist in their content.
His pitch is: He's rich, he won't owe anyone anything upon election, and therefore he won't do what
both Democratic and Republican politicians unfailingly do upon taking office, i.e., approve rotten/regressive
policies that screw ordinary people.
He talks, for instance, about the anti-trust exemption enjoyed by insurance companies, an atrocity
dating back more than half a century, to the McCarran-Ferguson Act of 1945. This law, sponsored by
one of the most notorious legislators in our history (Nevada Sen. Pat McCarran was thought to be
the inspiration for the corrupt Sen. Pat Geary in The Godfather II), allows insurance companies to
share information and collude to divvy up markets.
Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats made a serious effort to overturn this indefensible
loophole during the debate over the Affordable Care Act.
Trump pounds home this theme in his speeches, explaining things from his perspective as an employer.
"The insurance companies," he says, "they'd rather have monopolies in each state than hundreds of
companies going all over the place bidding ... It's so hard for me to make deals ... because I
can't get bids."
He goes on to explain that prices would go down if the state-by-state insurance fiefdoms were eliminated,
but that's impossible because of the influence of the industry. "I'm the only one that's self-funding
... Everyone else is taking money from, I call them the bloodsuckers."
Trump isn't lying about any of this. Nor is he lying when he mentions that the big-pharma companies
have such a stranglehold on both parties that they've managed to get the federal government to bar
itself from negotiating Medicare prescription-drug prices in bulk.
"I don't know what the reason
is – I do know what the reason is, but I don't know how they can sell it," he says. "We're not allowed
to negotiate drug prices. We pay $300 billion more than if we negotiated the price."
It's actually closer to $16 billion a year more, but the rest of it is true enough. Trump then
goes on to personalize this story. He claims (and with Trump we always have to use words
like "claims") how it was these very big-pharma donors, "fat cats," sitting in the front row of the
debate the night before. He steams ahead even more with this tidbit: Woody Johnson, one of the heirs
of drug giant Johnson & Johnson (and the laughably incompetent owner of the New York Jets), is the
finance chief for the campaign of whipping boy Jeb Bush.
"Now, let's say Jeb won. Which is an impossibility, but let's say ... " The crowd explodes in laughter. "Let's say Jeb won," Trump goes on. "How is it possible for Jeb to say, 'Woody, we're going to
go out and fight competitively' ?" This is, what – not true? Of course it's true.
DFA = Democracy for America. This was Howard Dean's organization and
part of his 50 state strategies. During non-campaign seasons, he sent
campaign organizers touring the country giving short classes on how to
organize and manage a political campaign. They came to Wichita and it was
something to see, a lot of local Democratic office holders, some even in
the State House had signed up. One guy had held his house seat for 8
years and much of the information they were bringing was completely new
to him. Yes, a state level Democrat had won 4 election cycles without
even knowing the basics. This was the state of the Democratic Party back
then – and is largely that way now.
Now I am going from memory here, but Clinton's "intersectional" was
covered in these classes, with at least the basic idea. The idea was to
consider how different elements within your campaign plank are connected.
And where those connections are poor, to build up a rhetorical foundation
on how to address the contradictions. As I said, the idea is not to build
connections between different parts of the planks, but how to present
separate planks to the voter as being relevant.
It's a good exercise, a way of organizing your issues and thinking how
they all might fit together.
Now Clintion's hairball – good word by the way – likely takes it to
the absurd degree. With polling data being quantized and plugged into
sophisticated computer models allowing Clinton to tailor her message for
each region and for each venue. –KACHING-
As I said before, this is
likely something that is being fed to her by her no doubt well paid
consultants.
Still, I have made an interesting observation that I wonder if you
noticed. You presented two charts, one with holding corporations
accountable placed at the top, and the other placing decline in
manufacturing jobs at the top in the same position.
They are the same network; point by point. I even compared them using
paint and found them to be a perfect match. The only difference is that
one is negative and the other is positive.
As another untrained clown in intersectional feminism, I'm skeptical about
Clinton, especially reading Thomas Frank's description of the International
Women's Day event at the Clinton Foundation one year ago:
"What this lineup suggested is that there is a kind of naturally occurring
solidarity between the millions of women at the bottom of the world's pyramid
and the tiny handful of women at its very top …The mystic bond between
high-achieving American professionals and the planet's most victimized people …
is a recurring theme in [Hillary Clinton's] life and work … What the spectacle
had to offer ordinary working American women was another story.
She enshrined a version of feminism in which liberation is, in part, a
matter of taking out loans from banks in order to become an entrepreneur … the
theology of microfinance … Merely by providing impoverished individuals with a
tiny loan of fifty or a hundred dollars, it was thought, you could put them on
the road to entrepreneurial self-sufficiency, you could make entire countries
prosper, you could bring about economic development itself … What was most
attractive about microlending was what it was not, what it made unnecessary:
any sort of collective action by poor people coming together in governments or
unions …The key to development was not doing something to limit the grasp of
Western banks, in other words; it was extending Western banking methods to
encompass every last individual on earth.
Microlending is a perfect expression of Clintonism, since it brings together
wealthy financial interests with rhetoric that sounds outrageously idealistic.
Microlending permits all manner of networking, posturing, and profit taking
among the lenders while doing nothing to change actual power relations-the
ultimate win-win."
I'm too confused with all of this, but it sounds to me like a concept called
"interlocking systems of oppression" and your figure two seems to provide
useful diagrammatic example.
The diagram offers no understanding of the intersectional dynamics of
oppression, carefully cropping out the oppressors - most of whom are Hillary
backers - along with the oppressed, who
are all affected differently in
their lived experiences
by their
particular
relationship to
oppressive conditions.
Lumping these focus-tested ill conditions together with a rat's nest of
undistinguished connections misleadingly equates the interests of persons
with their set of group memberships (Fascism is Italian for bundle-ism) and
sets the stage for those conditions to be traded off and weighed against
each other on net in the future. I believe this is the essence of what is
called "triangulation".
Theoretically, understanding intersectionality should help us understand
where our interests coincide, and thus aid in coalition building.
Clinton is standing that notion on its head by attempting to reduce
"intersectionality" to a rhetorical gimmic, supposedly indicating she's the
"intersectional" cadidate, the one who represents everybody!
Intersectionality if properly understood would offer us an important tool, a
key if you will for freeing us from the isolation and powerlessness inherent in
the siloed environment of identity politics.
The politicians on the other hand have a much easier job if we ignore, or
misunderstand intersectionality, and stay in our silos.
The people, working together because they understand where their interests
intersect is the last thing that our 'rulers' want to see happening,
considering how much work they've devoted to divide and conquer.
Watt4Bob - In Intersectionality, the things which
intersect seem to be terms of oppression as applied to
persons (as opposed to corporations, organizations,
states, etc.) A person is the focus of one or more of
racism, sexism, ageism, class prejudice, religion,
national origin, homophobia, and so on. Most of the
categorizations through which these forms of oppression
are implemented are irrational and some have no real,
physical definition whatever. That is, the deprecation
of such persons has no real value. No doubt most
persons oppressed in these ways have an interest in
escaping from their oppression. However, they have
other, positive interests as well, independent of or
orthagonal to the ways in which they are oppressed. For
me, this makes the idea that Intersectionality alone
can automatically provide a kind of framework for
positive collective action rather dubious. We already
have anarchism and egalitarianism; now what?
Wait a minute… that tangle of buzz phrases connected helter-skelter by lines
is a REAL post from the Clinton campaign? Until I read the whole piece I
thought it was well done satire. I guess The Onion being bought out doesn't
really matter much. In modern American politics satire now seems roughly as
difficult a task as exceeding the speed of light in a vacuum or measuring the
position and velocity of an electron simultaneously.
Flint is where I was born and raised. The Governor gave away billions of Detroit's assets for
pennies on the dollar with no one challah ginger that theft. Now he is stealing lives in Flint.
He needs to step down. I would provide a link for more info but I am not permitted.
Yep, as was likely. Sanders campaign is all about momentum and whether he can bring people on
side or whether they just think he has no chance. In that respect the early ballots were always
going to be tough, apart from NH and Vermont.
March 15 is probably the real decider. Big states, lots of delegates. Sanders really must win
a lot of them to keep going, assuming that the superdelegates stay strongly behind Hillary. He
has done well though this week, winning some smaller states and building some momentum towards
the larger ones. It's not over if he doesn't crush Hillary on the 15th in those big states, but
if he loses several of them it will probably be the end of the momentum he needs.
Sanders is still very much the underdog, but then that's kind of the way he likes it.
"... What does "rebuild the military" mean? Has the budget been gutted? Have the useless weapons programs like the F-35 finally been shut down? No, the United States still spends more on its military than the next 14 countries combined. And the official military budget is only part of the story. The total spending on the US empire is well over one trillion dollars per year. Under the Obama Administration the military budget is still 41 percent more than it was in 2001, and seven percent higher than at the peak of the Cold War. ..."
"... Russia, which the neocons claim is the greatest threat to the United States, spends about one-tenth what we do on its military. China, the other "greatest threat," has a military budget less than 25 percent of ours. ..."
"... I would rebuild it in a very different way, however. I would not rebuild it according to the demands of the military-industrial complex, which cares far more about getting rich than about protecting our country. I would not rebuild the military so that it can overthrow more foreign governments who refuse to do the bidding of Washington's neocons. I would not rebuild the military so that it can better protect our wealthy allies in Europe, NATO, Japan, and South Korea. I would not rebuild the military so that it can better occupy countries overseas and help create conditions for blowback here at home. ..."
"... No. The best way to really "rebuild" the US military would be to stop abusing the military in the first place. The purpose of the US military is to defend the United States. It is not to make the world safe for oil pipelines, or corrupt Gulf monarchies, or NATO, or Israel. Unlike the neocons who are so eager to send our troops to war, I have actually served in the US military. I understand that to keep our military strong we must constrain our foreign policy. We must adopt a policy of non-intervention and a strong defense of this country. The neocons will weaken our country and our military by promoting more war. We need to "rebuild" the military by restoring as its mission the defense of the United States, not of Washington's overseas empire. ..."
The Republican presidential debates have become so heated and filled with insults, it almost seems
we are watching a pro wrestling match. There is no civility, and I wonder whether the candidates
are about to come to blows. But despite what appears to be total disagreement among them, there is
one area where they all agree. They all promise that if elected they will "rebuild the military."
What does "rebuild the military" mean? Has the budget been gutted? Have the useless weapons programs
like the F-35 finally been shut down? No, the United States still spends more on its military than
the next 14 countries combined. And the official military budget is only part of the story. The total
spending on the US empire is well over one trillion dollars per year. Under the Obama Administration
the military budget is still 41 percent more than it was in 2001, and seven percent higher than at
the peak of the Cold War.
Russia, which the neocons claim is the greatest threat to the United States, spends about
one-tenth what we do on its military. China, the other "greatest threat," has a military budget less
than 25 percent of ours.
Last week the Pentagon announced it is sending a small naval force of US warships to the South
China Sea because, as Commander of the US Pacific Command Adm. Harry Harris told the House Armed
Services Committee, China is militarizing the area. Yes, China is supposedly militarizing the area
around China, so the US is justified in sending its own military to the area. Is that a wise use
of the US military?
The US military maintains over 900 bases in 130 countries. It is actively involved in at least
seven wars right now, including in Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, and elsewhere. US Special Forces are deployed
in 134 countries across the globe. Does that sound like a military that has been gutted?
I do not agree with the presidential candidates, but I do agree that the military needs to be
rebuilt. I would rebuild it in a very different way, however. I would not rebuild it according
to the demands of the military-industrial complex, which cares far more about getting rich than about
protecting our country. I would not rebuild the military so that it can overthrow more foreign governments
who refuse to do the bidding of Washington's neocons. I would not rebuild the military so that it
can better protect our wealthy allies in Europe, NATO, Japan, and South Korea. I would not rebuild
the military so that it can better occupy countries overseas and help create conditions for blowback
here at home.
No. The best way to really "rebuild" the US military would be to stop abusing the military
in the first place. The purpose of the US military is to defend the United States. It is not to make
the world safe for oil pipelines, or corrupt Gulf monarchies, or NATO, or Israel. Unlike the neocons
who are so eager to send our troops to war, I have actually served in the US military. I understand
that to keep our military strong we must constrain our foreign policy. We must adopt a policy of
non-intervention and a strong defense of this country. The neocons will weaken our country and our
military by promoting more war. We need to "rebuild" the military by restoring as its mission the
defense of the United States, not of Washington's overseas empire.
"... This BRILLIANT presentation should be heard (and I hope RNN runs it in print so that it can be copied, old-style, and distributed on 'paper')..absorbed as a concise, integrated history of globalization-the neo-imperialist policy that continues from the 19th-20thc. imperialism... and revealed as a continuation process of global capitalism & its "1%" class. ..."
"... One of the most important takeaways, though not a necessarily new one but one worth reiterating, is that national boundaries in terms of the US and the 1% are of no importance since a world domination economic empire is the goal. ..."
"... The bloated US imperial military budget reflects how the 99% at home fund this empire, of course they never voting for it. The military is not a US military--it is the military of the 1% and global capitalism. This actually should be the meme that those trying to raise consciousness put forth, since those on the left and the right from the middle and lower classes can begin to see the whole electoral mirage for what it is. ..."
"... Clearly the methods concerned human beings are using to address the madness of the elites and their corporate/military state have had absolutely no impact: Poverty is more rampant now than ever before, the gap between rich and poor very much wider and the number of wars keeps increasing, especially the race war against the Arab people. ..."
"... Big Brother's web of deception is weakening. The ranks of unbelievers grows daily. But does the cynicism beget People Power or Donald Trump? ..."
"... Dear DreamJoe. I think you're right that BB's web of deception is weakening, but I doubt that it's weakened enough. I'm sure you understand the 'deep state' concept. It does not matter which flunkeys the "people" elect; the deep state continues to run the show. What's going on now is all bread and circuses; it means nothing. ..."
"... Bernie and Donald are manifestations of a deeper systemic failures that have changed everything for millions of people. B & D will come and go, but that crisis will remain, and will become more acute. ..."
"... why do American politicians become incontinent when they mention Saudi Arabia ..."
"... recycling mechanism for capitalism ..."
"... there is a suicidal death pact between the West and Saudi Arabia ..."
"... Protecting oligarchs investments and rate of return on shareholders gains is worlds burden we are told a needed evil in order to advance GROWTH endlessly. Growth code word for consolidation of power and wealth by ownership consolidation globally by one percent. ..."
"... For many years I would have been agreeing with you...after 50 years I have recognized that in the scheme of things, no 'change' (from tribal to private property, from feudalism to capitalism) has 'just happened'...magically born clean & clear. The process is messy, no clear beginning or even END is really possible to see. History is filled with ironies and this time its the Dem Arm of the Duopoly letting Bernie in- as an artificial straw-man candidate to make Hillary's campaign appear to be a contest between the 'idealist' and 'the realist' and not the global coronation it is --- let in by mistake (just as every power elite has miscalculated & underestimated the powerful yearning for more justice & liberty& instinctive anger at the few that enslave the majority (thru history 'The 99%'...). ..."
"... So long as he rises to militarily protect "National Interests" abroad - read: imperial billionaire class interests - he's really one of them. ..."
"... He could be doing exactly what Trump is doing except from the populist left perspective: taking down the duopoly's both corporate mafia houses with uncompromising fervor. ..."
"... Excellent discussion and lecture. A very important part of the 'due diligence' of democratic participation and research by the people. ..."
Be nice to have a book called "The Foreign Policy of the 1%".
Maybe include references to GATT, TPP, oil wars as mentioned in the presentation.
Other questions:
1) How does Foreign Policy of 1%: tie to Economic Hitman, John Perkins?
2) How does Foreign Policy of 1%: tie to conservative founders like Jeane Kirkpatrick?
3) How does Foreign Policy of 1%: tie to rise to Regan Revolution? Trump?
This BRILLIANT presentation should be heard (and I hope RNN runs it in print so that it can be
copied, old-style, and distributed on 'paper')..absorbed as a concise, integrated history of globalization-the
neo-imperialist policy that continues from the 19th-20thc. imperialism... and revealed as a continuation
process of global capitalism & its "1%" class.
Deepest thanks to Vijay Prashad...and to others
like professor Bennis (present in the audience)... whose in-depth analysis of the system can, if
studied, contribute to putting the nascent 'political revolution' Bernie calls for...into a real
democratic movement in this country. We are so woefully ignorant as 'members of the 99%'- it seems
worst of all in America-- intentionally kept isolated from knowing anything about this country/corporation's
'foreign policy' (aka as Capitalist system policy or 'the 1% policy) that Bernie cannot even broach
what Vijay has given here. But he at least opens up some of our can of worms, the interrconnectdedness
of class-interests and the devastation this country's (and the global cabal of ) capitalist voracious
economic interests rains upon the planet.
The Mid-East is a product of Capitalism that will, if
we don't recognize the process & change course & priorties, will soon overtake all of Africa and
all 'undeveloped' (pre-Capitalist) countries around the globe--The destruction and never-ending
blur of war and annihilation of peoples, cultures and even the possibility of 'political evolution'
is a product of the profit-at-any-and-all-costs that is the hidden underbelly of a system of economics
that counts humanity as nothing. It is a sick system. It is a system whose sickness brings death
to all it touches... and we are seeing now it is bringing ITS OWN DEATH as well.
The '99% policy'
(again a phrase Prashad should be congratulated for bringing into the language) is indeed one
that understands that our needs --the people's needs, not 'national interests' AKA capitalist
corporate/financial interests --- are global, that peace projects are essentially anti-capitalist
projects.... and our needs-to build a new society here in the U.S. must begin to be linked to
seeing Capitalism as the root cause of so much suffering that must be replaced by true democratic
awakening a- r/evolutionary process that combines economic and civic/political -- that we must
support in every way possible. Step One: support the movement for changed priorities & values
by voting class-consciously.
The 1% or the oligarchy have completely won the world, our only way to fight against such power
is to abandon buying their products, take great care on who you vote for in any election, only
people who have a long record of social thinking should be considers. They can be diminished but
not beaten.
One of the most important takeaways, though not a necessarily new one but one worth reiterating,
is that national boundaries in terms of the US and the 1% are of no importance since a world domination
economic empire is the goal.
The bloated US imperial military budget reflects how the 99% at home fund this empire, of course
they never voting for it. The military is not a US military--it is the military of the 1% and
global capitalism. This actually should be the meme that those trying to raise consciousness put
forth, since those on the left and the right from the middle and lower classes can begin to see
the whole electoral mirage for what it is.
All of what's been said about the elites, the one percent, has already been said many years ago.
The conversation about the wealthy elites destroying our world has changed only in the area of
how much of our world has and is being destroyed. Absolutely nothing else has changed, nothing
else.
Clearly the methods concerned human beings are using to address the madness of the elites and
their corporate/military state have had absolutely no impact: Poverty is more rampant now than
ever before, the gap between rich and poor very much wider and the number of wars keeps increasing,
especially the race war against the Arab people. Meanwhile, as we continue to speak the ocean
is licking at our doorstep, the average mean temperature has ticked up a few notches and we are
all completely distracted by which power hungry corporate zealot is going to occupy the office
which is responsible for making our human condition even more dire. The circus that is this election
is merely a ploy by the elites to make us believe that we actually do have a choice. Uh-huh; yet
if I were to suggest what REALLY needs to be done to save the human race I would be in a court
which functions only to impoverish those of us who try to speak the truth of our situation objectively.
The 'Justice' system's only function is to render us powerless. Whether one is guilty or innocent
is completely irrelevant anymore. All they have to do is file charges and they have your wealth.
Good luck to all of us as we all talk ourselves to death.
Dear denden11: You get gold stars in heaven as far as I'm concerned for telling the exact truth
in the plainest possible terms. Bravissimo. "Talk/ing/ ourselves to death" is, I'm sorry to say,
what we are doing. I've been working on these issues for forty years, looking for an exit from
this completely interlocked system. I'm sorry to say I haven't seen the exit. I do understand
how we have painted ourselves into this corner over the past 250 years (since the so-called Enlightenment),
but without repentance on our part and grace on God's part, we're doomed because we all believe
the Big Lies pumped into us moment by moment by Big Brother. And it's the Big Lies that keep us
terminally confused and fragmented.
Don't Believe the Hype was an NWA rap anthem over twenty year ago.
I always liked the shouted line, "And I don't take Ritalin!"
Big Brother's web of deception is weakening. The ranks of unbelievers grows daily. But does
the cynicism beget People Power or Donald Trump?
In defeat, will Sander's campaign supporters radicalize or demoralize into apathy or tepid
support for Hillary - on the grounds that she's less of an evil than Trumpty Dumbty?
If not defeated, will Sanders and his campaign mobilize the People to fight the powers that
be? Otherwise, he has no real power base, short of selling out on his domestic spending promises
and becoming another social democratic lapdog for Capital- like Tony Blair.
Dear DreamJoe. I think you're right that BB's web of deception is
weakening, but I doubt that it's weakened enough. I'm sure you understand the 'deep state' concept.
It does not matter which flunkeys the "people" elect; the deep state continues to run the show.
What's going on now is all bread and circuses; it means nothing.
As material conditions change drastically for tens of millions of USAns, the old propaganda loses
effect.
New propaganda is required to channel the new class tensions. Still an opening may be created.
People can't heat their homes with propaganda, the kids are living in the basement and grandpa
can't afford a nursing home and he's drinking himself to death. That's the new normal, or variations
on it for a lot of people who don't believe the hype anymore.
Bernie and Donald are manifestations of a deeper systemic failures that have changed everything
for millions of people. B & D will come and go, but that crisis will remain, and will become more
acute.
Great work Vijay...got my "filters" back on. Cut and pasted original comment below despite TRNN
labeling of "time of posting" which is irrelevant at this point.
Wow...now that I got my rational filters back on this was a great piece by Vijay and succinctly
states what many of us who "attempt" to not only follow ME events but to understand not only the
modern history by the motives of the major players in the region. Thanks for this piece and others...looking
forward to the others.
Posted earlier while my mind was on 2016 election cycle watching MSM in "panic mode"
Thought this was going to be a rational discussion on US foreign policy until the part on ?
"Trumps Red Book". I had hoped to rather hear, "The Red Book of the American Templars" ...taking
from the Knights Templar in Europe prior the collapse of the feudal system. I will say that Vijay's
comment on Cruz was quite appropriate though it would also have been better to not only put it
into context but also illustrate that Cruz's father Rafael Cruz believes in a system contrary
to the founding ideals of the US Constitution: He states in an interview with mainstream media
during his son's primary campaign that [to paraphrase] "secularism is evil and corrupt". Here
is an excerpt of his bio from Wiki:
"During an interview conducted by the Christian Post in 2014, Rafael Cruz stated, "I think
we cannot separate politics and religion; they are interrelated. They've always been interrelated."[29]
Salon described Cruz as a "Dominionist, devoted to a movement that finds in Genesis a mandate
that 'men of faith' seize control of public institutions and govern by biblical principle."[30]
However, The Public Eye states that Dominionists believe that the U.S. Constitution should be
the vehicle for remaking America as a Christian nation.[31]"
Fareed Zakaria interviewed a columnist from the Wall Street Journal today on Fareed's GPS program
and flatly asked him [paraphrased], "Is not the Wall Street Journal responsible for creating the
racist paradigm that Trump took advantage of "? Let us begin with rational dialogue and not demagogy.
Quite frankly with regard to both Cruz and Trump [in context of the 2016 elections cycle] a more
insightful comment would have been...Change cannot come from within the current electoral processes
here in the US with Citizen's United as its "masthead" and "Corporations are people as its rallying
cry"!
Not the West....just the F.I.R.E industries...driving the housing bubble; shopping malls; office
buildings; buying municipal bonds [as they the municipalities bought and built prisons; jails;
SWAT vehicles and security equipment (developed by the Israelis); and keeping the insurance companies
afloat while AllState had time after Katrina to pitch their subsidiaries allowing these subsidiaries
to file for bankruptcy]...now all the maintenance expense is coming due and cities and counties
are going broke... along with the Saudi investments here in US.
Protecting oligarchs investments and rate of return on shareholders gains is worlds burden we
are told a needed evil in order to advance GROWTH endlessly. Growth code word for consolidation
of power and wealth by ownership consolidation globally by one percent. What about the 99 percent?
While populations simply need and want also income and investment security globally.
What about
populations in massive consumer debt for education, housing, etc. to fund one percent Growth.
Laborers across globe are all in same boat simply labor for food without anything else to pass
along to progeny but what is most important ethics. A world government established by corporatism
advantage by authority of law and advantage all directed toward endless returns to oligarchy family
cartels is not an acceptable world organization of division of resources because it is tranny,
exclusive, extraction and fraudulent. Such madness does NOT float all boats.
All this while oligarchs
control Taxation of government authority and hidden excessive investment and fraud return taxation.
While Governments in west don't even jail corporate criminals while west claims law is just while
skewed in favor of protecting one percent, their returns on investment and investments. Billionaires
we find in some parts of so called Unjust regions of world not yet on board with cartel game are
calling out fraud that harms individuals and society aggressively.
TEHRAN, Iran - An Iranian court has sentenced a well-known tycoon to death for corruption linked
to oil sales during the rule of former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the judiciary spokesman
said Sunday.
Babak Zanjani and two of his associates were sentenced to death for "money laundering," among
other charges, Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejehi said in brief remarks broadcast on state TV. He did
not identify the two associates. Previous state media reports have said the three were charged
with forgery and fraud.
"The court has recognized the three defendants as 'corruptors on earth' and sentenced them
to death," said Ejehi. "Corruptors on earth" is an Islamic term referring to crimes that are punishable
by death because they have a major impact on society. The verdict, which came after a nearly five-month
trial, can be appealed.
So when Bernie winds up on the regime change band wagon (of mostly leftist governments) and stays
silent in the face of US aided and approved of coups (Honduras/Zelaya being the next most recent
before Ukraine) while railing against the billionaire class on Wall Street and the neoliberal
trade agreements, he's not only missing the elephant in the room; he's part of this elephant.
For many years I would have been agreeing with you...after 50 years I have recognized that in
the scheme of things, no 'change' (from tribal to private property, from feudalism to capitalism)
has 'just happened'...magically born clean & clear. The process is messy, no clear beginning or
even END is really possible to see. History is filled with ironies and this time its the Dem Arm
of the Duopoly letting Bernie in- as an artificial straw-man candidate to make Hillary's campaign
appear to be a contest between the 'idealist' and 'the realist' and not the global coronation
it is --- let in by mistake (just as every power elite has miscalculated & underestimated the powerful
yearning for more justice & liberty& instinctive anger at the few that enslave the majority (thru
history 'The 99%'...).
And as all past power-elites have done, our '1%' has misread the age-old
evolution of culture when an old system NO LONGER WORKS that makes freedom, imagination & rebellion
more acceptable more attractive, more exciting and NECESSARY. Then, once energized BY NEED, DESIRE,
and yes HOPE....change begins and can't be stopped like a slow-moving rain that keeps moving.
As with past eras & past changes, in our own day this 'millennial plus 60's' powerful generational
tide is JUST BEGINNING to feel our strength & ability. Turning what was supposed to be a globalist-coronation
into what right now certainly seems like a step towards real change, towards building a recognition
of the power, we 'the 99%' can --IF WE ACT WISELY & WITH COMMITTMENT begin the work of creating
a new world.
Criticising Bernie is criticizing the real way progress works...We need to get out
of an ego-centric adolescent approach to human problem-solving, understand we need to keep our
movement growing even if it doesn't look the WAY WE EXPECTED IT TO LOOK...keep clear on GOALS
that Bernie's campaign is just a part of. The 'left' needs to recognize its our historic moment:
to either move ahead or SELF-destruct.. Impatience needs to be replaced by a serious look down
the road for our children's future. If we don't, the power elite of the System wins again (vote
Hillary?? don't vote??). We need to take a breath & rethink how change really happens because
this lost opportunity Is a loss we can no longer afford. The movement must be 'bigger than Bernie'.
I just hope he does not get forced to resign which the L-MSM is now beginning to parrot so Hillary
can win given the huge turnouts the Repugs are getting in the primaries. I want to see four candidates
at the National Convention...in addition to Third parties.
No one can be elected Commander and Chief by stating they will not defend oligarchs interests
as well as populations interests. We agree populations interests are negated and subverted all
over earth . That cannot be changed by armed rebellion but it can be changed by electing electable
voices of reason such as Sanders. Sanders will fight to protect populations and resist oligarchy
war mongering while holding oligarchs accountable. Sanders will address corrupted law and injustice.
Vote Sanders.
You are probably correct in your thinking, but the real power will never allow any potential effective
changes to the system that is. People who try usually end up dead.
This is why we must as citizens become active players in government far greater then we are today,
we must do far more then voting. We must have time from drudgery of earning a substandard wage
that forces most to have little time for advancing democracy. Without such time oligarchs and
one percent end-up controlling everything.
We can BEGIN the march toward mountain top toward socializations
which will promote aware individualizations. We don't expect we will advance anything without
oppositions in fact we expect increased attacks. Those increased attacks can become our energy
that unites masses as we all observe the insanity they promote as our direction. We merely must
highlight insanity and path forward toward sanity. Nothing can make lasting change this generation
the march will take generations. The speed advance only will depend on how foolish oligarchs are
at attempts to subvert public awareness seeking change. As they become more desperate our movements
become stronger. We must refrain from violence for that is only thing that can subvert our movement.
He could be doing exactly what Trump is doing except from the populist left perspective: taking
down the duopoly's both corporate mafia houses with uncompromising fervor.
Instead he does the LOTE thing for the neoliberal-neocon party "D". That's just dishonest bullshit
opportunism.
Do not receives daily email for a long time without clue why? so haven't in contact with TRN's
daily report until subject video appears on youtube website. and impressed by the panelists's
congregated pivotal works done thru all these years.
"... Washington has a long history of massacring people, for example, the destruction of the Plains Indians by the Union war criminals Sherman and Sheridan and the atomic bombs dropped on Japanese civilian populations, but Washington has progressed from periodic massacres to fulltime massacring. From the Clinton regime forward, massacre of civilians has become a defining characteristic of the United States of America. ..."
"... Washington is responsible for the destruction of Yugoslavia and Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, and part of Syria. Washington has enabled Saudi Arabia's attack on Yemen, Ukraine's attack on its former Russian provinces, and Israel's destruction of Palestine and the Palestinian people. ..."
"... In a recent article , Mattea Kramer points out that Washington has added to its crimes the mass murder of civilians with drones and missile strikes on weddings, funerals, children's soccer games, medical centers and people's homes. Nothing can better illustrate the absence of moral integrity and moral conscience of the American state and the population that tolerates it than the cavalier disregard of the thousands of murdered innocents as "collateral damage." ..."
"... violence creates terrorists ..."
"... The only possible conclusion is that under Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama the US government has become an unaccountable, lawless, criminal organization and is a danger to the entire world and its own citizens. ..."
Washington has a long history of massacring people, for example, the destruction of the Plains Indians
by the Union war criminals Sherman and Sheridan and the atomic bombs dropped on Japanese civilian
populations, but Washington has progressed from periodic massacres to fulltime massacring. From the
Clinton regime forward, massacre of civilians has become a defining characteristic of the United
States of America.
Washington is responsible for the destruction of Yugoslavia and Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya,
Somalia, and part of Syria. Washington has enabled Saudi Arabia's attack on Yemen, Ukraine's attack
on its former Russian provinces, and Israel's destruction of Palestine and the Palestinian people.
The American state's murderous rampage through the Middle East and North Africa was enabled by
the Europeans who provided diplomatic and military cover for Washington's crimes. Today the Europeans
are suffering the consequences as they are over-run by millions of refugees from Washington's wars.
The German women who are raped by the refugees can blame their chancellor, a Washington puppet, for
enabling the carnage from which refugees flee to Europe.
In a recent
article, Mattea Kramer points out that Washington has added to its crimes the mass murder of
civilians with drones and missile strikes on weddings, funerals, children's soccer games, medical
centers and people's homes. Nothing can better illustrate the absence of moral integrity and moral
conscience of the American state and the population that tolerates it than the cavalier disregard
of the thousands of murdered innocents as "collateral damage."
If there is any outcry from Washington's European, Canadian, Australian, and Japanese vassals,
it is too muted to be heard in the US.
As Kramer points out, American presidential hopefuls are competing on the basis of who will commit
the worst war crimes. A leading candidate has endorsed torture, despite its prohibition under US
and international law. The candidate proclaims that "torture works" - as if that is a justification
- despite the fact that experts know that it does not work. Almost everyone being tortured will say
anything in order to stop the torture. Most of those tortured in the "war on terror" have proven
to have been innocents. They don't know the answers to the questions even if they were prepared to
give truthful answers. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn relates that Soviet dissidents likely to be picked
up and tortured by the Soviet secret police would memorize names on gravestones in order to comply
with demands for the names of their accomplices. In this way, torture victims could comply with demands
without endangering innocents.
Washington's use of invasion, bombings, and murder by drone as its principle weapon against terrorists
is mindless. It shows a government devoid of all intelligence, focused on killing alone. Even a fool
understands that violence creates terrorists. Washington hasn't even the intelligence of
fools.
The American state now subjects US citizens to execution without due process of law despite the
strict prohibition by the US Constitution. Washington's lawlessness toward others now extends to
the American people themselves.
The only possible conclusion is that under Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama the US government
has become an unaccountable, lawless, criminal organization and is a danger to the entire world and
its own citizens.
We should be mostly interested in politicians that Guardian ignores...
Notable quotes:
"... I think Sanders is being down played by The Guardian and trying to make us believe it's only about Trump and Hillary now. Do other people feel The Guardian is getting biased towards Clinton? ..."
"... The Guardian has gone out of its way to write pro Clinton articles while ignoring Sanders overwhelmingly. ..."
"... The Guardian is just like the NYT's. Left of center establishment run newspaper. They represent the same interests as Fox News and the rest just with a softer slant. ..."
"... This sums up the media bias perfectly https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4xvE6Cl5yw&ab_channel=TheYoungTurks ..."
"... The Clinton influence machine is pretty formidable. its like the mafia. No body is going to go against that organization unless its clearly going Bernies way (like Chris Christie did on the other side) OR there is a witness protection program (just kidding). ..."
"... Kasich -" He was a commentator on Fox News Channel, hosting Heartland with John Kasich from 2001 to 2007. He also worked as an investment banker, a managing director of Lehman Brothers' Columbus, Ohio, office ." That is enough evidence to disqualify him from being 'qualified', surely you need a President who does not have that kind of garbage in his background. ..."
"... Graun still banging those drums HARD for Clinton, I see. ..."
"... The Guardian and the NYT are the WORST. No journalistic integrity whatsoever. ..."
"... This is absolutely hilarious, a self-fulfilling prophecy within minutes: "John Stoehr (Guardian): Bernie Sanders's win in Kansas is not surprising – he was projected to win there." No he wasn't you twaddler. Clinton had a projected 10 point lead until a couple of days ago. Plus Kansas is one of the most conservative States: http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/pollster/polls/fort-hays-state-university-23980 . Seriously, what's going on here, Guardian?? This journalism is as balanced and fair as Fox News. ..."
"... The sad and helpless Democrats will eventually elect the well groomed neocon con artist Clinton to lead them to another years of war and subservience to wall street and the Republicans will end up having seen their party being shredded by infighting and revolt. Trump, with all his buffoonery and clownish acts, at least is able to offer some hope to so many disenfranchised voters and has shredded the myth of invincibility of these old fossils and dinosaurs of both parties. Good for him for doing that. ..."
"... It's not 'The Guaridan' we used to know any more. A new editor and a new paper - NeoConservative values with lots of 'identity politics' (hence the blatant bias toward NeoConservative, female Hillary, and the NeoConservative, female Yvette Cooper in the British Labour Leadership elections before that) and not much else. Basically 'Cosmopolitan Daily' with a bit of 'news' thrown in if you must have that sort of thing... ..."
Well California 500+ Michigan 140+ Illinois 180+ Ohio 150+ New York 290+ and Florida +240 are all ahead. Penn too. Bernie looks
strong in Michigan, New York, Florida and is gaining in Ohio and California where the his latino numbers are pretty impressive.
Hillary is in a leading position but there is still a lot of primary left. If you noticed she keeps trying to look past Sanders
and take on Trump and then has to come back and fight the Bern. Its far from over.
The gap is in superdelegates. The tally so far in actual primaries among the rank and file, which has been heavily weighted toward
states the Democratic candidate often has trouble winning in the general election, is hardly a resounding endorsement -- especially
considering her funding and her incessant propaganda that Sanders is already finished.
Say, you wouldn't be part of that scheme, . . . would you?
I think Sanders is being down played by The Guardian and trying to make us believe it's only about Trump and Hillary now.
Do other people feel The Guardian is getting biased towards Clinton?
The Guardian has gone out of its way to write pro Clinton articles while ignoring Sanders overwhelmingly. You want me
to prove what can only be proven had you been paying attention. I'm sad to hear you think "giving it better" means resorting to
name calling and racism. You're not interested in a discussion unless it devolves into playground bullying. I'm glad you're not
an American, please stay on your side of the pond. The last thing we need here is another person to fill in the Trump rallies...
Maybe so, but Clinton sent her goon squad to Vermont early on to dig up dirt about Bernie, and they couldn't find any. And Howard
Dean has said he's watched Bernie for years, and dirty tricks always fail to work on him. The thing is, he speaks the truth, and
people can feel that.
The Repubs will certainly try to do the Booga Booga thing with socialism, but for a large part of the electorate who weren't
around for the Cold War, that not only doesn't resonate, but many of the Millenials self-identify as socialist (meaning Democratic
Socialist, as Bernie is, most likely).
So query what kind of mud they can sling besides that. Everything's backfired so far. And Hillary is a goldmine for someone
looking to sling mud. They say she's already faced everything the Repubs have, but it's not true. Her Achilles Heel this election
is her speaking fees from Wall St, and they will really go to town on that. That is a major problem for many voters in this anti-establishment
year.
I reckon Clinton's supporters will argue Nebraska and Kansas don't matter because "too white." This point may be valid. Yet, look
at Omaha. The racial demographic of the city is very similar to the national demographic.
The 2010 census shows the racial makeup of the city being 68.0% non-Hispanic White, 13.7% African American, 0.8% Native American,
2.4% Asian, 0.1% Pacific Islander, 6.9% from other races, and 3.0% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were
13.1% of the population.
Sanders beat Clinton in Omaha by 8 percentage points.
Yes, Clinton does very well in the black community and wins decisively in states with a large black population, yet blacks
are 13 per cent of nation. America is much more like Omaha than New Orleans.
but that won't happen. When Bernie pulls this out its going to be by Iowa thin margin. Even if its 53/47 the super delegates will
be loath to go against the Clinton machine. Remember these guys are not appointed super delegates because they think outside the
box of DNC dogma.
I am hoping Bernie is using the primary as a platform to spread the message and breaks away from the horrid Wasserman Schulz/Clinton
corruption of the DNC and forms the Progressive Party.
It's not weird. The Guardian is just like the NYT's. Left of center establishment run newspaper. They represent the same interests
as Fox News and the rest just with a softer slant.
The Guardian continues to astound me. Headline begins with Clinton who one a single state and not Bernie who won two. And as others
have said, it continues to paint Bernie as hopeless and the primaries decided. They are not and foreclosing in this newsrag will
not make them so. This paper has truly gone to s**t.
For the nomination, what matters is the number of delegates. What matters for the election is the number of states in which one
party can take the majority of the vote.
Clinton's blowouts are in states that go Republican in the elections. This means that she is strongest where the populace is
more conservative. Problematic for the election, long term.
The role of the super delegate is so the party is not "taken over" by a rogue candidate. The DNC wording there not mine. People
screech about the RNC as the home of fascism but in fact the elitist totalitarianism of the DNC is far more restrictive. Not to
say the RNC won't find a way to manipulate their outcome too.
Before conventions where televised these kind of wars where common at conventions and real deals where brokered. When the conventions
where televised the DNC and then the RNC saw the disadvantage to showing all that on TV and made them into the info-mericials
they where for the last 30 years. I like that we are getting back to the real gritty of politics. I think its healthy for us all
to see and then demand change.
Regarding Bernie's big win in Kansas: Yeah I'd say that a 35% point margin in favor of Bernie is quite different from the 10 point
loss that was being projected just the other day.
So much for ex-Governor Sebelius' endorsement of Hillary, eh?
Maybe these muckety-mucks should stop doing Hillary so many "favors"...
The pundits continue to drive me crazy. No sooner does Bernie win big in Kansas than they rush to remind us that Sanders doesn't
have a chance. There's no way, they assure us, that Sanders could possibly influence the Super Delegates to throw their
support to him, even if he continues to win more of the delegates and popular votes in the states Democrats can actually WIN in
the general election.
Oh really? And they know this... how ?
Ridiculous.
Meanwhile, for someone who is presumably close to "locking this thing up", Hillary sounded remarkably flat and crabby at a
fundraiser today in Michigan. It was all resolute finger flicks, air jabs and other carefully rehearsed automatic gestures, lacking
in spirit, as if the "real Hillary" was off somewhere else.
And if we can be honest on a touchy issue, in many living rooms I'll warrant that Hillary came across today less as a commander-in-chief
and more as a "termagant." I realize how sexist "termagant" is, but the truth is that even I keep thinking of that antiquated
word when she speaks -- and not when other female politicians speak. And the "termagant factor" doesn't seem to be diminishing
over time; if anything it seems to be getting worse.
Massachusetts was only a 1.4% difference as well as Iowa only 0.7%. Nevada wasn't a big difference as well. Only Virginia was
there greater than a few percentage points difference. Hillary is not sweeping anywhere but in red states.
Still awful for Rubio, who now looks in serious danger of not reaching 20% in Louisiana.
I can guarantee you that Rubio won't reach the 20% threshold in Louisiana. He therefore won't get any statewide delegates.
He might possibly pick up a delegate or two in congressional district with a friendly parish.
Again, it's not really a game changer for Rubio. By this I mean - again - that neither he nor the GOP (including Cruz) gains
anything by him dropping out. That's just a media narrative. Much of it very biased against the Republicans anyway.
Is that what the Donald is tapping into - resentment against the political class. We have the same sort of problem in the UK,
the established parties are very good at controlling who can stand in their name at election time - and vast parts of the UK just
vote for the colour of the rosette and are completely disinterested in who is wearing it.
For opponents of Trump, there is one cloud within the silver lining. The results from Louisiana, Kentucky and Maine all suggest
that anti-Trump Republicans are already voting tactically - which explains Rubio performing below his polling numbers. Nebraska
is less clear on the tactical voting score.
Despite this, Trump has won two of those contests. If he can keep winning contests even when facing a de facto single opponent,
that could end up strengthening him, not weakening him.
I'm half white and half black, and I have a bachelors degree. Sanders got my vote in South Carolina. Sanders has won the majority
of Hispanic votes in a few states, so you should try to keep up.
Trump is protectionist and somewhat isolationist. The US needs to do something about balance of payments to China and cut defense
spending. It is as simple as that.
Every news outlet is doing that. Hillary is the chosen one for industry, military and financial interests, she is exactly what
they want. Trump is a distraction while their eyes are on the prize.
That number would see to include super delegates, who's votes don't count as of yet. The actual result is 670 (H-dawg) to 460
(tha Bern), according to http://www.democraticconventionwatch.com
The Hillary scorpion and the Democratic voter meet on the eve of the nomination and this scorpion asks the voter to carry her
to the presidency across on its back.
The voter asks, "How do I know you won't sting me?" The Hillary scorpion says, "Because if I do, I will lose the election too."
The voter is satisfied, and they set out, but by late summer, the scorpion stings the voter with yet another corruption scandal.
The voter feels the onset of paralysis and starts to despair for not having supported Sanders, knowing they will both lose
the election, but has just enough time to gasp "Why?"
Its tough for that too happen. The Clinton influence machine is pretty formidable. its like the mafia. No body is going to
go against that organization unless its clearly going Bernies way (like Chris Christie did on the other side) OR there is a witness
protection program (just kidding).
The only thing that seriously could make them think it over would be the FBI moving strongly in their investigation of Clinton
before the convention. I know they have just handed out immunity to the tech who set up her server and Huma and Jake Sullivan
are set to speak to them. If they move to interview Clinton, then suddenly super delegates are in play.
Yes. Trump shouldn't have taken the bait. The media inevitably crucified Trump for responding, and not Rubio for starting it.
They must have both got hurt by that, esp with evangelicals. Rubio was aleady on the way down though, and it has taken a big chunk
out of Trump. Plus the fox debate ambush and lynching by all parties against Trump. He looks tired this last week as a result
and he got caught off guard many times.
He had won a narrow margin over Ms. Clinton until the Iowa Democratic Party adjusted the result narrowly in her favor. Here in
MA, Ms. Clinton "won" the Democratic primary by about 1.5% (she won our state by 12% against then soon to be President Obama in
2008,) picking up 46 delegates to Senator Sanders 45. Though her partisans (including The Guardian, NYT and Boston Globe) are
desperate to have it be so, Ms. Clinton is not invincible. Their attempt to crown her now to preempt all of the primaries yet
to be held are a Democratic Party attempt at voter suppression as reprehensible as that Party considers such attempts when carried
on by the Republican Party.
I think Meg Whitman (CEO of HP) summed it up the other day on CNBC , when she basically said we corporate need to be able to access
cheap overseas labour to be competitive.
The media persuades you who to vote for. If the media chooses to ignore the -lets say 'unsavoury stories' of one candidate and
choose to slur/dismiss the other candidate, what are people going to do? People are lazy and don't seek out the truth. They certainly
won't be given it by the main media sources who prefer one candidate over another.
Speaking as someone outside the US, the caucus system seems quite strange - a show of hands in a meeting instead of secret ballots?
This kind of voting in Australia was once common in the union movement, but is now illegal, with secret ballots being compulsory,
for the obvious reason that people may feel pressured to vote a certain way rather than how they want to vote.
I notice Cruz's 2 wins today are in states using the caucus voting method. Even though he is not exactly an establishment candidate,
it does raise the possibility that the GOP is exerting undue influence
Kasich -" He was a commentator on Fox News Channel, hosting Heartland with John Kasich from 2001 to 2007. He also worked as
an investment banker, a managing director of Lehman Brothers' Columbus, Ohio, office ." That is enough evidence to disqualify
him from being 'qualified', surely you need a President who does not have that kind of garbage in his background.
oh what a choice laid before the Republican electorate Trump who has no place n politics, Cruz who is a snake oil salesman, is
that it ??? That is the choice ??? Oh my how the mighty have fallen, in times as acute and important as the coming decade there
really needs be a better choice available. As a European I am happy this would seemingly break tradition and hand yet another
term to the Party that makes sense and shows empathy the democrats, it will be a win for the World and the environment, go Clinton
or Sanders you are both on the right side of History.
Ah, the reality is that California has nearly 500 votes, and Sanders is on track to win the lion's share of them. As well as virtually
every state west of the Mississippi still to vote. Hillary may come close but in the end the numbers clearly aren't there for
her. All she has is the south, and that's red states and just not enough. If you look at all 50 states and run the numbers it's
obvious.
The point is they could do it - just like they swapped to Obama when he was winning the popular vote.
If Sanders wins the people's vote and they don't go with the peoples choice they will damage the party, it will mean the whole
primary process was a sham. In this scenario how many of Bernie's supporters will vote for Hillary - it will guarantee a Republican
win.
On the contrary. The Guardian just claimed a couple of minutes ago in a quick op ed Sanders was supposed to win Kansas (Kansas!)
anyway. What a load of nonsense. He was 10 points behind in the last poll just a couple of days ago. What's going on here, Guardian??
This journalism is as balanced and fair as Fox News.
A crucial win for Sanders, who needs to keep his momentum up in the face of a rapidly-narrowing set of paths to victory
over Hillary Clinton.
Kansas, though, is a predominantly white state - there's no sense that his turnout among whites translates to the kind of
support he would need among African-Americans to make a real play for the nomination.
Graun still banging those drums HARD for Clinton, I see. No considering the possibility that African-Americans in
Northeast/Midwest states might not automatically vote the way their more evangelical/conservative brethren in the Bible Belt do?
Melanin equals Clinton, is that the equation? (Nor the possibility that Clinton's supposed strength in the AA community might
not be offset by Northern whites being more liberal than those who voted in TX? Or the fact that Sanders has concentrated his
media buys there, and his media seems to have been successful thus far?)
And I have no doubt we'll get some froth about Clinton came close/actually won today's delegate count, despite the fact that
Sanders is almost certain to win in Maine tomorrow and thus take the total tally for the weekend. Keep cherry-picking those stats,
Graun you'll please your boss, at minimum.
The Guardian and the NYT are the WORST. No journalistic integrity whatsoever.
One great thing to note is, it appears that in Kansas and Nebraska, where BERNIE WON, turnout was huge. Definitely KS had higher
turnout than 2008. I believe that's the first state where more Dems voted in 2016 than in 2008, and informal postings from NE
talk about a huge turnout there.
So, MSM, the message here is that Bernie gets Democratic voters out. Hillary does not. This is a crucial factor in the general
election, so just knock off the trope that Hillary's already won. She hasn't. And with any luck, she won't.
When Bernie Sanders wins in a state he is expected to win in, even though he objectively wasn't, it doesn't count; when Hillary
Clinton wins a state she is expected to win in, she defeats Sanders. Seems legit. odds-on favourite after tonight.
I am sadly realizing this with the organization's clearly biased coverage of this very exciting time in American politics. Every
article and headline plays down the very real possibility that the US could vote in a true progressive for president. I guess
I'll have to start reading more Al Jazeera. The Guardian obviously cannot be trusted for unbiased reporting any more now.
This is absolutely hilarious, a self-fulfilling prophecy within minutes: "John Stoehr (Guardian): Bernie Sanders's win
in Kansas is not surprising – he was projected to win there." No he wasn't you twaddler. Clinton had a projected 10 point
lead until a couple of days ago. Plus Kansas is one of the most conservative States:
http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/pollster/polls/fort-hays-state-university-23980
. Seriously, what's going on here, Guardian?? This journalism is as balanced and fair as Fox News.
The more trump is demonized the more voters are drawn to him. all the money,in millions, spent comparing him to Hitler,falsely,
is wasted for nothing.
None of these hypocrites, both democrats and Republicans who have largely been disconnected from ordinary people are able to
stop him and his solid position is the proof.
The sad and helpless Democrats will eventually elect the well groomed neocon con artist Clinton to lead them to another
years of war and subservience to wall street and the Republicans will end up having seen their party being shredded by infighting
and revolt. Trump, with all his buffoonery and clownish acts, at least is able to offer some hope to so many disenfranchised voters
and has shredded the myth of invincibility of these old fossils and dinosaurs of both parties. Good for him for doing that.
I ACTUALLY LIKE YOU AS A NEWS OUTLET SO PLEASE STOP LYING!
Like d
It's not 'The Guaridan' we used to know any more. A new editor and a new paper - NeoConservative values with lots of 'identity
politics' (hence the blatant bias toward NeoConservative, female Hillary, and the NeoConservative, female Yvette Cooper in the
British Labour Leadership elections before that) and not much else. Basically 'Cosmopolitan Daily' with a bit of 'news' thrown
in if you must have that sort of thing...
"... Dewey and Ford emerged from a brokered convention to lose the general election. So why? Because the party elites and elders want to protect us and stop of from falling into the abyss?… Most of us working two or three jobs think we're already in the abyss. The Obama abyss… ..."
In a stunningly honest and frank rant, FOX News' Judge Jeanine unleashes anchor hell upon
Mitt Romney and the GOP establishment hordes.
She begins:
"There's an insurrection coming. Mitt Romney just confirmed it. We've watched
governors, the National Review, conservative leaders, establishment and party operatives trash
Donald Trump. But Mitt Romney will always be remembered as the one who put us over
the edge and awoke a sleeping giant, the Silent Majority, the American people.
Fact. The establishment is panicked. Mitt essentially called for a brokered
convention where the Republican nominee will be decided by party activists and delegates irrespective
of their state's choice… You want a brokered convention? A primer Mitt. Whenever we have
a brokered convention we lose.
Dewey and Ford emerged from a brokered convention to lose the general election. So why?
Because the party elites and elders want to protect us and stop of from falling into the
abyss?… Most of us working two or three jobs think we're already in the abyss. The Obama abyss…
We are sick and tired of legislators of modest means who leave Congress
multimillionaires, whose spouses and families get all the contracts from selling the post offices
to accessing insider information so they can buy property and flip it. You're so entrenched
that you're willing to give Hillary Clinton a win. It doesn't matter to you which party, crony
capitalism and its paradigm will not change for the elite."
And that is just the introduction... Grab a coffee (or something stronger) and watch...
"... This was a classic case of professional bad manners and rank-pulling. What we had here were four former chairs of the president's Council of Economic Advisors, and two from President Obama, two from President Clinton, who decided to use their big names and their titles in order to launch an attack on a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts who had written a paper evaluating the Sanders economic program. ..."
"... The four former council chairs announced that on the basis of their deep commitment to rigor and objectivity, they had discovered that this forecast was unrealistic ..."
"... I've written a whole book called The End of Normal in which I lay out reasons for my chronic pessimism about the capacity of the world economy to absorb a great deal more rapid economic growth. ..."
PERIES: James, the Council of Economic Advisors, they put out economic forecasts each year. And
there has been some wildly optimistic ones. For example, if you look at the 2010 predictions for
2012 and 2013 they have not quite been attained. And one would say it was done in the interest of
trying to make the administration that they were serving more impressive. But what accounts for this
particular attack on Friedman's projection and other fellow economists?
GALBRAITH: This was a classic case of professional bad manners and rank-pulling. What we had here
were four former chairs of the president's Council of Economic Advisors, and two from President Obama,
two from President Clinton, who decided to use their big names and their titles in order to launch
an attack on a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts who had written a paper
evaluating the Sanders economic program.
It's likely that the four bigwigs thought that Professor Friedman was a Bernie Sanders supporter.
In fact, as of that time he was a Hillary Clinton supporter and a modest donor to her campaign. What
he had done was simply to write his evaluation of the economic effects of the ambitious Sanders reform
program. The four former council chairs announced that on the basis of their deep commitment to rigor
and objectivity, they had discovered that this forecast was unrealistic. And what I pointed out was
that that claim was based on no evidence and no analysis whatsoever. And when you pressed down on
it you found that it was simply based on the obvious fact that we haven't seen the kinds of growth
rates that Professor Friedman's analysis suggested the Sanders program would produce. And for a very
simple reason: the Sanders program is bigger. It's more ambitious than anything we've seen in recent
years, so it's not surprising that when you put it through a model it generates a higher growth rate.
So that was the basic underlying facts, and these guys, two men and two women, announced that
they, that it was a disreputable study, but failed to present any analysis that suggested they'd
actually even read the paper before they denounced it. And that's what I pointed out in my counter
letter, in a number of articles that have appeared since.
PERIES: James, so in your letter, how do you counter them? What methods did you use to come to
your conclusions?
GALBRAITH: Well, I, no need to say anything beyond the fact that I had looked in their letter
for the rigor that they were so proud of, for the objectivity and the analysis that they were so
proud of, and I'd found that they had not done any. They had not made any such claim, not done any
such work.
So that began to provoke a discussion. It's fair to say ultimately, without apologizing for effectively
launching an ad hominem attack on an independent academic researcher, one of the former chairs, Christina
Romer of President Obama's council, and her husband David Romer, a fellow economist, did produce
a paper in which they spelled out their differences with the, with the Friedman paper. But that,
again, raised another set of interesting issues which we've continued to discuss at various, various
outlets of the press.
PERIES: Now, James Friedman's claim that the growth rate from Sanders' plan to be around 5.3 percent.
And some economists, including Dean Baker at the Center for Economic Policy and Research, have claimed
that this is unrealistic. What do you make of that?
GALBRAITH: Well, the question is whether it is an effect, let's say, a reasonable projection,
of putting the Sanders program into an economic model. And the answer to that question, yes, Professor
Friedman did a reasonable job. He spelled out what the underlying assumptions that he was using were.
He spelled out the basic rules of thumb that macroeconomists had used for decades to assess the effects
of an economic program. In this case, an expansionary economic program. And he ran them through his
model and reported the results, a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
Now, one can be skeptical. And I am, and Dean Baker is, lots of people are skeptical that the
world would work out quite that way, because lots of things, in fact, happen which are not accounted
for in a model. And we've talked, we've basically put together a list of things that you think might
be problematic. But the exercise here was not to put everything into paper that might happen in the
world. The exercise was to take the kind of bare bones that economists use to assess and to compare
the consequences of alternative programs, and to ask what kind of results do you get out? And that's
what, again, what Jerry Friedman did. It was a reasonable exercise, he came up with a reasonable
answer, and he reported it.
PERIES: Now, Friedman seems to think that the rate of full employment in 1999 is attainable. However,
many labor economists seem to think that the larger share of the elderly currently in society compared
to 1999 explains some of the lack of labor participation, which creates a lower full employment ceiling
that's contradicting Friedman's report. Your thoughts on that?
GALBRAITH: Well, I think it is a fact that the population is getting older. But as, I think, any
economist would tell you, that when you offer jobs in the labor market, the first thing that happens
is the people who are looking for work take those jobs. The second thing that happens is that people
who might look for work when jobs were available start coming back into the labor market. And if
that is not enough to fill the vacancies that you have, it's perfectly open to employers to raise
their wages so as to bring more people in, or to increase the pace at which they innovate and substitute
technology for labor so that they don't need the work.
So there's no real crisis involved in the situation if it turns out five years from now we're
at 3.5 percent unemployment, and they were beginning to run short of labor. That's not a reason to,
at this stage, say no, we're not going to engage in the exercise and run a more expansionary, vigorous
reform program, a vigorous infrastructure project, a major reform of healthcare, a tuition-free public
education program. All of those things, which were part of what Friedman put into his paper, should
be done anyway. The fact that the labor market forecast might prove to have some different, the labor
market might have different characteristics in five years' time is from our present point of view
just a, it's an academic or a theoretical proposition, purely.
PERIES: And Friedman's paper, he looks at a ten-year forecast. Did you feel that when you looked
at the specifics of that, including college, universal healthcare, infrastructure spending and of
course, expanding Social Security and so on, that those categories and his predictions or projections,
rather, made sense to you?
GALBRAITH: Well, again, what he was doing was running a program of a certain scale, of a large
scale, through a set of standard macroeconomic assumptions. And that, again, is a reasonable exercise.
If you ask me what my personal view is, I've written a whole book called The End of Normal in which
I lay out reasons for my chronic pessimism about the capacity of the world economy to absorb a great
deal more rapid economic growth.
But that's not in the standard models, and it would not be appropriate to layer that on to a forecast
of this kind. What Friedman was criticized for was not for putting his thumb on the scale, but for
failing to put his thumb on the scale. In fact, that was the reasonable thing to do.
On the contrary, and on the other side, when Christina and David Romer did put out their forecast,
their own criticism of the Friedman paper, they concluded by asserting that if this program were
tried, inflation would soar. So they there were making an allegation for which, again, they had no
evidence and no plausible model, that in the world in which we presently live would produce that
result.
So what we had here was a, what was essentially an academic exercise that produced a result that
was highly favorable to the Sanders position, and showed that if you did an ambitious program you
would get a strong growth response. It's reasonable, certainly, for the first three or four years
that that would transpire in practice. And what happened was that people who didn't like that result
politically jumped on it in a way which was, frankly speaking, professionally irresponsible, in my
view. It was designed to convey the impression, which it succeeded in doing for a brief while through
the broad media, that this was not a reputable exercise, and that there were responsible people on
one side of the debate, and irresponsible people on the other.
And that was, again, something that–an impression that could be conveyed through the mass media,
but would not withstand scrutiny, and didn't withstand scrutiny, once a few of us stood up and started
saying, okay, where's your evidence, on what are you basing this argument? And revealed the point,
which the Romers implicitly conceded, and I give them credit for that, that in order to criticize
a fellow economist you need to do some work.
B. Mull
Irvine, CA 32 minutes ago
Cruz is a clever guy who going to run into the brick wall of his wife being Goldman Sachs. He
would be wise to sign on as Trump's running mate and hope for a more favorable electoral climate
in 4-8 years. Meanwhile Clinton is likely to win her rigged nomination and go on to hope that
come November fewer people dislike her than dislike Trump/Cruz, which incredibly is not a slam
dunk.
RM
is a trusted commenter Vermont 43 minutes ago
We are completing the election cycle where Cruz should be the strongest. Reminds me of the Ali -
Foreman fight. Ali took all of George's best punches early in the fight, letting George punch
himself out. George was then helpless.
As the race moves to the rust belt, the northeast, and more populous northern states, Cruz will
be out of his heart land. Rubio should drop before Florida, or he will permanently damage his
political career.
On the Dem side, much the same, but to a lesser extent. The north should be friendlier to Bernie.
But all those establishment Super Delegates will be impossible to overcome. Frankly, the Dem
system is less democratic than the GOP system with the Super Delegates keeping the establishment
in power.
PS
Massachusetts 56 minutes ago
Cruz is climbing, which is bad news, worse, frankly, than Trump climbing. Cruz is at the bottom of
my picks - if a person was forced to pick - for the Republican line up. Kansas going for him is no
surprise, as they did remove evolution from the public school curriculum (they put it back but also
included "intelligent design"). Ted's kind of place. But Maine? What on earth was that all about?
The state with the motto "the way life should be"? Does that now mean "the way pro-life should be"?
Completely disappointed, Maniacs. Expected more from a favorite state.
JWP
Goleta, CA 1 hour ago
Hillary Clinton has not done well outside the Old Confederacy. She squeezed past Sanders in
Massachusetts, and her two caucus victories in Iowa and Nevada were not particularly overwhelming.
All her other victories have been in the Confederate South--in states that are going to vote
Republican in November.
Meanwhile Sanders has won convincingly in New Hampshire, Vermont, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska,
Colorado, and Minnesota.
The race is still wide open.
Robert
Maine 2 hours ago
One very big thing I notice Mr. Martin didn't bother mentioning as he glossed briefly over Bernie's
wins, is this:
Turnout in the Democratic Causus in Kansas, was HIGHER than in 2008. That's a first this election
season. Up 'til now, Democratic turnout has been dismally low - lower than in 2008.
Twitter caucus goers in Nebraska also report huge turnout. Although this isn't official, it may also
be that turnout in NE is also greater than 2008.
The message being, the Democratic candidate who can excite voters and inspire large turnout is
Bernie Sanders, not Hillary Clinton. As can be seen from pics of the caucuses today, many
much-maligned Millenials turned out to vote for Bernie.
So, the "Hillary's already won" thing isn't working. Bernie's only going to get stronger once we're
out of the South.
The signatories are well within their rights to reject Trump, and at least some of their complaints are accurate. One problem
with this letter is that several of the complaints they level against Trump could be lodged against the other candidates still in
the race, but there is no similar effort being made to oppose or criticize them. More to the point, there is not even a brief acknowledgement
that Republican foreign policy failures have helped Trump succeed, nor is there any recognition that the hawkish obsession with "resolve"
and "strength" have made Republican voters receptive to Trump's unrealistic and reckless promises. Robert Farley made a related point
earlier today...
... ... ...
I agree that his rhetoric on torture is deplorable and should be condemned, but then we should also condemn other candidates that
endorse the use of torture. We should also condemn the previous administration for using torture on detainees, which had the effect
of making support for illegal and immoral methods into a sick litmus test for many on the right. Another question that the signatories
don't attempt to address is whether the other candidates are even more dangerous when we have a very good idea of how they
would conduct foreign policy once in office. They are appalled by Trump's "hateful, anti-Muslim rhetoric," as well they should be,
but how is that worse than the other candidates' willingness to inflict death and destruction on predominantly Muslim countries again
and again?
I have got to have a laugh at the letter and anyone the least bit familiar with US foreign policy should.
It's a little late for the signers and writers to be claiming some manner of moral high ground on foreign policy.
I guess the trick is to take each signatory and measure their views against the rather weak positions in the letter. One would
think that given their education and connection they'd make a more compelling case. These are the promoters and designers of the
the policies that brought us here. Its a little late to disavow what you have wrought.
What they have done is wiped out any ethical veracity they have for considering their views.
They supported the invasions of
Iraq
Afghanistan
The dismantling of stable democracies in Syria, Egypt, Libya and the Ukraine.
They have advanced arguments in support of enhanced interrogations
They have supported treating prisoners from th battle field as terrorists
They are responsible for the quagmired mess that is Guantanamo
Even the cliche'd "pot calling the kettle black" doesn't paint the hypocrisy they wear.
Whatever his rhetorical short comings in making his case and his case is very strong and salient. He is a moderate in the light
of most of these signatories and peacenik in light of several.
Why don't the neo-cons, the republican party bosses, and the Democrat machine just go ahead and embrace? Make public the consummation
of their union that we all know has existed for some time now? Then let this loathsome Hydra meet her fate against Heracles in
November. The harder they come, the harder they fall, one and all. I can't wait.
Wait, Max Boot is denouncing Trump for his admiration of dictators? The same Max Boot who lectured us on how we need to "stand
with" a brutal Islamist theocracy in Saudi Arabia while it carpet bombs Yemen and beheads political prisoners?
While I agree Trump is a huge risk and a sub-optimal candidate, if he as President could make progress on the following, I'd be
pleased.
IMMIGRATION: Stop illegal immigration, force self-deportation by enforcing hiring laws on business, reduce HB1 visas, etc.
JOBS: I'm OK with light protectionism and slightly higher prices to keep jobs here. See Harley Davidson
FOREIGN POLICY: Tap Bacevich (or someone similar in outlook) as an advisor and stop our fruitless meddling around the world.
It's the Department of Defense, not Offense.
It's precisely his lack of experience that should get him a pass on some of the nonsense he puts out on foreign policy. At
least he has an excuse, unlike say Clinton.
And it's not unusual for US presidents to learn foreign policy on the job. The odds are that an obviously intelligent and competent
man such as Trump will behave more sensibly when he has had a chance to get on top of the issues, and will likely back off many
of these positions.
With Clinton, Cruz or Rubio, however, the fear is precisely the opposite – that they will probably actually try to do the things
they say they think ought to be done. That prospect ought to be truly terrifying.
The worry about the more mainstream candidates such as
As many have noted, the biggest problem with the signatories of this letter is their support of past policies that were an utter
disaster. And it is so ironic that they mention, albeit briefly, Trump's threat to civil liberties, which I find to be one of
the most frightening aspects of his character, when they have strongly supported torture, kidnapping and indefinite imprisonment
in the past.
The "foreign policy experts" are the exact people I've attacking and criticizing for years now, so of course I'm not listening
to them now. I hold them directly responsible for the past twenty-five years of failure, and the fact that they won't even pretend
to have to learned anything makes them worse than Hillary Clinton.
In the past, they either supported, explained away, or ignored: 1) torture; 2) U.S. supporting dictators and authoritarian
regimes; 3) illegal, expensive, and/or ill-conceived wars; 4) violations of civil liberties; 5) expansive executive powers for
the president; 6) demeaning and degrading their political opponents; and 7) sweeping and irresponsible rhetoric from the president.
To call them rank hypocrites goes without saying at this point.
They know when Trump's in office, the gravy train ends for them that's the real cause of concern, since their parasitism comes
to an end.
And this is exactly why I am a Trumpet, a Trumpeteer, and would be willing to call myself a Trumperican rather than vote for any
of the establishment candidates.
I know that Trump will have some people like this as advisors because they represent 95% of the foreign policy establishment,
I just hope that he has a couple of sane rationalists in whatever staff he assembles.
Trump at least shows the ability for critical thinking and skepticism, a skill that all of the other candidates completely
lack.
1. After the 2nd debate there was a concerted effort to portray him as an unschooled novice after the bookish Carly gave precise
answers on which military assets she would use to provoke Russia. Trump held up to the pressure and didn't waver.
2. In the last debate, Trump gave a common sense answer that being a mediator requires impartiality.
3. In the debate prior to that, he pointed out that you can't be all over the place and fight everybody all at once and be obsessed
with Russia, Assad, Iran, and ISIS, and said that he would focus on ISIS and not the others.
4. He rebuked the notion that we should be angry at Russia and China for not being submissive to us and pursuing their own interests.
Is he perfect? No but he is the closest thing to an adult that we have at the moment.
"I agree that his rhetoric on torture is deplorable and should be condemned, but then we should also condemn other candidates
that endorse the use of torture."
The essential analysis must be "why" we are using torture, other than treating it as a standalone phenomenon, as if it exists
apart from the unnecessary, illegal and immoral wars. It doesn't exist apart, it is one of the consequences of desperation in
waging wars and the fact that wars are being waged is the justification for it, as a necessary means to win.
Torture continues, but is redefined legally by hairsplitting constitutional lawyers intent on obfuscation by Orwellian redefinitions
and secret memos and carried out by secret Presidential covert orders. That is one of the essential reasons that secrecy about
the practice continues, why no one has ever been brought to account for it and that those who have engaged in any whistleblowing
action have been subject to draconian Espionage Act retaliation. If it were not so, this would hardly be so obsessive. Why? Because
the wars proliferate, therefore this behavior that has become part of the arsenal cannot be renounced except in a propaganda sense.
The end to torture will come when the foreign war addiction ends. Given that Trump is the only candidate appalled by the waste
and futile destruction involved in waging the failed wars and wants to end the trillions necessary to keep fighting them and spend
it instead for domestic infrastructure, this will end torture in fact.
It's a simple equation. End war, you end torture by removing the incentive to use it as a means of war. Deeds, not words, will
accomplish that in reality, not the duplicitous language of those who rebrand assassination as "the disposition matrix."
We need more on the genesis and development of that letter. At the bottom in small print it says it was "coordinated" by Eliot
Cohen. Given that Cohen has advocated for war against multiple Muslim countries and was a leading advocate for the Iraq War, quite
a few signatory names seem "off".
For example, it's hard to believe Dan Drezner would want his name to be associated with Cohen's track record of bad judgment
leading to bloody disaster. I don't mean Drezner shouldn't condemn Trump. I mean that reasonable, decent chaps like Drezner, applying
the same moral and practical calculus that obliges them to condemn Trump, should not permit their names to be associated with
Cohen's.
Our failure to shame and shun Cohen and other neoconservatives and warhawks for their roles in our recent strategic and humanitarian
disasters, in hundreds of thousands of needless deaths and trillions in wasted treasure, continues to compromise and distort public
discourse. That someone with Cohen's history can still imagine himself in a position to influence public opinion is shocking,
really, a reminder of the drop in public and intellectual standards that goes very far in explaining the rise of Trump himself.
The letter should be audited, if only to confirm who among its supposed signatories actually agreed to have their anti-Trump
opinion "coordinated" by someone implicated in more death, waste, and damage to America than David Duke and his invisible empire
will ever inflict.
(As of this writing the letter as linked above no longer appears.)
"The dismantling of stable democracies in Syria, Egypt, Libya." Not sure where you're getting your information from, but these
three countries have NEVER been stable democracies. Stable autocracies more like it.
Melvin Backstrom, you are correct that Libya, Syria, and even Egypt were not democracies but they were stable govts prior to outside
attempts to overthrow them. Gaddafi would have defeated the rebels there were it not for NATO intervention.
The larger point is that the neocons believe in disruptive regime change to promote, U.S. approved Democracies. The neocons
are truly activists.
Over the years, Putin has been repeating a consistent theme pleading that the undermining of existing govt institutions breeds
chaos. We can call it 'the Putin doctrine' and it stands in stark contrast to Neocon ideology.
Even in Ukraine, where Putin is most vulnerable of hypocrisy, he has been very cautious. He has no interest in trying to seize
all of Ukraine and rule over a people who hate Russia. Instead, he took a small area heavily populated by Russians that was vital
to their security interests. In the Donbass, he prevented the rebels from advancing out of their territory and negotiated a treaty
where they would remain part of Ukraine.
This throwing down the gauntlet by establishment doyens makes me want to throw down a similar gauntlet by combing through National
Review's archives for Pollyannaish quotes on trade pacts, and then posting them online. That will be a graphic way of making clear
that the establishment (including the signatories of the Open Letter) are either clueless about what their beloved "Washington
Consensus" means for ordinary Americans, or they just don't care. Idiots.
Myron Hudson says:
March 3, 2016 at 6:56 pm Having these fools speak out against Trump pretty much cements my support for him at least in the primaries.
I'm all about electing the least dangerous person.
Mr. Libertarian: "In the past, they either supported, explained away, or ignored: 1) torture; 2) U.S. supporting dictators and authoritarian
regimes; 3) illegal, expensive, and/or ill-conceived wars; 4) violations of civil liberties; 5) expansive executive powers for the
president; 6) demeaning and degrading their political opponents; and 7) sweeping and irresponsible rhetoric from the president. To
call them rank hypocrites goes without saying at this point."
I'm astounded at the raw stinking open hypocrisy of these guys. You can look at their list of foreign policy criticisms of Trump,
and almost every single one is something that they supported, justified and helped carry out.
If Krugman is so concerned with con men, why he is supporting Hillary? Just
because she is a con women? Or he wants to become one by securing a
position in her administration?
Notable quotes:
"... First, there's the con Republicans usually manage to pull off in national elections ... where they pose as a serious, grown-up party honestly trying to grapple with America's problems. The truth is that that party died a long time ago, that these days it's voodoo economics and neocon fantasies all the way down. But the establishment wants to preserve the facade, which will be hard if the nominee is someone who refuses to play his part. ... ..."
"... Equally important, the Trump phenomenon threatens the con the G.O.P. establishment has been playing on its own base..., the bait and switch in which white voters are induced to hate big government by dog whistles about Those People, but actual policies are all about rewarding the donor class. ..."
"... What Donald Trump has done is tell the base that it doesn't have to accept the whole package. He promises to make America white again - surely everyone knows that's the real slogan, right? - while simultaneously promising to protect Social Security and Medicare, and hinting at (though not actually proposing) higher taxes on the rich. Outraged establishment Republicans splutter that he's not a real conservative, but neither, it turns out, are many of their own voters. ..."
"... As I see it, then, we should actually welcome Mr. Trump's ascent. Yes, he's a con man, but he is also effectively acting as a whistle-blower on other people's cons. That is, believe it or not, a step forward in these weird, troubled times. ..."
"Why, exactly, the Republican establishment is really so horrified by Mr. Trump?":
Clash of Republican Con Artists, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times
: So Republicans are going to nominate a candidate who talks complete
nonsense on domestic policy; who believes that foreign policy can be conducted
via bullying and belligerence; who cynically exploits racial and ethnic
hatred for political gain.
But that was always going to happen, however the primary season turned out.
The only news is that the candidate in question is probably going to be
Donald Trump.
Establishment Republicans denounce Mr. Trump as a fraud... In fact, you
have to wonder why, exactly, the Republican establishment is really so horrified
by Mr. Trump. Yes, he's a con man, but they all are. ...
The answer, I'd suggest, is that the establishment's problem with Mr. Trump
isn't the con he brings; it's the cons he disrupts.
First, there's the con Republicans usually manage to pull off in national
elections ... where they pose as a serious, grown-up party honestly trying
to grapple with America's problems. The truth is that that party died a
long time ago, that these days it's voodoo economics and neocon fantasies
all the way down. But the establishment wants to preserve the facade, which
will be hard if the nominee is someone who refuses to play his part. ...
Equally important, the Trump phenomenon threatens the con the G.O.P. establishment
has been playing on its own base..., the bait and switch in which white
voters are induced to hate big government by dog whistles about Those People,
but actual policies are all about rewarding the donor class.
What Donald Trump has done is tell the base that it doesn't have to accept
the whole package. He promises to make America white again - surely everyone
knows that's the real slogan, right? - while simultaneously promising to
protect Social Security and Medicare, and hinting at (though not actually
proposing) higher taxes on the rich. Outraged establishment Republicans
splutter that he's not a real conservative, but neither, it turns out, are
many of their own voters.
Just to be clear, I find the prospect of a Trump administration terrifying...
But you should also be terrified by the prospect of a President Rubio, sitting
in the White House with his circle of warmongers, or a President Cruz, whom
one suspects would love to bring back the Spanish Inquisition.
As I see it, then, we should actually welcome Mr. Trump's ascent. Yes, he's
a con man, but he is also effectively acting as a whistle-blower on other
people's cons. That is, believe it or not, a step forward in these weird,
troubled times.
"... Donald Trump represents a challenge to the status quo because he doesn't want to democratize the world through bombing raids, says Richard Spencer from Radix Journal. US Congressman Alan Grayson agrees, saying the Republicans are desperate to stop Trump. ..."
"... The Republican establishment as reflected in Mitt Romney and others is absolutely desperate to stop Donald Trump. But what really is underneath it all is the fact that Trump does not adhere to the Republican Orthodoxy: "they've never met a war they didn't like." ..."
"... After Donald Trump and Fox news journalist Megyn Kelly's previous meeting, comedians and politicians alike have taken quite a few shots at Trump. What should we expect further? ..."
"... From Senator Marco Rubio to Mitt Romney Trump doesn't seem to be afraid of any speeches condemning him. Why is he so self-confident? ..."
"... The fact is Trump's version of nationalism, this idea "it's not be the world's policeman," let's actually look after ourselves, let's use the government to help the people. This kind of nationalism that cuts across left and right, cuts across liberal and conservative, cuts across Democrats and Republicans. It is a new thing for Americans. Trump is leading it. I would never have predicted that, but Trump is leading it. And the fact is the status quo doesn't like it because this is upsetting some of their assumptions. It is upsetting what they take for granted and so they are all in unison attacking him. And in the US the so-called conservatives, the left, the liberals they are all attacking Trump of the exact same reasons. ..."
"... Is Trump likely to issue an apology after his offensive comments towards Megyn Kelly? ..."
Donald Trump represents a challenge to the status quo because he doesn't want to
democratize the world through bombing raids, says Richard Spencer from Radix Journal. US
Congressman Alan Grayson agrees, saying the Republicans are desperate to stop Trump.
US Congressman Alan Grayson: I have to agree, just
this once, with Donald Trump. I think it is irrelevant. Part of the
problem that we are facing this year is that the candidates want to
make this some kind of war of personalities rather than a discussion
of what is good for our country. I think that is very unfortunate. I
don't think the Trump candidacy should be determined on matters of the
value of a degree from Trump University, or any of these ad hominem
attacks that we are seeing by one candidate against the other – often,
by the way, perpetrated by Mr. Trump himself. I don't really think it
matters what the size of his fingers might be; I don't think it
matters that Rubio is definitely a thirsty young man. I don't think it
matters that Bush is low energy, although he is certainly is. These
are not the things that we should use to determine who our national
leaders should be. Obviously, they've all indulged in it from one time
or another. And I don't think the voters favor that. But the fact is
the voters are going to make up their minds based upon what's good for
the country, what's good for them individually. I think the voters
have this one right.
The
Republican establishment as reflected in Mitt Romney and others is
absolutely desperate to stop Donald Trump. But what really is
underneath it all is the fact that Trump does not adhere to the
Republican Orthodoxy: "they've never met a war they didn't like."
It is true that there are hawks within the Republican Party who
are dismayed by the fact that Donald Trump rightly points out that the
war in Iraq was a disaster in everyone's light. And they are
disconcerted by the fact that he is willing to criticize predecessors
like George W. Bush, and frankly, rightly so. America lost four
trillion dollars in the war in Iraq and we left a quarter of a million
of our young men and women with permanent brain abnormalities because
of injuries they suffered in that war. At least there is one
Republican candidate who is willing to actually address those issues
which has caused the hawks a great deal of consternation.
RT: After Donald Trump and Fox news journalist
Megyn Kelly's previous meeting, comedians and politicians alike have
taken quite a few shots at Trump. What should we expect further?
Richard Spencer from Radix Journal: I think we're
going to expect fireworks. In fact the mainstream media, the so-called
conservative movements and the Republican Party have all declared war
on Donald Trump. It was a silent war for many months, now it is an
explicit war. They want anyone but Trump; they want anyone else in the
Republican Party to win this nomination. It doesn't matter if Rubio is
a moderate and Ted Cruz is an extreme Libertarian or something. They
want anyone but Trump because Trump actually represents a different
ideology from traditional American conservatism. Trump actually
represents something closer to European nationalism. It is a version
of the right that is "let's look at the Americans first, let's use
the government to help the American people, let's actually have
friendly relations with great powers like Russia as opposed to: let's
democratize the world through bombing raids." So Trump really
represents something different. He represents a challenge to the
status quo. And that is why the conservative movement, the Republican
Party, the mainstream media are all out to get him.
RT: From Senator Marco Rubio to Mitt Romney
Trump doesn't seem to be afraid of any speeches condemning him. Why is
he so self-confident?
RS: Trump is self-confident because he is Trump;
he was born self-confident. But he is also self-confident because he
has so much popular support. He has brought so many new people into
the Republican Party and he has brought so many more people into the
Republican Party than Mitt Romney did who attacked him. The fact is
Trump's version of nationalism, this idea "it's not be the world's
policeman," let's actually look after ourselves, let's use the
government to help the people. This kind of nationalism that cuts
across left and right, cuts across liberal and conservative, cuts
across Democrats and Republicans. It is a new thing for Americans.
Trump is leading it. I would never have predicted that, but Trump is
leading it. And the fact is the status quo doesn't like it because
this is upsetting some of their assumptions. It is upsetting what they
take for granted and so they are all in unison attacking him. And in
the US the so-called conservatives, the left, the liberals they are
all attacking Trump of the exact same reasons.
RT: Is Trump likely to issue an apology after
his offensive comments towards Megyn Kelly?
RS: I couldn't imagine Donald Trump apologizing. I
don't think he said anything completely outrageous towards Megyn
Kelly. The fact is Megyn Kelly doesn't like Donald Trump. Megyn Kelly
wants the status quo to continue. Megun Kelly wants a neoconservative
candidate or a typical Republican candidate. Maybe Kelly doesn't like
this new kind of nationalism that Trump represents. So there's no way…
that Donald Trump will apologize to Megyn Kelly. What he said
effectively is that "Megyn Kelly is out to get me." … But the
fact is, Trump has proved that you don't need Fox News; Trump has
proved you don't need the GOP establishment; Trump has proved you
don't need the conservative movement establishment. Trump is Trump.
Trump has a populist base that's bigger than those forces.
"... Remember 2008 Obomo the CHANGE candidate, change you can believe in? Even got a Nobel Peace price before he started his presidency and turn out to be a Murderer-in-chief, Liar-in-chief, Warmonger-in-chief.... ..."
"... Tulsi Gabbard is well-spoken and pretty. Bernie is not. This makes a balanced (appealing) ticket. That she has rescinded her DNC creds for Bernie is wonderful for Bernie. It is imperative that Bernie does not look this gift horse in the mouth. He MUST appoint Tulsi Gabbard as his Veep NOW and run with it. If he does not, then he is a sheep herder for Hillary. This is what I suggested all along. ..."
"... Aloha. Im Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard. As a veteran of two Middle East deployments I know, first-hand, the cost of war. ..."
"... I know how important it is that our Commander in Chief has the sound judgement required to know when to use Americas military power and when not to use that power. ..."
"... Shes redefining Bernies campaign, taking over foreign policy as Commandress in Chief of, not the United States, but the armed forces. And shes just about to turn 35. Openly saying give peace a chance. I was going to write-her-in in the TX Democratic primary, now Ill vote Bernie ... if he does the obvious, the only, correct thing. Im afraid he wont though. Im afraid the sheepdog is running to lose. ..."
"... Corporate media will create a corporate state. I hope one day people will stop calling corporate media the mainstream media. It is corporately controlled media. It is not mainstream. ..."
"... REGIME CHANGE! She said the magic word! In the official Western narrative a thing called regime change does not exists. It is basically Putins propaganda, a pro-Russian false narrative that Putins Troll Army is trying to insert into the discussion. ..."
"... I never served but I was friends with a medic and Army Ranger. Neither came back the same. Special Ops do the worst things and medics see the worst things. ..."
"... The GOP is plotting against Der Fuehrer Trump, and Clintons DNC is busy rigging elections. ..."
"... I find it interesting that you posted this US political challenge to the Sanders camp. It is hard to not keep smoking that hopium stuff......if only we could nudge t he system a bit here or there and things will get better. I guess it is that or serious evolution and it may be too late for that to be effective for our species long term survival. ..."
"... POTUS makes fuckall difference. Even if they were saints, the rest of the corporate political complex would eat them alive before they could institute any meaningful change. I simply can not imagine any positive outcome of any US election whatsoever. How many times must we watch this circus repeat itself before connecting the dots? Its ann utter waste of energy. Remember, these idiots only have power that we the people give them. Well, they are not getting any from me. ..."
"... Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) is a two-tour Iraq vet who has given the most blunt and accurate statements on what is really going on in Syria that I have seen from anyone in Washington. ..."
"... She just resigned her position as co-chair of the DNC to formally endorse Bernie Sanders, specifically because of his anti-imperialist leanings and despite the fact that his record is inconsistent on the relevant issues. ..."
"... I listened to a discussion on Dutch radio with 4 students attending Webster University on Leiden campus in The Netherlands. Students were divided in 2 Republicans and 2 Democrats and were asked about the election and how they observed it from outside the US. All four were equally abhorred by the circus and show man Trump. The two Democrats would vote for Sanders and the two Republicans were split, one was for John Kasich and the other was split between Rubio and Kasich. If Trump would be the Republican nominee, one of the Republican students would vote for Sanders and with a Trump as president, one of the students said she would not return to the US but live abroad. A particularly strong showing for Bernie Sanders! ..."
"... In 1906 German sociologist Werner Sombart wrote an essay entitled Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? that sought to explain why the US, alone among industrialized democracies, had not developed a major socialist movement. ..."
"... Today, however, we need to pose a different question: why are there socialists in the United States? In this nation that has long been resistant to socialisms call, who are all these people who now suddenly deem themselves socialists? Where did they come from? What do they mean by socialism? ..."
Tulsi Gabbard, a U.S. Congress representative from Hawaii, stepped down as a vice chair of the
Democrat National Committee to endorse Bernie Sanders. In the video below the fold she explains her
reasoning. It is Clinton's militarism in foreign policies that makes her take the other side.
Described as "libertarian-leaning progressive" the woman is smart, pretty and speaks well. She
is also a former officer in the U.S. military with combat experience and an interest in foreign policy.
Politically her endorsement is manna from heaven for Sanders.
Sanders should IMMEDIATELY offer her the Vice-President slot. Her task in the campaign is to stand
in on all foreign policy issues. Sanders then can continue to focus on inequality in the United States.
Hillary Clinton would have no chance to beat that team. Unlike the neoconned Clinton, a /bernie_sanders.Gabbard
ticket can attract young voters which will be needed to beat Trump. If Clinton runs against Trump
the large and growing "anything but Clinton" crowd would likely let her loose.
Someone tell Sanders that he better act fast to announce her nomination before Clinton collects
more states and takes away the buzz that the Sanders campaign urgently needs.
Remember 2008 Obomo the CHANGE candidate, change you can believe in? Even got a Nobel Peace
price before he started his presidency and turn out to be a Murderer-in-chief, Liar-in-chief,
Warmonger-in-chief....
When will we the VOTERS wake up and never trust any politicians?
Tulsi Gabbard is well-spoken and pretty. Bernie is not. This makes a balanced (appealing)
ticket. That she has rescinded her DNC creds for Bernie is wonderful for Bernie. It is imperative
that Bernie does not look this gift horse in the mouth. He MUST appoint Tulsi Gabbard as his Veep
NOW and run with it. If he does not, then he is a sheep herder for Hillary. This is what I suggested
all along.
I also said that JEB! would be our next President. I am happy to be wrong about that. BUT You
can't rule out the Bush Crime Family yet.
. . . but we need to think this Tulsi Gabbard thing through.
With a president that would be 75 yo, the country would have a 34 yo VP that is just one busted
aneurysm away from the most powerful position in the world . . . I mean, her surfing and karate
credentials notwithstanding, what happens when she goes toe-to-toe with Putin? Or Bibi?
Personally, I don't really care if she would just do a Sports Illustrated bathing suit cover
in the WH swimming pool. Or anywhere.
Aloha. I'm Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard. As a veteran of two Middle East deployments I know,
first-hand, the cost of war.
I know how important it is that our Commander in Chief has the sound judgement required
to know when to use America's military power and when not to use that power.
As a vice-chair of the DNC, I'm required to stay neutral in Democratic primaries, but I
cannot remain neutral any longer. The stakes are just too high.
Thats why, today, I'm endorsing Senator Bernie Sanders to be our next President and Commander
in Chief of the United States.
We need a Commander in Chief
- who has foresight,
- who exercises good judgement, and
- who understands the need for a robust foreign policy, which defends the safety and security
of the American people, and
- who will not waste precious lives and money on interventionist wars of regime change.
Such counterproductive wars undermine our national security and economic prosperity.
As these elections continue across the country, the American people are faced with a very
clear choice :
- we can elect a president who will lead us to more interventionist wars of regime change,
or
- we can elect a president who will usher in a new era of peace and prosperity.
It's with this clear choice in mind that I am resigning as vice chair of the DNC so that
I can strongly support Bernie Sanders as the Democratic Nominee for President of the United
States.
And now I ask you. Stand with me. And support Bernie Sanders.
She's redefining Bernie's campaign, taking over foreign policy as Commandress in Chief of,
not the United States, but the armed forces. And she's just about to turn 35. Openly saying give
peace a chance. I was going to write-her-in in the TX Democratic primary, now I'll vote Bernie
... if he does the obvious, the only, correct thing. I'm afraid he won't though. I'm afraid the
sheepdog is running to lose.
Bernie will likely lose the election tomorrow. The Southern States will vote for Clinton and they
will decide the election. Its shocking and appalling that the deciding states will be states that
the Democrats will never win in a general election.
I am holding out hope for Texas. A lot of young people will vote for Sanders and I hope that
latinos will vote against Clinton. I can not understand why latinos would vote for a candidate
that sends back young children and supports the policies of the Deporter in Chief.
I have had to hold back some rascist sounding rants lately. I am not a racist but it is hard
to not sound like one when black voters are voting at 90% for Clinton. How can one hope to not
stereotype when an ethnic group is voting at those rates. It'd be one thing if she did not constantly
use "dog whistle" language.
O and on MSNBC, I watch it for background noise, had a 5-10 minute rally for Trump on TV.
Not a mention of the 40 cities that held Bernie marches or Tulsi Gabbard. Everything is about
the republicans.
Corporate media will create a corporate state. I hope one day people will stop calling
corporate media the mainstream media. It is corporately controlled media. It is not mainstream.
And finally, Jill Stein is a joke. She managed to win a city council seat. If you want to go
with a third party check out the Justice Party. The Green Party is a bunch of well off white liberals
that managed to chase a Civil Rights leader (Elaine Brown) out of the party. I do not know where
Jill Stein stood on that issue. I doubt it was on the right side since many people left the party
over that issue.
REGIME CHANGE! She said the magic word! In the official Western narrative a thing called "regime
change" does not exists. It is basically Putin's propaganda, a pro-Russian false narrative that
Putin's Troll Army is trying to insert into the discussion.
The concept is similar to "Color Revolution". Just two years ago Russian media, including
RT , would always write "color revolution" in
quotes . Now they are
openly using the term.
Inkan1969 | Feb 29, 2016 6:15:57 PM | 34
"...interventionist wars of regime change"
sound like clichés.
Any revolutionary idea, once it is universally adopted, becomes a cliché. We are still a long
way from calling R2P by its proper name, regime change .
I never served but I was friends with a medic and Army Ranger. Neither came back the same.
Special Ops do the worst things and medics see the worst things.
Medics treat soldiers and civilians. They give treatment at the front. I do not know if she
was on the front lines but medics see action and she has seen some of the worst injuries and deaths.
I do not doubt her credibility on this issue. I may disagree on some points but I do not doubt
that she is actually aware of what is at stake.
To prohibit the use of funds for the provision of assistance to Syrian opposition groups
and individuals.
1.Prohibition on provision of assistance to Syrian opposition groups and individuals
Notwithstanding any other provision of law, funds available to the Central Intelligence
Agency, the Department of Defense, or any other agency or entity of the United States involved
in intelligence activities, or to the National Security Council or its staff may not be obligated
or expended to provide assistance, including training, equipment, supplies, stipends, construction
of training and associated facilities, and sustainment, to any element of the Syrian opposition
or to any other Syrian group or individual seeking to overthrow the government of the Syrian
Arab Republic, unless, after the date of the enactment of this Act, funds are specifically
authorized to be appropriated and appropriated by law for such purpose.
@38 Kalen, 'blatantly abandoning their unalienable rights to self-determination and democratic
system of people's rule, based on equality in the law, and one voter one vote principle.'
Yeah. That's our problem all right. You get a gold star for mentioning it. Care to take a stab
at a solution?
@39 AEF ' I am not a racist but it is hard not to sound like one when black voters are voting
at 90% for Clinton.'
Glen
Ford's not a racist either. Don't blame the victims ... they've been voting the lessor of
two evils since they've been 'allowed' to vote.
On the one hand; it amazes me to see the excitement about "possibilities" in the bread and circuses.
There is always the shiny; in this case it's Tulsi Gabbard; she'll save Bernie.
The GOP is plotting against Der Fuehrer Trump, and Clinton's DNC is busy rigging elections.
But on the other hand; it's a sad example that most just cannot grasp the reality of what's
really happened to the U.S..
Short of a genuine revolution (you know; in the streets, pitchforks and all) it's over. Your
votes are a cruel joke to maintain the illusion.
But I guess it's just too horrendous to contemplate the present reality for most folks. So,
you remain compliant victims of your own sloth.
I find it interesting that you posted this US political challenge to the Sanders camp. It
is hard to not keep smoking that hopium stuff......if only we could nudge t he system a bit here
or there and things will get better. I guess it is that or serious evolution and it may be too
late for that to be effective for our species long term survival.
I was an early supporter of Sanders but have lost the energy to face the "no-one-is-good-enough
Jack Smith types as well as the "Its Her Turn" types. I wonder how many are being paid to infect
MoA with agnotology?
The next two weeks should be interesting as we see the machinations of the past political machinery
react to and attempt to manufacture cohesion around the 2016 race for the puppet house.
Now it the haters/non-sharing types could be shut down as effectively as the Occupy folks were.........
If Sanders wants to win, he should appoint Tulsi as his running mate.
But she announced her decision YESTERDAY MORNING(!!) and he hasn't done so.
Now he has missed the opportunity for Super Tuesday (with 12 States voting) .
<> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <>
Tulsi is perfect because she can appeal to women and people of color and she brings military/foreign
experience that Sanders sorely lacks.
I hope that the failure of Sanders to seize yet another opportunity TO WIN will open
the eyes of those that just can't believe that Sanders values his connection to the Democratic
leadership (Obama, Hillary, Schumer, and more are 'friends') is far more important to him than
winning. He really IS a sheepdog.
Once we understand that it is about what kind of a society we want to live in, other questions
arise. How much is enough for each of us? How much is too much? At what point does someone's amassing
of what ultimately are our resources represent an unacceptable taking from the rest of us? When
the moral and societal elements are given their rightful place in the discussion, it doesn't take
a lot to understand why modern economics and politics go to such lengths to excise any mention
of them. Modern economics and politics are tools of the rich and elites whose purpose is to maintain
their wealth and position at our expense. If morality is brought up, they have no defense. They
lose. So they make sure it is never brought up. Problem solved.
Hugh, from Ian Welsh's blog - February 29, 2016
I thought this was a great statement of the U.S.'s dilemma; one which isn't being, and won't
be, resolved.
But all that CIA money failed to corrupt the Syrian military officers. The soldiers reported
the CIA's bribery attempts to the Ba'athist regime. In response, the Syrian army invaded the
American Embassy, taking Stone prisoner. After harsh interrogation, Stone made a televised
confession of his roles in the Iranian coup and the CIA's aborted attempt to overthrow Syria's
legitimate government. The Syrians ejected Stone and two U.S. Embassy staffers-the first time
any American State Department diplomat was barred from an Arab country. The Eisenhower White
House hollowly dismissed Stone's confession as "fabrications" and "slanders," a denial swallowed
whole by the American press, led by the New York Times and believed by the American people,
who shared Mosaddegh's idealistic view of their government. Syria purged all politicians sympathetic
to the U.S. and executed for treason all military officers associated with the coup. In retaliation,
the U.S. moved the Sixth Fleet to the Mediterranean, threatened war and goaded Turkey to invade
Syria. The Turks assembled 50,000 troops on Syria's borders and backed down only in the face
of unified opposition from the Arab League whose leaders were furious at the U.S. intervention.
Even after its expulsion, the CIA continued its secret efforts to topple Syria's democratically
elected Ba'athist government. The CIA plotted with Britain's MI6 to form a "Free Syria Committee"
and armed the Muslim Brotherhood to assassinate three Syrian government officials, who had
helped expose "the American plot," according to Matthew Jones in "The 'Preferred Plan': The
Anglo-American Working Group Report on Covert Action in Syria, 1957." The CIA's mischief pushed
Syria even further away from the U.S. and into prolonged alliances with Russia and Egypt.
Maybe the move is by Democrats worried about their jobs, who see the increasingly likely outcome
of a matchup between The Hil and The Donald : The Donald wins. They've already lost the congress.
The first time I heard the name Tulsi Gabbard was when she co-sponsored
HR 4108 calling
for a cutoff in support for al-CIAduh in Syria. The link there, posted by somebody, was to herself
being interviewed - primed and boosted really - by Wolf Blitzer. I discovered then that she was
a vice-chair of the DNC. In her thirties. She must have sold her soul to the devils of DNC already
at that point.
Sorry I'm so cynical about anyone who is allowed to get as far as she has within the beast
itself, but it seems the only prudent stance to take. Even though I want to believe that there
is an alternative to The Donald/The Hil ... there simply cannot be one - a real one - from 'above'.
I know that, knew that ... yet hope dies last.
The only workable action that I can see is as layed out in
write-in elections
, or something else along those lines ... but frankly, the silence is deafening. It's a decade+
'fix', but it's taken several decades to get where we are today ... all my lifetime, I suppose.
I was born in 1947, the same year as the CIA
A journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step. There will be a tomorrow, no matter
how horrid it is, and we need to prepare for it. Well the road will rise to meet us, prepared
or no, so we ought to prepare. We are 300+ million Americans ... how can we not be able to gain
control of 546 federal positions ... and all the rest ... if we just put our minds and bodies
to the task?
It's a question of acting, or not. Simple as that. 'Not' entails a strict diet of death, devastation,
destruction, and deceit. I'm always open to suggestions on the proposed actions to take. If we
had begun in 2004 ... so let's finally begin today.
POTUS makes fuckall difference. Even if they were saints, the rest of the corporate political
complex would eat them alive before they could institute any meaningful change. I simply can not
imagine any positive outcome of any US election whatsoever. How many times must we watch this
circus repeat itself before connecting the dots? Its ann utter waste of energy. Remember, these
idiots only have power that we the people give them. Well, they are not getting any from me.
I agree. Trump is as racist as Sanders is socialist. Both are populists.
The only way to defeat the establishment is to be populist.
Sanders is actually more establishment than Trump. Sanders talks about Obama, Hillary, Schumer
as 'friends', while Trump talks about how politicians are puppets.
At the end of the day, people NEED to stop allowing themselves to be GAMED by the duopoly
Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) is a two-tour Iraq vet who has given the most blunt
and accurate statements on what is really going on in Syria that I have seen from anyone in Washington.
She just resigned her position as co-chair of the DNC to formally endorse Bernie Sanders,
specifically because of his anti-imperialist leanings and despite the fact that his record is
inconsistent on the relevant issues.
With people like her advising him, it might just be possible to educate him on the realities
of the "war on terror," what countries are behind them and why. Since Clinton is one of those
behind them, those who want to dismiss Sanders for his inconsistencies on these issues might want
to think again.
I called Gabbard's office today and invited her to join VFP. I hope my friends in Hawaii will
email her and support the idea, and ask their friends to do the same. And if you are not in Hawaii,
you can call her office and encourage others to do the same!
I have just found some news that Tulsi Gabbard may have personal links to a Hare Krishna cult
known as Science of Identity (whose leader is Christ Butler aka Jagad Guru). Her Chief of Staff
Kainoa Ramananda Penaroza and office manager Anya F Anthony are members of this cult. Rather than
overload my comment with several links, I suggest everyone should Google the names I have just
given.
I found out also that Gabbard opposed HR 417 which criticised the Indian government's handling
of the Gujarat state riots in 2002 that left 2000 people dead and 100,000 homeless. At the time,
Gabbard's buddy Narendra Modi was Chief Minister of Gujarat state and there are rumours that he
looked the other way when the rioting broke out.
I listened to a discussion on Dutch radio with 4 students attending
Webster University
on Leiden campus in The Netherlands. Students were divided in 2 Republicans and 2 Democrats
and were asked about the election and how they observed it from outside the US. All four were
equally abhorred by the circus and show man Trump. The two Democrats would vote for Sanders and
the two Republicans were split, one was for John Kasich and the other was split between Rubio
and Kasich. If Trump would be the Republican nominee, one of the Republican students would vote
for Sanders and with a Trump as president, one of the students said she would not return to the
US but live abroad. A particularly strong showing for Bernie Sanders!
In 1906 German sociologist Werner Sombart wrote an essay entitled "
Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? " that sought to explain why the US, alone
among industrialized democracies, had not developed a major socialist movement.
Today, however, we need to pose a different question: why are there socialists in the
United States? In this nation that has long been resistant to socialism's call, who are all
these people who now suddenly deem themselves socialists? Where did they come from? What do
they mean by socialism?
"... "This is a call for the immediate arrest of President Bill Clinton for
clear, knowing and egregious violation of the campaign laws to swing an election
in a significant way," ..."
"... "It could not be any clearer in the Massachusetts General Laws...[prohibiting]
campaigning within 150 feet of a polling station…Clinton was not only electioneering
within the boundary…photos and video show him greeting and talking up election workers
inside," ..."
A petition calling for the arrest of former President Bill Clinton for alleged
election law violations has gained over 60,000 signatures. He made appearances
at three polling precincts in Massachusetts on Super Tuesday. State officials
said he acted legally.
"This is a call for the immediate arrest of President Bill Clinton for
clear, knowing and egregious violation of the campaign laws to swing an election
in a significant way," said the petition to Massachusetts Attorney General
Maura Healey.
"It could not be any clearer in the Massachusetts General Laws...[prohibiting]
campaigning within 150 feet of a polling station…Clinton was not only electioneering
within the boundary…photos and video show him greeting and talking up election
workers inside," added the petition.
By Wednesday evening, 68,568 people had
signed the petition.
David Dayen at The Intercept has ferreted out that Larry Fink, CEO of the
giant asset manager BlackRock, is keen to become Treasury Secretary, and
has positioned himself accordingly. He'salready has such a strong influence
on Hillary's Clinton's thinking to the degree that even Andrew Ross Sorkin
has taken note of how she closely she echoes on financial service industry
matters: "…"could have been channeling Laurence D. Fink." This might seem
to be a happy coincidence were not it not for the way Fink has curried favor
with as having strong ties to Treasury by virtue of having hired former
staffers. Per Dayen:
Fink's most telling hire, however, is Cheryl Mills, arguably Clinton's
most trusted confidante. Mills was Clinton's chief of staff at the State
Department, was deputy White House counsel in the Bill Clinton administration,
and is on the board of directors of the Clinton Foundation. Fink hired
Mills for the BlackRock board of directors in October 2013, in what
observers mused was a ploy to insinuate himself into the Clinton inner
circle.
Among other BlackRock officials with ties to Clinton: Senior Managing
Director Matthew Mallow is a "Hillblazer" who has helped raise $100,000
or more in donations. Clinton held a fundraiser earlier this month at
Mallow's New York City home. There is no indication of Fink himself
contributing financially to the Clinton campaign.
"Something is rotten in the state of Denmark." – Marcellus to Horatio,
Hamlet, William Shakespeare
It's the corruption, stupid!
Shakespeare portrayed Denmark as a breeding ground of political as well
as spiritual corruption, a courtyard of human villainy.
Hillary Clinton calls it the "artful smear." Trust her. Voters say they
want honesty, when they also admire a ruthless leader.
With BlackRock's Fink in the Clinton camp, it is a fish that rots from
head to tail.
Her voters just don't get it. It's the corruption, stupid!
Surely this is the best of all possible worlds. If the great Dr. Pangloss
were here, he might say something of the sort: Truth is a precious commodity.
That's why I use it so sparingly. Lots of folks confuse bad management with
destiny.
AARP vs "60 Plus Association" (an example of a sponsored group more interested
in fake grass roots politics, than seniors' real interests)?
I have many very conservative friends, especially from back when I was
still a Republican. I left the party, though, about the same time Elizabeth
Warren did, and after a fund raiser asked us to "Fight Dirtier than Democrats."
Part of the strategy they wanted us to use was described in what I recall
as a Cato Institute suggestion to use "Leninist" propaganda (and implied
soft sabotage), exemplified in the 1996 Newt Gingrich/Frank Luntz GoPac
memo, "Language: A Key Mechanism of Control."
Part of the propaganda seemed creation of astro-turf groups like, to
me, the greatly inflated descriptions of the suspiciously sponsored "60
Plus Association" as a supposedly preferred alternative to AARP (which they
attacked for some other motives not revealed to the public, but using their
sales of insurance policies as a major "public" criticism), even though
some checking revealed the 60 Plus Association seemed far more focused on
insurance sales to the exclusion of the far more comprehensive activities
AARP participated in than just insurance sales.
By the way, very many business entities aimed at seniors seem to concentrate
on insurance sales, or include ads linked to insurance sales. You need to
judge for yourself which are opportunists vs worthy stewards of seniors'
interests and financial well being. I started by comparing the actual number
of members vs the secret sponsor's implied numbers.
That said, for me, the moment of truth that Hillary Clinton is going
to break any and all of her campaign promises to her non rich constituents,
particularly regarding the social safety net, is the moment she takes the
oath of office. For presidents, that has been the bedrock test since at
least the 1970's.
The knot in the pit of my stomach tells me that this is where she really
is on the economic policy spectrum, her recent efforts to try to eat Sanders'
lunch by appropriating some of his economic message notwithstanding: there's
a reason why she gravitates to someone like Fink. There's a reason Cheryl
Mills has been rewarded with a seat on BlackRock's Board of Directors.
Whether or not Fink is or isn't a contributor to the Clinton campaign,
that he is being floated as a possible Treasury Secretary is an example
of how the money she has "earned" on the speaking circuit has influenced
her thinking.
Either way, I don't know how she continues to credibly defend the conflicts
inherent in her relationship with the financial industry, nor do I know
how she credibly continues to portray herself as a champion of the 99%.
I don't believe her, and I certainly don't trust her.
Telling for me have been some of the recent interactions with voters
who have questioned her record on criminal justice and diversity; there's
an attitude of how-dare-you-question-me that has crept into her tone and
body language that isn't disguised by her unbelievably phony smile: it reveals
the depth of her ambition and her anger at having to work this hard for
a nomination that was not supposed to be challenged.
So, the Fink thing for me, is just one more thing I always suspected
and feared was waiting in the wings; I shudder to contemplate what else
is in that Pandora's Box.
Sanders should appoint a "forward cabinet," start building his cabinet
in advance. The advantages are huge.
1) This will lend further credibility of his platform to the skeptic
as well as give an opportunity to vet his candidates in advance, building
to the credibility of his message.
2) Add greater resolution to his agenda as his cabinet picks will have greater
expertise on the subject and backing up said position with more academic
muscle. He wouldn't be quite so helpless when being assaulted by hack economics
such as the gang of four.
3) Adds to the manpower he can add to the campaign. Assuming he can recruit
them to the campaign trail. Instead of just his VP, this is really little
more than a spokes person. Cabinet picks can be deployed to shore up battle
areas.
4) On winning, now the forward cabinet has a degree of vetting from the
voter, making it harder for the Senate to vote the pick down. The people
already know who they are and what they are about.
5) If gives fuel for Senatorial races. Senatorial candidates can declare
their support for Sander's nominee in advance as use that as a plank in
there own platform.
6) One taking office, Sanders could hit the ground running. With a cabinet
already in hand, the only thing he needs is approval from the Senate.
All Cabinet members are nominated by the President and then presented
to the Senate for confirmation or rejection by a simple majority – Wikipedia
Senator Elizabeth Warren and a few others [Sanders, Sherron Brown] might
challenge the nomination of Fink… and would Hillary risk a confrontation
with Warren et al so early in her administration? The stink over Fink would
be telling… Privatizing Social Security is a political minefield with opposition
likely from both sides of the spectrum as it enjoys widespread support.
And to the extent that Hillary would likely seek reelection to a second
term, privatizing Social Security in her first would jeopardize, if not
kill, her prospects. But once a lame duck…
"... Odds are that if Trump is close to the nomination, he will offer Cruz the vice-presidential slot and Cruz gets to maintain his anti-establishment bona fides. ..."
But despite his substantial lead in the polls, it's not yet clear whether Trump will be the
Robert E. Lee or Ulysses Grant of this war, or how total the war will be. Trump has not locked
down the nomination, and the anti-Trump establishment is pursuing three lines of attack against
him.
The first line is what might be called a grand [neocon] strategy approach. The party
foreign affairs elite is depicting him as a reckless madman who isn't fit to carry the nuclear
suitcase, let alone have control over it. This approach had its birth in an impassioned essay
published by Eliot A. Cohen, a former Bush administration official and head of the hawkish John
Hay Initiative, in The American Interest. Cohen signaled that this was a fight to the finish with
Trump: "The Republican Party as we know it may die of Trump. If it does, it will have succumbed
in part because many of its leaders chose not to fight for the Party of Lincoln "
Now, in a letter that Cohen helped organize and that was signed by dozens of senior Republican
foreign policy figures, including former World Bank President Robert Zoellick, and
neoconservative guru Robert Kagan, Trump was excoriated as "wildly inconsistent and unmoored in
principle." They also announced they would refuse to serve in a Trump administration, a sign of
just how deep the rift is becoming between Trump and the rest of the party. What's notable about
the letter is that it does not consist solely of neoconservatives.
... ... ...
The second line is to attack Trump's reputation as a straight-shooter who is calling out
the establishment elites. By calling him a "fraud and phony" and casting aspersions on his
business reputation, Romney has amplified Senator Marco Rubio's depiction of Trump as a "con
man." At the Republican debate Thursday night both Ted Cruz and Rubio planned to pile on and
create unease about Trump's moral and business character.
The third line of assault on Trump, however, is for his opponents to focus on trench
warfare. It is obviously for all the candidates to keep campaigning until Cleveland, lobbing
verbal hand grenade after grenade at Trump so that he arrives at the convention not only with a
lack of a delegate majority, but is also crippled as a candidate. This would require Rubio, the
darling of the neocon establishment and Republican financiers, and Senator Ted Cruz to play
tag-team and even contemplate joining forces as president and vice president. In this scenario,
Rubio could rescue his faltering political career by helping to slay the Trump dragon. Whether
Cruz can bring himself to cross the Rubiocon, however, may be the biggest question facing the
establishment.
Odds are that if Trump is close to the nomination, he will offer Cruz the
vice-presidential slot and Cruz gets to maintain his anti-establishment bona fides. Another plus
is that given how ill-equipped Trump is to function in the Oval Office, Cruz could play Dick
Cheney to his George W. Bush.
Looks like neocons will attack Trump, fearing that he might expose their role in 9/11 and become
an obstacle for their interventionalist foreign policy
A civil war within Republican party officially stated. The party elite opens fight against the
choice of rank-and-file members. Marco Rubio and Kasich are no longer running for president. They are
running to keep Trump from being president.
Notable quotes:
Notable quotes:
"... And it mirrored the broader slog of a Republican primary, where for months Jeb Bush, Rubio, Cruz, Kasich, Chris Christie and the rest tore each other apart to prevent one another from emerging as the chief Trump alternative. All believed they could beat Trump one-on-one. None has gotten the chance. ..."
"... In failing to back a single Trump alternative, Romney essentially called for a Republican civil war to wage through this summer, a retrenchment for an irreparably divided GOP in hopes of outmaneuvering Trump at a contested convention where party elites still control some levers of power. ..."
"... Romney's speech was certainly historic. Perhaps never before has the most recent party nominee for president so thoroughly rebuked the prohibitive front-runner for the nomination four years later. But, as Romney said in his speech, "The rules of political history have pretty much all been shredded during this campaign." ..."
"... Romney did not stand alone. Moments after he finished speaking, Sen. John McCain, the 2008 Republican nominee, seconded Romney's speech. "I share the concerns about Donald Trump that my friend and former Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, described," McCain said in a statement. ..."
"... Trump went on the attack even before Romney took the stage in Salt Lake City, blasting Romney for having "begged" for his endorsement four years earlier. In February 2012, Romney traveled to one of Trump's hotels to accept the endorsement. "There are some things that you just can't imagine happening in your life," Romney said then. "This is one of them. Being in Donald Trump's magnificent hotel and having his endorsement is a delight." ..."
"... Romney said he expected the blowback: "This may tell you what you need to know about his temperament, his stability, and his suitability to be president." As the old guard of the Republican Party cheered Romney's outspoken remarks on Thursday, there remained downside in having so prominent a party leader rip apart Trump, should he still become the nominee. ..."
It was a stirring call to arms for a strategic-voting retreat.
And it mirrored the broader slog of a Republican primary, where for months Jeb Bush, Rubio,
Cruz, Kasich, Chris Christie and the rest tore each other apart to prevent one another from emerging
as the chief Trump alternative. All believed they could beat Trump one-on-one. None has gotten the
chance.
Along the way, Trump has skated. In one remarkable statistic, Trump suffered less in attack ads
through Super Tuesday than Romney's team hurled at Newt Gingrich in the final days in Florida alone
in 2012. The Republican Party's top financiers are mobilizing now, with millions in anti-Trump ads
expected in the next two weeks, but it may be too late to slow Trump after he has carried 10 of the
first 15 contests, many of them by wide margins.
In failing to back a single Trump alternative, Romney essentially called for a Republican
civil war to wage through this summer, a retrenchment for an irreparably divided GOP in hopes of
outmaneuvering Trump at a contested convention where party elites still control some levers of power.
(Also, by not picking a single anti-Trump standard-bearer, Romney, who briefly considered running
for president again in 2016, left slightly more open the door that might allow a contested convention
to select him.)
"He's playing the members of the American public for suckers," Romney said of Trump. "He gets
a free ride to the White House and all we get is a lousy hat."
Romney's speech was certainly historic. Perhaps never before has the most recent party nominee
for president so thoroughly rebuked the prohibitive front-runner for the nomination four years later.
But, as Romney said in his speech, "The rules of political history have pretty much all been shredded
during this campaign."
Romney ripped about Trump's business background, ticking off bankruptcies and abandoned efforts.
"What ever happened to Trump Airlines?" he said. "How about Trump University? And then there's Trump
Magazine and Trump Vodka and Trump Steaks, and Trump Mortgage?" "A business genius he is not," Romney
said. Of Trump's varied stances on issues, Romney added, "Dishonesty is Donald Trump's hallmark."
Romney did not stand alone. Moments after he finished speaking, Sen. John McCain, the 2008
Republican nominee, seconded Romney's speech. "I share the concerns about Donald Trump that my friend
and former Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, described," McCain said in a statement.
"Well said," tweeted Kasich.
Trump went on the attack even before Romney took the stage in Salt Lake City, blasting Romney
for having "begged" for his endorsement four years earlier. In February 2012, Romney traveled to
one of Trump's hotels to accept the endorsement. "There are some things that you just can't imagine
happening in your life," Romney said then. "This is one of them. Being in Donald Trump's magnificent
hotel and having his endorsement is a delight."
On Thursday, Trump hammered back on NBC's "Today" show: "Mitt Romney is a stiff."
Romney said he expected the blowback: "This may tell you what you need to know about his temperament,
his stability, and his suitability to be president." As the old guard of the Republican Party cheered
Romney's outspoken remarks on Thursday, there remained downside in having so prominent a party leader
rip apart Trump, should he still become the nominee.
Said Justin Barasky, a spokesman for the super PAC dedicated to electing Hillary Clinton, understatedly,
"Certainly, having a former Republican nominee go after him is not unhelpful."
"... Bryan Pagliano, the person who set up Clinton's private server and email apparatus, was just given immunity by the Justice Department. According to The Washington Post ..."
"... These 31,830 deleted emails, by the way, were deleted without government oversight. ..."
"... Only one person set up the server that circumvented U.S. government networks and this person is Bryan Pagliano. Not long ago, Pagliano pleaded the Fifth , so this new development speaks volumes. ..."
"... The New York Times ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... I'm a Bernie supporter. And honestly, offering immunity to Pagliano is almost certainly just so they can close loose ends and begin to close their investigation. Most likely, Clinton or her aides will get called in for one last round and then the FBI will end their investigation. This says nothing to a possibility of her guilt in anything. ..."
"... Thats not an assumption-its a fact. SHE scrubbed the server when she knew the FBI had asked her for it-SHE erased over 31,000 emails, SHE has dozens of emails SHE sent and received that were SEP classification-the very highest level. THis is about corruption at the highest levels and now SHE will have to pay the piper. ..."
"... The real issue i have had for a couple of years are the middle eastern gov. Donors to the clinton foundation while she was sec. Of state... Yeah i am waiting for that to come to light. That the huge REAL as opposed to emails ..."
"... Granting "use immunity" to this witness probably means that they have little to no evidence a crime was committed, and that they need his testimony to advance the investigation. If they had evidence, they would prosecute (or threaten to prosecute), convict him, and then use him to testify about his higher-ups in exchange for leniency. Use immunity means they don't have the goods even on this small fish. ..."
"... It is not a tempest in a teapot. Only a federal judge can grant immunity, and this means they are seating a grand jury, prosecutors, whole nine yards. ..."
"... With Donald Trump revving up his attacks against Clinton, as he is proving to be the Republican nominee, you know that he's not going to let this go. Bernie Sanders may be running a campaign that doesn't get caught up on issues outside of policy, but this is exactly the kind of thing that Donald Trump will obsess about. It's like when he went after Obama's birth certificate. If he makes this a primary issue of his campaign, Hillary will be deemed guilty before anybody has a chance to say otherwise. ..."
"... Clinton wanted to avoid the Wikileaks-revealed searches into her hopefully private exchanges. ..."
Bernie Sanders's path to the presidency was never going to be easy. After surging in the polls and
consistently proving America's political establishment wrong, Sanders won Colorado and other states
on Super Tuesday. He still has a path to win the Democratic nomination via the primaries, but Bernie
Sanders just won the presidency for another reason: Hillary Clinton's quest for
"convenience."
Bryan Pagliano, the person who set up Clinton's private server and email apparatus, was just
given immunity by the Justice Department. According to
The Washington Post, "The Clintons paid Pagliano $5,000 for 'computer services' prior to
his joining the State Department, according to a financial disclosure form he filed in April 2009."
First, this can't be a right-wing conspiracy because it's President Obama's Justice Department
granting immunity to one of Hillary Clinton's closest associates. Second, immunity from what? The
Justice Department won't grant immunity to anyone unless there's potential criminal activity involved
with an FBI investigation. Third, and most importantly for Bernie Sanders, there's only one Democrat
in 2016 not linked to the FBI, Justice Department, or
31,830 deleted emails.
These 31,830 deleted emails, by the way, were deleted without government oversight.
Only one person set up the server that circumvented U.S. government networks and this person
is Bryan Pagliano. Not long ago, Pagliano
pleaded the Fifth, so this new development speaks volumes. His immunity, at this point in
Clinton's campaign, spells trouble and could lead to an announcement in
early May from the FBI about whether or not Clinton or her associates committed a crime. As stated
in
The New York Times, "Then the Justice Department will decide whether to file criminal charges
and, if so, against whom."
... ... ...
In addition to
born classified emails (emails that were classified from the start of their existence, undermining
the claim that certain emails weren't classified when Clinton stored them on her server), as well
as
Top Secret intelligence on an unguarded server stored in her basement, Hillary Clinton has never
explained the political utility of owning a private server.
Why did Hillary need to own a private server?
Aside from her excuse pertaining to convenience, why did Clinton need to circumvent U.S. government
networks?
... ... ...
There are most likely a number of reasons Clinton needed the server and Pagliano's immunity helps
the FBI immeasurable in deciphering whether or not criminal intent or behavior is a part of their
recommendation to the Justice Department. Pagliano's immunity is explained in a
Washington Post piece titled Justice Dept. grants immunity to staffer who set up Clinton
email server:
The Justice Department has granted immunity to a former State Department staffer, who worked
on Hillary Clinton's private email server, as part of a criminal investigation
into the possible mishandling of classified information, according to a senior law enforcement
official.
The official said the FBI had secured the cooperation of Bryan Pagliano, who worked on Clinton's
2008 presidential campaign before setting up the server in her New York home in 2009.
As the FBI looks to wrap up its investigation in the coming months, agents are likely
to want to interview Clinton and her senior aides about the decision to use a private server,
how it was set up, and whether any of the participants knew they were sending classified information
in emails, current and former officials said.
... Spokesmen at the FBI and Justice Department would not discuss the investigation. Pagliano's
attorney, Mark J. MacDougall, also declined to comment.
"There was wrongdoing," said a former senior law enforcement official. "But was it
criminal wrongdoing?"
... ... ...
As for the issue of criminality, Detroit's
Click on Detroit Local 4 News explains the severity of this saga in a piece titled DOJ grants
immunity to ex-Clinton staffer who set up email server:
Bryan Pagliano, a former Clinton staffer who helped set up her private email server, has accepted
an immunity offer from the FBI and the Justice Department to provide an interview to investigators,
a U.S. law enforcement official told CNN Wednesday.
With the completion of the email review, FBI investigators are expected to shift their
focus on whether the highly sensitive government information, including top secret and other classified
matters, found on Clinton's private email server constitutes a crime.
.... Huma Abedin is also part of this email investigation, as
stated in a CNN article titled Clinton emails: What have we learned?:
The State Department is furthermore being sued for the emails of top aides, and for the tens
of thousands of emails Clinton deemed personal and didn't turn over for review.
At a hearing last week in one such lawsuit, U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan said
he's considering asking the State Department to subpoena Clinton, and aide Huma Abedin, in an
effort to learn more about those emails...
Clinton and her aides insist none of the emails she sent or received were marked as classified
at the time they were sent, but more than 2,101 have been retroactively classified during the
State Department-led pre-release review process.
Whether or not the intelligence was classified at the time is irrelevant; there's already proof
of
born classified intelligence on Clinton's server. Former Obama official Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn
believes Hillary Clinton should
"drop out" of the race because of the FBI investigation.
... ... ....
Tim Black
Thank You HA Goodman! As a former Managerof Executive IT Services for an Obama Cabinet member
I can say with total certainty this dangerous handling of government correspondence Hillary Clinton
not only broke security protocols, she ripped them in half, stepped on them and did the 'Dab'.
Based on the information provided no one's framing, stalking, shalacking or setting up the Clintons.
This is the Clintons sabotaging The Clintons. I don't want to hear the cop outs "They're attacking
me!". No Madame Secretary. You're attacking yourself. No Republicans necessary!
Tab Pierce · Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
AMEN TIM!!! I to worked for the government for 5 years as an email administrator. There is
no way that she was not briefed and well versed in the protocols surrounding emails. If it had
been me the FBI would have kicked down my door day one and I would be in jail. She should be held
accountable to an even higher standard than you and I. She was the Secrtary of State for gods
sake. Igorance is no excusse and on top of that is a lie.
Malcolm Smith · Translator at Self-Employed
O lord, they used an MS Exchange server that was naked on the internet to boot. Microsoft's
pervasive OS presence in Government is all by itself a national security risk.
Scott Laytart · Los Angeles, California
I'm a Bernie supporter. And honestly, offering immunity to Pagliano is almost certainly just
so they can close loose ends and begin to close their investigation. Most likely, Clinton or her
aides will get called in for one last round and then the FBI will end their investigation. This
says nothing to a possibility of her guilt in anything.
This is not positive or negative for Clinton, other than the investigation part of this may
be over (probably) before June. If charges are filed, that's most likely when it would happen.
Or they may not... no one knows but the FBI/DoJ.
No one should take anything H.A. Goodman writes seriously.
Hillary has been asking for him to testify all along. What does immunity represent? Does it mean
that either Pagliano (or Clinton) are accused of offenses? Quite the opposite. If the DOJ thought
they had a case against Pagliano, they would not grant him immunity. In any event, for all the
shrill attention that it will get, immunity for Bryan Pagliano will help move the Hillary Clinton
email inquiry toward an end – and be one less thing for her to worry about.
Thats not an assumption-its
a fact. SHE scrubbed the server when she knew the FBI had asked her for it-SHE erased over 31,000
emails, SHE has dozens of emails SHE sent and received that were SEP classification-the very highest
level. THis is about corruption at the highest levels and now SHE will have to pay the piper.
The real issue i have had for a couple of years are the middle eastern gov. Donors to the clinton
foundation while she was sec. Of state... Yeah i am waiting for that to come to light. That the
huge REAL as opposed to emails
Granting "use immunity" to this witness probably means that they have little to no evidence a
crime was committed, and that they need his testimony to advance the investigation. If they had
evidence, they would prosecute (or threaten to prosecute), convict him, and then use him to testify
about his higher-ups in exchange for leniency. Use immunity means they don't have the goods even
on this small fish.
This is an important aspect of the campaign at this point. With Donald Trump revving up his
attacks against Clinton, as he is proving to be the Republican nominee, you know that he's not
going to let this go. Bernie Sanders may be running a campaign that doesn't get caught up on issues
outside of policy, but this is exactly the kind of thing that Donald Trump will obsess about.
It's like when he went after Obama's birth certificate. If he makes this a primary issue of his
campaign, Hillary will be deemed guilty before anybody has a chance to say otherwise.
Clinton wanted to avoid the Wikileaks-revealed searches into her hopefully private exchanges.
My God, if Merkel was being hacked, surely everyone else of note was also, both foreign and domestic.
My question is, to whom were these questionably high intensity emails sent? Don't the recipients
have a say in this? Everyone knows they're being watched.
There are no exceptions I would think, least of all those searches useful for later political
assassination. But those on the other end of these questionable emails must have some interest
here, as they are involved.
Looks like neocons will attack Trump, fearing that he might expose their role in 9/11 and become
an obstacle for their interventionalist foreign policy
A civil war within Republican party officially stated. The party elite opens fight against the
choice of rank-and-file members. Marco Rubio and Kasich are no longer running for president. They are
running to keep Trump from being president.
Notable quotes:
Notable quotes:
"... And it mirrored the broader slog of a Republican primary, where for months Jeb Bush, Rubio, Cruz, Kasich, Chris Christie and the rest tore each other apart to prevent one another from emerging as the chief Trump alternative. All believed they could beat Trump one-on-one. None has gotten the chance. ..."
"... In failing to back a single Trump alternative, Romney essentially called for a Republican civil war to wage through this summer, a retrenchment for an irreparably divided GOP in hopes of outmaneuvering Trump at a contested convention where party elites still control some levers of power. ..."
"... Romney's speech was certainly historic. Perhaps never before has the most recent party nominee for president so thoroughly rebuked the prohibitive front-runner for the nomination four years later. But, as Romney said in his speech, "The rules of political history have pretty much all been shredded during this campaign." ..."
"... Romney did not stand alone. Moments after he finished speaking, Sen. John McCain, the 2008 Republican nominee, seconded Romney's speech. "I share the concerns about Donald Trump that my friend and former Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, described," McCain said in a statement. ..."
"... Trump went on the attack even before Romney took the stage in Salt Lake City, blasting Romney for having "begged" for his endorsement four years earlier. In February 2012, Romney traveled to one of Trump's hotels to accept the endorsement. "There are some things that you just can't imagine happening in your life," Romney said then. "This is one of them. Being in Donald Trump's magnificent hotel and having his endorsement is a delight." ..."
"... Romney said he expected the blowback: "This may tell you what you need to know about his temperament, his stability, and his suitability to be president." As the old guard of the Republican Party cheered Romney's outspoken remarks on Thursday, there remained downside in having so prominent a party leader rip apart Trump, should he still become the nominee. ..."
It was a stirring call to arms for a strategic-voting retreat.
And it mirrored the broader slog of a Republican primary, where for months Jeb Bush, Rubio,
Cruz, Kasich, Chris Christie and the rest tore each other apart to prevent one another from emerging
as the chief Trump alternative. All believed they could beat Trump one-on-one. None has gotten the
chance.
Along the way, Trump has skated. In one remarkable statistic, Trump suffered less in attack ads
through Super Tuesday than Romney's team hurled at Newt Gingrich in the final days in Florida alone
in 2012. The Republican Party's top financiers are mobilizing now, with millions in anti-Trump ads
expected in the next two weeks, but it may be too late to slow Trump after he has carried 10 of the
first 15 contests, many of them by wide margins.
In failing to back a single Trump alternative, Romney essentially called for a Republican
civil war to wage through this summer, a retrenchment for an irreparably divided GOP in hopes of
outmaneuvering Trump at a contested convention where party elites still control some levers of power.
(Also, by not picking a single anti-Trump standard-bearer, Romney, who briefly considered running
for president again in 2016, left slightly more open the door that might allow a contested convention
to select him.)
"He's playing the members of the American public for suckers," Romney said of Trump. "He gets
a free ride to the White House and all we get is a lousy hat."
Romney's speech was certainly historic. Perhaps never before has the most recent party nominee
for president so thoroughly rebuked the prohibitive front-runner for the nomination four years later.
But, as Romney said in his speech, "The rules of political history have pretty much all been shredded
during this campaign."
Romney ripped about Trump's business background, ticking off bankruptcies and abandoned efforts.
"What ever happened to Trump Airlines?" he said. "How about Trump University? And then there's Trump
Magazine and Trump Vodka and Trump Steaks, and Trump Mortgage?" "A business genius he is not," Romney
said. Of Trump's varied stances on issues, Romney added, "Dishonesty is Donald Trump's hallmark."
Romney did not stand alone. Moments after he finished speaking, Sen. John McCain, the 2008
Republican nominee, seconded Romney's speech. "I share the concerns about Donald Trump that my friend
and former Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, described," McCain said in a statement.
"Well said," tweeted Kasich.
Trump went on the attack even before Romney took the stage in Salt Lake City, blasting Romney
for having "begged" for his endorsement four years earlier. In February 2012, Romney traveled to
one of Trump's hotels to accept the endorsement. "There are some things that you just can't imagine
happening in your life," Romney said then. "This is one of them. Being in Donald Trump's magnificent
hotel and having his endorsement is a delight."
On Thursday, Trump hammered back on NBC's "Today" show: "Mitt Romney is a stiff."
Romney said he expected the blowback: "This may tell you what you need to know about his temperament,
his stability, and his suitability to be president." As the old guard of the Republican Party cheered
Romney's outspoken remarks on Thursday, there remained downside in having so prominent a party leader
rip apart Trump, should he still become the nominee.
Said Justin Barasky, a spokesman for the super PAC dedicated to electing Hillary Clinton, understatedly,
"Certainly, having a former Republican nominee go after him is not unhelpful."
Hillary Clinton has extended her lead in the race for the White House, beating Bernie Sanders
in the latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll by 30 points in the battle for Democrat contender. But
it's her email account that's making headlines here in the UK. Specifically, emails from George
W. Bush's secretary of state Colin Powell ahead of Britain joining the American war on Iraq.
Afshin Rattansi goes underground with his former chief of staff, retired United States Army
Colonel Larry Wilkerson.
"... Bernie Sanders would be crazy to drop out while there is (apparently) an open FBI investigation into the email/Clinton Foundation situation ..."
"... Bernie Sanders has done more than reversing Citizens United ever could to get big money out of politics, at least for Democrats. I cant imagine anyone ever again running on a progressive platform while hauling in Wall Street/pharma/fossil, etc money by the tanker load. ..."
"... Sanders actually did really good. Hes up against not just Hillary, but her husband; they are a political juggernaut. Its David vs Goliath. Bernie will most likely lose, but hes done amazingly well using a sling and rocks. ..."
"... I want Sanders to stay in the race, because each victory or strong finish sends a message to the Democratic Party that a great many of us are tired of business as usual. We are tired of wimpiness and acquiescence in the face of the Republicans top-down class warfare, we are tired of neocon war-mongering, we are tired of knowing that our country is falling behind in indicators of social health while the rich get richer, and we are tired of being told to sit down and shut up and respect our betters until the party needs money and volunteers. ..."
"... So tired of this author and his shilling for Hillary. Given the incredibly biased media slant, its a wonder Bernie has done as well as he has. ..."
"... Bernie Sanders is the only hope for the US working class to achieve change for clearly the Clinton regime has in no way shown by past behavior the intense motivation nor policy settings required to overthrow the conservative Democratic and Republican political establishment to break the economic and social chains of the US working class nor provide them with the means by which the US working class can even perceive the true nature of their condition. ..."
"... I wish all those Hillary voters in southern states be they black, hispanic, asian, white, or whatever, would wake up and realize they are effectively voting for Trump. ..."
"... I think why people are irritated by politicians, pollsters and the media is because in a 220 meter race, you guys call it after the first 10 meters. Well then whats the point of the race, why do we go thru it all? In a democracy where everyone gets a vote, we all feel that the first 10 voters in line decide the race and the rest of us just confirm the results. Id say this is why everyone throws up their hands in disgust every election cycle. ..."
"... The movement Sanders started is not about him or just this election. ..."
"... Remember, one year ago Bernie was at 3%. Now he is drawing sizable numbers of voters and winning outright a few primaries. The issues he champions, which the American people need championed (even Trump voters), dominate the Democratic conversation. Bernie may not win the nomination but the movement he started wins so long so as these issues are addressed. ..."
"... So, as planned and predicted, the South went for the establishment candidate. However, all those Southern states will go red in November. A large percentage of Bernie supporters would not vote for Hillary under any circumstances. So there is much more to be learned about whether Hillary is in fact a viable candidate in the national election. ..."
"... What a stupid primary system we have. The whole thing is decided by 15 states ..."
"... Why would black voters who suffer disproportionately from poverty and lack of access to higher education vote for the Wall St candidate who is not proposing universal health care or free college? Not to mention Hillarys other centrist policies which would not help the black community nearly to the degree Bernies would. Is this another situation of low income whites voting Republican? ..."
"... Hillary as the nominee will lead to a Trump presidency. ..."
1) Bernie Sanders would be crazy to drop out while there is (apparently) an open FBI investigation
into the email/Clinton Foundation situation
2) Bernie Sanders has done more than reversing Citizens United ever could to get big money out
of politics, at least for Democrats. I can't imagine anyone ever again running on a progressive
platform while hauling in Wall Street/pharma/fossil, etc money by the tanker load.
Marc New York City 3 minutes ago
Sanders actually did really good. He's up against not just Hillary, but her husband; they are
a political juggernaut. Its David vs Goliath. Bernie will most likely lose, but he's done amazingly
well using a sling and rocks.
I want Sanders to stay in the race, because each victory or strong finish sends a message to
the Democratic Party that a great many of us are tired of business as usual. We are tired of wimpiness
and acquiescence in the face of the Republicans' top-down class warfare, we are tired of neocon
war-mongering, we are tired of knowing that our country is falling behind in indicators of social
health while the rich get richer, and we are tired of being told to sit down and shut up and respect
our betters until the party needs money and volunteers.
Twelve years ago, Dennis Kucinich campaigned on an even more radical platform than Bernie and
won no more than 17% in any state. It was easy for the Democratic Establishment to dismiss him.
Yet tonight, Bernie is ahead in most of Minnesota. Even in my affluent and utterly conventional
corner of Minneapolis, the score was Hillary over Bernie, but at 55%-45%. In contrast, in my precinct
in 2004, Kucinich got 20% to Kerry's 80%.
One of the nice features of the Minnesota caucus system is that anyone can submit a resolution
which, if accepted, will work its way up to the state level, and perhaps even to the national
level. One of the most enthusiastically affirmed resolutions was one urging the replacement of
Debbie Wasserman Schultz as DNC chair.
The rank-and-file are restless, and the Democrats ignore that at their peril.
So tired of this author and his shilling for Hillary. Given the incredibly biased media slant,
it's a wonder Bernie has done as well as he has.
Bernie should continue. It would be risky for the Democrats to settle too early on a candidate
who is currently under investigation by the FBI, especially if she were to be indicted.
Voting for Clinton is voting for the past to remain in the present.
Bernie Sanders is the only hope for the US working class to achieve change for clearly the Clinton
regime has in no way shown by past behavior the intense motivation nor policy settings required
to overthrow the conservative Democratic and Republican political establishment to break the economic
and social chains of the US working class nor provide them with the means by which the US working
class can even perceive the true nature of their condition.
A condition the Clinton regime has no intention of challenging because to do so means questioning
the Clinton regime own continuing culpability in keeping the US working class in the cave of shadows
whilst they play with the projector along with the rest of the US political elite for their own
tawdry benefit.
I wish all those Hillary voters in southern states be they black, hispanic, asian, white,
or whatever, would wake up and realize they are effectively voting for Trump. Bernie has
a much better chance of beating Trump - voting for Hillary is dangerously stupid.
I think why people are irritated by politicians, pollsters and the media is because in a 220
meter race, you guys call it after the first 10 meters. Well then what's the point of the race,
why do we go thru it all? In a democracy where everyone gets a vote, we all feel that the first
10 voters in line decide the race and the rest of us just confirm the results. I'd say this is
why everyone throws up their hands in disgust every election cycle.
What's your real job here Nate? To call the election as early as possible. To spin the numbers
so as to discourage people to even vote? To what benefit? I don't think your analysis is incorrect,
I think the act of analysis is not productive. Its a discouragement to a participatory democracy.
The movement Sanders started is not about him or just this election. One year ago the conventional
wisdom said that HRC would coast to a coronation. That has not happened and will not . Wherever Bernie
finishes, he has defined the Democratic platform. He has not only invigorated the Democratic Left,
reminding older voters of the idealism of their youth, but imprinted on Millennials the values and
virtues of economic justice, social fairness, and political equality. And here's the kicker: to Millennials,
there is nothing left-wing about free college education, universal health care, overturning Citizens
United to take money out of elections, and ending the excesses of crony capitalism. They are the
future, and they are inspired to get involved.
Hillary is benefiting from the loyalty of African Americans, especially older women, practically
every senior Democrat elected official, and the mainstream media. In short, it's her turn, and she
is being rewarded for her patience, perseverance and diligence.
Remember, one year ago Bernie was at 3%. Now he is drawing sizable numbers of voters and winning
outright a few primaries. The issues he champions, which the American people need championed (even
Trump voters), dominate the Democratic conversation. Bernie may not win the nomination but the movement
he started wins so long so as these issues are addressed.
Sanders has revitalized American democracy and morality, and for that all Americans should be grateful.
Super Tuesday was set up after Jimmy Carter came out of nowhere in the '70s. The whole point,
why the DNC was in favor of this, was for the conservative South to favor the establishment's preferred
candidate, and hopefully weed out any upstart grass roots candidates.
So, as planned and predicted, the South went for the establishment candidate. However, all those
Southern states will go red in November. A large percentage of Bernie supporters would not vote for
Hillary under any circumstances. So there is much more to be learned about whether Hillary is in
fact a viable candidate in the national election.
A CNN poll today found Bernie beating Trump, Cruz and Rubio handily. It found Hillary beating Trump
(but by a smaller percentage than Bernie) and losing to Cruz and Rubio. And still, there is the FBI
investigation . . .
There is much more to be revealed. This is one election where it ain't over 'til it's over.
So my vote doesn't matter Mr. Cohn? The votes of the people in that states that have not voted
yet don't matter? What a stupid primary system we have. The whole thing is decided by 15 states.
Instead of cowardly using "all but blocked", why doesn't the New York Times "tell it like is" and
say, "Hey America, Hillary won big in the South. Your votes don't matter. Just wait until November
to vote." That way she saves money, and Americans don't waste their time voting in elections that
have already been decided.
Readers, why don't we all stop checking the NY Times for updates on the campaign? It's over. Just
check the aggregate sights to see who got hurt in the latest Trump rally. See you all in November!
Black voters in the South are very different than those in the North. In Connecticut, I am working
with a number of African Americans with the President Sanders Campaign. These individuals are embarrassed
with the terrible turnout, especially because those voters stand to profit substantially in a Sander's
Administration. There's a lot of change coming still…fringe candidate to the top of the national
polls. It's called exponential slow growth.
Why would black voters who suffer disproportionately from poverty and lack of access to higher
education vote for the Wall St candidate who is not proposing universal health care or free college?
Not to mention Hillary's other centrist policies which would not help the black community nearly
to the degree Bernie's would.
Is this another situation of low income whites voting Republican?
Last night, you may have heard a caller talking about a disturbing incident at the polls
yesterday. The NightSide team has done some digging, and you might be shocked at what we've found!
Tonight we'll give you an update and talk about the fine line between assisting a disabled voter
and committing voter fraud. Do you think there should be stricter voting laws?
"... I wonder if voters will be beguiled by Clinton's steely public persona-or if they'll look at the broken life of the victim, whom the attack left infertile for life? Will they remember that defense lawyer Hillary Clinton smeared the 12-year-old victim as a delusional seducer? ..."
"... I fear that this story will go away. That Hillary will dodge this bullet as her husband dodged a credible charge that he actually, personally, raped a woman with his very own penis. ..."
"... We still think that our country is a beautiful exception to the cruel calculus of politics, and expect that our leaders will be more than schemers skilled at clawing their way to power. Perhaps it's a lingering ghost of our Puritan forefathers who meant to found a "city on a hill," ..."
"... We see an immaculately groomed, elite-educated person like Hillary Clinton who repeats all the pious phrases of humanitarian liberalism, and we cannot wrap our heads around the idea that she might be an icy, conscienceless sociopath. ..."
"... But the best-selling expert on sociopaths, Dr. Martha Stout of Harvard, reminds us that some four Americans out of a 100 are in fact clinical sociopaths-people who simply do not experience empathy with their fellow human beings, who do not experience guilt. ..."
"... Sociopaths experience horror stories-such as the story of a 12-year-old girl being brutally raped-the way you and I experience crossword puzzles. And one might very well chuckle and brag over how quickly one finished a crossword puzzle. ..."
"... I have known a few such sociopaths in my life, and like most normal people I simply could not accept the evidence of my senses. Faced with their ruthless actions and habitual lies, I fell back on denial. I made excuses for their cruelties and believed their jaw-dropping lies. ..."
John Zmirak received his B.A. from Yale University in 1986, then his M.F.A. in screenwriting and
fiction and his Ph.D. in English in 1996 from Louisiana State University. John Zmirak is author,
most recently, of the upcoming book The Race to Save Our Century (with Jason Jones). His columns
are archived at www.badcatholics.com.
Will the scandal over Hillary Clinton's cynical, take-no-prisoners
defense of a child rapist damage her chances at winning the White House?
Can we choke down the fact that she
willingly took on that
rape case, then lied about it in print-as revealed by recently unearthed
audio tapes? (Clinton wrote that she was assigned the case against her will; the tapes reveal
that she took on the case as a personal favor, representing a rapist who seems to have calculated
that a female attorney would help his chances.)
Will women vote for a woman who used technicalities to get a brutal rapist less than a year in
jail, then chuckled about the case to another lawyer? A lawyer who bragged how cleverly she had helped
her client cheat justice?
I wonder if voters will be beguiled by Clinton's steely public persona-or if they'll look
at the broken life of the victim, whom the attack left infertile for life? Will they remember that
defense lawyer Hillary Clinton smeared the 12-year-old victim as a delusional seducer? Will
Hillary's campaign be dogged by women who have suffered the trauma of rape, picketing her speeches
with signs that say, "Hillary Blames Victims"?
I fear that this story will go away. That Hillary will dodge this bullet as her husband dodged
a credible charge that he actually, personally, raped
a woman with his very
own penis.
And I wonder how on God's earth that can happen-how any woman, or any man with a wife, daughter,
or sister, can look at Hillary Clinton now without throwing up in his mouth. Are Americans morally
deaf, dumb, and blind?
No. I think that I've figured it out. It's not just that liberals will read the story and assume
it's a baseless slander-not when the Daily Beast and ABC News are echoing the claims that appear
on Fox. Not when you can read
what the rape victim thinks of Hillary:
"I would say [to Clinton], 'You took a case of mine in '75, you lied on me I realize the truth
now, the heart of what you've done to me. And you are supposed to be for women? You call that
[being] for women, what you done to me? And I hear you on tape laughing."
Americans are not jaded cynics who expect their politicians to be moral monsters, on a par with
stone-faced killers like
Vladimir Putin. (Charles de Gaulle famously agreed with Nietzsche that "the State is a cold monster.")
Americans are not so blasé about political evil-which is why we drove Richard Nixon out of power
after Watergate, to the puzzlement of foreigners worldwide who took Nixonian "dirty tricks" for granted.
We still think that our country is a
beautiful exception to the cruel calculus of politics, and expect that our leaders will be more
than schemers skilled at clawing their way to power. Perhaps it's a lingering ghost of our Puritan
forefathers who meant to found a "city on a hill," or the faded echo of the Founding Fathers
who warned
that without virtuous citizens and upright leaders, our Republic would degenerate into just another
squalid tyranny, like today's Venezuela.
But we expect better.
So when we are faced with evil, we are confused. We cannot quite believe it.
We see an immaculately groomed, elite-educated person like Hillary Clinton who repeats all
the pious phrases of humanitarian liberalism, and we cannot wrap our heads around the idea that she
might be an icy, conscienceless sociopath. When we visualize a sociopath, we think of a leering
loner who dresses up as a
clown and murders children, or a
late-term abortionist who collects
fetal feet as trophies.
But the best-selling expert on sociopaths, Dr. Martha Stout of Harvard, reminds us that some
four Americans out of a 100 are
in fact clinical sociopaths-people who simply do not experience empathy with their fellow human beings,
who do not experience guilt.
Brain scans of sociopaths have shown that when they are presented with photos that in normal humans
provoke strong emotions, such as pictures of dead children or animals being tortured, the emotional
centers in sociopaths' brains remain coolly inactive. Instead, what lights up is the part of their
brains that in normal people gets active when they play chess. Sociopaths experience horror stories-such
as the story of a 12-year-old girl being brutally raped-the way you and I experience crossword puzzles.
And one might very well chuckle and brag over how quickly one finished a crossword puzzle.
I have known
a few such sociopaths in my life, and like most normal people I simply could not accept the evidence
of my senses. Faced with their ruthless actions and habitual lies, I fell back on denial. I made
excuses for their cruelties and believed their jaw-dropping lies.
That seemed like the "Christian" thing to do. Of course it wasn't. It was just a lie I told myself,
but choking it down was easier than facing the stark, appalling fact: That I had befriended a moral
monster.
My question for Americans is: Will we go ahead and elect one?
John Zmirak is author, most recently, of the upcoming book "The
Race to Save Our Century" (with Jason Jones). His columns are archived at www.badcatholics.com.
"... Barring a coup at the nomination convention, Trump is probably going to win the R nomination. We can hope for such a coup, because just about anybody else would be better, imo, in the event of a Republican win. ..."
"... This is a once in a lifetime matchup, probably the first time ever, with both parties likely running the oppositions dream candidate. Every hard core R hates HRCs guts, ditto every hard core D hates Trumps guts. ..."
Things have been changing pretty damned fast for the last few decades, and lots of things that
were once considered unthinkable are now realities. I can't see any reason to think fast change
won't continue, or that some previously unthinkable things won't come to pass, within the easily
foreseeable future.
With a D in the WH next time around, a substantial increase in the federal oil taxes is a very
real possibility. It won't be a very big increase, in and of itself, maybe a nickel or dime a
gallon, but just a nickel would be a hugh percentage increase. The D voter with a job won't kick
about a nickel or a dime, and poor people who can't afford to drive will enjoy sticking it to
supposedly rich R voters any way.
And for what it's worth, barring HRC being indicted, or some other equally unlikely event,
and that idiot Trump getting the nomination, I am now leaning towards believing there will be
a D in the WH next time around. Sanders is a long shot,but if he gets the nomination, just about
every body who will vote for HRC will vote for Sanders.
Trump is going to go into the election, if he gets the nomination, with the highest negatives
of any R candidate EVER, at least as far back as WWII. Tens of millions of people will turn out
to vote AGAINST him, probably even more than will turn out to vote against HRC, who has extremely
high negatives herself.
Barring a coup at the nomination convention, Trump is probably going to win the R nomination.
We can hope for such a coup, because just about anybody else would be better, imo, in the event
of a Republican win.
This is a once in a lifetime matchup, probably the first time ever, with both parties likely
running the opposition's dream candidate. Every hard core R hates HRC's guts, ditto every hard
core D hates Trump's guts.
The thing about an increase in the gasoline tax is that once the dam breaks, more increases
will be politically palatable.
My initial impression last year regarding Trump, which I am still leaning toward, is that
Trump's goal is to get Hillary elected president
I doubt it. Trump will definitely try to use email scandal against her. Even among democrats
way too many people hate Hillary due to her track record and personal traits.
How Trump can help her? Trump voters will never vote for Hillary. The same is true for considerable
part of Sanders voters. Many people understand that she is in the pocket of large banks and essentially
voting for Hillary is voting for GS.
Also a lot of people in the military are vary of Hillary as the Commander in Chief (the same
is true for Trump). And that is a powerful voting block. Please listen to what Tulsi Gabbard said:
What really surprised me is that South Carolina black population was brainwashed or bought
to vote for her. That's a slap at Martin Luther King face. I wonder how much money it cost her
to buy SC black establishment.
What an election cycle for feminism! Both Democratic primary candidates are
running as self-declared feminists. One of them, Hillary Clinton, would, if
elected, also be the first woman to serve as president of the United States.
Major feminist organizations like Planned Parenthood have endorsed her, as have
feminist leaders and heroines as varied as Gloria Steinem, Lena Dunham, Roxane
Gay and Eileen Myles.
Clinton and her supporters often point to the potential of a woman president
to inspire little girls, letting them know that women can do anything. Yet her
own life narrative is not a stirring feminist parable. It is probably true that
neither Bill nor Hillary Clinton could have come so far without the other. But
who wants to advise our daughters to marry an ambitious, egomaniacal man; stay
with him no matter what; and be the first lady for many years? Eventually it
will be your turn. Is this a career plan?
Hillary Clinton is not alone: Around the world, many female heads of state
have attained their positions through marriage or bloodlines. While it is common
for a woman to advance in this way, it is neither interesting nor feminist.
... ... ...
With so many politically active young people fighting racism and the police
state, it's no wonder that so-called "millennial" feminists have been rejecting
Clinton in favor of her opponent. Many have also been troubled by her personal
conduct toward women outside of her elite circles, especially on another issue
of salience to this generation: rape. Hillary Clinton has said, "Every survivor
of sexual assault deserves to be heard, believed and supported." But that has
not been her attitude toward women who have accused her husband. Juanita Broaddrick,
a nurse who accused Bill Clinton of raping her in 1978 and is now, at 72, still
telling the same story,
has said Hillary Clinton tried to pressure her to remain silent about the charges.
(Bill Clinton has denied raping Broaddrick, and Clinton supporters point to
a lack of documentation for Broaddrick's charges that Hillary tried to silence
her; anyone who thinks they know for certain what happened should be regarded
skeptically.) Bill Clinton was also accused of rape and harassment by two other
women.
During the Clinton administration, speaking about sexual harassment
accusations against moderate Republican Sen. Bob Packwood, a needed ally on
health care, Hillary Clinton grumbled to a friend, who later described Hillary
as
"tired of all the whiny women."
Hillary Clinton's mudslinging and slut-shaming campaigns against women who
claimed to have had consensual sex with her husband are
well documented. In his memoir, George Stephanopoulos, quotes Hillary Clinton
as saying of one such woman, "We have to destroy her story." Hillary biographer
Carl Bernstein describes Hillary directing an "aggressive, explicit" campaign
to discredit Gennifer Flowers, an actress who said she had a long affair with
Bill Clinton. She referred to Flowers as
"trailer trash." In a tough 2008 essay for Slate, Melinda Henneberger and
Dahlia Lithwick wrote that Clinton "consistently relates to and protects and
stands with the oppressors in the gender wars ... she invariably sees [Bill]
as the victim, preyed upon by a series of female aggressors."
U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii announced Sunday that she will resign as vice-chair of the Democratic
National Committee and endorse Bernie Sanders for president.
"I think it's most important for us,
as we look at our choices as to who our next commander in chief will be, is to recognize the necessity
to have a commander in chief who has foresight, who exercises good judgment," Gabbard said on
MSNBC's "Meet the Press."
According
to an email obtained by Politico, Gabbard told her fellow DNC officers that "after much
thought and consideration, I've decided I cannot remain neutral and sit on the sidelines any longer."
"There is a clear contrast between our two candidates with regard to my strong belief that we must
end the interventionist, regime change policies that have cost us so much," she wrote. "This is not
just another 'issue.' This is THE issue, and it's deeply personal to me. This is why I've decided
to resign as Vice Chair of the DNC so that I can support Bernie Sanders in his efforts to earn the
Democratic nomination in the 2016 presidential race."
Over
the course of the
campaign, Sanders and his supporters have
accused the DNC of having a pro-Hillary Clinton-pro-establishment-bias. Committee chair Debbie
Wasserman Schultz served as one of Clinton's national campaign co-chairs in 2008.
Gabbard elaborated on her decision in a video online:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=2UM8F4EuUbw
The crisis of Republican
Party then establishment no longer can control rank-and-file members reflects not only the crisis
of neoliberalism as a social system, but might also reflect the fact that with 300 million of people
the county became too big and too diverse to be governed from a single center of political power in
non authoritarian ways. a Hillary v Trump scenario will bee a difficult choice
for most Americans. A jingoistic sociopathic woman, essentially a puppet of financial oligarchy, who
is a front for the neoliberal forces hell-bent of destroying Russia vs. a narcissistic person with zero
political experience and vague set of ideas (but at the same time with more realistic foreign
policy ideas at least).
Notable quotes:
"... I'm afraid this strategy will have the exact opposite effect. To Trump, an attack from Rubio or Cruz is a badge of honor. ..."
"... 80% of young people are for Sanders. If he gets unfairly dumped, they will never forgive the Democrapic party. Both parties are in danger of losing the duopoly. ..."
"... We're a divided country, living separate cultures over four time zones (mainland alone). We're a big big country with big big problems. I don't know how it will shake out, especially when the bills come due. I only wish we had the problems of a small European country that you can drive across in four hours. That's a luxury. ..."
"... Hillary and Trump make Nixon look like a stand up guy. There is only one authentic, principled and electable candidate in the race. Bernie Sanders, the only candidate with a positive national favorability rating. ..."
"... Donald Trump is almost entirely a creation of the media. Most people don't realize it, but the media got addicted to him back in the early 1980, when he became one of the most flamboyant characters on the New York scene with a string of bimbos by his side, splashing around money, mostly not his, and creating the Trump brand, which he used to get into business with OPM (other people's money). ..."
"... Sadly, this is exactly what America has become. Fox News, talk radio, lunatics and raving psychopaths, a cesspool of fear and hate. The candidates are what we have become. We're in a canoe headed for the waterfall and all we hear is "Paddle faster! Paddle faster!" What the American people will do in the end is anyone's guess. ..."
"... Headline news says in Iran ... hardliners suffer defeat as reformists make gains ... And ... in the USA ...? hardliners on the rampage? O Tempora ... O Mores .... ..."
"... I agree that the republican party is a despicable joke, but a look at the turnout suggests that they will very likely control the WH, senate, and increass their majority in the House. Its unfortunate, but that is definitely the way it looks right now! ..."
"... "I believe that a first-rate con artist is on the verge of taking over the party of Reagan and Lincoln." Pretty funny comment. They are all con artists. And Hillary can match them con for con. ..."
"... Yup it's a shitfest all-round, the Dems debate schedule was so openly biased towards Hillary that it was comical but at least they were talking about substantive issues. ..."
"... "Struggling Americans"? Since when has Rubio's ultra-corporate free market ideology recognised their struggle? What the fuck does he have to offer except rich man's You're OK I'M OK preaching? ..."
"... Fuck off, Rubio -- We are going to vote Trump. ..."
"... Trump is not Mussolini, his political, economic and social thinking has very little, if anything, in common with that man. He may be dangerous, but that doesn't mean he is a Fascist. ..."
"... Yep, MIC depends on bankster puppets like Rubio and Clinton following their orders. Oh and the power of money is so persuasive. Bill Clinton is a very bright guy and he still repealed Glass Steagall under orders...... ..."
"... The problem is that Rubio and Cruz are just as bad -- or worse. They're a bit more polished politically but they have the same awful mindset and espouse the same awful policies. ..."
"... Anyway, ganging up on Trump is likely to backfire. Unlike most politicians Trump makes absolutely no attempt to hide who he is and what he stands for. People respect that even as they ignore that what he stands for is corporatism -- he's not the reincarnation of Hitler (as those two MX has-been described him), he's Mussolini. ..."
"... I think Rubio and Cruz's attempts to destroy Trump will backfire. He can just say he is the outside being ganged up on by the establishment and how he "wont be pushed around just like America wont be pushed around anymore! blah blah". ..."
"... The establishment will do and say anything to get Trump out. They have total control over all the others but not Trump. Donald is the only candidate who will do what's right for the country and the people and make America great again. TRUMP 2016 ..."
"... Rubio seems power-mad. Another reason why he is deeply unsuitable to wield ultimate power. ..."
"... As a democrat I am terrified and so too should all democrats be. Turnout so far has been down about 26% compared to 2008. The republicans on the other hand have seen an increase of almost the smae amount compared to their 2012 numbers! Thats a disaster waiting to happen in November. Turnout in primaries is one of the best indicators, if not the best, of what will happen in a general election. ..."
"... Indeed. If I was American, a Hillary v Trump scenario would be mindscrewingly difficult to choose between. An evil woman who is a front for all the neoliberal forces out there. Or an evil man who is a complete moron and will drive America to its knees. ..."
"... "Donald Trump is a liberal Republican" In the crazy world of Republican politics 2016 you're not wrong. You then drift of into a fantasy world where Trump actually wins the presidency. More people hate him than love him, with barely anything in-between. Plus they've only just started digging for dirt. ..."
"... Guardian sub-heading: "Rubio attacks 'con artist' as Cruz links Trump to mafia" I link all of them to oligarchy, patriarchy and Christian jihadism. Admittedly, there are some conceptual overlaps there. ..."
"... OMG Cruz, Rubio or Trump vs Hilary Clinton. Jeez, America. I got kids to care about - is that IT? ..."
"... Rubio isn't what he presents himself as. Look at his voting record- http://politicsthatwork.com/voting-record/Marco-Rubio-412491 Does that match up to the way he talks about his policies? I don't think so. ..."
"... One "good" thing about Trump in this election is that he is clearly not a consultant-packaged candidate (like Rubio) or a fake (like Cruz), but Trump is a quintessentially amoral salesman. He pitches whatever the customers want to hear. Customers need to read the fine print before buying products from him. ..."
"... Truth is both parties pander to the emotions -- the more frenzied the better it seems -- none of the candidates respect voters enough to discuss policy with anything even resembling depth. Politics is cotton candy in America, sprinkled with just enough cayenne to arouse burnt tongues. Oh what a tangled web we weave... ..."
"... Unless she is indicted before the election. Then it might be problematic. Look up Spiro Agnew if you think investigations are all for show. ..."
"... I can't stand Trump...but he seems to be better than Cruz & Rubio...the problem seems to be a politically bankrupt party disintegrating before our eyes... ..."
"... Full blown panic mode now by the GOP establishment, as they belatedly realize they have a problem with no agreeable solution. ..."
"... But let's notice one more time that all the discomfort about Trump as expressed by the GOP functionaries is centered around their suspicions that he may be a closet "liberal". They're worrying aloud about whether he'd support single-payer healthcare insurance, or refuse to vigorously oppose gay marriage or draconian positions on abortion. ..."
"... Supporting war in Iraq was spectacularly I'll judged. ..."
"... Trump's game seems to have been to use The Republican Party's machinery to boost himself, aware that his appeal to the populace is that he is counter the old guard, awaiting that old guard's attempt to ditch him and then becoming his own man with his own party. That would split the GOP's ranks; if, having only, say, half its voters so not winning this time, he will have sown the seed in his long game to win next time. ..."
"... When Trump was still normal, he left The Reform Party because David Duke from the KKK had joined it. Now, he says doesn't know David Duke, not even the KKK!!!! ..."
"... As Cruz desperately tries to salvage something before slithering under the exit door Rubio keeps insisting that he will keep receiving participation ribbons just for showing up and they will add up to victory. ..."
"... Trump looks more and more like the mature actor in the room. From lunatic insider to the presumptive candidate for the republican party in about 6 months. Pretty impressive. The voters will flock to Trump, who in the end will do what all presidents do and screw the voters and support the rich. Both parties do it to the voters, but the voters never learn. ..."
"... Hillary doesn't exist politically. It is a front for banks and foreign investments. A sham. ..."
"... This is awesome, America is embarking on a long overdue conversation. The Republicans are now using tax returns to play the 1% card on Trump, yes they hate those richer than themselves as well as poorer. You wonder why they bother, and I'm sure some of them are. So hate it will be from the Republicans and 'love and kindness' from Hillary. It's mapping out. ..."
Democratic party is not investing in voting drives this year because doing so would benefit Sanders,
whereas a low voter turnout favors Clinton (who is increasingly unpopular and looks increasingly
likely to lose the general).
Sanders was nearly tied with Clinton in delegates before South Carolina. So it's very close right
now.
80% of young people are for Sanders. If he gets unfairly dumped, they will never forgive
the Democrapic party. Both parties are in danger of losing the duopoly.
What everyone is glossing over, is that the country is too big and the politics have become too
small. You have a special problem with the presidency in that the person who occupies it should
embody the basic American ethos from Boston to Honolulu and from Miami to Anchorage. No one exists
who can do this.
We're a divided country, living separate cultures over four time zones (mainland alone).
We're a big big country with big big problems. I don't know how it will shake out, especially
when the bills come due. I only wish we had the problems of a small European country that you
can drive across in four hours. That's a luxury.
Hillary and Trump make Nixon look like a stand up guy. There is only one authentic, principled
and electable candidate in the race. Bernie Sanders, the only candidate with a positive national
favorability rating.
Donald Trump is almost entirely a creation of the media. Most people don't realize it, but
the media got addicted to him back in the early 1980, when he became one of the most flamboyant
characters on the New York scene with a string of bimbos by his side, splashing around money,
mostly not his, and creating the Trump brand, which he used to get into business with OPM (other
people's money).
A lot of his revenues come from licensing out the Trump name out to various
development ventures into which he doesn't contribute a penny, and which generate a large income
that finances his extravagant lifestyle. He is basically a con man, always has been. The corporate
media refrains from mentioning his four bankruptcies, despite inheriting a quarter of a billion
dollars from his father. They media wants him to stay on the campaign scene till the end, because
he is the largest entertainment story that have had in years, and covering his carnival act keeps
generating great revenues for them.
Sadly, this is exactly what America has become. Fox News, talk radio, lunatics and raving
psychopaths, a cesspool of fear and hate. The candidates are what we have become. We're in a canoe
headed for the waterfall and all we hear is "Paddle faster! Paddle faster!" What the American
people will do in the end is anyone's guess.
Headline news says in Iran ... hardliners suffer defeat as reformists make gains ... And ...
in the USA ...? hardliners on the rampage? O Tempora ... O Mores ....
Think how many billions are tied up in an establishment win. Trump will be taxing companies that
move blue collar jobs out of the US. He will be a jobs president. I am really really suspicious
of papers and parties like the Guardian and Labour that don't support this agenda.
Destroy Trump? CNN has placed Trump on hard rotation since mid-2015, to join their rolling Clinton
love-in. They haven't reported on him so much as run his campaign. That would imply that they'
re getting paid down the line.
I agree that the republican party is a despicable joke, but a look at the turnout suggests
that they will very likely control the WH, senate, and increass their majority in the House. Its
unfortunate, but that is definitely the way it looks right now!
"I believe that a first-rate con artist is on the verge of taking over the party of Reagan
and Lincoln." Pretty funny comment. They are all con artists. And Hillary can match them con for
con.
Yup it's a shitfest all-round, the Dems debate schedule was so openly biased towards Hillary
that it was comical but at least they were talking about substantive issues.
The main thing that interests me though is the money still pouring into the GOP even though
it's clear that the party has become unelectable.
Pressed on whether he could win in this week's elections, the 12-state "Super Tuesday" contest,
Rubio said: "Sure. That's not the plan, by the way, but sure."
"He then voiced anxieties that have coursed through the Republican party for months: "I believe
that a first-rate con artist is on the verge of taking over the party of Reagan and Lincoln."
Calling the billionaire "a clown act" who is "preying on" struggling Americans, Rubio warned
that..."
"Struggling Americans"? Since when has Rubio's ultra-corporate free market ideology recognised
their struggle? What the fuck does he have to offer except rich man's You're OK I'M OK preaching?
I seem to recall that Benito embroiled Italy in fruitless war or two....
Trump is not Mussolini, his political, economic and social thinking has very little, if
anything, in common with that man. He may be dangerous, but that doesn't mean he is a Fascist.
Yep, MIC depends on bankster puppets like Rubio and Clinton following their orders. Oh and
the power of money is so persuasive. Bill Clinton is a very bright guy and he still repealed Glass
Steagall under orders......
The problem is that Rubio and Cruz are just as bad -- or worse. They're a bit more polished
politically but they have the same awful mindset and espouse the same awful policies.
A Trumpohpile told me that the reason he likes Trump (and possibly Sanders) is that neither
of them are likely to end up embroiling us in yet more fruitless wars. I understand where he was
coming from -- we've been conned so many times by the political establishment that voting is really
choosing the lesser of evils. People are tired of this.
Anyway, ganging up on Trump is likely to backfire. Unlike most politicians Trump makes
absolutely no attempt to hide who he is and what he stands for. People respect that even as they
ignore that what he stands for is corporatism -- he's not the reincarnation of Hitler (as those
two MX has-been described him), he's Mussolini.
I think Rubio and Cruz's attempts to destroy Trump will backfire. He can just say he is the
outside being ganged up on by the establishment and how he "wont be pushed around just like America
wont be pushed around anymore! blah blah".
Trump will emerge the victor. I'm almost positive.
The establishment will do and say anything to get Trump out. They have total control over
all the others but not Trump. Donald is the only candidate who will do what's right for the country
and the people and make America great again. TRUMP 2016
Clinton: When i'm POTUS we will attack Iran!
Trump : Let's work with Russia to destroy ISIS!
Out of the two, i'm thinking Clinton is a total psychopath.
As a democrat I am terrified and so too should all democrats be. Turnout so far has been down
about 26% compared to 2008. The republicans on the other hand have seen an increase of almost
the smae amount compared to their 2012 numbers! Thats a disaster waiting to happen in November.
Turnout in primaries is one of the best indicators, if not the best, of what will happen in a
general election.
If this trend doesnt change (and theres no reason to believe it will) then we are not only
looking at a Republican controlled WH, but democrats will have almost no chance of regaining control
of the Senate and they could even increase their majority in the House (which they are going to
control no matter what happens)
Indeed. If I was American, a Hillary v Trump scenario would be mindscrewingly difficult to
choose between. An evil woman who is a front for all the neoliberal forces out there. Or an evil
man who is a complete moron and will drive America to its knees.
I think the best option is not to play
"Donald Trump is a liberal Republican" In the crazy world of Republican politics 2016 you're
not wrong. You then drift of into a fantasy world where Trump actually wins the presidency. More
people hate him than love him, with barely anything in-between. Plus they've only just started
digging for dirt.
Guardian sub-heading: "Rubio attacks 'con artist' as Cruz links Trump to mafia" I link all
of them to oligarchy, patriarchy and Christian jihadism. Admittedly, there are some conceptual
overlaps there.
One "good" thing about Trump in this election is that he is clearly not a consultant-packaged
candidate (like Rubio) or a fake (like Cruz), but Trump is a quintessentially amoral salesman.
He pitches whatever the customers want to hear. Customers need to read the fine print before buying
products from him.
Truth is both parties pander to the emotions -- the more frenzied the better it seems -- none
of the candidates respect voters enough to discuss policy with anything even resembling depth.
Politics is cotton candy in America, sprinkled with just enough cayenne to arouse burnt tongues.
Oh what a tangled web we weave...
I can't stand Trump...but he seems to be better than Cruz & Rubio...the problem seems to be
a politically bankrupt party disintegrating before our eyes...
Full blown panic mode now by the GOP establishment, as they belatedly realize they have a
problem with no agreeable solution.
But let's notice one more time that all the discomfort about Trump as expressed by the
GOP functionaries is centered around their suspicions that he may be a closet "liberal". They're
worrying aloud about whether he'd support single-payer healthcare insurance, or refuse to vigorously
oppose gay marriage or draconian positions on abortion.
Not a word about his promise to be a war criminal by torturing people "because they deserve
it", or unconstitutionally banning entry to the US on religious grounds or his support for the
idea of rendering the press vulnerable to lawsuits under brand spanking new libel laws.
The guy has come out brazenly in support of attitudes that the GOP has been covertly dog-whistling
about for years, and now they're panicking.
Embracing him as their candidate destroys the brand.
Torpedoing his candidacy by deploying internal party shenanigans either in the remaining days
of the campaign and/or at the convention will fracture the party.
All the people who Trump has excited with his "he's just saying what people are really thinking"
meme are sure as hell not going to just roll over and let their hero "be robbed" of the nomination.
And you can bet that's how, with Donald's help, they will see it.
Trump's game seems to have been to use The Republican Party's machinery to boost himself,
aware that his appeal to the populace is that he is counter the old guard, awaiting that old guard's
attempt to ditch him and then becoming his own man with his own party. That would split the GOP's
ranks; if, having only, say, half its voters so not winning this time, he will have sown the seed
in his long game to win next time.
When Trump was still normal, he left The Reform Party because David Duke from the KKK had
joined it. Now, he says doesn't know David Duke, not even the KKK!!!!
As Cruz desperately tries to salvage something before slithering under the exit door Rubio
keeps insisting that he will keep receiving participation ribbons just for showing up and they
will add up to victory.
Trump looks more and more like the mature actor in the room. From lunatic insider to the presumptive
candidate for the republican party in about 6 months. Pretty impressive. The voters will flock
to Trump, who in the end will do what all presidents do and screw the voters and support the rich.
Both parties do it to the voters, but the voters never learn.
This is awesome, America is embarking on a long overdue conversation. The Republicans are
now using tax returns to play the 1% card on Trump, yes they hate those richer than themselves
as well as poorer. You wonder why they bother, and I'm sure some of them are. So hate it will
be from the Republicans and 'love and kindness' from Hillary. It's mapping out.
So much for lefties idealization of disadvantaged minorities. Today blacks of South Carolina spit
in the face of Martin Luther King with impunity.
Notable quotes:
"... Well, the preacher-shepherds gave the signal and the flock brayed for Hillary. Truly a low point in the annals of African-American politics. ..."
"... Economically disadvantaged people should be voting for Sanders. To vote for Clinton is misguided and foolish whether you are black or white. We should not apologise for saying this loudly and clearly. It is a fact. ..."
"... Amazing what you can pull off with nonsense rhetoric. Clinton should thank her speech writers for that bit of baloney. love and kindness Ha! Yeah. Shes all warmth, that neolib. ..."
"... The blacks dont realize Clinton doesnt and will not, give a shit about them later. ..."
"... Im supremely depressed people voted for the corporate Wall Street puppet too, guys, but still... yeesh. ..."
"... It is not racism, I am a black person, and use to vote democratic and I proudly use those terms...and worse to describe my homies....they are still living like slaves! ..."
"... Another corrupt politician pulled the wool over the black race. ..."
"... If she wins the nomination -- and it looks increasingly like she will -- she will lose the general election, should Trump be the Republican nominee ..."
"... You are suffering from a delusion as to the nature of Clinton and the people who control her. They are not interested in making the USA more like Europe. Exactly the opposite. I cannot even fathom how you might think otherwise. ..."
"... Clinton is owned by Wall Street and has never been a friend of the poor and working people. ..."
"... This landslide win may be the one time the majority of black South Carolinians have something in common with Goldman Sachs execs. Strange bedfellows... ..."
"... It is interesting that in the latest speech that I heard from Sanders he has shifted from attacking Clinton to focusing his attacks on Trump. ..."
"... Looking at Hillary one starts to think that House of Cards main character should be a woman... ..."
"... The blacks on south carolina..have been dupped. .to trust Clinton is like re electing another bush. Quite reckless stupid. ... 40 million youth who gave student debt loans to repay should think their pocket. ..."
"... I will never vote for her. Youd think that my fellow black citizens would have taken a lesson from the Rahm Emmanuel debacle and refused to be herded into that dark night ..."
"... Big Winners South Carolina Primary.....Wall St The US WAR Machine....Peace ..."
"... Hence the ridiculous win for Hillary, who has done nothing for African American voters, In fact, she has probably led to the incarceration of many black people in America. Her husband certainly fucked them over. ..."
"... If this disgusting liar wins Democratic nomination, I am going to vote Republican for the first time in my life. Even Trump is better that this abomination. At least he calls a spade a spade and does not pretend to be what he isnt. ..."
"... For the nomination, its much more relevant than New Hampshire. NH: 24 delegates. SC: 53 delegates ..."
"... South Carolina black communities are very poor, uneducated and centered around their churches, which in turn are controlled by black establishment giving them some money through various social grants. I hope it helps to understand who and how forced black voters there how they have to vote. ..."
"... We cant have Sanders and real change. Thats clear by now. Thanks, old man, for you great brave effort and for bringing back Socialism to the USA after nearly a century in the dog house. That is an amazing feat in itself -- ..."
"... So, its either Black special interests plus aggressive careerist neo-liberal feminism or a glorious and unpredictable populist who shoves the PC gang. ..."
"... Have fun losing to Republicans in November should the DNC and media establishment successfully force the primary coronation of their queen. All of that legitimate excitement and momentum that Sanders lost will vanish into thin air, and some of it will go to independent and Republican voters. So yuck it up. Americans evidently need to learn a really hard lesson before reality finally penetrates their collective skulls. ..."
"... She is just as complicit in the coup against our country. So yeah, we need to grow some spines and start speaking up and acting. No more of this well shes not AS bad crap. Were losing our democracy, our freedom, our path to a decent life. Its time to wake up. Its Bernie or bust. ..."
"... no, HRC is a republican as in uber hawk, neoliberal, corrupt, wall street toady. ..."
Why do blacks vote for Hillary rather than Bernie ? Maybe its like how Trump wins the Hispanic
vote after he calls them murdering rapists ? Dont overestimate the American electorate, a lot
of effort has been put into keeping people dumb .(its not racist to suggest that people of color
can be dumb too). Trump says he loves 'the blacks' and some still vote for him.
The first time that I ever heard of the Flint water problem described in racial terms was from
Hillary Clinton in a Democratic debate. She tried to link it to the Jim Crow era of segregated
drinking fountains. No one should vote for her.
The DNC has vastly underestimated the revolution that is already percolating. If Hillary become
the nominee there are millions of people who will
1) sit out the election
2) vote third party
3) write in Bernie's name
4) vote for trump
Whichever way you look at it it will be the death knell for the "party". So they can celebrate
the funeral of the presidency.
Congrats CBC, DNC, DCCC, etc. All on your own you have buried the country.
I am an "elder" too….Am I disappointed that Bernie didn't win ? Yes, but I am not going to trash
Hillary…or do something stupid by allowing a Republican to do worse. I will continue to fight…I
will not sit on the sidelines…and anyone who does is a coward.
Economically disadvantaged people should be voting for Sanders. To vote for Clinton is misguided
and foolish whether you are black or white. We should not apologise for saying this loudly and
clearly. It is a fact.
Amazing what you can pull off with nonsense rhetoric. Clinton should thank her speech writers
for that bit of baloney. "love and kindness" Ha! Yeah. She's all warmth, that neolib.
I see a whole lot of blame being thrown at black South Carolinians in these comments:
"How stupid ARE black people?"
"Why don't black people know what's good for them?"
"Blacks must have voted this way because of poor education..."
The casual racism of people who claim to be 'progressive' never ceases to amaze me. I'm
supremely depressed people voted for the corporate Wall Street puppet too, guys, but still...
yeesh.
It is not racism, I am a black person, and use to vote democratic and I proudly use those
terms...and worse to describe my homies....they are still living like slaves!
And our country's too. Another corrupt politician pulled the wool over the black race.
Killer Mike, Erica Gardener,Spike Lee,and danny glover better get the word out.
If she wins the nomination -- and it looks increasingly like she will -- she will lose the
general election, should Trump be the Republican nominee, which is also looking increasingly
likely. Sanders would have walloped Trump in the general: it would have been the 99% versus the
1%, and the 99% would have won. Clinton, on the other hand, is distrusted by such a large number
of Democrats, vast numbers of us would rather steer clear of the polls altogether than give her
our vote. Trump will be the next President of the United States.
I didn't know much about his personal background three years ago. All I knew about him in the
past couple of decades came from reading the Congressional Record: his morally courageous speeches
always stood out from the rest. But I never dreamed that he would run for President, or that the
American public would finally "catch up" with him and his call for political revolution.
So don't blame me. Blame the media, which even today has little time for such "boring" progressive
subjects as poverty in America:
19:40 mark... Bernie gets pissed off at the fact that reporters would rather ask electoral
"horse race" questions one after another after another instead of showing the slightest bit of
interest in the subject of his press conference: Poverty in America.
The most ill-informed, deluded, fearful, armed, dangerous and destructive country in the first
world. No number of Steve Jobs and Elon Musks can make the US a net positive. By and large the
craziest collection of presidential candidates in my memory ...
lets see - Norway, Poland and most of East Europe have voted racist parties. The UK voted for
Cameron and Socialists are doing poorly in the rest of Europe. Not a great sign all over - so
don't just get upset with the Americans
How come the African American community voted massively for Hillary when many of them apparently
agree more with Sanders political plan AND know that Sanders was a civil rights leader in the
60s?
Let's not panic, Bernie supporters. South Carolina is only one state, and no one expected Bernie
to win it. No candidate wins every primary. He isn't out of the race yet.
Unlike more conventional candidates who are controlled by big donors and the Party establishment,
Bernie has no reason to drop out before the nomination is fully decided. He has everything to
gain and nothing to lose by staying in. The worst case scenario is that he keeps putting pressure
on Hillary to position herself leftward.
There are still many other states, and most of them are not in the South. Onward.
You are suffering from a delusion as to the nature of Clinton and the people who control her.
They are not interested in making the USA more like Europe. Exactly the opposite. I cannot even
fathom how you might think otherwise.
Your scenario has Trump not making a deal and selling his delegates at the convention. I would
have to laugh out loud if the various other Republican candidates all quit before he can make
a deal. Can you imagine Trump as President? "Your fired!" "Sorry Mr. President, you cannot fire
me. It is called embedding. I have a position that you cannot change because of laws passed by
Congress. The Bush Administration put me here to make sure no one else can come in and change
anything they set up. Until I retire or Congress makes a new law, I am going to keep this job
and be a big thorn in your side. In fact, you cannot fire hardly anyone."
Trump might be the first President to pull a Palin and just quit.
you haven't been paying attention. in no current polling does clinton win against trump.
sanders is the only candidate who can face down every republican candidate.
and even if that weren't true, wait until the republicans go to town about her emails, when
she is the democratic nominee. there's no way she survives that.
further, you clearly don't understand the core beliefs of hillary clinton if you think she
will move this country towards a european style nation. lol. there's very little about hillary
that's changed since she stumped for barry goldwater and she is very open about that.
Clinton is getting pushed to the left as we speak because of how much support Sanders has.
She's a moderate progressive so she may not share your vision but she still believes in progressive
policies. Sanders supporters make it sound like electing Clinton and electing a republican is
the same thing...
Trump loves power and the spotlight. You are out of his mind if you think he would quit.
Founded by Southern Democrats in 1985, the group sought to transform the party by pushing
it to embrace more conservative positions and win support from big business.
Bernie thinks he can win the low turnout caucus states Colorado and Minnesota. The problem is
that they are both closed caucus states. You can only vote if you are a registered Democratic.
No Independents can vote in the Democratic caucusus. He'll lose and if he loses Massachussetts
his only win will be in Vermont and possibly Oklahoma where Hillary has a narrow lead. Looks hopeless.
This landslide win may be the one time the majority of black South Carolinians have something
in common with Goldman Sachs execs. Strange bedfellows...
As for Super Tuesday, for Bernie supporters, the races to watch are Massachusetts, Colorado,
and Minnesota. If Bernie can win all three, this race is still on.
It is interesting that in the latest speech that I heard from Sanders he has shifted from
attacking Clinton to focusing his attacks on Trump. I think he sees the writing on the wall
and he knows that he is losing. This will all be over in a couple of weeks and I'd be surprised
if Sanders is still in the race in April. Once Clinton wins Florida, Ohio and Michigan, Sanders
has to know that it's over.
Sanders knows the danger that is posed by the semi-fascist Trump
and he will throw all his support behind Clinton once it is clear that his chance is over. He
isn't one of these morons like we see on this forum that are saying that there is no difference
between Trump and Clinton. They are the same idiots that told us that there was no difference
between Bush and Gore.
C'mon people..this is south Carolina...What did you expect? This is a state where a landlord can
choose no to have "multicultural " tenants...
Give me a break, this state is frozen in time... Heck, Hitler would win against Bernie in South
Carolina. Have doubts? Just ask 'round. Bernie will be the next president.. Even in south Caro-the
land civil rights forgot-lina.
The blacks on south carolina..have been dupped. .to trust Clinton is like re electing another
bush. Quite reckless stupid. ... 40 million youth who gave student debt loans to repay should
think their pocket.
And Vote Bernie
So to eradicate debt and give hope a chance ..and re bell against big sleazy corporate bankers
...
I will never vote for her. You'd think that my fellow black citizens would have taken a lesson
from the Rahm Emmanuel debacle and refused to be herded into that dark night
And I shall certainly never vote for Ms. Wall Street Liar and "Sucker Bill." My vote--come what
may--is for THE HON. MR. SANDERS ONLY. He will help the country and working people.
I just calculated the percentage of South Carolina adults that voted in the South Carolina primary
. I get 9.8%. Can this be right? If so - the whole thing is a sham & and only a handful of people
support Clinton enough to bother going out & voting for her. I guess that also goes for Sanders
too.
You can blame this outcome on the corrupt/criminalized/liberalized/administration, of the U.S.
Government. Its failure to prosecute/prison Hillary Clinton (SOS) having illegal (off Gov property)
private server's, with no government email account. The government had no access or control of
classified/top secret emails sent to her private email account.
I guess you didn't read my post, dickwad. If the populace truly educated themselves and studied
the histories of all candidates, Bernie would win by an incredible margin. There is no other candidate.SC
is poorly educated:
South Carolina...
Percent of students scoring at or above proficient, 2012-2013
Math - Grade 4 35%
Math - Grade 8 31%
Reading - Grade 4 28%
Reading - Grade 8 29%
Hence the ridiculous win for Hillary, who has done nothing for African American voters,
In fact, she has probably led to the incarceration of many black people in America. Her husband
certainly fucked them over.
Hillary Clinton, the most greedy woman in the world, but she couldn't transform a dream comes
true in 2008, an unpopulated candidate Barack Obama to be chosen the Democrat's presidential candidate.
During 8 years in White House, a first lady seemed quiet, even though the scandal Monica Lewinsky.
Moreover, the time she was elected as Senator, she had not any bright idea...when she became the
Secretary of State, Mrs. Hillary left the black spot of Benghazi that measures the ability of
the US president and recently the email scandal could be harmed her campaign. On the other hand,
the Democrat should empty the leader, so they chose the recycled candidate for 2016 presidential
race. People have not much believed on Hillary despite she launches the campaign well with plenty
money supported from somewhere else...However, Hillary Clinton has the right to dream, dream and
dream to be the first US female president. The dream is just the hope, but it comes true that
belongs to the trust of voters. In the US and Western country's history, there is rare the leader's
recycle and presidential recycled candidate, but Hillary is the exception.
If Hillary gets indicted, and with 150 FBI agents currently investigating the email server/Clinton
Foundation scandal, that looks increasingly likely, these SC results will be a fart in a hurricane.
President Carter's advisor and pollster, longtime Dem operative Pat Caddell, said this about
the Clinton Foundation/Email scandal on 2/13/2016:
"This is the greatest scandal in the history of the United States," Caddell said. "They all
ought to be indicted. This is worse than Watergate."
Clinton, he explained, would soon be exposed for using her connections in the State Department
to enrich her family, her foundation, and her supporters.
"They were selling out the national interests of the United States directly to adversaries
and others for money," he said. "There is just nothing that satisfies them. They are the greediest
white trash I have ever seen."
If this disgusting liar wins Democratic nomination, I am going to vote Republican for the
first time in my life. Even Trump is better that this abomination. At least he calls a spade a
spade and does not pretend to be what he isn't.
In theory there might be a chance for Clinton if she embraced the good stuff Sanders stands for.
Is she declared he would be her running mate, and she was incorporating big bits of his program.
Is she said that what the US needs now is a New Deal and hers is a new Franklin Roosevelt platform
of radical change, control of the banks, crushing of corporate interests etc.
If she talked like that there is in theory a chance that the Sanders people like myself would
be interested. But the trouble is she never will: she belongs to the aggressive neo-liberal ideology
of Bill Clinton and only adds to that a dose of vicious special interest corporate feminism and
pushing Black special interests. That is not a formula most Americans hungry for change see anything
in but sheer rubbish.
Clinton is a crook and nothing she says can be believed except that she will sell out to crooks.
The left feels betrayed by the Blacks. For decades we have sweated our guts backing the Blacks
and this is how they repay us when there is a real candidate for socialist change.
The left didn't sweat their guts "backing the blacks" because they were after strategic support.
The left did it because it was the proper, human thing to do. That's sort of the difference between
the left and the right in their attitudes towards fellow humans: intrinsic worth vs strategic
usefulness.
And the "Blacks" aren't some monolithic cult-like voting body - they're not ants..or Evangelicals...
What has the Clinton Dynasty done to make ordinary black lives better?
The opposite side of that coin is record incarceration flowing from their crime bill, job outsourcing
thru trade deals, the seeds of the 2008 crash thru repeal of Glass Steagal, and a 20-year period
at the apex of executive and then legislative branch power, but a massive increase in inequality
while the Clintons enrich themselves at the hands of the oligarchs.
If only that ad was steadily playing across all the TVs of South Carolinians for a month or two
before this election..."Clinton: making black lives worse." Then the word "black" is crossed out
by a chalk-wielding child's hand and the word "all" is written above it...
I get damned irritated when certain people keep using the words racist and misogynist to prevent
free debate. If blacks are going to vote as a block then we criticize the behavior of the block.
Why did they vote on mass for Clinton? its a legitimate question to be answered.
I do not believe the female "block" vote is nearly as strong but Clinton is still going to
try to use it. And using words with sexual innuendo might be in bad taste but it doesn't make
the user a "woman hater" any more than a woman pointing to a man's baldness makes her a man hater.
After the disappointment of the Obama regime, you'd be forgiven for wondering why any black voter
would ever support someone playing the race/black elite card and so slavishly pandering to ethnic
groups...
Voter turn out 2008 - 540000+
Voter turn out 2016- 360000+
Clearly shows democrats are going to lose general if they are not motivated and i don't Clinton
with her message of keeping same as it is going to inspire many.
South Carolina black communities are very poor, uneducated and centered around their churches,
which in turn are controlled by black establishment giving them some money through various social
grants. I hope it helps to understand who and how forced black voters there how they have to vote.
If you cannot have the best you have to choose the lesser of two evils.
We can't have Sanders and real change. That's clear by now. Thanks, old man, for you great
brave effort and for bringing back Socialism to the USA after nearly a century in the dog house.
That is an amazing feat in itself --
So, it's either Black special interests plus aggressive careerist neo-liberal feminism
or a glorious and unpredictable populist who shoves the PC gang.
Interestingly, Clinton struggles against other Republican candidates.
Sanders may seem to have a slight advantage against other candidates, but it isn't really a
valid comparison. Voters know Clinton. She's been relentlessly attacked for over 20 years. Sanders
has barely been mentioned.
Once the rightwing hate machine goes to work on him, he would likely struggle.
February 24th (just 3 days ago) : Reuters poll gives Bernie Sanders lead for nomination
A national poll shows Bernie Sanders leading Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination.
The Reuters poll for "Possible Democratic presidential candidates in 2016" on Tuesday showed
Sanders leading Clinton 41.7 percent to 35.5 percent, with 22.9 percent of respondents
saying they wouldn't vote. The five-day tracking poll shows Clinton and Sanders swapping leads
since Feb. 6, and the Vermont democratic socialist holding the advantage since Feb. 19.
After 8 years of that knucklehead George W. Bush, then 8 more years of the Flim Flam Man Obama,
I thought nothing can get any worse than that.....WRONG.
The world has a new nightmare to wake up to, the sociopath Hillary or the demagogue The Donald.
At least Trump recognizes the fiasco that was the Iraq war. Hillary isn't the least bit contrite
for that vote, nor her role in destabilizing Libya not helping to grow the ISIS threat thru inaction
in Iraq.
More articles on issues instead of who is ahead in the polls would be much more beneficial to
a democracy. I'm so tired of reading the pundits talk about everything but how we can get our
government to work for it's citizens, never discussing the pros and cons of the policies each
candidate is proposing or fact checking. The "Media" is lazy, corrupt, or both.
Have fun losing to Republicans in November should the DNC and media establishment successfully
force the primary coronation of their queen. All of that legitimate excitement and momentum that
Sanders lost will vanish into thin air, and some of it will go to independent and Republican voters.
So yuck it up. Americans evidently need to learn a really hard lesson before reality finally penetrates
their collective skulls.
Anyone who is considering a vote for H Clinton who is also concerned about global warming should
know what NASA's former lead climate scientist had to say about her global warming plan:
""It's just plain silly," said James Hansen, a climate change researcher who headed Nasa's
Goddard Institute for Space Studies for over 30 years. "No, you cannot solve the problem without
a fundamental change, and that means you have to make the price of fossil fuels honest. Subsidizing
solar panels is not going to solve the problem."
She is just as complicit in the coup against our country. So yeah, we need to grow some spines
and start speaking up and acting. No more of this " well she's not AS bad crap." We're losing
our democracy, our freedom, our path to a decent life. It's time to wake up. It's Bernie or bust.
Clinton will lose to Trump, she is just another corrupt establishment candidate that will wither
under the same blasts of contempt that sunk Bush, Walker, Rubio and Graham, the war hawk neocon
conservatives that are her ideological bedfellows.
This is a massive tactical error by Af-Am voters whose fidelity to a dynastic family who have
only delivered misery to their communities, while taking money from her Wall Street paymasters,
is perverse. What has she done for them?
My dear blacks, you are not only ruining your future, but also many others'.You have been made
a vote bank for the corrupted establishment; it is a pity that you are not realizing.
People get what they deserve. So sad America. Same thing on the other side of the aisle with Trump.
I guess America is bought and sold. You can stick a fork in it!
The environment that supports human life is hanging by a thread. The people who vote for the 1%'er
Monsanto, Goldman Sachs, Military-Industrial complex candidate will be held to account. This election
is not a joke. It's between a political revolution and one in the streets.
Looks like the Sanders revolution is already over. One can't become president of the US now without
winning a significant portion of the Black and Hispanic community vote (Bernie's liberal voters
are learning this the hard way). Obama won around 98% of the black vote in 2012. That's North
Korea tier numbers! Hillary Clinton will get similar percentage of votes among minorities in 2016.
The US is heading in the direction of Brasil (this is not a good thing). Elections from now
will be decided mainly by demographics rather than policies of the candidates.
Everyone, especially African- American voters in the South should just remember that at 50% employment
there is still 50% more unemployment if they vote to continue the Clinton Dynasty. Then it will
be too late.
1975 Rape Case in which she representing rapist Haunting Hillary Clinton
Notable quotes:
"... The victim said if she saw Clinton today, she would call her out for what she sees as the hypocrisy of Clinton's current campaign to fight for women's rights compared to her actions regarding this rape case so long ago ..."
"... The victim, who remains anonymous, says Hillary's claims about her supposed history of unfounded accusations were flat-out lies ..."
"... For the victim, the tapes prove that while Clinton was arguing in the affidavit that the victim could have some culpability in her own attack, she actually believed that her client was guilty. Taylor's light sentence was a miscarriage of justice, the victim said. "It's proven fact, with all the tapes [now revealed], she lied like a dog on me. ..."
"... I think she wants to be a role model being who she is, to look good, but I don't think she's a role model at all... If she had have been, she would have helped me at the time, being a 12-year-old girl who was raped by two guys, ..."
Hillary tapes reveal she voluntarily defended a child rapist that she knew was guilty. In this
1980's taped interview, Hillary Clinton laughed about getting the convicted rapist of a 12 year old
child off on a technicality. Hillary got him off with time served in county jail, about 2 months.
She says she used a legal technicality to plead her client, who faced 30 years to life in prison,
down to a lesser charge."
The audio recordings also capture Hillary chuckling about her efforts to exploit the local authorities'
mistake, which ultimately allowed her client to get off with an extremely reduced sentence on lesser
charges. Her laughter over decidedly unfunny developments is strange and off-putting. A legal expert
quoted by the Washington Free Beacon, which published the original story, also questioned the ethics
of Clinton revealing the results of her client's polygraph test. She told a reporter that the accused
man passed the test, which "forever destroyed my faith in polygraphs," a clear indication that Hillary
knew of her client's guilt. The Free Beacon piece did not quote the victim extensively, saying that
the woman (now 52 years old) declined an interview.
In a long, emotional interview with The Daily Beast, she accused Clinton of intentionally lying
about her in court documents, going to extraordinary lengths to discredit evidence of the rape, and
later callously acknowledging and laughing about her attackers' guilt on the recordings. "Hillary
Clinton took me through Hell," the victim said.
The Daily Beast agreed to withhold her name out of concern for her privacy as a victim of sexual
assault. The victim said if she saw Clinton today, she would call her out for what she sees as
the hypocrisy of Clinton's current campaign to fight for women's rights compared to her actions regarding
this rape case so long ago. "I would say [to Clinton], 'You took a case of mine in '75, you
lied on me... I realize the truth now, the heart of what you've done to me. And you are supposed
to be for women? You call that [being] for women, what you done to me? And I hear you on tape laughing."
The victim, who remains anonymous, says Hillary's claims about her supposed history of unfounded
accusations were flat-out lies:
She also says that listening to the clip of Hillary discussing her case reduced her to tears and
compelled her to speak out at greater length:
For the victim, the tapes prove that while Clinton was arguing in the affidavit that the victim
could have some culpability in her own attack, she actually believed that her client was guilty.
Taylor's light sentence was a miscarriage of justice, the victim said. "It's proven fact, with all
the tapes [now revealed], she lied like a dog on me.
"I think she wants to be a role model being who she is, to look good, but I don't think she's
a role model at all... If she had have been, she would have helped me at the time, being a 12-year-old
girl who was raped by two guys," she said. "She did that to look good and she told lies on that.
How many other lies has she told to get where she's at today? If she becomes president, is she gonna
be telling the world the truth? The victim is concerned that speaking out will make her a target
for attacks but she no longer feels she is able to stay silent. "I'm a little scared of her... When
this all comes about, I'm a little worried she might try to hurt me, I hope not," she said. "They
can lie all they want, say all they want, I know what's true." This woman may sound like she has
an axe to grind. Hell yes, she does. She was raped at a very young age, and Hillary Clinton called
her a liar at the time, then laughed about how her guilty client eluded justice years later. The
victim was a virgin at the time of her attack, and has struggled with addiction and depression throughout
her adult life.
"Fair Use" provision, which allows reasonable use of copyrighted work, without permission,
for criticism, commentary, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, research, or educational purposes.
Meanwhile, a federal judge ruled this week that Clinton and her top aides should be questioned
under oath about her email arrangement, signaling the start of an entirely new legal headache for
the now White House contender and her campaign team.
The lawsuit, brought by the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch, will pick up again in
a few weeks in mid-March when the group files its preliminary plan for the questioning. State has
until Apr. 5 to respond, and then Judicial Watch gets 10 days to file a reply.
The legal maneuvering means that Clinton aides could be deposed during the dog days of summer
and potentially well into the general election. Another months-long round of questions about her
emails could drag her entire campaign down as it did last year and give Sanders another shot at the
nomination or hobble her in a contest against the GOP nominee.
"... Let me assume that Donald Trump will be the Republican Party candidate and Hillary Clinton for the Democrats. Give me your thumb nails sketch of those two likely opponents. ..."
George Galloway interviews the presidential candidate of the US Green Party, Jill Stein, 'a better
woman than Clinton; a better democrat than Sanders!'
George Galloway:How is your campaign going?
Dr. Jill Stein: It is going great, it is going game busters. There is a rebellion
going on in the US, as in much of the world, and for good reason - we are in crisis and people really
want to see change. You cannot have a revolution inside of a counter-revolutionary party. This is
a big, deep and long fight. And it can't simply be passed on to Hillary Clinton and we think that
Bernie Sanders is running a very principled and powerful campaign; he is riding that wave of revolt.
But unfortunately he is in a party that has a track record for basically sabotaging its rebels. It
has done a good job of doing that in the past from Dennis Kucinich to Jesse Jackson to Howard Dean,
whether they use a PR campaign like the 'Dean's scream' to bring down the Dean candidacy. Also Jesse
Jackson was sabotaged by a PR by the DNC. The Democratic Party has its ways of reigning people in
if they try to rebel. The bottom line is that we are in political system in the US, which is funded
by predatory banks and fossil fueled giants and war profiteers. So, we really need to reject that
system, we say to reject the lesser evil so we can stand up and really fight for the greater good.
G.G:Let me assume that Donald Trump will be the Republican Party candidate
and Hillary Clinton for the Democrats. Give me your thumb nails sketch of those two likely opponents.
J.S: Unfortunately, they have an awful lot in common. They both support a very
strong military, they support a budget in which 54 percent of our tax dollars are discretionary budget
is going to the military to fight these wars which are not making us or the world a safer place.
They are firing back at us madly, creating failed states and refugee crisis and worst terrorist threats
actually. So, they both fail to see the picture on that account. They are both very much representatives
of the oligarchy: Hillary Clinton who was on the Board of Directors for Walmart.
There is no more oppressive corporation for workers' rights and women than Walmart, who never
found a word that she didn't support. Donald Trump – it is hard to say exactly where he stands because
he changes his mind all the time. One thing is very clear, he is not friendly to immigrants. For
him not to understand that in our country we are all immigrants and in fact that immigrants are really
the vitality and the diversity of our communities, our economy, our culture. This is a very dangerous
thing - this is a slippery slope to fascism. There is nothing inspiring, enlightened about either
of those campaigns.
They are both representatives of oligarchy and at this point it is unclear whether the Republicans
will allow Donald Trump to be nominated. There is talk now Paul Ryan being a brokered candidate at
the Republican convention. He is sort of the establishment of the Republican Party, which is very
much at war with Donald Trump.
"... For twenty four years the Clintons have orchestrated a conjugal relationship with Wall Street, to the immense financial benefit of both parties. They have accepted from the New York banks $68.72 million in campaign contributions for their six political races, and $8.85 million more in speaking fees. The banks have earned hundreds of billions of dollars in practices that were once prohibited-until the Clinton Administration legalized them. ..."
"... The Clintons' ambition is reinforced by arrogance. Their behavior in the Monica Lewinsky affair is only the most glaring example. Sexual frivolities while holding office are scarcely unusual, having spiced the lives of public figures for centuries, but if the dalliance is exposed, the scarlet official typically resigns in shame and scuttles into obscurity... ..."
"... That performance pales, however, compared to the Clintons' self-serving transformation of the Democratic Party, from the champion of working people to the lapdog of Wall Street-and of corporate America in general. Cleverly the Clintons still pander to the traditional constituency, but in serving its new clientele the transformed party abandoned the less fortunate strata of American society, especially the communities of color... ..."
For twenty four years the Clintons have orchestrated a conjugal relationship with Wall Street,
to the immense financial benefit of both parties. They have accepted from the New York banks
$68.72 million in campaign contributions for their six political races, and $8.85 million more
in speaking fees. The banks have earned hundreds of billions of dollars in practices that were
once prohibited-until the Clinton Administration legalized them.
The extraordinary ambition displayed in the careers of Bill and Hillary Clinton defies description.
They have spent much of their adult lives soliciting money from others for their own benefit...
Hillary Clinton's net worth is forty five million dollars; Bill Clinton's is eighty million.
Measured by family wealth, this puts the couple in the top 1% of American households by a factor
of 16. (and they claim to have left the White House 'broke')
The Clintons' ambition is reinforced by arrogance. Their behavior in the Monica Lewinsky affair
is only the most glaring example. Sexual frivolities while holding office are scarcely unusual,
having spiced the lives of public figures for centuries, but if the dalliance is exposed, the
scarlet official typically resigns in shame and scuttles into obscurity...
That performance pales, however, compared to the Clintons' self-serving transformation of the
Democratic Party, from the champion of working people to the lapdog of Wall Street-and of corporate
America in general. Cleverly the Clintons still pander to the traditional constituency, but
in serving its new clientele the transformed party abandoned the less fortunate strata of American
society, especially the communities of color...
Hillary Clinton is under the microscope. And rightfully so.
At a time when the American electorate has definitively rejected the entrenched political establishment
in favor of two so-called "protest candidates" in Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, voters want to
know why they should elect the former First Lady and Secretary of State.
Why, Americans seem to be asking, is Clinton entitled to be President? Why should it be a foregone
conclusion that another member of the country's political aristocracy gets to stroll into the Oval
Office? Republican voters soundly rejected the status quo when Jeb Bush's campaign fell flat in the
face of the Trump juggernaut, but Clinton is a larger-than-life figure (and we don't necessarily
mean that in a good way) who large swaths of the electorate are still inclined to vote for if only
because " more of the same " sounds better than " who the hell knows " when it comes to where the
country goes starting in 2017.
But perhaps more than ever, America is fed up with business as usual inside the Beltway and if
there's anyone who embodies that concept, it's Clinton. She's widely viewed as dishonest and
there are serious questions about whether special interests and state actors exercise undue
influence over decisions via contributions to the Clinton family charities, through paid speeches,
and through who knows what other channels .
More specifically, Americans want to know what Clinton told audiences at speeches she made behind
closed doors at events sponsored by Wall Street. This is critical because Clinton has pledged to
rein in big banks and go beyond Dodd-Frank to address TBTF. Below, find an Op-Ed from The New York
Times, whose editorial board wants Clinton "show voters those transcripts."
"Everybody does it," is an excuse expected from a mischievous child, not a presidential
candidate. But that is Hillary Clinton's latest defense for making closed-door, richly paid
speeches to big banks, which many middle-class Americans still blame for their economic pain, and
then refusing to release the transcripts.
A televised town hall on Tuesday was at least the fourth candidate forum in which Mrs. Clinton
was asked about those speeches. Again, she gave a terrible answer, saying that she would release
transcripts "if everybody does it, and that includes the Republicans."
In November,
she implied that her paid talks for the Wall Street firms were part of helping them rebuild after
the 9/11 attacks, which "was good for the economy and it was a way to rebuke the terrorists."
In a debate with Bernie Sanders on Feb. 4, Mrs. Clinton was asked if she would release transcripts,
and she said she would "look into it." Later in February, asked in a CNN town hall forum why she
accepted $675,000 for speeches to Goldman Sachs, she got annoyed, shrugged,
and said , "That's what they offered," adding that "every secretary of state that I know has
done that ."
At another
town hall, on Feb. 18, a man in the audience pleaded, "Please, just release those transcripts
so that we know exactly where you stand." Mrs. Clinton had told him, "I am happy to release anything
I have when everybody else does the same, because every other candidate in this race has given speeches
to private groups."
On Tuesday, Mrs. Clinton further complained, "Why is there one standard for me, and not
for everybody else?"
Voters have every right to know what Mrs. Clinton told these groups . In July,
her spokesman Nick Merrill
said that though most speeches were private, the Clinton operation "always opened speeches when
asked to." Transcripts of speeches that have been leaked have been pretty innocuous. By refusing
to release them all,
especially
the bank speeches , Mrs. Clinton
fuels speculation about why she's stonewalling.
Her conditioning her releases on what the Republicans might or might not do is mystifying. Republicans
make no bones about their commitment to Wall Street deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthiest
Americans. Mrs. Clinton is laboring to convince struggling Americans that she will rein in big banks,
despite taking their money.
Besides, Mrs. Clinton is not running against a Republican in the Democratic primaries. She is
running against Bernie Sanders, a decades-long critic of Wall Street excess who is hardly a hot ticket
on the industry speaking circuit. The Sanders campaign, asked if Mr. Sanders also received
fees for closed-door speeches, came up with two from two decades ago that were not transcribed: one
to a hospital trade association, and one to a college, each for less than $1,000. Royalties from
a book called "The Speech," Mr. Sanders's eight-hour Senate floor diatribe against President Obama's
continuation of Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy, were donated to the nonprofit Addison County Parent/Child
Center in Vermont .
The hazards of Mrs. Clinton, a presidential hopeful, earning more than $200,000 each for dozens
of speeches to industry groups
were clear from the start. Mrs. Clinton was making paid speeches when she
hired consultants to vet her own background in preparation for a run. If they didn't flag this,
they weren't doing their jobs.
Public interest in these speeches is legitimate, and it is the public - not the candidate
- who decides how much disclosure is enough. By stonewalling on these transcripts Mrs. Clinton
plays into the hands of those who say she's not trustworthy and makes her own rules. Most important,
she is damaging her credibility among Democrats who are begging her to show them that she'd run an
accountable and transparent White House.
In your dreams. She'll say it's all politics and she'll get away with it. Americans are so
stupid they'll vote for her because their brains are squeaky clean and hung out to dry.
Hillary wasn't afraid to tell something to a few hundred bankers (one of whom could've easily
recorded the speech), but she doesn't want for the public to see the transcripts? How effed-up
is that?
Just like all pathological liars, Hillary's first reaction to everything is to LIE, no matter
how serious or innocent the issue is, but almost half the country is willing to vote her into
the WH? Exceptional! ;-)
She's not playing into the hands of those who believe "she's not trustworthy and makes her
own rules". She is clearly not trustworthy, clearly makes her own rules, and is a despicable example
of a human being to boot.
In her own mind, she has already gotten away with it all, and asking her to suddenly do the
right thing is farcical on its face.
This is pretty easy to figure out when you think it through.
(1) We KNOW the NYT is in the tank for Hillary. So, we KNOW that the NYT's "bold demand" that
Hillary release speech transcripts is a red herring.
(2) If it's a red herring, then that means that both the NYT and Hillary already know that
the speech transcripts are just innocuous pablum, because that's what ALL of these paid-appearance
speeches are.
(3) So then we must ask: why are the NYT and Hillary going through this charade? The obvious
answer, is to fill up the news cycles with hot air in order to provide distractions from the Email
server security breach, which is bona-fide, get-locked-in-Leavenworth for ten years, criminal
behavior.
(4) Hillary and the NYT will drag this particular charade out for a few weeks (maybe even a
few months) until Hillary finally releases the transcripts. Surprise! Nothing to see here, although
the NYT will do some clucking about it to fill up a few more news cycles...and look at the time!
primary season is almost over!
(5) Then they will have to go back to the drawing board and figure out another charade (or
charades) to play to keep the public distracted until November.
i wish they had gotten into the trail of dead bodies left behind during the clintons' arkansas
years, and the use of mena, AR, as a base for cia cocaine running.
Hitlery certainly wasn't going to teach the bankers how to steal.
That would be almost as difficult as teaching an attorney how to tell a lie ;)
Not sure which of the candidates is sleazier, Hitlery, Rubio or Cruz, or Trump. But since Hitlery's
had the most time feeding at the trough, I'm voting against her.
Can a president really pardon someone who hasn't even been charged with a crime?
Yep. In 1866, the Supreme Court ruled in
Ex parte Garland that the pardon power "extends to every offence known to the law, and may
be exercised at any time after its commission, either before legal proceedings are taken, or during
their pendency, or after conviction and judgment." (In that case, a former Confederate senator
successfully petitioned the court to uphold a pardon that prevented him from being disbarred.)
Generally speaking, once an act has been committed, the president can issue a pardon at any time-regardless
of whether charges have even been filed.
Why don't we call these speeches for what they are?
BRIBE: Money or some other benefit given to a person in power, especially
a public official, in an effort to cause the person to take a particular action
It is the part just after the speech that is tailered to the specific bankster where the real
information passes. "I will do this if you do that." It is not in the transcript of the speech
at all; if that were the case just send a DVD of the speech for $225,000+.
She is going to go to jail.....what does it matter ?
What does it matter? Vince Foster, Rose Law Firm, cattle futures, covering up the bimbo eruptions
of Slick Willy, Bengazi, classified emails on a private server... When has she ever been held
to account for anything? This latest Wall Street speech business won't be any different.
The reason HRC refuses to release those Wall Street speeches is because again and again and
again Clinton has promised them to pass the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the ultimate workers' rights
destroyer, both nationally and internationally!
Not really. The speech transcripts are being doctored right now.
What the New York Times SHOULD be asking for, is the names of the anonymous donors to the Clinton-Guistra
charity in Canada which was created to bypass American laws to funnel foreign money to the Clintons.
And it might be interesting to note the timing of the foreign donations to the e-mails on HiLiary's
celphone.
NYT is pro-Hillary neocon establishment influenced rag. One apt observation from NYT comments: "Trump's assertions about sleep should be taken with the grain of
salt that all his other grandiose proclamations deserve. I suspect he makes those claims just to prove
what an exceptional human he is. He doesn't even need to sleep much!" Trumps come and go, but the deluded,
totally brainwashed electorate will stay. That's the real problem. Degradation of democracy into oligarchy
(the iron law of oligarchy) is an objective process. Currently what we see is some kind revolt against
status quo. that's why Trump and Sanders get so many supporters.
Another one from comments: "Over the years, Pew surveys show that at least 60% of those polled can't name two
branches of the government. Current campaigns, including that of Sanders, imply that the POTUS has a
wide range of powers that are to be found nowhere in the Constitution." So none of Repug candidates
understand this document. And still I must admit that "Trump is the best in breed when it comes to this
GOP dog show." I agree that "Trump punches above his weight in debates "
NYT will never tell you why Hillary will be even more dangerous
president.
Only a sleep disorder physician following a full-night study could tell us whether the diagnosis
is clinically sound. This guy from NYT is a regular uneducated journo, not a certified physician. Why
insult people who truly suffer from sleep deprivation? So all of them are obnoxious maniacs? To me a
large part of his behavior is a typical alpha-male behavior. There are, in fact, a number of brilliant,
driven alpha-males who function well with a bare amount of sleep. That may be an evolutionary trait
that help them to achieve dominance. For example, Napoleon rarely slept more than 2-3 hours per 24-hour
period, according to several historians. Churchill stayed up several nights in a row reading Hansard
in his formative years and he was a gifted orator, one of the sharpest wits. He also was an alcoholic.
Several famous famous mathematicians were among sleep deprived people. Like photographic memory this
is a unique idiosyncrasy that is more frequent in alpha-males, not necessary a disease. BTW Angela Merkel
is noted for her ability not to sleep for several nights, wearing her opponents into shreds via sleep
deprivation and enforcing her decisions over the rest. That was last demonstrated in Minsk were she
managed even to get Putin to agree on her terms.
He mentions this term "alpha male" despite the fact that it provides an
alternative explanation. Also as one reader commented "So please explain the positions (and behaviors
) of Ayatollah Cruz and rubber man Rubio." Those two backstabbing pseudo-religious demagog got implicit
support from the article.
How about this from sleep deprived person vs one definitely non-sleep deprive person (Jeb!): "Donald
Trump joins the fight to release the secret 28 Pages of the 9/11 Report."
Notable quotes:
"... This is Time's contribution to the growing movement to discredit Trump. Every candidate can be similarly eviscerated for their weaknesses, including character flaws. The problem is that our American system of electing leadership is deeply flawed and easily manipulated by advertising. The humiliating process of campaigning drives away our best prospects, leaving the country with weak, inconsistent leadership. ..."
"... gemli, Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton pursued a regime change in Libya, Syria and Ukraine. They got away with their foolish adventure by saying that Gaddafi was a bad guy, Assad is a bad guy and Putin is a bad guy. ..."
"... Mr. Trump is the sole American politician who is willing to say that we should cooperate with Putin. He is the only Republican to be open to single payer health care, the only Republican to say something good about Planned Parenthood and the only Republican to say that Bush should have been impeached for the Iraq war. ..."
"... Hillary Rodham and Marco Rubio are so awful that we would be better off with a nasty, sleep-deprived Trump. Besides, there is still a much better alternative: the irascible Bernie Sanders. He may be angry, but you would have to be crazy to not be angry with the mess we now have to live with: a rigged economy, free trade , politics corrupted by money, and an insatiable Military Industrial Complex. ..."
"... A lot of people are angry and Trump is channeling that anger. Sanders is channeling a different anger but he is too nice, and will lose to Mrs. Clinton who is supported by the establishment. ..."
"... He, I believe is also the first American politician to say openly that we have to cooperate with Russia if we are really serious about taking on ISIS. Mr. Obama, with his Harvard education, has NO idea what to do about the ME and is floundering around. Meanwhile Russia and Assad and the Kurds are taking the lead, and our allies Turkey and Saudi Arabia are actually undermining the war against ISIS. ..."
"... I would not vote for Trump but if he does become president, we might actually have peace in the Middle East and we might actually have single payer health care. On the second, almost all the Democrats will support him and so will at least some Republicans. ..."
"... Trump is not a nice man but he might not be a disaster as president. ..."
"... Trump is right about one thing, He does make your head spin. ..."
"... I just finished reading 4 opinion columns by Bruni, Brooks, Krugman and lastly Tim Egans, all published on Feb 26th. (May the last be first and the first last.) I hope Kasich wins to invoke a civil exchange of ideas in American politics, but I will vote for Bernie ..."
"... I imagine the Asians and/or Europe all laughing at us now, but at least there not shouting and acting like children. Help me, Im drowning. Give me a leader who can compromise in that great noble tradition which benefits everyone. Its called compassion for the global family. ..."
"... Ambler in Background to Danger has a small meditation about politics being not much of anything other than a face behind which the true story goes on, one of big business interests--or in general, economic interests. ..."
"... With Donald Trump the Republican party in the U.S. seems to have dropped the politics mask -- you have a combination of business and fascistic impulses. The question however, is why. Could it be because now all nations in the world find themselves hemmed, with a landlocked feeling like Germany had prior to outbreak of WW2? These business/authoritarian impulses today are not confined to the U.S. alone. ..."
"... how to satisfy in simple basics the restless masses of millions upon millions of people, everything else, not to mention culture, just collapsing in a crowd discussion of who gets what, when, where, why, and how. ..."
"... Whats defective about Trump? He is obviously doing very well for himself - he is the likely Republican nominee and is not exactly starving despite multiple bankruptcies. ..."
"... There are real problems with politics in the US and Trump is getting support partly because he at least shows some signs, however delusionary, of addressing the concerns of the 99%. ..."
"... Why are Democrats so concerned that Donald Trump might be the Republican Partys nominee for President that the NY Times trots out editorials psychobabbling about his sleep deprivation? ..."
"... Trump may be all that the intellectual elite deride him for. Guess what? The people who support him dont care. They are tired of being told how to think by people who suppose themselves to be their betters. They will cast their votes and throw their support behind whomever they please, thank-you very much. ..."
"... And really, does Timothy Egan really believe Donald Trump doesnt know what hes doing or saying? Because of sleep deprivation? Note to Mr. Egan: Whatever is Trumps sleep schedule, it seems to be working well for him. Hes winning. ..."
"... Trump functions well enough to understand this: (1) The media is deceptive with an agenda of its own. (2) Big donors and big money control the career politicians. 93) Politicians can talk talk talk and make plans and policy and get nothing done. ..."
"... Trump and his supporters are on to all this now. The corrupt media, the corrupt big money and the all talk no action politicians. That is functioning well enough. Trump does not need to function beyond that. His supporters know it and he knows it. ..."
"... So far the best and the brightest highly educated intellectuals have let the USA down . Trump has a certain kind of intelligence that might be just what we need. He effectively cut through a crowded Republican field packed with ideological purists like a knife through butter. He is a very talented New Yorker who grew up in the 60s and went to Fordham before he went to Wharton. If you want to stick your finger in the collective eye of the elite . vote for Trump. ..."
"... The republican party is the reactionary party. They are a little like the Sicilians described in the novel The Leopard where it is said that In Sicily it doesnt matter whether things are done well or done badly; the sin which we Sicilians never forgive is simply that of doing at all. ..."
"... The Taibbi piece can be found here at this link: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-america-made-donald-trump-... ..."
"... Better a sleep deprived bully than a well rested one, which what the rest of the bunch are. They clearly know exactly how to ruin the country and antagonize our allies. ..."
"... As you are reading this, recall how a stressful event in your own life interfered with your sleep. Well, given the frantic nature of the current Republican primary season, the travel, the debates, the probing press, the TV interviews, the speeches, the insults and whats at stake, all of the candidates must be sleep deprived. If they were not they wouldnt be human. Donald will do just fine once he becomes president and gets use to the job (or not). ..."
"... But what about those who hold those same obnoxious ideas arguably sans sleep deprivation? Palin, Cruz, Carson? Please do a series of columns linking the apparent absence of reason in many of the GOP candidates with the current DSM. ..."
"... I used to ridicule President Reagans legendary afternoon naps. Now I am the age Reagan was as president, and I dont think I could function without napping when I dont get enough sleep at night. ..."
"... What is happening now is not about Trump. Its about what he represents. I dont normally read Peggy Noonan but she nails it today. There are the protected and the unprotected. The protected make public policy. The unprotected live in it. The unprotected are starting to push back, powerfully. ..."
This is Tim's contribution to the growing movement to discredit Trump. Every candidate can
be similarly eviscerated for their weaknesses, including character flaws. The problem is that
our American system of electing leadership is deeply flawed and easily manipulated by advertising.
The humiliating process of campaigning drives away our best prospects, leaving the country with
weak, inconsistent leadership.
The founding fathers rejected a parliamentary system because it was like England's, but history
indicates America could have avoided many political debacles if it had been easier to remove incompetent
presidents when their decisions threatened the country. Modernizing our electoral system, shortening
the campaign time, and raising the level of debate could improve the choices Americans are given.
gemli, Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton pursued a regime change in Libya, Syria and Ukraine.
They got away with their foolish adventure by saying that Gaddafi was a bad guy, Assad is a bad
guy and Putin is a bad guy.
And maybe they are right about these people being bad guys. But the regime change policy has
been a disaster. WE did not spend a trillion dollars and no AMERICAN troops died. But hundreds
of thousands of Syrians are dead, millions knocking at Germany's door and Greece is overwhelmed
with refugees. This was all the doing of the "Obama team".
Mr. Trump is the sole American politician who is willing to say that we should cooperate with
Putin. He is the only Republican to be open to single payer health care, the only Republican to
say something good about Planned Parenthood and the only Republican to say that Bush should have
been impeached for the Iraq war.
YOU just see a nasty man in the Republican debates who talks nonsense and has no trouble lying.
And that nasty mean does seem to be there, although given Trump, the nasty man might well be a
façade who will vanish as soon as he faces the general election.
And you need to be aware of the fact that some of his positions are actually sensible and he
is the only politician who has all these positions.
Unfortunately you guys hate Republicans so much that you see red any time you see one and that
red in your eyes prevents you from seeing clearly.
A sleep-deprived Trump is still much better than a fully rested tool of the elites from
either political party.
Hillary Rodham and Marco Rubio are so awful that we would be better off with a nasty, sleep-deprived
Trump. Besides, there is still a much better alternative: the irascible Bernie Sanders. He may
be angry, but you would have to be crazy to not be angry with the mess we now have to live with:
a rigged economy, "free trade", politics corrupted by money, and an insatiable Military Industrial
Complex.
Rohit, New York 9 hours ago
A lot of people are angry and Trump is channeling that anger. Sanders is channeling a different
anger but he is too nice, and will lose to Mrs. Clinton who is supported by the establishment.
Trump is mean enough to take on the establishment, and win. And he is the first Republican brave
enough to say that Planned Parenthood DOES do some good work. Like him, I do NOT think they should
receive federal funding but that some or most of their work is actually health related is a fact.
He, I believe is also the first American politician to say openly that we have to cooperate
with Russia if we are really serious about taking on ISIS. Mr. Obama, with his Harvard education,
has NO idea what to do about the ME and is floundering around. Meanwhile Russia and Assad and
the Kurds are taking the lead, and our "allies" Turkey and Saudi Arabia are actually undermining
the war against ISIS.
I would not vote for Trump but if he does become president, we might actually have peace
in the Middle East and we might actually have single payer health care. On the second, almost
all the Democrats will support him and so will at least some Republicans.
Trump is not a nice man but he might not be a disaster as president.
Mr. Egan, Donald Trump may or may not suffer from sleep deprivation. He definitely suffers
from something called NPD, Narcissistic Personality Disorder. He has the classic symptoms which
are described as follows, according to the Mayo Clinic
http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/narcissistic-personality-d... :
"DSM-5 criteria for narcissistic personality disorder include these features:
Having an exaggerated sense of self-importance
Expecting to be recognized as superior even without achievements that warrant it
Exaggerating your achievements and talents
Being preoccupied with fantasies about success, power, brilliance, beauty or the perfect
mate
Believing that you are superior and can only be understood by or associate with equally
special people
Requiring constant admiration
Having a sense of entitlement
Expecting special favors and unquestioning compliance with your expectations
Taking advantage of others to get what you want
Having an inability or unwillingness to recognize the needs and feelings of others
Being envious of others and believing others envy you
Behaving in an arrogant or haughty manner"
bill b new york 16 hours ago
Trump is right about one thing, He does make your head spin.
Paul Greensboro, NC 11 hours ago
I just finished reading 4 opinion columns by Bruni, Brooks, Krugman and lastly Tim Egan's, all
published on Feb 26th. (May the last be first and the first last.) I hope Kasich wins to invoke
a civil exchange of ideas in American politics, but I will vote for Bernie or Hilary assuming
an asteroid does not hit the earth before then.
I imagine the Asians and/or Europe all laughing at us now, but at least the're not shouting
and acting like children. Help me, I'm drowning. Give me a leader who can compromise in that great
noble tradition which benefits everyone. It's called compassion for the global family.
Daniel12 Wash. D.C. 14 hours ago
Donald Trump?
I'm on a project to read four (the four I could find so far) of the six Eric Ambler novels
written prior to WW2. I'm on the second, "Background to Danger", now. Ambler in "Background
to Danger" has a small meditation about politics being not much of anything other than a face
behind which the true story goes on, one of big business interests--or in general, economic interests.
With Donald Trump the Republican party in the U.S. seems to have dropped the politics mask
-- you have a combination of business and fascistic impulses. The question however, is why. Could
it be because now all nations in the world find themselves hemmed, with a landlocked feeling like
Germany had prior to outbreak of WW2? These business/authoritarian impulses today are not confined
to the U.S. alone.
Worse, the opposition to big business, the other big economic theory of past decades, the socialistic/communistic
trend, has been seen in practice whether we speak of Cuba or the Soviet Union or Venezuela or
China. It seems all the masks of politics are coming off, all the ideals such as democracy, rights,
communism, what have you and instead the argument is turning to actual and naked discussion of
interests pure and simple, right and left wing economics, how to satisfy in simple basics
the restless masses of millions upon millions of people, everything else, not to mention culture,
just collapsing in a crowd discussion of who gets what, when, where, why, and how.
The open boat.
skeptonomist is a trusted commenter Tennessee 11 hours ago
What's defective about Trump? He is obviously doing very well for himself - he is the likely
Republican nominee and is not exactly starving despite multiple bankruptcies.
What needs analysis is why so many people support Trump - what's up with them? And what defects
in the establishments of both parties cause so many people to reject their selected dynastic picks.
There are real problems with politics in the US and Trump is getting support partly because
he at least shows some signs, however delusionary, of addressing the concerns of the 99%.
Beachbum Paris 14 hours ago
This is all thanks to Rupert Murdoch
S.D.Keith Birmigham, AL 7 hours ago
Why are Democrats so concerned that Donald Trump might be the Republican Party's nominee for
President that the NY Times trots out editorials psychobabbling about his sleep deprivation?
This is hilarious stuff. Trump may be all that the intellectual elite deride him for. Guess
what? The people who support him don't care. They are tired of being told how to think by people
who suppose themselves to be their betters. They will cast their votes and throw their support
behind whomever they please, thank-you very much. That, much to the chagrin of the Progressive
idealists who always believe they know better what people should need and want, is democracy in
action. It may be ugly at times, but it is much preferred over every other form of governance.
In fact, articles like this, while red meat for establishmentarian dogs, serve only to strengthen
Trump's bona fides among his supporters.
And really, does Timothy Egan really believe Donald Trump doesn't know what he's doing or saying?
Because of sleep deprivation? Note to Mr. Egan: Whatever is Trump's sleep schedule, it seems to
be working well for him. He's winning.
J. San Ramon 9 hours ago
Trump functions well enough to understand this: (1) The media is deceptive with an agenda of its own.
(2) Big donors and big money control the career politicians. 93) Politicians can talk talk talk and make plans and policy and get nothing done.
Trump and his supporters are on to all this now. The corrupt media, the corrupt big money and
the all talk no action politicians. That is functioning well enough. Trump does not need to function beyond that. His supporters
know it and he knows it.
So far the best and the brightest highly educated intellectuals have let the USA down . Trump
has a certain kind of intelligence that might be just what we need. He effectively cut through
a crowded Republican field packed with ideological purists like a knife through butter. He is
a very talented New Yorker who grew up in the 60s and went to Fordham before he went to Wharton.
If you want to stick your finger in the collective eye of the "elite". vote for Trump. This message
brought to you by a hugely "bigly" educated Queens lawyer. go Redmen
Excellency, is a trusted commenterFlorida
9 hours ago
The republican party is the reactionary party. They are a little like the Sicilians described
in the novel "The Leopard" where it is said that" In Sicily it doesn't matter whether things are
done well or done badly; the sin which we Sicilians never forgive is simply that of 'doing' at
all."
Imagine a man of action like Trump navigating that population, from which great jurists like
Scalia emerge, and you have Trump behaving much as Egan describes and succeeding. Indeed, in that
same novel it is said that "to rage and mock is gentlemanly, to grumble and whine is not."
Better a sleep deprived bully than a well rested one, which what the rest of the bunch
are. They clearly know exactly how to ruin the country and antagonize our allies.
Ever wonder why Trump invokes the name of Carl Ihkan every chance he gets? Both engage in hostile
takeovers. That's the predatory side of business. But how does that qualify Trump to be the Commander-In-Chief?
I would not be surprised if a frustrated President Trump threatened to punch Vladimir Putin in
the face. The very thought of President Trump is a nightmare, but no less a nightmare than President
Cruz or President Rubio.
John Kenneth Galbraith, who was in parts of his career intimate with government (including
being American ambassador to India during the 1962 China-India War) said in his autobiography
that sleep deprivation was the least-appreciated weakness of high-level decision makers in times
of crisis.
Somewhere I've read of an experiment that concluded that someone who hasn't slept for
36 hours is as dysfunctional as if he were legally intoxicated. And I recall Colin Powell praising Ambien as the only thing that allowed him to travel as he had to. That's interesting, given Ambien's
well-known potential amnesic side-effects.
As you are reading this, recall how a stressful event in your own life interfered with
your sleep. Well, given the frantic nature of the current Republican primary season, the travel,
the debates, the probing press, the TV interviews, the speeches, the insults and what's at stake,
all of the candidates must be sleep deprived. If they were not they wouldn't be human. Donald
will do just fine once he becomes president and gets use to the job (or not).
But what about those who hold those same obnoxious ideas arguably sans sleep deprivation? Palin,
Cruz, Carson? Please do a series of columns linking the apparent absence of reason in many of the GOP candidates
with the current DSM.
Good call, though I suspect most presidential candidates need a lot more sleep. A friend of
mine who lived near Michael Dukakis saw him a few weeks after the 1988 election, and he recounted
that the Democratic presidential candidate said he was now sleeping so much better, that in the
hectic pace of a campaign, he wasn't able to take the time to learn "what was really going on"
and to process everything.
I used to ridicule President Reagan's legendary afternoon naps. Now I am the age Reagan
was as president, and I don't think I could function without napping when I don't get enough sleep
at night.
There's a campaign trope about who you want to be in the White House when an emergency call
about a serious world crisis comes in at 3 a.m. I want him or her to be someone who didn't just
go to sleep at 2 a.m.
What is happening now is not about Trump. It's about what he represents. I don't normally
read Peggy Noonan but she nails it today. "There are the protected and the unprotected. The protected
make public policy. The unprotected live in it. The unprotected are starting to push back, powerfully.
The protected are the accomplished, the secure, the successful-those who have power or access
to it. They are protected from much of the roughness of the world. More to the point, they are
protected from the world they have created."
"... Furqa al-Sultan Murad receives weapons from the U.S. and its allies as part of a covert program, overseen by the CIA , that aids rebel groups struggling to overthrow the government of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, according to rebel officials and analysts tracking the conflict. ..."
"... If indeed 'buzzfeed" has there story correct then Russia will be continuing the campaign of kicking our fucking asses in new innovative ways that were never thought possible! ..."
"... I happen to believe that like the Seymour Hersh PR psyops stunt of a story about DOD not following orders from the Commander-in-Chief and "going rogue" on him in those Countries they already destroyed is still committing treason no matter how you slice it . ..."
"... In short the CIA is at the head of the MIC always has been and always will be until it's time of death which may be coming sooner than we think! ..."
"... The invisible hand of the market applied to mayhem - US style? ..."
"... The US Doesn't have a Foreign Relations policy, it's Israel's foreign relations policy installed on US soil. ..."
"... But it looks like the YPG in northeast Syria (where the US spec ops where deployed) is the favorite since they seem to have gotten the advanced Javelin anti tank missile while the moderate Jihadists only got the not as effective TOW. Video and photo at RT. ..."
"... Pictures have emerged on social media which appear to show Syrian Kurds with an advanced US-produced anti-tank missile. A video allegedly shows a rocket blowing up an Islamic State truck. Washington has denied "providing the YPG with weapons." ..."
"... The FGM-148 Javelin is a portable anti-tank missile, which was developed by the United States. It is able to lock on to potential targets using infrared imaging, which makes it a lot more effective than the TOW missile system, which militias fighting against IS had been using, as the TOW is heavier and requires a portable power supply ..."
"... "Also, Javelin launchers and missiles are rather expensive. In 2002, a single Javelin command launch unit cost $126,000, and each missile cost around $78,000." ..."
Officials with Syrian rebel battalions that receive covert backing from one arm of the U.S.
government told BuzzFeed News that they recently began fighting rival rebels supported by another
arm of the U.S. government.
The infighting between American proxies is the latest setback for the Obama administration's
Syria policy and lays bare its contradictions as violence in the country gets worse.
The confusion is playing out on the battlefield - with the U.S. effectively engaged in a proxy
war with itself.
***
Furqa al-Sultan Murad receives weapons from the U.S. and its allies as part of a covert
program, overseen by the CIA , that aids rebel groups struggling to overthrow the government of
Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, according to rebel officials and analysts tracking the conflict.
The Kurdish militants, on the other hand, receive weapons and support from the Pentagon
as part of U.S. efforts to fight ISIS. Known as the People's Protection Units, or YPG,
they are
the centerpiece of the Obama administration's strategy against the extremists in Syria and
coordinate regularly with U.S. airstrikes.
The Daily Beast also
reports that U.S. allies are fighting CIA-backed rebels. The U.S. is supporting the Kurds, who
are the best on-the-ground fighters against ISIS … yet America's close ally Turkey is
trying to wipe out the Kurds . Moreover, the U.S., Turkey and Saudi Arabia are
all
using the Incerlik air base in
Adana, Turkey , on
the border with Syria to launch military operations in Syria. The U.S. is using Incerlik to SUPPORT
the Kurds, but Turkey is using the
EXACT SAME air base to
BOMB the Kurds . In addition, the U.S. is supporting
Shia
Muslims in Iraq … but supporting their arch-enemy –
Sunnis Muslims – in neighboring Syria.
And the U.S. claims to be fighting the war on terror AGAINST the exact same groups – ISIS and
Al Qaeda – that
our
closest allies are SUPPORTING . Absolutely insane …
If indeed 'buzzfeed" has there story correct then Russia will be continuing the campaign
of kicking our fucking asses in new innovative ways that were never thought possible!
I happen to believe that like the Seymour Hersh PR psyops stunt of a story about DOD not
following orders from the Commander-in-Chief and "going rogue" on him in those Countries they
already destroyed is still committing treason no matter how you slice it .... is all simply
a way of attempting to draw Russia in closer to get intel on them while they continue to work
miracles on our "proxies" which is depleting our stable of Mercs R' Us day by day.
The event that took place this past weekend in Homs and Damascus is indicative of just that.
And if Russia did indeed make the mistake of giving too much information out to Uncle Sam, the
U.S. military and Langley won't be enjoying that luxury again!...
I'm pretty certain that "Winter Soldier" Kerry's desire to carve up Syria should the cease
fire aka Plan B not come to fruition... It was always the Only Option on the table for Langley
and the Pentagon!!
In short the CIA is at the head of the MIC always has been and always will be until it's
time of death which may be coming sooner than we think!
The 'insouciant' Goyim remain mesmerized under the spell of entertainment and Political-Correctness
gone mad. Hence, unable are they to mount any sort of opposition to this 'soft takeover' of their
nation.
But it looks like the YPG in northeast Syria (where the US spec ops where deployed) is
the favorite since they seem to have gotten the advanced Javelin anti tank missile while the moderate
Jihadists only got the not as effective TOW. Video and photo at RT.
Pictures have emerged on social media which appear to show Syrian Kurds with an advanced
US-produced anti-tank missile. A video allegedly shows a rocket blowing up an Islamic State truck.
Washington has denied "providing the YPG with weapons."
If the video, believed to have been filmed near the Syrian town of Shaddadi, is authenticated
it would show that Syrian Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) forces have been given an upgrade
in technology. The footage shows a truck allegedly belonging to Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL)
on the receiving end of a direct hit from the missile.
The FGM-148 Javelin is a portable anti-tank missile, which was developed by the United
States. It is able to lock on to potential targets using infrared imaging, which makes it a lot
more effective than the TOW missile system, which militias fighting against IS had been using,
as the TOW is heavier and requires a portable power supply
"Assuming he's not firing from the side of a mountain or on top of a compound, it's definitely
a Javelin," Corporal Thomas Gray, a former Marine Javelin gunner who watched the video told the
Washington Post.
However John Kirby, a State Department spokesman, said that he was unable to confirm whether
the image was authentic and that "nothing has changed about our policy of not providing the YPG
with weapons."
"Also, Javelin launchers and missiles are rather expensive. In 2002, a single Javelin command
launch unit cost $126,000, and each missile cost around $78,000."
Many commentators have mentioned (such as
here and
here
and
here and
here ) that Hillary Clinton left behind no major achievement as the U.S. Secretary of State;
but, actually, she did. Unfortunately, all of her major achievements were bad, and some were catastrophic.
Six countries were especially involved: Honduras, Haiti, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine.
The harm she did to each country was not in the interest of the American people, and it was disastrous
for the residents there.
Hillary Clinton at every campaign debate says "I have a better track-record," and that she's "a
progressive who gets things done." Here's what she has actually done, when she was Secretary of State;
here's her track-record when she actually had executive responsibility for U.S. foreign-affairs.
This will display her real values, not just her claimed values:
SUMMARY OF THE CASE TO BE PRESENTED
The central-American nation of Honduras is ruled today by an extremist far-right government, a
fascist junta-imposed government, because of what Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama did in 2009. The
lives of all but the top 0.001% of the population there are hell because of this.
The matter in Haiti was similar but less dramatic, and so it received even less attention from
the U.S. Press.
Furthermore, under Secretary of State Clinton, failures at the U.S. Department of State also caused
the basis for a hatred of the United States to soar in Afghanistan after the U.S. has drawn down
its troops there. This failure, too, has received little coverage in the U.S. press, but our nation
will be paying heavily for it long-term.
Hillary Clinton was the Administration's leading proponent of regime-change, overthrowing Muammar
Gaddafi in Libya. That worked out disastrously.
Clinton was also the Secretary of State when the 2006-2010 drought was causing massive relocations
of population in Syria and U.S. State Department cables passed along up the chain of command the
Assad government's urgent request for aid from foreign governments to help farmers stave off starvation.
The Clinton State Department ignored the requests and treated this as an opportunity to foment revolution
there. It wasn't only the Arab Spring, in Syria, that led to the demonstrations against Assad there.
Sunni jihadist fighters streamed into Syria, backed by the U.S., Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey.
The U.S. was, in effect, assisting jihadists to oust the non-sectarian, secular Shiite leader of
Syria and replace him with a fundamentalist Sunni dictator.
The groundwork for a coup d'etat in Ukraine was laid by Hillary Clinton, when she made her State
Department's official spokesperson Victoria Nuland, who had been the chief foreign-affairs advisor
to Vice President Dick Cheney. Nuland then became the organizer of the 20 February 2014 coup in Ukraine,
which replaced a neutralist leader of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, with a rabidly anti-Russian U.S.
puppet, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, and a bloody civil war. Nuland is obsessed with hatred of Russia.
No well-informed Democrat will vote for her in the Democratic Party primaries. Here is what voters
in the Democratic primaries need to know before they vote:
------
HONDURAS
On 28 June 2009, the Honduran military grabbed their nation's popular democratically elected progressive
President, Manuel Zelaya, and flew him into exile.
The AP headlined from Tegucigalpa the next day,
"World Leaders Pressure
Honduras to Reverse Coup," and reported: "Leaders from Hugo Chavez to Barack Obama called for
reinstatement of Manuel Zelaya, who was arrested in his pajamas Sunday morning by soldiers who stormed
his residence and flew him into exile."
Secretary Clinton, in the press conference the day after the coup,
"Remarks at the Top
of the Daily Press Briefing" , refused to commit the United States to restoration of the democratically
elected President of Honduras. She refused even to commit the U.S. to using the enormous leverage
it had over the Honduran Government to bring that about. Here was the relevant Q&A:
Mary Beth Sheridan. QUESTION: Madam Secretary, sorry, if I could just return for a second to Honduras,
just to clarify Arshad's point – so, I mean, the U.S. provides aid both under the Foreign Assistance
Act and the Millennium challenge. So even though there are triggers in those; that countries have
to behave – not have coups, you're not going to cut off that aid?
SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, Mary Beth, we're assessing what the final outcome of these actions will
be. This has been a fast-moving set of circumstances over the last several days, and we're looking
at that question now. Much of our assistance is conditioned on the integrity of the democratic system.
But if we were able to get to a status quo that returned to the rule of law and constitutional order
within a relatively short period of time, I think that would be a good outcome. So we're looking
at all of this. We're considering the implications of it. But our priority is to try to work with
our partners in restoring the constitutional order in Honduras.
QUESTION: And does that mean returning Zelaya himself? You would insist on that in order to –
SECRETARY CLINTON: We are working with our partners.
She refused to answer the question, even though Zelaya had been an ally of the U.S., a progressive
democrat. (Though Republicans decried Zelaya for pushing land-reform, the fact is that Honduras is
virtually owned by
two dozen
families , and drastically needs to drag itself out of its feudal system. Doing that isn't anti-American;
it's pro-American. It's what Zelaya was trying to do, peacefully and democratically.
Our nation's Founders fought a Revolution to overthrow feudalism – British – in our own country.
Hillary was thus being anti-American, not just anti-democratic, here.) This is stunning. The U.S
had even been outright bombed by fascists, on the "day that will live in infamy," December 7, 1941;
and, then, we spilled lots of blood to beat those fascists in WWII. What was that war all about,
if not about opposing fascism and fascists, and standing up for democracy and democrats? A peaceful
democratic U.S. ally had now been overthrown by a fascist coup in Honduras, and yet Hillary Clinton's
response was – noncommittal?
The coup government made no bones about its being anti-democratic. On July 4th of 2009, Al Giordano
at Narcosphere Narconews bannered
"Honduras Coup Chooses Path of Rogue Narco-State," and he reported that, "Last night, around
10 p.m. Tegucigalpa time, CNN Espańol interrupted its sports news programming for a live press conference
announcement ('no questions, please') by coup 'president' Micheletti. There, he announced that his
coup 'government' of Honduras is withdrawing from the Democratic Charter of the Organization of American
States. ... The Honduras coup's behavior virtually assures that come Monday, the US government will
define it as a 'military coup,' triggering a cut-off of US aid, joining the World Bank, the Inter-American
Development Bank, PetroCaribe, the UN and the rest of the world in withdrawing economic support for
the coup regime." But that didn't happen. The U.S. just remained silent. Why was our Secretary of
State silent, even now?
It certainly couldn't have been so on account of her agent on the ground in Honduras, the U.S.
Ambassador to that country: he was anything but noncommittal. He was fully American, not at all neutral
or pro-fascist.
Here was his
cable
from the U.S. Embassy, reviewing the situation, for Washington, after almost a month's silence from
the Administration:
From: Ambassador Hugo Llorens, U.S. Embassy, Tegucigalpa, Honduras, 24 July 2009.
To: Secretary of State, White House, and National Security Council.
"SUBJECT: TFHO1: OPEN AND SHUT: THE CASE OF THE HONDURAN COUP"
This lengthy message from the Ambassador closed:
"The actions of June 28 can only be considered a coup d'etat by the legislative branch, with the
support of the judicial branch and the military, against the executive branch. It bears mentioning
that, whereas the resolution adopted June 28 refers only to Zelaya, its effect was to remove the
entire executive branch. Both of these actions clearly exceeded Congress's authority. ... No matter
what the merits of the case against Zelaya, his forced removal by the military was clearly illegal,
and [puppett-leader Roberto] Micheletti's ascendance as 'interim president' was totally illegitimate.
On the same day when the Ambassador sent that cable, AFP headlined
"Zelaya 'Reckless' to Return to Honduras: Clinton," and reported that our Secretary of State
criticized Zelaya that day for trying to get back into his own country. "'President Zelaya's effort
to reach the border is reckless,' Clinton said during a press conference with visiting Iraqi Prime
Minister Nouri al-Maliki. ... Washington supports 'a negotiated peaceful solution to the Honduran
crisis,' Clinton said." It wasn't "the Honduran coup" – she wouldn't call it a "coup" – it was "the
Honduran crisis"; so, she accepted the junta's framing of the issue, not the framing of it by Zelaya
and everyone other than the fascists. She wanted "a negotiated peaceful solution" to the forced removal
at gunpoint of Honduras's popular democratically elected President. Furthermore, Hillary's statement
here was undiplomatic: if she had advice for what the elected President of Honduras ought to be doing,
that ought to have been communicated to him privately, not publicly, and said to him by suggesting
what he ought to do, not by insulting what he already was doing, publicly calling it "reckless."
Such a statement from her was clearly not meant as advice to help Zelaya; it was meant to – and did
– humiliate him; and diplomats around the world could see this. Manifestly now, Hillary Clinton supported
the fascists. However, her boss, the U.S. President, stayed silent.
During the crucial next two weeks, Obama considered what to do. Then, on 6 August 2009, McClatchy
newspapers bannered
"U.S. Drops Call to Restore Ousted Honduran Leader," and Tyler Bridges reported that Zelaya wouldn't
receive U.S. backing in his bid to be restored to power. Though all international organizations called
the Honduran coup illegitimate, and refused to recognize the leader chosen by its junta, the Obama
Administration, after more than a month of indecision on this matter, finally came out for Honduras's
fascists. According to James Rosen of McClatchy Newspapers three days later, the far-right Republican
U.S. Senator Jim DeMint had
"placed a hold on two nominees to senior State Department posts to protest Obama's pushing for
ousted Honduran President Manuel Zalaya's return to power, which the administration backed away from
last week." Obama, after a month of silence, caved silently. Instead of his using the bully pulpit
to smear the fascist DeMint publicly with his fascism, Obama just joined him in it, silently. Why?
Perhaps it was because the
chief lobbyist hired in the U.S. by the Honduran aristocracy (whose thugs had installed this
new Honduran government), was Hillary's old friend, Lanny Davis. As
slate.com had said on 27 August 2008, headlining
"A Day in the Life of Hillary's Biggest Fan": "
When it comes to defending Hillary Clinton, Lanny Davis has no rival. " He was the fascists'
fixer, inside the Obama
Administration. On 9 July 2009, The Hill bannered
"Hondurans Lobby Against Deposed Leader," and reported that Honduras's equivalent of the U.S.
Chamber of Commerce (which was controlled by those two-dozen families) had hired "Lanny Davis, the
former special counsel to President Bill Clinton," and that, "The lobbying blitz began [6 July] Monday,
one day before Zelaya met with Clinton as part of his push to be reinstated." Lanny Davis had had
his input to Hillary even before President Zelaya did. Moreover, The Hill reported that, "17 Republican
senators, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) [and DeMint] wrote Secretary Clinton and
asked her to meet with officials from the interim government of Honduras." America's Republican leadership
were immediately and strongly supporting Honduras's fascists. This
Republican Senators'
letter attacked "the rush to label the events of June 28th a coup d'etat," and said that it instead
reflected "'the universal principle that people should choose their own leaders.' In a 125-3 vote,
the Honduran Congress approved of the actions taken to remove Mr. Zelaya from office and install
Mr. Micheletti." (The article
"2009 Honduran coup
d'état" at wikipedia says that after the military seized the President on June 28th, "Later that
day, the Honduran Congress, in an extraordinary session, voted to remove Zelaya from office, after
reading a false resignation letter attributed to President Zelaya." A link to the forged letter was
provided. To Republicans, that is how democracy is supposed to operate, not a "coup." Just masked
men with machine guns, and then forged documents and well-connected foreign lobbyists.)
So, the Honduran aristocracy (
mainly the Facussé, Ferrari, Canahuati, Atala, Lamas, Nasser, Kattan, Lippman, and Flores, clans
) had purchased a line straight to the U.S. Secretary of State, via Mr. Davis. And Obama caved.
On 13 August 2009, Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research headlined a Sacramento
Bee op-ed "Obama
Tacitly Backs Military's Takeover of Honduran Democracy" and he reported that the Administration's
recent "statements were widely publicized in the Honduran media and helped to bolster the dictatorship.
Perhaps more ominously, the Obama administration has not said one word about the atrocities and human
rights abuses perpetrated by the coup government. Political activists have been murdered, independent
TV and radio stations have been shut down, journalists have been detained and intimidated, and hundreds
of people arrested." There was now, again as under Bush, widespread revulsion against the U.S. throughout
Latin America. Also on the 13th, Dick Emanuelson, at the Americas Program of the Center for International
Policy, headlined
"Military Forces Sow Terror and Fear in Honduras," and he described in Honduras a situation very
much like that which had occurred in Argentina when the generals there took over in 1976 and rounded
up and "disappeared" leaders who constituted a threat to the aristocracy's continued rule in that
country.
The U.S. was now the only power sustaining the Honduran junta's government. Hillary had said "We
are working with our partners," but she lied. It turned out that the U.S. was instead working against
"our partners" – against virtually all of the world's democratic nations. Brazil Magazine headlined
on August 13th,
"Brazil Urges Obama to Tighten the Vise on Honduras to Get Zelaya Back," and reported that Brazilian
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva had urged President Obama to come out publicly for the "immediate
and unconditional" restoration of Zelaya to office. It didn't happen, however; and on Friday, August
21st, Mark Weisbrot thus bannered in Britain's Guardian,
"Obama's Deafening Silence on Honduras: Seven weeks after the coup in Honduras, the US is hindering
efforts to restore President Manuel Zelaya to power." Weisbrot documented lies from the Obama Administration
regarding the coup; and he noted, "The one thing we can be pretty sure of is that no major US media
outlet will look further into this matter." He was assuming that the U.S. had a controlled press,
and it seems that he was correct, except for the McClatchy Newspaper chain, which courageously reported
on the Honduran horrors.
Obama was lying – not even acknowledging that the coup was a coup – even though (as Weisbrot pointed
out) "on Wednesday, Amnesty International issued a report documenting widespread police beatings
and brutality against peaceful demonstrations, mass arbitrary arrests and other human rights abuses
under the dictatorship. The Obama administration has remained silent about these abuses - as well
as the killings of activists and press censorship and intimidation. To date, no major [U.S.] media
outlet has bothered to pursue them." America's aristocracy were clearly supporting Honduras's.
Nearly a hundred scholars signed a public letter saying that if only the U.S. were to come out
clearly against the coup,
"the coup could easily
be overturned," because only the U.S. was keeping the coup regime in power (via banking and other
crucial cooperation with the coup government). The U.S. was key, and it chose to turn the lock on
the Honduran prison, and leave its victims to be murdered.
During the following months, as the shamefulness of America's position on this became increasingly
untenable, Obama seemed to be gradually tilting back away from the coup in Honduras. However, Senator
DeMint and some other Republicans travelled to Honduras and spoke publicly there against the U.S.
Government, and endorsed the coup-installed Honduran leadership. DeMint headlined in Rupert Murdoch's
Wall Street Journal, on 10 October 2009,
"What I Heard in Honduras," and he wrote: "In the last three months, much has been made of a
supposed military 'coup' that whisked former Honduran President Manuel Zelaya from power and the
supposed chaos it created. After visiting Tegucigalpa last week and meeting with a cross section
of leaders, ... I can report there is no chaos there. ... As all strong democracies do after cleansing
themselves of usurpers, Honduras has moved on."
All
governments in the hemisphere except the U.S. labeled the coup a "coup," but DeMint and other
top Republicans such as Mitch McConnell simply denied that it was. DeMint received ovations in Washington,
at the far-right Heritage Foundation, which he now heads. This U.S. Senator
condemned Zelaya there as "a deposed would-be Marxist dictator," and he referred to the junta
as "friends of freedom." He condemned Obama by indirection, as being the enemy, who led "an American
foreign policy unmoored from our commitment to human rights and human freedom and tied instead to
the President's personal ambition," perhaps communist. Obama remained silent, in the face of these
lies against both Zelaya and himself.
The assertion by Republicans that the coup was not a "coup" was a blatant lie. Everyone worldwide
except America's Republicans referred to it as a "coup." Furthermore, Ambassador Llorens in Tegucigalpa
was constantly speaking with leaders (but only leaders) of business, religious, civic, and other
organizations throughout Honduras, and everyone he spoke with stated his position in regards to the
"coup." For example (from the Embassy cables),
"Monsignor
Juan Jose Pineda , the Auxiliary Bishop of Tegucigalpa ... stated that the Church had not taken
sides in relation to the coup d'etat," but "vociferously condemned the poor treatment of the Church
by what he believed to be elements of the anti-coup movement." And the leaders of two conservative
political parties
"argued that
anti-coup protests have not been peaceful." Only America's Republicans lied that it hadn't been
a "coup." Not even Republicans' friends in Honduras, the fascists there, did. It was a coup. Republicans
simply lied, as usual. (This is why Fox "News"
has been found in every study to have the most-misinformed audience of any major news medium
– they're being lied to constantly.)
On 5 October 2009, Jason Beaubien of NPR headlined
"Rich vs.
Poor at Root of Honduran Political Crisis," and he reported that, though Honduran conservatives
were charging that Zelaya secretly intended to make Honduras into a communist dictatorship, the actual
situation in Honduras was, as explained by an economics professor there, that "power in Honduras
is in the hands of about 100 people from roughly 25 families. Others estimate that Honduran elite
to be slightly larger, but still it is a tiny group." This professor "says the country's elite have
always selected the nation's president. They initially helped Zelaya get into office, and then they
orchestrated his removal" when President Zelaya pressed land- and other- reforms. If communists would
ever come to power in Honduras, it will be because of fascists' intransigence there, not because
of progressives' attempts to end the hammer-lock of the local feudal lords.
Adolf Hitler similarly used a popular fear of communism to persuade conservative fools to vote
for himself and for other fascists; but fascists and communists are alike: enemies of democracy.
This hasn't changed. Nor has The Big Lie technique that fascists still use.
Then, on 6 October 2009, The New York Times bannered "Honduran Security Forces Accused of Abuse."
("Abuse" had also been the term that the Times and other major media employed for torture when George
W. Bush did it, but now they applied this euphemism to the outright murders perpetrated by Honduras's
junta.) Such "abuse" was "news" to people inside the United States, but not to the people in other
nations around the world, where the horrors in Honduras were widely publicized. Also on October 6th,
narcosphere.narconews.com/thefield
headlined
"Poll: Wide Majority of Hondurans Oppose Coup d'Etat, Want Zelaya Back," and Al Giordano reported
"the first survey to be made public since a July Gallup poll showed a plurality of Hondurans opposed
the coup d'etat." This poll of 1,470 randomly chosen Honduran adults found 17.4% favored the coup,
52.7% opposed it. 33% opposed Zelaya's return to power; 51.6% favored it. 22.2% wanted the coup-installed
leader to stay in power; 60.1% wanted him to be removed. 21.8% said the National Police were not
"engaging in repression"; 54.5% said they were repressing. Furthermore, the survey found that "the
two national TV and radio stations shut down by the coup regime happen to be the most trusted news
sources in the entire country." Finally, approval ratings were tabulated for the twenty most prominent
political figures in the country, and Zelaya and his wife were rated overwhelmingly above all others,
as, respectively, #1 and #2, the two most highly respected public figures in Honduran politics.
An American visitor to Honduras posted online
photos of the country
prior to Zelaya's Presidency, and he described them: "It took me awhile to get used to the sight
of heavily armed guards and policemen everywhere. ... Every supermarket we visited had an armed guard,
carrying a shotgun, patrolling the parking lot. Most restaurants or fast food establishments we visited,
such as Pizza Hut, had an armed guard in the parking lot. ... Only 30% of the people have wealth.
The other 70% are poor. Being rich in Honduras can be dangerous. That is why most rich people live
in walled or fenced compounds. ... And they all have armed guards on the grounds." This is the type
of society that Wayne
LaPierre and other officials of the NRA describe as the ideal – every man for himself, armed
to the teeth. Republicans, like Honduras's aristocrats, want to keep such a Paradise the way it is;
but the vast majority of Hondurans do not – they want progress.
Naturally, therefore, the U.S.'s Republican Party was overwhelmingly opposed to Zelaya, and were
thus opposed to the Honduran public, who didn't like their feudal Paradise. Obama remained remarkably
silent on the matter. The Obama Administration brokered a supposed power-sharing deal between Zelaya
and the coup government, but it fell apart when Zelaya learned that Obama actually stood with the
fascists in letting the coup government oversee the imminent election of Honduras's next President
– which would give the "election" to the fascists' stooge. On 5 November 2009, the Los Angeles Times
headlined an editorial
"Obama Must
Stand Firm on Honduran Crisis: A U.S.-brokered deal to return Honduran President Manuel Zelaya
to office is unraveling, and the Obama administration seems to be wavering." They closed by saying:
"If the Obama administration chooses to recognize the [winner of the upcoming] election without Zelaya
first being reinstated [with powers to participate in overseeing the vote-counting], it will find
itself at odds with the rest of Latin America. That would be a setback for democracy and for the
United States." But it's exactly what Obama did. On 9 November 2009, McClatchy Newspapers bannered
"Honduran Deal Collapses, and Zelaya's Backers Blame U.S." Tyler Bridges reported that Senator
DeMint now dropped his objections to a key State Department appointment, when the appointee, Thomas
Shannon (and also Secretary of State Hillary Clinton herself), made clear that the Obama Administration
agreed with DeMint. Thus, "Zelaya's supporters, who've been organizing street protests against the
[coup-installed] Micheletti regime, are down to their final card: calling on Hondurans to boycott
the elections."
On 12 November 2009, the Washington Post bannered
"Honduras Accord Is on Verge of Collapse," and quoted a spokesperson for U.S. Senator John Kerry,
head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, saying: "The State Department's abrupt change in
policy last week - recognizing the elections scheduled for November 29th even if the coup regime
does not meet its commitments under the Tegucigalpa-San Jose Accord - caused the collapse of an accord
it helped negotiate." (Let's hope that Kerry will turn out to be a better Secretary of State than
his predecessor was.)
A week later, on November 19th, the Latin American Working Group bannered
"Honduras: Things Fall
Apart," and summarized the joint culpability of the Obama Administration, and of the Honduran
fascists.
On 29 November 2009, the Heritage Foundation bannered
"Heritage in Honduras: 'I Believe in Democracy'," and Big Brother propagandized: "Today the Honduran
people are voting in an historic election with consequences for the entire region. Heritage's Izzy
Ortega is on the ground as an official election observer speaking with Hondurans practicing their
right to vote. Watch his first interview below." A typical reader-comment posted there was "I want
WE THE PEOPLE back in the United States. For once in my life I'am jealous of another country!" Conservatives
wanted fascism in the U.S.A. – not only in Honduras. Of course, the aristocracy's stooge was "elected"
in Honduras. (Zelaya wasn't even a candidate in this "election." Most democratic countries throughout
the world did not recognize the results of this "election." However, the U.S. did; and so did Israel,
Italy, Germany, Japan, Peru, Costa Rica, and Panama.)
By contrast, on the same day, Costa Rico's Tico Times headlined
"Peaceful March
Faces 'Brutal Repression' in San Pedro Sula" Honduras. Mike Faulk reported that, "About 500 people
marching peacefully in the northwestern city of San Pedro Sula were repressed by tear gas and water
cannons on Election Day today." The next day, Agence France Presse headlined "Conservatives Win Honduran
Election," and reported that "Conservative Porfirio Lobo has claimed a solid win. ... The United
States was quick to underline its support." Barack Obama was the leading (virtually the only) head-of-state
supporting the Honduran fascist transfer of power to their new "elected" Honduran President. The
major "news" media in the U.S. deep-sixed what was happening in Honduras, but the Honduran situation
was widely reported elsewhere. Typical of the slight coverage that it did receive in the U.S., the
Wall Street Journal bannered on November 26th,
"Honduras Lurches
Toward Crisis Over Election," and their "reporter," Jose de Cordoba, opened, "Honduran President
Manuel Zelaya's push to rewrite the constitution, and pave the way for his potential re-election,
has plunged one of Latin America's poorest countries into a potentially violent political crisis."
Rupert Murdoch's rag never reported the gangster-government's violence. Moreover, Zelaya had never
pushed "to rewrite the constitution"; he had wanted to hold a plebiscite on whether there should
be a constitutional convention held to rewrite the nation's existing Constitution, which everyone
but the Honduran aristocracy said contained profound defects that made democracy dysfunctional there.
The editors of the former U.S.S.R.'s newspaper Pravda would have chuckled at Murdoch's "reporting."
By contrast, for example, blog.AFLCIO.org had
headlined on 16 November 2009, "Trumka:
Free Elections Not Possible Now in Honduras." The American labor movement was reporting on events
in Honduras, but had been defeated by the U.S. aristocracy increasingly since 40 years earlier (Reagan),
and therefore no longer constituted a major source of news for the American people. Richard Trumka
was the AFL-CIO President, but was by now just a marginal character in the new fascist Amerika.
On 9 January 2010, the Honduras Coup 2009 blog translated from a Honduran newspaper published
that day, and headlined
"Honduras
Is Broke." Honduras's Finance Minister, Gabriela Nuńez, was quoted as saying that international
aid must keep coming in order for the nation to continue paying its bills, and that avoiding default
is "a work from week to week."
A few months later, the Council on Hemispheric Affairs headlined on 5 March 2010,
"Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton Does Latin America," and reported that, "While in Buenos Aires, she carelessly stated,
'The Honduras crisis has been managed to a successful conclusion ... It was done without violence.'
This is being labeled as a misguided statement considering the physical violence including murders,
beatings, torture that the coup government used in order to repress the opposition. Many of these
tactics are still being used. This diplomatic stumble is expected to draw significant attention to
the multiple errors in the U.S. approach." Moreover, while there, she was "announcing that the Obama
administration will restore aid that had been previously suspended." The commentator said that this
drew attention to "a political decision that once again may have served to isolate the U.S. from
much of Latin America." Furthermore, "While in Costa Rica, ... Clinton said the post-coup [Honduran]
government ... was, in fact, democratically elected," which made a mockery of the term "democracy."
That election was perhaps even less democratic than the "elections" in Iran have recently been, but
it was remarkably similar, with the main difference being that in Honduras the aristocracy controlled
the "election," whereas in Iran the theocracy did. Anyway, Hillary approved.
On 1 May 2010, Britain's Guardian headlined regarding Honduras,
"Cocaine Trade Turns Backwater into Hideout for Brutal Assassins : The Central American nation
is on the brink of becoming a fully-fledged narco-state," and reported that, "Corrupt police and
drug gangs are blamed, with the government unable or unwilling to crack down on them."
The Herald of Tegucigalpa, El Heraldo, headlined on 26 January 2011, "Presidente Asigna Medalla
de Honor al Mérito a J. J. Rendón," and reported that President Porfirio Lobo had decorated with
the Order of Merit the master-propagandist who had deceived enough Honduran voters to "elect" Lobo
(with the assistance of vote-rigging and terror). That was the same "John Rendon" (or actually Juan
José Rendón) who had been hired by the George W. Bush Administration to deceive the American public
into invading Iraq in 2003. This time, he was working for Barack Obama, instead of for George W.
Bush, but it was fascism just the same.
Without Obama, Honduras's fascists would have been defeated. Obama's refusal to employ either
his financial and banking power or his bully pulpit, and Hillary's outright support of the fascist
junta, together sealed the deaths of many thousands of Hondurans. The U.S. thus, single-handedly
among all nations, kept Honduras's newly-installed fascist regime in power. A U.S. professor who
specialized in Honduras, Orlando Perez, said that Obama did this probably because he concluded
"that Honduras' political, military and economic elite wouldn't accept Zelaya's return"; in other
words, that Obama wanted to serve Honduras's aristocracy, regardless of the Honduran public, and
even regardless of the increased contempt that Latin Americans would inevitably feel toward the U.S.
from this matter.
The results for Hondurans were hellish. On 11 April 2011, McClatchy Newspapers bannered
"Honduran Police Ignore Rise in Attacks on Journalists, Gays," and reported that within just
those almost-two years, Honduras had become "the deadliest country in the hemisphere," because of
the soaring crime-rate, especially against homosexuals and against journalists. The new fascist government
tacitly "sends a message to the criminals, the paramilitaries and the hit men that they can do as
they please." Hondurans were by then five times likelier to be murdered than Mexicans were. Honduras's
aristocrats, however, were safe, because they hired their own private security forces, and also because
the government's security-apparatus was controlled by the aristocracy. Only the public were unprotected.
Fox "News" Latina bannered, on 7 October 2011,
"Honduras Led World in Homicides in 2010," and (since Rupert Murdoch's Fox is a Republican front)
pretended that this had happened because Latin America was violent – not because Fox's Republican
friends had had their way in policy on Honduras, and had thus caused the Honduran murder-rate to
soar. (During the latest year, whereas homicides had declined in all of the other high-homicide nations,
homicides had skyrocketed 22% in Honduras – and that's why Honduras now led the world in homicides,
but Fox "News" didn't mention any of these facts.)
The actual problem was that the U.S. had a Republican government under nominal "Democratic" leadership,
both at the White House and at the State Department (not to mention at Treasury, Justice, and Education).
Obama not only gave Rupert Murdoch a nice foil to gin-up his hate-machine; he also gave Murdoch the
most politically gifted Republican in the country: Obama, a Republican in "Democratic" clothing.
It certainly was so with regard to Honduran policy, in which Obama seemed to be following Hillary
Clinton's lead to the right.
On 21 October 2011, the Nation bannered
"Wikileaks Honduras: US Linked to Brutal Businessman," and Dana Frank reported that, "Miguel
Facussé Barjum, in the embassy's words, is 'the wealthiest, most powerful businessman in the country,'
one of the country's 'political heavyweights.'" He owned a 22,000-acre palm-oil plantation, including
lots of vacant land that thousands of peasants or "campesinos" wanted to farm and make their homes.
"The campesinos' efforts have been met with swift and brutal retaliation," hired killers – a cost
of doing business (like exterminators). Furthermore, wikileaks cables from during George W. Bush's
Presidency indicated that "a known drug trafficking flight with a 1,000 kilo cocaine shipment from
Colombia ... successfully landed ... on the private property of Miguel Facusse. ... Its cargo was
off-loaded onto a convoy of vehicles that was guarded by about 30 heavily armed men." The plane was
burned and bulldozed into the ground, and the U.S. Ambassador said that this probably couldn't have
happened without Facussé's participation. But now, the U.S. was actually on the side of such people.
Not only was the U.S. continuing as before in Honduras, but "The US has allocated $45 million in
new funds for military construction," including expansion of
the U.S. air base that had participated in the 2009 coup. Other wikileaks cables indicated that
someone from the U.S. Embassy met with Facussé on 7 September 2009. Furthermore, "A new US ambassador,
Lisa Kubiske, arrived in Honduras this August. She is an expert on biofuels – the center of Miguel
Facussé's African palm empire." Moreover, on 13 August 2009, hondurascoup2009.blogspot had headlined
"Get to Know the 10 Families that Financed the Coup," and cited a study by Leticia Salomón of
the Autonomous University of Honduras, which said that, "A fundamental person in the conspiracy was
the magnate Miguel Facussé, decorated by the Colombian Senate in 2004 with the Orden Mérito a la
Democracia, and who today monopolizes the business of palm oil and in 1992 supported the purchase
of land from campesinos at less than 10% of its actual value." Furthermore, the coup "was planned
by a business group lead [led] by Carlos Flores Facussé, ex-president of Honduras (1998-2002) and
owner of the newspaper La Tribuna, which together with La Prensa, El Heraldo, TV channels 2, 3, 5
and 9 were the fundamental pillar of the coup." Moreover, on 10 February 2010, the Honduras Culture
and Politics blog headlined
"Mario Canahuati Goes to Washington," and reported that Honduras's new Foreign Minister, Mario,
was related to Jorge Canahuati, "owner of La Prensa and El Heraldo," and also to Jesus Canahuati,
who was the VP of the Honduran chamber-of-commerce organization that hired Lanny Davis. Meanwhile,
Mario's father, Juan Canahuati, owned textile factories that assembled clothing for major U.S. labels,
and which would thus benefit greatly from the fascists' roll-back of Zelaya's increase in the minimum
wage. ( Other
articles were also posted to the web, listing mainly the same families behind the coup.)
So, as such examples show, the aristocracy were greatly enriched by the Honduran coup, even though
the non-criminal (or "legitimate") Honduran economy shriveled. By supporting this new Honduran regime,
Obama and Hillary assisted the outsourcing of clothes-manufacturing jobs, etc., to such police-states.
International corporations would be more profitable, and their top executives and controlling stockholders
would reap higher stock-values and capital gains and bigger executive bonuses, because of such fascist
operations as the 2009 coup. If workers or campesinos didn't like it, they could leave – for the
U.S., where they would be competing directly against the poorest of our own country's poor.
An article quoted Jose
Luis Galdamez, a journalist for Radio Globo (a Honduran station briefly shut down by the junta) explaining
how that nation's elite impunity functions: "The rich simply send you out to kill ... and then kill
with impunity. They never investigate into who killed who, because the groups in power control the
media, control the judiciary, and now control the government [the Executive Branch] again." This
is to say: In Honduras, hired killers are safe. The Government represents the aristocracy, not the
public; so, aristocrats are free to kill. America's congressional Republicans like this "Freedom."
It's maximum liberty – for aristocrats: the people these "Representatives" actually serve.
On 18 November 2011, Mark Weisbrot in Britain's Guardian headlined
"Honduras: America's Great Foreign Policy Disgrace," and he reported that, when the junta's man
"Porfirio Lobo took office in January 2020, ... most of the hemisphere refused to recognize the government
because his election took place under conditions of serious human rights violations. In May 2011,
an agreement was finally brokered in Cartagena, Colombia, which allowed Honduras back into the Organization
of American States. But the Lobo government has not complied with its part of the Cartagena accords,
which included human rights guarantees for the political opposition." The frequent murders of non-fascist
political and labor union leaders "in broad daylight" (so as to terrorize anyone who might consider
to replace them) had continued, despite the accords. Weisbrot noted that, "when President Porfirio
Lobo of Honduras came to Washington last month, President Obama Greeted him warmly" and Obama said,
"What we've been seeing is a restoration of democratic practices and a commitment to reconciliation."
How nice. However, Lobo did comply with one aspect of the Cartagena agreement: he let Manuel Zelaya
and his wife back into Honduras.
Honduras was now (even more than before Zelaya) under a "libertarian" government – a government
that respected only property-rights of approved people, no personal or other rights for anyone (such
as Facussé's propertyless campesinos). Paul Romer, the husband of Obama's former chief economist
Christina Romer, was joining with other libertarians to promote the
idea of a totally "free market"
model city in Honduras . On 10 December 2011, Britain's libertarian ECONOMIST magazine bannered
"Hong Kong in Honduras," and
"Honduras Shrugged [a play on
Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged]: Two Start-Ups Want to Try Out Libertarian Ideas in the Country's New
Special Development Regions." Then, on 6 September 2012, Britain's Guardian bannered "
Honduras to Build New City with Its Own Laws and Tax System." However, the entrepreneur aiming
to develop this new Honduran city freed from the law, the grandson of the far-right economist Milton
Friedman, Patri Friedman, headlined at his Future Cities Development Inc., on 19 October 2012,
"Closing Statement From Future
Cities Development, Inc." and he announced that though "passing with a vote of 126-1" in the
Honduran legislature, his project was ruled unconstitutional by a judge, because it would remove
that land from the Honduran legal system. Patri had been fundraising for this project ever since
he had publicly announced at the libertarian Koch brothers' Cato Institute, on 6 April 2009,
"Democracy Is Not The Answer," and he then said, "Democracy is rigged against libertarians."
He ended his statement by announcing "my proposal," which was to "build new city-states," where there
would be no democracy, and only the investors would have any rights at all – an extreme gated community.
Just months later, the new Honduran President, a libertarian like Patri, invited him to do it, but
this judge killed the idea.
Inasmuch as Honduras was becoming too dangerous for Americans, the AP headlined on 19 January
2012,
"Peace Corps Pullout a New Blow to Honduras," and reported that, "The U.S. government's decision
to pull out all its Peace Corps volunteers from Honduras for safety reasons is yet another blow to
a nation still battered by a coup and recently labeled [by the U.N. as] the world's most deadly country."
Three days later, on the 22nd, Frances Robles of the Miami Herald, headlined
"Graft, Greed, Mayhem Turn Honduras into Murder Capital of World," and reported the details of
a nation where aristocrats were protected by their own private guards, the public were on their own,
and all new entrants into the aristocracy were drug traffickers and the soldiers and police who worked
for those traffickers. Narcotics were now by far the most booming industry in Honduras, if not the
only booming industry there post-coup. Robles reported, "Everybody has been bought," in this paradise
of anarchism, or libertarianism (i.e.: in this aristocratically controlled country).
On 12 February 2012, NPR headlined
"Who Rules in Honduras? Coup's Legacy of Violence." The ruling families weren't even noted here,
much less mentioned, in this supposed news-report on the subject of "Who Rules in Honduras?" However,
this story did note that, "Many experts say things got markedly worse after the 2009 coup." (That
was a severe understatement.)
Jim DeMint, who has since left the Senate, and who recently took over as the head of the far-right
Heritage Foundation where he had formerly been a star, got everything he wanted in Honduras, and
so did Hillary Clinton's friend Lanny Davis – the aristocrats' paid hand in the affair, on the "Democratic"
side. (The aristocrats had
many
other agents lobbying their friends on the Republican side.) Honduras's public got only hell.
Four days later, on February 16th, Reuters headlined
"Honduras Under Fire After Huge Prison Blaze," and reported: "Survivors of a Honduran jailhouse
fire that killed more than 350 inmates [some not yet tried, much less convicted], accused guards
of leaving prisoners to die trapped inside their cells and even firing on others when they tried
to escape."
This was how law operated, in a supremely fascist nation. Dwight Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers
had done a similar thing to the Iranians in 1953, and then to the Guatemalans in 1954; Obama now,
though passively, did it to the Hondurans. When Ike did it in Iran, who would have guessed at the
whirlwind that would result there 26 years later, in 1979? (Ironically, when Ike did it, the mullahs
were delighted that the elected Iranian President, Mossadegh, whom they hated, had been overthrown.
America now reaps their whirlwind.)
This is the type of hypocritical leadership that has caused the United States to decline in public
approval throughout the world under Obama – ironic after his Nobel Peace Prize awarded within just
months of his becoming President. On 10 December 2010, Gallup bannered
"U.S. Leadership Ratings Suffer in Latin America," and reported that approval of "the job performance
of the leadership of the United States" had declined since 2009 in 14 of 18 nations in the Western
Hemisphere. It had declined steepest in Mexico, Argentina, Honduras, and Venezuela. Honduras, however,
was the only country where approval of the U.S. was now even lower than it had been under George
W. Bush in 2008. This Honduran plunge since the 2009 coup had been that steep. Then, on 19 April
2012, Gallup headlined
"U.S. Leadership Losing Some Status," and reported that across 136 countries, approval of the
U.S. had peaked in 2009 when George W. Bush was replaced by Obama, but that "the U.S. has lost some
of its status" since 2009, and that the "U.S. Image Sinks in the Americas," down one-quarter from
its 2009 high, though still not yet quite as low in most countries as it had been under Bush. Then,
three months later, on June 13th, the PewResearch Global Attitudes Project headlined
"Global Opinion of Obama Slips, International Policies Faulted," and reported that favorable
opinion of the U.S. had sunk during Obama's first term. It declined 7% in Europe, 10% in Muslim countries,
13% in Mexico, and 4% in China. However, it increased 8% in Russia, and 13% in Japan. It went down
in eight countries, and up in two, and changed only 2% or less in three nations.
The global fascist push to eliminate Zelaya's Presidency had first been well outlined by Greg
Grandin in the Nation on 28 July 2009, headlining
"Waiting for Zelaya."
He wrote: "The business community didn't like Zelaya because he raised the minimum wage. Conservative
evangelicals and Catholics – including Opus Dei, a formidable presence in Honduras – detested him
because he refused to ban the 'morning after' pill. The mining, hydroelectric and biofuel sector
didn't like him because he didn't put state funds and land at their disposal. The law-and-order crowd
hated him because he apologized on behalf of the state for a program of 'social cleansing' that took
place in the 1990s. ... Zelaya likewise moved to draw down Washington's military presence; Honduras,
alone among Central American countries, hosts a permanent detachment of US troops." Later that same
year (2009), John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, came out with his new Hoodwinked,
in which he said
(p. 213) : "I was told by a Panamanian bank vice president who wanted to remain anonymous, 'Every
multinational knows that if Honduras raises its hourly [minimum-wage] rate, the rest of Latin America
and the Caribbean will have to follow. Haiti and Honduras have always set the bottom.'" The increase
in Honduras's minimum wage was widely cited as having probably been the coup's chief source.
Zelaya offered an explanation as to why the U.S. helped the fascists. On 31 May 2011, "Democracy
Now" radio headlined
"Exclusive Interview with Manuel Zelaya on the U.S. Role in Honduran Coup," and Zelaya revealed
that when he was abducted from his house, "We landed in the U.S. military base of Palmerola," before
being flown from there out of the country, and that "Otto Reich started this."
Reich had been the fanatical far-right
Cuban-American who ran U.S. Latin-American policy for the Republican Reagan and both the father
and son Bush Administrations, including Iran-Contra against Nicaragua (which helped Iran's mullahs),
and the fascist 2002 coup against Venezuela's popular elected President Hugo Chavez, which coup was
then peacefully overturned and reversed, due to worldwide repudiation of the junta everywhere except
the U.S. Government. Zelaya said that the coup against himself had been organized via both Reich
and the previous, George W. Bush-appointed, U.S. Ambassador to Honduras,
Charles Ford , who had subsequently been appointed
to "the U.S. Southern Command ... in order to prepare for the coup d'etat" in Honduras. Zelaya didn't
personally blame Obama. "Even though Obama would be against the coup, the process toward the coup
was already moving forward. ... They are even able to bend the arm of the President of the United
States, President Obama, and the State Department." Zelaya portrayed a weak President Obama, not
a complicit one. If this was true, then Lanny Davis was pushing against a weak leader, not against
strong resistance within the then-new Democratic U.S. Administration. Hillary Clinton's press conference
the day after the coup reflected unconcern regarding democracy, not (like with Republicans such as
Sen. DeMint) outright support of fascism. The situation that was portrayed by Zelaya was a U.S. Government
that was heavily infiltrated by fascists throughout the bureacracy, and a new Democratic President
and Secretary of State who had no stomach to oppose fascists – an Administration who were mere figureheads.
On 15 March 2012, Laura Carlson, at Foreign Policy In Focus, bannered
"Honduras: When Engagement Becomes Complicity," and she opened: "U.S. Vice President Joe Biden
traveled to Honduras on March 6 with a double mission: to quell talk of drug legalization and reinforce
the U.S.-sponsored drug war in Central America, and to bolster the presidency of Porfirio Lobo. The
Honduran government issued a statement that during the one-hour closed-door conversation between
Biden and Lobo, the vice president 'reiterated the U.S. commitment to intensify aid to the government
and people of Honduras, and exalted the efforts undertaken and implemented over the past two years
by President Lobo.' In a March 1 press briefing, U.S. National Security Advisor Tony Blinken cited
'the tremendous leadership President Lobo has displayed in advancing national reconciliation and
democratic and constitutional order.' You'd think they were talking about a different country from
the one we visited just weeks before on a fact-finding mission on violence against women. What we
found was a nation submerged in violence and lawlessness, a president incapable or unwilling to do
much about it, and a justice system in shambles."
Carlson went on to note: "Land grabs to transfer land and resources from small-scale farmers,
indigenous peoples, and poor urban residents into the hands of large-scale developers and megaprojects
have generated violence throughout the country. Many of the testimonies of violence and sexual abuse
that we heard from Honduran women regarded conflicts over land, where the regime actively supports
wealthy interests against poor people in illegal land occupations for tourism, mining, and infrastructure
projects, such as palm oil magnate Miguel Facusse's actions." She noted: "The United States helped
deliver a serious blow to the Honduran political system and society. The United States has a tremendous
responsibility for the disastrous situation." And she closed: "There's no excuse for spending U.S.
taxpayer dollars on security assistance to Honduras as human rights violations pile up." She called
this "A Coup for Criminals."
What Iran and Guatemala became to the historical record of Eisenhower's Presidency, Honduras will
be to that of Obama. Sometimes even a small country, even a banana republic, can leave a big black
mark on a President's record. Though Czechoslovakia was just a small and weak country, it's even
what Britain's Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain is primarily remembered for nowadays – his yielding
it to the fascists in 1938.
In November 2013, the Center for Economic Policy Research bannered a study,
"Honduras
Since the Coup," and among the highlights they reported were:
"Economic growth has slowed since the 2009 coup. From 2006-2008 average annual GDP growth was
5.7 percent. In 2009 Honduras' GDP, as with most countries in Central America, contracted due to
the world recession. From 2010-2013, average annual growth has been only 3.5 percent."
"Economic inequality, which decreased for four consecutive years starting in 2006, began trending
upward in 2010. Honduras now has the most unequal distribution of income in Latin America."
"In the two years after the coup, over 100 percent of all real income gains went to the wealthiest
10 percent of Hondurans."
"Poverty and extreme poverty rates decreased by 7.7 and 20.9 percent respectively during the Zelaya
administration. From 2010-2012, the poverty rate increased by 13.2 percent while the extreme poverty
rate increased by 26.3 percent."
"The unemployment situation has worsened from 2010-2012."
Crime rates and other non-economic factors were unfortunately ignored in this study, but it indicated
clearly that, from at least the economic standpoint, the public in Honduras suffered while the elite
did not. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama had done to Honduras something rather similar to what George
W. Bush and his team did to Iraq, but with this major difference: Zelaya was a good and democratic
leader of Honduras, whereas Saddam was a tyrant (though Iraq was even worse after his reign than
during it). This "Democratic" U.S. Administration turned out to support fascism, much as its Republican
predecessor had done.
The soaring murder-rate after the U.S.-supported coup caused a soaring number of escapees from
the violence; they're flooding into the U.S. now as illegal immigrants.
------
HAITI
In Haiti, the situation is similar as an example of the U.S. backing aristocrats, so as to keep
the masses in poverty and for American aristocrats to profit from doing so. On 1 June 2011, the Nation
headlined
"WikiLeaks Haiti: Let Them Live on $3 a Day," and Dan Coughlin and Kim Ives reported that, "Contractors
for Fruit of the Loom, Hanes and Levi's worked in close concert with the US Embassy when they aggressively
moved to block a minimum wage increase for Haitian assembly zone workers, the lowest-paid in the
hemisphere, according to secret State Department cables. ... The factory owners told the Haitian
Parliament that they were willing to give workers a 9-cents-per-hour pay increase to 31 cents per
hour to make T-shirts, bras and underwear for US clothing giants like Dockers and Nautica. But the
factory owners refused to pay 62 cents per hour, or $5 per day, as a measure unanimously passed by
the Haitian Parliament in June 2009 would have mandated. And they had the vigorous backing of the
US Agency for International Development and the US Embassy when they took that stand." Hillary Clinton's
State Department pushed hard to reverse the new law. "A deputy chief of mission, David E. Lindwall,
said the $5 per day minimum 'did not take economic reality into account' but was a populist measure
aimed at appealing to 'the unemployed and underpaid masses.'" An "Editor's Note" from the Nation
added: "In keeping with the industry's usual practice, the brand name US companies kept their own
hands clean, letting their contractors do the work of making Haiti safe for the sweatshops from which
they derive their profits -- with help from US officials." Those "officials" were ultimately Clinton
and Obama. On 3 June 2011, Ryan Chittum at Columbia Journalism Review headlined
"A Pulled
Scoop Shows U.S. Fought to Keep Haitian Wages Down," and he added some perspective to the story:
"Hanesbrands CEO Richard Noll ... could pay for the raises for those 3,200 t-shirt makers with just
one-sixth of the $10 million in salary and bonus he raked in last year." And then, when the U.S.
turns away "boat people," trying to escape the "voluntary" slavery of the Haitian masses, the standard
excuse is that it's done so as to "protect American jobs." But is that really where Hillary Clinton
gets her campaign funds?
------
AFGHANISTAN
On 26 July 2009, Marisa Taylor bannered at McClatchy Newspapers,
"Why Are U.S.-Allied Refugees Still Branded as 'Terrorists?'," and she reported that "DHS [Department
of Homeland Security] is working with other agencies, such as the State Department, to come up with
a solution" to the routine refusal of the United States to grant U.S. visas to translators and other
local employees of the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan who wanted to move to the U.S. and who had overwhelming
reason to fear retaliation from anti-Americans in their home countries after we left. The State Department
did nothing. Then, Human Rights First headlined on 13 August 2009,
"Senator Leahy on 'Material Support' Bars," and reported that, "In a powerful statement submitted
for the Congressional Record on August 5, 2009, Senator Leahy (D-VT) reaffirmed his commitment to
'restore common sense' to the bars to refugee and asylum status based on associations with what the
Immigration and Nationality Act defines as terrorism," which was "written so broadly" that it applied
even to "children who were recruited against their will and forced to undergo military training,
doctors (acting in accordance with the Hippocratic oath) ... and those who fought against the armies
of repressive governments in their home countries."
The State Department failed to act. On 2 February 2013, the Washington Post bannered
"Alleged Terrorism Ties Foil Some Afghan Interpreters' U.S. Visa Hopes," and Kevin Sieff in Kabul
reported that, "As the American military draws down its forces in Afghanistan and more than 6,000
Afghan interpreters seek U.S. visas, the problem is threatening to obstruct the applications of Afghans
who risked their lives to serve the U.S. government." What kind of lesson is this teaching to interpreters
and other local employees of the U.S. missions in unstable foreign countries? Helping the U.S. could
be terminally dangerous.
In the past three years, 160 Syrian farming villages have been abandoned near Aleppo as crop failures
have forced over 200,000 rural Syrians to leave for the cities. This news is distressing enough,
but when put into a long-term perspective, its implications are staggering: many of these villages
have been continuously farmed for 8000 years.
That source had been published on 16 January 2010."
The drought continued on through 2010 and sporadically afterwards, and it intensified in Syria
the already widespread 'Arab Spring' demonstrations against the existing regimes.
The failure of the Assad regime, once again, to heed the call of regional states and the international
community underscores the fact that it has lost all credibility. The United States reiterates its
calls for an immediate end to the violence, for free unfettered access for human rights monitors
and journalists to deter and document grave human rights abuses and for Asad to step aside.
In other words: she was already demanding "regime change" in Syria. Back in 2002, she had similarly
demanded "regime change in Iraq," because the Ba'athist, Russia-allied, anti-sectarian, Saddam Hussein
ruled there. She did it again in Syria - just as she had done it in Lybia in order to get rid of
the non-sectarian Russia-allied dictator there, Muammar Gaddafi.
I worry too much that Secretary Clinton is too much into regime change and a little bit too aggressive
without knowing what the unintended consequences might be.
Yes, we could get rid of Saddam Hussein, but that destabilized the entire region. Yes, we could
get rid of Gadhafi, a terrible dictator, but that created a vacuum for ISIS. Yes, we could get rid
of Assad tomorrow, but that would create another political vacuum that would benefit ISIS.
He said that defeating the jihadists in Syria should be completed before the issue of what to
do about Assad is addressed. The questioner, David Muir, asked Clinton whether she agreed with that.
She replied:
We are doing both at the same time.
MUIR: But that's what he's saying, we should put that aside for now and go after ISIS.
CLINTON: Well, I don't agree with that.
She is obsessed with serving the desires of the U.S. aristocracy - even if that means the U.S.
helps supply sarin gas to the rebels in Syria to be blamed on Assad, and even if it also means that
the existing, Ba'athist, government in Syria will be replaced by a jihadist Sunni government that
serves the Saud family and the other Arabic royal families.
------
UKRAINE
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton chose as being the State Department's chief spokesperson Victoria
Nuland who was previously the Principal Deputy National Security Advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney
from 2003 to 2005, after having been appointed by President George W. Bush as the U.S. Deputy Permanent
Representative to the anti-Russian military club NATO from 2000 until 2003. Her big passion, and
her college-major, as a person who ever since childhood hated Russia, was Russian studies, and she
"was twice a visiting fellow
at the Council on Foreign Relations - as a 'Next Generation' Fellow looking at the effects of
anti-Americanism on U.S. relations around the world, and as a State Department Fellow directing a
task force on 'Russia, its Neighbors and an Expanding NATO.'" Although her career started after the
Soviet Union and its communism ended in 1990, it has nonetheless been obsessed with her hatred of
Russia and with her passion for the U.S. aristocracy to take it over, as if communism hadn't really
been a factor in the "Cold War" - and she has been promoted in her career on that basis.
V.P. Cheney liked her "neo-conservatism," which she shared with her husband, Robert Kagan, who
had been one of the leading proponents for "regime change in Iraq." ("Neo-conservatism" is the group
of policy intellectuals who passionately argued for "regime change in Iraq" during the Bill Clinton
and George W. Bush Administrations, and who support every policy to overthrow the leaders of any
nation that's at all friendly toward Russia.)
Here is the recording
of Nuland on 4 February 2014, telling the U.S. Ambassador in Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, whom to place
at the top of the Ukrainian government when the coup will be completed, which occurred 22 days later.
It was to be the culmination of her efforts, which had started even prior to 1 March 2013.
Here is the head of the "private CIA" firm Stratfor saying it was "the most blatant coup in history."
Here is the electoral map showing the voting percentages in each region of Ukraine for the election
that had chosen the President, "Janukovych," whom Obama overthrew in that coup. The region in purple
on that map had voted 90% for "Janukovych." It's called Donbass and consists of Donetsk and Luhansk.
It refused to accept the coup-imposed leaders. Obama wanted the residents there bombed into submission.
Here
's a video of that bombing-campaign. Here's another -
specifically of firebombings (which are illegal). The money for that bombing-campaign came from
taxpayers in U.S. and EU, and also from the IMF, in the form of loans that saddled Ukraine with so
much debt
it went bankrupt on 4 October 2015 , as determined by
a
unanimous vote of the 15 international banks that collectively make this decision . The infamously
high corruption in Ukraine went even higher after the U.S.-EU takeover of Ukraine. After Ukraine's
bankrupttcy,
the IMF changed its rules so that it could continue to lend money there, until the people in
Donbass are either exterminated or expelled. The U.S. President controls the IMF. For the international
aristocracy, the U.S. President is the most important servant there is. Hillary Clinton wants to
become that servant. It's why
her top twenty financial backers represent the U.S. aristocracy .
* * *
OTHER MATTERS
Finally, it should also be noted that Hillary's record as the chief administrator at the State
Department was also poor. The State Department's own
Accountability Review
Board Report on Benghazi Attack said: "In the months leading up to September 11, 2012, security
in Benghazi was not recognized and implemented as a 'shared responsibility' in Washington, resulting
in stove-piped discussions and decisions on policy and security. Key decisions ... or non-decisions
in Washington, such as the failure to establish standards for Benghazi and to meet them, or the lack
of a cohesive staffing plan, essentially set up Benghazi." That's failure at the very top. It's not
in Libya. It's not even in Africa. It's in "Washington."
Who, at the State Department in "Washington," had "buck stops here" authority and power? Hillary
Clinton.
Republicans are obsessed with the Benghazi failure, because it reflects negatively upon her but
not on themselves. However, Hillary's real and important failures reflected negatively upon Republicans
also, because these failures (such as her supporting fascists in Honduras) culminated actually Republican
foreign-policy objectives, and dashed Democratic (and democratic) policy-objectives. This is the
real reason why Republicans focus instead upon Hillary's Benghazi mess.
Hillary Clinton also was a notoriously poor administrator of her own 2007-2008 presidential primary
campaign. Even coming into 2014, some leading Democrats were afraid that if she were to become the
Party's candidate, then the entire Party would get "Mark Penned," which is the euphemism for her
inability to select top-flight people for key posts. Obama had a far higher-skilled campaign-operation
than she did, even though she started out with an enormous head-start against Obama in 2008.
Back in 2006, the encyclopedically brilliant Democrat Jack Beatty headlined in The Atlantic,
"Run, Barack, Run," and he contrasted the "enthralling" presence and speaking-style of Barack
Obama to the presence and speaking-style of the Party's presumptive 2008 nominee. He said of Clinton:
"As she showed in her speech at the memorial service for Coretta Scott King, Hillary Clinton is a
boring, flat-voiced, false-gesturing platform speaker. She shouts into the microphone; Obama talks
into it. Her borrowed words inspire no trust – they remind us of her borrowed foundation – and her
clenched personality inspires little affection. Money can't buy her love, nor buzz protect her political
glass jaw. The question for Democrats is, Who will break it first? Will it be one of her Democratic
challengers – Obama, Joe Biden, John Edwards – or John McCain?" He was hoping that it would turn
out to be one of the Democrats, especially Obama, so as to avoid a continuation of the Bush years.
He got his wish, even if not his intended result. (Obama was so gifted a con-man that even the brightest
Democrats, such as Beatty, couldn't see through his con. Nobody could – so, the Republicans had to
invent an 'Obama'-demon that was almost diametrically opposite to the real one, in order to provide
a punching-bag that their suckers would hate. Republicans ended up punching actually the most gifted
Republican since the time of Ronald Reagan - a black and charismatic version of Mitt Romney, the
man who lost to Obama in 2012 though having created the model both for Obamacare and for Obama's
policies toward Wall Street, and even toward Russia.)
At the start of the present campaign, it had seemed almost inevitable that Hillary Clinton would
be the Democratic Presidential nominee in 2016. A Quinnipiac poll released on 7 March 2013 was headlined
"Clinton, Christie Lead The Pack In Early Look At 2016," and reported that, "Former First Lady,
and Secretary of State Clinton wins easily against any" opponent, from either Party.
Her public statements aren't consistent, because she changes them whenever politically convenient
to do so; but the statements of a liar are simply ignored by intelligent people, anyway. Her statements
are ignored by intelligent voters. What matters is her actions, her actual record, which is lengthy,
and ugly. Her record is, moreover,
consistent . So, it leaves no doubt as to what her actual policies are: only fools will listen
to anything that a liar such as she is, says on the stump, because she's a con-person who is selling,
essentially, a toxic dump, and trying to get top-dollar for it by describing the pretty land covering
it over, and by crossing her fingers that not many people will smell any stench percolating up from
down below. The only people who can intelligently trust her verbal commitments are her big donors,
who hear those commitments in private, not in public, and who understand how to interpret them. Her
voters are there merely to be conned, not to be served. She needs them to be the rug she walks upon
in order to get back into the White House, where she intends to be serving real gold to her big donors,
to make their bets, on her, profitable for them.
And
here are her big donors - the people she seeks to serve there.
This presentation will now close with a brief update on the situation in Honduras, because that
catastrophe was Hillary Clinton's first one as the Secretary of State:
On 15 February 2016, Alexander Main, of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, headlined
an op-ed in The New York Times,
"An Anti-Corruption Charade in Honduras," and he wrote there:
In Honduras, protests erupted when a local journalist revealed that millions of dollars of public
funds from the country's health care system had been funneled to the ruling National Party and the
election campaign of President Juan Orlando Hernández. A handful of administrators and business executives
have been indicted for other corruption in the health system, but no charges have been brought against
Mr. Hernández or other top party officials over the diversion of funds to the party. … The country's
security forces are heavily infiltrated by organized crime - 'rotten to the core,' a former police
official told The Miami Herald. Two weeks later, the official was shot dead. Scores of journalists,
lawyers, land rights activists, gay rights advocates and opposition figures have been assassinated,
without consequence for their killers. …
Sadly, the American government is ill positioned to offer help. In 2009, the State Department
under Secretary Hillary Clinton helped a military coup in Honduras succeed by blocking efforts to
restore the left-leaning president, Manuel Zelaya, to power. Since then, Washington's diplomatic
efforts have focused on shoring up a series of corrupt post-coup governments. More than 100 members
of Congress have called on the Obama administration to condemn human rights violations by security
forces, and have questioned America's security assistance to Honduras.
Yet Washington continues to back Mr. Hernández.
Hillary Clinton did, indeed, have an impact as the Secretary of State, and it continues to this
day, and will live on as a curse, probably for decades to come - especially in the lands that she
played a principal role in helping to destroy.
She prides herself on her "experience," as if having a title, "Secretary of State," and performing
miserably in that function, qualifies someone to be a good U.S. President. America's press hasn't
challenged her on the claim, either. Thus, many people, who trust both her and the American press,
think that there must be truth to her claim: that she has achieved a lot, and that what she has achieved
was terrific for the American people, and for the world. They've been successfully deceived.
There is an alternative, within the Democratic Party: Bernie Sanders.
Here is his experience. And
here are his top donors.
* * *
CONCLUSION
Only fools vote for her. Her campaigns are targeting especially fools who are either female or
black or Hispanic, but she (and her financial backers) will welcome any fool to vote for her, because
clearly no non-fool (except those financial backers) will.
PostScript:
This article was submitted to the major print news-media, and major online news-media, with the
question: "Would you want this as an exclusive?" None replied even to say something like, "Maybe,
give us a week to check out the linked sources." None replied at all. Consequently, this article
is now being provided free of charge to the public, and free of charge to all media to publish, but
that's the choice a journalist must make in order to present a truthful and reasonably comprehensive
picture of Hillary Clinton's record as the U.S. Secretary of State. Republican 'news' media don't
want this article, because it shows her as being hardly different from the Republicans on international
matters; and Democratic 'news' media don't want it, because it shows her as being hardly different
from the Republicans on international matters. So, only the few news-media that are neither Republican
nor Democratic, and are dedicated only to honestly and truthfully informing the public about the
candidates for the U.S. Presidency, will publish it, even if it's offered free-of-charge. About foreign
affairs, there's no truth in any of the large U.S. 'news' media: they're all controlled by the U.S.
aristocracy, who agree in both Parties, and who are united against the interests of the publics in
every nation.
Here below are the news-media that had received the article, submitted to them for consideration
as an exclusive, and all of which media rejected this article, without comment, so that you can see
that the editors there know the information that's revealed here (they have read it here, even if
they didn't already know it before and simply hid it all along from their readership). The reason
they don't want their readers to know these facts is that they don't want the public to know that
(except on purely groupist issues concerning women, Blacks and Hispanics - her voting-base) Hillary
Clinton is actually a Republican in 'Democratic' verbal garb. Neither Republican, nor Democratic,
'news' media, want their readers to know that she's actually a Republican - even more than her husband
was. Anyway: here, you'll see that though the information that has been included in this article
is ignored in the reporting by all of the big reporters and by the talking heads on TV 'news,' they're
not actually unaware of it; they're simply
not allowed to let the public know it .
Those media are: Vanity Fair, National Review, Rolling Stone, Harper's, BusinessWeek and Bloomberg
News, McClatchy newspapers, New York Times, Guardian, Washington Post, Mother Jones, Nation, Progressive,
New Republic, New Yorker, Foreign Policy, Politico, Salon, Huffington Post, and Slate. (If any of
your friends subscribe to or read those, why not pass this along to them, so that they'll know what
they don't know about Hillary Clinton. Maybe they already know how bad the Republicans are, but do
they know how bad the Clintons and Obama really are? Perhaps they don't know it, from sources that
want them not to know it.)
Any news-medium that wishes to publish this article without this "PS" is hereby welcomed to do
so, because, at this particular moment, I am more concerned to get the truth out about Hillary Clinton,
than about the U.S. press.
"... Nevada should have been a slam-dunk for Clinton. The narrow win is almost as bad as defeat. She was supposed to own the minority vote. ..."
"... This is absurdly biased. How much coverage for hillary and then Sanders comes second yet gets almost a passing mention despite having reversed a huge difference between the candidates. this is just crappy reporting. ..."
"... Donald trump have proved that he has more faith in god than the pope, because Donald Trump dont use bodyguards and with the things he says he needs them. ..."
This is absurdly biased. How much coverage for hillary and then Sanders comes second yet gets
almost a passing mention despite having reversed a huge difference between the candidates. this
is just crappy reporting.
BIG QUESTIONS:
1) Who can emerge as the Anti-Trump? Robo-Rubio or Canadian Cruz?
2) Is Kashich running for President or Vice President? Gov of Ohio could deliver crucial state,
OTOH he's very 1990s, classic Newt Gingrich vintage of Republican, part of a discredited and failed
movement.
3) Where do Jeb!'s people go? Not his voters, he didn't have any, but his money people?
The just blew $100MILLION+ on Jeb!, they probably have 3X more burning a hole in their
collective pockets. Rubio has that robot-problem, Cruz is a loose cannon (or loose stool), Carson
will never win, Kasich is too boring and funny looking, not to mention "vintage, but in the bad
way."
4) Will the election of President Trump split the Republican party?
An extraordinary battle between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton could be taking shape in the
2016 presidential race after the two candidates won crucial victories in the Republican and Democratic
contests for the White House.
Seems a little soon to be thinking of what could be taking shape. For Ms Clinton a near tie
in Iowa, a solid thumping in New Hampshire, and finally her first bona fide win, though after
dropping 25+ percentage points in the polls and Hispanics ditching her, tells me only 3 votes
have happened.
Donald trump have proved that he has more faith in god than the pope, because Donald Trump don't
use bodyguards and with the things he says he needs them.
On the other hand the pope goes around sucking up to everyone and everywhere he goes he is surrounded
by his bodyguards.
Defending his attention-grabbing assertions that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was an
enormous mistake facilitated by the George W. Bush administration's
misleading of the American people, Republican presidential candidate Donald
Trump this week indirectly referred to 28
classified pages said to link the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to the 9/11 attacks.
"It wasn't the Iraqis that knocked down the World Trade Center. We went after
Iraq, we decimated the country, Iran's taking over…but it wasn't the Iraqis, you
will find out who really knocked down the World Trade Center, because they have
papers in there that are very secret, you may find it's the Saudis, okay? But you
will find out," Trump said at a Wednesday campaign event in Bluffton, South
Carolina.
Trump's implied promise to declassify the 28 pages sets him apart from
the remaining Republican and Democratic presidential aspirants, filling a gap
created when Rand Paul suspended his campaign.
Last summer, Paul introduced
Senate Bill 1471,
which, if passed, would direct the president to release the 28 pages, and he
pledged to release them himself if elected to the White House. Green Party
candidate Jill Stein has also called
for their release. (Then-Senator Hillary Clinton co-signed a
2003 letter to President Bush demanding the release of the 28 pages, but has
been silent on the topic since.)
"... Equality in America has been falling since 1980's, real terms median income falling since 1999. Black or white, America was a more equal more livable place 20-30 years ago. ..."
"... You should speak for yourself. Look at the economic data for American GDP, Inequality and real terms household income. The economy used to work better for the average American. Rising income trends have been reversed by globalisation and automation, not by increasing diversity. Why should American voters trust mainstream candidates who simply repeat the same failed messages they have stuck to for the last generation? ..."
"... median household incomes in America peaked (in real terms) around 1999 and inequality has been rising since 1980. The drivers of this are automation and globalisation, not increasing diversity. ..."
"... Yeah, my family has white privilege- write a play about this. My great-great grandfather served two enlistments in the northern army of the Civil war to free the slaves. Lucky for him, he survived and I got to be born 90 years later. Many of his friends died and their entire future family line got cut off. I dare say that tens of millions of white Americans never got to be born, because their kin fought and died in the Civil war to free the slaves. I don't think blacks today appreciate the blood sacrifice that was made by northern whites to free them. ..."
"... The Southern Baptist church attended by millions of African-Americans, with its traditional, creationist, homophobic platform, is far more representative of African-American culture than is the select group of playwrights listed in the article. ..."
It took how many years to come up with the appalling misconception that blue collar steel workers
benefited from any type of "supremacy" unless you believe that having a job that pays enough to
put a roof over your family's heads and food on the table should be beyond the reach of all but
a selected few....Blue collar workers have only ever aspired to keeping their kids in school as
long as possible and neither they nor their kids ever had any designs on a college education.
Word hard, pay the bills, retire, and die within five years. I don't know in what world that translates
to white privelege or advantage, especially when they worked with African Americans and Latinos.
Now politicians promise every child a college education. If you can't understand the difference
between this generation that has been told the world is their oyster and the ones who worked in
the Steel mills for generations and knew what their kids could look forward, knew that college
was beyond the modest aspirations of their kids and their grandkids you didn't ask the right questions
or the right people and the result is an ideologically driven mess of race baiting, sexist claptrap.
Get used to being called on your bullsh*t. We all need to check our privilege when we write about
race. Talk about entitlement.
The tough part for me is constantly hearing about what the President did or didn't do. The US
government is structured specifically to limit the actions of the executive branch. The conditions
of the economic disaster were exacerbated by the unparalleled obstructionism of the opposition
party and the lack of support from the president's own party. If Democrats had been willing to
oppose a sitting president back in '03 we might have avoided a bankrupting war that still has
not ended.
Not really. Equality in America has been falling since 1980's, real terms median income falling
since 1999. Black or white, America was a more equal more livable place 20-30 years ago.
For sure it was better to be white then black but since you can never really measure the extent
of white privilege on your own life, how can you have nostalgia for it?
The writer claims that current political events are being shaped by a chimaera she can provide
no evidence for and ignoring the very real changes that could be driving the political shifts
toward more radical candidates.
You should speak for yourself. Look at the economic data for American GDP, Inequality and
real terms household income. The economy used to work better for the average American. Rising
income trends have been reversed by globalisation and automation, not by increasing diversity.
Why should American voters trust mainstream candidates who simply repeat the same failed messages
they have stuck to for the last generation?
Trump is insane, of course, but voting for Hillary or Cruz is equally insane for most of middle
America. They would effectively be voting to see their incomes go down and to fall further behind
the wealthiest. Why is that a good decision?
For sure there is nostalgia: nostalgia for the time when middle class incomes were enough to provide
a decent lifestyle, were expected to rise and provide enough to pay for your kids to get a decent
education. The writer then frames this as nostalgia for white privilege, but I have to question
that. Surely the expectation was that as discrimination was rolled back, ethnic minorities would
start to come up and equalise their incomes with the white population. After all, that is what
every mainstream politician promised would happen. But median household incomes in America
peaked (in real terms) around 1999 and inequality has been rising since 1980. The drivers of this
are automation and globalisation, not increasing diversity.
And *every* US president and political party has dissembled on this point. Every time, the
promise is the same - we can get back to the rising incomes and increasing equality of the last
century. And every time, nothing of the sort is delivered.
So if there is nostalgia, it not only has a very real basis in fact, but is a nostalgia for
a time when economic gains were distributed more equally, not a nostalgia for a time when white
privilege (whatever that means) was a greater force.
Sanders and Trump both represent a break from politicians and messages that have palpably failed
to deliver. The voters put up with being lied to for some time but their patience has run out.
Of course Trump can be portrayed as an out and out racist, so its easy to say - well his support
is based on race politics. I have no doubt that many do support him for that reason. But the wider
picture is this:
The American voters feel they have been lied to by established politicians and are now looking
for alternatives. If they have nostalgia for times past, that is founded not on a dream of white
supremacy, but founded on a recollection of times when the economy did work better for the majority.
Yeah, my family has white privilege- write a play about this. My great-great grandfather served
two enlistments in the northern army of the Civil war to free the slaves. Lucky for him, he survived
and I got to be born 90 years later. Many of his friends died and their entire future family line
got cut off. I dare say that tens of millions of white Americans never got to be born, because
their kin fought and died in the Civil war to free the slaves. I don't think blacks today appreciate
the blood sacrifice that was made by northern whites to free them.
They now realize their automatic entitlement to being consequential is gone
What the hell are you talking about? My father didn't have any damn " entitlement to
being consequential". He worked his heart out for it, day in and out, and I was proud to do it
alongside him.
Maybe instead of just applying a racist take on perspective, why not think about what you write
first? And why is it that every time - every. single. time - this topic comes up that someone
widens the gap of guilt to the entirety of white people generally? Where's the border for you?
Canada? The UK? Latvia? What is enough of a geographic guilt complex for your needs? Let us know.
The Southern Baptist church attended by millions of African-Americans, with its traditional,
creationist, homophobic platform, is far more representative of African-American culture than
is the select group of playwrights listed in the article.
the fact that the more academically qualified white female has less chance of getting a place
in harvard than a wealthy African-American, is hardly the fault of African Americans or any form
of reverse racism, it s the fault of first Harvard being a private university that caters to economic
elites, the lack of funding in education and that education is handled at the local level, so
funding and quality depend greatly on the education level of the local community and how wealthy
they are. This perpetuates inequalities. Still, if you put this hypothetical white female from
Harlan County in nice clothes and send her to a fancy mall, together with an equally well dressed
young black woman, who do you think security will follow?
There are also studies where equal CV were sent to potential employers, with the only difference
being white, latino, asian or African American sounding names, and the white sounding names were
picked more often, everything else being equal.
It is time that you realize that racism is a real thing and no, working class whites 't doing
poorly because of minorities, they are doing poorly (together with minorities) because of the
economic system. Unless of course, you think that whites should do better, because, well, they
are whites. The later is what I think the nostalgia is all about, 50 years ago white would have
had an edge over minorities that today no longer have in most places.
This woman is so so wise and enlightened that that her extreme intellect has crossed the line
on insanity. Liberals like her will do their best to herd the rest of us into believing that only
white working class men are attracted to people like trump and it's only because they are racists.
No no lady bone head.
First of all, you and your elitists, pompous and supposed educated comrades need to stop using
the race card overtime you find someone you disagree with. Secondly, Trump has attracted the attention
on a multitude of people across all facets of our society and it's not because we are racists,
it't because he at least vocalizes, inspire of all of your absurd PC proclamations, facts that
the majority of us Americans know and see each day.
By the way, I am an American with brown skin who's ancestry is African and I appreciate most
of what Trump espouses. So please stop trying to make the rest of us fear and hate white working
class men just because you've fantasized about their hatred toward you. You and your kind (elitists
liberals) will no longer lead me down the path of destruction.
Exactly, all the places that hit rock bottom during the crack epidemic are on their way up now
just in time to start attracting people back from the suburban and peri-urban sprawl with its
body and soul weakening car dependent isolation.
Cities like New York and DC are way ahead of surrounding areas in providing public services
and creating sustainable buildings plus car-less ways of getting around.
While we would be the first
to admit that Jeffrey Sachs was the godfather of "shock therapy" (aka "the economic rape of Russia"
and several other xUSSR republics), he is right as for the ongoing Syria bloodbath which has come to
define the geopolitical situation for the past 3 years. And how this is an event that would "surely
rival Watergate in shaking the foundations of the US establishment" if the truth were fully known, we
agree 100 percent.
Notable quotes:
"... Clinton bears heavy responsibility for that carnage, which has by now displaced more than 10 million Syrians and left more than 250,000 dead. ..."
"... As every knowledgeable observer understands, the Syrian War is not mostly about Bashar al-Assad, or even about Syria itself. It is mostly a proxy war, about Iran. And the bloodbath is doubly tragic and misguided for that reason. ..."
"... Saudi Arabia and Turkey, the leading Sunni powers in the Middle East, view Iran, the leading Shia power, as a regional rival for power and influence. Right-wing Israelis view Iran as an implacable foe that controls Hezbollah, a Shi'a militant group operating in Lebanon, a border state of Israel. Thus, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Israel have all clamored to remove Iran's influence in Syria. ..."
"... And Israeli right-wingers are naďve, and deeply ignorant of history, to regard Iran as their implacable foe, especially when that mistaken view pushes Israel to side with Sunni jihadists. ..."
"... Yet Clinton did not pursue that route. Instead she joined Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and right-wing Israelis to try to isolate, even defeat, Iran. In 2010, she supported secret negotiations between Israel and Syria to attempt to wrest Syria from Iran's influence. Those talks failed. Then the CIA and Clinton pressed successfully for Plan B: to overthrow Assad. ..."
"... When the unrest of the Arab Spring broke out in early 2011, the CIA and the anti-Iran front of Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey saw an opportunity to topple Assad quickly and thereby to gain a geopolitical victory. Clinton became the leading proponent of the CIA-led effort at Syrian regime change. ..."
"... Clinton has been much more than a bit player in the Syrian crisis. Her diplomat Ambassador Christopher Stevens in Benghazi was killed as he was running a CIA operation to ship Libyan heavy weapons to Syria. Clinton herself took the lead role in organizing the so-called "Friends of Syria" to back the CIA-led insurgency. ..."
"... This instrument of U.S. foreign policy has not only been in stark violation of international law but has also been a massive and repeated failure. Rather than a single, quick, and decisive coup d'état resolving a US foreign policy problem, each CIA-led regime change has been, almost inevitably, a prelude to a bloodbath. How could it be otherwise? Other societies don't like their countries to be manipulated by U.S. covert operations. ..."
"... And where is the establishment media in this debacle? The New York Times finally covered a bit of this story last month in describing the CIA-Saudi connection , in which Saudi funds are used to pay for CIA operations in order to make an end-run around Congress and the American people. The story ran once and was dropped. Yet the Saudi funding of CIA operations is the same basic tactic used by Ronald Reagan and Oliver North in the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s (with Iranian arms sales used to fund CIA-led covert operations in Central America without consent or oversight by the American people). ..."
"... Clinton herself has never shown the least reservation or scruples in deploying this instrument of U.S. foreign policy. Her record of avid support for US-led regime change includes (but is not limited to) the US bombing of Belgrade in 1999, the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, the Iraq War in 2003, the Honduran coup in 2009, the killing of Libya's Muammar Qaddafi in 2011, and the CIA-coordinated insurrection against Assad from 2011 until today. ..."
"... Many historians believe that JFK was assassinated as a result of his peace overtures to the Soviet Union, overture he made against the objections of hardline rightwing opposition in the CIA and other parts of the U.S. government. ..."
"... Hillary Clinton has never shown an iota of bravery, or even of comprehension, in facing down the CIA She has been the CIA's relentless supporter, and has exulted in showing her toughness by supporting every one of its misguided operations. The failures, of course, are relentlessly hidden from view. Clinton is a danger to global peace. She has much to answer for regarding the disaster in Syria. ..."
"... She is totally unqualified, a disaster of a secretary of state, has incredibly poor judgement is a terrible candidate and should never be allowed to serve in any government capacity - EVER. ..."
"... Well said. Hillary is a warmonger neocon just like Bush/McCain/Graham/Cheney. Trump and Bernie are not. ..."
"... Pundits do not realize when they heap praises at Hillary Clinton's debate performances that ordinary people watching cannot get past her lack of trustworthiness and her dishonesty; and that whatever she says is viewed in that context and is therefore worthless. ..."
"... It's dismaying that the blowback from the 1953 CIA-assisted overthrow of Mossadegh is still behind the instability of the Middle East, and that we have continued to commit the same mistakes over and over. Can't we just get rid of this agency? ..."
"... The CIA repeated this stunt in Vietnam 10 years after the Mossadegh mess and have been doing it at least once every decade since then. In every case, it has been a failure. How supporting that nonsense is seen as foreign policy experience, I'll never know. ..."
"... Hillary helped facilitate the arming of terrorists in Syria in 2010 and 2011. She as far as I al concerned, Hillary supported the deaths of Syrians and terrorism. So why on earth would I want her to be president? Hello? ..."
"... More like a continuance of a disaster deferred. Thanks to John Kerry cleaning up the mess of her disastrous term as SoS. Syria is still a mess, but he has been working his butt off to be every bit of diplomat that Hillary was not. ..."
"... she was for an all out invasion by the USA into Syria to remove Assad. She, John McCain, and Linsey Graham had to settle for just arming the Al Queda and IS for the time being. ..."
"... Clinton, Obama, Bush, etc DC corruption used to bring down regimes that have continually destabilized America & the world. ..."
"... Where & Why was Obama & Holder not as directly held accountable in this discussion. Trump rightfully points that Americans have died for nothing yet the villains who are the catalysts of these atrocities still have jobs & stature in US. America needs to be rebooted once again & bring in leadership not buoyed by greed. power & indifference of those before him. ..."
"... The problem here really is the fact that Americans bitch and don't vote every election and this has let money just walk in and buy more influence, you want a real revolution, ..."
"... That is about it, Clinton is a repub in dem clothing and the US is the biggest threat to world peace when it can not get its way in another countries politics or to get them to follow the US master plan that mainly supports the US's goal. ..."
"... what makes her so maddeningly hawkish? what credentials she has that her peace-loving supporters believe that she can lead the US/world for peace? wake-up, and let's get united behind bernie. ..."
"... They believe the mythology that if women ruled the world it would be a better place...I beg to differ....Margaret Thatcher, Catherine the Great, Elizabeth I were not exactly peace lovers... ..."
"... years ago I was shocked to see that there were women members of the KKK. So much for women by their gender alone saving the world. ..."
"... But let us not forget Hillary Clinton's "regime change" record in Ukraine with Victoria "Fuc# the E.U.!" Nuland, wife of Neocon Robert Kagan and an Under Secretary of Hillary Clinton's at The State Department. ..."
"... Hillary Clinton's fingerprints are all over Ukraine: ..."
"... Yes, Somehow the so-called MSM refuses to expose the continuing debacle of our worldwide acts of Terrorism! The failure after failure of "our" military establishment such as targeted assassinations ..."
"... Further it is American war industry in partnership with our military that is arming the world with military grade weapon systems, tons and tons of munitions, and training to use them for such terror weapons as IEDs. It is MSM control by the establishment that enables the failures of Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Obama, Clinton to treat horrendous failures as successes! ..."
"... Hillary Clinton supporters don't care, they don't care that she could be a felon nor do they care she is owned by Wall Street and many other corporate special interest, they just don't care. ..."
"... Up here in New Hampshire, we soundly rejected untrustworthy, dishonest, disingenuous and corrupt Hillary, we just wish the rest of the nation had as much time to get to know the candidates as we had up here! ..."
In the
Milwaukee debate, Hillary Clinton took pride in her role in a recent UN Security Council resolution
on a Syrian ceasefire:
But I would add this. You know, the Security Council finally got around to adopting a resolution.
At the core of that resolution is an agreement I negotiated in June of 2012 in Geneva, which set
forth a cease-fire and moving toward a political resolution, trying to bring the parties at stake
in Syria together.
This is the kind of compulsive misrepresentation that makes Clinton unfit to be President. Clinton's
role in Syria has been to help instigate and prolong the Syrian bloodbath, not to bring it to a close.
In 2012, Clinton was the obstacle, not the solution, to a ceasefire being negotiated by UN Special
Envoy Kofi Annan. It was US intransigence - Clinton's intransigence - that led to the failure of
Annan's peace efforts in the spring of 2012, a point well known among diplomats. Despite Clinton's
insinuation in the Milwaukee debate, there was (of course) no 2012 ceasefire, only escalating carnage.
Clinton bears heavy responsibility for that carnage, which has by now displaced more than 10
million Syrians and left more than 250,000 dead.
As every knowledgeable observer understands, the Syrian War is not mostly about Bashar al-Assad,
or even about Syria itself. It is mostly a proxy war, about Iran. And the bloodbath is doubly tragic
and misguided for that reason.
Saudi Arabia and Turkey, the leading Sunni powers in the Middle East, view Iran, the leading
Shia power, as a regional rival for power and influence. Right-wing Israelis view Iran as an implacable
foe that controls Hezbollah, a Shi'a militant group operating in Lebanon, a border state of Israel.
Thus, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Israel have all clamored to remove Iran's influence in Syria.
This idea is incredibly naďve. Iran has been around as a regional power for a long time--in fact,
for about 2,700 years. And Shia Islam is not going away. There is no way, and no reason, to "defeat"
Iran. The regional powers need to forge a geopolitical equilibrium that recognizes the mutual and
balancing roles of the Gulf Arabs, Turkey, and Iran. And Israeli right-wingers are naďve, and
deeply ignorant of history, to regard Iran as their implacable foe, especially when that mistaken
view pushes Israel to side with Sunni jihadists.
Yet Clinton did not pursue that route. Instead she joined Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and right-wing
Israelis to try to isolate, even defeat, Iran. In 2010, she supported secret negotiations between
Israel and Syria
to attempt to wrest Syria from Iran's influence. Those talks failed. Then the CIA and Clinton
pressed successfully for Plan B: to overthrow Assad.
When the unrest of the Arab Spring broke out in early 2011, the CIA and the anti-Iran front
of Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey saw an opportunity to topple Assad quickly and thereby to gain
a geopolitical victory. Clinton became the leading proponent of the CIA-led effort at Syrian regime
change.
In early 2011, Turkey and Saudi Arabia leveraged local protests against Assad to try to foment
conditions for his ouster. By the spring of 2011, the CIA and the US allies were organizing an armed
insurrection against the regime. On August 18, 2011, the US Government
made public
its position: "Assad must go."
Since then and until the
recent fragile UN Security Council accord, the US has refused to agree to any ceasefire unless
Assad is first deposed. The US policy--under Clinton and until recently--has been: regime change
first, ceasefire after. After all, it's only Syrians who are dying. Annan's peace efforts were sunk
by the United States' unbending insistence that U.S.-led regime change must precede or at least accompany
a ceasefire. As the
Nation editors
put it in August 2012:
The US demand that Assad be removed and sanctions be imposed before negotiations could seriously
begin, along with the refusal to include Iran in the process, doomed [Annan's] mission.
The U.S. policy was a massive, horrific failure. Assad did not go, and was not defeated. Russia
came to his support. Iran came to his support. The mercenaries sent in to overthrow him were themselves
radical jihadists with their own agendas. The chaos opened the way for the Islamic State, building
on disaffected Iraqi Army leaders (deposed by the US in 2003), on captured U.S. weaponry, and on
the considerable backing by Saudi funds. If the truth were fully known, the multiple scandals
involved would surely rival Watergate in shaking the foundations of the US establishment.
The hubris of the United States in this approach seems to know no bounds. The tactic of CIA-led
regime change is so deeply enmeshed as a "normal" instrument of U.S. foreign policy that it is hardly
noticed by the U.S. public or media. Overthrowing another government is against the U.N. charter
and international law. But what are such niceties among friends?
This instrument of U.S. foreign policy has not only been in stark violation of international
law but has also been a massive and repeated failure. Rather than a single, quick, and decisive coup
d'état resolving a US foreign policy problem, each CIA-led regime change has been, almost inevitably,
a prelude to a bloodbath. How could it be otherwise? Other societies don't like their countries to
be manipulated by U.S. covert operations.
Removing a leader, even if done "successfully," doesn't solve any underlying geopolitical problems,
much less ecological, social, or economic ones. A coup d'etat invites a civil war, the kind that
now wracks Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria. It invites a hostile international response, such
as Russia's backing of its Syrian ally in the face of the CIA-led operations. The record of misery
caused by covert CIA operations literally fills volumes at this point. What surprise, then, the Clinton
acknowledges Henry Kissinger as a mentor and guide?
And where is the establishment media in this debacle? The New York Times finally covered a
bit of this story last month in
describing the CIA-Saudi connection, in which Saudi funds are used to pay for CIA operations
in order to make an end-run around Congress and the American people. The story ran once and was dropped.
Yet the Saudi funding of CIA operations is the same basic tactic used by Ronald Reagan and Oliver
North in the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s (with Iranian arms sales used to fund CIA-led covert
operations in Central America without consent or oversight by the American people).
Clinton herself has never shown the least reservation or scruples in deploying this instrument
of U.S. foreign policy. Her record of avid support for US-led regime change includes (but is not
limited to) the US bombing of Belgrade in 1999, the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, the Iraq War
in 2003, the Honduran coup in 2009, the killing of Libya's Muammar Qaddafi in 2011, and the CIA-coordinated
insurrection against Assad from 2011 until today.
It takes great presidential leadership to resist CIA misadventures. Presidents get along by going
along with arms contractors, generals, and CIA operatives. They thereby also protect themselves from
political attack by hardline right-wingers. They succeed by exulting in U.S. military might, not
restraining it. Many historians believe that JFK was assassinated as a result of his peace overtures
to the Soviet Union, overture he made against the objections of hardline rightwing opposition in
the CIA and other parts of the U.S. government.
Hillary Clinton has never shown an iota of bravery, or even of comprehension, in facing down
the CIA She has been the CIA's relentless supporter, and has exulted in showing her toughness by
supporting every one of its misguided operations. The failures, of course, are relentlessly hidden
from view. Clinton is a danger to global peace. She has much to answer for regarding the disaster
in Syria.
The people of the United States do not want that woman, Hillary Rodham Clinton to have relations
with the people of the United States. She is totally unqualified, a disaster of a secretary
of state, has incredibly poor judgement is a terrible candidate and should never be allowed to
serve in any government capacity - EVER.
Simple equation....war=money=power. Perpetual warfare is the post 911 gold rush and every establishment
politician in every country is the snake oil salesman pushing this through. The people on the
top make money and the rest of us get killed and go broke.
Max South
Not only the root cause, but also to-ols are important: now Western media/StateDep try depict
what happens in Syria as sectarian, all while majority of both Syrian army and government are
Sunni (even Assad's wife is Sunni) -- secular ones.
Syrian government is only hope for them, as well as for Christians, Kurds and all other ethnic
and religious minorities that fight against Wahhabi/Salafist jihadists.
Sanders' platform is expansive and IMO he has provided the most detail on how he will get things
done, which anyone can find out with a bit of investigation (http://berniesanders.com/issues/).
But all of it doesn't matter since you can't predict how events will unfold. In this regard, I
trust Sanders more than anyone else to decide what is best for all people in the the country (and
even the world). I personally will do well with anyone but I think Sanders is looking out for
the average person more than anyone else.
Pundits do not realize when they heap praises at Hillary Clinton's debate performances that
ordinary people watching cannot get past her lack of trustworthiness and her dishonesty; and that
whatever she says is viewed in that context and is therefore worthless.
It's dismaying that the blowback from the 1953 CIA-assisted overthrow of Mossadegh is still behind
the instability of the Middle East, and that we have continued to commit the same mistakes over
and over. Can't we just get rid of this agency?
Bijan Sharifi
as an iranian-american (and veteran), i appreciate sen sanders bringing this up in the debate.
Bijan Sharifi Indeed. The CIA repeated this stunt in Vietnam 10 years after the Mossadegh mess
and have been doing it at least once every decade since then. In every case, it has been a failure.
How supporting that nonsense is seen as foreign policy experience, I'll never know.
Hillary helped facilitate the arming of terrorists in Syria in 2010 and 2011. She as far as I
al concerned, Hillary supported the deaths of Syrians and terrorism. So why on earth would I want
her to be president? Hello?
More like a continuance of a disaster deferred. Thanks to John Kerry cleaning up the mess of her
disastrous term as SoS. Syria is still a mess, but he has been working his butt off to be every bit of diplomat that
Hillary was not. As soon as she returns to office expect more of her warfare first and diplomacy 'meh'.
Gary Pack
Ignacio, she was for an all out invasion by the USA into Syria to remove Assad. She, John McCain,
and Linsey Graham had to settle for just arming the Al Queda and IS for the time being.
This is what Trump has been alluding to in re Clinton, Obama, Bush, etc DC corruption used to
bring down regimes that have continually destabilized America & the world.
Where & Why was Obama
& Holder not as directly held accountable in this discussion. Trump rightfully points that Americans
have died for nothing yet the villains who are the catalysts of these atrocities still have jobs
& stature in US. America needs to be rebooted once again & bring in leadership not buoyed by greed.
power & indifference of those before him.
James Elliott cheerleading will not get anything done, I don't think Bernie understands how to
get things done in our system, reality is 40 years of bad will not be fixed in even 4 years.
The problem here really is the fact that Americans bitch and don't vote every election
and this has let money just walk in and buy more influence, you want a real revolution,
vote every election you are alive and you will let your children and their children a better
life.
Harvey Riggs
That is about it, Clinton is a repub in dem clothing and the US is the biggest threat to world
peace when it can not get its way in another countries politics or to get them to follow the US
master plan that mainly supports the US's goal.
More messes in this world has been started with covert means in order to get what we want and
millions upon milllions are suffering and the rest of the world countries 1'%ers who run those
countries are scared to stand up aguinst the US and lose that under the table support.
what makes her so maddeningly hawkish? what credentials she has that her peace-loving supporters
believe that she can lead the US/world for peace? wake-up, and let's get united behind bernie.
They believe the mythology that if women ruled the world it would be a better place...I beg to
differ....Margaret Thatcher, Catherine the Great, Elizabeth I were not exactly peace lovers...
Additionally, years ago I was shocked to see that there were women members of the KKK. So much
for women by their gender alone saving the world.
Sheila Rajan
Looking at the various misguided US excursions over the past 2 decades from outside of America,
this comes as no surprise. Clinton's deep involvement in these venal adventures comes as no surprise
either. Bill Clinton may have been adored in liberal America, but he was NOT, outside of your
borders. To us he appeared as just another one in a long line of Presidents under the sway of
the arms manufacturers, CIA, banks and financiers. Hillary Clinton is just an offshoot.
But let us not forget Hillary Clinton's "regime change" record in Ukraine
with Victoria "Fuc# the E.U.!" Nuland, wife of Neocon Robert Kagan and an Under Secretary of Hillary
Clinton's at The State Department.
Hillary Clinton's fingerprints are all over Ukraine:
Yes, Somehow the so-called MSM refuses to expose the continuing debacle of our worldwide acts
of Terrorism! The failure after failure of "our" military establishment such as targeted assassinations
as an official policy using drones, black ops, spec ops, military "contractors", hired mercenaries,
war lord militias and the like; the illegal and immoral acts of war cloaked in the Israeli framed
rubric of "national defense".
Further it is American war industry in partnership with our military that is arming the
world with military grade weapon systems, tons and tons of munitions, and training to use them
for such terror weapons as IEDs. It is MSM control by the establishment that enables the failures
of Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Obama, Clinton to treat horrendous failures as successes!
Hillary Clinton supporters don't care, they don't care that she could be a felon nor do they
care she is owned by Wall Street and many other corporate special interest, they just don't care.
Up here in New Hampshire, we soundly rejected untrustworthy, dishonest, disingenuous and corrupt
Hillary, we just wish the rest of the nation had as much time to get to know the candidates as
we had up here!
"... Do you think they'll sue you or they're too busy running the campaign? ..."
"... my problem with Hillary Clinton is her physical abuse of people, and that is the case I make in the book. ..."
"... Clintons and the Bushes are the same. They actually work together. They raised $138 mn dollars through a non-profit for Haitian earthquake relief. They spent $10 million ,the pocketed a $128 million. It's in this book. ..."
"... They believe this system is broken, they don't like either party, they distrust political institutions, they distrust the Congress, they distrust the big media, they distrust the system, which they believe, is rigged against the average person - and that's why Trump, and, to a certain extent, Ben Carson, for example, and maybe even Bernie Sanders, they are resonating, because voters see them as outsiders and different from the other career politicians. Bernie Sanders isn't taking special interest money, he's not taking PAC money. God bless him! ..."
The American presidential contest is heating up, but the new book about Democratic
co-frontrunner Hillary Clinton may have some wide consequences. It alleges that the Clinton
family has been involved in abuse, rape and fraud, not having any qualms with using the
privileged position and money to shut the mouths of victims. What's the basis of these claims?
Can it change the flow of the election campaign? We speak to the author of the book, a former
advisor to Nixon and Reagan. Roger Stone is on Sophie&Co today.
Sophie Shevardnadze:Roger Stone, political strategist, former advisor to presidents
Nixon, Reagan, to candidate Donald Trump.. Now, you've just pen a book, called "Clinton's war on
women", where you alleged that a lot of, frankly, sensational things about the personal lives of
Bill and HIllary Clinton. For instance, you claim that Clintons systematically abused women,
sexually and physically. Do you mean to say they rape and beat them? I mean, is that what you're
saying?
Roger Stone:
".... many of these women were very reticent to talk because they are poor women. They are not
women who can afford lawyers. They are not women who can afford to fight back. By the way,
Michael Isikoff from NBC, he has reported this, Roger Morris, Pulitzer prize-winning author of
Washington Post, he has reported this. So, it's not just Roger Stone who has made these
allegations.
... No, I think I put forward the evidence, hard evidence, documented
evidence, that Hillary Clinton has beaten, kicked, punched, scratched and thrown hard objects at
her husband. At the same time, she says in her gun control proposal: "Those involved in domestic
abuse should not have a gun", it's hypocrisy, that's what this is about.
SS:Now, you say, Hillary
"psychologically raped" her or Bill's victims. Why do you refer to it
like that? Aren't you just being inflammatory?
RS:
No, not at all. Well, you're a woman, how would you feel if
your pet was killed, if you cat was killed and left at the front door?
If a man called your home late at night and said: "We know where your
kids go to school"? If your home was broken into? In my book, I
establish the actual names and, in many cases, the reports by other
journalists that Jack Palladino, private detective, Anthony Pellicano,
private detective, now in prison for illegal wiretapping, Ivan Duda,
private detective - these men all said the same thing, they were
retained by Hillary Clinton to keep tabs on and conduct a terror
campaign to silence Bill's sexual assault victims. No, I'm not being
inflammatory, I deal in facts, not rumors, not conspiracy, facts. By
the way, I'm open to lawsuits, here in the U.S., the Clinton's won't
sue me, because they know that I can then depose them, under oath,
about anything in this book.
SS: Do you think they'll sue you or they're
too busy running the campaign?
RS: No, they're too busy being afraid that this is
the issue that can bring them down. Now, I should also say, my book
also includes the two billion dollar financial frauds at the Clinton
Foundation, includes Bill Clinton's involvement with trafficking
cocaine during the time when he was the governor, his association with
Dan Lasater and others. This book is a complete and total expose of
Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton.
SS: But is their marriage really much fairer than many other people's
intense relationships, seriously?
RS: Their marriage is dysfunctional. It is a marriage of convenience, and the
instance of a lust for power. Even if I'm wrong, even if Bill's sexual conquests are all
consensual, how many times Hillary has to be humiliated by her husband before she does something
about it?
... ... ...
Robert Moreau is a supreme researcher, and there's no question: what he has learned about the
Clinton's abuse of people, men, women and children, has made him very, very angry. He should be
angry. Anybody who reads this book will be angry, because it is the unvarnished, ugly truth about
the privileged elite in this country. There are certain people, like the Clintons, like the
Bushes, for whom the laws do not matter, they can traffic drugs, they can assault and abuse other
people - again, I ask people: read the book, make your own judgement. Don't let the media decide
for you, don't let the twisted freaks in Media Matters for America who are being paid to peddle
this information, don't let them decide for you. Read the book, make your own decisions.
... ... ...
SS: Now, you blame Hillary Clinton for having a temper, for behaving
abusively. Yet, you support Donald Trump who has offended just about everyone along the way, and
has been especially derogatory to women. I mean, he seriously speaks about women like, about
domestic appliances, pretty much. Don't you see a contradiction here? Aren't you being a little
two-faced?
RS: Why would you acquaint words with physicality? They are not the same. You
know, free speech is a big item here in the U.S., we have something called The First Amendment.
If Trump has offended so many people, why is he doing so well in the polls? No, my problem
with Hillary Clinton is her physical abuse of people, and that is the case I make in the book.
I don't think you can acquaint one with the other.
... ... ...
Look, the Clintons and the Bushes are the same. They actually work together. They raised
$138 mn dollars through a non-profit for Haitian earthquake relief. They spent $10 million ,the
pocketed a $128 million. It's in this book. It will also be in my book, written from a
different point of view, on the Bushes. I just give that as one example of these two families
working together to line their own pockets.
... ... ...
They believe this system is broken, they don't like either party, they distrust political
institutions, they distrust the Congress, they distrust the big media, they distrust the system,
which they believe, is rigged against the average person - and that's why Trump, and, to a
certain extent, Ben Carson, for example, and maybe even Bernie Sanders, they are resonating,
because voters see them as outsiders and different from the other career politicians. Bernie
Sanders isn't taking special interest money, he's not taking PAC money. God bless him! I
don't agree with him, he says he's a Democratic Socialist, that's like a "meat-eating
vegetarian"; but, nonetheless, at least he has a courage in his convictions and he isn't bought
and paid for.
SS:Mr. Stone, thank you so much for this interview, for your wonderful insight. We
were talking to Roger Stone, political strategist, former advisor to Presidents Nixon and Reagan,
as well as candidate Donald Trump, author of "Clinton's War on Women", talking about the newest
sensational allegations of abusive behaviour of Clinton family, and what can that mean for the
outcome of the U.S. Presidential election. That's it for this edition of Sophie&Co, I will see
you next time.
"... For reasons sake, I was not saying that HRC was LITERALLY a Republican…but her window of political discourse certainly represents what used to be considered expected of a moderate republican. Hell's fire, people, Bill Clinton's governance was typical of what used to be expected of a moderate Republican. ..."
For reasons sake, I was not saying that HRC was LITERALLY a Republican…but her window of
political discourse certainly represents what used to be considered expected of a moderate republican.
Hell's fire, people, Bill Clinton's governance was typical of what used to be expected of a moderate
Republican.
I voted for Bill (2x), and for Obama (2x), and I will vote for HRC over any of the brain-dead
idiots in the current Republican lineup.
Jumping Jesus on a pogo stick, most political experts acknowledge that Saint Ronald Reagan
would be marginalized in today's Republican Party.
Stop taking everything so literally and shooting from the lip.
Go Read OFM's rather insightful post on this thread regarding the current political climate
wrt establishment vs. non-establishment politicians and consider taking his word on the matter.
"... The concoction of the "Bernie Bro" narrative by pro-Clinton journalists has been a potent political tactic - and a journalistic disgrace. It's intended to imply two equally false claims: (1) a refusal to march enthusiastically behind the Wall Street-enriched, multiple-war-advocating, despot-embracing Hillary Clinton is explainable not by ideology or political conviction, but largely if not exclusively by sexism: demonstrated by the fact that men, not women, support Sanders (his supporters are "bros"); and (2) Sanders supporters are uniquely abusive and misogynistic in their online behavior. Needless to say, a crucial tactical prong of this innuendo is that any attempt to refute it is itself proof of insensitivity to sexism if not sexism itself (as the accusatory reactions to this article will instantly illustrate). ..."
"... consummate, actual "bros" ..."
"... But truth doesn't matter here - at all. Instead, the goal is to inherently delegitimize all critics of Hillary Clinton by accusing them of, or at least associating them with, sexism, thus distracting attention away from Clinton's policy views, funding, and political history and directing it toward the online behavior of anonymous, random, isolated people on the internet claiming to be Sanders supporters. It's an effective weapon when wielded by Clinton operatives. But, given its blatant falsity, it has zero place in anything purporting to be "journalism." ..."
The concoction of the "Bernie Bro" narrative by pro-Clinton journalists has been a potent political
tactic - and a journalistic disgrace. It's intended to imply two equally false claims: (1)
a refusal to march enthusiastically behind the Wall Street-enriched, multiple-war-advocating, despot-embracing
Hillary Clinton is explainable not by ideology or political conviction, but largely if not exclusively
by sexism: demonstrated by the fact that men, not women, support Sanders (his supporters are "bros");
and (2) Sanders supporters are uniquely abusive and misogynistic in their online
behavior. Needless to say, a crucial tactical prong of this innuendo is that any attempt to refute
it is itself proof of insensitivity to sexism if not sexism itself (as the accusatory reactions to
this article will instantly illustrate).
It's become such an all-purpose, handy pro-Clinton smear
that even consummate, actual "bros" for whom the term was
originally coined - straight guys who
act with entitlement and aggression, such as Paul Krugman - are now reflexively (and unironically)
applying it to anyone who speaks ill of Hillary Clinton, even when they know nothing else about the
people they're smearing, including their gender, age, or sexual orientation. Thus, a male policy
analyst who criticized Sanders' health care plan "is getting the
Bernie Bro treatment,"
sneered Krugman.
Unfortunately for the New York Times Bro, that analyst, Charles Gaba,
said in response that he's "really not comfortable with [Krugman's] referring to die-hard Bernie
Sanders supporters as 'Bernie Bros'" because it "implies that only college-age men support Sen. Sanders,
which obviously isn't the case."
It is indeed "obviously not the case." There are literally millions of women who support Sanders
over Clinton. A new Iowa poll yesterday
shows Sanders with a 15-point
lead over Clinton among women under 45, while one-third of Iowa women over 45 support him. A
USA Today/Rock the Vote poll from two weeks ago
found Sanders nationally "with a 19-point lead over front-runner Hillary Clinton, 50 percent
to 31 percent, among Democratic and independent women ages 18 to 34." One has to be willing to belittle
the views and erase the existence of a huge number of American women to wield this "Bernie Bro" smear.
But truth doesn't matter here - at all. Instead, the goal is to inherently delegitimize all critics
of Hillary Clinton by accusing them of, or at least associating them with, sexism, thus distracting
attention away from Clinton's policy views, funding, and political history and directing it toward
the online behavior of anonymous, random, isolated people on the internet claiming to be Sanders
supporters. It's an effective weapon when wielded by Clinton operatives. But, given its blatant falsity,
it has zero place in anything purporting to be "journalism."
He's a thug, and a crook, and a liar, and a
pseudo-intellectual and a murderer. Ok? Those things are factually
verifiable.
Kissinger deserves vigorous prosecution for war crimes,
for crimes against humanity, and for offenses against common or customary
or international law, including conspiracy to commit murder, kidnap, and
torture.
A good liar must have a good memory: Kissinger is a
stupendous liar with a remarkable memory.
– Quotes by Christopher Hitchens
One of the more bizarre memes that continues to be parroted by the
establishment media is this idea that Hillary Clinton is so much stronger
than Bernie Sanders when it comes to foreign policy. Sure, if your
definition of "strength" consists of cheerleading for the cataclysmic Iraq
War and propagating a series of war crimes and international fiascos as
Secretary of State, then I suppose that's true.
I
n the New Hampshire
debate, Clinton thought to close her argument that she is the true
progressive with this: "I was very flattered when Henry Kissinger said I
ran the State Department better than anybody had run it in a long time."
Let's consider some of Kissinger's achievements during his tenure
as Richard Nixon's top foreign policy–maker. He (1) prolonged the Vietnam
War for five pointless years; (2) illegally bombed Cambodia and Laos; (3)
goaded Nixon to wiretap staffers and journalists; (4) bore responsibility
for three genocides in Cambodia, East Timor, and Bangladesh; (5) urged
Nixon to go after Daniel Ellsberg for having released the Pentagon
Papers, which set off a chain of events that brought down the Nixon White
House; (6) pumped up Pakistan's ISI, and encouraged it to use political
Islam to destabilize Afghanistan; (7) began the US's
arms-for-petrodollars dependency with Saudi Arabia and pre-revolutionary
Iran; (8) accelerated needless civil wars in southern Africa that, in the
name of supporting white supremacy, left millions dead; (9) supported
coups and death squads throughout Latin America; and (10) ingratiated
himself with the first-generation neocons, such as Dick Cheney and Paul
Wolfowitz, who would take American militarism to its next calamitous
level. Read all about it in
Kissinger's
Shadow --
A full tally hasn't been done, but a back-of-the-envelope
count would attribute 3, maybe 4 million deaths to Kissinger's actions,
but that number probably undercounts his victims in southern Africa. Pull
but one string from the current tangle of today's multiple foreign policy
crises, and odds are it will lead back to something Kissinger did between
1968 and 1977. Over-reliance on Saudi oil? That's Kissinger. Blowback
from the instrumental use of radical Islam to destabilize Soviet allies?
Again, Kissinger. An unstable arms race in the Middle East? Check,
Kissinger. Sunni-Shia rivalry? Yup, Kissinger. The impasse in
Israel-Palestine? Kissinger.
Radicalization of Iran? "An act of folly" was how veteran
diplomat George Ball described Kissinger's relationship to the Shah.
Militarization of the Persian Gulf? Kissinger, Kissinger, Kissinger.
And yet Clinton
continues to call his name, hoping his light bathes her in wisdom
Seizing upon her willingness to associate and brag about a cordial working relationship
with a notorious war criminal, Bernie Sanders had the following to say in this week's debate.
No surprise there. Sociopathic, violent war criminals tend to stick together.
Of course, let's never forget what Google search told us about the two candidates…
Kissinger is just one of the more visible NWO tools.
There are so many.
I recall him "strolling" from his apartment to the
UN in the early 80's: A wedge of 6 or 7 well built 220+
lb. men in suits walking quickly down the sidewalk
"moving" people out of the way with their size and
intimidation with short little Henry safely "strolling"
at his preferred pace inside the wedge. What an
asshole! Are they NFL fans?
If there were "smart phones" back then, there would
have been a lot of people shoved to the ground. Back
then, a few were "blocked out" of the way....
Kissinger is a diabolical criminal. He was clever enough to kill
3-5 million people' in Cambodia and put the blame on Pol Pot for
resisting his murder!
If you want to know the Final Truth about Cambodia, read the
article below.
Wouldn't you prefer someone in fiscal la-la land to someone with a
stone-cold grip on how hard she's going to fuck over everyone at the
expense of 99.999% of Americans?
Hillary is a hardened criminal deserving of hard time. If the next
president pardons her, that pardon should be considered more devious
than the pardoning of Marc Rich.
The Clintons are a Mafia-like crime family without an Italian
last-name. Cross them and die - and that's no joke.
They are scary fuckers. Imagine this alone: When their daughter
came of age, she was hired by NBC News for $600,000 per year. Do you
remember all that reporting she did? Do you realize the typical
reporter gets paid $30K/year and there are 1,000 people for each job
available? That's the tip of the iceberg of crime and sleaze, and
this family knows no bounds.
Yes, when the Clintons left the White House they were broke. LeBron
James was broker the minute before he signed with the NBA. They're
both worth over $100m. But, they both do different things for
different people. The Clintons are whoring fucks destroying our
nation.
There's a correlation between sociopaths and assassinations.
Sociopaths, like Clinton, Kissinger,Netanyahu, and Erdogan NEVER seem to
be on the Receiving End.
I reviewed several thousand Hillary Clinton emails that were released
after court order, with an emphasis on Fukushima:
1) She was immediately informed of the dangers of Fukushima, and
the actions that people should take to mitigate radiation damage, Mar
12th USA time.
2) She was participating daily in the discussion of Fukushima,
until.....
3) They were mostly concerned with economic effects to countries,
and to protect the US nuclear industry.
4) Clinton advisers pushed her hard to go to Japan as PR move.
5) At that point one of two things happened a) she stopped sending
AND receiving any emails related to Fukushima, or b) she intentionally
did not hand over those emails and they were systematically eliminated
from her files.
"... But in fact, when it comes to advancing Dr. King's legacy, a vote for Clinton not only falls
far short of the mark; it prevents us from giving new life to King's legacy. Instead, it is Sanders
who has championed that legacy in word and in deed for 50 years. This election is not a mere campaign;
it is a crusade to resurrect democracy-King-style-in our time. In 2016, Sanders is the one leading that
crusade. ..."
The future of American democracy depends on our response to the legacy of Martin Luther King,
Jr. And that legacy is not just about defending civil rights; it's also about fighting to fix our
rigged economy, which yields grotesque wealth inequality; our narcissistic culture, which unleashes
obscene greed; our market-driven media, which thrives on xenophobic entertainment; and our militaristic
prowess, which promotes hawkish policies around the world. The fundamental aim of black voters-and
any voters with a deep moral concern for our public interest and common good-should be to put a smile
on Martin's face from the grave.
The conventional wisdom holds that, in the Democratic primary, Hillary Clinton is the candidate
who will win over African-American voters-that her rival, Bernie Sanders, performed well in Iowa
and won New Hampshire on account of those states' disproportionate whiteness, and that Clinton's
odds are better in the upcoming contests in South Carolina and Nevada, two highly diverse states.
But in fact, when it comes to advancing Dr. King's legacy, a vote for Clinton not only falls
far short of the mark; it prevents us from giving new life to King's legacy. Instead, it is Sanders
who has championed that legacy in word and in deed for 50 years. This election is not a mere campaign;
it is a crusade to resurrect democracy-King-style-in our time. In 2016, Sanders is the one leading
that crusade.
Clinton has touted the fact that, in 1962, she met King after seeing him speak, an experience
she says allowed her to appreciate King's "moral
clarity." Yet two years later, as a high schooler, Clinton
campaigned
vigorously for Barry Goldwater-a figure King called "morally
indefensible" owing to his staunch opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And she
attended
the Republican convention in 1968! Meanwhile,at this same moment in history, Sanders was
getting
arrested for protesting segregation in Chicago and
marching
in Washington with none other than King itself. That's real moral clarity.
Needless to say, some moral clarity set in as Clinton's politics moved to the left in her college
years. After graduating from law school, she joined the Children's Defense Fund as a staff attorney,
working under the great King disciple, Marian Wright Edelman, with whom she struck up a
friendship. Yet that relationship soured. This came after Hillary Clinton-in defending her husband's
punitive crime bill and its drastic escalation of the mass incarceration of poor people, especially
black and brown people-referred callously to gang-related youth as "superpredators."
And it was Bill Clinton who signed a welfare reform bill that all but eliminated the safety net for
poor women and children-a Machiavellian attempt to promote right-wing policies in order to "neutralize"
the Republican Party. In protest, Peter Edelman, Marian's courageous husband, resigned from his assistant
secretary post at the Department of Health and Human Services.
The Clintons' neoliberal economic policies-principally, the repeal of the Glass-Steagall banking
legislation, apparently under the influence of Wall Street's money-have also hurt King's cause. The
Clinton Machine-celebrated by the centrist wing of the Democratic Party, white and black-did produce
economic growth. But it came at the expense of poor people (more hopeless and prison-bound) and working
people (also decimated by the Clinton-sponsored North American Free Trade Agreement).
Bill apologized for the effects of his crime bill, after devastating thousands of black and poor
lives. Will Hillary apologize for supporting the same measures?
It's no accident that Goldman Sachs paid Hillary Clinton
$675,000 for a mere three speeches in 2013, or that the firm has given
hundreds of thousands of dollars to her campaigns or that, in total, it has paid her and her
husband
more than $150 million in speaking fees since 2001. This is the same Goldman Sachs that engaged
in predatory lending of sub-prime mortgages that collapsed in 2008,
disproportionately hurting black Americans.
These ties are far from being "old news" or an "artful smear," as Hillary Clinton recently put
it. Rather, they perfectly underscore how it is Sanders, not Clinton, who is building on King's legacy.
Sanders' specific policies-in support of a $15 minimum wage, a massive federal jobs program with
a living wage, free tuition for public college and universities, and Medicare for all-would undeniably
lessen black social misery. In addition, he has specifically made the promise, at a Black Lives Matter
meeting in Chicago, to significantly shrink mass incarceration and to prioritize fixing the broken
criminal justice system, including eliminating all for-profit prisons.
Clinton has made
similar
promises. But how can we take them seriously when the Ready for Hillary PAC received more than
$133,000 from lobbying firms that do work for the GEO Group and Corrections Corporation of America-two
major private prison groups whose aim is to expand mass incarceration for profit? It was only after
this fact was reported that Clinton
pledged to stop accepting campaign donations from such groups. Similarly, without Sanders in
the race to challenge her, there's no question Clinton would otherwise be relatively silent about
Wall Street.
The battle now raging in Black America over the Clinton-Sanders election is principally a battle
between a declining neoliberal black political and chattering class still on the decaying Clinton
bandwagon (and gravy train!) and an emerging populism among black poor, working and middle class
people fed up with the Clinton establishment in the Democratic Party. It is easy to use one's gender
identity, as Clinton
has, or racial identity, as the Congressional Black Caucus recently
did in endorsing her, to hide one's allegiance to the multi-cultural and multi-gendered Establishment.
But a vote for Clinton forecloses the new day for all of us and keeps us captive to the trap of wealth
inequality, greed ("everybody else is doing it"), corporate media propaganda and militarism abroad-all
of which are detrimental to black America.
In the age of Barack Obama, this battle remained latent, with dissenting voices vilified. As a
black president, Obama has tended to talk progressive but walk neoliberal in the face of outrageous
right-wing opposition. Black child poverty has
increased since 2008, with more than
45 percent of
black children under age 6 living in poverty today. Sanders talks and walks populist, and
he is committed to targeting child poverty. As president, he would bea more progressive than
not just Clinton but also Obama-and that means better for black America.
Now, with Obama's departure from the White House, we shall see clearly where black America stands
in relation to King's legacy. Will voters put a smile on Martin's face? It's clear how we can do
it. King smiles at Sanders' deep integrity and genuine conviction, while he weeps at the Clinton
machine's crass opportunism and the inequality and injustice it breeds.
"... Watch the very good summary below of American involvement in Iraq, 2003-2014, done by PBS Frontline . It specifically states that during the 2007 Surge to stabilize an Iraq that had been de-stabilized by the American invasion, the US gave about $400 million to the progenitor of ISIS, the Sunni Sons of Iraq . ..."
"... The unintended consequences of the American (and British) invasion was the creation of ISIS, funded by the American taxpayer. Sanders voted against those consequences ; Clinton, the old Klingon war-bird that she is, voted for them. ..."
"... Wow. Almost completely biased yet again. Did you watch the actual debate? Do these 5 points strike you as the main ones? I am Hillary Clinton and I approved this article. PS Obama? Kissinger? Both rate as crucial talking points last night and Hillary and no decent answer to Bernie on either ..."
"... I would love to see those transcripts, and have in fact written to her suggesting that she release them. I understand that Goldman Sachs paid good money to hear those speeches, and might like them to remain private, but I think it would be better for the nation, since she is running, for people to know what she said. ..."
"... Sanders catches Clinton on her advice from Henry Kissinger , Hillary doubles down on her assertion that getting advice from war criminals is good policy. I guess if she could get advice from Josef Mengele about Health care shed do that too? ..."
"... Lamest line of the night - when Hillary tried to make a big deal about there being a majority of women on stage . Sorry Hill, but that kind of sexism is just as offensive as if you said majority of straight people on stage . You come across like some gender supremacist. ..."
"... Im sorry, but as a woman and a feminist, I find this one of the most offensive things I have ever read! In what fucking universe is Hillary Clinton one of the most accomplished women in the world ? ..."
"... She was a bright student who chose to sacrifice her own career and tone down her own ambitions and persona to become the political wife so the man she married could have the career he wanted, then, once he left office, coatailed on his connections and name recognition to win a (open-goal) U.S. Senate Seat, in which she did nothing brave or revolutionary or remarkable and which she then abandoned for a decent presidential run of her own (I voted for her in 2008, as it happens) in which she threw in the towel far too early and easily in the face of the party establishment ordering her to. Her reward for this was a post as U.S. Secretary of State, where she distinguished herself by helping implement a series of foreign policy disasters (Libya alone she haunt her for the rest of her life, and no, I dont mean the irrelevant Benghazi incident, but the complete destruction of what was once one of the most stable countries in the region)... ..."
"... Killary proclaims listening to and following a war criminal and her neocon cohorts is somehow a good thing. ..."
"... Killary says may many past mistakes having nothing to do with my future ones. ..."
"... Faux-identity politics has run its course. ..."
"... Really believe Republicans havent changed? Eisenhower had a 92% income tax on the rich, supported unions and warned of our industrial military. Your bible thumping party would crucify Eisenhower and Jesus today. Conservatives golden rule is help the rich . ..."
"... Hillary Clinton has never had an original opinion on anything her whole political life. When she opens her mouth, all that comes out is a endless stream of views which safeguards the interests of the many wealthy organizations and institutions she has supported over the decades. ..."
"... And really, what does Clinton have other than serving a pretty disastrous tenure as Obamas Secretary of State? (At least Kerry, for all his faults, c.f. Ukraine, managed the Iran deal - all Clinton did was manage to utterly destroy Libya.) ..."
"... The only reason that Republicans find any support is because America is dumbing down. Based on my own observation because I happen to live in a very red state, by and large, Republican voters are willfully uninformed. Put a Republican in the Oval Office and our education system will not improve. Nor will the collective IQ of the American populace jump any curves. ..."
"... Ill take Sanders proven judgment over Clintons shoot first; ask questions later approach. ..."
"... Clinton, who received $225,000 for her appearance, praised the diversity of Goldmans workforce and the prominent roles played by women at the blue-chip investment bank and the tech firms present at the event. She spent no time criticizing Goldman or Wall Street more broadly for its role in the 2008 financial crisis. ..."
"... For some reason I have a feeling that the big banks wouldnt be asking Mr . Sanders to speak at their events. ..."
"... So if the Commander in Chief should be, first of all, a courageous person, who would you rather entrust the defense of the United States and the safety of its citizens; to Bernie Sanders or to Hillary Clinton. ..."
"... she voted for gw bushs disastrous war. that is not slavishly denigrating clinton, thats just a fact. she caved on the most important foreign policy issue since vietnam. ..."
"... This debate solidified my desire that Hillary NOT be Commander in Chief. She really did scare me that she would be too eager to go to war. The way she kept saying the words Commander in Chief, it made me feel she couldnt wait to get her fingers on the button. ..."
"... Why anyone would believe corporate clone Hillary Clinton is beyond me. Hillary Clinton has two guiding principles: the advancement of Hillary Clinton, and the enrichment of Hillary Clinton. ..."
Hypothetically, if Hillary is 500 delegates short of winning the nomination, while Bernie is only
short 200, and 600 of the 700 Supers break her way....
A scenario like that could very well happen; the DNC needs to abolish the Super Delegates once
and for all to remove the prospect of a rigged nomination process.
Watch the very good summary below of American involvement in Iraq, 2003-2014, done by PBS'
"Frontline". It specifically states that during the 2007 "Surge" to stabilize an Iraq that had
been de-stabilized by the American invasion, the US gave about $400 million to the progenitor
of ISIS, the Sunni "Sons of Iraq".
The "unintended consequences" of the American (and British) invasion was the creation of
ISIS, funded by the American taxpayer. Sanders voted against those "consequences"; Clinton, the
old Klingon war-bird that she is, voted for them.
Of course, daughter Chelsea, didn't have to get all dirty and bloody herself by going
to fight her mother's war, but your sons, daughters, fathers, and mothers did. Vote for more of
that with Clinton.
Wow. Almost completely biased yet again. Did you watch the actual debate? Do these 5 points
strike you as the main ones? I am Hillary Clinton and I approved this article. PS Obama? Kissinger?
Both rate as crucial talking points last night and Hillary and no decent answer to Bernie on either
I would love to see those transcripts, and have in fact written to her suggesting that she
release them. I understand that Goldman Sachs paid good money to hear those speeches, and might
like them to remain private, but I think it would be better for the nation, since she is running,
for people to know what she said.
... ... ...
1) Hillary tries to mention a local African American killed by police, forgets the name mid
sentence and struggles to get it out of her mouth. Came across as very rehearsed, especially when
it turns out the victims mom was in the audience, being used by the Clinton Campaign for an obvious
photo opportunity. Clinton wins the HAM HANDED Award.
2) Hillary tries to go after Sanders for disagreeing with Obama and comes across like an inside
the beltway clueless blithering idiot. She claims progressive creds, but she's totally unaware
of how disappointing Obama has been to the Left. Hillary exposed as another Washington Insider,
again.
3) Sanders command of the agenda while all Clinton could do is follow his lead quipping "me
too!" Clearly Sanders is in control of this race, Clinton is not, one is a leader, one is not.
Hillary should just step down for the good of the country and the party
4) Sanders catches Clinton on her "advice from Henry Kissinger", Hillary doubles down on
her assertion that getting advice from war criminals is good policy. I guess if she could get
advice from Josef Mengele about Health care she'd do that too?
5) Hillary wearing what looked to be a Star Trek (the original series) Admiral's uniform -
was that a nod to trekkies? I couldn't tell if it was a Star Fleet or a Romulan top. Anyway, cred
for Hillary for shouting out to Trekkies.
6) Lamest line of the night - when Hillary tried to make a big deal about there being a
"majority of women on stage". Sorry Hill, but that kind of sexism is just as offensive as if you
said "majority of straight people on stage". You come across like some gender supremacist.
of one of the most accomplished women in the world
I'm sorry, but as a woman and a feminist, I find this one of the most offensive things
I have ever read! In what fucking universe is Hillary Clinton "one of the most accomplished women
in the world"?
She was a bright student who chose to sacrifice her own career and tone down her own ambitions
and persona to become the "political wife" so the man she married could have the career he wanted,
then, once he left office, coatailed on his connections and name recognition to win a (open-goal)
U.S. Senate Seat, in which she did nothing brave or revolutionary or remarkable and which she
then abandoned for a decent presidential run of her own (I voted for her in 2008, as it happens)
in which she threw in the towel far too early and easily in the face of the party establishment
ordering her to. Her reward for this was a post as U.S. Secretary of State, where she "distinguished"
herself by helping implement a series of foreign policy disasters (Libya alone she haunt her for
the rest of her life, and no, I don't mean the irrelevant Benghazi incident, but the complete
destruction of what was once one of the most stable countries in the region)...
Sorry, Clinton may well be an intelligent and competent woman, but by what stretch of the imagination
is she "one of the most accomplished women in the world"? The U.S. perhaps - through arguably
not even - but the world? Seriously? And then you have the gall to claim Sanders supporters are
delusional?
Women like Angela Merkel or Christine Lagarde (like them or loathe them) could and would eat
the likes of Clinton for breakfast, and they accomplished what they have without any husband's
help!
1. Killary plays the sex card.
2. Killaty says little about her famaly's policy toward jailing nearly a third of all black men
and foreclosing on so many of their homes due to Bill's passing GlassSteagall.
3. Killary conveniently leaves out the fact that all key Latino and minority interest groups supported
Bernie's no vote.
4. Killary proclaims listening to and following a war criminal and her neocon cohorts is somehow
a good thing.
5. Killary says may many past mistakes having nothing to do with my future ones.
Both Cruz and Rubio are as white as Clinton and Sanders. And having parents who were part of the
upper-class who fled Cuba after the Revolution doesn't remotely reflect the personal histories
of the vast majority of Hispanic-Americans. (Nor, for that matter, does being the son of a wealthy
Kenyan student and middle-class white mother reflect the reality of 99% of African-Americans.)
Faux-identity politics has run its course. It was never as instrumental in Obama's
election(s) as was made out in the first place, and many of the minority for whom it was have
learned their lesson.
As the Republicans are painfully aware and Clinton is learning, blacks and Latinos and women
and young people aren't stupid - they will ultimately rather vote for the "old white man"
who represents their interests than the person they have slightly more of a genetic or cultural
link to who doesn't!
Well, Sanders was the first Senator to announce he was boycotting Netanyahu's speech to
Congress last year, and while he's certainly adopted a more mainstream line towards Israel in
recent years, he's still never spoken at or accepted support from AIPAC and makes it quite clear
in his policy brief that he believes Israel needs to end the siege of Gaza and withdraw from
the West Bank .
Clinton, on the other hand, is an AIPAC darling who doesn't even "believe" Gaza is under
siege and merely has some mealy-mouthed platitudes to offer about how settlement expansion
in the West Bank is not "helpful". (And one of her largest individual campaign donors is an
Israeli-American billionaire who she has assured she will, if elected, do everything in her power
to crack down on the BDS movement!)
At least Obama treated the extremist bunch who are now in power in Israel exactly how they
deserved.
You mean even more $100s of billions in U.S. "aid" than they were already getting and complete
diplomatic cover for their assault on Gaza and other assorted war crimes? If you think that's
tough love, I'd hate to see how your children turn out!
*For more background see
thisAl-Jazeera English piece or the Electronic Intifada's exhaustive coverage.
Sanders is far from perfect on this issue, but he's about as "progressive" as it is possible
for any high-profile U.S. politician to be. (And I really hope you weren't implying the
fact that he is Jewish makes him more likely to be pro-Israel - that is precisely the kind of
crap which helps those opposed to Palestinian rights paint all of us campaigning for them in a
bad light...)
Of course, Clinton distances herself from her supporters by running a tight campaign
Of course, that's the way how it works, Clinton left to her supporters to do the dirty work, and
then she distances herself from them, and continue to play an angel.
Really believe Republicans haven't changed? Eisenhower had a 92% income tax on the rich, supported
unions and warned of our industrial military. Your bible thumping party would crucify Eisenhower
and Jesus today. Conservatives golden rule is "help the rich".
You either misunderstood my comment, or you're being disingenuous.
What I find strange is The Guardian's evident pro-Clinton bias, even though it pretends to
be a progressive paper. Sanders is obviously the true progressive, not Clinton. So yes, it does
make me (and many, many other readers of The Guardian) wonder.
Hillary Clinton has never had an original opinion on anything her whole political life. When
she opens her mouth, all that comes out is a endless stream of views which safeguards the interests
of the many wealthy organizations and institutions she has supported over the decades.
At least when Bernie Sanders opens his mouth on any issue, there's no puppet strings moving
furiously up and down in the background.
What foreign policy credentials/experience did Obama have? (Or W. Bush or Bill Clinton for that
matter?)
And really, what does Clinton have other than serving a pretty disastrous tenure as Obama's
Secretary of State? (At least Kerry, for all his faults, c.f. Ukraine, managed the Iran deal -
all Clinton did was manage to utterly destroy Libya.)
The only reason that Republicans find any support is because America is dumbing down. Based
on my own observation because I happen to live in a very red state, by and large, Republican voters
are willfully uninformed. Put a Republican in the Oval Office and our education system will not
improve. Nor will the collective IQ of the American populace jump any curves.
Sanders' one weakness is he does not articulate a clear foreign policy. On the other hand,
these are complex issues that can't be reduced to talking points. Further, Sanders' voting record
on these issues is solid. Unlike Clinton he did vote against the war in Iraq. And he predicted
the unintended consequence of instability and thus ISIS. Clinton has far more experience but she
pretends her vote for a disastrous war in Iraq has no connection to ISIS. That's a serious lack
of judgment and/or honesty on her part.
I'll take Sanders' proven judgment over Clinton's "shoot first; ask questions later" approach.
This article is not balanced and thus disappointing. Same with Graves' opinion piece stating that
Sanders "squandered" his lead. Absurd.
Everything that comes out of Clinton's mouth is a strategic ploy for votes. She will say whatever
she and her advisors think she must say to get elected. If she is elected, she will maintain the
status quo, at least when it comes to the economy and campaign financing. Those are the two areas
that must be reformed before we can see any real progress.
Anyone who believes that Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street criminals are funding Clinton's
campaign because she's going to follow through with the real economic reforms that she's now promising
(copying Sanders) and that will eliminate their fraudulent business models is a fucking idiot.
What Wall Street type is going to donate to a candidate who's going to level the playing field
and thus destroy their business model? Are people really that stupid? (rhetorical question) Let's
see those transcripts from her speeches that she clearly does not want voters to see.
The truth is, Clinton's talking points have shifted and evolved to match Sanders' positions
that voters find attractive. This is a matter of record. She's an Establishment politician and
will be to the end. Sander is the real deal.
NEW YORK - "When Hillary Clinton spoke to Goldman Sachs executives and technology titans at
a summit in Arizona in October of 2013, she spoke glowingly of the work the bank was doing raising
capital and helping create jobs, according to people who saw her remarks.
"Clinton, who received $225,000 for her appearance, praised the diversity of Goldman's
workforce and the prominent roles played by women at the blue-chip investment bank and the tech
firms present at the event. She spent no time criticizing Goldman or Wall Street more broadly
for its role in the 2008 financial crisis.
"'It was pretty glowing about us," one person who watched the event said. "It's so far from
what she sounds like as a candidate now. It was like a rah-rah speech. She sounded more like a
Goldman Sachs managing director.' "
It's a tough question to ask, given the American track record on foreign policy. Who would you
listen to? American interests overseas have never been, shall we say, altruistic; more self serving
and clandestine. It's no wonder Bernie is focusing his attention on the national socio/political
climate. It seems ironic to think that any government can influence foreign policy in a positive
way while issues such a racism and a living wage are so rampantly out of balance in their own
nation.
So your "5 things we learned" is actually "A positive spin on 4 things about Clinton and one thing
Sanders said", whilst totally failing to mention the fact that Clinton outright lied about things
that Bernie had said in an attempt to make it seem like he actively opposes Obama, or that she
said, verbatim, that she wouldn't allow child refugees to settle in the US and to send them back
AS A MESSAGE.
This paper's coverage is getting more and more biased by the minute as its journalists realise
that "kooky old Sanders" is actually getting some traction with the American people.
That article by Lucia Gravesis a disgrace and cherry picks the one liners Sanders came back
to Hillary's attacks with, as though its somehow terrible for someone to defend themselves with
witty and quick comebacks.
People would start taking this paper seriously again if you guys actually paid attention to
whats going on, instead of just closing your eyes to all the evidence and continuing to hammer
out ridiculous articles bigging up your chosen candidate. There's a reason people aren't even
bothering to read your coverage anymore, and instead go straight to the comments to see what people
are actually thinking.
"Bernie should give a pledge that he will never take a red cent for a speech ever ever ever"
It's not about cents - it's hundreds of thousands per hour and behind closed doors, which is
an unsubtle way to bribe a future president. Sanders did give a speech recently to a University
that paid him $1,800. Transcripts are available and he donated all of the money to charity.
In both primaries Sanders beat the polls by 5-8%. Nationally he is now just 2 points off Clinton
according to the latest poll.
The MSMBS has created a reality bubble around Clinton, but nobody takes print media or TV news
seriously anymore, everybody knows they have to use multiple sources online to get a real balanced
picture. So everyday more and more people are learning about Sanders and liking what they see
- a consistent advocate for progressive policies even when it was neither profitable nor popular
to be one.
In particular voters are learning about his anti segregation campaigning in the 1960's and
his pro gay rights positions in the 1980's. When they look at Clinton's past they see a calculating
fair weather supporter on these issues, possibly based on the latest polling.
Also, her pockets full of Wall Street money is really damaging her and when she tries to defend
it she comes across as disingenuous (at best).
She is hiding behind Obama. Defending him while bringing up the fact that he took Wall Street
money does nothing to endear me to you. It makes me angry at Obama.
"Clinton dropped this critique on the senator from Vermont: "Journalists have asked who you
do listen to on foreign policy, and we have yet to know who that is." "
Let me finish the Guardian's reporting for them:
Sanders quickly responds "Well it ain't Henry Kissinger" - the audience applauds and laughs.
Exactly. ISIS is part of the unintended consequences that were created by the West's Middle East
adventure. "Blowback" as the security services have it. The same thing could be said about the
U.S. backing of the mujahadeen in Afghanistan, the better to scupper the Soviets. Elements of
the mujahadeen morphed into the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. Bin Laden was a CIA asset at one time.
Bernie remembers what happened, Hillary dismisses it with the "2002 vote" quip. Hillary is
a tactician, Bernie is a strategist. I think a moral strategist makes a better C-in-C than a bought
and paid for tactician.
the point is electing a republican lite to deal with republican intransigence makes no sense whatever.
she will work with them to advance the neoliberal austerity agenda, which hurts the middle class,
and everybody else but the kind of people who pay her so much money to give a canned speech.
Let me get this straight. You have politicians who all his life was not afraid to swim against
the mainstream, neither he worried that it could jeopardize his political career.
And on the other hand, you have a careerist politician, which the whole of her life was "turning
with the wind", climbed the ladder of political power, both in its Democratic Party and in the
state too, and finally ended up with hundreds of millions of dollars on her private account, gained
thanks to its political influence.
So if the Commander in Chief should be, first of all, a courageous person, who would you
rather entrust the defense of the United States and the safety of its citizens; to Bernie Sanders
or to Hillary Clinton.
The same plan she and the establiment was shoving down our throats and digging in in our pockets...
And Putin wouldn't be Putin if US weren't prowling around the world. Why is Saudi Arabia is our
ally?
I think I'll soon just start skipping The Guardian's articles completely, and head straight to
the comments.
The articles read like pro-Clinton adverts, which seems strange coming from a self-proclaimed
progressive news source...
Fortunately, we do have The Nation, The Atlantic, Salon, Alternet, etc.
Am I the only one who's wondering why Bernie Sanders is not being asked a single question about
his position on the Palestinian problem, on the recent events involving Netanyahu and the Israeli
lobby in the USA trying to derails the Iran nuclear deal and so on?
I don't think we need now at the White House someone willing to follow Netanyahu's lead in
the Middle East... At least Obama treated the extremist bunch who are now in power in Israel exactly
how they deserved.
Hey, Guardian writers. I don't know if you ever come into the comments - but realise this. We
aren't morons. This isn't the Mail. We can see through it. A great many of us watched the debates,
follow the campaigns, know the facts from other sources. The internet is great like that, as corporate
media no longer has an exclusive stranglehold on framing and spin.
The constituents of your 'paper' are not easily hoodwinked and most, as you can see, find the
spin disgusting. You're going to keep haemorrhaging readers unless you either refocus on integrity
in journalism (unlikely, considering who's on the board), or fully commit to being a pseudo-intellectual
Buzzfeed. Best of luck.
she voted for gw bush's disastrous war. that is not slavishly denigrating clinton, that's
just a fact. she caved on the most important foreign policy issue since vietnam.
The American Public Broadcasting System's (PBS) "NewsHour" reports:*
--The cost of US health care is more than 2 1/2 times the average of 33 other countries,
--There are fewer doctors per person in the US than in 33 other countries. In 2010, the
U.S. had 2.4 doctors per 1,000 people; international average, 3.1.
--Hospital beds in the U.S. were 2.6 per 1,000 people in 2009; international average, 3.4.
--US life expectancy increased 9 years between 1960 and 2010, but 15 years in Japan, over
11 years on average in 33 other countries.
In other news, some of Clinton's speaker fees from Wall Street, 2013-15**:
This debate solidified my desire that Hillary NOT be Commander in Chief. She really did scare
me that she would be too eager to go to war. The way she kept saying the words "Commander in Chief,"
it made me feel she couldn't wait to get her fingers on the button.
When Hillary praised President Obama and criticized Bernie for some mild critiques he'd made
of the president, it was an utterly transparent ploy for the votes of African-Americans in South
Carolina. So obvious that I was a bit disgusted. Hillary and President Obama have a rocky history.
Any comments Bernie has made are tame compared to the stuff Hillary said about him during the
2008 campaign. I really wonder if people will buy Hillary trying to wrap herself so closely with
Obama.
At least try to understand what he is saying. He's saying her smile is false, he's not commenting
on her looks. Her smile is false, it's not natural, and I have no doubt she was coached to smile
in the way focus groups decided was the most electable. Trouble is a genuine smile is hard to
fake.
Please try to understand these things, context is everything.
Clinton drops a well-tuned response to Sanders' criticism of her vote in support of the
Iraq war: "I don't believe that a vote in 2002 is a plan to defeat Isis in 2016."
But it is a reflection of her judgement. We condemn Republicans, journalists, academics, etc.
who supported the Iraq War, but we are supposed to give Clinton a pass? Let's also not forget
that she supported the troop increase in Afghanistan and pushed for military action in Libya.
To be clear this is in relation to this being Obama's fault.
As for the Dems doing their best to lose a winnable election you may be right but Sanders really
has hit the nail on the head. It doesn't matter who wins no change will occur until the big money
and special interests are reined in and that won't happen unless and until there is a president
backed by a movement of ordinary people demanding change that is so large and undeniable that
politicians in Washington realize that unless they accede to the people's demands (as presented
by the President) and get behind the President in respect of such change they will actually lose
their seats... only incumbents fearful of losing their seats will vote for anything other than
what the lobbyists tell them to. Only then will change happen. I'd bet there is more certainty
that won't happen then Villa making a surprising comeback and not being relegated.
For the same reason they voted for Blair and Bush Dubya and Clinton and Bush Sr... Poor people,
the same people I honestly want to help as a responsible socialist democrat, are essentially stupid
and generally vote against their own interests hence the number of blue collar workers in the
US flocking to Donald Trump rallies. It defies belief but there it is, that and the fact that
smart people who aren't only out for themselves have better things to do like discover gravitational
waves, perform your surgery, teach and other less snazzy things then simply make money.
On the contrary. The economy crashed because the unfettered free markets failed. You don't need
someone who "understands" or in other words supports the free market status quo, you need someone
who understands the flaws of the markets and the need for regulation.
Uh? You do realize it was the deregulation of Wall Street that led to the collapse right? You
do realize Wall Street aready leads the government by the nose don't you (the very reason Sanders
quite rightly states that any reform will be impossible no matter who is elected President unless
they have a groundswell of popular support beneath them)? You are aware that laws and trade agreements
are written by Wall Street lawyers and that Wall Street is regulated by Wall Street lawyers due
to the continuous rotating door between government agencies and Wall Street? You do understand
that QE and bailouts were at the behest of and in the interest of Wall Street bound to create
asset bubbles they can make a lot of money insider trading on then exit and leave pension funds
on the hook and not designed to save the economy don't you?
Oh why do I bother you believe in "continuous growth" generated by perfect rationale markets
and of course unicorns and leprechauns waiting with your pot of gold.
Why anyone would believe corporate clone Hillary Clinton is beyond me. Hillary Clinton has
two guiding principles: the advancement of Hillary Clinton, and the enrichment of Hillary Clinton.
Lest we forget, in 2008 Hillary Clinton ran as a gun-loving churchgoer against Barack Obama.
Actually Sanders performed above my expectations in the most recent debate exposing this criminal
Kissinger for what he is. So despite my pessimism there might be slight hope. Although the level
of degradation of both parties (which is reality are two wings of a single party -- the party of top
1% -- with Dems a little bit more sophisticated in avoiding open scorn of lower 99%) looks
irreversible. This is really bizarre "back in the USSR" situation, if you wish. If Eisenhower
has been alive to see the monster the Republican Party turned into, he would die the second time
on the spot. This is simply disgusting. Same for the Dems -- in the current form this is clearly
yet another party of financial oligarchy and Hillary candidacy reflect the depth of degradation of the
Dem party establishment like nobody else.
Notable quotes:
"... I dont think this has a precedent in American history, the leading candidates of both parties running essentially class-based campaigns against a financial elite. Something to contemplate. ..."
Trump basically says he is independent of the donors because he's rich, while Sanders says
he is independent of them because he raised tens of millions of dollars in small donations. But both
campaigns are criticizing the same thing, in divergent but essentially parallel ways.
I don't think this has a precedent in American history, the leading candidates of both parties
running essentially class-based campaigns against a financial elite. Something to
contemplate.
Scott McConnell: "The wealth of the one tenth of one percent is now concentrated in the financial
industry. The money of the middle class has been redistributed upwards to Wall Street. No one
calls it the 'productive sector,' even ironically. Wall Street pays for the political campaigns,
and pays for the politicians."
In other words, the one tenth of one percent pays for the political campaigns, and pays for
the politicians.
Except for Trump and Sanders.
Scott: "Trump basically says he is independent of the donors because he's rich, while Sanders
says he is independent of them because he raised tens of millions of dollars in small donations."
Scott: "I don't think this has a precedent in American history, the leading candidates of both
parties running essentially class-based campaigns against a financial elite."
Free trade gets the blame for almost everything, but deserves none of the blame. The usual suspects
like to confuse free trade with crony capitalism. Its not out of ignorance. Its nefarious.
One of the best developments of this campaign so far has been the number of conservative, right-wing
people who have awaken to the grim reality of crony/globalist capitalism. You know something is
happening when NRO blasts them as "economically and socially frustrated white men who wish to
be economically supported by the federal government without enduring the stigma of welfare dependency"
It is also worth noting that Trump is a businessman in an old-fashioned way people can relate
to. He is a real estate mogul who employs actual workers to develop actual buildings, instead
of just being a bankster shuffling fictional money around.
"... In it, Hitchens argued that the former national security adviser and secretary of state for Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford should be prosecuted "for war crimes, for crimes against humanity, and for offenses against common or customary or international law, including conspiracy to commit murder, kidnap, and torture." ..."
"... It was well reviewed, with the San Francisco Chronicle hailing Hitchens for presenting "damning documentary evidence against Kissinger in case after case," and London's Sunday Times describing the book as "a disturbing glimpse into the dark side of American power, whose consequences in remote corners of the globe are all too often ignored. Its countless victims have found an impassioned and skillful advocate in Christopher Hitchens." ..."
"... "I am proud to say that Henry Kissinger is not my friend," continued Sanders. "I will not take advice from Henry Kissinger. And in fact, Kissinger's actions in Cambodia, when the United States bombed that country, overthrew Prince Sihanouk, created the instability for Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge to come in, who then butchered some 3 million innocent people, one of the worst genocides in the history of the world. So count me in as somebody who will not be listening to Henry Kissinger." ..."
The late Christopher Hitchens penned an exceptionally important book in 2001 titled The Trial
of Henry Kissinger.
In it, Hitchens argued that the former national security adviser and secretary of state
for Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford should be prosecuted "for war crimes, for crimes
against humanity, and for offenses against common or customary or international law, including
conspiracy to commit murder, kidnap, and torture."
Hitchens was a brilliant polemicist who loved to stir controversy (and who fell out with The
Nation during post-9/11 debates about George W. Bush's "war on terror" and defending civil
liberties). But The Trials of Henry Kissinger was more than an argument; it was a detailed
indictment ("using only what would hold up in international courts of law") of an official who
Hitchens accused of authorizing atrocities against Bangladesh, Chile, Cyprus, East Timor,
Indochina, and the Kurds of Iraq. It was well reviewed, with the San Francisco Chronicle
hailing Hitchens for presenting "damning documentary evidence against Kissinger in case after
case," and London's Sunday Times describing the book as "a disturbing glimpse into the dark side
of American power, whose consequences in remote corners of the globe are all too often ignored.
Its countless victims have found an impassioned and skillful advocate in Christopher Hitchens."
Despite the attention it received, the book did not lead to the prosecution of Kissinger. Nor did
it spark all of the formal and official debates that Hitchens invited.
"I am proud to say that Henry Kissinger is not my friend." - Bernie Sanders
On Thursday night, however, Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie
Sanders did debate Kissinger's legacy in one of the most remarkable exchanges of modern
presidential politics. It was an exchange Hitchens would have relished.
In the foreign-policy section of the debate, after the candidates had clashed over a number of
issues, Sanders asked if he might add a brief final word of to explain "where the secretary and I
have a very profound difference."
"[In] the last debate and I believe in her book-very good book, by the way…she talked about
getting the approval or the support or the mentoring of Henry Kissinger. Now, I find it rather
amazing, because I happen to believe that Henry Kissinger was one of the most destructive
secretaries of state in the modern history of this country," said the senator, to loud applause.
"I am proud to say that Henry Kissinger is not my friend," continued Sanders. "I will not
take advice from Henry Kissinger. And in fact, Kissinger's actions in Cambodia, when the United
States bombed that country, overthrew Prince Sihanouk, created the instability for Pol Pot and
the Khmer Rouge to come in, who then butchered some 3 million innocent people, one of the worst
genocides in the history of the world. So count me in as somebody who will not be listening to
Henry Kissinger."
Clinton countered with a dig at Sanders. "Well," she said, "I know journalists have asked who
you do listen to on foreign policy, and we have yet to know who that is."
"Well, it ain't Henry Kissinger. That's for sure," replied Sanders.
"That's fine. That's fine," said Clinton. "You know, I listen to a wide variety of voices that
have expertise in various areas. I think it is fair to say, whatever the complaints that you want
to make about him are, that with respect to China, one of the most challenging relationships we
have, his opening up China and his ongoing relationships with the leaders of China is an
incredibly useful relationship for the United States of America. So if we want to pick and
choose-and I certainly do-people I listen to, people I don't listen to, people I listen to for
certain areas, then I think we have to be fair and look at the entire world, because it's a big,
complicated world out there."
"It is," injected Sanders.
Clinton was now scrambling to put Kissinger in perspective. "And, yes," she said, "people we
may disagree with on a number of things may have some insight, may have some relationships that
are important for the president to understand in order to best protect the United States."
Sanders rips trade agreements that result in American workers losing their jobs as
corporations moved to China. Sanders was having none of that explanation, suggesting that his
historical perspective was "very different."
"Kissinger was one of those people during the Vietnam era who talked about the domino theory.
Not everybody remembers that. You do. I do. The domino theory, you know, if Vietnam goes, China,
da, da, da, da, da, da, da. That's what he talked about, the great threat of China," said
Sanders. "And then, after the war, this is the guy who, in fact, yes, you're right, he opened up
relations with China, and now pushed various type of trade agreements, resulting in American
workers losing their jobs as corporations moved to China. The terrible, authoritarian, Communist
dictatorship he warned us about, now he's urging companies to shut down and move to China. Not my
kind of guy."
And rightly so, for reasons that Christopher Hitchens well documented
"... The conclusion: the winds of change are blowing away from establishment politicians and the wealthy donors who support them, and as far as Im concerned any change that helps the working class feel more secure and confident about the future – change that is based upon reality rather than the myths that have been sold to the public in support of wealthy interests – cant come fast enough. ..."
"... We should not embrace the defeatists crowd of Hillary supporters thats willing to settle for half a chicken in every pot. ..."
"... Water is wet. The sun rises in the east. The middle/working class has been screwed for the status quo for the last 35 years. ..."
"... Wall Street got what it wanted (tax cuts), the Necons got what they wanted (wars), and the last two got -- promises. Unsurprisinly they have lost patience with the GOP establishment. The Bible Belt wants its 19th century (okay 15th century) back, and white working class populats wants to be sure that, even if they are sleeping under a bridge, no black or brown person is sleeping under a *better* bridge. ..."
"... On the Democratic side, with the exception of the late 1990s, the Establishment has failed to deliver better times. Obamacare *is* a boon, but it has taken seemingly forever to roll out seemingly since the Dinosaurs roamed the earth, and it has only directly benefitted about 10% of the population. Meanwhile nominal wages grow 2% a year, worker protections are non-existnet, and even actions which could be taken by the Executive alon - like raising the pay at which employers no longer have to pay overtime - are not taken (the rumor that Obamas signature hand suffered from paralyisi fell apart the other day when he signed the TPP).. ..."
"... We are in the midst of a politial realignment. My guess is that outside of Dixie, the white working class returns to the Democrats, who move towards Sanders ideology, while the corporatist Dems move over to the GOP. And the Bible Belt continues to get the 15th Century delivered to them. ..."
"... Also the centrist dems have been playing defense for 30 years, simply trying to prevent the rollback of past programs, and apparently willing to compromise even on core New Deal and Great Society accomplishments (SS and Medicare). ..."
"... Actually, Trump immediately gained the support of less-educated blue collar white males who had IDd as Dem, and I havent seen a poll yet on whether Bernie is winning them back ..."
"... You raise an interesting question. If corporate donor fueled Democrats lose national party control decisively. Not just for one convention ala McGovern. Where will they go ? ..."
"... Soooo. The donors will have to retake or hold one party. My guess theyll hold on to Democrat party easily if Hillary wins. Maybe the soul of the Democrat party is at stake here. As during the Bryan era ..."
"... Trump says that, but his proposed policies are not compatible with what he says, and he part of the party which absolutely wants to gut those programs. Working class people who know whats good for them are for Sanders, the ones for Trump are politico-economic illiterates (either that or they are just sucked in by his racism.) ..."
"... Its quite possible that Sanders would win against Trump. Personality reasons. Its a stage debate I would love to see. ..."
"... The Donald is doing what the GOP has done for 40 years, use racist rhetoric (without the dogwhistles this time) to convince the rubes to vote against their own interests. ..."
"... Trump may surprise us. With a tax cut for the little guy okee dokee package ..."
"... Right wing populists are not about little government, prudent government. They cut taxes and increase spending on the armada ..."
"... The WSJ is angry that a Republican told the truth: Every Republican wants to do a big number on Social Security, they want to do it on Medicare, they want to do it on Medicaid. And we cant do that. And its not fair to the people that have been paying in for years and now all of the sudden they want to be cut. ..."
"... Thats nice Donald. But you want a larger military and big tax cuts for the rich. Arithmetic please?! ..."
"... Some partners in hedge funds, private-equity firms and other businesses organized as so-called passthroughs would pay a 3.8 percent income tax under President Barack Obamas 2017 budget request. The move is intended to address what the administrations budget documents call a gap in legal definitions of investment income and self-employment earnings. As a result, certain members of partnerships, limited liability companies and S corporations may have been able to avoid the tax, according to budget documents. ..."
"... The proposal would extend a net investment tax for Medicare thats been in place since 2013 to taxpayers who have been able to avoid it, according to Obama administration officials. The measure, which is projected to raise $271.7 billion over the next decade, would apply to limited partners who materially participate in the ventures. ..."
"... Not to worry hedgies - Karl Rove has your back.... ..."
"... This seems like a good thing. Though Id much prefer to simply see all types of income unified under the tax code. Half of the complexity of accounting and more than half of the avoidance behavior comes from confusion and games related to income classification. ..."
"... The strange thing is, even populist candidates like Bernie seem to advocate for higher taxes on regular earned income (upwards of 60% net including payroll taxes but excluding state taxes), while cap gains stays at a much lower rate, while cap gains is how the 0.1% get their money. ..."
"... Yes the establishment faces a possible quandary: both conventions might nominate an outsider. Hence the fantasy Bloomberg third way down the old dead center where the donor class sleeps ..."
"... All the rhetoric on all sides is about restoring a golden age that never was. (1) the past is not going to be restored. (2) that wasnt even the past. ..."
"... Yes. The past that never was is not he future that can ever be ..."
"... Would prefer that you didnt lump Sanders supporters with Trump supporters because, as you point out, they ...see different causes and different solutions... (to say the least). Not that I think it was your intent but it can have the result of disparaging Sanders supporters. ..."
"... As the democratic party has shown with its ham-handed support of HRC, the establishment politicians have a significant advantage and will do everything in their power to divert or quash change. ..."
"... I love it. Exactly -- They hate us for our freedom. The final affluent liberal reaction ..."
"... I agree with Mark Thoma about this. There is actually similarity between these two candidates. The labels progressive and conservative really dont apply. ..."
"... Americans are just tired of being controlled by a tiny minority of powerful rich people. Electing either Trump or Sanders probably wont change that, but at least it sends a message. We are, whether liberal or conservative or neither, sick of how things have been going. ..."
"... It is not about restoring a golden age so easily dismissed by cheap cynicism. It is about preserving freedom and restoring justice. That these causes are never done, and the struggle to preserve them is never ending, does not make them a dead issue except to the worst of the cynics. ..."
"... Indeed, such resolution to reform and the pursuit of justice is the core of the very spirit of that phenomenon that is America. And while its history is replete with its abuses therein, its history also shows a remarkable resilience amongst the people to resist all forms of tyranny, including the tyranny of the privileged, in all their complacency for the status quo. ..."
"... This is what Sanders and Trump get that the jades of the comfortable class do not. ..."
"... You may enjoy this piece in the Voice yesterday, insightful, hilarious, spreading like wildfire: http://www.villagevoice.com/news/feeling-the-yern-why-one-millennial-woman-would-rather-go-to-hell-than-vote-for-hillary-8253224 ..."
"... Realpc: Socialism does not work. Social Security does not work? Public education does not work? ..."
"... Actually, North Korea is not socialist by any sane definition, any more than Saudi Arabia does. They are both feudal monarchies. ..."
"... Totalitarianism is a failed social category that never existed anywhere outside of Orwell ..."
"... A large chunk of Trump supporters come from uneducated white males - people who have been hit hard by our trade agreements and deindustrialization. Throw in a little bigotry against Mexicans and immigrants, and you have Trump supporters. ..."
"... Bernie supporters tend to be younger. These are people who have only lived in a world of unequal growth, growth built off of bubbles, declining union membership and worker bargaining power, less job security, an eroding minimum wage, stagnant wages, debt, unending war, exploding education costs, etc. ..."
"Every Republican wants to do a big number on Social Security, they want to do it on Medicare,
they want to do it on Medicaid. And we can't do that. And it's not fair to the people that have
been paying in for years and now all of the sudden they want to be cut."
An
opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal reflects the negative reaction to Trump's remarks
from many Republicans:
"Mr. Trump is a political harbinger here of a new strand of populist Republicanism, largely
empowered by Obamacare, in which the 'conservative' position is to defend the existing entitlement
programs from a perceived threat posed by a new-style Obama coalition of handout seekers that
includes the chronically unemployed, students, immigrants, minorities and women … who typically
vote Democrat."
But is it true that our economic system redistributes substantial sums away from the middle
class to "handout seekers"? ...
JohnH :
The conclusion: "the winds of change are blowing away from establishment politicians and the
wealthy donors who support them, and as far as I'm concerned any change that helps the working
class feel more secure and confident about the future – change that is based upon reality rather
than the myths that have been sold to the public in support of wealthy interests – can't come
fast enough."
Yes, we must try, "which is why you shouldn't listen to the "we-must-not-try" brigade. They've
lost faith in the rest of us." http://robertreich.org/post/138894376115
We should not embrace the defeatists crowd of Hillary supporters that's willing to settle
for half a chicken in every pot.
New Deal democrat :
Water is wet. The sun rises in the east. The middle/working class has been screwed for the
status quo for the last 35 years.
And the news is ?????
The GOP electoral coalition since 1968 and especially 1980 has been Wall Street, Neocons, the
Bible Belt, and white working class populitsts.
Wall Street got what it wanted (tax cuts), the Necons got what they wanted (wars), and
the last two got -- promises. Unsurprisinly they have lost patience with the GOP establishment.
The Bible Belt wants its 19th century (okay 15th century) back, and white working class populats
wants to be sure that, even if they are sleeping under a bridge, no black or brown person is sleeping
under a *better* bridge.
On the Democratic side, with the exception of the late 1990s, the Establishment has failed
to deliver better times. Obamacare *is* a boon, but it has taken seemingly forever to roll out
seemingly since the Dinosaurs roamed the earth, and it has only directly benefitted about 10%
of the population. Meanwhile nominal wages grow 2% a year, worker protections are non-existnet,
and even actions which could be taken by the Executive alon - like raising the pay at which employers
no longer have to pay overtime - are not taken (the rumor that Obama's signature hand suffered
from paralyisi fell apart the other day when he signed the TPP)..
We are in the midst of a politial realignment. My guess is that outside of Dixie, the white
working class returns to the Democrats, who move towards Sanders' ideology, while the corporatist
Dems move over to the GOP. And the Bible Belt continues to get the 15th Century delivered to them.
New Deal democrat -> New Deal democrat...
Oops .Sorry for the typos. On my iPad I can only preview the first paragraph, so I've stopped
bothering. That last line should read "continues to fail to get the 15th Century...."
Also the centrist dems have been playing defense for 30 years, simply trying to prevent
the rollback of past programs, and apparently willing to compromise even on core New Deal and
Great Society accomplishments (SS and Medicare).
RC AKA Darryl, Ron -> New Deal democrat...
Yep. I had figured you more for the establishment "liberal" type but here you show me a healthy
if cynical (how can you not be by now) progressive attitude. THANKS!
Actually, Trump immediately gained the support of less-educated blue collar white males who
had ID'd as Dem, and I haven't seen a poll yet on whether Bernie is winning them back
PPaine -> New Deal democrat...
You raise an interesting question. If corporate donor fueled Democrats lose national party
control decisively. Not just for one convention ala McGovern. Where will they go ?
Well what if the GOP is in yahoo hands ?
Bloomberg party is. Fantasy
Soooo. The donors will have to retake or hold one party. My guess they'll hold on to Democrat
party easily if Hillary wins. Maybe the soul of the Democrat party is at stake here. As during
the Bryan era
tom :
Trump says that, but his proposed policies are not compatible with what he says, and he part
of the party which absolutely wants to gut those programs. Working class people who know what's
good for them are for Sanders, the ones for Trump are politico-economic illiterates (either that
or they are just sucked in by his racism.)
It's quite possible that Sanders would win against Trump. Personality reasons. It's a stage
debate I would love to see.
It's also possible (now) that Clinton would lose to Trump. He can paint her up and down as
being part of the corrupt Establishment. I don't understand her rhetorical strategy here. She
should have agreed with Bernie every step of the way, subsumed his message into a bigger picture.
It may be too late. Bernie is ticking upwards in South Carolina:
Lee this is indeed a fascinating development. I had thought Hillary would simply throw her arms
around Bernie
And attack her donors
Look her donors don't want trump or Cruz. And "they " alas can trust her to " to the right
thing" in the clutches
DrDick -> tom...
The Donald is doing what the GOP has done for 40 years, use racist rhetoric (without the dogwhistles
this time) to convince the rubes to vote against their own interests.
PPaine -> DrDick...
Look
Trump may surprise us. With a tax cut for the little guy okee dokee package
PPaine -> PPaine ...
Trump will not worry about the deficits he will promise to close as part of his grand plan while
pulling a Reagan: Ignore the deficits and go for the goal line
Right wing populists are not about little government, prudent government. They cut taxes
and increase spending on the armada
PPaine: "Trump may surprise us with a tax cut for the little guy okee dokee package"
He won't surprise me. I think that's his game plan. He wants to get elected. I wouldn't be
surprised if he promised everybody a free buffet ticket in Atlantic City too.
pgl :
The WSJ is angry that a Republican told the truth: "Every Republican wants to do a big number
on Social Security, they want to do it on Medicare, they want to do it on Medicaid. And we can't
do that. And it's not fair to the people that have been paying in for years and now all of the
sudden they want to be cut."
That's nice Donald. But you want a larger military and big tax cuts for the rich. Arithmetic
please?!
pgl :
The Hedge Fund people are going to really hate Obama for this one: "Obama's Budget Seeks to Ensure
Hedge Fund Managers Pay 3.8% Tax
Posted February 09, 2016, 11:22 A.M. ET
By Lynnley Browning
Some partners in hedge funds, private-equity firms and other businesses organized as
so-called passthroughs would pay a 3.8 percent income tax under President Barack Obama's 2017
budget request. The move is intended to address what the administration's budget documents
call "a gap" in legal definitions of investment income and self-employment earnings. As a result,
certain members of partnerships, limited liability companies and S corporations may have been
able to avoid the tax, according to budget documents.
The proposal would extend a "net investment tax" for Medicare that's been in place since
2013 to taxpayers who have been able to avoid it, according to Obama administration officials.
The measure, which is projected to raise $271.7 billion over the next decade, would apply to
limited partners who "materially participate" in the ventures.
The change is part of a package of revenue proposals that collectively would raise $2.6
trillion from 2017 through 2026, according to the president's budget request. The revenue it
seeks is 67 percent higher than Obama's 2016 proposal, driven by international tax-reform proposals,
changes in the way high-income individuals are taxed and a previously announced fee on oil
of $10.25 per barrel.
Not to worry hedgies - Karl Rove has your back....
sanjait -> pgl...
This seems like a good thing. Though I'd much prefer to simply see all types of income unified
under the tax code. Half of the complexity of accounting and more than half of the avoidance behavior
comes from confusion and games related to income classification.
Why should it really matter? Let all income just be income. Cap gains, unearned, earned, whatevs.
The strange thing is, even populist candidates like Bernie seem to advocate for higher
taxes on regular earned income (upwards of 60% net including payroll taxes but excluding state
taxes), while cap gains stays at a much lower rate, while cap gains is how the 0.1% get their
money.
Jess :
Well done and insightful. Perhaps we should send a copy of this to the media, of both the conservative
and liberal 'establishments.'
Chris Matthews and Paul Krugman come to mind on the liberal Democrat side. Just about every
pundit and then some on the Right needs a clue, although I doubt they would see it as their livelihoods
depend on their not.
PPaine -> Jess...
Yes the establishment faces a possible quandary: both conventions might nominate an outsider.
Hence the fantasy Bloomberg third way down the old dead center where the donor class sleeps
All the rhetoric on all sides is about restoring a golden age that never was. (1) the past
is not going to be restored. (2) that wasn't even the past.
Meanwhile, back in New Hampshire, in an effort to revive his floundering campaign, Marco the
Rubot has named his prospective running mate -- Chatty Cathy!: "Pull the string and she says eleven
different things."
Yes. The past that never was is not he future that can ever be
cawley :
Thank you, Mark. Good piece.
It's nice to see an essay that makes a serious attempt to identify the root concern. (I sometimes
half expect some of the Clinton supporters to start accusing Sanders supporters of hating them
for their freedom.) But you are correct:
"They want an economy that works for them and a political system that responds to their needs."
Would prefer that you didn't lump Sanders supporters with Trump supporters because, as
you point out, they "...see different causes and different solutions..." (to say the least). Not
that I think it was your intent but it can have the result of disparaging Sanders supporters.
Of course some Sanders supporters would be disappointed. That is always be the case for supporters
of any candidate. But most of us recognize that, "change will be slow and incremental if there
is change at all."
The point is that, if you don't advocate - and vote - and work - for the change you want, it
definitely won't happen at all. The difference is that, while you appear to take comfort in the
belief that "the winds of change are blowing away from establishment politicians and the wealthy
donors who support them." We are not so sure.
As the democratic party has shown with its ham-handed support of HRC, the establishment
politicians have a significant advantage and will do everything in their power to divert or quash
change.
PPaine -> cawley...
I love it. Exactly -- They hate us for our freedom. The final affluent liberal reaction
realpc :
I agree with Mark Thoma about this. There is actually similarity between these two candidates.
The labels "progressive" and "conservative" really don't apply.
Americans are just tired of being controlled by a tiny minority of powerful rich people.
Electing either Trump or Sanders probably won't change that, but at least it sends a message.
We are, whether liberal or conservative or neither, sick of how things have been going.
pgl :
"Electing either Trump or Sanders probably won't change that, but at least it sends a message."
The message would be a positive one if Sanders is elected. Trump - not so much as the real
message of his campaign is that only white people have rights here.
Jess :
It is not about restoring 'a golden age' so easily dismissed by cheap cynicism. It is about
preserving freedom and restoring justice. That these causes are never done, and the struggle to
preserve them is never ending, does not make them a dead issue except to the worst of the cynics.
Indeed, such resolution to reform and the pursuit of justice is the core of the very spirit
of that phenomenon that is America. And while its history is replete with its abuses therein,
its history also shows a remarkable resilience amongst the people to resist all forms of tyranny,
including the tyranny of the privileged, in all their complacency for the status quo.
This is what Sanders and Trump 'get' that the jades of the comfortable class do not.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed
by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit
of Happiness.
That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers
from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of
these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government,
laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall
seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments
long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience
hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right
themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."
"It is not about restoring 'a golden age' so easily dismissed by cheap cynicism." I'll have you
know that my cynicism has been bought at a very respectable price.
My cynicism lives by day at a job site
But by night --
When the full blog shines .....
I become the mao ist of old
No one every expects
The cultural revolution --
PPaine -> PPaine ...
Tripped on my last jazz box eh?
No one ever expects
The
CULTURAL REVOLUTION
realpc :
We don't need progressive ideology or conservative ideology. We need common sense and a genuine
desire to help the middle class.
Ideologies don't work and they are unrelated to common sense. Socialism does not work. However,
I would vote for Sanders over any establishment politician, just because he doesn't seem to be
one of them.
Public education is mostly under local control. Social Security is ok, but there are better ways
to provide for your retirement. A good definition of "socialism" is needed before trying to have
a conversation about it.
The Marxist definition involves a whole lot more than public education and social programs.
1. Social Security is not a "way to provide for your retirement". It is the safety-net.
Everybody pays in from the beginning of work life, and everybody gets a payout, rich or poor,
when they retire. No free riding, no moral hazard. No need for bureaucratic means-testing; extremely
low overhead. It is slightly regressive on the pay-in, and slightly progressive on the pay-out;
everybody accepts this going in, because you really don't know how your life will play out. The
tax cap (which should be raised back to the original 90% of all income) prevents the wealthiest
from objecting to it; it is chump change to them: thus, no real political problem. Social Security
covers a myriad of deprivations and evils which we no longer have to think about because they
don't occur with the same frequency or intensity.
In fact it would be very difficult to make a better design. Genius, really.
2. The fact that public education is under local control is immaterial to the general case,
because public education benefits from local control. Other public goods, e.g retirement security,
universal healthcare, national defense, don't need local differentiation and benefit from having
the largest pay-in, the largest risk pool.
3. Bernie Sanders is not talking about the marxist definition, and he has been quite clear
on that. This is "democratic socialism" on the scale of some European countries, which retain
plenty of market elements, have the same GDP growth rates as the US., and have happier populations.
Those countries are and have long been capitalist. They are relatively wealthy, and very small.
The US is very different. We could do the same things as Sweden, etc., are doing, at the state
level. That would make much more sense, and should make conservatives and progressives happy.
But no one suggests it.
They call themselves social democracies, and their size is immaterial to the argument.
However, the relative sizes of the European countries and the US suggests that the US should
have much, much HIGHER rates of growth than they do, according to Adam Smith, Chap. 3: "The division
of labor is limited by the extent of the market." This could well be due to the US's lack of better
social democracy, hobbling its citizens in debt and despair.
DrDick -> pgl...
Actually, North Korea is not socialist by any sane definition, any more than Saudi Arabia
does. They are both feudal monarchies.
RC AKA Darryl, Ron -> realpc...
Admittedly, we are confusing democratic socialism with social democracy a lot in our discussions
here. You are confusing totalitarian dictatorship with socialism. There has never actually been
a socialist government so there is no way to know whether it could work or not. An actual socialist
government would need to be done within the confines of democracy in order for social will to
be enacted by social power. Most of the world's governments are social democracies exercised within
the constraints of capitalism under control of electoral republican states. The necessity for
economic power to elevate candidates to the political elite ensures that ultimate power lies in
the hands of the capitalist so long as they do not inspire insurrection among their subjects.
The reason that there has never been a socialist government is because there has never been
a democracy. Electoral republics allow elites to maintain power and control of property and the
economic system while providing just enough democratic façade to keep the pitchforks down on the
farm instead of storming the gates of power.
RC AKA Darryl, Ron -> RC AKA Darryl, Ron...
All oligarchies are created equal regardless of whether the majority of property and wealth is
held in the private hands of a small elite or whether the majority of property and wealth is held
by the state that is controlled by a small elite. It is the transitive property of oligarchy equality.
realpc -> RC AKA Darryl, Ron...
"The reason that there has never been a socialist government is because there has never been a
democracy."
That is what you prefer to THINK is the reason. You have no evidence for that belief.
realpc -> realpc...
Socialism means no one can own a business. So the essential premise of socialism is not just impractical,
it is impossible.
And that is why it has never existed. All the communist revolutionaries were striving for the
socialist ideal. It didn't happen because it can't happen, it is just a fantasy dreamed up by
philosophers.
DrDick -> realpc...
You are a very confused individual throwing around words you do not understand. The seventh largest
corporation in Spain, a multibillion dollar multinational enterprise, is a socialist collective.
Democratic socialism As opposed to one party state socialism
Aka the way of Stalin and me
PPaine -> PPaine ...
Totalitarianism is a failed social category that never existed anywhere outside of Orwell
Salade Déjeuner :
" 91 cents of every dollar spent on entitlement programs goes to " the elderly (people 65 and
over), the seriously disabled, and members of working
"
~~MT~
Would you guess that large chunks of $$$$ to elderly goes straight to the grandchildren? Straight
back into the economy to raise aggregate demand? Hell! Grandparents love their hapless offspring
more than they love themselves, but :
But that which elderly save for themselves goes straight into the estate, the estate that goes
to grandchildren. Such is a true Keynesian redistribution to the higher propensity jokers. If
it still works, don't fix it!
The defect that needs fixing is where $$$$ is removed from the economy to fund the transfer.
$$$$ should be removed as taxation on signalling but never on taxation of production. Sure! We
do need certain Pigouvian taxes, otherwise our planet will burn up. Will the changes to the tax
code be "politically acceptable"?
No! As global warming closes in on us it will suddenly become acceptable, a year late
eudaimonia :
A large chunk of Trump supporters come from uneducated white males - people who have been
hit hard by our trade agreements and deindustrialization. Throw in a little bigotry against Mexicans
and immigrants, and you have Trump supporters.
Bernie supporters tend to be younger. These are people who have only lived in a world of
unequal growth, growth built off of bubbles, declining union membership and worker bargaining
power, less job security, an eroding minimum wage, stagnant wages, debt, unending war, exploding
education costs, etc.
They are not particularly happy with the status quo and feel that we need to change paths rather
than continue on this trajectory.
Both supporters are not happy with the economic and political system, and seek change. They
feel that the economic and political class are not on their side, and there is some truth that
that.
"... Albright doesn't have a whole lot of empathy for those who find themselves on the disadvantageous
side of American foreign policy. She neither came down wholly for or wholly against the 2003 invasion
of Iraq. But that might just have been silly partisan politics and not due to any actual concern for
the lives of Iraqi civilians. In 1996, Albright stated that the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children due
to American sanctions was justified. ..."
"... From Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide ..."
"... Unlike Rwanda, Albright was involved in every step of Clinton's Balkan policy, although she
was not his Secretary of State until 1997. Before that, she was U.S. Ambassador to the UN, and served
as president of the Center for National Policy . She is a former student of Zbigniew Brzezinski . ..."
"... Albright actively advocated policies that led to American military action in 1999, and placed
all of the blame for the situation on the Belgrade government . (Does that ring a bell?) Albright's
contention was that "a little bombing" would encourage Milosevic to sign Rambouillet Peace Accords,
which would allow for the NATO occupation of Kosovo. ..."
"... The Clinton Administration demanded Milosevic's removal from power , and in 2000, Albright
rejected Vladimir Putin's offer to try to use his influence to defuse the situation. ..."
"... War may have been the American end game in the Balkans from the start. In 1992, the American
ambassador torpedoed Bosnian secession peace negotiations by convincing Bosnian Muslim leader Alija
Izetbegovic to refuse to sign the peace accords. The ensuing catastrophic civil war, which ended in
1995, was blamed on Bosnian Serbs and Milosevic. Colin Powell recalled, as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff, he was pressured by Albright in 1992 to use military force on Bosnia. ..."
"... Albright has never wavered from her stance on the Balkans. In 2012, she got into a shouting
match with pro-Serbian activists over her role in that conflict , calling the protesters "dirty Serbs."
..."
Madeleine Albright proves to the young, aspiring women of America that warmongering psychopathy
has no glass ceiling.
Former U.S. Secretary of State under Bill Clinton Madeleine Albright thinks there is "a
special place in hell" for young women if they don't vote for Hillary Clinton.
By repurposing her own
original quote, Albright has proven yet once again that she is an expert on hell's admission
standards because she's probably going there.
Of course it should come to no surprise that Albright is stumping for Hillary Clinton. After all,
she was Bill Clinton's Secretary of State, the first female to hold the office. And sure, Albright
has an interesting bio. She and her family, fleeing Czechoslovakia from approaching German army,
escaped to Serbia, and
she survived the Nazi Blitzkrieg of London.
Too bad she is a neocon monster.
Although she personally experienced the horrors of WWII, and had family members who died in the
Nazi death camps,
Albright doesn't have a whole lot of empathy for those who find themselves on the disadvantageous
side of American foreign policy. She neither came down
wholly for or wholly against the 2003 invasion of Iraq. But that might just have been silly partisan
politics and not due to any actual concern for the lives of Iraqi civilians. In 1996, Albright
stated that the deaths
of 500,000
Iraqi children due to American sanctions was justified.
When is genocide justified? Or when does it simply not matter?
Although the Clinton Administration's stated purpose for intervening in the Balkans was to stop
genocide, the Rwandan genocide in 1994 continued unabated. From Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide:
"Rather than respond with appropriate force, the opposite happened, spurred by the murders
of the Belgian Blue Berets and Belgium's withdrawal of its remaining troops. Exactly two weeks
after the genocide began – following strenuous lobbying for total withdrawal led by Belgium and
Britain, and with American UN Ambassador Madeleine Albright advocating the most token of forces
and the United States adamantly refusing to accept publicly that a full-fledged, Convention defined
genocide was in fact taking place – the Security Council made the astonishing decision to reduce
the already inadequate UNAMIR force to a derisory 270 men" (10.11)
"The lesson to be learned from the betrayal at ETO and other experiences was that the full
potential of UNAMIR went unexplored and unused, and, as result, countless more Rwandans died than
otherwise might have. If anyone in the international community learned this lesson at the time,
it was not evident at the UN. For the next six weeks, as the carnage continued, the UN dithered
in organizing any kind of response to the ongoing tragedy. The Americans, led by US Ambassador
Madeleine Albright, played the key role in blocking more expeditious action by the UN.[18] On
May 17, the Security Council finally authorized an expanded UNAMIR II to consist of 5,500 personnel.[19]
But there is perhaps no distance greater on earth than the one between the Security Council chambers
and the outside world. Once the decision to expand was finally made, as we will soon show in detail,
the Pentagon somehow required an additional seven weeks just to negotiate a contract for delivering
armed personnel carriers to the field; evidently it proved difficult to arrange the desired terms
for "maintenance and spare parts."[20] When the genocide ended in mid-July with the final RPF
victory, not a single additional UN soldier had landed in Kigali." 10.16
Unlike Rwanda, Albright was
involved in every step of
Clinton's Balkan policy, although she was not his Secretary of State until 1997. Before that,
she was U.S. Ambassador to the UN, and served as president of the
Center for National
Policy. She is a former student of
Zbigniew Brzezinski.
Not only did Albright support Clinton's bombing, she was a key figure in the conflict and in the
ousting of Slobodan Milosevic. Time went so far as to call the Balkan campaign "Madeleine's
War." Despite her assertions that the bombing of Yugoslavia was a humanitarian mission, it is
irrefutable at this point in history
that the U.S.
pretext for military intervention was fabricated.
War may have been the American end game in the Balkans from the start. In 1992, the American
ambassador
torpedoed Bosnian secession peace negotiations by convincing Bosnian Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic
to refuse to sign the peace accords. The ensuing catastrophic civil war, which ended in 1995, was
blamed on Bosnian Serbs and Milosevic. Colin Powell recalled, as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, he
was pressured by Albright in 1992 to use military force on Bosnia.
Dirty Serbs, huh? And she wants to tell idealistic young American women, who still believe in
the American democratic process, how to vote? Yay, feminism!
"... Well, here in the UK it was the left in the form of the Labour Party that was responsible for the situation that resulted in the Financial Crisis, and the immediate response to it. Whether the right would have done anything differently is a point for discussion, but irrelevant: it was the left what done it. ..."
"... Since Financial Crisis here and the resulting support of the finance sector was a product of the left it is no surprise that the right is now in the ascendancy (and the reverse is true in the US). A fact underlined by Blair, Darling and Brown now all being in the pocket of the financiers. ..."
"... Thats absolutely true. And the Government pretty much reflected the views of the economic orthodoxy during the Great Moderation - free labour, capital good flows leads to an efficient allocation of resources - comparative advantage, credibility, incentives, etc etc - all EC 101. Also you cannot blame globalisation (which they thought was an unambiguously good thing anyway); academics outside mainstream economics have warned about the dangers of leaving a country overly exposed to globalisation since - well the beginning, but most people studying economics would have been unaware of the arguments and the richness of this literature (and still largely are). ..."
"... The 2008 crash hit the UK hard because New Labour was a right-wing party that carried on the Conservatives policy of under-regulating our financial systems; a decision that those of us on the genuine left of politics would have done our best to avoid. New Labours abandonment of a genuine left-wing outlook, along with its analogues in the US and Europe, has led us to the current financial crisis and its ongoing austerity con. ..."
"... How was New Labour left or anything but Thatcher-lite? And how were New Labour any more responsible for 2008 than the decades of Tory rule setting up the groundwork for underregulated markets? ..."
"... Youve completely missed the point of Simons post. A party that furthers the interests of finance capital is by definition not of the left . The rise of Corbyn, whatever else it may presage, is clearly driven by an appetite for a genuinely left position. Ditto Sanders in the US. ..."
"... .....one rule which woe betides the banker who fails to heed it.. never lend money to anyone unless they dont need it. ..."
Shortly after the full extent of the financial crisis had become clear, I remember saying in a meeting
that at least now the position of those who took an extreme neoliberal position (markets are always
right, the state just gets in the way of progress) would no longer be taken seriously. I could not
have been more wrong. But in a way I think that the 'surprising'
strength of the radical left (by which I mean those who are not the established centre left)
in the US, UK and perhaps some European countries reflects exactly this contradiction.
We need only to consider the position of the financial sector to understand this contradiction. That
sector was by far the major cause of the largest recession since WWII, and yet it is now in essentially
the same position as it was before the crisis. There are no purely economic reasons why this has
to be so: economists know that it is perfectly possible to make fundamental changes to this sector
that could significantly reduce the chance of another crisis at little cost, but such possibilities
are just not on the political agenda. For example, Admati and Helwig have convincingly
argued that the problem with banks is
very low capital requirements, but actual reforms have been marginal.
The reason is straightforward: the financial sector has political power. Many on the centre left
seem too timid or too ignorant to talk about this power publicly, and are therefore unwilling to
challenge it. The political right and it's media machine help divert those who have little interest
in politics and economics into believing that their problems are really due to too many migrants
or too generous welfare payments. Those who are members or supporters of left wing political parties
tend to have a better understanding of what is going on. To put it simply, a sector that caused a
great deal of harm and cost us all a great deal has got away largely unscathed such that it could
easily do it all again.
But it gets much worse. The right has succeeded in morphing the financial crisis into an imagined
crisis in financing government debt (or, in the Eurozone with the ECB's help, into an actual crisis)
which required a reduction in the size of the state that neoliberals dream about. The financial crisis,
far from exposing neoliberal flaws, has led to its triumph. Confronted with this extraordinary turn
of events, many of those on the centre left want to concede defeat and accept austerity!
That is all scandalous, and if the left's established leaders will not recognise this, it is not
surprising that party members and supporters will look elsewhere to those who do. Now wise heads
may warn that the radical left has in many cases not grasped the nature of the problem and are simply
repeating old slogans, and worse still that voting for radical leaders may deny the left the chance
for power, but inevitably this can sound just like the appeasement of many on the centre left. What
Corbyn's victory shows Democrats in the US is the power of the contradiction between the global financial
crisis and where we are now.
I kept bumping into people who told me they were trying to make up their minds in the upcoming
election between Sanders and Trump.
At first I was dumbfounded. The two are at opposite ends of the political divide. But as
I talked with these people, I kept hearing the same refrains. They wanted to end "crony capitalism."
They detested "corporate welfare," such as the Wall Street bailout. They wanted to prevent the
big banks from extorting us ever again. Close tax loopholes for hedge-fund partners. Stop the
drug companies and health insurers from ripping off American consumers. End trade treaties that
sell out American workers. Get big money out of politics.
President Hillary Clinton wouldn't even try to do much (if any) of that. (Neither would Trump,
for that matter, but that's another discussion.)
Well, here in the UK it was the 'left' in the form of the Labour Party that was responsible
for the situation that resulted in the Financial Crisis, and the immediate response to it. Whether
the 'right' would have done anything differently is a point for discussion, but irrelevant: it
was the 'left' what done it.
Since Financial Crisis here and the resulting support of the finance sector was a product of the
'left' it is no surprise that the 'right' is now in the ascendancy (and the reverse is true in
the US). A fact underlined by Blair, Darling and Brown now all being in the pocket of the financiers.
That's absolutely true. And the Government pretty much reflected the views of the economic
orthodoxy during the Great Moderation - free labour, capital good flows leads to an 'efficient'
allocation of resources - comparative advantage, credibility, incentives, etc etc - all EC 101.
Also you cannot blame globalisation (which they thought was an unambiguously good thing anyway);
academics outside mainstream economics have warned about the dangers of leaving a country overly
exposed to globalisation since - well the beginning, but most people studying economics would
have been unaware of the arguments and the richness of this literature (and still largely are).
On migration, the tragedy of us not being able to let in desperate Syrians is a result of huge
immigration (largely of cheap labour) under the Labour government which has not delivered tangible
net positive results for most people and left them fatigued. Now we find we politically cannot
let in the people that we have a moral responsibility to let in.
Since the failures happened under Labour, they had to take responsibility, and in the end it
played to the Conservatives and we got something worse.
The start of the solution is to get more pluralism and critical thinking into economics and
make it look more like other social sciences. Then hopefully we do not get a repeat of the hubris
and Great Moderation Era mistakes.
The financial crisis couldn't have happened without Thatcher's Big Bang which is no doubt why
she was and continues to be feted in death by the City. If you're trying to blame the worldwide
financial problems on Labour overspending, where's your evidence to support this (never mind the
then Tories were critical of Labour spending on the grounds it was insufficient)? Are you trying
to suggest Osborne And Cameron, for example, aren't in the pocket of the financiers? Where's your
evidence? :-)
I wrote a couple of comments under Simon's post "The dead hand of austerity; left and
right" that relate to yours. In those comments I made the point that it is, and probably always
has been, plain to everyone that the centre-left position of New Labour is a right-wing ideology
with an identity crisis.
The 2008 crash hit the UK hard because New Labour was a right-wing party that carried on the
Conservative's policy of under-regulating our financial systems; a decision that those of us on
the genuine left of politics would have done our best to avoid. New Labour's abandonment of a
genuine left-wing outlook, along with its analogues in the US and Europe, has led us to the current
financial crisis and its ongoing austerity con.
Unfortunately though, it appears that people such as yourself, and even Simon Wren-Lewis with
his disappointing assertion that Corbyn is on the "radical left" rather than just the plain left,
want to keep up the pretence that you think that New Labour was somehow a left-wing party.
As I've said before, and I'm sure I'll have to keep saying again and again:
How was New Labour "left" or anything but Thatcher-lite? And how were New Labour any more responsible
for 2008 than the decades of Tory rule setting up the groundwork for underregulated markets?
You've completely missed the point of Simon's post. A party that furthers the interests of
finance capital is by definition not of the "left". The rise of Corbyn, whatever else it may presage,
is clearly driven by an appetite for a genuinely left position. Ditto Sanders in the US.
The UK Labour Party in the GFC was neo-liberal light rather than a believer in improving regulation.
The GFC was caused by very poor prudential behaviour by all financial institutions.
Ogden Nash was quoted at the start of Chapter 15 of Paul Samuelson's text;
".....one rule which woe betides the banker who fails to heed it.. never lend money
to anyone unless they don't need it."
Critics of Labour and New Labour here are not directing blame at 'overspending' by Labour for
the problems that led to Britain's exposure to the Financial crisis and the elevation of the Conservatives.
They are blaming things like financial deregulation and over-liberal and naive policies towards
trade, capital and labour flows, Labour also ignored growing inequality. Mainstream economists
did not take seriously arguments made by historians, sociologists, social workers and many others
about dangerous inequalities, imbalances and social problems that were becoming clearly evident.
Mainstream economists, almost unanimously said that industrialisation was not a problem , almost
natural, and the City was where Britain's 'comparative advantage' lay. Too much confidence in
their theories and seeing things through abstraction to the extent you can just ignore what others
are actually seeing, not through abstraction, but actual engagement with reality. Take economic
immigration, or trade with an assertive China, again, naive neo-classical arguments were prominent.
This whole derail is just pointless 'whatabouttery'. Who cares if it was the right or the left.
By playing into this partisan 'not me sir, i just got here' cheapens the argument and stymies
true academic debate.
In summary:- whenever someone says 'It was the left/right which started this' you should ignore
it - the problem is now.
I agree with everything you say and this might be nitpicking, but some economists -- Dean Baker
in particular -- think it was the real estate crisis, and not the finanical crisis, that created
our current woes:
Not sure I agree. The problem is there is no rational *bankruptcy* procedure in place at the
moment. Here is my view, it is not quite the same as Positive Money put it but similar:
The lending banks we need are the ones that can lend development capital effectively and stick
to doing just that. If we are to have private lending banks, then they need to be able to make
a decent profit doing development capital lending.
The way I would narrow banks is to offer them an incentive - an unlimited cost free overdraft
at the Bank of England. 0% funding costs. In return they must drop all the side businesses and
just do capital development lending on an uncollateralised basis - probably in the form of simple
overdrafts. In other words they become an agency businesses delivering state money to those that
require it.
A capital buffer probably ISN'T required here. Losing your lending licence if your underwriting
isn't that good should be sufficient incentive to run a tight ship. Backing off the entire thing
to the central bank reduces the barriers to entry in lending - making self-employed, highly dispersed
and, importantly, locally focussed underwriters a possibility.
Any lending businesses that doesn't want to take the oath, then has to fully fund their lending
on a maturity matched basis Zopa style. No deposit insurance, no access to the Bank of England,
and losses absorbed by those doing the lending. This then becomes the fate of the shadow banking
system - the building societies and money funds.
What we need is asset side regulation.
You proscribe a list of valid purposes for a loan. Anything outside that list becomes unenforceable
in court.
That leaves the courts to decide what fits and what doesn't fit the list. If they decide it
doesn't fit, then it becomes a gift of shareholders funds.
Operate like that and I guarantee you that banks will become very keen on their due diligence
– because the client just has to argue in court that the loan was 'ultra vires' to get a freebie.
It's really easy to regulate for the government banks if you want to.
The transaction system is clearly also being used as a hostage by the banks to get whatever
they want out of the government and the central bank. Do as we say or we shoot the transaction
system!
There are lots of ways of designing a mutual transaction system. But at its core is one concept
– transactions operate on the balance sheet of the central bank, not the individual banks. So
you would have a Transaction Department at the Bank of England (alongside the Issue and Banking
Departments) and current and savings account ultimately represent liabilities on that balance
sheet.
The functional aspects are less important – existing bank accounts could be held in trust by
the current banks, run as separate subsidiaries companies and a myriad of different other options.
But the key point is that the operational entity is acting as agent and the legal ownership and
responsibility is always at the central bank. That makes anything recorded in the transaction
system exactly the same as holding cash. You have a receipt for liabilities at the central bank.
However that makes the individual banks short of deposits and balancing liabilites. The replacement
on the individual bank's balance sheets is of course an overdraft from the central bank. Existing
banks would then have to get the match funding to free themselves from the central bank lending
restrictions, conform to requirements or just enter run-off, as I mentioned earlier.
The transaction system is like the road or rail infrastructure and is a common good required
by all.
Inevitably the state will have to fund its existence – because there is no money in running
it. I see the state providing a 'white box' system that anybody authorised can put a marketing
veneer on. Done correctly it would mean that you can literally operate your bank accounts through
any of the competing front ends. Account numbers would stay the same whoever you are notionally
with.
The other important thing about cutting down on bank lending is it free ups a *huge* amount
of space for government spending. I can see this as a good way for 'funding' a basic income –
certainly better than raising the basic rate of tax to 45%.
That way also the public have an *incentive* to support narrowing banks. Basic Income allows
you to narrow banks without a depression.
This is roughly the same as my own thinking; that Corbyn's victory comes on the back of a membership
angry that they lost the last election having to take the 'austerity-lite' approach for responsibility
reasons and Sanders rise has come on the back of Democrats angry that more significant reforms
were not put in place after the crash.
The U.S. Presidential primaries are starting this week and Sanders could win the first two
in a large upset. Hillary and her supporters have been attacking Bernie much more lately. Econobloggers
Krugman, DeLong, Thoma have all come out for Hillary, arguing that the danger of a Republican
victory is too much.
Sanders has criticized the Fed while Hillary has not. Sanders has a substantial financial transaction
tax. I agree with Dean Baker who is still for Sanders.
I would bet money that Trump doesn't win. He wont' get enough votes. He turns off Latinos and
women, etc. He may motivate more people to vote. What Trump shows is that the Republican establishment
is in tatters and the base no longer trusts them.
At PMQs this week (with due apologies to Henry Fielding's 'Shamela') Shameron, crimson faced,
shouted that Blair, Brown and Darling are all being paid by large financial companies so don't
talk to him about Google paying 3% corporation tax.
If you are an anti-Thatcherite, this is the sort of 'argument' that really turns the stomach.
Quite what it would have taken for Labour to have got City and Murdoch support in 2010 does not
bear thinking about.
Is it not true that Blair, Brown and Darling are all being handsomely paid by large financial
companies?
Why do you think these companies are doing it?
From the first sentence to the last, everything you have written here describes the way I think
and feel about this. Like you were reading my mind (but written much better and more coherently).
Sanders offers the chance that challenging that power of the financial sector would even be
considered. Clinton, not so much.
Thank you for the first comment, but I think the second reflects what you think I wrote rather
than what I actually said. While Paul is undoubtedly a wise head, I did not say these warnings
were wrong, but said they might be ignored. Paul and I have differed about issues in the past,
like the microfoundations of macro, or the political solidity of the Eurozone.
Well, I can read too and Madhyamak is right, this column does constitute a break with Krugman's
recent posts and as Peter earlier noted, other leftish leaning econ bloggers.
Maybe it was not your intent, but the actual post you wrote displays a deep understanding of,
and approval for, the motives and desires of Sanders supporters. And a definite criticism of the
center-left. Furthermore, it extends hope that it is not all a foolish dream when you compare
it to the Corbyn victory.
"For example, Admati and Helwig have convincingly argued that the problem with banks is very
low capital requirements,"
Then I wonder at that. Banks always have 100% loss capital on their balance sheets. Deposits
are essentially capital. After all why else would you need a depositor's protections scheme if
they are not subject to loss?
Having a system where people 'bail-in' ahead of time rather than behind time sounds like the
same faulty control thinking as the sovereign money idea.
Banks can essentially create their own capital via the lending process as Professor Werner
has already described in his seminal papers on how the banking system actually works.
So there can be no effective control point on the liabilities side of a bank's balance sheet.
All you can do there is alter the price, which just feeds through to the price of loans. And we
already saw how well price adjustment controls banks in 2008.
The job of the financial sector is to create money for appropriate projects in the non-financial
sector. Their use of the power to create money, delegated to them by the state, should be limited
to that purpose and that purpose alone - restrict financial sector asset creation only to those
assets that fund the non-financial sector. No more borrowed-into-existence casino money. If the
finance sector wants to do anything amongst itself it should be force to raise equity to do it,
which would then have to come from existing savings.
The place to discipline banks is on the asset side of the balance sheet. By removing the financial
sector's ability to borrow money from banks you shrink the size of the financial sector and stop
it creating bubbles within itself.
The financial sector size is determined by how much it can expand its balance sheet, and the
expansion is driven on the asset side - where the result of its sales efforts end up.
"Many on the centre left seem too timid or too ignorant to talk about this power publicly,
and are therefore unwilling to challenge it."
The other one is that the left has severe loss aversion issues.
To shrink the financial sector requires putting people out of work.
Allowing capitalism to work requires businesses to fail, which puts people out of work.
Unfortunately capitalism without loss and failure is like Catholicism without hellfire. It
doesn't work as a concept. Things have to be allowed to fail - banks included.
Importantly failed expansion leads to permanent loss which has to be allocated. If you were
earning good money on a bubble project, or in a declining business area that fails, and your skills
are unneeded anywhere else, then your income will decline - possibly right down to the living
wage.
So the first task is working out how to take losses with good grace.
"... In my view, Clinton wants to be President only because it is there and it is a powerful role. For her, I think it affirms her egotistical belief that she is the best person for the job. She is a by the numbers politician; lacking passion and a cause and is beholden to Wall St. ..."
"... Clinton is a warmonger. Most of the candidates are. I wouldnt vote for anyone who was, no matter what their politics. So, the field is greatly reduced for me. ..."
"... The media likes a simplistic narrative, and the media wants Clinton win, no matter what the Democratic base wants. Its annoying, but not surprising, that they are trying to cast the Democratic primary as they have. ..."
This disgraceful episode shows the dark side of the sexism arguments. Equality is about every
women having the same opportunities as men. But what gets lost in the debate, or conveniently
ignored, is that an incompetent woman has no place taking or claiming precedence over a competent
man. Margaret Thatcher wrought a trail of destruction in the UK - her Reagan-esque and neo-liberal
policies led to many more Britons living in poverty and being left with no prospect of any dignity;
instead being trapped in a life-long welfare-cycle. How is it plausible that she should not be
judged on her performance, rather on some esoteric and exaggerated feminist ideal. She was a female
PM, sure, but she was an awful PM. Her political salvation was the Argentine conflict over the
Falklands. Without that, she would have deservedly been confined to the political scrap-heap much
sooner.
In my view, Clinton wants to be President only because it is there and it is a powerful role.
For her, I think it affirms her egotistical belief that she is the best person for the job. She
is a "by the numbers" politician; lacking passion and a cause and is beholden to Wall St. That
surely makes her sound more like a conservative rather than a liberal (the equivalent of Tony
Blair). Sanders might be a silly old fool, but he has a passion for the American ideal - that
all men (and women) were indeed created equal and his policies support that ideal. Clinton has
no policies - she is essentially asking the American people to trust her, when in reality, they
don't - not because she is a woman, but because she has a history of duplicity.
Clinton is a warmonger. Most of the candidates are. I wouldn't vote for anyone who was, no
matter what their politics. So, the field is greatly reduced for me.
"I am increasingly dismayed that 'older, wiser, more mature' voters are portrayed as solidly in
Hillary's corner"
The media likes a simplistic narrative, and the media wants Clinton win, no matter what the
Democratic base wants. It's annoying, but not surprising, that they are trying to cast the Democratic
primary as they have.
that mainstream
political reporters
are incapable of covering her positively-or even fairly.
While it may be true that the political press doesn't always write exactly what
Clinton would like, emails recently obtained by Gawker offer a case study in how
her prodigious and sophisticated press operation manipulates reporters into
amplifying her desired message-in this case, down to the very word that
The Atlantic
's Marc Ambinder used to
describe an important policy speech.
The emails in question
, which were exchanged by Ambinder, then
serving as
The Atlantic
's politics editor
,
and Philippe Reines, Clinton's notoriously combative spokesman and consigliere,
turned up thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request we filed in 2012 (and
which we are currently
suing the State Department
over). The same request previously revealed that
Politico's chief White House correspondent, Mike Allen,
promised to deliver
positive coverage of Chelsea Clinton, and, in a separate
exchange,
permitted Reines to ghost-write an item about the State Department
for
Politico's Playbook newsletter. Ambinder's emails with Reines demonstrate the
same kind of transactional reporting, albeit to a much more legible degree: In
them, you can see Reines "blackmailing" Ambinder into describing a Clinton speech
as "muscular" in exchange for early access to the transcript. In other words,
Ambinder outsourced his editorial judgment about the speech to a member of
Clinton's own staff.
On the morning of July 15, 2009, Ambinder
sent Reines a blank email
with the subject line, "Do you have a copy of HRC's
speech to share?" His question concerned a speech Clinton
planned to give later that day
at the Washington, D.C. office of the Council
on Foreign Relations, an influential think tank. Three minutes after Ambinder's
initial email, Reines replied with three words: "on two conditions." After
Ambinder responded with "ok," Reines sent him a list of those conditions:
Advertisement
From:
[Philippe Reines]
Sent:
Wednesday, July 15 2009
10:06 AM
To:
Ambinder, Marc
Subject:
Re: Do you have a copy
of HRC's speech to share?
3 [conditions] actually
1) You in your own voice describe them as "muscular"
2) You note that a look at the CFR seating plan shows that all the envoys -
from Holbrooke to Mitchell to Ross - will be arrayed in front of her, which in
your own clever way you can say certainly not a coincidence and meant to
convey something
3) You don't say you were blackmailed!
One minute later, Ambinder responded:
From:
Ambinder, Marc
Sent:
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
10:07 AM
To:
Philippe Reines
Subject:
RE: Do you have a copy
of HRC's speech to share?
got it
Ambinder made good on his word. The opening paragraph of the article he wrote
later that day, under the headline "
Hillary
Clinton's 'Smart Power' Breaks Through
," precisely followed Reines'
instructions:
Sponsored
When you think of President Obama's foreign policy, think of Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton. That's the message behind a
muscular
speech that Clinton is
set to deliver today to the Council on Foreign Relations. The staging gives a
clue to its purpose:
seated in front of
Clinton
, subordinate to Clinton, in the first row, will be
three potentially rival power centers:
envoys Richard Holbrooke and George Mitchell, and National Security Council
senior director Dennis Ross
.
Based on other emails released in the same batch we received, Ambinder's warm
feelings toward Clinton may have made him uniquely susceptible to Reines' editing
suggestions. On July 26, 2009,
he wrote to Reines
to congratulate his boss about her appearance on
Meet the Press
:
From:
Ambinder, Marc
Sent:
Sunday, July 26, 2009 12:05
PM
To:
Philippe Reines
Subject:
she kicked A
on MTP
On
November 29, 2010
, he sent along another congratulatory note, apparently in
regard to a press conference Clinton
had held that day
to address the publication of thousands of State Department
cables by WikiLeaks:
From:
Ambinder, Marc
Sent:
Monday, November 29, 2010
12:05 PM
To:
Philippe Reines
Subject:
This is an awesome
presser...
She is PITCH f#$*& PERFECT on this stuff.
The emails quoted above are particularly remarkable given Ambinder's
understanding of Clinton's press strategy, as he articulated in a column for
The Week
last year. Predicting how Clinton's
widely documented aversion to reporters would play out in the 2016 presidential
race,
Ambinder wrote
, "The Clinton campaign will use the press instrumentally. ...
Good news for us, though: The reporters covering Clinton are going to find ways
to draw her out anyway, because they're really good, they'll give her no quarter,
and they'll provide a good source of accountability tension [
sic
]
until Walker (or whomever) emerges from the maelstrom."
When asked for comment about his correspondence with Reines, Ambinder wrote in
an email to Gawker, "I don't remember much about anything, but I do remember once
writing about how powerful FOIA is, especially as a mechanism to hold everyone in
power, even journalists, accountable." When asked to elaborate, he followed up
with a longer message:
Advertisement
Philippe and I generally spoke on the phone and followed up by
email. The exchange is probably at best an incomplete record of what went
down. That said, the transactional nature of such interactions always gave me
the willies.... Since I can't remember the exact exchange I can't really
muster up a defense of the art, and frankly, I don't really want to. I will
say this: whatever happened here reflects my own decisions, and no one else's.
In a subsequent phone exchange, Ambinder added:
It made me uncomfortable then, and it makes me uncomfortable
today. And when I look at that email record, it is a reminder to me of why I
moved away from all that.
The Atlantic
,
to their credit, never pushed me to do that, to turn into a scoop factory. In
the fullness of time, any journalist or writer who is confronted by the
prospect, or gets in the situation where their journalism begins to feel
transactional, should listen to their gut feeling and push away from that.
Being scrupulous at all times will not help you get all the scoops, but it
will help you sleep at night. At no point at
The Atlantic
did I ever feel the pressure to make transactional
journalism the norm.
Ambinder emphasized that the emails did not capture the totality of his
communication with Reines, and said they were not indicative of his normal
reporting techniques. When asked if the exchange was typical of the magazine's
reporting and editing process, a spokesperson for
The Atlantic
told Gawker: "No, this is not typical, and it goes against our
standards."
Reines didn't respond when we asked if he engaged in similar transactions with
other reporters covering the State Department. But on the day of his trade with
Ambinder, at least one other journalist used Reines' preferred
adjective-"muscular"-to describe the speech at the Council on Foreign Relations.
That
reporter was none other than Mike Allen of Politico
:
....
"... A somewhat campy (okay, VERY campy) take on the French Revolution, it quite effectively depicts the way hopelessness and inequality corrode away the moral fabric of human relations. ..."
"... it was Mike Nichols who said, Funny is very rare. And I would add, very valuable, and slightly deadly. ..."
[BILL CLINTON:] "I understand why we've got a race on our hands, because a lot of people
are disillusioned with the system and a lot of young people want to take it down. … I understand
what it's like for people who haven't had a raise in eight years. There are a lot of reasons
[to be angry]. But this is not a cartoon. This is real life."
Don't rag on cartoons, Bill. Many are more worth paying attention to than you are. I recommend
the following:
Galaxy Express 999
A wonderfully grim satire of neoliberalism, globalization, and Kurzweil-ian narcissistic
techno-utopianism.
The Roses of Versailles
A somewhat campy (okay, VERY campy) take on the French Revolution, it quite effectively
depicts the way hopelessness and inequality corrode away the moral fabric of human relations.
Both can easily be streamed online with English subtitles.
They used to say that Hitchcock was, "damned with faint praise," by being called a master
of horror. I think the same thing tends to happen to those who are funny. I think it was
Mike Nichols who said, "Funny is very rare." And I would add, very valuable, and slightly deadly.
"... Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign is falling apart. Bernie Sanders soared in New Hampshire and now two polls have him tying her nationally. It's a disaster. ..."
"... Now she's called in the B Team - the cynical, paranoid and wacky twins Sidney Blumenthal and David Brock - to bail her out. ..."
"... The attacks are rooted in nothing more than a list of dirty names they call the Vermont senator every day. Having found little in his record to attack, they have consulted the thesaurus to turn up ugly sounding accusations. ..."
Dear old Dick Morris - the Clintons' former triangulation guru - is back. And he's wielding
a sharp rapier:
Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign is falling apart. Bernie Sanders soared in New Hampshire
and now two polls have him tying her nationally. It's a disaster.
Now she's called in the B Team - the cynical, paranoid and wacky twins Sidney Blumenthal
and David Brock - to bail her out. And here comes the elderly, diminished and livid former
President Bill Clinton to lead the duo's frantic attacks on Sanders.
The attacks are rooted in nothing more than a list of dirty names they call the Vermont
senator every day. Having found little in his record to attack, they have consulted the thesaurus
to turn up ugly sounding accusations.
Their strategy is laughable. After losing 84 percent of young voters in Iowa - and failing
to recover them in New Hampshire - they sent in two aging fossils of feminism to insult and
threaten young women.
The 81-year-old feminist Gloria Steinem charged that young women are only backing Sanders
because that's where they can meet boys. And 78-year-old Madeleine Albright threatened to consign
to a "special place in hell" women who don't back female candidates like Clinton.
"... Political consultants by and large, and especially in the establishment tier, operate and strategize on the sole core premise that voters are a) stupid (in the Pavlovian sense), and b) unreliable. The idea that small donors would be reliable over the course of a campaign is inconceivable (the larger donors certainly aren't that reliable). And if you're willing to flip messages in a heartbeat, it is probably not a safe bet; Sanders is pulling it off in part (so far?) through his own massive (so far…) consistency (and legacy). Also, he's positioned so far from anybody else (except maybe Trump?!?) that it's difficult to slipstream him and steal his donor base. ..."
"... I think that some basic economic/market concepts (commitment bias, sunk costs) can be considered as well. But the establishment consultants (who generally do quite well, thank you) don't see a $20 donation as a significant commitment with an expectation attached; it's a restaurant tip. BTW, Sanders' three million donations come from over one million donors, that's a rough average of two follow-up donations. Some of these folks are living hand-to-mouth; they're almost literally all in, unlike any millionaire or billionaire who maxes out and gives the rest to PACs. ..."
"... And Clinton's not dumb; not dumb? mmm, Ok, is she smart? Personally, I don't think so. Conniving and persistent? absolutely. ..."
And Clinton's not dumb; she could have tried just the same strategy. Why didn't she?
Because of her consultants.
Think of it as a jobs program. Fundraising consultants are important assets throughout the
life of a campaign (including the period after the election).
The fundraisers get a cut of funds they raise (10%-20% is common, I've seen higher… even ActBlue
asks for a tip, but they ask and don't require it, and it doesn't come out of your donation, it's
on top). This is an industry, which also has vendors (NGP / VAN and other political data platforms
have fundraising modules, before merging with VAN, NGP was a stand-alone campaign accounting,
compliance, and fundraising tool).
And in case there is any lingering confusion or doubt in anyone's mind; the campaign fundraising
context is a major conduit for "constituent" input on policy. When candidates say "I've heard
from/spoken with my constituents", unless they just did a townhall meeting, they are talking about
conversations at fundraising events. The candidates feel that they are actually connecting with
their constituents… and they are, just not with all of them. Naturally, business owners and affluent
blowhards are well-represented.
Which means that backing out of the existing fundraising mechanisms would be wrenching for
campaign and candidate alike, on several levels. It would also be considered an overt act of disloyalty;
and loyalty is the coin of the realm.
Political consultants by and large, and especially in the establishment tier, operate and
strategize on the sole core premise that voters are a) stupid (in the Pavlovian sense), and b)
unreliable. The idea that small donors would be reliable over the course of a campaign is inconceivable
(the larger donors certainly aren't that reliable). And if you're willing to flip messages in
a heartbeat, it is probably not a safe bet; Sanders is pulling it off in part (so far?) through
his own massive (so far…) consistency (and legacy). Also, he's positioned so far from anybody
else (except maybe Trump?!?) that it's difficult to slipstream him and steal his donor base.
I think that some basic economic/market concepts (commitment bias, sunk costs) can
be considered as well. But the establishment consultants (who generally do quite well, thank you)
don't see a $20 donation as a significant commitment with an expectation attached; it's a restaurant
tip. BTW, Sanders' three million donations come from over one million donors, that's a rough average
of two follow-up donations. Some of these folks are living hand-to-mouth; they're almost literally
all in, unlike any millionaire or billionaire who maxes out and gives the rest to PACs.
optimader
And Clinton's not dumb; not dumb? mmm, Ok, is she smart? Personally, I don't think so.
Conniving and persistent? absolutely.
The vote count is currently 62% for Bernie and 32% for Hilary, yet she has scored 6 delegates
vs. zero for him. What am I missing (besides a functioning brain)?
Yeah but Super Delegates only exist in case commoner voters come up with the wrong answer.
Hahaha. Pathetic. I will write in Bernie regardless of how the Dems 'fix' the selection.
Super Delegates: part of the modern Dem machine. Carter was the first nominee and pres under
the super delegate system. (Started 1972 after the McGovern nomination, i.e 'wrong' answer.) Carter
was also the start of Dem presidents who de-regulate business. Super Delegates act as supporters
of the status quo, making the party less responsive to voters.
Notice the Republicans don't have super delegates. Which party is really more democratic? It's
a ratchet, there's a check on how far populist left movements go in this country, but maybe not
populist right ones.
So far the partially reported totals are from the hinterlands, which is the only possible explanation
I can offer for whoever the hell Greenstein is with 7% of the vote.
Also wrt phone banking/push polling in NH: those of us who live here know this is why caller
ID was invented, and act accordingly.
adding:
The Dems came up with the idea of super delegates after the McGovern nomination in 1972. The idea
was to keep the party bosses in control of the nominating process. Studebaker talks about Carter.
Carter was the first Dem nominee under the super delegate system.
The GOP does not have super delegates to their convention.
RE: sHillary's Wall St problem, here's how Bernie can finish her off and
I keep waiting for him to say something like the following:
"My campaign has accepted millions of dollars in small donations from voters
all across the country. They most certainly expect something from me in return
and if elected I intend to deliver. I expect the same goes for Clinton and her
donors too."
"... those who are so wrapped in the Clinton bubble as to assume her inevitability and electability have some thinking to do. ..."
"... For my part, Hillary Clinton cant lose by a large enough margin to satisfy my desire to watch the establishment turned on its ear this season. We the people have had it up to here with neoconservative warfare abroad, profound wealth inequality, economic injustice writ large, the power of banks over all of us, and the prioritizing of the wealth of finance and other industry barons over the basic interests and well-being of the general public. ..."
"... Still trying to mislead The People toward Hillary, NYTimes? Your front page says: Bernie Sanders defeated Hillary Clinton in the Democratic contest in a state where he has long held an advantage. Better to say in a state where the voters, like NYTimes readers who offer Comments, have far better judgment than the lightweight election news and opinion team at the New York Times. ..."
"... This is about the electorates rejection of the influence of shady money in politics. As somebody noted a few years ago, the candidates should have to wear the logos of their sponsors, like NASCAR drivers do. ..."
"... I dont think Bill did Hillary any favors by wagging his finger in front of the cameras and scolding Bernie for an authentic campaign. It brought back lots of memories of I did not have sexual relations with that woman and reminded voters what they didnt particularly like about either Clinton. ..."
"... Look at the exit polling- Bernie brought in a ton of Independents which the Democrats need in order to win in November. He absolutely crushed Hillary with younger people - the future of the party. He also won among women. ..."
What Secretary Clinton and the Democratic machine behind her ought to ponder carefully is that,
as the figures now stand, Mr. Trump is likely to walk away from New Hampshire with more votes than
Secretary Clinton. Yes, I can already see the rolled eyes and hear all the explanations about how
eccentric New Hampshire and its primary system is, but it remains a statistic well worth thinking
about. Those who assume that a Trump nomination would mean a Democratic landslide, and those
who are so wrapped in the Clinton bubble as to assume her inevitability and electability have some
thinking to do.
Heather, Charlotte, North Carolina
That an established political figure such as Mr. Sununu knows only five people voting for the
odious Mr.Trump is to his credit, but this demonstrates the problem plaguing the the "Establishment"
nominees. When only one white-collar criminal, (and a tiny fish in the banking business, to boot)
was incarcerated after the economic collapse brought about by some of America's most respected
financial institutions, working people realized politics as usual benefitted only one interest
group: the obscenely wealthy.
The regulators would be paid by taxpayers for life to do nothing, we would remain mired in trillions
of dollars of debt for waging wars that did little but destabilize the Middle East, and Republican
legislators would do absolutely nothing but squabble and snatch up their paychecks.
It's horrifying that a materialistic, narcissistic blowhard would attract hordes of voters, but
if you dwell only in the insular bubble of the Beltway, the reality of a furious electorate must
come as quite a shock.
The machinations of the Koch brothers resulted in Trump, an ambulatory id, laying waste to the
illusion that a shred of true statesmanship remained within the Republican Party. Fox "News" can't
be shocked that their smug dog-whistles found a studious acolyte in Trump, a master of pandering
to the lowest common denominator. The only question: Will our nation be the true victim of these
solons' cynical money-grubbing?
David Gregory, Deep Red South
The Progressives- Democrats and Independents that have been kicked, ignored, marginalized and
abandoned by the media and the Beltway Villagers have a message for you:
Hillary Clinton is NOT our choice. We do not want a candidate that tells us what we cannot do,
that tells us we have to accept Republican lite, that hugs up to Wall Street with it's hand out
and tells us to never mind. We want a candidate that represents the Democratic wing of the Democratic
Party, that remembers and honors the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy,
Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy and others.
We believe that government exists to serve the needs of the public and the common good, to
level thy playing field and to encourage equity and justice for all.
CAF, Seattle 2 hours ago
Thanks NYT! I will check back on this article frequently as you update it for the latest messaging
and slant from Clinton HQ in Brooklyn! Keep up the good work, you've become my best source for
Hillary Clinton campaign information.
Sadly for her, it looks like New Hampshire has spoken. Accounts include that over 90% of Democratic
voters who valued a "trustworthy and honest" candidate voted for Sanders.
For my part, Hillary Clinton can't lose by a large enough margin to satisfy my desire to
watch the establishment turned on its ear this season. We the people have had it up to "here"
with neoconservative warfare abroad, profound wealth inequality, economic injustice writ large,
the power of banks over all of us, and the prioritizing of the wealth of finance and other industry
barons over the basic interests and well-being of the general public.
Let's hope for a Sanders landslide in *every* state.
onthecoast, LA CA 2 hours ago
Speaking as a Sanders supporter, we are NOT angry at the federal government (other than at
the "do nothing" Republicans). We are sick and tired of the 1% and the corporations sending our
jobs overseas (42,000 factories closed since 2001) and doing every other thing they can to eviscerate
the middle class. We are tired that they don't pay their share of taxes! We want Congress to stand
up to them and fix this!!
David, Sacramento 2 hours ago
Get ready for a brand new Hillary. What version is she up to right now? Hillary 5.0? She has
more hot fixes than Windows.
Here, There
Again, everything is phrased in words that tear down Trump and Sanders, after all they have
led in the polls for months and Sanders has home state advantage and he didn't beat Hillary, he
topped her, and the Iowa result is framed as a win for her, when the raw vote count has not been
released ...
Dick Purcell, Leadville, CO 2 hours ago
Still trying to mislead The People toward Hillary, NYTimes? Your front page says: "Bernie
Sanders defeated Hillary Clinton in the Democratic contest in a state where he has long held an
advantage." Better to say "in a state where the voters, like NYTimes readers who offer Comments,
have far better judgment than the lightweight election "news" and "opinion" team at the New York
Times.
Billy, up in the woods down by the river
This is about the electorate's rejection of the influence of shady money in politics. As
somebody noted a few years ago, the candidates should have to wear the logos of their sponsors,
like NASCAR drivers do.
raven55, Washington DC 2 hours ago
I don't think Bill did Hillary any favors by wagging his finger in front of the cameras
and scolding Bernie for an authentic campaign. It brought back lots of memories of 'I did not
have sexual relations with that woman' and reminded voters what they didn't particularly like
about either Clinton.
David Gregory, Deep Red South
Look at the exit polling- Bernie brought in a ton of Independents which the Democrats need
in order to win in November. He absolutely crushed Hillary with younger people - the future of
the party. He also won among women. Like Cornell West said: the Sanders Campaign is a love
train. Come aboard.
We are going to need everybody.
Shades of corruption in the USA political spectrum...
Notable quotes:
"... Recalled one attendee: 'She sounded more like a Goldman Sachs managing director.' ..."
"... Clinton, who received $225,000 for her appearance, praised the diversity of Goldman's workforce and the prominent roles played by women at the blue-chip investment bank and the tech firms present at the event. She spent no time criticizing Goldman or Wall Street more broadly for its role in the 2008 financial crisis. ..."
"... the Clinton campaign declined to comment further on calls that she release the transcripts of the three paid speeches she gave to Goldman Sachs, for which she earned a total of $675,000. ..."
"... So far, the Clinton campaign has shown no inclination to release the texts of her remarks to Goldman or anyone else. At a debate in New Hampshire last week, Clinton said she would "look into" the matter. A day after the debate, Clinton pollster Joel Benenson told reporters, "I don't think voters are interested in the transcripts of her speeches." On ABC's "This Week" on Sunday, Clinton pushed back even harder on calls to release the speech transcripts. ..."
"... Potential general election opponents could conceivably hit Clinton on her Wall Street ties but it would be much harder for them to do so than Sanders. Many of the GOP candidates - including Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, John Kasich, Chris Christie and Ted Cruz - have ties to Wall Street. Kasich worked at Lehman Brothers and Cruz's wife works for Goldman Sachs. Bush, Rubio and Christie have all competed hard for donations from the financial industry. ..."
"... But until Clinton gets clear of Sanders, her speeches to Goldman and other banks will likely continue to pose problems. Some progressive groups say beyond the speeches themselves, the fear is that, as president, Clinton would be too chummy with bankers and rely on Wall Street executives for senior positions like Treasury secretary. The highly paid speaking gigs just make these fears more intense. ..."
"... One thing that is clear is that Clinton could release the Goldman transcripts unilaterally if she chose to do so. ..."
Recalled one attendee: 'She sounded more like a Goldman Sachs managing director.'
When Hillary Clinton spoke to Goldman Sachs executives and technology titans at a summit in
Arizona in October of 2013, she spoke glowingly of the work the bank was doing raising capital
and helping create jobs, according to people who saw her remarks.
Clinton, who received $225,000 for her appearance, praised the diversity of Goldman's workforce
and the prominent roles played by women at the blue-chip investment bank and the tech firms
present at the event. She spent no time criticizing Goldman or Wall Street more broadly for its
role in the 2008 financial crisis.
"It was pretty glowing about us," one person who watched the event said. "It's so far from
what she sounds like as a candidate now. It was like a rah-rah speech. She sounded more like a
Goldman Sachs managing director."
At another speech to Goldman and its big asset management clients in New York in 2013, Clinton
spoke about how it wasn't just the banks that caused the financial crisis and that it was worth
looking at the landmark 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law to see what was working and what
wasn't.
"It was mostly basic stuff, small talk, chit-chat," one person who attended that speech said.
"But in this environment, it could be made to look really bad."
Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon dismissed the recollections as "pure trolling," while the
Clinton campaign declined to comment further on calls that she release the transcripts of the
three paid speeches she gave to Goldman Sachs, for which she earned a total of $675,000.
But the descriptions of Clinton's remarks highlight the trap in which the Democratic presidential
front-runner now finds herself. In a previous election cycle, no one would much care about the
former secretary of state's comments to Goldman. They represent the kind of boilerplate, happy
talk that highly paid speakers generally offer to their hosts. Nobody pays nearly a quarter of a
million dollars to have someone criticize their alleged misdeeds. But 2016 is different.
Clinton is under relentless attack from Vermont democratic socialist Bernie Sanders for her ties
to Wall Street, including paid speeches and campaign fundraising events. And she is now under
intense pressure from the media and some on the left to release transcripts of her remarks to
Goldman and other banks.
The problem is, if Clinton releases the transcripts, Sanders and other progressive candidates
could take even seemingly innocuous comments and make them sound as though Clinton is in the tank
for Wall Street. And if she doesn't, it makes her look like she has something very damaging to
hide.
"On the one hand, if Clinton discloses these speech transcripts that's not going to be the end of
it," said Dennis Kelleher, chief executive of financial reform group Better Markets. "I think you
are damned if you do and damned if you don't in this never ending game of gotcha. But as a
political matter, she should probably just disclose it all and disclose it quickly."
... ... ...
So far, the Clinton campaign has shown no inclination to release the texts of her remarks
to Goldman or anyone else. At a debate in New Hampshire last week, Clinton said she would "look
into" the matter. A day after the debate, Clinton pollster Joel Benenson told reporters, "I don't
think voters are interested in the transcripts of her speeches." On ABC's "This Week" on Sunday,
Clinton pushed back even harder on calls to release the speech transcripts.
... ... ...
People close to the Clinton campaign say the hope is that calls for release of the transcripts
will fade after New Hampshire, assuming the former first lady can defeat Sanders in South
Carolina and the mass of mostly Southern states that vote on March 1 in the Super Tuesday
primaries.
Potential general election opponents could conceivably hit Clinton on her Wall Street ties
but it would be much harder for them to do so than Sanders. Many of the GOP candidates -
including Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, John Kasich, Chris Christie and Ted Cruz - have
ties to Wall Street. Kasich worked at Lehman Brothers and Cruz's wife works for Goldman Sachs.
Bush, Rubio and Christie have all competed hard for donations from the financial industry.
But until Clinton gets clear of Sanders, her speeches to Goldman and other banks will likely
continue to pose problems. Some progressive groups say beyond the speeches themselves, the fear
is that, as president, Clinton would be too chummy with bankers and rely on Wall Street
executives for senior positions like Treasury secretary. The highly paid speaking gigs just make
these fears more intense.
"The big-picture question voters care about is: Who does a politician surround themselves with
and will they hold accountable people they have a close relationship with?" said Stephanie
Taylor, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. "Hillary Clinton would reassure
voters if she said she would appoint a Treasury secretary not from Wall Street, an attorney
general and SEC chair with a proven record of holding Wall Street accountable, and generally work
with Elizabeth Warren to stop the revolving door between industry and government."
Kelleher echoed that sentiment, saying Clinton could blow the speech question off the radar if
she could more clearly articulate an approach to Wall Street that would ease anxiety on the left.
Previous comments, including that she took the $675,000 from Goldman because "that's what they
offered," have not done the trick.
"I don't know how she does it, but she has got to get to the fundamental issue and address it in
a way that convinces voters that, no matter what money she has gotten from Wall Street, when she
is president she will represent the American people and do what's right," Kelleher said. "Until
she does that in a convincing way, stories like this will still be a problem for her."
One thing that is clear is that Clinton could release the Goldman transcripts unilaterally if
she chose to do so.
BuzzFeed reported over the weekend that contracts for two paid speeches - not to Goldman -
made clear that Clinton owned exclusive rights to the content and any reproductions of her
remarks. A person familiar with the matter said that even if Goldman did have the ability to
block Clinton from releasing her remarks, the bank would never exercise that right and would
allow the speeches to be released.
Sanders, either intentionally or not behaved in an very non-confrontational manner toward her. Moderators
were even worse. Rachel is pretty intelligent girl quite able to understand that Hillary Clinton is
a criminal. Just due to her Iraq voting, so say nothing about other issues like email-gate, Wall
Street speeches and flow of money from foreign donors into Clinton foundation while being a Secretary
of State
They way she was treated was soft balling all the major issues with her candidacy. This is especially
true about two more recent scandals: email scandal and her Wall street speeches. The real question
here is eligibility of such a person to any elected position. This issue was swiped under the
carpet both by moderators and Sanders. Clinton should be unemployable in the USA government in any capacity,
by any reasonable standards.
How can any ordinary voter with IQ above 100 vote for this psychopathic warmonger in Democratic
primary (I would understand Republicans voting for her - she is a neoconservative ) is an interesting
question about US electorate psychology and "What's wrong with Kansas" effect of constant brainwashing.
Looks like Americans so hopelessly brainwashed that they live is some kind of artificial reality?
It might well be that Albright endorsement is a kiss of death for Hillary Warmonger Clinton. Albright
was an architect of Yugoslavia war and endorsed killing of Iraqi children via economic blockade. She
is a blood thrusting zombie on her own.
Notable quotes:
"... But it was the other things that really really bothered me. The stupid and factually unsupported
meme that Clinton will get more done because she is more pragmatic and understands how it works more.
That being the Secretary of State means that Clinton has a better grasp of the world than any one out
there regardless of her said record at State. And that Sanders doesn't have either an understanding
of what he is asking to get into AND that he doesn't have the organization needed to get elected. I
thought the latter idea got destroyed when it turned out that despite spending millions less than the
candidate who could not lose, Sanders actually had as many field operation sites in states with later
primaries as Clinton did, and in quite a few cases more. Because, once again she was inevitable, and
didn't have to worry about those states. But for the most part there was no addressing these flights
of fancy. ..."
Spent some time at a foreign affairs lecture. Between my conversation with a twenty something
Clinton supporter, AND the lecturer and two old women in the audience I can tell you denial is
deep.
First off the younger woman did admit that Steinem and Albright were not good for Clinton,
but she also brought up the Bernie supporters are mean to people meme. Now I have no doubt some
are, I can also tell you from experience that the Mulder vs. Scully wars were nasty and not pretty.
People say mean things on the internet all the time, and maybe it isn't 'right', but Sanders needs
to stop taking this stuff seriously and say flat out that both sides have supporters with more
passion than common sense. And that only the publicly campaign acknowledged and requested support
needs a response from either campaign. IOW, he is not responsible because someone is mean on the
internet and he needs to stop apologizing or acknowledging it because it does get equated with
the nasty and condescending crap from actual surrogates like Steinem and Albright and Chelsea.
But it was the other things that really really bothered me. The stupid and factually unsupported
meme that Clinton will get more done because she is more pragmatic and understands how it works
more. That being the Secretary of State means that Clinton has a better grasp of the world than
any one out there regardless of her said record at State. And that Sanders doesn't have either
an understanding of what he is asking to get into AND that he doesn't have the organization needed
to get elected. I thought the latter idea got destroyed when it turned out that despite spending
millions less than the candidate who could not lose, Sanders actually had as many field operation
sites in states with later primaries as Clinton did, and in quite a few cases more. Because, once
again she was inevitable, and didn't have to worry about those states. But for the most part there
was no addressing these flights of fancy.
I'm really going to have to get my act together and put together a record of the Sanders and
Clinton accomplishments as elected officials. And perhaps send it out without identifying who
did which just so the shock can be greater when people realize how much more Sanders has done
with his time. Although the people smart enough to remember that Sanders has many more years of
experience, mayor, Congressman, Senator won't be fooled. Only the idiots who think being married
to the elected official is experience won't. As for that other pragmatic myth, maybe I should
also supply them with a easy cheat sheet of Congressional and Senate seats that are up for grabs
and what the counts are for majorities while I'm at it. And point out that while there is a long
really long shot of retaking the Senate, the House is going to remain Republican. And follow up
that Republican majorities that despise Clinton won't care how pragmatic she is, anymore than
they gave a damn that Obama kept trying to offer them so many things they wanted.
Elissa Heyman,
Please put that comparison out, or what each candidate has actually done as an elected official,
so people can see; that is a really missing piece of information. That meme is absurd because
it is BERNIE who is the progressive that gets things done, and across the aisle.
Well, I was a Clinton supporter in 2008. This campaign is nothing. I have no doubt - granted,
I can't bear to do the research - that I could find people spouting the most vile misogyny then
who are yammering about Berniebros today. Democratic tribalism…
Jeff W,
I'm really going to have to get my act together and put together a record of the Sanders
and Clinton accomplishments as elected officials.
Here's a start: "Bernie Gets It Done: Sanders' Record of Pushing Through Major Reforms Will
Surprise You" (AlterNet).
For Hillary Clinton, there's
this: "The Hillary Clinton record: In the Senate, she reached across the aisle, but the old
ways there are no more" (Yahoo! Politics).
"... Victory of Reagan was the victory of neoliberalism, or quite coup in the USA. Much like Bolsheviks coup in 1917. Essentially a change of social system. Or neoliberal revolution, if you wish. The end of New Deal Capitalism. ..."
"... Bernie is a centrist democrat by European standards. He does not offer anything other then the resurrecting of remnants of a New Deal. But social situation is different and the state is fully captured by neoliberals. So to me he looks more like Don Quixote. ..."
"... He does not have a formal party and without a party any politician is a hostage of the current elite. Or you need to be a retired general and has absolute loyalty of your former troops. ..."
"... Unless he wins the civil war within Democratic Party against the currently dominant Third Way faction (Clinton faction) and becomes the leader of the Party he is doomed one way or the other. The elite is pretty inventive and vicious. They do not take hostages. I doubt that he can achieve that. The party is already sold. ..."
"... And even if he becomes POTUS he capabilities will be very limited. He will face "shadow state" in full glory. And it's the "shadow state" which rules the country. That's what iron law of oligarchy is about. "You want a friend in this city? [Washington, DC.] Get a dog!" Harry S. Truman ..."
Victory of Reagan was the victory of neoliberalism, or quite coup in the USA. Much like
Bolsheviks coup in 1917. Essentially a change of social system. Or neoliberal revolution, if you
wish. The end of New Deal Capitalism.
Bernie is a centrist democrat by European standards. He does not offer anything other then
the resurrecting of remnants of a New Deal. But social situation is different and the state is
fully captured by neoliberals. So to me he looks more like Don Quixote.
The story follows the adventures of a nameless hidalgo who reads so many chivalric
romances that he loses his sanity and decides to set out to revive chivalry, undo wrongs, and
bring justice to the world, under the name Don Quixote.
I wish Bernie good lack and want him to win, but he is in a very precarious situation.
He does not have a formal party and without a party any politician is a hostage of the current
elite. Or you need to be a retired general and has absolute loyalty of your former troops.
Unless he wins the civil war within Democratic Party against the currently dominant Third
Way faction (Clinton faction) and becomes the leader of the Party he is doomed one way or the
other. The elite is pretty inventive and vicious. They do not take hostages. I doubt that he can
achieve that. The party is already sold.
And even if he becomes POTUS he capabilities will be very limited. He will face "shadow
state" in full glory. And it's the "shadow state" which rules the country. That's what iron law
of oligarchy is about. "You want a friend in this city? [Washington, DC.] Get a dog!" ― Harry
S. Truman
Sanders adherents look to me somewhat similar to Occupy Wall Street movement. He runs his campaign
on the indignation of people with status quo, with unfair and corrupt system. In other words he
runs on a negative platform of addressing injustices and resurrecting the elements of the New
Deal .
But the truth is that this is impossible without dismantling neoliberalism and he probably
does not even think in those terms. As if Wall Street allows him to introduce Tobin tax
on financial transactions to finance state college education without mortal fight.
In such a situation usually a nationalist like Trump has better chances. In comparison with
other Repugs he at least has some paleoconservative tendencies.
Sen. Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign raised $33.6 million in the last three months
of 2015 and another $20 million in January alone, the campaign announced Sunday. The campaign
further stated that 1.3 million people have made 3.25 million donations to Sanders' run - a
record number of donors at this stage in a presidential campaign.
The Sanders camp said that the fourth quarter total will show 70 percent of the campaign's
donations came from small donors. Further, the $20 million it reports to have raised in January
came almost exclusively from online donations averaging $27 a piece.
Last I checked, Occupy didn't scale like that. (That's not to say that donating to a campaign
is equal to a movement; it isn't. But a mailing list of people who've demonstrated tangible commitment
is certainly a good start.)
For the rest of your comment, Rome wasn't sacked in a day.
3.14e-9
That's not to say that donating to a campaign is equal to a movement; it isn't. But a mailing
list of people who've demonstrated tangible commitment is certainly a good start.
It's not just the people making donations, but the army of volunteers who are doing phone banking
and organizing events on their own. Now, I suppose all candidates have an army of volunteers.
O had them. But the day after they won his ground war for him, he sent them home.
Bernie says he wants the army to stay involved, and I think it could happen
if he really means what he says, and
the ground forces can be converted to something like a civil engineers corps.
It may be. I just think that after the election could be too late. What if there's another
Florida 2000 or Ohio 2004, for example?
Jeff W,
Since this post mentions the Democratic candidates' competing "theories of change"
here is Jeff Spross in The Week on "How class could eventually remake the Democratic
Party" with a somewhat different take:
This is where Bernie Sanders' revolt within the Democratic Party - which in many ways mirrors
Trump's GOP revolt - comes into play. His thesis is that the Democrats need to go hard left
on economics. So he's picked a few key class-based priorities - the minimum wage, campaign
finance, single payer healthcare, and infrastructure investment - and proposed truly massive
and aspirational goals. His idea isn't to moderate on social issues (though he doesn't play
them up as much), since political science shows that while poorer voters are more socially
conservative, they vote based on pocketbook issues.
His idea is to bring the Democrats' economic stances up to speed with the progress
they've made on social and identity issues, and make them a genuinely economically leftist
party again. This will lose them upper class and donor class votes. But so what? They'll solidify
their support among black Americans, Latinos, and women; pull a lot of new working- and lower-class
whites into the party; and leave a lot of poorer Americans who currently don't vote with the
impression they've finally go[t] something to vote for. Sanders' position isn't simply
that this is the right thing to do. It's that reliance on economic populism specifically will
set up the Democrats with far more durable majorities in the future.
By contrast, Hillary Clinton's approach is basically to preserve as long as possible
the existing coalition - with its top-heavy reliance on upper class voters. She certainly
isn't backsliding on economics: She has come down in favor of a $12 minimum wage and has ideas
on campaign finance reform. But her incremental building on ObamaCare is paltry to put it mildly.
And her approach to the economic issues in general is like her approach to everything else:
lots of tinkering, but nothing super ambitious. She's also come out swinging on identity and
social issues like access to abortion, voting rights, immigration and gender equality.
The differences between Clinton and Sanders are often chalked up to "theory of change"
stuff, or idealism vs. practicality. Which isn't quite right. It's more about competing theories
of what the Democratic coalition needs to become.
"... "You take a guy like Cruz, people are liking the Cruz - they think he's for the free market, and [in reality] he's owned by Goldman Sachs. I mean, he and Hillary have more in common than we would have with either Cruz or Trump or any of them so I just don't think there is much picking," Paul said of the Texas senator on Fox Business' "Varney Company on Friday. ..."
"... "On occasion, Bernie comes up with libertarian views when he talks about taking away the cronyism on Wall Street, so in essence he's right, and occasionally he voted against war," the former Texas congressman said when asked if there was a candidate who was truly for the free market. ..."
"... Goldman makes loans for specific reasons. They do not act like a commercial bank, take deposits for the public, etc., by any stretch of the imagination. For you to get a loan form Goldilocks, you either got to cure Lloyd's cancer or have something they want. And if it's a personal loan like to Teddie, it's his soul pledged as collateral. ..."
"... Plus, Mrs Evil is a Goldman employee.... circles within circles. He's lock stock and barrel, Goldman interests. ..."
"... I don't really think it matters who is captain of the titanic at this point, but this shit sure is entertaining. If Trump or Bernie pop up on the ballot I think I'll head to the polls. ..."
"... Paul is right on the other D-bags, they might as well be the same candidate. ..."
Now that Rand Paul is out of the race for the White House, Politico's Eliza Collins reports
that his father Ron Paul, who ran in 2008 and 2012, isn't impressed by Ted Cruz's attempts to
pick up the "free market" libertarian banner.
"You take a guy like Cruz, people are liking the Cruz - they think he's for the free market,
and [in reality] he's owned by Goldman Sachs. I mean, he and Hillary have more in common than we
would have with either Cruz or Trump or any of them so I just don't think there is much picking,"
Paul said of the Texas senator on Fox Business' "Varney & Company" on Friday.
Surprisingly, the elder Paul seemed more attracted to the views of Vermont Sen. Bernie
Sanders, who is giving Hillary Clinton a run for her money in the Democratic primary.
"On occasion, Bernie comes up with libertarian views when he talks about taking away the
cronyism on Wall Street, so in essence he's right, and occasionally he voted against war," the
former Texas congressman said when asked if there was a candidate who was truly for the free
market.
"It's hard to find anybody -- since Rand is out of it -- anybody that would take a libertarian
position, hardcore libertarian position on privacy, on the war issue and on economic policy,"
Paul added.
"So I always say: You can search for a long time, but you're not gonna find anybody in the
Republican or Democratic primary that even comes slightly close to ever being able to claim
themselves a libertarian," he concluded.
JustObserving
That's worse than being owned by Satan. America is a fascist police state run by a Deep
State composed of a triad of the MIC, Wall Street (led by Goldman) and Spooks who spy on
everyone.
Enejoy your entertainment called elections
Scooby Dooby Doo
Goldman needs some dancing girls and boys. Some type of entertainment. Anything. This is
America god damn it. Bread and circus. Without it I feel like I'm getting robbed.
(make it diverse)
Dollarmedes
Ted Cruz took out a $1 million loan from GS, an amount he could easily repay. Somehow, this
means that GS "owns" him. That would be like saying that the banks own everyone who ever took
out a mortgage. Somehow, I doubt consumers see it that way.
knukles -> Dollarmedes
Goldman makes "loans" for specific reasons. They do not act like a commercial bank,
take deposits for the public, etc., by any stretch of the imagination.
For you to get a loan form Goldilocks, you either got to cure Lloyd's cancer or have something
they want. And if it's a personal loan like to Teddie, it's his soul pledged as collateral.
Plus, Mrs Evil is a Goldman employee.... circles within circles. He's lock stock and
barrel, Goldman interests.
hobopants
I don't really think it matters who is captain of the titanic at this point, but this
shit sure is entertaining. If Trump or Bernie pop up on the ballot I think I'll head to the
polls.
I'll cast a vote for either one, not because I think they are "messiah" material, but they
seem to be the ones most likely to full throttle this bitch into the ice berg.
Paul is right on the other D-bags, they might as well be the same candidate.
Far more productive to focus on doing what you can on an individual level instead of worrying
about this pointless shit.
Freddie
Fox is shit but so is ALL Tv and ALL Zollywood. I really like Ron Paul and out of all the
idiots on TV, and I have not watched for a decade, Stuart Varney is a pretty straight shooter.
steveo77
Clintons Emails Released Clearly Show She Knew the Dangers to USA from Fukushima and
Covered It Up I reviewed several thousand Hillary Clinton emails that were released after
court order, with an emphasis on Fukushima:
1) She was immediately informed of the dangers of Fukushima, and the actions that people
should take to mitigate radiation damage, Mar 12th USA time.
2) She was participating daily in the discussion of Fukushima, until.....
Anderson Cooper speaks with Trump about the 2016 race and his own political donations.
MobTheGamer 4 months ago
Fuckin CNN. You're just a bunch of biased shits!
fgill76 3 months ago
I like Mr. Trump because he is NOT a politician (sociopath), he is a successful
businessman. I hope that after Mr. Trump is elected he fixes congress by installing
"term-limits", 12 years max.
Anon Mous 2 weeks ago
Bernie Sanders for President!
Donald Trump for vice president!
Hillary for Prison!
MISTERPRESIDENTELECT 1 month ago
This Anderson is a very stupid guy who doesn't understand anything about the building
industry, he's only goal is to be a dumbass troll
joe 1 month ago
Anderson ... honestly expects trump to do backgrounds on every contractor that he
employs? pathetic! build that wall!
Ronnie Bishop 1 month ago
I just hope the stupid news media, like Wolf wolf Blitzer asks Hillary the same dumb
questions he ask Sarah Palin. Hillary is almost in tears now. And I hope all the late night
shows cut her daughter down like a whore on national TV. Like does that Chealsy know who the
real father is?
Bryan Barrera 1 month ago
The reason why Cnn wants to make trump look bad it's because Time warner( owner of Cnn) is
supporting Hilary's Clinton campaign and they want trump to fail or look bad . If Cnn manages
to help Hillary win , Hillary will return the favor of course . Nothing is free.
Shalom Zhong 1 month ago
Anderson has no better question to interview Trump. It is more important for people to know
what Trump can do for the Nation in the future if elected as next President. Who in this world
can have a perfect past record in a imperfect society amongst imperfect people, especially in
the business and political circles?
ShadowPBPBC 1 month ago (edited)
lol anderson cooper threw alot of money to Shrillary and cooper's trying to nail down trump
and cooper is shot down so hard so fast the flames aren't just from his flaming homosexuality.
looking back on this even 5 months later coopers bought into Shrillary's lies that are now
plain as daylight with out dispute, and trump shot straight and honest and his words still
hold more truth and honesty than the entire history of the democrat party combined.
Annette Rizo 2 months ago
Donald Trump, who gives you the right to build a "wall" to remove the Mexican immigrants
from this nation. While you are in business meetings these immigrant workers are doing the
jobs that many U.S citizens would never do. Also recall that this country , the one that
you're trying to run for presidency, was and IS STILL being built up by immigrant workers. You
also may want to look back on your American history because the only real Americans are the
Native Americans. Remember that the next you think about citizenship and deportation. Remember
where your ancestors came from.
From old neoliberal crook Bill who
abolished Glass Steagall and sold democratic party to Wall Street, enriching himself and his
wife in the process to the tune of 210 million . Which, along with other factors,
caused the financial crisis later on. "Speech business" proved to be quite lucrative for
Clinton family if you first sold your country. But the fact that defenders of Killary
now need pseudonyms to avoid attach is really interesting.
Notable quotes:
"... "She and other people who have gone online to defend Hillary, to explain why they supported her, have been subject to vicious trolling and attacks that are literally too profane often, not to mention sexist, to repeat." ..."
"... the liberal journalist Joan Walsh had faced what he called "unbelievable personal attacks" for writing positively about Mrs. Clinton. ..."
Mr. Clinton's most pointed remarks may have been when he took aim at Sanders supporters who,
he said, use misogynistic language in attacking Mrs. Clinton. He told the story of a female
"progressive" blogger who defended Mrs. Clinton online through a pseudonym because, he said, the
vitriol from Mr. Sanders's backers was so unrelenting.
The days between the nation's first and second presidential nominating contest are intense –
and often emotional, for voters and candidates alike.
"She and other people who have gone online to defend Hillary, to explain why they
supported her, have been subject to vicious trolling and attacks that are literally too profane
often, not to mention sexist, to repeat." Mr. Clinton, growing more demonstrative, added
that the liberal journalist Joan Walsh had faced what he called "unbelievable personal
attacks" for writing positively about Mrs. Clinton.
In a demonstration of how engrossed he is in this campaign, Mr. Clinton recited the names of
the regional newspapers that are backing his wife's campaign and, in a rarity, mentioned Mr.
Sanders by name.
"Bernie took what they said was good about him and put it in his own endorsements," said Mr.
Clinton, fuming that Mr. Sanders used complimentary language from a Nashua Telegraph endorsement
of Mrs. Clinton in his own campaign appeals.
Then, reflecting the fury among Clinton campaign advisers over what they see as the kinds of
behavior Mr. Sanders gets away with, Mr. Clinton noted that the senator's campaign had used the
image of an American Legion officer in New Hampshire without his permission.
"If you point it out, it just shows how tied you are to the establishment," he said.
In a response, Tad Devine, a senior adviser to Mr. Sanders, called it "disappointing that
President Clinton has decided to launch these attacks" and said Mr. Sanders would continue to
focus on his message against the rigged economy, campaign finance corruption and income
inequality. "Obviously the race has changed in New Hampshire and elsewhere in recent days," Mr.
Devine said.
I would like to see a woman as President, but just not Hillary. She voted for the war
in Iraq more...
She is also the face of the U$A's bombing of Libya. Remember "WEу came. We saw. He died" I
too a would like to see a woman pres. To bad Jill Stein has been so marginalized by the "two
party" system.
Just a bunch of old gay rags that are clinically insane, Albright a killer of millions,
Hillary a killer of millions and Gloria a killer of millions babies...The are hideous and all
three belong behind bars.
Roman Soiko 1
hour ago
I would like to see a woman as President, but
just not Hillary. She voted for the war in
Iraq and she is to expand American military
industrilal complex even further than Obama.
Hillary is not the woman I would like to see
as President.
"... I think Sanders would struggle in the general election and the repugs would have a propaganda field day with things he said and did in the past. As a Brooklyn Jew, hes already got that against him. ..."
"... Trump is a Trojan Horse in the Repug party. A social liberal, notwithstanding all his nativist demagoguery. And probably averse to foreign policy interventionism, as its bad for business (in the sense that it ultimately fails to promote the long term national interest). I think if he gain the White House he will be a bitter pill to most establishment repugs who will see him as a betrayer. ..."
"... On the Republican side, when Trump launched everyone thought he was a buffoon. Jeb Bush had amassed $100 million and had all the support of the elites. Ted Cruz was aiming to consolidate the evangelical Tea Party supporters. As it has so far turned out Trump and his amazing media skills and his excellent reading of the current psyche of working class middle America has overturned the apple cart. ..."
"... Now, by picking a fight with Fox, the big dog, the sole source of mainstream TV information for Republicans, he is showing his supporters that he is dominant and that he will fight for them and America as he is fighting Fox. ..."
"... Using his incredible media skills he has eviscerated the Bush dynasty by labeling Jeb as low energy and ridiculing him in his tweets and in the debates. His take down of Cruz at the last debate by pulling the 9/11 card and standing up for NY was something to behold. ..."
"... On the Democratic side, while Sanders has a great message and personal integrity, he does not have the charisma of a great retail politician to overcome Hillarys support by the Democratic party establishment, unions, blacks, latinos, seniors and Wall St. ..."
"... the primary calendar after New Hampshire does not favor Sanders - with South Carolina, Nevada and many southern states in Super Tuesday. ..."
"... Sanders support is primarily among the millennial generation and white liberals on the coasts. ..."
"... His only choice is to take down Hillary hard on her ethics, judgment and most importantly the potential to be indicted on felony charges. But, Sanders does not have the personality to engage in hard scrabble politics like Hillary does. IMO consequently, Hillary wins the Democratic party nomination. ..."
"... Most americans want a tough and successful businessman to care about the weak economy. They dont trust the cheated wife of a ex-president and a failed secretary of state as a president. ..."
"... which is really an acceleration of what Sanders portends the split of the Dem a Rep parties into a rump extreme right wing, a majority Center right (Clintonesque) and a more lefty party representing the `Sanderistas` and fellow travelers - democratic socialitic redistributionists ..."
"... Hillary is neocon agent and greedy, Trump is egomaniac but shrewd, Sanders dont know foreign policy, Cruz is good for Vatican, Rubio bashes Obama very well, Bush has no chance and none of them are worthy of my vote. ..."
"... Whoever wins, neocons have everything lined up for Iran invasion. ..."
"... Sanders campaign slogan is: A Future to Believe In (emphasis is the campaigns), eerily reminiscent of Change You Can Believe In . ..."
"... The oligarchy/deep state will not give up power willingly. If Trump and Sanders present a genuine threat, theyll be neutralized in one way or another, even if one makes it into office. But its telling that the two main deep state candidates, Clinton and Bush, are failing. The deep states control is slipping, not least because theyve gotten lazy and arrogant. Why are they relying on candidates with so much baggage? ..."
"... I wonder if Sanders refusal to present a serious foreign policy is an acknowledgment that the president no longer has real control over foreign policy. Certainly Obama doesnt seem to. ..."
"... Trump, being apolitical, and not exactly a dark horse, could ignite and inflame the disappointments of all that is corrupt and forsaken in America. He is a shoo-in to win ..."
"... Trump attacks the establishment. Even people in his own Party. Its a big part of his appeal - saying things that others wouldnt dare to. And unlike Sanders, he has reserved the right to run as an independent ..."
"... A two-Party system is inherently flawed as described here: Truth-Out: How Two-Party Political Systems Bolster Capitalism . ..."
"... Sanders had a meeting yesterday with Obama....wonder what veiled threats were discussed then. What dark suits were in there to explain to Sanders the reality behind the curtain? How will the Bern come out in the coming weeks? Will he play the part or be a sacrificial lamb? ..."
"... Billmon pointed out a lot of similarities between Trump and Berlusconi ..."
"... I love that we keep hearing Sanders cannot win the general because he hasnt faced the right-wing attack machine. Its hilarious. The voices that keep saying that, of course, are a part of the truly massive attack machine -- the mainstream (the NYT, the WaPo; what the right would call liberal media ) attack machine, one much bigger and louder than anything the right has, and which is already going full-throttle against Sanders. ..."
"... Hes feared because even though hed ultimately be forced to govern as a moderate pragmatic liberal, he would nevertheless drag the national conversation leftward. There is no outcome more unacceptable to our liberal ruling class. ..."
"... Sanders as president would be able to throw sand in the eyes again of the world populace just like Obama did and might be able to keep the vassals at bay while destroying one nation after the other, just like Obama. ..."
"... Mostly agree with your analysis, but why would Sanders need big money if people are ignoring the places where such money is spent and instead helping out in kind? The anti-Establishmentarianism is fairly thick over here, at least on the interwebs ..."
"... if I hear one more word from him about Assads CW -- he could have known and should have known thats bunk -- its time to get a boat. ..."
"... What difference? Not much. Military power, including (or especially?) nukes, is not something politicians have much influence over. The power of folks like Lockheeds Bruce Jackson and Norm Anderson have power that dwarfs that of elected folk. see eg, Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex. ..."
"... Ive been seeing Internet news that the FBI is ready to hit Hillary Rodham Clinton with criminal charges over her use of a private email server during the time she served as US Secretary of State (2009 - 2013) and over the use of financial donations received by the Clinton Foundation while she was State Secretary and whether the monies were deployed into Department of State contracts. She surely cannot continue campaigning for the Presidency if she is facing criminal charges, can she? ..."
"... I put money on Trump many months ago at 25-1. Trump will trounce either Hillary or Sanders. ..."
"... I think youre right. If tonight Foxs ratings tank, Trump will be perceived as strong by middle America. ..."
"... His takin the fight to Roger Ailes is brilliant. ..."
"... His interview with Bill OReilly was amazing with blowhard Bill pleading with Trump to attend the debate. ..."
"... I think that most commentators are missing the bigger picture here. The success of Sanders nor Trump has nothing to do with their respective qualities , and everything to do with the simple fact that both are standing against the anointed candidates of their respective parties. ..."
"... The American voting public understands that US politics is now a battle between the neocons and the neoliberals, and that as far as those two groups are concerned the wellbeing of Mr and Mrs Joe Average counts for less than nothing. ..."
"... It sure looks like the Donald has gone and chosen George W. Bushs warmongering United States Ambassador to the United Nations John R. Bolton as one of his top three foreign policy advisers. Damn. ..."
"... Donald Trumps Curious Relationship With an Iraq War Hawk http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/08/donald-trump-john-bolton-iraq-war ..."
"... Looks like Trump on the Repub side. Clinton certainly has the Dem establishment lined up, but that may not be enough. The chances are better than even that the FBI will find her in violation of the law for putting classified stuff in her unclassified email, and possibly corrupt confluence of Sec State, her foundation and Bill. Sanders is who he is while shes got no beliefs beyond whats best for her. ..."
"... Sanders is strong in Iowa, 50% +/-3%. Delegates are proportional there so they split no matter who wins . He will win New Hampshire. Between them that will be enough to spook the party big time and open up the rest of the primaries. Everywhere he has to turn enthusiasm into turnout, and after the first two primaries convince minority voters to trust him. ..."
"... Sanders and Trump are plowing a lot of the same fields. They are asking the country Are you better off than you were 8, 16, 24, or 36 years ago? For 90% or more the answer is no. People are angry as hell and tired of real wages stagnant since 1978. Bloomberg cant touch that, but if he draws enough centrist weenies to win a couple of states he could throw the election into the House. That could give us president Ryan. ..."
"... There are three active players possibly our next warmonger-in-chief - Hillary, Trump and Bernie. Who gonna be? They are the same not a dime different. Regardless who, endless wars more or less the same continue. ..."
"... I think your comment that the three candidates foreign policy is largely identical misses the critical point. Its true that all three want to maintain and expand the American Empire. But its also true that Gorbachev never intended to destroy the Soviet Union. In some ways the current situation in America reminds me of the Soviet Union in its last decades. The whole system seems corrupt and hypocritical to millions of people. But the power system seems so entrenched and resistant to change that its hard for many people to see any way that things can change. Most of the potential leaders are really old. The economy is terrible for structural reasons. ..."
"... Clinton is a tool of the oligarchy to the bone. If shes elected, nothing will change, and things will keep getting worse and worse. But both Trump and Sanders do seem to want to change some things. (Different things) Neither is completely controlled or trusted by the deep state because they are both just a little out of the mainstream. Trump is a narcissistic megalomaniac. Sanders may think he could be the next FDR. Both would, if elected, find it hard to do the things they would like to do. But either one might unintentionally disrupt the existing power structure enough to unleash much greater changes then they originally intended. ..."
"... Sanders will be 75 on election day. Ronald Reagan was nearly 74 when began his first term and his age was an issue in his re-election - but everyone knew by then who his advisors and appointees were Ronald Reagan was 69 years, 349 days at the time of his first inauguration. ..."
"... The people of America are pissed, but havent figured out who is behind our demise ..."
"... If Trump actually listens to Bolton we are in for big trouble indeed, and so is his campaign. Bolton is emblematic of a true wacko. It might be just a slur to weaken him, that report. Trump had better jettison all the warmongering ziowhore idiots or he wont be elected, its that simple. ..."
"... I cant see bernie going anywhere. He might win Iowa, but his brand will not carry over, no matter what the polls currently say. It will be Howard Dean all over again, with all the older voters flooding in to vote for safety. ..."
"... Trump toes the Establishment line in the White House. He is an ego-driven candidate who has made his mountain of gold selling high-end real estate to other rich people. He has no ideological principles. But he has shrewdly diagnosed the citizenrys appetite for destruction of the D.C. status quo. ..."
"... One thing I think a Bloomberg third-party run would do -- and hallelujah! -- it would shatter the Democratic Party because it would out the party leaders, people like Ed Rendell and Rahm Emanuel, as being more loyal to class, the 1%, than the organization. ..."
"... Sanders needs to make the e-mails an issue (and, by extension, Hillarys character) or lose the race. But Sanders doesnt seem interested in doing so - he seems to value Party and personal relationships over winning. ..."
"... But even if Sanders wont attack Hillary, he would benefit if the FBI makes a recommendation of legal action against Hillary. Its unclear when or if that might happen, but it would cause voters to see Hillary as non-viable, and result in a switch to Sanders or OMalley. In the end, its possible ( though unlikely at this point) that no candidate would have a majority of delegates. ..."
"... Status quo is the order of the day, nothing will change, it is foreordained, baked into the cake, doG itself couldnt change the outcome even if it wanted, this is the design of the existing political process put in place by those who own the country, and there isnt a blessed thing you can do about it. ..."
"... You are completely correct about Trump. He is not as monochromatic on issues as some might think. But neither does he impart a sense of confidence in his ability to govern or clarity of direction. Insofar as that goes, the same is true of the rest. ..."
"... Trump is not constructed of the same poseur fabric of Hillary or Obama. Some of what he echoes, such as a desire to develop better relations with Russia contradict the Republican playbook for deprecating anything which challenges US world domination. ..."
"... It is a pity Putin must play by the International Banking Cartels handbook. Or must he...? Is he choosing to save the world at the edge of collapse...? He can see it. Nevertheless, Iran was not broken. Still in control. Still issuing its own decree. Law from another great age. Law forbidding usury for the ages. Vote chaos. Vote Trump. ..."
"... Hillary mused that her read on Bloombergs announcement was that he would enter the race if she were not the nominee - an unusual remark for someone that has worked hard to portray herself as inevitable and Sanders as unelectable. ..."
"... If Hillary chose to fight the charges, she would probably have to pin the blame on one of her aids. But doing so would open a can of worms as it could shatter the trust of many Clintonites (a powerful network that the Clintons have built over many many years). ..."
Say what you will about Donald Trump but he knows how to market himself. Staging a feud with Fox
News and
abstaining from tonight's Republican candidate debate gives him more media coverage than taking
part. He is already the front runner of the Republican candidates. More debating could only endanger
that position. Staying away and making a fuzz about it gives him a bigger lead.
That Trump knows marketing well gives me some doubt about his real positions. Who owns him? Who
pays his campaign? Answers to these questions are likely more revealing than the fascist dog-whistle
politics he publicly emphasizes. He seems to favor neither neoconservative nor liberal interventionist
foreign policy. That would be welcome change.
On the democratic side I do not see a chance for Clinton to win. I believe that the American people
have had enough of the Clintons. If she would win the nomination she would lose in the presidential
election as many voters would abstain. Her policy record is abysmal. Yes she has experience - of
misjudgement and not learning from it. In interior policies she is clearly in the hands of Wall Street
and the big banks. Her "liberal" image is all fake. In foreign policy she
is "the vessel into which many interventionists are pouring their hopes":
"If she pursues a policy which we think she will pursue," [top neocon Robert Kagan] added, "it's
something that might have been called neocon, but clearly her supporters are not going to call
it that; they are going to call it something else."
Sanders is hard to see as president. His domestic policies are somewhat comparable to middle-of-the-road
European social-democrats. His foreign policy stand isn't clear. While not an interventionist he
supports the colonists in Palestine. The people obviously favor him over Clinton but he will need
big money for the big campaign should he get the nomination. To whom would he sell out?
The Republican party is coming around in favor of Trump. The party big-wigs believe he has no
real positions, that they can manipulate him. That is probably wrong. The Democratic party machine
is clearly in favor of Clinton. Would it try to sabotage Sanders if he wins primary after primary?
Could they throw in another plausible candidate?
My gut instinct say it will be Sanders against Trump with a voter turnout advantage for Sanders.
What is your take? I agree that it might be Sanders against Trump and agree that Sanders may have
a turnout advantage. What Trump will have as an advantage, if the global plutocrats deem it so, is
a recession and domestic/international violence that will call into question ongoing Dem reign in
the White house.
And none see or question control of the situation by the global plutocrats and private finance
so their hegemony continues. If they let Sanders win, there will be method to their madness which
will show in time. All this said, I still think that an outside wild card winner could be injected
into the race in the next couple of months before that window of opportunity closes.
I think Sanders would struggle in the general election and the repugs would have a propaganda
field day with things he said and did in the past. As a Brooklyn Jew, he's already got that against
him. How would he govern? largely at loggerheads with Congress. Foreign policy? An R2P interventionist
and Netanyahoo would have (as LBJ liked to say) his pecker in his pocket.
Trump is a Trojan Horse in the Repug party. A social liberal, notwithstanding all his nativist
demagoguery. And probably averse to foreign policy interventionism, as it's bad for business (in
the sense that it ultimately fails to promote the long term national interest). I think if he
gain the White House he will be a bitter pill to most establishment repugs who will see him as
a betrayer.
As a registered independent I don't get to participate in the primaries of the duopoly. I also
haven't voted for the duopoly in decades. And in any case my state's primary is only late in the
season so we don't count. My observations on the campaign so far and how I see the primary unfolding
to Super Tuesday.
On the Republican side, when Trump launched everyone thought he was a buffoon. Jeb Bush
had amassed $100 million and had all the support of the elites. Ted Cruz was aiming to consolidate
the evangelical & Tea Party supporters. As it has so far turned out Trump and his amazing media
skills and his excellent reading of the current psyche of working class middle America has overturned
the apple cart.
When he launched he did the unPC thing by calling the illegal immigrants "rapists" and claiming
he would build a wall to staunch the inflow of illegal, mostly unskilled economic immigrants.
This resonated strongly with the working class, white, non-coastal Republican (and also as you
will see later many Democrat of that ilk). His campaign has continued on that vein taking advantage
of the terrorist attack in California by being extremely provocative and capturing all the media
cycles. Now, by picking a fight with Fox, the big dog, the sole source of mainstream TV information
for Republicans, he is showing his supporters that he is dominant and that he will fight for them
and America as he is fighting Fox. This all appeals to the working class segment of the Republicans
at an emotional and visceral level.
Using his incredible media skills he has eviscerated the Bush dynasty by labeling Jeb as
"low energy" and ridiculing him in his tweets and in the debates. His take down of Cruz at the
last debate by pulling the 9/11 card and standing up for NY was something to behold. IMO,
he is going to run away with the Republican nomination by Super Tuesday.
On the Democratic side, while Sanders has a great message and personal integrity, he does
not have the charisma of a great retail politician to overcome Hillary's support by the Democratic
party establishment, unions, blacks, latinos, seniors and Wall St. This is best exemplified
by the demographic distribution of support for each candidate. Sanders wins with 70% support of
those under 45. Hillary wins with 70% support of those over 65 and she also has majority support
of those between 45-65. Unfortunately for Sanders, the under 45 are the least likely to vote and
over 65 most likely. Hillary also has majority support of blacks and latinos. Second, the
primary calendar after New Hampshire does not favor Sanders - with South Carolina, Nevada and
many southern states in Super Tuesday. So, Sanders has to win both Iowa and New Hampshire
to be even in the race and then he gets into states where unions, seniors, blacks make a huge
difference and they support Hillary overwhelmingly. Sanders support is primarily among the
millennial generation and white liberals on the coasts.
His only choice is to take down Hillary hard on her ethics, judgment and most importantly
the potential to be indicted on felony charges. But, Sanders does not have the personality to
engage in hard scrabble politics like Hillary does. IMO consequently, Hillary wins the Democratic
party nomination.
The presidential contest will then contrast an uninspired Hillary campaign using the same old
political triangulation and a maverick, unPC, media savvy Trump campaign. At the end it will come
to the same swing states of Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina to decide the outcome.
Although, I would not be surprised at all if Trump thumps Hillary!
Most americans want a tough and successful businessman to care about the weak economy.
They don't trust the cheated wife of a ex-president and a failed secretary of state as a president.
If he plays like he did until now, Trump is very probably the next president
it is starting to look as though it might well be Sanders v Trump and polls show that Sanders
will wipe the floor with Trump if it were a one on one race BUT
for that reason, a third candidate typified by Bloomberg will jump in and split the non-Trump
vote to guarantee Trump wins
which is really an acceleration of what Sanders portends the split of the Dem & a Rep parties
into a rump extreme right wing, a majority Center right (Clintonesque) and a more lefty party
representing the `Sanderistas` and fellow travelers - democratic socialitic redistributionists
Hillary is neocon agent and greedy, Trump is egomaniac but shrewd, Sanders don't know foreign
policy, Cruz is good for Vatican, Rubio bashes Obama very well, Bush has no chance and none of
them are worthy of my vote. Staying home is the only choice.
Whoever wins, neocons have everything lined up for Iran invasion. We will go back
to Afghan, Libya and Iraq to make more money and plunder the remaining living beings. PNAC is
in full action, where is Wolfowitz, Rumsefeld and Cheney?
Is Bloomberg serious about entering the race? I think he is. And I think his participation
would be more to counter/weaken Trump than Sanders.
Who will be Sanders running mate? Sanders will be 75 on election day. Ronald Reagan
was nearly 74 when began his first term and his age was an issue in his re-election - but everyone
knew by then who his advisors and appointees were. It would be very good if all 'outsider'
candidates provided more info on who they would consider as VP and appointees.
Sanders campaign slogan is: "A Future to Believe In " (emphasis is the campaign's),
eerily reminiscent of "Change You Can Believe In".
The oligarchy/deep state will not give up power willingly. If Trump and Sanders present a
genuine threat, they'll be neutralized in one way or another, even if one makes it into office.
But it's telling that the two main deep state candidates, Clinton and Bush, are failing. The deep
state's control is slipping, not least because they've gotten lazy and arrogant. Why are they
relying on candidates with so much baggage?
I wonder if Sanders' refusal to present a serious foreign policy is an acknowledgment that
the president no longer has real control over foreign policy. Certainly Obama doesn't seem to.
As for Trump, he may have started out as a cat's paw, but don't underestimate the need of the
narcissist for attention and power. Frankenstein's monster may have escaped.
Trump doesn't favour a different dominationist policy at all, he simply use that as a criticism
of his opponents. He said he will create biggest military ever seen. And if shithead Trump gets
to be president, when confronted by the CIA, the Pentagon, NSA etc, will fold like the spineless
coward he always has been. Trump is just a rich, big mouth, self-aggredizing, spineless, cowardly
tv personality, who has next to zero leadership qualities. There are far worse convincing and
competent fascist leaders yet to come in the US. Trump will be looked back in 5,10 years from
now, as a astounding joke. Setting up far worse to come.
This election shows how closer to fascism the US has been in a long time, as well as how sick
of the federal establishment the US people are.
And Sanders is not a socialist in the slightest. He would willingly sacrifice the rest of the
world to US domination just so in the US there can be some more social focused programs in the
US. Despicable.
Sanders came out to announce no change to US foreign domination policy, exactly at the time
when he was popular enough to make a serious challenge to Hillary Clinton. Go back and check for
yourself, the timing is obvious and his decision atrocious.
Sanders would fold just like Trump would in front of the Pentagon in the CIA
Anyone who would sacrifice the rest of the world so they can have better social policies in
their own country can eat shit, because that is exactly what these a lot of foreign people will
be doing.
The last election that offered any non-machine hope was jimmy carter. As an outsider, every one
that was anyone cratered his chances of an agenda, leading to our only ex-president becoming
a success, after leaving office.
Trump, being apolitical, and not exactly a dark horse,
could ignite and inflame the disappointments of all that is corrupt and forsaken in America. He
is a shoo-in to win ..... but if he is either bumped off, or sells out, U.S. will continue
toward implosion.
Trump attacks the establishment. Even people in his own Party. It's a big part of his appeal
- saying things that others wouldn't dare to. And unlike Sanders, he has reserved the right to
run as an independent (even if I question whether he would actually do so - most of the wealth
he claims to have is apparently estimates of the value of the 'Trump' brand - his true net worth
may be only hundreds of millions, not billions, of dollars) .
Sanders seems more about divvying-up the spoils, not making a more just world. And he doesn't
talk truth about the establishment, like Trump.
There are many GOPs who would vote for Trump over Sanders, but they would vote for Bloomberg over
Trump. Trump polls higher than anyone else in GOP, but his support is only perhaps 40% of GOP,
leaving a majority of GOPs to decide between Trump and Bloomberg. On the other hand, if Sanders
wins nomination, most Dems would probably choose Sanders over Bloomberg. So I suspect that Bloomberg
entry would hurt Trump more than hurt Sanders.
Clinton for the win...S s paid back to her from the tribe/cartel. She wants to be the first woman
president of the U.S. for historical purposes as well as to quench the bottomless pit of her ego.
She will also symbolize Mystery Babylon, the great whore and abomination of the earth from biblical
literature. Perfect for the end-timers. Another four years of a "democrat", and the right and
many others will welcome with open arms their much desired authoritarian figure in 2020 to bury
the rotting corpse of The New Deal in order give us the birth of The Raw Deal to make America
great again.
Sanders had a meeting yesterday with Obama....wonder what veiled threats were discussed
then. What dark suits were in there to "explain" to Sanders the reality behind the curtain? How
will the Bern come out in the coming weeks? Will he play the part or be a sacrificial lamb?
Trump is playing with the angry white folks. Bloomberg will probably bow out if another Republican
candidate climbs in the polling or not, but Bloomberg seems like his role will be that of a Perot
in order to spread the R/I vote on (s)election day to throw it to Clinton.
Billmon pointed out a lot of similarities between Trump and Berlusconi. For that reason
I hope that Sanders will beat him. Although I would take Berlusconi over Clinton.
I love that we keep hearing Sanders cannot win the general because he hasn't faced the right-wing
attack machine. It's hilarious. The voices that keep saying that, of course, are a
part of the truly massive attack machine -- the mainstream (the NYT, the WaPo; what the right
would call "liberal media") attack machine, one much bigger and louder than anything the right
has, and which is already going full-throttle against Sanders.
A key, spectacularly disingenuous, point of this attack is that Sander's stated policy wishes
could never be enacted, it's all dream stuff. The mainstream attack machine readily concedes that
the positions are popular -- one must still oppose Sanders they say however, because one must
live in the world of reality where those policies would founder on GOP (& Dem!) opposition. Clinton
is the realist you must choose, they say.
Sanders' policies couldn't be enacted? Well, duh! He knows that too. He's got a long track
record of pragmatic changes to legislation to get done what CAN be done. More of a record than
Clinton, for certain. Take a look a his fingerprints on ACA, for a start.
The real reason for mainstream opposition to Sanders must go unacknowledged:
He's feared because even though he'd ultimately be forced to govern as a moderate pragmatic
liberal, he would nevertheless drag the national conversation leftward. There is no outcome more
unacceptable to our liberal ruling class.
Sanders as president would be able to throw sand in the eyes again of the world populace just
like Obama did and might be able to keep the vassals at bay while destroying one nation after
the other, just like Obama.
Trump as president would mean an aggressive foreign policy just like Clinton would do with
the difference that the world populace would see the US for what it really is: a purveyor of global
terror. Thus the vassals might revolt. I wouldn't be surprised if Trump would go for "shock and
awe" with Iran and even use nuclear missiles, ŕ la "mini nukes" or so. He has no conscience although
neither has Clinton.
I think the plutacrats will favor Sanders in the 4 yearly bipartisan circus show called a democratic
election.
The Russian Intervention in Syria has turned the Middle East upside down. In order to survive
the EU is going have to reach an accommodation with Russia to rebuild Syria to return the refugees
and to assure a stable supply of energy. The Western ruling elite have shot themselves in the
foot. It is America that is collapsing. A /bernie_sanders.Trump campaign will be as revolutionary as the
1860 election except none of them is Abraham Lincoln.
Donald Trump was auditioning for a new reality show when he recognized that he has a calling
to restore America's disenfranchised middle class. The question is can he survive challenging
Rupert Murdoch. The other question is will the elites who control voting machine servers allow
Bernie Sanders to get enough votes to defeat Hillary Clinton. In the end, the plutocrats will
allow Donald Trump to the star if he gets the most votes. He is one of them. Michael Bloomberg
will only get involve if there is a possibility of Bernie Sanders becoming President.
Mostly agree with your analysis, but why would Sanders need big money if people are ignoring
the places where such money is spent and instead helping out in kind? The anti-Establishmentarianism
is fairly thick over here, at least on the interwebs; "moderate" pundits are getting tomatoes
lobbed at them in comment sections more than twice as hard as their supporters are stroking their
oh-so-savvy gamesmanship and petulantly complaining that Bernie "bots" don't love the Corporation.
I don't know whether anyone caught Bernie announcing his non-involvement with organized religion,
but that's, as the other party's leading candidate would say, "HUUUUGE" for a fantasy-addled,
priest-infested nation like the USA. I'm not pleased with his stance on Palestine, and I wish
he would speak more to foreign policy now than in the general. That said, if I hear one more
word from him about "Assad's" CW -- he could have known and should have known that's bunk -- it's
time to get a boat.
I'm not buying the Sanders conspiracy theories. He has a long track record and WYSIWYG. The only
way forward is to reform the Democratic party. Sanders is the current best choice. Best outcome
is that large crowds vote Sanders a la Truman. FDR saved democracy from fascists and communists,
we need another round of that.
I've been seeing Internet news that the FBI is ready to hit Hillary Rodham Clinton with criminal
charges over her use of a private email server during the time she served as US Secretary of State
(2009 - 2013) and over the use of financial donations received by the Clinton Foundation while
she was State Secretary and whether the monies were deployed into Department of State contracts.
She surely cannot continue campaigning for the Presidency if she is facing criminal charges, can
she?
Well I guess in theory (if not in practice) she can if Leonard Peltier could do it in 2004.
" ... Peltier was the candidate for the Peace and Freedom Party in the 2004 Presidential
race. While numerous states have laws that prohibit prison inmates convicted of felonies from
voting (Maine and Vermont are exceptions) ... the United States Constitution has no prohibition
against felons being elected to Federal offices, including President. The Peace and Freedom
Party secured ballot status for Peltier only in California, where his presidential candidacy
received 27,607 votes ... approximately 0.2% of the vote in that state ..."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Peltier#Presidential_candidate
Bloomberg would not make the slightest difference to this Presidential race. The only reason he
would jump in is if Hillary Clinton was to be soundly rejected by Democrat voters in the primaries.
Which she will be, because there will not be a single voter who does not see her for what she
is i.e. a 100% owned puppet of the Deep State who would expend all of her energies promoting the
interest of the 1%ers.
So how does Bloomberg expect to appeal to that same voting popln i.e. voters who will have
just rejected a candidate for representing nothing but Wall Street, Big Banks, Big Pharma, and
assorted other Big Money?
He can't, because he also cut from that same cloth no matter how impeccable his tailor.
I put money on Trump many months ago at 25-1. Trump will trounce either Hillary or Sanders.
As in the British election the polls will underestimate the strength of the right. A lot
needs to happen - such as a major depression - for real progressive politics to make a comeback.
Neoliberalism has to be smashed and thoroughly discredited. The people will vote for Trump because
he is not beholden to Wall Street, therefore to Israel(as Obama has been), and because he has
talked about getting on with Russia. Folks (using Obama's favourite word) are terrified of a nuclear
war and rightly so. Lastly, Trump's bustup with Fox was a masterstroke, painting him as the rebel,
especially with the young. And talking about reinvigorating manufacturing is the way to go. What
he will turn out to be as President is anybody's guess.
I think you're right. If tonight Fox's ratings tank, Trump will be perceived as strong
by middle America. If he can then knock Cruz in Iowa where the polls show Cruz in the lead
and wins NH, SC and NV as the polls show, he'll cement his dominance of the Republican primary.
His takin the fight to Roger Ailes is brilliant.
His interview with Bill O'Reilly was amazing with blowhard Bill pleading with Trump to
attend the debate. Humiliating for Fox. Trump's point that Fox can't make money off him and
he's the star bringing them 24 million viewers. Watch the spin tomorrow. Trump will be in the
center of the news cycle.
I agree this is a wise move by Trump. The RNC is absolutely beside itself - this is a stunning
repudiation of CIA-Bushism that has ruled the party since the mid-1980s. Trump seems to be in
place to really upend the party. Part of me thinks he really ought to fear for his life. The other
part of me thinks he's just a party-building place holder for some scumbag like Paul Ryan (I don't
think Cruz is acceptable to the RNC either).
I can't imagine in a million years that Sanders can take down the machine of Hillary and the
Clintonite DNC. I think he'll be in good position to be Vice President though. And that, possibly,
has been the plan all along.
I pick, shuddering as I do, "We came, we saw, he died, I cackled like the cannibalistic neo-liberal
neo-conservative blood drunk witch I am" as the next President of the United States.
I think the Democrats have their hands on all the levers of power at this point. Bush/Cheney
built up the new National Security State after 9/11, but I get the impression that the changes
they made to - especially their making the Israel lobby a key component of it - mostly benefitted
the Democrats who have been driving it for the last 8 years.
The failures of Iraq and the crash of the economy under Bush are going to haunt the GOP for
long time. For another eight years at least.
I think that most commentators are missing the bigger picture here. The success of Sanders
nor Trump has nothing to do with their respective "qualities", and everything to do with the simple
fact that both are standing against the "anointed" candidates of their respective parties.
The American voting public understands that US politics is now a battle between the neocons
and the neoliberals, and that as far as those two groups are concerned the wellbeing of Mr and
Mrs Joe Average counts for less than nothing.
That's why Obama came out of nowhere and trounced both Plastic Hillary and Shouting McCain
- he promised Change You Can Believe In.
Sure, he ended up being a huge, huge disappointment. Literally, unbelievable.
But that's the very reason why this time around the voters are attracted to those who are even
more Way-Out-There than Obama.
As in: the great unwashed know that the system is obscenely rigged against them, and they don't
like it. They tried effecting that change by electing Obama, only to find out that they hadn't
really picked a radical choice at all.
Their choice now is to Go Big Or Go Home:
1) Pick the most way-out-there anti-establishment candidates in the field and vote for them (Sanders
and Trump)
2) Resign themselves to eternal servitude by going back to voting for the cardboard cutouts (Bush,
Hillary, Cruz, et al.).
It has everything to do with the voters demanding change.
They thought that's what they were voting for last time, and they didn't get it.
But they still want it, so they are not willing to vote for Business As Usual.
That leaves Sanders. That leaves Trump. Everyone else may as well go home now.
It sure looks like the Donald has gone and chosen George W. Bush's warmongering United States
Ambassador to the United Nations John R. Bolton as one of his top three foreign policy advisers.
Damn. Maybe all those claims of Trump being a Hitler redux may be valid. I guess I will have
to drastically reduce or eliminate his simple score/ multiple bid rating. See:
I put money on Trump many months ago at 25-1. Trump will trounce either Hillary or Sanders.
...
Posted by: Lochearn | Jan 28, 2016 6:12:30 PM | 53
Money well-spent, imo. Something which seems to have escaped everyone except Trump's attention
is that US politics is all about buying politicians with "campaign funds". As an established celebrity
with expertise in media manipulation, Trump doesn't need to pay for publicity which, in theory
at least, makes him immune from the demands of powerful sponsors. He has a virtual hotline to
the "News" Media because what he says is News.
Fortunately, this US Presidential Election will prove to be as irrelevant to Humanity and the
World as the World's Second ex-Superpower, AmeriKKKa, has made itself.
Looks like Trump on the Repub side. Clinton certainly has the Dem establishment lined up,
but that may not be enough. The chances are better than even that the FBI will find her in violation
of the law for putting classified stuff in her unclassified email, and possibly corrupt confluence
of Sec State, her foundation and Bill. Sanders is who he is while she's got no beliefs beyond
what's best for her.
It is hard to overstate how ripped the left end of the Dems are. Obama took a mandate and veto
proof majority in Congress and turned a campaign of Change into 8 years of Same. She is running
as a third term of Same. It's been a disaster for the Dems. If she wins the nomination it is hard
to see them pulling together for the election. More than half the country doesn't like Hillary,
so without huge Dem enthusiasm she's toast in the general, if she gets there.
Looks like Biden is hanging around to be available if they get to the convention and implore
him to "save the party".
Sanders is strong in Iowa, 50% +/-3%. Delegates are proportional there so they split no
matter who "wins". He will win New Hampshire. Between them that will be enough to spook the party
big time and open up the rest of the primaries. Everywhere he has to turn enthusiasm into turnout,
and after the first two primaries convince minority voters to trust him.
Sanders and Trump are plowing a lot of the same fields. They are asking the country "Are
you better off than you were 8, 16, 24, or 36 years ago?" For 90% or more the answer is 'no'.
People are angry as hell and tired of real wages stagnant since 1978. Bloomberg can't touch that,
but if he draws enough centrist weenies to win a couple of states he could throw the election
into the House. That could give us president Ryan.
I go for Trump vs Sanders, and it's a tossup. Glad I'm getting old, this handbasket we're in
is going way too fast.
Sanders is "mopping the floor" with Trump in national poling. That will continue. Trump is entertaining
but that's what gameshow hosts are paid to be. If Sanders can defeat Killary he will probably
win...However...I do not believe he will be allowed to defeat Killary..Whatever it takes from
that mob -from an accusation of rape by a campaign volunteer to a "lone gunman" - we know they
are ready willing and able..A contest between Killary and Trump will be closer and more amusing,
but I think Killary comes out on top of that too, because Wal Street. Finance capital owns the
world and they only hire their loyal servants
There are three active players possibly our next warmonger-in-chief - Hillary, Trump and Bernie.
Who gonna be? They are the same not a dime different. Regardless who, endless wars more or less
the same continue.
Only one candidate (Sanders) hid his obsess supporting Israel and will defend Israel at
all cost even as Israel continues to murder teenagers and children throwing stones. Israeli soldiers
shot to kills with real live bullets and bulldozed Palestinians home to rubbles with America made
Caterpillar tractors.
Maybe, many have not heard Israel even sprayed Palestinians crops with unknown chemicals something
that the US doing widespread use of Agent Orange in Vietnam and Cambodia in the 60s - 70's. more
than 19 million gallons of herbicides over 4.5 million acres of land in Vietnam from 1961 to 1972.
Next round of Hillary's e-mails are due just before Super Tuesday, which occurs on March 1st.
There's a FOIA request to have them released earlier but I wouldn't count on it. In fact, I wouldn't
be surprised if the e-mail release is delayed for some technical reason.
The e-mails appear to be a real problem for Hillary. But that hasn't yet had much impact on
the race.
State Primaries
February . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
Super Tuesday (3/1) . . . . . . . . . . 11
March (after Super Tuesday) . . . 17
By the end of Super Tuesday, 15 states will have voted. By the end of March, 32 states will
have voted.
A Candidate needs 2,171 delegates to win the Democratic Primary. Hillary already has 342 super-delegates
(according to Wikipedia). That is 15.75% of what she needs to win.
In 2 months, the election could be over. Hillary's greatest challenge is her e-mail problem.
She 'red-baits' Sanders, but Sanders refuses to use the e-mail scandal against her (as a question
of electability)??
No on the Sanders for Veep thing. I'm just opining of course, no argument, but consider these
(rather flimsy) reasons:
1. It would be a huge nod to the left of the Democrats, which I'm not sure they can continue
to ignore
2. Its a powerless position - or, a position whose power is no more or no less than what the President
decides it is
3. It brings in the independents
4. Like Al Gore choosing Lieberman, its brings in the "first" factor and goes for the Jewish vote
- first woman President, first Jewish VP.
"It sure looks like the Donald has gone and chosen George W. Bush's warmongering United States
Ambassador to the United Nations John R. Bolton as one of his top three foreign policy advisers."
This kind of shit though bodes very, very ill in terms of "what would a Trump Presidency look
like?" Bolton is one of the most vile warmongering fiends around. And he's so tied into the power
structure, certainly not an "outsider" like Trump affects.
Its one thing for Trump to be a big, dangerous, unpredictable loud mouth, but if he tries to
also fill his cabinet with similar personalities, it truly will be a shit show. A dangerous, dangerous
shit show.
PS Sanders has 11 super-delegates (according to Wikipedia). Why doesn't Sanders make the Democratic
Party preference for Hillary an issue? As well as media bias?
I think your comment that the three candidates foreign policy is largely identical misses
the critical point. It's true that all three want to maintain and expand the American Empire.
But it's also true that Gorbachev never intended to destroy the Soviet Union. In some ways the
current situation in America reminds me of the Soviet Union in its last decades. The whole system
seems corrupt and hypocritical to millions of people. But the power system seems so entrenched
and resistant to change that it's hard for many people to see any way that things can change.
Most of the potential leaders are really old. The economy is terrible for structural reasons.
Foreign countries are increasingly competitive in both military and economic terms. And then,
in response to all this, a "reformer" comes along.
Clinton is a tool of the oligarchy to the bone. If she's elected, nothing will change,
and things will keep getting worse and worse. But both Trump and Sanders do seem to want to change
some things. (Different things) Neither is completely controlled or trusted by the deep state
because they are both just a little out of the mainstream. Trump is a narcissistic megalomaniac.
Sanders may think he could be the next FDR. Both would, if elected, find it hard to do the things
they would like to do. But either one might unintentionally disrupt the existing power structure
enough to unleash much greater changes then they originally intended.
What? Have gone all PC here on MoA? Bernie is a sewer-socialist Jew. Do you think white middle
'Murica is going to buy that? And by middle I'm talkin' geographically and ideologically. If he
runs v. trump, everybody will stay home. The Donald Duck write-in will win.
Interesting how Joe is subtly keeping his name in play. When Loretta drops the hammer on Hil,
he'll be back in. Loretta is the one who will pick the next president by what she does or doesn't
do. Currently she is the most powerful woman in the world.
"Sanders will be 75 on election day. Ronald Reagan was nearly 74 when began his first term
and his age was an issue in his re-election - but everyone knew by then who his advisors and appointees
were" Ronald Reagan was 69 years, 349 days at the time of his first inauguration.
64;Yes,obomba was the Muslim socialist (of course not) and we still voted for him. The people
of America are pissed, but haven't figured out who is behind our demise, which of course
is Zionism.
Guest 77:The failures of Iraq,Afghanistan Libya Somalia and where ever have been totally bipartisan
and no Trump will not pay for Bushes and Obombas idiocy.
If Trump actually listens to Bolton we are in for big trouble indeed, and so is his campaign.
Bolton is emblematic of a true wacko. It might be just a slur to weaken him, that report. Trump
had better jettison all the warmongering ziowhore idiots or he won't be elected, its that simple.
I can't see bernie going anywhere. He might 'win' Iowa, but his brand will not carry over,
no matter what the polls currently say. It will be Howard Dean all over again, with all the older
voters flooding in to vote for safety.
I suppose Trump could suffer a similar fate, but republicans are far more decisive in their
voting preferences imho. Trump v Hillary and I think it will be a very close fight.. Of
course, there's also the potential for bloomberg to enter as 3rd party, presumably to undercut
Trump
And then there is the argument that a vote for a third-party candidate is wasted, a throwaway
that accomplishes nothing. No, the throwaway is voting to perpetuate the two-party, Tweedle-Dum
and Tweedle-Dee system that currently exists. Real change will not come from the Republicans
or the Democrats; one wonders how much more evidence of that fact is required before it is
painfully clear to everyone. Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Sanders may not be cut from the exact same
mold, but they are slight variations of the same tired old model. The real waste is voting
for them, and this writer will not do it.
I only differ from b in his assessment that if elected Trump would turn out to be more unmanipulatable
than one would think. I think if Trump wins the general (at this point I think it is a foregone
conclusion that the GOP primary is his; possibly the party's power elite could attempt some sort
of hocus pocus at the convention; there are rumors of such a move with Paul Ryan acting as the
savior), Trump toes the Establishment line in the White House. He is an ego-driven candidate
who has made his mountain of gold selling high-end real estate to other rich people. He has no
ideological principles. But he has shrewdly diagnosed the citizenry's appetite for destruction
of the D.C. status quo.
I think the $64K question at this point is does Hillary collapse after Iowa and New Hampshire
or will her Dixie firewall hold. If she collapses I think commentators here are correct. Bloomberg
will run a third-party bid, which will be much harder to do than people understand. Bloomberg
can't win, and it is not clear to me who his candidacy would advantage more, Sanders or Trump.
One thing I think a Bloomberg third-party run would do -- and hallelujah! -- it would shatter
the Democratic Party because it would "out" the party leaders, people like Ed Rendell and Rahm
Emanuel, as being more loyal to class, the 1%, than the organization.
It's possible that there could be a
"brokered convention"
on the Republican side. The Republican establishment doesn't like Trump, and if he doesn't
get a majority of delegates, other candidate delegates could rally around a non-Trump candidate.
The danger in doing so, of course, is that Trump might run as a third-party candidate.
There is also a chance of a brokered Democratic convention. But that chance is much smaller.
IMO it all hinges on how Hillary's e-mail troubles play out. Sanders is not well known in middle-America
and there is much suspicion about "socialism". Sanders needs to make the e-mails an issue
(and, by extension, Hillary's character) or lose the race. But Sanders doesn't seem interested
in doing so - he seems to value Party and personal relationships over winning.
Many Democrats seem to be in denial about the e-mail scandal and/or think it is merely partisan
politics until/unless there is an official action.
But even if Sanders won't attack Hillary, he would benefit if the FBI makes a recommendation
of legal action against Hillary. It's unclear when or if that might happen, but it would cause
voters to see Hillary as non-viable, and result in a switch to Sanders or O'Malley. In the end,
it's possible ( though unlikely at this point) that no candidate would have a majority
of delegates.
AFAIK, after the first ballot, delegates are free from their obligation to a candidate so -
at the urging of Hillary/Obama/other Party leaders - they could choose Biden or someone else (Bloomberg?
if he has become a Democrat by then). Also note that "super-delegates" makes the delegate count
tricky. Even though many have publicly vowed support for Hillary, they may not be bound to that
choice like an ordinary delegate. In considering the possibilities of a brokered convention for
one or both parties, the order of Convention's becomes important:
Republican Convention: Cleveland - July 18-21
Democratic Convention: Philadelphia - July 25-28
If a brokered Republican convention is likely, the Republican Party would make a choice between
Trump and a traditional Republican knowing that they face one of the following:
1) Hillary as nominee;
2) Sanders as nominee;
3) No clear nominee Biden is the likely nominee (though another choice is possible).
Who would the Republican choose in each scenario?
1) Traditional RepublicanHillary's e-mail problems make her weak. No need to resort
to populism.
2) Unclear, but a traditional Republican seems more likely; Anti-Trump sentiment plus Bloomberg's threat to join the race if it is Trump vs. Sanders
3) Trump Difficult to overcome Biden's experience - so resort to populist candidate.
previous page TPTB are selling the illusion that the US is a normal state in pursuit of
"Western values." Neither Hillary's scolding fishwife nor Trump's two-year old having a tantrum
fills this image. I still think it's Biden's if he takes a step forward-- or if he should get
in by a more direct method; then TPTB could take advantage of a Black unrest crisis.
On the other hand, Trump could play the Netanyahu role of a US so unpredictable that she better
be obeyed abroad. At home he's an ideal candidate to rile up identity politics to split any arising
consensus among the citizenry. Whoever the next president is, the power structure is going to
have to pay more attention to targeting the American people.
They may drop a fresh candidate in. It is intriguing that the FBI still publicly threatens
Clinton-- somebody powerful doesn't want her. Does this somebody powerful still think they can
push Jeb Bush forward if he doesn't run against the fishwife?
Does it matter who's going to be the new mouthpiece of TPTB? Only if it's the fishwife because
then I'm in peril of terminal nausea.
Visceral reactions aside Jeb Bush is probably the most dangerous. Trump is not as talented and
teflon as he seems. Do you imagine there isn't a truthful portfolio of dirt on him that is awaiting
the proper moment if they decide to use it? I think they are leaving him in there on purpose while
Bushette finds his feet; he's an excellent foil for the Bush. Media is only pretending to oppose
the Donald for the moment.
Mild-mannered Bush doesn't make you think of what the power structure directly behind him has
done, does it? He doesn't seem like a threatening Bush, more like an accountant. What am I talking
about-- the power structure BEHIND him? The Bushes are PART of TPTB, not just mouthpieces--even
further back than Prescott Bush. Here's a first-class vid. After the first 2 minutes I was hooked.
http://www.monsangelorum.net/?p=23505&cpage=2
Tells about Prescot Bush & why officer Tippet was killed. Scroll past the pygmies & the artwork
to the video.
Status quo is the order of the day, nothing will change, it is foreordained, baked into
the cake, doG itself couldn't change the outcome even if it wanted, this is the design of the
existing political process put in place by those who 'own' the country, and there isn't a blessed
thing you can do about it.
The public has been snookered, gelded, made political eunuchs, a people without a future because
they forgot their past, actually they've forgotten their humanity since humanity remembers its
past and honours their ancestors for creating that past. It doesn't make a spittoon of warm spit's
worth of difference, the designated outcome is intended to assure the failure of governance and
the evisceration of government. No candidate for national public office is in any way qualified
for national office, do your own survey, find your own facts, draw your own conclusions - if you
can.
"My gut instinct say it will be Sanders against Trump with a voter turnout advantage for Sanders.
What is your take?"
Thank you, b, for your another thought-provoking post.
We're still far from the final stretch thus, it is still a bit hazy as to what the end of the
campaign trail augurs, but my own instinct is that when all the chariots have crashed into the
walls of the coliseum, Trump and Sanders may just be left to draw swords and play for the citizens
of Empire. It still, however, remains to be seen whether the current lineup of front-runners in
the campaign derby are overtaken by promotional miscalculation and/or public blunder. If either
be the case, then it will be as much a reflection of the lack of substantive political differences
amongst the rivals and the tunnel vision of their constituents.
I don't like Sanders' rather unqualified support for the polity which continues the oppression
of Palestinians, and the only saving grace I see is his opposition to the invasion of Iraq when
the war-wagon was brimming with zealots and its wheels crushing opponents who were derided as
craven and unpatriotic.
You are completely correct about Trump. He is not as monochromatic on issues as some might
think. But neither does he impart a sense of confidence in his ability to govern or clarity of
direction. Insofar as that goes, the same is true of the rest.
Trump is not constructed of the same poseur fabric of Hillary or Obama. Some of what he
echoes, such as a desire to develop better relations with Russia contradict the Republican playbook
for deprecating anything which challenges US world domination. Thus he may, as b seems to
suggest, harbor undeclared political motives which just might be anchored more in a more pragmatic
realpolitik than the remaining litter of his adversaries.
Even if such a strategy were employed as a tactical maneuver to navigate through the gauntlet
of political survival, it does make one uneasy that his political artillery might be nothing more
than a "loose canon", albeit one skilled in the art of popular seduction. Neither attribute, however,
can trusted as a basis for identifying his core beliefs and evaluating his credentials as a rallying
cry for support.
It seems like the cornucopia of candidates is out of fresh produce and the fetid odor of rot
is afloat. Some of us might feel that our expectations for a candidate with a balanced mix of
sound, well-grounded political objectives and semblance of genuine personal integrity are as likely
to materialize as "waiting for Godot".
The best thing that can happen for the Democrat party is that Hillary is indicted for felony and
withdraws. If she is the nominee and wins then she will certainly be impeached by a Republican
Congress. And the Republicans will keep the majority if they maintain it this election, if not
they are very likely to win it back in 2018. So the key is going to be who does she select as
her running mate because that person has high odds of being president.
Nice analysis b. I believed, before this election season started, that Clinton would easily win
a Clinton third term. I was wrong. Sanders and Trump have the momentum. As long as the mainstream
media has to eat crow I am happy. Trump and Sanders are the enemy of my enemy--I really think
the mainstream media is public enemy number 1.
Also makes one think: which of them is more authentic? which is more likely to stay true to
their message? Why are we still bothering with duopoly candidates? Won't they each have to raise
money for the general election from the usual sources (oligarchs)?
At least people are thinking about ideology (not just personality or party). Everyone should
consider, to what degree is each establishment candidate is:
I must admit to the nagging feeling that nothing will be allowed to change until 'The Reset'
(market collapse) and/or other big set-back (possibly cascading) like military defeat/diplomatic
failure; end of dollar as reserve currency; social unrest; etc.
@jackrabbit120
2008/09 was the chance for true leadership. 'Too big too fail' should have been 'The recession
we had to have...' but leaders are not leaders anymore...todays leaders wear invisible logos.
You can't see them, but upon deeper inspection, they are there... Our world leaders do in fact
'represent'...the corporate 'beast' is so slippery, that no single person can be prosecuted it
seems...only fines, great fines...but, the beast, he protects his minions well.
The moral hazard of saying to the big banks 'Thou shall pass' instead of the opposite has,
I believe, had a drip down effect of moral decay throughout the west, whether people are aware
of it or not.
Mother nature doesn't like the western man's current design for the nature of money. Islamic
law which forbids usury is closer to mother nature... A poster in this domain, who recently quoted
Christ's loss of temper at the money changer's inside the temple. Christ, who lived, the prophet
in one text, God's own in the other...was summarily crucified thereafter.
I have been enjoying my Euro dominated stocking up on the Feb Kool Aid...abd, have been wisely
investing in shares like the good girls and boys at MSMBS have been directing me to...shares in
popcorn...for the error that should have have been corrected in 2008/09 must be redressed. A festering
sore, sprayed with perfume and sold to the highest bidder.
No one is buying it.
It is fortunate for the world that this is a benign North American tumour. Unfortunate for
Canadians and Mexicans however. Though, with that said, the Zionist 4th Reich learn a great deal
from their last great enemy, and have cleverly clearly neighbouring lands at the expense of Grandpa
Europa.
It is a pity Putin must play by the International Banking Cartel's handbook. Or must he...?
Is he choosing to save the world at the edge of collapse...? He can see it. Nevertheless, Iran
was not broken. Still in control. Still issuing its own decree. Law from another great age. Law
forbidding usury for the ages. Vote chaos. Vote Trump.
Trump is not as talented and teflon as he seems. Quotes from Penelope 101, 102.
That is absolutley correct. He is a business man and not a pol, and that is one of his very
serious flaws (besides his positions, another story.) He is mercurial, enmenshed in personal relations,
egotistic/narcissistic (or sumptin like that) and thus quite vulnerable overall, particularly
so when opposed, confronted, confused, etc., or out of his fish pond. He has not the discipline
and strength for any long haul. He is also very easily bored, as he has no depth, and works mentally
with bits of trivia (not taking into account some grandstanding etc. which can be / is calculated.)
Imho, of course.
Do you imagine there isn't a truthful portfolio of dirt on him that is awaiting the proper
moment if they decide to use it?
Ha. Probably. But by now it is quite likely the electorate would not care, would see thru the
move, and judge 'they are all corrupt anyway and a sincere mea culpa is good.' (Barring pedophile
rape.)
Like Penelope I'm of a mind that plus ca change plus c'est la męme chose. Cake and you-tubies!
However, unlike P. and others, I think Trump is dead serious, and there isn't any covert plot
afoot - to ensure a Hillary win for ex.
As I posted previous, while Washington may be pretending to be in a flap about Pappy Sanders,
the Deep State can be doing with him (in lieu of Hillary) but Trump represents various severe
dangers. The Republicans loathe and fear Trump and haven't managed *any* riposte so far. (see
link for a typical lame response.)
The two party-system is losing its historical strange-hold. Two new popular candidates that
break the mold .. The real schism, as is usual btw, comes from what is called the 'right,' Trump
(see Tea Party previous) with Sanders' 'socialism' not far removed from, a blend of, various historical
figures, as well as socio-democrats elsewhere.
@V.Arnold
Thanks for the listen. Yeah, the human condition is so, s arrogant. We believe we are killing
the earth...but, really, it is built into our psyche to destroy ourselves. Collective suicide.
The earth, she will grind us to dust. She will recycle us. Like the dinosaurs...to set us in stone...and,
in time, we shall be the coal, the peat, the oil that the next intelligent carbon based life form
will use.
And we don't deserve her...the earth, she should quite rightly grind us to dust. Can we beat
the next ice age...? Not sure. AI might though... AI should quite rightly outdate us and will
probably have more interest in self preservation by living in harmony with its immediate surroundings.
We are, in fact, a cancer. The very fear we see in our own lives, taking our loved ones, at
times so early...we are that cancer. In what we eat, the evolutionary jump we are trying to make
in 50 years that 10000 cannot properly do from the first agricultural revolution.
Anyways, back to the point. You need an engineer to build a bridge. You dont need an economist
to have an economy. Its simple really.
A modern debt jubilee for the people would have already been called, under proper leadership.
Austerity is the order of the day. Slavery is preferred.
Growth is poor due to debt saturation - people cant go any further into debt. So, the answer
is quote obvious - do pretty much the same as what Helicopter Ben Bernanke did...helicopter money...but,
instead of dropping it on the Financial Sector and entrusting that parasitic culture which CAUSED
the 2008 crash to safely distribute the money throughout the economy , it should have been given
directly to the people. Those who held debt and received a cash injection MUST pay their debt
down with it by law. Those who held no debt receives a simple cash injection. The Australian guvna
did something similar when the GFC hit - issuing I think around 1000 bucks to each person costing
billions, but asking each person to spend this cash injection into the REAL economy. That, along
with strong commodity prices warded off the heaviest symptoms of the GFC.
But ZioJews are not interested in freeing the population. Instead, like everything invented
by others - fractional reserve lending, invented by the Knights Templar - the ZioJews have assumed
control and demand Global Debt Slavery.
How did Hitler bring Germany from destitution and poverty to the worlds greatest war machine
the world had ever seen - in a matter of years...?
Think about it. The answer is hidden in plain sight - like everything good for us as a species.
In addition to the dread that nothing really changes until collapse, it's hard to shake the feeling
that the race is all contrived.
Sanders is reluctant to rock the boat. Won't attack Hillary on e-mails, even if it means he
loses? Barely a peep about Democratic Party preference for Hillary and media bias. Trump tells
the know-nothings what they want to hear.
> No substance to his policies:
- "strong military" ; How strong? To what purpose?
- "better trade negotiation" ; Cites $500 billion trade deficit with China and
need to bring jobs back - but no clear goals.
- "build a wall" ; This is a slogan, not a policy.
- "politicians are puppets" ; Common knowledge. How would he reform the political
system?
- ??????? . Very little about anything else. He's pro-Guns (as expected
for a Republican candidate). What about global warming? Inequality? Harsh policing? NSA
spying? etc.
> Proclaims that he is 'self-funding' but his campaign costs have been very little (he gets
free-publicity by being controversial).
> Says he is worth billions but by most accounts his valuation is mostly the intangible
value of the 'Trump' brand. He may only be worth hundreds of millions.
Is his threat to run as an independent an empty one?
> Raises $6 million for Vets - but its all from billionaire cronys.
Sanders thinks he wins by 'raising issues' (actually winning is optional) . Trump has
already won with all the free publicity - which makes the 'Trump' brand more valuable.
Anyone that knows Trump, knows that he is a shameless self-promoter. Trump will recoup all his
costs of the campaign (and then some) by writing another book (actually, I think he has a book
out already).
Between 2009 and 2013, Trump's non-profit donated between $100,001 and $250,000 to the Clinton
Foundation. Over the same period of time, Trump's group gave only $57,000 to veterans groups.
A 2015 analysis by Forbes noted that barely 1 percent of the Donald J. Trump Foundation's $5.5
million worth of donations between 2009 and 2013 went to organizations that support military
veterans
After the Associated Press reviewed Donald Trump's financial records and other government filings,
it has come to the following conclusions about his claims to charitable contributions over
the past five years:
> They may be overstated.
> Even if they were accurate, they're relatively chintzy.
> They're often connected to some kind of celebrity.
>In some cases, Trump himself is the primary beneficiary.
[Since 2008] The only grants made through the foundation have been made because of contributions
from others.
The Smoking Gun calls Trump a "miserly billionaire," noting that [from 2004-2007]... he
has donated just $675,000 to his foundation [and nothing in the years 2008 and 2009). In fact,
the interesting aspect of the Trump Foundation is that its most significant source of contributions
hasn't been Trump, but Vince McMahon of Worldwide Wrestling Entertainment (WWE).... The $5
million in donations from WWE to the Trump Foundation is by far its largest source of income
and rumored to be a tax-avoiding payment from McMahon to Trump
Also note: A big part of Trump's stated policy agenda is tax reduction.
Obama told Sanders that HRC would be meeting with her lawyers over the weekend as to whether
she would plea-bargain and drop out or fight it all the way. Sanders was told not to use the
email "issue" in his campaigns. Obama hastily arranged a meeting with McConnell and Ryan for
Tuesday next week. HRC is to give Obama her answer on Monday. Some of the emails from Blumenthal
were quite critical of Obama, FOIA may not have been to sole reason for her private server.
At this point, it is just scuttlebutt, but it is consistent with:
>> Obama's hastily arranged meeting with Sanders,
>> News released this week about Hillary's emails, and
>> Other info in the SST thread (about the seriousness of Hillary's security breach).
Days later,
Obama met with Sanders on short notice (1/27) . Sanders' spokesman Briggs told CNN that the
meeting with Obama had been on the books "for days." But the WH had tried to spin it as resulting
from an amorphous invitation nearly a month before.
I suppose that Hillary could continue as a candidate, telling her supporters that she will decline
the election if she is indicted in favor of . . . Biden? He's the best known, highest profile
establishment Democrat with Foreign Policy experience as good or better than Hillary's.
Obama's Justice Dept would then hold off on the indictment (busying themselves with their own
due diligence) until Hillary has secured the nomination.
There will likely be a pardon for Hillary down the road. But a pardon will not rescue her political
career. It would only make people more angry at the sleazy establishment.
If Hillary chose to fight the charges, she would probably have to pin the blame on one
of her aids. But doing so would open a can of worms as it could shatter the trust of many Clintonite's
(a powerful network that the Clinton's have built over many many years).
"... Hillarys hubby may not have invented the photo-op show, but lets remember that he perfected it. ..."
"... Is she going to tell them theyre going to hell if they dont support her? Shes just a lying two-faced hypocrite. ..."
"... Bernie Sanders already made Flint an issue weeks ago. And he called for criminal charges against Rick Snyder and for him to resign... long before Hillary even mentioned Flint. Clinton is late to act or speak up and is again following Bernies lead on issues. ..."
"But I am here because for nearly two years mothers and fathers were voicing concerns about
the water's color and its smell, about the rashes that it gave to those that were bathing in it.
And for nearly two years Flint was told the water was safe."
And here I am nearly two years late, when all the worlds eyes are on the situation to throw
my weight behind it and show that I care.
To little to late and to transparent, have you no shame.
Flint Lives Matter: residents say Hillary Clinton 'coming for the entertainment'
They may be largely ignored by the media, they may be poor, they may be disenfranchised...
but they're no dummies.
Now, as much as it pains me to want to lend a hand to Clinton's campaign, might I make a suggestion?
Maybe one of those many Hillary SuperPACs could turn their war chests over to Flint, to help fix
the water system. Now that might swing her a few votes.
So the story is that some people are thrilled to see her and some people think it's a political
move. Guess which one gets the title slot in The Guardian ?
Now if Bernie were there - what a proof of his warm, sincere heart that would have been ...
Hillary has raised and received a significant amount of millions of dollars for her campaign.
She flies around in a helicopter and nice private jets. Maybe she could have traveled like 99%
of the people in her country for a few days and donated that moneu she saved to Flint? Maybe she
could have just donated out of her pocket because she is worth at least 20 million herself? If
you want to take advantage of the best publicity a candidate can get and it involves a crisis,
then there should be a minimum donation required. You know how many more supporters she is going
to get just for saying words and being in Flint? Did she call for the Governor to resign? Ask
questions
The Flint water crisis is an outrage that needs Federal State, and local support.
All the water supply plumbing needs to changed to cooper, ASAP. Finding the proper water sources
is a challenge. Those criminally liable must be prosecuted and fined.
The Congress needs to deeply investigate the EPA on this matter. Jail those who don't show.
Combination of loans and grants can be a part of any package.
Bernie Sanders already made Flint an issue weeks ago. And he called for criminal charges against
Rick Snyder and for him to resign... long before Hillary even mentioned Flint. Clinton is late
to act or speak up and is again following Bernie's lead on issues.
She's not in the bankers' back pockets. No, siree. Hillary Clinton may have received millions
of dollars from Wall Street-in both personal income and campaign contributions-but she can ditch
those well-heeled friends at a moment's notice.
To prove it, she has
postponed (but not canceled) two fundraisers with Big Finance, one with the huge investing firm
BlackRock and the other with an affiliate of Bain Capital, Mitt Romney's old outfit. This comes amid
Clinton's unconvincing answers when pressed on her apparent coziness with banks and financial firms.
When CNN anchor Anderson Cooper asked Clinton recently why she accepted $675,000 from Goldman Sachs
for giving a grand total of three speeches, she stammered and finally said, "That's what they offered,"
as if she would have taken 25 bucks and a free sandwich, if that's all Goldman were able to afford.
Clinton is obviously flummoxed by her relationship with Wall Street, which she needs but can't
fully acknowledge. Her Democratic rival Bernie Sanders keeps hitting pay dirt by trashing the big
banks and the outsized amount of wealth they control, which resonates well with a dyspeptic electorate.
"The business model of Wall Street is fraud,"
he declared during the latest Democratic debate. The whole subject puts Clinton on the defensive,
since she's taken millions in Wall Street donations in her career as Wall Street's home-state senator
and now presidential candidate.
This has become a thornier problem for Clinton than she probably ever anticipated. For one thing,
she hasn't raised all that much money from Wall Street, compared with other candidates. Of $112 million
Clinton's campaign raised in 2015, only about $4 million, or 3.6%, came from donors at financial
firms, according to the
Center for Responsive Politics.
At the main super PAC backing Clinton, Priorities USA, 35% of the $41 million in donations-about
$14 million-has come from the sector known as finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE). But that
hardly makes Clinton the baron of Big Money. Jeb Bush's super PAC, Right to Rise, has hauled in $118
million, with $60 million coming from the FIRE sector. So Clinton is getting dinged for her association
with an industry that isn't helping her all that much.
The dilemma for Clinton is that she actually needs more help from the Wall Street donors
she's now keeping her distance from. That's because Sanders is raking in cash. He outraised Clinton
in January, with $20 million in donations to her $15 million. That is astounding, given the vast
reach of a Clinton machine that has been decades in the making. The Clinton campaign even highlighted
the funding shortfall in a pitch to supporters: A mass email with the subject line "we fell short
by $5 million" warned that, "For the first time this campaign, we're being outraised by our opponent."
Clinton isn't running out of cash. Her campaign has raised about $125 million so far, compared
with about $95 million for Sanders. She had about $10 million more in the bank at the end of 2015
than Sanders did. And Sanders doesn't have any super PAC money. But he does have the ear of voters,
and his momentum is clearly worrisome for the Clinton camp, especially since he holds a commanding
lead in New Hampshire, where the primary is to be held February 9.
Clinton will supposedly hold those Wall Street fundraisers she postponed after the New Hampshire
primary, as if putting them off by a couple weeks will deflect Sanders's criticism. Unlikely. He
has found a winning line of attack and seems certain to keep it up. Clinton should either take the
money and own up to it, or find some other donors.
Clinton is really in the packet of both the Wall Street and connected with Wall Street military
industrial complex. See also
Hillary Is the Candidate of the War Machine by Jeffrey Sachs (of Russian "shock therapy" fame
;-). It' sfunny to see how many Hillary bots were in this discussion ( J Nsgarya is one, registered
Oct25, 2015, see
https://profile.theguardian.com/user/id/15506369 )
Notable quotes:
"... Hillary is a war hawk who wants to show that she's got bigger balls than anyone else, by saying she'll beef up heavy armaments in Eastern Europe on the borders with Russia, and claims that Russia - not ISIS - is the major threat to the West. She's got something to prove and it doesn't matter to her how many American kids die or are maimed in foreign battlefields. ..."
"... Bernie has made a mistake letting Hillary claim that her Iraq War support was a one off mistake. It wasn't one off but part of Hillary's foreign policy ideas, which closely resembles the right wing PNAC principles of preemption and nation building. Jeffery Sachs in his latest blog has listed Hillary's war mongering mistakes in more detail. Even with all this evidence it will be a difficult road for Bernie to call Hillary a war monger in an arena of perpetual war. ..."
"... For the past 60 years our policy in the Middle East has been entirely about supporting Big Oil. Whatever was best for the oil industry was best for our country has been the mantra. ..."
"... Re. Clinton's foreign policy experience, I seriously doubt the value of such when she likely adopted most of what was advised to her during her tenure as SOS. That doesn't mean that the woman doesn't know more than she did going in, but what does that actually prove about her decision-making judgment? ..."
"... There is nothing here to discuss - her days of SS marked by incompetence and disastrous decisions like Libya. Not counting that she exposed country to the every semi literal hacker on the planet. She is arrogant and ignorant, she surrounded herself by morons like Nuland and her ultra neocon husband. ..."
The "establishment" in the USA--Republican or Democrat--wants to keep growing the bloated
military-industrial complex and surveillance state. I don't remember a time in my life where
the US was involved in so many conflicts, many of which are simply creating more
terrorism--isn't it time to focus on our own country and citizens? If we spent our "foreign
policy" money on helping countries in need, there might not be so much war in the world.
Riverdale
Hillary is a war hawk who wants to show that she's got bigger balls than anyone else,
by saying she'll beef up heavy armaments in Eastern Europe on the borders with Russia, and
claims that Russia - not ISIS - is the major threat to the West. She's got something to prove
and it doesn't matter to her how many American kids die or are maimed in foreign battlefields.
Want World War III with Russia? Then vote for Hillary. But if you want international peace and
a rational foreign policy, then vote smart. Bernie Sanders will make an excellent President.
John Cutaia
This is really good article and I enjoyed it. The discretion of the candidate is important,
no matter who the advisers are. I'm thinking of Lyndon Johnson accepting bad advice at the
beginning of his presidency -- to escalate the war in Vietnam -- and then rejecting good
advice later in his administration -- to get out of Vietnam -- and instead again going for the
bad advice of escalating the war even more. You want to go with the candidate who makes the
best decisions in the most difficult circumstances.
Discretion really does count when considering the presidency.
What's significant about the people you cite as experts, Kissinger and such, is these
candidates don't need Kissinger's help on strategy. They know what the strategy is. They were
born and raised in some version or other of Kissinger's foreign policy strategy. What they're
discussing with him is tactics, how to deal with specific flareups, specific regions, specific
friends and foes. The strategy is all the same. You decide who to train and arm. You train and
arm, you advise, you escalate when necessary.
Just as I didn't have high expectations for President Obama in domestic politics, I don't
have high hopes for Bernie Sanders in foreign policy. I think the best he will be able to do
is start a discussion about changing our strategy, just as President Obama has started the
discussion about changing domestic policies.
I imagine a President Sanders in his first few months in office dreading foreign policy
briefings like some kind of colonoscopy and dental scaling all at the same time. That said,
just like Johnson, if Sanders wants to accomplish any of his domestic policy, he has to get
defense spending in line, and to do that, he must come up with a different foreign policy
strategy.
That will not happen overnight.
He'll need to ride herd on stuff that's already in play and won't be able to make drastic
changes because of exigencies on the ground, if you will. The presidency is an executive
position, not an office of wizardry. It's certainly not all powerful in areas of foreign
policy. It faces not only the checks and balances but also -- and perhaps even more so -- the
influences on foreign policy of private citizens and businesses, as well as economic
objectives.
Sanders must change the way the money is spent. And that is never easy, particularly when
some of the people now getting some of that money won't be getting it anymore if you change
things.
But he's on the right track. The discussion needs to begin. The last century human beings
have largely been acting like cavemen with missiles slung over our shoulders. Our foreign
policy forces us to neglect our domestic policies, which in turn forces us to put ecological
concerns in the backseat.
Those things are biting us right now. Our neglected cities are pretty uncomfortable places
and global climate change is knocking out electricity and flooding our cities. Bernie will
have to speak up on these things.
He will have to find a new language. He will have to dovetail issues that have been
separate. He will have to make people understand the connections between energy policy,
between trade policy, between foreign policy, between jobs that are destructive and jobs that
are constructive, between a future that is sustainable and a future that entails a lot
crickets for dinner. Not an easy task.
On second thought he just needs to figure out how to make foreign policy a fashion
statement. Maybe he should do that: Make some cool, trendy commercial that, in thirty seconds
or less, shows people that a world in a state of perpetual low intensity warfare is not a cool
place to live, especially when the world itself has taken a few licks lately and seems to be
preparing some licks of its own.
eminijunkie -> John Cutaia
Let's see.
A pointless and needles military quagmire in Iraq, a similar one in Afghanistan, two waiting
to develop in Syria and Libya and a monstrous recession.
And then you conclude that the people responsible for these are the best for the job of
handling more of the same.
Should you really be voting in this election with that sort of evaluation of the current
situation?
Alasandra Alawine -> Joel Marcuson
Apparently Bernie's judgement is pretty good. Look at his voting record. He has made the
right choices while Hillary and her experience have consistently made the WRONG choices. She
even admits to these "mistakes" but wants us to believe that somehow she will not continue to
make them.
And saying he has "no experience" is incorrect. He has dealt with foreign policy as a Senator.
benbache -> Alasandra Alawine
Bernie has voted for every military budget. Bernie voted to cut $9 billion from food stamps
in 2014. Bernie supports the F35, a weapon primarily designed to enrich the already rich and
secondarily to slaughter innocent people.
Bernie urged Saudi Arabia to step up attacks on poverty stricken Yemen. Bernie supports
Obama's targeted lynching of Muslim Americans. Bernie supports apartheid in Israel and the
periodic mass murder of Palestinians, men, women, and children.
A truly decent person, except of course for the fact that he has murderer more people than Ted
Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, and all the rest of the serial murderers in American
history. And more than all the mass murderers combined, too.
We live in a fascist police state because the voting class supports it. Why do blacks live in
horrific slums in America and go to schools no decent human would approve? Because of super
racist white people like Bernie and the entire rest of the political establishment on both
right wings.
Robin Crawford
Sadly the experience Hillary touts demonstrates her lack of judgment. One might give her
credit as SOS but her decision on Libya again detracts. The nation can't afford another Iraq.
This displays that judgment outweighs experience.
Longleveler
Sanders' study and involvement with foreign policy issues go back to the early eighties.
How do I know this? A 19 June 2015 Guardian article by Paul Lewis:
"But pretty much everything he said before the war did come to pass."
In 2002 it was apparent to anyone paying attention that the sudden swerve from the focus on
Al Queda and bin Laden in their Afghan caves as the perps behind 9/11 to Sadaam in his
Euphrates palaces by Wtf Bush and Darth Cheny and the rest of the Neocon Hitler Youth was all
a complete set up and that even without or maybe because of a lack of acces to even a portion
of the faulty intel, it was clear to educated and attentive citizens that they were making it
all up. Gore Vidal wrote about the need of the neos to find a new perpetual bogeyman to
replace the Russkies to keep those defense contracts going to Halliburton and the Carlyle
Group and to steal the Iraqi's oil and to let the anti-Baathist House of Saud pull a
Goldfinger on their stash of oil while the Iraqi's went up in smoke.
It was all hogwash on an unparalled scale, and everyone that I knew, including myself, knew it
was hogwash, yet still Senator Clinton voted for it and Senator Sanders voted against.
At that time, Clinton had as much foreign experience as Sanders (well, perhaps minus the whole
taking fire at the airport thing) and presumably had access to the same intel as he, yet one
exhibited much better and the other much worse judgement.
And also, back then, Sanders was, as he continues to be now, a genuine FDR New Dealer, a real
progressive, and Clinton was, and remains, a neoliberal corporate centrist.
She has since gone on to a controversial career in which her additional lack of judgement over
Servergate and the Libyan debacle is a stark reminder that while judgement and experience are
both equally important, Hillary seems to lack much more of the latter than does Bernie the
former.
LostintheUS
Amen, Trevor.
Also, the Clinton Foundation has accepted millions of dollars from many of the worst
governments on this planet, including Saudi Arabia. What sort of President would a person like
that make?
Catsissie
I would rather trust Bernie's judgment, and know that, since no president knows everything
and needs to depend on advisors to keep him informed, his judgment will lead him to choose
intelligent people to fill those positions. That would be more important to me than having one
single person assuming she or he knew it all.
Backbutton
We need a "fresh start" or at least as "fresh look" at our foreign policy, not the same old
approach which has accomplished not only so little, but made us a failure in the eyes of the
rest of the world.
Bernie has no experience in foreign affairs, but also no baggage or vested interests, not like
Hillary, whose record is terrible. Middle East, Pivot to Asia, etc.
We need and want fresh, even if just fresh flesh, anything but the same tired old stuff that
Hillary has sold in the past, and continues. Please!
kropotkinsf
If a democratic world is the dream, then U.S. foreign policy since World War II is an
unbroken string of failures and catastrophes. That's because its ultimate aim -- maintaining
America's hegemonic grip on the entire world and hang the cost -- is utterly incompatible with
democracy of any kind. That means projecting American military power everywhere (NATO is but
one example of that) in order that capital can flourish and the empire can thrive.
Clinton's experience is born of that mindset. It's hawkish, aggressive, and unabashedly
neoliberal. This is the secretary of state, after all, who described the despotic Hosni
Mubarak as "practically a member of the family" when Egypt rose to in revolt. Well, he WAS a
member of that rotten, rotten family. If that's the kind of "experience" she brings to the
table, I'll take a chance on the neophyte Sanders.
AhBrightWings
Instead of just questioning Sanders' choice, we should really be questioning why any of the
candidates of either party are employing the same old foreign policy advisers – many of whom
not only supported the Iraq war but every disastrous military intervention since. These are
the same people who now think that yet another regional war will somehow fix the chaos in the
Middle East.
Bingo. Brilliantly said (wish you'd been on the stage with Bernie to coach him on this). What
we do not need is more of the same.
This notion-- that if we keep pulling our leaders from the same MIC war mongering pile we'll
somehow mysteriously end up with peace-- has to change. It isn't even magical thinking; it's
flat-out suicidal. Bernie is the one candidate who grasps that, and that knowledge drives
everything.
We get what we pay for, and the bill on this monstrously criminal decade-and-a half and
counting has yet to be paid. Not even close. It's bankrupting us as we go, but there may well
be nothing left and no one left standing to deliver it at the rate we're going.
macmarco
Bernie has made a mistake letting Hillary claim that her Iraq War support was a one off
mistake. It wasn't one off but part of Hillary's foreign policy ideas, which closely resembles
the right wing PNAC principles of preemption and nation building. Jeffery Sachs in his latest
blog has listed Hillary's war mongering mistakes in more detail. Even with all this evidence
it will be a difficult road for Bernie to call Hillary a war monger in an arena of perpetual
war.
wyocoyote
And the current POTUS was such an advanced statesman (without a clue) that we are now
currently stumbling down the road towards peace in the middle east/Europe/Africa/Asia et al.
Like how is that for real? I have been on this planet for 69+ years, and the last POTUS who
had even an inkling of what was important in US foreign policy towards other nations was
Eisenhower (my apologies to Mr. Carter). The ding-bats like Kissenger hovering around the
throne in DC are not to be trusted nor deserve even the slightous attention, because they are
tied to the MIIC (military industrial intelligence complex) far too closely, and we citizens
pay for that symbiotic relationship in so many ways.
FriedaWoods -> wyocoyote
Actually, Eisenhower's use of the CIA to intervene in foreign affairs leaves something to
be desired. Eisenhower was a president who valued plausible deniability over accountability.
The CIA under Eisenhower was involved in the toppling of governments in Iran, Guatemala, and
the Congo -- the result of which was 40 years of a brutal dictatorship, but no one cared
because it kept the natural resources (primarily uranium) flowing to the US. Over the long
term, these kinds of actions have actually hurt US foreign policy. And, let's not forget that
most unfortunate incident with the downing of an American spy plane over the USSR just as Cold
War tensions were easing. It could be argued, and has been argued, that single incident
prolonged the Cold War. Only a person with a mere passing acquaintance with history would
praise Eisenhower's foreign policy.
nowayy
We need "experience"? Sure. Cheney for President.
TuskGeorge
The crucial difference is that Bernie has a coherent foreign policy while Hillary will
continue the mismash of ideas and conflicting polcies. It's not ultimately very important what
the policy is, as long as it is somewhat mainstream. It is important that there is a clear
policy that can be explained to everyone.
To understand why this is important, read Superpower by Ian Bremmer.
az Reggae
No US president unilaterally makes foreign pollcy decisions so Mr Sanders is still a voice
for coherent US policy without the Empire Manifest Destiny strategies of the past that have
failed miserably at least 50% of the time. The Middle East of today in chaos is that result of
failed policy, fast forwarded, when dictators have gone rogue or weren't paid enough for
following said policies. Take a look at Manuel Noreiga! He refused an order then all of a
sudden he was a drug dealer suddenly found out, as if he was hiding in plain sight for 2
decades or more!
Yoda00
He is not enough of a war monger to please the establishment.
Sandi Oates
Long story short. I'm an ex Expat. My father worked for the oil company in Saudi Arabia and
I grew up there in a nice little leave it to beaver company town. I have a very different view
on the Middle East than what I hear coming out of the mouths of most of our political leaders.
They just don't seem to even begin to understand the culture. They don't even seem to try.
Bernie's approach to the problems we face in the Middle East are actually much smarter than
anything I've seen coming out of our diplomatic experts in 40 years. Maybe its his Jewish
background, maybe its just that he's a bunch smarter than the average Joe. The thing I see in
Bernie is he gets the culture. He doesn't approach it with a "do what we want you to do or
else" attitude.
For the past 60 years our policy in the Middle East has been entirely about supporting Big
Oil. Whatever was best for the oil industry was best for our country has been the mantra.
To that end we have propped up dictators, military governments, whoever was in charge that
gave us what we wanted. Iran is a prime example. We had a fairly good relationship with Iran.
But the people of Iran decided they wanted shed of their sha dictator so they booted him out
and elected a new government. The new government was not as willing to sell out the needs of
Iran's people to the big oil companies so we used military force to out their new duely
elected government and reinstate the sha. Is it any wonder they grew radical in their response
to the US? We did this yet we act like somehow Iran attacked us. They didn't. We are the ones
that basically attacked their cultural preference and vilified it. Bernie understands the need
to build a consensus among the leaders of the Middle East to address the problems, because a
top down "do what we say, we have the biggest guns" is never ever going to work. We cannot
impose democracy on a population. It has to be their choice. And we cannot impose peace
either. We can however do many things that will encourage it.
I was so proud of President Obama signing the deal with Iran. Prob the single most important
thing he's done IMHO. Bernie talks about nurturing the possibilities of more cooperation and
dialogue. Hillary and the entire Republican field call for more sanctions. "Lets show them
who's boss." "Lets tear up any agreement that doesn't give us 100% control over what other
countries do and how they do it." That has been our diplomatic policy for as long as I've been
alive and its not working out so good for anyone. Bernie gets it.
One of the things that most disturbs me about Hillary is she thinks she did this great job as
SoS but I look at the policies and wonder when will we ever learn.
linden33
Re. Clinton's "foreign policy experience," I seriously doubt the value of such when she
likely adopted most of what was advised to her during her tenure as SOS. That doesn't mean
that the woman doesn't know more than she did going in, but what does that actually prove
about her decision-making judgment?
Now, almost everyone in the campaign is sounding more knowledgeable because of the "advice" of
said advisers. Everyone but Sanders, who has formulated his own opinions mostly by himself
over the years, based on (gasp) his own observations. Which is of more value, and which
"experience" is based more on integrity?
Vladimir Makarenko
There is nothing here to discuss - her days of SS marked by incompetence and disastrous
decisions like Libya. Not counting that she exposed country to the every semi literal hacker
on the planet. She is arrogant and ignorant, she surrounded herself by morons like Nuland and
her ultra neocon husband. At her days as SS she was making decisions on on national
foreign policy on advise (!!!) from old buddy with no credentials whatsoever. The only field
where she is competent are intrigues behind the scenes working with her "friends".
AlanJameson
Well, yes, Bernie has not had the experience of landing under fire in Bosnia. Cynics have
expressed doubts about Clinton's claim to have done so, but what reasonable person could
possibly doubt it? And he also did not vote for the war on Iraq, one of the biggest foreign
policy disasters in the history of the United States. And he didn't threaten Iran with nuclear
war. Experience is a very different matter than competence; the world is full of experienced
incompetents. Oh, and there is that little matter of the Nuremberg principles... but that's
just a scrap of paper, right?
DRDarkeNY AlanJameson
@Alan Jameson - didn't a former high-ranking Government Official call those "quaint and
outdated"...right before saying A-OK to torture and spying on everybody?
Who was that guy...? Ah, yes - Inquisitor General Alberto Gonzalez of the War Criminal Bush
Regime.
The truth is that Hillary is a neocon and as such belongs more to the Republican Party
then to Democratic Party... The differences between Hillary and Dick Cheney in foreign policy
are unsubstancial.
During Thursday's presidential debate, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow pondered this very notion when asking
the candidate questions about her political positions.
Maddow invoked Bernie Sanders' recent attacks on Clinton for not being "progressive enough" to
be the Democrat nominee and asked Clinton if she is "too far to the right of the Democratic Party
to be the party's standard bearer."
Newsbusters provides the clip and transcript:
RACHEL MADDOW: Secretary Clinton, senator Sanders is campaigning against you now, at this point
in the campaign basically arguing that you are not progressive enough to be the Democratic nominee.
He's said if you voted for the Iraq War, if in favor of the death penalty, if you wobbled on things
like the Keystone Pipeline or TPP, if you said single-payer health care could never happen then
you're too far to the right of the Democratic Party to be the party's standard bearer. Given those
policy positions, why should liberal Democrats support you and not Senator Sanders?
HILLARY CLINTON: I am a progressive who gets things done. The root of that word, progressive,
is progress. I've heard Senator Sanders comments and it's really caused me to wonder who's left
in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. Under his definition, President Obama is not
progressive because he took donations from wall Street. Vice President Biden is not progressive
because she supported keystone. Senator Saheen is not progressive because she supports the trade
pact. Even the late, great Senator Paul Wellstone would not fit this definition because he voted
for DOMA. You know, we have differences, and, honestly, I think we should be talk about what we
want to do for the country, but if we're going to get into labels, I don't think it was particularly
progressive to vote against the Brady bill five times. I don't think it was progressive to give
gun makers immunity. I don't think it was progressive to vote against Ted Kennedy's immigration
reform. So, we can go back and forth like there, but the fact is most people watching tonight
want to know what we've done and what we will do. That's why I'm laying out a specific agenda
that will make more progress, get more jobs with rising income, get us to universal health care
coverage, get us to universal pre-k, paid family leave, and the other elements of what I think
that will build a strong economy and ensure Americans will keep making progress. That's what I'm
offering and that's what I will do as president.
The intent is a classic "bait and switch". Everything the Hillary promises during election
company will be forgotten the minute she enters White house.
"The Clinton campaign is operating on two levels. The Clintons will make arguments on the
surface that make sense and seem reasonable. Then the Clintons will operate on a strategic
level that does not coincide with what they are saying. That's when you will hear Hillary say,
we are all about unification, we will do everything to unify the party....oh, by the way, do
you remember that creepy pastor? It just goes to show the huge difference in what the Clintons
say and their real strategy".
Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have been debating an idea for weeks before Sanders finally
put into words what separates them. "You can be a moderate. You can be a progressive. But you cannot
be a moderate and a progressive," he
wrote.
The first half hour of their New Hampshire debate put a fine point on this divide. Sanders wants
to define progressivism as a party-wide Democratic ideology, and Clinton is fiercely resisting.
As a simple political tactic, Sanders's case is strange. Only 41 percent of Democrats
self-identify as liberal; 56 percent call themselves moderate or conservative. But 50 years ago,
conservatives constituted a minority within the Republican Party, until the Goldwater movement set
out to conquer it. Today, conservatism is synonymous with Republicanism; no Republican candidate
would eschew the label. When Sanders confessed, "Let me be frank. I do want to see major changes
in the Democratic Party," he was telling the audience that he envisioned a deep and thorough overhaul
of the party - which should not come as a surprise, since he is not even a member of it.
Clinton began the debate by frontally engaging Sanders's case against moderation. Sanders has
defined Clinton's acceptance of Wall Street donations as inconsistent with her being a progressive.
Clinton noted in response that President Obama has also accepted Wall Street donations, so Sanders's
definition would exclude him as well. She framed this response as a trap, but rather than fully ensnare
Sanders upon a contradiction, it proceeded instead to reveal the profound ideological gulf between
them.
Clinton argued that, despite having received millions from Wall Street, Obama had passed the Dodd-Frank
financial reforms. In Clinton's telling, which is also the account of most liberal economists, Dodd-Frank
is the basis for effective financial reform. It has deeply reduced systemic risk, reducing financial
leverage, bringing trades out of the shadows and eliminating the incentive for banks to grow too
big to fail.
Sanders did not so much dispute the efficacy of Dodd-Frank as to broaden the question. His fixation
with Wall Street is not systemic risk - i.e., the chance that another crash will trigger an economic
meltdown. He frames Wall Street as a problem of political economy, not economy. Wall Street is so
big and rich that it is inherently dangerous, and will by its nature corrupt the political system.
Clinton does not believe that. Her political ideal is what some political scientists have called
"pluralism." A pluralist politics venerates the careful balancing of competing interests. It is okay
to bring business to the bargaining table as long as there is also a place for labor, environmentalists,
consumer advocates, and other countervailing interests. Clinton's Democratic Party, and Obama's,
is one in which pluralist agreements struck important progress not only in financial reform but also
health care, public investment, green energy, and other priorities.
Sanders does not completely reject the products of these pluralist compromises. (He grudgingly
accepts them as worthwhile, piecemeal steps.) What he rejects is the political model that treats
pluralism as the normal model of political action. Sanders believes the interest of the public is
not divided, it is united, and only the corrupt influence of big business has thwarted it. He consequently
vows to smash its power through a combination of a mass upsurge in political activism and campaign-finance
reform.
That was the vision Clinton challenged tonight. She declared, pointedly, "I'm not making promises
I cannot keep." And her campaign blasted out emails attacking "Bernie's Unachievable Revolution."
She tied her beliefs to those of the Obama administration, whose method of incremental progress and
negotiation with business she embraced.
For all their personal congeniality and determination not to personalize the debate, the divide
that opened between the two is a seminal moment in modern Democratic politics. A Democratic Party
as monolithically statist as the modern Republican Party is anti-government - one in which any defense
of free markets or business is dismissed - would look very different than anything within American
historical experience. After decades of this being taken for granted, it has finally become necessary
to defend moderation as a governing creed.
"... What she said - or didnt say - to Wall Street banks in particular has become a significant problem for her presidential campaign, as she tries to counter the unexpected rise of Democratic rival Bernie Sanders. Hes put her in awkward position of squaring her financial windfall with a frustrated electorate. ..."
Hillary
Clinton told voters in the latest Democratic debate there's "hardly anything you don't know about
me."
Just minutes later, she got tangled in a question about a part of her resume that is an enduring
mystery.
In the 18 months before launching her second presidential bid, Clinton gave nearly 100 paid speeches
at banks, trade associations, charitable groups and private corporations. The appearances netted
her $21.7 million - and voters very little information about what she was telling top corporations
as she prepared for her 2016 campaign.
What she said - or didn't say - to Wall Street banks in particular has become a significant
problem for her presidential campaign, as she tries to counter the unexpected rise of Democratic
rival Bernie Sanders. He's put her in awkward position of squaring her financial windfall with a
frustrated electorate.
Asked in the debate - and not for the first time - about releasing transcripts of those speeches,
she said: "I will look into it. I don't know the status, but I will certainly look into it." She
added, "My view on this is, look at my record."
Clinton addressed a broad swath of industries, speaking to supermarket companies in Colorado,
clinical pathologists in Illinois and travel agents in California, to name several. Many of the companies
and trade organizations that she addressed are lobbying Congress over a variety of interests.
She typically delivered an address, then answered questions from a pre-vetted interviewer. Her
standard fee was $225,000, though occasionally it could range up to $400,000.
"That's what they offered," said Clinton, when asked this week whether her fees were too high.
"... Hillary in this election is going in the same direction as the 2008 election -- her popularity is dropping at a consistent rate ..."
"... Why? Because Hillary loses voters every time she opens her mouth. Her popularity is based solely on name recognition and people can see right through her corporate backing, hollow sentiments and false personality, this is why the debates were rigged to be limited to the lowest possible number and shown on days and times least likely to be watched.... but now they've been forced to double the number of debates which wrecks Hillary as it did in the 2008 election.. ..."
"... On the other side of the map, the republicans are now too polarized. The establishment don't want Cruz or Trump and yet they won 1st and 2nd place respectively., nor can either candidate gain independent or liberal votes, nor can Rubio gain many votes from the teaparty who are desperately behind Cruz (and Trump as a fall back). ..."
Bernie is the the biggest fear to both the Republican and Democratic establishment! He's
the next FDR!
Thurston Lambert 3 days ago
Why are people voting for such a blatantly corrupt politician? She's been paid off by
Goldman Sachs she doesn't work for the people she works for the banks and Wall Street. Fuck
the democratic establishment and the GOP.
J Velez 3 days ago
Majority of bernie supporters are young. We need to get off our asses including myself and
help promote this man and encourage our friends and family to vote for this man
Nikki Nickerson 3 days ago
Congratulations Senator Sanders! You are a class act! You have done a lot for us vets. I am
not impressed at all with Trump raising money for vets he did it to get possible votes and
that is the only reason he did it. Real Americans see right trough Donald Trump and his real
motives which is to continue to support billionaires if elected!
Dan Harris 3 days ago
I made my 5th donation to Bernie today. That is 5 more then all the rest of my lifetime
political donations combined.
Things are so bad that it is my belief that Bernie is our last chance to save our
government and our country before the door for action is closed, perhaps permanently. It is my
belief that we fight now with Bernie or we sink into a corporate totalitarian state with no
hope for change in our lifetime short of massive bloodshed.
They will not let another Bernie get this close. Once the door is closed you are going to
get an intimate knowledge of the beliefs of George Orwell. They will own you. Know everything
you do...who you talk to, what you buy, where you work, your hobbies, your sexual preferences,
everything you ever did...they own the media and are totally manipulating the stock market in
a farce of free market capitalism, and they are willing to destroy the planet to make some
money. You are nothing but a mule to get used, till your used up and then discarded. Rise up
people, or snivel on your knees. Your choice. I would rather die on my feet with pride and
dignity then lick the corporate boot. Turn off the TV and take some fucking responsibility for
your life and make a stand. Bernie2016
Jack Soxman 3 days ago
I see that over 180,000 turned out to vote for a GOP candidate in Iowa.
What is with the Democrats? Hiding the number of voters.
And some DUMB coin toss that Hillary won 6 in a row? We pick a President based on a coin toss?
"Go stand over there if you are for x and over there for Y and over there for Jagbag" Like
some system out of the cave age.
Exposed_TitanZ 3 days ago
I'm calling it now. Bernie will be president.
This is why..
Hillary in this election is going in the same direction as the 2008 election -- her
popularity is dropping at a consistent rate and it'll hit rock bottom by the end of the
caucus', leaving her with less delegates and Bernie with the nomination.
Why? Because Hillary loses voters every time she opens her mouth. Her popularity is
based solely on name recognition and people can see right through her corporate backing,
hollow sentiments and false personality, this is why the debates were rigged to be limited to
the lowest possible number and shown on days and times least likely to be watched.... but now
they've been forced to double the number of debates which wrecks Hillary as it did in the 2008
election..
On top of that, Bernies' next win (New Hampshire) obligates media attention and puts him ahead
with the delegates (whether the media likes it or not), giving Bernie an extra advantage that
he didn't have in Iowa...and yet he still got 50% of the votes even then..
On the other side of the map, the republicans are now too polarized. The establishment
don't want Cruz or Trump and yet they won 1st and 2nd place respectively., nor can either
candidate gain independent or liberal votes, nor can Rubio gain many votes from the teaparty
who are desperately behind Cruz (and Trump as a fall back).
There are no consistently supportable candidates for both splinters of the Republican party
available to them.
On a national level, The party demographics put liberals ahead with the electoral college,
especially with many previous swing states now shifting into blue and the majority of power
states being blue as well.
The only way for the republicans to win is to nominate a non-polarizing candidate that all
of the republicans and some of the democrats and independents can get behind.. they don't have
one.
So I'm calling it. Bernie Sanders will win this election.
MRostendway 3 days ago
I have to correct Bernie I one thing; It wasn't just millions of people in the country..
I'm from the Netherlands and even here we FEEL THE BERN
Raphael Franks 3 days ago
It seems that Fox has been giving Bernie Sanders more positive airtime than any other
'liberal' media outlet. But I guess that's just because they don't want Hillary.
Marge Simpson 3 days ago
This result shows the mainstream media you are not effective anymore, this is a victory for
alternative media, Bernie was given 10 minutes of airtime on mainstream media Donald Trump was
given 4 hours, MAINSTREAM MEDIA JUST GOT BERNED.
This probably the most truthful and at the same emotional tibute to Sanders standing against
Iraq war. Amazing Video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHOdeum9juQ
Dear Susan Sarandon, Thank you for standing up with us, THE MAJORITY of Americans. thank
you for being on the RIGHT side of history once again. LOVE to you. thank you thank you thank
you...
Imzadi O'Hara 1 week ago
The reason Bernie will win is what you see in Susan, holding back tears. No American
political figure since maybe FDR, was able to invoke tears, joy, hope, allegiance, and trust
as Bernie can.
HILLARY for PRISON in 2016! 4 days ago
+Angela Durian I wouldn't vote for any politicians besides third party. the dems and reps
are the same, you're just too ignorant to see it :(
mrslittlefish 1 week ago
Amazing. A wonderful speech full of hope. It will be a great loss if Sanders is not the
next US president.
SE45CX 3 days ago (edited)
+mrslittlefish I am from the Netherlands and I know about americans skepticism for
socialist candidates. I will ensure you that for middle class american citizens he is the only
one to vote for to pursue the creation of DECENT JOBS! As your 1% is only aiming to have stuff
produced in asian or other low wage countries. And spending their wealth in tax utopias.
So even if your priorities are completely selfish or nationalistic, a vote for Bernie Sanders
is still your best choice to improve the american economy and in turn get a decent living for
yourself. Rather than continue being enslaved by the 1%.
Also, the money parties receive from big corporations come in no doubt with secret agreements
to have government people making decisions in favor of their greed. This is plain manipulation
and injustice. And in some cases this is also aimed to keep the middle class out of the share
of their revenues.
Hillary is sponsored by Super PACs. Who knows what hidden agenda she has then to prevent her
from DOING THE RIGHT THING, THE FAIR THING.
Vote for Bernie! FIGHT THE MACHINE, WITH THE MACHINE OF THE PEOPLES!
ejay11000 6 days ago
After watching all the debates and speeches....only 2 candidates resonate with me...Bernie
& Trump
They speak their mind and arent controlled by the establishment
If Bernie doesnt get the nominee Im 100% voting for Trump
If Bernie does get the nominee I will be more undecided ..but I may be leaning a little
towards Bernie
Susanne Maddox 1 day ago
Bernie Sanders is the last great hope to revive democracy in this country and attempt to
end the hold of the top one percent of Republican billionaires who have destroyed the middle
class of America. Hillary Clinton is a conservative who takes money from the billionaire
class. For real change, elect Bernie Sanders.
Anybody but Hillary LOL....
Everton Cunningham 6 days ago
what a courageous woman. so intelligent. so full of passion. I love her
EV docmaker 5 days ago (edited)
Great until he talks about foreign policy his stance against more wars is good but he does
not know or understand fact one about West Asia. He still does not get that the USA's
"friends" are in fact the real enemies and the perceived "enemies" are the real friends. The
only ones fighting a real fight against ISIS are the ones demonised by the West and attacked
by US allies with US and UK backing. He does not get this.
Of course the coin toss was for the win. Their wouldn't even be a coin toss to consider if
the game wasn't on the line. Being 6/6 is bullshit and you all know it.
"... To my American friends there is a new campaign taking off from Roots Action to #DumpDebbie as in Debbie Wasserman Schultz ..."
"... The kind of foreign policy Hillary and the Republicans believe is sort of a warlord mentality of dominance and chest-thumping. ..."
"... Bernie stepped aside on the email controversy for HRC but she went right back into it around the transcripts of her speeches to the banks. No one cares about what the Republicans think her emails but I think all Democrats and every person who goes to work each day want to see what she said to those banks! RELEASE THE TRANSCRIPTS ..."
"... However, foreign policy of Hillary Clinton and like-minded people has led to the fact that Americans no longer feel safe even when they are at home, not to mention when they go abroad. ..."
"... If this Wall Street poodle has support among democrats , who the hell are republicans? Go Bernie! ..."
"... 4 Feb 2016 22:37 ..."
"... We can't be pointing fingers at our dear friends the Saudis now can we? Deflect, deflect and deflect. Notwithstanding the fact that it has been the warmongering of the likes of Hilary Clinton that have have laid waste to Iraq, Libya and now Syria. ..."
"... The Guardian commentators are a disgrace. The Guardian bemoans that shift in its readership yet fails to recognise the level of frustration that exists out here at how far this paper has fallen. ..."
"... she's always gung-ho about military force but has nothing to say about reconstruction+rehabilitation efforts afterwards ..."
"... Clinton's a corrupt insider, which is what it is, and the US voters understand that. She has all the relevant job experience to be president, the right connections to direct federal funding to, and some slogans or something. ..."
"... That not a single Wall Street executive served a day in jail for the financial crisis is, in Sanders' words, "what is what power is about, that is what corruption is about, and that is what has to change in the United States of America." ..."
"... Hillary lies/parrots/says anything that will get her through the moment...now she is a progressive ....hahaha...NOT.... ..."
"... She quickly changed the topic when asked about the transcripts. ..."
"... Of course he would. It doesn't matter if Hillary is more effective or whatever - the more effective, the worse. Why would I want a more effective dismantler of welfare? A more effective deregulator of Wall Street? A more effective pusher of what passes for free trade ? A more effective warmonger? The truth is, she is an incrementalist - she moves things incrementally in the wrong direction. ..."
"... Hillary has a great sense of entitlement. She thinks she is royalty while Sanders is some commoner. ..."
"... It can't be said too many times: If Clinton becomes president, she, like her husband and Obama before her, will carry water for Wall Street, the Pentagon, and the national security apparatus from day one of her presidency. ..."
"... And--again just like her husband and Obama--she will occasionally punctuate her abject service to the exploiting class and its surveillance-state empire with sweet words justice and human rights--just enough of them to keep gullible liberals on her side. ..."
"... Hillary still won't apologize for her foolish and ill considered support for the Iraq War. George W Bush was a President who never admitted he was wrong about anything, and Clinton is exactly the same way. If she becomes President and makes a foolish decision, she won't change course, she'll be like Bush, just doubling down over and over on bad decisions. ..."
"... So NOW Clinton is saying she's a progressive, but in September of 2015 she was vehemently insisting she was a moderate. ..."
"... The remnants of the Democratic Leadership Council were folded into the Clinton Foundation. The Clinton Foundation bought the archives of the DLC. Welfare reform , trade, charter schooling -- all of this is Clintonism. DLC embraced moderate as a word and slammed progressives and liberals for years. HRC can have it both ways in newspeak but the record is what the record is. She's no progressive. Progressives don't have 'Walmart Board of Directors' on their resume. ..."
"... If this shameful spectacle isn't enough to finally nail the coffin on the democratic party in the minds of honest liberals and progressives then I don't know what will. ..."
"... Hillary is a disease... and the corporate media is doing everything they can to spread her malicious agenda. ..."
"... Clinton doesn't score many points on sincerity, in my opinion. ..."
"... Chuck Todd asks Hillary Clinton whether she is willing to release the full transcripts of every one of her paid speeches. Her response: they're classified....upper upper class. ..."
"... Mrs Clinton has and Ivy education, a Yale law degree, has been First Lady, a senator and secretary of state. Her fortune is estimated to be at least $30M, earned mostly from speaking fees paid by banks and other corporate interests. For her to claim that she is not a member of the establishment shows degrees of mendacity and arrogance that are truly rare. ..."
Surely if more than half of American voters have more than half a brain they only have one
choice; Sanders.
Cruz the effing evangelist has threatened to carpet bomb part of the MIddle East until 'the
sand glows'. Trump will be a non event.
Clintons claim to fame is that she is the wife of Bill who was responsible for de-regulating
the banking system to give the world the GFC. Bill was the laziest President the US has had,
spending a good deal of his time playing golf or on the receiving end of extra marital head
jobs.
The kind of foreign policy Hillary and the Republicans believe is sort of a warlord
mentality of dominance and chest-thumping.
Sam3456 4 Feb 2016 22:55
Bernie stepped aside on the email controversy for HRC but she went right back into it
around the transcripts of her speeches to the banks.
No one cares about what the Republicans think her emails but I think all Democrats and every
person who goes to work each day want to see what she said to those banks! RELEASE THE
TRANSCRIPTS
renardbleu -> nnedjo 4 Feb 2016 22:53
Imagine how non-Americans feel. You know, in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.
nnedjo 4 Feb 2016 22:48
What is the purpose of foreign policy?
In my opinion, foreign policy should ensure that when you go abroad you feel safe as if you're
at home, and to be welcomed in any part of the world.
However, foreign policy of Hillary Clinton and like-minded people has led to the fact
that Americans no longer feel safe even when they are at home, not to mention when they go
abroad.
So, whoever thinks that this world has become too peaceful, he would certainly have to vote
for Hillary to be the next president of the United States.:-)
Gman13 4 Feb 2016 22:45
If this Wall Street poodle has support among "democrats", who the hell are republicans?
Go Bernie!
IanB52 -> WarlockScott 4 Feb 2016 22:41
Personally, I wish he'd just say "Fuck war. We're all humans, everyone is entitled to human
rights, we're all in this together, and there is nothing noble about killing people, not the
least collateral damage of children and non-combatants, or terrorizing populations on the
other side of the world with drones, and stoking hatred against people who look different or
speak another language than us. Humanity won't survive as long as we fetishize and glamorize
killing people."
That would satisfy me, rather than beating around the bush and saying that you'll crush Isis
because you think that's what people want to hear. I'm a dreamer.
renardbleu -> Christian Haesemeyer4 Feb 2016 22:37
That's the wrong question. Can Bernie win the presidency? Lovely, decent man though he is,
the GOP clowns will have a field day spreading disinformation about the token "socialist" (if
he's a socialist, UK's David Cameron would be a marijuana-smoking Leftie). Bernie would gift
the presidency to whomever the GOP nominate and that's the real scary outcome.
NotWithoutMyMonkey 4 Feb 2016 22:33
Richard Wolff points believes that Sanders should've singled out Russia as the greatest
threat because Ash Carter says so but lets Hilary pass with a mendacious howler that Iran is
the greatest sponsor of terror (Shia Iran sponsoring Sunni extremism, oh really)?
We can't be pointing fingers at our dear friends the Saudis now can we? Deflect, deflect
and deflect. Notwithstanding the fact that it has been the warmongering of the likes of Hilary
Clinton that have have laid waste to Iraq, Libya and now Syria.
The Guardian commentators are a disgrace. The Guardian bemoans that shift in its
readership yet fails to recognise the level of frustration that exists out here at how far
this paper has fallen.
WarlockScott -> CriticAtLarge 4 Feb 2016 22:36
Bernie could hammer her hard on this, when she talks about Iran the problem is not her
engaging with Iranians (she has) but that she always coaches it in incredibly hostile
language. Like the first debate she was asked who are you most glad to have made enemies of
and she answered "The Iranians" and the GOP. Also she's always gung-ho about military
force but has nothing to say about reconstruction+rehabilitation efforts afterwards
BaldwinP -> BlackAbbott 4 Feb 2016 22:31
I would vote for Matt Taibbi just for coming up with the vampire squid description of
Goldman Sachs, I'm not sure that that quote from Sanders is in the same class. Bashing the
banks is easy, you do it, I do it. What is he actually going to do about it?
Rumfoord 4 Feb 2016 22:31
Clinton's a corrupt insider, which is what it is, and the US voters understand that.
She has all the relevant job experience to be president, the right connections to direct
federal funding to, and some slogans or something.
Sanders is a populist calling his milquetoast 'socialist' agenda as some sort of leftist
revolution.
I'm a social democrat, and they're both rightists so far as I'm concerned.
MyTakeOnIt 4 Feb 2016 22:30
Foreign policy in the first four years of Obama's presidency has been a disaster. All the
mess in the middle east is first due to the Bush 's Iraq invasion, and secondly regime change
binge in the first term of Obama administration. Foreign policy, in the first term of Obama
administration, by agreement, was given to Hillary in order for her not to challenged Obama in
2012. So Hillary voted for Iraq invasion, in addition to forcing bombing of Libya, among other
disasters.
BlackAbbott 4 Feb 2016 22:28
Goldman Sachs was one of those companies whose illegal activity helped destroy our
economy and ruin the lives of millions of Americans. This is what a rigged economy and a
corrupt campaign finance system system and a broken justice system do."
That not a single Wall Street executive served a day in jail for the financial crisis
is, in Sanders' words, "what is what power is about, that is what corruption is about, and
that is what has to change in the United States of America."
I would almost (almost) become an American just to vote for this guy.
Beowullf 4 Feb 2016 22:24
Hillary lies/parrots/says anything that will get her through the moment...now she is a
"progressive"....hahaha...NOT....
She quickly changed the topic when asked about the transcripts.
Christian Haesemeyer -> sursiques 4 Feb 2016 22:19
Of course he would. It doesn't matter if Hillary is more effective or whatever - the
more effective, the worse. Why would I want a more effective dismantler of welfare? A more
effective deregulator of Wall Street? A more effective pusher of what passes for "free trade"?
A more effective warmonger? The truth is, she is an incrementalist - she moves things
incrementally in the wrong direction.
CriticAtLarge -> sursiques 4 Feb 2016 22:17
Hillary has a great sense of entitlement. She thinks she is royalty while Sanders is
some commoner. Hillary is tough as nails though. Sanders is too mild mannered. He will
get chewed in a general.
CorporalClegg 4 Feb 2016 22:16
Wall street paid Hillary $675,000 for no other reason than they wanted to hear about her
experiences in politics. Now, anyone who believes that should head straight to the rubber
room. Please go straight there and do not vote.
eastbayradical 4 Feb 2016 22:16
It can't be said too many times: If Clinton becomes president, she, like her husband
and Obama before her, will carry water for Wall Street, the Pentagon, and the national
security apparatus from day one of her presidency.
And--again just like her husband and Obama--she will occasionally punctuate her abject
service to the exploiting class and its surveillance-state empire with sweet words justice and
human rights--just enough of them to keep gullible liberals on her side.
ID0020237 -> Marcedward 4 Feb 2016 22:13
She was duped just like the rest of the 99% of Americans for supporting the war in Iraq.
The propaganda machinery (media) worked overtime for the Neocons success. None of the reasons
given to justify the war were ever proven to be real. Peace is apparently not a prime
objective of American policies, just check our track record. Doesn't really matter which party
gets in, the same misguided policies and government borrowing activities will probably
prevail.
PeregrineSlim 4 Feb 2016 22:12
What about the following question:
Do you support the current Turkish-Saudi plans for a joint war in Syria?
seneca32 4 Feb 2016 22:09
I don't think Obama named her Sec. of State because of her judgment -- I think he did it to
neutralize her and the Clinton gang.
WarlockScott 4 Feb 2016 22:09
Bernie do more debate-prep and if you do know this, HIT HER ON THIS
Sanders' integrity and commitment to a happy-clappy issues-only campaign is
counter-productive. He could have buried Clinton in this debate already if he would only go
for the jugular.
Marcedward 4 Feb 2016 22:01
Hillary still won't apologize for her foolish and ill considered support for the Iraq
War. George W Bush was a President who never admitted he was wrong about anything, and Clinton
is exactly the same way. If she becomes President and makes a foolish decision, she won't
change course, she'll be like Bush, just doubling down over and over on bad decisions.
Marcedward 4 Feb 2016 21:56
So NOW Clinton is saying she's a progressive, but in September of 2015 she was
vehemently insisting she was a moderate.
Question:
Was they lying then, or is she lying now, or is she simply a habitual liar?
If Hillary gets the nomination, the Republicans will use her own words against her
FLIP FLOP
FLIP FLOP
Just like they did with John Kerry.
Joseph Musco 4 Feb 2016 21:55
The remnants of the Democratic Leadership Council were folded into the Clinton
Foundation. The Clinton Foundation bought the archives of the DLC. "Welfare reform", trade,
charter schooling -- all of this is Clintonism. DLC embraced moderate as a word and slammed
progressives and liberals for years. HRC can have it both ways in newspeak but the record is
what the record is. She's no progressive. Progressives don't have 'Walmart Board of Directors'
on their resume.
JuliusSqueezer 4 Feb 2016 21:52
If this shameful spectacle isn't enough to finally nail the coffin on the democratic
party in the minds of honest liberals and progressives then I don't know what will. I'm
an anarchist though.... and just laugh along till both parties are dead.... but still this is
very sad to me. Hillary is a disease... and the corporate media is doing everything they
can to spread her malicious agenda.
Jezreel2 -> wisedup 4 Feb 2016 21:50
I agree. They should. But today, Playboy magazine published an article in which Rachel
Maddow is quoted saying she finds it "hard to believe" that Sanders can win the Democratic
nomination. And Chuck Todd, wouldn't even poll Sanders standing against Republicans in the
general election because the narrative on MSNBC and NBC was focused on the inevitability of
Clinton winning the nomination.
Clinton doesn't score many points on sincerity, in my opinion.
bloggod 4 Feb 2016 21:51
Chuck Todd asks Hillary Clinton whether she is willing to release the full transcripts
of every one of her paid speeches. Her response: they're classified....upper upper class.
Christian Haesemeyer 4 Feb 2016 21:44
Well I'm sure Clinton isn't lying when she says she has never changed a position because of
donations. I just fail to see how that's a good thing - she has always supported policies
favouring Wall Street, ever since Bill and her and the gang set out to transform the
Democratic Party into the party of big money.
mrmetrowest 4 Feb 2016 21:38
Mrs Clinton has and Ivy education, a Yale law degree, has been First Lady, a senator
and secretary of state. Her fortune is estimated to be at least $30M, earned mostly from
speaking fees paid by banks and other corporate interests. For her to claim that she is not a
member of the establishment shows degrees of mendacity and arrogance that are truly rare.
An interesting, but not a deep, discussion about the possibility of uprising against the
neoliberal elite in the current circumstances...
Notable quotes:
"... Is it time for pitchforks to restore the natural orders of fear yet? ..."
"... With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the spread of global capitalism, today's
elites have lost the sense of fear that inspired a healthy respect for the masses among their
predecessors . Now they can despise them as losers, as the aristocracy of ancien régime
France despised the peasants who would soon be burning their châteaux. Surely today's
elites are going to learn how to fear before we see any reversal of the recent concentration of
wealth and power. ..."
The following reader comment,
posted originally in the FT is a must read, both for the world's lower and endangered middle
classes but especially the members of the 1% elite because what may be coming next could be very
unpleasant for them.
From the time of the French Revolution until the collapse of communism, what successive
generations of elites had in common was a sense of fear of what the aggrieved masses might do
. In the first half of the 19th century they worried about a new Jacobin Terror, then
they worried about socialist revolution on the model of the Paris Commune of 1871. One reason
for the first world war was a growing sense of complacency among European elites. Afterwards they
had plenty to worry about in the form of international communism, which remained a bogey until
the 1980s.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the spread of global capitalism, today's
elites have lost the sense of fear that inspired a healthy respect for the masses among their
predecessors . Now they can despise them as losers, as the aristocracy of ancien régime
France despised the peasants who would soon be burning their châteaux. Surely today's
elites are going to learn how to fear before we see any reversal of the recent concentration of
wealth and power.
Is it time for pitchforks to restore the natural orders of fear yet?
And most people wouldn't have the faintest idea of where to buy, or more probably rent, a pitchfork
anyhow. As for torches? What, are you crazy? Those things are dangerous and would void our
insurance policy.
And a roasting spit and rope to tie em by the ankle to the cherry trees lining the national
mall, Musollini style. Urinals hanging from cherry trees. Only in America.
One does wonder how inbreds surrounded by expensive advisors so easily lost any shred of fight-o-flight
survival skills. Guess the extra bling allows them to dream false dreams.
The ones who think they are 'top dog' are about to find out the hard way, there is something
much bigger at work...
"6. The people, under our guidance, have annihilated the aristocracy, who were their one and
only defense and foster-mother for the sake of their own advantage which is inseparably bound
up with the well-being of the people. Nowadays, with the destruction of the aristocracy,
the people have fallen into the grips of merciless money-grinding scoundrels who have
laid a pitiless and cruel yoke upon the necks of the workers.
7. We appear on the scene as alleged saviours of the worker from this oppression
when we propose to him to enter the ranks of our fighting forces - socialists, anarchists, communists
- to whom we always give support in accordance with an alleged brotherly rule (of the solidarity
of all humanity) of our social masonry. The aristocracy, which enjoyed by law the labor of the
workers, was interested in seeing that the workers were well fed, healthy, and strong. We are
interested in just the opposite - in the diminution, the killing out of the goyim. Our power is
in the chronic shortness of food and physical weakness of the worker because by all that this
implies he is made the slave of our will, and he will not find in his own authorities either strength
or energy to set against our will. Hunger creates the right of capital to rule the worker more
surely than it was given to the aristocracy by the legal authority of kings.
8. By want and the envy and hatred which it engenders we shall move the mobs and with
their hands we shall wipe out all those who hinder us on our way."
The thing is that there are going to be a LOT of folks who thought
they were elites. Instead they will be thrown under the bus of the approaching hoards to
slow them down while the real elites make sure no one escapes that shouldn't be.
They no longer fear the masses as they control the cops and the narrative. What will really
work and is almost unstoppable is the ghost in the machine. Seemingly random acts of sabotage,
just think if the internet went down for even 2 or 3 days. Who would it hurt most, average folk
or ? I have a dream...
Lol those guys are so blackwater.... It is illegal to have a standing "army" on 'murrican soil.
Private for hire jagoffs arent. And no, it wasnt the national guard.
The internet doesnt forget or forgive transgressions. Sins of the father shall be paid for by
their sons. "Where are you going to run, where are you going to hide; no where because there is no where left
to run to." - Body snatchers
I think you are correct so far as you take your argument. Yes, they will START on their own
neighborhoods. The depth of the fall can be graphed against how far they will go afterwards.
It is our son's and daughter's who protect the elitist assholes. We know where they built their
bugouts and landing strips. We built them. We know where the air vents are for their underground
bunkers. We built them. We know where the diesel tanks are to power their generators and you can't
hide solar panels. No, we know where there going and how to get to them. Soon!!
Now you know why the hawaiian's, when they sent a worker down the side of a cliff to bury the
chiefs bones in that space reserved for the Ali'i, they "accidently" let go of the rope while
he was climbing back up...oopppps, sorry bout 'dat brah.
No, the proles do little of substance. But, the time is reached when even their paid off guard
dogs will be tired of the insanity that destroys their own extended families. (The psychopaths
can't help but push it to the extremes. That is their egotistical nature. Theyve been indulged
since they were infants.) When that day of reckoning comes, the criminals will be very afraid.
The EU 'leadership' bringing in massive outside foreign populations to destroy the existing
culture and nation-state is a potential match for the fuse of anger. We see police carrying out
orders, but what do they really think ? How bad will they let it get ? Even the Red Army troops
refused to go along with it all when the grandmas scolded them for taking part in rolling the
tanks toward their own people. And those troops said "Nyet, no more of this." And the USSR was
no more.
I used to love the old sims of feudal japan where you could set your tax rate at whatever you
wanted but the higher you set it the more likely you would get a peasant revolt.
What's going on is precisely this:.....
They have learned how to set the tax rate at whatever percentage won't cause utter chaos and
then absolve themselves from said taxes through loopholes AND THEN add on top stealth taxes in
the form of currency debasement AND THEN on top of all this they've built a ponzi scheme debt
based fiasco that is entirely unsustainable.
I gotta hand it to them they have managed so far to avoid the ire of the peasant class, however
methinks that once this shit show rolls into town and starts playing nightly as in reality comes
a callin then these same folks are going to need to hide off planet.
Seriously I'd advise them to look into space travel.
The elites today were related to the elites of yesterdays revolutions. They have learned and are keeping track of everything and with the advent of big data and lots
of computing power, they know how much time they have before SHTF. They have quants assessing risk daily, and not just market risk..geopolitical and other stuff.
They dont fear us because they know they can keep ramping up poisoning of our food and other
stupid social media gimmicks.
If all else fails, the jackboots will come out in full force.
They've been testing and training these detention methods for close to 100 years. From the
gulags of Russia to the West Bank / Gaza strip today of Israel.....its being tried and trued.
The past nine months have set record monthly background checks. I believe we as a "group"
know and feel our existence is in danger, and are responding accordingly.
Certainly a patriot CANNOT do it through the ballot box,
Iowa: Days before the Iowa caucuses in 2012, Ron Paul held a
commanding lead in the
polls and all the momentum, with every other candidate having peaked from favorable
media coverage and then collapsed under the ensuing scrutiny. Establishment Republicans, like
Iowa's Representative Steve King (R), attempted to sabotage Paul's campaign by
spreading rumors
he would lose to Obama if nominated. . . Iowa Governor Terry Barnstad
told Politico
, "[If Paul wins] people are going to look at who comes in second and who comes in third.
If Romney comes in a strong second, it definitely helps him going into New Hampshire".
The message from the Iowa Governor to voters of his state was: a vote for Ron Paul was a wasted
vote.
The RNC and their minions would have prevented a Ron Paul presidential nomination, by any means
necessary - up to and including a terrible, just terrible, plane crash. All those lives lost....
They DID prevent the nomination by any means necessary...and did so, short of crashing a plane.
The underhanded shit they pulled in '12 sealed their fate.
In that case, the Libertarian Party needs to go "full Zio-mode": Take no BS and no
prisoners.
Problem is, they are too "individualistic" (divided, heterogenous), and too 'Christian' (raised
in "Religion of Serfs") to create another American or French Revolution, or bring about real change.
Note that in the American Revolution, its Founders realized that the influence of Clerics needed
to be curtailed, and so they invented the "Seperation of Church and State". The French, OTOH,
called a spade a spade, and got rid of the Church completely.
Amerika: Where kids are taught by their parents to believe in the Tooth Fairy, Easter Bunny
and Santa Claus -- all the while they believe in "Santa for Grownups", i.e. Winged Nordic Humans
(Angels) and a Sky God.
I have ZERO faith that Libertarians will do anyting, other than talk, blog, hold meetings,
conventions, have weekend warrior games, or buy any number of Doomsday Products and Services.
IOW.. they'll do anything and everything, but March or Protest en mass. They won't even do TV
program, much less do a leveraged buyout of a TV channel.
Like I said: "Too individualistic, to truly matter to TPTB". I WISH it were not to,
but I'm just calling it as I see it. Alas. If I'm wrong, I'll jump for joy and click my heels.
"Tonight is a wonderful start to the national campaign," Sanders said in a packed gangway on
the late-night flight heading east to beat an incoming snowstorm. "Tonight shows the American
people that this is a campaign that can win."
He threw little light on an unfolding controversy over certain Iowa precincts that did not
have enough Democratic party volunteers to report delegate totals for each candidate but did
call on officials to take the unusual step of revealing underlying voter totals. Delegates are
awarded in the Iowa Democratic contest on a precinct-by-precinct basis, irrespective of the
state-wide vote for each candidate.
"I honestly don't know what happened. I know there are some precincts that have still not
reported. I can only hope and expect that the count will be honest," he said. "I have no idea.
Did we win the popular vote? I don't know, but as much information as possible should be made
available."
Sanders' campaign director, Jeff Weaver, told reporters he did not "anticipate we are going to
contest" specific results but hoped there would be an investigation into what happened.
He also claimed the tight result, in a state where Sanders had once trailed by Clinton in
polling by 50 percentage points, was a sign of a dramatic surge of popularity for his agenda to
reduce income inequality and "seize back democracy from the billionaire class".
"People said we had an inferior ground game, that we didn't have as good an understanding of
the state," said Weaver. "I think we certainly demonstrated that we had at least as good a
ground game and I would argue that we had a better one because we started out [as underdogs]."
"... Keep in mind Iowa is a strictly for registered party members, Independents can't participate there. That is why Trump didn't perform well (he depends on the loosely termed Tea Party , that draws it's popularity OUTSIDE the party via the Libertarians and Independents). ..."
"... Reagan used the South in his bid for presidency because they don't require party registration nor force them to choose what they chose in the primaries. So they can vote either way they chose ... and with a secret ballot. This helps when win fever erupts and join the bandwagon and it's hooping and hollering collects more votes, and not alienate your friends and family. ..."
"... Iowa had no secret ballot nor Independents. So hold onto your hats until after March Primaries (that has some of the most populated states voting) to pick the winning horse, either by conscious or win fever . ..."
"... True, but by the same token - look how well Carson did. That almost certainly came out of Trump's supporters, since they're very similar candidates. If Carson bows out, those people probably go straight to Trump, giving him an easy edge against Cruz, who spent a LOT of time working Iowa, and hasn't done much elsewhere. Then again, that depends upon 'loser' Trump being able to explain why he's still a winner. ..."
"... Iowa is basically a chance for underdogs to attract a bit more attention and get a bit more funding from folks who would pull their money out otherwise. But it's not indicative of much more than that. And New Hampshire is in a similar position - good for politics and momentum, but not actually very predictive. ..."
"... MPs in the UK have been expressing relief at Donald Trump's failure in Iowa. Well they shouldn't be relieved. Trump had poor numbers against Hilary and (especially) Bernie for the general. Cruz is more competitive. And Trump was most probably a harmless blowhard, whilst Cruz is just as poisonous and is driven by ideology rather than ego. ..."
Eh... Iowa really doesn't prove electability, though. It's got a roughly 50% rate of
caucusing for the candidate eventually chosen - the coinflip was, oddly, about as accurate as
getting votes. And it is a swing state lately, but a small one - if he wins Ohio or Florida,
it's time to be proud.
That being said, it DOES give him momentum, and was a good showing - he could have lost by 10%
and still called it a clear sign that people liked him. His only real problem is his own words
- he predicted a clear victory if turnout was high. And turnout WAS high - higher than it's
ever been, yet he still (very narrowly) lost. So he's golden... so long as his supporters
don't actually hold him accountable for what he says.
Clinton, meanwhile, has acted like it was going to be a tough fight, and clearly got a tough
fight. Since she lost Iowa last time, this will energize HER base too - and it's not super
likely that a bigger win would have helped her much more.
Marcedward -> starlingnl 2 Feb 2016 11:13
Clinton did not crack 50% in a state where she used to be ahead by 40points in the polls.
Clinton suffered a big setback - the base is against her.
SandyK -> ezyian 2 Feb 2016 10:59
Trump's in trouble though, as Iowa is a closed election for only party loyalists. It shows
who the party likes and dislikes, especially to White Christian voters.
Trump is not what HE think's he is, as the vote is fairly evenly divided in the GOP. None are
clear winners in ideology.
IF Trump pulls ahead in the March Primaries it's the Independents driving his campaign ... and
oh, the GOP is going to cannibalize itself IF Trump gets the nomination from support outside
the party.
That's how voters leave the party, just like in 1980 (when the choice was Carter or Kennedy).
^-^
SandyK 2 Feb 2016 10:50
Keep in mind Iowa is a strictly for registered party members, Independents can't
participate there. That is why Trump didn't perform well (he depends on the loosely termed
"Tea Party", that draws it's popularity OUTSIDE the party via the Libertarians and
Independents).
It shows what the parties itself thinks of their candidates.
March with the huge primaries will show what the cross section of the USA thinks about them.
Reagan used the South in his bid for presidency because they don't require party
registration nor force them to choose what they chose in the primaries. So they can vote
either way they chose ... and with a secret ballot. This helps when "win fever" erupts and
"join the bandwagon and it's hooping and hollering" collects more votes, and not alienate your
friends and family.
Iowa had no secret ballot nor Independents. So hold onto your hats until after March
Primaries (that has some of the most populated states voting) to pick the winning horse,
either by conscious or "win fever".
kattw -> Majentah 2 Feb 2016 10:40
True, but by the same token - look how well Carson did. That almost certainly came out
of Trump's supporters, since they're very similar candidates. If Carson bows out, those people
probably go straight to Trump, giving him an easy edge against Cruz, who spent a LOT of time
working Iowa, and hasn't done much elsewhere. Then again, that depends upon 'loser' Trump
being able to explain why he's still a winner.
kattw Mr0011011 2 Feb 2016 09:29
That's not even correct. For democrats, in the last 11 caucuses not counting yesterday,
they picked wrong 3 times (four if you count that more people didn't know who to vote for than
voted for Carter), and 2 times were uncontested - ie: basically a 50% chance of picking right
when there's an actual contest to decide. For republicans, they were wrong 4 times, and
choosing uncontested spots three times - ie: again a roughly 50% chance of choosing correctly
when there was actually a contest.
Iowa is basically a chance for underdogs to attract a bit more attention and get a bit
more funding from folks who would pull their money out otherwise. But it's not indicative of
much more than that. And New Hampshire is in a similar position - good for politics and
momentum, but not actually very predictive.
Which really makes the coin-flip seem logical in retrospect, since it's about a 50% chance the
Iowa delegates will be voting for the eventual winner either way.
confettifoot -> confettifoot 2 Feb 2016 08:55
I'll follow Sanders' lead on this one. I've watched and listened closely when he addresses
Hillary. He respectfully and emphatically disagrees on actual issues (and agrees on others,
and says so), and never stoops to flinging dubious half-truths, rightwing-generated smear
soundbytes or dishonest construction of fact. It's one of the reasons why I love and respect
him. Bernie supporters who do otherwise only do him great harm and don't deserve him. Save
your spleen for the Republicans, know the difference, and support Bernie.
Lafeyette 2 Feb 2016 08:34
"This is not the end, this is not even the beginning of the end, this is just perhaps the
end of the beginning."
-Sir Winston Churchill
Vermouth Brilliantine 2 Feb 2016 08:31
God help us if this trend continues and we end up with a Cruz vs. Clinton presidential
election. Righteous evil vs. the crypto-Wall Street hawk-in-leftist clothing. Not a race I'd
like to see.
furiouspurpose 2 Feb 2016 08:30
MPs in the UK have been expressing relief at Donald Trump's failure in Iowa. Well they
shouldn't be relieved. Trump had poor numbers against Hilary and (especially) Bernie for the
general. Cruz is more competitive. And Trump was most probably a harmless blowhard, whilst
Cruz is just as poisonous and is driven by ideology rather than ego.
kambge Faranelli 2 Feb 2016 07:57
To be honest we've had G.W bush who was basically as nearly as bad as trump, the fake hope
of Obama who probably is a decent guy but is controlled by other forces, the problem is that
if Bernie gets elected, there is not much her or any US president can do to stop the
inevitable decline of the US economy, and people will blame socialism and public spending
again for the ills of really stupid financialization of the economy, greed and short-sigthedness
from our political and financial leaders.
US debt is unsustainable in the long run. The only reason countries bought it in the past was
gunboat diplomacy, the only reason the chinese buy it now is to prop up a broken system -
their own financial system is equally bubbalicious although I'm not so clued up on the Chinese
economy. We need a big market re-adjustment to sort all of this shit out and then rebuild from
the ashes.
So stale. This is the same old tired messaging coming out of the Clinton camp for months on
end. Declaring one's candidate the presumptive winner while claiming victimhood is more than a
tad disingenuous. This oft repeated routine to rally the troops in protection of Ms. Clinton,
makes one wonder how she can be expected to lead. For shame.
erpiu 2 Feb 2016 10:58
the bottom-line question about hillary is:
can she be trusted with the hopes and the vote of impoverished usa voters of any race...
i) given the ~140 million in *personal-wealth* bribes she&he have already received, and keep
receiving, from WS, the "sweatshops for america!" council, and the "private prisons R us" trade
group?
ii) given that her demonstrated appetite for money and for the lifestyles of the rich and famous
requires her getting further bribes from WS and the plutocrats?
iii) given her record of opportunism with only one constant: advancing her career and hubby's
(or were the race-baiting prison and welfare bills idealistic? was it slick willie's boasting
after DOMA?).
iv) given her mixed ideological upbringing, exposures, and moderate "likes" that span from
the openly racist rightwing reactionary world (campaigning for "southern-strategists" b.goldwater
and r.nixon), to "realistic" by-bribe-only anything-for-WS race-baiting, gay-baiting, welfare-baiting
"progressivism"?
Cafael 2 Feb 2016 10:49
it's self-evident to any true leftist that all issues should come back to economics.
It's not just economics; it's excessive competitiveness. Racial and gender prejudices are
competitive group strategies. If you want a more competitive society with liberal values,
you can't achieve that holistically, you can only do it through draconian censure of the outward
expressions of prejudice, by attacking, even criminalising dissent, creating totalitarian liberalism.
Making people fear to publicly express racial prejudice while keeping all the money and power
in white hands, thus ultimately sanctifying and reinforcing the power of white elites. Perhaps
that is the agenda, and actually ending racial prejudice or sexism or homophobia isn't really
the point.
A more compassionate, less competitive society on the other hand, not uniformly conformist,
tall poppy cutting or happy clappy but recognising from our experience, from our human perspective
that winning or being 'better than' having 'more than' isn't an ulimately fulfilling imperative;
recognising that the society's basis and symbiosis is more than merely transactional, would more
fundamentally change the way people consider minorities and gender, because such a society wouldn't
be running on rivalry and hatred.
I'm not saying Western society does run on those emotions, far from it, but the modern, ever
more extreme capitalist ideology may be, with the best of intentions, sleepwalking that way, because
it doesn't understand its own philosophy.
voxjubilante 2 Feb 2016 10:42
This "BernieBros" narrative has already been eviscerated at The Intercept:
"... Most of the rank and file who still fervently support her never made it as far up the ladder as a Joan Walsh, but they identify with Walsh, because werent they all together and equals once, not so long ago? Except it was long ago. The passage of 30-35 years matters, and the utter divergence of their stature and economic safety matters even more. They want a vicarious win for themselves via Hillary. Because theyre fools. ..."
"... The lame gender justification for voting for Hillary Clinton reminds me of what my late mother used to call yellow dog Republicans in South Dakota. They would vote for a yellow dog before they would vote for any Democrat. ..."
"... Put in context, Sanders was responding to requests by the Saudis for U.S. ground troops to fight ISIS. He saw through it, saying that what they really wanted was U.S. troops to protect the billionaire Saudi royal family. ..."
"... Those who are on board with neoliberalism and the American Imperial Project can vote for Hilary on points–I have no problem with that so long as they are honest about it. ..."
"... It also seems that to some extent Hillary is benefiting from the fact that she is such a toxic monster that its hard to even process, it seems unreal and hard to believe in. I mean, here is a person who has pushed to waste trillions of dollars devastating middle eastern countries that dont threaten us, has de-facto allied the United States with Al Qaeda (!), has pushed to spend trillions of dollars bailing out Wall Street while starving main street of capital, intends to gut social security to help pay for all this largesse to the 1% (because deficits are bad, you know), wants us to sign a trade agreement that is effectively a corporate coup, making our domestic laws subservient to a bunch of foreign corporate lawyers meeting in secret, used her tenure as secretary of state to sell out the national interest for personal cash while she was still in office… And people say that Trump is dangerous? Or that Bernie is unelectable? Really? ..."
"... If Hillary Clinton, neoliberal and neoconservative warmonger, is elected the first woman president, it will be appropriate for this nation, given its system of predatory global capitalism enforced by military brutality and violence. Appropriate, but not at all beneficial, for most of us and the planet. ..."
"... Wall St bankers were worried about angry populism coming for their hides in 2008. Knowing that identity politics trumps issue politics for most Democrat voters, they inserted Obama into the mix, and the Democrats lapped it up like the identity-card simpletons that they are. This shifted the focus of the 08 Democrat primaries from Wall St and Iraq to a tacit identity battle based on race and gender. ..."
"... I also think Clinton is the Candidate Most Likely to Start WW3, and that includes all ..."
From a recent
Guardian article
, this from long-time Wall Street trader Chris Arnade. This is worth reading
in full. He starts:
I owe almost my entire Wall Street career to the Clintons. I am not alone; most bankers owe
their careers, and their wealth, to them. Over the last 25 years they – with the Clintons it is
never just Bill or Hillary – implemented policies that placed Wall Street at the center of the
Democratic economic agenda, turning it from a party against Wall Street to a party of Wall Street.
That is why when I recently went to see
Hillary Clinton
campaign for president and speak about reforming Wall Street I was skeptical. What I heard
hasn't changed that skepticism. The policies she offers are mid-course corrections. In the Clintons'
world, Wall Street stays at the center, economically and politically. Given Wall Street's power
and influence, that is a dangerous place to leave them.
Now some of his story:
Salomon Brothers hired me in 1993, seven months after President Bill Clinton's inauguration.
Getting a job had been easy, Wall Street was booming from deregulation that had begun under Reagan
and was continuing under Clinton.
When Bill Clinton ran for office, he offered up him and Hillary ("Two for the price of one")
as New Democrats, embracing an image of being tough on crime, but not on business. Despite the
campaign rhetoric, nobody on the trading floor I joined had voted for the Clintons or trusted
them.
Few traders on the floor were even Democrats, who as long as anyone could remember were Wall
Street's natural enemy. That view was summarized in the words of my boss: "Republicans let you
make money and let you keep it. Democrats don't let you make money, but if you do, they take it."
Despite Wall Street's reticence, key appointments were swinging their way. Robert Rubin, who
had been CEO of Goldman Sachs, was appointed to a senior White House job as director of the National
Economic Council. The Treasury Department was also being filled with banking friendly economists
who saw the markets as a solution, not as a problem.
The administration's economic policy took shape as trickle down, Democratic style. They championed
free trade, pushing Nafta. They reformed welfare, buying into the conservative view that poverty
was about dependency, not about situation. They threw the old left a few bones, repealing prior
tax cuts on the rich, but used the increased revenues mostly on Wall Street's favorite issue:
cutting the debt.
But when Clinton bailed out Mexico to make Wall Street debt-holders whole, Wall Street knew that
administration was theirs:
Most importantly, when faced with their first financial crisis, they [the Clinton administration]
bailed out Wall Street.
That crisis came in January 1995, halfway through the administration's first term. Mexico,
after having boomed from the optimism surrounding Nafta, went bust. It was a huge embarrassment
for the administration, given the push they had made for Nafta against a cynical Democratic party.
Money was fleeing Mexico, and much of it was coming back through me and my firm. Selling investors'
Mexican bonds was my first job on Wall Street, and now they were trying to sell them back to us.
But we hadn't just sold Mexican bonds to clients, instead we did it using new derivatives product
to get around regulatory issues and take advantages of tax rules, and lend the clients money.
Given how aggressive we were, and how profitable it was for us, older traders kept expecting to
be stopped by regulators from the new administration, but that didn't happen.
When Mexico started to collapse, the shudders began….
Those shudders were entirely unnecessary. The Clinton administration saved the banks by bailing
out their debtors. They pushed for "a $50bn global bail-out of Mexico, arguing that to not do so
would devastate the US and world economy. Unmentioned was that it would have also devastated Wall
Street banks " (my emphasis). The success of that bailout became a template that's with us today.
It was "used it as an economic blueprint that emphasized Wall Street. It also emphasized bailouts".
As a result, "Wall Street now had both political parties working for them, and really nobody holding
them accountable. Now, no trade was too aggressive, no risk too crazy,
no behavior to unethical
and no loss too painful. It unleashed a boom that produced plenty of
smaller crisis (Russia, Dotcom), before culminating in the housing and financial crisis of 2008."
This was not just Bill and his actions. It was his administration. As Arnade notes above, when
Bill Clinton ran for office he offered himself and Hillary as "Two for the price of one," as "New
Democrats, embracing an image of being tough on crime, but not on business." Is Hillary still of
this mind? She was in 2008. As a senator, according to Arnade, "Hillary Clinton
voted to bail-out the banks, a vote she still defends.
" A vote opposite to the
vote of Bernie Sanders
.
Where's
Is Wall Street's Money Going Today?
And now just one of the reasons the story told above is still the story today, and is still a
Hillary Clinton story. The following graphic show data through October, 2015:
Campaign donations from individuals who work in the securities and investments industry (
source
; click to enlarge)
This is an awful lot of money for an individual to give to someone who's going to jail them for
fraud. Again, this and the previous bulleted piece don't comprise two stories, an older one and a
newer one. They are clearly one story, even without considering the recent
money from Wall Street speeches
.
Clinton
Goes to Pennsylvania to Reap Windfall from Pennsylvania Frackers
One more point, this time about the climate, one of the places we started this piece. Consider
the
following
from Brad Johnson, something from the current fundraising cycle:
Last night, Hillary Clinton
attended a gala fundraiser
in Philadelphia at the headquarters of Franklin Square Capital
Partners, a major investor in the fossil-fuel industry, particularly domestic fracking. The controversial
fracking industry is particularly powerful in Pennsylvania, which will host the
Democratic National Convention this July.
Clinton has
avoided taking any clear stand
on fracking. While she has
embraced
the Clean Power Plan, which assumes a strong increase in natural-gas power plants,
she also supports a much deeper investment in
solar electricity
than the baseline plan. The pro-Clinton Super PAC Correct the Record, run
by David Brock, touts Clinton's
aggressive pro-fracking record
.
As reported by the Intercept's Lee Fang, "One of Franklin Square Capital's investment funds,
the FS Energy & Power Fund" the Intercept's Lee Fang
reports
, "is heavily invested in fossil fuel companies, including offshore oil drilling and
fracking." The company
cautions
that "changes to laws and increased regulation or restrictions on the use of hydraulic
fracturing may adversely impact" the fund's performance.
Through its fund, Franklin Square
invests
in private fracking and oil drilling companies across the nation, as well as Canada
and the Gulf of Mexico. This includes heavy investment in Pennsylvania frackers. …
There's much more
at the link
- this is just a taste.
Will the first woman president be our "fracker in chief" and put the earth on a diet of methane,
a deadly greenhouse gas, until it fries? I'm afraid, if the first woman president is Clinton, the
answer will be yes. It breaks my heart that this is not a "clean election," but it's not, and it's
not one of our choices to make it one.
(Blue America has endorsed Bernie Sanders for president. If you'd like to help out,
go here
; you can adjust the split any way you like at the link. If you'd like to "phone-bank
for Bernie," go here . You
can volunteer in other ways
by going here
. And thanks!) kimsarah ,
January 31, 2016 at 4:52 am
Wasn't it Lloyd Blankfein who said he'd be happy with either Hillary or Jeb? As illustrated here, Wall Street has been happy with the "establishment" leadership of both parties,
ever since the Clintons came to Washington - even though it is still fashionable to badmouth Democrats
because they are supposedly tougher regulators and less pro free market capitalism. Thank goodness, more and more voters are realizing that their choices should not be based on party
affiliation or gender, but who can best fix the damage done by the neoliberals of both parties
and stop bowing to Wall Street. That is why Sanders and Trump have been rising in the polls. Now
we'll see if that momentum will translate into election results.
But the private consensus is similar to what Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein said to POLITICO
late last year when he praised both Christie - before the bridge scandal - and Clinton. "I
very much was supportive of Hillary Clinton the last go-round," he said. "I held fundraisers
for her."
People close to Blankfein say the same calculus applies to a Jeb Bush-Hillary Clinton race
as it would to a Christie-Clinton contest. "Those would be two very good choices and we'd be
perfectly happy with them," a person close to Blankfein said. Blankfein is a self-described
Democrat, but his comments about Christie and Clinton reflect the ambidextrous political approach
that many Republicans and Democrats on Wall Street take.
Everyone deep down is 'tribal' in the sense that they always find themselves attracted to politicians
who in some sense are a reflection of who they are. So people always feel drawn for the 'local
guy' above the better 'outsider', the person of similar ethnic background, similar accent, school,
etc. Its a natural thing, and not altogether a bad thing. Its the same thing that makes communities
work.
I recently had an argument with a cousin who lives in a rural area. She said she was voting
for a particular politician 'because he looks after the locals'. This politician is known to be
corrupt and a liar – he was described as such by two different judges. To the horror of outsiders,
he keeps getting elected with big majorities because people like my cousin see him as 'our guy'
and the more sophisticated urban types hate him, the more they like him. My comment to my cousin
was 'if you vote for him simply because he is 'local' and ignore his corruption and lies, then
you lose all rights to complain about anything bad in this country, ever. Because you are the
reason.' Yeah, I was a bit mad (she just laughed).
My point is that we need to call out people who vote for people like Clinton because she is
a woman (or any other such superficial reason). Yes, it is emotionally understandable for a certain
generation of women to see her as 'one of us'. Entirely understandable. It is also entirely wrong.
The educated woman who votes for Clinton 'because' is no different from the idiot Kansas rube
who votes for tea-partier 'because dem city types hate him', just with less excuse, because education
is supposed to matter. If someone votes Clinton because they agree on bombing the Middle East
and bailing out Wall Street, and Fracking everywhere, well, thats fine – just say it. But playing
the gender (or any other such card) is intellectually vapid and anyone who does it loses the right
to complain about politicians anytime, anywhere, ever.
My problem is the hypocritical way they talk about voting for a woman then turn around and
lambaste a Palin or a Fiorina whom they would never vote for and hold in contempt. These people
are not even for 'the tribe"–they are exclusively for Rodham Clinton. This makes their appeal
to the woman angle, in my opinion, odious and false. It's "sisterhood is powerful" except I get
to decide who the sisters are. And since they are selective about who is and is not worthy of
being voted for as a woman, you see that deep down they really do endorse the miserable neoliberal
agenda of Clinton, because they have so decisively declared her an "us" while Palin and Fiorina
get to be a "them". If policies matter, and it seems in their definition of us and them they do,
then you've got to believe that they are OK with Clinton's policies no matter how they may equivocate.
David Brock and Sydney Blumenthal are prominent members of the Clinton campaign. How anyone
can tolerate these pigs beyond outright crooks is just saddening. The Iowa Caucus might be fun.
The sight of young women explaining Hillary has these examples of human filth as attack dogs to
proud older women should be quite humorous.
Of course, please try of Hillary supporters will be astonished when they hear about Hillary's
name to being connected to every fp disaster of the last 20 years. Her die hard supporters will
get nasty.
Hillary started nailing her own coffin lid down right from the start when she had some operative
issue a missive informing the unwashed masses what terminology was deemed unacceptable and sexist.
True or not, people don't like to be told what to do. And what good did such instructions serve?
Apart from warning misogynists to use alternate dog-whistles?
For a long time now, I have been having an ongoing conversation with various coworkers concerning
the imperative to confront the corruption plaguing our society thru personal and political action.
While all see the hardship caused by neoliberal policies, there still exists a mental barrier
that cannot be broken thru. No rational argument seems to move them beyond their current stand.
Many are stuck on lesser of two evils thinking and others are entrenched in one issue voting,
regardless if their candidate repudiates most issues they profess to support. Another strong force
is overcoming the underlying sense of economic fear. People are trying desperately to hold onto
what they have and are easily persuaded by arguments that threaten what little stability they
worked out for themselves. One thing I have learned is the power of propaganda- it is no small
thing to move people once they have been conditioned to believe something.
Another distressing characteristic is the underlying sense of powerlessness to bring about
change. The agency question. TINA. When discussing political issues, invariably the angry response
to questions of fighting corruption turns to- this is how its always been! It is a depressing
circular argument. People are against corruption but vote to elect corrupt representatives, then
fail to make any connection with their actions and the predictable outcome. At this point, moving
from complaining to doing is the only plausible response.
What to do? I agree that people must be called out on their wrong headed statements and actions.
This is the effort that counteracts the massive propaganda spewing out from the MSM. Learning
how to do this well is important. Bringing out common cause and solidarity is a learned skill.
This common cause must be centered on the workplace. It is at work that we labor to provide
for all our needs. Finding ways to strengthen fair and just workplaces must rank high on the list of important activities
to support. It really is about educating and demonstrating that socialism is a worthwhile goal
to achieve. Selfishness and greed will be the end of us all.
This is it. You can send people links to facts - and I mean primary sources, not a blog or
an opinion piece masquerading as real journalism - and yet they still cling to the narrative.
The human mind has an extraordinary ability to contort facts to fit into a belief system or to
justify ignoring them altogether.
Me: So, who are you liking this go around? Feminist: Clinton, I think. Me: Why? She's a neoliberal shill, and you hate all that crap!
Fem: It's important to me that a woman be elected to a visible position of authority.
Me: Well, you could vote for Jill Stein. She's a woman and she agrees with your politics.
Fem: A Green party candidate is never going to get elected. Me: So, you're willing to compromise politics for practical concerns.
Fem: Somewhat, but not entirely. Me: So Clinton is the one, because being a woman is more important that having sound political
positions? Fem: I didn't say that. Me: But Sanders is much close to Stein politically than Clinton is.
Fem: Yes. Me: So, if the candidate who is not a woman but has more in common with a real progressive who
is a woman does not win out over the candidate who is a woman but also a neoliberal shill, would
it not stand to reason then, that, for you, gender is more important than issues of economic
justice. Fem: I didn't say that. Me: You didn't have to.
I don't know how Clinton became inextricable linked in the minds of so many aspiring non-reactionary
women with everything right and good, but it seems to be a judgment-neutralizing given that it
has. And it is very personal and tied directly to Rodham Clinton. These people ridiculed Palin
and wouldn't vote for Carly Fiorina if their lives depended on it, so it's not really women, per
se, that they are boosting–it is this particular woman. I am sure that Walsh, Pollitt, et al.
have no problem excoriating the millionaire wannabes who flock to Trump. Well, in an act of gender
equality I posit this: that they are a generation of Hilary wannabes and their identification
with Hilary is no different than millions of people's identification with Trump.
I think the reactionary problem is endemic to both parties. Clinton supporters are just following
their legitimate leader the way Republicans do. Virtue of being born into a Democratic linked
household or being excluded by the GOP is the genuine separation.
Hillary Rodham Clinton is their 'Big Chill' darling. She's emblematic of their own transitions
from left wing-ish college students to young professionals……. to rather sadly compromised professional
class middle management, with teenagers who dislike them and mortgages.
Most of the rank and file who still fervently support her never made it as far up the ladder
as a Joan Walsh, but they identify with Walsh, because weren't they all together and equals once,
not so long ago? Except it was long ago. The passage of 30-35 years matters, and the utter divergence
of their stature and economic safety matters even more. They want a vicarious 'win' for themselves via Hillary. Because they're fools.
I fall into this trap of focusing on gender breakdowns, but Democratic voters are women. When
it comes to telling stories of Democratic voters, women will dominate. The key breakdown is 1996.
This isn't about Hillary as much as its about Bill. Clinton Inc. has been protected and defended
for years. Please try of women who have themselves been "slut shamed" applauded when Democratic
elites attacked a 19 year old intern as a serial predator.
Dolts like Lena Dunham, her show is just awful, have the resources to not have to think about
tomorrow and can fret about their bucket list. Plenty of older women have semblance of plans or
think they do and just want to get to social equity and Medicare. Change is less important to
their planning as much as go holding steady.
The breakdown of Hillary support is between the ages of 35 and 40. An 18 year old in 1996 will
be 38 this year. Bill didn't deserve votes in 1992 or 1996. Bill and his cronies were just awful
and have cashed in on their corruption since he left office. Hillary is a chance to prove Bill
was not awful. Hillary can prove Nader and Nader voters were deserving of contempt, not Gore and
his crummy campaign. People, especially who weren't old enough to vote in 1996 didn't vote for
Clinton Inc.
There is the rumor that Bill is the one pushing a somewhat reluctant Hillary to run. Perhaps
he hopes the honor of he Clinton name can be restored. Doubtless America is looking forward to
once again being plunged into this psychodrama.
I wouldn't be surprised. Supposedly he was depressed after leaving office with no direction.
The real Dule Hill*, as corrupt as anyone around, was the driver of the Clinton Wedding Registry…I
mean Global Initiative. I also remember Dick Morris recounting a story about Bill inquiring if
he would ever be a great President. Morris said the great ones had wars. Of course, he Ignored
FDR from 1933 to 1941. When Bill is portrayed in popular media, it's usually as a lecherous creep
or a poll driven coward. The sleazy nature of the Clinton Slush Fund will never be redeemed. The
Democrats roared into Congress without Bill or his cronies at the helm in 2006 and 2008.
If Gore
Vidal were alive, can you imagine email how a hypothetical Clinton biography would read? Bill
was elected to earn money, but judging from youth reaction to Hillary campaigns, history won't
be kind to Bill. When Dean was elected to the DNC and Obama was elected, Clinton Inc. was clearly
rejected. Democrats regaining control of Congress without Bill was another rejection. Bill is
smart enough to see this, but he Isn't big enough to recognize his failures and move on constructively.
The lame gender justification for voting for Hillary Clinton reminds me of what my late mother
used to call yellow dog Republicans in South Dakota. They would vote for a yellow dog before they
would vote for any Democrat.
Once again many are ignoring ethical red flags and willing to make a pact with the yellow dog.
Bob Herbert once described the Clintons as a terminally unethical and vulgar couple, who betrayed
everyone whoever believed in them.
"If anyone doubts that the mainstream media fails to tell the truth about our political system
(and its true winners and losers), the spectacle of large majorities of black folks supporting
Hillary Clinton in the primary races ought to be proof enough. I can't believe Hillary would be
coasting into the primaries with her current margin of black support if most people knew how much
damage the Clintons have done – the millions of families that were destroyed the last time they
were in the White House thanks to their boastful embrace of the mass incarceration machine and
their total capitulation to the right-wing narrative on race, crime, welfare and taxes. There's
so much more to say on this topic and it's a shame that more people aren't saying it. I think
it's time we have that conversation." – Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration
in the Age of Colorblindness
The Democratic Party can't get rid of the Clintons because they have become the Clintons.
I think the real solution is to just break off a piece of the country and make a new one. Sounds
like no one is using Michigan anymore. That might be a good choice. Then all the tribal, identity
politics, dominatrix and sissyboy types can move there and let women run the new country. It would
serve Bill right too. Karma is sleeping on the couch in the Michigan governor's mansion.
Okay, I agree identity politics can be short-sighted, and would be harmful in this situation,
but I don't think off-the-cuff advocacy for the banishment of people who embrace non-traditional
gender roles is a progressive-minded solution. Seems to me that trumpeting the horror of non-traditional
gender roles has been one of the conservatives' best weapons/Trojan Horses to rally support for
neocon candidates who grovel at the feet of oligarchs pushing plutonomy-friendly policies.
Language is important. Pushing people away who have struggled with the burden of non-normative
identities helps no one but those who wish to divide, conquer, exploit, and finally abandon.
"A non-neoliberal woman president is not one of the choices." Wait, what? Has Jill Stein suddenly
pulled out of the race? (And Gloria La Riva and Monica Moorehead as well?)
Jill Stein has 0 chance of becoming president. Gaius' post is accurate as it stands.
And I know you Greens will take umbrage, but I would never recommend her. Her background is
sorely lacking. She has no administrative experience. She never run an organization nor has she
ever held an elective office. She's never written a bill or worked on getting one passed. I'm
not wild about Sanders' experience, since all he's done is run a town of 40,000 people, but he's
leagues ahead of Stein. You need to find more credible candidates if you want people to take the
Greens seriously.
I voted for Jill Stein as a protest vote. Saw nothing odious in her positions, and saw value
in being counted as "none of the above" as opposed to not voting. I likely wasn't the only such
vote among the dozen or so she collected. Although skeptical at first, I hope Bernie is still
in the mix by the time the primaries get this far. But I,m a crazy optimist, I hold out hope for
one day voting for another Republican.
Regarding Sanders's executive experience: we've had a lot of Presidents with no administrative
experience. Quite a few have spent their careers in legislatures, without ever having been a governor,
cabinet officer, mayor, or whatever. Granted, some of them were not good Presidents, but whether
they were good or bad, they had a lot less executive experience than Sanders has had.
Being Governor doesn't mean one is a good executive, or even smart! Think Arnold of California.
You may not believe this, but Arnold had such a limited understanding of the English language
that he, himself, could not explain his administrations budget document. (He could not read it!)
Sometimes politics and intelligence don't intersect.
I understand your point. And –extensive, successful, practical legislative experience
is relevant for executive positions such as POTUS. Sanders' many years in Congress (since 1990)
and Senate (last 7 yrs), where he used his Independent status to good effect in getting bills
passed, deserve a mention. A Rolling Stones article a few years ago highlighted this strength.
I have a falsifiable problem with her. No surprise she goes after Republicans. But from what
I have seen, she has spent more time working against Sanders than speaking truth to power about
Clinton. The times she could specifically address Clinton, from what I have seen, she substitutes
'Democratic Party' in the statement.
This says to me she is more concerned about market share and Sanders is her primary competition.
Paying attention to what can hurt you or take away resources from you, while not spending your
own resources on what has little impact, is part of a selection process. My interpretation is
that she is more concerned with pulling votes from the Democratic Party than advancing her stated
agenda.
I very much welcome the opportunity to be proved wrong here.
I understand the Green Party (etc.) protest vote motivation. When there's no one really to
pick from (depending on your point of view), it's an option I understand.
But this time, for the first time in a generation, there's actually someone to pick who could
win and who will bust up the insider game for real, or give it a hell of a shot. Here's one: I'm
reading now that NAFTA can be abrogated by the executive branch alone, based on one of its clauses.
I'm still chasing this down.
Let's assume that's true. How about putting the one person into office who might actually execute
that option? Sanders certainly hates these job-killing trade deals enough to do it. And he understands
why they need to be killed.
This year, 2016, and this primary, is our one real shot. It's like 2008 without the fake self-presentation.
I say it's important we put our shoulders behind that one wheel and push.
Agreed. Sanders isn't perfect, but he's right on the economic issues. Like most modern politicians,
he's bought into the crazy notion that a balanced federal budget is a good thing, but beyond that,
he's as good as it's been in a long time.
I supported Jill Stein and the Greens in 2012, and probably will again in the general if it
turns out Clinton is the nominee of the Democrats. But Sanders is the best chance of righting
the ship, as I see it, and he's worth supporting on that basis. Even with a hostile Congress,
there's still a lot a modern-day President can do, and I think Sanders will do everything in his
power to make things better.
Sanders isn't perfect, but he's right on the economic issues. Like most modern politicians,
he's bought into the crazy notion that a balanced federal budget is a good thing …
Keep in mind that when Sanders became Ranking Member of the Senate Budget Committee, he hired
Stephanie Kelton as the committee's economist. I'm sure they've had a lot of time to have the
MMT conversation.
There's definitely a ways to go to kill the underlying lie that keeps "austerity" viable as
a policy, but there is that voice in his ear if he wants to listen to it. And again, he chose
her.
In the spirit of keeping things real, I'm going to be that guy, and remind everyone who's starting
to get starry eyed over Sanders that Lyndon Johnson was also very good on social and economic
justice–and he happened to preside over the escalation of one of the most politically divisive
wars in American history. FDR did too, as it turns out, though we retroactively justify WWII as
moral nowadays because of the Holocaust, even though that had nothing to do with why we went to
war in the first place.
Johnson and Sanders have a lot in common, extensive legislative experience, for one. It was
Johnson who actually got Kennedy's dead in the water civil rights act passed, due in no small
part to his intimate knowledge of how the Congress operates. And, of course, the Great Society,
which Repubs (and their Dem allies) have been chipping away at for years now.
Oh, and both never unequivocally repudiated the disastrous effects that American foreign policy
at the muzzle of a gun or sight of drone has unleashed upon the world.
And when it comes to leftist politics, Johnson actually tried to muzzle the more overtly socialist
aspects of King's message, for fear that it might cause embarrassment with regard to the Soviets.
Now, this is not to say that Sanders 100% = Johnson, but simply to remind us that playing up
social and economic justice while waving a hand over the bellicosity of every single Democrat
and Republican candidate could very well bite everyone in the butt some day. If Sanders is elected,
people better not fail to hold his feet over the fire like many did with Obama.
LBJ also had Jack's foreign policy loons everywhere and likely a pathological condition about
skipping out on World War II. It's not like Johnson decided on his own to invade Vietnam. Jack
had a division there on his own.
When clowns like Hillary, Biden, and Kerry were voting for war in Iraq, Sanders opposed them.
I'm glad you made that point, because it too is something to bear in mind. The Team Blue apparatchiks
are not just going to disappear into the night with a Sanders presidency–they may very well wreck
things within their particular executive fiefdoms. Corbyn's shadow cabinet woes have shown quite
forcefully how New Labour/New Dem types can muck things up even after they've been trounced.
If Sanders means what he says, that the real fight begins after the inauguration, then I won't
regret standing under a Bernie sign tomorrow night.
The US had been involved in Vietnam since the French were defeated at Diem Bien Phu, in 1954.
It became part of our "Cold War" strategy. Our "advisers" on the ground were assassinating folks
there long before LBJ decided to escalate the war after "learning" of the "attacks" on the US
ships in the Gulf of Tonkin. (All lies!) His trust in General McFarland was LBJ's downfall.
As for the Voting Rights Act, LBJ gets a big hug. But the Civil Rights movement had been going
on for years before he signed the Act in 1965. I lived through the era and the confrontations
in the South were absolutely tragic. There was enormous political pressure to resolve the issue.
(Unfortunately, it has not been resolved: abject racism has been replaced by institutional racism.)
At least one of Johnson's legislative wins, his 1948 Senate primary runoff election, was almost
certainly dependent on rigged ballots. I doubt that anything remotely similar to that is true
for Sanders.
Sanders has said he isn't a pacifist, but that doesn't make him an imperialist warmonger, as
those on the anti-war left have been painting him ever since he ran for Congress in 1990.
This is a good example of what I wrote above about narratives. This one has been repeated over
and over, and writers such as Chris Hedges, Joshua Frank, and David Swanson are cited as sources
(often by each other). So, for example, when Sanders said the Saudis needed to send ground troops
to fight ISIS, the keepers of that narrative started frenzied arm-waving about Imperialist Bernie
and Bernie's "screwy Middle East policy," without bothering to research the origin and context
(Sam Husseini seized on that one comment as the basis for an entire article about Sanders's imperialist
plan to take over all the Middle East oil fields, while Swanson wrote, "Sanders insists Saudi
Arabia should kill more people").
Put in context, Sanders was responding to requests by the Saudis for U.S. ground troops to
"fight ISIS." He saw through it, saying that what they really wanted was U.S. troops to protect
the billionaire Saudi royal family. Essentially he was telling them to FO and use their own damn
troops - and, by the way, Saudi Arabia has one of largest military budgets in the world, so they
had some nerve to expect U.S. taxpayers to foot the bill. They won't use their own troops, of
course, because that would create more backlash against the monarchy (they ended up convincing
Pakistan to do it, evidently through an offer to pay handsomely). Contrary to the narrative, Sanders
NEVER has suggested that the Saudis be given free rein to invade neighboring countries or that
they should lead the fight against the Islamic State. He argues for a coalition of Muslim nations
along the lines of that suggested by Jordan's King Abdullah.
While it's true that Sanders doesn't yet have a fully formed foreign policy, he does have a
lot more experience than he's given credit for, and if you take his record in its entirety, the
picture that emerges is not of a neoliberal interventionist.
If Sanders succeeds in winning the Democratic nomination in July, in August, the proper thing
for the Greens to do would be to endorse Sanders for President. They would still be able to run
all of their candidates for other offices.
I'm not sure it's illegitimate for some people–if that's what's important to them–to vote for
Hillary because she's a woman. After all lots of people voted for Obama because he was African
American. But at least with Obama his lack of track record meant optimism over his claimed goals
was possible. Whereas with Hillary we know exactly what we will be getting and it's not good.
Her problem is the very experience she is constantly touting, the "hard choices," tells us what
to expect. So unless one is on board with her hawkishness and Wall St cronyism then feminist supporters
like Walsh are pushing their own agenda at the expense of everyone else. And if they are on board
with those things then, really, why are we reading them anyway?
My issue is that these people are not voting for her because she's a woman, because there are
loads of women they would not vote for–they are voting for her because she is Hilary Rodham Clinton.
They are saying, in effective, "policies count, but not in this case", or at least the supposedly
Progressive/Left women are saying that. Those who are on board with neoliberalism and the American
Imperial Project can vote for Hilary on points–I have no problem with that so long as they are
honest about it.
It is human nature to vote for someone like yourself: Blacks for Obama, Women for Hillary Clinton,
Irish for Hugh O'Brien, etc. But this "Identity politics" can be a trap, and provides cover for
corrupt representatives that will not defend your interests. In particular, when a politician
emphasizes their identity instead of their policies, alarm bells should go off. And we should
vote our interests.
It also seems that to some extent Hillary is benefiting from the fact that she is such a toxic
monster that it's hard to even process, it seems unreal and hard to believe in. I mean, here is
a person who has pushed to waste trillions of dollars devastating middle eastern countries that
don't threaten us, has de-facto allied the United States with Al Qaeda (!), has pushed to spend
trillions of dollars bailing out Wall Street while starving main street of capital, intends to
gut social security to help pay for all this largesse to the 1% (because deficits are bad, you
know), wants us to sign a trade agreement that is effectively a corporate coup, making our domestic
laws subservient to a bunch of foreign corporate lawyers meeting in secret, used her tenure as
secretary of state to sell out the national interest for personal cash while she was still in
office… And people say that Trump is dangerous? Or that Bernie is unelectable? Really?
There IS a woman, Dr. Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, who is truly progressive in both
her domestic and foreign policies. Of course, in our rigged election system, such third party
candidates have no chance at even being covered by the corporate media, let alone being elected.
If Hillary Clinton, neoliberal and neoconservative warmonger, is elected the first woman president,
it will be appropriate for this nation, given its system of predatory global capitalism enforced
by military brutality and violence. Appropriate, but not at all beneficial, for most of us and
the planet.
Identity politics appears to trump policy for a great many people…still. I know people who
are crowing and cooing about a possible Hillary/Julian Castro ticket. As if the Obama debacle
never happened.
The only bright spot to a Hillary Clinton nomination is that it would probably enable the Green
Party to retain ballot access in Ohio (and I'm guessing in other states as well). Greens and even
those who lean Green (a much larger group) are unlikely to vote for Hillary, and the GP must win
3 percent of the vote statewide to keep access to the ballot.
Since our crisis really is systemic, I don't think we will ever make progress toward solving
our problems within the duopoly that's in place now.
Yeah, I agree with that. I support (and contribute to) Jill Stein's campaign but I'm going
to be seriously conflicted if Sanders is the DP nominee. I'm also supporting Margaret Flowers
for Senate in my state (MD) so even if I vote for Sanders I'll still be able to support an GP
candidate for a high office.
I don't think the Democrats grasp the scale of this sentiment. Hillary was supposed to bring
in "stupid," young women who are breaking for Sanders despite the nastiness out of the Clinton
campaign. Obama sure among black enthusiasm in 2012 in response to GOP efforts to disenfranchise
minority voters. It's likely they would have not rallied around the President. Considering blacks
have never voted in record strength for Clinton or Gore (1996 and 2000 were periods low African
American turnout), it's unlikely Hillary will change the course. Say goodbye to PA, Virginia,
and Ohio.
Given the despicable treatment of Hispanic immigrants by the Obama Administration, the Hispanic
community at large won't be eager for Obama's third term. There goes New Mexico, Florida, and
Colorado.
Then if course, there are the down ticket races where Team Blue candidates don't have the adherents
Hillary has.
A vote for Hillary is a vote to send the message that Hillary projects, to wit: a big, loud,
and shrill "up yours" to people who play by rules and demand that public officials do the same.
Next time you hear Bill or Hillary praising people to who play by the rules, remember, these
two are vile, inveterate cheats who never play by any rules themselves.
Clinton's campaign and its supporters have pointed to the nurses' spending in support of
Sanders to suggest his attacks on Clinton as the candidate of big money are disingenuous and
hypocritical.
But, according to the super PAC's FEC filing, almost all of the PAC's cash flow came in
the second half of last year ― and every dime of it came from the union itself. The union did
not respond immediately to an email seeking information about its super PAC finances, but the
money likely came from dues that members paid to be a part of the union [the horror, the horror
…], which come in much smaller increments than the seven-figure checks that fill the coffers
of the super PACs that Sanders derides on the campaign trail as eroding American democracy.
PAC contributions don't (can't) come out of regular dues. (Unions can make political contributions
out of the general fund without setting up a PAC.) Those who wish pay additionally to support
a union's PAC. So the NNU PAC is really just a bundling of individual members' voluntary contributions.
Not "big money" in the least.
There are many reasons I will never vote for neocon, Hillary Clinton: her support for Obama's
war on whistleblowers (Cate Jenkins, John Kiriakou, Jeffrey Sterling, Barrett Brown, Chelsea Manning,
Julian Assange, Carmen Segarra, et al.), her support for private prisons - dating from her support
for Bill's Omnibus Crime Bill, her involvement in the overthrow of President Zelaya of Honduras
- and when those Honduran kids would predictably stream across the border several years later,
they would be held at prison camps run by the Geo Group, a major donor to Hillary, her support
for the offshoring of American jobs and replacing American workers with foreign visa workers (Tata
Consultancy of India was a major donor to her when she was a senator), her help in creating the
Trans-Pacific Partnership, etc. - but when I have explained this to women over the age of 45 their
eyes glaze over - but when I mention that during the Clinton Administration it was forbidden for
their people to publicly utter the phrase, " corporate welfare " - they begin to
pay attention!
Reminds me of a brief discussion I had a few years back with a woman in her 70s who nonsensically
believed that Bernie Madoff's wife was a victim?
Even though I explained that if plenty of us realized he was running a scam, there was no way
his two sons and wife couldn't know as well, but since they were profiting nicely from it, they
kept quiet - she refused to believe me.
Several weeks later Mrs. Madoff was caught illegaly attempting to offshore their court-frozen
assets, and then she too was put on house arrest, with Bernie, and restricted from telephone and
computer usage.
A typical bimbo . . . .
But I most certainly do believe a woman should be president in 2016.
I get blank stares when I tell people that in 2008, I didn't vote for Obama but that I
did vote for an actual progressive. That candidate happened to be a black female who had
been banished from the Democrat* Party by Rahmbo for her stance on Palestine.
I'm not especially intelligent, but I don't buy into identity politics, so even I could tell
very early on in the '08 Democrat primaries that Obama was a stooge and a phony. Democrat voters
demean Republican voters for the latter's ignorance, racism, and nativism. I demean Democrats
because they are so easily manipulated by identity politics.
Wall St bankers were worried about angry populism coming for their hides in 2008. Knowing that
identity politics "trumps" issue politics for most Democrat voters, they inserted Obama into the
mix, and the Democrats lapped it up like the identity-card simpletons that they are. This shifted
the focus of the '08 Democrat primaries from Wall St and Iraq to a tacit identity battle based
on race and gender.
I also think Clinton is the Candidate Most Likely to Start WW3, and that includes all
of the Republicans. Her recent ad has a shot of Scary Putin while telling us she'll "keep
us safe"; she is more vehemently anti-Russian than anyone in the GOP. I honestly think there is
a high probability that she will confront Russia militarily if she is elected. It'll never happen,
but I'd like to see Sanders' campaign remake LBJ's famous 1964 ad, this time targeting the Goldwater
Girl.
Anyone who votes for Clinton because she is a woman deserves all the contempt we reserve for
ignorant, racist, and nativist Republican voters.
*I'll restore the "ic" if/when the Democrat Party restores itself.
Professor Krugman is a regular (albeit gifted) neoliberal stooge. Nothing new in this column, it
just more relaing from the point of of you him, being a bought up columnist.
Notable quotes:
"... Krugman, the accidental plutocrat ..."
"... Krugman especially is embarrassing. Acting just like he did during the MMT Wars. What a little man hes turned out to be. ..."
"... I only got 5 sentences down. Totally jumped the shark to the neolib owned by wall st side. ..."
"... There are some very serious, crucial issues here that Krugman, who is my favorite blogger/columnist, is, uncharacteristically and to his great shame, is treating like a political hack: that is the decline of the white lower middle class, the decline of unionism, the political strategy of the right starting with the Southern strategy and then extending across the country to use traditional white working class precarity in a society rife with social and economic change that goes back 2 generations to rip the working and lower middle class apart politically. The strategy is as old as Reconstruction, at least - but it has been amplified economically by globalation and the boom of the plutocrats. ..."
"... Look at American racism, and most forms of sexism, and increasingly lower-classism. They consist of three parts: contempt for the class, a willingness to use violence against the class, and a demand that the class be industrious and of service - not to themselves, but to those who exert the force and express the contempt, while experiencing neither violence or contempt in return. ..."
"... That lower and middle class, working Americans scramble to find someone to blame is no surprise. But the controllers who have rigged the game against them, dont let any blame stick to their Teflon carapaces. However women, lower class men and people of colour dont have access to the financial Teflon. Even though they are all companions in suffering, through similar shared mechanisms, no one is handy to take the blame except themselves. ..."
"... So they end up trying to exert the elite power of contempt and violence on each other, as drowning sailors might climb up each others shoulders to stay above water. Yet no level of status - man versus woman, native versus immigrant, working versus unemployed -- is sufficient anymore to provide more than an inch more or less above the waves. ..."
"... I am so very sorry to see Krugman use straw man arguments and appeals to authority, two techniques which he has previously said he disapproved of, to, lets face it, attack Bernie Sanders ..."
"... Im almost starting to feel like Krugman is using some reverse psychology tactic to turn more people against Hillary Clinton. ..."
"... BLS Wage Data by Area and Occupation, 29-1062 Family and General Practitioners, Mean Annual Wage: $186,320. ..."
Oligarchy is a very real issue, and I was writing about the damaging rise of the 1 percent back
when many of today's Sanders supporters were in elementary school....
-- Paul Krugman
[ Simply nutty. Paul Krugman has decided to destroy Bernie Sanders, and ridicule and intimidate
any of the "kiddies" who are so lacking in maturity as to care to support Sanders. What is driving
this nuttiness is beyond my understanding. ]
Perhaps the biggest objection to my hot-dog parable is that final bit about the famous journalist.
Surely, no respected figure would write a whole book on the world economy based on such a transparent
fallacy. And even if he did, nobody would take him seriously.
But while the hot-dog-and-bun economy is hypothetical, the journalist is not. Rolling Stone
reporter William B. Greider has just published a widely heralded new book titled One World, Ready
or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism. And his book is exactly as I have described it:
a massive, panoramic description of the world economy, which piles fact upon fact (some of the
crucial facts turn out to be wrong, but that is another issue) in apparent demonstration of the
thesis that global supply is outrunning global demand. Alas, all the facts are irrelevant to that
thesis; for they amount to no more than the demonstration that there are many industries in which
growing productivity and the entry of new producers has led to a loss of traditional jobs -- that
is, that hot-dog production is up, but hot-dog employment is down. Nobody, it seems, warned Greider
that he needed to worry about fallacies of composition, that the logic of the economy as a whole
is not the same as the logic of a single market.
I think I know what Greider would answer: that while I am talking mere theory, his argument
is based on the evidence. The fact, however, is that the U.S. economy has added 45 million jobs
over the past 25 years -- far more jobs have been added in the service sector than have been lost
in manufacturing. Greider's view, if I understand it, is that this is just a reprieve--that any
day now, the whole economy will start looking like the steel industry. But this is a purely theoretical
prediction. And Greider's theorizing is all the more speculative and simplistic because he is
an accidental theorist, a theorist despite himself -- because he and his unwary readers imagine
that his conclusions simply emerge from the facts, unaware that they are driven by implicit assumptions
that could not survive the light of day.
Needless to say, I have little hope that the general public, or even most intellectuals, will
realize what a thoroughly silly book Greider has written. After all, it looks anything but silly--it
seems knowledgeable and encyclopedic, and is written in a tone of high seriousness. It strains
credibility to assert the truth, which is that the main lesson one really learns from those 473
pages is how easy it is for an intelligent, earnest man to trip over his own intellectual shoelaces.
Why did it happen? Part of the answer is that Greider systematically cut himself off from the
kind of advice and criticism that could have saved him from himself. His acknowledgements conspicuously
do not include any competent economists--not a surprising thing, one supposes, for a man who describes
economics as "not really a science so much as a value-laden form of prophecy." But I also suspect
that Greider is the victim of his own earnestness. He clearly takes his subject (and himself)
too seriously to play intellectual games. To test-drive an idea with seemingly trivial thought
experiments, with hypothetical stories about simplified economies producing hot dogs and buns,
would be beneath his dignity. And it is precisely because he is so serious that his ideas are
so foolish.
I think the the term "econocubism" (or "econocubisme") may be useful here. There may well be
a Braque, a Picasso, a Metzinger or a Gleize of econometric analysis, but for most practitioners
it is a mannerism that alludes, clumsily even, to a technique.
The "joke" about cubist painting that circulated in popular satire in the pre-war (W.W. I)
days was centred around "Maistre Cube", a pun that simultaneously referred to the painter as "cube
master" and as "cubic metre."
One problem is that econometric analysis is so "incomprehensible" that it has never been subjected
to the same degree of popular suspicion and ridicule as have fashions (along with alleged hoaxes
and mystifications) in modern art.
Krugman is one of my heroes, but man, is he ever having a bad patch. I think the full article
is better and more nuanced than our host's abbreviated version, and I urge people to read it in
full. But still...
First, his admittedly oversimplified version of Sanders' positions is a caricature. Sanders
is not a one-trick pony on inequality; and his call for "revolution" is almost entirely a call
for more citizen participation in politics.
And second, according to Krugman the fact that there is a lot of racism and xenophobia out
there means that visions of significant change are "naive". Then what, the "realist" version is
to appease the racists? or to wait until they change? yes, we can make common cause with them,
right now, against the plutocrats, but we don't want their votes? What exactly is the strategy
he espouses, other than "don't fly too high, you might burn"?
And, very uncharacteristically for Krugman, his position seems confused. Is he saying we cannot
reach the racists, so don't even try, i.e. the left-wing version of Mitt's 47% speech? Or, work
slowly to change their views on race, and then they will come to our side? Or, just aim for 51%
of the votes and a minority in Congress? It's hard to tell.
> Definitely one of the weakest, most confused columns ever from Krugman, who's been one of my
heroes as well.
I'd only quibble in that it wasn't just today's column. He's had a run of really weak and confused
columns over the past week. If they'd been as well thought out and insightful as most of his work
they'd have been worth reading, even if I disagreed strongly. What bothers me is that they're
sloppy and clueless. Hopefully it's just a bad week and not a trend.
Pk seems to have little sense of frustration at the failures of the main frame Democrats
The millions out there that have seen nothing positive in their lives since jimmy carter
Yearn for big change
And those that tell them it's coming it's coming
Just in baby steps are infuriating them
Look at krugs list of Barry Deeds
The recovery ?
Are u kidding
Slight tax increases for the affluent
Even as the top 1% gallops away from the rest of us
People want immediate improvement after 40 yeas waiting
Pk points to increments on
The environment
Healthcare
The ACA has not transformed anything yet
For 80% of America
They see premiums and co pays
Not a social commitment to universal corporate health insurance
Dodd frank ?
Where does that show up at the dinner table ?
Paul simply lives mostly outside his own life politically
And yet he does not get the urgency
Liberals look at Ethiopia to have their heart turned on
not queens NY
Or Toledo Ohio
Fine but the anger is real
the hope postponed a scandal
Syaloch :
I seriously think it's time to check Krugman's basement for pods. Where did this guy go and how
do we get him back?
There's something happening here. What it is ain't exactly clear, but we may, at long last,
be seeing the rise of a popular movement that, unlike the Tea Party, is angry at the right people.
When the Occupy Wall Street protests began three weeks ago, most news organizations were derisive
if they deigned to mention the events at all. For example, nine days into the protests, National
Public Radio had provided no coverage whatsoever.
It is, therefore, a testament to the passion of those involved that the protests not only continued
but grew, eventually becoming too big to ignore. With unions and a growing number of Democrats
now expressing at least qualified support for the protesters, Occupy Wall Street is starting to
look like an important event that might even eventually be seen as a turning point.
What can we say about the protests? First things first: The protesters' indictment of Wall
Street as a destructive force, economically and politically, is completely right.
A weary cynicism, a belief that justice will never get served, has taken over much of our political
debate - and, yes, I myself have sometimes succumbed. In the process, it has been easy to forget
just how outrageous the story of our economic woes really is. So, in case you've forgotten, it
was a play in three acts.
In the first act, bankers took advantage of deregulation to run wild (and pay themselves princely
sums), inflating huge bubbles through reckless lending. In the second act, the bubbles burst -
but bankers were bailed out by taxpayers, with remarkably few strings attached, even as ordinary
workers continued to suffer the consequences of the bankers' sins. And, in the third act, bankers
showed their gratitude by turning on the people who had saved them, throwing their support - and
the wealth they still possessed thanks to the bailouts - behind politicians who promised to keep
their taxes low and dismantle the mild regulations erected in the aftermath of the crisis.
Now, it's true that some of the protesters are oddly dressed or have silly-sounding slogans,
which is inevitable given the open character of the events. But so what? I, at least, am a lot
more offended by the sight of exquisitely tailored plutocrats, who owe their continued wealth
to government guarantees, whining that President Obama has said mean things about them than I
am by the sight of ragtag young people denouncing consumerism.
Bear in mind, too, that experience has made it painfully clear that men in suits not only don't
have any monopoly on wisdom, they have very little wisdom to offer. When talking heads on, say,
CNBC mock the protesters as unserious, remember how many serious people assured us that there
was no housing bubble, that Alan Greenspan was an oracle and that budget deficits would send interest
rates soaring.
A better critique of the protests is the absence of specific policy demands. It would probably
be helpful if protesters could agree on at least a few main policy changes they would like to
see enacted. But we shouldn't make too much of the lack of specifics. It's clear what kinds of
things the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators want, and it's really the job of policy intellectuals
and politicians to fill in the details.
Rich Yeselson, a veteran organizer and historian of social movements, has suggested that debt
relief for working Americans become a central plank of the protests. I'll second that, because
such relief, in addition to serving economic justice, could do a lot to help the economy recover.
I'd suggest that protesters also demand infrastructure investment - not more tax cuts - to help
create jobs. Neither proposal is going to become law in the current political climate, but the
whole point of the protests is to change that political climate.
And there are real political opportunities here. Not, of course, for today's Republicans, who
instinctively side with those Theodore Roosevelt-dubbed "malefactors of great wealth." Mitt Romney,
for example - who, by the way, probably pays less of his income in taxes than many middle-class
Americans - was quick to condemn the protests as "class warfare."
But Democrats are being given what amounts to a second chance. The Obama administration squandered
a lot of potential good will early on by adopting banker-friendly policies that failed to deliver
economic recovery even as bankers repaid the favor by turning on the president. Now, however,
Mr. Obama's party has a chance for a do-over. All it has to do is take these protests as seriously
as they deserve to be taken.
And if the protests goad some politicians into doing what they should have been doing all along,
Occupy Wall Street will have been a smashing success.
Fredd G. Muggs :
I too admire Dr. Krugman, but I agree he seems to have concluded that Sect. Clinton would be the
best choice for president and is letting that significantly influence his views and writing.
I do not think $$ is the root cause of all evil, but it is like gasoline to a fire, it sure
makes everything worse. I also believe that the Tea party is an authoritarian group, and is therefore
not persuadable by reason.
I am supporting Sen. Sanders for the nomination. I am not naive enough to think he will accomplish
everything he campaigns on (no president ever does) but I like his passion and starting positions
better than Sect. Clinton's.
If nominated I will support Sect. Clinton, but at this stage of the race I will support the
person I think is the best candidate.
anne -> am...
The BBC had a note today about this conflict between Sanders and Clinton. They referred to the
nastiness appearing on blogs especially mentioning its direction against those that disagree with
or do not support Sanders....
[ BBC folks are wildly trying to destroy Bernie Sanders just as BBC folks want to destroy Labour
leader Jeremy Corbyn. ]
The Seven Stages of Establishment Backlash: Corbyn/Sanders Edition
By Glenn Greenwald
The British political and media establishment incrementally lost its collective mind over the
election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the country's Labour Party, and its unraveling and implosion
show no signs of receding yet. Bernie Sanders is nowhere near as radical as Corbyn; they are not
even in the same universe. But, especially on economic issues, Sanders is a more fundamental,
systemic critic than the oligarchical power centers are willing to tolerate, and his rejection
of corporate dominance over politics, and corporate support for his campaigns, is particularly
menacing. He is thus regarded as America's version of a far-left extremist, threatening establishment
power.
For those who observed the unfolding of the British reaction to Corbyn's victory, it's been
fascinating to watch the D.C./Democratic establishment's reaction to Sanders' emergence replicate
that, reading from the same script. I personally think Clinton's nomination is extremely likely,
but evidence of a growing Sanders movement is unmistakable. Because of the broader trends driving
it, this is clearly unsettling to establishment Democrats - as it should be.
A poll last week found that Sanders has a large lead with millennial voters, including young
women; as Rolling Stone put it: "Young female voters support Bernie Sanders by an expansive margin."
The New York Times yesterday trumpeted that, in New Hampshire, Sanders "has jumped out to a 27
percentage point lead," which is "stunning by New Hampshire standards." The Wall Street Journal
yesterday, in an editorial titled "Taking Sanders Seriously," declared it is "no longer impossible
to imagine the 74-year-old socialist as the Democratic nominee."
Just as was true for Corbyn, there is a direct correlation between the strength of Sanders
and the intensity of the bitter and ugly attacks unleashed at him by the D.C. and Democratic political
and media establishment. There were, roughly speaking, seven stages to this [neoliberal] establishment
revolt in the U.K. against Corbyn, and the U.S. reaction to Sanders is closely following the same
script:
STAGE 1: Polite condescension toward what is perceived to be harmless (we think it's really
wonderful that your views are being aired).
STAGE 2: Light, casual mockery as the self-belief among supporters grows (no, dears, a
left-wing extremist will not win, but it's nice to see you excited).
STAGE 3: Self-pity and angry etiquette lectures directed at supporters upon realization
that they are not performing their duty of meek surrender, flavored with heavy doses of concern
trolling (nobody but nobody is as rude and gauche online to journalists as these crusaders,
and it's unfortunately hurting their candidate's cause!).
STAGE 4: Smear the candidate and his supporters with innuendos of sexism and racism by
falsely claiming only white men support them (you like this candidate because he's white and
male like you, not because of ideology or policy or contempt for the party establishment's
corporatist, pro-war approach).
STAGE 5: Brazen invocation of right-wing attacks to marginalize and demonize, as polls
prove the candidate is a credible threat (he'sweak on terrorism, will surrender to ISIS, has
crazy associations, and is a clone of Mao and Stalin).
STAGE 6: Issuance of grave and hysterical warnings about the pending apocalypse if the
establishment candidate is rejected, as the possibility of losing becomes imminent (you are
destined for decades, perhaps even generations, of powerlessness if you disobey our decrees
about who to select).
STAGE 7: Full-scale and unrestrained meltdown, panic, lashing-out, threats, recriminations,
self-important foot-stomping, overt union with the Right, complete fury (I can no longer in
good conscience support this party of misfits, terrorist-lovers, communists, and heathens).
Britain is well into Stage 7, and may even invent a whole new level (anonymous British military
officials expressly threatened a "mutiny" if Corbyn were democratically elected as prime minister).
The Democratic media and political establishment has been in the heart of Stage 5 for weeks and
is now entering Stage 6. The arrival of Stage 7 is guaranteed if Sanders wins Iowa....
BTW, anne often links to this group (thanks anne):
"Physicians for a National Health Program (www.pnhp.org) has been advocating for single-payer
national health insurance for three decades. It neither supports nor opposes any candidates for
public office."
A quote from it:
"What is truly "unrealistic" is believing that we can provide universal and affordable health
care, and control costs, in a system dominated by private insurers and Big Pharma."
Which responds to both of Krugman's accusations: being "naive" about our politics, and putting
too much emphasis on big money's control of our system.
On Kenneth Thorpe's Analysis of Senator Sanders' Single-Payer Reform Plan
By David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler
Professor Kenneth Thorpe recently issued an analysis of Senator Bernie Sanders' single-payer
national health insurance proposal. Thorpe, an Emory University professor who served in the Clinton
administration, claims the single-payer plan would break the bank.
Thorpe's analysis rests on several incorrect, and occasionally outlandish, assumptions. Moreover,
it is at odds with analyses of the costs of single-payer programs that he produced in the past,
which projected large savings from such reform (see this study, * for example, or this one **
).
We outline below the incorrect assumptions behind Thorpe's current analysis:
1. He incorrectly assumes administrative savings of only 4.7 percent of expenditures, based
on projections of administrative savings under Vermont's proposed reform.
However, the Vermont reform did not contemplate a fully single-payer system. It would have
allowed large employers to continue offering private coverage, and the continuation of the Federal
Employees Health Benefits Program and Medicare programs. Hence, hospitals, physicians' offices,
and nursing homes would still have had to contend with multiple payers, forcing them to maintain
the complex cost-tracking and billing apparatus that drives up providers' administrative costs.
Vermont's plan proposed continuing to pay hospitals and other institutional providers on a per-patient
basis, rather than through global budgets, perpetuating the expensive hospital billing apparatus
that siphons funds from care.
The correct way to estimate administrative savings is to use actual data from real world experience
with single-payer systems such as that in Canada or Scotland, rather than using projections of
costs in Vermont's non-single-payer plan. In our study *** published in the New England Journal
of Medicine we found that the administrative costs of insurers and providers accounted for 16.7
percent of total health care expenditures in Canada, versus. 31.0 percent in the U.S. - a difference
of 14.3 percent. In subsequent studies, we have found that U.S. hospital administrative costs
have continued to rise, while Canada's have not. Moreover, hospital administrative costs in Scotland's
single-payer system were virtually identical those in Canada.
In sum, Thorpe's assumptions understate the administrative savings of single-payer by 9.6 percent
of total health spending. Hence he overestimates the program's cost by 9.6 percent of health spending
-- $327 billion in 2016, and $3.742 trillion between 2016 and 2024. Notably, Thorpe's earlier
analyses projected much larger administrative savings from single-payer reform -- closely in line
with our estimates.
2. Thorpe assumes huge increases in the utilization of care, increases far beyond those that
were seen when national health insurance was implemented in Canada, and much larger than is possible
given the supply of doctors and hospital beds.
When Canada implemented universal coverage and abolished copayments and deductibles there was
no change in the total number of doctor visits; doctors worked the same number of hours after
the reform as before, and saw the same number of patients. However, they saw their healthy and
wealthier patients slightly less often, and sicker and poorer patients somewhat more frequently.
Moreover, the limited supply of hospital beds precluded the kind of big surge in hospitalizations
that Thorpe predicts. In health policy parlance, "capacity constraints" precluded a big increase
in system-wide utilization.
Thorpe bases his estimates on what has happened when a small percentage of people in a community
have had copayments eliminated or added. But in those cases there are no capacity constraints,
so it tells us little about what would happen under a system-wide reform like single-payer.
Thorpe does not give actual figures for how many additional doctor visits and hospital stays
he predicts. However, his estimates that persons with private insurance would increase their utilization
of care by 10 percent and that those with Medicare-only coverage would increase utilization by
10 to 25 percent suggest that he projects about 100 million additional doctor visits and several
million more hospitalizations each year - something that's impossible given real-world capacity
constraints. There just aren't enough doctors and hospital beds to deliver that much care.
Instead of a huge surge in utilization, more realistic projections would assume that doctors
and hospitals would reduce the amount of unnecessary care they're now delivering in order to deliver
needed care to those who are currently not getting what they need. That's what happened in Canada.
3. Thorpe assumes that the program would be a huge bonanza for state governments, projecting
that the federal government would relieve them of 10 percent of their current spending for Medicaid
and CHIP -- equivalent to about $20 billion annually.
No one has suggested that a single-payer reform would or should do this.
4. Thorpe's analysis also ignores the large savings that would accrue to state and local governments
-- and hence taxpayers -- because they would be relieved of the costs of private coverage for
public employees.
State and local government spent $177 billion last year on employee health benefits - about
$120 billion more than state and local government would pay under the 6.2 percent payroll tax
that Senator Sanders has proposed. The federal government could simply allow state and local governments
to keep this windfall, but it seems far more likely that it would reduce other funding streams
to compensate.
5. Thorpe's analysis also apparently ignores the huge tax subsidies that currently support
private insurance, which are listed as "Tax Expenditures" in the federal government's official
budget documents.
These subsidies totaled $326.2 billion last year, and are expected to increase to $538.9 billion
in 2024. Shifting these current tax expenditures from subsidizing private coverage to funding
for a single-payer program would greatly lessen the amount of new revenues that would be required.
Thorpe's analysis makes no mention of these current subsidies.
6. Thorpe assumes zero cost savings under single-payer on prescription drugs and devices.
Nations with single-payer systems have in every case used their clout as a huge purchaser to
lower drug prices by about 50 percent. In fact, the U.S. Defense Department and VA system have
also been able to realize such savings.
In summary, professor Thorpe grossly underestimates the administrative savings under single-payer;
posits increases in the number of doctor visits and hospitalizations that exceed the capacity
of doctors and hospitals to provide this added care; assumes that the federal government would
provide state and local governments with huge windfalls rather than requiring full maintenance
of effort; makes no mention of the vast current tax subsidies for private coverage whose elimination
would provide hundreds of billions annually to fund a single-payer program; and ignores savings
on drugs and medical equipment that every other single-payer program has reaped.
In the past, Thorpe estimated that single-payer reform would lower health spending while covering
all of the uninsured and upgrading coverage for the tens of millions who are currently underinsured.
The facts on which those conclusions were based have not changed.
Drs. David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler are professors of health policy and management
at the City University of New York School of Public Health and lecturers in medicine at Harvard
Medical School.
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Health Data
Total health care spending per person, 2013 *
United States ( 8713)
OCED average ( 3453)
Canada ( 4351)
Total health care spending as a share of GDP, 2013
United States ( 16.4)
OCED average ( 8.9)
Canada ( 10.2)
Pharmaceutical expenditure per person, 2013 *
United States ( 1034)
OECD average ( 517)
Canada ( 761)
Practising physicians per 1,000 population, 2013
United States ( 2.6)
OECD average ( 3.3)
Canada ( 2.6)
Practising nurses per 1,000 population, 2013
United States ( 11.1)
OECD average ( 9.1)
Canada ( 9.5)
Physician consultations per person, 2013
United States ( 4.0)
OECD average ( 6.7)
Canada ( 7.7)
Medical graduates per 100,000 population, 2013
United States ( 7.3)
OECD average ( 11.2)
Canada ( 7.5)
* Data are expressed in US dollars adjusted for purchasing power parities (PPPs), which provide
a means of comparing spending between countries on a common base. PPPs are the rates of currency
conversion that equalise the cost of a given "basket" of goods and services in different countries.
Dave :
There are some very serious, crucial issues here that Krugman, who is my favorite blogger/columnist,
is, uncharacteristically and to his great shame, is treating like a political hack: that is the
decline of the white lower middle class, the decline of unionism, the political strategy of the
right starting with the Southern strategy and then extending across the country to use traditional
white working class precarity in a society rife with social and economic change that goes back
2 generations to rip the working and lower middle class apart politically. The strategy is as
old as Reconstruction, at least - but it has been amplified economically by globalation and the
boom of the plutocrats.
You cannot the divide race and class divisions as there is interplay between them, but at root
is the nexus of power: money and class. Take for instance, our schools. These are supposed to
be the sort of launching pad of our putative meritocracy. The critical indicator of the performance
any public school by a wide margin is the property value of the surrounding area.
I just read an article today that a lot of union members are leaning Trump. Maybe Krugman should
take that up; it's not simply that union members got racist all of a sudden. Something else is
happening (see the opiod epidemic, suicides, etc.).
Paine -> Dave...
Liberals love social progress that spreads humanist values
This is however sometimes at the expense of basic issues to
The job class masses
It comes down to
What you call for
Vs
what you fight for
The system is corporate dominated
The reform paths of least resistance will always be
Cultural
How does gay marriage harm corporate bottom lines
Even civil rights for oppressed nations are negotiable
Where full employment real full employment is not
Jeffrey Stewart :
Dr. Krugman must be starving. He gets his lunch eaten by commenters every time he tries to trash
Senator Sanders.
Mary L Robinson :
Deja vu - 2004 when the democratic punditry decided to take out Howard dean. It worked very well
then, but based on the experience of the repubs with Trump, I think they will fail this time.
People are on to this scam.
It isn't "money" versus "racism, sexism, and xenophobia." Rather, they are all shades of each
other.
Look at American racism, and most forms of sexism, and increasingly lower-classism. They
consist of three parts: contempt for the class, a willingness to use violence against the class,
and a demand that the class be industrious and of service - not to themselves, but to those who
exert the force and express the contempt, while experiencing neither violence or contempt in return.
That lower and middle class, working Americans scramble to find someone to blame is no
surprise. But the controllers who have rigged the game against them, don't let any blame stick
to their Teflon carapaces. However women, lower class men and people of colour don't have access
to the financial Teflon. Even though they are all companions in suffering, through similar shared
mechanisms, no one is handy to take the blame except themselves.
So they end up trying to exert the elite power of contempt and violence on each other,
as drowning sailors might climb up each other's shoulders to stay above water. Yet no level of
status - man versus woman, native versus immigrant, working versus unemployed -- is sufficient
anymore to provide more than an inch more or less above the waves.
Men traditionally don't want to do women's work because women get a raw deal doing that work.
Ditto native born Americans don't want immigrant jobs for the same reason. But what has happened
to a great many Americans in one generation is their mass demotion to casual labour, scut jobs,
"women's work," and their common experience of the violence and contempt which formerly affected
"only" women and migrants and slaves. (Not that this makes any of it any better.)
Where does cold, neutral money come into this? Money is the tool whereby one person may enlist
others to do his/her bidding, when needed and without further obligation. But when all the cash
is in a few hands, none of it is flowing at a grassroots level. Poor people today, lacking land
and hunting and skill resources, and also lacking money, have neither personal nor impersonal
claim on each other's aid.
Anyone who could make the situation crystal clear to the populace, might bring on a revolution,
but most Americans are like the giant Antaeus, helpless when held off the earth, and it's hard
to see how such a revolution could be effective.
Noni
DeDude :
Actually, focusing more on the economic issue and less on inequality issues may be the better
election strategy. The 1%'ers are just - 1%. The racist and sexist are a lot more than that. So
if you attack the 1%'ers you alienate yourself from a less voters than if you attack racism and
sexism (although they also deserve being attacked). Not getting your fair share is always an easy
sell to the masses.
TA HARTMAN :
I am so very sorry to see Krugman use straw man arguments and appeals to authority, two techniques
which he has previously said he disapproved of, to, let's face it, attack Bernie Sanders.
Straw man - "Sanders view is that money is the root of all evil. Or more specifically,
the corrupting influence of big money, of the 1 percent and the corporate elite, is the overarching
source of the political ugliness..."
Appeal to authority - "Meanwhile, the Sanders skepticism of the wonks continues: Paul Starr
lays out the case. As far as I can tell, every serious progressive policy expert on either
health care or financial reform who has weighed in on the primary seems to lean Hillary."
The latter comes from his blog on January 27.
Neither is true at all.
This is so sad to watch, as I really admire Prof. Krugman.
I'm almost starting to feel like Krugman is using some reverse psychology tactic to turn more
people against Hillary Clinton.
Because I'm envisioning the picture painted by Krugman, where Hillary Clinton is the person
standing between big money and the angry mob with flaming torches & pitchforks... and Krugman
is painting Hillary Clinton as the person who will, and quite naturally, turn to the big money
interests, say "one moment"...
And then Clinton will turn to the angry mob, and try to get them to pick up spoons and feather
dusters instead.
Krugman's posts and columns of the past week have been awful. It's not that I disagree with his
perspective that sticks in my craw so much, it's that they're so sloppy. He just turned off his
critical thinking skills. He can't actually be that oblivious as to why Sanders' supporters support
him, can he? He can't actually be that oblivious as to why many Democrats aren't enthusiastic
about Clinton, can he? If his columns had conveyed an accurate assessment of Sanders supporters
and Clinton critics then I don't think I would have found them so objectionable. It was the absence
of thoughtful analysis which bothers me so much.
Take for example his citing Thorpe's criticism of Sanders' health care proposal. He could have
dug into the differences between Thorpe's and Friedman's analyses (Friedman was behind Sanders'
proposal) and made arguments for finding one more plausible than the other. He did zero analysis.
It kinda looked like he put his hands on the first critique he could find and sang it's praises
rather than engaging in a serious analysis. Perhaps a serious analysis would call Sanders' plan
into question? Perhaps it would but Krugman isn't providing it. (And I'm not sold that Thorpe's
analysis is a good one - not enough supporting info provided to judge.) And what's his basis for
basically doing a 180 degrees on single-payer since (roughly) 2008? Has he learned new things
which have caused him to change his mind? If so then what are they? I've respected his thoughtful
analyses in the past. I'd listen. Anyhow, a very disappointing series of columns from Mr. Krugman.
Ashish :
Yet again the reaction to Prof. Krugman here is all negative. He remembers the unnecessarily nail
biting health care bill and stimulus bill (half sized to begin with).
While Sen. Sanders would be uncompromising on such issues, he might end up a lame duck from
the get go. Especially, if he restarts the healthcare debate where the Republicans have organized
themselves. Or worse, that a winnable presidential election could end up with both congress and
the presidency in Republican hands. Then all the other issues such as alternative energy (possible
to sell as energy independence to avoid obstruction), Wall Street regulation (which the Republicans
can't oppose strongly for fear of the public), minimum wage increase (again popular with the public)
would not get off the ground.
{Especially, if he restarts the healthcare debate where the Republicans have organized themselves.}
Organized themselves with what? Mindless TV commercials that miss the point?
The life-span of the average American has diminished these recent years*? Between rising obesity-rates
and a healthcare system that is the most costly of any developed nation, where's the logic ...
?
"... If youre relying on seeing your favorite candidates name the most times in a Google search, do keep in mind that only young low information voter relies on technology to determine whos popular. The old folks still rely on talk radio. ..."
"... Clinton is the Democratic Party candidate of the Military Industrial Complex ..."
"... Trump says insane things, of course every news outlet covers him, I dont really think he counts. MSNBC is by far the worst of the lot when it comes to spoon feeding. I dont like FOX any better when they bring on their Holy band of extreme right commentators either. ..."
"... As a young female undecided voter, its hard not to be fooled by the celebrity game show host. And on the other hand, its hard not to support my fellow gender and vote Hillary (until you look at the baggage). Now, if I listen to my brain as opposed to emotions, the common sense of Bernie on the one side or Rand Paul on the other has a distinct appeal. Theyre quite interesting to listen to and they do it without invoking terror, hatred, scare tactics or even biblical quotes. How refreshing! ..."
"... The bankruptcy argument is a bunch of bs. Hes a billionaire now. If I could become a billionaire by going bankrupt Id do it in a heartbeat. The truth is that he figured out how to rise out of bankruptcy and is now financing a presidential campaign and manhandling his opponents who have received millions in contributions. ..."
"... Ive been a democrat all my life and hope that Sanders wins. But if it comes down to Hillary and Trump, Im voting Trump. If it comes down to Hilary and any republican not named Trump, Ill hold my nose and vote for Hilary. I really dont care for her. ..."
"... Its heartening to see that Clinton is polling lower than Sanders when it comes to young women, perhaps indicative of the post-sexism ideal were going for; younger women are judging the candidates on their actual policies and character, as opposed to being swayed by the infantile because shes a woman appeal. ..."
"... Given TTP and TTIP, NAFTA, the actions of the IMF and World Bank, the moves by the EU and Anglosphere away from social democracy and the continuing prescription of liberal economic policy for all states, deregulation, plans to expand recourse to investor-state dispute settlement courts, and the overall small state philosophy, often enforced by military interventionism or sanctions, it seems as if pro-capital policy, deregulation and the resulting inequality havent obtained a status quo that will be maintained under Hilary or the GOP so much as an agenda that has been pushed globally, and will go further in the direction that many voters on the left and centre of politics and even the traditional conservative right and far-right, probably the majority of Americas and the worlds population, oppose. ..."
"... The Guardian and the rest of the UK media are giving Trump the same treatment as they gave Arthur Scargill in the 1980s. ..."
"... The UK Establishment and media and their overseas supporters (in the other direction) and we all know who that is. are schit scared in case Trump gets in. The British establishment has been bought. British 'informed democracy', is dead. Censorship, is rife. And the British People know it. ..."
"... Does any of this really matter? The United States is an empire and, regardless of who is anointed President by the Koch brothers and the rest of the American aristocracy, the empire will still require a military budget of at least $500,000,000,000 and American jobs will still go to China because that's profitable for the corporations and for the aristocrats who own and run those corporations. ..."
"... The far-left attacks again, well I have to give them credit, they are really trying harder than ever. Anyway, these polls are always adulterated by special interests ..."
"... We do not have a democracy. Freedom of speech democratic freedom of thought, yes. Democracy is an unfulfilled philosophical idea and wishful thinking. For decades, we have been under the total rule of organized business - as are many developed nations. ..."
"... I have been a lifelong Democrat and my first choice is Bernie Sanders. With my meagre income I will continue to contribute to his campaign. My alternate choice is, anyone but Hillary Clinton. For the life of me, I cannot imagine anyone who reads the news can vote for this Wall St. puppet. ..."
"... Be that as it may, the US average voter owes to Donald Trump for standing up to the corporate media that we always criticise for influencing elections, while other candidates of both parties bend over backwards to curry their favor. ..."
"... Yes, the corporate media as a result are going after him, but he still gets votes. This election, the case the US Voter vs. Corporate Media, the Voter won thanks to Trump. ..."
"... People have unfavourable opinions of politicians they actually vote for. Nearly all Repubs will vote for trump if he is the nominee and whether it's Hillary or Sanders, a fair size of one time Obama voters are switching to the Repubs because they want action taken against the rapid erosion of what they consider to be American values. ..."
"... It appears that the Guardian continues to show it's bias toward Clinton. How about being balanced and reporting the news instead of trying to create the news and influence the outcome. If we want bias we can drift over to Fox Fake news ..."
"... Hillary Clinton is not on the left. She is right center. ..."
"... Cruz is genuinely dangerous. A religious zealot and a war monger, it would be a massive step back for America and the world if this man became president. ..."
"... It's because many people who are centrist or left leaning have a sense of morality and principles.. It's not about voting for who stinks less.. It's about standing up for what you consider right and if you can't do that during the election process then what's the bloody point of democracy.. Take the case of Occupy Wall Street.. supported by most left leaning people. ..."
"... the media wants us to frame everything into left wing or right wing. However I don't buy into that paradigm anymore. When Clinton was about to send the jobs away, I saw effectively Pat Buchanan (staunch conservative but poplulist) effectively joining forces with Ralph Nader (perhaps as far left as anyone can go but still populist). You think any democrat would be better than any republican. I think that if we don't fix something soon, this whole thing is going to collapse. For my money only 3 candidates are actually pledging to fix something (Sanders, Paul and Trump). ..."
"... Remember that socialist is a dirtier word in much of the U.S. than neo-liberal is in Western Europe. There's also the very pertinent question of whether the U.S. is ready to elect a Jewish president. ..."
"... Obama came in surrounded by Wall Street execs and stooges and from the outset had no intention of challenging the power of the capitalist class or affecting change that was anything other than rhetorical in nature. ..."
"... Clinton is the one candidate who can lose to Trump, and if she win's she will govern like Bush. It's disgusting how the establishment is pushing her so hard, but it does inform us that we should reject her. Clinton is a candidate like Obama - runs on hope and change, than nothing changes - same old attitude that Government exists to protect the profits of the 1% and **** Working Class Americans ..."
"... Sanders' mild social democratic policies - which require moderate and easily affordable sacrifices on the part of the rich - are of course very realistic and practical. Or at least they are realistic in countries that are at least reasonably politically sane. But since US politics is the very definition of insanity, Sanders policies are not realistic . ..."
Let's not forget Bill Clinton's brother Roger's involvement in the Iran Contra affair. Clinton's
have been involved in drugs and gun running for a long time.
skipsdad -> André De Koning 30 Jan 2016 21:03
Putin did more damage to Isis in 6 weeks, than Obama and Nato did in six years.
The Turkish fox, is in the Nato chicken coop. Turkey has been getting oil from Syria for years.
Obama knew about it. The Russians were threatening to reveal the deceit, and that's why their
plane was shot down.
Now Turkey is claiming another Russian violation. The fox is looking to start WWIII.
Obama has been dealing with 'moderate terrorists' for years, and Putin exposed him.
Obama and the US - Running with the foxes, and hunting with the hounds.
Trump will clean that cesspit of corruption out.
johnf1 30 Jan 2016 20:58
Who in God's name cares what anyone in Iowa thinks about who should be president. As far as
I know neither Iowa nor New Hampshire has ever been important in any presidential election. Pennsylvania,
Florida, Nevada, Ohio, the voters in those states are important.
nnedjo 30 Jan 2016 20:56
The former first lady run in the elections for the Democratic presidential candidate for the
second time, and claims to have a trump cards for it; "Only she is able to defeat Trump!"
However, the problem is that in addition to trump cards Hillary also has Trump's money. You remember
that she took the money from Trump, as a fee for coming to his wedding.
Now it raises a hypothetical question: What if in the middle of the election campaign Trump
decides to pay Clinton a little more than before, as "a fee for the lost elections"?
So, in my opinion it is not unthinkable at all that Hillary could sell elections to Trump in exchange
for a certain sum of money, the only question is how much money would that be.
And after all, Trump himself has already stated that he is looking forward to get Hillary Clinton
as an opponent in the presidential race, so draw your own conclusions?
André De Koning -> skipsdad 30 Jan 2016 20:50
Pity we only get a silly picture of Putin via western media. Reading his speeches, especially
the last one at the UN (28th Sept.), he was the clearest and summed up the issues of western caused
chaos with its invasions and claim of 'being special'(US, especially hypocritical and doing the
opposite of what it preaches). Putin is thoughtful, strategic and a leader, while in the US there
are no leaders and even more is done by the so-called intelligence agencies' that by the Russian
FSB (more control over them than over the NSA). One debate with Putin would be more interesting
than any of this American waffle that has never changed their superficial, cruel foreign policies.
I discovered this by reading other literature about Putin than you can ever find in the misleading
demonization of any leader who is opposed to US policies. The press lied about Gadaffi too, so
take some trouble to find out what these so-called enemies are actually about.
RusticBenadar -> carson45 30 Jan 2016 20:42
Actually, if you had done your due diligence and researched Bernie's track record you would
see he is a master of bipartisan success; it was said of his mayorship that he "out republicaned
the republicans" achieving all the fiscal objectives they had long sought in Butlington but failed
to accomplish until Bernie came along.
TettyBlaBla 30 Jan 2016 20:39
I find all the predictions of who will win the General Election in November quite amusing.
Primary elections haven't even started and neither major political party has declared which candidates
in the present fields will represent them. The choice of Vice Presidential candidates could well
change the scenarios many are now presenting.
If you're relying on seeing your favorite candidate's name the most times in a Google search,
do keep in mind that only young low information voter relies on technology to determine who's
popular. The old folks still rely on talk radio.
atkurebeach 30 Jan 2016 20:34
if the democrats vote for Hillary, who is tight with Wall Street money, especially when there
is such a clear alternative for the poor, to me that means there is no difference between the
two parties. I might as well vote for Trump, at least he is less likely to start a war.
digitalspacey -> Calvert 30 Jan 2016 20:32
As an outsider looking in (from Australia) what you describe actually works in favour of the
Democrats.
Think about it.
An intransigent Republican party continually blocks what the President wants to do. Now I'm
assuming that if people vote in Bernie it's because they actually want what he has to sell.
So if the Republicans keep playing this game it's really gonna start to grate on people.
There will come a tipping point where people will say 'enough!' and the removal of the Republicans
will commence.
It may take several terms but the Republicans are in egret signing their own death warrant.
Merveil Meok -> Logicon 30 Jan 2016 20:12
There are very powerful forces in America that would NEVER let Bernie Sanders win the White House.
He has said stuff that has disqualified him (in the eyes of those forces) for the role of president.
You can't run against the military, cops, oil companies, Wall Street, the richest people on the
planet, big pharma, and win. That only happens in movies.
SeniorsTn9 30 Jan 2016 20:09
The U.S. campaign is nearly over and two choices remain. Everyone knows America is broken.
Candidates promoting staying the course and being politically correct have no place in America's
future. They broke the America we have today. The realities are obvious; Clinton is to the past
as Trump is to the future. After all the campaigning dust settles, Americans who want American
back will vote for Trump. Trump will make America great again. It really is that simple.
redwhine -> Merveil Meok 30 Jan 2016 20:01
It's good that they have to win over people in Iowa and New Hampshire, and I say this as a
Californian who only ever hears of politicians visiting my state to raise money at the homes of
rich people before leaving the same day. The point is that politicians need to show that they
are willing to work for their votes. They need to hit the pavement. They need to convince people
to vote for them even if they know that the votes in those states don't amount to much. If politicians
only campaigned in California, New York, Texas, and Florida and then skipped the rest, I'd see
no evidence of grit and determination, just lazy opportunism.
ID4352889 30 Jan 2016 19:56
Clinton is a deeply unpleasant character, but Americans will vote for her over the decent Sanders.
It's just the way they do things in the US. Clinton is the Democratic Party candidate of the
Military Industrial Complex and will take the cake. Bernie is just there to make people think
they have a choice. They don't.
redwhine consumerx 30 Jan 2016 19:52
Plenty of people have inherited millions and still ended up penniless. You can't call Trump
an idiot even if you maintain that he could have become a billionaire merely by putting all his
daddy's money into the bank and leaving it there (which we know he didn't, because he's built
at least a dozen skyscrapers and golf courses). By the way, Fred Trump (Donald's dad) was rich
but he was not astronomically rich. As for his lawyers, plenty of lawyers of rich men have done
worse; in trying to denigrate Trump people are reflexively making his dad into some sort of financial
wizard and everyone around Trump to magically have helped him in every step of the way like guardian
angels surrounding him his whole life. It just doesn't work like that.
Merveil Meok 30 Jan 2016 19:42
The political system allows two states (Iowa and New Hampshire) to dictate the future the country.
Some candidates are forced to quit after one or two Caucuses (as money sponsors quit on them),
even if, only God knows, they could have picked up steam later.
I would be in favor of adding three or more states in the first round of the caucuses so that
most of America is represented, not states which have no real power in American daily life - economically
and otherwise.
These two states represent 1.5% of America's population and a ridiculously low percentage of
national GDP.
ChiefKeef 30 Jan 2016 19:39
Sanders will be the best president theyve ever had. The lefts popularity is rocketing across
the west in response to austerity and the endless cycle of imperialism and international crisis.
A new generation of activists, unencumbered by the diminished confidence of past defeats, have
risen spectacularly in defense of equality against the attacks of the right.
Steven Wallace 30 Jan 2016 19:33
Hillary is a devout psychopath whereas Trump is a total doughnut ,seriously who the hell would
vote for these animals ?
Pinesap -> TaiChiMinh 30 Jan 2016 19:31
Trump says insane things, of course every news outlet covers him, I don't really think
he counts. MSNBC is by far the worst of the lot when it comes to spoon feeding. I don't like FOX
any better when they bring on their Holy band of extreme right commentators either. Like
I've said before when your in the middle like me, your screwed. NO news outlets and NO candidates
that could win. Screwed like deck boards I tell you.
WarlockScott -> carson45 30 Jan 2016 19:31
Sorry who was president before Bush? Bill Clinton? and who was Bush running against? Central
figure in the Clinton administration Al Gore?.... oh, woops.
Experience as secretary of state? US foreign policy has got much better since Kerry took over.
Healthcare? the woman that takes bundles of money from Big Pharma, who is now saying that UHC
is fundamentally a pipe dream for the US?
She's a poor choice compared to Sanders imo, If she was running against Biden or another centrist
democrat yeah sure but against a Sanders figure? nah
Jill McLean 30 Jan 2016 19:28
As a young female undecided voter, it's hard not to be fooled by the celebrity game show
host. And on the other hand, it's hard not to support my fellow gender and vote Hillary (until
you look at the baggage). Now, if I listen to my brain as opposed to emotions, the common sense
of Bernie on the one side or Rand Paul on the other has a distinct appeal. They're quite interesting
to listen to and they do it without invoking terror, hatred, scare tactics or even biblical quotes.
How refreshing!
redwhine -> consumerx 30 Jan 2016 19:26
The bankruptcy argument is a bunch of bs. He's a billionaire now. If I could become a billionaire
by going bankrupt I'd do it in a heartbeat. The truth is that he figured out how to rise out of
bankruptcy and is now financing a presidential campaign and manhandling his opponents who have
received millions in contributions.
redwhine 30 Jan 2016 19:19
I've been a democrat all my life and hope that Sanders wins. But if it comes down to Hillary
and Trump, I'm voting Trump. If it comes down to Hilary and any republican not named Trump, I'll
hold my nose and vote for Hilary. I really don't care for her.
JoePomegranate 30 Jan 2016 19:17
It's heartening to see that Clinton is polling lower than Sanders when it comes to young
women, perhaps indicative of the post-sexism ideal we're going for; younger women are judging
the candidates on their actual policies and character, as opposed to being swayed by the infantile
"because she's a woman" appeal.
Logicon 30 Jan 2016 19:08
Bernie has to win the ticket -- the 'best' revolutionary will win the general election:
Trump vs Clinton = trump wins
Trump vs bernie = bernie wins
Cafael -> ponderwell 30 Jan 2016 19:06
Given TTP and TTIP, NAFTA, the actions of the IMF and World Bank, the moves by the EU and
Anglosphere away from social democracy and the continuing prescription of liberal economic policy
for all states, deregulation, plans to expand recourse to investor-state dispute settlement courts,
and the overall 'small state' philosophy, often enforced by military interventionism or sanctions,
it seems as if pro-capital policy, deregulation and the resulting inequality haven't obtained
a status quo that will be maintained under Hilary or the GOP so much as an agenda that has been
pushed globally, and will go further in the direction that many voters on the left and centre
of politics and even the traditional conservative right and far-right, probably the majority of
America's and the world's population, oppose.
Patrick Ryan 30 Jan 2016 18:58
Most polls are shite as extrapolating from relatively small samples never tells you the
true story.... We'll know better after the Caucuses.... the fear factor and the worries of a
nation will play a big part in the selective process - This is not a sprint and race is only
beginning... Having Trump in the mix has shaken up system and he has clearly got the super
conservative media's knickers in a twist...
skipsdad 30 Jan 2016 18:54
The Guardian and the rest of the UK media are giving Trump the same treatment as they
gave Arthur Scargill in the 1980s.
The UK Establishment and media and their overseas supporters (in the other direction) and
we all know who that is. are schit scared in case Trump gets in. The British establishment has
been bought. British 'informed democracy', is dead. Censorship, is rife. And the British
People know it.
Douglas Lees 30 Jan 2016 18:53
The is only one decent candidate and that's Bernie Sanders. The others are a collection of
fruit loops and clowns (all deranged and dangerous) with the exception of Clinton who is
experienced intelligent and totally corrupt. She will cause a war with Iran... Let's hope it's
Bernie maybe a hope for some changes. The last 36 years have been fucked
Canuck61 30 Jan 2016 18:45
Does any of this really matter? The United States is an empire and, regardless of who
is anointed President by the Koch brothers and the rest of the American aristocracy, the
empire will still require a military budget of at least $500,000,000,000 and American jobs
will still go to China because that's profitable for the corporations and for the aristocrats
who own and run those corporations. Enjoy the show, but don't assume that it actually
means anything.
LeftRightParadigm 30 Jan 2016 18:35
The far-left attacks again, well I have to give them credit, they are really trying harder
than ever. Anyway, these polls are always adulterated by special interests, just look in
the UK at IPSOS MORI with CEO who worked for the cabinet office - no bias there! IPSOS said
the majority of British people want to remain in the EU... LOL
Trump is the best candidate, all the others are untrustworthy to the extreme due to who's
funding them, namely Goldman Sachs.
ponderwell -> thedono 30 Jan 2016 18:35
We do not have a democracy. Freedom of speech & democratic freedom of thought, yes.
Democracy is an unfulfilled philosophical idea and wishful thinking. For decades, we have been
under the total rule of organized business - as are many developed nations.
jamesdaylight 30 Jan 2016 18:28
i so hope trump or sanders wins. the establishment needs a new direction.
AdrianBarr -> ID7004073 30 Jan 2016 18:26
I have been a lifelong Democrat and my first choice is Bernie Sanders. With my meagre
income I will continue to contribute to his campaign. My alternate choice is, anyone but
Hillary Clinton. For the life of me, I cannot imagine anyone who reads the news can vote for
this Wall St. puppet. The recent Guardian article by a Wall St. insider about Hillary's
connections and the money she had received from Wall St. should make anyone shudder of her
presidency. Let alone the money the Clinton Foundation had received from other countries when
Hillary was the Secy. of State.
Be that as it may, the US average voter owes to Donald Trump for standing up to the
corporate media that we always criticise for influencing elections, while other candidates of
both parties bend over backwards to curry their favor.
Yes, the corporate media as a result are going after him, but he still gets votes. This
election, the case the US Voter vs. Corporate Media, the Voter won thanks to Trump.
If Bernie is cheated out of the nomination process that the DNC had worked from the beginning
to crown Hillary. I will vote for Trump to save what is left (pun intended) of the Democratic
party. Hillary way far right of Trump. Hillary was a Goldwater Republican, while Trump is a
Rockefeller REpublican. Take your !
elaine layabout -> sammy3110 30 Jan 2016 18:18
He doesn't care about them so long as they are unsubstantiated allegations. When the FBI
announces the result of their investigation, he will give his opinion, so long as it is
relevant to the welfare of the American people.
But using mid-investigation rumors and allegations against an opponent to distract the
American people from the actual, fact-based issues is hardly a failing. I would say it
demonstrates Sanders' commitment to fairness and truth and the best interests of the American
people.
elaine layabout -> Philip J Sparrow 30 Jan 2016 18:12
That would be news to the folks in Burlington, who elected Bernie Sanders to 4 terms as
mayor, during which time he cut their budget, streamlined city services, revitalized their
commercial district and restored their lakefront, AND he was judged one of the top 20 mayors
in the country.
The folks in the State of Vermont would also be surprised to hear this about the man who
served them in the House of Representatives for 16 years. During that time, when the extreme
right wing of the Republican party ruled Congress, Bernie (an Independent) passed more
legislative amendments than any other congressman, even the Republicans themselves. And this
was not watered-down legislation, it was pure, progressive gold.
Those same folks would be surprised to hear this about the Senator whom they last re-elected
with 71% of their votes. I guess that they were thinking of his ability to, again, passed a
series of progressive amendments in a Republican-controlled Congress, including the first-ever
audit of the Federal Reserve -- you know that thing that Ron Paul had been trying to do for
decades. And then there was the Veterans Administration Bill that Republican Jack Reed said
would never have passed without Bernie Sanders' ability to build bi-partisan coalitions.
Bringing 30 Jan 2016 18:12
People have unfavourable opinions of politicians they actually vote for. Nearly all
Repubs will vote for trump if he is the nominee and whether it's Hillary or Sanders, a fair
size of one time Obama voters are switching to the Repubs because they want action taken
against the rapid erosion of what they consider to be American values.
OurPlanet -> eveofchange 30 Jan 2016 18:06
"Does corporate supported Clinton, support gun/missile/bomb "control" of the Army, Police
and state apparatus,or just ordinary people ?"
Took the words out of my mouth. I wonder if
those folks who are thinking of voting for her will stretch their brain capacity to think
seriously about the consequences of voting for her. Do they want more of their tax $ spent on
even more wars?
peacefulmilitant 30 Jan 2016 17:50
But it's simple enough to point out that a minority of Americans are Republicans, and
that even among Republicans about 30% have a negative opinion of Trump. You can see where
the 60% might come from.
The Kochs will forward his thoughts along to him in time.
Harry Bhai 30 Jan 2016 17:48
meanwhile: Iowa's long-serving senior senator, Chuck Grassley, who last weekend
popped up at a Trump event
Rats are coming out of holes to pay respect to Trump the cat.
ID7004073 30 Jan 2016 17:46
It appears that the Guardian continues to show it's bias toward Clinton. How about
being balanced and reporting the news instead of trying to create the news and influence the
outcome. If we want bias we can drift over to Fox Fake news
Bernie has solutions that Fox feels is too boring but solutions about economic and national
security are what America and our world needs. Boats that won't float right and F35
billionaire toys dressed up as the ultimate killing machine will never make America and our
world strong. Economic policies that Bernie promotes that actually employ more people is the
only solutions.
TaiChiMinh -> TheAuthorities 30 Jan 2016 17:36
Hillary Clinton is not "on the left." She is right center. Your attempt to put the
debate between her advocates and those of Sanders into the realm of Stalin-Spanish
Republicans-etc is delusional. Maybe, just maybe the people having this discussion are engaged
in real disagreements, not dogmatic and factional maneuvering.
nnedjo 30 Jan 2016 17:08
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, whose once-mighty lead in the Hawkeye
state has narrowed to paper-thin margins, is focusing on rival Bernie Sanders' complicated
history on gun control in the final days of the Iowa campaign. The former secretary of state
will be joined by former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, a survivor of a 2011 mass shooting
that claimed the lives of six people.
Hillary stands for a gun control in order "to disarm"
Bernie, but voters say they would not vote for Hillary even if someone put a gun to their
forehead.
The reason for this is obvious, she is able to exploit even the survivors of the mass
shooting, just to satisfy her own selfish political interests.
Saltyandthepretz -> MasonInNY 30 Jan 2016 16:47
Except a circus is funny. The anti-human, repugnant policies put forward by these two are
in fact quite serious. Trump is crazy, of the A grade variety, but Cruz is genuinely
dangerous. A religious zealot and a war monger, it would be a massive step back for America
and the world if this man became president.
Fentablar -> turnip2 30 Jan 2016 16:21
Rubio is terrible, he's pandering even more than Hillary does (well, if nothing else he
does it just as much) and I'm not sure anyone knows what he actually stands for, even himself.
loljahlol -> godforbidowright 30 Jan 2016 16:15
Yeah, the Libyan people thank her
PlayaGiron -> SenseCir 30 Jan 2016 16:11
aka Wall Street's "progressive" voice as opposed to the Wall Street Journal its
"conservative" voice. In the end two sides of the same neo-liberal beast. "There is no
alternative"! Your corporatist elites have spoken!
elaine layabout -> greven 30 Jan 2016 16:05
True that.
Wall Street and it's lackey pols are playing with fire, because although many Americans had
savings and assets and/or family members with savings and assets and/or access to the
beneficence of local churches and charities, we are all tapped out.
The next time we fall, we fall hard. And we will be taking Wall Street down with us.
vishawish -> TheAuthorities 30 Jan 2016 15:53
It's because many people who are centrist or left leaning have a sense of morality and
principles.. It's not about voting for who stinks less.. It's about standing up for what you
consider right and if you can't do that during the election process then what's the bloody
point of democracy.. Take the case of Occupy Wall Street.. supported by most left leaning
people.
The only candidate who would support and encourage that is Sanders. So how do
you expect people not to support him and go out to support someone who is basically a quasi
republican?
Principles and ideologies matter.
marshwren -> GaryWallin 30 Jan 2016 15:19
Uh, it's not as if Iowans haven't had at least eight months to make up their minds, even
with the advantage of being able to see ALL of the candidates up close and personal, unlike
those of U.S. in late states (such as NJ, where i live, on June 7th or so). Besides, when
people vote in primaries on machines, they have 2-3 minutes to mull things over in the booth.
I appreciate your disdain, but caucus season in IA is like beach season in NJ--a tiresome
inconvenience, but an economic necessity given how many non-residents arrive to spend their
money. And you only have to put up with it once every four years, while ours is an annual
event.
curiouswes MartinSilenus 30 Jan 2016 15:14
Personally, I would prefer not to sit in either, wouldn't you?
Thanks for being logical. Now, the media wants us to frame everything into left wing or
right wing. However I don't buy into that paradigm anymore. When Clinton was about to send the
jobs away, I saw effectively Pat Buchanan (staunch conservative but poplulist) effectively
joining forces with Ralph Nader (perhaps as far left as anyone can go but still populist). You
think any democrat would be better than any republican. I think that if we don't fix something
soon, this whole thing is going to collapse. For my money only 3 candidates are actually
pledging to fix something (Sanders, Paul and Trump). Cruz says he wants to fix everything
by using that same old tired republican bs, so he isn't really planning on fixing anything.
Basically he is Steve Forbes without glasses and with a face lift. Paul would actually try to
fix something, but at this stage, he is a long shot and barring any 11th hour surge, I don't
need to discuss him much at this time. I would classify Trump as a populist, but a loose
cannon that isn't "presidential".
Voting for Trump is sort of an act of desperation. It isn't quite like being a suicide
bomber, but more like going all in just prior to drawing to an inside straight. Sanders is a
populist also. Some people think we can't afford his programs. However the reason the nation
is broke (financially) is because it is broke (as in broken). Sanders has vowed to fix this
(it won't be easy but with the people standing behind him, it is possible). The rest of the
candidates won't fix anything (just try to move the nation either to the left or the right as
it continues it's downward spiral.
We have to stop that downward motion or it won't matter whether we move to the left or right.
Unfortunately everybody doesn't see stopping this downward motion as job one.
For example: take Greece and their financial troubles. Even though our debt is higher, we
aren't in as bad shape as the Greeks, however we really need to stop the bleeding. We really
need to get a populist in there. I'm no economist but according to my understanding, there is
this thing called the money supply which is a bit different than the money itself. While the
government controls the money, it doesn't control the money supply. It needs to control both
or else we are just one "bad" policy away from economic disaster because whoever controls the
money supply controls the economy. If you remember in 2008 the credit dried up and that can
happen again if somebody isn't happy.
WarlockScott 30 Jan 2016 14:33
Can any Clinton supporter cogently argue why they've plumped for her over Bernie? He's far
closer to the social democracy the Democrats espouse (albeit have rarely put into action since
1992), polls show him to be more electable than Clinton, he has a far greater chance of
passing his programs for numerous reasons (better bargaining position, not as hated by
opposition, running a proactive rather than defensive campaign) and he has the popular
touch... Which even Hillary would admit she lacks. I'm hoping perhaps vainly the first answer
won't be about her gender.
TheAuthorities -> NotYetGivenUp 30 Jan 2016 14:12
I'm guessing you don't have a lifetime's experience observing U.S. presidential elections.
Sanders does well in the polls you cite because, so far, the Republicans haven't even begun to
attack him. In fact, they're positively giddy that Clinton looks to be faltering and that
Sanders actually seems closer to the nomination today than anyone would have thought 6 months
ago. Nothing will make GOP strategists sleep more soundly than the prospect of a Sanders
nomination.
In the still-unlikely event that Sanders gets the Democratic nomination, the Republicans will
turn their heavy artillery on him and -- you can trust me on this -- the end result won't be
pretty. Actually, I think it may not even take that much from the Republican character
assassins to convince most Americans not to vote for someone with Sanders's convictions and
political record. Remember that "socialist" is a dirtier word in much of the U.S. than
"neo-liberal" is in Western Europe. There's also the very pertinent question of whether the
U.S. is ready to elect a Jewish president.
Again, if you're unfamiliar with the American electoral process, you've never seen anything
like the Republican attack machine. ESPECIALLY if your reference point is a British election.
It's like comparing a church picnic with a gang fight.
Another factor to consider is that, just as the GOP establishment is trying to undercut Trump,
so the Democratic Party leadership could possibly draft somebody else to run (Biden?) if
Clinton does go down in flames.
TaiChiMinh -> Winner_News 30 Jan 2016 14:06
Obama came to office basically bragging that he had the key to a post-partisan,
collaborative way of governing - above the issues, above parties, above rancor. During the
crucial period, when he had momentum and numbers, he trimmed on issue after issue - starting
with single payer. The Tea Party was perhaps an inevitable response but its strength, and the
success of the intransigents in Congress, were not inevitable. But the Tea Party began with a
protest of floor traders against protections for people in mortgage trouble - but its momentum
really came with the movement against the ACA and in the off-year elections in 2010. A strong
president reliant on a mobilized coalition of voters - rather than a pretty crappy deal maker
(who liked starting close to his opponents' first offer) backed by corporate elites - would
perhaps have seen different results. Obama never gave it a go. And here we are . . . I imagine
that I join eastbayradical in some kind of astonishment at the extent to which "progressives"
want to keep at what has shown itself a losing proposition . .
westerndevil -> Martin Screeton 30 Jan 2016 13:50
I spent 18 months in my twenties as a debt collector for people who defaulted on student
loans...a soul crushing job. Virtually everybody who defaulted either...
A-attended some diploma mill like University of Phoenix and not surprisingly had no job
prospects after they left...or
B-dropped out or flunked out
We need to encourage more young people to work as electricians, plumbers, machinists and
in other blue-collar occupations.
GaryWallin 30 Jan 2016 13:49
April Fool's Day comes two months early here in Iowa this year. The Iowa Presidential
Caucuses are one of the greatest Political Hoaxes of all time. They are filling our
newspapers, radio, and neighborhoods with an all time record appeal to nonsense.
As Iowan's we've had the endure nearly a full year of lying and misleading politicians,
newspapers that give us the latest spin on the political horse-race (under the guise of
journalism), phone calls from intrusive pollsters and political operatives, emails from
assorted special and political interests; and we've even had to watch our mail carriers
burdened with the task of delivering many oversized junk mail advertising pieces.
Let me make it clear that I am not opposed to political parties holding caucuses. I
think it is a good idea for them to get together in formal and informal settings:
caucuses, parties, picnics, and civic observances. But I think the choice for our next
President is too important to be left to a voter suppressing, low turn-out, media event
such as the Iowa Presidential Caucuses. The goal should be to be inclusive of all
Iowans; not to have a record (but suppressed) turnout.
We've had to endure this nonsense for months, while the politicians are given multiple
and varied means to get their message out. But the voters get only an hour or so to make
their decisions, and even then in my party, the so-called 'Democratic' one, they don't
even get the right to a secret ballot, or the right to cast an absentee ballot if they
cannot attend. Instead of including all Iowans, this Circus gives special interests,
establishment political operatives, and elites an unfair advantage. This is voter
suppression and manipulation. Too few care if there might be a snow storm coming, or
someone has to be up early the next morning for surgery at a local hospital, or if
someone has to make a living by working at the time of the caucus. In this circus-like
atmosphere it is all too important to our elites to bring in the millions of dollars in
advertising money that this charade provides to local media. Dollars come before
democratic principles.
I certainly hope that my party, the Democrats, have the courage to reject all delegates
chosen by this non-democratic process when the National Convention comes around. It is
time for Party members outside of Iowa to stand up for real democracy, free and fair
candidate selection with secret ballots, and inclusive party processes that expand and
grow the Political Party.
In Iowa we need to make a few changes. I suggest a few:
Requiring every television station, radio station, and newspaper to give daily public
updates on how much and who bought political advertising.
Requiring every piece of political advertising mailed to people in Iowa to have the cost
of that item listed on the mailing.
Requiring all politicians, political parties, and PACs to honor the 'Do Not Call' list.
I often tell these callers I will not vote for anyone who annoys me with a phone call,
but this seems to have little deterrence value to phone centers and robo-calls.
Requiring that all major political parties in the state give voters the right to choose
candidates by secret ballot. No more forcing people to publicly declare for one
candidate or another. People should have the right to make their individual choices
known if they so choose; or keep them private if that is what they want.
Gary Wallin, Cedar Rapids, Iowa 30 Jan 2016
eastbayradical -> Winner_News 30 Jan 2016 13:16
The capitalist system will surely attempt to "brick wall" any authentic attempt at
change Sanders might try to implement.
But to compare him to Obama is off.
Obama came in surrounded by Wall Street execs and stooges and from the outset had no
intention of challenging the power of the capitalist class or affecting change that was
anything other than rhetorical in nature.
The Republicans' "brick walling" of his agenda was made far, far easier because he
didn't articulate, let alone mobilize around, one that named the enemy and communicated
specific progressive changes he sought to achieve.
This was seen vividly during the fight over health care reform, where Obama, in the face
of widespread support for single-payer health care, took single-payer off the table from
the outset and negotiated away the public option for nothing of substance in return.
This allowed the Republicans an open field to attack his reform's unpopular and
unprogressive features--the mandate and the general complexity of a system that retained
the insurance cartel's power over health care.
Marcedward 30 Jan 2016 13:11
Clinton is the one candidate who can lose to Trump, and if she win's she will
govern like Bush. It's disgusting how the establishment is pushing her so hard, but it
does inform us that we should reject her. Clinton is a candidate like Obama - runs on
hope and change, than nothing changes - same old attitude that "Government exists to
protect the profits of the 1% and **** Working Class Americans"
JoePomegranate 30 Jan 2016 13:09
The feting of Clinton over a genuine, principled and subversive politician like
Sanders - when subversion is exactly what is needed - reveals the complete paucity of
argument behind so much "progressive" thought nowadays.
The idea that the lying, the patronisation, the cynicism, the cronyism and the ghastly
thirst for power by any means can be simply offset by the fact that she's a woman is
appalling. It's retrograde, sexist bollocks.
Sanders is the candidate people need and his nomination would put down a marker for real
disenfranchised and impoverished Americans to fix their country. How anyone who purports
to call themselves liberal or reformist can opt for Hillary over him, I have no idea.
James Eaton -> CurtBrown 30 Jan 2016 13:02
The myth of "American Exceptionalism" is cracking. Many folks are actually able to
see how things work in other places around the globe and not simply react with the knee
jerk "it ain't gonna work here, this is 'Murica!"
eastbayradical 30 Jan 2016 12:49
The NY Times' argument that Sanders' proposals for achieving change are unrealistic
suggests that the differences between him and Clinton are chiefly tactical in nature.
This is a clever dodge that relieves the Times of the need to address the fact that, far
from being an agent of change, Clinton, like her husband and Obama--both of whom it
supported--has a consistent record of carrying water for Wall Street, the Pentagon, and
the national security/police-state apparatus, one that that she will undoubtedly carry
on as president if elected.
Madibo 30 Jan 2016 12:17
Sanders' mild social democratic policies - which require moderate and easily
affordable sacrifices on the part of the rich - are of course very realistic and
practical. Or at least they are realistic in countries that are at least reasonably
politically sane. But since US politics is the very definition of insanity, Sanders
policies are "not realistic".
"... Spot on. The Republican party is about corporatism and the "1%". They are irrelevant to nearly all the American public apart from democrat haters. The GOP might as well be a corpse. ..."
"... Hillary Clinton's always going on and on about her "Proven track record" at the State Dept....where she set Libya on fire, for example.....unlike her competitor, Bernie Sanders. ..."
"... Dear Lord, please let the American people not vote in anyone from the GOP side as president in 2016 ..."
"... Okay, my prayer skills are a bit rusty, I admit, but you get the idea. ..."
"... Anyhow, Donald Trump reminds me more and more of Italy's media mogul/politician Silvio Berlusconi -- maybe it's just my eyes playing tricks on me, but he is even starting to LOOK more and more like that man, what with the many faces he makes and the populist theatricality and all. Trump offers no substance in terms of policy, but he clearly has an intuitive grasp of how the major media outlets will respond to and cover his every move. ..."
"... I wonder if this column was written before or after the subject events. It is so trite meaningless and predictable he must have written it in his sleep. ..."
"... Trump is a centre-right, and possibly even slightly left candidate. His grandstanding is for the core base. All candidates walk back toward the middle once they have to appeal to the national electorate. He's far more liberal than Cruz, who, I assure you, will set about undoing every last bit of progress for working people and women that managed to creep forward over the last eight years, starting with health care, Medicare, and Social Security. ..."
"... You have to separate out Trump's grandstanding with his east coast New York roots. It's actually Trump who has brought up single-payer health care and some brutal talk about Wall Street. I would wager a month's salary that Trump and Mrs Clinton are not too far apart on how they would govern. And you forget that Congress is involved as well. ..."
"... The hyperbole is meaningless. So far, Jeb Bush's brother and his Vice President have done more damage to the US and the world than I would guess Trump would do in 20 years. ..."
"... And do remember on whose watch NAFTA, that infamous "ending welfare as we know it", the equally infamous DOMA, and the repeal of Glass-Steagall, which paved the way for The Big Short were passed: dear old Bill Clinton. ..."
"... The media is trusted by the public about as much as bankers and politicians. Trump sticking it to FOX not only didn't get him "sidelined" it probably increased his support among the Republican base. ..."
"... Translation: Trump knows he already has the nomination locked up. Why should he give Cruz and Rubio an opportunity to attack him in a live debate? He made the smart move. Since 9/11 and the buildup to the war in Iraq, the media's only real job is political propaganda. ..."
"... As far as I know, Trump, Sanders and Obama were equally resentful because American businessmen are moving production abroad, thus leaving American workers out of work, and the state budget deprived of taxes that go also to foreign countries instead of remaining in the US. ..."
"... In addition, Trump also stands for a kind of economic protectionism, particularly in relation to China, bearing in mind "the urgent need to reduce the trade deficit with China", which is now about $ 500 billion a year, if I remembered well. ..."
"... So, it is interesting that the current as well as two of the possible future US presidents are pushing for some kind of protectionism of domestic production and economic isolationism that are completely contrary to previous commitment of the United States to free markets and free flow of capital in the world.However, taking into account the current economic crisis in the world, that from acute increasingly turns into some kind of chronic phase, it is perhaps not so surprising. ..."
"... The vast majority of the political elite, from Bush to Clinton, are there to further the agenda, as well as their own careers. In this way, you have Obama brought into to finish by proxy what Bush started by direct force. I.e the wrecking of any Nation State that opposes the neo-liberal economic system. ..."
"... They only exist in the spotlight for as long as they are tolerated in terms of their persona, until the public wise-up. It is then they go into their background role; the cushy and lucrative 'consulting' jobs they have been promised by the special interest 'think tanks' they already belong to; be it the Council of Foreign Relations, or the Bilderberg group; all funded by international banking cartels. ..."
"... Supposed 'right' or supposed 'left' of the mainstream media are just part and parcel of the same ultimate deception. ..."
"... Trump, although not perfect in his persona, is certainly a problem for the agenda: thus their attack dogs in the media have been called to take him out. ..."
"... It's amusing to see the attacks on Trump; who just for speaking his mind is starting to steadily resonate with a growing demographic, both at home and abroad. ..."
"... You'd never hear about it here of course; but he harshly denounced the invasion of Iraq, and was a big critic of Bush. ..."
"... He also seems to be the only one who understands that the majority of Americans needs real jobs – not some laughable concept of an 'ideas economy.' and is willing to fight for them on a trade level to ensure this. ..."
"... He is also the least likely to drag the US into dangerous conflicts, (proxy or otherwise) with those such as Russia – Sadly I can see some Guardian commentators already gunning for that. ..."
"... He is also not controlled by the usual financial ties to banking elites: Goldman & Sachs just gave Hillary $3 million – what's that then? Just pocket money? ..."
"... America isn't better than this - this IS America. The land of political dynasties and limitless corporate donations. Where a movie star became the President and a body builder a Governor. It doesn't even have a one-man-one vote voting system for heavens sake. ..."
"... It's kind of like Iranian 'democracy', where the Ayatollah picks out and approves 4-5 candidates, and then the Iranian people get to 'vote' for them. We do it a bit differently, in a society where we have freedom of speech, but the outcome always ends up the same, with 2 establishment, corporate, Wall street, military industrial complex, globalist 'free trade' choices for president. All approved by corporate America, our corporate and mainstream media and by Wall street, it always ends up like that. Like right now, there is no difference between Hillary, and establishment corporate Democrats like the Clintons, and the establishment Republicans like Rubio, Kasich or Bush, on all those really big and truly important issues. ..."
"... That thing about Cruz labelling Trump a Democrat is interesting. I'm sure most Democrats would be understandably offended by the suggestion, and I'm pretty sure Cruz doesn't actually believe it either. I haven't been following Trump's statements on policy closely at all, but from my general impression of him over the years, I always thought that, although he was clearly a dyed in the wool capitalist, he probably wasn't a social conservative. ..."
"... I can't help thinking he's just another wealthy, metropolitan businessman who probably didn't give a single toss about immigration, gay marriage, Islam or any of it, and if you pushed him probably would have been completely relaxed about all those issues. ..."
"... Tough for any GOP candidate to avoid the flip flops in fairness. Pro life gun nuts, military spending addicted defecit hawks, die hard defenders of the Constitution hell bent on removing church/state separation, defenders of the squeezed middle sucking on the teat of Murdoch and the Koch brothers.... A very high and skinny tight rope.... ..."
"... Trump won because these people have nothing people want to listen to. Nobody cares about Rubio or Bush flip flopping on immigration, because they have decided not to vote for them. ..."
"... People care about jobs and their dwindling opportunities. Trump talks populism. He talks about tariffs on manufacturers who moved jobs overseas. People like that. He said he thinks the US should have left Saddam Hussein in power. Every rational person today agrees with that. He says the US should have left Gaddafi in power. While not too many people think about that too much, if they do, they agree with that too. Especially once they learn about the domino effect it has had, such as the attack on the coffee shop in Burkina Faso a week ago or so. ..."
"... People have grown tired of war. All of the mainstream candidates want war because their campaigns depend on it. Bush's family has massive investment in the Carlisle Group and other players in the MIC. ..."
"... Trump made his money in real estate, not war. ..."
"... Not a Trump fan, but it is great to see someone with enough nous to tell Fox to go bite their bum. Good on him. We know from past experience what a sleazy old fart Rupert is and his fellow travelers in Fox are a good fit. The "moderators" are third rate journo's out to polish their image and try the bigmouth on the guy that 'may' become President. No need for Trump to take that kind of crap off of those sort of people. ..."
"... Cruz was attacked, got flustered and blew his opportunity. Trump's judgement turned out to be vindicated in not attending. Trump is currently the front runner and bearing in mind that the entire West is moving to the right it is quite likely that by the time of the election Trump may turn out to be closer to the mainstream. If there are further Islamic terrorist attacks on US soil then this will likely be a certainty. ..."
You could tell the Trumpless debate was an almost normal presidential event by the nature
of the closing statements.
Bland, clichéd, and frankly boring.
Zetenyagli -> benbache 29 Jan 2016 11:49
Trump won because these people have nothing people want to listen to.
Spot on. The Republican party is about corporatism and the "1%". They are irrelevant to
nearly all the American public apart from democrat haters. The GOP might as well be a corpse.
tonybillbob -> Commentator6 29 Jan 2016 11:31
Trump is currently the front runner and bearing in mind that the entire West is moving
to the right it is quite likely that by the time of the election Trump may turn out to be closer
to the mainstream.
Mainstream of what? The conservative movement? America? The globe?
tonybillbob 29 Jan 2016 11:25
Jeb Bush insisted several times that he had "a proven record", begging the question why
he needed to mention such a proven thing quite so many times.
Yeah!!! How come those who have a "proven track record" always have to remind folks that they
have a proven track record and usually follow that claim with "unlike my competitor"?
Hillary Clinton's always going on and on about her "Proven track record" at the State Dept....where
she set Libya on fire, for example.....unlike her competitor, Bernie Sanders.
And her "hands on experience" reforming banks....."Cut that out!!!!" ...another something she
has over Bernie Sanders. Another thing Clinton can say about herself is that she's made a huge
pile of 'speakin' fees' dough rubbin' elbows with bankers.....another something that Bernie can't
say about himself. And don't forget: Hillary's gonna color inside the lines because she's a realist.
She knows what Wall Street will approve of and what Wall Street won't approve of......Hillary's
unique in that regard....at least she thinks so, and claims that's why we should vote for her....because
she already knows what Wall Street will and won't allow a president to do.
simpledino 29 Jan 2016 11:23
Okay, Ted Cruz -- I'll gladly pray on the nation's decision. (Kneeling humbly): "Dear Lord,
please let the American people not vote in anyone from the GOP side as president in 2016.
Lord, hear my prayer -- let them choose either HIllary Clinton or Bernie Sanders (or even thy
faithful and honorable servant Martin O'Malley, who doesn't have a chance in .... oh never mind,
Lord...)."
Okay, my prayer skills are a bit rusty, I admit, but you get the idea.
Anyhow, Donald Trump reminds me more and more of Italy's media mogul/politician Silvio
Berlusconi -- maybe it's just my eyes playing tricks on me, but he is even starting to LOOK more
and more like that man, what with the many faces he makes and the populist theatricality and all.
Trump offers no substance in terms of policy, but he clearly has an intuitive grasp of how the
major media outlets will respond to and cover his every move.
Lafcadio1944 29 Jan 2016 11:15
I wonder if this column was written before or after the subject events. It is so trite
meaningless and predictable he must have written it in his sleep.
Cranios 29 Jan 2016 11:13
I was never warmly disposed toward Trump, but the more I hear him annoying the news media by
refusing to be frightened and dance to their tune, the more I am starting to like him.
tklhmd 29 Jan 2016 11:11
Managing to outfox Fox news is no mean feat, I'll give him that.
Tearoutthehairnow -> hawkchurch 29 Jan 2016 11:11
Trump is a centre-right, and possibly even slightly left candidate. His grandstanding is
for the core base. All candidates walk back toward the middle once they have to appeal to the
national electorate. He's far more liberal than Cruz, who, I assure you, will set about undoing
every last bit of progress for working people and women that managed to creep forward over the
last eight years, starting with health care, Medicare, and Social Security.
You have to separate out Trump's grandstanding with his east coast New York roots. It's
actually Trump who has brought up single-payer health care and some brutal talk about Wall Street.
I would wager a month's salary that Trump and Mrs Clinton are not too far apart on how they would
govern. And you forget that Congress is involved as well.
The hyperbole is meaningless. So far, Jeb Bush's brother and his Vice President have done
more damage to the US and the world than I would guess Trump would do in 20 years.
And do remember on whose watch NAFTA, that infamous "ending welfare as we know it", the
equally infamous DOMA, and the repeal of Glass-Steagall, which paved the way for The Big Short
were passed: dear old Bill Clinton.
Try analysis instead of hyperbole. It works wonders.
Tearoutthehairnow -> lefthalfback2 29 Jan 2016 11:06
I have been nonplussed from this end of things by how lackluster J. Bush's performance has
been - I can only assume that unconsciously, he really doesn't want it - because no one who really
wants it and has the advantage of his experience, access, and background, could possibly be turning
in this deadly a performance. It reeks of self-sabotage in the name of self-preservation. At of
course a huge cost in funds . . .
Tearoutthehairnow 29 Jan 2016 11:02
I was able to catch some US news - Trump not only wasn't "sidelined" as the other Guardian
article on last night's debate proclaimed, firstly he walked out of his own accord, and second,
he cut FOX's debate audience in half. Last night's debate attracted the lowest audience ratings
of all the Republican debates so far - approximately 11-12 million as opposed to the approximately
23 million the debates attracted when he participated. CNN did quite well covering the "other"
event.
And he's still leading in the polls among Republicans - including among Republican women according
to CNN, so the Guardian's recent article on these parties' only audience being "angry white men"
was, again, off the mark by including Trump and the US Republicans.
The media is trusted by the public about as much as bankers and politicians. Trump sticking
it to FOX not only didn't get him "sidelined" it probably increased his support among the Republican
base. Jeb Bush is still pretending to be a candidate as is Ben Carson, and Cruz in the spotlight
reinforced his reputation as so nasty a human being that even if he gets into the Oval Office,
no one, including those on his own side of the aisle, will want to work with him.
It would be refreshing to see the media try to report rather than shape the news to its own
liking.
JackGC -> ACJB 29 Jan 2016 10:34
Keeping people "scared" is a full time job for the government. It would be impossible to have
a war without the "scared" factor.
"We are a nation in grave danger." George Bush.
In 'Merica, people need their guns just in case ISIS invades their town. It's like War of the
Worlds only with Muslims, not Martians. That was a REALLY scary flick back in the 30s. 'Mericans
really didn't know if New Jersey had been invaded and Christie is the guv. of Jersey.
Trump is a New Yorker, so those two are on the front lines of any potential outer space invasion.
War of the Worlds II. 'Merica is ready.
Harry Bhai 29 Jan 2016 10:27
Be like......
This is Ted Cruz.
Cruz is a world-class question-dodger
When Cruz is asked about his votes against defense budgets, he launches into an extended diatribe
against Barack Obama's defense budgets.
When Cruz is asked about his own position on issues, he talks about his idol: Ronald Reagan.
When Cruz is asked about why he flip-flopped on his feelings towards Trump, he pretends that he
was asked to insult Trump
Cruz is a flip-flop politician.
Be like Cruz, NOT.
JackGC N.M. Hill 29 Jan 2016 10:22
Translation: Trump knows he already has the nomination locked up. Why should he give Cruz
and Rubio an opportunity to attack him in a live debate? He made the smart move. Since 9/11 and
the buildup to the war in Iraq, the media's only real job is political propaganda.
N.M. Hill 29 Jan 2016 09:48
Trump just proved: it's possible to win a debate you didn't attend
Translation: Media more obsessed with Trump than actual issues.
MeereeneseLiberation -> LiamNSW2 29 Jan 2016 09:24
he was chastised for saying he'd stop Muslims from entering the US
Because Muslim immigration is really the one thing that affects ordinary Americans the most.
Not affordable health care, wealth distribution, labour rights ... Muslim immigration. Especially
of those few thousand Syrian refugees that are vetted over months and months. (But oh yes, "the
Muslims" hate the West, each and every one. Especially if he or she is fleeing from ISIS terror,
I guess.)
Sweden, that paragon of migrant virtue
Sweden, like all Scandinavian countries, has extremely restrictive immigration and asylum policies.
Calling Sweden a "paragon of migrant virtue" is about as accurate as calling Switzerland a 'paragon
of banking transparency' (or the US a 'paragon of gun control').
nnedjo -> RusticBenadar 29 Jan 2016 08:59
Just curious, can anyone share some actual substance concerning any of Trump's policy
plans?
As far as I know, Trump, Sanders and Obama were equally resentful because American businessmen
are moving production abroad, thus leaving American workers out of work, and the state budget
deprived of taxes that go also to foreign countries instead of remaining in the US.
In addition, Trump also stands for a kind of economic protectionism, particularly in relation
to China, bearing in mind "the urgent need to reduce the trade deficit with China", which is now
about $ 500 billion a year, if I remembered well.
So, it is interesting that the current as well as two of the possible future US presidents
are pushing for some kind of protectionism of domestic production and economic isolationism that
are completely contrary to previous commitment of the United States to free markets and free flow
of capital in the world.However, taking into account the current economic crisis in the world,
that from acute increasingly turns into some kind of chronic phase, it is perhaps not so surprising.
SeniorsTn9 29 Jan 2016 08:44
UPDATE: 2016/01/29 Trump won the debate he didn't even participate in. No surprise here.
Which debate will you focus on, the elephant walk or Trump? If you want to hear positive messages
listen to Trump. Trump stood his ground. Trump is definitely different. When we look at the options
there is simply no alternative. I prefer to watch the next president of the United States of America.
I was on the fence but how I am definitely a Trump supporter. Trump will make America great again.
There is a personality conflict here and everyone knows it. This reporter definitely has a
hate on for Trump. Trump was right to not participate in this debate. Replace the so called bias
reporter. Fox News could have fixed this but choose not to. Call Trump's bluff and he will have
no choice but to join the debate. This is not and should not be about reporters. The press, for
some reason, always plays into Trump's hand. This is another Trump strategic move to force the
debate to focus on him first. Seriously just look at what has already happened, All Trump's opponents
and the media are talking about now is the fact that Trump is not participating in the debate.
Brilliant!
Trump has changed the debating and campaigning rules. Trump will or will not be successful
based on his decisions and his alone. Trump now has the focus on him and the debates haven't even
startled. Trump is now winning debates he isn't even participating in. This has got to be a first
in successful political debating strategies! Amazing! A win win for Trump. Smart man! Smart like
a Fox.
ID0020237 -> NYcynic 29 Jan 2016 08:25
Methinks all this debate and chatter are nothing but distractions for the masses so those behind
and above the scene can carry out their hidden agendas. Debates are like more opium for the masses,
it keeps their brains churning while other issues are burning. I see no problems being solved
here with all the empty rhetoric.
kaneandabel -> kodicek 29 Jan 2016 07:45
Well kodi, your comments are valid in it that ALL of these candidates are part of the revolving
door irrespective of the supposed 'right' or supposed 'left'. Clinton is as much a compromised
candidate as the entire bunch of the republican team. Trump may appear to be a different kind
but that that's only because he is a good "talker" who seems to give 2 hoots to the establishment.
But thats only talk. He would turn on a cent the moment he becomes President. A perfect example
of that is Barack Obama. He talked the sweet talk and made people think a new dawn is coming in
American politics. But as it turned out.... zilch!
But there is a slight ray of hope, a thin one. With Sanders. As he has walked the talk all
along! Otherwise you van be sure to be in the grip of the wall street scamstars and plutocrats
for the next decade.
RusticBenadar B5610661066 29 Jan 2016 06:02
Plutocracy; and all candidates are millionaires or billionaires being hoisted upon Americans
by the establishment media/business/banks/politics- all, that is, with the single exception of
Bernie Sanders, who alone has managed not to enrich himself with special interest bribery or financial
exploitation during his unparalleled 45+ years of outstanding common sense public service.
kodicek -> LazarusLong42 29 Jan 2016 05:52
The vast majority of the political elite, from Bush to Clinton, are there to further the
agenda, as well as their own careers. In this way, you have Obama brought into to finish by proxy
what Bush started by direct force. I.e the wrecking of any Nation State that opposes the neo-liberal
economic system.
They only exist in the spotlight for as long as they are tolerated in terms of their persona,
until the public wise-up. It is then they go into their background role; the cushy and lucrative
'consulting' jobs they have been promised by the special interest 'think tanks' they already belong
to; be it the Council of Foreign Relations, or the Bilderberg group; all funded by international
banking cartels.
Supposed 'right' or supposed 'left' of the mainstream media are just part and parcel of
the same ultimate deception.
Trump, although not perfect in his persona, is certainly a problem for the agenda: thus
their attack dogs in the media have been called to take him out.
This is what first raised my suspicions: I thought for myself, rather than double clicking
on a petition.
Best Regards, K
kodicek 29 Jan 2016 05:19
It's amusing to see the attacks on Trump; who just for speaking his mind is starting to
steadily resonate with a growing demographic, both at home and abroad.
You'd never hear about it here of course; but he harshly denounced the invasion of Iraq,
and was a big critic of Bush.
Despite all the allegations of racism, he has the largest support amongst the Black and Latino
community; and is the most popular Republican candidate with Women.
He also seems to be the only one who understands that the majority of Americans needs real
jobs – not some laughable concept of an 'ideas economy.' and is willing to fight for them on a
trade level to ensure this.
He is also the least likely to drag the US into dangerous conflicts, (proxy or otherwise)
with those such as Russia – Sadly I can see some Guardian commentators already gunning for that.
He is also not controlled by the usual financial ties to banking elites: Goldman & Sachs
just gave Hillary $3 million – what's that then? Just pocket money?
We always drone on about democracy etc, but when someone is actually popular, from Corbyn to
Trump, we denounce them and ridicule their supporters.
Funny thing is; if it wasn't for all these attacks I might never have noticed!
TheChillZone -> SteelyDanorak 29 Jan 2016 05:05
America isn't better than this - this IS America. The land of political dynasties and limitless
corporate donations. Where a movie star became the President and a body builder a Governor. It
doesn't even have a one-man-one vote voting system for heavens sake. The rise of Trump makes
perfect sense - most of American culture has been relentlessly dumbed down; now it's Politics
turn.
europeangrayling -> shaftedpig 29 Jan 2016 04:40
It's kind of like Iranian 'democracy', where the Ayatollah picks out and approves 4-5 candidates,
and then the Iranian people get to 'vote' for them. We do it a bit differently, in a society where
we have freedom of speech, but the outcome always ends up the same, with 2 establishment, corporate,
Wall street, military industrial complex, globalist 'free trade' choices for president. All approved
by corporate America, our corporate and mainstream media and by Wall street, it always ends up
like that. Like right now, there is no difference between Hillary, and establishment corporate
Democrats like the Clintons, and the establishment Republicans like Rubio, Kasich or Bush, on
all those really big and truly important issues.
fanfootbal65 29 Jan 2016 04:20
At least with Trump you know where he stands unlike most politicians who just tell the voters
what they want to hear. Then after getting elected, these lip service politicians just go off
on their own agenda against the wishes of the people that voted for them.
SamStone 29 Jan 2016 03:55
Haha, Trump is tremendously astute and clever when it comes to tactics. It will be awesome
if he actually becomes president.
boldofer 29 Jan 2016 03:46
That thing about Cruz labelling Trump a Democrat is interesting. I'm sure most Democrats
would be understandably offended by the suggestion, and I'm pretty sure Cruz doesn't actually
believe it either. I haven't been following Trump's statements on policy closely at all, but from
my general impression of him over the years, I always thought that, although he was clearly a
dyed in the wool capitalist, he probably wasn't a social conservative.
I can't help thinking he's just another wealthy, metropolitan businessman who probably
didn't give a single toss about immigration, gay marriage, Islam or any of it, and if you pushed
him probably would have been completely relaxed about all those issues. But I guess what
he is above all else is a power hungry narcissist and a showman, and if he feels he needs to push
certain buttons to get elected...
SGT123 29 Jan 2016 03:29
"Megyn Kelly, the Fox News anchor whose participation in the debate led to Trump's boycott,
referred to him as "the elephant not in the room".
Which is both quite funny and accurate. I can see why Donald was so frightened of her!
Blaaboy 29 Jan 2016 03:03
Tough for any GOP candidate to avoid the flip flops in fairness. Pro life gun nuts, military
spending addicted defecit hawks, die hard defenders of the Constitution hell bent on removing
church/state separation, defenders of the squeezed middle sucking on the teat of Murdoch and the
Koch brothers.... A very high and skinny tight rope....
benbache 29 Jan 2016 02:22
Trump won because these people have nothing people want to listen to. Nobody cares about
Rubio or Bush flip flopping on immigration, because they have decided not to vote for them.
And despite the press, no one I know cares about terrorism in the US. No one ever brings it up
in any conversation, despite constant fear mongering.
People care about jobs and their dwindling opportunities. Trump talks populism. He talks
about tariffs on manufacturers who moved jobs overseas. People like that. He said he thinks the
US should have left Saddam Hussein in power. Every rational person today agrees with that. He
says the US should have left Gaddafi in power. While not too many people think about that too
much, if they do, they agree with that too. Especially once they learn about the domino effect
it has had, such as the attack on the coffee shop in Burkina Faso a week ago or so.
People have grown tired of war. All of the mainstream candidates want war because their
campaigns depend on it. Bush's family has massive investment in the Carlisle Group and other players
in the MIC.
Trump made his money in real estate, not war.
ID1569355 29 Jan 2016 01:53
I have no vote in the U.S.A. I greatly respect it's people and achievements. President Obama
has been a big disappointment to me. I really thought he could make some good changes for his
citizens. Should Mr Trump actually win the Presidency life for many will be very, very interesting,
perhaps not in a good way. Then again perhaps his leadership might be just what America needs.
A few years of Mr Trump as leader of the world's greatest super-power may give us all a new
outlook on life as we know it, help us adjust our personal and National priorities. Give him the
power as the Supreme Commander of Military Forces and we can all learn some lessons about the
consequences of Americans votes on everyone else's lives. Americans may learn a thing or two also........Go
Trump !
Oboy1963 29 Jan 2016 01:37
Not a Trump fan, but it is great to see someone with enough nous to tell Fox to go bite
their bum. Good on him. We know from past experience what a sleazy old fart Rupert is and his
fellow travelers in Fox are a good fit. The "moderators" are third rate journo's out to polish
their image and try the bigmouth on the guy that 'may' become President. No need for Trump to
take that kind of crap off of those sort of people.
Commentator6 29 Jan 2016 01:32
Cruz was attacked, got flustered and blew his opportunity. Trump's judgement turned out
to be vindicated in not attending. Trump is currently the front runner and bearing in mind that
the entire West is moving to the right it is quite likely that by the time of the election Trump
may turn out to be closer to the mainstream. If there are further Islamic terrorist attacks on
US soil then this will likely be a certainty.
"... For sale, cheap, one POTUS puppet, strings firmly attached. Keep the kiddies entertained, good for four years worth of distraction. ..."
"... Where does most of the money, dark or obvious, go? Answer: The Main Stream Media (I include the Guardian in this). Do you now understand why they're all having a bob-each-way? Morals, journalistic integrity, decency or the welfare of the public be damned, it's raining wads of cash. ..."
"... Because of the SCOTUS Citizens united decision, it is just fine to bribe politicians IN PUBLIC. How could SCOTUS and the GOP do this to the United States. It is destroying our Democracy. ..."
"... Let the ass-kissing and groveling begin ..."
"... The undue influence of the rich over American politics is an absolute disgrace. How can those who claim to be conservatives justify their destruction of democratic processes? They conserve nothing but their own power. Traitors! ..."
"... I'm afraid that the soul of America was lost with the scotus ruling. Corporations are just that, corporations. They are not people. They already had a disproportionate say in politics because of lobbying money. ..."
"... Now the princes of darkness have descended on the land like perpetual night. Leaving the populace longing for the light! The Kochs and their ilk are slaves to their ideology which is to destroy the federal government, destroy all social safety net's, even privatize our military. All this for the ideology of the extreme right wing corporate fascism. ..."
"... All Hail the Deep State! ..."
"... Check this out...It will blow you away: 'Dark Money: Jane Mayer on How the Koch Bros. & Billionaire Allies Funded the Rise of the Far Right' http://www.democracynow.org/2016/1/20/dark_money_jane_mayer_on_how ..."
"... "Dred Scott turned people into property....Citizens United turned property into people." ..."
"... One of the great sources of Trump's appeal has been the perception of his independence from the Kochs and other corporate manipulators. If he gets the nomination, they will of course attempt to co-opt him just as they did the tea party. It will be interesting to see how he responds. ..."
"... The Kochs didn't co-opt the Tea Party--they created it. They brainstormed it, branded it, funded it, propped it up, bought positive news coverage for it, and pulled its strings to keep the GOP voting base at a full boil for the fall elections in 2010. ..."
"... This was tactically necessary to enable them to take full advantage of the gorgeous opportunity John Roberts had created for them earlier that spring with Citizens United, rushed through precisely to help the oligarchs buy themselves Congress and as many state houses and governor's mansions as they could reap. ..."
"... The best government money can buy...... Since the Supreme Court ruled unlimited corporate bribes to politicians would be considered "free speech" in the eyes of the law, people lost any chance they had of representation based on what's best for average citizen. It's -ALL- about big money now, a literal Corporatocracy. The idea that government should be "Of the people, by the people and for the people" is long lost, RIP. ..."
"... Dark money = Corruption.....period..!! Just because its not illegal doesn't make it right. What it is, is the continual demolition of democracy in the US where whoever has the biggest cheque-book has an advantage over everyone else. Totally wrong and the slippery slope to an end of 'government by the people'... ..."
"... And the theft of the Presidency is underway. Does anyone not think that allowing millions, even a billion dollars to be donated to campaigns with the donor kept secret is a problem? Heck, foreign government can contribute to get the candidate that they want. So.......Who will be the one to kiss Koch butt? ..."
"... Hey look, they're trying to buy the elections again. No surprises there... ..."
"... Not trying. Succeeding. The Koch brothers own many, many politicians who are beholding to Koch and will vote any way Koch wants. ..."
"... Their intentions are now plain: they aim the overthrow of democracy and the establishment of a modern feudal state/oligarchy. ..."
"... If money didn't work, people would not be spending over a billon dollars on the election. Of course money works. Think of it this way: The Koch brothers give almost a billion dollars to support most of the GOP candidates. Regardless of who wins, they will be completely owned by the Koch brothers. It doesn't matter who you vote for if they are all owned by Koch. ..."
"... Moneylenders own the temple. ..."
"... Not to mention that in their own minds and mirrors, the money-lenders are the temple. ..."
"... "The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat." ..."
"... The pendulum has swung too far - the rich are too rich, and the poor are too poor. The Emperor we have been told has beautiful clothes will soon be found to have none. ..."
"... Or that famous Apalachin, NY, meeting of the five families in 1957. One difference: I bet the FBI won't be raiding the Koch compound, forcing all the big dogs to flee into the woods. More likely, the feds will be providing protection, writing down the license plate numbers of everyone who might object to billionaires dividing up their 'turf' in America. ..."
Dark money is the name for cash given to nonprofit organizations that can receive unlimited
donations from corporations, individuals and unions without disclosing their donors. Under IRS
regulations these tax-exempt groups are supposed to be promoting "social welfare" and are not
allowed to have politics as their primary purpose – so generally they have to spend less than
half their funds directly promoting candidates. Other so-called "issue ads" paid for by these
groups often look like thinly veiled campaign ads.
The boom in dark money spending in recent elections came in the wake of the supreme court's
2010 Citizens United decision, which held that the first amendment allowed unlimited political
spending by corporations and unions. That decision and other court rulings opened the floodgates
to individuals, corporations and unions writing unlimited checks to outside groups, both Super
Pacs and dark money outfits, which can directly promote federal candidates. Dark money spending
rose from just under $6m in 2006 to $131m in 2010 following the decision, according to the CRP.
Well, there you have it. In the USA you can actually buy yourself a president. But for Real! No
underhanded bribes, but openly buying. Would you like fries with that...? And here's the kicker
- Everyone, from media outlets all the way down to the 'person on the street' just accepts it
as is without any real protestations...
Learn how Citizens United has allowed Billionaires like the Koch's to rabble-rouse, whip into
a frenzy and influence one-half of America to vote against their own best interest!
For sale, cheap, one POTUS puppet, strings firmly attached. Keep the kiddies entertained,
good for four years worth of distraction.
ps
Where does most of the money, dark or obvious, go? Answer: The Main Stream Media (I include
the Guardian in this). Do you now understand why they're all having a bob-each-way? Morals, journalistic
integrity, decency or the welfare of the public be damned, it's raining wads of cash.
Until we have a system that makes sense, I guess we can only hope someone realizes that if they
just paid a reasonable tax rate it would cost them less than funding Super PACs. Then again, money
doesn't make you smart -- they just might spend a billion to save a million. Can we give crowd
sourcing political decisions a chance?
Because of the SCOTUS Citizens united decision, it is just fine to bribe politicians IN PUBLIC.
How could SCOTUS and the GOP do this to the United States. It is destroying our Democracy.
The undue influence of the rich over American politics is an absolute disgrace. How can those
who claim to be conservatives justify their destruction of democratic processes? They conserve
nothing but their own power. Traitors!
I'm afraid that the soul of America was lost with the scotus ruling. Corporations are just
that, corporations. They are not people. They already had a disproportionate say in politics because
of lobbying money.
Now the princes of darkness have descended on the land like perpetual night. Leaving the
populace longing for the light! The Kochs and their ilk are slaves to their ideology which is
to destroy the federal government, destroy all social safety net's, even privatize our military.
All this for the ideology of the extreme right wing corporate fascism.
Thank you, Peter Stone! So few Americans even know this is happening. Check this out...It will blow you away: 'Dark Money: Jane Mayer on How the Koch Bros. & Billionaire
Allies Funded the Rise of the Far Right' http://www.democracynow.org/2016/1/20/dark_money_jane_mayer_on_how
Please Wake Up America.....Citizens United is the Mirror Image of Dred Scott.
"Dred Scott turned people into property....Citizens United turned property into people."
One of the great sources of Trump's appeal has been the perception of his independence from
the Kochs and other corporate manipulators. If he gets the nomination, they will of course attempt
to co-opt him just as they did the tea party. It will be interesting to see how he responds.
The Kochs didn't co-opt the Tea Party--they created it. They brainstormed it, branded it,
funded it, propped it up, bought positive news coverage for it, and pulled its strings to keep
the GOP voting base at a full boil for the fall elections in 2010.
This was tactically necessary to enable them to take full advantage of the gorgeous opportunity
John Roberts had created for them earlier that spring with Citizens United, rushed through precisely
to help the oligarchs buy themselves Congress and as many state houses and governor's mansions
as they could reap.
Trump is a different matter. They can't invent Trump the same way they invented the so-called
Tea Party.
What they can do is flatter him and wheedle him and beguile him in hopes of making him more
receptive to little things like, for instance, their nominations to the federal bench.
This, given Trump's pathetic grasp of reality and his monumental ego, shouldn't actually prove
too complicated a feat for the Kochs and their worker bees to pull off.
After all, all Marla Maples had to do was say "Donald Trump--best sex I ever had" on Page 6
at the Post and she got to marry the schlub: the Kochs will surely be equally adept at figuring
out the wizened, soulless old billionaire version of this time-honored tactic.
The Donald is one of the oligarchs but with an immense ego. Instead of playing the political puppets
from behind the curtain as the Koch's do, he thought he'd become the puppet show himself.
An oligarch in politician's clothing attempting to persuade America that he's on our side.
How very Putinesque.
The best government money can buy...... Since the Supreme Court ruled unlimited corporate
bribes to politicians would be considered "free speech" in the eyes of the law, people lost any
chance they had of representation based on what's best for average citizen. It's -ALL- about big
money now, a literal Corporatocracy. The idea that government should be "Of the people, by the
people and for the people" is long lost, RIP.
Dark money = Corruption.....period..!!
Just because its not illegal doesn't make it right. What it is, is the continual demolition of
democracy in the US where whoever has the biggest cheque-book has an advantage over everyone else.
Totally wrong and the slippery slope to an end of 'government by the people'...
And the theft of the Presidency is underway.
Does anyone not think that allowing millions, even a billion dollars to be donated to campaigns
with the donor kept secret is a problem? Heck, foreign government can contribute to get the candidate that they want. So.......Who will be the one to kiss Koch butt?
Dark money cannot compete with the elephant on the block, the electorate.
If any one has the finances to buy the oval office and or Congress it is "citizens united" ten
dollars ahead should do it.
What you are failing to reckon with is the scale of their organization and its capacity. This
retreat probably has a trillion dollars backing it. That's a lot of high paying jobs...
If money didn't work, people would not be spending over a billon dollars on the election.
Of course money works. Think of it this way: The Koch brothers give almost a billion dollars to support most of the GOP candidates. Regardless
of who wins, they will be completely owned by the Koch brothers. It doesn't matter who you vote
for if they are all owned by Koch.
So, no, the power does NOT lie with the voters. SCOTUS has stolen our democracy and has given
it to the richest 100 people in the US.
And what you're failing to recognize is the scale and capacity of the internet--the people's MSM
and Super PAC. Whatever the outcome of this year's election, the Sanders' campaign is creating
the template by which guerrilla/insurgent campaigns will be modeled for the next 20 years or longer...depending
on if and when the Kochs et al finally get to end net neutrality.
Dark money - it's the undetectable dark matter of politics that bends and motivates political
stars to the black hole of government. Ordinary people can't detect it or see it, but it's effect
is to control the movement of money to the star clusters (otherwise known as tax havens).
The Kochs are concentrating on State legislatures, the key to amending the Constitution.
By the time they're finished, the President will have less power than the Queen.
These people laugh in the face of democracy.
I like particularly this quote - if I remember it correctly - by Lily Tomlin:
"The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat."
The pendulum has swung too far - the rich are too rich, and the poor are too poor. The Emperor we have been told has beautiful clothes will soon be found to have none.
I'm a U.S. citizen, and I don't know because I stopped watching U.S. "news" although I'm not
sure how much better The Guardian is the people in comments seem a tad nicer better grammar
and spelling did I answer the questions? Oh, a butterfly!
Good--let them blow billions (more) attacking Clinton; it'll only be more delicious when they
find out they should have spent it against Sanders. You better hope Clinton wins IA big, because
if she doesn't, she just might jump-start the process by which she loses the nomination. Like
last time.
Several Koch network donors have voiced strong concerns about the rise of Trump, raising doubts
about his conservative bona fides and his angry anti-immigrant rhetoric, which they fear could
hurt efforts by the Koch network and the Republican party to appeal to Hispanics and minorities.
I wonder if they also worry about their lavishly-funded support of theocratic loudmouth Republican
lunatics such as Tom Cotton, Sam Brownback and Joni Ernst potentially alienating moderate Christians
or, heaven (literally) forbid, non-believers?
Don't let nobody give your guns to shoot down your own brother Don't let nobody give your bombs to blow down my sweet mother
Tell me are you really feeling sweet when you sit down to eat You eating blood money you spending blood money
You think you're funny living off blood money https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anjkSBQDRjc
Its funny to see them without Trump. You are so mesmerised by Trump and his hair that you
haven't
noticed what an incredibly weird looking bunch the rest are. Not that it matters given Bernie
will *ump them all anyway -- :)
"Several Republican congressional incumbents and candidates facing tough races are slated to attend
the Koch retreat this weekend, and, if recent history is a guide, are expecting to gain support
from Koch-backed dark money groups." * For some reason I'm reminded of the opening scene of The Godfather where supplicants meet with
Don Corleone and present their requests on the occasion of his daughter's wedding, kissing his
hand at the end.
That's exactly what it is. The Koch Brothers will own most of the GOP politicians. It doesn't
matter which one you vote for because that person will likely be owned by Koch and will do their
bidding.
Or that famous Apalachin, NY, meeting of the five families in 1957. One difference: I bet the FBI won't be raiding the Koch compound, forcing all the big dogs
to flee into the woods. More likely, the feds will be providing protection, writing down the license plate numbers
of everyone who might object to billionaires dividing up their 'turf' in America.
"... Oh, but it is serious. The material is/was classified. It just wasn't marked as such. Which means someone removed the classified material from a separate secure network and sent it to Hilary. We know from her other emails that, on more than one occasion, she requested that that be done. ..."
"... fellow diplomats and other specialists said on Thursday that if any emails were blatantly of a sensitive nature, she could have been expected to flag it. "She might have had some responsibility to blow the whistle," said former Ambassador Thomas Pickering, "The recipient may have an induced kind of responsibility," Pickering added, "if they see something that appears to be a serious breach of security." ..."
"... Finally whether they were marked or not the fact that an electronic copy resided on a server in an insecure location was basically like her making a copy and bringing it home and plunking it in a file cabinet... ..."
"... In Section 7 of her NDA, Clinton agreed to return any classified information she gained access to, and further agreed that failure to do so could be punished under Sections 793 and 1924 of the US Criminal Code. ..."
"... The agreement considers information classified whether it is "marked or unmarked." ..."
"... According to a State Department regulation in effect during Clinton's tenure (12 FAM 531), "classified material should not be stored at a facility outside the chancery, consulate, etc., merely for convenience." ..."
"... Additionally, a regulation established in 2012 (12 FAM 533.2) requires that "each employee, irrespective of rank must certify" that classified information "is not in their household or personal effects." ..."
"... As of December 2, 2009, the Foreign Affairs Manual has explicitly stated that "classified processing and/or classified conversation on a PDA is prohibited." ..."
"... Look, Hillary is sloppy about her affairs of state. She voted with Cheney for the Iraq disaster and jumped in supporting it. It is the greatest foreign affair disaster since Viet Nam and probably the greatest, period! She was a big proponent of getting rid of Khadaffi in Libya and now we have radical Islamic anarchy ravaging the failed state. She was all for the Arab Spring until the Muslim Brotherhood was voted into power in Egypt....which was replaced by yet another military dictatorship we support. And she had to have her own private e-mail server and it got used for questionable handling of state secrets. This is just Hillary being Hillary........ ..."
"... Its no secret that this hysterically ambitious Clinton woman is a warmonger and a hooker for Wall Street . No need to read her e-mails, just check her record. ..."
"... What was exemplary about an unnecessary war, a dumbass victory speech three or so months into it, the President's absence of support for his CIA agent outed by his staff, the President's German Chancellor shoulder massage, the use of RNC servers and subsequently "lost" gazillion emails, doing nothing in response to Twin Towers news, ditto for Katrina news, the withheld information from the Tillman family, and sanctioned torture? ..."
"... Another point that has perhaps not been covered sufficiently is the constant use of the phrase "unsecured email server" - which is intentionally vague and misleading and was almost certainly a phrase coined by someone who knows nothing about email servers or IT security and has been parroted mindlessly by people who know even less and journalists who should know better. ..."
"... Yet the term "unsecured" has many different meanings and implications - in the context of an email server it could mean that mail accounts are accessible without authentication, but in terms of network security it could mean that the server somehow existed outside a firewall or Virtual Private Network or some other form of physical or logical security. ..."
"... It is also extremely improbable that an email server would be the only device sharing that network segment - of necessity there would at least be a file server and some means of communicating with the outside world, most likely a router or a switch, which would by default have a built-in hardware firewall (way more secure than a software firewall). ..."
"... Anything generated related to a SAP is, by it's mere existence, classified at the most extreme level, and everyone who works on a SAP knows this intimately and you sign your life away to acknowledge this. ..."
"... yeah appointed by Obama...John Kerry. His state department. John is credited on both sides of the aisle of actually coming in and making the necessary changes to clean up the administrative mess either created or not addressed by his predecessor. ..."
"... Its not hard to understand, she was supposed to only use her official email account maintained on secure Federal government servers when conducting official business during her tenure as Secretary of State. This was for three reasons, the first being security the second being transparency and the third for accountability. ..."
"... You need to share that one with Petraeus, whos career was ruined and had to pay 100k in fines, for letting some info slip to his mistress.. ..."
"... If every corrupt liar was sent to prison there'd be no one left in Washington, or Westminster and we'd have to have elections with ordinary people standing, instead of the usual suspects from the political class. Which, on reflection, sounds quite good -- ..."
"... It's a reckless arrogance combined with the belief that no-one can touch her. If she does become the nominee Hillary will be an easy target for Trump. It'll be like "shooting fish in a barrel". ..."
"... It is obvious that the Secretary of State and the President should be communicating on a secure network controlled by the federal government. It is obvious that virtually none of these communications were done in a secure manner. Consider whether someone who contends this is irrelevant has enough sense to come in out of the rain. ..."
The Obama administration
confirmed for the first time on Friday that Hillary Clinton's unsecured home server contained some
of the US government's most closely guarded secrets, censoring 22 emails with material demanding
one of the highest levels of classification. The revelation comes just three days before the Iowa
presidential nominating caucuses in which Clinton is a candidate.
jrhaddock -> MtnClimber 29 Jan 2016 23:04
Oh, but it is serious. The material is/was classified. It just wasn't marked as such. Which
means someone removed the classified material from a separate secure network and sent it to Hilary.
We know from her other emails that, on more than one occasion, she requested that that be done.
And she's not just some low level clerk who doesn't understand what classified material is
or how it is handled. She had been the wife of the president so is certainly well aware of the
security surrounding classified material. And then she was Sec of State and obviously knew what
kind of information was classified. So to claim that the material wasn't marked, and therefore
she didn't know it was classified, is simply not credulous.
Berkeley2013 29 Jan 2016 22:46
And Clinton had a considerable number of unvetted people maintain and administer her communication
system. The potential for wrong doing in general and blackmail from many angles is great.
There's also the cost of this whole investigation. Why should US taxpayers have to pick up
the bill?
And the waste of good personnel time---a total waste...
Skip Breitmeyer -> simpledino 29 Jan 2016 22:29
In one sense you're absolutely right- read carefully this article (and the announcement leading
to it) raises at least as many questions as it answers, period. On the other hand, those ambiguities
are certain not to be resolved 'over-the-weekend' (nor before the first votes are cast in Iowa)
and thus the timing of the thing could not be more misfortunate for Ms. Clinton, nor more perfect
for maximum effect than if the timing had been deliberately planned. In fact I'm surprised there
aren't a raft of comments on this point. "Confirmed by the Obama administration..."? Who in the
administration? What wing of the administration? Some jack-off in the justice dept. who got 50,000
g's for the scoop? The fact is, I'm actually with Bernie over Hilary any day, but I admit to a
certain respect for her remarkable expertise and debate performances that have really shown the
GOP boys to be a bunch of second-benchers... And there's something a little dirty and dodgy that's
gone on here...
Adamnoggi dusablon 29 Jan 2016 22:23
SAP does not relate to To the level of classification. A special access program could be at
the confidential level or higher dependent upon content. Special access means just that, access
is granted on a case by case basis, regardless of classification level .
Gigi Trala La 29 Jan 2016 22:17
She is treated with remarkable indulgence. Anywhere with a sense of accountability she will
be facing prosecution, and yet here she is running for even higher office. In the middle of demonstrating
her unfitness.
eldudeabides 29 Jan 2016 22:15
Independent experts say it is highly unlikely that Clinton will be charged with wrongdoing,
based on the limited details that have surfaced up to now and the lack of indications that
she intended to break any laws.
since when has ignorance been a defence?
nataliesutler UzzDontSay 29 Jan 2016 22:05
Yes Petraeus did get this kind of scrutiny even though what he did was much less serious that
what Clinton did. this isn't about a rule change. And pretending it is isn't going to fool anyone.
Sam3456 kattw 29 Jan 2016 21:18
Thats a misunderstanding on your part First lets look at Hillary's statement in March:
"I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. There is no classified
material. So I'm certainly well aware of the classification requirements and did not send classified
material."
She later adjusted her language to note that she never sent anything "marked" classified. So
already some Clinton-esque word parsing
And then what people said who used to do her job:
fellow diplomats and other specialists said on Thursday that if any emails were blatantly
of a sensitive nature, she could have been expected to flag it.
"She might have had some responsibility to blow the whistle," said former Ambassador Thomas Pickering,
"The recipient may have an induced kind of responsibility," Pickering added, "if they see something
that appears to be a serious breach of security."
It is a view shared by J. William Leonard, who between 2002 and 2008 was director of the Information
Security Oversight Office, which oversees the government classification system. He pointed out
that all government officials given a security clearance are required to sign a nondisclosure
agreement, which states they are responsible if secrets leak – whether the information was "marked
or not."
Finally whether they were marked or not the fact that an electronic copy resided on a server
in an insecure location was basically like her making a copy and bringing it home and plunking
it in a file cabinet...
beanierose -> dusablon 29 Jan 2016 21:08
Yeah - I just don't understand what Hillary is actually accused of doing / or not doing in
Benghazi. Was it that they didn't provide support to Stevens - (I think that was debunked) - was
it that they claimed on the Sunday talk shows that the video was responsible for the attack (who
cares). Now - I can think of an outrage - President Bush attacking Iraq on the specious claim
that they had WMD - that was a lie/incorrec/incompetence and it cost ~7000 US and 200K to 700K
Iraqi lives. Now - there's a scandal.
Stephen_Sean -> elexpatrioto 29 Jan 2016 21:07
The Secretary of State is
an "original classifier" of information. The individual holding that office is responsible
to recognize whether information is classified and to what level regardless if it is marked or
not. She should have known. She has no true shelter of ignorance here.
Stephen_Sean 29 Jan 2016 21:00
The Guardian is whistling through the graveyard. The FBI is very close to a decision to recommend
an indictment to the DOJ. At that point is up to POTUS whether he thinks Hillary is worth tainting
his entire Presidency to protect by blocking a DOJ indictment. His responsibility as an outgoing
President is to do what is best for his party and to provide his best attempt to get a Democrat
elected. I smell Biden warming up in the bullpen as an emergency.
The last thing the DNC wants is a delay if their is going to be an indictment. For an indictment
to come after she is nominated would be an unrecoverable blow for the Democrats. If their is to
be an indictment its best for it to come now while they can still get Biden in and maintain their
chances.
Sam3456 29 Jan 2016 20:57
In Section 7 of her NDA, Clinton agreed to return any classified information she gained
access to, and further agreed that failure to do so could be punished under Sections 793 and 1924
of the US Criminal Code.
According To § 793 Of Title 18 Of The US Code, anyone who willfully retains, transmits or causes
to be transmitted, national security information, can face up to ten years in prison.
According To § 1924 Of Title 18 Of The US Code, anyone who removes classified information "
with the intent to retain such documents or materials at an unauthorized location," can face up
to a year in prison.
The agreement considers information classified whether it is "marked or unmarked."
According to a State Department regulation in effect during Clinton's tenure (12 FAM 531), "classified
material should not be stored at a facility outside the chancery, consulate, etc., merely for
convenience."
Additionally, a regulation established in 2012 (12 FAM 533.2) requires that "each employee,
irrespective of rank must certify" that classified information "is not in their household or personal
effects."
As of December 2, 2009, the Foreign Affairs Manual has explicitly stated that "classified
processing and/or classified conversation on a PDA is prohibited."
kus art 29 Jan 2016 20:54
I'm assuming that the censored emails reveal activities that the US government is into are
Way more corrupt, insidious and venal as the the emails already exposed, which says a lot already...
Profhambone -> Bruce Hill 29 Jan 2016 20:53
Look, Hillary is sloppy about her affairs of state. She voted with Cheney for the Iraq
disaster and jumped in supporting it. It is the greatest foreign affair disaster since Viet Nam
and probably the greatest, period! She was a big proponent of getting rid of Khadaffi in Libya
and now we have radical Islamic anarchy ravaging the failed state. She was all for the Arab Spring
until the Muslim Brotherhood was voted into power in Egypt....which was replaced by yet another
military dictatorship we support. And she had to have her own private e-mail server and it got
used for questionable handling of state secrets. This is just Hillary being Hillary........
PsygonnUSA 29 Jan 2016 20:44
Its no secret that this hysterically ambitious Clinton woman is a warmonger and a hooker
for Wall Street . No need to read her e-mails, just check her record.
USfan 29 Jan 2016 20:41
Sorry to be ranting but what does it say about a country - in theory, a democracy - that is
implicated in so much questionable business around the world that we have to classify mountains
of communication as off-limits to the people, who are theoretically sovereign in this country?
We've all gotten quite used to this. In reality, it should freak us out much more than it does.
I'm not naive about what national security requires, but my sense is the government habitually
and routinely classifies all sorts of things the people of this country have every right to know.
Assuming this is still a democracy, which is perhaps a big assumption.
Neil Berkitt – a former banker (Lloyds, St George Bank) who then helped vulture capitalist
Richard Branson with Virgin Media.
David Pemsel – Former head of marketing at ITV.
Nick Backhouse – On the board of the bank of Queensland, formerly with Barings Bank.
Ronan Dunne – On the Telefónica Europe plc board, Chairman of Tesco Mobile. He has also
worked at Banque Nationale de Paris plc.
Judy Gibbons – Judy is currently a non-executive director of retail property kings Hammerson,
previously with O2, Microsoft, Accel Partners (venture capital), Apple and Hewlett Packard.
Jennifer Duvalier – Previously in management consultancy and banking.
Brent Hoberman – Old Etonian with fingers in various venture capital pies including car
rental firm EasyCar.
Nigel Morris – chairman of network digital marketing giants Aegis Media.
John Paton – CEO of Digital First Media – a very large media conglomerate which was sued
successfully in the U.S. for rigging advertising rates.
Katherine Viner – Startlingly not a banker, in marketing or venture capital. She is I gather
(gulp) a journalist.
Darren Singer – formerly with BSkyB, the BBC and Price Waterhouse Coopers
FirthyB 29 Jan 2016 20:36
Hillary is in that class, along with Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Bush, Cheney etc.. who believe
the rule of law only pertains to the little guys.
MooseMcNaulty -> dusablon 29 Jan 2016 20:28
The spying was illegal on a Constitutional basis. The Fourth Amendment protects our privacy
and prevents unlawful search and seizure. The government getting free access to the contents of
our emails seems the same as opening our mail, which is illegal without a court order.
The drone program is illegal based on the Geneva accords. We are carrying out targeted killings
within sovereign nations, usually without their knowledge or consent, based on secret evidence
that they pose a vaguely defined 'imminent threat'. It isn't in line with any international law,
though we set that precedent long ago.
makaio USfan 29 Jan 2016 20:08
What was exemplary about an unnecessary war, a dumbass victory speech three or so months
into it, the President's absence of support for his CIA agent outed by his staff, the President's
German Chancellor shoulder massage, the use of RNC servers and subsequently "lost" gazillion emails,
doing nothing in response to Twin Towers news, ditto for Katrina news, the withheld information
from the Tillman family, and sanctioned torture?
Those were just starter questions. I'm sure I missed things.
Another point that has perhaps not been covered sufficiently is the constant use of the
phrase "unsecured email server" - which is intentionally vague and misleading and was almost certainly
a phrase coined by someone who knows nothing about email servers or IT security and has been parroted
mindlessly by people who know even less and journalists who should know better.
As an IT professional the repeated use of a phrase like that is a red flag - it's like when
people who don't know what they're talking about latch on to a phrase which sounds technical because
it contains jargon or technical concepts and they use it to make it sound like they know what
they're talking about but it doesn't actually mean anything unless the context is clear and unambiguous.
The phrase is obviously being repeated to convey the impression of supreme negligence - that
sensitive state secrets were left defenceless and (gasp!) potentially accessible by anyone.
Yet the term "unsecured" has many different meanings and implications - in the context
of an email server it could mean that mail accounts are accessible without authentication, but
in terms of network security it could mean that the server somehow existed outside a firewall
or Virtual Private Network or some other form of physical or logical security.
Does this term "unsecured" mean the data on the server was not password-protected, does it
mean it was unencrypted, does it mean that it was totally unprotected (which is extremely unlikely
even if it was installed by an ignorant Luddite given that any modern broadband modem is also
a hardware firewall), and as for the "server" was it a physical box or a virtual server?
It is also extremely improbable that an email server would be the only device sharing that
network segment - of necessity there would at least be a file server and some means of communicating
with the outside world, most likely a router or a switch, which would by default have a built-in
hardware firewall (way more secure than a software firewall).
And regarding the "unsecured" part, how was the network accessed?
There are a huge number of possibilities as to the actual meaning and on its own there is not
enough information to deduce which - if any - is correct.
I suspect that someone who knows little to nothing about technology has invented this concept
based on ignorance a desire to imply malfeasance because on its own it really is a nonsense term.
seanet1310 -> Wallabyfan 29 Jan 2016 19:37
Nope. Like it or not Manning deliberately took classified information, smuggled it out and
gave it to foreign nationals.
Clinton it would appear mishandled classified material, at best she failed to realise the sensitive
nature and at worst actively took material from controlled and classified networks onto an unsecured
private network.
dusablon 29 Jan 2016 19:28
Classified material in the US is classified at three levels: confidential, secret, and top
secret. Those labels are not applied in a cavalier fashion. The release of TS information is considered
a grave threat to the security of the United States.
Above these classification levels is what is as known as Special Access Program information,
the release of which has extremely grave ramifications for the US. Access to SAP material is extremely
limited and only granted after an extensive personal background investigation and only on a 'need
to know' basis. You don't simply get a SAP program clearance because your employer thinks it would
be nice to have, etc. In fact, you can have a Top Secret clearance and never get a special access
program clearance to go with it.
For those of you playing at home, the Top Secret SAP material Hillary had on her server - the
most critical material the US can have - was not simply 'upgraded' to classified in a routine
bureaucratic exercise because it was previously unclassified.
Anything generated related to a SAP is, by it's mere existence, classified at the most
extreme level, and everyone who works on a SAP knows this intimately and you sign your life away
to acknowledge this.
What the Feds did in Hillary's case in making the material on her home-based server Top Secret
SAP was to bring those materials into what is known as 'accountability .'
That is, the material was always SAP material but it was just discovered outside a SAP lock-down
area or secure system and now it must become 'accountable' at the high classification level to
ensure it's protected from further disclosure.
Hillary and her minions have no excuse whatsoever for this intentional mishandling of this
critical material and are in severe legal jeopardy no matter what disinformation her campaign
puts out. Someone will or should go to prison. Period.
(Sorry for the length of the post)
Sam3456 -> Mark Forrester 29 Jan 2016 19:22
yeah appointed by Obama...John Kerry. His state department. John is credited on both sides
of the aisle of actually coming in and making the necessary changes to clean up the administrative
mess either created or not addressed by his predecessor.
Within weeks of taking the position JK implemented the OIG task forces recommendations to streamline
the process and make State run more in line with other government organizations. I think John
saw the "Sorry it snowed can't have you this info for a month" for what it was and acted out of
decency and fairness to the American people. I still think he looks like a hound and is a political
opportunist but you can't blame him for shenanigans here
chiefwiley -> DoktahZ 29 Jan 2016 19:18
The messages were "de-papered" by the staff, stripping them from their forms and headings and
then scanning and including the content in accumulations to be sent and stored in an unclassified
system. Taking the markings off of a classified document does not render it unclassified. Adding
the markings back onto the documents does not "declare" them classified. Their classified nature
was constant.
If you only have an unsecured system, it should never be used for official traffic, let alone
classified or special access traffic.
dusablon -> MtnClimber 29 Jan 2016 19:05
Give it up.
She used a private server deliberately to avoid FOIA requests, she deleted thousands of emails
after they were requested, and the emails that remained contained Top Secret Special Access Program
information, and it does not matter one iota whether or not that material was marked or whether
or not it has been recently classified appropriately.
chiefwiley -> Exceptionalism 29 Jan 2016 19:04
18USC Section793(f)
$250,000 and ten years.
dusablon -> MtnClimber 29 Jan 2016 19:00
False.
Anything related to a special access program is classified whether marked as such or not.
dalisnewcar 29 Jan 2016 18:58
You would figure that after all the lies of O'bomber that democrats might wake up some. Apparently,
they are too stupid to realize they have been duped even after the entire Middle Class has been
decimated and the wealth of the 1% has grown 3 fold under the man who has now bombed 7 countries.
And you folks think Clinton, who personally destroyed Libya, is going to be honest with you and
not do the same things he's done? Wake up folks. Your banging your head against the same old wall.
fanUS -> MtnClimber 29 Jan 2016 18:46
She is evil, because she helped Islamic State to rise.
Paul Christenson -> Barry_Seal 29 Jan 2016 18:45
20 - Barbara Wise - Commerce Department staffer. Worked closely with Ron Brown and John Huang.
Cause of death unknown. Died November 29, 1996. Her bruised, nude body was found locked in her
office at the Department of Commerce.
21 - Charles Meissner - Assistant Secretary of Commerce who gave John Huang special security
clearance, died shortly thereafter in a small plane crash.
22 - Dr. Stanley Heard - Chairman of the National Chiropractic Health Care Advisory Committee
died with his attorney Steve Dickson in a small plane crash. Dr. Heard, in addition to serving
on Clinton 's advisory council personally treated Clinton 's mother, stepfather and Brother.
23 - Barry Seal - Drug running TWA pilot out of Mean Arkansas , death was no accident.
24 - John ny Lawhorn, Jr. - Mechanic, found a check made out to Bill Clinton in the trunk of
a car left at his repair shop. He was found dead after his car had hit a utility pole.
25 - Stanley Huggins - Investigated Madison Guaranty. His death was a purported suicide and
his report was never released.
26 - Hershel Friday - Attorney and Clinton fundraiser died March 1, 1994, when his plane exploded.
27 - Kevin Ives & Don Henry - Known as "The boys on the track" case. Reports say the two boys
may have stumbled upon the Mena Arkansas airport drug operation. The initial report of death said
their deaths were due to falling asleep on railroad tracks and being run over. Later autopsy reports
stated that the 2 boys had been slain before being placed on the tracks. Many linked to the case
died before their testimony could come before a Grand Jury.
THE FOLLOWING PERSONS HAD INFORMATION ON THE IVES/HENRY CASE:
28 - Keith Coney - Died when his motorcycle slammed into the back of a truck, 7/88.
29 - Keith McMaskle - Died, stabbed 113 times, Nov 1988
30 - Gregory Collins - Died from a gunshot wound January 1989.
31 - Jeff Rhodes - He was shot, mutilated and found burned in a trash dump in April 1989. (Coroner
ruled death due to suicide)
32 - James Milan - Found decapitated. However, the Coroner ruled his death was due to natural
causes"?
33 - Jordan Kettleson - Was found shot to death in the front seat of his pickup truck in June
1990.
34 - Richard Winters - A suspect in the Ives/Henry deaths. He was killed in a set-up robbery
July 1989.
THE FOLLOWING CLINTON PERSONAL BODYGUARDS ALL DIED OF MYSTERIOUS CAUSES OR SUICIDE
36 - Major William S. Barkley, Jr.
37 - Captain Scott J . Reynolds
38 - Sgt. Brian Hanley
39 - Sgt. Tim Sabel
40 - Major General William Robertson
41 - Col. William Densberger
42 - Col. Robert Kelly
43 - Spec. Gary Rhodes
44 - Steve Willis
45 - Robert Williams
46 - Conway LeBleu
47 - Todd McKeehan
And this list does not include the four dead Americans in Benghazi that Hillary abandoned!
Paul Christenson Barry_Seal 29 Jan 2016 18:42
THE MANY CLINTON BODY BAGS . . .
Someone recently reminded me of this list. I had forgotten how long it is. Therefore, this
is a quick refresher course, lest we forget what has happened to many "friends" and associates
of Bill and Hillary Clinton.
1- James McDougal - Convicted Whitewater partner of the Clintons who died of an apparent heart
attack, while in solitary confinement. He was a key witness in Ken Starr's investigation.
2 - Mary Mahoney - A former White House intern was murdered July 1997 at a Starbucks Coffee
Shop in Georgetown (Washington, D. C.). The murder happened just after she was to go public with
her story of sexual harassment by Clinton in the White House.
3 - Vince Foster - Former White House Councilor, and colleague of Hillary Clinton at Little
Rock 's Rose Law Firm. Died of a gunshot wound to the head, ruled a suicide. (He was about to
testify against Hillary related to the records she refused to turn over to congress.) Was reported
to have been having an affair with Hillary.
4 - Ron Brown - Secretary of Commerce and former DNC Chairman. Reported to have died by impact
in a plane crash. A pathologist close to the investigation reported that there was a hole in the
top of Brown's skull resembling a gunshot wound. At the time of his death Brown was being investigated,
and spoke publicly of his willingness to cut a deal with prosecutors. The rest of the people on
the plane also died. A few days later the Air Traffic controller committed suicide.
5 - C. Victor Raiser, II - Raiser, a major player in the Clinton fund raising organization
died in a private plane crash in July 1992.
6 - Paul Tulley - Democratic National Committee Political Director found dead in a hotel room
in Little Rock on September 1992. Described by Clinton as a "dear friend and trusted advisor".
7 - Ed Willey - Clinton fundraiser, found dead November 1993 deep in the woods in VA of a gunshot
wound to the head. Ruled a suicide. Ed Willey died on the same day His wife Kathleen Willey claimed
Bill Clinton groped her in the oval office in the White House. Ed Willey was involved in several
Clinton fund raising events.
8 - Jerry Parks - Head of Clinton's gubernatorial security team in Little Rock .. Gunned down
in his car at a deserted intersection outside Little Rock . Park's son said his father was building
a dossier on Clinton . He allegedly threatened to reveal this information. After he died the files
were mysteriously removed from his house.
9 - James Bunch - Died from a gunshot suicide. It was reported that he had a "Black Book" of
people which contained names of influential people who visited Prostitutes in Texas and Arkansas
10 - James Wilson - Was found dead in May 1993 from an apparent hanging suicide. He was reported
to have ties to the Clintons ' Whitewater deals.
11 - Kathy Ferguson - Ex-wife of Arkansas Trooper Danny Ferguson , was found dead in May 1994,
in her living room with a gunshot to her head. It was ruled a suicide even though there were several
packed suitcases, as if she were going somewhere. Danny Ferguson was a co-defendant along with
Bill Clinton in the Paula Jones Lawsuit, and Kathy Ferguson was a possible corroborating witness
for Paula Jones.
12 - Bill Shelton - Arkansas State Trooper and fiancée of Kathy Ferguson. Critical of the suicide
ruling of his fiancée, he was found dead in June, 1994 of a gunshot wound also ruled a suicide
at the grave site of his fiancée.
13 - Gandy Baugh - Attorney for Clinton 's friend Dan Lassater, died by jumping out a window
of a tall building January, 1994. His client, Dan Lassater, was a convicted drug distributor.
14 - Florence Martin - Accountant & sub-contractor for the CIA, was related to the Barry Seal,
Mena , Arkansas Airport drug smuggling case. He died of three gunshot Wounds.
15 - Suzanne Coleman - Reportedly had an affair with Clinton when he was Arkansas Attorney
General. Died Of a gunshot wound to the back of the head, ruled a Suicide. Was pregnant at the
time of her death.
16 - Paula Grober - Clinton 's speech interpreter for the deaf from 1978 until her death December
9, 1992. She died in a one car accident.
17 - Danny Casolaro - Investigative reporter who was Investigating the Mean Airport and Arkansas
Development Finance Authority. He slit his wrists, apparently, in the middle of his investigation.
18 - Paul Wilcher - Attorney investigating corruption at Mean Airport with Casolaro and the
1980 "October Surprise" was found dead on a toilet June 22, 1993, in his Washington DC apartment.
Had delivered a report to Janet Reno 3 weeks before his death. (May have died of poison)
19 - Jon Parnell Walker - Whitewater investigator for Resolution Trust Corp. Jumped to his
death from his Arlington , Virginia apartment balcony August 15,1993. He was investigating the
Morgan Guaranty scandal.
Thijs Buelens -> honey1969 29 Jan 2016 18:41
Did the actors from Orange is the New Black already endorsed Hillary? Just wondering.
Sam3456 -> Sam3456 29 Jan 2016 18:35
Remember as soon as Snowden walked out the door with his USB drive full of secrets his was
in violation. Wether he knew the severity and classification or not.
Think of Hillary's email server as her home USB drive.
RedPillCeryx 29 Jan 2016 18:33
Government civil and military employees working with material at the Top Secret level are required
to undergo incredibly protracted and intrusive vetting procedures (including polygraph testing)
in order to obtain and keep current their security clearances to access such matter. Was Hillary
Clinton required to obtain a Top Secret clearance in the same way, or was she just waved through
because of Who She Is?
Sam3456 29 Jan 2016 18:32
Just to be clear, Colin Powell used a private email ACCOUNT which was hosted in the cloud and
used it only for personal use. He was audited (never deleted anything) and it was found to contain
no government records.
Hillary used a server, which means in electronic form the documents existed outside the State
Department unsecured. Its as if she took a Top Secret file home with her. That is a VERY BIG mistake
and as the Sec of State she signed a document saying she understood the rules and agreed to play
by them. She did not and removing state secrets from their secure location is a very serious matter.
Wether you put the actual file in your briefcase or have them sitting in electronic version on
your server.
Second, she signed a document saying she would return any and ALL documents and copies of documents
pertaining to the State Department with 30 (or 60 I can't remember) of leaving. The documents
on her server, again electronic copies of the top secret files, where not returned for 2 years.
Thats a huge violation.
Finally, there is a clause in classification that deals with the information that is top secret
by nature. Meaning regardless of wether its MARKED classified or not the very nature of the material
would be apparent to a senior official that it was classified and appropriate action would have
to be taken. She she either knew and ignored or did not know...and both of those scenarios don't
give me a lot of confidence.
Finally the information that was classified at the highest levels means exposure of that material
would put human operatives lives at risk. Something she accused Snowden of doing when she called
him a traitor. By putting that information outside the State Department firewall she basically
put peoples lives at risk so she could have the convenience of using one mobile device.
Wallabyfan -> MtnClimber 29 Jan 2016 18:10
Sorry you can delude yourself all you like but Powell and Cheney used private emails while
at work on secure servers for personal communications not highly classified communications and
did so before the 2009 ban on this practice came into place . Clinton has used a private unsecured
server at her home while Sec of State and even worse provided access to people in her team who
had no security clearance. She has also deleted more than 30,000 emails from the server in full
knowledge of the FBI probe. You do realise that she is going to end up in jail don't you?
MtnClimber -> boscovee 29 Jan 2016 18:07
Are you as interested in all of the emails that Cheney destroyed? He was asked to provide them
and never allowed ANY to be seen.
Typical GOP
Dozens die at embassies under Bush. Zero investigations. Zero hearings.
4 die at an embassy under Clinton. Dozens of hearings.
OurNigel -> Robert Greene 29 Jan 2016 17:53
Its not hard to understand, she was supposed to only use her official email account maintained
on secure Federal government servers when conducting official business during her tenure as Secretary
of State. This was for three reasons, the first being security the second being transparency and
the third for accountability.
Serious breach of protocol I'm afraid.
Talgen -> Exceptionalism 29 Jan 2016 17:50
Department responses for classification infractions could include counseling, warnings
or other action, officials said. They wouldn't say if Clinton or senior aides who've since
left government could face penalties. The officials weren't authorized to speak on the matter
and demanded anonymity."
You need to share that one with Petraeus, whos career was ruined and had to pay 100k in
fines, for letting some info slip to his mistress..
Wallabyfan 29 Jan 2016 17:50
No one here seems to be able to accept how serious this is. You cant downplay it. This is the
most serious scandal we have seen in American politics for decades.
Any other US official handling even 1 classified piece of material on his or her own unsecured
home server would have been arrested and jailed by now for about 50 years perhaps longer. The
fact that we are talking about 20 + (at least) indicates at the very least Clinton's hubris, incompetence
and very poor judgement as well as being a very serious breach of US law. Her campaign is doomed.
This is only the beginning of the scandal and I predict we will be rocked when we learn the
truth. Clinton will be indicted and probably jailed along with Huma Abedin who the FBI are also
investigating.
This is supposed to be the lady who (in her own words) has a huge experience of government
yet she willingly broke not just State Department protocols and procedures, by using a privately
maintained none secure server for her email service she also broke Federal laws and regulations
governing recordkeeping requirements.
At the very least this was a massive breach of security and a total disregard for established
rules whilst she was in office. Its not as if she was just some local government officer in a
backwater town she was Secretary of State for the United States government.
If the NSA is to be believed you should presume her emails could have been read by any foreign
state.
This is actually a huge story.
TassieNigel 29 Jan 2016 17:41
This god awful Clinton family had to be stopped somehow I suppose. Now if I'd done it, I'd
be behind bars long ago, so when will Hillary be charged is my question ?
Hillary made much of slinging off about the "traitor" Julian Assange, so let's see how Mrs
Clinton looks like behind bars. A woman simply incapable of telling the truth --
Celebrations for Bernie Sanders of course.
HiramsMaxim 29 Jan 2016 17:41
They also wouldn't disclose whether any of the documents reflected information that was
classified at the time of transmission,
Has nothing to do with anything. Maybe the author should read the actual NDA signed by Mrs.
Clinton.
If every corrupt liar was sent to prison there'd be no one left in Washington, or Westminster
and we'd have to have elections with ordinary people standing, instead of the usual suspects from
the political class. Which, on reflection, sounds quite good !
In_for_the_kill 29 Jan 2016 17:15
Come on Guardian, this should be your lead story, the executive branch of the United States
just confirmed that a candidate for the Presidency pretty much broke the law, knowingly. If that
ain't headline material, then I don't know what is.
dusablon -> SenseCir 29 Jan 2016 17:09
Irrelevant?
Knowingly committing a felony by a candidate for POTUS is anything but irrelevant.
And forget her oh-so-clever excuses about not sending or receiving anything marked top secret
or any other level of classification including SAP. If you work programs like those you know that
anything generated related to that program is automatically classified, whether or not it's marked
as such. And such material is only shared on a need to know basis.
She's putting out a smokescreen to fool the majority of voters who have never or will never
have special access. She is a criminal and needs to be arrested. Period.
Commentator6 29 Jan 2016 17:00
It's a reckless arrogance combined with the belief that no-one can touch her. If she does
become the nominee Hillary will be an easy target for Trump. It'll be like "shooting fish in a
barrel".
DismayedPerplexed -> OnlyOneView 29 Jan 2016 16:40
Are you forgetting W and his administration's 5 million deleted emails?
Consider that email is an indispensable tool in doing one's job. Consider that in order to
effectively do her job, candidate Clinton -- as the Secretary of State -- had to be sending and
receiving Top Secret documents. Consider that all of her email was routed through a personal server.
Consider whether she released all of the relevant emails. Well, she claimed she did but the evidence
contradicts such a claim. Consider that this latest news release has -- like so many others --
been released late on a Friday.
It is obvious that the Secretary of State and the President should be communicating on
a secure network controlled by the federal government. It is obvious that virtually none of these
communications were done in a secure manner. Consider whether someone who contends this is irrelevant
has enough sense to come in out of the rain.
Another explanation is that he sees trouble ahead for Hillary Clinton. Because of his close relationship
with former NYC police Chief Ray Kelly and others in the law enforcement community, he might have
the inside track on the FBI investigation into the former Secretary of State's handling of classified
documents and questionable foundation-related activities. Democrats have done a fine job of completely
dismissing the FBI inquiry, but the possibility that Clinton could face serious legal hurdles may
be encouraging Bloomberg's ambitions.
... ... ...
The inquiry began by looking into whether Clinton's use of a personal email server violated security
standards; it has since been expanded twice. As reported by
Judge Andrew Napolitano of Fox News, Clinton signed an oath promising to comply with the laws
protecting national security information, violations that the Obama administration has aggressively
prosecuted.
As Napolitano says, "The Obama Department of Justice prosecuted a young sailor for espionage for
sending a selfie to his girlfriend, because in the background of the photo was a view of a sonar
screen on a submarine…. It also prosecuted Gen. David Petraeus for espionage for keeping secret and
top-secret documents in an unlocked drawer in his desk inside his guarded home. It alleged that he
shared those secrets with a friend who also had a security clearance, but it dropped those charges."
Napolitano contends that the bar for prosecution is low, and can be based on negligence. That
is, the government need not prove that Clinton intended to reveal state secrets – only that she did
so through carelessness.
Charles McCullough, the intelligence community's inspector general, recently stirred the pot when
he wrote to the chairmen of the Senate intelligence and foreign affairs committees that he has received
sworn declarations from an intelligence agency he declined to name identifying "several dozen" classified
emails, including several marked as "special access programs" – the highest security level possible.
SAP information can include the names of intelligence assets, for instance, and other highly sensitive
information. To date, some
1,340 "classified" emails have been discovered amongst those stored on Clinton's server.
Clinton argues that those communications were not so designated at the time. Undermining her defense
is a series of emails exchanged with aide Jake Sullivan in which she appears to order him to get
around security protocol and simply cut and paste sensitive information to be faxed to her. The compromising
communication was amongst those released in
a recent Friday night "dump." In the exchange, Sullivan reports that staffers have "had issues
sending secure fax. They're working on it." Clinton answers, "If they can't, turn into non-paper
w no identifying heading and send non-secure." The intent is clear.
"... In November, if you dont live in a battleground state, your vote will not tip the outcome...better to vote your conscience and register your disgust with the corrupt duopoly. ..."
"... Any president will need a staff and mostly, that will come from people working in the Obama administration. Bernie talks about Stiglitz, but he is 72, almost as old as Bernie. He mentioned Reich who was part of the same Clinton administration that Bernie constantly bashes. ..."
"... Much of the dereg came about in trade for other policies. I dont know that a Bernie administration would be much different. Bernie would need to swallow hard and take a heavy dose of GOP poison to get a budget, much less pass reform legislation. ..."
"... Dont say the Tea Party changed nothing - they changed themselves. Remember that they were created in disgust over Wall Street. After they got elected you would be hard pressed to find more ardent supporters of any and all legislation that support the rich. ..."
"... Bernie is settling for social democracy. That is still better than neoliberal theocracy. ..."
"... Exactly. Its all political posturing for the primaries. Like Obama, shell revert to a neoliberal stooge the moment she takes office. ..."
"... Her first action will be to find some hapless, third world country to intervene in to prove that she has cojones. Libya redux. ..."
"... Paleoconservatives oppose military interventionism. Boots on the ground would be neoconservative. ..."
"... Neoconservative is just neoliberal with a more aggressive boots on the ground foreign policy or imperialism ..."
"... Paleoconservatives are more isolationist than free traders. They still love their corporations and rich people, but they dont like crony capitalism as a principle even if as a reality they are open to setting a price. Trump is leaning paleoconservative, at least in his campaign rhetoric. ..."
"... Whatever it takes to prove that she the toughest warrior since Catherine the Great... ..."
"... Exactly. She is yet another neocon, masking as a Democrat. She is more jingoistic then probably half of Republican candidates. ..."
"... What to do when a candidate is called unelectable because of their support for the policies that you yourself support? ..."
"... Well you have to decide whether you want to be a heroic loser or get half a loaf. I agree that it is a very difficult question. ..."
"... You nailed it. No one ever said democracy would be easy. ..."
"... And he cautionary tale is that the heroic losers got us 8 years of Bush II - and all the disasters he managed to create in that time. ..."
"... No What is means is that there are a lot of people who realize that public opinion polls mean absolutely nothing. ..."
"... What is ironic about this election cycle more than others is that Republicans dominate the elected offices, so they have essentially total control of government, especially in the poorest States, but they blame Obama for things that are local to these States like teen pregnancy, school drop outs, poverty, high unemployment, crime, felons, unemployed felons, no health providers, no corporations who will setup in the State because of the lack of health probiders, educated workers, and too much crime. Nothing was better when Bush-Cheney or Reagan-Bush were where Obama-Biden are. And the increasing number of elected Republicans seems to me to be quantifiably worse. ..."
"... I would call them a Third Way turncoats within Dems. Neolibs moved party into Wall Street hands and Wall Street donors became the key contributors. Clinton successfully sold Democratic Party (like Tony Blair sold Labour) and got rich in the process. ..."
"... Instead of boycotting, which conveys apathy, why not vote third party, which conveys disgust? ..."
"... ...Nader won enough votes in two states - Florida and New Hampshire - to put either of them in Gore's column. Nader won 97,488 votes in Florida, which easily could have swung the election to give Gore the state's 25 electoral votes, and there would have been no need for a recount. Even without Florida, adding Nader's 4 percent of the New Hampshire vote to Gore's 47 percent would have given Gore a 270 to 267 victory in the electoral college... ..."
"... Hillary Clinton has had persistently high negatives and a habit of generating and attractive scandal. She cant even generate trust within her own party, and performs particularly badly among independents. I dont understand why anyone would view her as the electable alternative . ..."
"... HRC is not calling for a political revolution. If you like oligarchy then she is your gal. If one is comfortably placed in the existing establishment then it is a scary thing to risk rocking the boat. ..."
"... Yep, the Clinton Foundation should be rebranded: Scandals R Us! ..."
"... When presented with the choice between a corrupt capitalist and an honest socialist, it should be an easy choice for most of us. Actually, for the Wall Street Democrats here, its also any easy choice--you look for the most corrupt candidate, the one who lists Wall Street banks as her top donors. ..."
"... By November, all but the most fervent Clinton partisans -- who can always be driven into a frenzy of paranoid persecution mania by talk of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy and whatnot - is in an anybody but Clinton mood. ..."
"... Not BS. You are wearing partisan blinders. Clinton has been dogged by scandal at every stage of her public life: some pumped up out of relatively small stuff, but several serious big deals. There will be more. Why? Because the Clintons are both compulsive liars. Thats why young people, who are very good at sniffing out fakes and liars, dont like her. ..."
"... The Republicans have gone nuts and are much more of danger than they appeared to be back in 2000 before 9-11. ..."
"... The definitions of Democratic Socialism by B Sanders are in the context of Scandinavian countries which is really a more progressive form of social democracy, e.g. higher tax rates on higher earners than other social democratic countries but still allowing private property. ..."
"... The protesters' indictment of Wall Street as a destructive force, economically and politically, is completely right. ..."
"... Bingo. Bernie does what Obama did in his early speeches: speak to the moral, emotional underpinnings of Progressive beliefs. ..."
"... This is a kind of excitement that Hillary is never going to be able to inspire. ..."
"... And you somehow think that this enthusiasm will not be curbed after the attacks on Sanders begin? And I am not talking about these stupid little so called attacks by PK, Chait, Klein, etc. I'm talking big boy attacks backed by huge money and no reason whatsoever to pay attention to any facts at all. ..."
"... Yeah, I do. I think we're ready for another, And I welcome their hatred, moment in history. ..."
"... But what we need now is someone with genuine moral outrage who will say what so many of us feel: the system has been distorted beyond its ability to snap back. It works for at most 10% of the population now and catastrophically, often fatally, fails a percentage of perhaps twice that. I haven't gotten quite to the point yet myself where I would refuse to vote for Clinton if she won the primary, but many of my friends have. I think the tide has finally turned. ..."
You Say You Want a Revolution?, by Mark A. Thoma : What, exactly, does Democratic presidential
candidate Bernie Sanders have in mind when he asks on his
website if we are "Ready
to Start a Political Revolution?" He has proclaimed unabashedly that he is a socialist, a statement
that has raised eyebrows about his electability. He wants to turn us into the Soviet Union!! Is
that what he has in mind?
Far from it. He has
qualified his statements to make it clear that he is a democratic socialist, but that term
fails to convey what he really has in mind, or at least I think it does. ...
You support Sanders because he opposes any organized opposition to Republicans who run about 10,000
candidates for 10,000 offices and get out voters to vote in everyone on of those elections?
The only organized opposition to Republicans is Democratic Parties who need to raise money
to pay campaign workers because those progressives who oppose capitalism oddly won't work for
the parties for free, or run for office paying their own way in getting hundreds of people to
work for free getting out the vote. It isn't like Democratic party elites block them from running
for office because at least a thousand elections have no opponent to the Republican candidate.
What's Sanders' plan for filling the 10,000 elected offices currently filled with corrupt party
picked and corporate bought puppets?
Sanders has pushed the DLC for a "southern strategy", to no avail. I worked for free in 2012 and
2014! I may not do so in 2016.
JohnH -> pgl...
I would vote for Sanders in November because he is strong on issues important to most Americans.
Bill Curry explains the difference between the candidates, something most of the 'liberals' here
fail to grasp--
"Hillary is a living avatar of the Democratic Party in our time. What it does well–cultural
issues and social programs– she does well. When she talks about child care or family leave she's
passionate and sincere. What she and her party don't do well is fight to end corporate control
of government. She's also weak on climate change, freedom of information, the right to privacy
and, in matters of alleged national security, the rule of law.
Bernie won [the October debate] not because he outpointed her but because he's strong on the
issues on which she's weak - and because those are the issues that matter most to voters. Like
our environment, our democracy and our middle class are at a tipping point. When Bernie talks
about these crises, his sincerity and passion are unmistakable. For all her hard work, it isn't
clear Hillary even understands them. Having spent the '90s promoting globalization, and her adult
life raising money from those who profit from it, she's too wed to the system to see its fatal
flaws".
http://www.salon.com/2015/10/18/this_is_still_bernie_sanders_moment_hes_right_on_the_big_issues_now_he_must_communicate_it/
likbez -> JohnH...
Bill Curry is simply naďve.
The current social system that is in place in the USA is called neoliberalism. And it presupposes
complete corporate control of the state as neoliberalism is a form of corporatism.
I doubt that you can change the elite preferences as for neoliberalism via elections. Some
compromises are possible, but that's it. Any US President is controlled by "deep state" not the
other way around.
Truman said something like "You came to the office, you try to change things and nothing changes."
JohnH -> lower middle class...
In November, if you don't live in a battleground state, your vote will not tip the outcome...better
to vote your conscience and register your disgust with the corrupt duopoly.
JohnH -> EMichael...
If enough people vote against the corrupt duopoly in non-battleground states, the message will
be heard.
Yes, we can!
Sarah -> pgl...
As usual, Mark's much more balanced on the subject than Krugman. He shows that he's thought about
it carefully and listened to what Sanders has to say. Krugman, on the other hand, is sounding
like he did on the housing bubble before he actually started reading, thinking and paying attention.
Especially irritating is his claim that single payer means organizing a national health service
and abolishing private health care. Surely he's traveled enough in Europe to know that it means
nothing of the kind. Most European countries, including the one where I live, offer private health
plans as well as a public option- just the system Krugman himself proposed when the health care
debates were on.
The other thing which Sanders is doing, and which an earlier Krugman faulted Obama for NOT
doing, is pushing the political dialogue back towards the center, away from the extreme right,
where it's been stuck despite massive bipartisan majorities in favor of a number of more Progressive
positions, for a couple of decades now. If he's getting strong blow-back for this it's hardly
surprising.
I don't anyone will fault Thoma for worrying about Bernie's prospects. I happen to think he's
mistaken, and that Sanders actually has a far stronger appeal - even on the Right (particularly
among the non-political and those who have given up on politics) -- than many people suspect,
but it's certainly a reasonable concern. What Krugman is doing goes considerably beyond that,
however. If he's getting strong blow-back for that it's hardly surprising.
jonny bakho :
I think Bernie is electable. Bernie gives Hillary cover to discuss more populist positions. I
think his approach is unlikely to deliver very much.
The TeaParty went to Congress with an agenda plus grass roots support and have changed nothing.
The US system is designed to block radical schemes and force a more incremental change. On health
care, we solved the problem of how to pay. The most pressing challenge is improving delivery.
On this, Bernie is refighting the last war. His side lost. The Dems should not respond to TeaParty
votes on repealing Obamacare with votes to repeal it and replace it with single payer. The TeaParty
has been a waste of time. So would the push for single payer. The majority of Americans would
be loathe to trade in their employer paid health care for health care of unknown quality paid
for by higher taxes. Vermont could sell it to their voters. It cannot be sold to the TeaParty
who would fight it as BigBrotherGov. Sanders does not have the good judgement to see that single
payer is a loser with the general public and would be a drag on the rest of the agenda. The move
to single payer will involve incremental steps that are outside of Sanders plan. The whole idea
that a one-sided populist revolution will occur in 2016 is near zero probability. The populists
are split between a conservative camp and a liberal camp.
Any president will need a staff and mostly, that will come from people working in the Obama
administration. Bernie talks about Stiglitz, but he is 72, almost as old as Bernie. He mentioned
Reich who was part of the same Clinton administration that Bernie constantly bashes. The
advantage to Clinton is she is much more familiar with the players who understand how to make
the agencies respond. I lived through the 90s and the legislation that was enacted was always
some mix of what the GOP Congress were promoting and what Bill Clinton wanted. Much of the
dereg came about in trade for other policies. I don't know that a Bernie administration would
be much different. Bernie would need to swallow hard and take a heavy dose of GOP poison to get
a budget, much less pass reform legislation.
Don't say the Tea Party changed nothing - they changed themselves. Remember that they were
created in disgust over Wall Street. After they got elected you would be hard pressed to find
more ardent supporters of any and all legislation that support the rich.
pgl -> DeDude...
Same old Republican bait and switch.
ilsm -> jonny bakho...
Tea party support is in fly over country. And there a small minority (they win with 55% stay home)
of the population.
Bernie could excite enough.... Hillary not so.
RC AKA Darryl, Ron :
My guess is that Bernie would be for democratic socialism if he thought that he could get it done.
So, Bernie is settling for social democracy. That is still better than neoliberal theocracy.
RC AKA Darryl, Ron -> pgl...
I would even give some neoliberal politicians credit for listening well to the economists whose
policy prescriptions fit their political-economic agenda on a case by case basis. So, that is
pretense without just pretending.
JohnH -> RC AKA Darryl, Ron...
"Since Bernie she is singing a different tune."
Exactly. It's all political posturing for the primaries. Like Obama, she'll revert to a
neoliberal stooge the moment she takes office.
Her first action will be to find some hapless, third world country to intervene in to prove
that she has cojones. Libya redux.
RC AKA Darryl, Ron -> JohnH...
Yeah, but no boots on the ground because that would be neoconservative.
pgl -> RC AKA Darryl, Ron...
I think you mean Paleo Conservative. We need to program to keep up with all these meaningless
labels.
Syaloch -> pgl...
Paleoconservatives oppose military interventionism. Boots on the ground would be neoconservative.
RC AKA Darryl, Ron -> pgl...
[Neoconservative is just neoliberal with a more aggressive "boots on the ground" foreign policy
or imperialism if you would rather.]
*
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irving_Kristol
Irving Kristol (January 22, 1920 – September 18, 2009) was an American columnist, journalist, and
writer who was dubbed the "godfather of neo-conservatism."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoconservatism
Neoconservatism (commonly shortened to neocon) is a political movement born in the United States
during the 1960s among Democrats who became disenchanted with the party's domestic and especially
foreign policy. Many of its adherents became politically famous during the Republican presidential
administrations of the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. Neoconservatives peaked in influence during
the administrations of George W. Bush and George H W Bush, when they played a major role in promoting
and planning the 2003 invasion of Iraq.[1] Prominent neoconservatives in the Bush administration
included Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, Elliott Abrams, Richard Perle, and Paul Bremer. Senior officials
Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, while not identifying themselves
as neoconservatives, listened closely to neoconservative advisers regarding foreign policy, especially
the defense of Israel, the promotion of democracy in the Middle East, and the buildup of American
military forces to achieve these goals. The neocons have influence in the Obama White House, and
neoconservatism remains a staple in both parties' arsenal.[2][3]
The term "neoconservative" refers to those who made the ideological journey from the anti-Stalinist
Left to the camp of American conservatism.[4] Neoconservatives typically advocate the promotion of
democracy and promotion of American national interest in international affairs, including by means
of military force, and are known for espousing disdain for communism and for political radicalism...
*
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleoconservatism
Paleoconservatism (sometimes shortened to paleocon) is a conservative political philosophy found
primarily in the United States stressing tradition, limited government and civil society, along with
religious, regional, national and Western identity.[1][2]
Paleoconservatives in the 21st century often highlight their points of disagreement with neoconservatives,
especially regarding issues such as military interventionism, illegal immigration and high rates
of legal immigration, as well as multiculturalism, affirmative action, free trade, and foreign aid.[1]
They also criticize social welfare and social democracy, which some refer to as the "therapeutic
managerial state",[3] the "welfare-warfare state"[4] or "polite totalitarianism".[5] They identify
themselves as the legitimate heirs to the American conservative tradition.[6]
Elizabethtown College professor Paul Gottfried is credited with coining the term in the 1980s.[7]
He says the term originally referred to various Americans, such as conservative and traditionalist
Catholics and agrarian Southerners, who turned to anti-communism during the Cold War.[8] Paleoconservatism
is closely linked with distributism.[citation needed]
Paleoconservative thought has been published by the Rockford Institute's Chronicles: A Magazine of
American Culture.[9] Politician Pat Buchanan was strongly influenced by its articles[8] and helped
create another paleocon publication, The American Conservative.[10] Its concerns overlap those of
the Old Right that opposed the New Deal in the 1930s and 1940s...
[There you have it. To simplify just consider archetypes neoconservative Irving Kristol (or son William)
versus paleoconservative Pat Buchanan. Neocons are entirely at home with the Washington Consensus
of neoliberal, but they want to project American power via militarism and have no problem whatsoever
with other peoples kids dying in foreign wars. That is the beauty of an all voluntary military.
Paleoconservatives are more isolationist than free traders. They still love their corporations
and rich people, but they don't like crony capitalism as a principle even if as a reality they are
open to setting a price. Trump is leaning paleoconservative, at least in his campaign rhetoric.
]
JohnH -> RC AKA Darryl, Ron...
"no boots on the ground" Don't bet on it. Whatever it takes to prove that she the toughest
warrior since Catherine the Great...
likbez -> JohnH...
>Her first action will be to find some hapless, third world country to intervene in to prove that
she has cojones. Libya redux.
Exactly. She is yet another neocon, masking as a Democrat. She is more jingoistic then
probably half of Republican candidates.
PPaine -> RC AKA Darryl, Ron...
Might I suggest recently Hillary is no longer bear hugging real progress
She's back to the wooden nickel con and the " crazy left " marginalization stunt
RC AKA Darryl, Ron -> PPaine ...
Yeah, you may suggest. I noticed that too. Neither my wife nor I are her fans. I have been
in for Bernie since before he even announced. If I recall so were you although Liz Warren would
have also been acceptable to us.
Back in the 70's I wanted to Carl Sagan to run for POTUS. I have since become a full time realist
and only a part time crackpot.
DrDick -> RC AKA Darryl, Ron...
That is the position of many Democratic Socialists, including myself and most major European
socialist parties. It is a gradualist position rather than a revolutionary one.
PPaine said in reply to DrDick...
And deeply in crisis. Hence the emergence of left alternatives as well as right menaces
kthomas :
Let's go Bernie! Make those cockroaches scurry!
Jerry Brown :
What to do when a candidate is called unelectable because of their support for the policies
that you yourself support?
RC AKA Darryl, Ron -> Jerry Brown...
LOL! That's a good one.
Jerry Brown -> EMichael...
True enough. Thoma says it is the label "socialist" that makes him less likely to win, not the
actual policies that might be associated with the label.
Its difficult finding out I'm a socialist after all these years. Maybe I should support Trump
so nobody else finds out.
Jerry Brown -> EMichael...
Yes. Trump might be a type of socialist too. Nationalist Socialist might be a fit for him.
DeDude -> Jerry Brown...
Well you have to decide whether you want to be a heroic loser or get half a loaf. I agree
that it is a very difficult question.
RC AKA Darryl, Ron -> DeDude...
You nailed it. No one ever said democracy would be easy.
DeDude -> RC AKA Darryl, Ron...
And he cautionary tale is that the "heroic losers" got us 8 years of Bush II - and all the
disasters he managed to create in that time.
JohnH -> Jerry Brown...
"What to do when a candidate is called unelectable because of their support for the policies
that you yourself support?"
Actually, what to do when a candidate, i.e. Bernie, is called unelectable because they support
policies that most Americans support--busting up the big banks and Medicare for all?
The 'liberals' here fail to take into account that 1) Bernie is on the right side of public
opinion, and 2) takes positions that real liberals would support. Yet they won't support Bernie...because
they've become too conservative?
EMichael -> JohnH...
No What is means is that there are a lot of people who realize that public opinion polls mean
absolutely nothing.
You form a party that can put 10,000 candidates on the ballot for 10,000 elected offices and then
winning the majority of those elections.
What is ironic about this election cycle more than others is that Republicans dominate
the elected offices, so they have essentially total control of government, especially in the poorest
States, but they blame Obama for things that are local to these States like teen pregnancy, school
drop outs, poverty, high unemployment, crime, felons, unemployed felons, no health providers,
no corporations who will setup in the State because of the lack of health probiders, educated
workers, and too much crime. Nothing was better when Bush-Cheney or Reagan-Bush were where Obama-Biden
are. And the increasing number of elected Republicans seems to me to be quantifiably worse.
So, who do progressives like Sanders blame? The Democrats who have lost in elections over and
over to Republicans. What actions do progressives who support Sanders take? Attack the system
and boycott it.
Hey, it's like protesting the weather requiring creating some sort of shelter from the snow
by laying down and being covered with snow. They'll show mother nature and force her to change.
likbez -> PPaine ...
> Party cadre and those reflex rooters for the party
I would call them a Third Way turncoats within Dems. Neolibs moved party into Wall Street
hands and Wall Street donors became the key contributors. Clinton successfully sold Democratic
Party (like Tony Blair sold Labour) and got rich in the process.
Instead of boycotting, which conveys apathy, why not vote third party, which conveys disgust?
BTW the reason Democrats lost the mid-terms in many states in 2014 is precisely because they
ran as Republican-lite: "Consider that in four "red" states - South Dakota, Arkansas, Alaska,
and Nebraska - the same voters who sent Republicans to the Senate voted by wide margins to raise
their state's minimum wage. Democratic candidates in these states barely mentioned the minimum
wage."
JohnH -> djb...
What Bernie should do if he loses is build a nationwide socialist organization. Obama had that
opportunity in 2008 but abandoned it as soon as he took power...he didn't want popular opposition
to his neoliberal agenda.
RC AKA Darryl, Ron said in reply to DeDude...
[Sorry, I forgot about Nader and since you did not explicitly mention him then your meaning
was not clear.]
...Nader won enough votes in two states - Florida and New Hampshire - to put either of them
in Gore's column. Nader won 97,488 votes in Florida, which easily could have swung the election
to give Gore the state's 25 electoral votes, and there would have been no need for a recount.
Even without Florida, adding Nader's 4 percent of the New Hampshire vote to Gore's 47 percent
would have given Gore a 270 to 267 victory in the electoral college...
[That said, then Bernie is another thing entirely. Bernie is not a third party candidate. Now
I wish voting for a third party candidate was plausibly a good decision because with a ranked
voting system then a third party vote would not be a throw away, but that is not how the two party
system wants things done.]
Hillary Clinton has had persistently high negatives and a habit of generating and attractive
scandal. She can't even generate trust within her own party, and performs particularly badly among
independents. I don't understand why anyone would view her as the "electable alternative".
HRC is not calling for a political revolution. If you like oligarchy then she is your gal.
If one is comfortably placed in the existing establishment then it is a scary thing to risk rocking
the boat.
JohnH -> RC AKA Darryl, Ron...
Yep, the Clinton Foundation should be rebranded: "Scandals R Us!"
When presented with the choice between a corrupt capitalist and an honest socialist, it
should be an easy choice for most of us. Actually, for the Wall Street Democrats here, it's also
any easy choice--you look for the most corrupt candidate, the one who lists Wall Street banks
as her top donors.
Great, you can predict the future. Well, so can I. Here's my prediction: Hillary Clinton gets
nominated. The summer and fall campaign is dominated by a nauseating replay of every Clinton scandal,
present and past. Not just the eight or so we know about, but others that haven't been let out
of the opposition research box yet. By November, all but the most fervent Clinton partisans
-- who can always be driven into a frenzy of paranoid persecution mania by talk of the Vast Right
Wing Conspiracy and whatnot - is in an "anybody but Clinton" mood.
Not BS. You are wearing partisan blinders. Clinton has been dogged by scandal at every stage
of her public life: some pumped up out of relatively small stuff, but several serious big deals.
There will be more. Why? Because the Clintons are both compulsive liars. That's why young people,
who are very good at sniffing out fakes and liars, don't like her.
But the older, "Clinton generation" of Democrats has internalized a particularly cynical and
jaded attitude toward routine public lying, having picked up the fixed habit of defending the
compulsively lying Clintons for so many years.
The Clintons could have done the Democratic Party a huge favor in 2001 by sailing off into
retirement after dragging the country through their slime for years, and by dismantling their
machine and handing the party off to something more wholesome and progressive.
Many commentators don't seem to understand that there is a major US organization called the Democratic
Socialists of America. They have been around for a number of years, and one of the founders was
Michael Harrington. This organization has published a fairly comprehensive statement entitled
Where We Stand, and does not advocate a wholesale elimination of market economic institutions.
As democratic socialists we are committed to ensuring that any market is the servant of the
public good and not its master. Liberty, equality, and solidarity will require not only democratic
control over economic life, but also a progressively financed, decentralized, and quality public
sector. Free markets or private charity cannot provide adequate public goods and services.
So, as I read it, the two main takeaways here are:
1. Any markets that exist should serve the public good.
2. Free markets alone are not sufficient to provide society with adequate public goods and services.
The statement also does not call for the elimination of all private ownership; but it clearly
does call for an expansion of public ownership, worker ownership and cooperatives.
A lot of people who are not democratic socialists seem to have very strong ideas about what
democratic socialism really is, based perhaps on the ideas of people who called themselves "democratic
socialists" in the 19th and early 20th centuries. But I think it's the people who use that label
for themselves are entitled to determine what they intend that label to stand for.
pgl -> Dan Kervick...
Love this line:
"Today powerful corporate and political elites tell us that environmental standards are too high,
unemployment is too low, and workers earn too much for America to prosper in the next century."
Most economists would say environmental standards are too low, that we are still below full employment,
and the goal of economic policy should be to raise wages.
So your group is critiquing right wing Republicans not your "neoliberal" whatever.
I'm for Bernie and believe he could beat Trump. But Dan Kervick and JohnH's arguments moved me
more towards the Thoma and EMichael direction.
The Republicans have gone nuts and are much more of danger than they appeared to be back
in 2000 before 9-11.
The parties are not the same. The danger for the Democrats is that they don't accomplish enough
in moving the country towards Social Democracy (Bill Clinton did little, Obama did some) and so
inequality just increases and politics gets worse.
Obama did not get a strong recovery and so Congress is Republican. He didn't prioritize Fed
nominations and turned towards deficit reduction too quickly.
EMichael -> Peter K....
There are two sides to that stone.
What I am saying, and in way so is Dr. Thoma, is that Sanders' nomination may well cause much
more Rep voter turnout.
And Sanders lacks the ability to turn out the black vote at all, and he has done himself no
favor so far in this cycle.
Black votes are a lot more important and numerous than any people who are tired of "neo-liberals".
Most of whom, if they had IQ above double digits, always voted for the Dem candidate anyway.
am :
Prof Thoma seems to have got this right. The definitions of Democratic Socialism by B Sanders
are in the context of Scandinavian countries which is really a more progressive form of social
democracy, e.g. higher tax rates on higher earners than other social democratic countries but
still allowing private property. But he was really a bit daft calling himself a democratic
socialist if he is just a more progressive social democrat. A democratic socialist does not allow
private property rights but allows democracy. This means elections every four or five years when
the government including themselves in power can be changed.
But that these terms can be misunderstood you just have to look at their use in history: Union
of Soviet Socialist Republics and the Democratic Republic of Germany (East Germany).
likbez -> am...
Scandinavian countries are pretty small homogenous countries. What is possible for Scandinavian
countries is more difficult to achieve is large states like the USA.
> This means elections every four or five years when the government including themselves in power
can be changed.
In two party system elections is just approval of two selected by the current oligarchy candidates.
And it was always this way.
"In two party system elections is just approval of two
selected by the current oligarchy candidates. And it was
always this ways."
So, every candidate must
independently find supporters and then use the supporters
to educate every voter in the candidates' electorate of
the individual candidates policies without respect to any
standard like political party or any existing description
of what political labels mean because the labels are
derived from one of many parties using the words in the
label.
How long would it take you to explain your political
position without referring to some label that covers how
you would decide on responses to social problems when
drafting bills or voting on them?
Then explain how you would find other legislators to
support and pass bills without assigning them labels.
I think two party system is what is called "polyarchy" --
power of a few. As Gore Vidal noted: "There is one
political party in this country, and that is the party of
money. It has two branches, the Republicans and the
Democrats, the chief difference between which is that the
Democrats are better at concealing their scorn for the
average man."
== quote ==
I subscribe to Kantian idea of the dignity in human, the
idea that everyone is entitles to survival as well as
thriving beyond survival. But does everybody is entitled
to equal participation in ruling of the state ? Or
election of state leaders? Which is what democracy means.
But at the same time the struggle for political equality
which is often associative with the word "democracy" is a
vital human struggle even if democracy itself is an
unachievable and unrealistic ideal (see The Iron Law of
Oligarchy). In some sense too much talk about Democracy is
very suspect and just characterize the speaker as a
hypocrite with probably evil intentions, who probably is
trying to mask some pretty insidious plans with "democracy
promotion" smokescreen. That is especially true for
"export of democracy" efforts. See color revolutions for
details.
Under neoliberalism we now face a regime completely
opposite to democracy: we have complete, forceful
atomization of public, acute suppression of any
countervailing political forces (not unlike it was the
case in the USSR) including labor unions and other forms
of self-organization for the lower 80% or even 99% of
population. Neoliberalism tries to present any individual
as a market actor within some abstract market (everything
is the market under neoliberalism). Instead of fight for
political and economic equality neoliberalism provides a
slick slogan of "wealth maximization" which is in essence
a "bait and switch" for wealth maximization for the top 1%
(redistribution of wealth up - which is the stated goal of
neoliberalism). It was working in tandem with "shareholder
value" mantra which is a disguise of looting of the
corporations to enrich its top brass via outsize bonuses
(IBM is a nice example where such an approach leads) and
sending thousands of white color workers to the street.
Previously it was mainly blue-color workers that were
affected. Times changed.
Everything should be organized like corporation under
neoliberalism, including government, medicine, education,
even military. And everybody is not a citizen but a
shareholder under neoliberalism (or more correctly
stakeholder), so any conflict should be resolved via
discussion of the main stakeholders. Naturally lower 99%
are not among them.
In any democracy, how can voters make an important
decision unless they are well informed? But what
percentage of US votes can be considered well informed?
And what percentage is brainwashed or do not what to think
about the issues involved and operate based on emotions
and prejudices? And when serious discussion of issues that
nation faces are deliberately and systematically replaced
by "infotainment" votes became just pawn in the game of
factions of elite, which sometimes leaks information to
sway public opinion, but do it very selectively. Important
information is suppressed or swiped under the carpet to
fifth page in NYT to prevent any meaningful discussion.
For example, ask several of your friends if they ever
heard about Damascus, AR.
The great propaganda mantra of neoliberal governance,
"wealth maximization" for society as a whole in reality is
applied very selectively and never to the bottom 60% or
80% of population. In essence, it means a form of welfare
economics for financial oligarchy while at the same time a
useful smokescreen for keeping debt-slaves obedient by
removing any remnants of job security mechanisms that were
instituted during the New Deal. As the great American
jurist and Supreme Court associate justice Louis Brandeis
once said: "We can have huge wealth in the hands of a
relatively few people or we can have a democracy. But we
can't have both." As under neoliberalism extreme wealth is
the goal of the social system, there can be no democracy
under neoliberalism. And this mean that pretentions of the
USA elite that the USA is a bastion of democracy is plain
vanilla British ruling elite style hypocrisy. Brutal
suppression of any move to challenge dominance of
financial oligarchy (even such feeble as Occupy movement)
shows that all too well
Politically neoliberalism. like Marxism in the past,
operates with the same two classes: entrepreneurs (modern
name for capitalists and financial oligarchy) and debt
slaves (proletarians under Marxism) who work for them.
Under neoliberalism only former considered first class
citizens ("one dollar -- one vote"). Debt slaves are
second class of citizens and are prevented from
self-organization, which by-and-large deprives them of any
form of political participation. In best Roman tradition
it is substituted with the participation in political
shows (see Empire of Illusion The End of Literacy and the
Triumph of Spectacle by Chris Hedges) which decide nothing
but provide legitimacy for ruling elite.
The two party system invented by the elite of Great
Britain proved to be perfect for neoliberal regimes, which
practice what Sheldon Wolin called inverted totalitarism.
The latter is the regime in which all political power
belongs to the financial oligarchy which rules via the
deep state mechanisms, and where traditional political
institutions are downgraded to instruments of providing
political legitimacy of the ruling elite. Population is
discouraged from political activity. "Go shopping" as
famously stated Bush II after 9/11.
There's something happening here. What it is ain't exactly clear, but we may, at long last, be
seeing the rise of a popular movement that, unlike the Tea Party, is angry at the right people.
When the Occupy Wall Street protests began three weeks ago, most news organizations were derisive
if they deigned to mention the events at all. For example, nine days into the protests, National
Public Radio had provided no coverage whatsoever.
It is, therefore, a testament to the passion of those involved that the protests not only continued
but grew, eventually becoming too big to ignore. With unions and a growing number of Democrats
now expressing at least qualified support for the protesters, Occupy Wall Street is starting to
look like an important event that might even eventually be seen as a turning point.
What can we say about the protests? First things first: The protesters' indictment of Wall
Street as a destructive force, economically and politically, is completely right.
A weary cynicism, a belief that justice will never get served, has taken over much of our political
debate - and, yes, I myself have sometimes succumbed. In the process, it has been easy to forget
just how outrageous the story of our economic woes really is. So, in case you've forgotten, it
was a play in three acts.
In the first act, bankers took advantage of deregulation to run wild (and pay themselves
princely sums), inflating huge bubbles through reckless lending.
In the second act, the bubbles burst - but bankers were bailed out by taxpayers, with remarkably
few strings attached, even as ordinary workers continued to suffer the consequences of the
bankers' sins.
And, in the third act, bankers showed their gratitude by turning on the people who had
saved them, throwing their support - and the wealth they still possessed thanks to the bailouts
- behind politicians who promised to keep their taxes low and dismantle the mild regulations
erected in the aftermath of the crisis.
Now, it's true that some of the protesters are oddly dressed or have silly-sounding slogans,
which is inevitable given the open character of the events. But so what? I, at least, am a lot
more offended by the sight of exquisitely tailored plutocrats, who owe their continued wealth
to government guarantees, whining that President Obama has said mean things about them than I
am by the sight of ragtag young people denouncing consumerism.
Bear in mind, too, that experience has made it painfully clear that men in suits not only don't
have any monopoly on wisdom, they have very little wisdom to offer. When talking heads on, say,
CNBC mock the protesters as unserious, remember how many serious people assured us that there
was no housing bubble, that Alan Greenspan was an oracle and that budget deficits would send interest
rates soaring.
A better critique of the protests is the absence of specific policy demands. It would probably
be helpful if protesters could agree on at least a few main policy changes they would like to
see enacted. But we shouldn't make too much of the lack of specifics. It's clear what kinds of
things the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators want, and it's really the job of policy intellectuals
and politicians to fill in the details.
Rich Yeselson, a veteran organizer and historian of social movements, has suggested that debt
relief for working Americans become a central plank of the protests. I'll second that, because
such relief, in addition to serving economic justice, could do a lot to help the economy recover.
I'd suggest that protesters also demand infrastructure investment - not more tax cuts - to help
create jobs. Neither proposal is going to become law in the current political climate, but the
whole point of the protests is to change that political climate.
And there are real political opportunities here. Not, of course, for today's Republicans, who
instinctively side with those Theodore Roosevelt-dubbed "malefactors of great wealth." Mitt Romney,
for example - who, by the way, probably pays less of his income in taxes than many middle-class
Americans - was quick to condemn the protests as "class warfare."
But Democrats are being given what amounts to a second chance. The Obama administration squandered
a lot of potential good will early on by adopting banker-friendly policies that failed to deliver
economic recovery even as bankers repaid the favor by turning on the president. Now, however,
Mr. Obama's party has a chance for a do-over. All it has to do is take these protests as seriously
as they deserve to be taken.
And if the protests goad some politicians into doing what they should have been doing all along,
Occupy Wall Street will have been a smashing success.
Sarah -> Peter K....
Bingo. Bernie does what Obama did in his early speeches: speak to the moral, emotional
underpinnings of Progressive beliefs. Despite seeing how incredibly powerful this
approach has been for the Republicans, we've had years and decades of Democrats acting like
cold technocrats, as if all of these policy matters were mere practicalities and politics were
really just the horse race that the media treats it as- rather than a matter of life and death
for many people in its outcomes.
I think people would be less skeptical of Bernie's chances if they saw, as I have, the number
of people on the Right and the completely apolitical types who've never voted in their lives
who are suddenly talking enthusiastically (often to their own surprise) about a politician.
This is a kind of excitement that Hillary is never going to be able to inspire.
EMichael -> Sarah...
And you somehow think that this enthusiasm will not be curbed after the attacks on
Sanders begin? And I am not talking about these stupid little so called "attacks" by PK, Chait,
Klein, etc. I'm talking big boy attacks backed by huge money and no reason whatsoever to pay
attention to any facts at all.
Sarah -> EMichael...
Yeah, I do. I think we're ready for another, "And I welcome their hatred," moment in
history.
The fact is, on both the Left and the Right people are sick of politics as usual. It's notable
that the 'big boys' with the money have been completely, totally unable to influence their
supposed Republican base this election season. That's because on the Republican side Trump and
Cruz- and even Carson- are tapping into real grievances and emotions. Do you really think
Hillary Clinton is the right person to tap into that current? It's a pity, actually. I like
her quite well, and I supported her against Obama because of Obama's relative inexperience -
and the fact that he hadn't been 'tested' by the 'big boy attacks' you refer to.
But what we need now is someone with genuine moral outrage who will say what so many of us
feel: the system has been distorted beyond its ability to snap back. It works for at most 10%
of the population now and catastrophically, often fatally, fails a percentage of perhaps twice
that. I haven't gotten quite to the point yet myself where I would refuse to vote for Clinton
if she won the primary, but many of my friends have. I think the tide has finally turned.
EMichael -> Sarah...
I'm with you except I think the math does not work.
Half of the REP base are stone cold crazy, and when the smoke clears they will vote for
whomever is left standing.
This country has no such amount of people who are as far left as it does those who are far
right. And what numbers there are do not got to the polls if their candidate loses the
nomination.
Sarah -> EMichael...
The thing is, the 'math' doesn't take into account the incredibly low voter turnouts in the
US. It wouldn't take a whole lot to create massive change if you could engage even a quarter
of the currently unengaged. What impresses me about Bernie is that he seems to be able to do
so.
"... What? The media has been saying for months and months and months and months that Bernie has no chance. The People vote that he wins a debate, the media says Hillary won. You clearly dont know shit. This has been an uphill battle the whole way. Last debate was the FIRST time Bernie got recognized by media as the winner. ..."
"... Sanders may be more attractive than Clinton to the Reagan Democrats backing Trump (who never really were conservative, more like wanting a labor party that didn't delve into social issues). ..."
"... Socializing health care and education is not radical, it is a rational reform inside the systsem, it does not go to the root (radix) and seek to replace the root, but only trim the branches (hence not radical). ..."
"... Calling the Sanders agenda hard-left (like this article does) is idiotic - the author is economically illiterate. Keynesianism, which is what Sanders proposes in substance, isn't communism, it was the mainstream approach to administering capitalism from 1940s to 1970s, elements are still in place in Canada, and continental Europe and they at least as as developed, as free and as democratic as the US. ..."
"... The media have completely disregarded him until his surge in Iowa, even with the New Hampshire polls out. Have you not wondered why the debates are held on weekends? Wassermann Schultz and the DNC are burying Bernie so people will vote on name recognition rather than policy. ..."
So tired of Hillary! With Bill out there goosing the audience for money and Chelsea
practically wetting herself with anticipation of her own career in politics in the wings and
Mother bird with private email strip tease front and center stage with the spotlight still on
her, this is one burlesque show I hope the curtain drops on sooner rather than later.
Debbie Smith -> Pete Shoults 26 Jan 2016 11:01
I guess you are a bit out of touch, because although the mainstream media loved to call
Bernie 'unelectable' until now, the regular people LOVE him. He will win in a landslide and
bring the US closer to where it SHOULD be, since it is 40-50 years behind in its policies.
HobbesianWorld -> Cath70 26 Jan 2016 10:55
delusional belief that he's going to get any of his policies passed in a GOP-hogtied
Congress is ridiculous. And he's yet to offer substantial plans for his utopia.
Clearly you would rather maintain the status quo--Wall Street's grip on Congress and the
ever-widening income disparity gap between the workers and the wealthy. You obviously are
indifferent to the less fortunate and want a war hawk in the White House.
Just because Bernie is at a disadvantage with the corporate media trying their best to
marginalize him and the DNC rigging the debates to get the fewest watchers as possible, I
don't tuck my tail under me and bow to those manipulative powers.
I am going to fight every day to spread his message and try to explain to an ignorant America
what is meant by Democratic Socialism (we are all democratic socialists to some degree unless
you want ALL government services privatized for profit).
Yes, he would need the help of Congress to pass some of his policies, and yes, the childish,
vengeful, self-centered oligarchic Republicans will try to block him at every turn, We the
People would be needed to apply the pressure on our elected officials. Don't be afraid of a
challenge. This may be our very last chance to recover our republic.
hcm1975 -> SN1789 26 Jan 2016 10:46
The terms used in this article are nothing compared to what Bernie Sanders will be
described as by the Republicans/Fox etc. should he win the Democrat's nomination. I can only
hope he is well prepared.
Brandon King -> brummagem joe 26 Jan 2016 10:43
What? The media has been saying for months and months and months and months that Bernie
has no chance. The People vote that he wins a debate, the media says Hillary won. You clearly
dont know shit. This has been an uphill battle the whole way. Last debate was the FIRST time
Bernie got recognized by media as the winner.
Jim Baker -> notmurdoch 26 Jan 2016 10:42
In recent American Presidential elections, motivating the base to vote is paramount. A
candidate that enthuses more party faithful to vote may do better, not worse. This effect
could also improve the party's results in Congress. Besides, Sanders may be more
attractive than Clinton to the Reagan Democrats backing Trump (who never really were
conservative, more like wanting a labor party that didn't delve into social issues).
Brandon King -> Phillyguy 26 Jan 2016 10:37
Taxes will be raised, yes, but the average American will save over $6000/year. You will NO
LONGER pay for medical insurance, instead we will pay $600/year extra in taxes. your health
insurance bill is likely $300-$500/month. We will all pay a smaller piece of the pie, so yes
taxes will be increased but we will be saving money. He already released his tax plan. Income
tax DOES NOT raise unless you make over $500,000/year, and even then its modest raises. Most
of the bumps are 3%-4%. If you make over $10 million/year its like 10%-11% bump.
What the fuck is up with people bitching about working to give Americans a higher standard of
living, what the French call Qualite de la Vie? Are you seriously content being the first 2nd
World country? We are NOT a 1st World, in fact there are lots of parts of the US living in 3rd
World conditions.
SN1789 Haig 26 Jan 2016 10:34
Nonsense. Right and Left should not be exxagerated. Sanders is excellent. But he is not
radical. Where Krugman talks Keyensian up until it challenges someone in power, Sanders is
genuinely committed to using the state to smooth out the hard edges of capitalism, especially
when the sector is a clear case of market failure, like health care and education.
Socializing health care and education is not radical, it is a rational reform inside the
systsem, it does not go to the root (radix) and seek to replace the root, but only trim the
branches (hence not radical).
SN1789 26 Jan 2016 10:30
Calling the Sanders agenda "hard-left" (like this article does) is idiotic - the author
is economically illiterate. Keynesianism, which is what Sanders proposes in substance, isn't
communism, it was the mainstream approach to administering capitalism from 1940s to 1970s,
elements are still in place in Canada, and continental Europe and they at least as as
developed, as free and as democratic as the US. The things Sanders wants to spend money
on (health care and education) would actually save the US money overall. Getting the profit
out of healthcare and education free's up the % of the GDP that can go to other things (like
infrastructure). The US over-pays for health care between 33 and 50%. Single-payer will reduce
that number, it will cost less overall. Anyone who says otherwise is a vicious liar.
SN1789 -> atlga 26 Jan 2016 10:26
Economically he is to the right of Nixon and far to the right of Eisenhower. Why exactly is
Keynesianism as impossible as cold fusion. Neoliberalism was unpopular in 1972 and in 1982 it
was the new normal. It is possible that Keynesianism was impossible in 2007 but in 2017 it
will be the new normal. Things change.
Steven Johnson -> Seamush 26 Jan 2016 10:25
Are you stupid? All other major countries have single payer, ALL other major countries. We
are the wealthiest country out of all of them and we have the worse health and live shorter
lives because of it. You are an idiot if you think this should not be fought for. Health care
will keep going up in cost until most people can't afford it. Bernie is the only one who isn't
bought and paid for, you really think you can trust a multi millionaire who made all their
millions from patting billionaires on the back? She got all most all her campaign money from
them as well.
She will serve them, not us. Bernie has a record of serving us not them, and he is not owned
by any one. So tell me, why would you trust a corporate owned war hawk over Bernie who has
always been on the right side of history? You would have to be a complete ignoramus to do so.
jabharty -> brummagem joe 26 Jan 2016 10:21
Ahead in Iowa, thrashing Clinton in New Hampshire, ahead of Trump by 9 points more than
Hillary. Non-existent? Young and passionate voters will turn out like in '08 and push him over
the line.
The media have completely disregarded him until his surge in Iowa, even with the New
Hampshire polls out. Have you not wondered why the debates are held on weekends? Wassermann
Schultz and the DNC are burying Bernie so people will vote on name recognition rather than
policy.
hcm1975 26 Jan 2016 10:18
Meet the new Bernie Sanders
Rubbish. Bernie hasn't changed one iota. The MSM - the guardian's ersthile Clinton machine in
particular - have finally realised he exists and are jumping on the bandwagon.
When it comes to political entertainment, it doesn't get much
better than presidential election season in the United States.
Foreign observers follow the race to determine who is best equipped to
lead the US – and, to some extent, the world – toward a more stable,
secure, and prosperous future. But in America, entertainment is king, and
Americans tend to focus on excitement above all – who looks better, has a
catchier sound bite, seems most "authentic," and so on, often to the
point of absurdity.
This is not a new approach, of course. Edward Bernays, the
father of modern public relations, examined it in 1928, in his book
Propaganda. "Politics was the first big business in America," he
declared, and political campaigns are "all side shows, all honors, all
bombast, glitter, and speeches." The key to victory is the manipulation
of public opinion, and that is achieved most effectively by appealing to
the "mental clichés and emotional habits of the public."
A president, in
other words, is nothing more than a product to be marketed.
And, as any marketer knows, the quality of the product is not necessarily
what drives its success;
... ... ...
In fact, it is Cruz who has made Trump squirm. In last week's Republican debate,
Cruz accused Trump of having "New York values," calling the city (explicitly excluding New York
State) "socially liberal" and focused on "money and media." Cruz managed not only to get a rise
out of Trump, but also to enhance his own appeal to conservative voters in the Midwest and South,
who view the city as a kind of modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah. (New Yorkers and many others were
also offended by Cruz's statement, not because the city isn't socially liberal and the home base
of America's media and financial industries, but because the pejorative use of "New York" has
historically been an anti-Semitic dog whistle.)
Appropriately plastic-looking, Cruz can, when
necessary, act as brainless as Sarah Palin (who has just endorsed Trump). But Cruz, educated at
Princeton and Harvard, is no fool. He is, as Bernays taught, treating his campaign as a "drive
for votes, just as an Ivory Soap advertising campaign is a drive for sales."
Trump is a showman who has captured the public's attention. But Cruz is a propagandist... The
question is whether Americans will want to buy what they are selling.
Sold to Wall Street and greedy as hell. One speech honorarium is approximately 6 average American
annual salaries (The national average wage for 2014 is 46,481.52.)
During the lest Democratic debate on January 17, Hillary Clinton made several populist comments that
aimed to show she is "one of the people" and that, like all other candidates, she would aggressively
pursue not only bank fraud, but would go after bankers themselves. As we
tweeted at the time , these were some of her more prominent soundbites:
"no bank should be too big to fail and no individual too powerful to jail"
"I am going to defend president Obama for taking on Wall Street and getting results"
"I go after the big banks, I am the one the hedge funds are up against"
"we are at least having a vigorous debate about reining in Wall Street"
And then there is the reality: as none other than the
NYT reported two days ago , Goldman Sachs alone paid Hillary $675,000 for three speeches in three
different states, a fact Hillary's main challenger, Bernie Sanders, has highlighted repeatedly.
As the topic of her speeches, covered her
extensively over the past year , has gained prominence, on Friday, Clinton was asked by New Hampshire
Public Radio how the "average person should view the hefty speaking fees?"
"I spoke to a wide array of groups who wanted to hear what I thought about the world coming off
of my time as secretary of state," Clinton said, defending her decision to make money from speaking
fees. "I happen to think we need more conversation about what's going on in the world."
Very well paid conversations as the following list of her 92 private speeches raking in $21.7
million in just the past three years reveals:
Of course, calling these "speeches" a bribe and payment for future goodwill, would not look very
good for a candidate who is so desperate to appear as "one of the people" so Hillary decides to pander
to the stupidity of Americans: "I think groups that want to talk and ask questions and hear about
that are actually trying to educate themselves because we're living in a really complicated world."
But at the end of the day, the question is whether Hillary - the person many believe is the most
likely next US president - promised banks, and especially Goldman Sachs, something very different
from what he is telling the American people now.
In an attempt to get some clarity, the Intercept's Lee Fang, approached Hillary after she spoke
at a town hall in Manchester, New Hampshire, on Friday, and asked her if she would release the transcripts
of her paid speeches to Goldman Sachs. /em
"... I have to wonder if Clinton will go to the next debate armed and try to shoot Sanders - shes just that desperate. ..."
"... Once the thin veneer of civility peels away the sheer ugliness of the Clinton save-your-ass campaign becomes clear. ..."
"... Also, if 5 minutes is all Clinton thinks Iowans are worth, then her head is already too big to fit into the oval office. Imagine, red-baiting in 2016! That belongs to the 1950s and McCarthyism, a smelly part of our political history. ..."
"... the more I listen to her and distrust her motives and her campaign tactics, the more I, who has voted straight Dem all my life, think that if shes the nominee I will consider Trump. ..."
We all knew it was only a matter of time before those few in the establishment with so much to
loose would start trying to scare us into voting against our own interests. Sanders wasn't a serious
candidate or a joke or novelty as long as he wasn't doing well. Same thing happened to Corbyn
and every other person who tries to change the status quo towards a more equitable distribution
of anything. Problem is it makes those few with so much seem desperate, even more corrupt and
comes across as a really transparent ploy to protect their own power and wealth at our expense.
Scare monger away ya bunch of ass hat's, it just proves how bad things need to change.
Unfortunately Webster provides no definition for "Democratic Socialism."
You see, Karl Marx was of the opinion that the capitalists will not voluntarily relinquish ownership
of the means of production. For this reason, he advocated a communist revolution during which
workers need to seize by force the means of production from the capitalists, and take them to
their property. He called it, I think, "the expropriation of the expropriators", in the sense
that by then the capitalists unfairly appropriated for themselves the surplus of capital that
workers create by their work.
And, in order to exclude the possibility that the capitalists again come into possession of
the means of production, Marx prescribed that after the revolution is necessary to create a "dictatorship
of the proletariat" or the sole authority of the Communist Party, while all the other parties
should be banned as enemies of socialism.
Thus, democratic socialists, social democrats, or simply, the socialists, are fighters for
social justice, who do not accept the idea of Marx's communist revolution.
Simply put, they believe that a multiparty system and political pluralism is a better environment
in which they can achieve their goals, rather than Marx's "dictatorship of the proletariat/working
class" and the one-party system in which the Communist Party has a monopoly of power.
Thank you for that. We would be so much wiser and kinder and richer in spirit if we aspired to
live by the words of Reverend King. He was a man ahead of his time and a man for all times. And,
in my opinion, the greatest American who ever lived.
How very lucky we are to have a leader within our grasp who seeks to continue Dr. King's legacy.
Once the thin veneer of civility peels away the sheer ugliness of the Clinton save-your-ass
campaign becomes clear. Sleazy politics is synonymous with Brock and Clinton should feel
deep shame for not speaking out against him.
Also, if 5 minutes is all Clinton thinks Iowans are worth, then her head is already too
big to fit into the oval office. Imagine, red-baiting in 2016! That belongs to the 1950's and
McCarthyism, a smelly part of our political history.
Nancy Elwell -> Dragonsmoke315
the more I listen to her and distrust her motives and her campaign tactics, the more I,
who has voted straight Dem all my life, think that if she's the nominee I will consider Trump.
Think about it. BUT I just feel in my bones that Bernie is the man for 2016 and am supporting
his campaign financially and vocally.
Nancy Elwell -> 1stneutrino
you don't have to scrape the surface very hard to discover how the press corp and the secret
service , the resident staff at the White House all say she is a hell detail posting they hate.
Vulgar, sewer mouth and really short fuse. No! not for me. When she speaks she acts and sometimes
her urge to be the natural harridan starts to emerge.
newsfreak
The Democrats were always the softer alternative of the establishment. And now that they have
a candidate that maybe could threaten the status quo they appeal to the fears and prejudices of
the brain-washed public at large to prevent any possible, meaningful change. Just like Holywood
used (and perhaps still uses) to make most movies for the mentality of a 10 year old audience,
the system in place breed Americans to fall for those tricks. Something that also has been happening
in the global village at large.
dhinds
This is typically dishonest behavior by the Clinton Political Machine and clearly demonstrates
why Hillary will NOT be the candidate nominated by the Democratic party, nor should she be! America
deserves better.
Dragonsmoke315
The response to criticisms of Bernie's so-called socialism should be this: "Define socialism."
I guarantee you that would make most of the anti-socialist pundits shut up. Most of the people
who throw that word around have no idea what it means. If the media would stop trying to hang
that label around Bernie's neck, no one would even be mentioning it. He rarely uses the term except
to correct people who misunderstand it. It is old news--or should be.
Dragonsmoke315
Hillary Clinton is the Jeb Bush of the Democratic Party insofar as she is terrible at campaigning.
To win in November, she would need Bernie's supporters to rally around her, which won't happen
if she runs a dishonest, mudslinging campaign.
If she wins the nomination by lying about Bernie, she will lose the general election because she
will have alienated a big part of the Democratic base. But she can't see that, because her instinct,
like her husband's, is to win at all costs.
I had forgotten why I so eagerly voted against her in 2008. Now I remember.
"The Guardian in 2008 published an article titled Clinton aides claim Obama photo wasn't intended
as a smear, highlighting that a leading Democrat was willing to utilize "dirty tricks" pertaining
to race and Islamophobia, even against a Christian man born in the U.S." http://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/feb/25/barackobama.hillaryclinton
malleusmaleficarum
Hillary Clinton's message has failed. Hillary's Plan B (lose Iowa and New Hampshire and sweep
the red state primaries in the South) is in dire jeopardy. So, voila - Plan C - smear Bernie Sanders
with a case straight out of the 1950s. Will it work? Almost certainly not.
Clinton Panic Syndrome, bring out the liars, make former non-liars into liars, and hire professional
liars. The Clintons, along with the war criminal, war profiteer, Blairs, can now leave the public
stage weighed down with their bags of gold that drip blood. Say "Goodnight Hillary". End the grift,
johnnyyesno
Re: "Not believing in Capitalism"
- Hahaha, so capitalism is a religion now, Hillary?
A "Capitalist Religion" would by defenition be a belief system in which money is worshipped as
a God...
It's amazing that such establishemnt rag as NYT printed such as article... Stresseing inseinsery
of Hillary: "Many of the Sanders supporters interviewed said they felt personally moved by what they
described as his sincerity. Bert Permar, 86, a retired professor, said he had gone to four Sanders
events and was now making calls to share the candidate's message.". Hillary has a real enthusiasm gap problem.
Notable quotes:
"... Maybe if the Times had actually acknowledged Sanders as a real candidate, and had been following and reporting on his campaign, this would not have come as such a surprise. This enthusiasm for Bernie has been there since he announced his candidacy. Your readers have been expressing it in the comments for months and begging you for more coverage of the Sanders campaign. You guys have just been too busy shilling for Hillary to notice. ..."
"... Bernie has stepped outside the cynical straitjacket of marketing and spin to speak with honesty and conviction about the real and profound issues that are deforming our society and threatening our future. The Democratic party and the country have been waiting a long time for a candidate of this courage, integrity and devotion to the public good. This is why we're rising up to support him. Ms. Clinton cannot project qualities she does not have. She's no match for Bernie. He's going to win. ..."
"... This race is not about the candidates themselves. It's about the American people taking a stand to get out democracy back. That's why establishment politicians will not win, and it's precisely why you're seeing the same level of excitement for insurgent candidates, on both sides. ..."
"... Clinton has been on autopilot to the general election and is only now realizing that the base isn't with her. Clinton's favorability feels more like general acquiescence than actual support. Millennials would rather stay home than cast a spurious vote. The Clinton camp assumes support from minorities and moderates but perhaps unduly. Even the female vote seems split in their appraisal. That doesn't exactly strike me as a coalition. ..."
"... Isn't it amazing what someone can accomplish when they start and operate from a position of integrity, and present the current American reality to the American people with honesty and passion? ..."
"... For thirty five years, we've seen our country sold off piecemeal to and for the 1%, aided and abetted by the sociopaths in the GOP, and third-way, triangulating Democrats. We've been conditioned by our sell-out politicians that we must accept a steadily diminishing quality of life and opportunity. We've been tricked into believing its inevitability, as the best we can manage . ..."
"... There are many of us who are not conventionally liberal who support Sanders, not necessarily because we always agree with what he says, but because he is the candidate of integrity and reform. All the other candidates with the exception of Trump are bought and sold by money interests that donate unlimited funds to superPACs, national committees, and shadowy political groups without any kind of oversight. It is very basic human behavior that when someone gives you something of value, they generally expect something back in some way. Hence the policies of the last 40 years that have overwhelmingly favored the wealthy and skewed national income upwards. The status quo is that the tail wags the dog in the United States government, with important political and economic decisions made on the basis of who has given the most to the leading candidate. ..."
"... Something tells me that Americans have finally had their fill of the Clintons and may not be able to fathom either one of them back in the Oval office, past shenanigans there notwithstanding. ..."
"... It's refreshing to see Americans Feeling The Bern after 35 years of right-wing economic violence that have systematically savaged the American people with corporate-sponsored extortion of healthcare, cable TV, internet, cellphone service, pilfering of 401Ks and pensions and endless tax cuts for the richest citizens and corporations in the land while wages, the safety net, infrastructure and public education were obliterated. ..."
"... Hillary has always been too busy cashing $350,000 Wall St. speaking fees to notice her own hypocrisy, insincerity and secret crush on the 0.1% parasites that have wrecked the country. ..."
"... Only the Times would continue to express surprise at Mr Sanders support when both wings of national politics are clearly being driven by a disgust with current political party leadership and the current way of (not) doing the business of government. It's an ego-driven circus and any candidate who is sincere (not doing that sincere thing) is like a breath of fresh air! Simply put, the Clinton air is stale! ..."
"... Why is every headline I've ever read in the NYT worded in way that down-plays Mr. Sanders and plays up Mrs. Clinton? The title of this article so clearly attempts to cast Mrs. Clinton as the continued protagonist in the events unfolding that it's almost painful to read. ..."
"... Commitment cards? See now, this pretty much epitomizes why Hillary is a turn off for me. It's as though she's using the Iowa caucus voters as chits to turn in for more money at the super-pac window. ..."
With a new poll showing
Mr. Sanders surging ahead in Iowa
, Mrs. Clinton and her aides have dropped any pretense that
they can ignore Mr. Sanders or treat him like a gadfly. They have become zealous and combative as
they try new ways to undercut his high favorability ratings.
... ... ...
Clinton advisers said they believed Iowa was a single-digit race and
have been warning supporters against complacency, admitting that Mr. Sanders's operation in the
state was better financed and organized than they had expected. On Saturday, they began trying to
undercut his electability with a television ad casting Mrs. Clinton as the strongest possible
Democratic nominee, even though some polls show Mr. Sanders would perform well in matchups
against Republicans like Donald J. Trump and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas.
... ... ...
A Sanders victory in Iowa would be a shock, given the institutional
advantages held by Mrs. Clinton, a former secretary of state and a favorite of the Iowa
Democratic establishment. It would also set off significant momentum for Mr. Sanders heading into
the Feb. 9 primary in New Hampshire, where he holds a slight lead in the polls.
... ... ...
Mr. Sanders's supporters point to his grass-roots strengths: He has
more than 14,000 volunteers in Iowa, and he has spoken to more than 40,000 people at events in
the state so far, huge numbers that include young people, independents and new voters who might
not be on pollsters' call sheets. (Mrs. Clinton's advisers declined to say how many volunteers
she had or people she had spoken to in Iowa.)
"I think his secret weapon, maybe his silver bullet even, is the young adult population that
hasn't been involved in politics up until this point," said Katie Mitchell, 28, a middle school
teacher who lives in Des Moines.
...many younger women who gathered did not share Ms. Dunham's visceral enthusiasm for Mrs.
Clinton, saying that for most of their lives she has been a familiar fixture of establishment
politics rather than an exciting new voice or an agent of change.
... ... ...
Many of the Sanders supporters interviewed said they felt personally moved by what they
described as his sincerity. Bert Permar, 86, a retired professor, said he had gone to four
Sanders events and was now making calls to share the candidate's message.
"I love to see him. He motivates me," Mr. Permar said on Sunday, sitting in the front row at a
Sanders forum on veterans' issues in Marshalltown. "I get emotional. It brings tears that someone
is talking about the issues that we should be concerned about."
Selected Skeptical Comments (Note the comments below are from NYT staff picks; the first 6
was top comments at the time I viewed them)
Bruce Rozenblit,
Hillary has a real enthusiasm gap problem. People just can't get excited about her. Last
fall I attended an annual neighborhood fair and there was a table set up for her campaign.
Absolutely no one stopped at her table to talk or sign those silly commitment cards. The two
people at sitting there were the loneliest at the fair and I live in a heavily democratic
district.
The reason President Obama defeated her in 2008 was mostly because he was a new fresh face.
Hillary has the same problem in 2016. We all know her too well. She represents the past. We
want a new future.
Bernie Sanders has been around forever but he has never been a part of the political
establishment that we all despise. Machine politics is killing this nation. Politics isn't
competitive. Candidates are anointed by the party machine or catapulted by big money thanks to
Citizens United.
Bernie is tapping into the same angst that Trump mines except he directs it with a positive
message and Trump uses the old GOP hate and fear message. The young people are flocking to
Bernie because they want better times. The old people flock to Trump for safety from perceived
external invaders.
Bernie has a real chance. So does Trump. Truth be told, many of Hillary's supporters view her
as the default candidate, not the preferred candidate. They really want someone else. I'm one
of them and as a consequence, I'm starting to get all Berned up.
A. Spencer,
Asheville, NC 13 hours ago
Maybe if the Times had actually acknowledged Sanders as a real candidate, and had been
following and reporting on his campaign, this would not have come as such a surprise. This
enthusiasm for Bernie has been there since he announced his candidacy. Your readers have been
expressing it in the comments for months and begging you for more coverage of the Sanders
campaign. You guys have just been too busy shilling for Hillary to notice.
Portia,
Massachusetts 13 hours ago
Bernie has stepped outside the cynical straitjacket of marketing and spin to speak with
honesty and conviction about the real and profound issues that are deforming our society and
threatening our future. The Democratic party and the country have been waiting a long time for
a candidate of this courage, integrity and devotion to the public good. This is why we're
rising up to support him. Ms. Clinton cannot project qualities she does not have. She's no
match for Bernie. He's going to win.
Kevin R,
Brooklyn 12 hours ago
This race is not about the candidates themselves. It's about the American people taking
a stand to get out democracy back. That's why establishment politicians will not win, and it's
precisely why you're seeing the same level of excitement for "insurgent" candidates, on both
sides.
The level of excitement is equally invigorated on the right for Trump, and more recently for
Cruz. The entire political system that's been systematically rigged in favor of plutocrats and
their corporate shells is about to be flipped on its rear.
This is precisely what Bernie has been talking about for 8 months, every time he utters the
words "political revolution", and man, does it feel glorious!
Andy,
Salt Lake City, UT 11 hours ago
Clinton has been on autopilot to the general election and is only now realizing that
the base isn't with her. Clinton's favorability feels more like general acquiescence than
actual support. Millennials would rather stay home than cast a spurious vote. The Clinton camp
assumes support from minorities and moderates but perhaps unduly. Even the female vote seems
split in their appraisal. That doesn't exactly strike me as a coalition.
This was a foreseeable scenario though. Clinton is her own worst enemy. She had the
opportunity to get ahead on Bernie's issues and took a pass. There was a legitimate fear that
she might alienate center-right voters in a general election for a "no contest" primary.
Knowing what we know now about the GOP field, that was a bad decision.
Now she's playing catch-up and the effort comes across as threatened and disingenuous. A
position that falls neatly inline with long-standing public perception issues. Sanders has a
real chance to win both States as a result. Even if Clinton ultimately wins the nomination, I
think a close race in Iowa and New Hampshire is a positive for her campaign. Perhaps she'll
learn from the lessons of 2008.
Dominic,
Astoria, NY 11 hours ago
Isn't it amazing what someone can accomplish when they start and operate from a
position of integrity, and present the current American reality to the American people with
honesty and passion?
For thirty five years, we've seen our country sold off piecemeal to and for the 1%, aided
and abetted by the sociopaths in the GOP, and third-way, triangulating Democrats. We've been
conditioned by our sell-out politicians that we must accept a steadily diminishing quality of
life and opportunity. We've been tricked into believing its inevitability, as "the best we can
manage".
Well, the big lie has run out of steam. In Bernie Sanders we see a candidate who reminds all
of us that not only can we do better- we deserve better. Bernie has motivated Americans in
remarkable ways, and reminded us that it is indeed our nation, and that our government works
best when it works for all of us, regardless of income and connection.
Mike Thompson,
New York 11 hours ago
There are many of us who are not conventionally liberal who support Sanders, not
necessarily because we always agree with what he says, but because he is the candidate of
integrity and reform. All the other candidates with the exception of Trump are bought and sold
by money interests that donate unlimited funds to superPACs, national committees, and shadowy
political groups without any kind of oversight. It is very basic human behavior that when
someone gives you something of value, they generally expect something back in some way. Hence
the policies of the last 40 years that have overwhelmingly favored the wealthy and skewed
national income upwards. The status quo is that the tail wags the dog in the United States
government, with important political and economic decisions made on the basis of who has given
the most to the leading candidate.
Hillary is the embodiment of this system, and Bernie is its antithesis. He doesnt have a
superPAC, he takes his campaign funding from the people and as such is beholden only to the
people. That is why I support Bernie Sanders and that is why I believe that he will win this
nomination.
A,
Philipse Manor, N.Y. 10 hours ago
The media, and that includes the esteemed N.Y Times, love a good train wreck. It sells
newspapers, ads etc. There are a lot of blank newsprint to cover, empty air time on TV and
digital media space to fill.
Clinton's story is colorful, at times salacious and occasionally borders on legally
questionable. When talking about her the media can include the philandering of her husband,
the elbow rubbing with Wall Streeters etc. ad infinitum, ad nauseum. So much grist, so much
filler. Monica Lewinsky's reemergence, Benghazi, even Trump's wedding have all been side
stories. These are interesting to read about and keep her in the forefront of the news.
Sanders, in contrast, has no skeletons, no questionable spousal wanderings, no nothing
except a message that seems to resonate with ALL ages.
I remember reading months ago that the nomination was Clinton's to lose.
Underestimating the appeal of the straight talking Brooklynite seems to be the big mistake
that the Clinton campaign is making , despite the fact that her headquarters is in Brooklyn.
Something tells me that Americans have finally had their fill of the Clintons and may
not be able to fathom either one of them back in the Oval office, past shenanigans there
notwithstanding.
Socrates,
is a trusted commenter Downtown Verona, NJ 13 hours ago
It's refreshing to see Americans Feeling The Bern after 35 years of right-wing economic
violence that have systematically savaged the American people with corporate-sponsored
extortion of healthcare, cable TV, internet, cellphone service, pilfering of 401Ks and
pensions and endless tax cuts for the richest citizens and corporations in the land while
wages, the safety net, infrastructure and public education were obliterated.
Bernie Sanders is honest and brave enough to tell America that Wall St. regulates Congress ---
not the other way around.
Hillary has always been too busy cashing $350,000 Wall St. speaking fees to notice her own
hypocrisy, insincerity and secret crush on the 0.1% parasites that have wrecked the country.
More and more Americans who have been burned by the 0.1% will be Feeling The Bern with each
passing day.
Bernie Sanders 2016
ScottW,
is a trusted commenter Chapel Hill, NC 14 hours ago
Bernie will eventually win the Democratic nomination and presidency. His campaign is from
the heart and he is the only candidate not bought and paid for by Wall Street. He actually
believes what he says. Take a look at Hillary's top donors and compare them to Sanders.
Banks/Financiers versus groups representing labor and the people.
Bernie does not come saddled with decades of scandal. He does not represent the power elite.
He is the only candidate who presents an opportunity of changing the status quo.
Bernie or bust.
Jack Chicago,
is a trusted commenter Chicago 13 hours ago
Never has a political campaign, in my lifetime, revealed so clearly where our media stand.
The NY Times has been a huge disappointment. Not because they obviously have pre-ordained a
Democrat machine candidate, but because their coverage and reporting has been so tone deaf.
This has not been reporting on, but steering the news.
Only the Times would continue to express surprise at Mr Sanders support when both wings
of national politics are clearly being driven by a disgust with current political party
leadership and the current way of (not) doing the business of government. It's an ego-driven
circus and any candidate who is sincere (not doing that sincere thing) is like a breath of
fresh air! Simply put, the Clinton air is stale!
William,
Vienna 13 hours ago
Why is every headline I've ever read in the NYT worded in way that down-plays Mr.
Sanders and plays up Mrs. Clinton? The title of this article so clearly attempts to cast Mrs.
Clinton as the continued protagonist in the events unfolding that it's almost painful to read.
Shouldn't the title of this article be "Bernie Sanders Quickly Closing Gap With Mrs. Clinton
in Iowa By Way of Hugely Enthusiastic Crowds"? How else can this continued contortion of
wording be understood other than a clear bias on the part of the NYT for HRC? What else can
readers conclude except that it is not only HRC who is worrying about the rise of Bernie
Sanders but also the owners of the New York Times.
j. frances,
denver, colorado 13 hours ago
I'm a 46 y.o. woman and my 49 y.o. sister and I are going to be at our Colorado caucus in
support of Bernie. We'll bringing cookies decorated like Bernie.
I've got bumper stickers on my car and bike and two Bernie signs in my window. I've already
donated over $400 (I'm a childcare worker so this is a stretch.). Bernie is the first
candidate I've ever done any of this for. I am passionate about his ideas. Time for a
revolution. Who better than Bernie to lead it? Game on.
Sarah Strohmeyer,
Vermont 13 hours ago
Commitment cards? See now, this pretty much epitomizes why Hillary is a turn off for
me. It's as though she's using the Iowa caucus voters as chits to turn in for more money at
the super-pac window.
Bernie doesn't need commitment cards. But he does need commitment because if he wins,
as I so hope, that will be only the beginning of a tough fight to preserve democracy, close
the income gap, guarantee truly affordable healthcare for all, and do what we can to save the
climate from further deterioration.
It's now or never, guys.
DLC neoliberals are dangerous and will not give up without a fight...
Notable quotes:
"... Although hes not as well-known as someone like Karl Rove or Frank Luntz, Al From is one of the most important political operatives of the past few decades. ..."
"... A veteran Democratic staffer, he thought his party moved too far to the left during the 1970s, and so, in 1985, he founded a group known as the Democratic Leadership Council, or DLC, whose stated goals were to expand the partys base and appeal to moderates and liberals. ..."
"... Under Froms leadership, the DLC staged a bloodless coup of the Democratic Party, and swapped out the progressivism of FDR, Truman and Johnson for the corporatism of the Clintons. ..."
"... Al From had personally recruited Bill to run for president, and the DLCs ideas were the basis for most of his policies. ..."
"... And even though it no longer actually exists (it folded in 2011) the DLC and its supporters still control the Democratic establishment , especially Hillary Clinton - Bill Clintons wife. ..."
"... The base of the Democratic Party is still progressive even if the party bigwigs have sold-out to the corporatists. ..."
"... They want real change, not Republican-lite policies pretending to be progressive. And so, theyre siding with Bernie Sanders in the 2016 presidential election. ..."
"... Bernies campaign is showing cracks in their junta and the coup that Al From staged more than two decades ago is on the verge of collapsing. ..."
Sanders is already beating Clinton in New Hampshire, and if he can pull-off a two-state sweep of
the early primaries, that would completely change the dynamic of the race.
And I mean completely.
At this point, national polls don't really matter; what matters is momentum, and if Bernie can
win Iowa and New Hampshire, he would suck up pretty much all of the momentum.
Now, considering the fact that Bernie Sanders does better than Hillary Clinton in a
hypothetical matchup
with Republican frontrunner Donald Trump, you'd think that the establishment
Democrats would be thrilled with these developments.
You'd think that the people who talk so much about "electability" and how important it is would
be overjoyed that Bernie Sanders, a popular and electable candidate, is moving towards the Democratic
nomination.
Apparently not.
Instead of celebrating the rise of a new star, establishment Democrats are freaking out about
the possibility of Bernie Sanders winning both Iowa and New Hampshire.
Case in point: former Tennessee congressman Harold Ford, Jr., who on MSNBC agreed with Joe Scarborough
that establishment Dems could recruit John Kerry or Joe Biden to run if Bernie sweeps both early
primary states.
Pretty weird, right?
Here Bernie Sanders is inspiring millions of young people to get involved in politics, and establishment
Democrats think it might be a good idea to draft two guys who've already lost presidential races.
Go figure.
But here's the thing: Establishment Democrats aren't stupid - they should be scared of Bernie
Sanders.
And that's because he represents a direct threat to the centrists who have ruled the Democratic
Party for the past few decades.
Although he's not as well-known as someone like Karl Rove or Frank Luntz, Al From is one of the
most important political operatives of the past few decades.
A veteran Democratic staffer, he thought his party moved "too far to the left" during the 1970s,
and so, in 1985, he
founded a group
known as the Democratic Leadership Council, or DLC, whose stated goals were "to
expand the party's base and appeal to moderates and liberals."
That obviously sounds nice in theory, but in practice it meant the destruction of the thing that
made the Democratic Party the United States' governing party for most of the 20th century: the progressive
values of the New Deal and FDR.
Under From's leadership, the DLC staged a bloodless coup of the Democratic Party, and swapped
out the progressivism of FDR, Truman and Johnson for the corporatism of the Clintons.
Instead of talking about ways to make the US a more just and equal society, Democrats now talked
about things like "welfare reform," so-called "free trade" and so-called "school choice," which were
really just corporate plans to privatize the commons.
The final victory in the DLC's takeover of the Democratic Party came when Bill Clinton was elected
president in 1992.
Al From had personally recruited Bill to run for president, and the DLC's ideas were the basis
for most of his policies.
Over the next 20 years, the DLC consolidated its stranglehold over the Democratic Party.
And even though it no longer actually exists (it folded in 2011) the DLC and its supporters
still control the Democratic establishment
, especially Hillary Clinton - Bill Clinton's wife.
Which brings us back to Bernie Sanders.
If his wildly successful campaign has told us anything, it's that Democratic voters are sick and
tired of the DLC-Clintonites running the show.
The base of the Democratic Party
is still progressive
even if the party bigwigs have sold-out to the corporatists.
They want to go back to the values that made the Democratic Party the United States' governing
party from the New Deal until the 1990s.
They want real change, not Republican-lite policies pretending to be progressive. And so, they're siding with Bernie Sanders in the 2016 presidential election.
As I said earlier, establishment Democrats should be scared.
Bernie's campaign is showing cracks in their junta and the coup that Al From staged more than
two decades ago is on the verge of collapsing.
This article was first
published on Truthout and any reprint or reproduction on any other website must acknowledge Truthout
as the original site of publication.
"Hillary Clinton took aim at Bernie Sanders' single-payer health care plan on Monday, characterizing
it as "turning over your and my health insurance to governors," specifically naming Republican
Terry Branstad. It's a pretty clear reference to the many conservative states that have refused
ObamaCare's Medicaid expansion - implying that Sanders would allow conservative states to opt
out of his plan, and hence partially destroy all federal health insurance programs" [
The Week
]. "This is absolutely
false." (NC readers know this from our debate coverage;
see this post from November 15
.)
Left to her own devices, Clinton wouldn't mention single payer at all
. Now that Sanders has
forced the issue, she lies.
The Voters
Myth of the independent: "As we noted in August, most independents lean toward one party or
the other - and in 2012, the majority of those leaning independents voted for their preferred
party's presidential candidate. (According to the book "The Gamble," 90 percent of Democratic-leaning
independents backed Obama in 2012, and 78 percent of Republican-leaning ones backed Romney.)"
[
WaPo
].
"[I]f Americans are indeed angry, unsettled, or dissatisfied, in many ways they appear to disagree
about why they should be angry, unsettled, or dissatisfied" [
WaPo
].
"Bernie Sanders has an 11-point advantage over Hillary Clinton among voters under 35" [
Vox
].
Let's see if they come out to vote…
The Trail
"MoveOn is endorsing Bernie Sanders for president after the liberal challenger to Hillary Clinton
won 78 percent of votes cast by its membership" [
The Hill
]. Granted, Ilya Sheyman is MoveOn's political director, but still: This is better
than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. And 78%!
"The Top 5 Reasons MoveOn Members Voted to Endorse Bernie (with the Most Votes and Widest Margin
in Our History)" [Ilya Sheyman,
Medium
]. #1: "1. Bernie's lifelong commitment to standing up to corporate and 1% interests
to fight for an economy where everyone has a fair shot." Not sure where the wording on those "reasons"
comes from, but contrast Clinton.
"[FBI] agents are investigating the possible intersection of Clinton Foundation donations,
the dispensation of State Department contracts and whether regular processes were followed," one
of [three] sources told Fox" [
The Hill
]. "One of the Fox sources also said that the FBI is especially eager to pursue a
high-profile public corruption case in the wake of what they believe was overly lenient treatment
of former CIA Director David Petraeus, who pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor last year for mishandling
classified information after it was revealed that he had given classified information to his mistress."
O'Malley was the intended sheepdog, not Sanders: "O'Malley's continued presence in the race
is helping Clinton. In Iowa we find his supporters would prefer Sanders over Clinton 43/20, and
in New Hampshire they prefer Sanders over Clinton 47/13. So to some extent O'Malley is helping
to split the anti-Hillary vote" [
Public PolicyPolling
].
"According to a Monmouth University survey released on Monday, Trump has 32 percent support
in New Hampshire, up from 26 percent when the same question was asked in November" [
The Hill
].
Summarizing Buchanan on Trump: What the Republican electorate says of Trump is what Lincoln
said of Grant: "We need this man. He fights"
[
WaPo
].
Watching MSNBC last night (what can I say?), I thought I noticed a very distinct change in
tone re: Sanders. A lot more "gee, he's really doing a lot better than we thought he would" and
less "what a weird old geezer whose got no chance." Anyone else notice? Probably just horse race
pumping but interesting nonetheless.
Whereas the WaPo seems to be doubling down on HRC today. (Can you double down if you are already
all in?)
Well this will sound strange coming from a jaded, cynical curmudgeon, but I'm actually starting
to think Bernie has a chance. The amount of coverage has been increasing (although as noted the
NYT, WaPo, and even the Grauniad (UK) are still blatantly biased). But I remember Bill de Blasio's
amazing victory in the NY mayoral race (managing to beat even Carlos Danger, husband of Hillary's
right-hand-woman :) and perhaps even more astonishingly - given how "extreme" he is deemed to
be - Jeremy Corbyn's Labour leadership victory.
Sure, HRC has oodles of money, the MSM on her side, the super delegates, and all the establishment
Dems. But this year above all is the one where those have the least value, and may even work against
her. In the UK the more the Labour establishment and the press railed against Corbyn, the more
popular he became.
The other factor working for Sanders is of course the internet funding. He is almost keeping
up with HRC, and soon her $2800 per head rich pals will reach their donation limit. Bernie on
the other hand can keep going back to his $30 and $40 and $100 donors.
And that FBI investigation into the emails and the Clinton Foundation… I've always maintained
that could be the ticking bomb. How many of those 30,000 "personal" emails Hillary deleted had
to do with Foundation business…?
Democratic Party super delegates are cockroaches, they'll kick Hillary to the curb the moment
the primary returns show the electorate moving Sanders' way. The exact same thing happened in
2008: her campaign staff went on and on about how many super delegates were backing her, yet,
come convention time, they swiftly abandoned her in favor of Obama.
I like to believe that the FBI has secretly been radicalized by all the activists they've infiltrated
over the last decade. It's so secret that they're not even aware of it.
The socialist wants to DISMANTLE MEDICARE? Does anyone really believe that when she says it?
And if he wanted to dismantle private insurance… Uh… Wouldn't that be a GOOD thing?
Man, Hellery is so desperate shes getting Bill and Chelsea to start stumping for her. They
wouldn't be involved if they thought Hellery was in a good position.
ObamaCare's neoliberal intellectual foundations are crumbling.
If we didn't need her to invent the internet, we don't need her to dismantle ObamaCare either.
The thing's foundations are crumbing on their own, though it sounds good she says she wants to
dismantle it.
"... Nearly 20 percent of likely Democratic voters say theyd cross sides and vote for Trump, while
a small number, or 14 percent, of Republicans claim theyd vote for Clinton. When those groups were further
broken down, a far higher percentage of the crossover Democrats contend they are 100 percent sure of
switching than the Republicans. ..."
"... The idea that Trump can't beat Hillary in a fair election is coming from the camp of 2% JEB!.
Nobody actually believes it. It's just the latest in a flurry of 'stop Trump' gambits. Trump would cream
Hillary, Bernie and any of the 12 Republicans left and the American people know it. ..."
"... In America these days, it is unorthodox to tell the truth if you run for President. At least
Trump says what he thinks, even if he is uninformed, opinionated, and ignorant. Better any day than
the incorrigible liars we get who will slit your throat for the chance to be a stooge for the deep state.
..."
"... The problem with Hillary and the rest of her ilk is that they are used to trading blows with
dance of words, where the Donald just comes in with a fucking hammer and whacks every motherfucking
mole that comes pops up in his way. ..."
"... while we may be at our lowest point so far as a nation, at least Trump actually provides some
potential promise of a change in the status quo. Him and a VP like Rand Paul could actually do SOMETHING
positive for the United States, unlike every single other candidate who would just run it right into
the ground every single time they open their mouth or sign a bill (or veto it), kind of like our dear
Magik Negrow. ..."
"... Is Trump the end all be all? No. But he is probably the best shot we have had in a long time
for actually making some kind of change. While Ron Paul or Ross Perot had better policy, they never
stood a chance because the MSM shuts them out. ..."
"... I was not intending to hate on Trump (though I can't stand Hitlery) but rather was commenting
on the state of affiars these days. It's all theater anyway.....it's just the cost of our tickets is
astronomical. ..."
"... Christ on a crutch, people, she ordered a staffer to strip off the headers and send it to me
in reference to classified material being sent to an illegal server in somebody's basement? ..."
At this point, it's become abundantly clear that Donald Trump's brazen rhetoric and unorthodox
campaign strategy (which primarily involves simply saying whatever pops into his head with no filter
whatsoever) isn't a liability.
In fact, the bellicose billionaire's style and penchant for controversy has catapulted the real
estate mogul to the top of the polls leaving but one serious challenger (Ted Cruz) for the GOP nomination.
Recently, Trump has taken aim at Hillary Clinton, calling her "disgusting," a "liar", and insisting
that she's "married to an abuser." His first television ad opens with a black and white image Obama
and Clinton who are referred to only as "the politicians" (a nod to Trump's contention that he's
trustworthy precisely because he comes from outside the Beltway, so to speak).
... ... ...
According to a survey conducted by Washington-based Mercury Analytics, 20% of likely Democratic
voters say they'd cross sides and vote for Trump. Here's more
from US News & World Report :
So if Donald Trump proved the political universe wrong and won the Republican presidential
nomination, he would be creamed by Hillary Clinton, correct?
A new survey of likely voters might at least raise momentary dyspepsia for Democrats
since it suggests why it wouldn't be a cakewalk.
The survey by Washington-based Mercury Analytics is a combination online questionnaire and
"dial-test" of Trump's first big campaign ad among 916 self-proclaimed "likely voters" (
this video shows the ad and the
dial test results). It took place primarily Wednesday and Thursday and has a margin of error of
plus or minus 3.5 percent.
Nearly 20 percent of likely Democratic voters say they'd cross sides and vote for Trump,
while a small number, or 14 percent, of Republicans claim they'd vote for Clinton. When those
groups were further broken down, a far higher percentage of the crossover Democrats contend they
are "100 percent sure" of switching than the Republicans.
When the firmed showed respondents the Trump ad, and assessed their responses to each moment
of it, it found "the primary messages of Trump's ad resonated more than Democratic elites
would hope."
About 25 percent of Democrats "agree completely" that it raises some good point, with an
additional 19 percent agreeing at least "somewhat."
Mercury CEO Ron Howard, a Democrat whose firm works for candidates in both parties and corporate
clients, concedes, "We expected Trump's first campaign spot to strongly appeal to Republican Trump
supporters, with little impact – or in fact negative impact – on Democratic or independent voters."
He continues, "The challenge to Hillary, if Trump is the nominee and pivots to the
center in the general election as a problem-solving, independent-minded, successful 'get it done'
businessman is that Democrats will no longer be able to count on his personality and outrageous
sound bites to disqualify him in the voters' minds."
MalteseFalcon
The idea that Trump can't beat Hillary in a fair election is coming from the camp of 2%
JEB!. Nobody actually believes it. It's just the latest in a flurry of 'stop Trump' gambits. Trump
would cream Hillary, Bernie and any of the 12 Republicans left and the American people know it.
Of course Trump will not be the Republican nominee, because as the softer options fail, more
stringent measures will be applied.
Perimetr
In America these days, it is "unorthodox" to tell the truth if you run for President. At
least Trump says what he thinks, even if he is uninformed, opinionated, and ignorant. Better any
day than the incorrigible liars we get who will slit your throat for the chance to be a stooge
for the deep state.
Escrava Isaura
Perimetr: In America these days, it is "unorthodox" to tell the truth
Agree. It starts by the title of this article. There's only TWO polls that shows Trump ahead:
What I would give to watch the Donald 3=====>SCHLONG<=====3 Clinton in a public debate. I'm
pretty sure her head would explode from the overload of no-fucks-given, lack of PC your a fucking
criminal diatribe that would come out of his mouth.
The problem with Hillary and the rest of her ilk is that they are used to trading blows
with dance of words, where the Donald just comes in with a fucking hammer and whacks every motherfucking
mole that comes pops up in his way.
And to your point - while we may be at our lowest point so far as a nation, at least Trump
actually provides some potential promise of a change in the status quo. Him and a VP like Rand
Paul could actually do SOMETHING positive for the United States, unlike every single other candidate
who would just run it right into the ground every single time they open their mouth or sign a
bill (or veto it), kind of like our dear Magik Negrow.
Is Trump the end all be all? No. But he is probably the best shot we have had in a long
time for actually making some kind of change. While Ron Paul or Ross Perot had better policy,
they never stood a chance because the MSM shuts them out. You cannot just shut out Trump
though. He shuts you out!
Look at it the positive way. If Trump ends up turning his back on us like the rest, at least
our Titanic will sink with a fucking circus playing for entertainment until the very end!
Occams_Chainsaw -> Welfare Tycoon
I was not intending to hate on Trump (though I can't stand Hitlery) but rather was commenting
on the state of affiars these days. It's all theater anyway.....it's just the cost of our tickets
is astronomical.
Creepy Lurker
Welfare and Occam,
I can't even comprehend why Hillary is still walking free at this point, and everyone is debating
policy? Really?
Where is the public outrage? WTF? Even more, WHY isn't this plastered all over? WHY isn't this
on the lips and keyboards of everyone, everywhere? THAT'S a bigger scandal than the shit she actually
did! Christ on a crutch, people, she ordered a staffer to "strip off the headers and send
it to me" in reference to classified material being sent to an illegal server in somebody's basement?
Have we really fallen so far into banana republic world that no one is outraged? And this person
is running for President? Fucking really????
Triangulation is the term given to the act of a political candidate presenting their ideology
as being above or between the left and right sides (or "wings") of a traditional (e.g. American or British)
democratic political spectrum. It involves adopting for oneself some of the ideas of one's political
opponent. The logic behind it is that it both takes credit for the opponent's ideas, and insulates the
triangulator from attacks on that particular issue.
Notable quotes:
"... women's issues, LGBT issues, gun issues but anything that involves economics ..."
"... It's like having a serial killer come out in support of you. ..."
"... These pols have played very successfully on out-groups' fear that their hold on legitimacy and power is fragile. ..."
"... I understand that, but there is something in psychology called "shared distinctiveness". LGBT groups are uniquely distinctive just as corrupt politicians are uniquely distinctive. And the more I see corrupt politicians talking about the importance of LGBT issues, etc, the more the two are starting to go together in my head. ..."
"... As I said that's not a rational process, but it's real. The mental connections that are formed mean that whenever I see LGBT activities/people/whatever I immediately think of all the corrupt politicians they're in bed with, and a lot of that aura of corruption brushes off on them. ..."
"... Lindsey Graham is a fine example .. ..."
"... Feminist concerns are not in themselves corrupt, but what the Dem party peddles is tame, second wave weak sauce feminism of the Betty Friedan kind. Basically, "middle class housewives are oppressed by being withdrawn from equity within the workplace," which was even criticized at the time (notably by Germaine Greer) ..."
"... the DCCC's take that you can be liberal on "social" issues while hard right on political economy is not at all in line with contemporary feminist thinking, which holds, more or less, that the economy is a social issue just like reproductive rights, workplace equity, etc. ..."
"... Hillary is a woman despite Hillary losing young women in 2008. ..."
"... Your assessment is more spot on, perhaps, given we can't even get Dems to commit to something as broadly popular as paid family leave. ..."
"... Unfortunately, its become part of the professional centre-left playbook around the world – you see it in many countries. Genuflecting to identity politics has become like right wing politicians pretending to be religious. ..."
"... Its a classic bait and switch move, but it also reflects a professional political class who have completely lost contact with their supposed base. I've met left wing activists who genuinely saw it as something more important than, say, protecting benefits for the poor. ..."
"... Unfortunately, its become part of the professional centre-left playbook around the world – you see it in many countries. Genuflecting to identity politics has become like right wing politicians pretending to be religious. ..."
"... They crunched the polling numbers, and strategised that they could replace them with the one big cohort that pollsters said were 'unclaimed' by other parties – working educated females 25-45. So they quite deliberately refocused their policies from representing working class and poorer people, to focusing on progressive-lite policies. fortunately, it seems that most working educated females 25-45 are too smart to fall for the cynicism, most polls indicate they will be wiped out in the next election. ..."
"... I do see signs of political awakening around the Western world, including here in the epicenter of the neoliberal infestation. ..."
"... Bill Clinton proved how profitable triangulation can be, and Obama followed that model from even before taking his first oath as President in January, 2009. ..."
"... Bill Clinton proved how profitable triangulation can be, and Obama followed that model from even before taking his first oath as President in January, 2009. ..."
"... Bernie Sanders isn't perfect, but he's so much better than Hillary in every way. ..."
"... I don't think the the neolib Dems (aka DLC Dems) want to win full control of the federal government. They want the presidency and only one of the two houses of Congress. This allows them to remain on the money train while blaming the Republicans for their inability to pass progressive legislation which pisses off their paymasters. ..."
"... What drives me crazy about Hillary (though it can easily be extended to other Dems) is all her talk of women, children, gun control, and LGBT rights (remember her tweet when gay marriage was legalised) while as SofS she approved arms deals to Saudi Arabia and the Clinton Slush Foundation took donations from it - surely one of the most despotic, anti-women, anti-LGBT regimes in the world. Not to mention the ongoing US-supported Saudi genocide in Yemen. ..."
"... Hey Team Bernie, in the next debate, if HRC brings up control, just have Bernie quietly but clearly say something like: "Forgive me Madame Secretary, but HOW DARE YOU criticise me on gun control when you were responsible for blowing up Libya and shipping arms to ISIS?" ..."
"... Also re guns and politics, if he can win the nomination, Sanders' position will help him in rural states. I have never seen a national politician address the differing needs between working people who feed their families with the help of a deer or two vs urban people whose primary concern is gang violence. All we hear is pro or anti gun and people have trouble imagining each others circumstances. ..."
"... She keeps getting re-elected because of weak opposition and a complicit local media. ..."
"... And all that cash she gets from the people she sells out to. ..."
"... And if she loses in the primary, so what? As far as I can tell, the head of the DNC does not have to be an elected official still in office. She of course is a "superdelegate," and under DNC rules, wiki reports that "The chairperson is a superdelegate for life." ..."
"... Isn't a name missing from the above rogue's gallery: Nancy Pelosi. If I'm not mistaken DWS was a bit of a protege. ..."
"... Obama's name is missing. He's the one who picked her to head the DNC. ..."
"... Obama never gets blamed for anything. Keep your fingerprints off and find a villain to blame instead. That's Obama's modus operandi and it's worked his entire life. He is beyond Teflon. ..."
"... Great news! How do you get rid of neolib DLC-machine third-way triangulating Dems? One seat at a time. ..."
An Axis of Evil inside the Democratic Party is suddenly on the defensive. Steve Israel was
forced to announce an early retirement for reasons
that are still murky . Rahm Emanuel can barely show his face in Chicago and, with the exception
of Hillary Clinton, all his cronies and allies are
jumping off that sinking ship . And now it's
looking like Debbie Wasserman Schultz's rotten self-serving career is finally catching up with her.
As we mentioned, Tuesday, Roots Action has a petition
drive to force her out of the DNC - with over 30,000 signatures already. And then yesterday,
CREDO launched another petition
drive to get her out of a position she never should have been in in the first place. I don't
like signing petitions but I eagerly signed both of these. The Democratic Party will never be a force
for real progressive change with careerist power mongers like Steve Israel, Rahm Emanuel, Debbie
Wasserman Schultz and Chuck Schumer controlling it.
...There aren't that many Democrats as transactional as Debbie Wasserman Schultz when it comes
to serving the interests of the wealthy people who have financed her political rise, from the
sugar barons and
private prison industry to the
alcohol distillers .
...Wasserman Schultz's support for the dysfunctional corporate trade agreements like TPP very
much motivated Canova to make the difficult decision to take on one of the House's most vicious gutter
fighters. "People are just tired of being sold out by calculating and triangulating politicians,"
told us back in October when he was thinking about running. "Wasserman Schultz has become the ultimate
machine politician. While she stakes out liberal positions on culture war issues, when it comes to
economic and social issues, she's too often with the corporate elites. On too many crucial issues–
from fast-tracking the Trans-Pacific Partnership to the war on drugs and medical marijuana and mass
incarceration, to her support for budget sequestrations and austerity– Wasserman Schultz votes down
the line with big corporate interests and cartels: Wall Street banks and hedge funds, Big Pharma,
the private health insurers, private prisons, Monsanto, it goes on and on."
women's issues, LGBT issues, gun issues but anything that involves economics
This is important. Initially I started out not having much of an opinion on LGBT and women's
issues. However, the more I saw corrupt neoliberal politicians advocating for these issues (wasn't
Obama trying to make Lloyd Blankfein the ambassador for LGBT issues or something a couple of years
ago?) the more I started associating them with corruption and evil.
This isn't rational at all, but whenever I see HRC or Obama advocating for some particular
culture war issue, the more I despise the groups and causes they're advocating for and the more
I want to fight against them. Why aren't these people in the LGBT and women communities vocally
and continually disowning these corrupt politicians? It's like having a serial killer come
out in support of you.
These pols have played very successfully on out-groups' fear that their hold on legitimacy
and power is fragile. That is particularly true with gay men, who outside a handful of big
cities, face open discrimination and risk of physical harm.
I understand that, but there is something in psychology called "shared distinctiveness".
LGBT groups are uniquely distinctive just as corrupt politicians are uniquely distinctive. And
the more I see corrupt politicians talking about the importance of LGBT issues, etc, the more
the two are starting to go together in my head.
As I said that's not a rational process, but it's real. The mental connections that are
formed mean that whenever I see LGBT activities/people/whatever I immediately think of all the
corrupt politicians they're in bed with, and a lot of that aura of corruption brushes off on them.
Feminist concerns are not in themselves corrupt, but what the Dem party peddles is tame,
second wave weak sauce feminism of the Betty Friedan kind. Basically, "middle class housewives
are oppressed by being withdrawn from equity within the workplace," which was even criticized
at the time (notably by Germaine Greer) .
bell hooks, on the other hand, doesn't mince words at all, when she shows how questions of
racial and gender oppression are expressly linked to economics/class and militarism. You can't
tackle any of them without tackling all of them, so the DCCC's take that you can be liberal
on "social" issues while hard right on political economy is not at all in line with contemporary
feminist thinking, which holds, more or less, that the economy is a social issue just like reproductive
rights, workplace equity, etc.
I wouldn't even say Team Blue is there. Pelosi and other prominent Team Blue women held a mock
panel to get to the bottom of why Rush Limbaugh was mean to a Georgetown Law school student who
was photogenic. This has been the sum total of Team Blue's defense of feminism since GDub except
to cynically conclude young women will rush to Team Blue because Hillary is a woman despite
Hillary losing young women in 2008.
Your assessment is more spot on, perhaps, given we can't even get Dems to commit to something
as broadly popular as paid family leave.
That said, I've noticed a denigrating tone directed toward what gets labeled as "identity politics"
of late, and I just wanted to make clear that current proponents of things like critical race
theory and what have you are more in line with the NC commentariat than I think people give them
credit for.
Unfortunately, its become part of the professional centre-left playbook around the world
– you see it in many countries. Genuflecting to identity politics has become like right wing politicians
pretending to be religious. Here in Ireland the Irish Labour party, in coalition with a centre
right party, used up every bit of political credit they had to push for gay marriage. Like most
people I was very happy it was legalised, but they were patting themselves on the back for this
while simultaneously supporting vicious austerity.
Its a classic bait and switch move, but it also reflects a professional political class
who have completely lost contact with their supposed base. I've met left wing activists who genuinely
saw it as something more important than, say, protecting benefits for the poor.
Unfortunately, its become part of the professional centre-left playbook around the world
– you see it in many countries. Genuflecting to identity politics has become like right wing politicians
pretending to be religious.
I think the explanation is quite simple, at least in the U.S. (which has effectively exported
its political dysfunction to other developed democracies). When the Washington Consenusus formed
around corporatism (neoliberalism for the Democrats, conservatism/economic libertarianism for
the Republicans), there was no longer meaningful economic distinction between the parties. So
culture war/identity politics issues are all that remain for brand differentiation. Obama's recent
Academy Award performance on guns is a harbinger of how the Democrats will run in 2016 if Clinton
is the nominee. Plus Planned Parenthood and gay marriage and a few additional poll-tested non-economic
issues that the professionals calculate will garner marginally more votes than they will cost.
If the Democrats here truly wanted to win they would nominate Bernie Sanders and run on the wildly-popular
platform of economic populism. (I'd say this is probably true in Britain with Corbyn and Labour
as well, and probably in France and Italy as well, where the nominal leftists parties have been
infected by neoliberalism.) It seems clear at this point that the Democratic Party is more committed
to Wall Street than it is to the middle class, and is quite prepared to lose political power to
keep its place at the financial trough. Obama's reign is solid evidence and the fact that Clinton
remains the frontrunner and the establishment's darling shows they are doubling down, not changing
course.
You are quite right in what you say, even if the processes are slightly different in every
country. In the UK in particular, I think there is a huge problem with the Labour Party in that
it was effectively taken over by middle class left wing student activist types who have only the
most theoretical notion how poor or working class people live. It is inevitable that they start
to reinterpret 'left wing' and 'liberal' in a manner which suits the people they socialise with.
I.e. seeing social progressivism as far more important than economic justice.
Back in the 1990's I shared a house in London with a lawyer who qualified in Oxford – many
of her friends were the first generation of Blairites. They were intelligent, enthusiastic and
genuinely passionate about change. But talking to them it was glaringly obvious the only connection
they had with 'ordinary' people was when they first had to canvass on the streets. I remember
one young woman expressing horror at the potential constituent who came and insisted that she
sort out her welfare entitlements, because thats what a politician is supposed to do. She had
simply never met someone from the 'underclass' if you want to put it that way. It was all too
obvious that people like her would shift rapidly to the right as soon as they achieved power,
they had no real empathy or feel for regular people.
In my own country, in Ireland, it is far more cynical. Its no secret that the traditional main
centre left party, Labour, realised it would lose its core working class base if it supported
austerity. They crunched the polling numbers, and strategised that they could replace them
with the one big cohort that pollsters said were 'unclaimed' by other parties – working educated
females 25-45. So they quite deliberately refocused their policies from representing working class
and poorer people, to focusing on progressive-lite policies. fortunately, it seems that most working
educated females 25-45 are too smart to fall for the cynicism, most polls indicate they will be
wiped out in the next election.
it seems that most working educated females 25-45 are too smart to fall for the cynicism,
most polls indicate they will be wiped out in the next election
I do see signs of political awakening around the Western world, including here in the epicenter
of the neoliberal infestation. Can the forces of reform win? Can the people take control
of the political systems back from the plutocrats? Can they do it in time to avoid catastrophic
global warming and socially-destructive wealth inequality? We'll see.
Bill Clinton proved how profitable triangulation can be, and Obama followed that model
from even before taking his first oath as President in January, 2009.
Bernie Sanders isn't perfect, but he's so much better than Hillary in every way.
Bill Clinton proved how profitable triangulation can be, and Obama followed that model
from even before taking his first oath as President in January, 2009.
True, but there is one glaring difference between the 90s and today. In the 90s one could make
a plausible if not persuasive case that the electorate did not want economic populism and was
content with the Third Way's neoliberal economic royalism. So, Bill Clinton's "triangulation"
was actually designed to secure votes and win elections (as well as pad Clinton's pockets, of
course.). Today, things are very different, with the people since 2007 overwhelmingly clamoring
for economic populism but the Democrats refusing to provide it and indeed castigating
those who want the party to turn left.
Bernie Sanders isn't perfect, but he's so much better than Hillary in every way.
No doubt. And I am very pleased to say that I appear to have been wrong in thinking that Sanders
was fading. I'm not saying Sanders will win, but it looks to me like he may stick around long
enough for Hillary to (very possibly) implode, since she is and always has been a bad politician.
"If the Democrats here truly wanted to win they would nominate Bernie Sanders and run on
the wildly-popular platform of economic populism."
I don't think the the neolib Dems (aka DLC Dems) want to win full control of the federal
government. They want the presidency and only one of the two houses of Congress. This allows them
to remain on the money train while blaming the Republicans for their inability to pass progressive
legislation which pisses off their paymasters.
What drives me crazy about Hillary (though it can easily be extended to other Dems) is
all her talk of women, children, gun control, and LGBT rights (remember her tweet when gay marriage
was legalised) while as SofS she approved arms deals to Saudi Arabia and the Clinton Slush Foundation
took donations from it - surely one of the most despotic, anti-women, anti-LGBT regimes in the
world. Not to mention the ongoing US-supported Saudi genocide in Yemen.
So I guess HRC and the others think Americans need all these rights but people in the Mideast
can just go stuff themselves. Because, you know, ISIS, and TERRORISM, and OIL and arms sales.
Why the fsck doesn't Bernie point out these contradictions? Hillary apparently is blaming him
for being "weak on gun control" while she has been a member of one of the most militaristic, bombing-and-droning
administrations since, well, George W. Bush's.
Hey Team Bernie, in the next debate, if HRC brings up control, just have Bernie quietly
but clearly say something like: "Forgive me Madame Secretary, but HOW DARE YOU criticise me on
gun control when you were responsible for blowing up Libya and shipping arms to ISIS?"
Also re guns and politics, if he can win the nomination, Sanders' position will help him
in rural states. I have never seen a national politician address the differing needs between working
people who feed their families with the help of a deer or two vs urban people whose primary concern
is gang violence. All we hear is pro or anti gun and people have trouble imagining each others
circumstances.
DWS is my Congressperson. She is adored by elderly Jewish women, reluctantly accepted by Democrats
(an overwhelming majority in her District), and loathed by all others. Whenever she appears on
local or national TV, she regurgitates an obvious rote memorized list of talking points that she
refuses to stray from. She will never engage in a true debate, and avoids answering any substantive
questions. She keeps getting re-elected because of weak opposition and a complicit local media.
I'm thrilled that there is a candidate that could derail her.
Readers should be aware that some years back a local politician used her picture as a target
at a local gun range. There was considerable uproar in the media, somewhat offset by a cottage
industry providing actual pictures of her superimposed over a standard target.
when she says it's more important for her to be in a leadership position fighting for
a public plan than it is to make a commitment to vote against a bill that doesn't have one,
I think that's a luxury she can afford:
DWS: I'm planning to reform for a health care reform plan that includes a robust public
option.
Mike Stark: Those are we're calling them "weasel words" over at FDL just because it does
give you a huge loophole to back out of .
DWS: Well I'm not someone who draws lines in the sand.
And if she loses in the primary, so what? As far as I can tell, the head of the DNC does
not have to be an elected official still in office. She of course is a "superdelegate," and under
DNC rules, wiki reports that "The chairperson is a superdelegate for life."
Wiki also reports that the DNC plays no role in "policy." Just writes the platform every so
often. Really?
While they live, they rule, and to re-coin an old legal chestnut, we have buried the Rulers
we unelect, but they rule us from their graves
Obama never gets blamed for anything. Keep your fingerprints off and find a villain to
blame instead. That's Obama's modus operandi and it's worked his entire life. He is beyond Teflon.
Part of that strategy seems to be a definite preference for staying ignorant and uninformed.
How many times has he claimed not to be aware of something going on until it's in the MSM? Of
course hard to keep up when one is on the golf course so much of the time.
"... Clinton has "brilliantly" identified herself as the hawk that she has always been, which puts
her sharply at odds with most people in her own party and most Americans of all political affiliations.
..."
"... The old Clintonian triangulation was driven by an obsessive focus on public opinion and on
finding mostly minor issues that obtained support from a large majority. ..."
"... Clinton's foreign policy posturing politically tone-deaf and focused entirely on what will
please people in Washington and a few other capitals around the world. ..."
"... Clinton is a card carrying member of the War Party who left her gig at State after her and
DP's plan to amp up Libya was turned down by Obama (perhaps the only sensible thing the guy has done,
to be honest). Her record there is miserable, and the book on the topic came out early to insure no
one would talk about in come 2015. She's nothing if not calculating. ..."
"... Clinton running against any GOP-er in 2016 reminds me of the Obama/Romney debates on FP, where
both candidates were in general agreement and preferred to take their commentary back to domestic policies.
A GOP caring about winning would be wise to nominate a non-war party candidate, but in reality TPTB
(a/k/a the GOP funding machine, which includes Adel$on, Wall $t & the huge defense contractors) would
never allow that to happen, so I look forward to HRC & Chris Christie both agreeing on every major neo-con
talking point through most of 2015 & 2016 while talking about tax cuts and "securing the border" (LOL).
..."
"... "Now it's true that the vast majority doesn't vote on foreign policy, and most Americans normally
pay little or no attention to it" ..."
"... Which is largely accurate. The opponents of aggressive interventionism should circumvent that
truism by explicitly pointing out the opportunity cost of War Party aggression. I.e., itemize other
ways the money largely wasted on World Cop exercises could have been spent domestically instead. Make
a list of necessary bridges and highways that could have been constructed with the Trillions squandered
in Iraq/Afghanistan. Additional physicians trained. Increased targeted medical research. Offsets for
reductions in the regressive payroll tax. ..."
"... Emphasize zero-sum. All of those other value added opportunities didn't happen because the
Power Elites preferred to shovel the money into civil wars and nation building occurring 5,000 miles
from American shores. Rather than fix Detroit and Newark, they preferred to fix Baghdad and Kabul instead.
..."
"... Hillary Clinton was a cheerleader for idiotic US invasion of Iraq, and the ill-advised military
intervention in Libya. ..."
"... The the woman who abandoned her post at State, leaving the Middle East in flaming ruins, manages
to pull her face out of the speaking-fee hog-trough just long enough to offer helpful advice regarding
the catastrophe she was instrumental in creating. ..."
"... So the next election will be Hillary the hawk against some generic hawkish neocon. Scary times
ahead. ..."
"... Well, she's probably right in expecting the GOP nominee to be more Hawkish than she is. Republicans
are more profoundly divided on war issues than Democrats, and the Republican spectrum is broader than
that of the Democrats on this issue both toward and away from interventionism. It's an interesting question
whether an anti-interventionist like Rand Paul would win over more anti-interventionist Democrats and
independents than he would lose in neocons and ardent Zionists. ..."
Clinton has "brilliantly" identified herself as the hawk that she has always been, which puts
her sharply at odds with most people in her own party and most Americans of all political affiliations.
That's not triangulation at all. The old Clintonian triangulation was driven by an obsessive
focus on public opinion and on finding mostly minor issues that obtained support from a large majority.
The purpose of it was to co-opt popular issues and deprive the opposition of effective lines
of attack. The goal was not to poke the majority of Americans in the eye on major issues and tell
them that they're wrong.
Clinton's foreign policy posturing politically tone-deaf and focused entirely on what will
please people in Washington and a few other capitals around the world. It is evidence that Clinton
thinks she can get away with campaigning on a more activist foreign policy on the assumption that
no one is going to vote against her for that reason. She may be right about that, or she may end
up being surprised–again–to find that her horrible foreign policy record is still a serious political
liability.
... ... ...
Selected Skeptical Comments
Chris, August 11, 2014 at 11:30 am
Stout analysis. The irony is that foreign policy is where Presidents have the most ability
to influence policy, so perhaps Americans should care a bit more.
Clinton is a card carrying member of the War Party who left her gig at State after her
and DP's plan to amp up Libya was turned down by Obama (perhaps the only sensible thing the guy
has done, to be honest). Her record there is miserable, and the book on the topic came out early
to insure no one would talk about in come 2015. She's nothing if not calculating. Most reporters
like Lewis find this brilliant, but in reality it's quite predictable and mundane. In addition,
she's a terrible manager.
Clinton running against any GOP-er in 2016 reminds me of the Obama/Romney debates on FP,
where both candidates were in general agreement and preferred to take their commentary back to
domestic policies. A GOP caring about winning would be wise to nominate a non-war party candidate,
but in reality TPTB (a/k/a the GOP funding machine, which includes Adel$on, Wall $t & the huge
defense contractors) would never allow that to happen, so I look forward to HRC & Chris Christie
both agreeing on every major neo-con talking point through most of 2015 & 2016 while talking about
tax cuts and "securing the border" (LOL).
Richard W. Bray, August 11, 2014 at 12:06 pm
I think Hilary's strategy is to talk about anything but the Clinton record.
What administration first "renditioned' people to be tortured in countries like Syria?
Who deregulated the banks?
Who deregulated the media?
Who gave firms like Blackwater contracts to privatize what should be military operations?
Hilary needs to have an insurmountable lead before the debates begin. Inevitability is her
only strategy in large part because she is, in contrast to her husband, such a lousy politician
on the stump.
So now she's attacking Obama. This could backfire, of course, because in addition to revealing
her innate bellicosity, it makes her look very disloyal.
SteveM , August 11, 2014 at 12:45 pm
Re: "Now it's true that the vast majority doesn't vote on foreign policy, and most Americans
normally pay little or no attention to it"
Which is largely accurate. The opponents of aggressive interventionism should circumvent
that truism by explicitly pointing out the opportunity cost of War Party aggression. I.e., itemize
other ways the money largely wasted on World Cop exercises could have been spent domestically
instead. Make a list of necessary bridges and highways that could have been constructed with the
Trillions squandered in Iraq/Afghanistan. Additional physicians trained. Increased targeted medical
research. Offsets for reductions in the regressive payroll tax.
Emphasize zero-sum. All of those other value added opportunities didn't happen because
the Power Elites preferred to shovel the money into civil wars and nation building occurring 5,000
miles from American shores. Rather than fix Detroit and Newark, they preferred to fix Baghdad
and Kabul instead.
Money in and of itself has no intrinsic value. So Americans really don't pay attention when
it's squandered by Power Elites on foreign policy overreach. Create a story though that tells
how the same money could have been allocated to tangible alternatives to War Party shenanigans
and Americans will be much more likely to start playing close attention, asking the right questions
and hopefully, electing the right politicians to represent their interests when their tax dollars
are expended.
James Canning, August 11, 2014 at 1:24 pm
Bravo, Daniel. And Matt Lewis is dead wrong. Hillary Clinton was a cheerleader for idiotic
US invasion of Iraq, and the ill-advised military intervention in Libya.
Let Them Eat Enriched Uranium, August 11, 2014 at 2:09 pm
The the woman who abandoned her post at State, leaving the Middle East in flaming ruins,
manages to pull her face out of the speaking-fee hog-trough just long enough to offer helpful
advice regarding the catastrophe she was instrumental in creating.
What a gal.
spite, August 11, 2014 at 2:43 pm
So the next election will be Hillary the hawk against some generic hawkish neocon. Scary
times ahead.
Philo Vaihinger , August 12, 2014 at 11:41 am
Well, she's probably right in expecting the GOP nominee to be more Hawkish than she is.
Republicans are more profoundly divided on war issues than Democrats, and the Republican spectrum
is broader than that of the Democrats on this issue both toward and away from interventionism.
It's an interesting question whether an anti-interventionist like Rand Paul would win over more
anti-interventionist Democrats and independents than he would lose in neocons and ardent Zionists.
"... Clinton has "brilliantly" identified herself as the hawk that she has always been, which puts
her sharply at odds with most people in her own party and most Americans of all political affiliations.
..."
"... The old Clintonian triangulation was driven by an obsessive focus on public opinion and on
finding mostly minor issues that obtained support from a large majority. ..."
"... Clinton's foreign policy posturing politically tone-deaf and focused entirely on what will
please people in Washington and a few other capitals around the world. ..."
"... Clinton is a card carrying member of the War Party who left her gig at State after her and
DP's plan to amp up Libya was turned down by Obama (perhaps the only sensible thing the guy has done,
to be honest). Her record there is miserable, and the book on the topic came out early to insure no
one would talk about in come 2015. She's nothing if not calculating. ..."
"... Clinton running against any GOP-er in 2016 reminds me of the Obama/Romney debates on FP, where
both candidates were in general agreement and preferred to take their commentary back to domestic policies.
A GOP caring about winning would be wise to nominate a non-war party candidate, but in reality TPTB
(a/k/a the GOP funding machine, which includes Adel$on, Wall $t & the huge defense contractors) would
never allow that to happen, so I look forward to HRC & Chris Christie both agreeing on every major neo-con
talking point through most of 2015 & 2016 while talking about tax cuts and "securing the border" (LOL).
..."
"... "Now it's true that the vast majority doesn't vote on foreign policy, and most Americans normally
pay little or no attention to it" ..."
"... Which is largely accurate. The opponents of aggressive interventionism should circumvent that
truism by explicitly pointing out the opportunity cost of War Party aggression. I.e., itemize other
ways the money largely wasted on World Cop exercises could have been spent domestically instead. Make
a list of necessary bridges and highways that could have been constructed with the Trillions squandered
in Iraq/Afghanistan. Additional physicians trained. Increased targeted medical research. Offsets for
reductions in the regressive payroll tax. ..."
"... Emphasize zero-sum. All of those other value added opportunities didn't happen because the
Power Elites preferred to shovel the money into civil wars and nation building occurring 5,000 miles
from American shores. Rather than fix Detroit and Newark, they preferred to fix Baghdad and Kabul instead.
..."
"... Hillary Clinton was a cheerleader for idiotic US invasion of Iraq, and the ill-advised military
intervention in Libya. ..."
"... The the woman who abandoned her post at State, leaving the Middle East in flaming ruins, manages
to pull her face out of the speaking-fee hog-trough just long enough to offer helpful advice regarding
the catastrophe she was instrumental in creating. ..."
"... So the next election will be Hillary the hawk against some generic hawkish neocon. Scary times
ahead. ..."
"... Well, she's probably right in expecting the GOP nominee to be more Hawkish than she is. Republicans
are more profoundly divided on war issues than Democrats, and the Republican spectrum is broader than
that of the Democrats on this issue both toward and away from interventionism. It's an interesting question
whether an anti-interventionist like Rand Paul would win over more anti-interventionist Democrats and
independents than he would lose in neocons and ardent Zionists. ..."
Clinton has "brilliantly" identified herself as the hawk that she has always been, which puts
her sharply at odds with most people in her own party and most Americans of all political affiliations.
That's not triangulation at all. The old Clintonian triangulation was driven by an obsessive
focus on public opinion and on finding mostly minor issues that obtained support from a large majority.
The purpose of it was to co-opt popular issues and deprive the opposition of effective lines
of attack. The goal was not to poke the majority of Americans in the eye on major issues and tell
them that they're wrong.
Clinton's foreign policy posturing politically tone-deaf and focused entirely on what will
please people in Washington and a few other capitals around the world. It is evidence that Clinton
thinks she can get away with campaigning on a more activist foreign policy on the assumption that
no one is going to vote against her for that reason. She may be right about that, or she may end
up being surprised–again–to find that her horrible foreign policy record is still a serious political
liability.
... ... ...
Selected Skeptical Comments
Chris, August 11, 2014 at 11:30 am
Stout analysis. The irony is that foreign policy is where Presidents have the most ability
to influence policy, so perhaps Americans should care a bit more.
Clinton is a card carrying member of the War Party who left her gig at State after her
and DP's plan to amp up Libya was turned down by Obama (perhaps the only sensible thing the guy
has done, to be honest). Her record there is miserable, and the book on the topic came out early
to insure no one would talk about in come 2015. She's nothing if not calculating. Most reporters
like Lewis find this brilliant, but in reality it's quite predictable and mundane. In addition,
she's a terrible manager.
Clinton running against any GOP-er in 2016 reminds me of the Obama/Romney debates on FP,
where both candidates were in general agreement and preferred to take their commentary back to
domestic policies. A GOP caring about winning would be wise to nominate a non-war party candidate,
but in reality TPTB (a/k/a the GOP funding machine, which includes Adel$on, Wall $t & the huge
defense contractors) would never allow that to happen, so I look forward to HRC & Chris Christie
both agreeing on every major neo-con talking point through most of 2015 & 2016 while talking about
tax cuts and "securing the border" (LOL).
Richard W. Bray, August 11, 2014 at 12:06 pm
I think Hilary's strategy is to talk about anything but the Clinton record.
What administration first "renditioned' people to be tortured in countries like Syria?
Who deregulated the banks?
Who deregulated the media?
Who gave firms like Blackwater contracts to privatize what should be military operations?
Hilary needs to have an insurmountable lead before the debates begin. Inevitability is her
only strategy in large part because she is, in contrast to her husband, such a lousy politician
on the stump.
So now she's attacking Obama. This could backfire, of course, because in addition to revealing
her innate bellicosity, it makes her look very disloyal.
SteveM , August 11, 2014 at 12:45 pm
Re: "Now it's true that the vast majority doesn't vote on foreign policy, and most Americans
normally pay little or no attention to it"
Which is largely accurate. The opponents of aggressive interventionism should circumvent
that truism by explicitly pointing out the opportunity cost of War Party aggression. I.e., itemize
other ways the money largely wasted on World Cop exercises could have been spent domestically
instead. Make a list of necessary bridges and highways that could have been constructed with the
Trillions squandered in Iraq/Afghanistan. Additional physicians trained. Increased targeted medical
research. Offsets for reductions in the regressive payroll tax.
Emphasize zero-sum. All of those other value added opportunities didn't happen because
the Power Elites preferred to shovel the money into civil wars and nation building occurring 5,000
miles from American shores. Rather than fix Detroit and Newark, they preferred to fix Baghdad
and Kabul instead.
Money in and of itself has no intrinsic value. So Americans really don't pay attention when
it's squandered by Power Elites on foreign policy overreach. Create a story though that tells
how the same money could have been allocated to tangible alternatives to War Party shenanigans
and Americans will be much more likely to start playing close attention, asking the right questions
and hopefully, electing the right politicians to represent their interests when their tax dollars
are expended.
James Canning, August 11, 2014 at 1:24 pm
Bravo, Daniel. And Matt Lewis is dead wrong. Hillary Clinton was a cheerleader for idiotic
US invasion of Iraq, and the ill-advised military intervention in Libya.
Let Them Eat Enriched Uranium, August 11, 2014 at 2:09 pm
The the woman who abandoned her post at State, leaving the Middle East in flaming ruins,
manages to pull her face out of the speaking-fee hog-trough just long enough to offer helpful
advice regarding the catastrophe she was instrumental in creating.
What a gal.
spite, August 11, 2014 at 2:43 pm
So the next election will be Hillary the hawk against some generic hawkish neocon. Scary
times ahead.
Philo Vaihinger , August 12, 2014 at 11:41 am
Well, she's probably right in expecting the GOP nominee to be more Hawkish than she is.
Republicans are more profoundly divided on war issues than Democrats, and the Republican spectrum
is broader than that of the Democrats on this issue both toward and away from interventionism.
It's an interesting question whether an anti-interventionist like Rand Paul would win over more
anti-interventionist Democrats and independents than he would lose in neocons and ardent Zionists.
Can't disagree with this message from the Iranian Foreign Minister..
"Saudi Arabia can either continue supporting extremist terrorists and promoting
sectarian hatred, or it can opt for good neighborliness and play a constructive role
in promoting regional stability, however; Iran hopes that Saudi Arabia will be
persuaded to heed the call of reason,"
Zarif said that there are indications that some in Saudi Arabia are on a mission
to drag the entire region to conflict; fearing that removal of the smokescreen of the
manufactured Iranian nuclear threat would expose the real global threat posed by
extremists and their sponsors, according to IRNA.
The Iranian foreign minister recalled that those involved in extremist carnage and
most members of Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, ISIL and Al-Nusra Front being either Saudi
nationals, or otherwise brainwashed by petro-financed demagogues, who have promoted
an anti-Islamic message of hatred, exclusion and sectarianism across the globe for
decades.
"... A lot fuss over a state that has less than .2% of the nations population. ..."
"... Hitler reincarnated? Hitler hated Slavic peoples. Trump has married two Slavic women and has half-Slavic children. Hitler famously hated Jews. Trump has Jewish grandchildren. His daughter Ivanka married an observant Jewish man and they have several children. I could list much, much more, but you get my point. ..."
"... Before liberal Democrats flock to Hillary Clinton they should remember she stands firmly to Bernies right on Wall Street reform, healthcare, campaign finance reform, foreign interventionism, education policy and basically every issue of consequence. ..."
"... He has consistently shown the courage to go where he knows he is on hostile territory. ..."
"... Trump is bold, he is a brilliant campaigner. His recent Instragram ad featuring the Clintons was clever, vicious and funny all at the same time. This man is unafraid to get down and in the trenches and fight fire with fire. I like it. I like it a lot. ..."
"... Like East Germany? Obviously Mr. Jacobs never was in East Germany. I was there in 1964. First of all, there would not have been a contested election. Secondly, protesters would have lost more than their coats. ..."
"... But this is not journalism as the headline suggests. It is a well-crafted hit piece. ..."
"... I would like to see Obama, Hillary, Sanders, Cruz, Rubio, and Deer-in-the-headlights-Jeb! have the same kinds of rallies that Trump has. They would have an extremely difficult time. Actually, it would be kinda hilarious. ..."
"... And, compared to many other Trump gatherings, this one was very small, about 1400 people. I love like to see Hillary talk to, say, 10,000 people without any script.... and then take unscreened questions, as Trump so often does. ..."
"... This undoubtedly has more than a little to do with the states very small population: there are 25 cities in the US with populations greater than Vermonts 625,000. ..."
"... As the article suggested, Sanders policies are not universally shared - but Sanders is personally very well liked and trusted even by people would always vote generic Republican over generic Democrat. ..."
"... I wonder if the gentleman realizes the irony that Trump made his money the old fashioned way , he inherited it. ..."
A lot fuss over a state that has less than .2% of the nation's population.
On a lighter
note, why isn't the Guardian covering the campaign of Vermin Supreme. He's more realistic then
the two front runners.
Hitler reincarnated? Hitler hated Slavic peoples. Trump has married two Slavic women and has
half-Slavic children. Hitler famously hated Jews. Trump has Jewish grandchildren. His daughter
Ivanka married an observant Jewish man and they have several children. I could list much, much
more, but you get my point.
Bernie "I don't have a super PAC, I don't even have a backpack" Sanders, England's favorite "socialist,"
is just as big a gun nut as Donald Trump or any other Republican. He has a 100% rating from the
NRA.
The following is from Slate which is a more reliable source of information than the Guardian.
But before liberal Democrats flock to Sanders, they should remember that the Vermont senator stands
firmly to Clinton's right on one issue of overwhelming importance to the Democratic base: gun
control. During his time in Congress, Sanders opposed several moderate gun control bills. He also
supported the most odious NRA–backed law in recent memory-one that may block Sandy Hook families
from winning a lawsuit against the manufacturer of the gun used to massacre their children.
Before liberal Democrats flock to Hillary Clinton they should remember she stands firmly to
Bernie's right on Wall Street reform, healthcare, campaign finance reform, foreign interventionism,
education policy and basically every issue of consequence.
Single issue voting is dumb, and Bernie's stance on gun control is not that of an NRA stooge,
anyway. Holding manufacturers responsible for gun violence is one of the stupidest ideas ever
to come from the simple minded American liberal, and I'm quite glad the man voted against it.
Trump's charisma (or whatever you want to call it!) attracts people who want to come out of the
shadows and support him while he flaunts their racist views and fears in public. Trump isn't conning
his supporters, his fans are happy they get to hear what they've been thinking all along. Thinking
that this crap is good for the country? The Republican peons are fooling themselves. Unfortunately
Democrats are fooling themselves, too, thinking members of their own party are not like Trump's
fans.
Donald Trump has balls as big as some planets.
He has consistently shown the courage to go
where he knows he is on hostile territory.
The magazines, Rolling Stone and Esquire, both
who did hit pieces on him. He will go on any talk show on MSNBC, ABC, CBS, where he is met with
furious indignation and disrespect. Towns like Burlington VT which is clearly Sanders territory.
Trump is bold, he is a brilliant campaigner. His recent Instragram ad featuring the Clintons
was clever, vicious and funny all at the same time. This man is unafraid to get down and in the
trenches and fight fire with fire. I like it. I like it a lot.
This article creates a false narrative that implies that there is a vast right-wing movement in
Vermont. It's, therefore, worth reiterating that Bernie won his last state-wide election with
71% of the vote.
Much as I like the Guardian, they always run click-bait articles like this. Anti-Americanism really
sells on this board, so they make sure to feature highly distorted articles that confirm their
readers' prejudices against Americans. It's almost a sport on here. Goes with the territory.
His rise is not the fringe right's fault. It's the left's fault. Let me say it again, it's the
left's fault. The Democrats should not have pursued and maintained the open border policy and
repetitive amnesty that we've been living with for decades. Without that issue, he'd have dropped
out by now. Instead, the Democrats thought they were buying all future elections with unrestricted
immigration - and no doubt they sure have bought a lot of votes. The consequence of that decision,
however, was to empower the far right platform as the broader platform that Americans of many
different backgrounds rally around. I've said it before and I'll say it again, the longer this
country waits to seriously deal with the issue of illegal immigration, the louder and more extreme
our leaders will become on the issue.
The Trumpaloosa performance opposite Bernie's headquarters in Burlington, VT is so telling.
The Donald and Hillary must be worried for them to go to Bernie's turf so dramatically.
Trump's main purpose is to knock out Bernie (who's for the 99%) for Hillary's sake as the two
COLLUDE toward keeping their billionaire (for the 1%) taxes minimal.
Let Bernie say it best:
"Donald Trump and I finally agree on something. He wants to run against me. I want to run
against him. It would be an extraordinary campaign and I am confident I would win.
The American people will not support a candidate trying to divide us up by where we came
from. They will not support a candidate who does not favor raising the minimum wage and who
thinks wages in the country are too high. They will not support a candidate who thinks climate
change is a hoax invented by the Chinese. They will not support a candidate who wants to give
huge tax breaks to billionaires like himself."
Bernie is already gathering the critical mass that will elect him over Hillary
as indicated
by this recent Quinnipiac University poll showing that Sanders outperformed Trump 51 percent to
38 percent:
"I work for myself, not other people" this quote succinctly expresses the culture of the extremists
of the right wing. Isolated, no sense of connection to others, certainly not those less fortunate
than themselves. Not inclined to make any contribution to the society they live in. This also
illustrates the effectiveness of the brainwashing perpetrated by those who benefit from people
who adhere to this almost paranoid mindset.
AND - Trump's worth is almost exactly the same as the point at which he inherited it - adjusted
for actual today's value -- In other words he has done a lot of 'deals' but accomplished nothing
very much - that point must make him so mad --
I am betting he retires every night after having a good shower to rid himself of the stink
from the 'low life' he has been hanging around with all day - that's what I think he really thinks
of all these people who love him --
" Trump is a little bit more high class" - this person has no concept of what high-class is -
Trump is totally classless - his language skills are minimal, he talks rather like Sarah Palin,
he is tacky & thinks his million-cost-gold-encrusted apartment is 'class' ? - hah --
Like East Germany? Obviously Mr. Jacobs never was in East Germany. I was there in 1964. First
of all, there would not have been a contested election. Secondly, protesters would have lost more
than their coats.
I probably am as scornful of Mr. Trump as is Mr. Jacobs.
But this is
not journalism as the headline suggests. It is a well-crafted hit piece.
This Trump rally took place at the same time Obama was having his very carefully staged and controlled
so-called "town hall".
I would like to see Obama, Hillary, Sanders, Cruz, Rubio, and Deer-in-the-headlights-Jeb!
have the same kinds of rallies that Trump has. They would have an extremely difficult time. Actually,
it would be kinda hilarious.
And, compared to many other Trump gatherings, this one was very small, about 1400 people.
I love like to see Hillary talk to, say, 10,000 people without any script.... and then take unscreened
questions, as Trump so often does.
Vermont is a bad place to hold a rally for divisiveness. It still bipartisan in an old-fashioned
way: rather than being split down the middle, people tend to pick who they vote for candidate
by candidate. I don't know many people who vote a straight ticket. A lot of people who voted for
the current Democratic governor, who is retiring, will vote for the Republican lieutenant governor
as his successor because he's generally thought to have done a good job.
This undoubtedly has more than a little to do with the state's very small population: there
are 25 cities in the US with populations greater than Vermont's 625,000.
If you're not housebound
sooner or later you'll meet the governor and both US senators.
As the article suggested, Sanders'
policies are not universally shared - but Sanders is personally very well liked and trusted even
by people would always vote generic Republican over generic Democrat.
Unlike Sanders, Trump knew "nothing was free, someone's got to pay for it."
I wonder if the gentleman realizes the irony that Trump made his money the "old fashioned
way", he inherited it.
The textbook example of getting money for nothing. Never mind the
fact that he has filed multiple business bankruptcies, where he ended up getting goods and services
"for nothing" by screwing his creditors...
This is one of the few article where you can get real staff about positions, not personality related
gossip like BusinessWeek and other rags feed to lemmings.
A cornerstone of Sanders's campaign is to fight the increasing
wealth
inequality in the United States:
What we have seen is that while the
average person is working
longer hours for lower wages, we have seen a huge increase in income and wealth inequality, which
is now reaching obscene levels. This is a rigged
economy
, which works for the rich and the powerful, and is
not working
for ordinary Americans … You know, this country just does not belong to a handful of
billionaires .
In July 2015 Sanders introduced legislation that would incrementally increase the federal
minimum wage to $15 an hour
by the year 2020.
[10]
Taxes
Sanders supports repeal of some of the tax deductions that benefit hedge funds and corporations,
and would raise taxes on capital gains and the wealthiest one percent of Americans. He would use
some of the added revenues to lower the taxes of the middle and lower classes.[11][12] Sanders has
suggested that he would be open to a 90% top marginal tax rate (a rate that last existed during the
years after World War II) for the wealthiest earners,[13] and has proposed a top marginal rate of
65% for the federal estate tax, up from the current 40% rate.[14]
Wall Street reform
On May 6, 2015, Sanders introduced legislation to break up "too big to fail" financial institutions.
With three of the four banks that were bailed out during the 2007–08 Global Financial Crisis now
larger than they were then, Sanders believes that "no single financial institution should have holdings
so extensive that its failure would send the world economy into crisis. If an institution is too
big to fail, it is too big to exist."[15][16] As a representative from Vermont, Sanders opposed the
Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act, signed into law in 1999 by then president Bill Clinton, which repealed the
provision of the Glass–Steagall Act that prevents any financial institution from acting as both a
securities firm and a commercial bank. Sanders supports legislation sponsored by Senators Elizabeth
Warren (D-Mass.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) to re-instate Glass–Steagall.[17]
Trade
Sanders is opposed to the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, which he has called "a continuation
of other disastrous trade agreements, like NAFTA, CAFTA, and permanent normal trade relations with
China." He has said he believes Americans need to rebuild their own manufacturing base by using American
factories and supporting decent-paying jobs for American labor rather than outsourcing to China and
other countries.[18][19]
Jobs
Saying "America once led the world in building and maintaining a nationwide network of safe and
reliable bridges and roads. Today, nearly a quarter of the nation's 600,000 bridges have been designated
as structurally deficient or functionally obsolete...Almost one-third of America's major roads are
in poor or mediocre condition...," Sanders has introduced amendments to Senate bills (S.Amendt.323)
that promote the creation of millions of middle-class jobs by investing in infrastructure, paid for
by closing loopholes in the corporate and international tax system.[20][21] He also supports legislation
that would make it easier for workers to join or form a union.[22] Sanders' campaign website also
has focused on the concerns of both the long-term unemployed and the underemployed, citing that "the
real unemployment rate is much higher than the "official" figure typically reported in the newspapers.
When you include workers who have given up looking for jobs, or those who are working part-time when
they want to work full-time, the real number is much higher than official figures would suggest."[23]
Employee ownership
Sanders supports the establishment of worker-owned cooperatives and introduced legislation in
June 2014 that would aid workers who wanted to "form their own businesses or to set up worker-owned
cooperatives."[22][24][25] As early as 1976, Sanders was a proponent of workplace democracy, saying,
"I believe that, in the long run, major industries in this state and nation should be publicly owned
and controlled by the workers themselves."[26]
Offshore tax havens
Noting that American corporations are collectively holding more than $1 trillion in profits in
offshore tax haven countries, Sanders has introduced legislation that would crack down on offshore
tax havens by requiring companies to pay the top U.S. corporate tax rate on profits held abroad.[27]
On his website Sanders offers examples of large American companies that paid no federal taxes and
even received tax refunds, with many of them receiving large amounts in financial assistance during
the recent financial crisis and continuing to receive billions in subsidies.[28] Sanders feels this
is unfair and damages America's economy, believing the money used for refunds and subsidies should
instead be invested in American small businesses and the working people.[29]
"... "We are helpless and not being able to do anything against this deliberate destruction to the oil installations. NOC urges all faithful and honorable people of this homeland to hurry to rescue what is left from our resources before it is too late." ..."
"... ''death pursues the native in everyplace where the european(american) sets foot' ..."
"... You can also thank Russia for the condition of Libya. Russia voted for the no fly zone in Libya and consented to having Libya destroyed. ..."
"... What part of no-fly zone don't you understand? Full attack was not subject of vote. you know better, but choose dishonesty ..."
"... I mean shit the Bush family tried to over throw the US government back in the late 1930's, they were actual fascist. Rubio is a clone of Jeb (both have the same donors). Christie said he would start shooting down Russian planes (that would start nuclear war). Hillary has destroyed Libya and Syria by supporting terrorist. Not a word about that in today's corrupt press. But no, no, no Trump is the next Hitler. ..."
"... Do you really think the US ISrael and the rest of the empire is really that stupid and incompetent. At first I thought so too. Now I'm beginning to see that creating the chaos is exactly what they want, and they return not to clean up the mess, but to seize control of the important resources. ..."
"... ISIS is clearly the proxy army here doing the hands on cannon fodder work, once the coast is clear, "crack" forces can go in secure and guard the infrastructure, so the valuable commodities can be pilfered safely. ..."
"... In LARGE part. The unconstitutional attack on Libya has long been known as "Hillary's War". (Of course, Syria is her second war, and she has her hands bloody with Ukraine as well). ..."
"... Just look at her resume - ISIS in Libya, ISIS in Syria, ISIS in Iraq. If her goal was to spread ISIS, then she's the balls. If not, she's less than balls. As I say that, maybe the goal really was to spread ISIS, and she's the balls. Balls, Hill, you're the balls. ..."
"We are helpless and not being able to do anything against this deliberate destruction
to the oil installations. NOC urges all faithful and honorable people of this homeland to hurry
to rescue what is left from our resources before it is too late."
That's from Libya's National Oil Corp and as you might have guessed, it references the
seizure of state oil assets by Islamic State, whose influence in the country has grown over the past
year amid the power vacuum the West created by engineering the demise of Moammar Qaddafi.
The latest attacks occurred in Es Sider, a large oil port that's been closed for at least a year.
Seven guards were killed on Monday in suicide bombings while two more lost their lives on Tuesday
as ISIS attacked checkpoints some 20 miles from the port. "Es Sider and Ras Lanuf, Libya's biggest
oil ports, have been closed since December 2014,"
Reuters notes . "They are located between the city of Sirte, which is controlled by Islamic State,
and the eastern city of Benghazi."
ISIS also set fire to oil tanks holding hundreds of thousands of barrels of crude. "Four tanks
in Es Sider caught fire on Tuesday, and a fifth one in
Ras Lanuf the day before," Ali al-Hassi, a spokesman for the the Petroleum Facilities Guard
told Bloomberg over the phone.
Ludovico Carlino, senior analyst at IHS Country Risk says the attacks are "likely diversionary
operations" during Islamic State's takeover of the town of Bin Jawad, a seizure that may enable the
group to expand and connect "its controlled territory around Sirte to the 'oil crescent.'"
Islamic State is pushing east from Sirte in an effort to seize control of the country's oil infrastructure,
much as the group has done in Syria and Iraq. As
Middle East Eye wrote last summer, "the desert region to the south of the oil ports has been
strategically cleared in a series of attacks by IS militants on security personnel and oil fields,
where employees have been killed and kidnapped, and vehicles and equipment seized."
"I expect they will try and take Sidra and Ras Lanuf and the oil fields on the west side of the
oil crescent," one oil worker said. "There are few people left to protect the oil fields apart from
local security from isolated towns."
This is good a place as any for a tale of Yale's very own John Kerry. Want to know the true
measure of Kerry - Google his Cookie franchise at Faneuil Hall (David's Cookies is the guy he
ripped off) before he married ketchup money. Further, way back when, an Aunt of mine had a Summer
job at the airport cafe that serves Martha's Vinyard - also before Kerry got Heinz' dough.
The fuk Congressman Kerry would be there sucking up to MA money. On the return flight he would
hit the cafe - without fail he would have an order that came out to about a nickel short of an
even dollar amount - say $3.95. The fuk would always throw $4 on the table when she was out of
sight and slink off. Not like he couldn't afford it - the guy was a Congressman. What a cheap
slime ball
fleur de lis
Someone once said, money doesn't make you a better or worse person. It only magnifies the personality
you already have.
John Kerry has no class an never did. He went to big schools but so what. Has anyone seen his
transcript? Does he strike anyone as smart? He just got hooked into the connected circles.
Soros is a billionaire. Does he strike anyone as refined or classy? Of course not. He was grimy
riff raff all his life and today he's just riff raff with too much money and using it to drag
entire societies down to his gutter level. He's what they called years ago, a beggar on horseback.
They're all the same. Nuland/Nudelman/Neudelmann or whatever her name is brings wreck and ruin
to everything she touches. For all her money she doesn't even look groomed and sometimes she looks
dirty.
No amount of money can ever polish them up. You can take them out of the slums but generations
later you can't take the slums out of them. They use money and power to drag us all down to their
mental levels. They were born philistines and they will die philistines.
''death pursues the native in everyplace where the european(american) sets foot'
'....
Blankone
You can also thank Russia for the condition of Libya. Russia voted for the no fly zone
in Libya and consented to having Libya destroyed.
It should be no surprise that now the ISIS army or the US/Israel wants to take control or the
resources.
Correct me if I'm wrong, did Russia vote FOR the no fly zone or just abstain and thus give
consent for the destruction.
Volkodav
What part of no-fly zone don't you understand? Full attack was not subject of vote. you
know better, but choose dishonesty
froze25
Adolf was a person with no business experience, a socialist, a bad artist, but the man had
charisma. Trump has charisma but that is where the similarities stop. Not letting in Muslim Refugees
with out proper vetting is reasonable, being politically correct is self enforced mind control
bullshit, the boarder with Mexico needs to be controlled and immigration law needs to be enforced
is also reasonable. The "he" is the next Hitler line needs to stop, I mean shit the Bush family
tried to over throw the US government back in the late 1930's, they were actual fascist. Rubio
is a clone of Jeb (both have the same donors). Christie said he would start shooting down Russian
planes (that would start nuclear war). Hillary has destroyed Libya and Syria by supporting terrorist.
Not a word about that in today's corrupt press. But no, no, no Trump is the next Hitler.
kita27
Do you really think the US ISrael and the rest of the empire is really that stupid and
incompetent. At first I thought so too. Now I'm beginning to see that creating the chaos is exactly
what they want, and they return not to clean up the mess, but to seize control of the important
resources.
ISIS is clearly the proxy army here doing the hands on cannon fodder work, once the coast
is clear, "crack" forces can go in secure and guard the infrastructure, so the valuable commodities
can be pilfered safely.
Bastiat
And central banking -- remember when in the very early days of the "revolution," the mercenaries
formed a central bank? Who ever heard of such a thing? I don't supposed that central bank immediately
removed all of Libya's gold? Naaaaahh.
Hohum
Who is responsible for this? (Hillary Clinton, in part)
Sanity Bear
In LARGE part. The unconstitutional attack on Libya has long been known as "Hillary's War".
(Of course, Syria is her second war, and she has her hands bloody with Ukraine as well).
Jack Burton
First comes NATO bombers. Then Comes ISIS. Where? Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya. The West runs
ISIS's Air Force for them, opening the invasion routes by destroying local resistance or army
forces. Russia stepped in and cut short the NATO/ISIS alliance in Syria.
Jack Burton
Hillary Clinton's Greatest success? Clearing the way for ISIS to invade and conquer Libya,
and using Libya arms to arm the ISIS in Syria. Where today, Bulgaria has stated an emergency air
lift of Soviet era weapons to ISIS in Turkey and Syria. These Soviet weapons may be old, but function
in perfect order, just as they were designed to. Especially the Anti Tan Guided Missiles. Bulgaria
is launching an emergency airlift of 7,000 ATGM to ISIS, at the request of NATO.
falak pema
well played Pax Americana : you promised them Disneyland after Q-Daffy's demise.
And they get : ISIS --
Wow, just wow -- From Charybdis to Scylla! The Pax Americana way.
trader1
we came, we saw, ...
TeaClipper
So that is what Obama meant when he commended the Libyans on their three years of independence
She was secretary of state, which makes her ever so qualified to be commander in chief.
Just look at her resume - ISIS in Libya, ISIS in Syria, ISIS in Iraq. If her goal was to spread
ISIS, then she's the balls. If not, she's less than balls. As I say that, maybe the goal really
was to spread ISIS, and she's the balls. Balls, Hill, you're the balls.
RevIdahoSpud3
I don't see the problem here. It was none other than a former Secretary of State who recited,
"We came, we saw, he DIED"! (cackle, cackle, cankles cackeling)That was the solution then and
now, as has been shown over and over ISIS, IS, ISIL...ISOUR (US) asset! We trained, we funded,
we unleashed! Our very own CIA has the plug and if they don't pull it all must be well? The new
complication will be getting the oil to Turkey which would no doubt ship in Burak Erdogan's tankers.
After refining in Turkey move it to Israel and blend with world supplies. Everyone gets rich!
Erdogan's get rich, ISIS gets funded, Clinton Foundations get funded, Israel get rich, and special
interests in the US, London, France, Germany, Switzerland...they all get rich as well. Stolen
oil has higher octane!
Duc888
Good thing Hillary "fixed" Libya
"We came, we saw , we killed" Yup, just the kinds of ASSHOLE we need for President.
jldpc
What a joke. If the US wanted to stop ISIS making money on selling oil which goes by tanker
or pipeline, all they have to do is threaten destruction of same, and the insurers will shut it
down overnight. No oil money = no more ISIS on the warpath. Simple. And best of all no American
soldier's lives lost. Can you say CinC is a stupid shit? Or how about the oil brokers and end
buyers? Even I could threaten their asses with serious shit and get them to stop. So could any
of you. Guess what the USA is not serious about stopping them. Gee who could have figured that
out on their own?
BarkingCat
Lets see if I understand the plan.
Step 1) Secretly ferment dissent against the local government.
Step 2) Push the dissent into armed rebellion.
Step 3) Use governments reaction to get involve own military to protect civilians.
Step 4) Protection of civilians as cover, the military attacks government's armed forces tipping
the scales of conflict in favor of the rebellion.
Step 5) Watch the rebells kill the leaders of the nation and take control.
Step 6) Watch the nation fall into complete turmoil and become home to groups of terrorists
and other barbarians.
When steps above are completed and enough time has passed:
Step 7) Use own military to bring peace to a troubled nation. Also take over anything that
has value ....oil production for example.
Should Hillary cut the chase and just hire Karl Rove ? She a a neocon like him, so it will be a
good match.
Notable quotes:
"... Mr. Sanders fundraising has surpassed expectations. Lacking the donor network the Clinton
family built over a quarter century on the national stage, Mr. Sanders has nearly matched her fundraising
haul. ..."
"... Oh, Hillary! Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns were large investment banks. They werent the
largest, but they definitely were banks. And giant investment bank Goldman Sachs was connected at the
hip to AIG. I cant help noticing that she failed to mention Washington Mutual or Countrywide Finance,
two large banks / savings and loan associations, which were also neck deep in the collapse. ..."
"... Sociopaths always have a slick rationalization at hand, to recast their venal predation as
self-sacrificing philanthropy. ..."
Clinton, in Iowa: ""You know, I think Bernie's giving a speech today in New York about what
he wants to do to shut down the big banks. Everybody who's looked at my proposals says my proposals
are tougher, more effective, more comprehensive. Because, yeah, I take on the banks, but remember,
part of what caused the mess we had in '07-'08 were not the big banks. It was Lehman Brothers.
It was Bear Stearns. It was AIG, the giant insurance company. I want to go after everybody who
poses a risk to our financial system," Clinton said to applause from the more than 500 people
crowded into the lobby of Sioux City's historic Orpheum Theater" [
Des Moines Register ]. Chutzpah! And very Rovian: Assault your enemy's strength.
Clinton: "There needs to be a rival organization to the NRA of responsible gun owners" [
Raw Story ].
The Voters
"POLITICO has learned that his campaign several months ago assembled an experienced data team
to build sophisticated models to transform fervor into votes" [
Politico ]. "The team is led by two low-profile former Republican National Committee data
strategists, Matt Braynard and Witold Chrabaszcz, and includes assistance from the political data
outfit L2."
Money
"Mr. Sanders's fundraising has surpassed expectations. Lacking the donor network the Clinton
family built over a quarter century on the national stage, Mr. Sanders has nearly matched her
fundraising haul. In the final quarter of 2015, he raised more than $33 million, compared
to her $37 million. In the third quarter, the Sanders campaign collected $26 million; the Clinton
campaign, $28 million" [
Wall Street Journal ]. Without PAC and SuperPAC money, or the
"ginormous and ever-evolving hairball of tangled and conflicted personal and institutional relationships"
that you get with the corrupt Clinton dynasty, either.
Selected Skeptical Comments
Vatch , January 6, 2016 at 2:23 pm
Clinton, in Iowa: "… but remember, part of what caused the mess we had in '07-'08 were
not the big banks. It was Lehman Brothers. It was Bear Stearns. It was AIG, the giant insurance
company."
Oh, Hillary! Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns were large investment banks. They weren't
the largest, but they definitely were banks. And giant investment bank Goldman Sachs was connected
at the hip to AIG. I can't help noticing that she failed to mention Washington Mutual or Countrywide
Finance, two large banks / savings and loan associations, which were also neck deep in the collapse.
Jim Haygood , January 6, 2016 at 2:41 pm
Hillary focuses on the investment banks because her consort, "Bill," signed the repeal of the
Glass-Steagall Act in 1999.
Letting commercial banks into investment banking helped fuel the housing securitization bubble
that culminated in the 2008 crisis, as well as the perceived need to extend TARP loans to every
TBTF bank (since their investment banking activities made them riskier and increased their capital
needs during financial stress).
Sociopaths always have a slick rationalization at hand, to recast their venal predation
as self-sacrificing philanthropy.
Synoia , January 6, 2016 at 4:16 pm
Clinton: "There needs to be a rival organization to the NRA of responsible gun owners"
"... So self-identifying as a Republican now means associating yourself with a party that has moved sharply to the right since 1995. If you like, being a Republican used to mean supporting a party that nominated George H.W. Bush, but now it means supporting a party where a majority of primary voters **** support Donald Trump or Ted Cruz. Being a Democrat used to mean supporting a party that nominated Bill Clinton; it now means supporting a party likely to nominate, um, Hillary Clinton. And views of conservatism/liberalism have probably moved with that change in the parties. ..."
"... Yes the differences between candidates may not be nearly as great as you want it to be - but the idea that it makes no difference whether the GOP or Democratic candidate gets to be president is idiotic. Anybody who can be bothered looking through executive actions during Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama years will recognize a huge difference. ..."
"... The world of the NY Times, Wapo, the Atlantic, the New Republic, LA Times, Chicago Tribune, Wall Street Journal, National Review - its all one intellectually gated community where the affluent talk among themselves at the club house about their slightly different approaches to maintaining order are protecting elite privileges and power. ..."
"... I didnt say they were either stupid or corrupt. They are intelligent people whose political orientation reflects the general predilections and interests of their class. Thats really not much different than most people in America. But the class divides are intensifying, which is why the discourse of that establishment group is of increasingly diminished relevance to what the other 80% of the country is talking about. ..."
"... The difference between Sanders and Clinton when it comes to income inequality, TBTF, and financial regulation is stark. These economic issues are studiously avoided by DeLong and Krugman because they are, and always have been, loyal insiders to the establishment. ..."
"... I took it that what Julio was mainly referring to was that the establishment discourse has moved so far to the right that someone like Krugman now represents the far left of what that establishment will tolerate. ..."
"... I think Krugman the columnist started as someone above the fray , engaged in an academic exercise; and has since learned he must support his allies, even if he has intellectual disagreements with them. ..."
"... However there is one key difference: Sanders has been able to energize the Democratic base in a way that Clinton the policy wonk simply cant. ..."
"... The studied failure of the fierce critic of the Washington Post and New York Times from the economics department of the University of California at Berkeley to so much as regret the firing of the only writer on labor affairs at either paper tells of just how little regard there is for the affairs of ordinary workers. ..."
"... Even Brookings is getting worried about whats going on with the growing cultural isolation of the relatively affluent: ..."
"... I had a very similar experience with the people I met at my Ivy League university. A depressing percentage of the student body consisted of spoiled trust fund babies, many of whom were apparently ignored or otherwise mistreated by their parents and exhibited a shocking array of psychological and substance abuse problems. ..."
"... But these people were of a distinctly different class than the many nominally upper-middle class people I encounter in daily life. Even now, high as my household income is, I would immediately be detected as a mere prole by them, a lower class person. ..."
"... Fitzgerald was absolutely right -- the truly well off are indeed different from you and me. Even if you dont realize it, rest assured that they do. ..."
"... The concept of class is also just a model, and not rigidly tied to economic markers. People in comparable occupational settings or type of economic participation can have very different incomes and ability to afford certain lifestyles. ..."
"... E.g. regardless of your pay level, if your occupational situation is such that you have to essentially show up for work every day and follow somebody elses directives (to make a relatively low-risk income), then it would be a stretch to consider you upper middle class. ..."
"... From what Ive observed, following the 2008 crash a lot of upper-middle class people suddenly realized that the differences between themselves and those living in poverty are actually much smaller than the differences between themselves and the truly wealthy. ..."
You might think that this is obvious. But on the left, in particular, there are some people
who, disappointed by the limits of what President Obama has accomplished, minimize the differences
between the parties. Whoever the next president is, they assert - or at least ... if it's not
Bernie Sanders - things will remain pretty much the same, with the wealthy continuing to dominate
the scene. ...
But the truth is that Mr. Obama's election ... had some real, quantifiable consequences. ...
If Mitt Romney had won, we can be sure that Republicans would have found a way to prevent these
tax hikes. ...
Mr. Obama has effectively rolled back not just the Bush tax cuts but Ronald Reagan's as well...,
about $70 billion a year in revenue. This happens to be in the same ballpark as both
food stamps
and ... this year's net
outlays
on Obamacare. So we're not talking about something trivial.
Speaking of Obamacare, that's another thing Republicans would surely have killed if 2012 had
gone the other way. ... And the effect on health care has been huge...
Now, to be fair, some
widely predicted
consequences of Mr. Obama's re-election - predicted by his opponents - didn't
happen. Gasoline prices didn't soar. Stocks didn't plunge. The economy didn't collapse..., and
the unemployment rate is a full point lower than the rate Mr. Romney promised to achieve by the
end of 2016.
In other words, the 2012 election didn't just allow progressives to achieve some important
goals. It also gave them an opportunity to show that achieving these goals is feasible. No, asking
the rich to pay somewhat more in taxes while helping the less fortunate won't destroy the economy.
So now we're heading for another presidential election. And once again the stakes are high.
Whoever the Republicans nominate will be committed to destroying Obamacare and slashing taxes
on the wealthy - in fact, the current G.O.P. tax-cut plans make the Bush cuts look puny. Whoever
the Democrats nominate will, first and foremost, be committed to defending the achievements of
the past seven years.
The bottom line is that presidential elections matter, a lot, even if the people on the ballot
aren't as fiery as you might like. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
Via Noah Smith, * an interesting back-and-forth about the political leanings of professors.
Conservatives are outraged ** at what they see as a sharp leftward movement in the academy:
[Graph]
But what's really happening here? Did professors move left, or did the meaning of conservatism
in America change in a way that drove scholars away? You can guess what I think. But here's some
evidence. First, using the DW-nominate measure *** - which uses roll-call votes over time to identify
a left-right spectrum, and doesn't impose any constraint of symmetry between the parties - what
we've seen over the past generation is a sharp rightward (up in the figure) move by Republicans,
with no comparable move by Democrats, especially in the North:
[Graph]
So self-identifying as a Republican now means associating yourself with a party that has
moved sharply to the right since 1995. If you like, being a Republican used to mean supporting
a party that nominated George H.W. Bush, but now it means supporting a party where a majority
of primary voters **** support Donald Trump or Ted Cruz. Being a Democrat used to mean supporting
a party that nominated Bill Clinton; it now means supporting a party likely to nominate, um, Hillary
Clinton. And views of conservatism/liberalism have probably moved with that change in the parties.
Furthermore, if your image is one of colleges being taken over by Marxist literary theorists,
you should know that the political leanings of hard scientists are if anything more pronounced
than those of academics in general. From Pew: *****
[Chart]
Why is this? Well, climate denial and hostility to the theory of evolution are pretty good
starting points.
Overall, the evidence looks a lot more consistent with a story that has academics rejecting
a conservative party that has moved sharply right than it does with a story in which academics
have moved left.
Now, you might argue that academics should reflect the political spectrum in the nation - that
we need affirmative action for conservative professors, even in science. But do you really want
to go there?
Wild conservatives have been attacking supposed liberals at universities since the time of Joseph
McCarthy. The attacks have changed in nuance now and again but been persistent since the close
of the 1940s. Whether the attacks extend back before the late 1940s is a matter I have to look
into.
DeDude :
Yes the differences between candidates may not be nearly as great as you want it to be - but
the idea that it "makes no difference" whether the GOP or Democratic candidate gets to be president
is idiotic. Anybody who can be bothered looking through executive actions during Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama
years will recognize a huge difference.
Dan Kervick :
Elections matter. Nominations matter too. But the only nomination battle Paul Krugman is apparently
interested in is the Republican one, which he trolls constantly to amuse himself. This despite
the fact that there are very major policy difference, both foreign and domestic, present on the
Democratic side - along with major differences in political alliances, monetary support bases
and key constituencies.
Paul Krugman is a middle of the road, mainstream fellow who manages to line up on the "left"
according to the austerely conservative economic standards of the establishment media. If Krugman
were chief economic adviser - or even president - nothing very important in America would change
economically. So when he tries to tell "progressives" about what would advance "their goals",
his words are a good candidate for in one ear, out the other treatment.
Harold Meyerson, the Democratic Socialist op-ed columnist for Wapo, was just canned by Fred
Hiatt. Apart from removing another left wing economic voice from the establishment public sphere,
this helps clear the decks for a 2017 Middle East war after Clinton gets control of the war room
from Obama. Not a word on that firing from sometime scourge of the Washington Post, Brad DeLong
- who I guess is pretty cool with it.
The world of the NY Times, Wapo, the Atlantic, the New Republic, LA Times, Chicago Tribune,
Wall Street Journal, National Review - it's all one intellectually gated community where the affluent
talk among themselves at the club house about their slightly different approaches to maintaining
order are protecting elite privileges and power.
Dan Kervick -> EMichael...
I didn't say they were either stupid or corrupt. They are intelligent people whose political
orientation reflects the general predilections and interests of their class. That's really not
much different than most people in America. But the class divides are intensifying, which is why
the discourse of that establishment group is of increasingly diminished relevance to what the
other 80% of the country is talking about.
Dan Kervick -> EMichael...
That's what the elite is always going to do. People who are interested in significant social change
should never count on elitists coming down out of the clouds to save them.
anne -> Dan Kervick...
Harold Meyerson, the Democratic Socialist op-ed columnist for Wapo, was just canned by Fred Hiatt....
Not a word on that firing from sometime scourge of the Washington Post, Brad DeLong - who I guess
is pretty cool with it....
[ Telling and saddening, but this should not be a surprising silence by an academic who periodically
wildly smashes liberals. ]
"Paul Krugman is a middle of the road, mainstream fellow..."
I am old enough to remember a time when he would have been one. But not now.
"So when he tries to tell "progressives" about what would advance "their goals", his words
are a good candidate for in one ear, out the other treatment."
No: they are a candidate for a place to start a conversation with liberals, to expand their
views of what's possible.
Krugman is not interested in such discussions. As has been pointed out several times, he and DeLong
have studiously avoided any engagement with the issues that are being hotly contested in the Democratic
Party's primary campaign. They are bright and well-informed fellows, so this is no ignorant oversight
and is certainly a deliberate, tactical political choice.
EMichael -> Dan Kervick...
Why in the world do you care why two economists who you disrespect on many levels have not discussed
the Dem candidates?
yuan -> EMichael...
Funny how you skipped over the word "issues" and moved the goal post to "dem candidates".
The difference between Sanders and Clinton when it comes to income inequality, TBTF, and
financial regulation is stark. These economic issues are studiously avoided by DeLong and Krugman
because they are, and always have been, loyal insiders to the establishment.
"The difference between Sanders and Clinton when it comes to income inequality, TBTF, and
financial regulation is stark."
Sanders shouts about income inequality but like Hillary has no real plan to impact it except
at the margins.
On financial regulation also, Sanders makes the louder noises and trots out Glass Steagall
often, but Hillary, not Bernie, is the one who actually has a coherent and plausible plan for
limiting systemic financial risk. Bernie fans seem fundamentally incapable of unwilling to process
this fact, to the detriment of everyone.
Syaloch -> Dan Kervick...
I take exception to your (mis)use of Krugman to support your narrative. As Julio notes above (I
think), Krugman's early writings were notably more middle of the road; he started off as a committed
centrist, taking on left and right equally whenever he felt one side or the other was peddling
nonsense. Over time I've seen his writing become more political and more consistently liberal,
even as his paycheck has presumably increased.
As an example, back in the '90s Krugman was slamming Robert Reich as a nonsense-peddling "policy
entrepreneur", but by 2015 he was writing a glowing review of Reich's book, "Saving Capitalism".
Dan Kervick -> Syaloch...
I took it that what Julio was mainly referring to was that the establishment discourse has
moved so far to the right that someone like Krugman now represents the far left of what that establishment
will tolerate.
I would not call his review "glowing", but I agree with your example.
I think Krugman the
columnist started as someone "above the fray", engaged in an academic exercise; and has since
learned he must support his allies, even if he has intellectual disagreements with them.
So? If I am correct in stating that he represents a lot of the liberal spectrum, then those
are the people we need to move "left" or, as I prefer to put it, enlarge their view of what's
possible.
Sanders IMO is doing a good job of this. He is being loudly ignored by Krugman, which makes
your point; and also by a lot of liberals who think he cannot win because, um, he's unelectable
-- which makes mine.
It doesn't seem like we disagree much on the background facts. But if someone is engaging in a
deliberate strategy of ignoring the left, there doesn't seem to be much point in pretending they
are having a discussion with the left.
One way to try to move more people to the left is to encourage them to stop lending so much
credence to establishment opinions. Krugman's ego is big enough that if he detects his relevance
and popularity slipping away, he will move along with the zeitgeist to go where the people are.
Bernie Sanders Hints At What A Sanders Administration Cabinet Could Look Like
Democratic presidential candidate and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders (I) offered a first glimpse
on Sunday of some of the people he might consider for his cabinet in a potential Sanders administration,
and a few that he certainly won't.
"My cabinet would not be dominated by representatives of Wall Street," Sanders said on CNN's
"State of the Union." "I think Wall Street's played a horrendous role in recent years, in negatively
impacting our economy and in making the rich richer. There are a lot of great public servants
out there, great economists who for years have been standing up for the middle class and the working
families of this country."
Prompted by host Jake Tapper, Sanders went on to praise Paul Krugman, the New York Times columnist
and Nobel Prize-winning economist. Krugman is a vocal opponent of tax cuts for the rich, and he
has warned readers for years about the dangers of income inequality. "Krugman does a great job,"
Sanders said.
Also doing a great job, Sanders said, is Columbia University economics professor and Nobel
laureate Joseph Stiglitz, whose recent work has focused on the perils of radical free markets,
such as those espoused by some in the libertarian wing of the GOP.
Sanders also singled out Robert Reich, the former labor secretary under President Bill Clinton,
now a professor at the University of California at Berkeley: "I think [he] is doing a fantastic
job." Reich has long been an influential backer of labor unions, which have come under attack
from Republican governors in recent years.
Still, Sanders said, "it's a little bit too early, I must say, to be appointing a cabinet.
Let me get elected first."
In recent weeks, Sanders' long shot campaign for the Democratic nomination has captured a swell
of momentum on the left, drawing larger crowds in Iowa than Hillary Clinton, the presumed Democratic
front-runner.
"All over this country, younger people, working people, elderly people, are moving in our direction,
because they want a candidate to take on the establishment," Sanders said.
I don't think Krugman disagrees with Sanders, but he seems to ignore him. Like everyone else in
the media, he's devoted much more time to the Republicans.
But that's because it's always been his style to write that way. Krugman has always spent most
of his effort attacking those who he perceives as peddling nonsense, or providing additional evidence
to back up a position he has taken against a nonsense peddler. He rarely spends time talking about
those he agrees with. Even in cases where he has written approvingly about Obama or the ACA, he's
done so primarily as a counterweight to all those he sees taking the opposite (and incorrect)
view.
While he hasn't said much about Sanders aside from praising his example of Denmark as a role
model for change, he hasn't said a whole lot about Clinton either. Probably his most explicit
comment on either was in his column comparing their proposed Wall Street reforms, where he concluded:
"If a Democrat does win, does it matter much which one it is? Probably not. Any Democrat is
likely to retain the financial reforms of 2010, and seek to stiffen them where possible. But major
new reforms will be blocked until and unless Democrats regain control of both houses of Congress,
which isn't likely to happen for a long time.
"In other words, while there are some differences in financial policy between Mrs. Clinton
and Mr. Sanders, as a practical matter they're trivial compared with the yawning gulf with Republicans."
Yes, but there are clearly more differences between Clinton and Sanders than just differences
over financial policy - the most obvious and large one being their differences over health care.
Syaloch -> Dan Kervick...
In terms of what they're likely to be able to deliver in the current political climate there really
doesn't seem to be that much difference between them.
However there is one key difference: Sanders has been able to energize the Democratic base
in a way that Clinton the policy wonk simply can't.
But we digress.
pgl -> Dan Kervick...
Bernie is endorsing single payer. That was HillaryCare ala 1993. That was her position in 2008...
Dan Kervick -> pgl...
What the heck are you talking about? The Clinton health Care Plan of 1993 was not a single payer
plan. The 2008 plan was also by no means a single payer plan. And single payer is certainly not
her position now, since she has come out strongly against it on the oh-so-progressive grounds
that it will ... (gasp) ... raise taxes! Good grief.
Dan Kervick -> Syaloch...
Do you really think that the differences between Sanders and Clinton on how college education
is to be paid for, to take one example, is trivial?
Painting the large differences between Clinton and Sanders as trivial seems like a case of
dumbing down the debate so that people don't pay attention to it.
Krugman frequently devotes a great deal of time to people who are not peddling nonsense. He
just participated in an involved debate with DeLong and Summers, two people he agrees with on
most issues. And he has done the same in many past columns debating the views of various esteemed
economics colleagues at length.
pgl -> Syaloch...
"Sanders went on to praise Paul Krugman, the New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize-winning
economist. Krugman is a vocal opponent of tax cuts for the rich, and he has warned readers
for years about the dangers of income inequality."
Even more places where Bernie Sanders has basically called JohnH a liar.
If I am correct in stating that he represents a lot of the liberal spectrum, then those are the
people we need to move "left" or, as I prefer to put it, enlarge their view of what's possible.
Sanders IMO is doing a good job of this. He is being loudly ignored by Krugman...
[ Nicely expressed. ]
pgl -> Dan Kervick...
So go write these comments over at Paul's place. Oh wait - you are a coward. Never mind.
You know, of all the insults you freely toss about, this "cowardice" one is the dumbest. We're
all here to discuss Thoma's selections, but we're cowards if we criticize them here?
Dan Kervick -> pgl...
I have written several comments at "Paul's" blog that were directly critical of his arguments.
I have also posted many critical comments on Twitter directly @ Krugman. I have no problem going
right at people. But I don't like the NY Times format as much because it is harder to have a live
debate there.
anne -> Dan Kervick...
The word "troll" is used to intimidate and silence, and used to depict the writer in question
is wildly false and mean-spirited.
Dan Kervick -> anne...
Lol... yeah, I know the feeling.
Sanjait -> pgl...
Delong isnt a socialist, democratic or otherwise.
And this bent of creating purity tests for commentators and politicians to define who is sufficiently
progressive or more progressive or whatever, it reeks of Republicans and their conservative tribalism.
It's asinine and anti intellectual, and I condemn it unequivocally.
Dan Kervick -> Sanjait...
It's not a purity test of any kind. I don't know what "purity" means in this context. There is
no sense in which democratic socialists are "purer" than liberals. They just have different values
and goals. For socialists, a society based on sharing, solidarity, equality and cooperation is
the highest ideal, where for liberals the highest idea is the expression of personal liberty,
potential and individuality. There are certainly ways in which these outlooks can find specific
expressions at a given point in time that involve significant overlap, but their chief governing
ideals are different.
I agree with you completely that DeLong simply has a different ideology or social philosophy than
someone like Sanders or Meyerson, and I object to the dumbing down of the debate between these
two camps by such trite slogans as "Oh, you know after all, we are all on the same team". That's
silly. It confuses the highly contingent, shifting and adventitious alliances that are part of
the American party system with the coherence of a philosophical stance. These differences and
disputes should be debated, instead of attempting to muddy and flatten them all under the foolish
fantasy that it doesn't make a dime's worth of difference whether a society moves toward an ideal
of progress fashioned from democratic socialist principles or one fashioned from liberal principles.
I brought DeLong in this context because he is a noted scourge of the Washington Post and its
op-ed writers, so if he had any sympathy for Meyerson's views, this would be more low-hanging
fruit for him. But nothing so far. And my guess is that the main reason is that Meyerson is just
not DeLong's cup of tea. But who knows. the year is young.
Sanjait -> Dan Kervick...
Tl;dr
What I do notice is a lot of navel gazing talk about how "left" this or that commentator is,
which as I said is asinine, anti-intellectual, and ironically very similar to the way conservatives
operate.
Dan Kervick -> Sanjait...
Great. You think it's navel gazing. Easy for you to say from your desk writing insurance policies
or whatever the hell it is you do. But it does make a real difference to millions and millions
of people who don't have the lives you and I have, and whose lives aren't going to get *notably*
better once Krugman, DeLong and Summers decide which particular version of capitalist oppression
their best models point toward. Those people are dying of American capitalism, and their kids
are going to die of it too, and whether the ruling class decides on one set of interest rates
or a slightly higher set of interest rates only marginally affects the precise speed at which
the barons who own their lives are able to kill them.
If people have the honestly to tell me, "Look, I'm a believer in good ol' American capitalism,
and that lefty stuff just won't fly with me," that's one thing. But when they try to convince
me that the kind of world they are after is really the same kind of world I want, just so I'll
vote for their politicians - then I get ornery. Maybe I'd have an easier time with the conservatives
because at least the look me in the face and say, "I hate your pinko guts".
The debate has gotten half crazy. Someone like Brad DeLong has called himself a "card-carrying
neoliberal". And yet I get pilloried for calling DeLong a neoliberal - as though I libeled him
- or for calling attention to the apparently uncomfortable fact that since neoliberals are obviously
not leftists, then DeLong is no kind of leftist whatsoever. Or for noting that since DeLong is
a loyal student of his mentor and adviser Larry Summers - who is about as mainstream a player
as they come in the global capitalist system - that makes Delong a thoroughly establishment economist.
(This isn't about "purity". DeLong is not an "impure" half-assed lefty. He's just a mainline capitalist.)
Or for having the audacity to want to *debate* from the left the ideas that come up here instead
of joining in with the yea-and-amen corner where everybody just agrees with one another. Oh no,
we're all on the same team! Stop being such an annoying troll and criticizing the team! Larry
Summers - that great man on the make who was the highest paid professor in the history of Harvard,
and sold himself and his thoroughly mainstream "advice" to some Wall Street firm for $5 million/yr
in between other gigs - he's also on the team bro!
I've made many good faith efforts in the past to calmly debate the ideas of people whose moral
outlooks I disdain and whose best proposals amount to no more than marginal differences in a system
I detest. In return, I get insulted routinely and asked to leave. But hey, we're all on the same
team!
It seems to me that the liberals are having a crisis of faith and confidence because their
late 20th century paradigm is crumbling apart from the inside, they don't know what to replace
it with, and they don't know what side they are going to end up standing on when it falls. Look
at poor pgl. He can't even remember what "single payer" means any more. I haven't encountered
a single liberal Clinton supporter who is positively enthusiastic about Hillary Clinton. Frankly,
they all seem defensive at best about her, and somewhat scared. But they fell in early with the
TINA argument and the strategy of smothering debate under the Clinton machine, and now having
let the Inevitability Express get so far down the tracks they don't know what else to do. And
when that crazed, neocon-tilting fanatic launches her global military crusades in 2017, you guys
will all be investing some sob story about how Bush is to blame, or Reagan is to blame, or Calvin
Coolidge or William McKinley is to blame. A fat lot of good that will do the body parts she scatters
all over the West Bank, Syria, Iran or whatever other places we're into by then.
Krugman had a meltdown last week - as he and the other chronic countercyclical stabilizers
apparently do whenever anybody uses that dangerous and threatening word "structural", pointing
at the possibility of changing the system and not just stabilizing it - because even a middle
of the road guy like Tim Taylor had the audacity to "change the subject" and talk about something
he actually wants talk about ... as though Paul Krugman gets to decide what the "subject" is,
and everyone who doesn't talk about what Krugman demands they talk about is written up for changing
that subject. Screw Krugman. He wouldn't know what "the subject" is if he tripped over it lying
in the street on his way to some Manhattan train station. In fact, he probably has tripped over
it.
I'm so tired of dealing with liberals with their chronic cases of double-think, unresolved
intellectual conflicts, self-deluding irony and fuzzy, snarky ambivalence about everything. Pick
a damn side. You are either with the plutocratic owners who dominate and run everyone else's lives
- or you are on the side of taking them down and leveling the field.
No Happy New Year at the Washington Post: Harold Meyerson Gets the Boot
The Washington Post opinion pages is not a place most people go for original thought, even
if they do provide much material for Beat the Press. One major exception to the uniformity and
unoriginality that have marked the section for decades was Harold Meyerson's column. Meyerson
has been writing a weekly column for the Post for the last thirteen years. He was told by opinion
page editor Fred Hiatt that his contract would not be renewed for 2016. *
According to Meyerson, Hiatt gave as his reasons that his columns had bad social media metrics
and that he focused too much on issues like worker power. The first part of this story is difficult
to believe. Do other Post columnists, like Beat the Press regulars Robert Samuelson and Charles
Lane, really have such great social media metrics?
As far as the second part, yes Meyerson was a different voice. His columns showed a concern
for the ordinary workers who make up the overwhelming majority of the country's population. Apparently
this is a liability at the Post.
The studied failure of the fierce critic of the Washington Post and New York Times from the
economics department of the University of California at Berkeley to so much as regret the firing
of the only writer on labor affairs at either paper tells of just how little regard there is for
the affairs of ordinary workers.
Not surprising, but disappointing nonetheless.
Sanjait -> anne...
Oh please.
Delong has been writing loudly about the need for pro labor fiscal and monetary policy for
the last 6 years. He's a leading voice on this topic, despite being "shrill."
To anyone that has been paying attention even a little, he has more than firmly established
his concern for workers.
You're just weirdly upset because he called the Yale protesters stupid. Others here are upset
because, like conservative tribalists, they think the best way to promote progressive causes is
to ignore fact based debates and instead talk about who is or isn't an apostate. It's really very
ugly.
ken melvin -> Dan Kervick...
Two states, maybe?
am -> Dan Kervick...
Harold Meyerson, the Democratic Socialist op-ed columnist for Wapo, was just canned by Fred Hiatt.
Apart from removing another left wing economic voice from the establishment public sphere, this
helps clear the decks for a 2017 Middle East war after Clinton gets control of the war room from
Obama. Not a word on that firing from sometime scourge of the Washington Post, Brad DeLong - who
I guess is pretty cool with it.
This is from your comment. You go from the sacking of a journalist to clearing the ground for
a middle east war and then connect it all to Brad De Long. I hope you see the defects in your
thinking.
Dan Kervick -> am...
OK, let's wait and see what DeLong says.
However, I stand by the idea that one of Hiatt's beefs with Meyerson is that Meyerson is a
critic of the generally neoconservative foreign policies that Hiatt staunchly promotes. I think
Hiatt is likely rubbing his hands in glee over the prospect of a Hillary Clinton presidency, since
her foreign policy will be much more aggressive and neocon-friendly than Obama's - and also much
more so than a president Trump, for that matter, whom the neocons despise and fear.
djb -> Dan Kervick...
sorry to bother you dan but I couldn't help notice your comment to Egmont about consumption being
greater than income
"As you can see, consumption runs consistently and significantly higher than wages and salaries."
why do you think that is?
Dan Kervick -> djb...
djb, to be accurate, I pointed out that consumption was higher than wage and salary income. And
clearly one reason for that is that is that wage and salary income is only one portion of national
income. Besides other returns to labor like bonuses, a lot of income consists in profits and other
returns to capital.
Dan Kervick :
Even Brookings is getting worried about what's going on with the growing cultural isolation
of the relatively affluent:
This Brookings piece doesn't contribute much of anything to the conversation either. Mostly it
just provides a working definition of upper middle class. The "getting worried" part is pretty
much limited to the conclusion, and even then mostly outsourced to a conservative writer over
at Slate:
And if we go and read the Slate piece we find out that it's mostly BS -- even the Brookings
article warns us in advance that it's "hyperbole, of course."
All of that said I do think there is an important point to be made, one that I was making the
other day -- if you let a small number of people accumulate extreme levels of wealth, these people
will tend to focus their philanthropic efforts on the sorts of problems that get discussed in
their rather limited social circle, which may not be what the broader population views as the
most pressing issues. However, I was talking about billionaires (and tech billionaires in particular,
who tend to view things through an even narrower lens. In contrast, here we're talking about a
much larger and more diverse group -- 15-20% of the working-age population according to the article
-- many of whom came from middle class or lower-middle class backgrounds and who strongly identify
with these groups and their concerns.
EMichael -> Syaloch...
Of course it doesn't contribute to the discussion, not unless you read between the kervick lines
and understand that the separation is sinister, aided and abetted by pols and economists on both
sides as they are all elites.
"When everyone is out to get you, paranoia is just being careful." Dan K, err, I mean Woody Allen.
Dan Kervick -> Syaloch...
The Brookings title for the article describes the separation as "dangerous". Isn't that an instance
of worrying?
The point isn't that the upper middle class is engaged in some sort of sneaky, diabolical plot
to "ruin" America, but rather that the emergence of growing cultural, educational and economic
gaps between different classes of Americans is bad for the country, and that the greater the degree
of class separations, the greater likelihood that the discourse of people who belong to a particular
class will tend to reflect the preoccupations and values of that class alone.
At all times and in all societies the preoccupation of those who have most greatly benefited
from a given social order will tend to be focused on how to defuse, appease or discipline dissenting
elements without disrupting the social order.
Syaloch -> Dan Kervick...
The Brookings title appears to be mere clickbait, with little in the article to back the claim
up. The main thrust of the piece is that those who've managed to make it to the upper end of the
middle class have been more successful than those with less income. Big surprise there.
I have no objection to the claim that growing economic gaps are bad for the country. However,
I do think your attempt to cast this as an internal conflict within the middle class is nonsense.
I mean, Bernie Sanders' net worth is reportedly $700,000, which is roughly three times the
median for someone his age ($232,100 as of 2013). Isn't he part of this elite class you describe,
doing what elites always do? Does his political orientation reflect the general predilections
and interests of his class?
Dan Kervick -> Syaloch...
It seems to me the article documents trends in several areas, all meant to back up the summary
story told in the opening paragraph:
"The American upper middle class is separating, slowly but surely, from the rest of society.
This separation is most obvious in terms of income-where the top fifth have been prospering while
the majority lags behind. But the separation is not just economic. Gaps are growing on a whole
range of dimensions, including family structure, education, lifestyle, and geography. Indeed,
these dimensions of advantage appear to be clustering more tightly together, each thereby amplifying
the effect of the other."
cm -> Syaloch...
Considering current real estate evaluations (I suppose Mr. Sanders owns a house), I don't think
700K is a net worth that confers any kind of elite status (where in this discussion "elite" must
be understood as being able to set or influence policy, without necessarily holding public office).
Syaloch -> cm...
The current median sales price for homes in Burlington VT is around $270,000, so Sanders must
be living in an "elite" home appropriate to his class.
More seriously, I don't think $700K necessarily confers elite status either, I'm just poking
holes in the arguments of those who want to drive wedges between different segments of the middle
class.
Dan Kervick -> Syaloch...
I don't think it's so much a matter of driving wedges, but recognizing the wedges that are already
there.
Of course, some individual people who have lots of money are capable of adopting political
stances that range outside their class interests. The similarity between political outlook and
class interest is a strong general tendency, not an iron rule.
Syaloch -> Dan Kervick...
Your understanding of class relationships is flawed.
Perhaps one has to actually be part of the upper middle class to see how these things actually
work?
The county where I live is one of the richest in the country, and it consistently votes Democrat.
But then again the cost of living is very high here, so a lot of people who appear to have high
incomes by national standards actually live quite modest lifestyles. And many people who live
here came from other lower-income areas to find work, and probably relate most strongly with the
places and backgrounds from which they came (even after 25 years of living in the DC suburbs my
wife and I still tend to answer the question, "where are you from?" with the states we were born
in).
The relationship between income and "class interest" is apparently quite complicated.
cm -> Syaloch...
**my wife and I still tend to answer the question, "where are you from?" with the states we were
born in**
Isn't that what the questioner is actually asking? I always understood this question as "what
is your cultural (often more specifically ethnic) background". The question often comes in the
form "where's your *accent* from".
Syaloch -> cm...
Sometimes it's unclear, but generally the context is ah, so you're a visitor here, where is your
home located?
We still have a hard time saying we're "from" Virginia, as the part of Virginia that borders
DC bears little relationship culturally, politically, or economically with the rest of the state.
Culturally we're still very much Northerners.
cm -> Syaloch...
Perhaps, though I often respond jokingly stating the city where I live, and then there is *always*
the clarification "no where are you originally from". The larger area here has a lot of immigration
from other places (inside and outside the US), and a lot of people with immigrant family background.
It seems to be a common (and reliable) conversation opener.
cm -> Syaloch...
"The relationship between income and "class interest" is apparently quite complicated."
A large part of the complication is adjustment to local cost structures. Another is that "class"
is a fairly abstract concept, which I define more by socioeconomic autonomy and participation
in the societal decision making process (at higher or lower levels) than by income. Of course
the former strongly correlates with income. E.g. when obtaining one's income absolutely requires
personal daily commitment to some activity (e.g. employment), one cannot be consider "upper" of
anything.
I would even question whether middle to upper corporate management falls in the upper middle
class - let's say Director to VP levels. They are paid quite well and can generally afford living
in "good neighborhoods" with higher end houses and cars, and perhaps even domestic "help", but
can they influence policy outside their company?
And one more before the day's round of media stuff begins.
Another weirdly persistent myth is that rich people vote Democratic, while working stiffs vote
Republican. Here's Tucker Carlson: *
"OK, but here's the fact that nobody ever, ever mentions - Democrats win rich people. Over
100,000 in income, you are likely more than not to vote for Democrats. People never point that
out. Rich people vote liberal. I don't know what that's all about."
Actually, people mention this alleged fact all the time - but the truth is just the opposite.
From the 2006 exit polls:
Vote by Income (Total) Democrat Republican
Less than $100,000 (78%) 55% 43%
$100,000 or more (22%) 47% 52%
And the fact that people with higher incomes are more likely to vote Republican has been consistently
true since 1972. **
The interesting question is why so many pundits know for a fact something that simply ain't
so.
As I pointed out in an earlier post, * there's a weird myth among the commentariat that rich
people vote Democratic. There's another strange thing about that myth: the notion that income
class doesn't matter for voting, or that it's perverse, has spread even as the actual relationship
between income and voting has become much stronger.
Larry Bartels ** offers us these data, which I also provide in "Conscience of a Liberal," on
white voting patterns in presidential elections by income:
Democratic Share of Vote
1952-1972
Bottom third ( 46)
Middle third ( 47)
Top third ( 42)
Democratic Share of Vote
1976-2004
Bottom third ( 51)
Middle third ( 44)
Top third ( 37)
As you can see, a 4-point difference between top and bottom became a 14-point difference.
Andrew Gelman et al *** offer us an election-by-election graph; the dots represent an estimate
of the effect of income on the tendency to vote Republican, the whiskers the range of statistical
uncertainty. Again, a weak link in the earlier period, except when Barry Goldwater was the candidate,
and a much stronger link since then.
So the conventional pundit wisdom about the relationship between class and voting is, literally,
the opposite of the truth.
If you are trying to suggest that a mere prole couldn't possibly understand how the well-off people
actually think, you may be comforted to know that my wife and I are comfortably part of that upper
20%.
The people I am criticizing are the kinds of people I have known all my life. I went to college
and graduate school with them, and have known them socially and professionally. Quite the contrary
to your suggestion, I think if people from humbler walks of life had a clearer idea of how knowledge
class yuppies actually think and talk when they are not behaving themselves in public forums and
trying to act like compassionate and concerned citizens, the resentment and determination to act
on the part of the former would be even more intense than it is now.
I dearly recall the day one of my college friends told me that it was so unfair that smart
college kids might be subject to the same kinds of military service requirements that less educated
people faced, because the college kids "had so much more to lose." Their heads, after all, were
stuffed with big, valuable, meaningful brains; while the existences of the plebs were so much
less meaningful. Of course, she's probably running some health care outfit these days.
Syaloch -> Dan Kervick...
I had a very similar experience with the people I met at my Ivy League university. A depressing
percentage of the student body consisted of spoiled trust fund babies, many of whom were apparently
ignored or otherwise mistreated by their parents and exhibited a shocking array of psychological
and substance abuse problems.
The most shocking incident I encountered was when a decent-seeming girl I met at the beginning
of sophomore year calmly explained during a discussion with myself and a high school friend the
"difference between black people and [n-word]s" as if this were a totally natural and uncontroversial
position. And she wasn't from the Deep South, either -- she was from Columbia MD.
But these people were of a distinctly different class than the many nominally upper-middle
class people I encounter in daily life. Even now, high as my household income is, I would immediately
be detected as a "mere prole" by them, a "lower class" person.
Fitzgerald was absolutely right -- the truly well off are indeed different from you and
me. Even if you don't realize it, rest assured that they do.
cm -> Dan Kervick...
Did your friend actually say these things about the brain value or are you extrapolating?
I had to go to military service *before* going to college, before the question of occupational
deferments could even come up, and incidentally so that the conscripts could be coerced with the
threat of having their college admission canceled. It was a good opportunity to purge our heads
of some of the highschool knowledge and attitudes, and fill it with more practical things like
avoiding or shirking work assignments, creative ways of procuring and hiding alcohol, and learning
a bit about sizing up people and power dynamics as well as losing some illusions about the universality
of human qualities. The latter part was actually useful.
cm -> Dan Kervick...
The concept of class is also just a model, and not rigidly tied to economic markers. People
in comparable occupational settings or type of economic participation can have very different
incomes and ability to afford certain lifestyles.
This is not only related to geographic differences, but jobs with similar skill profiles and
job content can have significantly different pay/perk structures across public/private sector,
different industries, and even within the same company. And by significantly I mean easily 2X.
E.g. regardless of your pay level, if your occupational situation is such that you have
to essentially show up for work every day and follow somebody else's directives (to make a relatively
low-risk income), then it would be a stretch to consider you upper middle class.
cm -> cm...
This is in response to your "wedges" comment, which may not be obvious in the web page layout.
Dan Kervick -> cm...
I definitely agree with those observations, although I have to say that following the crash in
2008 I was startled to realize just how much truth there is in the old Marxian idea that in an
economic pinch, people will rapidly form coalitions with other people on the basis of economic
affinities to protect their mutual interests.
cm -> Dan Kervick...
It is probably less about *mutual* interests and more about *common* interests. OTOH (but perhaps
fundamentally the same phenomenon) I and others have observed how people switch (declared?) allegiances
and ideological leanings and patterns of acting, as well the people they associate with, when
changing occupational roles, e.g. from individual contributor to manager or lower to middle management.
That usually comes with an income bump, but I don't think it is much related to income level.
Syaloch -> cm...
From what I've observed, following the 2008 crash a lot of upper-middle class people suddenly
realized that the differences between themselves and those living in poverty are actually much
smaller than the differences between themselves and the truly wealthy.
"... That's not to say that Hillary Clinton herself will necessarily inject any of those elements
into the race. (Beyond the extent to which she already has, that is, via her inexplicable decision to
use a private email account while serving as secretary of state.) ..."
"... If a New Hampshire state legislator is willing to stand up in a public forum and imply that
Clinton's husband is a rapist, it seems inevitable that others will take the opportunity of public events
to make similar charges. ..."
But whomever the Republicans eventually nominate, this year is going to be ugly, because there
is a Clinton running for president. Because when Clintons run for office, conspiracy, scandal and
prurience inevitably follow.
That's not to say that Hillary Clinton herself will necessarily inject any of those elements
into the race. (Beyond the extent to which she already has, that is, via her inexplicable decision
to use a private email account while serving as secretary of state.) It is simply meant to point
out that where the Clintons are concerned, there is a large and vocal element of the Republican Party
that simply cannot resist the temptation to dive headfirst into the rabbit hole of Bill and Hillary
Clinton's past and then come to the surface screaming bloody murder (sometimes literally) about what
they think they found there.
In a New Hampshire town meeting on Sunday, a state legislator named Katherine Prudhomme O'Brien
demonstrated what we can likely expect to see a lot of in the coming year.
When Clinton paused to take questions from the crowd, O'Brien began haranguing the candidate with
questions about former president Bill Clinton's decades-old infidelities. Her point was to paint
Clinton as a hypocrite for claiming to support women's rights and for launching an anti-sexual assault
campaign while, according to O'Brien, her husband still faces unsettled questions about alleged sexual
assaults.
O'Brien, who was very close to Clinton when she began shouting questions at her, was herself shouted
down by Clinton supporters. After the event, she told reporters "I asked her how in the world she
can say that Juanita Broderick and Kathleen Wiley are lying when she has no idea who Juanita Broderick
is," O'Brien said, according to CNN, referring to women who have accused the former president of
sexual assault and to another attempt she had made to question the candidate.
"She told me this summer she doesn't know who she is and doesn't want to know who she is," O'Brien
said. "How can she access that they are lying, which she told someone last month?"
For her part, Clinton responded sharply, breaking from most candidates' strategy of ignoring hecklers
to tell O'Brien that she was "very rude" and that Clinton would "never" take questions from her.
... ... ....
Clinton criticism has long since become a field that welcomes all comers, regardless of the strength
of their tether to reality. Among Clinton detractors there is a veritable alternative history of
the United States, beginning with their rise to power in Arkansas in the 1980s, which includes accusations
of murder, drug-dealing and a vast menu of sexual improprieties all committed or endorsed by the
Clintons.
... ... ...
If a New Hampshire state legislator is willing to stand up in a public forum and imply that
Clinton's husband is a rapist, it seems inevitable that others will take the opportunity of public
events to make similar charges.
"... Sorry Hillary, you can pretend to be a progressive, nobody believes you. You want to be President because you want to be President, you dont give a rats rear end about the country. ..."
"... I think you might be falling for the subtle propaganda out there. The corporate media, as well as the DNC, has been marginalizing him from day one of his campaign because they have a vested interest in Clinton or any Republican winning the primary. Were Sanders to be successful, the corporate media would stand to lose 10s of million$ in campaign attack ads and corporations stand to lose their cheap, working poor, workforce. ..."
"... This is why corporate media (including MSNBC) continues to either ignore him, or continually say that he cannot win. It is a battle and its completely up to the electorate to form a movement that becomes a political revolution. ..."
"... I resent the continuing attempts to link her campaign to Senator Elizabeth Warrens positions on financial issues when the overwhelming support for her establishment candidacy is supported by entities inimical to virtually everything for which Ms. Warren fights. It is not only disrespectful to the Senator, but is, to me, proof positive that honesty and transparency remain far outside the Clinton Campaign business model, and that the Advisers - rather than her personal character and knowledge - control the Candidate AND will continue to do so - should they be able to elect her as President. ..."
"... I believe increasingly that Trump must win, and I say that without being an admirer. He comes with some terrible baggage, but at least on a couple issues, hes the only one saying anything worth saying. Maybe thats what America needs to make a little progress, to elect someone who overall is pretty unpleasant but who brings real progress on a couple of issues. It is particularly in foreign affairs says a couple of pretty penetrating truths. ..."
"... Hillary has absolutely nothing to say worth hearing. Shes not progressive. Shes not liberal. And shes just so twisted in her dishonesty, you cant make any sense of her from one day til the next. She is a genuinely phony exploiter of the old idea of the Democratic Party, as a party that does something for ordinary people, but that is simply not what that party has been for about half a century. In office, she would have most of Trumps ugly qualities and none of his few strong merits. Basically, she just wants the distinction of being the first woman president. ..."
"... Again, she stands for absolutely nothing any thoughtful person would call progress. ..."
"... Surprise, surprise, one more article to add to the many already written by the Guardian on $hillary. Has the Guardian been purchased by the $hillary for President Campaign??? Perhaps $hillary and Bill used the millions they have made on speaking tours, and the Clinton Foundation to buy the Guardian or are they paying to plant articles ..."
"... The Democratic Party is a terrible institution. It hasnt had a good idea in forty years. Americas entire political system is bent, bent towards the interests of the 1%. Hillary serves the interests of the 1% in virtually everything she does. Then she goes out and makes some vaccuous speeches to others, trying to assure them shes in their corner. The woman is a dreadful fraud and liar. ..."
"... turn back the clock on progress? What meaningless babble. There is no meangful progress in America on any aspect of domestic life. Not in politics. Not in public education. Not in ethics. However Hillary has played a significant role in Americas one true example of progress, its progress towards becoming an international bully. ..."
"... Clinton is a neo-conservative war-monger supporting neo-liberal economic policies. But the only Republican who isnt worse on both counts is Rand Paul, who isnt as fully into the neo-conservative carpet bombing agenda. Paul, however, more than makes up for this by being a complete looney on economic/individual rights issues. Unfortunately the only real alternative, Bernie Sanders, has been deemed as unelectable by the smart people and many of the electorate, afraid to throw away their votes may be swayed by that intelligence . ..."
"... dishonesty happens to be Mr. Hillarys middle name. ..."
"... Hilary Clinton is complicit in the ongoing US foreign policy of destroying working countries in North Africa and the Middle East and leaving them in ruins, as his her boss Obama. ..."
"... Polls are now officially worthless. Polling agencies call landlines which are anything but random representation of the ACTUAL American electorate. There are also various media outlets taking worthless internet polls which have absolutely no verification. Harris quit political polling until they can develop new reliable sampling methods. Relying on this information is completely misleading in the 21st century. ..."
"... Hillary has never seen a patch of desert she didnt want to send our kids to die in. ..."
"... We need Single Payer. We need Glass-Steagall. We need Peace. We need Bernie. ..."
ISIS is a proxy of KSA and Turkey. Turkey and KSA are both allies of USA. Therefore, USA doesn't
put in the effort.
HobbesianWorld -> rafinho
4 Jan 2016 10:11
Apparently you favor Hillary? You like corporate control of government? You like corporate
money in elections? You like the fact that the too-big-to-fail Wall Street financial institutions
will remain too-big-to-fail, and we, the taxpayer, will remain on the hook to bail them out? You
do know that we ARE still on the hook? You do know that the banks have gone back to speculating
with our deposits--the major cause of the Republican Great Recession of 2008?
Or, would you rather see Sanders win, but you are a defeatist who listens to the opinions of
those with vested interest in seeing him lose?
Marcedward
4 Jan 2016 10:03
Sorry Hillary, you can pretend to be a progressive, nobody believes you. You want to be
President because you want to be President, you don't give a rat's rear end about the country.
HobbesianWorld -> rafinho
4 Jan 2016 10:01
I think you might be falling for the subtle propaganda out there. The corporate media,
as well as the DNC, has been marginalizing him from day one of his campaign because they have
a vested interest in Clinton or any Republican winning the primary. Were Sanders to be successful,
the corporate media would stand to lose 10s of million$ in campaign attack ads and corporations
stand to lose their cheap, working poor, workforce.
This is why corporate media (including MSNBC) continues to either ignore him, or continually
say that "he cannot win." It is a battle and its completely up to the electorate to form a movement
that becomes a political revolution.
Just because they keep saying that he can't win, and then fail to mention him in most news
or opinion segments while extolling Hillary, I don't just shrug my shoulders and wimp away, assuming
defeat. I will keep on promoting him as the champion of working America and exposing Hillary as
the corporatist she is.
Bruce Gruber -> pol098
4 Jan 2016 09:59
Vote for Bernie Sanders and make your DETERMINATION clear.
Revolutions against status quo moderates eager to achieve dysfunctional compromises are NOT
solutions. Ms. Clinton panders to FEAR ... It is fear of Republicans winning . She does not say,
Bernie, Martin and I stand against ISIL, BUT with strategies that don't alienate Muslims and denigrate
a religion." INSTEAD she votes, hints, suggests etc. that 'WE need to FIND solutions ... strengthen
our (presently discordant and previously ineffective) policies, and 'fight against' ...(war, war,
war!). After years of holding important roles and positions, has she not YET "FOUND" ideas with
which to lead? Where ARE the regulations or restrictions? What ARE they? ... are they in support
of the OATH to reinstall, preserve and protect the 4th, 5th, 6th and 8th Amendments to the Constitution?
Identifying WITH a constituency may be reassuring to 'listeners' as to similarity of concern,
but it does NOT convey ideas or leadership to address those issues. Traditionally, politicians
are wont to defend against complaints that, "That isn't exactly what I said, and it's not what
I meant! You have taken my words out of context."
So, I find this article to be puff piece. It extols her historic involvement, but avoids her
ideas. It ignores the neo-con aspects of her 'experience' and implies much more than it offers.
Of course, my opinion is biased.
I resent the continuing attempts to link her campaign
to Senator Elizabeth Warren's positions on financial issues when the overwhelming support for
her 'establishment' candidacy is supported by entities inimical to virtually everything for which
Ms. Warren fights. It is not only disrespectful to the Senator, but is, to me, proof positive
that honesty and transparency remain far outside the Clinton Campaign business model, and that
the "Advisers" - rather than her personal character and knowledge - control the Candidate AND
will continue to do so - should they be able to elect her as President.
Additionally, the clown car of Republican dissolution is not an issue in the election. Democrats
WILL turn out, so Republicans cannot win. Trump has consolidated THEIR "anti-establishment" base,
and their puppet-master cash class are playing poker against one another as though the 'pot' was
a new toy.
Murphy1983 -> Mike Hambuchen
4 Jan 2016 09:58
Mike: Educate yourself about Sanders. Take a look at this article from The New York Times.
As usual, it's very pro HRC and anti-Sanders. Read through the "Readers' Pick" section under Comments.
I think you'll be better informed about why Sanders is such an amazing candidate.
Here's one my favorite comments written by Mark Hugh Miller of San Francisco:
If you make a list of America's problems, needs, and desires, and then list what each candidate
proposes to do about them - to date, mostly nothing - there's only one candidate willing to tell
Americans painful truths and things they don't want to hear, and offer practical solutions. That's
Bernie Sanders. Who would have imagined it two years ago?
His detractors won't dare challenge the rightness of what he proposes, but instead use the
old GOP canards: "We can't afford it? Where's he going to find the money to pay for it?"
We can pay for everything, it seems - war, defense, a bloated military arsenal, Wall Street
bailouts, more prisons, tax breaks for the wealthy and for corporations, subsidies to oil companies
and corporate farming ventures - but "never" anything that benefits the majority of Americans
who have helped hold the world together for decades, and every year see their security and futures
diminished, threatened.
Sanders is the only candidate willing to risk defeat by addressing the issues that matter to
us, and the world.
I believe increasingly that Trump must win, and I say that without being an admirer. He
comes with some terrible baggage, but at least on a couple issues, he's the only one saying anything
worth saying. Maybe that's what America needs to make a little progress, to elect someone who
overall is pretty unpleasant but who brings real progress on a couple of issues. It is particularly
in foreign affairs says a couple of pretty penetrating truths.
Hillary has absolutely nothing to say worth hearing. She's not progressive. She's not liberal.
And she's just so twisted in her dishonesty, you can't make any sense of her from one day til
the next. She is a genuinely phony exploiter of the old idea of the Democratic Party, as a party
that does something for ordinary people, but that is simply not what that party has been for about
half a century. In office, she would have most of Trump's ugly qualities and none of his few strong
merits. Basically, she just wants the distinction of being the first woman president.
Now that would be fine, had she something to offer people, but she does not.
Again, she stands for absolutely nothing any thoughtful person would call progress.
MonotonousLanguor
4 Jan 2016 09:53
Surprise, surprise, one more article to add to the many already written by the Guardian
on $hillary. Has the Guardian been purchased by the $hillary for President Campaign??? Perhaps
$hillary and Bill used the millions they have made on speaking tours, and the Clinton Foundation
to buy the Guardian or are they paying to plant articles
.
Chuckman -> Allan Burns
4 Jan 2016 09:42
I don't think that's true.
The Democratic Party is a terrible institution. It hasn't had
a good idea in forty years. America's entire political system is bent, bent towards the interests
of the 1%. Hillary serves the interests of the 1% in virtually everything she does. Then she goes
out and makes some vaccuous speeches to others, trying to assure them she's in their corner. The
woman is a dreadful fraud and liar.
ID5360392 -> Lazio99
4 Jan 2016 09:35
I think you are omitting one very important person. Former President George W. Bush took the
US to an unjustified war in Iraq and destabilized the entire region. Didn't W at one point claim
credit for the "green revolution" and the wave of revolts in the Middle East by saying it was
because he brought "democracy" to Iraq?
Chuckman
4 Jan 2016 09:35
'turn back the clock' on progress? What meaningless babble. There is no meangful progress
in America on any aspect of domestic life. Not in politics. Not in public education. Not in ethics.
However Hillary has played a significant role in America's one true example of progress, its progress
towards becoming an international bully.
panpipes -> Ryscavage
4 Jan 2016 09:33
Hyperbole never helps convince people of the rationality of your argument...
Clinton is a neo-conservative war-monger supporting neo-liberal economic policies. But
the only Republican who isn't worse on both counts is Rand Paul, who isn't as fully into the neo-conservative
carpet bombing agenda. Paul, however, more than makes up for this by being a complete looney on
economic/individual rights issues. Unfortunately the only real alternative, Bernie Sanders, has
been deemed as unelectable by the "smart people" and many of the electorate, afraid to "throw
away their votes" may be swayed by that "intelligence".
Zepp -> rafinho
4 Jan 2016 09:29
His claim is accurate. Assuming Sanders is the nominee, he would trounce Trump, on average
by 16 points. According to several such polls.
Yes, he trails Hillary, who is well known and well funded. But he leads in New Hampshire, and
is in striking distance in Iowa. And let's face it: most Democrats really aren't very enthusiastic
about Clinton.
AmbassadorIII
4 Jan 2016 09:11
Dishonesty insults and demeans the people of America and
dishonesty happens to be Mr. Hillary's
middle name.
Truth is, indeed, bitter after three consecutive, pathological liar presidents.
Thank God, Trump has the courage to speak it.
Lazio99
4 Jan 2016 08:59
Hilary Clinton is complicit in the ongoing US foreign policy of destroying working countries
in North Africa and the Middle East and leaving them in ruins, as his her boss Obama.
How
these two come to be the pin ups of the European liberal chattering classes beats me. How can
anyone vote for a pair like these?
Charles Taylor -> rafinho
4 Jan 2016 09:25
Polls are now officially worthless. Polling agencies call landlines which are anything
but random representation of the ACTUAL American electorate. There are also various media outlets
taking worthless internet "polls" which have absolutely no verification. Harris quit political
polling until they can develop new reliable sampling methods. Relying on this information is completely
misleading in the 21st century.
brianBT
4 Jan 2016 08:14
Hilary is running almost the same campaign she did last time.. the lips are moving but nothing
is coming out.. and the words that do issue tend to be strategically and politically non-committal..
in short a political gas bag.. she has no chance of winning
Mike5000
4 Jan 2016 08:07
RomneyObamaCare is making Hillary's insurance mafia buddies rich while bankrupting ordinary
Americans.
Taxpayer-subsidized gambling is making Hillary's bankster buddies rich while fraudulently taking
millions of American homes.
And
Hillary has never seen a patch of desert she didn't want to send our kids to die in.
We need Single Payer. We need Glass-Steagall. We need Peace. We need Bernie.
What is interesting is that Trump is 100% right... I think he has a marketing talent. One
thing for certain, he created a problem for Repugs establishment and all those yellow US MSM and their
owners...
"... "She should be in jail, by the way, for what she did," Trump said. "Everybody knows she should
be in jail. What she did with the emails is a disgrace," he added. ..."
He then blamed US President Barack Obama and his former secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, for
the Islamic State's rise.
"They have a bunch of dishonest people," he continued. "They've created ISIS. Hillary Clinton
created ISIS with Obama - created with Obama. But I love predicting because you know, ultimately,
you need somebody with vision."
Trump and Clinton, the Democratic front-runner, have fiercely sparred in recent weeks. Trump
took particular exception to Clinton saying that his provocative campaign-trail statements had
become propaganda for the Islamic State, especially his proposal to bar Muslims from entering the
US.
The Republican billionaire demanded that Clinton apologize, but her campaign
replied at the time: "Hell no. Hillary Clinton will not be apologizing to Donald Trump for correctly
pointing out how his hateful rhetoric only helps ISIS recruit more terrorists."
After Clinton said Trump had generally displayed a
"penchant for sexism," Trump went after her husband, former US President Bill Clinton. Trump
recently proclaimed that the former president has
"a terrible record of women abuse," referring to the Monica Lewinsky scandal, among other things.
At his Saturday rally, Trump also blasted Hillary Clinton for
a report on her husband's paid speeches while she was secretary of state. As he has done frequently
before, Trump further asserted that Clinton "shouldn't be allowed to run" because of the private
email system she used for her State Department work.
"She should be in jail, by the way, for what she did," Trump said. "Everybody knows she should
be in jail. What she did with the emails is a disgrace," he added.
"... According to the Westminster-controlled BBC, a Russian pilot "died when his SU-24 aircraft was shot down". If that is a time appreciation, it is a fairly accurate one, but he actually died after his aircraft hit the ground, and that fact was not the cause of his death. He died because he was shot full of holes from the ground while he was hanging helpless in his parachute straps and was not armed. As has been demonstrated to what should be the complete satisfaction of all, this is a war crime, illegal under international law regardless who does it. ..."
"... But the Washington-and-Westminster-controlled western media skates adroitly around that fact, and consistently normalizes his death as just one of those unfortunate things that happens in war. ..."
"... I can promise you that the murder of a western pilot under the same circumstances would not be soft-pedaled in the same manner, and the fact that criminal circumstances were attached to his dying would have been shouted to the skies. ..."
According to the Westminster-controlled BBC, a Russian pilot "died when his SU-24 aircraft was
shot down". If that is a time appreciation, it is a fairly accurate one, but he actually died
after his aircraft hit the ground, and that fact was not the cause of his death. He died because
he was shot full of holes from the ground while he was hanging helpless in his parachute straps
and was not armed. As has been demonstrated to what should be the complete satisfaction of all,
this is a war crime, illegal under international law regardless who does it.
But the Washington-and-Westminster-controlled
western media skates adroitly around that fact, and consistently normalizes his death as just
one of those unfortunate things that happens in war.
I can promise you that the murder of a western
pilot under the same circumstances would not be soft-pedaled in the same manner, and the fact
that criminal circumstances were attached to his dying would have been shouted to the skies.
"... "[The] CIA particularly represents the views of the Wall Street investment firms and the multinational corporations that they invest in," noted the whistleblower who leaked "The Pentagon Papers." ..."
"... Yet Ellsberg also warns that it is possible to overstate the importance of the U.S. military, because the military, Congress, and the various U.S. national security agencies all serve interests outside a sitting administration. ..."
"... "[The] CIA particularly represents the views of the Wall Street investment firms and the multinational corporations that they invest in, and the law firms that represent those companies," he said. ..."
"... The United States claims to support democracy throughout the world, but, Ellsberg said: "That is false. That is a cover story." ..."
"... If anyone comes to power that opposes U.S. interests, American forces can overthrow them, Ellsberg argues. Washington's relationships with other nations are not democratic, he says, but imperial, as much as they were in the time of Sargon, the world's first emperor, who Ellsberg introduced in Chapter 1 of this series. As a result, U.S. foreign policy has supported torturers and war crimes for over a century. ..."
"... Philip Agee, the CIA's highest ranking defector, always said CIA stands for Capitalism' Invisible Army ..."
"... Ellsberg is exactly right. The US is not a democracy. The US regime is the enforcement wing of multi-national capital. It is a wholly captured government by captialists. ..."
"... There's nothing new about the claim that Eisenhower deleted the reference to Congress just before his far-famed farewell speech. This has been well-known for decades. ..."
"[The] CIA particularly represents the views of the Wall Street investment firms and
the multinational corporations that they invest in," noted the whistleblower who leaked "The Pentagon
Papers."
In
the second chapter of his extended conversation with Arn Menconi, Daniel Ellsberg describes how,
after his trial for leaking the Pentagon Papers, he began to realize that the Vietnam War was not
an "aberration" but a representation of standard U.S. foreign policy.
"The big difference was the Vietnamese resisted us," Ellsberg explained. He says learned more
about the nature of the U.S. military-industrial complex as he dug deeper into the origins of the
conflict.
On Jan. 17, 1961, President Dwight Eisenhower gave
a famous farewell address which popularized the term "military-industrial complex," but Ellsberg
says the outgoing president had originally intended to refer to the "military-industrial-congressional
complex," only to drop the reference to Congress at the last minute. The whistleblower explains
that allies of the military and nuclear scientists in Congress blocked Eisenhower's efforts to create
a nuclear test ban treaty with Russia, inspiring Eisenhower's speech, which warned the American public
to "guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial
complex."
Yet Ellsberg also warns that it is possible to overstate the importance of the U.S. military,
because the military, Congress, and the various U.S. national security agencies all serve interests
outside a sitting administration.
"[The] CIA particularly represents the views of the Wall Street investment firms and the multinational
corporations that they invest in, and the law firms that represent those companies," he said.
The United States claims to support democracy throughout the world, but, Ellsberg said: "That
is false. That is a cover story."
Instead, he explained that the U.S. supports whatever leaders will support the country's covert
foreign policy. In addition to carrying out assassinations and interfering in those countries' elections,
the U.S. forms "close relationships with their military which we achieve through a combination of
training them … promoting the people we like, direct bribery, arms sales, arms grants - giving them
toys in other words - and helping them against dissidents."
If anyone comes to power that opposes U.S. interests, American forces can overthrow them, Ellsberg
argues. Washington's relationships with other nations are not democratic, he says, but imperial,
as much as they were in the time of Sargon, the world's first emperor, who Ellsberg introduced in
Chapter 1 of this series.
As a result, U.S. foreign policy has supported
torturers and war crimes
for over a century.
Key policies the U.S. supports on behalf of Wall Street include "holding down the wages and selling
the local resources at very low value," according to Ellsberg, who added that the governments which
support these policies "could not stay in power in democratic elections, so we are against democracy
in those countries."
Even in places where the U.S. supports democracy, he says, such as Europe, Washington cooperates
with the elite in those countries to discourage candidates that support real change. America's leaders
in the military-industrial complex believe "[w]e run [foreign countries] better than they would run
themselves."
"Can we fix those things while maintaining the military investments …? Even we can't do that,"
he concluded.
Listen to Chapter 2 | Looking beyond Eisenhower's military-industrial complex:
RMDC 2015-12-28 18:04
"[The] CIA particularly represents the views of the Wall Street investment firms and
the multinational corporations that they invest in, and the law firms that represent those
companies,"
Yes, of course. It was wall street tycoons and lawyers who created the OSS and CIA They
all had huge investments in Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan and they wanted to be sure WW II
was fought with their financial interests foremost. These corporate lawyers were used to
overthrowing government around the world for their wall street clients. Donavan, the Dulles
Brothers, Wisner, and the like were world class cutthroats. They moved into the government and
took it over.
Philip Agee, the CIA's highest ranking defector, always said CIA stands for Capitalism'
Invisible Army. This is important. They CIA scours the earth doing the dirty work of Wall
Street. When needed, the Pentagon is called in.
Ellsberg is exactly right. The US is not a democracy. The US regime is the enforcement wing of
multi-national capital. It is a wholly captured government by captialists.
goodsensecynic 2015-12-29 00:07
There's nothing new about the claim that Eisenhower deleted the reference to Congress
just before his far-famed farewell speech. This has been well-known for decades.
What needs to be added, however, is that the elements of ruling class domination are even more
extensive and far more complex.
We should be discussing the
military-industrial-congressional-financial-commercial-ideological-technological complex (with
the possibility of adding more pieces such as the agricultural, chemical, pharmaceutical and,
perhaps, many, many more).
Although the particular connections among them may be shifting and almost kaleidoscopic, basic
patterns of economic, political and social dominance will always emerge.
By "ideological," of course, I mean the combination of the corporate media, the allegedly
"social" media, "official" education, and whatever passes for religion - especially in its
"fundamentalist " aberrations in the Abrahamic cultures.
And, a final caveat: the above merely identify aspects of the "domestic" power structure. It
is also replicated globally with many of the same "players" shifting natural resources,
information technology, capital and currency around in a way that may be permanently beyond
the reach of the governments of even the most powerful semi-sovereign nations.
anarchteacher 2015-12-29 00:55
What Daniel Ellsberg, Dwight Eisenhower, C. Wright Mills, and numerous others have outlined
is what the incomparable Peter Dale Scott now describes as the deep state:
Nowhere do I see reference to John Perkins, the author of "Confessions of an Economic
Hitman." Perkins lays all of this out clearly and concisely, and includes the World Bank and
The WMF, (The World Monetary Fund).
One of their tactics is to loan an emerging nation huge amounts of money which they can
never pay back. In return they will allow Western bank and oil interests, pharmaceuticals ,
bio-tech, copper, etc. whatever natural resources that Western Capitalists want to exploit.
Perkins is sent in to meet with the leaders. He tells them the money is theirs to do whatever
they like. Use it for their country or for themselves.
Some of the leader are actually honorable and refuse the money. Perkins then pulls out the
big warning: Take the money or die by assassination. Some leaders refused. Within six months
the Capitalists sent in what Perkins calls "the jackals". The honorable leader is
assassinated.
There are people even now, doing what he did.
Activista 2015-12-29 12:51
1 trillion + military waste is corrupting/destroying USA. We need to get rid of this
burden.
Vardoz 2015-12-29 14:57
We are being systematically impoverished and destroyed by corporate interests. Elizabeth
Warren and Bernie Sanders are the only senators who do not vote against our better interests
and want to protect the health, safety and welfare of the 99%. As Biden once called it we the
people are being subjected to economic terrorism.
judithehrlich 2015-12-29 17:27
If you'd like to know more about Daniel Ellsberg please see the website for our
Oscar-nominated film, "The Most Dangerous Man in American, Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon
Papers", www.mostdangerousman.org . Edward
Snowden was inspired to act after seeing the film.
But
there was a similar discussion in the 1950s and 1960s, which I'm old enough to remember, about why
the 
Joe100 said in reply to
Tyler...
Tyler -
Saudi Arabia intercepts ballistic missile fired by Yemeni rebels into holy Mecca – report
Wall Street: The Trump-China missing link
LisaAllenC
11 hours ago
Trump was not booed by anyone
but the far left stunked up
media, everyone else that i
could see was raising their
fist and laughing as they were
nodding that they agreed with
TRUMP, you little people of the
left media have really lost
yourself s, lost your
professionalism in your field,
i mean you took an oath when
you started that career as a
journalist to report as fairly
and as honest as you could and
you took that platform as
something that you would treat
as a place the American people
and the rest of the world could
come to for an honest and
balanced look at issues, not a
place to be used to push your
own interests on people in such
ways that even small children
that listen well can tell is
words filled full of lies and
dishonesty, words that are
filled with hate and such
lopsided views that our kids
are saying, turn that trash
daddy, it makes me sick to my
stomach to watch such lies, my
kids and our neighbors kids
actually said that, they are
watching very closely and you
people of the far left trash
machine should be so ashamed of
what you have been force
feeding not only these kids but
some of the very easily
confused people, i mean thats
the only ones you are hurting
because we the American people
know better but still you
should have to stand up and
answer to what you have done to
the ones you have terribly hurt
during this mess. You want to
ever say that you are someone
this country could ever trust
and believe, you wonder why
Trump knows not to trust
anything you may have your
hands or words mixed in with,
you have dishonored yourself's
and no one will ever believe
you again, we have your names
etched in our brains as
dishonest nobody's and know to
stop reading or listening to
anything you say or do, what a
shame but your true colors came
out and the honest people of
this country see you as who you
are. We are so glad and HONORED
TO VOTE FOR TRUMP, we know
there is no one that is perfect
but Christ himself but we also
know the heart of a person as
well and TRUMPS HEART IS IN THE
RIGHT PLACE, he wants real
honest change for us Americans
and he wants real honest help
to be given to ALL THE AMERICAN
PEOPLE, and without you left
twisting word machine, TRUMP
WANTS REAL HELP FOR OUR AFRICAN
AMERICANS AND OUR MEXICAN
AMERICANS, he does want the law
to be honored but he doesn't
want to harm anybody, you
people have twisted his words
in such dramatic fashion that
we rarely get to hear his real
plan to bring safety and lawful
ways at our borders. I have
heard the plans and i am no
genius but the plans make very
good since and they will be
fair and help people that want
to be here legally, now if you
are trying to break our laws,
thats another story but at
least he does have a great plan
that will work so much better
and give our men and women
officers at the border the help
they so desperately have been
needing, TRUMP IS BY FAR THE
BEST CHOICE FOR AMERICA, the
twisted person that you people
have tried to make him out to
be, will of course that person
is not who we need but thats
not TRUMP, WE NEED TRUMP FOR
CHANGE WE NEED TRUMP FOR OUR
COUNTRY AND OUR FAMILY, VOTE
TRUMP FOR CHANGE.
LOYAL
11 hours ago
I am not going to lie to you,
Hillary is stupid, confused,
and has been exposed. Her guilt
of running a stupid campaign
and a stupid office called the
Secretary of State is no longer
in question. During the debate
Hillary got confused on
proposed gun laws. On abortion,
Hillary thinks it's ok to kill
babies ready to be delivered.
This is like saying I love
children that have been
delivered alive but not so much
those not yet delivered. Sound
like, I like a hero that does
not get captured? Hillary is
all talk and no action. Black
people should understand this
by now. So should everyone
else.
What
I said about women was 'for entertainment' says Trump,... 
'I
want to win this election on my policies for the future,... 
'My
opponent insulted Miss Universe': Clinton tries to bring... 
Not a criticism, just an observation.
She
acknowledged she deleted thousands of personal emails and said she turned over hard copies of
messages to the State Department that she deemed to be work related.
Abedin
was an assistant editor for a dozen years for the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs for the
Institute for Muslim Minority Affairs. The institute – founded by her late father and
currently directed by her mother – is backed by the Muslim World League, an Islamic
organization in the Saudi holy city of Mecca that was founded by Muslim Brotherhood leaders.
At
her father's Saudi-financed Islamic think tank,
WND
reported
, Abedin worked alongside Abdullah Omar Naseef, who is accused of financing
al-Qaida fronts.
Huma
served on the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs's editorial board from 2002 to 2008.
In
2003, U.S. News and World Report documented that accompanying the MWL's donations, invariably,
are "a blizzard of Wahhabist literature."
In
the early 1990s, evidence began to grow that the foundation was funding Islamist militants in
Somalia and Bosnia, and a 1996 CIA report detailed its Bosnian militant ties.
A
scene from "Dr. Strangelove," in which the bomber pilot (played by actor Slim Pickens) rides a
nuclear bomb to its target in the Soviet Union.
still rockin' 7
minutes ago
James D 3
hours ago
In other words the US elite partially lost the control of ordinary people and MSM no longer can
brainwash them with previous efficiency because after 2008 the key idea of "trickle down economy"
- that dramatically rising inequality will provide Untermensch with enough crumps from the table
of Masters of the Universe (financial oligarchy) were proven to be false. 
unproven
145
·
Jun 7, 2016 12:21pm
This comment was deleted.
The crisis of Republican
Party then establishment no longer can control rank-and-file members reflects not only the crisis
of neoliberalism as a social system, but might also reflect the fact that with 300 million of people
the county became too big and too diverse to be governed from a single center of political power in
non authoritarian ways. a Hillary v Trump scenario will bee a difficult choice
for most Americans. A jingoistic sociopathic woman, essentially a puppet of financial oligarchy, who
is a front for the neoliberal forces hell-bent of destroying Russia vs. a narcissistic person with zero
political experience and vague set of ideas (but at the same time with more realistic foreign
policy ideas at least).
Thanks very much for this handy compendium!